Apocalypse Europe: The Pangea Protocol

A serialized technothriller novel

From the ashes of Notre Dame Cathedral to the cosmic mysteries lurking inside the CERN supercollider to bone-strewn labyrinths of the Paris Catacombs to the gilded halls of all-corrupting wealth and power in Davos comes an unprecedented technothriller adventure.

“The intrigue of The Da Vinci Code combined with

the big-scale action of James Bond.”

A heinous genocidal attack threatens Europe, a monstrous bioweapon is unleashed on Moscow, and Ellie Sato, a young British reporter, finds herself caught in the middle of Apocalypse Europe!

Reader Suitability: Scenes of violence, moderate profanity,

sexuality, and torture.

Recommended for 18+

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CHAPTER 1

EASTER 2031

NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL

PARIS

A MAN

A man walked past Notre Dame; the night air was cool on his lips and tongue. He looked up at the rebuilt cathedral and icy tendrils of pain and the mortification of shameful failure seized him. The obscene structure was illuminated from the front by a row of small floodlights along its stone walls and backlit against the night sky by a halo of Parisian city lights. From four kilometers away, the Eiffel Tower sent out rhythmic lances of illumination from its rotating searchlights. Low-hanging clouds reflected this spectral pulse of the city. The man paused and, resting his clean hand on the grimy railing of the bridge over the Seine, forced himself to look up.

This old bitch looked better when she was on fire, he thought.

The man had set fire to Notre Dame Cathedral twelve years ago. Much had changed since then, he knew, but there it was. The decrepit monument was still standing on the Île de la Cité, a disgusting leper’s sore persistently oozing foul-smelling pus onto the face of Paris. That thought, and others, made him shudder.

Memories, only memories.

It was after midnight, someone would wonder where he was. Still, he continued slowly along the river, his head angled a few degrees to one side as though he were listening for a melody which was just about to begin. The halogen light made the walls and the rebuilt spire both appear to be made out of stone. A latticework of restoration scaffolding crisscrossed above the foremost towers. Easter Vigil had concluded hours ago. The cathedral and the park surrounding it on the Île de la Cité were as silent and gloomy as a graveyard.

The man, intending at last to go home, turned towards the car and the shadowy figures following him at a distance. Something slid under his foot. The ground was wet and had soaked through the paper of a small, homemade handbill. All he could read was:

“Joyeuses Pâques! Christ est ressuscité!”

Oh fuck, thought the man. “Happy Easter, Christ is risen.” Couldn’t the bastard stay dead?

Not wanting to touch the despicable paper with his hand, he pushed at it with a tasseled loafer, scraped it under a railing and over the edge of the bridge. A balled-up dirty mess, the flyer fell into the dark waters.

The man felt the cool wind from the river at his back. It made him realize how hot and flushed his face had become as he stared up at the cathedral. In his mind, the cathedral was burning again. In his vision, Notre Dame was gloriously aflame, utterly collapsing into ruin, the ashes sinking into a pit. The pit then widened, taking in not only the terrible medieval monument but Square Jean XXIII as well, finally engulfing the entire Île de la Cité. The river waters would rush down through the gaping sinkhole and spew into rat-infested sewers and into the catacombs, bringing up the stored bones of six million disinterred corpses.

A boat horn sounded. The man realized it was not the cathedral that was burning. It was him burning with utter hate. For a moment, he raged silently at the church, its new spire, and most violently of all at the obscenity of all obscenities: the Christian Cross.

By now, this was supposed to be the Mosque of Notre Dame, or the brothel of Notre Putain.

During the French Revolution, Notre Dame had been turned into a seedy warehouse for turnips and cabbages. To him, it was not important what they used it as: a garbage dump, or a whorehouse, or a mosque. What mattered was that this blight must be gone from Paris. This leprosy of the mind called Christianity had to be scraped away from humankind.

That was why he had set the fire and tried to burn down the damned place. That was why the shame of his failure smoldered in him like an ember that had fallen on fireplace tiles just short of a fluffy wool rug, yearning to set the house aflame but in the end merely sitting there sizzling impotently.

In 2019, setting the fire had by no means been a certain thing. For days he had worked caught up in a frenzy, completely alone, coming up with one fanciful plan after another: crashing a light plane or helicopter full of fuel into the roof, tampering with natural gas lines. And rejecting each idea in turn.

It had been April 15, just before Easter. He had not touched water or food for two days, maybe three. He had not been able to stop moving since the moment the desire for destruction had seized him.

