The Demon Code

41

On both sides of the Channel, wherever she could get any internet access Kennedy continued to work through Toller’s prophecies, trying to nail down the idea that had occurred to her when she was talking to Bouchard. By the time she was done, she was a few minutes away from St Pancras, and in a slightly surreal daze. She’d thought after meeting the Judas tribe that nothing could ever surprise her again.

She’d been dead wrong.

Her phone rang as the train pulled into the platform. She glanced at the caller ID: Ben Rush. As she was about to answer, Leo Tillman rolled slowly into her field of vision. He was leaning against a pillar halfway along the platform, hands in his pockets, conspicuously waiting for her. The train slowed to a halt, placing him dead centre in Kennedy’s window. In her current mood, that was slightly too flashy an effect for her liking. She hit IGNORE on the phone. She’d catch up with Rush later.

Tillman fell into step with her as she descended from the carriage and walked towards the barrier. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.

Kennedy looked around, first left and then right. ‘No marching bands? No parade? Some welcome.’

‘Heather, whatever this is about, it’s not ancient literature.’

‘I never thought it was,’ she said. ‘Actually, Leo, I think it’s about the end of the world.’

He gave her a slightly wary glance. ‘I wouldn’t have gone that far. But I went looking for your Elohim girl and I found—’

‘You did what?’ Kennedy stopped dead and swivelled to face him, unable to keep the horror from showing on her face. ‘Leo, I told you—’

‘I know. You told me to sit this out. But I didn’t make any promises. Listen, there’s something I need to show you. Can you give me an hour or two? I can promise you something you’ve never seen before.’

‘I’ve heard that from a lot of men,’ Kennedy muttered darkly. ‘It never comes to anything good.’

And this is no exception, she thought, forty-five minutes later. She was standing in a lock-up in Lewisham, underneath a railway arch, with the gates locked behind her, and she was staring into the back of an articulated truck. The stuff inside it was maybe what you’d get if you asked a terrorist to come up with a vision of the earthly paradise.

She picked up a rifle from a case close to the truck’s tailgate that Tillman had already opened. It was a military machine gun — no use for sports, and scarcely better for public order deployment. It was designed to be planted firmly on the ground and set to full automatic, spewing out a few hundred rounds per minute into whatever piece of territory needed to be tenderised.

The next box held grenades, and the one after that, more rifles. They were stacked up against three drums of white phosphorus.

‘This is a nightmare,’ Kennedy said.

‘Or a wet dream,’ Tillman said. ‘Depending on where you’re standing. There was a warehouse full of this stuff, Heather. Thirty to forty times as much as you’re looking at here. The warehouse is mostly smoke and charcoal briquettes by this time. And I’m going to get rid of what’s in the truck, too, as soon as I’ve figured out how. I just wanted you to see it first so you’d know I wasn’t exaggerating.’

Tillman ran a hand through his unruly hair, looking more uneasy and uncertain than she could ever remember seeing him. ‘Heather, I got a look at the paperwork. The outfit that owned the warehouse — High Energy Haulage — was delivering to a hundred other places. It was a global network.’

‘Did you call the police?’

Tillman laughed lugubriously. ‘Yeah, I did, for what it’s worth. But like I said, this was just a distribution centre. Do you see what we’re looking at? We already knew that the Messengers were killers, but this …’ He threw out his arms in an inarticulate gesture, indicating the truck full of death. ‘Unless the London branch just experienced some kind of sudden shared psychosis, we’re talking about an incredible escalation of hostilities. They’re shipping industrial quantities of small arms, field munitions, high explosive and incendiaries. Moving it all into place. And it’s enough to fight a medium-sized war — which I guess is what it’s probably for.’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘That’s not what it’s for.’

Tillman stared at her in bewilderment. ‘How would you know? Is this something you found in France? Something to do with —’

Kennedy cut across him. ‘Not yet, Leo. This is still you showing me yours. How does any of this tie in with the Messenger I met? The girl? You said you went looking for her. Explain.’

Kennedy could tell from his expression as he stared at her that her tone had given too much away. He knew that she was hiding something, and he knew that it was important. How hard would it be for him to put the pieces together and realise who it was he’d been chasing? ‘Tell me,’ she said again, more urgently.

‘She rides a motorbike,’ Tillman said, his voice calm, almost expressionless in contrast to Kennedy’s. ‘Manolis was able to get the licence number, and then he hacked into the UK speed camera networks to see where she’d been clocked. We were looking for clusters. Thought we might get some idea of where she was based. But she saw us coming.’

‘Saw you?’ Kennedy was appalled all over again. ‘You mean you met her? You actually—’

‘No. I don’t mean that. She guessed what we’d do and she turned the tables on us. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway. She wanted me to find that warehouse. She used the bike to lead me there. Or she had the place under surveillance herself, and Mano got the wrong end of the stick. But whichever of the two it was, she knows I was there. She was watching me the whole time.’

He took the rifle from Kennedy and put it back in the case, pushed the lid back down hard. Kennedy had forgotten she was even holding it. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.

‘Because I tripped an alarm, while I was in there. I made myself a target. I should have been killed, by rights. But I wasn’t, because I had a tailgunner. There was another shooter, lying out in the long grass, who laid down some cover fire for me. And as far as I could see, she did it without killing anyone. Beautiful, precision shooting.’

‘Not your man?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Manolis?’

‘He isn’t a shooter. And he wasn’t anywhere near that place. His wife would skin me and salt me if I asked him to do anything like that. I use him for surveillance, which is his specialty, and that’s all I use him for.’

Tillman paused for a second, watching her. Kennedy had to fight the impulse to turn away from him, afraid of what he might be reading in her face.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know for sure nobody followed me in. And nobody else was moving out on that waste ground after I got there. That means the shooter was already embedded and hidden before I arrived. It was the girl. There’s no other way I can figure it. And she backed my play, which is the only reason I got out alive. If she actually planted that trail for me to follow — if she knew I’d go looking for her, find the bike, and all the rest of it — then she made a lot of right guesses about me based on nothing but thin air and moonbeams.’

‘She’s a Messenger,’ Kennedy said. ‘They studied you for years.’ And you share a whole lot of DNA. Maybe that gave her a little bit of an edge, too.

Tillman nodded. ‘Makes sense, I suppose. A little bit of sense. But I’ve still got a feeling that there’s something else going on — and that it might be the something you said you’d tell me about later. Is it maybe time you came clean, Heather?’

‘There’s … I think …’ She came to the brink, then hesitated. When she’d first met Tillman, he’d seemed to be on the edge of some kind of breakdown, worn down by years of searching for his lost family. He was doing a lot better now, but if she told him about Diema, and it turned out she was wrong, the harm she might do him was beyond any reasonable calculation. It was almost exactly balanced by the harm she could do if she was right, and Tillman found out from his daughter what had happened to his sons. There were so many reasons for Kennedy to keep quiet, and only one reason to talk. But it was a big reason: it was that she had no right to stand between Tillman and his daughter — the only living person he truly loved.

She shook her head, as much to clear it as anything. Tillman waited patiently for her to speak, but before she could, her phone went off. Grateful for the interruption, she took it out of her pocket. It was Rush again.

‘I have to take this,’ she lied.

‘Okay,’ Tillman said. ‘I’ll still be here when you’re done.’

Putting the phone to her ear, Kennedy turned slightly away from him, not so much for the sake of privacy as because she still felt the impulse to hide and the phone gave her the excuse.

‘Go ahead, Rush,’ she said.

‘Kennedy.’ His voice was strained. ‘How was your trip?’

‘It was productive. Did you find out anything useful about Toller?’

‘Well, I was going to do some homework on …’ Rush began. But a second voice in the background made him pause. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that,’ he muttered. ‘She says it will keep for later.’

‘She says? Who says? Rush—’

‘I’m sorry, Kennedy. I’m supposed to stick to the script. Listen to me.’ The tremor in his voice was much more evident now, making it hard to understand what he was saying. ‘This is an invitation from Diema Beit Yudas. She wants both of you to come and meet her.’

‘Both of us?’ Kennedy repeated stupidly. Tillman looked like he was about to speak so she held up a hand to stop him and at the same time flicked the phone to speaker. Leo probably had to hear this first-hand. And it hadn’t escaped her notice that the girl was going under a different surname from Tillman’s former wife, Rebecca Beit Evrom. ‘Both of us are to meet her? Ask her who she means by that, Ben.’

Rush’s voice sounded out, thin and strained.

‘She wants to talk to you, but she wants it to be on her terms. She says she thinks you probably know enough about her by now not to do anything stupid, but in case she’s wrong about that, she wants you to know that any move you make against her will mean … will get me killed. Is that understood?’

‘It’s understood,’ Kennedy said, her heartbeat loud in her own ears. ‘Rush, don’t panic. We’ll come and get you. Give me the address.’

‘No, wait. There’s more. She says you should bring the book and Tillman should bring the truck. And it’s got to be just the two of you. Nobody else.’

‘Can I talk to her?’ Kennedy asked. ‘To … Diema?’ Tillman said nothing, but his eyebrows rose and his lips tightened.

The other voice murmured in the background.

‘Yes.’

