The Dead Sea Deception (51 page)

‘“The elaborations of a bad liar”,’ said Moggs. It sounded like a quote but Kennedy didn’t get it and didn’t feel like asking. She turned to Gayle instead. ‘So you think someone took advantage of this guy’s absence to get into his computer and take something out of it? And then when he died instead of coming back to his desk, they worked out a supernatural cover story?’

‘That’s exactly what I think,’ Gayle agreed.

‘I think you’re wrong, Sheriff.’

Gayle blinked a few times, hit squarely in the face by the harsh words. A moment ago, they’d all been conspirators – and conspiracy-busters – together: now it seemed like Kennedy didn’t want to play.

‘How’s that?’ he asked her.

Kennedy turned to Moggs. ‘Have you got the passenger list from 124?’ she asked.

Moggs nodded. ‘Got every piece of information I could legally hold about this whole business, and then a little bit more.’

‘Can you go get it?’

Moggs went over to her desk and fired up her computer. Sheriff Gayle went with her and stood behind her as she keyed in her password. His hands dropped to her shoulders, a gesture of protection and solidarity. They’d shown their baby to Kennedy: was she about to throw it out with the bathwater?

Moggs tapped a few keys, opened a file. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Got it.’

‘Find Peter Bonville.’

‘Got him. He’s near the top, obviously.’

‘Okay, I’m going to tell you his seat number.’

Moggs shot her a puzzled glance. ‘What, from memory?’

‘I never even heard his name until just now.’

‘Then how would you know his seat number?’

‘Maybe I don’t. In a lot of ways, I hope I’m wrong. But is it 29E?’

Both of them, in unison, read the screen and then turned to stare at her. ‘How’d you know that?’ Gayle demanded.

Kennedy reached into her inside pocket and took out the folded sheet Gayle had given to her the day before: the photocopy of the marked dollar bill that Brand had carried. She held it out. Gayle took it and scanned it, but Moggs got there first.

‘The three lines on the note,’ she said. ‘They run right across the serial number here, at the bottom.’

‘Well, I’ll be goddamned!’ Gayle exclaimed in wonder, getting there a second later. The three red lines crossed out an E, a 2 and a 9.

‘The first thing I thought when I saw this note was that it might be a coded message of some kind,’ said Kennedy. ‘The people I’ve been tracking … they love codes and hidden messages. They think they’re the smartest people in the room, I guess, and that they can operate right out in plain sight so long as they put up a smokescreen over their comms. This is right in their line, as far as that goes.’

‘So how does this mean we’re wrong?’ Gayle asked.

‘Because you were assuming the raid on Bonville’s computer was opportunistic. It wasn’t. Whoever gave this note to Brand was telling him who the target was. Which means that Brand got on that plane with the express intention of killing Bonville. And for reasons we’re never going to know now …’

‘Oh sweet Jesus,’ Moggs murmured.

‘… he killed them all. Everyone on board. He completed his mission by bringing down CA124.’

In some ways, after that, it got easy.

Bonville didn’t board at Los Angeles. He was with 124 all the way from its point of origin: Benito Juárez International Airport, Mexico City. Kennedy asked Sheriff Gayle – despite the jurisdictional issues that Moggs had already mentioned – to place the call to Bonville’s former supervisor, a woman named Lucy Miller-Molloy, at the New York Department of Public Works. What had Bonville been doing down in Mexico? And while they were on the subject, what did Bonville do, period? What was his job, in the department? What was his area of specific expertise?

Power routing, was the short answer. The slightly longer answer: Bonville was a respected thinker in the expanding field of peak usage flow-back equalisation. Miller-Molloy knew far too much about the subject herself to explain it clearly to a layman, but she told Gayle enough so that he could give a bare-bones summary to Kennedy and Moggs without contradicting himself.

