The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  She knew who he was, of course. Kuutma had told her everything, arming her in advance against surprises. Tillman was the father of her flesh. It was him who had impregnated Diema’s mother, Rebecca Beit Evrom, when she was sent into the world as one of the Kelim, completing a purpose that was above and beyond him. He was, in this, like a donkey carrying one of the faithful to pray. The donkey has no clue what the weight on its back really signifies, the meaning of its labour. It plays its part, controlled by whip and words, and then it’s put to pasture.

  Diema had spent her whole life among the People, the fathers and mothers of her soul. Though her sire was a heathen and her mother had died when she was too young even to grieve for her, she dwelled among the chosen and she was of their number. The least of their number, it was true, and she had been made to feel that. But still, that truth outweighed all other truths. It was the grounding and the purpose and the very meat of her. So it wasn’t that she felt any kinship with Tillman, because of some animal task he’d performed adequately nineteen years before. If anything, the contemplation of his role in her conception filled her with disgust and something like shame – the sense of having touched, at one remove, something foul.

  But she couldn’t help herself. She was surprised and even a little shaken at what he had managed to do here. He had realised that she was following him and somehow he’d found out enough about her to follow her right back. Except that by good fortune, she hadn’t been back to the safe house even once in the last three days. She’d divided her time between following Tillman and the rhaka and watching this place – which she was almost certain was Ber Lusim’s.

  So now Tillman was investigating her investigation, which, of course, was all part of Kuutma’s master plan. But still, he made her uneasy. And the unease and the disgust were like oil and water: they didn’t mix.

  She imagined killing him. That helped a little.

  30

  Most of the drive from Rennes to Avranches was on main roads through the ruined industrial hinterlands around Fougères. But when Kennedy got to the coast, she saw the vast expanse of the estuary stretching away on both sides and the fairy-tale castle of Mont Saint-Michel hanging behind her shoulder.

  She stole a look out across the bay, a tidal plain so wide she couldn’t see its edges. Mont Saint-Michel guarded it with anachronistic zeal, its lower slopes crusted with the barnacles of cheap restaurants and souvenir shops, but the abbey of La Merveille standing proud and clean at the top like an angel on a dunghill.

  She should have brought Izzy here. Izzy wouldn’t have gone walking on that pottery-clay beach for a million euros and a pink Cadillac, but she would have trudged up to the abbey and back, complaining all the way, and she would have drunk apple brandy with Kennedy in one of the local dives until Kennedy had to half-carry her back to the hotel for holiday sex that was wild and clumsy and heart-stopping like the first time ever.

  The Scriptorial wasn’t hard to find. The road took Kennedy straight into town, and the building was right there in front of her. An angle of the old city wall enfolded it on two sides, and an ancient square tower rose right behind it, but the Scriptorial itself was a triangular tumulus with rounded corners, like a man-made anthill.

  The bulk of the space, Kennedy knew, was a standing exhibition devoted to the history of books and book-binding, and the literally crowning glory on the building’s top floor was a selection of the books rescued from the library of La Merveille around the time when the revolutionary government decided that bibles made good kindling.

  Kennedy reported to the desk, and while she waited, cast her eye over the exhibits. There were models of La Merveille showing the stages by which it had been built over the space of a handful of centuries, stone sculptures and wooden carvings looted from its chapel, and maps of the area at different times in its history. But she was too tired from the drive and too restless to take in much of what she was seeing.

  ‘Miss Kennedy.’

  The voice was cultured and with the merest trace of an accent – just enough to turn the i of miss into an ee. Kennedy turned and Gilles Bouchard extended a hand.

  Long acquaintance with Emil Gassan had conditioned her to expect someone both dry and dapper. But Bouchard was young – maybe her own age – robustly built and dressed very casually in a grey polo neck sweater and snow-white jeans. His hair was long, fine and blond, his narrow face tanned like a movie star’s.

