The Demon Code

48

Diema, Tillman and Rush flew from Heathrow to Budapest Ferihegy on a red-eye flight that left at half-past midnight. They used false papers supplied by a contact of Tillman’s who he referred to as Benny.

It was only a two-hour flight, so there was no question of sleeping. Rush had brought along some of the books he’d swiped from the Ryegate House collection, and used the time to look up Johann Toller in the index of each book in turn.

Diema put on her headphones and selected a cartoon to watch. It was very beautiful to look at, but she quickly decided that she didn’t like it one bit. It started with a lengthy sequence in which a man loses his wife and mourns her: the emotional precipices that opened up for Diema as she watched were a long way from what she looked for in a cartoon. She wanted irreconcilable war between cats and mice, violence that bent and buckled the world, and a world so resilient it snapped right back into shape.

Angry and frustrated, she snatched the headphones off and stuffed them back into the seat pocket.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ Rush asked her.

‘No,’ Diema growled. She’d noticed how often his glance stole in her direction and it was irritating her so much that she’d considered moving seats.

‘It’s not big secret stuff, swear to God. It’s about Toller.’

Diema turned her head to give the boy a cold stare. ‘One question. Then you leave me alone.’

‘Okay, it’s this. Toller said he was born in darkness. Was that literally true? Do your people actually live underground?’

She carried on staring at him in stony silence for a few seconds longer. Then she picked up the headphones and put them back on.

‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ Rush said quickly. ‘If you don’t want to answer that, fine. I get it. Maybe that does touch on one of your big secrets. Different question. What’s the actual passage in your scripture that talks about the three thousand years? The one that Toller based his predictions on? Is it possible he was counting from a different start date?’

Diema suppressed the urge to clamp a hand around the boy’s windpipe — both to shut him up and for the sake of emphasis. ‘Adamites who read our gospel die,’ she reminded him. ‘So if that’s really your question, I’ll answer it. Then I’ll cut your throat in the airport car park at Ferihegy. It’s your call, boy.’

Rush digested this threat in thoughtful silence.

‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Scratch that, then. How about this? Robert Blackborne talks about the weird sign that Toller used to make as a blessing, but nobody else ever mentions it. So I’m wondering how different it is from the sign of the cross. Can I see it?’

Diema scowled. ‘You want me to bless you?’

‘I want to see you make the sign, that’s all.’

It was like pacifying a baby. Disgruntled, she demonstrated the sign of the noose for him, several times over, and he watched her with a certain fascination. Unless it was all just a ruse so that he could stare at her breasts again.

‘Can I try,’ he asked at last. ‘Or would that be blasphemy?’

Diema shrugged dismissively. ‘Go ahead.’

He moved his hand as though he were suffering from a stomach ache and was trying to ease it. Amused in spite of herself, and happy to be distracted from the lingering feelings left by the movie, Diema schooled him.

Not the whole hand, with the palm flat — that looks wrong. The forefinger should be extended, pointing inward to your chest.

Don’t do it so fast, and only do it once. Not around and around and around.

Imagine a clock, set in your chest. Imagine the hands of the clock running backward. Follow the hands of the clock with your finger.

‘I’m not going to get this,’ Rush said, but he kept on trying. In the end, he was reasonably proficient.

‘Would there be something you’d say, at the same time?’ he asked her.

‘You could say, “He kul tairah beral”. “The hanged man’s blessing be on you”.’

‘Ha kul tiara beral.’

‘Tairah. Tay-rah.’

‘Ha kul tairah beral.’

‘He kul. Not ha.’

‘He kul tairah beral.’

‘Vi ve kul te.’

‘What’s that?’

‘And on you.’

‘Okay. What else? Yeah, I was wondering—’

‘You’ve run out of questions,’ Diema said, cutting him off.

‘This one isn’t about Toller. It’s about you.’

‘I never said you could ask questions about me.’

‘No, you didn’t, but maybe we could swap. I ask a question, then you ask a question. Like an exchange of hostages.’

‘That’s a wonderful idea,’ Diema said.

‘Cool.’

‘Except that there’s nothing I want to know about you.’

This, finally, made the boy back off and give her a respite from his noise. She found another cartoon, a short from 1935 directed by Tex Avery, but she couldn’t enjoy it. Her mind was too unsettled.

She left her seat and went to the back of the plane, ostensibly to use the toilet. She didn’t really need it, but she did need to be alone with her own thoughts. The boy’s presence was intrusive, whether he spoke or not.

Both toilets were engaged and to her further chagrin, Leo Tillman was also waiting there.

He gave her a nod, which in her present mood incensed her more than she could bear in silence.

Leaning against the bulkhead wall, looking out at the unchanging vista of clouds, she addressed him without looking at him.

‘Did you understand the plan, as I outlined it to you?’ she murmured, her voice barely audible above the engines’ constant rumble.

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Because the whole point of our travelling separately is so that Ber Lusim’s people, if they’re checking flights into the city, won’t realise that we’re working together.’

‘Yeah, I got that.’

‘They’re meant to be watching Kennedy, not us.’

‘Sure.’ Tillman’s tone was easy and — insultingly — reassuring. ‘But you said yourself, we’re worried about them checking the passenger manifests on incoming flights. We’re not assuming they’ll have spies on the plane. That’s so unlikely, we might as well count it as impossible.’

But it was still sloppy and thoughtless and she couldn’t give him the last word. ‘We don’t take risks that we don’t have to take,’ she snapped. ‘Only a fool would do that.’

Tillman didn’t answer. She looked round. He was watching her with detached curiosity. ‘First time on a stealth mission?’ he asked.

‘No. I’ve been a soldier for almost a year now. And I’ve been undercover in enemy territory for most of that time.’

He nodded and his expression changed — became something that she suspected was pity. ‘But the whole world is enemy territory for you, isn’t it? Apart from that one tiny patch of ground. No wonder you people go squirrelly in the head.’

‘Whereas your society is a monument to pure reason,’ Diema sneered. How dare this hacked and sanded thug, this slubbering executioner, lecture her? Talk down to her?

‘We don’t make murder into a sacrament.’

‘Yes.’ Diema couldn’t keep the outrage from showing in her voice. ‘You do. Of course you do. Your priests and bishops blessed soldiers and butchers for centuries. They still do. You kill more of your own every day than we’ve killed in the whole of your history. Half the stories you tell, the novels and movies you make, have killers for heroes. Your whole culture is in love with violence. You embrace your own destruction, all the time. It’s what defines you. You ruin the world that was given to you. Treat her like a whore, instead of a mother, and then—’

She stopped herself by force of will, fighting down the anger as she’d been taught. Tillman was still staring at her very intently, but his expression now was unreadable.

‘Well,’ he said, in a tone that was carefully neutral, ‘you got me on that one. Here we both stand, kid. On the moral low ground.’

‘I don’t think I could get down that low,’ Diema said, ‘if I dug for a thousand years.’

She left him and went back to her seat. The conversation had done nothing to improve her mood and she was still unable to settle either to work or to diversion. She was relieved when the plane finally landed and she could become active again. Movement and action healed by their very nature.

They went through customs and immigration very quickly. They’d brought only carry-on luggage, and their new-minted passports stood up to scrutiny.

She had been told to go to the third level of the short-stay car park, where she’d be met by a Summoner of Elohim with local knowledge. He would be standing beside a blue Skoda Fabia and he would have with him a range of equipment from which she and her team could take what they needed.

When she stepped out of the elevator on the third level, she saw him at once. Saw both of them, rather. There were two men waiting there, hands in their pockets, stolid and patient. Diema turned to Tillman and Rush, who were right behind her.

‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to them alone.’

‘Given what we were saying back in England about trust,’ Tillman said curtly, ‘I think that’s a pretty terrible idea.’

‘For a minute, alone,’ Diema insisted. ‘If this was an ambush, I’d have set it up by phone, before we ever got on the plane. I wouldn’t be trying to scrape it together now.’

‘A minute,’ Tillman said. ‘Go on.’

Diema crossed the thirty yards or so of asphalt that separated her from the two Elohim. The nearer man smiled and opened his arms as she approached. She embraced him and let him embrace her.

‘It’s so good to see you, Diema,’ he murmured in her ear.

‘It’s good to see you, too, Nahir,’ she said in a neutral tone.

He’d changed a lot since she saw him last, but probably no more than she had. Now that he’d been exposed to sun and weather, he’d lost the characteristic pallor of the People. But where Diema’s skin had initially reddened and blotched, and turned gradually to an uninspiring ruddy blush, Nahir’s had magically reverted to the rich olive cast that the People must have had when they lived in the air instead of the earth. He’d changed in other ways, too. He seemed to have gained a confidence, a poise, that he’d never displayed in Ginat’Dania. It was perhaps no surprise that he’d already been promoted to the role of Summoner.

The second man, Shraga, who Nahir now introduced, was a complete stranger to her. He too bore the marks of living among the Nations, although in his case, while his skin darkened, his hair had bleached to the colour sometimes called strawberry blond. It would have made him a wonderful exotic in Ginat’Dania.

They gave Diema another set of papers. A new name, a Hungarian passport and driving licence, a bank account to draw on, and weapons. Nahir had assumed correctly that she would have left her knives, her guns, her pharmaca, behind in London, and that she would wish to resupply at the earliest opportunity.

‘Kuutma relayed your message,’ he told her, as she examined the guns they had brought — dismounting and reassembling them, testing the load and the firing action, weighing them in her hands. It was a slightly risky thing to do right there in the car park, but they were shielded by the raised lid of the boot and Diema wanted to be done and gone from here as quickly as she could. ‘He told us to extend every assistance to you and promised us two dozen Messengers in addition to those we have. Some have already arrived. Do you want to brief them yourself?’

‘No,’ Diema said. ‘Not yet. I have other duties to attend to. I assume you made sure you weren’t followed here. But I won’t be taking that risk again, with you or anybody else. If there’s news, tell me by phone or through agreed channels. If there’s no news, leave me be.’

Nahir stared at her, both affronted and troubled.

‘We understood,’ he said stiffly, ‘that you’d be leading this mission.’

‘That’s correct,’ Diema told him, still absorbed in her triage of the weapons. Along with six sica blades, and the modified Dan-inject she’d chosen and ordered for Kennedy, she chose a nameless Chinese army-issue semi-automatic and a nine-millimetre hand pistol, which was small enough to carry in her ankle holster. She put both guns into a sports bag that Shraga handed to her. After a moment’s thought, she also took a Ruger 44 carbine rifle.

‘Follow the brief that Kuutma gave you,’ she instructed the two men, helping herself to some boxes of ammunition. ‘Look for possible addresses or areas from which Ber Lusim might be operating. Circulate likenesses of his rogue Elohim to all your people, and drill them — make them memorise faces and names. Also, look for trucks, vans or cars bearing the name of the High Energy Haulage company, and anyone who travels or books goods or services under their auspices. If you turn up anything that seems positive, or even hopeful, pass the information to me at once.’

‘To you?’ Nahir asked.

Diema nodded. ‘To me. And then wait. I’ll decide what action you’re to take, if any. Those men standing over there by the elevators are my primary team, for now — along with the rhaka, Heather Kennedy. I’m sure Kuutma didn’t omit her from his briefing.’

She beckoned to Tillman and Rush, who came over from where they were still standing, in front of the elevator doors. ‘Help yourself,’ she said to Tillman.

Tillman rummaged among the guns on offer, watched with silent outrage by the two Elohim. Finally he held up a retooled Beretta that looked as though it might once have been a competition gun. ‘Is this chambered for .380?’ he asked the Messengers.

Shraga nodded wordlessly.

‘Okay, then,’ Tillman said. ‘I’ll take this. Thanks.’

‘What about me?’ Rush said. ‘Do I get to have a gun?’

‘Have you ever fired one?’ Diema asked him.

‘No.’

‘Then no, you don’t. You’ll be more danger to us than to the enemy.’ She looked into the boot of the car again. In among the weapons, there were a great many items of general equipment. Some of them were clearly left over from training exercises, and had no conceivable use for her or her team.

She picked up a small cylinder of black plastic with a tab at one end like the ring-pull on a soft-drink can. She tossed it to Rush. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You get to have this.’

He turned the object over in his hands, examining it gingerly as though it might go off in his hands. Then he found the label. WILDWAYS GREEN PAINT BOMB. 400ML. SPRAY AREA 8MTRS DIAMETER. ‘Funny,’ Rush said. ‘Really hilarious.’

Diema wasn’t listening. She’d turned her attention back to Nahir and Shraga. She’d said all that needed saying, but she knew that men often took categorical instructions differently from a woman than they did from another man.

So she spelled it out for them. ‘You’re not part of this,’ she told them. ‘Your role, for now, is to gather information. When I need more from you, I’ll ask for it. I’m speaking with Kuutma’s authority in this, and if you doubt me you can ask him. Keep your eyes open and your hands to yourselves. That’s all.’

Nahir bristled. ‘This is absurd,’ he said. ‘You need us.’

‘I disagree,’ Diema said quietly. ‘Do as you’ve been told, my brother. Please. We serve the same god, and the same city. Everything will be fine, so long as you give me the help I need, when I need it.’ She paused, holding his gaze. ‘If you don’t, you’ll have enough blood on your conscience to make an inland sea.’

She turned to Shraga. ‘These weapons are not traceable to you or to any of your people?’ she asked him. She indicated with a nod the guns and other munitions piled in the boot of the car.

Shraga shook his head.

‘Good. Then drive the car to Katona Jószef Utca. Leave it there, locked, but with the keys on top of the rear driver-side tyre. Leave all the weapons where they are. If we need any more equipment while we’re here, we’ll help ourselves. I assume you brought a second car for us to use?’

He gave her a set of keys and nodded towards the car that faced them across the aisle of the car park, a black Audi A4 with a Hungarian licence plate. ‘What about you?’ Shraga asked, dismayed. ‘We were supposed to escort you to the safe house and see you installed there.’

‘We’ll make our own way into the city,’ Diema said, backing across to the other car while still talking to them. ‘Good hunting, cousins. And God favour us all.’

‘May He watch over you,’ Shraga muttered, bowing again.

He’ll need to do a lot more than just watch, Diema thought as she got into the car, followed by Tillman and Rush.

‘The paint bomb was way harsh,’ Rush reproached her, seeming genuinely hurt.

‘So is life,’ Diema told him.

49

Kennedy took a mid-morning flight and got to Budapest around two in the afternoon. The customs officer who took a cursory glance at her EU passport asked her if the purpose of her trip was business or holiday. She told him she was there to work.

She also told that to the taxi driver who took her from the airport to the Hotel Karoly, on Molnar Utca, directly across the Danube from Gellert Hill and a short walk from the Hungarian parliament. She booked in under her own name and, in answer to the desk clerk’s polite query, once again said very emphatically that she was in Budapest because she had a job to do there. Might take one day, might take two or three, but she was staying until it was done.

Then she grabbed another cab and went to the police headquarters building — Police Palace — which was a squat, stepped tower of glass and steel just opposite the northern tip of Margaret Island. She applied for a temporary licence to use legal but controlled surveillance equipment, providing a long and itemised list and giving her profession as ‘freelance investigator’.

She walked back along the Pest side of the river. Here the down-at-heel Soviet-era brutalism seemed tilted to a rakish angle, inviting tourists to fantasise that they were taking a walk on the wild side. But the hotel and restaurant owners maintained their frontages in a precisely calibrated state of decorative distress, so clearly the wild side was only as wild as the market would bear. Kennedy grabbed some lunch — hortobagy pancakes and a sugared fruit skewer — at a café in a square off Bathory Street, in the extensive shadow of the Magyar Televízió building. She watched the people passing, but made no attempt to interact with any of them.

This was the riskiest part. If everything had gone according to plan, Tillman and Diema had picked up her trail at the Police Palace and were now moving with her through the city, keeping track of her — but they had to stay well away, and out in the open there were too many variables for them to be able to stay on top of all of them. Kennedy imagined information flicking through the air around her: streams of data converging, triangulating, defining her position and her vector.

Or maybe she flattered herself.

She did a lot of things on the way back to the hotel that left a footprint. She drew some money from a cashpoint, signed a petition at the parliament building, used her credit card to buy grapes and a four-pack of Staropramen at a mini-market. Probably none of these things would make a difference, but a little overkill certainly wouldn’t hurt.

At the hotel, still thinking about the evidence chain she was leaving, she placed a call to Ryegate House. She spoke to the receptionist there — not Lorraine, who was on extended leave of absence — and left a more or less meaningless message for Valerie Parminter. She called Izzy’s flat, too, and told the answerphone there that she’d be out of contact for a few days but would get back in touch as soon as she could. Izzy never checked her voicemail anyway, so she wouldn’t get the cryptic message and be panicked by it.

There was nothing more to do but wait. Kennedy turned on the TV and flicked through the menus of pay-on-demand movies. She tried a couple, but the comedy wasn’t funny and the conspiracy thriller depressed her by being less implausible than her life had become.

She called room service and ordered a Caesar salad. When it came she felt like the last thing in the world she wanted to do was eat.

The phone in her room rang at about nine o’clock in the evening, as soon as darkness fell — three rings, then silence. Ten minutes later, Kennedy went down to the ground floor and out of the back door of the hotel, where there was a row of five green-painted dumpsters. Between the third and the fourth, there was a large plastic bag carrying the logo of the Europeum Mall. She collected the bag and took it back to her room.

It took a while to familiarise herself with the contents. During her days in the Met, Kennedy had carried a Glock 27 — a true cop’s gun, with a forward-canted grip so it seemed to jump into your hand on the draw, and a dead-straight recoil. She’d lost it in circumstances that still haunted her and had only fired one other in the years that followed. She’d certainly never fired anything like the monstrosity she took out of the bag. The Dan-inject had been Tillman’s suggestion and Diema had seen the virtue of it.

Kennedy put out her light early, but didn’t go to sleep. She sat on the bed and thought about Izzy. Specifically, she thought about sex with Izzy — varied times and places, even more varied sex. It had been sweet at the time, and it was a whole lot sweeter in retrospect.

Kennedy indulged a fantasy in which she was back in the Cask bar in Pimlico, and Izzy was offering — by way of a peace initiative — to take her home and screw her until her brain melted. In the fantasy, Kennedy accepted the offer and brain-melting sex ensued.

In reality, the bedside alarm clock ticked from 11.59 to 12.00 and the world — or the part of it that spoke Hungarian and sprawled around Kennedy on all sides — was silent and sex-free.

She settled back on the pillows, but sat up again at once when she felt herself starting to drift into a doze. That was a luxury she couldn’t indulge until the job was done.

50

‘I don’t see how this is going to work,’ said a voice in Diema’s walkie-talkie.

It was the boy, Rush, complaining again. That seemed to be the unique talent he brought to this operation. Diema ignored him, but Tillman’s voice replied. ‘Diema thinks it has a chance, Rush, and I’m inclined to go with her instincts. She knows her own people.’

It was half-past midnight. Diema was up on the roof of a building directly opposite Kennedy’s hotel, crouched behind a low parapet wall so she was invisible from the street but had a good view of the window of Kennedy’s room. Tillman was watching the small alley where the dumpsters were, and where Diema had dropped off the Dan-inject for Kennedy. Rush was sitting in the parked Audi down the street from the hotel, watching its front door, which was far and away the least likely way for Ber Lusim’s Elohim to come and therefore the place where the boy could do the least harm.

There was a silence. But not for very long.

‘It just seems too obvious,’ Rush said. ‘I mean, like we’re trying to scare them by saying boo or something.’

‘Maybe.’ Tillman again. ‘But we know Ber Lusim’s people see Heather as a threat. They’ve tried to kill her twice already and the second time they wanted to interrogate her, too. They’re worried that she knows something important. If we’re lucky, losing their warehouse will have made them even more worried.’

‘I get that. I just don’t see how it—’

‘Do your job and be quiet,’ Diema snapped. ‘You don’t need to understand or to agree. You only need to do what you’re told.’

This time the silence was longer. There was a click as the walkie-talkie switched frequency — Tillman closing the party circuit to talk to her directly. ‘He’s afraid,’ he told Diema. ‘If you want to shut him up — or calm him down — you should explain to him.’

‘It would be quicker to cut his throat,’ she muttered.

‘More time-consuming, though. You’d have to go all the way down to the street and then back up again. And then we’d have nobody to watch the front lobby.’

Diema said nothing. But after a minute, still scowling into the inoffensive night, she switched the walkie-talkie back to the all-parties frequency. ‘Heather Kennedy is well known to my people,’ she said, in a tone somewhere between terse and outright sullen. ‘Mostly we think of the Adamite world as a distraction. A nothing. But she has a reputation. There are stories about her. How she found the Ginat’Dania that was and how she fought one of our Elohim to the death. She’s the only one outside the People themselves who the Messengers actually respect.’

Almost, she added to herself, a little unwillingly. Almost the only one.

‘But she didn’t do a thing today besides walk around,’ Rush pointed out. ‘She was acting like a tourist. They’ve got to see that she has nothing.’

Actually, Diema thought, that’s the real genius of Kennedy’s plan. But perhaps she saw that more clearly than the boy did because the plan was aimed so squarely at the Messenger mindset; of course Diema would have the right reaction to it, because she was in the target demographic. ‘What they see is this,’ she told Rush. ‘If you’re right, and Budapest is where Ber Lusim has set up his home, then the rhaka, the wolf woman, the bitch, has done it again. She’s found them. She comes and camps out on their doorstep, so obviously she knows they’re here. Once you accept that, her doing nothing is a lot more sinister than her doing something they can identify and stop.’

