‘Where are the vats?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to see them.’
Raziel looked to Diema, who nodded. ‘Do as he says.’
Raziel led them to a massive room that seemed to take up most of the factory’s interior space. Certainly its ceiling, far over their heads, was the underside of the building’s roof, buttressed with massive steel beams and festooned with looped and dangling cables. The pigeons flew to and fro up there, and everything in sight was speckled chalk-white with their droppings. The beating of their wings reminded Kennedy very suddenly and strongly of a bike she’d had when she was seven. She’d slipped playing cards through the spokes of the rear wheel, and the sound when she rode it was exactly the same, she realised now, as the sound of pigeons taking startled flight.
In the centre of the room, obviously much newer than anything else in the place but already mottled with guano, stood seven massive tubs. They were of yellow plastic and they came up to Kennedy’s shoulder. In each, there was an inch or so of thick green slurry or paste.
‘Get me some of that,’ Tillman said. ‘But don’t touch it with your hands.’
Taria found a length of wooden slat and used it as a spoon, scooping up a little of the muck. She held it out to Tillman, who leaned his weight against a cement pillar before he took the slat and sniffed at the gooey mess.
‘Is that the toxin?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘No, it’s too wet,’ Tillman said. ‘This is just cake. Ber Lusim’s people would have crushed the beans here, expressed the oil, and then filtered the residue a whole bunch of times. But they’d still have needed to precipitate the ricin. That’s a two-stage process. We’re looking for a room with a lot of wide, flat trays in it.’
‘Why are we looking for it?’ Nahir asked, with sarcastic emphasis.
Ignoring him, Diema barked out a terse command. Raziel and the angels made the sign of the noose and got moving at once. Nahir stayed where he was.
‘
Na be’hiena se ve rach
chain of command,’ Diema said to him. Her tone was mild, but her eyes were narrowed. Nahir met that gaze for a second or two longer, then joined the search.
That left Diema and the three of them. She turned to Tillman. ‘You’ve seen a place like this before?’ she asked him.
‘Twice.’ He held up two fingers, counted them off. ‘The first time in Afghanistan, the second time right here in America. Texas. Small-scale outfits, both times, and as far as we could tell, neither of them processed enough ricin to hurt anyone. Except themselves, maybe. This looks to be a slicker operation.’ He pointed at some bags of chemicals stacked up next to the vats. ‘Sodium sulfate. Carbon tet. Lots of both. And seven vats means they had batches refining and drying all the time. A real assembly line.’
He reached up a hand to scratch his chest, but was defeated by the thick layers of dressings and gave up after a moment or two. ‘It’s the delivery system, every time,’ he murmured.
‘What is?’ Diema asked.
Tillman looked at her, shrugged one shoulder: the other was holding most of his weight. ‘The problem with ricin. It’s really nasty stuff. Kills if it’s inhaled, or swallowed, or if you get any of it inside your system some other way. But you need more than a grain or two. You need a thick aerosol spray or a solid pellet. Did you ever hear of Georgi Markov?’
Diema shook her head.
‘A Bulgarian writer, and a political dissident. Lived in London in the 1970s. He was saying harsh things about the Soviets, and they wanted to shut him up, so someone got an assassin to stab him with the sharp end of an umbrella. Three days of agony, then he died. The umbrella had been rigged to deliver a pellet of ricin about a millimetre in diameter.’
‘Which is fine if you want to kill one Bulgarian,’ Diema said.
Tillman nodded. ‘But you can’t bomb New York with poisonous umbrellas. You need a delivery system that will flood the streets with millions of those pellets or with billions of smaller solid particles in suspension. If we figure out the system, we’ll know where to find Ber Lusim. And whatever it is he’s come up with, this is where he put it together, so there might be a clue here.’
Nahir and Raziel returned, followed a few minutes later by Taria and then Alus. ‘Nothing,’ Nahir said. ‘No trays, and no obvious surface on which trays might have been ranged or racked. You appear to be mistaken.’
Tillman turned – slowly, carefully, shifting his weight with some difficulty – to look at the Messenger. ‘Maybe about the logistics,’ he said. ‘Not about the chemistry. This process would have produced a pulpy mass, and once it’s dried the ricin is skimmed off the surface. You lay it out flat in a shallow tray because you want a big surface area. If Ber Lusim didn’t do that here, then he took the refined pulp away and skimmed it somewhere else.’
