The Paradise Prophecy

“Why don’t we ask the lady with the stretched neck?”

They were moving through a forest of pines when Batty thought about Milton and the seven missing pages from the Devil’s Bible.

It was a foregone conclusion now that Milton was a guardian himself-an idea that might seem far-fetched to some, but to Batty’s mind, only made sense. Milton was a deeply religious man and a passionate civil servant who often spoke out against the king. He had almost gotten himself killed for it, and had spent much of the latter days of his life in sightless seclusion, his reputation tarnished. And it wouldn’t be outside his nature to take on the responsibilities of Custodes Sacri, especially if it meant he’d spend those last days in the service of God.

But Brother Philip had said that the curse on those pages had driven Milton blind-just like Galileo before him. And that Milton had destroyed the pages when he realized how dangerous they were.

But could any of this be true?

Could both of these men have had possession of the pages at some point in their lives?

Philip had said that Galileo had given Milton “the bug,” and Batty knew that the poet had visited the astronomer on his travels through Europe. Had an obsession been born during that visit? An obsession that had eventually been satisfied, only to drive Milton blind?

And why had Ozan wanted to know about the pages? Were they somehow mixed in with his attempts to decipher those verses from Paradise Lost? And did it all relate in some way to this mysterious Telum?

There was a connection here. There had to be.

But Batty had too little information to figure it all out.

So maybe he needed to start with Ozan’s and Gabriela’s obsession. In chapter eleven of Paradise Lost, the Archangel Michael takes Adam to the highest hill in Paradise and shows him a vision of the future. Adam witnesses the death and destruction of Noah’s flood, the rise of the tyrant Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, the deterioration caused by old age, the ravages of war and disease-all of which could be prevented if man were to live a virtuous life.

But there were no secret messages to be found in that chapter. No codes to be deciphered. Batty himself had been through the book time and again and had never found anything.

But then he suddenly remembered something. A small bit of curiosity he had set aside when things started getting crazy on the plane. Before Belial had hijacked Callahan and the plane started its nosedive, he had been looking through the manuscript, marveling at the ink on the pages, the words crossed out, the inserted revisions.

But as he had flipped to the end of the book, he had noticed something odd. Something wrong with the binding.

Something missing.

Could it be that simple?

Batty stopped in his tracks, fumbling for the book bag. As he reached inside and grabbed the manuscript, Callahan realized that he was no longer walking beside her and turned to look.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Batty found the stump of a fallen pine and sat, pulling the book into his lap. “I think I may have just figured it out.”

She came over to him. “Figured what out?”

He quickly flipped through the manuscript until he reached the last chapter-what would be chapters eleven and twelve in the revised version, but was actually chapter ten here. He checked the binding, saw the torn edges, as if several pages had been removed.

“Is it possible?”

“Is what possible? What’s going on?”

He looked up at Callahan. “Ozan and Gabriela were trying to decipher the wrong chapter eleven.”

“What do you mean the wrong chapter eleven? What other chapter eleven is there?

“Paradise Lost was originally divided into ten chapters,” he told her. “Until the publisher asked Milton to split two of those chapters to make it seem longer and look more appealing to the readers.”

He showed her the manuscript. “This is the original ten chapters.” He gestured to the torn binding. “But there are pages missing here. Torn out of the back of the book. But if you look at the verse, it’s complete. It ends exactly where it’s supposed to end.”

A light came into Callahan’s eyes. “He wrote another chapter. The real chapter eleven.”

“The right chapter eleven,” Batty said. “The one they should have been trying to decipher all along. And look how many pages are missing.”

He handed her the book and she took a closer look at the binding, the torn edges, mentally counting them, moving her lips as she did. Then her eyes went wide.

“Seven,” she said.

“The seven missing pages of the Devil’s Bible. And this isn’t a coincidence. That has to be what was there.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. Philip said Milton burned them, and look at these edges. This is the same paper he used in the rest of the manuscript. And you said the Codex’s pages were huge, and written several centuries before.”

Batty thought about this and shook his head. “I don’t have an explanation, but I know I’m right. And this has something to do with the key Philip told us about. It’s a prophecy of some kind, an instruction manual-who knows?”

“But you’d think if anyone would, it would be Ozan and Gabriela.”

“No necessarily,” Batty said. “Like I told you before, they could be operating on blind faith. Remember that e-mail? And what Philip said about Ozan being a curious old fool?”

Callahan shook her head and handed the book back to him. “We could sit here and speculate from now until doomsday-which, if you believe Brother Philip, is not that far away. But there’s no way we’ll be able to figure all this out unless we get one of the remaining guardians to spill. And the chances of that look pretty slim right now.”

“Maybe not,” Batty said.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“The e-mail to D.C., remember? The guardian who probably started you on this whole quest in the first place. The guy in the president’s administration.”

“Hey, that was as much speculation as all this other stuff.”

“I don’t think so,” Batty said. “And as soon as you can get reception on that cell phone of yours, I think you need you to call your people and set up a meeting.”

“For what? You don’t know Section. They’re a closed shop.”

“Say you want to discuss the Telum. If one of the guardians is behind this, he’s sure to swallow the bait.”

“And if he does?”

“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.”

They were nearing civilization when Callahan got a signal.

After dialing in her com-code, she waited a full ten minutes before the disembodied voice came on the line. “Yes?”

“We have a situation.”

“What sort of situation?”

“I can’t go into much detail over the phone.”

“This line is secure, Agent Callahan. You know that.”

She did indeed. Section spent a considerable amount of time and money making sure it was secure, but that didn’t help her much right now.