The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Diema said.

  Rush flushed slightly. ‘No, I don’t. That’s sort of what I just said.’

  ‘Johann Toller,’ Diema said, enunciating the words with the care reserved for deaf people, foreigners and imbeciles, ‘said the world would end after all his prophecies were fulfilled.’

  ‘That part I got.’

  ‘Then what would you do if you wanted the world to end?’

  Rush stared at her. ‘If I … ?’ he repeated.

  Then he stared some more. Tillman and Kennedy were staring, too.

  ‘The time of the bargain came,’ Diema said. ‘And then it went. God didn’t appear to us. But over such a very, very long time, mistakes and misunderstandings are possible – not on the part of the Holy Name, but on our part. The Sima, our high council, argued for patience. God’s plan would reveal itself, if we waited.

  ‘But Shekolni, who had a voice in that council, disagreed. He said God had never, ever expected us just to wait. That to do nothing was the last thing He wanted from us. After three thousand years, our time would come. But it was exactly that – our time. It was up to us to act. And God had already told us what to do.’

  ‘Through Johann Toller,’ Kennedy said.

  Diema gave a brusque shrug. What do you think?

  ‘That’s what they’re doing.’ Kennedy felt an acute sense of vertigo. ‘They’re making it happen by making all the signs and wonders happen first. They’re ringing in the Second Coming.’

  ‘And the signs and the wonders will only get bigger and bloodier,’ Diema said. ‘Unless you stop them.’

  ‘Unless we stop them?’ Rush blurted. ‘Why is this down to us?’

  Diema pointed at Kennedy, and then at Tillman. ‘I meant them,’ she said. ‘Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for.’

  ‘And we were?’ Kennedy said, jumping on the words. She was right. She had to be right.

  ‘The boy raises a good point,’ Tillman growled, getting to his feet. He didn’t seem to have registered Kennedy’s words. ‘This is your business, not ours. Something you and your people vomited into the world. Why in the name of anything you want to swear by would you come to the very people you despise and hate, and ask them to clear up your mess?’

  Diema was silent. With all their eyes on her, she shrugged again. This time the gesture seemed to say she’d made her case and they could take it or leave it. ‘It’s true that we want Ber Lusim’s network closed down,’ she said. ‘His beliefs are heresy – abomination. And besides, what he’s doing puts us at risk. It’s too visible. It makes people ask questions and look for patterns. So that’s why I was sent. That’s why I’m here, now, talking to you.

  ‘But I’d say the stakes are higher for you than for us. Lots of people have already died. But if Ber Lusim gets to the last prophecy, many, many more people will die.’ Diema’s gaze met Kennedy’s. ‘You read the book. Toller talks about the thousand thousand who are going to be sacrificed. A million people. I can’t believe you want that to happen.’

  ‘But that’s not why you came to us,’ said Kennedy. ‘You don’t give a damn how many people die, so long as it’s our kind and not yours. We’re no better than cattle to you. And the stakes? How could the stakes be higher, exactly? Secrecy is an iron law to you people. Anything that threatens the big secret, you rip it right out of the world. And you want us to believe that this – these maniacs running around loose, making all this noise – is no big deal for you?’

  Diema pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing a little. ‘I expressed myself badly,’ she said, with stolid patience. ‘Of course this concerns us. But there’s a parable – about a traveller who is set on by robbers as he sits by his campfire at night. He takes a stick out of the fire to fend them off. Then, when his enemies are beaten, he throws the brand back into the flames and lets it be consumed.’

  ‘And we’re the stick?’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s sweet. And it’s a lot closer to the truth. But you gave yourself away, girl – when you were talking about the death of the woman and her children, and all of a sudden you had to go to the window and breathe some sweet, fresh air. So why is it so hard for you to say?’

  ‘To say what?’ Tillman asked. ‘What am I missing?’

  Diema glanced at him for a moment, then lowered her gaze to the ground.

