Rush put the bottle back and went up to his room, moving as quietly as he could in case his dad had taken off the headphones and turned in for the night. He opened his bedroom door, stepped inside and closed it firmly before turning the light on.
There was a girl on his bed. That registered first, because it was such a novelty in itself.
The gun in her hand presented itself to his mind a half-second or so later, but with even more breathtaking effect.
As a distant third, he realised that she’d been watching TV on his tiny portable, with the sound right down. Cartoon Network. A very old episode of Courage, the Cowardly Dog.
‘Lock it,’ the girl said, with a nod of her head towards the door.
PART FOUR
COUNCIL OF WAR
41
On both sides of the Channel, wherever she could get any internet access Kennedy continued to work through Toller’s prophecies, trying to nail down the idea that had occurred to her when she was talking to Bouchard. By the time she was done, she was a few minutes away from St Pancras, and in a slightly surreal daze. She’d thought after meeting the Judas tribe that nothing could ever surprise her again.
She’d been dead wrong.
Her phone rang as the train pulled into the platform. She glanced at the caller ID: Ben Rush. As she was about to answer, Leo Tillman rolled slowly into her field of vision. He was leaning against a pillar halfway along the platform, hands in his pockets, conspicuously waiting for her. The train slowed to a halt, placing him dead centre in Kennedy’s window. In her current mood, that was slightly too flashy an effect for her liking. She hit IGNORE on the phone. She’d catch up with Rush later.
Tillman fell into step with her as she descended from the carriage and walked towards the barrier. ‘Welcome home,’ he said.
Kennedy looked around, first left and then right. ‘No marching bands? No parade? Some welcome.’
‘Heather, whatever this is about, it’s not ancient literature.’
‘I never thought it was,’ she said. ‘Actually, Leo, I think it’s about the end of the world.’
He gave her a slightly wary glance. ‘I wouldn’t have gone that far. But I went looking for your Elohim girl and I found—’
‘You did what?’ Kennedy stopped dead and swivelled to face him, unable to keep the horror from showing on her face. ‘Leo, I told you—’
‘I know. You told me to sit this out. But I didn’t make any promises. Listen, there’s something I need to show you. Can you give me an hour or two? I can promise you something you’ve never seen before.’
‘I’ve heard that from a lot of men,’ Kennedy muttered darkly. ‘It never comes to anything good.’
And this is no exception, she thought, forty-five minutes later. She was standing in a lock-up in Lewisham, underneath a railway arch, with the gates locked behind her, and she was staring into the back of an articulated truck. The stuff inside it was maybe what you’d get if you asked a terrorist to come up with a vision of the earthly paradise.
She picked up a rifle from a case close to the truck’s tailgate that Tillman had already opened. It was a military machine gun — no use for sports, and scarcely better for public order deployment. It was designed to be planted firmly on the ground and set to full automatic, spewing out a few hundred rounds per minute into whatever piece of territory needed to be tenderised.
The next box held grenades, and the one after that, more rifles. They were stacked up against three drums of white phosphorus.
‘This is a nightmare,’ Kennedy said.
‘Or a wet dream,’ Tillman said. ‘Depending on where you’re standing. There was a warehouse full of this stuff, Heather. Thirty to forty times as much as you’re looking at here. The warehouse is mostly smoke and charcoal briquettes by this time. And I’m going to get rid of what’s in the truck, too, as soon as I’ve figured out how. I just wanted you to see it first so you’d know I wasn’t exaggerating.’
Tillman ran a hand through his unruly hair, looking more uneasy and uncertain than she could ever remember seeing him. ‘Heather, I got a look at the paperwork. The outfit that owned the warehouse — High Energy Haulage — was delivering to a hundred other places. It was a global network.’
‘Did you call the police?’
Tillman laughed lugubriously. ‘Yeah, I did, for what it’s worth. But like I said, this was just a distribution centre. Do you see what we’re looking at? We already knew that the Messengers were killers, but this …’ He threw out his arms in an inarticulate gesture, indicating the truck full of death. ‘Unless the London branch just experienced some kind of sudden shared psychosis, we’re talking about an incredible escalation of hostilities. They’re shipping industrial quantities of small arms, field munitions, high explosive and incendiaries. Moving it all into place. And it’s enough to fight a medium-sized war — which I guess is what it’s probably for.’
Kennedy shook her head. ‘That’s not what it’s for.’
Tillman stared at her in bewilderment. ‘How would you know? Is this something you found in France? Something to do with —’
Kennedy cut across him. ‘Not yet, Leo. This is still you showing me yours. How does any of this tie in with the Messenger I met? The girl? You said you went looking for her. Explain.’
Kennedy could tell from his expression as he stared at her that her tone had given too much away. He knew that she was hiding something, and he knew that it was important. How hard would it be for him to put the pieces together and realise who it was he’d been chasing? ‘Tell me,’ she said again, more urgently.
‘She rides a motorbike,’ Tillman said, his voice calm, almost expressionless in contrast to Kennedy’s. ‘Manolis was able to get the licence number, and then he hacked into the UK speed camera networks to see where she’d been clocked. We were looking for clusters. Thought we might get some idea of where she was based. But she saw us coming.’
‘Saw you?’ Kennedy was appalled all over again. ‘You mean you met her? You actually—’
‘No. I don’t mean that. She guessed what we’d do and she turned the tables on us. That’s what I’m thinking, anyway. She wanted me to find that warehouse. She used the bike to lead me there. Or she had the place under surveillance herself, and Mano got the wrong end of the stick. But whichever of the two it was, she knows I was there. She was watching me the whole time.’
He took the rifle from Kennedy and put it back in the case, pushed the lid back down hard. Kennedy had forgotten she was even holding it. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.
‘Because I tripped an alarm, while I was in there. I made myself a target. I should have been killed, by rights. But I wasn’t, because I had a tailgunner. There was another shooter, lying out in the long grass, who laid down some cover fire for me. And as far as I could see, she did it without killing anyone. Beautiful, precision shooting.’
‘Not your man?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Manolis?’
‘He isn’t a shooter. And he wasn’t anywhere near that place. His wife would skin me and salt me if I asked him to do anything like that. I use him for surveillance, which is his specialty, and that’s all I use him for.’
Tillman paused for a second, watching her. Kennedy had to fight the impulse to turn away from him, afraid of what he might be reading in her face.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know for sure nobody followed me in. And nobody else was moving out on that waste ground after I got there. That means the shooter was already embedded and hidden before I arrived. It was the girl. There’s no other way I can figure it. And she backed my play, which is the only reason I got out alive. If she actually planted that trail for me to follow — if she knew I’d go looking for her, find the bike, and all the rest of it — then she made a lot of right guesses about me based on nothing but thin air and moonbeams.’