His specialty was engineering, not demolition; he only knew basic formulas of materials science. He could not risk making a detailed online search for the information he needed to bring down the grand old slut of the Catholic Church in Paris. His old textbooks from university were inadequate. He needed a better source. Finding it led indirectly to his epiphany and the genesis of his fire.

During the early months of 2019, Notre Dame had been in the middle of extensive repairs. Scaffolding had been erected across the transept and around the base of the wooden rooftop spire. The public was still being admitted to view the relics inside the cavernous monstrosity. Access to the ground floor was not a problem, but it might also be a trap.

Early on he was inclined to favor inspiration over deliberation. If he spied the layout first and formulated his plan based on rotating guard schedules or where workers were assigned on a given day, his scheme could be obsolete the very next day. Worse, his frequent visits could be noted and might lead to his capture.

Emerging from his apartment that morning eager for knowledge, he found his way to a used book shop. There he found a fat tattered binder entitled Criminal Fires: Chemistry and Physics of Fire Behavior. When the clerk was busy, he had quickly shoved it into his briefcase and left. As he walked along the alley behind the book shop, he was still in the throes of anxiety. Could he do it? Could he do it without being caught? Perhaps he should delay and create a defense strategy if he should be apprehended. Could he find a lazy psychiatrist who would unwittingly help him document a fake mental illness?

Fate provided a final push. In the alley behind the book shop a homeless man was selling junk, it was all laid out on the filthy cobblestones. Among these items was a can of oil-based wood stain. He grabbed it and paid the grizzled old beggar with a hateful stare and a closed fist.

Kerosene or some unusual accelerant would cause suspicion during the detailed investigation that was sure to follow. Notre Dame was rife with woodwork; from his knowledge of chemistry, linseed oil was just what he wanted. The other components necessary he already had in his flat: painter’s overalls and a mask retained from a part-time job he had years ago.

He found himself back in his modest apartment and looked at the time. Still early. He could do it that very day. He became drunk on his own audacity. Killing one person was only a murder—this act, so sudden and unexpected, would strike at the heart of France and the soul of Europe. He sat at his small kitchen table and greedily studied the fire prevention manual. In an hour he felt fully prepared.

Walking to the cathedral, he took the most logical route for someone not in a hurry on a spring day in Paris. Mindful of being watched by the street surveillance cameras, he behaved precisely as an engineering consultant working for a large international investment firm would on his day off. His wallet was in the pocket of his suede jacket; everything else was tucked in a medium-sized leather shoulder bag.

He walked toward the Île de la Cité like an automaton. He was risking everything—his career, his money, his life, his family’s good name—and for what? The answer was too big for his brain. All he knew was he could not stop. It was as though he were in a dreamlike state, acting out events that had already happened.

What if they questioned him? Why was he going to the cathedral? He knew Catholic liturgy but was not a regular at Notre Dame. Attacks against Christian and Jewish places of worship had recently escalated; there was always security. As he approached the entrance, he considered cover stories.

The firm at which he worked was a large multinational conglomerate involved in construction and finance globally. The connections his position provided him would, over the next twelve years after the fire, provide him links to money and secret avenues of power in Brussels and Davos. Those covert economic and political partnerships would lay the foundation of his future success and entrée into a very special society.

But on April 15, 2019, he was just a junior consulting engineer. If questioned as to why he was visiting Notre Dame, he decided to say his firm was considering reinsuring an Armenian state restoration project, which was actually true. He wanted to see how work on the cathedral was progressing in order to write a memo to his firm’s risk assessment department.

Boring, credible, perfect.

His overalls and mask, which were rolled up into a very tight bundle, were for his work—also true. His department was bidding on a contract to remediate the hundreds of kilometers of limestone quarry catacombs which lay under Paris, mostly on the Left Bank. At some point he would have to climb down into the musty caverns which honeycombed through the foundations of Paris.

Nothing about him would appear out of place, as long as no one looked into his small leather grooming bag and analyzed the contents of his bottle of hair oil. He had emptied out the original product to make a receptacle for the wood oil. As a finishing touch, he’d added an extra sheen of organic argan hair oil to his thick dark hair. Obviously he was a man who liked to take care of his appearance.

What he did not carry was a lighter or even so much as a single match. One did not need those to start a fire.

He reached Notre Dame. At the sight of a long line of white-and-blue police vans stretching along the street leading to the entrance, his hands started to shake. He quickly thrust them into his pockets.

