The Apocalypse Fire
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
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
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Post Script
Aramaic
Sources Cited
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Endnotes
For
Delia, Inigo, and Arminel
For the LORD thy God is a consuming fire.
Deuteronomy 4:24
(traditionally ascribed to Moses)
Prologue
One Year Ago
Tverskoy District
Moscow
Russian Federation
THE HOLY MOTHER was terrifying.
Oleg Antonevich Durov knew it from the moment she had first visited him, many years ago. Yet he had always done what she asked – however awful.
He looked out of the armoured limousine’s tinted windows at the stationary traffic around him.
It was going nowhere.
He was late for a meeting at the Ministry of Energy. As chairman of the Oil and Gas Working Committee, he had a big day ahead.
He ordered the driver to stop.
It would be faster to walk.
Stepping out onto the pavement, he unhooked his jacket from the peg by the window, picked up a slim brown leather pouch of papers, slammed the door, and set off on foot.
He walked a block, away from the luxury boutiques, and the incongruous mix of super-wealthy shoppers and tourists keen to be surrounded by the finest Moscow could offer.
As he crossed the road, carefully avoiding the puddles left by the early-morning street cleaners, he was suddenly aware of a storm of small diffuse white light balls darting from behind him. They were travelling quickly, flitting by his feet, hips, and head, then scudding along the pavement ahead.
He listened, horrified, to a low-frequency thundering deep in the earth. It rose to ear-splitting levels, and the ground started to shake violently. A moment later, the sound was joined by a high-pitched rushing, as if he had stepped behind a waterfall.
The noise level mounted until it was thundering in his ears, impossibly loud.
He fell to his knees, terrified he was having a brain haemorrhage. His pouch of papers slid to the pavement, spilling sensitive Kremlin documents and petrochemical reports over the tarmac.
Up ahead, the white lights slowed, centring on one spot, where they coalesced into a shimmering ellipse, then a mandorla.
He watched incredulously as the shape’s edges started to strobe and fluoresce with psychedelic pulses of colour, bleeding out into the bland scene of people going about their business.
He stared uncomprehending at the young woman materializing at the centre of the shape, her feet resting on a crescent moon, and her body in front of a blazing sun.
She wore a dress of burnished silver, a starry rainbow sash at her waist, and a hooded cloak of shimmering blue. Her skin was radiant white, and her lips were a glassy ruby red.
He clamped his hands over his ears to shut out the unendurable noise. But it made no difference.
Petrified, he watched in awe as the woman’s crimson lips parted, and her voice flowed over him, scalding like molten gold.
He was vaguely conscious of other pedestrians staring at him. Then he realized – as he had on the two ecstatic occasions she had appeared before, many years ago – that he was the only one special enough to see her.
She had chosen him.
It was a private theophany – a sacred gift.
And she reserved it for him alone.
He listened to her words, feeling them penetrate him like heavenly arrows. They speared every cell, breaking apart the individual helix strands of his DNA, fusing with his soul.
His eyes were on fire. He felt himself burning up.
What she commanded was unspeakable. Inhuman. Terrible in its destruction.
He was to be her agent on earth – her amanuensis for the Final Days.
It was all written, in the Bible – every detail of the Apocalypse.
And he understood the ancient prophecies of annihilation in all their terrifying glory.
Deep in his heart, he felt blessed. His knowledge was why the Holy Mother had chosen him.
He was the only one who understood her.
He was the only one she could trust.
DAY ONE
Chapter 1
Present Day
Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist
Turin
The Republic of Italy
THE FOUR MONKS checked their weapons.
They were ready.
Night had fallen over the Susa Valley, which carved its jagged way through the Alps – from the French border, deep into the mountains of Italy.
At its eastern end, on the northern Italian plain, Giovanni Raspallo looked hesitantly through the ancient low doorway of the cathedral’s sacristy.
The moment the black-robed figures appeared in the gloom, he knew he had made a dreadful mistake.
Earlier that morning, a hollow-cheeked monk had approached him gingerly, quietly introducing himself as Father Vasily.
The monk had asked in halting Italian if he and a few brothers from a monastery near Novgorod might have some prayer time alone with the ancient icon of Saints Archelais, Thecla, and Susanna – the tortured virgins of Salerno – whose Orthodox feast day commenced at sunset.
