The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Occulted light warned Kennedy and made her flick her gaze upwards. The man with the gun loomed over her, then drew back his foot and kicked her hard in the chest. Pain expanded from a point in the middle of her ribcage like a synaesthetic fire-work. The kick lifted her and dropped her down again. She had no breath left, her flickering awareness rebuilt around the astonishing pain as though around a bulky, solid object.

  With unhurried but precise movements, the murderer – the assassin, because that was what he was – helped his fallen colleague to his feet. The two stepped over Kennedy, out of her line of sight, and she heard their steps receding. Or perhaps she only felt the vibrations through her cheek as she lay on her side on the floor. The screaming had resumed with full vigour and volume, so it was hard for any other sound to get a purchase on the saturated air. And maybe, if she ever managed to suck in another breath around the bolus of agony in her chest, she’d add her own voice to the chorus.

  She rolled over on to her back and then – laboriously, fighting nausea and the numb buoyancy of encroaching unconsciousness – struggled to her feet. She was taking oxygen in tiny sips and it hurt like swallowing half-chewed barbed wire.

  A few students hadn’t been quick enough to get to the door and so had just pressed themselves into the corners of the room in terror as the hideous pantomime unfolded. ‘Call the police,’ Kennedy told them. The words came out wrong, or maybe it was just that she was hearing them wrong. Her tongue felt too big for her mouth, and her body swayed as though it couldn’t find the vertical.

  She set off at a run anyway. The killers would be heading for the van. There was still time to stop them, or at least to get the goddamned licence plate.

  She almost fell on the stairs, moving too quickly to keep her balance. Her balance was gone, in any case. Time was moving in a pizzicato rhythm, moments pinched out on taut strings to the irregular beat of her pulse. Blood soaked her sleeve, so dark it was more black than red. In the foyer, students stepped back in alarm from this drunken madwoman with a bloodied, swollen face. Kennedy hit the double doors, wrestled with them, staggered through into daylight.

  She saw the van immediately. It was a few feet taller than the compact cars that filled every other space in the lot. She saw one of the men climbing into the driver’s seat. The other had opened the door on the passenger side, about to get in, but had turned to look at a security guard who, Kennedy guessed, had offered him some challenge. The man’s hand moved to his jacket. The guard was angry-faced, overweight, oblivious and about to die.

  ‘Police!’ Kennedy yelled. Or something that shared vowel sounds with that word. ‘You’re under arrest!’

  The assassin turned to glance at her as she walked out on to the asphalt, among the parked cars, into a narrow avenue that contained nothing else but her and him. He stared at Kennedy, momentarily inactive as though he required a context in which to understand her, the guard temporarily forgotten, which was something at least. Kennedy strode towards him and he completed the movement he’d already begun, reaching into his jacket to remove what was ready to hand there. But it wasn’t the gun, which was what she’d been expecting. It was the knife. Incongruous relief flooded her. The knife might kill her, but it wouldn’t annul her the way a cross annuls a vampire. It didn’t even look particularly formidable, though she knew by now what it could do. It had a bizarre, asymmetrical shape, bulging out at one side. She kept on walking, as the security guard backed off with a muttered ‘Oh shit.’

  The assassin’s arm unfolded, the movement abstract and perfect, the knife aligning precisely with her gaze, so that its slender blade became invisible.

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ Kennedy said again, with a fair bit more conviction this time even though it was getting harder to talk. ‘And you will lower that weapon or I swear to God I will take it away from you and peel you like a piece of fruit.’

  ‘Da b’koshta,’ the man said. The exact same sequence of sounds he’d made inside the lab. He drew his arm back and Kennedy tensed like a goalkeeper facing a penalty kick, already deciding which way to jump. If he missed her, she’d have a window of a second or so and she meant to use it.

  There was a crisp, hollow boom that seemed to come from all directions at once and the knife exploded in the assassin’s hand like a steel firework. But he didn’t cry out: didn’t make a sound, in fact. He pressed his hand to his chest, the fingers curled strangely, and turned to gaze off to Kennedy’s left. The second shot thudded into his chest, visible because his light-coloured jacket developed suddenly a poppy-bright circle of red.

