by Adam Blake
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘Look, I’ve probably taken up more of your time than you can really spare …’
‘I’m happy to help,’ Bouchard said.
She got up from the desk and pushed the typescript in his direction, going for broke. ‘Then could you explain some of these prophecies to me? The proper nouns, at least?’
Bouchard raised his eyebrows. There were a lot of pages. It was a lot to ask.
‘I can perhaps add some annotations,’ he said, without much enthusiasm. ‘Marginal notes. Here and there.’
It was Kennedy’s turn to be surprised. ‘Marginal notes? On the only surviving copy of a lost book?’
‘No. Obviously not. What you’ve been reading is not the only copy. It’s a copy of the copy, which I made so you could take it away with you.’ He raised his hand, forestalling her thanks. ‘Thank John Partridge. He pleaded very eloquently on your behalf. Burn it when you’re done. And don’t, please, tell anyone who gave it to you. We have our reputation to consider.’
Kennedy understood perfectly. She’d had one of those herself, once.
Since there was no second chair, and no room in the narrow cubicle to set one down, Bouchard just sat on the floor and talked her through the prophecies one at a time. Some he just passed on, but on most he had at least a guess to offer – and Kennedy copied in his annotations in the margins or over the actual words of the text.
Münsters Churche was the Überwasserkirche, where a group of religious extremists – Anabaptists – had inaugurated their new government during a short-lived coup.
The faithlesse Soldier was almost certainly Thomas Fairfax, one of Cromwell’s generals who had been a friend to Toller and the Fifth Monarchy movement, but had subsequently withdrawn his support for them and backed out of public life entirely.
Ister was one of many old names for the River Danube.
And so on, through all the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of a very intricate, idiosyncratic book. But Bouchard had nothing to offer Kennedy on the Island that was given for an Island. ‘It could be anywhere. This was a time when all the European powers were annexing territories in the New World as fast as they could be discovered, then fighting endless wars over them, using the native populations as cannon fodder.’ He frowned at the text, as though unwilling to admit that he was stumped. ‘It would have to be referring to something recent enough that it was still talked about in Toller’s day. Then again, he refers to the Münster uprising, and that was decades earlier. It will be hard to pin down.’
Kennedy was only half-listening. Something Bouchard had said had nudged a memory and she was chasing it up on the laptop. The Überwasserkirche. She found the reference and stared at it in mute horror.
And the faithless soldier. A few more clicks brought up a biography of Thomas Fairfax and she knew with a sickening certainty that she was right.
‘The ending of days,’ she muttered.
‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’ Bouchard enquired politely.
Kennedy stared at him. ‘What all of this is about. The ending of days. The second coming. Armageddon.’
Bouchard nodded. ‘Yes, that’s the climax of Toller’s prophecies, of course. Christ will descend and destroy the unrighteous. Only the just will remain. All of these other events are merely warnings. Harbingers. They tell us that the beginning of Christ’s kingdom is imminent.’
‘Then He must be on His way,’ Kennedy said. ‘Because most of these things have already happened.’
40
Rush fretted a lot about how he was going to get his stash of illicitly borrowed books out of Ryegate House. But in the end, he just picked his moment and walked out of the staff entrance carrying them in a black plastic bin bag. If he was stopped, he was planning to say he’d found the bag in a corridor and assumed it was rubbish. But he wasn’t stopped.
An hour or so later, and seven miles east in Harlesden, he decanted his haul onto his parents’ kitchen table. His mum and dad were in bed already. His mother would have fallen asleep long ago, on half a temazepam, and his dad would probably be sitting up with a book, listening to classical music on his headphones. Neither had heard him return, which meant he didn’t have to pretend that everything was normal.
He’d chosen the books quickly, and some of them were no use at all. But Toller appeared in the indexes of most of them. And in one, Rush found a commentary of some kind on the mysterious book of prophecies.
