The Revelation Code (Wilde/Chase 11) (6 page)

‘I thought so.’ His eyes returned to the screens. ‘My people have been watching you for some time. You’ve been to a lot of places, but not one was a church. And even a cesspool of sin like New York has churches.’

Despite her fear, Nina still felt annoyance at the slur on her home town. ‘I don’t have an opinion on whether or not God exists, because it’s not an issue that comes up a great deal in my everyday life. God might be real, or not, but either way the subway still runs late.’

‘Ah, an agnostic, then,’ said Cross in a patronising tone. ‘In some ways that’s worse than an atheist, because at least they have conviction. You don’t believe in the Lord because you can’t be bothered.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that sloth is a deadly sin?’

He shook his head. ‘Nowhere in the Bible says so directly. Proverbs eighteen, verse nine comes close – “He also that is slothful in his work is brother to him that is a great waster” – but the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins is an invention of the Catholic Church.’ His obvious disdain for that institution was almost as great as for atheists. ‘Only what’s written in the Bible itself matters. Which brings me to why you’re here.’

‘Which is?’

Cross came back to stand before her. ‘Are you familiar with the Book of Revelation, Dr Wilde?’

‘If you’re asking me if I can quote chapter and verse, then no – but yeah, of course I’m
familiar
with it. The last book of the New Testament, also known as the Apocalypse of John, written in exile by John of Patmos – who may or may not be John the Apostle, depending which school of thought you follow – accepted into biblical canon at the third Council of Carthage in
AD
397 over considerable opposition . . . and argued about ever since.’

The white-robed man seemed almost impressed. ‘More familiar than I expected given that you claim you can’t be bothered to believe.’

‘I’m an archaeologist – ancient history’s kind of my thing.’

‘Then you accept the Bible as a historical document?’

‘I accept
some
of it as a historical document – the parts that can be corroborated with other contemporary accounts. Revelation definitely isn’t one of those parts, though.’

‘Why not?’ His gaze became challenging. ‘Have you read it?’

‘When I was a student, for historical context. It reads like something you’d hear from a crazy guy living in a dumpster.’ Cross and his two followers showed irritation at the criticism, but she pressed on: ‘Visitations by angels, stars falling from the sky, plagues, a pregnant woman being chased by a dragon, the four horsemen of the apocalypse . . . and the end of the world. It’s completely at odds with the rest of the New Testament. There were other equally crazy apocalyptic gospels that were rejected from canon – Paul, Ezra – so why this one got through is a mystery.’

Cross shook his head. ‘It’s not a mystery. The reason is because the Book of Revelation is
true
.’ He leaned closer, a new and frightening intensity in his eyes. ‘And I’ll prove it to you.’

4

C
ross led Nina across the control room to a vault-like metal door, using a thumbprint scanner to unlock it. Beyond was something even more incongruous within a church: a chamber that appeared to be a laboratory. Walls, floor and ceiling were all tiled in gleaming white, a stainless-steel bench standing before a glass and metal cabinet. A laptop on the countertop was the only loose item.

Nina felt a new unease. She had been in a similar lab before, part of a Russian biological warfare centre. Whatever Cross kept in here, he considered dangerous.

He went to the cabinet. ‘Do you know what that is?’ he asked, pointing at its contents.

She peered through the toughened glass. On top of a small pedestal sat a fragment of pottery or ceramic. It seemed to have been burned, a dark charcoal smear on the surface. ‘It looks like . . . a piece of a statue?’

‘It is,’ said Cross, nodding. ‘But it’s also something else. I told you I’d seen an angel, Dr Wilde. There it is.’

‘You mean you saw a
statue
of an angel?’

‘Yes. But I believe – as firmly as I believe in the word of God and Jesus – that they’re the same thing.’ On her questioning look, he went on: ‘The Book of Revelation talks of four angels, bound by God. Chapter nine, verse thirteen: “And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, ‘Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates.’” And I’ve seen one of them with my own eyes. This was it!’

Nina held back the more scathing of her immediate thoughts. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I was on a mission for the CIA in Iraq, before the invasion. There’s a lake between the Euphrates and the Tigris called Umm al Binni – we had a rendezvous with a group of Marsh Arabs there. Saddam had drained the marshes to drive them out, and because of that, the water level had dropped enough to reveal something in the lake. A temple. I went inside, and found the angel. The
unbroken
angel.’ He held one hand about twelve inches above the other. ‘It was this tall, and looked exactly as John described in Revelation – the body of a man but with the head of a lion, wrapped in six wings full of eyes.’

‘If you say so,’ said Nina warily.

He rounded on her. ‘I don’t need to
say
so!’ he barked. ‘I can show you!’ He flipped up the laptop’s lid. ‘Here!’

The screen came to life, displaying a photograph of the interior of the temple. The resolution was relatively low, but still clear enough for her to realise that whatever else she thought of her captor, he had made an impressive discovery.

