The Dead Sea Deception

52

The thing about despair was that it didn’t move. It stayed right where it was, like a train abandoned on a siding.

Tillman had avoided despair for thirteen years, simply by virtue of having an agenda. There were things that needed to be done, and he did them, going from A to B to C with ruthless focus and inexhaustible patience. It might even look impressive from the outside — some kind of achievement, some great act of will — but in fact it was just his refuge, his salvation.

Now, suddenly, he had nothing to do. Michael Brand was dead and the trail was cold. Maybe Kennedy could keep her Rotgut investigation alive by mining something out of those discs and papers, but it seemed impossible now, that the trail would lead him anywhere close to Rebecca and his children.

They weren’t even children any more. Grace, the youngest, would be in high school now, discovering make-up and rock music and boys. Actually, she would have discovered those things already: the thresholds shifted, decade by decade, so that girls and boys started becoming women and men that much earlier.

Rebecca was old. Or dead. The children were adults. Or dead. The bridge was out. The case was closed. The end of the line.

And at the end of the line, in the exact same place where it had always been, was that windowless train. It had never moved, in all those years. It had just stood on the siding, waiting for him to get on board.

In a rented room in a damp-stewed B&B in a grimy west London suburb, Tillman sat on the bed, the gun in his lap. It had six rounds in it, but only out of pure habit. He was thinking of firing just one.

It had taken him a while to get to this point. Kennedy had rung his cellphone often in the first few days; and back then, which already seemed like a long time ago, he’d picked up, spoken to her. She told him about her suspension, and then, almost immediately, about her resignation. It had been the perfect stitch-up, from the way she described it. If she stayed in the force, the investigation into Combes’s death would reveal enough procedural irregularities to justify handing a dossier to the CPS and asking them to consider a prosecution against Kennedy for criminal negligence and possibly even manslaughter. If she agreed to stand down and to sign a confidentiality agreement, her DCI had told her, they wouldn’t come after her. They wanted her gone more than they wanted her hurting. Far more than either, they wanted an end to media speculation and some room to breathe.

So Kennedy had said yes, and she’d signed, and then she’d worked out her few last days in what she called ‘the bear pit’, closing off and handing over cases, clearing out her desk, performing the ritual obsequies over the death of her own career. She’d had to fight even for this concession: the higher echelons wanted her gone immediately, and would have preferred her to serve out her notice at home, but Kennedy stubbornly insisted on walking all the stations of her personal cross.

That, at least, was how her fellow detectives viewed her continuing presence in the division. And some of them gave her a grudging respect for that; but at a distance, as befits someone who’s seen two partners into the grave inside of a fortnight. Nobody wanted to help Kennedy make the hat-trick.

Kennedy allowed them to think what they wanted, while she used up favours, abused reporting protocols and raided other people’s files at a rate that would have been suicidal if there was any chance at all of her still being there when the chickens came back to the homestead. If anybody asked, she was just tidying up. She did exactly enough tidying up to make the cover story stick.

The most important — and the most flagrantly illegal — thing she did was to find out where Professor Emil Gassan was being kept, and to forward him the copy she’d made of the Dovecote disc. She added a brief covering letter in which she asked Gassan, if he succeeded in unravelling any meaning from the files on the disc, to request a meeting with her. The request had to come from him and it had to come while she was still nominally a cop. Also, it had to come through Specialist Ops, the department that had found the safe house for the professor and was looking after him there. Unlike Central, Specialist Ops wouldn’t necessarily know about the axe impending over Kennedy and would have no particular reason to check. She could hope, at least, that they would put the request through to her directly, rather than via the DCI.

All of this, Tillman got from Kennedy in the first couple of weeks after the night of the Dovecote fire. He couldn’t remember now what he himself had been doing during those two weeks: couldn’t remember weather, meals, places, or any significant action that he’d performed. He was running down, using up the last of the stored energy that had got him this far.

After the second week, he stopped picking up the phone. Kennedy kept calling, kept leaving messages. He put the phone on silent, threw it out of sight, maybe into a drawer. Somebody moved, outside the door of his room, and a little later in the room next door. He heard a scratching at the base of the wall, almost too faint to catch. It couldn’t have been Kennedy, checking up on him, because he’d never given her — or anyone — an address. Then again, she was a detective, and she’d turned out to be pretty good at her job, so maybe she’d found a through-line to him. That meant he should move, at once: if Kennedy could do it, his enemies could do it, too.

He stayed put, and waited. He didn’t admit to himself what he was waiting for, until it became apparent that nothing was going to happen.

He was waiting for death: for the pale killers to smash the door down and cut his throat, or shoot him, or do whatever they felt like doing to take him off the map. That would have been neat, and logical, and it would have saved him the effort of thought and action. Thought and action seemed to be all but beyond him now. Or maybe he’d struggled so hard, for so long, against the obvious, that his own stubbornness, like a canker grown up inside him, had frozen him in an attitude of denial and defiance. So now, when all he wanted to do was close his eyes for ever, he couldn’t bend to take the obvious and necessary steps.

Time kept passing, brought nothing. More and more nothing, piling up around and inside him, as though the room were the interior of his mind and this a continuum that went on endlessly, within him, beyond him, level upon level. The man sitting on the bed: zoom in, find on the curved surface of his retina the man sitting on the bed.

Six bullets in the gun. The empty speed-loader in his left hand. Fastidious — it was hard to source them in a size that matched the Unica’s configuration — he reached out to put the loader on the bedside table. He misjudged the distance: it fell on the floor at his feet, rolled under the bed and clunked up against something there.

He raised the gun, stared into its single black eye.

But the speed-loader was out of sight now. It would be missed. Lost. Probably never matched up with the Unica again. Why should that even bother him? Was he looking for an excuse to live?

Slowly, ponderously, as though he had to remember all over again how to move, he rose from the bed and knelt to reach under it. His hand closed, not on the speed-loader, but on the phone. So that was where it had ended up. He stared at the thing, reminded of a past life in which it had had a function.

Amazingly, the phone still had some charge left in it. On the tiny screen inset into its lid, a figure danced: a cartoon unicorn, trailing a cartoon banner that read, ‘YOU HAVE NEW MESSAGES’.

The figure blurred suddenly. Tillman was blinded by tears, ambushed by a sudden, peremptory grief that ransacked and dismantled him. Mr Snow was drowned. So was the little girl who had once held fiercely on to Mr Snow as she fell asleep, raising him like a grubby bulwark against the cares and fears of the world. He’d let her down in the end. Everything had let her down, in the end. He knew, then, with a terrible certainty, that she was dead: that they were all dead. Rebecca. Jud. Seth. Grace. If they were anywhere in the world, he would have found them. He had been fleeing for thirteen years from this one, simple admission. Now it swirled through him in filaments like ink through water, and as he stood, as he straightened up, that small movement stirred the blackness, spread it to every corner of his being.

He pressed the gun to his forehead.

But with dark-adjusted eyes, he saw the room differently. He saw, at that pivotal moment, the anomaly, the new thing: it was a note, slipped under his door. He crossed to it and picked it up.

It was not a note. It was a photograph. Rebecca. Rebecca in her late teens or early twenties. He knew her at once, even though he had never known her at that age. Rebecca sitting at a table on a café terrace, people walking by in the background, down a wide street. The light was strange, greyed out as though a storm was coming. Rebecca ducked her head shyly and grinned, hiding from the camera but knowing that the shot would be taken anyway.

The shot. The synchronicity dizzied him.

It was as though he heard the camera shutter, snickering suggestively as it cut a single moment of time out of the endless ebb tide; as it made the transient eternal and immutable.

He wouldn’t hear the bullet, though. Not unless consciousness adhered to pulped brain tissue. Eternity was waiting, and it was almost out of patience.

He turned the photo over. On the back, in a small, neat script, five words were written.

She said you wouldn’t stop.

There was an interim. What it consisted of, Tillman didn’t know. He punched something: the wall, or a door, or a piece of furniture. He punched it repeatedly, until hammering and shouted protests were coming from above, below and across the corridor.

It wasn’t enough. The pain in his hands was starting to cut through the fog and the ink and the dullness, but it was too far away. He had to connect himself to the world again, before the world went away.

He punched out the window and selected a piece of broken glass of a size that he could conveniently hold. He used it to make incisions in his arms and chest, judging the depth of the cuts judiciously so that no nerves or major arteries were severed.

Some progress there.

He heard shouts in the hallway outside his room and someone banged on the door for a long time but finally gave up and went away.

Tillman lifted the glass to the level of his eye, stared at his own blood, dripping from the narrow end. He used that map to find himself: in the red and the mess and the dangerous ruck, not the clarity of the nothing ever.

The photo. And the phone. You have new messages, said Mr Snow. You have new messages from your dead wife.

He found the phone again and pressed the voicemail key.

Kennedy’s voice. ‘Leo, there’s something I have to tell you …’

‘When the messages had all played out, Tillman sat in silence on the bed, staring at the furious red gashes on his arms.

Kennedy’s message and Rebecca’s smile roiled behind his eyes: not ink now, but oil and water. Oil and water didn’t mix.

Kennedy said that Michael Brand was the changing symbol of something that endured. Not a man but a mask that any man could wear and then throw aside.

Through the words on the photo, Michael Brand had said, Come and find me.

Tillman got up, on legs that trembled a little, and began, slowly, methodically, to do a number of things that needed to be done.

He found the speed-loader and put it back in the duffle bag where he carried all the weaponry and ammo that weren’t on his person at a given time.

He checked that there were indeed six bullets in the Unica. He’d been so far away for so long that he couldn’t be entirely sure without verifying by eye. He was thinking that he might live after all, and so it mattered again that the gun was in working order.

He showered — he stank like something dead — and shaved off what might be a month’s growth of beard.

He left the rented room for the first time in however long it was, found a cheap restaurant and ate until he was no longer hungry. It didn’t take long: the ravenous appetite he felt when he sat down turned out to be one easily sated by a few crumbs. His hand shook a little as he ate. He’d have to rebuild his strength, but that was a practical problem and he knew how to go about it.

Back in the room, he read the Gassan files that Kennedy had sent him, and familiarised himself with what she’d learned about the Judas tribe.

Last of all, he picked up the phone again and placed a call.

‘Leo!’

‘Hoe gaat het met jou, Benny?’

‘Could be better, could be worse. It’s not like you to keep the same number for so long, Leo. You’re still in Britain? How did things go there? Did you manage to get some face time with Mr Brand?’

‘Not yet, Benny. But maybe soon. Maybe very soon.’

‘Well, that’s maybe good news, then.’ Vermeulens’ tone was cautious.

‘In the meantime, I was hoping you could do me a favour.’

‘This I had guessed, Leo.’

Tillman found he was ashamed. ‘On the far side of this,’ he said, ‘if it turns out I’m still alive, I’ll make it up to you, Benny. I’m close to … something. Something big. But I’ve got to travel again, and Suzie — Insurance — isn’t selling to me right now. I think if you offered to buy on my behalf, she might make an exception.’

‘What was it you wanted?’

‘Basic package. A passport, to my spec. Credit card in the same name with a couple of thousand ready to draw. Legend and supporting papers good enough to stand up to more than one glance.’

‘That’s not a small favour, Leo.’

‘I’m good for the money. I can pay upfront by a wire transfer from the Dominican account.’

‘I don’t think about the money. I think about my job.’

‘Nobody ever gets to know.’

‘From you, perhaps, nobody ever gets to know. You can’t make the same guarantees for anybody else.’ A silence fell between them. Tillman didn’t push: he knew there was nothing he could say that would influence Vermeulens’ decision, and he didn’t want to twist the man’s arm any further than he already had just by asking.

‘Something big,’ Vermeulens said at last. ‘Big enough that this might be over finally, for you? Or only big in being a station on the way to something bigger?’

Tillman thought about the gun, and the first bullet in the gun. ‘It will be over,’ he said. ‘One way or another, this will finish it.’

‘Then I’ll do what I can. Stay by the phone, Leo.’

‘Thanks, Benny.’

‘Remember what you owe me is nothing. But this … perhaps this is the last nothing.’

53

In Ginat’Dania, there were no seasons. Every day was like every other day, untouched by tempest, changeless as God’s countenance: a piece of eternity, fallen into the fallen world but still perfect, still miraculous.

It had been five years since Kuutma had last been home. He stood out now, like a stranger, and as he walked up the grand alley to the Em Hadderek, all eyes flicked round to stare at him. At his aberrantly dark skin. At his gait, his movements, the expressions that crossed his face. All were wrong in gross or subtle ways, and since he was clearly not a woman, he could not be of the Kelim: the wrongness marked him out as one thing, and one thing only. Everyone he passed bowed to him, or saluted him, or murmured the ‘Ha ana mashadr’ — ‘We sent you out’ — as he passed, touching his shoulders lightly with the fingers of their right hands. Kuutma took this as his due and kept on walking.

But just as they saw his strangeness, he saw theirs: he felt the raw tension in the air, a mood of expectation, half-fearful and half-enthralled. Kuutma didn’t like it. It betokened change, here in this place that was immune to change. It troubled him and it reproached him.

From the Em Hadderek he turned left, past the farm sheds and the animal pens, the shops of Talitha, then the place of gathering. Just beyond was the Sima, where the elders met. Kuutma walked directly to its door, where four men of huge girth and slab-solid muscle stood. He saluted them with the ritual words. ‘Ashna reb nim t’khupand am at pent ahwar’: I have returned to the house from which I set forth.

They gave the proper answer, speaking all in unison, with solemn formality. ‘Besiyata Dishmaya’: with the help of Heaven.

‘I need to speak with them,’ Kuutma said, lapsing into English, the linguistic switch a finessing move, in a sense, reminding the guardians of where he had come from and what he’d done. It made it very difficult for them to say no. Still, they couldn’t have him intrude on the elders without being announced first, and so one went into the Sima while the others stood to attention before Kuutma, in a heavy silence, until their comrade returned and indicated to him that he should go inside.

None of the guards came with him, but two more were standing just inside as he entered, and they fell into step to either side of him. Kuutma went to the Kad Sima, the debating chamber. The vast space was empty apart from the three elders sitting on the dais at its centre.

Kuutma’s honour guard waited at the threshold of the room: they had not been summoned. Kuutma himself genuflected, making the sign of the noose, then walked down the steps to the centre of the room.

The three stern men, two ancient and one still young, watched him come. They did not smile to see him, but they accepted his obeisance with curt answering nods. By tradition, they were known as the Ruakh, the Sheh and the Yedimah: in the language that preceded even the true tongue, these names signified the Oak, the Ash and the Seed of That Which is to Be. Only the last role, that of the Yedimah, could be filled by a man younger than sixty years of age.

The Ruakh spoke first, as tradition required. ‘Kuutma,’ he said, his voice high and a little querulous with extreme age. ‘You’ve struggled against tremendous difficulties. Truly, tremendous difficulties.’ That seemed to be the limit of what he wanted to say. He glanced left and right at his two yokemates, inviting either of them to take up the reins.

