The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  Kennedy counted on her raised fingers as she worked it out in her head. ‘If they keep working at the present rate, I’d say that gives us four days at most,’ she said.

  They were all silent for a moment or two as the implications of this sank in. Budapest was a very big haystack, and four days was no time at all. It had taken Kennedy almost that long to find Alex Wales and she’d only had one building to search.

  ‘We need a back-up plan,’ Tillman said. ‘By all means, girl, let your people go to town on this. But there’s no way we should just sit and wait while they work.’

  ‘You have a better suggestion?’ Diema asked, her eyes narrowing as she stared at him.

  ‘I do,’ Kennedy said.

  They all turned to look at her, expectantly.

  ‘I think there’s at least a chance that we can make them come to us.’

  PART FIVE

  THE BELLY OF

  THE BEAST

  48

  Diema, Tillman and Rush flew from Heathrow to Budapest Ferihegy on a red-eye flight that left at half-past midnight. They used false papers supplied by a contact of Tillman’s who he referred to as Benny.

  It was only a two-hour flight, so there was no question of sleeping. Rush had brought along some of the books he’d swiped from the Ryegate House collection, and used the time to look up Johann Toller in the index of each book in turn.

  Diema put on her headphones and selected a cartoon to watch. It was very beautiful to look at, but she quickly decided that she didn’t like it one bit. It started with a lengthy sequence in which a man loses his wife and mourns her: the emotional precipices that opened up for Diema as she watched were a long way from what she looked for in a cartoon. She wanted irreconcilable war between cats and mice, violence that bent and buckled the world, and a world so resilient it snapped right back into shape.

  Angry and frustrated, she snatched the headphones off and stuffed them back into the seat pocket.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ Rush asked her.

  ‘No,’ Diema growled. She’d noticed how often his glance stole in her direction and it was irritating her so much that she’d considered moving seats.

  ‘It’s not big secret stuff, swear to God. It’s about Toller.’

  Diema turned her head to give the boy a cold stare. ‘One question. Then you leave me alone.’

  ‘Okay, it’s this. Toller said he was born in darkness. Was that literally true? Do your people actually live underground?’

  She carried on staring at him in stony silence for a few seconds longer. Then she picked up the headphones and put them back on.

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ Rush said quickly. ‘If you don’t want to answer that, fine. I get it. Maybe that does touch on one of your big secrets. Different question. What’s the actual passage in your scripture that talks about the three thousand years? The one that Toller based his predictions on? Is it possible he was counting from a different start date?’

  Diema suppressed the urge to clamp a hand around the boy’s windpipe – both to shut him up and for the sake of emphasis. ‘Adamites who read our gospel die,’ she reminded him. ‘So if that’s really your question, I’ll answer it. Then I’ll cut your throat in the airport car park at Ferihegy. It’s your call, boy.’

  Rush digested this threat in thoughtful silence.

  ‘Okay,’ he said at last. ‘Scratch that, then. How about this? Robert Blackborne talks about the weird sign that Toller used to make as a blessing, but nobody else ever mentions it. So I’m wondering how different it is from the sign of the cross. Can I see it?’

  Diema scowled. ‘You want me to bless you?’

  ‘I want to see you make the sign, that’s all.’

  It was like pacifying a baby. Disgruntled, she demonstrated the sign of the noose for him, several times over, and he watched her with a certain fascination. Unless it was all just a ruse so that he could stare at her breasts again.

  ‘Can I try,’ he asked at last. ‘Or would that be blasphemy?’

  Diema shrugged dismissively. ‘Go ahead.’

  He moved his hand as though he were suffering from a stomach ache and was trying to ease it. Amused in spite of herself, and happy to be distracted from the lingering feelings left by the movie, Diema schooled him.

  Not the whole hand, with the palm flat – that looks wrong. The forefinger should be extended, pointing inward to your chest.

  Don’t do it so fast, and only do it once. Not around and around and around.

  Imagine a clock, set in your chest. Imagine the hands of the clock running backward. Follow the hands of the clock with your finger.

  ‘I’m not going to get this,’ Rush said, but he kept on trying. In the end, he was reasonably proficient.

