The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘Perhaps it would be better to be dead,’ Gassan murmured, as though to himself. ‘Dead, and famous, and relevant. Is that preferable to an indefinite parenthesis? I don’t know. I don’t know.’

  ‘Professor,’ Kennedy said, ‘I know this has been hard on you. But as you’re aware, we’re still pursuing the case. The more you can tell me, the better the chance that we can end this and get you back to your normal life.’

  Gassan favoured her with a stare of utter contempt. ‘That would be a huge consolation,’ he said, acidly, ‘if it weren’t arrant, bloody nonsense. These people come and go as they please, and kill who they please. The only thing that’s keeping me alive is that I said no to Barlow when it counted, and now they’ve got me marked down on their great stone tablets somewhere as being safe to ignore. God help me if they ever change their minds about that.’

  ‘They’re not omnipotent,’ Kennedy said. The professor’s fatalism angered her, even disgusted her a little, but she tried to keep her face and her tone neutral.

  ‘They might as well be. Is anyone still alive who they wanted dead?’

  ‘Me. I think they wanted me dead.’ And Tillman, of course, but she wasn’t about to bring Tillman into this conversation.

  ‘With respect, they kill savants. People who know and understand. They only trouble with your sort when you accidentally step into their path.’

  ‘Which I’m aiming to do again,’ Kennedy answered, grimly. ‘And I repeat, the more you can tell me, the better chance I’ll have of finding them and bringing them to book.’ She meant to stop there. It was cruelty that made her go on. She was nettled in spite of herself by the line Gassan drew between people who understood and dull, plodding coppers. ‘The only alternative, professor, is for you to spend the rest of your life in places like this, hiding from a retribution that might not even be coming. Like Salman Rushdie or Roberto Saviano – except that they were hiding because they’d written something that made an impact on the world. You wouldn’t even have that consolation.’

  She broke off. Gassan was staring at her, half-aghast and half in wonder. She thought for a moment that he was going to storm out of the room, retire to his tents, as Tillman (with much better reason) had now done, and leave her to figure it all out for herself.

  Instead, the professor nodded. And then, with impressive calmness, humility even, he came and sat down opposite her again.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘If I’m irrelevant, it’s because I made myself irrelevant. I shouldn’t complain. And I end up being part of the process in any event, don’t I? The least I can do is act as Stuart Barlow’s amanuensis, since I refused all the more glamorous roles available.

  ‘Go on, Sergeant Kennedy, go on. Debrief me. Interrogate me. Bully and humble me. Beat me, even, if you want to. That would be novel, at least. Yes. Barlow translated a gospel into a gospel. After five hundred years of scholarship had failed to do as much.’

  Kennedy let out a long breath. ‘But this new gospel – the one he found when he decoded the Rotgut – it’s one that wasn’t known before?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s unique. An undiscovered gospel dating – probably – from the first century after Christ.’

  ‘You can tell that? The Rotgut was medieval.’

  ‘The Rotgut was itself just a translation, as you already know. When Stuart went looking for the source document, the original from which it was translated, he went straight to the earliest codices and the scrolls that immediately preceded them – to Nag Hammadi and the Rylands Papyri. And he applied a cypher key he’d already observed, in tiny, tantalising fragments, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He had plenty to go on. In fact, his problem was that he was spoiled for choice. Here. Have you ever seen this before?’

  He opened the notebook and flicked through a few pages, then turned it to face her. Kennedy found herself reading a short, itemised list.

  P52

  P75

  NH II-1, III-1, IV-1

  Eg2

  B66, 75

  C45

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was written on the back of a photograph that Stuart Barlow hid under the floor in his office. What does it mean?’

  Gassan closed the notebook again, as though he felt uncomfortable having someone else examine its contents, even though he’d promised her complete disclosure. ‘All of these letters and numbers are shorthand,’ he said, ‘for specific scrolls and codices in specific locations. The prefix P indicates the Rylands Papyri. B stands for Bodmer and C for the Chester collection. NH, of course, is Nag Hammadi. I imagine you can guess what these specific documents all have in common. Or am I giving credit where none is due?’

