The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Kennedy couldn’t remember, for a moment, where she was. In Arizona, she knew. But no, that was before. They’d driven south, into Mexico. This was Mexico City.

  Mexico City was a lake of darkness, in which nobody fished and nobody swam. Except her.

  She turned a slow circle in the water, breathing in deep, ragged gulps as though she was breaking off pieces of the air and chewing them, forcing them down her heaving throat. To her back, a sheer wall rose, studded with the dark vaults of windows. She’d come up from underneath it, where the streets of the lower level ran invisible, flooded from floor to ceiling.

  To either side, and in front of her, multiple stairways like the ones that opened from the other plaza. Kennedy had no idea where they led. The distances receded and then advanced upon her in a sinister lockstep. Her brain was a limp, floppy, saturated thing through which thoughts refused to move.

  But from a long way away, she heard voices.

  66

  ‘She died,’ Kuutma told Tillman. ‘She died a long time ago.’

  The waters had receded a little further and he’d taken a seat at the top of the main steps. Tillman knelt a little way away, both hands gripped tightly to his wound. Despite what Kuutma had told him, the wound had been carefully placed and would take a good while to kill him yet. The blade had not been anointed. The flow of blood would slow gradually, and perhaps even stop so long as Tillman didn’t move. Right then, Tillman looked incapable of moving.

  ‘Rebecca,’ Tillman muttered. His voice was weak, ragged. The voice of something profoundly broken.

  ‘Exactly,’ Kuutma agreed. ‘Your Rebecca. I killed her. With a knife just like this one.’ He held up the sica so that Tillman could see, turned it over in his hand so it caught what light there was. No gleam, in that twilight: the blade looked like a dead thing, in his hand. The world was a dying world, almost unpeopled. ‘But I didn’t toy with her, or torment her, the way I’m tormenting you. I cut into her chest, between the fourth and fifth ribs, and cut her heart into two pieces. She died very quickly.’

  Kuutma wasn’t even looking at Tillman as he spoke, but he saw out of the corner of his eye the movement as Tillman stood and lurched towards him. He’d been expecting it, was even waiting for it.

  He came to his feet as Tillman reached him, the sica still in his right hand, but used his left to block Tillman’s clumsy punch, then hook-locked him with left arm and right foot and threw him down on to the top of the steps with a force that might easily have cracked the man’s spine. Only then did he lean in and open up Tillman’s cheek with the blade: a single slash running from brow to chin.

  ‘Good,’ he said, approvingly. ‘Hate me as I hate you. Hate me with every breath you draw, until the hate becomes thick enough that you choke on it. This is what I wanted from you.’

  Kuutma moved away to the other side of the steps and sat down again. The violence had brought a certain release, but it had set his heart running quickly in his chest. He needed to find the quiet heart of the violence, and inhabit it, as he did when killing out in the world. But this was not the world, it was Ginat’Dania. And this was not a killing like any other killing: it was the paying of the balance.

  Kuutma watched the slumped body until it twitched and stirred, which indicated that Tillman was both alive and conscious. Then he resumed his narrative.

  ‘Death was Rebecca’s right,’ he said. ‘It’s the right of all the Kelim. But I never thought she’d choose it. I told her, when she came to me, that there was no need. For others, yes, possibly, but not for her. Never, never for a moment …’ He stopped. This was not how he had meant to start: he had to keep his mind on the goal and build logically towards the revelation that would destroy Tillman.

  Kill his enemy’s soul and only then despatch the body.

  Kuutma began again, although calm still eluded him. ‘We live apart,’ he said. ‘That’s one of the commandments laid on us. We keep our bloodline pure. Not since Judas only, but since Eden that was, we hold ourselves apart.

  ‘But purity comes with a price. The people number less than a hundred thousand and in such a small community, certain sicknesses – sicknesses that come with birth – spread quickly. We know the genetic basis for this now, as you probably do too, Mr Tillman. In a small breeding community, double recessive genes pair up with disastrous frequency, and congenital defects, weakness of heart and body and mind, become endemic. Without a periodic influx of new genetic material, the community cannot thrive.

