The Dead Sea Deception (48 page)

Finally she put through another call to Tillman’s number. ‘Me again,’ she said. ‘Leo, the Michael Brand who died on the plane was in his late twenties, which means he’d have been a kid when Rebecca went missing. There’s no way he could have matched
up to the description you got back then. It’s a different man. I think it’s always a different man. There probably never was a Michael Brand. It’s just a name they use when they go out on this kind of job. They’ve got people they call “Messengers”. Maybe all their Messengers are Michael Brand. For the love of Christ, would you just call me? And if you don’t call me, then read my damned emails. I need you!’

That felt a little cathartic, at least. She went back to the laptop and got to work. First she called up a few maps of Arizona state. She found whole websites devoted to that one subject, offering every kind of map and chart – topographic, economic, physical and political. She also discovered a site that allowed her to switch between a simplified schematic map and satellite camera footage, which sucked her in for two whole hours. She followed the likely route of Flight 124, tracking along both arms of the California Gulf and then across the Mexican and Arizona desert as far north as Lake Havasu.

She wouldn’t admit to herself exactly what it was she was looking for, but she found nothing: nothing out of the ordinary anyway. Nothing mysterious or unlabelled or controversial: nothing – say it! – that could be a secret enclave of crazed assassins hiding out from everybody in the middle of the wilderness. It was the wrong wilderness anyway, surely? Why would a group of religious refuseniks from ancient Judea be living in Arizona?

Maybe they liked the dry heat.

Or maybe they went where the power went. Maybe they’d lived in the Middle East for as long as the Middle East felt like the hub of something, then spilled west into Europe when Europe was a happening place, and decamped into the New World during the death throes of colonialism.

Is that what I’d do, Kennedy wondered, if I were a murderous madman who’d struck a special deal with God? All things considered, it was hard to tell.

She tried a different tack, using several search engines and meta-search engines to interrogate Southern Arizona directly. What were its biggest landmarks, its population centres, its most remote spaces and its anomalous microclimates?

She learned a lot, or at least surfed a lot of information, but got no real insights or inspirations. The terrain was harsh, parts of it were inaccessible, and nobody could say it was densely populated. With fifty or so people to the square mile, Arizona ranked thirty-third out of the fifty states of the Union – and most of those people were clustered in a few major population centres. But the state had good roads, it was on a whole lot of flight paths, and satellites looked down on it twenty-four hours a day.

Kennedy had been imagining a scenario. Flight 124 is winging its way up from Mexico City. Someone looks out of the window and sees something they weren’t meant to see – something that points to the existence of the Judas tribe. An alarm bell rings somewhere, somehow, and Michael Brand – one of the Michael Brands – is despatched. He can’t touch the plane while it’s in mid-air, obviously, so the best he can do is to get to Los Angeles and board it during the stop-over, which he makes with inches to spare. Then he finds a way to bring the plane down, which with his unique combination of combat skills and frothing madness is a piece of rancid cake.

But the closer Kennedy looked at it now, the less she liked it. It all hinged on there being something to see: something big enough to be visible from 124’s cruising altitude (about twenty-seven thousand feet, Gayle had ascertained), and not just visible but identifiable; and yet, at the same time, something that was
presumably temporary, only there to be seen on this one occasion. Otherwise the skies over Southern Arizona and Mexico would be thick with falling planes like summer rain.

She couldn’t, for the life of her, imagine what that something could be. And she couldn’t, yet, come up with an alternative scenario. Finally, she came to the obvious conclusion that this wasn’t something she could do from her hotel room.

When Gayle called at around three in the afternoon, she told him her plan. ‘I want to go look at the area that the plane flew over. Some of it anyway.’

Gayle was surprised and clearly wary of the idea. ‘That’s a lot of ground,’ he pointed out. ‘Where were you thinking of starting?’

‘I don’t know. The state line, I guess. The Arizona part of the route is the most accessible from here.’

‘Sure.’ Gayle sounded far from convinced. ‘Of course, the distance from Mexico City to LA is about fifteen hundred miles, give or take. Maybe sixteen. And only about a tenth of that is likely to be inside of Arizona. I don’t know how much you’re going to achieve.’

‘Well, at least it will give me a sense of the lie of the land,’ Kennedy said. ‘How far apart these places are, and where they lie in relation to each other. It might spark some ideas.’

As she said it, she did the math in her mind: tried to anyway. Fifteen hundred miles, and at a height of twenty-seven thousand feet you’d probably have a field of vision that would be … the best she could manage to visualise was a triangle twenty-seven thousand feet on a side. You’d be seeing – seeing really clearly, right below you – an area that stretched for at least a mile on either side. So at a conservative estimate, she had three thousand square miles to search. It would take days just to cover that distance by road: and how much would she see from the road?

‘I just don’t want to sit here,’ she said, glumly. ‘And I can’t think of anything better to do.’

There was a short silence while Gayle thought about this.

‘Take the plane,’ he said.

Kuutma was listening to music when Mariam’s call came through. This was unusual because Kuutma hated music.

No, that wasn’t true. But it was a refractory medium for him. He didn’t understand its structures or its appeal. As a younger man, he’d listened to certain tunes with a kind of pleasure. He even remembered dancing once. All of this before he became a Messenger and left Ginat’Dania. After that, the course of his life had been irrevocably set, and somehow, music had slowly ceased to mean anything to him.

Perhaps it was an effect of the drug.
Kelalit
altered perception; or, more accurately, altered the interface between the user and the world. Reality became a dumb show, drenched in sepia and moving with the sluggishness of syrup. The mind was quicker, the movements surer: the overall sense was of heightened awareness, and yet paradoxically the things of which one was aware had been leached of much of their vividness, their ‘thisness’. Sights, sounds, textures, tastes: all became flattened along one dimension, became – he could think of no clearer way to express it – schematics of themselves.

