He tried not to be afraid, but he’d seen how Nahir and his posse had been looking at him and Kennedy down in the caves, and he was pretty sure he knew what those looks meant. They’d outlived their usefulness – not that there’d been much usefulness to outlive, in his case. The
Elohim
would figure out the prophecy without their help, or else they would blow it. Either way, he and Kennedy – and Tillman, assuming Tillman wasn’t dead already – would be taken out behind the barn. Even if Diema wanted to protect them, there probably wasn’t a lot she could do about it. And as far as he could tell, Diema was going along with the whole—
The bolt on the outside of the cell door rattled and then clanked as it was drawn back. Rush turned around, expecting to see the Messenger who’d brought him here – but it was her.
Diema closed the door behind her, quietly but firmly. She stared at Rush hard, her expression intense but unreadable.
‘So how was your day?’ he asked.
‘Shut up,’ Diema said.
‘Okay.’
‘And lie on the bed.’
It wasn’t what he was expecting to hear, so the snappiest comeback he could dredge up was ‘What?’
‘The bed,’ Diema snapped, walking up to him and pushing him towards it. Her body was rigid with tension. ‘Lie down. Lie down on the bed. Quickly!’
Bemused, Rush obeyed – but this just seemed to get the girl angry. ‘Not with your clothes on!’ she exploded. ‘For God’s sake, have you never had sex before? Your pants. Your pants!’
He stood up again. ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m really not in the mood. The apple? Okay, the apple was funny, but this—’ A thought struck him, and he wound down in mid-sentence. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a joke at all, it was—
Poison on a sugar lump.
A hypnotist’s pocket watch, set swinging.
Being asked to count down from ten, so you wouldn’t feel it when the needle slipped into your arm on the count of seven.
‘Hey,’ he said, his voice shaking a little. ‘Let’s not do this, okay. I swear I’m not going to tell anyone about you. Nobody would even believe me if I did. You don’t have to …’
Diema exhaled – a loud huff of exasperation – and breathed in again deeply and slowly. On the in-breath she magically produced a knife, one of those evil-looking sica things, and pressed it to Rush’s stomach.
‘Oh shit,’ he blurted.
With a single sweep of the knife, she sliced clean through his belt and took his fly button, too. Then she pushed him again, tangling up her foot with his in a complicated way so that he slammed down onto the bed.
Diema kicked off her boots and undressed from the waist down. With the knife still in her hand, she climbed on top of him. She tapped the blade of the knife against his chest. Her face, as she contemplated him, was solemn, even severe.
‘We’ve got ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Can you get there in ten minutes, Rush?’
‘Can I—’
‘Because if you can’t, I’m not going to be responsible for the consequences. But I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be a lot of blood.’
She reached underneath her, found him with her hand and rubbed him with a lot more vigour than tenderness. When he was hard enough, she guided him in.
It was reminiscent of Dovecote Farm, in a lot of ways. Except that being beaten up by her at Dovecote Farm hadn’t involved performance anxiety. It took him a long while to get into any kind of a rhythm, and a couple of times along the way he almost lost his erection. Diema was pushing back against him brusquely, but there was no trace of pleasure on her face.
As soon as he reached his climax, Diema uncoupled from him and tucked the knife away. She began to dress again without a word.
‘Was it … was it good for you?’ he asked dazedly.
Diema snorted in derision. ‘No!’
He raised himself a few inches to stare at her. ‘Then why did we do it?’ he asked.
She tugged her trousers up over her hips, then stepped into her boots and knelt to tie up the laces.
‘Why?’ Rush insisted. He was afraid of what the answer might be, but he really needed to know.
Diema was already walking towards the door, hauling it open, but she paused for a moment in the doorway and glanced back at him.
‘Because I don’t trust you to lie,’ she said coldly. From the tone of her voice and the look on his face, a casual observer would think Rush had just run over Diema’s dog, rather than that they’d just shared a moment of physical intimacy.
The door slammed shut behind her.
He slumped back onto the bed and closed his eyes, overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness and despair.
Maybe every condemned man felt like that after his hearty meal.
Diema was oppressed by the feeling of time running out – except that the image her mind gave her wasn’t of sand falling through an hourglass. It was of a lit fuse, like the fuse on a bomb in a Tex Avery cartoon, burning down to the final, irrevocable KABOOM.