  Kennedy thought of the Rotgut. ‘They’re all early copies of John’s Gospel,’ she hazarded.

  ‘Exactly. The Gospel of John, or in some cases the Apocryphon of John – a related text. Some are whole, some partial, some very fragmentary indeed. But they’re all John. We don’t know which of the scrolls that Barlow looked at turned out to be the Rotgut source, but we can infer that it was a copy of the Gospel of John – complete or almost complete – dating from the late first century or early second century of the Common Era.’

  ‘And this is where I get lost,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘How do we get from the Gospel of John to this other text?’

  ‘By means of a code, of course.’ The answer was curt – stating the obvious. ‘Which was the entire point of Barlow’s work, and the core of his discovery.’

  Kennedy was trying to think of a different way to frame the same question. She knew it was a code: what she needed to understand was the mechanics of it, the bread and butter stuff about what was being encoded as what. Gassan saw her hesitation and sighed.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Ab initio. Sergeant Kennedy, I believe I explained to you, when we first spoke, that a codex is a multipart text.’

  ‘You said that two or three separate books or documents could be bound together into a single codex,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly. The ancient world had no concept of the integrity or discreteness of the single message. Papyrus was scarce and costly to make, so you used what you had. If that meant making strange bedfellows – putting a Platonic dialogue next to a biblical tract – then you did it without a qualm. You probably wouldn’t even start a clean page: you’d just go directly from one document to the next, writing them one after, or one beneath, another.

  ‘So when scholars looked at the Rotgut, that was what they saw. The Rotgut has the whole of John’s Gospel, then seven verses of a different gospel. It seemed natural to assume that someone had looked at an Aramaic codex and begun to translate it, starting at the beginning and going on until, for some reason, they were interrupted.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘But suppose those two texts – or the one text and the tiny fragment of the second – had been put together for a different reason? If you were solving an anagram, you might write the original version down so that you could cross off letters until you worked out the solution. “Has to pilfer”, say, and then the answer, “a shoplifter”. Or “a rope ends it”, and the answer, “desperation”. And similarly, someone faced with a coded message might write the cypher down first and the decoded message afterwards.’

  ‘So the Gospel of John was the cypher?’

  ‘A specific copy of the Gospel of John was the cypher. As I said, I haven’t been able to determine which. Whoever wrote the Rotgut had found this version, this written copy of John, and had been told how the code worked or else had managed to work it out for himself. He – it was almost certainly a he – wrote out the surface meaning of the text and then began to decode the message, to write out the text hidden beneath. But he found it arduous: even knowing what he knew, he only succeeded in decoding seven verses before giving up. Or, just as likely, he switched to a different piece of paper. And since he neglected to write down the cypher key, the rest of the message was lost.’

  ‘I get it,’ said Kennedy.

  ‘I’m so glad. And fo
r centuries thereafter, that status quo remained unchanged. Until Stuart Barlow came along and – alerted by some clue or some leap of logic or intuition – started to take a really close look at the Nag Hammadi texts and these other early documents. He found the relevant version of John. And he found – on the papyrus itself – some sort of substitution code that depended on subtle, almost invisible variations on the standard letter shapes. He found a second message encoded in the same symbols: a buried gospel, lying beneath the obvious gospel.’

  Gassan got up and crossed to the window. He looked out anxiously, although there was nothing to see: the window looked on to a light well that was interior to the building, a brick-sided shaft eight feet on a side. Kennedy waited a minute or two and then joined him. She knew how frustrated Gassan was at his enforced isolation – and underneath that, how terrified he was that by picking up the Rotgut project he’d become contaminated by its curse. Kennedy would have liked to reassure him, but the only comfort she could offer was a despairing one – that after Dovecote Farm had been wiped off the face of the earth, and Josh Combes became a burned offering, Michael Brand had vanished down whatever hole he normally inhabited. They might all be safe now simply because they offered him no credible threat.

