by Adam Blake
The big man bent over her. Contradictory expressions – eagerness, revulsion, fear, hate – chased themselves across his face.
‘I’ll talk,’ Kennedy said quickly. ‘You don’t need to cut me. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
Abydos gestured, and Samal paused again. He hadn’t even touched her and he seemed relieved not to have to, even though she saw how easily the knife sat in his hand. She was sure he’d killed before. She was equally sure that torture held no particular terrors for him. There was nothing like mercy in his face, and if anything, he seemed to feel a visceral loathing for her. On an impulse, she struggled against the cuffs and let her forearm, as if by accident, touch the back of Samal’s hand. The man jumped as if he’d been stung.
Women, Kennedy thought. You’re scared of women.
‘Very well,’ Abydos said. ‘Let’s begin with this afternoon. You called a meeting, at Ryegate House. What happened there?’
Kennedy licked her dry lips and tried her hardest to keep her voice steady. ‘I accused a man, Alex Wales, of theft.’
‘Theft of what?’
‘A book.’
‘Name the book.’ Abydos’s emphasis was so precise that Kennedy hesitated, forewarned. She knew how important the written word was for the Judas People. Actually, she’d been told in counter-terrorism seminars back when she was still a cop, that the same thing went for most religious fanatics. To the fundamentalist mindset, the word was literally flesh and any harm or disrespect offered to it was a direct assault on the godhead.
So, out of some half-explored instinct, she lied. ‘We weren’t able to find that out,’ she said. ‘We just knew that there was a discrepancy. That one of the boxes in that room was light. Something had been stolen.’
‘And you knew that Alex Wales had stolen it.’
‘Yes.’ Again, they had to know this much. Their agent, the other member of their cell, hadn’t reported in – had dropped off the map. His death would hit the news soon enough, if it hadn’t already. Lying wouldn’t help her.
‘How did you know?’ Abydos asked.
Kennedy stumbled through an explanation. The chiming dates in the personnel files. The inside-man hypothesis. The coincidence of Silver’s death.
‘Very good,’ Abydos acknowledged, as though he were a teacher, or else a priest coaching her in her catechism. ‘And you put these things to him. To Wales.’
‘I questioned him. Yes.’
‘How did he reply?’
‘He didn’t. He refused to answer any of my questions. And then, when I locked him in the room and called the police, he killed himself with his own knife.’
Samal made a sound, an ululating moan, deep in his throat. Abydos glared at him and admonished him in whatever their language was. ‘Ne eyar v’shteh. De beyoshin lekot.’ It certainly sounded a lot like the bastard Aramaic of the Judas People.
‘Ma es’irim shud ekol—’ Samal answered, his face as tragic and imploring as a whipped dog’s.
Abydos cut him off with a curt, commanding gesture. Then he turned back to Kennedy, as though there’d been no interruption. ‘But it won’t do,’ he told her. ‘You’re very careful to say “I did this” and “He wouldn’t answer me”. As if the two of you were alone in that room. But you weren’t. You will tell us, please, who else was there.’
Kennedy realised with a cold, sudden shock that this – all of this, everything that was happening to her now and was about to happen – was the reason why Alex Wales hadn’t killed her when he could. Once he’d decided on his own death, it became essential to allow Kennedy to live so that these men could question her.
‘I thought Wales might be more likely to talk if I spoke to him alone,’ she said. Her voice cracked, zigzagged raggedly up the scale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
‘No,’ Abydos said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s the truth.’
There was a long pause. ‘I ask you again, Miss Kennedy. Who else was there? Tell me, and spare yourself this pain.’
‘It’s the truth,’ she said again.
‘Well,’ Abydos said. He nodded to Samal.
Kennedy braced herself, but she knew enough about torture to be sure that any preparations she made in advance would be useless as soon as it started.
She thought the man might take a few moments to screw up his courage, but he just stuck the knife deep into her left side, until it touched the rib and ground against the bone. Kennedy opened her mouth to scream. Abydos, who had been expecting this, pushed a piece of cloth – a handkerchief, maybe – deeply into her throat. The scream became a soggy yodel, more vibration than sound. The man watched her closely, clinically, as she struggled and gurgled into the gag.
