There was a sense of everyone in the room stepping back from a confrontation whose terms and rules of engagement had never been formally stated. Diema relaxed her stance, letting out a long breath.
Rush reached for the sica to take a closer look at it. Diema’s hand locked around his wrist. With the other hand, she took the knife away from his reaching fingers and slid it back into its sheath inside her shirt.
‘The blade’s poisoned,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘Pick it up in the wrong way and you’ll probably die.’
Looking at the red runnel on the girl’s cheek, it occurred to Kennedy that that was every bit as true of her as it was of the knife.
47
The talk ebbed and flowed around Rush. He tried to pay attention, but the rigours of the last two days — everything from his fight with Alex Wales and the wounding of Professor Gassan up to his interrogation and kidnapping by the scary girl and the drive down here, bound hand and foot, in the back of what looked like a postal delivery van — were catching up with him. He found himself drifting in and out of a heavy doze, missing the connections between sentences and ideas or else experiencing them as an imagistic jumble.
He kept flashing back to the one time the girl had really hurt him. She was a skilled interrogator, and mostly she just talked the truth out of him. She seemed to know most of it already, so all he had to do to save his life was to agree to one or two of the things she was saying — agree that he knew what she was, and who her friends were, and what she was for.
But when she asked him where she was from, and he said he didn’t know, she took his hand in hers and folded his wrist back on itself in some complicated way. It was agonising, and he was terrified that the wrist was going to snap.
‘Ginat’Dania,’ she said. ‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know!’ Rush had yelled and then bellowed and then whimpered. ‘I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know, I never heard of it, please. Oh, Jesus. Please.’
The night was a morass of fear, leavened with shame, but most of it could be dissolved into soft focus. That moment stood out very clear and sharp. He turned it over and over in his mind as though it were a puzzle box and he was looking for the sequence of manipulations that would slide it open.
That was why he’d voted yes, although he wasn’t kidding himself that his vote had counted for much. He needed to prove that he wasn’t afraid of her. Hating her would have been okay, but being afraid of her wasn’t. The distinction mattered a lot.
And still they talked. Kennedy was arguing now about what it was they were signing up for. ‘Leo’s a soldier, and you’re … what you are. But this isn’t what I do. I’ve killed exactly twice, once in a police action and once in self-defence. I can’t take part in raids or ambushes or executions. I probably can’t even watch those things.’
‘I’ve studied you,’ Diema said bluntly, ‘and I think you’re wrong. But it’s not for me to say what you can do and what you can’t do. It’s irrelevant in any case. There are too many of them for us to fight them like that. We need another way.’
Then there was some talk about the two men — the warrior, Ber Lusim, and the priest, Shekolni. Their strengths and their weaknesses, according to Kuutma, and according to the girl’s own observations. Rush started to doze, missed some of the conversation.
‘… tracked Ber Lusim to safe houses in three different cities,’ Diema was saying now. ‘Berlin. Tokyo. Santiago. And we think there might be bases in Los Angeles and London, also. But as far as we know, none of those places was a permanent base of operations.’
‘Same problem with the paperwork I saw at the warehouse,’ Tillman answered. ‘They were shipping stuff pretty much everywhere. Singapore. Toulouse. New York. Budapest. No way to know whether any of those places are fixed bases or distributive hubs in their own right. They’re setting up hundreds of one-off terrorist acts in a dozen different countries. Ber Lusim could be overseeing the whole programme from any one of those places, or from somewhere else entirely.’
‘Budapest,’ Rush said. He knew he’d said it because he heard it — with that weird sense of detachment and unfamiliarity you get when you hear your own voice played over a tape recorder.
The other three all looked at him.
‘You’ve got an opinion on this?’ Tillman asked him.
Rush blinked a few times, because he wasn’t seeing all that clearly. ‘It’s Budapest,’ he said again. ‘I think.’ He found his gaze drawn to the girl, whose dark eyes and pale face suddenly reminded him overpoweringly of a photographic negative, or an X-ray. As though she belonged to another world that was the anti-matter image of his own. ‘What you said,’ he mumbled, ‘about Shekolni being obsessed with Johann Toller — and about how your people always follow tradition. Stick to what you know.’
‘Yes?’ Diema said. ‘What about those things?’
It was a shock to Rush to realise that he was the only one who knew this. He riffled through Kennedy’s typescript until he found the picture of the rock and the town at its base. And the Latin tag in heavy, uneven type.
De agoni ventro veni, atque de austio terrae patente.
He showed it to the others. ‘It’s Gellert Hill, in Budapest.’ He pointed at the little cluster of buildings. ‘Whoever captioned it thought so, anyway. And that town there is Buda, I guess. It’s the Buda side of the river, anyway. I went there once on holiday.’
He realised at this point that he wasn’t at all certain of his ground, but he plunged on anyway. ‘Toller put this engraving at the front of his book. So maybe the “I” in the Latin there — “I come from the belly of the beast”, and all that — is really him. It’s him saying to us, this is where I come from. This is my secret origin.’
‘Budapest,’ Tillman mused. ‘But where does that get us?’
Diema had gone very still, looking down at her hands, which were in her lap, palms-up.
‘Not just Budapest,’ Rush said. His index finger was still resting on the badly photocopied picture. ‘Somewhere around here — the base of Gellert Hill. I know about this place because I did the Blue Danube tour when I was on holiday out there. There’s a massive cave inside the hill that the modern city uses as a reservoir. I think that may have been where your Judas People were living, back in the 1660s. Budapest was part of the Ottoman Empire back then, so coming and going would have been a bit of a challenge — but maybe that just made it easier for Toller to get away from his people and not be followed.’
‘Is any of this true?’ Kennedy asked Diema. ‘Is that where your people were living three centuries ago?’
Diema continued to stare at her own hands. ‘I told you there were two commandments that couldn’t be broken,’ she said quietly. ‘Now you know both of them.’
‘It makes sense,’ Kennedy said. ‘So if Shekolni thinks of Toller as the great prophet …’
‘… he might want to go back to the source,’ Tillman finished. ‘But that still gives us an entire city to search. Might take a long time if we have to go house-to-house.’
‘Our Elohim could do it,’ Diema said. Clearly they were no longer in the taboo zone and she was able to speak freely again. ‘We can access satellite and CCTV footage to map the movements of any trucks with the HEH logo and livery. Any address where a truck goes, we’ll know. We should be able to narrow it down in a matter of hours or days.’
‘But they wouldn’t be delivering weapons to their head office,’ Tillman objected. ‘This — what we’re looking for — is the think tank. It’s where the decisions get made. The arsenals are almost certainly elsewhere.’
‘We’ll make the search, in any case,’ Diema said. ‘If it comes up empty, we’ve lost nothing. Also, we’ll monitor communications. We have a long list of phone numbers that we’ve tied to Ber Lusim’s people — some definite, some just highly likely. Calls into the city from any of those numbers can be traced.’