by Adam Blake
Diema lurched to her feet. She looked as if she might run, but she stood her ground, her fists clenched. ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said, her voice almost back under control now, ‘that you’d try to turn me against my own people. It’s exactly what I’d expect from you. I’m only surprised you waited until we were all the way out here. You should have done it at Dovecote Farm, where you and Leo Tillman killed my brothers.’
It was Kennedy’s one remaining hope – that they’d spared the girl that, at least. She sank her head into her hands, succumbing to a moment of sheer despair.
‘Oh yes,’ Diema sneered, glaring down at her. ‘Did you think you could lie to me, Heather Kennedy? Did you think they’d let me meet you – and him – without telling me what it was you’d done? You say I’ve been lied to, and manipulated, by people I love. But you forgot to mention what Leo Tillman did to me. What he took from me. Perhaps it slipped your mind.’
Kennedy forced herself to look the girl in the eye again. It was an effort. She was really afraid of that scorn and that hatred: afraid of what it might be capable of doing. ‘Diema,’ she said, her voice thickened by her crying, ‘did you ever ask, or did your teachers ever tell you, why Leo and I went to your Ginat’Dania?’
‘To destroy it,’ the girl said promptly.
‘No, it wasn’t that at all. And it was already destroyed, as far as that went. We came too late. I went to make an arrest. But Leo was looking for his wife, and his children. He was looking for you. He’d been looking for you for twelve years. Ever since the day he came home and found the house empty. He loved you more than anything else in the world. He couldn’t live without you. So he kept on searching, for you, and for Rebecca, and for your brothers, even though it had been so long, and nobody else believed you could even be alive—’
‘We weren’t alive!’ Diema shouted. ‘My mother was dead by then. My brothers were dead, because he’d already killed them, back in England. I was the only one left.’
‘He didn’t know that. He still doesn’t. Oh, he knows about Rebecca. Michael Brand told him how she died. But he doesn’t know about Ezei and Cephas. It would break his heart if he ever found out.’
Diema leaned down and thrust her face into Kennedy’s face, gripping the lapels of the woman’s jacket tightly. ‘Then when this is over,’ she growled, ‘I’ll break his heart.’
The fury passed through the girl, almost like a visible wave, and left her weak and sickened. She turned away from Kennedy with a gesture of surrender: not surrender to her arguments, just a desire to be done with all these words, all these thoughts.
‘Put the chip into your cheek, rhaka,’ she said hoarsely, after a while. ‘I want to get out of here.’
‘Keep it,’ Kennedy said.
‘We need you to—’
‘I know what you need me for. But talking to you just now, I had another thought about that. I think it might be a really bad idea to have something implanted in my body that lets your people find me whenever they want to. So forget it.’
Diema stared at her. ‘It’s your choice,’ she said coldly.
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’
The walkie-talkie, still set to vibrate, jumped and writhed on the bedside table, raising a burring clamour like a dentist’s drill hitting enamel.
Kennedy picked it up and opened the main channel. Diema drew out her own set and turned away as she pressed it to her ear.
‘Are you two almost done?’ Tillman asked.
‘Yes. No. Almost,’ Kennedy mumbled. ‘Can you give us a couple of minutes, Leo?’
‘Take as long as you need. But listen to what Rush has to say before you go anywhere.’
‘What the boy has to say?’ Diema snapped. ‘Why should anyone care what the boy has to say? He knows nothing about this.’
‘Actually,’ Tillman said after a moment, ‘he makes a good case. Heather, you shouldn’t go to the parliament building.’
‘Then where should I go?’ It didn’t seem possible that it could matter right then: she asked mechanically, because he seemed to be expecting her to ask.
‘To the baths,’ he said.
53
The Gellert Hotel stood right at the foot of Gellert Hill, on the Buda side of the Szabadság Hid, or Freedom Bridge. It was an art nouveau palace, dressed in cool white stone and with Turkish minarets at its corners, even though the Ottomans had bailed on Budapest several centuries before the hotel was built.
On the top of the hill, 235 metres above Kennedy’s head as she walked across the bridge, a weathered bronze statue of Saint Gellert stood at the edge of the precipice, one arm raised above his head in valediction, as though he were about to jump.
The hotel, with its huge bath complex, was a major tourist attraction, and on a day as hot as this there was a line right out of the side door and down the steeply sloping street. The front door, and the whole of the piazza between the hotel and the river, was taken up with a massive open-air market.
Kennedy joined the line and stood on the scorching pavement, tuning out conversations in English, Hungarian, German and Italian. The shoulder of Gellert Hill rose behind her, its rugged face softened on this side by the mature vines and fig trees that sprawled down from its peak almost to the river.
Out of the belly of the beast.
‘This is what I’m thinking,’ Rush had said. ‘Toller used that picture as the frontispiece of his book, right? So I’m betting that his house is actually right there in the picture. What else would he be showing us? And if Shekolni is trying to model himself on Toller, maybe he’s in that same house – or as close to it as he could get. So there’s no point Kennedy going up to the parliament. It’s the wrong side of the river and too far north. She should go to some place that’s actually in that picture – or a place that stands where the houses in the picture used to be.’
