of the steel door. “Step back this way. Slow and steady.” He paused, then continued in a voice laced with thinly-veiled disbelief and confusion. “Mr Oppenheimer and the others are safe. You can come back now.”
Alexander returned his gaze to the enemy skyscraper, and saw that the gun barrels had disappeared. They were watching; he could still feel the pressure of their gaze. But the ambush was over.
He stared hard into the blackness of the steel and glass spire. “So it really is you leading them,” he muttered. The acidic burn of liquid fear bubbled low in his bowel. All the notes, the signs, the slow and creeping advance of these barbarous hordes upon their homes. All the time he had kept the truth of who was really behind it all a secret, even to those he loved, even to Norman.
Yet the reality of it all hadn’t seeped in until now, not really. It had taken this, facing the firing squad, literally.
Ignoring the prickling of the hairs along his spine, he turned his back on the street and walked back to the gate. He forced himself to take his time, not hurrying, passing over tarmac studded with gouges and ragged old vehicles torn to scrap by bullet holes. And the bodies, too. Not only those of Oppenheimer’s party lay scattered around the wall, but also the bloated remains of those slaughtered in ambushes earlier in the week, when the other ambassadors had arrived.
The stench this close to the compound was nauseating, a black ugly smell that clawed at the back of his throat.
He made a point to study each of their faces in turn, and they joined the endless parade that had over time followed him in the name of the mission, only to meet their deaths. He didn’t dare try claiming the bodies, not even the children. He alone was being spared a bullet to the head, but how far did their mercy extend?
His nerve almost broke at the gate’s threshold. It took all his mettle to stand fast and walk unhurried into the courtyard. Hands ran over him, pulling, tugging, buffeting over his clothes and face. A few secured his safety beyond the threshold, Marek’s chief among them. Alexander struggled to pick out any one face from the teeming mass; there were so many. Voices gabbled their joy at his safety. Reverential and fetishistic hands caressed him.
The klaxon buzzed overhead and the gate swung shut. Those up on the catwalk held firm until it squealed to a booming close, then they too relaxed and turned to look down at him. From the tower itself, Alexander could make out the ghostly images of refugees filling every window of the lobby and several floors above, pressed against the glass, all watching.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” Marek growled in his ear.
“Helping a friend,” Alex said. He looked at Oppenheimer who crouched weeping over his one remaining young daughter.
“We could have lost you.”
Alexander almost retorted that he was nothing special, but caught his tongue just in time. The masses had treated him as a demigod for so many years it had become part of the fabric of who they were. People used to pilgrimage to his home before the famine. Sometimes, he forgot how they all saw him.
That’s why they all wanted to touch me. I’m something other, privy to secret truths.
He had just walked towards an enemy that had slain everything it had come into contact with, and walked away.
You might as well have walked on water, oh great Messiah.
Norman appeared in the crowd, and those around him bowed back to make room for him, affording him a juvenile form of the reverence being beamed at Alexander himself. Norman had been his disciple long before anyone had called him Messiah. It was hard to see him as anything but the embodiment of all Alexander had worked for. To see him so broken and weak was unsettling.
He hadn’t turned out to be the man Alexander had hoped.
A harried, scornful voice rose above the racket, coming from the lobby. “Of all the shameful, reckless, godforsaken imbecilic things I’ve seen in my time, you take the candle and the dish, Mr Cain!” Evelyn Fisher screeched. A wrinkled, regal creature from a bygone era of war and eternal fear in the north during the Early Years, she let her Yorkshire accent cut a swathe through the crowd’s ranks and left a tunnel of bare tarmac between them. Her eyes glowered over