The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  The door looked undisturbed, but only at first glance. After a silent moment, Tillman pointed to what Kennedy had already seen for herself: the splintering of the jamb over an area of about three or four inches, just underneath the level of the lock plate. Someone had levered the door open with a crowbar or perhaps a car jack, and then pulled it to again.

  Kennedy pushed the door with her foot. It opened a few inches with an audible creak.

  Tillman grunted non-committally. ‘Are you going to introduce us or should I wait in the truck?’

  ‘Come on in. We’re so far from the operations manual at this point, I don’t think it matters all that much. We’ll be sharing whatever we find, whether Combes likes it or not – and he’s got as much reason as me to keep quiet about the details.’

  She nudged the door with her foot a second time, pushed it open as far as it would go. The interior of the house was completely dark even on this bright day, the doorway in front a solid black rectangle.

  ‘Combes!’ she called.

  No answer, and no echo: the darkness swallowed the sound absolutely.

  Stepping over the threshold, Kennedy breathed in a sharp, musty smell as thick as incense. The smell of damp, working on paper and fabric at leisure in the dark. Unsettlingly, her shoulders brushed against unyielding substance to left and right – as though the space she was stepping into were somewhat narrower than the doorway itself. A tunnel rather than a hallway.

  She called Combes’s name again, louder this time. Again, the sound felt oddly flat and muffled.

  Kennedy groped beside the door, hoping to find a light switch. Her fingers touched something soft and cool and ragged-edged. When it rustled, she recognised it as paper, and now that her eyes began to adjust a little to the dark she could see it, too: paper stacked in a rough and ready way to shoulder height, just inside the door.

  She found the light switch immediately above the stack and pressed it, and light from a bare bulb flooded the scene before them. Poised there, Kennedy and Tillman stared.

  ‘What the hell?’ Tillman murmured.

  It wasn’t a single stack of paper, it was just the only one that didn’t reach all the way from floor to ceiling. They were looking into a hallway that extended about ten feet, with two doors each to left and right and another at the end. Paper lined the walls, piled up in profusion, leaving a space between barely wide enough for one person to walk through. In places, clearly, it would be necessary to turn or lean inwards so as not to disturb the stacks. They looked precarious, but none had fallen over. Probably the fact that they were braced against the ceiling as well as the floor, and packed in very tightly, helped there.

  In the one room that they could see, at the end of the hallway, more paper had been piled up, in haphazard blocks like the layers of a badly made stepped pyramid. It looked like someone had been filling the room with paper, to begin with in a methodical way, but had finally taken to putting it down wherever was closest and easiest.

  Kennedy took the top sheet from the nearest stack – the one that only came up to her shoulder. It was printed with alphanumeric gibberish: letters and numbers, the letters all capitals, in a sans serif font. They filled the page completely, set out in an unbroken block from right to left, with three-quarter-inch borders. No breaks and no indentations: nothing to indicate whether this was a free-standing document or a single page of a much longer one.

  Kennedy showed the sheet to Tillman. He scanned it briefly, then looked across at her.

  ‘I was hoping we might find a floppy disk,’ she said.

  Tillman laughed: a bark of incredulous amusement.

  Kennedy went in first, angling her body sideways so as not to touch the encroaching towers of paper. The air felt stiflingly warm, heavy with that sour tang, and she had the uneasy feeling of entering an organic space – of being swallowed or of being born in reverse. The thought of seeming nervous or flustered in the face of Tillman’s stolid calm was an unpleasant one. She shoved her presentiments firmly down into her hind-brain and locked them in.

  ‘You made a good call,’ he said behind her. ‘I’m guessing this is Stuart Barlow’s research project right here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘I don’t see anything that looks like a gospel yet.’ Or anything that looks like that bastard, Combes.

  They moved on, slowly and warily. Bare floorboards creaked beneath their feet, and the smell got ever stronger as they left the daylight behind. The first doorway to the left showed them another room full of paper. The first to the right was the same, the second empty apart from a half-full bag of cement and a few lengths of two-by-four on the floor. The last door on the left led through to a sort of hallway, where a flight of narrow, steep wooden stairs led upward. Two more closed doors opening directly off this narrow space, behind the stairwell, turned out to be locked.

