Florence broke off from her vigil. “What’s real?”
Insects crawled beneath Jake’s skin and the room felt as if it were rotating; he fought to control his bladder. Again he heard the incantation from his dream, the beat of the drum. He tried to blink himself awake, like a patient told he has advanced cancer. But this was reality.
“The Book of Thunder,” he managed. “It works.”
Dark shadows had formed under Florence’s cheeks. “Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s the only explanation,” he said. “There are thousands of churches in Ethiopia, and we stumble on the very one where Eusebius hid the inscription? No. You knew it was here.”
“A lucky guess.” She tried to laugh.
“I saw you last night, Florence. Storm watching again. I saw the lightning – the bolt hit this exact spot, like …” he struggled for an analogy. “Like a finger, pointing the way.”
“Coincidence.”
“No, no, no!” Jake was angry now. “It’s too much.”
He couldn’t believe it. But he couldn’t not believe it. Not on top of the death of Professor Britton, struck down by lightning. That, and the ebb and flow of Roman history: how it dovetailed with thunder from beginning to end. He thought of all those ‘leaps of intuition’ Florence had made. Her chanting in Istanbul and the instantaneous crack of thunder over the mainland. She had pulled him into an alcove. I suddenly felt so paranoid. Seconds later they walked into a trap. Florence had sensed what was coming, even if her prescience was fuzzy at the time.
Under that same turbulent sky she had pulled them into the Topkapi – on the one evening its doors stood open for cleaning.
And after the lightning in Axum she had insisted they flee from the chapel in the opposite direction from MI6. She knew there was trouble waiting for them: the skies had told her so.
Something else occurred to him. “You once said the Etruscans believed lightning from the north-east was a good omen,” she said. “And lightning from the north-west a bad one.”
Reluctantly she nodded. The room seemed to darken as Jake pictured the lightning that killed Britton. That CCTV image left no doubt: the bolt had come from the north-west. Jake made another geographical calculation. The thunder in Istanbul was over the European mainland – north-west again, auguring ill. And the portent that bought them here had pointed from the north-east.
It was as if the book wanted to be found.
Still the revelations came. “Your eyes,” he whispered. “Every time you read a sign there were more burst blood vessels in your eyes. Every discovery we made, you were increasing your power.”
Florence didn’t deny it. In one epiphany each little strangeness of the last few weeks had resolved itself. And all he had learned about existence and the rules that govern nature was blown away – like Einstein standing over the rubble of a clockwork universe.
Pure subordination.
A dark religion.
The world had become creepy. Every object looked different: the rugs, the beams, the tapestries. Brought to this place by causation and chance? Or by the decisions of men? The runic letters seemed to sneer at the notion. For if actions could be read in the clouds before they happened, what of free will?