Static on the walkie-talkie. ‘Okay,’ Rush said slowly. ‘So then …’

‘Sooner or later they send someone to take her. We intercept and question him instead. We find out where he came from.’

‘Okay. I guess I get that. Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Diema growled. ‘Now shut up and watch the door.’

Which the boy did, at last. And at length.

The night wore itself out and the sun came up. Diema saw Kennedy draw back the curtains of her room and open her window a little way to breathe the dawn air. She caught Diema’s eye briefly as she yawned and stretched.

The hook still dangling there, in the water. But nobody was biting.

51

‘I don’t believe this is something we need to act on,’ Ber Lusim said.

Avra Shekolni spread his hands. ‘You are the Summoner. I bow to your knowledge of your profession and its attendant rituals,’ he said, with well-polished humility. ‘None of God’s Messengers is so mighty as Ber Lusim, nor so clear-sighted.’ He paused, as if reluctant to voice what he had to say next. ‘But still, I think it is.’

They were in a large, airy chamber in the labyrinthine space that Ber Lusim had chosen for his followers to inhabit. Both had just listened as one of his Messengers, who had watched Heather Kennedy for half a day and all of the night, told them of her movements — or rather, her immobility. Several other Elohim were present, including Hifela, who had recently returned from England. He stood at the back of the room, beside the door, ostensibly taking onto himself the role of watchman. In this tightly guarded and barricaded space, and with so many Messengers meeting together, the role was superfluous: it was a mark of discretion and respect on Hifela’s part, and reflected all that Ber Lusim found admirable in the man.

The room was close and windowless — which made it, on the whole, comfortable and homely to anyone who had been born and raised in Ginat’Dania. Every man here had spent his formative years underground, absorbing the light frequencies of sunlight only from luminescent panels. Every man here experienced confined spaces as security and was highly tolerant of artificial light and recycled air.

So the claustrophobia that Ber Lusim felt arose from something else. It was a strange thing. Since they had embarked on the plan — since that first night of blood and wonder back in Nunappleton Hall, a feeling had been growing in him. It was that his life, which had at times seemed a labyrinth of complex choices, had been progressively unravelling itself into a single straight line.

Each of the choices he’d made since he first went out into the wider world had paradoxically narrowed the scope of subsequent choices more and more, so that the vast arcades and vistas of the Nations, so unlike the cramped and contained perspectives of his home, were for him a long, straight corridor with no branches.

One of those choices had been to give his trust to Avra Shekolni, and despite the separate and several misgivings of his heart and mind he didn’t in any way regret that bargain. His old friend was now become his prophet, the light that guided his soul through the darkness of the world. But about some things, perforce, he was more clear-sighted than the Holy One. Violence and subterfuge were the twin mysteries into which he had been initiated when he joined the Elohim, and they were ingrained in him so deeply that his mind knew no other way to work.

Therefore, there were things about the present situation that concerned him. The English warehouse shut down, the intricate clockwork of their plan interrupted and thrown out, and now this — the rhaka arriving here, presenting herself to them, like an omen of doom. All women were omens of doom, of course. From Eve onwards, their business and their delight was always to stray from the path and drag others to destruction with them. One did not move to chastise such a one until one was sure beyond all doubt what mischief she was bent on.

He said none of this to Shekolni. ‘You know what the mathematician, Archimedes, had to say about levers,’ he observed instead. Because he was among his followers, he kept his tone light and accompanied the words with a half-smile, disowning their import even as he spoke them.

‘That with a large enough lever, he could move the world,’ Shekolni said.

Ber Lusim inclined his head. ‘And that is all Heather Kennedy is, blessed one. She moved Ginat’Dania, I know. We all know. And by this we know that she is a very large lever, or else one which on that occasion was very cleverly positioned, so as to exert a greater force than might have been expected.’

‘Forgive me, but I thought Archimedes was born of the Nations, not of the People.’ Shekolni did not smile and his tone was a little stern. ‘I was also given to believe that it was this Adamite man, Leo Tillman, who had found Ginat’Dania. The woman was with him, certainly — but it was Tillman, not the rhaka, who killed Kuutma-that-was. And it is doubtless he who hides behind this woman now.’

Ber Lusim turned to Hifela, his refuge in many storms. ‘Tell us again what happened at the warehouse,’ he ordered him.

Hifela made the sign of the noose. ‘One man went alone into the warehouse,’ he said, as formally as if he were reading aloud from a report. ‘A second remained outside, providing cover fire when he retreated. The man killed three of us and wounded four. None of us saw him clearly enough to identify him, but we believe it was Leo Tillman. Some footage survived from perimeter cameras. Red hair. Tall. Heavy build. Those are circumstantial details — but if you consider them in the light of the way he fought us, it seems almost certain.’

He didn’t need to add that for any Adamite man to kill three Messengers was a dark miracle in itself. They all knew that.

‘So,’ Ber Lusim summed up. ‘Tillman, moving against us in England. Depriving us of resources that were already allocated and about to be sent out. Throwing everything into jeopardy. And now, here, the rhaka, arriving — as it were — at the gates of our house. Yes, it seems possible that you’re right. That these two have made common cause again. It doesn’t follow, though, that we have anything to fear from them.’

‘Only observe her arrogance,’ Shekolni countered, his body leaning forward. ‘She comes. She stands full in our sight. She doesn’t even try to hide herself from us.’

‘Perhaps she does not hide,’ Ber Lusim said, ‘because she doesn’t know that there is anything to hide from.’

Shekolni grimaced, as though the suggestion were something unpleasant in his mouth. ‘Perhaps. Yes. That could be. But consider, Ber Lusim, the whole pattern of her movements since you first became aware of her. She begins by searching for the book. She finds your man, within a matter of days, despite two attempts to remove her.’

‘I spoke with Abydos,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘He could not say much, but I pieced together some of what happened. The rhaka had help, from another, younger woman. A woman whose identity we still haven’t managed to determine.’ The familiar fury and hatred rose in him as he said it, as he saw it in his mind — his men, the brothers of his heart, struck down by whores whose very strength and skill were abomination in God’s sight — but he still kept his voice perfectly level and the muscles of his face relaxed.

‘I believe my point stands,’ Shekolni said quietly. ‘But I have other points. She finds a copy of the holy book. A copy that should not even exist, if your Messengers had done the work assigned to them. And in this, we see, she is swimming up the waterfall, pressing herself against the very current of our enterprise. How does she do this? How does she find what your Elohim missed?’

‘Again, Blessed One, with help,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Not alone. Not by some superhuman ability or intuition.’

‘Then, having read the book, she comes here.’

‘And does nothing.’

‘And does — so far as we can see — nothing. But what can we infer from that, Ber Lusim? If she came to search for us, why doesn’t she search? If she came to confer with someone, why doesn’t she meet them and confer? Why does she go from such wild activity to such complete stillness? What is she, perhaps, waiting for? I beg you to indulge me in this. If you’re right, you lose nothing by questioning her. If you’re wrong, you lose much by leaving her free to harm us. Despite the time you’ve lost because of events in England — the need, which you have explained to me, to re-route shipments and to source new equipment — we are coming to the final page. I beg you to question the rhaka and ensure that nothing she has planned can interfere with that.’

‘I will do this thing,’ said Ber Lusim, ‘if I’m brought to it. But precisely because of that lost time, Most Holy, I would rather not be brought to it. To secure the rhaka, and then to question her, would delay us still further. I would rather drive onward with the mission that we’ve set ourselves.’

‘Well, I am unschooled in these things.’ Shekolni’s voice was freighted with almost subliminal amounts of sarcasm and resentment. ‘I’m prey to foolish fears.’

It was necessary to bring this matter to rest, Ber Lusim knew. It was bad for the others to see the two of them at odds, even for a moment. An idea struck him. He caught Hifela’s gaze and held it for a moment.

‘Tell me this, Blessed One. If you’re right, and the rhaka knows we’re here — if she is about to call down some disaster on our heads — how should I cast my net, for such a fish? How should I bring this woman into my house, so that I can question her? No matter how many Messengers I send against her, she’ll merely eat them alive and excrete their bones.’

Nobody laughed. Nobody could be completely certain that their leader was joking.

‘Send me,’ Hifela suggested.

The words hung in the air. The Elohim, awed, waited for Ber Lusim’s verdict.

‘You, old Skull-bone?’ Ber Lusim enquired. ‘Well, I said that she was formidable. But if I approved this thing, I’d want her brought to me alive and your natural instincts tend towards death.’

‘No,’ Hifela said.

‘No?’

‘No, Tannanu. My instincts tend towards obedience. I wait on your will. If you say to bring her alive, I will be as protective of her body’s safety as her mother would be. But I will bring her.’

He knows me so well, Hifela thought. It was like a small piece of theatre that they had planned together. Perhaps, as the ending of days came closer, all conversations would feel more and more like this. As though the weight of many centuries pressed on every word.

‘Watch her, Hifela,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Choose a few who you trust, and watch her close. So long as she does nothing, do likewise. When she moves, move with her. And if she does anything that concerns you, even in the smallest degree, take her. Take her and bring her before me. Let me speak with her and satisfy myself on some few significant points.’

He rose to his feet, signalling that the meeting was at an end. But none of the Elohim moved or spoke. They waited on his peroration.

‘It may be,’ he said, ‘that Heather Kennedy’s death is meant to be folded into the greater death. It may be that God has brought her to our door for a reason. Because he wishes us to make a sacrifice unto Him that is great in proportion to the greatness of what we do. If that’s so, we’ll sacrifice joyfully, as the commandment bids us.’

He left the room to the sound of their cheers. He paused at the doorway and put his hands on Hifela’s shoulders, staring for a moment into the man’s deep-set, almost hooded eyes. Then he walked on without a word. The Face of the Skull was never comfortable with signs of approval, let alone signs of love. But this was a father’s blessing bestowed upon a faithful son — and as such, it was holy.

52

The day was hot and humid — uncomfortable at ten in the morning, and by noon hardly bearable. In Kennedy’s hotel room, where the AC control on the wall turned out to be a completely empty plastic box, it went by like a river of treacle.

But it was even worse for the watchers. The rooftop opposite the hotel was as hot as a grill pan. Diema slathered her melanin-deficient skin with a zinc oxide preparation and bore it stoically. Rush, still in the car, was far less stoical but was forbidden by Diema to move the car so that he could follow the shade. All he could do was wind the windows down and keep swigging water from the plastic bottles stacked up on the back seat. Only Tillman, bivouacked among the dumpsters, was out of the fierce sun and fairly comfortable.

There was one point in the course of the morning when it seemed as though someone might be walking into their trap — when a windowless van rolled up at the hotel’s back entrance and two men stepped out. But they were delivering catering supplies, boxes of individual tea bags and sugar sachets, plastic cups and tiny packs of biscuits. They were done inside of ten minutes and on their way again.

At 1 p.m., breaking protocol, Kennedy called Tillman on the walkie-talkie that Diema had given her.

‘What?’ Tillman said, without preamble.

‘Nothing,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘Too much nothing. I’m starting to get antsy.’

‘I sympathise. But you’re supposed to maintain radio silence unless there’s an emergency. Is there an emergency, Heather?’

‘No.’

‘Then we stick to the plan.’

She could tell from his tone that he was about to sign off, so she spoke quickly, forestalling him. ‘Leo, I’m not sure the plan is going to work.’

Tillman sighed. ‘We agreed on this. Anything we do now—’

‘No, hear me out. Say we read them right and everything is playing out the way we wanted it to. Say we got Ber Lusim’s attention. He could have watchers camped out around the hotel now, but further out than where you are — or closer in, for that matter. Someone sitting down in the lobby, waiting to follow me when I move.’

‘So?’

‘So maybe I should move. He might be ready to swallow the bait, but still not feel happy about moving into a space I’ve had time to fortify. Maybe he’s planning to grab me off the street as soon as I step out.’

‘All the more reason to keep you off the street, Heather.’ Tillman’s tone was dry. ‘We’re in control here. Out there, not so much.’

‘I’m looking out of my window at the dumpsters, Leo.’

‘I know. I can see you.’

‘So give me a wave.’

‘No. And don’t look out of your window at the dumpsters.’

‘Listen, if there was less at stake, I’d agree with you,’ Kennedy snapped, all her tension coming to the surface at once. ‘But if he’s waiting for us to do something, and we’re waiting for him to do something, he wins. Because presumably, he’s still got his merry band of lunatics out there setting incendiaries and decapitating rats the whole time — and getting closer to whatever it is they’re going to do that will leave a million people dead. I don’t want that on my conscience, Leo. I seriously don’t. I can’t just sit here and wonder how high the body count is getting.’

‘But we can protect you here,’ Tillman objected, stolid and patient. ‘If they come in, we come in right behind them. Out in the open, it’s different. Not to mention the fact that if you start wandering around again, it doesn’t look purposeful. It looks random. We want them to think you’re up to something that threatens them.’

‘I know. So let me do something purposeful.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as a meeting.’

There was silence on the line while Tillman considered this.

‘Diema could set up someone for you to meet with,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘One of her Elohim …’

‘I don’t mean a real meeting. Especially not with someone they might recognise. I mean an imaginary someone. I go to a place where there’s a crowd, but only a few ways in and out — a place where it’s still easy for the three of you to come in close to me.’

‘And what does that give us?’

‘Leverage, maybe. If they think I’m up to something — delivering something or hooking up with my contact — maybe that’s when they decide to play out the hand. Maybe they feel they need to stop it from happening.’

She waited. The silence was a lot longer this time, because Tillman was thinking through all the implications. ‘I’ll talk to Diema,’ he said at last.

‘It’s not for her to decide,’ Kennedy said sharply.

‘No, it isn’t. But she’s got people who know the ground. If we do it, we need to pick the right place.’ There was a pause, but he didn’t turn off the walkie-talkie, so she knew he hadn’t finished speaking. ‘But you could be right,’ he said at last. ‘This is meant to be a provocation. It becomes less provoking the longer you sit there and do nothing. I’ll talk to the others and get back to you.’

He signed off. Kennedy tossed the walkie-talkie onto the bed and made herself a cup of really uninspiring coffee.

Diema didn’t even argue the point. ‘She’s right,’ was all she said. ‘We should probably have done it earlier. Give them a changing situation to react to, instead of one that seems stable.’

‘Jesus, please,’ Rush broke in. ‘Anything that gets me out of this car. It’s like a sauna in here.’

‘So where should she go?’ Tillman asked Diema.

‘I’ll ask.’

‘You mean you’ll confer with your people?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how long will that take?’

‘As long as it takes.’

She closed the channel. A moment later, the walkie-talkie vibrated again. It was Rush.

‘I need to pee,’ he groaned.

‘Use the empty water bottles,’ Tillman said. ‘That’s what they’re for.’

‘Okay, then I need to breathe.’

‘No, you don’t. It’s just a habit people get into.’

‘I need to use my legs before I get a deep-vein thrombosis and die.’

‘Keep the channel clear,’ Tillman grunted, ‘and your eyes open. We’re still working here.’

He switched off the walkie-talkie. His shoulders were stiff so he massaged them, one at a time, always keeping the walkie-talkie ready in his free hand, and never taking his eyes off the hotel’s rear door.

Maybe a little more than half an hour later, Diema got back to him.

‘My people say we should use the Országház,’ she said. ‘The parliament building.’

Tillman was dubious. ‘Did they say why? Lots of security, presumably, so lots of risk. Plenty of reasons for Ber Lusim not to want to go anywhere near Heather in a place like that.’

‘And plenty of reasons why he’d be afraid of who she might be meeting there,’ Diema countered. ‘The high risk cuts both ways. Ber Lusim thinks that, perhaps, this is why she came. Perhaps she’s been waiting for an appointment with someone high up in the government and it just came through. He’d need to know who that is and what’s being planned. Most likely, if he makes a move, he’ll do it as soon as he figures out where she’s going — either when she’s in the front lobby or before she even gets into the building.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Tillman said. ‘There’ll be armed guards in there. If Ber Lusim’s people come for her, Heather could get caught in a crossfire.’

‘Heather’s in this conversation,’ Kennedy said on the walkie-talkie. ‘No pain, no gain. I follow the reasoning, Diema, and I’ll do it.’

But Tillman was still thinking it through and he still had questions. ‘How many exits has that place got?’

‘More than a dozen,’ Diema conceded. ‘But I had a thought about that. My people are going to drop something off — something that gives us a bit of an edge.’

‘What kind of something?’ Kennedy asked.

‘A GPS chip. It’s about the size of a pinhead, and we can implant it under your skin. Once it’s in place, we can establish your location to an accuracy of half a metre — which means if we lose you for any reason, we can still keep track of you. They’ll be dropping it off to me in the next few minutes. I’ll need to get it to you. The easiest way is if I just walk right in there, looking like I’m visiting someone or delivering something. Leave your door unlocked.’

The channel went dead. But only for a couple of seconds.

‘Tillman?’ Rush said.

‘Lad, either use the bloody water bottles or hold it in until we—’

‘It’s not about that. It’s about this whole thing. Taking the Heather Kennedy show on the road.’

‘Well? What about it, Ben?’

‘I think I might have a better idea.’

Kennedy did as she was told — unlocked the door and left it on the latch, so it could be pushed open from the outside. For a few minutes after that, she paced up and down the room, unable to keep still. Finally she went back to the window and stared out at the dumpsters, trying to identify where exactly Tillman had secreted himself. Wherever he was, he was well hidden. But he could see her, so she ought to be able to see him. At any rate, it was interesting to keep looking, like playing a chess game with only one move.

The door whickered momentarily against the thick pile of the carpet and a breath of air touched her back. She turned and saw Diema closing and locking the door.

‘Okay,’ the girl said. ‘Let’s do this.’

She was carrying a shoulder bag. She took something like a Bic lighter out of it and threw the bag on the bed.

‘That’s it?’ Kennedy asked.

‘This is the applicator. And this,’ she held up her other hand, in which she was holding a small, unlabelled tube like a tube of toothpaste, ‘is a topical anaesthetic plus anti-bacterial agent. You need to rub it on the spot and leave it to work for half a minute. Take off your pants and sit on the bed.’

‘Take off my what?’

Diema was matter-of-fact. ‘There’ll be an implant wound — tiny but noticeable. If we had time for it to heal over, anywhere on your body would be fine. As it is, our best bet is to implant the chip internally, so there’s no visible mark. The supplier said the inside of your cheek would do, but he also said there might be swelling on your face, which would look suspicious. So I think we should go with his other suggestion, which was to place the chip in your vaginal wall.’

Kennedy folded her arms and stayed exactly where she was. ‘I think we should stick with the cheek,’ she said, deadpan.

Diema stared hard at Kennedy, clearly surprised and a little impatient. ‘We know Ber Lusim’s men are female-averse,’ she said, in an I’ll-keep-on-saying-this-until-you-get-it tone. ‘If this goes wrong, and they succeed in taking you, they may search you. But the two rogue Elohim you met in London were reluctant even to undress you fully, so I think we’re safe in assuming that they wouldn’t give you a full orifice search.’

She waited for reason to prevail and for Kennedy to do as she was told.

‘Sit down, girl,’ Kennedy said.

Diema seemed bemused at the suggestion. ‘There’s no time,’ she said curtly. ‘If you insist on the cheek, then let’s—’

‘Sit down,’ Kennedy said again. ‘We have to talk.’

‘No,’ Diema said, not even bothering to hide her contempt for the older woman. ‘We don’t have to talk. We only have to work together. I thought that was clear.’

‘Clear to you, maybe. I’m going to sit down anyway. You can stand there, if you want to, but you will talk to me. Because if you don’t, this ends here.’

Diema’s eyes widened. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘There are too many lives at stake.’

‘A couple more than you know, maybe.’ Kennedy went and sat, not on the bed but on the room’s one chair. She waited in silence for the girl to join her.

Diema stood irresolute for several heartbeats. Finally, rigid with tension, she crossed the room and sat on the bed facing Kennedy. She put on a sardonic expression. I’m waiting.

‘Why did you change your name?’ Kennedy asked.

Diema blinked. ‘What?’

‘It’s not that tough a question. Why did you change your name?’

‘For no reason that you need to know about.’

The girl’s tone was flat and final. Kennedy waited her out.

‘Because I changed my life,’ Diema said at last, in the same voice.

‘Yes,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘I can see that, Grace. I’m just trying to work out how deep the changes go.’

The girl’s expression didn’t change, apart from a barely perceptible flicker of her eyelids. ‘I was Tabe,’ she said. ‘I was never Grace. Grace was just what the father of my flesh called me.’

‘The father of your flesh? Is that how you think of him?’ Diema opened her mouth to speak again, but Kennedy held up a hand. ‘Never mind. I don’t pretend to understand your customs, but you’re wrong about that and you need to know it.’

‘My name is—’

‘Your mother named you Grace. And she named your brothers Jude and Seth. Normally you’d have kept those names when she took you back home, because none of them were offensive to your people’s beliefs. The tradition, as far as I was told, is to rechristen children if they’ve been given names that are too … what would you call it? Too Adamite. But Jude and Seth were good, biblical names — and who could argue with Grace?’

‘I said,’ the girl repeated, through gritted teeth, ‘my name is Diema.’

‘But your Michael Brand, your Kuutma, he seemed to feel that your past, and your brothers’ past, needed to be more thoroughly erased than that. Perhaps because he loved your mother, Rebecca, and wanted her family to be his family, too. But she killed herself. She didn’t want to live without your father. I mean, the father of your flesh. Leo Tillman. And after she was dead, Michael Brand gave new names to the three of you. He called you Tabe — and your brothers Ezei and Cephas.’

