The Demon Code

19

Southampton Row at half-past seven in the morning was already busy. Shops had their shutters half-raised so employees could limbo underneath and start stacking shelves. Upmarket cafés and breakfast bars were packed with early birds heading for the shops and offices of the West End, cheaper ones with tired cleaners and security staff clocking off from night shifts.

Kennedy walked between them, a transient, belonging neither to the night world nor the day. Fatigue and fretfulness distanced her from everything. She felt as though the surface of her brain had been roughly polished up with a scouring pad, and that this process had loosened it enough in her skull for it to jar when she walked.

She’d left Izzy’s the night before with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. Both of her attackers were still profoundly unconscious, and Samal in particular looked like he’d need a lot of medical attention if he was ever going to play the piano again — or form a sentence with more than one syllable in it. But Kennedy’s nerves were shot and she couldn’t bring herself to pack a suitcase with the two men lying there, stepping over their inert bodies as she hunted out her own blouses and slacks from among Izzy’s cocktail dresses and sexy lingerie.

So she just got out of there, locking the door behind her.

She made a quick pit-stop at her own apartment on the floor below, where she threw some underwear and shirts into a shoulder bag.

She’d told Izzy about the need to break her own pattern. When you were being hunted, the worst thing you could do was to stick to known contacts and established habits. Otherwise, sooner or later, at a bend in some familiar path there’d be a tripwire and a pit with sharpened bamboo stakes at the bottom. She took her own advice. She walked half a mile from the apartment before grabbing a taxi.

‘Where to, love?’ the cabbie asked.

‘Where did you pick up your last fare?’ Kennedy asked him.

‘Eh?’ The cabbie seemed to find something sinister in the question.

‘Whoever was in here last. Where were they coming from?’

‘Talbot Square, innit. Out by Paddington Station.’

‘Great. Take me there.’

It was a good choice, as far as that went. Talbot Square opened off Sussex Gardens, where every second house was a hotel. Kennedy grabbed some emergency supplies from an all-night mini-market on Praed Street, then checked into one of the hotels, reassuringly named the Bastion, with mildewed pilasters framing the door and a sign jammed into the lower corner of the window that promised FREE WIRELESS INTERN. Presumably an E and a T were hidden by the angle of the frame.

She paid for her room with cash. The desk clerk wanted to see some ID in the name of Conroy, which was the name Kennedy had given, but she deflected his curiosity in that regard with a couple of twenties.

The room was an odd, indented shape, seemingly made up out of pieces cut from other, adjacent rooms. Kennedy snatched a couple of hours of shallow sleep in the narrow single bed, but the pain in her wounded side woke her every time she shifted position. In the end she gave up and just lay unmoving on her back, staring at the mottled plaster of the ceiling and trying to figure out how things had gotten so screwed up so quickly.

Not by accident. Not by serendipity. Not by blind chance. Lightning didn’t strike the same spot twice without a bloody good reason.

The Judas tribe had sent their Messengers, their Elohim, to kill her.

But the girl who’d saved her had identified herself as a Messenger, too.

There were wheels within wheels, and fires within fires.

When dawn filtered through the paisley-pattern curtains, she got up and showered. The water only ran lukewarm, but it was still enough to start the shallow wound in her side bleeding again, marbling the water at her feet with red ripples. Kennedy felt an incongruous sense of relief. The wound had scabbed and was only bleeding now because she’d opened it again. She was lucky that the Messengers used different blades for torture: the ones they used for murder had usually been anointed with a powerful anti-coagulant that made even shallow wounds potentially fatal.

She dried herself, ruining the towel in the process, and then disinfected and dressed the wound. Time to face the day. And to put herself fairly and squarely back in the crosshairs again.

Because her first stop was going to be Leo Tillman.

The Pantheon Café on Montague Street had a frontage so narrow and unassuming that its name had to be intended as some kind of ironic gesture. When Kennedy stepped inside, she found that she was the only customer in the place, but then again it would only have held about eight people when full. Two tables covered with tartan-patterned plastic tablecloths stood just inside the door, to balance the two outside. Beyond them there was a cooler that was too big for the tiny space and blocked half of the tiny counter. On the wall opposite the drinks machine, a much-smeared whiteboard advertised the specials of the day — falafel in pitta bread, dolmades, feta salad. For a Greek café, they didn’t sound all that special.

At the counter, a man with a slim, athletic build, slickeddown hair and a bandito moustache that looked like it had just blown in from someone else’s face was arranging slices of baklava into a crude mosaic on an oval tray.

‘Hi,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with Leo. Leo Tillman.’

The man didn’t look up from his work. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And?’

‘And I was told that I could leave a message for him here.’

‘Ah.’

Kennedy waited, but that seemed to be it. ‘So if I leave a message with you,’ she continued, ‘maybe you could pass it on to Leo the next time he comes through. If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.’

‘Ah,’ the man said again. ‘If.’

‘Look,’ said Kennedy. ‘Do you know Leo or not? If it’s not, I’m out of your life.’

The man looked at her for the first time — an appraising, appreciative stare. ‘You are not in my life, my lovely,’ he told her solemnly. ‘I see this man, I tell him you’re looking for him.’ He shrugged and gave her a sad smile. ‘All I can do.’

Kennedy locked eyes with him. ‘So what are you going to tell him? I didn’t even give you my name.’

‘I tell him that a very beautiful woman is looking for him. And I describe your lovely face, your lovely body to him in such detail that he knows who I mean.’

Kennedy’s tolerance for this kind of talk was low. She opened her mouth, already lining up a row of curse words to fire out of it, but then she noticed that the man was looking over her shoulder.

Tillman was behind her, leaning in the doorway, heavy hands deep in his pockets.

‘It’s good to see you, Heather,’ he said. ‘Come on into my office.’

Kennedy thought Tillman meant the diner, but as it turned out, his office was Coram’s Fields — a more or less perfectly X-shaped patch of greenery just west of Gray’s Inn Road. In the days when Coram’s was a foundling hospital, the fields would have been its grounds, awash with urban orphans discovering what grass felt like. These days it was mostly filled with foreign students from London House and solicitors’ clerks on their lunch breaks.

Tillman sat on a bench at the top of a grassy bank and motioned to Kennedy to sit next to him. For the moment, she ignored the invitation. Tillman looked pretty good, she had to admit. Or maybe it was just that the first time she’d met him, he’d been running on empty, twelve years into a mono-maniacal quest that was disintegrating his mind and his body an atom at a time. He still looked like an Irish docker with an anger management problem, but now he looked like an Irish docker on his way to church, instead of on the third day of a suicidal bender. He sat with his huge hands resting demurely on his knees. His sandy hair — now fuse-wire silver at the temples — was combed back into some kind of a shape, instead of spiking and rolling randomly like a freeze-frame of a brushfire.

‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘I just wanted to drop off a message. I was told that the Pantheon was your mailbox. But you saw me coming, right?’

‘John told me you were looking to get up with me,’ Tillman admitted.

‘And then what? You decided to camp out at that café until I showed? If you’ve got that much time to waste, Leo, good for you. I don’t. Why didn’t you just call me?’

‘Manolis is helping me with something,’ Tillman said. ‘A project I’ve got going on. Calling you was the next thing I was going to do, Heather. As soon as I got done with this.’

His tone was mild, calming. The truth was that her anger had nothing to do with him. She’d been helpless the night before, tied to a bed with her legs spread wide, while two men threatened and brutalised her. True, she’d then seen her attackers beaten flatter than a dirty postcard, but that hadn’t done much to reconcile her to her own pain and humiliation.

‘I’m having a bad week,’ she told Tillman. ‘I’m sorry. It’s good to see you, too.’

She sat down next to him, stifling the restless urge that wanted her to stay upright and moving.

He made no attempt to touch her. He wasn’t a man who did hugs and kisses all that much. Back when he was searching for his family, he’d lived like a monk for long enough to make solitude his natural state. You didn’t put something like that down lightly, once you’d let it get into the grain of you the way Leo had. And he didn’t try to coax her to talk, either. He just waited, knowing that she’d get to it in her own time.

‘So what were you doing back there at the café?’ she asked again. ‘John Partridge said you were on a job. What does that mean for you, these days?’

Tillman laughed softly. ‘It never seems to mean the same thing twice. But this isn’t work, exactly. More like a side effect of work. Someone’s been watching me. I’m trying to figure out who it might be and what they’re looking to do, but they’re good enough that I can never seem to catch them at it.’

Kennedy was perturbed and he saw it in her face. Again, he waited quietly for her to explain.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t like that one bit. It might be completely unconnected with what brought me here, but I don’t think that’s very likely.’

She told Tillman about the events of the last few days, concisely but with as much circumstantial detail as she could provide. She wanted him to see it all from the same perspective from which she’d seen it, as the pieces all came together and screamed the impossible, unwelcome conclusion at her. But she stopped with the death of Alex Wales. She couldn’t talk about what had happened after that, after she left the hospital and went home. Not to Tillman. Not yet.

‘The Judas People,’ Tillman murmured, when she’d finished. He said it with a kind of dulled wonder, as though it were somehow both unexpected and obvious at the same time — like the favourite in a horse race romping home after you’d bet on a hundred-to-one outsider.

‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, a little piqued by his calm. ‘The Judas People, Leo. The ones who killed my partner, stole your family from you, and almost—’ She reined herself in, catching a hysterical edge in her own voice. ‘I’m not dealing with this all that well,’ she said, stating the obvious. ‘It’s been three years, and I did my best to forget the whole thing. Now — it’s like it never went away. Like we never came back from Mexico.’

‘But we did,’ he reminded her. He gave her a remorseless stare. ‘Heather, they threw everything they had at us and we came out of it still on our feet. This isn’t like that. This is you walking across the edge of something they’re involved in. They may not even have put two and two together. They may not know it’s you. That you’re … someone who already knows about them.’

‘I wish I could believe that,’ Kennedy said bleakly. ‘But I don’t. And neither do you. If it was just me, I’d buy it. Maybe. It could be the lousiest of lousy luck. But it’s not just me, it’s me and Emil Gassan. Two of the three people in the world who know that the Judas tribe are out there. That kind of changes the odds, doesn’t it?’

Tillman blew out his cheek. ‘Maybe.’

‘Maybe?’

‘I could make a case. All of this seems to be about that book, somehow, doesn’t it? And Gassan’s speciality is deciphering old texts. So I don’t see it as too much of a stretch that he was close to hand when the book was stolen. Or destroyed. Or whatever happened to it.’

‘Except that he wasn’t. He was drafted in afterwards, like me.’

‘Still. Old texts are his discipline. It makes some sense for him to be there. And when they asked him to bring in a private investigator, how long do you think his shortlist was? It was you, Heather. You’re the only person he knows with that background.’

‘Just coincidence, then.’

‘Just coincidence. Because the alternative is to think that the universe folds itself out of shape just for you. And once you start thinking that, you’re well on your way to some kind of serious personality disorder.’

Kennedy didn’t say word one about either pots or kettles. ‘Well, thanks for coming up with a rational explanation, Leo,’ she said. ‘But that isn’t how it looks from where I’m sitting. There must have been a hundred palaeographers the museum could have gone to. And the guy in charge of the collection getting a stroke right then, and the theft happening right then … I’d say we’re operating right out at the limits of coincidence here.’ She steeled herself. ‘Anyway,’ she said, in a low voice, ‘there’s more.’

‘You think I couldn’t see that in your face? Go on.’

‘They came after me last night. When I got back home, they were waiting for me.’

Tillman’s eyebrows went up a fraction, which for him was expressive of extreme astonishment. ‘Knowing their fieldcraft,’ he said, ‘you were lucky to spot them.’

‘I didn’t spot them,’ Kennedy said. ‘I walked right into it. They were going to kill me. Question me first, and then kill me when they had all the answers. But then this … this girl turned up. And bear in mind, Leo, I don’t call women girls all that often. She was young. And she was better than they were. She saved my life. Left these two Messengers more dead than alive. And mostly she just used her bare hands and the bedroom furniture.’

She let that sink in for a few moments. Tillman’s face showed that he was weighing up what it meant. But Kennedy drew the conclusion for him anyway. ‘She was one of them. One of the Elohim.’

He tapped his thumb against the back of the bench, looking off into the distance. Not randomly, Kennedy realised. He’d chosen this spot because of the view it commanded, and he’d been monitoring all the people who’d walked by while they were talking. He was still doing it, making sure they weren’t being watched or eavesdropped on, checking lines of sight and patterns of movement.

‘Two factions,’ he said at last, after a long silence.

‘That’s the obvious conclusion,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But what the hell would it mean? A breakaway group from the Judas tribe, the way the Provos broke away from the original IRA? These people kept their shit together for two thousand years. What’s so special about now?’

‘We know they decamped. Relocated their hidden city from Mexico to someplace else. That would have created a lot of stress. Hundreds of thousands of people on the move, leaving behind everything they knew. Having to build their homes again, from scratch. It’s probably safe to assume that they’re going through some social upheaval right now. Choppy waters for the chosen people.’

‘It was three years ago,’ Kennedy pointed out.

‘Doesn’t matter. The shockwaves might take a whole generation to die down. Longer even. Anything that big, Heather, it happens too slowly to measure. Believe me. A lot of my assignments for Xe were what they call après-war, so I got to see a lot of people — a lot of cultures — working through a lot of bad stuff. Everything gets thrown up in the air and comes down again in the wrong order. This wasn’t a war, obviously; it was an exodus. But I bet it was comparable in some ways.’

Kennedy found herself rebelling against this argument. Maybe sympathising with the bastards who’d done so much to ruin Tillman’s life and tried to end hers was just too big a feat of moral gymnastics for her to pull off. ‘Comparable to a war? The only way it would be comparable would be if they’d gotten so hidebound — so rigid in the way they think and the way they live — that any kind of change would break them.’

‘Well,’ Tillman said, looking away again, ‘it’s only a hypothesis. The facts on the ground suggest that they’re fighting against each other. We can agree on that much. The reasons … well, we’re never going to know, one way or the other, are we? If you asked them, and they told you, they’d have to kill you right after.’

He said it lightly, but Kennedy didn’t laugh — and Tillman wasn’t really joking. He stood up and stared down at her in silence.

‘What?’ Kennedy said.

‘What is it you want from me, Heather?’

‘Right now? Nothing. I’m just warning you, because it seems to me that if they’re really dusting off unfinished business — if this is more than just coincidence — then they’ll be coming after you next. And now it looks like they already did. I bet it’s them who are watching you.’

‘No,’ Tillman said.

‘What do you mean, no? The one person they hate more than me would have to be you, so it’s kind of inevit—’

‘I mean, you didn’t come here to warn me.’

‘I didn’t?’

‘Well, not just for that. Tell me the rest. You want me to ride shotgun for you?’

Kennedy was appalled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Leo, no. Jesus, after what you’ve been through? I’m not trying to pull you back in. Not …’ Not to fight them, she wanted to say. Not to kill any more of them. But if she followed that chain of ideas, with Tillman right there in front of her, there was no way of knowing what her face might give away. He still had no idea that the two Messengers he’d killed at Dovecote Farm had been his own sons. She was determined that he’d never find out.

In fact there was only one conceivable counterbalance to that determination, and this was the real reason why she’d come: outweighing the two dead sons, the one living daughter. Tabe. Because it was impossible, looking at the girl’s face and hearing her speak, not to see the resemblances, hear the echoes. But she’d been with Diema so briefly, at a time when her thoughts had been in turmoil. She could easily be mistaken. The age was about right, but what the hell did that mean? All of the Messengers were young. The drugs they took to increase their strength and speed killed them before they got old.