She found Nahir sitting at the desk in his command room, deep in discussion with Kuutma. She waited in the doorway to be noticed, prepared to walk away again if Kuutma ignored her, but he beckoned her in.
‘—monitoring live data feeds from scanners at airports and border checkpoints,’ Nahir was saying as she entered. ‘But there’s nothing yet. We’re checking against all of Ber Lusim’s known aliases, but of course we’re not assuming that we know every identity he has. Since we closed the airports, the knock-on effects have led to security checkpoints being set up along all the major roads into and out of the city. We can’t say for sure that we’ve stopped Lusim, but I’m confident we’ve slowed him down.’
Kuutma nodded. ‘Sensible steps to take, certainly,’ he said. ‘Diema, your opinion?’
‘My opinion? I don’t think it can do any harm,’ Diema said. Her slow, considered tone left vast amounts unspoken.
‘What would you do that I’ve left undone?’ Nahir asked, receiving the insult with a face frozen into immobility.
‘Assuming that you’ve also stationed Messengers at the Keleti and Nyugati Pályaudvar railheads—’
‘Of course.’
‘—and that you’re monitoring take-offs from private airfields, then I’d say you’ve done all you can to prevent Ber Lusim from leaving the city.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So what I would do, Nahir, is assume that you’ve failed, and do my best to find out where he’s going.’
She was standing before him now, and he stood up too, maybe to assert the advantage of his height.
‘Do my best,’ he repeated, with cold politeness. ‘That’s a rhetorical exhortation, Diema Beit Evrom, rather than a piece of advice that I can actually act on.’
‘Then act on this,’ she said. ‘Wake Leo Tillman.’
Nahir looked from her to Kuutma and back again. He shook his head, not in refusal but in bafflement. ‘Tillman was enlisted as a killer,’ he pointed out. ‘Surely his usefulness is at an end.’
‘We need what’s in his head. He was the one who went into Ber Lusim’s warehouse, back in London. He saw the documentation on the weapons and equipment that Lusim had already shipped.’
‘We’re starting to retrieve similar information from the computers we found down in the caves.’
‘Good.’ Diema’s tone was clipped. ‘I’m not saying those efforts should stop. Just that we should use every option that’s open to us. Kennedy is right that as Adamites, she and the others come at the Toller prophecies from a different angle than we do. She proved that just now – and justified your decision to enlist her,
Tannanu
. I want to use Leo Tillman’s expertise, too. His tactical intelligence, which was great enough to allow him to find Ginat’Dania that was.’
Kuutma rubbed his cheek with his thumb. ‘Could this be done?’ he asked Nahir. ‘Could you wake him? Or is Tillman too far-gone?’
Nahir made a non-committal gesture. ‘I don’t know,
Tannanu
,’ he admitted. ‘I was thinking of Tillman as a spent asset, so I haven’t asked the doctors to report to me on his condition. I’ll do so now.’
‘Thank you, Nahir,’ Kuutma said. ‘Take my bodyguards with you. They both have a good grounding in field medicine. Perhaps they can be of use. We’ll join you shortly.’
‘I want the others there, too,’ Diema said quickly. ‘Kennedy and Rush.’
Kuutma frowned. ‘They were not, I believe, present in the warehouse with Tillman,’ he observed.
‘No. But they were both researching Johann Toller and his prophecies. Again, it’s a case of using all possible assets. If any of them has an insight we can use, we need to squeeze it out of them now.’
‘Very well,’ Kuutma said. ‘Nahir, please have them fetched.’
Nahir made the sign of the noose, which Kuutma returned, and then he left. Diema read extreme tension in the set of Nahir’s back and shoulders. He wouldn’t forgive her for the indignities she’d put him through today. But in a way, that made what she had to do easier: he was so relentlessly focused on his own hurt feelings that she didn’t need to give them any thought herself.
Alone with Diema for the first time, Kuutma gave her a brief but warm embrace. ‘I’m pleased with all you’ve accomplished,’ he told her. ‘Pleased and proud. The operation here was brilliantly handled.’