‘Then put her—’

‘You can talk to her here. She wants you to come here, so all three of you can talk.’

Kennedy breathed out slowly, finding some stratum of calm. ‘And where’s here, Ben?’

‘A farm. Dovecote Farm. The address is—’

‘We know the address,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’re coming. We’ll be there soon.’

‘Great.’

‘Rush, you’ll be okay. We’re coming right now. She won’t hurt you.’

‘You think?’ His voice crackled with bleak sarcasm. ‘She’s got me wired up with a bloody—’ The phone went dead.

Kennedy turned to Tillman. He was already heading for the cab of the truck. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said over his shoulder.

42

When Ben Rush thought about farmyards — which admittedly wasn’t all that much — he tended to think in terms of a big house with a whole lot of barns and stables all around it, chickens scratching at the dirt and a horse looking over a hedge.

Dovecote Farm was basically just a ruin. There must have been an actual farmhouse once, but it looked like it had burned down, leaving only a massive patch of scorched earth where nothing grew. The barns and stables were still standing, but there were holes in the walls where planks had been taken out or kicked in, and the spavined, sagging roofs seemed close to final surrender. Insects buzzed and chirped in the weeds and bullrushes between the outbuildings, but nothing was moving that was big enough for Rush to see.

From his vantage point on the upper level of one of the barns, with the hayloft doors thrown open in front of him, he could look out across the ruined ground towards the road — and be seen from it in his turn, which was probably the point. He was sitting in a wheelback chair, his ankles tied to the front legs and his arms handcuffed together around the back. The chair was rickety, so every time he shifted his weight it lurched either forward and to the left or back and to the right. He was afraid that if he tipped forward too suddenly, he’d fall right out of the hayloft and break his neck. Or maybe he wouldn’t break his neck, but the explosives or whatever it was in the package that the girl had strapped to his chest would detonate and blow him apart.

The girl was sitting a few feet away, behind him, with her back against one of the beams. She had her arms folded in her lap and she was looking out at the road. Whatever thoughts were going through her mind, they left no footprints: the girl’s face was completely inexpressive.

They’d been like this for a while now, and clearly the girl could keep the silence up for however long it took. So if anyone was going to speak, it was going to have to be him.

He screwed up his courage and went for it.

‘You like Courage, the Cowardly Dog?’ he asked her.

The girl didn’t move, but her gaze flicked round and her eyes focused on him. ‘No,’ was all she said. She said it with a warning emphasis, as though that was fighting talk where she came from.

‘You were watching it.’

No answer.

‘I prefer the golden oldies,’ Rush said. ‘The Flintstones. The Jetsons. Yogi Bear.’ Since the girl didn’t react, he went on listing old cartoon shows as a mental exercise. At least it passed the time. ‘Huckleberry Hound. Hector Heathcote. Funky Phantom. The Hair Bear Bunch. Josie and the Pussycats. Deputy Dawg. Top Cat. Foghorn Leghorn. Tom and Jerry.’

Still no reaction from the girl. Well, maybe a flicker of interest on Tom and Jerry, but nothing you could take to the bank.

‘You want to play a game?’ he asked her.

‘No.’

‘Come on. I bet I can read your mind.’

She stared at him for a long time. Eventually, she said, ‘Be quiet.’

‘You don’t think I can read your mind?’ Rush persisted.

This time she didn’t bother to speak.

‘Think of a number from one to ten,’ Rush said. ‘Then take away five.’

The girl’s forehead creased in a frown. ‘A pink elephant from Denmark. It’s old and it’s stupid. Now be quiet. Or do you want me to cut you?’

And suddenly she had a knife in her hand. It was a weird, asymmetrical thing, with a flat extension like a hook or a bracket to one side of the blade. Rush stared at it, and then at the girl’s face. After a moment, she slipped the knife back inside her shirt. There must be a sheath there, strapped to her shoulder: the strap would go down between her breasts, and the knife would sit underneath. And now he was looking at her breasts — and she was looking at him looking at her breasts, which maybe wasn’t such a great idea.

‘If you cut me, you don’t have a hostage any more,’ he said. He was just about able to keep the tremor out of his voice.

‘No, boy,’ the girl said patiently. ‘If I kill you, I don’t have a hostage. I can still cut you.’

That shut him up for a good ten minutes. But he’d read a thriller once where the detective said that psychopaths found it easier to kill you if they didn’t have to see you as a human being. So he gave it one more try.

‘My name’s Ben,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

Instead of answering, the girl rummaged in the kit-bag she carried, brought out a narrow strip of straw-coloured cloth and started to twist it into a braid. She looked at Rush expectantly.

He weighed up the pros and cons. It was a good sign, really, that she’d decided to gag him instead of taking the knife to him.

But he really didn’t want to be gagged.

But maybe if she got in close enough to put the gag over his mouth, he could do something. Shift his weight at a crucial moment, maybe, and push her out of the hayloft.

He knew that wasn’t going to happen. Even if he had both hands free, the girl could fold him into an origami sculpture.

But what the hell was he, anyway? She’d called him boy, and he had to be at least a full year older than her, and probably more like two. And he hadn’t done one damn thing, so far, besides get smacked around and tied up and questioned and intimidated by her.

‘Those are really, really small tits,’ he said, after a long and pregnant silence. ‘But they look great on you. If you’ve ever considered plastic surgery, I’d say don’t go for it.’

The gag was uncomfortable, and it bit slightly into the corner of his mouth, but Rush was very slightly cheered by the fact that the girl had been blushing when she tightened the knot.

Now I’m human, he thought. And what’s more, so are you.

43

On the A3100, just south of Shalford, there was a sign by the side of the road that read DEAD PEOPLES THINGS FOR SALE. It stood in front of a windowless wooden shed, whose peeling white paint gave it a leprous look. The first time Kennedy had been driven along this road, as a girl of twelve, she’d mainly noticed the missing apostrophe, and in a priggish way disapproved of the sign. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder who the dead people were, and how their things made their way out here to the arse end of Surrey.

Three years ago, riding as now in the cab of a fourteen-wheeler with Tillman beside her, driving, she’d only been amazed that the sign was still there.

Today, with the sun hiding its face from moment to moment behind sudden, scudding banks of cloud, the unwelcome reminder of death struck her as a bad omen.

When Tillman pulled the truck off the road and onto what was left of the drive of Dovecote Farm, it was death that was chiefly on her mind — her own as much as anybody else’s. On that previous visit, three years before, she and Tillman had been trapped on the roof of the farmhouse as it burned, with a trio of Elohim on the ground taking free potshots at them every time they stuck their heads up above the guttering. Kennedy had been close to jumping off the roof-ridge, with a vague hope of staying intact enough when she landed to make a run for it, but really, she was just choosing a broken neck over being burned alive.

But Tillman had turned the tables on their attackers, who thought themselves invincible in the dark. Firing from the roof, he’d blown up the gas tank of the truck they’d arrived in with a home-made incendiary round. One of the Messengers had died in that explosion, and Tillman had shot the other when he came running — much too late — to help his friend.

Except it wasn’t his friend. It was his brother. They were Tillman’s own sons, Ezei and Cephas, who he’d known as Jude and Seth. And because he hadn’t seen them since they were four and five years old, and because in any case he’d never been close enough to see either of their faces clearly, Tillman never had the slightest idea what it was he’d done — how his quest of twelve years had finally brought him back to his family just so he could gun them down.

But Kennedy was pretty sure that Diema-who-used-to-be-Tabe-who-used-to-be-Grace knew it very well. That she’d chosen this place where her brothers fought and died because in some way it fitted her agenda for today. And now, as Tillman rolled to a halt on that same sad piece of scorched earth, Kennedy found herself genuinely afraid of what that agenda might be.

Tillman looked a question at her: ready? She gave him a curt nod, turned the handle of the door and climbed down out of the cab, holding the print-out of Toller’s book under one arm. The blackened substrate under her feet — even after three years, probably as much charcoal as dirt — crunched as she put her weight on it. She looked around, and as Tillman rounded the cab, she pointed wordlessly.

Rush was in plain sight. When the farmhouse was still standing, the barn that Diema had chosen would have been hidden from sight behind it: now it faced them across thirty metres of nothing very much. The hayloft doors were wide open, or more likely just gone, and Rush was sitting in what looked like an ordinary kitchen chair, close to the edge, looking down at them. His hands were behind his back, presumably tied or cuffed.

Kennedy wondered for a moment why he hadn’t called out to them. Then she saw the gag in his mouth.

The girl wasn’t visible at first, but then she stepped forward from deeper inside the hayloft and stood beside Rush, her hand resting on the back of the chair. Her expression was calm and cold. They took a step towards her, but she tilted her head in a warning motion and they stopped.

‘Something you should hear before you go any further,’ she called down to them. She raised her hand. Something small and white was resting on her palm. She pressed it with her thumb and the digitised chimes of Big Ben wafted down to them. As far as Kennedy could tell, they were coming from Rush.

