The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  ‘No,’ Hifela said.

  ‘No?’

  ‘No, Tannanu. My instincts tend towards obedience. I wait on your will. If you say to bring her alive, I will be as protective of her body’s safety as her mother would be. But I will bring her.’

  He knows me so well, Hifela thought. It was like a small piece of theatre that they had planned together. Perhaps, as the ending of days came closer, all conversations would feel more and more like this. As though the weight of many centuries pressed on every word.

  ‘Watch her, Hifela,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Choose a few who you trust, and watch her close. So long as she does nothing, do likewise. When she moves, move with her. And if she does anything that concerns you, even in the smallest degree, take her. Take her and bring her before me. Let me speak with her and satisfy myself on some few significant points.’

  He rose to his feet, signalling that the meeting was at an end. But none of the Elohim moved or spoke. They waited on his peroration.

  ‘It may be,’ he said, ‘that Heather Kennedy’s death is meant to be folded into the greater death. It may be that God has brought her to our door for a reason. Because he wishes us to make a sacrifice unto Him that is great in proportion to the greatness of what we do. If that’s so, we’ll sacrifice joyfully, as the commandment bids us.’

  He left the room to the sound of their cheers. He paused at the doorway and put his hands on Hifela’s shoulders, staring for a moment into the man’s deep-set, almost hooded eyes. Then he walked on without a word. The Face of the Skull was never comfortable with signs of approval, let alone signs of love. But this was a father’s blessing bestowed upon a faithful son – and as such, it was holy.

  52

  The day was hot and humid – uncomfortable at ten in the morning, and by noon hardly bearable. In Kennedy’s hotel room, where the AC control on the wall turned out to be a completely empty plastic box, it went by like a river of treacle.

  But it was even worse for the watchers. The rooftop opposite the hotel was as hot as a grill pan. Diema slathered her melanin-deficient skin with a zinc oxide preparation and bore it stoically. Rush, still in the car, was far less stoical but was forbidden by Diema to move the car so that he could follow the shade. All he could do was wind the windows down and keep swigging water from the plastic bottles stacked up on the back seat. Only Tillman, bivouacked among the dumpsters, was out of the fierce sun and fairly comfortable.

  There was one point in the course of the morning when it seemed as though someone might be walking into their trap – when a windowless van rolled up at the hotel’s back entrance and two men stepped out. But they were delivering catering supplies, boxes of individual tea bags and sugar sachets, plastic cups and tiny packs of biscuits. They were done inside of ten minutes and on their way again.

  At 1 p.m., breaking protocol, Kennedy called Tillman on the walkie-talkie that Diema had given her.

  ‘What?’ Tillman said, without preamble.

  ‘Nothing,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘Too much nothing. I’m starting to get antsy.’

  ‘I sympathise. But you’re supposed to maintain radio silence unless there’s an emergency. Is there an emergency, Heather?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we stick to the plan.’

  She could tell from his tone that he was about to sign off, so she spoke quickly, forestalling him. ‘Leo, I’m not sure the plan is going to work.’

  Tillman sighed. ‘We agreed on this. Anything we do now—’

  ‘No, hear me out. Say we read them right and everything is playing out the way we wanted it to. Say we got Ber Lusim’s attention. He could have watchers camped out around the hotel now, but further out than where you are – or closer in, for that matter. Someone sitting down in the lobby, waiting to follow me when I move.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe I should move. He might be ready to swallow the bait, but still not feel happy about moving into a space I’ve had time to fortify. Maybe he’s planning to grab me off the street as soon as I step out.’

  ‘All the more reason to keep you off the street, Heather.’ Tillman’s tone was dry. ‘We’re in control here. Out there, not so much.’

  ‘I’m looking out of my window at the dumpsters, Leo.’

  ‘I know. I can see you.’

  ‘So give me a wave.’

  ‘No. And don’t look out of your window at the dumpsters.’

