by Adam Blake
The room was an odd, indented shape, seemingly made up out of pieces cut from other, adjacent rooms. Kennedy snatched a couple of hours of shallow sleep in the narrow single bed, but the pain in her wounded side woke her every time she shifted position. In the end she gave up and just lay unmoving on her back, staring at the mottled plaster of the ceiling and trying to figure out how things had gotten so screwed up so quickly.
Not by accident. Not by serendipity. Not by blind chance. Lightning didn’t strike the same spot twice without a bloody good reason.
The Judas tribe had sent their Messengers, their Elohim, to kill her.
But the girl who’d saved her had identified herself as a Messenger, too.
There were wheels within wheels, and fires within fires.
When dawn filtered through the paisley-pattern curtains, she got up and showered. The water only ran lukewarm, but it was still enough to start the shallow wound in her side bleeding again, marbling the water at her feet with red ripples. Kennedy felt an incongruous sense of relief. The wound had scabbed and was only bleeding now because she’d opened it again. She was lucky that the Messengers used different blades for torture: the ones they used for murder had usually been anointed with a powerful anti-coagulant that made even shallow wounds potentially fatal.
She dried herself, ruining the towel in the process, and then disinfected and dressed the wound. Time to face the day. And to put herself fairly and squarely back in the crosshairs again.
Because her first stop was going to be Leo Tillman.
The Pantheon Café on Montague Street had a frontage so narrow and unassuming that its name had to be intended as some kind of ironic gesture. When Kennedy stepped inside, she found that she was the only customer in the place, but then again it would only have held about eight people when full. Two tables covered with tartan-patterned plastic tablecloths stood just inside the door, to balance the two outside. Beyond them there was a cooler that was too big for the tiny space and blocked half of the tiny counter. On the wall opposite the drinks machine, a much-smeared whiteboard advertised the specials of the day – falafel in pitta bread, dolmades, feta salad. For a Greek café, they didn’t sound all that special.
At the counter, a man with a slim, athletic build, slickeddown hair and a bandito moustache that looked like it had just blown in from someone else’s face was arranging slices of baklava into a crude mosaic on an oval tray.
‘Hi,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with Leo. Leo Tillman.’
The man didn’t look up from his work. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And?’
‘And I was told that I could leave a message for him here.’
‘Ah.’
Kennedy waited, but that seemed to be it. ‘So if I leave a message with you,’ she continued, ‘maybe you could pass it on to Leo the next time he comes through. If that wouldn’t be too much trouble.’
‘Ah,’ the man said again. ‘If.’
‘Look,’ said Kennedy. ‘Do you know Leo or not? If it’s not, I’m out of your life.’
The man looked at her for the first time – an appraising, appreciative stare. ‘You are not in my life, my lovely,’ he told her solemnly. ‘I see this man, I tell him you’re looking for him.’ He shrugged and gave her a sad smile. ‘All I can do.’
Kennedy locked eyes with him. ‘So what are you going to tell him? I didn’t even give you my name.’
‘I tell him that a very beautiful woman is looking for him. And I describe your lovely face, your lovely body to him in such detail that he knows who I mean.’
Kennedy’s tolerance for this kind of talk was low. She opened her mouth, already lining up a row of curse words to fire out of it, but then she noticed that the man was looking over her shoulder.
Tillman was behind her, leaning in the doorway, heavy hands deep in his pockets.
‘It’s good to see you, Heather,’ he said. ‘Come on into my office.’
Kennedy thought Tillman meant the diner, but as it turned out, his office was Coram’s Fields – a more or less perfectly X-shaped patch of greenery just west of Gray’s Inn Road. In the days when Coram’s was a foundling hospital, the fields would have been its grounds, awash with urban orphans discovering what grass felt like. These days it was mostly filled with foreign students from London House and solicitors’ clerks on their lunch breaks.
