The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  By this time it was after midday, they were on the fourth pot of coffee, and Gayle had relaxed his strictures against the bourbon. He took a slug of it now, in a tiny shotglass labelled in red letters, ‘A Present from Tijuana’. Silhouettes of a sombrero and a cactus provided additional verification.

  ‘I’m not seeing how this picture fits into your picture,’ Moggs said to Kennedy, scrolling through her Bonville notes, to which she’d been adding in the course of the morning. ‘Your Judas people kill anyone who finds out about their secret bible, right? Are we assuming that Bonville came across this Rotgut Gospel somewhere down in Mexico?’

  Kennedy had been pondering the exact same thing and had come up with something like an answer. ‘I think they cast their net wider than that,’ she said, as Moggs resumed her rapid typing. ‘The point about people not seeing the Gospel of Judas isn’t just a blind article of faith. If it was, they’d have killed everyone who read the mangled version that surfaced a few years back – the Codex Tchacos. I think the point is that they don’t want anyone to know that they exist or that they ever existed. The complete version of the gospel, the one Barlow got from the Rotgut, talks about their internal rules and the divisions of their society. It makes it clear that the worship of Judas was something that defined a community. A tribe. That seems to be what they want to keep secret.’

  ‘An ancient Judean tribe? There’s still no logical through-line.’

  ‘Well,’ Kennedy said, ‘maybe there is. We know that Bonville travelled the world, advising people – local government people, public agencies – about power usage. So he had access to a whole lot of data about that stuff, about patterns of power flow and power consumption, at different times, in different places. Suppose he found a piece of data that didn’t fit into the pattern?’

  Moggs’ hands, poised over the keyboard, froze. She turned to stare at Kennedy. ‘Power usage where there shouldn’t be any,’ she said.

  ‘Exactly. Or just heavier than it ought to be, for a particular place and a particular population density. He could have found out where the Judas people are based, purely on the basis of those statistics. He wouldn’t even know, necessarily, what it was he’d found. But he started to ask the wrong questions or look in the wrong places. And they shut him down before he could put two and two together and get four.’

  Gayle cast an anxious look at Moggs’s computer. Kennedy could read his mind. ‘We’ve got to be really careful who we tell about this,’ she agreed. ‘In fact, I’m thinking we should keep it between the three of us for now. Eileen, do you have a laptop?’

  Moggs nodded.

  ‘Save those notes on to a pen-drive and move them over to the laptop – and keep the laptop off the net. If they could get to Bonville’s computer, they can get to yours.’

  ‘Maybe I should unplug my home computer, too,’ Moggs muttered. ‘I can use the machine down at the Chronicler office for internet stuff.’

  Kennedy shook her head. ‘No, keep your machine here plugged in. If they were to check up on you, we’d want them to find nothing at all out of the ordinary. Everything as it should be and everything smelling of roses. If they see us coming, they’ll come for us first. Believe me, you do not want that to happen.’

  ‘What’s the next step?’ Moggs asked.

  ‘Santa Claus,’ Gayle answered, before Kennedy could get the words out. ‘We go on up to the evidence store again and we see whether anything of Bonville’s is either in his box or in among the anonymous stuff. Anything that might tell us what it was he found.’

  ‘That’s my feeling, too,’ said Kennedy. ‘And we do that right now. If we get no joy there, we go back to the New York office and ask for a list of all the places Bonville went in the past year, say. That gives us a shortlist.’

  ‘Might give us more than that,’ said Moggs. ‘If you cross-referenced that list against the files on the New York server, you might find that there was only one discrepancy – one place that doesn’t have any data saved for it.’

  They agreed, in the end, to work both ends at the same time. Moggs would stay at the apartment and place that call. Gayle and Kennedy would drive out to the storage sheds at Santa Claus and search for smoking guns there. That was Gayle’s expression and it made Kennedy wince.

  ‘As a personal favour,’ she asked him, ‘can we just say “search for evidence”?’

