The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  Em expected buildings; but when they passed through the barrier, the road led to a gateway in a high, mesh fence with warning signs about electrification. Em’s view was limited, but he could see enough to spot an observation tower exactly like the ones they had in U.S. prison movies. Creepier still, the four guards on this gate wore military uniforms and carried semiautomatic rifles. They moved crisply to surround the car, and one actually shone a flashlight in Em’s face before waving them on. The gate opened of its own accord as they approached.

  “Next stop is your champagne reception,” Em’s right-hand man remarked.

  It looked more like a small town than conventional company buildings. As the limo drove slowly down a main street, Em could see towering office blocks interspersed with lower-slung research and laboratory facilities. Signposts on junctions guided the unfamiliar. Despite the lateness of the hour, there were pedestrians in suits and pedestrians wearing white coats. There was even—and this was the clincher to the small-town feel—an all-night café that seemed to be doing a roaring business. Victor had mentioned that the Bederbeck Foundation was the largest employer for miles around. It seemed that the foundation worked its employees on a twenty-four-hour shift rotation.

  It also seemed his long journey was about to end. He glanced at the men flanking him and amended the thought: end badly.

  Em closed his eyes, partly to relieve the stinging, but mainly to try to think. Now that the shock of his betrayal was wearing off, he was slowly coming to realize that his present situation made no sense. He tried to organize his thoughts in the hope of finding some flaw in his logic; but try as he might, there was none. The situation had unfolded in dramatic, but very simple, steps:

  His father’s research into Nostradamus had led him to discover a Knights of Themis plot. Professor Goverton had been murdered in order to keep his discovery quiet. But before he died, he’d hidden documentary proof of the plot, then passed its location on to Em. Since then the Knights had been hot on Em’s heels to stop him from finding it.

  Which was exactly where the whole business stopped making sense. Because it was obvious that the Bederbeck Foundation—hence its Themis masters—already knew where Em’s father had hidden the proof. And had known it before Em and Victor worked out the secret message only days ago: they’d put up a hut on the site, for heaven’s sake; they’d installed electricity and arc lights; they’d driven in an RV! Then they’d set their men watching, apparently for Em to turn up.

  But why? Why not simply take back the proof and destroy it?

  “You want that I drive to the main entrance?” came the voice of their driver.

  “No,” said the man on Em’s right, who seemed to be the senior of the three. “The boss will want to see him at once. If we take him through the lobby, everybody in the building will be trying to catch a glimpse of him. We’ll take him through the side door and use the service elevator. With luck we can make delivery before anybody realizes he’s in the building.”

  The man on Em’s left broke his long silence. “We nearly blinded him with the arc lights. The boss won’t like that.”

  “It was an accident,” the man on the right growled. “Besides, he isn’t blind—are you, Em?”

  “No,” Em muttered sourly. With his eyes still closed, he found himself reminded of the “blind man,” the curiously shaped rock he’d spotted as he walked into the clearing. Could that be the clue to what was happening? Suppose the Knights discovered the area in which his father had hidden the proof but not the proof itself? Once the treacherous Victor told them that Em knew the meaning of the reference to the “blind man,” the Knights would have redoubled their efforts to find him. They didn’t know his claim was a bluff any more than Victor did.

  The only problem with that theory was that the blind man rock was obvious. Anyone in the clearing would have spotted it at once. Working on their own property with all the time and money in the world, men from the foundation could have turned the entire site into an archaeological dig. They should have found the documents within days.

  Em opened his eyes. The limo had entered a side street and was pulling up opposite a small door in one of the high buildings.

  “This is where we get out,” the man on his right told him.

  This was where his captors might make a mistake, Em thought. He was no longer helpless. He could see as well as ever now. The three men all seemed relaxed, as if they expected no trouble from him, and he realized his accidental blinding must have lulled them into a false sense of security. All three looked reasonably fit; but they were considerably older than he was, and he was certain he could out-run any of them. Especially if surprise gave him a few yards head start.

  The man on his right opened the limo door, slid out, then turned to hold it open for Em. The tinted glasses didn’t allow Em to see his eyes, but his stance gave no hint of wariness. Em slid across the seat to follow him, moving casually—not too quickly, not too slowly. The man to his left opened the other door, climbed quickly out, and walked around the vehicle to join his companion. The driver remained behind the wheel, staring directly ahead. Em tensed. When he got both feet on the ground, he planned to take off like a rabbit. Once he lost the two goons, he still had to get through the security gates and somehow find his way out of the desert, back to the city; but he’d worry about all that later.

  Em’s feet landed on the pavement, and his two guards, working like robots, gripped his arms firmly, halting his planned getaway before it even began. In a moment he was frog-marched through the side door. A moment more and he was standing between the two men in an express elevator. He made one more try to find out what was going on. “Where are you taking me?” He didn’t expect an answer and wasn’t disappointed.

  The elevator stopped on the twenty-third floor, and the men marched him out without relaxing their guard for an instant. He had a brief impression of luxurious carpeting on the floor of a reception area, the startled expression on the face of a girl behind a desk.

  “Is that him?” she asked, staring as if Em had grown a second head.