‘Say you run a city and you’ve got a generator that’s providing electricity for the city,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you’ll need a lot of power, sometimes not so much. So you use the trough times to charge up auxiliary generators – or, say, to pump water
upriver a few miles, past a dam with a hydro plant. Then when you get to a peak time, you’ve got that extra charge saved up like money in the bank and you can pay yourself back somehow – increase your capacity at the peak times.’

It seemed there were many different ways of doing this flow-back stuff, some so cheap they paid for themselves. What Bonville did was look at power systems and say, ‘Well, you’ve got room to do this, this and this, and it will cost you this much for each erg of power.’

The New York Department of Public Works had used Bonville as an outside consultant for a while and then had put him on salary – a pleasant corollary of which was that they could generate additional revenue by sending him out on loan to other municipalities. Mexico City had been the latest of many of these gigs.

‘So he was down there telling them how to economise on electricity,’ Gayle summarised, when he reported back to Kennedy and Moggs. ‘The idea was that he’d look at their power usage. Then he’d tell them where they had spare capacity in their system and how they could use it.’

By this time it was after midday, they were on the fourth pot of coffee, and Gayle had relaxed his strictures against the bourbon. He took a slug of it now, in a tiny shotglass labelled in red letters, ‘A Present from Tijuana’. Silhouettes of a sombrero and a cactus provided additional verification.

‘I’m not seeing how this picture fits into your picture,’ Moggs said to Kennedy, scrolling through her Bonville notes, to which she’d been adding in the course of the morning. ‘Your Judas people kill anyone who finds out about their secret bible, right? Are we assuming that Bonville came across this Rotgut Gospel somewhere down in Mexico?’

Kennedy had been pondering the exact same thing and had
come up with something like an answer. ‘I think they cast their net wider than that,’ she said, as Moggs resumed her rapid typing. ‘The point about people not seeing the Gospel of Judas isn’t just a blind article of faith. If it was, they’d have killed everyone who read the mangled version that surfaced a few years back – the Codex Tchacos. I think the point is that they don’t want anyone to know that they exist or that they ever existed. The complete version of the gospel, the one Barlow got from the Rotgut, talks about their internal rules and the divisions of their society. It makes it clear that the worship of Judas was something that defined a community. A tribe. That seems to be what they want to keep secret.’

‘An ancient Judean tribe? There’s still no logical through-line.’

‘Well,’ Kennedy said, ‘maybe there is. We know that Bonville travelled the world, advising people – local government people, public agencies – about power usage. So he had access to a whole lot of data about that stuff, about patterns of power flow and power consumption, at different times, in different places. Suppose he found a piece of data that didn’t fit into the pattern?’

Moggs’ hands, poised over the keyboard, froze. She turned to stare at Kennedy. ‘Power usage where there shouldn’t be any,’ she said.

‘Exactly. Or just heavier than it ought to be, for a particular place and a particular population density. He could have found out where the Judas people are based, purely on the basis of those statistics. He wouldn’t even know, necessarily, what it was he’d found. But he started to ask the wrong questions or look in the wrong places. And they shut him down before he could put two and two together and get four.’

Gayle cast an anxious look at Moggs’s computer. Kennedy
could read his mind. ‘We’ve got to be really careful who we tell about this,’ she agreed. ‘In fact, I’m thinking we should keep it between the three of us for now. Eileen, do you have a laptop?’

Moggs nodded.

‘Save those notes on to a pen-drive and move them over to the laptop – and keep the laptop off the net. If they could get to Bonville’s computer, they can get to yours.’

‘Maybe I should unplug my home computer, too,’ Moggs muttered. ‘I can use the machine down at the
Chronicler
office for internet stuff.’

Kennedy shook her head. ‘No, keep your machine here plugged in. If they were to check up on you, we’d want them to find nothing at all out of the ordinary. Everything as it should be and everything smelling of roses. If they see us coming, they’ll come for us first. Believe me, you do not want that to happen.’

‘What’s the next step?’ Moggs asked.

‘Santa Claus,’ Gayle answered, before Kennedy could get the words out. ‘We go on up to the evidence store again and we see whether anything of Bonville’s is either in his box or in among the anonymous stuff. Anything that might tell us what it was he found.’