  ‘Would there be something you’d say, at the same time?’ he asked her.

  ‘You could say, “He kul tairah beral”. “The hanged man’s blessing be on you”.’

  ‘Ha kul tiara beral.’

  ‘Tairah. Tay-rah.’

  ‘Ha kul tairah beral.’

  ‘He kul. Not ha.’

  ‘He kul tairah beral.’

  ‘Vi ve kul te.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘And on you.’

  ‘Okay. What else? Yeah, I was wondering—’

  ‘You’ve run out of questions,’ Diema said, cutting him off.

  ‘This one isn’t about Toller. It’s about you.’

  ‘I never said you could ask questions about me.’

  ‘No, you didn’t, but maybe we could swap. I ask a question, then you ask a question. Like an exchange of hostages.’

  ‘That’s a wonderful idea,’ Diema said.

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘Except that there’s nothing I want to know about you.’

  This, finally, made the boy back off and give her a respite from his noise. She found another cartoon, a short from 1935 directed by Tex Avery, but she couldn’t enjoy it. Her mind was too unsettled.

  She left her seat and went to the back of the plane, ostensibly to use the toilet. She didn’t really need it, but she did need to be alone with her own thoughts. The boy’s presence was intrusive, whether he spoke or not.

  Both toilets were engaged and to her further chagrin, Leo Tillman was also waiting there.

  He gave her a nod, which in her present mood incensed her more than she could bear in silence.

  Leaning against the bulkhead wall, looking out at the unchanging vista of clouds, she addressed him without looking at him.

  ‘Did you understand the plan, as I outlined it to you?’ she murmured, her voice barely audible above the engines’ constant rumble.

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the whole point of our travelling separately is so that Ber Lusim’s people, if they’re checking flights into the city, won’t realise that we’re working together.’

  ‘Yeah, I got that.’

  ‘They’re meant to be watching Kennedy, not us.’

  ‘Sure.’ Tillman’s tone was easy and – insultingly – reassuring. ‘But you said yourself, we’re worried about them checking the passenger manifests on incoming flights. We’re not assuming they’ll have spies on the plane. That’s so unlikely, we might as well count it as impossible.’

  But it was still sloppy and thoughtless and she couldn’t give him the last word. ‘We don’t take risks that we don’t have to take,’ she snapped. ‘Only a fool would do that.’

  Tillman didn’t answer. She looked round. He was watching her with detached curiosity. ‘First time on a stealth mission?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’ve been a soldier for almost a year now. And I’ve been undercover in enemy territory for most of that time.’

  He nodded and his expression changed – became something that she suspected was pity. ‘But the whole world is enemy territory for you, isn’t it? Apart from that one tiny patch of ground. No wonder you people go squirrelly in the head.’

  ‘Whereas your society is a mo
nument to pure reason,’ Diema sneered. How dare this hacked and sanded thug, this slubbering executioner, lecture her? Talk down to her?

  ‘We don’t make murder into a sacrament.’

  ‘Yes.’ Diema couldn’t keep the outrage from showing in her voice. ‘You do. Of course you do. Your priests and bishops blessed soldiers and butchers for centuries. They still do. You kill more of your own every day than we’ve killed in the whole of your history. Half the stories you tell, the novels and movies you make, have killers for heroes. Your whole culture is in love with violence. You embrace your own destruction, all the time. It’s what defines you. You ruin the world that was given to you. Treat her like a whore, instead of a mother, and then—’

  She stopped herself by force of will, fighting down the anger as she’d been taught. Tillman was still staring at her very intently, but his expression now was unreadable.

  ‘Well,’ he said, in a tone that was carefully neutral, ‘you got me on that one. Here we both stand, kid. On the moral low ground.’

  ‘I don’t think I could get down that low,’ Diema said, ‘if I dug for a thousand years.’

  She left him and went back to her seat. The conversation had done nothing to improve her mood and she was still unable to settle either to work or to diversion. She was relieved when the plane finally landed and she could become active again. Movement and action healed by their very nature.

