As always, the noise was deafening, the traffic so snarled up that it was difficult to tell in which direction it was even supposed to travel. There were one or two expensive limousines carrying important people to important places, but most of the vehicles belonged on the scrap heap or had perhaps been rescued from it. There were crumpled, ancient cars with cracked windows and plastic seats, only kept in service with odd, spare parts and prayer. Buses stood rumbling, jammed with people pressed against each other without air for hours on end, slowly baking to death in the heat. And everywhere there were bicycles, rickshaws, scooters and tuk-tuks, motorized death traps that zigzagged through the traffic with their lawnmower engines buzzing like angry wasps.
The driver tapped his thumbs against the steering wheel, waiting for the lights to change. One of the children, a boy of about six or seven, rapped on the glass and pointed at his mouth, and the driver was briefly tempted to take out the gun which he always carried and shoot him right between those pathetic, staring eyes. The street-sellers would look up for an instant before going back to their work. And the blood would spread in the flyblown puddles that filled the cracks and the potholes in the road. One less mouth to feed! For a moment, he was seriously tempted. But to shoot the boy, he would have to roll down the window, and that would mean letting in the heat and the noise just for a few seconds. It wouldn’t be worth it. His passenger wouldn’t be pleased.
The lights changed but the car didn’t move. There was an obstruction just ahead. An ox had been pulling a cart filled with old fridges and freezers – scrap metal – turning left across the carriageway. But the weight had been too much for the wretched animal, which had collapsed, blocking all three lanes. Its owner was standing over it, beating it again and again with a wooden stick. But the ox couldn’t get up. It tried to raise itself onto its spindly legs, then collapsed again. Two policemen in black-and-white uniforms ran forward. They could have helped. They could have redirected the traffic or forced some of the children to help move the load. Instead, they began to shout, lashing out with their truncheons. Soon everyone was shouting at everyone. Horns blared. The ox lay still, staring out with saliva dribbling from its mouth.
“What is it, Channon?” the passenger asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. There seems to have been an incident…”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got plenty of time.”
The inside of the car was air-conditioned, the air filtered twice before it entered. The seats were leather, the windows tinted, the floor thickly carpeted. The passenger was reading a newspaper and there were several bottles of water in the compartment next to him. Even without the bulletproof glass, the thick military-grade armour built into the side panels, and the doors as heavy as those on a commercial airliner, he would have felt secure and suitably removed from the world outside. He was the chief executive officer of the Nightrise Corporation, the single most powerful business organization on the planet. He was protected.
Nightrise had come a long way in the last ten years. It was still active in the fields of telecommunications, energy and weapons development … but it had added so many strings to its bow that there was barely any area in which it wasn’t the market leader. It now controlled sixty-five per cent of the world’s food. Its pharmaceutical wing owned the cures to virtually all the world’s diseases. No newspapers or television station ever criticized Nightrise, because Nightrise had bought them all. The fact was that if you wanted to eat, stay healthy, and live with any degree of comfort, you needed Nightrise – although as Nightrise was quick to point out, it never needed you.
The chief executive officer was called Jonas Mortlake and he had been working for the company all his life. His mother, Susan, had headed the Los Angeles office of the corporation and had been highly regarded until she had died with a bullet in her head. Jonas had been working for the London office when he heard the news but he hadn’t asked for time off to go to the funeral. He was far too busy and he had been brought up with one simple rule: business always comes first. He had never really liked his mother very much anyway. He only ever saw her a couple of times a year and he was slightly jealous of her success.
Jonas was still a young man … which was just as well because old age, like any weakness, disgusted him. His curly blond hair had been cut short, in a style that was almost military, and he had the physique of a soldier … the result of a careful diet and a personal trainer working with him every day at his private gym. Jonas was proud of his body, with every muscle perfectly developed, and he never covered it with anything less than a one-thousand-dollar suit. Even his nails were manicured, his eyebrows plucked, his teeth artificially whitened. Appearances are important. That was one of the things he had learned in business school. And business, of course, was his life.
Even so, he was not particularly handsome. Hours spent in front of the computer screen had damaged his eyesight and he now wore wire-framed spectacles that sat awkwardly on his face. He had never had plastic surgery but somehow looked as if he had. There was a slightly sweaty, artificial sheen to his skin and everything was stretched a little too tight, making it hard for him to show any emotion. He spoke with a public-school accent and there was perhaps a part of him that had never left school. His lips were always twisted in a half-smile. He was very pleased with himself and couldn’t disguise it. But then, he had managed to work his way to the highest level of Nightrise. He was even more senior than his mother had been at the time of her death. So why shouldn’t he be pleased with himself? He was at the top of his game.
Jonas Mortlake was not married and had no children of his own. The idea of being close to another human being slightly repulsed him and he particularly disliked women, with their soft, flabby flesh, their emotions, their weakness, their constant demands. He glanced at the business newspaper lying open on his lap, at the tiny print and the endless columns of figures. That was where real pleasure was to be found.
