The spymaster’s forehead glistened with perspiration and he blew a chestnut-brown forelock from his glasses: the executive letting loose on the squash court.
“My dear boy, you’ve really given me the run-around these last few weeks,” said Waits. “Not bad for an amateur, I must admit.”
Jake sank to the floor. “Why are you doing this, Charlie?” he panted, leaning on his thighs. “How many will you kill to get at it? Is this being a patriot? Is this the British way?”
“Why?” Waits cried to Davis. “He asks us, why?”
One of Waits’s hands was in the pocket of his chinos and with the other he raised his blade until the tip brushed the hollow of Jake’s throat.
“Before I put out your life,” he said – Davis looked on, transfixed at the prospect of bloodletting – “let me give you a lesson in geopolitics. Nations never stand still. They rise or they fall. It is an inalienable fact of history. Now, what do you think is happening in the world today? What is the broad historical theme of the age we live in?”
Jake didn’t reply.
“I submit that it is this,” said Waits. “The end of the ascendancy of the West. The transfer of power to the East. Oh, it’s a scary time to be a westerner. We face the very real prospect that the world will be run by the Orient in three decades’ time. Of course, that may turn out for the good. But it may not. The Chinese are a cruel race, as anyone familiar with the East will tell you. And I rather fancy that once in the driving seat our Oriental cousins will not be as magnanimous with wealth and debt as the West has been. It’s a great unknown, Jake, and a world run by the Orient is not a world I want my daughters to grow up in. Thus, we must defend our position.” He smiled, revealing pointed incisors. “And sometimes that means defending ourselves very aggressively.”
“By murdering everyone in our way?” said Jake. “That doesn’t sound much like the West I know.”
“Oh, you are a silly sausage,” said Waits. “Do you think the West is an omelette made without breaking the occasional egg? Do you think Rome was built without brute force and repression?” He laughed. “Ask Carthage about that one, ask Corinth! Ask any of the other cities our predecessors razed to the ground so Western society might triumph over the barbarous East.”
Waits was too engrossed in his theme to notice the slight figure who had emerged onto the roof, stealing toward the discarded papyri. And Davis only had eyes for the blade which hovered at Jake’s windpipe.
“Rome,” Waits said again, rolling the R with great reverence. “Western Civilization mark one, if you will. Ask yourself this, Jake. What happened when Constantine brought about the empire’s downfall. Was it for the good? Or for the bad?”
Jake bowed his head.
“I think we both know the answer,” said Waits. “Why, it was bad, Jake, very bad indeed, a scarcely imaginable cataclysm. It ushered in nothing less than a new Dark Age. Great works of science and literature were lost for all time. We find skeletons an inch shorter due to malnutrition. Trade routes that had lasted two thousand years fell out of use. In some places money was abandoned for barter and exchange. And art? It regressed from naturalism to distended heads and pointy feet.” Waits shook his head. “Why, we even forgot the world was round.”
He gestured to the skyline of London with a sweep of blade. “Look around you. The West, mark two. This is what’s at stake, boy. We are Rome. China is the rising Persian Empire. Russia awakes again, and the Arab Spring has left a billion Muslims in a state of ferment. And lots of them are spoiling for a fight with us. Goths and Vandals, barbarians at the gates. Don’t you see it? History doesn’t repeat itself, as Mark Twain put it. But it does rhyme.”
Unwavering fanaticism was in Waits’s eyes. “This is a war of civilizations, Wolsey, it always has been. Europe’s a busted flush. So we have a choice. Do we play Augustus? Do we breathe another five hundred years into our civilization? Or do we repeat the mistake of Constantine and condemn ourselves to oblivion? Now consider what would happen if the power to predict the future fell into the hands of our enemies. I confess that I tremble at the prospect.”
When the journalist spoke it was with the calmness of someone who knows he is about to die and is resolved to say his piece.
“Britain’s enemies have had this power before, Charlie,” he began. “Or have you forgotten how this science came to your attention in the first place? Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Heydrich – they are your predecessors. And mark my words, corpse after broken corpse, you people have got a long way to go to catch up with the Nazis. So consider instead the blood on the hands of the last men to wield this power as I put your question back to you. Is it for the good? Or for the bad?”
Waits had no answer and it enraged him. “You are a political child,” he spat. “Now, enough of this nonsense.”
He drew back the sword, ready for the capital stroke.
A new voice interrupted him, a female voice. “Hello, chuck.”
Waits wheeled around to see Florence Chung. The priestess had been inside the armoury when the alarm sounded, but rather than rushing for the exit she had hidden. Now the Disciplina Etrusca was clasped before her like an instruction manual and her cheeks were flushed with triumph.
Waits raised his blade. “You.”
Florence sniggered. “Do you really think a sliver of steel is any match for a fully blown fulguriator? A worthy opponent of the legacy of Tages and Rome? Really, Charles, I expected more. Let’s do this the old fashioned way. If you think you can handle me.”
“Very well. So be it.”
Waits dropped his sword and raised one arm to the sky, murmuring and closing his eyes.
His hand was trembling.
Florence placed on her head a scarlet cap that finished in a tube pointing skyward, as if funnelling the contents of her brain toward the clouds. Jake had seen one of these in Britton’s office; at the time he had laughed. But there was nothing funny about it now. There was nothing to laugh about as Florence also began murmuring, one hand raised in a rival supplication. The voices rose in intensity, chanting that tongue which bore no resemblance to any Indo-European language. Immediately the wind picked up, stirring this way and that, undecided which way to blow.
Jake noticed how cloudy it had become.
The sky was darkening, casting the world into half-light. Waits’s voice had become shrill, and to Jake’s dismay he realized he could understand snatches of what the spymaster was saying.
And then everything seemed to slow down.
*
The edge of Jake’s vision was deteriorating like a badly-tuned television picture. He viewed the world in three colours: black, white and purple. His neck was stiff and his head felt leaden. With an effort he turned to face Waits, whose face folded and flapped like a sail; his mouth was a jet-black hole. Florence stood with one arm raised: the pose of a rock star after a thunderous last chord. Her eyeballs flickered with violet and Jake could see right through to the capillaries inside her head, where lights danced. The leaves on the roof spiralled in dust devils and clouds were sucked towards the duelling fulguriators, as if there was a vacuum over the Tower.
He heard the first stirring of thunder.
The chanting turned manic, the beat of the drum, the beat that had begun so very long ago. Now a twinkle of purple-blue danced in Waits’s eyes too, as if a plug was short-circuiting in his frontal lobes. The cloud had gathered itself into two knots, one above Waits, one above Florence, the inverse peaks of the network’s wrath.
And then everything slowed down even more.