The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Mariam kicked him in the throat. She hadn’t put her boots back on, but she turned her foot to the side and made contact with her instep, the full weight of her body aligned behind her extended leg so that the force went from hip to knee to ankle and thence without mitigation into the unprotected flesh of the man’s gullet.

  The sound he made was no sound at all, but a muted vibration: his ruined voicebox pulsing momentarily against the flesh of her foot. Then she lowered that foot, raised the other, performed a half-pirouette and straddled him. It was easy: his rising motion had stopped and he had crashed back down on to his knees, hands raised to his throat, making no move to defend or to counterattack. Mariam pincered his head between her muscular legs and, reaching down, wrapped her forearms around his temples.

  A half-twist from this position would have broken the man’s neck easily, unless he knew it was coming and braced himself against it. Mariam applied a smaller degree of torsion but an equal amount of force, closing the man’s airway without damaging any of his vertebrae. She was already assuming that it would be necessary to burn down the farmhouse, so any soft-tissue damage she inflicted would be disguised by the much greater damage done by the flames.

  The man realised that he was dying, a few seconds too late for the knowledge to do him any good. From this position, the only way he could reach her hands was to bend his arms back behind his own head. Most of his strength was lost in the awkward contortion, while hers was almost doubled by the kelalit she’d taken. The man writhed and strained under her, but she’d positioned herself well and he was unable to shift her balance or break free of the hold. His feet slammed against the bare boards, forcefully at first but then in a rapid diminuendo as his strength failed him.

  When he was weak enough that she could afford to shift her weight a little, Mariam leaned forward to whisper into the man’s ear. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s almost over.’ Her English wasn’t good, but she spoke slowly and carefully, and she was reasonably sure he understood her. It was a small gesture but important all the same. We dress our brutality in ritual to keep our own animal nature at a distance. Mariam was never more gentle or considerate than when she killed.

  The man’s last conscious movement was to fasten both of his hands around one of her ankles. It was a good idea, but again too late: he wasn’t strong enough now to push against her leg and disturb her balance. The grip was ineffectual, the push feeble and short-lived.

  Mariam maintained her hold for a full minute after the man stopped moving, then parted her legs to let him fall. Kneeling beside him, she felt his throat for a pulse. There was none. The man’s face had gone hectic red and he fixed her with a reproachful, exophthalmic stare. She ignored it: the spirit didn’t linger long enough to bear grudges, and the flesh was nothing.

  She searched the rest of the upper floor quickly, finding no trace of the woman. By this time, she wasn’t expecting to: if anyone had been within earshot, the frantic thrashing and kicking of the man as he died would have brought them at a run.

  She went back down the stairs, less concerned now about the creaking floorboards, and found Ezei still waiting for her at the bottom. ‘One man,’ she rapped out, as she slipped her boots back on and laced them. ‘Alone. Search again.’

  Between them they combed every inch of the farmhouse, looking everywhere that a human body could possibly squeeze itself. Finally, Mariam satisfied herself that the woman wasn’t on the premises. If she’d never arrived, that was fine. If she’d been there previously but had left, they might have a very narrow window in which to destroy these records – the other part of their assignment, and in fact the task that the Tannanu had mentioned first.

  Mariam sent Ezei and Cephas back to the car to fetch some of their equipment, including the fire-starting kit. It included untraceable chemical accelerants and a flexible tube that she would use to breathe smoke into the lungs of the dead man. Most coroners wouldn’t look further than that before pronouncing a verdict of death by fire.

  Once the men had gone, she returned to the computer room. Their instructions were to destroy everything that was here, but she was aware that it was sometimes possible to retrieve information from computer discs and hard drives even when they’d been comprehensively damaged. Along with the fire-starting materials, Ezei and Cephas would bring the wipe-clean, a portable generator in a briefcase-sized box that produced a monstrously powerful AC magnetic field. A ten-second pass with the device at full charge would corrupt every file on the computer, so that even if anything was saved from the fire, it would be gibberish. Taking the computer away with them would be simpler, of course, but would expose them to the risk of being stopped and searched while they still had it in their possession. This was better.

