Helen
Augustine was an incredibly striking woman. Standing at just over 5 feet 8
inches tall, she was slim, athletic, and distractingly beautiful. Her long hair
was a deep auburn that had previously been described as mesmerising, and she
had the most incredible aquamarine eyes that exploded with intelligence and
tempted you to dive straight into their enchanting clarity. All of this she
seemed to wear with little or no cognisance. The greeting she received from William
Cochrane was not what anyone in the Castle in Dundee had expected. Still, it
was undoubtedly accurate and necessary to turn her particular talents to the
cause she had fought against for several millennia. The collision with the
Challenger Tank had rendered her stricken with acute amnesia, and the men who
had gathered together from all over the world were determined that this most
important and dangerous of adversaries would become an ally.

“Helen Augustine, Elena de-Augustine, Flavia
Julia Helena, or is it Elena de-Borgia, amongst many others I could mention,
but we don’t have time. You are over three thousand years old and were once the
most feared graduate from the Consurgian battle school called the Ataraxia. The
deaths of millions of innocents are the direct consequences of both your and
your father’s actions over time. It was you who encouraged the avaricious
Guillaume de-Nogaret, King Philip of France’s serpentlike litigator, to write the
false charges and accusations made against the Knights Templar that led to so
many brave and innocent brothers being burned alive. By influencing Emperor
Constantine, you ensured that the Holy Roman Empire flourished unhindered in
its desire to bring its people under religious control. At the same time, in
325, both you and your father were enthusiastically instrumental in the
behind-the-scenes machinations before, during and after the Council of Nicea.
As a result of this first conclave, Jesus suddenly became divine and the Son of
God, so yes, by committee. Less than ten days ago, in a hospital in Ireland,
you killed a man for information, in return for the receipt of which you
offered the IRA two Barrett Heavy Machine Gun point 50 high-velocity sniper
rifles. As it turned out, you were in London overnight and then in the
Southwest of England to visit a rather odd couple, but you got what you wanted.
You extracted information from them that would have led you to a courageous man
you would have killed without thought. If it weren’t for the fact that you
somehow managed to hit a seventy-ton main battle tank almost head-on at 70mph,
your long spree of malice, deceit, intrigue, and senseless violence would have
continued unabated. I have been the leader of a team trying to prevent you and
your father from finding something extremely precious that we hid many years
ago. We now only wish that you could accept the truth of your past and work
with us to end this blight on civilisation. Now that’s quite enough from me.
Let’s sit you down, and Roger will get us all a nip of the 1926.”

“Look, Tom, you get caught, you die. It’s as simple as
that. Only a handful of people have ever survived the Nutting Squad. It’s a
one-way ticket to a roadside in South Armagh, wearing a black bin bag and a
nine mill round in the back of your head. You go in this time, and Devlin will
send you for your tea for sure.”

“I only have this one chance to get confirmation.”  

“You’re too close for my liking.” Miller often
betrayed his roots when he was annoyed; it was one of the things that made him
more human. Intelligence was such a sterile profession for the most part. For
Tom Hampton, it was a release, a passage of discovery.

Prior Esquin
de Floyran of Beziers was to be described years later as a villain who sought
to save himself from imprisonment and an imminent death sentence by raising malevolent
allegations against the Knights Templar. This was in the autumn of 1307. The
former prior was ruthless and ambitious and was to be, in the years that
followed, one of the official torturers of his former fellow Templars in Paris.
Unbeknownst to the men who had sought shelter and respite at Micy, the
accusations he had made a month or so earlier were of great value to the
corrupt King. The allegations he had vindictively levelled resulted in spies
being sent to infiltrate the Order throughout France. Anywhere en route to the
Citadel and port at La Rochelle was very near the top of their target list. 

On 7th June
1917 at 03:10hrs exactly, right across the Messines Ridge, the earth shattered
as millions of tons of earth were disgorged hundreds of feet into the air on
the tips of enormous tongues of flame. Clods of earth the size of cars flew
into the now orange and blue sky, spiralling upward in lazy parabolas, then
falling into the maelstrom below. 
Plumer’s plan had worked, and thousands of troops moved off, their ears
ringing, their dry mouths full of soil, and their nostrils stinging with
ammonium nitrate into battle. Sapper Thomas Lloyd was to comment later that the
strangest sight he had ever seen as daylight flooded into the grim battlefield,
as the Infantry pushed on, Lloyd and the rest of his Engineer section came
across a sight which astounded them all. Deep within the crater, exposed upon a
ledge, sat four German officers at a table; one stood against the wall, still
smiling. The concussion from the blast had killed them all.