  50

  Highway 93 was clear as far as the horizon, in both directions, again. All the same, Kennedy couldn’t keep from checking the rear-view mirror every minute or so. She didn’t trust the desert to remain empty.

  ‘This is going to take some explaining,’ Gayle ruminated. ‘And as soon as we start into explaining, it’s going to be federal. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Those people got the resources after all. And I guess once the risk is spread that wide, it ain’t a risk any more. There’ll be no reason for anyone to come after us, if all this stuff gets to be out in the open. But the feds have got their own rules and they’re powerful hard to negotiate with. You might find your Arizona vacation a little longer than you expected, Sergeant. If they think they’re likely to need what you know, they’ll want to keep you right here ready to hand. And I know you ain’t got your own people to go to bat for you. But keeping you out of the picture … well, that’d be real hard at this point.’

  ‘You don’t have to lie for me, Sheriff,’ Kennedy told him. ‘You play it exactly the way you think it needs to be played and if any rules have gotten broken or bent along the way, feel free to put that on to me.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Okay. But I bulled my way in here by lying to you – and the lie’s on record. Nobody but us needs to know that you saw through it. You were helping a fellow cop. It all rolled out of that.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gayle said. ‘I like that version.’

  The Biscayne backfired, the report sounding like an embarrassed cough.

  They rolled off the highway, parked the car and went on into the storage shed. It was mid-afternoon now, even hotter than it had been on their first visit. Gayle switched on the AC and they took refuge in the Biscayne until the tiny, outmatched unit could start to make a difference.

  ‘You and Moggs been together a long time?’ Kennedy asked.

  Gayle actually blushed a little. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s kind of … you know, what you hear ain’t always …’ He tailed off, hitting the limits of articulation, then rallied with a question of his own. ‘What about you? There a Mr Sergeant Kennedy, Sergeant Kennedy? There a special man in your life?’

  His evasiveness made her sick of her own equivocations. ‘I’m gay,’ she said. ‘But there isn’t anyone right now. Been a while since I got down to any serious misbehaviour.’

  Gayle’s blush deepened. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well … different strokes, for …’ That was another sentence that wasn’t destined to be finished. ‘I reckon we can probably make a start,’ he said, and got out of the car again.

  It was true that the storage shed had cooled a little now. They went straight to the right-hand aisle, picking up the red folder along the way.

  Like a general, Gayle outlined their plan of campaign. He’d brought two pairs of non-reactant gloves, one of which he handed to her, and a bottle of spray disinfectant. ‘It’s everything from here through to here,’ he said, pointing with nods of the head as he anointed both his own hands and hers. ‘We made an effort to group similar types of thing together, but to be honest, it depended on who was writing it up. Anstruther had his own categories, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, and Scuff is just plain lazy, so I don’t think there’s much we can afford to leave out.’ He was slipping the gloves on as he spoke. ‘One thirty-eight to one ninety-seven is clothes, and we turned out all the pockets, so let’s keep them as a last resort. Chances are, there’ll be real slim pickings there. One ninety-eight is right here, so that gives us … five units, or sixty boxes, give or take. I guess I’ll start from one end,
you can start from the other, and we’ll meet in the middle.’

  Kennedy nodded and went to her place, putting her hands into the gloves as she went and wriggling the fingers into place. Gayle called out after her.

  ‘Sergeant?’

  She turned. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t care who you share your bed with. I was just brought up not to talk about it. No offence meant.’

  He looked ridiculously earnest. Kennedy smiled.

  ‘None taken,’ she said.

  ‘Okay, then. Good hunting.’

  ‘And to you, Sheriff.’

  The contents of the boxes were a tragi-comic miscellany. She’d gotten a glimpse of them, of course, when she opened the red folder the first time around. Now she had to sort through them, and it turned out to be a task filled with horror and pathos, like trying to read the future in the entrails of dead children. But it was the past she was trying to read and she couldn’t afford to be squeamish.