Diema seemed completely unmoved. ‘You seem to think I should care what I was called out here in your world,’ she said to Kennedy, her lower lip twisting. ‘I don’t. It’s never been my world and it isn’t now. It’s just a place where I work.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Your world is a big cave somewhere, with the sky painted on the underside of the roof. I can’t imagine what that would be like, but I know you didn’t … don’t … think of it as a great hardship. You never missed what you never had. But doesn’t it seem terrible to you, now that you’ve seen what the real world is like, that anyone should grow up in that way and live in that way? In the dark?’ Kennedy heard the tremor in her own voice. She was trying to speak to the young woman, but she kept seeing the child imprisoned inside her, the child entombed, and it was so terrible she felt a sort of sympathetic panic — a feeling of vicarious suffocation.

‘It’s not dark,’ Diema said. ‘It was only dark when you saw it, rhaka. And that was because you saw your own darkness.’

‘No,’ Kennedy said sharply. ‘No. Believe me, I know the difference. And I know there’s nothing I can say that will change you now. I can’t push back the weight of all those years. But at least think about it. Please. Why did they send you? Why you, of all people? Why did they even think to turn you into …’ she pointed at the girl with a hand that trembled slightly ‘… into this? I can’t forget what Kuutma said to Leo, the only time we ever met him. “Your daughter is an artist. She paints. There’s such beauty inside her that it spills out of her fingers into the world.” He said that! And then they turned around and made you into one of their murderers.’

Kennedy felt tears welling in her eyes and fought to hold them back. She knew that the girl would only see them as signs of weakness. But in spite of all she could do, a tear ran down her cheek. She was weeping for Grace, and for Tabe, both of them gone without a trace.

Diema was not contemptuous of the tear: she was outraged by it. ‘Nobody made me do anything!’ she said, her voice rising. ‘This was my decision. Kuutma saw the potential in me. He gave me the choice — to serve my people.’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘And he sent you to me, knowing I’d see Leo’s face in yours. Knowing I’d have to go to Leo, against every instinct I had, and bring him back into this. Don’t lie to yourself, Diema. If you were ever an artist, you probably had that gift that artists have of seeing exactly what’s in front of your eyes. So look at this picture and see what it says to you. They took you up, and trained you, and sent you out to enlist us, because they knew you were the only one who could. Not an atom of chance or coincidence. Not an atom of choice, for any of us.’

Diema lurched to her feet. She looked as if she might run, but she stood her ground, her fists clenched. ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said, her voice almost back under control now, ‘that you’d try to turn me against my own people. It’s exactly what I’d expect from you. I’m only surprised you waited until we were all the way out here. You should have done it at Dovecote Farm, where you and Leo Tillman killed my brothers.’

It was Kennedy’s one remaining hope — that they’d spared the girl that, at least. She sank her head into her hands, succumbing to a moment of sheer despair.

‘Oh yes,’ Diema sneered, glaring down at her. ‘Did you think you could lie to me, Heather Kennedy? Did you think they’d let me meet you — and him — without telling me what it was you’d done? You say I’ve been lied to, and manipulated, by people I love. But you forgot to mention what Leo Tillman did to me. What he took from me. Perhaps it slipped your mind.’

Kennedy forced herself to look the girl in the eye again. It was an effort. She was really afraid of that scorn and that hatred: afraid of what it might be capable of doing. ‘Diema,’ she said, her voice thickened by her crying, ‘did you ever ask, or did your teachers ever tell you, why Leo and I went to your Ginat’Dania?’

‘To destroy it,’ the girl said promptly.

‘No, it wasn’t that at all. And it was already destroyed, as far as that went. We came too late. I went to make an arrest. But Leo was looking for his wife, and his children. He was looking for you. He’d been looking for you for twelve years. Ever since the day he came home and found the house empty. He loved you more than anything else in the world. He couldn’t live without you. So he kept on searching, for you, and for Rebecca, and for your brothers, even though it had been so long, and nobody else believed you could even be alive—’

‘We weren’t alive!’ Diema shouted. ‘My mother was dead by then. My brothers were dead, because he’d already killed them, back in England. I was the only one left.’

‘He didn’t know that. He still doesn’t. Oh, he knows about Rebecca. Michael Brand told him how she died. But he doesn’t know about Ezei and Cephas. It would break his heart if he ever found out.’

Diema leaned down and thrust her face into Kennedy’s face, gripping the lapels of the woman’s jacket tightly. ‘Then when this is over,’ she growled, ‘I’ll break his heart.’

The fury passed through the girl, almost like a visible wave, and left her weak and sickened. She turned away from Kennedy with a gesture of surrender: not surrender to her arguments, just a desire to be done with all these words, all these thoughts.

‘Put the chip into your cheek, rhaka,’ she said hoarsely, after a while. ‘I want to get out of here.’

‘Keep it,’ Kennedy said.

‘We need you to—’

‘I know what you need me for. But talking to you just now, I had another thought about that. I think it might be a really bad idea to have something implanted in my body that lets your people find me whenever they want to. So forget it.’

Diema stared at her. ‘It’s your choice,’ she said coldly.

‘Yeah, isn’t it?’

The walkie-talkie, still set to vibrate, jumped and writhed on the bedside table, raising a burring clamour like a dentist’s drill hitting enamel.

Kennedy picked it up and opened the main channel. Diema drew out her own set and turned away as she pressed it to her ear.

‘Are you two almost done?’ Tillman asked.

‘Yes. No. Almost,’ Kennedy mumbled. ‘Can you give us a couple of minutes, Leo?’

‘Take as long as you need. But listen to what Rush has to say before you go anywhere.’

‘What the boy has to say?’ Diema snapped. ‘Why should anyone care what the boy has to say? He knows nothing about this.’

‘Actually,’ Tillman said after a moment, ‘he makes a good case. Heather, you shouldn’t go to the parliament building.’

‘Then where should I go?’ It didn’t seem possible that it could matter right then: she asked mechanically, because he seemed to be expecting her to ask.

‘To the baths,’ he said.

53

The Gellert Hotel stood right at the foot of Gellert Hill, on the Buda side of the Szabadság Hid, or Freedom Bridge. It was an art nouveau palace, dressed in cool white stone and with Turkish minarets at its corners, even though the Ottomans had bailed on Budapest several centuries before the hotel was built.

On the top of the hill, 235 metres above Kennedy’s head as she walked across the bridge, a weathered bronze statue of Saint Gellert stood at the edge of the precipice, one arm raised above his head in valediction, as though he were about to jump.

The hotel, with its huge bath complex, was a major tourist attraction, and on a day as hot as this there was a line right out of the side door and down the steeply sloping street. The front door, and the whole of the piazza between the hotel and the river, was taken up with a massive open-air market.

Kennedy joined the line and stood on the scorching pavement, tuning out conversations in English, Hungarian, German and Italian. The shoulder of Gellert Hill rose behind her, its rugged face softened on this side by the mature vines and fig trees that sprawled down from its peak almost to the river.

Out of the belly of the beast.

‘This is what I’m thinking,’ Rush had said. ‘Toller used that picture as the frontispiece of his book, right? So I’m betting that his house is actually right there in the picture. What else would he be showing us? And if Shekolni is trying to model himself on Toller, maybe he’s in that same house — or as close to it as he could get. So there’s no point Kennedy going up to the parliament. It’s the wrong side of the river and too far north. She should go to some place that’s actually in that picture — or a place that stands where the houses in the picture used to be.’

With a certain degree of smugness, he’d unveiled his front — runner: the Gellert Hotel. He remembered it from the holiday he’d taken in Budapest a few years before. It would have been in Toller’s picture, if it had been built back then. It was big enough and crowded enough to make a plausible spot for a meeting, but it had only two main entrances. And it had no armed guards, no lock-downs, no pack drill. ‘Elementary, my dear Watsons.’

Diema hadn’t liked it at first — hadn’t wanted even to discuss it. The confrontation with Kennedy had left her sullen and withdrawn — regrouping herself, Kennedy thought, along the interior battle lines that seemed to mean so much to her. But Diema hadn’t been able to fault the argument and finally she’d gone along with what was basically a fait accompli. It was clear by then that both Kennedy and Tillman preferred Rush’s version of the plan, and had withdrawn their consent from hers.

So Kennedy crossed the river and waited in the sweaty heat of the afternoon until the line moved forward enough for her to get through the doors into the vast entrance hall with its wooden pillars, its light wells, its elegant nude statues and geometrical mosaics. Some of it was original, approaching its hundredth birthday. The rest had been seamlessly reconstructed after 1945, when the Russian shelling of retreating German columns had reduced most of Buda to loose chippings.

The ticket window Kennedy was slowly approaching was flanked by massive wooden notice boards — one in Hungarian, the other in very bad English — advertising an array of treatments and services. In addition to the main public access and spa pools, there were dry and steam saunas, massage booths, manicures and pedicures, mud packing, carbonic acid tubs, weight baths, stretch baths and cold dive-pools. And a bar, she couldn’t help noticing.

Trying not to scan the faces around her, or meet anyone’s gaze for more than a fleeting second, Kennedy took the open day pass. It would get her into all the pools and saunas: specialist services involving heavy weights, mud or mild corrosives would cost extra.

She was given a towel, a wrist band and a set of instructions in rapid Hungarian to which she just nodded along. There were separate entrances for men and women: Kennedy’s Hungarian was just about equal to following the arrowed signs marked Nök to a gleaming steel turnstile standing incongruously under a decorative arch, whose carved woodwork echoed the grape vines on the hill outside. A stony-faced woman with the hotel’s logo blazoned in red across her white T-shirt showed her how to use her wristband to swipe herself in.

Looking neither to right nor left, Kennedy went on, down a long flight of steps and through an underground tunnel into the main bath complex. A lot of it, she realised, was underground, although there were signs everywhere pointing up towards the outside pool.

Kennedy went into a one-person changing room, where she took off her light jacket, shirt and trousers, replacing them with T-shirt and shorts. The few things she needed to carry went into a string purse that she wore on her shoulder.

She looked innocuous. Unarmed. A lamb to the slaughter.

She exited the changing room and sauntered through the seemingly endless aisles and alleys of cubicles until she found one of the spiral staircases that led to the outdoor pool.

The pool area was vast and heaving with bronzed or lightly broiled bodies. Kennedy had read once — admittedly a good few years before — that the whole human population of the world could stand shoulder to shoulder on the island of Zanzibar. It looked as though most of them had chosen today to try to stand in the Hotel Gellert’s bath complex.

She sat down on a deckchair and anointed herself with sun-block, putting the bottle back in the shoulder bag afterwards. Then she checked her watch, not ostentatiously but visibly, and leaned back in the chair, hands folded demurely in her lap.

If it was going to happen at all, it would probably happen soon.

Kennedy’s three watchers had had to cross the city in lock-step with her, which prevented them from choosing their stations in advance. There was a brief, hurried conference at the western end of the Freedom Bridge, where Diema was able to use the hotel complex itself, looming in the middle distance, as a visual aid.

‘I’m going to be on the hill,’ she said. ‘That way I can see the front and side doors of the hotel, so I’ll be your early warning if anybody shows. Tillman, you go inside, in the lobby space. You can watch the entrance to the baths, and you’ll be on point if anyone gets past me.’

‘What about me?’ Rush asked, without much hope.

‘Watch the front doors, from the outside, and the steps up from the river,’ Diema said. She didn’t go to any effort to make it sound like a job that had any real importance.

‘Are they likely to come up from the river?’ Rush asked.

‘They could,’ Diema said.

She was already walking away when Tillman caught her by the arm and brought her to a halt. It was an electrifying moment, and it made Rush swallow the complaint he was halfway to voicing.

‘Do you have a problem?’ Diema asked, in a tone that said do you want to lose that hand?

‘The GPS receiver,’ Tillman said.

‘What about it?’

‘No offence, girl, but I think I might have Heather’s interests more at heart than you do. Why not let me hold onto the base unit?’

They locked eyes for a long, dangerous moment.

‘Protector of women,’ Diema said. ‘Defender of the weak, and the weak-minded. Is that your brief, Tillman? Or do you just want to get into her pants?’

‘If you want to know about Heather’s pants,’ Tillman said equably, ‘you should probably ask Heather. Meantime, I’ll take the tracker. Unless this is something you actually want to fight about.’

Diema reached into a pocket of her black leather jacket, found something that looked a little like a TV remote, and tossed it to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You take it, with my blessing. It won’t do any good, though. She changed her mind about wearing it. You should teach your bitch a little discipline, some time. God knows, she could use it.’

The girl walked away before he could answer her, heading for the east side of the hotel and the rugged hillside beyond. She didn’t look back.

Tillman turned to Rush, who was giving him a slightly dazed stare.

‘Did I just hear right?’ the boy demanded. ‘Kennedy’s in the wind?’

‘Not if we do our job right,’ Tillman muttered gruffly. ‘Pick your spot, lad. And keep your channel open. This might be our last shot.’

‘It might be hers,’ Rush said.

And since Tillman had no answer to that, they parted without any further exchange of pleasantries.

Rush stayed where he was, out on the pavement in front of the hotel’s main entrance, with the street market right at his back. Tillman went into the lobby and up into the gallery set into the circular dome at its mid-point.

Once again, all they could do was wait. And Tillman was starting to feel that if they waited much longer, this so-called plan would founder on the reefs of their divergent agendas.

He was also wondering, if they happened to succeed in locating and neutralising Ber Lusim, for how long after that the Judas People would let them live.

Sitting under the rotunda dome at the centre of the Hotel Gellert’s lobby, wearing a gaudy shirt and with a camera around his neck, Hifela watched Heather Kennedy pass through the turnstile and considered his brief. If she does anything that concerns you, his commander had said.

He could refer back to Ber Lusim, but this seemed to fit the definition very well. For the rhaka to come so shockingly close to their base of operations was still an ambiguous act, but it admitted of very few interpretations — and in all of them, the woman or one of her associates had somehow succeeded in locating them. Possibly she was planning some kind of raid, but it seemed unlikely she’d do that by day. It was only too plausible, though, that she was reconnoitring the ground for a later incursion.

Hifela decided that this was a good moment to intervene. But he didn’t want to overstep the bounds of his commission, even then. He took out his phone and texted a message to Ber Lusim. ‘The woman is close to you. Horizontal distance, two hundred and fifty metres. Vertical distance, eighty metres.’

He sent the message, and while he waited for a reply he sauntered around the lobby, casting a critical eye on the statuary. But he could not relax, and he was all too aware that he looked as though he were inspecting the nudes on a parade ground.

He thought back, at this crucial juncture, to his life’s other major turning point, to the moment when he had decided to follow Ber Lusim into exile. That had been an act of blind faith. They had had no idea, then, of the part they were to play in human history. They hadn’t even known that they were chosen. Then the prophet had arrived and made sense of everything. He had promised to show them a miracle and he had delivered on the promise. He had shown them how every one of their own actions was a stone in a mosaic, not random but perfect and necessary and interconnecting. When Shekolni spoke, there was perspective.

So the other Elohim said, anyway. For Hifela, it was always more a matter of personal loyalty to his chief — love, even, for what he felt for Ber Lusim was more fervent and intense than anything he had ever felt for a woman; just as the intimacies of the battlefield were deeper than the intimacies of the bedroom.

His phone pinged once, the discreet sound of an elevator arriving. He glanced at the screen, then opened the text, which consisted of a single word.

Execute.

Hifela stood slowly, set the camera to flash and took a photo of the nearest nude.

That was the prearranged signal. Although there was no visible sign of it in the random movements of the crowd around him, the word was being passed down the line and the Elohim assigned to him were going in.

Not against the woman. The woman would wait, a little while.

Until they’d disposed of her three guardian angels.

54

Ben Rush survived the first attack for one reason only: he was in Diema’s line of sight.

Rush was watching the hotel’s front entrance, which faced onto the river. Diema was watching from the south, where the hotel faced the hillside, and as always she favoured a high vantage point. In the absence of a building backing onto the hotel, she’d chosen a massive fig tree at the base of the hill, whose upper branches were on a level with the hotel’s fifth-floor windows. Tillman was inside, in the lobby, close to a window that looked onto the outside pool where Kennedy had positioned herself.

It was some trick of body language that made Diema focus on the man who was crossing the road, heading towards the front entrance and — as though coincidentally — towards Rush. She couldn’t say what it was she recognised, but she found herself staring at the man, registering him instantly as one of her own tribe. Then, as he drew the sica from the back of his belt, she realised belatedly that his left hand had just traced an ellipse against the light-coloured fabric of his suit jacket. It had seemed as though he were just smoothing out a crease, but it was the sign of the noose.

The distance was about two hundred metres — already long for the nine-millimetre, but the nine-millimetre was in her hand while the Chinese cannon was in the satchel sitting on the branch beside her. She was sure she could place a bullet in the man at that distance, but she couldn’t with any confidence gauge where it would hit — and he was of the chosen, so she couldn’t risk killing him.

Squaring the circle, she fired off five rounds in quick succession, aiming very low. Three pedestrians went down, shot in the knee, calf or foot. Screams and bellows rose from the street, and consternation burgeoned visibly from the seeds of pain and panic she’d just created. It was a rough and ready solution, but it made people flee across the knife-man’s path. It might also make Rush look in the right direction and catch sight of him.

It was the best Diema could do and it took a heartbeat longer than she would have liked. Because she knew for certain that she was blown. There was just no way Ber Lusim’s Elohim would come for Rush and not for her. And no way, given enough time and patience, that they wouldn’t have made her, sitting up in the tree, and gotten into position to take her.

The satchel was an arm’s length away, with all her kit — apart from the nine-millimetre and the walkie-talkie, still strapped to her belt — inside it. It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. She straightened her legs, slid forward and let herself fall straight off the branch. Rifle fire shredded the foliage above her and reduced her former perch to a threshing floor.

Diema used the canopy to slow her fall, turning it into a cascade roll, and caught herself on another branch ten feet lower down. She’d been able to gauge the direction of the gunfire, at least roughly, and had angled her fall to the left, away from the flank of the hill. Now she scrambled a few feet further over, even though it meant crawling out towards the thinner end of the branch she was on. The branch dipped precariously under her, but the bole of the tree was between her and the shooters.

For now.

She snatched up the walkie-talkie, but before she could open the channel, let alone speak, more shots smacked into the bark right above her head.

She was pinned from at least two directions. And they could see her.

Tillman saw the knife first, already in the air, the knife-man a half-second later. It was much too late by that time, and though he turned and dropped by subliminal reflex, that only meant the sica caught him higher up on his side and at a shallower angle. Sharper than a razor, it went into the angle of the pectoral and deltoid muscles on his right side and embedded itself deeply. Along with the pain came the shock of realisation that the hurt he’d just received was probably his death warrant. The anti-coagulants the Elohim used to coat their blades could render even a shallow graze deadly, and he’d just taken a deep wound at a nexus of two major arteries.

Two men — presumably Messengers, given their choice of weapon — were coming at him from two different directions around the circular gallery, intentionally cutting him off from the stairs and the lift. Tillman’s gun was tucked into the back of his belt and there was no time to get to it — especially with the protruding knife impeding his movements. Any of the Elohim would already have the advantage over him in speed. The man who’d already thrown was drawing another blade. The second assassin, marginally closer because he hadn’t taken the time to aim and throw, was coming towards Tillman at a run.

He carried the knife in his right hand, the left hovering above it seemingly en garde — but then he let the two hands draw apart, the knife-hand stabbing low while the supposedly defensive hand darted up to jab at Tillman’s throat.

Tillman walked right into the attack. Being wounded already freed him from that particular concern, although not from the danger of being disembowelled. He struck down with his own right hand to knock the knife aside and leaned to the side so that the throat-jab went wide.

He clamped his left hand onto the assassin’s shoulder. Still advancing, still turning, he ducked to transform the lock into a throw. He took the man’s knife-arm just above the wrist, pulled him around and down in a clumsy but quick kitap, but since he maintained his grip on his opponent’s forearm the weight of the man’s own body ripped his arm out of its socket.

And gave Tillman a knife.

He brought it up in time to fend off a slashing attack from the second man, the two knives clashing once, then twice, as though they were swords and this was a fencing bout. Tillman was aware that every movement was forcing more blood out of the deep wound in his side, but there was no time to think about that.

More worrying was the fact that he was facing a knife-fighter far more experienced and comfortable with this weapon than he was. He was giving ground with each feint and guard, backing towards the wall. He was going to lose, and he was going to die.

So he did the only thing he could think of. He bought a half-second with a wild horizontal slash, used it to back away another step — leaving his knife way out of line, his torso unprotected.

The assassin took the invitation, moving in with terrifying speed, but Tillman was already angling his body away from the blow, and because he had to make the call he decided it would be a high thrust to the heart. Luck was with him: his opponent, over-committed, leaned in past him. By this time, Tillman had dropped his knife. He grabbed the man in a two-handed embrace and pivoted on his left foot, adding his own momentum to the lunge.

They went through the tall window together, but the Elohim assassin was the lead partner in this short, ugly waltz.

Tillman kept the other man beneath him as they fell the twenty feet to the ground. They landed on bright blue tiles, in a shower of glass shards, and gravity delivered the coup de grâce.

Where they landed was a decorative apron next to the outdoor pool, in the middle of a dense crowd of sunbathing tourists — who screamed and leaped to their feet, scrambling to avoid the hard rain of broken glass and then to get away from the blood-boltered madman who reared up, staggering, in front of them, standing over a pulped corpse like a lion over his kill.

