The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  But the more Diema ducked away from talking to him, the more certain he was that it was something that mattered.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Tillman turned to Nahir.

  ‘So is she right?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to stick to your orders and work with me? Or are we going to have to fight this out? I know you don’t lie, so I figure it’s worth asking. It would be useful to know if I can turn my back on you.’

  The Messenger stared at him – stared at both of them – with stony calm. The hate was still there, too, but it was a good way back and under control. And something else was working under the uncommunicative surface of his face. Maybe he’s afraid, Rush thought. Diema had as good as told them that this was her home town – Ginat’Dania, the great mysterious refuge. He hadn’t figured out yet how you hid a city in the middle of New York, but if that was what they’d done, Nahir – along with all the Elohim – might be about to become a homeless orphan. Under the circumstances, it was pretty much of a miracle that they were keeping it together as well as they were. Maybe being batshit crazy was protecting them from the worst of it. Rush knew that the only reason he was staying so calm himself was because his mind couldn’t make the phrase a million dead mean anything: it just kept slipping off at an oblique angle.

  ‘There would be no fight,’ Nahir said with chilly dignity. ‘If I were to decide that you and this boy should die, I’d kill you. But I would hardly have waited, in that case, until you stood on this holiest of ground. I would have killed you out among the Nations. I could have dealt with you while Diema was leading us into Gellert Hill. I thought about doing that. But I take the oaths I’ve sworn seriously. Obedience in a soldier is what chastity is in a marriage.’

  Tillman raised his eyebrows at the comparison. ‘You mean it’s precious because it’s so rare?’

  ‘I’m getting tired,’ Rush said, ‘of being called a boy. Just thought I’d throw that out there.’

  ‘I want to get up to the roof,’ Tillman said. ‘Take a look at the neighbourhood from up there. Supposing you’re still feeling chaste, I’d appreciate some help with that. Are there any stairs in this place?’

  It turned out there were, and with both Nahir and Rush taking some of his weight, Tillman was able to climb them. A steel door, hanging halfway off its hinges, gave onto a narrow walkway with the main pitch of the roof above and behind it. There was a parapet wall just high enough to trip over and a congregation of pigeons that scattered when Rush pushed the door open.

  Gravel crunched under their feet as they stepped out. The Bronx was laid out before them, wearing the beauty of the evening like a garment – a peephole bra, maybe, or something similarly sleazy and enticing. Warehouses and office blocks close to hand gave way to streets of low-rises and row houses further to the north and east.

  A thousand terraces, rising like the steps of an amphitheatre. New York’s vast, vertical concatenation.

  A thousand places for a madman to sit and watch the sun go down, and throw his poisoned confetti.

  Nahir and Tillman began to discuss wind speed and elevation. Rush left them to it, certain that they didn’t need him and wouldn’t see him go.

  He went back down the stairs, into the big room with the vats. He found a patch of sunlight coming through a hole in the roof and sat to read Toller’s book one final time.

  Diema let Kennedy drive, because she trusted her own instinct and observation more than she trusted anyone else’s. But the hopelessness of the task began to sink in before they’d gone half a mile. The possible launch points for an aerial release of the powdered ricin were pretty close to infinite – and unless they happened to see Ber Lusim loitering at a window or looking down from a roof, there was almost nothing to make any one stand out from the next.

  Higher was better. Upwind was essential. They were searching a vast cone of three-dimensional space with the northern end of Manhattan Island as its base – and they were searching it from the ground.

  Except that Kennedy wasn’t. She’d allowed the truck to roll to a halt, and she was looking south. Diema followed her gaze. They’d reached the end of a cross street – the sign told her it was 225th. Highway 9 was ahead of them, with a stretch of elevated railway rising like a rampart over the surface street. Beyond was just more of what they’d already seen, factories and marshalling yards and sheds, with occasional rows of shops whose windows were so grimy you couldn’t guess from this distance what it was they sold.

