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Back The Omen Save as PDF
Chapters (16)
  1. The Omen
  2. Epigraph
  3. Preface
  4. Chapter One
  5. Chapter Two
  6. Chapter Three
  7. Chapter Four
  8. Chapter Five
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Chapter Ten
  14. Chapter Eleven
  15. Chapter Twelve
  16. Chapter Thirteen

Students of the Bible had seen it too, the falling into place of biblical symbols that heralded the event that was now at hand. In the form of the Common Market, the Holy Roman Empire had risen, and with the statehood of Israel the Jews had returned to the Promised Land. This, coupled with worldwide famine and the disintegration of international economic structure, demonstrated more than a mere coincidence of events. Clearly it was a conspiracy of events. The Book of Revelations had predicted it all.

As, high in the sky, the black star grew brighter, the chant grew louder, and the basalt center of the planet reverberated with its power. Within the hollowed-out ruins of the ancient city of Meggido, the old man Bugenhagen could feel it, and wept; his scrolls and tablets useless now. And above him on the desert floor outside of Israel the night shift of archaeological students paused in their work, their dirt-sifters falling silent as the ground beneath them began to tremble.

In his first-class seat aboard the 747 bound from Washington to Rome, Jeremy Thorn felt it too and routinely fastened his seat belt, preoccupied with what awaited him below. Even if he had known the reason for the sudden turbulence, it would have been too late. For at that moment, in the basement of the Ospedale Generale in Rome, a stone crushed the head of the child that was meant to be his.

Chapter One

At any given moment there are over a hundred thousand people in airplanes in the sky. It was the kind of statistic that intrigued Thorn, and as he read it in the Skyliner magazine he instantly cleaved the human population between those on the earth and those in the air. Normally he was given to more serious musing, but on this particular flight he grasped at anything to keep his mind off the uncertainty that he was heading for. What the statistic meant was that if suddenly the earth-bound population were to be annihilated, there would be over a hundred thousand of them left aloft, sipping martinis and watching movies, unaware that all had been lost.