‘This is just the ringer from a wireless doorbell,’ Diema told them. ‘But I want you to take a good look at your friend.’ Kennedy did. Rush was wearing something bulky over his shirt — a sleeveless garment like a life jacket. It was shiny black, and whatever was inside or under it showed in rectangular bunchings on its surface. A suicide vest. And the ringer from a doorbell would make a perfectly good detonator at this range. Diema had just armed the explosives. If she pressed the ringer again, they’d detonate.

‘Now we understand each other,’ the girl said, lowering her hand to her side again. ‘Come on up. I won’t ask you to drop any weapons you might be carrying. Just know that any misbehaviour on your part will lead to a more even distribution of this boy across the landscape.’

‘Then maybe we should talk down here,’ Tillman said bluntly.

Diema stared down at him — and there was something of mockery in her face, or maybe contempt. ‘Are you afraid of dying, Tillman?’ she asked him.

‘I’m averse to it wherever it can be avoided,’ he said.

And you want her on ground she hasn’t already prepped, Kennedy thought. But the stakes are too high here, Leo — for you as well as for Ben Rush.

‘We’ll come up,’ she said aloud. And in a quieter voice, to Tillman, ‘Don’t push her too hard. When we find out what she wants, then we decide which way to jump.’

‘When we’re cosying up to forty or so pounds of high-explosive?’ he murmured back.

‘Move the truck away from the road first,’ Diema told them. ‘Out behind the barn. Tillman, you do that. Kennedy, come up here. Now.’

They did as they were told. Tillman got back into the truck and the ignition rumbled into life. It rolled on past Kennedy as she walked towards the barn. Then she stepped across the threshold, into sudden shadow.

The loft ladder was off to her right. There was nothing else in the ruined barn, no hay-bales, no rusting farm equipment, no stalls or mangers. If this was an ambush, the ambushers were up in the loft with Diema and Rush. But then, if this was an ambush, the girl was working too hard. She could have left both Kennedy and Tillman to die individually and severally before now, and instead she’d exerted herself to keep them alive.

If the agenda had changed, they’d find out soon enough. But there wasn’t anything Kennedy could do about it besides play along; not unless she was prepared to stand by and watch Ben Rush’s insides become his outsides.

She climbed up the ladder.

The loft was much better furnished than the floor of the barn. As well as the chair in which Rush was sitting, there were two more chairs set at a fold-up table. A pitcher of water stood on the table, next to a stack of plastic cups. All the comforts of home.

Diema had moved away from Rush and was standing with her back to the wall of the loft, directly facing Kennedy. The detonator was ready in her hand, her thumb poised over it. Kennedy hauled herself up through the trapdoor in the floor, moving very slowly.

‘I want to be sure Ben is okay,’ she told the girl. ‘Can I take that gag off him?’

‘You can sit,’ the girl said, ‘at the table, and wait quietly until I tell you what else to do. Is that the book?’

Kennedy showed her the typescript, which was still unbound and only held together with a thick elastic band. She set it — still slowly, still carefully — down on the table.

‘Good,’ Diema said. ‘Now sit.’

Kennedy sat.

She heard Tillman below, starting to climb.

‘If you press that button now,’ Kennedy said to the girl, ‘you’re going to kill yourself as well as us.’

‘I’m a soldier,’ Diema told her. ‘Death in the field is what soldiers expect.’

‘In my experience,’ Tillman said, his head and shoulders rising through the trapdoor as he spoke, ‘soldiers expect that for everybody else, not for themselves.’ He kept his empty hands constantly in full view as he climbed up into the loft. Nonetheless, the girl gave him a stare that was full of mistrust.

‘Sit down,’ she told him.

He sat, but he pulled the chair a little away from the table and angled it towards the girl. He wanted to be free to move if the need arose, Kennedy guessed.

If Diema saw what he was doing, she gave no sign of being troubled by it. ‘Is everything you took from the warehouse still in the truck?’ she asked him.

Tillman nodded. ‘All the incriminating evidence,’ he said, ‘assembled in one place. Is that what this is about? Are you the cleanup crew?’

Diema gave the question serious consideration. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I am. But you have no idea what it is I’m cleaning up, so you don’t know what it is you’re saying. That’s why you’re here, really. To be instructed.’ She paused for a moment, as though expecting a question. When neither Kennedy nor Tillman spoke, she said, ‘If I meant you harm — if I meant you harm now, today — I’d have come at you in a different way. You realise that, don’t you?’

Kennedy looked from Diema to Ben Rush, sitting with his back to them, then back to Diema. She raised her eyebrows. Exhibit A.

Diema met her gaze, unblinking. ‘I was doing my best to help you,’ she said. ‘That’s what I was ordered to do. That’s why I’m here. But then I spoke to the boy, and now I think I may need to reinterpret my orders.’

She continued to stare at Kennedy with quiet, fierce intensity. ‘Some time ago,’ she said, ‘a secret came into your keeping. A very great secret. When I spoke to the boy …’ her gaze flicked momentarily across to Rush ‘… I learned that you’d passed that secret on to him. Before we say anything on any other subject, I have to know why. I was assuming you have some sense of honour, some idea of what honour means.’

All of this was addressed directly to Kennedy, seeming purposefully to exclude Tillman, and it was said so solemnly that Kennedy boggled slightly. If this girl had seen twenty, it was a recent memory.

‘You tied Ben to a chair with a suicide belt strapped to his chest so you could see if we’re honourable?’ she said, trying to keep her tone neutral. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘No.’ The girl made an impatient gesture — her mouth folding into a grimace before straightening again to the deadpan that seemed to be her default expression. ‘That’s what you’re saying. Let’s go through this again.’

She pressed down on the ringer and the chimes of Big Ben sounded again. Kennedy gasped aloud and Rush convulsed, but it was only with an access of panic. No explosion came.

In the loud silence, Diema threw the ringer onto the table.

‘There’s no suicide belt,’ she said. ‘No explosives. And I gagged him because he was talking about my breasts. I didn’t like it.’

Kennedy rose to her feet. Her first thought after screw me sideways! was for Rush. She wanted to get him untied and away from that bloody drop. Tillman’s initial reaction was different. His right hand swept across his left and suddenly he had a gun in it, centred on the girl’s upper body. It wasn’t the big and heavy Mateba Unica he usually carried, it was a discreet little Saturday night special, and it looked absurdly tiny in his big hand.

‘I’m sorry to do this,’ he said to the girl brusquely, ‘because I know you saved my life the other night, but there’s too much blood under the bridge already for me to trust you. Please move over to the wall. Keep your hands where I can see them, and move like you’re walking underwater.’

‘Leo—’ Kennedy blurted, her heart in her mouth.

‘She’s Elohim,’ he said, across her. ‘No surprises, Heather. Not beyond the ones we’ve already had.’ And to the girl, ‘Please. I said against the wall, and I don’t want any argument. Do it.’

Just one damn thing after another, Kennedy thought bitterly. And she knew Tillman was right, on one level. But the level on which he was wrong concerned her more, and she found herself stepping in between the two of them, letting the barrel of Tillman’s gun bump against her breastbone, come to rest up against her throat.

‘Enough, Leo,’ she said. ‘Put the gun away. She’s done enough to prove her point.’

Tillman tried to step around Kennedy but she gripped his wrist in both of her hands and it was clear that the only way he was going to get it free would be by force.

‘What point,’ he asked, ‘has she proved, exactly?’

‘That she’s not interested in killing us,’ Kennedy said, between clenched teeth. ‘So put the gun away, and we’ll talk it out. For now, this is neutral ground we’re standing on.’ She looked over her shoulder at the girl. ‘Right?’

‘Not right at all,’ Diema said. ‘Blood was shed here. My people’s blood. It’s far from neutral. But it’s holy, and I’ll respect it. You who shed it should honour it, too.’ She was looking at Tillman, staring straight into his eyes, a quiet ferocity in her expression. He met that stare with a pugnacious determination that Kennedy had seen in his face before. The back of her neck prickled unpleasantly. She felt, for a moment, as though she’d stepped between Tillman and his reflection in a mirror. How could he look at Diema, from this close, and not see? And how could he not hear in her voice how much that spilled blood mattered to her?

‘So we’re good,’ she summed up, knowing that was something a lot worse than a lie. ‘We’re good for now, and that’s what matters. The gun goes away. We talk. Maybe you tell us what the hell is going on, Diema, and where you fit into it. Nobody dies. Nobody dies, Leo.’

He still had the gun raised. Forcing the issue, Kennedy closed her hands over it and tugged. She couldn’t have loosened his grip, but Tillman let her take it from his hands.

Kennedy drew a deep, ragged breath. She turned to the girl.

‘Could you cut Ben loose?’ she asked. ‘Or would that be too much to ask?’

The girl gave a half-shrug. ‘He’s a lot more bearable like this,’ she said. But she reached into her pocket and came up with a handcuff key, which she tossed to Kennedy with a disdainful flick of her wrist.

Kennedy manhandled the chair back from the edge before she set about freeing Rush. And before she loosened the gag she leaned down until her mouth was at his ear. ‘Don’t try anything stupid,’ she said. ‘Only Leo would be able to slow her down for more than a heartbeat. So just swallow your pride and keep your mouth shut.’