‘A secondary processing plant,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe over in Manhattan itself. Would there be any way of identifying it?’
Tillman shook his head reluctantly. ‘No, it’s a pretty streamlined operation. This is the biggest and the hardest part of the job. Pressing the beans, extracting the oil and processing the pulp. That takes time, manpower and a lot of powerful chemical solvents. But when you’re skimming it, all you need is a blade.’
‘And gloves,’ Diema said. ‘Presumably.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t want to touch the stuff, certainly. Or breathe it in. You’d have your harvesters in protective body suits with their own air supply. But unless they go out for a cigarette break and forget to change into their street clothes, I don’t see where that helps us.’
‘In any case, the skimming wouldn’t still be going on now,’ Kennedy pointed out. ‘Whatever Ber Lusim intends to do, we’ve got to assume he’s got it all in place and ready to go.’
‘The trucks that dropped the castor beans and chemicals off here,’ Taria said. ‘Where did they go afterwards?’
Kennedy had never heard Taria speak before and she was surprised that the woman’s voice was light and soft rather than sonorous.
‘I don’t know,’ Diema admitted. ‘And it’s a good question. Nahir, find out.’
Nahir took out a cellphone and dialled, without protest or argument.
The earlier conversation about the chain of command must have struck a chord
, Kennedy thought.
While he spoke, either to Kuutma or more likely to some subordinate, Tillman made his own painfully slow circuit of the factory. Kennedy went with him, supporting some of his weight.
There was nothing in the main room that caught his attention, but at the back of the space, furthest from the door through which they’d entered, there was a double-door that had once been padlocked. A length of chain still hung from one of the two handles, and the wood of the doors themselves was splintered around the edges. At first, Kennedy thought that Kuutma’s
Elohim
must have forced the door when they searched the place. Then she realised that the broken chain was welded to the woodwork with immemorial deposits of pigeon shit. It had been there a long time.
In the space beyond, they found a grease pit. Tillman examined it closely, even though he had to kneel down to do so. It was a massive space, about twenty feet by ten in area and five feet deep, with two parallel bars of pitted, rusted iron laid across the bottom. ‘There would have been some kind of hydraulic lift here,’ Tillman thought aloud. ‘Back when this place was still up and running, I mean.’
‘Are you wondering whether Ber Lusim could have laid trays or racks out down there, to skim off the ricin?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘Thought had crossed my mind.’
It looked unlikely, at first glance. The floor of the pit was filled with a thick, foul sediment of oil and slurry.
But Kennedy tapped with her foot at the edge of the pit. Tillman looked where the toe of her shoe was pointing: fresh scuff and scrape marks showed light against the ingrained oil stains at the edge of the pit, and a bisected crust of pigeon shit indicated where a piece of rusty sheet metal had been moved.
‘Something got done here, anyway,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe he threw a cover over the pit and set the racks out on that.’
Tillman scanned the bare room slowly, with intense and silent concentration. Then he made a circuit of the pit, which took a good ten minutes, and finally rejoined Kennedy.
‘Plenty of evidence of movement,’ he said. ‘Heavy stuff being dragged around. I think you’re right, Heather. Ber Lusim processed the ricin right here, and then he hauled it out. What I’m looking for is some kind of clue as to what else he might have done with it first. Whether it’s still just loose powder or it’s been packed into jackets or containers of some kind. Aerosol sprayers is a possibility, but then we ought to find some more chemical residues. He’d have been messing with propanes or ether compounds to make a propellant, and the smell would be all over here.’
Kennedy looked at her watch. It was 14.48. Four hours and twelve minutes left. ‘Let’s go see if Nahir found anything on those HEH transports,’ she suggested.
They found that the others had returned to the truck. Rush was sitting on the tailgate, leafing through the typescript of Toller’s book, while Diema was speaking to the other
Elohim
in their native tongue.
She turned to Tillman and Kennedy as they approached, and switched to English. ‘The trucks went from here to a rented lot at Locust Point,’ she said. ‘Four miles east. They’re still there. Nobody’s used them since, as far as we can tell.’
