The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  The woman strode through the door right behind her and was on her again while she was still disentangling herself from the wreckage of the door. She was so fast. Kennedy put up a block: the woman’s hands locked on her arm, one above and one below the elbow, and she leaned, very slightly, from the waist. Intolerable pressure was brought to bear suddenly on the bone of Kennedy’s upper arm. She heard the snap as it gave. She opened her mouth to scream and the woman’s forearm came up from below, hammered her jaw shut, so the sound was just a ratchet clicking of teeth and tongue and half-swallowed breath.

  ‘Be patient,’ the woman said, severely. ‘Pace yourself.’

  A hard rain of punches and jabs drove Kennedy backwards one lurching step at a time, until she slammed into an interior wall. No, it was a solid beam, that jarred every bone in her body. Her vision blurring, she saw the woman shift footing for another attack. She threw herself to the side: the reverse roundhouse kick scythed through the space where she’d been. The wooden beam, five inches square, broke like a twig.

  There were two upsides to this, from Kennedy’s point of view. The first was that it wasn’t her neck that had snapped. The second was that the roof fell in on them both.

  It was a wooden shingle roof, and it held together initially, swinging down at an angle like a giant fly swatter. It hit the woman first, just because she was standing. Not hard enough to take her out but hard enough to hurt her and distract her. Kennedy had a second or so to see it coming and rolled away – agony flared in her broken left arm as the weight of her body bore upon it – but the roof was breaking up now anyway, like a calving glacier, raining sheets of wood and tempests of dust on them both.

  Kennedy elbowed and kneed her way to the left – both knees, only one elbow, her left arm trailing uselessly – as far as the side wall, then got half-upright and made a run for the open doorway, which she could just about see through the suspension of wood pulp, dust and assorted debris.

  She almost made it.

  The knife hit her low down in her back, on the right-hand side, and it went in deep. It felt like a punch at first, and then pure, perfect cold spread out from the impact point. It wasn’t pain: it was the herald of pain, and it brought the pain in its silent, shrieking wake.

  Pure momentum kept Kennedy moving. She took a step, then another, stumbled through the doorway into the clear, baking air, but crashed down on to her knees and pitched forward off the porch into the sand.

  She heard the woman at her back and then the woman’s shadow fell across her.

  ‘No poison,’ the woman said, her voice harsh and ragged. She coughed, once and then a second time. Good! At least the damned dust had got to her. ‘No poison on the blade. Nothing to be found here that would link your death to any other death. And it will be slower this way. We’ll sit together, you and I. I’ll sing to you as you die.’

  Kennedy tried to crawl, one-handed again, her heels scuffing sand, her feet and her right hand finding no purchase. She tried again, levered herself forward a little, slumped again on to her stomach, gulping shallow breaths. Her side wasn’t cold now: it was pulsing with a sort of raggedly rhythmic fire. She didn’t dare to look. She didn’t want to know how much blood she was losing.

  The woman began to tidy away her things, picking up the gun and the magazine, the keys. The keys were fifteen feet or so away and as she bent to retrieve them, she had her back to Kennedy for a moment.

  Kennedy abandoned her pantomime of total immobility and launched herself into a much faster crawl, quickly covering the distance that separated her from Gayle’s body. The woman turned, saw her, began to break into a cold smile and then realised, an instant later, what Kennedy was aiming for. As Kennedy reached the sheriff, the woman slammed the magazine home into her semi-automatic, aimed and fired in one quick, liquid movement. Too quick: the cartridge hung up as it entered the chamber and the gun clicked to no effect.

  The woman dropped the gun and ran towards Kennedy.

  Kennedy pulled the snap-lock strap away from the holster on Gayle’s belt and drew the FN Five-Seven from its sheath. She didn’t even have time to see whether he was still alive, still breathing. She thumbed the safety as she rolled on to her back. Was that the safety? It was where she would expect the safety to be, to the back of the grip and on the left, but maybe she’d just ejected the magazine.

