Tillman turned — slowly, carefully, shifting his weight with some difficulty — to look at the Messenger. ‘Maybe about the logistics,’ he said. ‘Not about the chemistry. This process would have produced a pulpy mass, and once it’s dried the ricin is skimmed off the surface. You lay it out flat in a shallow tray because you want a big surface area. If Ber Lusim didn’t do that here, then he took the refined pulp away and skimmed it somewhere else.’
‘A secondary processing plant,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe over in Manhattan itself. Would there be any way of identifying it?’
Tillman shook his head reluctantly. ‘No, it’s a pretty streamlined operation. This is the biggest and the hardest part of the job. Pressing the beans, extracting the oil and processing the pulp. That takes time, manpower and a lot of powerful chemical solvents. But when you’re skimming it, all you need is a blade.’
‘And gloves,’ Diema said. ‘Presumably.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t want to touch the stuff, certainly. Or breathe it in. You’d have your harvesters in protective body suits with their own air supply. But unless they go out for a cigarette break and forget to change into their street clothes, I don’t see where that helps us.’
‘In any case, the skimming wouldn’t still be going on now,’ Kennedy pointed out. ‘Whatever Ber Lusim intends to do, we’ve got to assume he’s got it all in place and ready to go.’
‘The trucks that dropped the castor beans and chemicals off here,’ Taria said. ‘Where did they go afterwards?’
Kennedy had never heard Taria speak before and she was surprised that the woman’s voice was light and soft rather than sonorous.
‘I don’t know,’ Diema admitted. ‘And it’s a good question. Nahir, find out.’
Nahir took out a cellphone and dialled, without protest or argument. The earlier conversation about the chain of command must have struck a chord, Kennedy thought.
While he spoke, either to Kuutma or more likely to some subordinate, Tillman made his own painfully slow circuit of the factory. Kennedy went with him, supporting some of his weight.
There was nothing in the main room that caught his attention, but at the back of the space, furthest from the door through which they’d entered, there was a double-door that had once been padlocked. A length of chain still hung from one of the two handles, and the wood of the doors themselves was splintered around the edges. At first, Kennedy thought that Kuutma’s Elohim must have forced the door when they searched the place. Then she realised that the broken chain was welded to the woodwork with immemorial deposits of pigeon shit. It had been there a long time.
In the space beyond, they found a grease pit. Tillman examined it closely, even though he had to kneel down to do so. It was a massive space, about twenty feet by ten in area and five feet deep, with two parallel bars of pitted, rusted iron laid across the bottom. ‘There would have been some kind of hydraulic lift here,’ Tillman thought aloud. ‘Back when this place was still up and running, I mean.’
‘Are you wondering whether Ber Lusim could have laid trays or racks out down there, to skim off the ricin?’ Kennedy asked him.
‘Thought had crossed my mind.’
It looked unlikely, at first glance. The floor of the pit was filled with a thick, foul sediment of oil and slurry.
But Kennedy tapped with her foot at the edge of the pit. Tillman looked where the toe of her shoe was pointing: fresh scuff and scrape marks showed light against the ingrained oil stains at the edge of the pit, and a bisected crust of pigeon shit indicated where a piece of rusty sheet metal had been moved.
‘Something got done here, anyway,’ Kennedy said. ‘Maybe he threw a cover over the pit and set the racks out on that.’
Tillman scanned the bare room slowly, with intense and silent concentration. Then he made a circuit of the pit, which took a good ten minutes, and finally rejoined Kennedy.
‘Plenty of evidence of movement,’ he said. ‘Heavy stuff being dragged around. I think you’re right, Heather. Ber Lusim processed the ricin right here, and then he hauled it out. What I’m looking for is some kind of clue as to what else he might have done with it first. Whether it’s still just loose powder or it’s been packed into jackets or containers of some kind. Aerosol sprayers is a possibility, but then we ought to find some more chemical residues. He’d have been messing with propanes or ether compounds to make a propellant, and the smell would be all over here.’
Kennedy looked at her watch. It was 14.48. Four hours and twelve minutes left. ‘Let’s go see if Nahir found anything on those HEH transports,’ she suggested.
They found that the others had returned to the truck. Rush was sitting on the tailgate, leafing through the typescript of Toller’s book, while Diema was speaking to the other Elohim in their native tongue.
She turned to Tillman and Kennedy as they approached, and switched to English. ‘The trucks went from here to a rented lot at Locust Point,’ she said. ‘Four miles east. They’re still there. Nobody’s used them since, as far as we can tell.’
‘Okay,’ Tillman said. ‘Did you check for—’
Nahir rode right over him. ‘They’re empty, and they’ve been stripped clean. Nothing to go on. Nothing we can use. And the site rental was paid through a front company in Belgium. It was a dead end.’
‘But there’s something else,’ Diema added. ‘Kuutma has been working through the satellite images, and he found something. The time we know about — when they delivered the castor beans — that was the second time this place was visited. HEH trucks came here another time, a week earlier. So there could be something else, besides the ricin. Another threat.’
‘No,’ Rush said.
Nahir shot the boy a look of sheer exasperation and muttered something in Aramaic.
‘It doesn’t make sense, that’s all,’ Rush said, with a defensive shrug. ‘The prophecy talks about one thing. One breath, killing a million people. Not multiple attacks.’
‘He’s right,’ Kennedy said. ‘Whatever was in the first delivery, it has to relate to the ricin. It’s all got to be tied together, somehow. Can we find out what it was?’
‘We’re trying,’ Diema said. ‘The information could be in the computers we took in Gellert Hill. We just can’t afford to wait for it. We’ve either got to find Ber Lusim or else we’ve got to cover every base.’
Kennedy felt a wave of fatalistic despair sweep over her, like a sudden paralysis. There was too much ground to make up and too little time. Ber Lusim had set the agenda all along, and everything they’d done had achieved nothing more than getting them ringside seats for his command performance. Under the circumstances, it was hard to make herself believe that anything they did now could matter.
But Diema was still pacing, her face fierce with thought. And Tillman, watching her, was wearing an expression that was both more complicated and more painful. His desire to help her, to make her mission succeed, was palpable. He’d almost died trying, and it wasn’t over yet.
What was left? What had they missed? What could they still hope to do, in the dog end of time they still had?
‘You said your people checked the water already?’ she asked Diema.
‘Yes,’ Diema said tersely. ‘There’s nothing out there now that shouldn’t be there. And there are Elohim stationed at the confluence of the rivers. If anything unscheduled comes down into this stretch, they’ll keep a watch on it — and fire on it if they have to.’
At the confluence of the rivers. That meant at the northern end of Manhattan, right across the water from where they were now. Kennedy wondered whether Diema knew how much she was giving away here, and decided that the answer was almost certainly yes. Whatever else she was, the girl was no fool.