He tried not to be afraid, but he’d seen how Nahir and his posse had been looking at him and Kennedy down in the caves, and he was pretty sure he knew what those looks meant. They’d outlived their usefulness — not that there’d been much usefulness to outlive, in his case. The Elohim would figure out the prophecy without their help, or else they would blow it. Either way, he and Kennedy — and Tillman, assuming Tillman wasn’t dead already — would be taken out behind the barn. Even if Diema wanted to protect them, there probably wasn’t a lot she could do about it. And as far as he could tell, Diema was going along with the whole—
The bolt on the outside of the cell door rattled and then clanked as it was drawn back. Rush turned around, expecting to see the Messenger who’d brought him here — but it was her.
Diema closed the door behind her, quietly but firmly. She stared at Rush hard, her expression intense but unreadable.
‘So how was your day?’ he asked.
‘Shut up,’ Diema said.
‘Okay.’
‘And lie on the bed.’
It wasn’t what he was expecting to hear, so the snappiest comeback he could dredge up was ‘What?’
‘The bed,’ Diema snapped, walking up to him and pushing him towards it. Her body was rigid with tension. ‘Lie down. Lie down on the bed. Quickly!’
Bemused, Rush obeyed — but this just seemed to get the girl angry. ‘Not with your clothes on!’ she exploded. ‘For God’s sake, have you never had sex before? Your pants. Your pants!’
He stood up again. ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked. ‘Because I’m really not in the mood. The apple? Okay, the apple was funny, but this—’ A thought struck him, and he wound down in mid-sentence. It wasn’t a joke. It wasn’t a joke at all, it was—
Poison on a sugar lump.
A hypnotist’s pocket watch, set swinging.
Being asked to count down from ten, so you wouldn’t feel it when the needle slipped into your arm on the count of seven.
‘Hey,’ he said, his voice shaking a little. ‘Let’s not do this, okay. I swear I’m not going to tell anyone about you. Nobody would even believe me if I did. You don’t have to …’
Diema exhaled — a loud huff of exasperation — and breathed in again deeply and slowly. On the in-breath she magically produced a knife, one of those evil-looking sica things, and pressed it to Rush’s stomach.
‘Oh shit,’ he blurted.
With a single sweep of the knife, she sliced clean through his belt and took his fly button, too. Then she pushed him again, tangling up her foot with his in a complicated way so that he slammed down onto the bed.
Diema kicked off her boots and undressed from the waist down. With the knife still in her hand, she climbed on top of him. She tapped the blade of the knife against his chest. Her face, as she contemplated him, was solemn, even severe.
‘We’ve got ten minutes,’ she said. ‘Can you get there in ten minutes, Rush?’
‘Can I—’
‘Because if you can’t, I’m not going to be responsible for the consequences. But I can pretty much guarantee there’ll be a lot of blood.’
She reached underneath her, found him with her hand and rubbed him with a lot more vigour than tenderness. When he was hard enough, she guided him in.
It was reminiscent of Dovecote Farm, in a lot of ways. Except that being beaten up by her at Dovecote Farm hadn’t involved performance anxiety. It took him a long while to get into any kind of a rhythm, and a couple of times along the way he almost lost his erection. Diema was pushing back against him brusquely, but there was no trace of pleasure on her face.
As soon as he reached his climax, Diema uncoupled from him and tucked the knife away. She began to dress again without a word.
‘Was it … was it good for you?’ he asked dazedly.
Diema snorted in derision. ‘No!’
He raised himself a few inches to stare at her. ‘Then why did we do it?’ he asked.
She tugged her trousers up over her hips, then stepped into her boots and knelt to tie up the laces.
‘Why?’ Rush insisted. He was afraid of what the answer might be, but he really needed to know.
Diema was already walking towards the door, hauling it open, but she paused for a moment in the doorway and glanced back at him.
‘Because I don’t trust you to lie,’ she said coldly. From the tone of her voice and the look on his face, a casual observer would think Rush had just run over Diema’s dog, rather than that they’d just shared a moment of physical intimacy.
The door slammed shut behind her.
He slumped back onto the bed and closed his eyes, overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness and despair.
Maybe every condemned man felt like that after his hearty meal.
Diema was oppressed by the feeling of time running out — except that the image her mind gave her wasn’t of sand falling through an hourglass. It was of a lit fuse, like the fuse on a bomb in a Tex Avery cartoon, burning down to the final, irrevocable KABOOM.
She found Nahir sitting at the desk in his command room, deep in discussion with Kuutma. She waited in the doorway to be noticed, prepared to walk away again if Kuutma ignored her, but he beckoned her in.
‘—monitoring live data feeds from scanners at airports and border checkpoints,’ Nahir was saying as she entered. ‘But there’s nothing yet. We’re checking against all of Ber Lusim’s known aliases, but of course we’re not assuming that we know every identity he has. Since we closed the airports, the knock-on effects have led to security checkpoints being set up along all the major roads into and out of the city. We can’t say for sure that we’ve stopped Lusim, but I’m confident we’ve slowed him down.’
Kuutma nodded. ‘Sensible steps to take, certainly,’ he said. ‘Diema, your opinion?’
‘My opinion? I don’t think it can do any harm,’ Diema said. Her slow, considered tone left vast amounts unspoken.
‘What would you do that I’ve left undone?’ Nahir asked, receiving the insult with a face frozen into immobility.
‘Assuming that you’ve also stationed Messengers at the Keleti and Nyugati Pályaudvar railheads—’
‘Of course.’
‘—and that you’re monitoring take-offs from private airfields, then I’d say you’ve done all you can to prevent Ber Lusim from leaving the city.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So what I would do, Nahir, is assume that you’ve failed, and do my best to find out where he’s going.’
She was standing before him now, and he stood up too, maybe to assert the advantage of his height.
‘Do my best,’ he repeated, with cold politeness. ‘That’s a rhetorical exhortation, Diema Beit Evrom, rather than a piece of advice that I can actually act on.’
‘Then act on this,’ she said. ‘Wake Leo Tillman.’
Nahir looked from her to Kuutma and back again. He shook his head, not in refusal but in bafflement. ‘Tillman was enlisted as a killer,’ he pointed out. ‘Surely his usefulness is at an end.’
‘We need what’s in his head. He was the one who went into Ber Lusim’s warehouse, back in London. He saw the documentation on the weapons and equipment that Lusim had already shipped.’
‘We’re starting to retrieve similar information from the computers we found down in the caves.’
‘Good.’ Diema’s tone was clipped. ‘I’m not saying those efforts should stop. Just that we should use every option that’s open to us. Kennedy is right that as Adamites, she and the others come at the Toller prophecies from a different angle than we do. She proved that just now — and justified your decision to enlist her, Tannanu. I want to use Leo Tillman’s expertise, too. His tactical intelligence, which was great enough to allow him to find Ginat’Dania that was.’