The Dead Sea Deception

39

The Colorado was a spent force these days. Extensively pillaged by Southern California via something known as the All-American Canal (what patriot wouldn’t stand and salute for a watercourse that called itself that?), and by irrigation channels built to slake the thirst of Arizona farmlands, it mostly ran out of steam somewhere south of Yuma, lost its way in dry arroyos and never made it within a hundred miles of the ocean.

This much Kennedy learned from her cab driver, a chatty guy named John-Bird who claimed to be three-quarters Mojave Indian. He picked Kennedy up, as arranged, outside the main terminal at Laughlin Bullhead, which called itself an international airport but was accessible from London only via a stopover at Washington Dulles. It had been a fifteen-hour flight and Kennedy was ragged at the edges even before she got into the cab. The heat didn’t help — local time was 11.50, and the sun was at its blinding zenith — although John-Bird cheerfully informed her that it was a dry heat and not nearly so debilitating as the wetter heats you got in less civilised parts of the world. He turned the air conditioning up a notch, which did nothing to the temperature but significantly increased the noise.

They caught the 68 and drove straight out of town, staying with the Colorado until they turned off east towards Kingman and distant Flagstaff. The river looked impressive enough to Kennedy, a meandering giant twice as wide as the Thames flowing between towering ramparts of orange rock. She couldn’t see a single cloud from horizon to horizon.

‘Go south, go clockwise, veer left,’ John-Bird said. ‘Know what that is? That’s how to remember all the tributaries of the Colorado — the Gila River, the San Juan, Green River, the Colorado River Aqueduct, the … what’s V, what’s V? Okay, yeah, the Virgin River, and the Little River. ’S cute, huh? Sounds like directions, but it won’t get you nowhere. It’s just to remember.’

‘Very useful,’ Kennedy agreed, glumly. Peason was a forty-five minute drive away and John-Bird looked to be just getting into his stride. He was telling her now how the name of the river came from the fact that the water used to be coloured bright red with sediment — but these days all that stuff got filtered out by the Glen Canyon Dam, so it was the same colour as any other river. Cute, huh?

To get him off his speciality subject, she asked him about the plane crash. Yeah, it turned out, he was on the road that day, driving a fare from Grasshopper Junction, and he actually saw the plane come down. ‘It was crazy sudden. Like, out of nowhere. Never seen nothing like it. But it was far enough away that it didn’t make no sound, that I could hear. It was real quiet. That was what I couldn’t forget, afterwards — that it came down out of the sky and there must have been, like, a huge explosion, but for me it was quiet like … you know, like when you’ve got the TV on with the volume turned right down. All those people dead, without a sound.’

He mused on this for a minute or so, which gave Kennedy a respite to look at the instructions the sheriff’s office had sent her. But it was a short meditation, and soon she was being regaled by more fun facts about the south-west’s favourite waterway. Not that John-Bird was limited to the Colorado: he knew all sorts of stuff about Lake Mead and Lake Mohave, too. He refused, though, to be drawn on the subject of Las Vegas Bay. ‘Not a good place. Not a family place.’ Spaced out from tiredness, and almost free-associating, Kennedy tried to imagine what a sleazy, non-family-friendly body of water would look like. Maybe there were illegal additives.

When they finally got to Peason, she made John-Bird wait while she dumped her bags at the hotel, an EconoLodge fitted out in fake hacienda style, so that he could take her straight on over to the sheriff’s office. She knew she wasn’t at her best, but she wanted to make contact and get things moving on that front. She might not have much lead time, so she should at least make the best use of what she had.

The sheriff’s office was a single-storey building right on Peason’s main street, next door to a realtor’s that offered LUXURY APARTMENTS TWICE THE SQUARE FOOTAGE. John-Bird gave Kennedy a card. She solemnly put it in her purse, but promised herself that she’d only use it as a last resort.

She crossed the street and went on into the office, as John-Bird pulled past her with a final wave.

