The Demon Code (40 page)

Kennedy folded her arms and stayed exactly where she was. ‘I think we should stick with the cheek,’ she said, deadpan.

Diema stared hard at Kennedy, clearly surprised and a little impatient. ‘We know Ber Lusim’s men are female-averse,’ she said, in an
I’ll-keep-on-saying-this-until-you-get-it
tone. ‘If this goes wrong, and they succeed in taking you, they may search you. But the two rogue
Elohim
you met in London were reluctant even to undress you fully, so I think we’re safe in assuming that they wouldn’t give you a full orifice search.’

She waited for reason to prevail and for Kennedy to do as she was told.

‘Sit down, girl,’ Kennedy said.

Diema seemed bemused at the suggestion. ‘There’s no time,’ she said curtly. ‘If you insist on the cheek, then let’s—’

‘Sit down,’ Kennedy said again. ‘We have to talk.’

‘No,’ Diema said, not even bothering to hide her contempt for the older woman. ‘We don’t have to talk. We only have to work together. I thought that was clear.’

‘Clear to you, maybe. I’m going to sit down anyway. You can stand there, if you want to, but you will talk to me. Because if you don’t, this ends here.’

Diema’s eyes widened. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘There are too many lives at stake.’

‘A couple more than you know, maybe.’ Kennedy went and sat, not on the bed but on the room’s one chair. She waited in silence for the girl to join her.

Diema stood irresolute for several heartbeats. Finally, rigid with tension, she crossed the room and sat on the bed facing Kennedy. She put on a sardonic expression.
I’m waiting
.

‘Why did you change your name?’ Kennedy asked.

Diema blinked. ‘What?’

‘It’s not that tough a question. Why did you change your name?’

‘For no reason that you need to know about.’

The girl’s tone was flat and final. Kennedy waited her out.

‘Because I changed my life,’ Diema said at last, in the same voice.

‘Yes,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘I can see that, Grace. I’m just trying to work out how deep the changes go.’

The girl’s expression didn’t change, apart from a barely perceptible flicker of her eyelids. ‘I was Tabe,’ she said. ‘I was never Grace. Grace was just what the father of my flesh called me.’

‘The father of your flesh? Is that how you think of him?’ Diema opened her mouth to speak again, but Kennedy held up a hand. ‘Never mind. I don’t pretend to understand your customs, but you’re wrong about that and you need to know it.’

‘My name is—’

‘Your
mother
named you Grace. And she named your brothers Jude and Seth. Normally you’d have kept those names when she took you back home, because none of them were offensive to your people’s beliefs. The tradition, as far as I was told, is to rechristen children if they’ve been given names that are too … what would you call it? Too Adamite. But Jude and Seth were good, biblical names – and who could argue with Grace?’

‘I said,’ the girl repeated, through gritted teeth, ‘my name is Diema.’

‘But your Michael Brand, your Kuutma, he seemed to feel that your past, and your brothers’ past, needed to be more thoroughly erased than that. Perhaps because he loved your mother, Rebecca, and wanted her family to be his family, too. But she killed herself. She didn’t want to live without your father. I mean, the father of your flesh. Leo Tillman. And after she was dead, Michael Brand gave new names to the three of you. He called you Tabe – and your brothers Ezei and Cephas.’

Diema seemed completely unmoved. ‘You seem to think I should care what I was called out here in your world,’ she said to Kennedy, her lower lip twisting. ‘I don’t. It’s never been my world and it isn’t now. It’s just a place where I work.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Your world is a big cave somewhere, with the sky painted on the underside of the roof. I can’t imagine what that would be like, but I know you didn’t … don’t … think of it as a great hardship. You never missed what you never had. But doesn’t it seem terrible to you, now that you’ve seen what the real world is like, that anyone should grow up in that way and live in that way? In the dark?’ Kennedy heard the tremor in her own voice. She was trying to speak to the young woman, but she kept seeing the child imprisoned inside her, the child entombed, and it was so terrible she felt a sort of sympathetic panic – a feeling of vicarious suffocation.

‘It’s not dark,’ Diema said. ‘It was only dark when you saw it,
rhaka
. And that was because you saw your own darkness.’