As they backed and ran from him, Tillman’s walkie-talkie vibrated on his belt. He thumbed the ACCEPT key and heard Diema’s voice.

‘Tillman! Rush! The plan’s shot. They were waiting for us. They’ll kill us first, then go after—’ Her voice was drowned out by the white noise of gunfire. An automatic rifle, from up close.

Tillman snatched up the walkie-talkie, already moving. He had plenty of empty space to move into, suddenly. The bathers were fleeing away from him on all sides as quickly as they could.

‘Where are you?’ he yelled.

He heard a single word. It sounded like ‘hill’, or maybe ‘kill’.

He hoped the boy would survive. He hoped they all would.

But he did what he had to do.

Kennedy heard the gunshots first — the precise, hammer-on-nail iterations of Diema’s handgun, followed by the nerve-shredding road-drill roar of an automatic rifle. A moment later, and much closer, a window shattered.

From where she was, the side of an awning hid the falling bodies of Tillman and the Messenger, and the first screams drowned out the sound when they hit. She only knew that violence was erupting all around her — and from this, that their plan had both succeeded and failed. The Elohim had taken the bait, but somehow they’d missed the target. Or else they were choosing to take her out in a way that involved a lot of collateral damage.

She took three steps in the direction of the sounds, but that was as far as she got. The people closest to her backed into her, turned and started to run, infected with the panic of those at the epicentre of the disturbance. Except that it wasn’t really running. In the space of seconds, as hundreds of people surged towards the few available exits, the crowd congealed into a single, struggling mass. Kennedy couldn’t swim against that tide: she tried to stand her ground and let it sweep past her, but even that was more than she could manage. She was carried with it.

Men and women with the hotel’s red logo on their chests — lifeguards, presumably — were trying to divert the tide and stop people from being crushed against the walls. One of them was shouldered aside by a fleeing man and pushed into the pool. Probably the safest place to be right then, Kennedy thought, but she had to find out what was happening, and she had to do it quickly.

She let the crowd carry her. Once she was downstairs, in the changing area, it would be easier to peel off and go her own way.

‘Itt!’ the lifeguards were shouting. ‘Here! This way!’ Two of them, a man and a woman, were holding a door open against the crowd’s barging, stumbling turbulence. Kennedy went through it and down the stairs beyond. Each step was a fight to stay on her feet and avoid being trodden under by the sheer press of people.

At the bottom of the stairs, emptying into the wider space of the changing area, the crowd spread out a little and the crush was lessened. Here, too, though, urgent men and women ushered them onward — ‘Itt! Itt!’ — and pushed them if they stopped.

A man stepped into their path and yelled into Kennedy’s face. ‘Itt kell mennem, asszony — itt!’ She went the way he pointed, through another door off to one side and into a white-tiled corridor that was mercifully empty. She’d already taken several steps along it when she realised that the man who’d just spoken to her hadn’t had the house logo on his chest. He hadn’t been wearing a T-shirt at all, but a plain white shirt and a linen-weave suit.

She stopped and turned, just in time to see the man pull the door closed and draw a bolt across, locking himself in with her.

55

As soon as he saw the man walking towards him with the knife in his hand, Ben Rush turned and ran. The street market was right there beside him and it was pretty much the only way that wasn’t blocked by shouting, screaming people, so that was where he headed.

But the knife-man was running too, and after one frantic glance over his shoulder, Rush knew that he wasn’t going to win this race on the flat. Jesus, this guy was fast!

So his only chance was to make it into a steeplechase. He vaulted over counters, to the indignant bellows of the stallholders, barged through clothes racks and stacked boxes, swarmed under tent flaps, and generally did his best to get out of his pursuer’s line of sight. But every time he thought he’d shaken him off, the bastard hauled into sight again, dogging Rush’s heels so closely that there was never any chance for him to go to ground.

Rush was young, and reasonably fit, but he knew he couldn’t keep this pace up for long. And it was getting harder to manoeuvre as stallholders and shoppers stopped what they were doing to watch the chase. They formed a semi-solid wall now, blocking him from most of the bolt-holes he might have used and giving the assassin — with their attentive, curious stares — a signpost that pointed towards Rush in real time.

If Diema had only given me a gun, he thought wildly. But how could he have started a firefight in the middle of a thousand innocent bystanders? And besides, he’d never fired a gun in his life. The only thing that was certain if he’d tried it here was that he wouldn’t have hit the one man he was actually aiming at.

He rounded a corner, legs and elbows pumping, and skidded to a halt. No more road. The market went all the way to the river, and that was where he was. There was a low parapet wall ahead of him. A long way below, the broad ribbon of Zela Utca, the river road, stood between him and the Danube. Not even an Olympic athlete could have jumped across that distance.

Rush thought furiously. He did have the paint grenade and he took it from his pocket now. Maybe he could let the guy get up close and then blind him with it? But he’d seen people messing with these things on YouTube — they sprayed paint in thin streaks, not in waves. They were a nuisance, designed for drunken prats who think damage to property is hilarious in itself.

The inspiration hit him when it was almost too late to be of any use. He still had a second or two before the assassin turned the corner and saw him again. He staggered right up to the nearest stall, which was selling sweet and savoury strudels, held the grenade above his head and pulled the pin. ‘Debreceniiii!’ he yelled, his voice ragged. ‘Debreceni are a load of bollocks. Polecsik is a wanker. Liverpool shagged you up the arse!’

The grenade kicked in his hand and the world went green.

The gunfire was coming from at least three directions and Diema could only think of one way to respond. She couldn’t return fire: she couldn’t even see where the shots were coming from, and if she fired at random she might kill one of her own race — the sin that would bar her from ever going home.

So she kept on dropping and sliding down through the branches of the tree, hiding herself from one shooter or another, trying to find a space that would offer her cover from all quarters. As a strategy, it was only a little bit better than praying.

As soon as that thought crossed her mind, she realised that she had at least one more option.

Diema began to sing. She knew a hundred blessings, and most could be sung as well as spoken. She started with the funeral hymn, which for obvious reasons was uppermost in her mind. Forgetting cadence and harmony, she shouted it at the top of her voice, hoping that it would carry to where Ber Lusim’s Elohim were.

The gunfire slackened and then stopped.

Yes, Diema thought. Home-town girl. Now you know.

Somewhere close by, a shrill, rising voice screamed out an order in bastard Aramaic. ‘Y’tuh gemae le! Net ya neiu!’ The order was utter blasphemy: never mind who she is, complete your mission. For a moment, and then another, nothing happened. But the speaker had pronounced Diema’s death sentence.

The branch she was squatting on was barely able to support her weight — but the one above it, to which she was clinging with her hands, was longer and thicker. As the shooting began again, she hauled herself up onto it, found her balance and began to run.

She was still maybe ten feet above the ground — clearly visible from below now as she broke out of the tree’s thickest canopy into semi-open air. But these trees were old: centuries ago, they’d linked arms in solidarity against the city’s incursions, tying their extremities into a lovers’ knot.

At the end of the branch, Diema jumped. She wasn’t aiming for any particular part of the neighbouring tree, just using its foliage to soften the impact and then its branches to allow her to complete her controlled fall to the ground.

She landed on her feet, which was a welcome miracle. There was a man directly in front of her, already turning — a rifle in his hands. Diema shot him in both legs, and then as he toppled towards her she swung the handgun up to meet him, driving the butt into the side of his head. He was unconscious when he hit the ground.

She took the man’s rifle and retreated up the hill, darting quick glances into the trees around her. There was movement there, and another shout: ‘Be hin et adom!’ Yes, Diema thought. She’s on the ground. Maybe you’ll be a bit less free and easy with the rifle fire when you might hit one of your own.

Meanwhile, her own rifle fire would sound like theirs and make it harder for them to track her. It also lent itself very well to her new tactics. She cut another man off at the knees with a short, sweeping burst, and left him screaming — then she waited until one of his comrades came to check the damage, and shot him too. She was happy to keep this up until Ber Lusim didn’t have a single Messenger left who could walk.

She kept on moving, always upwards — which she hoped would draw the Elohim along with her, away from the others. The plan was moot now, but they still needed a living Messenger to question. Kennedy had the Dan-inject, so she had the best chance of landing that fish.

Of course, the slopes of Gellert Hill were now full of Elohim who were in no fit state to walk away, but their comrades would collect them as soon as they’d dealt with Diema, and for all her efforts that couldn’t take long now.

Even as she was thinking that, she heard a soft, thudding impact on the ground close by. Looking down, she saw a grenade rolling to a halt against her foot. She kicked it away down the hill and threw herself flat on her stomach.

Or started to.

She was still in mid-air when the shockwave took her.

Kennedy had encountered the Elohim before and survived the experience — mostly by means of luck or outside help, and once (in Santa Claus, Arizona) by the time-honoured device of bringing a gun to a knife fight. She knew enough to be certain that if she let this man get in close to her, she was probably finished.

As he advanced, she took the Dan-inject out of her bag. Then she threw away the bag, dropped her free hand to her side like a duellist in a Victorian novel, and took aim with the flimsy, almost weightless device — one-handed and with her arm straight out in front of her, a stance she’d never have used with an actual gun. But this wasn’t a gun, it was a modified version of the dart-launchers that zookeepers use to sedate dangerous animals. Instead of bullets, it fired flechette darts with a payload of three millilitres of fentanyl. Recoil would be minimal, too small even to feel.

The assassin was on Kennedy in three strides. In that time, she fired off both of the pre-loaded darts, aiming for his chest. But the darts were slower than bullets, as well as lighter. The Messenger, whose addiction to the drug kelalit profoundly altered his perceptions of the world, walked around them, tilting his body first to the left and then to the right.

Which kept his mind occupied while Kennedy brought up the jabstick and stabbed him in the shoulder.

The jabstick was manufactured by the same company that made the dart gun. It was gas-and-spring loaded, modifiable to release the sedative payload either automatically or on depressing a trigger. The one Kennedy was carrying — illegally customised and cut down from its original two-metre length to just under five inches — was set to automatic. And because it was a weapon of last resort, it carried five millilitres of fentanyl instead of three. The assassin’s eyes registered a momentary shock as the drug hit his system.

But he didn’t break stride. He swatted the jabstick out of Kennedy’s hand and at the same time punched her hard in the stomach.

She didn’t see the punch coming, so she had no chance of leaning into it and lessening the impact. She doubled up, the breath leaving her in a huffing bark of agony. The follow-up blow to the back of her head made her crash down onto her knees, her sight strobing black and white.

Fentanyl was a relatively recent addition to the line-up of commercially available sedatives, a synthetic ethyl compound discovered in the 1960s and at first used almost exclusively for emergency pain relief. Its spectacularly quick action made it perfect for use by paramedics on burn and trauma victims, and that instant knock-out effect was one reason why Diema had chosen it. The other was a chemical oddity that the drug’s inventor had noted enthusiastically at the time: even long-term drug addicts whose habit had made them too tolerant of opioids to be treated with morphine would respond to fentanyl.

But long-term users of kelalit seemed to be able to shrug it off with impunity. The Messenger was on top of Kennedy now, rolling her onto her stomach and twisting her arms behind her. He was much stronger than her and trained in immobilising techniques. He held both of her hands in one of his, and his grip didn’t even seem particularly tight, but she couldn’t move an inch without searing agony shooting up her arms.

She screamed for help, but he ignored her. There were enough screams echoing around the building that one more wouldn’t even be noticed. With his free hand, he took a plastic gardening tie from somewhere she couldn’t see and fastened it around her wrists, pulling it tight.

Then he hauled her to her feet, pressing her hard against the white-tiled wall. He drew a knife — a sica — and waved it in front of her eyes.

‘You see this?’ he muttered in her ear. ‘Just nod.’

Kennedy nodded.

‘The blade is poisoned. If I cut you with this knife, you’ll die. You understand?’

She nodded again.

‘At the end of the corridor, there is a door. Beyond the door, a small parking area. We will walk across that space to the van that’s parked there and you will climb into the back of the van. Do this without a word, without a sound, and without trying to run. Otherwise I’ll kill you. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ Kennedy said.

With a hand on her shoulder, he turned her and launched her.

When Diema clambered to her feet again, she found that she was deaf.

Two men were running towards her down the hill, but dirt and leaves were still raining down from the explosion and the air was thicker than soup, so they hadn’t seen her until she stood up directly in front of them. She let the first man run into her, ducked under him and threw him high and hard. But doing that laid her open to the second man’s attack, a vicious combination of kicks and punches that sent her staggering backwards on the treacherous ground until she fell, fetching up with a jarring impact against the bole of a tree.

The Messenger brought his rifle up to chest height, his free hand steadying the breech. His gaze met Diema’s.

‘Aikh kadal,’ Diema murmured, staring deep and pleadingly into those dark eyes. Older brother.

The man’s resolution faltered, for a heartbeat. Diema fired twice, which emptied the handgun’s clip. One shot went wide, the other hit the man’s right hand, shattering the rifle’s stock and blowing off two of his fingers.

He was drawing a sica from his belt, left-handed, when Diema rushed on him, leaving the ground in a desperate leap to kick him in the chest. He went down hard and took a second longer than she did to struggle upright again. By that time she’d snatched up his rifle — which was still just about serviceable as a club. Her wild swipe slammed into the underside of his jaw and the shuddering impact knocked him out cold.

Her hearing was starting to return now, but her whole body throbbed with pain — and against that dull background ache, every movement caused flares of bright, localised agony from her left side. Probably she’d cracked a rib when she’d fallen after the grenade went off.

But she had her prisoner. If the others had survived, this could still count as a success. Diema looked around for something to tie her attacker’s hands with. His belt would probably do. She knelt down and unfastened it, rolling the man onto his side so she could drag it free.

But as she bundled his wrists together, he stirred under her hands and opened his eyes. ‘Dekai?’ he mumbled. Alive? You’re taking me alive?

‘To question you,’ Diema told him, though she shied away from explaining what that might mean. ‘We want to know about Ber Lusim and about the work you’ve done for him.’

The man grimaced. The muscles of his jaw contorted and his pale face flushed suddenly red.

Diema didn’t realise what he was doing until it was too late to stop him. She wrestled briefly with his jaws, but even as she forced his mouth open, a shudder ran through him. He stiffened, eyes wide, and all his muscles locked in a body-wide rictus.

The idea of a suicide capsule — for one of the People — was as obscene to her as the idea of the People killing their own. Costly in the sight of the Lord is the blood of his servants. Their lives were precious because there were few enough of them to be counted. But Ber Lusim had taught them new ways of thinking.

Grim-faced, fighting back tears, Diema used her thumb and forefinger to force the dead man’s eyelids closed over his bulging eyes.

As she did so, something cold and hard touched the back of her neck.

‘Akhot ha’aktana,’ Hifela said softly, raising the Sig Sauer so that the tip of its barrel touched her cheek. ‘Little sister.’

Kennedy walked in front of the Messenger, but when they got to the end of the corridor he reached past her to push the door open. Bright sunlight flooded in, making her blink and squint.

‘There,’ the man said, not pointing but pushing her where he wanted her to go. There was a red van, parked about twenty feet away. On its side, in black script printed to look like a military stencil, were the words ‘High Energy Haulage’, along with the dolmen logo.

Kennedy stumbled towards it, dragging her steps in the vain hope that someone might come around the corner of the building and see what was happening.

Nobody did. They reached the van and her captor threw open the back doors. ‘Inside,’ he ordered. Kennedy stared at him. His voice had definitely been slurred and there was an asymmetric lean to his stance.

She backed away a few steps. The Messenger lunged for her and caught her by the arm, but almost fell over in the process. He blinked rapidly a few times, as though to clear his vision.

‘Inside,’ he said again, pulling her towards the van. He held the sica close to Kennedy’s throat and though he was careful not to cut her, she was terrified: his hand didn’t look that steady.

She climbed into the van, with great difficulty because of her bound hands, and swung herself around so she sat facing outward.

As the Messenger pushed the doors to, Kennedy threw her upper body flat, bracing herself against the floor of the van, and kicked the doors into his face. The knife flew from his hand, bouncing end over end across the ground, and he stumbled backward, going down on one knee.

Kennedy squirmed and rolled out of the van, aiming to hit the ground running. But the assassin was already scrambling to his feet again, blocking the only way out of the narrow cul-de-sac. She feinted left, then when he took a step towards her she sprinted past him on the right. But even doped and confused he was faster than her. He swivelled and turned, tripping her.

Kennedy rolled as she landed, and managed to get her feet back under her. The Messenger moved around her, putting himself between her and the exit again. Blood was brimming behind his clenched teeth and his eyes were glazing over, but the look on his face was one of murderous rage. He fumbled inside his jacket and came out with two slender wooden rods like the handles of a tiny skipping rope. A moment later, as it caught the light, Kennedy registered the almost invisible wire suspended between them.

The man advanced on her and Kennedy retreated before him. But a handful of baby steps left her with the wall pressing against her shoulders. She looked left, then right: she had nowhere to go. As the Messenger raised his strangling cord, she bowed her head and turned her back on him.

He dropped the cord into place around her neck and she stepped back into his embrace as though welcoming her death.

The sica, which she’d snatched up from the ground when she’d fallen, was clutched tightly between her bound hands. The assassin walked onto its blade, which sank hilt-deep into his stomach. Kennedy twisted, moving her hands up, down, across. Seppuku by proxy.

The dying man made a choking sound of pain and protest. She heard the muted impact as he fell to his knees, and only then turned to look. He was folded around the obscene wound, probably already dead, although his staring eyes seemed troubled by some unfathomable realisation. Kennedy told herself that the fentalyn must have taken away most of the pain. The strangling cord remained around her neck, its wooden grips dangling like the loose ends of a bow tie, as she addressed herself to the problem of freeing her hands with a poisoned blade.

Diema dropped her hands to her sides and waited. She recognised Hifela’s voice, of course: recognised it twice over, from the tapes she’d studied in Ginat’Dania and from the shouted command she’d heard when she sang her blessing from the top of the fig tree that she should be killed, no matter who she was or where she came from.

So she knew what was about to happen, apart from the precise details. The gun was pressed into the hollow at the base of her skull, perfectly positioned for an execution shot.

‘I have a question,’ she said.

‘So do I,’ Hifela told her, his voice relaxed, almost casual. ‘Two questions, in fact. How did you find us and who else knows? Obviously we’ll ask the rhaka the same things, at greater length and with more emphatic punctuation. But since we have this moment, little sister, answer me truly. Are the four of you alone here or will I have to kill again tomorrow?’

‘We’re alone.’

Hifela made a half-swallowed sound like a snort or a chuckle. ‘Fascinating. Perhaps we should have let you come, then, and visit us at home. It might have been cheaper, in terms of lives lost.’

Diema stiffened. ‘I killed no one,’ she blurted.

‘Not you. But your burly friend killed at least one of the men I sent against him and maimed another. And the grenade that failed to kill you took down one of ours. So. Now I’ve got half an answer. The other half, please. How did you find us?’

‘The frontispiece of Toller’s book. It showed this hill. We guessed the rest.’

‘A prodigious guess. But yes, I see. There is a trail of logic there and we should not have placed ourselves so squarely at the end of it. Elegantly done, sister. Your question, now, before I fertilise this soil with your bone and blood and brains.’

‘You’d do that?’ It sounded weak, childish even, like a plea for mercy. But it wasn’t, it was a plea for the world to make sense and be as it was meant to be. But then, perhaps only a child would expect that.

‘Didn’t this soldier do as much, when he killed himself?’ Hifela asked her. ‘Didn’t his life, his death, weigh as much as yours?’ Diema saw the flaw in that reasoning, but with her mind in turmoil, she couldn’t articulate it. Hifela didn’t seem to need an answer. ‘In growing older,’ he said, as though he’d read her mind, ‘I’ve become impatient of excess baggage. The sacred, the solemn, the binding, these things are terrible weights. I travel lighter now. So yes, I’ll kill you without a thought. I’m a killer, after all. Why set limits to such a clean and simple thing? And now, this is your last chance to ask your question.’

‘I withdraw my question,’ she murmured.

‘Really?’ For the first time there was something like interest in the man’s voice. ‘Then tell me, little girl, just for the sake of curiosity, what would it have been?’

‘It would have been this. Why did you follow him? Why did you go with Ber Lusim when he spat on his duty and forsook his people? Did you really think his conscience outweighed the whole of Ginat’Dania? But I think you already answered me. If nothing is sacred, what would stop you from doing those things?’

‘Ah, but I didn’t say that nothing was sacred.’ Hifela tapped her lightly on the nape of the neck with the barrel of the gun, as if he was a teacher rebuking a thoughtless child. ‘Did I?’

She turned her head, very slowly. She knew this might provoke him to shoot her, but since he was going to shoot her anyway she didn’t feel as though she had very much to lose — and she wanted, perhaps because of that contemptuous tone, that contemptuous tap, to stare him down as she died. ‘Then that can be my question,’ she said, trying to find the same tone, trying to spit at least a little of his contempt back in his face.

He tilted his head a little to one side, but the gun — now pointing at her throat — didn’t waver by so much as a millimetre. He frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘What’s sacred to you, Hifela?’

‘Ah.’ He smiled — a sad, bleak smile, a little twisted at the corner. ‘I thought that was obvious. He is, of course.’

The moment lengthened. Diema closed her mouth, which had fallen open. Hifela laughed out loud — and though when he smiled he was mocking himself, now he was mocking her. ‘Oh, child, if you’d lived longer, you’d have had a lot to learn. But perhaps God lets us die when he thinks we’ve reached the end of our learning. When our minds close, and all we can do is live, the way animals and vegetables do. Shut your eyes.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘If you close your eyes, it will be easier.’

