The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  It was scarcely a tactic. He was able to trap the assassin’s right arm against his body, but his left arm was free. He was only hoping to hold the man more or less immobile while the girl got her act together and attacked him from behind.

  Hifela responded by hammer-punching him in the head with jarring, agonising force. Tillman saw stars – then the darkness between the stars. He leaned in close, burying his face in the assassin’s shoulder, forcing him to bring his arm down at an oblique angle and so taking some of the force out of the second punch, and the third.

  There was no fourth. Trying to break Tillman’s hold, Hifela’s groping, testing fingers had found the hilt of the sica that was still embedded in Tillman’s shoulder. He pulled it out and drove it in again, higher and at a more oblique angle.

  The shock of agony, and the near severing of his trapezius muscle, caused Tillman to release his hold. Leaning away from him, Hifela brought the knife up in a diagonal slash across the other man’s chest. Then he drew it up and back for a final thrust into Tillman’s heart.

  Taking the risk that Tillman had shrunk from, Diema shot the assassin in the head. The bullet went obliquely through Hifela’s skull, entering via the left occipital lobe and exiting through the orbit of his left eye.

  Hifela’s body – that exquisite instrument – rebelled against him. He froze with the knife still in the air, though his hand trembled violently as though he were still trying hard to bring it down. Then the spasm passed and he lunged.

  Tillman caught Hifela’s wrist in mid-air and turned him, slowly, inexorably, so that they were both sideways on to Diema. He could see her on her knees, her face stupid with concussion, her eyes glazed, the gun – Hifela’s own Sig Sauer Pro 2022 – held before her like an offering at an altar nobody else could see. The head shot must have been a one-in-a-million chance, but this was a gift and she took it.

  In fact, since the gun had eleven bullets left in its magazine, she took it eleven times.

  Hifela crashed down onto his knees in the dirt, then fell full-length. Tillman fell beside him, unable to hold himself upright any more. He ended up staring into Hifela’s slack, haunted face.

  ‘Bilo b’eyet ha yehuani,’ Hifela wheezed. ‘Siruta muot dil kasyeh shoh.’

  The words had a liquid undertow, but they were distinct, forced out of him along with the last of his spirit.

  57

  Kennedy found them first – following the same trail that Tillman had followed – but she knew she couldn’t be far ahead of the pack. The local police – it was the Çevik kuvvet, the anti-terrorist squad – had gone directly to the hotel, because dozens of witnesses had seen shots fired there and there were bodies, one lying face down next to the outdoor pool and the other in the staff car park. But shots and explosions had been heard in the parkland on Gellert Hill, too, so that would be their next stop.

  Tillman was unconscious and almost certainly dying. The ground around him was so saturated with his blood that Kennedy’s shoes sank into it. Blood was still welling from deep wounds in his shoulder and across his chest – but weakly and fitfully, like the last knockings coaxed from an almost empty barrel.

  The man lying next to him was dead. A dozen bullet wounds, each a black disc ringed with red-brown crust, stood out like withered flowers on his dead white skin.

  Then there was another man, also dead, but with no wounds on him apart from a damaged hand – and Diema, trying to stand and failing. The front of the girl’s shirt was drenched with vomit and her bloodshot eyes seemed unable to focus.

  Kennedy supported her weight and helped her into a sitting position, her back to a tree. ‘You’re concussed,’ she said. ‘Don’t try to move.’ Kennedy’s gaze kept sliding back to Tillman, his ashen face and the red ruin of his shirt. She had to do something. It was probably too late, but she had to try.

  She took out her phone and started to dial the emergency number. If Hungary was in the EU, it ought to be 112. If not she’d try the operator and ask to be put through.

  Diema’s hand locked on Kennedy’s wrist and dragged her hand down. ‘Channel zero,’ she slurred.

  ‘I’m calling an ambulance,’ Kennedy said, pulling her hand free. ‘Try to stay awake.’

  ‘Channel zero!’ The girl fumbled with the walkie-talkie and unhooked it from her belt on the third try. But then she just stared at it, unable to see the keys clearly enough to operate them.

  Kennedy took the walkie-talkie from Diema and reset it. ‘What’s channel zero?’ she asked.