  Tillman motioned Kennedy aside and kicked the doors open, without much difficulty: a single kick to each, at waist height. One was yet another paper store, the other a kitchen. Kennedy was interested in the kitchen. She went inside and looked around. A kettle next to the sink, when she flicked up the lid, still had a little water in it. A teapot next to it was brimful of feathery grey mould.

  By this time, Tillman had found the fridge. He threw the door open, winced and covered his face with a hand. ‘Take a look at this,’ he called to Kennedy. She came and peered around his shoulder. The fridge was full of corruption: green milk, white-spotted cheese, apples whose fresh red faces had fallen in on brown plague sores.

  ‘How long to get this bad?’ he asked her. ‘Couple of months?’

  ‘Maybe less,’ Kennedy muttered. ‘Feel how warm it is in here, Tillman. We’re six weeks out from Barlow’s death now. He could have been coming here regularly right up until he was killed.’

  And if he did, she thought, that means he was better than me at shaking his tail. I took death with me to Park Square. This amateur managed to keep his big secret in spite of everything – and his killers still hadn’t found it.

  That thought brought another in its train. If Combes had been here, why had these doors still been locked? It didn’t read right. Unless he was still here somewhere – had found something so engrossing that he hadn’t finished his search or heard their arrival.

  ‘Nothing else down here,’ Tillman said. ‘Let’s take a look upstairs.’

  ‘Give me a second,’ Kennedy told him.

  She went back to the door, stepped outside and took a good look around – a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep. Nothing and nobody in sight, and the silence was still unbroken apart from the cawing of a crow, softened by distance.

  She went back inside, closing the door. Tillman stood watching her expectantly from the other end of the passage. She nodded to him and he headed up the stairs.

  Bringing up the rear, Kennedy made sure to look behind every door and in the corners of the paper storerooms where someone or something might have hidden behind the uneven stacks. She found nothing. But at the top of the stairs, they struck gold.

  They struck paper, too, of course: more murdered forests reduced to cubic yards of print-out, the same meaningless strings of letters and numbers on every sheet that Kennedy picked up and examined. But when they turned on the light in the largest bedroom, which did not contain a bed, among the stacks of A4 was another stack, of grey plastic slabs bearing the Hewlett-Packard logo.

  ‘Looks like a hi-fi tower,’ Tillman grunted.

  ‘Servers,’ Kennedy said. ‘They use rigs like this to render 3D effects for movies. Somebody needed a lot of processing power.’

  She pointed to a trestle table over by the room’s only window. A monitor and keyboard sat there, connected by a thicket of wire cables to the server stack. From the servers, the wires arced away across the floor to a bank of adaptors, where they lost themselves in intricate cross-connections some of which terminated at wall sockets while others ran on out of the room. At least one rose vertically to disappear through a tr
apdoor in the ceiling. There hadn’t been enough power points in this one room, obviously, to handle the traffic. Even with three- and four-way adaptors, it had been necessary to call on the sockets in other rooms. A tarpaulin to one side of the trestle table had been thrown hastily over another rampart of irregular but squared-off shapes: more computer components, maybe, that hadn’t yet been called into service or had been replaced as inadequate.

  This was the room that had the single unboarded window, but thick sack cloth had been draped over it, hanging asymmetrically from a row of nails. Whoever had been working here seemed to have been caught in a contradiction – wanting the possibility of light but wanting to avoid being distracted by the scenic view on the other side of the glass: or, perhaps, to avoid being seen from outside.

  There was more paper on the desk. Only a dozen sheets or so: quite modest in comparison to the rest of the house. Also a stack-pack of CD-R discs, still in its shrinkwrapping.

  Kennedy crossed to the table and turned the computer on. She was rewarded by the faint humming and clicking noises of start-up, sounding fainter still as the barricades and escarpments of paper swallowed the sound.

  She turned her attention to the paper on the desk. She was expecting the same endless streams of alphanumerics, but what she saw drew an exclamation from her – a monosyllable that made Tillman pick up the second sheet to see what she was seeing.

