Jedediah looked at him, realizing that Crane had suddenly spoken in an English accent. Crane seemed to realize at the same moment and tried to cover it by continuing, braying mockingly like a comedy English toff, “Another time, another place, another life, old boy. It’s a prophecy, don’t you know?”
Jedediah smiled. “That’s real funny, Pastor. You sound real different. Like someone in a movie.”
Crane grunted and returned to his chart. He unfolded another map, a modern one this time, of Manhattan Island and New York City. Putting the two side by side, he began marking co-ordinates taken from the numbers on the old chart on the map of New York.
“Look, Pastor,” Jedediah said. The excitement had raised his voice to a fevered squeak.
Crane already knew what he would see. It was not the first time he had done this – he had checked and rechecked the map references and locations numerous times. Each time he did so the same pattern emerged: the co-ordinates plotted three intersecting circles over the centre of New York City.
Triple wheels. And where the three wheels intersected they formed a symbol.
A Triskellion.
And the centre of the Triskellion bounded an area of downtown New York, with one building at its heart. Crane knew the history of that building, and its significance. He knew that this was where the prophecy would be fulfilled. This would be where Ezekiel One would happen again, and where he would gather his followers to him for whatever fate awaited them.
They were now motoring away from the New Jersey coast and across the harbour towards Brighton Beach. In the distance Crane could see the glittering spires of downtown Manhattan twinkling in the sun, and he felt he was about to fulfil his destiny, to do something for which he would be remembered for ever.
When the visitors came, he would present himself to them as their rightful representative on earth. As a direct descendant of the English Traveller, he was surely the natural ambassador. He would deliver up his loyal followers to the visitors – to do with as they saw fit. To breed the next super-generation with Crane himself as their leader. He was in absolutely no doubt about the role he was to play. He had not always felt this way – but he had finally come to recognize that his remarkable survival, his new-found powers, his re-birth, his lineage had all marked him out as the Chosen One.
Him. Not two snotty American kids from a bastard gene pool.
The water was becoming choppy and clouds gathered over the Manhattan skyline. A red sun hung heavily in the sky, casting a pink light on the glass towers. The boat powered up into the East River, past the buildings of the Lower East Side, until it found a berth alongside Roosevelt Island.
Crane gathered the crew on the teak deck.
“Look at the sunset, Brothers, and remember this day.” He took the hand of the two disciples on either side of him, who, following his lead, took the hand of those next to them and so on, until all on the deck were linked. The sun, huge now and blood-red, was sinking down behind the bristling spires and towers that yearned towards the pink-streaked sky.
Crane dropped his head in prayer. “Remember where you were on this day. Remember who you were with, and remember the sun going down on a world which from tomorrow will have been changed for ever. Amen.”
“Amen!” Brother Jedediah’s croak sounded above the low voices of the others.
Crane let go of their hands and smiled benignly at the group. “Tick-Tock,” he said breezily. “The time has come.” He looked down at the large Triple Wheel watch on his wrist, watching as the second hand swept round, waiting until it reached twelve.
And then he pushed the button…
In a pastel-pink house on a quiet tree-lined street in a suburban neighbourhood between Indianapolis and Tulsa, Barbra and Bob Anderson and their two children had just started to eat dinner. Meat loaf with gravy and mashed potatoes. Apple and raspberry cobbler to follow. It was Bob’s favourite.
“Meat loaf’s as great as always,” he said.
Barbra smiled. “Thanks, honey.”
The children rolled their eyes at each other and made kissy-kissy noises. Their parents told them to be more respectful and then laughed, unable to keep straight faces.
Then the alarms sounded.
Four separate alarms on the four wristwatches the family had been given by Brother Thomas and Sister Marianne. Gifts from Pastor Ezekiel Crane and the Church of the Triple Wheel.
Bob Anderson gently laid down his knife and fork. Barbra, Eden and Tammy did the same, their eyes fixed ahead, the tinny beep-beep of the alarms continuing to sound as they pushed back their chairs and rose from the dining table.
Bob and Barbra joined hands and walked slowly into their bedroom to gather their things together. Coats, bags, car keys.
Eden and Tammy were already by the front door, ready and waiting to go, when their parents re-emerged; their four smiles were fixed and serene, their eyes wide and unblinking. Barbra opened the door, stepped out and took a deep breath. The air was crisp and scented with the honeysuckle that grew in huge pots at the edge of the driveway.
It was the perfect day for it.
The family climbed into Bob’s station wagon, and as the car reversed out on to the road, Eden and Tammy waved at the family next door, who were pulling out of their drive at the same time.
Bob eased the big car out into the stream of slow-moving traffic. He nodded at Barbra and she nodded back. Their alarms and those of the children in the back began to synchronize: the tinny music of each one harmonizing with the others, until the car was filled with a sound like robotic birdsong.
They drifted towards the freeway, content to make the journey in silence. Bob and Barbra, Tammy and Eden. Each head was filled with the words they had read and heard every night.
The promises.
Each one was blissfully happy to be joining the others.