‘There’s something else,’ she admitted. ‘Something I’m going to need to tell you about, only I can’t do it yet. I don’t know if I’m right, and if I’m wrong it would be …’ She tailed off. This had strayed onto really dangerous ground, really fast. ‘I swear, Leo,’ she said, aware of the hollow reverb on her weasel words, ‘as soon as I’m sure, I’ll tell you. And then — well, yeah, then I’d want you to get involved. Then you’d have to get involved.’

‘And until then, I just have to trust your instincts?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fine,’ Tillman said. ‘Because I do.’ He let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘It’s funny. For a long time, I thought I was at peace. I knew that Rebecca was dead. I knew how she died, and why. I knew my kids were doing okay, that they were happy, even if they were with those maniacs. I thought that was enough. But lately it’s been troubling me. Like, how could I know they were out there and not try to find them? Even if I only saw them from a distance, it would mean so much. You coming to see me … it’s strange, but it’s strange in a good way. It’s as though everything I thought we laid to rest is waking up again.’

Not quite everything, Kennedy thought. Not Ezei, or Cephas. This was why she was terrified of letting him get too close. It magnified the risk that he’d find out what he’d done, and she was sure beyond any shadow of a doubt that the knowledge would break him. ‘Leo,’ she said, trying to head him off, ‘we found their home once and they uprooted it and moved it. There’s no way they’d let you find it again. I think you should put that out of your mind. And believe me, please, I really didn’t come here to drag you into my mess. I came to warn you to watch your back, and … No, that’s all. Just watch your back. If you’ve got the option of going to ground somewhere, do it. When it’s over, I’ll leave a message at that café, or wherever. I’ll come over and tell you what happened. Maybe — maybe I’ll have some news to tell you.’

‘Heather,’ Tillman said mildly, ‘with respect — and I hope you know how much I respect you — I don’t think that’s how this will work. Even if I was happy to sit it out, I’m the only one you can ask for help who knows how these bastards work.’

‘I’m not,’ Kennedy said, a little desperate now. ‘I’m not asking you for help. Actually, I’m asking you not to help. I’ve got … I’m setting something up. Something complicated. If you come barging in, you might wreck it. Please, Leo. Keep your distance until I’m done.’

‘Something complicated.’

‘Yes.’

‘A sting of some kind?’

‘I’d tell you if I could.’

Tillman laughed. ‘Damn, Heather. How could you be a murder cop all those years and not get good at lying? You can’t even look me in the eye. Look, you need me, and I’m offering. Of my own free will. You don’t have to say yes or no right now. Just keep in touch, and when I’m done with this other stuff I’m doing, I’ll be available for any kind of back-up or heavy lifting you need done. Where are you staying? Not at home, I’m assuming?’

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Nowhere anyone could find me.’

‘Well, don’t get too comfortable, all the same,’ he warned her. ‘But we should stay in touch, even if you don’t want me elbowing in on your play. Especially if you don’t want me in on it. You’ve got pen and paper? Write your address down for me.’

So nobody with long-range listeners pointed in this direction could hear her say it out loud, Kennedy realised. She hesitated, but really there was no good reason not to give Tillman the address of the Bastion. If something did happen — if the Elohim popped up in his life, too — it would be better if he could let her know about it quickly. She wrote the name and address of the hotel on the back of a till receipt that she found in her purse. She handed it to Tillman and he thrust it into his pocket without looking at it. ‘We’ll do this again soon,’ he promised her.

‘I’ll yell out if I need you,’ Kennedy counter-offered. ‘I’ll leave a message at the café. Stay away from me and away from all of this, until you hear from me.’

‘No promises,’ he said. ‘But let’s stay in touch anyway. It’s best if each of us knows roughly where the other is, at least — in case anything happens. So I’ll assume I can reach you at this address unless you tell me you’re going to be somewhere else. Okay?’

Kennedy nodded. ‘Okay.’

‘And I’ll let you know if I find out anything about the people who’ve been tailing me. Might be unconnected, like you said. Just unfinished business from my misspent youth. If it’s not, I’ll keep you in the loop.’

They said goodbye, but as Kennedy was walking away, he called out to her. ‘Heather.’

She turned.

‘Just like old times,’ he said.

Gassan’s exact words, Kennedy thought. At the time, she’d disagreed. ‘Yeah,’ she said glumly. ‘Pretty much.’

20

From Coram’s, Kennedy went on to Ryegate House. It was past 9.30 a.m., now, but the building was still closed to the world, with steel shutters down over the sliding doors of the front entrance and three police cars parked in a row outside. She rang the bell a few times without eliciting any response at all. Then she went around the back of the building, found the staff entrance that Rush had mentioned and hammered on the steel-plated door as loud as she could.

Eventually, the racket produced a result. There was a rattling of keys from inside the door. It swung open and a uniformed guard stared blankly at Kennedy from the inside. ‘This is the staff entrance,’ he said coldly.

She stepped in past him without giving him time to react. ‘I’m on staff,’ she said. ‘I work for Professor Gassan.’

‘ID, please,’ the guard demanded belatedly.

Kennedy showed her driver’s licence.

‘I mean, internal ID. Are you on our system? If not—’

‘I’ll vouch for her,’ Ben Rush said, walking up to join them in the narrow service corridor. ‘It’s all right, Cobbett. She’s investigating this.’

‘I thought the police were investigating,’ the other man said. Being sidestepped didn’t seem to have done much for his mood.

‘She’s private. Reports direct to the professor.’

Rush took possession of her and led her away. ‘Only that would be a neat trick right now,’ he muttered grimly.

‘Any word there?’ Kennedy asked him. She was ashamed that she hadn’t tried to call the hospital herself, but survival had had to be the first item on the day’s agenda.

‘Nothing good. Lorraine called ten times already. They won’t tell her much, because she’s not family, but it sounds as though they’re having a hard time getting him stable. Police are all over the place, but they won’t give us the time of day. Mr Thornedyke’s still under sedation, and Valerie Parminter is away on a course, so there’s nobody taking decisions about anything — there’s just the police and the headless chickens. Lorraine will fix you up with a day pass, and we’ll take it from there.’

He took Kennedy through a labyrinth of corridors and stairwells and finally through a double door into the foyer. Lorraine was standing at the reception desk with her fists clenched at her sides, hiccupping out huge, body-shaking sobs.

The receptionist seemed unable to formulate a complete sentence, but from the fragments she did manage to get out, Kennedy gathered that Emil Gassan was dead, from a combination of toxaemia and blood loss, both probably exacerbated by an unidentified alkaloid on the blade of Alex Wales’s knife. Valerie Parminter wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was dead, too, Lorraine wailed. Maybe everybody was dead.

Rush deadended the switchboard to a call again later message while Kennedy got the distraught woman calmed down a little. Dredging her memory of the staff interviews she’d done, she suggested that Lorraine go find Allan Scholl, the next in the pecking order, and tell him he was in the big chair for the day.

All of this displacement activity helped Kennedy to keep her own emotions at arm’s length until she felt a bit more ready to deal with them. She’d known this was possible from the moment when Gassan took the wound, so she felt little surprise. What she felt instead was a sickening sense of guilt and shame that she’d let it happen — that Gassan had died because she’d been so completely unprepared. Because she’d blithely and unthinkingly set a trap for a rabbit and had no game plan when she realised she’d caught a tiger.

Once Lorraine had left, Rush turned to Kennedy again. ‘We won’t get near Alex Wales’s desk,’ he told her. ‘The police bagged everything and took it away, then they went and bagged the desk, too. It’s wrapped up in that plastic they use at airports for busted suitcases, and police tape all on top of that.’

Kennedy forced herself to think about practicalities. ‘What about his computer?’ she asked.

‘They took that first.’

‘And his locker?’

‘Oh yeah. They’re way ahead of us.’

It would have been surprising and even mildly scandalous if they weren’t. They’d had the whole night to work in, after all, and this was their job. Kennedy had to remind herself that it wasn’t hers, any more. Not now that it had become a murder investigation. The only sane thing to do was to walk away.

And spend the rest of her life seeing Gassan take that knife in the chest, in endless action replay.

‘You still want in on this?’ she asked Rush.

‘Doesn’t matter what I want,’ he told her. ‘In is what I’ve got.’

Kennedy couldn’t fault the logic, especially now. With Gassan’s death, the stakes seemed a lot clearer than they had the night before. The Messengers were already trying to kill her, and they’d be coming for Rush the moment they figured out he was involved. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Do you know anyone in the IT department here?’

The boy thought long and hard. ‘I sort of know Matthew Jukes. I mean, we’ve had a few drinks now and again.’

Kennedy took out her wallet, drew two fifty-pound notes out of it and handed them over. ‘If your computer network has some kind of back-up storage, we may be able to get at Wales’s files that way. See if this Jukes guy will take a bribe.’

‘And if he won’t?’

‘Roll him and steal his passwords.’

Rush whistled. ‘Going down the slippery slope real fast here, aren’t we?’

‘See what a bribe will do, anyway,’ Kennedy told him. ‘We’ll come up with another way in later, if that doesn’t work. Call me when you’ve got anything to tell me, and we’ll meet up — somewhere else, not here.’

She left the way she’d come. The staff door was unattended, but the guard who’d challenged her on the way in was having a cigarette break in the courtyard just outside. Discipline was going to hell.

21

After Kennedy left him, Tillman went back to the Pantheon Café. Manolis’s wife Caitlin was at the counter. She gave him a nod that was on the ragged edge of civil and unlocked the door to the back room.

Tillman knew better than to ask her whether Manolis had called. Caitlin regarded Tillman as belonging to a disreputable past that her husband should have stepped away from long before now, and his recent reappearance in Manolis’s life had been the cause of more than one snarled and muttered argument that Tillman had tactfully pretended not to overhear.

But Manolis was one of the best covert surveillance men he knew. There certainly wasn’t his equal in London — or at least, not walking around free — so Tillman had approached him, with some qualms, and offered him a one-off payment for a short, probably risk-free job.

All of this pre-dated Kennedy’s call, but what she’d just told him fitted with disturbing neatness into his own ongoing problems — and that was the real reason why he hadn’t pressed her for further information. He already had some pertinent facts in his possession and was in the process of acquiring more.

In the back room, he sat at a fly-specked table and played patience with a deck of cards that was missing the two of clubs. It was pretty pointless as a game, but it had a certain value from the point of view of Zen meditation. After three hands, the door opened and Manolis entered, still in his bike leathers and helmet. He dumped a rucksack on the table in front of Tillman.

Tillman put the cards back in his pocket.

‘Well?’ he asked.

Manolis nodded.

‘She had a tail?’

Manolis held up his hand, the thumb and forefinger a halfinch apart. ‘A little one,’ he said. ‘Cottontail, like a rabbit. Pretty much definite, Leo. Was the same girl that was following you two nights ago. I didn’t get a clear shot of her face, but the height, the build — identical. Let me show you.’

He took off his gloves and then his helmet. From inside the helmet he removed, with great care, a small lozenge of black plastic that had been affixed there by two steel brackets clipped to the helmet’s inside rim. At one end of the device, the only break in its smooth surface, there was a tiny glass bulb: the micro-camera’s lens.

From the lozenge, Manolis detached the even smaller plastic wafer that was the memory card. He booted up the computer in the corner of the tiny room, and slid the card into a reader built into the front fascia.

A window opened and began to fill with thumbnails. Manolis leaned close to the screen, squinting at the tiny images with furious concentration. ‘Here,’ he said at last. He clicked the mouse and one of the images expanded. It showed the part of Hunter Street that ran behind Coram’s Fields. The image was tilted slightly, which wasn’t surprising, since it had been taken from a moving motorcycle. What was surprising was that there was no motion blur of any kind, only a little fish-eye distortion, because of the curvature of the lens. Manolis knew his kit and what it was capable of.

He zoomed in on a corner of the image. A woman — Heather Kennedy — was walking away from the camera, her face turned in profile. Fifty yards behind her was a shorter figure, a girl, very slight in build, wearing black jeans and a white T-shirt. She had her back to the camera, her face not visible at all.

Manolis tapped the mouse and the screen flickered, one image replacing another so that the figures moved forward in jerky freeze-frame. At the same time, the angles and relationships shifted. Manolis had overtaken the girl and continued to take pictures as he passed her. The image tilted even further, but the focus stayed pin-sharp even when he zoomed in to the point where her head filled the screen.

Her head, but not her face. As though she could sense the camera, she turned away from it, so Manolis had got only the back of her neck, the curve of her cheek.

‘I would have gone back for another pass,’ he said to Tillman apologetically. ‘But I didn’t think I’d get away with it. You know, you can just tell, sometimes, if someone’s got their radar out, and it felt like she did. I didn’t want to scare her off. But she looks like the same one to me.’

‘Same one,’ Tillman said. ‘Definitely. And she hasn’t let me get a clear look at her face, either. So she was tailing me and now she’s tailing Heather. Did you manage to follow her back to source?’

Manolis clenched and unclenched his fists, and bowed his bullet head. ‘Sorry, Leo. I lost her. I don’t think she saw me, I think she just has good tradecraft. She zigs and zags a lot, and I was in traffic. She went down Onslow Street. There are steps down from the main road. Steep. I can’t drive down there. And if I ditch the bike and follow, she sees me, she knows why I come. I had to let her go. So then I go round by Saffron Hill, but there’s no sign. She’s already gone.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Mano. What you’ve got is good. Very good. But stay free. I may need you to do one more thing for me.’

‘It’s all in the price. You’ve got me for three more days.’

‘You’ve given me everything I asked for. If you do this, I’ll pay you a bonus. But I’m absolutely fine if you say no, because the risk profile just changed radically.’

‘I never said I wanted to keep my head down, Leo. Only way to avoid all the risks is to be dead. What do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing, just yet,’ Tillman said. ‘Heather said she was attacked last night, and this girl pulled her irons out of the fire. I want to go look over that ground. Might pick up something that we can use. Because what I really want to do, right now, is to meet this kid and ask her what it is she thinks she’s doing.’

Manolis shrugged. ‘I’m here when you need me,’ he said. ‘But one thing, Leo. If you need to see your friend again, better make it somewhere else.’

Tillman was surprised. ‘Why’s that, Mano? I’d have thought Heather would be just your type.’

‘Yeah, exactly,’ Manolis agreed. ‘Caitlin thinks so, too.’

22

Matthew Jukes caved in very quickly once money was mentioned, but the list of Alex Wales’s files that he handed to Rush furtively in the alcove that housed the coffee machine ran to over fifty pages, and the file names mostly gave no clue at all as to their contents.

‘Is there any way to get these files back up on another computer?’ Rush asked Jukes.

‘Anywhere you like,’ Jukes said. He was a sour-faced bugger, normally, but the combination of money and an opportunity to show off had rendered him magically cordial. ‘All this stuff is in the mainframe. Even if you save to your own C or D drive, there’s a hundred per cent back-up at the end of the day. That’s standard policy.’

‘So you can set me up with Wales’s files, on my own machine?’

‘It would be my pleasure.’

In fact, Jukes went one better than that. He faked a temporary administrator ID for Rush, which gave him full access not just to Alex Wales’s files but also to his usage stats. That meant Rush could see what he’d done and when he’d done it, which files he’d kept open for longest, even which ones he’d printed out.

And the results were surprising. As Allan Scholl’s PA, most of Wales’s time should have been divided between Scholl’s diary and Scholl’s inbox. In fact, Wales seemed to have gotten that bread-and-butter stuff out of the way right at the start of each day, logging on as early as 7 a.m. After that, he let the emails lie wherever they fell, while he trawled through pages and pages of what looked like gibberish — random screeds of numbers and letters separated by occasional backslashes.

