The Doomsday Code

‘Perhaps you are right.’ He cupped his chin in a shaking hand. ‘Yes … yes. Perhaps then, that’s — yes, that’s what I should do.’

‘The other alternative is to remain here,’ she added. ‘Which I calculate would be a tactically poor choice.’

He reached out for her and grasped her arms suddenly. ‘What would I do without you?’

She flashed one of her carefully selected smiles at him.

John’s face seemed to have reclaimed some of its colour. ‘Behind such beauty, you have a mind just as cunning as any ambassador or general. I … I — ’

Becks eased herself from his tight grip and pushed him gently back. ‘My lord, we should set forth immediately.’

‘Yes … yes, that would be advisable.’ His lovelorn puppy eyes cleared and focused on more practical matters. ‘Yes, we must assemble a caravan immediately.’

Yet he stared at her in silence for a while longer, his blue eyes narrowing, marvelling at her. ‘If only it were the way of things that I had been king … you would truly make a formidable queen.’

A part of her mind calculated whether she should reveal his future to him; whether knowing what fate awaited him would strengthen his resolve to stand up to Richard. But a hard-coded protocol reminded her that knowledge of the future to any man was just as big a contaminant to history as any careless time traveller. There were other ways to ensure he found a bit of backbone and stood firm against Richard when the time came.

‘Be strong for me now,’ she said gently, teasingly. ‘And perhaps I will yet be your queen.’

CHAPTER 56

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

‘What are you going to do with me?’ asked Liam.

Locke looked up at him. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. ‘My merry men,’ he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, ‘were rather keen to make an example of you. It’s down to the fact that you’re a rich Norman and they’re all poor Saxons.’

‘But I’m Irish, not French!’

He shrugged. ‘All they see is a rich young man in expensive clothes.’ He pared a hunk of venison off the bone and handed it to Liam. ‘As it always was, it shall always be … rich overlords, a poor underclass and a world of hatred between them.’

Liam chewed on the meat, surprising himself at how hungry he was. ‘Mr Locke, the things you’ve said about your time … it doesn’t sound too good.’

He smiled sadly. ‘No … No, it isn’t.’ Locke held him with his eyes. ‘In my time things are going very badly … very quickly.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Where do I start? We — we’ve exhausted the world of its resources. The world ran out of oil in the late 2030s. It ran out of coal and natural gas in the 2050s. It ran out of many of the essential minerals and ores at the same time. We lost so much land to the advancing seas, land that contained fertile soils, mines, oilfields. And there’ve been wars. Plenty of them. Regional wars, as billions of dispossessed people migrate from flooded lands to already crowded lands.’

Locke shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a mess all of our own making. Perhaps if we’d changed our ways at the beginning of the twenty-first century … if we’d managed to control our population, if we’d all been less greedy wanting our shiny new things, then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. It’s an exhausted world. It’s a dying world.’

Liam looked at the hunched form of the robot in the corner; just a dark outline and two pale blue eyes. ‘Mr Locke, why did you come back here? It wasn’t just to escape that world, was it?’

Locke sighed. A long silence followed, and outside they could hear the evening routine of camp: voices raised, several dogs barking hungrily. Liam had imagined the camp might have been alive with folk songs around a fire, the good-natured exchange of merry freedom-fighters. Instead it was the desperate sounds of a refugee camp — a hundred ragged half-starved outlaws living off what they could trap or steal.

‘You’re right. There was a mission.’ He picked at his teeth. ‘A mission of sorts. An objective.’ He frowned for a moment, as if trying to remember what it was. ‘In my time there are only a few of us left. No longer influential, no longer the silent power behind presidents and popes. We’re just a small band of believers.’

‘Believers?’

‘Templars.’

Liam stopped chewing. ‘You’re one of them knights? But you’re … you’re from the future, so you are! You saying they’ve got Templar Knights in the future?’

He laughed softly. ‘Well, not if you mean men running around in chain mail and waving big swords, Liam. But yes, there are Templars … men who believe. Men who still hope, even now at this late stage, that God will step in to save us from ourselves.’

Locke’s face reminded him a little of Cabot. A face etched with a lifetime of memories and set with a grim determination to see the right things done.

‘We put our faith in technology. All of us. We saw we were running out of oil, but instead of using less of it, we assumed technology would eventually find us a miracle. Free energy, harmless energy for all. But there was no man-made miracle. We used up oil and then there came the Oil Wars. The world became obsessed with fighting itself for dwindling resources, and the oceans and the skies grew more polluted. The ecosystem began to collapse. There was a hope technology could engineer new forms of genetic life that could restore the balance, bacteria that would eat carbon out of the air and help to cool our world down again. But it was too little and too late. All we did was create bacteria that poisoned the sea with big toxic blooms. The more we tried to bail ourselves out with technology … the worse we seemed to make it.’

Locke shook his head. ‘So all that’s left now is blind faith … that there’s something else that can help us.’

‘God?’

He shrugged. ‘Who can say? God or perhaps something Godlike. Something greater than man, something or someone who can help us.’

Liam looked down at the candle. ‘I’m not a real believer, Mr Locke, truth be told. If there is a God, he’s never bothered yet to speak to me.’

‘I’m not sure what I believe either … but hope, belief is practically the last thing we have left.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much.’

‘And we have a knowledge …’

Liam looked up. ‘Knowledge?’

Locke seemed reluctant to continue, as if debating with himself whether to say more. Finally he spoke in a voice little more than a whisper. ‘Knowledge of a prophecy.’

‘What?’

‘A prediction … a prophecy. Something we’ve known about for over a thousand years.’

‘You say “we” … you mean, the Templar Knights?’

‘Yes. Us … the name has changed, of course, depending on which conspiracy nuts you listen to. Templars, Masons, the Illuminati … Priory of Sion, New World Order. There have been all sorts of imaginative and ridiculous names for us over the decades and centuries. But we started out simply as an order of soldier-monks in Jerusalem.’ He laughed drily. ‘No more, basically, than janitors, temple security guards — hence the name Templars.’

Liam recalled Cabot’s story. ‘But something happened, didn’t it? Something was discovered by the security guards.’

Locke nodded. ‘You know the story, then?’