  She took the hand and shook it. ‘Yes, I’m Heather Kennedy. And you’re Dr Bouchard?’

  ‘Gilles.’

  ‘Gilles. Thank you for agreeing to see me at such short notice.’

  ‘It’s my pleasure. I believe I may be repaying a favour, by a fairly Byzantine route.’

  Kennedy grinned. ‘Yes, so I was led to believe.’

  ‘I was also told you might not have much time.’

  ‘I’m here on your terms. But if you’ve got the book ready to hand, I’d love to take a look at it.’

  ‘The book,’ Bouchard said. He gave the word a slightly satirical edge. ‘Yes. Well, I’ll show you what we have, and I’ll explain how we come to have it. Please, come this way.’

  He led her away from the timeline and the lower slopes of the exhibition to a door, which opened onto a stairwell with red-painted walls. The stairs were steel, and rang under their feet.

  ‘The Scriptorial within the Scriptorial,’ Bouchard said. ‘It runs clockwise, where the public rooms run counter-clockwise – or widdershins, to use the charming English word. We call this space le filetage administratif; the administrative thread. You understand the metaphor? Like the thread of a screw.’ He gestured with his index finger, moving it in a spiral.

  ‘I understand the metaphor,’ she confirmed.

  ‘This is where we keep the bulk of our collection,’ he told her, ‘along with facilities dedicated to their preservation and repair. Many of our books came from the abbey, as you probably know – and our bias, perhaps for that reason, is towards religious works. Here. I have set this room aside for you.’

  He unlocked a door and ushered her into a room that was no more than a cubicle. The desk and straight-backed chair that it contained more or less filled it. Behind the desk there was a single wall-mounted shelf. The walls and ceiling were painted in a soul-sapping hospital green.

  The room was narrow enough that if Bouchard had followed her, he would have been standing uncomfortably close, so he stayed in the doorway, hands in pockets, and indicated with a nod of the head the slender document that lay dead centre on the desk.

  ‘The book,’ he said, with the same slightly mocking inflection as before.

  Kennedy sat and pulled it towards her. It was a bundle of A4 sheets, a little ragged and feathery at the edges, held together by a bulldog clip at the top-left corner. The title A TRUMPET SPEAKING JUDGMENT was roughly centred on the page, typed in 12-point Courier.

  ‘And this is a full transcript?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, we think so. But we don’t know. It’s an anomaly, to be honest. We would probably have thrown it away except that we lost our only copy of the book – the actual printed book – in bizarre circumstances, and were unable to replace it. Since this is all we have, we keep it. And since it’s lacking even the most basic authentication, we don’t advertise the fact.’

  He excused himself politely, aware of her tension and urgency but too polite to comment on them, and left her with the transcript.

  Kennedy removed the clip and turned the page – or rather lifted the page, since the typescript wasn’t bound. She was surprised to find that the second sheet was a muddy photocopy of what must have been the original book’s frontispiece. It was a line drawing, done with indifferent skill, of a cliff wall with a town at its base. Underneath the picture, there was an epigram in Latin. De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente. Kennedy’s Latin was just about good enough for those who are about to die salute you, and she’d never liked that sentiment much in any case.

  She turn
ed to the next sheet, which was numbered 1.

  Since this New Worlde proves to be so very like the Old, and since our new-minted Rulers are of base metal, that a man may bite and see the mark of his Teethe in the coine, I say now: I have done with them, for all and ever. I and every Manne of Sense. 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.

  For Christes Kingdome is upon us, and indeed has come later than some sages conjudged. And now, because He loves His servants, He lets me see his footprintes wheresoever I look. He will walk on English souls and eat of English bread, and ye that read me will see it, whether looking out from Munsters spire or from Westminsters darkened casements. Ye cannot choose, for he will speak at first in Fire and Water and last in Earthe and Air.

