The Seventh Commandment

by Tom Fox

  The module was a metallic rectangle, half the length of a lorry trailer but in its other dimensions similar. It was mounted to the poured concrete slab on which it stood by four steel feet that lifted it twenty centimetres off the ground, and out of its belly ran a trunk of cables that divided and subdivided to traverse the distance to monitoring equipment stationed all over the eighty-three square kilometres that constituted Pantelleria itself. From the height of its taller peak, called Montagna Grande and reaching 836 metres into the sky, down to the ancient Castello that was the heart of the island’s small coastal town; from the minuscule airport to the huddles of hot springs scattered all across the small landscape, every dimension of Pantelleria was monitored. Each measuring unit sent its data back to the research module, where computers assessed, processed, stored and relayed it all.

  The module’s interior was mostly made up of computer racks and data storage units, though a small space accommodated a swivel chair and a bank of real-time equipment monitors for the occasions when scientists came to service it in person. The floor was a metal grate, and an air conditioning system worked twenty-four hours a day to keep the stock of valuable equipment from being melted by the heat of the Sicilian climate.

  It was empty today, of course. The scientific teams came on a monthly rota, and there was rarely need to modify their predetermined schedule. Pantelleria was not an island of active concern. Its residents lived peacefully, grateful for the hot springs but otherwise dismissive of a geological past that was well and truly the stuff of history.

  So no one was in the module, seated at the monitoring station, as the manual dials connected to the central survey equipment began to come to life for the first time since they’d been installed.

  Outside, no one noticed anything at all.

  PART FIVE

  Decisions

  43

  Fourteen months ago

  The document that lay on Emil’s desk was longer than he’d anticipated. Not that he hadn’t seen it in each of the four drafts that had preceded the current copy. He’d watched it grow beyond the proportions he’d initially anticipated, though always from afar – from the sidelines of second-hand copies fed to him as the small preparatory team headed by the ex-priest did its work.

  Today’s meeting was the first he’d seen of the document’s final form, and the first occasion he’d had to be shown it by the author himself.

  Emil took his eyes from the sheet of A4 paper on which the text was printed in neat, twelve-point Arial font. Beneath it was another sheet covered in pencil scrawls of Akkadian cuneiform symbols which Laurence’s team, in conjunction with qualified helpers, had been working on for weeks.

  ‘The translation will stand up?’ he finally asked. Laurence’s old features remained emotionless as he nodded slightly.

  ‘We’ve had a doctoral researcher from Canada working on it since we reached a final text,’ he said. ‘He’s a bright young thing in the field, doing his research in the language from the high period of 1000 to 1500 BCE. There’s no one out there who knows the language as well as he does.’ He paused, stared directly into Emil’s waiting eyes. What passed unspoken between them was the knowledge that this helper could not be allowed to survive his contribution to their efforts. There could be no loose ends. Not once things went public.

  ‘As linguistics go, it’s a perfect fake.’

  Emil let his eyes fall back to the pages, swapping the printout for the cuneiform draft. He had worked with a few Akkadian items during his tenure at the Vatican Archives, though the language had never been a speciality of his. He recognised a few glyphs here and there – enough to know it wasn’t gibberish.

  That alone put him miles ahead of ninety-nine percent of the population, who were the main targets for the writing. The average member of the Italian populace wouldn’t know Akkadian from Klingon. They would believe it said what it said, because someone would tell them.

  It was the other one percent that was the worry. Italy grew scholars of antiquity like a field grew weeds, only without the benefit of pesticides to eradicate the excess. The text had to be convincing enough that they would buy it, or at least to keep them occupied and working long enough to give Emil his window.

  ‘We’ve ensured the English version that will get circulated contains a few minor errors,’ Laurence added, sounding pleased with this particular point.

  ‘Errors?’

  ‘Small things,’ the other man explained. ‘A few variations of tense, a mixing up of insignificant vocabulary here and there. That type of stuff.’

