The Secret Prophecy

by Herbie Brennan

  The blank look changed to one of confusion. “They don’t know I’m still alive. How could they? We’ve taken all necessary precautions; and thanks to you, we have their best man under lock and key.”

  “Who’s we, Dad: the Bederbeck Foundation?” Em demanded. He leaned toward his father with an air of urgency. “Dad, the Bederbeck Foundation is a front for the Knights of Themis. They’re both the same thing!”

  Professor Goverton blinked. “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “You know?”

  “Of course I know. What do you think I’ve just been talking about?”

  “The Knights of Themis!” Em exclaimed. “You’ve been talking about the Knights of Themis and how they tried to kill you and how you set them up using me and—”

  “Em,” His father interrupted gently. “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood the situation completely. It was Section 7 who’s been hunting me. I thought you must have realized that.”

  This time it was Em’s turn to look blank. “Why would Section 7 want to kill you?”

  “Because I am Grand Master of the Knights of Themis,” his father told him.

  Chapter 43

  His dad called the place a canteen, but it looked more like a five-star restaurant to Em. He picked up the breakfast menu with a feeling of disbelief. Eggs Benedict . . . eggs Mornay . . . beluga caviar . . . French charcuterie . . . venison sausage . . . plus a mind-blowing list of more familiar food, including American favorites such as waffles with maple syrup.

  Despite everything, Em discovered he was ravenously hungry and put in an order for bacon, eggs, sausages, black and white pudding, fried mushrooms, grilled tomato, potato cake, baked beans, and a pot of coffee. His father stared at him with an expression of amazement, shook his head slightly, then told the waiter he would have fresh fruit salad followed by Darjeeling tea and brown toast.

  The food appeared with miraculous speed. Em speared one of his sausages and asked, “What’s going on, Dad?”

  His father nodded. “You deserve to know the truth, Em. But I’m afraid it’s a little complicated.”

  “You said that before,” Em informed him. “If it makes things simpler, Victor told me about the Knights.” He thought he might as well get it out in the open. He was still reeling from his dad’s confession.

  “I suppose he told you we were a supersecret, power-mad organization set on dominating the world and enslaving everybody in it?”

  That was about the size of it, all right. “More or less,” Em admitted. He bit the end off his sausage and discovered it was delicious, but was having difficulty concentrating on his food.

  His father shook his head sadly. “Did you believe him?”

  “More or less,” Em repeated. But it occurred to him that he’d never questioned any element of Victor’s story, never asked for proof, never tried to check it out. Now that he knew Dad was a member of the Knights of Themis—heck, a fairly high-up member, to judge from his title—it also occurred to him that he might have been less trusting. Nothing Dad was involved in could be all that sinister. “I mean, I did when he told me. Not now, of course. I mean, not . . . if you’re in it.” It was embarrassing, but he couldn’t quite make the words sound confident.

  His father smiled. “Our organization isn’t quite like that.”

  “Okay,” Em said, “what is it then?” It came out a little more belligerently than he intended, but he was feeling guilty about accepting everything Victor said so readily.

  “Historically, it was a group founded in ancient Greece. But that isn’t Themis as it exists today.”

  Em hastily swallowed a mouthful of egg. The Greek business tallied with what he’d already been told. It was his father’s second comment that rang a different bell. “It isn’t?”

  “The original Knights were eventually broken up. But some Themis ideas lived on, and eventually the movement was reconstituted by a group of intelligent men as a Masonic-style organization in the Middle Ages. Its most important principle was—and is—the notion that our leaders aren’t doing a very good job.”

  Em had never taken much of an interest in the Middle Ages, but he doubted there were many people who’d argue with that today. He was always hearing about how politicians ruined the country financially, then fiddled with their expenses while telling everybody else to tighten their belts. It wasn’t much better in America, where their politicians got everybody into wars nobody wanted and legalized torture by calling it a different name. And that was before you got to the really nasty countries: dictatorships such as Burma and North Korea. But Victor had blamed that all on the Knights themselves, claiming they were basically antidemocratic. Suddenly Em decided to put his father to the test. “At least we have democracy,” he said.