Tillman sat on a bench at the top of a grassy bank and motioned to Kennedy to sit next to him. For the moment, she ignored the invitation. Tillman looked pretty good, she had to admit. Or maybe it was just that the first time she’d met him, he’d been running on empty, twelve years into a mono-maniacal quest that was disintegrating his mind and his body an atom at a time. He still looked like an Irish docker with an anger management problem, but now he looked like an Irish docker on his way to church, instead of on the third day of a suicidal bender. He sat with his huge hands resting demurely on his knees. His sandy hair – now fuse-wire silver at the temples – was combed back into some kind of a shape, instead of spiking and rolling randomly like a freeze-frame of a brushfire.
‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘I just wanted to drop off a message. I was told that the Pantheon was your mailbox. But you saw me coming, right?’
‘John told me you were looking to get up with me,’ Tillman admitted.
‘And then what? You decided to camp out at that café until I showed? If you’ve got that much time to waste, Leo, good for you. I don’t. Why didn’t you just call me?’
‘Manolis is helping me with something,’ Tillman said. ‘A project I’ve got going on. Calling you was the next thing I was going to do, Heather. As soon as I got done with this.’
His tone was mild, calming. The truth was that her anger had nothing to do with him. She’d been helpless the night before, tied to a bed with her legs spread wide, while two men threatened and brutalised her. True, she’d then seen her attackers beaten flatter than a dirty postcard, but that hadn’t done much to reconcile her to her own pain and humiliation.
‘I’m having a bad week,’ she told Tillman. ‘I’m sorry. It’s good to see you, too.’
She sat down next to him, stifling the restless urge that wanted her to stay upright and moving.
He made no attempt to touch her. He wasn’t a man who did hugs and kisses all that much. Back when he was searching for his family, he’d lived like a monk for long enough to make solitude his natural state. You didn’t put something like that down lightly, once you’d let it get into the grain of you the way Leo had. And he didn’t try to coax her to talk, either. He just waited, knowing that she’d get to it in her own time.
‘So what were you doing back there at the café?’ she asked again. ‘John Partridge said you were on a job. What does that mean for you, these days?’
Tillman laughed softly. ‘It never seems to mean the same thing twice. But this isn’t work, exactly. More like a side effect of work. Someone’s been watching me. I’m trying to figure out who it might be and what they’re looking to do, but they’re good enough that I can never seem to catch them at it.’
Kennedy was perturbed and he saw it in her face. Again, he waited quietly for her to explain.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t like that one bit. It might be completely unconnected with what brought me here, but I don’t think that’s very likely.’
She told Tillman about the events of the last few days, concisely but with as much circumstantial detail as she could provide. She wanted him to see it all from the same perspective from which she’d seen it, as the pieces all came together and screamed the impossible, unwelcome conclusion at her. But she stopped with the death of Alex Wales. She couldn’t talk about what had happened after that, after she left the hospital and went home. Not to Tillman. Not yet.
‘The Judas People,’ Tillman murmured, when she’d finished. He said it with a kind of dulled wonder, as though it were somehow both unexpected and obvious at the same time – like the favourite in a horse race romping home after you’d b
et on a hundred-to-one outsider.
‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, a little piqued by his calm. ‘The Judas People, Leo. The ones who killed my partner, stole your family from you, and almost—’ She reined herself in, catching a hysterical edge in her own voice. ‘I’m not dealing with this all that well,’ she said, stating the obvious. ‘It’s been three years, and I did my best to forget the whole thing. Now – it’s like it never went away. Like we never came back from Mexico.’
‘But we did,’ he reminded her. He gave her a remorseless stare. ‘Heather, they threw everything they had at us and we came out of it still on our feet. This isn’t like that. This is you walking across the edge of something they’re involved in. They may not even have put two and two together. They may not know it’s you. That you’re … someone who already knows about them.’
‘I wish I could believe that,’ Kennedy said bleakly. ‘But I don’t. And neither do you. If it was just me, I’d buy it. Maybe. It could be the lousiest of lousy luck. But it’s not just me, it’s me and Emil Gassan. Two of the three people in the world who know that the Judas tribe are out there. That kind of changes the odds, doesn’t it?’