  ‘You’ve seen how they fight, Leo,’ Kennedy said, her voice sounding harsh and hateful in her own ears: because she really did hate this. The big unspoken lie, the sin of omission. She hated everything that was behind it. ‘You’ve seen how casually they kill.’

  ‘Seen it right up close,’ Tillman agreed. ‘Like you.’

  ‘But when Diema here dismantled the two Messengers who were about to torture me, she left them both alive. Concussed, bleeding, beaten to a pulp, but alive. And you said at the warehouse …’ She let the sentence tail off.

  ‘Same thing,’ Tillman confirmed.

  Kennedy leaned forward, her face right up close to Diema’s. Like a scolded schoolgirl, Diema kept her head bowed and her eyes down. ‘You can’t kill your own, can you?’ Kennedy said. ‘You put us through all this because you can’t do it yourself. There’s one commandment you can’t break. You’re not allowed to shed the blood of the blessed.’

  They held the tableau for a few seconds longer.

  ‘Answer me!’ Kennedy yelled.

  Diema looked up at last. ‘You’re right,’ she said, her voice tight. ‘There are two commandments that can’t be broken – for which the punishment is exile, for ever. And one of them is … what you said. We can’t do this without you. We can find Ber Lusim and we can help you to stop him, but …’

  The silence lengthened.

  ‘But you need us to pull the trigger on him,’ Tillman said.

  Diema drew herself up to her full height, which was a head shorter than his. She stared up at him, her arms at her sides, as unbending as the upright of a cross. ‘It should come naturally to you,’ she said. ‘You talk about how easily we kill. But we kill for survival. You’ve killed for much less important things, like money, for example.’

  Tillman seemed taken aback by the barely contained fury in her tone. He opened his mouth to answer, but Diema hadn’t finished. ‘The only question,’ she snarled, ‘is whether you want to work with me and use what I know or cut me loose and go your own way. Either way, I’ve said what I came here to say. And even though you’re my enemies, I never treated you as enemies. I gave you more respect than you gave me.’

  A single red tear ran down the girl’s cheek. She didn’t move to wipe it away.

  ‘No,’ Kennedy said. ‘That’s not the only question. Before I decide whether I can work with you – whether I can even bear to be in the same room with you – I want an answer on something else.’

  The girl looked at her in stolid silence.

  ‘What’s eating you, Heather?’ Tillman asked. Clearly, he could see from her face that it was something big.

  ‘We thought there were only two kinds of emissary,’ Kennedy said. ‘The soldiers and the mothers. But suppose there was a third kind? Not fighters, exactly, but fixers. People who make things happen. People with connections and resources, who plant themselves in the Adamite world and do with money what the Elohim do with knives. Protect the Judas People and serve their interests.’

  ‘Why,’ Diema asked quietly, ‘would you suppose that?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. How about because the Validus Trust put Emil Gassan in place to deal with the theft of Toller’s book from Ryegate House. Then Gassan brought me in and I met you, and I went to Leo. None of that was chance, and none of it was destiny. It was planned. You just said as much, right now. Someone set us up like dominoes. Anticipated our every move and the money of the Validus Trust was the first domino. Everything else flowed from that.’

  Diema didn’t confirm or deny the hypothesis, and nobody else spoke. They were all staring at the girl.

  ‘Tell me that didn’t happen, Diema,’ Kennedy s
aid. ‘Tell me we weren’t recruited.’

  ‘They’re called Nagodim,’ Diema said at last. ‘And they work in exactly the way you just described.’

  Kennedy shook her head slowly. The certain knowledge that she’d been manipulated filled her with mixed emotions of outrage and relief. Outrage, because she was being moved around like a playing piece in a complicated game. Relief, because she was being moved around by some ordinary man or woman, not by Nemesis or Fate or God.

  All the same, two men had died because of these manipulations. Jesus, they’d probably been behind the fortuitous stroke that had taken out Emil Gassan’s predecessor. Sooner or later, there had to be a reckoning. Kennedy said that to the girl with her eyes.

  Aloud, breaking the heavy silence, she said, ‘You haven’t earned my trust. Nothing like. I still think your people are a kind of creeping poison, but this has to be stopped. So I say we work together.’