  “I’m afraid some of us aren’t as keen on democracy as we might be,” his father said without a moment’s hesitation. “What’s called democracy today is a far cry from the original democracy of ancient Greece, and even that had its failings.”

  Em wasn’t so much interested in ancient history as his father’s take on democracy today. But his father had that look he sometimes got, and Em knew he was going to get the complete lecture anyway.

  “When the Greek authorities wanted to do anything important—like change a law or go to war—they had to put it to a general vote,” his father said. “The voters turned up at the forum and said yea or nay. If you didn’t get a majority, you couldn’t go ahead with your plan. That was something close to real democracy: the people decided all the important issues; and if you couldn’t be bothered to turn up at the forum to vote, you couldn’t very well complain about the outcome afterward.”

  “What’s so different about today’s democracy?” Em asked, intrigued despite himself. Everybody went on endlessly about democracy and the Free World, and he’d always more or less accepted that this was what he was living in. The way he accepted what Victor had told him about the Knights. Without thinking.

  His father shrugged lightly. “In our Western system, we don’t generally vote on any particular issue. We vote to elect leaders who decide all the issues for their term of office while we have no more say in the matter. That’s how wars start. We vote in old men who send young men to their deaths because our old men get annoyed with other old men or want to extend their power. And even on the very few occasions when we do have a direct vote on some issue—a referendum, for example—the general public can be manipulated so easily by political lies and promises that the response is almost always entirely predictable.”

  Em recognized the light in his father’s eye and realized he was in for a major political speech if he didn’t head him off at the pass. “Yes, but what’s all this got to do with the Knights of Themis?”

  “The original Knights were intelligent men who looked at the messes their leaders were making throughout Europe and decided they could do better. Unfortunately, intelligence and power are not the same thing, so Themis really got under way as an intellectual movement, not a revolutionary one. But that changed. Around the turn of the last century a group of American intellectuals, all of them secret Knights of Themis, decided not only that current political systems were no longer serving humanity, but that something should be done about it. Their main concern was America itself, of course; but they quickly realized two things. One was that the rot was apparent in just about every other country of the world. The other was that the world was becoming more integrated, so that any reform could not be confined to America alone.

  “These were concerned men, Em. They wanted a better world, a more equal world, a more peaceful world where national conflicts no longer slaughtered millions, where common problems were no longer ignored because of narrow political interests. But they knew intelligent analysis would never be enough. So they began to recruit powerful people to their cause. They concentrated first on the very wealthy: bankers, oil and rail magnates, industrialists—all individuals in positions of great power unencumbered by any need to answer to voters or lobbyi
sts. Later they expanded their reach to senior civil servants, selected politicians, judges, newspaper and other media owners. The result was Themis as it exists today. As an organization, we are not hungry for power—most of our members already wield more than enough power to satisfy any rational man. Nor are we hungry for money. Collectively, we can call on resources greater than those of many sovereign nations. What we are is a wholly benevolent organization dedicated to the welfare of the human race.”

  Em looked at his father’s familiar features. What he said had to be true. It fitted in with everything he knew about his father: the thoughtful, gentle, concerned professor so popular with both his colleagues and his students. All the same, Em heard his own voice ask brusquely, “What about the vaccination business?” Now that he realized his father was involved with the Knights of Themis, he knew the vaccination story couldn’t possibly be true. He had already tucked it away as another of Victor’s lies. But the fact remained that Victor had only interpreted the story: it was Em’s own father who had created it as part of the coded message that brought Em here. There were still things his father needed to explain.

  If his father was in any way perturbed by the question, he did not show it. “I think before we go into that I’d better tell you a little about Section 7. Have you heard the term before?”

