The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘Tillman. Good to … see you,’ she croaked. She looked in a bad way, her left arm in a cast and taped to her side, which was also swathed in thick bandages. She was herself, though, and better, she was mobile. She levered herself up out of the bed with a grunt of pain and effort and came to meet him. Tillman was already hauling the bolt cutters out of the bag.

  ‘GPS tag,’ he said tersely. ‘Which leg?’

  Kennedy showed him and he knelt to cut the strap. It was tight enough that he could only get the blade of the cutters halfway under, but it snapped all the way across when he applied pressure.

  ‘Open the window,’ he told Kennedy. He threw aside the bolt cutters and reached into the bag again for the rappel rope, which he uncoiled with a flick of the wrist.

  Alarm crossed Kennedy’s face when she saw the rope. ‘Tillman,’ she said, tightly, ‘there’s no way I’m swinging out of the goddamned window. Look at me. I’ve only got one functional arm!’

  ‘You won’t have to take your own weight,’ he said. ‘I’ll carry you.’ He was unfolding the grapnel, slipping the rope through its eyelet, checking the friction hitch on his belt.

  Kennedy didn’t waste any more time arguing. She unlocked the window and opened it. A security lock stopped it from moving more than a few inches. Kennedy held out her hand for Tillman’s gun, which he handed over with some reluctance. She smashed the lock off the frame using the butt of the Unica, three measured blows, and gave the gun back to him. By this time, Tillman had the rope doubled through the friction hitch and the grapnel firmly wedged into the steel frame of Kennedy’s bed. He pushed the bed up against the window so it wouldn’t slide in that direction when they put their weight on the rope.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked her.

  She nodded.

  Tillman helped her over the sill, then climbed out after her, his left arm around her waist, his right arm on the control lever of the friction hitch. It took a few seconds to find a grip that was firm enough, yet didn’t press against her injured arm. He leaned backwards to test the weight and Kennedy swore, off balance above a gulf of air and not liking it a bit.

  They heard an alarm begin to sound back inside the room: either the nurse had raised a shout or someone had found the two downed cops. From now on, it was all on the clock, and Tillman had to measure off every second against the perfect, Platonic version of the plan in his mind.

  He kicked off from the window ledge and abseiled down the hospital wall in a series of clumsy, gingerly hop-and-jumps. If it had been a rock face, or the wood of a climbing tower, he’d have made the three storeys in three quick see-saw leaps, but this wall was mostly glass. If they went through, it would be a toss-up whether or not they bled out before hospital security or the troopers from the corridor found them and slammed the cuffs on them.

  As it was, by the time they landed on the felt-and-gravel flat roof below, heads were already beginning to peer out of the windows above. One of the heads was accompanied by an arm, at the end of which was a gun.

  ‘Stay where you are!’ a voice yelled. ‘Kneel down and place your hands on your heads!’

  Tillman took careful aim with the Unica and squeezed off a shot. The cop drew his head hastily back and didn’t return fire. Not yet anyway.

  Tillman scooped Kennedy up in his arms and sprinted along the roof to the end, where he launched himself into space. Kennedy, who had managed not to make a sound during the hair-raising descent from the fourth floor, gave an involuntary yell now: but Tillman’s feet landed with a resounding metallic clang on the lid of the dumpster he’d pushed in against the wall at that exact point, and from there they made it to the ground in three steps – from dumpster to regular rubbish bin to plastic drum full of contaminated sharps, and so to asphalt.

  ‘Can you run?’ Tillman asked Kennedy.

  ‘I can run.’

  ‘Then let’s run.’

  57

  The first shots sounded as they sprinted around the side of the building, through the ambulance bay to the main parking area. Slowing a little, Tillman led the way to the third aisle, where a bright red Noble M15 awaited them. Kennedy stared at the indecently conspicuous car in horror: its gaping side-vents reminded her of a shark’s gills.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Tillman, they’ll pick us up before we’ve gone a bloody mile.’

  ‘Get inside,’ he told her, tersely.

  She shot a glance towards the hospital’s front doors. No pursuit visible as yet. Maybe if they got out of the car park on to the street before the cops emerged, they’d have a fighting chance.

