The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  Wheeling the racks into all their various permutations, Tillman found what he had expected to find: a trapdoor set flush with the floor, with three keyholes evenly spaced along one of its edges.

  Risking the noise, Tillman shot out the locks one by one. Then he lifted the trap part-way. Striplights flickered on automatically down below, illuminating a lower chamber as big – but not nearly as high – as the one he stood in. Quarry tiles on the floor, some of them cracked, white-limed walls. Broad, sturdy wooden steps led down to it, and alongside them there was a mechanical chain-hoist. A smell compounded of mildew, packing grease and bleach rose to greet Tillman, strong and dank and insinuating.

  He thought for a moment or two. He wanted to go on down and find out the worst. But this place – not just the hidden basement, but the building as a whole – could easily turn into a trap. He had to take a few minimal precautions, at least, his own version of a tripwire tied to a few tin cans. The instinct was too deeply ingrained in him to ignore.

  Tillman let the trapdoor fall all the way open. It hit the wall, where a wooden stay-bar had been bolted into place for it to rest on. He walked back across to the freight bay looking for something he could use.

  Seven miles away, a red light winked on a board, to the accelerating pulse of an electronic alarm.

  32

  Diema muttered an oath. It wasn’t much of an oath, since the People viewed profanity as a wound to the soul of the utterer, but there was a lot of feeling behind it.

  The warehouse’s alarm was silent, but the red light flashing on the tell-tale unit just over the loading bay doors showed that Tillman had tripped it – probably by forcing a lock or stepping in front of a motion sensor. It was only a matter of time, now. He could still get out of there before they came, but only if he knew what he’d done, moved now and moved fast.

  The girl waited, edgily, for the inevitable consequences to play out. It took eleven minutes before a black van, high-sided and windowless, pulled off the A312 onto the deserted industrial estate, drove halfway down the approach road to the warehouse and stopped, effectively blocking it. The only other way out was across open ground to the south or east.

  A minute later, a Volvo S60, also black, rolled up behind the van. Whereupon the van drove over the lip of the kerb and into the wasteground, trundling slowly around to the other side of the building.

  Diema watched this disaster unfolding with a mixture of exasperation and fatalism. She still needed more from Tillman, so his death right now would be a major stumbling block. On the other hand, it would show perhaps how flawed he was – how much less than she’d been told. There was a great deal of report and speculation in Kuutma’s files about Tillman’s unique talents – his combat skills, his intuition, his dogged courage, his endless, insane resourcefulness. Now it seemed he was falling at the first hurdle, and in such an obvious way! Couldn’t he have checked for alarms? Couldn’t he have taken the time to do proper recon?

  Men – only men, no women – were stepping out of the van and the car now, and walking towards the warehouse. Most were the same men who’d been working there earlier in the day, but among them Diema saw two who were of a different order. The skeletally thin man with the ash-white hair was Hifela, the Face of the Skull, and the muscular man beside him, who looked like an oaf or a butcher, was Elias Shud. They were hand-trained executioners, answerable only to Ber Lusim himself.

  So it was over. Unless she risked everything to go in and rescue Tillman from the mess he’d made. And even then …

  She counted ten. Ten Elohim – two of them among the best the People had ever raised.

  It was over, whether she went or stayed.

  33

  What Tillman found in the lower room came as no surprise, but only because he’d already had the big surprise when he opened up the truck. Along with more explosives and raw materials for explosives, there were RPG-Komar shoulder-mounted missiles, self-igniting phosphorus grenades, Belgian army issue Tatang combat knives, M2 backpack flamethrowers and – looking almost ashamed of the shabby company it was keeping – a box of digital alarm clocks ready to be filleted for timing mechanisms. It was an arsenal of enormous extent and terrifying variety, assembled by someone who knew what they wanted to cook up (presumably Armageddon) and exactly what the recipe called for.