‘Database logs,’ Jukes said carelessly. ‘They look like that unless you go in through the client server. You can’t open them up as files like you can with Word docs and stuff like that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of the architecture. It’s event-driven.’

‘Jukes, I have no idea what you just said.’

‘That’s obvious,’ Jukes sneered, his natural obnoxiousness bobbing briefly to the surface. ‘All right. Say you ask a question like how many people are there in the world?’

‘Okay. Say I do.’

‘So what’s the answer?’

‘There isn’t any answer,’ Rush said. ‘It’s changing all the time. It’s changed in the time it takes you to ask me the question.’

‘Exactly. Same with this stuff. Event-driven architecture just means that the system keeps adjusting itself in real time. External events trigger updates. So every time you ask the question, you get a different answer. You can’t open the file because there isn’t a file. There’s a data set that keeps changing.’

Rush scrolled through pages and pages of the same kind of nonsense. Occasionally he saw something that looked like a surname with initials attached. MILTONTF. LUBINSKIJJ. SPEEDWELLNM. The rest was impenetrable, just alphanumeric vomit.

‘So what question was he asking?’ Rush demanded. ‘Is there any way we can tell?’

‘Maybe.’ Jukes waved him up out of the seat and took his place. For a few minutes, he opened windows on the screen and watched while white-on-black text scrolled through them. Occasionally he typed strings of letters in response to cursor prompts.

What he ended up with was another array of random symbols, but he nodded as though it made sense. ‘There,’ he said, pointing.

The tip of his finger touched the word USERS? followed by a dozen or so numbers. Rush could see now that it recurred all the way down the screen, at least once in every two or three lines.

‘Users of what?’ he asked.

Jukes tapped some more, leaning close in to the screen as though he stood a better chance of prising loose its secrets if he cut down the distance.

‘I don’t know,’ he admitted at last. ‘Wait. No. Yeah, I do. This is old data. Like, completely defunct. No wonder Alex was able to get into it so easy.’

‘This was easy?’

‘Try getting at the live stuff. You’ll see. This is … yeah, it’s part of the British Library database.’

Rush’s heart did something surprising and alarming inside his chest. ‘Which part?’ he asked.

Jukes threw him a curious glance. ‘Getting excited now, are we?’

‘Which part, Jukes?’

Tap. Tap. Tap. ‘Users,’ he said.

‘Shit, I got that much.’

‘Keep your hair on, will you? It means people who called a book up, from the stacks. Wales was trying to generate a complete list, but the system wouldn’t let him because the data wasn’t live any more. It had been disaggregated, taken out of the data set that you can use to populate a form. Anyone in IT admin could have just changed the flag and brought them back again, but Wales didn’t have the pass codes.’

‘So? I’m getting about a third of this, by the way.’

‘So he had to dive down into the data set and do it low-tech. He looked for the identifying code for that one book and then wherever it cropped up he trawled the user stats until he found out who requisitioned it.’ Jukes looked up at Rush, blinking rapidly and arrhythmically — his tell when he was thinking hard. ‘I mean, back when it was in the stacks. Before they closed the reading room at the British Museum and took the circus down the road. There would have been a handwritten form that the user took to the desk. Then whoever was on the desk would scan their ID and—’

‘No,’ Rush said. ‘No, Jukes. Don’t try to talk me through your whole system. Just tell me if I’m right. Wales was trying to make a list of the names of everyone who’d ever read a particular book.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘He was trying to make a list of everyone who ever even filled in a form so they could see it. They wouldn’t have had to read it.’

‘Right. You’re right. Okay, so now tell me if he succeeded. Is the finished list in here somewhere?’

Jukes blinked some more. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I suppose we could input some of these user names as strings and search the rest of Wales’s files to see if they turn up anywhere else.’

‘So do it.’

Jukes did it. ‘Nope. Nothing. Maybe he wrote it up by hand. Or maybe … wait. Let me look at his deleted files.’

‘You can do that?’

Jukes chuckled evilly. ‘Oh yeah. Unless you use a shredder program like Eraser, hitting delete is just hitting “save for later”. And nobody here is allowed to put non-authorised software on their machines, so usually everything just ends up … Okay, here.’

A pop-up farm of windows opened on the screen. Jukes culled them back again methodically, until there was only one left.

‘There’s your list,’ he said.

Rush could tell one thing at a glance: A Trumpet Speaking Judgment had never been a smoking bestseller. There were only about twenty names on the list, and if the dates next to them were the dates when they’d accessed the book, the time span he was looking at covered more than fifty years. The earliest name, FOSSMANH, was listed against the date 17/4/46; the latest, DECLERKJO, against 2/9/98.

‘Is there any way we can get addresses and telephone numbers for these people?’ Rush asked.

‘Oh yeah,’ Jukes said. ‘Two ways, actually.’

Rush waited. ‘Well? What are they?’

‘A telephone book, or another ton. Your credit just expired, mate.’

23

The street door of number 276 Vincent Square, Pimlico, was controlled by a buzzer system, but someone — presumably the two killers who’d stopped by the night before — had disabled it so that it hung an inch open in the frame, refusing to latch. Should have spotted that, Heather, Tillman thought. You’re slipping.

Isobel James’s flat, he knew, was number 11, which was on the third floor. The lock here had been picked, rather than forced, and Tillman was prepared to use his own lock-picks, but he didn’t have to. He found a spare key underneath a potted palm that stood in the window recess next to the door: the third most likely place after the mat and the door sill.

Inside, silence and stillness and a penumbral gloom. The flat’s hallway had no windows and didn’t look onto the world outside at any point. Tillman took out a flashlight and clicked it on, casting it around the confined space. Nothing moved, and there was nothing to see that wasn’t bland and obvious. Bookcase. Hall table with a nude sculpture based on Klimt’s The Kiss. A few coats hanging on hooks on the wall.

The still air had a slightly stale, trapped smell. All the same, once Tillman had closed the door, he did a quick preliminary search, moving down the hall with a stealth that belied his sheer bulk to peer into each room and around each angle. He was checking for ambushes, but the air hadn’t lied. He was alone in the flat.

Tillman was reasonably confident now that he wouldn’t be disturbed, but he still kept to the agenda he’d decided on beforehand: start at the scene of the crime and work outwards. He went straight to the bedroom and stepped inside.

There were no bodies there, alive or dead. Again, this was only confirming what his nose had already told him. If Kennedy’s attackers had died here, and their bodies hadn’t been removed, the complex aromas of decay would already have been detectable.

But they could still have died and been carried away by someone else. Tillman surveyed the ruck and debris in the room and began to read it. The blood on the sheets he assumed was Kennedy’s. There was a large, dark stain about a third of the way down from headboard to foot, consistent with a wide, shallow wound to the upper body. She’d seemed to favour her left side a little when they’d met. Now he knew why.

More blood on the carpet, in two areas. Right beside him, between the bed and the door, and over on the far side of the room next to the wall.

Nearest first. He knelt to look at the dark dots and stipples on the beige carpet: the discreet Morse code of spectacular violence. Tillman saw several distinct clusters of dark spots and one extended spray of clotted streaks that widened from a point near to the bedside table. Someone had been hit repeatedly on this spot, probably with more than one weapon and from more than one angle. Wide variation in the area and angle of scatter suggested that the victim had been standing when the assault began, but that it had gone on — maybe for some time — after he’d fallen.

Tillman crossed the room to examine the other bloodstains. There were fewer of them and they told a different story. A wide sprinkle of near-invisibly small flecks, irregularly distributed with wide gaps: a blow to upper body or more likely to the head, in a space where objects — objects no longer present — occluded the blood spatter. He saw a fast, furious fight, a lucky or well-aimed blow breaking the septum of one fighter’s nose, or else a cut to the cheek or forehead.

On the wall immediately behind the blood spatter there was an area of damage, a roughly circular area, just below Tillman’s head height, where something had smashed into the plaster hard enough to leave an impact crater. Someone’s fist, or the back of someone’s head.

Now that he could see how narrow and restricted a space this was, he marvelled all over again at the skill the unknown girl had shown. To take down two armed opponents, when one of them is already pointing a gun at you … that’s something of a challenge even when you’ve got all the free space you could wish for. In this small bedroom, where the battlefield included the splayed body of the woman she’d come to rescue, it was only a hair’s breadth short of a miracle.

But she had one advantage over them. She was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Something brightly coloured caught Tillman’s gaze, tucked right up under the bed where it would have been invisible from most angles. He knelt and retrieved it. It was a torn corner of glossy paper, showing part of a photograph, the curve of a woman’s breast and part of her shoulder.

Not just helplessness. Her disguise had gone further than that. Knowing she was dealing with — what? Ascetics? Misogynists? Religious zealots? All of the above seemed to fit the bill — she’d armoured herself in unrighteousness and carried her Taser into the room behind the makeshift screen of a pornographic magazine.

So where had she gotten it? Tillman looked around, found the rest of the skin-mag where it had fallen or been thrown behind a chest of drawers. Bush League. Hot amazon action. Mandy and Celeste get dirty with toys — and boys! There was no price sticker, nothing to provide a clue as to the magazine’s origin.

He backtracked into the hall, flicking the flashlight around the floor. After a few moments he found a wrinkled skein of torn shrink-wrap. At one corner was a green label, smearily printed with the words US hardcore: only £3.99.

Paydirt. So to speak. This was a local product, snatched up to meet the needs of the occasion.

Tillman found the shop around the corner in Fynes Street. It called itself a newsagents, confectioner’s and tobacconist’s, but it was also a general store in a half-hearted way, boasting a single shelf unit stacked with tins of baked beans, Green Giant sweetcorn, Vesta curry sauces, digestive biscuits and bottles of washing-up liquid old enough to have wept fluorescent green tears a third of the way down their plastic sides. One wall, behind the counter, was stacked high with cigarettes. The wall opposite was a magazine rack, whose top two shelves were a cornucopia of T&A. A closed-circuit camera on a jointed steel arm leaned down from the ceiling at a crazy angle. The angle was because the housing was loose and the supposedly tamper-proof unit had slid halfway out of it — but it looked as though the camera was in the grip of a voyeuristic impulse, coming in close to ogle the porn.

Between the cigarettes and the magazines sat a bored, flabby man with thick glasses and a pock-scarred, glassy-eyed face. He was slumped in on himself as though he was cowering away from his own cash register. Then Tillman realised that both the man’s expression and his posture had the same explanation. He was watching a tiny portable TV, an antique model shaped like a rectangular telescope. The TV spoke in waves of murmured static, but presumably there were words or music of some kind underneath.

‘You sell this?’ Tillman asked the man. He held up the magazine and the man leaned forward to peer at it. He kept looking for a lot longer than seemed necessary, first taking in the cover image and then — judging by the movements of his eyes — reading not just the title but also the rest of the copy.

‘Could be,’ he said at last. ‘We sell a lot of ’em.’

‘Mostly to men, though,’ Tillman said. ‘Right?’

The man switched his gaze from the passionately entwined amazons to Tillman’s face.

‘Of course to men,’ he said. ‘I don’t sell to kids, do I? Are you from the council?’

‘No, I’m not. Were you working here last night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Until midnight?’

‘We’re open all hours. It says so on the sign.’

‘Well, last night you sold this to a woman. A young woman.’

The man blinked and his Adam’s apple bobbed a little. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Her. All right, yeah. I remember now.’

‘What do you remember?’ Tillman asked.

‘Sour-faced little madam, wasn’t she.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, I tried to have a bit of a laugh with her. I can’t remember what I said, but something harmless, you know. Something a bit light-hearted. And she give me a look like I was something under her shoe.’

‘Kids of today, eh?’ Tillman said, stony-faced. ‘So does that thing work?’ he nodded up towards the camera, and the shopkeeper followed his gaze.

‘Yeah, it works.’

‘And it was working last night?’

‘It’s on all the time. It’s on a loop.’

‘I’d like to take a look at the tape.’

The man looked scandalised. ‘I can’t do that. My customers value their privacy.’

‘Is that why they buy their porn in a sweet shop? What if I told you she was underage?’

A flicker of uncertainty crossed the man’s face, but he rallied quickly. ‘I asked her to show ID,’ he said. ‘It looked good enough to me.’

‘And that’s on the tape too, is it?’ Tillman asked.

‘It … I … yes … I think, that might have been on another occasion, when she …’ the man floundered, looking for a safe haven to sail his white lie into.

‘I’m not from the council,’ Tillman said. ‘And I don’t care what you sold her. I’m just her social worker and I want to make sure it was actually her. Show me the tape, I’m on my way.’

‘It’s digital,’ the man said. ‘On a disc. I don’t understand it myself. I’ll have to get our Kevin.’

Tillman nodded. ‘Good call,’ he said.

The screen on the portable TV was about three inches square and the picture was every bit as good as the sound. It offered a glimpse into a fragile, beleaguered world, canted slightly off the true and periodically overwhelmed by waves of interference like pixellated blizzards.

The slight, speechless teenager who answered — or more usually failed to answer — to ‘our Kevin’ messed with the controls on the TV, the playback machine, the TV again. The picture swam into and out of focus, but after a while it was obvious that sharpening it up any further would just add more contrast rather than more detail. They fast-forwarded through the previous day’s footage, telescoping twelve hours of lived time into a couple of minutes of jerky stop-motion. The man with the bottle-glass spectacles seemed to have been on duty for the whole of that time, apart from a couple of toilet breaks lasting four or five frames each, during which his part was played by our Kevin.

‘There,’ the man said at last, jabbing his stubby index finger at the screen.

Kevin froze the image, but he froze it between frames, so that the girl danced in and out of the shop’s entrance, her foot over the threshold, then back, then over it again. The boy swore to himself a little, pressing PLAY and PAUSE alternately until the image stabilised.

But the resolution was so bad that freezing the picture just removed one layer of information. Tillman reached past Kevin and hit PLAY again, watching the whole short sequence through from start to finish. You could tell more about the girl while she was in motion. There was a care and an economy in her movements, the tightness of a coiled spring, or of a dancer waiting for her cue.

He rewound to the beginning, watched again as the girl entered the shop, picked up the magazine — after a quick, detached scan of the top shelf — and presented it to the man at the counter.

‘So is it her?’ the man asked Tillman. ‘The one you’re looking for?’

‘Does it zoom?’ Tillman asked Kevin, ignoring the question.

‘A little,’ the boy muttered. He held down a button and the central part of the image swelled until the girl’s face, seen from above and off to one side, filled the screen.

It was a reasonably attractive face, as far as Tillman could tell from this soup of pixels, heart-shaped, with large dark eyes, framed by a barbed wire tangle of short, spiked hair. She was too pale, though — pale enough that you might think she was anaemic, or recovering from a recent illness. Or that she grew up underground, Tillman thought, in a city that was never open to the sun and saw nothing unnatural in that deprivation.

So what do you make of the outside world, princess? Not a whole lot, probably, since they only let you out to hunt.

He rewound and watched again, but he went too far, past the point where the girl entered the shop. Outside the front window, in shot but barely visible, horizontal blurs were succeeded by vertical blurs. Then the door opened and the girl stepped inside, quick, methodical, racing against time — on her way to save Heather Kennedy’s life.

What had he just seen?

He rewound again and pondered those blurs. Something moving on the pavement or on the road. Moving sidelong into sight. Then a bob, or a dip: the sense of a quick, downward movement, ended as soon as it was begun.

Then the door opening.

Again. He still couldn’t make sense of it. Again. He turned the sound up, hoping for another contextual clue, and heard a rumble like a slowed-down road drill. It stopped before the girl came into the shop. In fact, it stopped just before that quick dip.