It looked pretty promising at first, but it turned out to have nothing to say about the prophecies themselves. It was more interested in the book as a physical object, and in particular the revolutionary use of a process for the book’s few picture plates that anticipated some aspects of lithography.
Rush had no idea what lithography was, so he had no opinion about that. But as he was flicking through the pages he saw another reproduction of the frontispiece: the steep crag, and the town, and the Latin tag. Now he noticed the image had a second caption as well as the one Toller had given it.
It read ‘Gellert Hall, circa 1640’.
His vision was starting to swim. It wasn’t ‘Gellert Hall’, it was ‘Gellert Hill’.
He gave up and closed the book. He’d get up early in the morning and read some more before he went into work. Or maybe he’d pull a sickie and spend the day reading. He was keen to have something solid to show to Kennedy when she got back.
He went into the kitchen, raided his dad’s meagre stash of booze and found a half-bottle of cheap brandy that was mostly full, but when he unscrewed the cap the smell of it made his stomach turn. What he really needed was sleep, but he knew that it would take its own not-so-sweet time coming. Whenever he closed his eyes, he could still see Professor Gassan with his hands clasped around the knife that was sticking out of his chest.
Rush put the bottle back and went up to his room, moving as quietly as he could in case his dad had taken off the headphones and turned in for the night. He opened his bedroom door, stepped inside and closed it firmly before turning the light on.
There was a girl on his bed. That registered first, because it was such a novelty in itself.
The gun in her hand presented itself to his mind a half-second or so later, but with even more breathtaking effect.
As a distant third, he realised that she’d been watching TV on his tiny portable, with the sound right down. Cartoon Network. A very old episode of Courage, the Cowardly Dog.
‘Lock it,’ the girl said, with a nod of her head towards the door.
PART FOUR
COUNCIL OF WAR
41
On both sides of the Channel, wherever she could get any internet access Kennedy continued to work through Toller’s prophecies, trying to nail down the idea that had occurred to her when she was talking to Bouchard. By the time she was done, she was a few minutes away from St Pancras, and in a slightly surreal daze. She’d thought after meeting the Judas tribe that nothing could ever surprise her again.
She’d been dead wrong.
Her phone rang as the train pulled into the platform. She glanced at the caller ID: Ben Rush. As she was about to answer, Leo Tillman rolled slowly into her field of vision. He was leaning against a pillar halfway along the platform, hands in his pockets, conspicuously waiting for her. The train slowed to a halt, placing him dead centre in Kennedy’s window. In her current mood, that was slightly too flashy an effect for her liking. She hit IGNORE on the phone. She’d catch up with Rush later.
Tillman fell into step with her as she descended from the carriage and walked towards the barrier. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.
Kennedy looked around, first left and then right. ‘No marching bands? No parade? Some welcome.’
‘Heather, whatever this is about, it’s not ancient literature.’
‘I never thought it was,’ she said. ‘Actually, Leo, I think it’s about the end of the world.’
He gave her a slightly wary glance. ‘I wouldn’t have gone that far. But I went looking for your Elohim girl and I found—’
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‘You did what?’ Kennedy stopped dead and swivelled to face him, unable to keep the horror from showing on her face. ‘Leo, I told you—’
‘I know. You told me to sit this out. But I didn’t make any promises. Listen, there’s something I need to show you. Can you give me an hour or two? I can promise you something you’ve never seen before.’
‘I’ve heard that from a lot of men,’ Kennedy muttered darkly. ‘It never comes to anything good.’
And this is no exception, she thought, forty-five minutes later. She was standing in a lock-up in Lewisham, underneath a railway arch, with the gates locked behind her, and she was staring into the back of an articulated truck. The stuff inside it was maybe what you’d get if you asked a terrorist to come up with a vision of the earthly paradise.
She picked up a rifle from a case close to the truck’s tailgate that Tillman had already opened. It was a military machine gun – no use for sports, and scarcely better for public order deployment. It was designed to be planted firmly on the ground and set to full automatic, spewing out a few hundred rounds per minute into whatever piece of territory needed to be tenderised.