‘Then you close yours,’ Leo Tillman suggested.

The boom of a single gunshot, from very close, deafened Diema all over again.

56

If Tillman had been shooting with his right hand — if his right hand had still been functioning — he would have tried for the kill shot, even though Diema and the cadaverous killer were so close together that they were practically touching.

He’d approached the two of them from down the slope, from the direction of the hotel. He had the GPS signal to go on — Diema had kept the pellet in her pocket when she gave him the tracker — but even without that, the shredded foliage, bullet-torn bark and spilled blood made a trail that an idiot could have followed. Twice he’d encountered seriously wounded Messengers, crippled by leg shots but still in the fight, and twice he’d had to exchange fire with them, leaving them dead behind him.

Once he was close enough, he tracked Diema by the sound of her voice, and the other voice that was speaking to her. Tillman had learned stealth in the jungles of three continents, and besides, Diema and the pale man were thoroughly engrossed in their conversation. They didn’t hear his approach.

But he was carrying — in his left hand — a gun he’d never fired. Only a lunatic would have relied on a weapon like that when friend and foe were standing cheek by jowl. So he got in as close as he could without alerting the skull-faced man to his presence, fired into the air and threw himself forward in a headlong charge.

The gunshot did what it was meant to do. It told the assassin there was a clear and present danger, shifting his attention from the girl to Tillman.

But there were still ten feet of ground to cover. Enhanced by kelalit, Hifela brought his gun around and fired before Tillman had travelled half that distance.

Enhanced by kelalit, Diema slammed the heel of her hand into the assassin’s wrist, pushing the gun even further in the direction in which it was already moving. The shot went wide.

Then Tillman hit Hifela like a tank.

But in the split-second before that impact, Hifela had assessed the changed situation and, it seemed, made a decision. He had two enemies now, instead of one. Order of preference had become an issue.

He dipped and pivoted, and though Diema saw the kick coming she couldn’t do much more than roll with it. The heel of Hifela’s foot struck her in the side of the head, slamming her backward and down the slope in an uncontrolled sprawl.

There was a price to pay. Hifela was off-balance when Tillman hit him and had to take the big man’s attack head-on. Tillman’s left hand swept down, clubbing the gun loose from Hifela’s grip and he followed up with a scything blow to Hifela’s stomach. The Messenger simply endured it, noticing that his opponent’s fist had slowed in the instant before impact, suggesting some sort of injury to his right arm. With Tillman now well within his reach, he hit back hard and fast.

A storm of kicks, punches and jabs rode down Tillman’s guard in an instant and he staggered back, dropping his own gun and taking damage even as he blocked. Hifela followed him, keeping up the pressure. Tillman knew at once that he was outclassed. He wasn’t going to win this fight, and barring outside factors he wouldn’t even be able to draw it out all that long. One of those outside factors was stirring on the ground behind Hifela. Tillman tried to move round in the opposite direction, forcing the assassin to turn his back on Diema, but it was all he could do to stay on his feet.

The girl made her move, but Hifela could see her out of the corner of his eye. He leaped over her dive, turned as he came down and launched a kick at Tillman’s midriff, blindsiding Tillman and forcing him to turn and take the kick on the thigh as the only possible defence. There was no opening, no hole in the terrifying virtuosity of his violence.

Diema tried again. Her movements were sluggish — the blow to the head had left her hurt and dazed — but she struggled up onto hands and knees and gathered herself for another lunge.

Without seeming even to look at her, Hifela scraped dust and gravel into her face with a sweep of his heel, then wheeled on the spot to kick her in the exact same spot, on the side of the head. As she fell, he shifted his balance and did the same thing again. This time Diema raised her hands in a block, but too slowly. Hifela’s booted foot went through her guard without slowing and slammed into her temple.

It was a taunt, as much as anything, a demonstration of his absolute power over the two of them. But there was an opening this time, the last kick obliging the assassin to angle his body a little away from Tillman. Tillman launched himself into the gap, fists flailing, but Hifela was gone — falling out of reach, rolling, coming up with Tillman’s gun in his hand. He had anticipated the move, probably invited it. He was ahead of them all the way.

Staring down the barrel of the Beretta, Tillman — who counted his shots obsessively — knew that this was the best chance he was going to get. Probably the only chance. He walked into Hifela’s attack as the slide of the empty gun jammed open with a flat thud, and wrapped the other man in a tight bear-hug.

It was scarcely a tactic. He was able to trap the assassin’s right arm against his body, but his left arm was free. He was only hoping to hold the man more or less immobile while the girl got her act together and attacked him from behind.

Hifela responded by hammer-punching him in the head with jarring, agonising force. Tillman saw stars — then the darkness between the stars. He leaned in close, burying his face in the assassin’s shoulder, forcing him to bring his arm down at an oblique angle and so taking some of the force out of the second punch, and the third.

There was no fourth. Trying to break Tillman’s hold, Hifela’s groping, testing fingers had found the hilt of the sica that was still embedded in Tillman’s shoulder. He pulled it out and drove it in again, higher and at a more oblique angle.

The shock of agony, and the near severing of his trapezius muscle, caused Tillman to release his hold. Leaning away from him, Hifela brought the knife up in a diagonal slash across the other man’s chest. Then he drew it up and back for a final thrust into Tillman’s heart.

Taking the risk that Tillman had shrunk from, Diema shot the assassin in the head. The bullet went obliquely through Hifela’s skull, entering via the left occipital lobe and exiting through the orbit of his left eye.

Hifela’s body — that exquisite instrument — rebelled against him. He froze with the knife still in the air, though his hand trembled violently as though he were still trying hard to bring it down. Then the spasm passed and he lunged.

Tillman caught Hifela’s wrist in mid-air and turned him, slowly, inexorably, so that they were both sideways on to Diema. He could see her on her knees, her face stupid with concussion, her eyes glazed, the gun — Hifela’s own Sig Sauer Pro 2022 — held before her like an offering at an altar nobody else could see. The head shot must have been a one-in-a-million chance, but this was a gift and she took it.

In fact, since the gun had eleven bullets left in its magazine, she took it eleven times.

Hifela crashed down onto his knees in the dirt, then fell full-length. Tillman fell beside him, unable to hold himself upright any more. He ended up staring into Hifela’s slack, haunted face.

‘Bilo b’eyet ha yehuani,’ Hifela wheezed. ‘Siruta muot dil kasyeh shoh.’

The words had a liquid undertow, but they were distinct, forced out of him along with the last of his spirit.

57

Kennedy found them first — following the same trail that Tillman had followed — but she knew she couldn’t be far ahead of the pack. The local police — it was the Çevik kuvvet, the anti-terrorist squad — had gone directly to the hotel, because dozens of witnesses had seen shots fired there and there were bodies, one lying face down next to the outdoor pool and the other in the staff car park. But shots and explosions had been heard in the parkland on Gellert Hill, too, so that would be their next stop.

Tillman was unconscious and almost certainly dying. The ground around him was so saturated with his blood that Kennedy’s shoes sank into it. Blood was still welling from deep wounds in his shoulder and across his chest — but weakly and fitfully, like the last knockings coaxed from an almost empty barrel.

The man lying next to him was dead. A dozen bullet wounds, each a black disc ringed with red-brown crust, stood out like withered flowers on his dead white skin.

Then there was another man, also dead, but with no wounds on him apart from a damaged hand — and Diema, trying to stand and failing. The front of the girl’s shirt was drenched with vomit and her bloodshot eyes seemed unable to focus.

Kennedy supported her weight and helped her into a sitting position, her back to a tree. ‘You’re concussed,’ she said. ‘Don’t try to move.’ Kennedy’s gaze kept sliding back to Tillman, his ashen face and the red ruin of his shirt. She had to do something. It was probably too late, but she had to try.

She took out her phone and started to dial the emergency number. If Hungary was in the EU, it ought to be 112. If not she’d try the operator and ask to be put through.

Diema’s hand locked on Kennedy’s wrist and dragged her hand down. ‘Channel zero,’ she slurred.

‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ Kennedy said, pulling her hand free. ‘Try to stay awake.’

‘Channel zero!’ The girl fumbled with the walkie-talkie and unhooked it from her belt on the third try. But then she just stared at it, unable to see the keys clearly enough to operate them.

Kennedy took the walkie-talkie from Diema and reset it. ‘What’s channel zero?’ she asked.

‘Tell them … where we are.’ The girl’s hands were at her belt again. Kennedy opened the channel, heard the crackle of a live line.

‘Ayn? ’ It was a man’s voice, clipped and clear.

Kennedy’s scalp prickled. ‘We’re on Gellert Hill,’ she said.

A pause. ‘Who is this, please?’

‘Diema is here,’ Kennedy said. ‘Diema. Diema Beit Evrom.’

‘Pere echon!’ Diema cried, sounding like a drunkard. ‘Pere echon adir!’

‘I said—’

‘I hear her,’ the man said quickly. ‘On Gellert Hill. North side or south?’

‘North. Just above the Gellert Hotel.’

‘Keep the channel open. We will come.’

Kennedy lowered the walkie-talkie and stared at Diema — or rather, at what Diema was holding in the palm of her hand. A small hypodermic, of the kind that diabetics use to dose themselves with insulin, and a snap-in ampoule of clear liquid. They fell into the dirt as the girl’s hand swayed.

‘Dal le beho’ota,’ Diema said.

Kennedy took the needle, waved it in the girl’s face. ‘Diema, what do you want me to do with this?’ she yelled. ‘In English! I speak English!’

The girl’s eyes swam briefly into focus.

‘Put it in his heart,’ she said.

58

There was a time of pain, and of regrouping, but it was a short time. There was a great deal still to be done.

Nahir’s team of local Elohim, loyal to the People and the oath they’d sworn, took Tillman off Gellert Hill in broad daylight, in the hollow interior of a gurney rigged to look like an ice cream cart. Diema and Kennedy walked beside them, their battered faces hidden behind masks in the likeness of Punchinello, the comical child-murderer and wife-beater from the Italian commedia dell’arte. The bodies of the Elohim who’d died on the hill were also removed, by some other means into which Diema and Kennedy were in no condition to enquire.

In the nearest safe house, behind the boarded-up frontage of a former florist’s shop on Stollár Béla Street, Diema was examined by Elohim medics. Her concussion was mild, and already passing, but she had two cracked ribs, which they bound up, and a broken finger that she didn’t even remember acquiring. She impatiently refused the pain relieving drugs offered to her, and — as soon as she could think straight — asked after the health of her team.

The prisoners, Nahir told her, were in safe keeping. The Englishman would probably die, but the others were in relatively sound condition and ready to be questioned at her convenience.

Diema stood on tip-toe to bring her face as close to Nahir’s as possible, and told him that it would be inconvenient for the Englishman to die. So inconvenient, in fact, that if it happened she would see that Nahir spent the next few years in the main cloaca of Ginat’Dania, cleaning out sewage conduits with his tongue.

‘I am still Kuutma’s emissary,’ she reminded him, with ferocious calm. ‘And as long as I’m here in your city, you answer to me.’

Doctors were summoned and assigned. Leo Tillman’s condition was looked to and addressed.

Next, Diema had them find Ben Rush and bring him. He was in Uzsoci Hospital, serving as a sewing sampler for a nurse with well-muscled arms, several yards of suture and a robust work ethic. Thoroughly worked over by fists, boots and many ad hoc implements, the boy was unrecognisable. He had already had seventy-three stitches put into various wounds in his face, scalp, shoulder and side. The nurse was optimistic about the sight in his left eye, but only in the long term. For now it was swollen shut and ringed with thirty-five of those stitches.

When two strange men turned up at Rush’s bedside and told him that Diema had sent them, Rush assumed they were there to kill him and refused point-blank to go with them, struggling to maintain control of his bladder. ‘She says,’ Shraga added, delivering Diema’s message with scrupulous care, ‘that nobody besides you has ever complained about her breasts, and that a little boy who likes big breasts probably has an unhealthy sexual fixation on his mother.’ Rush changed his mind and agreed to accompany them, although he was still scared of having his throat cut right up to the moment when he saw her.

He told Diema what he’d done, and how he’d survived. The paint bomb had masked his face, or rather it had given his face at least a passing resemblance to the faces of the two dozen other people who were within its effective radius when it went off. And since most of those people were already piling onto him, each of them eager to be the first to push his teeth down his throat, the confusion was compounded. The Messenger sent to kill him, finding himself on the fringes of a spreading mêlée, and with the sound of police sirens already tainting the summer breeze, had quietly withdrawn.

Rush also remembered to thank Diema for the warning she’d given him when the knife-man first appeared. She told him she resented the bullets she’d had to use up, and that on future occasions she wouldn’t waste a second of her precious time on his survival. Privately, she was both surprised and (reluctantly) impressed that the boy had come out of the battle alive — and that he’d done it using the paint bomb she’d offered him as a mark of contempt. She remembered one of her teachers telling her, after she’d fluked a perfect score in a test, that it was better to be lucky than to be good. The boy was probably too stupid to realise that he’d just used up a lifetime’s luck in one go.

By this time, Diema had extorted further concessions from Nahir’s people. Kennedy had been moved to a cell with a bed in it, and Tillman to a thoroughly disinfected room in which a full trauma suite had been painstakingly assembled.

Diema demanded a report and the doctors obediently provided one. The Adamite, they told her, had lost more than two litres of blood — close to the maximum that a human body can shed without shutting down for good. The anti-toxin that Diema had had Kennedy give him had probably prevented, by a hair’s breadth or so, his slipping into clinical shock, and allowed him to survive long enough to be given a transfusion, but his wounds were terrible. The damage to his right arm, particularly, was likely to be irreversible, and they wouldn’t be able to tell whether there’d been any brain damage until he recovered consciousness — for which the doctors could offer no realistic estimate.

She went to see him. A doctor was examining Tillman’s pupillary responses, but he stepped back from the bed when Diema entered the room and waited with his arms at his sides.

‘Go outside,’ Diema told him. ‘Stay there until I call you.’

The doctor inclined his head and retreated.

She went to the bed and looked down at Tillman. He looked old and weak, and more than a little ugly, his skin mottled red and white with broken blood vessels, his cheeks sunken. Tubes for fluid and wiring for diagnostics decorated his flesh or tunnelled into it. A faint smell of sweat and disinfectant rose from him: the smell of bad news delivered in well-lit rooms.

Diema wrestled with the riddle, but she couldn’t solve it without a clue of some kind, and everybody who could have given her the clue was dead. Her mother, Rebecca, who had taken her own life. Kuutma-that-was, who in the end died because he grieved for Rebecca too much. And her father — the father she remembered, lifting her and carrying her away (as she cried and kicked) from her half-finished drawing. The father who lived mostly in the scorched earth between the thickets of her memory, and who had torched most of that ground himself.

Are you him?

The red-and-white thing on the bed, trailing strings and wires like a marionette, couldn’t tell her. She thought of Punchinello. No matter what the question might be, Punchinello’s only answer was to grab his stick, which he cradled like a child in his two folded arms, and commit another murder. And she thought of Wile E. Coyote, whose implacable enmity for the Roadrunner was the core of his being.

She had wanted Tillman to be like that: a cartoon creation, simple and predictable and easy to hate. That was how she had always seen him, even before she knew what cartoons were. She could still see him that way, with only a little effort.

But here was someone else, who had come to her when she needed him instead of trying to save the rhaka who was his friend and ally, who had faced down Hifela, the Face of the Skull, with his arm all but useless, and let his chest be sliced like pork rind while he did what he could to give her a clear shot.

Hifela’s words echoed in her head. Y’tuh gemae le. Net ya neiu.

One of the People had tried to kill her. And the father of her flesh had saved her. She had to acknowledge that paradox, and deal with it.

Or become a cartoon character herself.

It was time to stop putting off the inevitable. She went to see Kennedy — who went off like a bomb as soon as the door was opened.

‘Where’s Leo? What have you done to him?’ The woman took a step towards Diema, not in the least deterred by the two Elohim who stood, stoical and watchful, to either side of her. ‘If he’s dead—’

‘He’s alive,’ Diema said. ‘But only just. Sit down, Heather. Please.’

Kennedy obeyed — perhaps because hearing about Tillman’s condition had taken some of the strength from her, or perhaps because she’d registered that Diema had just used her Christian name and knew from this that something significant had changed.

Diema sent the Messengers away with a curt gesture and closed the door behind them.

‘Tell me,’ Kennedy said, her voice tight. ‘Tell me how he is.’

Diema recapped the blood loss, the chest and shoulder wounds, the continuing coma. It was a concise, full and factual summary. Her teachers would have been proud of her.

‘But he’ll recover,’ Kennedy said, not quite asking, still less pleading. ‘This is Leo. He’s going to get back up again.’

‘They think so,’ Diema said. ‘Everything except the shoulder. They say the damage to the muscle was very severe. They did what they could to knit it back together again, but they can’t promise.’

‘And who are they, Diema?’ Kennedy demanded savagely. ‘The doctors you trusted his life to? This place isn’t a hospital. It’s a prison. So where in God’s name do you source your doctors from?’

‘It’s not a prison,’ Diema said. ‘It’s just a safe house. The doctors are on staff here, but they’re in touch with other doctors in Ginat’Dania. They’ve spoken to the most skilful of our healers, taken advice. And those other doctors are on their way here, now. I asked for them to be sent and they’re coming.’ This wasn’t a boast: it was just a statement of fact. Kuutma had promised her all the support she needed, without question. She had told him she needed this.

‘I want to see him,’ Kennedy said.

‘He’s unconscious. He won’t know you’re there.’

‘I want to see him.’

Diema nodded. ‘All right.’

‘And Rush. What happened to Rush? I want to see both of them.’

‘Yes,’ Diema said. ‘I promise. But I’ve got something else to ask you first. The mission has reached—’

‘Oh my god,’ Kennedy raged. ‘Don’t. Don’t even talk about that. We did what we could. We did everything we possibly could, but we were outclassed. We should have known that before we went in. It was not our fault that the mission was a fiasco!’

‘No.’

‘If it had been anyone but Leo, I would have known it was madness.’ Kennedy was speaking to herself now, rather than to Diema. She shook her head in dismayed wonder. ‘I thought he was some kind of bloody Superman. I thought he couldn’t fail. And so I let him go up against those … those monsters, and I went up against them myself. As if we had a chance. But we didn’t. We failed because we had to fail, Diema.’

‘We didn’t fail.’

‘Because nobody could take on a whole—’

‘Heather, we didn’t fail.’

Finally, Kennedy wound down, assimilating what she was being told. ‘What?’ she muttered, confused. ‘What are you saying? They all died. Or else escaped. We got nothing.’

‘We got everything we needed. I know where Ber Lusim is. And we’re going in. We’re just waiting for the equipment. That’s why I came here. To ask you if you want to come. I think you’ve earned that right. And I think …’ She hesitated. It was hard to frame the words, around the bulky, ugly concepts that they covered. ‘I think you’ll be safer if you stick with me than if I leave you here.’

Kennedy’s unwavering stare was full of surprise and mistrust. Perhaps there was an accusation there, too.

‘I’m not asking you to kill anyone,’ Diema said. ‘You already told me that wasn’t something you felt you could do.’ She’d seen the police reports from the Gellert Hotel by this time and knew what Kennedy had done with a sica to a trained assassin, but she felt that might be a conversation best left for another time. ‘For your insights. I need you as a detective.’

Kennedy was implacable — and bitter. ‘To detect what? Something you say you’ve already found? Do you think I just fell out of a tree, girl? Do you think I don’t know how you spoon-fed us all the way down the line? You let Leo get a fix on your bike so he’d follow you to that factory. You let us find Toller’s book for ourselves and then went ahead and told us what was in it. You only needed Leo to cut throats — and you only needed me to bring in Leo. Which, God forgive me, I did. But I’m all done, now. You go on and play your games.’

‘But it was you that brought us here,’ Diema said. ‘You and the boy. You put together all the things you knew and made sense out of them. Gave me a direction. I want you to be with me when I go into Ber Lusim’s house, in case that’s needed again. Whatever’s in there, whatever he’s still got planned, it might help me if I can see it through your eyes.’

‘That’s a pity. They’re staying right here, along with the rest of me. Along with Leo.’

Diema’s impatience made her reckless. She slapped Kennedy hard across the face.

Kennedy’s response, before she’d even registered the pain of the blow, was to slam her fist into Diema’s jaw. Diema took the blow without a sound, without even wincing.

‘Your pain,’ Diema said, feeling the thin trickle of blood running down from the corner of her mouth, ‘and my pain. Are they the same?’

Kennedy had stepped back, arms raised, readying herself for a fight. It didn’t seem to bother her that it was likely to be a very short fight. But the question troubled her. She dropped her hands again, nonplussed. Then after a moment she shrugged it off, making a gesture of disgust and dismissal.

‘Please get out of here,’ she told Diema. ‘Let me see Leo, or get out. I’ve got nothing for you.’

‘Answer the question. Your pain—’

‘How do I know if they’re the same?’ Kennedy yelled. ‘I’m not inside your mind, am I? I don’t know what you feel. Or if you feel. I don’t know anything about you except your name, and even that’s kind of a grey area.’

‘But we’re all the same,’ Diema said. ‘Under the skin. That’s what you believe, isn’t it?’

Kennedy stared at her, angry and incredulous. ‘Never mind what I believe. It’s not what you believe. You believe in a separate creation — your people and the rest of the world. The chosen ones and the dregs at the bottom of the barrel.’