  ‘The Elders conferred, many centuries ago, and reached a judgement. A wise one. We could not give our precious blood to the degraded mass of half-animals you call humanity. But we could take strength and vigour from them, where we needed to. We could enrich our stock with graftings from the best of theirs.

  ‘The women who were sent out were called Kelim – vessels. Where the Messengers carry death, outwards from Ginat’Dania to the world, the Kelim go out into the world and bring back life. That’s their sacrament. Their glory.’

  Tillman had got partway upright again, resting on an elbow. He stared at Kuutma with a feral intensity. Kuutma put away the sica and took his gun from its holster. The next time that Tillman charged him, he would shoot out one of the man’s knees: the right one, probably.

  ‘The water,’ Tillman slurred.

  ‘The water?’ Kuutma frowned at the irrelevance of the comment. ‘The water’s poisoned. Kelalit. The same poison we Messengers take to give us our strength and our speed. In concentrations greater than five parts per million, it will paralyse and kill. You’ve had a very small dose because when the water hit you, the sluice had only just begun to empty into it. It’s been emptying all the while we’ve been talking, the concentration building to LD 100 level: the level at which a single sip will kill within a minute or two. Ciudad de Mexico will be a vast graveyard. When the people move, they leave nothing behind them, Tillman. We sow the earth with salt and the sky with ash.

  ‘But we were talking about Rebecca. Rebecca Beit Evrom.’

  Tillman tensed and gathered himself. He would move soon, Kuutma felt sure of it. But in this condition, befuddled by the kelalit diffused in the water and weakened by his injuries, he presented no threat.

  ‘The Kelim are chosen by lottery,’ said Kuutma. He felt as though he were building a scaffold on which to hang Tillman, a noose for his neck, a trapdoor for his feet to stand on. ‘They go out into the world, with false identities provided by the Elohim, and they marry. We access the medical records of any potential husbands and vet them for diseases carried in their seed. If there’s no risk, the union is approved – for breeding only. It’s not, of course, a marriage in the religious sense.

  ‘The Kelim bear three children, and then they return. The husband comes back to an empty house – the woman, to her real home and the bosom of the people. Her exile is finally at an end. As you’d imagine, this duty – though sacred – is hard to endure. It is a terrible ordeal, to pretend to love someone for three or four or five years, to live so long under the shadow of a lie.’

  ‘No!’ Tillman gasped. He made it to his feet and took a step towards Kuutma. Kuutma raised his gun and Tillman stopped.

  ‘It was a horrible mischance,’ Kuutma said, with more vehemence than he’d intended. ‘The odds against it … two or three thousand to one. I never thought she’d draw the red ball from the bag. That she’d be chosen. But because I was Kuutma, I thought, it would not be so bad for her as it was for others. I would watch over her. I would still be with her, in a way, even if I couldn’t speak to her.

  ‘I sent her to England. She met you. She shared your bed and had your children. Judas, who in your presence she called Jud. Seth. Grace. I watched them grow and I waited my time. To the last day and hour, I waited my time. Until finally the day came when I was allowed to call her home.

  ‘My God, Tillman, that was a bitter time!’ Kuutma found that he was talking through clenched teeth, his voice harsh and clotted. ‘She committed no sin, you underst
and? She was blameless. And yet she wallowed in your arms at the end of each day and surrendered herself to … abomination. I felt for her. I felt for her so much.

  ‘Sometimes …’ Why was he saying this? Why had he gone so far from the words he’d prepared? ‘Sometimes, people forget this. They’re not mindful of the sacrifice the Kelim make for us – the sacrifice of their own flesh. Sometimes the women find, when they return, that nobody wants them. As wives, I mean. Wants to be bonded to them. The vessel is clean, scripture says, but how can something still be clean when it’s been dipped nightly in filth and ordure for so many years? You understand? It’s a mystery. A holy mystery.

  ‘But I offered … I offered her … myself.’ Kuutma blinked away tears. He got to his feet and took a step in Tillman’s direction. There was a magnetism that drew him: it had to draw Tillman too, and reel him in to the next stage of his dismantling.

