The Apocalypse Codex

Her chest rises. “I hear the call, Father.”

The seat belt clicks. His neck is abruptly damp with sweat. Blood speeding, he watches as she kicks off her heels and slides down to the floor of the limo before him to kneel in stockinged feet. She kneels as he begins to recite: “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit—”

His handmaiden leans towards him, pure and terrible: clean and untouched, a virgin, just the way he requires. Have to marry her off soon, he thinks with mild regret. Slim fingers that have never seen nail gloss reach out and gently unzip his fly. Let her do her duty. He continues to pray, quietly awaiting her deliverance. The younger Ray would have risen for her, exulted as she went down on his manhood—or worse, he might have spoiled her, yanked up her skirt and thrust himself into her— unclean. I’m better now. So much better.

She slides her hands between his legs, privy to his shameful secret, forgiving and obedient as she touches the place where his manhood used to be and performs the service he requires.

“—mortify me, for I have sinned.”

The pain is monstrous, but absolves all guilt.

All guilt.

6. JET LAG

FORTY KILOMETERS AWAY, DANGEROUS MEN ARE STALKING A woman.

It’s a sunny day in Surrey, out beyond the M25 motorway, and the horizon-spanning urban sprawl has given way to ribbon development and scattered commuter dormitory towns separated by farms and green belt land and isolated strips of woodland. Many of these are privately owned; and the owner of one particular eighty-hectare chunk of ancient forest is in the habit of renting it out to murderers by the hour.

The woman is clearly aware that she’s being pursued. Equally clearly, she isn’t prepared for this. She’s dressed for the office, not for a hike in the wild woods, and it’s a hot day. She’s slung her black suit jacket through her handbag’s straps and is walking barefoot through the undergrowth, smart shoes clutched in one hand. Breathing deeply, she backs up close to a three-hundred-year-old oak encrusted with ivy and lichen. Her eyes flicker from side to side, mistrusting. They searched her bag and took her phone—otherwise she could get a GPS fix and call for help. She’s unarmed; she has no idea how many men are pursuing her, but doubts there are fewer than two. And they will be armed. On the other hand, she knows there’s a perimeter wall. On the other side of it, there’s a main road—if she can get over it, she can flag down a ride. Or she can backtrack along it to the gatehouse, assuming her pursuers aren’t waiting for her there. If. If. She glances up at the sky, but the foliage is so thick she can’t spot the sun. She’s running out of options, and as she realizes this her heart beats faster.

Less than a hundred meters away, her closest pursuer crouches on top of a muddy bluff and inspects the ground at his feet. Unlike his target, he’s dressed for the occasion in woodland camo and para boots. He wears a webbing vest and a helmet with headset, and carries a chunky machine pistol. Right now he’s examining a couple of telltale smears in the mud. Not boots. Not animal paw-prints, either; the only large animals he’s likely to meet in this over-tame forest are deer, and possibly the odd fox or badger. He taps his mike. “Found a trail,” he says. “Recent. Looks to be barefoot.” She came up here for a look-around, slipped and fell, he considers. Or did she? There’s no crushed patch of shrubbery nearby. He peers over the edge of the bluff, looks down three meters. If she’d gone over, I’d have heard. Probably.

Hunting around, he spots a clump of nettles. The ground around them—someone or something has given them a wide berth and, in doing so, they’ve left traces: bent stems, broken twigs. He grimaces. Clueless. It’s not what he’d expect of a smart fugitive. But nevertheless, it’s a trail. He follows it, scanning for more signs of passage. Careless, he thinks.

It’s nearly the last thing he thinks. The trail winds close to the edge of the bluff again, then through a disturbed tangle of ferns and nettles between beech trees. As he steps close to it, something catches his eye and he drops into a crouch. It’s almost invisible when he’s standing, but from beneath…“Nasty,” he whispers. Stretching between the trees, about one and a half meters up, is a nearly invisible nylon wire, smeared with mud and vegetable sap. He taps his mike again. “Rabbit showing its teeth.” He tightens his grip on his gun and swings round. Which is why the woman’s field-expedient blackjack—doubled-over nylon hose filled with pebbles from the bed of the stream that feeds the ferns—catches him on the side of the helmet rather than on the back of his neck.

They close and grapple and two seconds later it’s all over.

“How do you score that?” Johnny is lying with his back against one of the beech trees, the paintball gun beside him.

“The usual handicaps apply: I make it one all.” Persephone rolls over on her back. “You shot me, I cracked your skull.”

“That tripwire was most unpleasant, Duchess.” Johnny sits up and rubs his untouched throat. “Where did you conceal it?”

“Up top.” She sits up. “Hair extensions are one option; I can loop it through the roots in a continuous run. Takes ages to untangle, though. This time I just tucked it into the lining of my bag—metal detectors don’t see it, and if you do it properly even a trained X-ray tech will assume it’s just a seam.”

“Right. And the cosh—”

“Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.” She smiles enigmatically, then holds up one of her shoes. “Heels, too.” Then she sits up. “Okay, back to base then we’ll run it again. This time”— she reaches out and taps him on the shoulder with the shoe—“tag, you’re it. Let Zero know, will you?”

It’s a game they play about once a month: escape, evasion, and ambush. The object of the exercise is training—not merely for the pursued to avoid capture but to turn the tables on their pursuer, trapping or killing them. Often they run it in the wild, as on this rented paintball range—which they have to themselves for the day— and sometimes they play it on deserted industrial estates, at night. Sometimes they drag in other players to beef up the pursuit side, and sometimes they play it one-on-one. The only constant is that the game only ends when one of them is down.

They’re standing up and Johnny is calling Zero to tell him round two is on when his phone rings. He answers it. “It’s for you.” He passes it across.

“Yes?” She listens intently for a minute, nodding silently. “All right, I’ll do it. Thanks.” She hangs up, glances at Johnny. “Playtime is cancelled. Tell Zero to bring the car round; we have a date.”

“Uh-huh. Where?”

She starts walking, back the way they’ve come. “That was Lockhart. Schiller’s on his way to the airport and his pilot’s just filed a flight plan for Denver. As his Mission has a compound outside Colorado Springs, that’s probably where he’s going. Also, Lockhart’s got me a gilt-edged ticket. They run a weekend spiritual retreat for interested outsiders from time to time—with a remarkable track record of generating born-again believers. In fact, the conversion ratio is one of the things that got his attention.”

“So you’re going to go in and sniff around?” Johnny’s expression makes his reservations glaringly obvious.

“Of course. What could possibly go wrong?” She gives him a sardonic look. “Better hurry; I want to see if we can make the four p.m. shuttle to JFK.”

I’M AT HOME THAT EVENING, ENJOYING A LONG HOT BATH, WHEN my phone rings.

It’s been a trying day. From the whole suit-wearing thing to the offsite visit to HMGCC, Pinky and the amazing pyroclastic pigeon-zapper, and then the usual tiresome bullshit in the COBWEB MAZE working group, which is trying to nail down the extent of the damage caused by the BLOODY BARON committee being infiltrated by—no, let’s not dive in the acronym soup just yet. I go home early out of sheer brain-dead exhaustion, hit the Tesco Express for a ciabatta, microwave curry, and a bottle of wine, and just as soon as I get into the steaming hot bath in hope of