The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Gassan smiled faintly. ‘No. That’s a different gospel. Matthew, to be precise. But the figure thirty does appear, in a way that makes it seem likely that Matthew was referring to something specific when he chose that figure. Should I read you the text?’

  Kennedy shrugged. ‘Shoot.’

  Gassan took up the notebook again. ‘There’s a digital version,’ he said. ‘A clean text, which I’ll send to you. I imagine you’ll want to read it in its entirety before you saddle up and go into battle again. I also sent a copy, with all of Barlow’s notes and my own, to my solicitor, along with a letter telling him to publish after my death. I’ll have nothing left to lose, then, will I? And I’ll have earned the right to have my name added to the list of the gospel’s discoverers, if I’ve already died for it.’

  He found his place at last and read aloud, in a voice from which much of the tonal colour had drained away. ‘Then Judas said unto Him, All will be done as you have laid it down, oh lord. And Jesus said, yes, even so, all will be done in that wise. And you will be reviled by them that know you not, yet afterward you will be raised up higher than them that hate you.

  ‘And when shall I be raised, oh lord?

  ‘Jesus said, from this moment in which I speak unto you thenceforward until the ending of the seed of Adam, they will execrate your name.

  ‘But my Father has given dominion to the seed of Adam only for a certain time. And afterwards he will end them, that the world might be given unto you and yours.

  ‘And Jesus gave unto Judas thirty silver pieces, saying, how many bronze prutahs have I given unto you? For so many years will the seed of Adam enjoy this world: for so many years will their lease endure. But afterward they will be cast down, and the world will belong to you and yours for ever.’

  The professor looked up at Kennedy, perhaps expecting a question. The only one Kennedy could think of was pretty banal. ‘What’s the answer?’ she asked. ‘How many bronze whatevers?’

  ‘Three thousand. There were a hundred prutahs in one shekel. Three thousand years, then the children of Judas get their turn in the big chair.’

  ‘Guess we’ve still got a while, at least.’

  Gassan frowned. ‘Why do you say that, Sergeant?’

  ‘Even if the gospel was written right after Christ died,’ Kennedy said, with a shrug, ‘it’s only two thousand years.’

  ‘True. Unfortunately, nobody in Judea in those days counted anything from Christ. In Judea and Samaria, where this text was presumably written, it was customary to count from the unification of the tribes, in 1012 BCE. Three thousand and twenty years ago, give or take. I hate to rain on your parade, but our lease is up.’

  Kennedy closed her eyes, rubbed them with thumb and forefinger. There was no headache yet, but she could feel the beginnings of one, forming like a thunderhead in the vaulted roof of her skull. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So we got a chunk of the Gnostic Bible, and it was a big secret, once upon a time. I’m with you all the way, professor. But it still leaves me missing a piece, somewhere along the line. Nobody kills for a word. Or at least … not a word this old.’

  Gassan’s depressed spirits flared up in sudden irritation, his arms flailing in truncated, awkward arcs. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sergeant. Everybody kills for words! What else is there to kill for? Money? Money is words from a government saying they’ll give you gold. Laws are words from judges saying who gets to live free and who doesn’t. Bibles … Bibles are words from God saying do all the awful, awful things you want to do and you’ll be forgiven anyway. It all comes down to words. And in every case, the people who kill for them are the ones who think they own them.’

  He seemed to realise, suddenly, that his voice was too loud in the empty, echoing room – almost a shout. He turned away from her, embarrassed and still bristling. With a formless wave of his hand, he indicated the notebook.

  ‘Read it,’ he suggested. ‘Read it all. Not just the gospel, but the words around the gospel – the messages that went with it. You need to see for yourself.’

  43

  The morgue was way over in Bullhead. It seemed that Peason kept nothing within its city limits: it was a sort of outsourced town.

