Hifela decided that this was a good moment to intervene. But he didn’t want to overstep the bounds of his commission, even then. He took out his phone and texted a message to Ber Lusim. ‘The woman is close to you. Horizontal distance, two hundred and fifty metres. Vertical distance, eighty metres.’
He sent the message, and while he waited for a reply he sauntered around the lobby, casting a critical eye on the statuary. But he could not relax, and he was all too aware that he looked as though he were inspecting the nudes on a parade ground.
He thought back, at this crucial juncture, to his life’s other major turning point, to the moment when he had decided to follow Ber Lusim into exile. That had been an act of blind faith. They had had no idea, then, of the part they were to play in human history. They hadn’t even known that they were chosen. Then the prophet had arrived and made sense of everything. He had promised to show them a miracle and he had delivered on the promise. He had shown them how every one of their own actions was a stone in a mosaic, not random but perfect and necessary and interconnecting. When Shekolni spoke, there was perspective.
So the other Elohim said, anyway. For Hifela, it was always more a matter of personal loyalty to his chief — love, even, for what he felt for Ber Lusim was more fervent and intense than anything he had ever felt for a woman; just as the intimacies of the battlefield were deeper than the intimacies of the bedroom.
His phone pinged once, the discreet sound of an elevator arriving. He glanced at the screen, then opened the text, which consisted of a single word.
Execute.
Hifela stood slowly, set the camera to flash and took a photo of the nearest nude.
That was the prearranged signal. Although there was no visible sign of it in the random movements of the crowd around him, the word was being passed down the line and the Elohim assigned to him were going in.
Not against the woman. The woman would wait, a little while.
Until they’d disposed of her three guardian angels.
54
Ben Rush survived the first attack for one reason only: he was in Diema’s line of sight.
Rush was watching the hotel’s front entrance, which faced onto the river. Diema was watching from the south, where the hotel faced the hillside, and as always she favoured a high vantage point. In the absence of a building backing onto the hotel, she’d chosen a massive fig tree at the base of the hill, whose upper branches were on a level with the hotel’s fifth-floor windows. Tillman was inside, in the lobby, close to a window that looked onto the outside pool where Kennedy had positioned herself.
It was some trick of body language that made Diema focus on the man who was crossing the road, heading towards the front entrance and — as though coincidentally — towards Rush. She couldn’t say what it was she recognised, but she found herself staring at the man, registering him instantly as one of her own tribe. Then, as he drew the sica from the back of his belt, she realised belatedly that his left hand had just traced an ellipse against the light-coloured fabric of his suit jacket. It had seemed as though he were just smoothing out a crease, but it was the sign of the noose.
The distance was about two hundred metres — already long for the nine-millimetre, but the nine-millimetre was in her hand while the Chinese cannon was in the satchel sitting on the branch beside her. She was sure she could place a bullet in the man at that distance, but she couldn’t with any confidence gauge where it would hit — and he was of the chosen, so she couldn’t risk killing him.
Squaring the circle, she fired off five rounds in quick succession, aiming very low. Three pedestrians went down, shot in the knee, calf or foot. Screams and bellows rose from the street, and consternation burgeoned visibly from the seeds of pain and panic she’d just created. It was a rough and ready solution, but it made people flee across the knife-man’s path. It might also make Rush look in the right direction and catch sight of him.
It was the best Diema could do and it took a heartbeat longer than she would have liked. Because she knew for certain that she was blown. There was just no way Ber Lusim’s Elohim would come for Rush and not for her. And no way, given enough time and patience, that they wouldn’t have made her, sitting up in the tree, and gotten into position to take her.
The satchel was an arm’s length away, with all her kit — apart from the nine-millimetre and the walkie-talkie, still strapped to her belt — inside it. It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon. She straightened her legs, slid forward and let herself fall straight off the branch. Rifle fire shredded the foliage above her and reduced her former perch to a threshing floor.
Diema used the canopy to slow her fall, turning it into a cascade roll, and caught herself on another branch ten feet lower down. She’d been able to gauge the direction of the gunfire, at least roughly, and had angled her fall to the left, away from the flank of the hill. Now she scrambled a few feet further over, even though it meant crawling out towards the thinner end of the branch she was on. The branch dipped precariously under her, but the bole of the tree was between her and the shooters.
For now.
She snatched up the walkie-talkie, but before she could open the channel, let alone speak, more shots smacked into the bark right above her head.
She was pinned from at least two directions. And they could see her.
Tillman saw the knife first, already in the air, the knife-man a half-second later. It was much too late by that time, and though he turned and dropped by subliminal reflex, that only meant the sica caught him higher up on his side and at a shallower angle. Sharper than a razor, it went into the angle of the pectoral and deltoid muscles on his right side and embedded itself deeply. Along with the pain came the shock of realisation that the hurt he’d just received was probably his death warrant. The anti-coagulants the Elohim used to coat their blades could render even a shallow graze deadly, and he’d just taken a deep wound at a nexus of two major arteries.
Two men — presumably Messengers, given their choice of weapon — were coming at him from two different directions around the circular gallery, intentionally cutting him off from the stairs and the lift. Tillman’s gun was tucked into the back of his belt and there was no time to get to it — especially with the protruding knife impeding his movements. Any of the Elohim would already have the advantage over him in speed. The man who’d already thrown was drawing another blade. The second assassin, marginally closer because he hadn’t taken the time to aim and throw, was coming towards Tillman at a run.
He carried the knife in his right hand, the left hovering above it seemingly en garde — but then he let the two hands draw apart, the knife-hand stabbing low while the supposedly defensive hand darted up to jab at Tillman’s throat.
Tillman walked right into the attack. Being wounded already freed him from that particular concern, although not from the danger of being disembowelled. He struck down with his own right hand to knock the knife aside and leaned to the side so that the throat-jab went wide.
He clamped his left hand onto the assassin’s shoulder. Still advancing, still turning, he ducked to transform the lock into a throw. He took the man’s knife-arm just above the wrist, pulled him around and down in a clumsy but quick kitap, but since he maintained his grip on his opponent’s forearm the weight of the man’s own body ripped his arm out of its socket.
And gave Tillman a knife.