The Dead Sea Deception (43 page)

There were still too many hours of daylight left, and nobody she knew in this place and nowhere particular to go. Even the
What’s On in Peason?
magazine on the bedside table pretty much shrugged its shoulders, turned out its pockets and came back with the answer:
nothing
. She’d just missed the flower show, apparently, and the next cultural landmark was the Hardyville Days, over in Bullhead, which wasn’t until October and seemed to lean heavily on the entertainment concept of ugly men in drag. She was planning to be long gone by then.

So what sort of innocent fun could she get up to in her hotel room?

She took out her laptop, actually her sister Chrissie’s, logged on to the wi-fi network and accessed her email account. There were four items in the inbox, the first three from DCI Jimmy Summerhill, with the tone creeping up the scale from professional detachment to foam-flecked stridency. Into the wastebasket with those: she was paying for this connection by the hour after all.

She also had an email from Izzy, who had agreed to look after Kennedy’s dad until Chrissie came to collect him at the weekend – assuming Kennedy wasn’t already back by then.

You left so suddenly. Gonna miss you, while you’re away. And, you know, hope nothing’s wrong
.

She started a reply but scrapped it; started another that went the same way.

Lots of things wrong
, she eventually wrote.
But I’m still on the case. Maybe tell you about it over a drink some time?

After that, and with no real hope at all of getting an answer, she sent an email to Leo Tillman – the latest in a series – telling
him where she was and what she was doing. It was terse, but it covered the bases.

Leo, as per last message I’m out in Arizona chasing the Michael Brand connection. No real news as yet, but I’ve made contact with local law enforcement and they’re being really helpful. Hope to have a lot to report tomorrow. In the meantime, am attaching AGAIN the analysis Doctor Gassan gave me of the Dovecote Farm files. Maybe you’ve read them already, but if you haven’t, you really should. This whole thing could maybe break wide open any time if we find the right crowbar – and everything suggests that Brand is it. Deal still stands. Let me know if you have anything to share.

– Kennedy

She attached the files and hit
SEND
. She could think of nothing else to do with Tillman now, other than to keep pinging him and hope that in the end she got some faint echo back.

And now, since the files were there, she opened them again herself. She felt like she knew the contents by heart, but rereading them kept it fresh – taking her back, every time, to her first and last face-to-face meeting with Emil Gassan, in the dismal, dilapidated safe house where they were keeping him until they certified his real life free from risk.

The one in which Gassan told her about the Judas tribe.

‘So it is a gospel?’ Kennedy demanded, bewildered.

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, the translated version is still a gospel? Barlow puts together a crack team, dedicates years of his time – sacrifices his life, in the end – to translate a gospel into another gospel?’

Emil Gassan shrugged, a little impatiently. They were sitting in a bare, bleak room: four tables, eight chairs, walls painted in the shade of dark green that exists nowhere outside of Victorian buildings that have become hospitals, police stations or lunatic asylums. A poster on the wall advocated safe sex with the aid of a cartoon unicorn wearing a condom on its horn. Gassan’s right hand rested on a slender, black-covered notebook, as though he were about to swear an oath on it.

It was ten days after Dovecote: ten days after the fire, and Combes’s death. Nine days and some odd hours, then, since she’d sent her own copy of the Dovecote disc to Gassan and asked him to put the files on there together into something that made sense. Gassan’s haggling had been minimal: he’d wanted chocolate – Terry’s Chocolate Oranges – some bottles of a good French Meursault, and the last three issues of Private Eye. Remind me that the world is still out there, he’d told her, essentially – and I’ll solve your puzzle for you. Hearing the tremor of
eagerness in his voice, she’d gotten the impression that she could have refused him on every count and he’d still have agreed.

