The Last Prophecy - [Kamal & Barnea 07]

by By Jon Land

  “It would’ve been of no value to them.”

  “They might have seen things differently,” Danielle said.

  “If it had been a gold bar, would there have been anything wrong with us keeping it?”

  “Wrong? Yes.”

  “I meant, would anyone be hurt by it?”

  “What’s the difference? Unless you found Hitler’s long-lost gold under that trench.”

  “Not gold, Inspector Barnea, but something that may have turned out to be just as valuable.”

  Colonel William Henley had jimmied open the lockbox in the camp building the 121st was using for its headquarters. He sat at a desk that in all probability had been occupied by Buchenwald’s commandant, or a similarly high-ranking figure, until barely a week before.

  Immediately he saw the contents of this smaller lockbox were different; specifically a black leather case, zippered closed. Henley opened the case and pulled out a plastic pouch that was both air- and watertight. Henley slit the pouch and slowly removed a thick wad of irregularly shaped heavy parchment paper. The paper had yellowed and grown brittle with age. A piece of one page’s corner came off and Henley thought for a moment about sliding the contents back into the pouch. But they were more than halfway out and reversing the process now would probably do more harm than good.

  So Henley continued to ease the pages from the pouch, curious as to why they had been segregated in a separate container. His rough count of the pages put the number at fifty-two, all of them containing two, three, or four four-line verses written in a language he didn’t recognize. Mostly French, it looked like, with other languages or dialects sprinkled into the mix.

  The next morning, prior to contacting military intelligence, he and Major John Henry Phills had similarly opened the larger three cases. The contents of these cases, though, were considerably different from those of the smaller one: what looked like field and mission reports accompanied by maps and other historical documents.

  U. S. military intelligence didn’t rate retrieval of the documents highly. It was severely backed up as the Nazi war machine continued to fall. They could not possibly arrange pickup for another two days. Henley’s orders were to secure the material until he was otherwise instructed.

  That had been the only order Walter Henley had ever violated in his entire military career. He had retained the services of German locals from Weimar who shocked him with their quick and often cursory translations of a sampling of the documents contained in the three larger cases. The fact that they had been buried here in Buchenwald, which opened in the late 1930s, indicated to Henley that Hitler had never laid eyes on their contents. Someone, either a spy or a person working against Hitler from the inside, had conspired to make sure he never had a chance to review the materials, fearing what the madman might do with some supernatural talisman on his side.

  This made Henley especially curious about the contents of the pages segregated in their own lockbox and written mostly in French instead of German. As near as he could tell, the smaller case contained the only original documents of the entire lot. Henley hadn’t brought the 121st’s personnel files with him and tried to recall from memory who among its members might have some degree of fluency in French.

  There was only one he could think of: Mildred Hayes, a nurse who had joined the 121st after a stretch of working for the Red Cross in occupied France. Although Henley had barred women, nurses, from accompanying the 121st to Buchenwald, Mildred had shown up at the front gate the day before, having hitched a ride on a convoy from Frankfurt. She was well aware of what was going on and wanted to be a part of it. Having spent the better part of her nursing career working in a burn unit, she figured she could handle the rigors of Buchenwald.

  And for the most part she was right. Henley found her tending to patients in one of the unit’s makeshift medical wards well past the end of her shift. He was honest with her about the origins of the lockbox, stretching the truth only when he said he needed her help in preparing a preliminary report of their findings for military intelligence.

  Mildred accompanied Henley to his office and settled in behind his desk. He repeated the process of carefully easing the pages from the weather-sealed pouch and positioned them in front of her. She slid a pair of reading glasses from the rucksack containing all she had brought with her to Buchenwald and settled them upon her nose. Positioning the desk lamp, she began to study the top page, the only one to be written in prose instead of verse.

  Almost immediately, Mildred turned back to Henley.

  “Is this some kind of joke, Colonel?”

  “Of course not. Why?”

  “You‘re telling me these documents are real, originals?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “And you really have no idea what they are?”

  “That’s what I needed you for.”

  Mildred shook her head and returned her attention to the pages before her.

  “She was the one who organized our first reunion,” Henley said, interrupting the flow of his tale. “That was eight years ago. She spent months tracking down as many of us as she could. It became her life’s work, and she even mastered e-mail to make the process easier.”

  “What happened to her?” Danielle asked, fearing the answer.

  “She died,” Henley told her. “Peacefully, of natural causes two years ago at the age of eighty-five. I guess you could say she was one of the lucky ones. I never told her I kept the contents of the lockbox. She was under the impression, as everyone else was, that I turned it over to military intelligence when they finally showed up.”