Rush said nothing, even after the gag was removed. When Kennedy had unlocked the handcuffs, he took the strip of cloth from her and wound it around his wrist. ‘I said too much already,’ he muttered. ‘She had a gun, and she said she was going to kill me. I’m sorry, Kennedy.’

‘Forget it,’ she said. Given that it was her loud mouth that had gotten him into this position, she should be saying sorry to him.

They walked back to the table. Diema faced them across it like a stern schoolmistress.

‘It was after Alex Wales died,’ Kennedy said. ‘I told Rush what he was.’

‘Alex Wales?’

‘The Messenger at Ryegate House. The one who was undercover there. Rush saw Wales kill a man with a poisoned sica. And he saw Wales cry red tears. He asked me what it all meant and I told him enough so he’d understand. I told him about your tribe and about the Ginat’Dania where you lived before your last move. I didn’t do it lightly.’

‘Who else have you told?’ Diema demanded.

‘Nobody.’

‘Not even your lover?’

The girl was staring at her with scornful scepticism. Kennedy stared straight back. ‘Especially not Izzy. In my experience, anyone who knows too much about you people does pretty badly out of it. I wouldn’t do that to someone I love.’

The girl turned to Tillman. ‘And you?’ she asked him.

He shook his head. ‘Nobody.’

‘Swear it.’

‘My word’s good, girl.’

‘Your word is water. Swear it. Swear it on something that matters.’

Tillman thought about that for a moment. Then he pointed past her out of the window. ‘You mentioned the blood I spilled here. I swear on that blood. I’ve never told anyone about your people or about Ginat’Dania.’

Diema’s face went blank, then filled with powerful, chaotic emotion. She tried several times to speak, and Kennedy tensed, ready to step in, because it looked for a moment as though the girl were going to fling herself on Tillman. But she got herself back under control.

‘Why should I believe that blood matters to you?’ she asked him, her voice thick. ‘You shed it easily enough.’

‘They were young men,’ Tillman said simply. ‘Very young men. And I had to kill them because somebody had filled their heads full of rancid crap. I hated to do it. But if you don’t believe that, I’ll swear on something else.’

Diema made a formless, unreadable gesture. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I swear — on the same blood — you’ll never tell anyone else. Take that any way you like.’

‘Well, I’m inclined to take it as a threat,’ he said unhappily.

‘For the love of Christ!’ Rush interjected. ‘It was me that was tied up and gagged and wired to a fake bomb. Can we drop this and get to the bloody point?’

‘I agree,’ Kennedy said quickly, pulling them both away from the danger zone. ‘Diema, this meeting was your idea. What is it you want?’

The girl crossed to the hayloft doors and brought back the chair that was there. She set it down in front of her, but didn’t sit. ‘I want us to share information,’ she said. ‘And then I want us to discuss strategy.’

‘I’ll need some convincing,’ Tillman said, ‘that either of those is a good idea.’

Diema didn’t seem to have heard him. She was addressing herself to Kennedy again. ‘This was my mission long before it was yours,’ she said. ‘But I can’t make you trust me or cooperate with me. I suggest you pool what you know. Now that you’ve read the book of Johann Toller, you probably know a lot. Call when you want me. I’ll tell you what I was told, and what I’ve found out for myself, and I’ll answer any questions you have. I’ll do that without asking you to do the same. I can’t think of anything else I can offer. I’ll wait in the truck.’

‘Which is full of—’ Tillman began.

‘In the cab. You’ll be able to see me from here. Wave, and I’ll come back up.’ Now she turned to look at him, and the depth of her hate was there in her face, for all of them to see. ‘Do you know how the Elohim are bound, Tillman? Did Kuutma, who is called the Brand, ever explain it to you?’

‘You’re not bound at all,’ Tillman said. ‘You’re free to kill whoever you like. Your priests give you absolution up front.’

‘Free to kill, yes. Or to maim. Or to torture. To steal, where necessary. To damage and destroy whatever might need to be damaged or destroyed, if it will help the People. But not to do any of those things for our own pleasure or profit. And not to lie. So I tell you again that I’m not here to kill you. God kept you alive for this long so you could be useful. So you could be the stick that chastises his enemies. When your work is done, then you’ll be free to die.’

She descended the ladder, making no sound at all. A moment or so later, they saw her cross to the truck and climb into the cab, where she sat, arms folded, in the passenger seat.

‘Where do we start?’ Kennedy asked.

‘By checking for listening devices,’ Tillman answered quietly.

44

Diema remembered very little about the father of her flesh. Her mother had taken her back to the People before her third birthday, and of course she’d never seen him again after that homecoming. Three years was long enough for some memories to have stuck, but belonging as they did to another world, another life, there was less and less in her mind for those memories to adhere to. So they faded, slowly at first, then quickly and finally. But there were a few isolated moments that had stayed with her:

In one of them, she was sitting at a long, low table, sitting on the ground, so it must have been very low indeed — probably a coffee table of some kind. She was drawing with coloured pencils. Drawing a lion in a jungle. The pencils were new, and excitingly unfamiliar to her hand. They were entirely full of themselves, in her memory; almost luminous with their thisness, as new things are to a child.

And she was almost done with her picture, but there was a feeling of urgency in her mind, of a time drawing to its close. Then big, enfolding hands closed around her waist and she felt herself lifted, her legs kicking slightly, off the floor, gathered up into arms too strong to resist.

Her father’s face, square-jawed and bristle-chinned, smiled down at her, his basso voice rumbled at her that it was time for bed, and she was taken away from the pencils and the almost-complete, almost-incarnate lion to be tucked up in white sheets in another room. Probably, being a child’s bedroom, it contained things and colours and textures, but in Diema’s memory it was white like the sheets, empty like her grieving hands.

Despite the vagueness of the memory, she knew this beyond any possibility of a doubt: she never held the pencils again; the drawing was never completed. That trivial, wonderful thing had been stolen from her.

The father of her flesh was synonymous with loss, even then.

She kept her eyes fixed on the open doors of the hayloft, where nothing moved. She waited for them to call her. And for the lion to be delivered at last.

45

‘Ben Rush, this is Leo Tillman. Tillman, Rush,’ Kennedy said.

She turned the photocopied sheets so that they faced the two men.

‘If we’re going to do this,’ she said, ‘I think we should start with Toller’s book. Alex Wales came to Ryegate House to steal this, and then stayed to get a list of everyone who’d read it, going back about sixty or seventy years. The ones that were still alive aren’t alive any more.’

Kennedy was standing, both men were sitting — side by side on the same side of the table, facing her. Tillman pulled out the sheaf of paper from the bundle in front of him and read aloud, with Rush peering over his shoulder. ‘And the False word wille die, and the True worde live. As on the threshing Floor, when Chaff is sorted from Wheat, that all who worke dilligently and earn their Hire may finally eat …’ Tillman looked up at Kennedy. ‘Any chance of a summary?’

‘It’s pretty much all like this,’ she said. ‘Three hundred and seventy two prophecies over sixty or seventy pages — all the signs and wonders that come right before the end of the world.’

‘Like in the Book of Revelations,’ Rush said.

‘Thank you, Rush. I knew I could rely on a good Catholic boy like you to make that connection.’ Still chafing under the weight of his earlier humiliations, Rush blushed, and glanced at Kennedy sharply to see if this was sarcasm. ‘Exactly like the Book of Revelations,’ she confirmed. ‘Except that Toller goes into a lot more detail. Look at a few of the prophecies at random, you’ll see what I mean.’

Tillman turned the pages and he and Rush both read for a while in silence.

‘Why is the book significant?’ Tillman asked at last. ‘To the Judas People, I mean? Why do they care who reads this? It’s not their scripture, is it?’

‘Yeah, I think it is,’ Kennedy said.

There was a silence while Tillman absorbed this. ‘But we read their scripture,’ he said. ‘You did, anyway. It was much, much older than this nonsense — first- or second-century. And it was about the bargain Jesus made with Judas.’

‘Which was what, again?’ Rush asked.

‘Judas helped Jesus to die,’ Kennedy said wearily. ‘In return, God gave Judas and his kindred the earth. But they would have to wait three thousand years to inherit. Thirty pieces of silver — standing for thirty centuries.’

‘So where does this come in?’ Tillman asked, jerking his head at Toller’s book.

‘I think Toller was one of the Judas People,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think he came out of their hidden city into the world and started or joined a cult called the Fifth Monarchists. They preached an apocalyptic version of Christianity. They were waiting for the fifth and last empire — Christ’s — to start, which would bring about the end of history, the end of earthly kings and dominions, the end of the world as we know it.’

‘Wait,’ Rush said. ‘Is this what all the Judas People think or just Toller?’

‘They all think it’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘But Toller thought it was going to happen right then, at the end of the seventeenth century. And he went out and spread the word among the heathens, which really isn’t the Judas tribe’s MO at all.’

‘So Toller was what, a kind of Judas People heretic?’

‘Good a word as any,’ Kennedy said. ‘But what matters for us is that he appears out of nowhere in the middle of the seventeenth century and starts to preach and write …’

‘After an accident,’ Rush said.

Kennedy and Tillman both looked at him.