  Bullhead, though, was very different from Santa Claus: it was a small but busy urban hub, with an even busier morgue. Kennedy couldn’t quite believe how busy, how many freezer rooms the place had and how many doors were marked full. Coming in through the parking lot, they had passed several windowless vans with massive freezer units attached, and Kennedy had clocked enough hours on enough different task forces to know them for what they were: mobile refrigeration units of the kind normally sent into disaster areas to put a lot of dead people on ice quickly and prevent the spread of epidemics.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ she asked Gayle, as they stepped off the baking asphalt into the air-conditioned chill.

  He didn’t get what she meant, then he followed her gaze and grunted. He seemed about to speak, but a white-coated assistant who looked to be still in his teens was already heading in their direction, smiling a professional consultative smile he’d learned from his elders and smoothers. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Gayle muttered. ‘It’s kind of a taboo subject around here.’

  They no longer had Brand’s body on the premises, the assistant told them unnecessarily. He had been released for burial three weeks before, although in fact the state authorities had decided to cremate him, along with two other unclaimed bodies from the plane. Surely the sheriff’s office was already aware?

  ‘We didn’t come to see the body, son,’ Gayle broke in. ‘Just the file.’

  ‘The file is public access. It’s available via—’

  ‘Yeah, but that’s just a summary. I mean the full file, with all the whistles and bells, photos and prints and what all. It’s on my authority, and county’s already approved it, but you’re going to want to check in with your supervisor before you set us up, and we’re happy to wait while you go ahead and do just that, long as it doesn’t take more than two minutes out of my already over-full day.’

  His script pulled out from under him, the lad scampered away without another word. Kennedy was impressed. Gayle’s style, high on casual warmth and low on intimidation, but with an underlying steeliness to it that warned you not to mess with him, seemed to work like a charm. She felt glad she wasn’t negotiating this maze by herself.

  The assistant came back well inside of two minutes. He ushered them into a tiny windowless office, on the wall of which the original ‘dangling kitten’ motivational poster – hang in there! – had been pinned, with the overlay of a rifle sight zeroed on the kitten’s head. Instead of the original legend, it was captioned with the words: Hanging’s too good for the little bastard. Police morgues were entitled to police humour, which was always robust.

  The assistant used his log-in and password to get them into the digital records, asked them – politely, and without ever managing to look Gayle entirely in the eye – to restrict themselves to the file they’d officially requested, and left them to it.

  ‘You need me to stay here?’ Gayle asked.

  ‘No,’ said Kennedy. ‘Thanks, Sheriff. I can manage.’

  ‘Okay. I got a phone call to make, and I guess I’ll get a coffee along the way. You want me to bring you one back?’

  Kennedy asked for milk, no sugar, and Gayle headed out. She turned to the file and immersed herself in its cold certainties.

  Brand’s corpse, like most of those that had fallen with the plane, presented with numerous abraded and crush injuries, friction artefacts and depressurisation traumas. The list ran to a page and a half, but could be summarised in four words: Brand was a mess. With such a spectacularly damaged body, it was almost meaningless to state a cause of death, although the usual conclusions, with the usual provisos, had been reached. The lining of Brand’s lungs had been ripped when the cabin depressurised at speed. Oxygen concentrations in venous tissue suggested that trapped air had been forced through the lungs into the man’
s thoracic cavity, where the oxygen had formed bubbles in both major and minor blood vessels. The heart would have stopped in short order, but the brain would have been starved of blood in any case. Unconsciousness and death would have followed swiftly enough that it was almost impossible Brand was still alive when the plane hit the ground.

  So much for the big picture. Smaller details were then sketched in lightly as observations and speculations, usually with no firm conclusions drawn. Abrasions to Brand’s knuckles might indicate a physical altercation with another passenger, possibly in the panic of the initial forced descent. Broken fingernails and damage to the tissue of the fingertips on both hands was harder to explain: had he perhaps clawed at the frame of a window or door, trying to escape? It seemed likely, in any case, that Brand had been on his feet when the depressurisation occurred, because unsecured bodies collected more – and more widely distributed – trauma artefacts than those that were fixed in one position. It could be stated with more confidence that he had not been wearing his seat belt: seated and belted passengers, without exception, had a pattern of bruising across the hips caused by sudden shifts in air speed pushing the body hard against the restraining belt. Brand didn’t have those particular bruises.