  The text on the paper was still completely unformatted: a logorrhoeic stream that ran uninterrupted from top to bottom of the paper. The only difference – the realisation that had made Kennedy swear aloud – was that these were actual words.

  ANDJESUSGAVEUNTOHIMTHEBLESSINGOFHISHANDSTHATHEWITHHE LDFROMALLOTHERSEVENTHOSEWHOFOLLOWEDHIMANDHESAIDUN TOHIMIAMCALLEDSAVIOURYETWHOWILLSAVEMELORDISCARIOTANS WEREDHIMIFITBETHYWILLISWEARTHATIWILLSERVETHEEINANYWISE ANDJESUSSAIDUNTOISCARIOTYOUWILLBETHELOWESTANDTHEHIGHE STTHEALPHAANDTHEOMEGATHENWERETHEOTHERSANGRYTHATHE

  The squared-off, bolded capitals and the absence of spaces and line breaks made the stream of words read like a drunkard’s bellowed rant. The bottom of the page cut it off mid-word: the sudden, bathetic silence when the ranter realises that his meaning has escaped him, and shuffles off into the night.

  The computer had booted up by this time, into a mode that didn’t look like any interface Kennedy had ever seen. Folder icons were displayed in white on a black background, each with a header label: SYSTEM, BIOS, SECURITY, DEVICES, PROGRAMS, PROJECTS.

  Kennedy sat down at the table. The tubular steel chair had a wobble, so she had to lean forward to keep it steady. She clicked PROJECTS and the display disappeared, to be replaced by another list. It contained only two items: PARENT DIRECTORY and ROTGUT.

  She clicked ROTGUT.

  A box popped up, red-bordered. PASSWORD, it demanded.

  Kennedy opened her handbag and took out her notebook. She turned to the last page, where she’d copied down the words from Sarah Opie’s paper.

  Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms

  Alone and palely loitering the sedge has withered

  From the lake and no birds are singing.

  She typed in the number 2, then in quick succession 4334624. She hit return, and nothing happened except that the PASSWORD box flashed once and emptied itself again.

  ‘What was that?’ Tillman asked.

  ‘I took these words down from a sheet of paper Sarah Opie had on her when she died,’ Kennedy said. ‘She told me it was a mnemonic for her computer password. It’s from a Keats poem. “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” And it actually goes: “Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms / Alone and palely loitering? / The sedge has withered from the lake / And no birds sing.”

  ‘She played about with the line breaks, so that she’d be left with exactly eight words on a line. Messed with the wording a bit, too.’

  ‘So you’re thinking an eight-digit password,’ Tillman said.

  ‘Yeah. And I just tried the first line – assuming that Opie was just taking the number of letters in each word.’

  She tried the second and third lines, too. Nothing: the box filled up each time and refreshed when she hit return, appearing empty and with the same silent demand.

  ‘Initial letters,’ Tillman suggested.

  Kennedy tried that without success. Then she tried both sequences – numbers of letters and initials – in reverse. The box blinked at her, inscrutably, and refused to yield. She swore softly.

  ‘It’s got to be something obvious,’ Tillman pointed out. ‘It’s no use as a mnemonic if she had to think about it too much.’

  Kennedy chewed her lower lip, thinking furiously. Something obvious, but not initial letters or length of words.

  Why three sequences of eight words, rather than just one? The blocks of eight indicated an eight-digit key, but maybe the three lines were significant, too. She took every third word and entered the letter totals.

  can – knight – alone – loitering – has – the – no – singing

  3-6-5-9-3-3-2-7

  The computer chuntered industriously to itself for a few moments, then the screen went completely blank, before filling up again with a list of what were presumably file names:

  ROTGUT RAW 1, 1–7

  ROTGUT RAW 2, 8–10

  ROTGUT RAW 3, 11–14a

  ROTGUT RAW 4, 14b–17

  ROTGUT PARTIAL 1, 1–7

  ROTGUT PARTIAL 2, 8–10

  ROTGUT PARTIAL 3, 11–14a

  ROTGUT PARTIAL 4, 14b–17

  ROTGUT FULL 1, 1–7

  ROTGUT FULL 2, 8–10

  ROTGUT FULL 3, 11–14a

  ROTGUT FULL 4, 14b–17

  Kennedy clicked on the first file: ROTGUT RAW 1, 1–7. The screen blinked, there was another rattle of dry, chitinous sounds from the hard drive, and then she was looking at a different list.

