The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  The stairwell was out.

  Someone outside was waiting to kill them if they stuck their heads out of the windows.

  What did that leave?

  Kennedy tapped him on the arm, beckoned. He followed her, back into the computer room. She pointed upwards at the trapdoor, set into the ceiling. Tillman nodded vigorously, made a thumbs-up sign. Okay, let’s do it.

  They piled up unopened boxes of paper to make a step ladder. He boosted Kennedy up so she could first throw the trapdoor open – it wasn’t locked, thank God – and then haul herself into the loft space above. He followed, climbing on to the precarious stack of boxes, then jumping and catching the edge of the trapdoor. The wood creaked loud enough to be heard over the buffeting roar of the flames, but it held. He got his elbows in and Kennedy hauled him the rest of the way over the edge.

  The loft space was so full of dull grey smoke that it seemed like a solid thing, packed in there in cords and bundles. But when they moved, they left darker holes in the smoke that hung in their wake, tunnels of past time.

  A skylight would have been too much to hope for, and in any case they didn’t need one. The slates were of pre-war construction, probably nineteenth century, each hung on a single wooden pin in the traditional method, exquisitely balanced. But the spruce-wood laths were so old and worm-eaten that Tillman could dismantle them with his hands. Working together, they made a ragged hole and crawled out on to the sloping roof.

  It was like climbing out of a hole in the ice of a pond. The area around the gap they’d made had been weakened so that it leaned inwards and clearly wouldn’t bear their weight. They slid downwards from it towards the gutter, which also didn’t look like a safe bet.

  It became a lot less safe a second later, when one of the slates at the edge of the roof exploded into razor shards that tore at their faces. Tillman heard the thup thup thup of small arms fire: he could even identify the gun, within a reasonable margin of error. The light but sturdy Sig-226, probably in a double-action Kellerman version with two trigger reset points. The sort of gun a cop like Kennedy might have used in the days before .40 calibre became the word and the law.

  Tillman backed away up the roof ridge, keeping his body as flat to the tiles as he could. Beside him, Kennedy was imitating his action: in fact, she’d started moving a second or so before him.

  But there was no salvation on the roof ridge. They’d just be at the highest point when the roof collapsed, which couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes away now. Assuming they didn’t catch a bullet first, they’d plunge through the roof back into that furnace, and if they were lucky they’d break their necks in the fall.

  That wasn’t at all what Kennedy had in mind. She was looking off to Tillman’s left, towards the rear of the building, and as he followed the line of her gaze he saw what she was looking at, or looking for: the nearest of the barns, maybe fifteen feet from the farmhouse and a yard or so higher. It faced the farmhouse full-on, and had a square hole in its front where a window had once been. Wooden shutters welded open by generations of lazy paint jobs stood to either side of the gap: landing guides for a short, unpowered flight.

  Dangerous but not impossible.

  Kennedy started to clamber upright on the ridge. Out of the corner of his eye, Tillman caught the movement from far below. He pulled her down again just as the bullets started punching through the tiles around them: heavy, slanting rain that brought a shower of shrapnel in its wake. He drew his Unica and returned fire, to buy them a little respite and to warn the shooters against pulling back too far from the walls of the farmhouse in search of a better shot.

  ‘Damn!’ Kennedy bellowed in rage and frustration ‘This is total bloody overkill.’

  Tillman emptied the Unica into the darkness below, then rolled on to his back to reload. He had two spare speedloaders, modified HKS 255s, both ready racked. After that he had nothing, not even loose ammunition. He emptied out the spent cartridges, slotted the speedloader and loaded the chambers with a quick twist of his wrist, all within a few seconds, but the virtuosity was an empty gesture. Firing into the dark, backlit by the flames that were starting to dance and weave between the gaps in the tiles, he knew he had little chance of hitting anything – of achieving anything beyond making himself an easier target. Maybe he could draw off the unseen assassins’ fire while Kennedy made her run and jump for it.

