by Adam Blake
‘Did any of this come up in your job interview?’ Kennedy asked laconically.
He shrugged. ‘It was a long time ago.’
She sighed. ‘Okay, I get it. You’re telling me you know about this dark, grown-up stuff. Well, maybe you do, at that. If you’re sure you want the truth, I’ll give it to you.’
‘I want it,’ he said at once.
So she told him the whole story – or at least, as much of it as was hers to tell.
She started with the death of Chris Harper, her partner, who bled out in her arms after taking a wound from one of the Messengers’ poisoned knives. It was hard for her to keep her voice steady. Even after three years, it still hurt to remember.
She talked about the Judas People for what must have been an hour or more. She told Rush how they lived as a separate tribe within the mass of humanity. How they hid in the cities of the Earth, choosing places where there was sufficient density of population to hide them, and how they’d perfected the arts of camouflage to the point where they left no footprint on history, no record of their comings or their goings.
Rush kept quiet for most of it and let her talk.
‘And they really believe they’re descended from the serpent of Eden?’ he asked, when she’d finished.
‘By way of Cain and Judas,’ Kennedy said.
‘But the serpent was the Devil.’
Kennedy shrugged. ‘That’s our version. Their version is that he was an emissary of the true God who stands above and outside creation. So Cain was special, and all Cain’s offspring are special, whereas Eve begat a lineage of sinners and wastrels. But they name themselves after Judas because he’s the one who made the covenant with God on their behalf.’
‘And the deal was?’
‘Three thousand years in the wilderness. For all that time, the children of Adam are the stewards of God’s Creation. But after that time is up, the faithful – the true heirs of Cain and Judas – will be given their reward. Which is everything. Dominion over the whole world.’
Rush absorbed this for a few moments in silence. ‘Three thousand years counting from when?’ he asked at last.
‘Well, let’s just say that God should have called by now. Judas made the covenant about two thousand years ago, but the date that was used as a reference point was around a thousand years BC. The unification of the tribes of Israel, under King David. That was the cornerstone of history, as far as Judas was concerned. The one moment in time that everybody knew and nobody was going to argue about. So that was what he and Christ used as a reference point. At least, that’s what the Judas Gospel says.’
‘And they waited all that time …’ Rush mused.
‘They’re still waiting. They’re not happy about it, but at this point they don’t have a lot of choice. The thing is, there aren’t that many of them. And three thousand years is a long time as far as genetic inbreeding goes. So they come out into the world every so often. I mean, some of them do.’
Rush was looking at her with a baffled kind of expression, so Kennedy went on, picking her words carefully. This part of the story belonged to others. It wasn’t for her to tell how Leo Tillman’s family had been stolen from him, and how he’d later killed his own sons, at Dovecote Farm in Surrey, without knowing who they were. That secret, at least, she intended to take to her grave. ‘They send women out, to get pregnant. To bring in new genes. The women meet Adamite men, get married and raise families with them.’
‘Adamite?’ Rush said, with a grimace. ‘What? What’s that? The rest of us?’
‘That’s the rest of us, yeah. And these women, these “vessels” – the Kelim – get pregnant three times. As soon as the third child is old enough to travel, they just disappear. They go back to the tribe, taking the children with them. Mission accomplished.’
‘You’re putting me on,’ Rush protested. ‘Nobody would do that. It’s sick.’
‘Getting into this stuff,’ Kennedy said, deadpan, ‘it’s like stepping into another world, Rush. They’ve got their own rules. Their own way of seeing things. And it does the job. Stops them all dying from double recessives. But anything could happen to a woman out in the world by herself. A woman raised in seclusion, totally lacking in street smarts. So there are others. Agents. Operatives. People who act like guardian angels for the Kelim, and to some extent for the whole tribe. They’re called the Elohim, which is Aramaic for “Messengers”, and if they think someone knows too much … well, their speciality is accidental death, but they’re comfortable with straight murder, too. That’s what Alex Wales was.’
When she finally ran out of words, Rush stared at her for a few moments in complete silence.
‘I don’t know why I sat through all that lunacy,’ he said at last.
‘Yeah, you do,’ Kennedy said. ‘It was because you saw a man kill himself right in front of you today and you can’t get the picture out of your head. You’re willing to listen to any amount of lunacy if it will help you to understand that.’
‘That’d be great if it actually worked. But I’m not understanding any of this. It’s a stupid story.’
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’
‘But you say it happened to you.’
‘And to you, Rush, as of today. You were in the room. With any luck, they won’t know that, but maybe it’s just as well you made me tell you all this. At least now, you might be that little bit more paranoid at a time when you’ve actually got something to be paranoid about.’
‘Thanks,’ Rush said glumly. ‘Anything particular I ought to watch out for?’
‘What happened to Wales’s eyes, that’s something they seem to do a lot. When they kill. When they’re thinking about killing. Or sometimes just as a response to stress or emotion. It’s called haemolacria. They weep blood.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It’s because of the drug they take. It’s toxic and in the end it kills them, but it makes them faster and stronger and more resistant to pain. Believe me, it takes a lot to put one of them down.’
