The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Still, it was a blind alley. That should have been the end as well as the beginning of Tillman’s quest. He had a name, but nothing to attach to the name. He had the fact of a meeting, but no hypothesis that made sense of the meeting. He should have given up.

  Thirteen years later, he had not given up. He had emerged from the red spatter of the world’s battlefields, a man given over to violence and death, to resume with unexpected vigour a search that it now appeared he had never really abandoned. He was looking for his wife, who after so long an absence might not even be alive; for his children, who he would not even know if he saw them. He was trying to rebuild by force of will the one moment of real joy his life had ever harboured.

  It was of the utmost importance to Kuutma, and to the people who employed and put their trust in him, that Tillman should fail. It was also, in a different sense, important to the fates of twenty million others.

  Because if Tillman even got close to the truth, that was the number of people who would die.

  11

  The bursar wasn’t available when Kennedy got to Prince Regent’s. In fact, nobody was. The history annexe seemed to be deserted except for a sad-looking man at the front desk, framed against the backdrop of the bulletin board with its endless vista of the gigs of yesteryear: the Dresden Dolls, Tunng, the Earlies. She asked if the receptionist could open the room up for her himself: that was outside his brief. And nobody else was available on-site? Nobody. What about in the main building? The main building was outside his brief.

  She flashed her ID. ‘Get someone over here now,’ she told him, grimly. ‘I’m not asking for an extension on my homework, I’m investigating a death.’

  The sad man grabbed the phone and spoke into it with a certain urgency. A couple of minutes later, Ellis bustled through the door, annoyed and flustered. ‘Inspector Kennedy,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’ His expression said a lot more, none of it complimentary.

  ‘I’d like to take another look at Professor Barlow’s office, Mr Ellis. Would that be possible?’

  ‘Now?’ The bursar’s lack of enthusiasm was palpable.

  ‘Ideally, yes. Now.’

  ‘It’s just that there’s a degree ceremony tomorrow and a lot to do if we’re to be ready. It would be much more convenient if you could wait until next week.’

  She didn’t bother to repeat the speech about investigating a death. ‘I’m happy to just sign out the key and find my own way,’ she told him. ‘I know you’re a busy man. But of course, if it’s too late now, I can come back tomorrow morning.’ During your damned degree ceremony.

  The bursar caved with alacrity. He had the sad man on reception bring the cleaner’s sub-master key from a locked cabinet on the wall behind him. ‘This will open all the doors in that corridor,’ Ellis told her. ‘But obviously I’ll need to be told if you intend to go into any other rooms. There are privacy implications.’

  ‘I’m only interested in that one room,’ said Kennedy. ‘Thank you.’

  Ellis turned away, but Kennedy detained him with a touch on his arm. He turned back, wearing an aggrieved expression.

  ‘Mr Ellis, there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about before you go. Professor Barlow was a member of an online group or society of some kind. The Ravellers. Do you know anything about that?’

  ‘A little,’ Ellis admitted, grudgingly. ‘Not my field, as I said before, but yes. I know what they do.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘They translate documents. Very old, very difficult documents. Badly preserved codices, decontextualised fragments, that sort of thing. Some of them, like Stuart, are professionals in the field, but I think a lot of people in the group are just interested hobbyists. It’s a place where they exchange ideas, suggest hypotheses and get feedback. Stuart used to joke that when the CIA found out how good the Ravellers were, they’d either recruit them all or have them assassinated.’

  Kennedy didn’t get the joke. In answer to her blank expression, Ellis elaborated. ‘Code-breaking, you see. Some of the early codices are so badly damaged, you’re trying to make out the whole message from about a third of the characters. You have to use X-rays, fibre analysis, all sorts of things, to guess at what’s missing.’

  ‘Where does the name come from?’ Kennedy asked. ‘The Ravellers?’

  It was Ellis’s turn to look blank now. ‘I have no idea. Ravel isn’t actually a verb, is it? Just a back formation from “unravel”. To knit things together? To combine small pieces into bigger meanings? Or perhaps it’s a technical term. I really couldn’t say.’

  ‘Do you know who any of the other members of the group are or how I could contact them?’

  The bursar’s interest, not huge to start with, was visibly waning. ‘You’d have to get in touch with whoever runs the forum, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it would be too hard.’ Another thought struck him and he raised his eyebrows. ‘Of course, that’s assuming the server and the moderators are based here in the UK,’ he mused. ‘It might be harder if they were in the United States, say, or somewhere in Europe. There’d be jurisdictional problems, wouldn’t there?’

  ‘Possibly. Thank you, Mr Ellis, you’ve been a great help.’

  She took the key and headed for the stairs. Behind her, she heard the sad man’s woes being added to in low but ferocious tones. Clearly, the bursar felt that this could have been handled without his personal intervention.

  Barlow’s study was exactly as she remembered it, except that it was later in the day and the sunlight was shining through the slatted blinds at a shallower angle. She stood in the doorway, trying to recall what it was she’d seen earlier, what had stood out from its surroundings enough to register on her subconscious. It was a line, she decided, a line out of place, and lower than her eye level. It didn’t seem to be there now, but maybe that was because of the changed light.