  ‘Tell them … where we are.’ The girl’s hands were at her belt again. Kennedy opened the channel, heard the crackle of a live line.

  ‘Ayn? ’ It was a man’s voice, clipped and clear.

  Kennedy’s scalp prickled. ‘We’re on Gellert Hill,’ she said.

  A pause. ‘Who is this, please?’

  ‘Diema is here,’ Kennedy said. ‘Diema. Diema Beit Evrom.’

  ‘Pere echon!’ Diema cried, sounding like a drunkard. ‘Pere echon adir!’

  ‘I said—’

  ‘I hear her,’ the man said quickly. ‘On Gellert Hill. North side or south?’

  ‘North. Just above the Gellert Hotel.’

  ‘Keep the channel open. We will come.’

  Kennedy lowered the walkie-talkie and stared at Diema – or rather, at what Diema was holding in the palm of her hand. A small hypodermic, of the kind that diabetics use to dose themselves with insulin, and a snap-in ampoule of clear liquid. They fell into the dirt as the girl’s hand swayed.

  ‘Dal le beho’ota,’ Diema said.

  Kennedy took the needle, waved it in the girl’s face. ‘Diema, what do you want me to do with this?’ she yelled. ‘In English! I speak English!’

  The girl’s eyes swam briefly into focus.

  ‘Put it in his heart,’ she said.

  58

  There was a time of pain, and of regrouping, but it was a short time. There was a great deal still to be done.

  Nahir’s team of local Elohim, loyal to the People and the oath they’d sworn, took Tillman off Gellert Hill in broad daylight, in the hollow interior of a gurney rigged to look like an ice cream cart. Diema and Kennedy walked beside them, their battered faces hidden behind masks in the likeness of Punchinello, the comical child-murderer and wife-beater from the Italian commedia dell’arte. The bodies of the Elohim who’d died on the hill were also removed, by some other means into which Diema and Kennedy were in no condition to enquire.

  In the nearest safe house, behind the boarded-up frontage of a former florist’s shop on Stollár Béla Street, Diema was examined by Elohim medics. Her concussion was mild, and already passing, but she had two cracked ribs, which they bound up, and a broken finger that she didn’t even remember acquiring. She impatiently refused the pain relieving drugs offered to her, and – as soon as she could think straight – asked after the health of her team.

  The prisoners, Nahir told her, were in safe keeping. The Englishman would probably die, but the others were in relatively sound condition and ready to be questioned at her convenience.

  Diema stood on tip-toe to bring her face as close to Nahir’s as possible, and told him that it would be inconvenient for the Englishman to die. So inconvenient, in fact, that if it happened she would see that Nahir spent the next few years in the main cloaca of Ginat’Dania, cleaning out sewage conduits with his tongue.

  ‘I am still Kuutma’s emissary,’ she reminded him, with ferocious calm. ‘And as long as I’m here in your city, you answer to me.’

  Doctors were summoned and assigned. Leo Tillman’s condition was looked to and addressed.

  Next, Diema had them find Ben Rush and bring him. He was in Uzsoci Hospital, serving as a sewing sampler for a nurse with well-muscled arms, several yards of suture and a robust work ethic. Thoroughly worked over by fists, boots and many ad hoc implements, the boy was unrecognisable. He had already had seventy-three stitches put into various wounds in his face, scalp, shoulder and side. The nurse was op
timistic about the sight in his left eye, but only in the long term. For now it was swollen shut and ringed with thirty-five of those stitches.

  When two strange men turned up at Rush’s bedside and told him that Diema had sent them, Rush assumed they were there to kill him and refused point-blank to go with them, struggling to maintain control of his bladder. ‘She says,’ Shraga added, delivering Diema’s message with scrupulous care, ‘that nobody besides you has ever complained about her breasts, and that a little boy who likes big breasts probably has an unhealthy sexual fixation on his mother.’ Rush changed his mind and agreed to accompany them, although he was still scared of having his throat cut right up to the moment when he saw her.