Inside, the place smelled of pot pourri — honey, wisteria, maybe rose petals — and the air conditioning was perfectly pitched. The formidable woman at the despatch desk, with bad skin, big hair and a face as flat and pugnacious as a bulldog’s, looked like she might be responsible for keeping up the moral fibre of the place, and like she might take those responsibilities seriously. Beyond her desk, the room was bisected by a wooden dividing wall at waist height, into which a small gate had been set.

‘Yes ma’am,’ the bulldog said to Kennedy. ‘How may I help you?’

Kennedy approached the desk and handed over the guarantors of her bona fides: a letter of introduction on London Metropolitan Police headed paper and a print-out of an email sent by someone named Webster Gayle, inviting her to come on over whenever she liked, he’d be only too happy to help out in any way he could.

‘I’m from London,’ she explained. ‘I’m meant to be meeting up with Sheriff Gayle. I don’t have an appointment as such, but I thought I’d let him know that I’ve arrived.’

The bulldog scanned both sheets with slow, imperturbable concentration. ‘Oh yeah,’ she said at last. ‘Web said you’d be coming by. He thought it was tomorrow, but I guess it’s today after all. Okay, why’n’t you go ahead and take a seat, and I’ll tell the sheriff you’re here.’

Kennedy took the offered seat, while the bulldog tapped keys on a switchboard and murmured something into the intercom too low for her to hear. The sheriff’s voice, by contrast, came through painfully loud. ‘Thanks, Connie. Tell her to wait a minute, would you mind? I got to comb my hair and tuck my shirt inside my pants for a British lady. Is she pretty, at all? Or does she look like the Queen?’

The bulldog closed the channel and gave Kennedy an inscrutable look. ‘He’ll be right with you,’ she said.

Kennedy sat down and waited, trying not to nod off. She drank a couple of glasses of water from the cooler, which was almost painfully cold and helped a lot. By the time she’d finished the second, a man the size of a Welsh dresser was lumbering towards her, unlatching the gate with huge, awkward-looking hands, one of which he held out to be shaken as he took the remaining space in two strides.

Kennedy pegged Gayle at once as the sort of big man who’d learned a kind of innate caution and delicacy from having to deal all the time with a world several sizes too small for him. He didn’t enfold her hand in his, he just touched her lightly on the palm and the backs of the knuckles with the tips of his own fingers, making a courteous nod stand in for an actual handshake.

‘Webster Gayle,’ he told her. ‘County Sheriff. Always a pleasure to meet a fellow law enforcement officer, Sergeant — and your force has a great reputation.’

‘Thank you, Sheriff,’ Kennedy said. ‘Listen, I only just got in and I’m more dead than alive. But if you’ve got some time tomorrow, I’d love to pick your brains about this business and maybe get your take on—’

‘Tomorrow?’ Gayle chewed on the word as though it was a dubious piece of gristle. ‘Well, yeah, we could talk tomorrow. But I’ve got a window right now, and I’m aware that you’ve only got five days in your budget. If you’re really too tired, then okay, let’s let it rest and meet in the a.m. But if you think you can stay upright for another hour or so, then maybe we could at least go over the basics — what it is you want to do while you’re out here and how we can facilitate that.’

‘Of course.’ Kennedy smiled and nodded. She was entirely dependent on this man’s goodwill and she knew better than to pull back on the reins if he was ready to break into a trot. Besides, Gayle was right in saying that she didn’t have much time: probably even less than he thought. ‘By all means, let’s get the ball rolling.’

Kennedy knew this interview had to come and she had a speech all prepared that she hoped she could deliver with the appropriate conviction despite the jet lag. The speech explained, with a fair amount of supporting documentation, exactly what crimes she was investigating, how they strayed into Gayle’s jurisdiction, what international and inter-agency protocols could be invoked in support of her presence, and what level of support she wanted the County Sheriff’s office to provide. In other words, she was ready to fill in the blanks from the official (or at least, official-looking) inter-force aid request and put precise limits on what otherwise might have looked like a blank cheque.

