The Dead Sea Deception (15 page)

Tillman pushed on to the far end of the lounge and out into
a much smaller lobby area with fruit machines on one side and toilets on the other. He dug into his holdall for one of the bags of loose currency he carried – one that held some euro coins. He found Mr Snow, the unicorn, and tucked the fluffy, vacant, sickly sweet thing into the pocket of his jeans by one front paw. It dangled there, an ineffectual mascot, as Tillman fed forty or fifty euros into the one-armed bandit. Pulling the levers and pressing the buttons at random ate away at the time without using up any of his attention, allowing him to watch the flow of those who passed and those who loitered. They passed and loitered with perfect conviction. No anomalies, no warning bells. But then, there hadn’t been any in Bucharest, either. He wasn’t going to stay the distance if he underestimated his enemies.

When Tillman finally ran out of coins, he checked his watch. They had to be already more than halfway over by this time. He went back into the lounge, stood in line and bought a coffee, but once again the noise and the claustrophobic press overwhelmed him. He walked out to the lobby before he’d taken more than two sips of the bland muck.

Not that many places left to go. He decided to spend the last half-hour of the crossing on deck, but he felt the tiredness catching up on him. In the absence of caffeine, he could at least splash some cold water in his face. He went through the door bearing the stylised man whose arms were thrown out from his sides like those of a gunslinger walking into a duel.

The restroom was a windowless twenty-by-twenty cube with urinals along one wall, sinks opposite, and three cubicles at the back. He stepped across a floor awash with water, which had slopped over from a sink that had been filled with toilet paper in lieu of a plug. A single flickering neon strip lit the depressing scene.

He draped his jacket over a condom machine, dropping his
holdall at his feet, and ran the cold tap for a long time before finally accepting that the water wouldn’t run cold. Tepid as it was, he splashed it on his face anyway, then hit the hand drier and lowered his head into its jet of air. The door at his back sighed as it opened, sighed again as it closed.

When he straightened up, they were there. Two of them, side by side, already coming at him. Two suited men, startlingly handsome, clean cut and serious-looking. The kind who might knock on your door to ask if you’d found Jesus or whether they could count on your vote for the Conservative candidate. Tillman had time only to take in their uncanny synchronisation – something that had to be born out of endless drilling under the same trainer or commander. Then they raised their hands and the short blades they held flashed, one high one low, as they intersected the light from the neon strip overhead.

Tillman hooked his jacket off the condom machine with his left hand and whirled it in the air in front of him, retreating into the ten feet of space that the room allowed him. Behind that moving screen he hooked the squat, heavy Mateba Unica from its customary resting place, tucked into the back of his belt, and in the same movement thumbed the safety.

The two men seemed to anticipate him. Even as he brought the gun up, one of them half-turned away and kicked back against the turn: a perfect
yoko geri
. Tillman saw it coming, but the man moved so inhumanly fast that seeing it didn’t help him. The guy’s heel smacked into the inside of Tillman’s wrist before he could pull it away, knocking the gun from his grip. It clattered across the floor. Both knives came up in slashing feints, one aimed at Tillman’s heart and the other at his face. Caught out of position, he faked right and whipped the jacket down like a flail so that it wrapped around the wrist of the man on his left. The other man’s blade cut across his upper arm in a broad, deep
slash, but he ignored the pain. Wrenching on the jacket brought the man within reach and Tillman headbutted him in the face, then – since he didn’t go down – circled behind him to use him as a shield and snatch a moment’s respite.

Again the two men moved and reacted in frictionless unison. The one tangled up in the jacket dropped into a crouch and the other leaned over him, launching another slashing attack. Tillman bent backwards from the knees like a contestant in a limbo competition, just about staying out of the blade’s reach.

The attacker jumped over his kneeling comrade and advanced again, the knife flicking back and forth at the level of Tillman’s stomach. Tillman instinctively lowered his hand to block a possible disembowelling thrust: the instinct almost killed him. The knife came up inside his guard, moving around his block as effortlessly as if it wasn’t there. Flinching aside, he felt as well as heard the air part as it passed by his face.

