by Adam Blake
Then she grabbed another cab and went to the police headquarters building – Police Palace – which was a squat, stepped tower of glass and steel just opposite the northern tip of Margaret Island. She applied for a temporary licence to use legal but controlled surveillance equipment, providing a long and itemised list and giving her profession as ‘freelance investigator’.
She walked back along the Pest side of the river. Here the down-at-heel Soviet-era brutalism seemed tilted to a rakish angle, inviting tourists to fantasise that they were taking a walk on the wild side. But the hotel and restaurant owners maintained their frontages in a precisely calibrated state of decorative distress, so clearly the wild side was only as wild as the market would bear. Kennedy grabbed some lunch – hortobagy pancakes and a sugared fruit skewer – at a café in a square off Bathory Street, in the extensive shadow of the Magyar Televízió building. She watched the people passing, but made no attempt to interact with any of them.
This was the riskiest part. If everything had gone according to plan, Tillman and Diema had picked up her trail at the Police Palace and were now moving with her through the city, keeping track of her – but they had to stay well away, and out in the open there were too many variables for them to be able to stay on top of all of them. Kennedy imagined information flicking through the air around her: streams of data converging, triangulating, defining her position and her vector.
Or maybe she flattered herself.
She did a lot of things on the way back to the hotel that left a footprint. She drew some money from a cashpoint, signed a petition at the parliament building, used her credit card to buy grapes and a four-pack of Staropramen at a mini-market. Probably none of these things would make a difference, but a little overkill certainly wouldn’t hurt.
At the hotel, still thinking about the evidence chain she was leaving, she placed a call to Ryegate House. She spoke to the receptionist there – not Lorraine, who was on extended leave of absence – and left a more or less meaningless message for Valerie Parminter. She called Izzy’s flat, too, and told the answerphone there that she’d be out of contact for a few days but would get back in touch as soon as she could. Izzy never checked her voicemail anyway, so she wouldn’t get the cryptic message and be panicked by it.
There was nothing more to do but wait. Kennedy turned on the TV and flicked through the menus of pay-on-demand movies. She tried a couple, but the comedy wasn’t funny and the conspiracy thriller depressed her by being less implausible than her life had become.
She called room service and ordered a Caesar salad. When it came she felt like the last thing in the world she wanted to do was eat.
The phone in her room rang at about nine o’clock in the evening, as soon as darkness fell – three rings, then silence. Ten minutes later, Kennedy went down to the ground floor and out of the back door of the hotel, where there was a row of five green-painted dumpsters. Between the third and the fourth, there was a large plastic bag carrying the logo of the Europeum Mall. She collected the bag and took it back to her room.
It took a while to familiarise herself with the contents. During her days in the Met, Kennedy had carried a Glock 27 – a true cop’s gun, with a forward-canted grip so it seemed to jump into your hand on the draw, and a dead-straight recoil. She’d lost it in circumstances that still haunted her and had only fired one other in the years that followed. She’d certainly never fired anything like the monstrosity she took out of the bag. The Dan-inject had been Tillman’s suggestion and Diema had seen the virtue of it.
Kennedy put out her light early, but didn’t go to sleep. She sat on the bed and thought about Izzy. Specifically, she thought about sex with Izzy – varied times and places, even more varied sex. It had been sweet at the time, and it was a whole lot sweeter in retrospect.
Kennedy indulged a fantasy in which she was back in the Cask bar in Pimlico, and Izzy was offering – by way of a peace initiative – to take her home and screw her until her brain melted. In the fantasy, Kennedy accepted the offer and brain-melting sex ensued.
In reality, the bedside alarm clock ticked from 11.59 to 12.00 and the world – or the part of it that spoke Hungarian and sprawled around Kennedy on all sides – was silent and sex-free.
She settled back on the pillows, but sat up again at once when she felt herself starting to drift into a doze. That was a luxury she couldn’t indulge until the job was done.
