The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Tillman nodded, but without conviction. He pulled in at the kerb, took out his phone and started to dial. He hesitated, looked over at Kennedy. ‘A friend,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t know you and he’s strict about who gets to know his business. You mind?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘I could do with stretching my legs anyway.’ She got out of the car, surprised to find that the air was cool. A breeze had sprung up from somewhere and there was a thick overcast in the sky, changing the light to something numinous and silver-grey. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Summer thunder, and a cleansing rain. Kennedy felt grimed to the core of her being and longed to be washed in any water, hot or cold or in-between, until her body felt like her own again.

  She walked slowly towards the end of the street. She could hear nothing. There was almost total silence here, in this city of over twenty million souls. None of the twenty million, it seemed, lived in Xochimilco. She crossed to a café, or at least the frontage of one, which called itself – with heroic hubris – El Paraiso. The windows had been boarded up with corrugated steel, and the good things advertised on the sign (ENCHILADAS! CHILAQUILES! BISTECK!) seemed unlikely to materialise.

  The restaurant was a dwarf on a street of behemoths, but it was just as dead: the crisis of late monopoly capitalism, like the angel of death, spares no one who doesn’t have the magic sign of God’s favour painted on their doorposts.

  Kennedy reached the corner and stopped. Facing her across the road – a dual carriageway avenue wide enough to have a row of trees planted in the middle of it, but completely empty of traffic – stood a warehouse complex. A single massive structure with uncountable outbuildings, all built from the same prestressed concrete and painted battleship grey. A few tiny windows high up on the walls so deep-set in the brickwork that they couldn’t have let in any light at all. A still-solid fence and a set of gates bearing a massive padlock. Above them, bristling nests of CCTV cameras mounted on steel posts surveyed the street to either side.

  Kennedy laughed aloud – out of sheer incredulity.

  She heard Tillman’s step behind her, and turned. ‘All of it,’ he said, indicating the area around them with a wide sweep of both hands. ‘Station 73 South serves everything within about a two-mile radius of here. We’ll have to try something else, Kennedy. Maybe if Bonville spoke to someone here about what he was working on, or filed a report, we could triangulate from that. Otherwise, I think we should try looking at …’

  He broke off, at last, seeing that Kennedy was pointing: across the street, to the great grey warehouse.

  ‘We’re here, Leo,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

  It was the building from the photo underneath Stuart Barlow’s floor – the one on the back of which he’d written the list of scrolls and codices that contained John’s Gospel.

  The end of their journey had been written into its beginning.

  61

  It took Tillman ten minutes to ascertain that the cameras were dead.

  He noticed first of all that they sat on mobile mounts, designed to increase the viewing arc by swivelling from side to side: but they had been locked in one position, not even the most practical or advantageous position. The one on the left was aimed more or less directly ahead, but the corresponding one on the right had pivoted inwards to point towards its partner. Effectively, both were looking at the same area of ground, leaving a dead zone to the right.

  That could have been a mechanical malfunction, leaving the cameras frozen but still seeing. Tillman used the dead zone to creep across the street and edge in close to the base of the nearer support pole. With a digital multimeter from his kit, he tested the wires and found no current flowing to them.

  Since there was no need for stealth now, he crossed directly back to Kennedy, making the throat-cut gesture. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Power’s out. Either they’ve been shut down at the board or the whole area’s had a power cut.’

  Kennedy pointed. The first streetlamps were blinking on a few blocks further on. The lamps closest to them had all been smashed, but clearly if there was a power cut it was a very local one.

  Tillman considered.

  ‘I think this might be where we part company,’ he told Kennedy.

  ‘What?’ Kennedy was shocked. ‘What the hell do you mean, Tillman? We’re in this together. I know I can’t fight, but I didn’t drive a thousand miles to send you off with a wave and a kiss on the cheek. I’m going in with you. Count on it.’

