by Adam Blake
She made the sign of the noose. Kuutma raised an eyebrow.
‘I’m sorry,’ Selaa said, a little sheepishly. ‘I’d feel sad even for the death of so many animals.’
‘But you wouldn’t ask God to bless their carcasses.’
‘No. I suppose not.’
‘Thank you, watermaster. I think this will be easy enough. Isn’t there a control, though, called the tsa’ot khep?’
Selaa looked puzzled. ‘The “Voice of the Flood”? That’s a defence mechanism, Kuutma. There won’t be anything left that needs to be defended.’
‘I know. But I’m curious. Please show it to me.’
‘With the biggest pumps removed, it won’t work in any case. Not as it’s meant to work anyway. It’s this control here: the sluices slaved to this lever, and the channels re-routed through the slides – ten of them in all – along here.’
‘Will all these controls still be functional tomorrow?’
Selaa nodded. ‘The power runs to the whole bank,’ she said. ‘I can’t turn off parts of the station house: nobody ever saw a need to.’
‘No. Of course. Again, thank you for your time. You must be very busy. I presume you have a set of keys to hand to me?’
She gave him her own, taken from a loop on her belt. ‘There’s a copy set in my office,’ she said. ‘But it should be these that lock the doors for the last time: they were given to me by Chanina, who was watermaster when I first came here. Please keep them when you’re done, Kuutma. It would make me happy for you to have them. Unless you think you’d have no use for such a souvenir.’
‘I’ll keep them until I die,’ he promised her. He bowed formally and withdrew.
I’d feel sad even for the death of so many animals. It was a sentimental thought, and sentimentality was something he’d seen little of in Ginat’Dania. It felt and looked like weakness – a weakness the people, because of their tiny numbers, could not afford to indulge. But what of his own weakness? What of the holes in his own armour, made by equally indefensible emotions?
He was going to kill twenty million. And yet he only cared about one.
Nethqadash shmakh, oh Lord. Help me to draw a breath in which there is only You.
59
Crossing the border turned out to be easier than Tillman had imagined. But thinking about it in safe hindsight as he threaded the back roads of a nameless hinterland just south of Chihuahua, he could see why it worked that way.
The resources of the state of Arizona were bent on stopping Mexicans from coming north across the border. What patrols they saw – and he knew there were a whole lot – had all been looking at the traffic in that one direction, and were not inclined to view one white man heading south in a suspicious light.
One white man, alone, because Kennedy lay slumped in the back of the Lincoln under a blanket, completely out of sight and asleep most of the time. She was still in a lot of discomfort from her injuries. Tillman didn’t have much to give her by way of pain relief, but he did have some more of the desflurane. When the pain got to be too much, he gave her a little of it to sniff on a paper tissue, after which she fell into a deep, scarily motionless slumber.
For the border crossing, he shifted her, with apologies, to the wheel well in the boot. Kennedy was afraid that folding herself into the narrow space would open up the wound in her side, but Tillman insisted. They couldn’t take the chance that a casual search would find her. He was proved right when the guards at the border station north of Nogales threw open the boot and rummaged through his luggage – the innocuous parts of it anyway, since the guns and explosives were inside the gutted and rebuilt rear seats – before sending him on his way.
He stopped as soon as he dared, about two miles further on, and helped Kennedy out of her confinement. The bloodied bandages at her side showed that her fears had been justified. Tillman got her to strip to the waist and changed the dressing quickly and expertly. He admired her breasts as he did so, because they were impressive and right there in front of his face, but he tried his best to edit out the memory afterwards, or at least to keep his mind on other things. Normally when he doled out medicine to fellow soldiers, they were neither man nor woman to him: you needed a level of detachment when doing running repairs on the failing body of someone you’d been swapping jokes with an hour or two earlier.
This seemed to be a good time to give Kennedy the clothes he’d brought along for her: anonymous blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a loose-fitting black jacket, serviceable trainers. Kennedy struggled into them, Tillman helping to manoeuvre her bound-up arm. Nothing fit her perfectly, but it was all more or less okay, and there was no denying she was a lot less conspicuous now. Like a tourist from north of the border, trying to look stylish but casual and failing in both aims.
‘I don’t think I’m going to make this,’ Kennedy groaned. ‘It’s another seven hundred miles. A whole day’s driving – a day and a night probably – and every time we go over a bump it’s like someone stuck a knitting needle in my kidneys.’
‘Take some more desflurane,’ Tillman suggested. ‘You can sleep all the way. Then we’ll take a couple of hours once we get there for you to put your brains back together.’
Kennedy shook her head emphatically. ‘I need to be awake for this,’ she said.
‘A day and a night,’ he reminded her. ‘You’re not going to stay awake the whole time, Heather. And if the pain gets to be too much, you might go into shock. Then I’d have to take you to a hospital, where they’d most likely match us up to the descriptions in some police APB. We just need to meet one person who’s more than half-awake and we’re solidly screwed.’
Kennedy chewed it over. ‘Yeah,’ she said at last, glumly, reluctantly. ‘Okay.’