  They went through customs and immigration very quickly. They’d brought only carry-on luggage, and their new-minted passports stood up to scrutiny.

  She had been told to go to the third level of the short-stay car park, where she’d be met by a Summoner of Elohim with local knowledge. He would be standing beside a blue Skoda Fabia and he would have with him a range of equipment from which she and her team could take what they needed.

  When she stepped out of the elevator on the third level, she saw him at once. Saw both of them, rather. There were two men waiting there, hands in their pockets, stolid and patient. Diema turned to Tillman and Rush, who were right behind her.

  ‘Wait here,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to them alone.’

  ‘Given what we were saying back in England about trust,’ Tillman said curtly, ‘I think that’s a pretty terrible idea.’

  ‘For a minute, alone,’ Diema insisted. ‘If this was an ambush, I’d have set it up by phone, before we ever got on the plane. I wouldn’t be trying to scrape it together now.’

  ‘A minute,’ Tillman said. ‘Go on.’

  Diema crossed the thirty yards or so of asphalt that separated her from the two Elohim. The nearer man smiled and opened his arms as she approached. She embraced him and let him embrace her.

  ‘It’s so good to see you, Diema,’ he murmured in her ear.

  ‘It’s good to see you, too, Nahir,’ she said in a neutral tone.

  He’d changed a lot since she saw him last, but probably no more than she had. Now that he’d been exposed to sun and weather, he’d lost the characteristic pallor of the People. But where Diema’s skin had initially reddened and blotched, and turned gradually to an uninspiring ruddy blush, Nahir’s had magically reverted to the rich olive cast that the People must have had when they lived in the air instead of the earth. He’d changed in other ways, too. He seemed to have gained a confidence, a poise, that he’d never displayed in Ginat’Dania. It was perhaps no surprise that he’d already been promoted to the role of Summoner.

  The second man, Shraga, who Nahir now introduced, was a complete stranger to her. He too bore the marks of living among the Nations, although in his case, while his skin darkened, his hair had bleached to the colour sometimes called strawberry blond. It would have made him a wonderful exotic in Ginat’Dania.

  They gave Diema another set of papers. A new name, a Hungarian passport and driving licence, a bank account to draw on, and weapons. Nahir had assumed correctly that she would have left her knives, her guns, her pharmaca, behind in London, and that she would wish to resupply at the earliest opportunity.

  ‘Kuutma relayed your message,’ he told her, as she examined the guns they had brought – dismounting and reassembling them, testing the load and the firing action, weighing them in her hands. It was a slightly risky thing to do right there in the car park, but they were shielded by the raised lid of the boot and Diema wanted to be done and gone from here as quickly as she could. ‘He told us to extend every assistance to you and promised us two dozen Messengers in addition to those we have. Some have already arrived. Do you want to brief them yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Diema said. ‘Not yet. I have other duties to attend to. I assume you made sure you weren’t followed here. But I won’t be taking that risk again, with you or anybody else. If there’s news, tell me by phone or through agreed channels. If there’s no news, leave me be.’

  Nahir stared at her, both affronted and troubled.

  ‘We understood,’ he said stiffly, ‘that you’d be leading this mission.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Diema told him, still absorbed in her triage of the weapons. Along with six sica blades, and the modified Dan-inject she’d chosen and ordered for Kennedy, she chose a nameless Chinese army-issue semi-automatic and a nine-millimetre hand pistol, which was small enough to carry in her ankle holster. She put both guns into a sports bag that Shraga handed to her. After a moment’s thought, she also took a Ruger 44 carbine rifle.

  ‘Follow the brief that Kuutma gave you,’ she instructed the two men, helping herself to some boxes of ammunition. ‘Look for possible addresses or areas from which Ber Lusim might be operating. Circulate likenesses of his rogue Elohim to all your people, and drill them – make them memorise faces and names. Also, look for trucks, vans or cars bearing the name of the High Energy Haulage company, and anyone who travels or books goods or services under their auspices. If you turn up anything that seems positive, or even hopeful, pass the information to me at once.’

  ‘To you?’ Nahir asked.