  He didn’t seem to have heard her. He walked away while she was still talking, heading back towards the Lincoln. Kennedy broke into a jog-trot to catch up.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You can outrun me but you can’t stop me from going in unless you tie me up and gag me or something, and if you even try that, I’ll struggle hard enough and make enough noise that they see us coming a mile off. I repeat, Leo: we’re in this together. All the way.’

  They’d reached the car by this time. Tillman threw open the rear door, then turned to meet her gaze. ‘You’re a cop, Heather,’ he said. ‘You uphold the law.’

  ‘I stopped being a cop when they made me resign, remember?’

  ‘But it’s still what you’re here for. Because people were killed and it’s your job to make sure that the killers pay.’

  ‘You’re not listening, Leo.’ Kennedy struggled to keep her temper. ‘It’s not my job any more. Anything I do down here is illegal two or three times over. I’m out of my jurisdiction, I’m off the force, and I’m a wanted fugitive. This stopped being about the law a long time ago. It’s about justice now.’

  His stare was still locked on her, waiting, weighing her, looking for some sign. ‘What kind of justice?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What kind of justice is it about, Heather?’

  She stared back, bewildered, threw up her one good arm. ‘Is there more than one flavour?’

  ‘Lots of flavours. And the one I’m interested in is the worst of them all. The really filthy one. An eye for an eye. They killed my wife and they killed my kids. They took everything from me – everything. But they didn’t have the decency to kill me. Thirteen years. Thirteen years in this world that they left uninhabited. All that’s left now for me is to give them back what’s rightfully theirs.’

  He reached into the car and wrenched off the seat cover, revealing two machine rifles, four handguns, clips and belts of ammunition stacked and coiled, and a number of glossy black plastic bags, about the size and shape of bricks, bearing the WORDS M112 CHARGE DEMOLITION C4.

  Kennedy’s mouth opened and closed. She struggled to get any words out, and when she did, she knew they weren’t the sort of words that were going to be any good. ‘Leo … you’re wrong. You’re wrong about this.’

  Tillman didn’t seem to take offence. He just smiled sadly. ‘What, you think there’s still a chance my family are alive, Heather? After thirteen years?’

  And like some holy assassin, Kennedy crashed head-first into the impossibility of the lie. It died in her throat.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I … I don’t think they’re still alive.’

  ‘But if we’re right about anything, that building is going to be full of people who had nothing to do with killing them. Other people’s families, Leo. Are you so hungry to get even with Michael Brand that you’d be ready to turn yourself into him? Because if you are, get out that fancy pistol and put it right up against my head because I swear to God, you’re going to have to start with me.’

  They stood facing each other in the street, for some uncountable number of seconds. Tillman winced, as though thinking about this was costing him physical pain.

  ‘I didn’t come here to kill kids,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘The plastique—’

  ‘Yes, Leo? What about the plastique?’

  ‘I had no idea what we were going to find here. Or how we were going to get in. I wanted to be ready for anything.’

  Kennedy nodded. ‘So that’s good,’ s
he said. ‘We’re ready.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But we’re here for Michael Brand, right? All the Michael Brands.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  Tillman shook his head slowly. ‘Someone sent them. Someone chose them, and trained them, and equipped them. Someone told them what to do to me, and mine. And your young lad, Harper. And Christ knows who else. We close them down, Heather. Not just Brand. The people behind Brand. We close every last one of the bastards down.’

  ‘Pass me one of those guns.’

  Tillman did. Kennedy felt a prickle of déjà vu as she took it. It was a G22, identical to the one with which she’d killed Marcus Dell. But that was in another country and that Heather Kennedy was now officially dead.

  She gestured with the gun, raising it butt-first to show the mag-base. Tillman got the message, selected a clip from the rich array inside the hollow of the gutted seat and slapped it into place for her.

  ‘Couple more,’ she instructed him.

  Tillman took one in each hand, slid them carefully into the pockets of her jacket.