  And then they’d stroll over to the barn and pick her off at their leisure. He needed to come up with something better than that. Something that offered at least measurable odds on their surviving.

  His gaze passed over the truck, then came back. Blow up the gas tank? It was a sign of how desperate he was that he considered it even for a second. Urban legend aside, it had been proved time and again that you couldn’t make a petrol tank ignite by shooting at it. The bullet didn’t generate enough heat, and fuel-grade petrol wasn’t unstable enough. Striking a spark off the metal of the tank itself might do it, but that was worse than a one-in-a-million chance, and there was no point gambling on those odds.

  Which left one spectacularly stupid stunt: the sort of thing the phrase ‘million-to-one chance’ had been invented for.

  Tillman groped in his pockets and found what he was looking for: the box of Swan Vestas he’d been carrying ever since Folkestone. Opening the cylinder of the Unica again, he tapped it against the heel of his hand and let a bullet slide out into his palm.

  Kennedy was watching him, bewildered.

  ‘Move towards the barn,’ he told her. She didn’t hear him through the mask, so he hauled it off and threw it away: the air was cleaner out here, and one way or another they probably weren’t going to die from the smoke now. ‘Move towards the barn,’ he said again.

  ‘They’ll see me,’ Kennedy pointed out.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Move over there, as close as you can get, but don’t jump until … well, jump when they’re looking elsewhere.’

  ‘At what? What will they be looking at?’

  ‘All the pretty lights,’ Tillman muttered.

  He turned his attention to the bullet. A .454 Casull, a round that had built on the Colt .45 casing and turned what was already a gun-range classic into a small masterpiece. Casull and Fullmer, the designers, were looking to make a handgun cartridge primarily for the biggest of big-game hunting, so they wanted to maximise power at point of impact – ideally, though, without breaking the arm of the shooter. So they’d married a rifle primer to a pistol cartridge, generating upwards of 60,000 cup when shot from a test barrel, and capable of accelerating a 230 grain bullet to 1800 feet per second.

  For the low-recoil architecture of the Unica, it was the perfect round. Tillman stuck to the storefront standard most of the time, but occasionally rolled his own using the Hornady brass casing and a primer he’d gotten from an old Irish recipe. Consequently, he knew when he prised the bullet casing open with his teeth that it wouldn’t explode and rip the lower half of his face off.

  Kennedy was edging away from him along the roof, and the bullets had moved with her. She was pressed flat against the tiles, offering the smallest possible target, but a stray bullet was going to take her out sooner rather than later. Even a peripheral hit would probably send her sliding and tumbling down the slope of the roof, gathering momentum until she pitched right off at the bottom.

  Right now she was probably wondering if Tillman was just using her as a decoy, aiming to make a run and jump himself off the opposite end of the roof ridge and trust to luck that he didn’t break a leg or his spine when he landed.

  Opening the Swan box, Tillman bit the heads off a couple of dozen matches. He chewed them up in his mouth, turning them into a thick paste, then let the foul, bitter mixture dribble from between his lips into the base of the bullet casing: a crude stew of red phosphorus and saliva. He resealed the casing, again using his teeth to bite around the edges of the base and crimp it into place. He bit down as hard as he could, until his teeth seemed likely to shatter under the applied pressu
re. Even then, there was a better than fifty per cent chance that the freakish, home-made thing would just explode in the barrel. But screw it, he was committed now.

  Kennedy had gone as far as she could go: was pressed up tight against a broad chimney stack two-thirds of the way along the roof. It offered a little cover, at least, but it also blocked her passage unless she stood or knelt upright to edge around it. The shooters had followed her there and were more or less free now to choose their angle. They remained completely invisible in the perfect darkness below, but the muzzle flashes showed their positions each time they fired. Tillman could target the muzzle flashes, of course, but he knew, too, that only an idiot would be standing still while they fired.

  Stick with plan A – where A stood for absurd.

  He counted to three in his mind, then sat bolt upright. He took careful aim, even though he knew how well he must be showing up against the brightness of the fire at his back. A shot whucked past his shoulder, close enough to feel. A second smacked into the tiles between his legs.