  She hauled open the passenger door, shinnied inside and then struggled to belt herself in one-handed. She looked towards the driver’s side, filled with effervescent impatience.

  It was fully twenty seconds before the other door opened and Tillman climbed in, moving without undue haste. ‘Come on,’ Kennedy yelled. ‘Get a move on.’

  Tillman turned the key and revved up the engine, but stayed where he was.

  ‘Tillman!’ Kennedy bellowed. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Wait for it,’ he murmured, looking over his shoulder towards the doors of the hospital, where now two figures in dark tan uniforms came running out into the sunlight. Tillman let them get halfway to their car before he reversed out directly into their path, forcing them to leap aside to right and left. He peeled rubber as they picked themselves up, and was gone around the end of the line of cars as they drew and aimed. The shots they got off were more to make a point than anything else.

  ‘They saw us,’ Kennedy wailed. ‘You let them see us.’

  ‘They didn’t hit us, though,’ Tillman said. ‘That puts us well ahead of the game. Open the glove compartment.’

  Kennedy did. Inside, she saw a squat block of black plastic with green and amber LED lights on its fascia and the words UNIDEN BEARCAT BC355C in the lower right-hand corner. A tangle of wires at the back suggested that it had been hooked up to the car’s battery in some ad hoc way. Kennedy knew a radio scanner when she saw one, and although this model was new to her, she had a reasonably good idea what to do with it. She looked for the tuner and found it already set to the VHF hi-band, around about 155MHz. A little tweaking on the up and down keys quickly brought in the local police wavelength – where, unsurprisingly, the gossip was all about them.

  ‘—in pursuit, and we’ve got visual,’ a man’s voice was saying. ‘They’re on Oak, north of 93, and they’re going east. Repeat, they’re eastbound on Oak.’

  ‘Roger that, four-seven,’ a woman’s voice took up. ‘We’ve got cars incoming on Maple and Topeka, and another unit coming down Andy Devine. They’ve got to be heading for I-93. We’ll set up a roadblock at Powderhouse Canyon, over.’

  ‘Copy.’ It was the male voice again – probably the driver of the black-and-white stuck dead centre in their rear-view mirror, a fair way back but holding on for grim life.

  Tillman took a right, on two wheels, and shot down a narrower road at precarious speed. It was a steep slope and Kennedy thought for a second that the black-and-white would overshoot, or at least lose ground, but it made the turn just as adroitly as Tillman had.

  ‘They took a right,’ said the man’s voice. ‘We’re on 4th.’

  ‘Copy,’ the woman said. ‘Okay, I can see exactly where you are. They’ll probably turn left on to—’

  They shot across a major intersection, almost clipping the back bumper of a leaf-green soft-top that was poodling across their path. The doppler wail of a car horn followed them south.

  ‘Okay, scratch that,’ the woman muttered. ‘Guess they’re not headed for I-93 after all. Car five-oh, you’ve overshot. They just … they crossed Topeka and they’re still going south.’ How the hell did she know that? ‘They’re not heading out of town at all. They’re gonna double back.’

  Another man, his voice incongruously slow and laconic. ‘Might wanna think about another roadblock down on the 40, then – and one on 66. Ain’t nowhere else they can go, unless the
y’re fixing to grab some dinner at Mr D’z before they light out of here.’

  ‘Covered,’ the woman said, and then, ‘We’ve got a chopper in the air, coming out of Bullhead. ETA six minutes.’

  Kennedy swore bitterly and obscenely. The original black-and-white was still hanging on to line of sight with them, the woman at despatch somehow keeping track of them. And now they’d have to contend with an eye-in-the-sky on top of everything else.

  ‘We should give it up,’ she muttered. ‘If we hit one of these roadblocks, they’ll fire on us, sure as hell. People will die, Tillman – probably starting with us.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to die,’ Tillman said, with such complete assurance that Kennedy stared at him in wonder and fell silent for a moment.

  The silence was broken by the chatter from the scanner. ‘Car five-oh, where are you now?’

