The Dead Sea Deception (47 page)

‘I’m thinking crazy thoughts,’ was what she said, almost apologetically.

Gayle shrugged with his eyebrows, acknowledging the proviso, inviting her to say more.

‘I think Brand might be the answer to one of your questions. I think maybe he brought down the plane.’

Gayle looked at her in mild puzzlement. ‘Why would you think that?’

Kennedy showed him what she’d found in the files: the evidence that Brand had been in a fight, and the damage to his fingertips – which he might have sustained in trying to pull the door open before the pressure seal broke. It was nothing much, when you thought about it, but Gayle nodded thoughtfully.

‘Brand came on board late,’ he told her. ‘That was the call I just made – to the FAA. He bought his ticket when the plane was already boarding, got to the gate with a minute to spare. He was in a hurry to get to New York, that’s for sure.’

‘Or maybe not,’ said Kennedy. ‘Maybe he was just in a hurry to get on board that particular plane.’

‘So he could sabotage it?’

Kennedy made a non-committal gesture. ‘Possibly. Yes. I’m thinking yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It had come in from Mexico, right?’

‘Mexico City.’

‘How did they come in? What was the flight plan?’

‘I have no idea, Sergeant. Mostly the airlines like to take the planes out over water if there’s any to hand, so I guess it would have come up the Gulf and maybe clipped the south-western corner of the state before it turned west.’

‘What’s down there, Sheriff?’

‘The desert. Then Tucson. Then more desert.’

Kennedy pondered.

‘Could we find out,’ she ventured at last, ‘whether 124 filed a change in its flight plan at any point?’

‘I guess we could. The FAA keeps all that stuff on record for twenty years, I seem to remember. Why? What’s on your mind?’

What was on her mind sounded ridiculous even to Kennedy. She shook her head, meaning either
I don’t know
or
I can’t tell you
.

Either way, Gayle appeared to accept the head-shake as all the answer he was going to get for now. ‘I’ll call them from the car,’ he said, dropping his coffee cup neatly into the waste bin. ‘Let’s move on out.’

On the way back to Peason, she remembered to ask again about the refrigeration trucks.

Grayle chewed on the question in silence for a while, as though thinking how best to answer it. ‘Well, that’s a thing that happens every summer,’ he told her at last. ‘We got a whole lot of illegals coming in from Mexico, across the border. Used to be it was only a problem in the southern parts of the state. You know, down around Tucson. But there’s a lot more patrols out now, since the state legislature said we got to get tougher on this. So the coyotes – the people traffickers – they gotta stay further out from cities, further out from roads, and go through a lot
more desert before they can do the hand-off. They’ll cross the 8 and the 10, before they turn east. And that’s a lot of desert. So every year, and specially in summer, there’s a lot of them don’t make it.’

‘Jesus.’ Kennedy was appalled. ‘But if each of those trucks holds, what? Ten? A dozen bodies? That means—’

‘Even this far north, we can get twenty or thirty in a bad month. Plus we take in some of the overspill from further south. It’s hundreds, Sergeant. Maybe thousands. Thousands every year. Bodies wear down quick in the desert, get covered up with sand and dust. Get eaten, maybe. Get so you don’t know if the bones are a year old or a couple of centuries. So don’t nobody have a proper count of it.’

Kennedy said nothing, but something floated up to the surface of her mind: a quote that she’d read in a history textbook once.
Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States
.

‘The only other place I’ve seen those trucks used …’ she ventured at last.

‘Was after an earthquake or something. A disaster. Sure. Well, this is our disaster, I guess. Arizona armageddon. Just happens to be in slow motion.’

The silence was somewhat hard to break after that. Giving up on light conversation, Gayle got Connie to place a second call to the FAA and patch him through. Obviously curious, the despatch clerk offered to call on Gayle’s behalf and put whatever questions he needed answered. Gayle thanked her kindly but said he’d handle it himself, after which Connie maintained a sullen silence over the airwaves as she did as she was told.