Rush seemed a little uncomfortable with the attention, but he went on. ‘Toller fell down a ravine in the Swiss Alps. Then an angel started talking to him about the time to come. It was after he came back to England that he started prophesying.’

‘Some sort of near-death experience,’ Tillman mused dourly. ‘You could see where that might change the course of his life. Make him feel like there was something else he needed to be doing.’

‘Is there anything else we know about him?’ Kennedy asked Rush.

Rush shrugged. ‘We know when he died. And we know that he had this weird way of doing the sign of the cross that was more like he was rubbing his stomach.’

‘The noose,’ Kennedy said. ‘The Judas People use the sign of the noose the same way Christians use the sign of the cross. It means the same thing to them. Because some of the early accounts of Judas’s life have him dying by hanging.’

‘It’s circumstantial evidence,’ Tillman said.

‘But Toller also talks about three thousand years being given to the four kingdoms of Man before Christ returns. It’s a close match to the Judas tribe’s belief that they get to inherit the world after the children of Adam rule it — for three millennia. Okay, Leo, you asked why Toller’s book matters. Why it matters now, to us and to the Judas People. And here’s where we get to it. Look at the prophecies on the first page of Toller’s book.’

This time it was Rush who read — flatly, without expression. ‘“The Infidels who soile the Holy Worde will bewaile their Blindness, and repent. Even in the House of the faithlesse Soldier they will repent. And in Münsters Churche, so, and likewise, they will repent. But such repentance wille come too late and Helles Fires will take holde on them.”’

‘The faithless soldier is Thomas Fairfax,’ Kennedy said. ‘One of the generals in the English Civil War. He was sympathetic towards Toller’s Fifth Monarchists for a while, but then he dropped them. From their point of view, betrayed them.’

‘Still sounds like ancient history,’ Tillman said dryly.

‘Doesn’t it?’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But a few weeks ago, Fairfax’s old country seat, Nunappleton Hall, was burned to the ground. Hell’s fires, if you want to be melodramatic, in the house of the faithless soldier.

‘And Münster’s church went the same way. Toller meant a specific church — the Überwasserkirche, which was the site of a famous uprising. The day after the fire at Nunappleton, someone planted and detonated a bomb in the Überwasserkirche. Again, a firebomb.’

Both men were staring at her in grim, perturbed silence, trying to figure out what this could mean. But they hadn’t heard anything yet, and Kennedy couldn’t spare their feelings.

‘With me so far? Okay, look at prophecy number two. “Gods Angel will stand over Zion with a flaming Sworde outstretched in his hand, ready to doe Execution.” One of God’s angels was called Azrael — I think he might have been the angel of death, but don’t quote me on that. When I got home four nights ago, I turned on the TV and heard about an incident where an Azrael ground-to-air missile was fired over Jerusalem. The Israeli government blamed it on an accident. It exploded in mid-air, thank God — no deaths, this time. But the prophecy goes on to say that the angel won’t strike with his sword because it isn’t the time yet.’

Kennedy paused for a second, waiting for them to challenge her. What she was saying sounded so much like madness, even to her, that she couldn’t imagine anyone else swallowing it for a moment. But when Tillman spoke, it was to ask a very practical and logistical question.

‘So the order of these incidents,’ he said. ‘Is the same as the order in which the prophecies occur in the book?’

‘Always. I went back and checked. The abortive missile strike was the same day as the Münster bombing, but if you correct for local time, it happened two hours later.’

She looked at the book again. It had almost developed a personality for her by this time, its riddles and ellipses part of a sick game, its dire promises full of psychopathic enthusiasm.

‘“Where the Highest bled,”’ she read, ‘“the Lowest wille likewise bleed. Even the vermin, that all shunne and disdaine.” When the Civil War was over, Cromwell’s Parliamentarians sentenced Charles the First to death by decapitation. He was executed on Whitehall, in front of a building called the Banqueting House.

‘An hour and a half after the Azrael incident, a beat cop found about a thousand rats on the steps of the Banqueting House — all with their heads cut off. Take the king to be the “Highest”, and the vermin bled right where he bled. They even died in the same way.’

She met Tillman’s gaze, then Rush’s, and shrugged. ‘And “Ister” is the River Danube. It ran red a couple of hours after the rats were found — not with blood, with aniline dye, but then the prophecy only says “as with blood”.

‘And so it goes on. I didn’t manage to match all of them up, but as near as I can tell, we’re three-quarters of the way through the book. Toller’s prophecies are all coming to pass, one by one, in order.’

Tillman scratched his chin but said nothing.

‘Jesus Christ!’ Rush protested. ‘What are we saying here? Seriously? Toller predicted the end of the world three hundred years ago, and now it’s happening?’

‘You’re not listening,’ Tillman growled. ‘That isn’t what she’s saying at all.’

‘No,’ Kennedy agreed, ‘it isn’t. But Rush wasn’t in that warehouse with you, Leo. And he hasn’t seen what’s sitting in your truck.’ To Rush, she said, ‘The Nunappleton fire was arson. The dead bodies the police found in the wreckage — the unbelievers who’d profaned the holy word — had been brought into the house purely so they could die there. The missile attack wasn’t an accident either. Somebody infiltrated an Israeli field station and killed four soldiers before setting off the Azrael. None of these were accidents, Rush. And more to the point, they weren’t inexorable destiny. These incidents are all being set up, very carefully and very deliberately.’

Rush looked confused rather than convinced. ‘But if they’re happening all over the world … and they’re only a few hours apart …’

He let the sentence tail off. Kennedy turned back to Tillman.

‘Tell him what you found,’ she said.

Tillman said nothing.

‘Leo, he knows about the Messengers. And the girl had him pegged as my accomplice, so you can bet that the Elohim know all about him. Tell him about the warehouse or I will.’

Tillman made a placatory gesture, but it was still a moment or two before he spoke. ‘There seems to be a group,’ he said, giving Rush a sombre glance, ‘that’s stockpiling weapons and explosives in very, very large amounts. They’re shipping the weapons out to a lot of different places. I found what I hope to God was their main stash, and closed it down, but it’s pretty certain that they’ve got a lot of really lethal kit already sitting in a lot of different places. Maybe if we’re lucky, I slowed them down a little.’

‘Oh my god,’ Rush said. His face was pale.

‘Someone is using Toller’s book as an instruction manual,’ Kennedy summed up. ‘Everything that he predicted, they’re playing it out, taking a lot of care to get all the details right and to make sure that the disasters happen in the right sequence — the same sequence the book puts them in.’

Something occurred to her, belatedly — maybe because of where she was, and because of what had happened, what she’d seen, the last time she was here. She went to the window and looked down. After a moment, when the two men came to join her there, she pointed to the side of the truck. It bore the name of the company that owned the warehouse, High Energy Haulage, with the initial letters picked out in red and their logo, which was a sort of dolmen shape, two vertical blocks supporting a horizontal one.

‘H-E-H,’ Kennedy spelled out. ‘Heh.’ She pronounced it hay. ‘It’s the fifth letter of the Aramaic alphabet. And they used their letters as numbers, too, so that sign, right there — it’s a five. As in fifth. As in monarchy.’

‘But why?’ Rush demanded, although it sounded more like a plea. ‘Why would anybody make prophecies come true three centuries too late? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Maybe it’s time to call in our expert witness,’ Kennedy said into the silence that followed.

46

There was once a man of great virtue, Diema said, to whom all earthly rewards and accolades came early, and easy. Everyone loved him. Everyone believed in him. Everyone wanted him to succeed. But unfortunately, although nobody around him could see it, he was possessed by a demon.

She told it exactly like this, as though it were a fairy story, or perhaps a parable — but in any case, as though it were a narrative already removed from all of them, herself and her listeners alike, into another level of reality, even though she’d made it clear that the man she was talking about was still very much alive.

His name was Ber Lusim, and perhaps, after all, he was no more than the furthest point on a bell curve. The Elohim were always chosen young. Diema herself, selected at age sixteen, was coming to her calling late, by the standards of the People. Most of the Messengers were learning the tools and methods of their trade before their thirteenth birthday.

Ber Lusim presented himself to Kuutma — pre-empted the process — when he was nine. His words, according to the story, were ‘I want to serve.’

‘And what service can you offer?’ Kuutma demanded of the little boy, amused.

Ber Lusim opened his hands. In each of them there was a dead bird — a tiny thing, less than four inches from beak to tail. The birds had green flanks and crimson throats. The feathers on their bellies, by contrast, were a drab grey. Calypte anna, Anna’s hummingbird, one of the fastest creatures that ever lived.

‘I want to serve,’ the boy said again.

Kuutma adopted him formally into the Elohim, there and then.

‘This Kuutma,’ Tillman cut in, his stare hard and unwavering. ‘This was the man we met in Mexico? The one who used to call himself Michael Brand?’

The girl stared back. ‘Yes, but why should that matter? It’s not a name, it’s a job description. All Kuutmas are the Brand. Kuutma means the Brand. And the “el” in Michael stands for the holy one, whose name cannot be spoken. Kuutma is the brand of God on the world of the godless.’

Wordlessly, Tillman waved to her to go on.

