Scott Mariani - The Doomsday Prophecy

‘Yes, actually I would. Besides, it’s still early days.’

‘Maybe you don’t realise what’s going on here, Dr Greenberg. We’re on the clock with this.’

‘You can’t just click your fingers and make severe retrograde amnesia disappear overnight. Her GOAT results are improving steadily.’

‘What the hell is a goat?’ Jones snapped.

‘Galveston Orientation and Amnesia Test,’ the doctor said, trying to preserve his calm.

‘Don’t bullshit me with medical jargon. She’s lying.’

‘You saw the polygraph result.’

‘The lie detector isn’t reliable. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Listen to me,’ the doctor hissed. ‘We’re close. Really close. A few more days, a week. Maybe two, and it’s my guess that her memory will come back completely.’

Jones shook his head. ‘Why is it I get the feeling that you’re stalling me?’

‘I’m not stalling.’

‘Yes you are. You sympathise with the bitch. Buying her time. Let me tell you something. You’re not paid to sympathise. You’re paid to get results, and you ain’t getting them. I’ve given you all the leeway I’m prepared to give. We even redecorated the whole goddamn upper floor so we could move her to a nice little room, because you said the gentle approach would help. But I’ve had it with gentle.’

The doctor looked down at his feet and balled his fists at his sides. ‘So what are you suggesting we do?’

‘Apply more pressure. There are ways.’

‘What kind of pressure?’

Jones shrugged. ‘Whatever works. I don’t give a shit.’

‘You’re talking about torture.’

Jones shrugged again. ‘Like I said, whatever gets the job done.’

The doctor stared. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

Jones said nothing. His eyes were steady and cold.

‘You apply any kind of severe stress to her, and all you’ll do is drive the memories deeper,’ the doctor said. ‘She’ll regress dramatically. And I won’t have anything to do with torture. That isn’t what you hired me for.’

‘You’ll do what I tell you to do,’ Jones said. ‘And this is where we’re going to start.’ He grabbed a sheet of paper from his desk and brusquely handed it across.

The doctor scanned it quickly. There was just one name scrawled on the sheet. It was the name of a chemical. He looked up in alarm. ‘You can’t give that to her. You’re not authorised to use it. It’s experimental. And illegal.’

‘I can give anything I want to her,’ Jones said softly. ‘Now tell me. This shit goes a lot deeper than sodium pentothal, right?’

‘I’m not happy with this.’

‘Like I give a fuck. Answer the question.’

‘It’s designed to repress higher cortical functions and remove all inhibitions,’ the doctor muttered. ‘In theory, potentially, it’s the most powerful truth serum ever developed. But -’

‘That’s what I heard too.’

‘The only people who ever used this drug are terrorists and mass murderers,’ the doctor said. ‘This is America, not Sierra Leone.’

Jones just smiled, showing yellow teeth.

‘You’ve heard about the side effects?’

Jones didn’t answer.

‘Ninety-five-plus per cent chance of complete, irreversible psychosis. Those are the stories, and there are lab results on chimps to confirm it. That’s what you want to do to this girl? Fry her brain down to the size of a peanut so she has to spend the rest of her life in a mental hospital?’

Jones nodded slowly. ‘If I can get what I need from her first, yes.’

‘Just so you can get this information from her. You’re willing to make that trade?’

‘Absolutely. This matters a great deal to the people I work for.’

‘Then you can find someone else to help you. I won’t be party to this.’

‘Think you have a choice, Greenberg?’

‘I don’t answer to you.’ The doctor turned to go. But the metallic sound of the gun being cocked behind him stopped him in his tracks. He turned back to face Jones.

The man was aiming a pistol right at his head. In his other hand he was holding a phone. ‘You’re going to make a call, doc. You’re going to get me some of that serum. And then you’re going to administer it to our little patient in there, and we’ll see who’s right.’

The doctor hung his head. He was powerless here. They had him. ‘All right. I have a contact. But I can’t just write out a prescription for this stuff. It might take a few days.’

‘Too slow,’ Jones said. ‘My employer isn’t a patient man.’ He checked his watch. ‘You get it for me by tonight.’

‘Tonight!’

‘Fail me, and you’ll watch me torture the girl before I put a bullet in your eye,’ Jones said. ‘Your choice.’

Savannah, Georgia

Ben spent the afternoon in Augusta Vale’s luxurious guest quarters, sitting on the four-poster bed and poring over Cleaver’s book.

The book was two things. First it was an account of how the humble preacher from Alabama had become the mouthpiece of John the Apostle after the saint had appeared to him years before in a miracle vision. Much of the text was devoted to persuading the reader of the truth of this, which the author did in fine style. Ben noticed that the last page of the book was a detachable slip for readers to mail their donations to the Cleaver Foundation, part of whose function was to raise funds for the author’s political ambitions.

Secondly, the book was a scalding doomsday forecast based squarely on the Book of Revelation, the apocalyptic text of the New Testament and the key biblical reference for millions of evangelical Christians, predominantly Americans, who believed in the coming End Times.

Cleaver certainly knew his Bible. His style was pounding, insistent, articulate and utterly sincere. His book went into enormous detail about what was coming, any time now, all closely referenced from the Book of Revelation: global meltdown, the destruction of social order and the rise of the Antichrist, soon followed by the battle of Armageddon, when the returning Christ would vanquish his enemies forever and lead the faithful into eternal glory.

Ben noticed that, like most evangelical Christians, Cleaver assumed without question that all the ‘John’ books of the Bible were the work of one man, John the Apostle – Christ’s loyal follower, ‘the disciple Jesus loved’, present at the Crucifixion and the first to believe that Christ had truly risen. The traditional account, reflected in Cleaver’s book, was that after the crucifixion John had travelled widely preaching the Gospel. Then, seized by the Romans and thrown in boiling oil, he had miraculously escaped without so much as a blister. After the embarrassing miracle the Roman authorities had banished him to the remote Greek island of Patmos, off the Turkish coast. There he had penned his strangest and darkest work, the doom-laden Book of Revelation in which he set out his vision of the future. A book so dramatic and thunderous in its terrible imagery that, millennia later, it remained more imprinted on the public consciousness than ever.

The rest was Cleaver’s unique twist on the tale, explaining how St John had personally appeared to him and confirmed in no uncertain terms that the End Times were truly coming, and that the faithful must rally. Things were about to get nasty.

But Ben wondered how deeply Cleaver had looked into the theological studies surrounding Revelation. Many modern scholars didn’t agree that the author of the Gospel of St John and the Book of Revelation were the same man. They distinguished between at least three different biblical Johns: John the Evangelist, John the Presbyter and John of Patmos. John of Patmos, most agreed, was the author of the apocalyptic book. But was he the same John who had been numbered among Christ’s twelve apostles? The blood and violence of Revelation, contrasted with the milder and more philosophic Gospel of St John, seemed like the work of two different writers.