The Dead Sea Deception (39 page)

At his side, Kennedy swore. For a moment, she seemed rooted to the spot. Then she sank down on her knees. He thought she was praying, then realised she was searching. She came up with the pack of computer discs in her hand.

‘There’s no time,’ Tillman told her.

‘I’ll bloody make time,’ Kennedy snarled, tearing at the shrinkwrap plastic.

They didn’t even have to shout: the fire wasn’t loud yet, despite its fierceness. That was more unsettling even than the smell: this was a fire that got on with the job, with minimum fuss and maximum effect.

Tillman crossed to the door and stepped out into the heat, which was like pushing against a physical presence that filled the stairwell. He got as far as the angle of the stairs, beyond which a harsh actinic light, as much white as yellow, was writhing like a living thing. He cast a quick look around that corner, enough
to tell him that there was no way through. The lower hall had become an oven, hot enough to render flesh from bone.

The windows, he thought. But there were boards nailed up over the windows. Except for the one in the computer room.

He ran back up the stairs and into the room. Kennedy was busy at the machine, hammering at the keyboard, feeding a disc into the drive. ‘Kennedy!’ he bellowed. ‘Heather!’ She didn’t answer. ‘We’ve got to
go
.’

‘It’s only the downstairs that’s on fire,’ Kennedy shouted over her shoulder. ‘We’ve still got a couple of minutes.’

Tillman grabbed her arm, turned her around to face him. ‘The smoke will kill us first,’ he reminded her. ‘You know that. Let’s go.’

She hesitated for a second, then gave him a reluctant nod. ‘Smash the window. I’ll be right with you.’

He crossed to it quickly, looking around for something he could use to smash the glass out of its frame. Kennedy ejected the disc from the drive, snatched it up and stuffed it in her pocket.

Tillman went to the stack of computer servers and hefted the top one in his hands. Wires connected it to the others, but he shook and kicked them loose.

‘That’s evidence!’ Kennedy yelled, anguished.

‘It’s going to be molten plastic inside of three minutes,’ Tillman told her, tersely.

He struck the glass once, twice, three times. It smashed on the first impact: the other two were to clear the jagged shards from the corners of the frame so that they could climb through without slashing open an artery. He was leaning in for a fourth blow when something else hit the wood from the outside, slamming into the edge of the sash and making it explode into fragments inches from Tillman’s face.

The whining report of a semi-automatic followed a second later. Tillman was already ducking back, acting on pure reflex. The second shot went past his ear, close enough for him to feel the wake of displaced air, and punched through the plaster of the ceiling, sending a shower of dust down on their heads.

Kennedy stared at the hole in the plaster and swore again. He thought she might be freezing on him: people did that in a crisis sometimes, even capable people, and the best thing to do in that situation was usually to punch them out. They were less trouble as a dead weight than as an active encumbrance.

But he was wrong. Kennedy was thinking it through. She cast a glance around the room, zeroed in on the blanket that was covering yet another pile of junk and snatched it up. That derailed her for a moment, since it revealed a fresh corpse lying on the floor, hidden by the blanket until now.

‘You poor bastard,’ Tillman heard Kennedy mutter. ‘Should have … oh Jesus, Combes! …’

Her voice tailed off. She ran from the room, trailing the blanket behind her. Tillman followed, guessing what she was going to do. It wouldn’t save them but it would buy them time.

He found her in the bathroom. She’d already started the taps running in the sink and in the bath, and she was trying to tear the blanket into strips. He took the hunting knife from his belt and offered it to her wordlessly. With the knife she quickly made a tear and ripped a ragged triangle from one corner of the blanket. Tillman took it from her and soaked it in the water filling the sink, while Kennedy cut loose a second strip of cloth for herself.

When the torn strips were thoroughly drenched, they tied them around their faces like bandanas. It would keep the smoke out for a few minutes and stave off monoxide poisoning. It gave them leeway. But leeway to do what?

