The Demon Code (14 page)

‘Yeah, isn’t it?’

‘But you say it happened to you.’

‘And to you, Rush, as of today. You were in the room. With any luck, they won’t know that, but maybe it’s just as well you made me tell you all this. At least now, you might be that little bit more paranoid at a time when you’ve actually got something to be paranoid about.’

‘Thanks,’ Rush said glumly. ‘Anything particular I ought to watch out for?’

‘What happened to Wales’s eyes, that’s something they seem to do a lot. When they kill. When they’re thinking about killing. Or sometimes just as a response to stress or emotion. It’s called haemolacria. They weep blood.’

‘Jesus.’

‘It’s because of the drug they take. It’s toxic and in the end it kills them, but it makes them faster and stronger and more resistant to pain. Believe me, it takes a lot to put one of them down.’

‘Like you said,’ he reminded her, ‘I was in the room.’ He pondered, staring into his empty glass. ‘But why didn’t he just kill us all, then? Wales, I mean. It wouldn’t have been all that hard.’

Kennedy felt the weight of that guilt and unease settle on her. ‘He could have done, if he’d wanted to. But I think he didn’t want to be questioned. They hide from the light. I threw that into the mix and hoped he’d run away. It didn’t occur to me that he’d kill himself to avoid answering awkward questions.’

She picked up her bag, straightened her jacket and generally did the premonitory things that mean you’re about to leave. Rush ignored the signals.

‘What do we do now?’ he asked her.

Kennedy frowned. ‘We don’t do anything now,’ she said. ‘We go to bed and sleep. Neither of us is in any shape for life-or-death decisions.’

Rush laughed hollowly. ‘You think it’s going to be up to us to decide? Really?’

Kennedy got to her feet. ‘I think we wait and see,’ she said. ‘If we’re lucky, this is where it ends.’

But it wouldn’t be. Of course it wouldn’t. That was why she’d told Izzy not to come home yet, and why she’d told Rush enough to put him on his guard. It wasn’t over. It couldn’t be.

Herself, and Emil Gassan. No coincidence. She’d been rolled up into something, by a force that she couldn’t see or define. She was in this mess for a reason and it sure as hell wasn’t her own reason.

‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ she told Rush. ‘I have to sleep.’

‘Okay.’

‘You’re staying?’

‘I need another drink.’

‘Just make sure you can still walk home,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

But as she turned, he called her name again. She looked back over her shoulder.

‘It’s Ben,’ he said.

His voice was slurred enough that she didn’t understand at first. ‘It’s what?’ she demanded.

‘Benjamin. Ben. My given name. I was christened—’

‘Okay.’ She waved him to silence. ‘Sorry. It’s way too late for that. You’re Rush now.’

He sighed deeply.

‘What’s the secret of a good joke?’ he asked Kennedy.

‘Timing.’

‘Right. So I guess I’m a bad one.’

She just about had time to jump on the Piccadilly Line at Leicester Square, then drop down to Pimlico on the last southbound train.

Kennedy’s feet were heavy and she was irresolute all the way back about where she was going to sleep. The night before, Izzy’s bed without Izzy in it had felt like an alien planet. But she suspected that her own would feel like a crypt.

In the end she went for Izzy’s because at least the bed was made and she could just fall into it. Whether she’d sleep was a question that would answer itself in due course.

She opened the door and stepped inside, wondering for a moment why the action of the lock seemed a little looser than usual, the cylinder rattling slightly in its housing.

As she stepped across the threshold, she saw the living room door ahead of her standing open. She knew she’d left it closed that morning, so now she knew why the lock was loose.

Stand or run? A professional wouldn’t give her a chance to run in any case, and if it was a casual burglar – please, God – she could probably take him. She reached into her bag for the pepper spray.

Arms locked around her from behind, pinning her hands to her sides. Something was pressed to her face and though she struggled not to inhale, consciousness slipped away before she could even register the smell of the drug.

13

The world came back piecemeal, a lot more slowly than it had gone away.

Kennedy was aware of sounds first: slow, discrete, shifted toward the bass register. Not words, as such – and they carried on not being words no matter how hard she focused on them.

Then a sourness that was half-smell, half-taste welled up from everywhere and nowhere, around and inside her. She balked.

