Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

He nodded. A rough hand grasped his and pulled him up on to legs that wobbled uncertainly.

‘I–I lost my weapon and my shield …’ he said.

‘Not to worry,’ the man grinned. ‘There’ll be plenty more to pick up soon enough, sire,’ he said, then turned away, scrambling up the gravel to join the thick ruck of men fighting to hold the breach.

At the top, Liam thought he caught sight of Bob: the back of his head, his broad shoulders; one arm swinging a long-handled axe to and fro like a scythe.

His head was swimming with pain, a sharp stabbing agony that almost made it impossible to gather together a single coherent thought.

But he just about managed one.

When the hell’s Becks coming back?

John watched the distant struggle from the balcony of the keep’s Great Hall. From this far away the squirming press of men looked like insects fighting over a dung hill.

Every last man of the garrison was over there, and a good proportion of the town’s menfolk, all fighting for their town.

And fighting for me.

He felt sick of his weakness, his cowardice. The sight of blood had always left him in a cold dread.

You have not the heart of a king — that’s why you shall never be one ; something Richard had once said to him back when their father had been alive.

‘Perhaps you are right,’ John whispered miserably. And yet … he thought he’d caught a glimpse of something inside himself. Perhaps ‘courage’ was too grand a word for it, but it was a firmness of resolve, perhaps even a hint of defiance as he’d parlayed with Richard earlier.

I was strong then, was I not?

Strong?

He stroked his beard absently with a hand that trembled like an autumn leaf ready to take flight on a fresh breeze. ‘No … you are just a weak fool,’ he answered himself.

‘Sire?’

John looked over his shoulder to see one of the keep’s squires standing beside the drapes. A pale-faced, effeminate man in expensive linens. ‘Sire? Should we — should we not close the castle’s gates? Should they break through, we would be safe in the castle a while longer!’

John felt something deep inside him turn away in disgust.

‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Have you a sword and mail?’

The squire’s eyes rounded. ‘Sire?’

‘You heard.’

‘I–I — I suppose I have … somewhere …’

‘Then fetch it.’

‘F-fetch it, S-sire?’

‘Yes.’ John took a deep breath to steady the timbre of his voice. ‘We shall be joining them.’

2001, New York

Maddy leaned against the crumbling brick wall of their transplanted archway, watching the others standing over on the grass-tufted hummocks of silt along the East River.

‘Madelaine?’

She turned round to see Becks standing in the opening beneath the fully raised shutter.

‘You all done?’

Becks nodded an affirmative.

‘If I lock your hard-drive partition again, what you know — what you’ve just read, it’s all gonna be safe in there, right?’

‘That is correct.’

Maddy nodded thoughtfully. No one else would know what secret message was hidden in the Grail, not even Becks herself.

She’d already made her mind up on the matter: she was going to unlock Becks’s partition with Foster present; they’d both hear what she had to say. And then together figure out what it meant, what they’d have to do about it, if anything.

‘Ready to lock that information away?’

‘Affirmative.’

She uttered the three words quietly. Becks blinked several times then cocked her head. Her voice immediately returned to its softer, more feminine tone. ‘I register thirty-seven minutes of absent data …’

Maddy raised her hand. ‘It’s OK, I’ve been talking with your alter ego.’

Becks consulted something inside her mind. ‘My code-word-locked partition?’

‘Yup.’ Maddy looked at the others. ‘You decoded the Holy Grail successfully. It’s now safely locked away in your head.’ Maddy laughed. ‘Not even you can get in there.’

Becks nodded approvingly. ‘A sensible precaution, Maddy.’

She was about to say a thank-you when she heard Sal’s voice calling out. She could just make out her small outline in the twilight, turning away from the river towards her.

‘What’s up?’ she called out.

She replied something but a sudden freshening breeze carried it away; ripples of cats’ paws danced across the mirror-smooth water towards them as a fresh breeze stirred the millpond calm.

Something’s coming our way.

Maddy looked at the sky and saw it: what looked like a rolling stormfront rushing towards them from out of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Hurry!’ she shouted at Sal. Sal in turn beckoned the other two men to hasten after her up the shingle towards their jagged brick bunker perched among the sandy dunes.

Their feet clattered off soft sand on to the broken fragments of pavement and alleyway that had transported to this reality along with the archway, just as the black stormcloud rolled over Manhattan Island.

‘Tis the Lord’s coming,’ gasped Cabot sombrely.

‘No,’ said Sal. ‘Just a time wave.’

Among the churning black clouds crossing the river towards them, Maddy thought she saw a dozen different city skylines flicker over Manhattan: one moment, towering pointed church steeples topped with cruciforms that reached for the sky, then the next they formed into the rounded bulge of mosques and onion-shaped minarets topped with crescents.

‘My God … Do you see that? ’ said Adam, his voice competing with a growing thundering boom.

Wind danced around them, stinging their cheeks with whipped-up sand as they stood in the opening to the archway watching the world in flux. And then, the wall of undulating reality was upon them.

A moment of pitch-black as the tidal wave swept over. And then it was gone.

The archway was entirely dark and lifeless, then a moment later a light winked on inside and they heard the soft chug of the generator starting up in the back room.

Outside, it was a calm evening once more; the gentle lapping of low tide punctuated by the lonely plaintive call of a solitary seagull.

Either side of her, Maddy heard both Adam and Cabot gasping. Cabot the worst of the two. ‘God help me,’ he gasped, ‘did I just witness the Devil’s work?’

‘A reality shift,’ said Becks. ‘Events in the past have changed the present.’

Maddy looked at the island of Manhattan. The lights of the fishing boats had gone. The lights of the town beyond, gone. Instead she could only make out a thick dark treeline descending down to the water’s edge. ‘There’s nothing there now!’

‘Just woods,’ said Sal.

Maddy bit her lip. ‘Becks?’

‘Yes?’

‘What on earth was going on when you left the twelfth century?’

‘King Richard was preparing to take the town of Nottingham from his brother.’

‘Oh great!’ snapped Maddy. ‘Is that, like, ourfault ?’

‘No,’ said Adam, ‘that actually happened.’

‘Well, something’s still wrong back then!’

‘The holy scroll thing?’ Sal pointed towards the table. ‘Maybe we hung on to it too long?’

‘Yes,’ Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. We should get it back, ASAP.’

‘But … is that right?’ said Adam. ‘Does Richard get his hands on the Holy Grail, you know, in correct history?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t know! But it sure shouldn’t be here in the twenty-first century.’

‘It goes missing. It gets lost!’ Adam stepped back towards the table. ‘That’s how this becomes the stuff of myth and legends. That’s why people ended up thinking it was the cup of Christ! It gets lost, right?’