She counted ten. Ten Elohim — two of them among the best the People had ever raised.
It was over, whether she went or stayed.
33
What Tillman found in the lower room came as no surprise, but only because he’d already had the big surprise when he opened up the truck. Along with more explosives and raw materials for explosives, there were RPG-Komar shoulder-mounted missiles, self-igniting phosphorus grenades, Belgian army issue Tatang combat knives, M2 backpack flamethrowers and — looking almost ashamed of the shabby company it was keeping — a box of digital alarm clocks ready to be filleted for timing mechanisms. It was an arsenal of enormous extent and terrifying variety, assembled by someone who knew what they wanted to cook up (presumably Armageddon) and exactly what the recipe called for.
Tillman wasn’t given to letting his imagination run wild, but found himself playing out in his mind the scenarios that would arise if this Pandora’s Box were opened and a tenth of its contents saw the light of day.
But this was an ongoing operation. It didn’t look like a survivalist stockpile assembled against a future apocalypse. Quite the opposite. Two trucks had rolled in, one had rolled out again. The other had been stacked to the roof with instruments of death and mayhem and was in the freight bay ready to roll.
Perturbed, Tillman retreated to the upper level.
He was remembering the petite, self-contained girl he’d watched on the CCTV feed at the newsagents’ in Pimlico. It was hard to reconcile that pretty, solemn face with this house of horrors. But then again, from what Kennedy had said, the girl was as much beast as beauty.
Shaking his head to clear it of the ammoniac stink, Tillman crossed to the office. He didn’t bother to try keys this time, since there was no way his visit here was going to pass unnoticed. He just kicked the flimsy door off its hinges and walked in.
A dark-green filing cabinet stood demurely in the corner of the room. Tillman tried the top drawer, found it locked. Again, he thought, To hell with subtlety. He still had the crowbar in his hand and he used it to bend the front of the top file drawer out and down.
The file hangers inside were labelled with alphanumerics — TN1, GF3, KB14. He hauled papers out and scanned them. Most were bills of lading, invoices and paperwork for shipments out of the warehouse. Screws, bolts, belts and gaskets going to Bergen, Berlin, Bogota, Brussels, Brisbane. Either there were no As or they were filed out of sequence. The High Energy Haulage logo was on every sheet, its head office given each time as a different address in a different city, all of them a long way from Hayes, Middlesex.
Tillman opened up the next drawer, and the next. He found more of the same. Nothing incriminating, nothing that related in any way to the real business of this place. But why would there be? He scanned more and more of the paperwork, trying to get a feel for what this operation might be about from the items that had been sent out and the places they’d been sent to.
But there was no rhyme or reason. Most of the destinations were big cities, but some were towns he’d barely heard of. San Gimignano. Bardwell, Kentucky. Darling, South Africa. La Orotava. He glanced across at the desk in the office. Two computers sat there, side by side. Maybe a better bet.
But as he crossed to the desk and leaned in to turn on the nearer of the two machines, he heard a loud, metallic clattering from behind him, the unmusical tolling of empty paint and lube cans. He’d wired up all the doors in that way, but the direction of the sound suggested it had come from the double doors through which he’d entered.
He was all out of time.
34
Diema waited and watched.
There was nothing else she could do.
She saw Hifela and his hit squad walk into the warehouse through its rear doors. She saw most of them come out again and walk around to the front of the building, presumably to catch Tillman between two fronts.
A minute or two passed without further sound.
And then there was a single, resonating boom.
Leo Tillman had just been dispatched, execution-style.
Diema thought about this and tried to decide how she felt about him being dead before circumstances had even obliged her to speak to him. But as she considered, she frowned.
No, that made no sense. Her first guess had to be wrong.
35
Elias Shud thought often about the parable of the talents. Maybe too much, if he were honest with himself. In the parable, the man who didn’t use what God gave him was rebuked: the Lord’s blessings went to those who diligently exploited what they already had.
Shud’s own talents were mostly kept hidden, these days, because he had chosen to follow Ber Lusim into exile — and in the decade that followed, Ber Lusim had sent him only against the softest of targets.
So a man who was capable of going up against the mightiest fighters in the Nations, and coming away with their blood on his hands, had been used instead to dispatch men, women — even, occasionally, children — who didn’t even know that they were targets and either died unknowing or died surprised. And then, more recently, as Shekolni had preached his gospel of pre-emption, he had created terror on a larger scale, but still without any personal engagement worthy of the name.
So Shud had come to think of himself, in recent years, as a man whose service to the Word consisted chiefly in the abasement of his pride — in the glory that comes from forsaking glory.
Today felt no different. They were responding to an alarm call from the warehouse. Ten of them. A minyan of Messengers! Rushing to respond to a wire chewed by a rat or a security guard whose chair had toppled over while he dozed.
But as soon as they came within sight of the building’s rear entrance, they knew it wasn’t that. The door had been left open, which told them immediately that the yokels on-site had miscarried in some way.
Hifela commanded his men with gestures to fan out to left and right of the door, and chose two to lead. But there was no attack as they went in. The way through the small room beyond was clear.
Shud went in next and saw what they’d missed: one of the guards, bound and gagged and rolled out of sight in the corner of the room, behind a stack of fibreboard panels. He was barely conscious, but Shud slapped him awake and ripped the gag from his mouth.
‘How many?’ he rasped.
‘One,’ the man mumbled. ‘I … I only saw one.’
The number meant nothing in itself. It was far safer to assume they were facing a team. But now, at least, they knew there was someone ranged against them. Their time hadn’t been completely wasted.
‘Armed?’ Hifela asked, behind him.
The guard nodded. ‘I think … yes. A gun. He hit me with the butt of a gun.’
Hifela looked at the double doors that stood before them. To push them open and walk straight through was obviously an option. They had superior numbers, after all, and they were Elohim, warriors in the service of the Name.
But they were not fools. In battle, they knew, to throw away an advantage when you don’t need to is a sin — usually a mortal one.
Speaking with his hands again, Hifela designated two to watch the doors. The rest he took with him, back through the rear door and around the side of the building.
The warehouse space was huge. It took up most of the interior of the building, and there were half a dozen ways or more of approaching it. Two of them were doors opening off parallel corridors that were easily reached from a side entrance.
Hifela led the way there and let them in using a master key. They entered, separated into two groups, and — on Hifela’s signal — moved quickly and silently down the corridors to the two doors. Hifela opened one with the master key. Shud broke the other open with a single thrust of his shoulder.