The road ahead appeared ever more brightly lit. There were torches lining either side of the freeway, like burning spears on the approach to an ancient city. Puzzled, they sped on past the darkened countryside below.
'We have to stay in the desert until the deadline has passed,' said Brett. 'It's the only way to be sure. The priest said all four horsemen have to act or the Apocalypse can't occur. Where are we now?'
'The last time I looked we were about thirty miles east of some town called Plaster City. I can't read the map in this light and the glovebox bulb isn't working. Where on earth did you get this car?'
Around the next bend, crimson accident flares were spread before a stack of crushed vehicles spread across the road.
'Shit! Hold tight!'
Slamming on the brakes, Brett carommed the car side-on into the flames and veered off at a fast-approaching junction of the freeway. Suddenly there were people lining either side of the connecting road, waving, cheering and making the handsalute of the church. It felt as though Brett and Lisa were making their entry into Rome. In fact, they were about to enter the city of Phoenix.
The car radio had been operating below Brett's hearing threshold for several miles. Now it boomed into fresh life as the announcer spoke of one last hope for peace; a few minutes ago the Chinese had said that if they were provided with a positive, conciliatory gesture from the leader of the US military within the hour, they would halt their planned strike action on the Russian seaboard. So there was a slim chance of salvation!
'Did you hear that? There's still a hope!' He turned to Lisa, and one glance at her unguarded face told him all he needed to know.
No-one could look so disappointed at the news. He had been duped. She had deliberately led him out here. She saw him looking and stared blankly back.
'This is where you need to be in order to fulfil the prophecy,' she said simply.
He looked up at the road ahead, and saw that once again they had entered a deserted stretch of highway. A sign above him read YOU ARE NOW ENTERING PHOENIX CITY LIMITS. Puzzled, he accelerated – and suddenly on the ramp below the car he saw dozens of police motorbikes crossing in formation. A motorcade was passing beneath the empty road. Brett started to brake, trying to make sense of what he saw, but with a feral cry Lisa stamped her shoe over his, forcing his foot down. The Oldsmobile rocketed ahead to vault the off-ramp barrier and smash down on to the central passing limo of the motorcade, flipping both vehicles and turning one into a thundering ball of flame. A roar of triumphant applause grew from the reappearing crowds.
Hurled from the Oldsmobile, Brett spiralled away in a bellowing sea of flame-lit faces.
Slowly, painfully, he returned to consciousness.
He was stripped to the waist, lying on a warm granite slab that formed a dais in the middle of a field near the freeway. He was surrounded by thousands of celebrating people. Fires filled the horizon. He could smell barbecued chicken in the air.
Lisa, Mara and his son checked with each other to see who would go first, then stepped bashfully forward in turn. Davey's arms were unbandaged, and completely unmarked. He gave a Candid Camera kind of smile and shrugged. Brett's work colleagues were there. So were most of his friends and family.
'You did it, Brett!' Mara cried happily. 'You fulfilled your destiny as the Horseman of Death!' There were whoops and hollers. Everyone was joyous. The noise was like a hundred sitcom audiences cheering the entrance of a sexy woman.
'I don't understand,' he croaked weakly.
They tried to explain that he had hit the motorcade bringing the military heads back from Nevada. A simple accident on the road to Phoenix – that was all he had been needed for. They all talked at once, and weren't sure if he could hear them.
Now the only remaining moderate military leader was dead, Lisa explained. No answer could go back to the Chinese. She felt bad about killing Elias, but he'd had a good life. Hadn't it all turned out for the best? She poured him a plastic beaker of Californian champagne, but he knocked it out of her hand.
The apocalypse ran a little late. It was some time after midnight that the sky from the East began to light up with the arcing trails of the arriving missiles. Lisa gripped Brett's arm and told him not to worry.
'Your destiny isn't ours,' she said sadly. 'You and your three partners will live on, through destruction, death and decomposition. You'll see it through – right through – to a time of rebirth and regeneration. Then you'll be released from your earthly duty, to return to dust.'
