The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  But long-term users of kelalit seemed to be able to shrug it off with impunity. The Messenger was on top of Kennedy now, rolling her onto her stomach and twisting her arms behind her. He was much stronger than her and trained in immobilising techniques. He held both of her hands in one of his, and his grip didn’t even seem particularly tight, but she couldn’t move an inch without searing agony shooting up her arms.

  She screamed for help, but he ignored her. There were enough screams echoing around the building that one more wouldn’t even be noticed. With his free hand, he took a plastic gardening tie from somewhere she couldn’t see and fastened it around her wrists, pulling it tight.

  Then he hauled her to her feet, pressing her hard against the white-tiled wall. He drew a knife – a sica – and waved it in front of her eyes.

  ‘You see this?’ he muttered in her ear. ‘Just nod.’

  Kennedy nodded.

  ‘The blade is poisoned. If I cut you with this knife, you’ll die. You understand?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘At the end of the corridor, there is a door. Beyond the door, a small parking area. We will walk across that space to the van that’s parked there and you will climb into the back of the van. Do this without a word, without a sound, and without trying to run. Otherwise I’ll kill you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kennedy said.

  With a hand on her shoulder, he turned her and launched her.

  When Diema clambered to her feet again, she found that she was deaf.

  Two men were running towards her down the hill, but dirt and leaves were still raining down from the explosion and the air was thicker than soup, so they hadn’t seen her until she stood up directly in front of them. She let the first man run into her, ducked under him and threw him high and hard. But doing that laid her open to the second man’s attack, a vicious combination of kicks and punches that sent her staggering backwards on the treacherous ground until she fell, fetching up with a jarring impact against the bole of a tree.

  The Messenger brought his rifle up to chest height, his free hand steadying the breech. His gaze met Diema’s.

  ‘Aikh kadal,’ Diema murmured, staring deep and pleadingly into those dark eyes. Older brother.

  The man’s resolution faltered, for a heartbeat. Diema fired twice, which emptied the handgun’s clip. One shot went wide, the other hit the man’s right hand, shattering the rifle’s stock and blowing off two of his fingers.

  He was drawing a sica from his belt, left-handed, when Diema rushed on him, leaving the ground in a desperate leap to kick him in the chest. He went down hard and took a second longer than she did to struggle upright again. By that time she’d snatched up his rifle – which was still just about serviceable as a club. Her wild swipe slammed into the underside of his jaw and the shuddering impact knocked him out cold.

  Her hearing was starting to return now, but her whole body throbbed with pain – and against that dull background ache, every movement caused flares of bright, localised agony from her left side. Probably she’d cracked a rib when she’d fallen after the grenade went off.

  But she had her prisoner. If the others had survived, this could still count as a success. Diema looked around for something to tie her attacker’s hands with. His belt would probably do. She knelt down and unfastened it, rolling the man onto his side so she could drag it free.

  But as she bundled his wrists together, he stirred under her hands and opened his eyes. ‘Dekai?’ he mumbled. Alive? You’re taking me alive?

  ‘To question you,’ Diema told him, though she shied away from explaining what that might mean. ‘We want to know about Ber Lusim and about the work you’ve done for him.’

  The man grimaced. The muscles of his jaw contorted and his pale face flushed suddenly red.

  Diema didn’t realise what he was doing until it was too late to stop him. She wrestled briefly with his jaws, but even as she forced his mouth open, a shudder ran through him. He stiffened, eyes wide, and all his muscles locked in a body-wide rictus.

  The idea of a suicide capsule – for one of the People – was as obscene to her as the idea of the People killing their own. Costly in the sight of the Lord is the blood of his servants. Their lives were precious because there were few enough of them to be counted. But Ber Lusim had taught them new ways of thinking.

  Grim-faced, fighting back tears, Diema used her thumb and forefinger to force the dead man’s eyelids closed over his bulging eyes.

  As she did so, something cold and hard touched the back of her neck.