She stretched out on the Lincoln’s back seat and Tillman doped her again: a stronger dose this time, but still well below the red line on the dosage chart he’d gotten along with the drug. Desflurane was a general anaesthetic after all, and sending Kennedy down too deep – into the realms where she’d need mechanical assistance even to breathe – was a real danger.
Tillman looked down at her, lying insensate, and experienced an unfamiliar twinge of conscience. Had he sucked Kennedy into his own madness or had they just met each other at a moment when she was mad enough to resonate on the same frequency? He covered her with a blanket, strapped her in at shoulder and waist with the seatbelts. He felt glad anyway, that he hadn’t told her her bed was mostly made of plastic explosive.
He kept to the back roads, even though the back roads were rougher and more treacherous. As night came on, he flicked the headlights to full beam and slowed down to forty, a compromise between their need to cover the distance before the search for them crossed the border and the more immediate need to drive around the crater-deep potholes instead of into them.
The desert night was as wide as a continent, and they were its sole inhabitants: a ghostly caterpillar threading the dark, with the beams of their headlights for its body and the Lincoln rocking along at its tail end. Tillman found himself drifting into reverie: Rebecca and the children spoke to him, or at least he saw their faces and heard sounds suggestive of their voices. There were no real words, though, and no need for him to reply. The burden of what they were saying was: soon.
Outside Zacatecas, with maybe three hundred miles still to go, he looked for a billboard next to the road. When he found one, he pulled off the asphalt and eased the car in behind it, so it would be out of sight unless someone was actually looking for it.
He didn’t bother to lie down. He just slid the seat back a couple of inches, closed his eyes and slept at the wheel.
His dreams were formless and hideous things, but Rebecca’s face floated above all of them, calling him onwards.
60
Kennedy woke around seven, with sun-up. She muttered and turned, but couldn’t keep the light out of her eyes. Her throat was so dry she couldn’t swallow, dry to the point of agony, and her head throbbed to the rhythm of her own hea
rtbeat.
They were still moving, or maybe moving again: the car yawed on its clapped-out shocks like a rubber dinghy in a squall.
‘Jesus,’ Kennedy groaned, thickly. ‘Where … where are we?’
‘Lopez Mateos,’ Tillman said. ‘It’s been all built up for the last thirty miles or so, but we’re not properly in the city yet – and Xochimilco is to the south. Say another hour.’
Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached over the back of the seat to hand Kennedy a bottle of water. She sat up, groggily, to drink it. She kept the first sip in her mouth, swilling it around, and then let it trickle down her throat in tiny increments. Even so, it made her stomach heave and her head spin. She persevered, while Tillman drove on in silence. Once the swollen membranes of her throat had eased a little, she could take larger swigs. Eventually she emptied the whole bottle. It did nothing to dull the ache in her head, but she felt a little more able to think around the pain.
She watched the anonymous suburbs and barrios roll by, while her mind came back into focus by fits and starts. When Tillman pulled in, about halfway along an interminable row of one-storey breeze-block buildings, she didn’t realise at first why he was stopping. Then the smell of cooking reached her: eggs and bread and something spiced. Kennedy’s stomach turned a few more aggrieved pirouettes, but underneath the nausea she found she was hungry.
In the rear corner of the bare and busy cantina, they ate huevos rancheros and tiny bread rolls still hot from the oven. Kennedy kept the jacket on, draped loosely over her shoulders to hide the cast on her arm, and ate one-handed. The food tasted unexpectedly delicious, and Tillman let her wolf the breakfast down in silence. When she finally came up for air, he got straight to business.
‘I need to know where we’re going,’ he told her. ‘Xochimilco, you said, and we’re almost there now. But is there an address? Some place specific we’re headed?’
‘There’s no address,’ said Kennedy, pushing the empty plate away. She’d popped two Tylenol along with the eggs and sausage and, between the food and the lessened pain, was starting to feel more like a human being. ‘But I know it’s in the area served by a particular electrical generating station – and I think it’s going to turn out to be something big. Something like a whole office block or a row of office blocks.’
She told Tillman about Peter Bonville and the unexplained hiccups in power usage that had first put him on the track of the Judas tribe. Tillman frowned in concentration, drinking the information in. He waited until she’d finished before he asked any questions.
‘This was all recent?’
‘Up to a couple of months ago. Bonville was on his way back from Mexico City when Flight 124 went down – why he was on it. And the crash happened on the same day Stuart Barlow was murdered.’
‘But you don’t think there was a connection?’
Kennedy shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound likely. As far as we know, Barlow and Bonville never met and never communicated. They didn’t exactly move in the same circles. The only connection is that they both represented a threat to Michael Brand and his … well, his people, I suppose. The people who sent him out into the world.’
She fell silent, thinking about the words of the Judas Gospel: the Elohim and the Kelim, the two types of emissary that this group of ancient sectarian ninja maniacs sent out into the world. She made a connection suddenly – probably because her brain was cross-wired right then, and begun working in ways slightly aslant to its usual functioning.
‘Your wife,’ she said to Tillman. ‘Rebecca. What was her maiden name?’
‘Kelly. Why?’
‘There was another Kelly who disappeared. Tamara? Talulah? Something like that. It was one of the cases Chris tied Brand to, before he died.’