  Diema nodded. ‘To me. And then wait. I’ll decide what action you’re to take, if any. Those men standing over there by the elevators are my primary team, for now – along with the rhaka, Heather Kennedy. I’m sure Kuutma didn’t omit her from his briefing.’

  She beckoned to Tillman and Rush, who came over from where they were still standing, in front of the elevator doors. ‘Help yourself,’ she said to Tillman.

  Tillman rummaged among the guns on offer, watched with silent outrage by the two Elohim. Finally he held up a retooled Beretta that looked as though it might once have been a competition gun. ‘Is this chambered for .380?’ he asked the Messengers.

  Shraga nodded wordlessly.

  ‘Okay, then,’ Tillman said. ‘I’ll take this. Thanks.’

  ‘What about me?’ Rush said. ‘Do I get to have a gun?’

  ‘Have you ever fired one?’ Diema asked him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then no, you don’t. You’ll be more danger to us than to the enemy.’ She looked into the boot of the car again. In among the weapons, there were a great many items of general equipment. Some of them were clearly left over from training exercises, and had no conceivable use for her or her team.

  She picked up a small cylinder of black plastic with a tab at one end like the ring-pull on a soft-drink can. She tossed it to Rush. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You get to have this.’

  He turned the object over in his hands, examining it gingerly as though it might go off in his hands. Then he found the label. WILDWAYS GREEN PAINT BOMB. 400ML. SPRAY AREA 8MTRS DIAMETER. ‘Funny,’ Rush said. ‘Really hilarious.’

  Diema wasn’t listening. She’d turned her attention back to Nahir and Shraga. She’d said all that needed saying, but she knew that men often took categorical instructions differently from a woman than they did from another man.

  So she spelled it out for them. ‘You’re not part of this,’ she told them. ‘Your role, for now, is to gather information. When I need more from you, I’ll ask for it. I’m speaking with Kuutma’s authority
in this, and if you doubt me you can ask him. Keep your eyes open and your hands to yourselves. That’s all.’

  Nahir bristled. ‘This is absurd,’ he said. ‘You need us.’

  ‘I disagree,’ Diema said quietly. ‘Do as you’ve been told, my brother. Please. We serve the same god, and the same city. Everything will be fine, so long as you give me the help I need, when I need it.’ She paused, holding his gaze. ‘If you don’t, you’ll have enough blood on your conscience to make an inland sea.’

  She turned to Shraga. ‘These weapons are not traceable to you or to any of your people?’ she asked him. She indicated with a nod the guns and other munitions piled in the boot of the car.

  Shraga shook his head.

  ‘Good. Then drive the car to Katona Jószef Utca. Leave it there, locked, but with the keys on top of the rear driver-side tyre. Leave all the weapons where they are. If we need any more equipment while we’re here, we’ll help ourselves. I assume you brought a second car for us to use?’

  He gave her a set of keys and nodded towards the car that faced them across the aisle of the car park, a black Audi A4 with a Hungarian licence plate. ‘What about you?’ Shraga asked, dismayed. ‘We were supposed to escort you to the safe house and see you installed there.’

  ‘We’ll make our own way into the city,’ Diema said, backing across to the other car while still talking to them. ‘Good hunting, cousins. And God favour us all.’

  ‘May He watch over you,’ Shraga muttered, bowing again.

  He’ll need to do a lot more than just watch, Diema thought as she got into the car, followed by Tillman and Rush.

  ‘The paint bomb was way harsh,’ Rush reproached her, seeming genuinely hurt.

  ‘So is life,’ Diema told him.

  49

  Kennedy took a mid-morning flight and got to Budapest around two in the afternoon. The customs officer who took a cursory glance at her EU passport asked her if the purpose of her trip was business or holiday. She told him she was there to work.

  She also told that to the taxi driver who took her from the airport to the Hotel Karoly, on Molnar Utca, directly across the Danube from Gellert Hill and a short walk from the Hungarian parliament. She booked in under her own name and, in answer to the desk clerk’s polite query, once again said very emphatically that she was in Budapest because she had a job to do there. Might take one day, might take two or three, but she was staying until it was done.