He was excited.
As much as he mistrusted emotion, he couldn’t deny it. He was on his way to a conference and he’d been looking forward to it for weeks. “ENDGAME” it had simply announced on the invitation, which, of course, was actually a command. He was aware that, elsewhere in the traffic, a hundred more limousines were carrying hundreds more men and women to the same event. They had all been summoned to meet the chairman of Nightrise, to hear him speak. But Jonas was different. He had already been told what was going to be said, and afterwards, when the chairman had made his surprise announcement, he was going to have a meeting, one-to-one, in which his own destiny would be spelled out.
They had managed to move the ox, which was now lying at the edge of the road, its eyes wide, its stomach heaving up and down. One of the policemen blew a whistle, frantically gesticulating, and somehow the traffic managed to untie itself and move forward. Glancing up from his newspaper, Mortlake saw an open-air market spread out beneath a concrete flyover: more food frying, and water carriers – some only seven or eight years old – bent double under the plastic tanks which they carried on their backs and which would cripple them before they were nine. Women dressed in shorts, low-cut T-shirts, sandals and cheap jewellery with nothing to sell but themselves rested against the concrete pillars. At night, the area would be lit by coloured bulbs and open braziers and perhaps they would look a little less hideous and grotesque.
The car turned a corner and suddenly the river was ahead of them, the water as tangled up with old boats as the roads were with cars. The sun was even worse here. Out in the open, reflecting off the water, it made everything hard and brittle. With the smoke rising from the dozens of miniature bonfires that had been lit along the quayside, it was as if the ground itself was catching fire. There was no electricity or running water in this part of the city. The people sat, slumped in defeat.
At last they reached their destination. The building, with its famous curved front and multiple flags, stood in the plaza that had been named after it.
The United Nations. New Y
ork.
Two guards armed with machine guns stood and saluted as the barrier was raised and Jonas Mortlake was welcomed in.
NINE
There were one thousand eight hundred seats in the General Assembly and nearly every one of them was taken. Jonas Mortlake had been given a place in the second row and saw it as a sign of favour. The closer you were to the front, the more important you were considered to be. As he walked to his place, he was aware of the multicoloured crowd – many had chosen to wear their national costume – all sitting with their attention focused on the stage. There were Arabs in white robes and headdresses, Africans in brilliant woven shirts, Chinese and Japanese in silk, Indians in saris. It was important to show which countries they represented … which countries they had destroyed … and it was a reminder that delegates had come from every continent. Normally, at the end of the conference there would be a party and everyone wanted to look their best.
Jonas smiled to himself. There was indeed going to be a party in a short while, but it wasn’t the one that everyone was expecting and he was glad he hadn’t received an invitation. Just a few rows behind him, he noticed a man he had known at the London office. What was his name? The man nodded at him and Jonas nodded back. At the same time, he thought to himself, You’re not going to be nodding in a few hours from now. He couldn’t wait to see the look on their faces.
The hall had barely changed since the time it had been built, with vast, golden walls sloping inwards and an arched ceiling high above. There was a stage with a podium and behind it a circular disc that had once carried a map of the world bracketed by two olive branches, which stood, of course, for peace. But this had been replaced with a different symbol:
The sign of the Old Ones.
Jonas sat down, taking his place beside a silver-haired man whom he had also met before. He was a Russian, a man who had sucked so much money out of his country’s oil and gas that it was said that you couldn’t turn a light on in Kiev without his permission. He had lavished that money on himself with homes all over the world, a fleet of yachts and a premier league football team who played privately for him. Behind him, two women were whispering excitedly. Jonas didn’t recognize them but the smell of their perfume was overpowering. It made him feel queasy. Ushers stood at the end of every row, showing the last arrivals to their seats. Everyone had arrived in good time. To have entered the room even a few seconds after the eleven-thirty start time would have meant immediate sacking … or worse.
And at half past eleven exactly, the conference began. There was no announcement. The lights didn’t dim. The chairman of Nightrise simply walked onto the stage and everyone got to their feet, bursting into applause that wouldn’t stop until he had reached the central podium.
It took a long time since the chairman was very old and moved like a tortoise, which in so many ways he resembled. He was completely bald and his head, at the end of an unusually long neck, bobbed forward as he made his way across, as if it was emerging from a shell. His eyes were red and watery. His skin was discoloured, covered in liver spots and so wrinkled that, from a distance, it could have been mistaken for scales. His black suit did not disguise how thin and fragile his body had become with age. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen steps from the wings to the centre of the stage but he took each one of them as if it might be his last.
And finally he arrived. The applause rose in pitch, the audience congratulating him on having completed the journey. The chairman reached out a hand to steady himself and stood there, smiling, enjoying his reception. At last he raised the same hand, showing spindly fingers and grey, uneven nails. It was a signal for silence. The audience immediately obeyed, sitting back down in their chairs.