The room was filling up with thick smoke now, on which motes of fire from the burning paper below floated like lanterns in a stream. The fire had got a lot louder now, too, roaring like a demon in the stairwell, making up for lost time. On top of the masks, that made it almost impossible to talk.

The stairwell was out.

Someone outside was waiting to kill them if they stuck their heads out of the windows.

What did that leave?

Kennedy tapped him on the arm, beckoned. He followed her, back into the computer room. She pointed upwards at the trapdoor, set into the ceiling. Tillman nodded vigorously, made a thumbs-up sign.
Okay, let’s do it
.

They piled up unopened boxes of paper to make a step ladder. He boosted Kennedy up so she could first throw the trapdoor open – it wasn’t locked, thank God – and then haul herself into the loft space above. He followed, climbing on to the precarious stack of boxes, then jumping and catching the edge of the trapdoor. The wood creaked loud enough to be heard over the buffeting roar of the flames, but it held. He got his elbows in and Kennedy hauled him the rest of the way over the edge.

The loft space was so full of dull grey smoke that it seemed like a solid thing, packed in there in cords and bundles. But when they moved, they left darker holes in the smoke that hung in their wake, tunnels of past time.

A skylight would have been too much to hope for, and in any case they didn’t need one. The slates were of pre-war construction, probably nineteenth century, each hung on a single wooden pin in the traditional method, exquisitely balanced. But the spruce-wood laths were so old and worm-eaten that Tillman could dismantle them with his hands. Working together, they made a ragged hole and crawled out on to the sloping roof.

It was like climbing out of a hole in the ice of a pond. The area around the gap they’d made had been weakened so that it leaned inwards and clearly wouldn’t bear their weight. They slid downwards from it towards the gutter, which also didn’t look like a safe bet.

It became a lot less safe a second later, when one of the slates at the edge of the roof exploded into razor shards that tore at their faces. Tillman heard the
thup thup thup
of small arms fire: he could even identify the gun, within a reasonable margin of error. The light but sturdy Sig-226, probably in a double-action Kellerman version with two trigger reset points. The sort of gun a cop like Kennedy might have used in the days before .40 calibre became the word and the law.

Tillman backed away up the roof ridge, keeping his body as flat to the tiles as he could. Beside him, Kennedy was imitating his action: in fact, she’d started moving a second or so before him.

But there was no salvation on the roof ridge. They’d just be at the highest point when the roof collapsed, which couldn’t be more than a couple of minutes away now. Assuming they didn’t catch a bullet first, they’d plunge through the roof back into that furnace, and if they were lucky they’d break their necks in the fall.

That wasn’t at all what Kennedy had in mind. She was looking off to Tillman’s left, towards the rear of the building, and as he followed the line of her gaze he saw what she was looking at, or looking for: the nearest of the barns, maybe fifteen feet from the farmhouse and a yard or so higher. It faced the farmhouse full-on, and had a square hole in its front where a window had once been. Wooden shutters welded open by generations of lazy paint jobs stood to either side of the gap: landing guides for a short, unpowered flight.

Dangerous but not impossible.

Kennedy started to clamber upright on the ridge. Out of the corner of his eye, Tillman caught the movement from far below. He pulled her down again just as the bullets started punching through the tiles around them: heavy, slanting rain that brought a shower of shrapnel in its wake. He drew his Unica and returned fire, to buy them a little respite and to warn the shooters against pulling back too far from the walls of the farmhouse in search of a better shot.

‘
Damn!
’ Kennedy bellowed in rage and frustration ‘This is total bloody overkill.’

Tillman emptied the Unica into the darkness below, then rolled on to his back to reload. He had two spare speedloaders, modified HKS 255s, both ready racked. After that he had nothing, not even loose ammunition. He emptied out the spent cartridges, slotted the speedloader and loaded the chambers with a quick twist of his wrist, all within a few seconds, but the virtuosity was an empty gesture. Firing into the dark, backlit by the flames that were starting to dance and weave between the gaps in the tiles, he knew he had little chance of hitting anything – of achieving anything beyond making himself an easier target. Maybe he could draw off the unseen assassins’ fire while Kennedy made her run and jump for it.