As it was, the officers were more interested in their lunch than providing security. People wandered around the sunlit square in front of the cathedral. Despite a sign cautioning baggage was not allowed, people entered and left with large shopping bags and backpacks. His small satchel was not noticed. He paused directly in front of a security camera, checking his watch and making sure the lens got a good look at him.

Then, with the vigor of a man with a full bladder, he strode down the side street that flanked the cathedral on the river side, and entered a tented area which contained a line of portable toilets. He entered the last one.

He waited for a knock; waited to be challenged and told these latrines were for registered renovation workers only. No one came. No one knocked. He changed into is overalls and stuffed his satchel up through an air hole to rest on the plastic roof of the latrine.

After putting on his paint mask, he took a deep breath. He smelled chlorine and urine. He began.

That Monday afternoon, noon Mass was in full swing. The sounds of liturgy filtered through to the side of the cathedral. Hearing it nearly made him sick to his stomach, but he forced himself to swallow the acidic bile which his empty stomach had tried to rid itself of. It would not do to vomit into his mask.

He walked out, mixing in with the contractors and tradesmen leaving for their lunch break. Passing the lower rung of a scaffold, he had the inspired notion to grab a tool belt hanging there. Casually, he draped it over his shoulder to hide the fact that he was not sporting the security badge identifying authorized workers on site. If anyone accosted him as he studied how best to access the cathedral, he would claim he was returning to get one of his valuable tools—a digital caliper or a wood hygrometer.

He had to get up to the roof. He certainly could not use the electric service lift, which was the normal way workmen accessed the upper scaffolding. People were milling around the bottom of the lift and presumably also at the top, which he could not see.

He looked left and right. Soon someone would notice him just standing there with sweat running down the back of his neck under the hood of his painter’s coveralls. He felt stuck in place. Any second now, he would be spotted, surrounded, forced to his knees, stripped, and made to confess right there. Would they bring out a priest to hear his sins?

He looked up. The noon sun burned down pitilessly. A blaze of light made him close his eyes. Above him, burned into his retinas, the rays had sliced the figment of a priest’s dagger made of pure light.

The moment passed. Still no one noticed him. For the workers, it was lunchtime. For the faithful, it was Mass at the grand altar. He blinked hurriedly, turned away from the light, and saw a lower rung on the support struts for the scaffold. They were covered with blue plastic material and hung about a foot above his farthest reach.

He jumped, and the tool belt slipped off his shoulder. His muscles remembered his youthful days in the gymnastics competitions. He could do this! Climbing steadily up the scaffolding was much easier than negotiating twists on the high bar. But soon he was thirty feet off the ground, and his muscles and ligaments sawed at him in pain. Each twinge reminded him he was twenty years older than the spry gymnast who had tried out for the French Olympic team.

His hands started to sweat. Could he even gain access to the inner roof? Everything depended on that. The outer roof was made of lead. Those sheets of heavy metal were held up by the inner roof which was a maze of enormous timbers. His entire plan hinged upon starting a fire inside, not on the exterior of the church, where it would quickly be seen and put out.

He held himself still on the metal rungs, his face inches from that of a grimacing gargoyle. These functional waterspouts were carved in the shape of creatures intended to protect the church from malevolent spirts. This grotesque’s face, a cross between a jaguar and a dragon, was made even more hideous by pockmarks caused by pollution and acid rain.

As a student of architecture, he knew the story of their design, how Saint Romain had defeated the fire-breathing La Gargouille, cutting off its head and nailing it to a church roof. When it rained, the mouth of La Gargouille gushed water. It was right then, nose to snout with the leering limestone demon of Notre Dame, that he again nearly lost his nerve.

He was not superstitious, quite the opposite. But he was hanging dozens of feet above the ground on a rickety railing. Anyone who passed directly beneath him only had to look up, and he would be arrested and ruined. At the very least, he would be sent to a psychiatric facility. He had no idea if it was even possible to access the space under the outer roof or precisely what he might find inside. There might only be a dead end. His footing may be made of rotting wood and he would end up landing on the inner roof with a broken back.

He reconsidered. It was crazy. He was bound to be caught. There had to be a better way. He had just seen they were letting people with all sorts of bags and knapsacks into the church. He would descend, learn how to construct a very good incendiary device, and form a better plan. The giddy excitement of the past fifty-odd hours emptied from him like the inevitable letdown after a gymnastics competition.

The grotesque had done its job and fended off a mortal enemy of the cathedral. This… was madness.

