Then something happened to Alex Wales’s eyes and Kennedy felt a jolt of pure shock rush through her from the centre on out to the extremities, as though someone had just plugged her heart into a live socket.
Wales’s eyes reddened.
They became bloodshot with a suddenness that was almost surreal. It was as though blood were welling up in them like tears, waiting to be shed.
She had seen this before.
Haemolacria
. It was the side effect of kelalit, a very potent drug in the methamphetamine family. Three years earlier, back when she was still a cop, Kennedy had run across a group of people who all took the drug, and all displayed the same unsettling trait. They called themselves
Elohim
, or Messengers, and they were the holy assassins of a secret tribe of humanity – the Judas People. It occurred to Kennedy now that when Wales had seen the ashes in the box, when he’d murmured under his breath, his expression had changed – become for a moment much more serious, even solemn. He’d looked like a man in church, kneeling at the altar for holy communion. And she was sure that whatever it was he’d said, he’d been speaking to the ashes, rather than to anyone else in the room.
If Alex Wales was on kelalit, the reddening of his eyes indicated that his system was preparing for sudden, violent action. The drug would give him the speed and the strength to kill like a demon unleashed from hell.
She knew this because she had seen it happen. She had watched her own partner cut down by one of these monsters – had faced them herself, in a case where their conscienceless atrocities had been triggered by something as banal and trivial as the translation of a lost gospel. So if she and Gassan and Thornedyke and poor puppy-like Rush were going to survive past the next few seconds, Kennedy would have to pull something out of her ass real fast.
And in the meantime, she just kept talking. Because if Wales had wanted to kill them straight out, they’d be dead already. There had to be something else he wanted, too.
‘You had me guessing, at first,’ Kennedy said, improvising recklessly, ‘about the target. The book. What was so special about it. Why you’d gone to all that trouble to find it and acquire it. False identities. Breaking and entering. Camping out in a box. Then I realised that it might not be about the book at all.’
Wales scowled in slow motion. Obviously that guess had gone way wide. It
was
all about the book. But Wales was still listening.
You want to know what we know
, Kennedy thought.
You want to be absolutely sure we’re still blind before you pull the plug on this. Or else you want to know who else, besides us, has to be taken down.
And maybe it would slow you down a little if you thought that might be a long list.
‘So at this point,’ she said, pushing back her chair and standing up, ‘I started to call in some favours. People I still knew in the Met. Academics. Acquaintances in the intelligence community. I shared data with friends and gave them the whole story. Your name. Silver’s name. The title of the book, and my guesses as to who you really are under that
nom de guerre
.’
Gassan made an audible gasp. He was staring at Kennedy in horror. ‘Heather,’ he protested weakly. ‘We stipulated discretion.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You did.’ She was moving now, around the edge of the table, and Wales was turning his head to keep her in sight.
‘You have no idea who we are,’ he said. And his voice had changed. The humility had fallen away, the naked edge of something completely other showing through.
‘I know this much,’ Kennedy said, still ambling towards the head of the table – not even looking at the door, although it lay full in her path. ‘I know that you and Mark Silver don’t regard anything you did as a crime, and you don’t feel any sense of guilt for it. Even if you’d had to kill, as you more than half-expected you might, you’d have been ready for—’
That was as far as she got. Wales saw where Kennedy was heading or else just guessed – as Kennedy had guessed – that something wasn’t playing out as it should. He stepped into her path and suddenly, as his hands unfolded from his chest, he had a knife balanced in each of them.
The second shock was as painful as the first. Kennedy knew the knives, too: handleless sica blades. Their unsettling, asymmetrical shape cropped up in her nightmares.
‘Thornedyke,’ she shouted. ‘Do it!’ It meant nothing, it was just a distraction. Thornedyke scrambled up and staggered back from the table, utterly terrified. Professor Gassan, with more presence of mind, lunged for the phone.
Rush went for Wales and the speed of his reflexes was what saved Kennedy from dying in that first moment. He charged the man from behind, trying to pin his arms to his sides. For a moment he succeeded, but Wales bent from the knees, dropping cleanly out of Rush’s grip, then jabbed up and back with his left arm. His elbow slammed into Rush’s crotch and the boy folded with a whuff of agonised breath. Wales rose as he fell, the elbow still extended so that it hit Rush in the face with solid, sickening force.
