‘I’m averse to it wherever it can be avoided,’ he said.
And you want her on ground she hasn’t already prepped, Kennedy thought. But the stakes are too high here, Leo — for you as well as for Ben Rush.
‘We’ll come up,’ she said aloud. And in a quieter voice, to Tillman, ‘Don’t push her too hard. When we find out what she wants, then we decide which way to jump.’
‘When we’re cosying up to forty or so pounds of high-explosive?’ he murmured back.
‘Move the truck away from the road first,’ Diema told them. ‘Out behind the barn. Tillman, you do that. Kennedy, come up here. Now.’
They did as they were told. Tillman got back into the truck and the ignition rumbled into life. It rolled on past Kennedy as she walked towards the barn. Then she stepped across the threshold, into sudden shadow.
The loft ladder was off to her right. There was nothing else in the ruined barn, no hay-bales, no rusting farm equipment, no stalls or mangers. If this was an ambush, the ambushers were up in the loft with Diema and Rush. But then, if this was an ambush, the girl was working too hard. She could have left both Kennedy and Tillman to die individually and severally before now, and instead she’d exerted herself to keep them alive.
If the agenda had changed, they’d find out soon enough. But there wasn’t anything Kennedy could do about it besides play along; not unless she was prepared to stand by and watch Ben Rush’s insides become his outsides.
She climbed up the ladder.
The loft was much better furnished than the floor of the barn. As well as the chair in which Rush was sitting, there were two more chairs set at a fold-up table. A pitcher of water stood on the table, next to a stack of plastic cups. All the comforts of home.
Diema had moved away from Rush and was standing with her back to the wall of the loft, directly facing Kennedy. The detonator was ready in her hand, her thumb poised over it. Kennedy hauled herself up through the trapdoor in the floor, moving very slowly.
‘I want to be sure Ben is okay,’ she told the girl. ‘Can I take that gag off him?’
‘You can sit,’ the girl said, ‘at the table, and wait quietly until I tell you what else to do. Is that the book?’
Kennedy showed her the typescript, which was still unbound and only held together with a thick elastic band. She set it — still slowly, still carefully — down on the table.
‘Good,’ Diema said. ‘Now sit.’
Kennedy sat.
She heard Tillman below, starting to climb.
‘If you press that button now,’ Kennedy said to the girl, ‘you’re going to kill yourself as well as us.’
‘I’m a soldier,’ Diema told her. ‘Death in the field is what soldiers expect.’
‘In my experience,’ Tillman said, his head and shoulders rising through the trapdoor as he spoke, ‘soldiers expect that for everybody else, not for themselves.’ He kept his empty hands constantly in full view as he climbed up into the loft. Nonetheless, the girl gave him a stare that was full of mistrust.
‘Sit down,’ she told him.
He sat, but he pulled the chair a little away from the table and angled it towards the girl. He wanted to be free to move if the need arose, Kennedy guessed.
If Diema saw what he was doing, she gave no sign of being troubled by it. ‘Is everything you took from the warehouse still in the truck?’ she asked him.
Tillman nodded. ‘All the incriminating evidence,’ he said, ‘assembled in one place. Is that what this is about? Are you the cleanup crew?’
Diema gave the question serious consideration. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose I am. But you have no idea what it is I’m cleaning up, so you don’t know what it is you’re saying. That’s why you’re here, really. To be instructed.’ She paused for a moment, as though expecting a question. When neither Kennedy nor Tillman spoke, she said, ‘If I meant you harm — if I meant you harm now, today — I’d have come at you in a different way. You realise that, don’t you?’
Kennedy looked from Diema to Ben Rush, sitting with his back to them, then back to Diema. She raised her eyebrows. Exhibit A.
Diema met her gaze, unblinking. ‘I was doing my best to help you,’ she said. ‘That’s what I was ordered to do. That’s why I’m here. But then I spoke to the boy, and now I think I may need to reinterpret my orders.’
She continued to stare at Kennedy with quiet, fierce intensity. ‘Some time ago,’ she said, ‘a secret came into your keeping. A very great secret. When I spoke to the boy …’ her gaze flicked momentarily across to Rush ‘… I learned that you’d passed that secret on to him. Before we say anything on any other subject, I have to know why. I was assuming you have some sense of honour, some idea of what honour means.’
All of this was addressed directly to Kennedy, seeming purposefully to exclude Tillman, and it was said so solemnly that Kennedy boggled slightly. If this girl had seen twenty, it was a recent memory.
‘You tied Ben to a chair with a suicide belt strapped to his chest so you could see if we’re honourable?’ she said, trying to keep her tone neutral. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘No.’ The girl made an impatient gesture — her mouth folding into a grimace before straightening again to the deadpan that seemed to be her default expression. ‘That’s what you’re saying. Let’s go through this again.’
She pressed down on the ringer and the chimes of Big Ben sounded again. Kennedy gasped aloud and Rush convulsed, but it was only with an access of panic. No explosion came.
In the loud silence, Diema threw the ringer onto the table.
‘There’s no suicide belt,’ she said. ‘No explosives. And I gagged him because he was talking about my breasts. I didn’t like it.’
Kennedy rose to her feet. Her first thought after screw me sideways! was for Rush. She wanted to get him untied and away from that bloody drop. Tillman’s initial reaction was different. His right hand swept across his left and suddenly he had a gun in it, centred on the girl’s upper body. It wasn’t the big and heavy Mateba Unica he usually carried, it was a discreet little Saturday night special, and it looked absurdly tiny in his big hand.
‘I’m sorry to do this,’ he said to the girl brusquely, ‘because I know you saved my life the other night, but there’s too much blood under the bridge already for me to trust you. Please move over to the wall. Keep your hands where I can see them, and move like you’re walking underwater.’
‘Leo—’ Kennedy blurted, her heart in her mouth.
‘She’s Elohim,’ he said, across her. ‘No surprises, Heather. Not beyond the ones we’ve already had.’ And to the girl, ‘Please. I said against the wall, and I don’t want any argument. Do it.’
Just one damn thing after another, Kennedy thought bitterly. And she knew Tillman was right, on one level. But the level on which he was wrong concerned her more, and she found herself stepping in between the two of them, letting the barrel of Tillman’s gun bump against her breastbone, come to rest up against her throat.
‘Enough, Leo,’ she said. ‘Put the gun away. She’s done enough to prove her point.’
Tillman tried to step around Kennedy but she gripped his wrist in both of her hands and it was clear that the only way he was going to get it free would be by force.
‘What point,’ he asked, ‘has she proved, exactly?’
‘That she’s not interested in killing us,’ Kennedy said, between clenched teeth. ‘So put the gun away, and we’ll talk it out. For now, this is neutral ground we’re standing on.’ She looked over her shoulder at the girl. ‘Right?’
‘Not right at all,’ Diema said. ‘Blood was shed here. My people’s blood. It’s far from neutral. But it’s holy, and I’ll respect it. You who shed it should honour it, too.’ She was looking at Tillman, staring straight into his eyes, a quiet ferocity in her expression. He met that stare with a pugnacious determination that Kennedy had seen in his face before. The back of her neck prickled unpleasantly. She felt, for a moment, as though she’d stepped between Tillman and his reflection in a mirror. How could he look at Diema, from this close, and not see? And how could he not hear in her voice how much that spilled blood mattered to her?