The Dead Sea Deception (14 page)

There was a
CONTACT US
option on the menu bar, but the email address it linked to was in the defunct Freeserve domain, which probably meant that it hadn’t been changed in years and no longer led to an active server. Harper sent a message anyway, but didn’t trust it to get to anyone – and he couldn’t post anything on the forum without joining the group, which seemed like a long way to go about things.

He went back to the search results and refined the parameters, searching for the intersection of ‘Ravellers’ with ‘Barlow’. The first couple of items were obviously bot-based catch-alls.
Read Ravellers Barlow stories and see Ravellers Barlow photos and videos!
The third, though, was a short post on a different message board, announcing an award given to a Dr Sarah Opie for services to scholarship. Among the many follow-on posts on the thread was one from Stuart Barlow that read, ‘Well deserved, Sarah!’ The post was about eighteen months old. The item had come up in Harper’s list because Dr Opie had listed membership of the Ravellers among her interests and credits – and she was on staff at the University of Bedfordshire, not in their history faculty (which didn’t seem to exist) but in the school of computer science and technology.

Harper dialled the university’s switchboard and asked to speak to Dr Opie. When the receptionist asked him to leave a message, he identified himself and explained that this was in connection with a murder inquiry. One short flurry later, he was talking to Dr Opie herself.

‘I’m really sorry to bother you,’ he started off, ‘but I’m part of the team investigating the death of Professor Stuart Barlow. I understand that you belong to an organisation of which he was also a member. An organisation called the Ravellers.’

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Harper was about to speak again when Dr Opie finally answered him – with a question. ‘Who are you?’ Her voice, which sounded younger than he’d expected, was also brittle with strain and distrust.

He’d already told her, but he said it again. ‘My name is Christopher Harper. I’m a detective constable with the Serious and Organised Crime Agency of the London Metropolitan—’

‘How do I know that?’ She shot the question in before he’d even finished with the formalities.

‘You hang up and check,’ Harper suggested. Given the mounting body count, her paranoia seemed reasonable. ‘Call New Scotland Yard, ask for Ops, and then for Detective Division. Use my name, and say I asked you to call. I’ll still be here, and we can talk.’

He was expecting the line to go dead, but it didn’t. He could hear the distant half-noises that go with someone moving, breathing, just being there.

‘You said this is about Stuart.’

‘Well, not just that. A couple of other things, too.’

‘What things?’

Harper hesitated.
I’m building a list of dead historians. Do you know any?
That sounded like a loaded question, even inside his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘why don’t you hang up and call me back? I think you’ll feel better talking about this if you know it’s not a crank call.’

‘I want to know what this is about,’ the voice on the other end of the line said, the tension screwed up by half a notch or so.

Harper took a deep breath. Back when he wore uniform, which was right up until a year ago, he’d envied the detectives their cachet, the easy and natural authority they wore. But maybe it was a trick you had to learn. ‘It’s about a pattern of suspicious deaths,’ he said, and then added the lame amendment, ‘Potentially. Potentially suspicious.’

He heard a sound like a hollow knock – as though the phone had fallen out of her hand and hit the floor, or bumped into something as she turned.

‘Hello?’ Harper said. ‘Are you still there?’

‘What deaths? Tell me. What deaths?’

‘Stuart Barlow. Catherine Hurt. Samir Devani.’

Opie let out a disconcerting moan.

‘Oh God. They weren’t … they weren’t accidents?’

‘Wait,’ said Harper. ‘You knew them all? Dr Opie, this is important. How did you know them?’

The only answer was the click and burr of the phone being hung up. He waited, irresolute, for a minute and a half. If he called her switchboard again, his phone would be tied up while they patched the call through to her faculty building, and then to her extension. If she was calling him back, rather than just ending the call, he’d be shutting her out.

Just as he gave up and reached for the phone, it rang. He picked up. ‘External call for you,’ the comms clerk said. ‘A Dr Opie.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Harper. ‘Put her through.’

The noise of the despatch room gave way to the silence of another space.

‘Dr Opie?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you know those three people?’

He knew what the answer would be, which went some way to explain the prickle of déjà vu he felt as she said it. ‘They were Ravellers. They were all in the group. And …’

He waited. Nothing came. ‘And?’

‘They were working on the same translation.’

Tillman surfaced in Calais, where he booked a passage on a cross-Channel ferry to Dover. But of course, he would: the shortest sea route, the smallest window within which he would be enclosed and vulnerable. Still, Kuutma didn’t take anything for granted. He kept his anchors in place all along the northern coastline, and his mole in the offices of the SNCF on full alert, until he had visual confirmation of Tillman boarding the ferry.

Even then Kuutma moved methodically and meticulously. It was the last sailing of the day, leaving harbour at 11.40 p.m., but the Calais ferry terminal was still crowded. The Messengers – three of them again, as in Bucharest and Paris – boarded last and remained near the exits, which they watched until the bow doors closed and the vessel began to back out of its berth.

Kuutma stood at the quayside, watching. Would Tillman appear on deck at the last moment, claiming he’d left something behind and had to disembark after all? Was this to be another double or triple bluff?

It seemed not. No last-minute alarums came, no diversionary scuffles or panics, no false starts. The ferry left without incident, with Tillman on board. Tillman, and the three who were to kill him. Kuutma made the sign of the noose as it departed, calling for the hanged man’s blessing on his Messengers.

Belatedly but fervently, he yearned to be with them. Again, he found himself thinking unprofitable thoughts. Picking apart his own thought processes, fruitlessly and even dangerously. It did not do to be divided from oneself in this way. He was prepared to admit, now that it was all but done, that he hated Tillman and had waited too long to move against the mercenary because he doubted the purity of his own motives. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

There was nobody left to make it for.