The other man was back on his feet now, moving in behind the first, and things were likely to go from bad to worse. Tillman weighed the odds. Karate skills didn’t impress him overmuch: both men were slighter in build than him, and even the knives didn’t count for so very much in the restricted space of the restroom. What made the situation impossible was the two-for-one deal and the men’s appalling speed. All things being equal, he was probably going to be dead inside the next ten seconds.

Tillman’s only hope was to change the odds. Reaching over his head, he drove his fist into the exact centre of the neon tube.

In the absence of windows, the fluorescent strip was the only light in the room. As the glass crunched against Tillman’s bare knuckles, the restroom was plunged into absolute darkness.

Tillman dropped to the ground and rolled. He groped for the gun, whose location he held in his memory. Nothing.

The splash of feet in spilled water. Something moving to his right. He kicked, made contact, rolled again. This time his fingertips brushed the familiar cold metal of the Unica. He found the grip, raised it and came upright firing in a wide arc: once, twice, three times, spaced to quarter the room.

It was a calculated risk. Firing blind revealed his location. In the perfect dark, nothing would be easier than throwing one of those wickedly sharp knives directly at the muzzle flash. But the Unica was loaded with .454 Casull, exceeding even the stopping power of the Magnum cartridge. Even if his attackers were both wearing Kevlar under those elegant suits, at this range it would make no difference. A single hit would take them out for the duration.

With the gun at head height, moving in a figure of eight, Tillman backed toward the door. His near-photographic memory came to his aid again, and after only three steps he felt the blunt bar of the door handle prodding the small of his back.

Another movement, this time to his left. Tillman fired in that direction – leaving a single bullet in the Unica’s cylinder – and kicked the door open behind him. A wedge of light invaded the room, as did the incongruous tinkling conversation of the fruit machines in the alcove opposite. Both men had been advancing on Tillman in the dark. One was clutching his arm, indicating a glancing impact from that last bullet. The other threw himself on Tillman, jabbing the knife at him in a straight stab.

Without that fortuitous light, Tillman would have taken the thrust full in the throat. Forewarned at the last moment, his
krav maga
training, acquired in his mercenary days from a wily old bastard named Vincent Less, kicked in automatically. As the two of them fell out into the corridor, he used his right hand, still gripping the gun, to turn the blow aside, then caught the man’s wrist with his free hand and twisted so that he dropped
the knife. Bringing his gun hand back inside the man’s guard, he clubbed him in the face with the butt of the Unica to complete the move. He staggered free as the man fell, then he clambered to his feet, turned and ran. One of his opponents was down, the other at least hurt, but he had only the one round left – and win or lose, he couldn’t afford to stay for any kind of official investigation.

Tillman headed away from the lounge. He figured the shots must have been heard and the panicked crowd there would probably be impassable. Slowing to a quick walk, he turned the first bend in the corridor and immediately hit another crowd surging out of the duty-free shop. Clearly the sound of the ruckus had penetrated there, too, but it didn’t look like anyone knew where the shots had come from. Nobody had quite made their mind up which way to run. Tillman pushed his way through the skittish mob as quickly as he could. Right now, the biggest danger to them was proximity to him.

He found a stairway, went up it and came out on to the deserted upper deck. Immediately a woman came out through another door at the deck’s further end. She stopped when she saw him and stared at him in something that might have been perplexity or concern.

‘Go back inside!’ he called out to her. He went to the rail and looked out. Still a fair few miles from the Dover shore, but the ship had become non-viable so he really had no other choice. If he stayed here, he’d be questioned, and if he was questioned, he’d be arrested – for the unlicensed firearm, if nothing else.

