The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  The boxes had been ranged sequentially, and every single one was in its proper place, so finding 161 was as simple as walking down the second aisle to the right spot and sliding it out. Gayle brought it back to the desk and set it down, nodding to Kennedy. ‘Be my guest, Sergeant.’ She slid the lid off the box and looked inside.

  Each of the objects in the box had been separately bagged. Most were items of clothing: shirt, trousers, jacket, pants and socks. Sheathed in anodyne plastic, they looked – on first glance – like they’d just come back from the dry cleaner’s. But the cleaner had done a really bad job, leaving red-black bloodstains here and there on pretty much everything.

  In the bottom of the box, underneath the ruined clothes, she found a sparse sprawl of objects. A till receipt, also stained red-brown at one corner: it was for a newspaper and a pack of Big Red gum, paid for with cash at one of the Walden Books stands at LAX. A black plastic comb. A wallet, already emptied. A separate bag containing bills and coins that had been found in the wallet, to the total value of $89.67. An opened packet of paper tissues. A half-empty blister pack of cinnamon chewing gum, presumably the one described in the till receipt. And that was it: the total worldly goods of Michael Brand.

  ‘No passport,’ Kennedy remarked. She hadn’t had high expectations, but felt a little deflated anyway.

  ‘Stuff from the flight got scattered over a lot of ground, Sergeant – and this is a desert. Most likely it’s still out there somewhere. Unless someone picked it up and handed it in at a local police station – or kept it as a souvenir, or sold it on. But his passport was scanned when he joined the flight. All that information’s on record.’

  ‘I know,’ Kennedy said. ‘I wasn’t thinking of the passport itself, so much.’

  ‘Baggage stub?’

  ‘Yeah, that.’

  ‘We already cross-referenced all that stuff, working off the flight manifests that Coastal sent us. Brand didn’t bring a case on board. He had no stowed luggage at all.’

  With Gayle’s permission, Kennedy put on gloves and examined the disappointing haul. She turned the till receipt over, making sure the obverse was blank: no hidden messages or enigmatic lists. She rooted through the wallet, looking for slips of paper that had been missed, torn linings in which something might have been secreted, inscriptions or markings on the leather itself. There was nothing.

  Someone had marked one of the dollar bills, though: three parallel lines drawn in red marker, running from top centre to bottom right. Someone had tried to cross out Ben Franklin’s face and missed by a good half-inch or so. Kennedy puzzled over the note for a while, then gave it up.

  ‘What about the unmatched stuff?’ she asked Gayle.

  ‘There’s a whole lot of that,’ he said. ‘Boxes and boxes – takes up most of the last aisle. You’d be talking about a good six or seven thousand items. I don’t think there’s enough hours in the day for you to go over it all.’

  ‘Do you have a list?’

  ‘Most definitely we do. That’s the second folder. The red one.’

  Kennedy read through the list, looking for anything that stood out from the background. A number of things caught the eye for a moment, maybe a little longer: part of glass unicorn; medallion with skull and marijuana leaf; dildo decorated with stars and stripes motif. But how could she know what Michael Brand had been carrying or what it might have meant to him? More significantly, she noted three dozen or so cellphones whose owners hadn’t been identified – but when she got to that page and looked up at Sheriff Gayle, he was shaking her head before she could even frame the question.

  ‘I can’t let you turn any of those on, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘It’s not legal without a warrant, and there’s no way I’d be able to get a warrant without showing probable cause – of which there ain’t a shred, really, for any of these people. Not even for your Michael Brand, when you come right down to it.’

  ‘No,’ Kennedy agreed, reluctantly. ‘A lot of this is more gut instinct than anything else.’

  ‘And gut instinct is fine. I wouldn’t hear a word said against it – but it limits my scope, if you see what I mean. There’s things I can do and things I can’t.’

  Kennedy almost laughed. It could have been herself talking: herself before she met Tillman and waded into this mess so far she couldn’t see dry land any longer. ‘I totally understand, Sheriff,’ was all she said, still holding the plastic evidence bag containing Michael Brand’s cash. She held it up and showed it to Gayle. ‘Listen, can I get a photocopy of this dollar bill here? The one with the red lines on it?’

