The Demon Code

64

The Borough of Manhattan extends beyond the Island that gives it its name, carving out a foothold on the mainland in the shape of Marble Hill — ‘the Bronx’s Sudetenland’. But on the island itself, if you keep on going north about as far as you can, just before you hit the Harlem River you hit Inwood.

It’s a seriously schizophrenic neighbourhood, anyone will tell you that, but there’s some disagreement as to exactly where the divide comes. Some people claim it’s East-West, with Broadway separating a larger East Side full of mostly Dominican families, maybe two or three generations out of the Republic and as aspirational as hell, from a smaller and more Bohemian West Side full of artists, writers and second-stringers from the city’s many orchestras. Others say the distinction that matters is up-down. Inwood is either your first beachhead in Manhattan real estate, with a view to going south along with your rising fortunes, or else it’s your swan song before you hit the boroughs.

And then there’s a third distinction, of which most of Inwood’s general population are entirely unaware: between those who live above the ground and those who live under it. Because from Isham Park in the North to Fort George Hill in the South, from 10th Avenue to Payson, and from 30ft to 700ft below the street, Inwood is the current location of Ginat’Dania, the peripatetic homeland of the Judas People.

Within that volume of space, whose combined ground area across all of its levels is close to five hundred square miles, the entire population of the People, apart from the tiny diaspora already defined, live and work and dream and die. Six high-rise blocks wholly owned and staffed by the People’s guardians, the Elohim, form its periscopes and its guard towers, but most of the citizenry never visit these above-ground extrusions. They’re accustomed to the rhythms and logistics of life underground, to the point where ‘underground’ ceases to be part of their frame of reference.

Ginat’Dania, the Eden Garden from which the rest of humanity was long ago expelled, is where they live.

And to Ginat’Dania Kuutma now returned, in order to begin its defence in depth.

By the time he touched down at Newark and went through customs, it was nine minutes after 11 a.m. Since Eastern Standard Time is five hours before Greenwich Meantime, that meant that there were seven hours and fifty-one minutes left on the clock. Zero hour would be seven that evening. Kuutma was already giving orders to his Messengers as he was being driven through the streets of New Jersey, and the first Messengers were mobilising and moving out by the time he reached the island of Manhattan and descended into his home.

The first and most important consideration was to seal and guard the borders. To this end, Kuutma gave orders for the surface streets at Thayer, Nagle Avenue and along the eastern limits of Inwood Hill Park to be undermined with earthworks so that they would start to collapse. The New York City authorities promptly closed the affected streets for repairs, re-routing traffic via the bridge at University Heights. Cars could still come and go along the full length and breadth of the island, obviously, but if Ber Lusim was carrying his poison in trucks, they wouldn’t be able to pass directly into the territory under which Ginat’Dania lay.

That left air and water as potential approaches. Elohim were sent to search all known private airfields around the city, looking mainly for microlight aircraft small enough to be exempt from safety inspections and federal monitoring. Satellite footage was being examined in order to identify any potential runways whose location was disguised.

As far as the water went, dockside warehouses were being searched at the same time, as well as ships on the river that were in fixed moorage. The factory in which Ber Lusim had extracted and refined his poison had already been identified from archived satellite footage, which showed the red liveried trucks of the High Energy Haulage company making a delivery there more than a month before. But it had clearly been abandoned for some time. There was nothing there now except some industrial waste, sacks of raw chemicals and several hundredweight of castor beans that had not been pulped and processed. The location of the factory was a calculated insult: it was in Marble Hill, looking directly across the Harlem River towards the northern tip of Manhattan Island. Ber Lusim, who they had sought around the world, had built his weapon of mass destruction within walking distance of Ginat’Dania itself.

It was true the Elohim’s search was hampered by their having no idea of what that armament might be, and what it might look like. But it was also true that they could rule out some possibilities and concentrate on others that were more likely. Ricin was extremely difficult to weaponise. It had a high toxicity, but it was most effective in solid form, either as a pellet or as a poisonous coating on some form of scatter munition. The amount required to kill a million people would be measured in tons, and each of the victims would have to be directly exposed to the toxin: there was no way its effects could be transmitted from one person to another.

All of these factors worked in their favour. But Ber Lusim had known these things, too, and had still chosen ricin over a wide range of other toxic agents such as sarin, botulinum, smallpox or anthrax, which might have been more convenient or more efficacious. It followed that he had a plan for delivering the poison across the city, or at least across enough of the city to kill a million of its inhabitants.

Would he really attack Ginat’Dania itself? The thought was terrible, but it had a monstrous logic of its own. Shekolni had believed completely and fervently in Johann Toller’s divine inspiration, and Toller, in his book, had described God choosing those who would be saved. Who else would he choose but the Judas People? And therefore, where else could the final atrocity be unleashed?

So Ginat’Dania was in a state of siege, all of its citizens in lockdown, all of its entry and exit points fortified and guarded, all of its Messengers answerable directly to Kuutma himself, who sent a constant stream of instructions and queries from his rooms in het retoyet.

Or almost all.

Coming from a tiny commercial airfield much further out from the city, a good hour behind Kuutma because of the complications involved in transporting one of its passengers, an armoured truck bearing the logo of a well-known security firm was also headed for Manhattan. In its innards, not quite imprisoned and yet not quite free, was the small group that had been deputed to Diema’s command. It consisted of Diema herself, Desh Nahir, Kuutma’s two bodyguards Alus and Taria, and the three Adamites. Tillman. Kennedy. Rush.

Kuutma frowned as he thought about them. The memory of that last hour in Budapest still troubled him. He had heard Diema out — he owed her that, and more. But he was far from sure that he had made the right decision.

‘I need the three of them to come with me,’ Diema had said. ‘You see that, Tannanu, don’t you? The reason why you sent me to them — it wasn’t just because they can kill where we can’t. It’s because they see things differently from the way we see them, and we need their expertise. It was with their help that I got this far. It would be blind stupidity to give up that help now, while we still might need it. Let them come with us, to New York.’

Nahir made a sound of disgust, deep in his throat.

‘You disagree, Nahir?’

‘It makes no sense, Tannanu. If you need their input, speak to them by phone or address your requirements to me and I’ll speak to them for you. There’s no need for them to accompany you. It would even be better that way, since Tillman is probably too weak to be moved. You’d risk killing him in transit — which Diema Beit Evrom surely wouldn’t want, if he’s such a valuable asset.’

‘We can’t predict what we’ll find and what we’ll need,’ Diema countered. ‘It may be that we’ll need Tillman to accompany us, as weak as he is, and give us his insights. It’s not about safeguarding his health. It’s about keeping him where he can do the most good.’

‘And Kennedy, likewise?’ Kuutma asked.

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘And the boy?’

Diema didn’t answer. Which was an answer in itself.

‘Very well,’ Kuutma said. ‘We’ll take the rhaka. And Tillman, too, though I find it hard to believe we’ll use him in the way you suggest. But the boy stays. Once we’re gone, Nahir can dispose of him as he sees fit.’

Diema tensed visibly, as though she was steeling herself for some intense physical effort.

‘Benjamin Rush is the father of my child,’ she said, ‘who is not yet born.’

Kuutma’s shock at hearing this was as great as Nahir’s, but unlike Nahir, he was able to keep the shock from showing on his face or in his actions.

Nahir, by contrast, cried out, a wordless yell of disgust and protest. He took a step towards Diema, his hand raised as though he intended to strike her. She took a combat stance herself, ready to defend against the attack.

‘What is this?’ Kuutma asked her coldly. ‘What is this thing you say? You’re Elohim, not Kelim.’

‘Now I’m both,’ she said.

‘You’re a whore!’ Nahir bellowed. ‘A filthy whore!’

She gave him a look of cool derision. ‘You need to learn some new curse words, Desh Nahir. Vary your repertoire. It would be terrible if you became dull.’

‘Desh Nahir makes a reasonable assumption,’ Kuutma broke in, grinding out the words. ‘If he’s wrong, tell me why. How did this happen?’

Diema stared into his eyes. ‘It happened, Tannanu, in this wise,’ she said. ‘I gave myself to the boy in order to win his trust — and through him, the trust of Heather Kennedy. It was part of my mission, I took no pleasure in it, but neither did I hesitate. Other Elohim have done such things, many times. But I miscounted my days and fell pregnant. And in that, obviously, I was at fault.’

‘At fault?’ Nahir almost screamed. ‘This foulness—’

Kuutma silenced him with a curt gesture. ‘Go on,’ he said to Diema.

‘And so,’ she said, ‘I was faced with a choice. I could have terminated the pregnancy. It would have been no shame. But the wombs of the daughters of the People are the portals through which the Blessed enter the world. I decided to be delivered of the child, if I can carry it to term. And once that decision was made, I was thenceforth Kelim and Ben Rush was my partner, the man with whose seed I must be sown. Three times, the laws say.’

‘The laws do not cover this!’ Nahir shouted. ‘The laws are silent on this!’

‘It is without precedent,’ Kuutma said.

‘It’s filth and abomination!’

Diema had said her piece. She stood with her head slightly bowed, awaiting Kuutma’s verdict.

And for the first time since he took the mantle of command — his own personal holy of holies — Kuutma was at a loss.

‘Bring me the boy,’ he said at last.

Nahir turned to the nearest of his Elohim, but Alus and Taria, the women who served Kuutma as his bodyguards, had already detached themselves and were gone.

‘Say nothing to him,’ Kuutma warned Diema. ‘I’ll question him myself.’

The women returned, a few seconds later, leading Ben Rush between them. Rush looked anxiously at Diema, who looked pointedly away, then at Nahir, who glared at him like an ogre in a pantomime.

‘Keep your eyes on me,’ Kuutma snapped. Startled, Rush obeyed.

‘If anything has passed between you and our sister,’ Kuutma said, ‘tell us now. Only honesty will save you. A lie dooms you, and ruins her. So speak.’

The boy took a long while to get a word out. And since he was an Adamite, when he did it was a lie. ‘I didn’t touch her,’ he said. His gaze flicked sideways at Diema again.

‘At me,’ Kuutma growled. ‘Only at me. So there was no physical congress? She’s clean? Clean of your pollution?’

The boy was clearly terrified now. Perhaps he had some inkling of what was at stake here; of how close he was to death.

‘I … obviously I came on to her,’ he stammered. ‘I thought, you know, I might be in with a chance. So if … yeah. Anything that happened was down to me. But it wasn’t much. She … Diema wasn’t interested. She smacked me in the head, and that was that.’

Kuutma reached out and gripped the boy’s face in his broad hand.

‘You’re saying you didn’t lie with her?’

‘No,’ Rush mumbled. ‘I mean, yes. That’s what I’m saying.’

‘So if she were pregnant, the child could not be yours?’

The boy’s face gave him all the answer he needed. The wonder and terror and stark astonishment that warred there could not be counterfeited.

‘Tannanu, I beg you,’ Nahir said, his voice thick. ‘Kill the Adamites here and now, and be done. The three of them. Nothing is gained by this … this humiliating alliance.’

Kuutma released his hold on the boy and made a brusque gesture. Alus and Taria took Rush away, handling him a good deal more roughly than before.

Nahir’s face, now, was almost as transparent as the boy’s had been. The whole course of his affections for Diema, his hopes, and the crisis into which he was now thrown, could be read there.

‘I will not pronounce on it,’ Kuutma said, speaking mostly to Diema herself. ‘Not yet. The time is too pressing. Diema, I will allow you to bring your Adamite menagerie to New York, and I will guarantee their safety until this threat is dealt with. After that, we will speak further on these matters. For now, we set them aside.’

But Nahir wasn’t quite done. His whole body shaking, he spat out the hrach bishat, the formal execration that made him Diema’s accuser.

‘Are you sure you want this?’ Kuutma asked Nahir.

Nahir made no answer. There was nothing to be said: too much had been said already.

‘You will return with us,’ Kuutma told Nahir. ‘Make the arrangements.’

He pondered that decision now, alone in his room in het retoyet, while in the city around him, his Messengers moved in and out among the Adamites, weaving their invisible skein. Surely so great a concentration of Elohim in one place had never been seen before, in all the ages since Christ’s death. Perhaps Ber Lusim was right: perhaps these were, after all, the end times.

Or perhaps he was just growing old.

Old men, past their prime, were wont to second-guess their own decisions.

There was no doubt in his mind as to what Diema’s performance was meant to achieve. She had chosen a course of action — perhaps the only course of action — that would bring Tillman, Kennedy and the boy out of Budapest alive. Because she’d reasoned, correctly, that leaving them behind in Nahir’s hands would mean consigning them to their deaths. So she’d demonstrated that Tillman and the rhaka were still valuable alive, and then she’d extended to the boy the temporary but binding status of an out-father.

It was clever and deeply troubling — that his protégée, his agent, his almost-daughter should waste so much effort to such an end. As though she had lost the Elohim’s necessary indifference to Adamite lives. As though she had forgotten, all at once, the rules that licensed and governed her.

But it wasn’t so sudden, he corrected himself. There had been the boy she killed, and her inability to put his death behind her. The warning signs had been there from the start.

Kuutma knew he had been right, in any case, to bring Nahir back to Ginat’Dania. If they all survived this, the Sima would hear Nahir’s accusation against Diema, and pronounce on it. It would mean exile for one of them. This needed to be done at once. It couldn’t be allowed to fester.

But to place Nahir in Diema’s team — to force them to work together — that was unnecessary cruelty. It showed Kuutma the mirror of his own failings. He had put too much faith in the girl, allowed her inside his guard, and now he felt a sense of grief and anger that was largely personal, when he should be entirely Kuutma, the Brand, his individual emotions sublimed away by the heat of righteousness.

He had never had a family. The women he had known had never been as real to him as his vocation, his life of service, and he had let them drift away with no sense of loss.

For the first time, now, he found himself thinking about what Tillman had lost. Then about what Tillman had destroyed, with his own hands. It would not be possible to imagine two men who had lived more different, more opposed lives than himself and that man. The Adamite’s purely private, purely selfish quest, as against his own public life, his relentless self-abnegation.

But he knew what it was he was feeling, and the facile comparison didn’t blunt the force of it. Nahir’s jealousy, so blatant and indecent, allowed him to see his own for what it was — but it gave him no clue as to what he should do about it. Perhaps he would be fortunate. Perhaps the decision would be taken out of his hands.

Perhaps the world would end.

65

Three miles out from Manhattan, breaking the speed limit in the back of a truck that had air conditioning but no suspension, Kennedy held on tight to a balance rail and to her kidneys, and tried not to think about the situation they were all in.

Rush was sunk in introspective misery. The two female Elohim, Alus and Taria, sat in perfect stillness, seeming indifferent to their surroundings but, Kennedy was sure, supremely aware of them. Tillman was awake but very weak — and strapped onto a bench at the front end of the truck so that the incessant jolts and bounces didn’t send him sprawling. There was still a danger that they would open his wounds, and Kennedy could see from the expression of concentration on his sweat-sheened face the effort it was costing him to keep himself from fainting every time they hit a bad stretch of road. Diema stood a few feet away from him, her feet bracing her into a corner, staring at her father with an expression of deep thoughtfulness. Nahir watched them all, the way a cat watches a mousehole.

The journey from Hungary hadn’t given Kennedy any real time to talk with Tillman or with Rush. It had been a chaotic, seemingly endless ordeal involving a breakneck drive out of Budapest on narrow, crowded streets, across the Slovak border into the ragged industrial outskirts of Levice. And then a night flight out of a private airfield near Podluzany that turned out to be no airfield at all, but a newly laid runway in the middle of nowhere — just fresh tarmac poured over grass and weeds and smoothed with garden rollers while it cooled. Their feet, as they walked to the plane, had stuck to the still-wet surface and come up again with audible pops and smacks.

