The Dead Sea Deception (44 page)

Gassan got up and crossed to the window. He looked out anxiously, although there was nothing to see: the window looked on to a light well that was interior to the building, a brick-sided shaft eight feet on a side. Kennedy waited a minute or two and then joined him. She knew how frustrated Gassan was at his enforced isolation – and underneath that, how terrified he was that by picking up the Rotgut project he’d become contaminated by its curse. Kennedy would have liked to reassure him, but the only comfort she could offer was a despairing one – that after Dovecote Farm had been wiped off the face of the earth, and Josh Combes became a burned offering, Michael Brand had vanished down whatever hole he normally inhabited. They might all be safe now simply because they offered him no credible threat.

She stared out with Gassan at nothing. ‘So each letter, each symbol on the papyrus, was two letters?’ she asked him.

‘Essentially, yes. Each letter had a standard referent and a coded referent.’ He didn’t turn to look at her, but his tone, listless at first, picked up a little as he explained the technicalities. ‘The code uses a combination of two features that are completely meta-textual. The first is the number of additional stylus strokes used to write the letters. For example the Aramaic letter “heh”’ – he drew it in the condensation on the window – ‘is typically drawn as a single stroke with an acute angle and a curve, and then a separate downstroke. Two movements of the brush or stylus, you see? But it’s possible for a scribe to raise the marking tool from the papyrus twice in the course of making the complex stroke. Or once. Or he could do it as a single, continuous shape, without lifting the brush at all. That gives you three states of the letter. And then the simple stroke, similarly, could be one or two movements: the tool could be rested partway, leaving a slight thickening of the line. That gives six states – two times three.

‘The other feature is the relative length of strokes within a letter, where the possible states are, to put it crudely, short, medium and long. In heh, the simple stroke is typically drawn down further by the scribe than the enfolding arms of the complex stroke on either side. But it could stop at the same level, or not come down so far, remaining above the arms. Now we have at the very least eighteen states of the letter: probably more, in that the encoding of comparative length probably also brings in comparative distance between one feature of the letter and another, or possibly between each letter and its neighbour.’

Kennedy thought about this slightly dizzying prospect, trying hard to get a handle on it.

‘And each of those … states, as you call them …’

‘Corresponds, within the cypher, to a different symbol. So this heh might then become gamal, or daleth, or zain. It would still be read as heh in the parent text, but it would stand as something else entirely in the decoded text.’

‘Why would someone do this?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Isn’t a gospel supposed to spread the word about your religion? If you have to hide it, then it loses most of its point, doesn’t it?’

Gassan snorted through his nose. ‘There are lots of stegano-graphic texts – hidden messages – from that period, Sergeant. The early Christian sects were at war with each other, and often with their local governments as well. They had every reason to hide their messages away.’

‘But hiding one Christian message behind another …’

‘… rather suggests that the Christians, or perhaps a specific group of Christians, were your target audience, doesn’t it? With a code like this, you could disseminate your gospel and hide it at the same time. And your readers could carry the message from place to place without having to look over their shoulder. Anyone who examined the text would see only John’s Gospel: canonical, unobjectionable.’

‘Whereas the hidden message is a heresy?’

‘It’s safe to say, Sergeant, that the hidden message is heresy on the most breathtaking scale imaginable.’

‘So what the hell is it?’

‘You didn’t read it?’ Gassan turned from the window at last, to give Kennedy a stare of horrified indignation.

‘I read some of the parts that had already been rendered into plain text. They didn’t seem to be anything special – just Jesus talking to his disciples, most of the time. I couldn’t find my way through the files – there were too many of them and they all seemed to be hundreds of pages long.’

Gassan hesitated: his disapproval at being asked for a précis
fought against his desire to stand on a soapbox and hold forth. In the end, it was no contest.

‘You’re going after these people?’ he asked. ‘The people who killed Barlow and Catherine Hurt, and the others?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I suppose you need to know what you’ll be facing. You’ll lose, though. I probably ought to make that clear up front.’

‘Thanks, professor. For the vote of confidence, I mean.’

‘Believe me, Sergeant, I wish it were otherwise. If you could beat them, I could go back to living a life worthy of the name. But then, of course, if you could beat them …’

He walked back to the centre of the room, touched the cover of the black notebook, then the table, as if to reassure himself that both the words and the world were still where he’d left them.

‘If I could beat them?’

He looked around at her, his eyes desolate. ‘Well, then they wouldn’t still be out there, would they? Not after all those centuries. If they were vulnerable on any conceivable level, someone would have beaten them already.’

Sheriff Gayle collected Kennedy from the front of the hotel at nine the next morning. The night before, when he had taken her back to the hotel, he’d used a police black-and-white. This morning, he was driving a car only a little smaller than a football pitch, its colour scheme two-tone, equally divided between sky blue and rust. In places there were actual holes in the bodywork.

Seeing her dubious expression, Gayle assured her earnestly that the car would get them to where they were going. ‘Never let me down yet, Sergeant. If there was enough room at the cemetery, I think I’d aim to be buried in her.’

The scenery here was flatter and less dramatic than along the banks of the Colorado, but Kennedy experienced the same sense of colossal scale as they drove out of Peason along Interstate Highway 93. Distant mountains to their right piled up layer on layer, the stone audience in a planet-sized amphitheatre. To their left the horizon formed a single perfect curve. Highway 93 made the dividing line, a human act of ordering on a par with God’s dividing the waters above from the waters beneath. For most of the journey, theirs was the only car on the road.