  The gun seemed too light and had a plastic feel, like a child’s toy. The sun was in her eyes now, but the woman’s body as she ran towards Kennedy occulted the sun. That plus the distance compensated for the clumsy, one-handed grip and the blurring of her vision. She thrust her arm out straight in front of her and fired.

  People who like the Five-Seven are impressed by its capacity of twenty rounds. Those who hate it are appalled by the muzzle flash it spits out sometimes, like a searchlight beam full in your eye. Through strobe bursts that seared white on black against the inside of her eyeballs, Kennedy pulled the trigger again and again and again in a steady, mechanical rhythm, moving her wrist through small increments to right and left to give a quartering fire.

  Finally, the gun was empty and the trigger wouldn’t yield any more. She let it fall from her hands.

  When she could move again, the first thing she did – even before ripping up her shirt with her right hand and her teeth to make tourniquets – was check on the woman’s condition. As it turned out, only two of those twenty shots had hit, and one was a surface wound to the woman’s calf.

  The other had gone through the left side of her chest, and from the sounds she was making, it was pretty clear that it had punctured a lung.

  There wasn’t a whole lot that Kennedy could do for her. In any case, Gayle came first. Stanching the sheriff’s shoulder wound with only her right hand in play and the bones of her left arm grating against each other whenever she moved was like juggling chainsaws with barbed wire mittens on. It took a long time and by the time she’d finished, the blood in her own wound was flowing sluggishly, starting to clot. She didn’t dare pull the knife out and start it flowing again, and she couldn’t dress the wound with the knife in place, so she just left it there.

  Gayle’s breathing was so shallow his chest didn’t even seem to move. Kennedy could only detect it by putting her cheek to his mouth and feeling the slight stir of air.

  She called the incident in using the radio in the Biscayne, probably not making much sense by this time because her mind was starting to float away a little. She heard Connie – the bulldog at the despatch desk – shouting, ‘Is Web okay? Is Web okay?’ again and again. Then, ‘Anstruther. Anstruther’s coming.’ Then silence.

  In the silence, the woman’s voice: an obscene chorus of choking, bubbling sounds. Kennedy stumbled across to her, found her livid face painted red like a Hollywood Indian, with the burns and with her own blood.

  Gayle had left his jacket on the Biscayne’s back seat. Kennedy was able to wad it up and get it under the woman’s head and shoulders, which she thought might clear her airways marginally. It didn’t seem to make much difference, though.

  The woman was still trying to talk: in some foreign language at first, full of liquid labials (much less pretty to hear when the liquid was blood) and occasional glottal concatenations, but then in English and finally in some sort of pre-linguistic mewling.

  Before she died, her dark gaze fixed on Kennedy’s face with a feral intensity, she whispered a secret.

  It seemed to give her some comfort that Kennedy heard it and that Kennedy wept.

  PART FOUR

  GINAT’DANIA

  52

  The thing about despair was that it didn’t move. It stayed right where it was, like a train abandoned on a siding.

  Tillman had avoided despair for thirteen years, simply by virtue of having an agenda. There were things that needed to be done, and he did them, going from A to B to C with ruthless focus and inexhaustible patience. It might even look impressive from the outside – some kind of achievement, some great act of will – but in fac
t it was just his refuge, his salvation.

  Now, suddenly, he had nothing to do. Michael Brand was dead and the trail was cold. Maybe Kennedy could keep her Rotgut investigation alive by mining something out of those discs and papers, but it seemed impossible now, that the trail would lead him anywhere close to Rebecca and his children.

  They weren’t even children any more. Grace, the youngest, would be in high school now, discovering make-up and rock music and boys. Actually, she would have discovered those things already: the thresholds shifted, decade by decade, so that girls and boys started becoming women and men that much earlier.

  Rebecca was old. Or dead. The children were adults. Or dead. The bridge was out. The case was closed. The end of the line.