  She picked up the framed newspaper article in both hands, glazed side facing outwards. Catching the light from the window, she reflected it round the room, a moving spotlight that stood in for the sunlight of that morning.

  It took a while, but she got there in the end. One of the floor tiles was standing proud of its neighbours, creating a shadow along its trailing edge. As though it had been lifted and put back, but hadn’t settled into exactly the same position as before.

  Kennedy knelt down. Sliding her fingernails under the edge of the tile, she lifted it gently. Underneath, lying unprotected on the dusty floorboards, was a rectangle of slightly glossy card. At the top the single word: Here? Blue biro, scrawled, double underlined. And then at lower right corner, several sets of characters written more neatly and carefully in black fineliner.

  P52

  P75

  NH II-1, III-1, IV-1

  Eg2

  B66, 75

  C45

  Turning the card over, she saw that it was a photograph.

  It showed a building, from a distance: a factory, or more likely a massive warehouse of some kind. A grey-painted concrete wall reared up six storeys or more from the cracked asphalt of a weed-choked parking lot. A few small windows near the top, but otherwise an unbroken surface. A small strip of road visible at one corner of the photo. A chainlink fence that looked reasonably intact, but plenty of evidence of ruin elsewhere: the garbage piled up against the fence, the weeds squeezing up between the paving slabs, and at one edge of the photo the abandoned hulk of a car, its tyreless wheels up on bricks. The whole image was blurred and the angle was a little off: a picture taken very sloppily, or maybe very quickly, by someone in a car or a train. It looked like the test photo you’d take to bring the counter on your camera from zero to one at the start of a new reel of film. But who used film these days?

  Kennedy flipped the card again to look at the figures on the back. A code of some kind? It couldn’t be a very long message, if so. Unless the figures referred to passages in a book, a prearranged code key, something like that. Or maybe they made up a combination
for a digital lock or a password to unlock a file. She had no way of knowing without some other clue to point her in the right direction.

  She tagged and bagged the photo, and scribbled a brief note to herself in her evidence pad about where she’d found it. Then she lifted up the adjacent tiles to make sure she wasn’t missing an obvious trick. Nothing there.

  She hadn’t intended to do a thorough search of the room, only to scratch an itch, but all the same she found herself checking out other likely hiding places: behind the pictures on the walls, the backs of desk drawers, the undersides of furniture. Nothing else appeared, and the sheer volume of papers and books defeated her. Someone needed to look at this stuff with an informed eye, and the someone wasn’t her.

  Her inner paranoiac was now fully awake, though, and in light of the intruder at the Barlows’ cottage, Kennedy thought to check the door this time. The lock was a standard five-pin, built into the doorknob. There were light scratch marks around the keyhole, and way too much play in the lock itself. Someone had picked it part-way with a tension tool and then turned the whole cylinder with a plug-spinner to make it open.

  There was an upside and a downside to that. On the one hand, whoever had broken in here hadn’t found the hidden photo.

  On the other, there was no telling what they had taken.

  12

  Chris Harper hated routine and repetitive tasks, and hated even more that he was good at them. Once he’d made initial calls to everyone on the London History Forum list, without turning up another corpse, he got on to the other two items on Kennedy’s things-to-do list.

  Michael Brand was no longer staying at the Pride Court, the desk clerk regretted to inform him. Brand had left several weeks ago, checking out on the thirtieth of June. Three days after Barlow and Hurt had died, two days after Devani. Barlow’s sister had been right, then: Brand was in London through that whole time, while his fellow Ravellers were dying in colourful and ambiguous ways up and down the country. Then he’d waited a few days before shooting off to pastures new. Maybe he’d come to warn Barlow; or to bring him something, or take something from him. Maybe he knew the killer. Maybe he was the killer. Somehow, none of those hypotheses quite fitted with him hanging around in a cheap London hotel for two days after the shit hit the fan.

  ‘Did he leave a home address on file?’ Harper asked. The clerk became coy, but only until Harper mentioned an ongoing investigation. Then he volunteered without demur an address in Gijon, Spain, and a phone number to go with it.

  Harper thanked him, hung up and dialled the number. He got the one-note whine that means no connection has been established, then a click and an irritatingly patrician voice cut in: ‘Sorry. Your number has not been recognised. Sorry. Your number has not—’

  Harper hit the Spanish electoral rolls via the Interpol database and entered the Gijon address: 12, Campo del Jardin. The three names attached to it were Jorge Ignacio Argiz, Rosa Isabella Argiz and Marta Pacheco. No Michael Brand, and the phone number listed was different from the one that Brand had given. Harper called it, got Jorge Argiz on the first try. Did Jorge know a Michael Brand? Jorge’s English was good enough to assure the detective that he did not.

  Harper put Brand to one side and started to zero in on the Ravellers.

  The very first thing an internet search turned up was their online forum, Ravellers.org, whose respectable and glossy front page hid hundreds of pages of gibberish about variant readings and disputed identifications. Readings and identifications of what? There didn’t seem to be any way of telling. Threads on the forum typically had titles such as ‘Pigment spread link variant 1-100, NH papyri 2.2.1 – 3.4.6’, ‘PH 1071 imaged in infra-red spectrum – using 1000nm filter!’ and ‘Challenged zayin in DSS 9P1, line 14, position 12’. Harper might as well have been reading Sanskrit. Some of the posts certainly contained Sanskrit, and weren’t even apologetic about it.