The noise changed from time to time, becoming either a high-pitched whine or a low buzz and shifting in pitch and intensity, but it was always there in Rachel’s head. Constant and maddening. She knew it was the same for Gabriel and Adam – the terrible noise that only they could hear, the sound of the interference, of whatever was neutralizing their abilities – and she knew her face was twisted into the same tortured expression as theirs.
She could see it: hunched over and staring at herself in the polished metal of the cell wall. Blurred and indistinct as the reflection was, the pain and frustration were clear.
She felt hopeless.
Powerless…
The sounds within the cell itself were no less unpleasant, no more comforting. The rustle of the plastic suits was like the whisper of something terrible whenever she, Adam or Gabriel shifted position; whenever they turned over on the floor or stretched to fight off the cramp, fighting against the pain as the handcuffs cut off the blood to their wrists. Pressing themselves against one another for comfort or inching away in an effort to be alone for a while, they tried to deal with the noise, and worse with the sickening realization that the journey they had begun in a small English village a little over two years before would end here, like this.
Lost and helpless. A long way from home.
In those first few terrible hours after their capture, Rachel came to accept that the only possible escape was into herself. The interference hissed and hummed until the headache was barely noticeable any more, and there were moments when, if she focused hard enough, she found herself able to sink beneath it. To hide for a few minutes at a time in that part of her brain that they would never reach. In the tangle of synapses that still sparked; that still fired the strange and unsettling images she had lived with since she and Adam had first set foot in the village of Triskellion.
The part of her that dreamed; that saw the truth.
Now she felt the first flashes of a strange new vision. The lights in the cell never dimmed, but Rachel, studying the shift patterns of the guards, knew that it was night; that it was dark outside. She closed her eyes and surrendered her consciousness to th
e darkness within. She let herself drift down into it, towards bright explosions of light and sound, until her mind was like a screen and she could watch images move across it.
She lay her head down against the cold metal floor and dreamed the past…
The girl remembered the tree and the fields of maize that had surrounded it.
The stranger had taught her Wappinger tribe to cultivate this well-watered and fertile island they called Manna-Hata. As far as she knew, he had been there many years: longer than her father and her grandfather – the chief – could remember. They called him Achak-Aranck, which meant “Spirit from the Stars”. He had seemed ageless and tireless, and had been regarded by the tribe as a medicine man and shaman.
The story told to the children was that he had brought the bees with him.
His gift to the tribe.
He had taught the tribesmen how to plant and cultivate maize, so they no longer had to live purely on meat. He had shown them how to burn off the crop to ensure greater fertility the next season, and the bees had pollinated many new species of plant around the island. He had taught them new techniques, so they could harvest shellfish from the bay and could manage the herds of buffalo that roamed freely across the plains.
He had helped the tribe to develop. He had turned them into a civilized and peaceful people.
The Wappinger had wanted for nothing once the stranger had arrived. They always had enough food to last through the winter, and the stranger’s good deeds and kindness ensured that they all lived side by side in peace and prosperity. Manna-Hata had been an earthly paradise: a land of milk and honey.
Until the European came.
Her father and the other braves had rowed out in canoes to meet him when his ship had arrived in the harbour. They had greeted him with gifts of honey, corn and dried meat. They had never seen such a man, fair-skinned and bearded, and they met him with good fellowship in their hearts as they had the stranger many years before.
For the Wappinger, the arrival of travellers had always been a good omen.
But this man was different.
His voice was rough and angry, and so were his crew. Once they had come ashore they behaved like animals: eating like pigs and forcing themselves on the women of the tribe like wild beasts. Protests had been met with violence. The Wappinger braves were proud and had fought back, but they had been no match for the exploding powder that the Europeans used to blow them to bits.
They had killed her father.
Achak-Aranck had called for a truce. He had offered the Europeans corn, buffalo, fish, beads and carvings to leave, but they had wanted more. They had wanted the land. Achak-Aranck had become angry. He had paced in a circle all night, entering a trance and shouting at the stars. Then the storm had come; torrential rain had washed away the crops and tossed the European ship aground in the bay.
The Europeans had become nervous at the power of the tribe’s medicine man, unnerved by the strange-looking shaman who seemed to be able to control the weather.
So they had killed him.
The Europeans had overpowered Achak-Aranck. They had run him through with a sword, spilling his guts on to the fertile land for the dogs to eat. Then, while he had still been alive, they had filled his mouth with their gunpowder and blown his head off.
A warning to the tribe.
And then the skies had really opened. The storms had battered the coastline, wrecking oyster beds and blowing away the tepees of the Wappinger. Swarms of bees had covered everything and everybody, stinging and dying as if to punish humanity for its folly. The European privateers had broken out in sores and died agonizing deaths in their beds, pus weeping from every wound.
As soon as his men had repaired the ship, the European captain had taken his remaining crew and limped away into the Atlantic Ocean, never to return.
They had gone, but the girl had known that nothing would be the same again. The braves had chopped down the tree where Achak-Aranck had died. They had carved it into a totem in memory of their shaman, the Spirit from the Stars, and had planted it where the tree had stood, in the same place that they buried their own dead.