  The objects were banal in themselves. What made them terrible was their specificity: a wallet with photos of two grinning kids, a boy and a girl, the girl slightly cross-eyed; a silver fountain pen inscribed MG – for forty years; a key chain whose fob was a chunk of crystal into which a 3D image, the portrait of a patrician older woman, had been laser-etched; an MP3 player in a case decorated with comic book panels, on to which the name Stu Pearce had been written in smudged black marker. The stumps of sheared-off lives, still raw, when the screaming had long since stopped and the bodies were underground.

  She steeled herself against the emotions rising inside her: they’d only slow her down and make it harder to think. She was looking for something that might conceivably have belonged to Peter Bonville and might in some way contain a message. A CD, a USB stick, a voice recorder, a Walkman, a diary. Eventually they’d get to the phones, and Gayle would have to wrestle with the Fourth Amendment and his conscience.

  But it was Gayle who struck gold, in the end, and it probably didn’t even take all that long, counting by the clock. Subjectively, every minute spent poring through these cardboard burial vaults was a day.

  ‘Sergeant.’

  She turned to look at him. He was holding up a notebook: A5, or maybe a little smaller, with the words WALMART VALUE emblazoned across its red cover.

  ‘Definite?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Or only maybe?’

  Gayle turned the pages with gingerly care. ‘Well, right at the start here we’ve got a list of addresses, headed up with the words “Switching stations”. Then there’s a second list of “Hubs”. Lot of figures in columns, and then we get this. “Visit, Saturday: Siemens power generation service, Poniente 116 590, Industrial Vallejo, Metro Azcapotzalco, Mexico City, Distrito Federal: matters arising”. It’s looking pretty solid, I’d say.’

  Kennedy thought so, too. She came and read over Gayle’s shoulder as he turned the pages. Most of it was unfathomable, but it all stank of electricity. Measurements in amps and volts, references to generating capacity, peak and off-peak averages, resistor tolerances, fluctuation by time and by district, where the districts had names like Azcapotzalco, Alvaro Obregon, Magdalena.

  Three pages from the end they found another table, with the heading in block capitals, XOCHIMILCO ANOMALIES, and lists of numbers, some with multiple question marks appended as though they defied all logic and reason.

  ‘What do you think?’ Gayle asked.

  ‘I think it’s paydirt,’ Kennedy said.

  They had to decide whether to continue with the search or not. There could be more: digital data in some form or other that would corroborate and substantiate these handwritten notes. But what they had already was enough to bring the house down and the feds in, effectively filling all the blanks in their evidence trail. Michael Brand led back to Stuart Barlow and forward to the sabotaging of Flight 124. Flight 124 led to Bonville and Bonville led to … this. A place called Xochimilco. A place in Mexico, presumably. A place that was important, in some way, to the Judas tribe, and would prove their existence.

  Kennedy weighed that against the numbing prospect of trawling through yet more boxes of mortal remains. The equation yielded only one answer.

  Her eyes met Gayle’s and he nodded, seeming to acknowledge everything she’d thought but hadn’t said. ‘It’s enough,’ he said. ‘Feels like it should be anyway. Let’s leave it to the big boys to figure out from here.’

  Just as he had with Michael Brand’s dollar bill – which he now took the opportunity to put back – Gayle insisted on following evidence protocols, signing the notebook out into his own possession. Kennedy waited by the door, feeling a weird sense of calm descend over her. Now that she had something, some weapon – however small – to aim at the bastards who had killed Chris Harper, it was as though she only had to let herself go now and gravity would reel her in. She knew that wasn’t true – that in fact she had another gauntlet to run back in the UK very soon – but it was a pleasant feeling to indulge just for a moment.

  ‘Okay,’ said Gayle, closing the folder. ‘I guess we’re done.’

  There was another wait while he locked the shed up and then they headed for the car, Gayle a few steps in front.

  ‘Should we call Eileen?’ Kennedy asked him. ‘I’d like to know how she got on with the New York people.’

