Codex

by Adrian Dawson

  “Oh, how it pleases me to finally see you on your knees,” Simon said with a contemptuous smile. “You have no idea how I have hated having to tolerate your desire to control things and your ability to find fault with every plan I implement.” He laughed, standing over her body and mocking her wretched state. “You have done me a favour, Magdalene. Because it is fitting that I should kill you and it is fitting that I should be the one to kill Bernstein.”

  MaryBeth looked up at him, her face pleading. She could not speak for the blood which filled her throat. It would have made no difference; Simon was unmoved. “Give my regards to The Baptist,” he said, swinging the ancient sword as hard as he could. As the fire caught a pocket of air and exploded, the razor-sharp blade came down and sliced through the delicate skin of her neck. After two thousand years Mary of Bethany; the Magdalene, was finally dead.

  But The Abraham had one more thing he needed to do before he threw the sword to the floor. Crouching, he turned her severed head to face him, her expression trapped in a final desperate moment of disbelief. Even in death, she still had something he needed.

  As Simon Zelotes, he had been a zealot who controlled Jesus’ flock from within and evoked the wrath of the authorities. Reinventing himself as Simon Magus, he had been a master showman, head of the West Manesseh Magi from whom the word ‘magician’ had ultimately originated.

  Now, as the one true Abraham of Eternity; the man who would issue final judgment on the world and rule in its wake, he gathered the things he needed and walked calmly out of the burning room. Back into the darkness.

  the word is gone

  Isaiah 45:23

  Having long since conceded the game of chess and returned to the spare system in D-11, Jack was waiting both for the freshly-woken Warner to bring coffee from Level-C and for MaryBeth to arrive so that he could show her how swiftly the Quotient system had uncovered the primer. The key to the code that many Jewish scholars had apparently denounced as heresy. The bible, they said, was pure. It was there to be understood for the inherent wisdom of its conventional text, not to be analysed and dissected by technology. Heretical thoughts returned Jack’s mind to Brother Frederico. Wild-eyed and full of his own heretical thoughts, the old man had been denounced by those around him and spirited away to a remote monastery where those who were embarrassed by him forgot him and those who got to know him tolerated him. But he had known. All the time he had damn well known.

  His question had been simple; why must we be warned? Jack had been flippant and sarcastic, but he would be deathly serious if he had the chance to ask again.

  But that chance would never come; because Frederico was dead. Dead like Dave, like Paulo and like Andy. The final thing that Frederico had said at the table, indeed the final words that Jack had ever heard him utter, were still as clear as day. He could almost see Brother Frederico’s eyes widen, almost see Brother Bernard’s look of unease and almost hear Brother Peter’s sombre translation:

  “He says that even today they are keeping the lineage strong and pure, selecting a suitable mate and creating descendant after descendant so that they may be ready to launch their new Messiah. The Baptist was our Messiah but He is gone. Now they are biding their time and building their power. When they are ready they will create Armageddon for their own purposes. People will die, but it is those who live that he fears for. They will believe that it is the End of Days and Judgment is come. They will be expecting a Saviour, and will blindly follow anyone that might offer them salvation.”

  If he was a madman then by definition he was a madman like Jean Cocteau, beside whose painting the nightmare had started. A madman like Leonardo Da Vinci whose genius had helped shape the modern world whilst his heresy had been thinly disguised. Carefully hidden but gently obvious, waiting for centuries to be viewed by those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

  The settlement in Kozlar was only one of four facets of the cult as a whole, each one designated as a modern day Horseman of the Apocalypse. The complete organisation had interests so wide ranging that it had managed to carve its signature into almost every avenue of modern life; business, finance, manufacturing, agriculture, environmental issues, armaments and... in Borac... human minds. They had built their resources on ancient foundations and added a tower made from the ivory of modern technology. All they needed now was to decimate the planet and deliver a saviour into the hearts of its broken inhabitants.