  Mariam wondered, though, what secret had been discovered in this house that she and her cousins were charged with deleting from the world’s consciousness again. She crossed to the desk and picked up the top sheet from among the papers there. Reading it, she experienced a surge of mixed emotions. The words on the sheet were unexpectedly familiar: so familiar that she could have recited them from heart. But to see them in this place was momentarily disorienting, as though she had opened a door in a stranger’s house and found her own bedroom behind it.

  In that moment of strange suspension, a spotlight shone through the window and picked her out perfectly.

  It was an illusion, of course. Even as her training made her freeze in place, the light swung past and was replaced by a second, moving in lockstep with the first. The sound of the engine and the crunch of tyres on gravel reached her at the same time. Headlights. The headlights of a car.

  It was the woman, then. Or perhaps someone else. It didn’t matter, either way: whoever it was had to die, and the task of destruction had to be completed. As soon as the lights passed by, Mariam moved to do what was necessary. Quickly, she dragged the body across the floor, to a stack of boxes that had been covered with a tarpaulin sheet. She manhandled it into position at the base of the stack and rearranged the tarpaulin to hide it from a casual glance.

  Where were Ezei and Cephas? On their way back from the car by now, surely. They would have seen the headlights and they would know that the situation had changed. Hopefully they would stay in place and wait for her to contact them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t leave or call them: not yet. She had to wait for her moment and she had to know who it was they were now dealing with.

  She moved to the window and parted the folds of sacking very slightly. Below and to her left, a little way from the house, a large truck was now parked. As she watched, the doors of the cab opened. A woman and then a man got out. They were only silhouettes in the dusk, hard to make out even though, like her physical strength and speed, the keenness of her sight had been enhanced by the kelalit.

  The two figures walked towards the door. Retreating from the window, Mariam considered her options and decided on the most direct and obvious. She would wait in the room and kill the two as they entered. She might have to break bones, but she would try not to. If there was visible damage to the bodies, that fire wouldn’t hide, she might resort to the rape scenario she’d described to the Tannanu. Or she might drop the bodies from the window, so that it looked as though the damage had been sustained as the two tried to escape from the fire.

  She walked silently to the door of the room. She could hear the two in the hall downstairs now: their voices, coming towards the stairs and then passing them. They were in the kitchen. She heard the man call the woman Kennedy, which came as no surprise at all. But the woman’s answer caught her unprepared.

  ‘Feel how warm it is in here, Tillman.’

  Tillman.

  Mariam’s fists clenched involuntarily. The target they’d missed so many times. The man who’d first escaped from Ezei and Cephas, in the point-blank confines of the ferry’s washroom, and then shot her knife out of the air. Who’d read their ambush from who knew what near-invisible clue, and escaped it. Who’d sent them down into a
dank sewer in search of his abandoned phone. He was here. He was here with the woman.

  Kelalit was known to heighten certain emotions. Part of the training of a Messenger included locking those emotions down into a manageable and containable part of the mind: you worked around them, refused to acknowledge them until, ignored, they lost the power to harm. That was what Mariam did then: she did not even look at the emotions that Tillman’s name, Tillman’s presence evoked. She folded those emotions in anaesthetic veils and pushed them down beneath the threshold of perception. At the same time, she conducted a rational appraisal of the situation. Tillman was a trained fighter and had survived an attack by her two cousins. There was a real chance that if she tried to take him here, even with the advantage of surprise, she might fail.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs now: Tillman and the woman coming up. Moving as slowly as she dared, Mariam crossed the upper landing and stepped into the room opposite. It was possible that her enemies would go there first but it was unlikely. The computers were visible through the open doorway and would attract their attention. The logical thing to do would be to go and examine them immediately.