As the world erupted around him, Brett demanded to know why he was chosen, out of anyone in the world.
Lisa stroked his face gently. 'Don't you know that the greatest harm can only be carried out by the blind?' she whispered, kissing his forehead as the cleansing conflagration filled the sky.
Brett stood naked at the centre of the blinding sun, the brightest light in the universe, his limbs outstretched, the living personification of Leonardo Da Vinci's drawing of Man. Like the phoenix he would die and be reborn in flame.
Around him he could see four galloping stallions of fire, racing like missiles. And through them, the merest glimpse of something else, the world far into the future, a world that was green and clean and pure, ready to begin again.
UNFORGOTTEN
It cannot think, fanciful to imagine it could, for how would so many millions of lives make themselves heard, distilled into a single voice? But if – just if – there was such a thing as a collective intelligence, what would it be saying now, the voice of London?
During the trial of Captain Clarke at the Old Bailey in 1750, the court became so hot that the windows had to be opened, and the foul germ-laden stench from nearby Newgate Prison that blew in killed everyone sitting on the window-side of the court – all forty-four people.
'How much do they want for the sale?'
'Three hundred and seventy grand. That's what they figure it's worth at today's prices.'
'I'm in this business to make a living, not to be bent over a table and fucked stupid.'
'I'm sorry, that's what their man told me to tell you.'
'Well, you can tell them – ' The door opened behind Marrick and his exhausted secretary stuck her head into the room. Marrick nearly fell off his chair trying to see who it was.
'For fuck's sake, Doris,' he exploded, 'will you stop creeping around like Marley's fucking ghost?'
'I'm sorry, Mr Marrick, I'm about to vanish for the night, and your wife is here.' Doris tossed the information into the room like a lit firecracker and beat a hasty retreat.
Marrick banged his chair upright. 'Harrods must have declined her credit cards again. This is all I fucking need. Excuse me, gentlemen. Jonathan, see if you can talk some fucking sense into the sales agent. Try to make him see that I'm not a completely heartless bastard. You know – lie.' The door slammed and he was gone in a cloud of acrid cigar smoke.
Jonathan Laine didn't much like his boss; the man had no respect for anything or anyone. Adrian Marrick trampled a path through life in a cheap suit, shouting and shoving all the way. The technique worked, up to a point, but Jonathan could not see the company expanding beyond this dingy Holborn office. There were barriers of class in the city, invisible lines that could not be crossed by a marauding loud-mouthed oik from south London.
Jonathan was not complaining; at the age of fifty-seven he was at least still employed and making a subsistence wage. His boss was just past his twenty-fourth birthday, and although it sometimes seemed strange to be working for such a young man, Marrick possessed a cunning far beyond his years. He could even be fun in an appalling way – chainsmoking, swearing, drinking and dealing through the property market, and he was a good teacher so long as you remembered to isolate the immoral and illegal elements of his advice. His observations about his fellow man could be jaw-droppingly crass, and yet there was often a horrible accuracy to them. He was part of a new generation whose tastes were decided by price. 'You owe us, old sport,' he would say in one of his ma
gnanimous after-dinner moods. 'We're burying the past, chucking away the old rules. Giving commerce a chance to breathe.'
