The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘Do nothing that is not warranted,’ Mariam quoted. ‘Do everything that is needful.’

  ‘And always – we must infer – be mindful of where our actions fall along that line.’

  ‘I understand, Tannanu.’

  ‘But you’re grieving, Mariam, for your cousins. The hurt you feel … if I know you at all, I would venture to say that it is more real to you, and bigger to you, than anything else in this world.’

  ‘It is not bigger, or more real, than God, Tannanu.’

  ‘Hence,’ Kuutma answered, gently, ‘I specified this world. You loved them. You fought with them and shared with them everything of yourself that was godly to share. What you’ve lost … I know, believe me, how great it is.’ When she didn’t answer, he went on. ‘If you wanted to go home now, there’d be no shame. Someone else could finish this and you could heal in the company of other loved ones.’

  ‘Tannanu, forgive me.’ Her voice had taken on a harshness now. ‘If I flinched from this, because of some emotional pain, some imagined wound to my heart, how could I not be ashamed? When Ezei and Cephas gave everything, how could I weigh out what I give and say this is enough, or this is too much? You sent me out. Don’t – I beg you – call me home again before my work is all done.’

  He bowed his head, in a gesture of respect for her that she couldn’t see and would never know about. ‘Barthi, I will not.’

  There was a silence. ‘What is that music?’ Mariam asked, in a more subdued tone, as though her victory over him had exhausted her.

  ‘The Rolling Stones,’ he told her. ‘A song called “Paint it Black”.’

  ‘Is the sound pleasant to you, Tannanu?’

  Kuutma felt embarrassed. ‘No. Of course not. It’s a monstrous cacophony. I’m listening only to align my thoughts with those of my quarry. This is Tillman. Tillman’s music. He’s listened to it several times since the fire, and I wanted to understand what emotions it might give rise to.’

  ‘Have you found an answer, Tannanu?’

  Kuutma was on firmer ground here. ‘Despair, barthi. He’s feeling despair.’

  47

  Kennedy had feared that being on Flight 124 would feel eerie and unnerving, but after the first five or ten minutes it was just a flight. She took the window seat she’d specified when she booked, refused the complimentary drinks and pretzels, and settled in to watch the ground as it unrolled below her.

  City, suburb, desert, desert, desert. A stone quarry, a small town, a dam and more desert. As the plane gained altitude, she became less and less able to distinguish individual features of the terrain. After a while, she could only tell built-up areas by their colour: sprawls of grey against the greater sprawls of tawny brown, turd brown and olive drab.

  At twenty-seven thousand feet up, revelations were hard to come by.

  She could see the coastline, obviously, and rivers stood out pretty clearly. Roads were harder but you could guess where they were sometimes, from the interruptions in the lines of mountains or where the area around them had been cleared. Was there a road, maybe, where a road shouldn’t be? A road that serviced no obvious destination?

  But that couldn’t be it. Anything as permanent as that would be seen by the passengers of every flight that took this route. What she was looking for – what she needed – was something transitory: it would have been a one-off event. So the flight could give her a sense of the possible scale of the thing, but that was all. She was up here to play twenty questions, and she was still at the ‘Is it bigger than a breadbox?’ stage.

  Roads, then, but not the traffic on the roads. Manmade structures, if they were very tall or reasonably extensive. Other planes: she saw several of those, passing by at leisurely speeds in the middle distance.

  And lights. As evening came on, the landscape turned into a lattice, some areas lit up, others in profound darkness. Okay, that might be something: a light where no light should be? But of course, as it got darker, it got harder to see the salient features of the landscape, so you had less and less to orient yourself by. Who could say where a light shouldn’t be or where it was in relation to anything else? The pilot would know. And the copilot. They’d have instruments to go by, as well as sight. Would Brand have downed a whole plane to kill the cabin crew?