On the flight, they’d torn out a row of seats and adapted the row behind into a makeshift travois for Tillman, strapping him in with seatbelts and duct tape all along his body’s length. He was drifting in and out of consciousness: the Elohim doctor seemed to favour a pain-control regime that was basically a chemical sledgehammer. But in one of his brief periods of lucidity, Kennedy was at last able to ask him how he was feeling.

‘Fine,’ was all he’d said. ‘I’m good, Heather. Only hurts when I laugh.’

‘She sold us out, Leo,’ Kennedy had said, leaning close to murmur the words in his ear. ‘As soon as you were down, on Gellert Hill, she took us home to meet the folks. They’re running this, now. Running us.’

Tillman had smiled at that, a little lopsidedly because his system hadn’t purged itself of the sedatives yet. ‘I’m her folks,’ he said.

Which startled and appalled Kennedy, because she thought it must have been her that gave it away. ‘You knew that?’

‘Yes. I knew that. That was why I followed her signal, back there on the hill. I knew there was a possibility you might be in trouble, too. And the lad. But I heard … gunfire, explosions, all around her. I couldn’t leave her there. I’m sorry about leaving you to fend for yourself.’

‘Don’t be,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘How did you know, Leo? What did I say?’

He shook his head, very slowly. ‘Nothing. Well, you said at Dovecote that you only came to find me after you’d met Diema. You didn’t say it was because you’d met her, but that seemed to be the implication.’

‘Damn,’ Kennedy said bitterly.

‘But I would have known, anyway. She’s the spitting image of her mother.’

‘I think the resemblance ends right there.’ She had to say it, however much it hurt him. Otherwise, he’d only be hurt worse later. ‘She doesn’t give a good goddamn about any of us. She got them to stick a needle in your heart to wake you up, so they could question you.’

Tillman winced — pain from his wounds or from the words. ‘Good,’ he said.

‘Good?’

‘She doesn’t know me from Adam, and Adam was a piece of shit in her book. A million dead, Heather. That’s what’s about to happen. She plays the hand she’s dealt, which is what I’d want her to do. What I’d do.’

The conversation had to stop then, because they were coming in for a landing. It was Diema who loomed suddenly at their shoulders to tell them that — and in retrospect, there was no way of knowing how long she’d been listening.

How they’d gotten into the USA at all was still a mystery to Kennedy. Probably they hadn’t, officially. The plane had had to clear customs, of course, but there had been no inspection of its contents and — in her case, and Tillman’s, and Rush’s — no passport checks or immigration procedures. Kennedy’s best guess was that the remote field where they’d landed was mostly used by drug runners and that the Judas People were just taking advantage of an existing network of bribes, bungs and semi-professional courtesies. As far as US Customs were concerned, they were all airfreight. Whoever pocketed the kickback didn’t care whether they were sex workers, terrorists or camera-shy rock stars.

So they’d never had a chance, at any stage in the proceedings, to cut loose from their Elohim handlers and ask for sanctuary. They were here on Diema’s terms, and at her mercy, as they had been ever since the battle on Gellert Hill. They’d fallen off the edge of the world, and into another world that ran along next to it. Now their fate was in the hands of lunatics and children.

And it was a little after nine on a misty, sunny Sunday morning, which meant that there were ten hours left to Armageddon.

The truck took a turn very sharply, rocking on its base like a boat on a rising tide. One of Kuutma’s women — Alus, Kennedy thought — spoke through a security grille to the other, who was driving. Both had changed into security guard livery in case the truck got stopped at any stage. Everyone else had been given a change of clothes before they left Budapest, so they were now dressed in smart casual clothes that wouldn’t attract a second glance. Except that Tillman looked like a dead man walking and Rush’s face (though the swelling had gone down) was crossed and recrossed with ant-tracks of surgical suture.

‘Where are we?’ Diema asked Alus.

‘He vuteh,’ the woman answered shortly. ‘The tunnel.’

Diema looked at Kennedy, then at Tillman, ignoring Rush. ‘We’ve reached the Lincoln Tunnel,’ she said. ‘We’re crossing into Manhattan. We have to decide where we want to go first.’

‘The factory,’ Tillman muttered. His voice was indistinct. ‘Up in the Bronx. Where Lusim milled the ricin. I want to see it.’

‘The factory’s already been searched by our people,’ Alus said. ‘You won’t find anything they missed.’

Tillman didn’t waste energy arguing with her and Kennedy knew why. It was still Diema’s operation and her voice was the one that counted.

Diema spoke to Alus — it sounded like a single word — and Alus spoke through the grille to Taria.

‘This is foolish,’ Nahir said to Diema, in a low, fierce voice. ‘A waste of time. Everyone else is searching the north end of the island.’

‘You see a point in us doing what everyone else is doing?’ Tillman asked him.

Diema said something else to Nahir, in quick-fire Aramaic, and he fell silent. Do as you’re told, Kennedy guessed. So Diema trusted Tillman’s instincts, whatever else. So did she, for that matter. Everyone needs a rock to cling to when the flood comes.

Nothing to do now until they got through the Uptown traffic to the Henry Hudson Bridge, and over into the Bronx. Kennedy crossed to Rush, who was still lost in his own fathom less thoughts, and put a hand on his shoulder.

He looked up at her, his face tired and bleak.

‘Hanging in there?’ she asked him.

‘I’m okay,’ he said. He even tried a smile.

‘I don’t think any of us are okay, Rush. But you haven’t said a word since Budapest. Did something happen there?’

‘Lots of things happened there.’

‘That’s true,’ Kennedy acknowledged. ‘But you gave a good account of yourself. Faced a stone killer and came away alive, which is one-nil for the home team. You’re not going to have to do that again, if that’s what’s worrying you. If we figure out where Kuutma’s going to make his strike, it’s Kuutma’s people who will go in. Not us.’

‘It’s not that,’ Rush said. ‘It’s … I …’ He seemed to wrestle with the next word for a long time. Kennedy realised that Nahir was watching them both from the other side of the narrow space, and moved to block his line of sight. The sound of the traffic and the rumbling of the truck’s diesel engine would drown out any sound they were making.

‘What?’ she asked him.

‘She’s in trouble with her people,’ Rush said. ‘Diema. And I think it’s because of me.’

The thought that he might be concerned about the girl had never occurred to Kennedy and it blindsided her completely. ‘What?’ she asked stupidly.

‘It was something that happened at the safe house. I think she might be under arrest, or something. The shithead over there, Nahir — he was mouthing off at her, and then the scary bald guy got a turn, too, and then he said he’d make a judgment.’

‘A judgment about what? Do you have any idea?’

He shook his head. ‘I wish I hadn’t come here,’ he muttered bleakly. ‘I haven’t made the slightest bit of difference. I don’t know why I thought I could. All I’ve done is screw things up.’

‘This — what we’re doing right now — it isn’t your area of expertise,’ Kennedy said gently. ‘Or mine.’

He looked up and met her concerned gaze. ‘Heather, I haven’t got an area of expertise.’

Kennedy took the typescript of Toller’s book out of her handbag and handed it to him.

‘Yeah, you do,’ she said. ‘Same as mine. We’re the detectives, Ben. That’s why they need us.’

The truck rolled to a halt at last, and Taria unlocked and opened its rear doors from the outside. They stepped out into daylight for the first time in two hours. Taria and Alus, with surprising care and gentleness, helped Tillman down off the tailgate of the truck. Kennedy had to remind herself that they’d be just as happy to cut his throat, if the order came down. You couldn’t lower your guard around these people.

Any of them.

The factory was a shell, most of its windows broken or boarded, graffiti climbing its walls like moss. It stood on an apron of asphalt that was being ripped apart in slow motion by bramble and knotweed. Pigeons nested on the ledges of the higher windows and in holes in the walls where bricks had fallen out. The air was heavy with their insinuations. There was a sign, also streaked with birdshit. It read PARNASSUS IRON AND STEEL COMPANY, with a stylised picture of a mountain behind it like the Paramount logo.

Beyond a sagging chain-link fence, the waters of the Harlem River lapped at a concrete pier on which an ancient sofa sat, mildewed and foul. There was a small, dense cluster of empty beer bottles standing next to the sofa and a cairn of polystyrene boxes bearing the McDonald’s logo. Further in the background, but dominating everything, the towers of Manhattan rose like a dream: the land of milk and honey, just across the water.

One of Kuutma’s Messengers, who looked to be about the same age as Diema or maybe a year older, had been stationed at the factory’s main doors to await their arrival. He was dressed in torn jeans and a faded STROKES T-shirt, but he came to attention as Diema approached and greeted her with the sign of the noose, instantly on his mettle. She seemed to know him.

‘Raziel,’ she said.

He blushed with pleasure at being recognised. ‘Ready to serve you, sister,’ he said. He stood aside for her without a word and fell in behind her. The rest of the party, apart from the driver, followed her inside the building. Tillman, leaning heavily on Kuutma’s two angels, brought up the rear.

‘Where are the vats?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to see them.’

Raziel looked to Diema, who nodded. ‘Do as he says.’

Raziel led them to a massive room that seemed to take up most of the factory’s interior space. Certainly its ceiling, far over their heads, was the underside of the building’s roof, buttressed with massive steel beams and festooned with looped and dangling cables. The pigeons flew to and fro up there, and everything in sight was speckled chalk-white with their droppings. The beating of their wings reminded Kennedy very suddenly and strongly of a bike she’d had when she was seven. She’d slipped playing cards through the spokes of the rear wheel, and the sound when she rode it was exactly the same, she realised now, as the sound of pigeons taking startled flight.

In the centre of the room, obviously much newer than anything else in the place but already mottled with guano, stood seven massive tubs. They were of yellow plastic and they came up to Kennedy’s shoulder. In each, there was an inch or so of thick green slurry or paste.

‘Get me some of that,’ Tillman said. ‘But don’t touch it with your hands.’

Taria found a length of wooden slat and used it as a spoon, scooping up a little of the muck. She held it out to Tillman, who leaned his weight against a cement pillar before he took the slat and sniffed at the gooey mess.

‘Is that the toxin?’ Kennedy asked him.

‘No, it’s too wet,’ Tillman said. ‘This is just cake. Ber Lusim’s people would have crushed the beans here, expressed the oil, and then filtered the residue a whole bunch of times. But they’d still have needed to precipitate the ricin. That’s a two-stage process. We’re looking for a room with a lot of wide, flat trays in it.’

‘Why are we looking for it?’ Nahir asked, with sarcastic emphasis.

Ignoring him, Diema barked out a terse command. Raziel and the angels made the sign of the noose and got moving at once. Nahir stayed where he was.

‘Na be’hiena se ve rach chain of command,’ Diema said to him. Her tone was mild, but her eyes were narrowed. Nahir met that gaze for a second or two longer, then joined the search.

That left Diema and the three of them. She turned to Tillman. ‘You’ve seen a place like this before?’ she asked him.

‘Twice.’ He held up two fingers, counted them off. ‘The first time in Afghanistan, the second time right here in America. Texas. Small-scale outfits, both times, and as far as we could tell, neither of them processed enough ricin to hurt anyone. Except themselves, maybe. This looks to be a slicker operation.’ He pointed at some bags of chemicals stacked up next to the vats. ‘Sodium sulfate. Carbon tet. Lots of both. And seven vats means they had batches refining and drying all the time. A real assembly line.’

He reached up a hand to scratch his chest, but was defeated by the thick layers of dressings and gave up after a moment or two. ‘It’s the delivery system, every time,’ he murmured.

‘What is?’ Diema asked.

Tillman looked at her, shrugged one shoulder: the other was holding most of his weight. ‘The problem with ricin. It’s really nasty stuff. Kills if it’s inhaled, or swallowed, or if you get any of it inside your system some other way. But you need more than a grain or two. You need a thick aerosol spray or a solid pellet. Did you ever hear of Georgi Markov?’

Diema shook her head.

‘A Bulgarian writer, and a political dissident. Lived in London in the 1970s. He was saying harsh things about the Soviets, and they wanted to shut him up, so someone got an assassin to stab him with the sharp end of an umbrella. Three days of agony, then he died. The umbrella had been rigged to deliver a pellet of ricin about a millimetre in diameter.’

‘Which is fine if you want to kill one Bulgarian,’ Diema said.

Tillman nodded. ‘But you can’t bomb New York with poisonous umbrellas. You need a delivery system that will flood the streets with millions of those pellets or with billions of smaller solid particles in suspension. If we figure out the system, we’ll know where to find Ber Lusim. And whatever it is he’s come up with, this is where he put it together, so there might be a clue here.’

Nahir and Raziel returned, followed a few minutes later by Taria and then Alus. ‘Nothing,’ Nahir said. ‘No trays, and no obvious surface on which trays might have been ranged or racked. You appear to be mistaken.’

Tillman turned — slowly, carefully, shifting his weight with some difficulty — to look at the Messenger. ‘Maybe about the logistics,’ he said. ‘Not about the chemistry. This process would have produced a pulpy mass, and once it’s dried the ricin is skimmed off the surface. You lay it out flat in a shallow tray because you want a big surface area. If Ber Lusim didn’t do that here, then he took the refined pulp away and skimmed it somewhere else.’

‘A secondary processing plant,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe over in Manhattan itself. Would there be any way of identifying it?’

Tillman shook his head reluctantly. ‘No, it’s a pretty streamlined operation. This is the biggest and the hardest part of the job. Pressing the beans, extracting the oil and processing the pulp. That takes time, manpower and a lot of powerful chemical solvents. But when you’re skimming it, all you need is a blade.’

‘And gloves,’ Diema said. ‘Presumably.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t want to touch the stuff, certainly. Or breathe it in. You’d have your harvesters in protective body suits with their own air supply. But unless they go out for a cigarette break and forget to change into their street clothes, I don’t see where that helps us.’

‘In any case, the skimming wouldn’t still be going on now,’ Kennedy pointed out. ‘Whatever Ber Lusim intends to do, we’ve got to assume he’s got it all in place and ready to go.’

‘The trucks that dropped the castor beans and chemicals off here,’ Taria said. ‘Where did they go afterwards?’

Kennedy had never heard Taria speak before and she was surprised that the woman’s voice was light and soft rather than sonorous.

‘I don’t know,’ Diema admitted. ‘And it’s a good question. Nahir, find out.’

Nahir took out a cellphone and dialled, without protest or argument. The earlier conversation about the chain of command must have struck a chord, Kennedy thought.

While he spoke, either to Kuutma or more likely to some subordinate, Tillman made his own painfully slow circuit of the factory. Kennedy went with him, supporting some of his weight.

There was nothing in the main room that caught his attention, but at the back of the space, furthest from the door through which they’d entered, there was a double-door that had once been padlocked. A length of chain still hung from one of the two handles, and the wood of the doors themselves was splintered around the edges. At first, Kennedy thought that Kuutma’s Elohim must have forced the door when they searched the place. Then she realised that the broken chain was welded to the woodwork with immemorial deposits of pigeon shit. It had been there a long time.

In the space beyond, they found a grease pit. Tillman examined it closely, even though he had to kneel down to do so. It was a massive space, about twenty feet by ten in area and five feet deep, with two parallel bars of pitted, rusted iron laid across the bottom. ‘There would have been some kind of hydraulic lift here,’ Tillman thought aloud. ‘Back when this place was still up and running, I mean.’

