The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘So was the investigating officer. You see what it means, though, right?’

  Harper nodded, but his face showed that he was still working through the implications. ‘It’s from Barlow’s jacket,’ he said. ‘Or maybe his trousers. But … it’s in the wrong place.’

  ‘Jacket or trousers, Barlow shouldn’t be anywhere near here,’ Kennedy agreed, tapping the spot itself with her finger. ‘It’s a good seven or eight feet, laterally, from where he ended up, and it’s on the wrong side of the stair rail – the outside. The jag in the wood is angled downwards, too. You’d more or less have to be moving upwards into the sharp edge to tear your clothes on it, and that’s assuming you’re standing where we are. I don’t see any way this could happen as the body fell from above.’

  ‘Maybe Barlow flails around after he hits bottom,’ Harper speculated. ‘Not quite dead. Trying to get up and get help or—’ He stopped abruptly, shook his head. ‘No, that’s ridiculous. The poor bastard has a broken neck.’

  ‘Right. If the loose thread had been from the street coat, then I’d maybe buy that. You can’t figure the angles on something that’s flapping around loose in someone’s hand. But the street coat is black. This came from the clothes the victim was wearing, which wouldn’t move upwards when his body was moving down, or do elaborate pirouettes around solid objects. No, I’m thinking Barlow met his attacker right here, at the bottom of the stairs. The guy waited out of sight here, probably in this alcove under the stairs, then when he heard the footsteps coming down he got into position, stepped out as Barlow walked by and grabbed him from behind.’

  ‘And then arranged the body to look as though he fell,’ Harper finished the thought. ‘That would explain him hauling Barlow upright and catching his clothes on that jag.’

  Kennedy shook her head. ‘Remember the blood on the upper stairs, Harper. The body did fall. I just think it fell later. The attacker kills Barlow down here, because down here is safer. No windows, less chance that Barlow will see him coming – or recognise him, maybe, if they’ve met before. But he’s thorough and he wants to make sure all the physical evidence is right. So once Barlow is dead, he drags the body up the stairs so he can throw it down again and add that extra touch of authenticity. In that process, as he’s manhandling the body, the jacket catches on this jagged edge and a little shred of it gets caught.’

  ‘That’s way too complicated,’ Harper protested. ‘You just have to hit the guy with a pipe wrench, right? Everyone will assume it was a mugging that went wrong. You could walk right out of here with the murder weapon under your coat and nobody would ever know. Dragging the body up the stairs, even late in the evening when there’s no one around, is a stupid risk to take.’

  ‘It could be he preferred that risk to the risk of an investigation,’ Kennedy said. ‘There’s the bulb, too.’

  ‘The bulb?’

  ‘On the upper landing. If I’m right, Barlow wasn’t killed or even attacked up there. But the light is blown, to make it look that bit more likely that he fell. Could just be a weird coincidence, but I don’t think so. I think our killer takes care of that little detail too. Unscrews the bulb, shakes it until the filament snaps, puts it back.’

  ‘Afterwards.’

  ‘Yes. Afterwards. I know, it sounds insane. But if that is what happened, then maybe …’

  She started up the stairs again, on hands and knees this time, head bent low to examine the edges of the stair runners. But it was Harper who found it, seven steps up, after she’d already gone past it.

  ‘Here,’ he called to her, pointing.

  Kennedy turned and leaned in close to peer. Caught on the head of a nail that had been hammered in at a slight angle and remained proud of the wood, there was another wisp of light-brown cloth. It had survived because it was right in close to the wall, where people using the stairs were least likely to tread. Kennedy nodded, satisfied. ‘Bingo,’ she said. Corroborating evidence. Barlow’s body had been dragged up the stairs, prior to falling down them but presumably after death.

  ‘So,’ Harper summarised, ‘we’ve got a killer who strikes from the shadows, breaks a guy’s neck with a single twist, then lugs him all the way up a flight of stairs that’s in public use, and hangs around long enough to do a bit of stage dressing, all so he can fake an accident and duck a murder investigation. That takes an insane amount of balls.’

