The Demon Code (31 page)

Kennedy shook her head. ‘That’s not what it’s for.’

Tillman stared at her in bewilderment. ‘How would you know? Is this something you found in France? Something to do with —’

Kennedy cut across him. ‘Not yet, Leo. This is still you showing me yours. How does any of this tie in with the Messenger I met? The girl? You said you went looking for her. Explain.’

Kennedy could tell from his expression as he stared at her that her tone had given too much away. He knew that she was hiding something, and he knew that it was important. How hard would it be for him to put the pieces together and realise who it was he’d been chasing? ‘Tell me,’ she said again, more urgently.

‘She rides a motorbike,’ Tillman said, his voice calm, almost expressionless in contrast to Kennedy’s. ‘Manolis was able to get the licence number, and then he hacked into the UK speed camera networks to see where she’d been clocked. We were looking for clusters. Thought we might get some idea of where she was based. But she saw us coming.’

‘
Saw
you?’ Kennedy was appalled all over again. ‘You mean you met her? You actually—’

‘No. I don’t mean that. She guessed what we’d do and she turned the tables on us. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway. She wanted me to find that warehouse. She used the bike to lead me there. Or she had the place under surveillance herself, and Mano got the wrong end of the stick. But whichever of the two it was, she knows I was there. She was watching me the whole time.’

He took the rifle from Kennedy and put it back in the case, pushed the lid back down hard. Kennedy had forgotten she was even holding it. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.

‘Because I tripped an alarm, while I was in there. I made myself a target. I should have been killed, by rights. But I wasn’t, because I had a tailgunner. There was another shooter, lying out in the long grass, who laid down some cover fire for me. And as far as I could see, she did it without killing anyone. Beautiful, precision shooting.’

‘Not your man?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Manolis?’

‘He isn’t a shooter. And he wasn’t anywhere near that place. His wife would skin me and salt me if I asked him to do anything like that. I use him for surveillance, which is his specialty, and that’s all I use him for.’

Tillman paused for a second, watching her. Kennedy had to fight the impulse to turn away from him, afraid of what he might be reading in her face.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know for sure nobody followed me in. And nobody else was moving out on that waste ground after I got there. That means the shooter was already embedded and hidden before I arrived. It was the girl. There’s no other way I can figure it. And she backed my play, which is the only reason I got out alive. If she actually planted that trail for me to follow – if she knew I’d go looking for her, find the bike, and all the rest of it – then she made a lot of right guesses about me based on nothing but thin air and moonbeams.’

‘She’s a Messenger,’ Kennedy said. ‘They studied you for years.’
And you share a whole lot of DNA. Maybe that gave her a little bit of an edge, too.

Tillman nodded. ‘Makes sense, I suppose. A little bit of sense. But I’ve still got a feeling that there’s something else going on – and that it might be the something you said you’d tell me about later. Is it maybe time you came clean, Heather?’

‘There’s … I think …’ She came to the brink, then hesitated. When she’d first met Tillman, he’d seemed to be on the edge of some kind of breakdown, worn down by years of searching for his lost family. He was doing a lot better now, but if she told him about Diema, and it turned out she was wrong, the harm she might do him was beyond any reasonable calculation. It was almost exactly balanced by the harm she could do if she was right, and Tillman found out from his daughter what had happened to his sons. There were so many reasons for Kennedy to keep quiet, and only one reason to talk. But it was a big reason: it was that she had no right to stand between Tillman and his daughter – the only living person he truly loved.

She shook her head, as much to clear it as anything. Tillman waited patiently for her to speak, but before she could, her phone went off. Grateful for the interruption, she took it out of her pocket. It was Rush again.

‘I have to take this,’ she lied.

‘Okay,’ Tillman said. ‘I’ll still be here when you’re done.’

Putting the phone to her ear, Kennedy turned slightly away from him, not so much for the sake of privacy as because she still felt the impulse to hide and the phone gave her the excuse.

‘Go ahead, Rush,’ she said.

‘Kennedy.’ His voice was strained. ‘How was your trip?’

‘It was productive. Did you find out anything useful about Toller?’

‘Well, I was going to do some homework on …’ Rush began. But a second voice in the background made him pause. ‘I’m not supposed to talk about that,’ he muttered. ‘She says it will keep for later.’