  ‘Why?’

  Finally, the tiniest smile. The first show of emotion on the ex-cleric’s face. ‘Because a few errors make it more believable. We can’t have a perfect translation right out of the gate – that never happens. It would be suspicious. Give the translators out there a few errors to fuss over. They’ll trip over themselves to correct each other’s punctuation and tense shifts. It’ll keep them focused on that rather than provenance and things that really matter. Then we can release our own translation, correct, with all its “divine origin”, when the time comes.’

  Emil absorbed the comment, nodded. Laurence had proven himself more than capable, thinking through dimensions of the project that hadn’t even occurred to Emil. He was a gem of a find.

  But there was one issue that still troubled him.

  ‘Do there really need to be so many?’ Emil asked abruptly. He shuffled the pages in his hands so that the printed translation was again on top. ‘It’s far more than we need.’

  Laurence kept his gaze level. Emil’s face, rather than the papers, attracted his stare.

  ‘It’s a symbolic number. In this kind of document, symbolism is everything.’

  ‘But there were ten plagues in Egypt,’ Emil countered, meeting Laurence’s stare. ‘If you were going to go for overkill, why not go all the way for the traditional count?’

  ‘Mirroring shouldn’t be our aim,’ he answered. ‘We want allusions, not exact parallels. So we engage with the first – the water of the Nile turning to blood – but we go our own way with the second. Unless . . .’ he hesitated, a wry smile on his lips, ‘unless you wish somehow to concoct an infestation of frogs?’

  Emil tried to smile back, though his focus wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Little twists here and there,’ Laurence continued, ‘to let us do what you need done.’

  ‘But seven?’ Emil asked. ‘I only need three or four.’

  ‘Seven is a good biblical number, especially for Christians. Seven days of creation, the number of cosmic and divine perfection—’

  ‘I know the symbolism, Father.’ Emil stressed the man’s former title in annoyance.

  ‘Then you should have no trouble seeing why it would be helpful in selling this little dream to the kind of audience you want to receive it.’ Laurence leaned forward. ‘Every little helps, Emil.’

  He huffed. ‘Understood. Still, it’s more than I was anticipating. I’m not sure we’ll be able to pull them all off.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t go through with all of them,’ Laurence answered confidently, sitting back. ‘I haven’t modified your plans that much. Only carrying out the first few will be necessary. The rest are there simply to build expectation.’ He paused, and when his voice returned it had a bemused air that even the conspiratorial tone of their conversation couldn’t mask.

  ‘I mean, come on, Emil. Even you couldn’t blot out the sun.’

  Their conversation went on for another twenty minutes, Laurence describing in detail each of the plagues that the text articulated, together with the means that he and Emil’s technical crews had worked out for accomplishing those that would actually be brought to life. The longer Emil listened, the more confident he became in the preparations, and the more poetic the text began to feel.

  Once there had been ten plagues, now there would be seven. And they would roll off the lips of a populace to whom he would feed, line by line, this new message from ‘antiquity’.<
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  He read the text over again, allowing its contents to resonate and slip into his memory like some sacred song.

  When his eyes at last returned to Laurence, the smile had finally come.

  ‘This is good, very good. Everything up to the fifth plague.’

  Laurence leaned forward. ‘You don’t like the final two?’

  ‘I think we can do better.’ The words weren’t a condemnation, and Emil’s smile had only broadened. ‘I mean, if we’re going to go big, let’s go big.’

  ‘How . . . big?’ Laurence asked.

  Emil rose from his desk. He was growing to like this man, and suddenly felt as if the two of them needed to share a drink and enjoy these moments for the grandeur they truly represented. He walked to a small shelf, uncapped a bottle, and poured them each a neat drink.

  ‘Join me,’ he said, and handed Laurence one of the glasses. And then, back to their task, ‘Let’s go all the way.’