  Em nodded as he buttered the last piece of toast. “Victor said he was one of their agents.”

  “I’m surprised he mentioned it by name. Victor isn’t just one of their agents, and Section 7 is arguably the most secret, most sinister, most dangerous, most evil organization on the planet.”

  Em glanced at his father in surprise. The old man wasn’t usually given to exaggeration. “It’s just part of the British Secret Service, isn’t it?” He wasn’t sure Victor had actually said that, but it was certainly the impression Em had been left with.

  His father raised one eyebrow. “Is that what he told you?” He shook his head with an expression of disgust. “No, it’s not just part of the British Secret Service, although Britain did have a hand in setting it up. The agency itself was set up in late 1946 as a joint venture between America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, and, oddly enough, Finland. British India was briefly in as well, but withdrew after independence the following year. The code name for the agency was Watchman, but since it was the seventh Anglo-American agency to be set up at the end of World War II, those involved took to referring to it as Section 7.”

  “Sounds respectable enough to me,” Em remarked.

  “It was, until 1955. That was the year the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact. By then the agency had stumbled onto the Knights and, frankly, became obsessed with our activities. By the middle fifties the obsession had turned to paranoia. Section 7 concluded that we were actually the ones behind the Warsaw Pact, that we had somehow manipulated the Soviets. Complete nonsense, of course. Even the American government didn’t buy it. Apparently exchanges got a little heated. President Eisenhower consulted with his counterparts in Britain and the other countries involved, and made the decision to disband the agency. But when they failed to persuade Eisenhower to change his mind, the agency went rogue. They dropped out of sight—they were experts in concealment—ceased to report to the administration, and embarked on criminal activities to replace their official funding.”

  Em had finally stopped eating and was staring at his father with undivided attention. It was difficult to picture Victor as a member of a rogue, criminal organization, but then it had never occurred to him that Victor had lied so consistently about the Knights. He licked his lips. “What sort of criminal activities?”

  “Human trafficking, mainly.”

  “Jeez!” Em breathed. He’d read about that. East European girls were smuggled into France or Britain on the promise of well-paid jobs. But once separated from friends and family, they were forced into prostitution. It looked as if he’d completely misjudged Victor. The man was mixed up in some very nasty business.

  “Since 1955—more than fifty years—Section 7 has tried to destroy the Knights of Themis. It is their single most important goal, and they have pursued it with almost unimaginable ruthlessness. The Knights have been forced to respond by becoming more and more secretive, particularly in terms of our membership. Unfortunately, this policy has proven less than successful. In recent years Section 7 had a change of leadership. The new man introduced a policy of directly targeting members of our ruling council. Several have been assassinated. He was getting close to discovering who I was. Once he did, I would be next for the chop.” He paused, sighed, then went on. “I decided we had to do something about it for my own protection.”

  Em swallowed. “Like what? Assassinate them back?”

  “Really, Em, you seem to have been reading far too many trashy thrillers. Besides, we’re not assassins, whatever you’ve been told. But we did decide to fight fire with fire. We thought that if we could capture and hold the new Section 7 leader, we might guarantee my safety and the safety of our people at least for a time. The only problem was discovering his identity.” His expression softened. “These agents work in the shadows, and we had no idea who the new man was. We had to bring him into the light of day—and quickly. I’m pleased to say that I was the one who came up with a plan—ingenious, if I say so myself—to flush him out.”

  It was weird to think of his father involved in stuff that wouldn’t have been out of place in a James Bond movie. But no weirder than the simple fact that the father he thought dead was talking to him now.

  “It was my interest in Nostradamus that gave me the idea,” his father went on. “When I finally tracked down the wording of the secret prophecy, one interpretation that occurred to me was that it could predict a pandemic of some sort and that the ‘slender lance’ reference might refer to vaccination. But it was the ‘yoke of slavery’ that really set bells ringing. I knew that one of Section 7’s great myths was that we of the Knights planned to enslave humanity rather than help them. It struck me then that we might use their very paranoia against them.”

