The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Assuming she was right at all, what made Flight 124 worth killing?

  44

  Kennedy flipped through the pages – what Gassan had called the full transcripts – with a gathering sense of unreality.

  ‘There’s …’ she said, but the sentence she was trying to frame made no sense. She had to abandon it and start again. ‘The gospel, it’s … it stops being about Judas, here, and becomes …’

  ‘It’s a sort of meta-commentary,’ Gassan agreed. He was standing over by the window again, as if hungry for the meagre light that was coming in there. The safe house had no windows at ground level and those higher up were kept shuttered whenever the security rating of the inmates seemed to warrant it. ‘There are sections like this in the Old Testament. And in the Koran, too, I believe – instructions for how the sacred text itself is to be handled. To be complete, the message must include instructions designed to ensure its own survival. The recipe specifies not just the cake but the recipe for more recipes.’

  ‘But …’ Kennedy was struggling with unfamiliar concepts that she didn’t even want to understand. ‘The penalties that are written down here. You’re not suggesting …’

  Gassan laughed – a hollow, unnerving sound. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. Think, though, about what happened when that American preacher, Jones or whatever his name was, threatened to burn a copy of the Koran at the site of the 9/11 attacks. Islamists in Iraq bombed churches: dozens died. Some have posited that the inflexible interpretation of the word of God is the very essence of fundamentalism. The divine word, to the fanatic, is reified – it’s a physical thing, a fact of existence, and since it’s also the cornerstone of existence, it must be revered. There seems to be no rational limit to how far people with that mindset will go to avenge themselves on those they see as the enemies of the word.’

  The professor turned his gaze on the sheaf of papers in Kennedy’s hand. ‘I presume,’ he said, ‘that you’ve reached the passage on page forty-one, commencing, “This testament shall not be read or known”.’

  Kennedy nodded, read aloud from the page. ‘This testament shall not be read or known by any outside the kindred, or delivered to them in any wise. But if they come to know it, they shall be cut down …’

  Gassan took up the recitation. ‘… and their mouths stopped, and their days counted. For His bargain was not with them, but with us who bear our lives from Judas, from Cain, and from the serpent their father.’ Gassan tailed off. The corners of his mouth quirked downwards, as if he were about to cry. ‘That was their death sentence,’ he murmured. ‘Barlow worked out the answer and they killed him for it.’

  Kennedy was aware of the anger building up inside her, powerful enough now to affect the rhythm of her breathing. She’d been struggling against it for some time, but without much effect because she didn’t really understand where it had come from. Now she understood, but that did nothing, really, to help rein in her feelings. It was the same anger that Tillman must have felt. She’d gotten the wrong answer: this dry explanation and the nightmares she’d lived through seemed grotesquely, horribly mismatched.

  ‘Gnostics,’ she said, as though the word meant cobblers. ‘You expect me to believe that Gnostics are out there killing people because their security was compromised. On a two-thousand-year-old text.’

  Her tone was furiously sarcastic, but Gassan merely nodded. ‘I doubt they call themselves Gnostics any more, Sergeant,’ he observed, mildly. ‘Assuming they ever did. Think of them as the Judas people. Although clearly, they claim a line of descent that runs back through Judas to the dawn of human time – and we must assume, there were proto-messages of theirs embedded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which sent Stuart Barlow off on this tangent. I’ve wondered about that.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Kennedy laughed, and the laugh had a harsh, ugly ring to it. ‘Did you wonder whether you were awake?’

  ‘I’ve wondered,’ Gassan repeated, ‘when they speak of Cain and Judas, whether they had in mind a physical lineage that links them or something more spiritual. In a sense, anyone who rebels against Laldabaoth, the usurper god who represses and tyrannises, would be the spiritual successor of Cain, and of Judas: but “bear our lives from” suggests a more literal reading. A Judas tribe.’

  ‘I repeat. A document from two thousand—’

  ‘Your murders, Sergeant,’ he cut across her, ‘are very much of the here and now.’

