The Book of Names by Jill Gregory & Karen Tintori

Author:Jill Gregory & Karen Tintori [Gregory, Jill & Tintori, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780312354732
Google: ovGh4Cy0gSEC
Amazon: 1423330854
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2007-01-05T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Hypnotized by the screen, the Serpent worked all through the night.

By dawn, the last two names still eluded him.

He attacked the formulas again. His dirty-blond hair had gone unwashed for two days, and his armpits reeked with sweat as his fingers flew across the keyboard. His mind raced faster than the CPU at his command.

For days he’d forgotten to bathe, to eat, even to use his cane. At one point he’d shoved back his chair and sprung up without it, only to tumble to the floor.

Cursing, he’d struggled back up, grasped the damned cane, and smashed it full force against one of his treasured sculptures.

He was growing to hate the numbers, the graphs, the overlays of transcriptions. Instead of reflecting his brilliance, they now seemed to mock him, hiding their secrets, refusing to part the curtain of mystery. There had been no more breakthroughs, but then, neither had any more papyri fragments been found, none since the summer of 2001.

Everything I need is here. It must be here. I’m so close.

We’re so close.

And it’s all hanging on me. The downfall of God. The end of the world. The victory of the Gnoseos.

They’d tried so hard, so many times. His people’s history never failed to move him.

He thought of the first time they’d come close to wiping out the Hidden Ones. How the imbalance it caused in the world had triggered the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, destroying Pompeii. And of the hero, Attila the Hun, who brutally slaughtered so many in the fifth century he was dubbed the “scourge of God.”

The Gnoseos had rejoiced at the plague, the Black Death that killed nearly half the people in Western Europe in the fourteenth century. They’d prayed it would spread throughout the world.

The Inquisition in Spain under Torquemada, and the Armenian massacres, had killed many of the Hidden Ones, but never enough of them, never thirty-six within a generation.

There had been so many moments of hope—the Yellow River bursting its banks in China, killing nearly a million people in 1887. The sinking of the Titanic. Communism—and the Khmer Rouge—the movement that massacred millions in Cambodia.

In many lands and in many times, slavery was their tool—suffocating hope, drowning the human spirit, destroying those with pure souls as if they were vermin.

The Nazis also did their part—and for a time his great-grandfather had led the Circle of his generation in a valiant campaign to bring down the world. They’d come so close.

But we are closer now, he told himself, closer than at any other time in history. He thought of the Ark, of the provisions newly stockpiled in that subterranean stronghold, and of the two thousand faithful awaiting the signal—the signal to enter their new world, the signal that could only come once he completed his task.

Two more names. Why couldn’t he find them? What was he doing wrong?

He tried a different algorithm, altered another sequence, ran another equidistant letter skip.

Garbage. The screen showed him only garbage.

He bit his tongue until it bled. Stupid blood, what does it matter? Patience mattered.

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