  ‘I agree,’ Tillman said. ‘With the same reservations. We pool our resources until we’ve done what we’ve got to do. Beyond that, we don’t make any promises or any assumptions.’

  ‘Do I get a vote?’ Rush asked.

  Kennedy searched the boy’s face for a long second. She could guess at some of what he was feeling: it had to overlap at least a little with what she’d felt when she was helpless in the hands of Samal and Abydos. The difference was that nobody had suggested she should kiss and make up with Samal and Abydos. If there wasn’t so very much at stake, she’d be prepared to give the boy the right of veto here. As it was …

  ‘I vote yes,’ he said, before she could answer. ‘I’m good with it. In case anyone was wondering.’

  He poured himself a glass of the water, which nobody had touched, and drank it down.

  There was a sense of everyone in the room stepping back from a confrontation whose terms and rules of engagement had never been formally stated. Diema relaxed her stance, letting out a long breath.

  Rush reached for the sica to take a closer look at it. Diema’s hand locked around his wrist. With the other hand, she took the knife away from his reaching fingers and slid it back into its sheath inside her shirt.

  ‘The blade’s poisoned,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘Pick it up in the wrong way and you’ll probably die.’

  Looking at the red runnel on the girl’s cheek, it occurred to Kennedy that that was every bit as true of her as it was of the knife.

  47

  The talk ebbed and flowed around Rush. He tried to pay attention, but the rigours of the last two days – everything from his fight with Alex Wales and the wounding of Professor Gassan up to his interrogation and kidnapping by the scary girl and the drive down here, bound hand and foot, in the back of what looked like a postal delivery van – were catching up with him. He found himself drifting in and out of a heavy doze, missing the connections between sentences and ideas or else experiencing them as an imagistic jumble.

  He kept flashing back to the one time the girl had really hurt him. She was a skilled interrogator, and mostly she just talked the truth out of him. She seemed to know most of it already, so all he had to do to save his life was to agree to one or two of the things she was saying – agree that he knew what she was, and who her friends were, and what she was for.

  But when she asked him where she was from, and he said he didn’t know, she took his hand in hers and folded his wrist back on itself in some complicated way. It was agonising, and he was terrified that the wrist was going to snap.

  ‘Ginat’Dania,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Rush had yelled and then bellowed and then whimpered. ‘I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know, I never heard of it, please. Oh, Jesus. Please.’

  The night was a morass of fear, leavened with shame, but most of it could be dissolved into soft focus. That moment stood out very clear and sharp. He turned it over and over in his mind as though it were a puzzle box and he was looking for the sequence of manipulations that would slide it open.

  That was why he’d voted yes, although he wasn’t kidding himself that his vote had counted for much. He needed to prove that he wasn’t afraid of her. Hating her would have been okay, but being afraid of her wasn’t. The distinction mattered a lot.

  And still they talked. Kennedy was arguing now about what it was they were signing up for. ‘Leo’s a soldier, and you’re … what you are. But this isn’t what I do. I’ve killed exactly twice, once in a police action and once in self-defence. I can’t take part in raids or ambushes or executions. I probably can’t even watch those things.’

  ‘I’ve studied you,’ Diema said bluntly, ‘and I think you’re wrong. But it’s not for me to say what you can do and what you can’t do. It’s irrelevant in any case. There are too many of them for us to fight them like that. We need another way.’

  Then there was some talk about the two men – the warrior, Ber Lusim, and the priest, Shekolni. Their strengths and their weaknesses, according to Kuutma, and according to the girl’s own observations. Rush started to doze, missed some of the conversation.

  ‘… tracked Ber Lusim to safe houses in three different cities,’ Diema was saying now. ‘Berlin. Tokyo. Santiago. And we think there might be bases in Los Angeles and London, also. But as far as we know, none of those places was a permanent base of operations.’