  “How?” Em asked.

  “My plan was dangerous,” his father told him, perhaps a little proudly. “But given that, I was certain it would work.”

  “Well, don’t keep me in suspense, Dad. What was the plan?”

  His father smiled again. “I let it be known, very discreetly, in certain circles that my interest in Nostradamus had led me to uncover a dastardly Themis plot to wipe out a generation of children by means of a toxic vaccination program. I knew that word of my supposed discovery would reach Section 7 eventually; and for something like this, our psychological profiles suggested the new leader would take personal charge of the investigation—he had apparently been a very successful field officer before his promotion. When I faked my own death, I drew him deeper into my plan and distracted him from investigating me too closely—he had to remain focused on the details of the supposed plot. In short, I led him here.”

  Em stared at him. “So the whole story of a Themis plot . . . ?” He already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear his father say it.

  “Was fiction,” his father said.

  “And the new leader of Section 7, the one who ordered your people assassinated . . . ?”

  “Was your old friend Victor. I’m sorry, Em; I know you trusted him. But you mustn’t feel bad about that. He is an expert in the art of deception.”

  “What have you done with him?” Em asked stonily.

  “Our security people are holding him here for questioning.”

  And after that? Em wanted to ask. But something stopped him.

  Chapter 44

  The guided tour of the Bederbeck facility was bizarre. Em’s earlier impression of a small town was strongly reinforced; but now he saw it almost as a small town from the future, with science-fiction touches such as segments of motor-driven walkways leading to the major buildings and robotic voices responding to swipe card security. The office towers weren’t particularly high by American standards
, but high enough to British eyes. Everything looked eerily clean, as if it had only just been built. There were gigantic storage tanks attached to the lower-slung warren of laboratories and manufacturing plants. (Em assumed they were for fuel until his father explained that many pharmaceuticals were based on petrochemicals nowadays.) But what really got to Em was the reaction to his father and himself.

  Although they used electric-driven pods from time to time, most of the tour was on foot, accompanied by an entourage his father hadn’t felt the need to explain. Em worked out that one was a secretary, another a personal assistant. A young man in a neat linen suit might be some sort of communications officer—all he seemed to do was talk on a cell phone and whisper messages into Dad’s ear. Two others could only be security. They were pressed from the same mold as the characters who had brought Em in: beefy men in shades and suits.

  “This is our research division,” his father said as they entered another busy building; and once again Em couldn’t help but notice the reaction. His father wasn’t treated like a UK visitor. His father was treated like God. Or at least like the company president. Staff members rushed to greet him, fussed to help him. He seemed to be able to go anywhere he wanted, demand to see anyone he wished. Yet even the idea of a big boss didn’t quite explain it. Many members of the staff looked at him with expressions that bordered on awe; and not just junior staff either. Em noticed the odd reaction sometimes extended to himself, presumably because he was his father’s son, although in his case the expressions showed curiosity rather than respect.

  The tour ended at a low-slung residential building set well away from the remainder of the facility behind a screen of trees. Em took in the manicured lawns and swimming pool at a single glance. “Wow!”

  “Home sweet home,” his father said, clearly pleased by his reaction. “Bit better than we had in England, but no harm in that. Okay, Em, this is where we’re living for the duration of our stay, and this is where I leave you for the moment—some things I need to see to.” He handed Em a plastic swipe card with a delicate eye-in-pyramid hologram embossed in one corner. “The doors are all self-locking, but this will let you in. It’ll also let you in anywhere you want to go in the rest of the foundation, although, obviously I’d want you to avoid the high-security danger areas; there are a few of them in the facility, but they’re all clearly marked. It also doubles as a cash card. You can use it to pay for meals or anything else you need to buy here. Try not to bankrupt me on your first day if you can possibly avoid it.”