The town of Santa Claus, though, showed the bathos underlying human aspirations. At its height, Gayle had told her, the
place had had a population of ten thousand: now it was a cluster of cutesy cottages from a Disney cartoon slowly being reclaimed by the desert. They’d been painted to look like gingerbread houses: red and white striped walls; candy-pink fascia boards; bright-green shutters with rounded tops, set permanently open. All was falling into ruin. A leprous Santa Claus leered from a porch whose railings hung askew like shattered ribs. Twin strips of abraded metal, joined by a few surviving railway sleepers, were visible here and there between the battered buildings: they seemed to have been built to serve a kiddie-sized red locomotive that now leaned against the side of a house, forever out of steam, its cow-catcher half-buried in the sand.

To either end of the street was an advertising billboard, perfectly well maintained. The southern one advertised computers, the northern one – on which the leper Santa fixed his hideous grin – incontinence pads. Just beyond this second sign, where Sheriff Gayle was pointing now, stood a small row of aluminum-frame sheds like scaled-down aircraft hangars.

‘Third one’s ours, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘’Less you want to go tell Santa what you want for Christmas.’

‘What every girl wants,’ Kennedy said, joining in the joke. ‘A pony and a Barbie doll. Peace on earth.’

‘There you go,’ Gayle said, leading the way. ‘I think the old feller winked at you just then, so you probably got that to look forward to now. Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.’

He’d taken the heavy key ring from his belt and was sorting through it slowly and carefully. Finally he selected a big brass key with a hollow shank and inserted it into a keyhole that was perfectly circular. He didn’t turn it, just pressed it in and then pulled it out again. There was a two-tone metallic sound:
tchikclunk
. Gayle shoved the metal door sideways on its runners and they stepped into a dark space as hot as the inside of a furnace.

‘There’s an AC unit here,’ Gayle said, fumbling with some switches on the wall just inside the door. ‘You might want to give it a few minutes.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Kennedy said. As the lights flickered on, she moved out into the wide, undifferentiated space. It was just a single storeroom, with long metal shelf units dividing it up into aisles. At the nearer end she saw a desk with a couple of A4 folders on it, one blue and one red.

The shelves were full of boxes, no doubt bought en masse from the storage solutions company whose logo they all bore:
EZ-STACK
. Each box also had a number, and Gayle now flipped open the top folder on the desk, the blue one, to show her the master list.

He flicked over a page or two, found the Bs and ran his finger down the left-hand margin. ‘Michael Brand, Michael Brand, Michael Brand,’ he muttered. ‘There you go. Box number 161.’

The boxes had been ranged sequentially, and every single one was in its proper place, so finding 161 was as simple as walking down the second aisle to the right spot and sliding it out. Gayle brought it back to the desk and set it down, nodding to Kennedy. ‘Be my guest, Sergeant.’ She slid the lid off the box and looked inside.

Each of the objects in the box had been separately bagged. Most were items of clothing: shirt, trousers, jacket, pants and socks. Sheathed in anodyne plastic, they looked – on first glance – like they’d just come back from the dry cleaner’s. But the cleaner had done a really bad job, leaving red-black bloodstains here and there on pretty much everything.

In the bottom of the box, underneath the ruined clothes, she found a sparse sprawl of objects. A till receipt, also stained red-brown at one corner: it was for a newspaper and a pack of Big Red gum, paid for with cash at one of the Walden Books stands at LAX. A black plastic comb. A wallet, already emptied. A
separate bag containing bills and coins that had been found in the wallet, to the total value of $89.67. An opened packet of paper tissues. A half-empty blister pack of cinnamon chewing gum, presumably the one described in the till receipt. And that was it: the total worldly goods of Michael Brand.

‘No passport,’ Kennedy remarked. She hadn’t had high expectations, but felt a little deflated anyway.

‘Stuff from the flight got scattered over a lot of ground, Sergeant – and this is a desert. Most likely it’s still out there somewhere. Unless someone picked it up and handed it in at a local police station – or kept it as a souvenir, or sold it on. But his passport was scanned when he joined the flight. All that information’s on record.’

‘I know,’ Kennedy said. ‘I wasn’t thinking of the passport itself, so much.’

‘Baggage stub?’

‘Yeah, that.’

‘We already cross-referenced all that stuff, working off the flight manifests that Coastal sent us. Brand didn’t bring a case on board. He had no stowed luggage at all.’

With Gayle’s permission, Kennedy put on gloves and examined the disappointing haul. She turned the till receipt over, making sure the obverse was blank: no hidden messages or enigmatic lists. She rooted through the wallet, looking for slips of paper that had been missed, torn linings in which something might have been secreted, inscriptions or markings on the leather itself. There was nothing.

Someone had marked one of the dollar bills, though: three parallel lines drawn in red marker, running from top centre to bottom right. Someone had tried to cross out Ben Franklin’s face and missed by a good half-inch or so. Kennedy puzzled over the note for a while, then gave it up.

‘What about the unmatched stuff?’ she asked Gayle.

‘There’s a whole lot of that,’ he said. ‘Boxes and boxes – takes up most of the last aisle. You’d be talking about a good six or seven thousand items. I don’t think there’s enough hours in the day for you to go over it all.’

‘Do you have a list?’

‘Most definitely we do. That’s the second folder. The red one.’

Kennedy read through the list, looking for anything that stood out from the background. A number of things caught the eye for a moment, maybe a little longer:
part of glass unicorn; medallion with skull and marijuana leaf; dildo decorated with stars and stripes motif
. But how could she know what Michael Brand had been carrying or what it might have meant to him? More significantly, she noted three dozen or so cellphones whose owners hadn’t been identified – but when she got to that page and looked up at Sheriff Gayle, he was shaking her head before she could even frame the question.

‘I can’t let you turn any of those on, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘It’s not legal without a warrant, and there’s no way I’d be able to get a warrant without showing probable cause – of which there ain’t a shred, really, for any of these people. Not even for your Michael Brand, when you come right down to it.’