The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  This was neutral ground: not Dovecote. They slowed at last, by silent consent deciding that they’d run far enough for now. Kennedy bent from the waist, hands gripping her knees, and gradually got her breath back under control. Tillman stayed upright, looking behind for pursuit: but they would already have heard any pursuit that wasn’t made up of ninjas.

  ‘Where now?’ Kennedy asked, haltingly. ‘We’re … in the middle of … bloody nowhere, and you blew up the truck!’

  ‘Felt like a good idea at the time,’ Tillman said.

  Kennedy laughed – a harsh sound that seemed torn out of her. ‘Did the job,’ she observed, grimly, and then, ‘How? How did you do that?’

  By the dumbest of dumb luck, was the answer. The mere chance that I couldn’t find a lighter to cauterise my wounds, back in Folkestone, and had to settle for matches; and a fun fact from a decades-ago chemistry lesson. ‘I turned a regular bullet into an incendiary,’ he told her. ‘The miracle ingredient was ground-up match-heads: they’re mostly crystallised red phosphorus. Two-hundred-degree ignition point, more or less, which is about the same as the petrol in the tank – but you’ve only got to hit that temperature for a fraction of a second, say with impact friction, and then it sparks like crazy because it’s a degraded form of white phosphorus, and that’s a natural pyrophore.’

  He wound down because that was as much as he knew, really. As a kid, he’d done it with BB pellets, anointing the noses of the tiny leaden slugs with gritty red slime and then waiting for them to dry: shooting at cans of lighter fluid at ten metres on a home-made range, then marvelling at the angel of light and heat that spread its wings suddenly above their tiny backyard.

  Kennedy looked at him, in silence, for a long time, seeming about to speak but saying nothing. Tillman waited anyway, knowing that something was coming.

  ‘That’s two people dead,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Two people dead. Extra-judicial killings. You killed them, Tillman.’

  He shrugged, genuinely not sure what response she wanted from him. ‘So?’

  ‘So I’m meant to sodding arrest you. This is … messed up. I’m not your moll, or your sidekick, or your … anything else. We can’t go on meeting like this.’

  He breathed out slowly, his own equilibrium escaping him. It had been a wild night even by his sloppy standards, and the deaths, in memory, left him with no sense of triumph. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We can’t. Not for much longer. But the deal stands, Kennedy. Whatever you get from those discs or the papers …’

  ‘Yes? Whatever I get?’

  ‘Well, I killed for it. So it’s mine, too.’

  She stared at him in silence again, and again he waited her out. This time there was no sequel. Whatever it was she wanted to say, she didn’t manage to find the words for it. She walked on past him down the lane, heading towards the road. He respected her mood, allowed her a whole lot of distance all the way down.

  38

  What had happened at Dovecote Farm could not be hidden.

  Kennedy called Division from the roadside, reporting the results of their search, Combes’s death and her encounter with the killers. She left out nothing – except that in her account, she’d made her own way to the farm after being separated from Combes, and she’d been alone when she escaped from the blaze. About Tillman, she was silent.

  Squad cars and ambulances, fire tenders and vans with flashing lights began to arrive within the next half-hour. They cordoned off the site, put out the flames still feeding fitfully on the remains of the farmhouse and the truck, and began the long, involved task of working the scene. Kennedy wished them joy of it.

  Summerhill himself was almost the last to arrive. There could be any number of reasons for that, but one was certainly his backtracking through the files before he left Division, looking for the data trail that led to this pandemonium, making damn sure he hadn’t given his blessing to it.

  They exchanged words briefly. Kennedy played up her exhaustion and pain to keep Summerhill at bay and the paramedics mindful of their duties. She gave him the barest of bare-bones explanations, decisively derailed when she told him that one of the as yet unidentified bodies was that of Detective Sergeant Combes: another man down. Summerhill didn’t even ask if she’d managed to retrieve any of the physical evidence, so she didn’t have to lie.