‘Are you wondering whether Ber Lusim could have laid trays or racks out down there, to skim off the ricin?’ Kennedy asked him.

‘Thought had crossed my mind.’

It looked unlikely, at first glance. The floor of the pit was filled with a thick, foul sediment of oil and slurry.

But Kennedy tapped with her foot at the edge of the pit. Tillman looked where the toe of her shoe was pointing: fresh scuff and scrape marks showed light against the ingrained oil stains at the edge of the pit, and a bisected crust of pigeon shit indicated where a piece of rusty sheet metal had been moved.

‘Something got done here, anyway,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe he threw a cover over the pit and set the racks out on that.’

Tillman scanned the bare room slowly, with intense and silent concentration. Then he made a circuit of the pit, which took a good ten minutes, and finally rejoined Kennedy.

‘Plenty of evidence of movement,’ he said. ‘Heavy stuff being dragged around. I think you’re right, Heather. Ber Lusim processed the ricin right here, and then he hauled it out. What I’m looking for is some kind of clue as to what else he might have done with it first. Whether it’s still just loose powder or it’s been packed into jackets or containers of some kind. Aerosol sprayers is a possibility, but then we ought to find some more chemical residues. He’d have been messing with propanes or ether compounds to make a propellant, and the smell would be all over here.’

Kennedy looked at her watch. It was 14.48. Four hours and twelve minutes left. ‘Let’s go see if Nahir found anything on those HEH transports,’ she suggested.

They found that the others had returned to the truck. Rush was sitting on the tailgate, leafing through the typescript of Toller’s book, while Diema was speaking to the other Elohim in their native tongue.

She turned to Tillman and Kennedy as they approached, and switched to English. ‘The trucks went from here to a rented lot at Locust Point,’ she said. ‘Four miles east. They’re still there. Nobody’s used them since, as far as we can tell.’

‘Okay,’ Tillman said. ‘Did you check for—’

Nahir rode right over him. ‘They’re empty, and they’ve been stripped clean. Nothing to go on. Nothing we can use. And the site rental was paid through a front company in Belgium. It was a dead end.’

‘But there’s something else,’ Diema added. ‘Kuutma has been working through the satellite images, and he found something. The time we know about — when they delivered the castor beans — that was the second time this place was visited. HEH trucks came here another time, a week earlier. So there could be something else, besides the ricin. Another threat.’

‘No,’ Rush said.

Nahir shot the boy a look of sheer exasperation and muttered something in Aramaic.

‘It doesn’t make sense, that’s all,’ Rush said, with a defensive shrug. ‘The prophecy talks about one thing. One breath, killing a million people. Not multiple attacks.’

‘He’s right,’ Kennedy said. ‘Whatever was in the first delivery, it has to relate to the ricin. It’s all got to be tied together, somehow. Can we find out what it was?’

‘We’re trying,’ Diema said. ‘The information could be in the computers we took in Gellert Hill. We just can’t afford to wait for it. We’ve either got to find Ber Lusim or else we’ve got to cover every base.’

Kennedy felt a wave of fatalistic despair sweep over her, like a sudden paralysis. There was too much ground to make up and too little time. Ber Lusim had set the agenda all along, and everything they’d done had achieved nothing more than getting them ringside seats for his command performance. Under the circumstances, it was hard to make herself believe that anything they did now could matter.

But Diema was still pacing, her face fierce with thought. And Tillman, watching her, was wearing an expression that was both more complicated and more painful. His desire to help her, to make her mission succeed, was palpable. He’d almost died trying, and it wasn’t over yet.

What was left? What had they missed? What could they still hope to do, in the dog end of time they still had?

‘You said your people checked the water already?’ she asked Diema.

‘Yes,’ Diema said tersely. ‘There’s nothing out there now that shouldn’t be there. And there are Elohim stationed at the confluence of the rivers. If anything unscheduled comes down into this stretch, they’ll keep a watch on it — and fire on it if they have to.’

At the confluence of the rivers. That meant at the northern end of Manhattan, right across the water from where they were now. Kennedy wondered whether Diema knew how much she was giving away here, and decided that the answer was almost certainly yes. Whatever else she was, the girl was no fool.

Ber Lusim’s big finale was also his homecoming. Where else would one of the chosen expect the Messiah to descend? So now Kennedy had found Ginat’Dania twice — and this time she hadn’t even been looking for it. It was one more problem that would have to be faced at some point: whether there was any way the three of them could get out of this alive, knowing what they now did.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘And you’ve got the street traffic covered. Air dispersal seems like the best bet — maybe the only bet — but there’s no way he’s going to get in close by diverting a commercial flight. Nine/eleven closed that loophole.’

‘And we’ve got effective lockdowns on all private airfields,’ Alus said. ‘Nothing can get into the air without our Elohim seeing it. And if they don’t like what they see, they’ll swat it down before it even gets off the runway.’

‘Subway trains.’ Kennedy didn’t even believe it as she said it, but there was no point in missing the obvious.

‘There’s only one station in what we think is the target zone,’ Diema told her. ‘207th Street, at the top of Broadway. It’s the northern terminus for one of the main underground lines, so there’s no through traffic to worry about. But Kuutma has stationed Messengers on the platforms and in the streets around, just in case Ber Lusim tries to bring anything in that way.’

‘That way? Meaning in a train? Okay, but suppose he’s setting something up in the tunnels? Maybe it’s worth sending a team in to check.’

‘You’re not thinking of the numbers,’ Nahir told Kennedy scornfully. ‘At the end of the line, there will be the lowest concentration of people. The whole New York subway and Metropolitan transit network — across all the boroughs and outlying areas — handles about four million passengers in the space of a day. Perhaps more, but not many more. What percentage of those do you think will visit 207th Street and Broadway, rhaka? I guarantee you that it’s not a quarter of them.’

Kennedy did her best to ignore the anger that rose inside her. It didn’t help that Nahir was right.

‘Maybe we should forget about the maps, for a while,’ she suggested.

‘And do what?’ Nahir’s politeness was even more scathing than his contempt.

‘And go back to the book. Rush, could you give us the last prophecy again?’

Rush glanced at her, nodded, and turned to the final page of the typescript. She wondered what page he’d been reading, if it wasn’t that one. He began to read aloud. ‘And the stone shall be rolled away from the tomb, as it was the time before—’

‘We know what it says,’ Diema said. Her tone was tense, strained. They were all getting close to the ragged edge.

‘Sure,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But have we accounted for all the variables? The stone and the tomb, and the voice crying out — yes. That all happened when Shekolni died. And presumably “the time before”, when the stone was first rolled away, is the time of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Toller seems to be saying that at least some of the circumstances of Christ’s second coming will be like the first one.’

‘Obviously,’ Nahir said.

‘And then there’s the breath. “He will condemn a great multitude with a single breath.” If Ber Lusim is as literal-minded with this as he’s been with the other prophecies, he’ll have turned the ricin into some kind of gas.’

‘That’s what we’re assuming,’ Diema said. There was still an edge to her voice, as if this were a distraction from more important things.

‘How high does he have to be to get the stuff out on the wind?’ Kennedy wondered. ‘Has anyone done the maths?’

‘It’s not a question of height,’ Nahir said. ‘With a microlight aircraft, he could cover an area of—’

‘I’m not thinking of aircraft. I’m thinking of window ledges. Rooftops. Terraces. Suppose he’s just relying on the wind? Ricin spreads best as a powder. If he’s refined it into that form, he could have tons of the stuff ready to shovel out into the air. You’re thinking crop sprayers and microlights, but maybe he’ll use a low-tech solution.’

Diema had already picked up her phone. A second later, she was having a conversation, either with Kuutma or with someone else in the hierarchy.

Locked out again, Kennedy gave the typescript back to Rush.

‘I think we may be about to hit the road,’ she said. ‘Get ready.’

Diema lowered her phone. ‘The prevailing wind is westerly,’ she said. ‘But only for the last couple of hours. It’s predicted to be from the north, which is where it’s been for most of the last three days. Kuutma is sending spotters up to the tops of the tallest buildings. They’ll look for suspicious movement. But we’re talking about thousands of windows and hundreds of rooftops. He’s…’ She hesitated, picking her words with care. ‘He’s going to try to draft in some additional Elohim.’

‘He’s asking for volunteers,’ Tillman translated. ‘Raising a posse of concerned citizens.’

There was another pause. Diema nodded.

Nahir muttered something savage and Diema shut him up with a terse ‘Ve rahi!’ She’d just confirmed that Ginat’Dania was right here and the fact had not gone unnoticed by the other Messengers.

Kennedy tried not to think about that. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ she said. ‘But a wind out of the north will be passing right through here, won’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Diema confirmed. ‘Kuutma already made that point. He’ll send some people — as many as he can. But we’re stretched very thin now. It’s possible that we can’t check every possible location in time.’

‘Then let’s get started,’ Kennedy said. ‘We can work outward from this place in semi-circular sweeps, doubling back on ourselves every time we hit the river.’

‘Two hours left,’ Tillman mused. ‘I’m not saying you’re wrong, Heather, but maybe this is the wrong time to be putting all our eggs in one basket.’

‘The only basket we have,’ Diema countered. ‘Unless anyone can think of anything better, that’s what we’re going to do.’

She waited, looking from face to face. Nobody spoke.

‘Then it’s agreed. We pair up, with a Messenger in each pair, so that we can stay in touch with each other and with Kuutma.’

‘Can I be paired with you?’ Rush asked her.

‘No,’ Diema said.

Rush tried again, tentative but stubborn. ‘I’d like … I need to talk to you about some stuff. Please. Let me go with you.’

‘We’ll talk later, Rush. For now, you go with Taria. Alus, you’re with Kennedy. I’ll go with—’

‘I’m staying here,’ Tillman said. ‘This is a tall building. If I can find my way up to the roof, I can get the lay of the land from here. I’ll just slow you down, in any case. You’ll get twice as much done without me, and I can keep in touch with you by phone. If anything else occurs to me, I’ll pass it along.’

‘He’ll need to be guarded,’ Nahir said, ignoring Tillman and speaking directly to Diema. ‘More than ever now, after your incautious words. He can’t be left alone, to speak to others of his kind, or leave messages. Someone has to watch him, from now until—’

‘Then watch him,’ Diema snapped.

‘Yeah,’ Rush said. ‘That’ll work.’ He stood up, whacking the rolled typescript against the side of the truck and producing a bass-drum boom. They all looked at him — much as they’d looked at Taria when she’d proved she had a voice. His face was full of anger and confusion and hurt pride. ‘I mean, it’s not like your friend there will kill us as soon as your back is turned. It’s not like he was trying to persuade your boss to finish us off back in Budapest. He’s a reasonable man. I bet he’d never even dream of sharpening his knife on Leo’s kidneys.’

Diema was rigid with impatience, standing on the balls of her feet. ‘He’ll follow his orders,’ she said tightly. ‘Kuutma said he’d give a ruling. You’re safe until he’s pronounced on you.’

‘So you say. If Leo stays, I’m staying too. And I’ll be watching your friend the whole time he watches us.’ He stared at her, looking close to tears, and she looked back at him with a face like a closed fist. If it was a staring contest, Rush lost. He held up the typescript like a shield in front of his eyes. ‘Anyway, Kennedy said the answer’s in here and I believe her. So you do what you want. I’ll stick around and catch up on my reading.’

‘As you like,’ Diema said curtly. ‘We’ll spend an hour on this, then regroup here. And we’ll stay in touch by phone, in the meantime. Those who are coming, come.’

Along with Alus, Taria, Kennedy and Raziel, she headed out. Diema and Kennedy took the truck, since somebody had to. The others took to the streets on foot.

66

A feeling of despair welled up inside Rush as he watched Diema leave.

Brief as it was, their lovemaking had left him feeling more bruised and blown open than he’d felt at any time since the death of his ex-girlfriend, Siobhan — the one who’d killed herself.

Then Kuutma had shone a light on the whole thing that was crazy but plausible. Diema had done that to him — seduced him, or raped him, or ricocheted off him — because for some reason she wanted to get pregnant. Maybe it was like that tired bullshit you heard about single mothers and council flats. Girls having babies so they could jump the queue. Maybe Ginat’Dania had a housing shortage.

But when he got that far, and tried to imagine Diema — who he thought of as an unexploded bomb in human form — knitting woollen booties, breast-feeding, pushing a stroller, it was like trying to paint the two sides of a Moebius strip in different colours.

If that was all, if she’d needed a quick delivery system for some DNA, he’d still feel stupid but he could let it go. What was hard was the not knowing: the feeling that his pocket had been picked, somehow, while his attention was elsewhere, and that he couldn’t figure out what had been taken.

But the more Diema ducked away from talking to him, the more certain he was that it was something that mattered.

As soon as they were out of sight, Tillman turned to Nahir.

‘So is she right?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to stick to your orders and work with me? Or are we going to have to fight this out? I know you don’t lie, so I figure it’s worth asking. It would be useful to know if I can turn my back on you.’

The Messenger stared at him — stared at both of them — with stony calm. The hate was still there, too, but it was a good way back and under control. And something else was working under the uncommunicative surface of his face. Maybe he’s afraid, Rush thought. Diema had as good as told them that this was her home town — Ginat’Dania, the great mysterious refuge. He hadn’t figured out yet how you hid a city in the middle of New York, but if that was what they’d done, Nahir — along with all the Elohim — might be about to become a homeless orphan. Under the circumstances, it was pretty much of a miracle that they were keeping it together as well as they were. Maybe being batshit crazy was protecting them from the worst of it. Rush knew that the only reason he was staying so calm himself was because his mind couldn’t make the phrase a million dead mean anything: it just kept slipping off at an oblique angle.

‘There would be no fight,’ Nahir said with chilly dignity. ‘If I were to decide that you and this boy should die, I’d kill you. But I would hardly have waited, in that case, until you stood on this holiest of ground. I would have killed you out among the Nations. I could have dealt with you while Diema was leading us into Gellert Hill. I thought about doing that. But I take the oaths I’ve sworn seriously. Obedience in a soldier is what chastity is in a marriage.’

Tillman raised his eyebrows at the comparison. ‘You mean it’s precious because it’s so rare?’

‘I’m getting tired,’ Rush said, ‘of being called a boy. Just thought I’d throw that out there.’

‘I want to get up to the roof,’ Tillman said. ‘Take a look at the neighbourhood from up there. Supposing you’re still feeling chaste, I’d appreciate some help with that. Are there any stairs in this place?’

It turned out there were, and with both Nahir and Rush taking some of his weight, Tillman was able to climb them. A steel door, hanging halfway off its hinges, gave onto a narrow walkway with the main pitch of the roof above and behind it. There was a parapet wall just high enough to trip over and a congregation of pigeons that scattered when Rush pushed the door open.

Gravel crunched under their feet as they stepped out. The Bronx was laid out before them, wearing the beauty of the evening like a garment — a peephole bra, maybe, or something similarly sleazy and enticing. Warehouses and office blocks close to hand gave way to streets of low-rises and row houses further to the north and east.

A thousand terraces, rising like the steps of an amphitheatre. New York’s vast, vertical concatenation.

A thousand places for a madman to sit and watch the sun go down, and throw his poisoned confetti.

Nahir and Tillman began to discuss wind speed and elevation. Rush left them to it, certain that they didn’t need him and wouldn’t see him go.

He went back down the stairs, into the big room with the vats. He found a patch of sunlight coming through a hole in the roof and sat to read Toller’s book one final time.

