The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  ‘Hell,’ said Moggs, ‘the plain truth of it is, you’re working on our very own favourite cabbage patch, and that’s why we wanted to break bread with you, and that’s why I want to share with you. So what do you say?’

  She thrust out a hand. Still blushing, Kennedy took it – not in a formal shake but in a slap and thumb-lock that felt a lot more intense and reassuring.

  ‘Come on through to the living room,’ Moggs said. ‘And I’ll show you what I got.’

  She led the way back through the curtain and across a narrow hall into the warm and welcoming space, full of soft furniture and sunset colours. A massive sofa wore a crocheted throw adorned with a stylised but splendid American eagle. ‘Actually,’ Moggs said, as soon as she had Kennedy sat down on the sofa, ‘this might be the kind of thing where we need to fortify ourselves with some more coffee. I’ll go brew a fresh pot.’

  She scooted back through into the kitchen and after a minute Gayle followed her, muttering something about helping to carry the tray. Left alone, Kennedy read the walls while her heart rate slowed to normal. The walls were covered with photographs, and Eileen Moggs herself showed in none of them. There was a wall of portraits, some of which Kennedy recognised: Webster Gayle (twice), George Clooney, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Bono, Donald Rumsfeld scowling like the devil on crack. The facing wall was all places: the Grand Canyon, Route 66 complete with iconic sign and biker flotilla, Anasazi ruins, cactuses, the state legislature being mobbed by hundreds of demonstrators, and one very disturbing image of a desert setting where a group of uniformed police or state troopers (Kennedy didn’t know the uniform code well enough to tell for sure) posed solemnly around the corpse of a black man.

  Gayle came in carrying three mugs on a tray, backing through the beads with his head ducked down. Moggs followed with a plate of cookies and – a little incongruously – a bottle of Jim Beam. Gayle set the tray down and Moggs twisted the cap off the bourbon. ‘I usually have a shot of this in my coffee,’ she said to Kennedy. ‘Just a small one. Symbolic, really, but it takes the edge off edgy things.’

  She spiked her own drink, looked at Kennedy with the bottle raised and ready.

  ‘Are we going to be talking about edgy things?’

  Moggs grinned. ‘Didn’t we already?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Kennedy said, and Moggs poured.

  ‘I’ll pass,’ Gayle said. ‘I gotta go back to work after this.’

  ‘I’m still on the clock,’ Moggs growled.

  ‘Sure. But everyone expects a newshound to be drunk.’

  They ribbed each other with the easy intimacy of lovers. They didn’t need to laugh at each other’s jokes. Moggs went across to an over-sized L-shaped desk in a corner of the room and returned with a very thick olive-green file folder, which she put down on the table between them, pushing the plate of cookies over to one side to make space: the pièce de résistance.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, with the air of someone getting down to brass tacks. ‘This is our dead-men-walking file.’

  Kennedy hadn’t been feeling any thrill of anticipation, but experienced a sinking feeling, all the same. ‘The ghosts of Flight 124?’ she said.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Moggs confirmed. ‘Take a look. I promise you revelations, signs and wonders.’

  ‘I’m … not a believer in this stuff,’ Kennedy protested, queasily but without much force.

  ‘Oh, me neither, Sergeant. Read it anyway. Then we’ll talk.’

  A half-hour later, Kennedy was still reading, watched by her indulgent hosts – but the signs and wonders had yet to put in an appearance. In fact, the contents of the file were exactly what she would have expected them to be: a warmed-over soup of urban legends, done-in-one-sentence spooky stories and sad self-delusions.

  All the usual suspects were in there: the man who sent emails full of indecipherable gibberish from his office computer when his body was lying on a slab in an Arizona morgue; the woman who felt her dead husband’s hand on her shoulder and his kiss on her cheek at the exact moment that the plane went down; the car left running on a driveway in the middle of the night (‘My wife’s keys were in the ignition – she had them on her when she died, I swear it!’); the mother-and-child stick figures drawn in the condensation of a nursery window, and the sweet old lady identifying them unhesitatingly, and tearfully, as the work of her granddaughter (‘She always drew herself with curly hair, even though she grew the curls out a year ago’). And so on, and so forth, with minor and uninteresting variations. The tales people tell each other to convince themselves, against all the odds, that death is not the end.

