The Demon Code (50 page)
The Messengers affected not to hear her. Clearly they didn’t take orders from the likes of her.
Kennedy switched her attention to Nahir, who was standing in the corner of the room, watching them in silence. He hadn’t moved since they arrived, which was why she hadn’t seen him up until then. His expression was less detached than those of the doctor and the guards, but what was showing on his face was mostly curiosity – an interest as to which way they might jump.
‘What,’ Kennedy said, ‘are you scared he might pick a fight with someone? Cut him loose!’
‘No,’ Nahir said.
‘This is a human being.’
‘Is it?’
Kennedy went to the bed and started to untie Leo herself. When the Messengers moved in to stop her, she swivelled on the spot and punched the nearest one full in the face.
They had her immobilised before she could draw another breath. Actually, it was the man she’d just punched who put her in the arm-lock, inside of a second and without the aid of his three colleagues. Rush stepped forward to help her and ran into a human barricade: a male and a female
Elohim
, standing shoulder to shoulder, daring him to raise a hand against them.
He took the dare, but unlike Kennedy he didn’t have the advantage of surprise. One of the two dropped him with a punch that he didn’t see coming and couldn’t even reconstruct after it had hit. He was left in a foetal position on the floor, struggling to draw in a breath through a solid wall of agony.
‘You better not give me an inch of slack,’ Kennedy gasped.
‘I won’t,’ her captor promised her, sounding almost amused.
‘A human being,’ Nahir said, musing. ‘Would you claim that status for yourself? I wonder. I imagine you would. And that you’d do so without the slightest sense of irony.’
‘You want irony?’ Kennedy snarled. ‘I’ll tell you what’s ironic. That you people are so prissy about killing each other when killing is the only thing you’re any good at!’
Nahir signalled to the Messenger to release her – a negligent wave of the hand. Kennedy could see from his face and his posture that he expected her to attack him, and was ready for her if she did.
‘This is personal for you, isn’t it?’ she asked him, clutching her numbed arm to her chest.
Nahir’s mouth pinched in a minute grimace. ‘Not in the slightest.’
‘I’m just trying to figure out why,’ Kennedy said. ‘Is it because we found your Ginat’Dania? I can see where that would hurt.’
‘Nothing you can do could ever make the smallest difference to us.’
‘And yet here we are.’ Kennedy forced a grin. ‘Saving you from yourselves. Because three thousand years turned out to be nowhere near long enough for you sorry sons of bitches to get your act together. You saying you don’t need us is a really bad joke after you went to so much trouble to get us here.’
Nahir put a hand to the back of his belt. ‘Say another word,’ he invited Kennedy. ‘And find out for yourself how much I need you.’
She opened her mouth – and the creak and swish of the door at her back interceded, probably saving her life.
‘Good,’ Kuutma said. ‘Everybody is here, and everything, I assume, is in place.’ Diema entered the room behind him and closed the door. For a moment, her gaze was locked on Kennedy’s – a wordless catechism. Then she looked away.
‘Doctor?’ Kuutma said.
The doctor, a man of the same age and with the same physique as the Messengers, bowed perfunctorily and made the sign of the noose. ‘I’ve completed a physical evaluation of the patient,’ he said. ‘He seems to have been in excellent health before he received these wounds. His system is massively compromised now, but I believe I can wake him by injecting adrenalin and methylphenidate directly into his heart. Obviously there are a number of risks involved in this procedure. But if time is of the essence …’
‘Time,’ said Kuutma, ‘is very much of the essence. Do it, please.’
The doctor turned to the racks and trays against the walls and began to select from the bottles there.
‘What risks?’ Kennedy asked.
Assembling the hypo, the doctor answered over his shoulder. Possibly he hadn’t noticed that he was being questioned by an Adamite. ‘Haemorrhaging within the heart is possible, but not very likely. The main risk is
tamponade
– massive, uncontrolled vaso-constriction that will starve his system of oxygen. I’ll have a stand-by injection of benzamine ready in case that happens.’
‘Don’t do this,’ Kennedy said. She was speaking to Diema.
‘Restrain her,’ Nahir ordered. ‘She’s capable of disrupting the procedure.’