‘Unparalleled difficulties,’ the Sheh agreed, dry and caustic. ‘Never in our history have two threats of such magnitude come side by side. Perhaps, Kuutma, that is why you have failed to acquit yourself with your usual thoroughness and attention to detail. Things have been done badly. Things have been done late. Some things have not been done at all, and still need to be looked to.’

Kuutma had no alternative but to bow before the three and accept the censure. Feeling a tremor in some part of himself that could not physically shake — his soul, perhaps — Kuutma knelt.

‘Revered ones,’ he said, his eyes on the ground, ‘I carried out my duties as well as I was able. If that was not enough, your servant humbly begs pardon.’

‘The scholars in England,’ the Sheh allowed, ‘were dealt with expeditiously. And yet, as it transpires, you left loose ends even there. The man, Tillman, you neglected until he became a canker. The American was killed in a way that guaranteed scrutiny. An entire plane brought down, and hundreds killed! Most unforgivably, the woman — the police sergeant, from London — has now been allowed to put these things together. When she went to the United States, it should have been obvious to you at once that her death outweighed all other tasks then depending upon you. You should have killed her yourself, not trusted the task to the youngest and least experienced of your Elohim.’

Still kneeling, Kuutma allowed himself to look up into the face of his accuser.

‘I recommended thirteen years ago that Tillman be killed,’ he pointed out. ‘I was overruled, Elders, because your predecessors did not see him as a threat. His survival is the random factor that has bedevilled so many of our recent actions. The policewoman, for example, would have died had she not had Tillman with her. And the information Tillman brought allowed her to make the link to the operation in America.

‘As for the downing of Flight 124, I gave no such order. The agent I sent to deal with the American was told to kill him before he boarded the plane. He chose instead to destroy the plane and himself with it. It was madness.’

The Yedimah spoke for the first time. ‘Perhaps your agent was inadequately briefed,’ he said, mildly — but underneath the reasonable tone Kuutma discerned an edge.

‘Nehor,’ Kuutma said. ‘Nehor Bar-Talmai. You will remember, Elders, that I asked you to recall him to Ginat’Dania five months ago. I said then that he was coping badly with being in the world, and that I felt his suitability as a Messenger needed to be re-examined.’

‘We remember,’ said the Yedimah. ‘We decided that with proper shepherding — proper guidance — he could grow into the role we had ordained for him. Clearly, at the end, he lacked that guidance. Had you given him more explicit and more practical instructions as to how to deal with the American clerk, he would not have improvised so desperately and made so disastrous a misjudgement. In the end, we believe, it must all come back to Kuutma — the Brand. That, after all, is the significance of the name. Kuutma’s will is a fire, and the marks he leaves on the minds of others are written there as with hot steel.’

Kuutma knew as well as did the Yedimah that this was false etymology. He knew, too, that he could not win this argument: he could not even begin it. ‘Your servant begs pardon,’ he said again.

The Sheh waved his hand in a vague and unconvincing benediction. ‘It is granted,’ he said. ‘Stand, Kuutma. We ask no penitence of you.’

The Yedimah raised an eyebrow at this, as though the Sheh had overstepped the bounds of his authority. ‘We have, however,’ he murmured, ‘determined that this will be the last time you take the field as Kuutma. From now on, your skills will be deployed closer to home.’

Kuutma let no emotion show on his face: he did not even stiffen. But something at once hot like a coal and sharp like a drawn wire ran through his brain. He felt as if he were becoming weightless. ‘Here in Ginat’Dania?’ he asked, so there could be no mistake.

‘In Ginat’Dania,’ said the Sheh. ‘But not here. We prepare for mapkanah.’

It was true, then. Kuutma had known it as soon as he stepped through the gate and felt that tension in the air: the people were preparing to be gone from this place that was their home, and find a new home in a far distant place. This had not been done for two centuries, and then, as now, it was because the location of Ginat’Dania had been compromised. Underneath the pain, underneath the shame that was being heaped on him, Kuutma felt the stirring of a strange joy: the joy of things coming together as they finally must.

‘It is not for me to say,’ he murmured, his eyes cast down again.

The Yedimah breathed through his nose, almost a sniff of indignation. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘It is not. Kuutma, there are those alive who may now know who we are and where we are. Their deaths will be procured, in due course, but as of now their deaths are not even a priority. We have gone beyond such concerns. First, before all else, we must protect the people.’

Kuutma bared his teeth in a snarl, but kept his head bowed so that nobody would see it. ‘They have always been my care, Yedimah.’

‘We know it. And we know you must feel this as a reproach. Still, it must be done, and we must see it done. We look to your support in this, as in everything.’

Kuutma stood. Strictly speaking, he ought to have waited for permission to rise, but this seemed to be a time when protocol bled away into the spaces between thoughts and words, words and deeds. He stared at the Yedimah for a long time in silence, and the Yedimah waited for him to speak. All of them, the Oak and the Ash and the Seed, waited on the words of the Brand.

‘With mapkanah comes maasat, the paying of the balance,’ Kuutma said, stating the obvious.

The Ruakh nodded, once.

‘When?’ Kuutma demanded.

‘Two days from now,’ the Ruakh said.

‘So soon?’

‘So late,’ said the Yedimah, grimly.

Kuutma made the sign of the noose, yielding the point. ‘I want to stay,’ he said. ‘To efface my failure, let me be the one to hold the scales and make sure the balance is paid. Grant me this, Elders, and I will give up my place as Kuutma with a light heart.’

He was holding the Yedimah’s gaze. So many things were hiding in the thicket of that sentence, unspoken, so many shy, skittish meanings. What would it be like if I failed to surrender my place? Or if I did it resentfully, unreconciled? He spoke no word of threat, but his eyes prophesied.

‘The systems are automatic,’ the Yedimah said. ‘It needs no one to be here.’

‘Can a machine deal justly with a man?’ Kuutma intoned, with austere savagery. ‘Can a switch or a lever answer, before God, and say, “This is the balance, this thing is rightly done”? Elders, when a thing becomes possible, it does not therefore become inevitable. Grant me this thing. Let me stay.’

He waited them out.

One by one, they bowed, the Yedimah last of all.

‘You will hold the scales, Kuutma. You will pay the balance.’

He thanked them gravely. They accepted graciously.

And then he went from that place, with a terrible hurt and a terrible hope warring in his breast. He was still Kuutma: until Ginat’Dania ended, and was reborn, he held his name in his hands.

His name and one thing more.

54

It took Tillman a little longer to travel to Arizona than it would have taken anyone else. There were things that needed to be done before he could embark on that journey, and none could be skimped or compressed.

First, he had to collect the documents that Benny Vermeulens had bought on his behalf. Insurance had asked for an insane fee — twenty times higher than she would normally have taken for a package like this — and she’d demanded payment up front. That wasn’t an issue: Tillman had emptied his various accounts and sent the money. But the arrangements for the hand-over were more problematic.

Benny understood that Tillman wouldn’t provide an address or even turn up at a post office box to take receipt of the passport, the credit card and their attendant proofs. He knew, too, that Tillman would be concerned about how far he could trust his weight to the documents, given Insurance’s withdrawal of goodwill.

Benny solved these problems by travelling to London himself on the false passport. He and Tillman were very similar in build, so all that was needed to produce a reasonable resemblance was hair dye and coloured contact lenses. He arranged to meet Tillman at Heathrow, in the Café Rouge in the departure area of Terminal 5. Tillman arrived first, ordered two double espressos and sat with his hands folded in his lap and his gaze fixed on his hands, pondering imponderable things. When the chair opposite him creaked, he looked up.

Benny slid a bulky envelope across the table. He was dressed in a suit of obviously expensive cut. Somehow it made him look less respectable and more dangerous than he’d ever looked in combat fatigues. Or maybe it was his physical impersonation of Tillman that was unsettling. ‘Here, Leo,’ he said. ‘Happy Christmas.’

Leo took the package without examining its contents. Vermeulens had earned that trust a hundred times over. ‘It’s July,’ he pointed out.

Benny shook his head. His jowled face was solemn. ‘December,’ he said. ‘Late December. The turning of the year, when nobody’s really sure whether or not the sun will come back.’

Tillman smiled awkwardly. ‘I didn’t know you were a poet, Benny.’

‘I’m the least poetic man alive, Leo. I’m telling you what you already know. You’re going off to do battle against the forces of darkness and you don’t think you’ll be coming back. That’s the only reason you’re cutting yourself to the bone like this.’

‘The money? I can always get more money.’

‘I meant the tone of your voice when you called me. The look I see in your eye, now that I’m here. Leo, I was on the roster at Xe longer than you were. I’ve seen a lot of men kill themselves in a firefight because they thought it was their time to die. They behave in ways that are …’ he gestured ‘… unsustainable. They forget to watch their backs or secure an exit. They lower their guard because they think their guard is irrelevant.’

‘I’ve seen that, too,’ Tillman agreed. ‘But that’s not me, Benny. I’ll get in, I’ll do the job and then I’ll get out. Like always.’

Benny laughed a funereal laugh. ‘And what’s the job?’

Tillman didn’t answer.

‘Not the same,’ Benny said. ‘Not the same as what it was. Don’t bother to lie to me, Leo. This is a slash-and-burn mission, and the last thing you burn will be yourself. I hope it’s worth it.’

Leo turned the envelope in his hands, feeling its weight and solidity.

‘I think so,’ he said at last. ‘I think it will be.’

Then there was the provisioning, the sourcing of equipment — not in London but in Los Angeles. He didn’t trust Insurance for this. He had his own contacts in America, and although it had been years since he spoke to them, they were still there when he called. Guns? Guns of any size and specification could be obtained. Explosives? Likewise. Electronic eavesdropping items, even of professional standard, were universally available these days, as were crowd control devices like pepper sprays and tear gas. Tillman put together a long list, to be paid for C.O.D.

After that came the journey. Normally, he avoided planes because they were — by definition — enclosed spaces with no exits. Flying put you in the hands of people who might wish you harm. This time he didn’t spare a thought for those concerns. They belonged to a life in which there was a distinction to be made between ‘safe’ and ‘perilous’.

Normally, too, Tillman bore the tedium of long journeys well: he sat still, his mind working through logistical puzzles that needed to be solved. This time his thoughts were locked on a single idea: revenge. He spent the flight in contemplation of that monolithic ambition, like a supplicant kneeling at an altar no one else could see.

He’d paid for reconnaissance, as well as guns and ammunition, so he knew by this time that Arizona state police were holding Heather Kennedy — ex-sergeant — under guard at the Kingman-Butler Hospital in Kingman, Arizona, charged with first-degree murder, impersonating a police officer, false representation and a raft of lesser offences. He’d established the conditions in which she was being held, as well as her injuries and the likelihood that she’d be conscious at any given time of the day or night.

Tillman drove from Los Angeles, in a car hired under the temporary name he’d bought from Insurance. It took the best part of a day, with stops along the way, but it had the advantage of making his precise location difficult to determine, even if Insurance had sold the name and credit card details on to third parties.

From Bullhead City, he called the hospital and demanded to speak to Heather Kennedy. It was a calculated risk. He had to wait while the nurse put him on hold — to check with the police guard, he guessed — then she came back on and asked what this was concerning.

‘A death in the family,’ Tillman said. ‘Her mother. God forbid you keep this from her, ma’am. She needs to know, and it’s her right to know.’

Another wait. Then a gruff state trooper came on the line and asked a few more questions. Mechanically, his thoughts elsewhere, Tillman invented a lingering illness for Kennedy’s mother that had gone through a great many permutations but left her alive long enough to gasp out one final message for her only daughter.

‘Only daughter?’ the cop grunted. ‘Our information is she has a sister. What’s that about?’

‘Half-sister,’ said Tillman. ‘Same father, different mothers.’

‘And you are?’

‘Half-brother. Same mother, different fathers. Listen, does any part of your state or federal law allow you to hold Heather incommunicado? Because if it doesn’t, you should stop asking these stupid questions and just put her on the phone. I’m recording every word of this, officer … what was your name again?’

It turned out his name was ‘Wait a second.’ Tillman waited, and the next voice on the line was Kennedy’s. She sounded groggy and very tired but not drugged into stupor.

‘Who is this?’ she asked. There was a time-delayed echo on her voice: maybe just a bad line, or maybe a bad wire-tap, set up very quickly with no real quality control.

‘It’s Leo.’

A long silence. ‘Tillman.’ More silence. ‘Thank God.’

‘So. Murder? Conspiracy to murder? It’s like I don’t know you any more, girl.’

‘You remember Dovecote Farm?’

‘Sure.’

‘You remember hearing a woman screaming?’

‘Seems like I do.’

‘She did the murdering, and the conspiring, too. The local sheriff will vouch for me, but he’s in deep sedation right now. Bullet wound to the upper torso. He might not pull through. If he doesn’t, there goes my alibi. There was a woman who could have spoken up for me, but she’s dead, too.’

‘Sounds like you’re screwed.’

‘Doesn’t it.’

‘We miss you, Heather. All of us.’

‘All of you?’ She sounded wary. He wondered if she knew that the line was bugged. He’d have to assume that she did. There was no time to finesse this.

‘Me. Freddie. Jake. Little Wendy, with the squint eye. You’re in our thoughts all the time.’

‘I … miss you, too.’

‘You’re just being kind,’ Tillman said. ‘It’s no secret to anyone that you and I haven’t been close in recent times. I want you to know that’s going to change.’

‘Well, you always say that.’

‘I mean it, Heather. I’m going to see you again soon. I promise.’

‘Okay. Whatever.’

‘Are you ready, do you think? To see me again?’

‘Any time, Tillman. Name the day. Name the hour. Or just surprise me.’

‘I guess I’ll surprise you. You, um, you get many visitors there, Heather?’

‘Not that many, no. Just two big burly cops at the door to keep me company, and two more on the main corridor where it branches after the elevators.’

‘They don’t want you to go wandering off and get lost.’

‘Evidently. But in case I do, there’s always the GPS tag locked to my ankle.’

‘I see. Well, at least you’re among fellow cops. You guys can all sit around and talk shop.’

‘My shop’s a corner store in Queen’s Park. Theirs is a strip mall in Monument Valley. You’d be amazed how little …’

Her voice faded out and the cop came on again. ‘I’m limiting you to five minutes,’ he told Tillman. ‘You can call again tomorrow, if you want.’

‘I didn’t even tell her about mum yet,’ said Tillman. ‘I was still working my way around to it. At least let me—’

‘Tomorrow.’ The line went dead.

Tillman put the phone away and drove on, his mind starting to move again at last. It was a relief to have something practical to think about. And it would be, he knew, an even bigger relief to have something he could set his weight against and push.

55

The girl named Tabe lived alone, although she was too young, strictly speaking, to be allowed to do so. Before that, she had lived in orphans’ house with the helpers. She had always been an obedient and courteous child, but as the helpers said, beiena ke ha einanu, her soul moved on silence. She seemed to live alone in a small, self-bounded world, barely aware of the people who lived and had their being around her.