  ‘Surely. Let me sign it out and we can bring it into town with us now. Connie can copy it for you while we go on over to the morgue. Why, you reading something into those lines?’

  ‘A code, maybe. The people we’re dealing with seem to like codes. Might be nothing anyway. Most likely is. But I’d like to think about it.’

  Gayle solemnly filled out a chitty, which he took from the top drawer in the desk, stamped holes in it with a tiny hole-punch (second drawer) and inserted into the evidence file. Then – just as the straining air-conditioning unit was starting to make some kind of an impact on the superheated air in the great hangar, they stepped back out into the desert.

  42

  ‘So who are the big villains, would you say, in the Bible?’ Professor Gassan asked. He stood at the table as though at a lectern, even though there were only the two of them in the room. Old habits died hard: or maybe it was just a way of defining their relative status here.

  Kennedy was in even less of a mood for a study session on the Bible than she’d been the first time they’d spoken. The gleam in the professor’s eyes oppressed her spirit in much the way a snake’s stare was supposed to paralyse a rabbit. But she suspected it might be the only way Gassan was prepared to give her what she needed to know – and the only way for him to keep functioning despite his fears and inner conflicts.

  ‘Cain,’ she hazarded. ‘Judas. Pontius Pilate. Or did you mean tribes, like the ones who couldn’t say “shibboleth”?’

  ‘No, I meant individuals. And Cain and Judas were the two I was certain you’d mention. Most people would come up with those two names, I think. Most people, that is, outside of the Gnostic tradition. You’ve heard of the Gnostics, I assume?’

  He looked at her hard, signalling that despite her impatience, he was coming to the point in his own way.

  ‘Early Christian sect,’ Kennedy said. ‘Stuart Barlow’s book – the one that the Rotgut research grew out of – was meant to be a study of them.’

  ‘Exactly. But let’s say sects, plural. There were many, with some beliefs in common. The Gnostics were contrarians. Religious extremists. And they were already that long before Christ came along: he just gave them a new focus and a new momentum. They embraced the teachings of Jesus because Jesus was ready to stir up the hornets’ nest. They must have felt they’d found a spiritual leader in their own image.

  ‘The Gnostics started from the assumption that most of the Bible – all of the Bible really, as it had been handed down – was utter nonsense. The scribblings of people who really didn’t understand the miracles they were attesting to. The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek gnosis, which meant “knowledge”. These sects believed that a hidden truth existed behind everything: behind the world and behind the word. When God spoke to man, as He did to Adam, and to Moses, and later to New Testament prophets like John the Baptist, He wasn’t ever, at any point, handing down simple, univocal truths – because the universe isn’t a simple place and the truth is a complex thing that has to be hidden from the eyes and ears of the vulgar.’

  ‘When you say “hidden truth”,’ Kennedy asked, ‘are you talking about codes? Is that the point here?’

  Gassan raised an austere eyebrow at the interruption from the floor. A hectoring edge crept into his voice. ‘The point, Sergeant Kennedy, is that your enemies – the people who killed your partner, and Stuart Barlow’s team – don’t share your w
orld view. I’m trying to allow you to see them as they are, without the parallax errors you impose by your own values. No, I don’t mean codes, as such. That’s only a small part of what I mean. The Gnostics did use cyphers, and clearly the cypher that Barlow found has to be read in that context. But these people saw the whole of the created world as one colossal hidden message: the will and word of God, expressed in other things. And they believed that most holy texts are just … ham-fisted approximations of a message that the great mass of people are born without the capacity to understand.

  ‘I’m telling you this because what I say next would sound strange without that preamble. In the Gnostic tradition, the heroes and villains of the Bible are not those you’d be most likely to recognise.’

  ‘They think Jesus went over to the dark side of the Force?’

  ‘No, the Gnostic tradition is very kind to Jesus. It’s God they have a problem with.’

  Kennedy smiled and shrugged: I’ll bite.