  ‘I’ll call her from the car, on the hands-free,’ said Gayle. ‘I’ll feel a lot happier once we—’

  Arriving simultaneously with its own sound – a sharp snap like the cracking of a whip – the bullet took him through the shoulder, close to the neck. It must have passed clean through because even as blood fountained forward from the entry wound, Kennedy could see a red ring widening at the back of Gayle’s white shirt: expanding and filling out like a sun coming up, then drooping and losing its symmetry like one of the melting clocks in a Dali painting. The sheriff gave a grunt of astonishment and pain. He toppled sideways, crumpling into an ungainly shape as he hit the ground.

  Kennedy was too shocked, too dumbfounded, even to dive for cover, and in any case there was no cover to be found: the Biscayne was the nearest, and that was ten yards away, in the same direction from which the shot had come. Tearing her eyes from Gayle’s sprawled body, she looked past the car towards the leering Father Christmas on the porch of the nearest chalet.

  Santa wasn’t the shooter, though: the shooter stepped out from behind him now, the gun raised in her hand. It was the woman from the bar, at Benito Juárez airport. The woman who had left the silver coin for Kennedy to find. She wore no makeup at all now, so the red, scorched flesh that marred the beauty of her face was shockingly distinct.

  ‘Just you and me,’ the woman said, in a voice indefinably accented but still distinct. ‘That was how it should have been last time, you murderous whore. But who knows what God wants of us? He made me wait. And now – finally – He’ll make you bleed.’

  51

  This close, in full daylight, there was no mistaking what the woman was: underneath the burns, she had the same death pallor as the other assassins, both those in Luton and the ones Tillman had killed at Dovecote.

  Unarmed and in the open, Kennedy knew she had no chance. She took a step back and to the side, away from the woman, hesitant, uncertain, as though she might run, in reality putting herself a little closer to the car.

  The woman laughed, with real amusement. She held up her hand and silver flashed. Not a coin this time but the keys to the Biscayne, which Gayle had left in the ignition because who the hell was going to steal them way out here? She flicked them into the air, made to catch them but at the last moment let them fall at her feet, trod down on them with her boot heel. ‘There isn’t anywhere,’ the woman said. ‘I wasn’t so stupid. But look. Now I will do something stupid.’

  She lowered her gun, turned it over and slammed the heel of her hand down on the mag-catch. The magazine slid out part-way, on to her palm. She drew it the rest of the way and threw it down in the sand. Then she tossed the gun over her shoulder with a negligent gesture
. She looked at Kennedy and shrugged theatrically. Well, now.

  Kennedy’s reaction was immediate and instinctive – and wrong, she knew, even as she was doing it. She ran hard at the fish-belly-pale woman, who just stood with her arms at her side and watched her come. With a wordless yell, she swung a punch at that cold, contemptuous face that would have ended up halfway down the woman’s throat if it had connected.

  The woman caught her wrist, turned and threw her – a move that seemed almost improvised but was performed with snake-tongue speed. Kennedy flew through the air on a short, tight arc, smashed into Father Christmas, shattering him to matchwood, hit the wall behind and landed hard.

  She started to scramble up but a dead weight slammed her down. The woman knelt astride her, right hand and left forearm combined to grip her throat in an agonising lock, lifting Kennedy’s head while her knee, dead-centred in-between Kennedy’s shoulder blades, kept Kennedy’s torso pinned flat against the ground.

  ‘This will hurt you much, much more than you imagine,’ the woman murmured, close to her ear. ‘And it will last for a very long time. Your friend will bleed out and die, as we do this. Your other friend, the journalist, is dead already. And the gun that killed them both will be found in your hand – the knife that kills you, in the sheriff’s. Fight. Fight against me, you filthy, broken thing. Let me break you some more. I offer up your pain to God, who loves it.’

  She slammed Kennedy’s head hard against the planks of the porch. Stunned, her ears ringing, Kennedy tried a sideways roll that was unexpectedly successful because the woman was already gone, had stood up and stepped away from her.

  Kennedy climbed groggily to her feet. The woman waited for her and then half-turned to kick her in the stomach with devastating force. Kennedy folded, saw the shovel-hook punch coming but couldn’t dodge it, and was sent staggering backwards. This time she went clean through the door of the chalet, the desiccated wood exploding into dust and splinters.