Diema took the Chinese semi-automatic from the back of her belt. She was about to offer the nine-millimetre from her ankle holster to Kennedy, but Kennedy stepped past her, moving slowly so as to minimise the squelching sounds her feet made in the thick ooze, and picked up Tillman’s fallen gun from where it lay at the edge of the pit. She examined it briefly, seemed satisfied, and responded to Diema’s questioning glance with a curt nod. Ready.
They moved to the door, taking opposite sides without needing to confer. Standing stock still, they listened.
Two voices, both male. A serious — if slightly bizarre — conversation was being conducted just below them.
‘He is a piece of bread.’ That was Ben Rush’s voice. And another voice answered, ‘God is one. Only fools deny that.’
There were seven wooden steps, which were dangerously slippery with the same grease and filth that filled the bottom of the pit. Then Rush’s feet touched down on gritty, dry cement.
There was a click from above him, followed by the whickering rattle of strip-lights waking up. Rush blinked and shielded his eyes as the dark space around him was suddenly scoured brighter than daylight with remorseless neon.
He was standing in a wide but low-ceilinged room, buttressed with rough-cut wooden beams. All around him were big bags like sandbags or sacks of fertiliser, stacked all the way to the ceiling, with a broad aisle between them. They all seemed to be identical. They bore the legend HIGH C8(NO2)8 EXPLOSIVE in stencilled letters on their sides.
At the far end of the room, facing him, a laptop computer sat on a trestle table. Two long leads connected it to a bizarre modernist sculpture consisting of a handful of steel rods and several dozen fat parcels wrapped in greaseproof paper.
Despite the foul state of the steps, the floor was reasonably clean. A broom was propped incongruously against some of the sacks of high explosive, and once Rush had noticed that, he saw a whole raft of domestic touches in quick succession: a kettle and a carton of milk on an upturned packing crate. A pair of speakers with an iPod nestled between them. A reading lamp on the table and a book lying open next to it.
Ber Lusim was waiting for the end of the world with all the comforts of home.
He appeared beside Rush and put a hand on his shoulder to steer him over to the table. Remembering what else Ber Lusim’s hands had just done, Rush shuddered and backed away hurriedly, turning to face the Messenger.
Ber Lusim was staring at him with quizzical interest.
‘Look,’ Rush said. ‘I … I don’t know what you want from me. I shouldn’t even be here.’
‘Yes,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘You should. Of course you should. You had no choice. Please, sit down. I won’t hurt you.’
‘I’m fine right here,’ Rush said.
Ber Lusim nodded. ‘Very well.’ He walked past Rush to the table and picked up the book that lay there. He held it up for Rush to see.
The book was very old, its corners foxed and furled, its cover as roughly ridged as though someone had dropped it into the bath. On the cover, in a plain, uneven font, were the words A Trumpet Speaking Judgment, or God’s Plan Revealed in Sundry Signes.
‘You know this?’ Ber Lusim asked.
Rush thought about lying, but only for a moment. Why else would he be there?
‘Yes.’
Ber Lusim smiled warmly, as though he’d extracted a confession that would be good for Rush’s soul. ‘I want to thank you,’ he said.
The tone — serious, conversational, friendly — shook and scared Rush. He said nothing, only staring at the other man as he flicked through the pages of the book and handed it to him. Rush took it and saw that it was turned to the last page. The centuries-old paper, dry and brittle, rustled between his fingers.
‘That paragraph troubled me,’ Ber Lusim said. ‘Specifically, when Toller says that the son and the spirit will be present when the end comes. It smacked of the meaningless liturgy of the Roman church. The dividing of God into three, as though God were a piece of bread.’
‘He is a piece of bread,’ Rush said. ‘Did all that stuff about the Eucharist not get to you yet?’
He heard his own voice saying that and wondered at it. Did he want Ber Lusim to break his arms and legs into loose kindling? Or was he flapping at the mouth purely because of that earlier promise that he wouldn’t be hurt? Either way, Ber Lusim didn’t react to the flip tone, or even seem to hear it.
‘God is one,’ he said. ‘Only fools deny that. So this referencing of the son and the spirit always struck both of us — Avra and me — as strange. Enigmatic, rather. But time and providence make all things clear. Do you know what your name means?’
‘You already told me it means “son of”.’
Ber Lusim nodded. ‘Yes. That’s what “Ben” means. But I meant your family name. “Rush”.’ He went on, not waiting for Rush to answer. ‘It transliterates the Hebraic word ruach, which means “spirit”. You are the son, Ben Rush, and you are also the spirit. God told Johann Toller that you would come, and Johann Toller told me. In this way, he reassures me that all is well. That what I’m doing is right, and exactly as he intended. I can hear your breathing, by the way.’
He raised his voice on those last words and looked over Rush’s shoulder towards the stairs. ‘By all means, join us,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in hiding up there. And no time left, now, for anything you do to affect my plans. Although I will, of course, kill you if you try.’
Despite Ber Lusim’s words, Kennedy was nearly certain that it wasn’t their breathing that gave them away.
She’d discovered that Tillman’s gun — a retooled Beretta — had a grip safety, rather than the thumb toggle she was more used to, and she’d chosen a moment when Ber Lusim was talking to squeeze the front of the grip and cock the gun. The click was slight, barely audible even to her, and she’d thought it was completely hidden by the sound of Lusim’s voice — but something about the way he paused immediately afterwards made her think she’d put him on his guard.
Then he invited them to join him and there was no longer any doubt. Kennedy mimed to Diema, putting her hands together and then drawing them apart again. Split up and give him two targets. Diema nodded.
They came down the stairs, Diema leading the way and Kennedy hanging slightly back.
Ber Lusim watched them with narrow attention as they came into his line of sight.
‘I was expounding scripture to your friend,’ he told them. ‘Which is amusing. I never thought of myself as a preacher. You should perhaps drop those guns, in case you feel tempted to use them.’
‘In a roomful of explosives?’ Kennedy said. ‘That would be a little stupid, wouldn’t it?’
Ber Lusim looked at the ramparts of sacks all around them. ‘You can’t set off octocubane with a bullet,’ he said. ‘And the primer is behind me, on the table. You’d be shooting through Mr Rush, here, who would be unlikely to thank you. There are also, over there in the corner—’ he pointed with the barrel of his gun ‘— a number of plastic buckets filled with the extremely potent granular poison, ricin. If you were to puncture one of those, the air would fill with highly toxic dust. Of course, the explosion that is about to take place will kill you long before the poison starts to work on you, so that’s a matter of less consequence than it would otherwise be.’
‘Why are we still alive?’ Diema asked. ‘Have you lost your taste for killing, Ber Lusim?’ She was drawing away from Kennedy, making it harder for the rogue Messenger to keep them both in view at the same time and giving his gun a few more degrees of arc to travel through if he decided to shoot. He held up his hand for them to stop.