The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 78

2001, New York

Maddy leaned against the crumbling brick wall of their transplanted archway, watching the others standing over on the grass-tufted hummocks of silt along the East River.

‘Madelaine?’

She turned round to see Becks standing in the opening beneath the fully raised shutter.

‘You all done?’

Becks nodded an affirmative.

‘If I lock your hard-drive partition again, what you know — what you’ve just read, it’s all gonna be safe in there, right?’

‘That is correct.’

Maddy nodded thoughtfully. No one else would know what secret message was hidden in the Grail, not even Becks herself.

She’d already made her mind up on the matter: she was going to unlock Becks’s partition with Foster present; they’d both hear what she had to say. And then together figure out what it meant, what they’d have to do about it, if anything.

‘Ready to lock that information away?’

‘Affirmative.’

She uttered the three words quietly. Becks blinked several times then cocked her head. Her voice immediately returned to its softer, more feminine tone. ‘I register thirty-seven minutes of absent data …’

Maddy raised her hand. ‘It’s OK, I’ve been talking with your alter ego.’

Becks consulted something inside her mind. ‘My code-word-locked partition?’

‘Yup.’ Maddy looked at the others. ‘You decoded the Holy Grail successfully. It’s now safely locked away in your head.’ Maddy laughed. ‘Not even you can get in there.’

Becks nodded approvingly. ‘A sensible precaution, Maddy.’

She was about to say a thank-you when she heard Sal’s voice calling out. She could just make out her small outline in the twilight, turning away from the river towards her.

‘What’s up?’ she called out.

She replied something but a sudden freshening breeze carried it away; ripples of cats’ paws danced across the mirror-smooth water towards them as a fresh breeze stirred the millpond calm.

Something’s coming our way.

Maddy looked at the sky and saw it: what looked like a rolling stormfront rushing towards them from out of the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Hurry!’ she shouted at Sal. Sal in turn beckoned the other two men to hasten after her up the shingle towards their jagged brick bunker perched among the sandy dunes.

Their feet clattered off soft sand on to the broken fragments of pavement and alleyway that had transported to this reality along with the archway, just as the black stormcloud rolled over Manhattan Island.

‘Tis the Lord’s coming,’ gasped Cabot sombrely.

‘No,’ said Sal. ‘Just a time wave.’

Among the churning black clouds crossing the river towards them, Maddy thought she saw a dozen different city skylines flicker over Manhattan: one moment, towering pointed church steeples topped with cruciforms that reached for the sky, then the next they formed into the rounded bulge of mosques and onion-shaped minarets topped with crescents.

‘My God … Do you see that?’ said Adam, his voice competing with a growing thundering boom.

Wind danced around them, stinging their cheeks with whipped-up sand as they stood in the opening to the archway watching the world in flux. And then, the wall of undulating reality was upon them.

A moment of pitch-black as the tidal wave swept over. And then it was gone.

The archway was entirely dark and lifeless, then a moment later a light winked on inside and they heard the soft chug of the generator starting up in the back room.

Outside, it was a calm evening once more; the gentle lapping of low tide punctuated by the lonely plaintive call of a solitary seagull.

Either side of her, Maddy heard both Adam and Cabot gasping. Cabot the worst of the two. ‘God help me,’ he gasped, ‘did I just witness the Devil’s work?’

‘A reality shift,’ said Becks. ‘Events in the past have changed the present.’

Maddy looked at the island of Manhattan. The lights of the fishing boats had gone. The lights of the town beyond, gone. Instead she could only make out a thick dark treeline descending down to the water’s edge. ‘There’s nothing there now!’

‘Just woods,’ said Sal.

Maddy bit her lip. ‘Becks?’

‘Yes?’

‘What on earth was going on when you left the twelfth century?’

‘King Richard was preparing to take the town of Nottingham from his brother.’

‘Oh great!’ snapped Maddy. ‘Is that, like, ourfault?’

‘No,’ said Adam, ‘that actually happened.’

‘Well, something’s still wrong back then!’

‘The holy scroll thing?’ Sal pointed towards the table. ‘Maybe we hung on to it too long?’

‘Yes,’ Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re probably right. We should get it back, ASAP.’

‘But … is that right?’ said Adam. ‘Does Richard get his hands on the Holy Grail, you know, in correct history?’

Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t know! But it sure shouldn’t be here in the twenty-first century.’

‘It goes missing. It gets lost!’ Adam stepped back towards the table. ‘That’s how this becomes the stuff of myth and legends. That’s why people ended up thinking it was the cup of Christ! It gets lost, right?’

‘Maybe we should just, you know, rip it up?’ offered Sal.

They all stared in a prolonged silence at the unrolled parchment beneath the glare of the light above it.

‘King Richard would kill his brother,’ said Cabot finally. ‘If he does not get what he’s come for.’ The old man shook his head. ‘His anger … he would kill everyone in Nottingham.’

‘That doesn’t happen,’ said Adam. ‘Not in proper history. The siege of Nottingham lasts just a few days, John surrenders and Richard forgives him.’

Cabot looked at him. ‘Ye are certain?’

‘Oh yeah. John’s forgiven. In fact he gets to be king when Richard dies several years later.’

‘Then Richard must get what he wanted,’ said Maddy. ‘The Grail. Right? He gets it, he’s a happy boy. John is forgiven.’

‘But …’ Sal glanced at the table. ‘But isn’t there some big secret in there? Some secret that makes him go and do another one of them crusades which — ’

‘Which results in England’s complete financial ruin,’ cut in Adam, ‘and the invasion of the French king, Philip II.’

Maddy bit her lip with frustration. What do we do? Give it to him? Or not?

Another long silence, all eyes on her, waiting for her to make the call.

‘No.’ It was Becks who spoke finally. ‘No,’ she said again.

‘No — what?’ said Maddy impatiently.

‘King Richard will find nothing in the Grail.’

Adam suddenly grinned. ‘She’s right! Maybe it’s a — maybe it turns out to be a … a complete disappointment for him. Maybe what he ends up with is a useless scroll that he can’t decode because …’

‘Because the real grille was always the Treyarch Confession?’ said Maddy.

Adam nodded. ‘And perhaps what he has, that grille guarded by the knights in Acre, that was just a red herring. A fake.’

Maddy gave it a moment’s thought. ‘Yes! Why would there be another key? The one Richard has is no good!’

‘We should return it immediately,’ said Becks. ‘Reality is fluctuating.’

Sal nodded. ‘That last wave was really weird … like it couldn’t decide which way it wanted to go.’

‘Perchance the battle for Nottingham has begun?’ said Cabot. ‘And ’tis that the outcome of this battle hangs in the balance?’

Maddy wasn’t sure if this last time wave actually meant that. In fact she wasn’t sure what it meant, other than history was still somehow derailed. But then again … maybe the old monk was right. After all, the correct-history version of the siege of Nottingham hadn’t featured a lethal killing machine like Bob back there fighting on the side of John.

‘OK. My mind’s made up,’ she said. ‘Becks and you too, Mr Cabot — you’re taking the Grail back and you’ve got to get it to John to give to King Richard, somehow. Make him a happy boy — happy enough to let his brother live.’

She bit her lip.

Oh crud, is this the right call?