  ‘Akhot ha’aktana,’ Hifela said softly, raising the Sig Sauer so that the tip of its barrel touched her cheek. ‘Little sister.’

  Kennedy walked in front of the Messenger, but when they got to the end of the corridor he reached past her to push the door open. Bright sunlight flooded in, making her blink and squint.

  ‘There,’ the man said, not pointing but pushing her where he wanted her to go. There was a red van, parked about twenty feet away. On its side, in black script printed to look like a military stencil, were the words ‘High Energy Haulage’, along with the dolmen logo.

  Kennedy stumbled towards it, dragging her steps in the vain hope that someone might come around the corner of the building and see what was happening.

  Nobody did. They reached the van and her captor threw open the back doors. ‘Inside,’ he ordered. Kennedy stared at him. His voice had definitely been slurred and there was an asymmetric lean to his stance.

  She backed away a few steps. The Messenger lunged for her and caught her by the arm, but almost fell over in the process. He blinked rapidly a few times, as though to clear his vision.

  ‘Inside,’ he said again, pulling her towards the van. He held the sica close to Kennedy’s throat and though he was careful not to cut her, she was terrified: his hand didn’t look that steady.

  She climbed into the van, with great difficulty because of her bound hands, and swung herself around so she sat facing outward.

  As the Messenger pushed the doors to, Kennedy threw her upper body flat, bracing herself against the floor of the van, and kicked the doors into his face. The knife flew from his hand, bouncing end over end across the ground, and he stumbled backward, going down on one knee.

  Kennedy squirmed and rolled out of the van, aiming to hit the ground running. But the assassin was already scrambling to his feet again, blocking the only way out of the narrow cul-de-sac. She feinted left, then when he took a step towards her she sprinted past him on the right. But even doped and confused he was faster than her. He swivelled and turned, tripping her.

  Kennedy rolled as she landed, and managed to get her feet back under her. The Messenger moved around her, putting himself between her and the exit again. Blood was brimming behind his clenched teeth and his eyes were glazing over, but the look on his face was one of murderous rage. He fumbled inside his jacket and came out with two slender wooden rods like the handles of a tiny skipping rope. A moment later, as it caught the light, Kennedy registered the almost invisible wire suspended between them.

  The man advanced on her and Kennedy retreated before him. But a handful of baby steps left her with the wall pressing against her shoulders. She looked left, then right: she had nowhere to go. As the Messenger raised his strangling cord, she bowed her head and turned her back on him.

  He dropped the cord into place around her neck and she stepped back into his embrace as though welcoming her death.

  The sica, which she’d snatched up from the ground when she’d fallen, was clutched tightly between her bound hands. The assassin walked onto its blade, which sank hilt-deep into his stomach. Kennedy twisted, moving her hands up, down, across. Seppuku by proxy.

  The dying man made a choking sound of pain and protest. She heard the muted impact as he fell to his knees, and only then turned to look. He was folded around the obscene wound, probably already dead, although his staring eyes seemed troubled by some unfathomable realisation. Kennedy told herself th
at the fentalyn must have taken away most of the pain. The strangling cord remained around her neck, its wooden grips dangling like the loose ends of a bow tie, as she addressed herself to the problem of freeing her hands with a poisoned blade.

  Diema dropped her hands to her sides and waited. She recognised Hifela’s voice, of course: recognised it twice over, from the tapes she’d studied in Ginat’Dania and from the shouted command she’d heard when she sang her blessing from the top of the fig tree that she should be killed, no matter who she was or where she came from.

  So she knew what was about to happen, apart from the precise details. The gun was pressed into the hollow at the base of her skull, perfectly positioned for an execution shot.

  ‘I have a question,’ she said.

  ‘So do I,’ Hifela told her, his voice relaxed, almost casual. ‘Two questions, in fact. How did you find us and who else knows? Obviously we’ll ask the rhaka the same things, at greater length and with more emphatic punctuation. But since we have this moment, little sister, answer me truly. Are the four of you alone here or will I have to kill again tomorrow?’