  But Frederico had said that they would blindly follow anyone who offered them salvation.

  And that did not necessarily mean Lara’s child.

  Thousands would die and all the time Frederico had known. He had not known when or how, but he had clearly stated that it was those who lived that he feared for. Jack was so lost in his thoughts that he did not even see the digital entry system on the wall inform him that a visitor had just entered the building. In bright red digital letters, the display read: ‘<5017>M.DeLaine’. It stayed on screen for three seconds and then was gone.

  Warner appeared in the doorway and handed over a cup of coffee; white with one. Jack did not accept it, his thoughts were too far away to even see it. He stared vacantly forward and saw nothing but the stupidity of his own blind faith that it had all been over.

  “He’s still alive,” he said, fear tainting his words.

  “Who is?” Warner asked sceptically.

  “The leader of the cult,” Jack said.

  “I don’t think so,” Warner said. “He shot himself in the face. Lots of mess, remember?”

  “No,” Jack said quietly, his eyes still searching out the answers. “The man who killed himself was the man who ran the settlement. That was why he had been wearing pale green robes. The man who ran the armaments division; RKI, would wear red, Pegasus white and Mørkhest black. But none of them was the overall leader. That was somebody else.”

  Warner was starting to look as worried as Jack. “So if the old guy wasn’t the leader, who was?”

  Jack’s eyes widened. Then Warner realised that they were no longer looking at him. They were looking beyond him, over his shoulder. He turned around and saw an expensively dressed man standing in the doorway. He did not know who it was, but it was quite obvious that Jack had recognised him immediately. It was the man who had used Jack as a pawn from the start. The man who had lured his daughter and used her to conceive a child that would ultimately be sacrificed to the authorities when the time was right, just so that Jack would think that he had won. The man who had known from the start that there was only one system in the world that could break the code he had held for thousands of years. All he had needed to do was trick the man who owned that system into using it, believing that the four sectors of Eternity were gone as surely as the threat they had carried with them. The man who wanted the future of the world. The man who controlled Eternity.

  Jack stared his uninvited guest straight in the eye, his features curled into a harsh veneer of loathing and contempt as he realised with a sickening finality the true face of his daughter’s killer.

  With a .357 revolver clasped firmly in his left hand, Simon twisted his face into a cruel and arrogant smile.

  “I’ve come to retrieve what is mine.” he said.

  all that i command thee

  Exodus 7:2

  Warner instinctively reached into his coat to remove the F.B.I.-issue Glock semiautomatic, but there was no time. Without a second thought Simon turned and fired, the bullet hitting Warner full in the chest. He fell backward with a sickening thump, the blood instantly starting to flow down through his shirt and collect in a pool on the floor around him. His eyes were wide open as he gasped for breath, the thick liquid steadily filling his throat and lungs.

  Jack stared at Simon with a look of uncontrolled horror.

  “Where is my book, Mr. Bernstein?”

  Jack could barely speak for the tightening in his throat. He felt sure he was going to vomit.

  Simon raised the gun to eye level. “I will ask you one more time. Where is my bo
ok?”

  Jack started to edge backward. A million questions fought for space in his mind, and a million answers never appeared. If he did not hand over the book, then he was going to die. If he did, then he was probably still going to die. Shit, he thought, he was going to die anyway.

  “Who the hell are you?” was all he could think to ask. He needed time to think.

  Simon smiled with vicious pride. “I, Mr. Bernstein, am Simon Magus, Head of the West Manasseh Magi in Samaria.”

  With his black suit creating a harsh silhouette against the bright yellow system and his eyes filled with controlled vanity, he began to quote from the New Testament: “Acts Chapter eight, Verse nine; ‘There was a certain man, Simon by name, which beforetime in the city used sorcery, and amazed the people of Samaria, giving that himself was some great one; to whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, this man is that power of God which is called Great. And they gave heed to him, because that of long time he had amazed them with his sorceries.’”

  Simon seemed extremely proud that Jack had not already worked this out for himself.

