Scott Mariani - The Doomsday Prophecy

‘Stop. You’re not going anywhere.’ Ben raised the gun again.

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I want the rest. I want to know about the prophecy.’

Cleaver slumped back down in his chair. ‘So that’s why you were so keen to talk prophecies last night.’

‘What was in the box that Skid McClusky delivered to you?’

‘Just a fragment of pottery. Nothing more.’

Ben remembered what Tom Bradbury had told him that day in Summertown about Zoë’s discovery of ancient pottery fragments. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Why pay ten million for a piece of pottery?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ Cleaver said.

‘You’re not leaving here unless you do.’ Ben cocked the gun. ‘And you’d better believe it. So talk.’

‘I had it carbon dated,’ Cleaver replied wearily. ‘It was the right age.’

‘The right age for what?’

Cleaver looked up at him abruptly. ‘The right age to have been around when the Book of Revelation was written.’

Ben stared and blinked. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘She let me see one tiny piece,’ Cleaver said. ‘She still has the rest of it.’

‘The rest of what?’

‘The rest of the evidence. She says that she found a collection of pottery tablets engraved in Ancient Greek, going back to biblical times. She says they prove beyond any doubt that St John wasn’t the author of Revelation.’

‘And?’

‘And that’s it. That’s all I know about them. She didn’t give me a lot to go on. But I have to believe she means what she says, and that it’s true. I can’t afford not to.’

‘You don’t sound very sure of your ground,’ Ben said.

‘All right. All right. I’ll level with you. You’ve seen my book. You know what it’s about.’

‘That John the Apostle spoke to you.’

Cleaver nodded and made a face.

Ben smiled. ‘You’re trying to tell me that John didn’t really speak to you.’

‘No, of course he didn’t,’ Cleaver muttered. ‘How the hell could he? He’s been dead for nearly two thousand years.’

‘I didn’t really think he had, Cleaver.’

‘I only said it to give me an angle,’ Cleaver said desperately. ‘An edge over all of the other End Time preachers out there.’

‘You mean the honest ones,’ Ben said. ‘The ones who aren’t just taking everyone for a ride.’

‘Whatever. But everything I’ve built is based on that book. All of this.’ Cleaver gestured at the view from the window. ‘Millions of Americans buying into the idea that I have a direct line to St John. That he personally vouched for the truth of all the prophecies that he wrote in the Book of Revelation. And now that little bitch says she’s dug up something that could screw it all up for me. The evidence that theology scholars have been looking for for centuries to end the debate about who the real author of Revelation was.’

‘But she’d bury the evidence for ten million dollars.’

Cleaver made a helpless gesture. ‘That’s what she said. And I had to take it seriously, didn’t I? I mean, if she was just some two-bit student, I could call her bluff. But she isn’t. She’s a respected academic, believe it or not. She writes books. If she tells people about this, they’ll take it seriously. Hell, she could get on TV with it. A hundred of your goddamned scholars waiting in the wings to pounce on it. It would finish me. No more book sales. It would mean the end of my political career.’

‘And bye bye to the hundred million dollars.’

Cleaver nodded sadly. ‘The little inchworm threatened to tell Augusta. Said she’d make me out to be a big con artist.’

‘But you are,’ Ben said. ‘You just admitted it.’

Cleaver gazed out of the window for a few moments, then turned and looked hard at Ben. ‘Sure. I’m a con artist. I’m a hustler. But that’s all I am. I never hurt anyone. I never sent anyone to Greece. I don’t know about bombings or leg-breaking. I met Skid McClusky once, when he brought me the box. That’s it. I gave the man his money and he left.’ Cleaver’s face was turning red. He stood up behind the desk. ‘I’m leaving now. You can shoot me if you want to. But you’d be shooting an innocent man.’

‘If I find out you’ve been lying to me,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll come back. And I will kill you. Up close or from a thousand yards away, you won’t see it coming. You know that.’

But as he watched Cleaver walk out of the room, something was telling him that he’d got this whole thing very, very wrong.

When Senator Bud Richmond had first started out in politics, he’d been just another hapless rich boy aiming vaguely for the top. The son of a Montana logger who’d worked his way up to become a multimillionaire industrialist, Bud had never done a proper day’s work in his life and was more concerned with his golf swing, his lady friends, his fishing trips and his beloved Porsche 959 than with serious business.

Two years ago, Irving Slater, his chief of staff and personal assistant, had been despairing of Richmond and on the point of handing in his resignation. As he saw it, he was still only thirty-seven and wasting a promising career on an indolent jackass who thought politics was just a game.

But then something had happened: a pair of unconnected incidents, six months apart, that had turned Bud Richmond’s world around and ended up presenting Irving Slater with the chance of a lifetime.

One day shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Richmond had been about to board an airliner heading from his home state of Montana to Washington DC when he’d had a premonition. Like a faraway voice in his head, he’d said later, telling him that under no circumstances should he get on that plane. To the great irritation of Irving Slater, he’d refused to board it and waited for the next one. When his intended plane had crashed on takeoff with few survivors, he’d started talking miracles.

The second miracle had taken place when Richmond was driving his Porsche along the mountain roads near his home. Rounding a bend, he’d suddenly and inexplicably been seized by the urge to stop and look at the beautiful sunset, something he’d never done before. After ten minutes of gazing at the sky, he’d climbed back in the Porsche and raced on. A mile down the road he’d come across the wreck of a coach. A massive landslide had just tumbled down from the mountain and crushed it. Out of thirty-nine passengers, only two survived – and according to their account, the rocks had hit the bus at the exact moment that Richmond calculated he’d have been in that spot if he hadn’t stopped to admire the view.

In Richmond’s mind there was only one explanation. God had spared his life for some higher purpose. The conversion was instant. Over the eighteen months since the second miracle had occurred, Bud Richmond’s political angle had changed dramatically. And it was actually working for him. He grew up, took himself seriously. And his followers loved him. Born again, suddenly Richmond’s zeal for life and work became unstoppable – and suddenly he was getting support from a whole new section of the community that had never shown him much interest before and one that Slater had never counted on: the massive evangelist movement. More than fifty million of them. Slater quickly saw the angle. Over fifty million votes equated to a heady potential for the White House.

Irving Slater couldn’t believe it. That the motherfucker had become a devout and driven man seemed far weirder than the miracles that he alleged had happened to him. But the wave was rising fast and the chief of staff was ready to ride it.

Suddenly Slater was buried deep in the Bible. His boss’s cast-iron belief in the End Time prophecies of the Book of Revelation led him to study that text in extreme detail and read every scrap that had ever been written about Bible prophecy. He’d been stunned by the power of the belief that so many American Christians held: that at any time, the world could be plunged into the Tribulation and Rapture events foretold in the Good Book. It struck him two ways. First, privately, as utter hooey. Secondly, and much more importantly, as the deepest and richest political goldmine that anyone had ever stumbled upon.