Diema let Kennedy drive, because she trusted her own instinct and observation more than she trusted anyone else’s. But the hopelessness of the task began to sink in before they’d gone half a mile. The possible launch points for an aerial release of the powdered ricin were pretty close to infinite — and unless they happened to see Ber Lusim loitering at a window or looking down from a roof, there was almost nothing to make any one stand out from the next.

Higher was better. Upwind was essential. They were searching a vast cone of three-dimensional space with the northern end of Manhattan Island as its base — and they were searching it from the ground.

Except that Kennedy wasn’t. She’d allowed the truck to roll to a halt, and she was looking south. Diema followed her gaze. They’d reached the end of a cross street — the sign told her it was 225th. Highway 9 was ahead of them, with a stretch of elevated railway rising like a rampart over the surface street. Beyond was just more of what they’d already seen, factories and marshalling yards and sheds, with occasional rows of shops whose windows were so grimy you couldn’t guess from this distance what it was they sold.

But just south of them, beyond the glittering arc of the Henry Hudson Bridge, Broadway opened up like a lover’s arms.

‘What’s the matter?’ Diema asked. ‘Why have you stopped?’

‘I’m just thinking of an old joke,’ Kennedy said. ‘When you’re buying real estate, what are the three most important things to bear in mind?’

‘I have no idea. Please keep moving.’

‘Location, location and location.’

Kennedy turned to look at her hard, and Diema understood what it was she was saying.

‘Ber Lusim’s factory,’ she murmured.

‘Exactly. Why here? Presumably he didn’t want to transport the poison a long way. Every time he moved it, he was risking being stopped, and found out. So he wanted to be close. But this close? I mean, that’s Ginat’Dania down there, isn’t it? A half-mile south of us?’

Diema said nothing.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Kennedy exploded. ‘Just nod!’

Slowly, with a prickle of superstitious dread, Diema forced her head to move — down once, then up again.

‘So I’m guessing he was well within the radius of your border patrols. There’s no way you wouldn’t keep a watch on your own front doorstep. He’s way too close, and way too visible.’

‘Perhaps it pleased his ego to play with us.’

Kennedy drummed the steering wheel with the heels of her thumbs, thinking. ‘Maybe. But is that what he was like, as a Messenger? Did he grandstand or did he get the job done?’

‘Mostly,’ Diema admitted, ‘he got the job done.’

‘Then I think we’re missing something. We’ve got to be. Otherwise—’

Diema’s phone rang, and although the rhaka seemed disposed to carry on talking, she silenced her with a raised hand. That tone meant Kuutma. And if Kuutma was calling her, he had something important to tell her or to ask her.

Rush had got sick of the final prophecy. They’d worried it to pieces and there didn’t seem to be any new insights to be gleaned. So he’d flicked back to the first page and started from scratch.

He was struck all over again by how ludicrous it was to read this crap as though it contained sacred truths. Toller wasn’t just barking, he was barking and boring — so hung up on the minutiae of his own time that he couldn’t talk about the eternal without making six or seven veiled references to the strictly contemporary.

Which, when you thought about it, was strange for one of the Judas People. Getting so caught up in local politics — Adamite politics — seemed like worrying about the weather forecast for the moon.

Something was nagging at Rush. It had been nagging at him when he read the scholarly accounts of Toller and the other Fifth Monarchists on the plane, and when he’d talked it over with Diema. It was the blunt end of an idea, but it wasn’t making enough of an impression to stick. It was just that general sense of wrongness or incongruity, combined with something really tiny and specific that he’d already noticed and wondered about, a discrepancy between the written accounts and the observable here and now.

A second later, as he got into the meat of the prophecies, it fell out of his head altogether, because something else struck him much more forcefully. It was sitting in the book’s opening paragraphs, and the only reason he hadn’t seen it before was because he’d been focusing on the actual text, rather than on the annotations that Kennedy had written in the margins or over the words. That French guy’s sleeve notes.

And so I stand upon the Muses’ Mountain, asking Inspiration of all, though my true Muse be Godde the Higheste. And here He doth deliver, through me unworthy, His final Judgment.

That was Toller. And over the words ‘the Muses’ Mountain’ Kennedy had written in neat black biro a single word.

Parnassus.

The word produced the image: the picture of a mountain on the sign they’d passed as they walked in here. Parnassus Iron and Steel.

Rush got to his feet. The nape of his neck prickled like someone was standing right behind him and breathing on it. Would Ber Lusim — or his Obi Wan, Avra Shekolni — have missed that reference? They’d taken everything else in the book literally as gospel. So it made sense that they would have felt the book had directed them to this place.

Which was empty. There was nobody here, and nowhere for them to be hiding. Kuutma’s Messengers had searched the building and found nothing.

But Rush felt that the silence around him had changed, somehow, and he didn’t feel like sitting down again. It was only a conditional silence, in any case. Just like anywhere in New York, the air carried the roar of traffic from the middle distance. This emptiness was in the heart of a great city. Rush was standing at the still centre of the turning world.

He stepped out of the sunlight and did a slow circuit of the room, with the manuscript rolled up in his hand. He moved quietly, because the echoes of his footsteps sounded disconcertingly loud. Whenever he stopped, he listened. But nothing was moving any closer than the traffic.

When he moved out of the main factory floor into the smaller rooms around it, Rush admitted to himself that this had become a search. He still didn’t know what it was he was looking for, but the uneasiness was eating at him and he wanted to be absolutely sure there was nothing there.

He found himself at last in front of the double doors that led through to the grease pit. He’d seen Kennedy and Tillman looking it over earlier, so he was pretty certain that there wouldn’t be anything to see here, but he went in anyway.

The pit was foul. Probably it had been left that way by the previous owners. The walls and floor of it were thick with industrial residue that might have been oil, tar, paint or most likely all of the above. There were puddles of water with an unhealthy, nacreous sheen to them, and a stink of baking bitumen hung over everything like the breath of a motorway on an August morning.

He looked up at the ceiling. There weren’t any obvious holes in it, but that didn’t mean anything. Water finds its level. The rain could have come in somewhere else and ended up in the pit because the pit was the lowest point.

There was no way of getting down there without ruining your clothes. If you sat down and lowered yourself in, the seat of your pants would get covered in the oily muck. If you jumped, you’d raise a splash.

He walked around the pit instead, feeling like an idiot and yet relieved at the same time that there was nothing to see.

Except that there was. Halfway around the rim, he walked into a shaft of sunlight that came in through a broken skylight high above him and hit one of the pit’s walls. Part of the wall must have been raised a little proud of the area around it, because there was a shadow — perfectly square, and about five feet on a side. It looked like there was a trapdoor in the wall, except that it was only the outline of a door. The colours and textures of that area of wall were exactly the same as the colours and textures to either side of them. It had to be a trick of the light, but it was a disconcerting one, and once he’d seen it he couldn’t trick himself into not seeing it again.

He stood irresolute at the edge of the pit. This was ridiculous. If there was something here, someone else — someone who knew what they were doing — would have found it by now.

The sun went behind a cloud, the ray of light disappeared and the imaginary door went with it. Rush turned away. But at the last moment before he walked out of the room, he remembered Diema’s words back at Dovecote.

Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for.

Bugger it.

Rush launched himself into the pit with an ungainly jump, landing heavily and sending up, just as he’d feared, a shower of variegated filth. He almost lost his footing, but saved himself by holding onto the wall.

One baby step at a time, scared both of what he was treading in and of what he was breathing, he crossed the pit to the wall where the tell-tale shadow had been. There was nothing there. No sign of a hinge or a handle, or of a physical break in the wall where a door might begin or end. But then, the oily residue that had been sluiced over everything made a pretty effective camouflage.

It was pretty fresh, too, and splashed a little thicker, here, than elsewhere on the wall.

Suppressing a shudder, Rush reached out and pushed his fingers into the thick muck. He ran them from right to left and back again, feeling for a break point, a crack in the structure. There was nothing like that.

But there was something else. Around about his chest height, there was a raised spot, rounded and about an inch and a half in diameter. A boss or the head of a rivet, maybe. Rush scooped the oily mess away from it and found a circular plate made of some dull, weathered metal.

It was pivoted at the top, so you could slide it sideways. Rush did so now.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he whispered.

He was looking at a keyhole.

Kennedy got out of the truck and walked to the corner of the street. Diema’s conversation with Kuutma didn’t look like ending any time soon, and since they were talking in their own language there was nothing to be gained from eavesdropping.

There was a lot of traffic on the main highway, but nobody walking anywhere in sight. The corner store had been a Blockbuster, but not for a while now. Displayed in its window were the upcoming movie sensations of a few years back. Wild Hogs. 300. Zodiac. A poster offered two movie rentals plus popcorn and a large bottle of Coke for $12.99. Underneath the poster lay a dead bird, something small and nondescript, like a sparrow or a dunnock, that had gotten itself in there and couldn’t get out again.

Two hours and some odd minutes to go, and they were treading water. But she couldn’t think of anything else they could do. In a city-wide game of hide-and-seek, the hider had it all over the seeker.

But she was right about the location. She knew there was something there, if she could only think it through. Ber Lusim had extracted and purified his toxin in a place that increased his own risk enormously. Why would someone who was supposed to be a master strategist do something that was so stupid on the face of it?

Maybe the answer was something really banal. When he first became a Messenger, Ber Lusim might have been sent out to patrol these streets. He could have found the old steelworks back then and kept it in mind. Except that back then, he’d still been sane and — you had to assume — wasn’t contemplating mass murder even as a distant possibility.

So make a different assumption. He chose the location later, nearer to the present time. He was looking for a specific feature and this place had it. And whatever it was, it was worth the risk of sending his highly visible bright-red trucks here twice, and maybe spending time here himself, within walking distance of the homeland where he was a wanted man.

Twice. The trucks came here twice. And the poison was the second shipment, not the first. But in that case…

Diema appeared at her shoulder without a sound, making her start violently. ‘Shit,’ she exclaimed.

The girl didn’t waste any time on apologies. ‘They found out what the first shipment was.’

‘Go on,’ said Kennedy.

‘It was conventional explosive. Ten thousand tons of octocubane and five kilos of acetone peroxide.’

Kennedy thought through the amounts. ‘Is the peroxide a primer?’

Diema nodded.

‘So how big a blast is that? Not big enough to kill a million, right?’

‘Big enough to take down most of a city block. Depending on where you placed it, you could easily get ten or twenty thousand casualties.’

It was clear that the girl wanted to head back for the truck. She made a feint in that direction now, looking at Kennedy expectantly, but Kennedy was fishing out the earlier thought about the trucks. Something was falling into place, and the explosive was the piece that made sense out of everything else.

‘Earth and air,’ she muttered.

Diema got the reference. ‘Toller’s book,’ she said. ‘“God will speak in fire and water, and last in earth and air.”’

‘We screwed up,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think we screwed up.’

‘How? What did we miss?’

‘We were thinking Ber Lusim had to release the ricin into the air.’

‘He does,’ Diema insisted. ‘That’s the only way you could get casualties on the scale the prophecy calls for.’

‘But microlights? Crop dusters? This is the most fiercely defended airspace in the world. He could never be sure of getting through. And my idea about balconies and rooftops — if the wind changes, he’s nowhere. He can’t wait. We know that much. Shekolni told us an exact time, not a vague ballpark.’

Diema’s mind was running parallel to hers now. ‘If earth and air were one thing, not two things …’

‘That’s it,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘You remember Nine/Eleven? You’d still have been at school, but—’

‘We remember,’ Diema said tightly.

‘When the towers fell, there was a dust cloud like nothing on earth. Thousands and thousands of tons of dust, racing through the streets on the shockwave, running the length and breadth of Manhattan. People got sick, just because of the dust. Some of them are still sick.’

‘Berukhot! He uses the explosive to blow up a building …’

‘To pulverise a building. Smash it into atoms. So you get a massive shockwave and a massive dust cloud. And the ricin is inside the building, so the dust cloud becomes a vector. It spreads out from here along the lines of the streets. Earth and air, all mixed together into a poison cocktail. It kills everyone who takes a breath.’

‘But where?’ Diema demanded. ‘Which building would he choose?’

‘The trucks only came those two times, Diema. They never came back.’

The girl stared at her, bewildered. ‘So?’

‘So he didn’t choose that factory because he liked the décor. He chose it because it’s right at the north end of Broadway. That’s his delivery system right there. He’s got himself a gun barrel thirteen miles long and eighty feet wide. I don’t think the poison ever left the building.’

Rush was having a hard time persuading Tillman and Nahir to come and look at what he’d found. In fact, he was having a hard time making them listen to him at all. Nahir’s feeling, when he finally let Rush say his piece, was that ‘found’ was probably the wrong word to use.

‘The building was searched by Elohim,’ he pointed out. His tone suggested that only a moron would need to have this explained to him. ‘Anything you’ve seen, you can be certain that they’ve also seen it and investigated it.’

‘But you can only see it from certain angles,’ Rush explained, trying hard to sound calm and rational. ‘And even then, only when the light hits it full-on. It’s camouflaged.’

‘Against amateurs,’ Nahir said. ‘Not against professionals.’

‘Where is this, Rush?’ Tillman asked.

‘In that empty swimming pool thing.’

‘The grease pit? Out toward the back of the building.’

‘Yes. That.’

Tillman looked doubtful. ‘I checked that over,’ he said. ‘With Kennedy. We think that was probably where Ber Lusim had his skimming trays. But there was no sign that he’d been there recently.’

Tillman’s tone was milder than Nahir’s, but the same assumptions were behind it. ‘Shit!’ Rush yelled, ‘I am not making this up and I’m not stupid. I know what I saw. Now will you just come down and take a look at it?’

‘Later,’ Nahir said loftily. ‘We don’t have time for this now.’

Rush looked at his watch, which was showing forty-five minutes to zero hour. ‘Later?’ he repeated.

The two men had gone back to their discussion and neither of them answered. Nahir was evidently relaying whatever they were talking about to the Elohim out in the city. He had his phone to his mouth and was switching between muttered English and muttered Aramaic.

‘Sorry,’ Rush said. ‘Later’s no good to me.’

He swiped the phone out of Nahir’s hand and threw it over the parapet wall.

The look of surprise and rage on the Messenger’s face was pretty damn satisfying — but only for about a half a second. That was how long it took for Nahir to explode into violent motion and slam Rush to the ground in an agonising, total lock.

‘Are you mad?’ he hissed. ‘Do you want to die?’

‘Nobody’s killing anyone,’ Tillman said quietly — quietly enough that the click when he thumbed the safety of the Beretta sounded indecently loud. It was just as well that he took the reins of the conversation, because Rush’s windpipe was crimped tightly by what felt like Nahir’s elbow, and he couldn’t either talk or take a breath. His face was pressed flat against the gravel of the narrow walkway, without him having much idea of how it had got there, and none of his limbs were free to move. The ball was very much in everybody else’s court.

‘You should put the gun away,’ Nahir said to Tillman. ‘Or this will end badly.’

‘I’m happy to,’ Tillman told him. ‘But let the kid up. He was just trying to get our attention.’

‘He has my attention. And I can break his neck whether you fire on me or not.’

‘Works better if you let him up and I put this away.’

There was a short, painful silence. At least, it was painful for Rush.

‘I’ll release him,’ Nahir said. ‘But if he speaks again, I’ll break both of his arms.’

The immobilising pressure on every moving part of Rush’s body was suddenly eased as Nahir rose. Nonetheless, Rush stayed where he was. He could only be thrown down again if he made the mistake of getting up.