Just as he decided to quit, to surrender to his better judgment, he heard voices right beneath the spot where he clung on, trying to remain motionless. Two workmen. He could not make out what they were saying. It didn’t matter. He had just become certain his current plan would fail. At best, it would only cause a small fire, and then security would be tightened. If he were caught, even if he managed to weasel out of criminal charges, they would watch him for years. He would have no chance to try again.

He had to get down. But he could not. Those two down there were chatting while having a smoke; they would see him. No story he could make up would clear him. There had to be twenty police on the other side of the church.

The gargoyle leered at him. One of its eyes was crumbling in. It mocked him.

Before he knew what he was doing, his feet and hands became energized and moved of their own accord. He was climbing higher. Where moments before was only bare man-made escarpment, he now found crevices and handholds.

As he hauled himself up, there came to him a glorious sight. Tight under the lead-clad roof was a hole. A stone mason had removed a portion of the upper wall. That fitted stone had disintegrated beyond repair, and a replacement stone was probably in a workshop being cut to the precise shape.

Just as he was marveling at his find, a bee started buzzing around his head. Then another, and another. He held his breath. If they stung… If he yelled out… He did not even want to look down at the workmen below. He shut his eyes. No matter what happened, he must not cry out.

The bees went back to their hive. He had completely forgotten that some eco-maniac had convinced the church to install a bee hive on the roof of Notre Dame. He took a deep breath and returned his gaze into the space underneath the roof.

The opening was just wide enough for his shoulders. A larger man would not have fit. A heavier man would not have been able to climb the scaffolding. In his self-congratulatory joy he forgot about the two men below who had a minute ago so tormented him. He squeezed through into the space between the lead roof above and the inner stone ceiling of the cathedral below. As his eyes adjusted he saw he was inside a vaulted stack comprised of hundreds of tons of dry timber, the Forest.

This was where the fire had to take root. This mass of centuries-old virgin oak was as perfectly arranged as the kindling of any bonfire. The tapestries and other apparently flammable items in the public areas below were false temptations. While the smoke and initial flames might be frightening and dramatic, any blaze which started down in the main floor of the cathedral would be detected and killed before it had time to blossom.

His fire, the healing fire he and humanity needed, had to begin small in a place which was well-ventilated. That way, early puffs of smoke would dissipate and confuse the cathedral’s smoke detector devices while at the same time the tiny adolescent flames would have enough fuel and be fed enough oxygen to spur exponential growth.

A conviction, like the moral contained in a parable or a folk tale, came to him like an epiphany. The genius of destruction had at least to be equal to the thing that was being destroyed. As soon as he thought this, his self-doubts dissipated entirely. He could be the Da Vinci of annihilation.

The darkness under the cave-like roof was shot through by the dull flaring light coming from a few hanging bulbs. He ignored them. As with the tapestries below, they were not the source of ignition he needed in order to inflict the most damage and—Oh, that it might be so!—even cause the utter destruction of this monument to wickedness.

Pausing, he heard only the wind. The massive oak pillars had been hewn nearly a thousand years ago out of trees that were up to five hundred years old when they were felled. As though they sensed doom was upon them, they groaned.

In the Forest the stale air made the space shrink like a shadowy cloister around his white-swathed form. He crept along. A little bit farther… bit farther… He ducked under crossbeams, pausing at any sound.

The benefit of there being a bare minimum of electrical devices up here was he faced no risk of additional security measures such as cameras or motion detectors. Under the huge rafters, there was nothing to steal, nothing but Notre Dame itself. He ducked around a final fat square post and found it. There was the spot.

He ducked down, leaned over, and hung like an ungainly bat under one of the fat oak beams. The surface was ideal—under his fingers, the wood felt powdery with age. He pulled out the rags he had brought and spread them flat. Onto these he poured the linseed oil from his flask. He soaked the material, squeezed it, then soaked it again to make sure it was completely saturated.

His feverish mind had a final insight. He twisted the fat rag into a coil. It looked like a piece of dough or a seashell. He had the idea that this shape, a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor was φ, the golden ratio, would somehow increase the exothermic reaction of the linseed oil as it dried.

The fissure in the beam was shaped like a V. It gaped open like a sideways mouth, as though it were asking to be filled up. He thrust in the oil-soaked rags.

Virgin oak no more, Notre Dame, you unholy bitch. You are defiled!

He spread the remainder of the oil above and below the crevice. That was it. No fancy timer, no exotic explosives or chemicals, no smoldering fuse taper. Just basic chemistry and ingenuity. He looked again at the electrical cables.

