The Demon Code (55 page)

He was struck all over again by how ludicrous it was to read this crap as though it contained sacred truths. Toller wasn’t just barking, he was barking and boring – so hung up on the minutiae of his own time that he couldn’t talk about the eternal without making six or seven veiled references to the strictly contemporary.

Which, when you thought about it, was strange for one of the Judas People. Getting so caught up in local politics – Adamite politics – seemed like worrying about the weather forecast for the moon.

Something was nagging at Rush. It had been nagging at him when he read the scholarly accounts of Toller and the other Fifth Monarchists on the plane, and when he’d talked it over with Diema. It was the blunt end of an idea, but it wasn’t making enough of an impression to stick. It was just that general sense of wrongness or incongruity, combined with something really tiny and specific that he’d already noticed and wondered about, a discrepancy between the written accounts and the observable here and now.

A second later, as he got into the meat of the prophecies, it fell out of his head altogether, because something else struck him much more forcefully. It was sitting in the book’s opening paragraphs, and the only reason he hadn’t seen it before was because he’d been focusing on the actual text, rather than on the annotations that Kennedy had written in the margins or over the words. That French guy’s sleeve notes.

And so I stand upon the Muses’ Mountain, asking Inspiration of all, though my true Muse be Godde the Higheste. And here He doth deliver, through me unworthy, His final Judgment.

That was Toller. And over the words ‘the Muses’ Mountain’ Kennedy had written in neat black biro a single word.

Parnassus
.

The word produced the image: the picture of a mountain on the sign they’d passed as they walked in here. Parnassus Iron and Steel.

Rush got to his feet. The nape of his neck prickled like someone was standing right behind him and breathing on it. Would Ber Lusim – or his Obi Wan, Avra Shekolni – have missed that reference? They’d taken everything else in the book literally as gospel. So it made sense that they would have felt the book had directed them to this place.

Which was empty. There was nobody here, and nowhere for them to be hiding. Kuutma’s Messengers had searched the building and found nothing.

But Rush felt that the silence around him had changed, somehow, and he didn’t feel like sitting down again. It was only a conditional silence, in any case. Just like anywhere in New York, the air carried the roar of traffic from the middle distance. This emptiness was in the heart of a great city. Rush was standing at the still centre of the turning world.

He stepped out of the sunlight and did a slow circuit of the room, with the manuscript rolled up in his hand. He moved quietly, because the echoes of his footsteps sounded disconcertingly loud. Whenever he stopped, he listened. But nothing was moving any closer than the traffic.

When he moved out of the main factory floor into the smaller rooms around it, Rush admitted to himself that this had become a search. He still didn’t know what it was he was looking for, but the uneasiness was eating at him and he wanted to be absolutely sure there was nothing there.

He found himself at last in front of the double doors that led through to the grease pit. He’d seen Kennedy and Tillman looking it over earlier, so he was pretty certain that there wouldn’t be anything to see here, but he went in anyway.

The pit was foul. Probably it had been left that way by the previous owners. The walls and floor of it were thick with industrial residue that might have been oil, tar, paint or most likely all of the above. There were puddles of water with an unhealthy, nacreous sheen to them, and a stink of baking bitumen hung over everything like the breath of a motorway on an August morning.

He looked up at the ceiling. There weren’t any obvious holes in it, but that didn’t mean anything. Water finds its level. The rain could have come in somewhere else and ended up in the pit because the pit was the lowest point.

There was no way of getting down there without ruining your clothes. If you sat down and lowered yourself in, the seat of your pants would get covered in the oily muck. If you jumped, you’d raise a splash.

He walked around the pit instead, feeling like an idiot and yet relieved at the same time that there was nothing to see.

Except that there was. Halfway around the rim, he walked into a shaft of sunlight that came in through a broken skylight high above him and hit one of the pit’s walls. Part of the wall must have been raised a little proud of the area around it, because there was a shadow – perfectly square, and about five feet on a side. It looked like there was a trapdoor in the wall, except that it was only the outline of a door. The colours and textures of that area of wall were exactly the same as the colours and textures to either side of them. It had to be a trick of the light, but it was a disconcerting one, and once he’d seen it he couldn’t trick himself into not seeing it again.