‘Okay,’ Tillman said. ‘Did you check for—’
Nahir rode right over him. ‘They’re empty, and they’ve been stripped clean. Nothing to go on. Nothing we can use. And the site rental was paid through a front company in Belgium. It was a dead end.’
‘But there’s something else,’ Diema added. ‘Kuutma has been working through the satellite images, and he found something. The time we know about – when they delivered the castor beans – that was the
second
time this place was visited. HEH trucks came here another time, a week earlier. So there could be something else, besides the ricin. Another threat.’
‘No,’ Rush said.
Nahir shot the boy a look of sheer exasperation and muttered something in Aramaic.
‘It doesn’t make sense, that’s all,’ Rush said, with a defensive shrug. ‘The prophecy talks about one thing. One breath, killing a million people. Not multiple attacks.’
‘He’s right,’ Kennedy said. ‘Whatever was in the first delivery, it has to relate to the ricin. It’s all got to be tied together, somehow. Can we find out what it was?’
‘We’re trying,’ Diema said. ‘The information could be in the computers we took in Gellert Hill. We just can’t afford to wait for it. We’ve either got to find Ber Lusim or else we’ve got to cover every base.’
Kennedy felt a wave of fatalistic despair sweep over her, like a sudden paralysis. There was too much ground to make up and too little time. Ber Lusim had set the agenda all along, and everything they’d done had achieved nothing more than getting them ringside seats for his command performance. Under the circumstances, it was hard to make herself believe that anything they did now could matter.
But Diema was still pacing, her face fierce with thought. And Tillman, watching her, was wearing an expression that was both more complicated and more painful. His desire to help her, to make her mission succeed, was palpable. He’d almost died trying, and it wasn’t over yet.
What was left? What had they missed? What could they still hope to do, in the dog end of time they still had?
‘You said your people checked the water already?’ she asked Diema.
‘Yes,’ Diema said tersely. ‘There’s nothing out there now that shouldn’t be there. And there are
Elohim
stationed at the confluence of the rivers. If anything unscheduled comes down into this stretch, they’ll keep a watch on it – and fire on it if they have to.’
At the confluence of the rivers. That meant at the northern end of Manhattan, right across the water from where they were now. Kennedy wondered whether Diema knew how much she was giving away here, and decided that the answer was almost certainly yes. Whatever else she was, the girl was no fool.
Ber Lusim’s big finale was also his homecoming. Where else would one of the chosen expect the Messiah to descend? So now Kennedy had found Ginat’Dania twice – and this time she hadn’t even been looking for it. It was one more problem that would have to be faced at some point: whether there was any way the three of them could get out of this alive, knowing what they now did.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘And you’ve got the street traffic covered. Air dispersal seems like the best bet – maybe the only bet – but there’s no way he’s going to get in close by diverting a commercial flight. Nine/eleven closed that loophole.’
‘And we’ve got effective lockdowns on all private airfields,’ Alus said. ‘Nothing can get into the air without our
Elohim
seeing it. And if they don’t like what they see, they’ll swat it down before it even gets off the runway.’
‘Subway trains.’ Kennedy didn’t even believe it as she said it, but there was no point in missing the obvious.
‘There’s only one station in what we think is the target zone,’ Diema told her. ‘207th Street, at the top of Broadway. It’s the northern terminus for one of the main underground lines, so there’s no through traffic to worry about. But Kuutma has stationed Messengers on the platforms and in the streets around, just in case Ber Lusim tries to bring anything in that way.’
‘That way? Meaning in a train? Okay, but suppose he’s setting something up in the tunnels? Maybe it’s worth sending a team in to check.’
‘You’re not thinking of the numbers,’ Nahir told Kennedy scornfully. ‘At the end of the line, there will be the lowest concentration of people. The whole New York subway and Metropolitan transit network – across all the boroughs and outlying areas – handles about four million passengers in the space of a day. Perhaps more, but not many more. What percentage of those do you think will visit 207th Street and Broadway,
rhaka
? I guarantee you that it’s not a quarter of them.’
Kennedy did her best to ignore the anger that rose inside her. It didn’t help that Nahir was right.