23rd April
It was a warm, sunny day, and Helen had nothing specific to do.
Joan had wanted to meet with Swan that morning, so Helen was left to occupy her own time.
She took her laptop to a small wooded area within the Bovington compound and sat down, leaning against a tree.
She trawled the Internet for information about the five alleged key figures in ARK – names that MI5 had gleaned from surveillance of Wimborne Chained Library and that had been confirmed in the message that Leadbetter had sent to Swan.
Four were bishops: Hunter, Rycroft, Bishop Julian Summerland and Bishop Anthony Forrester. The fifth was not a bishop but a vicar in the small Norfolk parish of Great Melford.
The name of this fifth individual was Adrian Holland. Not having the public profile of the bishops, Holland had much less information about him readily accessible on the Internet. He was fifty-two years old and a graduate of Cambridge University. Helen noted that he had studied particle physics at Cambridge, so was one of those clerics that the Church brought into play for debates with atheist scientists.
Helen found the website of St Sigebert’s – Holland’s church in Great Melford. It contained samples of the vicar’s sermons which Helen began to read.
The style and tone of the sermons was very much in keeping with the hellfire and brimstone perspective that might fit with a medieval, fundamentalist, terror group like ARK.
Thoughts about the nature of ARK led her mind back to her captivity in the crypt of the church at Meadowcote Hall.
It was true that it had been a frightening experience, but there had been other feelings too. There had been excitement and exhilaration.
In retrospect, it seemed to Helen that it had been one of the few times in her life when she had felt truly alive.
Helen then reflected on the strangeness of having been, in effect, recruited by MI5.
These were, however, strange times.
Joan, for example, a senior MI5 operative with many years of experience, had been happy for a mentally unstable vicar to kidnap and interrogate an Anglican bishop and possibly go after a second.
This had appeared to Joan as a legitimate strategy in pursuit of a group who believed Swan to be some demonic, supernatural figure – a group that seemed to be planning to gain control of American nuclear warheads at a time when the Earth would be at high risk of a catastrophic asteroid impact.
As if her world had not departed far enough from the everyday reality of Waterford, a secret group, possibly linked to the US government, seemed to want to kill Swan.
Helen looked at the normal world of grass, trees, birds and sunshine in which she was sitting, as if to take a reality check on the situation she had just summarised in her mind. ‘It’s all odd as hell,’ she said aloud to herself. Then she smiled. ‘But it’s a lot more exciting than the Waterford Women’s Group!’
She returned to reading the sermon displayed on her laptop screen. She would be interested to meet the Reverend Adrian Holland. Surely it was not beyond the bounds of reason, in these peculiar and insane times, for her to pursue that line of enquiry herself.
Helen glanced up and saw Swan approaching. She placed the laptop on the grass and stood up. As he reached the spot where she stood, she leant forward to kiss him.
She stopped suddenly and stepped backwards – something was not right. The person in front of her certainly looked like Swan, but his demeanour and body language, even his scent, were wrong.
‘You’re not Swan,’ she said.