  ‘I told her that nothing had changed between us. I said I’d take her and marry her, and raise her children. But she chose death. She felt so fouled by your touch, so deeply spoiled, she couldn’t meet an honest man’s eyes again or accept his love. You hear me, Tillman?’

  ‘I hear you,’ Tillman mumbled. ‘You sad little prick. She turned you down. She turned you down because she still loved me.’

  Kuutma screamed. He couldn’t help himself. The sound was torn out of some part of him too deep for reason. He covered the distance between him and Tillman in three strides and smashed the butt of the pistol into the bridge of the man’s nose, shattering it. Tillman staggered and started to crumple, but Kuutma turned like a dervish and planted a kick in the centre of his stomach before he could even hit the ground. As Tillman lurched back, doubled over, Kuutma smashed him again with the gun, in the side of his head, and finally he fell.

  ‘She didn’t love you!’ Kuutma bellowed. ‘She never loved you! You don’t kill yourself because you love someone!’

  Winded and helpless, Tillman knelt on all fours at his feet. Kuutma racked a bullet into the chamber of the Sig-Sauer and flicked off the safety. He put the gun against the back of Tillman’s head.

  But he got himself under control again before he could pull the trigger. He was almost ready: almost. But he couldn’t send Tillman into the dark on that note of absurd and insulting defiance. He had to tell him the rest and watch him weep his soul into the dirt.

  ‘Your daughter,’ Kuutma said. ‘Her name isn’t Grace now. It’s Tabe. She was raised by strangers – and taught to hate you. She’s so happy here, Tillman. So happy with us. She’s an artist. She paints. There’s such beauty inside her that it spills from her fingers into the world. You hear me? Your daughter loves the life I gave her! Before I came here, I went to her. I told her that I was going to kill you and I asked for her blessing. She gave it joyfully. “Why should I care what happens to the father of my flesh?” she said. And when I’m done with you, Tillman, I’ll go back to her. I’ll tell her how you died, and she’ll kiss my hand and bless me all over again.’

  Tillman was shaking. For a moment, Kuutma thought it was fear that made him tremble, but then realised that the man’s once-powerful frame was wracked with wrenching tears. ‘Alive!’ Tillman sobbed. ‘Grace is alive! My Grace is alive!’

  In an excess of rage, Kuutma clubbed the huddled, helpless ruin in front of him again and again with the butt of the gun. ‘She hates you!’ he bellowed. ‘Didn’t you hear me? She hates you!’

  Kuutma’s own hands were shaking now and there was little force to his blows. Crouched like a rat in a rainstorm, Tillman weathered them.

  Kuutma touched the Sig once again to the back of the man’s skull. He still had the final, the unanswerable argument. It was a sublime instinct after all, that had made him start with Rebecca and save the worst for last.

  ‘Your sons—’ he began.

  Movement from above caught his eye. Something falling. Kuutma jumped aside and the ornamental urn, pushed from a balustrade on a terrace way up over his head, smashed to the ground exactly where he’d just stood. Jagged shards of stone hit his face and body.

  ‘How much does God love you, Kuutma?’ a voice said, speaking from the air all around him.

  It was Rebecca’s voice.

  67

  Six months in narcotics: the shortest posting you could take and still claim it on your CV as valid experience. What Kennedy didn’t know about drugs would fill whole libraries.

  Ironically, what she knew about methamphetamine came from a homicide bust. A woman who’d killed her two flatmates and fellow addicts in their sleep with the spiked end of a mallet intended for tenderising steak. She’d tenderised them very thoroughly indeed. She’d also been happy to explain why: they’d been trying to kill her with microwaves and with poison soaked into the fabric of her pillow.

  One in five long-term meth users will eventually succumb to an intractable mental illness known to clinicians as amphetamine psychosis. And Brand had been using regularly for at least thirteen years. He had to be at least a little crazy, even by the exacting standards of religious maniacs.

  Kennedy walked slowly down the stairs towards Brand – or Kuutma, as he seemed to call himself – and Tillman. She’d lost the gun Tillman had given her, but she had a chair leg that she’d picked up along the way. She held it close to her side, where she hoped it would be hard to spot.

  She was improvising desperately. All she’d really wanted to do was to stop the bastard from finishing that sentence. But she seemed to have got his attention anyway: all she had to do now was keep it.