Jonathan considered himself to be a reasonably moral man. He had never meant to end up working in a place like this. The pleasures of his life stemmed from peaceful pursuits, his interests inclined to classical studies. He had always held an unformulated plan in his head, to succeed as some kind of architectural historian. Instead he had married young, looked after his parents, raised a child, suffered a nervous breakdown. He had been sidetracked by his need to make money, distracted by the fuss of living, misrouted from his original goal. And now, here he was in the centre of one of the most historically important cities in the world, and the only work he had found since the death of Connie was in property speculation, helping to asset-strip and destroy the very thing he cared about most dearly. A typical Gemini trait, he thought, to be both destroyer and creator. Well, one day he would find a way to repay the debt, redress the balance. Until then…
He turned back to a desk smothered in unprocessed documents. Darren, the office junior, was laboriously clipping surveyors' reports together and arranging them in files. Today's problem had been growing for a while now. The building in question was a run-down Victorian house presently occupied by an electrical appliance contractor. The freehold was owned by the Japanese property conglomerate Dasako, and the lease had been granted on a short-term basis that was now reaching an end. Jonathan's case notes ran to dozens of pages. Marrick was desperate to purchase the building outright because it stood between two other properties he owned under different company titles. Individually neither was worth much above land value, but collectively they represented a highly attractive proposition. Jonathan assumed that ownership of the third property would increase access to the other two, but Marrick had never explained why he wanted to own such a large chunk of property. He never explained anything. He was guided by an unerring instinct for making money.
Jonathan was sure that Dasako had no knowledge of Marrick's involvement in the surrounding offices; the names on the company records would mean nothing to them. Even so, their asking price for the soon-to-be-vacant property was way too high. The area would not support such a valuation. There had to be a reason for pricing themselves out of the market, but what could it be?
'Tell you what,' said Marrick in the pub later that evening, 'I've got an idea,' and he threw Jonathan a crooked grin which normally meant something dishonest was coming. He made a meaty fist around the handle of his pint, his rings glittering like gold knuckle-dusters. 'Get me the plans for the city block, would you?'
'The whole block?'
'Yeah. There's something I remember seeing the last time I went over the place. I've got a feeling we can stitch up these tossers without moving a fucking muscle.' He drained his glass and banged it down, then felt his jacket for his cigars. 'Three hundred and seventy K for an almost derelict building, bollocks! I know their fucking game.'
'You think they're going to find a new tenant?'
'Nope,' said Marrick, lighting up an absurdly large cigar. 'Of course not. Crafty bastards have other plans. They're gonna get it listed and restore all the original features.' He sucked noisily at the stogie.
'How can you be so sure?' asked Jonathan, shifting beyond his boss's smoke-ring range.
'Ah, well you see, while you're still snuggled up in bed in your pyjamas dreaming about retirement, I'm up with the fucking larks collecting information, and I hear that Dasako are currently employing the services of a design company that specialises in restaurants. Fucking great big Conran-style eateries that seat 700 diners at a time. If they get a restaurant in that space and it's a success, we'll never fucking get them out.'
'So what do you propose to do?' asked Jonathan. He ran a hand through his straggling grey hair and waited while his employer picked flakes of tobacco from his lip.
'I'm gonna buy 'em out, pull the whole lot down and resell. It's worth fuck-all as it is. The upper floors are falling apart. Just get me the plans of the block.'
The teeming humanity that passes through London as the centuries rise and fall! The sheer weight of life borne by such a small area of land! The city transforms itself from a Romancapital with an amphitheatre, forum and basilica, its Temples of Mithras and Diana giving way to the spired cathedrals of Christianity. Walls, gates and defences rise, parish churchesare built over Saxon villages, medieval commerce packs the streets with wood-beamed houses, and the kaleidoscope of history spins wildly on through coronations, insurrections and disharmonies, mutiny and jubilation eliding past, present and future. And through these pululating voices one word is heard most clearly; Charles I, stepping up to his execution before jeering crowds in Whitehall, turns to his bishop-confessor and cries 'Remember!'
When old London Bridge was widened in the 1760s, it was realised that the new footpath would have to cut through the hundred-year-old tower of St Magnus the Martyr on the eastern side of the bridge. Incredibly, Sir Christopher Wren had built the church in anticipation that this problem would occur a century later, and had already provided the tower's arches with removable sections to create such a passageway.