  But just south of them, beyond the glittering arc of the Henry Hudson Bridge, Broadway opened up like a lover’s arms.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Diema asked. ‘Why have you stopped?’

  ‘I’m just thinking of an old joke,’ Kennedy said. ‘When you’re buying real estate, what are the three most important things to bear in mind?’

  ‘I have no idea. Please keep moving.’

  ‘Location, location and location.’

  Kennedy turned to look at her hard, and Diema understood what it was she was saying.

  ‘Ber Lusim’s factory,’ she murmured.

  ‘Exactly. Why here? Presumably he didn’t want to transport the poison a long way. Every time he moved it, he was risking being stopped, and found out. So he wanted to be close. But this close? I mean, that’s Ginat’Dania down there, isn’t it? A half-mile south of us?’

  Diema said nothing.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Kennedy exploded. ‘Just nod!’

  Slowly, with a prickle of superstitious dread, Diema forced her head to move – down once, then up again.

  ‘So I’m guessing he was well within the radius of your border patrols. There’s no way you wouldn’t keep a watch on your own front doorstep. He’s way too close, and way too visible.’

  ‘Perhaps it pleased his ego to play with us.’

  Kennedy drummed the steering wheel with the heels of her thumbs, thinking. ‘Maybe. But is that what he was like, as a Messenger? Did he grandstand or did he get the job done?’

  ‘Mostly,’ Diema admitted, ‘he got the job done.’

  ‘Then I think we’re missing something. We’ve got to be. Otherwise—’

  Diema’s phone rang, and although the rhaka seemed disposed to carry on talking, she silenced her with a raised hand. That tone meant Kuutma. And if Kuutma was calling her, he had something important to tell her or to ask her.

  Rush had got sick of the final prophecy. They’d worried it to pieces and there didn’t seem to be any new insights to be gleaned. So he’d flicked back to the first page and started from scratch.

  He was struck all over again by how ludicrous it was to read this crap as though it contained sacred truths. Toller wasn’t just barking, he was barking and boring – so hung up on the minutiae of his own time that he couldn’t talk about the eternal without making six or seven veiled references to the strictly contemporary.

  Which, when you thought about it, was strange for one of the Judas People. Getting so caught up in local politics – Adamite politics – seemed like worrying about the weather forecast for the moon.

  Something was nagging at Rush. It had been nagging at him when he read the scholarly accounts of Toller and the other Fifth Monarchists on the plane, and when he’d talked it over with Diema. It was the blunt end of an idea, but it wasn’t making enough of an impression to stick. It was just that general sense of wrongness or incongruity, combined with something really tiny and specific that he’d already noticed and wondered about, a discrepancy between the written accounts and the observable here and now.

  A second later, as he got into the meat of the prophecies, it fell out of his head altogether, because something else struck him much more forcefully. It was sitting in the book’s opening paragraphs, and the only reason he hadn’t seen it before was because he’d been focusing on the actual text, rather than on the annotations that Kennedy had written in the margins or over the words. That French guy’s sleeve notes.

  And so I stand upon the Muses’ Mountain, asking Inspiration
of all, though my true Muse be Godde the Higheste. And here He doth deliver, through me unworthy, His final Judgment.

  That was Toller. And over the words ‘the Muses’ Mountain’ Kennedy had written in neat black biro a single word.

  Parnassus.

  The word produced the image: the picture of a mountain on the sign they’d passed as they walked in here. Parnassus Iron and Steel.

  Rush got to his feet. The nape of his neck prickled like someone was standing right behind him and breathing on it. Would Ber Lusim – or his Obi Wan, Avra Shekolni – have missed that reference? They’d taken everything else in the book literally as gospel. So it made sense that they would have felt the book had directed them to this place.

  Which was empty. There was nobody here, and nowhere for them to be hiding. Kuutma’s Messengers had searched the building and found nothing.