But it turned out that Webster Gayle, like John-Bird, had a pet subject on which he was only too happy to talk — and, mercifully, it was not the Colorado River but the fate of Coastal Airlines Flight 124. In his tiny office, which was really just a partitioned-off corner of the larger space with screens for walls, he got started before she’d even sat down.

‘Human error,’ he said to Kennedy. ‘That was what they said, in the end. Human error.’ His emphasis was heavy, almost sarcastic. ‘I guess that’s one of the things they come up with when they don’t really know what all else they can say.’

‘I thought it was the door,’ said Kennedy. ‘The door came open in the air and they lost cabin pressure.’

‘That’s right,’ Gayle agreed. ‘But the door mechanism was sound as a bell. So they don’t really have an explanation as to why it blew. Human error is kind of the fallback position, is what I’m thinking. If nothing else went wrong, well, then the people must’ve gone wrong. That’s easier than saying, “We just don’t know”, or maybe grounding the whole fleet while they check out the doors on every last plane, like the Australians did that time with their superjumbos. You know, when they had an engine blow? And hell, that didn’t even kill nobody.’

Kennedy nodded politely. ‘But it’s all academic now, right? They closed the investigation when they found the flight recorder.’

‘No, ma’am.’ The sheriff was emphatic. ‘They never did find that black box thing. They just stopped looking for it when it stopped signalling — which is something that’s not supposed to happen, by the way. I read up on it. The battery’s supposed to be good for three months, and you pretty much can’t destroy it even if you’ve got a bomb. Makes sense, doesn’t it? A plane falling out of the sky, that’s kind of like a bomb, so it would have to stand up to …’

He stopped abruptly and his face went blank. Kennedy thought he looked like he was remembering something very specific and very vivid, and trying not to.

‘Did you see the crash, Sheriff Gayle?’

The big man pulled himself together. ‘No, ma’am, I didn’t. But I saw what it was like afterwards. The wreckage and such. Wasn’t anything I’m going to forget in a hurry.’ He drummed the table, thrown off track — either by the question or by his own disordered recollections. ‘So the recorder,’ he said at last, picking up the thread again, ‘that’s not gonna come to harm, and it’s not going to stop sending unless it falls into a live volcano or something. And last time I checked, we don’t have too many of those in Coconino County.

‘So there’s two mysteries, right there. How did the door come open and what happened to the box? Now I’m going to add a third one to that list. How many survivors were there?’

Kennedy blinked — running on empty and wondering how the conversation had gotten so quickly into X-Files territory.

‘None, is what I heard,’ she said.

‘None is what they reported,’ Gayle said, with something like relish. ‘But then all this other stuff started happening.’ He launched into a detailed summary of the post-mortem sightings, the walking dead of Flight 124, while Kennedy — deeply sceptical, and incapable of faking any kind of interest — did her best not to respond at all. When Gayle wound down, she groped for a non-committal comment.

‘Well, I … I guess that’s a mystery of a different order,’ she said. ‘I mean, what happened on the flight, and what happened to the recorder afterwards — you could actually get an answer to those two things. But ghosts are, you know … there’s not ever going to be an explanation. People will believe they saw what they saw, but they won’t ever be able to prove it. So there’s no answer. It will just go down as one of those things.’

She was trying hard not to give offence: Gayle didn’t take any but he dismissed the objection with an easy smile. ‘Well, ma’am, I find that it’s best in life to keep an open mind. Sometimes if a thing looks impossible, it’s just because you’re looking at it from the wrong angle.’

Damned jet lag. Kennedy really didn’t feel up to this kind of brinkmanship. ‘Well, like I said, my main focus is going to be on—’

‘—the facts that relate to your investigation. I know that. But there again, what’s relevant isn’t always what seems to point in the right direction. I don’t need to tell you that — you’re a detective.’ He was jocular and confiding, radiating a sort of proprietorial eagerness, and Kennedy realised why he’d agreed so readily to see her and help with the investigation: he’d been waiting for someone he could give this stuff to. She wondered, with glum fatalism, how far she’d have to humour him in his pet obsession to get answers to her own questions.