‘Come and see the frigging door,’ he said, his voice slightly strangulated.

‘You have been warned, boy.’

‘No,’ Tillman said. ‘Let’s go and see the door. You’ve convinced me, Rush. Whatever it is you’ve found, you just put your neck on the line for it.’

‘Whatever it takes,’ Rush wheezed, picking himself up.

They took the stairs even more slowly going down. Tillman seemed to be cramping up a little and needed a lot more support. He was okay over the flat, though, so Rush led the way to the double doors and pointed through them towards the pit.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Far side. Under the skylight.’

Nahir entered first, and Rush stood aside to let Tillman precede him, too. He wanted them to see for themselves. Then, belatedly, he noticed that the sun had gone in again, so they might not see the outline of the door at all. ‘Okay,’ he said, hurriedly stepping between them. ‘Let me show you.’

He needn’t have worried. The discontinuity in the wall of the grease pit was clearly visible, despite the poor light, because the door was standing open and the darkness beyond it was much deeper than the darkness on either side.

But it wasn’t the door that Nahir and Tillman were looking at.

It was the man standing on the opposite side of the pit, directly facing them.

‘This is unfortunate,’ the man said. His tone was calm, almost solemn.

‘Ber Lusim,’ Nahir gasped. He seemed frozen to the spot, unable to process what he was seeing.

And Rush felt something that was almost like vertigo. They’d come so far to attend this meeting, he felt for a split second as though maybe there was such a thing as predestination after all.

Ber Lusim was looking from one to the other of them, with cool, detached appraisal. If he felt threatened or alarmed at their being there, it didn’t show in his face or his stance — which when Rush thought about it was pretty frightening.

‘In these closing moments of the old order,’ Ber Lusim said to them, ‘it’s still possible for men to die. But after this last, great dying, death will end for ever.’ An incantatory quality had crept into his voice. ‘I feel, therefore, that it might be presumption on my part if I were to kill you. Arrogance. As though I asserted my citizenship of this time, this world, even as I usher in the next world, the world everlasting. I have no great desire to do that. Therefore, if you wish to die, you must express an explicit preference — or volunteer yourselves for death by some unambiguous action.’

Nahir crossed his hands over his chest and suddenly had two sica blades between his fingers.

Ber Lusim laughed, as though this were a joke that he richly appreciated.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Something like that.’

67

Nahir’s hands flashed outwards and up in a movement so fluid and graceful that he looked to Rush, for an insane moment, like a flamenco dancer striking the pose that begins the dance. The two knives, leaving his fingers at the same time, drew parallel lines in the air.

Ber Lusim barely seemed to move in response, but now there was a knife in his hand, too, and it met each of Nahir’s thrown blades along their separate trajectories. Two high, ringing notes sounded, like the chiming of a bell. Nahir’s knives leaped away to right and left, the right-hand one glittering like a Catherine wheel as it hit a sudden shaft of sunlight.

Nahir was drawing again and so was Tillman — presumably a gun rather than a knife — but Ber Lusim was faster than either of them. He crossed the grease pit in a standing long jump, landing between the two men, and he didn’t seem to mind very much that he was now fighting a war on two fronts.

Nahir thrust at Ber Lusim with a third sica, aiming for his chest. Ber Lusim leaned away and his own hand came up inside Nahir’s guard. The knife he held, unexpectedly reversed, slashed deeply into Nahir’s wrist, almost severing his hand.

By this time, Tillman had his gun out and aimed, but his movements seemed almost comically slow compared to those of the two Elohim. Ber Lusim didn’t even turn to face him. He just took the gun out of Tillman’s hand with a near-vertical kick, then returned his attention to Nahir.

A series of lightning-quick sweeps of the blade forced Nahir — who now only had one hand to defend with — to give ground hurriedly, and took Ber Lusim, as he followed, out of Tillman’s reach.

Tillman lumbered after him. Rush, who up to this point had stood frozen in shock, recovered himself enough to yell, ‘Leo, don’t!’ He launched himself forward, but in the three seconds it took him to reach them a whole lot of things happened.

Ber Lusim stopped dead, letting Tillman run against him. The Messenger took a solid punch to the side of the head, but it didn’t seem to affect him — and at the same time he hammered his elbow into Tillman’s throat.

Nahir pressed a desperate attack, jumping into what he presumed was a gap in Ber Lusim’s guard. Ber Lusim blocked, feinted, blocked, and then sliced Nahir’s other wrist, in a deliberate, mocking echo of the earlier attack.

Nahir’s charge faltered, pain and alarm flickering across his face. Ber Lusim bent from the waist to deliver a roundhouse kick to Nahir’s stomach, then slammed the hilt of the knife into the side of the other man’s head as he folded. Except that it wasn’t a hilt, because a sica didn’t have a hilt, as such, just a sharp end and a blunter end. The blunt end was still a narrow wedge of steel, which bit into Nahir’s skull with a sound like a cleaver dissecting a watermelon.

And Ber Lusim still had time, before Rush reached him, to bring the knife around so that the tip of it pointed at the centre of Rush’s chest. Rush stumbled to a halt with the razor-sharp blade touching his skin, having parted the thin fabric of his shirt as though it wasn’t even there.

‘Think on it,’ Ber Lusim said calmly, as Nahir fell full-length and Tillman crumpled to his knees. ‘They had weapons, at least. You have nothing. But if you wish it, then come.’

Tillman was fumbling for his fallen gun. Ber Lusim kicked him in the face with brutal force, sending him toppling sideways into the grease pit. There was a moment when Rush could have dodged around the knife and attacked him. But he couldn’t make his body move: rooted to the spot with terror, he stared down at Tillman’s unmoving body. Leo was facedown in the muck and ooze that covered the floor of the pit. If he wasn’t dead already, he was probably about to drown or suffocate.

Rush forced himself into motion. He turned his back on Ber Lusim, while his hindbrain screamed at him to duck and cower and fall into a foetal huddle, and jumped down into the pit.

This time he didn’t manage to keep his footing. He went over on his back in the rancid oil and floundered grotesquely for a second or two before he could roll over and right himself. He crawled across to Tillman, pawed at him with hands now thick with grease and finally managed to turn him onto his back. The big man was profoundly unconscious, but he was breathing.

Rush got his hands under Tillman’s armpits and hauled on him. Tillman was a dead weight, but Rush managed to move him an inch at a time over to the wall of the pit. He propped Tillman up there, wedged into the corner, so that he couldn’t easily slip down again.

Rush was conscious of Ber Lusim’s presence above and behind him — the Messenger’s utter silence probably, but not necessarily, meaning that he wasn’t moving.

‘Have you come a long way?’ Ber Lusim asked.

Small talk, from the saint of killers.

‘London,’ Rush said. ‘Budapest. New York. I’m sure you can fill in the dots.’ He was going for bravado, but his voice — in his own ears, at least — sounded high and weak.

Ber Lusim laughed, as though Rush had said something funny, and jumped down beside him — then walked on, past him, towards the open door.

‘We expect to walk a straight line,’ he said, looking back at Rush over his shoulder. ‘I’m not sure where that hope comes from. Experience should teach us that there are no straight lines in nature. God doesn’t draw with a ruler. What’s your name, boy?’

And Rush took the insult on the chin this time, because what else had he just been, while the men fought it out?

‘Ben,’ he said.

‘That’s half a name. It means son of. Where is the rest?’

‘Rush. Ben Rush.’

Ber Lusim looked momentarily startled. ‘Ben Rush,’ he repeated.

‘Yeah.’ Rush swallowed hard and looked down at Tillman. ‘Look, he’s in a bad way. Will you let me go, so I can get some help for him?’

‘Of course not,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘What help could there be, in any case? In twenty minutes’ time, this building will be a crater. And after that, all reckoning of time will stop. Leave him. I want to show you something.’

He indicated the doorway.

‘What?’ Rush said.

‘Go inside,’ Ber Lusim ordered him.

‘I … what’s inside? Why would I go in there?’ Rush hadn’t been afraid of the dark since he was seven years old, but right then that square opening seemed to be full of inimical promise.

‘You came a long way to find me,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘And you succeeded, where everyone else failed. That was a striking and exceptional thing — and obviously it was meant, as all things are meant. The prophet taught me that, when I had forgotten it, or learned to act as if it weren’t true. I’m going back inside, Ben Rush. I can’t leave you behind me, on your feet and free to leave. If you insist on staying here, I’ll respect that. But—’ he raised his hand and the knife stropped the air as he flicked it back and forth with terrifying dexterity ‘—I’ll have to make sure you’re unable to move. The quickest and easiest way to do that would be to sever your spinal column and the nerve stem that runs through it. The decision is yours. I’ll give you a few moments to consider it.’

‘No, I … I’m good. I mean, I’ll go inside. I pick that one.’

Ber Lusim nodded and indicated with a sweep of the hand that Rush should go first.

Choking on fear and humiliation, Rush stepped into the dark.

To get to the factory’s front gate meant driving around three of the four walls of the compound, but Kennedy just dropped the truck down a gear and took it straight through the fence. A length of the wire-mesh weave remained wrapped around the windshield, and one of the cement posts was ripped out of the ground and went bounding along the ground behind them like a dog.

Diema had used the time while they drove to call Kuutma, but she was answered with the brutal bathos of a voicemail message. She told him in a few terse sentences what Kennedy had guessed, and put the phone down just as Kennedy took the fence.

The rhaka slewed the truck around, raising a tidal wave of gravel, and was already jumping down out of the driver’s side before the heavy vehicle had stopped rocking on its axis. She sprinted ahead of Diema into the building, but slowed once inside to get her bearings.

‘There!’ Diema said, pointing. It wasn’t hard to see where they needed to go: the X that marked the spot was Nahir’s crumpled body, sprawled just inside the doorway that connected the main factory floor to the smaller room beyond.

Diema drew both a gun and a sica, and approached Nahir cautiously. Nothing moved on the other side of the doors. There was no clue as to what had struck him, and no sign of the two Adamites.

She let Kennedy examine Nahir, standing guard over them both while she did so. To her surprise, it was apparent as soon as Kennedy turned the man over onto his back that he was alive. He’d fought and lost, and in that process taken a horrific beating. Blood saturated both of his arms and was still pumping weakly from his gashed wrists. He’d taken an injury to the head, too — an attack that had destroyed the orbit of his right eye. Kennedy flinched from the sight of that wound. Diema didn’t. A buried part of her reflected on how the matter of the eye itself had become tears, spilling down Nahir’s cheek, and how that effect might be rendered in oil pastels. Another part, shocked and protesting, reminded her that she had lain with this man. And a third part, that embraced both of the others and then subsumed them, noted that Nahir’s condition proved the validity of Kennedy’s guesswork. Ber Lusim was here. Now.

Nahir was trying to speak.

Diema knelt beside him. ‘Nahir,’ she said. His lips worked, but the sounds that came from them were formless and atomised.

‘Ber Lusim,’ Diema prompted. ‘Where is he? Where is he now?’

Nahir’s good eye flicked to the grease pit and his finger jerked twice — down.

Diema gathered herself and was about to stand. But Nahir’s forearm bumped against hers. He was trying to grip her arm, but the fingers of his hand were incapable of responding to his brain’s commands. All they could do was twitch in tiny, random saccades.

‘Too … quick…’ Nahir whispered. ‘Too … too … quick … to …’ He took a deep, shuddering breath and tried again. ‘Don’t … fight. Too …’

‘We’ll be back soon,’ Diema said. She was still staring into that one good eye. It pleaded silently, wide with unaccustomed shock and fear. She slipped off her leather jacket, folded it over on itself and slipped it under Nahir’s head. Kennedy went to the edge of the grease pit, drew a deep, startled breath and clambered down into it, out of Diema’s line of sight.

‘We’ll be back soon,’ Diema said to Nahir. ‘We’ll get help for you.’ Or else, she thought, this whole place will be ripped into loose molecules by a ten-kiloton cubane explosion. Either way, Nahir wouldn’t have to suffer long.

She crossed to the pit and surveyed its interior before climbing carefully and quietly down to join Kennedy. Kennedy had found Tillman, propped up in one corner of the pit, and was checking on his condition. His face was masked with blood and he was profoundly unconscious, but his injuries looked to be less severe than Nahir’s. Weakened as he was, he would have presented far less of a threat.

Kennedy opened her mouth to speak, but Diema hushed her with a raised hand and pointed towards the open door. Kennedy nodded. She touched Tillman’s cheek with the fingers of one hand, kissed the top of his head. Then she stood.

Diema took the Chinese semi-automatic from the back of her belt. She was about to offer the nine-millimetre from her ankle holster to Kennedy, but Kennedy stepped past her, moving slowly so as to minimise the squelching sounds her feet made in the thick ooze, and picked up Tillman’s fallen gun from where it lay at the edge of the pit. She examined it briefly, seemed satisfied, and responded to Diema’s questioning glance with a curt nod. Ready.

They moved to the door, taking opposite sides without needing to confer. Standing stock still, they listened.

Two voices, both male. A serious — if slightly bizarre — conversation was being conducted just below them.

‘He is a piece of bread.’ That was Ben Rush’s voice. And another voice answered, ‘God is one. Only fools deny that.’

There were seven wooden steps, which were dangerously slippery with the same grease and filth that filled the bottom of the pit. Then Rush’s feet touched down on gritty, dry cement.

There was a click from above him, followed by the whickering rattle of strip-lights waking up. Rush blinked and shielded his eyes as the dark space around him was suddenly scoured brighter than daylight with remorseless neon.

He was standing in a wide but low-ceilinged room, buttressed with rough-cut wooden beams. All around him were big bags like sandbags or sacks of fertiliser, stacked all the way to the ceiling, with a broad aisle between them. They all seemed to be identical. They bore the legend HIGH C8(NO2)8 EXPLOSIVE in stencilled letters on their sides.

At the far end of the room, facing him, a laptop computer sat on a trestle table. Two long leads connected it to a bizarre modernist sculpture consisting of a handful of steel rods and several dozen fat parcels wrapped in greaseproof paper.

Despite the foul state of the steps, the floor was reasonably clean. A broom was propped incongruously against some of the sacks of high explosive, and once Rush had noticed that, he saw a whole raft of domestic touches in quick succession: a kettle and a carton of milk on an upturned packing crate. A pair of speakers with an iPod nestled between them. A reading lamp on the table and a book lying open next to it.

Ber Lusim was waiting for the end of the world with all the comforts of home.

He appeared beside Rush and put a hand on his shoulder to steer him over to the table. Remembering what else Ber Lusim’s hands had just done, Rush shuddered and backed away hurriedly, turning to face the Messenger.

Ber Lusim was staring at him with quizzical interest.

‘Look,’ Rush said. ‘I … I don’t know what you want from me. I shouldn’t even be here.’

‘Yes,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘You should. Of course you should. You had no choice. Please, sit down. I won’t hurt you.’

‘I’m fine right here,’ Rush said.

Ber Lusim nodded. ‘Very well.’ He walked past Rush to the table and picked up the book that lay there. He held it up for Rush to see.

The book was very old, its corners foxed and furled, its cover as roughly ridged as though someone had dropped it into the bath. On the cover, in a plain, uneven font, were the words A Trumpet Speaking Judgment, or God’s Plan Revealed in Sundry Signes.

‘You know this?’ Ber Lusim asked.

Rush thought about lying, but only for a moment. Why else would he be there?

‘Yes.’

