The Last Judgement Read online

  The Last Judgement

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Acknowledgements

  Next in Series

  Copyright

  To Olivia, Lincoln and Edan. Nephews new and nieces old. Your journey is only just beginning

  Chapter 1

  James Titus enjoyed feeling the cool refreshing breeze against his neck one final time before closing his study window and sitting down at the grand oak work table. His soft leather slippers squeaked against the wooden floorboards as he reached across the green fabric-covered surface to retrieve a sealed brown Jiffy bag from the table’s far edge. He held the package tightly to his chest and lovingly embraced it as one might do a lover or a child, while a single tear rolled down his leathery cheek.

  ‘How many years has it been?’ he asked himself. ‘Thirty? Forty?’

  Titus revelled in this moment and his mind wandered back through the decades of searching that had led up to this remarkable day. How lucky, fortuitous – no, how honoured he was to be gifted with such an item, and he yearned to know of the sights it must have witnessed since its creation. As to these he could only imagine, but for it to end up in his hands after such a long journey was a miracle in itself, and he took tremendous comfort in that knowledge. It still numbed his mind with a sense of awe to think that something so small and seemingly insignificant was the answer to all the questions that he and his kind had chased for so many years. Yet here it was, all neatly wrapped up and safely in his arms.

  Titus caressed the brown package and lovingly ran his index finger along its corners as he contemplated the possibilities of the new world to come. For any other person on the planet, what was to follow and what he was soon to experience would be unfathomable – that is, if one did not know the truth.

  ‘It’s time, James,’ a voice whispered, and Titus glanced across to see a shadowy figure standing in the study’s open doorway.

  The flickering log fire set far back into the stone hearth was the only source of light, but even though he could not make out any features, he knew who it was. ‘I am ready,’ he replied calmly, and placed the package back down on the desk before rising slowly to his feet and making his way over to the fireplace. He then reached down and grasped the handle of a brass poker which nestled between the burning logs, and lifted its bright red tip up towards himself, illuminating his face in an orange glow.

  He didn’t feel any fear about what would come next, yet nervousness was getting the better of him and his skin began to tingle and his throat tightened uncomfortably.

  ‘Will it hurt?’ Titus asked, still without any trace of fear in his voice as the figure glided past him and scooped up the brown paper bag from the table.

  ‘Yes,’ the figure whispered, now moving to join Titus at the fireplace. ‘But pain has its own rewards, does it not?’

  Titus managed a slight nod of his head, and his upper body began to tremble as the mysterious figure plucked the poker from his now sweating hands and then held the red tip of it between them.

  ‘Do not fear what I bring you,’ the figure rasped, and he moved the blazing-hot implement to within centimetres of Titus’s eyes. ‘I now offer you what you have searched for all these long years, and all I ask for in return is your obedience.’

  ‘I understand, and I will serve you,’ Titus managed, regaining some of his faltering courage as he clenched his fists.

  ‘Good,’ the figure hissed, glancing down at Titus’s hands. ‘Now conserve your energy…you’ll need it.’

  Chapter 2

  ‘Have you ever heard of the Codex Gigas?’ the man asked, as he scratched his brow with trembling fingers which hinted at a nervousness not apparent in his voice. ‘No, don’t answer that,’ he then said with a wave of his finger. ‘The least I can do is answer it myself, seeing how gracious you have been in allowing me an audience. The Codex is a book, written about eight hundred years ago by a Benedictine monk in a monastery located in what is now the Czech Republic. As legend tells it, the monk, after breaking his monastic vows, was sentenced to be sealed up within the monastery walls and left to die. In a desperate last-minute bid to redeem himself, and thus save his own skin, the young monk vowed to compose a book in just one day that would contain the entire history of humanity and thus glorify his monastery until the end of time.’

  There he paused for a moment, and his eyes began to bulge as if comprehending the true hopelessness of such an impossible task.

  ‘With no time to spare, the monk set about the said task with all the enthusiasm and energy he possessed. But, as midnight approached, he began to accept the inescapable conclusion that, no matter how much he wished it, this incredible feat of extreme speed writing would never achieve fruition. With the consequences of failure at the forefront of his mind, and with the deadline approaching, the young monk then began to pray. But this was not a prayer to his Lord and Saviour, but rather to an angel. A fallen angel who could be relied upon to offer service to the truly desperate…for a price. That angel was Lucifer, and the price was to be the monk’s soul. For it is said that the soul of any human being is a sweet meal for the Devil, but the soul of a devout man is the sweetest of them all. With such a prize on offer, the Dark Lord spared no time in revealing himself and completing the book before the stroke of midnight. With his life now assured, the monk added a picture of the Devil therein, as a show of gratitude, and it is this image that is believed by some to be the only true representation of Satan himself.’

