The Paradise Prophecy

30

ISTANBUL, TURKEY

After the fifth shot of whiskey, Batty still wasn’t properly anesthetized, but he was getting there. He’d brought the bottle to their hotel room and planned to finish it off before the night was over.

He was slumped on a couch near a window that overlooked the city, his forearm bandaged, the Milton manuscript lying on the cushion next to him. But he hadn’t cracked it open yet. His excitement over it had waned. Died, actually. He was too busy getting drunk.

And thinking about the redhead.

He cursed himself for not recognizing what she was the moment he’d taken her into his bed. But then the smell of the swamp had been high that night, hadn’t it? And the temptation strong.

But that was no excuse. No matter what desperate rationalization he might come up with, the end result was always the same.

He had slept with the creature who had killed his wife.

He’d had intimate relations with the dark angel-the fucking demon, all right?-who came into his home, burrowed her way into Rebecca’s mind and drove the woman he loved to destruction-all the while using his voice to spew her venom.

His voice.

Yet despite knowing this, and despite his utter contempt for the creature, Batty’s yearning for her-that animal instinct-had not gone away. Seeing her on that floor with Ajda had stirred a desire in him he could barely suppress.

And that made him sick to his stomach.

Hence, the bottle of whiskey.

“You ready to talk about it yet?”

Callahan sat in her armchair, Ozan’s iPad in her lap, the copy of Steganographia and Ozan’s notes on the table next to her. With Batty about as useful as a flashlight without batteries, she’d taken possession of it all and had spent the last couple hours working away, scribbling notes, checking references, consulting the Internet, texting messages . . . He had no idea what she was up to, but she was certainly keeping busy.

He, on the other hand, was merely passing time between shots.

He remembered that Ajda had targeted him specifically in that tunnel. Was it possible she had smelled the redhead on him? Was that why he was a threat? Had she attacked out of jealousy, of all things?

“Earth to LaLaurie.”

He blinked. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Just answer one question. All this stuff you’ve been spouting about angels and drudges and sycophants-it didn’t come from just books, did it?”

He looked at her. Realized he had involuntarily started rubbing the scar on his left wrist, as if he’d known what she was about to ask.

“No,” he said.

She set her phone and the iPad aside, giving him her full attention now. “Look. You don’t have to tell me about this if you don’t want to. I haven’t exactly been the most receptive human being on the planet.” She gestured to the bottle. “But it looks to me like you’re on the train to oblivion, and by all rights, I should be in the seat right next to you. Call me selfish, but I’d rather that didn’t happen.”

“Does it really matter?”

“It does to me,” she said. “I watched my father nearly drink himself to death right before he put a bullet in his head. And I’d just as soon not see that happen again.”

Batty didn’t often do this without permission, but she’d opened a small window and he took a moment to peek inside her mind. There was a lot of childhood anguish in there, and he knew she usually kept that window sealed tight.

“I’m not going to burden you with any details,” he told her. “We’ll save that for another day. Let’s just say that most of what I know about this subject came my way because of two things: my curse and my stupidity.”

“I’m gonna need a little more than that.”

“The curse I was born with,” he said. “This thing my mother called The Vision . . .” He raised his hands now, showing her his wrists. “And my stupidity.”

“I assume you did that after your wife was killed?”

“After what I’d seen in our bedroom I thought I knew exactly where she was headed, and I was foolish enough to think I could go after her. And when I cut my wrists, I was swept away to a place I wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

Truth be told, his memory of that journey had faded over the last two years, becoming little more than a vague horror in a corner of his mind, like the murky remnants of a nightmare. But he’d come away from the place with its culture and its history imprinted on his brain, like data etched onto a microchip.

And knowledge like that wasn’t easy to forget.

“I know I shouldn’t be surprised by this,” Callahan said, “but are you saying hell actually exists?”