Ber Lusim smiled warmly, as though he’d extracted a confession that would be good for Rush’s soul. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said.

The tone — serious, conversational, friendly — shook and scared Rush. He said nothing, only staring at the other man as he flicked through the pages of the book and handed it to him. Rush took it and saw that it was turned to the last page. The centuries-old paper, dry and brittle, rustled between his fingers.

‘That paragraph troubled me,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Specifically, when Toller says that the son and the spirit will be present when the end comes. It smacked of the meaningless liturgy of the Roman church. The dividing of God into three, as though God were a piece of bread.’

‘He is a piece of bread,’ Rush said. ‘Did all that stuff about the Eucharist not get to you yet?’

He heard his own voice saying that and wondered at it. Did he want Ber Lusim to break his arms and legs into loose kindling? Or was he flapping at the mouth purely because of that earlier promise that he wouldn’t be hurt? Either way, Ber Lusim didn’t react to the flip tone, or even seem to hear it.

‘God is one,’ he said. ‘Only fools deny that. So this referencing of the son and the spirit always struck both of us — Avra and me — as strange. Enigmatic, rather. But time and providence make all things clear. Do you know what your name means?’

‘You already told me it means “son of”.’

Ber Lusim nodded. ‘Yes. That’s what “Ben” means. But I meant your family name. “Rush”.’ He went on, not waiting for Rush to answer. ‘It transliterates the Hebraic word ruach, which means “spirit”. You are the son, Ben Rush, and you are also the spirit. God told Johann Toller that you would come, and Johann Toller told me. In this way, he reassures me that all is well. That what I’m doing is right, and exactly as he intended. I can hear your breathing, by the way.’

He raised his voice on those last words and looked over Rush’s shoulder towards the stairs. ‘By all means, join us,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in hiding up there. And no time left, now, for anything you do to affect my plans. Although I will, of course, kill you if you try.’

Despite Ber Lusim’s words, Kennedy was nearly certain that it wasn’t their breathing that gave them away.

She’d discovered that Tillman’s gun — a retooled Beretta — had a grip safety, rather than the thumb toggle she was more used to, and she’d chosen a moment when Ber Lusim was talking to squeeze the front of the grip and cock the gun. The click was slight, barely audible even to her, and she’d thought it was completely hidden by the sound of Lusim’s voice — but something about the way he paused immediately afterwards made her think she’d put him on his guard.

Then he invited them to join him and there was no longer any doubt. Kennedy mimed to Diema, putting her hands together and then drawing them apart again. Split up and give him two targets. Diema nodded.

They came down the stairs, Diema leading the way and Kennedy hanging slightly back.

Ber Lusim watched them with narrow attention as they came into his line of sight.

‘I was expounding scripture to your friend,’ he told them. ‘Which is amusing. I never thought of myself as a preacher. You should perhaps drop those guns, in case you feel tempted to use them.’

‘In a roomful of explosives?’ Kennedy said. ‘That would be a little stupid, wouldn’t it?’

Ber Lusim looked at the ramparts of sacks all around them. ‘You can’t set off octocubane with a bullet,’ he said. ‘And the primer is behind me, on the table. You’d be shooting through Mr Rush, here, who would be unlikely to thank you. There are also, over there in the corner—’ he pointed with the barrel of his gun ‘— a number of plastic buckets filled with the extremely potent granular poison, ricin. If you were to puncture one of those, the air would fill with highly toxic dust. Of course, the explosion that is about to take place will kill you long before the poison starts to work on you, so that’s a matter of less consequence than it would otherwise be.’

‘Why are we still alive?’ Diema asked. ‘Have you lost your taste for killing, Ber Lusim?’ She was drawing away from Kennedy, making it harder for the rogue Messenger to keep them both in view at the same time and giving his gun a few more degrees of arc to travel through if he decided to shoot. He held up his hand for them to stop.

‘That’s far enough. To answer your question, I’m about to kill a million people, which scarcely suggests excessive squeamishness in the taking of life. But that’s in the nature of a sacrifice, rather than a murder — fundamentally, a religious observance. Individual deaths, on the other hand … here in this place, at this time, they smack of impiety. But I’ll do it, unless you stand where you are and disarm. I’m happy for you all to wait with me, for the moment to come — but I know what’s in your hearts and I won’t allow it.’

‘There’s still time to stop this,’ Kennedy said. She knew that Diema would be able to aim and fire far more quickly and accurately than she could, so she reasoned that it was up to her to be the diversion. ‘Too many people have died already.’

Ber Lusim’s gaze flicked to her, but went back to Diema. He seemed to have made an accurate assessment of the relative dangers.

‘Everybody who ever lived has died,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Apart from the few who are still living now. But today, everything changes.’

‘Because of a few lines in a three-hundred-year-old book?’ Kennedy asked. ‘I don’t see that.’

‘You’re not required to. And this absurd dance must stop, now. Stand where you are. Drop your weapons or place them at your feet. I don’t want to spill your blood here. I don’t see the need. But I won’t let that stop me, if you’re determined to force my hand.’

Kennedy slowed and stopped.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You win.’

She turned her gun in her hand to point it at the ceiling and bent, very slowly, from the knees, to lay it on the ground.

Diema picked her moment and fired.

68

Once again, just like during the fight beside the grease pit, the action accelerated to the point where Rush had real trouble with crucial things like cause and effect.

He saw Diema’s arm move and he heard gunshots — three of them, back to back, so loud that the sound felt more like a physical pressure, pushing against his skin.

Then something flew whirling from Diema’s hand and Diema herself was punched backwards so that she hit the wall.

The sound had seemed to come from all directions at once in the confined space, so it was only from this collateral evidence that Rush was able to figure out that Diema hadn’t fired at all. All three shots had come from Ber Lusim.

By the time he came to that realisation, the whole thing was over. Diema had slid down the wall to the floor and Ber Lusim had his gun pointed at Kennedy — who was frozen to the spot in a tight crouch, her hand still on her gun which was still on the ground.

‘Don’t,’ Ber Lusim advised her.

Diema breathed out, a long, shuddering gasp. She was lying full length on the cement floor, clutching her side. Blood oozed thickly from between her fingers, and as Rush watched a red stain spread across the leg of her jeans. At least two of Ber Lusim’s three bullets had hit their target.

No, all three, he realised. Diema’s gun lay on the floor ten feet away from her, the barrel bent into an L-shape.

‘I wish that had not been necessary,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘But you’re still alive, at least. Sadly, that’s the last courtesy I can do you.’

Rush’s heart was hammering in his chest and he felt like he was about to throw up. He saw Kennedy’s shoulders tense, which surely meant that Ber Lusim had seen it, too. She was about to make her move, and her move was going to get her killed. There was nothing else she could do.

But there was — there might be — something he could do.

If only there was time left to do it in. And if only he could find the words.

‘Wait!’ he said. Actually, he didn’t say it at all; he yelled it, way too loud and way too high. And he raised the book — Toller’s book — in his hand as though he were about to preach.

Ber Lusim turned to stare at him and he waved the book in the Messenger’s face.

‘I’m in here, right?’ he babbled. ‘You said that. I’m part of the big picture. God sent me, to bring you a message. That’s what you said.’

‘Yes,’ Ber Lusim said in a voice whose calm and quiet made Rush’s panicky yelping seem even more absurd than it was. ‘I did say that.’

‘Okay,’ Rush said, fighting down the trembling in his legs, his arms, his voice. ‘Then right here, right now, for however long the world’s got left, I’m what you are. I’m one of God’s messengers. I’m not just some Adamite idiot swimming out of his depth.’

Ber Lusim frowned. ‘So?’ he said. ‘Where is this going?’

‘I’ll tell you where it’s going. If I’m a messenger, Ber Lusim, my message is for you. Are you willing to listen to it?’

Ber Lusim made a gesture, turning both hands palm-up. Go ahead.

‘Okay.’ Rush swallowed. So far so good. He risked a look over his shoulder. Diema hadn’t moved at all, except to prop herself up on her left elbow. She was still pressing her hand against her wound, trying without much success to stanch the flow of blood. She was watching Ber Lusim with dulled eyes, or at least she was trying to, but her head kept drooping. Kennedy still looked like she was looking for an opening. Rush met her gaze and moved his head through the tiniest arc. Not yet.

He turned back to Ber Lusim.

‘Everything you’re doing,’ he said, ‘you’re doing because of Toller. Isn’t that right? Because of the predictions in this book. It’s like he wrote the book for you. Like he saw you coming, three hundred years back, and he spoke to you across that gap.’

‘He saw the end of the world coming,’ Ber Lusim corrected him. ‘But yes, he spoke to us. He told us what we needed to do to bring history to an end and initiate the reign of Messiah.’

‘Okay. But I wonder if you know who was talking to you? I mean, if you ever found out anything about Johann Toller’s life.’

‘More than you can imagine.’

‘You think you know him.’ Rush felt like he was picking his way through a minefield. But more than that, he felt like he was in a courtroom and he was cross-examining a witness. Trying to make a case, out of nothing except the barest hunch.

‘Yes,’ Ber Lusim agreed. ‘I believe I know him.’

‘I’m going to have to disagree,’ Rush said. And in the silence that followed, he plunged on. ‘I think you’re right that God sent me here, Ber Lusim. I think he wanted you to listen to what I’ve got to say. Because you’ve made a big mistake. You’ve killed a lot of people and you’re about to kill a whole lot more, and it’s all on the basis of a … a stupid … you messed up. You messed up so badly.’

Ber Lusim stared at him in complete silence. Rush saw his own death weighed and measured in that stare. The only thing he had going for him was an accidental letter of introduction from Johann Toller, and he had no idea how long that get-out-of-jail-free card was going to last.

‘There’s something you don’t know,’ he said, his voice wobbling a little on the last word. ‘About Toller. Something you got wrong.’

‘Something I got wrong,’ Ber Lusim repeated, his tone dangerously mild. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘Who he was.’

Ber Lusim pursed his lips. ‘I’ll overlook your irreverence,’ he said to Rush. ‘I still believe there must be some point to your being here. Some reason why you’ve been placed in my path, at this most solemn and auspicious time. But you must be very careful what you say. Johann Toller was divinely inspired. To speak ill of him is to blaspheme against God.’

Rush kept his gaze fixed on the gun in Ber Lusim’s hand — although probably if Ber Lusim decided he needed to be killed, he wouldn’t waste a bullet on someone who was in easy reach of his hands. ‘Is it speaking ill of Toller to say he wasn’t who you think he was?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to blaspheme. I just think you misread the evidence.’

Ber Lusim raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes? How?’

‘Well, you think Toller was your missing prophet. The one person who walked away from your hidden city without official sanction. I mean, the one person who did that before you and your people did it.’

‘I don’t think this. I know it.’

‘Because Toller talks about the secret beliefs of the People.’

‘Yes.’

‘And his book shows the location of Ginat’Dania.’

‘Yes, that too.’

‘And because he blessed his friends and followers with the sign of the noose instead of the sign of the cross.’

‘Of course.’

Rush was standing on the edge of the precipice now. He didn’t dare to look around again, to see whether either Diema or Kennedy was tracking his moves. If they weren’t, this was going to come to nothing anyway. All he could do — the best he could do — was give them a window.

‘Well, in spite of all those things, Ber Lusim, I think you’ve been cheering for the wrong team. Toller was never one of the Judas People. He was an Adamite.’

Diema used two things to stay conscious: the pain from her wounds and the countdown on her watch.

The pain was constant static along the thousands of unravelling miles of her nervous system.

The countdown stood at seven minutes.

Ber Lusim had his gun pressed against Rush’s temple now. Rush was leaning sideways, away from it, his whole body arced like a strung bow, but he didn’t dare to step back or to try to push the gun away.

‘I see your death,’ Ber Lusim said to the boy. ‘Without the benefit of prophecy.’

‘No, just listen,’ Rush quavered. ‘Listen to me. I can make you believe.’

‘I already believe.’

‘Then I can make you doubt. Why did God send me?’

‘To test me. To put my beliefs to the test.’

‘Then … then you have to take the test, don’t you? You have to listen. Blowing my brains out is just going to piss God off.’

Neither of them moved, for a moment or two longer. Then Ber Lusim lowered the gun, very gradually, to his side.

‘This is nonsense,’ he said heavily. ‘But say what you like. Nonsense can’t hurt me.’

‘Okay, look at the documentary evidence,’ Rush said, starting to babble again. ‘In your version of the story your man comes out of Ginat’Dania, heading west. Then a good long time afterwards, Johann Toller arrives in England and starts to preach. And you can tell he’s your guy because of all the stuff he says. He knows about Ginat’Dania. He knows about the three-thousand-year cycle. And how else could he have found that out?

‘But what happened in the meantime? What made him abandon his mission and his people and go native like that?’

‘An angel,’ Ber Lusim said, his voice almost a growl, ‘spoke to him.’

‘Right.’ Rush nodded. ‘An angel spoke to him and gave him the secrets of heaven. And Toller wanted to share the amazing things he’d learned. He felt like he had to share it with the whole world. So he goes to England.

‘And this is where I kind of lose the plot. It’s the Civil War. The political scene in England is a snake pit, but Toller jumps in like it’s a swimming pool. He makes all kinds of friends and enemies in Cromwell’s government. He rallies the religious dissenters — becomes one of their spokesmen, kind of. He joins the Fifth Monarchy movement. Gets a seat at the table. And I’m asking myself: why? What is the point of it all? If you’ve seen the eternal truth, why would you care whether Cromwell or Fairfax keep their promises, or whether bishops get to speak in parliament? It’s a sideshow. The world is going to end, the kingdom is going to come and that’s all that matters.’

Diema pulled her attention away from the doctrinal argument and looked for her gun. It was far enough away that she’d have to crawl to reach it and it looked as though it had taken a direct hit in any case.

But she had the other gun, in her ankle holster: the tiny, modest little M26 that she’d taken from Nahir and Shraga almost as an afterthought.

She groaned and rolled over as though she were in agony, using the movement to curl her legs up and bring them closer to her left hand. It felt as though her right wrist might have been broken when Ber Lusim shot the gun out of her hand — an outrageous feat, even at this short a distance.

‘Time is contained within eternity, like the grit in a pearl,’ Ber Lusim was saying. ‘Toller saw all things, both close and far away. And he cared about all things.’

Rush held up the book, his hand shaking even more noticeably. ‘Okay, maybe. Maybe it happened like that. But here’s another scenario: Toller was nobody. Just some guy. But he was British. He came out of England, maybe doing the whole grand tour thing, or maybe because he was a merchant or a diplomat.

‘So he’s travelling through the Alps, and he has an accident. Only he’s not alone when he has it. And he’s not the only survivor. There’s another man, lying next to him — injured, probably dying. That’s your prophet, fresh out of Ginat’Dania. And that’s the moment when everything changes for Toller. That’s where his life turns upside down.

‘Because the injured man is hallucinating, and he can’t stop talking. Or else it’s just that he knows he’s dying. He’s got to tell his life story to someone before he goes, and Toller’s right there. Toller’s listening. Listening with every ear he’s got.’

‘This is grotesque,’ Ber Lusim said.

‘So Toller gets the whole story. The holy betrayer. The secret city. The end of the world. It’s a revelation. No, it’s a whole book of revelations. And it’s got to be the truth, because who’s going to waste the last hours of his life spinning such a crazy story? It’s as though God put this man just in the right place, just at the right time, so that Toller’s eyes could be opened.