  He stopped, turning to face Jack. “I am the first true magician,” he said, his face glowing with less than modest self-appreciation. “I am the ordained Abraham of the Essene disciples of Eternity. You would be wise to do exactly as I say, Bernstein, for I am indeed that power of God which is called Great.”

  Jack thought of Frederico. “So.. you’re immortal?” He could not even believe that he had found himself in a situation where he was asking that question and expecting the answer to be ‘yes’.

  Simon laughed openly now. “A primitive word, but an accurate one nevertheless. I have the power of God; the power of Eternal Life.”

  Jack had edged himself to the furthest reaches of the room. “Stolen from John the Baptist?”

  Simon did not move; the gun was still focused. “No, Mr. Bernstein. Bequeathed by The Baptist... Voluntarily.”

  Jack sneered. “Just before you killed him?”

  “The Baptist was the master of his own destiny,” Simon replied. “He did not need me, he made many enemies of his own volition. He opposed Antipas’ marriage to the divorced wife of his half-brother and was arrested for voicing his opinions. I simply decided that it would best serve my needs if he never emerged from his incarceration, that was all.”

  Jack was shaking his head, his glazed stare accentuating his growing disbelief. “You... you murdered the Messiah?” he asked slowly.

  Simon shook his head in denial. “I, Bernstein, will be Messiah. The Baptist was special because he had been granted a gift from God, but that did not automatically make him the Chosen One.” He shook his head in denial. “Promised from the line of David and delivered from the line of the Zadok? Allowing himself to be betrayed so easily? Does that sound like a man destined to deliver his people from the corruption inherent in His Father’s kingdom.” He sighed, tiring of the small-talk now that the focus had been moved away from himself. “If, like the rest of the world seems to have done with The Christ, you choose to believe that such a catastrophic failure of a man was the last hope of salvation, then I care little. I am here only for what is rightfully mine, not to give you another lesson in history.”

  Jack was backed against a wall in every sense. He could go no further. He carefully extracted the book from the scanner and, shaking, handed it over. Simon received it in his right hand and checked that it was undamaged. The only part of his plan that he had not liked was the fact that he must temporarily place his most sacred artefact into the hands of a man who could not possibly understand its true value.

  “Now give me the disk,” he said.

  Jack tried in vain to appear ignorant. “What disk?” he asked.

  “The disk in that drive behind you,” Simon offered calmly. “The disk with the key to the hidden words of God. The key to my future.”

  Jack reached to his right and pressed the button on a high data capacity drive at the side of the computer’s monitor. A yellow disk popped out. He was reluctant to hand it over, but the one consolation he could take was from the fact that he had chosen to save a backup copy of the scanned Hebrew text and the primer directly onto the spare Quotient’s hard disk. Because it clogged the system unnecessarily, it was something he rarely did.

  Simon smiled as he accepted it. “MaryBeth told me you were extremely predictable,” he said. “She was always so very sure that you would co-operate.”

  Jack suddenly remembered that MaryBeth had never arrived. She had promised that she would and in all the time he had known her, she had never broken her promises. His eyes narrowed. “Where is she?” he asked with contempt. “What have you done with her?”

  Simon shook his head and laughed. “Do you realise how much comfort I am currently absorbing from the fact that you really are as stupid as I had initially hoped? MaryBeth is... forgive me, MaryBeth was... working for me. If you truly held suspicions of our Eternal Life then I thought you might have realised that by now.”

  Jack’s face became a mask of vacant shock.

  “MaryBeth...?” Simon questioned. “Mary of Bethany? She was The Magdalene; she came to work for you at my command, although you actually selected yourself when you acquired Gambit’s technology. I merely allowed her to move to your company as part of the takeover so that she might guide you instead of them. Now that she is of no more use she has gone the way of all those who attempt to stand in my way.”