This is not to say that she was selfish. Tabe was a warm-hearted girl, and kind, and even considerate, on the occasions when she surfaced from her own thoughts long enough to interact with others. But she was an artist: colours and tones and textures formed the dimensions of her world. Mostly she painted still lives. In the past she had painted people, too, but she had scandalised the helpers by asking if she could sketch a boy, Aram, with his robes removed. That had been the end of Tabe’s career as a painter of the human figure.

Now she lived alone in a room on the fourth level of Dar Kuomet. But her paintings could be seen as far afield as Tethem towards the daybreak and Va Ineinu towards the night. She seemed happy alone. The boy, Aram, was betrothed now and Tabe had painted their married rooms with images of happy, dancing children. She seemed to bear no grudge against the lad, but then her interest in him had been primarily an aesthetic one.

In her room in Dar Kuomet, Kuutma found her. She was drawing with a stick of black oil pastel on a bedsheet nailed to the wall (on the other walls, painted directly on to the plaster, were murals of strawberries and redcurrants in earthen bowls). It took her some while to realise that she wasn’t alone. When she finally registered Kuutma’s presence, she bowed her head to him and whispered, ‘Ha ana mashadr’, blushing a red more hectic than the fruit painted on her walls.

Kuutma signed to Tabe to sit. ‘You knew me for one of the Elohim,’ he said to her. ‘Was that by my complexion?’

Tabe rubbed the tips of her fingers together nervously: they were black and greasy from the pastel. But she met Kuutma’s gaze directly. ‘Not only that,’ she said. ‘I remembered your face. You came to visit us once at the orphans’ house and I asked one of the helpers who you were. She said you were Kuutma. The Brand.’

Kuutma nodded. ‘And so I am. Until mapkanah, at least.’ At that word, her eyes lit up, which somewhat surprised him. But to the young, anything new seems exciting just by being new. And then again, she was an artist: wherever Ginat’Dania went next, the light would be different and there would be new scenes to paint. For Tabe, mapkanah might seem like a rebirth.

‘When I came to the orphans’ house,’ Kuutma said, ‘it was to see you — you and your two brothers. I had an interest in verifying for myself that you were happy there. I knew your mother, you see.’

The girl’s face clouded for an instant. ‘My mother …’ she said, tentatively, and left the sentence unfinished. Kuutma sensed something of bitterness in her tone, and he frowned.

‘You know she was sent forth, like me,’ he said.

Tabe’s stare was hard: it gave no ground, no quarter. ‘Not like you.’

‘The work of the Kelim is every bit as important as the work we Elohim do,’ said Kuutma. ‘More so, even. We both work for the survival of the people: but our work is glorious, theirs is bitter and degrading. We’re honoured and they’re reviled.’

Tabe shrugged, but made no other answer.

‘I would have you think well of her,’ Kuutma said, stiffly. ‘Your mother. I’d have you be generous to her, in your memory. Think what her sacrifice meant for you, as well as for us.’

Tabe looked down at her blackened fingers now. He could see that she was longing for him to be gone, so that she could get back to her work.

‘I know your father, too,’ he said.

Her gaze snapped up again, and her eyes as she stared into his were like two dark wounds in the unblemished whiteness of her face. But to the Elohim, all things look like wounds. Kuutma had made love only a handful of times in his life, plagued each time by the terrible thought that a woman’s sex is like the site of an old injury, partly healed.

He waited, allowing the girl the space in which to speak. She only watched him.

‘You don’t ask me what he’s like — your father,’ he said at last.

‘No.’ Tabe was categorical. ‘How would it help me to know?’

‘He’s … a brave man, by his own lights. A soldier, like me. But he’s a soldier who fights against us. Our enemy.’

Tabe considered this. ‘Then will you have to kill him?’ she asked.

Kuutma smiled reluctantly. ‘That’s why I came to see you today,’ he admitted — although he’d had no intention, when he came, of telling her all this. ‘I think killing your father may be the last thing I do, as Kuutma. I have …’ He hesitated, picked his words with care. ‘I can see a pathway that leads us to meet. And when that happens, I’ll certainly have to kill him. Would I have your blessing, if I did that?’

Tabe’s dark gaze was unwavering. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. Ha ana mashadr, Kuutma. Everything you do, you do in our name. Of course you have my blessing. He’s only the father of my flesh, not of my spirit. But if he’s as brave as you say, I hope he doesn’t hurt you. I hope he dies quickly, without striking a single blow against you.’

Kuutma saw the radiant innocence and earnestness in her face. He felt humbled by her simplicity — he who, out in the wider world, had become as complex and subtle as a snake. But snakes were holy, too, of course: snakes were holiest of all.

He knelt before her. ‘Touveyhoun, daughter,’ he murmured, his voice thick with emotion he could not bear to examine.

‘Touveyhoun, Tannanu,’ she said, but she was unnerved by the wrongness of his kneeling to her. He realised that he had disturbed her calm and probably ruined the painting that she was making. With a muttered apology, he left her.

Tabe paced the floor a while after he left, clasping herself hard and leaving black fingerprints on the flesh of her own forearms. But she had become used to turning strong emotion into some less transient form. Soon enough, she took up the pastel and resumed her effort to capture the swollen, pregnant belly of a storm cloud.

56

Tillman took his time. He’d come up with a reasonable plan, but it involved a great many moving parts, and he had to start from the assumption that he was in enemy territory. Getting Kennedy out of the hospital wouldn’t be hard in itself, but the Arizona police would mobilise quickly once she went off the grid. At that point, he had to disappear her quickly and unanswerably. Otherwise the operation would pretty much be doomed.

He parked down the block from the hospital and walked up to its grounds, where he reconnoitred thoroughly, moving at a brisk pace so that he wouldn’t be challenged. He had floor plans to work from, but floor plans were useless unless he could link them to reality: he started that process by visualising the building as a three-dimensional space, with physical entrances and exits mapped on to the schematic diagrams he had in his head.

The good news was the flat roof, three storeys below the window of Kennedy’s room; or at least, below the space that corresponded with Ward 20 on the plans. The bad news … well, the bad news was manifold. He’d timed the distance from the nearest police station: at the speed of a flat-out chase it was three minutes, no more. The flat roof was on the far side of the building from the car park, and he’d found no closer approach. Bullhead City and Seligman both had police heliports, and there were only two main roads out of town — State Highway 40 and Interstate 93. Closing both of those roads would be the work of a minute once the alarm went up.

He thought about how to adapt the plan, given the lie of the land. He couldn’t come up with a single elegant or fool-proof solution. But one led the others by virtue of being intensely confusing and chaotic. If you haven’t got any good cards, play a wild card.

Tillman walked back to the car and drove on up to the hospital, parking not too close to the police black-and-white he’d already located in the car park out front and not too far from the street: a fine balance, on which a lot was going to depend.

He’d already chosen and packed his kit, in a plastic bag-for-life with the name and logo of a local florist blazoned on it and the leaves of a potted plant sticking out the top. He went in through the front doors, walked right by the reception desk and kept on going like a man who already knows his destination.

In the gents’ toilets on the first floor of the main building, Tillman unpacked the bag and transformed himself into a hospital orderly by means of a long white coat and an official-looking ID badge. The badge was a fake, and not even a very good one, but it would fool someone who didn’t spend all day every day looking at the real thing: a cop on temporary guard duty, for example.

In a wide hallway next to the service elevator, he obtained — as he’d hoped — an empty gurney. He’d been prepared to wander the wards a little until he found one, but the less time he spent walking around in the whites, the less chance he had of being challenged.

Tillman rode the elevator to the fourth floor and stepped out, wheeling the gurney in front of him. The two cops who Kennedy had warned him about — the first two — were waiting where the corridor forked. They looked tough and humourless and alert. Tillman walked on up to them and nodded to indicate that he intended to pass. ‘Transfer from Ward 22,’ he said.

The nearest of the two cops checked Tillman’s badge, which Tillman helpfully held out with the thumb of his left hand. His right hand rested on a sap that he was holding below the pushbar of the gurney, but he was hoping not to have to use it: improvisation at this early stage would be a bad omen for the whole damned enterprise.

The cop waved him through. Tillman rolled the gurney on down the branch corridor that led to Kennedy’s ward among several others.

At Ward 22, he abandoned the gurney and the whites. The long coat would just encumber him and from here he’d have to move fast. From the storage bin underneath the gurney, he retrieved his bag, tossing the pot plant.

Kennedy’s ward, number 20, was around a right-angled bend about ten yards further on. Tillman took the corner at the briskest of brisk walks and found himself heading directly for two more cops who looked just as solid and serious as the first two.

He dropped the bag and raised his hands to shooting position. In each hand he held a bottle of OC spray, and his index fingers were already clamped down on the nozzles. This wasn’t pepper spray, as such: it was a Russian-made product, a derivative of pelargonic acid, the nastiest thing of its type Tillman had ever encountered, weighing in at four and a half million Scoville units. The two men went down in agony, clawing at their faces. Tillman slipped on a surgical mask and carefully and unhurriedly knocked them out with desflurane soaked into a handkerchief. He also anointed their faces with a milk and detergent mix that would mitigate the worst of the spray’s effects. He had no intention of killing law officers on this jamboree, even unintentionally.

He left the men where they lay and walked through double swing doors into the ward. It had been sub-divided into several bays, but he got lucky: Kennedy’s bed was in the second of these areas. Tillman saw her just as a nurse came out from another bay further down and registered his presence. A second later she registered the Unica in his hand: not aimed at her exactly, but impossible to ignore.

‘Go back inside,’ Tillman told her. ‘Don’t say anything or do anything. Just wait.’

With a nearly voiceless squeak of panic, the nurse backed away out of sight. Tillman turned his attention back to Kennedy.

‘Tillman. Good to … see you,’ she croaked. She looked in a bad way, her left arm in a cast and taped to her side, which was also swathed in thick bandages. She was herself, though, and better, she was mobile. She levered herself up out of the bed with a grunt of pain and effort and came to meet him. Tillman was already hauling the bolt cutters out of the bag.

‘GPS tag,’ he said tersely. ‘Which leg?’

Kennedy showed him and he knelt to cut the strap. It was tight enough that he could only get the blade of the cutters halfway under, but it snapped all the way across when he applied pressure.

‘Open the window,’ he told Kennedy. He threw aside the bolt cutters and reached into the bag again for the rappel rope, which he uncoiled with a flick of the wrist.

Alarm crossed Kennedy’s face when she saw the rope. ‘Tillman,’ she said, tightly, ‘there’s no way I’m swinging out of the goddamned window. Look at me. I’ve only got one functional arm!’

‘You won’t have to take your own weight,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry you.’ He was unfolding the grapnel, slipping the rope through its eyelet, checking the friction hitch on his belt.

Kennedy didn’t waste any more time arguing. She unlocked the window and opened it. A security lock stopped it from moving more than a few inches. Kennedy held out her hand for Tillman’s gun, which he handed over with some reluctance. She smashed the lock off the frame using the butt of the Unica, three measured blows, and gave the gun back to him. By this time, Tillman had the rope doubled through the friction hitch and the grapnel firmly wedged into the steel frame of Kennedy’s bed. He pushed the bed up against the window so it wouldn’t slide in that direction when they put their weight on the rope.

‘Ready?’ he asked her.

She nodded.

Tillman helped her over the sill, then climbed out after her, his left arm around her waist, his right arm on the control lever of the friction hitch. It took a few seconds to find a grip that was firm enough, yet didn’t press against her injured arm. He leaned backwards to test the weight and Kennedy swore, off balance above a gulf of air and not liking it a bit.

They heard an alarm begin to sound back inside the room: either the nurse had raised a shout or someone had found the two downed cops. From now on, it was all on the clock, and Tillman had to measure off every second against the perfect, Platonic version of the plan in his mind.

He kicked off from the window ledge and abseiled down the hospital wall in a series of clumsy, gingerly hop-and-jumps. If it had been a rock face, or the wood of a climbing tower, he’d have made the three storeys in three quick see-saw leaps, but this wall was mostly glass. If they went through, it would be a toss-up whether or not they bled out before hospital security or the troopers from the corridor found them and slammed the cuffs on them.

As it was, by the time they landed on the felt-and-gravel flat roof below, heads were already beginning to peer out of the windows above. One of the heads was accompanied by an arm, at the end of which was a gun.

‘Stay where you are!’ a voice yelled. ‘Kneel down and place your hands on your heads!’

Tillman took careful aim with the Unica and squeezed off a shot. The cop drew his head hastily back and didn’t return fire. Not yet anyway.

Tillman scooped Kennedy up in his arms and sprinted along the roof to the end, where he launched himself into space. Kennedy, who had managed not to make a sound during the hair-raising descent from the fourth floor, gave an involuntary yell now: but Tillman’s feet landed with a resounding metallic clang on the lid of the dumpster he’d pushed in against the wall at that exact point, and from there they made it to the ground in three steps — from dumpster to regular rubbish bin to plastic drum full of contaminated sharps, and so to asphalt.

‘Can you run?’ Tillman asked Kennedy.

‘I can run.’

‘Then let’s run.’

57

The first shots sounded as they sprinted around the side of the building, through the ambulance bay to the main parking area. Slowing a little, Tillman led the way to the third aisle, where a bright red Noble M15 awaited them. Kennedy stared at the indecently conspicuous car in horror: its gaping side-vents reminded her of a shark’s gills.

‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Tillman, they’ll pick us up before we’ve gone a bloody mile.’

‘Get inside,’ he told her, tersely.

She shot a glance towards the hospital’s front doors. No pursuit visible as yet. Maybe if they got out of the car park on to the street before the cops emerged, they’d have a fighting chance.

She hauled open the passenger door, shinnied inside and then struggled to belt herself in one-handed. She looked towards the driver’s side, filled with effervescent impatience.

It was fully twenty seconds before the other door opened and Tillman climbed in, moving without undue haste. ‘Come on,’ Kennedy yelled. ‘Get a move on.’

Tillman turned the key and revved up the engine, but stayed where he was.

‘Tillman!’ Kennedy bellowed. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

‘Wait for it,’ he murmured, looking over his shoulder towards the doors of the hospital, where now two figures in dark tan uniforms came running out into the sunlight. Tillman let them get halfway to their car before he reversed out directly into their path, forcing them to leap aside to right and left. He peeled rubber as they picked themselves up, and was gone around the end of the line of cars as they drew and aimed. The shots they got off were more to make a point than anything else.

‘They saw us,’ Kennedy wailed. ‘You let them see us.’

‘They didn’t hit us, though,’ Tillman said. ‘That puts us well ahead of the game. Open the glove compartment.’

Kennedy did. Inside, she saw a squat block of black plastic with green and amber LED lights on its fascia and the words UNIDEN BEARCAT BC355C in the lower right-hand corner. A tangle of wires at the back suggested that it had been hooked up to the car’s battery in some ad hoc way. Kennedy knew a radio scanner when she saw one, and although this model was new to her, she had a reasonably good idea what to do with it. She looked for the tuner and found it already set to the VHF hi-band, around about 155MHz. A little tweaking on the up and down keys quickly brought in the local police wavelength — where, unsurprisingly, the gossip was all about them.