‘Right,’ she agreed, guardedly.

‘Now I’m not saying you should give an ear to every crank theory that someone shoves your way. I just value an open mind, like I said, and I don’t think you should straight away dismiss something just because it sounds stupid. Great things get invented on account of stupid questions, it seems to me. What if you put rat poison into someone’s veins, ’stead of medicine? That’s warfarin, in case you didn’t know: stops lots of folks from dying of heart attacks. Or what if you close your eyes and try to see something with your ears? That’s radar.

‘So I went into this thinking there could be something to it, but not thinking for certain sure I knew what the something was. And then I talked it over with a good friend of mine, Mizz Eileen Moggs, who writes for our local paper and is the smartest person I know. And she said they always do this, after a disaster. She put it down to something called the news cycle: and the way that works is if they got to report a story but nothing happened since the last time they reported it, they just go ahead and make something up. Like, people want to keep hearing about this stuff, and that’s a hunger that’s got to be fed. You come across that notion?’

‘Yes,’ Kennedy said. ‘I think your friend is right.’

Gayle seemed pleased by this response. He wagged a finger at her. ‘Ah, but then I showed my friend all the stuff I collected up — all these bits and pieces I took off the internet and places like that — and she started in to thinking about it herself. And she said this time is different.’

‘Different how, exactly?’

‘Well, maybe you’ll get to hear that answer from Eileen herself, Sergeant Kennedy. I’d really like to introduce the two of you, if the opportunity comes up.’

It was way past time, Kennedy decided, to start imposing her own agenda on all this. ‘Well, that would be great,’ she said. ‘I’d be very happy to meet Miss … Moggs? But as you know, I’m sort of on the clock here. And my main concern is to pursue some information pertaining to my murder inquiry.’

‘Stuart Barlow and subsequent addendums. Yeah, I read the case files you forwarded. Something of a head-scratcher.’

‘That’s putting it mildly, Sheriff Gayle.’

‘And you say our investigation into the plane crash might could help you out, in some way.’

‘That’s what I’m hoping, yes. One of the passengers on CA 124 was a man travelling under the name of Michael Brand.’

‘That “under the name of” kind of implies it wasn’t his actual given name. Is that the case?’

‘We can’t really say. We were totally failing to run him to ground in Europe when we learned that he’d died over here. We don’t know much about him at all, except that he’s got a career that goes back a fair few years and includes crimes other than murder.’

‘Such as?’

‘Kidnapping, maybe. Gun-running, maybe. Involvement in drug trafficking.’

‘All maybe?’

‘Mostly hearsay, and the source is a CI I can’t even name. But the grounds for my being here relate entirely to the Barlow case. We think there’s plenty in that case file to justify our concern and our approaching you with a request.’

Gayle scratched his chin — a pantomime of deep and weighty thought. ‘Yeah, I guess I’d have to agree on that. Your multiple homicide has got to count as a good reason to knock on all the doors you can think of. We’re pretty stretched here, but I think I can give you a couple of days at least.’

The implications of that took a second or so to sink in. ‘A couple of days?’ Kennedy repeated, inanely.

‘After that I’ll have to get back in here and do some desk stuff.’

‘A couple of days of your own time? Sheriff, that’s a lot more than I ever expected. Are you sure you can …’

He was waving her silent, smiling a wide, self-deprecating smile. ‘We’re more than happy to do what we can, Sergeant. So tell me what you had in mind.’