  Temporary dressings were applied to her cuts and burns, and then she was spirited away to the Royal Surrey, the nearest hospital with an A & E department. Before she left, she asked Summerhill to send a black-and-white after her. If they were going to drug her – maybe put her under – she wanted to get her statement down first: there was no telling what she might forget under anaesthetic. Begrudgingly, Summerhill agreed. Apart from that, though, he ordered her to talk to nobody before she talked to him. ‘Nobody, Kennedy. Not even a bloody priest.’

  ‘I don’t know any, Jimmy,’ she croaked. ‘Don’t move in those kind of circles.’

  In fact, her injuries were mostly superficial and nobody suggested putting her out. It was just topical analgesics, painkillers and an anaesthetic gel. They did suggest an intravenous drip, but Kennedy refused it, signing the prissy little form which said, effectively, that it was her look-out.

  Twenty-five minutes later she walked out through the sliding doors of the A & E and found the squad car waiting on the tarmac. ‘I need to go back to Division,’ she told the slightly startled constable. ‘New Scotland Yard. Now. There’s some evidence that needs to be logged.’

  The PC reached for his radio. Kennedy put a hand on his arm and he stopped.

  ‘It’s ATSA,’ she said. ‘No discussion on open channels. Sorry.’

  The PC didn’t argue or ask any questions: it was bullshit, of course, but the provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Security Act were a useful trump card, a shapeless bag of special powers invoked whenever anyone in Division wanted to jump a small hurdle without slowing down for explanations.

  Or was it bullshit? Certainly she was up against a conspiracy that had better resources than she did and links to other countries.

  Once they got back to Dacre Street, she let the PC go. He’d probably report in straight away, but only to his own super. She wasn’t worried about word getting back to Summerhill any time soon.

  In the bear pit, she made a copy of the disc. Then she dropped the original into an envelope and put it in the internal mail to Summerhill. She added a brief note explaining how the pain of her burns and the trauma of her narrow brushes with death had made her momentarily forget that she’d managed to save one small keepsake from the inferno.

  She felt the absurdity of all this hole-in-corner intrigue. But she knew, too, that the next few days were going to be rough: rougher, even, than what had come before. Another man down, and once again the record would show that Kennedy had gone in without proper back-up. This time she’d also ignored chain of command and acted without any authorisation from her case officer. There was a real chance that the book, suspended in mid-air since the events at Park Square, would now be thrown full-force. If that happened – if she was embroiled in committees and hamstrung by inquiries – she wanted at least to be able to evaluate what she’d found, to stay involved in the investigation, as far as she could. She owed that much to Harper, and to herself.

  She copied the disc one more time, for Tillman. While she was waiting for her creaky, ancient drive to finish the job, she checked her emails. Among them she found a reply from Quai Charles de Gaulle, Lyon. Interpol.

  She scanned the email: ‘Your request for information under the reciprocal arrangements set out in the UN Convention … positive results recent enough to be relevant to your … accompanying documents only to be circulated internally and by permission of …’

  There was an attachment. She clicked on it. And then stared at the screen for a minute without even blinking.

  Then she picked up her phone and called Tillman’s cell, the new number.

  ‘Tillman.’

&n
bsp; ‘Kennedy.’ Considering what they’d been through a scant couple of hours before, he sounded pretty composed and matter-of-fact. She wondered where he was. In a transport café off the A3? A pub in Guildford? Back in the Smoke already, holed up in some rented room reading Guns and Ammo?

  ‘Leo …’ she said, and got no further.

  ‘Are you okay? What happened when your top brass arrived? I was watching that circus from about a half-mile off: really didn’t feel like getting any closer.’

  ‘I … it was fine,’ she foundered. ‘It’s fine so far. They can’t convene a firing squad until they’ve checked their ammunition.’

  ‘Let me know when it gets serious. I’ll help any way I can.’

  ‘Leo, listen. There’s a message here from Interpol. They came back on my C52.’

  ‘On your what?’

  ‘Routine request. Information from other forces on pending cases. I asked them … I asked them about Michael Brand.’

  ‘And they came up positive?’ The tenor of his voice changed instantly. ‘Something new?’

  ‘They forwarded a whole wad of stuff from America. PDFs of documents from local forces in Arizona, and from the FBI.’ She swallowed, tried again. ‘Leo, there are other ways into this. With what we’ve got from Dovecote, we can—’

  He cut across her, reading her tension accurately, wanting her just to say it, whatever it was. ‘Kennedy, ten words or less.’