  He told Diema what he’d done, and how he’d survived. The paint bomb had masked his face, or rather it had given his face at least a passing resemblance to the faces of the two dozen other people who were within its effective radius when it went off. And since most of those people were already piling onto him, each of them eager to be the first to push his teeth down his throat, the confusion was compounded. The Messenger sent to kill him, finding himself on the fringes of a spreading mêlée, and with the sound of police sirens already tainting the summer breeze, had quietly withdrawn.

  Rush also remembered to thank Diema for the warning she’d given him when the knife-man first appeared. She told him she resented the bullets she’d had to use up, and that on future occasions she wouldn’t waste a second of her precious time on his survival. Privately, she was both surprised and (reluctantly) impressed that the boy had come out of the battle alive – and that he’d done it using the paint bomb she’d offered him as a mark of contempt. She remembered one of her teachers telling her, after she’d fluked a perfect score in a test, that it was better to be lucky than to be good. The boy was probably too stupid to realise that he’d just used up a lifetime’s luck in one go.

  By this time, Diema had extorted further concessions from Nahir’s people. Kennedy had been moved to a cell with a bed in it, and Tillman to a thoroughly disinfected room in which a full trauma suite had been painstakingly assembled.

  Diema demanded a report and the doctors obediently provided one. The Adamite, they told her, had lost more than two litres of blood – close to the maximum that a human body can shed without shutting down for good. The anti-toxin that Diema had had Kennedy give him had probably prevented, by a hair’s breadth or so, his slipping into clinical shock, and allowed him to survive long enough to be given a transfusion, but his wounds were terrible. The damage to his right arm, particularly, was likely to be irreversible, and they wouldn’t be able to tell whether there’d been any brain damage until he recovered consciousness – for which the doctors could offer no realistic estimate.

  She went to see him. A doctor was examining Tillman’s pupillary responses, but he stepped back from the bed when Diema entered the room and waited with his arms at his sides.

  ‘Go outside,’ Diema told him. ‘Stay there until I call you.’

  The doctor inclined his head and retreated.

  She went to the bed and looked down at Tillman. He looked old and weak, and more than a little ugly, his skin mottled red and white with broken blood vessels, his cheeks sunken. Tubes for fluid and wiring for diagnostics decorated his flesh or tunnelled into it. A faint smell of sweat and disinfectant rose from him: the smell of bad news delivered in well-lit rooms.

  Diema wrestled with the riddle, but she couldn’t solve it without a clue of some kind, and everybody who could have given her the clue was dead. Her mother, Rebecca, who had taken her own life. Kuutma-that-was, who in the end died because he grieved for Rebecca too much. And her father – the father she remembered, lifting her and carrying her away (as she cried and kicked) from her half-finished drawing. The father who lived mostly in the scorched earth between the thickets of her memory, and who had torched most of that ground himself.

  Are you him?

  The red-and-white thing on the bed, trailing strings and wires like a marionette, couldn’t tell her. She thought of Punchinello. No matter what the question might be, Punchinello’s only answer was to grab his stick, which he cradled like a child in his two folded arms, and commit another murder. And she thought of Wile E. Coyote, whose implacable enmity for the Roadrunner was the core of his being.

  She had wanted Tillman to be like that: a cartoon creation, simple and predictable and easy to hate. That was how she had always seen him, even before she knew what cartoons were. She could still see him that way, with only a little effort.

  But here was someone else, who had come to her when she needed him instead of trying to save the rhaka who was his friend and ally, who had faced down Hifela, the Face of the Skull, with his arm all but useless, and let his chest be sliced like pork rind while he did what he could to give her a clear shot.

  Hifela’s words echoed in her head. Y’tuh gemae le. Net ya neiu.

  One of the People had tried to kill her. And the father of her flesh had saved her. She had to acknowledge that paradox, and deal with it.

  Or become a cartoon character herself.

  It was time to stop putting off the inevitable. She went to see Kennedy – who went off like a bomb as soon as the door was opened.

  ‘Where’s Leo? What have you done to him?’ The woman took a step towards Diema, not in the least deterred by the two Elohim who stood, stoical and watchful, to either side of her. ‘If he’s dead—’

  ‘He’s alive,’ Diema said. ‘But only just. Sit down, Heather. Please.’