‘—in pursuit, and we’ve got visual,’ a man’s voice was saying. ‘They’re on Oak, north of 93, and they’re going east. Repeat, they’re eastbound on Oak.’

‘Roger that, four-seven,’ a woman’s voice took up. ‘We’ve got cars incoming on Maple and Topeka, and another unit coming down Andy Devine. They’ve got to be heading for I-93. We’ll set up a roadblock at Powderhouse Canyon, over.’

‘Copy.’ It was the male voice again — probably the driver of the black-and-white stuck dead centre in their rear-view mirror, a fair way back but holding on for grim life.

Tillman took a right, on two wheels, and shot down a narrower road at precarious speed. It was a steep slope and Kennedy thought for a second that the black-and-white would overshoot, or at least lose ground, but it made the turn just as adroitly as Tillman had.

‘They took a right,’ said the man’s voice. ‘We’re on 4th.’

‘Copy,’ the woman said. ‘Okay, I can see exactly where you are. They’ll probably turn left on to—’

They shot across a major intersection, almost clipping the back bumper of a leaf-green soft-top that was poodling across their path. The doppler wail of a car horn followed them south.

‘Okay, scratch that,’ the woman muttered. ‘Guess they’re not headed for I-93 after all. Car five-oh, you’ve overshot. They just … they crossed Topeka and they’re still going south.’ How the hell did she know that? ‘They’re not heading out of town at all. They’re gonna double back.’

Another man, his voice incongruously slow and laconic. ‘Might wanna think about another roadblock down on the 40, then — and one on 66. Ain’t nowhere else they can go, unless they’re fixing to grab some dinner at Mr D’z before they light out of here.’

‘Covered,’ the woman said, and then, ‘We’ve got a chopper in the air, coming out of Bullhead. ETA six minutes.’

Kennedy swore bitterly and obscenely. The original black-and-white was still hanging on to line of sight with them, the woman at despatch somehow keeping track of them. And now they’d have to contend with an eye-in-the-sky on top of everything else.

‘We should give it up,’ she muttered. ‘If we hit one of these roadblocks, they’ll fire on us, sure as hell. People will die, Tillman — probably starting with us.’

‘Nobody’s going to die,’ Tillman said, with such complete assurance that Kennedy stared at him in wonder and fell silent for a moment.

The silence was broken by the chatter from the scanner. ‘Car five-oh, where are you now?’

‘Faked south and we’re turning on to Hoover, right now, at 2nd. Where are they?’

‘They’re still north of you. That’s great. You can get to 4th ahead of them and cut them off. Repeat, they’re south on 4th, and you got the drop on them.’

Tillman slammed the accelerator to the floor: the Noble’s three-litre engine made an oddly muted noise, like a giant trying to utter a roar of menace without waking up a small child. The car shot away like a speedboat, seeming to leave the road surface altogether.

They crossed the next intersection at something close to the speed of sound. A second police car had been heading towards them from the west at a fair lick, but they shot by in front of its nose, forcing the driver to brake to avoid hitting their original tailing car full-on.

‘They got past us!’ car five-oh’s driver bellowed.

‘Damn! Sorry, five-oh, I guess I misread the distance. Four-seven, you still on them?’

‘Just. They’re a ways ahead of me now.’

‘Five-oh, you turn around and stake out on Old Trails Road. They’re driving into a goddamn cul de sac and that’s the only way out, far as I read it. Four-seven, keep them in sight but don’t engage until you’ve got some back-up. The man is armed.’

‘I know he’s armed, Caroline. He damn well shot at me back at the hospital.’

‘There’s no need for language, Leroy.’

‘There is if you want to say something to someone. Listen, I’m losing him. That boat has got a turn of speed on her. How long till the chopper gets here?’

‘Two minutes. They’re over the 68 right now.’

Tillman looked in the rear-view, where the police car was now almost too far away to see. He slowed a little, took a sharp left, then a right on to a road that ran parallel with the one they’d been on. Two blocks south Kennedy saw a bridge where this road crossed a smaller road. Another glance in the rear-view, then Tillman pulled off the road and drove straight down the bank. For a few seconds they were skidding on sandy soil and weeds and scrub. Kennedy thought they’d slew sideways and roll end over end, but Tillman somehow kept the car under control and wrestled its speed down. At the bottom of the bank, he rolled in under the bridge and stopped. Directly across from them was a parked car, halfway up on to the pavement: a dark-blue Lincoln sedan, a little rusted-up around the front wheel arches.

‘That’s our ride,’ said Tillman. ‘You didn’t have any luggage with you, did you?’

He got out without waiting for an answer, covered the distance in two strides, and was behind the wheel of the other car before Kennedy had time to react. He threw the passenger door open and beckoned to her peremptorily.

When Kennedy followed, she found him fiddling with the controls of an identical radio scanner in the glove compartment of the Lincoln.

‘I’ve lost them!’ The driver of car four-seven, in a flat panic.

‘Negative, four-seven. They’re still ahead of you.’

‘What? Where?’

‘South on 5th. They are south on 5th, four-seven. You keep right on going.’

The bridge was a steel-frame construction, with concrete and asphalt overlaid: they heard the black-and-white pass over their heads like muted thunder.

Tillman gave it a decent interval, then rolled out and drove east. After a while, they heard the chopper coming in from the west. They took a left, keeping a convenient line of taller buildings — three- and four-storey apartment blocks — between them and the eye-in-the-sky.

‘I don’t have them, Caroline, and I’m running out of road.’

‘You’re right on top of them, four-seven. Maybe they got out of the car already. Look for a woman moving on foot.’

Look for a woman? Why say that, instead of a woman and a man? Kennedy realised then what Tillman had done, what it was the woman at the despatch desk was tracking. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said, with scandalised awe. ‘They’re chasing my GPS tag, aren’t they? Where did you put it?’

‘Taped it underneath their car,’ Tillman said, ‘back in the hospital parking area. That was why I wanted them to follow us — close enough so they’d misread what they were seeing on the read-out. These tagging rigs usually aren’t accurate to more than twenty feet or so.’

Kennedy slumped in her seat, almost catatonic as the aftereffects of the prolonged adrenalin surge hit her system. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said again.

Tillman was putting on dark glasses, a so-so fake moustache, a Yankees baseball cap, all from the glove compartment where they’d been stuffed above the scanner.

‘Still got to get out of this bottleneck and on to the Interstate,’ he murmured. ‘But it definitely helps that they’re all looking in the wrong direction.’

A couple of police cars drove south down the cross streets on either side of them as they kept on heading north.

‘Where are we going by the way?’ Tillman asked her at last.

‘Mexico City. Xochimilco.’

Tillman sighed heavily.

‘What?’

‘Crossing the border. Complicates things a little.’

Kennedy laughed in spite of herself. ‘What, breaking me out of hospital and beating on the asses of the Arizona police department didn’t count as complicated? You set the bar high, Leo. You set the bar halfway to the bloody moon!’

58

Watched with the right level of detachment, the process of mapkanah was not unlike the process whereby water swirls down a drain. A gathering, a patterning, the gradual replacement of random turbulence with a powerful and directional flow, which then imposes itself, inexorably, on a whole continuum.

Kuutma felt like a cork bobbing on the surface of that flow, too light to be touched by it. He watched the people packing away not their own belongings — already packed and stowed long before — but the infrastructure of their world. They lowered the vats from the hydroponics plants, drained and still dripping, from upper windows to the ground, where waiting teams rolled them on down to the cargo bays. A loom from the textile factory rolled by on a cart pulled by a single, straining ox. Kuutma heard the drover murmur reassurances into its ear: ‘Only another three after this, my lad, and then we start on the carding machines, which are so much lighter.’ Most surreal of all, a burly man struggled by, carrying on his shoulders the carved wooden lectern from the Kad Sima. In his sweating face shone a boundless pride: it was like hauling a piece of the Godhead.

The city was packing, folding itself flat, along one plane and then another, until finally it would disappear through an auger hole.

Kuutma, meanwhile, needed to be trained in his new responsibilities. He went to the pump station and reported to the watermaster there, a woman named Selaa who was younger than Kuutma by a full decade. She was suoma’ka, red-haired. It was a recessive trait among the people, and very rare, so that those who possessed it moved through life surrounded by whiplash double-takes. To Kuutma, with the mantle of the outside still upon him, it merited neither a glance nor a thought.

‘I’m Kuutma,’ he said, knowing she’d already been briefed.

She was a businesslike woman, and clearly very busy with the task of dismantling the parts of the water plant that would no longer be needed here: the purifiers, the meters and gauges, the two largest of the pumps. Nonetheless, she bowed respectfully to Kuutma and touched his shoulder.

‘Ha ana mashadr,’ she said. ‘Do you know the equipment already, Kuutma? I know many people spend a season at the pump station, when they’re young, to learn the rudiments.’

‘That practice came in after my time,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’m good with machines generally, though, and I’m familiar in theory with what you do.’

‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘And I imagine that the only machines you’ll need to operate tomorrow will be the sluices.’

She showed him where they were and what they did. There were four, two drawing from the Cutzamala reservoirs and two directly from the aquifer below the city which was all that remained of Lake Texcoco. Selaa was very proud of the system, and she had reason to be. ‘In the last decades,’ she boasted, ‘the city outside has suffered continual crises of water shortage. It’s sinking into the lake bed at the rate of three inches a year, Kuutma. Did you know that? That’s how quickly Ciudad de Mexico is using up the resources of its own water table. But our water flow has never been interrupted. It’s never even suffered a drop in pressure. The people take what they need, as God allows.’

Kuutma pulled her back to the practicalities. ‘One of these sluices has been modified, I assume,’ he said to her. ‘Which one, and how does it work?’

‘It’s not a sluice,’ she said. ‘It’s just a tank here — one of the purification tanks — which will feed into the flow through the sluice when it reaches the third station. That’s this bank of controls here. The water comes in at station one, runs through the aqueduct under Em Hadderek, and out through these branch channels. But all the branch channels will be closed after we leave. The water will flow straight through and back into Cutzamala — back into the main water supply of Ciudad de Mexico. All you have to do is open the sluice gate with this lever, and then whenever you’re ready, dump the concentrate from the tank into the water.’

She made the sign of the noose. Kuutma raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m sorry,’ Selaa said, a little sheepishly. ‘I’d feel sad even for the death of so many animals.’

‘But you wouldn’t ask God to bless their carcasses.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Thank you, watermaster. I think this will be easy enough. Isn’t there a control, though, called the tsa’ot khep?’

Selaa looked puzzled. ‘The “Voice of the Flood”? That’s a defence mechanism, Kuutma. There won’t be anything left that needs to be defended.’

‘I know. But I’m curious. Please show it to me.’

‘With the biggest pumps removed, it won’t work in any case. Not as it’s meant to work anyway. It’s this control here: the sluices slaved to this lever, and the channels re-routed through the slides — ten of them in all — along here.’

‘Will all these controls still be functional tomorrow?’

Selaa nodded. ‘The power runs to the whole bank,’ she said. ‘I can’t turn off parts of the station house: nobody ever saw a need to.’

‘No. Of course. Again, thank you for your time. You must be very busy. I presume you have a set of keys to hand to me?’

She gave him her own, taken from a loop on her belt. ‘There’s a copy set in my office,’ she said. ‘But it should be these that lock the doors for the last time: they were given to me by Chanina, who was watermaster when I first came here. Please keep them when you’re done, Kuutma. It would make me happy for you to have them. Unless you think you’d have no use for such a souvenir.’

‘I’ll keep them until I die,’ he promised her. He bowed formally and withdrew.

I’d feel sad even for the death of so many animals. It was a sentimental thought, and sentimentality was something he’d seen little of in Ginat’Dania. It felt and looked like weakness — a weakness the people, because of their tiny numbers, could not afford to indulge. But what of his own weakness? What of the holes in his own armour, made by equally indefensible emotions?

He was going to kill twenty million. And yet he only cared about one.

Nethqadash shmakh, oh Lord. Help me to draw a breath in which there is only You.

59

Crossing the border turned out to be easier than Tillman had imagined. But thinking about it in safe hindsight as he threaded the back roads of a nameless hinterland just south of Chihuahua, he could see why it worked that way.

The resources of the state of Arizona were bent on stopping Mexicans from coming north across the border. What patrols they saw — and he knew there were a whole lot — had all been looking at the traffic in that one direction, and were not inclined to view one white man heading south in a suspicious light.

One white man, alone, because Kennedy lay slumped in the back of the Lincoln under a blanket, completely out of sight and asleep most of the time. She was still in a lot of discomfort from her injuries. Tillman didn’t have much to give her by way of pain relief, but he did have some more of the desflurane. When the pain got to be too much, he gave her a little of it to sniff on a paper tissue, after which she fell into a deep, scarily motionless slumber.

For the border crossing, he shifted her, with apologies, to the wheel well in the boot. Kennedy was afraid that folding herself into the narrow space would open up the wound in her side, but Tillman insisted. They couldn’t take the chance that a casual search would find her. He was proved right when the guards at the border station north of Nogales threw open the boot and rummaged through his luggage — the innocuous parts of it anyway, since the guns and explosives were inside the gutted and rebuilt rear seats — before sending him on his way.

He stopped as soon as he dared, about two miles further on, and helped Kennedy out of her confinement. The bloodied bandages at her side showed that her fears had been justified. Tillman got her to strip to the waist and changed the dressing quickly and expertly. He admired her breasts as he did so, because they were impressive and right there in front of his face, but he tried his best to edit out the memory afterwards, or at least to keep his mind on other things. Normally when he doled out medicine to fellow soldiers, they were neither man nor woman to him: you needed a level of detachment when doing running repairs on the failing body of someone you’d been swapping jokes with an hour or two earlier.

This seemed to be a good time to give Kennedy the clothes he’d brought along for her: anonymous blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a loose-fitting black jacket, serviceable trainers. Kennedy struggled into them, Tillman helping to manoeuvre her bound-up arm. Nothing fit her perfectly, but it was all more or less okay, and there was no denying she was a lot less conspicuous now. Like a tourist from north of the border, trying to look stylish but casual and failing in both aims.

‘I don’t think I’m going to make this,’ Kennedy groaned. ‘It’s another seven hundred miles. A whole day’s driving — a day and a night probably — and every time we go over a bump it’s like someone stuck a knitting needle in my kidneys.’

‘Take some more desflurane,’ Tillman suggested. ‘You can sleep all the way. Then we’ll take a couple of hours once we get there for you to put your brains back together.’

Kennedy shook her head emphatically. ‘I need to be awake for this,’ she said.

‘A day and a night,’ he reminded her. ‘You’re not going to stay awake the whole time, Heather. And if the pain gets to be too much, you might go into shock. Then I’d have to take you to a hospital, where they’d most likely match us up to the descriptions in some police APB. We just need to meet one person who’s more than half-awake and we’re solidly screwed.’

Kennedy chewed it over. ‘Yeah,’ she said at last, glumly, reluctantly. ‘Okay.’