Two
Elohim
took Kennedy’s arms. The remaining two stood over Rush, who by now was sitting up but hadn’t managed to stand.
‘Proceed,’ said Kuutma.
The doctor used an epidural needle that looked more like a duelling sword. Kennedy forced herself not to look away as the doctor, without preamble, inserted the point between Tillman’s fourth and fifth ribs and pushed the needle in slowly and smoothly, to a depth of about three inches. He thumbed the bulb at the end of the syringe, and the plunger inside the hypodermic slid across, instantly, like an eye blinking shut.
For a split-second longer, Tillman’s body remained calm and motionless. Then it quaked, riven by a massive interior shock. A powerful muscular contraction went through him, making the restraints tighten and his body lift clear of the bed – then slam down again with enough force to make it rock.
‘Hold him!’ the doctor said, to the two angels, and they stepped in on either side to enfold Tillman in a rigid embrace. There was a second contraction, then a third, not so severe as the first but more protracted.
Tillman’s eyes and mouth gaped open. His throat worked and so did his chest, but there was no sound of indrawn breath. Quickly, the doctor gave him a second injection into the side of his neck. Sputters and gasps came from Tillman’s throat, as though he were doing a bad mime of a coffee percolator. They peaked, then died away.
The doctor turned to look at Kuutma, tense, seeking instruction or permission. ‘He’s barely breathing. I need another chemical antagonist to fight the adrenalin. But there are none here. This house is not so well stocked as my own surgery. I didn’t think to bring—’
‘Glyceril trinitrate,’ one of the angels said.
The doctor blinked, his mouth dropping open. ‘But that’s … that’s the chemical composition of nitroglycerin. It’s an explosive.’
‘And a vaso-dilator.’ The woman looked to Nahir. ‘Do you have any?’
Nahir shrugged. ‘Almost certainly.’
One of the
Elohim
went in search of it. The rest of them were summarily ejected from the room so that the doctor could prep Tillman for an emergency ECMO. If necessary, they would force oxygen into his blood using cannulae and membrane oscillators.
Kennedy was still in the grip of the two
Elohim
who Nahir had told to guard her. But she’d stopped struggling against their grasp, and they were holding her loosely. If Leo died, she intended to try to tear loose from their grip, but she had no idea whether she was going to attack Nahir, Kuutma or Diema. She just felt that leaving a mark on one of the three would be a memorial that she owed Tillman, even if she died trying.
Her gaze kept going back to Diema, who stood with her arms folded, her expression sullen and guarded. Everything that was happening here was being driven by her. She could still stop this, but she said nothing, engaged with nothing, let it flow around her while she stood and thought.
The nitro was brought. Kennedy was expecting a gelid brick, wrapped in grease-proof paper, like a package of C4, but it came in a bottle, looking a lot more like medicine than explosive. The
Elohim
took it into Tillman’s room and closed the door behind them.
‘You know the one thing I regret, in all of this?’ Rush asked. He was speaking to Diema, who turned to stare at him, startled out of her reverie.
‘That I let you touch me,’ Rush said.
She didn’t answer. Kuutma frowned, and looked at Diema – a look of surprise and deep thought.
The door opened, and the doctor looked out at them. His bland expression gave nothing away, but he nodded. ‘He’s ready for you,’ he said to Kuutma.
They filed back into the room. Tillman’s eyes were open and he was breathing – not normally, but deeply, with an audible rasp on each in-breath like the blade of a hacksaw dragged through cardboard. Kennedy tried to go to him, but the Messengers who held her arms wouldn’t allow her.
‘Leo,’ she said.
His wide eyes flickered, swivelled and found her. He tried to speak, eventually producing a sound that could have been the start of her name. ‘Heh …’
And a second later, ‘… ther.’
Kuutma wasted no time. ‘As you wished, Diema,’ he said to her, with a wave of his hand. ‘Please continue.’
Diema stepped forward. ‘We found Ber Lusim’s base of operations, underneath Gellert Hill,’ she said, addressing herself to Tillman. ‘But he escaped us. And now, we think, he’s aiming to fulfil the final prophecy in Toller’s book. So we have to go there, too, and stop him. Our goal is what it’s been all along – to save a million lives. If we can do that, then everything … everything that’s happened along the way will have been justified.’