  44

  Emil’s home office

  Alone in his office when the drinks were done and plagues six and seven had been decided upon, Emil was afforded something that had become a rarity since his plans had begun to take shape in earnest: a moment of peace and solitude. He was by nature a man who favoured quiet over noise, who disliked idle chit-chat as much as he was perfectly content to run a meeting or speak his will to others. The constant stream of conversations that had been necessary over the past weeks were not idle, and so they didn’t really bother him; but he was still happy with the moments of quiet that seemed like rarer and rarer gems scattered throughout his days.

  All this talk of religion, of plagues, it was the worst sort of conversation. Not that he didn’t enjoy his time with Laurence – the old man had a cynicism and boldness about him that Emil admired, combined with a deviousness that he hadn’t expected. His departure from the priesthood had left him poor in addition to resentful, with few prospects for anything approximating a comfortable future, so when Emil had been able to promise him a complete change of circumstances, and a remainder to his life that could be lived in a kind of luxury Laurence had never known, the older man had committed whole-heartedly to the project.

  Still, the theme they had to address was one neither of them cared for. Prophecy was the very heart of the plan Emil had concocted that first afternoon when the idea of the operation that would change his life had occurred to him. The key to it all. But what a foul-smelling key! The idea that grown men, seemingly intelligent by most other standards, could actually believe that God spoke to them – that a divine voice would so spend its time as to dictate things as mundane as the colour of rivers or changes in the weather – it was the height of absurdity. If a god existed at all, surely he would just fix the earth or destroy it. Those had always seemed like the only reasonable options Emil would consider, were he ever in a divinity’s shoes. Make things better, or wipe them out and start over. What kind of god would be so whimsical and inefficient as to expend his voice and will to send . . . frogs? That’s what it had been in Egypt. And then, bugs?

  Fucking insects. Emil simply couldn’t fathom people who would believe these things and then go on worshipping a god of ‘power and might’. Not when what was billed as one of the fiercest shows of his power in the Old Testament was a ‘plague’ that could have been overcome with a good batch of insecticide.

  But the fact was that there were people who believed these things. More than believed them: there were people who lived in the light of such ideas. Who saw the evidence of God speaking in the past, and fervently believed he did so still. Who waited for his words. Who heard them in the mouths of their teachers, in headlines in the news, in the songs of children. Christ, their god seemed to talk everywhere. Everything was a revelation, everything a prophecy.

  Vacuous, stupid – and precisely what Emil needed.

  All the more reason he needed to get it right. There was a way these people spoke, and a way they expected God to speak. If he was, for a moment, to play the part of the divinity, he needed to get his voice right.

  Of course, Emil’s interests were far less divine than theirs. God only knew what today’s ranks of charismatics, Pentecostalists and revelation-ready believers thought God was actually leading them towards through his apparitions on a slice of toast and appearance in watermarks on the underside of a bridge. Spiritual enlightenment? A better world? Peace and love and . . . the notions became more sickly and annoying as he listed them in his mind.

  Emil’s interests were more base. The minds and hearts of the masses had never appealed to him, and Emil had never fancied himself a prophet, had never desired to play the part of a religious leader or to develop a cult of followers. Yet since his life in legitimate scholarship had been stolen from him, he had fancied himself one thing – one thing that, to his mind, stood higher than a prophet or leader or voice of the people.

  A man with the power and wit to get what he deserved.

  If what was deserved was not going to be given, it would be taken. And Emil would take far, far more than anyone would expect.

  But as any good thief knows, the art of the heist rests in a key ingredient never to be overlooked or ignored.

  Distraction.

  Emil phoned Laurence at the end of a thoughtful silence. The old man didn’t like to speak on his mobile, being ‘of too different a generation to care for that sort of thing’, but he answered when it rang.

  ‘We forgot to discuss one thing,’ Emil said abruptly. ‘The next step.’

  Laurence hesitated only slightly.

  ‘Next?’

  ‘Now that we’ve decided on the plagues, what’s next on the to-do list?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Laurence answered. ‘The planning is done. There’s nothing left to be done but to turn something new into something old.’

