by Adam Blake
‘—and that you’re monitoring take-offs from private airfields, then I’d say you’ve done all you can to prevent Ber Lusim from leaving the city.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So what I would do, Nahir, is assume that you’ve failed, and do my best to find out where he’s going.’
She was standing before him now, and he stood up too, maybe to assert the advantage of his height.
‘Do my best,’ he repeated, with cold politeness. ‘That’s a rhetorical exhortation, Diema Beit Evrom, rather than a piece of advice that I can actually act on.’
‘Then act on this,’ she said. ‘Wake Leo Tillman.’
Nahir looked from her to Kuutma and back again. He shook his head, not in refusal but in bafflement. ‘Tillman was enlisted as a killer,’ he pointed out. ‘Surely his usefulness is at an end.’
‘We need what’s in his head. He was the one who went into Ber Lusim’s warehouse, back in London. He saw the documentation on the weapons and equipment that Lusim had already shipped.’
‘We’re starting to retrieve similar information from the computers we found down in the caves.’
‘Good.’ Diema’s tone was clipped. ‘I’m not saying those efforts should stop. Just that we should use every option that’s open to us. Kennedy is right that as Adamites, she and the others come at the Toller prophecies from a different angle than we do. She proved that just now – and justified your decision to enlist her, Tannanu. I want to use Leo Tillman’s expertise, too. His tactical intelligence, which was great enough to allow him to find Ginat’Dania that was.’
Kuutma rubbed his cheek with his thumb. ‘Could this be done?’ he asked Nahir. ‘Could you wake him? Or is Tillman too far-gone?’
Nahir made a non-committal gesture. ‘I don’t know, Tannanu,’ he admitted. ‘I was thinking of Tillman as a spent asset, so I haven’t asked the doctors to report to me on his condition. I’ll do so now.’
‘Thank you, Nahir,’ Kuutma said. ‘Take my bodyguards with you. They both have a good grounding in field medicine. Perhaps they can be of use. We’ll join you shortly.’
‘I want the others there, too,’ Diema said quickly. ‘Kennedy and Rush.’
Kuutma frowned. ‘They were not, I believe, present in the warehouse with Tillman,’ he observed.
‘No. But they were both researching Johann Toller and his prophecies. Again, it’s a case of using all possible assets. If any of them has an insight we can use, we need to squeeze it out of them now.’
‘Very well,’ Kuutma said. ‘Nahir, please have them fetched.’
Nahir made the sign of the noose, which Kuutma returned, and then he left. Diema read extreme tension in the set of Nahir’s back and shoulders. He wouldn’t forgive her for the indignities she’d put him through today. But in a way, that made what she had to do easier: he was so relentlessly focused on his own hurt feelings that she didn’t need to give them any thought herself.
Alone with Diema for the first time, Kuutma gave her a brief but warm embrace. ‘I’m pleased with all you’ve accomplished,’ he told her. ‘Pleased and proud. The operation here was brilliantly handled.’
‘Thank you, Tannanu.’ Diema assumed the same tone of simple humility she’d used when she spoke with him in Ginat’Dania, and her heart swelled as it always had when he praised her, but there were other emotions in the mix now, and she chose her words with care. ‘But I think I could have done more, and done it more quickly. And in any case, the plan was yours.’
‘Yes,’ Kuutma agreed. ‘The plan was mine. I said you should bring Tillman and the rhaka into the orbit of our investigation, and use their talents. But I knew how much I was asking of you. I knew that this thing, which was so easy to say, would be very hard indeed to carry out. You carried it out immaculately.’
‘Thank you, Tannanu.’
‘What I’m concerned about, is how you yourself may have been hurt in the process – especially in meeting Leo Tillman and being forced into close proximity with him. No Messenger has ever had to bear that burden.’
Diema knew that she couldn’t plausibly counterfeit indifference, so she let him see some of the tension she’d been hiding, letting the mask slip as though with relief. She grimaced. ‘It hasn’t been easy. Sometimes I see my brothers in him. Myself, even. It’s hard, at those times, not to let him see how much I hate him.’
