The Secret Prophecy (10 page)

Chapter 21

“T
he year was 594 BC; the country was Greece; the city was Athens. . . .”

“What was the weather like?” Em asked.

Victor glared at him. “Do you want to know what’s going on or don’t you?”

“Sorry,” Em said contritely.

“There were actually riots in the streets,” Victor continued. “The poor in Athens were tired of being pushed around by the nobles and having no say in what happened to them. So the Athenians called in a man named Solon to act as mediator, and he set up a whole series of reforms—new laws, what amounted to a new constitution, really. These laws were the first steps toward political democracy, the first time such a thing happened anywhere in the world.”

“Good for him,” Em murmured.

“Solon was a very wise man,” Victor remarked. “But unfortunately, his reforms pleased nobody. The nobles thought they went too far; the poor thought they didn’t go far enough. Solon went off on a world tour—that’s when he discovered the Egyptian records of Atlantis that Plato wrote about—and left them to sort themselves out. While he was away, a group of the most conservative nobles banded together to form the Knights of Themis.”

Em frowned. “Knights of . . . ?”

“Themis. She was one of the ancient Greek Titans, the embodiment of divine order. She represented the old laws and customs. The Athenian nobles liked her because they wanted to go back to the way things were before Solon stuck his nose in. Specifically, they wanted to get rid of this newfangled democracy business. The Knights of Themis was a political movement in the form of a secret society dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. The society itself was organized something like today’s Masonic Lodge, with initiations into various degrees. There were oaths pledging obedience to the superiors of the order and binding members to absolute secrecy about their plans, aims, and methods.”

Em frowned. “And I should be interested in this because . . . ?”

“Because the Knights never went away,” Victor told him bluntly.

“Wait a minute,” Em cut in. “A political movement founded in Greece more than two and a half thousand years ago is still in existence today?”

Victor shrugged. “Why not? Democracy was a political movement founded in Greece more than two and a half thousand years ago, and that’s in existence today. Believe me, the Knights of Themis are still very much active. Antidemocratic movements have always been able to attract influential people. Their main goal now is a unified world under a single government.”

“No more wars,” Em murmured.

“No more democracy.” Victor scowled. “Their ideal world government is one completely controlled by themselves.”

After a moment Em said cautiously, “Yes, but we don’t have a world government, democratic or not; and not much sign of one.”

“We have a united Europe,” Victor said.

“Yes, but that’s just trade. The European Union is just trade.”

“That’s certainly the way it was sold to the voters, but it’s not just trade anymore. There’s a European parliament and a European legislature, and the laws they bring in are binding on all the member states. They don’t call it a United States of Europe yet, but that’s where it’s heading; and it’s getting stronger and more powerful every year.”

Em began to smile. “You’re not trying to tell me that the Knights of Themis—”

“Were behind the European Union?” Victor interrupted him. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. Just like they were behind the two world wars. The next step for Europe will be to abolish national governments and create a single, central, all-powerful government for the whole continent. And guess who’ll be running that?”

Victor obviously wanted him to say the Knights. Em actually said nothing.

Victor knuckled his eyes tiredly. “In fact, their plans for Europe are so far advanced, they’ve now moved on to the second stage: the establishment of a new world order.”

“What’s that?”

“The abolishment of
all
sovereign states everywhere and the creation of a single world government.”

Em finished his coffee in a single gulp. “Hard to swallow.”

“The coffee or the concept?”

“The concept. The coffee’s fine.”

“They’re not doing it all at once. The idea is to integrate various countries into greater unions, then unify the unions. You already have the European Union. There’s also an emerging Asian Union: China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. It’s all economics at the moment, but that’s the way the European Union started. There are also proposals on the table for a Central Asian Union to unify Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan; and for a South Asian Union that would be bigger than the rest of them put together. That one’s going to bring together
forty-three
different countries all the way from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines . . . and the creepy thing is, the South Asian Union includes major players from the Asian Union and the Central Asian Union, so you’re
already
seeing a potential union of the unions.”

Em opened his mouth to say something, but Victor was in full flight.

