Scott Mariani - The Doomsday Prophecy

At the time, the sense of unease that Richmond’s ad-libbed answer had instilled in Slater had only been slight and temporary. He’d soon forgotten about it.

But then disaster had struck. When the surveillance team watching Clayton Cleaver in Georgia had informed him that Cleaver was under fire from a blackmailer, Slater had realised that in the light of Richmond’s comments all their careful plans were in serious trouble.

He’d never heard of any Zoë Bradbury before. When he Googled the name he began to worry even more. This was a legit Bible scholar with a high enough profile to blow everything apart. If what she was saying was true, and if she could give the critics the evidence they needed to prove that the Book of Revelation hadn’t been written by John the Apostle, that its very legitimacy as a New Testament text was in question – that the book was a fraud , for Christ’s sake – the End Time Stratagem was dead in the water. Revelation was the central pillar holding up the End Time roof. To undermine its authority would shake the whole movement down to its roots. Not only that, but Richmond was now saying he’d be happy to walk away from it if he thought it had lost credibility. His standing with the evangelical voters would deflate like a punctured football – and with it Slater’s visions of the White House.

Slater was a businessman, and his mind worked pragmatically. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out the options.

One. Buy her off. She wanted ten million from Cleaver, but why should she care where the cash came from as long as she got rich? He could double that figure to make her go away. But what if she kept coming back for more? What if she went ahead and spilled the beans anyway? How could she be trusted?

He’d preferred option two. Grab her and make her lead them to the evidence. They’d destroy it for good, and then they’d bury her along with her claims.

So Slater had called on his contacts. His chief associate within the CIA had delegated the task to his man Jones, who in turn had sent a team to Corfu to snatch her. Now Bradbury was in their custody, somewhere nobody would ever find her. But there were too many problems and complications. He couldn’t afford to wait. It was time for decisive action.

He turned off the DVD playback and sank back in the soft armchair, massaging his temples. On the low table in front of him was a hardwood bowl filled with chocolate bars. He grabbed three of them, tore off the wrappers and swallowed them voraciously.

Gulping down the last of the chocolate, he snatched his phone from the arm of the chair and stabbed the keys.

His associate’s voice answered on the second ring.

‘We need to talk,’ Slater said. Pause. ‘No. You come here. I’m alone. I sent the jackass on vacation for a few days.’

‘Give me three hours,’ his associate replied.

‘Be here in two.’

Montana

The previous day

Dr Joshua Greenberg pulled the rental Honda in off the highway and into the parking lot of the roadside diner. Grabbing his briefcase from the passenger seat, he climbed out and groaned. He’d been on the road a long while. He stretched and rubbed his eyes.

A Freightliner truck roared past with a blast of wind and a cloud of dust and diesel fumes. The doctor turned towards the diner and slowly, stiffly, climbed the two steps up to the entrance. The place was quiet – a few sullen truckers and a couple of families taking a late lunch. He took a booth in the corner, settled on the red vinyl seat and ordered coffee. He didn’t feel like eating. The brown liquid that the waitress shoved under his nose wasn’t really coffee, but he sat and drank it anyway.

He sat there for thirty minutes, staring at his hands on the table. He should be moving on. They’d be expecting him back at the facility, to deliver the package to Jones. It was still two hours’ drive away.

He gave a short, bitter laugh. Facility . That was a fine word for a semi-derelict hotel in the middle of nowhere that was being used as an illegal detention centre for a kidnapped innocent young woman.

He glanced down at the briefcase next to him on the seat. Reached across, unsnapped the catch, dipped inside and came out holding the little bottle. He set it down on the table in front of him. It was amber glass and held just under 100 millilitres of clear, slightly viscous fluid. There was no label. It looked innocuous enough. It could have been anything, some kind of innocent herbal remedy even. But he knew that if he were to empty the contents into the bubbling coffee pot behind the counter, every cup served out of it would make its drinker a candidate for the nuthouse within a day.

First they would become unusually chatty and uninhibited, happily revealing even the most intimate secrets about themselves. Then the drug would go to town on the unconscious mind, liberating every shred of darkness from inside – every repressed fear, every angry or bitter emotion, every disturbing or violent thought. It would all come flooding out, overwhelming the conscious mind in a wave of rage and paranoia and grief and terror, the whole spectrum of the most extreme emotions a human being could experience, all at once, relentlessly, for hours.

There was no stopping the feedback loop. Madness was the inevitable result, and there was no antidote.

He shuddered. And he was on his way to hand this over to Jones to give to an innocent young woman. To ruin her for ever.

He sank his head into his hands.

How the hell did I get involved with this terrible business?

He knew perfectly well how. One small mistake, building on the errors of his past that he thought he’d left behind. One small mistake had ruined everything.

Joshua Greenberg had come from a poor background and spent his life trying to make up for it. His father was a Detroit factory worker and his mother cleaned offices. The two of them had worked their asses off to put their only child through college. He’d done them proud, graduated in medicine and gone on to specialise in neurology and psychiatry. At the age of forty-eight, he was a successful man with his own New York private practice and a lectureship at Columbia where he was head of his department. The big house in the Hamptons had two acres, pool and stables and it was everything his wife, Emily, had ever wanted. His two teenage daughters had the Arab horses they’d always wanted, and he’d built a luxurious annexe onto the house so that his elderly, proud parents could be close by.

The ghost from his past was something that he’d never thought would catch up with him again. It had been in his freshman year at college, the first time away from home for a nervous eighteen-year-old. His roommate had been Dickie Engels.

He’d never forget Dickie. He was a lawyer’s son, and the two years he had on Joshua had been spent travelling around France and Italy, places that seemed as far away as the moon. Compared to Joshua, Dickie was a true man of the world. He smoked Sobranie Black Russians, knew about wine and had read Tolstoy and James Joyce. For six months Joshua worshipped him from a distance, fervently hoping his burning feelings wouldn’t show. Once, tipsy after drinking the first champagne of his life, he’d been on the verge of kissing Dickie. It had never happened, but soon afterwards Dickie had asked to be transferred to another room. Then, a few months later, Joshua had met Emily and the shameful incident was forgotten. He moved on and got on with life.

Until James happened, fourteen months ago. He remembered clearly the first time he’d laid eyes on his dazzling new student. The thick black hair, the satin skin, the deep brown eyes. Suddenly the old feelings had started returning. It started taking over. It wasn’t just a crush. And the beautiful young man seemed to feel the same way, taking more than a casual interest in his overweight, middle-aged lecturer. Joshua had initially tried to avoid him, and evaded the repeated invitations for ‘coffee sometime’.