“Hell, Lazaa, Tartarus, Kalichi-every religion has a name for it, and believe me, you don’t want to go there if you can help it. I only had a small taste of it, and that was more than enough. And I’m pretty sure I brought a little piece of it back with me.”

He could see that despite all she’d seen tonight, she was having trouble accepting this idea. But he had to give her credit for not dismissing it out of hand.

She was making progress.

“What do you mean ‘a piece of it’?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” he told her, “but I don’t always have the sunniest of dispositions.”

Callahan said nothing.

“I think part of the reason for that is what I’ve seen, but it’s also something inside me, as if a living piece of the place attached itself to my soul before I was revived. Like a parasite. For all I know, I’m only one kiss away from being a drudge myself.”

Which was why, he supposed, he still felt that attraction to the redhead.

“That’s ridiculous,” Callahan said.

“We went way past ridiculous a long time ago. And you can throw in absurd, ludicrous and laughable as well. Unfortunately, none of this is very funny.”

“So what’s your solution? Sit here and wallow in your misery? Or do you want to do something productive?”

“The two aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?”

“Come on, Professor, I need you to sober up. You’re not any good to me like this. What do you say we call down to room service and order a pot of that really disgusting coffee these Turks love so much?”

“You make it sound so inviting.”

“It’s better than no invitation at all, isn’t it?”

He thought about it and sighed. “All right. I give.”

“Good,” she said. “I have something I want to show you.”

The coffee was so thick and strong that Batty nearly gagged the moment it touched his tongue. He wasn’t close to being sober yet, but he knew he needed to snap out of this and pay attention to what Callahan was saying.

“I went through Ozan’s client list,” she told him. “He had over six hundred active accounts, and the auction house is doing brisk business. In the last two months alone, they’ve shipped seven hundred and twenty-seven packages, all over the world.”

“So the database is a bust. What about the iPad?”

“That’s what I want to show you.” She picked up Ozan’s iPad from the table and touched the home button, bringing the screen to life. “His e-mail app is connected to two different mailboxes. Work and personal, both attached to the same server, run by an Internet provider here in Istanbul.” She touched the screen and called up the browser. “But when I started exploring, I found a Web page in his cache. An anonymous mail service, running in the cloud.”

“The cloud?”

“Out there on the Internet. Like Google apps or Skytap, where everything is centralized.”

“So what does that mean?”

“In itself, not much. But when I found it, I had to ask myself, why would Ozan need a separate Webmail account, especially an anonymous one? Was he subscribing to porn sites and trying to cover his tracks? That doesn’t seem likely.”

Batty suddenly understood. “He was corresponding with the other guardians.”

Callahan nodded. “Not often, but when I hacked into his account, I found four separate recipients, all of whom were sent messages by Ozan the day before he died. He’d already dumped them into his trash folder, but he hadn’t bothered to empty it-a mistake amateurs always make. They assume that once a message is deleted, it’s deleted.”

“So who were the recipients?”

Callahan huffed. “I wish it were that easy. But they’re all anonymous Web accounts, too.”

“So it’s a dead end.”

“Not really. I managed to hack into the accounts, run an IP trace and found they’d last been accessed from four different Internet cafes. Sao Paulo, D.C., London and Chiang Mai, Thailand.”

“We already know the recipient in Sao Paulo.”

Another nod. “But Gabriela hadn’t accessed the account since before she went on her last tour, so she never got the message.”

“What is the message?”

“That’s where I ran into a little snag. It’s nothing but spam. ‘Viagra at Internet Prices,’ blah, blah, blah. The kind of stuff most people delete, which, of course, is the point. It’s actually pretty ingenious.”

She touched the iPad’s screen, then handed it to Batty, and sure enough, the message she’d retrieved was a long, solid paragraph of a poorly written advertising come-on. Get one of these in your inbox and you immediately hit the kill button. But he knew there was more to it than that.

“It isn’t spam,” he said. “It’s a hidden message.”