The next box held grenades, and the one after that, more rifles. They were stacked up against three drums of white phosphorus.
‘This is a nightmare,’ Kennedy said.
‘Or a wet dream,’ Tillman said. ‘Depending on where you’re standing. There was a warehouse full of this stuff, Heather. Thirty to forty times as much as you’re looking at here. The warehouse is mostly smoke and charcoal briquettes by this time. And I’m going to get rid of what’s in the truck, too, as soon as I’ve figured out how. I just wanted you to see it first so you’d know I wasn’t exaggerating.’
Tillman ran a hand through his unruly hair, looking more uneasy and uncertain than she could ever remember seeing him. ‘Heather, I got a look at the paperwork. The outfit that owned the warehouse – High Energy Haulage – was delivering to a hundred other places. It was a global network.’
‘Did you call the police?’
Tillman laughed lugubriously. ‘Yeah, I did, for what it’s worth. But like I said, this was just a distribution centre. Do you see what we’re looking at? We already knew that the Messengers were killers, but this …’ He threw out his arms in an inarticulate gesture, indicating the truck full of death. ‘Unless the London branch just experienced some kind of sudden shared psychosis, we’re talking about an incredible escalation of hostilities. They’re shipping industrial quantities of small arms, field munitions, high explosive and incendiaries. Moving it all into place. And it’s enough to fight a medium-sized war – which I guess is what it’s probably for.’
Kennedy shook her head. ‘That’s not what it’s for.’
Tillman stared at her in bewilderment. ‘How would you know? Is this something you found in France? Something to do with —’
Kennedy cut across him. ‘Not yet, Leo. This is still you showing me yours. How does any of this tie in with the Messenger I met? The girl? You said you went looking for her. Explain.’
Kennedy could tell from his expression as he stared at her that her tone had given too much away. He knew that she was hiding something, and he knew that it was important. How hard would it be for him to put the pieces together and realise who it was he’d been chasing? ‘Tell me,’ she said again, more urgently.
‘She rides a motorbike,’ Tillman said, his voice calm, almost expressionless in contrast to Kennedy’s. ‘Manolis was able to get the licence number, and then he hacked into the UK speed camera networks to see where she’d been clocked. We were looking for clusters. Thought we might get some idea of where she was based. But she saw us coming.’
‘Saw you?’ Kennedy was appalled all over again. ‘You mean you met her? You actually—’
‘No. I don’t mean that. She guessed what we’d do and she turned the tables on us. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway. She wanted me to find that warehouse. She used the bike to lead me there. Or she had the place under surveillance herself, and Mano got the wrong end of the stick. But whichever of the two it was, she knows I was there. She was watching me the whole time.’
He took the rifle from Kennedy and put it back in the case, pushed the lid back down hard. Kennedy had forgotten she was even holding it. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.
‘Because I tripped an alarm, while I was in there. I made myself a target. I should have been killed, by rights. But I wasn’t, because I had a tailgunner. There was another shooter, lying out in the long grass, who laid down some cover fire for me. And as far as I could see, she did it without killing anyone. Beautiful, precision shooting.’
‘Not your man?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Manolis?’
‘He isn’t a shooter. And he wasn’t anywhere near that place. His wife would skin me and salt me if I asked him to do anything like that. I use him for surveillance, which is his specialty, and that’s all I use him for.’
Tillman paused for a second, watching her. Kennedy had to fight the impulse to turn away from him, afraid of what he might be reading in her face.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know for sure nobody followed me in. And nobody else was moving out on that waste ground after I got there. That means the shooter was already embedded and hidden before I arrived. It was the girl. There’s no other way I can figure it. And she backed my play, which is the only reason I got out alive. If she actually planted that trail for me to follow – if she knew I’d go looking for her, find the bike, and all the rest of it – then she made a lot of right guesses about me based on nothing but thin air and moonbeams.’