She stretched out on the Lincoln’s back seat and Tillman doped her again: a stronger dose this time, but still well below the red line on the dosage chart he’d gotten along with the drug. Desflurane was a general anaesthetic after all, and sending Kennedy down too deep — into the realms where she’d need mechanical assistance even to breathe — was a real danger.

Tillman looked down at her, lying insensate, and experienced an unfamiliar twinge of conscience. Had he sucked Kennedy into his own madness or had they just met each other at a moment when she was mad enough to resonate on the same frequency? He covered her with a blanket, strapped her in at shoulder and waist with the seatbelts. He felt glad anyway, that he hadn’t told her her bed was mostly made of plastic explosive.

He kept to the back roads, even though the back roads were rougher and more treacherous. As night came on, he flicked the headlights to full beam and slowed down to forty, a compromise between their need to cover the distance before the search for them crossed the border and the more immediate need to drive around the crater-deep potholes instead of into them.

The desert night was as wide as a continent, and they were its sole inhabitants: a ghostly caterpillar threading the dark, with the beams of their headlights for its body and the Lincoln rocking along at its tail end. Tillman found himself drifting into reverie: Rebecca and the children spoke to him, or at least he saw their faces and heard sounds suggestive of their voices. There were no real words, though, and no need for him to reply. The burden of what they were saying was: soon.

Outside Zacatecas, with maybe three hundred miles still to go, he looked for a billboard next to the road. When he found one, he pulled off the asphalt and eased the car in behind it, so it would be out of sight unless someone was actually looking for it.

He didn’t bother to lie down. He just slid the seat back a couple of inches, closed his eyes and slept at the wheel.

His dreams were formless and hideous things, but Rebecca’s face floated above all of them, calling him onwards.

60

Kennedy woke around seven, with sun-up. She muttered and turned, but couldn’t keep the light out of her eyes. Her throat was so dry she couldn’t swallow, dry to the point of agony, and her head throbbed to the rhythm of her own heartbeat.

They were still moving, or maybe moving again: the car yawed on its clapped-out shocks like a rubber dinghy in a squall.

‘Jesus,’ Kennedy groaned, thickly. ‘Where … where are we?’

‘Lopez Mateos,’ Tillman said. ‘It’s been all built up for the last thirty miles or so, but we’re not properly in the city yet — and Xochimilco is to the south. Say another hour.’

Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached over the back of the seat to hand Kennedy a bottle of water. She sat up, groggily, to drink it. She kept the first sip in her mouth, swilling it around, and then let it trickle down her throat in tiny increments. Even so, it made her stomach heave and her head spin. She persevered, while Tillman drove on in silence. Once the swollen membranes of her throat had eased a little, she could take larger swigs. Eventually she emptied the whole bottle. It did nothing to dull the ache in her head, but she felt a little more able to think around the pain.

She watched the anonymous suburbs and barrios roll by, while her mind came back into focus by fits and starts. When Tillman pulled in, about halfway along an interminable row of one-storey breeze-block buildings, she didn’t realise at first why he was stopping. Then the smell of cooking reached her: eggs and bread and something spiced. Kennedy’s stomach turned a few more aggrieved pirouettes, but underneath the nausea she found she was hungry.

In the rear corner of the bare and busy cantina, they ate huevos rancheros and tiny bread rolls still hot from the oven. Kennedy kept the jacket on, draped loosely over her shoulders to hide the cast on her arm, and ate one-handed. The food tasted unexpectedly delicious, and Tillman let her wolf the breakfast down in silence. When she finally came up for air, he got straight to business.

‘I need to know where we’re going,’ he told her. ‘Xochimilco, you said, and we’re almost there now. But is there an address? Some place specific we’re headed?’

‘There’s no address,’ said Kennedy, pushing the empty plate away. She’d popped two Tylenol along with the eggs and sausage and, between the food and the lessened pain, was starting to feel more like a human being. ‘But I know it’s in the area served by a particular electrical generating station — and I think it’s going to turn out to be something big. Something like a whole office block or a row of office blocks.’

She told Tillman about Peter Bonville and the unexplained hiccups in power usage that had first put him on the track of the Judas tribe. Tillman frowned in concentration, drinking the information in. He waited until she’d finished before he asked any questions.

‘This was all recent?’

‘Up to a couple of months ago. Bonville was on his way back from Mexico City when Flight 124 went down — why he was on it. And the crash happened on the same day Stuart Barlow was murdered.’

‘But you don’t think there was a connection?’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound likely. As far as we know, Barlow and Bonville never met and never communicated. They didn’t exactly move in the same circles. The only connection is that they both represented a threat to Michael Brand and his … well, his people, I suppose. The people who sent him out into the world.’

She fell silent, thinking about the words of the Judas Gospel: the Elohim and the Kelim, the two types of emissary that this group of ancient sectarian ninja maniacs sent out into the world. She made a connection suddenly — probably because her brain was cross-wired right then, and begun working in ways slightly aslant to its usual functioning.

‘Your wife,’ she said to Tillman. ‘Rebecca. What was her maiden name?’

‘Kelly. Why?’

‘There was another Kelly who disappeared. Tamara? Talulah? Something like that. It was one of the cases Chris tied Brand to, before he died.’

Tillman stared at Kennedy, waiting for her to tease the thought out. ‘You flew here,’ she said. ‘I mean, to the States. From London.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But not under your own name?’

Tillman put down his fork, his eggs only half-finished. ‘I usually buy travel documents from a woman who specialises in fake identities. She’s ex-CIA, has friends in the corporate mercenary community and mainly works for people in that line of business. Espionage, but espionage that’s being done a level or so down from what the government gets up to. Heather, where are you going with this?’

‘Brand always uses the same name,’ she said. ‘It makes his job harder, makes it more likely that someone like you will pick up his trail, but he never, ever switches to an alias. Why is that?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to lie. And if it is that … then maybe …’

She was feeling dizzy again, and the eggs, which had tasted so good going down, threatened to rise catastrophically. Tillman saw from her face that she was going through some sort of crisis, reached out to touch her forearm.

‘You want to leave?’

‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Tillman, Emil Gassan said that Elohim, in Aramaic, means something like Messengers. In the regular Bible, angels get called that. I wonder if maybe Brand’s killers — his team of assassins — see themselves as guardian angels for their people, and so that’s the name they use.’

‘Okay. Go on.’

‘Well, if I’m right, the Kelim would have to be something else.’ She hoped he’d complete the chain of logic for her, but he didn’t. She was really saying: what if the Kelim, like Brand, walk among normal people without scrupling to lie about what they are? What if they choose a name that advertises their origins, or their purpose, or their nature.

Rebecca Kelly.

Tamara Kelly.

Maybe a whole lot of other Kellys. Why hadn’t she run a search on missing women with that surname?

What if they were the Kelim? Coming out like Brand and his team to complete some sort of mission in the world, then disappearing once that mission was done. And if they’d had a life in the meantime, raised a family, the family came back with them.

‘Possibly just ranks or specialised roles in the one organisation,’ Tillman said. ‘Probably they all work for Brand. But I think you’re right that he doesn’t want to lie. That’s why he leaves the coins, too. If there’s a link to Judas — and you said this gospel mentions silver pieces in terms of some kind of bargain these people struck with God — then the coins could refer to that. They announce that one of their kind was there.’ He chuckled — a sound so much at odds with her mood that it almost made her give a physical start. ‘But it’s some handicap, for a hit man — not being able to lie. I can’t see why they’d tie their hands behind their backs like that.’

Kennedy found that she could. ‘Why do Catholics give up comforts and luxuries for Lent?’ she asked, rhetorically. ‘Same thing maybe. They offer up their suffering to God — and the Judas people offer up, I don’t know, their truthfulness.’ Even as she said it, a better explanation hit her. ‘Or maybe they get absolution in advance, for specific sins — the way bishops used to bless soldiers going into war. But they’re only cleared for murder, not for every kind of sin they feel like committing. So they have to be moral in other ways and that includes not lying.’

‘That’s insane,’ Tillman pointed out.

‘Did you really think that we were dealing with sane people here, Leo? After everything that’s happened?’

He didn’t answer. Instead, he signalled to the waiter with a wave and a nod that they were ready to pay.

‘They’ve lived like a big secret society for at least the last two millennia,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘But actually, that’s a lousy simile for what they are. Because they’re also a race. A secret race. A secret species almost. They don’t see themselves as anything like the rest of us — less like us than we are like monkeys maybe. They hold themselves apart. They ought to have their own country somewhere, but what they’ve got is …’

‘An office block in Mexico City.’

‘Or something. So don’t expect sanity, Leo. Whatever we find at the end of this road, I can pretty much guarantee that it will not be sane.’

They drove on south, through a city that seemed to come at them in waves. Endless expanses of adobe and concrete slums — the old and the new thrown together in bleak discord — gave way to business districts where steel-and-glass fortresses stabbed at the sky. But then the same thing would happen in reverse, the gleaming towers and ramparts would die away and there would be more avenues of dust and breeze blocks and despair.

Finally, Tillman’s pocket map — bought from a gas station while Kennedy was still sleeping — told them that they’d arrived in Xochimilco.

It was not what Kennedy had been expecting. Knowing what she did about the sheer scale of the resources available to Michael Brand — resources sufficient to launch teams of murderers across whole continents and swat planes out of the sky — she’d thought she must be approaching some hub of power. One of the sky-threatening towers seemed appropriate, or else a complex of buildings on their own gated campus, like a modern fortress sealing itself off from the city that sprawled all around it.

Xochimilco held nothing even remotely like that. It was a factory district, mostly derelict. Weeds grew up in profusion through the asphalt of the wide streets and the only cars parked at the kerbside were burned-out wrecks. It was as though they were driving through a city that had hosted some private apocalypse. The buildings that rose on either side of them were huge, but they were only shells: every window broken, every door gaping dark and vacant like a dead man’s mouth.

Something tugged at Kennedy’s memory, something with overtones of death and disaster.

Tillman took turns at random. ‘Going to be a long job without an address,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not like there’s even any kind of a grid or we know what we’re looking for.’

‘Generating Station 73 South,’ said Kennedy. ‘Where Bonville found the weird patterns of power usage. That’s where we have to go.’

Tillman nodded, but without conviction. He pulled in at the kerb, took out his phone and started to dial. He hesitated, looked over at Kennedy. ‘A friend,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t know you and he’s strict about who gets to know his business. You mind?’

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘I could do with stretching my legs anyway.’ She got out of the car, surprised to find that the air was cool. A breeze had sprung up from somewhere and there was a thick overcast in the sky, changing the light to something numinous and silver-grey. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Summer thunder, and a cleansing rain. Kennedy felt grimed to the core of her being and longed to be washed in any water, hot or cold or in-between, until her body felt like her own again.

She walked slowly towards the end of the street. She could hear nothing. There was almost total silence here, in this city of over twenty million souls. None of the twenty million, it seemed, lived in Xochimilco. She crossed to a café, or at least the frontage of one, which called itself — with heroic hubris — El Paraiso. The windows had been boarded up with corrugated steel, and the good things advertised on the sign (ENCHILADAS! CHILAQUILES! BISTECK!) seemed unlikely to materialise.

The restaurant was a dwarf on a street of behemoths, but it was just as dead: the crisis of late monopoly capitalism, like the angel of death, spares no one who doesn’t have the magic sign of God’s favour painted on their doorposts.

Kennedy reached the corner and stopped. Facing her across the road — a dual carriageway avenue wide enough to have a row of trees planted in the middle of it, but completely empty of traffic — stood a warehouse complex. A single massive structure with uncountable outbuildings, all built from the same prestressed concrete and painted battleship grey. A few tiny windows high up on the walls so deep-set in the brickwork that they couldn’t have let in any light at all. A still-solid fence and a set of gates bearing a massive padlock. Above them, bristling nests of CCTV cameras mounted on steel posts surveyed the street to either side.

Kennedy laughed aloud — out of sheer incredulity.

She heard Tillman’s step behind her, and turned. ‘All of it,’ he said, indicating the area around them with a wide sweep of both hands. ‘Station 73 South serves everything within about a two-mile radius of here. We’ll have to try something else, Kennedy. Maybe if Bonville spoke to someone here about what he was working on, or filed a report, we could triangulate from that. Otherwise, I think we should try looking at …’

He broke off, at last, seeing that Kennedy was pointing: across the street, to the great grey warehouse.

‘We’re here, Leo,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

It was the building from the photo underneath Stuart Barlow’s floor — the one on the back of which he’d written the list of scrolls and codices that contained John’s Gospel.

The end of their journey had been written into its beginning.

61

It took Tillman ten minutes to ascertain that the cameras were dead.

He noticed first of all that they sat on mobile mounts, designed to increase the viewing arc by swivelling from side to side: but they had been locked in one position, not even the most practical or advantageous position. The one on the left was aimed more or less directly ahead, but the corresponding one on the right had pivoted inwards to point towards its partner. Effectively, both were looking at the same area of ground, leaving a dead zone to the right.

That could have been a mechanical malfunction, leaving the cameras frozen but still seeing. Tillman used the dead zone to creep across the street and edge in close to the base of the nearer support pole. With a digital multimeter from his kit, he tested the wires and found no current flowing to them.

Since there was no need for stealth now, he crossed directly back to Kennedy, making the throat-cut gesture. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Power’s out. Either they’ve been shut down at the board or the whole area’s had a power cut.’

Kennedy pointed. The first streetlamps were blinking on a few blocks further on. The lamps closest to them had all been smashed, but clearly if there was a power cut it was a very local one.

Tillman considered.

‘I think this might be where we part company,’ he told Kennedy.

‘What?’ Kennedy was shocked. ‘What the hell do you mean, Tillman? We’re in this together. I know I can’t fight, but I didn’t drive a thousand miles to send you off with a wave and a kiss on the cheek. I’m going in with you. Count on it.’

He didn’t seem to have heard her. He walked away while she was still talking, heading back towards the Lincoln. Kennedy broke into a jog-trot to catch up.

‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You can outrun me but you can’t stop me from going in unless you tie me up and gag me or something, and if you even try that, I’ll struggle hard enough and make enough noise that they see us coming a mile off. I repeat, Leo: we’re in this together. All the way.’

They’d reached the car by this time. Tillman threw open the rear door, then turned to meet her gaze. ‘You’re a cop, Heather,’ he said. ‘You uphold the law.’

‘I stopped being a cop when they made me resign, remember?’

‘But it’s still what you’re here for. Because people were killed and it’s your job to make sure that the killers pay.’

‘You’re not listening, Leo.’ Kennedy struggled to keep her temper. ‘It’s not my job any more. Anything I do down here is illegal two or three times over. I’m out of my jurisdiction, I’m off the force, and I’m a wanted fugitive. This stopped being about the law a long time ago. It’s about justice now.’

His stare was still locked on her, waiting, weighing her, looking for some sign. ‘What kind of justice?’

‘What?’

‘What kind of justice is it about, Heather?’

She stared back, bewildered, threw up her one good arm. ‘Is there more than one flavour?’