Tillman watched the coast of France recede, with mixed feelings.

Kartoyev had confirmed a lot he already knew, had provided a few new clues and crucially had given him a fix on his next destination. He sensed for the first time that he was closing in on Michael Brand. That where he’d once chased a name, and then a phantom, now he was in pursuit of a man, who could almost be glimpsed running ahead of him.

On the other hand, he had fresh anomalies to consider. The drugs, for one. He’d never found a link before now between Brand and the drugs trade. He’d run covert ops in Colombia, and he was aware, in a general way, of how that trade was plied. Brand’s movements across the globe were not the movements of a salesman or a purchaser. An enforcer, possibly, but what was he enforcing? And why, if he was in the drugs business, would he travel so far to source ingredients that were readily available in most countries? The former Soviet Union was not Brand’s base, Tillman felt sure of that. His stays there were too short and too narrowly focused on a few specific contacts.

A smokescreen, then. Brand bought his chemicals in Ingushetia because he didn’t want to leave a trail that led any closer to his real base of operations. And he refused Kartoyev’s offer of refined methamphetamine, presumably because he wanted to mix his
own. And he was about to mix a batch that was larger by factors of ten than his usual batch.

File that one for future thought. Tillman had more urgent things to think about right now.

In his journey westwards across Europe, he had become aware as never before that he was hunted as well as hunter. In Bucharest it had been pure luck that delivered him. Walking in Mătăsari, a place where everyone keeps one eye over their shoulder, he’d read from the reaction of a man he passed in the street that he might be being followed. He didn’t look back, but tested the theory by walking through a crowded street market, where his tailgunners had closed in out of sheer necessity. He’d tacked from stall to stall in random patterns, memorising the faces around him, and after half an hour had isolated one as a definite tail, another two as probable. Once he knew he was marked, it had simply been a case of choosing the best moment to shake them off. But he had no clue as to who they were or what they wanted.

In Paris he was ready for them. Expecting to be found, hair-trigger for any whiff of pursuit or surveillance, he was able to turn the tables on his shadowy followers and tail one of them back to base. But he had little to show for it. The house they’d been using out on the Périphérique had been unfurnished, apart from three bed rolls lying side by side on a bare wooden floor. These men were ascetics, clearly. Like the early Christian saints who spent years in the wilderness, mortifying their flesh. It troubled Tillman to think that the people chasing him were capable of such humourless and stern dedication. It troubled him, even, to find that they were so many. He had no idea why an organisation of this size and this degree of organisation would kidnap women and children from London streets.

But perhaps
chasing
was too strong a term. It was possible
that they only wanted to see how far Tillman had got. Whether he was moving in the right direction at last, or still going round in circles. He wished, now that it was too late, that he’d gone on through Belgium and the Netherlands, tried harder to make a false trail. But at the end of the day, there were only so many ways to get to Britain from mainland Europe, if you didn’t want to take a plane. With even moderate resources, it was possible to keep watch on all of them.

And he had to go to Britain. He’d stayed in Paris long enough to contact some former friends and acquaintances in the private security business. Many of them were still active in that amphibian, quasi-legal world, and they had been able to give him some very interesting and very current nuggets of information about Michael Brand. For thirteen years the bastard had stayed below the water line. Now he’d breached, and Tillman had to be there. There just wasn’t any other option.

Tillman turned from the rail and made his way through the light sprinkling of passengers on the deck towards the double doors that led back inside. As he did so, he checked his watch. It was only a ninety-minute crossing, and he noted with approval that twenty of those minutes had already gone.

In the lounge area it was much more crowded. Families sat in inward-looking groups, their territory marked with handbags and rucksacks. They mostly looked either grim or tired, but happier families had been reproduced on the walls behind them in giant photographic prints, maintaining some kind of a karmic balance. In the absence of any free seats, people were sitting with their backs against a bulkhead, while others were propping up the bar that ran down the right-hand side of the room. A single barman stood serving draught Stella Artois from a single pump. The adjacent Guinness pump had been marked
OUT OF ORDER.
Further on, the bar gave way seamlessly to a food
counter where people queued for baguettes and chips. The air smelled of stale beer and old frying fat.

Tillman didn’t feel hungry, and preferred whisky to lager. He looked at the optics of Bell’s, Grant’s and Johnny Walker lined up behind the bar, all perfectly drinkable. But in the army he had only drunk when he wanted oblivion, and these days he didn’t often afford himself such a luxury. He felt tempted for a second or two, slowed his stride, then dismissed the idea and walked on. Later, when he got to London, he might find a bar and reacquaint himself with that momentary chemical caress. For now, he preferred to stay awake and alert.

He was looking for a place to sit that fulfilled his usual criteria: a view of all exits, a wall at his back and something nearby like a wall or a counter that would block a sightline at need. In this crowded room, he knew that wouldn’t be possible. It was also, he was aware, faintly ridiculous to apply criteria like that in a setting where any attack would be hampered by the instant panic stampede it would trigger, and where the assassin would have no ready escape even if the attack succeeded. The people who had followed him in Bucharest and Paris had still done nothing to suggest they wanted to harm him. All they’d done, both times, was to tail him.

So was this paranoia? The carrying of his usual caution over the edge of the abyss at last into mania and psychosis? Or had he responded to some cue he hadn’t even consciously processed? Normally he trusted his instincts, but he’d been pushing himself hard for a long time. He felt a weight of weariness fall on him, so abruptly it was like a physical thing. With it came a revulsion against the crush of humanity all around – the babble of voices sounding like an externalisation of some confusion or plurality in his own heart and soul.