With a certain degree of smugness, he’d unveiled his front -runner: the Gellert Hotel. He remembered it from the holiday he’d taken in Budapest a few years before. It would have been in Toller’s picture, if it had been built back then. It was big enough and crowded enough to make a plausible spot for a meeting, but it had only two main entrances. And it had no armed guards, no lock-downs, no pack drill. ‘Elementary, my dear Watsons.’
Diema hadn’t liked it at first – hadn’t wanted even to discuss it. The confrontation with Kennedy had left her sullen and withdrawn – regrouping herself, Kennedy thought, along the interior battle lines that seemed to mean so much to her. But Diema hadn’t been able to fault the argument and finally she’d gone along with what was basically a fait accompli. It was clear by then that both Kennedy and Tillman preferred Rush’s version of the plan, and had withdrawn their consent from hers.
So Kennedy crossed the river and waited in the sweaty heat of the afternoon until the line moved forward enough for her to get through the doors into the vast entrance hall with its wooden pillars, its light wells, its elegant nude statues and geometrical mosaics. Some of it was original, approaching its hundredth birthday. The rest had been seamlessly reconstructed after 1945, when the Russian shelling of retreating German columns had reduced most of Buda to loose chippings.
The ticket window Kennedy was slowly approaching was flanked by massive wooden notice boards – one in Hungarian, the other in very bad English – advertising an array of treatments and services. In addition to the main public access and spa pools, there were dry and steam saunas, massage booths, manicures and pedicures, mud packing, carbonic acid tubs, weight baths, stretch baths and cold dive-pools. And a bar, she couldn’t help noticing.
Trying not to scan the faces around her, or meet anyone’s gaze for more than a fleeting second, Kennedy took the open day pass. It would get her into all the pools and saunas: specialist services involving heavy weights, mud or mild corrosives would cost extra.
She was given a towel, a wrist band and a set of instructions in rapid Hungarian to which she just nodded along. There were separate entrances for men and women: Ke
nnedy’s Hungarian was just about equal to following the arrowed signs marked Nök to a gleaming steel turnstile standing incongruously under a decorative arch, whose carved woodwork echoed the grape vines on the hill outside. A stony-faced woman with the hotel’s logo blazoned in red across her white T-shirt showed her how to use her wristband to swipe herself in.
Looking neither to right nor left, Kennedy went on, down a long flight of steps and through an underground tunnel into the main bath complex. A lot of it, she realised, was underground, although there were signs everywhere pointing up towards the outside pool.
Kennedy went into a one-person changing room, where she took off her light jacket, shirt and trousers, replacing them with T-shirt and shorts. The few things she needed to carry went into a string purse that she wore on her shoulder.
She looked innocuous. Unarmed. A lamb to the slaughter.
She exited the changing room and sauntered through the seemingly endless aisles and alleys of cubicles until she found one of the spiral staircases that led to the outdoor pool.
The pool area was vast and heaving with bronzed or lightly broiled bodies. Kennedy had read once – admittedly a good few years before – that the whole human population of the world could stand shoulder to shoulder on the island of Zanzibar. It looked as though most of them had chosen today to try to stand in the Hotel Gellert’s bath complex.
She sat down on a deckchair and anointed herself with sun-block, putting the bottle back in the shoulder bag afterwards. Then she checked her watch, not ostentatiously but visibly, and leaned back in the chair, hands folded demurely in her lap.
If it was going to happen at all, it would probably happen soon.
Kennedy’s three watchers had had to cross the city in lock-step with her, which prevented them from choosing their stations in advance. There was a brief, hurried conference at the western end of the Freedom Bridge, where Diema was able to use the hotel complex itself, looming in the middle distance, as a visual aid.
‘I’m going to be on the hill,’ she said. ‘That way I can see the front and side doors of the hotel, so I’ll be your early warning if anybody shows. Tillman, you go inside, in the lobby space. You can watch the entrance to the baths, and you’ll be on point if anyone gets past me.’
‘What about me?’ Rush asked, without much hope.
‘Watch the front doors, from the outside, and the steps up from the river,’ Diema said. She didn’t go to any effort to make it sound like a job that had any real importance.
‘Are they likely to come up from the river?’ Rush asked.
‘They could,’ Diema said.
She was already walking away when Tillman caught her by the arm and brought her to a halt. It was an electrifying moment, and it made Rush swallow the complaint he was halfway to voicing.
‘Do you have a problem?’ Diema asked, in a tone that said do you want to lose that hand?
‘The GPS receiver,’ Tillman said.
‘What about it?’
‘No offence, girl, but I think I might have Heather’s interests more at heart than you do. Why not let me hold onto the base unit?’
They locked eyes for a long, dangerous moment.
‘Protector of women,’ Diema said. ‘Defender of the weak, and the weak-minded. Is that your brief, Tillman? Or do you just want to get into her pants?’
‘If you want to know about Heather’s pants,’ Tillman said equably, ‘you should probably ask Heather. Meantime, I’ll take the tracker. Unless this is something you actually want to fight about.’