‘Lots of flavours. And the one I’m interested in is the worst of them all. The really filthy one. An eye for an eye. They killed my wife and they killed my kids. They took everything from me — everything. But they didn’t have the decency to kill me. Thirteen years. Thirteen years in this world that they left uninhabited. All that’s left now for me is to give them back what’s rightfully theirs.’

He reached into the car and wrenched off the seat cover, revealing two machine rifles, four handguns, clips and belts of ammunition stacked and coiled, and a number of glossy black plastic bags, about the size and shape of bricks, bearing the WORDS M112 CHARGE DEMOLITION C4.

Kennedy’s mouth opened and closed. She struggled to get any words out, and when she did, she knew they weren’t the sort of words that were going to be any good. ‘Leo … you’re wrong. You’re wrong about this.’

Tillman didn’t seem to take offence. He just smiled sadly. ‘What, you think there’s still a chance my family are alive, Heather? After thirteen years?’

And like some holy assassin, Kennedy crashed head-first into the impossibility of the lie. It died in her throat.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I … I don’t think they’re still alive.’

‘But if we’re right about anything, that building is going to be full of people who had nothing to do with killing them. Other people’s families, Leo. Are you so hungry to get even with Michael Brand that you’d be ready to turn yourself into him? Because if you are, get out that fancy pistol and put it right up against my head because I swear to God, you’re going to have to start with me.’

They stood facing each other in the street, for some uncountable number of seconds. Tillman winced, as though thinking about this was costing him physical pain.

‘I didn’t come here to kill kids,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘The plastique—’

‘Yes, Leo? What about the plastique?’

‘I had no idea what we were going to find here. Or how we were going to get in. I wanted to be ready for anything.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘So that’s good,’ she said. ‘We’re ready.’

‘Right.’

‘But we’re here for Michael Brand, right? All the Michael Brands.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

Tillman shook his head slowly. ‘Someone sent them. Someone chose them, and trained them, and equipped them. Someone told them what to do to me, and mine. And your young lad, Harper. And Christ knows who else. We close them down, Heather. Not just Brand. The people behind Brand. We close every last one of the bastards down.’

‘Pass me one of those guns.’

Tillman did. Kennedy felt a prickle of déjà vu as she took it. It was a G22, identical to the one with which she’d killed Marcus Dell. But that was in another country and that Heather Kennedy was now officially dead.

She gestured with the gun, raising it butt-first to show the mag-base. Tillman got the message, selected a clip from the rich array inside the hollow of the gutted seat and slapped it into place for her.

‘Couple more,’ she instructed him.

Tillman took one in each hand, slid them carefully into the pockets of her jacket.

Kennedy thanked him with a nod. ‘By virtue of the authority invested in me as an ex-cop way too far from home,’ she told him, ‘I’m deputising you. You know what that means, Leo?’

He seemed afraid of how this was going, of how much of his decision-making he was entrusting to her. But the slope they were on had become so steep now neither wanted to look down. And at this point, Kennedy knew what was at the bottom better than Tillman did because she’d heard the last words of the lady assassin back at Santa Claus: words she was determined Tillman would never get to hear.

‘No, Heather. What does it mean?’

She tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans and tugged the jacket closed over it. ‘It means we’re an armed response unit. Let’s go respond.’

The easiest way into the warehouse compound turned out to be at the side, where an adjacent building — a one-storey shed of some kind on a site that had once been a U-Store depot — ran close to the fence and allowed them to jump across.

Tillman went first, and when Kennedy jumped he caught and braced her so that she didn’t fall. She hadn’t realised until then how weak she still was, in spite of the long sleep and the meal. Her side felt stiff and sore, her broken arm ached worse even than her head, and the anaesthetic was still in her system — dulling her thinking without doing a damned thing for the pain.

Tillman had transferred a whole lot of light and heavy ordnance into a kit bag that he carried on his back. In his hands, in place of the Unica, he carried a FA-MAS Clairon assault rifle in the French army configuration, complete with bayonet and grenade launcher. The thing terrified Kennedy: it looked like the Swiss army knife of sudden death.

They followed the wall of the main building, looking for a way in. The only door they found turned out to be welded into its frame. All the windows were way above their heads, and since Kennedy couldn’t climb, the ropes and grapnels would have to be a last resort.

They saw more camera posts at intervals along the fence: none of them moved, and all showed negative for current when Tillman tested them with the multimeter.

When they reached the front of the warehouse, they looked out cautiously on an open stretch of asphalt like a parade ground, its surface pitted and broken, with copious weeds everywhere. But there were odd anomalies, which they pointed out to each other in whispers. The fence looked in perfect repair, the chains and padlocks rust-free and solid: and the weeds inside the compound had been flattened down in straight swathes, as if by recent and heavy traffic.

Tillman was reluctant to step out into the open, even though he knew they had nothing to fear from the cameras. He counted too many vantage points from which they could be watched. They went round to the back of the building instead, where the asphalt gave way in places to dust and earth, and where narrower spaces separated the main structure from some of the many satellite buildings.

Exploring these outlying structures, they discovered that all the doors were like the first they’d seen: welded shut and clearly no longer in use. At last, though, Kennedy found tyre tracks in the dirt, fresh and clear, and followed them back to the up-and-over door of what appeared to be a garage or hangar. The place looked shabby and disused, but the tracks suggested otherwise.

The door was fixed with a padlock. Tillman took a crowbar from his kit bag and snapped the hasp with a single movement, grunting slightly from the effort. He swung the shutter up and they stared into the interior of the building.

It took a moment or two for Kennedy to process what she was seeing. They stood at the top of a ramp that extended downwards into perfect darkness. It seemed to run the full width of the building, about forty feet, and its incline was a gentle one-in-ten. They heard no sound and saw nothing else. The building housed the ramp and nothing more: or rather, whatever else it contained was below them, at the ramp’s further end.

‘You got a torch in there?’ Kennedy muttered, nodding at Tillman’s bag. Her voice echoed in the eerie stillness and took a long time to die away.

Tillman produced two: sturdy cylindrical flashlights with rubber sheathes, each about a foot and a half long. They seemed to have been designed to serve as truncheons as well as sources of illumination.

Kennedy flicked the switch and aimed the strong, steady beam into the darkness below. Tillman followed suit. All that accomplished was to show them that the ramp extended a lot further than they’d thought. The beams still didn’t reach the bottom.

Tillman glanced at Kennedy, who gave a single nod. Nowhere to go but down. Her unease deepened with every step. No scenario that she could imagine reconciled setting up this degree of security and then being so lax in its oversight. And who’d live in a wasteland like this in the first place? They’d obviously found a supply depot of some kind, rather than — as she’d thought — their enemies’ heartland.

The ramp extended about three hundred feet, and took them down at least thirty below street level. At its bottom end, a corrugated steel roller-door stretched from end to end of the ramp, blocking their path. Kennedy shone her flashlight beam on the wall, looking for controls, but found none: probably they were on the other side. She was about to suggest looking elsewhere when Tillman’s light, aimed at the floor, revealed that the way wasn’t blocked at all: there was a foot of clearance between the bottom of the steel shutter and the floor.

Wordlessly, they got down on hands and knees — Kennedy grunting in pain as already abused muscles registered their protest — and slid-shuffled under the door.

On the other side, they stood up, still in complete darkness, but Kennedy could tell from the movement of air on her face that she was in a very large space. Her flash, flicked at random around her, picked out nothing close enough for the light to touch it.

Tillman put out a hand to touch this side of the steel shutter and followed it along. Kennedy shone her torch ahead of him and, as he reached it, put a perfectly centred spotlight on a bank of switches. A red light to the left of the array announced that here at least, there was still current.

She came to join him and they examined the switchboard together: there were three large slide controls at the left-hand side and then four banks of ten smaller switches, none labelled.

‘We touch these,’ Kennedy whispered, ‘and we’re throwing up our hands and shouting, “Look at me”.’

‘Listen,’ Tillman whispered back.

She did. No sound at all, anywhere: not even the sounds of distant traffic that count for silence in most cities most of the time. Tillman was right. The noise they’d already made in sliding under the shutter — even their footsteps on the ramp, though they’d been as quiet as they could — would have carried a long way in this absolute hush. If there was anyone here, their arrival was surely no secret. But if there was anyone here, why hadn’t they already been challenged?

Tillman didn’t bother to get Kennedy’s approval this time. He just pressed the sliders all the way down and flicked the top row of switches, one at a time.

The sliders didn’t seem to do anything much, but when Tillman pressed the switches he was conducting a symphony of light: not bulbs or strips or spots but huge panels, inset in the walls and stretching from floor to roof, stirred into life like a chain of sunrises all around them.

Kennedy gasped.

They stood in a space as high as a cathedral but much longer: a subterranean avenue whose walls were blocks of sheer, almost painful radiance. Kennedy covered her eyes with her right forearm, dazzled, blinking away tears.

‘Wait,’ Tillman murmured. ‘Okay. Got it.’

It was because he’d floored the slide controls first. He cut them back to about two-thirds, and the light dimmed to something more bearable.

They took stock of their surroundings, and it was slowly borne in on Kennedy that they were in the right place after all.

This was a street: an avenue, rather, thirty feet wide and seventy or eighty high, which stretched away into the distance in both directions. Small wooden booths like the stalls in a market lined the street on either side, and behind them stood more permanent structures with doors and windows of their own: an indoor thoroughfare in an indoor metropolis.

Two thoughts struck Kennedy at once. The first: that the market stalls were all empty, one or two of them clumsily ransacked. The second: that the space couldn’t actually be that high, given that they weren’t far enough below ground. She stared up at the ceiling, appraising it more carefully. It had been painted to resemble clouds and blue firmament, and it curved in a vast arch. It was — it must be — the inside of the warehouse roof. They stood underneath the main structure, which had been hollowed out inside to provide a vault of sky for this underground concourse.

‘This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Kennedy said, her throat suddenly dry.

Tillman said nothing, but he moved on down the street and gestured for Kennedy to follow him. She fell in at his side. She’d swapped the now useless torch for the G22, and she gripped it tight.

The market stalls extended for the first twenty metres or so, but the structures behind them were a continuous feature. Some had wide windows, like shop windows, with shelves and platforms to display goods. All were empty, except in places for a scatter of boxes, the occasional plastic strip or bag, and in one display a single yellow scarf hanging from an otherwise empty rack of polished wood. There were signs above the doors, written in a script that looked to Kennedy like Hebrew. The enigma hit her anew: assuming the Judas people had arisen in ancient Judea, as the sica knives seemed to suggest, why come from the Holy Land all the way to the arse-end of Mexico City?

Probably she’d never know, but she felt certain, suddenly, that it had nothing to do with the fluctuations of temporal power. Twenty million people, and an urban sprawl that covered six hundred square miles — that made a great desert to hide a grain of sand in. Maybe they did this often. Maybe the Judas tribe were a nomadic people, going wherever the best camouflage, or some other resource that they tracked and followed, was to be found.

And riding on that thought, another, terrible possibility, which she didn’t dare to voice: maybe we missed them.

They were approaching what must be the northern limit of the warehouse site. The roof high above them was sheared off clean by the plunging vertical of the front wall, and the trompe l’oeil clouds bent at sharp angles suddenly as though they’d crashed into some invisible barrier and gotten broken.

Kennedy expected the vast space to close in now, but the gulf of air that had been over their heads was replaced, unexpectedly, by a gulf that opened beneath their feet: where the warehouse ended and the ceiling closed in, the great alley opened downwards on to a vast parade of descending steps, which then broke apart into subsidiary flights heading off to right and left and straight ahead. More streets led off this one but they were stepped and went further down into the ground.

Tillman took a stairway at random and they descended into another thoroughfare, just as wide and almost as high as the first. Here there were no shops, but what looked like houses instead. Rows and rows of windows lining the walls, terraces on which chairs and tables had been set out, ornamental urns and sculptures at corners and on balustrades. But some of the urns had toppled and shattered, and some of the doors gaped open on dark interior spaces. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the huge indoor complex look homely — and then had ransacked it.

Tillman’s face was set in a scowl. He stopped suddenly, his gaze darting to left and right before finally settling on Kennedy. ‘People can’t live like this,’ he muttered, his voice thick with something like anger. He must be afraid now, as she was: afraid that they’d come too late and that solving the puzzle meant nothing after all.

‘Yeah,’ she said, unhappily. ‘I think they could. These lights in the walls probably include UV frequencies, so they wouldn’t go crazy from cabin fever. Maybe they get to go upstairs every once in a while, although I’m guessing they don’t do it often. They’ve lived underground long enough for most of the melanin to have leached out of their skin, which is why even their field agents are about as tanned as snow tigers.’

Tillman didn’t appear to be listening, so she stopped talking. He’d crossed to a decoration of some kind, hung over the edge of a balcony. It was a white sheet, on which someone had painted a strikingly beautiful image. It was the moment when sunlight breaks through storm clouds, announcing either that the storm is over or that it’s not going to come. The storm clouds were black, swag-bellied horrors: the sunlight that broke through them was a filigree of the most delicate gold, only there when you looked at the painting from a certain angle and the light bounced off it just so.

Tillman ripped the sheet down and tore it in two.

‘To hell with this!’ he bellowed. The words bounced back at him from every wall and cornice, redoubled and fractured, a chorus line of expletives that kept on tripping over its own feet.

‘Leo—’ Kennedy began, but he silenced her with a wild glare. He didn’t want sympathy or condolence right then, and really she didn’t have a whole lot to offer. She felt cored out, tired beyond words. To have come this far, only to find this mausoleum, was too cruel.

In the end, having nothing to say, she left him there and went back up to the top of the steps. The whole vast complex was like a sounding board, so Kennedy’s own movements came back to her, overlaid on themselves in ever more complex discords. She thought of the Duchamp painting of the nude on the staircase, shedding angular, stroboscopic fragments of her own being as she walks. How much of herself would she leave in this place? It seemed a fair question, given how much she’d had to sacrifice to get here.

She couldn’t make it all the way to the top of the stairs in one go. On a terrace just past halfway, she leaned on the balustrade and rested. Her side was aching again, and her arm, too. She should have asked Tillman to put the bottle of Tylenol in his kit bag along with the crowbar, the guns, the ammo, the kitchen sink.

She saw him moving below her. He was checking some of the houses, maybe to see if anyone had gone to ground there. One of the doors didn’t give. Kennedy watched Tillman kick it open, sending a sound like chambered thunder through the vast space.

But the thunder grew, rather than fading. And now it seemed to be coming from above her, instead of below. Kennedy walked the rest of the way to the top and looked back the way they’d come.

The corridor seemed to be melting, like wax in a flame. Then she saw that the moving, rippling mass was something independent of walls and floor and sky-painted ceiling. It was a battering ram made of water, that filled the space from top to bottom.

It struck Kennedy like a kick in the teeth from God, and then it trod her under.

62

Kuutma held the sluice gates open for seven minutes. The first thirty seconds gave him the volume of water needed to mix in the concentrate. After that, the only use the water had was as a weapon.

