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.