Of course it did.

Tillman turned to the shopkeeper. ‘She was on a motorbike when she arrived,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

The man’s face lit up with sudden animation. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘She was. I remember that, because she didn’t have a helmet on. That was what I said to her. I said, you’ll come a cropper one of these days, riding without a helmet. And she just give me a look, like I didn’t have the right to even talk to her.’

‘Do you remember anything about the bike?’

The man shrugged. ‘Sorry. I don’t know nothing about them things.’

‘Anything at all? The colour? Decorative trim? One exhaust or two?’

The man shrugged again. ‘It was just a bike.’

‘Actually,’ Kevin said, ‘it was a Ducati Multistrada 1200. The Sport version, in red and silver, with a hybrid frame. Pirelli Scorpion Trail tyres, front and back. And she had the side panniers, too.’

There was a pause while both older men stared at him, the shopkeeper in blank astonishment and Tillman with something like respect.

Kevin blushed furiously under this close surveillance. ‘But she’d taken the windshield off,’ he mumbled.

24

H. Fossman. N.O. DeClerk. P. Giuliani. S. Rake. J. Leavis. D. Wednesbury. A. Davies. And so on.

Rush didn’t have much to go on, at first, but he reasoned that most of the people who went looking for A Trumpet Speaking Judgment would do so for professional rather than recreational purposes. Camped out in Emil Gassan’s office, where he figured he was unlikely to be disturbed, he started off by typing each of the names into a meta-search engine along with a number of additional terms such as ‘Civil War’, ‘English history’ and ‘seventeenth century’.

A fair few of them turned out to fit right into that framework. They were historians with published works including a biography of Oliver Cromwell (Nigel DeClerk), a history of religious dissenters in northern Europe (Phyllida Giuliani) and a racy study of the British interregnum called The Headless Kingdom (Stephen Rake). The rest didn’t appear to be famous in any field that Google cared about. They were stubborn enigmas until Rush remembered that they had to have taken other books out of the British Library, too, and would probably still be on the main user database. That gave him full names and contact details, and opened up a lot of other options.

Most of which then closed again, pretty quickly.

When Rush saw the pattern emerging, he swore under his breath. He called Kennedy in a state of barely suppressed hysteria and told her that he had something he needed to talk over with her right then. She told him to meet her at the Union Chapel, so he grabbed his coat and sprinted most of the way there.

She was sitting right under the pulpit, with her backside on the back of one pew and her feet on the seat of the pew behind. Even in a deconsecrated church, that felt slightly shocking to Rush, whose Catholic upbringing furnished him with enough devils and guilt for any three ordinary people.

She was talking on the phone, and judging by the half of the conversation he could hear, it was to a boyfriend.

‘No, of course I miss you. It’s just that I’m still … if I could get up to see you, I would. You know I would.’

Squeak and rattle of the boyfriend’s voice. He sounded shrill.

‘I get that, babe. But I don’t know and I can’t promise.’

Squeak. Rattle rattle squeak. ‘Izzy,’ Kennedy said, interrupting the flow. ‘Isobel. Stop. I’ve got to go. I’ll call you later.’ Rattle. ‘Yeah. Love you, too. Well, hold that thought and we’ll work on it soon.’

She snapped the phone shut and put it away. Rush stared at her. He’d registered that the boyfriend was a girlfriend and was trying to process the information.

‘What?’ Kennedy said.

He pulled himself together and handed her the sheaf of printouts he was carrying. ‘Wales was obsessed with that book,’ he said. ‘God’s Plan Revealed, and the talking trumpet, and all the rest of it. He was trying to work up a list of everyone who’d read it or even taken it out of the stacks. So then I tried to find out who these people were. Some of them are dead, but that’s—’

‘Recently?’ Kennedy broke in quickly.

She was instantly alert, in a way that told Rush this news wouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to her.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not recently. Why?’

‘Never mind. Go on.’

‘Well, these were people who took the book out back in the forties and fifties. It would be a bit surprising if they were still around. But here’s the weird thing. Some of the names kept coming up in archived news reports. I ignored them, at first — thought they were probably just coincidence. But I started noticing that all the news items were about people going missing. Around about a dozen of the people who were on Wales’s list have disappeared. And you see the dates? They’re all this year, within a couple of months of each other. That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.’

‘No. It sounds like a conspiracy. But mass kidnapping?’

‘A minute ago, you looked like you were ready to buy mass murder,’ Rush said. ‘What’s the difference?’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘Mass murder is part of the Judas People’s regular MO,’ she said. ‘But usually they cover their tracks and make it look like an accident. People going missing means other people going looking for them.’

Rush gave her a bewildered and slightly scandalised stare. ‘You’re telling me they’d kill people just because they happened to read a particular book?’

‘It’s fair to say, even on my limited experience, that that’s the core of their remit,’ Kennedy told him.

‘Seriously?’

‘Seriously. Rush, I told you what you were getting into. If you want to back out, now’s a really good time. They came after me last night and I was lucky to get away in one piece.’

She told him about the two Elohim and the scary ninja girl. Rush was both shaken and fascinated, and stopped her with frequent questions. When she’d finished, he shook his head as though to clear it.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘So what do we do now?’

‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ Kennedy said. ‘We read the book.’

25

‘This,’ Manolis said, ‘is going to be a ram raid.’

Tillman chewed down on the words and found he didn’t like them much. ‘There’s no way to do it with finesse?’ he asked. ‘Get in, get out again, nobody the wiser?’

They were in the back room at the Pantheon and Manolis was once again sitting at his command deck. He’d thrown away the Linux interface he usually defaulted to and taken the system back to the bare bone of some prompt-and-command structure that displayed in green text on black background moving up the screen too fast for the eye to follow. The screens, plural: there were whole recursive nests of them, opening out of each other and then falling back again in a fractal cascade.

‘I wish,’ he muttered distractedly. ‘But there’s nobody who’s meant to have access to this data in real time. Not even the government. You must understand, Leo, this is not one system of cameras. It’s thousands of systems, millions of individual machines, most of them set up by local councils for traffic control or to monitor public order hotspots. The police, the army, MI5 and MI6 and NaCTSO, they all make search requests on these systems, all the time, and they’re accommodated. But they follow protocols, they go through channels, and they take their time. What we do is different. What we do is to interrogate all the systems simultaneously.’

‘And you can make that work?’ Tillman asked.

Manolis blew out a breath with an audible puff. ‘Damn yes, I can make it work. But not for long. As soon as I’m in, every system will report a breach and every operator will try first to shut me out and then to backtrack the query and find me. This they will succeed in doing, definitely, if we give them long enough. Proxy servers — even the best proxy servers — are not designed to stand up under that level of interrogation. So before they obtain our real-world location, we get what we need and we close down. The numbers, please.’

Tillman gave him a sheet of folded paper, on which he’d written five different registration numbers. Manolis entered them one by one into a small search window at the bottom right of the screen. He did it with scrupulous care, referring back to the paper after each tap on the keyboard. All of the numbers belonged to motorcycles purchased in the UK in the last six months: specifically, all of them belonged to red-on-silver Ducati Multistrada Sports with side panniers and Pirelli Scorpion Trail tyres fitted front and back. Tillman had heard the absolute conviction in Kevin’s voice, along with the wistfulness and the hunger, and would have staked his life on the accuracy of that description. Even in its basic configuration, the Multistrada was an expensive toy, and the machine that had made such an impression on Kevin was bespoke, not off the rack. That was the only thing that gave them a fighting chance on this.

There were 4.2 million CCTV cameras mounted on the streets of Britain, with more coming online all the time. And a very large proportion of them used some form of optical recognition system for vehicle licence plates. So in theory, if they pooled all the log listings for the CCTV camera networks that Manolis could hack into, they should end up with five dotted lines spun out across space and time, with each line representing the path taken by one of the five bikes. Only one of the five lines would intersect the Smoker’s Paradise newsagent’s shop in Fynes Street, Pimlico, and that one would be their target.

Manolis turned a slightly tense face to Tillman. ‘Ready?’

‘What do you mean, am I ready? All I’ve got to do is stand here, Mano. Take it away whenever the spirit moves inside you.’

Manolis tapped a key. ‘I’m an atheist,’ he murmured. ‘But I’m a very bad atheist. Let’s hope God takes that into account.’

The windows on the screen now seemed to be shuffling themselves like cards in a deck, the stack reshaping itself in peristaltic ripples with each screen refresh.

‘Are we in?’ Tillman asked.

‘Some hold-outs. But yes, mostly we’re in. And wait … wait … yes, already we have a winner, I think.’

‘We do?’

Manolis dragged one of the windows away from the stack. ‘These are central London feeds,’ he said. ‘And this bike — TC62 BGZ — is all over everywhere.’

‘Was it in Pimlico last night?’

‘I’ll tell you as soon as I know. But it was in Clerkenwell the day before. It’s her, Leo. I feel it in my soul.’

‘Your atheist soul.’

‘You think Christians have the monopoly? Yes, my atheist soul.’ Manolis was silent for a moment, then he swore. ‘Buggering shit.’

‘What’s the matter?’ Tillman demanded, but he could see that the deck was thinning out.

‘They see me already. Good security. Too good to take the candy I offer. They’re not bothering to backtrack, they’re just shutting the systems down and rebooting, to break the connection. So …’

‘So?’

‘Ram raid becomes hijack.’ The Greek’s long, elegant fingers flicked at the keyboard with ethereal delicacy. ‘I am now the traffic controller for the whole of the Greater London area. Congratulate me, Leo.’

‘You’re the man for the job,’ Tillman said tersely. ‘Doesn’t it make us easier to find, though?’

‘Yes. Once I let go. Right now …’ Manolis fell silent again, concentrating on the input from the screens and the information flows he was managing to control and merge moment by moment into a single data dump. Tillman said nothing, just let him work.

‘Done,’ Manolis said at last. ‘Almost done. Leo, remove the flash drive, there, from the machine, when I tell you to.’

The flash drive was bright yellow and bore the smiling face of a cartoon duck. It wasn’t an ironic statement, it was just part of a job lot that Manolis had bought cheaply from a wholesaler. Their capacity interested him more than their aesthetic. Tillman took the small wedge of plastic between finger and thumb, then waited until Manolis said ‘Now.’

He tugged the drive free. In the same moment, Manolis spread both of his hands over the keyboard and pressed down four or five keys simultaneously. He held the pose while the remaining windows popped like soap bubbles, one by one, until only one was left. On this one, the actor Wilfrid Brambell mouthed silently against a backdrop of metal bedframes and discarded tyres.

Manolis raised his hands from the keys and flexed his fingers. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Death to tyrants.’

‘Death?’ Tillman echoed.

Manolis shrugged brusquely. ‘Well, not death, exactly. It depends on your opinion of classic British sitcoms. I personally think Steptoe and Son was a highlight. So I’m giving the traffic control computers a free download of the first and second seasons. This should prevent them from completing a trace on us. It’s very hard to swim upstream, even when the stream is running through fibre-optic cable.’

With the command deck effectively offline, Manolis had to break out a battered old laptop to examine the data they’d stolen. His initial instincts proved correct: the licence plate TC62 BGZ had been recorded by a camera in Vincent Square at 11.30 p.m. the previous evening. There was no camera in Fynes Street itself, but that was close enough — and the bike’s movements over the past two days gave ample confirmation. It had been clocked half a dozen times in Islington, on St Peter’s Street, and it had been in Onslow Street that same afternoon.

‘No wonder you lost her,’ Tillman said. ‘You thought she was still on foot. And while you were taking the long way round, she switched to the bike. Probably drove right past you.’

‘No, probably not,’ Manolis protested. ‘Some things I might miss. I wouldn’t miss this bike.’

‘Sorry,’ Tillman said dryly. ‘I didn’t mean to question your professional expertise. Okay, Mano, let’s work out the clusters. I want an introduction to this girl. How close can you get me?’

‘I land you in her bedroom. Soft as thistledown.’

Which made Tillman wince a little, both because the girl was less than half his age and because he’d seen from the blood evidence what she was capable of in the bedroom.

‘I’ll settle for the front door,’ he said. ‘And I’ll wear hobnail boots so she hears me coming. I’m not in the mood for suicide.’

The phone rang and Manolis picked up. He said ‘Yes’ twice, then held the phone out to Tillman. ‘Your friend,’ he said.

‘Which friend?’ Tillman demanded.

‘The one my wife wouldn’t approve of.’

Tillman took the phone. ‘Hello, Heather.’

‘You said to tell you if I was moving.’

‘So where are you moving to?’

‘Avranches. Normandy. A day trip.’

‘Okay. Check in when you get back.’

‘Will do, Leo.’

Tillman rang off and gave the phone back. ‘Caitlin doesn’t have to worry,’ he told Manolis. ‘Heather has refined tastes.’

Manolis shook his head sorrowfully. ‘A pity. We would have been good together.’

‘Throw yourself into your work,’ Tillman suggested gravely.

Manolis did. And Tillman played fifty-one-card patience for three hours while his old comms sergeant worked through the endless data streams, eliminating and collating.

‘Here,’ he said at last. ‘I think I have it, Leo. This is the place where your girl has spent most of her time over the last three days — all of the time when she wasn’t watching you or the refined blonde.’

‘Where is it?’ Tillman asked, putting the cards away. ‘Where does she live?’

‘In a warehouse, apparently,’ Manolis said, with a good deal less confidence. ‘On an industrial estate in Hayes.’ He gave Tillman a doubtful look. ‘Perhaps this is her day job.’

26

Kennedy met with a lot more trouble than she expected in tracking down a copy of Johann Toller’s book to read. Borrowing a computer at the Charing Cross Library, and trying not to disturb the sleeping winos who used the reading room as a flophouse, she was able to find twenty-three copies of A Trumpet Speaking Judgment that had been listed at one time or another in the catalogues of the libraries of the world. That made it marginally less scarce than a Gutenberg Bible.

But actually it was a whole lot scarcer, because once Kennedy started calling around she discovered that every single one of those copies had been bought, burned, stolen or just plain mislaid in the space of the last few years. There wasn’t a copy of Toller’s book to be had for love or money.

Well, maybe for money. She called John Partridge, who grumbled that Kennedy was asking him to search for a needle in a haystack and that he’d get round to it when he could, and then called her back, less than an hour later, to report that he’d found a copy of the book. Or, he added, scrupulously, something almost as good.

‘What does that mean?’ Kennedy asked suspiciously.

‘Well, I tried the obvious,’ Partridge told her. ‘I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to find either a scan of the book or an e-version. Most books that are out of copyright have been put through the OCR mincing machine and made available online. But I hit a brick wall. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. A lot of links that should have led to your book turned out to be dead-ends. The sites had been completely erased. Viral markers on the search engines, nothing at all at the URLs.’

‘So?’

‘Digital slash-and-burn, Heather, my love. Someone went after those sites with malice aforethought, tore them down and then sowed the ground with salt.’

‘Could be nothing to do with our text, of course,’ Kennedy thought aloud.

‘If it was one site, the odds would favour coincidence. After half a dozen, you pay your money and take your choice.’

‘And how many times did you come across this, John?’

‘A lot more than half a dozen. In the end, I got lucky — up to a point, anyway — by specifically targeting non-live data. In other words, old stored downloads of data sets from defunct sites or sites that don’t offer direct internet access. And that’s where we come to the good news.’

‘There’s good news?’

‘The place where I found the abstract was the Scriptorial at Avranches, in northern France. They haven’t got an actual copy of the book, but they’ve got a full typed transcript.’

‘And they can send it to me? That’s brilliant.’