He had also accurately described the angel, which rested inside a gold-lined nook. It did indeed have a lion’s head on a man’s body, metal wing-like shapes tightly encircling it. But she found herself more intrigued by the surroundings than the centrepiece. The walls were covered in inscribed text – she recognised it as Akkadian, a long-extinct language of ancient Mesopotamia. It wasn’t one she could translate, though, those words visible through the dirt and shadows remaining indecipherable.

She also recognised another language: ancient Hebrew, carved into stone tablets propped against the wall. Their lower halves were lost beneath the flooded temple’s murky waters, leaving only a few lines visible. Again she couldn’t read the language; Latin and Greek had been her specialities.

‘This was under the lake?’ she asked, intrigued. She knew she was falling prey to her own weakness, her obsession with learning more about lost treasures of the past, but couldn’t help wanting to know more.

Cross nodded. ‘It had been under twenty feet of water until Saddam drained the region. The Marsh Arabs avoided the area even before then; they thought it was a place of death.’

‘And was it?’

‘I was the only person who got out alive after the Iraqis attacked, so yes. The temple was blown up by a helicopter gunship.’ He gestured at the sliver inside the cabinet. ‘That was the only piece of the angel I recovered.’

Nina was still examining the photograph. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to do with this. I can’t translate Akkadian, and I only know a small amount of ancient Hebrew. I don’t have a clue what this says.’

‘You don’t need to. This was taken twelve years ago. I’ve had it translated since then. In pieces, so that no outsider would know what it all meant.’ Cross brought up another picture.

Words had been overlaid upon a copy of the original image. But they were positioned almost randomly across the wall, a scattershot translation. Nina frowned. ‘These are only fragments. Is there even a complete sentence there?’

‘Only a few,’ he replied, with clear frustration at the fact. He pointed them out. She read them:
The guidance of God led His chosen through the desert and showed them water when they thirsted
;
Three times shall it be said, seven is the number of God, and man is always lesser
;
And the Elders sent their people into the lands around
. ‘They were all we could find, even after the picture was enhanced. But it told me enough.’

‘Which was?’

‘That this place was used by the twenty-four Elders – the ancient Hebrew leaders who sit around God’s throne in His temple, just as Revelation says.’ Cross indicated some of the translated text. ‘You see? The Akkadian symbols for the number twenty-four – and here in the Hebrew text,’ he added, pointing out one of the half-submerged slabs, ‘it actually uses the word “Elders”.’

Nina shook her head. ‘So it was an important religious site. That doesn’t prove that God personally stockpiled his angels there. The ancient Hebrews spread out over a wide area, including into Mesopotamia.’

‘There’s more.’ Cross’s finger moved to other snatches of translation. ‘These Hebrew sections say that the Elders sent the other three angels away for safety, dispersing them as more tribes came into the region. And the older text, the Akkadian, describes how the angels were bound in the first place – or rather, what was bound
inside
them.’

‘And what would that be?’ said Nina, her cynicism muted by the fact that she now genuinely wanted to know. She had no intention of taking Cross’s deductions at face value, but at the same time she couldn’t deny that his find deserved proper archaeological study.

‘Do you know what the Umm al Binni lake is, Dr Wilde?’ Before she could speak, he provided the answer. ‘It’s a meteorite crater. A meteorite hit Mesopotamia around 2200
BC
. The destruction it caused led to the downfall of the Sumerian civilisation – the Sumerians being replaced by the Akkadians.’

‘That’s conjecture,’ Nina corrected. ‘It’s a
possible
cause for the fall of Sumeria, but there are others. And yeah, I
have
heard of Umm al Binni. It might be a meteorite crater, but considering the state of things in Iraq since the war, nobody’s been in a big hurry to check it out.’

‘I believe it
was
a meteorite. And you will too.’ Cross went back to the cabinet, gazing down at the chunk of stone within. ‘Let me quote from Revelation again.’

‘Oh, I doubt I’m gonna be able to stop you,’ she sneered.

Anna strode right up to her. ‘Don’t talk back to the Prophet again. Understand? I can hurt you without hurting your baby.’

‘Anna, that’s enough. For now,’ said Cross. ‘Revelation chapter eight, verse ten: “And there fell a great star from heaven, burning as if it were a lamp.” Now, what does that describe, in modern terms?’

‘A meteorite,’ Nina had to admit – then her mind made a connection to another ancient story. ‘Wait . . . there’s a section in the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, I think the eleventh tablet, that could be interpreted the same way. It describes the Anunakki – a group of Sumerian sky gods – “setting the land ablaze with their torch” and “shattering the land like a pot”. That’s followed by a great flood, maybe the same one from Genesis, but the timing of the Gilgamesh legend roughly coincides with a date of around 2200
BC
.’

Cross exchanged glances with Anna and Simeon. ‘You know your subject, Dr Wilde,’ he told Nina. ‘That proves you’re the right person to find what I’m looking for. But I’m curious. You’re willing to accept
Gilgamesh
as a source of truth. So why not the Book of Revelation?’