  She watched one of the lights below flashing on and off, with a fixed periodicity: visible for three seconds, dark for five. It was over towards the coast, so she guessed it was a lighthouse. Could 124 have seen and registered some other kind of beacon, lit to send a signal meant only for the Judas people? They loved their codes after all: maybe they spoke to each other across the darkness with flashing torches or those massive, slatted searchlights that RAF bomber command used back in the Second World War.

  In the age of the mobile phone, that would be a really asinine thing to do, wouldn’t it?

  The plane began its descent into Mexico City – after the sparseness of the deep desert, a cluster of lights within lights as thick as enfolded galaxies – and Kennedy gave it up at last as a bad job.

  She had almost three hours to kill before the return flight. She wandered the concourse like a grim ghost, finding most of the shops and cafés already closed for the night. Finally she found a bar, sat down and ordered a large margarita. When in Rome, she figured, you should at least make a token effort.

  A woman at the other end of the bar was watching her, covertly and intermittently. She looked young; maybe pretty, too, but wearing way too much make-up. Not Kennedy’s type exactly, because Kennedy preferred larger than life curves, but interesting all the same, with a slender and no doubt quite supple body. She was wearing very drab casuals: blouse and slacks in indeterminate earth colours, which she could have gotten away with if she’d had more of a tan but just looked muddy and off-white next to the clear, light skin of her arms.

  Kennedy didn’t feel the least bit horny, but she was as tense as hell and she considered, for the first time in a long time, the possible restorative effects of a quick tumble. As a first, exploratory step in that direction, she kept her gaze on the woman – so that the next time she shot Kennedy a furtive glance, their eyes met.

  The effect wasn’t what Kennedy was expecting. Without moving, the woman drew in on herself. Not like someone shy or withdrawn, but like someone tensing for a confrontation. Christ. Kennedy had obviously read her wrong. Maybe the woman had made her as a cop somehow. Maybe she had a thing against cops.

  Kennedy was about to finish her drink and leave, but the woman beat her to it. She put her glass down, with a little more force than was necessary, beckoned the barman over and spoke with him for a few seconds before putting a wad of bills into his hands. The barman shrugged, counted, nodded. The woman left and Kennedy checked out her retreating bum with a vestigial twinge of regret.

  She took her time with the margarita, allowing the alcohol to soothe her back from partial arousal to something close to calm, closer to resignation. She made a sign to the barman to bring her the tab and he shook his head.

  ‘You’re good, ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘You’re good. The lady covered your drink. And she said to give you this.’

  He put something down on the bar in front of Kennedy. It looked like a quarter until she picked it up and registered first its weight, then its irregular shape, finally the partially erased uncial letters around its edge. She had the twin of that coin in her wallet, given her by Tillman in the Crown and Anchor on Surrey Street.

  She dropped the coin and sprinted out of the bar. She quartered the whole concourse at a quick jog-trot, hoping against hope that she might run into the woman again. There were few enough people around that she would have spotted her at once, but of course the woman wouldn’t have left the coin if she’d intended to stay. Kennedy slowed to a walk at last, breathless from more than just the running, her heart pounding in her chest.

  It had been … what had it been? A taunt. A provocation. A promise. The woman at the bar was on
e of the people she was looking for: the Judas tribe. And she’d allowed herself to be seen, as if to say to Kennedy that it didn’t matter how easy or how obvious they made it for her, she still wouldn’t get there, still wouldn’t put all the pieces together.

  Or maybe, that it didn’t even matter if she did.

  Anger had swept through Kennedy like a hot wave, but now it broke, and she found herself strangely calm. Whoever the woman was, revealing herself like this had been a reckless thing to do: seen in the context of centuries or millennia of obsessive secrecy, it was an inexplicable mistake. Possibly she saw it as a show of strength, but it wasn’t, couldn’t be that. It was some emotion that she hadn’t entirely been able to control, working through her and distorting her judgement. Kennedy remembered, suddenly, that she and Tillman had heard a woman’s voice, screaming, on the night when Dovecote burned. Was it possible that this could be the same woman? That she’d followed Kennedy all the way across the Atlantic? Wildly unlikely: if they’d been so ready to kill her on that night of blood and fire, why hold back now?