‘Hold your horses, ex-sergeant. They absolutely refuse to make the transcript available online or to send it out in file form because they no longer have the original text to compare it with. They used to have a copy of the actual book, but it was ruined in an accident a few years ago. There’s no way of verifying the authenticity of the transcript and the curators don’t want to be responsible for bad scholarship. But they will let you examine the transcript, if you turn up in the flesh. The head of the preservation department there is a man named Gilles Bouchard. He’s a friend of a friend of a friend of someone I used to be very friendly with, once upon a time. For her sake, he’ll bend the rules a little for you.’

‘Did I just hear a subliminal love story, John?’ Kennedy asked. ‘No, I know, a gentleman never tells. Listen, this is great. Really. If I owed you a pint before, I owe you a brewery now.’

‘Distillery, please. My poison of choice is usquebaugh.’

‘Single malt or blended?’

‘Surprise me. But not too far north. The winters are murder on my arthritis.’

Kennedy hung up and made some more calls. The last of these was to Rush.

‘So now what?’ he asked her. ‘You’re going to France?’

‘Already booked. It’s a long haul. Eurostar to Paris, then regular train out to Rennes and another fifty miles from there in a rental car. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

‘You should take me along.’ Rush kept his tone light and sardonic, but she could hear the yearning. ‘You’ll need someone to stand on the running board and take potshots at them if they catch up with you again.’

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy told him, ‘but I can’t afford your fare.’ Or any more deaths on my conscience. ‘See what you can dig up about Johann Toller’s life,’ she suggested.

‘His life, Kennedy?’

‘Yeah. Think about it. I chase the work, you chase the man. We’re the horns of the buffalo, Ben.’

‘You’re the horns of the buffalo. I’m the swishing tail of the buffalo, swatting away a few flies. The horns of the buffalo don’t look stuff up on Wikipedia. Because that’s what you’re asking me to do.’

‘I’m serious,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think we can assume that Toller is important to the Judas People for some reason. If we knew who he was, we might have a chance of figuring out what that reason is.’

Rush still wasn’t happy, but he allowed himself to be persuaded. And Kennedy didn’t begrudge the time it took to persuade him because he was essentially right about her motives. She was sending him to do make-work while she got on with the investigation.

That was the plan, anyway.

27

As far as the internet was concerned, Johann Toller was an enigma. But buried in the search engine dross, Rush found a few nuggets of fact. One of these was an encyclopedia entry that appeared again and again, endlessly recycled from one site to another with no citation of the original author.

Wherever Rush looked, that same bald summary stared back at him. Nobody bothered to list Toller’s several works, or to say anything further about how the man had lived and died.

Switching to IMAGES, he found that a single picture predominated. It wasn’t a picture of Toller, it was a reproduction of the frontispiece of his book. Below the title, there was a carving or etching of a hill with a small town nestled at its base. It looked vaguely familiar.

The picture was captioned with a few words in a very ornate, almost unreadable typeface. De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente. Rush parsed them as foreign and almost gave up at that point, but he fed them back into Babelfish to see what came out. Out of the belly of the beast I come, and from the open mouth of the Earth.

He looked up the Fifth Monarchists and found out they were just one of about a hundred radical religious movements in seventeenth-century England, routinely persecuted and marginalised for their beliefs. They didn’t sound that radical at all to Rush, but he got lost among the details. Mostly they just seemed to be saying that the second coming of Christ would happen at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. Or maybe three in the morning on Thursday. Or watch this space. Hadn’t every age had its end-of-the-world nut-jobs? Or was it something that happened cyclically, like locusts?

At this point he struck a richer lode of data from a man named Robert Blackborne, another member of the Fifth Monarchy movement. Blackborne had all kinds of anecdotes about Toller. Like, he claimed to have been ‘born in darkness and delivered into light’, and to have regular conversations with angels. And despite his accent and manner of speech, Blackborne seemed sure that Toller was born somewhere exotic, because he had this peculiar way of making the sign of the cross, which he tried to make the other Fifth Monarchists adopt. He put his hand to his throat, thence to his heart, and his stomach, and so in a circle back to where it began. And when I tasked him with this, and shewed him the right way, he said the blessing was thus practised by the angels in high heaven, and he could not choose but to honour it.

Blackborne also kind of had an origin story for Toller. It seemed he was travelling through the Alps this one time, and he fell down a ravine and almost died. He was sore wounded, and likewise constrained in a strait and terrible place, that he thought he would not see another day. So he commended his soul to God, and gave himself to solemn prayer, that he might prepare himself to stand before the seat of judgment.

But then an angel appeared and told Toller eternal truths, which he felt he had to pass on to the rest of humanity.

Rush copied it all into a master file. He was starting to feel like he was getting somewhere, and he considered walking over to the British Library and seeing what he could turn up there — ideally under a false name, given what had happened to everyone else who expressed an interest in Toller’s life and works.

Then it occurred to him that he had another option. It was stupid on the face of it, but ridiculously easy to do.

He went down to Room 37. Three times along the way, he passed police either standing and talking or walking in a different direction, but they only acknowledged him with wordless nods.

He swiped himself into the room and went straight to the box that Alex Wales had raided.

As he’d already noticed, it contained a mixture of old source texts and modern commentaries. He helped himself to a grabbag of what seemed to be relevant histories and biographies, and beat a quick retreat.

But once back in Gassan’s office, he found himself unable to read. He was suddenly struck by the ghoulishness of what he was doing — the fact that he was sitting at a dead man’s desk, when the man wasn’t even in the ground yet.

It was as though he hadn’t really registered until then that Gassan was really dead. It had been abstract and now it was suddenly concrete: it was this room, and this desk, and this silence. From a photo in a silver frame, the professor smiled out at him, incongruously triumphant, holding up a bronze plaque. Maybe he got third prize in some archaeological bakeoff.

The more Rush looked at the picture, the more sinister the smile became. I know something you don’t, Gassan seemed to be saying.

All you know is what it’s like to be dead, Rush told the picture.

And everyone gets to find that out.

28

From the Eurostar terminal onto the train, then to Paris, then to Rennes via Le Mans and Laval on an SNCF stopping train: it was, as Kennedy had told Ben Rush, a long haul. She’d intended to keep herself occupied by reading the abstract of Toller’s book supplied by the Avranches Scriptorial via John Partridge, but when she finally broke the file open on the tiny netbook that he’d loaned to her, it was a much slighter affair than she’d been expecting.

In the hermetically sealed tube, crossing the English Channel a hundred metres below the ocean bottom at a speed of 200 miles an hour, she read this:

There was more, but it was all on the same abstract level. Predictions about things that had or (the smart money said) hadn’t happened three and a half centuries before. If you were looking for a definition of futility, you pretty much had it right there.

Once she was out of the tunnel on the French side, Kennedy checked her emails. All but one of them were from Izzy. Read in sequence, they made up a riveting saga of frustrations, humiliations and atrocities. The characters — wicked witch Caroline, pussy-whipped Simon, Hayley and Ben co-starring as the babes in the wood — were larger than life but painted with real conviction. It was better than a Christmas pantomime. Or it would have been, if the subtext hadn’t been so loud and clear: I’m your girlfriend, get me out of here.

And she couldn’t. After what had happened at the flat the night before, she didn’t even dare to send a reply. There was no telling which parts of her life the Judas People were tracking. Izzy had almost died once already. Putting her back in the line of fire at this point was something Kennedy couldn’t bring herself to think about.

So she turned to the remaining email, which was from Ralph Prentice.

Okay, he wrote. I said I might have something for you on the knife wounds. I didn’t want to say any more than that until I’d checked it myself, because we seem to be going through a silly season. Lots of nasty incidents, but some of them less nasty than completely baffling. Who’s got time to cut the heads off a thousand rats? Where would you get the rats from in the first place?

But I digress. You remember we talked about the firebombing up in Yorkshire? It was a listed building — Nunappleton Hall. A convent, at one time, then a stately home, then empty and supposedly derelict. Empty right up to the time of the fire, in fact.

Local police are treating it as a terrorist attack, because the munitions that were used were extremely sophisticated. They called in the Met to assist with forensics, and a lot of the paperwork went across my desk — including the autopsy reports.

You might be wondering why there’d be any autopsy reports when the fire was in an abandoned building. Answer seems to be that the terrorists brought some hostages along with them and killed them on the spot. The method of execution — and I use the word advisedly — was with a knife, in each case. Severe damage to the eyes, too, possibly done with the same implement. But cause of death for all twelve was a single deeply incised wound to the throat. A very sharp knife drawn right across.

Prentice didn’t shy away from the grisly details of the post mortem examination, and hardened as she was Kennedy found the saliva drying in her mouth as she read. The victims had been gagged. Their hands and feet tied. Probably killed as they knelt, side by side, in a confined space — a stone larder behind the house’s main kitchen. Blinded and then slaughtered, most likely one at a time because some of the bodies had fallen so that limbs overlapped in ways that would be improbable if all twelve of these anonymous men and women had been killed at the same time.

They weren’t anonymous, though. All of the bodies had been identified either by DNA or by dentition. Kennedy scanned the names briefly, but they meant nothing to her, or at least, they meant far less than the terrible, indelible image of twelve people waiting in terrified, enforced silence as the butcher worked his way down the line.

She closed the email. Was this connected in some way with the theft of Toller’s book? Was there a single strand of insane logic connecting the Ryegate House break-in with this slaughter that had happened two hundred miles distant? Steal a book, then massacre a roomful of men and women? For most people, those crimes didn’t belong in the same paradigm — but for the Messengers of the Judas tribe, who’d been killing for centuries to protect the sanctity of their gospel, it could easily be possible.

A horrible suspicion came to her. She reached into her pocket again and brought out Ben Rush’s list: the names of British Library users who’d accessed Toller’s book and then vanished. She compared it to the casualties at Nunappleton Hall. Toller’s list of the disappeared was identical to Ralph Prentice’s list of the dead.

Kennedy had a strong stomach. It was her head that rebelled against this atrocity. Not kidnapping, then. It was mass murder, after all. And carried out with hideous care and precision. The Judas People, who saw their murders as sanctified rather than sinful, were loose in the world again.

No. They’d never left. She looked up Nunappleton Hall online. She wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to find that it had changed from being a convent to an estate right after the English Civil War, when one of Cromwell’s ex-generals had been looking for a place to settle down and grow roses up the door and when Johann Toller had begun preaching across England about Christ’s Second Coming.

She did one more thing. She searched for ‘rats with heads cut off’. She had had no idea what Prentice had been talking about, but the search engine showed it as a trending topic in the news and on social media. Someone had carpeted Whitehall, in London, with decapitated rats — about a thousand of them. The police were saying it was either an animal rights protest or some sick student prank. The rats had been carefully positioned in front of a building called the Banqueting House, which had been designed by Inigo Jones, some of the news reports noted, and completed in 1622.

It felt to Kennedy as though she were seeing pieces of a pattern, individual stones in a complex mosaic, but she was too close to it to see what was actually represented there. It meant something. She just had to find the vantage point from which the crazy little details coalesced into a face, a word, an answer. There was a level on which all of this made sense.

That thought, when she dragged it up into the light and looked at it, was the scariest thing of all.

29

Tillman lay in thick undergrowth and watched the warehouse through his field glasses. He lay on his stomach and kept himself as still as he could. The broken splotches of colour on his camouflage suit would hide him from a casual glance, but until the sky darkened completely, movement could still betray him.

The warehouse wasn’t exactly a ferment of activity, but people were moving in there. Twice during the day a truck had arrived and been allowed inside through a freight bay just left of centre in his line of sight. One of the two had emerged again, with a different man at the wheel, and driven away along the sliproad, passing within ten feet of Tillman. The other was still inside. Presumably it was being either loaded or unloaded, but the rolling door of the bay had been pulled down and locked, so it was impossible to tell which.

Throughout the day, people moved behind the windows, quickly and purposefully. In the forecourt, seven cars — all fairly new but nondescript — stood side by side. They had to belong to the warehouse staff or managers, since they’d been there the whole time that Tillman had been watching and nobody had approached them in that time.

This was where Manolis had traced the bike to, but there was no sign of it here — or the girl, for that matter. There was a margin of error, of course, and Mano had been keen to stress that this was only a best guess. The cameras hadn’t logged the place where the bike spent its nights. The warehouse was just the nexus of its last recorded positions for each day. Sometimes the girl had approached it from the west, more usually from the north or east, but she’d come here every day, towards midnight or a little after, and the bike hadn’t shown up on camera anywhere after that until six or seven the next morning. If she wasn’t at the warehouse, she was somewhere close enough to it that the building itself was worth more than a passing glance.

On paper, the warehouse belonged to a freight haulage company, High Energy Haulage. The name and logo of the firm were blazoned over the front and rear door of the building. The logo looked like one of the trilithons at Stonehenge: a broad horizontal bar, with two vertical bars of about equal length extending downwards. The bar on the right touched the top stroke, but there was a narrow gap at the top of the lefthand bar. Tillman wasn’t sure what it was meant to be, but it tugged annoyingly at his memory. He’d seen it, or something like it, before, and he hadn’t liked it then, either.

In fact, there wasn’t much he liked about this place. The fact that it was full of busy people, but with almost nothing coming in or going out, stank out loud. He had a hankering to see what they were up to, and he knew that his only chance was going to be at night. That was why he was still here, out in the long grass, with cramps in his legs and jagged-edged pebbles pressing into his chest.

He trained the field glasses on the rear door and the freight bay, the windows, the roof. There were security cameras, but he could see a couple of approaches that would take him safely through them. An alarm system, but it didn’t look like anything that would give him too much trouble. The external hub was labelled WESTMAN SECURITY SYSTEMS. Tillman knew pretty much what was inside that box and what it would do, and what it wouldn’t do. So long as it hadn’t been tweaked from base specs, it was going to be a dog that failed to bark.

But most likely there’d be dogs, too. And guards. There might even be a night shift, in which case he’d have to think again.

But as the sky darkened, and one by one the warehouse staff walked out to their cars, shrugging on jackets or overcoats, and drove away, Tillman became more sanguine about his chances.

The forecourt was empty now, but he still waited. After fifteen minutes, a man in a black uniform came out through the rear door, locking it behind him, did a perimeter walk that took him two and a half minutes, and went back in again. He did the same thing again an hour later.

This time, when the door closed, Tillman got to his feet, massaging his aching muscles, and started to walk towards the building.

Diema watched him as she had watched Kennedy, from far enough away that he could only be made aware of her through some gross error of her own. She was sitting a quarter of a mile away, behind a rampart of discarded crates and boxes on a piece of wasteground left to stand between two identikit business units — one dedicated to anti-theft devices for cars, the other to the manufacture of breast implants from medicalgrade silicon. The whole logic of the Adamite world, served up like the moral in a fable.

She liked that simile. But she wasn’t feeling the detached contempt and superiority that it implied. The truth, though it exasperated her to see such weakness in herself, was that Tillman made her uneasy.

She knew who he was, of course. Kuutma had told her everything, arming her in advance against surprises. Tillman was the father of her flesh. It was him who had impregnated Diema’s mother, Rebecca Beit Evrom, when she was sent into the world as one of the Kelim, completing a purpose that was above and beyond him. He was, in this, like a donkey carrying one of the faithful to pray. The donkey has no clue what the weight on its back really signifies, the meaning of its labour. It plays its part, controlled by whip and words, and then it’s put to pasture.

