The Nostradamus prophecies

58

It had taken Achor Bale three hours to foot-slog his way over the hills behind the Montserrat Sanctuary and he was starting to wonder whether he wasn’t taking caution to ridiculous extremes.

Nobody knew his car. Nobody was following him. Nobody was waiting for him. The chances of a French policeman making a connection between the Rocamadour murder and the death of the gypsy in Paris were thin in the extreme. And then to extrapolate from there to Montserrat? Still, something was niggling at him.

He had turned on the tracker twenty miles from Manresa, but he had known that the chances of picking up Sabir were pretty slim. Frankly, he didn’t much care if he never encountered the man again. Bale was not one to harbour grudges. If he made an error, he rectified it – it was as simple as that. Back at Rocamadour he had made an error in not giving the Sanctuary the once over. He had underestimated Sabir and the gypsy and he had paid the price – or rather the new watchman had paid the price.

This time he would not be so cavalier. Barring the train, which was too limiting, there was only one effective way into Montserrat, which was by road. Having left his car suitably concealed on the far side of the ridge, therefore, he would come in over the mountains, on the understanding that if the police had, by some miracle, been forewarned of his arrival, they would be monitoring the two obvious incoming routes and not those people exiting in the opposite direction by train, or hijacked vehicle, early in the morning.

One aspect of the fiasco at Rocamadour still irritated him, however. Bale had never lost a gun before – neither during his years on active service with the Legion, nor as a result of the many activities he had engaged in for the Corpus Maleficus after that period. And particularly not a gun that he had been given, in person, by the late Monsieur, his adoptive father.

He had been inordinately fond of the little. 380 calibre Remington 51 self-loader. All of eighty years old and one of the very last units off the factory production line, it had been small and easy to conceal. Hand-milled to reduce glare, it had a particularly effective delayed blow-back, which saw the slide and the breech-block travelling in tandem for a short distance after each shot, powering the slide back over the recoil spring, during which time the breech-block was fleetingly braced in its tracks before continuing on to rejoin it. In this manner the spent cartridge was ejected and the action re-cocked in one and the same process, with a fresh round being chambered on the return stroke. Brilliant. Bale liked mechanical things that worked as they were meant to.

Regret, though, was for losers. The return of the pistol could wait. Now that he had secured his very own copy of the Rocamadour verse he could put all thoughts of failure aside and get on with the job in hand. The most important new factor was that he didn’t need to follow people around anymore, or brutalise them for their secrets. This suited Bale admirably. For he wasn’t by nature a vindictive or a brutal man. To his way of thinking he was simply doing his duty in terms of the Corpus Maleficus. For if he and his ilk didn’t act when they needed to, Satan, the Great Pimp and his hetaera, the Great Whore, would take dominion over the earth and the reign of God would be ended. ‘He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.’

It was for this reason that God had granted adherents of the Corpus Maleficus free rein to unloose, anarchy when and where they wished, on to an imminently threatened world. Only by diluting total evil and turning it into its partial, controllable variant, could Satan be stopped. This was the ultimate purpose of the three Antichrists foretold in the book of Revelation, just as Madame, his adoptive mother, had described to him in her original exposition of his mission. Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, the two previous Antichrists – together with the Great One still to come – were beings specifically designed by God in order to prevent the world from turning to the Devil. They acted as the Devil’s objective correlative – placating him, as it were and ensuring that he was kept in a state of bemused satisfaction.

This was why Bale and the rest of the adepts of the Corpus Maleficus had been given the task of protecting the Antichrists and, if at all possible, sabotaging the so-called Second Coming – which might more correctly be termed the Second Great Placebo. It was this Second Coming that would galvanise the Devil from his interregnum, triggering the Final Conflict. For this purpose adepts were needed who were, in themselves, close to perfection. ‘These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins. These are they which follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth…And in their mouth was found no guile: for they are without fault before the throne of God.’

It was a simple charge and one which Achor Bale had embraced throughout his life with evangelical zeal. ‘And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire: and them that had gotten the victory over the beast and over his image and over his mark a nd over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.’

Bale was proud of the initiative he had used in following up Sabir. Proud that he had spent the better part of his life fulfilling a solemn duty of care.

‘We are not anti-anything, we are anti-everything.’ Wasn’t that how Madame, had explained it to him? ‘It’s impossible to publicise us because no one would believe you. Nothing is written down. Nothing transcribed. They build – we destroy. It is as simple as that. For order can only emerge from flux.’