  ‘Exactly.’ She threw up her hands. ‘That’s why I don’t think they were committed by Gnostics.’

  Gassan tilted his head a little to one side – a patronising and infuriating gesture, suggesting that he was listening to her arguments with minute care. ‘Do you know,’ he asked her, ‘what Judas’s name meant?’

  ‘Judas? It’s just another form of Judah, isn’t it? “The lion”?’

  ‘Judah didn’t mean “lion”, it meant “praise”. The lion was only his symbol. But I was talking about Judas’s other name. Iscariot.’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Kennedy admitted.

  ‘There are two theories. One is that it referred to a place: a town. Judas from Kerioth. The other is that it denoted his membership of a specific group. And this group, in turn, took their name from their favourite weapon …’

  Driving back into London later, Kennedy found herself turning over Gassan’s next words again and again. Somewhere in those many repetitions, the idea of the Judas people crystallised, or – what was that other word the professor had used – reified for her: became something real that she now had to deal with.

  ‘… their favourite weapon, which was a short knife – a sica. Judas Iscariot could have meant “Judas Sicarius”. “Judas the knife-man”. And you know what knife I mean, Sergeant Kennedy, because they used it on you, and on that poor man who worked with you. They have a sense of tradition, you see. Or possibly they see all of their battles as phases of the same battle, century after century.’

  A lost tribe, then. Or, no, not lost, but hidden: an entire race that had retreated from the world and scuffed sand over their own footprints so that nobody would know they’d existed. But they came out of hiding whenever they had to. Not all of them, but some. Gassan’s parting shot, as she was leaving, had made that clear.

  ‘Page fifty-three, Sergeant. The Judas people send out two kinds of emissary into the world, to make contact with ordinary humanity: the Elohim and the Kelim, the Messengers and the Vessels. I don’t know what the Vessels did, but it’s pretty clear from the wording what the Messengers were for.

  ‘“Send out your Elohim where there is need, that none shall trouble or persecute the people. Let those who would bring harm to the people be prevented, and their eyes sealed up, and the door of the grave closed upon them. They that do this thing are holy and righteous in God’s sight.”’

  ‘The Messengers were sanctified killers, Sergeant. And I think they still are. I think that’s who you’ve been dealing with.’

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ Kennedy muttered.

  Gassan nodded in sombre agreement. ‘Remember that they trace their line back past grandfather Judas to great-great-great-grandfather Cain.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why they’re so comfortable with murder. It’s in their blood.’

  45

  Gayle dropped Kennedy off at the EconoLodge. He had duties to attend to elsewhere, he told her, so he’d have to leave her to her own devices for a while; but he’d check in with her later in the day, and be her chauffeur again if need be.

  Up in her room, Kennedy powered up the laptop and sent another email to Tillman. Then for good measure she called him – knowing he wouldn’t answer – and left a message on his voicemail.

  ‘Leo, there’s something I have to tell you. Something really important. It changes everything and it means your trail hasn’t gone cold after all. Call me. Or else answer the email. Just do something to let me know you’re listening and I’ll tell you. But I’m not going to shout this out into the void and you know bloody well why. Call me. Please.�
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  She was planning to get down to some serious research after that, but she paced around the room for a good half an hour, unable to settle, finding pointless things to do with the few belongings she’d brought with her.

  Finally she put through another call to Tillman’s number. ‘Me again,’ she said. ‘Leo, the Michael Brand who died on the plane was in his late twenties, which means he’d have been a kid when Rebecca went missing. There’s no way he could have matched up to the description you got back then. It’s a different man. I think it’s always a different man. There probably never was a Michael Brand. It’s just a name they use when they go out on this kind of job. They’ve got people they call “Messengers”. Maybe all their Messengers are Michael Brand. For the love of Christ, would you just call me? And if you don’t call me, then read my damned emails. I need you!’