  ‘Faked south and we’re turning on to Hoover, right now, at 2nd. Where are they?’

  ‘They’re still north of you. That’s great. You can get to 4th ahead of them and cut them off. Repeat, they’re south on 4th, and you got the drop on them.’

  Tillman slammed the accelerator to the floor: the Noble’s three-litre engine made an oddly muted noise, like a giant trying to utter a roar of menace without waking up a small child. The car shot away like a speedboat, seeming to leave the road surface altogether.

  They crossed the next intersection at something close to the speed of sound. A second police car had been heading towards them from the west at a fair lick, but they shot by in front of its nose, forcing the driver to brake to avoid hitting their original tailing car full-on.

  ‘They got past us!’ car five-oh’s driver bellowed.

  ‘Damn! Sorry, five-oh, I guess I misread the distance. Four-seven, you still on them?’

  ‘Just. They’re a ways ahead of me now.’

  ‘Five-oh, you turn around and stake out on Old Trails Road. They’re driving into a goddamn cul de sac and that’s the only way out, far as I read it. Four-seven, keep them in sight but don’t engage until you’ve got some back-up. The man is armed.’

  ‘I know he’s armed, Caroline. He damn well shot at me back at the hospital.’

  ‘There’s no need for language, Leroy.’

  ‘There is if you want to say something to someone. Listen, I’m losing him. That boat has got a turn of speed on her. How long till the chopper gets here?’

  ‘Two minutes. They’re over the 68 right now.’

  Tillman looked in the rear-view, where the police car was now almost too far away to see. He slowed a little, took a sharp left, then a right on to a road that ran parallel with the one they’d been on. Two blocks south Kennedy saw a bridge where this road crossed a smaller road. Another glance in the rear-view, then Tillman pulled off the road and drove straight down the bank. For a few seconds they were skidding on sandy soil and weeds and scrub. Kennedy thought they’d slew sideways and roll end over end, but Tillman somehow kept the car under control and wrestled its speed down. At the bottom of the bank, he rolled in under the bridge and stopped. Directly across from them was a parked car, halfway up on to the pavement: a dark-blue Lincoln sedan, a little rusted-up around the front wheel arches.

  ‘That’s our ride,’ said Tillman. ‘You didn’t have any luggage with you, did you?’

  He got out without waiting for an answer, covered the distance in two strides, and was behind the wheel of the other car before Kennedy had time to react. He threw the passenger door open and beckoned to her peremptorily.

  When Kennedy followed, she found him fiddling with the controls of an identical radio scanner in the glove compartment of the Lincoln.

  ‘I’ve lost them!’ The driver of car four-seven, in a flat panic.

  ‘Negative, four-seven. They’re still ahead of you.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘South on 5th. They are south on 5th, four-seven. You keep right on going.’

  The bridge was a steel-frame construction, with concrete and asphalt overlaid: they heard the black-and-white pass over their heads like muted thunder.

  Tillman gave it a decent interval, then rolled out and drove east. After a while, they heard the chopper coming in from the west. They took a left, keeping a convenient line of taller buildings – three- and four-storey apartment blocks – between them and the eye-in-the-sky.

  ‘I don’t have them, Caroline, and I’m running out of road.’

  ‘You’re right on top of them, four-seven. Maybe they got out of the car already. Look for a woman moving on foot.’

  Look for a woman? Why say that, instead of a woman and a man? Kennedy realised then what Tillman had done, what it was the woman at the despatch desk was tracking. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said, with scandalised awe. ‘They’re chasing my GPS tag, aren’t they? Where did you put it?’

  ‘Taped it underneath their car,’ Tillman said, ‘back in the hospital parking area. That was why I wanted them to follow us – close enough so they’d misread what they were seeing on the read-out. These tagging rigs usually aren’t accurate to more than twenty feet or so.’

  Kennedy slumped in her seat, almost catatonic as the aftereffects of the prolonged adrenalin surge hit her system. ‘Son of a bitch,’ she said again.

  Tillman was putting on dark glasses, a so-so fake moustache, a Yankees baseball cap, all from the glove compartment where they’d been stuffed above the scanner.