  The wordes of the psalmist (114:4) shall be proved correct. No less so the words of John (1:12 and 5:6). And also, be mindful and listen, as John likewise saide: he that hath ears to heare, God has enjoined him to heare. It matters not a whit whether he wish it or noe.

  Kennedy looked ahead. The last sheet in the stack was number 86. It was going to be a sod of a long night.

  31

  Tillman made his approach along a route that took him between the lines of sight of the security cameras. There might be nobody watching the monitor in any case, or the monitor might be set to flick cyclically through the camera feeds, but he took as few chances as he could.

  He went to a place he’d already chosen from a long way out – the angle of a wall, where a dead zone for the cameras corresponded with a thick patch of shadow between two arc lights. He pressed himself in against the wall, partially shielded to his left by a downpipe, and waited.

  The next time the guard made his rounds, Tillman was ready. He let the man walk right past him.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Got the time?’

  He wasn’t being a smart-ass. Rotational force increased your chances of a clean knock-out, because when you turn quickly, your brain, in its bubble of protective fluid, floats relatively stationary inside your turning skull. As the guard swung round to face him, Tillman smacked him across the side of the head with a sap. The man’s knees buckled. Tillman caught him as he folded and lowered him carefully to the ground.

  He quickly took the guard’s jacket and cap. Keys were in the jacket pocket, ready to hand: good. There was no time to take the trousers. If anyone was watching the camera feed, the gap before he emerged again had to be short enough not to arouse suspicions. He tied the guard’s hands and feet with plasticated wire and gagged him with duct tape. Rough and ready, but it would hold for a while.

  Then he stepped out into the light, head turned slightly away from the watching cameras, and ambled around the back of the building towards the door.

  He was putting his money on there being a straightforward lock that one of the guard’s keys would fit, and even then he knew he needed to get it right on the first or second try. Otherwise, he’d have to shoot the lock-plate off and take his chances with whoever was inside. He had his gun, a Mateba Unica, unholstered in his hand as he stepped up to the door.

  But his luck was in. The guard hadn’t just left the door unlocked, he’d placed a wooden chock on the ground to wedge it open. That level of sloppiness and stupidity was a gift from God, and Tillman took it. He didn’t even break stride as he pushed the door wide and stepped in.

  On the other side of the door, there was a narrow vestibule, completely empty apart from a time clock on the wall and a rack of punch-cards. The time clock showed six o’clock, and had presumably done so for quite a while. The cards had a patina of dust, some had fallen out of their pigeonholes onto the floor, and there were bootmarks laid across them. Whoever was staffing this place now, they didn’t bother with clocking in and clocking out.

  There was a double swing-door ahead of Tillman, light spilling out from the crack between the two doors. He pushed it open and walked right through.

  Into a much larger space, flood-lit. Huge wood-and-steel-framed shelf units towered past the floodlights into the darkness of a ceiling void that had to be forty feet above him. On the shelves, crates and drums and bulky objects swathed in plastic fibre-wrap.

  Closer to hand, another guard turned as the door slammed against the wall.

  ‘What took—’ he said.

  Then he registered Tillman’s camouflage trousers, or maybe just Tillman’s cold, stern face. His eyes widened.

  Tillman hit him across the jaw with the butt of the Unica, knocking him backward into the nearest rack of shelves. It was very solidly built and didn’t even shake. The guard managed to stay on his feet, but he made the mistake of scrambling for the gun at his side. Tillman kicked his legs out from under him.

  There was no need for another punch. Tillman got the guard in a throat-lock, his free left hand holding the guy’s arm against his side so he couldn’t bring the gun up, and applied steady pressure.

  After thirty seconds, the guard wasn’t moving any more. After forty, Tillman set him down, tied him up and gagged him like the other one, and put him out of the way on one of the floor-level shelves.

  No way were these guys Elohim: they were local hire, and not very good at that.