Ber Lusim was the greatest of the Messengers. He was given his journeyman posting when he was fifteen — to Washington, where his appearance of youth and unworldliness was a very useful resource. His first kill came quickly, when an American journalist began to take too much of an interest in certain medieval documents whose speculations touched on the existence of a Judas-worshipping sect.

The journalist, a woman, had paedophilic tendencies, so far expressed only through the consumption of illegal pornography. Ber Lusim’s Summoner was considering using this fact to silence her, but Ber Lusim took a more direct approach. He presented himself to the woman — a fresh-faced boy, apparently willing; an impossible combination of innocence and wantonness. He was welcomed into her house, into her bedroom, where he killed her in a way that posthumously destroyed her reputation and drew all media attention far, far away from her professional researches.

It was a triumph. But possibly it left the boy damaged, an unacknowledged victim of his own elegant plan. Or perhaps it woke something inside him. The demon that had always slumbered there, biding its time.

Ber Lusim went from strength to strength; from his Berlin apprenticeship to South Africa, and from there to the Federal Republic of Germany. There he proved adept at forestalling potential enemies by stepping in ruthlessly and decisively as soon as a possible threat was identified or even suspected. He did not trouble, as many Messengers did, to lay a smokescreen of suicide notes or decoy suspects: but neither did he leave any trail leading to the People, so his brutal methods were never questioned.

In his twentieth year, he was made a Summoner of Elohim. It was a popular choice. The Messengers with whom he’d served admired him and were loyal to him. His star continued to rise. Was he too fond of proceeding to extreme sanctions? Was the kill count for his station higher than it should have been? Perhaps. And was it only coincidence that male Elohim thrived and were rewarded under Ber Lusim’s dispensation, while women were assessed harshly and passed on quickly to other assignments? Perhaps not. But it’s always easy to see these things in the spotlight glare of hindsight.

As Summoner, Ber Lusim was chiefly responsible for guarding and shepherding the Kelim who were in Germany at that time. He was good at this, by his lights. At least, he was good at making sure the women returned, with their families, when the appointed time came. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a task that exposed the cracks in Ber Lusim’s personality, and drove a crowbar into them.

Ber Lusim disliked the Kelim and the continued business of their sending out. He had spoken, in Council, in favour of suspending the practice, and although he had lost that argument …

Another interruption, this time from Ben Rush. ‘This is what you were telling me about?’ he asked Kennedy. ‘The sacred whores? The women who leave the secret city to get themselves pregnant?’

Tense, Kennedy nodded. ‘Let’s just listen,’ she said.

As Diema spoke, Kennedy could see how tightly Tillman’s fists were clenched and how white his knuckles were. This subject was far from abstract and theoretical for him. His wife had been one of these women and although he knew she’d been dead for many years, his feelings for her had never adjusted to that reality.

‘Go on,’ Tillman said to Diema. For a moment, his gaze locked with hers. She knows what she’s doing to him, Kennedy thought, amazed and unsettled. Maybe it’s even part of why she’s here.

Diema continued. Ber Lusim disliked the Kelim, very strongly. Or perhaps he disliked what they implied, which was that the vigour and virtue of the Judas People were not sufficient in themselves — that they needed to be fortified, from time to time, with graftings from other stock.

Or perhaps it was because his own mother had been one of that number, and he felt tainted by the association. Whatever his motivations may have been, Ber Lusim’s position allowed him to act on his feelings. The women who came out of Ginat’Dania to lie with Adamite men and then to return home freighted with their DNA passed through his hands on both the outward and the return journeys.

Oh, he took his duties seriously. Nobody could say he slacked, or failed to exercise due diligence. No sheep went astray on his watch. No holy Vessels returned empty, or failed to return at all.

Some, however, returned damaged. Specifically, they had been beaten. When questioned about this, they said that they’d been punished for disobedience. For taking too long to arrange their Adamite affairs, for weeping at the loss of their Adamite husbands, for taking too much with them or leaving too much behind.

Representations were made in Council. Ber Lusim was not reprimanded — there was a minority point of view that saw his zeal as admirable — but he was requested to put a moratorium on the beatings. In some cases, returning Kelim might be pregnant; too harsh a punishment might harm the unborn babies, who of course were the very point and pith of the whole enterprise.

Even that was a divisive judgement. The case of Ber Lusim leaned hard upon the paradoxes that propped up the People’s society, and the paradoxes threatened to give. The Kelim were necessary, and in theory they were respected. The women who went out were chosen by lot, so the unwelcome mission could fall to anyone. It was a sacrifice, as important to the survival of the Judas People as the eternal vigilance of the Messengers, and the sacrifice was honoured.

In theory.

The reality was more complicated. When a young woman of good family was chosen to be a vessel, it was common (though officially deplored) for her parents to say the service for the dead over her. When she returned, it was often impossible for her to find a husband among the People. There were even some — religious conservatives or just unvarnished misogynists — who would refuse to allow her shadow to fall on them.

Ber Lusim was one of those — and he converted many of the Messengers who served with him to his extreme opinions. But he accepted the judgement of the Council and stopped inflicting physical punishments on the returning vessels.

Until Orim Beit Himah.

Orim Beit Himah failed to present herself and her children to be returned to Ginat’Dania when the time came for her to do so. Ber Lusim had to send out a team of Messengers to retrieve her. He decided to lead the team himself.

He found Orim still with her Adamite husband. It was rumoured that she had explained everything to this man and that he tried to kill the Messengers when they arrived. Then again, and to the contrary, it was said that the husband had found Orim about to leave and had imprisoned her, convinced that she was running away with another man. And one account said that she had missed her appointed date because she was ill and couldn’t rise from her bed.

Ber Lusim killed the husband.

And Orim.

And the children.

For the first time in the telling, Diema seemed to be having trouble getting the words out. She had to break off for a few moments and go to the window as if she was checking for traffic on the road below — but they could all hear that the low engine sound she was responding to was that of a plane flying overhead, probably on its way into Gatwick.

The three of them watched the girl in silence as she squatted in the hayloft door, still and silent, staring down at the empty road. Though her agitation showed that she had human feelings, the pose reminded Kennedy of what Diema was. It was the pose of a raptor, scanning for prey with its tele scope eyes.

When she came back, she’d recovered some of her composure.

Ber Lusim claimed that the deaths were accidental. There had been a fight with the husband, and he had been armed. The woman and the children had found themselves in the crossfire and had been killed by stray bullets before anyone registered their presence.

Ber Lusim’s men backed up his story, in every detail. But curiously, they used almost identical language in their descriptions, as though they had been coached or at least had discussed the matter between themselves in a great deal of circumstantial detail.

It was a terrible thing. Unlike the beatings, it could not be overlooked. No gloss of decency could be put on it. The best that Ber Lusim could hope for would be to be stripped of his post as Summoner. If it was found that he had killed Orim deliberately, with full intent, he would never leave Ginat’Dania again. His life would be lived out in a windowless cell, a foot longer and wider than he was tall.

But when he was recalled to be tried, he disappeared. And his Messengers went with him.

‘So that’s who we’re dealing with,’ Tillman said, when Diema had finished her story. His face was cold and inexpressive, but his fists were still clenched and pressed down hard against the table. Kennedy knew how deeply that story would have penetrated into him and how much blood it would have drawn.

And what about Diema? Her own mother had been one of these women. Was that what had moved her or had it been something else? She remembered the girl in action, taking on the two Elohim in Izzy’s bedroom, beating them down and leaving them for dead.

Leaving them for dead. Not killing them. Since when did the Elohim not finish the job?

An answer to that question came to her very suddenly and the more she thought about it, the more she felt it had to be right. It explained so much. It explained that unlikely mercy. It explained why Diema had broken off her story so abruptly just then. And most of all, it explained the impossibly tenuous chain of chance or destiny that had drawn first Emil Gassan, then her and then Tillman into this deepening, thickening mess. Tillman had said you went with coincidence or you surrendered yourself to megalomania — that there was no third way. But there was. And it took her breath away with its sheer simplicity — its almost indecent obviousness.

‘The enemy we face,’ Diema said solemnly, ‘is those renegade Elohim, commanded by Ber Lusim. There is another man — Avra Shekolni — who joined them recently and has become their spiritual leader and teacher. We think that Shekolni has strengthened Ber Lusim’s extremism. Made him even less inclined to compromise than he was before.’

‘Wait,’ Rush said. ‘If this Shekolni is new on the scene, is he why they went after the book? Was that his idea?’

Diema stared at him thoughtfully for a second or two. She seemed to be deciding whether or not answering a former hostage’s questions would compromise her dignity. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We think it was Shekolni’s idea.’

‘They didn’t just steal that one copy of the book, did they?’ Kennedy broke in. ‘There were ashes in the box at Ryegate House.’

Diema turned her head to stare at Kennedy. The intensity of her attention was unsettling. It was as though, when she looked at you, the rest of the room, the rest of the world, disappeared. ‘Tephra,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘The ashes of a sacrifice are called tephra.’

‘Whatever.’ Kennedy couldn’t keep the impatience out of her voice. ‘They stole every copy of the book they could find. They burned all but one of them. They were taking the holy word out of the hands of the unbelievers.’

‘Yes.’