‘Like you said,’ he reminded her, ‘I was in the room.’ He pondered, staring into his empty glass. ‘But why didn’t he just kill us all, then? Wales, I mean. It wouldn’t have been all that hard.’
Kennedy felt the weight of that guilt and unease settle on her. ‘He could have done, if he’d wanted to. But I think he didn’t want to be questioned. They hide from the light. I threw that into the mix and hoped he’d run away. It didn’t occur to me that he’d kill himself to avoid answering awkward questions.’
She picked up her bag, straightened her jacket and generally did the premonitory things that mean you’re about to leave. Rush ignored the signals.
‘What do we do now?’ he asked her.
Kennedy frowned. ‘We don’t do anything now,’ she said. ‘We go to bed and sleep. Neither of us is in any shape for life-or-death decisions.’
Rush laughed hollowly. ‘You think it’s going to be up to us to decide? Really?’
Kennedy got to her feet. ‘I think we wait and see,’ she said. ‘If we’re lucky, this is where it ends.’
But it wouldn’t be. Of course it wouldn’t. That was why she’d told Izzy not to come home yet, and why she’d told Rush enough to put him on his guard. It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be.
Herself, and Emil Gassan. No coincidence. She’d been rolled up into something, by a force that she couldn’t see or define. She was in this mess for a reason and it sure as hell wasn’t her own reason.
‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she told Rush. ‘I have to sleep.’
‘Okay.’
‘You’re staying?’
‘I need another drink.’
‘Just make sure you can still walk home,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
But as she turned, he called her name again. She looked back over her shoulder.
‘It’s Ben,’ he said.
His voice was slurred enough that she didn’t understand at first. ‘It’s what?’ she demanded.
‘Benjamin. Ben. My given name. I was christened—’
‘Okay.’ She waved him to silence. ‘Sorry. It’s way too late for that. You’re Rush now.’
He sighed deeply.
‘What’s the secret of a good joke?’ he asked Kennedy.
‘Timing.’
‘Right. So I guess I’m a bad one.’
She just about had time to jump on the Piccadilly Line at Leicester Square, then drop down to Pimlico on the last southbound train.
Kennedy’s feet were heavy and she was irresolute all the way back about where she was going to sleep. The night before, Izzy’s bed without Izzy in it had felt like an alien planet. But she suspected that her own would feel like a crypt.
In the end she went for Izzy’s because at least the bed was made and she could just fall into it. Whether she’d sleep was a question that would answer itself in due course.
She opened the door and stepped inside, wondering for a moment why the action of the lock seemed a little looser than usual, the cylinder rattling slightly in its housing.
As she stepped across the threshold, she saw the living room door ahead of her standing open. She knew she’d left it closed that morning, so now she knew why the lock was loose.
Stand or run? A professional wouldn’t give her a chance to run in any case, and if it was a casual burglar – please, God – she could probably take him. She reached into her bag for the pepper spray.
Arms locked around her from behind, pinning her hands to her sides. Something was pressed to her face and though she struggled not to inhale, consciousness slipped away before she could even register the smell of the drug.
13
The world came back piecemeal, a lot more slowly than it had gone away.
Kennedy was aware of sounds first: slow, discrete, shifted toward the bass register. Not words, as such – and they carried on not being words no matter how hard she focused on them.
Then a sourness that was half-smell, half-taste welled up from everywhere and nowhere, around and inside her. She balked.
‘Mistakh he. He met e’ver.’
‘Ne riveh te zi’et. Hu vihel veh le tzadeh.’
Hands clasped her head and shoulder. She tried to pull away from them, but they just turned her onto her side. Her stomach tightened, sending a peristaltic wave through her upper body. She retched weakly, felt warm liquid run over her lips and tongue.
Cloth beneath her cheek, beneath her body. Soft, and cool. It had rocked slightly when she moved. She was on a bed.
A blurred dot of light appeared, more or less centred in her field of vision. It expanded and there was movement in front of it, across and across.
‘Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?’ A man’s voice, deep and mellifluous.
Kennedy played dead as she laboriously assembled her recent memories into some kind of sequence. The stairs. The door. The bed. No, she was missing a step. Someone moving behind her, arms pinning her arms, the handkerchief pressed to her face. And then the bed. Fine.
Not fine at all.
‘I think she’s awake.’ A different voice, not harsher but deader, affectless: a voice that actually scared her, given the implications of why she was lying on a bed, why she’d been attacked at all.
‘Then let’s get started.’
Hands were laid on her once more. She was too weak and sick to resist as she was rolled onto her back again and her arms were pulled up over her head. Something closed on her left wrist with a snap. There was a metallic clanking and scraping, then clack, something bit into her right wrist, hard and sudden enough to make her flinch. When she tried to flex her legs, she discovered that they were already immobilised in some way. She was spread-eagled on the bed, and absolutely defenceless.
‘Ni met venim, ye sichedur.’
‘Nhamim.’