  ‘Listen, if there was less at stake, I’d agree with you,’ Kennedy snapped, all her tension coming to the surface at once. ‘But if he’s waiting for us to do something, and we’re waiting for him to do something, he wins. Because presumably, he’s still got his merry band of lunatics out there setting incendiaries and decapitating rats the whole time – and getting closer to whatever it is they’re going to do that will leave a million people dead. I don’t want that on my conscience, Leo. I seriously don’t. I can’t just sit here and wonder how high the body count is getting.’

  ‘But we can protect you here,’ Tillman objected, stolid and patient. ‘If they come in, we come in right behind them. Out in the open, it’s different. Not to mention the fact that if you start wandering around again, it doesn’t look purposeful. It looks random. We want them to think you’re up to something that threatens them.’

  ‘I know. So let me do something purposeful.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as a meeting.’

  There was silence on the line while Tillman considered this.

  ‘Diema could set up someone for you to meet with,’ he admitted reluctantly. ‘One of her Elohim …’

  ‘I don’t mean a real meeting. Especially not with someone they might recognise. I mean an imaginary someone. I go to a place where there’s a crowd, but only a few ways in and out – a place where it’s still easy for the three of you to come in close to me.’

  ‘And what does that give us?’

  ‘Leverage, maybe. If they think I’m up to something – delivering something or hooking up with my contact – maybe that’s when they decide to play out the hand. Maybe they feel they need to stop it from happening.’

  She waited. The silence was a lot longer this time, because Tillman was thinking through all the implications. ‘I’ll talk to Diema,’ he said at last.

  ‘It’s not for her to decide,’ Kennedy said sharply.

  ‘No, it isn’t. But she’s got people who know the ground. If we do it, we need to pick the right place.’ There was a pause, but he didn’t turn off the walkie-talkie, so she knew he hadn’t finished speaking. ‘But you could be right,’ he said at last. ‘This is meant to be a provocation. It becomes less provoking the longer you sit there and do nothing. I’ll talk to the others and get back to you.’

  He signed off. Kennedy tossed the walkie-talkie onto the bed and made herself a cup of really uninspiring coffee.

  Diema didn’t even argue the point. ‘She’s right,’ was all she said. ‘We should probably have done it earlier. Give them a changing situation to react to, instead of one that seems stable.’

  ‘Jesus, please,’ Rush broke in. ‘Anything that gets me out of this car. It’s like a sauna in here.’

  ‘So where should she go?’ Tillman asked Diema.

  ‘I’ll ask.’

  ‘You mean you’ll confer with your people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how long will that take?’

  ‘As long as it takes.’

  She closed the channel. A moment later, the walkie-talkie vibrated again. It was Rush.

  ‘I need to pee,’ he groaned.

  ‘Use the empty water bottles,’ Tillman said. ‘That’s what they’re for.’

  ‘Okay, then I need to breathe.’

  ‘No, you don’t. It’s just a habit people get into.’

  ‘I need to use my legs before I get a deep-vein thrombosis and die.’

  ‘Keep the channel clear,’ Tillman grunted, ‘and your eyes open. We’re still working here.’

  He switched
off the walkie-talkie. His shoulders were stiff so he massaged them, one at a time, always keeping the walkie-talkie ready in his free hand, and never taking his eyes off the hotel’s rear door.

  Maybe a little more than half an hour later, Diema got back to him.

  ‘My people say we should use the Országház,’ she said. ‘The parliament building.’

  Tillman was dubious. ‘Did they say why? Lots of security, presumably, so lots of risk. Plenty of reasons for Ber Lusim not to want to go anywhere near Heather in a place like that.’

  ‘And plenty of reasons why he’d be afraid of who she might be meeting there,’ Diema countered. ‘The high risk cuts both ways. Ber Lusim thinks that, perhaps, this is why she came. Perhaps she’s been waiting for an appointment with someone high up in the government and it just came through. He’d need to know who that is and what’s being planned. Most likely, if he makes a move, he’ll do it as soon as he figures out where she’s going – either when she’s in the front lobby or before she even gets into the building.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Tillman said. ‘There’ll be armed guards in there. If Ber Lusim’s people come for her, Heather could get caught in a crossfire.’

  ‘Heather’s in this conversation,’ Kennedy said on the walkie-talkie. ‘No pain, no gain. I follow the reasoning, Diema, and I’ll do it.’