“Right. I started thinking about what you told me in Ozan’s library. About Trithemius-and this little puppy . . .” She patted the copy of Steganographia on the table beside her. “But if you look at the stuff on Ozan’s notepad, you can clearly see that he was about as good at steganography as he was at e-mail security. So he took the easy route and used a shortcut to code his messages.”

Batty glanced at the screen full of spam. “What kind of shortcut?”

“I checked his browser cache again and found a Web site that allows you to enter a phrase into a text box, then encodes it to look like this. I figure the guardians on the other end are using the same Web site to decipher it.”

“So much for ancient tradition. I assume you decoded it, too?”

She nodded and touched the screen again, showing him the result:

Someone watching. Stay alert.

Batty studied the message grimly. “He obviously wasn’t being paranoid. He was a sensitive, so he knew what was coming. Must’ve felt it.”

“And, unfortunately, Gabriela was so wrapped up in her tour she never bothered to read the warning.”

“I’m not sure how much difference it would’ve made. What about the D.C. and London accounts?”

“Both read and deleted,” Callahan said. She touched the screen again. “But that wasn’t the only spam Ozan sent. I found another exchange in his trash file-with the recipient from Thailand, dated a couple weeks earlier. I decoded it, but it’s still pretty cryptic.”

She showed him the results. First Ozan’s message:

Tell me about C Gigas, 7 pages.

Followed by the Thailand recipient’s reply:

Don’t make the same mistake the poet made.

You may lose more than your eyes.

Batty felt his heart accelerate.

“I tried Googling this C. Gigas guy,” Callahan said, “but all I got was a page on Pacific oysters. And I don’t think Ozan and his buddy were discussing seafood.”

“Or a person. They’re talking about the Codex Gigas.”

“Which is?”

“Another book.”

“What-are these people obsessed?”

“Apparently so,” Batty said. “But what surprises me is that it’s Ozan asking the question. He has one of the most extensive collections on the occult I’ve ever seen, so it seems to me he’d already know all about the Gigas.”

“That makes at least two of you. You mind filling me in?”

“It’s also called the Devil’s Bible,” Batty told her. “It was written in the thirteenth century, supposedly in one night. With the help of Satan.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s about the size of a small packing trunk, and at one time it was considered one of the wonders of the world. This thing has survived fire and the Thirty Years’ War. And right now it’s housed in a library in Sweden.” He looked at the e-mail again. “But like I said, Ozan would already know all that. His interest was in the seven missing pages.”

“The what?”

“There are seven pages missing from the Gigas. Nobody knows how or when they disappeared, but there’s been all kinds of speculation about what’s on them, from a message from Satan to the secrets of God and the universe. And that’s probably what Ozan was after.” He tapped the iPad screen. “But it’s the response that has me puzzled.”

“Why?”

“Because it mentions the poet. ‘Don’t make the same mistake the poet made. You may lose more than your eyes.’ I think we both know who he’s talking about.”

“John Milton.”

“Exactly. He went blind nearly a decade before he wrote Paradise Lost. But this reply is couched as a warning to Ozan-don’t make the same mistake-as if Milton did something to cause his blindness.”

“So let me get this straight,” Callahan said. “On one hand we have these seven missing pages, on the other hand we have two guardians searching for secret messages, and smack in the middle of it all we’ve got a blind fucking poet.”

“There’s obviously a connection there. We just need to figure out what it is.”

Callahan got to her feet, stretched. “Well, maybe we’ll get lucky when we talk to the monk.”

Batty looked at her. “Monk?”

“I cross-referenced those e-mails with Ozan’s client database,” she said. “I got about a hundred different hits for D.C. and London, but only one for Chiang Mai. Three months ago he sent a package to a Christian monastery there. To a monk called Brother Philip. I’ve already chartered a flight.”

“Then maybe he will have the answer. I guess it makes sense when you think about it.”

“Why?” Callahan asked.

“The Devil’s Bible was written by a Benedictine monk.”