  Tillman wasn’t given to letting his imagination run wild, but found himself playing out in his mind the scenarios that would arise if this Pandora’s Box were opened and a tenth of its contents saw the light of day.

  But this was an ongoing operation. It didn’t look like a survivalist stockpile assembled against a future apocalypse. Quite the opposite. Two trucks had rolled in, one had rolled out again. The other had been stacked to the roof with instruments of death and mayhem and was in the freight bay ready to roll.

  Perturbed, Tillman retreated to the upper level.

  He was remembering the petite, self-contained girl he’d watched on the CCTV feed at the newsagents’ in Pimlico. It was hard to reconcile that pretty, solemn face with this house of horrors. But then again, from what Kennedy had said, the girl was as much beast as beauty.

  Shaking his head to clear it of the ammoniac stink, Tillman crossed to the office. He didn’t bother to try keys this time, since there was no way his visit here was going to pass unnoticed. He just kicked the flimsy door off its hinges and walked in.

  A dark-green filing cabinet stood demurely in the corner of the room. Tillman tried the top drawer, found it locked. Again, he thought, To hell with subtlety. He still had the crowbar in his hand and he used it to bend the front of the top file drawer out and down.

  The file hangers inside were labelled with alphanumerics – TN1, GF3, KB14. He hauled papers out and scanned them. Most were bills of lading, invoices and paperwork for shipments out of the warehouse. Screws, bolts, belts and gaskets going to Bergen, Berlin, Bogota, Brussels, Brisbane. Either there were no As or they were filed out of sequence. The High Energy Haulage logo was on every sheet, its head office given each time as a different address in a different city, all of them a long way from Hayes, Middlesex.

  Tillman opened up the next drawer, and the next. He found more of the same. Nothing incriminating, nothing that related in any way to the real business of this place. But why would there be? He scanned more and more of the paperwork, trying to get a feel for what this operation might be about from the items that had been sent out and the places they’d been sent to.

  But there was no rhyme or reason. Most of the destinations were big cities, but some were towns he’d barely heard of. San Gimignano. Bardwell, Kentucky. Darling, South Africa. La Orotava. He glanced across at the desk in the office. Two computers sat there, side by side. Maybe a better bet.

  But as he crossed to the desk and leaned in to turn on the nearer of the two machines, he heard a loud, metallic clattering from behind him, the unmusical tolling of empty paint and lube cans. He’d wired up all the doors in that way, but the direction of the sound suggested it had come from the double doors through which he’d entered.

  He was all out of time.

  34

  Diema waited and watched.

  There was nothing else she could do.

  She saw Hifela and his hit squad walk into the warehouse through its rear doors. She saw most of them come out again and walk around to the front of the building, presumably to catch Tillman between two fronts.

  A minute or two passed without further sound.

  And then there was a single, resonating boom.

  Leo Tillman had just been dispatched, execution-style.

  Diema thought about this and tried to decide how she felt about him being dead before circumstances had even obliged her to speak to him. But as she considered, she frowned.

  No, that made no sense. Her first guess had to be wrong.

  35

  Elias Shud thought often about the parable of the talents. Maybe too much, if he were honest with himself. In the parable, the man who didn’t u
se what God gave him was rebuked: the Lord’s blessings went to those who diligently exploited what they already had.

  Shud’s own talents were mostly kept hidden, these days, because he had chosen to follow Ber Lusim into exile – and in the decade that followed, Ber Lusim had sent him only against the softest of targets.

  So a man who was capable of going up against the mightiest fighters in the Nations, and coming away with their blood on his hands, had been used instead to dispatch men, women – even, occasionally, children – who didn’t even know that they were targets and either died unknowing or died surprised. And then, more recently, as Shekolni had preached his gospel of pre-emption, he had created terror on a larger scale, but still without any personal engagement worthy of the name.

  So Shud had come to think of himself, in recent years, as a man whose service to the Word consisted chiefly in the abasement of his pride – in the glory that comes from forsaking glory.