50
‘I don’t see how this is going to work,’ said a voice in Diema’s walkie-talkie.
It was the boy, Rush, complaining again. That seemed to be the unique talent he brought to this operation. Diema ignored him, but Tillman’s voice replied. ‘Diema thinks it has a chance, Rush, and I’m inclined to go with her instincts. She knows her own people.’
It was half-past midnight. Diema was up on the roof of a building directly opposite Kennedy’s hotel, crouched behind a low parapet wall so she was invisible from the street but had a good view of the window of Kennedy’s room. Tillman was watching the small alley where the dumpsters were, and where Diema had dropped off the Dan-inject for Kennedy. Rush was sitting in the parked Audi down the street from the hotel, watching its front door, which was far and away the least likely way for Ber Lusim’s Elohim to come and therefore the place where the boy could do the least harm.
There was a silence. But not for very long.
‘It just seems too obvious,’ Rush said. ‘I mean, like we’re trying to scare them by saying boo or something.’
‘Maybe.’ Tillman again. ‘But we know Ber Lusim’s people see Heather as a threat. They’ve tried to kill her twice already and the second time they wanted to interrogate her, too. They’re worried that she knows something important. If we’re lucky, losing their warehouse will have made them even more worried.’
‘I get that. I just don’t see how it—’
‘Do your job and be quiet,’ Diema snapped. ‘You don’t need to understand or to agree. You only need to do what you’re told.’
This time the silence was longer. There was a click as the walkie-talkie switched frequency – Tillman closing the party circuit to talk to her directly. ‘He’s afraid,’ he told Diema. ‘If you want to shut him up – or calm him down – you should explain to him.’
‘It would be quicker to cut his throat,’ she muttered.
‘More time-consuming, though. You’d have to go all the way down to the street and then back up again. And then we’d have nobody to watch the front lobby.’
Diema said nothing. But after a minute, still scowling into the inoffensive night, she switched the walkie-talkie back to the all-parties frequency. ‘Heather Kennedy is well known to my people,’ she said, in a tone somewhere between terse and outright sullen. ‘Mostly we think of the Adamite world as a distraction. A nothing. But she has a reputation. There are stories about her. How she found the Ginat’Dania that was and how she fought one of our Elohim to the death. She’s the only one outside the People themselves who the Messengers actually respect.’
Almost, she added to herself, a little unwillingly. Almost the only one.
‘But she didn’t do a thing today besides walk around,’ Rush pointed out. ‘She was acting like a tourist. They’ve got to see that she has nothing.’
Actually, Diema thought, that’s the real genius of Kennedy’s plan. But perhaps she saw that more clearly than the boy did because the plan was aimed so squarely at the Messenger mindset; of course Diema would have the right reaction to it, because she was in the target demographic. ‘What they see is this,’ she told Rush. ‘If you’re right, and Budapest is where Ber Lusim has set up his home, then the rhaka, the wolf woman, the bitch, has done it again. She’s found them. She comes and camps out on their doorstep, so obviously she knows they’re here. Once you accept that, her doing nothing is a lot more sinister than her doing something they can identify and stop.’
Static on the walkie-talkie. ‘Okay,’ Rush said slowly. ‘So then …’
‘Sooner
or later they send someone to take her. We intercept and question him instead. We find out where he came from.’
‘Okay. I guess I get that. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Diema growled. ‘Now shut up and watch the door.’
Which the boy did, at last. And at length.
The night wore itself out and the sun came up. Diema saw Kennedy draw back the curtains of her room and open her window a little way to breathe the dawn air. She caught Diema’s eye briefly as she yawned and stretched.
The hook still dangling there, in the water. But nobody was biting.
51
‘I don’t believe this is something we need to act on,’ Ber Lusim said.
Avra Shekolni spread his hands. ‘You are the Summoner. I bow to your knowledge of your profession and its attendant rituals,’ he said, with well-polished humility. ‘None of God’s Messengers is so mighty as Ber Lusim, nor so clear-sighted.’ He paused, as if reluctant to voice what he had to say next. ‘But still, I think it is.’