He stood irresolute at the edge of the pit. This was ridiculous. If there was something here, someone else – someone who knew what they were doing – would have found it by now.

The sun went behind a cloud, the ray of light disappeared and the imaginary door went with it. Rush turned away. But at the last moment before he walked out of the room, he remembered Diema’s words back at Dovecote.

Not you, boy. You weren’t planned for
.

Bugger it.

Rush launched himself into the pit with an ungainly jump, landing heavily and sending up, just as he’d feared, a shower of variegated filth. He almost lost his footing, but saved himself by holding onto the wall.

One baby step at a time, scared both of what he was treading in and of what he was breathing, he crossed the pit to the wall where the tell-tale shadow had been. There was nothing there. No sign of a hinge or a handle, or of a physical break in the wall where a door might begin or end. But then, the oily residue that had been sluiced over everything made a pretty effective camouflage.

It was pretty fresh, too, and splashed a little thicker, here, than elsewhere on the wall.

Suppressing a shudder, Rush reached out and pushed his fingers into the thick muck. He ran them from right to left and back again, feeling for a break point, a crack in the structure. There was nothing like that.

But there was something else. Around about his chest height, there was a raised spot, rounded and about an inch and a half in diameter. A boss or the head of a rivet, maybe. Rush scooped the oily mess away from it and found a circular plate made of some dull, weathered metal.

It was pivoted at the top, so you could slide it sideways. Rush did so now.

‘Son of a bitch,’ he whispered.

He was looking at a keyhole.

Kennedy got out of the truck and walked to the corner of the street. Diema’s conversation with Kuutma didn’t look like ending any time soon, and since they were talking in their own language there was nothing to be gained from eavesdropping.

There was a lot of traffic on the main highway, but nobody walking anywhere in sight. The corner store had been a Blockbuster, but not for a while now. Displayed in its window were the upcoming movie sensations of a few years back.
Wild Hogs. 300. Zodiac
. A poster offered two movie rentals plus popcorn and a large bottle of Coke for $12.99. Underneath the poster lay a dead bird, something small and nondescript, like a sparrow or a dunnock, that had gotten itself in there and couldn’t get out again.

Two hours and some odd minutes to go, and they were treading water. But she couldn’t think of anything else they could do. In a city-wide game of hide-and-seek, the hider had it all over the seeker.

But she was right about the location. She knew there was something there, if she could only think it through. Ber Lusim had extracted and purified his toxin in a place that increased his own risk enormously. Why would someone who was supposed to be a master strategist do something that was so stupid on the face of it?

Maybe the answer was something really banal. When he first became a Messenger, Ber Lusim might have been sent out to patrol these streets. He could have found the old steelworks back then and kept it in mind. Except that back then, he’d still been sane and – you had to assume – wasn’t contemplating mass murder even as a distant possibility.

So make a different assumption
. He chose the location later, nearer to the present time. He was looking for a specific feature and this place had it. And whatever it was, it was worth the risk of sending his highly visible bright-red trucks here twice, and maybe spending time here himself, within walking distance of the homeland where he was a wanted man.

Twice. The trucks came here twice. And the poison was the second shipment, not the first. But in that case…

Diema appeared at her shoulder without a sound, making her start violently. ‘Shit,’ she exclaimed.

The girl didn’t waste any time on apologies. ‘They found out what the first shipment was.’

‘Go on,’ said Kennedy.

‘It was conventional explosive. Ten thousand tons of octocubane and five kilos of acetone peroxide.’

Kennedy thought through the amounts. ‘Is the peroxide a primer?’

Diema nodded.

‘So how big a blast is that? Not big enough to kill a million, right?’

‘Big enough to take down most of a city block. Depending on where you placed it, you could easily get ten or twenty thousand casualties.’