  ‘Late in the evening,’ Kennedy reminded him, but she didn’t disagree. It suggested a cold-blooded and self-possessed performance, not a crime of passion or a fight that just got out of hand.

  She straightened up. ‘Let’s take a look at Barlow’s study,’ she suggested.

  3

  In Leo Tillman’s dreams, his wife and kids were both alive and dead at the same time. Consequently, the dreams could pivot on almost nothing – some tiny detail that sparked the wrong association in his defenceless subconscious – and career off into nightmare. There were very few nights where he made it through all the way to morning. Very few dawns that didn’t find him already awake, sitting on the edge of his bed to disassemble and clean his Unica, or reading through online databases in the hope of a sighting.

  This morning, though, it wasn’t his bed. He was sitting on the seat of a complicated exercise machine in a stranger’s bedroom, watching the sun come up over Magas. And it wasn’t a gun in his hand, it was a printed A4 sheet with a couple of hundred words of slightly blurry copy. The Unica was tucked into his belt, with the safety on.

  A colossal picture window in front of him framed the presidential palace at the other end of a narrow avenue lined with wrought-iron fencing. It looked exactly how the White House would look if you dropped a mosque right in the middle of it and then walked away. Beyond that, Main Street, and beyond that – opening directly off the main drag – the Caucasus Highway. It was a joke to call Magas a town, in Tillman’s opinion, in the same way that it was a joke to call Ingushetia a country. No army. No infrastructure. Not even any people. The latest census gave the whole republic a smaller population than, say, Birmingham.

  People mattered to Tillman. He could hide in a crowd, and so could the man he was looking for. That made Magas both attractive and dangerous. If his quarry was here, which admittedly was a longshot, there weren’t very many places for him to go to ground. But the same thing would be true for Leo if things went bad.

  There was movement from the bed behind him: the faint, purposeless stirrings that come with waking up.

  Almost time to get to work.

  But he watched the sunrise for a few moments longer, caught – despite himself – in a waking dream. Rebecca was standing in the sun, like the angel from the Book of Revelation, and with her, cradled in her arms, Jud, Seth and Grace. All of them as they were on the last day he saw them: not aged, not touched by time. They were so real that they made Magas look like a cardboard cut-out of a town, a bad movie set.

  Tillman indulged these moments because they kept him alive, kept him moving. And at the same time he feared them because they softened him, made him weak. Love wasn’t part of his present, but it was real and vivid in his past, and the memories were like a sort of voodoo. They made dead ground inside him yawn and gape open, made parts of his own nature that were almost dead rise up. Most of the time, Tillman was as simple as a nail. Remembering made him complex, and contradictory.

  He heard a sigh and a fuzzy mumble from the bed. Then a more concerted movement. Reluctantly, Tillman closed his eyes. When he opened them again a few seconds later the sun was just the sun, not really capable any more of warming his world: just a spotlight, shining from a guard post in the sky.

  He got up and crossed to the bed. Kartoyev was fully awake now and was coming to terms with his situation. He strained against the ropes, but only once with each one, testing the tension. He wasn’t going to waste any energy in pointless struggle. He stared up at Tillman, his teeth bared as the muscles in his arms flexed.

  ‘Kto tyi, govn’uk?’ he demanded. His voice had a
gravelly burr to it.

  ‘English,’ Tillman told him, tersely. ‘And lie still. That’s a friendly warning.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Kartoyev glanced off towards the door, listening and calculating. No sound of approaching footsteps. No sound at all from the rest of the house. So had this intruder killed his bodyguards or just sidestepped them? It made a difference. Either way, his best option would be to play for time – but the amount of time would be different in each case.

  ‘Ya ne govoryu pa-Angliski, ti druchitel,’ he muttered. ‘Izvini.’

  ‘Well, that’s clearly not the case,’ Tillman said, mildly. ‘I heard you last night, talking to your girlfriend.’

  Belatedly, Kartoyev cast a glance to his left. He was alone in the massive bed. There was no sign of the redhead who’d shared it with him the night before.