The tone of her voice was strange. So were her words, Kennedy thought. She sounded as though she were pleading a case rather than carrying out an interrogation.
Tillman nodded. He swallowed deeply before he tried to speak again. ‘The island,’ he said, his voice slurred but comprehensible.
Diema nodded. ‘The island given for an island. We’ve all had time to think about it. If you’ve got any ideas – if any of you have anything at all – this is probably our last chance to figure it out.’
Nobody answered. Diema looked at each of them in turn.
‘Please,’ she said. She sounded desperate. ‘Anything. It’s not about our feelings. It’s not about whether we trust each other or not. Think about the living, who will soon be dead.’
Nahir winced, and shook his head. He seemed to think this whole spectacle was beneath his dignity.
‘There were treaties,’ Rush said, with deep reluctance.
Diema turned to him. ‘Go on.’
‘In the seventeenth century. Sometimes countries would give away or trade ownership of colonies, either to prevent a war or to share out the proceeds after one. I found a whole bunch of them.’
Diema was still looking at him expectantly. So was Kuutma. Rush shrugged. ‘I don’t think I can remember.’
‘Try,’ Diema said tightly.
Rush scowled and stared at the floor. ‘The Spice Islands,’ he said. ‘West Coast of … India, I think. They were given to England in the 1660s. It’s the right time for Toller, but there wasn’t a swap involved. I mean, they weren’t given for an island. They were part of a dowry. When Catherine of Braganza married Charles II.’
‘Then they’re probably out,’ said Diema. ‘What else?’
Rush thought some more. ‘The Azores kept changing hands between Spain and Portugal, all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So did the Madeira archipelago. There were a whole bunch of treaties where they swapped control over one island or another, abandoned forts, leased land, that kind of thing. You could probably say that any one of those islands had been given for another island at one time or another.’
‘Not enough people,’ Kennedy said, remembering Gilles Bouchard’s sleeve notes. ‘Even now, Madeira doesn’t top a quarter of a million. And the Azores are even smaller.’
‘Okay,’ Rush said. ‘Well, there’s Paulu Run, in Indonesia. Britain gave it to the Dutch in 1667 and got Manhattan – which is when New Amsterdam became New York. Martinique is possible. That was French, then British, then French again, all around the time when Toller was writing. Grenada. The French took the indigenous population out of there in the 1640s, which again is about right for Toller, and pushed them onto the smaller islands in the Grenadines. So you could say they gave an island for an island. And there are others. I can’t remember the details, but Aruba fits. So does Tasmania. Abel Tasman was resupplying his ship in Budapest at a time when Toller might still have been here.’
Rush shook his head. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘you could make a case for any island you want, pretty much. The big European powers back then, they had big, colony-swapping parties where everyone put their car keys in a bowl. We’re not going to get there this way.’
They absorbed this in silence. Diema let her hands fall to her sides, then balled her fists. An image flashed into Kennedy’s mind, suddenly and powerfully: Alex Wales, in the boardroom at Ryegate House, in the moment before he exploded into violence.
‘It’s … Manhattan,’ Tillman said.
A change came over all the
Elohim
in the room. They tried to hide it, and it was gone as quickly as it came – their ferocious self-control reasserted itself that quickly. But for a moment they looked the same way they’d looked when Diema had made her comment about forcing God’s hand.
‘Why?’ Kuutma said quickly.
Tillman stared at him, his eyes swimming in and out of focus. ‘Because High Energy Haulage … shipped there.’
‘We have that information,’ Nahir said. ‘From the computer files Ber Lusim left behind. High Energy did send a shipment there – but it wasn’t weapons. It was food products.’
‘Manhattan,’ Tillman murmured again, more weakly.
‘What food products?’ Kuutma asked Nahir.
‘Beans.’
‘Beans?’
‘Castor beans.’
‘Those aren’t food,’ Diema said savagely.
‘Natural … natural source …’ Tillman mumbled.
‘Of the ricin toxin,’ Kuutma finished. ‘I salute you, little sister. And you, Mr Tillman. Nahir, you’ve closed the local airspace. Open it again. Do whatever it takes. Diema and I will leave for New York at once.’
He opened the door and stood aside for her to step through. Diema remained where she was.
And took a breath.