‘Okay,’ Kennedy said. ‘I just wanted to drop off a message. I was told that the Pantheon was your mailbox. But you saw me coming, right?’
‘John told me you were looking to get up with me,’ Tillman admitted.
‘And then what? You decided to camp out at that café until I showed? If you’ve got that much time to waste, Leo, good for you. I don’t. Why didn’t you just call me?’
‘Manolis is helping me with something,’ Tillman said. ‘A project I’ve got going on. Calling you was the next thing I was going to do, Heather. As soon as I got done with this.’
His tone was mild, calming. The truth was that her anger had nothing to do with him. She’d been helpless the night before, tied to a bed with her legs spread wide, while two men threatened and brutalised her. True, she’d then seen her attackers beaten flatter than a dirty postcard, but that hadn’t done much to reconcile her to her own pain and humiliation.
‘I’m having a bad week,’ she told Tillman. ‘I’m sorry. It’s good to see you, too.’
She sat down next to him, stifling the restless urge that wanted her to stay upright and moving.
He made no attempt to touch her. He wasn’t a man who did hugs and kisses all that much. Back when he was searching for his family, he’d lived like a monk for long enough to make solitude his natural state. You didn’t put something like that down lightly, once you’d let it get into the grain of you the way Leo had. And he didn’t try to coax her to talk, either. He just waited, knowing that she’d get to it in her own time.
‘So what were you doing back there at the café?’ she asked again. ‘John Partridge said you were on a job. What does that mean for you, these days?’
Tillman laughed softly. ‘It never seems to mean the same thing twice. But this isn’t work, exactly. More like a side effect of work. Someone’s been watching me. I’m trying to figure out who it might be and what they’re looking to do, but they’re good enough that I can never seem to catch them at it.’
Kennedy was perturbed and he saw it in her face. Again, he waited quietly for her to explain.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t like that one bit. It might be completely unconnected with what brought me here, but I don’t think that’s very likely.’
She told Tillman about the events of the last few days, concisely but with as much circumstantial detail as she could provide. She wanted him to see it all from the same perspective from which she’d seen it, as the pieces all came together and screamed the impossible, unwelcome conclusion at her. But she stopped with the death of Alex Wales. She couldn’t talk about what had happened after that, after she left the hospital and went home. Not to Tillman. Not yet.
‘The Judas People,’ Tillman murmured, when she’d finished. He said it with a kind of dulled wonder, as though it were somehow both unexpected and obvious at the same time — like the favourite in a horse race romping home after you’d bet on a hundred-to-one outsider.
‘Yes,’ Kennedy said, a little piqued by his calm. ‘The Judas People, Leo. The ones who killed my partner, stole your family from you, and almost—’ She reined herself in, catching a hysterical edge in her own voice. ‘I’m not dealing with this all that well,’ she said, stating the obvious. ‘It’s been three years, and I did my best to forget the whole thing. Now — it’s like it never went away. Like we never came back from Mexico.’
‘But we did,’ he reminded her. He gave her a remorseless stare. ‘Heather, they threw everything they had at us and we came out of it still on our feet. This isn’t like that. This is you walking across the edge of something they’re involved in. They may not even have put two and two together. They may not know it’s you. That you’re … someone who already knows about them.’
‘I wish I could believe that,’ Kennedy said bleakly. ‘But I don’t. And neither do you. If it was just me, I’d buy it. Maybe. It could be the lousiest of lousy luck. But it’s not just me, it’s me and Emil Gassan. Two of the three people in the world who know that the Judas tribe are out there. That kind of changes the odds, doesn’t it?’
Tillman blew out his cheek. ‘Maybe.’
‘Maybe?’
‘I could make a case. All of this seems to be about that book, somehow, doesn’t it? And Gassan’s speciality is deciphering old texts. So I don’t see it as too much of a stretch that he was close to hand when the book was stolen. Or destroyed. Or whatever happened to it.’
‘Except that he wasn’t. He was drafted in afterwards, like me.’
‘Still. Old texts are his discipline. It makes some sense for him to be there. And when they asked him to bring in a private investigator, how long do you think his shortlist was? It was you, Heather. You’re the only person he knows with that background.’
‘Just coincidence, then.’
‘Just coincidence. Because the alternative is to think that the universe folds itself out of shape just for you. And once you start thinking that, you’re well on your way to some kind of serious personality disorder.’
Kennedy didn’t say word one about either pots or kettles. ‘Well, thanks for coming up with a rational explanation, Leo,’ she said. ‘But that isn’t how it looks from where I’m sitting. There must have been a hundred palaeographers the museum could have gone to. And the guy in charge of the collection getting a stroke right then, and the theft happening right then … I’d say we’re operating right out at the limits of coincidence here.’ She steeled herself. ‘Anyway,’ she said, in a low voice, ‘there’s more.’
‘You think I couldn’t see that in your face? Go on.’
‘They came after me last night. When I got back home, they were waiting for me.’
Tillman’s eyebrows went up a fraction, which for him was expressive of extreme astonishment. ‘Knowing their fieldcraft,’ he said, ‘you were lucky to spot them.’
‘I didn’t spot them,’ Kennedy said. ‘I walked right into it. They were going to kill me. Question me first, and then kill me when they had all the answers. But then this … this girl turned up. And bear in mind, Leo, I don’t call women girls all that often. She was young. And she was better than they were. She saved my life. Left these two Messengers more dead than alive. And mostly she just used her bare hands and the bedroom furniture.’
She let that sink in for a few moments. Tillman’s face showed that he was weighing up what it meant. But Kennedy drew the conclusion for him anyway. ‘She was one of them. One of the Elohim.’
He tapped his thumb against the back of the bench, looking off into the distance. Not randomly, Kennedy realised. He’d chosen this spot because of the view it commanded, and he’d been monitoring all the people who’d walked by while they were talking. He was still doing it, making sure they weren’t being watched or eavesdropped on, checking lines of sight and patterns of movement.
‘Two factions,’ he said at last, after a long silence.
‘That’s the obvious conclusion,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘But what the hell would it mean? A breakaway group from the Judas tribe, the way the Provos broke away from the original IRA? These people kept their shit together for two thousand years. What’s so special about now?’
‘We know they decamped. Relocated their hidden city from Mexico to someplace else. That would have created a lot of stress. Hundreds of thousands of people on the move, leaving behind everything they knew. Having to build their homes again, from scratch. It’s probably safe to assume that they’re going through some social upheaval right now. Choppy waters for the chosen people.’