‘But why is it the holy word? It was written only a few centuries ago, by — what would you call him? — a heretic? A turncoat? An escapee? It’s not your gospel. It’s late-breaking news from a religious lunatic.’

Diema nodded. ‘Toller’s words were lost because we didn’t think they were worth keeping,’ she agreed. ‘It was a long time before anyone even realised that he might have been of the People. One of our Messengers went astray, at that time, and was looked for but never found. It was within my lifetime that a scholar of the People saw the correspondences in Toller’s book and came up with the idea that our missing brother had taken a new name and preached to the Nations as Johann Toller.’

‘Then why would his word be revered?’ Kennedy demanded. ‘Why would it even be read, any more?’

‘Toller was the first to leave the People without the People’s blessing or sanction. Until Ber Lusim and Avra Shekolni, nobody else followed his example. Not in all of the three hundred and seventy years in between.’ Diema reached into her shirt and drew out the knife she kept there — the strange, asymmetrical blade that the Judas People called the sica. ‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked them. Before she spoke, before she’d even completed the movement, Tillman once again had the gun in his hand. But the girl didn’t acknowledge the threat or seem to notice it.

‘Take that as a yes,’ Rush suggested.

‘But you don’t really know what it is,’ Diema insisted. ‘To you it’s just a weapon. To us, it’s two and a half thousand years of history. We carried it and killed with it when we were subjects of the Romans. Now we carry it and kill with it as free men and women.’

‘What’s your point?’ Kennedy demanded. ‘And can you make it without that filthy thing in your hand?’

Diema set the knife down on the table, beside the typescript of Toller’s book. ‘I suppose my point is that we stick to our traditions. Change isn’t something that comes naturally or easily to us. Perhaps Avra Shekolni was already interested in Johann Toller before he left the city. Or perhaps not. Now, we know, he’s obsessed with the man. Toller is his only real precursor — a man of religion who went alone into the world, carrying what he thought was a great message.’

‘So?’ said Kennedy.

‘So Shekolni believes in that message.’

‘But Toller was predicting the end of the world back in the 1660s. It didn’t end,’ said Rush. ‘Or does Shekolni think it did and now we’re all living in the Matrix?’

‘You don’t understand,’ Diema said.

Rush flushed slightly. ‘No, I don’t. That’s sort of what I just said.’

‘Johann Toller,’ Diema said, enunciating the words with the care reserved for deaf people, foreigners and imbeciles, ‘said the world would end after all his prophecies were fulfilled.’

‘That part I got.’

‘Then what would you do if you wanted the world to end?’

Rush stared at her. ‘If I …?’ he repeated.

Then he stared some more. Tillman and Kennedy were staring, too.

‘The time of the bargain came,’ Diema said. ‘And then it went. God didn’t appear to us. But over such a very, very long time, mistakes and misunderstandings are possible — not on the part of the Holy Name, but on our part. The Sima, our high council, argued for patience. God’s plan would reveal itself, if we waited.

‘But Shekolni, who had a voice in that council, disagreed. He said God had never, ever expected us just to wait. That to do nothing was the last thing He wanted from us. After three thousand years, our time would come. But it was exactly that — our time. It was up to us to act. And God had already told us what to do.’

‘Through Johann Toller,’ Kennedy said.

Diema gave a brusque shrug. What do you think?

‘That’s what they’re doing.’ Kennedy felt an acute sense of vertigo. ‘They’re making it happen by making all the signs and wonders happen first. They’re ringing in the Second Coming.’

‘And the signs and the wonders will only get bigger and bloodier,’ Diema said. ‘Unless you stop them.’

‘Unless we stop them?’ Rush blurted. ‘Why is this down to us?’

Diema pointed at Kennedy, and then at Tillman. ‘I meant them,’ she said. ‘Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for.’

‘And we were?’ Kennedy said, jumping on the words. She was right. She had to be right.

‘The boy raises a good point,’ Tillman growled, getting to his feet. He didn’t seem to have registered Kennedy’s words. ‘This is your business, not ours. Something you and your people vomited into the world. Why in the name of anything you want to swear by would you come to the very people you despise and hate, and ask them to clear up your mess?’

Diema was silent. With all their eyes on her, she shrugged again. This time the gesture seemed to say she’d made her case and they could take it or leave it. ‘It’s true that we want Ber Lusim’s network closed down,’ she said. ‘His beliefs are heresy — abomination. And besides, what he’s doing puts us at risk. It’s too visible. It makes people ask questions and look for patterns. So that’s why I was sent. That’s why I’m here, now, talking to you.

‘But I’d say the stakes are higher for you than for us. Lots of people have already died. But if Ber Lusim gets to the last prophecy, many, many more people will die.’ Diema’s gaze met Kennedy’s. ‘You read the book. Toller talks about the thousand thousand who are going to be sacrificed. A million people. I can’t believe you want that to happen.’

‘But that’s not why you came to us,’ said Kennedy. ‘You don’t give a damn how many people die, so long as it’s our kind and not yours. We’re no better than cattle to you. And the stakes? How could the stakes be higher, exactly? Secrecy is an iron law to you people. Anything that threatens the big secret, you rip it right out of the world. And you want us to believe that this — these maniacs running around loose, making all this noise — is no big deal for you?’

Diema pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing a little. ‘I expressed myself badly,’ she said, with stolid patience. ‘Of course this concerns us. But there’s a parable — about a traveller who is set on by robbers as he sits by his campfire at night. He takes a stick out of the fire to fend them off. Then, when his enemies are beaten, he throws the brand back into the flames and lets it be consumed.’

‘And we’re the stick?’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s sweet. And it’s a lot closer to the truth. But you gave yourself away, girl — when you were talking about the death of the woman and her children, and all of a sudden you had to go to the window and breathe some sweet, fresh air. So why is it so hard for you to say?’

‘To say what?’ Tillman asked. ‘What am I missing?’

Diema glanced at him for a moment, then lowered her gaze to the ground.

‘You’ve seen how they fight, Leo,’ Kennedy said, her voice sounding harsh and hateful in her own ears: because she really did hate this. The big unspoken lie, the sin of omission. She hated everything that was behind it. ‘You’ve seen how casually they kill.’

‘Seen it right up close,’ Tillman agreed. ‘Like you.’

‘But when Diema here dismantled the two Messengers who were about to torture me, she left them both alive. Concussed, bleeding, beaten to a pulp, but alive. And you said at the warehouse …’ She let the sentence tail off.

‘Same thing,’ Tillman confirmed.

Kennedy leaned forward, her face right up close to Diema’s. Like a scolded schoolgirl, Diema kept her head bowed and her eyes down. ‘You can’t kill your own, can you?’ Kennedy said. ‘You put us through all this because you can’t do it yourself. There’s one commandment you can’t break. You’re not allowed to shed the blood of the blessed.’

They held the tableau for a few seconds longer.

‘Answer me!’ Kennedy yelled.

Diema looked up at last. ‘You’re right,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘There are two commandments that can’t be broken — for which the punishment is exile, for ever. And one of them is … what you said. We can’t do this without you. We can find Ber Lusim and we can help you to stop him, but …’

The silence lengthened.

‘But you need us to pull the trigger on him,’ Tillman said.

Diema drew herself up to her full height, which was a head shorter than his. She stared up at him, her arms at her sides, as unbending as the upright of a cross. ‘It should come naturally to you,’ she said. ‘You talk about how easily we kill. But we kill for survival. You’ve killed for much less important things, like money, for example.’

Tillman seemed taken aback by the barely contained fury in her tone. He opened his mouth to answer, but Diema hadn’t finished. ‘The only question,’ she snarled, ‘is whether you want to work with me and use what I know or cut me loose and go your own way. Either way, I’ve said what I came here to say. And even though you’re my enemies, I never treated you as enemies. I gave you more respect than you gave me.’

A single red tear ran down the girl’s cheek. She didn’t move to wipe it away.

‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s not the only question. Before I decide whether I can work with you — whether I can even bear to be in the same room with you — I want an answer on something else.’

The girl looked at her in stolid silence.

‘What’s eating you, Heather?’ Tillman asked. Clearly, he could see from her face that it was something big.

‘We thought there were only two kinds of emissary,’ Kennedy said. ‘The soldiers and the mothers. But suppose there was a third kind? Not fighters, exactly, but fixers. People who make things happen. People with connections and resources, who plant themselves in the Adamite world and do with money what the Elohim do with knives. Protect the Judas People and serve their interests.’

‘Why,’ Diema asked quietly, ‘would you suppose that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. How about because the Validus Trust put Emil Gassan in place to deal with the theft of Toller’s book from Ryegate House. Then Gassan brought me in and I met you, and I went to Leo. None of that was chance, and none of it was destiny. It was planned. You just said as much, right now. Someone set us up like dominoes. Anticipated our every move and the money of the Validus Trust was the first domino. Everything else flowed from that.’

Diema didn’t confirm or deny the hypothesis, and nobody else spoke. They were all staring at the girl.

‘Tell me that didn’t happen, Diema,’ Kennedy said. ‘Tell me we weren’t recruited.’

‘They’re called Nagodim,’ Diema said at last. ‘And they work in exactly the way you just described.’

