‘It’s not that,’ Rush said. ‘It’s … I …’ He seemed to wrestle with the next word for a long time. Kennedy realised that Nahir was watching them both from the other side of the narrow space, and moved to block his line of sight. The sound of the traffic and the rumbling of the truck’s diesel engine would drown out any sound they were making.
‘What?’ she asked him.
‘She’s in trouble with her people,’ Rush said. ‘Diema. And I think it’s because of me.’
The thought that he might be concerned about the girl had never occurred to Kennedy and it blindsided her completely. ‘What?’ she asked stupidly.
‘It was something that happened at the safe house. I think she might be under arrest, or something. The shithead over there, Nahir — he was mouthing off at her, and then the scary bald guy got a turn, too, and then he said he’d make a judgment.’
‘A judgment about what? Do you have any idea?’
He shook his head. ‘I wish I hadn’t come here,’ he muttered bleakly. ‘I haven’t made the slightest bit of difference. I don’t know why I thought I could. All I’ve done is screw things up.’
‘This — what we’re doing right now — it isn’t your area of expertise,’ Kennedy said gently. ‘Or mine.’
He looked up and met her concerned gaze. ‘Heather, I haven’t got an area of expertise.’
Kennedy took the typescript of Toller’s book out of her handbag and handed it to him.
‘Yeah, you do,’ she said. ‘Same as mine. We’re the detectives, Ben. That’s why they need us.’
The truck rolled to a halt at last, and Taria unlocked and opened its rear doors from the outside. They stepped out into daylight for the first time in two hours. Taria and Alus, with surprising care and gentleness, helped Tillman down off the tailgate of the truck. Kennedy had to remind herself that they’d be just as happy to cut his throat, if the order came down. You couldn’t lower your guard around these people.
Any of them.
The factory was a shell, most of its windows broken or boarded, graffiti climbing its walls like moss. It stood on an apron of asphalt that was being ripped apart in slow motion by bramble and knotweed. Pigeons nested on the ledges of the higher windows and in holes in the walls where bricks had fallen out. The air was heavy with their insinuations. There was a sign, also streaked with birdshit. It read PARNASSUS IRON AND STEEL COMPANY, with a stylised picture of a mountain behind it like the Paramount logo.
Beyond a sagging chain-link fence, the waters of the Harlem River lapped at a concrete pier on which an ancient sofa sat, mildewed and foul. There was a small, dense cluster of empty beer bottles standing next to the sofa and a cairn of polystyrene boxes bearing the McDonald’s logo. Further in the background, but dominating everything, the towers of Manhattan rose like a dream: the land of milk and honey, just across the water.
One of Kuutma’s Messengers, who looked to be about the same age as Diema or maybe a year older, had been stationed at the factory’s main doors to await their arrival. He was dressed in torn jeans and a faded STROKES T-shirt, but he came to attention as Diema approached and greeted her with the sign of the noose, instantly on his mettle. She seemed to know him.
‘Raziel,’ she said.
He blushed with pleasure at being recognised. ‘Ready to serve you, sister,’ he said. He stood aside for her without a word and fell in behind her. The rest of the party, apart from the driver, followed her inside the building. Tillman, leaning heavily on Kuutma’s two angels, brought up the rear.
‘Where are the vats?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to see them.’
Raziel looked to Diema, who nodded. ‘Do as he says.’
Raziel led them to a massive room that seemed to take up most of the factory’s interior space. Certainly its ceiling, far over their heads, was the underside of the building’s roof, buttressed with massive steel beams and festooned with looped and dangling cables. The pigeons flew to and fro up there, and everything in sight was speckled chalk-white with their droppings. The beating of their wings reminded Kennedy very suddenly and strongly of a bike she’d had when she was seven. She’d slipped playing cards through the spokes of the rear wheel, and the sound when she rode it was exactly the same, she realised now, as the sound of pigeons taking startled flight.
In the centre of the room, obviously much newer than anything else in the place but already mottled with guano, stood seven massive tubs. They were of yellow plastic and they came up to Kennedy’s shoulder. In each, there was an inch or so of thick green slurry or paste.
‘Get me some of that,’ Tillman said. ‘But don’t touch it with your hands.’
Taria found a length of wooden slat and used it as a spoon, scooping up a little of the muck. She held it out to Tillman, who leaned his weight against a cement pillar before he took the slat and sniffed at the gooey mess.
‘Is that the toxin?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘No, it’s too wet,’ Tillman said. ‘This is just cake. Ber Lusim’s people would have crushed the beans here, expressed the oil, and then filtered the residue a whole bunch of times. But they’d still have needed to precipitate the ricin. That’s a two-stage process. We’re looking for a room with a lot of wide, flat trays in it.’
‘Why are we looking for it?’ Nahir asked, with sarcastic emphasis.
Ignoring him, Diema barked out a terse command. Raziel and the angels made the sign of the noose and got moving at once. Nahir stayed where he was.
‘Na be’hiena se ve rach chain of command,’ Diema said to him. Her tone was mild, but her eyes were narrowed. Nahir met that gaze for a second or two longer, then joined the search.
That left Diema and the three of them. She turned to Tillman. ‘You’ve seen a place like this before?’ she asked him.
‘Twice.’ He held up two fingers, counted them off. ‘The first time in Afghanistan, the second time right here in America. Texas. Small-scale outfits, both times, and as far as we could tell, neither of them processed enough ricin to hurt anyone. Except themselves, maybe. This looks to be a slicker operation.’ He pointed at some bags of chemicals stacked up next to the vats. ‘Sodium sulfate. Carbon tet. Lots of both. And seven vats means they had batches refining and drying all the time. A real assembly line.’
He reached up a hand to scratch his chest, but was defeated by the thick layers of dressings and gave up after a moment or two. ‘It’s the delivery system, every time,’ he murmured.
‘What is?’ Diema asked.
Tillman looked at her, shrugged one shoulder: the other was holding most of his weight. ‘The problem with ricin. It’s really nasty stuff. Kills if it’s inhaled, or swallowed, or if you get any of it inside your system some other way. But you need more than a grain or two. You need a thick aerosol spray or a solid pellet. Did you ever hear of Georgi Markov?’
Diema shook her head.
‘A Bulgarian writer, and a political dissident. Lived in London in the 1970s. He was saying harsh things about the Soviets, and they wanted to shut him up, so someone got an assassin to stab him with the sharp end of an umbrella. Three days of agony, then he died. The umbrella had been rigged to deliver a pellet of ricin about a millimetre in diameter.’
‘Which is fine if you want to kill one Bulgarian,’ Diema said.
Tillman nodded. ‘But you can’t bomb New York with poisonous umbrellas. You need a delivery system that will flood the streets with millions of those pellets or with billions of smaller solid particles in suspension. If we figure out the system, we’ll know where to find Ber Lusim. And whatever it is he’s come up with, this is where he put it together, so there might be a clue here.’
Nahir and Raziel returned, followed a few minutes later by Taria and then Alus. ‘Nothing,’ Nahir said. ‘No trays, and no obvious surface on which trays might have been ranged or racked. You appear to be mistaken.’