‘Walk with me,’ Kuutma suggested.
He bowed, and with a sweep of his arm invited her to go before him. As they left Nahir’s command room, he fell in at her side, hands clasped behind his back, moving at an easy amble that belied the urgency of their situation.
‘Your hate, then,’ he said. ‘It’s as great as it ever was?’
‘His crime is as great as it ever was.’
‘Of course. It’s important that I know your heart in this, Diema. Very important. You’ve served the city more in a year than many do in a lifetime. Your well-being matters to me.’
‘I know.’ She looked at the ground.
‘Well,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’m answered. And really, I shouldn’t even have needed to ask. It was your suggestion to wake Tillman and speak to him, despite the severity of his wounds. You’re obviously not troubled at the thought of compromising his recovery – or accidentally killing him. The drugs that will be used will be very potent. So we’ll be putting a strain on his heart, when it’s already weak.’
Diema swallowed hard. ‘So long as he lives long enough to talk to us,’ she said, as carelessly as she could.
‘And here we are,’ Kuutma said. They had reached a door that was like all the other doors they’d passed. How did he know? Diema wondered. Had he studied the layout of the house before he arrived? Had he arrived earlier and remained in the background during the raid on the caves? Was there some system of signs in the safe houses that he knew about and she didn’t?
Was her face equally easy for him to read?
Diema knew that prolonged use of the drug kelalit could induce amphetamine psychosis. Paranoia was its chief symptom. She reached out and opened the door, bowing for Kuutma to precede her into the room. She didn’t even look over the threshold.
‘Tannanu,’ she murmured.
‘Thank you, Diema.’
He went in, and she followed him, steeling herself. Killing, when she’d been brought to it, had been much harder than she expected it to be. But what she was about to do now would be harder still.
She had to bring all three Adamites out of here alive.
63
When Kennedy got her first look at Leo Tillman, she had to fight back a cry of dismay. She’d seen his injuries when they were fresh, so she thought she was armoured against anything she might find when the Messengers thrust her and Rush in through the door of the medical room and told them brusquely to wait there.
But she’d reckoned without the vagaries of Elohim psychology. Tillman’s wounds had been bandaged, and he’d been given the blood transfusion he so desperately needed. In fact, it looked as though he’d been given scrupulous care. Diagnostic machines had been brought in from somewhere and hooked up to his body wherever there was a space between the drip feeds and catheters. His dressings were clean, and so were the sheets.
But someone had remembered, at some point in all these clinical proceedings, that they were dealing with an enemy. At that point, they had shackled Tillman’s hands and feet to the bed frame with four sets of sleeve cuffs tied so tightly that his body was almost being lifted from the bed.
A doctor was checking Tillman’s blood pressure with a pneumatic sleeve, his expression bland and calm, as though this were all in a day’s work. Kuutma’s two angels also stood by, coldly indifferent, watching him work.
‘Jesus frigging Christ,’ Rush exclaimed.
Kennedy turned to the four Elohim who’d brought them there. ‘Cut him loose,’ she said. She had to force the words out. The blood was pounding in her temples and she felt like she was choking on an anger – close to panic – that had been r
ising in her since the first time they’d been brought to this place.
The Messengers affected not to hear her. Clearly they didn’t take orders from the likes of her.
Kennedy switched her attention to Nahir, who was standing in the corner of the room, watching them in silence. He hadn’t moved since they arrived, which was why she hadn’t seen him up until then. His expression was less detached than those of the doctor and the guards, but what was showing on his face was mostly curiosity – an interest as to which way they might jump.
‘What,’ Kennedy said, ‘are you scared he might pick a fight with someone? Cut him loose!’
‘No,’ Nahir said.
‘This is a human being.’
‘Is it?’
Kennedy went to the bed and started to untie Leo herself. When the Messengers moved in to stop her, she swivelled on the spot and punched the nearest one full in the face.
They had her immobilised before she could draw another breath. Actually, it was the man she’d just punched who put her in the arm-lock, inside of a second and without the aid of his three colleagues. Rush stepped forward to help her and ran into a human barricade: a male and a female Elohim, standing shoulder to shoulder, daring him to raise a hand against them.
