Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

Liam couldn’t deny that bit. Yes, she had been using him.

‘Lady Rebecca has taken it to a safe place,’ said Liam. The fluttering of nerves in his own voice had gone. John didn’t look like a tyrant about to order his head be cut off. Liam had expected a torrent of abuse, a face full of royal spittle. Instead, John looked all of a sudden like a child, abandoned, frightened and lonely.

‘She told me to … to be strong ,’ he said quietly, a tear rolling down his cheek into the wispy bristles of his beard. ‘For her … you know? I would have been.’ He swiped at his cheek with a sleeve. ‘For her, you understand? For her … I would have stood up to Richard.’

Liam looked over John’s slumped shoulders at the arched alcove and the balcony beyond. In the heat-shimmering distance beyond the walls of Nottingham, he could see the endless rows of multicoloured tents and marquees of Richard’s assembled army, the sturdy lumber A-frames of half a dozen catapults, being swarmed around and finished by carpenters. Like ants at this distance.

‘I have to surrender to him,’ whispered John. ‘I have to capitulate. The longer I leave it … the angrier he will get! He will — ’

‘No!’ said Liam.

John looked up at him sharply, a flash of irritation in his eyes at Liam’s insubordinate interruption.

‘Listen, Sire … if you do surrender while you have no Grail, you have nothing to bargain with!’ Liam didn’t need to finish that thought for John. By the look in John’s red-rimmed eyes, he knew exactly what that meant for him.

‘But, if you stall …’ Liam continued.

‘ Stall? ’ A word John was unfamiliar with.

‘If you wait. Let Richard think you have it … maybe even threaten to destroy it if he attempts to attack — ’

‘ Destroy it? ’ John’s eyes looked like they’d glimpsed the very bowels of Hell. ‘Can you imagine, Sheriff — can you imagine what he would do to me? If I … If I were to …’

‘Would he dare risk that, though?’ Liam cocked an eyebrow. ‘Really? After all that he’s done to get hold of it, would he risk you putting a candle to it?’

John swallowed nervously. ‘He … he would know I daren’t .’

Liam looked at the man, trembling and pale. Perhaps he would at that.

‘You still have to be strong, Sire. You have to arrange a meeting with him. You have to tell him we have it here — and, unless his army disbands, you will burn it yourself.’

Bob opened his mouth to say something. Liam knew what it was: a warning about time contamination. The way history was supposed to go, Richard’s siege was successful and John surrendered to his older brother. Liam patted his good arm to hush him. John didn’t need to hear that right now, that he was destined to surrender.

‘Buy us a little time, Sire,’ said Liam. ‘Meet with him … convince him that you will destroy it if he attempts to attack us.’

John stroked his chin obsessively, the faint tremor of a nervous tic in his quivering jaw. Liam wondered if the poor man could convince anyone of anything right now.

‘Lady Rebecca will be back, I assure you. She’ll be back with the Grail.’

I hope.

‘And then you can arrange a truce, Sire. You’ll have something you can use to bargain with.’

2001, New York

Sebastien Cabot kept his eyes firmly clenched shut, not daring to get his first glimpse of the underworld and the Devil’s workings. Through his closed lids he could sense it was a dark place. His ears picked out sounds he’d never heard before, soft beeps and hums that could only be the devices of evil stirring, ready to tear his mortal soul apart.

‘And who’s this ?’ a female voice echoed. He sensed they were standing in some cave, perhaps on a ledge that overlooked an infinite cavern filled with a squirming sea of tormented souls below, burning in agony, prodded, stabbed and tortured by demons wandering among them.

‘Cabot.’ He recognized Lady Rebecca’s voice in reply.

‘Cabot? Like — like in the message? The same guy?’

‘Affirmative. He is here to help.’

Cabot slowly opened his clenched-shut eyes. He first saw his sandalled feet on a hard pockmarked and stained stone floor. And as he looked up he saw Lady Rebecca and three other strangely dressed people staring at him with curiosity. No demons. No fire. No tormented souls.

One of them stepped forward. A young woman. She had long frizzy hair and pale freckled skin. On her face were two ovals of glass that glinted reflection from a bright bar of light above him that fizzed and flickered slightly.

‘Hey, pleased to meet you,’ she said, extending a hand towards him. ‘I’m Maddy.’

Cabot’s dry mouth opened and closed without producing anything. Finally, he managed to say something. ‘This … this place? ’Tis not … Hell?’

The frizzy-haired girl shrugged and smiled in a friendly way. ‘Guess it’s a matter of opinion really.’

Some time later — Cabot, still lost in a state of numb shock, had no idea how long: perhaps an hour, a day, perhaps only a few minutes later — he found himself and these curious strangers sitting around a long wooden table on padded chairs. He held a cup full of a warm and bitter brown drink. The other girl in this place, dark-skinned like a Turk and wearing black clothes splashed with a lurid orange and pink design of some sort — she’d been introduced as Sal — had told him the drink was called Koff-eeee as she’d pressed it into his hands.

‘… has a section in it that is marked by four corner markers,’ Lady Rebecca was saying. ‘In these margin illuminations. Here, here, here and here.’

The man with them — called Adam — hunkered over the table beside Lady Rebecca and examined the Treyarch Confession more closely.

‘My God, I think she may be right!’ he said. ‘They’ve got to be grille markers.’

Maddy joined them slumped over the table. She pushed her glasses up her nose. ‘Show me.’

‘See?’ said Adam. ‘Like corners, embedded subtly into the illustration’s pattern?’

‘Yeah — oh man, yeah, I see it!’

Adam looked at them. ‘Basically this is the blueprint … instructions on how to make a cardan grille to decode that,’ he said, pointing to the small wooden box containing the Grail.

‘It is this passage of text,’ continued Becks, spreading her hands across the Treyarch, ‘that is being indicated. But it is in a language we do not have data for. An extinct form of Gaelic. Cabot,’ she said, pointing at him, ‘has knowledge of this language.’

All eyes suddenly rested on him. He put down the mug of hot liquid on the table and spread his hands apologetically. ‘I … uh … I know but a little of it,’ he said. ‘I served the order alongside another Templar, Irish, a man who came from Dun Garbhain .’

Maddy cocked a finger, inviting him to lean over. ‘Well, come on and take a closer look, Mr Cabot. See what you can figure out.’

Cabot pulled himself up out of his chair and joined them over the document, rolled out and spread flat along the table and almost as long. A steadily burning light in a small wire cage dangled from the arched brick roof just above them. He wondered what made it glow so steadily. It was certainly no flame.

He turned his attention to the elaborate curls and flourishes of handwriting before him. By contrast to the feeble flickering candlelight the priory’s monks worked to after dark, this steady light let him see as if the table was standing outside in a field in the middle of a bright summer’s day.