“My friends,” he began. He had a croaky voice and an accent that could have been Australian or American. Nobody knew where he had been born or where he lived. Like many of them, he probably spent most of his time on the move. “First, let me welcome you all to New York. I know some of you have come a long way and you’re all busy people. I take it as a personal compliment that you should have interrupted your schedules to be with me here today. At the same time, we couldn’t have achieved what we’ve achieved without you. You are the inner circle. It’s right that you should be here because this is the day you receive your rewards.”
The chairman was speaking without a microphone but somehow his voice carried to the very back of the assembly hall. And although half the people in the room couldn’t speak English, every one of them understood exactly what he said. How was it possible? Nobody wanted to ask that question. The truth was that the answer frightened them too much.
And what did it matter anyway? The last word – reward, Belohnung, recompensa, – echoed in their ears and once again they burst into applause. This was what they had all been waiting for. It was what this was all about.
Jonas Mortlake clapped too, but more slowly, his delicate white hands rubbing against each other. He wondered why the chairman was going through this performance. Perhaps he was simply doing it to amuse himself. These people … the senators and statesmen, bankers and businessmen, millionaires, billionaires, power-brokers and king-makers … what fools they all were! They were lapping it up. The women behind him were clapping so ferociously that their breasts were heaving, their earrings jangling. The man next to him was like an over-excited child.
“I want to talk to you about the Old Ones,” the chairman continued, once the room had calmed down. “Who are they? Where did they come from? What do they want? I’m afraid there are no easy answers to these questions. I guess you could say that they’ve been around for ever. They’re almost like a force. There are plenty of people who would claim that they’re simply pure evil – but then I would have to ask you, what exactly is evil? I mean, they’ve looked after us well enough, I’m sure you’d agree. Three-quarters of the world is starving. We have food. Millions of people have no water. We drink champagne. Women and children are dying in wars while we pay ourselves huge bonuses and get richer and more comfortable. At the end of the day, I’d say that ‘evil’ is simply a point of view.
“The important thing for us to remember is that the Old Ones first came into this world about ten thousand years ago … a long time before the Bible was written. And they had a Bible of their own. In the beginning was the word and the word was … kill, damage, maim, destroy! Why? Because it was their nature. It was what they enjoyed. And they were helped by people just like us. It was always important to them that they should remain invisible. They never wanted to be seen as the enemy because that would just make everyone unite against them. The way they saw it, the greatest enemy of mankind was man himself, and people shouldn’t be given the idea that they needed any help to make themselves extinct.
“The world was an amazing place ten thousand years ago, ladies and gentlemen. There was a civilization so extraordinary that it makes everything we have today look about as impressive as a Mumbai slum. There was art and poetry and cities full of beautiful buildings. People lived at peace with each other. Well, that quickly changed after the Old Ones arrived. They destroyed it so completely that there wasn’t a single trace of it left for future generations to find. Maybe there are a few memories. People talk about the age of Atlantis. There are Bible stories like Noah’s ark … or Sodom and Gomorrah. But basically it’s all gone. Wiped clean.
“If the Old Ones had had their way, they would have continued until the planet had been sucked dry, until there wasn’t so much as a single bacterium left. That was their aim. But at the very last minute, when there were only a few thousand people left alive, there was a rebellion against them and it was led by the very last people you’d have expected. Not adults but children! Yes … I can see the surprise on your faces and I don’t blame you. There were four boys and a girl. They brought all the survivors together and fought against the Old Ones.”
The chairman paused, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say.
“And they won!”
He reached for a glass of water and sipped. The assembly sat in silence, watching as the liquid made slow, painful progress down his throat.
“As you can imagine, these were not normal children,” the chairman continued. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call them superheroes, but they did have powers of a sort. One of them was a healer. One of them controlled the weather. Two of them – they were twin brothers – could read each other’s minds and they were able to control other people’s minds too … a neat trick. We’re not even sure what the last one was able to do. He could move things and smash them – just with the power of thought. And more. He was their leader and he was the most powerful of them all.
“Alone, the children were not a serious threat. They were strong, yes, but not strong enough. As long as they were separated, in different parts of the world, they posed no real danger. But if all five came together, if they formed a circle, then their abilities would be magnified. The Power of Five. That was what the Old Ones had to prevent at all costs. And in the end, they failed.
“There was a great battle which the children won, effectively by cheating. Yes. That’s exactly what they did. They played a dirty trick and suddenly they were all there together and at that moment something astonishing happened. A great hole was torn open in the fabric of the universe and the Old Ones, with all their armies, followers and servants, were sucked through it – banished to another dimension.
“At the same time, a gate was built – a barrier to keep them out. It was given a name … Raven’s Gate, and for the next ten thousand years it stood there in what finally became the county of Yorkshire, in England. And the world, which had come so close to extinction, was given a second chance. It grew and it developed, and finally it became the world that every one of us here today inherited.”
The speech showed no sign of coming to an end and already people were fidgeting in their seats, wondering what all this had to do with them. For his part, Jonas was beginning to get a headache. He just wanted this to be over – because then his own rise to ultimate power would begin.
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