She looked at it now: its stylized image of the stranger’s face, placid-looking and almond-eyed; the halo of bees round his head; the three-bladed amulet he had always worn round his neck carved underneath – the amulet from which he derived his power; the one torn from him by the European in his dying moments and taken away.
She looked at the wings that reached skyward from the top of the totem pole and saw a future: wood turning to brick, turning to steel on the same spot, growing and changing, thrusting ever higher, until a vast sparkling tower – glassy and jewel-like – stood on the spot where Achak-Aranck had perished. And at its top were two enormous silver wings poking up into the clouds.
And she was sure she could see two figures – spinning human fireballs – falling through the sky…
Rachel opened her eyes; dragged from the dream by the noise, metal against metal, she watched the guard slide the last of the three trays across the floor towards her and the others.
She blinked. She could still see the stranger’s image on the tree; a face that refused to show pain…
“Eat up,” the guard said.
The glass door slid shut, and only then did the guard holster his Taser.
Gabriel was awake. He looked down at the tray in front of him, then pushed it away with his foot.
“I’ll eat yours,” Adam said.
Gabriel shrugged and continued to stare through the glass at the guard.
Rachel watched him and wondered if he could possibly be feeling as wretched as she was. She knew he did not feel things in quite the same way as she and Adam did; she sensed that somewhere inside him was a strength she could never understand.
Yet despite all those things about Gabriel that were extraordinary, that defied belief and rational thought, he was still just a boy tied up in a prison cell. A boy to whom, she had come to accept, she would be inextricably tied for ever.
He turned to look at her. “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked. He nodded towards Adam, who was tucking into what looked like porridge, then back at Rachel’s untouched tray.
Rachel shook her head.
“Bad dreams?”
“Bad enough,” she said. She inched across the floor and laid her head on Gabriel’s shoulder. “But this is worse…”
Laura had spent the night in Amarillo: holed up in a cheap hotel and doing her best to stay awake. She had drifted off for an hour or two, but had spent most of the night watching the door and listening for footsteps outside the room or to the noise of cars drawing up in the car park. She had aided and abetted Kate’s escape from Australia and fled the scene of the shoot-out in Oklahoma.
Now the police would be looking for her too.
She had caught the bus to Alamogordo first thing, sharing the journey with half a dozen airmen heading back to the base after a few days’ R&R. Now, six hours later, she found herself approaching the base’s sentry-box, trailing behind those returning airmen and watching as they casually flashed their identification cards before marching through the gates.
Her mouth was dry and her heart was thumping in her chest.
“Help you, ma’am?”
The sentry peered at her from behind mirrored sunglasses. He was chewing gum and looked as though he could shoot her where she stood without giving it a second’s thought.
Laura took out her old Hope ID: a card she had not used for over two years, but which she hoped might be enough to get her inside. She tried to smile, to look relaxed, as she passed it across.
The sentry chewed his gum. He looked at the card, then at Laura. She could feel the sweat popping out across her forehead and prayed the guard would not see it. Long seconds crawled past before he slid the card back towards her. “Welcome to Alamogordo Air Force Base, Doctor Sullivan…”
Laura could scarcely believe her luck. It had been her only hope but she had still been certain that
her clearance would have long since been revoked. Perhaps they had simply forgotten. Perhaps they had never dreamed that she would have had the nerve to walk back into a Hope Project facility.
Whatever the reason, she was not about to question it and she hurried through the gates, her mind racing, wondering if the children were here and how on earth – now that she was inside – she was going to find them.
And what she would tell them when she did.
As she was walking past a block of single-storey buildings, a man in uniform rounded a corner and walked swiftly towards her.
“Doctor Sullivan?”
Laura nodded and tried to summon that relaxed smile again.
“I’ve been sent to escort you to the base commander’s office,” the airman said.
She fell into step with him. “And that would be…?”
“Major Todd Crow. He’s kind of … new.”
Laura nodded. Maybe that had been why she had found it so easy to get on to the base. Maybe this “new” commander was a little less security-minded than his predecessor.
Laura and her escort exchanged small talk as he led her into one of the low granite buildings on the base’s main square. They walked quickly through to the rear of the building, past window after window; Laura glanced into each one in the hope of catching a glimpse of Rachel or Adam. They eventually stopped outside a simple brown door. The airman knocked twice, sharply, and when the order was given to enter, showed Laura into the commander’s office.
The man behind the desk stood up. He was a little shorter than average but built like a soldier, with a broken nose and blond close-cropped hair. He stepped forward to shake her hand, and Laura found herself thinking it was unexpectedly soft in contrast to his tough militaristic appearance, with its pristine uniform and rod-straight back.
Crow sat down again and took a file from his desk. Laura saw her name and photograph at the top of the document.
It was her Hope file.
He tapped a finger against it. “Lots of good work,” he said. “Interesting research. Up until two years ago, that is. Then there’s just … nothing.”
Triskellion 3: The Gathering Page 17