  They passed within a few feet of her. She let them go by. Though her hands and feet prickled with the imminence of sudden, violent motion, she remained still.

  The man and the woman went into the room, talking. ‘Servers,’ the woman said. ‘They use rigs like this to render 3D effects for movies. Somebody needed a lot of processing power.’

  They were ten feet away from Mariam now, then fifteen. If she moved, and they saw the movement, Tillman would have time to turn: possibly, to draw and aim. But the distance was so small, she couldn’t miss with a thrown blade. She slid a sica from her belt and balanced it in her hand. She raised it, ready to throw – but only if the perfect window presented itself.

  The woman passed between her and Tillman, blocking her line of sight. Killing Kennedy would be easy, but would alert Tillman to Mariam’s presence. If he were able to find cover in the room, and hold her off, everything might be compromised.

  The moment passed. They both walked out of her line of sight, further into the room, heading no doubt for the desk.

  Mariam left her hiding place and walked down the stairs. The voices from behind her were loud enough to mask the sounds her movements made, but she kept to the edges of the stair runners to minimise the risk that the old wood might speak and reveal her.

  Only when she was in the hall did she acknowledge the slight tremor in her legs and in her hands: the small, almost insignificant component of that emotional surge that had been fear.

  She walked out of the farmhouse and round to the rear, staying close to the wall. Once out of any possible line of sight, both from the bedroom window and from the road, she walked out boldly into the long grass. Ezei and Cephas rose in her way, not challenging her – they had recognised her even in the dark – but acknowledging and reporting to her.

  ‘Tillman is there, as well as Kennedy,’ she said.

  Ezei blinked, startled. ‘What should we do?’

  ‘As we decided,’ Mariam said. ‘We burn the place. If they try to leave, we shoot them. If they stay in the building, we burn them. There are three of us and three faces to that building which have doors or windows. But if we work quickly enough, we’ll trap them on the upper floor in any case, and doors and windows will be no use to them. Come on.’

  Cephas nodded, and a second later Ezei did too. Mariam noticed the momentary hesitation and read it for what it was: an implied question. If you saw them, why are they still alive? She turned her back on her cousins and led the way to the building.

  They had two drums of the accelerant, a clear chemical compound that had no detectable by-products and virtually no smell – only a slight whiff of floral disinfectant – yet burned as quickly and as fiercely as kerosene. They started at the back of the building and worked their way to the door: Ezei and Mariam poured, anointing the piled-up papers, the walls and the floor. Cephas remained at the foot of the stairs until the last moment, his gun raised and ready.

  Ezei had the incendiary flare – also unidentifiable from its breakdown products – that would ignite the blaze. He gave it to Mariam, who acknowledged the gesture of respect with a curt nod. His earlier hesitation was still fresh in her mind.

  She pointed out to Ezei and Cephas the positions she’d assigned to them and they melted into the dark. There was nothing to be gained by waiting, and too much time lost already.

  She tugged on the strip that kept the two chemical components of the flare apart. They merged and it sputtered into life in her hand. She threw it underarm down the hallway, where it bounced once before it settled.

  There was a soft whump. Fierce light reared up like an angel in the narrow hallway, and hot, expanding air touched Mariam’s cheek like the caress of an urgent lover. She closed the door gently and took up her station.

  35

  Someone had been burning flowers. The stairwell was a cauldron of seething air that stank of ruined blossoms: an inferno in a quiet summer meadow. Tillman wasn’t an imaginative man, but images of sacrifice and massacred innocents rose in his mind anyway, too sudden to avoid. It was a smell you needed absolution from.

  At his side, Kennedy swore. For a moment, she seemed rooted to the spot. Then she sank down on her knees. He thought she was praying, then realised she was searching. She came up with the pack of computer discs in her hand.

  ‘There’s no time,’ Tillman told her.