‘She’s a Messenger,’ Kennedy said. ‘They studied you for years.’ And you share a whole lot of DNA. Maybe that gave her a little bit of an edge, too.
Tillman nodded. ‘Makes sense, I suppose. A little bit of sense. But I’ve still got a feeling that there’s something else going on – and that it might be the something you said you’d tell me about later. Is it maybe time you came clean, Heather?’
‘There’s … I think …’ She came to the brink, then hesitated. When she’d first met Tillman, he’d seemed to be on the edge of some kind of breakdown, worn down by years of searching for his lost family. He was doing a lot better now, but if she told him about Diema, and it turned out she was wrong, the harm she might do him was beyond any reasonable calculation. It was almost exactly balanced by the harm she could do if she was right, and Tillman found out from his daughter what had happened to his sons. There were so many reasons for Kennedy to keep quiet, and only one reason to talk. But it was a big reason: it was that she had no right to stand between Tillman and his daughter – the only living person he truly loved.
She shook her head, as much to clear it as anything. Tillman waited patiently for her to speak, but before she could, her phone went off. Grateful for the interruption, she took it out of her pocket. It was Rush again.
‘I have to take this,’ she lied.
‘Okay,’ Tillman said. ‘I’ll still be here when you’re done.’
Putting the phone to her ear, Kennedy turned slightly away from him, not so much for the sake of privacy as because she still felt the impulse to hide and the phone gave her the excuse.
‘Go ahead, Rush,’ she said.
‘Kennedy.’ His voice was strained. ‘How was your trip?’
‘It was productive. Did you find out anything useful about Toller?’
‘Well, I was going to do some homework on …’ Rush began. But a second voice in the background made him pause. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that,’ he muttered. ‘She says it will keep for later.’
‘She says? Who says? Rush—’
‘I’m sorry, Kennedy. I’m supposed to stick to the script. Listen to me.’ The tremor in his voice was much more evident now, making it hard to understand what he was saying. ‘This is an invitation from Diema Beit Yudas. She wants both of you to come and meet her.’
‘Both of us?’ Kennedy repeated stupidly. Tillman looked like
he was about to speak so she held up a hand to stop him and at the same time flicked the phone to speaker. Leo probably had to hear this first-hand. And it hadn’t escaped her notice that the girl was going under a different surname from Tillman’s former wife, Rebecca Beit Evrom. ‘Both of us are to meet her? Ask her who she means by that, Ben.’
Rush’s voice sounded out, thin and strained.
‘She wants to talk to you, but she wants it to be on her terms. She says she thinks you probably know enough about her by now not to do anything stupid, but in case she’s wrong about that, she wants you to know that any move you make against her will mean … will get me killed. Is that understood?’
‘It’s understood,’ Kennedy said, her heartbeat loud in her own ears. ‘Rush, don’t panic. We’ll come and get you. Give me the address.’
‘No, wait. There’s more. She says you should bring the book and Tillman should bring the truck. And it’s got to be just the two of you. Nobody else.’
‘Can I talk to her?’ Kennedy asked. ‘To … Diema?’ Tillman said nothing, but his eyebrows rose and his lips tightened.
The other voice murmured in the background.
‘Yes.’
‘Then put her—’
‘You can talk to her here. She wants you to come here, so all three of you can talk.’
Kennedy breathed out slowly, finding some stratum of calm. ‘And where’s here, Ben?’
‘A farm. Dovecote Farm. The address is—’
‘We know the address,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’re coming. We’ll be there soon.’
‘Great.’
‘Rush, you’ll be okay. We’re coming right now. She won’t hurt you.’
‘You think?’ His voice crackled with bleak sarcasm. ‘She’s got me wired up with a bloody—’ The phone went dead.
Kennedy turned to Tillman. He was already heading for the cab of the truck. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said over his shoulder.
42