His backup plan had been to take a resistor from his telephone charger and lay it across some frayed wires near a plug. This was not necessary, since he had found his Holy Cleft and made his offering. A resistor would have heated up very quickly and attracted unwanted attention. The linseed plan needed time but would yield the more bountiful fruit. It had to, after all he had suffered and risked, it had to.

For a desperate moment, he thought of a third backup plan: to remain inside the Forest as the cathedral burned. If the linseed oil didn’t work, he could start the fire with the resistor, fighting anyone who came up to put it out. In a short while, the smoke would be dense enough and the flames hot enough that no one without full firefighting gear would be able to breathe up where he perched. He saw himself emerging from the secret opening in the stone wall, climbing not down but up, up over the lead roof as it melted under his feet, crawling over to the base of the spire, his hands blistering as he climbed the burning wooden lattice, and upon reaching the top, spitting with his last breath a thick gob of sputum upon the Cross on its very top and watching it hang and sizzle there as the flames rose to consume everything.

As seductive as that vision was, the practical side of his brain rejected it. There were too many variables. His initial improvised plan had gone extremely well, adding in complications could ruin everything.

He exited the way he had entered. The workmen below the scaffolding had finished their smoke. Cigarette butts were ground down within heel marks. It was nearly three p.m.

Back inside the portable toilet, he resolved to only come out after the cathedral closed or if something delightful happened. Cameras may have picked him up in his street clothes entering the grounds, and he wanted to mix in with a crowd moving away from the church.

Flies buzzed around the opening in the roof. It was boring. He had not brought any electronic devices for fear of them being tracked. Once, the door rattled, but the fellow moved on and did his lengthy business in the next stall over. The noise of Paris traffic filtered through.

He might have dozed off. The chirping of an alarm roused him, and he nearly fell off the plastic seat of the commode. It was 6:20. Notre Dame was scheduled to close at 6:45. With excitement that pierced through the dullness his sleep-deprived lethargy and dehydration, an overwhelming thought surfaced. Could he have actually brought a fiery rapture to the heart of Paris?

As it dried, linseed oil underwent an exothermic reaction capable of igniting dry wood. In that dark cranny, he had left a taper of the soaked rags hanging out and exposed to air, with the rest wadded up to feed the cumulative heat reaction.

For the hundredth time as he parade to exit the latrine, he checked that he had not dropped anything. It was less risky taking the white overalls with him than discarding them. They were covered with his sweat, his DNA, wood dust from the Forest, and drippings of flammable oil.

He opened the door a crack and snuck a glance. The exiting crowd after closing hour would have been sufficient cover, but the mass of people rushing out at the sound of the first fire alarm was even more perfect. He joined them.

Once he got out to the side of Île de la Cité, his joy and excitement were shattered. No flames. Not even smoke. He feared the small fire gestating in the womb of the great hollow whore had been found and aborted before it could flourish. He paced back and forth, his mind jittering between despair and derangement. People were going back into the cathedral.

No!

He had failed. The shame and shock lanced through him as though a spear had gutted him. He had to do something. Should he run to a petrol station, douse himself with gasoline, set himself on fire, and run into the place?

While he was still standing, trembling in horrified indecision, the sirens sounded again. Just past seven o’clock, the first fire brigades arrived. Smoke rose from under the roof. The first puffs were as white as those that issued from the Vatican signaling the election of a new pope.

He had watched the first flames lick the base of the wooden spire, marveling at the sight. He stood with his back to the river and basked in the wafting heat and the charcoal incense of smoke billowing merrily over centuries-old timber. He imagined an army of sprites, orange devourers literally eating the past, cleaning the rot, draining the open sore that was the cathedral and the savage cult it represented.

Birds had flown past. The wind whipped the flames up higher and higher. Still, the spire supporting the crucifix was not engulfed. He had imagined the avians were his accomplices and could spew flammable shit on the bonfire to help make the destruction complete.

He forgot his surroundings. He became unconscious of where he was standing or even that he was standing. He must have been backing up toward the river, appearing to be overwhelmed by the sight of the disaster.

“Est-ce que ça va?”

A woman’s voice.

She must have thought he was about to faint or stumble and fall into the water. The only shock he felt was how beautiful this horror was, his horror. His would-be savior stood in front of a line of red-suited silver-helmeted firefighters. She was a mousy gray woman. Her face was blemished with tears and mascara, which looked like soot, as though she had pushed her face into his bonfire and tried to quench the flames with her hopeless sorrow.

She asked again how he was.

He was, indeed, a bit light-headed. The woman, a paramedic or amateur volunteer, ushered him to the back of the gathered onlookers. He took the bottle of water he was offered. When he looked up, he was alone in the crowd.