Tillman blew out his cheek. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘I could make a case. All of this seems to be about that book, somehow, doesn’t it? And Gassan’s speciality is deciphering old texts. So I don’t see it as too much of a stretch that he was close to hand when the book was stolen. Or destroyed. Or whatever happened to it.’
‘Except that he wasn’t. He was drafted in afterwards, like me.’
‘Still. Old texts are his discipline. It makes some sense for him to be there. And when they asked him to bring in a private investigator, how long do you think his shortlist was? It was you, Heather. You’re the only person he knows with that background.’
‘Just coincidence, then.’
‘Just coincidence. Because the alternative is to think that the universe folds itself out of shape just for you. And once you start thinking that, you’re well on your way to some kind of serious personality disorder.’
Kennedy didn’t say word one about either pots or kettles. ‘Well, thanks for coming up with a rational explanation, Leo,’ she said. ‘But that isn’t how it looks from where I’m sitting. There must have been a hundred palaeographers the museum could have gone to. And the guy in charge of the collection getting a stroke right then, and the theft happening right then … I’d say we’re operating right out at the limits of coincidence here.’ She steeled herself. ‘Anyway,’ she said, in a low voice, ‘there’s more.’
‘You think I couldn’t see that in your face? Go on.’
‘They came after me last night. When I got back home, they were waiting for me.’
Tillman’s eyebrows went up a fraction, which for him was expressive of extreme astonishment. ‘Knowing their fieldcraft,’ he said, ‘you were lucky to spot them.’
‘I didn’t spot them,’ Kennedy said. ‘I walked right into it. They were going to kill me. Question me first, and then kill me when they had all the answers. But then this … this girl turned up. And bear in mind, Leo, I don’t call women girls all that often. She was young. And she was better than they were. She saved my life. Left these two Messengers more dead than alive. And mostly she just used her bare hands and the bedroom furniture.’
She let that sink in for a few moments. Tillman’s face showed that he was weighing up what it meant. But Kennedy drew the conclusion for him anyway. ‘She was one of them. One of the Elohim.’
He tapped his thumb against the back of the bench, looking off into the distance. Not randomly, Kennedy realised. He’d chosen this spot because of the view it commanded, and he’d been monitoring all the people who’d walked by while they were talking. He was still doing it, making sure they weren’t being watched or eavesdropped on, checking lines of sight and patterns of movement.
‘Two factions,’ he said at last, after a long silence.
‘That’s the obvious conclusion,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But what the hell would it mean? A breakaway group from the Judas tribe, the way the Provos broke away from the original IRA? These people kept their shit together for two thousand years. What’s so special about now?’
‘We know they decamped. Relocated their hidden city from Mexico to someplace else. That would have created a lot of stress. Hundreds of thousands of people on the move, leaving behind everything they knew. Having to build their homes again, from scratch. It’s probably safe to assume that they’re going through some social upheaval right now. Choppy waters for the chosen people.’
‘It was three years ago,’ Kennedy pointed out.
‘Doesn’t matter. The shockwaves might take a whole generation to die down. Longer even. Anything that big, Heather, it happens too slowly to measure. Believe me. A lot of my assignments for Xe were what they call après-war, so I got to see a lot of people – a lot of cultures – working through a lot of bad stuff. Everything gets thrown up in the air and comes down again in the wrong order. This wasn’t a war, obviously; it was an exodus. But I bet it was comparable in some ways.’
Kennedy found herself rebelling against this argument. Maybe sympathising with the bastards who’d done so much to ruin Tillman’s life and tried to end hers was just too big a feat of moral gymnastics for her to pull off. ‘Comparable to a war? The only way it would be comparable would be if they’d gotten so hidebound – so rigid in the way they think and the way they live – that any kind of change would break them.’
‘Well,’ Tillman said, looking away again, ‘it’s only a hypothesis. The facts on the ground suggest that they’re fighting against each other. We can agree on that much. The reasons … well, we’re never going to know, one way or the other, are we? If you asked them, and they told you, they’d have to kill you right after.’
