Diema hadn’t liked it at first — hadn’t wanted even to discuss it. The confrontation with Kennedy had left her sullen and withdrawn — regrouping herself, Kennedy thought, along the interior battle lines that seemed to mean so much to her. But Diema hadn’t been able to fault the argument and finally she’d gone along with what was basically a fait accompli. It was clear by then that both Kennedy and Tillman preferred Rush’s version of the plan, and had withdrawn their consent from hers.
So Kennedy crossed the river and waited in the sweaty heat of the afternoon until the line moved forward enough for her to get through the doors into the vast entrance hall with its wooden pillars, its light wells, its elegant nude statues and geometrical mosaics. Some of it was original, approaching its hundredth birthday. The rest had been seamlessly reconstructed after 1945, when the Russian shelling of retreating German columns had reduced most of Buda to loose chippings.
The ticket window Kennedy was slowly approaching was flanked by massive wooden notice boards — one in Hungarian, the other in very bad English — advertising an array of treatments and services. In addition to the main public access and spa pools, there were dry and steam saunas, massage booths, manicures and pedicures, mud packing, carbonic acid tubs, weight baths, stretch baths and cold dive-pools. And a bar, she couldn’t help noticing.
Trying not to scan the faces around her, or meet anyone’s gaze for more than a fleeting second, Kennedy took the open day pass. It would get her into all the pools and saunas: specialist services involving heavy weights, mud or mild corrosives would cost extra.
She was given a towel, a wrist band and a set of instructions in rapid Hungarian to which she just nodded along. There were separate entrances for men and women: Kennedy’s Hungarian was just about equal to following the arrowed signs marked Nök to a gleaming steel turnstile standing incongruously under a decorative arch, whose carved woodwork echoed the grape vines on the hill outside. A stony-faced woman with the hotel’s logo blazoned in red across her white T-shirt showed her how to use her wristband to swipe herself in.
Looking neither to right nor left, Kennedy went on, down a long flight of steps and through an underground tunnel into the main bath complex. A lot of it, she realised, was underground, although there were signs everywhere pointing up towards the outside pool.
Kennedy went into a one-person changing room, where she took off her light jacket, shirt and trousers, replacing them with T-shirt and shorts. The few things she needed to carry went into a string purse that she wore on her shoulder.
She looked innocuous. Unarmed. A lamb to the slaughter.
She exited the changing room and sauntered through the seemingly endless aisles and alleys of cubicles until she found one of the spiral staircases that led to the outdoor pool.
The pool area was vast and heaving with bronzed or lightly broiled bodies. Kennedy had read once — admittedly a good few years before — that the whole human population of the world could stand shoulder to shoulder on the island of Zanzibar. It looked as though most of them had chosen today to try to stand in the Hotel Gellert’s bath complex.
She sat down on a deckchair and anointed herself with sun-block, putting the bottle back in the shoulder bag afterwards. Then she checked her watch, not ostentatiously but visibly, and leaned back in the chair, hands folded demurely in her lap.
If it was going to happen at all, it would probably happen soon.
Kennedy’s three watchers had had to cross the city in lock-step with her, which prevented them from choosing their stations in advance. There was a brief, hurried conference at the western end of the Freedom Bridge, where Diema was able to use the hotel complex itself, looming in the middle distance, as a visual aid.
‘I’m going to be on the hill,’ she said. ‘That way I can see the front and side doors of the hotel, so I’ll be your early warning if anybody shows. Tillman, you go inside, in the lobby space. You can watch the entrance to the baths, and you’ll be on point if anyone gets past me.’
‘What about me?’ Rush asked, without much hope.
‘Watch the front doors, from the outside, and the steps up from the river,’ Diema said. She didn’t go to any effort to make it sound like a job that had any real importance.
‘Are they likely to come up from the river?’ Rush asked.
‘They could,’ Diema said.
She was already walking away when Tillman caught her by the arm and brought her to a halt. It was an electrifying moment, and it made Rush swallow the complaint he was halfway to voicing.
‘Do you have a problem?’ Diema asked, in a tone that said do you want to lose that hand?
‘The GPS receiver,’ Tillman said.
‘What about it?’
‘No offence, girl, but I think I might have Heather’s interests more at heart than you do. Why not let me hold onto the base unit?’
They locked eyes for a long, dangerous moment.
‘Protector of women,’ Diema said. ‘Defender of the weak, and the weak-minded. Is that your brief, Tillman? Or do you just want to get into her pants?’
‘If you want to know about Heather’s pants,’ Tillman said equably, ‘you should probably ask Heather. Meantime, I’ll take the tracker. Unless this is something you actually want to fight about.’
Diema reached into a pocket of her black leather jacket, found something that looked a little like a TV remote, and tossed it to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You take it, with my blessing. It won’t do any good, though. She changed her mind about wearing it. You should teach your bitch a little discipline, some time. God knows, she could use it.’
The girl walked away before he could answer her, heading for the east side of the hotel and the rugged hillside beyond. She didn’t look back.
Tillman turned to Rush, who was giving him a slightly dazed stare.
‘Did I just hear right?’ the boy demanded. ‘Kennedy’s in the wind?’
‘Not if we do our job right,’ Tillman muttered gruffly. ‘Pick your spot, lad. And keep your channel open. This might be our last shot.’
‘It might be hers,’ Rush said.
And since Tillman had no answer to that, they parted without any further exchange of pleasantries.
Rush stayed where he was, out on the pavement in front of the hotel’s main entrance, with the street market right at his back. Tillman went into the lobby and up into the gallery set into the circular dome at its mid-point.
Once again, all they could do was wait. And Tillman was starting to feel that if they waited much longer, this so-called plan would founder on the reefs of their divergent agendas.
He was also wondering, if they happened to succeed in locating and neutralising Ber Lusim, for how long after that the Judas People would let them live.
Sitting under the rotunda dome at the centre of the Hotel Gellert’s lobby, wearing a gaudy shirt and with a camera around his neck, Hifela watched Heather Kennedy pass through the turnstile and considered his brief. If she does anything that concerns you, his commander had said.
He could refer back to Ber Lusim, but this seemed to fit the definition very well. For the rhaka to come so shockingly close to their base of operations was still an ambiguous act, but it admitted of very few interpretations — and in all of them, the woman or one of her associates had somehow succeeded in locating them. Possibly she was planning some kind of raid, but it seemed unlikely she’d do that by day. It was only too plausible, though, that she was reconnoitring the ground for a later incursion.