The Dead Sea Deception (59 page)

‘Your wife,’ she said to Tillman. ‘Rebecca. What was her maiden name?’

‘Kelly. Why?’

‘There was another Kelly who disappeared. Tamara? Talulah? Something like that. It was one of the cases Chris tied Brand to, before he died.’

Tillman stared at Kennedy, waiting for her to tease the thought out. ‘You flew here,’ she said. ‘I mean, to the States. From London.’

‘Yeah.’

‘But not under your own name?’

Tillman put down his fork, his eggs only half-finished. ‘I usually buy travel documents from a woman who specialises in fake identities. She’s ex-CIA, has friends in the corporate mercenary community and mainly works for people in that line of business. Espionage, but espionage that’s being done a level or so down from what the government gets up to. Heather, where are you going with this?’

‘Brand always uses the same name,’ she said. ‘It makes his job harder, makes it more likely that someone like you will pick up his trail, but he never, ever switches to an alias. Why is that?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want to lie. And if it is that … then maybe …’

She was feeling dizzy again, and the eggs, which had tasted so good going down, threatened to rise catastrophically. Tillman saw from her face that she was going through some sort of crisis, reached out to touch her forearm.

‘You want to leave?’

‘I’m fine,’ she lied. ‘Tillman, Emil Gassan said that Elohim, in Aramaic, means something like Messengers. In the regular Bible, angels get called that. I wonder if maybe Brand’s killers – his team of assassins – see themselves as guardian angels for their people, and so that’s the name they use.’

‘Okay. Go on.’

‘Well, if I’m right, the Kelim would have to be something else.’ She hoped he’d complete the chain of logic for her, but he didn’t. She was really saying: what if the Kelim, like Brand, walk among normal people without scrupling to lie about what they are? What if they choose a name that advertises their origins, or their purpose, or their nature.

Rebecca Kelly.

Tamara Kelly.

Maybe a whole lot of other Kellys. Why hadn’t she run a search on missing women with that surname?

What if they were the Kelim? Coming out like Brand and his team to complete some sort of mission in the world, then disappearing once that mission was done. And if they’d had a life in the meantime, raised a family, the family came back with them.

‘Possibly just ranks or specialised roles in the one organisation,’ Tillman said. ‘Probably they all work for Brand. But I think you’re right that he doesn’t want to lie. That’s why he leaves the coins, too. If there’s a link to Judas – and you said this gospel mentions silver pieces in terms of some kind of bargain these people struck with God – then the coins could refer to that. They announce that one of their kind was there.’ He chuckled – a sound so much at odds with her mood that it almost made her give a physical start. ‘But it’s some handicap, for a hit man – not being able to lie. I can’t see why they’d tie their hands behind their backs like that.’

Kennedy found that she could. ‘Why do Catholics give up comforts and luxuries for Lent?’ she asked, rhetorically. ‘Same thing maybe. They offer up their suffering to God – and the Judas people offer up, I don’t know, their truthfulness.’ Even as she said it, a better explanation hit her. ‘Or maybe they get absolution in advance, for specific sins – the way bishops used to bless soldiers going into war. But they’re only cleared for murder, not for every kind of sin they feel like committing. So they have to be moral in other ways and that includes not lying.’

‘That’s insane,’ Tillman pointed out.

‘Did you really think that we were dealing with sane people here, Leo? After everything that’s happened?’

He didn’t answer. Instead, he signalled to the waiter with a wave and a nod that they were ready to pay.

‘They’ve lived like a big secret society for at least the last two millennia,’ Kennedy murmured. ‘But actually, that’s a lousy simile for what they are. Because they’re also a race. A secret race. A secret species almost. They don’t see themselves as anything like the rest of us – less like us than we are like monkeys maybe. They hold themselves apart. They ought to have their own country somewhere, but what they’ve got is …’

‘An office block in Mexico City.’

‘Or something. So don’t expect sanity, Leo. Whatever we find at the end of this road, I can pretty much guarantee that it will not be sane.’

They drove on south, through a city that seemed to come at them in waves. Endless expanses of adobe and concrete slums – the old and the new thrown together in bleak discord – gave way to business districts where steel-and-glass fortresses stabbed at the sky. But then the same thing would happen in reverse, the gleaming towers and ramparts would die away and there would be more avenues of dust and breeze blocks and despair.

Finally, Tillman’s pocket map – bought from a gas station while Kennedy was still sleeping – told them that they’d arrived in Xochimilco.

It was not what Kennedy had been expecting. Knowing what she did about the sheer scale of the resources available to Michael Brand – resources sufficient to launch teams of murderers across whole continents and swat planes out of the sky – she’d thought she must be approaching some hub of power. One of the sky-threatening towers seemed appropriate, or else a complex of buildings on their own gated campus, like a modern fortress sealing itself off from the city that sprawled all around it.

Xochimilco held nothing even remotely like that. It was a factory district, mostly derelict. Weeds grew up in profusion through the asphalt of the wide streets and the only cars parked at the kerbside were burned-out wrecks. It was as though they were driving through a city that had hosted some private apocalypse. The buildings that rose on either side of them were huge, but they were only shells: every window broken, every door gaping dark and vacant like a dead man’s mouth.

Something tugged at Kennedy’s memory, something with overtones of death and disaster.

Tillman took turns at random. ‘Going to be a long job without an address,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not like there’s even any kind of a grid or we know what we’re looking for.’

‘Generating Station 73 South,’ said Kennedy. ‘Where Bonville found the weird patterns of power usage. That’s where we have to go.’

Tillman nodded, but without conviction. He pulled in at the kerb, took out his phone and started to dial. He hesitated, looked over at Kennedy. ‘A friend,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t know you and he’s strict about who gets to know his business. You mind?’

‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘I could do with stretching my legs anyway.’ She got out of the car, surprised to find that the air was cool. A breeze had sprung up from somewhere and there was a thick overcast in the sky, changing the light to something numinous and silver-grey. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Summer thunder, and a cleansing rain. Kennedy felt grimed to the core of her being and longed to be washed in any water, hot or cold or in-between, until her body felt like her own again.

She walked slowly towards the end of the street. She could hear nothing. There was almost total silence here, in this city of over twenty million souls. None of the twenty million, it seemed, lived in Xochimilco. She crossed to a café, or at least the frontage of one, which called itself – with heroic hubris – El Paraiso. The windows had been boarded up with corrugated steel, and the good things advertised on the sign (
ENCHILADAS! CHILAQUILES! BISTECK!
) seemed unlikely to materialise.

The restaurant was a dwarf on a street of behemoths, but it was just as dead: the crisis of late monopoly capitalism, like the angel of death, spares no one who doesn’t have the magic sign of God’s favour painted on their doorposts.

Kennedy reached the corner and stopped. Facing her across the road – a dual carriageway avenue wide enough to have a row of trees planted in the middle of it, but completely empty of traffic – stood a warehouse complex. A single massive structure with uncountable outbuildings, all built from the same prestressed concrete and painted battleship grey. A few tiny windows high up on the walls so deep-set in the brickwork that they couldn’t have let in any light at all. A still-solid fence and a set of gates bearing a massive padlock. Above them, bristling nests of CCTV cameras mounted on steel posts surveyed the street to either side.

Kennedy laughed aloud – out of sheer incredulity.

She heard Tillman’s step behind her, and turned. ‘All of it,’ he said, indicating the area around them with a wide sweep of both hands. ‘Station 73 South serves everything within about a two-mile radius of here. We’ll have to try something else, Kennedy. Maybe if Bonville spoke to someone here about what he was working on, or filed a report, we could triangulate from that. Otherwise, I think we should try looking at …’

He broke off, at last, seeing that Kennedy was pointing: across the street, to the great grey warehouse.

‘We’re here, Leo,’ she said. ‘That’s it.’

It was the building from the photo underneath Stuart Barlow’s floor – the one on the back of which he’d written the list of scrolls and codices that contained John’s Gospel.

The end of their journey had been written into its beginning.

It took Tillman ten minutes to ascertain that the cameras were dead.

He noticed first of all that they sat on mobile mounts, designed to increase the viewing arc by swivelling from side to side: but they had been locked in one position, not even the most practical or advantageous position. The one on the left was aimed more or less directly ahead, but the corresponding one on the right had pivoted inwards to point towards its partner. Effectively, both were looking at the same area of ground, leaving a dead zone to the right.

That could have been a mechanical malfunction, leaving the cameras frozen but still seeing. Tillman used the dead zone to creep across the street and edge in close to the base of the nearer support pole. With a digital multimeter from his kit, he tested the wires and found no current flowing to them.

Since there was no need for stealth now, he crossed directly back to Kennedy, making the throat-cut gesture. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Power’s out. Either they’ve been shut down at the board or the whole area’s had a power cut.’

Kennedy pointed. The first streetlamps were blinking on a few blocks further on. The lamps closest to them had all been smashed, but clearly if there was a power cut it was a very local one.

Tillman considered.

‘I think this might be where we part company,’ he told Kennedy.

‘What?’ Kennedy was shocked. ‘What the hell do you mean, Tillman? We’re in this together. I know I can’t fight, but I didn’t drive a thousand miles to send you off with a wave and a kiss on the cheek. I’m going in with you. Count on it.’

He didn’t seem to have heard her. He walked away while she was still talking, heading back towards the Lincoln. Kennedy broke into a jog-trot to catch up.

‘I’m serious,’ she said. ‘You can outrun me but you can’t stop me from going in unless you tie me up and gag me or something, and if you even try that, I’ll struggle hard enough and make enough noise that they see us coming a mile off. I repeat, Leo: we’re in this together. All the way.’

They’d reached the car by this time. Tillman threw open the rear door, then turned to meet her gaze. ‘You’re a cop, Heather,’ he said. ‘You uphold the law.’

‘I stopped being a cop when they made me resign, remember?’

‘But it’s still what you’re here for. Because people were killed and it’s your job to make sure that the killers pay.’

‘You’re not listening, Leo.’ Kennedy struggled to keep her temper. ‘It’s not my job any more. Anything I do down here is illegal two or three times over. I’m out of my jurisdiction, I’m off the force, and I’m a wanted fugitive. This stopped being about the law a long time ago. It’s about justice now.’

His stare was still locked on her, waiting, weighing her, looking for some sign. ‘What kind of justice?’

‘What?’

‘What kind of justice is it about, Heather?’

She stared back, bewildered, threw up her one good arm. ‘Is there more than one flavour?’

‘Lots of flavours. And the one I’m interested in is the worst of them all. The really filthy one. An eye for an eye. They killed my wife and they killed my kids. They took everything from me – everything. But they didn’t have the decency to kill me. Thirteen years. Thirteen years in this world that they left uninhabited. All that’s left now for me is to give them back what’s rightfully theirs.’

He reached into the car and wrenched off the seat cover, revealing two machine rifles, four handguns, clips and belts of ammunition stacked and coiled, and a number of glossy black plastic bags, about the size and shape of bricks, bearing the
WORDS M112 CHARGE DEMOLITION C4.

Kennedy’s mouth opened and closed. She struggled to get any words out, and when she did, she knew they weren’t the sort of words that were going to be any good. ‘Leo … you’re wrong. You’re wrong about this.’

Tillman didn’t seem to take offence. He just smiled sadly. ‘What, you think there’s still a chance my family are alive, Heather? After thirteen years?’