It was clear that the girl wanted to head back for the truck. She made a feint in that direction now, looking at Kennedy expectantly, but Kennedy was fishing out the earlier thought about the trucks. Something was falling into place, and the explosive was the piece that made sense out of everything else.

‘Earth and air,’ she muttered.

Diema got the reference. ‘Toller’s book,’ she said. ‘“God will speak in fire and water, and last in earth and air.”’

‘We screwed up,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think we screwed up.’

‘How? What did we miss?’

‘We were thinking Ber Lusim had to release the ricin into the air.’

‘He does,’ Diema insisted. ‘That’s the only way you could get casualties on the scale the prophecy calls for.’

‘But microlights? Crop dusters? This is the most fiercely defended airspace in the world. He could never be sure of getting through. And my idea about balconies and rooftops – if the wind changes, he’s nowhere. He can’t wait. We know that much. Shekolni told us an exact time, not a vague ballpark.’

Diema’s mind was running parallel to hers now. ‘If earth and air were one thing, not two things …’

‘That’s it,’ Kennedy agreed. ‘You remember Nine/Eleven? You’d still have been at school, but—’

‘We remember,’ Diema said tightly.

‘When the towers fell, there was a dust cloud like nothing on earth. Thousands and thousands of tons of dust, racing through the streets on the shockwave, running the length and breadth of Manhattan. People got sick, just because of the dust. Some of them are still sick.’

‘
Berukhot!
He uses the explosive to blow up a building …’

‘To pulverise a building. Smash it into atoms. So you get a massive shockwave and a massive dust cloud. And the ricin is inside the building, so the dust cloud becomes a vector. It spreads out from here along the lines of the streets. Earth and air, all mixed together into a poison cocktail. It kills everyone who takes a breath.’

‘But where?’ Diema demanded. ‘Which building would he choose?’

‘The trucks only came those two times, Diema. They never came back.’

The girl stared at her, bewildered. ‘So?’

‘So he didn’t choose that factory because he liked the décor. He chose it because it’s right at the north end of Broadway. That’s his delivery system right there. He’s got himself a gun barrel thirteen miles long and eighty feet wide. I don’t think the poison ever left the building.’

Rush was having a hard time persuading Tillman and Nahir to come and look at what he’d found. In fact, he was having a hard time making them listen to him at all. Nahir’s feeling, when he finally let Rush say his piece, was that ‘found’ was probably the wrong word to use.

‘The building was searched by
Elohim
,’ he pointed out. His tone suggested that only a moron would need to have this explained to him. ‘Anything you’ve seen, you can be certain that they’ve also seen it and investigated it.’

‘But you can only see it from certain angles,’ Rush explained, trying hard to sound calm and rational. ‘And even then, only when the light hits it full-on. It’s camouflaged.’

‘Against amateurs,’ Nahir said. ‘Not against professionals.’

‘Where is this, Rush?’ Tillman asked.

‘In that empty swimming pool thing.’

‘The grease pit? Out toward the back of the building.’

‘Yes. That.’

Tillman looked doubtful. ‘I checked that over,’ he said. ‘With Kennedy. We think that was probably where Ber Lusim had his skimming trays. But there was no sign that he’d been there recently.’

Tillman’s tone was milder than Nahir’s, but the same assumptions were behind it. ‘Shit!’ Rush yelled, ‘I am not making this up and I’m not stupid. I know what I saw. Now will you just come down and take a look at it?’

‘Later,’ Nahir said loftily. ‘We don’t have time for this now.’

Rush looked at his watch, which was showing forty-five minutes to zero hour. ‘Later?’ he repeated.

The two men had gone back to their discussion and neither of them answered. Nahir was evidently relaying whatever they were talking about to the
Elohim
out in the city. He had his phone to his mouth and was switching between muttered English and muttered Aramaic.

‘Sorry,’ Rush said. ‘Later’s no good to me.’

He swiped the phone out of Nahir’s hand and threw it over the parapet wall.

The look of surprise and rage on the Messenger’s face was pretty damn satisfying – but only for about a half a second. That was how long it took for Nahir to explode into violent motion and slam Rush to the ground in an agonising, total lock.