  ‘We’re alone.’

  Hifela made a half-swallowed sound like a snort or a chuckle. ‘Fascinating. Perhaps we should have let you come, then, and visit us at home. It might have been cheaper, in terms of lives lost.’

  Diema stiffened. ‘I killed no one,’ she blurted.

  ‘Not you. But your burly friend killed at least one of the men I sent against him and maimed another. And the grenade that failed to kill you took down one of ours. So. Now I’ve got half an answer. The other half, please. How did you find us?’

  ‘The frontispiece of Toller’s book. It showed this hill. We guessed the rest.’

  ‘A prodigious guess. But yes, I see. There is a trail of logic there and we should not have placed ourselves so squarely at the end of it. Elegantly done, sister. Your question, now, before I fertilise this soil with your bone and blood and brains.’

  ‘You’d do that?’ It sounded weak, childish even, like a plea for mercy. But it wasn’t, it was a plea for the world to make sense and be as it was meant to be. But then, perhaps only a child would expect that.

  ‘Didn’t this soldier do as much, when he killed himself?’ Hifela asked her. ‘Didn’t his life, his death, weigh as much as yours?’ Diema saw the flaw in that reasoning, but with her mind in turmoil, she couldn’t articulate it. Hifela didn’t seem to need an answer. ‘In growing older,’ he said, as though he’d read her mind, ‘I’ve become impatient of excess baggage. The sacred, the solemn, the binding, these things are terrible weights. I travel lighter now. So yes, I’ll kill you without a thought. I’m a killer, after all. Why set limits to such a clean and simple thing? And now, this is your last chance to ask your question.’

  ‘I withdraw my question,’ she murmured.

  ‘Really?’ For the first time there was something like interest in the man’s voice. ‘Then tell me, little girl, just for the sake of curiosity, what would it have been?’

  ‘It would have been this. Why did you follow him? Why did you go with Ber Lusim when he spat on his duty and forsook his people? Did you really think his conscience outweighed the whole of Ginat’Dania? But I think you already answered me. If nothing is sacred, what would stop you from doing those things?’

  ‘Ah, but I didn’t say that nothing was sacred.’ Hifela tapped her lightly on the nape of the neck with the barrel of the gun, as if he was a teacher rebuking a thoughtless child. ‘Did I?’

  She turned her head, very slowly. She knew this might provoke him to shoot her, but since he was going to shoot her anyway she didn’t feel as though she had very much to lose – and she wanted, perhaps because of that contemptuous tone, that contemptuous tap, to stare him down as she died. ‘Then that can be my question,’ she said, trying to find the same tone, trying to spit at least a little of his contempt back in his face.

  He tilted his head a little to one side, but the gun – now pointing at her throat – didn’t waver by so much as a millimetre. He frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘What’s sacred to you, Hifela?’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled – a sad, bleak smile, a little twisted at the corner. ‘I thought that was obvious. He is, of course.’

  The moment lengthened. Diema closed her mouth, which had fallen open. Hifela laughed out loud – and though when he smiled he was mocking himself, now he was mocking her. ‘Oh, child, if you’d lived longer, you’d have had a lot to learn. But perhaps God lets us die when he thinks we’ve reached the end of our learning. When our minds close, and all we can do is live, the way animals and vegetables do. Shut your eyes.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘If you close your eyes, it will be easier.’

  ‘Then you close yours,’ Leo Tillman suggested.

  The boom of a single gunshot, from very close, deafened Diema all over again.

  56

  If Tillman had been shooting with his right hand – if his right hand had still been functioning – he would have tried for the kill shot, even though Diema and the cadaverous killer were so close together that they were practically touching.

  He’d approached the two of them from down the slope, from the direction of the hotel. He had the GPS signal to go on – Diema had kept the pellet in her pocket when she gave him the tracker – but even without that, the shredded foliage, bullet-torn bark and spilled blood made a trail that an idiot could have followed. Twice he’d encountered seriously wounded Messengers, crippled by leg shots but still in the fight, and twice he’d had to exchange fire with them, leaving them dead behind him.