London's building plans are a mess. The Second World War saw to that. In some parts of the capital virtually every other building was destroyed in the firestorm of the Blitz, and the once-elegant streets gaped like the rotten teeth of a corpse. Between 6.00 p.m. and 9.30 p.m. on Sunday, 29 December 1940, the second great fire of London occurred when the German Luftwaffe dropped 127 tons of high explosive and more than 10,000 incendiary bombs on the city. A famous photograph of that night shows St Paul's rising unharmed through a raging sea of flame.
Jonathan looked up at the squat brown building standing between two fifties' office blocks and tried to imagine how it had been that terrible night; the din of tumbling masonry, the blasts of the firefighters' hoses. He had been two years old and living far away, in north Yorkshire. London Can Take It – some motto. But the city had managed it in the past, so many times, surviving the plagues and the fires only to be brought to its knees at the end of the twentieth century by traffic and developers. A city as old as Christianity itself was fighting for its life. Jonathan pulled the camera from his jacket and snapped a few shots; the grimy storefront with the yellow plastic sign reading AIKO ELECTRICS, the four floors of crumbling Victorian redbrick (third and fourth clearly on the verge of collapse), the ill-fitting modern roof, what an invisible, unimpressive – and unlisted – building it was. Perhaps it deserved to be pulled down. It wasn't always a good idea to cling to the past. Marrick would have no qualms about demolishing the Albert Hall if it suited his plans.
But then he looked up at the building again and tried to imagine it restored and filled with people. That was when he noticed the details; the dusty turquoise glazing bars on the tops of the third-floor windows, the swagged ornamentation on the broken rainwater head at the top of the drainpipe, the rusticated keystone above the archway leading to the building's side-alley, and he realised then that a magnificent building was hiding behind its wounds and beneath a caul of dirt, that it could all be restored, because it had been a restaurant once before, long ago, and Dasako had spotted it even if Marrick hadn't. On the pavement was another telltale sign; a shattered section of black and white mosaic in which the name of the establishment would have been set in curlicues of brass. And most miraculous of all, there on the wall beside the door, a battered cone of blackened metal, a snuffer! These rarely-spotted pieces of street furniture were used to extinguish the tar-covered brands of the linkboys who escorted the restaurant's visitors through the unlit streets. Dasako's architects had seen all this. The Japanese respected the traditions of the past. With patience and planning, they would allow this building to spring to full-blooded life once more, filled with gaiety and beauty. Its restaurant would stand as a magnificent testament to the pleasures of the past, and the possibilities of the future.
But there was something else here as well, something that cou
ld only be seen away from the light, something less wholesome and only just hidden from view. Jonathan could feel the strange sensation creeping across him like a storm cloud obscuring the sun. There was something here that hid within the bricks. The weight of history was giddying, and he felt suddenly sick. He ceased pacing in order to catch his breath, then walked on past the central building, turning the corner at the end of the block. Three buildings constituted its longest side; the other three sides were shorter; comprising two buildings each. The one in the centre of the long side, the building owned by Dasako, grew narrower toward the rear and was truncated to allow a central courtyard within the block, although according to Marrick little evidence of this could be seen from its windows, the courtyard having been largely built over.
Jonathan looked up at the rapidly darkening sky and felt a speck of rain. At his back, traffic thrummed endlessly around a one-way system toward Hackney Town Hall. He realised with a start that he was standing near the spot where he and Connie were married. The little church had been demolished in the seventies to make way for wider traffic lanes. In his mind's eye he saw Connie turning on the steps and crying delightedly, confetti drifting from her shoulders as a passing car sounded its horn in celebration. Harder to see her now, of course; harder each day to capture each retreating memory.
He pocketed the camera and turned his collar up, preparing for his next stop – the building registry office just behind Lombard Street. Why did Marrick want plans for the entire block? What was going through his mind? Sometimes his cunning displayed the most surprising lateral thinking. As he headed for the Old Street tube station, the only certainty Jonathan had was that money would once more change hands in deceitful circumstances.
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