  Dalath 2 actuals

  Waw 3 actuals 1 spaced

  Semkath 2 actuals 2 spaced

  He exact

  Resh exact

  Mim 1 actual 1 spaced

  Tau exact

  She used the scroll bar on the right of the screen to see how much of this stuff there was. It went on through what looked like several hundred items.

  She closed the file, opened one of the PARTIALs. This file was a whole lot busier.

  He fai

  dun [refer 7]

  chall

  whe [refer 4]

  can [6,7,2] came

  sai

  sun

  crall

  lai

  that [refer 21]

  wil [into?] [refer 3]

  that

  [21,4,6] he had [insert 2]

  til

  the t

  nil

  what

  given [refer 5] to them

  in

  get [hsem?]

  ant

  where [they?]

  on

  bet

  ane

  there

  an

  saw the

  sol [refer 18]

  their

  sand [let?]

  him [refer 33]

  fol

  tier

  s and

  gim

  dier

  t end

  lim

  ‘Any idea?’ Kennedy asked Tillman, nodding at the monitor.

  Tillman had been reading over her shoulder. ‘Translation,’ he suggested.

  ‘The file label said partial,’ Kennedy offered back. ‘And all these lists of words are places where they’re not sure – where they’re listing possible alternatives. They were working their way through a document, translating as they went.’

  ‘The Rotgut.’

  ‘Must be. No, wait. The Rotgut is already a translation, isn’t it? I mean, the actual Rotgut manuscript is already in English. Nobody knows what the source document was, or what language it was in, so that wouldn’t work.’

  Kennedy picked up the top sheet of paper again and ran her gaze across the surface of the hectic verbal torrent.<
br />
  THENLETNOTTHYSERVANTGTOILINVAINLORDORWITHOUTREWARD THEREWARDISHALLGIVEUNTOTHEEWILLBEGREATERTHANANYHAVE KNOWNANDGREATERTHANTHOUCANSTFRAMEINWORDSTHENHELE DHIMFROMTHATPLACEINTOANOTHERPLACEFROMWHICHALLTHING SINHEAVENANDINEARTHWEREVISIBLEIHAVEGIVENTHEEARTHUNTOA DAMANDHISSEEDWHATSHALLIGIVETHEEMOSTFAITHFULANDMOSTU NCOMPLAININGISHALLMAKETHEEHATEDANDREVILEDBUTTHENISHA

  Downstairs, tens of thousands of pages of random characters: upstairs, a few scant sheets of real words. No formatting, no punctuation, no spaces, but still, an actual narrative of some kind with a distinctly biblical flavour.

  ‘It was a code,’ Kennedy said, wonderingly. ‘And they broke it.’

  She turned to stare at Tillman. He was looking at her in silence, waiting for more. And the pieces of it were all in her mind, now, but it was still hard for her to make out the final shape – like trying to figure out what a jigsaw might show by looking at the reverse face, the face that bore no image.

  ‘Barlow gave evidence in a court case,’ she said. ‘Years back. A ring of counterfeiters, selling fake documents that were meant to be from one of the big biblical finds – Nag Hammadi.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He was the expert witness. They called him in to look – look hard – at the real documents and the fake ones, so he could testify which was which and prove that someone was putting dodgy gospels on the market. It was a really big thing for him. He had newspaper cuttings framed and put up on the wall of his office.’

  She looked at the screen again. At the list of maybe-Aramaic characters. Actuals. Spaces. Exacts. ‘Hundreds of scholars and historians must have looked at those things. Maybe thousands. But Barlow was coming at them from a different angle. He was trying to catch them out – looking for things that didn’t fit. And …’

  That was as far as she could go. She had no idea what Barlow had found, but she felt sure that it had been the turning point. ‘There was something wrong with the Nag Hammadi texts. Something you’d only see if you went in looking to catch a fraud in the first place.’