‘So which of us should care the most about a million dead?’ Diema asked.

She didn’t expect an answer, but she was pleased when the woman reacted — a succession of emotions appearing briefly in her face, like a slide show. At home in Ginat’Dania, Diema was used to saying what she thought, and even more used to refusing to do so. But in the Adamite world, talking was like fighting. You said what would give you advantage.

‘You don’t need me,’ Kennedy said. ‘You’ve got everything you need.’ But there was no conviction in her voice, and a moment later she spoke again. ‘Did you manage to take one of Ber Lusim’s people alive, after all? Have you been interrogating him all this time?’

Diema was certain that she’d won, but she didn’t let that awareness show in her face or her tone.

‘There’ll be a meeting,’ she told Kennedy, ‘in half an hour’s time. By then, the equipment I’ve asked for will have arrived and we’ll be ready to go in. I’d like you to be there. You can make a final decision when you’ve heard me out.’

She left, nodding to the Elohim to lock the door behind her. There was no need to talk any more.

Except to Nahir, who was still uncertain about what she was asking him to do and would need to be argued with. And to the boy, who would just have to do as he was told.

The boy.

Ronald Stephen Pinkus, risen from the grave yet again to haunt and torment her.

‘We set up an ambush, but it didn’t work. In fact, we got ambushed ourselves.’

Diema’s voice rang out, almost too loud in the small, crowded room. Along with Nahir, there were more than forty Messengers, many of whom were recently arrived. They sat in silence on folding chairs, flimsy things of stainless steel and black plastic, dressed in the hand-woven linen of their home. They were vectors of terrible violence, eerily suspended. Birds of prey, somehow brought to earth and persuaded to pose for a group photograph.

In their midst sat Kennedy and Rush, ringed by empty seats. Nobody wanted to sit next to the rhaka, the wolf-woman, and take the taint of her proximity.

Diema stopped, alarmed, and cleared her throat. There had been a shrill, rising note to her voice. She sounded like an idiot. Worse, she sounded like a child. The palms of her hands were hot and moist.

For all the things that she had done, and had had done to her, over the last three years, she had never been called on to speak in public. She feared now that it might lie outside her skill set.

She tried again. ‘The idea was to lure one of Ber Lusim’s Messengers into trying to capture Heather Kennedy — as they’d already tried to do in England — by making it appear that we might know where their base was.’ She looked from one grave face to another. ‘That part worked. Except they didn’t just come for Heather Kennedy, they came for all of us. And they didn’t send one Messenger. They sent many.’

‘They only sent one after me,’ Rush said. ‘Turned out to be a mistake.’ Given the state of his face, and the fact that his muffled, distorted voice was coming out of one side of a hideously swollen jaw, it could only have been intended as a joke. Forty Elohim, with no sense of humour when it came to their holy calling, stared at him in grim silence.

‘There were more than a dozen in all,’ Diema said, hastily pulling their attention back to her. ‘We can’t say for sure how many, because they waited until we were separated and attacked us in smaller groups. The last to fall was Hifela, who all of you know, or at least have heard of.’

The room was suddenly sibilant with a dozen whispered conversations. Diema waited them out. She’d used that phrasing deliberately and she wanted her countrymen to reflect for a moment on what it meant — that twelve Elohim had been sent against three Adamites, two of whom were sitting in front of them, still breathing.

‘We fought Hifela, on the slope of Gellert Hill,’ she said. ‘By we, I mean myself and … and Leo Tillman, known to the People because he was once …’ Her throat was dry and she had to clear it again. ‘Known to the People in other times, and other contexts. Hifela fought hard and might have won. Some of you have seen his body, so you know. It took a dozen bullets to kill him.

‘And as he lay on the ground, beside us, he spoke these words. “Bilo b’eyet ha yehuani. Siruta muot dil kasyeh shoh.”’

More murmurs around the room. Most of the Messengers looked puzzled or disconcerted. Nahir frowned. ‘He cannot have said that,’ he told Diema.

‘I was ten feet away from him, brother. I tell you what I heard.’

‘Then he meant the teacher. The apostate, Shekolni. The ground where he walks.’

‘That’s not what he said.’

‘Some of us,’ Kennedy said, cutting in loudly, ‘are Aramaically challenged. If there’s any point in our being here, someone’s going to have to translate.’

Nahir glanced at her once, coldly appraising her, then turned back to Diema. ‘Is there?’ he asked. ‘Any point in their being here? Many of us have wondered.’

Diema answered Kennedy’s question, ignoring Nahir’s. ‘Hifela said, “Take me to my Summoner. Let me die on holy ground.”’

‘And why is that significant?’ Kennedy demanded.

‘Because the only holy ground is Ginat’Dania,’ Diema said.

There was a sense, rather than a sound, of the assembled Elohim drawing in their breath, of the tension in the air ratcheting itself up a notch more, and then maybe another notch on top of that. Diema met Kennedy’s gaze. The boy would be clueless, but the rhaka would know how thin this tightrope they were walking was — as thin as the edge of a blade. You didn’t talk to the children of Adam about Ginat’Dania. Out of all the things you didn’t do, it was perhaps the one you didn’t do the most. In a society that lived at the cusp of the catastrophe curve, the instinct for self-preservation ran very deep, and subsumed all other instincts.

‘In spite of the latitude granted to you,’ murmured Nahir softly, ‘you will be careful what you say.’

Diema looked him in the eye, without flinching. This was a moment that had to be walked through, the way you walk over fire. ‘The woman, Heather Kennedy,’ she said, ‘and the man, Benjamin Rush, already know that Ginat’Dania exists. Moreover, they know that it used to exist here. It was necessary to tell them these things in order to follow Ber Lusim’s trail as far as we have — which you, Nahir, for all your resources, weren’t able to do.’

‘I have a knife,’ a woman in one of the rear ranks of the Messengers called out. ‘And a conscience. Tell me why I shouldn’t exercise them both.’

The woman was sitting directly behind Kennedy. Kennedy didn’t look round: she knew this was Diema’s play, and she had better sense than to get in the way of it.

‘Exercise your brain, sister,’ Diema said coldly. ‘That’s the part of you that you’re neglecting. The woman knew for years and Kuutma spared her. More. Kuutma sanctioned her involvement in this. She has Kuutma’s blessing — the first Adamite in a hundred lifetimes to be so blessed. All you have is a wish that things could be like they used to be in the old days. But the old days are dead. And if you cling to them now, you’ll die, too.’

It wasn’t — quite — a threat. It was hard to say what it was. The Messenger opened her mouth, but closed it again without speaking. Blood had rushed to her face, and she bowed her head to hide it, discomfited.

‘Ginat’Dania,’ Diema said, to the room at large, ‘the living and eternal Ginat’Dania, is far away from this place, and from Adamite eyes. But three hundred years ago, Ginat’Dania stood here. In the caves under Gellert Hill and Castle Hill, and under the river Danube itself. That’s where Hifela was asking to be taken. That’s where Ber Lusim has set up his house — in a maze of tunnels and chambers vast enough to house a million people. It’s the perfect hiding place, if you’re hiding from Adamites. But not if you’re hiding from us. We have maps of the city dating back to the time when it was alive and we can mount a search that will bring them into our hands.’

‘I thought your hands had to be empty.’ Ben Rush shrugged in mock-apology as the holy killers all turned to stare balefully at him again. ‘I mean, I thought that was the point. Human lives are expendable, but you can’t kill each other. And you don’t have Tillman to hide behind any more. So what, did you push through a rule-change? You’ve got a hunting licence now?’

Diema ignored the sarcastic inflection: the boy’s jibe was as good a set-up line as anything she could have scripted.

‘The Adamite mind,’ she said to the Elohim, smiling, inviting them to smile at Rush’s idiocy. ‘You see how little they can grasp, even when we put the answers in their hands? This is why we don’t have to be afraid of what they know. In the end, what they know always adds up to nothing.’

‘I know this much—’ Rush blurted, but Kennedy’s hard grip on his arm stopped him right there.

‘No hunting licence,’ Diema said, opening one of the boxes and reaching into it. ‘The rules — the rules that actually mean something — don’t change. But when a new situation arises, we apply the rules in different ways.’

She showed them the dart-rifle — the bigger, meaner brother of Kennedy’s Dan-inject — and how it worked. She told them that it would topple Ber Lusim’s Elohim without any risk of killing them. She omitted to mention the fact that the bullets that had slain Hifela had been fired by her, rather than Leo Tillman, that she’d already breached that final taboo.

Once they learned that, her life would be over.

59

Ber Lusim was grieving, alone in his room — a monastic cell carved into solid granite, without a window and with only a natural fissure in the rock for a door.

His Elohim absented themselves from his grief, recognising that it was not their property; not part of their leader’s public self at all, but an outpouring from his innermost soul.

Avra Shekolni showed less compunction. He came to the door of the cell and sat down there, with his back to the wall, tapping at the rock with his silver-ringed hand in a simple, repetitive rhythm.

After some little while, Ber Lusim came out to him.

‘Avra,’ he said, ‘I’m poor company right now. Please, take your music and your consolations somewhere else, for a while, and I’ll come to you when I can.’

Shekolni looked up at him from under lowered brows, stern and humourless. ‘Have I offered you consolation, Ber Lusim?’ he asked.

‘Blessed one, you have not. I assumed you came here—’

‘Because you’ve lost your friend and you find the loss hard to bear,’ Shekolni said. ‘Yes, of course. But it doesn’t follow, Ber Lusim, that I came to tell you how to bear that loss.’

Ber Lusim was puzzled and unnerved by this speech, and by the tone in which it was delivered. He didn’t know from which direction to approach it. ‘Hifela was not my friend,’ he said at last. ‘He was my servant, and the first among my Elohim. I relied on him in everything.’

‘He was your friend,’ Shekolni snapped. ‘Ber Lusim, God is not a lawyer or a politician. He knows the love you felt for Hifela, and he knows that his loss weakens you as a man, not just as a leader of men.’

The prophet’s voice rose, and he rose up with it, climbing to his feet to face Ber Lusim, with one hand raised as though he were preaching in a pulpit.

‘But to mourn him? To mourn him now? Are you mad, Ber Lusim? Has this loss turned your brain?’ He clamped his hands on Ber Lusim’s shoulders, stared with wide eyes into his.

Ber Lusim drew a deep breath. ‘Avra, I know my duty. Nothing that has happened today will stop me from completing—’

‘No! You misunderstand me!’ In his exasperation, Shekolni shook the Elohim Summoner as a mother shakes a child. ‘Think about what we’re doing, my dear friend, and what will come of it when we’re done. In ordinary times, to cry for a dead friend, a dead wife or husband, these things make sense. Even for someone who believes in the reality of heaven — you weep for the separation, and for how far away heaven is.’

The prophet’s eyes burned and Ber Lusim felt something within him take fire from that fire. ‘But now,’ Shekolni growled, ‘heaven is imminent. Heaven hangs just above our heads, like fruit on the lowest branch of a great tree. Do you cry, because Hifela has walked before you into the next room? Then how absurd your tears become! Hold faith now or Hifela will laugh you to shame when you meet next.’

Such was the force of the words that Ber Lusim saw, as though in life, the face he knew so well staring at him from the heights or depth of some interior space. He nodded, blinking to clear his dazzled eyes.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right, Avra. You’re right. What must I do?’

‘I’ve already told you what to do,’ Shekolni said more gently — more like a man to another man, and less like the voice of God or Fate. ‘Enact the last prophecy and take your reward. The reward of God’s most faithful servant.’

The words struck home. It was — almost — all that Ber Lusim had ever wanted.

Rapid footsteps on stone made both men turn. The man who ran into view, full of urgency that bordered on panic, was Lemoi, the youngest of those who’d been foresworn with Ber Lusim and followed him into exile. He stumbled to a halt in front of them, made the sign of the noose to the prophet, but addressed his words to Ber Lusim.

‘Commander, the scouts in the lower levels … The alarm has been raised. There’s a breach!’

‘What kind of a breach?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Speak clearly, Lemoi. Is it Adamites? You’re saying the city authorities have found us?’

‘Not Adamites,’ Lemoi blurted. ‘Elohim. It’s an army! They’ve brought an army against us!’

60

Diema’s Messengers, with Kennedy and Rush in tow, entered the Gellert caves through a doorway built into the back of a house.

Rush was in the rear as they descended the stairs into the house’s sub-basements. Not all the way to the back, obviously. There were armed Messengers behind him, their guns casually at the ready, and more on either side of him, subtly conveying the suggestion that he was fine so long as he didn’t stop, slow down, take a wrong turning, or look too much like an Adamite.

The house had stayed in Elohim hands ever since the city’s medieval heyday, so nothing had been changed. In the lowest cellar there was a hand printing press, which looked like a rack waiting for a customer, and on the wall beside it a massive wooden compositor’s frame, with hundreds of pigeonholes for movable lead type.

Diema’s Messengers slid the frame aside, with some effort because the iron tracks on which it had been mounted had rusted almost solid in the damp air. As the pale men and women put their drug-boosted backs into it, there was a sound like the bellowing of bulls — and gradually, an inch at a time, the frame was moved aside and the dark tunnel beyond opened itself to their eyes.

Each of Diema’s Messengers wore an AN/PVS autogated night-vision rig that turned midnight into cloudless noon. And each of them had been equipped with the new guns, in both rifle and handgun configurations.

Rush had been given a flashlight and an apple.

On the whole, he was kind of touched by the apple. Unlike the paint-bomb, it was an insult that Diema had put some thought into. She would have had to go out somewhere and buy it, or at the very least pick it up off a plate in passing and save it for him. It did something to help his bruised ego recuperate after the briefing session.

‘So the flashlight’s for finding my way in the dark, obviously,’ he said to her now, as the Elohim opened the gate. ‘And the apple’s for if I get hungry. So what do I use for a weapon?’

The girl fixed her dark, intransitive gaze on him. ‘The apple,’ she said, ‘is to remind you that you don’t have a weapon. Which in turn is to remind you that you’re not here to fight. If you find yourself about to get into a fight, look at the apple and it will jog your memory.’

‘And then?’

‘Go and hide somewhere until the urge goes away.’

As Diema turned away, Rush saw Kennedy checking the action on the M26 — the gun Diema had carried during the hotel raid. But Diema now had one of the new guns. Only Kennedy, out of all of them, had a regular handgun and Diema’s permission — under certain very strictly defined circumstances — to use it.

‘It’s okay for you,’ Rush muttered.

Kennedy smiled, without a trace of humour. ‘We’re going to fight in a cave, Rush,’ she said. ‘Against people who’ve lived in caves their whole lives, and have probably had years to fortify this particular cave against anything we can bring against it. So “okay” isn’t the word I’d use, exactly.’

She tucked a couple of spare magazines into her belt, the gun into its holster inside her jacket. ‘Diema is right, though,’ she said.

‘About what?’ Rush demanded.

‘About this fight. It’s not yours, and it’s not mine. Our time is going to come, and it’ll be soon, but I don’t think it’s going to be today. So we should both of us hang well back and let them do what they’ve got to do’

‘Then how come you get a gun and I get an apple?’

‘Because I know how to shoot and you don’t. Stay close to me.’

‘Why?’ he grunted. ‘So you can patronise me some more?’

‘Because you’re the only one who won’t be tempted to cut my throat in the dark,’ Kennedy said. ‘We can watch each other’s backs.’

The gate was open now, the heavy wooden frame pulled all the way to the side to reveal a wide corridor that sloped down into the ground at a shallow angle. The first few yards were lined with royal blue tiles that shone with a faint, rich lustre even in the dim light of the cellar. Beyond that, there was bare granite.

Diema raised her hand in a pre-arranged signal. Six Elohim launched themselves into the dark at a rapid, even jog-trot.

Diema gave them thirty seconds, then signalled again. More assassins peeled away from the mass and stepped through the gate.

Rush positioned himself off to one side and watched them go. The sight made his skin prickle, and when he tried to swallow he found his mouth was dry. What was so scary about them? Or rather, what was scarier about them now than when he was in that room, surrounded by them, and they were looking at him like they were trying to decide whether killing him merited the trouble of cleaning the blood off the floor afterwards? Maybe it was the night-vision goggles, which made them look like armoured owls. But no, he realised, it was something else.

It was because you expected the dominant predators in any ecosystem to hunt solo: to see these killers moving in formation, like synchronised swimmers, was like seeing the violation of some kind of physical law.

Rush was part of the last wave, with Elohim flanking him on either side and Diema running just ahead of him. He’d been expecting a steep descent — partly because of the angle at which the tunnel opening was set, but mostly because, well, they were going into a cave. But the house was at the foot of the hill and after the first hundred yards the corridor ended at a flight of stone steps leading upward. At the top of the steps was a broad arcade with stone pillars around its edges like a cloister. Many arched openings led off it on all four sides.

Diema and her people didn’t slow down as they moved out into the larger space. They’d planned their approach already, using the old maps of the place, and each squad had learned a route from which it was not expected to deviate except in emergencies.

The team Rush was with took the third opening on their left and kept on going, through narrow tunnels with ceilings so low they had to bend their heads and vast arcades like underground cathedrals. Every few yards, it seemed, the passage they were in was intersected by others, a few angled downward but most leading up towards the heart of the hidden city, still hundreds of yards above their heads and more than a mile away in horizontal distance.

At least it wasn’t totally dark. Every so often there were shafts sunk through the rock that must have been set there as lightwells, centuries before. A grey light filtered through them, presumably trickling down from the sides of the hill. Rush wondered what was at the other end of them. Rabbit holes? Wayside shrines? Probably just innocuous gratings that passers-by thought must be part of the city’s drainage network. The lightwells were irrelevant to the night-sighted Elohim, but Rush welcomed each one as it approached and missed it as soon as it was past.

Long before they got to the upper levels, they met the first show of resistance. Rush missed it, because it was over before he realised it was happening. They ran out of the mouth of a long, straight corridor into a space that was completely unlit, and there was a flurry of movement from around them. Not even breaking stride, the Elohim fired in all directions, the quiet reports of their guns like the sound of a gentle rap on a door. Heavier sounds of falling bodies created a stuttering counterpoint. Not one of Ber Lusim’s men got close enough to go hand-to-hand with the invaders.

Diema had taken Tillman’s idea and run with it — into some pretty dark places. The weapons she’d issued to her people were modified versions of the Dan-inject dart gun she’d given to Kennedy, and the modifications were utterly terrifying. These were configured for repeating fire, and they spat multiple darts on the principle of a shotgun or scatter-gun. Diema had also taken into account how long the Messenger tagged by Kennedy had taken to fall: she’d ordered the darts to be topped off with four times the highest dosage legally available. Experiments on volunteers from among her own people had established that a single hit would put down most opponents instantly. If you took more than three or four, you’d be in serious danger of death from respiratory depression. So medics followed behind the fighters, checking the condition of the fallen and administering intravenous ampakine where needed.

The second skirmish was longer than the first, but it had the same outcome. Cornered in their rat runs, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, Ber Lusim’s Elohim gave as good an account of themselves as they could, but though they tried to sell their lives dearly, Diema’s stone-cold mercy had ensured that they couldn’t find a buyer.

Other squads began to rendezvous with theirs as they progressed, having checked out the areas assigned to them and either come up empty or cleared them of opposition. The third confrontation was a massed battle lasting fully twenty minutes. Rush and Kennedy were kept well back from it, but when it was over they walked across the wide, low-ceilinged hall where it had been fought, stepping over the prone bodies of dozens of Elohim. Blood slicked the white stone floor, so obviously Diema’s forces hadn’t prevailed by dart-guns alone.

They crossed that room, and the two more, and that was as far as they got. Half an hour after they began their journey into the hill, they found their way blocked by a massive steel door that didn’t look anything like an antique. One of Nahir’s people examined it, and he didn’t seem happy with what he found. Rush casually ambled closer to eavesdrop as the Messenger straightened and turned to Diema, but he only got an earful of Aramaic for his pains.

Diema rapped out questions, then orders, and three Elohim headed back the way they’d come.

‘What have we got?’ Kennedy asked.

‘A Mosler-Bahmann safe door, apparently,’ Diema said. Her tone was distant: she was thinking as she spoke. ‘Shraga says the company has been bankrupt for well over a decade, so it’s possible that someone else put it here. Or else Ber Lusim acquired it from a bank that had no more use from it, and brought it down here. But Shraga also says it’s likely to be three feet thick and weigh forty tons. They wouldn’t have been able to carry it far.’

‘So you’re going to burn through it?’ Kennedy asked.

Diema shook her head. ‘Three feet thick,’ she said again. ‘And the core is concrete — only the shell and frame are steel. We’re going to use plastique.’

Kennedy looked shocked. ‘How much plastique?’ she asked.

‘A lot. But we don’t have to break through it, we just need to loosen it from the surrounding rock. Then we can tear it down. It should be simple enough.’

‘Then why are you looking like you swallowed a wasp?’ Rush asked.

Diema gave him a disapproving look — as though being reminded that he was still alive did nothing to improve her day. ‘Because it will take time,’ she said sourly. ‘And the more time they buy, the less we’re going to like what we find on the other side of that door.’

Avra Shekolni preached a sermon to Ber Lusim’s remaining Messengers. It was short and simple, since time was pressing on all of them.

His theme was the difference between the earthly and the eternal, and how hard it is, from behind the veils of the world and the flesh, to comprehend what is everlasting and incorruptible.