‘Mistakh he. He met e’ver.’

‘Ne riveh te zi’et. Hu vihel veh le tzadeh.’

Hands clasped her head and shoulder. She tried to pull away from them, but they just turned her onto her side. Her stomach tightened, sending a peristaltic wave through her upper body. She retched weakly, felt warm liquid run over her lips and tongue.

Cloth beneath her cheek, beneath her body. Soft, and cool. It had rocked slightly when she moved. She was on a bed.

A blurred dot of light appeared, more or less centred in her field of vision. It expanded and there was movement in front of it, across and across.

‘Can you hear me? Can you hear what I’m saying?’ A man’s voice, deep and mellifluous.

Kennedy played dead as she laboriously assembled her recent memories into some kind of sequence. The stairs. The door. The bed. No, she was missing a step. Someone moving behind her, arms pinning her arms, the handkerchief pressed to her face. And then the bed. Fine.

Not fine at all.

‘I think she’s awake.’ A different voice, not harsher but deader, affectless: a voice that actually scared her, given the implications of why she was lying on a bed, why she’d been attacked at all.

‘Then let’s get started.’

Hands were laid on her once more. She was too weak and sick to resist as she was rolled onto her back again and her arms were pulled up over her head. Something closed on her left wrist with a snap. There was a metallic clanking and scraping, then
clack
, something bit into her right wrist, hard and sudden enough to make her flinch. When she tried to flex her legs, she discovered that they were already immobilised in some way. She was spread-eagled on the bed, and absolutely defenceless.

‘Ni met venim, ye sichedur.’

‘Nhamim.’

If that language, whatever it was, was what her assailants spoke to one another, Kennedy wondered for a moment why they’d shifted into English. The answer came to her at once: ‘Let’s get started’ was something she was meant to hear and be frightened by. Seeing through the ruse gave her some crumb of comfort.

She opened her eyes now. There didn’t seem to be anything to be gained by faking unconsciousness any longer.

The biggest surprise – although it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all – was that she was in Izzy’s bedroom. She probably hadn’t been out that long and there was very little point in ambushing her at the flat if her assailants then had to take her to someplace else entirely. But still, the familiar surroundings accentuated the weirdness and her terror at what was happening.

There were just the two of them – the ones she’d already differentiated by their voices. Both were young, but one was very young, perhaps still in his teens or early twenties. He was slightly built, handsome, with shoulder-length black hair and a short, neat moustache and beard.

The other was bigger and stockier, with a sullen baby face. Black hair, again, but this man wore it short and in a curiously retro style, with an off-centre parting.

Both were dressed in rough-weave linen suits in a colour that might be called a light tan, and both had the unnatural pallor of the Judas tribe, whose life was lived mostly underground. Both were staring at her with solemn intensity – accompanied in the case of the bigger man by something like disgust.

‘We’re going to ask you some questions, Miss Kennedy,’ the bearded man said gently. Unsurprisingly, he was the one with the attractive, cultured voice.
The designated nice cop
, Kennedy thought. But she wasn’t about to give him the benefit of any doubts on that account. ‘About the job you were called in to do at the British Museum and about the events of this afternoon.’

Kennedy didn’t answer. She twisted her head to look up and then down, taking in what they’d done to her. Her wrists were cuffed – with a single pair of handcuffs threaded through the bed’s wrought-iron headboard. Pink, furry handcuffs: bondage gear. Her legs were locked in their wide-open position by some sort of hobble bar. But she was fully clothed. They hadn’t even taken off her jacket. The mixed signals were confusing. Why prep her for rape and then stop halfway?

‘Don’t know … what you’re talking … about,’ Kennedy mumbled. Her mouth and lower face were still numb from the drug and it was hard to form the words. But in any case, it seemed like a good idea to let them come to her.

The bigger man uttered an oath she didn’t catch. He reached into his jacket and drew out a knife. Kennedy’s heart hammered as she saw the asymmetrical shape of it, the curved spur where the blade ought to narrow to a point and the blunt, rough tang, the exact same metal as the blade, that served it as a hilt. It was the sica again.

These men were Messengers – the professional assassins of the Judas tribe.

