She settled back on the pillows, but sat up again at once when she felt herself starting to drift into a doze. That was a luxury she couldn’t indulge until the job was done.
50
‘I don’t see how this is going to work,’ said a voice in Diema’s walkie-talkie.
It was the boy, Rush, complaining again. That seemed to be the unique talent he brought to this operation. Diema ignored him, but Tillman’s voice replied. ‘Diema thinks it has a chance, Rush, and I’m inclined to go with her instincts. She knows her own people.’
It was half-past midnight. Diema was up on the roof of a building directly opposite Kennedy’s hotel, crouched behind a low parapet wall so she was invisible from the street but had a good view of the window of Kennedy’s room. Tillman was watching the small alley where the dumpsters were, and where Diema had dropped off the Dan-inject for Kennedy. Rush was sitting in the parked Audi down the street from the hotel, watching its front door, which was far and away the least likely way for Ber Lusim’s Elohim to come and therefore the place where the boy could do the least harm.
There was a silence. But not for very long.
‘It just seems too obvious,’ Rush said. ‘I mean, like we’re trying to scare them by saying boo or something.’
‘Maybe.’ Tillman again. ‘But we know Ber Lusim’s people see Heather as a threat. They’ve tried to kill her twice already and the second time they wanted to interrogate her, too. They’re worried that she knows something important. If we’re lucky, losing their warehouse will have made them even more worried.’
‘I get that. I just don’t see how it—’
‘Do your job and be quiet,’ Diema snapped. ‘You don’t need to understand or to agree. You only need to do what you’re told.’
This time the silence was longer. There was a click as the walkie-talkie switched frequency — Tillman closing the party circuit to talk to her directly. ‘He’s afraid,’ he told Diema. ‘If you want to shut him up — or calm him down — you should explain to him.’
‘It would be quicker to cut his throat,’ she muttered.
‘More time-consuming, though. You’d have to go all the way down to the street and then back up again. And then we’d have nobody to watch the front lobby.’
Diema said nothing. But after a minute, still scowling into the inoffensive night, she switched the walkie-talkie back to the all-parties frequency. ‘Heather Kennedy is well known to my people,’ she said, in a tone somewhere between terse and outright sullen. ‘Mostly we think of the Adamite world as a distraction. A nothing. But she has a reputation. There are stories about her. How she found the Ginat’Dania that was and how she fought one of our Elohim to the death. She’s the only one outside the People themselves who the Messengers actually respect.’
Almost, she added to herself, a little unwillingly. Almost the only one.
‘But she didn’t do a thing today besides walk around,’ Rush pointed out. ‘She was acting like a tourist. They’ve got to see that she has nothing.’
Actually, Diema thought, that’s the real genius of Kennedy’s plan. But perhaps she saw that more clearly than the boy did because the plan was aimed so squarely at the Messenger mindset; of course Diema would have the right reaction to it, because she was in the target demographic. ‘What they see is this,’ she told Rush. ‘If you’re right, and Budapest is where Ber Lusim has set up his home, then the rhaka, the wolf woman, the bitch, has done it again. She’s found them. She comes and camps out on their doorstep, so obviously she knows they’re here. Once you accept that, her doing nothing is a lot more sinister than her doing something they can identify and stop.’
Static on the walkie-talkie. ‘Okay,’ Rush said slowly. ‘So then …’
‘Sooner or later they send someone to take her. We intercept and question him instead. We find out where he came from.’
‘Okay. I guess I get that. Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Diema growled. ‘Now shut up and watch the door.’
Which the boy did, at last. And at length.
The night wore itself out and the sun came up. Diema saw Kennedy draw back the curtains of her room and open her window a little way to breathe the dawn air. She caught Diema’s eye briefly as she yawned and stretched.
The hook still dangling there, in the water. But nobody was biting.
51
‘I don’t believe this is something we need to act on,’ Ber Lusim said.
Avra Shekolni spread his hands. ‘You are the Summoner. I bow to your knowledge of your profession and its attendant rituals,’ he said, with well-polished humility. ‘None of God’s Messengers is so mighty as Ber Lusim, nor so clear-sighted.’ He paused, as if reluctant to voice what he had to say next. ‘But still, I think it is.’
They were in a large, airy chamber in the labyrinthine space that Ber Lusim had chosen for his followers to inhabit. Both had just listened as one of his Messengers, who had watched Heather Kennedy for half a day and all of the night, told them of her movements — or rather, her immobility. Several other Elohim were present, including Hifela, who had recently returned from England. He stood at the back of the room, beside the door, ostensibly taking onto himself the role of watchman. In this tightly guarded and barricaded space, and with so many Messengers meeting together, the role was superfluous: it was a mark of discretion and respect on Hifela’s part, and reflected all that Ber Lusim found admirable in the man.
The room was close and windowless — which made it, on the whole, comfortable and homely to anyone who had been born and raised in Ginat’Dania. Every man here had spent his formative years underground, absorbing the light frequencies of sunlight only from luminescent panels. Every man here experienced confined spaces as security and was highly tolerant of artificial light and recycled air.
So the claustrophobia that Ber Lusim felt arose from something else. It was a strange thing. Since they had embarked on the plan — since that first night of blood and wonder back in Nunappleton Hall, a feeling had been growing in him. It was that his life, which had at times seemed a labyrinth of complex choices, had been progressively unravelling itself into a single straight line.
Each of the choices he’d made since he first went out into the wider world had paradoxically narrowed the scope of subsequent choices more and more, so that the vast arcades and vistas of the Nations, so unlike the cramped and contained perspectives of his home, were for him a long, straight corridor with no branches.
One of those choices had been to give his trust to Avra Shekolni, and despite the separate and several misgivings of his heart and mind he didn’t in any way regret that bargain. His old friend was now become his prophet, the light that guided his soul through the darkness of the world. But about some things, perforce, he was more clear-sighted than the Holy One. Violence and subterfuge were the twin mysteries into which he had been initiated when he joined the Elohim, and they were ingrained in him so deeply that his mind knew no other way to work.
Therefore, there were things about the present situation that concerned him. The English warehouse shut down, the intricate clockwork of their plan interrupted and thrown out, and now this — the rhaka arriving here, presenting herself to them, like an omen of doom. All women were omens of doom, of course. From Eve onwards, their business and their delight was always to stray from the path and drag others to destruction with them. One did not move to chastise such a one until one was sure beyond all doubt what mischief she was bent on.