  Now, belatedly, Tillman did the reconnaissance that in a perfect world he would have done before going in. First of all, he checked for interior CCTV hook-ups, or wiring for pressure or contact alarms. There were none, which didn’t surprise him now that he’d seen the standard of the security staff. Next, he found the other doors out of this massive, hangar-like room – there were seven, in all – locked the ones that would lock with the guard’s keys, and marked the locations of the others. One led through to an inner office whose floor-to-ceiling window was designed to allow whoever sat there to oversee everything that went on in the warehouse. It was dark, now, and empty.

  Tillman checked the rolling door of the freight bay, too. It wasn’t a separate space but an area within the bigger room, with a built-up platform beside it and an unloading ramp for big items. An overhead crane hoist hung above it. In silhouette, it looked like the bowed head of a sleeping tyrannosaur.

  So why would our girl spend her nights here? he wondered. And why isn’t she here right now?

  But maybe a bigger question was: where is here?

  He went to the nearest shelves and took a look at their contents. The bulky, wrapped items looked to be machine parts, but it wasn’t easy to guess what the machines might be. He slashed some of the boxes open with the German paratrooper’s gravity knife that he wore in a boot-sheath. They contained metal mouldings, screws and gaskets – the lowest common denominator of garages and workshops the world over.

  But in a garage or a workshop, some of these boxes would be open and in use. Even in a wholesale warehouse, you’d expect some of them to have been broken out from under plastic seals to fulfil part-orders. Tillman ran his spread fingers over box after box. The dust was thick enough to ruck under his touch, and apart from the places where his hand fell, it was pristine.

  So whatever was going on here, the stuff on these shelves was a front. For what, though?

  Tillman thought of one place he could go to for an answer: the truck. If it was being loaded, it wasn’t with this stuff. He went over to the freight bay and tried the truck’s rear doors. Padlocked. But it didn’t take long to find a crowbar, and the hasp of the padlock broke open on the third tug. He threw the doors open.

  The dark interior of the truck was piled high with boxes. He took a torch from his pack, flicked it on and played the beam over the labels on the nearer boxes.

  C(CH2OH) 4 PENT

  B-HMX 95% HANDLE WITH CARE

  1,3 BUTADIENE BULK ELAST

  AMM NITR. CONC CAKE

  He sucked in his breath. Not nice at all. Some of this stuff – like the ammonium nitrate, which made up a large percentage of most commercial fertilisers – might have looked reasonably innocent by it
self. But there was only one context in which all of these substances would ever crop up together, and that was bomb-manufacture.

  The truck was a bespoke bomb factory on wheels.

  But it wasn’t only that, Tillman discovered as he widened his search. There were wooden longboxes, too, of a type he immediately recognised from his mercenary days. They were the crates in which guns and rifles were sometimes transported, wrapped in grease and plastic to keep them rust-proof for long-term storage. He broke one open, opened up the inner seal and pulled out a shining FN Mark 16 assault rifle. He counted six in the box. Another, smaller box in the adjacent stack contained forty-millimetre grenade launchers. They looked like a good fit for the FNs. And moving that box brought him face to face with another box, whose sides bore military stencils: CBU-94/B TMD SOFT. The TMD in that mouthful of acronyms stood for Tactical Munitions Dispenser. Cluster bombs, in other words, with launchers.

  Bombs. Guns. Portable munitions. Everything you needed to start your own war. Tillman backtracked. The busy little beavers who’d been filling this truck with high-tech death for most of the afternoon probably hadn’t been carrying the crates and boxes far. With some of this stuff, you minimised human contact as far as you could, on the grounds that if someone’s hand slipped you suddenly didn’t have humans any more – just runny chuck steak. So somewhere close by, and probably in this room, there was a cache.

  Once he knew that, it was absurdly easy to find. At one end of the room, separate from the fixed shelving, he found a set of moving racks of the kind used for library storage. These were packed as tight as sardines, with no aisles between them. But each unit ran on tracks and had a wheel fitted so it could be moved to left or right, creating an aisle wherever it was needed.