  Kennedy thanked him with a nod. ‘By virtue of the authority invested in me as an ex-cop way too far from home,’ she told him, ‘I’m deputising you. You know what that means, Leo?’

  He seemed afraid of how this was going, of how much of his decision-making he was entrusting to her. But the slope they were on had become so steep now neither wanted to look down. And at this point, Kennedy knew what was at the bottom better than Tillman did because she’d heard the last words of the lady assassin back at Santa Claus: words she was determined Tillman would never get to hear.

  ‘No, Heather. What does it mean?’

  She tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans and tugged the jacket closed over it. ‘It means we’re an armed response unit. Let’s go respond.’

  The easiest way into the warehouse compound turned out to be at the side, where an adjacent building – a one-storey shed of some kind on a site that had once been a U-Store depot – ran close to the fence and allowed them to jump across.

  Tillman went first, and when Kennedy jumped he caught and braced her so that she didn’t fall. She hadn’t realised until then how weak she still was, in spite of the long sleep and the meal. Her side felt stiff and sore, her broken arm ached worse even than her head, and the anaesthetic was still in her system – dulling her thinking without doing a damned thing for the pain.

  Tillman had transferred a whole lot of light and heavy ordnance into a kit bag that he carried on his back. In his hands, in place of the Unica, he carried a FA-MAS Clairon assault rifle in the French army configuration, complete with bayonet and grenade launcher. The thing terrified Kennedy: it looked like the Swiss army knife of sudden death.

  They followed the wall of the main building, looking for a way in. The only door they found turned out to be welded into its frame. All the windows were way above their heads, and since Kennedy couldn’t climb, the ropes and grapnels would have to be a last resort.

  They saw more camera posts at intervals along the fence: none of them moved, and all showed negative for current when Tillman tested them with the multimeter.

  When they reached the front of the warehouse, they looked out cautiously on an open stretch of asphalt like a parade ground, its surface pitted and broken, with copious weeds everywhere. But there were odd anomalies, which they pointed out to each other in whispers. The fence looked in perfect repair, the chains and padlocks rust-free and solid: and the weeds inside the compound had been flattened down in straight swathes, as if by recent and heavy traffic.

  Tillman was reluctant to step out into the open, even though he knew they had nothing to fear from the cameras. He counted too many vantage points from which they could be watched. They went round to the back of the building instead, where the asphalt gave way in places to dust and earth, and where narrower spaces separated the main structure from some of the many satellite buildings.

  Exploring these outlying structures, they discovered that all the doors were like the first they’d seen: welded shut and clearly no longer in use. At last, though, Kennedy found tyre tracks in the dirt, fresh and clear, and followed them back to the up-and-over door of what appeared to be a garage or hangar. The place looked shabby and disused, but the tracks suggested otherwise.

  The door was fixed with a padlock. Tillman took a crowbar from his kit bag and snapped the hasp with a single movement, grunting slightly from the effort. He swung the shutter up and they stared into the interior of the building.

  It took a moment or two for Kennedy to process what she was seeing. They stood at the top of a ramp that extended downwards into perfect darkness. It seemed to run the full width of the building, about forty feet, and its incline was a gentle one-in-ten. They heard no sound and saw nothing else. The building housed the ramp and nothing more: or rather, whatever else it contained was below them, at the ramp’s further end.

  ‘You got a torch in there?’ Kennedy muttered, nodding at Tillman’s bag. Her voice echoed in the eerie stillness and took a long time to die away.

  Tillman produced two: sturdy cylindrical flashlights with rubber sheathes, each about a foot and a half long. They seemed to have been designed to serve as truncheons as well as sources of illumination.

  Kennedy flicked the switch and aimed the strong, steady beam into the darkness below. Tillman followed suit. All that accomplished was to show them that the ramp extended a lot further than they’d thought. The beams still didn’t reach the bottom.