And then they’d stroll over to the barn and pick her off at their leisure. He needed to come up with something better than that. Something that offered at least measurable odds on their surviving.

His gaze passed over the truck, then came back. Blow up the gas tank? It was a sign of how desperate he was that he considered it even for a second. Urban legend aside, it had been proved time and again that you couldn’t make a petrol tank ignite by shooting at it. The bullet didn’t generate enough heat,
and fuel-grade petrol wasn’t unstable enough. Striking a spark off the metal of the tank itself might do it, but that was worse than a one-in-a-million chance, and there was no point gambling on those odds.

Which left one spectacularly stupid stunt: the sort of thing the phrase ‘million-to-one chance’ had been invented for.

Tillman groped in his pockets and found what he was looking for: the box of Swan Vestas he’d been carrying ever since Folkestone. Opening the cylinder of the Unica again, he tapped it against the heel of his hand and let a bullet slide out into his palm.

Kennedy was watching him, bewildered.

‘Move towards the barn,’ he told her. She didn’t hear him through the mask, so he hauled it off and threw it away: the air was cleaner out here, and one way or another they probably weren’t going to die from the smoke now. ‘Move towards the barn,’ he said again.

‘They’ll see me,’ Kennedy pointed out.

‘Doesn’t matter. Move over there, as close as you can get, but don’t jump until … well, jump when they’re looking elsewhere.’

‘At what? What will they be looking at?’

‘All the pretty lights,’ Tillman muttered.

He turned his attention to the bullet. A .454 Casull, a round that had built on the Colt .45 casing and turned what was already a gun-range classic into a small masterpiece. Casull and Fullmer, the designers, were looking to make a handgun cartridge primarily for the biggest of big-game hunting, so they wanted to maximise power at point of impact – ideally, though, without breaking the arm of the shooter. So they’d married a rifle primer to a pistol cartridge, generating upwards of 60,000 cup when shot from a test barrel, and capable of accelerating a 230 grain bullet to 1800 feet per second.

For the low-recoil architecture of the Unica, it was the perfect round. Tillman stuck to the storefront standard most of the time, but occasionally rolled his own using the Hornady brass casing and a primer he’d gotten from an old Irish recipe. Consequently, he knew when he prised the bullet casing open with his teeth that it wouldn’t explode and rip the lower half of his face off.

Kennedy was edging away from him along the roof, and the bullets had moved with her. She was pressed flat against the tiles, offering the smallest possible target, but a stray bullet was going to take her out sooner rather than later. Even a peripheral hit would probably send her sliding and tumbling down the slope of the roof, gathering momentum until she pitched right off at the bottom.

Right now she was probably wondering if Tillman was just using her as a decoy, aiming to make a run and jump himself off the opposite end of the roof ridge and trust to luck that he didn’t break a leg or his spine when he landed.

Opening the Swan box, Tillman bit the heads off a couple of dozen matches. He chewed them up in his mouth, turning them into a thick paste, then let the foul, bitter mixture dribble from between his lips into the base of the bullet casing: a crude stew of red phosphorus and saliva. He resealed the casing, again using his teeth to bite around the edges of the base and crimp it into place. He bit down as hard as he could, until his teeth seemed likely to shatter under the applied pressure. Even then, there was a better than fifty per cent chance that the freakish, home-made thing would just explode in the barrel. But screw it, he was committed now.

Kennedy had gone as far as she could go: was pressed up tight against a broad chimney stack two-thirds of the way along the roof. It offered a little cover, at least, but it also blocked her
passage unless she stood or knelt upright to edge around it. The shooters had followed her there and were more or less free now to choose their angle. They remained completely invisible in the perfect darkness below, but the muzzle flashes showed their positions each time they fired. Tillman could target the muzzle flashes, of course, but he knew, too, that only an idiot would be standing still while they fired.