Tom sighed. “Or there was a Master Builder on board.”
Sam nodded. It was the most likely possibility. “All right, I’ll give it to Elise when she gets here. If there’s any way of extracting the code, she’ll work it out.”
A few moments later, the Maria Helena reverberated under the downward whoop, whoop of the Sea King landing. Sam looked at Tom and Peter. “Speak of the Devil.”
Sam jogged up the steps, taking two at a time. He stepped out onto the deck and opened the helicopter’s front passenger door. It was empty. He looked up at Genevieve. “Where is she?”
“She wouldn’t wait for the blades to stop turning. She’s gone inside. She said she had to see you straight away.”
Sam nodded. “Okay. Thanks for getting her.”
Genevieve smiled. She knew how much he appreciated her, but it was rare for him to voice it. Every one of his crew worked hard and put a hundred percent into the job twenty-four hours a day. It’s what he expected from them and more often than not, what he needed. Genevieve said, “Go find her.”
He found Elise coming back down the stairs from the bridge.
She spoke before he could speak. “I’ve got the results from each of the samples.”
“And?”
“You’re not going to believe what they show.”
Chapter Forty — Vatican City
Sam sat down on an old leather armchair opposite John Wallis who sat behind the heavy oak desk of his office. A wooden placard read, Swiss Guard. Minister for the Future. Eight weeks ago, Sam had sat in the very same chair, when he’d first been introduced to the man. Since that day, he had no revelation as to what Wallis’s official title meant. Sam had found him because, among other things, Wallis documented the history of the Master Builders, going by a Latin name which meant, Witness to the Master Builders. It was a very old title, and it stretched back to the days of the Great Plague, when Nostradamus had accurately predicted a young monk in training would one day become the Pope. Wallis had been instructed to continue to perform the task of Witness, even though he had never met one of the great descendants.
His eyes swept the office. It was scattered with unique memorabilia from history. An early edition of the Holy Bible, strange Mayan weapons given or taken during the spread of Catholicism to the New World, an incomplete world map showing the ignorance of the 16th century Conquistadors, photos of the various Heads of State from around the world — on closer inspection, Sam saw that Wallis was in the background of every one of them — it was obvious, the man provided specialized services to the Holy See above and beyond Pontifical Security.
Wallis stared at him in silence. His hardened face perched in a permanent question, as if to say, I’m ready, let’s hear the truth. Sam quickly gave it to him; handing out the facts as they had been given to him. Even he hadn’t worked out why someone would do such a thing, or how it could have been achieved. None of it mattered. The fact was, he was happy to have been invited by the Church to find the truth, but now that it was out, it wouldn’t serve him or Tom any benefit in achieving their goal of finding Billie.
“A hoax?” His eyes narrowed. “I was there with my own eyes. There was a damned wooly mammoth there frozen in solid ice!”
Sam smiled, politely. It was all he could do. “Well that part was true.”
“I don’t understand. You’d better start from the beginning.”
“The wooly mammoth was dated as roughly 12,000 years old.”
“So, the strange temple is at least that old?”
“No. You have to remember the extinct creature was forced into the cavern by a slow moving glacier sometime in the past two thousand years. Only part of it had dropped into the lava tube, while the rest of it continued further into the mountain. The only remaining ice was what you saw a few days ago.”
“Okay, what about the paintings?”
“They were done around 300 A.D. give or take 50 years. But I’m willing to bet money that it was in April 286 A.D.”
Wallis sat up in his chair, as though his rigid muscles could coax his mind into some sort of understanding. “You think it was Gregory the Illuminator?”
“I do.”
“You think he found the frozen wooly mammoth, a monster he knew died out long ago, and decided to impart some sort of crazy lie, so that future generations might… what… believe in Christianity?”
Sam answered like a child in trouble, who knew that none would be adequate. “No.”
“That Christianity was fake, because Jesus Christ was based upon another person who died ten thousand years earlier — I don’t understand — for what purpose could Gregory the Illuminator have possibly performed such a horrible hoax?” Wallis paused, as though his mind was still trying to make some sort of sense of the news. “Even if he went to the tremendous lengths required to achieve it, what about the Four Horsemen? What part do they play in all this?”
Sam closed his eyes, waited for a moment and then spoke. “I’ve been thinking about the Four Horsemen and about Gregory.”
“And?”
“This isn’t some sort of juvenile hoax made up to get attention. This wasn’t for fun. It had to serve a purpose, and I think I might just know what it was.”
“Go on.”
“The entire elaborate deception was all designed to make us focus on one particular thing — the time period. He wanted us to examine a very specific time. He wanted us to look at what happened roughly twelve thousand years ago.”
“Why?”
Sam swallowed. “I think he was trying to give us some sort of warning. What if he was trying to warn us that the disaster that caused the period of mass-extinction of twelve thousand years ago, was hurling toward us again?”
Wallis spoke the words with a quiet solemnity. “The extinction of the human race.”
Sam nodded in silence. He’d had the same concern. Eight weeks ago he’d discovered that the final vision Nostradamus had seen was the extinction of the human race, and somehow — Sam Reilly was the only person on earth who might have the power to change the outcome.
It was Wallis who broke the silence first. “What about the Four Horsemen?”
Sam said, “I’ve been thinking about that, too. What if the Four Horsemen were set up to act as a final defense against the imminent disaster? Like an ancient covenant to come into effect when the time was right.”
“But how would they know when that was?” His face was etched with doubt and cynicism.
Sam nodded. It was a hard stretch to believe. “What if Nostradamus wasn’t the first?”
“You mean, what if someone else knew the future?”
“Sure. What if that person knew a precise date for a cataclysmic event, and how to stop it, but no way to be certain that the Four Horsemen would achieve their goal?” Sam took a breath and then continued. “People die, stories change over seventeen hundred years. The remaining Four Horsemen may not exist.”
“So?”
“So, maybe that person saw that we’d have an unusually warm summer this year. He or she saw the snow, which capped the upper third of Mount Ararat, begin to thin. It would lead someone to fall into the cavern. Maybe they knew the shifting glacier would bring the frozen wooly mammoth from twelve thousand years ago into the lava tube and our plain sight. That the twist about the age of Jesus Christ was so compelling that no matter who found the cavern, the message would reach the Vatican — where you would contact me to become involved.
“It’s a whole lot of what ifs for me to believe.” Wallis took a deep breath and then slowly breathed out. “Even if I did believe you, the fact remains, what are we supposed to do about it?”