  Whether the pause that prefaced his next words was meant for dramatic impact or not, it had that effect on Emil.

  ‘The tablet,’ Laurence said, ‘is ready for its inscription.’

  PART SIX

  Death

  45

  The present day – Hotel Majestic

  Via Vittorio Veneto

  The hotel at which Ben and Angelina eventually arrived was just what she’d wanted. Nothing too big, and nicely out of the way. She didn’t want to risk the exposure of staying in one of Rome’s enormous tourist establishments, and she’d had enough of narrow dodges in side streets to want to avoid the economy dives that lined every alleyway in the tourist-trap city. The pompously named Hotel Majestic was ideally in-between: a boutique establishment with just over forty rooms, a plain exterior, and a nice classical air inside. It was also exorbitantly expensive, as Angelina recalled as soon as the name registered in her memory – one of the finer, more reclusive hotels of Rome. That, too, was reassuring. The higher the price, the more private the city’s establishments tended to be. She didn’t exactly have money to spare on such a place, but she figured that narrowly escaping being shot justified going beyond budget for the sake of security and privacy.

  The hotel had looked as welcoming as home when the swearing taxi driver had deposited them outside its front entrance. He’d offered a final barrage of profanities, to the brow-raised surprise of the genteel hotel doorman who stepped out of brass-framed doors to meet them at the kerb, but seeing that no more cash was forthcoming from his unwelcome clients, the driver eventually slammed his foot against the accelerator once again and sped away. The power outage that had affected the city had ended some time during their drive – Angelina had no idea what had been its cause or its resolution – and the hotel glowed beyond an orange-lit frontage.

  Angelina had laid down her card at reception, extracted from her wallet before they’d entered so she could keep her handbag at her side, carefully laid against her leg in an attempt to conceal the tear in her trousers and the congealing blood of the wound beneath it. Fortunately, the reception counter was high, its old-fashioned oak buffed to an impossible shine, and the overly made-up recepti
onist uninterested in anything other than entering the new booking details into her computer, now that ‘the bloody ancient thing is actually running again’. With only a few minutes of negotiation Angelina had arranged a queen room for them to share. The hotel’s stock of family rooms with multiple beds was, it seemed, fully booked for the night.

  ‘We’re going to stay . . . together?’ Ben had asked. His sudden shyness and visible embarrassment marked yet another shift in his oscillating demeanour. It was quaint to see him so concerned about the propriety of their lodgings, having just having survived a gun chase in the darkness. For a heartbeat Angelina wondered whether it wouldn’t be more merciful to the man to go somewhere else and get them separate lodgings, but the simple fact was she felt safer together, and that outweighed any discomfort Ben might feel with the situation. She didn’t give him time to argue before confirming the arrangements and accepting their key – the old-fashioned type, forged of brass, attached to a large leather tassel.

  The room, situated on the fourth floor and accessed by an ancient elevator which they used despite the bellboy’s concerns that the power might go out again, was spacious and comfortable. It was done out almost entirely in pure, glowing white: white bedposts and linens, white fabric chairs, white enamel desk in front of three thicknesses of white curtains over the windows. Even the doors were painted gloss white, the whole room accentuated by numerous floor-to-ceiling mirrors that made it appear larger than it was. Angelina didn’t think she’d ever been in a hotel room quite so fine, though she also wasn’t certain that, if these were the decorating tastes of the uber-wealthy, she’d been missing all that much.

  The first fifteen minutes of their stay were dedicated to treating Angelina’s wound. Terrified of staining the white bedsheets with blood and facing the interrogation that would ultimately result with the staff, she’d perched herself on the edge of the porcelain bathtub and gingerly slid off her trousers. If the thought of lodging together had caused Ben to blush, seeing her in her pants, the colour of bare flesh reflected again and again through the ricocheting angle of the mirrors, turned him almost as red as the wound in Angelina’s leg.