  But Tillman was still thinking it through and he still had questions. ‘How many exits has that place got?’

  ‘More than a dozen,’ Diema conceded. ‘But I had a thought about that. My people are going to drop something off – something that gives us a bit of an edge.’

  ‘What kind of something?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘A GPS chip. It’s about the size of a pinhead, and we can implant it under your skin. Once it’s in place, we can establish your location to an accuracy of half a metre – which means if we lose you for any reason, we can still keep track of you. They’ll be dropping it off to me in the next few minutes. I’ll need to get it to you. The easiest way is if I just walk right in there, looking like I’m visiting someone or delivering something. Leave your door unlocked.’

  The channel went dead. But only for a couple of seconds.

  ‘Tillman?’ Rush said.

  ‘Lad, either use the bloody water bottles or hold it in until we—’

  ‘It’s not about that. It’s about this whole thing. Taking the Heather Kennedy show on the road.’

  ‘Well? What about it, Ben?’

  ‘I think I might have a better idea.’

  Kennedy did as she was told – unlocked the door and left it on the latch, so it could be pushed open from the outside. For a few minutes after that, she paced up and down the room, unable to keep still. Finally she went back to the window and stared out at the dumpsters, trying to identify where exactly Tillman had secreted himself. Wherever he was, he was well hidden. But he could see her, so she ought to be able to see him. At any rate, it was interesting to keep looking, like playing a chess game with only one move.

  The door whickered momentarily against the thick pile of the carpet and a breath of air touched her back. She turned and saw Diema closing and locking the door.

  ‘Okay,’ the girl said. ‘Let’s do this.’

  She was carrying a shoulder bag. She took something like a Bic lighter out of it and threw the bag on the bed.

  ‘That’s it?’ Kennedy asked.

  ‘This is the applicator. And this,’ she held up her other hand, in which she was holding a small, unlabelled tube like a tube of toothpaste, ‘is a topical anaesthetic plus anti-bacterial agent. You need to rub it on the spot and leave it to work for half a minute. Take off your pants and sit on the bed.’

  ‘Take off my what?’

  Diema was matter-of-fact. ‘There’ll be an implant wound – tiny but noticeable. If we had time for it to heal over, anywhere on your body would be fine. As it is, our best bet is to implant the chip internally, so there’s no visible mark. The supplier said the inside of your cheek would do, but he also said there might be swelling on your face, which would look suspicious. So I think we should go with his other suggestion, which was to place the chip in your vaginal wall.’

  Kennedy folded her arms and stayed exactly where she was. ‘I think we should stick with the cheek,’ she said, deadpan.

  Diema stared hard at Kennedy, clearly surprised and a little impatient. ‘We know Ber Lusim’s men are female-averse,’ she said, in an I’ll-keep-on-saying-this-until-you-get-it tone. ‘If this goes wrong, and they succeed in taking you, they may search you. But the two rogue Elohim you met in London were reluctant even to undress you fully, so I think we’re safe in assuming that they wouldn’t give you a full orifice search.’

  She waited for reason to prevail and for Kennedy to do as she was told.

  ‘Sit down, girl,’ Kennedy said.

  Diema seemed bemused at the suggestion. ‘There’s no time,’ she said curtly. ‘If you insist on the cheek, then let’s—’

  ‘Sit down,’ Kennedy said again. ‘We have to talk.’

  ‘No,’ Diema said, not even bothering to hide her contempt for the older woman. ‘We don’t have to talk. We only have to work together. I thought that was clear.’

  ‘Clear to you, maybe. I’m going to sit down anyway. You can stand there, if you want to, but you will talk to me. Because if you don’t, this ends here.’

  Diema’s eyes widened. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘There are too many lives at stake.’

  ‘A couple more than you know, maybe.’ Kennedy went and sat, not on the bed but on the room’s one chair. She waited in silence for the girl to join her.

  Diema stood irresolute for several heartbeats. Finally, rigid with tension, she crossed the room and sat on the bed facing Kennedy. She put on a sardonic expression. I’m waiting.

  ‘Why did you change your name?’ Kennedy asked.