‘Thank you,
Tannanu
.’ Diema assumed the same tone of simple humility she’d used when she spoke with him in Ginat’Dania, and her heart swelled as it always had when he praised her, but there were other emotions in the mix now, and she chose her words with care. ‘But I think I could have done more, and done it more quickly. And in any case, the plan was yours.’
‘Yes,’ Kuutma agreed. ‘The plan was mine. I said you should bring Tillman and the
rhaka
into the orbit of our investigation, and use their talents. But I knew how much I was asking of you. I knew that this thing, which was so easy to say, would be very hard indeed to carry out. You carried it out immaculately.’
‘Thank you,
Tannanu
.’
‘What I’m concerned about, is how you yourself may have been hurt in the process – especially in meeting Leo Tillman and being forced into close proximity with him. No Messenger has ever had to bear that burden.’
Diema knew that she couldn’t plausibly counterfeit indifference, so she let him see some of the tension she’d been hiding, letting the mask slip as though with relief. She grimaced. ‘It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I see my brothers in him. Myself, even. It’s hard, at those times, not to let him see how much I hate him.’
‘Walk with me,’ Kuutma suggested.
He bowed, and with a sweep of his arm invited her to go before him. As they left Nahir’s command room, he fell in at her side, hands clasped behind his back, moving at an easy amble that belied the urgency of their situation.
‘Your hate, then,’ he said. ‘It’s as great as it ever was?’
‘His crime is as great as it ever was.’
‘Of course. It’s important that I know your heart in this, Diema. Very important. You’ve served the city more in a year than many do in a lifetime. Your well-being matters to me.’
‘I know.’ She looked at the ground.
‘Well,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’m answered. And really, I shouldn’t even have needed to ask. It was your suggestion to wake Tillman and speak to him, despite the severity of his wounds. You’re obviously not troubled at the thought of compromising his recovery – or accidentally killing him. The drugs that will be used will be very potent. So we’ll be putting a strain on his heart, when it’s already weak.’
Diema swallowed hard. ‘So long as he lives long enough to talk to us,’ she said, as carelessly as she could.
‘And here we are,’ Kuutma said. They had reached a door that was like all the other doors they’d passed. How did he know? Diema wondered. Had he studied the layout of the house before he arrived? Had he arrived earlier and remained in the background during the raid on the caves? Was there some system of signs in the safe houses that he knew about and she didn’t?
Was her face equally easy for him to read?
Diema knew that prolonged use of the drug kelalit could induce amphetamine psychosis. Paranoia was its chief symptom. She reached out and opened the door, bowing for Kuutma to precede her into the room. She didn’t even look over the threshold.
‘
Tannanu
,’ she murmured.
‘Thank you, Diema.’
He went in, and she followed him, steeling herself. Killing, when she’d been brought to it, had been much harder than she expected it to be. But what she was about to do now would be harder still.
She had to bring all three Adamites out of here alive.
When Kennedy got her first look at Leo Tillman, she had to fight back a cry of dismay. She’d seen his injuries when they were fresh, so she thought she was armoured against anything she might find when the Messengers thrust her and Rush in through the door of the medical room and told them brusquely to wait there.
But she’d reckoned without the vagaries of
Elohim
psychology. Tillman’s wounds had been bandaged, and he’d been given the blood transfusion he so desperately needed. In fact, it looked as though he’d been given scrupulous care. Diagnostic machines had been brought in from somewhere and hooked up to his body wherever there was a space between the drip feeds and catheters. His dressings were clean, and so were the sheets.
But someone had remembered, at some point in all these clinical proceedings, that they were dealing with an enemy. At that point, they had shackled Tillman’s hands and feet to the bed frame with four sets of sleeve cuffs tied so tightly that his body was almost being lifted from the bed.
A doctor was checking Tillman’s blood pressure with a pneumatic sleeve, his expression bland and calm, as though this were all in a day’s work. Kuutma’s two angels also stood by, coldly indifferent, watching him work.
‘Jesus frigging Christ,’ Rush exclaimed.
Kennedy turned to the four
Elohim
who’d brought them there. ‘Cut him loose,’ she said. She had to force the words out. The blood was pounding in her temples and she felt like she was choking on an anger – close to panic – that had been rising in her since the first time they’d been brought to this place.