The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  The market stalls extended for the first twenty metres or so, but the structures behind them were a continuous feature. Some had wide windows, like shop windows, with shelves and platforms to display goods. All were empty, except in places for a scatter of boxes, the occasional plastic strip or bag, and in one display a single yellow scarf hanging from an otherwise empty rack of polished wood. There were signs above the doors, written in a script that looked to Kennedy like Hebrew. The enigma hit her anew: assuming the Judas people had arisen in ancient Judea, as the sica knives seemed to suggest, why come from the Holy Land all the way to the arse-end of Mexico City?

  Probably she’d never know, but she felt certain, suddenly, that it had nothing to do with the fluctuations of temporal power. Twenty million people, and an urban sprawl that covered six hundred square miles – that made a great desert to hide a grain of sand in. Maybe they did this often. Maybe the Judas tribe were a nomadic people, going wherever the best camouflage, or some other resource that they tracked and followed, was to be found.

  And riding on that thought, another, terrible possibility, which she didn’t dare to voice: maybe we missed them.

  They were approaching what must be the northern limit of the warehouse site. The roof high above them was sheared off clean by the plunging vertical of the front wall, and the trompe l’oeil clouds bent at sharp angles suddenly as though they’d crashed into some invisible barrier and gotten broken.

  Kennedy expected the vast space to close in now, but the gulf of air that had been over their heads was replaced, unexpectedly, by a gulf that opened beneath their feet: where the warehouse ended and the ceiling closed in, the great alley opened downwards on to a vast parade of descending steps, which then broke apart into subsidiary flights heading off to right and left and straight ahead. More streets led off this one but they were stepped and went further down into the ground.

  Tillman took a stairway at random and they descended into another thoroughfare, just as wide and almost as high as the first. Here there were no shops, but what looked like houses instead. Rows and rows of windows lining the walls, terraces on which chairs and tables had been set out, ornamental urns and sculptures at corners and on balustrades. But some of the urns had toppled and shattered, and some of the doors gaped open on dark interior spaces. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the huge indoor complex look homely – and then had ransacked it.

  Tillman’s face was set in a scowl. He stopped suddenly, his gaze darting to left and right before finally settling on Kennedy. ‘People can’t live like this,’ he muttered, his voice thick with something like anger. He must be afraid now, as she was: afraid that they’d come too late and that solving the puzzle meant nothing after all.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, unhappily. ‘I think they could. These lights in the walls probably include UV frequencies, so they wouldn’t go crazy from cabin fever. Maybe they get to go upstairs every once in a while, although I’m guessing they don’t do it often. They’ve lived underground long enough for most of the melanin to have leached out of their skin, which is why even their field agents are about as tanned as snow tigers.’

  Tillman didn’t appear to be listening, so she stopped talking. He’d crossed to a decoration of some kind, hung over the edge of a balcony. It was a white sheet, on which someone had painted a strikingly beautiful image. It was the moment when sunlight breaks through storm clouds, announcing either that the storm is over or that it’s not going to come. The storm clouds were black, swag-bellied horrors: the sunlight that broke through them was a filigree of the most delicate gold, only there when you looked at the painting from a certain angle and the light bounced off it just so.

  Tillman ripped the sheet down and tore it in two.

  ‘To hell with this!’ he bellowed. The words bounced back at him from every wall and cornice, redoubled and fractured, a chorus line of expletives that kept on tripping over its own feet.

  ‘Leo—’ Kennedy began, but he silenced her with a wild glare. He didn’t want sympathy or condolence right then, and really she didn’t have a whole lot to offer. She felt cored out, tired beyond words. To have come this far, only to find this mausoleum, was too cruel.

  In the end, having nothing to say, she left him there and went back up to the top of the steps. The whole vast complex was like a sounding board, so Kennedy’s own movements came back to her, overlaid on themselves in ever more complex discords. She thought of the Duchamp painting of the nude on the staircase, shedding angular, stroboscopic fragments of her own being as she walks. How much of herself would she leave in this place? It seemed a fair question, given how much she’d had to sacrifice to get here.