As the cathedral’s caretaker, Raspallo regularly received requests for favours, and he was usually happy to oblige. Turin was, after all, increasingly expensive for a single man of his age. It was no problem to keep a candle lit, fill a flask with fresh holy water, or leave a favourite
rosary lying overnight on the tomb of Blessed Pier. The little windfalls he earned in return allowed him to buy occasional treats for his pair of goldfinches, and when he refilled his empty boxes of table wine to help blur the lonely evenings, he did not always have to buy from the cheapest tap of dolcetto.
Now it was dark, and Father Vasily had returned with his three brothers. They were waiting outside the sacristy’s side entrance in the cool evening air – just as Raspallo had instructed – unmistakeable in their loose black Russian Orthodox robes and veiled kamilavka cylindrical hats.
Raspallo could not immediately put his finger on the problem. But the moment the monks began filing past him into the cramped sacristy – its glass-fronted cabinets filled with the silverware and embroidered vestments he had lovingly tended for decades – he instinctively knew something was very wrong.
As he closed the thick wooden door behind them, his head exploded in a bolt of burning white-hot light, and he was suddenly falling in a juddering searing paroxysm of agony, as if an archangel’s fiery sword was splitting him open.
By the time his gnarled back hit the smoothed terracotta flagstones, his aged muscles were spasming wildly, and a suffocating bile was rising in his throat.
His eyes rolled back into his head, preventing him from seeing the two slender copper wires now embedded in his chest, or the lithium power magazine in Vasily’s hand remorselessly pumping out fifty thousand volts.
Raspallo tried to scream, but the overpowering electrical interference was jamming all neural pathways in his jack-knifing body.
After five terrifying seconds, the current shut off, and he went into deep shock, shaking uncontrollably.
Before he had time to understand what was happening, Vasily reached down and yanked out the barbed taser darts, roughly ripping his flesh.
With no let up, another of the monks crouched in front of him and, without warning, punched him hard in the larynx. As the fresh pain and nausea tore through his neck and chest, a hand grabbed his head, and he was aware of something being slipped over it.
He struggled to understand why he could feel straps being fastened at the back of his skull. But his thoughts were cut off by the excruciating pain of his front teeth breaking as a metal block was hammered into his mouth with the heel of a palm, filling his throat with blood and shards of enamel and dentine.
Now he screamed – with all the force his convulsing body could summon. But the solid metal gag filling his mouth absorbed all sound.
“Be calm, and you won’t get hurt,” a voice grunted.
Raspallo struggled to process the words as he fought to absorb the violence of the onslaught.
The fourth, with a wide pockmarked face, was already in front of the control panel regulating the building’s fourteen discreet high-definition day-night security cameras. He tapped rapidly on the screen of a tablet he had jumped into the RJ45 maintenance port, temporarily disrupting the image feed for fifteen minutes while the system registered it was going offline for a software update.
As the two monks carrying Raspallo pressed deeper into the cathedral, he could tell from the patterns of marble hexagons in the floor that he was being taken down the candle-lit nave, towards the high altar.
Through the intense pain, he struggled to understand what was happening.
This made no sense.
The icon of Saints Archelais, Thecla, and Susanna was in the south-west corner of the building – in the opposite direction.
He began to struggle wildly, lashing out with his arms and legs to break free from his captors’ crushing grip, but a numbing punch to the top of his spine turned his skeleton to rubber.
Why were they doing this?
Were they here to kill him?
He struggled to raise his head, looking frantically for solace to the images and sculptures of saints and angels gazing down from the walls and ceiling. But all he saw near him was a bloodied and tortured body cruelly nailed to a cross, and a teenage girl strapped to a breaking wheel as a Roman soldier shattered her bones with a hammer.
He started to retch with fear.
As they carried him to the chancel, his eyes were drawn upwards from the altar’s six immense gold candlesticks to the towering rotunda, with its awe-inspiring cascade of ever-grander altars, one behind the other, fading into the cavernous gloom.
Surely God would not allow murder here, in this holy place?
He was numb with terror.
The men turned left, up the north transept, and Raspallo suddenly understood why he had been unnerved when the monks entered the sacristy.
It was obvious now.
They were not men whose bodies had been blunted by years of stillness, prayer, and fasting. They were straight-backed, athletic, and muscular.
Their faces were wrong, too, with short fresh beards, instead of untended straggly wisps of pious neglect.
As the group approached the cluster of side chapels lining the north wall, Raspallo caught sight of the first-floor triforium balustrade screening off the grand royal box. It was where the counts of Savoy once heard Mass, basking under the colossal gold, red, and white sculpture of their royal coat of arms.
