7
Sabir stood at his bedroom window and watched the twins get into their car, fire up the engine, and roar away from the kerbside with predictably screaming tyres.
He turned around and tossed the useless shotgun onto his bed. Then he lay down beside it and closed his eyes. God, if he could only sleep. Instead he lay awake, the adrenalin rush triggered by the implicit violence of the last fifteen minutes slowly leaching out of his system.
One thing he knew for certain. From now on his house would be as good as dead to him. That much was obvious even to an imbecile. Maintaining a fixed station like this, with Achor Bale’s twin brothers on his trail, would make him more than merely vulnerable. It would confirm him as suicidal.
No. The only thing for it was to get on the road and keep moving, taking any information he needed with him in his head. Curiously, the thought of going on the run again didn’t worry Sabir overmuch. In his mind he was a thousand miles away from Stockbridge already.
Much to his surprise, his investigation of the 52 lost Nostradamus quatrains had moved on by leaps and bounds in the past few weeks, to the extent that he was becoming increasingly eager to test out his new theories in the field. Maybe, just maybe, he could squeeze a book’s worth of material out of the thing without giving anything crucial away.
Sabir realized that only by publishing a rigorously expurgated version of the prophecies – with his own tentative suggestions as to their significance – could he protect both himself and the future of Alexi and Yola’s unborn child. He would, in effect, be conducting a damage limitation exercise in expedient disinformation.
When Captain Joris Calque of France’s Police Nationale had visited him in hospital all those months ago, the man had not come bearing a punnet of grapes. He had come on a fishing expedition for reasons as to why the Countess’s eldest son, Achor Bale, had been pursuing Sabir and his two Gypsy friends, Alexi Dufontaine and Yola Samana, halfway across France with such a murderous and single-minded intensity.
At first, Sabir had refused to enlighten him. Then Calque had reminded him of the sacrifices made by his late assistant, Paul Macron, and by the seriously injured Sergeant Spola in an effort to keep Sabir and his friends alive. Sabir had been forced to acknowledge that Calque had played fair by both him and by Yola and Alexi. At least according to his lights.
Reluctantly, he had taken pity on the man. He had begun by explaining how he believed that Nostradamus’s 52 lost quatrains constituted a 52-year rundown towards the date of a possible Armageddon. And that in his opinion the 52-year cycle had begun in 1960, leading to a possible end date circa 2012. And that this end date corresponded as near as dammit to the Mayan Great Change, which was predicted, according to the Maya Long Count Calendar, to occur on 21 December of that same year.
He had gone on to explain how each quatrain in the cycle appeared to point towards the events in just one specific run-up year. The list, in its entirety, covered the first French nuclear test in Algeria, the serial end of the French and British Empires, the Berlin Wall, Yuri Gagarin’s trip into space, the Kennedy brothers’ assassinations, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Arab/Israeli Six Day War, the US Defeat in Vietnam, the Cambodian Genocide, the Mexico City earthquake, the First and Second Gulf Wars, the 9/11 Twin Towers Disaster, the New Orleans Floods and the Indian Ocean Tsunami.
According to Sabir’s theory of Nostradamus’s intentions, as each event unfolded just as the seer had predicted, the exact End date of the cycle would, in consequence, became ever more firmly fixed in people’s minds. This would then enable the world’s population to come to terms with what awaited them and – if at all possible – do something about it. This part of Nostradamus’s master plan had not worked out quite as the seer intended.
Instead of being one amongst millions in on the secret, Sabir was now the only man on earth who knew that the prophecy earmarked for the present year purported to describe the location of a new visionary who would either confirm or deny the end date – a person capable, like Nostradamus, of seeing into the future and channelling the information found there. Only this person could tell the world what awaited it – regeneration or apocalypse.
The final-but-one prophecy in the 52-year cycle went on to describe the birth and identity of the Second Coming and his symbolic role against the Antichrist. It described how the knowledge of the birth of the Second Coming would dilute the Antichrist’s power, and make him vulnerable. And how this knowledge would gather together both believers and non-believers in a tidal wave of righteousness combating the forces of evil.
This information Sabir kept rigorously to himself. There clearly had to be a reason why Nostradamus had given his prophecies to the Gypsies for safekeeping, and that reason was that the Second Coming, ergo the Parousia, was due to be born of the direct line of the guardians of the prophecies.
This child was now on the way, and Yola, Sabir’s blood sister, was to be its mother. She had conceived the child on the beach at Cargese, in Corsica, after her notional – although entirely voluntary – kidnap by her long-time sweetheart, Alexi Dufontaine. Yola had confided to Sabir that she had conceived the child at the exact moment she lost her virginity, just as a flight of ducks had cast their shadow over the mating couple. Later, after Alexi had symbolically plucked out her eyes – Yola had used the Gypsy euphemism for female sexual ecstasy when describing the event – a male dog had run up to her on the beach and had licked her hand. This was how she knew their child would be a son.
More than four centuries before, Nostradamus had given the Samana family the location and safekeeping of the prophecies precisely in order to protect them from the prophecies’ unintended consequences. The fact that the Parousia was to emerge from the most hated, reviled, and discriminated-against portion of the world population – people with no clear land of their own, and no clear identity beyond that which they carried with them – would form a necessary part of the supranational healing process. The Gypsies were a nomadic people, shunned and sidelined by virtually all established cultures. Always the optimist, Nostradamus must have reckoned that if the world were ever to accept a saviour from amongst such a company, it must first – almost by definition – have learned the virtues of tolerance and inclusiveness.
Sabir shook his head in despair. It was clear that the world simply hadn’t come that far yet. Forbearance and inclusiveness were as far off the agenda as they had been in Nostradamus’s time. People paid lip service to ideas of colour-blindness, religious tolerance, and fair play, but if ever their own little bailiwicks were threatened, they very swiftly reverted to racial protectionism and national isolationism – ‘strangers out’ still seemed to be the motto in extremis. As a result of this, nothing on earth would ever get Sabir to divulge Yola’s true identity and whereabouts, and through her, the identity of her unborn son. Not to Calque. Not to anybody.
The penultimate prophecy in the cycle went on to describe the Third Antichrist – a being who would, if nothing was done to prevent him, trigger 2012’s final holocaust. That, too, needed to be kept secret.
But Sabir had to have something to sell to his publishers and the public at large. A suitable hook on which to hang his story. Or what old-time comedians would have called a shtick.
The safest bet seemed to consist of the narrative of his search for the unique visionary Nostradamus had spoken of in that year’s prophecy. A person apparently so in tune with the matted web of time that they could disentangle its threads and read the future from them.
If this person existed then Sabir would find him. And to heck with the Countess, the Corpus Maleficus, and the de Bale twins.
8
Sabir straightened up from checking underneath his three-year-old Grand Cherokee. The garage had been locked tight. He didn’t think there had been any way that the twins could have gained access to his vehicle.
Still, forewarned is forearmed. Both Achor Bale and the French police had used electronic tracker systems during their pursuit of Sabir and his friends in France. Sabir had never encountered such systems before that time, but he would certainly not overlook them again. He needed his car to get to the airport, and he needed that car to be clean. The last thing he wanted was for the twins to dog his trail all the way to Saudi Arabia.
He locked and alarmed the garage door behind him and trudged back towards the house. Since the events of the night before he had taken to carrying the shotgun with him wherever he went, trusting that his neighbours wouldn’t think he was partly off his trolley, and call the cops. He’d worked out a possible cover story to deal with
