‘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.’
‘And you knew that Alex Wales had stolen it.’
‘Yes.’ Again, they had to know this much. Their agent, the other member of their cell, hadn’t reported in — had dropped off the map. His death would hit the news soon enough, if it hadn’t already. Lying wouldn’t help her.
‘How did you know?’ Abydos asked.
Kennedy stumbled through an explanation. The chiming dates in the personnel files. The inside-man hypothesis. The coincidence of Silver’s death.
‘Very good,’ Abydos acknowledged, as though he were a teacher, or else a priest coaching her in her catechism. ‘And you put these things to him. To Wales.’
‘I questioned him. Yes.’
‘How did he reply?’
‘He didn’t. He refused to answer any of my questions. And then, when I locked him in the room and called the police, he killed himself with his own knife.’
Samal made a sound, an ululating moan, deep in his throat. Abydos glared at him and admonished him in whatever their language was. ‘Ne eyar v’shteh. De beyoshin lekot.’ It certainly sounded a lot like the bastard Aramaic of the Judas People.
‘Ma es’irim shud ekol—’ Samal answered, his face as tragic and imploring as a whipped dog’s.
Abydos cut him off with a curt, commanding gesture. Then he turned back to Kennedy, as though there’d been no interruption. ‘But it won’t do,’ he told her. ‘You’re very careful to say “I did this” and “He wouldn’t answer me”. As if the two of you were alone in that room. But you weren’t. You will tell us, please, who else was there.’
Kennedy realised with a cold, sudden shock that this — all of this, everything that was happening to her now and was about to happen — was the reason why Alex Wales hadn’t killed her when he could. Once he’d decided on his own death, it became essential to allow Kennedy to live so that these men could question her.
‘I thought Wales might be more likely to talk if I spoke to him alone,’ she said. Her voice cracked, zigzagged raggedly up the scale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
‘No,’ Abydos said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘It’s the truth.’
There was a long pause. ‘I ask you again, Miss Kennedy. Who else was there? Tell me, and spare yourself this pain.’
‘It’s the truth,’ she said again.
‘Well,’ Abydos said. He nodded to Samal.
Kennedy braced herself, but she knew enough about torture to be sure that any preparations she made in advance would be useless as soon as it started.
She thought the man might take a few moments to screw up his courage, but he just stuck the knife deep into her left side, until it touched the rib and ground against the bone. Kennedy opened her mouth to scream. Abydos, who had been expecting this, pushed a piece of cloth — a handkerchief, maybe — deeply into her throat. The scream became a soggy yodel, more vibration than sound. The man watched her closely, clinically, as she struggled and gurgled into the gag.
‘Again,’ he said.
Samal lowered the blade and Kennedy went into futile spasms, panic and terror shutting out all rational thought.
But the knife didn’t touch her, because the two men had both frozen at a sudden sound, absurd and extraneous, from outside the room. Five hollow knocks, in quick succession, in the sequence universally known as shave-and-a-haircut.
‘Izzy?’ It was a woman’s voice, young and slightly querulous, coming from the other end of the hall — from the flat’s front door. ‘Lover? Are you in there?’
14
Abydos responded a little quicker than Kennedy, and that slight difference was crucial. As she tensed her body for some movement violent enough to warn this newcomer off, he gripped her wrists tightly in his hands and whispered a single word to Samal.
‘Rishkert.’
By that time, Kennedy’s legs were lifting off the bed, but Samal caught her ankles in mid-air and forced them down again slowly and inexorably. She couldn’t produce any more noise than the writhing of her upper body against the sheets.
‘Izzy? Are you in here?’ The voice seemed a little wary and unhappy. ‘The door wasn’t locked …’ Abydos gave Samal a smouldering glare and Samal turned his face away from it as though from a slap.
Footsteps in the hall, getting closer. ‘Izzy?’ By now, whoever it was had to have seen the light streaming from under the door. But you wouldn’t just wander into someone’s bedroom, uninvited. Nobody would be insane or brazen or crass enough to do that, unless they were pretty sure they had an open invitation.
The door handle turned and the door opened an inch. ‘Okayyy …’ The voice had changed from tentative to teasing, although there was still an undertone of uncertainty. ‘If you’ve got someone in there, I’m giving you a full ten seconds to get under the covers. Nine … eight … seven … Nah, to hell with it.’
The door was pushed fully open and a young woman — a very young woman — stepped into the room. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and even in her extreme panic, a part of Kennedy’s mind found time for wonder and outrage.
Jesus, Izzy.
The woman was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt — plain, even drab — and black wrestling boots that hadn’t been in style for so long that they had to be a retro affectation. Her hair was short and dark and tightly curled, her eyes were violet, and right then they were as wide as saucers because whatever she was expecting to be looking at, what she was actually seeing was two stony-faced men and a tied-up woman, and Samal had stood and swung round to face her, a gun in his hand now (replacing the knife — when had that happened?) pointing directly at the mid-point of her body.
‘I … I …’ she faltered. ‘I was—’
‘Come into the room,’ Abydos said. ‘Come. We won’t hurt you.’ His voice was firm, but with a slow, even cadence, reassuring. He made no move towards her, but his gaze was fixed on her eyes. ‘Come in, or this woman will die.’
The girl looked from Abydos to Samal, then to the gun. Her face was the face of a trauma victim, dull with shock. Run, Kennedy thought, and tried to say, but the only sound that came through the gag was a desperate, almost voiceless growl.
‘Come inside,’ Abydos said, in the same gentling voice. ‘Close the door.’
The girl took a step. At least, her foot moved forward, but her body stayed where it was, on the threshold, frozen.
‘My mum knows I’m here,’ she said, but she said it with a rising pitch, as a question or a plea.
‘All right,’ Abydos said. ‘It’s all right. Close the door.’
But the girl seemed to have run out of motive force. ‘I just wanted …’ she said. ‘I was gonna give Izzy her books back.’
She held up something that Kennedy hadn’t seen until then: brightly coloured, even garish, and with a high gloss over which the light of the lamp played in a momentary flash of Morse.