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ Gassan said, with petulance in his voice. ‘He translated a gospel into another gospel. But obviously I didn’t manage to make myself clear. What Stuart has done is … remarkable. Almost unbelievable, really. And if it weren’t for the fact that the side effects would include my now being dead, instead of merely in Crewe, I could wish with all my heart that I’d said yes when he approached me. Also, if it weren’t for the fear of those same side effects, I’d be running with this to every journal on my Rolodex, telling them to hold the front page into the foreseeable future. Not that I have access to my Rolodex, in this godforsaken place. Or a phone.’

As though complaining about the stringent security had made him aware of its temporary absence, Gassan got up, crossed to the door and opened it. A stolid constable sitting just outside nodded civilly at the professor, who closed the door again without a word.

‘Perhaps it would be better to be dead,’ Gassan murmured, as though to himself. ‘Dead, and famous, and relevant. Is that preferable to an indefinite parenthesis? I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Professor,’ Kennedy said, ‘I know this has been hard on you. But as you’re aware, we’re still pursuing the case. The more you can tell me, the better the chance that we can end this and get you back to your normal life.’

Gassan favoured her with a stare of utter contempt. ‘That would be a huge consolation,’ he said, acidly, ‘if it weren’t arrant, bloody nonsense. These people come and go as they please, and kill who they please. The only thing that’s keeping me alive is that I said no to Barlow when it counted, and now they’ve got me marked down on their great stone tablets somewhere as
being safe to ignore. God help me if they ever change their minds about that.’

‘They’re not omnipotent,’ Kennedy said. The professor’s fatalism angered her, even disgusted her a little, but she tried to keep her face and her tone neutral.

‘They might as well be. Is anyone still alive who they wanted dead?’

‘Me. I think they wanted me dead.’ And Tillman, of course, but she wasn’t about to bring Tillman into this conversation.

‘With respect, they kill savants. People who know and understand. They only trouble with your sort when you accidentally step into their path.’

‘Which I’m aiming to do again,’ Kennedy answered, grimly. ‘And I repeat, the more you can tell me, the better chance I’ll have of finding them and bringing them to book.’ She meant to stop there. It was cruelty that made her go on. She was nettled in spite of herself by the line Gassan drew between people who understood and dull, plodding coppers. ‘The only alternative, professor, is for you to spend the rest of your life in places like this, hiding from a retribution that might not even be coming. Like Salman Rushdie or Roberto Saviano – except that they were hiding because they’d written something that made an impact on the world. You wouldn’t even have that consolation.’

She broke off. Gassan was staring at her, half-aghast and half in wonder. She thought for a moment that he was going to storm out of the room, retire to his tents, as Tillman (with much better reason) had now done, and leave her to figure it all out for herself.

Instead, the professor nodded. And then, with impressive calmness, humility even, he came and sat down opposite her again.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘If I’m irrelevant, it’s because I made
myself irrelevant. I shouldn’t complain. And I end up being part of the process in any event, don’t I? The least I can do is act as Stuart Barlow’s amanuensis, since I refused all the more glamorous roles available.

‘Go on, Sergeant Kennedy, go on. Debrief me. Interrogate me. Bully and humble me. Beat me, even, if you want to. That would be novel, at least. Yes. Barlow translated a gospel into a gospel. After five hundred years of scholarship had failed to do as much.’

Kennedy let out a long breath. ‘But this new gospel – the one he found when he decoded the Rotgut – it’s one that wasn’t known before?’

‘Exactly. It’s unique. An undiscovered gospel dating – probably – from the first century after Christ.’

‘You can tell that? The Rotgut was medieval.’

‘The Rotgut was itself just a translation, as you already know. When Stuart went looking for the source document, the original from which it was translated, he went straight to the earliest codices and the scrolls that immediately preceded them – to Nag Hammadi and the Rylands Papyri. And he applied a cypher key he’d already observed, in tiny, tantalising fragments, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He had plenty to go on. In fact, his problem was that he was spoiled for choice. Here. Have you ever seen this before?’

He opened the notebook and flicked through a few pages, then turned it to face her. Kennedy found herself reading a short, itemised list.