  He did have a lot of scars, though. Whoever had performed the autopsy had been punctilious in recording them. Bullet wounds, stab wounds, impact wounds, all remaining from previous brushes with death, all old enough to have mostly healed over. In one place, a newer stab wound had crossed the scar tissue from an older injury. This merited an exclamation mark from the coroner, who must have wondered exactly what kind of lifestyle Michael Brand had been enjoying. Given his age, it was a most astonishing history of prior injuries. I can honestly say, I have never seen even in a career soldier at the end of his active service such a fascinating and varied collection.

  Given his age? Kennedy went back up to the head of the document and cross-referenced with the summary of Michael Brand’s passport data included as an addendum. Then she went to the photographs.

  There were several full-face shots, identical as far as Kennedy could see. They all showed a bloated face, the skin blotched and mottled from broken blood vessels. He could be any dead man, at any stage of life. But underneath the damage, how old was he? How much had Michael Brand lived, before he fell out of the sky like Icarus, imploding as he died?

  Not long enough, was the answer. Or too long, depending how you looked at it.

  The door was kicked open from the outside, slamming back against the wall. Kennedy was rising as she turned, hands flying into a defensive block.

  It was Gayle: he had used his foot to open the door because he had a styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand.

  ‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ he said, staring at her with something like concern. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Don’t know my own strength.’

  Her heart pounding, she lowered her hands. When she took the coffee, she saw from the look on his face that he could feel the tremor in her fingers, but he maintained a casual tone as he asked her if she’d got what she wanted.

  ‘I got … something,’ she admitted.

  ‘Glad to hear it. Something good?’

  ‘I think I caught Michael Brand out in a lie. A big one, maybe. Could I have a few minutes longer?’

  ‘We’re not on the clock here,’ Gayle said, easily. ‘You go ahead. I’ll watch the traffic go by.’

  Kennedy finished her notes. She was doing it for form’s sake now, and to let her breathing and heart rate return to normal, but her gaze caught on one small detail in the brain work. Extensive damage to serotonergic neurons cannot be explained by or linked to other injuries, singly or in combination. Coupled with 5-HT depletion in the hippocampus, the nerve damage suggests prolonged and repeated exposure to a sympathomimetic drug such as methamphetamine, in extremely large doses.

  What makes people weep blood? Stress or drugs, Ralph Prentice had said. She believed she was seeing the drugs part of that equation. Michael Brand – and probably the pale assassins she’d met twice now – used some substance in the methamphetamine family, maybe to increase speed, strength and alertness. And it cost them: they took damage from it. As a cop, even one with very little formal narco training, she knew more than a little about what that damage might include. It was another fact for the file, abstract and useless for the moment, maybe relevant later.

  She closed the Brand file and looked up. Despite his joke about watching the traffic, Gayle was actually looking at her, his expression thoughtful and maybe expectant.

  He’d been the soul of professional discretion, but he had a right to expect her to share. Yet how could she explain the theory forming in her mind: particularly, how could she explain it to this bluff, friendly, uncomplicated man who seemed to embody a sort of homespun courtesy she imagined had disappeared from the world?

  ‘I’m thinking crazy thoughts,’ was what she said, almost apologetically.

  Gayle shrugged with his eyebrows, acknowledging the proviso, inviting her to say more.

  ‘I think Brand might be the answer to one of your questions. I think maybe he brought down the plane.’

  Gayle looked at her in mild puzzlement. ‘Why would you think that?’

  Kennedy showed him what she’d found in the files: the evidence that Brand had been in a fight, and the damage to his fingertips – which he might have sustained in trying to pull the door open before the pressure seal broke. It was nothing much, when you thought about it, but Gayle nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Brand came on board late,’ he told her. ‘That was the call I just made – to the FAA. He bought his ticket when the plane was already boarding, got to the gate with a minute to spare. He was in a hurry to get to New York, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Or maybe not,’ said Kennedy. ‘Maybe he was just in a hurry to get on board that particular plane.’