The ringing of the phone came, therefore, as a welcome distraction from the depressing enigma of the music.

‘Hello,’ Kuutma said.

‘She’s booked an airline ticket,
Tannanu
.’ Mariam’s voice sounded perfectly level, perfectly uninflected.

‘Where to?’ Kuutma asked.

‘Mexico City. But I don’t think the destination is the point. She’s taking Flight 124.’

‘Ah. Yes.’ Kuutma considered. That was good, in a number of ways. It showed how little, even at this stage, the detective had managed to piece together. And it offered opportunities for finishing the job that had been left unfinished in England. And yet. And yet. This business had been badly handled at every stage. To act again now and leave more loose ends still dangling would not be acceptable.

That was why he hadn’t ordered Mariam to move against Tillman. That was the only reason, he told himself yet again. There were no others. In any event, once Tillman returned to the rooming house in west London that had already been identified by Mariam’s team, there had been no need to move. He had put himself in Kuutma’s hands and Kuutma could order his death at any moment.

Kautma reminded himself that this removed the urgency from the situation: indeed, that it made surveillance more valuable and useful than immediate action. Kill Tillman now and perhaps some delayed action mechanism might be triggered: information released to others and a new danger opened up.

But Kuutma did not really believe this.

He had travelled to London. Taken the Underground, and then a bus, to the pitiful hole where Tillman now lodged. He had rented the adjacent room, and with infinitesimal care opened up a tiny hole in the wall, very close to the floor, using an exquisitely sharpened auger and taking several hours. Through the hole, he had inserted a pin-head spy camera on a micro-fibre lead.

What he had seen had given him considerable satisfaction.

‘He won’t stop coming. He’ll look into your eyes, some day, Kuutma, and one of you will blink.’

‘Rebecca, I do not think that it will be me.’

‘But you don’t know him, and I do.’

‘I wish, dear cousin, that you had never had to know him. I rejoice that you don’t have to know him any longer.’

‘Ah, but I don’t have to know anything any longer, Kuutma. That’s why they sent you.’

Perhaps he should have killed Tillman then. Perhaps, at any rate, he should have left him as he was and interfered no further. He had not killed Tillman and he had not left: not immediately. He had done one thing more that might – that would – have consequences.

‘What should I do,
Tannanu
?’ Mariam’s question dragged Kuutma out of his reverie, into which he should never have fallen.

Suppressing the memories, both old and recent, he turned various ideas in his mind and examined them for flaws. ‘For now,’ he said, ‘do nothing. Let the woman go and let her return. Follow her, if she leaves the airport terminal in Mexico. Depending on where she goes, and who she sees, it might be necessary to move quickly, against a wider range of targets. For now, though, let them gather. It’s good that they gather. It makes our task a great deal easier. You know, Mariam, the one great rule that we follow.’

‘Do nothing that is not warranted,’ Mariam quoted. ‘Do everything that is needful.’

‘And always – we must infer – be mindful of where our actions fall along that line.’

‘I understand,
Tannanu
.’

‘But you’re grieving, Mariam, for your cousins. The hurt you feel … if I know you at all, I would venture to say that it is more real to you, and bigger to you, than anything else in this world.’

‘It is not bigger, or more real, than God,
Tannanu
.’

‘Hence,’ Kuutma answered, gently, ‘I specified this world. You loved them. You fought with them and shared with them everything of yourself that was godly to share. What you’ve lost … I know, believe me, how great it is.’ When she didn’t answer, he went on. ‘If you wanted to go home now, there’d be no shame. Someone else could finish this and you could heal in the company of other loved ones.’

‘
Tannanu
, forgive me.’ Her voice had taken on a harshness now. ‘If I flinched from this, because of some emotional pain, some imagined wound to my heart, how could I not be ashamed? When Ezei and Cephas gave everything, how could I weigh out what I give and say this is enough, or this is too much? You sent me out. Don’t – I beg you – call me home again before my work is all done.’

He bowed his head, in a gesture of respect for her that she couldn’t see and would never know about. ‘
Barthi
, I will not.’

There was a silence. ‘What is that music?’ Mariam asked, in a more subdued tone, as though her victory over him had exhausted her.

‘The Rolling Stones,’ he told her. ‘A song called “Paint it Black”.’

‘Is the sound pleasant to you,
Tannanu
?’

Kuutma felt embarrassed. ‘No. Of course not. It’s a monstrous cacophony. I’m listening only to align my thoughts with those of my quarry. This is Tillman. Tillman’s music. He’s listened to it several times since the fire, and I wanted to understand what emotions it might give rise to.’

‘Have you found an answer,
Tannanu
?’

Kuutma was on firmer ground here. ‘Despair,
barthi
. He’s feeling despair.’

Kennedy had feared that being on Flight 124 would feel eerie and unnerving, but after the first five or ten minutes it was just a flight. She took the window seat she’d specified when she booked, refused the complimentary drinks and pretzels, and settled in to watch the ground as it unrolled below her.

City, suburb, desert, desert, desert. A stone quarry, a small town, a dam and more desert. As the plane gained altitude, she became less and less able to distinguish individual features of the terrain. After a while, she could only tell built-up areas by their colour: sprawls of grey against the greater sprawls of tawny brown, turd brown and olive drab.

At twenty-seven thousand feet up, revelations were hard to come by.

She could see the coastline, obviously, and rivers stood out pretty clearly. Roads were harder but you could guess where they were sometimes, from the interruptions in the lines of mountains or where the area around them had been cleared. Was there a road, maybe, where a road shouldn’t be? A road that serviced no obvious destination?