  Diema blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not that tough a question. Why did you change your name?’

  ‘For no reason that you need to know about.’

  The girl’s tone was flat and final. Kennedy waited her out.

  ‘Because I changed my life,’ Diema said at last, in the same voice.

  ‘Yes,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘I can see that, Grace. I’m just trying to work out how deep the changes go.’

  The girl’s expression didn’t change, apart from a barely perceptible flicker of her eyelids. ‘I was Tabe,’ she said. ‘I was never Grace. Grace was just what the father of my flesh called me.’

  ‘The father of your flesh? Is that how you think of him?’ Diema opened her mouth to speak again, but Kennedy held up a hand. ‘Never mind. I don’t pretend to understand your customs, but you’re wrong about that and you need to know it.’

  ‘My name is—’

  ‘Your mother named you Grace. And she named your brothers Jude and Seth. Normally you’d have kept those names when she took you back home, because none of them were offensive to your people’s beliefs. The tradition, as far as I was told, is to rechristen children if they’ve been given names that are too … what would you call it? Too Adamite. But Jude and Seth were good, biblical names – and who could argue with Grace?’

  ‘I said,’ the girl repeated, through gritted teeth, ‘my name is Diema.’

  ‘But your Michael Brand, your Kuutma, he seemed to feel that your past, and your brothers’ past, needed to be more thoroughly erased than that. Perhaps because he loved your mother, Rebecca, and wanted her family to be his family, too. But she killed herself. She didn’t want to live without your father. I mean, the father of your flesh. Leo Tillman. And after she was dead, Michael Brand gave new names to the three of you. He called you Tabe – and your brothers Ezei and Cephas.’

  Diema seemed completely unmoved. ‘You seem to think I should care what I was called out here in your world,’ she said to Kennedy, her lower lip twisting. ‘I don’t. It’s never been my world and it isn’t now. It’s just a place where I work.’

&n
bsp; Kennedy nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Your world is a big cave somewhere, with the sky painted on the underside of the roof. I can’t imagine what that would be like, but I know you didn’t … don’t … think of it as a great hardship. You never missed what you never had. But doesn’t it seem terrible to you, now that you’ve seen what the real world is like, that anyone should grow up in that way and live in that way? In the dark?’ Kennedy heard the tremor in her own voice. She was trying to speak to the young woman, but she kept seeing the child imprisoned inside her, the child entombed, and it was so terrible she felt a sort of sympathetic panic – a feeling of vicarious suffocation.

  ‘It’s not dark,’ Diema said. ‘It was only dark when you saw it, rhaka. And that was because you saw your own darkness.’

  ‘No,’ Kennedy said sharply. ‘No. Believe me, I know the difference. And I know there’s nothing I can say that will change you now. I can’t push back the weight of all those years. But at least think about it. Please. Why did they send you? Why you, of all people? Why did they even think to turn you into …’ she pointed at the girl with a hand that trembled slightly ‘… into this? I can’t forget what Kuutma said to Leo, the only time we ever met him. “Your daughter is an artist. She paints. There’s such beauty inside her that it spills out of her fingers into the world.” He said that! And then they turned around and made you into one of their murderers.’

  Kennedy felt tears welling in her eyes and fought to hold them back. She knew that the girl would only see them as signs of weakness. But in spite of all she could do, a tear ran down her cheek. She was weeping for Grace, and for Tabe, both of them gone without a trace.

  Diema was not contemptuous of the tear: she was outraged by it. ‘Nobody made me do anything!’ she said, her voice rising. ‘This was my decision. Kuutma saw the potential in me. He gave me the choice – to serve my people.’

  Kennedy shook her head. ‘And he sent you to me, knowing I’d see Leo’s face in yours. Knowing I’d have to go to Leo, against every instinct I had, and bring him back into this. Don’t lie to yourself, Diema. If you were ever an artist, you probably had that gift that artists have of seeing exactly what’s in front of your eyes. So look at this picture and see what it says to you. They took you up, and trained you, and sent you out to enlist us, because they knew you were the only one who could. Not an atom of chance or coincidence. Not an atom of choice, for any of us.’