The Dead Sea Deception (60 page)

And like some holy assassin, Kennedy crashed head-first into the impossibility of the lie. It died in her throat.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I … I don’t think they’re still alive.’

‘But if we’re right about anything, that building is going to be full of people who had nothing to do with killing them. Other people’s families, Leo. Are you so hungry to get even with Michael Brand that you’d be ready to turn yourself into him? Because if you are, get out that fancy pistol and put it right up against my head because I swear to God, you’re going to have to start with me.’

They stood facing each other in the street, for some uncountable number of seconds. Tillman winced, as though thinking about this was costing him physical pain.

‘I didn’t come here to kill kids,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘The plastique—’

‘Yes, Leo? What about the plastique?’

‘I had no idea what we were going to find here. Or how we were going to get in. I wanted to be ready for anything.’

Kennedy nodded. ‘So that’s good,’ she said. ‘We’re ready.’

‘Right.’

‘But we’re here for Michael Brand, right? All the Michael Brands.’

‘No.’

‘No?’

Tillman shook his head slowly. ‘Someone sent them. Someone chose them, and trained them, and equipped them. Someone told them what to do to me, and mine. And your young lad, Harper. And Christ knows who else. We close them down, Heather. Not just Brand. The people behind Brand. We close every last one of the bastards down.’

‘Pass me one of those guns.’

Tillman did. Kennedy felt a prickle of déjà vu as she took it. It was a G22, identical to the one with which she’d killed Marcus Dell. But that was in another country and that Heather Kennedy was now officially dead.

She gestured with the gun, raising it butt-first to show the mag-base. Tillman got the message, selected a clip from the rich array inside the hollow of the gutted seat and slapped it into place for her.

‘Couple more,’ she instructed him.

Tillman took one in each hand, slid them carefully into the pockets of her jacket.

Kennedy thanked him with a nod. ‘By virtue of the authority invested in me as an ex-cop way too far from home,’ she told him, ‘I’m deputising you. You know what that means, Leo?’

He seemed afraid of how this was going, of how much of his decision-making he was entrusting to her. But the slope they were on had become so steep now neither wanted to look down. And at this point, Kennedy knew what was at the bottom better than Tillman did because she’d heard the last words of the lady assassin back at Santa Claus: words she was determined Tillman would never get to hear.

‘No, Heather. What does it mean?’

She tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans and tugged the jacket closed over it. ‘It means we’re an armed response unit. Let’s go respond.’

The easiest way into the warehouse compound turned out to be at the side, where an adjacent building – a one-storey shed of some kind on a site that had once been a U-Store depot – ran close to the fence and allowed them to jump across.

Tillman went first, and when Kennedy jumped he caught and braced her so that she didn’t fall. She hadn’t realised until then how weak she still was, in spite of the long sleep and the meal. Her side felt stiff and sore, her broken arm ached worse even than her head, and the anaesthetic was still in her system – dulling her thinking without doing a damned thing for the pain.

Tillman had transferred a whole lot of light and heavy ordnance into a kit bag that he carried on his back. In his hands, in place of the Unica, he carried a FA-MAS Clairon assault rifle in the French army configuration, complete with bayonet and grenade launcher. The thing terrified Kennedy: it looked like the Swiss army knife of sudden death.

They followed the wall of the main building, looking for a way in. The only door they found turned out to be welded into its frame. All the windows were way above their heads, and
since Kennedy couldn’t climb, the ropes and grapnels would have to be a last resort.

They saw more camera posts at intervals along the fence: none of them moved, and all showed negative for current when Tillman tested them with the multimeter.

When they reached the front of the warehouse, they looked out cautiously on an open stretch of asphalt like a parade ground, its surface pitted and broken, with copious weeds everywhere. But there were odd anomalies, which they pointed out to each other in whispers. The fence looked in perfect repair, the chains and padlocks rust-free and solid: and the weeds inside the compound had been flattened down in straight swathes, as if by recent and heavy traffic.

Tillman was reluctant to step out into the open, even though he knew they had nothing to fear from the cameras. He counted too many vantage points from which they could be watched. They went round to the back of the building instead, where the asphalt gave way in places to dust and earth, and where narrower spaces separated the main structure from some of the many satellite buildings.

Exploring these outlying structures, they discovered that all the doors were like the first they’d seen: welded shut and clearly no longer in use. At last, though, Kennedy found tyre tracks in the dirt, fresh and clear, and followed them back to the up-and-over door of what appeared to be a garage or hangar. The place looked shabby and disused, but the tracks suggested otherwise.

The door was fixed with a padlock. Tillman took a crowbar from his kit bag and snapped the hasp with a single movement, grunting slightly from the effort. He swung the shutter up and they stared into the interior of the building.

It took a moment or two for Kennedy to process what she was
seeing. They stood at the top of a ramp that extended downwards into perfect darkness. It seemed to run the full width of the building, about forty feet, and its incline was a gentle one-in-ten. They heard no sound and saw nothing else. The building housed the ramp and nothing more: or rather, whatever else it contained was below them, at the ramp’s further end.

‘You got a torch in there?’ Kennedy muttered, nodding at Tillman’s bag. Her voice echoed in the eerie stillness and took a long time to die away.

Tillman produced two: sturdy cylindrical flashlights with rubber sheathes, each about a foot and a half long. They seemed to have been designed to serve as truncheons as well as sources of illumination.

Kennedy flicked the switch and aimed the strong, steady beam into the darkness below. Tillman followed suit. All that accomplished was to show them that the ramp extended a lot further than they’d thought. The beams still didn’t reach the bottom.

