Kennedy paused for a second, waiting for them to challenge her. What she was saying sounded so much like madness, even to her, that she couldn’t imagine anyone else swallowing it for a moment. But when Tillman spoke, it was to ask a very practical and logistical question.
‘So the order of these incidents,’ he said. ‘Is the same as the order in which the prophecies occur in the book?’
‘Always. I went back and checked. The abortive missile strike was the same day as the Münster bombing, but if you correct for local time, it happened two hours later.’
She looked at the book again. It had almost developed a personality for her by this time, its riddles and ellipses part of a sick game, its dire promises full of psychopathic enthusiasm.
‘“Where the Highest bled,”’ she read, ‘“the Lowest wille likewise bleed. Even the vermin, that all shunne and disdaine.” When the Civil War was over, Cromwell’s Parliamentarians sentenced Charles the First to death by decapitation. He was executed on Whitehall, in front of a building called the Banqueting House.
‘An hour and a half after the Azrael incident, a beat cop found about a thousand rats on the steps of the Banqueting House — all with their heads cut off. Take the king to be the “Highest”, and the vermin bled right where he bled. They even died in the same way.’
She met Tillman’s gaze, then Rush’s, and shrugged. ‘And “Ister” is the River Danube. It ran red a couple of hours after the rats were found — not with blood, with aniline dye, but then the prophecy only says “as with blood”.
‘And so it goes on. I didn’t manage to match all of them up, but as near as I can tell, we’re three-quarters of the way through the book. Toller’s prophecies are all coming to pass, one by one, in order.’
Tillman scratched his chin but said nothing.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Rush protested. ‘What are we saying here? Seriously? Toller predicted the end of the world three hundred years ago, and now it’s happening?’
‘You’re not listening,’ Tillman growled. ‘That isn’t what she’s saying at all.’
‘No,’ Kennedy agreed, ‘it isn’t. But Rush wasn’t in that warehouse with you, Leo. And he hasn’t seen what’s sitting in your truck.’ To Rush, she said, ‘The Nunappleton fire was arson. The dead bodies the police found in the wreckage — the unbelievers who’d profaned the holy word — had been brought into the house purely so they could die there. The missile attack wasn’t an accident either. Somebody infiltrated an Israeli field station and killed four soldiers before setting off the Azrael. None of these were accidents, Rush. And more to the point, they weren’t inexorable destiny. These incidents are all being set up, very carefully and very deliberately.’
Rush looked confused rather than convinced. ‘But if they’re happening all over the world … and they’re only a few hours apart …’
He let the sentence tail off. Kennedy turned back to Tillman.
‘Tell him what you found,’ she said.
Tillman said nothing.
‘Leo, he knows about the Messengers. And the girl had him pegged as my accomplice, so you can bet that the Elohim know all about him. Tell him about the warehouse or I will.’
Tillman made a placatory gesture, but it was still a moment or two before he spoke. ‘There seems to be a group,’ he said, giving Rush a sombre glance, ‘that’s stockpiling weapons and explosives in very, very large amounts. They’re shipping the weapons out to a lot of different places. I found what I hope to God was their main stash, and closed it down, but it’s pretty certain that they’ve got a lot of really lethal kit already sitting in a lot of different places. Maybe if we’re lucky, I slowed them down a little.’
‘Oh my god,’ Rush said. His face was pale.
‘Someone is using Toller’s book as an instruction manual,’ Kennedy summed up. ‘Everything that he predicted, they’re playing it out, taking a lot of care to get all the details right and to make sure that the disasters happen in the right sequence — the same sequence the book puts them in.’
Something occurred to her, belatedly — maybe because of where she was, and because of what had happened, what she’d seen, the last time she was here. She went to the window and looked down. After a moment, when the two men came to join her there, she pointed to the side of the truck. It bore the name of the company that owned the warehouse, High Energy Haulage, with the initial letters picked out in red and their logo, which was a sort of dolmen shape, two vertical blocks supporting a horizontal one.
‘H-E-H,’ Kennedy spelled out. ‘Heh.’ She pronounced it hay. ‘It’s the fifth letter of the Aramaic alphabet. And they used their letters as numbers, too, so that sign, right there — it’s a five. As in fifth. As in monarchy.’
‘But why?’ Rush demanded, although it sounded more like a plea. ‘Why would anybody make prophecies come true three centuries too late? It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Maybe it’s time to call in our expert witness,’ Kennedy said into the silence that followed.
46
There was once a man of great virtue, Diema said, to whom all earthly rewards and accolades came early, and easy. Everyone loved him. Everyone believed in him. Everyone wanted him to succeed. But unfortunately, although nobody around him could see it, he was possessed by a demon.
She told it exactly like this, as though it were a fairy story, or perhaps a parable — but in any case, as though it were a narrative already removed from all of them, herself and her listeners alike, into another level of reality, even though she’d made it clear that the man she was talking about was still very much alive.
His name was Ber Lusim, and perhaps, after all, he was no more than the furthest point on a bell curve. The Elohim were always chosen young. Diema herself, selected at age sixteen, was coming to her calling late, by the standards of the People. Most of the Messengers were learning the tools and methods of their trade before their thirteenth birthday.
Ber Lusim presented himself to Kuutma — pre-empted the process — when he was nine. His words, according to the story, were ‘I want to serve.’
‘And what service can you offer?’ Kuutma demanded of the little boy, amused.
Ber Lusim opened his hands. In each of them there was a dead bird — a tiny thing, less than four inches from beak to tail. The birds had green flanks and crimson throats. The feathers on their bellies, by contrast, were a drab grey. Calypte anna, Anna’s hummingbird, one of the fastest creatures that ever lived.
‘I want to serve,’ the boy said again.
Kuutma adopted him formally into the Elohim, there and then.
‘This Kuutma,’ Tillman cut in, his stare hard and unwavering. ‘This was the man we met in Mexico? The one who used to call himself Michael Brand?’
The girl stared back. ‘Yes, but why should that matter? It’s not a name, it’s a job description. All Kuutmas are the Brand. Kuutma means the Brand. And the “el” in Michael stands for the holy one, whose name cannot be spoken. Kuutma is the brand of God on the world of the godless.’
Wordlessly, Tillman waved to her to go on.
Ber Lusim was the greatest of the Messengers. He was given his journeyman posting when he was fifteen — to Washington, where his appearance of youth and unworldliness was a very useful resource. His first kill came quickly, when an American journalist began to take too much of an interest in certain medieval documents whose speculations touched on the existence of a Judas-worshipping sect.