going to kill him. She begged him to leave, to run, but he wouldn’t because he wanted to die.”
Something bothered the boy.
“What is it, son?”
“Why didn’t Jesus surrender himself? Why did he need grandfather to deliver him?” Menahem asked earnestly.
That was a question that had bothered Jair for most of his adult life. He had seen people spit at his mother, so called holy men, and curse her and call her a whore. It had cut deep. The Pharisees looking to smear her. He had asked his mother why Judas had to die for this other man with his new religion. Because she knew both men better than anyone, he thought she might have the answer. She gave him the only answer that made any sense: “Because he doubted himself. He doubted his own strength. Jesus needed someone at his side to be sure he went through with it. He wasn’t merely surrendering, he was sacrificing himself. He needed to know he wasn’t alone. So that was the sacrifice your grandfather made. He gave himself so that his friend could end the tyranny of the Pharisees.” And for that she allowed them to spit at her and call her whore.
“Grandfather must have been brave,” the boy said.
Jair nodded, lost again in memories that weren’t his. “Even his own friends turned on him because he couldn’t tell them the truth. Like everyone else they thought he had betrayed Jesus. They didn’t understand. There was so much they didn’t understand. They thought he had acted out of jealousy and greed. They thought it was all about these damned coins. It wasn’t. It never had been. You know that now. He lost everything because he was the best of them, the strongest, most faithful. And now they call him faithless.” Jair closed his eyes. The real betrayal was still fresh inside him.
0' width='19' align='justify'›“He was about to become a father, yet for the sake of his friend he gave up the chance of ever knowing me.” He looked at his son, trying to imagine himself in his father’s place. All of the choices he had made in his life paled beside that single choice Judas had made in this garden. It would have been so easy to flee, to take Mary and start their new family. Again that familiar swell of bitterness rose inside him. “I can’t imagine never knowing you,” Jair said, glad he had been spared that agony at least.
He gathered up the silver and handed the pouch to his son.
“These are yours now. Think of them as the last reminders of your grandfather’s sacrifice. We cannot forget the truth. We owe that much to him, don’t we?”
“I’ll never forget,” Menahem promised.
16
The first siren blared almost immediately.
The second and third came only a second later. In less than five seconds every alarm box in the street was wailing. Half of them might have only been for show, but the other half were doing the best to raise the dead. In thirty seconds they had joined into a single wall of noise.
“What the hell’s that racket?” one of the uniforms said.
“Not sure, Sarge. Sounds like burglar alarms.”
“You trying to tell me every bastard in this street just got robbed? I don’t like this. Go and check it out, Hollis.”
Ronan Frost listened to one set of booted footsteps clump down the stairs. That still left two uniforms upstairs. They were better numbers. He could take two, quickly, if he had to. Still, with a little bit of luck there would be no need.
“What the hell’s going on out there?” the uniform was talking into his radio, Frost realized. He couldn’t hear what the crackling voice said in reply. He didn’t doubt for a minute that Lethe had the ability to mess with their frequencies if he wanted to. If the boy could trigger every damned burglar alarm in a square mile, he could sure as hell dampen a radio signal. “Say again?” the officer repeated, shouting to be heard over the caterwauling alarms.
Just go down there and check it out, Frost willed the man to do his job.
They had a corpse here, but the one indisputable thing everyone knew about the dead was that they didn’t get up and walk unless it was a Romero film. She wasn’t going anywhere. Outside, it could have been the first salvo of the Third World War if the racket was anything to go by. They were policemen. It was their duty to go out there and investigate.
Frost waited, counting the rhythmic dub-dub dub-dub of his heartbeats.
Street by street more alarms sounded until they formed their own grotesque dawn chorus across the city. It was pandemonium. Still he didn’t move. His skin prickled with anticipation. He felt the tension coiling up inside him, desperate to be released in a fury of action. Still he waited, lying on his back, listening to the cacophony. It was music to his ears. He’d asked for a distraction and Lethe had delivered. He could picture people beginning to stumble out of their houses in the pajamas, rubbing their sleepy eyes and wondering what the hell was going on.
With a bit of luck a few more minutes of this and he’d be able to slip downstairs and out of the backdoor unnoticed. He wouldn’t need to be Harry Houdini to disappear into the crowd of woken sleepers grumbling about the bloody noise.
He heard more footsteps on the stairs.
It was hard to tell if it was one man, or if both of them were going down.
Frost waited until he couldn’t hear them, then whispered, “Talk to me Lethe.”
“You can say thank you any time you like. No, no, seriously. Any time you like. I live to serve.”
“Yeah, yeah, just tell me what you see.”
“Five plod standing around, looking worse than useless. I think I confused them. That or all the noise is interfering with the neural relays and their brains are shutting down to protect themselves.”
“Meaning one’s still inside the house,” Frost mused, ignoring everything after the word five.
“No fooling you, boss.”
“Remind me again why we keep you around?”
“Because I’m brilliant, obviously, and because without my little bit of techno-magic you’d be spending a good chunk of the foreseeable at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Now, it’s good to talk and all that, but how about you get the hell out of there, Frosty.”
Frost holstered his pistol.
He reached up for one of the rafters, caught a hold of the beam with both hands, and lifted himself silently to his feet. He stood, one foot either side of the loft hatch. He couldn’t stand fully upright because of the confined space. He bent down all the way, working his fingers beneath the wooden board, then very carefully lifted it out of the way. The alarm chorus hid the occasional scrape and scuff of wood on wood as he put the loft door down. He could see the landing lit up beneath him. Frost lowered himself back down to his stomach, then leaned ever so slightly down through the opening to see exactly what he’d be lowering himself into.
The last uniform still stood in the bedroom doorway, unable to pull his gaze away from the mutilation on the bed. The odds were the poor guy had never seen a corpse before. That his first looked like one of Andrei Chikatilo’s victims spread out there on her bed didn’t help his brain process the horror of the room. But it did help Frost. He breathed deeply, once, twice, steadying himself, before he lowered himself slowly, and soundlessly, down. Frost took all of his weight on his forearms like a gymnast on the parallel bars. As his shoulders came level with his elbows every muscle in his arms began to tremble violently. He expected the police officer to cry out, but he didn’t. Frost twisted slightly, allowing his body weight to lower him further, until it felt as though the muscles in his shoulders and upper back were going to tear, then he dropped down the last few inches to the floor silently behind the uniform.
He reached around to the holster at the base of his spine and drew his gun.
He took two steps across the deep pile carpet, quickly bringing himself up to no more than a few inches behind the policeman. He saw himself over the uniform’s shoulder, in the mirror on the wall behind the bed. The
