Ber Lusim raised his gun again and pointed it at Rush. ‘The book will be destroyed in the explosion in any case,’ he said. ‘Its physical integrity isn’t of paramount importance to me now. I would just like to die holding it. In any event, I’ve heard you out and I have not been swayed in the smallest degree. If you were meant to test me, boy, I’ve passed the test.’
‘But I’ve got evidence,’ Rush blurted. ‘I told you I had some evidence, right? Well, here it is. Forget about the angel and the accident, and all the rest of it. Forget about what Toller knew or where he got it from. Remember the one thing that he did that marked him out as one of the Judas People.
‘He used the sign of the noose.’
Diema had her hand on the grip of the M26 and had eased it halfway out of the holster. But Rush was still in the worst possible position, blocking most of her line of fire but almost none of Ber Lusim’s line of sight.
‘Toller used the sign of the noose as a blessing,’ Rush said. ‘His followers didn’t know what it was and he never explained it to them. But he did it anyway.’
‘I know this,’ Ber Lusim said.
‘You don’t know anything. Toller never used the sign of the noose even once.’
Ber Lusim’s eyes narrowed.
‘What?’
Rush shrugged, showed his empty hands. ‘I know, right? I thought that, too, the first time I read it. But then I saw Diema make the sign and something didn’t feel right. I got her to talk me through it. Then I went back and I read it again, and there it was. He put his hand to his throat, thence to his heart, and his stomach, and so in a circle back to where it began.’
‘I have read the passage,’ Ber Lusim snarled. ‘Do you take me for a fool?’
‘So if you had a clock face on your chest,’ Rush said, stealing the metaphor that Diema had used on the plane to Budapest, ‘that’s the way the hands would turn. Look. Like this.’
Diema could see that Rush was making the sign, just the way Robert Blackborne said Toller had made it. And she could tell from the way Ber Lusim’s eyes widened that he got the point.
‘It’s the wrong way round,’ Rush said. ‘As though Toller learned it by looking in a mirror. Which I think is more or less what he did.’
‘No,’ Ber Lusim said. It wasn’t a disagreement: it was a warning.
‘Yes,’ Rush insisted. ‘Not a mirror, obviously. But he saw someone else doing it and he copied it, exactly the way he saw it. He just forgot to turn it around.’
‘No,’ Ber Lusim said again.
‘It’s kind of funny, in a sick way,’ Rush said. Bluntly. Brutally. ‘You going to all this trouble, I mean.’ He gave a slightly hysterical laugh. ‘Pity Avra Shekolni is dead. I bet he’d have loved this.’
Maybe it was the laugh that sent Ber Lusim over the edge. He lunged forward, his hand shooting out to grip Rush’s throat.
It was the only moment they were going to get.
‘Now!’ Diema bellowed. ‘Do it now!’
Kennedy rose to her feet, gun in hand.
Ber Lusim turned.
And Diema fired.
Ber Lusim drew in his breath in a tremulous gasp. He looked down at his chest — at the small round hole that had appeared there, like a mysterious punctuation mark. A full stop, inscribed directly onto his heart. It went from black to red, and blood welled out of it. Ber Lusim had stiffened, his eyes wide as though from some awful realisation.
But it was Rush who fell, toppling from the ground up as his knees buckled under him.
Left-handed, out of position, Diema had taken the only shot she could: through Rush’s right shoulder and into the left side of Ber Lusim’s chest.
And now the way was clear. She and Kennedy fired again and again, emptying their guns into the assassin. Ber Lusim bowed his head and took the punishment, as though a man could endure gunfire in the same way as he endured heavy rain.
But this weather took a greater toll. Ber Lusim sank to his knees, as though by choice, then lowered himself by gradual degrees into a posture of prayer, which was how he died.
Kennedy began to approach the dead man slowly, covering him with her now-useless gun.
‘No!’ Diema shouted. ‘The timer, Kennedy! The timer!’
The woman ran to the desk, but hesitated. The smaller bomb that was the primer for Ber Lusim’s WMD was a baroque, ramshackle thing with wires and metal rods connecting to packets of acetone peroxide and clusters of industrial blasting caps. ‘What do I do?’ Kennedy yelled.
The timer on the screen showed twenty-three seconds. Kennedy turned to look at Diema, desperate, urgent. But Diema had no more idea than she did and it must have showed in her face.
With a wordless cry, like a paratrooper jumping out of a plane, Kennedy ripped the laptop out of the circuit.
It continued to count down in her hands.
To ten.
To five.
To zero.
Diema held an in-breath until her chest ached. Then slowly, soundlessly, let it out.
69
‘I’m bleeding,’ Rush said plaintively, from the floor. ‘Oh Christ. I’m bleeding all over the place. Help me.’
Diema crawled across to him slowly and painfully. She checked Rush’s wounds: both of them, entry and exit. The entry wound was small and neat and wouldn’t give any trouble at all. The exit wound was a lot bigger and the bullet had taken meat with it.
By the time it hit its intended target, the bullet would have spent at least a third of its initial velocity, most of it inside of Ben Rush. No wonder it had stopped Ber Lusim dead. The slowing bullet, lacking the energy required to leave his body once it had forced its way in, had sent a widening shockwave ahead of itself, pulping his internal organs like a steak tenderiser.
‘You did well,’ Diema said to Rush, as she patched him up.
Kennedy knelt down beside her and helped by tearing more strips of cloth as Diema knotted the makeshift dressing into place. ‘You did brilliantly,’ she confirmed. ‘Rush, how in the name of God did you figure that stuff out?’
‘I didn’t figure it out,’ he mumbled. His face was ashen. ‘I made most of it up. It’s probably all wrong. Except for the sign. I was pretty sure about the sign.’
‘You prevented a million deaths,’ Diema said. ‘You were a shield to my people. And to some of yours, too. You might amount to something one day after all, little boy.’
‘And you … aah, shit … you might grow some breasts,’ Rush countered. ‘Dream big.’
Diema turned her attention to Kennedy. ‘I’ll finish here,’ she said. ‘You go and check on my father — and get the truck into position. We’re leaving.’
A look passed between them. Kennedy nodded and left them to it, going rapidly back up the stairs to the grease pit.
Diema carried on knotting the dressing more firmly in place until Rush took hold of her hand to stop her. ‘When we had sex,’ he asked her, ‘was that just so you could get pregnant?’
‘I’m not pregnant, Rush.’
He stared at her, nonplussed.
‘You’re not?’
‘No. I said that to stop Nahir from cutting your throat.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ He thought about that a little longer as she tested the tightness of the dressing. ‘Uh … why?’
Diema was silent for a long time.
‘Do you mean, why would that stop him from killing you or why would I care whether he killed you or not?’
‘Either. Both.’
‘It’s hard to explain,’ she told him. ‘My people have some pretty odd ways of looking at things sometimes.’
Rush winced as some random movement sent a wave of pain through his torn shoulder muscle. ‘You don’t say? Well, thanks for the heroic self-sacrifice, anyway.’