But before he could flick the switches, something cold and hard touched the back of his neck.
From inside the cab of the truck, whose windows must have been rolled down all this time, the man’s voice murmured right in his ear.
‘Sorry. Lights were just bait.’
On the first word, Shud was already moving. But the man shot him high in the chest, the bullet heading down through his body at a steep angle. It was not just the bullet, it seemed, but the whole world that attacked him. The wall charged him, knocking him off his feet, and then the floor reared up to slam against his splayed body, full-length.
Shud heard the truck’s engine start, saw through bleared eyes its lights opening like the eyes of a dragon started from sleep.
The engine noise swelled to a roar and the truck leaped backwards, smashing into the nearest racks of shelving, sending them tumbling and crashing against their neighbours. The chain reaction toppled the burning drum of paracyanogen and a wave of blue fire spread across the room, lighting up a scene of chaos and destruction – running men, falling crates and toppling walls of shelving.
Then the truck reversed direction and rushed on Shud, and the darkness followed in due course.
The truck punched its way through the drop-down door of the freight bay without slowing, bringing it down from its housing in the brickwork and ripping out a steel supporting joist along with it. The debris rained down on the truck, which was already slewing around towards the slip road.
There was a moment when the light from one of the security spots shone directly into the cab, showing the driver, beyond any possibility of a doubt, to be Leo Tillman.
Diema felt an astonishment that had a prickle of awe in it. Ten Messengers, one Adamite man. It was like a Zen koan: there was no meaning in it that her mind could grasp.
The truck drove up the slip road, gathering speed. When it got to the car that had been left there as a road block, Tillman pulled suddenly to the left to hit it at an angle, spinning it off the road and over onto its side, its roof, its other side. It was still a terrific and damaging impact, but the truck, rocking like a boat in a tempest, kept right on going.
Three men – Hifela and two others – ran out through the ruined freight bay doors, guns in their hands, and took aim. To get to the main road, the truck would have to turn broadside on to them for a space of fifty yards, making the driver a relatively easy target.
Diema fired low. Her first two shots missed, but the third hit one of the shooters in the knee. He fell, clutching his leg, and a second later his scream floated past her on the light wind.
A lacework of shots forced Hifela and the other man to retreat behind the angle of the warehouse wall, carrying the wounded man between them. They returned fire, for the sake of their self-respect, but out in the dark of the wasteground Diema was an impossible target.
When the truck was out of sight, she slipped from her covert and retreated quickly back to the fence that separated this site from the next. She was about to lie down on her belly and slide through a hole in the base of the fence when the night turned to summer noon.
The explosion was an assault against each of her senses in turn. After the fireball, the shockwave hit her like a wrecking ball and threw her down onto the ground. The sound – a great, prolonged roar – mauled her as she lay there, stunned, and then a searing, chemical miasma invaded her lungs along with her sudden, shaking breath and tore at her from the inside.
It was whole minutes before she could make herself move again. She felt as though every inch of her skin had been separately squeezed and pummelled. The fire was still lighting up the sky brighter than daylight, but the smoke had now rolled across her and everything that was near at hand was cloaked and distorted by it.
Breathing as shallowly as she could, she crawled through the hole in the fence. On the far side, she stowed her rifle in a battered-looking sports bag, changed quickly into the clothes she thought of as her homeless street urchin disguise, and cleaned most – but not all – of the camouflage dirt off her face with moist wipes.
When she walked away, she was both anonymous and vaguely unclean. In the Adamite world, she found this to be the best disguise of all. The eye glanced off her because it didn’t want to see.
Not that anybody was likely to be looking, right then. The wrath of God had fallen on Ber Lusim and his people. And with supreme, inscrutable irony, it had worn the face of Leo Tillman.
Tillman drove for about five miles – sticking to back roads and country lanes – before he found a place where he could stow the truck. It was a derelict petrol station, right on the main road, with an equally abandoned-looking cottage alongside it. Possibly the cottage was attached to the property – live-in accommodation for the manager of the station, until the completion of the M25 left him beached an unfeasible six or seven miles from the passing trade.