But the call was a waste of time. There had been nothing anomalous about the flight plan of CA124 on the day of the disaster. It had come up along the line of the Gulf, as Gayle had
guessed, and stayed west of Tucson, flying over Puerto Peñasco and then a whole lot of nothing until it veered off towards LA at Lake Havasu City.

Kennedy looked out of the car window at the desert through which the road wound like an electric cable: plugging Arizona into the world beyond, whose existence was otherwise so easy to forget. The smell of wild sage came in through the open window of the car, sweet and strong.

Why bring down a plane? Why move from one-at-a-time murder to hecatombs of dead stacked perilously in the freezer boxes of already overstrained mortuaries?

Assuming she was right at all, what made Flight 124 worth killing?

Kennedy flipped through the pages – what Gassan had called the full transcripts – with a gathering sense of unreality.

‘There’s …’ she said, but the sentence she was trying to frame made no sense. She had to abandon it and start again. ‘The gospel, it’s … it stops being about Judas, here, and becomes …’

‘It’s a sort of meta-commentary,’ Gassan agreed. He was standing over by the window again, as if hungry for the meagre light that was coming in there. The safe house had no windows at ground level and those higher up were kept shuttered whenever the security rating of the inmates seemed to warrant it. ‘There are sections like this in the Old Testament. And in the Koran, too, I believe – instructions for how the sacred text itself is to be handled. To be complete, the message must include instructions designed to ensure its own survival. The recipe specifies not just the cake but the recipe for more recipes.’

‘But …’ Kennedy was struggling with unfamiliar concepts that she didn’t even want to understand. ‘The penalties that are written down here. You’re not suggesting …’

Gassan laughed – a hollow, unnerving sound. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. Think, though, about what happened when that American preacher, Jones or whatever his name was, threatened to burn a copy of the Koran at the site of the 9/11 attacks.
Islamists in Iraq bombed churches: dozens died. Some have posited that the inflexible interpretation of the word of God is the very essence of fundamentalism. The divine word, to the fanatic, is reified – it’s a physical thing, a fact of existence, and since it’s also the cornerstone of existence, it must be revered. There seems to be no rational limit to how far people with that mindset will go to avenge themselves on those they see as the enemies of the word.’

The professor turned his gaze on the sheaf of papers in Kennedy’s hand. ‘I presume,’ he said, ‘that you’ve reached the passage on page forty-one, commencing, “This testament shall not be read or known”.’

Kennedy nodded, read aloud from the page. ‘This testament shall not be read or known by any outside the kindred, or delivered to them in any wise. But if they come to know it, they shall be cut down …’

Gassan took up the recitation. ‘… and their mouths stopped, and their days counted. For His bargain was not with them, but with us who bear our lives from Judas, from Cain, and from the serpent their father.’ Gassan tailed off. The corners of his mouth quirked downwards, as if he were about to cry. ‘That was their death sentence,’ he murmured. ‘Barlow worked out the answer and they killed him for it.’

Kennedy was aware of the anger building up inside her, powerful enough now to affect the rhythm of her breathing. She’d been struggling against it for some time, but without much effect because she didn’t really understand where it had come from. Now she understood, but that did nothing, really, to help rein in her feelings. It was the same anger that Tillman must have felt. She’d gotten the wrong answer: this dry explanation and the nightmares she’d lived through seemed grotesquely, horribly mismatched.

‘Gnostics,’ she said, as though the word meant cobblers. ‘You expect me to believe that Gnostics are out there killing people because their security was compromised. On a two-thousand-year-old
text
.’

Her tone was furiously sarcastic, but Gassan merely nodded. ‘I doubt they call themselves Gnostics any more, Sergeant,’ he observed, mildly. ‘Assuming they ever did. Think of them as the Judas people. Although clearly, they claim a line of descent that runs back through Judas to the dawn of human time – and we must assume, there were proto-messages of theirs embedded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which sent Stuart Barlow off on this tangent. I’ve wondered about that.’