  She couldn’t make it all the way to the top of the stairs in one go. On a terrace just past halfway, she leaned on the balustrade and rested. Her side was aching again, and her arm, too. She should have asked Tillman to put the bottle of Tylenol in his kit bag along with the crowbar, the guns, the ammo, the kitchen sink.

  She saw him moving below her. He was checking some of the houses, maybe to see if anyone had gone to ground there. One of the doors didn’t give. Kennedy watched Tillman kick it open, sending a sound like chambered thunder through the vast space.

  But the thunder grew, rather than fading. And now it seemed to be coming from above her, instead of below. Kennedy walked the rest of the way to the top and looked back the way they’d come.

  The corridor seemed to be melting, like wax in a flame. Then she saw that the moving, rippling mass was something independent of walls and floor and sky-painted ceiling. It was a battering ram made of water, that filled the space from top to bottom.

  It struck Kennedy like a kick in the teeth from God, and then it trod her under.

  62

  Kuutma held the sluice gates open for seven minutes. The first thirty seconds gave him the volume of water needed to mix in the concentrate. After that, the only use the water had was as a weapon.

  Although he’d switched off the external cameras, he kept the security systems inside Ginat’Dania itself up and running, and so he was able to watch as first the woman and then Tillman succumbed to the flood. The woman was incapacitated, of course, with an arm broken and bound in a cast, but it would have made little difference if she’d been fully fit and mobile. The water came down the grand alley towards the Em Hadderek under enormous pressure, moving very fast. The strongest of swimmers would have been in dead trouble.

  The woman went under, and as she went under she fell backwards down the steps of the Em Hadderek. The flood would fill the space below, vast as it was, inside a minute, and there’d be nowhere for the rhaka to surface unless she swam all the way back to the Em Hadderek itself and found the upper level again – or went forward and found the Em Sh’dur. Swimming with one arm, either would be quite a feat.

  Paradoxically, although he was already on that lower level, Tillman had a much greater chance of survival. He could see the wall of water coming, then breaking and roaring down the stairways like a dozen questing, groping tentacles. He had time to brace himself, gripping to the iron lattice of an ornamental balcony. The water hit him but he held on fast and kept his grip – for the first minute.

  Then, with the lower spaces filling fast and the water pressure slackening as it found its level, Tillman launched himself upwards with slow, powerful strokes. He’d lost the machine rifle, but still had the kit bag strapped to his back. He looked around, presumably for the woman, but then all the lights went out as the water flooded junctions and fuse boxes. This meant that Kuutma could no longer keep track of Tillman’s movements. It also meant that Tillman’s chances of finding the woman before she drowned went from slim to – effectively – zero.

  Kuutma turned off the flow of the water, then proceeded to collect his own weapons and equip himself for the business to come. Six sica blades, three to each side of his belt. The Sig-Sauer in its shoulder holster, with a full clip and two spares in the pockets of his flak jacket. His movements were methodical and unhur
ried. He knew beyond and beneath logic that this was meant to be. This was why Tillman had survived for so long. Why he himself had leaned down, with dark and terrible mercy, to interrupt Tillman’s suicide.

  Tillman didn’t have the right to end himself in that way, and furthermore there was something he needed to hear before he died: to hear, and to understand. A balance had to be restored, and Kuutma had been blessed: the balance lay in his keeping.

  He locked the doors of the pump station and walked down the steps to ground level. He would have to come back one more time, of course, to release the water back into the Cutzamala reservoir. That would be the last thing he did before he left this place for good and closed the doors on the whole of his life up to this point.