By that time, Gassan had the phone receiver to his ear and his hand on the key pad. As he pressed 1 – for an external line – Wales’s right arm straightened like a whip and the knife that had been in his hand was in Gassan’s chest. The professor sat back down again, eyes wide, hands fluttering in uncoordinated protest.
Kennedy threw herself forward before Wales could recover his balance, and grappled with him. It wasn’t an attack, it was more of an embrace. She was hoping to trap Wales’s arms against his body, as Rush had, and stop him from using the remaining knife.
He twisted against her and Kennedy could feel his intimidating strength. She couldn’t maintain the hold. Wales’s left arm came free and he slammed her hard against the wall. But they were so close together now that it was hard for him to bring the blade to bear against her. He stepped back.
Rush – amazingly, still in the fight – kicked at Wales’s legs. It was a glancing blow, with almost no leverage behind it, but Wales stumbled, and it took him a fraction of a second to right himself – long enough for Kennedy to throw her left arm out, smashing the glass on the security alarm. The sound of the thin plate breaking was almost inaudible.
The sound of all the room’s door locks cycling was much louder.
Wales drove her into the wall with the full weight of his body and kicked her legs out from under her as she fell. At the same time, the shutters came down across the windows with a grinding shriek of metal on metal, taking out most of the light.
‘Lockdown,’ Kennedy gasped. She was on her stomach, pressed painfully into the angle of wall and floor, Wales’s knee in the small of her back, his body overlaid on hers so that every movement she might have made seemed to be forestalled in a different way. Wales held the knife right up against her throat: she felt the sting as it broke her skin and something like the heat of a blush as a little of her spilled blood trickled down into the hollow of her breastbone. ‘No way in or out, Alex. So whatever you do or don’t do to us, you’re not walking away from this.’
The man was bending low over her, his face almost on the same level as Kennedy’s and an inch or so away. His wide eyes, alien and inscrutable, stared sidelong into her own. The red tide brimmed behind them, threatening to spill down his cheeks.
‘The average response time is twelve minutes,’ Kennedy wheezed, fighting the urge to pull away from the blade – as though the man were a cat and any movement from his prey would trigger instincts so strong that conscious thought wouldn’t come into it.
Rush was still down, or down again, folded around his injured crotch. Emil Gassan had slumped back in his chair, hands clasped to his chest in an incongruous attitude of devotion. Thornedyke had backed away until he hit the wall and stood frozen, watching, his lower jaw hanging down in mute horror and dismay. ‘And there’s what,’ Kennedy said, forcing the words out from lungs that felt hollowed out like gourds, ‘six or seven doors between you and the street? How good are you with locks?’
It was impossible to tell what was going on behind the red-rimmed, open wounds that were Wales’s eyes. He said nothing, and the razor edge at Kennedy’s throat didn’t move. But the expression on his face, now, was one of serious thought.
Rush spoke for the first time, from behind them. Kennedy didn’t dare turn to see what the boy was doing or if he’d managed to get upright again. His voice was strained and tremulous. ‘Alex,’ he said, ‘listen to me. What you’ve done … it’s just breaking and entering. Maybe theft. You might not even go to jail. But if Professor Gassan dies, that’s murder. You’ve got to stop this. Give yourself up. Don’t be stupid. Nobody cares that you nicked a bloody book.’
Footsteps sounded from outside and someone knocked on the door – tentative at first, then more loudly. A second later there was an answering knock from one of the other doors. The room was surrounded, and the police were coming.
Wales seemed to weigh these things in the balance. He let out a long, slow, steady breath, but his left arm tensed. The blade bit a fraction of an inch deeper into Kennedy’s flesh, making her flinch and stiffen.
‘I swear to God,’ Rush said again, desperately, ‘you won’t go to jail.’
Wales straightened, removing his weight from Kennedy’s back. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I won’t.’
He drew the knife across his own throat.