Diema had spent her whole life among the People, the fathers and mothers of her soul. Though her sire was a heathen and her mother had died when she was too young even to grieve for her, she dwelled among the chosen and she was of their number. The least of their number, it was true, and she had been made to feel that. But still, that truth outweighed all other truths. It was the grounding and the purpose and the very meat of her. So it wasn’t that she felt any kinship with Tillman, because of some animal task he’d performed adequately nineteen years before. If anything, the contemplation of his role in her conception filled her with disgust and something like shame — the sense of having touched, at one remove, something foul.

But she couldn’t help herself. She was surprised and even a little shaken at what he had managed to do here. He had realised that she was following him and somehow he’d found out enough about her to follow her right back. Except that by good fortune, she hadn’t been back to the safe house even once in the last three days. She’d divided her time between following Tillman and the rhaka and watching this place — which she was almost certain was Ber Lusim’s.

So now Tillman was investigating her investigation, which, of course, was all part of Kuutma’s master plan. But still, he made her uneasy. And the unease and the disgust were like oil and water: they didn’t mix.

She imagined killing him. That helped a little.

30

Most of the drive from Rennes to Avranches was on main roads through the ruined industrial hinterlands around Fougères. But when Kennedy got to the coast, she saw the vast expanse of the estuary stretching away on both sides and the fairy-tale castle of Mont Saint-Michel hanging behind her shoulder.

She stole a look out across the bay, a tidal plain so wide she couldn’t see its edges. Mont Saint-Michel guarded it with anachronistic zeal, its lower slopes crusted with the barnacles of cheap restaurants and souvenir shops, but the abbey of La Merveille standing proud and clean at the top like an angel on a dunghill.

She should have brought Izzy here. Izzy wouldn’t have gone walking on that pottery-clay beach for a million euros and a pink Cadillac, but she would have trudged up to the abbey and back, complaining all the way, and she would have drunk apple brandy with Kennedy in one of the local dives until Kennedy had to half-carry her back to the hotel for holiday sex that was wild and clumsy and heart-stopping like the first time ever.

The Scriptorial wasn’t hard to find. The road took Kennedy straight into town, and the building was right there in front of her. An angle of the old city wall enfolded it on two sides, and an ancient square tower rose right behind it, but the Scriptorial itself was a triangular tumulus with rounded corners, like a man-made anthill.

The bulk of the space, Kennedy knew, was a standing exhibition devoted to the history of books and book-binding, and the literally crowning glory on the building’s top floor was a selection of the books rescued from the library of La Merveille around the time when the revolutionary government decided that bibles made good kindling.

Kennedy reported to the desk, and while she waited, cast her eye over the exhibits. There were models of La Merveille showing the stages by which it had been built over the space of a handful of centuries, stone sculptures and wooden carvings looted from its chapel, and maps of the area at different times in its history. But she was too tired from the drive and too restless to take in much of what she was seeing.

‘Miss Kennedy.’

The voice was cultured and with the merest trace of an accent — just enough to turn the i of miss into an ee. Kennedy turned and Gilles Bouchard extended a hand.

Long acquaintance with Emil Gassan had conditioned her to expect someone both dry and dapper. But Bouchard was young — maybe her own age — robustly built and dressed very casually in a grey polo neck sweater and snow-white jeans. His hair was long, fine and blond, his narrow face tanned like a movie star’s.

She took the hand and shook it. ‘Yes, I’m Heather Kennedy. And you’re Dr Bouchard?’

‘Gilles.’

‘Gilles. Thank you for agreeing to see me at such short notice.’

‘It’s my pleasure. I believe I may be repaying a favour, by a fairly Byzantine route.’

Kennedy grinned. ‘Yes, so I was led to believe.’

‘I was also told you might not have much time.’

‘I’m here on your terms. But if you’ve got the book ready to hand, I’d love to take a look at it.’

‘The book,’ Bouchard said. He gave the word a slightly satirical edge. ‘Yes. Well, I’ll show you what we have, and I’ll explain how we come to have it. Please, come this way.’

He led her away from the timeline and the lower slopes of the exhibition to a door, which opened onto a stairwell with red-painted walls. The stairs were steel, and rang under their feet.

‘The Scriptorial within the Scriptorial,’ Bouchard said. ‘It runs clockwise, where the public rooms run counter-clockwise — or widdershins, to use the charming English word. We call this space le filetage administratif; the administrative thread. You understand the metaphor? Like the thread of a screw.’ He gestured with his index finger, moving it in a spiral.

‘I understand the metaphor,’ she confirmed.

‘This is where we keep the bulk of our collection,’ he told her, ‘along with facilities dedicated to their preservation and repair. Many of our books came from the abbey, as you probably know — and our bias, perhaps for that reason, is towards religious works. Here. I have set this room aside for you.’

He unlocked a door and ushered her into a room that was no more than a cubicle. The desk and straight-backed chair that it contained more or less filled it. Behind the desk there was a single wall-mounted shelf. The walls and ceiling were painted in a soul-sapping hospital green.

The room was narrow enough that if Bouchard had followed her, he would have been standing uncomfortably close, so he stayed in the doorway, hands in pockets, and indicated with a nod of the head the slender document that lay dead centre on the desk.

‘The book,’ he said, with the same slightly mocking inflection as before.

Kennedy sat and pulled it towards her. It was a bundle of A4 sheets, a little ragged and feathery at the edges, held together by a bulldog clip at the top-left corner. The title A TRUMPET SPEAKING JUDGMENT was roughly centred on the page, typed in 12-point Courier.

‘And this is a full transcript?’ she asked.

‘Yes, we think so. But we don’t know. It’s an anomaly, to be honest. We would probably have thrown it away except that we lost our only copy of the book — the actual printed book — in bizarre circumstances, and were unable to replace it. Since this is all we have, we keep it. And since it’s lacking even the most basic authentication, we don’t advertise the fact.’

He excused himself politely, aware of her tension and urgency but too polite to comment on them, and left her with the transcript.

Kennedy removed the clip and turned the page — or rather lifted the page, since the typescript wasn’t bound. She was surprised to find that the second sheet was a muddy photocopy of what must have been the original book’s frontispiece. It was a line drawing, done with indifferent skill, of a cliff wall with a town at its base. Underneath the picture, there was an epigram in Latin. De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente. Kennedy’s Latin was just about good enough for those who are about to die salute you, and she’d never liked that sentiment much in any case.

She turned to the next sheet, which was numbered 1.

Kennedy looked ahead. The last sheet in the stack was number 86. It was going to be a sod of a long night.

31

Tillman made his approach along a route that took him between the lines of sight of the security cameras. There might be nobody watching the monitor in any case, or the monitor might be set to flick cyclically through the camera feeds, but he took as few chances as he could.

He went to a place he’d already chosen from a long way out — the angle of a wall, where a dead zone for the cameras corresponded with a thick patch of shadow between two arc lights. He pressed himself in against the wall, partially shielded to his left by a downpipe, and waited.

The next time the guard made his rounds, Tillman was ready. He let the man walk right past him.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Got the time?’

He wasn’t being a smart-ass. Rotational force increased your chances of a clean knock-out, because when you turn quickly, your brain, in its bubble of protective fluid, floats relatively stationary inside your turning skull. As the guard swung round to face him, Tillman smacked him across the side of the head with a sap. The man’s knees buckled. Tillman caught him as he folded and lowered him carefully to the ground.

He quickly took the guard’s jacket and cap. Keys were in the jacket pocket, ready to hand: good. There was no time to take the trousers. If anyone was watching the camera feed, the gap before he emerged again had to be short enough not to arouse suspicions. He tied the guard’s hands and feet with plasticated wire and gagged him with duct tape. Rough and ready, but it would hold for a while.

Then he stepped out into the light, head turned slightly away from the watching cameras, and ambled around the back of the building towards the door.

He was putting his money on there being a straightforward lock that one of the guard’s keys would fit, and even then he knew he needed to get it right on the first or second try. Otherwise, he’d have to shoot the lock-plate off and take his chances with whoever was inside. He had his gun, a Mateba Unica, unholstered in his hand as he stepped up to the door.

But his luck was in. The guard hadn’t just left the door unlocked, he’d placed a wooden chock on the ground to wedge it open. That level of sloppiness and stupidity was a gift from God, and Tillman took it. He didn’t even break stride as he pushed the door wide and stepped in.

On the other side of the door, there was a narrow vestibule, completely empty apart from a time clock on the wall and a rack of punch-cards. The time clock showed six o’clock, and had presumably done so for quite a while. The cards had a patina of dust, some had fallen out of their pigeonholes onto the floor, and there were bootmarks laid across them. Whoever was staffing this place now, they didn’t bother with clocking in and clocking out.

There was a double swing-door ahead of Tillman, light spilling out from the crack between the two doors. He pushed it open and walked right through.

Into a much larger space, flood-lit. Huge wood-and-steel-framed shelf units towered past the floodlights into the darkness of a ceiling void that had to be forty feet above him. On the shelves, crates and drums and bulky objects swathed in plastic fibre-wrap.

Closer to hand, another guard turned as the door slammed against the wall.

‘What took—’ he said.

Then he registered Tillman’s camouflage trousers, or maybe just Tillman’s cold, stern face. His eyes widened.

Tillman hit him across the jaw with the butt of the Unica, knocking him backward into the nearest rack of shelves. It was very solidly built and didn’t even shake. The guard managed to stay on his feet, but he made the mistake of scrambling for the gun at his side. Tillman kicked his legs out from under him.

There was no need for another punch. Tillman got the guard in a throat-lock, his free left hand holding the guy’s arm against his side so he couldn’t bring the gun up, and applied steady pressure.

After thirty seconds, the guard wasn’t moving any more. After forty, Tillman set him down, tied him up and gagged him like the other one, and put him out of the way on one of the floor-level shelves.

No way were these guys Elohim: they were local hire, and not very good at that.

Now, belatedly, Tillman did the reconnaissance that in a perfect world he would have done before going in. First of all, he checked for interior CCTV hook-ups, or wiring for pressure or contact alarms. There were none, which didn’t surprise him now that he’d seen the standard of the security staff. Next, he found the other doors out of this massive, hangar-like room — there were seven, in all — locked the ones that would lock with the guard’s keys, and marked the locations of the others. One led through to an inner office whose floor-to-ceiling window was designed to allow whoever sat there to oversee everything that went on in the warehouse. It was dark, now, and empty.

Tillman checked the rolling door of the freight bay, too. It wasn’t a separate space but an area within the bigger room, with a built-up platform beside it and an unloading ramp for big items. An overhead crane hoist hung above it. In silhouette, it looked like the bowed head of a sleeping tyrannosaur.

So why would our girl spend her nights here? he wondered. And why isn’t she here right now?

But maybe a bigger question was: where is here?

He went to the nearest shelves and took a look at their contents. The bulky, wrapped items looked to be machine parts, but it wasn’t easy to guess what the machines might be. He slashed some of the boxes open with the German paratrooper’s gravity knife that he wore in a boot-sheath. They contained metal mouldings, screws and gaskets — the lowest common denominator of garages and workshops the world over.

But in a garage or a workshop, some of these boxes would be open and in use. Even in a wholesale warehouse, you’d expect some of them to have been broken out from under plastic seals to fulfil part-orders. Tillman ran his spread fingers over box after box. The dust was thick enough to ruck under his touch, and apart from the places where his hand fell, it was pristine.

So whatever was going on here, the stuff on these shelves was a front. For what, though?

Tillman thought of one place he could go to for an answer: the truck. If it was being loaded, it wasn’t with this stuff. He went over to the freight bay and tried the truck’s rear doors. Padlocked. But it didn’t take long to find a crowbar, and the hasp of the padlock broke open on the third tug. He threw the doors open.

The dark interior of the truck was piled high with boxes. He took a torch from his pack, flicked it on and played the beam over the labels on the nearer boxes.

He sucked in his breath. Not nice at all. Some of this stuff — like the ammonium nitrate, which made up a large percentage of most commercial fertilisers — might have looked reasonably innocent by itself. But there was only one context in which all of these substances would ever crop up together, and that was bomb-manufacture.

The truck was a bespoke bomb factory on wheels.

But it wasn’t only that, Tillman discovered as he widened his search. There were wooden longboxes, too, of a type he immediately recognised from his mercenary days. They were the crates in which guns and rifles were sometimes transported, wrapped in grease and plastic to keep them rust-proof for long-term storage. He broke one open, opened up the inner seal and pulled out a shining FN Mark 16 assault rifle. He counted six in the box. Another, smaller box in the adjacent stack contained forty-millimetre grenade launchers. They looked like a good fit for the FNs. And moving that box brought him face to face with another box, whose sides bore military stencils: CBU-94/B TMD SOFT. The TMD in that mouthful of acronyms stood for Tactical Munitions Dispenser. Cluster bombs, in other words, with launchers.

Bombs. Guns. Portable munitions. Everything you needed to start your own war. Tillman backtracked. The busy little beavers who’d been filling this truck with high-tech death for most of the afternoon probably hadn’t been carrying the crates and boxes far. With some of this stuff, you minimised human contact as far as you could, on the grounds that if someone’s hand slipped you suddenly didn’t have humans any more — just runny chuck steak. So somewhere close by, and probably in this room, there was a cache.

Once he knew that, it was absurdly easy to find. At one end of the room, separate from the fixed shelving, he found a set of moving racks of the kind used for library storage. These were packed as tight as sardines, with no aisles between them. But each unit ran on tracks and had a wheel fitted so it could be moved to left or right, creating an aisle wherever it was needed.

Wheeling the racks into all their various permutations, Tillman found what he had expected to find: a trapdoor set flush with the floor, with three keyholes evenly spaced along one of its edges.

Risking the noise, Tillman shot out the locks one by one. Then he lifted the trap part-way. Striplights flickered on automatically down below, illuminating a lower chamber as big — but not nearly as high — as the one he stood in. Quarry tiles on the floor, some of them cracked, white-limed walls. Broad, sturdy wooden steps led down to it, and alongside them there was a mechanical chain-hoist. A smell compounded of mildew, packing grease and bleach rose to greet Tillman, strong and dank and insinuating.

He thought for a moment or two. He wanted to go on down and find out the worst. But this place — not just the hidden basement, but the building as a whole — could easily turn into a trap. He had to take a few minimal precautions, at least, his own version of a tripwire tied to a few tin cans. The instinct was too deeply ingrained in him to ignore.

Tillman let the trapdoor fall all the way open. It hit the wall, where a wooden stay-bar had been bolted into place for it to rest on. He walked back across to the freight bay looking for something he could use.

Seven miles away, a red light winked on a board, to the accelerating pulse of an electronic alarm.

32

Diema muttered an oath. It wasn’t much of an oath, since the People viewed profanity as a wound to the soul of the utterer, but there was a lot of feeling behind it.

The warehouse’s alarm was silent, but the red light flashing on the tell-tale unit just over the loading bay doors showed that Tillman had tripped it — probably by forcing a lock or stepping in front of a motion sensor. It was only a matter of time, now. He could still get out of there before they came, but only if he knew what he’d done, moved now and moved fast.

The girl waited, edgily, for the inevitable consequences to play out. It took eleven minutes before a black van, high-sided and windowless, pulled off the A312 onto the deserted industrial estate, drove halfway down the approach road to the warehouse and stopped, effectively blocking it. The only other way out was across open ground to the south or east.

A minute later, a Volvo S60, also black, rolled up behind the van. Whereupon the van drove over the lip of the kerb and into the wasteground, trundling slowly around to the other side of the building.

Diema watched this disaster unfolding with a mixture of exasperation and fatalism. She still needed more from Tillman, so his death right now would be a major stumbling block. On the other hand, it would show perhaps how flawed he was — how much less than she’d been told. There was a great deal of report and speculation in Kuutma’s files about Tillman’s unique talents — his combat skills, his intuition, his dogged courage, his endless, insane resourcefulness. Now it seemed he was falling at the first hurdle, and in such an obvious way! Couldn’t he have checked for alarms? Couldn’t he have taken the time to do proper recon?