They were in a large, airy chamber in the labyrinthine space that Ber Lusim had chosen for his followers to inhabit. Both had just listened as one of his Messengers, who had watched Heather Kennedy for half a day and all of the night, told them of her movements – or rather, her immobility. Several other Elohim were present, including Hifela, who had recently returned from England. He stood at the back of the room, beside the door, ostensibly taking onto himself the role of watchman. In this tightly guarded and barricaded space, and with so many Messengers meeting together, the role was superfluous: it was a mark of discretion and respect on Hifela’s part, and reflected all that Ber Lusim found admirable in the man.
The room was close and windowless – which made it, on the whole, comfortable and homely to anyone who had been born and raised in Ginat’Dania. Every man here had spent his formative years underground, absorbing the light frequencies of sunlight only from luminescent panels. Every man here experienced confined spaces as security and was highly tolerant of artificial light and recycled air.
So the claustrophobia that Ber Lusim felt arose from something else. It was a strange thing. Since they had embarked on the plan – since that first night of blood and wonder back in Nunappleton Hall, a feeling had been growing in him. It was that his life, which had at times seemed a labyrinth of complex choices, had been progressively unravelling itself into a single straight line.
Each of the choices he’d made since he first went out into the wider world had paradoxically narrowed the scope of subsequent choices more and more, so that the vast arcades and vistas of the Nations, so unlike the cramped and contained perspectives of his home, were for him a long, straight corridor with no branches.
One of those choices had been to give his trust to Avra Shekolni, and despite the separate and several misgivings of his heart and mind he didn’t in any way regret that bargain. His old friend was now become his prophet, the light that guided his soul through the darkness of the world. But about some things, perforce, he was more clear-sighted than the Holy One. Violence and subterfuge were the twin mysteries into which he had been initiated when he joined the Elohim, and they were ingrained in him so deeply that his mind knew no other way to work.
Therefore, there were things about the present situation that concerned him. The English warehouse shut down, the intricate clockwork of their plan interrupted and thrown out, and now this – the rhaka arriving here, presenting herself to them, like an omen of doom. All women were omens of doom, of course. From Eve onwards, their business and their delight was always to stray from the path and drag others to destruction with them. One did not move to chastise such a one until one was sure beyond all doubt what mischief she was bent on.
He said none of this to Shekolni. ‘You know what the mathematician, Archimedes, had to say about levers,’ he observed instead. Because he was among his followers, he kept his tone light and accompanied the words with a half-smile, disowning their import even as he spoke them.
‘That with a large enough lever, he could move the world,’ Shekolni said.
Ber Lusim inclined his head. ‘And that is all Heather Kennedy is, blessed one. She moved Ginat’Dania, I know. We all know. And by this we know that she is a very large lever, or else one which on that occasion was very cleverly positioned, so as to exert a greater force than might have been expected.’
‘Forgive me, but I thought Archimedes was born of the Nations, not of the People.’ Shekolni did not smile and his tone was a little stern. ‘I was also given to believe that it was this Adamite man, Leo Tillman, who had found Ginat’Dania. The woman was with him, certainly – but it was Tillman, not the rhaka, who killed Kuutma-that-was. And it is doubtless he who hides behind this woman now.’
Ber Lusim turned to Hifela, his refuge in many storms. ‘Tell us again what happened at the warehouse,’ he ordered him.
Hifela made the sign of the noose. ‘One man went alone into the warehouse,’ he said, as formally as if he were reading aloud from a report. ‘A second remained outside, providing cover fire when he retreated. The man killed three of us and wounded four. None of us saw him clearly enough to identify him, but we believe it was Leo Tillman. Some footage survived from perimeter cameras. Red hair. Tall. Heavy build. Those are circumstantial details – but if you consider them in the light of the way he fought us, it seems almost certain.’