‘Seriously?’ Kennedy laughed, and the laugh had a harsh, ugly ring to it. ‘Did you wonder whether you were awake?’

‘I’ve wondered,’ Gassan repeated, ‘when they speak of Cain and Judas, whether they had in mind a physical lineage that links them or something more spiritual. In a sense, anyone who rebels against Laldabaoth, the usurper god who represses and tyrannises, would be the spiritual successor of Cain, and of Judas: but “bear our lives from” suggests a more literal reading. A Judas tribe.’

‘I repeat. A document from two thousand—’

‘Your murders, Sergeant,’ he cut across her, ‘are very much of the here and now.’

‘Exactly.’ She threw up her hands. ‘That’s why I don’t think they were committed by Gnostics.’

Gassan tilted his head a little to one side – a patronising and infuriating gesture, suggesting that he was listening to her arguments with minute care. ‘Do you know,’ he asked her, ‘what Judas’s name meant?’

‘Judas? It’s just another form of Judah, isn’t it? “The lion”?’

‘Judah didn’t mean “lion”, it meant “praise”. The lion was
only his symbol. But I was talking about Judas’s other name. Iscariot.’

‘I have no idea,’ Kennedy admitted.

‘There are two theories. One is that it referred to a place: a town. Judas from Kerioth. The other is that it denoted his membership of a specific group. And this group, in turn, took their name from their favourite weapon …’

Driving back into London later, Kennedy found herself turning over Gassan’s next words again and again. Somewhere in those many repetitions, the idea of the Judas people crystallised, or – what was that other word the professor had used – reified for her: became something real that she now had to deal with.

‘… their favourite weapon, which was a short knife – a sica. Judas Iscariot could have meant “Judas Sicarius”. “Judas the knife-man”. And you know what knife I mean, Sergeant Kennedy, because they used it on you, and on that poor man who worked with you. They have a sense of tradition, you see. Or possibly they see all of their battles as phases of the same battle, century after century.’

A lost tribe, then. Or, no, not lost, but hidden: an entire race that had retreated from the world and scuffed sand over their own footprints so that nobody would know they’d existed. But they came out of hiding whenever they had to. Not all of them, but some. Gassan’s parting shot, as she was leaving, had made that clear.

‘Page fifty-three, Sergeant. The Judas people send out two kinds of emissary into the world, to make contact with ordinary humanity: the Elohim and the Kelim, the Messengers and the Vessels. I don’t know what the Vessels did, but it’s pretty clear from the wording what the Messengers were for.

‘“Send out your Elohim where there is need, that none shall trouble or persecute the people. Let those who would bring
harm to the people be prevented, and their eyes sealed up, and the door of the grave closed upon them. They that do this thing are holy and righteous in God’s sight.”’

‘The Messengers were sanctified killers, Sergeant. And I think they still are. I think that’s who you’ve been dealing with.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Kennedy muttered.

Gassan nodded in sombre agreement. ‘Remember that they trace their line back past grandfather Judas to great-great-great-grandfather Cain.

‘Perhaps that’s why they’re so comfortable with murder. It’s in their blood.’

Gayle dropped Kennedy off at the EconoLodge. He had duties to attend to elsewhere, he told her, so he’d have to leave her to her own devices for a while; but he’d check in with her later in the day, and be her chauffeur again if need be.

Up in her room, Kennedy powered up the laptop and sent another email to Tillman. Then for good measure she called him – knowing he wouldn’t answer – and left a message on his voicemail.

‘Leo, there’s something I have to tell you. Something really important. It changes everything and it means your trail hasn’t gone cold after all. Call me. Or else answer the email. Just do something to let me know you’re listening and I’ll tell you. But I’m not going to shout this out into the void and you know bloody well why. Call me. Please.’

She was planning to get down to some serious research after that, but she paced around the room for a good half an hour, unable to settle, finding pointless things to do with the few belongings she’d brought with her.