Some hours – maybe four, maybe five – went by in fuzzy staccato. Disconnected freeze-frames, the intervals between them filled with endless replays of that one indelible instant. Kennedy tried to shut it out with other thoughts, but it ran over and under and through them, the way Alex Wales’s blood had run over the knife blade and his shirt and the table and the oatmeal carpet and Kennedy’s hands and Rush’s hands as they tried to stanch the endless flow.
And through it all, Wales had smiled at them, contemptuously amused by their futile attempts to keep him alive against his will.
Kennedy had given two statements to the police, one to the regular Met, the second to one of the many anti-terrorist agencies, all of whom were on high alert because of the recent spate of fires, explosions and car-bombings. There was no question of her being blamed for the death. Rush’s testimony agreed with hers on every count, and the investigating officers were seeing these events in the light of the attack on her, two nights ago, where it now seemed more likely than not that Wales had been the aggressor. Thornedyke and Gassan would corroborate Kennedy’s story, too, no doubt, but neither could be approached for an opinion right then. Thornedyke had gone into screaming hysterics immediately after Wales’s suicide, had continued to show signs of distress and panic through the removal of the body, and on arrival at the hospital had been put under sedation. Emil Gassan was in intensive care and might not survive.
The forensics, too, supported an assumption of suicide. The angle of the gash in Alex Wales’s throat was consistent with a self-inflicted wound and although nobody had said so to Kennedy, they would obviously have checked the knife-hilt for prints by this time and found only those of Wales himself.
But the emergency room staff were if anything even more reluctant to let go of Kennedy than the police were, convinced first that some of the blood that had dried and caked on her must be her own and then that she must be suffering from shock.
And maybe she was, at that, but hot, sweet tea wasn’t going to help her out of it. She had to get away from solicitous bystanders and professionally neutral cops, and work out for herself what all this meant.
The Judas People. The Judas People running headlong into her and Emil Gassan. How could such a thing happen? What mechanism could even begin to explain it?
She had to call Izzy. Make sure Izzy was okay. Okay, maybe it didn’t make too much sense, when you looked at it closely – why wouldn’t she be? – but the instinct was too strong. Impatient of getting herself discharged from the hospital, or of persuading the friendly, inquiring detectives to tell her she was free to go, she went to the bathroom and called from inside a locked toilet.
Izzy didn’t answer and Kennedy started to panic. But as she was in the process of dialling again to leave a message, the phone registered an incoming call.
‘Sorry, babe,’ Izzy said. ‘Missed you by a second, there. Everything okay?’
Everything wasn’t, but Kennedy was suddenly tongue-tied. Izzy was still safest where she was. And telling her what had happened would mean an argument, because she’d want to come back and look after Kennedy, be there for her, and that was the last thing that Kennedy wanted right then. The assassins of the Judas People didn’t work alone, they worked in twos or threes. The man who’d called himself Alex Wales was down and he wasn’t getting up again, but there could be – would be – others.
Kennedy stammered through a few minutes’ worth of banal lies about how everything was okay and how nothing at all, either good or bad, had happened to her.
‘Well, God knows, I can sympathise,’ Izzy said, sounding glum. ‘A game of Trivial Pursuit with Hayley and Richard has been the highlight of my trip so far. And it was the family edition, babe, so they took me to the cleaners. Have
you
ever heard of Frankie Cocozza?’
‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘Izzy, I’ve got to go. Someone just came in.’
‘Okay. What’s that echo? It sounds like you’re in the loo. If you’re in the loo, and someone just came in, you’ve got a harassment suit right there.’
‘I’m … in a hallway.’ Kennedy’s mind was still firing randomly and she realised suddenly that the next day’s papers would be full of the violent suicide at Ryegate House. There was no way Izzy wasn’t going to get to hear about it. So she switched horses in mid-banality, came clean and gave Izzy a heavily redacted version of recent events that amounted to: someone died.
‘Right in front of you?’ Izzy demanded. ‘Someone just died, with you standing there? I don’t get it.’
‘It was … it’s hard to explain, Izzy. But I’m fine. I’m totally fine. He killed himself.’