  The shooter came into sight now, from the direction of the gates, running and firing at the same time. A bullet shattered one of the rear windows of the van, another hit nothing that Kennedy could see.

  The assassin moved, diving – or maybe it was falling – into the vehicle through the already open passenger door. The engine snarled, sputtered, snarled.

  The newcomer – a big man, bigger and more solid even than the heavier of the two killers – was a scant few feet away from the van when it slammed into reverse, forcing him to jump aside. It shot across the narrow aisle, punched into the back of another parked car, then veered around in a wide, drunken arc towards the gate.

  The newcomer took careful aim and squeezed off two more shots. The first went nowhere. The second blew off one end of the Bedford’s rear bumper but missed the tyre. The van crashed through the closed barrier – the attendant at the gate ducking and flinching as jagged fragments spun end-over-end through the air – and was gone. The shooter lowered the gun, which looked like some outlandish kind of revolver, and turned to Kennedy.

  Sandy-haired and rough-hewn, well over six feet tall, with big shoulders and ham-like hands, the man was built for bar fights and hard labour. He was hard to reconcile with that pinpoint shooting. There was something in his face, though: a grim stoicism that seemed to look inward as well as out, as though the man’s physical body was a stopper in the wall of an interior dam. Kennedy could imagine brave men flinching from that stare.

  But the man’s washed-out blue eyes weren’t looking into Kennedy’s. He was focused on her wound, which he indicated with a brusque nod of the head.

  ‘Get it looked at quick,’ he said. The voice, a soft burr, didn’t go with the hatchet hardness of the face. ‘Really. Right now.’

  And then he took off after the van. The security guard at the gate screwed his courage up and stepped into the man’s path, but stepped right back out of it again when he didn’t slow. Another instant and the shooter was gone, too. As though the whole thing had been a hallucination. As though she were asleep and dreaming this somewhere, maybe as she sat outside Summerhill’s office with Harper whistling tunelessly at her side.

  Harper.

  She staggered back inside and up the stairs. The stairwell and the corridor were full of milling people, most of whom got out of her way quickly when they saw the blood. She still had her badge in her hand and she flashed it whenever necessary to avoid having to speak. Her ears were full of a sickening, monotone hum like the sound you get when you bring a microphone too close to its own loudspeaker.

  The crowd was thickest right outside the IT lab, mostly students who’d fled from the violence, now creeping back to peer at the aftermath. But she saw a fair few men in suits who had added themselves to the fringes and were vainly trying to restore calm by requesting it at high volume. Kennedy grabbed one of these and shouted into his face: ‘Dial 999. Get an ambulance. Get the police, and an ambulance.’ The man, who was bald and florid, stared stupidly at her bruised face, at her badge, at her face again, until she sent him on his way with a push. Her voice had thickened even more, her jaw grating agonisingly with each word, but only a congenital idiot would have failed to get the message from her tone.

  Harper lay where he’d fallen, and he looked to be in a bad way. He was barely conscious, clutching his stomach from which blood welled and flowed in unfeasible amounts.

  Kennedy knelt bes
ide him, then slumped into a sitting position, resting her back against a fallen desk, as the last of her strength drained away. Harper turned his head to stare at her speechlessly.

  ‘Hang in there, Harper,’ she said. It was just a slurry of sound.

  Faced with that inarticulacy, Kennedy did something that amazed her even in the midst of so much else that was amazing. She raised Harper’s head, awkwardly but carefully, and cradled it in her lap, stroking his hair and his white, sweat-slick forehead until his eyes finally closed.

  They told her later that it shouldn’t have been a life-threatening wound. Deep as it was, it had missed all the major organs and – by a scant half-inch – the celiac artery. Harper might have been at risk, later, of peritonitis, as with any wound to the body cavity, but with immediate abdominal surgery and broad-spectrum antibiotics he ought to have made a full recovery.