‘For now,’ he intoned solemnly, ‘we see as through a glass, darkly. But then we will see all things clearly, as they are. Now we understand in part, but then we will know and be known. As your teacher, I have tried to bring you to that glass, not so that you could peer through it, but so that you could feel how close the eternal world is — how thin and fragile is the barrier behind which He waits for you. But today my purpose is lost. Today you’ll step through the veil and see for yourselves what was hidden. And because of your courage, your faith, your love for each other and for the light of truth, the veil will soon be parted for ever. See, I bow my head before you. The fool has said in his heart that there is no God. But I look at you, and I know that there is. No demiurge or lesser spirit could have made anything so beautiful, so perfect as you. Give me your blessing, my sons, my angels. Your blessing, and then — if I may ask this, if I am worthy — your lives.’

Some of them wiped tears from their eyes as he walked among them: some let them fall down their cheeks, unashamed. Some of them reached out to touch his hands or the hem of his robe. All were preparing themselves, mentally, for what was to come.

Ber Lusim came to Shekolni, and they embraced briefly.

‘It should not have happened like this,’ Ber Lusim said. He didn’t say whether he meant the invasion, Hifela’s death, or what was about to come.

‘It happens as God wills, Ber Lusim. I don’t need to lecture you on predestination. You are predestination’s agent. This is no tragedy — and indeed, it seems to me that we’ve had this conversation already, only a short time ago. The only thing that would be tragic, now, would be if these final, most necessary things were left undone. It would be as though we climbed a great mountain, and turned around when the summit was in sight. We would be fools, when we thought to be saints. And I think that God probably finds fools harder to love than sinners.’

‘I hadn’t looked to be either,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Go well, Avra.’

‘And you, my dear friend. I’ll see you soon.’

It took ten minutes to put the explosives in place. Diema used the time to satisfy herself absolutely that there was no easier way. She had had some hope that one of the adjacent walls might have been built during the time of the city, but they were all original rock — and far thicker than the vault door. That, of course, was why the door had been placed here rather than somewhere else. Ber Lusim had chosen his ground, and chosen it well.

‘Does this seem a little crazy to you?’ Rush asked Diema, as they jog-trotted with the Elohim back through several chambers to what Shraga had designated as the safe distance.

‘As compared to what?’ Diema asked dryly.

Shraga passed out earplugs and told them to breathe through their mouths from the start of the countdown right up to the detonation. It wasn’t unusual for a powerful shock wave to rupture eardrums, but if you had your mouth open, the Eustachian tubes should equalise the pressure and stop that from happening.

He offered the detonator to Diema, but she shook her head. ‘You’re the expert,’ she said. ‘Go ahead.’

Shraga counted down from ten, both aloud and with his fingers. Then he pressed the button.

Even with the earplugs, and the distance, the sound of the explosion felt to Diema like a physical blow, like a wrestler with two fistfuls of rings punching her temples. Then the shockwave hit, in two stages, making the floor buck and the air crack like a whip.

She didn’t realise she’d fallen until she felt the cold stone under her back. She picked herself up again and shouted out the command to go in. She knew nobody could hear her, but they could see her mouth form the words and her hand pointing.

Nahir’s men rushed into the chamber beyond the door, from which smoke was pouring like a river. They were carrying ropes and pulleys, but Shraga had placed the explosives like a maestro. The door was already down. Detached from the solid rock by perfectly shaped detonations, it had toppled under its own weight.

Nahir stepped out again, waving smoke away from his face, and gave the clear signal. Diema relayed it. The Messengers advanced, covering each other’s flanks and blind spots, alert for any movement from beyond the ragged opening in the rock. From moment to moment, as the smoke roiled, they stepped in and out of Diema’s sight.

‘Stay with me,’ she told Kennedy. Then she glanced across at Rush. He still looked shaken and disoriented by the explosion, but he waved his flashlight in a satirical show of readiness. ‘You too,’ she said curtly. She went forward, and after a moment they followed.

They had to clamber over the fallen vault door and the rubble that surrounded it. It had stayed miraculously intact through the blast, though the steel sheeting, inches thick, had been ripped away in places from the concrete core. It was as though some animal had clawed the metal — but it would have had to be one of the beasts of the Apocalypse.

That association was an unpleasant one. Diema stepped down and hurried on. A short corridor gave onto a roughly circular room much smaller than the gallery they’d just left, but with so high a ceiling that it was lost to the eye in the shadows overhead. No room at all, Diema thought: most likely it was a rock chimney that had stood at the heart of Gellert Hill since it reared its head up out of the earth, and greeted the Judas People when they first came here to build.

Around the curved walls, two dozen Elohim lay still. All were men, and not one wore the night-vision rigs or body armour of Kennedy’s people. Blood pooled visibly around the heads and chests of most of them, and a few had fallen on their backs or sides, so she could see that the blood came from their slit throats. They had kept their knives in their hands when they fell.

Diema’s own people hung back, guns trained on the man who sat at the centre of the room. He was dressed in black robes, bare-footed and bare-headed. He too held a sica in his hands, which were pressed to his chest as though he were praying. The tip of the blade pointed to his bare throat. His face wore an expression of beatific calm.

‘Avra Shekolni,’ Diema said. She raised a closed fist, signalling her Elohim to hold position and do nothing without her order. ‘Where is Ber Lusim?’

‘I am afraid,’ Shekolni said, ‘that this is not a question I am able to answer. He is gone to enact the glory of the ages and the end of time. The fifth and final king is coming, to reign for evermore. But He waits to be invited, and Ber Lusim must open the way for Him.’

‘I want to be there, too,’ Diema said. ‘I want to see this thing. Please, Tannanu. Tell me where this will happen.’

Shekolni stared at her for a long time. Then he stared at the knife around which his two hands were clasped.

‘Midnight,’ he whispered. ‘Sunday. Greenwich meantime.’

He leaned forward a little and drove the sica up to its hilt into his throat. With a curse, Diema ran forward as he toppled, and wrestled the knife from his grip, but there was nothing to be done. Shekolni was already drowning in his own blood, his airway as well as his jugular completely severed.

His right hand rose, trembling violently, and found her arm. It was as though he were trying to console her.

61

‘For Christ’s sake, could you please switch to English!’

Kennedy had said the words three times already, but this was the first time that the seemingly unending torrent of Aramaic was interrupted and the other people in the room — every last one of them Elohim — deigned to look at her. Not even Diema looked friendly.

She and Rush had been all but forgotten in the rapid retreat from Gellert Hill. The assassins had become removal men, taking up everything they could find — including the fallen, the few dead and the many wounded on both sides — and running flat-out with their heavy burdens back to the old print shop through which they’d entered.

From there, with the evacuation still in progress and the sound of sirens rising on all sides, Diema had had them taken back to the safe house in one of a phalanx of ambulances — real or fake, Kennedy couldn’t decide — driving with their own sirens full-on, against the swarms of emergency vehicles converging on the Buda side of the river. Earthquake or not, the fact that Gellert Hill had just shrugged massively and shaken down some of the houses on its slopes was being taken in deadly earnest. Kennedy prayed that no one had been killed as a result of the blast — then realised how futile that prayer was, with a million lives hanging in the balance.

Or were they still hanging? Thinking about the expression of peace and calm on Avra Shekolni’s face when he died, she had to wonder whether they’d just blown their last chance to stop Ber Lusim from turning Toller’s three-century-old visions into cold, hard fact.

At the safe house, Diema requisitioned a room and went into conclave with Nahir and his deputies. But at the last moment, just as she’d done down in the tunnels, she indicated with a flick of her head that Kennedy should come along too. Rush was led back to his cell, protesting bitterly.

But Kennedy’s presence at the crisis meeting mattered about as much as a fart in a windstorm, because the Judas People locked her out anyway — not with a door but with their language. And listening to the increasingly urgent and furious exchanges between them, Kennedy yielded to her own impatience at last and stepped in.

‘I’m not following this,’ she said now. ‘If you speak in English, I can be part of the conversation. Believe it or not, I might know something that will turn out to be useful.’ Nobody answered. The assassins all stared at her with a mixture of longing and hatred.

‘Why is she here with us?’ Nahir asked Diema. But he said it in English, allowing Kennedy to get the full benefit of his scorn for her. ‘Why must we endure this again?’

Diema stared him down. ‘For the reason she just gave you. She was involved in the earlier stages of this hunt. Her knowledge is relevant. I thought it was sensible to keep her close to hand.’

Nahir raised his eyebrows, politely sceptical. ‘If she has knowledge, I can have my people interrogate her.’

‘She worked as a detective. Her insights have been useful to me.’

‘Yes,’ Nahir said. ‘So you told me. And I wait, enthralled, to see that wonderful mind in action. But that doesn’t mean I want to sit at the same table as her or have her speak to me as though we are equals.’

Diema turned to Kennedy. ‘Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to,’ she ordered her.

‘And I won’t use her gutter tongue just so she can hobble along beside us.’ Having made his point, Nahir reverted to Aramaic and continued to talk to Diema in a loud, hectoring tone for a further minute.

When he was done, Diema glanced at Kennedy once and — seemingly with bad grace — nodded. Two Elohim rose and approached Kennedy.

‘They’ll take you back to your cell,’ Diema told them. ‘We’ll talk later.’

Kennedy stood, bowing to the inevitable as the girl had just done. But at that moment the doors opened and a man she’d never seen before walked in. He was a little on the short side but very solidly built, his upper arms bulging with muscle to such an extent that they slightly spoiled the lines of his light tan suit. His bald head gleamed with sweat, and he wiped his face with a linen handkerchief. Two women had entered with him and took up their stations to either side of him. Both were about six feet tall, dressed identically in dark grey pinstripe two-pieces that were probably intended to make them look like lawyers. But they didn’t: they looked like the angel of death and her sister. They watched the room with eyes that defied anyone to move.

But the Elohim moved anyway. One by one — starting with Nahir — they pushed their chairs back and sank to one knee, bowing their heads. Diema was last.

‘Bless us, Tannanu,’ she murmured. ‘And give us your counsel.’

Kennedy wondered why she’d switched back to English, and who the VIP was. But the second question was answered at once when the stranger’s gaze, sweeping the room, came to rest on her.

He didn’t speak, but it was obvious that he recognised her. And from that, her mind made the leap. This must be Kuutma, the Elohim’s supreme commander — the man who sometimes took the name of Michael Brand. The angels were scowling at her, eyes narrowed. Probably it was some kind of lèse majesté to look Michael Brand in the eye, but Kennedy was damned if she was going to give him a curtsy. She owed this bastard nothing but harsh language.

Kuutma turned his attention back to his own people. With a brusque gesture he signalled to them to stand. ‘I’m sorry I arrived too late to take part in your recent action,’ he said. ‘I’m also sorry that its outcomes were mixed. You seem to have comprehensively derailed Ber Lusim’s operations — and that was very well done — but I gather that the man himself evaded you.’

He crossed to the table, where Nahir instantly and without a word surrendered his place at its head. ‘Please bring me up to date on what’s happening now,’ Kuutma said. ‘What steps have been taken to find Ber Lusim?’

Nahir looked profoundly nervous, but spoke clearly. Kuutma had followed Diema’s lead and spoken in English, so he did likewise. ‘We’ve closed Ferihegy airport, by planting a small explosive device there and phoning in a warning. Follow-up threats were phoned in at Debrecen, Sármellék, Györ-Pér and Pécs-Pogány, so we’re assuming that flights have been grounded there, too. We’re also watching the mainline stations and the roads out of the city, but it’s impossible to stop all traffic there. We’re backtracking from phones and ID found on Ber Lusim’s Elohim to addresses in the city to which they were registered. We’re hoping we might find a safe house where he has gone to ground.’

Kuutma nodded. ‘And you’ve questioned the Elohim you captured in the caves?’

‘They refuse to speak,’ Nahir said. ‘We considered torture, but —’

‘But that’s out of the question, for anyone of the bloodline,’ Kuutma finished. ‘I agree. The precautions that you’ve taken are good ones, but we have to assume he’s been able to escape from the city and is now on his way to wherever it is he’s going. So where is he going?’ Not waiting for an answer, Kuutma turned to Diema. ‘You believe he’s still working his way through the prophecies in Toller’s book?’

‘As far as we can tell, Tannanu, yes,’ Diema said. ‘Leo Tillman’s intervention in London bought us a little time, but there’s no reason at all to think that it derailed the overall plan — which is to enact all the prophecies in sequence and force God’s hand.’

The blasphemy, so bluntly spoken, sent a frisson through the ranks of the Messengers.

‘And how far has he got?’ Kuutma asked calmly.

‘That’s what we’re trying to determine,’ Nahir said. ‘I have people looking at the book now.’

‘People?’ It was Kennedy who spoke. She was sick of standing by and listening — and she didn’t even try to keep the sardonic edge out of her voice. Nahir gave her another look of dyspeptic hatred, but Kuutma laughed — long and loud, throwing his head back. The Elohim, including Diema, stared at him. Twice Nahir seemed about to speak, but hesitated, waiting for Kuutma’s huge amusement to run its course.

‘She makes a point,’ Kuutma said, still smiling, and wiping the corner of his eye. ‘What people do you have, Desh Nahir? Put the lady’s mind at rest.’

Nahir clearly didn’t get the joke and just as clearly hated having to explain himself to an outsider, a rhaka. ‘Interpreters,’ he said, his gaze glancing off Kennedy before returning to Kuutma. ‘Priests. Textual exegesists. People who might be expected to have some skill in navigating a book of prophecies. But the prophecies were deliberately written in opaque and elliptical language. They support many different interpretations, and it’s hard — impossible, even — to say which if any is correct.’

‘So you don’t know,’ Kennedy concluded. ‘You don’t have any idea how long you’ve got or which prophecy Ber Lusim has reached. Which prophecy he’ll be looking to fulfil.’

‘This pains me,’ Nahir said to Kuutma. ‘Tannanu, I was about to exclude her. Please permit me to do so. I don’t see what we gain by letting her hear our proceedings. If you want to interrogate her later, I’d be happy to provide a room and some suitable—’

‘It’s the last prophecy,’ Kennedy said.

‘—some suitable implements for—’

‘He’s reached the last prophecy. Didn’t you see what Shekolni did down there? Did he slip it past you while you weren’t looking?’

Nahir was forced to acknowledge her now. He snarled what was presumably a curse word in ancient Aramaic, then swivelled to face her. ‘You’re talking about things you don’t understand,’ he said. ‘There are mysteries that will never be revealed to you — even if you were to spend a lifetime studying them.’

And that was meant to be a killer put-down, Kennedy thought: if there hadn’t been so very much at stake, including her life, she might have laughed in Nahir’s face. He was only a year or so older than Diema, Kennedy realised now. Of course, the Elohim tended to be young. Apart from Kuutma, she was probably the oldest person in the room. ‘And that’s your problem, right there,’ she said to him, her tone of condescension matching his. ‘You’re looking for revealed mysteries. All I’m looking for is an evidence trail.’

‘And you found one?’ Kuutma asked. He was staring at her keenly, expectantly. ‘Share it with us, please.’

‘Has someone got the text?’ Kennedy demanded.

Diema had learned it by rote, and to Kennedy’s surprise she recited it. ‘And the stone shall be rolled away from the tomb, as it was the time before. Then will a voice be heard, crying “The hour, the hour is at hand” and all men will see what heretofore was hidden. The betrayer will condemn a great multitude with a single breath. On the island that was given for an island, in the presence of the son and of the spirit, he will speak the names of the thousand thousand that will be sacrificed. And from his throne in the heavens, the Lord Jesus who is our glory and our life will speak the names of the few that will be saved.’

The words were met with a faintly awed silence from the other Elohim. Kennedy just nodded. ‘Avra Shekolni used his last words to name a time. Midnight on Sunday, GMT. He was being the voice — fulfilling Toller’s prophecy. And he roped us in, too. When we blew that door, we all became part of the scenario. Rolling away the stone from the mouth of the tomb. That’s the only reason why he waited for us.’

‘That place was not a tomb,’ Nahir said angrily. ‘It had been used as a granary.’

Kennedy turned to stare at him. ‘Wow, you got me there. Unless it became a tomb when he got a whole lot of his men to cut their throats in it. What do you think?’

‘And the door was steel. Not stone.’

‘Steel filled with poured concrete. You’re going to argue semantics with a dead prophet?’

‘No,’ Nahir said. ‘With a live whore.’

Kennedy shook her head in sorrowful wonder. ‘Did you skimp on your research, sweetheart?’ she asked. ‘Or are you scared you won’t be able to say dyke without blushing?’

She returned her attention to Kuutma, but she was speaking to the room at large. ‘Shekolni was pulling a trigger,’ she said. ‘We’ll probably never know, now, whether they had it planned this way all along or whether he killed himself rather than let you take him and question him. But by dying, he lined everything up — he fulfilled the conditions that would let Ber Lusim enact the last prophecy. And wherever he went when he left here, the place he’s heading for is the island — the “island that was given for an island”. Find that, and you’ll find him.’

She paused and looked from face to face, meeting an endless gallery of hostile stares and one quizzical frown.

‘And how,’ Kuutma said, ‘are we to do that?’

‘I’d suggest doing it fast,’ Kennedy answered.

A hubbub of voices arose, with Nahir and a dozen of his Elohim all shouting out at once. Kuutma held up a hand, calm and commanding, and the voices died away.

‘Enough,’ Kuutma said coldly. ‘I need to be completely briefed on your recent actions.’ Diema began to speak, but he continued over her. ‘Desh Nahir has rank and oversight in this city, so I’ll speak with him first — and then with my special emissary, Diema Beit Evrom. Time is short. We’ll speak in your command room, Nahir, and then we’ll meet again here immediately afterwards. The rest of you will wait for us to return.’ He glanced at Kennedy. ‘Except for the rhaka, who can be placed in whatever receptacle you deem appropriate.’

‘Take her back to her cell,’ Nahir said. The two Messengers who had started to close in on Kennedy earlier, and had stopped in their tracks when Kuutma entered, took hold of her now.

They turned Kennedy around and led her to the door. Their grip on her shoulders was tighter than it needed to be: one of them also had a fist jammed against her lower back, presumably prepared to get her in a full lock if she stepped out of line. Nahir looked away, done with the whole business. So did Diema.

If I wasn’t dead before, Kennedy thought, I’m sure as hell dead now.

62

For about a quarter of an hour after he was thrown back into his cell, Rush just sat on the cot bed with his head sunk onto his raised knees. But gradually, boredom and frustration won out over fear and unease.

He whiled away some time carving obscene graffiti on the walls with the edge of a coin. Then he hammered on the door for a while, demanding something to eat and drink — until he remembered the apple that Diema had given him, and ate that. It quenched his thirst a little, but mostly just reminded him of how much he wanted a hamburger or a chicken madras.

He tried not to be afraid, but he’d seen how Nahir and his posse had been looking at him and Kennedy down in the caves, and he was pretty sure he knew what those looks meant. They’d outlived their usefulness — not that there’d been much usefulness to outlive, in his case. The Elohim would figure out the prophecy without their help, or else they would blow it. Either way, he and Kennedy — and Tillman, assuming Tillman wasn’t dead already — would be taken out behind the barn. Even if Diema wanted to protect them, there probably wasn’t a lot she could do about it. And as far as he could tell, Diema was going along with the whole—

The bolt on the outside of the cell door rattled and then clanked as it was drawn back. Rush turned around, expecting to see the Messenger who’d brought him here — but it was her.

Diema closed the door behind her, quietly but firmly. She stared at Rush hard, her expression intense but unreadable.

‘So how was your day?’ he asked.

‘Shut up,’ Diema said.

‘Okay.’

‘And lie on the bed.’

It wasn’t what he was expecting to hear, so the snappiest comeback he could dredge up was ‘What?’

‘The bed,’ Diema snapped, walking up to him and pushing him towards it. Her body was rigid with tension. ‘Lie down. Lie down on the bed. Quickly!’

Bemused, Rush obeyed — but this just seemed to get the girl angry. ‘Not with your clothes on!’ she exploded. ‘For God’s sake, have you never had sex before? Your pants. Your pants!’

He stood up again. ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m really not in the mood. The apple? Okay, the apple was funny, but this—’ A thought struck him, and he wound down in mid-sentence. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a joke at all, it was—

Poison on a sugar lump.

A hypnotist’s pocket watch, set swinging.

Being asked to count down from ten, so you wouldn’t feel it when the needle slipped into your arm on the count of seven.

‘Hey,’ he said, his voice shaking a little. ‘Let’s not do this, okay. I swear I’m not going to tell anyone about you. Nobody would even believe me if I did. You don’t have to …’

Diema exhaled — a loud huff of exasperation — and breathed in again deeply and slowly. On the in-breath she magically produced a knife, one of those evil-looking sica things, and pressed it to Rush’s stomach.

‘Oh shit,’ he blurted.

With a single sweep of the knife, she sliced clean through his belt and took his fly button, too. Then she pushed him again, tangling up her foot with his in a complicated way so that he slammed down onto the bed.

Diema kicked off her boots and undressed from the waist down. With the knife still in her hand, she climbed on top of him. She tapped the blade of the knife against his chest. Her face, as she contemplated him, was solemn, even severe.

‘We’ve got ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Can you get there in ten minutes, Rush?’

‘Can I—’

‘Because if you can’t, I’m not going to be responsible for the consequences. But I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be a lot of blood.’

She reached underneath her, found him with her hand and rubbed him with a lot more vigour than tenderness. When he was hard enough, she guided him in.