He took the dare, but unlike Kennedy he didn’t have the advantage of surprise. One of the two dropped him with a punch that he didn’t see coming and couldn’t even reconstruct after it had hit. He was left in a foetal position on the floor, struggling to draw in a breath through a solid wall of agony.
‘You better not give me an inch of slack,’ Kennedy gasped.
‘I won’t,’ her captor promised her, sounding almost amused.
‘A human being,’ Nahir said, musing. ‘Would you claim that status for yourself? I wonder. I imagine you would. And that you’d do so without the slightest sense of irony.’
‘You want irony?’ Kennedy snarled. ‘I’ll tell you what’s ironic. That you people are so prissy about killing each other when killing is the only thing you’re any good at!’
Nahir signalled to the Messenger to release her – a negligent wave of the hand. Kennedy could see from his face and his posture that he expected her to attack him, and was ready for her if she did.
‘This is personal for you, isn’t it?’ she asked him, clutching her numbed arm to her chest.
Nahir’s mouth pinched in a minute grimace. ‘Not in the slightest.’
‘I’m just trying to figure out why,’ Kennedy said. ‘Is it because we found your Ginat’Dania? I can see where that would hurt.’
‘Nothing you can do could ever make the smallest difference to us.’
‘And yet here we are.’ Kennedy forced a grin. ‘Saving you from yourselves. Because three thousand years turned out to be nowhere near long enough for you sorry sons of bitches to get your act together. You saying you don’t need us is a really bad joke after you went to so much trouble to get us here.’
Nahir put a hand to the back of his belt. ‘Say another word,’ he invited Kennedy. ‘And find out for yourself how much I need you.’
She opened her mouth – and the creak and swish of the door at her back interceded, probably saving her life.
‘Good,’ Kuutma said. ‘Everybody is here, and everything, I assume, is in place.’ Diema entered the room behind him and closed the door. For a moment, her gaze was locked on Kennedy’s – a wordless catechism. Then she looked away.
‘Doctor?’ Kuutma said.
The doctor, a man of the same age and with the same physique as the Messengers, bowed perfunctorily and made the sign of the noose. ‘I’ve completed a physical evaluation of the patient,’ he said. ‘He seems to have been in excellent health before he received these wounds. His system is massively compromised now, but I believe I can wake him by injecting adrenalin and methylphenidate directly into his heart. Obviously there are a number of risks involved in this procedure. But if time is of the essence …’
‘Time,’ said Kuutma, ‘is very much of the essence. Do it, please.’
The doctor turned to the racks and trays against the walls and began to select from the bottles there.
‘What risks?’ Kennedy asked.
Assembling the hypo, the doctor answered over his shoulder. Possibly he hadn’t noticed that he was being questioned by an Adamite. ‘Haemorrhaging within the heart is possible, but not very likely. The main risk is tamponade – massive, uncontrolled vaso-constriction that will starve his system of oxygen. I’ll have a stand-by injection of benzamine ready in case that happens.’
‘Don’t do this,’ Kennedy said. She was speaking to Diema.
‘Restrain her,’ Nahir ordered. ‘She’s capable of disrupting the procedure.’
Two Elohim took Kennedy’s arms. The remaining two stood over Rush, who by now was sitting up but hadn’t managed to stand.
‘Proceed,’ said Kuutma.
The doctor used an epidural needle that looked more like a duelling sword. Kennedy forced herself not to look away as the doctor, without preamble, inserted the point between Tillman’s fourth and fifth ribs and pushed the needle in slowly and smoothly, to a depth of about three inches. He thumbed the bulb at the end of the syringe, and the plunger inside the hypodermic slid across, instantly, like an eye blinking shut.
For a split-second longer, Tillman’s body remained calm and motionless. Then it quaked, riven by a massive interior shock. A powerful muscular contraction went through him, making the restraints tighten and his body lift clear of the bed – then slam down again with enough force to make it rock.