Men — only men, no women — were stepping out of the van and the car now, and walking towards the warehouse. Most were the same men who’d been working there earlier in the day, but among them Diema saw two who were of a different order. The skeletally thin man with the ash-white hair was Hifela, the Face of the Skull, and the muscular man beside him, who looked like an oaf or a butcher, was Elias Shud. They were hand-trained executioners, answerable only to Ber Lusim himself.

So it was over. Unless she risked everything to go in and rescue Tillman from the mess he’d made. And even then …

She counted ten. Ten Elohim — two of them among the best the People had ever raised.

It was over, whether she went or stayed.

33

What Tillman found in the lower room came as no surprise, but only because he’d already had the big surprise when he opened up the truck. Along with more explosives and raw materials for explosives, there were RPG-Komar shoulder-mounted missiles, self-igniting phosphorus grenades, Belgian army issue Tatang combat knives, M2 backpack flamethrowers and — looking almost ashamed of the shabby company it was keeping — a box of digital alarm clocks ready to be filleted for timing mechanisms. It was an arsenal of enormous extent and terrifying variety, assembled by someone who knew what they wanted to cook up (presumably Armageddon) and exactly what the recipe called for.

Tillman wasn’t given to letting his imagination run wild, but found himself playing out in his mind the scenarios that would arise if this Pandora’s Box were opened and a tenth of its contents saw the light of day.

But this was an ongoing operation. It didn’t look like a survivalist stockpile assembled against a future apocalypse. Quite the opposite. Two trucks had rolled in, one had rolled out again. The other had been stacked to the roof with instruments of death and mayhem and was in the freight bay ready to roll.

Perturbed, Tillman retreated to the upper level.

He was remembering the petite, self-contained girl he’d watched on the CCTV feed at the newsagents’ in Pimlico. It was hard to reconcile that pretty, solemn face with this house of horrors. But then again, from what Kennedy had said, the girl was as much beast as beauty.

Shaking his head to clear it of the ammoniac stink, Tillman crossed to the office. He didn’t bother to try keys this time, since there was no way his visit here was going to pass unnoticed. He just kicked the flimsy door off its hinges and walked in.

A dark-green filing cabinet stood demurely in the corner of the room. Tillman tried the top drawer, found it locked. Again, he thought, To hell with subtlety. He still had the crowbar in his hand and he used it to bend the front of the top file drawer out and down.

The file hangers inside were labelled with alphanumerics — TN1, GF3, KB14. He hauled papers out and scanned them. Most were bills of lading, invoices and paperwork for shipments out of the warehouse. Screws, bolts, belts and gaskets going to Bergen, Berlin, Bogota, Brussels, Brisbane. Either there were no As or they were filed out of sequence. The High Energy Haulage logo was on every sheet, its head office given each time as a different address in a different city, all of them a long way from Hayes, Middlesex.

Tillman opened up the next drawer, and the next. He found more of the same. Nothing incriminating, nothing that related in any way to the real business of this place. But why would there be? He scanned more and more of the paperwork, trying to get a feel for what this operation might be about from the items that had been sent out and the places they’d been sent to.

But there was no rhyme or reason. Most of the destinations were big cities, but some were towns he’d barely heard of. San Gimignano. Bardwell, Kentucky. Darling, South Africa. La Orotava. He glanced across at the desk in the office. Two computers sat there, side by side. Maybe a better bet.

But as he crossed to the desk and leaned in to turn on the nearer of the two machines, he heard a loud, metallic clattering from behind him, the unmusical tolling of empty paint and lube cans. He’d wired up all the doors in that way, but the direction of the sound suggested it had come from the double doors through which he’d entered.

He was all out of time.

34

Diema waited and watched.

There was nothing else she could do.

She saw Hifela and his hit squad walk into the warehouse through its rear doors. She saw most of them come out again and walk around to the front of the building, presumably to catch Tillman between two fronts.

A minute or two passed without further sound.

And then there was a single, resonating boom.

Leo Tillman had just been dispatched, execution-style.

Diema thought about this and tried to decide how she felt about him being dead before circumstances had even obliged her to speak to him. But as she considered, she frowned.

No, that made no sense. Her first guess had to be wrong.

35

Elias Shud thought often about the parable of the talents. Maybe too much, if he were honest with himself. In the parable, the man who didn’t use what God gave him was rebuked: the Lord’s blessings went to those who diligently exploited what they already had.

Shud’s own talents were mostly kept hidden, these days, because he had chosen to follow Ber Lusim into exile — and in the decade that followed, Ber Lusim had sent him only against the softest of targets.

So a man who was capable of going up against the mightiest fighters in the Nations, and coming away with their blood on his hands, had been used instead to dispatch men, women — even, occasionally, children — who didn’t even know that they were targets and either died unknowing or died surprised. And then, more recently, as Shekolni had preached his gospel of pre-emption, he had created terror on a larger scale, but still without any personal engagement worthy of the name.

So Shud had come to think of himself, in recent years, as a man whose service to the Word consisted chiefly in the abasement of his pride — in the glory that comes from forsaking glory.

Today felt no different. They were responding to an alarm call from the warehouse. Ten of them. A minyan of Messengers! Rushing to respond to a wire chewed by a rat or a security guard whose chair had toppled over while he dozed.

But as soon as they came within sight of the building’s rear entrance, they knew it wasn’t that. The door had been left open, which told them immediately that the yokels on-site had miscarried in some way.

Hifela commanded his men with gestures to fan out to left and right of the door, and chose two to lead. But there was no attack as they went in. The way through the small room beyond was clear.

Shud went in next and saw what they’d missed: one of the guards, bound and gagged and rolled out of sight in the corner of the room, behind a stack of fibreboard panels. He was barely conscious, but Shud slapped him awake and ripped the gag from his mouth.

‘How many?’ he rasped.

‘One,’ the man mumbled. ‘I … I only saw one.’

The number meant nothing in itself. It was far safer to assume they were facing a team. But now, at least, they knew there was someone ranged against them. Their time hadn’t been completely wasted.

‘Armed?’ Hifela asked, behind him.

The guard nodded. ‘I think … yes. A gun. He hit me with the butt of a gun.’

Hifela looked at the double doors that stood before them. To push them open and walk straight through was obviously an option. They had superior numbers, after all, and they were Elohim, warriors in the service of the Name.

But they were not fools. In battle, they knew, to throw away an advantage when you don’t need to is a sin — usually a mortal one.

Speaking with his hands again, Hifela designated two to watch the doors. The rest he took with him, back through the rear door and around the side of the building.

The warehouse space was huge. It took up most of the interior of the building, and there were half a dozen ways or more of approaching it. Two of them were doors opening off parallel corridors that were easily reached from a side entrance.

Hifela led the way there and let them in using a master key. They entered, separated into two groups, and — on Hifela’s signal — moved quickly and silently down the corridors to the two doors. Hifela opened one with the master key. Shud broke the other open with a single thrust of his shoulder.

They surged into the warehouse from two sides and scattered widely, looking for the enemy.

There was no enemy, but there was a fire.

In the middle of the floor, a green steel drum blazed: brilliant blue flames, with a rippling heat haze towering above them like a genie in the still air.

And just below them, Shud knew, not to mention in the truck parked on the far side of the vast room, there were crates and barrels of high explosive, both stable and unstable; cubane, nitrocellulose, half a dozen varieties of plastique and toluenes.

‘Put it out,’ Hifela hissed.

That wasn’t the mistake. Two men moved forward quickly, the others coming up behind to cover them. One of the two dragged a fire blanket down from an emergency point without breaking stride.

But as they got closer to the burning drum, their footsteps faltered. One of them fell to his knees, the other staggered and clutched his throat.

Shud suddenly realised something that he should have registered before: the colour of the flames.

‘Don’t go any closer!’ he bellowed, in the tongue of the People. ‘Stay away from it. That’s paracyanogen. There’s cyanide gas in the—’

A shadow occulted the light, directly above his head. He dived and rolled even before he thought about it, and so was saved. Something slammed down out of empty air like the slamming of a door, and the two men to his left were no longer there.

Staying down, Shud took in the scene in a series of quick glances. The shattered packing crate, full of steel ball-bearings that were now rolling freely across the floor. The two men under it, the one clearly dead, the other horribly crushed but still moving, trying to free himself.

Above them, the jib of the overhead crane still rocking, its jaws wide and empty. All their enemy had had to do was position it above the burning drum and wait for them to come.

And that was when the shooting started.

36

These things occurred to Diema, in this order.

First, that the sound she’d heard at first couldn’t have been a gunshot, because only a lunatic would fire a gun in a warehouse full of high explosives.

Then, that the sounds she was now hearing definitely were gunshots.

And then, and therefore, that someone inside the building either didn’t care about consequences or was so sure of his aim that he was prepared to take the risk.

Leo Tillman was making a fight of it. Against ten Elohim. It was the most perfect, the most complete insanity.

But as madness went, there was something admirable about it.

37

From his position on the floor, Elias Shud had two major advantages.

The first was that the remains of the broken packing crate gave him effective cover. The second was that the toxic gas coming off the burning drum of paracyanogen was both hotter and lighter than the air in the warehouse, so he wasn’t in danger of inadvertently taking in a gulp of invisible and odourless death.

He was well placed, therefore, to admire the precision of the shots that killed several of his comrades.

They were coming from high up and over to his left, and they were spaced far enough apart to indicate a handgun set on full manual. Heavy, too: a .454 Casull load, or something very similar. The tool of a craftsman, in other words. Three men fell in the space of about ten seconds, each taken out by a single shot.

In combat, Shud kept his emotions firmly in check, but he was aware that one of the emotions he was shutting down was the thrill of meeting — after so long an interval — a worthy opponent.

He saw his comrade and leader, Hifela, kneeling behind the angle of a wall, triangulating — just as Shud himself had done — the point of origin of the shots. Hifela caught Shud’s gaze, gestured him to wait, took out his phone.

Shud turned his head, slowly and smoothly, to take in the area of the freight bay. There were very few places that would allow both for cover and for a clean line of fire. And obviously the shooter had started off by being there, in that corner, where the controls for the overhead crane were dangling on the end of their free line.

Hifela was talking in a murmur to the two men outside, the ones he’d left covering the rear doors. He put the phone away, signalled to Shud be ready.

Shud had a sica blade in one hand and a gun — a Jericho 941 loaded with low-penetration hollow-point ammo — in the other. Aside from being flat on his back, he was as ready as it was possible to be.

When the doors burst open, he was already rising into a crouch. Their man would be facing a vicious enfilade out of nowhere: he’d have to move or die, and any move away from this fresh attack would take him in Shud’s direction.

The whipstitch whine of semi-automatics was his signal. Shud was on his feet and running, Hifela running too on the other side of the shelving rack, staking out the dead ground between them without any need for discussion or signals.

Shud actually saw his man, just for a moment, wedged into the corner of the freight bay with nowhere to run. He brought up his arm and squeezed off a shot without even slowing, and felt a surge of satisfaction when the intruder jerked, half-turned around by the force of the bullet. He’d taken the shot either in the shoulder or high up on his chest.

Then the neon strips stuttered and stalled, and the room was plunged into complete darkness. Acting on honed instinct, Shud shifted left and slowed, breaking his stride. Bullets snarled against concrete beside him, where he’d been. So the enemy was hurt, but not down, and still working every advantage he had.

But the darkness helped Shud just as much as it helped his quarry. Knowing that Hifela was perfectly placed to fire if the man moved away from the wall and betrayed his position out in the open, he ran forward another ten feet, ducked and rolled, so that he was right up against the rear wheel of the truck. At this distance, even going by hearing alone, he could hardly miss. He waited for his enemy to move.

But nothing moved. And now Shud was skewered on the same dilemma, afraid of giving away his own position by an incautious sound or movement.

He considered. The man had to be very close. If he’d run towards Hifela or the others, there would have been shots or scuffles by now. So he’d remained in the freight bay, holding perfectly still just as Shud was, waiting for his moment.

The man had very few options, at this point. He could go around the front of the truck, between its bumper and the drop-down doors; around the rear, into the open — and into Hifela’s line of sight; under the truck, over it, or into it.

It struck Shud that by putting out the lights, the man had given away his decision. In the dark he was moving out, now, across the floor of the room. He was in the open, advancing as silently as he could between his attackers, taking the only chance he had to make it out of the trap he’d dug for himself and reach one of the doors.

Shud rose to his feet. Ten steps away, at the mouth of the freight bay, was the main bank of light switches. He took those steps slowly, soundlessly, shifting his weight with infinite care so that not even the rustling of the fabric of his own clothes would give him away.

Beside the cab of the truck, he paused again. There was no movement, yet, from anywhere else in the room. He reached out, still slowly, still silently, and found the lower edge of the panel of light switches, smooth steel bolted to split and weathered plywood board. His fingers traced the switches. He knew them by their relative positions. External lights. Bay lights. Main strips.

But before he could flick the switches, something cold and hard touched the back of his neck.

From inside the cab of the truck, whose windows must have been rolled down all this time, the man’s voice murmured right in his ear.

‘Sorry. Lights were just bait.’

On the first word, Shud was already moving. But the man shot him high in the chest, the bullet heading down through his body at a steep angle. It was not just the bullet, it seemed, but the whole world that attacked him. The wall charged him, knocking him off his feet, and then the floor reared up to slam against his splayed body, full-length.

Shud heard the truck’s engine start, saw through bleared eyes its lights opening like the eyes of a dragon started from sleep.

The engine noise swelled to a roar and the truck leaped backwards, smashing into the nearest racks of shelving, sending them tumbling and crashing against their neighbours. The chain reaction toppled the burning drum of paracyanogen and a wave of blue fire spread across the room, lighting up a scene of chaos and destruction — running men, falling crates and toppling walls of shelving.

Then the truck reversed direction and rushed on Shud, and the darkness followed in due course.

38

The truck punched its way through the drop-down door of the freight bay without slowing, bringing it down from its housing in the brickwork and ripping out a steel supporting joist along with it. The debris rained down on the truck, which was already slewing around towards the slip road.

There was a moment when the light from one of the security spots shone directly into the cab, showing the driver, beyond any possibility of a doubt, to be Leo Tillman.

Diema felt an astonishment that had a prickle of awe in it. Ten Messengers, one Adamite man. It was like a Zen koan: there was no meaning in it that her mind could grasp.

The truck drove up the slip road, gathering speed. When it got to the car that had been left there as a road block, Tillman pulled suddenly to the left to hit it at an angle, spinning it off the road and over onto its side, its roof, its other side. It was still a terrific and damaging impact, but the truck, rocking like a boat in a tempest, kept right on going.

Three men — Hifela and two others — ran out through the ruined freight bay doors, guns in their hands, and took aim. To get to the main road, the truck would have to turn broadside on to them for a space of fifty yards, making the driver a relatively easy target.

Diema fired low. Her first two shots missed, but the third hit one of the shooters in the knee. He fell, clutching his leg, and a second later his scream floated past her on the light wind.

A lacework of shots forced Hifela and the other man to retreat behind the angle of the warehouse wall, carrying the wounded man between them. They returned fire, for the sake of their self-respect, but out in the dark of the wasteground Diema was an impossible target.

When the truck was out of sight, she slipped from her covert and retreated quickly back to the fence that separated this site from the next. She was about to lie down on her belly and slide through a hole in the base of the fence when the night turned to summer noon.