  The shadowy man pushed back into his chair and continued to gaze at his audience through wide, unblinking, hazel-coloured eyes. ‘It’s quite a story…if you choose to believe it.’

  Professor Alex Harker sat motionless on a wooden lecture chair directly opposite and offered a dry smile. ‘Not sure I’m in a position to choose anything at the moment,’ he said, glancing down at the black muzzle of a 12-gauge sawn-off shotgun being pointed directly at him. ‘Wouldn’t you agree?’

  Just twenty minutes earlier, Harker had been wrapping up his lecture to a group of Cambridge graduates about the benefits of using a professional trowel compared to unearthing finds with cheap, non-branded ones. It was a short, one-off class concerning archaeological equipment, and its boring and mundane content meant that all the other professors involved would do anything to avoid it. In fact, the mind-numbing lecture was so reviled by staff that an annual lottery had been set up and, unfortunately for Harker, this year he had drawn the wrong ticket.

  An hour and a half later, and aware of numerous heavy eyelids in the
front row, Harker had wrapped up with a bad joke that not a soul had laughed at and, to the deafening sound of silence, he’d hastily made a speedy retreat towards the exit. He had almost reached it, too, before being cornered by someone he initially assumed to be an older mature student seeking further information on the dull subject discussed – and this was when all things educational had come to an abrupt halt. Without warning, the man had pulled out a sawn-off shotgun from underneath his long dark-brown overcoat and, as the now wide-eyed and alert students energetically ran screaming from the hall, the maniac had gestured to Harker, with a flick of his gun barrel, to take a nearby seat.

  The first few minutes had been a calm, although nerve-racking, interrogation by the armed man to confirm his hostage was indeed the same Harker who had been mentioned in all the newspapers during a series of natural disasters which occurred some six months earlier.

  At the time Harker had kept his mouth firmly shut, as he’d promised, and remarkably the media had finally settled on the idea of global warming and a solar flash that had knocked many of the globe’s satellites offline. He had found the solar story the most persuasive because, although it was complete rubbish, it did go a long way to explaining many of the phenomena experienced. In fact there was only one thing that truly irked Harker, but it was a big one: the existence of HAARP, and its ability to control weather, had been shrouded in secrecy by various governments and specifically their intelligence agencies. Despite some interest by the press the story had eventually disappeared and, along with it, mention of the technology that was HAARP. With a number of G8 governments involved in the cover-up, it was doubtful that anything would be revealed to the public anytime soon, and so Harker had learnt to accept that.

  All that aside, the past six months had proved an adventure in itself. Just a few weeks after the funeral of Sebastian Brulet, Harker had been offered a position on the Board of Scrutiny at Cambridge University which oversaw governance of the famous institution, and to top it off he had begun to receive a number of invitations to participate in radio and TV shows. He wasn’t yet famous but his face had appeared enough in the media that some people did recognize him and stop him in the street, even if it was only with a vague awareness of who he was exactly. ‘Hey, I know you. Aren’t you the guy that did that thing…you know, a few months back, at that place?’

  The best thing to come out of it all had been in the form of Dr Chloe Stanton. In the months following their discovery of HAARP, they had really hit it off, to the point that she was moving in with him. Officially later that same week, although pretty much everything she owned had already been dumped unceremoniously in assorted heaps throughout Harker’s house. He could not have felt happier about it, even if he was somewhat perplexed that a person of her drive and organizational skills could also turn out to be so bloody messy. Of course all that was of secondary importance as, with ever increasing anxiety, he now focused on the gunman in front of him and his now trembling trigger finger.

  ‘Sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.’

  ‘My name is not important,’ the gunman replied with a rasp, ‘but for the sake of this conversation you can call me Lucas.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Lucas,’ Harker replied as calmly as is possible with a shotgun pointed directly at one’s groin. ‘And, yes, I do know something about the Codex Gigas. It’s a well-known work with a fairly chequered history.’

  ‘Go on,’ the gunman urged, obviously eager to know how much Harker actually knew on the subject.

  ‘Well, it’s said that the book always brings bad luck to those who get near to it. For example, after being looted as booty by the Swedish army at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it was housed in Stockholm’s royal library. It stayed there for forty-odd years until the building burned down. The book itself was saved by being thrown out of a window by someone unknown, but it then landed on a passer-by who was badly injured. With respect, Lucas, it’s not exactly the equivalent of the Hope Diamond.’

  The barrel of Lucas’s shotgun began to quiver as he gripped it even tighter, while his nostrils flared a little.

  ‘But yes, you’re right,’ Harker backtracked respectfully, sensing his captor’s annoyance at his apparently flippant answer, ‘misfortune does appear to follow it.’

  Lucas seemed appeased by this and the wavering barrel began to settle. ‘Anything else?’ he demanded flatly.

  Harker immediately grasped this olive branch and began to rack his mind for any other titbit of information he could offer. ‘Well, there was some argument over it but I think that the book originally consisted of three hundred and thirteen pages, whereas now there are only three hundred and ten. No one knows how or when the rest went missing, though.’