He drank the water greedily. Then the flames called him back.

As he watched the rooftop pyre, his joy was fed by the lamenting agony of the crowd. The only thing that went awry was the skill of the firefighters.

If only they had blasted the roof with high-pressure water, then the flames and hot gases would have been reflected inwards, as in a blast furnace. The lead outer roof was melting in silver rivulets. Underneath the oak crossbeams was the vaulted inner roof of Notre Dame, which was made of stone.

During the height of the blaze, this inner roof would have superheated. A blast of water would have cracked and shattered the stone, bringing the whole edifice down. If only the rib vaulting of the nave had been compromised, then the walls and the repugnant stained-glass windows in them would have fallen in a noisome heap.

He did not move from his spot until all hope of Notre Dame’s total collapse was lost. His excitement had melted into disappointment but then was replaced by a growing, gnawing cold fear. He would be caught.

Everything was videotaped these days. He would be caught, humiliated. He would be declared insane, and his greatest punishment would be his inability to express why he had done it. They, the Parisians, Christians, Europeans, all of them, were not worthy to hear his true motives.

For the next few weeks after the fire, he felt like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He awoke with a start in the night, thinking he could sense a RAID anti-terror squad just outside his door, waiting for the signal to break it down.

He waited. And waited.

After two months, feigning the curiosity that was common to all Parisians, he asked a friend who had a connection with the National Police about the investigation. They hadn’t a clue. Even better, they did not want one. This was only a few years after the Islamic massacres at Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo. In the space of two years, two thousand churches had been burned or vandalized. During Mass, two Muslims wearing explosive belts had gone up to an eighty-five-year-old priest and slit his throat.

With all the problems over migration, the Yellow Vest protests, and the pension strikes, the country’s politicians did not need another headache. The fire at Notre Dame was caused by an errant cigarette or an electrical overload. The Élysée Palace told the public to choose which explanation made them happiest and stop asking questions.

He was safe. But his elation was cut short by the shame of failure. Perhaps, he had thought, what he had failed to achieve through flames he could achieve another way.

Through the architectural department of his multinational employer, he had proposed that a modern glass tower with a non-denominational aspect replace the symbols of shame which had been swept away to lie with the other remains of colonial genocide and Christian imperialism.

He had hoped the hardline Salafist Muslims would force a shrine to Islam to rise in the place of Notre Dame. During a trip to Saudi Arabia he suggested as much to leading Sunni architects. They might even keep the name. His research revealed Biblical Mary was the only woman mentioned by name in the holy Quran.

But the Arabs proved weak and disorganized, and they fought endlessly among themselves. If a grand vision for the continent was to succeed, some other group would have to be found. A group with means, organization, and above all, unyielding iron will.

In the end, it was the Pangeans who found him.

Through all the intervening years, despite the help of the globalist cabal, despite being raised up to success and power beyond anything an amateur arsonist could hope for, the incomplete destruction of Notre Dame remained his greatest failure.

*

Twelve years after the fire, on the avenue that night, the man looked up at the reconstruction scaffolding. He longed to stop the restoration work but dared not.

It could have been—

“Joyeuses Pâques, monsieur!”

At first this chirpy noise did not penetrate the depth of his dark mood.

“Joyeuses Pâques,” the cheery child’s voice persisted. Happy Easter.

He looked up. A small girl. Her skin was brown like a Syrian. There were many living on the streets. This one and her mother, or nanny, were clean and well dressed. Both wore matching designer overcoats. The man thought she must be about nine years old. She was beaming at him and holding out one of the Easter handbills like the one he had kicked into the river.

The woman, leading the girl by her hand, smiled cautiously, probably recognizing him but being too polite to gawk. It was late for them to be out; the pair continued walking in the opposite direction. He smiled and nodded and turned away.

A Stygian mist, only perceptible to him, descended. There was a “tink” sound like the stem of a brittle, hollow champagne glass breaking. It was audible only inside the man’s eardrums. Something snapped. Something which had been stretched tighter and tighter by the sight of the rebuilt cathedral, the memories of his efforts to burn it and all the frustrations of the intervening years. At the sight and sound and smell of the little girl, it snapped.

Caught between utter hopelessness and boundless rage, his mind felt as though it were sinking into quicksand. As brilliant sharp fragments of impotence blew away into the night, he saw. It was not that there was nothing to be done. There was everything to do.

It would start tonight, with a deconsecration.

