The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Kuutma stood at the quayside, watching. Would Tillman appear on deck at the last moment, claiming he’d left something behind and had to disembark after all? Was this to be another double or triple bluff?

  It seemed not. No last-minute alarums came, no diversionary scuffles or panics, no false starts. The ferry left without incident, with Tillman on board. Tillman, and the three who were to kill him. Kuutma made the sign of the noose as it departed, calling for the hanged man’s blessing on his Messengers.

  Belatedly but fervently, he yearned to be with them. Again, he found himself thinking unprofitable thoughts. Picking apart his own thought processes, fruitlessly and even dangerously. It did not do to be divided from oneself in this way. He was prepared to admit, now that it was all but done, that he hated Tillman and had waited too long to move against the mercenary because he doubted the purity of his own motives. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  There was nobody left to make it for.

  Tillman watched the coast of France recede, with mixed feelings.

  Kartoyev had confirmed a lot he already knew, had provided a few new clues and crucially had given him a fix on his next destination. He sensed for the first time that he was closing in on Michael Brand. That where he’d once chased a name, and then a phantom, now he was in pursuit of a man, who could almost be glimpsed running ahead of him.

  On the other hand, he had fresh anomalies to consider. The drugs, for one. He’d never found a link before now between Brand and the drugs trade. He’d run covert ops in Colombia, and he was aware, in a general way, of how that trade was plied. Brand’s movements across the globe were not the movements of a salesman or a purchaser. An enforcer, possibly, but what was he enforcing? And why, if he was in the drugs business, would he travel so far to source ingredients that were readily available in most countries? The former Soviet Union was not Brand’s base, Tillman felt sure of that. His stays there were too short and too narrowly focused on a few specific contacts.

  A smokescreen, then. Brand bought his chemicals in Ingushetia because he didn’t want to leave a trail that led any closer to his real base of operations. And he refused Kartoyev’s offer of refined methamphetamine, presumably because he wanted to mix his own. And he was about to mix a batch that was larger by factors of ten than his usual batch.

  File that one for future thought. Tillman had more urgent things to think about right now.

  In his journey westwards across Europe, he had become aware as never before that he was hunted as well as hunter. In Bucharest it had been pure luck that delivered him. Walking in Mătăsari, a place where everyone keeps one eye over their shoulder, he’d read from the reaction of a man he passed in the street that he might be being followed. He didn’t look back, but tested the theory by walking through a crowded street market, where his tailgunners had closed in out of sheer necessity. He’d tacked from stall to stall in random patterns, memorising the faces around him, and after half an hour had isolated one as a definite tail, another two as probable. Once he knew he was marked, it had simply been a case of choosing the best moment to shake them off. But he had no clue as to who they were or what they wanted.

  In Paris he was ready for them. Expecting to be found, hair-trigger for any whiff of pursuit or surveillance, he was able to turn the tables on his shadowy followers and tail one of them back to base. But he had little to show for it. The house they’d been using out on the Périphérique had been unfurnished, apart from three bed rolls lying side by side on a bare wooden floor. These men were ascetics, clearly. Like the early Christian saints who spent years in the wilderness, mortifying their flesh. It troubled Tillman to think that the people chasing him were capable of such humourless and stern dedication. It troubled him, even, to find that they were so many. He had no idea why an organisation of this size and this degree of organisation would kidnap women and children from London streets.

  But perhaps chasing was too strong a term. It was possible that they only wanted to see how far Tillman had got. Whether he was moving in the right direction at last, or still going round in circles. He wished, now that it was too late, that he’d gone on through Belgium and the Netherlands, tried harder to make a false trail. But at the end of the day, there were only so many ways to get to Britain from mainland Europe, if you didn’t want to take a plane. With even moderate resources, it was possible to keep watch on all of them.