  The man beside him merely grunted in a way that might have meant yes or might have meant no. Then there were swipe cards in security doors that shut off his last hopes of escape as they clicked shut. More carpeted corridors, then a brief halt before another door. One of his captors reached out to knock politely. After a long moment he knocked again.

  “Gone off,” said his companion.

  “What do we do? The orders were to deliver him here.”

  “He’s probably just been called to the conference suite. Do you have clearance to go in?” The man gestured toward the closed door.

  “Level five,” his companion nodded. “Should do it. But I’m not sure we—”

  “Won’t thank us for leaving him out here. You know the regs. See if your card works.”

  Em watched the man step forward and tentatively try his swipe card in the door lock. It flashed green at once.

  The man gave a small grunt of satisfaction and turned to Em. “Inside,” he said tersely. “Boss will be with you in a minute.”

  Em stepped through the doorway. He was expecting an office, but instead he was in a luxurious penthouse suite with abstract art on the walls, plush modern sofas, thick pile carpet, and a wall-mounted television screen twice as large as any Em had ever seen before. Off the living area was a small study with a polished desk, behind which was a whole bank of personal computers on their own countertop. Several of the screens were tuned to CCTV cameras throughout the building; or possibly some other building.

  As the door closed, Em noticed that a swipe card was needed to get out of the office as well as get into it, meaning he was still effectively a prisoner. He wondered who the boss was who was coming to see him. His guess was Bederbeck Foundation’s head of security or some other foundation executive. But a niggling, scary little voice in the back of his head kept asking if it might be the boss of the entire foundation.

  Em realized hi
s train of thought was going nowhere and took a cautious step farther into the room. The place reeked of money. Two of the abstract paintings on the wall looked like early Picassos, and Em would have bet anything that they were originals. He found himself wondering if the suite didn’t belong to the CEO of the foundation but rather to the head of the Knights himself.

  To take his mind off his increasing nervousness, he walked to the floor-to-ceiling curtains on one wall and drew them aside. As he suspected, the wall behind was entirely glass. Em looked out. The impression of a small town in the desert came through as strongly as ever. The sky to the east was lightening with the approach of dawn, and banks of streetlights were already beginning to wink out. Somehow it made Em feel even more afraid, as if the night had been a fiction but sunrise must bring his day of reckoning. He glanced straight down and experienced a wave of vertigo that drove him away from the window. Instead, he moved through to the study area and walked over to the computer screens. One had an internet connection and was displaying the familiar Google search page. On impulse Em typed in “Bederbeck Foundation.” As he hit ENTER, he heard the sound of the office door opening behind him.

  Em swung round, heart pounding, then stopped in sudden, absolute paralysis.

  “Hello, Em,” said the man in the doorway.

  Em squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again before he believed what he was seeing. But even then he could not, did not actually believe it. His heartbeat rose until it almost filled the room. Waves of sudden darkness threatened to engulf him. His knees felt weak; but somehow he managed to speak, somehow he managed to gasp out one word. “Dad?”

  Chapter 42

  It was like being ill with a fever. His heart was a jackhammer. He felt weak and shivering. But worst of all, nothing was real anymore. His world had the shifting quality of a dream, and there seemed to be snakes moving at the edges of his vision. “You’re dead,” Em said in a voice that echoed and reverberated through the empty recesses of his skull. “You died last month.” He thought of using the word murdered.

  “I’m not dead,” said Edward Goverton. His voice was as it should be and infinitely familiar. It did not quaver or shake or wooo the way ghosts were supposed to. Em didn’t believe in ghosts anyway. How could you see a ghost if you didn’t believe in it?

  “You were dead,” Em insisted. “You were cold.” He remembered the cold. The body had felt like meat.

  His father took him gently by the arm and led him to one of the upholstered sofas, encouraged him with subtle pressures to sit down. His father sat beside him, and Em could feel the cushion move. Cushions didn’t move when ghosts sat down. “I’m sorry,” his father said. “I should have prepared you for this.”

  “You were cold and not breathing. I felt your wrist. There was no pulse.” It was true. After he’d called for Mum, he’d gone all grown-up and efficient and tried to find a heartbeat. He’d held Dad’s wrist the way nurses did on TV and used his fingertips to feel. There was no pulse at all.

  “I’m sorry,” his father said again in his nasal, slightly reedy professorial voice, and sounded genuinely sorry, although Em wasn’t certain for what. “I deceived you. But let me explain, and you’ll realize it was necessary. Terrible, but necessary.”

  “Explain,” Em echoed vaguely. For some reason the word terrible didn’t seem to have any meaning.

  His father took it as an instruction to action. “Everything was arranged to make you think I was dead.”

  “I did think you were dead,” Em told him. Behind the strangeness and all the other emotions, he caught a glimpse of anger. How dare Dad do this to him? How dare Dad pretend he was dead?

  “An injection lowered my body temperature and respiration. The lack of pulse was an old stage magic trick. A billiard ball in the armpit. If you squeeze it, your pulse weakens, then disappears altogether. Crude but effective.”