  And at the end of the line, in the exact same place where it had always been, was that windowless train. It had never moved, in all those years. It had just stood on the siding, waiting for him to get on board.

  In a rented room in a damp-stewed B&B in a grimy west London suburb, Tillman sat on the bed, the gun in his lap. It had six rounds in it, but only out of pure habit. He was thinking of firing just one.

  It had taken him a while to get to this point. Kennedy had rung his cellphone often in the first few days; and back then, which already seemed like a long time ago, he’d picked up, spoken to her. She told him about her suspension, and then, almost immediately, about her resignation. It had been the perfect stitch-up, from the way she described it. If she stayed in the force, the investigation into Combes’s death would reveal enough procedural irregularities to justify handing a dossier to the CPS and asking them to consider a prosecution against Kennedy for criminal negligence and possibly even manslaughter. If she agreed to stand down and to sign a confidentiality agreement, her DCI had told her, they wouldn’t come after her. They wanted her gone more than they wanted her hurting. Far more than either, they wanted an end to media speculation and some room to breathe.

  So Kennedy had said yes, and she’d signed, and then she’d worked out her few last days in what she called ‘the bear pit’, closing off and handing over cases, clearing out her desk, performing the ritual obsequies over the death of her own career. She’d had to fight even for this concession: the higher echelons wanted her gone immediately, and would have preferred her to serve out her notice at home, but Kennedy stubbornly insisted on walking all the stations of her personal cross.

  That, at least, was how her fellow detectives viewed her continuing presence in the division. And some of them gave her a grudging respect for that; but at a distance, as befits someone who’s seen two partners into the grave inside of a fortnight. Nobody wanted to help Kennedy make the hat-trick.

  Kennedy allowed them to think what they wanted, while she used up favours, abused reporting protocols and raided other people’s files at a rate that would have been suicidal if there was any chance at all of her still being there when the chickens came back to the homestead. If anybody asked, she was just tidying up. She did exactly enough tidying up to make the cover story stick.

  The most important – and the most flagrantly illegal – thing she did was to find out where Professor Emil Gassan was being kept, and to forward him the copy she’d made of the Dovecote disc. She added a brief covering letter in which she asked Gassan, if he succeeded in unravelling any meaning from the files on the disc, to request a meeting with her. The request had to come from him and it had to come while she was still nominally a cop. Also, it had to come through Specialist Ops, the department that had found the safe house for the professor and was looking after him there. Unlike Central, Specialist Ops wouldn’t necessarily know about the axe impending over Kennedy and would have no particular reason to check. She could hope, at least, that they would put the request through to her directly, rather than via the DCI.

  All of this, Tillman got from Kennedy in the first couple of weeks after the night of the Dovecote fire. He couldn’t remember now what he himself had been doing during those two weeks: couldn’t remember weather, meals, places, or any significant action that he’d performed. He was running down, using up the last of the stored energy that had got him this far.

  After the second week, he stopped picking up the phone. Kennedy kept calling, kept leaving messages. He put the phone on silent, threw it out of sight, maybe into a drawer. Somebody moved, outside the door of his room, and a little later in the room next door. He heard a scratching at the base of the wall, almost too faint to catch. It couldn’t have been Kennedy, checking up on him, because he’d never given her – or anyone – an address. Then again, she was a detective, and she’d turned out to be pretty good at her job, so maybe she’d found a through-line to him. That meant he should move, at once: if Kennedy could do it, his enemies could do it, too.

  He stayed put, and waited. He didn’t admit to himself what he was waiting for, until it became apparent that nothing was going to happen.

  He was waiting for death: for the pale killers to smash the door down and cut his throat, or shoot him, or do whatever they felt like doing to take him off the map. That would have been neat, and logical, and it would have saved him the effort of thought and action. Thought and action seemed to be all but beyond him now. Or maybe he’d struggled so hard, for so long, against the obvious, that his own stubbornness, like a canker grown up inside him, had frozen him in an attitude of denial and defiance. So now, when all he wanted to do was close his eyes for ever, he couldn’t bend to take the obvious and necessary steps.