  He died in her arms, his blood a never-ending fountain.

  PART TWO

  DOVECOTE

  22

  Six days passed in a fog.

  The wound to Kennedy’s shoulder had been mended with a great many stitches, but it seeped first blood and then clear fluid for the first three of those days. There was an anti-coagulant on the knife blade, the doctors told her. It was the only explanation. That was why Harper had died so quickly from a wound he ought to have survived. They hadn’t identified the substance so far, and therefore it was all but impossible to neutralise. All they could do was wait until it left her system, keeping her on a plasma drip and changing the dressings on the wound every few hours.

  The lower half of her face had puffed up and become swollen to the point where talking was impossible until the fourth day, but she found the grotesque, lopsided aspect it gave her a lot harder to bear than the pain, dulled as it was with morphine. Most of the damage had been done by that final kick, which had cracked two of her ribs. The doctors had taped them up, running the tape from her sternum all the way around to her spine. It felt like being in a corset that she couldn’t take off or loosen.

  Lying in the hospital bed, trying to think through the painkiller-fuzz, she brooded on the gaps in her memory – not of the fight, but of its aftermath. She remembered sitting with her back against the fallen desk, Harper’s head in her lap. His hand on the wound and her hand on his hand, pressing down, slowing the bleeding. They might have been that way for hours or only for a few minutes. The students had all fled, so the only company they’d had was Sarah Opie’s corpse, whose stare was not so much reproachful as incredulous.

  She remembered talking to Harper and him talking back. But when she thought about what he’d said, she realised it wasn’t even his voice but her father’s. What do you want to be a cop for? Haven’t we given enough?

  ‘What counts as enough, Dad?’ she muttered, her voice made unintelligible by her swollen jaw.

  Yeah, keep talking back to me, Heather. Make me come over there.

  Then there was another gap.

  And then someone was prising her hand from Harper’s stomach, where it was no longer needed, and she couldn’t unclench her fist because she had held it so tightly and for so long in the one position.

  ‘He’s a detective,’ she told the paramedics. ‘We’re both detectives.’ Her voice, forced out of the side of her mouth, sounded like the voice of a bellows, of Victor Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant. ‘Call it in.’

  ‘Can you stand?’ someone asked her. ‘Can you walk?’

  She must have done both. She remembered stepping into the ambulance, sitting upright on the gurney, staring at Harper’s body as they laid it down opposite her in an opaque, unlovely plastic envelope thirty-six inches wide by ninety long.

  Another gap. She was staring down into Harper’s face. Someone must have unzipped the body bag.

  A voice said, ‘Oh. Hey. You’re not supposed to.’

  Harper looked troubled, his eyes tight shut, his forehead creased, as if he were trying to remember something.

  She stroked his cheek. His skin was too cool, with a waxy unresponsiveness.

  I’m sorry, she told him, without speaking. I’m sorry, Chris.

  And then, although she had no idea whether or not it was true, I’ll get them.

  On the seventh day, God rested. Kennedy wasn’t God: she returned to her labours, and to the incident committee.

  It was chaired by DCI Summerhill, who wore the face of a hanging judge but kept the questions softball for the first half-hour or so as he took her through the contents of the case file. Once he’d established for the benefit of the HR officer, Brooks, and the IPCC observer, a hard-nosed old battle-axe named Anne Ladbroke, that this was a case potentially involving at least three homicides, he moved in – with clinical and detached animosity – for the kill.

  ‘Why did you and Constable Harper go into this without support?’ he asked. ‘It must have been apparent that Dr Opie was at risk.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Kennedy said. ‘It wasn’t apparent at all.’ Her jaw still ached when she spoke, but she had a lot to say and she wasn’t going to let that stop her. ‘The three people known to have died had all been directly involved in Stuart Barlow’s research project on the Rotgut Codex. Dr Opie had expressly denied any connection to that project. It was only in questioning her that we realised she was a member of Barlow’s team – something that she herself, as you’ve heard on the tape, continued to deny.’