The big man pressed the knife to Kennedy’s cheek. ‘Listen to me, filth,’ he said, between clenched teeth. ‘Every time you lie to us, I will cut you. Every time you don’t answer quickly enough, I will cut you. Every time I don’t like the answer you give, I will cut you. And when I have no more questions, I will cut your throat.’

‘Samal.’ The younger man spoke the word softly, but his partner tensed at once and looked to him, settling for Kennedy the question – which had been open up until then – of the pecking order. He made a gesture and the heavy-set man took the knife away from Kennedy’s face, lowered it to his side. Nice cop outranked nasty cop.

The younger man sat down beside her on the bed, arranging himself almost primly, and stared into her eyes. He smiled – and the smile was a lot more unsettling than the big man’s ferocity. It was the smile of someone so sure of his own rectitude that guilt and shame couldn’t land a punch on him.

‘My name is Abydos,’ he told her. ‘And that man there, with the knife, he is my friend, Samal. Samal is a man who – as you might imagine from his manner – doesn’t flinch from unpleasant work. But despite what he says, it will be I who will question you. And I will only allow Samal to hurt you if you force my hand. By that I mean, if you make me believe that hurting you will bring you to tell us more or keep you from lying. You understand me? If you cooperate, there will be less pain. Perhaps no pain at all. And the end, when it comes, will come more quickly and more easily.’

He paused, as though he expected her to reply. When she didn’t, he resumed. ‘I can, besides, offer you one further consolation. At the moment – with only a little more stage management – your death will seem like a sexual game that escalated out of control. But if you tell us the truth, without prompting, then before we leave here we’ll remove these …’ he gestured, with a tight, uncomfortable smile ‘… accessories from your body and leave it fully clothed. You won’t be dishonoured.’

‘Yeah, I’ll still be dead, though,’ Kennedy said. ‘I hate to sound ungrateful, but … you know.’ It hurt her throat to speak, she discovered, and her voice came out as an unlovely croak.

The young man shrugged. ‘You’re an intelligent woman,’ he said. ‘If I promised to let you live, it would be meaningless. We’d both know it for a lie and then you wouldn’t believe anything else I told you.’

Kennedy licked her dry lips, muttered something low and far back in her throat. When the young man obligingly leaned forward to try to catch her words, she spat in his eye. It was all the defiance she could muster, but she saw from the horror and disgust that flared in his face that it had done the job.

The man took out a handkerchief and wiped his cheek with it. ‘Well, then,’ he said, his mouth twisted, ‘perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps it will be impossible, after all, to conduct this conversation along rational lines.’ He looked to the other man, who still stood ready with the knife in his hand. ‘Samal, take a finger.’

The big man bent over her. Contradictory expressions – eagerness, revulsion, fear, hate – chased themselves across his face.

‘I’ll talk,’ Kennedy said quickly. ‘You don’t need to cut me. I’ll tell you what you want to know.’

Abydos gestured, and Samal paused again. He hadn’t even touched her and he seemed relieved not to have to, even though she saw how easily the knife sat in his hand. She was sure he’d killed before. She was equally sure that torture held no particular terrors for him. There was nothing like mercy in his face, and if anything, he seemed to feel a visceral loathing for her. On an impulse, she struggled against the cuffs and let her forearm, as if by accident, touch the back of Samal’s hand. The man jumped as if he’d been stung.

Women
, Kennedy thought.
You’re scared of women
.

‘Very well,’ Abydos said. ‘Let’s begin with this afternoon. You called a meeting, at Ryegate House. What happened there?’

Kennedy licked her dry lips and tried her hardest to keep her voice steady. ‘I accused a man, Alex Wales, of theft.’

‘Theft of what?’

‘A book.’

‘Name the book.’ Abydos’s emphasis was so precise that Kennedy hesitated, forewarned. She knew how important the written word was for the Judas People. Actually, she’d been told in counter-terrorism seminars back when she was still a cop, that the same thing went for most religious fanatics. To the fundamentalist mindset, the word was literally flesh and any harm or disrespect offered to it was a direct assault on the godhead.

So, out of some half-explored instinct, she lied. ‘We weren’t able to find that out,’ she said. ‘We just knew that there was a discrepancy. That one of the boxes in that room was light. Something had been stolen.’