The Dead Sea Deception (52 page)

Kennedy nodded and went to her place, putting her hands into the gloves as she went and wriggling the fingers into place. Gayle called out after her.

‘Sergeant?’

She turned. ‘Yes?’

‘I don’t care who you share your bed with. I was just brought up not to talk about it. No offence meant.’

He looked ridiculously earnest. Kennedy smiled.

‘None taken,’ she said.

‘Okay, then. Good hunting.’

‘And to you, Sheriff.’

The contents of the boxes were a tragi-comic miscellany. She’d gotten a glimpse of them, of course, when she opened the red folder the first time around. Now she had to sort through them, and it turned out to be a task filled with horror and pathos, like trying to read the future in the entrails of dead children. But it was the past she was trying to read and she couldn’t afford to be squeamish.

The objects were banal in themselves. What made them terrible was their specificity: a wallet with photos of two grinning
kids, a boy and a girl, the girl slightly cross-eyed; a silver fountain pen inscribed
MG – for forty years
; a key chain whose fob was a chunk of crystal into which a 3D image, the portrait of a patrician older woman, had been laser-etched; an MP3 player in a case decorated with comic book panels, on to which the name
Stu Pearce
had been written in smudged black marker. The stumps of sheared-off lives, still raw, when the screaming had long since stopped and the bodies were underground.

She steeled herself against the emotions rising inside her: they’d only slow her down and make it harder to think. She was looking for something that might conceivably have belonged to Peter Bonville and might in some way contain a message. A CD, a USB stick, a voice recorder, a Walkman, a diary. Eventually they’d get to the phones, and Gayle would have to wrestle with the Fourth Amendment and his conscience.

But it was Gayle who struck gold, in the end, and it probably didn’t even take all that long, counting by the clock. Subjectively, every minute spent poring through these cardboard burial vaults was a day.

‘Sergeant.’

She turned to look at him. He was holding up a notebook: A5, or maybe a little smaller, with the words
WALMART VALUE
emblazoned across its red cover.

‘Definite?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Or only maybe?’

Gayle turned the pages with gingerly care. ‘Well, right at the start here we’ve got a list of addresses, headed up with the words “Switching stations”. Then there’s a second list of “Hubs”. Lot of figures in columns, and then we get this. “Visit, Saturday: Siemens power generation service, Poniente 116 590, Industrial Vallejo, Metro Azcapotzalco, Mexico City, Distrito Federal: matters arising”. It’s looking pretty solid, I’d say.’

Kennedy thought so, too. She came and read over Gayle’s
shoulder as he turned the pages. Most of it was unfathomable, but it all stank of electricity. Measurements in amps and volts, references to generating capacity, peak and off-peak averages, resistor tolerances, fluctuation by time and by district, where the districts had names like Azcapotzalco, Alvaro Obregon, Magdalena.

Three pages from the end they found another table, with the heading in block capitals,
XOCHIMILCO ANOMALIES
, and lists of numbers, some with multiple question marks appended as though they defied all logic and reason.

‘What do you think?’ Gayle asked.

‘I think it’s paydirt,’ Kennedy said.

They had to decide whether to continue with the search or not. There could be more: digital data in some form or other that would corroborate and substantiate these handwritten notes. But what they had already was enough to bring the house down and the feds in, effectively filling all the blanks in their evidence trail. Michael Brand led back to Stuart Barlow and forward to the sabotaging of Flight 124. Flight 124 led to Bonville and Bonville led to … this. A place called Xochimilco. A place in Mexico, presumably. A place that was important, in some way, to the Judas tribe, and would prove their existence.

Kennedy weighed that against the numbing prospect of trawling through yet more boxes of mortal remains. The equation yielded only one answer.

Her eyes met Gayle’s and he nodded, seeming to acknowledge everything she’d thought but hadn’t said. ‘It’s enough,’ he said. ‘Feels like it should be anyway. Let’s leave it to the big boys to figure out from here.’

