Lucifer (aka the Lucifer Code) (2001)

by Cordy, Michael

  'He set up his rival ministry when infighting was rife within the Church. Pope John Paul II was ill, and had become a puppet of the powerful reactionary right. In Europe and the United States Catholic youth were falling away in vast numbers. In Latin America there were huge losses of Catholics to evangelical Protestant teachings. It was a terrible time. Accosta should have stayed and reformed the Church from within, but instead he put himself first. His obsession with technology and what he calls truth is no less dogmatic than the blind arrogance of those fools in the Curia.'

  Riga paused for breath and his voice became softer, but no less passionate. 'We in the Society have one clear goal. Survival. We gotta save our Church from itself and those like the Red Pope who'd destroy us. Dr Fleming, you've stumbled into a war zone and you gotta be careful what you do with the technology you've found and the knowledge you seek. There are those in the Vatican and those near the Red Pope who'd do anything to possess it and control it.'

  'But that's the whole point,' said Fleming. 'Once we know what awaits us after death no religion can control us.'

  Riga released a dry, humourless laugh. 'You figure that's gonna fill the Vatican or the Red Pope with joy? Just think about the spiritual as well as the scientific implications of what you're seeking. You're putting yourself in the way of powerful forces - and you and Amber in a ton of danger.'

  'Shouldn't Amber decide for herself whether she wants to get involved? She came to me for help and this wavelength might be vital in curing her headaches.'

  'Maybe. We ain't talked since I visited with her in San Francisco a week ago.'

  Fleming frowned. 'She hasn't called you since?'

  'I figure she's got a lot to think about, with her mother. But I'm hoping she'll call soon.'

  'When she does call, will you ask her to contact me?'

  'Sure.'

  Fleming stood to leave, disappointed that he had achieved nothing by coming here. 'Thanks for your time,' he said, extending his hand.

  Riga took it. 'Likewise, Dr Fleming. You still gonna go looking for her?'

  'I've got no choice. There's nothing else I can do.'

  'God speed, then, and watch yourself.'

  Shortly after Fleming's departure, Father Peter Riga closed the door, returned to his desk and dialled Amber's number for the eighth time since Fleming had contacted him. The voicemail kicked in, but he left no message. Instead he dialled a three-number extension within his own building. On the third ring a voice responded. 'It's Father Peter. Get me the Superior General.' He didn't have to wait long before the rich voice of the head of the Society of Jesus was on the line. 'Superior General,' Riga said, we gotta talk. Urgent.'

  *

  Leonardo da Vinci Airport. Rome.

  Three hours later

  Fleming struggled through the milling crowd towards the British Airways check-in. As he approached the desk, he realized that the self-confidence he had always taken for granted had deserted him. His career, which had sustained him throughout his working life, was slipping away from him, his personal life was non-existent and he had nowhere to turn. He used to call his brother when something personal was troubling him, and talk through professional matters with the director of Barley Hall. But they were the source of his troubles.

  There was only one person who could help him make sense of all this and she was inaccessible. All he could do now was go home and wait for Amber Grant's call.

  Fleming looked around him, feeling the chill of paranoia as he remembered Riga's warning. A bland, mousy-haired man in a lightweight jacket suddenly averted his gaze, and for a second Fleming thought he might be following him. He retrieved the return ticket to Heathrow from his jacket pocket, looked up at the departures screen and suddenly had an irresistible urge to talk to someone who cared that he existed. He delved into his briefcase, reached for his cellphone and dialled his parents' number. His mother picked up.

  After reassuring each other that they were okay, he asked to speak to Jake.

  When he came on the line the six-year-old sounded breathless and excited. 'Hi, Milo. I played soccer today'

  Fleming's mood lifted. 'That's fantastic, Jake. Well done.'

  'When you come back I'll race you.'

  'Oh, I don't know about that. You've got bionic legs now:'

  'Don't worry' said Jake. 'I'll give you a head start if you like.'

  'We'll have to see about that. You still looking after the legs like we talked about?'

  'Yes.'

  'How's everything else back there?'

  'Okay' Jake's voice changed, becoming more pensive. 'Milo?'

  'Yes.'

  'Where are you?'

  'In Rome.' At that moment he heard his flight to London being called and he glanced up at the departures screen. But it was another entry that caught his eye. Noting the gate and departure time, Fleming checked his watch. The idea was so obvious that he was exasperated with himself. He had spent the last few days agonizing over how to contact Amber when what he should have done was take the most direct course of action. Even if it proved futile he had nothing better to do.

  'You coming back soon, Milo?'

  'Not just yet, Jake,' he replied, filled with fresh purpose. He headed for the Alitalia desk. 'Soon. But there's something I've got to do first. Give my love to Grandma and look after each other, okay?'

  'Okay, Milo.'

  ' 'Bye, Jake. Miss you.'

  ' 'Bye, Milo. Miss you too.'