  She stared out with Gassan at nothing. ‘So each letter, each symbol on the papyrus, was two letters?’ she asked him.

  ‘Essentially, yes. Each letter had a standard referent and a coded referent.’ He didn’t turn to look at her, but his tone, listless at first, picked up a little as he explained the technicalities. ‘The code uses a combination of two features that are completely meta-textual. The first is the number of additional stylus strokes used to write the letters. For example the Aramaic letter “heh”’ – he drew it in the condensation on the window – ‘is typically drawn as a single stroke with an acute angle and a curve, and then a separate downstroke. Two movements of the brush or stylus, you see? But it’s possible for a scribe to raise the marking tool from the papyrus twice in the course of making the complex stroke. Or once. Or he could do it as a single, continuous shape, without lifting the brush at all. That gives you three states of the letter. And then the simple stroke, similarly, could be one or two movements: the tool could be rested partway, leaving a slight thickening of the line. That gives six states – two times three.

  ‘The other feature is the relative length of strokes within a letter, where the possible states are, to put it crudely, short, medium and long. In heh, the simple stroke is typically drawn down further by the scribe than the enfolding arms of the complex stroke on either side. But it could stop at the same level, or not come down so far, remaining above the arms. Now we have at the very least eighteen states of the letter: probably more, in that the encoding of comparative length probably also brings in comparative distance between one feature of the letter and another, or possibly between each letter and its neighbour.’

  Kennedy thought about this slightly dizzying prospect, trying hard to get a handle on it.

  ‘And each of those … states, as you call them …’

  ‘Corresponds, within the cypher, to a different symbol. So this heh might then become gamal, or daleth, or zain. It would still be read as heh in the parent text, but it would stand as something else entirely in the decoded text.’

  ‘Why would someone do this?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Isn’t a gospel supposed to spread the word about your religion? If you have to hide it, then it loses most of its point, doesn’t it?’

  Gassan snorted through his nose. ‘There are lots of stegano-graphic texts – hidden messages – from that period, Sergeant. The early Christian sects were at war with each other, and often with their local governments as well. They had every reason to hide their messages away.’

  ‘But hiding one Christian message behind another …’

  ‘… rather suggests that the Christians, or perhaps a specific group of Christians, were your target audience, doesn’t it? With a code like this, you could disseminate your gospel and hide it at the same time. And your readers could carry the message from place to place without having to look over their shoulder. Anyone who examined the text would see only John’s Gospel: canonical, unobjectionable.’

  ‘Whereas the hidden message is a heresy?’

  ‘It’s safe to say, Sergeant, that the hidden message is heresy on the most breathtaking scale imaginable.’

  ‘So what the hell is it?’

  ‘You didn’t read it?’ Gassan turned from the window at last, to give Kennedy a stare of horrified indignation.

  ‘I read some of the parts that had already been rendered into plain text. They didn’t seem to be anything special – just Jesus talking to his disciples, most of the time. I couldn’t find my way through the files – there were too many of them and they all seemed to be hundreds of pages long.’

  Gassan hesitated: his disapproval at being asked for a précis fought against his desire to stand on a soapbox and hold forth. In the end, it was no contest.

  ‘You’re going after these people?’ he asked. ‘The people who killed Barlow and Catherine Hurt, and the others?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I suppose you need to know what you’ll be facing. You’ll lose, though. I probably ought to make that clear up front.’

  ‘Thanks, professor. For the vote of confidence, I mean.’

  ‘Believe me, Sergeant, I wish it were otherwise. If you could beat them, I could go back to living a life worthy of the name. But then, of course, if you could beat them …’

  He walked back to the centre of the room, touched the cover of the black notebook, then the table, as if to reassure himself that both the words and the world were still where he’d left them.