‘That’s my feeling, too,’ said Kennedy. ‘And we do that right now. If we get no joy there, we go back to the New York office and ask for a list of all the places Bonville went in the past year, say. That gives us a shortlist.’

‘Might give us more than that,’ said Moggs. ‘If you cross-referenced that list against the files on the New York server, you might find that there was only one discrepancy – one place that doesn’t have any data saved for it.’

They agreed, in the end, to work both ends at the same time. Moggs would stay at the apartment and place that call. Gayle and Kennedy would drive out to the storage sheds at Santa
Claus and search for smoking guns there. That was Gayle’s expression and it made Kennedy wince.

‘As a personal favour,’ she asked him, ‘can we just say “search for evidence”?’

Highway 93 was clear as far as the horizon, in both directions, again. All the same, Kennedy couldn’t keep from checking the rear-view mirror every minute or so. She didn’t trust the desert to remain empty.

‘This is going to take some explaining,’ Gayle ruminated. ‘And as soon as we start into explaining, it’s going to be federal. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Those people got the resources after all. And I guess once the risk is spread that wide, it ain’t a risk any more. There’ll be no reason for anyone to come after us, if all this stuff gets to be out in the open. But the feds have got their own rules and they’re powerful hard to negotiate with. You might find your Arizona vacation a little longer than you expected, Sergeant. If they think they’re likely to need what you know, they’ll want to keep you right here ready to hand. And I know you ain’t got your own people to go to bat for you. But keeping you out of the picture … well, that’d be real hard at this point.’

‘You don’t have to lie for me, Sheriff,’ Kennedy told him. ‘You play it exactly the way you think it needs to be played and if any rules have gotten broken or bent along the way, feel free to put that on to me.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t do that.’

‘Okay. But I bulled my way in here by lying to you – and the lie’s on record. Nobody but us needs to know that you saw through it. You were helping a fellow cop. It all rolled out of that.’

‘Okay,’ Gayle said. ‘I like that version.’

The Biscayne backfired, the report sounding like an embarrassed cough.

They rolled off the highway, parked the car and went on into the storage shed. It was mid-afternoon now, even hotter than it had been on their first visit. Gayle switched on the AC and they took refuge in the Biscayne until the tiny, outmatched unit could start to make a difference.

‘You and Moggs been together a long time?’ Kennedy asked.

Gayle actually blushed a little. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s kind of … you know, what you hear ain’t always …’ He tailed off, hitting the limits of articulation, then rallied with a question of his own. ‘What about you? There a Mr Sergeant Kennedy, Sergeant Kennedy? There a special man in your life?’

His evasiveness made her sick of her own equivocations. ‘I’m gay,’ she said. ‘But there isn’t anyone right now. Been a while since I got down to any serious misbehaviour.’

Gayle’s blush deepened. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Well … different strokes, for …’ That was another sentence that wasn’t destined to be finished. ‘I reckon we can probably make a start,’ he said, and got out of the car again.

It was true that the storage shed had cooled a little now. They went straight to the right-hand aisle, picking up the red folder along the way.

Like a general, Gayle outlined their plan of campaign. He’d brought two pairs of non-reactant gloves, one of which he handed to her, and a bottle of spray disinfectant. ‘It’s everything from here through to here,’ he said, pointing with nods of the
head as he anointed both his own hands and hers. ‘We made an effort to group similar types of thing together, but to be honest, it depended on who was writing it up. Anstruther had his own categories, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me, and Scuff is just plain lazy, so I don’t think there’s much we can afford to leave out.’ He was slipping the gloves on as he spoke. ‘One thirty-eight to one ninety-seven is clothes, and we turned out all the pockets, so let’s keep them as a last resort. Chances are, there’ll be real slim pickings there. One ninety-eight is right here, so that gives us … five units, or sixty boxes, give or take. I guess I’ll start from one end, you can start from the other, and we’ll meet in the middle.’