  Holding the out-breath, holding the target, he shut out the world and squeezed the trigger.

  Instantly, the night turned into day: specifically, the dies irae, when God loses his patience and says enough is damned well enough.

  36

  It was endgame.

  Tillman and the woman were effectively trapped in the building and the building was burning to the ground.

  Mariam expected them to try the windows and was ready to push them back inside when they did. In fact, she felt almost certain she’d hit Tillman when he appeared at the bedroom window, where she was already aiming, and she would not have been surprised if they’d seen no more of either him or the woman.

  It was Ezei who heard the sounds from the roof first. He whistled – two short notes, to get Mariam’s attention – and pointed up. She saw the movement there, abstract at first and then suddenly resolving into the woman’s head and shoulders. She fired and the woman ducked down out of sight.

  Of course, out of sight was purely a matter of geometry. Mariam didn’t need to tell Ezei and Cephas what to do. In synchrony with her, they stepped back from the walls of the house. Two figures were moving up on the roof now, but they blended in with their background for the most part: it was only when some part of one or other body broke above the line of the roof and was picked out against the glow of the licking flames that they could be seen. Mariam raised her gun on to that line and waited.

  Twice something bulked briefly against the flames and she fired. The second time, shots were returned and she had to duck back in closer to the wall out of Tillman’s line of sight.

  She considered, for a moment, leaving it at that, allowing the two to burn to death in their own time, without further complications. But the roof wasn’t completely isolated, and Tillman and Kennedy had seemed to be moving to the rear, from where it might be possible to jump across to the nearest of the out-house buildings.

  Mariam whistled and Ezei looked in her direction again. To the back, she signalled, and he took off at once. Quickly, she jogged along the front of the building until she could see Cephas on the other side. He looked round at her as she appeared and she gave him the same silent instruction.

  She herself, Mariam decided, would stay at the front. It seemed impossible now that Tillman and Kennedy would duck back into the building, whose interior must be one undifferentiated mass of flame, and try to make it to the window again – but if they did, or even more inconceivably made a run for the door, then Mariam would be in place to shoot them down.

  She watched approvingly as Ezei and Cephas circled, firing as they went. For a moment, she glimpsed the woman’s shoulder and part of her back. Kennedy appeared to have gotten most of the way to the rear end of the roof ridge, where the abrupt vertical of a chimney stack stood in her way, providing a little cover so long as she didn’t try to move past it. But if she stayed where she was, she had about a minute more before the roof collapsed, and in the meantime she stood out against the white-painted chimney every time she shifted her balance. Cephas took aim – but then suddenly shifted to fire at a different target, presumably Tillman. He squeezed off two shots.

  The third shot came from the roof and Mariam saw it at the same time that she heard it: a luminous red streak in the air, drawing the shortest possible line between two points. The first point was Tillman. The second was the truck in which he had arrived.

  The explosion was spectacularly sudden and agonisingly bright. Burning air washed over Mariam and slapped her off her feet. A buffeting thunderclap arrived so long afterwards that it seemed to belong to a different explosion altogether.

  Groggy, she raised her head and blinked into the roiling smoke. Her ears were ringing, her eyes were blind and the hot air she breathed was a soup of overcooked petroleum. She tried to shout for Cephas and broke into jagged coughs that ripped her seared throat as though she were chewing on broken glass.

  Then she saw a strange thing: a vision. The world had turned to black and white, and a man drawn in soot on grainy chalk was doing a ridiculous slapstick dance, his movements discontinuous and unconvincing. He fell down, as Charlie Chaplin was accustomed to fall down, with such energy in the fall that he rolled himself almost upright again, only to fall a second time.

  It was Cephas. And it wasn’t a dance or a comedic act. It was his death throes. The fire was all over him, clasping him like a lover, the burning petrol drenching his clothes and his skin, pulling the moisture from inside his body and turning it to vapour to fling it into the sky in a violent and terrible transubstantiation.