  ‘Same problem with the paperwork I saw at the warehouse,’ Tillman answered. ‘They were shipping stuff pretty much everywhere. Singapore. Toulouse. New York. Budapest. No way to know whether any of those places are fixed bases or distributive hubs in their own right. They’re setting up hundreds of one-off terrorist acts in a dozen different countries. Ber Lusim could be overseeing the whole programme from any one of those places, or from somewhere else entirely.’

  ‘Budapest,’ Rush said. He knew he’d said it because he heard it – with that weird sense of detachment and unfamiliarity you get when you hear your own voice played over a tape recorder.

  The other three all looked at him.

  ‘You’ve got an opinion on this?’ Tillman asked him.

  Rush blinked a few times, because he wasn’t seeing all that clearly. ‘It’s Budapest,’ he said again. ‘I think.’ He found his gaze drawn to the girl, whose dark eyes and pale face suddenly reminded him overpoweringly of a photographic negative, or an X-ray. As though she belonged to another world that was the anti-matter image of his own. ‘What you said,’ he mumbled, ‘about Shekolni being obsessed with Johann Toller – and about how your people always follow tradition. Stick to what you know.’

  ‘Yes?’ Diema said. ‘What about those things?’

  It was a shock to Rush to realise that he was the only one who knew this. He riffled through Kennedy’s typescript until he found the picture of the rock and the town at its base. And the Latin tag in heavy, uneven type.

  De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente.

  He showed it to the others. ‘It’s Gellert Hill, in Budapest.’ He pointed at the little cluster of buildings. ‘Whoever captioned it thought so, anyway. And that town there is Buda, I guess. It’s the Buda side of the river, anyway. I went there once on holiday.’

  He realised at this point that he wasn’t at all certain of his ground, but he plunged on anyway. ‘Toller put this engraving at the front of his book. So maybe the “I” in the Latin there – “I come from the belly of the beast”, and all that – is really him. It’s him saying to us, this is where I come from. This is my secret origin.’

  ‘Budapest,’ Tillman mused. ‘But where does that get us?’

  Diema had gone very still, looking down at her hands, which were in her lap, palms-up.

  ‘Not just Budapest,’ Rush said. His index finger was still resting on the badly photocopied picture. ‘Somewhere around here – the base of Gellert Hill. I know about this place because I did the Blue Danube tour when I was on holiday out there. There’s a massive cave inside the hill that the modern city uses as a reservoir. I think that may have been where
your Judas People were living, back in the 1660s. Budapest was part of the Ottoman Empire back then, so coming and going would have been a bit of a challenge – but maybe that just made it easier for Toller to get away from his people and not be followed.’

  ‘Is any of this true?’ Kennedy asked Diema. ‘Is that where your people were living three centuries ago?’

  Diema continued to stare at her own hands. ‘I told you there were two commandments that couldn’t be broken,’ she said quietly. ‘Now you know both of them.’

  ‘It makes sense,’ Kennedy said. ‘So if Shekolni thinks of Toller as the great prophet …’

  ‘… he might want to go back to the source,’ Tillman finished. ‘But that still gives us an entire city to search. Might take a long time if we have to go house-to-house.’

  ‘Our Elohim could do it,’ Diema said. Clearly they were no longer in the taboo zone and she was able to speak freely again. ‘We can access satellite and CCTV footage to map the movements of any trucks with the HEH logo and livery. Any address where a truck goes, we’ll know. We should be able to narrow it down in a matter of hours or days.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t be delivering weapons to their head office,’ Tillman objected. ‘This – what we’re looking for – is the think tank. It’s where the decisions get made. The arsenals are almost certainly elsewhere.’

  ‘We’ll make the search, in any case,’ Diema said. ‘If it comes up empty, we’ve lost nothing. Also, we’ll monitor communications. We have a long list of phone numbers that we’ve tied to Ber Lusim’s people – some definite, some just highly likely. Calls into the city from any of those numbers can be traced.’

  ‘And that’s all wonderful,’ Tillman said. ‘But it still comes down to time. They’re working their way down Toller’s list. When they get to the end, it’s at least possible that a million people will die. We have to find them before that happens.’