The Demon Code

by Adam Blake

  ‘But what happened in the meantime? What made him abandon his mission and his people and go native like that?’

  ‘An angel,’ Ber Lusim said, his voice almost a growl, ‘spoke to him.’

  ‘Right.’ Rush nodded. ‘An angel spoke to him and gave him the secrets of heaven. And Toller wanted to share the amazing things he’d learned. He felt like he had to share it with the whole world. So he goes to England.

  ‘And this is where I kind of lose the plot. It’s the Civil War. The political scene in England is a snake pit, but Toller jumps in like it’s a swimming pool. He makes all kinds of friends and enemies in Cromwell’s government. He rallies the religious dissenters – becomes one of their spokesmen, kind of. He joins the Fifth Monarchy movement. Gets a seat at the table. And I’m asking myself: why? What is the point of it all? If you’ve seen the eternal truth, why would you care whether Cromwell or Fairfax keep their promises, or whether bishops get to speak in parliament? It’s a sideshow. The world is going to end, the kingdom is going to come and that’s all that matters.’

  Diema pulled her attention away from the doctrinal argument and looked for her gun. It was far enough away that she’d have to crawl to reach it and it looked as though it had taken a direct hit in any case.

  But she had the other gun, in her ankle holster: the tiny, modest little M26 that she’d taken from Nahir and Shraga almost as an afterthought.

  She groaned and rolled over as though she were in agony, using the movement to curl her legs up and bring them closer to her left hand. It felt as though her right wrist might have been broken when Ber Lusim shot the gun out of her hand – an outrageous feat, even at this short a distance.

  ‘Time is contained within eternity, like the grit in a pearl,’ Ber Lusim was saying. ‘Toller saw all things, both close and far away. And he cared about all things.’

  Rush held up the book, his hand shaking even more noticeably. ‘Okay, maybe. Maybe it happened like that. But here’s another scenario: Toller was nobody. Just some guy. But he was British. He came out of England, maybe doing the whole grand tour thing, or maybe because he was a merchant or a diplomat.

  ‘So he’s travelling through the Alps, and he has an accident. Only he’s not alone when he has it. And he’s not the only survivor. There’s another man, lying next to him – injured, probably dying. That’s your prophet, fresh out of Ginat’Dania. And that’s the moment when everything changes for Toller. That’s where his life turns upside down.

  ‘Because the injured man is hallucinating, and he can’t stop talking. Or else it’s just that he knows he’s dying. He’s got to tell his life story to someone before he goes, and Toller’s right there. Toller’s listening. Listening with every ear he’s got.’

  ‘This is grotesque,’ Ber Lusim said.

  ‘So Toller gets the whole story. The holy betrayer. The secret city. The end of the world. It’s a revelation. No, it’s a whole book of revelations. And it’s got to be the truth, because who’s going to waste the last hours of his life spinning such a crazy story? It’s as though God put this man just in the right place, just at the right time, so that Toller’s eyes could be opened.

  ‘And when it was done, and the man was dead, Toller went home to England and picked up his life again. Except now he was a prophet. A man with a message. And he wanted to give the message as much authority as he could, so he came up with the angel’s visitation. Or maybe that was how he actually remembered it by this time, I don’t know. Maybe he really thought your man was an angel.’

  ‘Why should this thing be true?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Where is your evidence?’

  Diema had pulled the leg of her jeans up three inches from her ankle, exposing the holster. The gun was lying ready to her hand. But now another problem presented itself. Two problems, in fact. How was she going to get through Ber Lusim’s guard any better the second time, now that she was using her weaker, slower hand? And how was she going to draw and fire on him without hitting Rush, who was directly in the way? She saw that Kennedy was watching her, ready to move when she did.

  ‘It’s not about the evidence,’ Rush said, ‘although I do have some. A little, anyway. But think about it. Doesn’t my version make more sense? In your story, a Messenger decides out of nowhere to betray his sacred trust and go preach to the heathens. In mine, he only talks because he knows he’s dying.’

  ‘He didn’t just decide,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘You’re forgetting that he had a visitation from God.’