‘Hold him!’ the doctor said, to the two angels, and they stepped in on either side to enfold Tillman in a rigid embrace. There was a second contraction, then a third, not so severe as the first but more protracted.
Tillman’s eyes and mouth gaped open. His throat worked and so did his chest, but there was no sound of indrawn breath. Quickly, the doctor gave him a second injection into the side of his neck. Sputters and gasps came from Tillman’s throat, as though he were doing a bad mime of a coffee percolator. They peaked, then died away.
The doctor turned to look at Kuutma, tense, seeking instruction or permission. ‘He’s barely breathing. I need another chemical antagonist to fight the adrenalin. But there are none here. This house is not so well stocked as my own surgery. I didn’t think to bring—’
‘Glyceril trinitrate,’ one of the angels said.
The doctor blinked, his mouth dropping open. ‘But that’s … that’s the chemical composition of nitroglycerin. It’s an explosive.’
‘And a vaso-dilator.’ The woman looked to Nahir. ‘Do you have any?’
Nahir shrugged. ‘Almost certainly.’
One of the Elohim went in search of it. The rest of them were summarily ejected from the room so that the doctor could prep Tillman for an emergency ECMO. If necessary, they would force oxygen into his blood using cannulae and membrane oscillators.
Kennedy was still in the grip of the two Elohim who Nahir had told to guard her. But she’d stopped struggling against their grasp, and they were holding her loosely. If Leo died, she intended to try to tear loose from their grip, but she had no idea whether she was going to attack Nahir, Kuutma or Diema. She just felt that leaving a mark on one of the three would be a memorial that she owed Tillman, even if she died trying.
Her gaze kept going back to Diema, who stood with her arms folded, her expression sullen and guarded. Everything that was happening here was being driven by her. She could still stop this, but she said nothing, engaged with nothing, let it flow around her while she stood and thought.
The nitro was brought. Kennedy was expecting a gelid brick, wrapped in grease-proof paper, like a package of C4, but it came in a bottle, looking a lot more like medicine than explosive. The Elohim took it into Tillman’s room and closed the door behind them.
‘You know the one thing I regret, in all of this?’ Rush asked. He was speaking to Diema, who turned to stare at him, startled out of her reverie.
‘That I let you touch me,’ Rush said.
She didn’t answer. Kuutma frowned, and looked at Diema – a look of surprise and deep thought.
The door opened, and the doctor looked out at them. His bland expression gave nothing away, but he nodded. ‘He’s ready for you,’ he said to Kuutma.
They filed back into the room. Tillman’s eyes were open and he was breathing – not normally, but deeply, with an audible rasp on each in-breath like the blade of a hacksaw dragged through cardboard. Kennedy tried to go to him, but the Messengers who held her arms wouldn’t allow her.
‘Leo,’ she said.
His wide eyes flickered, swivelled and found her. He tried to speak, eventually producing a sound that could have been the start of her name. ‘Heh …’
And a second later, ‘… ther.’
Kuutma wasted no time. ‘As you wished, Diema,’ he said to her, with a wave of his hand. ‘Please continue.’
Diema stepped forward. ‘We found Ber Lusim’s base of operations, underneath Gellert Hill,’ she said, addressing herself to Tillman. ‘But he escaped us. And now, we think, he’s aiming to fulfil the final prophecy in Toller’s book. So we have to go there, too, and stop him. Our goal is what it’s been all along – to save a million lives. If we can do that, then everything … everything that’s happened along the way will have been justified.’
The tone of her voice was strange. So were her words, Kennedy thought. She sounded as though she were pleading a case rather than carrying out an interrogation.
Tillman nodded. He swallowed deeply before he tried to speak again. ‘The island,’ he said, his voice slurred but comprehensible.
Diema nodded. ‘The island given for an island. We’ve all had time to think about it. If you’ve got any ideas – if any of you have anything at all – this is probably our last chance to figure it out.’
Nobody answered. Diema looked at each of them in turn.
‘Please,’ she said. She sounded desperate. ‘Anything. It’s not about our feelings. It’s not about whether we trust each other or not. Think about the living, who will soon be dead.’