‘And when it was done, and the man was dead, Toller went home to England and picked up his life again. Except now he was a prophet. A man with a message. And he wanted to give the message as much authority as he could, so he came up with the angel’s visitation. Or maybe that was how he actually remembered it by this time, I don’t know. Maybe he really thought your man was an angel.’

‘Why should this thing be true?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Where is your evidence?’

Diema had pulled the leg of her jeans up three inches from her ankle, exposing the holster. The gun was lying ready to her hand. But now another problem presented itself. Two problems, in fact. How was she going to get through Ber Lusim’s guard any better the second time, now that she was using her weaker, slower hand? And how was she going to draw and fire on him without hitting Rush, who was directly in the way? She saw that Kennedy was watching her, ready to move when she did.

‘It’s not about the evidence,’ Rush said, ‘although I do have some. A little, anyway. But think about it. Doesn’t my version make more sense? In your story, a Messenger decides out of nowhere to betray his sacred trust and go preach to the heathens. In mine, he only talks because he knows he’s dying.’

‘He didn’t just decide,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘You’re forgetting that he had a visitation from God.’

‘And this visitation somehow gave him a complete who’s who of English politics? And it made him think that English politics actually mattered? Because he spent the rest of his life there, Ber Lusim. He was executed for trying to murder some kind of government clerk. What the hell was that?’

Ber Lusim took a step towards Rush, but Rush backed away. He held the book in his two hands, ready to tear it down the length of its spine. ‘You better back off,’ he warned Ber Lusim. ‘Or I’m going to commit some serious blasphemy.’

Ber Lusim raised his gun again and pointed it at Rush. ‘The book will be destroyed in the explosion in any case,’ he said. ‘Its physical integrity isn’t of paramount importance to me now. I would just like to die holding it. In any event, I’ve heard you out and I have not been swayed in the smallest degree. If you were meant to test me, boy, I’ve passed the test.’

‘But I’ve got evidence,’ Rush blurted. ‘I told you I had some evidence, right? Well, here it is. Forget about the angel and the accident, and all the rest of it. Forget about what Toller knew or where he got it from. Remember the one thing that he did that marked him out as one of the Judas People.

‘He used the sign of the noose.’

Diema had her hand on the grip of the M26 and had eased it halfway out of the holster. But Rush was still in the worst possible position, blocking most of her line of fire but almost none of Ber Lusim’s line of sight.

‘Toller used the sign of the noose as a blessing,’ Rush said. ‘His followers didn’t know what it was and he never explained it to them. But he did it anyway.’

‘I know this,’ Ber Lusim said.

‘You don’t know anything. Toller never used the sign of the noose even once.’

Ber Lusim’s eyes narrowed.

‘What?’

Rush shrugged, showed his empty hands. ‘I know, right? I thought that, too, the first time I read it. But then I saw Diema make the sign and something didn’t feel right. I got her to talk me through it. Then I went back and I read it again, and there it was. He put his hand to his throat, thence to his heart, and his stomach, and so in a circle back to where it began.’

‘I have read the passage,’ Ber Lusim snarled. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’

‘So if you had a clock face on your chest,’ Rush said, stealing the metaphor that Diema had used on the plane to Budapest, ‘that’s the way the hands would turn. Look. Like this.’

Diema could see that Rush was making the sign, just the way Robert Blackborne said Toller had made it. And she could tell from the way Ber Lusim’s eyes widened that he got the point.

‘It’s the wrong way round,’ Rush said. ‘As though Toller learned it by looking in a mirror. Which I think is more or less what he did.’

‘No,’ Ber Lusim said. It wasn’t a disagreement: it was a warning.

‘Yes,’ Rush insisted. ‘Not a mirror, obviously. But he saw someone else doing it and he copied it, exactly the way he saw it. He just forgot to turn it around.’

‘No,’ Ber Lusim said again.

‘It’s kind of funny, in a sick way,’ Rush said. Bluntly. Brutally. ‘You going to all this trouble, I mean.’ He gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Pity Avra Shekolni is dead. I bet he’d have loved this.’

Maybe it was the laugh that sent Ber Lusim over the edge. He lunged forward, his hand shooting out to grip Rush’s throat.

It was the only moment they were going to get.

‘Now!’ Diema bellowed. ‘Do it now!’

Kennedy rose to her feet, gun in hand.

Ber Lusim turned.

And Diema fired.

Ber Lusim drew in his breath in a tremulous gasp. He looked down at his chest — at the small round hole that had appeared there, like a mysterious punctuation mark. A full stop, inscribed directly onto his heart. It went from black to red, and blood welled out of it. Ber Lusim had stiffened, his eyes wide as though from some awful realisation.

But it was Rush who fell, toppling from the ground up as his knees buckled under him.

Left-handed, out of position, Diema had taken the only shot she could: through Rush’s right shoulder and into the left side of Ber Lusim’s chest.

And now the way was clear. She and Kennedy fired again and again, emptying their guns into the assassin. Ber Lusim bowed his head and took the punishment, as though a man could endure gunfire in the same way as he endured heavy rain.

But this weather took a greater toll. Ber Lusim sank to his knees, as though by choice, then lowered himself by gradual degrees into a posture of prayer, which was how he died.

Kennedy began to approach the dead man slowly, covering him with her now-useless gun.

‘No!’ Diema shouted. ‘The timer, Kennedy! The timer!’

The woman ran to the desk, but hesitated. The smaller bomb that was the primer for Ber Lusim’s WMD was a baroque, ramshackle thing with wires and metal rods connecting to packets of acetone peroxide and clusters of industrial blasting caps. ‘What do I do?’ Kennedy yelled.

The timer on the screen showed twenty-three seconds. Kennedy turned to look at Diema, desperate, urgent. But Diema had no more idea than she did and it must have showed in her face.

With a wordless cry, like a paratrooper jumping out of a plane, Kennedy ripped the laptop out of the circuit.

It continued to count down in her hands.

To ten.

To five.

To zero.

Diema held an in-breath until her chest ached. Then slowly, soundlessly, let it out.

69

‘I’m bleeding,’ Rush said plaintively, from the floor. ‘Oh Christ. I’m bleeding all over the place. Help me.’

Diema crawled across to him slowly and painfully. She checked Rush’s wounds: both of them, entry and exit. The entry wound was small and neat and wouldn’t give any trouble at all. The exit wound was a lot bigger and the bullet had taken meat with it.

By the time it hit its intended target, the bullet would have spent at least a third of its initial velocity, most of it inside of Ben Rush. No wonder it had stopped Ber Lusim dead. The slowing bullet, lacking the energy required to leave his body once it had forced its way in, had sent a widening shockwave ahead of itself, pulping his internal organs like a steak tenderiser.

‘You did well,’ Diema said to Rush, as she patched him up.

Kennedy knelt down beside her and helped by tearing more strips of cloth as Diema knotted the makeshift dressing into place. ‘You did brilliantly,’ she confirmed. ‘Rush, how in the name of God did you figure that stuff out?’

‘I didn’t figure it out,’ he mumbled. His face was ashen. ‘I made most of it up. It’s probably all wrong. Except for the sign. I was pretty sure about the sign.’

‘You prevented a million deaths,’ Diema said. ‘You were a shield to my people. And to some of yours, too. You might amount to something one day after all, little boy.’

‘And you … aah, shit … you might grow some breasts,’ Rush countered. ‘Dream big.’

Diema turned her attention to Kennedy. ‘I’ll finish here,’ she said. ‘You go and check on my father — and get the truck into position. We’re leaving.’

A look passed between them. Kennedy nodded and left them to it, going rapidly back up the stairs to the grease pit.

Diema carried on knotting the dressing more firmly in place until Rush took hold of her hand to stop her. ‘When we had sex,’ he asked her, ‘was that just so you could get pregnant?’

‘I’m not pregnant, Rush.’

He stared at her, nonplussed.

‘You’re not?’

‘No. I said that to stop Nahir from cutting your throat.’

‘Oh. Okay.’ He thought about that a little longer as she tested the tightness of the dressing. ‘Uh … why?’

Diema was silent for a long time.

‘Do you mean, why would that stop him from killing you or why would I care whether he killed you or not?’

‘Either. Both.’

‘It’s hard to explain,’ she told him. ‘My people have some pretty odd ways of looking at things sometimes.’

Rush winced as some random movement sent a wave of pain through his torn shoulder muscle. ‘You don’t say? Well, thanks for the heroic self-sacrifice, anyway.’

Diema said nothing, pretending to check Ber Lusim’s greying body for signs of life.

It wasn’t over yet.

‘Do you feel up to moving?’ she asked Rush.

He tried to get upright, but every movement hurt him. It took the two of them, finally, Diema bearing the boy’s weight whenever a twinge of agony froze his muscles. She raised him like a banner — a flag of surrender, because that was how it felt. As though she were giving in, suddenly but far too late, to the logic of an argument that had first been put to her three years before, when her hands were around the throat of Ronald Stephen Pinkus and the light disappeared from his eyes.

‘Ready?’ she asked Rush.

‘Ready for what?’ he panted. ‘You want to dance?’

‘I need you to walk.’

‘Okay.’

It took an eternity for them to get up the stairs. Kennedy met them at the top, her face grim.

‘Leo’s just about awake,’ she told Diema, ‘but I think some of the wounds on his chest have opened up. I’m scared of moving him.’

‘We don’t have any choice,’ Diema said.

They both looked towards Tillman. He was on his feet in the corner of the grease pit, his two arms stretched out along its edge to either side. His head was sagging onto his chest. He looked like a boxer who’d only just made it through the previous round.

Diema turned back to Kennedy.

‘Heather, we have to go,’ she said. ‘This is—’

‘I know what it is.’

‘It was part of the plan, always. You take the stick out of the fire, you beat your enemies, and then you throw it back. You let it be burned.’

‘I got that, Diema. I got that the first time.’

‘I can walk,’ Tillman said. His voice was a ghastly, gallows thing.

‘Prove it,’ Diema said.

But first they had to get out of the pit, which was so protracted an agony that Diema felt nostalgic for the stairs. She and Kennedy had to prop Tillman up against the side of the pit, then drag and push at his limbs one at a time as though they were trying to reassemble the faces of a Rubik cube. When they were done, he was lying on his back at the edge of the drop, exhausted by agony, drawing breaths so shallow that the front of his shirt, stiff with fresh blood, didn’t even move.

Then they had to do the same thing with Rush.

Finally they had both men up and moving, Diema supporting Tillman because she was the stronger of the two, Kennedy following with Rush.

They made their way, like the last teams standing in a marathon three-legged race, out onto the factory floor and across the obstacle course towards the main doors.

They passed Desh Nahir along the way, lying unconscious in his blood. Diema murmured a blessing, but didn’t stop or slow. The doors were in sight now, and she could see the tailgate of the truck. Tillman slipped in the algae-slick of a dried-up puddle, almost fell, but Diema held him upright by getting her weight under him and pushing him upward — the tsukuri part of a judo throw, with the follow-through indefinitely suspended.

The doors were directly ahead of them. Her eyes on the ground, because she was forced now to treat each step, each shifting of her weight, as an exercise in logistics, Diema saw her feet, and Tillman’s feet, enter the slanting beam of sunlight that spilled across the grimed cement. They were emerging into the world outside in tortuous slow motion.

Kuutma stepped through the doors, with Alus and Taria to either side of him, and met them there. Other Messengers were standing on the asphalt outside, still and silent, awaiting Kuutma’s order.

He stared at Diema, who had stumbled to a halt. His expression was complex and unreadable.

‘Report,’ he suggested to her, with dangerous mildness.

Diema tried to speak, but the words fled away from her flailing mind.

‘I … we …’ she tried.

‘Ber Lusim is dead,’ Kennedy said. ‘It’s over. But you need to dismantle the bomb. And your man, Nahir, needs medical attention.’

Kuutma’s gaze flicked to her for the smallest fraction of a second, then back to Diema. ‘Is this true?’ he asked.

Diema nodded, still mute.

‘Then the threat is removed? There’s no longer any danger?’

‘There is …’ Diema tried again. ‘The bomb. As Kennedy says. We removed the detonator, but the bomb needs to be dismantled. And Nahir …’

Kuutma turned to Alus and Taria. ‘See to him,’ he ordered, and they were gone from his side in an instant.

‘Dan cheira hu meircha!’ Kuutma shouted. Obedient to his command, the Messengers filed in through the doors to surround the small party.

With Rush leaning on her right arm, Kennedy tried to get her left hand inside her jacket to reach her shoulder holster. Diema reached out, snake-swift, to grip her wrist and keep the hand in plain sight. If Kennedy succeeded in drawing the gun, she’d be dead before she drew another breath.

Kuutma had been staring at Diema throughout these manoeuvres. ‘It was well done,’ he said to her. ‘It was very well done. You may stand down, Diema Beit Evrom. What remains to be done here, others will do.’

Diema made no move. The muscles of her chest seemed to be squeezing her lungs, so that it was a great effort even to draw a breath. ‘Tannanu,’ she said, ‘I need to speak with you.’

‘No,’ Kuutma said. ‘You don’t.’

‘Yes,’ Diema insisted. ‘To report.’

‘I’ve heard your report, Diema. And now this is in my hands. Step outside. I’ve deliberated, in the matter of your pregnancy, and I’ve reached a verdict. The only verdict possible, if you’re to escape censure. The boy’s death protects your honour. The other deaths were already agreed on before you ever left Ginat’Dania. But there’s no need for you to be present for this. I understand that it might distress you to see these people, who’ve fought at your side, lose their lives. Go. Go to the gates of the compound and wait for me there.’

Sour bile rose in Diema’s mouth and she swallowed it down again.

‘Tannanu,’ she said, the words scouring her throat like gravel, ‘I wish to speak. My testimony is pertinent to these matters. Hear me out.’

They held the tableau for some seconds. If Kuutma saw the tension in her posture, and if he understood what it meant, he gave no sign.

‘Very well,’ he said at last.

He gave clipped commands. Messengers came forward to remove Tillman from her grasp and to take hold of Kennedy and Rush.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Kennedy yelled. She threw a wild glance at Diema, who ignored it. Their fates rested with Kuutma now.

He walked aside a little way, beckoning her to follow him. Diema obeyed.

‘I’m listening,’ Kuutma said, dropping the mantle of formality. ‘But there’s no way of stopping this, little sister. You must know that.’

‘Brother,’ Diema said, staring full into his eyes, ‘there is. You’re Kuutma, the Brand, and what you say will happen here is what will happen. Nobody will argue with you.’

Kuutma shrugged brusquely. ‘That’s irrelevant. I can’t gainsay what I’ve already said. They’re going to die.’ He breathed out slowly, a breath that was almost a sigh. ‘I can see that these three have come to mean something to you — I saw that back in Budapest. And I grieve for you. You’ve known enough loss in your life already. But Kennedy’s death, and Tillman’s, were part of the task you accepted. Be strong, now, and see it through. As for the boy, even if you love him, you’ll forget him soon enough. Take another lover. Take a husband, even. Desh Nahir would embrace you in an instant.’

Diema ignored this grotesque suggestion, and stuck remorselessly to her point. ‘Tannanu, Leo Tillman is my father.’

‘No, Diema, he is not. He’s only—’

‘He is the father of my flesh and the father of my spirit. He is the only father I acknowledge. I cleave to him, as his daughter, and I will stand by him. The hand that’s raised to hurt him becomes, with that act, my enemy’s hand. On Gellert Hill, he fought for me and would have died for me, though we had but an hour’s acquaintance. I knew then that he had loved the child he lost, and that therefore he could not knowingly have killed my brothers. That was some terrible mistake, as the rhaka Kennedy told me it was. The monster whose death I assented to never existed — and to my father’s death, Tannanu, I do not assent.’