Tillman steered the truck between the rusting pumps and the blind eyes of the kiosk, and rammed it slowly and carefully through a decorative latticework fence into the cottage’s back garden. Then he got out and propped the fence back up again. The cottage hid the truck from the road, which was something, but it was as conspicuous as hell from the station forecourt. Given the obscene potential of its cargo, he’d have to come back soon and put it somewhere safer. But this would do for now. He still had to trek back overland and retrieve his own car, which was a mile or so from the warehouse in a stand of trees.
Sitting on the truck’s running board, Tillman stripped off his jacket and then slowly, with his left hand, undid the straps of the Kevlar vest. His shoulder was aching and starting to cramp. Examining the impact site, he realised that he was lucky to have gotten off so lightly. The deepening purple bruise was centred a bare inch from the edge of the vest.
Tillman pushed air through his clenched teeth, consumed for a moment by utter self-disgust. It had been bloody amateur hour all the way, and it was a miracle he’d gotten away as clean as he had. He remembered a barracks in Angola, more than a decade earlier. Field Sergeant Bennie Vermeulens holding forth as he sewed up a massive knife wound in his thigh with fishing line. ‘Improvising is the last tool in the box, Leo. It’s what you do when your plans run out. So every time you do it, ask yourself if you should have had more plans.’
If that last man – the one who’d looked too big to run so fast – had aimed an inch to the right, the hollow-point shell would have gone into Tillman’s shoulder, and its casing would have broken into molten meteors spraying out and down through his chest. Or if the guy had loaded a more penetrating round, at that distance the vest might not even have stopped it.
And if there’d been no handy tub of stabilised paracyanogen gel? No overhead crane? No truck?
He should have had more plans. Definitely.
But that wasn’t all. He’d left men standing and given them a clear shot when he ran. He’d been saved by another shooter, firing from the other side of the warehouse, away from the road. Someone, therefore, who must have already been in position when the kill squad rolled up, probably even earlier, when Tillman was doing his own recon. As he watched the warehouse through his field glasses, another pair of eyes had been trained on his back.
Friendly eyes? Best not to take anything for granted at this point. The hand that picks you up out of the fire may just be saving you for the frying pan. But friendly or not, he knew who they belonged to and how elegantly he’d been set up. He just didn’t know why. Or how she’d guessed that he’d track the bike and use it to get back on her. Or why she’d bothered, once he was in the trap, to help him get out again.
What are you up to, girl? And how do you even know me, let alone know me so well?
Unless it was all chance. All screw-up. Maybe she’d been watching the warehouse, too, and that was why she’d spent so much time there.
Like Kennedy, he had a sudden, uneasy feeling that he was a piece in a pattern he couldn’t perceive. Not acting, but acted on. And that the pattern, when he finally saw it, might be one he wouldn’t like much at all.
And the False word wille die, and the True worde live. As on the threshing Floor, when Chaff is sorted from Wheat, that all who worke dilligently and earn their Hire may finally eat. The Infidels who soile the Holy Worde will bewaile their Blindness, and repent. Even in the House of the faithlesse Soldier they will repent. And in Münsters Churche, so, and likewise, they will repent. But such repentance wille come too late and Helles Fires will take holde on them.
Gods Angel will stand over Zion with a flaming Sworde outstretched in his hand, ready to doe Execution. But his first Stroke he will withholde awhile, because the Houre is not yet come.
Where the Highest bled, the Lowest wille likewise bleed. Even the vermin, that all shunne and disdaine. Shall it not be below as it was above? God has even promised this (Matthew 6:10).
The water of Ister will runne red, as with Blood – a greate Wonder, and one that all will attest. They that touche it will be stained. They that drinke it will be cursed.
Kennedy shoved the thin sheaf of typewritten pages away from her and massaged her eyes with the heels of her hands. She’d learned a lot about Johann Toller in the last three hours, but was starting to wonder how much more she could take.