  Someone else, then. But someone who wanted her to know that she was known: that she was pursued, even as she continued with her own pursuit.

  So the real confrontation wouldn’t be long in coming. And now Kennedy was forewarned, so if she wasn’t forearmed that was shame on her.

  It was two in the morning when the shuttle flight landed at Bullhead, and after three when she got back to the hotel in Peason. John-Bird was her driver once again, but she forestalled his Colorado anecdotes by falling asleep instantly in the back of the cab. He kept right on talking anyway. Surfacing from her doze every now and again, Kennedy experienced the wash of words as bizarrely comforting: it felt good not to be alone right then. By way of thanks, she mumbled a ‘really?’ in response to whatever fluvial fact he was regaling her with, then promptly drifted off to sleep again.

  Staggering up to her room, she intended to collapse face down on the bed and sleep some more, probably without even bothering to get undressed. But the red light on the bedside phone was flashing. She picked up the receiver and dialled 3 for voicemail, holding the handset jammed under her chin as she wrestled her shoes off her slightly swollen feet.

  ‘Hey, Sergeant.’ Webster Gayle’s voice, hale and hearty and over-loud. ‘I hope you got something out of your trip south of the border besides cheap tequila. Can’t wait to hear how it went. Listen, we can’t put this off any more. You got to talk to Moggs, so’s you and her can put your heads together and reach critical mass. I promise I’ll stand way back out of the blast radius. She’s an early riser, so I thought we could do breakfast. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs at seven-thirty. Sleep tight.’

  One margarita, Kennedy reflected, wearily, as she rolled into bed and pulled the covers half-over her. One margarita, and nothing to look forward to but breakfast with ghosts. Not nearly tight enough.

  48

  It was clear to Kennedy inside of a minute that the relationship between Eileen Moggs and Webster Gayle went way beyond the professional. A minute or so after that, she could also tell that the man and the woman saw the relationship in different terms.

  Sheriff Gayle was casual and matter-of-fact in introducing Moggs, calling her ‘a very good friend of mine’. The phrase came from the lexicon of TV talk-show hosts and meant – in itself – as near to nothing as made no difference. But Moggs’s smile as he said it seemed charged, momentarily, with both pride and pain. It asserted that the sheriff had no better friend; and it admitted, at the same time, that there was no better word for what she was to him.

  The two women shook hands and sized each other up. ‘Oh, you’re a cop, all right,’ Moggs said, with a chuckle.

  ‘Got the look?’ Kennedy asked, ruefully.

  ‘In spades, darlin’, and you can take that as a compliment. My papa was a cop and so are both of my brothers. Anyone who’s got that set to their shoulders, I tend to think of them as being at the very least a kissing cousin.’

  Which explains why you’re dating the sheriff, Kennedy thought. She allowed Moggs to shoo her through a bead curtain into the kitchen, where waffles, eggs and bacon awaited her. They were surprisingly good, as was the coffee and the orange juice – the latter, apparently, squeezed by hand using an old-fashioned crank-operated juicer that had pride of place on one of the countertops. Kennedy had been feeling physically and emotionally lagged, but the breakfast restored her, and her replies to Moggs’s good-natured interrogation became steadily less monosyllabic.

  So how long had Kennedy been in the Detective Division? Six years, give or take.

  And had she always wanted to be a cop? Pretty much always. It was a family tradition (‘Usually is,’ Moggs agreed).

  Was this her first visit to the States? No, second. Kennedy had spent a week in New York once, with a girlfriend – or girl friend, rather; one of many false moves in a relationship that had remained bafflingly platonic despite all the signs of developing into something more primal and fulfilling. Kennedy didn’t mention the girl: she had no idea how Moggs and Gayle felt about homosexuality, and she didn’t want to bring additional awkwardness into a situation that was already slopping over with the stuff.