  ‘The Gnostic sects believed that the creator and ruler of our world, commonly worshipped as the ultimate god and source of all goodness, was actually a far lesser being – a flawed entity sometimes known as Laldabaoth. The real god is somewhere else, far above our perceptions and our plane of existence.’

  ‘Wait,’ Kennedy pleaded. ‘If these Gnostics were renegade Christians, or renegade Jews, or whatever, then they had to believe that God made the world. It’s right there in the Bible – even if you didn’t manage to read past chapter one.’

  ‘Certainly, a god made the world. But which one? Remember, these are people who pride themselves on reading between the lines – on finding the meanings that the ignorant miss. In their teachings, the ultimate God is a being of transcendent goodness and purity, who does not himself inhabit the universe of created things. Within that universe – our universe – there are beings of great power: beings who would be like ants compared with the ultimate God, but would still appear as gods to us. One of these beings, whatever you decide to call them, made the earth. And he’s quite happy to claim our worship, even though, in the Gnostics’ opinion, he doesn’t deserve it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not what, Sergeant? Please frame your questions as complete sentences.’

  Kennedy ground her teeth, not enjoying this at all. A trail of murdered men and women shouldn’t lead to a schoolroom, especially one where you had to put your hand up before you could speak. ‘Why does the god-who-made-the-world not deserve to be worshipped?’ she asked, stonily.

  ‘Because he did such a terrible job of it. Because he made evil, and sickness, poverty and hunger; the imperfect balance of the seasons which makes us die of too much heat or too much cold; flood and fire and pestilence and all the rest of it. Frankly, the Gnostics thought the world was a botched job and they weren’t interested in clapping its creator on the shoulder and telling him how wonderful he was. They were looking up, past him, to the sphere of perfection beyond – which they called, some of them, sometimes, when they sullied it with a name at all, the realm of Barbelo.

  ‘Read in this way, and with Yahweh seen – for the most part – as another name for the imperfect, the limited and limiting god of the fallen world, the Bible becomes a very different story. Those biblical figures who are paragons of obedience become fools and vectors of folly, to be shunned rather than revered. Adam is a coward who willingly takes the yoke. Eve is the brave soul who looks behind the curtain, plays outside the rules.’

  ‘And is punished for her sins.’

  ‘Oh, they’re both punished, Sergeant. And so are their blameless children, and their children’s children, and so on. God – the lesser god, Laldabaoth – is a sadist and a psychopath: doing what you’re told is no defence against his whimsical sense of justice. So the heroes of Genesis are disobedient Eve, the wise serpent who taught her, and Cain, her rebellious son. And when we get to Jesus, the moral perspective changes even more radically.’

  ‘You said Jesus still got to be the hero.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘The son of god.’

  ‘The son of …?’

  Kennedy breathed out heavily. ‘The son of the big, pure god. Not the evil one.’

  ‘Exactly, Sergeant. Jesus came from Barbelo, bringing his precious wisdom to the fallen world. And although he died for it, that too was part of the plan. Sounds a lot like the New Testament you already know and love, I imagine.’

  ‘It’s familiar,’ Kennedy allowed.

  ‘Well, don’t get too comfortable. In 1983, in Geneva, a professional intermediary – not a fence, strictly speaking, but someone who knew fences and did a broadly similar job – offered for sale to interested bodies or institutions a document. A codex. A priceless antiquity. It was a lost gospel.’

  ‘You told me once that there were hundreds of those things out there, professor.’

  ‘Not like this one. This was the Gospel of Judas.’

  ‘The Judas? Backstabbing Iscariot Judas? The man who betrayed the Messiah?’

  ‘Or,’ said Gassan, with something like a bravura flourish, ‘the man who became the Messiah.’

  He allowed a pause for effect that was probably longer than necessary. Kennedy waited him out, tired of the choric role that he’d allotted her. Eventually, with an austere sniff, like a man casting pearls before swine, the professor resumed. ‘The Gospel of Judas, so called – the Codex Tchacos, to give it its official designation – is an appallingly damaged document. And most of that damage came when the idiot who’d dug it up, and his friends, agents and satraps, were hauling it around the world in an attempt to sell it and make their fortunes. They did everything that you’re not supposed to do to a fragile papyrus, except possibly to wipe their backsides upon it. You might be forgiven for thinking that some of its interim custodians wanted to destroy rather than preserve it.