  He made his way to the grand alley. The great, imperious mass of the water had drained away into the lower levels, but deep puddles still remained. Kuutma knew this from the sounds his feet made as he strode through them: he couldn’t see them because the alley remained in complete darkness. There was a manual system for providing light in power failures and he knew where its controls were. He went to the nearest of these stations, slid back a panel in the wall and turned a cranking wheel that he found there.

  High overhead, slats in the steel roof of the warehouse – the shell that covered Ginat’Dania – slid from tightly overlapping diagonal positions to near-vertical. The day outside was overcast: only grey light filtered down, but it was enough.

  At the further end of the grand alley, a splashing and thrashing announced that Tillman had breached, like a whale. Staring in that direction, Kuutma couldn’t see the man at first. But then a flailing shape reared up at the top of the Em Hadderek steps, where they were widest and most beautiful: reared up and fell again, and crawled with spastic, uncoordinated movements out on to the dry land of the grand alley.

  Kuutma strode towards his adversary, holding in each of his hands, the familiar, exquisitely balanced weight of a sica blade.

  63

  When the waters closed over Kennedy, she did most of the wrong things.

  First of all she forgot to breathe. Stumbling backwards into the foaming chaos, she clamped her jaws tight shut, when she should have gulped in a massive lungful of air to last her until she became reacquainted with oxygen.

  Next, she fought against the irresistible surge that held her and moved her, wasting her strength in a futile struggle to break the surface. Her body’s natural buoyancy was going to carry her upwards in any case: she needed to use all the strength and agility she had to avoid hitting any of the buildings and structures towards which she was being carried like a toy in the hand of a running child.

  She slammed hard against a wall and almost opened her mouth in a gasp of shock and pain. That would have been the end for her, she knew. Getting her instincts back under control, she twisted and wriggled until she was facing in the same direction as the rushing water, and kicked out with her feet to move herself left, then right, avoiding two further collisions by inches.

  It was a little like flying, Kennedy thought dazedly. She could see the tiled floor of the lower level, the indoor streets and indoor houses, rushing past below and to both sides of her, a blue-shifted blur through which light spangled and starred in wild refraction.

  Then the lights went out and she knew she was in even worse trouble.

  Her lungs were already beginning to protest at the absence of air; to demand the right to inflate again. Kennedy had maybe half a minute, at best, to get herself to some place with air, and she had no idea where such a place might be.

  Motes of light danced before her eyes in the rushing darkness. They expanded into underwater suns, and Kennedy was dazzled by them, even while she recognised, objectively, that they weren’t there at all. She was starting to lose it. Oxygen deprivation was plucking at the loose strings of her brain.

  She tried to think. Pockets of air trapped inside the houses? From what she remembered of high school physics, that seemed possible – but she had no time for a house-to-house search, and in any case she had no police ID to show.

  Focus, Heather. Focus.

  Fight the flow or ride it?

  Go up, down or sideways?

  It wasn’t likely to make a whole lot of difference, but it felt important to decide. Her father had always told her to impose herself on situations. Just drifting along was almost always a mistake.

  64

  Tillman struggled to his feet. His own heartbeat sounded loud in his ears, but there was no other noise, and there was no light. His head was spinning: it also seemed to be expanding and contracting in time with his heartbeat, as though his heart orchestrated the pulsing heart of the universe itself.

  He laughed incredulously. It’s a small world after all, he thought. And I’m right here at the centre of it.

  But his stomach lurched and he felt suddenly sick. The megalomanic thrill subsided and nausea dropped him to his knees. He vomited into the last of the ebb tide: a noisome flux that tasted of chilli and coriander, probably because it contained the remnants of the meal he and Kennedy had eaten on their way down from … somewhere.

  It was cold and it was dark. Cold and dark as the grave. Tillman shuddered. But light descended, abruptly, from above him, soft and feathery like a fall of grey goose-down. Tillman tried to control his racing heart, his throbbing head, his shaking hands. He shouldn’t feel this bad. Something was wrong with him.

  And Kennedy. He had to find Kennedy, make sure she was okay.