  And he had to go to Britain. He’d stayed in Paris long enough to contact some former friends and acquaintances in the private security business. Many of them were still active in that amphibian, quasi-legal world, and they had been able to give him some very interesting and very current nuggets of information about Michael Brand. For thirteen years the bastard had stayed below the water line. Now he’d breached, and Tillman had to be there. There just wasn’t any other option.

  Tillman turned from the rail and made his way through the light sprinkling of passengers on the deck towards the double doors that led back inside. As he did so, he checked his watch. It was only a ninety-minute crossing, and he noted with approval that twenty of those minutes had already gone.

  In the lounge area it was much more crowded. Families sat in inward-looking groups, their territory marked with handbags and rucksacks. They mostly looked either grim or tired, but happier families had been reproduced on the walls behind them in giant photographic prints, maintaining some kind of a karmic balance. In the absence of any free seats, people were sitting with their backs against a bulkhead, while others were propping up the bar that ran down the right-hand side of the room. A single barman stood serving draught Stella Artois from a single pump. The adjacent Guinness pump had been marked OUT OF ORDER. Further on, the bar gave way seamlessly to a food counter where people queued for baguettes and chips. The air smelled of stale beer and old frying fat.

  Tillman didn’t feel hungry, and preferred whisky to lager. He looked at the optics of Bell’s, Grant’s and Johnny Walker lined up behind the bar, all perfectly drinkable. But in the army he had only drunk when he wanted oblivion, and these days he didn’t often afford himself such a luxury. He felt tempted for a second or two, slowed his stride, then dismissed the idea and walked on. Later, when he got to London, he might find a bar and reacquaint himself with that momentary chemical caress. For now, he preferred to stay awake and alert.

  He was looking for a place to sit that fulfilled his usual criteria: a view of all exits, a wall at his back and something nearby like a wall or a counter that would block a sightline at need. In this crowded room, he knew that wouldn’t be possible. It was also, he was aware, faintly ridiculous to apply criteria like that in a setting where any attack would be hampered by the instant panic stampede it would trigger, and where the assassin would have no ready escape even if the attack succeeded. The people who had followed him in Bucharest and Paris had still done nothing to suggest they wanted to harm him. All they’d done, both times, was to tail him.

  So was this paranoia? The carrying of his usual caution over the edge of the abyss at last into mania and psychosis? Or had he responded to some cue he hadn’t even consciously processed? Normally he trusted his instincts, but he’d been pushing himself hard for a long time. He felt a weight of weariness fall on him, so abruptly it was like a physical thing. With it came a revulsion against the crush of humanity all around – the babble of voices sounding like an externalisation of some confusion or plurality in his own heart and soul.

  Tillman pushed on to the far end of the lounge and out into a much smaller lobby area with fruit machines on one side and toilets on the other. He dug into his holdall for one of the bags of loose currency he carried – one that held some euro coins. He found Mr Snow, the unicorn, and tucked the fluffy, vacant, sickly sweet thing into the pocket of his jeans by one front paw. It dangled there, an ineffectual mascot, as Tillman fed forty or fifty euros into the one-armed bandit. Pulling the levers and pressing the buttons at random ate away at the time without using up any of his attention, allowing
him to watch the flow of those who passed and those who loitered. They passed and loitered with perfect conviction. No anomalies, no warning bells. But then, there hadn’t been any in Bucharest, either. He wasn’t going to stay the distance if he underestimated his enemies.

  When Tillman finally ran out of coins, he checked his watch. They had to be already more than halfway over by this time. He went back into the lounge, stood in line and bought a coffee, but once again the noise and the claustrophobic press overwhelmed him. He walked out to the lobby before he’d taken more than two sips of the bland muck.

  Not that many places left to go. He decided to spend the last half-hour of the crossing on deck, but he felt the tiredness catching up on him. In the absence of caffeine, he could at least splash some cold water in his face. He went through the door bearing the stylised man whose arms were thrown out from his sides like those of a gunslinger walking into a duel.