  “What was it Mildred Hayes realized, Colonel?” Danielle asked, staring at the steel case still held in Henley’s lap. “What was in those pages you asked her to translate?”

  “The future, Inspector Barnea. The lost prophecies of Nostradamus.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 42

  I

  ’ve got the tapes, Mr. Ambassador,” Major Jamal Jefferson said to Franklin Winters once the front door was closed behind him.

  Winters eagerly took the department-store shopping bag from Jefferson’s grasp. It was a long way from the diplomatic pouches both of them were accustomed to, but more fitting in this case.

  “Thank you, Major,” Winters offered gratefully, as he made his way into the corner den, which contained his entertainment center.

  “These are the last ones, Mr. Ambassador,” Jefferson told him. “I’ve been through the inventory. All the rest were taken in different sectors.”

  Winters had known Jefferson since the younger man was a full-scholarship cadet at West Point, ultimately graduating at the top of his class. Took him under his wing and became his mentor, not because he was black but because Winters saw in Jamal Jefferson the raw abilities that made great men. Although Jefferson had left for a high-level position in the Department of Defense two years earlier, the two men had remained close.

  Winters was barely conscious of Jefferson’s presence in the room, as he fit the first of the tapes into his VCR. Winters switched on the television and hit Play, still standing when the screen came alive. It showed a picture of the streets of Baghdad taken with concealed cameras by Special Ops troops during the war with Iraq. The footage was random, entirely worthless to most. To Winters, though, somewhere amidst it might lie some clue, however opaque, to his son Jason’s fate. He studied every frame of such footage, devoured it, in the fleeting hope that somewhere, somehow he would catch a glimpse of his son. It wasn’t much but it was all he had.

  The tapes he had watched in the past year would fill a closet. A few shots, only a few, offered enough detail to be enhanced, studied. None had panned out. But short of going to Baghdad himself and turning the city upside down, this was all Winters could do.

  “May I speak plainly, Mr. Ambassador?” Major Jamal Jefferson asked him.

  “As of two days ago, I’m not an ambassador to anything anymore. You can call me Franklin,” Winters said, without taking his ey
es off the screen.

  “Let me help you, sir.”

  Winters’s finger stiffened over the VCR’s remote control. “What are you talking about, Major?”

  “I know something’s wrong, sir. Just tell me what it is, see if I can help you work it out.”

  Winters still didn’t turn from the television. “What’s wrong is that my son is still MIA. Was there anything in the latest Sit Reports from the field?”

  “A few leads. Nothing concrete.”

  Winters turned toward Jefferson again. “Leads?”

  “Nothing concrete, as I said, sir.”

  “What then, Major?”

  “Indications, innuendo, rumors. Please, sir, as soon as anything of merit crosses my desk, any fact at all, I’ll bring it to your attention.”

  “Tell me about these indications, the rumors.”

  “Unreliable sources, sir,” Jefferson said, regretting he had even raised the subject.

  “I’d like to judge that for myself, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but. . .”

  “But what?”

  Jefferson realized he was still standing at attention. “I’m looking into things further, sir. If anything checks out, anything at all. . .”

  Winters turned back to the television, sighing deeply. “I understand, Major. Thank you.”

  Before Winters could speak again, his wife Mary entered the room and shuffled toward the television, blank stare locked on the screen.

  “John Wayne,” she muttered. “Is John Wayne in this one?”

  “No, Mary,” Winters said patiently.

  “I so like John Wayne war pictures. Except the one he died in. The Sands of something. Can we watch one?”

  Winters kept his attention trained on Major Jamal Jefferson. “Maybe later, dear.”

  Mary looked at Jefferson, then back at the screen. “Are the two of you staying for lunch?”

  “Major Jefferson was just leaving.”

  “Because I made tuna fish. And I really should get your names so I can introduce you both properly when my husband gets home. Now, I have the tuna in water and oil. Or I could make both.”

  “I think I’ll be going now,” Jefferson said.

  “Thanks again, Major,” Winters told him.

  “I’ll get back to you as soon as I learn something more, sir.”

  Jefferson turned and walked out of the room, leaving Winters and Mary alone.

  “He’s black, you know,” she whispered and then refocused her attention on the Baghdad street scene.

  Winters realized he’d have to rewind, probably run the tape from scratch when he could give it his full attention. Another twenty or so remained in the bag Jefferson had delivered.

  “What happened to John Wayne?” Mary said, staring at the screen again.

  * * * *

  Chapter 43

  W

  hat’s the matter, Inspector?” Henley asked, after gauging Danielle’s reaction.

  “You’re telling me all these people died for that?”

  “You don’t believe, I see.”

  “In a bunch of prophetic mumbo jumbo? No, I don’t.”