  Today felt no different. They were responding to an alarm call from the warehouse. Ten of them. A minyan of Messengers! Rushing to respond to a wire chewed by a rat or a security guard whose chair had toppled over while he dozed.

  But as soon as they came within sight of the building’s rear entrance, they knew it wasn’t that. The door had been left open, which told them immediately that the yokels on-site had miscarried in some way.

  Hifela commanded his men with gestures to fan out to left and right of the door, and chose two to lead. But there was no attack as they went in. The way through the small room beyond was clear.

  Shud went in next and saw what they’d missed: one of the guards, bound and gagged and rolled out of sight in the corner of the room, behind a stack of fibreboard panels. He was barely conscious, but Shud slapped him awake and ripped the gag from his mouth.

  ‘How many?’ he rasped.

  ‘One,’ the man mumbled. ‘I … I only saw one.’

  The number meant nothing in itself. It was far safer to assume they were facing a team. But now, at least, they knew there was someone ranged against them. Their time hadn’t been completely wasted.

  ‘Armed?’ Hifela asked, behind him.

  The guard nodded. ‘I think … yes. A gun. He hit me with the butt of a gun.’

  Hifela looked at the double doors that stood before them. To push them open and walk straight through was obviously an option. They had superior numbers, after all, and they were Elohim, warriors in the service of the Name.

  But they were not fools. In battle, they knew, to throw away an advantage when you don’t need to is a sin – usually a mortal one.

  Speaking with his hands again, Hifela designated two to watch the doors. The rest he took with him, back through the rear door and around the side of the building.

  The warehouse space was huge. It took up most of the interior of the building, and there were half a dozen ways or more of approaching it. Two of them were doors opening off parallel corridors that were easily reached from a side entrance.

  Hifela led the way there and let them in using a master key. They entered, separated into two groups, and – on Hifela’s signal – moved quickly and silently down the corridors to the two doors. Hifela opened one with the master key. Shud broke the other open with a single thrust of his shoulder.

  They surged into the warehouse from two sides and scattered widely, looking for the enemy.

  There was no enemy, but there was a fire.

  In the middle of the floor, a green steel drum blazed: brilliant blue flames, with a rippling heat haze towering above them like a genie in the still air.

  And just below them, Shud knew, not to mention in the truck parked on the far side of the vast room, there were crates and barrels of high explosive, both stable and unstable; cubane, nitrocellulose, half a dozen varieties of plastique and toluenes.

  ‘Put it out,’ Hifela hissed.

  That wasn’t the mistake. Two men moved forward quickly, the others coming up behind to cover them. One of the two dragged a fire blanket down from an emergency point without breaking stride.

  But as they got closer to the burning drum, their footsteps faltered. One of them fell to his knees, the other staggered and clutched his throat.

  Shud suddenly realised something that he should have registered before: the colour of the flames.

  ‘Don’t go any closer!’ he bellowed, in the tongue of the People. ‘Stay away from it. That’s paracyanogen. There’s cyanide gas in the—’

  A shadow occulted the light, directly above his head. He dived and rolled even before he thought about it, and so was saved. Something slammed down out of empty air like the slamming of a door, and the two men to his left were no longer there.

  Staying down, Shud took in the scene in a series of quick glances. The shattered packing crate, full of steel ball-bearings that were now rolling freely across the floor. The two men under it, the one clearly dead, the other horribly crushed but still moving, trying to free himself.

  Above them, the jib of the overhead crane still rocking, its jaws wide and empty. All their enemy had had to do was position it above the burning drum and wait for them to come.

  And that was when the shooting started.

  36

  These things occurred to Diema, in this order.

  First, that the sound she’d heard at first couldn’t have been a gunshot, because only a lunatic would fire a gun in a warehouse full of high explosives.

  Then, that the sounds she was now hearing definitely were gunshots.