Tillman stared at Kennedy, waiting for her to tease the thought out. ‘You flew here,’ she said. ‘I mean, to the States. From London.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But not under your own name?’
Tillman put down his fork, his eggs only half-finished. ‘I usually buy travel documents from a woman who specialises in fake identities. She’s ex-CIA, has friends in the corporate mercenary community and mainly works for people in that line of business. Espionage, but espionage that’s being done a level or so down from what the government gets up to. Heather, where are you going with this?’
‘Brand always uses the same name,’ she said. ‘It makes his job harder, makes it more likely that someone like you will pick up his trail, but he never, ever switches to an alias. Why is that?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to lie. And if it is that … then maybe …’
She was feeling dizzy again, and the eggs, which had tasted so good going down, threatened to rise catastrophically. Tillman saw from her face that she was going through some sort of crisis, reached out to touch her forearm.
‘You want to leave?’
‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Tillman, Emil Gassan said that Elohim, in Aramaic, means something like Messengers. In the regular Bible, angels get called that. I wonder if maybe Brand’s killers – his team of assassins – see themselves as guardian angels for their people, and so that’s the name they use.’
‘Okay. Go on.’
‘Well, if I’m right, the Kelim would have to be something else.’ She hoped he’d complete the chain of logic for her, but he didn’t. She was really saying: what if the Kelim, like Brand, walk among normal people without scrupling to lie about what they are? What if they choose a name that advertises their origins, or their purpose, or their nature.
Rebecca Kelly.
Tamara Kelly.
Maybe a whole lot of other Kellys. Why hadn’t she run a search on missing women with that surname?
What if they were the Kelim? Coming out like Brand and his team to complete some sort of mission in the world, then disappearing once that mission was done. And if they’d had a life in the meantime, raised a family, the family came back with them.
‘Possibly just ranks or specialised roles in the one organisation,’ Tillman said. ‘Probably they all work for Brand. But I think you’re right that he doesn’t want to lie. That’s why he leaves the coins, too. If there’s a link to Judas – and you said this gospel mentions silver pieces in terms of some kind of bargain these people struck with God – then the coins could refer to that. They announce that one of their kind was there.’ He chuckled – a sound so much at odds with her mood that it almost made her give a physical start. ‘But it’s some handicap, for a hit man – not being able to lie. I can’t see why they’d tie their hands behind their backs like that.’
Kennedy found that she could. ‘Why do Catholics give up comforts and luxuries for Lent?’ she asked, rhetorically. ‘Same thing maybe. They offer up their suffering to God – and the Judas people offer up, I don’t know, their truthfulness.’ Even as she said it, a better explanation hit her. ‘Or maybe they get absolution in advance, for specific sins – the way bishops used to bless soldiers going into war. But they’re only cleared for murder, not for every kind of sin they feel like committing. So they have to be moral in other ways and that includes not lying.’
‘That’s insane,’ Tillman pointed out.
‘Did you really think that we were dealing with sane people here, Leo? After everything that’s happened?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he signalled to the waiter with a wave and a nod that they were ready to pay.
‘They’ve lived like a big secret society for at least the last two millennia,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘But actually, that’s a lousy simile for what they are. Because they’re also a race. A secret race. A secret species almost. They don’t see themselves as anything like the rest of us – less like us than we are like monkeys maybe. They hold themselves apart. They ought to have their own country somewhere, but what they’ve got is …’
‘An office block in Mexico City.’
‘Or something. So don’t expect sanity, Le
o. Whatever we find at the end of this road, I can pretty much guarantee that it will not be sane.’
They drove on south, through a city that seemed to come at them in waves. Endless expanses of adobe and concrete slums – the old and the new thrown together in bleak discord – gave way to business districts where steel-and-glass fortresses stabbed at the sky. But then the same thing would happen in reverse, the gleaming towers and ramparts would die away and there would be more avenues of dust and breeze blocks and despair.
Finally, Tillman’s pocket map – bought from a gas station while Kennedy was still sleeping – told them that they’d arrived in Xochimilco.
It was not what Kennedy had been expecting. Knowing what she did about the sheer scale of the resources available to Michael Brand – resources sufficient to launch teams of murderers across whole continents and swat planes out of the sky – she’d thought she must be approaching some hub of power. One of the sky-threatening towers seemed appropriate, or else a complex of buildings on their own gated campus, like a modern fortress sealing itself off from the city that sprawled all around it.
Xochimilco held nothing even remotely like that. It was a factory district, mostly derelict. Weeds grew up in profusion through the asphalt of the wide streets and the only cars parked at the kerbside were burned-out wrecks. It was as though they were driving through a city that had hosted some private apocalypse. The buildings that rose on either side of them were huge, but they were only shells: every window broken, every door gaping dark and vacant like a dead man’s mouth.
Something tugged at Kennedy’s memory, something with overtones of death and disaster.
Tillman took turns at random. ‘Going to be a long job without an address,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not like there’s even any kind of a grid or we know what we’re looking for.’
‘Generating Station 73 South,’ said Kennedy. ‘Where Bonville found the weird patterns of power usage. That’s where we have to go.’