  That felt a little cathartic, at least. She went back to the laptop and got to work. First she called up a few maps of Arizona state. She found whole websites devoted to that one subject, offering every kind of map and chart – topographic, economic, physical and political. She also discovered a site that allowed her to switch between a simplified schematic map and satellite camera footage, which sucked her in for two whole hours. She followed the likely route of Flight 124, tracking along both arms of the California Gulf and then across the Mexican and Arizona desert as far north as Lake Havasu.

  She wouldn’t admit to herself exactly what it was she was looking for, but she found nothing: nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Nothing mysterious or unlabelled or controversial: nothing – say it! – that could be a secret enclave of crazed assassins hiding out from everybody in the middle of the wilderness. It was the wrong wilderness anyway, surely? Why would a group of religious refuseniks from ancient Judea be living in Arizona?

  Maybe they liked the dry heat.

  Or maybe they went where the power went. Maybe they’d lived in the Middle East for as long as the Middle East felt like the hub of something, then spilled west into Europe when Europe was a happening place, and decamped into the New World during the death throes of colonialism.

  Is that what I’d do, Kennedy wondered, if I were a murderous madman who’d struck a special deal with God? All things considered, it was hard to tell.

  She tried a different tack, using several search engines and meta-search engines to interrogate Southern Arizona directly. What were its biggest landmarks, its population centres, its most remote spaces and its anomalous microclimates?

  She learned a lot, or at least surfed a lot of information, but got no real insights or inspirations. The terrain was harsh, parts of it were inaccessible, and nobody could say it was densely populated. With fifty or so people to the square mile, Arizona ranked thirty-third out of the fifty states of the Union – and most of those people were clustered in a few major population centres. But the state had good roads, it was on a whole lot of flight paths, and satellites looked down on it twenty-four hours a day.

  Kennedy had been imagining a scenario. Flight 124 is winging its way up from Mexico City. Someone looks out of the window and sees something they weren’t meant to see – something that points to the existence of the Judas tribe. An alarm bell rings somewhere, somehow, and Michael Brand – one of the Michael Brands – is despatched. He can’t touch the plane while it’s in mid-air, obviously, so the best he can do is to get to Los Angeles and board it during the stop-over, which he makes with inches to spare. Then he finds a way to bring the plane down, which with his unique combination of combat skills and frothing madness is a piece of rancid cake.

  But the closer Kennedy looked at it now, the less she liked it. It all hinged on there being something to see: something big enough to be visible from 124’s cruising altitude (about twenty-seven thousand feet, Gayle had ascertained), and not just visible but identifiable; and yet, at the same time, something that was presumably temporary, only there to be seen on this one occasion. Otherwise the skies over Southern Arizona and Mexico would be thick with falling planes like summer rain.

  She couldn’t, for the life of her, imagine what that something could be. And she couldn’t, yet, come up with an alternative scenario. Finally, she came to the obvious conclusion that this wasn’t something she could do from her hotel room.

  When Gayle called at around three in the afternoon, she told him her plan. ‘I want to go look at the area that the plane flew over. Some of it anyway.’

  Gayle was surprised and clearly wary of the idea. ‘That’s a lot of ground,’ he pointed out. ‘Where were you thinking of starting?’

  ‘I don’t know. The state line, I guess. The Arizona part of the route is the most accessible from here.’

  ‘Sure.’ Gayle sounded far from convinced. ‘Of course, the distance from Mexico City to LA is about fifteen hundred miles, give or take. Maybe sixteen. And only about a tenth of that is likely to be inside of Arizona. I don’t know how much you’re going to achieve.’

  ‘Well, at least it will give me a sense of the lie of the land,’ Kennedy said. ‘How far apart these places are, and where they lie in relation to each other. It might spark some ideas.’

  As she said it, she did the math in her mind: tried to anyway. Fifteen hundred miles, and at a height of twenty-seven thousand feet you’d probably have a field of vision that would be … the best she could manage to visualise was a triangle twenty-seven thousand feet on a side. You’d be seeing – seeing really clearly, right below you – an area that stretched for at least a mile on either side. So at a conservative estimate, she had three thousand square miles to search. It would take days just to cover that distance by road: and how much would she see from the road?

