The Armageddon Conspiracy by Mike Hockney Read Free Book Online

dared believe
it.’
    ‘ You still haven’t said
who you are.’ Lucy wasn’t certain she was having this conversation. Dr Levis, her psychiatrist, told her she’d been delusional on a few
occasions. The delusions were only part of it. Severe trauma can
lead to Dissociative Identity Disorder, Levis said. The new name
for old-fashioned Multiple Personality Syndrome. Voices in the
head; several of them. But that was in the past, wasn’t it? Getting
better now, Levis said, much better.
    ‘ I’m from the Vatican,’
the man stated. ‘My name is Cardinal Joseph Sinclair. I’m the
Prefect of the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei.’
    Lucy concentrated hard. Was this a new voice in her head, or the genuine voice of a real
person? All the time, she had to check for clues to separate the
real from the imagined. In the ancient world, she wouldn’t have had
a problem. ‘Reality’ was much more fluid then. People knew there
was an afterlife because they’d seen it. Dreams – how wondrous they must have
seemed to those who had no idea what they were. Another world,
where the dead were alive again. The ancients believed the dream
world was the real world, that when we went to sleep we were afforded glimpses of
the world we would inhabit when our sleep became permanent. When
her parents died, Lucy lost the ability to know where the dream
ended and reality began.
    ‘ Sorry, I should have
said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,’ the cardinal
said. ‘It’s my job to protect the teachings of the Roman Catholic
Church from those who seek to subvert them.’
    Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith ? A fragment of Lucy’s
old life came back to her. At Oxford University, she was an expert
in non-standard belief systems and she was well aware of whom the
unorthodox – the heretics – feared the most.
    ‘ Why don’t you say who
you really are?’ She felt she was talking to the past, to all the
normal things she’d lost. Maybe she had conjured this urbane man as
a substitute for her father. She longed to be hugged by her dad
again. It seemed impossible that he would never hold her anymore,
nor ask how she was feeling, never make clumsy inquiries about her
love life or how her career was going.
    ‘ So, you’ve heard of
us,’ the man said. There was something different about his voice. A
sudden harshness.
    Lucy felt a shiver running through her. ‘When did you people stop calling yourselves the Inquisition?’ she
asked.
     
    8
     
    V ernon couldn’t
concentrate. In a world that might be dying, his personal ghost had
resurfaced. Lucy Galahan was the love of his life, the one who for
three years treated him to every bizarre theory about the great
holy relics – real and fabled – that littered human history. A
lecturer in Comparative Mythology and Esoteric Studies at Oxford
University, she was dazzlingly clever. It helped that she had great
looks too, and an athletic body honed by her obsession with scuba
diving. Put it all together and she was Vernon’s ideal woman…until
she dumped him.
    ‘ This is a file found
in the possession of one of the prisoners,’ Gresnick said, sliding
a folder to Vernon. ‘It’s a surveillance log. It’s all there: a
detailed diary of Lucy Galahan’s movements in the last week, her
daily schedule, who are carers are, long-lens photographs,
background reports and so on.’
    Vernon, shifting uneasily in his chair,
glanced at one of the pictures: a close-up of Lucy in a wheelchair
in a garden, accompanied by a nun. It shocked him to see the face
that had tormented him for so long. Even worse was to see Lucy so
helpless. Often enough, he’d tried to pretend she meant nothing to
him, but that just made things worse. Her raven hair entangled his
thoughts. He’d spent so much time running his fingers through it,
playing with it and smelling it. Her eyes did the most damage,
though. They were big and tender, almost childlike. The shade of
blue was remarkable, practically