  Once he was close enough, he tracked Diema by the sound of her voice, and the other voice that was speaking to her. Tillman had learned stealth in the jungles of three continents, and besides, Diema and the pale man were thoroughly engrossed in their conversation. They didn’t hear his approach.

  But he was carrying – in his left hand – a gun he’d never fired. Only a lunatic would have relied on a weapon like that when friend and foe were standing cheek by jowl. So he got in as close as he could without alerting the skull-faced man to his presence, fired into the air and threw himself forward in a headlong charge.

  The gunshot did what it was meant to do. It told the assassin there was a clear and present danger, shifting his attention from the girl to Tillman.

  But there were still ten feet of ground to cover. Enhanced by kelalit, Hifela brought his gun around and fired before Tillman had travelled half that distance.

  Enhanced by kelalit, Diema slammed the heel of her hand into the assassin’s wrist, pushing the gun even further in the direction in which it was already moving. The shot went wide.

  Then Tillman hit Hifela like a tank.

  But in the split-second before that impact, Hifela had assessed the changed situation and, it seemed, made a decision. He had two enemies now, instead of one. Order of preference had become an issue.

  He dipped and pivoted, and though Diema saw the kick coming she couldn’t do much more than roll with it. The heel of Hifela’s foot struck her in the side of the head, slamming her backward and down the slope in an uncontrolled sprawl.

  There was a price to pay. Hifela was off-balance when Tillman hit him and had to take the big man’s attack head-on. Tillman’s left hand swept down, clubbing the gun loose from Hifela’s grip and he followed up with a scything blow to Hifela’s stomach. The Messenger simply endured it, noticing that his opponent’s fist had slowed in the instant before impact, suggesting some sort of injury to his right arm. With Tillman now well within his reach, he hit back hard and fast.

  A storm of kicks, punches and jabs rode down Tillman’s guard in an instant and he staggered back, dropping his own gun and taking damage even as he blocked. Hifela followed him, keeping up the pressure. Tillman knew at once that he was outclassed. He wasn’t going to win this fight, and barring outside factors he wouldn’t even be able to draw it out all that long. One of those outside factors was sti
rring on the ground behind Hifela. Tillman tried to move round in the opposite direction, forcing the assassin to turn his back on Diema, but it was all he could do to stay on his feet.

  The girl made her move, but Hifela could see her out of the corner of his eye. He leaped over her dive, turned as he came down and launched a kick at Tillman’s midriff, blindsiding Tillman and forcing him to turn and take the kick on the thigh as the only possible defence. There was no opening, no hole in the terrifying virtuosity of his violence.

  Diema tried again. Her movements were sluggish – the blow to the head had left her hurt and dazed – but she struggled up onto hands and knees and gathered herself for another lunge.

  Without seeming even to look at her, Hifela scraped dust and gravel into her face with a sweep of his heel, then wheeled on the spot to kick her in the exact same spot, on the side of the head. As she fell, he shifted his balance and did the same thing again. This time Diema raised her hands in a block, but too slowly. Hifela’s booted foot went through her guard without slowing and slammed into her temple.

  It was a taunt, as much as anything, a demonstration of his absolute power over the two of them. But there was an opening this time, the last kick obliging the assassin to angle his body a little away from Tillman. Tillman launched himself into the gap, fists flailing, but Hifela was gone – falling out of reach, rolling, coming up with Tillman’s gun in his hand. He had anticipated the move, probably invited it. He was ahead of them all the way.

  Staring down the barrel of the Beretta, Tillman – who counted his shots obsessively – knew that this was the best chance he was going to get. Probably the only chance. He walked into Hifela’s attack as the slide of the empty gun jammed open with a flat thud, and wrapped the other man in a tight bear-hug.