“Once you take an interest in the world as a whole, you can see the hand of the Knights everywhere. But the really interesting part is what they’re doing to America.”

“The Land of the Free,” Em murmured.

“Not anymore,” Victor told him.

Chapter 22

“A
fter 1945,” Victor said, “the Knights decided to take over America.”

“They
what
?” Em gasped.

“You heard me,” Victor said. “America is unusual among modern democracies in that so much power is concentrated in the hands of one man: the president. Much more than our own prime minister, you can be certain. Put a Knight of Themis in the White House, and you effectively take control of America for at least four years—eight if you play your cards right.”

“But they haven’t done it, have they? They haven’t put a man in the White House?”

“Oh, yes, they have.”

Em stared at him in disbelief. “The current president?”

Victor shook his head. “Not him. They couldn’t control the backlash against their plans to expand America’s involvement in the Middle East. But the Knights have their own men in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and there are a whole host of lobby groups that secretly support their aims. They’ve also infiltrated the commercial and financial sectors big-time. Apart from that, they’ve had their men in the White House off and on since Washington. They even went public about it in 1957.”

“What happened in 1957?”

“They issued the current dollar bill.” He obviously caught Em’s blank look, for he asked, “You don’t have a dollar bill about your person, do you?”

“I’ve never even seen one.”

“Your education has been sadly lacking,” Victor said. He extracted a bill from his wallet. “Souvenir of my last trip to New York. Now look . . .” He placed it facedown on the table and smoothed it flat. “What’s that say?”

Em glanced at the banknote. “‘In God we trust.’” Em looked up at him. “All others must pay cash.” As he said it, he realized it was only the second joke he’d cracked since his father died. He was still desperately sad, still missed the old boy terribly; but the coiled spring inside his gut seemed to have eased when he wasn’t paying attention. He was returning, very slowly, to something like his old, cheerful self.

“Very funny,” Victor said sourly. “To the left of that—the Latin.”

Em looked to the left of the
ONE
on the dollar bill. Within a circle there was a drawing of an eye inside a pyramid with some wording around it. The drawing looked vaguely familiar, but for the life of him he couldn’t think why. He forced himself to concentrate on the wording.
“‘Annuit cœptis,’”
he read slowly.
“‘Novus ordo seclorum.’”

“Which means?”

“Bit rusty on the old Latin, I’m afraid,” Em told him.

“
Annuit cœptis
means ‘favors the beginning.’
Novus ordo seclorum
near enough translates as ‘new world order.’ Put the whole thing together and you have the message: The Knights of Themis want to start a new world order. And since it was printed right there on a dollar bill, the implication is that the USA
also
wants that.”

“Does it?” Em asked. He was beginning to feel at sea. Politics at home had never been an interest of his, and American politics was a complete mystery. He believed what Victor was telling him, but he couldn’t seem to get any overall picture into his head.

“There are signs,” Victor said. “It certainly wasn’t long before that message came out into the open: the first President Bush publicly announced that he favored a new world order in 1990 during an address to the United Nations. By that time, Themis even had the Russians on board. Premier Gorbachev was calling for a new world order as early as 1988.”

“Yes, but talking about it and doing anything about it are two different things.”

“Ever hear of the North American Union?”

Em shook his head. “No.”

“Neither have most of the American people. It’s a Themis plan to set up a union of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. There’s going to be a common currency called the amero. It’s just like the European Union, and it’s the first step toward a single state that will take in the whole of the Americas, north and south. Nobody’s ever voted for it, but plans are moving ahead just the same. That’s what I mean about taking over America. Anybody who criticizes the idea is accused of political scare tactics—I quote President George W. Bush on that.”

“You’re saying,” Em said carefully, “this North American Union is part of a new world order?”

“I’ve told you how these people work. First you unify countries, then you unify the unions. We’ve already got a European Union; we’re well on the way toward one or more Asiatic unions. Add in a union of the Americas, centralize power, and you’ve got a world government.”

Em went back to a much earlier thought. “Would that be such a bad thing?”

“What, with the Knights of Themis running the show?”