He said it lightly, but Kennedy didn’t laugh – and Tillman wasn’t really joking. He stood up and stared down at her in silence.
‘What?’ Kennedy said.
‘What is it you want from me, Heather?’
‘Right now? Nothing. I’m just warning you, because it seems to me that if they’re really dusting off unfinished business – if this is more than just coincidence – then they’ll be coming after you next. And now it looks like they already did. I bet it’s them who are watching you.’
‘No,’ Tillman said.
‘What do you mean, no? The one person they hate more than me would have to be you, so it’s kind of inevit—’
‘I mean, you didn’t come here to warn me.’
‘I didn’t?’
‘Well, not just for that. Tell me the rest. You want me to ride shotgun for you?’
Kennedy was appalled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Leo, no. Jesus, after what you’ve been through? I’m not trying to pull you back in. Not …’ Not to fight them, she wanted to say. Not to kill any more of them. But if she followed that chain of ideas, with Tillman right there in front of her, there was no way of knowing what her face might give away. He still had no idea that the two Messengers he’d killed at Dovecote Farm had been his own sons. She was determined that he’d never find out.
In fact there was only one conceivable counterbalance to that determination, and this was the real reason why she’d come: outweighing the two dead sons, the one living daughter. Tabe. Because it was impossible, looking at the girl’s face and hearing her speak, not to see the resemblances, hear the echoes. But she’d been with Diema so briefly, at a time when her thoughts had been in turmoil. She could easily be mistaken. The age was about right, but what the hell did that mean? All of the Messengers were young. The drugs they took to increase their strength and speed killed them before they got old.
‘There’s something else,’ she admitted. ‘Something I’m going to need to tell you about, only I can’t do it yet. I don’t know if I’m right, and if I’m wrong it would be …’ She tailed off. This had strayed onto really dangerous ground, really fast. ‘I swear, Leo,’ she said, aware
of the hollow reverb on her weasel words, ‘as soon as I’m sure, I’ll tell you. And then – well, yeah, then I’d want you to get involved. Then you’d have to get involved.’
‘And until then, I just have to trust your instincts?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine,’ Tillman said. ‘Because I do.’ He let out his breath in a long sigh. ‘It’s funny. For a long time, I thought I was at peace. I knew that Rebecca was dead. I knew how she died, and why. I knew my kids were doing okay, that they were happy, even if they were with those maniacs. I thought that was enough. But lately it’s been troubling me. Like, how could I know they were out there and not try to find them? Even if I only saw them from a distance, it would mean so much. You coming to see me … it’s strange, but it’s strange in a good way. It’s as though everything I thought we laid to rest is waking up again.’
Not quite everything, Kennedy thought. Not Ezei, or Cephas. This was why she was terrified of letting him get too close. It magnified the risk that he’d find out what he’d done, and she was sure beyond any shadow of a doubt that the knowledge would break him. ‘Leo,’ she said, trying to head him off, ‘we found their home once and they uprooted it and moved it. There’s no way they’d let you find it again. I think you should put that out of your mind. And believe me, please, I really didn’t come here to drag you into my mess. I came to warn you to watch your back, and … No, that’s all. Just watch your back. If you’ve got the option of going to ground somewhere, do it. When it’s over, I’ll leave a message at that café, or wherever. I’ll come over and tell you what happened. Maybe – maybe I’ll have some news to tell you.’
‘Heather,’ Tillman said mildly, ‘with respect – and I hope you know how much I respect you – I don’t think that’s how this will work. Even if I was happy to sit it out, I’m the only one you can ask for help who knows how these bastards work.’
‘I’m not,’ Kennedy said, a little desperate now. ‘I’m not asking you for help. Actually, I’m asking you not to help. I’ve got … I’m setting something up. Something complicated. If you come barging in, you might wreck it. Please, Leo. Keep your distance until I’m done.’