by Adam Blake
‘God …’ he choked. ‘God is my …’
‘God thinks,’ Kennedy told him, her cold voice grinding like a stone dragged across the mouth of a cave, ‘that you’re a lying, murdering bastard.’
Kuutma opened his mouth to answer but death got there first.
68
SUMMARY INTERVIEW WITH OFFICER FELIPE JUAREZ, CIUDAD DE MEXICO PTD, CONDUCTED BY LT JESUS-ERNESTO PENA, POLICIA FEDERAL. START TIME: 3.30 P.M.
LT PENA:
Did the call for assistance come from the site?
OFFICER JUAREZ:
I thought so at the time, Lieutenant. But the call wasn’t properly logged, as you know, and in such a densely populated area, interrogating the cellphone companies’ logs has turned out to be … well, not very practical.
PENA:
It was a man? A man’s voice you heard?
JUAREZ:
Yes.
PENA:
And he specified a location in Xochimilco?
JUAREZ:
Exactly. A warehouse, on a site formerly owned by the United Fruit Company. Its current owners are hard to determine. There is a maze of companies apparently, most of them based in Africa or the Middle East. A great deal of confusion.
PENA:
Tell me what you found when you arrived at the site.
JUAREZ:
Lieutenant, it’s almost impossible for me to describe. It was an underground complex, almost like a small city. It had been flooded, but still it was largely intact. An incredible thing. If someone had told me that such a place existed, I would have laughed at him.
PENA:
I’ve seen the pictures, Officer Juarez. And I agree, it’s impressive. I believe you found two people there when you arrived?
JUAREZ:
A man and a woman. Both of them injured – the man seriously. He had a wound to his abdomen and another to his face. The woman had been beaten and it’s possible that she had an injury to the left side of her body. She had a jacket draped over her left arm, so that I couldn’t see.
PENA:
Also there was a dead body.
JUAREZ:
Yes, that’s true. A second man was present and he was dead. A gunshot wound clear through the upper torso at very close range. My immediate assumption was that either one or both of these people must have killed him, and so I attempted to perform an arrest. I was unable to do so, however. The man outdrew me and forced me to surrender my side-arm.
PENA:
He outdrew you. Despite his wounds?
JUAREZ:
Lieutenant, he moved as quickly as a snake. This man had been a soldier. I don’t have any doubt of that. You saw the guns and ammunition he left behind – a whole arsenal. Also, he seemed a little insane. Unbalanced. If I had brought back-up, I might have had a chance against him: against the two of them, I should say. Alone, I had none.
PENA:
So. There you were with your gun in your holster and your dick in your hands.
JUAREZ:
Masturbation I leave to you federales. I try never to compete with an expert.
PENA:
I want that to remain in the transcript.
TAQUIGRAFO:
It’s your choice, lieutenant.
PENA:
Tell me what happened next.
JUAREZ:
They took me to a staircase and showed me that the lower levels of the complex had been flooded. They explained that the water was poisoned – a neurotoxin of some kind – and that it must not, under any circumstances, get back into the water table. It had to stay where it was, under guard, until it could be pumped away and disposed of. Was that the truth?
PENA:
That’s need-to-know, Officer Juarez. You’re not on the list.
JUAREZ:
No. Of course not. But I know that the site was closed for nineteen days. An area three blocks wide was sealed off, with haz-mat signs at every corner.
PENA:
Need-to-know.
JUAREZ:
And the satellite feeds? I heard a rumour that for two days before this, hundreds of trucks arrived at this warehouse and then drove away again. But nobody knows what they were carrying.
PENA:
Need-to-know.
JUAREZ:
And that there were tunnels, leading to other sites, also in Xochimilco. That there were houses and granaries and storerooms and swimming pools and gymnasia and—
PENA:
Tell me what happened next.
JUAREZ:
What happened next? The man and the woman told me an incredible story. Incredible anywhere else, I mean. In the place where we were at that time, it didn’t seem quite so hard to believe. The man had lost his wife and his children. The woman her partner. The man they killed had murdered a great many people and had tried to kill my city. My family. My friends. Everyone I knew. Can you imagine!
PENA:
Yes. I can imagine. What then?
JUAREZ:
They tied my hands, but not tightly, and the man told me it would not be good for me if I followed them.
PENA:
Did you try to follow them?
JUAREZ:
Eventually, yes. But by then they’d gone. There was no sign of them.
PENA:
How much time had passed at that stage?
JUAREZ:
Perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes.
PENA:
It took you fifteen or twenty minutes to free your hands, when there was a knife – logged as item 21 – lying directly at your feet?
JUAREZ:
It was dark. I didn’t see the knife.
PENA:
Until it was safe to do so.
JUAREZ:
It was dark. I didn’t see the knife.
PENA:
Or any of several other knives, in the belt of the dead man, in the kit bag logged as item 16?
JUAREZ:
It was dark. I didn’t see—
PENA:
Yes, thank you, Officer Juarez. I believe I understand. Let’s turn to AMC inter-force bulletin 1217. This concerns a woman who escaped from a hospital in Kingman, Arizona, where she was under police guard, with the help of a man who lowered her down the wall of the building on a rappelling rope.
JUAREZ:
Yes. I read it.