  ‘Still got to get out of this bottleneck and on to the Interstate,’ he murmured. ‘But it definitely helps that they’re all looking in the wrong direction.’

  A couple of police cars drove south down the cross streets on either side of them as they kept on heading north.

  ‘Where are we going by the way?’ Tillman asked her at last.

  ‘Mexico City. Xochimilco.’

  Tillman sighed heavily.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Crossing the border. Complicates things a little.’

  Kennedy laughed in spite of herself. ‘What, breaking me out of hospital and beating on the asses of the Arizona police department didn’t count as complicated? You set the bar high, Leo. You set the bar halfway to the bloody moon!’

  58

  Watched with the right level of detachment, the process of mapkanah was not unlike the process whereby water swirls down a drain. A gathering, a patterning, the gradual replacement of random turbulence with a powerful and directional flow, which then imposes itself, inexorably, on a whole continuum.

  Kuutma felt like a cork bobbing on the surface of that flow, too light to be touched by it. He watched the people packing away not their own belongings – already packed and stowed long before – but the infrastructure of their world. They lowered the vats from the hydroponics plants, drained and still dripping, from upper windows to the ground, where waiting teams rolled them on down to the cargo bays. A loom from the textile factory rolled by on a cart pulled by a single, straining ox. Kuutma heard the drover murmur reassurances into its ear: ‘Only another three after this, my lad, and then we start on the carding machines, which are so much lighter.’ Most surreal of all, a burly man struggled by, carrying on his shoulders the carved wooden lectern from the Kad Sima. In his sweating face shone a boundless pride: it was like hauling a piece of the Godhead.

  The city was packing, folding itself flat, along one plane and then another, until finally it would disappear through an auger hole.

  Kuutma, meanwhile, needed to be trained in his new responsibilities. He went to the pump station and reported to the watermaster there, a woman named Selaa who was younger than Kuutma by a full decade. She was suoma’ka, red-haired. It was a recessive trait among the people, and very rare, so that those who possessed it moved through life surrounded by whiplash double-takes. To Kuutma, with the mantle of the outside still upon him, it merited neither a glance nor a thought.

  ‘I’m Kuutma,’ he said, knowing she’d already been briefed.

  She was a businesslike woman, and clearly very busy with the task
of dismantling the parts of the water plant that would no longer be needed here: the purifiers, the meters and gauges, the two largest of the pumps. Nonetheless, she bowed respectfully to Kuutma and touched his shoulder.

  ‘Ha ana mashadr,’ she said. ‘Do you know the equipment already, Kuutma? I know many people spend a season at the pump station, when they’re young, to learn the rudiments.’

  ‘That practice came in after my time,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’m good with machines generally, though, and I’m familiar in theory with what you do.’

  ‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘And I imagine that the only machines you’ll need to operate tomorrow will be the sluices.’

  She showed him where they were and what they did. There were four, two drawing from the Cutzamala reservoirs and two directly from the aquifer below the city which was all that remained of Lake Texcoco. Selaa was very proud of the system, and she had reason to be. ‘In the last decades,’ she boasted, ‘the city outside has suffered continual crises of water shortage. It’s sinking into the lake bed at the rate of three inches a year, Kuutma. Did you know that? That’s how quickly Ciudad de Mexico is using up the resources of its own water table. But our water flow has never been interrupted. It’s never even suffered a drop in pressure. The people take what they need, as God allows.’

  Kuutma pulled her back to the practicalities. ‘One of these sluices has been modified, I assume,’ he said to her. ‘Which one, and how does it work?’

  ‘It’s not a sluice,’ she said. ‘It’s just a tank here – one of the purification tanks – which will feed into the flow through the sluice when it reaches the third station. That’s this bank of controls here. The water comes in at station one, runs through the aqueduct under Em Hadderek, and out through these branch channels. But all the branch channels will be closed after we leave. The water will flow straight through and back into Cutzamala – back into the main water supply of Ciudad de Mexico. All you have to do is open the sluice gate with this lever, and then whenever you’re ready, dump the concentrate from the tank into the water.’