  ‘I just don’t want to sit here,’ she said, glumly. ‘And I can’t think of anything better to do.’

  There was a short silence while Gayle thought about this.

  ‘Take the plane,’ he said.

  46

  Kuutma was listening to music when Mariam’s call came through. This was unusual because Kuutma hated music.

  No, that wasn’t true. But it was a refractory medium for him. He didn’t understand its structures or its appeal. As a younger man, he’d listened to certain tunes with a kind of pleasure. He even remembered dancing once. All of this before he became a Messenger and left Ginat’Dania. After that, the course of his life had been irrevocably set, and somehow, music had slowly ceased to mean anything to him.

  Perhaps it was an effect of the drug. Kelalit altered perception; or, more accurately, altered the interface between the user and the world. Reality became a dumb show, drenched in sepia and moving with the sluggishness of syrup. The mind was quicker, the movements surer: the overall sense was of heightened awareness, and yet paradoxically the things of which one was aware had been leached of much of their vividness, their ‘thisness’. Sights, sounds, textures, tastes: all became flattened along one dimension, became – he could think of no clearer way to express it – schematics of themselves.

  The ringing of the phone came, therefore, as a welcome distraction from the depressing enigma of the music.

  ‘Hello,’ Kuutma said.

  ‘She’s booked an airline ticket, Tannanu.’ Mariam’s voice sounded perfectly level, perfectly uninflected.

  ‘Where to?’ Kuutma asked.

  ‘Mexico City. But I don’t think the destination is the point. She’s taking Flight 124.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ Kuutma considered. That was good, in a number of ways. It showed how little, even at this stage, the detective had managed to piece together. And it offered opportunities for finishing the job that had been left unfinished in England. And yet. And yet. This business had been badly handled at every stage. To act again now and leave more loose ends still dangling would not be acceptable.

  That was why he hadn’t ordered Mariam to move against Tillman. That was the only reason, he told himself yet again. There were no others. In any event, once Tillman returned to the rooming house in west London that had already been identi
fied by Mariam’s team, there had been no need to move. He had put himself in Kuutma’s hands and Kuutma could order his death at any moment.

  Kautma reminded himself that this removed the urgency from the situation: indeed, that it made surveillance more valuable and useful than immediate action. Kill Tillman now and perhaps some delayed action mechanism might be triggered: information released to others and a new danger opened up.

  But Kuutma did not really believe this.

  He had travelled to London. Taken the Underground, and then a bus, to the pitiful hole where Tillman now lodged. He had rented the adjacent room, and with infinitesimal care opened up a tiny hole in the wall, very close to the floor, using an exquisitely sharpened auger and taking several hours. Through the hole, he had inserted a pin-head spy camera on a micro-fibre lead.

  What he had seen had given him considerable satisfaction.

  ‘He won’t stop coming. He’ll look into your eyes, some day, Kuutma, and one of you will blink.’

  ‘Rebecca, I do not think that it will be me.’

  ‘But you don’t know him, and I do.’

  ‘I wish, dear cousin, that you had never had to know him. I rejoice that you don’t have to know him any longer.’

  ‘Ah, but I don’t have to know anything any longer, Kuutma. That’s why they sent you.’

  Perhaps he should have killed Tillman then. Perhaps, at any rate, he should have left him as he was and interfered no further. He had not killed Tillman and he had not left: not immediately. He had done one thing more that might – that would – have consequences.

  ‘What should I do, Tannanu?’ Mariam’s question dragged Kuutma out of his reverie, into which he should never have fallen.

  Suppressing the memories, both old and recent, he turned various ideas in his mind and examined them for flaws. ‘For now,’ he said, ‘do nothing. Let the woman go and let her return. Follow her, if she leaves the airport terminal in Mexico. Depending on where she goes, and who she sees, it might be necessary to move quickly, against a wider range of targets. For now, though, let them gather. It’s good that they gather. It makes our task a great deal easier. You know, Mariam, the one great rule that we follow.’