The Demon Code (41 page)

She was given a towel, a wrist band and a set of instructions in rapid Hungarian to which she just nodded along. There were separate entrances for men and women: Kennedy’s Hungarian was just about equal to following the arrowed signs marked
Nök
to a gleaming steel turnstile standing incongruously under a decorative arch, whose carved woodwork echoed the grape vines on the hill outside. A stony-faced woman with the hotel’s logo blazoned in red across her white T-shirt showed her how to use her wristband to swipe herself in.

Looking neither to right nor left, Kennedy went on, down a long flight of steps and through an underground tunnel into the main bath complex. A lot of it, she realised, was underground, although there were signs everywhere pointing up towards the outside pool.

Kennedy went into a one-person changing room, where she took off her light jacket, shirt and trousers, replacing them with T-shirt and shorts. The few things she needed to carry went into a string purse that she wore on her shoulder.

She looked innocuous. Unarmed. A lamb to the slaughter.

She exited the changing room and sauntered through the seemingly endless aisles and alleys of cubicles until she found one of the spiral staircases that led to the outdoor pool.

The pool area was vast and heaving with bronzed or lightly broiled bodies. Kennedy had read once – admittedly a good few years before – that the whole human population of the world could stand shoulder to shoulder on the island of Zanzibar. It looked as though most of them had chosen today to try to stand in the Hotel Gellert’s bath complex.

She sat down on a deckchair and anointed herself with sun-block, putting the bottle back in the shoulder bag afterwards. Then she checked her watch, not ostentatiously but visibly, and leaned back in the chair, hands folded demurely in her lap.

If it was going to happen at all, it would probably happen soon.

Kennedy’s three watchers had had to cross the city in lock-step with her, which prevented them from choosing their stations in advance. There was a brief, hurried conference at the western end of the Freedom Bridge, where Diema was able to use the hotel complex itself, looming in the middle distance, as a visual aid.

‘I’m going to be on the hill,’ she said. ‘That way I can see the front and side doors of the hotel, so I’ll be your early warning if anybody shows. Tillman, you go inside, in the lobby space. You can watch the entrance to the baths, and you’ll be on point if anyone gets past me.’

‘What about me?’ Rush asked, without much hope.

‘Watch the front doors, from the outside, and the steps up from the river,’ Diema said. She didn’t go to any effort to make it sound like a job that had any real importance.

‘Are they likely to come up from the river?’ Rush asked.

‘They could,’ Diema said.

She was already walking away when Tillman caught her by the arm and brought her to a halt. It was an electrifying moment, and it made Rush swallow the complaint he was halfway to voicing.

‘Do you have a problem?’ Diema asked, in a tone that said
do you want to lose that hand?

‘The GPS receiver,’ Tillman said.

‘What about it?’

‘No offence, girl, but I think I might have Heather’s interests more at heart than you do. Why not let me hold onto the base unit?’

They locked eyes for a long, dangerous moment.

‘Protector of women,’ Diema said. ‘Defender of the weak, and the weak-minded. Is that your brief, Tillman? Or do you just want to get into her pants?’

‘If you want to know about Heather’s pants,’ Tillman said equably, ‘you should probably ask Heather. Meantime, I’ll take the tracker. Unless this is something you actually want to fight about.’

Diema reached into a pocket of her black leather jacket, found something that looked a little like a TV remote, and tossed it to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You take it, with my blessing. It won’t do any good, though. She changed her mind about wearing it. You should teach your bitch a little discipline, some time. God knows, she could use it.’

The girl walked away before he could answer her, heading for the east side of the hotel and the rugged hillside beyond. She didn’t look back.

Tillman turned to Rush, who was giving him a slightly dazed stare.

‘Did I just hear right?’ the boy demanded. ‘Kennedy’s in the wind?’

‘Not if we do our job right,’ Tillman muttered gruffly. ‘Pick your spot, lad. And keep your channel open. This might be our last shot.’