Just as he had with Michael Brand’s dollar bill – which he now took the opportunity to put back – Gayle insisted on following evidence protocols, signing the notebook out into his own possession. Kennedy waited by the door, feeling a weird
sense of calm descend over her. Now that she had something, some weapon – however small – to aim at the bastards who had killed Chris Harper, it was as though she only had to let herself go now and gravity would reel her in. She knew that wasn’t true – that in fact she had another gauntlet to run back in the UK very soon – but it was a pleasant feeling to indulge just for a moment.

‘Okay,’ said Gayle, closing the folder. ‘I guess we’re done.’

There was another wait while he locked the shed up and then they headed for the car, Gayle a few steps in front.

‘Should we call Eileen?’ Kennedy asked him. ‘I’d like to know how she got on with the New York people.’

‘I’ll call her from the car, on the hands-free,’ said Gayle. ‘I’ll feel a lot happier once we—’

Arriving simultaneously with its own sound – a sharp snap like the cracking of a whip – the bullet took him through the shoulder, close to the neck. It must have passed clean through because even as blood fountained forward from the entry wound, Kennedy could see a red ring widening at the back of Gayle’s white shirt: expanding and filling out like a sun coming up, then drooping and losing its symmetry like one of the melting clocks in a Dali painting. The sheriff gave a grunt of astonishment and pain. He toppled sideways, crumpling into an ungainly shape as he hit the ground.

Kennedy was too shocked, too dumbfounded, even to dive for cover, and in any case there was no cover to be found: the Biscayne was the nearest, and that was ten yards away, in the same direction from which the shot had come. Tearing her eyes from Gayle’s sprawled body, she looked past the car towards the leering Father Christmas on the porch of the nearest chalet.

Santa wasn’t the shooter, though: the shooter stepped out from behind him now, the gun raised in her hand. It was the
woman from the bar, at Benito Juárez airport. The woman who had left the silver coin for Kennedy to find. She wore no makeup at all now, so the red, scorched flesh that marred the beauty of her face was shockingly distinct.

‘Just you and me,’ the woman said, in a voice indefinably accented but still distinct. ‘That was how it should have been last time, you murderous whore. But who knows what God wants of us? He made me wait. And now – finally – He’ll make you bleed.’

This close, in full daylight, there was no mistaking what the woman was: underneath the burns, she had the same death pallor as the other assassins, both those in Luton and the ones Tillman had killed at Dovecote.

Unarmed and in the open, Kennedy knew she had no chance. She took a step back and to the side, away from the woman, hesitant, uncertain, as though she might run, in reality putting herself a little closer to the car.

The woman laughed, with real amusement. She held up her hand and silver flashed. Not a coin this time but the keys to the Biscayne, which Gayle had left in the ignition because who the hell was going to steal them way out here? She flicked them into the air, made to catch them but at the last moment let them fall at her feet, trod down on them with her boot heel. ‘There isn’t anywhere,’ the woman said. ‘I wasn’t so stupid. But look. Now I will do something stupid.’

She lowered her gun, turned it over and slammed the heel of her hand down on the mag-catch. The magazine slid out part-way, on to her palm. She drew it the rest of the way and threw it down in the sand. Then she tossed the gun over her shoulder with a negligent gesture. She looked at Kennedy and shrugged theatrically.
Well, now
.

Kennedy’s reaction was immediate and instinctive – and wrong, she knew, even as she was doing it. She ran hard at the fish-belly-pale woman, who just stood with her arms at her side and watched her come. With a wordless yell, she swung a punch at that cold, contemptuous face that would have ended up halfway down the woman’s throat if it had connected.

The woman caught her wrist, turned and threw her – a move that seemed almost improvised but was performed with snake-tongue speed. Kennedy flew through the air on a short, tight arc, smashed into Father Christmas, shattering him to matchwood, hit the wall behind and landed hard.

She started to scramble up but a dead weight slammed her down. The woman knelt astride her, right hand and left forearm combined to grip her throat in an agonising lock, lifting Kennedy’s head while her knee, dead-centred in-between Kennedy’s shoulder blades, kept Kennedy’s torso pinned flat against the ground.