Kennedy shook her head slowly. The certain knowledge that she’d been manipulated filled her with mixed emotions of outrage and relief. Outrage, because she was being moved around like a playing piece in a complicated game. Relief, because she was being moved around by some ordinary man or woman, not by Nemesis or Fate or God.

All the same, two men had died because of these manipulations. Jesus, they’d probably been behind the fortuitous stroke that had taken out Emil Gassan’s predecessor. Sooner or later, there had to be a reckoning. Kennedy said that to the girl with her eyes.

Aloud, breaking the heavy silence, she said, ‘You haven’t earned my trust. Nothing like. I still think your people are a kind of creeping poison, but this has to be stopped. So I say we work together.’

‘I agree,’ Tillman said. ‘With the same reservations. We pool our resources until we’ve done what we’ve got to do. Beyond that, we don’t make any promises or any assumptions.’

‘Do I get a vote?’ Rush asked.

Kennedy searched the boy’s face for a long second. She could guess at some of what he was feeling: it had to overlap at least a little with what she’d felt when she was helpless in the hands of Samal and Abydos. The difference was that nobody had suggested she should kiss and make up with Samal and Abydos. If there wasn’t so very much at stake, she’d be prepared to give the boy the right of veto here. As it was …

‘I vote yes,’ he said, before she could answer. ‘I’m good with it. In case anyone was wondering.’

He poured himself a glass of the water, which nobody had touched, and drank it down.

There was a sense of everyone in the room stepping back from a confrontation whose terms and rules of engagement had never been formally stated. Diema relaxed her stance, letting out a long breath.

Rush reached for the sica to take a closer look at it. Diema’s hand locked around his wrist. With the other hand, she took the knife away from his reaching fingers and slid it back into its sheath inside her shirt.

‘The blade’s poisoned,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘Pick it up in the wrong way and you’ll probably die.’

Looking at the red runnel on the girl’s cheek, it occurred to Kennedy that that was every bit as true of her as it was of the knife.

47

The talk ebbed and flowed around Rush. He tried to pay attention, but the rigours of the last two days — everything from his fight with Alex Wales and the wounding of Professor Gassan up to his interrogation and kidnapping by the scary girl and the drive down here, bound hand and foot, in the back of what looked like a postal delivery van — were catching up with him. He found himself drifting in and out of a heavy doze, missing the connections between sentences and ideas or else experiencing them as an imagistic jumble.

He kept flashing back to the one time the girl had really hurt him. She was a skilled interrogator, and mostly she just talked the truth out of him. She seemed to know most of it already, so all he had to do to save his life was to agree to one or two of the things she was saying — agree that he knew what she was, and who her friends were, and what she was for.

But when she asked him where she was from, and he said he didn’t know, she took his hand in hers and folded his wrist back on itself in some complicated way. It was agonising, and he was terrified that the wrist was going to snap.

‘Ginat’Dania,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know!’ Rush had yelled and then bellowed and then whimpered. ‘I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know, I never heard of it, please. Oh, Jesus. Please.’

The night was a morass of fear, leavened with shame, but most of it could be dissolved into soft focus. That moment stood out very clear and sharp. He turned it over and over in his mind as though it were a puzzle box and he was looking for the sequence of manipulations that would slide it open.

That was why he’d voted yes, although he wasn’t kidding himself that his vote had counted for much. He needed to prove that he wasn’t afraid of her. Hating her would have been okay, but being afraid of her wasn’t. The distinction mattered a lot.

And still they talked. Kennedy was arguing now about what it was they were signing up for. ‘Leo’s a soldier, and you’re … what you are. But this isn’t what I do. I’ve killed exactly twice, once in a police action and once in self-defence. I can’t take part in raids or ambushes or executions. I probably can’t even watch those things.’

‘I’ve studied you,’ Diema said bluntly, ‘and I think you’re wrong. But it’s not for me to say what you can do and what you can’t do. It’s irrelevant in any case. There are too many of them for us to fight them like that. We need another way.’

Then there was some talk about the two men — the warrior, Ber Lusim, and the priest, Shekolni. Their strengths and their weaknesses, according to Kuutma, and according to the girl’s own observations. Rush started to doze, missed some of the conversation.

‘… tracked Ber Lusim to safe houses in three different cities,’ Diema was saying now. ‘Berlin. Tokyo. Santiago. And we think there might be bases in Los Angeles and London, also. But as far as we know, none of those places was a permanent base of operations.’

‘Same problem with the paperwork I saw at the warehouse,’ Tillman answered. ‘They were shipping stuff pretty much everywhere. Singapore. Toulouse. New York. Budapest. No way to know whether any of those places are fixed bases or distributive hubs in their own right. They’re setting up hundreds of one-off terrorist acts in a dozen different countries. Ber Lusim could be overseeing the whole programme from any one of those places, or from somewhere else entirely.’

‘Budapest,’ Rush said. He knew he’d said it because he heard it — with that weird sense of detachment and unfamiliarity you get when you hear your own voice played over a tape recorder.

The other three all looked at him.

‘You’ve got an opinion on this?’ Tillman asked him.

Rush blinked a few times, because he wasn’t seeing all that clearly. ‘It’s Budapest,’ he said again. ‘I think.’ He found his gaze drawn to the girl, whose dark eyes and pale face suddenly reminded him overpoweringly of a photographic negative, or an X-ray. As though she belonged to another world that was the anti-matter image of his own. ‘What you said,’ he mumbled, ‘about Shekolni being obsessed with Johann Toller — and about how your people always follow tradition. Stick to what you know.’

‘Yes?’ Diema said. ‘What about those things?’

It was a shock to Rush to realise that he was the only one who knew this. He riffled through Kennedy’s typescript until he found the picture of the rock and the town at its base. And the Latin tag in heavy, uneven type.

De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente.

He showed it to the others. ‘It’s Gellert Hill, in Budapest.’ He pointed at the little cluster of buildings. ‘Whoever captioned it thought so, anyway. And that town there is Buda, I guess. It’s the Buda side of the river, anyway. I went there once on holiday.’

He realised at this point that he wasn’t at all certain of his ground, but he plunged on anyway. ‘Toller put this engraving at the front of his book. So maybe the “I” in the Latin there — “I come from the belly of the beast”, and all that — is really him. It’s him saying to us, this is where I come from. This is my secret origin.’

‘Budapest,’ Tillman mused. ‘But where does that get us?’

Diema had gone very still, looking down at her hands, which were in her lap, palms-up.

‘Not just Budapest,’ Rush said. His index finger was still resting on the badly photocopied picture. ‘Somewhere around here — the base of Gellert Hill. I know about this place because I did the Blue Danube tour when I was on holiday out there. There’s a massive cave inside the hill that the modern city uses as a reservoir. I think that may have been where your Judas People were living, back in the 1660s. Budapest was part of the Ottoman Empire back then, so coming and going would have been a bit of a challenge — but maybe that just made it easier for Toller to get away from his people and not be followed.’

‘Is any of this true?’ Kennedy asked Diema. ‘Is that where your people were living three centuries ago?’

Diema continued to stare at her own hands. ‘I told you there were two commandments that couldn’t be broken,’ she said quietly. ‘Now you know both of them.’

‘It makes sense,’ Kennedy said. ‘So if Shekolni thinks of Toller as the great prophet …’

‘… he might want to go back to the source,’ Tillman finished. ‘But that still gives us an entire city to search. Might take a long time if we have to go house-to-house.’

‘Our Elohim could do it,’ Diema said. Clearly they were no longer in the taboo zone and she was able to speak freely again. ‘We can access satellite and CCTV footage to map the movements of any trucks with the HEH logo and livery. Any address where a truck goes, we’ll know. We should be able to narrow it down in a matter of hours or days.’

‘But they wouldn’t be delivering weapons to their head office,’ Tillman objected. ‘This — what we’re looking for — is the think tank. It’s where the decisions get made. The arsenals are almost certainly elsewhere.’

‘We’ll make the search, in any case,’ Diema said. ‘If it comes up empty, we’ve lost nothing. Also, we’ll monitor communications. We have a long list of phone numbers that we’ve tied to Ber Lusim’s people — some definite, some just highly likely. Calls into the city from any of those numbers can be traced.’

‘And that’s all wonderful,’ Tillman said. ‘But it still comes down to time. They’re working their way down Toller’s list. When they get to the end, it’s at least possible that a million people will die. We have to find them before that happens.’

Kennedy counted on her raised fingers as she worked it out in her head. ‘If they keep working at the present rate, I’d say that gives us four days at most,’ she said.

They were all silent for a moment or two as the implications of this sank in. Budapest was a very big haystack, and four days was no time at all. It had taken Kennedy almost that long to find Alex Wales and she’d only had one building to search.

‘We need a back-up plan,’ Tillman said. ‘By all means, girl, let your people go to town on this. But there’s no way we should just sit and wait while they work.’

‘You have a better suggestion?’ Diema asked, her eyes narrowing as she stared at him.

‘I do,’ Kennedy said.

They all turned to look at her, expectantly.

‘I think there’s at least a chance that we can make them come to us.’