He’d left most of the documentation he had with him in the jacket, which was back in the restroom. That meant trouble, too, since he was travelling under his own name this time. But it was trouble that could be postponed. He slipped his shoes off and kicked them away.

The pain that flared in his side took him completely by surprise. A blunt concussion that flowered suddenly into a chrysanthemum burst of pure agony. Turning, he saw the woman walking towards him, drawing a second knife from her hip and balancing it in her hand. The hilt of her first weapon now protruded from his thigh, where it had buried itself all the way to the guard.

The woman was beautiful, and very similar in features to the men in the washroom: pale-skinned, dark-eyed and dark-haired, with a solemnity in her face like the solemnity of a child in a classroom told to stand up and recite.

There was nothing he could do to prevent the second throw. She had already drawn her hand back, and as he raised the gun he knew he couldn’t aim and fire in the time he had. He tracked her arm anyway and squeezed the trigger as she let go. The knife was invisibly fast except for the small part of its trajectory where the light from a security lamp lit it up in incongruous gold.

His bullet hit the blade and sent it whispering away over his head. It was much more luck than judgement, and Tillman knew he couldn’t do it again in a million years, even if his gun hadn’t been empty.

He vaulted on to the rail and jumped. A third knife flew over his shoulder, very close, and accompanied him on his wild, parabolic leap. The main deck at this point jutted twelve feet further out than the upper one. The knife made the distance comfortably, Tillman by inches.

The cold water closed over him, and he kept on falling, through a denser, colder and altogether more hostile medium. Thirty feet down he slowed, stopped, began to rise again.

With some effort, his leg already stiffening, he somersaulted in the water and swam further down. There were no directions in the midnight-black of the water, so he couldn’t be sure where
he was in relation to the ferry. Staying down as long as he could was the best way to get some distance from it.

When his breath began to give out he stopped swimming and let himself rise. At this moment, his lungs empty and screaming for air, he glimpsed something falling away from him into the depths below, where he couldn’t now follow it. Something pure white, which picked up the unsteady, murky gleam of the ferry’s stern lamp and flashed like the wing of a bird.

It was Mr Snow.

Tillman broke the surface a long way behind the ferry. He saw no figures on the deck looking or pointing back towards him. The night would hide him, and the assassins would hardly report that he’d jumped. There probably wouldn’t be a search. The intensely cold water would lessen the bleeding from his wounds, and he was unlikely to miss the south coast of England, given how big a target it was.

He also had an answer to his question, at last. The people who’d been following really did want him dead. Perhaps that meant Michael Brand was afraid of him. He hoped so.

But he couldn’t hope to find Mr Snow in the dark and the biting cold of the water. He needed every ounce of his strength if he was going to survive to make the shore. ‘I’m sorry,’ Tillman muttered, as the waves rocked and pawed him. Not to the toy, but to the daughter he’d lost so many years before. He felt as though he’d broken faith with Grace, in some way. And as though he’d lost a link that he really couldn’t afford to lose.

Survival. It was all that mattered now. He used the ferry’s wake to orient himself towards the north and the shore that was still ten miles distant.

When Kennedy called in from Prince Regent’s to check on Harper’s progress, he told her – with pardonable smugness – that he’d found a link between the three dead academics. It was spectacular news, but it shrank in the telling, as Kennedy kept coming up with other questions that he should have asked Sarah Opie while he had her on the line: were the three dead Ravellers only in direct contact through the website or did they know each other from elsewhere? How long had their shared project been going on, and who knew about it? Was anyone else collaborating with them, who wasn’t at the London History Forum? She wasn’t giving him a bollocking: it was just the way she operated, as he knew even from their brief acquaintance. She was putting things together in her mind, figuring out what they had, and what they needed.

‘I thought some of this could wait until we go to see her,’ Harper said, chagrined. ‘I mean, this is the breakthrough, right? We’ve got the link. If we’ve got the link, we must be really close to getting a motive. But I knew we’d need a full statement, and I didn’t want to put ideas into her head in advance.’