Although he’d switched off the external cameras, he kept the security systems inside Ginat’Dania itself up and running, and so he was able to watch as first the woman and then Tillman succumbed to the flood. The woman was incapacitated, of course, with an arm broken and bound in a cast, but it would have made little difference if she’d been fully fit and mobile. The water came down the grand alley towards the Em Hadderek under enormous pressure, moving very fast. The strongest of swimmers would have been in dead trouble.

The woman went under, and as she went under she fell backwards down the steps of the Em Hadderek. The flood would fill the space below, vast as it was, inside a minute, and there’d be nowhere for the rhaka to surface unless she swam all the way back to the Em Hadderek itself and found the upper level again — or went forward and found the Em Sh’dur. Swimming with one arm, either would be quite a feat.

Paradoxically, although he was already on that lower level, Tillman had a much greater chance of survival. He could see the wall of water coming, then breaking and roaring down the stairways like a dozen questing, groping tentacles. He had time to brace himself, gripping to the iron lattice of an ornamental balcony. The water hit him but he held on fast and kept his grip — for the first minute.

Then, with the lower spaces filling fast and the water pressure slackening as it found its level, Tillman launched himself upwards with slow, powerful strokes. He’d lost the machine rifle, but still had the kit bag strapped to his back. He looked around, presumably for the woman, but then all the lights went out as the water flooded junctions and fuse boxes. This meant that Kuutma could no longer keep track of Tillman’s movements. It also meant that Tillman’s chances of finding the woman before she drowned went from slim to — effectively — zero.

Kuutma turned off the flow of the water, then proceeded to collect his own weapons and equip himself for the business to come. Six sica blades, three to each side of his belt. The Sig-Sauer in its shoulder holster, with a full clip and two spares in the pockets of his flak jacket. His movements were methodical and unhurried. He knew beyond and beneath logic that this was meant to be. This was why Tillman had survived for so long. Why he himself had leaned down, with dark and terrible mercy, to interrupt Tillman’s suicide.

Tillman didn’t have the right to end himself in that way, and furthermore there was something he needed to hear before he died: to hear, and to understand. A balance had to be restored, and Kuutma had been blessed: the balance lay in his keeping.

He locked the doors of the pump station and walked down the steps to ground level. He would have to come back one more time, of course, to release the water back into the Cutzamala reservoir. That would be the last thing he did before he left this place for good and closed the doors on the whole of his life up to this point.

He made his way to the grand alley. The great, imperious mass of the water had drained away into the lower levels, but deep puddles still remained. Kuutma knew this from the sounds his feet made as he strode through them: he couldn’t see them because the alley remained in complete darkness. There was a manual system for providing light in power failures and he knew where its controls were. He went to the nearest of these stations, slid back a panel in the wall and turned a cranking wheel that he found there.

High overhead, slats in the steel roof of the warehouse — the shell that covered Ginat’Dania — slid from tightly overlapping diagonal positions to near-vertical. The day outside was overcast: only grey light filtered down, but it was enough.

At the further end of the grand alley, a splashing and thrashing announced that Tillman had breached, like a whale. Staring in that direction, Kuutma couldn’t see the man at first. But then a flailing shape reared up at the top of the Em Hadderek steps, where they were widest and most beautiful: reared up and fell again, and crawled with spastic, uncoordinated movements out on to the dry land of the grand alley.

Kuutma strode towards his adversary, holding in each of his hands, the familiar, exquisitely balanced weight of a sica blade.

63

When the waters closed over Kennedy, she did most of the wrong things.

First of all she forgot to breathe. Stumbling backwards into the foaming chaos, she clamped her jaws tight shut, when she should have gulped in a massive lungful of air to last her until she became reacquainted with oxygen.

Next, she fought against the irresistible surge that held her and moved her, wasting her strength in a futile struggle to break the surface. Her body’s natural buoyancy was going to carry her upwards in any case: she needed to use all the strength and agility she had to avoid hitting any of the buildings and structures towards which she was being carried like a toy in the hand of a running child.

She slammed hard against a wall and almost opened her mouth in a gasp of shock and pain. That would have been the end for her, she knew. Getting her instincts back under control, she twisted and wriggled until she was facing in the same direction as the rushing water, and kicked out with her feet to move herself left, then right, avoiding two further collisions by inches.

It was a little like flying, Kennedy thought dazedly. She could see the tiled floor of the lower level, the indoor streets and indoor houses, rushing past below and to both sides of her, a blue-shifted blur through which light spangled and starred in wild refraction.

Then the lights went out and she knew she was in even worse trouble.

Her lungs were already beginning to protest at the absence of air; to demand the right to inflate again. Kennedy had maybe half a minute, at best, to get herself to some place with air, and she had no idea where such a place might be.

Motes of light danced before her eyes in the rushing darkness. They expanded into underwater suns, and Kennedy was dazzled by them, even while she recognised, objectively, that they weren’t there at all. She was starting to lose it. Oxygen deprivation was plucking at the loose strings of her brain.

She tried to think. Pockets of air trapped inside the houses? From what she remembered of high school physics, that seemed possible — but she had no time for a house-to-house search, and in any case she had no police ID to show.

Focus, Heather. Focus.

Fight the flow or ride it?

Go up, down or sideways?

It wasn’t likely to make a whole lot of difference, but it felt important to decide. Her father had always told her to impose herself on situations. Just drifting along was almost always a mistake.

64

Tillman struggled to his feet. His own heartbeat sounded loud in his ears, but there was no other noise, and there was no light. His head was spinning: it also seemed to be expanding and contracting in time with his heartbeat, as though his heart orchestrated the pulsing heart of the universe itself.

He laughed incredulously. It’s a small world after all, he thought. And I’m right here at the centre of it.

But his stomach lurched and he felt suddenly sick. The megalomanic thrill subsided and nausea dropped him to his knees. He vomited into the last of the ebb tide: a noisome flux that tasted of chilli and coriander, probably because it contained the remnants of the meal he and Kennedy had eaten on their way down from … somewhere.

It was cold and it was dark. Cold and dark as the grave. Tillman shuddered. But light descended, abruptly, from above him, soft and feathery like a fall of grey goose-down. Tillman tried to control his racing heart, his throbbing head, his shaking hands. He shouldn’t feel this bad. Something was wrong with him.

And Kennedy. He had to find Kennedy, make sure she was okay.

He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and counted to ten. At least, he tried to. But the numbers mostly wouldn’t come.

‘And now,’ said a gentle, cultured voice from above him, ‘here we are.’

A solid impact at the side of Tillman’s jaw sent him sprawling, rolled him on to his side in the fouled water. He gasped, flailed, tried to come upright again. A second kick, to the ribs, and he folded in on himself, a tight ball centred on the sudden, violent pain.

‘Please,’ the voice said, ‘take a moment or two to orient yourself. I hope you didn’t swallow too much of the water. I’d hate it if you died before we had time to talk.’

Tillman stayed down. Staying down — so long as there were no further attacks — allowed him some space to think, however skewed and dulled his thinking had become. Something in the water? That seemed only too likely. He didn’t remember swallowing any, but it wasn’t possible that he’d avoided getting any at all in his system. And maybe the something, whatever it was, didn’t need to be swallowed. Maybe you could take it in through skin contact. Maybe it was evaporating off the water and he was breathing it in right now.

‘Get up,’ the voice said.

Tillman uncurled slowly, rolled over on to hands and knees, came up in a reverse kow-tow.

The man facing him looked his own age, more or less. Very tall but not too broad at the shoulders. Well muscled but lean — the physique of a dancer or a runner. He had a shaved head, his dark slender face bisected in the dim light by the vertical slash of an aquiline nose. He had about him the solemnity of a statue or a priest officiating at a ceremony.

‘Michael … Brand,’ said Tillman, his rubbery mouth slurring the words.

‘Yes,’ the stranger said, with something like satisfaction; something like pride. ‘That’s who I am. Michael is a Hebrew name. It means “who is like unto God?” The brand — in our own tongue, ku’utma — is the mark that Laldabaoth, the god of the fallen world, left upon the forehead of our father, Cain. I try to be honest, Mr Tillman. I try never to lie. A lie diminishes the man who speaks it, however noble the motive. I am Kuutma. I am the Brand.’

With a huge effort, Tillman struggled to his feet. He strode at the man before him, his fists raised.

The man’s hands moved swiftly. Tillman felt a lance of cold air drive into his lower belly, but when he touched his fingers to the place, there was pulsing warmth.

He looked down at his hand. It held a cornucopia of blood, which filled it again endlessly as it poured out between his clumsily parted fingers.

‘And now,’ Michael Brand said, ‘we must speak quickly. You don’t have much time left, and there are things that must be said.’

65

Symmetry, Kennedy told herself. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something.

Everything they’d seen here, everything they’d passed, had been constructed to a simple, elegant schema. The broad main street, its placement beneath the warehouse roof, the swooping falls of stairs that led down from the plaza where the street ended. All symmetrical, presenting to the inhabitants of this screwed-up, troglodyte world a pleasing, ordered vista.

So maybe at the far end of the lower level, there would be another set of steps and another plaza.

Kennedy swam with the flow of the water, using her legs more than her one good arm because the movements of her arm swung her sideways, out of control. She had her eyes tight shut, for some reason. But there was no light to see by, so she probably wasn’t missing anything.

The pressure in her lungs, the darkness in her head built and built. The ceiling of the vast corridor brushed her head. Kennedy kicked off against it and angled her body downwards, terrified of getting tangled up in a light fitting or smacking her head against a cornice. If she did that, it would all be over.

It was all over anyway. She was out of oxygen and out of time. Up or down, equally damned. She gave up and let herself float upwards, expecting the ceiling to press against her back and her struggling limbs, holding her in place. When that happened, Kennedy would open her mouth, probably on a profanity, and drown.

She broke surface with a splash that tore into the darkness on either side in endless susurrations. It was as though she’d ripped through the vault of the sky. Grey light filtered down from somewhere and showed her the indoor lake in which she floated.

Kennedy couldn’t remember, for a moment, where she was. In Arizona, she knew. But no, that was before. They’d driven south, into Mexico. This was Mexico City.

Mexico City was a lake of darkness, in which nobody fished and nobody swam. Except her.

She turned a slow circle in the water, breathing in deep, ragged gulps as though she was breaking off pieces of the air and chewing them, forcing them down her heaving throat. To her back, a sheer wall rose, studded with the dark vaults of windows. She’d come up from underneath it, where the streets of the lower level ran invisible, flooded from floor to ceiling.

To either side, and in front of her, multiple stairways like the ones that opened from the other plaza. Kennedy had no idea where they led. The distances receded and then advanced upon her in a sinister lockstep. Her brain was a limp, floppy, saturated thing through which thoughts refused to move.

But from a long way away, she heard voices.

66

‘She died,’ Kuutma told Tillman. ‘She died a long time ago.’

The waters had receded a little further and he’d taken a seat at the top of the main steps. Tillman knelt a little way away, both hands gripped tightly to his wound. Despite what Kuutma had told him, the wound had been carefully placed and would take a good while to kill him yet. The blade had not been anointed. The flow of blood would slow gradually, and perhaps even stop so long as Tillman didn’t move. Right then, Tillman looked incapable of moving.

‘Rebecca,’ Tillman muttered. His voice was weak, ragged. The voice of something profoundly broken.

‘Exactly,’ Kuutma agreed. ‘Your Rebecca. I killed her. With a knife just like this one.’ He held up the sica so that Tillman could see, turned it over in his hand so it caught what light there was. No gleam, in that twilight: the blade looked like a dead thing, in his hand. The world was a dying world, almost unpeopled. ‘But I didn’t toy with her, or torment her, the way I’m tormenting you. I cut into her chest, between the fourth and fifth ribs, and cut her heart into two pieces. She died very quickly.’

Kuutma wasn’t even looking at Tillman as he spoke, but he saw out of the corner of his eye the movement as Tillman stood and lurched towards him. He’d been expecting it, was even waiting for it.

He came to his feet as Tillman reached him, the sica still in his right hand, but used his left to block Tillman’s clumsy punch, then hook-locked him with left arm and right foot and threw him down on to the top of the steps with a force that might easily have cracked the man’s spine. Only then did he lean in and open up Tillman’s cheek with the blade: a single slash running from brow to chin.

‘Good,’ he said, approvingly. ‘Hate me as I hate you. Hate me with every breath you draw, until the hate becomes thick enough that you choke on it. This is what I wanted from you.’

Kuutma moved away to the other side of the steps and sat down again. The violence had brought a certain release, but it had set his heart running quickly in his chest. He needed to find the quiet heart of the violence, and inhabit it, as he did when killing out in the world. But this was not the world, it was Ginat’Dania. And this was not a killing like any other killing: it was the paying of the balance.

Kuutma watched the slumped body until it twitched and stirred, which indicated that Tillman was both alive and conscious. Then he resumed his narrative.

‘Death was Rebecca’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s the right of all the Kelim. But I never thought she’d choose it. I told her, when she came to me, that there was no need. For others, yes, possibly, but not for her. Never, never for a moment …’ He stopped. This was not how he had meant to start: he had to keep his mind on the goal and build logically towards the revelation that would destroy Tillman.

Kill his enemy’s soul and only then despatch the body.

Kuutma began again, although calm still eluded him. ‘We live apart,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the commandments laid on us. We keep our bloodline pure. Not since Judas only, but since Eden that was, we hold ourselves apart.

‘But purity comes with a price. The people number less than a hundred thousand and in such a small community, certain sicknesses — sicknesses that come with birth — spread quickly. We know the genetic basis for this now, as you probably do too, Mr Tillman. In a small breeding community, double recessive genes pair up with disastrous frequency, and congenital defects, weakness of heart and body and mind, become endemic. Without a periodic influx of new genetic material, the community cannot thrive.

‘The Elders conferred, many centuries ago, and reached a judgement. A wise one. We could not give our precious blood to the degraded mass of half-animals you call humanity. But we could take strength and vigour from them, where we needed to. We could enrich our stock with graftings from the best of theirs.

‘The women who were sent out were called Kelim — vessels. Where the Messengers carry death, outwards from Ginat’Dania to the world, the Kelim go out into the world and bring back life. That’s their sacrament. Their glory.’

Tillman had got partway upright again, resting on an elbow. He stared at Kuutma with a feral intensity. Kuutma put away the sica and took his gun from its holster. The next time that Tillman charged him, he would shoot out one of the man’s knees: the right one, probably.

‘The water,’ Tillman slurred.

‘The water?’ Kuutma frowned at the irrelevance of the comment. ‘The water’s poisoned. Kelalit. The same poison we Messengers take to give us our strength and our speed. In concentrations greater than five parts per million, it will paralyse and kill. You’ve had a very small dose because when the water hit you, the sluice had only just begun to empty into it. It’s been emptying all the while we’ve been talking, the concentration building to LD 100 level: the level at which a single sip will kill within a minute or two. Ciudad de Mexico will be a vast graveyard. When the people move, they leave nothing behind them, Tillman. We sow the earth with salt and the sky with ash.

‘But we were talking about Rebecca. Rebecca Beit Evrom.’