  Kennedy closed the file, still only half-read, to signify that she was done with it. If anything, she’d drawn it out because she felt more or less convinced now that Gayle and Moggs were evangelists for one of the more surreal American churches and she was about to have to tell them both that their sandwich quotient was deficient for picnicking purposes. ‘Like I said,’ she repeated, as neutrally as she could manage, ‘I don’t really subscribe to the whole life after death thing. This is interesting, but it’s really not my kind of—’

  ‘Interesting?’ Moggs was incredulous. ‘Why would you say that, Ms Kennedy? Why, most of this is the same garbage the supermarket crap-sheets try to feed us every damn day of the week. It’s so far from interesting, I can’t get through six pages of it without losing the will to live.’

  ‘Well, then …’ Kennedy foundered. ‘Why show it to me?’

  ‘That’s the right question,’ Moggs said. ‘And I’m gonna answer it with another question. What do you notice about this nonsense? What’s the pattern?’ There was something a little sly or smug in her voice: the tone of the teacher who already knows the right answer and is waiting for you to chip in with the wrong one.

  Kennedy went back to the file, scanned the first few pages again with no more enthusiasm than she’d managed the first time. ‘No actual sightings,’ she said. ‘Not much that’s verifiable. Nothing at all that couldn’t have been faked or imagined. It’s perfect tabloid-fodder: facts and names kept to a minimum, so it’s hard to cross-check anything and there’s maximum room to manoeuvre. Stories from one agency picked up and polished by another …’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Moggs said. ‘I’ve seen it all before, Ms Kennedy. Listen, can I call you Heather? Thank you. I’ve seen it all before, Heather, and it sounds like you have, too. But like they say, you have to look to the exception to prove the rule – and this time around, the exception is a pretty big, glaring one.’

  Kennedy shrugged with her hands. ‘I’m not seeing it.’

  She could see Gayle yearning to break in but holding himself back – presumably seeing this as Moggs’s show rather than his own.

  ‘The truth is,’ Moggs said, backing off just a fraction, ‘it took me a pretty fair time to see it, too. Web was driving me crazy with this stuff. Even when he wasn’t talking about it, he had a look on his face that said he was thinking about it. So I picked up this here scrapbook, basically so I could beat him round the head with it – show him all the different ways it was moonshine. Then it hit me – I think because it was all in the same place, and Web had tried to sort it by date and time and everything. That was sort of the key. Go back to the start, Heather, and bear in mind that the file’s in chronological order.’

  The first article concerned Peter Bonville, the clerk whose work routine was so powerful that death couldn’t hold him back from turning up at the office, fixing himself a cup of coffee, firing up his computer and working through his inbox. Something nagged at the edge of Kennedy’s attention. She checked the dateline: the fifth of July. Three days after CA124 went down.

  ‘This isn’t the first,’ she said. ‘There was one datelined on the fourth.’

  ‘Sylvia Gallos,’ Moggs confirmed, approvingly. ‘Right. That threw me, too, at first – but it’s a parallax error. You see, Gallos called into a local radio station – late-night talk show, same night it happened. So there’s no time lag. It happe
ns on the fourth and it’s filed on the fourth. The Bonville story hits a day later but it happened two days earlier. It’s just that it didn’t turn into news until someone thought to notice.’

  Clearly, they were getting to the meat of the matter now. Moggs didn’t actually lower her voice but she leaned in close as though what she was about to say deserved the theatrical attributes of conspiracy. ‘There were a lot of different versions of Peter Bonville’s story, with a crazy range of details about what he supposedly did when he checked into work that day. Like, Bonville swiped in with his own ID. Wrong. No one found any evidence of him coming or going. Bonville fixed himself a cup of coffee and left it half-drunk in his cubicle. Wrong. As far as I can tell, only the office area, which was open-plan, got a visitation: the kitchen space was elsewhere and it wasn’t touched. Bonville talked to some of his fellow employees, who didn’t know they were seeing a ghost until later. Wrong. Nobody saw him. All the evidence that he’d been there came from his computer, his workstation, which had been turned on and used.’