  ‘How much does God love you?’ she repeated, in the same cold, stern tone.

  Kuutma didn’t answer. He seemed unable to speak. He stared at her as she came towards him, and took an involuntary step back.

  ‘Seems to me,’ Kennedy said, ‘that those he loves, he protects. He gives the faithful their reward on earth and he smites the heathen. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? And you’re the arm that does the smiting, so I reckon you should know if anybody does.’

  Kuutma laughed suddenly, which wasn’t at all the reaction Kennedy was expecting – or hoping for. ‘Just you!’ he said. ‘I thought for a moment …’ He seemed to pull himself away from an interior precipice, a shudder running through his body. ‘God loves the people, rhaka. His covenant is with us. Only the fallen one cares about you.’

  Kennedy had reached the bottom of the steps now, only ten feet from Kuutma. She looked at her watch, then met his stare and shrugged. ‘Getting a little late, isn’t he?’ she asked, mildly.

  Kuutma’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re going to die with a blasphemy on your lips,’ he told her.

  Kennedy went on as though she hadn’t heard him. ‘More than twenty years late. You were supposed to wait for thirty centuries and then you’d get your turn in the big chair. But thirty centuries came and went, and you’re still living here in the dark like roaches. Hiding from the rest of the world. Sticking more and more fingers into more and more holes in the dike because the world is getting smaller all the time. Satellite surveillance, data monitoring, biometric passports and genetic fingerprinting. Even your electricity bills betray you, Kuutma. And you wait, and you wait, and still God doesn’t turn up, until you must feel like the shy girl in the corner who never gets asked up for a dance.

  ‘And what are all your murders worth, in the end, if you’re not holy? If God didn’t bless you and tell you to fight, then what about all that blood on your soul?’

  ‘There is no blood on my soul,’ Kuutma said. She’d slowed to a halt and now he took a step towards her. The gun still in his hand, and aimed at her heart, he unhooked one of the nasty, angled knives from his waist. ‘I am forgiven.’

  ‘But only for killing,’ Kennedy reminded him. ‘Not for lies. So tell me the truth about one thing, Kuutma, before you kill me.’

  Holding the knife at chest height, between index finger and forefinger, he tilted the blade to a sixty-degree angle and crooked his hand back to throw.

  ‘Ask me,
’ he invited her.

  ‘Was the whole of this sorry spectacle because you couldn’t do the nasty with Rebecca Beit Whatever-her-name-was? Because I’ve heard of lovers’ balls, man, but this is really, really sad.’

  Kuutma threw the knife.

  Kennedy made a judgement call and threw herself to the right. It was the wrong direction, but the movement saved her anyway: her plaster cast had been built around a steel frame and the knife hit one of the struts, exposed by its recent baptism. The blade creased Kennedy’s cheek as it bounced up and away into the dark.

  Kuutma drew a second blade. Kennedy threw herself forward, and with a wild swipe of the chair leg knocked the knife out of his hand. That just left the Sig-Sauer. It came up while she was still off-balance, and Kuutma had begun to pull back on the trigger, when the deafening peal of an explosion made him look down, in shock, at his own chest. A supernova of blood expanded there, covering the whole of his torso in two vertiginous seconds.

  Tillman hadn’t trusted his aim: he was too sick, too dizzy, his hands too unsteady. Even getting the Unica from his belt and thumbing the safety had taken every ounce of concentration that he could bring to bear.

  He’d dragged himself laboriously to his feet, while Kuutma debated theology with Kennedy, and moved towards them one baby-step at a time. Kuutma hadn’t seemed to notice him, but Kennedy had. She held her ground and kept on talking, presenting the world’s easiest target.

  And Tillman had brought the gun up at last, a scant inch from the back of Kuutma’s hand-woven linen jacket.

  Had held it on the right line.

  Had pressed the trigger.

  Had pressed harder because the trigger didn’t want to give way under his sapless grip.

  Had fired and lost the gun at once to the unexpected kick of a recoil he normally took in his stride.

  But one shot was all it took. Kuutma sank to his knees, still staring at Kennedy in blank-eyed astonishment.