The Demon Code (58 page)

He turned back to Ber Lusim.

‘Everything you’re doing,’ he said, ‘you’re doing because of Toller. Isn’t that right? Because of the predictions in this book. It’s like he wrote the book for you. Like he saw you coming, three hundred years back, and he spoke to you across that gap.’

‘He saw the end of the world coming,’ Ber Lusim corrected him. ‘But yes, he spoke to us. He told us what we needed to do to bring history to an end and initiate the reign of Messiah.’

‘Okay. But I wonder if you know who was talking to you? I mean, if you ever found out anything about Johann Toller’s life.’

‘More than you can imagine.’

‘You think you know him.’ Rush felt like he was picking his way through a minefield. But more than that, he felt like he was in a courtroom and he was cross-examining a witness. Trying to make a case, out of nothing except the barest hunch.

‘Yes,’ Ber Lusim agreed. ‘I believe I know him.’

‘I’m going to have to disagree,’ Rush said. And in the silence that followed, he plunged on. ‘I think you’re right that God sent me here, Ber Lusim. I think he wanted you to listen to what I’ve got to say. Because you’ve made a big mistake. You’ve killed a lot of people and you’re about to kill a whole lot more, and it’s all on the basis of a … a stupid … you messed up. You messed up so badly.’

Ber Lusim stared at him in complete silence. Rush saw his own death weighed and measured in that stare. The only thing he had going for him was an accidental letter of introduction from Johann Toller, and he had no idea how long that get-out-of-jail-free card was going to last.

‘There’s something you don’t know,’ he said, his voice wobbling a little on the last word. ‘About Toller. Something you got wrong.’

‘Something I got wrong,’ Ber Lusim repeated, his tone dangerously mild. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘And what would that be?’

‘Who he was.’

Ber Lusim pursed his lips. ‘I’ll overlook your irreverence,’ he said to Rush. ‘I still believe there must be some point to your being here. Some reason why you’ve been placed in my path, at this most solemn and auspicious time. But you must be very careful what you say. Johann Toller was divinely inspired. To speak ill of him is to blaspheme against God.’

Rush kept his gaze fixed on the gun in Ber Lusim’s hand – although probably if Ber Lusim decided he needed to be killed, he wouldn’t waste a bullet on someone who was in easy reach of his hands. ‘Is it speaking ill of Toller to say he wasn’t who you think he was?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to blaspheme. I just think you misread the evidence.’

Ber Lusim raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes? How?’

‘Well, you think Toller was your missing prophet. The one person who walked away from your hidden city without official sanction. I mean, the one person who did that before you and your people did it.’

‘I don’t think this. I know it.’

‘Because Toller talks about the secret beliefs of the People.’

‘Yes.’

‘And his book shows the location of Ginat’Dania.’

‘Yes, that too.’

‘And because he blessed his friends and followers with the sign of the noose instead of the sign of the cross.’

‘Of course.’

Rush was standing on the edge of the precipice now. He didn’t dare to look around again, to see whether either Diema or Kennedy was tracking his moves. If they weren’t, this was going to come to nothing anyway. All he could do – the best he could do – was give them a window.

‘Well, in spite of all those things, Ber Lusim, I think you’ve been cheering for the wrong team. Toller was never one of the Judas People. He was an Adamite.’

Diema used two things to stay conscious: the pain from her wounds and the countdown on her watch.

The pain was constant static along the thousands of unravelling miles of her nervous system.

The countdown stood at seven minutes.

Ber Lusim had his gun pressed against Rush’s temple now. Rush was leaning sideways, away from it, his whole body arced like a strung bow, but he didn’t dare to step back or to try to push the gun away.

‘I see your death,’ Ber Lusim said to the boy. ‘Without the benefit of prophecy.’

‘No, just listen,’ Rush quavered. ‘Listen to me. I can make you believe.’

‘I already believe.’

‘Then I can make you doubt. Why did God send me?’

‘To test me. To put my beliefs to the test.’

‘Then … then you have to take the test, don’t you? You have to listen. Blowing my brains out is just going to piss God off.’

Neither of them moved, for a moment or two longer. Then Ber Lusim lowered the gun, very gradually, to his side.

‘This is nonsense,’ he said heavily. ‘But say what you like. Nonsense can’t hurt me.’