‘Because some of the events in
Gilgamesh
can be corroborated by other sources. Revelation can’t. It’s a completely stand-alone piece of work, and to be frank, it reads like some sort of drug trip.’

She expected an angry response. Cross’s reply, however, surprised her. ‘Have you ever taken hallucinogenic drugs, Dr Wilde?’

‘What? Of course not.’

‘I have.’ Her surprise grew at the admission. ‘Part of my training with the CIA’s Special Activities Division. It lets them judge if an operative’s likely to give up information under truth agents. I passed the test, by the way.’

Nina gave him a thin smile. ‘Congratulations.’

‘But I discovered something about hallucinations, which I’ve since corroborated from other sources.’ A glance at Simeon; had he been another CIA agent who’d undergone the same training? ‘Anything you see while under the influence is taken from your own subconscious mind – it’s something you’ve already encountered, but reflected back at you in a distorted way, like a funhouse mirror. You can’t hallucinate something you’ve never encountered before, because there’s nothing for your mind to work with. So if you’ve never heard of an elephant, say, it would be impossible for you to hallucinate an elephant.’

She regarded him dubiously, unsure where the sudden divergence of topic was heading. ‘I’ll . . . take your word for it.’

‘So when I got back from Iraq and started researching –
really
researching – the Book of Revelation,’ he went on, ‘I realised that John’s visions were very much like my experiences under drugs. The intensity, the
reality
of what you’re seeing, the way your perception of time skips backwards and forwards, how all your senses are engaged – it made me think that John underwent a similar experience.’

‘Wait, wait a second,’ said Nina. ‘One minute you’re telling me you believe the Book of Revelation is true, that you take it literally – and the next you say that nope, the guy who wrote it was tripping?’

‘I never said I took Revelation
literally
. I said I believe it’s true – that it
contains
the truth.’

‘I don’t understand,’ she was forced to admit.

He clasped his hands together as if about to deliver a sermon. ‘I quit the CIA and went on a pilgrimage – to Patmos. There’s a monastery there, the Monastery of St John, marking where John wrote the Book of Revelation.’

‘The Cave of the Apocalypse.’

‘You know it?’

‘I know
of
it. John supposedly lived in the cave during his exile, and that’s where he wrote Revelation. I’ve never been there, though.’

‘You should.’

‘Let me go, and maybe I will.’

That prompted a mocking snort from Simeon. Cross gave him a stern look, making him lower his head in penance, then continued: ‘I visited the cave, and saw the crack in the ceiling through which John heard the voice of God telling him to write down his visions. I also saw that water comes down through it from above. Now, the land around the monastery is private, but that never stopped me before. And you know what I found growing in the woods? Psilocybin mushrooms. Hallucinogens. It looked like the monks had tried to clear them, but there were still patches hiding away. And if they’re growing naturally there now, there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t have been there two thousand years ago.’

‘So . . . you really
do
think that John was tripping when he wrote Revelation?’

Cross nodded. ‘The water might have been contaminated. Or he could even have eaten the mushrooms, not knowing what they were. But yes, I believe that his visions were psychoactive hallucinations.’ His gaze intensified. ‘So I had to find out where they came from.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I told you – you can’t hallucinate something you haven’t experienced. Yet John described mountains falling from the sky, the sea turning to blood, cities being destroyed – and he also described the twenty-four Elders, and the angels bound at the Euphrates.’ He returned to the laptop and pointed at the statue in the centre of the image. ‘He described this!’

She frowned. ‘But he couldn’t possibly have seen it.’

‘No. But someone could have described all those things to him. Or, more likely, he read about them, and all the other things that came from his subconscious when he had his vision. They were described so vividly, with such detail, that his mind was able to visualise them perfectly.’

‘So where did he read about them?’

‘The answer’s in Revelation. Chapters two and three are the letters that the Lord told John to send to the seven churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea.’

‘All in modern-day Turkey,’ said Nina.

‘And all places that John must have visited to know so much about them. The Ephesians hated the Nicolaitans, the Smyrnans were rich, the Thyatirans tolerated the presence of the false prophet Jezebel – and he also knew that Antipas the bishop, his friend, was martyred in Pergamum.’ He watched Nina expectantly, as if waiting for her to make a connection.

One came almost immediately. ‘Pergamum is another name for Pergamon,’ she said. ‘And Pergamon had one of the largest libraries of the ancient world.’ His expression confirmed that she had guessed correctly. ‘Is that what you’re saying? You think John read something there that formed his visions in Patmos?’

‘That’s exactly what I think, Dr Wilde,’ Cross replied. ‘The library contained the ancient texts of the Elders – a record of the meteorite strike and the binding of the four angels at the Euphrates.’

‘Well, I can tell you a big problem with your theory right away,’ she said. ‘Mark Antony took everything from the Library of Pergamon to give to Cleopatra as a gift. He cleared the place out, every last scroll. There’s no exact date for that, but he died in 30
BC
– long before Jesus was born, never mind John. And Antipas died in
AD
92, so Revelation couldn’t have been written until after then.’