  The room, basically a storeroom, was hot, without air conditioning. With every breath she was ingesting the sharp tang of toner cartridges. Talking about these things brought them back vividly, but with overlays of the time she’d spent remembering them in her hospital bed. After a while, all memories must metastasise in this way, until you were mainly recalling the emotions that accompanied each successive revisit and revision.

  ‘Only in questioning her …’ Summerhill mused. ‘Something that you could have done on the previous afternoon. Why did you wait?’

  Kennedy looked into his expressionless eyes. ‘For the same reason, sir,’ she said. ‘There seemed no reason to move quickly because Dr Opie had been identified as a useful witness, not as a potential victim. If she’d been more open with Constable Harper – if she’d told him that she was providing software and technical support for Barlow and his people – we would have come to a different conclusion and moved faster.’

  ‘So the fault lies partly with Constable Harper’s interview technique,’ Summerhill summarised, with envenomed casualness. ‘Still, as the case officer, you have to take some responsibility for that.’

  The IPCC woman scribbled a note to herself.

  Yeah, keep pushing me, you bastard. Back me into the corner and see where you get bitten.

  ‘I don’t accept that there were any shortcomings with Detective Harper’s questioning of Dr Opie,’ she said, and then after a slight pause, ‘sir. As you’re aware – as you were aware when you gave it to me – this case came down to Division as a mislabelled homicide. The investigation was reopened after the autopsy results failed to support the initial presumption of accidental death. Subsequently, we found evidence of a burglary and a stalking incident, both pertinent to the case. Both incidents had been reported, but neither had been attached to the case file. This accumulation of errors made it harder for us to identify a pattern in what we were seeing. In spite of this, Detective Harper succeeded in unearthing the other two suspicious deaths and in linking them to that of Professor Barlow. This in a single day. By any standards, his handling of the case was exemplary.’

  Summerhill made a show of examining the accumulated papers in front of him, then looked at her again. ‘Perhaps you just have lower standards than the rest of us, Sergeant.’

  ‘Perhaps so, sir,’ Kennedy answered, without inflection.

  ‘At Park Square,’ Summerhill said, returning to his perusal of the documents, ‘you ascertained that Dr Opie was a potential victim, but still failed to call for back-up.’

  ‘We decided to bring her in ourselves. We con
sidered that time was of the essence.’

  ‘And that therefore, standard operating protocols were negotiable.’

  Kennedy thought before replying. ‘Your earlier questions were about unreasonable delay, sir,’ she said, meeting Summerhill’s gaze. ‘Are you now saying that in bringing Dr Opie into protective custody, I didn’t delay long enough? If so, please remember that her murderers were already in the building. Backup couldn’t have reached us before they did unless it teleported. We thought we were short on time, and my God, we were right.’

  ‘You could have remained in Dr Opie’s office,’ Brooks mused. ‘With the door locked.’

  ‘With the door locked?’ Kennedy echoed, deadpan.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The walls were made of glass, and the killers had guns.’ Have you even read the file, you pole-climbing bitch?

  ‘Still,’ Summerhill broke in, briskly, ‘we can safely assume there were other offices in that building whose walls were more solid. Hindsight is always perfect, Sergeant Kennedy, but we’re talking about your decision-making – which, ultimately, led to a situation where a fellow officer and a civilian informant both died.’

  There was a heavy silence. Kennedy waited it out. Summerhill seemed to have run out of inspiration now, and Kennedy read that as a bad sign. It showed just how thin a veneer he was painting over his desire to be rid of her.

  Brooks stepped into the breach again. ‘There was a further altercation,’ she said. ‘A further encounter, I mean. You followed the two men – the murderers – out into the car park.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where a third shooter appeared. And apparently wounded one of his own people.’

  ‘I don’t think they were his people. He was acting against them, not with them.’

  ‘Or else he was a very bad shot.’

  ‘He shot a knife right out of the hand of one of those mopes. Hit him again before he could get back into the getaway vehicle, and then hit the vehicle itself while it was in motion. I’d have to say he was pretty good.’