  ‘She’s downstairs,’ Tillman said, reading the Russian’s expression. ‘Along with your muscle. No sense in making her go through all the unpleasantness that you and me are about to experience. No, she didn’t betray you. It was the booze that got you, not the girl.’ He reached into his pocket and brought out a small bottle, now mostly empty. It would look to the Russian like gloating, but in fact Tillman was just letting him see how deep Shit Creek was running. ‘One comma four,’ he said. ‘Butanediol. When it hits your stomach, it turns into GHB, the date-rape drug – but if you drink it along with alcohol, it takes its own sweet time to kick in. They’re both competing for the same digestive enzyme. So that’s why you slept so deeply. And why all your people are tied up in the bathroom right now like so many cords of wood.’

  ‘The boy from the bar,’ Kartoyev said, grimly, lapsing into English at last. ‘Jamaat. He’s dead. I know his name, his family, where he lives. He’s dead. I promise you.’

  Tillman shook his head. He didn’t bother to deny the young Chechen’s complicity: the booze was the only common factor and Kartoyev was no fool. ‘Too late for that,’ he told the Russian. ‘The kid’s long gone. I gave him a couple of million roubles out of your safe. Not a fortune, but enough to give him a start-up in Poland or the Czech Republic. Somewhere out of your reach.’

  ‘There is nowhere out of my reach,’ Kartoyev said. ‘I know all the flights out of Magas and I’ve got friends in the interior ministry. I’ll trace him and I’ll take him apart. I’ll take you both apart.’

  ‘Possibly. But maybe you’re overestimating your friends. Once the funeral’s over, they’ll probably be too concerned about carving up your little empire to worry much about who it was that took you out.’

  Kartoyev gave Tillman a long, hard stare, appraising him, taking his measure. Clearly he found something there that he took for weakness. ‘You’re not going to kill me, zhopa. You got that big pistol tucked into your belt, there, like a gangster, but you don’t have the stones. You look like you’re about to start crying like a little girl.’

  Tillman didn’t bother to argue. Maybe his eyes had watered a little when he stared into the sun, and the Russian was welcome to read into that whatever the hell he liked. ‘You’re right,’ Tillman said. ‘As far as the gun’s concerned anyway. It stays where it is, for now. Most of what I had in mind to do to you, it’s already done. Except I may untie you if you give me what I came here for.’

  ‘What?’ Kartoyev sneered. ‘You hot for me, American? You want to suck my cock?’

  ‘I’m British, Yanush. And I’ll pass, thanks.’

  Kartoyev tensed at the use of his given name and strained against the ropes again. ‘You are going to bleed, asshole. You better kill me. You better make sure you kill me because if I get my hands around your—’

  He broke off abruptly. Even over his rant, the click had been clearly audible. It had come from the bed, from directly underneath him.

  ‘I told you to lie still,’ Tillman said. ‘What, you didn’t feel that bulge under the small of your back? But you feel it now, obviously. And maybe you know what it is, since it’s in your catalogue. In the special offer section.’

  Kartoyev’s eyes widened and he froze into sudden, complete stillness.

  ‘There you go,’ Tillman said, encouragingly. ‘You got it in one.’

  Kartoyev swore long and loud, but he was careful not to move.

  Tillman raised the sheet of paper he was holding and read aloud from it. ‘The SB-33 minimum metal anti-personnel mine is a sophisticated battlefield munition combining ease of use, flexibility of deployment and resistance to detection and disarming. Emplaced by hand or by the dedicated air-dispersal SY-AT system – page 92 – the mine’s irregular outline makes it hard to locate on most terrain, while its MM architecture (only seven grams of ferrous metal in the whole assembly) renders most conventional detection systems useless.’

  ‘Yob tvoyu mat!’ Kartoyev screamed. ‘You’re insane. You’ll die, too. We’ll both die!’

  Tillman shook his head solemnly. ‘You know, Yanush, I really don’t think so. It says here the blast is highly directional: straight up, to rip open the balls and maybe the guts of the poor bastard who steps on it. I’m probably okay standing way over here. But you stopped me before I got to the good part. The SB-33 has a double pressure plate. If you lean down on it hard the way you just did, it doesn’t detonate, it just locks. That’s so you can’t make it blow long-distance, with a mine-clearing charge. It’s the next move you make that’s going to unlock the plate and introduce you to a life lived like a football match – in two halves.’