  ‘So the Judas Gospel, as we have it – as we have it in the Codex Tchacos – is in a very fragmentary form. Only thirteen pages of the original thirty-one survived even in partial form, and the decay and disintegration were extreme. Still, enough remained to make it clear that the actual work must be an astounding document indeed.’

  ‘Astounding in what way?’ Kennedy demanded.

  ‘It focuses on the relationship between Judas and Christ – and it portrays that relationship as unique and intense. In fact, the other eleven disciples feature mainly as comic relief. They understand nothing of Jesus’s true mission on earth, and their misinterpretations cause Jesus to get somewhat snitty and sarcastic with them at several points. Judas, by contrast, gets it – gets the message without being told. He’s a Gnostic: one of the many different sorts and varieties. He belongs to an already ancient cult that reads between the lines of the Bible. He knows that great truths must be hidden and he knows why. Consequently, it’s to Judas that Jesus entrusts the most delicate part of his plan.’

  ‘You mean Jesus actually wanted—’

  ‘Yes, Sergeant. Jesus asks Judas to betray him. It was essential to his mission. He must suffer, and die, so that his message would never be lost. He must be attacked and destroyed by someone close to him and trusted by him: the power of that narrative was the means by which his teachings would be dispersed to the world. Judas was an active collaborator in Christ’s thoroughly worked-out plan.’

  ‘All right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I admit, that’s novel. Arresting, even. But it’s not something anyone would kill for, is it?’

  ‘It was once. Irenaeus warned against the Judas Gospel explicitly in his Adversus Haereses, of which we’ve already spoken. Athanasius of Alexandria talked in rather more sinister terms about “cleansing the church of defilement” by texts like this. People did die for reading and disseminating the Judas Gospel. They died in large numbers, and they – by they, I mean the Gnostic churches, those who professed the faith of the serpent, Eve, Cain and Judas – ultimately disappeared from history.

  ‘In the modern world, though … well, the Judas Gospel in the truncated form of t
he Codex Tchacos has been in the public domain for several years now. The translation we have – partial translation, I mean, with holes you could drive a bus through – dates from 2006. Rodolphe Kasser and his people were the authors, and National Geographic helped with the funding. Nobody in that group, so far as I know, has been fired upon, stabbed through the heart or flung down a staircase.’

  Gassan paused again and sat down with a gesture of resignation, giving up the charade. Maybe that reference to Stuart Barlow’s death had soured the pleasure of showing off his erudition.

  ‘So what’s changed?’ Kennedy asked, as Gassan stared at his hands, folded in his lap.

  ‘The Rotgut text,’ the professor said, in an entirely different tone of voice. ‘It’s an intact version of the Judas Gospel. Moreover, it has sleeve notes – instructions to whoever was carrying it as to what to do, and what not to do, with the message.’

  ‘Go on,’ Kennedy said, because it looked at that moment as if Gassan might come to the point and then shy away from it, unable or unwilling to elucidate the real mystery.

  ‘Well, you see, Sergeant, if Jesus’s plan was to die in agony on the cross, the disciple who understood his needs well enough to help with that plan was the greatest of all, and carried out a service to the Godhead that was infinitely precious. If Christ ransomed and redeemed us, it was through Judas’s sacrifice that he was able to do so.’

  ‘Judas’s sacrifice?’ Kennedy repeated, momentarily thrown. ‘What did Judas sacrifice?’

  Gassan shrugged as though the answer were obvious. ‘The respect of his peers. The goodwill of all the world. The verdict of history. And his life, of course, but one imagines that was a relatively small part of the equation. Still, the death of Judas bears comparison with that of Christ. And in the complete gospel – in the Rotgut version, I mean, as translated by Barlow – Judas is offered a reward, in exchange for his faithful service.’

  ‘Thirty pieces of silver?’