  ‘If I could beat them?’

  He looked around at her, his eyes desolate. ‘Well, then they wouldn’t still be out there, would they? Not after all those centuries. If they were vulnerable on any conceivable level, someone would have beaten them already.’

  41

  Sheriff Gayle collected Kennedy from the front of the hotel at nine the next morning. The night before, when he had taken her back to the hotel, he’d used a police black-and-white. This morning, he was driving a car only a little smaller than a football pitch, its colour scheme two-tone, equally divided between sky blue and rust. In places there were actual holes in the bodywork.

  Seeing her dubious expression, Gayle assured her earnestly that the car would get them to where they were going. ‘Never let me down yet, Sergeant. If there was enough room at the cemetery, I think I’d aim to be buried in her.’

  The scenery here was flatter and less dramatic than along the banks of the Colorado, but Kennedy experienced the same sense of colossal scale as they drove out of Peason along Interstate Highway 93. Distant mountains to their right piled up layer on layer, the stone audience in a planet-sized amphitheatre. To their left the horizon formed a single perfect curve. Highway 93 made the dividing line, a human act of ordering on a par with God’s dividing the waters above from the waters beneath. For most of the journey, theirs was the only car on the road.

  The town of Santa Claus, though, showed the bathos underlying human aspirations. At its height, Gayle had told her, the place had had a population of ten thousand: now it was a cluster of cutesy cottages from a Disney cartoon slowly being reclaimed by the desert. They’d been painted to look like gingerbread houses: red and white striped walls; candy-pink fascia boards; bright-green shutters with rounded tops, set permanently open. All was falling into ruin. A leprous Santa Claus leered from a porch whose railings hung askew like shattered ribs. Twin strips of abraded metal, joined by a few surviving railway sleepers, were visible here and there between the battered buildings: they seemed to have been built to serve a kiddie-sized red locomotive that now leaned against the side of a house, forever out of steam, its cow-catcher half-buried in the sand.

  To either end of the street was an advertising billboard, perfectly well maintained. The southern one advertised computers
, the northern one – on which the leper Santa fixed his hideous grin – incontinence pads. Just beyond this second sign, where Sheriff Gayle was pointing now, stood a small row of aluminum-frame sheds like scaled-down aircraft hangars.

  ‘Third one’s ours, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘’Less you want to go tell Santa what you want for Christmas.’

  ‘What every girl wants,’ Kennedy said, joining in the joke. ‘A pony and a Barbie doll. Peace on earth.’

  ‘There you go,’ Gayle said, leading the way. ‘I think the old feller winked at you just then, so you probably got that to look forward to now. Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.’

  He’d taken the heavy key ring from his belt and was sorting through it slowly and carefully. Finally he selected a big brass key with a hollow shank and inserted it into a keyhole that was perfectly circular. He didn’t turn it, just pressed it in and then pulled it out again. There was a two-tone metallic sound: tchikclunk. Gayle shoved the metal door sideways on its runners and they stepped into a dark space as hot as the inside of a furnace.

  ‘There’s an AC unit here,’ Gayle said, fumbling with some switches on the wall just inside the door. ‘You might want to give it a few minutes.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Kennedy said. As the lights flickered on, she moved out into the wide, undifferentiated space. It was just a single storeroom, with long metal shelf units dividing it up into aisles. At the nearer end she saw a desk with a couple of A4 folders on it, one blue and one red.

  The shelves were full of boxes, no doubt bought en masse from the storage solutions company whose logo they all bore: EZ-STACK. Each box also had a number, and Gayle now flipped open the top folder on the desk, the blue one, to show her the master list.

  He flicked over a page or two, found the Bs and ran his finger down the left-hand margin. ‘Michael Brand, Michael Brand, Michael Brand,’ he muttered. ‘There you go. Box number 161.’