‘No,’ Kennedy said sharply. ‘No. Believe me, I know the difference. And I know there’s nothing I can say that will change you now. I can’t push back the weight of all those years. But at least think about it. Please. Why did they send you? Why you, of all people? Why did they even think to turn you into …’ she pointed at the girl with a hand that trembled slightly ‘… into this? I can’t forget what Kuutma said to Leo, the only time we ever met him. “Your daughter is an artist. She paints. There’s such beauty inside her that it spills out of her fingers into the world.” He said that! And then they turned around and made you into one of their murderers.’

Kennedy felt tears welling in her eyes and fought to hold them back. She knew that the girl would only see them as signs of weakness. But in spite of all she could do, a tear ran down her cheek. She was weeping for Grace, and for Tabe, both of them gone without a trace.

Diema was not contemptuous of the tear: she was outraged by it. ‘Nobody made me do anything!’ she said, her voice rising. ‘This was my decision. Kuutma saw the potential in me. He gave me the choice – to serve my people.’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘And he sent you to me, knowing I’d see Leo’s face in yours. Knowing I’d have to go to Leo, against every instinct I had, and bring him back into this. Don’t lie to yourself, Diema. If you were ever an artist, you probably had that gift that artists have of seeing exactly what’s in front of your eyes. So look at this picture and see what it says to you. They took you up, and trained you, and sent you out to enlist us, because they knew you were the only one who could. Not an atom of chance or coincidence. Not an atom of choice, for any of us.’

Diema lurched to her feet. She looked as if she might run, but she stood her ground, her fists clenched. ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said, her voice almost back under control now, ‘that you’d try to turn me against my own people. It’s exactly what I’d expect from you. I’m only surprised you waited until we were all the way out here. You should have done it at Dovecote Farm, where you and Leo Tillman killed my brothers.’

It was Kennedy’s one remaining hope – that they’d spared the girl that, at least. She sank her head into her hands, succumbing to a moment of sheer despair.

‘Oh yes,’ Diema sneered, glaring down at her. ‘Did you think you could lie to me, Heather Kennedy? Did you think they’d let me meet you – and
him
– without telling me what it was you’d done? You say I’ve been lied to, and manipulated, by people I love. But you forgot to mention what Leo Tillman did to me. What he took from me. Perhaps it slipped your mind.’

Kennedy forced herself to look the girl in the eye again. It was an effort. She was really afraid of that scorn and that hatred: afraid of what it might be capable of doing. ‘Diema,’ she said, her voice thickened by her crying, ‘did you ever ask, or did your teachers ever tell you, why Leo and I went to your Ginat’Dania?’

‘To destroy it,’ the girl said promptly.

‘No, it wasn’t that at all. And it was already destroyed, as far as that went. We came too late. I went to make an arrest. But Leo was looking for his wife, and his children. He was looking for you. He’d been looking for you for twelve years. Ever since the day he came home and found the house empty. He loved you more than anything else in the world. He couldn’t live without you. So he kept on searching, for you, and for Rebecca, and for your brothers, even though it had been so long, and nobody else believed you could even be alive—’

‘We
weren’t
alive!’ Diema shouted. ‘My mother was dead by then. My brothers were dead, because he’d already killed them, back in England. I was the only one left.’

‘He didn’t know that. He still doesn’t. Oh, he knows about Rebecca. Michael Brand told him how she died. But he doesn’t know about Ezei and Cephas. It would break his heart if he ever found out.’

Diema leaned down and thrust her face into Kennedy’s face, gripping the lapels of the woman’s jacket tightly. ‘Then when this is over,’ she growled, ‘I’ll break his heart.’

The fury passed through the girl, almost like a visible wave, and left her weak and sickened. She turned away from Kennedy with a gesture of surrender: not surrender to her arguments, just a desire to be done with all these words, all these thoughts.

‘Put the chip into your cheek,
rhaka
,’ she said hoarsely, after a while. ‘I want to get out of here.’

‘Keep it,’ Kennedy said.

‘We need you to—’

‘I know what you need me for. But talking to you just now, I had another thought about that. I think it might be a really bad idea to have something implanted in my body that lets your people find me whenever they want to. So forget it.’

Diema stared at her. ‘It’s your choice,’ she said coldly.

‘Yeah, isn’t it?’