Em shrugged. “They can’t do much worse than the politicians we have now: wars . . . famines . . . crime . . . drug running . . . people smuggling . . . bank crises . . . global warming. . . . Some of those are bound to get better under a world government.”

“You’re right,” Victor said. “Most of those problems
will
disappear—all of them, in fact. But I doubt you’ll like the way the Knights plan to make them go away.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Primarily through population control,” Victor said firmly. “Last time I checked, there were nearly seven billion of us on the planet—far too many for effective totalitarian government. The Knights plan to cut that figure down to approximately fifty million worldwide and keep it there.”

Em decided he’d misheard the figure. “You mean five hundred million?” Even that sounded ludicrously small.

“I mean fifty million,” Victor said. “About what it was at the time of ancient Egypt. Instant cure for famine as a start: enough food to go around, but not enough humans to pollute our environment—great idea, don’t you think? And if you structure the world government to be run by a few thousand Themis elite, with the rest of the population effectively functioning as their slaves, you abolish war. The really scary thing is that they’ve started the process of taking away people’s liberties already, to pave the way for their eventual slave state.”

Em blinked. “Have they?” He vaguely remembered his father complaining about the government and civil liberties, but what Victor was saying seemed a lot more serious.

Victor shrugged. “The Patriot Act in America allows the state to search through your emails, bug your phone conversations, examine your bank records and your medical records. You can also be arrested and held without trial, just like the good old Soviet police states. But it’s even worse here in Britain. You can now be arrested and held without trial, denied access to your own money, have your activities restricted for no reason whatsoever, and have samples of your DNA taken against your will. And the Knights of Themis are only really getting started.”

Em hesitated, then decided he didn’t believe it. Victor was talking about antiterrorist legislation that would probably only be temporary anyway. And it was one thing talking about a small, manageable population, but getting to it was a different matter. “How do you reduce the world population from nearly seven billion to fifty million?” Even as he asked it, a chilling idea occurred to him, and he added softly, “Start a nuclear war?”

But Victor was shaking his head. “A nuclear war would destroy the planet, leave it a miserable place for the survivors to live on. The Knights don’t want that. Their aim is a new Garden of Eden, with themselves enjoying the benefits and a slave population to look after them. One plan for the population reduction is a combination of sterilization for the young and euthanasia for the old. It won’t happen until they have a world government, and even then it will be introduced gradually. But there’s a faction of the Knights who thinks that’s too slow. They say we need to cut the population now before global warming gets out of control. Their favored method is a bioengineered virus designed to kill off most of the population and then die out itself, leaving a bright new world for the survivors. The problem, of course, is how you stop the virus from attacking the Knights themselves. They have scientists working on that already.”

Em stared at him in something close to horror, then shook his head violently. “How do you know stuff like this? I mean, most people have never even
heard
of the Knights of Themis.”

“I’m betting your father did,” Victor said.

Em blinked. “What’s my father got to do with it?”

“Your father was a world authority on Nostradamus, I gather?”

“Yes,” Em said cautiously.

“Not just the prophecies, but the man’s whole life?”

“Yes . . .”

“Nostradamus was a Themis initiate,” Victor said bluntly. “It’s the sort of obscure fact some scholars would know but nobody else cares about. There’s a theory that he used his prophecies to predict a future world where democracy no longer existed; and if you read them, it’s hard to argue with that.”

“But that was back in the sixteenth century,” Em protested. “You seem to know exactly what they’re up to
now
.”

“Wish I did,” Victor told him. “But I do know more than most. Section 7 was set up specifically to combat the Themis threat. I’ve spent most of my working life investigating the Knights.”

Em glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. Victor had been talking about his Knights of Themis for more than an hour now, and it was fascinating to listen to. But Em wasn’t sure he had the time to listen much longer. The Knights might be plotting to take over the world, but right now Em had more personal things on his mind. Like how to keep clear of the man with the gun and his friends. Or how to get his mother out of the psychiatric clinic.

“Look, Victor,” he said heavily, “what do the Knights of Themis have to do with me?”

“They’re the ones who are after you,” Victor said.