Tillman tensed and gathered himself. He would move soon, Kuutma felt sure of it. But in this condition, befuddled by the kelalit diffused in the water and weakened by his injuries, he presented no threat.

‘The Kelim are chosen by lottery,’ said Kuutma. He felt as though he were building a scaffold on which to hang Tillman, a noose for his neck, a trapdoor for his feet to stand on. ‘They go out into the world, with false identities provided by the Elohim, and they marry. We access the medical records of any potential husbands and vet them for diseases carried in their seed. If there’s no risk, the union is approved — for breeding only. It’s not, of course, a marriage in the religious sense.

‘The Kelim bear three children, and then they return. The husband comes back to an empty house — the woman, to her real home and the bosom of the people. Her exile is finally at an end. As you’d imagine, this duty — though sacred — is hard to endure. It is a terrible ordeal, to pretend to love someone for three or four or five years, to live so long under the shadow of a lie.’

‘No!’ Tillman gasped. He made it to his feet and took a step towards Kuutma. Kuutma raised his gun and Tillman stopped.

‘It was a horrible mischance,’ Kuutma said, with more vehemence than he’d intended. ‘The odds against it … two or three thousand to one. I never thought she’d draw the red ball from the bag. That she’d be chosen. But because I was Kuutma, I thought, it would not be so bad for her as it was for others. I would watch over her. I would still be with her, in a way, even if I couldn’t speak to her.

‘I sent her to England. She met you. She shared your bed and had your children. Judas, who in your presence she called Jud. Seth. Grace. I watched them grow and I waited my time. To the last day and hour, I waited my time. Until finally the day came when I was allowed to call her home.

‘My God, Tillman, that was a bitter time!’ Kuutma found that he was talking through clenched teeth, his voice harsh and clotted. ‘She committed no sin, you understand? She was blameless. And yet she wallowed in your arms at the end of each day and surrendered herself to … abomination. I felt for her. I felt for her so much.

‘Sometimes …’ Why was he saying this? Why had he gone so far from the words he’d prepared? ‘Sometimes, people forget this. They’re not mindful of the sacrifice the Kelim make for us — the sacrifice of their own flesh. Sometimes the women find, when they return, that nobody wants them. As wives, I mean. Wants to be bonded to them. The vessel is clean, scripture says, but how can something still be clean when it’s been dipped nightly in filth and ordure for so many years? You understand? It’s a mystery. A holy mystery.

‘But I offered … I offered her … myself.’ Kuutma blinked away tears. He got to his feet and took a step in Tillman’s direction. There was a magnetism that drew him: it had to draw Tillman too, and reel him in to the next stage of his dismantling.

‘I told her that nothing had changed between us. I said I’d take her and marry her, and raise her children. But she chose death. She felt so fouled by your touch, so deeply spoiled, she couldn’t meet an honest man’s eyes again or accept his love. You hear me, Tillman?’

‘I hear you,’ Tillman mumbled. ‘You sad little prick. She turned you down. She turned you down because she still loved me.’

Kuutma screamed. He couldn’t help himself. The sound was torn out of some part of him too deep for reason. He covered the distance between him and Tillman in three strides and smashed the butt of the pistol into the bridge of the man’s nose, shattering it. Tillman staggered and started to crumple, but Kuutma turned like a dervish and planted a kick in the centre of his stomach before he could even hit the ground. As Tillman lurched back, doubled over, Kuutma smashed him again with the gun, in the side of his head, and finally he fell.

‘She didn’t love you!’ Kuutma bellowed. ‘She never loved you! You don’t kill yourself because you love someone!’

Winded and helpless, Tillman knelt on all fours at his feet. Kuutma racked a bullet into the chamber of the Sig-Sauer and flicked off the safety. He put the gun against the back of Tillman’s head.

But he got himself under control again before he could pull the trigger. He was almost ready: almost. But he couldn’t send Tillman into the dark on that note of absurd and insulting defiance. He had to tell him the rest and watch him weep his soul into the dirt.

‘Your daughter,’ Kuutma said. ‘Her name isn’t Grace now. It’s Tabe. She was raised by strangers — and taught to hate you. She’s so happy here, Tillman. So happy with us. She’s an artist. She paints. There’s such beauty inside her that it spills from her fingers into the world. You hear me? Your daughter loves the life I gave her! Before I came here, I went to her. I told her that I was going to kill you and I asked for her blessing. She gave it joyfully. “Why should I care what happens to the father of my flesh?” she said. And when I’m done with you, Tillman, I’ll go back to her. I’ll tell her how you died, and she’ll kiss my hand and bless me all over again.’

Tillman was shaking. For a moment, Kuutma thought it was fear that made him tremble, but then realised that the man’s once-powerful frame was wracked with wrenching tears. ‘Alive!’ Tillman sobbed. ‘Grace is alive! My Grace is alive!’

In an excess of rage, Kuutma clubbed the huddled, helpless ruin in front of him again and again with the butt of the gun. ‘She hates you!’ he bellowed. ‘Didn’t you hear me? She hates you!’

Kuutma’s own hands were shaking now and there was little force to his blows. Crouched like a rat in a rainstorm, Tillman weathered them.

Kuutma touched the Sig once again to the back of the man’s skull. He still had the final, the unanswerable argument. It was a sublime instinct after all, that had made him start with Rebecca and save the worst for last.

‘Your sons—’ he began.

Movement from above caught his eye. Something falling. Kuutma jumped aside and the ornamental urn, pushed from a balustrade on a terrace way up over his head, smashed to the ground exactly where he’d just stood. Jagged shards of stone hit his face and body.

‘How much does God love you, Kuutma?’ a voice said, speaking from the air all around him.

It was Rebecca’s voice.

67

Six months in narcotics: the shortest posting you could take and still claim it on your CV as valid experience. What Kennedy didn’t know about drugs would fill whole libraries.

Ironically, what she knew about methamphetamine came from a homicide bust. A woman who’d killed her two flatmates and fellow addicts in their sleep with the spiked end of a mallet intended for tenderising steak. She’d tenderised them very thoroughly indeed. She’d also been happy to explain why: they’d been trying to kill her with microwaves and with poison soaked into the fabric of her pillow.

One in five long-term meth users will eventually succumb to an intractable mental illness known to clinicians as amphetamine psychosis. And Brand had been using regularly for at least thirteen years. He had to be at least a little crazy, even by the exacting standards of religious maniacs.

Kennedy walked slowly down the stairs towards Brand — or Kuutma, as he seemed to call himself — and Tillman. She’d lost the gun Tillman had given her, but she had a chair leg that she’d picked up along the way. She held it close to her side, where she hoped it would be hard to spot.

She was improvising desperately. All she’d really wanted to do was to stop the bastard from finishing that sentence. But she seemed to have got his attention anyway: all she had to do now was keep it.

‘How much does God love you?’ she repeated, in the same cold, stern tone.

Kuutma didn’t answer. He seemed unable to speak. He stared at her as she came towards him, and took an involuntary step back.

‘Seems to me,’ Kennedy said, ‘that those he loves, he protects. He gives the faithful their reward on earth and he smites the heathen. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? And you’re the arm that does the smiting, so I reckon you should know if anybody does.’

Kuutma laughed suddenly, which wasn’t at all the reaction Kennedy was expecting — or hoping for. ‘Just you!’ he said. ‘I thought for a moment …’ He seemed to pull himself away from an interior precipice, a shudder running through his body. ‘God loves the people, rhaka. His covenant is with us. Only the fallen one cares about you.’

Kennedy had reached the bottom of the steps now, only ten feet from Kuutma. She looked at her watch, then met his stare and shrugged. ‘Getting a little late, isn’t he?’ she asked, mildly.

Kuutma’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re going to die with a blasphemy on your lips,’ he told her.

Kennedy went on as though she hadn’t heard him. ‘More than twenty years late. You were supposed to wait for thirty centuries and then you’d get your turn in the big chair. But thirty centuries came and went, and you’re still living here in the dark like roaches. Hiding from the rest of the world. Sticking more and more fingers into more and more holes in the dike because the world is getting smaller all the time. Satellite surveillance, data monitoring, biometric passports and genetic fingerprinting. Even your electricity bills betray you, Kuutma. And you wait, and you wait, and still God doesn’t turn up, until you must feel like the shy girl in the corner who never gets asked up for a dance.

‘And what are all your murders worth, in the end, if you’re not holy? If God didn’t bless you and tell you to fight, then what about all that blood on your soul?’

‘There is no blood on my soul,’ Kuutma said. She’d slowed to a halt and now he took a step towards her. The gun still in his hand, and aimed at her heart, he unhooked one of the nasty, angled knives from his waist. ‘I am forgiven.’

‘But only for killing,’ Kennedy reminded him. ‘Not for lies. So tell me the truth about one thing, Kuutma, before you kill me.’

Holding the knife at chest height, between index finger and forefinger, he tilted the blade to a sixty-degree angle and crooked his hand back to throw.

‘Ask me,’ he invited her.

‘Was the whole of this sorry spectacle because you couldn’t do the nasty with Rebecca Beit Whatever-her-name-was? Because I’ve heard of lovers’ balls, man, but this is really, really sad.’

Kuutma threw the knife.

Kennedy made a judgement call and threw herself to the right. It was the wrong direction, but the movement saved her anyway: her plaster cast had been built around a steel frame and the knife hit one of the struts, exposed by its recent baptism. The blade creased Kennedy’s cheek as it bounced up and away into the dark.

Kuutma drew a second blade. Kennedy threw herself forward, and with a wild swipe of the chair leg knocked the knife out of his hand. That just left the Sig-Sauer. It came up while she was still off-balance, and Kuutma had begun to pull back on the trigger, when the deafening peal of an explosion made him look down, in shock, at his own chest. A supernova of blood expanded there, covering the whole of his torso in two vertiginous seconds.

Tillman hadn’t trusted his aim: he was too sick, too dizzy, his hands too unsteady. Even getting the Unica from his belt and thumbing the safety had taken every ounce of concentration that he could bring to bear.

He’d dragged himself laboriously to his feet, while Kuutma debated theology with Kennedy, and moved towards them one baby-step at a time. Kuutma hadn’t seemed to notice him, but Kennedy had. She held her ground and kept on talking, presenting the world’s easiest target.

And Tillman had brought the gun up at last, a scant inch from the back of Kuutma’s hand-woven linen jacket.

Had held it on the right line.

Had pressed the trigger.

Had pressed harder because the trigger didn’t want to give way under his sapless grip.

Had fired and lost the gun at once to the unexpected kick of a recoil he normally took in his stride.

But one shot was all it took. Kuutma sank to his knees, still staring at Kennedy in blank-eyed astonishment.

‘God …’ he choked. ‘God is my …’

‘God thinks,’ Kennedy told him, her cold voice grinding like a stone dragged across the mouth of a cave, ‘that you’re a lying, murdering bastard.’

Kuutma opened his mouth to answer but death got there first.

68

69

She went home.

She had a home to go back to.

It was a room, in which her father waited. She told him the story of where she’d been and what she’d done, although she knew he didn’t understand. She didn’t understand his story, either, come to that. The best you could do was bear witness and to listen whenever the chance came up.

Someone else waited, too, in another room, not too far away. There was dirty talk, and afterwards, some other things for which talk wasn’t necessary.

‘I always, always, always thought you were straight,’ Kennedy murmured, into Izzy’s ear.

‘Hell, no,’ Izzy giggled. ‘Not since I was fifteen.’

‘But you talk the talk so well …’

Izzy straddled her and smiled — for Kennedy alone — a smile that would melt platinum and open the legs of an angel. ‘Oh, the talk’s universal, hon. It’s the walk that counts.’

70

He went home. It was still empty.

But the emptiness felt different now. He knew that his wife had died loving him, thinking of him. That she hadn’t wanted to leave him, and couldn’t imagine a life without him, any more than he’d been able to build one without her.

He knew that his children were alive, somewhere in the world, and that they were happy.

He felt that his solitude was a shrine, in which he kept the holiest of things: his memories of their brief time together as a family, which nobody else alive now remembered.

Because he lived, it was all true. Because he remembered, they were with him.

Next to that, what else mattered?

71

‘Letter for you, Web. Got the Queen’s head on it, so I reckon it’s from England. Who’d you know in England?’

Connie handed the letter across the desk to Sheriff Gayle, and then hovered around with the air of someone who still has something else to do and is about to do it real soon.

‘Thanks, Connie,’ Gayle said.

‘Oh, you’re welcome,’ she told him. But he didn’t make any move to open the letter, and in fact put it aside with a negligent air, so eventually Connie had to retire defeated.

When she was gone, Gayle took the envelope up again, shivved it open with his little finger and took out the letter. It was from Heather Kennedy. He’d guessed that already because she was the only Brit he’d ever met.

Dear Web,

I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to make Eileen’s funeral. The truth is, I got out of Mexico by the skin of my teeth, and I had this worry that if I came back to Arizona, they might not let me go again. I know the original charges were dropped, but then there was all that damage Tillman did when he busted me loose, and some more stuff in Mexico that was even crazier.

That’s why I’m writing, really. I feel like you’ve got a right to know how it all turned out. You lost more than I did in this thing, and it’s not a loss that can ever be made good, so this — the story — is all I can give you. That and my thanks, truly heartfelt, for everything you did for me.

Gayle read on, for the best part of an hour. He only stopped when Connie brought him coffee and did some more hovering. Once he’d waited her out again, he took up where he’d left off.

It was crazy, just as Kennedy said it was. It was an easy secret to keep because nobody would ever believe it. Maybe that was the best thing they had going for them, these Judas guys: they were so damned preposterous, folks could stumble right across them and then talk themselves out of it again. Couldn’t have happened: too stupid, too wild, too ridiculous to have happened.

But what a story it would have made, for Moggs! How she would have given it gold paint, and shiny chrome, and wings and fins and flourishes.

It was only when he got to the end, to the last page, that he saw how it really was. He changed his mind about a lot of things then. It wasn’t an easy secret to keep at all: not for Kennedy anyway, who knew this Tillman guy and owed him her life and all. And Moggs wouldn’t ever have got to tell the story like it was because she just wasn’t anywhere near cruel enough.

I went back to Gassan’s translation, Kennedy wrote, and got caught up on some of the fine detail. It made a lot more sense once I’d seen that place for myself. The children of the Kelim keep the names they were given at birth, so long as those names were chosen by the mother. If the father chose, the kids are christened again by the people.

I think with Rebecca’s children, Brand just wanted to wash away as much of their past as possible. There was nothing wrong with the names they already had, but he gave them new ones anyway. And I knew what the names were. The woman who almost killed us both, up in Santa Claus, told me as she was dying.

Grace, the girl, became Tabe.

The boys — Ezei and Cephas — died at Dovecote.

Gayle folded up the letter and put it in his desk drawer. Then he thought better of it and put it through the office shredder. Then he had an even better idea and used Anstruther’s lighter to burn the confetti-like strands of it until there was nothing left.

Watching through the glass from the outer office, Connie contemplated with longing a good piece of gossip that she’d never get her hands on.