P52

P75

NH II-1, III-1, IV-1

Eg2

B66, 75

C45

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was written on the back of a photograph that Stuart Barlow hid under the floor in his office. What does it mean?’

Gassan closed the notebook again, as though he felt uncomfortable having someone else examine its contents, even though he’d promised her complete disclosure. ‘All of these letters and numbers are shorthand,’ he said, ‘for specific scrolls and codices in specific locations. The prefix P indicates the Rylands Papyri. B stands for Bodmer and C for the Chester collection. NH, of course, is Nag Hammadi. I imagine you can guess what these specific documents all have in common. Or am I giving credit where none is due?’

Kennedy thought of the Rotgut. ‘They’re all early copies of John’s Gospel,’ she hazarded.

‘Exactly. The Gospel of John, or in some cases the Apocryphon of John – a related text. Some are whole, some partial, some very fragmentary indeed. But they’re all John. We don’t know which of the scrolls that Barlow looked at turned out to be the Rotgut source, but we can infer that it was a copy of the Gospel of John – complete or almost complete – dating from the late first century or early second century of the Common Era.’

‘And this is where I get lost,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘How do we get from the Gospel of John to this other text?’

‘By means of a code, of course.’ The answer was curt – stating the obvious. ‘Which was the entire point of Barlow’s work, and the core of his discovery.’

Kennedy was trying to think of a different way to frame the same question. She knew it was a code: what she needed to understand was the mechanics of it, the bread and butter stuff about what was being encoded as what. Gassan saw her hesitation and sighed.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘
Ab initio
. Sergeant Kennedy, I believe I
explained to you, when we first spoke, that a codex is a multipart text.’

‘You said that two or three separate books or documents could be bound together into a single codex,’ she said.

‘Exactly. The ancient world had no concept of the integrity or discreteness of the single message. Papyrus was scarce and costly to make, so you used what you had. If that meant making strange bedfellows – putting a Platonic dialogue next to a biblical tract – then you did it without a qualm. You probably wouldn’t even start a clean page: you’d just go directly from one document to the next, writing them one after, or one beneath, another.

‘So when scholars looked at the Rotgut, that was what they saw. The Rotgut has the whole of John’s Gospel, then seven verses of a different gospel. It seemed natural to assume that someone had looked at an Aramaic codex and begun to translate it, starting at the beginning and going on until, for some reason, they were interrupted.’

‘Okay.’

‘But suppose those two texts – or the one text and the tiny fragment of the second – had been put together for a different reason? If you were solving an anagram, you might write the original version down so that you could cross off letters until you worked out the solution. “Has to pilfer”, say, and then the answer, “a shoplifter”. Or “a rope ends it”, and the answer, “desperation”. And similarly, someone faced with a coded message might write the cypher down first and the decoded message afterwards.’

‘So the Gospel of John was the cypher?’

‘A specific copy of the Gospel of John was the cypher. As I said, I haven’t been able to determine which. Whoever wrote the Rotgut had found this version, this written copy of John, and
had been told how the code worked or else had managed to work it out for himself. He – it was almost certainly a he – wrote out the surface meaning of the text and then began to decode the message, to write out the text hidden beneath. But he found it arduous: even knowing what he knew, he only succeeded in decoding seven verses before giving up. Or, just as likely, he switched to a different piece of paper. And since he neglected to write down the cypher key, the rest of the message was lost.’

‘I get it,’ said Kennedy.

‘I’m so glad. And for centuries thereafter, that status quo remained unchanged. Until Stuart Barlow came along and – alerted by some clue or some leap of logic or intuition – started to take a really close look at the Nag Hammadi texts and these other early documents. He found the relevant version of John. And he found – on the papyrus itself – some sort of substitution code that depended on subtle, almost invisible variations on the standard letter shapes. He found a second message encoded in the same symbols: a buried gospel, lying beneath the obvious gospel.’