  ‘I went to London once,’ Moggs confided. ‘Had a really rotten time there. It was high summer and it didn’t do anything but rain. Took the next month or so just to get dry again. Also, I had to point at the menus in restaurants because I discovered I couldn’t speak the language – even though it’s meant to be the same language!’ She laughed uproariously at her own joke. Kennedy laughed along.

  ‘So anyway,’ Moggs said, just as suddenly serious. ‘This murder investigation of yours … Web won’t talk to me about it because he doesn’t want to abuse his position – me being a journalist and him being an officer of the law – but he said that you might want to talk about it, and if you did, he couldn’t stop you. So I thought, hell, if I show you mine, you might be prepared to show me yours. What do you say?’

  Kennedy decided to go for blunt honesty. ‘I can’t answer that until I know what yours is.’ And if it turns out to be ghosts, I’m probably going to have to throw your hospitality back in your face.

  Moggs conceded the point with a grin. ‘That’s true. That’s very true. Listen, though. Web’s a good man, isn’t he? I mean, you only just met him and I bet you could tell that. He’s so good, he thinks everyone else is good, too. That’s kind of a weakness, in a cop.’

  ‘Sitting right here!’ Gayle protested.

  ‘Shut up, Web,’ Moggs told him, with affection. She kept her eyes on Kennedy the whole time and there was maybe a bit of a glint in them. ‘But I’m a news hack, Sergeant, so I know most folks is dirty. I imagine you’d agree with that, right?’

  ‘I’d say fifty-fifty,’ Kennedy allowed, warily.

  ‘Well,’ said Moggs. ‘I wouldn’t. I’d say the odds are way longer than that. So here’s how it works. Web gets a message from an out-of-towner, a fellow cop, and it’s a request for help. And Web’s first thought in that situation is, How can I help this person? Whereas my first thought is, What’s the scam, here? What do I stand to lose? What does this look like if you walk around it a few times and poke it with a stick? You get me?’

  Kennedy saw the question behind the question and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that she’d been blown out of the water. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I get you.’

  ‘So while Web rolls out the red carpet for you and tells me all these amazing things about you – how smart you are, and how polite, and the amazing accent and everything – I can’t help thinking, So who is this Sergeant Kennedy and what exactly is her angle? Because everyone’s got an angle, right?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘I guess that’s true.’

  ‘And your angle is that you’re not a cop any more. You got busted back down to civilian, or else you quit – depends who I ask. But you forgot to mention that to Web when you asked him to assist you in your investigation.’

  Kennedy w
as surprised to find herself blushing. She knew it was just a matter of time before someone checked her credentials and found that they were no good. She hadn’t expected the moment to be so painful when it came.

  She turned to Gayle. ‘I’m really sorry, Sheriff,’ she said, meaning it. ‘You must think I was using you pretty cynically, and maybe I was. But you wouldn’t believe what I’ve done already to make this case. What I’ve lost. And I couldn’t give it up. Even when it stopped being mine, when I stopped being police, I couldn’t give it up.’

  She stood, ready to leave either on her own or in his custody, but Gayle broke into a chuckle at her strained, solemn face.

  ‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ he told her. ‘I don’t see what you said as a lie, so much. I reckon there’s some people are cops before they get a badge, and they go on being cops after they give the badge back. Or they never get a badge, like Moggs here, but still got the instincts and the way of looking at the world.’

  ‘It’s in the blood,’ Moggs said, immodestly. ‘Seriously, Ms Kennedy – I guess I shouldn’t call you sergeant – I wasn’t trying to rub your nose in any of this. I was just telling you that we know. We figured you out. But you don’t have any jurisdiction over here anyway, and I know for a fact that you were working this case until your last day on the job. All you done wrong, in the world’s eyes, is not to stop. And the other thing is, Web hasn’t broken any rules in helping you. All of this is public domain stuff, as far as that goes. The County Sheriff can tell who he likes about a case in progress, if they ask.’

  ‘Although he generally doesn’t,’ Gayle interjected. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I’d be this indiscreet with anyone who just walked in off the street, Sergeant.’