‘Again,’ he said.
Samal lowered the blade and Kennedy went into futile spasms, panic and terror shutting out all rational thought.
But the knife didn’t touch her, because the two men had both frozen at a sudden sound, absurd and extraneous, from outside the room. Five hollow knocks, in quick succession, in the sequence universally known as shave-and-a-haircut.
‘Izzy?’ It was a woman’s voice, young and slightly querulous, coming from the other end of the hall – from the flat’s front door. ‘Lover? Are you in there?’
14
Abydos responded a little quicker than Kennedy, and that slight difference was crucial. As she tensed her body for some movement violent enough to warn this newcomer off, he gripped her wrists tightly in his hands and whispered a single word to Samal.
‘Rishkert.’
By that time, Kennedy’s legs were lifting off the bed, but Samal caught her ankles in mid-air and forced them down again slowly and inexorably. She couldn’t produce any more noise than the writhing of her upper body against the sheets.
‘Izzy? Are you in here?’ The voice seemed a little wary and unhappy. ‘The door wasn’t locked …’ Abydos gave Samal a smouldering glare and Samal turned his face away from it as though from a slap.
Footsteps in the hall, getting closer. ‘Izzy?’ By now, whoever it was had to have seen the light streaming from under the door. But you wouldn’t just wander into someone’s bedroom, uninvited. Nobody would be insane or brazen or crass enough to do that, unless they were pretty sure they had an open invitation.
The door handle turned and the door opened an inch. ‘Okayyy …’ The voice had changed from tentative to teasing, although there was still an undertone of uncertainty. ‘If you’ve got someone in there, I’m giving you a full ten seconds to get under the covers. Nine … eight … seven … Nah, to hell with it.’
The door was pushed fully open and a young woman – a very young woman – stepped into the room. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and even in her extreme panic, a part of Kennedy’s mind found time for wonder and outrage.
Jesus, Izzy.
The woman was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt – plain, even drab – and black wrestling boots that hadn’t been in style for so long that they had to be a retro affectation. Her hair was short and dark and tightly curled, her eyes were violet, and right then they were as wide as saucers because whatever she was expecting to be looking at, what she was actually seeing was two stony-faced men and a tied-up woman, and Samal had stood and swung round to face her, a gun in his hand now (replacing the knife – when had that happened?) pointing directly at the mid-point of her body.
‘I … I …’ she faltered. ‘I was—’
‘Come into the room,’ Abydos said. ‘Come. We won’t hurt you.’ His voice was firm, but with a slow, even cadence, reassuring. He made no move towards her, but his gaze was fixed on her eyes. ‘Come in, or this woman will die.’
The girl looked from Abydos to Samal, then to the gun. Her face was the face of a trauma victim, dull with shock. Run, Kennedy thought, and tried to say, but the only sound that came through the gag was a desperate, almost voiceless growl.
‘Come inside,’ Abydos said, in the same gentling voice. ‘C
lose the door.’
The girl took a step. At least, her foot moved forward, but her body stayed where it was, on the threshold, frozen.
‘My mum knows I’m here,’ she said, but she said it with a rising pitch, as a question or a plea.
‘All right,’ Abydos said. ‘It’s all right. Close the door.’
But the girl seemed to have run out of motive force. ‘I just wanted …’ she said. ‘I was gonna give Izzy her books back.’
She held up something that Kennedy hadn’t seen until then: brightly coloured, even garish, and with a high gloss over which the light of the lamp played in a momentary flash of Morse.
It was a porno mag. Bush League. Two mostly naked women entwined on its cover, pelvis grinding against pelvis, the body of one twisted ridiculously to display her gigantic breasts to the best effect.
‘You want to see?’ the girl said, holding it out. Samal recoiled from the image as though it were a snake. And then a number of impossible things happened in swift sequence.
From under the magazine, which tilted suddenly in the girl’s hand, two glittering threads arced up to hit Samal in the centre of his chest.