He didn’t need to add that for any Adamite man to kill three Messengers was a dark miracle in itself. They all knew that.
‘So,’ Ber Lusim summed up. ‘Tillman, moving against us in England. Depriving us of resources that were already allocated and about to be sent out. Throwing everything into jeopardy. And now, here, the rhaka, arriving – as it were – at the gates of our house. Yes, it seems possible that you’re right. That these two have made common cause again. It doesn’t follow, though, that we have anything to fear from them.’
‘Only observe her arrogance,’ Shekolni countered, his body leaning forward. ‘She comes. She stands full in our sight. She doesn’t even try to hide herself from us.’
‘Perhaps she does not hide,’ Ber Lusim said, ‘because she doesn’t know that there is anything to hide from.’
Shekolni grimaced, as though the suggestion were something unpleasant in his mouth. ‘Perhaps. Yes. That could be. But consider, Ber Lusim, the whole pattern of her movements since you first became aware of her. She begins by searching for the book. She finds your man, within a matter of days, despite two attempts to remove her.’
‘I spoke with Abydos,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘He could not say much, but I pieced together some of what happened. The rhaka had help, from another, younger woman. A woman whose identity we still haven’t managed to determine.’ The familiar fury and hatred rose in him as he said it, as he saw it in his mind – his men, the brothers of his heart, struck down by whores whose very strength and skill were abomination in God’s sight – but he still kept his voice perfectly level and the muscles of his face relaxed.
‘I believe my point stands,’ Shekolni said quietly. ‘But I have other points. She finds a copy of the holy book. A copy that should not even exist, if your Messengers had done the work assigned to them. And in this, we see, she is swimming up the waterfall, pressing herself against the very current of our enterprise. How does she do this? How does she find what your Elohim missed?’
‘Again, Blessed One, with help,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Not alone. Not by some superhuman ability or intuition.’
‘Then, having read the book, she comes here.’
‘And does nothing.’
‘And does – so far as we can see – nothing. But what can we infer from that, Ber Lusim? If she came to search for us, why doesn’t she search? If she came to confer with someone, why doesn’t she meet them and confer? Why does she go from such wild activity to such complete stillness? What is she, perhaps, waiting for? I beg you to indulge me in this. If you’re right, you lose nothing by questioning her. If you’re wrong, you lose much by lea
ving her free to harm us. Despite the time you’ve lost because of events in England – the need, which you have explained to me, to re-route shipments and to source new equipment – we are coming to the final page. I beg you to question the rhaka and ensure that nothing she has planned can interfere with that.’
‘I will do this thing,’ said Ber Lusim, ‘if I’m brought to it. But precisely because of that lost time, Most Holy, I would rather not be brought to it. To secure the rhaka, and then to question her, would delay us still further. I would rather drive onward with the mission that we’ve set ourselves.’
‘Well, I am unschooled in these things.’ Shekolni’s voice was freighted with almost subliminal amounts of sarcasm and resentment. ‘I’m prey to foolish fears.’
It was necessary to bring this matter to rest, Ber Lusim knew. It was bad for the others to see the two of them at odds, even for a moment. An idea struck him. He caught Hifela’s gaze and held it for a moment.
‘Tell me this, Blessed One. If you’re right, and the rhaka knows we’re here – if she is about to call down some disaster on our heads – how should I cast my net, for such a fish? How should I bring this woman into my house, so that I can question her? No matter how many Messengers I send against her, she’ll merely eat them alive and excrete their bones.’
Nobody laughed. Nobody could be completely certain that their leader was joking.
‘Send me,’ Hifela suggested.
The words hung in the air. The Elohim, awed, waited for Ber Lusim’s verdict.
‘You, old Skull-bone?’ Ber Lusim enquired. ‘Well, I said that she was formidable. But if I approved this thing, I’d want her brought to me alive and your natural instincts tend towards death.’
