The room was narrow enough that if Bouchard had followed her, he would have been standing uncomfortably close, so he stayed in the doorway, hands in pockets, and indicated with a nod of the head the slender document that lay dead centre on the desk.
‘The book,’ he said, with the same slightly mocking inflection as before.
Kennedy sat and pulled it towards her. It was a bundle of A4 sheets, a little ragged and feathery at the edges, held together by a bulldog clip at the top-left corner. The title A TRUMPET SPEAKING JUDGMENT was roughly centred on the page, typed in 12-point Courier.
‘And this is a full transcript?’ she asked.
‘Yes, we think so. But we don’t know. It’s an anomaly, to be honest. We would probably have thrown it away except that we lost our only copy of the book — the actual printed book — in bizarre circumstances, and were unable to replace it. Since this is all we have, we keep it. And since it’s lacking even the most basic authentication, we don’t advertise the fact.’
He excused himself politely, aware of her tension and urgency but too polite to comment on them, and left her with the transcript.
Kennedy removed the clip and turned the page — or rather lifted the page, since the typescript wasn’t bound. She was surprised to find that the second sheet was a muddy photocopy of what must have been the original book’s frontispiece. It was a line drawing, done with indifferent skill, of a cliff wall with a town at its base. Underneath the picture, there was an epigram in Latin. De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente. Kennedy’s Latin was just about good enough for those who are about to die salute you, and she’d never liked that sentiment much in any case.
She turned to the next sheet, which was numbered 1.
Since this New Worlde proves to be so very like the Old, and since our new-minted Rulers are of base metal, that a man may bite and see the mark of his
Teethe in the coine, I say now: I have done with them, for all and ever. I and every Manne of Sense. And so I stand upon the Muses’ Mountain, asking Inspiration of all, though my true Muse be Godde the Higheste. And here He doth deliver, through me unworthy, His final Judgment.
For Christes Kingdome is upon us, and indeed has come later than some sages conjudged. And now, because He loves His servants, He lets me see his footprintes wheresoever I look. He will walk on English souls and eat of English bread, and ye that read me will see it, whether looking out from Munsters spire or from Westminsters darkened casements. Ye cannot choose, for he will speak at first in Fire and Water and last in Earthe and Air.
The wordes of the psalmist (114:4) shall be proved correct. No less so the words of John (1:12 and 5:6). And also, be mindful and listen, as John likewise saide: he that hath ears to heare, God has enjoined him to heare. It matters not a whit whether he wish it or noe.
Kennedy looked ahead. The last sheet in the stack was number 86. It was going to be a sod of a long night.
31
Tillman made his approach along a route that took him between the lines of sight of the security cameras. There might be nobody watching the monitor in any case, or the monitor might be set to flick cyclically through the camera feeds, but he took as few chances as he could.
He went to a place he’d already chosen from a long way out — the angle of a wall, where a dead zone for the cameras corresponded with a thick patch of shadow between two arc lights. He pressed himself in against the wall, partially shielded to his left by a downpipe, and waited.
The next time the guard made his rounds, Tillman was ready. He let the man walk right past him.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Got the time?’
He wasn’t being a smart-ass. Rotational force increased your chances of a clean knock-out, because when you turn quickly, your brain, in its bubble of protective fluid, floats relatively stationary inside your turning skull. As the guard swung round to face him, Tillman smacked him across the side of the head with a sap. The man’s knees buckled. Tillman caught him as he folded and lowered him carefully to the ground.
He quickly took the guard’s jacket and cap. Keys were in the jacket pocket, ready to hand: good. There was no time to take the trousers. If anyone was watching the camera feed, the gap before he emerged again had to be short enough not to arouse suspicions. He tied the guard’s hands and feet with plasticated wire and gagged him with duct tape. Rough and ready, but it would hold for a while.
Then he stepped out into the light, head turned slightly away from the watching cameras, and ambled around the back of the building towards the door.
He was putting his money on there being a straightforward lock that one of the guard’s keys would fit, and even then he knew he needed to get it right on the first or second try. Otherwise, he’d have to shoot the lock-plate off and take his chances with whoever was inside. He had his gun, a Mateba Unica, unholstered in his hand as he stepped up to the door.
But his luck was in. The guard hadn’t just left the door unlocked, he’d placed a wooden chock on the ground to wedge it open. That level of sloppiness and stupidity was a gift from God, and Tillman took it. He didn’t even break stride as he pushed the door wide and stepped in.
On the other side of the door, there was a narrow vestibule, completely empty apart from a time clock on the wall and a rack of punch-cards. The time clock showed six o’clock, and had presumably done so for quite a while. The cards had a patina of dust, some had fallen out of their pigeonholes onto the floor, and there were bootmarks laid across them. Whoever was staffing this place now, they didn’t bother with clocking in and clocking out.
There was a double swing-door ahead of Tillman, light spilling out from the crack between the two doors. He pushed it open and walked right through.
Into a much larger space, flood-lit. Huge wood-and-steel-framed shelf units towered past the floodlights into the darkness of a ceiling void that had to be forty feet above him. On the shelves, crates and drums and bulky objects swathed in plastic fibre-wrap.
Closer to hand, another guard turned as the door slammed against the wall.
‘What took—’ he said.
Then he registered Tillman’s camouflage trousers, or maybe just Tillman’s cold, stern face. His eyes widened.
Tillman hit him across the jaw with the butt of the Unica, knocking him backward into the nearest rack of shelves. It was very solidly built and didn’t even shake. The guard managed to stay on his feet, but he made the mistake of scrambling for the gun at his side. Tillman kicked his legs out from under him.
There was no need for another punch. Tillman got the guard in a throat-lock, his free left hand holding the guy’s arm against his side so he couldn’t bring the gun up, and applied steady pressure.
After thirty seconds, the guard wasn’t moving any more. After forty, Tillman set him down, tied him up and gagged him like the other one, and put him out of the way on one of the floor-level shelves.
No way were these guys Elohim: they were local hire, and not very good at that.
Now, belatedly, Tillman did the reconnaissance that in a perfect world he would have done before going in. First of all, he checked for interior CCTV hook-ups, or wiring for pressure or contact alarms. There were none, which didn’t surprise him now that he’d seen the standard of the security staff. Next, he found the other doors out of this massive, hangar-like room — there were seven, in all — locked the ones that would lock with the guard’s keys, and marked the locations of the others. One led through to an inner office whose floor-to-ceiling window was designed to allow whoever sat there to oversee everything that went on in the warehouse. It was dark, now, and empty.