The walkie-talkie, still set to vibrate, jumped and writhed on the bedside table, raising a burring clamour like a dentist’s drill hitting enamel.

Kennedy picked it up and opened the main channel. Diema drew out her own set and turned away as she pressed it to her ear.

‘Are you two almost done?’ Tillman asked.

‘Yes. No. Almost,’ Kennedy mumbled. ‘Can you give us a couple of minutes, Leo?’

‘Take as long as you need. But listen to what Rush has to say before you go anywhere.’

‘What the boy has to say?’ Diema snapped. ‘Why should anyone care what the boy has to say? He knows nothing about this.’

‘Actually,’ Tillman said after a moment, ‘he makes a good case. Heather, you shouldn’t go to the parliament building.’

‘Then where should I go?’ It didn’t seem possible that it could matter right then: she asked mechanically, because he seemed to be expecting her to ask.

‘To the baths,’ he said.

53

The Gellert Hotel stood right at the foot of Gellert Hill, on the Buda side of the Szabadság Hid, or Freedom Bridge. It was an art nouveau palace, dressed in cool white stone and with Turkish minarets at its corners, even though the Ottomans had bailed on Budapest several centuries before the hotel was built.

On the top of the hill, 235 metres above Kennedy’s head as she walked across the bridge, a weathered bronze statue of Saint Gellert stood at the edge of the precipice, one arm raised above his head in valediction, as though he were about to jump.

The hotel, with its huge bath complex, was a major tourist attraction, and on a day as hot as this there was a line right out of the side door and down the steeply sloping street. The front door, and the whole of the piazza between the hotel and the river, was taken up with a massive open-air market.

Kennedy joined the line and stood on the scorching pavement, tuning out conversations in English, Hungarian, German and Italian. The shoulder of Gellert Hill rose behind her, its rugged face softened on this side by the mature vines and fig trees that sprawled down from its peak almost to the river.

Out of the belly of the beast
.

‘This is what I’m thinking,’ Rush had said. ‘Toller used that picture as the frontispiece of his book, right? So I’m betting that his house is actually right there in the picture. What else would he be showing us? And if Shekolni is trying to model himself on Toller, maybe he’s in that same house – or as close to it as he could get. So there’s no point Kennedy going up to the parliament. It’s the wrong side of the river and too far north. She should go to some place that’s actually in that picture – or a place that stands where the houses in the picture used to be.’

With a certain degree of smugness, he’d unveiled his front -runner: the Gellert Hotel. He remembered it from the holiday he’d taken in Budapest a few years before. It would have been in Toller’s picture, if it had been built back then. It was big enough and crowded enough to make a plausible spot for a meeting, but it had only two main entrances. And it had no armed guards, no lock-downs, no pack drill. ‘Elementary, my dear Watsons.’

Diema hadn’t liked it at first – hadn’t wanted even to discuss it. The confrontation with Kennedy had left her sullen and withdrawn – regrouping herself, Kennedy thought, along the interior battle lines that seemed to mean so much to her. But Diema hadn’t been able to fault the argument and finally she’d gone along with what was basically a fait accompli. It was clear by then that both Kennedy and Tillman preferred Rush’s version of the plan, and had withdrawn their consent from hers.

So Kennedy crossed the river and waited in the sweaty heat of the afternoon until the line moved forward enough for her to get through the doors into the vast entrance hall with its wooden pillars, its light wells, its elegant nude statues and geometrical mosaics. Some of it was original, approaching its hundredth birthday. The rest had been seamlessly reconstructed after 1945, when the Russian shelling of retreating German columns had reduced most of Buda to loose chippings.

The ticket window Kennedy was slowly approaching was flanked by massive wooden notice boards – one in Hungarian, the other in very bad English – advertising an array of treatments and services. In addition to the main public access and spa pools, there were dry and steam saunas, massage booths, manicures and pedicures, mud packing, carbonic acid tubs, weight baths, stretch baths and cold dive-pools. And a bar, she couldn’t help noticing.

Trying not to scan the faces around her, or meet anyone’s gaze for more than a fleeting second, Kennedy took the open day pass. It would get her into all the pools and saunas: specialist services involving heavy weights, mud or mild corrosives would cost extra.