  Seven minutes later, when Miles Fleming left the Alitalia desk and hurried to the departures gate, he didn't notice the bland, mousy-haired man punching a short text message into his WAP phone.

  Fleming no longer on flight BA 671 to Heathrow.

  Now on Alitalia AL 102. ETA. 09.15 a. M. local time.

  Destination: San Francisco.

  *

  VenTec. Alaska

  The first thing Amber became aware of was being awake, conscious, followed by an itching sensation all over her scalp.

  She opened her eyes. Nothing happened. However hard she willed her eyelids to move they remained stubbornly closed. She tried to reach up to scratch her scalp but her arms remained inert at her sides. Frantically she tried to move some part of her body, any part, but she couldn't.

  What was happening? Was she paralysed?

  Nothing made any sense. Even time lost its meaning as she struggled to think amid the torpor that fogged her brain. In the last few days - or was it hours? - she had been vaguely aware of people around her but little else. Did this have something to do with what had happened at Barley Hall? Something Fleming had discovered about her through his NeuroTranslator? If so, what?

  Think, damn you, think, she urged herself.

  Something must have happened in the limousine driving her from Barley Hall. There was only one logical explanation, although it made no sense. She had been drugged and abducted. But why?

  Suddenly she heard voices, a man's and a woman's. She dimly recognized the woman's and a distinctive musky scent hung in the air. She remembered it from the past.

  The bed was moving now and, even from behind her eyelids, she could tell the light was brightening, as if she was leaving a room and entering a corridor.

  A door hissed on her left, then the bed was wheeled into an even brighter area. Hands were on her now, lifting her from the bed and placing her on another. A hum filled the air around her.

  Suddenly her eyelids were pulled open, making her want to blink at the lights overhead. A face appeared above her, wearing bulbous eye-protectors. Then stinging liquid was dripped into her exposed eyeballs, and pegs attached to the lids, pinning them open. The pain was excruciating but Amber couldn't squirm or turn away. Lightly tinted lenses were then inserted into her eyes.

  Her head was raised and she saw a glass sphere resembling an astronaut's helmet being lifted over her head. In the curved glass she saw her image distorted like the reflection in the bottom of a spoon. What shocked her most was that her hair had been shaved off.
/>
  Amber was close to panic.

  To her right, refracted through the helmet in her peripheral vision, she could see a phantom figure in white bodysuit and eye-protectors, holding up a hypodermic syringe. The woman's voice spoke: 'She's lucky, she's only going to die in her dreams.'

  As the indistinct figure steered the needle closer to the exposed flesh of her right arm she smelt the frustratingly familiar scent again. Before she could try to make any connections she heard a hiss and an odourless luminous gas seeped into the helmet, bathing the world in a green actinic glow.

  Then her consciousness dimmed and darkness claimed her.

  No sooner had she surrendered to the comforting embrace of oblivion than she was racing towards the cone of light, to where she might find peace. She tried to control her terror as she sped towards it but she could sense the forces holding her back, threatening to rip her apart. The elastic tension grew and grew until she was absorbed in the light and close to the source. But even as she felt Ariel's luminous presence reaching for her, almost touching, the force ripped her back again. Back into the darkness. Back to herself.

  This time, however, there was no respite from dying, no return to the living. Instead of waking or returning to normal sleep, she was instantly catapulted back through the void towards the cone of light. Experiencing afresh the terror of dying she merged again with the light, this time going deeper than before, almost reaching its core, the source. Ariel was closer, she could sense it, but still out of reach . . .

  Then Amber was yanked away from the light. Only to be hurled back towards it again. And again.

  Each time she entered the light, she came closer to the source, to death and reunion with her sister. But every time she was thwarted. The closer she came to her sister, the greater the force that pulled her back.

  She was a pendulum swinging from life to death and back again, inhabiting neither, damned for ever to remain in limbo between them, in a hell of sorts.

  *

  Black sector conference room.

  VenTec

  'Bradley, is she all right?' Accosta was tense, watching Amber Grant's pale, sweating face in the glass sphere.

  Sitting in the conference room with Carvelli, Diageo, Knight and Soames, he looked into the laboratory through the two-way mirror wall. Now that the Soul Project was entering the critical stage, the entire Truth Council had taken leave of their other responsibilities to convene at VenTec. Each wanted to see this experiment in the flesh.

  Bradley Soames calmly studied the readings on a screen above them. 'Her life signs are fine, Your Holiness. Her heart's a little excited, but well within the safe range.' If he felt a qualm about turning his erstwhile business partner into a laboratory rat he gave no indication of it.

  Accosta told himself again that he should feel grateful for Soames's dedication to his cause. 'And the injection? Won't it interfere with her dreams?'

  Without looking away from the screen Soames said, 'On the contrary, Your Holiness. Revelax is a neurological wonder drug that our own Virginia Knight recommended.'