‘It might be hers,’ Rush said.

And since Tillman had no answer to that, they parted without any further exchange of pleasantries.

Rush stayed where he was, out on the pavement in front of the hotel’s main entrance, with the street market right at his back. Tillman went into the lobby and up into the gallery set into the circular dome at its mid-point.

Once again, all they could do was wait. And Tillman was starting to feel that if they waited much longer, this so-called plan would founder on the reefs of their divergent agendas.

He was also wondering, if they happened to succeed in locating and neutralising Ber Lusim, for how long after that the Judas People would let them live.

Sitting under the rotunda dome at the centre of the Hotel Gellert’s lobby, wearing a gaudy shirt and with a camera around his neck, Hifela watched Heather Kennedy pass through the turnstile and considered his brief.
If she does anything that concerns you
, his commander had said.

He could refer back to Ber Lusim, but this seemed to fit the definition very well. For the
rhaka
to come so shockingly close to their base of operations was still an ambiguous act, but it admitted of very few interpretations – and in all of them, the woman or one of her associates had somehow succeeded in locating them. Possibly she was planning some kind of raid, but it seemed unlikely she’d do that by day. It was only too plausible, though, that she was reconnoitring the ground for a later incursion.

Hifela decided that this was a good moment to intervene. But he didn’t want to overstep the bounds of his commission, even then. He took out his phone and texted a message to Ber Lusim. ‘The woman is close to you. Horizontal distance, two hundred and fifty metres. Vertical distance, eighty metres.’

He sent the message, and while he waited for a reply he sauntered around the lobby, casting a critical eye on the statuary. But he could not relax, and he was all too aware that he looked as though he were inspecting the nudes on a parade ground.

He thought back, at this crucial juncture, to his life’s other major turning point, to the moment when he had decided to follow Ber Lusim into exile. That had been an act of blind faith. They had had no idea, then, of the part they were to play in human history. They hadn’t even known that they were chosen. Then the prophet had arrived and made sense of everything. He had promised to show them a miracle and he had delivered on the promise. He had shown them how every one of their own actions was a stone in a mosaic, not random but perfect and necessary and interconnecting. When Shekolni spoke, there was perspective.

So the other
Elohim
said, anyway. For Hifela, it was always more a matter of personal loyalty to his chief – love, even, for what he felt for Ber Lusim was more fervent and intense than anything he had ever felt for a woman; just as the intimacies of the battlefield were deeper than the intimacies of the bedroom.

His phone pinged once, the discreet sound of an elevator arriving. He glanced at the screen, then opened the text, which consisted of a single word.

Execute
.

Hifela stood slowly, set the camera to flash and took a photo of the nearest nude.

That was the prearranged signal. Although there was no visible sign of it in the random movements of the crowd around him, the word was being passed down the line and the Elohim assigned to him were going in.

Not against the woman. The woman would wait, a little while.

Until they’d disposed of her three guardian angels.

54

Ben Rush survived the first attack for one reason only: he was in Diema’s line of sight.

Rush was watching the hotel’s front entrance, which faced onto the river. Diema was watching from the south, where the hotel faced the hillside, and as always she favoured a high vantage point. In the absence of a building backing onto the hotel, she’d chosen a massive fig tree at the base of the hill, whose upper branches were on a level with the hotel’s fifth-floor windows. Tillman was inside, in the lobby, close to a window that looked onto the outside pool where Kennedy had positioned herself.

It was some trick of body language that made Diema focus on the man who was crossing the road, heading towards the front entrance and – as though coincidentally – towards Rush. She couldn’t say what it was she recognised, but she found herself staring at the man, registering him instantly as one of her own tribe. Then, as he drew the sica from the back of his belt, she realised belatedly that his left hand had just traced an ellipse against the light-coloured fabric of his suit jacket. It had seemed as though he were just smoothing out a crease, but it was the sign of the noose.