A line of halogen arc lights aimed upwards to illuminate the cathedral, he walked behind them. There, he would be invisible to the woman and the girl now walking along the river. He signaled to his chief aide. All of the people with him tonight were fanatically loyal Pangeans. He would trust no one else to guard his melancholy walks.

He gave orders. His aide-de-camp’s lips compressed and blanched slightly, not with shock—they had collaborated on much more dangerous exploits—but with resolute determination to precisely fulfill his instructions.

By the time he had walked around to the front of Notre Dame Cathedral, the officers normally on duty outside had vanished. He strode through the forecourt under the gaze of the statue of the Virgin and her cupbearers, which stood in front of the west rose window.

The main doors were open wide.

Bas-relief sculptures watched mutely as he passed inside. The big oak door creaked shut behind him. The building, for all its fame, was not large. This was no St. Peter’s Basilica. Fifty paces took him to the transept.

Right here, he thought, looking up to the shadow-shrouded ceiling, where his glorious fire had reached its highest point. Right there, it had risen and consumed the crucifix-bearing spire. Then it had been prematurely put out, its purifying work unfinished.

Restoration work continued, and might for another decade. Tradesmen argued with stonemasons who had running feuds with carpenters. All were ants, he knew, squabbling on a snowball that was about to melt under their feet.

He kept walking slowly to the east, the cardinal direction most associated with his fellow light bringer, Lucifer Morningstar.

The task he had given his people was not difficult, but he did not want to embarrass them by making them rush. He paused, looking at the dimly lit place and smelling the musty air. Was that perfume? Had some evening Mass attendee sprayed herself so heavily that the air still reeked of her scent hours later?

He approached the high altar. Perfume was replaced by a dank wet smell. When had it rained last? How badly was the new roof leaking? He looked straight ahead; something was laid out on the altar. It lay very still.

There she was. His special sacrament was waiting. The small Easter celebrant, the girl from the walkway, lay on the cold stone. She lay still, naked and dead.

It’s wrong. The thought gripped him, and he twisted to one side, running to a pillar and bracing himself against it. His fingers clawed at the tapestry. He prized them off and motioned for his aide. It was wrong. Open or closed, he did not want to look at the girl’s eyes or her mouth. He knew her eyes might be open, sightlessly staring. Even her mouth might reveal tiny teeth and even a little lolling tongue. No!

He hissed instructions to his man. He waited, his heart pounding, his hands dripping with sweat, staining the delicate woven cloth which hung from the ceiling. After the new activity he had ordered was complete, he righted himself and continued toward the main altar at the end of the cathedral.

Before him lay a perfect grotesque to shock all the chimera and stone serpents above. It would have been embarrassing not to be able to rise to the occasion and perform the ritual. During the brief pause, he had inhaled a fast-acting Avanafil compound. It was already working. The holy scepter between his legs was begging to be freed from its restraints.

The altar was a bit high for him to achieve the correct angle. His people had thoughtfully put a wooden step stool in the appropriate position. He climbed up and looked down.

The body of the girl was thinner than he had imagined when she was clothed and alive. Virtually hairless, of course. The man studied an odd downy hair pattern which began above her small delicately indented navel and reached down toward her pubic area, which was now revealed between her widely spread skinny legs.

Without preamble or lubrication, he thrust himself in. One of the girl’s hands flopped limply over the side of the altar. She was dark-skinned but not black. The small nipples on her prepubescent breast buds were brown, offset by a mole of the same shape and size on the left side of her ribcage.

As he penetrated the freshly killed girl’s corpse his mind wandered. What were they, her and her mother? Syrian? Iraqi? When they came to France had they been immaculate and pure? It did not matter. Somehow, Europe had infected them. All the man could hope to do now was purify… purify… purify.

Fixated on completing the sacrament of deconsecration, he stared at the space above her bony shoulders. Nothing stared back up at him. The girl’s head had been neatly severed from her body, almost at the line of her collarbone. Only a stump remained.

Due to some fluke of anatomy, with each braced thrust of his rock-hard penis, the corpse’s diaphragm worked on her lungs and expelled a moiety of air through her cleaved windpipe. The sloppy, hissing gurgle sounded like:

“Jouy-esssse… Jouy-sesssse…”

*

He stood, sweating and shuddering, in front of the great crucifix and the altar. He cleaned his cock off with a handkerchief moisturized with oleo-limestone liniment. Swift and quiet hands were taking the girl’s body away.