‘
She
says? Who says? Rush—’

‘I’m sorry, Kennedy. I’m supposed to stick to the script. Listen to me.’ The tremor in his voice was much more evident now, making it hard to understand what he was saying. ‘This is an invitation from Diema Beit Yudas. She wants both of you to come and meet her.’

‘Both of us?’ Kennedy repeated stupidly. Tillman looked like he was about to speak so she held up a hand to stop him and at the same time flicked the phone to speaker. Leo probably had to hear this first-hand. And it hadn’t escaped her notice that the girl was going under a different surname from Tillman’s former wife, Rebecca Beit Evrom. ‘Both of us are to meet her? Ask her who she means by that, Ben.’

Rush’s voice sounded out, thin and strained.

‘She wants to talk to you, but she wants it to be on her terms. She says she thinks you probably know enough about her by now not to do anything stupid, but in case she’s wrong about that, she wants you to know that any move you make against her will mean … will get me killed. Is that understood?’

‘It’s understood,’ Kennedy said, her heartbeat loud in her own ears. ‘Rush, don’t panic. We’ll come and get you. Give me the address.’

‘No, wait. There’s more. She says you should bring the book and Tillman should bring the truck. And it’s got to be just the two of you. Nobody else.’

‘Can I talk to her?’ Kennedy asked. ‘To … Diema?’ Tillman said nothing, but his eyebrows rose and his lips tightened.

The other voice murmured in the background.

‘Yes.’

‘Then put her—’

‘You can talk to her here. She wants you to come here, so all three of you can talk.’

Kennedy breathed out slowly, finding some stratum of calm. ‘And where’s here, Ben?’

‘A farm. Dovecote Farm. The address is—’

‘We know the address,’ Kennedy said. ‘We’re coming. We’ll be there soon.’

‘Great.’

‘Rush, you’ll be okay. We’re coming right now. She won’t hurt you.’

‘You think?’ His voice crackled with bleak sarcasm. ‘She’s got me wired up with a bloody—’ The phone went dead.

Kennedy turned to Tillman. He was already heading for the cab of the truck. ‘I’ll drive,’ he said over his shoulder.

42

When Ben Rush thought about farmyards – which admittedly wasn’t all that much – he tended to think in terms of a big house with a whole lot of barns and stables all around it, chickens scratching at the dirt and a horse looking over a hedge.

Dovecote Farm was basically just a ruin. There must have been an actual farmhouse once, but it looked like it had burned down, leaving only a massive patch of scorched earth where nothing grew. The barns and stables were still standing, but there were holes in the walls where planks had been taken out or kicked in, and the spavined, sagging roofs seemed close to final surrender. Insects buzzed and chirped in the weeds and bullrushes between the outbuildings, but nothing was moving that was big enough for Rush to see.

From his vantage point on the upper level of one of the barns, with the hayloft doors thrown open in front of him, he could look out across the ruined ground towards the road – and be seen from it in his turn, which was probably the point. He was sitting in a wheelback chair, his ankles tied to the front legs and his arms handcuffed together around the back. The chair was rickety, so every time he shifted his weight it lurched either forward and to the left or back and to the right. He was afraid that if he tipped forward too suddenly, he’d fall right out of the hayloft and break his neck. Or maybe he wouldn’t break his neck, but the explosives or whatever it was in the package that the girl had strapped to his chest would detonate and blow him apart.

The girl was sitting a few feet away, behind him, with her back against one of the beams. She had her arms folded in her lap and she was looking out at the road. Whatever thoughts were going through her mind, they left no footprints: the girl’s face was completely inexpressive.

They’d been like this for a while now, and clearly the girl could keep the silence up for however long it took. So if anyone was going to speak, it was going to have to be him.

He screwed up his courage and went for it.

‘You like
Courage, the Cowardly Dog
?’ he asked her.

The girl didn’t move, but her gaze flicked round and her eyes focused on him. ‘No,’ was all she said. She said it with a warning emphasis, as though that was fighting talk where she came from.

‘You were watching it.’

No answer.

