‘And then?’
‘Go and hide somewhere until the urge goes away.’
As Diema turned away, Rush saw Kennedy checking the action on the M26 — the gun Diema had carried during the hotel raid. But Diema now had one of the new guns. Only Kennedy, out of all of them, had a regular handgun and Diema’s permission — under certain very strictly defined circumstances — to use it.
‘It’s okay for you,’ Rush muttered.
Kennedy smiled, without a trace of humour. ‘We’re going to fight in a cave, Rush,’ she said. ‘Against people who’ve lived in caves their whole lives, and have probably had years to fortify this particular cave against anything we can bring against it. So “okay” isn’t the word I’d use, exactly.’
She tucked a couple of spare magazines into her belt, the gun into its holster inside her jacket. ‘Diema is right, though,’ she said.
‘About what?’ Rush demanded.
‘About this fight. It’s not yours, and it’s not mine. Our time is going to come, and it’ll be soon, but I don’t think it’s going to be today. So we should both of us hang well back and let them do what they’ve got to do’
‘Then how come you get a gun and I get an apple?’
‘Because I know how to shoot and you don’t. Stay close to me.’
‘Why?’ he grunted. ‘So you can patronise me some more?’
‘Because you’re the only one who won’t be tempted to cut my throat in the dark,’ Kennedy said. ‘We can watch each other’s backs.’
The gate was open now, the heavy wooden frame pulled all the way to the side to reveal a wide corridor that sloped down into the ground at a shallow angle. The first few yards were lined with royal blue tiles that shone with a faint, rich lustre even in the dim light of the cellar. Beyond that, there was bare granite.
Diema raised her hand in a pre-arranged signal. Six Elohim launched themselves into the dark at a rapid, even jog-trot.
Diema gave them thirty seconds, then signalled again. More assassins peeled away from the mass and stepped through the gate.
Rush positioned himself off to one side and watched them go. The sight made his skin prickle, and when he tried to swallow he found his mouth was dry. What was so scary about them? Or rather, what was scarier about them now than when he was in that room, surrounded by them, and they were looking at him like they were trying to decide whether killing him merited the trouble of cleaning the blood off the floor afterwards? Maybe it was the night-vision goggles, which made them look like armoured owls. But no, he realised, it was something else.
It was because you expected the dominant predators in any ecosystem to hunt solo: to see these killers moving in formation, like synchronised swimmers, was like seeing the violation of some kind of physical law.
Rush was part of the last wave, with Elohim flanking him on either side and Diema running just ahead of him. He’d been expecting a steep descent — partly because of the angle at which the tunnel opening was set, but mostly because, well, they were going into a cave. But the house was at the foot of the hill and after the first hundred yards the corridor ended at a flight of stone steps leading upward. At the top of the steps was a broad arcade with stone pillars around its edges like a cloister. Many arched openings led off it on all four sides.
Diema and her people didn’t slow down as they moved out into the larger space. They’d planned their approach already, using the old maps of the place, and each squad had learned a route from which it was not expected to deviate except in emergencies.
The team Rush was with took the third opening on their left and kept on going, through narrow tunnels with ceilings so low they had to bend their heads and vast arcades like underground cathedrals. Every few yards, it seemed, the passage they were in was intersected by others, a few angled downward but most leading up towards the heart of the hidden city, still hundreds of yards above their heads and more than a mile away in horizontal distance.
At least it wasn’t totally dark. Every so often there were shafts sunk through the rock that must have been set there as lightwells, centuries before. A grey light filtered through them, presumably trickling down from the sides of the hill. Rush wondered what was at the other end of them. Rabbit holes? Wayside shrines? Probably just innocuous gratings that passers-by thought must be part of the city’s drainage network. The lightwells were irrelevant to the night-sighted Elohim, but Rush welcomed each one as it approached and missed it as soon as it was past.
Long before they got to the upper levels, they met the first show of resistance. Rush missed it, because it was over before he realised it was happening. They ran out of the mouth of a long, straight corridor into a space that was completely unlit, and there was a flurry of movement from around them. Not even breaking stride, the Elohim fired in all directions, the quiet reports of their guns like the sound of a gentle rap on a door. Heavier sounds of falling bodies created a stuttering counterpoint. Not one of Ber Lusim’s men got close enough to go hand-to-hand with the invaders.
Diema had taken Tillman’s idea and run with it — into some pretty dark places. The weapons she’d issued to her people were modified versions of the Dan-inject dart gun she’d given to Kennedy, and the modifications were utterly terrifying. These were configured for repeating fire, and they spat multiple darts on the principle of a shotgun or scatter-gun. Diema had also taken into account how long the Messenger tagged by Kennedy had taken to falclass="underline" she’d ordered the darts to be topped off with four times the highest dosage legally available. Experiments on volunteers from among her own people had established that a single hit would put down most opponents instantly. If you took more than three or four, you’d be in serious danger of death from respiratory depression. So medics followed behind the fighters, checking the condition of the fallen and administering intravenous ampakine where needed.
The second skirmish was longer than the first, but it had the same outcome. Cornered in their rat runs, outgunned and outmanoeuvred, Ber Lusim’s Elohim gave as good an account of themselves as they could, but though they tried to sell their lives dearly, Diema’s stone-cold mercy had ensured that they couldn’t find a buyer.
Other squads began to rendezvous with theirs as they progressed, having checked out the areas assigned to them and either come up empty or cleared them of opposition. The third confrontation was a massed battle lasting fully twenty minutes. Rush and Kennedy were kept well back from it, but when it was over they walked across the wide, low-ceilinged hall where it had been fought, stepping over the prone bodies of dozens of Elohim. Blood slicked the white stone floor, so obviously Diema’s forces hadn’t prevailed by dart-guns alone.
They crossed that room, and the two more, and that was as far as they got. Half an hour after they began their journey into the hill, they found their way blocked by a massive steel door that didn’t look anything like an antique. One of Nahir’s people examined it, and he didn’t seem happy with what he found. Rush casually ambled closer to eavesdrop as the Messenger straightened and turned to Diema, but he only got an earful of Aramaic for his pains.
Diema rapped out questions, then orders, and three Elohim headed back the way they’d come.
‘What have we got?’ Kennedy asked.
‘A Mosler-Bahmann safe door, apparently,’ Diema said. Her tone was distant: she was thinking as she spoke. ‘Shraga says the company has been bankrupt for well over a decade, so it’s possible that someone else put it here. Or else Ber Lusim acquired it from a bank that had no more use from it, and brought it down here. But Shraga also says it’s likely to be three feet thick and weigh forty tons. They wouldn’t have been able to carry it far.’