‘This will hurt you much, much more than you imagine,’ the woman murmured, close to her ear. ‘And it will last for a very long time. Your friend will bleed out and die, as we do this. Your other friend, the journalist, is dead already. And the gun that killed them both will be found in your hand – the knife that kills you, in the sheriff’s. Fight. Fight against me, you filthy, broken thing. Let me break you some more. I offer up your pain to God, who loves it.’

She slammed Kennedy’s head hard against the planks of the porch. Stunned, her ears ringing, Kennedy tried a sideways roll that was unexpectedly successful because the woman was already gone, had stood up and stepped away from her.

Kennedy climbed groggily to her feet. The woman waited for her and then half-turned to kick her in the stomach with devastating force. Kennedy folded, saw the shovel-hook punch coming but couldn’t dodge it, and was sent staggering backwards. This
time she went clean through the door of the chalet, the desiccated wood exploding into dust and splinters.

The woman strode through the door right behind her and was on her again while she was still disentangling herself from the wreckage of the door. She was so
fast
. Kennedy put up a block: the woman’s hands locked on her arm, one above and one below the elbow, and she leaned, very slightly, from the waist. Intolerable pressure was brought to bear suddenly on the bone of Kennedy’s upper arm. She heard the snap as it gave. She opened her mouth to scream and the woman’s forearm came up from below, hammered her jaw shut, so the sound was just a ratchet clicking of teeth and tongue and half-swallowed breath.

‘Be patient,’ the woman said, severely. ‘Pace yourself.’

A hard rain of punches and jabs drove Kennedy backwards one lurching step at a time, until she slammed into an interior wall. No, it was a solid beam, that jarred every bone in her body. Her vision blurring, she saw the woman shift footing for another attack. She threw herself to the side: the reverse roundhouse kick scythed through the space where she’d been. The wooden beam, five inches square, broke like a twig.

There were two upsides to this, from Kennedy’s point of view. The first was that it wasn’t her neck that had snapped. The second was that the roof fell in on them both.

It was a wooden shingle roof, and it held together initially, swinging down at an angle like a giant fly swatter. It hit the woman first, just because she was standing. Not hard enough to take her out but hard enough to hurt her and distract her. Kennedy had a second or so to see it coming and rolled away – agony flared in her broken left arm as the weight of her body bore upon it – but the roof was breaking up now anyway, like a calving glacier, raining sheets of wood and tempests of dust on them both.

Kennedy elbowed and kneed her way to the left – both knees, only one elbow, her left arm trailing uselessly – as far as the side wall, then got half-upright and made a run for the open doorway, which she could just about see through the suspension of wood pulp, dust and assorted debris.

She almost made it.

The knife hit her low down in her back, on the right-hand side, and it went in deep. It felt like a punch at first, and then pure, perfect cold spread out from the impact point. It wasn’t pain: it was the herald of pain, and it brought the pain in its silent, shrieking wake.

Pure momentum kept Kennedy moving. She took a step, then another, stumbled through the doorway into the clear, baking air, but crashed down on to her knees and pitched forward off the porch into the sand.

She heard the woman at her back and then the woman’s shadow fell across her.

‘No poison,’ the woman said, her voice harsh and ragged. She coughed, once and then a second time. Good! At least the damned dust had got to her. ‘No poison on the blade. Nothing to be found here that would link your death to any other death. And it will be slower this way. We’ll sit together, you and I. I’ll sing to you as you die.’

Kennedy tried to crawl, one-handed again, her heels scuffing sand, her feet and her right hand finding no purchase. She tried again, levered herself forward a little, slumped again on to her stomach, gulping shallow breaths. Her side wasn’t cold now: it was pulsing with a sort of raggedly rhythmic fire. She didn’t dare to look. She didn’t want to know how much blood she was losing.

The woman began to tidy away her things, picking up the gun and the magazine, the keys. The keys were fifteen feet or so
away and as she bent to retrieve them, she had her back to Kennedy for a moment.