  ‘Michael Brand …’

  ‘Yes? Come on.’

  ‘He went down in a plane crash just outside a town called Peason, in Arizona. He’s dead, Leo. He died six weeks ago.’

  PART THREE

  124

  39

  The Colorado was a spent force these days. Extensively pillaged by Southern California via something known as the All-American Canal (what patriot wouldn’t stand and salute for a watercourse that called itself that?), and by irrigation channels built to slake the thirst of Arizona farmlands, it mostly ran out of steam somewhere south of Yuma, lost its way in dry arroyos and never made it within a hundred miles of the ocean.

  This much Kennedy learned from her cab driver, a chatty guy named John-Bird who claimed to be three-quarters Mojave Indian. He picked Kennedy up, as arranged, outside the main terminal at Laughlin Bullhead, which called itself an international airport but was accessible from London only via a stopover at Washington Dulles. It had been a fifteen-hour flight and Kennedy was ragged at the edges even before she got into the cab. The heat didn’t help – local time was 11.50, and the sun was at its blinding zenith – although John-Bird cheerfully informed her that it was a dry heat and not nearly so debilitating as the wetter heats you got in less civilised parts of the world. He turned the air conditioning up a notch, which did nothing to the temperature but significantly increased the noise.

  They caught the 68 and drove straight out of town, staying with the Colorado until they turned off east towards Kingman and distant Flagstaff. The river looked impressive enough to Kennedy, a meandering giant twice as wide as the Thames flowing between towering ramparts of orange rock. She couldn’t see a single cloud from horizon to horizon.

  ‘Go south, go clockwise, veer left,’ John-Bird said. ‘Know what that is? That’s how to remember all the tributaries of the Colorado – the Gila River, the San Juan, Green River, the Colorado River Aqueduct, the … what’s V, what’s V? Okay, yeah, the Virgin River, and the Little River. ’S cute, huh? Sounds like directions, but it won’t get you nowhere. It’s just to remember.’

  ‘Very useful,’ Kennedy agreed, glumly. Peason was a forty-five minute drive away and John-Bird looked to be just getting into his stride. He was telling her now how the name of the river came from the fact that the water used to be coloured bright red with sediment – but these days all that stuff got filtered out by the Glen Canyon Dam, so it was the same colour as any other river. Cute, huh?

  To get him off his speciality subject, she asked him about the plane crash. Yeah, it turned out, he was on the road that day, driving a fare from Grasshopper Junction, and he actually saw the plane come down. ‘It was crazy sudden. Like, out of nowhere. Never seen nothing like it. But it was far enough away that it didn’t make no sound, that I could hear. It was real quiet. That was what I couldn’t forget, afterwards – that it came down out of the sky and there must have been, like, a huge explosion, but for me it was quiet like … you know, like when you’ve got the TV on with the volume turned right down. All those people dead, without a sound.’

  He mused on this for a minute or so, which gave Kennedy a respite to look at the instructions the sheriff’s office had sent her. But it was a short meditation, and soon she was being regaled by more fun facts about the south-west’s favourite waterway. Not that John-Bird was limited to the Colorado: he knew all sorts of stuff about Lake Mead and Lake Mohave, too. He refused, though, to be drawn on the subject of Las Vegas Bay. ‘Not a good place. Not a family place.’ Spaced out from tiredness, and almost free-associating, Kennedy tried to imagine what a sleazy, non-family-friendly body of water would look like. Maybe there were illegal additives.

  When they finally got to Peason, she made John-Bird wait while she dumped her bags at the hotel, an EconoLodge fitted out in fake hacienda style, so that he could take her straight on over to the sheriff’s office. She knew she wasn’t at her best, but she wanted to make contact and get things moving on that front. She might not have much lead time, so she should at least make the best use of what she had.

  The sheriff’s office was a single-storey building right on Peason’s main street, next door to a realtor’s that offered LUXURY APARTMENTS TWICE THE SQUARE FOOTAGE. John-Bird gave Kennedy a card. She solemnly put it in her purse, but promised herself that she’d only use it as a last resort.