  Lucas slowly nodded and a knowing smile formed across his dry, cracked lips. ‘In truth there was originally three hundred and fourteen pages, although not many know that important little morsel of truth,’ he declared. ‘Four missing pages that, as legend tells, contained secrets divulged by the Devil himself.’

  Harker attempted, and managed, to display the most serious and agreeable expression possible. Personally he had never heard this part of the story, and to his mind the missing pages had most likely held private information regarding the Benedictine monastery’s way of life, which they would not have wanted ordinary folk outside its walls to know. Maybe the monks were not as pious as they wished people to believe, or perhaps they threw drinking parties on Friday nights where they all got totally hammered. Either way it had always seemed to him a reasonable explanation…but, as a rule of thumb, when a man is pointing the barrel of a shotgun at your groin, and is of a clearly nervous disposition, it’s best to just agree with them and go with the flow, regardless.

  ‘I had heard that, yes…but the Codex is not something I’ve ever studied in detail, although I do have some acquaintances who have.’ He said this while trying to look as nonchalant as possible. ‘I would be happy to introduce you to them.’

  Harker’s last remark came off as being a bit sarcastic and he immediately regretted it, but Lucas, thankfully, didn’t seem to take offence.

  ‘I would have liked that but’ – Lucas nodded over Harker’s shoulder towards the two armed policemen in blue Kevlar breastplates and holding Glock handguns aimed in his direction – ‘I don’t think it’s really an option now, is it?’

  The armed response team had arrived within minutes of the hostage situation beginning, thanks to the stream of screaming students running from the building and highlighting the one and only positive aspect of a country being on high terrorist alert – a lightning-fast response. At first they were highly, and understandably, aggressive towards Lucas, until Harker had negotiated for them all to hear Lucas out, for fear of getting himself caught in a firefight. The policemen had shown remarkable calm and had dutifully pulled back towards the doorway, where the pair of them had taken up position, allowing the two men’s conversation to continue.

  ‘No,’ said Lucas with a shake of his head, ‘it’s you who needs to hear this.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘Because I know who you are, Professor Harker,’ Lucas continued cryptically. ‘Who you really are, and I know how you can find things.’

  This remark was clearly designed to make Harker feel uncomfortable, and it did the job. A torrent of thoughts began to swirl around within Harker’s mind. Did this person know about his affiliation with the Knights Templar, and the benefits it brought? Was it because Harker had gained a reputation for finding lost treasures, again with the help of the Templars? There was no way to be sure and, in any event, Harker certainly was not about to reveal anything.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I can assure you that with me what you see is what you get.’

  The mysterious Lucas rolled his head from left to right in an unsettlingly playful manner. ‘We both know that’s not true, Professor Harker. However, now I want you to use your connections and track down those missing seven pages for me.’


  Harker already had his mouth open to explain that it would be like searching for a needle in a haystack when Lucas raised his free hand towards his own mouth and extended a finger to his lips. ‘This isn’t up for discussion. You will find those pages and, when the time comes, one of my kind will find you and relieve you of the burden of them.’ He then leant forward and spoke in little more than a whisper. ‘That is, if you ever want to see your girlfriend again…at least in one piece.’

  The insidious nature of the threat took Harker aback for a moment, and he pulled away from the now grinning Lucas and shook his head in confusion. ‘What?’

  ‘Your girlfriend,’ Lucas repeated in a hushed tone so as not to draw unwanted attention from the policemen still poised by the doorway, ‘Dr Chloe Stanton. She’s quite lovely, by the way.’

  Harker did all he could to quell the anger now swelling in his chest, and he felt his jaw tighten painfully.

  ‘Now, now,’ Lucas hissed. ‘She’s safe and sound…for now. Consider her a down payment for your help in this matter.’

  Harker was already struggling against the urge to hurl himself towards his captor when the sound of the armed police behind him shifting position brought renewed clarity to his thoughts. ‘Where is she?’ he murmured through gritted teeth.

  ‘Like I said, she’s fine, and should you help me in this matter, then your reunion is assured.’

  An uncomfortable calm settled between the two men, and Lucas now appeared to take this as confirmation of Harker’s willingness to help.

  ‘Hand me your phone, and be subtle about it,’ Lucas demanded, glancing over at the two policemen. ‘I don’t want to attract any undue attention.’

  Attract any undue attention! What could be more attention-grabbing than taking someone hostage at gunpoint? If the current situation had not been so serious, Harker would have laughed out loud, but instead he furtively pulled out his phone and passed it over. Lucas began to tap at the keypad with one hand as the other held tightly to the shotgun.

  ‘Go to this address,’ he ordered as he discreetly passed it back to Harker. ‘You’ll find everything necessary to get you started.’