  The restroom was a windowless twenty-by-twenty cube with urinals along one wall, sinks opposite, and three cubicles at the back. He stepped across a floor awash with water, which had slopped over from a sink that had been filled with toilet paper in lieu of a plug. A single flickering neon strip lit the depressing scene.

  He draped his jacket over a condom machine, dropping his holdall at his feet, and ran the cold tap for a long time before finally accepting that the water wouldn’t run cold. Tepid as it was, he splashed it on his face anyway, then hit the hand drier and lowered his head into its jet of air. The door at his back sighed as it opened, sighed again as it closed.

  When he straightened up, they were there. Two of them, side by side, already coming at him. Two suited men, startlingly handsome, clean cut and serious-looking. The kind who might knock on your door to ask if you’d found Jesus or whether they could count on your vote for the Conservative candidate. Tillman had time only to take in their uncanny synchronisation – something that had to be born out of endless drilling under the same trainer or commander. Then they raised their hands and the short blades they held flashed, one high one low, as they intersected the light from the neon strip overhead.

  Tillman hooked his jacket off the condom machine with his left hand and whirled it in the air in front of him, retreating into the ten feet of space that the room allowed him. Behind that moving screen he hooked the squat, heavy Mateba Unica from its customary resting place, tucked into the back of his belt, and in the same movement thumbed the safety.

  The two men seemed to anticipate him. Even as he brought the gun up, one of them half-turned away and kicked back against the turn: a perfect yoko geri. Tillman saw it coming, but the man moved so inhumanly fast that seeing it didn’t help him. The guy’s heel smacked into the inside of Tillman’s wrist before he could pull it away, knocking the gun from his grip. It clattered across the floor. Both knives came up in slashing feints, one aimed at Tillman’s heart and the other at his face. Caught out of position, he faked right and whipped the jacket down like a flail so that it wrapped around the wrist of the man on his left. The other man’s blade cut across his upper arm in a broad, deep slash, but he ignored the pain. Wrenching on the jacket brought the man within reach and Tillman headbutted him in the face, then – since he didn’t go down – circled behind him to use him as a shield and snatch a moment’s respite.

  Again the two men moved and reacted in frictionless unison. The one tangled up in the jacket dropped into a crouch and the other leaned over him, launching another slashing attack. Tillman bent backwards from the knees like a contestant in a limbo competition, just about staying out of the blade’s reach.

  The attacker jumped over his kneeling comrade and advanced again, the knife flicking back and forth at the level of Tillman’s stomach. Tillman instinctively lowered his hand to block a possible disembowelling thrust: the instinct almost killed him. The knife came up inside his guard, moving around his block as effortlessly as if it wasn’t there. Flinching aside, he felt as well as heard the air part as it passed by his face.

  The other man was back on his feet now, moving in behind the first, and things were likely to go from bad to worse. Tillman weighed the odds. Karate skills didn’t impress him overmuch: both men were slighter in build than him, and even the knives didn’t count for so very much in the restricted space of the restroom. What made the situation impossible was the two-for-one deal and the men’s appalling speed. All things being equal, he was probably going to be dead inside the next ten seconds.

  Tillman’s only hope was to change the odds. Reaching over his head, he drove his fist into the exact centre of the neon tube.

  In the absence of windows, the fluorescent strip was the only light in the room. As the glass crunched against Tillman’s bare knuckles, the restroom was plunged into absolute darkness.

  Tillman dropped to the ground and rolled. He groped for the gun, whose location he held in his memory. Nothing.

  The splash of feet in spilled water. Something moving to his right. He kicked, made contact, rolled again. This time his fingertips brushed the familiar cold metal of the Unica. He found the grip, raised it and came upright firing in a wide arc: once, twice, three times, spaced to quarter the room.

  It was a calculated risk. Firing blind revealed his location. In the perfect dark, nothing would be easier than throwing one of those wickedly sharp knives directly at the muzzle flash. But the Unica was loaded with .454 Casull, exceeding even the stopping power of the Magnum cartridge. Even if his attackers were both wearing Kevlar under those elegant suits, at this range it would make no difference. A single hit would take them out for the duration.