  ‘So he could sabotage it?’

  Kennedy made a non-committal gesture. ‘Possibly. Yes. I’m thinking yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It had come in from Mexico, right?’

  ‘Mexico City.’

  ‘How did they come in? What was the flight plan?’

  ‘I have no idea, Sergeant. Mostly the airlines like to take the planes out over water if there’s any to hand, so I guess it would have come up the Gulf and maybe clipped the south-western corner of the state before it turned west.’

  ‘What’s down there, Sheriff?’

  ‘The desert. Then Tucson. Then more desert.’

  Kennedy pondered.

  ‘Could we find out,’ she ventured at last, ‘whether 124 filed a change in its flight plan at any point?’

  ‘I guess we could. The FAA keeps all that stuff on record for twenty years, I seem to remember. Why? What’s on your mind?’

  What was on her mind sounded ridiculous even to Kennedy. She shook her head, meaning either I don’t know or I can’t tell you.

  Either way, Gayle appeared to accept the head-shake as all the answer he was going to get for now. ‘I’ll call them from the car,’ he said, dropping his coffee cup neatly into the waste bin. ‘Let’s move on out.’

  On the way back to Peason, she remembered to ask again about the refrigeration trucks.

  Grayle chewed on the question in silence for a while, as though thinking how best to answer it. ‘Well, that’s a thing that happens every summer,’ he told her at last. ‘We got a whole lot of illegals coming in from Mexico, across the border. Used to be it was only a problem in the southern parts of the state. You know, down around Tucson. But there’s a lot more patrols out now, since the state legislature said we got to get tougher on this. So the coyotes – the people traffickers – they gotta stay further out from cities, further out from roads, and go through a lot more desert before they can do the hand-off. They’ll cross the 8 and the 10, before they turn east. And that’s a lot of desert. So every year, and specially in summer, there’s a lot of them don’t make it.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Kennedy
was appalled. ‘But if each of those trucks holds, what? Ten? A dozen bodies? That means—’

  ‘Even this far north, we can get twenty or thirty in a bad month. Plus we take in some of the overspill from further south. It’s hundreds, Sergeant. Maybe thousands. Thousands every year. Bodies wear down quick in the desert, get covered up with sand and dust. Get eaten, maybe. Get so you don’t know if the bones are a year old or a couple of centuries. So don’t nobody have a proper count of it.’

  Kennedy said nothing, but something floated up to the surface of her mind: a quote that she’d read in a history textbook once. Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.

  ‘The only other place I’ve seen those trucks used …’ she ventured at last.

  ‘Was after an earthquake or something. A disaster. Sure. Well, this is our disaster, I guess. Arizona armageddon. Just happens to be in slow motion.’

  The silence was somewhat hard to break after that. Giving up on light conversation, Gayle got Connie to place a second call to the FAA and patch him through. Obviously curious, the despatch clerk offered to call on Gayle’s behalf and put whatever questions he needed answered. Gayle thanked her kindly but said he’d handle it himself, after which Connie maintained a sullen silence over the airwaves as she did as she was told.

  But the call was a waste of time. There had been nothing anomalous about the flight plan of CA124 on the day of the disaster. It had come up along the line of the Gulf, as Gayle had guessed, and stayed west of Tucson, flying over Puerto Peñasco and then a whole lot of nothing until it veered off towards LA at Lake Havasu City.

  Kennedy looked out of the car window at the desert through which the road wound like an electric cable: plugging Arizona into the world beyond, whose existence was otherwise so easy to forget. The smell of wild sage came in through the open window of the car, sweet and strong.

  Why bring down a plane? Why move from one-at-a-time murder to hecatombs of dead stacked perilously in the freezer boxes of already overstrained mortuaries?