‘Okay, look at the documentary evidence,’ Rush said, starting to babble again. ‘In your version of the story your man comes out of Ginat’Dania, heading west. Then a good long time afterwards, Johann Toller arrives in England and starts to preach. And you can tell he’s your guy because of all the stuff he says. He knows about Ginat’Dania. He knows about the three-thousand-year cycle. And how else could he have found that out?

‘But what happened in the meantime? What made him abandon his mission and his people and go native like that?’

‘An angel,’ Ber Lusim said, his voice almost a growl, ‘spoke to him.’

‘Right.’ Rush nodded. ‘An angel spoke to him and gave him the secrets of heaven. And Toller wanted to share the amazing things he’d learned. He felt like he had to share it with the whole world. So he goes to England.

‘And this is where I kind of lose the plot. It’s the Civil War. The political scene in England is a snake pit, but Toller jumps in like it’s a swimming pool. He makes all kinds of friends and enemies in Cromwell’s government. He rallies the religious dissenters – becomes one of their spokesmen, kind of. He joins the Fifth Monarchy movement. Gets a seat at the table. And I’m asking myself:
why?
What is the point of it all? If you’ve seen the eternal truth, why would you care whether Cromwell or Fairfax keep their promises, or whether bishops get to speak in parliament? It’s a sideshow. The world is going to end, the kingdom is going to come and that’s all that matters.’

Diema pulled her attention away from the doctrinal argument and looked for her gun. It was far enough away that she’d have to crawl to reach it and it looked as though it had taken a direct hit in any case.

But she had the other gun, in her ankle holster: the tiny, modest little M26 that she’d taken from Nahir and Shraga almost as an afterthought.

She groaned and rolled over as though she were in agony, using the movement to curl her legs up and bring them closer to her left hand. It felt as though her right wrist might have been broken when Ber Lusim shot the gun out of her hand – an outrageous feat, even at this short a distance.

‘Time is contained within eternity, like the grit in a pearl,’ Ber Lusim was saying. ‘Toller saw all things, both close and far away. And he cared about all things.’

Rush held up the book, his hand shaking even more noticeably. ‘Okay, maybe. Maybe it happened like that. But here’s another scenario: Toller was nobody. Just some guy. But he was British. He came out of England, maybe doing the whole grand tour thing, or maybe because he was a merchant or a diplomat.

‘So he’s travelling through the Alps, and he has an accident. Only he’s not alone when he has it. And he’s not the only survivor. There’s another man, lying next to him – injured, probably dying. That’s your prophet, fresh out of Ginat’Dania. And that’s the moment when everything changes for Toller. That’s where his life turns upside down.

‘Because the injured man is hallucinating, and he can’t stop talking. Or else it’s just that he knows he’s dying. He’s got to tell his life story to someone before he goes, and Toller’s right there. Toller’s listening. Listening with every ear he’s got.’

‘This is grotesque,’ Ber Lusim said.

‘So Toller gets the whole story. The holy betrayer. The secret city. The end of the world. It’s a revelation. No, it’s a whole book of revelations. And it’s got to be the truth, because who’s going to waste the last hours of his life spinning such a crazy story? It’s as though God put this man just in the right place, just at the right time, so that Toller’s eyes could be opened.

‘And when it was done, and the man was dead, Toller went home to England and picked up his life again. Except now he was a prophet. A man with a message. And he wanted to give the message as much authority as he could, so he came up with the angel’s visitation. Or maybe that was how he actually remembered it by this time, I don’t know. Maybe he really thought your man was an angel.’

‘Why should this thing be true?’ Ber Lusim demanded. ‘Where is your evidence?’

Diema had pulled the leg of her jeans up three inches from her ankle, exposing the holster. The gun was lying ready to her hand. But now another problem presented itself. Two problems, in fact. How was she going to get through Ber Lusim’s guard any better the second time, now that she was using her weaker, slower hand? And how was she going to draw and fire on him without hitting Rush, who was directly in the way? She saw that Kennedy was watching her, ready to move when she did.

‘It’s not about the evidence,’ Rush said, ‘although I do have some. A little, anyway. But think about it. Doesn’t my version make more sense? In your story, a Messenger decides out of nowhere to betray his sacred trust and go preach to the heathens. In mine, he only talks because he knows he’s dying.’