  She crossed the street and went on into the office, as John-Bird pulled past her with a final wave.

  Inside, the place smelled of pot pourri – honey, wisteria, maybe rose petals – and the air conditioning was perfectly pitched. The formidable woman at the despatch desk, with bad skin, big hair and a face as flat and pugnacious as a bulldog’s, looked like she might be responsible for keeping up the moral fibre of the place, and like she might take those responsibilities seriously. Beyond her desk, the room was bisected by a wooden dividing wall at waist height, into which a small gate had been set.

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ the bulldog said to Kennedy. ‘How may I help you?’

  Kennedy approached the desk and handed over the guarantors of her bona fides: a letter of introduction on London Metropolitan Police headed paper and a print-out of an email sent by someone named Webster Gayle, inviting her to come on over whenever she liked, he’d be only too happy to help out in any way he could.

  ‘I’m from London,’ she explained. ‘I’m meant to be meeting up with Sheriff Gayle. I don’t have an appointment as such, but I thought I’d let him know that I’ve arrived.’

  The bulldog scanned both sheets with slow, imperturbable concentration. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said at last. ‘Web said you’d be coming by. He thought it was tomorrow, but I guess it’s today after all. Okay, why’n’t you go ahead and take a seat, and I’ll tell the sheriff you’re here.’

  Kennedy took the offered seat, while the bulldog tapped keys on a switchboard and murmured something into the intercom too low for her to hear. The sheriff’s voice, by contrast, came through painfully loud. ‘Thanks, Connie. Tell her to wait a minute, would you mind? I got to comb my hair and tuck my shirt inside my pants for a British lady. Is she pretty, at all? Or does she look like the Queen?’

  The bulldog closed the channel and gave Kennedy an inscrutable look. ‘He’ll be right with you,’ she said.

  Kennedy sat down and waited, trying not to nod off. She drank a couple of glasses of water from the cooler, which was almost painfully cold and helped a lot. By the time she’d finished the second, a man the size of a Welsh dresser was lumbering towards her, unlatching the gate with huge, awkward-looking hands, one of which he held
out to be shaken as he took the remaining space in two strides.

  Kennedy pegged Gayle at once as the sort of big man who’d learned a kind of innate caution and delicacy from having to deal all the time with a world several sizes too small for him. He didn’t enfold her hand in his, he just touched her lightly on the palm and the backs of the knuckles with the tips of his own fingers, making a courteous nod stand in for an actual handshake.

  ‘Webster Gayle,’ he told her. ‘County Sheriff. Always a pleasure to meet a fellow law enforcement officer, Sergeant – and your force has a great reputation.’

  ‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ Kennedy said. ‘Listen, I only just got in and I’m more dead than alive. But if you’ve got some time tomorrow, I’d love to pick your brains about this business and maybe get your take on—’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Gayle chewed on the word as though it was a dubious piece of gristle. ‘Well, yeah, we could talk tomorrow. But I’ve got a window right now, and I’m aware that you’ve only got five days in your budget. If you’re really too tired, then okay, let’s let it rest and meet in the a.m. But if you think you can stay upright for another hour or so, then maybe we could at least go over the basics – what it is you want to do while you’re out here and how we can facilitate that.’

  ‘Of course.’ Kennedy smiled and nodded. She was entirely dependent on this man’s goodwill and she knew better than to pull back on the reins if he was ready to break into a trot. Besides, Gayle was right in saying that she didn’t have much time: probably even less than he thought. ‘By all means, let’s get the ball rolling.’

  Kennedy knew this interview had to come and she had a speech all prepared that she hoped she could deliver with the appropriate conviction despite the jet lag. The speech explained, with a fair amount of supporting documentation, exactly what crimes she was investigating, how they strayed into Gayle’s jurisdiction, what international and inter-agency protocols could be invoked in support of her presence, and what level of support she wanted the County Sheriff’s office to provide. In other words, she was ready to fill in the blanks from the official (or at least, official-looking) inter-force aid request and put precise limits on what otherwise might have looked like a blank cheque.