  Tillman glanced at Kennedy, who gave a single nod. Nowhere to go but down. Her unease deepened with every step. No scenario that she could imagine reconciled setting up this degree of security and then being so lax in its oversight. And who’d live in a wasteland like this in the first place? They’d obviously found a supply depot of some kind, rather than – as she’d thought – their enemies’ heartland.

  The ramp extended about three hundred feet, and took them down at least thirty below street level. At its bottom end, a corrugated steel roller-door stretched from end to end of the ramp, blocking their path. Kennedy shone her flashlight beam on the wall, looking for controls, but found none: probably they were on the other side. She was about to suggest looking elsewhere when Tillman’s light, aimed at the floor, revealed that the way wasn’t blocked at all: there was a foot of clearance between the bottom of the steel shutter and the floor.

  Wordlessly, they got down on hands and knees – Kennedy grunting in pain as already abused muscles registered their protest – and slid-shuffled under the door.

  On the other side, they stood up, still in complete darkness, but Kennedy could tell from the movement of air on her face that she was in a very large space. Her flash, flicked at random around her, picked out nothing close enough for the light to touch it.

  Tillman put out a hand to touch this side of the steel shutter and followed it along. Kennedy shone her torch ahead of him and, as he reached it, put a perfectly centred spotlight on a bank of switches. A red light to the left of the array announced that here at least, there was still current.

  She came to join him and they examined the switchboard together: there were three large slide controls at the left-hand side and then four banks of ten smaller switches, none labelled.

  ‘We touch these,’ Kennedy whispered, ‘and we’re throwing up our hands and shouting, “Look at me”.’

  ‘Listen,’ Tillman whispered back.

  She did. No sound at all, anywhere: not even the sounds of distant traffic that count for silence in most cities most of the time. Tillman was right. The noise they’d already made in sliding under the shutter – even their footsteps on the ramp, though they’d been as quiet as they could – would have carried a long way in this absolute hush. If there was anyone here, their arrival was surely no secret. But if there was anyone here, why hadn’t they already been challenged?

  Tillman didn’t bother to get Kennedy’s approval this time. He just p
ressed the sliders all the way down and flicked the top row of switches, one at a time.

  The sliders didn’t seem to do anything much, but when Tillman pressed the switches he was conducting a symphony of light: not bulbs or strips or spots but huge panels, inset in the walls and stretching from floor to roof, stirred into life like a chain of sunrises all around them.

  Kennedy gasped.

  They stood in a space as high as a cathedral but much longer: a subterranean avenue whose walls were blocks of sheer, almost painful radiance. Kennedy covered her eyes with her right forearm, dazzled, blinking away tears.

  ‘Wait,’ Tillman murmured. ‘Okay. Got it.’

  It was because he’d floored the slide controls first. He cut them back to about two-thirds, and the light dimmed to something more bearable.

  They took stock of their surroundings, and it was slowly borne in on Kennedy that they were in the right place after all.

  This was a street: an avenue, rather, thirty feet wide and seventy or eighty high, which stretched away into the distance in both directions. Small wooden booths like the stalls in a market lined the street on either side, and behind them stood more permanent structures with doors and windows of their own: an indoor thoroughfare in an indoor metropolis.

  Two thoughts struck Kennedy at once. The first: that the market stalls were all empty, one or two of them clumsily ransacked. The second: that the space couldn’t actually be that high, given that they weren’t far enough below ground. She stared up at the ceiling, appraising it more carefully. It had been painted to resemble clouds and blue firmament, and it curved in a vast arch. It was – it must be – the inside of the warehouse roof. They stood underneath the main structure, which had been hollowed out inside to provide a vault of sky for this underground concourse.

  ‘This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Kennedy said, her throat suddenly dry.

  Tillman said nothing, but he moved on down the street and gestured for Kennedy to follow him. She fell in at his side. She’d swapped the now useless torch for the G22, and she gripped it tight.