  He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and counted to ten. At least, he tried to. But the numbers mostly wouldn’t come.

  ‘And now,’ said a gentle, cultured voice from above him, ‘here we are.’

  A solid impact at the side of Tillman’s jaw sent him sprawling, rolled him on to his side in the fouled water. He gasped, flailed, tried to come upright again. A second kick, to the ribs, and he folded in on himself, a tight ball centred on the sudden, violent pain.

  ‘Please,’ the voice said, ‘take a moment or two to orient yourself. I hope you didn’t swallow too much of the water. I’d hate it if you died before we had time to talk.’

  Tillman stayed down. Staying down – so long as there were no further attacks – allowed him some space to think, however skewed and dulled his thinking had become. Something in the water? That seemed only too likely. He didn’t remember swallowing any, but it wasn’t possible that he’d avoided getting any at all in his system. And maybe the something, whatever it was, didn’t need to be swallowed. Maybe you could take it in through skin contact. Maybe it was evaporating off the water and he was breathing it in right now.

  ‘Get up,’ the voice said.

  Tillman uncurled slowly, rolled over on to hands and knees, came up in a reverse kow-tow.

  The man facing him looked his own age, more or less. Very tall but not too broad at the shoulders. Well muscled but lean – the physique of a dancer or a runner. He had a shaved head, his dark slender face bisected in the dim light by the vertical slash of an aquiline nose. He had about him the solemnity of a statue or a priest officiating at a ceremony.

  ‘Michael … Brand,’ said Tillman, his rubbery mouth slurring the words.

  ‘Yes,’ the stranger said, with something like satisfaction; something like pride. ‘That’s who I am. Michael is a Hebrew name. It means “who is like unto God?” The brand – in our own tongue, ku’utma – is the mark that Laldabaoth, the god of the fallen world, left upon the forehead of our father, Cain. I try to be honest, Mr Tillman. I try never to lie. A lie diminishes the man who speaks it, however noble the motive. I am Kuutma. I am the Brand.’

  With a huge effort, Tillman struggled to his feet. He strode at the man before him, his fists raised.

  The man’s hands moved swiftly. Tillman felt a lance of cold air drive into his lower belly, but when he touched his fingers to the place, there was pulsing warmth.

  He looked down at his hand. It held a cornucopia of blood, which filled it again endlessly as it poured ou
t between his clumsily parted fingers.

  ‘And now,’ Michael Brand said, ‘we must speak quickly. You don’t have much time left, and there are things that must be said.’

  65

  Symmetry, Kennedy told herself. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something.

  Everything they’d seen here, everything they’d passed, had been constructed to a simple, elegant schema. The broad main street, its placement beneath the warehouse roof, the swooping falls of stairs that led down from the plaza where the street ended. All symmetrical, presenting to the inhabitants of this screwed-up, troglodyte world a pleasing, ordered vista.

  So maybe at the far end of the lower level, there would be another set of steps and another plaza.

  Kennedy swam with the flow of the water, using her legs more than her one good arm because the movements of her arm swung her sideways, out of control. She had her eyes tight shut, for some reason. But there was no light to see by, so she probably wasn’t missing anything.

  The pressure in her lungs, the darkness in her head built and built. The ceiling of the vast corridor brushed her head. Kennedy kicked off against it and angled her body downwards, terrified of getting tangled up in a light fitting or smacking her head against a cornice. If she did that, it would all be over.

  It was all over anyway. She was out of oxygen and out of time. Up or down, equally damned. She gave up and let herself float upwards, expecting the ceiling to press against her back and her struggling limbs, holding her in place. When that happened, Kennedy would open her mouth, probably on a profanity, and drown.

  She broke surface with a splash that tore into the darkness on either side in endless susurrations. It was as though she’d ripped through the vault of the sky. Grey light filtered down from somewhere and showed her the indoor lake in which she floated.