  ‘And this visitation somehow gave him a complete who’s who of English politics? And it made him think that English politics actually mattered? Because he spent the rest of his life there, Ber Lusim. He was executed for trying to murder some kind of government clerk. What the hell was that?’

  Ber Lusim took a step towards Rush, but Rush backed away. He held the book in his two hands, ready to tear it down the length of its spine. ‘You better back off,’ he warned Ber Lusim. ‘Or I’m going to commit some serious blasphemy.’

  Ber Lusim raised his gun again and pointed it at Rush. ‘The book will be destroyed in the explosion in any case,’ he said. ‘Its physical integrity isn’t of paramount importance to me now. I would just like to die holding it. In any event, I’ve heard you out and I have not been swayed in the smallest degree. If you were meant to test me, boy, I’ve passed the test.’

  ‘But I’ve got evidence,’ Rush blurted. ‘I told you I had some evidence, right? Well, here it is. Forget about the angel and the accident, and all the rest of it. Forget about what Toller knew or where he got it from. Remember the one thing that he did that marked him out as one of the Judas People.

  ‘He used the sign of the noose.’

  Diema had her hand on the grip of the M26 and had eased it halfway out of the holster. But Rush was still in the worst possible position, blocking most of her line of fire but almost none of Ber Lusim’s line of sight.

  ‘Toller used the sign of the noose as a blessing,’ Rush said. ‘His followers didn’t know what it was and he never explained it to them. But he did it anyway.’

  ‘I know this,’ Ber Lusim said.

  ‘You don’t know anything. Toller never used the sign of the noose even once.’

  Ber Lusim’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘What?’

  Rush shrugged, showed his empty hands. ‘I know, right? I thought that, too, the first time I read it. But then I saw Diema make the sign and something didn’t feel right. I got her to talk me through it. Then I went back and I read it again, and there it was. He put his hand to his throat, thence to his heart, and his stomach, and so in a circle back to where it began.’

  ‘I have read the passage,’ Ber Lusim snarled. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’

  ‘So if you had a clock face on your chest,’ Rush said, stealing the metaphor that Diema had used on the plane to Budapest, ‘that’s the way the hands would turn. Look. Like this.’

  Diema could see that Rush was making the sign, just the way Robert Blackborne said Toller had made it. And she could tell from the way Ber Lusim’s eyes widened that he got the point.

  ‘It’s the wrong way round,’ Rush said. ‘As though Toller learned it by looking in a mirror. Which I think is more or less what he did.’

  ‘No,’ Ber Lusim said. It wasn’t a disagreement: it was a warning.

  ‘Yes,’ Rush insisted. ‘Not a mirror, obviously. But he saw someone else doing it and he copied it, exactly the way he saw it. He just forgot to turn it around.’

  ‘No,’ Ber Lusim said again.

  ‘It’s kind of funny, in a sick way,’ Rush said. Bluntly. Brutally. ‘You going to all this trouble, I mean.’ He gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Pity Avra Shekolni is dead. I bet he’d have loved this.’

  Maybe it was the laugh that sent Ber Lusim over the edge. He lunged forward, his hand shooting out to grip Rush’s throat.

  It was the only moment they were going to get.

  ‘Now!’ Diema bellowed. ‘Do it now!’
r />   Kennedy rose to her feet, gun in hand.

  Ber Lusim turned.

  And Diema fired.

  Ber Lusim drew in his breath in a tremulous gasp. He looked down at his chest – at the small round hole that had appeared there, like a mysterious punctuation mark. A full stop, inscribed directly onto his heart. It went from black to red, and blood welled out of it. Ber Lusim had stiffened, his eyes wide as though from some awful realisation.

  But it was Rush who fell, toppling from the ground up as his knees buckled under him.

  Left-handed, out of position, Diema had taken the only shot she could: through Rush’s right shoulder and into the left side of Ber Lusim’s chest.

  And now the way was clear. She and Kennedy fired again and again, emptying their guns into the assassin. Ber Lusim bowed his head and took the punishment, as though a man could endure gunfire in the same way as he endured heavy rain.

  But this weather took a greater toll. Ber Lusim sank to his knees, as though by choice, then lowered himself by gradual degrees into a posture of prayer, which was how he died.