  ‘Used for what?’ Kennedy asked. She felt a prickle of tension on the back of her neck, on her forearms. Was there actually some pea of truth buried under the damp mattresses of all these lazy, overused fairy tales?

  ‘Well, again, there’s different versions,’ Moggs said. ‘Some of them have Bonville surfing porn sites. Most of them say he sent emails: either full of random gibberish or scary complaints about being lost in a desert somewhere where the sun never comes up. Again, I checked all that with Bonville’s employers, the New York Department of Public Works. They didn’t have to talk to me, of course – wouldn’t even have had to talk to Web, if he’d called, because his jurisdiction ends at the county line. But they wanted to talk. They were kind of griped by all the crazy stories going around and they wanted to set the record straight. They said Bonville’s mail program hadn’t been opened and neither had his browser. All he did – all whoever it was did – was access a few files and delete them. So they assumed it had to be a routine hacker attack rather than a ghostly visitation.’

  That preliminary prickle had become something a lot more urgent now, which had Kennedy sitting forward too, as though she was about to lean across the table and kiss Moggs – which might have caused Sheriff Gayle to revise his good opinion of her. ‘Which files? Do we know what they were?’

  ‘No, we don’t. And they don’t – because the department’s main server got a big viral infection later that day and all the back-up storage got wiped clean before they could do anything about it. All that was left was a registry table with the names of some of the files on it, but they’re not informative. Data 1, data 2, data 3, stuff like that.’

  Kennedy’s first thought was an obvious one: Rotgut? But no, that was vanishingly unlikely. If anyone on Stuart Barlow’s team had been talking to a minor official in a public agency in New York, she would have come across the data trail long before now. This was different: not Rotgut. But sufficiently like Rotgut for the response to have been the same. Send in Michael Brand.

  Moggs was still talking. ‘So there’s not much to work from at that end. But here’s what got me going, Sergeant. I said this was the earliest of the ghost incidents. I didn’t tell you just how early. That registry table had precise date stamps for the last time each of the files was modified – which was when they were deleted. They’re clustered really tight together, in a five-minute period starting at 11.13 a.m. on July the second. In other words, the files got wiped while Flight CA124 was still in the air: a good ten minutes or so before Peter Bonville became a ghost.’

  Kennedy checked the times for herself and then observed a minute of silence for Moggs’s detective work: or five seconds of silence, anyway. ‘You’re right,’ she said, full of admiration. ‘You’re totally … you nailed it, Miss Moggs. Eileen. This was a pre-emptive haunting.’

  Moggs laughed, clearly liking both the term and the praise. ‘Pre-emptive haunting, then two days of nothing, then all these other ghost stories kick in. So by the time Bonville’s supervisor figures out they’re missing some files and tells head office, all this other stuff is already starting to come out. And that’s how it was reported – another ghost from Flight 124.’

  Kennedy nodded slowly, thinking backwards and forwards along that chain of logic. ‘That’s actually really clever,’ she murmured. ‘You cover your trail as far as you can, but when you realise it’s not covered enough, you throw out a whole lot of false trails so it looks like it doesn’t lead anywhere.’

  ‘“The elaborations of a bad liar”,’ said Moggs. It sounded like a quote but Kennedy didn’t get it and didn’t feel like asking. She turned to Gayle instead. ‘So you think someone took advantage of this guy’s absence to get into his computer and take something out of it? And then when he died instead of coming back to his desk, they worked out a supernatural cover story?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I think,’ Gayle agreed.

  ‘I think you’re wrong, Sheriff.’

  Gayle blinked a few times, hit squarely in the face by the harsh words. A moment ago, they’d all been conspirators – and conspiracy-busters – together: now it seemed like Kennedy didn’t want to play.

  ‘How’s that?’ he asked her.

  Kennedy turned to Moggs. ‘Have you got the passenger list from 124?’ she asked.

