The Paradise Prophecy

37

That old woman with the really long neck is staring at me,” Callahan said.

They had been hiking for what seemed like hours, following the winding trail down the mountain past the rice fields and the tribal villages, both of them on edge, but exhausted after the debacle at the temple.

And that’s exactly what it had been. A debacle.

What else could you call it?

Two good men were dead, the temple in ruins, a helicopter destroyed, and Batty and Callahan were lucky to have gotten out of there with their souls still intact.

One of the only blessings to come of it, Batty thought, was the dispatching of Belial-at least in her current human form. But he knew they hadn’t seen the last of her.

This isn’t over, my darling.

Belial might not return in the form of knock-’em-dead redhead, but she’d be back, stronger than ever. You could count on it. It would take a lot more than a couple of clueless mortals to destroy her, and all he could think to do was to keep moving forward in hopes they’d get lucky again the next time.

At least they’d come away from the debacle with a bit of knowledge. Thanks to Brother Philip, they now knew this went well beyond a few calculated attacks against the guardians. There was a plan in motion and it was an ugly one. A plan that would reach its conclusion during the coming eclipse.

The fourth moon.

Batty knew about lunar tetrads, knew they were rare, but he’d never considered that there was a power in them that would help Belial and her friends open the gates of hell. And he knew in his gut that this was exactly what they were planning. After years of trying, they had finally harnessed enough corrupted souls to overwhelm all the good in the world and deliver to them the paradise they sought.

The paradise they had lost.

But based on what Brother Philip had said, he could only conclude that Saint Michael had a plan of his own. A plan that involved the sacred traveler, whoever that might be.

A wandering soul. The Telum.

The word itself was Latin for weapon-which was why he had asked Philip about it-but how could a person be a weapon?

And what about the key the guardians were protecting? Was its secret somehow hidden in this manuscript he had tucked under his arm?

Was that why Gabriela and Ozan had worked so hard to decipher it?

Why Belial had wanted it?

“She’s really giving me the evil eye,” Callahan said. “Should I be worried?”

Pulling himself out of his thoughts, Batty looked off to their left where an old tribal woman with gold neck rings was watching them work their way down the trail.

“I doubt Belial would be able to find a new skin quite that fast. Besides, she’d do a lot more than stare.”

“You can understand why I’m a little jumpy,” Callahan said. “And I don’t like the way she’s looking at me.”

“Relax. She’s a Kayan villager. She doesn’t mean you any harm. In fact, if you asked, she’d probably take you into her home and feed you.”

“Just as long as she doesn’t try feed on me,” Callahan said. “I’ve had enough excitement for one day. And what’s with the neck rings?”

Batty threw her a glance, surprised that in all of her travels, Callahan hadn’t encountered such a sight before.

“The Kayan consider an elongated neck a sign of beauty,” he told her. “The rings force the collarbone and ribs to compress and make the neck look longer than it really is.”

“You truly are a font of information, aren’t you? My own personal Internet.” She looked at the Kayan woman again. “How can they do that to themselves?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you wearing five-inch heels when we went to that auction?”

Callahan conceded the point with a shrug. “Speaking of which, my feet are killing me. Along with every other part of my body. Let me check to see if I’ve got a signal now. Maybe we can get somebody to pick us up.”

She stopped and pulled her cell phone out of a pocket, checking the screen and not happy with what she saw.

“Shit. You’d think if the missionaries can build a temple up here, someone could erect a cell tower.”

Batty shook his head. “I sometimes wonder how the world survived before those things were invented.”

“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.

“I need a face-to-face,” she said. “And I’m bringing the asset with me.”

“Impossible. Follow procedure and upload your report.”

“We have to speak to whoever originated this assignment. Someone upstairs.”

“That can’t be done. Even asking is a breach of protocol.”

“Then breach it,” she said. “I guarantee he’ll want to hear from me. It’s about the Telum.”

“The Telum?”

“I don’t have time to explain. If you can’t handle my request, pass me along to someone who can.”

There was hesitation on the line.

“This is highest priority,” she insisted. “It doesn’t get any higher than this.”

A long pause, then the voice said, “Wait for our call.”

The line clicked and Callahan lowered the phone, looking over at LaLaurie, who was resting at the side of the trail. They made eye contact, his gaze hopeful, but she shook her head and gestured to the phone, indicating she was waiting for an answer.

She knew her handler was passing the message along, and a flurry of calls would follow, sending it up the chain of command until someone who carried enough weight could figure out what to do with it.

Fifteen minutes later, her phone rang and she put it to her ear. “Your request has been denied,” the voice said.

“What? Did you tell them-”

“Continue with the investigation, Agent Callahan, and report back to us.”

Then the line clicked.