  Knight nodded: her pale face was drawn and perspiration beaded her high forehead. Her gaze fixed on Amber as she said, 'It'll help Dr Grant sleep and will also stimulate her brain to enter a natural state of REM quicker and for longer. It will help us harvest her dreams, increasing their frequency and longevity tenfold.'

  'In essence,' added Soames, 'her episodes of dying will last longer and occur more often, so every time her Bose-Einstein condensate leaves her body during her dreams of dying we can monitor the passage of her soul. Using modified technology similar to that found in an optical computer, we should then be able to get a lock on the tracking frequency'

  At the foot of Amber's bed stood a bank of apparatus: an optical computer, several monitors and a black box the size of a large television with four vertical strips of lights laid out in columns. Each column contained four different-coloured lights flashing independently up and down it, and mirrored the smaller columns of light embedded in the top of the glass head-sphere. The lights on all four columns would align - forming four rows of colour - when they had established a trace.

  Now that the moment of truth was drawing close Accosta felt drained. All the incandescent energy that had sustained him over the last few days had depleted what small reserves he had left. The rumour that he was dying, fuelled by his increasingly frail appearance and his recent absence from the Red Ark, had been fanned by the Vatican's press office. Without a successor, it was whispered, his Church would fold, leaving its members rudderless in a turbulent sea. Rome had indicated that it would forgive its fickle followers and welcome them back.

  But the worst aspect of these rumours was that they were true. The prostate cancer diagnosed almost six years ago had spread to his bones and liver, and his lungs were riddled with metastases. The disease was reaching its final stages. With only a few months, if not weeks, of life remaining, he was a candidate for one of his own Church's hospices.

  Amber Grant was his only salvation.

  'She's entering the REM state again,' he heard Carvelli say. He sounded breathless.

  Only Soames seemed calm, studying the monitors with an almost detached air. 'Excellent,' he said. 'That was the longest we've managed to hold on to the condensate as an integrated boson system.'

  'Why is that excellent?' asked Accosta, looking at the randomly flashing columns of lights. 'You still didn't lock on to the soul frequency'

  'Not yet, Your Holiness, but by tracking these first episodes of Amber dying, these first excursions of her consciousness from her body, we've come closer than with all the previous real deaths combined.'

  'So how many days before we get a result?' Accosta said.

  Soames laughed, and the scar tissue around his mouth distorted. 'Days, Your Holiness? Not days, hours - if not minutes. With the drug, Amber is entering and leaving the dream state indefinitely. She'll simply die again and again until we zero in on the exact frequency - like tracing a telephone caller by making them keep phoning. In fact, she'll die so often she'll wish she was dead.' Soames laughed again. 'Don't worry, Your Holiness, locking on to the human soul is no longer an issue. What we've got to focus on now is communicating with it.'

  Soames turned to Carvelli. 'Frank, help His Holiness make preparations for the final act. And we've got to start thinking about Miles Fleming.'

  'He won't help us,' Knight said.

  'He won't help you, Virginia, but he has no reason to distrust me,' Soames retorted. 'And I'm not going to ask Fleming to help us. I'm going to offer to help him.'

  Just then there was a beep and the four columns of light stopped their random flashing, settling into four static rows of colour.

  For the first time Soames lost his customary cool. 'Get the readings,' he shouted at his assistants in the laboratory. Then he turned to Accosta, with an excited grin of satisfaction. 'It's done.'

  But Accosta was no longer looking at Soames or the lights. He was looking at Amber Grant, and wondering why she seemed to be smiling.

  *

  The Church of the Soul Truth Hospice, Marin County.

  The next day

  The Sister's scarlet robes rustled as she checked the computer screen on the reception desk. She glanced up at the tall man, smiled and said, 'Mr Kent, I understand from your call that your father is ill and may need hospice accommodation.'

  'That's correct. But I'd like to look around first.'

  'Of course. I'll arrange for someone to give you a tour and get you an application pack, containing all the relevant information and forms you'll need to complete on your father's behalf. I'm sure you appreciate that accommodation here is limited, so we need to prioritize our care.'

  'I understand. But you do have vacancies?'

  The sister glanced at the computer screen and gave a serene smile. 'This is a hospice, Mr Kent. Vacancies always arise. It comes with the territory. If you don't mind waiting, I'll get your application pack and arrange for one of the sis
ters to show you around.'

  'Thank you.'

  'You're welcome.'

  As soon as the sister turned and left the desk, the man reached over and rotated the computer screen towards him. It took only a moment to find the name and suite number. There was an asterisk by the name but he didn't have time to check what that signified. Instead he turned and walked to the waiting room. On the wall there was a photograph of Xavier Accosta, the Red Pope, and a picture of the Red Ark.

  The man took a seat, and after a few moments another sister in scarlet introduced herself as Sister Angela and led him out of the waiting room on a tour of the hospice. The man listened attentively as she explained about the care and facilities available to the patients, but said little until they ascended the wide staircase to the second floor, where suite 21 was situated. Gillian Grant's private suite.