Diema reached into a pocket of her black leather jacket, found something that looked a little like a TV remote, and tossed it to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You take it, with my blessing. It won’t do any good, though. She changed her mind about wearing it. You should teach your bitch a little discipline, some time. God knows, she could use it.’
The girl walked away before he could answer her, heading for the east side of the hotel and the rugged hillside beyond. She didn’t look back.
Tillman turned to Rush, who was giving him a slightly dazed stare.
‘Did I just hear right?’ the boy demanded. ‘Kennedy’s in the wind?’
‘Not if we do our job right,’ Tillman muttered gruffly. ‘Pick your spot, lad. And keep your channel open. This might be our last shot.’
‘It might be hers,’ Rush said.
And since Tillman had no answer to that, they parted without any further exchange of pleasantries.
Rush stayed where he was, out on the pavement in front of the hotel’s main entrance, with the street market right at his back. Tillman went into the lobby and up into the gallery set into the circular dome at its mid-point.
Once again, all they could do was wait. And Tillman was starting to feel that if they waited much longer, this so-called plan would founder on the reefs of their divergent agendas.
He was also wondering, if they happened to succeed in locating and neutralising Ber Lusim, for how long after that the Judas People would let them live.
Sitting under the rotunda dome at the centre of the Hotel Gellert’s lobby, wearing a gaudy shirt and with a camera around his neck, Hifela watched Heather Kennedy pass through the turnstile and considered his brief. If she does anything that concerns you, his commander had said.
He could refer back to Ber Lusim, but this seemed to fit the definition very well. For the rhaka to come so shockingly close to their base of operations was still an ambiguous act, but it admitted of very few interpretations – and in all of them, the woman or one of her associates had somehow succeeded in locating them. Possibly she was planning some kind of raid, but it seemed unlikely she’d do that by day. It was only too plausible, though, that she was reconnoitring the ground for a later incursion.
Hifela decided that this was a good moment to intervene. But he didn’t want to overstep the bounds of his commission, even then. He took out his phone and texted a message to Ber Lusim. ‘The woman is close to you. Horizontal distance, two hundred and fifty metres. Vertical distance, eighty metres.’
He sent the message, and while he waited for a reply he sauntered around the lobby, casting a critical eye on the statuary. But he could not relax, and he was all too aware that he looked as though he were inspecting the nudes on a parade ground.
He thought back, at this crucial juncture, to his life’s other major turning point, to the moment when he had decided to follow Ber Lusim into exile. That had been an act of blind faith. They had had no idea, then, of the part they were to play in human history. They hadn’t even known that they were chosen. Then the prophet had arrived and made sense of everything. He had promised to show them a miracle and he had delivered on the promise. He had shown them how every one of their own actions was a stone in a mosaic, not random but perfect and necessary and interconnecting. When Shekolni spoke, there was perspective.
So the other Elohim said, anyway. For Hifela, it was always more a matter of personal loyalty to his chief – love, even, for what he felt for Ber Lusim was more fervent and intense than anything he had ever felt for a woman; just as the intimacies of the battlefield were deeper than the intimacies of the bedroom.
His phone pinged once, the discreet sound of an elevator arriving. He glanced at the screen, then opened the text, which consisted of a single word.
Execute.
Hifela stood slowly, set the camera to flash and took a photo of the nearest nude.
That was the prearranged signal. Although there was no visible sign of it in the random movements of the crowd around him, the word was being passed down the line and the Elohim assigned to him were going in.
Not against the woman. The woman would wait, a little while.
Until they’d disposed of her three guardian angels.
54
Ben Rush survived the first attack for one reason only: he was in Diema’s line of sight.
Rush was watching the hotel’s front entrance, which faced onto the river. Diema was watching from the south
, where the hotel faced the hillside, and as always she favoured a high vantage point. In the absence of a building backing onto the hotel, she’d chosen a massive fig tree at the base of the hill, whose upper branches were on a level with the hotel’s fifth-floor windows. Tillman was inside, in the lobby, close to a window that looked onto the outside pool where Kennedy had positioned herself.
It was some trick of body language that made Diema focus on the man who was crossing the road, heading towards the front entrance and – as though coincidentally – towards Rush. She couldn’t say what it was she recognised, but she found herself staring at the man, registering him instantly as one of her own tribe. Then, as he drew the sica from the back of his belt, she realised belatedly that his left hand had just traced an ellipse against the light-coloured fabric of his suit jacket. It had seemed as though he were just smoothing out a crease, but it was the sign of the noose.
The distance was about two hundred metres – already long for the nine-millimetre, but the nine-millimetre was in her hand while the Chinese cannon was in the satchel sitting on the branch beside her. She was sure she could place a bullet in the man at that distance, but she couldn’t with any confidence gauge where it would hit – and he was of the chosen, so she couldn’t risk killing him.
Squaring the circle, she fired off five rounds in quick succession, aiming very low. Three pedestrians went down, shot in the knee, calf or foot. Screams and bellows rose from the street, and consternation burgeoned visibly from the seeds of pain and panic she’d just created. It was a rough and ready solution, but it made people flee across the knife-man’s path. It might also make Rush look in the right direction and catch sight of him.