  He reached into his right hand pocket and removed a small ring case. As he flipped it open, Jack saw with horror what was contained inside. He had never thought to question how Simon might have gained access to the highly-secure R&D building, but now he knew.

  Simon had a key to the front door.

  He had MaryBeth’s eye.

  Jack suddenly realised just how carefully he had been moulded. MaryBeth had been with him for many years, she knew him better than anyone. And she had deliberately criticised his ideas about Simon, knowing that it would adequately fuel his determination to prove that he was right. She had pretended to be helping him and all the time she had been playing the queen; systematically luring Jack like a pawn towards her own king.

  MaryBeth; who joined IntelliSoft just after the Gambit takeover. The woman who had never aged in all that time. Bright, alive and full of ideas for the future of the company. Only one person had ever questioned MaryBeth’s motives; only one person had ever said that they did not trust her.

  When they came, Jack’s words were laboured and filled with an inherent desire to be wrong. Just this once.

  “Oh my God....” he said. “Elizabeth...?”

  Simon smiled and shrugged a mocking apology. “Like so many of the others, your late wife controlled her own destiny. She became an obstacle. Whatever might have happened to her was the result of her own choices.”

  Jack felt a sickness welling inside his entire body. Elizabeth, lying in the hospital; dying. Slowly slipping away as a result of injuries sustained when her ’59 Corvette left the road, climbed the embankment and hit a wall. She was such a careful driver, nobody had been able to understand what had happened. Especially when no other vehicles had been involved. She must have swerved to avoid an animal they said; it was a terrible accident.

  Everybody had known that the steering column had broken, but it was an old car; a classic. It had been restored long before Jack had bought it as a gift for his wife and nobody had ever thought to check the steering column. Why would they? Why would anybody restoring a classic to such a high standard have fitted a stressed steering column?

  Jack had lived with a strong sense of guilt over buying her the car; a birthday gift. He did not know that the column had been fine at the time he had made the purchase. He would never know that Zebulun had worked silently inside it the night before the crash; that he had carefully rebuilt the fascia with everything; even Elizabeth’s gum wrappers, placed millimetre-perfect where they had been before.

  A stressed column, stro
ng enough to withstand normal driving but always waiting for the moment; always ready to break. All it needed was a fast stretch of road, a parked vehicle and a long view ahead. When Elizabeth pulled out to pass the parked vehicle she would know that the road was clear, she would not even bother to take her foot off the gas. She would probably still be doing fifty. And then the stationary car would pull out. Suddenly and for no reason. It would place itself right in the middle of the road and Elizabeth would have nowhere to go. She would panic and turn the wheel as hard and as fast as she possibly could. She would pull it too hard; the pre-stressed metal would not be able to take the strain.

  With only slightest sound of cracking, it would break.

  Jack’s heart had been ripped out in an instant. “Why me,” he asked quietly. “Why the hell are you doing this to me?”

  Simon remained unaffected. “As I told you in the church I came to you because I am a wise man, a Magi, not a good Samaritan,” he laughed at his favourite double-entendre. “You were chosen because you fulfilled the three requirements I needed. You were Jewish, you had a daughter and you had purchased the technology from Gambit that might ultimately break the code. You should be flattered, Bernstein, because I showed great faith in you. I have watched your company grow and I have waited until your computers had the necessary processing power. Then I instructed the Magdalene to suggest the FireWorX system to you so that I could implement phase two...”

  He looked around the room as though he was addressing an audience of thousands. “My judgment,” he said with glorious pride. “My judgment across the face of the earth. Long overdue.”

  He walked around the room with an air of superiority, picking up or glancing occasionally at some of the more obscure computer peripherals. “Phase one was simple, really. I steal your daughter from you and make her The Mary so that she might bear the next Jesus for me. I then announce to my followers that this new Jesus is the true Messiah, so that they will do whatever I say. I convince the disciples and Ministers that your daughter’s Child is some kind of Messiah; a Saviour for their pitiful lives and, as such, they are happy to do my will without question.”