If that language, whatever it was, was what her assailants spoke to one another, Kennedy wondered for a moment why they’d shifted into English. The answer came to her at once: ‘Let’s get started’ was something she was meant to hear and be frightened by. Seeing through the ruse gave her some crumb of comfort.
She opened her eyes now. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by faking unconsciousness any longer.
The biggest surprise – although it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all – was that she was in Izzy’s bedroom. She probably hadn’t been out that long and there was very little point in ambushing her at the flat if her assailants then had to take her to someplace else entirely. But still, the familiar surroundings accentuated the weirdness and her terror at what was happening.
There were just the two of them – the ones she’d already differentiated by their voices. Both were young, but one was very young, perhaps still in his teens or early twenties. He was slightly built, handsome, with shoulder-length black hair and a short, neat moustache and beard.
The other was bigger and stockier, with a sullen baby face. Black hair, again, but this man wore it short and in a curiously retro style, with an off-centre parting.
Both were dressed in rough-weave linen suits in a colour that might be called a light tan, and both had the unnatural pallor of the Judas tribe, whose life was lived mostly underground. Both were staring at her with solemn intensity – accompanied in the case of the bigger man by something like disgust.
‘We’re going to ask you some questions, Miss Kennedy,’ the bearded man said gently. Unsurprisingly, he was the one with the attractive, cultured voice. The designated nice cop, Kennedy thought. But she wasn’t about to give him the benefit of any doubts on that account. ‘About the job you were called in to do at the British Museum and about the events of this afternoon.’
Kennedy didn’t answer. She twisted her head to look up and then down, taking in what they’d done to her. Her wrists were cuffed – with a single pair of handcuffs threaded through the bed’s wrought-iron headboard. Pink, furry handcuffs: bondage gear. Her legs were locked in their wide-open position by some sort of hobble bar. But she was fully clothed. They hadn’t even taken off her jacket. The mixed signals were confusing. Why prep her for rape and then stop halfway?
‘Don’t know … what you’re talking … about,’ Kennedy mumbled. Her mouth and lower face were still numb from the drug and it was hard to form the words. But in any case, it seemed like a good idea to let them come to her.
The bigger man uttered an oath she didn’t catch. He reached into his jacket and drew out a knife. Kennedy’s heart hammered as she saw the asymmetrical shape of it, the curved spur where the blade ought to narrow to a point and the blunt, rough tang, the exact same metal as the blade, that served it as a hilt. It was the sica again.
These men were Messengers – the professional assassins of the Judas tribe.
The big man pressed the knife to Kennedy’s cheek. ‘Listen to me, filth,’ he said, between clenched teeth. ‘Every time you lie to us, I will cut you. Every time you don’t answer quickly enough, I will cut you. Every time I don’t like the answer you give, I will cut you. And when I have no more questions, I will cut your throat.’
‘Samal.’ The younger man spoke the word softly, but his partner tensed at once and looked to him, settling for Kennedy the question – which had been open up until then – of the pecking order. He made a gesture and the heavy-set man took the knife away from Kennedy’s face, lowered it to his side. Nice cop outranked nasty cop.
The younger man sat down beside her on the bed, arranging himself almost primly, and stared into her eyes. He smiled – and the smile was a lot more unsettling than the big man’s ferocity. It was the smile of someone so sure of his own rectitude that guilt and shame couldn’t land a punch on him.
‘My name is Abydos,’ he told her. ‘And that man there, with the knife, he is my friend, Samal. Samal is a man who – as you might imagine from his manner – doesn’t flinch from unpleasant work. But despite what he says, it will be I who will question you. And I will only allow Samal to hurt you if you force my hand. By that
I mean, if you make me believe that hurting you will bring you to tell us more or keep you from lying. You understand me? If you cooperate, there will be less pain. Perhaps no pain at all. And the end, when it comes, will come more quickly and more easily.’
He paused, as though he expected her to reply. When she didn’t, he resumed. ‘I can, besides, offer you one further consolation. At the moment – with only a little more stage management – your death will seem like a sexual game that escalated out of control. But if you tell us the truth, without prompting, then before we leave here we’ll remove these …’ he gestured, with a tight, uncomfortable smile ‘… accessories from your body and leave it fully clothed. You won’t be dishonoured.’
‘Yeah, I’ll still be dead, though,’ Kennedy said. ‘I hate to sound ungrateful, but … you know.’ It hurt her throat to speak, she discovered, and her voice came out as an unlovely croak.
The young man shrugged. ‘You’re an intelligent woman,’ he said. ‘If I promised to let you live, it would be meaningless. We’d both know it for a lie and then you wouldn’t believe anything else I told you.’
Kennedy licked her dry lips, muttered something low and far back in her throat. When the young man obligingly leaned forward to try to catch her words, she spat in his eye. It was all the defiance she could muster, but she saw from the horror and disgust that flared in his face that it had done the job.
The man took out a handkerchief and wiped his cheek with it. ‘Well, then,’ he said, his mouth twisted, ‘perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps it will be impossible, after all, to conduct this conversation along rational lines.’ He looked to the other man, who still stood ready with the knife in his hand. ‘Samal, take a finger.’