  There was a CONTACT US option on the menu bar, but the email address it linked to was in the defunct Freeserve domain, which probably meant that it hadn’t been changed in years and no longer led to an active server. Harper sent a message anyway, but didn’t trust it to get to anyone – and he couldn’t post anything on the forum without joining the group, which seemed like a long way to go about things.

  He went back to the search results and refined the parameters, searching for the intersection of ‘Ravellers’ with ‘Barlow’. The first couple of items were obviously bot-based catch-alls. Read Ravellers Barlow stories and see Ravellers Barlow photos and videos! The third, though, was a short post on a different message board, announcing an award given to a Dr Sarah Opie for services to scholarship. Among the many follow-on posts on the thread was one from Stuart Barlow that read, ‘Well deserved, Sarah!’ The post was about eighteen months old. The item had come up in Harper’s list because Dr Opie had listed membership of the Ravellers among her interests and credits – and she was on staff at the University of Bedfordshire, not in their history faculty (which didn’t seem to exist) but in the school of computer science and technology.

  Harper dialled the university’s switchboard and asked to speak to Dr Opie. When the receptionist asked him to leave a message, he identified himself and explained that this was in connection with a murder inquiry. One short flurry later, he was talking to Dr Opie herself.

  ‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ he started off, ‘but I’m part of the team investigating the death of Professor Stuart Barlow. I understand that you belong to an organisation of which he was also a member. An organisation called the Ravellers.’

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Harper was about to speak again when Dr Opie finally answered him – with a question. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice, which sounded younger than he’d expected, was also brittle with strain and distrust.

  He’d already told her, but he said it again. ‘My name is Christopher Harper. I’m a detective constable with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency of the London Metropolitan—’

  ‘How do I know that?’ She shot the question in before he’d even finished with the formalities.

  ‘You hang up and check,’ Harper suggested. Given the mounting body count, her paranoia seemed reasonable. ‘Call New Scotland Yard, ask for Ops, and then for Detective Division. Use my name, and say I asked you to call. I’ll still be here, and we can talk.’

  He was expecting the line to go dead, but it didn’t. He could hear the distant half-noises that go with someone moving, breathing, just being there.

  ‘You said this is about Stuart.’

  ‘Well, not just that. A couple of other things, too.’

  ‘What things?’

  Harper hesitated. I’m building a list of dead historians. Do you know any? That sounded like a loaded question, even inside his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘why don’t you hang up and call me back? I think you’ll feel better talking about this if you know it’s not a crank call.’

  ‘I want to know what this is about,’ the voice on the other end of the line said, the tension screwed up by half a notch or so.

  Harper took a deep breath. Back when he wore uniform, which was right up until a year ago, he’d envied the detectives their cachet, the easy and natural authority they wore. But maybe it was a trick you had to learn. ‘It’s about a pattern of suspicious deaths,’ he said, and then added the lame amendment, ‘Potentially. Potentially suspicious.’

  He heard a sound like a hollow knock – as though the phone had fallen out of her hand and hit the floor, or bumped into something as she turned.

  ‘Hello?’ Harper said. ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘What deaths? Tell me. What deaths?’

  ‘Stuart Barlow. Catherine Hurt. Samir Devani.’

  Opie let out a disconcerting moan.

  ‘Oh God. They weren’t … they weren’t accidents?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Harper. ‘You knew them all? Dr Opie, this is important. How did you know them?’

  The only answer was the click an
d burr of the phone being hung up. He waited, irresolute, for a minute and a half. If he called her switchboard again, his phone would be tied up while they patched the call through to her faculty building, and then to her extension. If she was calling him back, rather than just ending the call, he’d be shutting her out.

  Just as he gave up and reached for the phone, it rang. He picked up. ‘External call for you,’ the comms clerk said. ‘A Dr Opie.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Harper. ‘Put her through.’

  The noise of the despatch room gave way to the silence of another space.

  ‘Dr Opie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you know those three people?’

  He knew what the answer would be, which went some way to explain the prickle of déjà vu he felt as she said it. ‘They were Ravellers. They were all in the group. And …’

  He waited. Nothing came. ‘And?’

  ‘They were working on the same translation.’

  13

  Tillman surfaced in Calais, where he booked a passage on a cross-Channel ferry to Dover. But of course, he would: the shortest sea route, the smallest window within which he would be enclosed and vulnerable. Still, Kuutma didn’t take anything for granted. He kept his anchors in place all along the northern coastline, and his mole in the offices of the SNCF on full alert, until he had visual confirmation of Tillman boarding the ferry.

  Even then Kuutma moved methodically and meticulously. It was the last sailing of the day, leaving harbour at 11.40 p.m., but the Calais ferry terminal was still crowded. The Messengers – three of them again, as in Bucharest and Paris – boarded last and remained near the exits, which they watched until the bow doors closed and the vessel began to back out of its berth.