  Time kept passing, brought nothing. More and more nothing, piling up around and inside him, as though the room were the interior of his mind and this a continuum that went on endlessly, within him, beyond him, level upon level. The man sitting on the bed: zoom in, find on the curved surface of his retina the man sitting on the bed.

  Six bullets in the gun. The empty speed-loader in his left hand. Fastidious – it was hard to source them in a size that matched the Unica’s configuration – he reached out to put the loader on the bedside table. He misjudged the distance: it fell on the floor at his feet, rolled under the bed and clunked up against something there.

  He raised the gun, stared into its single black eye.

  But the speed-loader was out of sight now. It would be missed. Lost. Probably never matched up with the Unica again. Why should that even bother him? Was he looking for an excuse to live?

  Slowly, ponderously, as though he had to remember all over again how to move, he rose from the bed and knelt to reach under it. His hand closed, not on the speed-loader, but on the phone. So that was where it had ended up. He stared at the thing, reminded of a past life in which it had had a function.

  Amazingly, the phone still had some charge left in it. On the tiny screen inset into its lid, a figure danced: a cartoon unicorn, trailing a cartoon banner that read, ‘YOU HAVE NEW MESSAGES’.

  The figure blurred suddenly. Tillman was blinded by tears, ambushed by a sudden, peremptory grief that ransacked and dismantled him. Mr Snow was drowned. So was the little girl who had once held fiercely on to Mr Snow as she fell asleep, raising him like a grubby bulwark against the cares and fears of the world. He’d let her down in the end. Everything had let her down, in the end. He knew, then, with a terrible certainty, that she was dead: that they were all dead. Rebecca. Jud. Seth. Grace. If they were anywhere in the world, he would have found them. He had been fleeing for thirteen years from this one, simple admission. Now it swirled through him in filaments like ink through water, and as he stood, as he straightened up, that small movement stirred the blackness, spread it to every corner of his being.

  He pressed the gun to his forehead.

  But with dark-adjusted eyes, he saw the room differently. He saw, at that pivotal moment, the anomaly, the new thing: it was a note, slipped under his door. He crossed to it and picked it up.

  It was not a note. It was a photograph. Rebecca. Rebecca in her late teens or early twenties. He knew her at once, even though he had never known her at that age. Rebecca sitting at a tab
le on a café terrace, people walking by in the background, down a wide street. The light was strange, greyed out as though a storm was coming. Rebecca ducked her head shyly and grinned, hiding from the camera but knowing that the shot would be taken anyway.

  The shot. The synchronicity dizzied him.

  It was as though he heard the camera shutter, snickering suggestively as it cut a single moment of time out of the endless ebb tide; as it made the transient eternal and immutable.

  He wouldn’t hear the bullet, though. Not unless consciousness adhered to pulped brain tissue. Eternity was waiting, and it was almost out of patience.

  He turned the photo over. On the back, in a small, neat script, five words were written.

  She said you wouldn’t stop.

  There was an interim. What it consisted of, Tillman didn’t know. He punched something: the wall, or a door, or a piece of furniture. He punched it repeatedly, until hammering and shouted protests were coming from above, below and across the corridor.

  It wasn’t enough. The pain in his hands was starting to cut through the fog and the ink and the dullness, but it was too far away. He had to connect himself to the world again, before the world went away.

  He punched out the window and selected a piece of broken glass of a size that he could conveniently hold. He used it to make incisions in his arms and chest, judging the depth of the cuts judiciously so that no nerves or major arteries were severed.

  Some progress there.

  He heard shouts in the hallway outside his room and someone banged on the door for a long time but finally gave up and went away.

  Tillman lifted the glass to the level of his eye, stared at his own blood, dripping from the narrow end. He used that map to find himself: in the red and the mess and the dangerous ruck, not the clarity of the nothing ever.