  Kennedy obeyed – perhaps because hearing about Tillman’s condition had taken some of the strength from her, or perhaps because she’d registered that Diema had just used her Christian name and knew from this that something significant had changed.

  Diema sent the Messengers away with a curt gesture and closed the door behind them.

  ‘Tell me,’ Kennedy said, her voice tight. ‘Tell me how he is.’

  Diema recapped the blood loss, the chest and shoulder wounds, the continuing coma. It was a concise, full and factual summary. Her teachers would have been proud of her.

  ‘But he’ll recover,’ Kennedy said, not quite asking, still less pleading. ‘This is Leo. He’s going to get back up again.’

  ‘They think so,’ Diema said. ‘Everything except the shoulder. They say the damage to the muscle was very severe. They did what they could to knit it back together again, but they can’t promise.’

  ‘And who are they, Diema?’ Kennedy demanded savagely. ‘The doctors you trusted his life to? This place isn’t a hospital. It’s a prison. So where in God’s name do you source your doctors from?’

  ‘It’s not a prison,’ Diema said. ‘It’s just a safe house. The doctors are on staff here, but they’re in touch with other doctors in Ginat’Dania. They’ve spoken to the most skilful of our healers, taken advice. And those other doctors are on their way here, now. I asked for them to be sent and they’re coming.’ This wasn’t a boast: it was just a statement of fact. Kuutma had promised her all the support she needed, without question. She had told him she needed this.

  ‘I want to see him,’ Kennedy said.

  ‘He’s unconscious. He won’t know you’re there.’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  Diema nodded. ‘All right.’

  ‘And Rush. What happened to Rush? I want to see both of them.’

  ‘Yes,’ Diema said. ‘I promise. But I’ve got something else to ask you first. The mission has reached—’

  ‘Oh my god,’ Kennedy raged. ‘Don’t. Don’t even talk about that. We did what we could. We did everything we possibly could, but we were outclassed. We should have known that before we went in. It was not our fault that the mission was a fiasco!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If it had been anyone but Leo, I would have known it was madness.’ Kennedy was speaking to herself now, rather than to Diema. She shook her head in dismayed wonder. ‘I thought he was some kind of bloody Superman. I thought he couldn’t fa
il. And so I let him go up against those … those monsters, and I went up against them myself. As if we had a chance. But we didn’t. We failed because we had to fail, Diema.’

  ‘We didn’t fail.’

  ‘Because nobody could take on a whole—’

  ‘Heather, we didn’t fail.’

  Finally, Kennedy wound down, assimilating what she was being told. ‘What?’ she muttered, confused. ‘What are you saying? They all died. Or else escaped. We got nothing.’

  ‘We got everything we needed. I know where Ber Lusim is. And we’re going in. We’re just waiting for the equipment. That’s why I came here. To ask you if you want to come. I think you’ve earned that right. And I think …’ She hesitated. It was hard to frame the words, around the bulky, ugly concepts that they covered. ‘I think you’ll be safer if you stick with me than if I leave you here.’

  Kennedy’s unwavering stare was full of surprise and mistrust. Perhaps there was an accusation there, too.

  ‘I’m not asking you to kill anyone,’ Diema said. ‘You already told me that wasn’t something you felt you could do.’ She’d seen the police reports from the Gellert Hotel by this time and knew what Kennedy had done with a sica to a trained assassin, but she felt that might be a conversation best left for another time. ‘For your insights. I need you as a detective.’

  Kennedy was implacable – and bitter. ‘To detect what? Something you say you’ve already found? Do you think I just fell out of a tree, girl? Do you think I don’t know how you spoon-fed us all the way down the line? You let Leo get a fix on your bike so he’d follow you to that factory. You let us find Toller’s book for ourselves and then went ahead and told us what was in it. You only needed Leo to cut throats – and you only needed me to bring in Leo. Which, God forgive me, I did. But I’m all done, now. You go on and play your games.’

  ‘But it was you that brought us here,’ Diema said. ‘You and the boy. You put together all the things you knew and made sense out of them. Gave me a direction. I want you to be with me when I go into Ber Lusim’s house, in case that’s needed again. Whatever’s in there, whatever he’s still got planned, it might help me if I can see it through your eyes.’