  “Neither did I, for a long, long time,” Henley said distantly. “But the Germans must have. We had it all wrong, you see. Oh, someone had hidden these documents from Hitler to keep him from seeing them all right, but not for the reasons we thought. No, they kept them from him because these pages predicted his fall. Cryptically, yes, but the insinuation was there in a few of the prophecies Mildred Hayes was able to translate to a certain extent.”

  “Is that why you never turned the manuscript in to army intelligence?”

  “You said so yourself, Inspector: why bother when they wouldn’t have believed anyway? The war was ending. We’d all be going home before too much longer. I told you before, I got greedy. If Mildred Hayes was right, and the documents weren’t forgeries, I knew how valuable they might be. Once back in the States, I could get them authenticated and get some rough estimates on their worth. But I never did. I just held on to them. I never even bothered trying to have the prophecies translated.” Henley stopped and took a deep breath. “Then something changed.”

  “Your son,” Danielle recalled. “A linguistics specialist who wrote software code for translation programs.”

  Henley’s gaze had grown as distant as his voice. He seemed to look past Danielle, at the wall, into nothing. “I’d become quite an expert on the prophet Nostradamus already. Those verses I had noticed were actually four-line stanzas called quatrains. Nostradamus wrote all of his prophecies in that form. Plenty know that, but very few know that he scrambled both the order and the meaning of his quatrains so that humanity would not be able to decode them until they had outgrown the savagery and violence of the sixteenth century.”

  “If Nostradamus could see the future, he’d have known that was never going to happen.”

  “I was just like you,” Henley told her flatly. “Until my son’s translation changed my mind. He was tops in his field in the entire world,” he continued, his tired voice starting to crack with emotion again. “I finally showed him the manuscript and he wrote an encryption program designed to identify repetitive images and extrapolate their meaning. The computer discerns meaning by studying a large number of examples to isolate patterns and tendencies. What he found was truly amazing, terrifying in another sense. The manuscript foretold dozens of major events from the modern era. But the ones yet to happen were scariest of all, one in particular.”

  Henley pulled an ordinary piece of copy paper from the case and handed it to Danielle. She took it and read the one stanza, what he’d called a quatrain:

  In an age of two’s four, in a land of many

  An army rises from midland afar on a day of equal light and dark

  Beneath the flames of the bringer of fire, a darkness will reign eternal

  “You said quatrain,” Danielle noted. “What happened to the fourth line?”

  “This was the last prophecy in the manuscript. Nostradamus never completed it. He must have died or fallen ill before he had the chance. But those three lines were enough to cost my children their lives, not to mention more than a dozen other good people, heroes who deserved far better.”

  “What did you mean before about far more lives about to be lost?”

  Before Henley could answer, a shrill alarm began to blare through the A-frame.

  “We got us some company,” said John Henry Phills.

  * * * *

  Chapter 44

  J

  ohn Henry Phills yanked open the cabin’s lone closet and wheeled a Civil War-era cannon out from it into a position directly in front of the door.

  “This ought to discourage them,” he said, looking back. “But you better come with me first.”

  Henley clutched the lockbox tighter against his chest, as John Henry Phills lifted a flashlight from a shelf and handed it to Danielle.

  “This way,” he said.

  Phills kicked a tattered carpet aside to reveal the outline of a hatch cut into the knobby pine floor. He reached down, found the handhold, and hoisted the hatch open. The cabin’s murky light was enough to reveal a ladder below.

  “Escape tunnel,” he explained. “I built it for the day the black helicopters showed up. Runs a half-mile beneath the woods. Follow the back road until you come to Route Four. I’ll hold them back long as I can.”

  Danielle lowered herself onto the ladder first. She felt a chilly draft, smelled air rich with moisture and rot. She touched down on a bed of soft dirt and held the ladder steady for Henley’s descent. The latch above them closed abruptly as he neared the bottom. Once Henley was beside her, Danielle shined the flashlight down John Henry Phills’s tunnel, which ran straight for a brief stretch before forking sharply to the left.

  “It’s them, isn’t it?” Henley asked, sounding more angered than scared. “The ones who killed my son, my daughter. . . .”

  “Tell me why, Colonel
Henley,” Danielle said, and began to head down the tunnel with Henley just behind her.

  “Because I know what they’re up to, their plan. Nostradamus predicted it and that knowledge is the only thing that can stop them.”

  In an age of two’s four, in a land of many

  An army rises from midland afar on a day of equal light and dark

  Beneath the flames of the bringer of fire, a darkness will reign eternal

  “The first line,” Henley said, after reciting the quatrain again. “According to my son, ‘two’s four’ refers to the year 2004. ‘A land of many’ is the United States.”