  Kennedy began to approach the dead man slowly, covering him with her now-useless gun.

  ‘No!’ Diema shouted. ‘The timer, Kennedy! The timer!’

  The woman ran to the desk, but hesitated. The smaller bomb that was the primer for Ber Lusim’s WMD was a baroque, ramshackle thing with wires and metal rods connecting to packets of acetone peroxide and clusters of industrial blasting caps. ‘What do I do?’ Kennedy yelled.

  The timer on the screen showed twenty-three seconds. Kennedy turned to look at Diema, desperate, urgent. But Diema had no more idea than she did and it must have showed in her face.

  With a wordless cry, like a paratrooper jumping out of a plane, Kennedy ripped the laptop out of the circuit.

  It continued to count down in her hands.

  To ten.

  To five.

  To zero.

  Diema held an in-breath until her chest ached. Then slowly, soundlessly, let it out.

  69

  ‘I’m bleeding,’ Rush said plaintively, from the floor. ‘Oh Christ. I’m bleeding all over the place. Help me.’

  Diema crawled across to him slowly and painfully. She checked Rush’s wounds: both of them, entry and exit. The entry wound was small and neat and wouldn’t give any trouble at all. The exit wound was a lot bigger and the bullet had taken meat with it.

  By the time it hit its intended target, the bullet would have spent at least a third of its initial velocity, most of it inside of Ben Rush. No wonder it had stopped Ber Lusim dead. The slowing bullet, lacking the energy required to leave his body once it had forced its way in, had sent a widening shockwave ahead of itself, pulping his internal organs like a steak tenderiser.

  ‘You did well,’ Diema said to Rush, as she patched him up.

  Kennedy knelt down beside her and helped by tearing more strips of cloth as Diema knotted the makeshift dressing into place. ‘You did brilliantly,’ she confirmed. ‘Rush, how in the name of God did you figure that stuff out?’

  ‘I didn’t figure it out,’ he mumbled. His face was ashen. ‘I made most of it up. It’s probably all wrong. Except for the sign. I was pretty sure about the sign.’

  ‘You prevented a million deaths,’ Diema said. ‘You were a shield to my people. And to some of yours, too. You might amount to something one day after all, little boy.’

  ‘And you … aah, shit … you might grow some breasts,’ Rush countered. ‘Dream big.’

  Diema turned her attention to Kennedy. ‘I’ll finish here,’ she said. ‘You go and check on my father – and get the truck into position. We’re leaving.’

  A look passed between them. Kennedy nodded and left them to it, going rapidly back up the stairs to the grease pit.

  Diema carried on knotting the dressing more firmly in place until Rush took hold of her hand to stop her. ‘When we had sex,’ he asked her, ‘was that just so you could get pregnant?’

  ‘I’m not pregnant, Rush.’

  He stared at her, nonplussed.

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No. I said that to stop Nahir from cutting your throat.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’ He thought about that a little longer as she tested the tightness of the dressing. ‘Uh … why?’

  Diema was silent for a long time.

  ‘Do you mean, why would that stop him from killing you or why would I care whether he killed you or not?’

  ‘Either. Both.’

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ she told him. ‘My people have some pretty odd ways of looking at things sometimes.’

  Rush winced as some random movement sent a wave of pain through his torn shoulder muscle. ‘You don’t say? Well, thanks for the heroic self-sacrifice, anyway.’

  Diema said nothing, pretending to check Ber Lusim’s greying body for signs of life.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  ‘Do you feel up to moving?’ she asked Rush.

  He tried to get upright, but every movement hurt him. It took the two of them, finally, Diema bearing the boy’s weight whenever a twinge of agony froze his muscles. She raised him like a banner – a flag of surrender, because that was how it felt. As though she were giving in, suddenly but far too late, to the logic of an argument that had first been put to her three years before, when her hands were around the throat of Ronald Stephen Pinkus and the light disappeared from his eyes.

  ‘Ready?’ she asked Rush.

  ‘Ready for what?’ he panted. ‘You want to dance?’

  ‘I need you to walk.’

  ‘Okay.’