There was a sound like a clock ticking, but too fast and too loud. Samal did a clumsy moonwalk, moving backwards across the room in three jerky half-steps, until his shoulders hit the wall. He slid down it, expelling breath in a grunt of agony.
Meanwhile, Abydos had lunged for some weapon of his own, but the young girl had dropped both the porno mag and the spent Taser, leaped across the bed like a hurdler and was up in his face, darting whip-swift punches at him that forced him to use both hands to defend himself.
Both hands were enough, at first, but the girl was in constant movement, her body swaying back and forth, her flickering hands weaving in and out like the shuttle on a loom, forcing Abydos back. Then there was a moment when he warded off two low blows, leaving his upper body undefended. The girl stepped into the gap and drove her forehead into his face.
Abydos staggered back, blinded and in pain, and the girl pirouetted, her left leg swinging round with balletic grace to smack into the side of his head with a muffled crunch. He sank to his knees, then toppled full length.
A movement closer to hand diverted Kennedy’s attention. Samal was groping for the fallen gun. Acting purely on instinct, Kennedy twisted round on the bed and dropped her legs over his head. Then she drew up her knees, so that the hobble bar hit him in the throat.
If he hadn’t been groggy from the Taser, he’d have dealt with the clumsy assault in a heartbeat. As it was, he had to wrestle with Kennedy’s dead weight for a few seconds before he succeeded in lifting her bodily and throwing her off. In that time, the girl had crossed the room again, snatching up Izzy’s bedside lamp en passant. She hadn’t even slowed to look at the lamp, it seemed to Kennedy, but with its stainless steel base, its weight and its heft, it fitted her needs exactly. She swung it back behind her like a bowler, then brought it round and up, gathering her body under it, and delivered it with appalling force to the point of Samal’s chin. The blow lifted him an inch off the ground and dropped him flat on his back on the bedroom floor, which shook under his weight.
The girl circled him cautiously. The big man was still conscious. He rolled to his side, trying to get up yet again. Unhurriedly but with clinical precision, she delivered three devastating blows to the back of his head, which drove him into Izzy’s shag-pile carpeting like a hammer driving a nail into a board. After a moment’s further appraisal, she hit him again.
Then, finally, she dropped the lamp and flexed her hands as though gripping it so tightly had hurt her a little.
Somewhere during those last, terrifying seconds Kennedy had drawn in a panic breath so deep and sudden that she’d partially inhaled Abydos’s handkerchief. Now she was suffocating on it. She writhed on the bed, trying to draw in air that wasn’t there.
The girl was checking the two sprawled bodies with quiet, detached interest, but she noticed Kennedy’s plight at last. She put down the lamp and reached into Kennedy’s mouth to fish out the handkerchief by the end that was still visible.
Kennedy took a raw, shuddering breath, converted – when she let it out again – into the ragged sobs of shock.
‘You’re fine,’ the girl said, sounding exactly as Abydos had sounded a moment or two before. ‘It’s over. But you have to go.’
‘Who …’ Kennedy wheezed, ‘… are … you?’
‘I’m Diema,’ the girl said simply. She was searching Samal’s pockets, and then Abydos’s, for a key, but Kennedy didn’t make the connection until she saw it, until the girl was unlocking the cuffs at her wrists, the bar at her ankles. ‘You need to get out of here,’ the girl repeated as she worked. ‘These men came here alone, but there will be others. Probably soon.’
Kennedy sat up and began to massage some life back into her numbed hands and forearms. She glanced down at Samal, afraid in spite of what she’d seen, in spite of what her rational mind was telling her, that he might rise up and attack her again. ‘I’m sorry but I’m not getting this,’ she said, when she felt she could trust her voice. ‘Who are you? Why did you help me? Are you – are you really a friend of Izzy’s?’
The girl gave her a slightly startled look, momentarily thrown. ‘A friend of your lover? Don’t be ridiculous. Just listen to what I’m telling you. Find a place they don’t know about. And then another place, and another. Keep moving. Change your habits. Don’t give them an easy target.’