  Mariam screamed, and the scream hurt so much that her mind almost shut down. She had to fight to stay conscious.

  Her eyes streaming, she staggered to her feet. She saw Ezei running around the rear of the farmhouse, then stopping abruptly as he saw what she had seen: Cephas turned into an offering to God. ‘Ezei!’ she croaked, as she started towards him. She had to shape the sound with blistered lips. ‘Ezei, don’t—’

  Don’t go near him, was what she meant to say. Don’t step into the light, you’ll only make yourself a target. But Tillman’s gun sounded even as she spoke, and the spectacular lighting allowed Mariam to see Ezei’s fate with far too much clarity. The smoke beside his head rolled and reddened: some of that smoke was Ezei’s blood and brains, exiting through a hole made by a heavy shell at close to medium range. He stumble-stepped to a halt, already dead, and fell heavily to the ground.

  Mariam was running before she knew it, running for the barn, because that was what they’d do now. They’d jump and they’d be vulnerable when they jumped, vulnerable when they landed. She could still bring this home, she could still avenge, she could still finish the mission.

  The closed barn doors hung off their hinges. She tugged and heaved until they opened, stepped back and then launched herself into the darkness inside in a tight vertical roll. She tensed as she unfolded, gun in one hand, sica blade in the other. If she saw him before he saw her, she’d use the knife. If it came to a shoot-out, she’d trust to the gun first and pray he lived long enough for her to get in close and slit his throat.

  From outside came a soft thump, and then a second. They’d climbed over the barn, not into it.

  Mariam screamed again – a profanity she wouldn’t even have admitted that she knew. She ran outside, but the burning truck and the burning building and the air super-saturated with smoke seeled her eyes more effectively than any blindfold. There were running footsteps in the darkness beyond the painful light. She ran after them, firing in that direction until the clip emptied and the trigger locked.

  Then she tripped on something in the dark and sprawled on the rough ground, tearing the skin of her palms. The breath was knocked out of her. Her chest felt like it had been ripped open, and the skin of her burned face was too tight on her skull, stretched like a death mask. She rolled over on her back in the long grass, spent. For a moment she felt she was dying. But the pain, which intensified w
ith each breath, told her that she was still alive.

  Through the agony, she began to glimpse the faint, uncertain outlines of a consolation. God wasn’t done with her, yet. And she wasn’t done with the monsters who had snuffed out the lives of her beloved cousins.

  37

  A moment came, in their running, when Tillman wondered what it was, exactly, that they were running from.

  The shooters, obviously. But he’d laid out two of them, one with an exploding petrol tank, the other in a more conventional way, with a bullet. He’d tried to count, while he was up on the roof, and was almost certain that there could only be one or two more of them out there, in all.

  But that meant one or two who’d actually fired: they could have reinforcements ready to hand and ways of bringing them to bear real quick. Maybe the scream they’d heard, after they jumped from the roof of the barn, was exactly that: a summons. It had sounded like a woman’s voice. He wondered, inconsequentially, if it was the woman from the boat, who’d landed a knife into his thigh at thirty yards. That wasn’t a woman to face in the dark, with an empty gun.

  Better to run, then, and take stock later, rather than stay and fight what might be a premature last stand. Kennedy had the disc in her pockets: they’d gotten … something out of this, and it was something the pale assassins had swarmed to keep them away from. So it was worth having. It had to be.

  Kennedy was keeping up with him, at first, and then suddenly she was outpacing him. His hip, still stiff from the knife wound, slowed him down. He put on an extra burst of speed, in spite of the pain, and caught up with her as they reached a shallow ditch that seemed to be the southern edge of the property line.

  Negotiating the ditch, Tillman walked into a barbed wire fence, but it was only a single length of cable and it did minimal damage. He clambered over it and found himself on a dirt path that led back down towards the distant road on a steep angle. He looked back at Kennedy, who was struggling over the wire behind him. She either didn’t see his offered hand or else chose to ignore it.