Tillman glanced at Kennedy, who gave a single nod. Nowhere to go but down. Her unease deepened with every step. No scenario that she could imagine reconciled setting up this degree of security and then being so lax in its oversight. And who’d live in a wasteland like this in the first place? They’d obviously found a supply depot of some kind, rather than – as she’d thought – their enemies’ heartland.

The ramp extended about three hundred feet, and took them down at least thirty below street level. At its bottom end, a corrugated steel roller-door stretched from end to end of the ramp, blocking their path. Kennedy shone her flashlight beam on the wall, looking for controls, but found none: probably they were on the other side. She was about to suggest looking elsewhere when Tillman’s light, aimed at the floor, revealed that the way
wasn’t blocked at all: there was a foot of clearance between the bottom of the steel shutter and the floor.

Wordlessly, they got down on hands and knees – Kennedy grunting in pain as already abused muscles registered their protest – and slid-shuffled under the door.

On the other side, they stood up, still in complete darkness, but Kennedy could tell from the movement of air on her face that she was in a very large space. Her flash, flicked at random around her, picked out nothing close enough for the light to touch it.

Tillman put out a hand to touch this side of the steel shutter and followed it along. Kennedy shone her torch ahead of him and, as he reached it, put a perfectly centred spotlight on a bank of switches. A red light to the left of the array announced that here at least, there was still current.

She came to join him and they examined the switchboard together: there were three large slide controls at the left-hand side and then four banks of ten smaller switches, none labelled.

‘We touch these,’ Kennedy whispered, ‘and we’re throwing up our hands and shouting, “Look at me”.’

‘Listen,’ Tillman whispered back.

She did. No sound at all, anywhere: not even the sounds of distant traffic that count for silence in most cities most of the time. Tillman was right. The noise they’d already made in sliding under the shutter – even their footsteps on the ramp, though they’d been as quiet as they could – would have carried a long way in this absolute hush. If there was anyone here, their arrival was surely no secret. But if there was anyone here, why hadn’t they already been challenged?

Tillman didn’t bother to get Kennedy’s approval this time. He just pressed the sliders all the way down and flicked the top row of switches, one at a time.

The sliders didn’t seem to do anything much, but when Tillman pressed the switches he was conducting a symphony of light: not bulbs or strips or spots but huge panels, inset in the walls and stretching from floor to roof, stirred into life like a chain of sunrises all around them.

Kennedy gasped.

They stood in a space as high as a cathedral but much longer: a subterranean avenue whose walls were blocks of sheer, almost painful radiance. Kennedy covered her eyes with her right forearm, dazzled, blinking away tears.

‘Wait,’ Tillman murmured. ‘Okay. Got it.’

It was because he’d floored the slide controls first. He cut them back to about two-thirds, and the light dimmed to something more bearable.

They took stock of their surroundings, and it was slowly borne in on Kennedy that they were in the right place after all.

This was a street: an avenue, rather, thirty feet wide and seventy or eighty high, which stretched away into the distance in both directions. Small wooden booths like the stalls in a market lined the street on either side, and behind them stood more permanent structures with doors and windows of their own: an indoor thoroughfare in an indoor metropolis.

Two thoughts struck Kennedy at once. The first: that the market stalls were all empty, one or two of them clumsily ransacked. The second: that the space couldn’t actually be that high, given that they weren’t far enough below ground. She stared up at the ceiling, appraising it more carefully. It had been painted to resemble clouds and blue firmament, and it curved in a vast arch. It was – it must be – the inside of the warehouse roof. They stood underneath the main structure, which had been hollowed out inside to provide a vault of sky for this underground concourse.

‘This is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,’ Kennedy said, her throat suddenly dry.

Tillman said nothing, but he moved on down the street and gestured for Kennedy to follow him. She fell in at his side. She’d swapped the now useless torch for the G22, and she gripped it tight.

The market stalls extended for the first twenty metres or so, but the structures behind them were a continuous feature. Some had wide windows, like shop windows, with shelves and platforms to display goods. All were empty, except in places for a scatter of boxes, the occasional plastic strip or bag, and in one display a single yellow scarf hanging from an otherwise empty rack of polished wood. There were signs above the doors, written in a script that looked to Kennedy like Hebrew. The enigma hit her anew: assuming the Judas people had arisen in ancient Judea, as the
sica
knives seemed to suggest, why come from the Holy Land all the way to the arse-end of Mexico City?

Probably she’d never know, but she felt certain, suddenly, that it had nothing to do with the fluctuations of temporal power. Twenty million people, and an urban sprawl that covered six hundred square miles – that made a great desert to hide a grain of sand in. Maybe they did this often. Maybe the Judas tribe were a nomadic people, going wherever the best camouflage, or some other resource that they tracked and followed, was to be found.

And riding on that thought, another, terrible possibility, which she didn’t dare to voice: maybe we missed them.

They were approaching what must be the northern limit of the warehouse site. The roof high above them was sheared off clean by the plunging vertical of the front wall, and the trompe l’oeil clouds bent at sharp angles suddenly as though they’d crashed into some invisible barrier and gotten broken.

Kennedy expected the vast space to close in now, but the gulf
of air that had been over their heads was replaced, unexpectedly, by a gulf that opened beneath their feet: where the warehouse ended and the ceiling closed in, the great alley opened downwards on to a vast parade of descending steps, which then broke apart into subsidiary flights heading off to right and left and straight ahead. More streets led off this one but they were stepped and went further down into the ground.

Tillman took a stairway at random and they descended into another thoroughfare, just as wide and almost as high as the first. Here there were no shops, but what looked like houses instead. Rows and rows of windows lining the walls, terraces on which chairs and tables had been set out, ornamental urns and sculptures at corners and on balustrades. But some of the urns had toppled and shattered, and some of the doors gaped open on dark interior spaces. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make the huge indoor complex look homely – and then had ransacked it.