The Paradise Prophecy

“Of course I have.”

“And what’s your conclusion?”

“That they know more than I do. But then they always do.”

“Maybe somebody put a bug in their ear.”

“Like who?”

Batty shrugged. “Somebody who knows enough to recognize a red flag when he sees one. Maybe somebody who got an e-mail message that said, ‘stay alert.’ They hear about Gabriela, happen to be close enough to your people to wield some influence, and the next thing you know, you’re on a plane.”

Callahan looked as if she was weighing a decision, then said, “I’m breaching protocol when I tell you this, but I think the order may have come directly from the White House.”

“You think maybe our president is a guardian?”

Callahan laughed. “I highly doubt it, but he’s been accused of worse. Maybe somebody in his administration is. And if that’s true, then why bother with me? Why not warn the others directly?”

“Maybe he feels compromised. Thinks he’s being watched and doesn’t want to raise any alarms.”

“None of which tells us what’s at the root of all of this. Why Milton, of all people? Why Paradise Lost and the search for hidden messages? Why all the questions about missing pages and giant books? I can’t stand being blindfolded.”

“Maybe this Brother Philip will know.”

“Assuming we can find him,” Callahan said.

They had left it at that, taking a taxi to a remote airport in the dead of night, so that some pilot for hire could lock them into a tiny metal tube and bounce them all over the cloudless sky.

But in the end, it wasn’t the turbulence that terrified Batty.

It was the nosedive.

was exhausted. She’d spent the last few hours running the night’s insanity through her head, visions of sycophants and human combustibles parading before her mind’s eye, convincing her that her entire life had been a fraud.

It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t known these things existed, had thought that they were merely fantasies created to thrill and entertain in movies and books and around the campfire. But maybe if she’d had an open mind, had not been so closed off to that world, had accepted at least the possibility that it existed, she wouldn’t be paying for it now.

She thought about that moment in the alley in Paradise City. Seeing her ten-year-old self put a shotgun to her head. Had that merely been a product of her fractured past, or had something more sinister been at work? That whole place was knee-deep in the spooky.

She was, she suddenly realized, verging on another panic attack, and it took everything she had to tamp it down. Her hands were trembling worse than ever and she knew that if she didn’t get some decent sleep, very soon, they’d have to carry her off this plane in a stretcher.

But, like always, sleep refused to come.

Unwilling to sit here and let her mind keep recycling the same events until they drove her completely nuts, she pulled Ozan’s notepad out of her bag and started going through the verses he’d copied, concentrating on the crossed-out letters and words, trying to see if she could find what Ozan had been looking for.

She’d read up a little on Trithemius’s code schemes and one of the codes featured in Steganographia was called the Ave Maria cipher, in which you looked for every other letter in every other word. But it was clear that Ozan had already covered that ground and had come up with zip.

And no matter how she rearranged these words, she got nothing. Absolutely nothing. If there were any hidden messages here, they were beyond her feeble mind. Still, she spent the good part of an hour running through the possibilities before she finally gave up in utter frustration.

And she still couldn’t sleep.

Pulling Ozan’s iPad into her lap, she thought about checking for more e-mails, but the labs at Section had already been alerted and were busy scouring Ozan’s server, so she didn’t see any real point. Instead, she navigated to the New York Times Web site and stared morosely at the home page:

STATE DEPARTMENT WARNS OF NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

The story warned that U.S. intelligence agencies had encountered evidence of the recent distribution of weapons-grade uranium throughout the Middle East and Africa. Some were concerned that several nuclear warheads had already been built and could well be circulating on the black market, and the impending threat of doom hung heavy over everyone in D.C.

The attorney general insisted that there was no need for alarm. He was working night and day and, with the president’s help, was busy putting together an international coalition to study and address these concerns. Most experts, however, agreed that this was too little, too late. The fuse was already burning and might not be all that easy to put out.

Maybe it wasn’t dark angels they had to worry about, Callahan thought.

Why the hell was she headed to Thailand?

Dumping the iPad in disgust, she settled back in her chair and closed her eyes. Maybe if she could just let herself go, didn’t try so hard, her creeping anxiety would subside and sleep would find her.

When she was very young, and her father was still alive, he would perch himself on the edge of her bed at night and sing her a song. She could always smell the booze on his breath, but she loved him and he was there and that was all that counted. She remembered his voice, low and sweet, as he stroked her forehead with his fingertips.

Then, to her surprise, there it was-his voice-right now. There inside her head:

Sleep, Bernadette. Sleep.

The sound was as real as if he’d whispered in her ear. But she knew that was impossible. He’d been dead for most of her life.

Sleep, my angel. Sleep. I’m here with you. I always will be. So let yourself go and sleep.

Yes, she thought. Sleep.

Maybe she could manage it after all.

The moment she thought this, all of her cares began to melt away, like magic. Sleep was now a real possibility, an all-consuming possibility, and the temptation was too great to resist. Her anxiety would no longer be an issue. The tremors would stop. The world along with them. Everything would be better if she just let it take her.

Sleep, my darling.

And before Callahan knew it, sweet, blissful darkness wrapped itself around her . . . and swept her away.

Three minutes before the nosedive, Batty pulled the Milton manuscript from his book bag, finally ready to look at it.

It was a work of beauty. The worn leather cover. The time-aged pages. The fading ink. The flawless blank verse. Over ten thousand words. Words that had meant so much to him for so many years. Words that Milton claimed had come from God himself.

So was it possible that there was something in this draft that would open the door for them?

Batty supposed he should feel guilty for stealing it from a dead man, but he didn’t. If it wasn’t a fake-and he instinctively believed it wasn’t-then it deserved to be in a museum somewhere, to be shared with the world, not locked up in a private library.

The most commonly seen version of Paradise Lost, the one taught in schools and found in the bookstores, was twelve chapters long. The twelve-chapter version had first been published the year Milton died, but that wasn’t his original intent. The first incarnation of the poem, published several years earlier, had contained only ten chapters. But at the request of his publisher, Milton had divided chapters seven and ten and added short summaries to all twelve for the more poetry-challenged readers in the