  It took an eternity for them to get up the stairs. Kennedy met them at the top, her face grim.

  ‘Leo’s just about awake,’ she told Diema, ‘but I think some of the wounds on his chest have opened up. I’m scared of moving him.’

  ‘We don’t have any choice,’ Diema said.

  They both looked towards Tillman. He was on his feet in the corner of the grease pit, his two arms stretched out along its edge to either side. His head was sagging onto his chest. He looked like a boxer who’d only just made it through the previous round.

  Diema turned back to Kennedy.

  ‘Heather, we have to go,’ she said. ‘This is—’

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘It was part of the plan, always. You take the stick out of the fire, you beat your enemies, and then you throw it back. You let it be burned.’

  ‘I got that, Diema. I got that the first time.’

  ‘I can walk,’ Tillman said. His voice was a ghastly, gallows thing.

  ‘Prove it,’ Diema said.

  But first they had to get out of the pit, which was so protracted an agony that Diema felt nostalgic for the stairs. She and Kennedy had to prop Tillman up against the side of the pit, then drag and push at his limbs one at a time as though they were trying to reassemble the faces of a Rubik cube. When they were done, he was lying on his back at the edge of the drop, exhausted by agony, drawing breaths so shallow that the front of his shirt, stiff with fresh blood, didn’t even move.

  Then they had to do the same thing with Rush.

  Finally they had both men up and moving, Diema supporting Tillman because she was the stronger of the two, Kennedy following with Rush.

  They made their way, like the last teams standing in a marathon three-legged race, out onto the factory floor and across the obstacle course towards the main doors.

  They passed Desh Nahir along the way, lying unconscious in his blood. Diema murmured a blessing, but didn’t stop or slow. The doors were in sight now, and she could see the tailgate of the truck. Tillman slipped in the algae-slick of a dried-up puddle, almost fell, but Diema held him upright by getting her weight under him and pushing him upward – the tsukuri part of a judo throw, with the follow-through indefinitely suspended.

  The doors were directly ahead of them. Her eyes on the ground, because she was forced now to treat each step, each shifting of her weight, as an exercise in
logistics, Diema saw her feet, and Tillman’s feet, enter the slanting beam of sunlight that spilled across the grimed cement. They were emerging into the world outside in tortuous slow motion.

  Kuutma stepped through the doors, with Alus and Taria to either side of him, and met them there. Other Messengers were standing on the asphalt outside, still and silent, awaiting Kuutma’s order.

  He stared at Diema, who had stumbled to a halt. His expression was complex and unreadable.

  ‘Report,’ he suggested to her, with dangerous mildness.

  Diema tried to speak, but the words fled away from her flailing mind.

  ‘I … we …’ she tried.

  ‘Ber Lusim is dead,’ Kennedy said. ‘It’s over. But you need to dismantle the bomb. And your man, Nahir, needs medical attention.’

  Kuutma’s gaze flicked to her for the smallest fraction of a second, then back to Diema. ‘Is this true?’ he asked.

  Diema nodded, still mute.

  ‘Then the threat is removed? There’s no longer any danger?’

  ‘There is …’ Diema tried again. ‘The bomb. As Kennedy says. We removed the detonator, but the bomb needs to be dismantled. And Nahir …’

  Kuutma turned to Alus and Taria. ‘See to him,’ he ordered, and they were gone from his side in an instant.

  ‘Dan cheira hu meircha!’ Kuutma shouted. Obedient to his command, the Messengers filed in through the doors to surround the small party.

  With Rush leaning on her right arm, Kennedy tried to get her left hand inside her jacket to reach her shoulder holster. Diema reached out, snake-swift, to grip her wrist and keep the hand in plain sight. If Kennedy succeeded in drawing the gun, she’d be dead before she drew another breath.

  Kuutma had been staring at Diema throughout these manoeuvres. ‘It was well done,’ he said to her. ‘It was very well done. You may stand down, Diema Beit Evrom. What remains to be done here, others will do.’

  Diema made no move. The muscles of her chest seemed to be squeezing her lungs, so that it was a great effort even to draw a breath. ‘Tannanu,’ she said, ‘I need to speak with you.’