Toller described the source of his revelations as an angel made all of fire, with six wings and multiple pairs of eyes under each wing – Revelation 4:8, he had helpfully added. The angel had appeared to him when he was close to death, and recounted the prophecies to him.
And they were deeply strange. They soared and plunged from the sublime and the cosmic to the sordid and the petty. God would deal out vengeance upon the nations that denied him, but also on specific, named people: minor officials in Cromwell’s Barebones Parliament and its successors, quartermasters in the New Model Army and even clerks in government ministries.
But riding behind the local details was a religious fervour freed from the confines of workaday sanity. Toller believed that Christ was on his way, ready to keep a date he’d made with the faithful long before. He was already late. He was already looked for. If you held your breath and closed your eyes, you could hear his footsteps.
A conviction grew in Kennedy as she read. The terms of Toller’s rhetoric were so similar to the Judas Gospel, as Emil Gassan had once read it to her, that she knew, somewhere beneath or beyond reason, that the echoes meant something. Like Toller, the Judas People were obsessed with timing and haunted by the fear that the Lord might have turned his face away from them – that their precious covenant might come, in the end, to nothing.
The similarities were too close to be accidental. Toller even mentioned the same figure of three thousand years, which was central to the Judas tribe’s theology but made very little sense to regular Christians. A three-millennia cycle was about to close, Toller said, and once it was complete, everyone would see God’s final purpose. Which was exactly what Kennedy had read, three years before, in the forbidden pages of the Judas Gospel.
While she was still trying to make sense of this discovery, the door behind her opened. Gilles Bouchard stepped inside and skirted the little desk to stare down at her, moving with the silence of a monk in a cloister. She gave him a nod of acknowledgement, and saw Bouchard measuring with an expert eye the number of pages she’d turned.
‘You should skip to the climax, Ms Kennedy,’ he said, smiling. ‘There is, I promise you, a great deal of repetition along the way.’
Actually, Kennedy had already skipped ahead to the last page. It was the same as the rest, maybe a little more wilfully opaque and fantastic in its imagery, but cut from the same cloth as the rest of the book.
And the Stone shall be rolled away from the Tombe, as it was the Time before. Then will a VOICE be heard, crying ‘The Hour, the Hour is at Hand’ and all Menne will see what heretofore was hidden. The Betrayer will condemne a great Multitude with a single Breathe. On the Island that was given for an Island, in the presence of the Son and of the Spirit, hee will speake the Names of the thousand thousand that will be sacrificed. And from his Throne in the Heavens, the Lord Jesus who is our Glory and our Life will speake the Names of the few that will be Saved.
Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.
Amen.
‘It’s an unfathomable and pointless book,’ Bouchard murmured. ‘But typical of its time.’
Kennedy put down the page she was reading and swivelled on the chair to face Bouchard, resting an arm across its back. ‘Is it?’ she asked. ‘How, exactly?’ She was looking for reassurance, she realised. If all this madness was in the air back then, the eerie parallels she was seeing would be a lot less disturbing.
Bouchard made a non-committal gesture. ‘I didn’t mean anything profound,’ he assured her. ‘I just meant that Toller’s argument would have been far less controversial in the 1600s than it sounds today.’
‘The religious mania?’
‘The second coming of Christ. Specifically that. A great many people, in Toller’s time, took it as a given that the Day of Judgment was at hand. Not sad, troubled men with sandwich boards, but influential thinkers. Entire religious movements, in fact.’
Bouchard leaned back against the wall, since there was nowhere in the room that he could sit. ‘It’s strange, in some ways,’ he said, ‘and very understandable in others. Strange in the timing. The word “millenarian”, by its etymology, explicitly addresses a phenomenon that happens at the end of a millennium – the end of a great swathe of time, which is easy to mistake for the end of time itself. The late seventeenth century was a long way away from one of those watershed moments. But it seemed like an ending for other reasons.’