PENA:
Look at the photographs. Is this the man and woman you saw?
JUAREZ:
My understanding is that the charges against the woman were dropped on the evidence of the county sheriff, who said the woman had actually saved him from an attacker.
PENA:
The man is still wanted. Look at the photographs.
JUAREZ:
It seems to me, if the water was really poisoned, that the man who died at the warehouse might have been a poisoning son of a bitch who deserved to be shot clear through the upper torso at very close range.
PENA:
It seems to me that if I wanted your opinion on that, I’d ask for it. Look at the photos.
JUAREZ:
That was not the woman and that was not the man. I wish I could help, Lieutenant.
PENA:
I wish I could put your balls in a vice.
JUAREZ:
So few people are ever truly happy in this world.
69
She went home.
She had a home to go back to.
It was a room, in which her father waited. She told him the story of where she’d been and what she’d done, although she knew he didn’t understand. She didn’t understand his story, either, come to that. The best you could do was bear witness and to listen whenever the chance came up.
Someone else waited, too, in another room, not too far away. There was dirty talk, and afterwards, some other things for which talk wasn’t necessary.
‘I always, always, always thought you were straight,’ Kennedy murmured, into Izzy’s ear.
‘Hell, no,’ Izzy giggled. ‘Not s
ince I was fifteen.’
‘But you talk the talk so well …’
Izzy straddled her and smiled – for Kennedy alone – a smile that would melt platinum and open the legs of an angel. ‘Oh, the talk’s universal, hon. It’s the walk that counts.’
70
He went home. It was still empty.
But the emptiness felt different now. He knew that his wife had died loving him, thinking of him. That she hadn’t wanted to leave him, and couldn’t imagine a life without him, any more than he’d been able to build one without her.
He knew that his children were alive, somewhere in the world, and that they were happy.
He felt that his solitude was a shrine, in which he kept the holiest of things: his memories of their brief time together as a family, which nobody else alive now remembered.
Because he lived, it was all true. Because he remembered, they were with him.
Next to that, what else mattered?
71
‘Letter for you, Web. Got the Queen’s head on it, so I reckon it’s from England. Who’d you know in England?’
Connie handed the letter across the desk to Sheriff Gayle, and then hovered around with the air of someone who still has something else to do and is about to do it real soon.
‘Thanks, Connie,’ Gayle said.
‘Oh, you’re welcome,’ she told him. But he didn’t make any move to open the letter, and in fact put it aside with a negligent air, so eventually Connie had to retire defeated.
When she was gone, Gayle took the envelope up again, shivved it open with his little finger and took out the letter. It was from Heather Kennedy. He’d guessed that already because she was the only Brit he’d ever met.
Dear Web,
I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to make Eileen’s funeral. The truth is, I got out of Mexico by the skin of my teeth, and I had this worry that if I came back to Arizona, they might not let me go again. I know the original charges were dropped, but then there was all that damage Tillman did when he busted me loose, and some more stuff in Mexico that was even crazier.
That’s why I’m writing, really. I feel like you’ve got a right to know how it all turned out. You lost more than I did in this thing, and it’s not a loss that can ever be made good, so this – the story – is all I can give you. That and my thanks, truly heartfelt, for everything you did for me.
Gayle read on, for the best part of an hour. He only stopped when Connie brought him coffee and did some more hovering. Once he’d waited her out again, he took up where he’d left off.
It was crazy, just as Kennedy said it was. It was an easy secret to keep because nobody would ever believe it. Maybe that was the best thing they had going for them, these Judas guys: they were so damned preposterous, folks could stumble right across them and then talk themselves out of it again. Couldn’t have happened: too stupid, too wild, too ridiculous to have happened.
But what a story it would have made, for Moggs! How she would have given it gold paint, and shiny chrome, and wings and fins and flourishes.
It was only when he got to the end, to the last page, that he saw how it really was. He changed his mind about a lot of things then. It wasn’t an easy secret to keep at all: not for Kennedy anyway, who knew this Tillman guy and owed him her life and all. And Moggs wouldn’t ever have got to tell the story like it was because she just wasn’t anywhere near cruel enough.
I went back to Gassan’s translation, Kennedy wrote, and got caught up on some of the fine detail. It made a lot more sense once I’d seen that place for myself. The children of the Kelim keep the names they were given at birth, so long as those names were chosen by the mother. If the father chose, the kids are christened again by the people.
I think with Rebecca’s children, Brand just wanted to wash away as much of their past as possible. There was nothing wrong with the names they already had, but he gave them new ones anyway. And I knew what the names were. The woman who almost killed us both, up in Santa Claus, told me as she was dying.
Grace, the girl, became Tabe.
The boys – Ezei and Cephas – died at Dovecote.
Gayle folded up the letter and put it in his desk drawer. Then he thought better of it and put it through the office shredder. Then he had an even better idea and used Anstruther’s lighter to burn the confetti-like strands of it until there was nothing left.
Watching through the glass from the outer office, Connie contemplated with longing a good piece of gossip that she’d never get her hands on.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Prologue
PART ONE: ROTGUT
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
PART TWO: DOVECOTE
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
PART THREE: 124
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
PART FOUR: GINAT’DANIA
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71