  Kartoyev swore again, as vigorously as before, but the colour had drained out of his face. He knew this item of his inventory very well, and not just by reputation: during his army days, he had probably had plenty of opportunity to see what the SB-33’s maiming charge could do to a human body at point blank range. Probably he was weighing up in his mind the many different ways in which that shaped charge could mess him up, short of killing him. With the mine’s upper surface pressed right against his lower spine, it was virtually certain that it would kill him. But there were some truly sickening alternative scenarios.

  ‘So,’ Tillman continued, ‘I was looking for some information on one of your clients. Not a big account, but a regular one. And I know he’s been by to see you quite recently. But I don’t know which of your many products and services he was interested in. Or how to reach him myself. And I’m very keen to do that.’

  Kartoyev’s gaze flicked up, down, sidelong, then back to Tillman by the longest possible route. ‘What client?’ he asked. ‘Tell me his name.’ The Russian was too smart and too disciplined to let anything show in his face, but Tillman saw it all the same in those restless eyes – the visible sign of a complex calculation. You didn’t get to be as successful as this man was in so many different rackets – illegal arms sales, drugs, people trafficking, the buying and selling of political influence – by ratting out your customers. Everything he said would have to sound plausible and everything he said would have to be a lie. Small, inconsequential details would be closest to the truth, while key information about place and time and transactions would be lies on a spectacular and heroic scale. Kartoyev was building an inverted pyramid of falsehood in his mind.

  Tillman waved the question away brusquely. ‘Name’s slipped my mind,’ he said. ‘Don’t even worry about it. I need to get some coffee, and maybe a little breakfast. We’ll talk later.’

  Kartoyev’s eyes widened. ‘Wait—’ he began, but Tillman was already heading for the door. When he was halfway along the upper hallway, he heard the Russian say ‘Wait!’ again, in a slightly more urgent tone. He went on down the spiral staircase, treading heavily on the inlaid wooden steps so his footsteps resounded.

  He checked on the other captives before doing anything else. Kartoyev’s girlfriend and many bodyguards weren’t in the bathroom: it would have taken too long to drag them all from the various places in which they’d fallen into the drug sleep. Tillman had just tied and gagged them in situ or lugged them a little way and dumped them behind furniture if there was
any chance that they could be glimpsed from the building opposite. Most of them were groggily awake by now, so he went around with syringes of Etomidate, a dope-fiend Santa with gifts for all. He injected the drug into the men’s – and the woman’s – left or right cubital veins because their tightly bound arms made them stand out like ropes. Soon enough they were all sleeping again, more profoundly than before.

  When it came to killing, Tillman was precise and professional, and his choice of drugs reflected this. The difference between an effective dose of Etomidate and a lethal one was about thirty to one for a healthy adult. These people would wake up sicker than parrots and weaker than puppies, but they’d wake up.

  With that business concluded, Tillman went and sat by the window for a while, watching the street. The house was set back in its own grounds, the gates high and the walls topped with razor wire. To discourage uninvited guests no doubt. But he didn’t want to be surprised by an invited one, or a colleague or acquaintance coming around to find out why Kartoyev hadn’t shown up at some appointment or other. Once that happened, the house, the city and the entire Republic of Ingushetia would quickly become an escape-proof trap for Tillman. He had every reason to act fast.

  But he had even better reasons to wait, so that was what he did. And because he was too tense to eat or drink, to read or to rest, he waited in stillness, staring out of the window into the bull grass and the monkey puzzle trees.

  Tillman had been a mercenary for nine years. He’d never done interrogation work – he had no particular taste for it, and in his experience the men who specialised in it were profoundly damaged – but he’d seen it done and he knew the big secret, which was to make the subject do most of the heavy lifting for you. Kartoyev was a tough bastard, who’d clawed his way to his current position of eminence using the balls and throats of lesser mortals as handholds. But now he was lying on top of a contact mine, and his imagination would be feeding on itself in ferocious, toxic fast-forward. When a strong man is helpless, strength becomes weakness.