The distance was about two hundred metres – already long for the nine-millimetre, but the nine-millimetre was in her hand while the Chinese cannon was in the satchel sitting on the branch beside her. She was sure she could place a bullet in the man at that distance, but she couldn’t with any confidence gauge where it would hit – and he was of the chosen, so she couldn’t risk killing him.

Squaring the circle, she fired off five rounds in quick succession, aiming very low. Three pedestrians went down, shot in the knee, calf or foot. Screams and bellows rose from the street, and consternation burgeoned visibly from the seeds of pain and panic she’d just created. It was a rough and ready solution, but it made people flee across the knife-man’s path. It might also make Rush look in the right direction and catch sight of him.

It was the best Diema could do and it took a heartbeat longer than she would have liked. Because she knew for certain that she was blown. There was just no way Ber Lusim’s
Elohim
would come for Rush and not for her. And no way, given enough time and patience, that they wouldn’t have made her, sitting up in the tree, and gotten into position to take her.

The satchel was an arm’s length away, with all her kit – apart from the nine-millimetre and the walkie-talkie, still strapped to her belt – inside it. It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. She straightened her legs, slid forward and let herself fall straight off the branch. Rifle fire shredded the foliage above her and reduced her former perch to a threshing floor.

Diema used the canopy to slow her fall, turning it into a cascade roll, and caught herself on another branch ten feet lower down. She’d been able to gauge the direction of the gunfire, at least roughly, and had angled her fall to the left, away from the flank of the hill. Now she scrambled a few feet further over, even though it meant crawling out towards the thinner end of the branch she was on. The branch dipped precariously under her, but the bole of the tree was between her and the shooters.

For now.

She snatched up the walkie-talkie, but before she could open the channel, let alone speak, more shots smacked into the bark right above her head.

She was pinned from at least two directions. And they could see her.

Tillman saw the knife first, already in the air, the knife-man a half-second later. It was much too late by that time, and though he turned and dropped by subliminal reflex, that only meant the sica caught him higher up on his side and at a shallower angle. Sharper than a razor, it went into the angle of the pectoral and deltoid muscles on his right side and embedded itself deeply. Along with the pain came the shock of realisation that the hurt he’d just received was probably his death warrant. The anti-coagulants the
Elohim
used to coat their blades could render even a shallow graze deadly, and he’d just taken a deep wound at a nexus of two major arteries.

Two men – presumably Messengers, given their choice of weapon – were coming at him from two different directions around the circular gallery, intentionally cutting him off from the stairs and the lift. Tillman’s gun was tucked into the back of his belt and there was no time to get to it – especially with the protruding knife impeding his movements. Any of the
Elohim
would already have the advantage over him in speed. The man who’d already thrown was drawing another blade. The second assassin, marginally closer because he hadn’t taken the time to aim and throw, was coming towards Tillman at a run.

He carried the knife in his right hand, the left hovering above it seemingly en garde – but then he let the two hands draw apart, the knife-hand stabbing low while the supposedly defensive hand darted up to jab at Tillman’s throat.

Tillman walked right into the attack. Being wounded already freed him from that particular concern, although not from the danger of being disembowelled. He struck down with his own right hand to knock the knife aside and leaned to the side so that the throat-jab went wide.

He clamped his left hand onto the assassin’s shoulder. Still advancing, still turning, he ducked to transform the lock into a throw. He took the man’s knife-arm just above the wrist, pulled him around and down in a clumsy but quick
kitap
, but since he maintained his grip on his opponent’s forearm the weight of the man’s own body ripped his arm out of its socket.

And gave Tillman a knife.

He brought it up in time to fend off a slashing attack from the second man, the two knives clashing once, then twice, as though they were swords and this was a fencing bout. Tillman was aware that every movement was forcing more blood out of the deep wound in his side, but there was no time to think about that.

More worrying was the fact that he was facing a knife-fighter far more experienced and comfortable with this weapon than he was. He was giving ground with each feint and guard, backing towards the wall. He was going to lose, and he was going to die.