  Moggs nodded. ‘Got every piece of information I could legally hold about this whole business, and then a little bit more.’

  ‘Can you go get it?’

  Moggs went over to her desk and fired up her computer. Sheriff Gayle went with her and stood behind her as she keyed in her password. His hands dropped to her shoulders, a gesture of protection and solidarity. They’d shown their baby to Kennedy: was she about to throw it out with the bathwater?

  Moggs tapped a few keys, opened a file. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Got it.’

  ‘Find Peter Bonville.’

  ‘Got him. He’s near the top, obviously.’

  ‘Okay, I’m going to tell you his seat number.’

  Moggs shot her a puzzled glance. ‘What, from memory?’

  ‘I never even heard his name until just now.’

  ‘Then how would you know his seat number?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t. In a lot of ways, I hope I’m wrong. But is it 29E?’

  Both of them, in unison, read the screen and then turned to stare at her. ‘How’d you know that?’ Gayle demanded.

  Kennedy reached into her inside pocket and took out the folded sheet Gayle had given to her the day before: the photocopy of the marked dollar bill that Brand had carried. She held it out. Gayle took it and scanned it, but Moggs got there first.

  ‘The three lines on the note,’ she said. ‘They run right across the serial number here, at the bottom.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be goddamned!’ Gayle exclaimed in wonder, getting there a second later. The three red lines crossed out an E, a 2 and a 9.

  ‘The first thing I thought when I saw this note was that it might be a coded message of some kind,’ said Kennedy. ‘The people I’ve been tracking … they love codes and hidden messages. They think they’re the smartest people in the room, I guess, and that they can operate right out in plain sight so long as they put up a smokescreen over their comms. This is right in their line, as far as that goes.’

  ‘So how does this mean we’re wrong?’ Gayle asked.

  ‘Because you were assuming the raid on Bonville’s computer was opportunistic. It wasn’t. Whoever gave this note to Brand was telling him who the target was. Which means that Brand got on that plane with the express intention of killing Bonville. And for reasons we’re never going to know now …’

  ‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ Moggs murmured.

  ‘… he killed them all. Everyone on board. He completed his mission by bringing down CA124.’

  49

  In some ways, after that, it got easy.

  Bonville didn’t board at Los Angeles. He was with 124 all the way from its point of origin: Benito Juár
ez International Airport, Mexico City. Kennedy asked Sheriff Gayle – despite the jurisdictional issues that Moggs had already mentioned – to place the call to Bonville’s former supervisor, a woman named Lucy Miller-Molloy, at the New York Department of Public Works. What had Bonville been doing down in Mexico? And while they were on the subject, what did Bonville do, period? What was his job, in the department? What was his area of specific expertise?

  Power routing, was the short answer. The slightly longer answer: Bonville was a respected thinker in the expanding field of peak usage flow-back equalisation. Miller-Molloy knew far too much about the subject herself to explain it clearly to a layman, but she told Gayle enough so that he could give a bare-bones summary to Kennedy and Moggs without contradicting himself.

  ‘Say you run a city and you’ve got a generator that’s providing electricity for the city,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you’ll need a lot of power, sometimes not so much. So you use the trough times to charge up auxiliary generators – or, say, to pump water upriver a few miles, past a dam with a hydro plant. Then when you get to a peak time, you’ve got that extra charge saved up like money in the bank and you can pay yourself back somehow – increase your capacity at the peak times.’

  It seemed there were many different ways of doing this flow-back stuff, some so cheap they paid for themselves. What Bonville did was look at power systems and say, ‘Well, you’ve got room to do this, this and this, and it will cost you this much for each erg of power.’

  The New York Department of Public Works had used Bonville as an outside consultant for a while and then had put him on salary – a pleasant corollary of which was that they could generate additional revenue by sending him out on loan to other municipalities. Mexico City had been the latest of many of these gigs.

  ‘So he was down there telling them how to economise on electricity,’ Gayle summarised, when he reported back to Kennedy and Moggs. ‘The idea was that he’d look at their power usage. Then he’d tell them where they had spare capacity in their system and how they could use it.’