Jake came round to see the priestess’s head topple off her shoulders and her body keel over backwards. Behind the decapitated fulguriator stood Jenny, blade clasped horizontally in the manner of a samurai. The severed appendage rolled once, twice, three times, coming to a rest at Jake’s feet. Florence’s left eyelid twitched, steam rising from her corneas. The pupils of those blood-red eyeballs contracted to pinheads.
Sightless.
Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Lady Jane Grey; Florence Chung. The last person to be decapitated at the Tower, as Hess was its last prisoner. For the second time the sword of Oliver Cromwell had put an end to they who would rule absolutely.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
The clouds fizzled with unspent energy, lightning shimmering along their undersides, and again Jake was reminded of a cerebral mass: angry but impotent, thoughts seething through it.
Jenny dropped the blade and gasped. Then she fell to her knees, staring at Florence’s head.
“I killed her,” she said. “I killed someone.”
Jake placed a hand on Jenny’s shoulder. “You killed it,” he said. “She had become an it.”
They became aware of two things: first, the smell of burning oak, and second, the crowd. In an attempt to seal in the intruders Sir Richard had ordered the outer gates closed. But the storm was unlike anything the tourists had seen before and it had reduced them to panic. Now smoke rose from the roof, the beams ignited by the lightning; the general had no choice but to open the gates so the crowd to escape. They watched Evelyn Parr join the throng.
“Quickly,” said Jake, gathering up the Disciplina Etrusca. “We’ve got a window of opportunity to get out of here.”
The soldiers were taken up with the evacuation and they fled the White Tower unimpeded. As Jake joined the stampede he glanced at the keep and felt a stab of sorrow. A building that was evil and beautiful, English and French, a repository of history itself; it was being consumed. He took Jenny by the arm and steered her through the outer walls without looking back.
*
The City of London was a ghost town on a Saturday, its glass anthills dormant. The noise of sirens carried from Tower Hill as they ran and a helicopter skimmed overhead. They stopped underneath the Gherkin – a statement of power to rival Vespasian’s Colosseum – and Jake placed the bundle of papyri on the ground.
“Right,” he said, sparking his lighter. “Here goes.”
“Wait.”
Jake extinguished the flame. “What is it?”
“Before you destroy it … there’s something I need to do. One thing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Whatever killed Mum. I need to know if I’m a carrier.”
She picked up the bundle and flicked through the pages from beginning to end.
“You’re not serious,” he said.
“Is it a laughing matter?”
He sparked the lighter and took the papyri from her. “No way. It burns.”
“Why not?” she said. “What harm would it do to find out this one thing? You don’t know what it’s like, living under a death sentence.”
The flame neared the papyri, but Jenny grasped him by wrist, pulling it back.
“Wait,” she hissed. “Let’s think about this. With this document we could do whatever we wanted. We could clean out Monte Carlo, go into politics. We could be rich – Jesus, Jake, we could be powerful beyond our wildest dreams.”
For an insane moment he considered it. But then he recalled the beat of the drum, the tramp of boots, the blood-red gaze of the lightning priestess at her most terrible.
She was proposing a deal with the devil.
“Jenny …” He stared at her, willing her back. “Let it go, Jenny.”
She blinked, and she was her old self again. She wept for a second time then, kneeling on the pavement and burying her face in her elbow.
“I almost gave in,” she whispered.
“But you didn’t give in.”
A breeze turned the pages of the manuscript, each of them stamped with a swastika.
“Burn it,” she said.
The flame danced in Jake’s hands before leaping to the bundle.
Energy.
Almost two thousand years ago it had fallen to earth in sunlight to be sucked up by the papyrus plants of the Nile Delta and converted to matter. Then it had been harvested, beaten wafer-thin, written upon and stored. For centuries it had lain underground, waiting to be disturbed. Waiting to end the lives of sixty million people. Now that energy was released at last in a flare of heat and light. Flame raced inward from all sides, like the Red Army encircling Hitler’s bunker.
The last scrap to be destroyed carried a name: TAGES.
And then it was gone.
*
Overhead the cloud had broken up to reveal a chink of blue.
“What now?” said Jenny.
“Now?” repeated Jake, as he crushed the ashes into dust. “Now we have a choice. We can publish everything we have. We can drag down Evelyn Parr and half of MI6. We can rewrite history. Christ, I might become the most famous journalist of all time. Watergate is a minor traffic accident by comparison.”
“Or?”
“Or we flee. We flee from Evelyn Parr and whoever she recruits. We go abroad and we never breathe another word of this to anyone who lives. We destroy what evidence we’ve gathered so Niall Heston’s got nothing to back up his story and the paper can’t run it.”
“Why would we do that?”
“To stop word of this science spreading to every government and treasure hunter and would-be despot in the world. The genie goes back in the bottle.”
“Where would we go?”
“I don’t know,” Jake admitted.
“What would we do?”
“I don’t know that either. But …”
His heart was pounding.
She looked up at him. “But what, Jake?”
Her eyes were clear.
“But …”
This was it. This was what it all came down to. Still his heartbeat raced, yet when he spoke it was with certainty.
“But we’d have each other.”
The air around them was charged. Jake held out his hand; his fingers did not tremble. She offered hers in return, the positive streamer to his step leader. There was the briefest hesitation. Then their fingers touched, and a spark seemed to dart between them – a spark that was wholesome and pure.
Jenny laughed. “Fate,” she said. “Do you believe in it, Jake?”
He looked at the ashes of the Book of Thunder. The wind was spreading them across the concourse with its invisible fingers, pushing them into the cracks of the pavement; taking them up into the air. And he couldn’t help wondering if what they had found together was the point in it all.