  With the gun at head height, moving in a figure of eight, Tillman backed toward the door. His near-photographic memory came to his aid again, and after only three steps he felt the blunt bar of the door handle prodding the small of his back.

  Another movement, this time to his left. Tillman fired in that direction – leaving a single bullet in the Unica’s cylinder – and kicked the door open behind him. A wedge of light invaded the room, as did the incongruous tinkling conversation of the fruit machines in the alcove opposite. Both men had been advancing on Tillman in the dark. One was clutching his arm, indicating a glancing impact from that last bullet. The other threw himself on Tillman, jabbing the knife at him in a straight stab.

  Without that fortuitous light, Tillman would have taken the thrust full in the throat. Forewarned at the last moment, his krav maga training, acquired in his mercenary days from a wily old bastard named Vincent Less, kicked in automatically. As the two of them fell out into the corridor, he used his right hand, still gripping the gun, to turn the blow aside, then caught the man’s wrist with his free hand and twisted so that he dropped the knife. Bringing his gun hand back inside the man’s guard, he clubbed him in the face with the butt of the Unica to complete the move. He staggered free as the man fell, then he clambered to his feet, turned and ran. One of his opponents was down, the other at least hurt, but he had only the one round left – and win or lose, he couldn’t afford to stay for any kind of official investigation.

  Tillman headed away from the lounge. He figured the shots must have been heard and the panicked crowd there would probably be impassable. Slowing to a quick walk, he turned the first bend in the corridor and immediately hit another crowd surging out of the duty-free shop. Clearly the sound of the ruckus had penetrated there, too, but it didn’t look like anyone knew where the shots had come from. Nobody had quite made their mind up which way to run. Tillman pushed his way through the skittish mob as quickly as he could. Right now, the biggest danger to them was proximity to him.

  He found a stairway, went up it and came out on to the deserted upper deck. Immediately a woman came out through another door at the deck’s further end. She stopped when she saw him and stared at him in something that might have been perplexity or concern.

  ‘Go back inside!’ he called out to her. He went to the rail and looked out. Still a fair few miles from the Dover shore, but the ship had become non-viable s
o he really had no other choice. If he stayed here, he’d be questioned, and if he was questioned, he’d be arrested – for the unlicensed firearm, if nothing else.

  He’d left most of the documentation he had with him in the jacket, which was back in the restroom. That meant trouble, too, since he was travelling under his own name this time. But it was trouble that could be postponed. He slipped his shoes off and kicked them away.

  The pain that flared in his side took him completely by surprise. A blunt concussion that flowered suddenly into a chrysanthemum burst of pure agony. Turning, he saw the woman walking towards him, drawing a second knife from her hip and balancing it in her hand. The hilt of her first weapon now protruded from his thigh, where it had buried itself all the way to the guard.

  The woman was beautiful, and very similar in features to the men in the washroom: pale-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with a solemnity in her face like the solemnity of a child in a classroom told to stand up and recite.

  There was nothing he could do to prevent the second throw. She had already drawn her hand back, and as he raised the gun he knew he couldn’t aim and fire in the time he had. He tracked her arm anyway and squeezed the trigger as she let go. The knife was invisibly fast except for the small part of its trajectory where the light from a security lamp lit it up in incongruous gold.

  His bullet hit the blade and sent it whispering away over his head. It was much more luck than judgement, and Tillman knew he couldn’t do it again in a million years, even if his gun hadn’t been empty.

  He vaulted on to the rail and jumped. A third knife flew over his shoulder, very close, and accompanied him on his wild, parabolic leap. The main deck at this point jutted twelve feet further out than the upper one. The knife made the distance comfortably, Tillman by inches.

  The cold water closed over him, and he kept on falling, through a denser, colder and altogether more hostile medium. Thirty feet down he slowed, stopped, began to rise again.