  His father was talking about stage magic tricks as if they were discussing the entertainment at a party. It was too bizarre for words. “Why?” Em asked almost desperately. “Why did you want me to think you were dead?”

  “They were closing in on me. Actually, they were very, very close to discovering everything,” his father said. He had to mean the Knights of Themis. Em had most of that story already: the secret prophecy . . . the discovery of the plot that put his father in so much danger. “The symptoms of my illness were caused by poison.”

  “I thought your death was caused by poison. That’s what Mum thought too.”

  His father dropped into a familiar lecture mode, his voice crisp and sharp. “You need to listen carefully, Em. This is a complicated story.”

  “I’m listening, Dad,” Em said. Strangely, the lecture voice helped. It was like the old days when his dad decided to tell him something important. The familiarity made Em feel better.

  “I thought they might be getting close, but I wasn’t sure how much they knew. I certainly didn’t anticipate an attempt on my life. They were very, very subtle. The toxin was very subtle. I assumed I’d just picked up a bug. Fortunately Alex—Dr. Hollis—was more suspicious and ran tests.”

  “Dr. Hollis helped section Mum!” Em told him, suddenly outraged.

  “For her own protection,” his father said patiently. “We didn’t think they’d attack her—why should they?—but we couldn’t take any chances. With her safe, we were free to act without having to worry.”

  Safe? Em thought. In a Knights of Themis clinic? But his father probably didn’t realize how far the arm of the Knights reached, even after they’d poisoned him. He wouldn’t have realized it was a Themis clinic. Em opened his mouth to tell him, but his father was talking again: “Once we’d confirmed that they’d poisoned me, it was obvious we needed to come up with a plan—and urgently. Clearly I couldn’t continue as I had before. Actually, I needed to get out of the country and into hiding before they made another attempt on my life. I—”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “We couldn’t risk it,” his father said soberly.

  Seated on the sofa with his arms folded across his chest, his knees tight together, Em found that he was feeling sick but buried the sensation. “You say ‘we’—who else . . . ?”

  “Well, Dr. Hollis knew, of course. He had to sign the death certificate. And Tom. Tom was in on it.”

  “Tom Peterson?” Em gasped. “He didn’t say anything to me!” He found himself wondering if Charlotte knew, but decided at once that she couldn’t have. She’d never have kept anything that important from him.

  Edward Goverton shook his head. “Well, he couldn’t, could he? Basically the plan was that I had to die—appear to die anyway—and let those bastards think they’d succeeded in killing me. Then when I went into hiding, they wouldn’t come looking. It was vital to make this believable. I couldn’t tell your mother, and I couldn’t tell you. One small slipup by either of you and the plan would be ruined. But if you believed I was dead, you couldn’t slip up, could you? It was really the only way of being safe.”

  “Mum isn’t safe.”

  “There’s no need to worry,” his father said without explanation. “Your mother knows what happened now, and she’s on her way to join us. I made the arrangements as soon as I knew you were in Arizona.”

  “How’s she getting here?” Em asked. There were more important things he needed to know—like how Dad had got her released from the clinic—but his mouth wouldn’t do what it was told when it came to questions.

  “Private jet.”

  Private jet? His father could scarcely afford a bicycle. Maybe when he died he claimed his life insurance. Em suppressed an urge to giggle, then realized he was becoming hysterical. He made a massive effort to pull himself together. The world around him seemed to solidify a little. He concentrated hard, trying to focus. Eventually he said, “Your message to me . . . about the prophecy and . . .” He shrugged helplessly. If his father was still alive and had proof of the Themis plot, why send Em on a wild-goose chase to find it
? There were parts of the story that weren’t making sense.

  For the first time his father smiled, albeit grimly. “That was the clever part. Obviously once I was secure and had things properly set up, I wanted your mother and you to join me. But frankly, Em, I also wanted to strike back. The problem was, dealing with an enemy like that, you have to flush them out into the open. That’s why I dangled the bait of the Themis vaccination plan. That’s also why I involved you. This part of the plan had to be as believable as my death. Obviously I would never have entrusted something like this to anyone outside the family. Which only left you, young as you are.” His father’s smile broadened. “And as you can see, it worked to perfection.”

  Except it hadn’t. As far as Em could see, it hadn’t worked at all. They were both locked in a Bederbeck Foundation building, and the Bederbeck Foundation was a front for the Knights. Heck, the Bederbeck Foundation was manufacturing the very vaccine his father was trying to expose.

  As he tried to piece together the more confusing elements of his father’s story, Em was abruptly struck by a blinding revelation. Maybe Dad didn’t know that the foundation and the Knights of Themis were one and the same. It was the only thing that made sense. Em had no idea how his father had managed to end up here. Obviously there was more to the story than he’d told yet; and just as obviously something had happened to fool him completely. Although Em still couldn’t figure out the details, he found himself suspecting, with a sinking heart, that the Knights had played his father like a fish. “Dad,” he said urgently, “we have to get out of here!”

  His father looked at him blankly. “Why?”

  “They’ll kill you. They’ll have to. Nothing’s changed about your secret prophecy discovery, except now they know you’re still alive.” They would probably kill him as well, Em thought, since he also knew about the vaccination plot.