Kuutma listened to this speech with a look of sombre concern. When it was finished, he said nothing for a long time.

Finally, he reached out and put a hand on Diema’s shoulder.

‘I’ve done you no service,’ he said heavily. ‘I see that now. I love you and honour you, Diema, but I put you in the way of this hurt, and now I don’t see how to make it pass from you.’

‘Let them live.’

‘I can’t do that. I’m not free to choose.’

‘Then neither am I,’ Diema said. She drew a sica from its sheath against her breast and placed it so that the tip of the blade touched her stomach. ‘Kill Leo Tillman and I’ll die, too.’

Kuutma’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Diema,’ he said, his voice almost a whisper. ‘You can’t mean it.’

‘I mean it.’

Many emotions crossed Kuutma’s face. The one that was most clearly visible was pain. ‘A blasphemy,’ he said.

‘I’m damned already. On Gellert Hill, I shot Hifela, of the Elohim, and watched him die. And I lied to you in Budapest, Tannanu. I’m not pregnant. I said that to save the boy, and the boy just saved us all.’ She wrestled with words, with reasons, trying to explain something that had come to her without the benefit of either, as a rising tide of revelation. ‘If I let them die,’ she said, ‘I become less than they are. Less than I thought they were, when I didn’t know them.’

Kuutma’s face still bore the same expression of dismay and suffering. ‘I could disarm you,’ he pointed out.

‘Possibly. But you couldn’t keep me disarmed.’ She put the knife away, to reinforce the point. ‘I don’t have to die here or now, Tannanu. I’ve got all the time in the world. If I decide to kill myself, the only way to stop me is to kill me first.’

Silence fell between them. They stared at one another, intransigent, immovable.

With no more sound than a whisper of fabric, Alus and Taria appeared to either side of Diema.

‘Desh Nahir will live,’ Alus said.

‘And he has withdrawn his execration,’ Taria added. ‘He wishes no harm to Diema Beit Evrom.’

Kuutma nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Secure Diema Beit Evrom and confiscate her weapons.’

The two women did as they were told. Diema made no protest and she didn’t struggle, as Alus held her hands behind her back and Taria methodically searched her for weapons. The tall woman’s eyes met hers and she could see how little they liked to treat one of their own in this way.

‘Guard her,’ Kuutma said.

Taria nodded. ‘Yes, Kuutma. What about the rhaka and the others? Should we—’

‘Do nothing,’ Kuutma said. ‘I wish to speak with Leo Tillman.’

Following Kuutma’s curt instructions, his Messengers overturned one of the plastic tubs, tipping out the thin paste at the bottom of it, and rolled it to a distant corner of the room, far from the others. Tillman was half-dragged and half-carried across and set down on the tub, where in due course Kuutma joined him.

Tillman was still in a great deal of pain, but Alus’s medical skills had once again been called into service. She had made up a cocktail of drugs designed to help him manage the pain and stay conscious. His fully dilated pupils and the morbid tension of his posture suggested that they were just starting to kick in.

Kuutma stared down at the Adamite, with the puzzled frown of a mathematician considering a problem in formal logic.

‘I had a plan,’ he said, ‘that included your death. Yours, and the woman’s.’

Tillman nodded.

‘It’s true that your death was only a detail,’ Kuutma continued. ‘It was a way of dealing with a situation that my predecessor had allowed to arise. The main thrust of the plan related to much clearer and more present dangers.’

He hesitated a moment, then sat beside the Adamite man. It enabled him to lower his voice a little further: all of the Messengers present had recently taken prodigious doses of kelalit, which enhances the senses, so there was a possibility, despite the discreet distance, that they were being overheard.

‘I wish,’ Kuutma said, ‘that I’d killed you first and found some different way to solve my remaining problems.’

Tillman laughed shortly — a single snort. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘well, that just sums you people up, it seems to me. You always over-think these things, and you always make the same mistake.’

Kuutma scowled, but kept his tone even and controlled. ‘And what mistake is that, Mr Tillman?’

Tillman ran a hand over his sweating face and blinked several times, rapidly. The drugs he’d been given were interfering with his perception, or his thought-processes, or both.

‘She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?’

‘What?’ Kuutma asked, thrown.

‘My little girl. She’s a real piece of work. I’d hazard a guess that maybe that goes for all the women in her family. She reminds me a lot of my wife.’

‘Rebecca Beit Evrom was not your wife.’

‘No?’

‘No. The relationship between a Kelim woman and an Adamite out-father is not characterised as marriage, in our laws. What mistake is it that you think we make, Mr Tillman?’

Still blinking, Tillman turned his head to stare at Kuutma. ‘There’s a kind of a proverb. You must have heard of it. It says if you’ve only got a hammer in your toolbox, everything looks like a nail.’

‘I’m familiar with that observation.’

‘You’ve spent two thousand years killing anyone who gets onto you or gets too close to the truth about you. Playing ducks and drakes with history.’

‘We do what we have to do.’

‘No,’ Tillman said, his voice slurring a little. ‘You do what you already know how to do. You don’t change your repertoire, even when you can see that it’s not working.’

‘It’s worked well enough so far,’ Kuutma said.

Tillman laughed again. ‘Then why do you even exist? If it worked, Kuutma, if it had ever worked, they wouldn’t need you. Thousands of years of surreptitious murder, and every time, every damn time … as soon as you finish one operation it’s all got to be done again. Hundreds of Elohim with their ears to the ground, all across the world, trying to keep track of a whisper line with seven billion voices on it. Of course you’re going to make a pig’s breakfast out of it.’

‘You’re saying there’s a better way?’ Kuutma asked sardonically.

‘Yes.’

‘Teach me, Tannanu Tillman.’

‘Well, for starters,’ Tillman said, ‘you don’t squash the story. You shout it. Flood the world with rumours about the Judas People, about Ginat’Dania. Tell everyone about the secret book, the lost gospel. Tell them if they read it, pale men who weep blood will find them and kill them with knives that were last seen twenty centuries ago. Tell them about the beautiful women who’ll sleep with you and then disappear, leaving you to grow crazy with searching for them. Tell them about the underground city, and all the rest of it.’

‘Why?’ Kuutma demanded, mystified. ‘Why would we do these things?’

‘Because the world’s full of lies,’ Tillman said. ‘Full to the brim and slopping over. And when your story’s out there, it looks like one more lie. It has its hour, and then it’s stale, and then it’s dead, and everyone moves on to the next big thing. “You’re still trying to sell that Judas People bullshit? Seriously? There’s this new book says Jesus was a woman!” That’s what you need. That saturated, been-there, heard-it feeling. And it’s so easy to get. All you’ve got to do is face the same way everyone else is facing, so you get lost in the crowd. Whereas what you’re doing now is pushing against the grain the whole time. Not only is it a lot harder that way, but every time you move, every time you do anything, you make another trail that somebody could follow.’

The speech seemed to have used up all of Tillman’s remaining strength. He bowed his head onto his chest and closed his eyes.

Kuutma stood, and — after a moment’s irresolution — moved away.

‘Let me speak to her, one more time,’ Tillman said.

Kuutma paused. ‘Why?’

‘To say goodbye.’

‘She doesn’t need to say goodbye to you. She’s made her peace with your death.’

Tillman made a weary, broken gesture with his hand. ‘If you say so. I know you people can’t lie.’

No, Kuutma thought, staring down at the wounded man, we can’t.

Except to ourselves.

70

The flight back to London was funereal. And the fact that they were in business class just made it surreal, too.

Any time that Rush could think of anything to say, Kennedy replied with monosyllables. And he didn’t blame her, because the things that he could think of to say were all wrong. Small talk. Desperate verbal swerves, taking them away as far as possible from the one topic that they couldn’t discuss.

Why did we let them do that to him?

Why didn’t they do it to me?

The stewardess came by and offered them champagne. Kennedy didn’t even seem to hear. Rush shook his head emphatically.

‘We’re good,’ he lied. ‘We’re fine. Thanks.’

71

Kennedy didn’t phone ahead and tell Izzy that she was coming. The fact was that she was scared to. Scared of words more than anything, at this point, because the first thing she’d done when she finally touched down at Heathrow was to catch up on a whole week of Izzy’s texts.

She’d never been an archaeologist, but she’d met some. It felt like archaeology.

Unearthing the evidence of a vanished way of life.

Izzy’s tone going from chatty to bitter to resigned to valedictory.

And the dark ages, which was Tuesday and Wednesday and today, when there were no messages, no signs of life at all.

She took the train up to Leicester. She didn’t trust herself to drive. A taxi took her from the station to Knighton, the driver bending her ear about something or other the whole way, except that she didn’t hear a word, so technically her ears were unbent.

She told him to wait. She might not be here long.

Caroline answered on the third ring. She was surprised to see Kennedy, and judging from how thin the line of her lips got, it wasn’t the kind of surprise that makes you squeal for joy.

‘Hello, Heather.’

‘Hi, Caroline.’ Kennedy considered and abandoned various feeble conversational gambits. ‘Is Izzy there? I … I’d like to talk to her. Just for a minute.’

Caroline nodded and withdrew. Kennedy stood on the doorstep in a light summer drizzle, listening to footsteps echo through the big house, fainter and fainter.

She didn’t hear Izzy’s footsteps approaching, because Izzy was in her socks. She was just there, suddenly. The door was flung open and she was up in Kennedy’s face, in Kennedy’s arms, kissing her with a ferocity that was going to leave bruises.

They stayed like that for a long time. Caroline came into the hallway behind them and watched for a moment or two in stony-faced silence, like Lot’s wife looking back at the cities of the plain. Then she went away again.

‘I screwed up,’ Kennedy said, when Izzy finally allowed her the free use of her mouth. ‘But I love you, Iz. I can’t imagine not having you in my life. If you give me another chance, I’ll never push you away again.’

‘I knew it,’ Izzy murmured in Kennedy’s ear.

‘Knew what?’

‘That if I held out for long enough, you’d find some way that it was your fault I shagged that boy. You’re a genius, babe. That’s why I need you.’

They kissed some more, but then Izzy pulled her face away from the lip-lock to stare down the drive towards the street.

‘Have you got a taxi waiting?’

‘Oh,’ Kennedy said. ‘Yeah.’

‘Thank God. Let’s go.’

72

That the eyes should be red was licence, of a kind. It was a way of saying something that needed to be said, even if it wasn’t what she was seeing.

But there was a problem with the blacks, Diema decided.

Both of the women had such lustrous hair that she couldn’t catch the richness and the fullness of it with the pigments and the techniques she knew.

By way of a partial solution, she drew them in stylised form, their hair solid black with solid bars of white for the highlights, their muscles limned in feathered greys on the perfect whiteness of their skin.

‘I’ve got to move,’ Alus moaned. ‘My nose is itching.’

‘Your nose probably isn’t in the picture,’ Taria said. ‘The canvas isn’t that big.’

When she finally let them see the picture, they were baffled. ‘It looks like something a little kid would do,’ Taria said. ‘But … it works, somehow. It’s like the way you’d say something, and everyone would know you were exaggerating, but they’d see the truth underneath the exaggeration. It’s like that, but in a picture.’

Diema blushed. ‘In the Nations,’ she said, ‘they call a drawing in this style a cartoon.’

‘My two-year-old son paints just like this,’ Alus said. ‘You think I could call it a cartoon and sell it?’

Diema might have bridled at the insult, but she laughed and let it pass. She was still amazed that they had agreed to pose for her, and she was anxious not to do anything that might make them change their minds. Not only was she finally getting to paint them, as she’d wanted to do ever since she first met them, but they were also her only source of news about her father.

They talked about him now, as she prepared a meal of bread and olives for her two models, who were putting their clothes back on in a corner of the studio. It was a very large studio. Space wasn’t so much sought after down here in het retoyet, at the bottom of Ginat’Dania.

‘He’s going on about windows now,’ Alus said. ‘Why can’t he have any windows? It’s driving him crazy that he doesn’t have a view. He’s four hundred feet underground and he wants a view. So Kuutma, instead of telling him to shove it up his arse, says “What view would you like, Mr Tillman? What is it that you want to be looking at?” And Leo goes “I don’t know, maybe a lake or something.” And the next time I go in, Kuutma’s fixed up a live video feed from Lake Michigan. And you know what Leo says?’

‘He says, “There’s no sound!”’ Taria broke in, stepping on Alus’s punchline. ‘He says he likes the water, but it’s not real without the sound. So Kuutma turns around and says to Alus—’

‘Call Michigan. See if there’s any way they can put a microphone in.’

Both women were laughing uproariously. This was their favourite kind of story about Tillman — the kind where he did something outrageous or curmudgeonly or inexplicable. The kind where he was like an exotic pet, with exotic needs and neurotic, high-maintenance habits.

In Ginat’Dania at large, Diema knew, her father was seen very differently. He was the prisoner in the tower, the monster caged, the trophy that Kuutma had brought back after vanquishing Ber Lusim and saving the city. And more, he was the former enemy forced now to toil at the wheel, to labour for the People though it broke his proud heart and gravelled his spirit.

Tillman was the brilliant Adamite tactician who had once found Ginat’Dania and forced it to flee from him. But now his insights, squeezed out of him by Kuutma’s merciless interrogation, served Kuutma’s agenda and the People’s. They had been instrumental in switching the main thrust of Elohim activity from concealment to white noise and disinformation.

It was a new age, and Leo Tillman was a prized resource.

Within the Elohim, it was known that he was also a hostage for the good behaviour of the rhaka, Heather Kennedy. And for the killer of Ber Lusim, Benjamin Rush. These two had saved the city in its hour of greatest need and so were allowed to live out their lives among the Nations, as an act of sublime mercy on Kuutma’s part, on condition of profound and eternal silence. If they spoke a word of what they’d done, or what they’d seen, Tillman would die on the instant.

‘Over time,’ Kuutma told Diema, ‘we’ll adjust the emphasis, little by little. We’ll say that the light of truth, the power of the word, can pierce even a darkness as profound as Leo Tillman’s. We’ll say that he works for us willingly, seeing the value of what he builds and the error of his former ways. We’ll say he wants to be remembered for good, not for evil, and hopes to buy some small degree of redemption by serving something greater than himself.’

Diema understood the strategy, but was impatient of ever seeing it implemented. Kuutma moved so slowly, seeming content to defer the decision from month to month while he sounded the waters of public sentiment in an endless, open-ended process of triage. ‘When can I see him?’ she asked, on the occasion of each brief, inconclusive progress report.

‘Soon,’ Kuutma said each time.

But not yet. That Tillman had been an out-father, and that his child still lived in the city, was the most problematic, the most scandalous aspect of his being there at all. What if he came to learn of the child’s existence? What if he tried to assert some imaginary right of access, of guardianship? What if — God forbid! — the child should accidentally come into contact with him?

So not yet. The People were contemplating, now, many things that would once have been anathema to them. But there were still some lines that could not, must not, be crossed.

She wrote him letters, though words had never come easily to her. Then, once she’d heard that story from Alus and Taria about him demanding windows, she began to send him pictures. Imaginary landscapes. Woods and fields, desert mesas, mountains. And a vast lake stretching to the horizon, with islands floating in its grey, choppy waters.

She dreamed, some nights, of the two of them walking there, on its endless, contested margins. Talking about the past until the past lost its power to hurt them and the shoreline turned into a bridge that took them home.

She waited to meet him.