  But Rush felt that the silence around him had changed, somehow, and he didn’t feel like sitting down again. It was only a conditional silence, in any case. Just like anywhere in New York, the air carried the roar of traffic from the middle distance. This emptiness was in the heart of a great city. Rush was standing at the still centre of the turning world.

  He stepped out of the sunlight and did a slow circuit of the room, with the manuscript rolled up in his hand. He moved quietly, because the echoes of his footsteps sounded disconcertingly loud. Whenever he stopped, he listened. But nothing was moving any closer than the traffic.

  When he moved out of the main factory floor into the smaller rooms around it, Rush admitted to himself that this had become a search. He still didn’t know what it was he was looking for, but the uneasiness was eating at him and he wanted to be absolutely sure there was nothing there.

  He found himself at last in front of the double doors that led through to the grease pit. He’d seen Kennedy and Tillman looking it over earlier, so he was pretty certain that there wouldn’t be anything to see here, but he went in anyway.

  The pit was foul. Probably it had been left that way by the previous owners. The walls and floor of it were thick with industrial residue that might have been oil, tar, paint or most likely all of the above. There were puddles of water with an unhealthy, nacreous sheen to them, and a stink of baking bitumen hung over everything like the breath of a motorway on an August morning.

  He looked up at the ceiling. There weren’t any obvious holes in it, but that didn’t mean anything. Water finds its level. The rain could have come in somewhere else and ended up in the pit because the pit was the lowest point.

  There was no way of getting down there without ruining your clothes. If you sat down and lowered yourself in, the seat of your pants would get covered in the oily muck. If you jumped, you’d raise a splash.

  He walked around the pit instead, feeling like an idiot and yet relieved at the same time that there was nothing to see.

  Except that there was. Halfway around the rim, he walked into a shaft of sunlight that came in through a broken skylight high above him and hit one of the pit’s walls. Part of the wall must have been raised a little proud of the area around it, because there was a shadow – perfectly square, and about five feet on a side. It looked like there was a trapdoor in the wall, except that it was only the outline of a door. The colours and textures of that area of wall were exactly the same as the colours and textures to either side of them. It had to be a trick of the light, but it was a disconcerting one, and once he’d seen it he couldn’t trick himself into not seeing it again.

  He stood irresolute at the edge of the pit. This was ridiculous. If there was something here, someone else – someone who knew what they were doing – would have found it by now.

  The sun went behind a cloud, the ray of light disappeared and the imaginary door went with it. Rush turned away. But at the last moment before he walked out of the room, he remembered Diema’s words back at Dovecote.

  Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for.

  Bugger it.

  Rush launched himself into the pit with an ungainly jump, landing heavily and sending up, just as he’d feared, a shower of variegated filth. He almost lost his footing, but saved himself by holding onto the wall.

  One baby step at a time, scared both of what he was treading in and of what he was breathing, he crossed the pit to the wall where the tell-tale shadow had been. There was nothing there. No sign of a hinge or a handle, or of a physical break in the wall where a door might begin or end. But then, the oily residue that had been sluiced over everything made a pretty effective camouflage.

  It was pretty fresh, too, and splashed a little thicker, here, than elsewhere on the wall.

  Suppressing a shudder, Rush reached out and pushed his fingers into the thick muck. He ran them from right to left and back again, feeling for a break point, a crack in the structure. There was nothing like that.

  But there was something else. Around about his chest height, there was a raised spot, rounded and about an inch and a half in diameter. A boss or the head of a rivet, maybe. Rush scooped the oily mess away from it and found a circular plate made of some dull, weathered metal.

  It was pivoted at the top, so you could slide it sideways. Rush did so now.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ he whispered.

  He was looking at a keyhole.

  Kennedy got out of the truck and walked to the corner of the street. Diema’s conversation with Kuutma didn’t look like ending any time soon, and since they were talking in their own language there was nothing to be gained from eavesdropping.