‘He didn’t just decide,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘You’re forgetting that he had a visitation from God.’

‘And this visitation somehow gave him a complete who’s who of English politics? And it made him think that English politics actually
mattered
? Because he spent the rest of his life there, Ber Lusim. He was executed for trying to murder some kind of government clerk. What the hell was that?’

Ber Lusim took a step towards Rush, but Rush backed away. He held the book in his two hands, ready to tear it down the length of its spine. ‘You better back off,’ he warned Ber Lusim. ‘Or I’m going to commit some serious blasphemy.’

Ber Lusim raised his gun again and pointed it at Rush. ‘The book will be destroyed in the explosion in any case,’ he said. ‘Its physical integrity isn’t of paramount importance to me now. I would just like to die holding it. In any event, I’ve heard you out and I have not been swayed in the smallest degree. If you were meant to test me, boy, I’ve passed the test.’

‘But I’ve got evidence,’ Rush blurted. ‘I told you I had some evidence, right? Well, here it is. Forget about the angel and the accident, and all the rest of it. Forget about what Toller knew or where he got it from. Remember the one thing that he did that marked him out as one of the Judas People.

‘He used the sign of the noose.’

Diema had her hand on the grip of the M26 and had eased it halfway out of the holster. But Rush was still in the worst possible position, blocking most of her line of fire but almost none of Ber Lusim’s line of sight.

‘Toller used the sign of the noose as a blessing,’ Rush said. ‘His followers didn’t know what it was and he never explained it to them. But he did it anyway.’

‘I know this,’ Ber Lusim said.

‘You don’t know anything. Toller never used the sign of the noose even once.’

Ber Lusim’s eyes narrowed.

‘What?’

Rush shrugged, showed his empty hands. ‘I know, right? I thought that, too, the first time I read it. But then I saw Diema make the sign and something didn’t feel right. I got her to talk me through it. Then I went back and I read it again, and there it was.
He put his hand to his throat, thence to his heart, and his stomach, and so in a circle back to where it began
.’

‘I have read the passage,’ Ber Lusim snarled. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’

‘So if you had a clock face on your chest,’ Rush said, stealing the metaphor that Diema had used on the plane to Budapest, ‘that’s the way the hands would turn. Look. Like this.’

Diema could see that Rush was making the sign, just the way Robert Blackborne said Toller had made it. And she could tell from the way Ber Lusim’s eyes widened that he got the point.

‘It’s the wrong way round,’ Rush said. ‘As though Toller learned it by looking in a mirror. Which I think is more or less what he did.’

‘No,’ Ber Lusim said. It wasn’t a disagreement: it was a warning.

‘Yes,’ Rush insisted. ‘Not a mirror, obviously. But he saw someone else doing it and he copied it, exactly the way he saw it. He just forgot to turn it around.’

‘No,’ Ber Lusim said again.

‘It’s kind of funny, in a sick way,’ Rush said. Bluntly. Brutally. ‘You going to all this trouble, I mean.’ He gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Pity Avra Shekolni is dead. I bet he’d have loved this.’

Maybe it was the laugh that sent Ber Lusim over the edge. He lunged forward, his hand shooting out to grip Rush’s throat.

It was the only moment they were going to get.

‘Now!’ Diema bellowed. ‘Do it now!’

Kennedy rose to her feet, gun in hand.

Ber Lusim turned.

And Diema fired.

Ber Lusim drew in his breath in a tremulous gasp. He looked down at his chest – at the small round hole that had appeared there, like a mysterious punctuation mark. A full stop, inscribed directly onto his heart. It went from black to red, and blood welled out of it. Ber Lusim had stiffened, his eyes wide as though from some awful realisation.

But it was Rush who fell, toppling from the ground up as his knees buckled under him.

Left-handed, out of position, Diema had taken the only shot she could: through Rush’s right shoulder and into the left side of Ber Lusim’s chest.

And now the way was clear. She and Kennedy fired again and again, emptying their guns into the assassin. Ber Lusim bowed his head and took the punishment, as though a man could endure gunfire in the same way as he endured heavy rain.

But this weather took a greater toll. Ber Lusim sank to his knees, as though by choice, then lowered himself by gradual degrees into a posture of prayer, which was how he died.

Kennedy began to approach the dead man slowly, covering him with her now-useless gun.