  And then, and therefore, that someone inside the building either didn’t care about consequences or was so sure of his aim that he was prepared to take the risk.

  Leo Tillman was making a fight of it. Against ten Elohim. It was the most perfect, the most complete insanity.

  But as madness went, there was something admirable about it.

  37

  From his position on the floor, Elias Shud had two major advantages.

  The first was that the remains of the broken packing crate gave him effective cover. The second was that the toxic gas coming off the burning drum of paracyanogen was both hotter and lighter than the air in the warehouse, so he wasn’t in danger of inadvertently taking in a gulp of invisible and odourless death.

  He was well placed, therefore, to admire the precision of the shots that killed several of his comrades.

  They were coming from high up and over to his left, and they were spaced far enough apart to indicate a handgun set on full manual. Heavy, too: a .454 Casull load, or something very similar. The tool of a craftsman, in other words. Three men fell in the space of about ten seconds, each taken out by a single shot.

  In combat, Shud kept his emotions firmly in check, but he was aware that one of the emotions he was shutting down was the thrill of meeting – after so long an interval – a worthy opponent.

  He saw his comrade and leader, Hifela, kneeling behind the angle of a wall, triangulating – just as Shud himself had done – the point of origin of the shots. Hifela caught Shud’s gaze, gestured him to wait, took out his phone.

  Shud turned his head, slowly and smoothly, to take in the area of the freight bay. There were very few places that would allow both for cover and for a clean line of fire. And obviously the shooter had started off by being there, in that corner, where the controls for the overhead crane were dangling on the end of their free line.

  Hifela was talking in a murmur to the two men outside, the ones he’d left covering the rear doors. He put the phone away, signalled to Shud be ready.

  Shud had a sica blade in one hand and a gun – a Jericho 941 loaded with low-penetration hollow-point ammo – in the other. Aside from being flat on his back, he was as ready as it was possible to be.

  When the doors burst open, he was already rising into a crouch. Their man would be facing a vicious enfilade out of nowhere: he’d have to move or die, and any move away from this fresh attack would take him in Shud’s direction.

  The whipstitch whine of semi-automatics w
as his signal. Shud was on his feet and running, Hifela running too on the other side of the shelving rack, staking out the dead ground between them without any need for discussion or signals.

  Shud actually saw his man, just for a moment, wedged into the corner of the freight bay with nowhere to run. He brought up his arm and squeezed off a shot without even slowing, and felt a surge of satisfaction when the intruder jerked, half-turned around by the force of the bullet. He’d taken the shot either in the shoulder or high up on his chest.

  Then the neon strips stuttered and stalled, and the room was plunged into complete darkness. Acting on honed instinct, Shud shifted left and slowed, breaking his stride. Bullets snarled against concrete beside him, where he’d been. So the enemy was hurt, but not down, and still working every advantage he had.

  But the darkness helped Shud just as much as it helped his quarry. Knowing that Hifela was perfectly placed to fire if the man moved away from the wall and betrayed his position out in the open, he ran forward another ten feet, ducked and rolled, so that he was right up against the rear wheel of the truck. At this distance, even going by hearing alone, he could hardly miss. He waited for his enemy to move.

  But nothing moved. And now Shud was skewered on the same dilemma, afraid of giving away his own position by an incautious sound or movement.

  He considered. The man had to be very close. If he’d run towards Hifela or the others, there would have been shots or scuffles by now. So he’d remained in the freight bay, holding perfectly still just as Shud was, waiting for his moment.

  The man had very few options, at this point. He could go around the front of the truck, between its bumper and the drop-down doors; around the rear, into the open – and into Hifela’s line of sight; under the truck, over it, or into it.

  It struck Shud that by putting out the lights, the man had given away his decision. In the dark he was moving out, now, across the floor of the room. He was in the open, advancing as silently as he could between his attackers, taking the only chance he had to make it out of the trap he’d dug for himself and reach one of the doors.