  ‘I’ll bloody make time,’ Kennedy snarled, tearing at the shrinkwrap plastic.

  They didn’t even have to shout: the fire wasn’t loud yet, despite its fierceness. That was more unsettling even than the smell: this was a fire that got on with the job, with minimum fuss and maximum effect.

  Tillman crossed to the door and stepped out into the heat, which was like pushing against a physical presence that filled the stairwell. He got as far as the angle of the stairs, beyond which a harsh actinic light, as much white as yellow, was writhing like a living thing. He cast a quick look around that corner, enough to tell him that there was no way through. The lower hall had become an oven, hot enough to render flesh from bone.

  The windows, he thought. But there were boards nailed up over the windows. Except for the one in the computer room.

  He ran back up the stairs and into the room. Kennedy was busy at the machine, hammering at the keyboard, feeding a disc into the drive. ‘Kennedy!’ he bellowed. ‘Heather!’ She didn’t answer. ‘We’ve got to go.’

  ‘It’s only the downstairs that’s on fire,’ Kennedy shouted over her shoulder. ‘We’ve still got a couple of minutes.’

  Tillman grabbed her arm, turned her around to face him. ‘The smoke will kill us first,’ he reminded her. ‘You know that. Let’s go.’

  She hesitated for a second, then gave him a reluctant nod. ‘Smash the window. I’ll be right with you.’

  He crossed to it quickly, looking around for something he could use to smash the glass out of its frame. Kennedy ejected the disc from the drive, snatched it up and stuffed it in her pocket.

  Tillman went to the stack of computer servers and hefted the top one in his hands. Wires connected it to the others, but he shook and kicked them loose.

  ‘That’s evidence!’ Kennedy yelled, anguished.

  ‘It’s going to be molten plastic inside of three minutes,’ Tillman told her, tersely.

  He struck the glass once, twice, three times. It smashed on the first impact: the other two were to clear the jagged shards from the corners of the frame so that they could climb through without slashing open an artery. He was leaning in for a fourth blow when something else hit the wood from the outside, slamming into the edge of the sash and making it explode into fragments inches from Tillman’s face.

  The whining report of a semi-automatic followed a second later. Tillman was already ducking back, acting on pure reflex. The second shot went past his ear, close enough for him to feel the wake
of displaced air, and punched through the plaster of the ceiling, sending a shower of dust down on their heads.

  Kennedy stared at the hole in the plaster and swore again. He thought she might be freezing on him: people did that in a crisis sometimes, even capable people, and the best thing to do in that situation was usually to punch them out. They were less trouble as a dead weight than as an active encumbrance.

  But he was wrong. Kennedy was thinking it through. She cast a glance around the room, zeroed in on the blanket that was covering yet another pile of junk and snatched it up. That derailed her for a moment, since it revealed a fresh corpse lying on the floor, hidden by the blanket until now.

  ‘You poor bastard,’ Tillman heard Kennedy mutter. ‘Should have … oh Jesus, Combes! …’

  Her voice tailed off. She ran from the room, trailing the blanket behind her. Tillman followed, guessing what she was going to do. It wouldn’t save them but it would buy them time.

  He found her in the bathroom. She’d already started the taps running in the sink and in the bath, and she was trying to tear the blanket into strips. He took the hunting knife from his belt and offered it to her wordlessly. With the knife she quickly made a tear and ripped a ragged triangle from one corner of the blanket. Tillman took it from her and soaked it in the water filling the sink, while Kennedy cut loose a second strip of cloth for herself.

  When the torn strips were thoroughly drenched, they tied them around their faces like bandanas. It would keep the smoke out for a few minutes and stave off monoxide poisoning. It gave them leeway. But leeway to do what?

  The room was filling up with thick smoke now, on which motes of fire from the burning paper below floated like lanterns in a stream. The fire had got a lot louder now, too, roaring like a demon in the stairwell, making up for lost time. On top of the masks, that made it almost impossible to talk.