‘I prefer the golden oldies,’ Rush said. ‘
The Flintstones. The Jetsons. Yogi Bear
.’ Since the girl didn’t react, he went on listing old cartoon shows as a mental exercise. At least it passed the time. ‘
Huckleberry Hound. Hector Heathcote. Funky Phantom. The Hair Bear Bunch. Josie and the Pussycats. Deputy Dawg. Top Cat
.
Foghorn Leghorn. Tom and Jerry
.’

Still no reaction from the girl. Well, maybe a flicker of interest on Tom and Jerry, but nothing you could take to the bank.

‘You want to play a game?’ he asked her.

‘No.’

‘Come on. I bet I can read your mind.’

She stared at him for a long time. Eventually, she said, ‘Be quiet.’

‘You don’t think I can read your mind?’ Rush persisted.

This time she didn’t bother to speak.

‘Think of a number from one to ten,’ Rush said. ‘Then take away five.’

The girl’s forehead creased in a frown. ‘A pink elephant from Denmark. It’s old and it’s stupid. Now be quiet. Or do you want me to cut you?’

And suddenly she had a knife in her hand. It was a weird, asymmetrical thing, with a flat extension like a hook or a bracket to one side of the blade. Rush stared at it, and then at the girl’s face. After a moment, she slipped the knife back inside her shirt. There must be a sheath there, strapped to her shoulder: the strap would go down between her breasts, and the knife would sit underneath. And now he was looking at her breasts – and she was looking at him looking at her breasts, which maybe wasn’t such a great idea.

‘If you cut me, you don’t have a hostage any more,’ he said. He was just about able to keep the tremor out of his voice.

‘No, boy,’ the girl said patiently. ‘If I
kill
you, I don’t have a hostage. I can still cut you.’

That shut him up for a good ten minutes. But he’d read a thriller once where the detective said that psychopaths found it easier to kill you if they didn’t have to see you as a human being. So he gave it one more try.

‘My name’s Ben,’ he said. ‘What’s yours?’

Instead of answering, the girl rummaged in the kit-bag she carried, brought out a narrow strip of straw-coloured cloth and started to twist it into a braid. She looked at Rush expectantly.

He weighed up the pros and cons. It was a good sign, really, that she’d decided to gag him instead of taking the knife to him.

But he really didn’t want to be gagged.

But maybe if she got in close enough to put the gag over his mouth, he could do something. Shift his weight at a crucial moment, maybe, and push her out of the hayloft.

He knew that wasn’t going to happen. Even if he had both hands free, the girl could fold him into an origami sculpture.

But what the hell was he, anyway? She’d called him
boy
, and he had to be at least a full year older than her, and probably more like two. And he hadn’t done one damn thing, so far, besides get smacked around and tied up and questioned and intimidated by her.

‘Those are really, really small tits,’ he said, after a long and pregnant silence. ‘But they look great on you. If you’ve ever considered plastic surgery, I’d say don’t go for it.’

The gag was uncomfortable, and it bit slightly into the corner of his mouth, but Rush was very slightly cheered by the fact that the girl had been blushing when she tightened the knot.

Now I’m human
, he thought.
And what’s more, so are you.

43

On the A3100, just south of Shalford, there was a sign by the side of the road that read DEAD PEOPLES THINGS FOR SALE. It stood in front of a windowless wooden shed, whose peeling white paint gave it a leprous look. The first time Kennedy had been driven along this road, as a girl of twelve, she’d mainly noticed the missing apostrophe, and in a priggish way disapproved of the sign. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder who the dead people were, and how their things made their way out here to the arse end of Surrey.

Three years ago, riding as now in the cab of a fourteen-wheeler with Tillman beside her, driving, she’d only been amazed that the sign was still there.

Today, with the sun hiding its face from moment to moment behind sudden, scudding banks of cloud, the unwelcome reminder of death struck her as a bad omen.

When Tillman pulled the truck off the road and onto what was left of the drive of Dovecote Farm, it was death that was chiefly on her mind – her own as much as anybody else’s. On that previous visit, three years before, she and Tillman had been trapped on the roof of the farmhouse as it burned, with a trio of
Elohim
on the ground taking free potshots at them every time they stuck their heads up above the guttering. Kennedy had been close to jumping off the roof-ridge, with a vague hope of staying intact enough when she landed to make a run for it, but really, she was just choosing a broken neck over being burned alive.