The police, Kennedy thought. I’ve got to call the police.
The bedside table had gone over and the phone was lying on the floor. She reached for it, but the girl’s foot came down on her wrist before she could touch it. She let all her weight fall onto Kennedy’s hand, making Kennedy gasp in pain and shock.
‘No,’ the girl said.
Pinioned, Kennedy looked up at her. The girl’s face, calm and detached despite the violence she’d just meted out, was folded into an uncompromising frown.
‘You know who I am?’ she asked Kennedy. ‘Where I’ve come from?’
Kennedy pushed the answer out through clenched teeth. ‘No. I r-really don’t.’
The girl’s eyes flicked momentarily to the bodies on the floor, then back to Kennedy. ‘The same place they came from. And we’re all sworn to keep that place a secret. So you know what I’d have to do to you if you picked up that phone and dialled.’
She took her foot away. Gingerly, Kennedy flexed the fingers of her hand. They hurt like hell and she could barely make them move, but none were broken.
‘Think about this,’ the girl said. ‘These men came here to question you and then to kill you. They failed, so others will be sent. Assuming you did speak to the authorities, I doubt they could help you very much. It would be hard for them even to believe you. Get out now. Leave behind everything you don’t need. Think about where you go. Who you talk to. The trail you’ll be leaving behind you. Because there will be people following that trail, people who are very skilled at what they do.’
‘So I shouldn’t go back to Ryegate House?’ Kennedy asked. ‘You’re warning me off?’
The girl’s frown deepened. She stared at Kennedy as if she were mad.
‘Of course you should go back. Finish the job you were given. Find the book and do what has to be done. Why do you think I’ve been wasting my time watching your back? Why else would you be worth saving?’
She turned on her heel and left, treading the porno mag underfoot with contemptuous disregard.
15
In Scotland, four clergymen reported missing are found dead. Their deaths mirror the deaths of four of the twelve apostles of Jesus: Matthew (stabbed through with a spear, in this case an athletics javelin), Thaddaeus (beaten to death with a rock), James (beheaded) and Peter (crucified upside down). Scottish police classify the murders as hate crimes.
In Umbria, a road bridge collapses. Cars fall like heavy rain into a steep gorge, at the bottom of which there is another road
, carpeted with rush-hour traffic. Two hundred are killed.
In California, every warm-blooded animal in the San Diego zoo dies over a three-day period, showing symptoms similar to Ebola. When the viral agents are isolated, they are found to be different for almost every species, individually tailored or adapted for maximum susceptibility. The birds are simply gone, one morning, their cages open to the sky. A state-wide search fails to find a single one.
In Beijing, the Tiananmen Gate, its structure weakened in some way that defies analysis, disaggregates into several massive blocks of stone, which crush a party of German tourists and three students cycling to college. The pulped bodies are removed in buckets, prompting protests from relatives about the insensitive handling of their loved ones’ remains.
Seven young cavers in Auckland enter a beginners’ cave with a maximum depth of seven metres. All are found dead from severe decompression sickness and arterial gas embolisms, consistent with a dive to a thousand metres and an almost instantaneous return to the surface.
Across the world, the ripples were spreading. But that is precisely the wrong metaphor, Ber Lusim thought. Ripples get weaker and weaker, the further they get from their source. This – he observed with a certain pleasure – was more like a tsunami building, or like a riptide dragging more and more unwary swimmers into its invisible, deadly channels.
It was not that he relished pain and degradation for their own sake. Once, perhaps. A little. But he was no longer that man, no longer purely and simply the Demon. The prophet’s words had changed him in his essence, without altering his trajectory by the smallest fraction. He did all the things that he had always done, mortifying flesh and spirit, but different meanings now attached to his actions. That was Shekolni’s miracle, and proof enough that he was touched with the divine.
The prophet found his old friend sitting on the cot bed in his sleeping quarters. The room was as bare as a monk’s cell, so in fact there was nowhere else to sit. Easily and unselfconsciously, Shekolni seated himself on the stone floor in front of Ber Lusim.