  There was a lot of traffic on the main highway, but nobody walking anywhere in sight. The corner store had been a Blockbuster, but not for a while now. Displayed in its window were the upcoming movie sensations of a few years back. Wild Hogs. 300. Zodiac. A poster offered two movie rentals plus popcorn and a large bottle of Coke for $12.99. Underneath the poster lay a dead bird, something small and nondescript, like a sparrow or a dunnock, that had gotten itself in there and couldn’t get out again.

  Two hours and some odd minutes to go, and they were treading water. But she couldn’t think of anything else they could do. In a city-wide game of hide-and-seek, the hider had it all over the seeker.

  But she was right about the location. She knew there was something there, if she could only think it through. Ber Lusim had extracted and purified his toxin in a place that increased his own risk enormously. Why would someone who was supposed to be a master strategist do something that was so stupid on the face of it?

  Maybe the answer was something really banal. When he first became a Messenger, Ber Lusim might have been sent out to patrol these streets. He could have found the old steelworks back then and kept it in mind. Except that back then, he’d still been sane and – you had to assume – wasn’t contemplating mass murder even as a distant possibility.

  So make a different assumption. He chose the location later, nearer to the present time. He was looking for a specific feature and this place had it. And whatever it was, it was worth the risk of sending his highly visible bright-red trucks here twice, and maybe spending time here himself, within walking distance of the homeland where he was a wanted man.

  Twice. The trucks came here twice. And the poison was the second shipment, not the first. But in that case…

  Diema appeared at her shoulder without a sound, making her start violently. ‘Shit,’ she exclaimed.

  The girl didn’t waste any time on apologies. ‘They found out what the first shipment was.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Kennedy.

  ‘It was conventional explosive. Ten thousand tons of octocubane and five kilos of acetone peroxide.’

  Kennedy thought through the amounts. ‘Is the peroxide a primer?’

  Diema nodded.

  ‘So how big a blast is that? Not big enough to kill a million, right?’

  ‘Big enough to take down most of a city block. Depending on where you placed it, you could easily get ten or twenty thousand casualties.’

  It was clear that the girl wante
d to head back for the truck. She made a feint in that direction now, looking at Kennedy expectantly, but Kennedy was fishing out the earlier thought about the trucks. Something was falling into place, and the explosive was the piece that made sense out of everything else.

  ‘Earth and air,’ she muttered.

  Diema got the reference. ‘Toller’s book,’ she said. ‘“God will speak in fire and water, and last in earth and air.”’

  ‘We screwed up,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think we screwed up.’

  ‘How? What did we miss?’

  ‘We were thinking Ber Lusim had to release the ricin into the air.’

  ‘He does,’ Diema insisted. ‘That’s the only way you could get casualties on the scale the prophecy calls for.’

  ‘But microlights? Crop dusters? This is the most fiercely defended airspace in the world. He could never be sure of getting through. And my idea about balconies and rooftops – if the wind changes, he’s nowhere. He can’t wait. We know that much. Shekolni told us an exact time, not a vague ballpark.’

  Diema’s mind was running parallel to hers now. ‘If earth and air were one thing, not two things …’

  ‘That’s it,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘You remember Nine/Eleven? You’d still have been at school, but—’

  ‘We remember,’ Diema said tightly.

  ‘When the towers fell, there was a dust cloud like nothing on earth. Thousands and thousands of tons of dust, racing through the streets on the shockwave, running the length and breadth of Manhattan. People got sick, just because of the dust. Some of them are still sick.’

  ‘Berukhot! He uses the explosive to blow up a building …’

  ‘To pulverise a building. Smash it into atoms. So you get a massive shockwave and a massive dust cloud. And the ricin is inside the building, so the dust cloud becomes a vector. It spreads out from here along the lines of the streets. Earth and air, all mixed together into a poison cocktail. It kills everyone who takes a breath.’