Assisted by the powerful erection drug, he was still hard. He considered deconsecrating the dead body of the woman who had been with the girl, the mother or the nanny. He discarded the idea and stuffed his throbbing manhood sideways into his pants. The adult woman was too old, too defiled, and too used up to be purified. Much like Europe, she was an irredeemable corpse.

After the ceremony, the man left Notre Dame revived, refreshed, and renewed. He barely remembered the girl’s headless remains splayed naked on the altar. But etched in his mind, like the faces of the stone saints in the entrance of Notre Dame, were the expressions of his loyal Pangeans as they had watched.

They had absolute faith in him that he would lead humanity to a better world. It came to him, like his stunning beautiful orgasm at the culmination of the deconsecration. Somewhere in the recent past he had lost faith in himself, in Pangea. He had to reclaim it. He would reclaim it.

The two bodies would soon be submerged and floating under the dark waters of the Seine. With violent crime and suicides at record highs, who would notice? The Seine was unofficially called La rivière des Cadavres Frais, the River of Fresh Corpses.

He needed to get home before anyone noticed his absence. Yet it seemed wrong to just discard the deconsecrated youngster. He called his man over.

He ordered them to dispose of the woman and the girl’s head, but he had to keep a memento. He told them to reduce and strip the girl’s carcass and add her bones to the New Catacombs.

His grim servant nodded.

He advised them to make certain to be artful, to make her into a pleasant arrangement when they cemented her onto a carefully chosen section of the wall. That was fitting. It was not the little waif’s fault she had become polluted beyond living redemption. No, he thought as he exited the cathedral and stared at the silent river, it was Europe’s fault.

For a few minutes, he walked. The night air did not refresh; it was cloying. Maybe it was the fast-acting erection drug, or his exertions with la petite offrande, or the seed of an idea growing like a tickle in the back of his throat. He inhaled, widening his mouth. Then he struggled to breathe out again. It seemed as though the invasion of stale night air would not let him expel an impossibly big concept.

He became dizzy. It would not do for his security people to see his unsteadiness. There were six established routes by foot along the road back to his home. He chose a seventh.

With a hand signal, he told his minders to stay in the street. He walked into an alley. It was too narrow for cars. The chip embedded in his brainstem let him access a panel painted to look like an electrical transformer station.

Alone, he descended a twisting staircase. Motion sensors activated small footlights as he passed. The tunnel widened until he came upon a leering jamboree of human skulls and thigh bones cemented into the wall.

In these modern sections of the catacombs, some of the bones were old, rescued from the ancient catacombs, which had caved in. Other bones were more recent additions dating from the Vichy era and the subjugation of Algeria.

Large subterranean quarries lay under much of Paris. The limestone blocks taken from there had built much of the city, including Notre Dame. The gaps left by the tunneling had been filled with cemetery bones. Outnumbering the more noisome two million residents of Paris above, the millions of more sedate denizens of Paris below had never been subject to an exact census.

He came upon neat rows of cranial bones. He followed their shiny domes to the gateway of his residence. Around a turn was the entrance to a service elevator. As it carried him past the second floor, he got a whiff from the kitchens. Chef was keeping something hot in case he or his wife requested a late-night meal.

During the ride up to the top floor, he checked the internal surveillance cameras. His wife, Giselle, was asleep. The entrance gates were closed and guarded.

A mullioned panel hissed aside, and the elevator disgorged him onto plush red carpeting. He went straight to his office. His broad, ornate desk was watched over by a secret painting of Belgium’s King Leopold II.

He’d had the work of art falsely authenticated as a lost portrait of a young Jules Verne. The two men, the visionary writer and visionary social engineer, looked very similar. He told visitors that Verne’s perspectives of the future inspired him in his work.

The thought that had stuck him like a pistol shot when that dirty little girl had said those foul words to him reverberated through his skull. He had to make it leave, get it out of his head. The only way was through action.

Twelve years ago, he had made a vile mistake. He thought by destroying a monument he could open people’s eyes. But as he had seen, monuments can be rebuilt as long as there are hands that have the skill and minds that remember. The way forward was not to open people’s eyes but to close them.

He rang for his most trusted and capable administrative assistant. She had thick glasses and birdlike limbs, which reminded him slightly of those belonging to the dead girl on the altar. Her oiled hair was streaked with gray.

After using his own equipment to make sure the room was secure from prying eyes and ears, he gave her a set of very specific instructions. As a high-ranking Pangean, she knew enough not to bring any paper pad or recording instrument. Twelve minutes later, the man asked if everything was clear to her.

"Oui, je comprends parfaitement, Monsieur le Président.”