It was reminiscent of Dovecote Farm, in a lot of ways. Except that being beaten up by her at Dovecote Farm hadn’t involved performance anxiety. It took him a long while to get into any kind of a rhythm, and a couple of times along the way he almost lost his erection. Diema was pushing back against him brusquely, but there was no trace of pleasure on her face.

As soon as he reached his climax, Diema uncoupled from him and tucked the knife away. She began to dress again without a word.

‘Was it … was it good for you?’ he asked dazedly.

Diema snorted in derision. ‘No!’

He raised himself a few inches to stare at her. ‘Then why did we do it?’ he asked.

She tugged her trousers up over her hips, then stepped into her boots and knelt to tie up the laces.

‘Why?’ Rush insisted. He was afraid of what the answer might be, but he really needed to know.

Diema was already walking towards the door, hauling it open, but she paused for a moment in the doorway and glanced back at him.

‘Because I don’t trust you to lie,’ she said coldly. From the tone of her voice and the look on his face, a casual observer would think Rush had just run over Diema’s dog, rather than that they’d just shared a moment of physical intimacy.

The door slammed shut behind her.

He slumped back onto the bed and closed his eyes, overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness and despair.

Maybe every condemned man felt like that after his hearty meal.

Diema was oppressed by the feeling of time running out — except that the image her mind gave her wasn’t of sand falling through an hourglass. It was of a lit fuse, like the fuse on a bomb in a Tex Avery cartoon, burning down to the final, irrevocable KABOOM.

She found Nahir sitting at the desk in his command room, deep in discussion with Kuutma. She waited in the doorway to be noticed, prepared to walk away again if Kuutma ignored her, but he beckoned her in.

‘—monitoring live data feeds from scanners at airports and border checkpoints,’ Nahir was saying as she entered. ‘But there’s nothing yet. We’re checking against all of Ber Lusim’s known aliases, but of course we’re not assuming that we know every identity he has. Since we closed the airports, the knock-on effects have led to security checkpoints being set up along all the major roads into and out of the city. We can’t say for sure that we’ve stopped Lusim, but I’m confident we’ve slowed him down.’

Kuutma nodded. ‘Sensible steps to take, certainly,’ he said. ‘Diema, your opinion?’

‘My opinion? I don’t think it can do any harm,’ Diema said. Her slow, considered tone left vast amounts unspoken.

‘What would you do that I’ve left undone?’ Nahir asked, receiving the insult with a face frozen into immobility.

‘Assuming that you’ve also stationed Messengers at the Keleti and Nyugati Pályaudvar railheads—’

‘Of course.’

‘—and that you’re monitoring take-offs from private airfields, then I’d say you’ve done all you can to prevent Ber Lusim from leaving the city.’

‘Thank you.’

‘So what I would do, Nahir, is assume that you’ve failed, and do my best to find out where he’s going.’

She was standing before him now, and he stood up too, maybe to assert the advantage of his height.

‘Do my best,’ he repeated, with cold politeness. ‘That’s a rhetorical exhortation, Diema Beit Evrom, rather than a piece of advice that I can actually act on.’

‘Then act on this,’ she said. ‘Wake Leo Tillman.’

Nahir looked from her to Kuutma and back again. He shook his head, not in refusal but in bafflement. ‘Tillman was enlisted as a killer,’ he pointed out. ‘Surely his usefulness is at an end.’

‘We need what’s in his head. He was the one who went into Ber Lusim’s warehouse, back in London. He saw the documentation on the weapons and equipment that Lusim had already shipped.’

‘We’re starting to retrieve similar information from the computers we found down in the caves.’

‘Good.’ Diema’s tone was clipped. ‘I’m not saying those efforts should stop. Just that we should use every option that’s open to us. Kennedy is right that as Adamites, she and the others come at the Toller prophecies from a different angle than we do. She proved that just now — and justified your decision to enlist her, Tannanu. I want to use Leo Tillman’s expertise, too. His tactical intelligence, which was great enough to allow him to find Ginat’Dania that was.’

Kuutma rubbed his cheek with his thumb. ‘Could this be done?’ he asked Nahir. ‘Could you wake him? Or is Tillman too far-gone?’

Nahir made a non-committal gesture. ‘I don’t know, Tannanu,’ he admitted. ‘I was thinking of Tillman as a spent asset, so I haven’t asked the doctors to report to me on his condition. I’ll do so now.’

‘Thank you, Nahir,’ Kuutma said. ‘Take my bodyguards with you. They both have a good grounding in field medicine. Perhaps they can be of use. We’ll join you shortly.’

‘I want the others there, too,’ Diema said quickly. ‘Kennedy and Rush.’

Kuutma frowned. ‘They were not, I believe, present in the warehouse with Tillman,’ he observed.

‘No. But they were both researching Johann Toller and his prophecies. Again, it’s a case of using all possible assets. If any of them has an insight we can use, we need to squeeze it out of them now.’

‘Very well,’ Kuutma said. ‘Nahir, please have them fetched.’

Nahir made the sign of the noose, which Kuutma returned, and then he left. Diema read extreme tension in the set of Nahir’s back and shoulders. He wouldn’t forgive her for the indignities she’d put him through today. But in a way, that made what she had to do easier: he was so relentlessly focused on his own hurt feelings that she didn’t need to give them any thought herself.

Alone with Diema for the first time, Kuutma gave her a brief but warm embrace. ‘I’m pleased with all you’ve accomplished,’ he told her. ‘Pleased and proud. The operation here was brilliantly handled.’

‘Thank you, Tannanu.’ Diema assumed the same tone of simple humility she’d used when she spoke with him in Ginat’Dania, and her heart swelled as it always had when he praised her, but there were other emotions in the mix now, and she chose her words with care. ‘But I think I could have done more, and done it more quickly. And in any case, the plan was yours.’

‘Yes,’ Kuutma agreed. ‘The plan was mine. I said you should bring Tillman and the rhaka into the orbit of our investigation, and use their talents. But I knew how much I was asking of you. I knew that this thing, which was so easy to say, would be very hard indeed to carry out. You carried it out immaculately.’

‘Thank you, Tannanu.’

‘What I’m concerned about, is how you yourself may have been hurt in the process — especially in meeting Leo Tillman and being forced into close proximity with him. No Messenger has ever had to bear that burden.’

Diema knew that she couldn’t plausibly counterfeit indifference, so she let him see some of the tension she’d been hiding, letting the mask slip as though with relief. She grimaced. ‘It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I see my brothers in him. Myself, even. It’s hard, at those times, not to let him see how much I hate him.’

‘Walk with me,’ Kuutma suggested.

He bowed, and with a sweep of his arm invited her to go before him. As they left Nahir’s command room, he fell in at her side, hands clasped behind his back, moving at an easy amble that belied the urgency of their situation.

‘Your hate, then,’ he said. ‘It’s as great as it ever was?’

‘His crime is as great as it ever was.’

‘Of course. It’s important that I know your heart in this, Diema. Very important. You’ve served the city more in a year than many do in a lifetime. Your well-being matters to me.’

‘I know.’ She looked at the ground.

‘Well,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’m answered. And really, I shouldn’t even have needed to ask. It was your suggestion to wake Tillman and speak to him, despite the severity of his wounds. You’re obviously not troubled at the thought of compromising his recovery — or accidentally killing him. The drugs that will be used will be very potent. So we’ll be putting a strain on his heart, when it’s already weak.’

Diema swallowed hard. ‘So long as he lives long enough to talk to us,’ she said, as carelessly as she could.

‘And here we are,’ Kuutma said. They had reached a door that was like all the other doors they’d passed. How did he know? Diema wondered. Had he studied the layout of the house before he arrived? Had he arrived earlier and remained in the background during the raid on the caves? Was there some system of signs in the safe houses that he knew about and she didn’t?

Was her face equally easy for him to read?

Diema knew that prolonged use of the drug kelalit could induce amphetamine psychosis. Paranoia was its chief symptom. She reached out and opened the door, bowing for Kuutma to precede her into the room. She didn’t even look over the threshold.

‘Tannanu,’ she murmured.

‘Thank you, Diema.’

He went in, and she followed him, steeling herself. Killing, when she’d been brought to it, had been much harder than she expected it to be. But what she was about to do now would be harder still.

She had to bring all three Adamites out of here alive.

63

When Kennedy got her first look at Leo Tillman, she had to fight back a cry of dismay. She’d seen his injuries when they were fresh, so she thought she was armoured against anything she might find when the Messengers thrust her and Rush in through the door of the medical room and told them brusquely to wait there.

But she’d reckoned without the vagaries of Elohim psychology. Tillman’s wounds had been bandaged, and he’d been given the blood transfusion he so desperately needed. In fact, it looked as though he’d been given scrupulous care. Diagnostic machines had been brought in from somewhere and hooked up to his body wherever there was a space between the drip feeds and catheters. His dressings were clean, and so were the sheets.

But someone had remembered, at some point in all these clinical proceedings, that they were dealing with an enemy. At that point, they had shackled Tillman’s hands and feet to the bed frame with four sets of sleeve cuffs tied so tightly that his body was almost being lifted from the bed.

A doctor was checking Tillman’s blood pressure with a pneumatic sleeve, his expression bland and calm, as though this were all in a day’s work. Kuutma’s two angels also stood by, coldly indifferent, watching him work.

‘Jesus frigging Christ,’ Rush exclaimed.

Kennedy turned to the four Elohim who’d brought them there. ‘Cut him loose,’ she said. She had to force the words out. The blood was pounding in her temples and she felt like she was choking on an anger — close to panic — that had been rising in her since the first time they’d been brought to this place.

The Messengers affected not to hear her. Clearly they didn’t take orders from the likes of her.

Kennedy switched her attention to Nahir, who was standing in the corner of the room, watching them in silence. He hadn’t moved since they arrived, which was why she hadn’t seen him up until then. His expression was less detached than those of the doctor and the guards, but what was showing on his face was mostly curiosity — an interest as to which way they might jump.

‘What,’ Kennedy said, ‘are you scared he might pick a fight with someone? Cut him loose!’

‘No,’ Nahir said.

‘This is a human being.’

‘Is it?’

Kennedy went to the bed and started to untie Leo herself. When the Messengers moved in to stop her, she swivelled on the spot and punched the nearest one full in the face.

They had her immobilised before she could draw another breath. Actually, it was the man she’d just punched who put her in the arm-lock, inside of a second and without the aid of his three colleagues. Rush stepped forward to help her and ran into a human barricade: a male and a female Elohim, standing shoulder to shoulder, daring him to raise a hand against them.

He took the dare, but unlike Kennedy he didn’t have the advantage of surprise. One of the two dropped him with a punch that he didn’t see coming and couldn’t even reconstruct after it had hit. He was left in a foetal position on the floor, struggling to draw in a breath through a solid wall of agony.

‘You better not give me an inch of slack,’ Kennedy gasped.

‘I won’t,’ her captor promised her, sounding almost amused.

‘A human being,’ Nahir said, musing. ‘Would you claim that status for yourself? I wonder. I imagine you would. And that you’d do so without the slightest sense of irony.’

‘You want irony?’ Kennedy snarled. ‘I’ll tell you what’s ironic. That you people are so prissy about killing each other when killing is the only thing you’re any good at!’

Nahir signalled to the Messenger to release her — a negligent wave of the hand. Kennedy could see from his face and his posture that he expected her to attack him, and was ready for her if she did.

‘This is personal for you, isn’t it?’ she asked him, clutching her numbed arm to her chest.

Nahir’s mouth pinched in a minute grimace. ‘Not in the slightest.’

‘I’m just trying to figure out why,’ Kennedy said. ‘Is it because we found your Ginat’Dania? I can see where that would hurt.’

‘Nothing you can do could ever make the smallest difference to us.’

‘And yet here we are.’ Kennedy forced a grin. ‘Saving you from yourselves. Because three thousand years turned out to be nowhere near long enough for you sorry sons of bitches to get your act together. You saying you don’t need us is a really bad joke after you went to so much trouble to get us here.’

Nahir put a hand to the back of his belt. ‘Say another word,’ he invited Kennedy. ‘And find out for yourself how much I need you.’

She opened her mouth — and the creak and swish of the door at her back interceded, probably saving her life.

‘Good,’ Kuutma said. ‘Everybody is here, and everything, I assume, is in place.’ Diema entered the room behind him and closed the door. For a moment, her gaze was locked on Kennedy’s — a wordless catechism. Then she looked away.

‘Doctor?’ Kuutma said.

The doctor, a man of the same age and with the same physique as the Messengers, bowed perfunctorily and made the sign of the noose. ‘I’ve completed a physical evaluation of the patient,’ he said. ‘He seems to have been in excellent health before he received these wounds. His system is massively compromised now, but I believe I can wake him by injecting adrenalin and methylphenidate directly into his heart. Obviously there are a number of risks involved in this procedure. But if time is of the essence …’

‘Time,’ said Kuutma, ‘is very much of the essence. Do it, please.’

The doctor turned to the racks and trays against the walls and began to select from the bottles there.

‘What risks?’ Kennedy asked.

Assembling the hypo, the doctor answered over his shoulder. Possibly he hadn’t noticed that he was being questioned by an Adamite. ‘Haemorrhaging within the heart is possible, but not very likely. The main risk is tamponade — massive, uncontrolled vaso-constriction that will starve his system of oxygen. I’ll have a stand-by injection of benzamine ready in case that happens.’

‘Don’t do this,’ Kennedy said. She was speaking to Diema.

‘Restrain her,’ Nahir ordered. ‘She’s capable of disrupting the procedure.’

Two Elohim took Kennedy’s arms. The remaining two stood over Rush, who by now was sitting up but hadn’t managed to stand.

‘Proceed,’ said Kuutma.

The doctor used an epidural needle that looked more like a duelling sword. Kennedy forced herself not to look away as the doctor, without preamble, inserted the point between Tillman’s fourth and fifth ribs and pushed the needle in slowly and smoothly, to a depth of about three inches. He thumbed the bulb at the end of the syringe, and the plunger inside the hypodermic slid across, instantly, like an eye blinking shut.

For a split-second longer, Tillman’s body remained calm and motionless. Then it quaked, riven by a massive interior shock. A powerful muscular contraction went through him, making the restraints tighten and his body lift clear of the bed — then slam down again with enough force to make it rock.

‘Hold him!’ the doctor said, to the two angels, and they stepped in on either side to enfold Tillman in a rigid embrace. There was a second contraction, then a third, not so severe as the first but more protracted.

Tillman’s eyes and mouth gaped open. His throat worked and so did his chest, but there was no sound of indrawn breath. Quickly, the doctor gave him a second injection into the side of his neck. Sputters and gasps came from Tillman’s throat, as though he were doing a bad mime of a coffee percolator. They peaked, then died away.

The doctor turned to look at Kuutma, tense, seeking instruction or permission. ‘He’s barely breathing. I need another chemical antagonist to fight the adrenalin. But there are none here. This house is not so well stocked as my own surgery. I didn’t think to bring—’

‘Glyceril trinitrate,’ one of the angels said.

The doctor blinked, his mouth dropping open. ‘But that’s … that’s the chemical composition of nitroglycerin. It’s an explosive.’

‘And a vaso-dilator.’ The woman looked to Nahir. ‘Do you have any?’

Nahir shrugged. ‘Almost certainly.’

One of the Elohim went in search of it. The rest of them were summarily ejected from the room so that the doctor could prep Tillman for an emergency ECMO. If necessary, they would force oxygen into his blood using cannulae and membrane oscillators.

Kennedy was still in the grip of the two Elohim who Nahir had told to guard her. But she’d stopped struggling against their grasp, and they were holding her loosely. If Leo died, she intended to try to tear loose from their grip, but she had no idea whether she was going to attack Nahir, Kuutma or Diema. She just felt that leaving a mark on one of the three would be a memorial that she owed Tillman, even if she died trying.

Her gaze kept going back to Diema, who stood with her arms folded, her expression sullen and guarded. Everything that was happening here was being driven by her. She could still stop this, but she said nothing, engaged with nothing, let it flow around her while she stood and thought.

The nitro was brought. Kennedy was expecting a gelid brick, wrapped in grease-proof paper, like a package of C4, but it came in a bottle, looking a lot more like medicine than explosive. The Elohim took it into Tillman’s room and closed the door behind them.

‘You know the one thing I regret, in all of this?’ Rush asked. He was speaking to Diema, who turned to stare at him, startled out of her reverie.

‘That I let you touch me,’ Rush said.

She didn’t answer. Kuutma frowned, and looked at Diema — a look of surprise and deep thought.

The door opened, and the doctor looked out at them. His bland expression gave nothing away, but he nodded. ‘He’s ready for you,’ he said to Kuutma.

They filed back into the room. Tillman’s eyes were open and he was breathing — not normally, but deeply, with an audible rasp on each in-breath like the blade of a hacksaw dragged through cardboard. Kennedy tried to go to him, but the Messengers who held her arms wouldn’t allow her.

‘Leo,’ she said.

His wide eyes flickered, swivelled and found her. He tried to speak, eventually producing a sound that could have been the start of her name. ‘Heh …’

And a second later, ‘… ther.’

Kuutma wasted no time. ‘As you wished, Diema,’ he said to her, with a wave of his hand. ‘Please continue.’

Diema stepped forward. ‘We found Ber Lusim’s base of operations, underneath Gellert Hill,’ she said, addressing herself to Tillman. ‘But he escaped us. And now, we think, he’s aiming to fulfil the final prophecy in Toller’s book. So we have to go there, too, and stop him. Our goal is what it’s been all along — to save a million lives. If we can do that, then everything … everything that’s happened along the way will have been justified.’

The tone of her voice was strange. So were her words, Kennedy thought. She sounded as though she were pleading a case rather than carrying out an interrogation.

Tillman nodded. He swallowed deeply before he tried to speak again. ‘The island,’ he said, his voice slurred but comprehensible.

Diema nodded. ‘The island given for an island. We’ve all had time to think about it. If you’ve got any ideas — if any of you have anything at all — this is probably our last chance to figure it out.’

Nobody answered. Diema looked at each of them in turn.

‘Please,’ she said. She sounded desperate. ‘Anything. It’s not about our feelings. It’s not about whether we trust each other or not. Think about the living, who will soon be dead.’

Nahir winced, and shook his head. He seemed to think this whole spectacle was beneath his dignity.

‘There were treaties,’ Rush said, with deep reluctance.

Diema turned to him. ‘Go on.’

‘In the seventeenth century. Sometimes countries would give away or trade ownership of colonies, either to prevent a war or to share out the proceeds after one. I found a whole bunch of them.’

Diema was still looking at him expectantly. So was Kuutma. Rush shrugged. ‘I don’t think I can remember.’

‘Try,’ Diema said tightly.

Rush scowled and stared at the floor. ‘The Spice Islands,’ he said. ‘West Coast of … India, I think. They were given to England in the 1660s. It’s the right time for Toller, but there wasn’t a swap involved. I mean, they weren’t given for an island. They were part of a dowry. When Catherine of Braganza married Charles II.’

‘Then they’re probably out,’ said Diema. ‘What else?’

Rush thought some more. ‘The Azores kept changing hands between Spain and Portugal, all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So did the Madeira archipelago. There were a whole bunch of treaties where they swapped control over one island or another, abandoned forts, leased land, that kind of thing. You could probably say that any one of those islands had been given for another island at one time or another.’

‘Not enough people,’ Kennedy said, remembering Gilles Bouchard’s sleeve notes. ‘Even now, Madeira doesn’t top a quarter of a million. And the Azores are even smaller.’

‘Okay,’ Rush said. ‘Well, there’s Paulu Run, in Indonesia. Britain gave it to the Dutch in 1667 and got Manhattan — which is when New Amsterdam became New York. Martinique is possible. That was French, then British, then French again, all around the time when Toller was writing. Grenada. The French took the indigenous population out of there in the 1640s, which again is about right for Toller, and pushed them onto the smaller islands in the Grenadines. So you could say they gave an island for an island. And there are others. I can’t remember the details, but Aruba fits. So does Tasmania. Abel Tasman was resupplying his ship in Budapest at a time when Toller might still have been here.’

Rush shook his head. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘you could make a case for any island you want, pretty much. The big European powers back then, they had big, colony-swapping parties where everyone put their car keys in a bowl. We’re not going to get there this way.’

They absorbed this in silence. Diema let her hands fall to her sides, then balled her fists. An image flashed into Kennedy’s mind, suddenly and powerfully: Alex Wales, in the boardroom at Ryegate House, in the moment before he exploded into violence.

‘It’s … Manhattan,’ Tillman said.

A change came over all the Elohim in the room. They tried to hide it, and it was gone as quickly as it came — their ferocious self-control reasserted itself that quickly. But for a moment they looked the same way they’d looked when Diema had made her comment about forcing God’s hand.

‘Why?’ Kuutma said quickly.

Tillman stared at him, his eyes swimming in and out of focus. ‘Because High Energy Haulage … shipped there.’

‘We have that information,’ Nahir said. ‘From the computer files Ber Lusim left behind. High Energy did send a shipment there — but it wasn’t weapons. It was food products.’

‘Manhattan,’ Tillman murmured again, more weakly.

‘What food products?’ Kuutma asked Nahir.

‘Beans.’

‘Beans?’

‘Castor beans.’

‘Those aren’t food,’ Diema said savagely.

‘Natural … natural source …’ Tillman mumbled.

‘Of the ricin toxin,’ Kuutma finished. ‘I salute you, little sister. And you, Mr Tillman. Nahir, you’ve closed the local airspace. Open it again. Do whatever it takes. Diema and I will leave for New York at once.’

He opened the door and stood aside for her to step through. Diema remained where she was.

And took a breath.