The monks stopped and, with a shattering realization, Raspallo understood what they wanted.
“Smettete lo—” he bellowed, but the sound died in his mouth, absorbed by the solid metal gag.
Up ahead, Vasily strode to the side chapel beneath the royal box, expertly assessing its floor-to-ceiling glass screens. Behind the partition was a long low altar in front of a thick red curtain, and on the cloth was hung a large indistinct photograph of a man’s head. It had an oddly elongated face, with high cheek bones, long hair, a full beard, and deep haunting eyes.
Vasily confidently opened the sliding glass screens, stepped into the chapel, and grabbed hold of the red curtain. He tore it down with a single tug, dragging the beguiling photograph to the floor with it.
They could all now see that the curtain had been hiding a large glass case, twice the length and width of a man, and more than eight inches deep. It was mounted on an adjustable metal trestle frame, permitting it to lie horizontally or be flipped up vertically. Bizarrely, it was plugged into a bank of hi-tech computer equipment.
Although Raspallo had never been allowed behind the curtain before, he knew exactly what the case was, and what the electronics, cables, and tubes were for.
The glass was hollow, and the machinery humming beside it twenty-four hours a day regulated the artificial atmosphere inside it at a constant temperature and humidity, ensuring it was anaerobic and anti-bacterial, 99.5 per cent argon and 0.5 per cent oxygen.
It was not the sort of technology normally found in a church. But then, the thin piece of fragile ivory-coloured linen it was protecting was not in any way ordinary either.
Raspallo could not see the ancient piece of textile. But he knew exactly what it looked like.
Every detail was burned into his mind.
He had marvelled over it during the official exhibitions in 2010 and 2015, when several million people had visited the cathedral to shuffle past a special display. In the evenings, when the crowds had left and the building was dark and quiet, he had stood before the relic, drinking in its wonders. He had stared at it so long he could now close his eyes and recall intimately the faint sepia-coloured image of the front and back of a viciously crucified man, disfigured by hundreds of wounds and blood stains.
As Vasily approached the sacred glass reliquary, Raspallo felt a fresh surge of fear.
Why was he being made to watch what they were doing?
The two monks dropped Raspallo to the floor. The stockier of the two grabbed his trembling wrists, then expertly bound them with a zip tie under his right knee, trussing him up into a position that left him unable to move.
Both monks then bent down and took w
eapons from their small black backpacks.
Raspallo was not a military man, but he had done his naja service forty years ago, and he could recognize a mini submachine gun – not that he had ever seen one so small, or with such malevolent futuristic lines.
He coughed to clear the blood from his throat, only intensifying the throbbing and burning pain in his mouth as his whole body starting to convulse uncontrollably.
The tallest of the monks moved quickly back into the church and took up an observation position from where he could see the sacristy’s door and his comrades. Another of the monks remained between Raspallo and the side chapel, training his evil-looking weapon directly on the caretaker.
Vasily bent over an open black backpack and pulled out a rectangular machine with wide hooped handles. Without warning, he flicked its power switch, and the noise of the two-thousand-watt engine reverberated off the smoothed floor and walls, shattering the great temple’s hush.
Raspallo was drenched in sweat, staring at the chainsaw.
Surely they weren’t…?
He had seen films.
His eyes widened as the monk stepped towards him, but it was only to pull a protective pair of glasses from his bag, before slipping them over his eyes.
Throwing a threatening glance to Raspallo, Vasily strode over to the hi-tech display case, peered down for a moment at the bulletproof glass, then lowered the savage-looking circular saw blade.
Raspallo gazed on impotently, rage now mixing with the terror.
This was sacrilegio.
It was an outrage.
The sacred linen was not just another object in the cathedral, like one of the many censers, candlesticks, or valuable paintings.
It was the most famous relic in Christendom – gifted to the Holy Father himself by the last king of Italy, whose family had preserved the ancient cloth for five hundred and thirty years.
At the other end of the side chapel from Vasily, the pockmarked monk had pulled a grey rubber-ribbed laptop from his bag, set it onto the end of the glass case, and hooked it up to a matching satellite phone.
The monk closest to the caretaker prodded him in the gut with the tip of his gun’s barrel, then shoved his hand deep into the older man’s back pocket, pulling out a battered wallet. He tossed the brown leather bundle over to his comrade at the laptop, who flipped through its meagre contents, before pulling out an official Carta d’Identità.