The explosion was an assault against each of her senses in turn. After the fireball, the shockwave hit her like a wrecking ball and threw her down onto the ground. The sound — a great, prolonged roar — mauled her as she lay there, stunned, and then a searing, chemical miasma invaded her lungs along with her sudden, shaking breath and tore at her from the inside.

It was whole minutes before she could make herself move again. She felt as though every inch of her skin had been separately squeezed and pummelled. The fire was still lighting up the sky brighter than daylight, but the smoke had now rolled across her and everything that was near at hand was cloaked and distorted by it.

Breathing as shallowly as she could, she crawled through the hole in the fence. On the far side, she stowed her rifle in a battered-looking sports bag, changed quickly into the clothes she thought of as her homeless street urchin disguise, and cleaned most — but not all — of the camouflage dirt off her face with moist wipes.

When she walked away, she was both anonymous and vaguely unclean. In the Adamite world, she found this to be the best disguise of all. The eye glanced off her because it didn’t want to see.

Not that anybody was likely to be looking, right then. The wrath of God had fallen on Ber Lusim and his people. And with supreme, inscrutable irony, it had worn the face of Leo Tillman.

Tillman drove for about five miles — sticking to back roads and country lanes — before he found a place where he could stow the truck. It was a derelict petrol station, right on the main road, with an equally abandoned-looking cottage alongside it. Possibly the cottage was attached to the property — live-in accommodation for the manager of the station, until the completion of the M25 left him beached an unfeasible six or seven miles from the passing trade.

Tillman steered the truck between the rusting pumps and the blind eyes of the kiosk, and rammed it slowly and carefully through a decorative latticework fence into the cottage’s back garden. Then he got out and propped the fence back up again. The cottage hid the truck from the road, which was something, but it was as conspicuous as hell from the station forecourt. Given the obscene potential of its cargo, he’d have to come back soon and put it somewhere safer. But this would do for now. He still had to trek back overland and retrieve his own car, which was a mile or so from the warehouse in a stand of trees.

Sitting on the truck’s running board, Tillman stripped off his jacket and then slowly, with his left hand, undid the straps of the Kevlar vest. His shoulder was aching and starting to cramp. Examining the impact site, he realised that he was lucky to have gotten off so lightly. The deepening purple bruise was centred a bare inch from the edge of the vest.

Tillman pushed air through his clenched teeth, consumed for a moment by utter self-disgust. It had been bloody amateur hour all the way, and it was a miracle he’d gotten away as clean as he had. He remembered a barracks in Angola, more than a decade earlier. Field Sergeant Bennie Vermeulens holding forth as he sewed up a massive knife wound in his thigh with fishing line. ‘Improvising is the last tool in the box, Leo. It’s what you do when your plans run out. So every time you do it, ask yourself if you should have had more plans.’

If that last man — the one who’d looked too big to run so fast — had aimed an inch to the right, the hollow-point shell would have gone into Tillman’s shoulder, and its casing would have broken into molten meteors spraying out and down through his chest. Or if the guy had loaded a more penetrating round, at that distance the vest might not even have stopped it.

And if there’d been no handy tub of stabilised paracyanogen gel? No overhead crane? No truck?

He should have had more plans. Definitely.

But that wasn’t all. He’d left men standing and given them a clear shot when he ran. He’d been saved by another shooter, firing from the other side of the warehouse, away from the road. Someone, therefore, who must have already been in position when the kill squad rolled up, probably even earlier, when Tillman was doing his own recon. As he watched the warehouse through his field glasses, another pair of eyes had been trained on his back.

Friendly eyes? Best not to take anything for granted at this point. The hand that picks you up out of the fire may just be saving you for the frying pan. But friendly or not, he knew who they belonged to and how elegantly he’d been set up. He just didn’t know why. Or how she’d guessed that he’d track the bike and use it to get back on her. Or why she’d bothered, once he was in the trap, to help him get out again.

What are you up to, girl? And how do you even know me, let alone know me so well?

Unless it was all chance. All screw-up. Maybe she’d been watching the warehouse, too, and that was why she’d spent so much time there.

Like Kennedy, he had a sudden, uneasy feeling that he was a piece in a pattern he couldn’t perceive. Not acting, but acted on. And that the pattern, when he finally saw it, might be one he wouldn’t like much at all.

39

Kennedy shoved the thin sheaf of typewritten pages away from her and massaged her eyes with the heels of her hands. She’d learned a lot about Johann Toller in the last three hours, but was starting to wonder how much more she could take.

Toller described the source of his revelations as an angel made all of fire, with six wings and multiple pairs of eyes under each wing — Revelation 4:8, he had helpfully added. The angel had appeared to him when he was close to death, and recounted the prophecies to him.

And they were deeply strange. They soared and plunged from the sublime and the cosmic to the sordid and the petty. God would deal out vengeance upon the nations that denied him, but also on specific, named people: minor officials in Cromwell’s Barebones Parliament and its successors, quartermasters in the New Model Army and even clerks in government ministries.

But riding behind the local details was a religious fervour freed from the confines of workaday sanity. Toller believed that Christ was on his way, ready to keep a date he’d made with the faithful long before. He was already late. He was already looked for. If you held your breath and closed your eyes, you could hear his footsteps.

A conviction grew in Kennedy as she read. The terms of Toller’s rhetoric were so similar to the Judas Gospel, as Emil Gassan had once read it to her, that she knew, somewhere beneath or beyond reason, that the echoes meant something. Like Toller, the Judas People were obsessed with timing and haunted by the fear that the Lord might have turned his face away from them — that their precious covenant might come, in the end, to nothing.

The similarities were too close to be accidental. Toller even mentioned the same figure of three thousand years, which was central to the Judas tribe’s theology but made very little sense to regular Christians. A three-millennia cycle was about to close, Toller said, and once it was complete, everyone would see God’s final purpose. Which was exactly what Kennedy had read, three years before, in the forbidden pages of the Judas Gospel.

While she was still trying to make sense of this discovery, the door behind her opened. Gilles Bouchard stepped inside and skirted the little desk to stare down at her, moving with the silence of a monk in a cloister. She gave him a nod of acknowledgement, and saw Bouchard measuring with an expert eye the number of pages she’d turned.

‘You should skip to the climax, Ms Kennedy,’ he said, smiling. ‘There is, I promise you, a great deal of repetition along the way.’

Actually, Kennedy had already skipped ahead to the last page. It was the same as the rest, maybe a little more wilfully opaque and fantastic in its imagery, but cut from the same cloth as the rest of the book.

‘It’s an unfathomable and pointless book,’ Bouchard murmured. ‘But typical of its time.’

Kennedy put down the page she was reading and swivelled on the chair to face Bouchard, resting an arm across its back. ‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘How, exactly?’ She was looking for reassurance, she realised. If all this madness was in the air back then, the eerie parallels she was seeing would be a lot less disturbing.

Bouchard made a non-committal gesture. ‘I didn’t mean anything profound,’ he assured her. ‘I just meant that Toller’s argument would have been far less controversial in the 1600s than it sounds today.’

‘The religious mania?’

‘The second coming of Christ. Specifically that. A great many people, in Toller’s time, took it as a given that the Day of Judgment was at hand. Not sad, troubled men with sandwich boards, but influential thinkers. Entire religious movements, in fact.’

Bouchard leaned back against the wall, since there was nowhere in the room that he could sit. ‘It’s strange, in some ways,’ he said, ‘and very understandable in others. Strange in the timing. The word “millenarian”, by its etymology, explicitly addresses a phenomenon that happens at the end of a millennium — the end of a great swathe of time, which is easy to mistake for the end of time itself. The late seventeenth century was a long way away from one of those watershed moments. But it seemed like an ending for other reasons.’

‘What reasons?’ Kennedy asked. Dry as the subject was, she was keenly, even urgently, interested.

‘You’re inviting me to give you a lecture,’ Bouchard warned. ‘You may come to regret that.’

‘Go ahead,’ Kennedy told him. ‘You don’t scare me.’

Bouchard grinned, and spread his arms in a declamatory gesture. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ he said. ‘Well, mostly it was just the worst of times. Or at any rate, the most unsettled. The most unstable. The upheavals of the seventeenth century had the feel of a great and irreversible change, a culmination of human history. In Britain, the monarchy was overthrown and the king beheaded by his own people. In Europe, the Lutheran challenge to the Roman church seemed to echo the cataclysmic battles promised by St John in his Apocalypse. If Mother Church could be attacked, undermined, forced to fight for her survival, then what was safe?’

‘So there was acid in the Kool-Aid,’ Kennedy summed up. ‘For a century or so. Across a whole continent.’

Bouchard shrugged, seeming unconvinced by the metaphor. ‘Johann Toller belonged to a group called the Fifth Monarchists,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of them?’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘I’m probably not going to have heard of any of this stuff. Assume I’m completely ignorant. I won’t be offended.’

‘They were one of many, many radical organisations at that time. Religious zealots — and as part and parcel of that, political dissidents. They came from many different backgrounds — prominent politicians, magistrates, writers and high-ranking army officers — but they were united by a single article of faith. They believed that there was a shape to human history, which the wise and the good could analyse and understand.’

‘What shape?’

‘A cyclical one. They believed that there had been four great monarchies or empires, each ruling over a particular age, and that each in its turn had been conquered and overturned by the next. I believe the four were Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, and then Rome.’

‘So where was the fifth monarchy?’

‘Not where,’ Bouchard said. ‘When. The fifth monarchy was the one that was about to dawn. The new king would be Christ, and his reign would last for ever. They backed this theory up with close reference to Biblical texts. There was a very heavy emphasis on the Revelation of St John, which famously gives the number of the beast as 666. Many argued that the year 1666 would be the last year of the earthly calendar. They liked the Book of Daniel, too. In that book, Daniel receives a vision of four great beasts who will have dominion over the Earth, and then, after “a time, and times, and half a time” will be cast down. That will be the signal that the son of man was about to ascend his throne.’

Again, Kennedy heard a definite and scary echo of the Judas tribe’s world view, with its insistence on thousand-year-long cycles and its infatuation with St John. The only extant version of their secret gospel had been encoded in a copy of his.

‘And Toller was part of this group?’

‘A leading figure, along with the likes of John Carew, Vavasor Powell and Robert Blackborne. Blackborne was the first secretary of the admiralty, by the way. Their modern-day successors may be marginal crackpots, but these were solid, serious men, with public stature and political influence.’

‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘Look, I’ve probably taken up more of your time than you can really spare …’

‘I’m happy to help,’ Bouchard said.

She got up from the desk and pushed the typescript in his direction, going for broke. ‘Then could you explain some of these prophecies to me? The proper nouns, at least?’

Bouchard raised his eyebrows. There were a lot of pages. It was a lot to ask.

‘I can perhaps add some annotations,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Marginal notes. Here and there.’

It was Kennedy’s turn to be surprised. ‘Marginal notes? On the only surviving copy of a lost book?’

‘No. Obviously not. What you’ve been reading is not the only copy. It’s a copy of the copy, which I made so you could take it away with you.’ He raised his hand, forestalling her thanks. ‘Thank John Partridge. He pleaded very eloquently on your behalf. Burn it when you’re done. And don’t, please, tell anyone who gave it to you. We have our reputation to consider.’

Kennedy understood perfectly. She’d had one of those herself, once.

Since there was no second chair, and no room in the narrow cubicle to set one down, Bouchard just sat on the floor and talked her through the prophecies one at a time. Some he just passed on, but on most he had at least a guess to offer — and Kennedy copied in his annotations in the margins or over the actual words of the text.

Münsters Churche was the Überwasserkirche, where a group of religious extremists — Anabaptists — had inaugurated their new government during a short-lived coup.

The faithlesse Soldier was almost certainly Thomas Fairfax, one of Cromwell’s generals who had been a friend to Toller and the Fifth Monarchy movement, but had subsequently withdrawn his support for them and backed out of public life entirely.

Ister was one of many old names for the River Danube.

And so on, through all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of a very intricate, idiosyncratic book. But Bouchard had nothing to offer Kennedy on the Island that was given for an Island. ‘It could be anywhere. This was a time when all the European powers were annexing territories in the New World as fast as they could be discovered, then fighting endless wars over them, using the native populations as cannon fodder.’ He frowned at the text, as though unwilling to admit that he was stumped. ‘It would have to be referring to something recent enough that it was still talked about in Toller’s day. Then again, he refers to the Münster uprising, and that was decades earlier. It will be hard to pin down.’

Kennedy was only half-listening. Something Bouchard had said had nudged a memory and she was chasing it up on the laptop. The Überwasserkirche. She found the reference and stared at it in mute horror.

And the faithless soldier. A few more clicks brought up a biography of Thomas Fairfax and she knew with a sickening certainty that she was right.

‘The ending of days,’ she muttered.

‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ Bouchard enquired politely.

Kennedy stared at him. ‘What all of this is about. The ending of days. The second coming. Armageddon.’

Bouchard nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the climax of Toller’s prophecies, of course. Christ will descend and destroy the unrighteous. Only the just will remain. All of these other events are merely warnings. Harbingers. They tell us that the beginning of Christ’s kingdom is imminent.’

‘Then He must be on His way,’ Kennedy said. ‘Because most of these things have already happened.’

40

Rush fretted a lot about how he was going to get his stash of illicitly borrowed books out of Ryegate House. But in the end, he just picked his moment and walked out of the staff entrance carrying them in a black plastic bin bag. If he was stopped, he was planning to say he’d found the bag in a corridor and assumed it was rubbish. But he wasn’t stopped.

An hour or so later, and seven miles east in Harlesden, he decanted his haul onto his parents’ kitchen table. His mum and dad were in bed already. His mother would have fallen asleep long ago, on half a temazepam, and his dad would probably be sitting up with a book, listening to classical music on his headphones. Neither had heard him return, which meant he didn’t have to pretend that everything was normal.

He’d chosen the books quickly, and some of them were no use at all. But Toller appeared in the indexes of most of them. And in one, Rush found a commentary of some kind on the mysterious book of prophecies.

It looked pretty promising at first, but it turned out to have nothing to say about the prophecies themselves. It was more interested in the book as a physical object, and in particular the revolutionary use of a process for the book’s few picture plates that anticipated some aspects of lithography.

Rush had no idea what lithography was, so he had no opinion about that. But as he was flicking through the pages he saw another reproduction of the frontispiece: the steep crag, and the town, and the Latin tag. Now he noticed the image had a second caption as well as the one Toller had given it.

It read ‘Gellert Hall, circa 1640’.

His vision was starting to swim. It wasn’t ‘Gellert Hall’, it was ‘Gellert Hill’.

He gave up and closed the book. He’d get up early in the morning and read some more before he went into work. Or maybe he’d pull a sickie and spend the day reading. He was keen to have something solid to show to Kennedy when she got back.

He went into the kitchen, raided his dad’s meagre stash of booze and found a half-bottle of cheap brandy that was mostly full, but when he unscrewed the cap the smell of it made his stomach turn. What he really needed was sleep, but he knew that it would take its own not-so-sweet time coming. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could still see Professor Gassan with his hands clasped around the knife that was sticking out of his chest.

Rush put the bottle back and went up to his room, moving as quietly as he could in case his dad had taken off the headphones and turned in for the night. He opened his bedroom door, stepped inside and closed it firmly before turning the light on.

There was a girl on his bed. That registered first, because it was such a novelty in itself.

The gun in her hand presented itself to his mind a half-second or so later, but with even more breathtaking effect.

As a distant third, he realised that she’d been watching TV on his tiny portable, with the sound right down. Cartoon Network. A very old episode of Courage, the Cowardly Dog.

‘Lock it,’ the girl said, with a nod of her head towards the door.