Kennedy took a second to pull her thoughts together. She’d expected to meet indifference, if not outright hostility. Instead she’d found a friendly obsessive who wanted to be a part of her investigation because he hadn’t been allowed to pursue it as his own. It was such a thoroughbred gift horse, she had to fight the urge to wrestle its mouth open and take a better look. ‘Well, what I was hoping to do,’ she told Gayle, ‘first and foremost, was to find out whether anything came out of your investigations here that could throw light on Brand’s origins or possible confederates. Like, for example, if any of his clothes or belongings were retrieved, and if so, whether they’d still be available for me or my colleagues to examine. And likewise, if any forensic data were available on the body itself, or if he filed an address with your civil aviation authority when he purchased his ticket. Anything like that.’

Gayle was nodding along to this list. ‘I don’t see how any of that would be a problem. I can tell you now there isn’t much, but they did an autopsy, and there’d be photos and records pertaining to that. Clothes and belongings would have been logged into evidence — both the ones we could definitively match up with a particular body and the ones we had to give up on. Most of that stuff is up north of here, in a storage facility that we rent from Santa Claus.’

‘From Santa Claus?’ She’d have to watch this tendency to become a choric echo.

‘The municipality of Santa Claus,’ Gayle clarified. ‘Sorry, Sergeant, that doesn’t even raise a smile around here. Santa Claus is a town about ten miles out from Peason, just inside the county limits. A ghost town, these days. They got space to rent for next to nothing, and we got a space problem, so we use them for all kinds of overspill stuff. Okay, what else?’

‘Depending on what I find — if I find anything — then maybe you’d be prepared to act as liaison. You know, talk with other US agencies or bodies, send information requests. I know that’s a lot to ask, and if you prefer I can bounce through Interpol instead. It’s just that I don’t have any jurisdiction out here and it would be great to pick up a thread and just follow it, if we’re lucky enough to turn up something worth following.’

‘That’d have to be case-by-case,’ Gayle told her, ‘but we can probably lend you a deputy and a desktop, if it comes to it.’

‘That’s really kind, Sheriff Gayle. Thank you.’

‘My pleasure. Now why don’t I drop you at your hotel? I think I come near to talked your legs off and you probably need to get some rest after that flight.’

Kennedy made some token resistance and was overruled. Sheriff Gayle got up to leave and as she followed him out into the reception area, he counted off on his fingers the items on the agenda. ‘So. Autopsy records. Victims’ possessions. Paper trail. Would that be it for now?’

‘That would be plenty for now, Sheriff.’

‘We’ll do it in the a.m. Connie, I’m going to drive Sergeant Kennedy out to her hotel. I’ll be back in thirty.’

The bulldog looked at Kennedy and then at him. ‘Okay,’ she said, after slightly too long a pause. ‘What shall I tell Eileen Moggs if she calls?’

Kennedy detected a sly intonation to the question, as though it was designed to catch the sheriff slightly off balance — to sucker-punch him. If it was, it didn’t work. Gayle just shrugged. ‘Tell her I’ll call her back,’ he said. ‘I’ll be seeing her later on anyway. Come on, Sergeant.’

Kennedy made one more token protest. ‘I can take a cab …’

‘No, no. We aim to send you home with good memories of Arizona.’

Kennedy smiled and nodded, as he hustled her out the door. Privately, though, she thought that might be asking a lot.

At the hotel, Kennedy got herself in the mood for sleep by breaking out a bottle of Dos Equis from the room’s mini-bar and soaking in a hot bath while she drank it. Perversely, it made her feel wired and restless rather than pushing her jet lag towards the edge of the catastrophe curve so that she could sleep.

There were still too many hours of daylight left, and nobody she knew in this place and nowhere particular to go. Even the What’s On in Peason? magazine on the bedside table pretty much shrugged its shoulders, turned out its pockets and came back with the answer: nothing. She’d just missed the flower show, apparently, and the next cultural landmark was the Hardyville Days, over in Bullhead, which wasn’t until October and seemed to lean heavily on the entertainment concept of ugly men in drag. She was planning to be long gone by then.

So what sort of innocent fun could she get up to in her hotel room?

She took out her laptop, actually her sister Chrissie’s, logged on to the wi-fi network and accessed her email account. There were four items in the inbox, the first three from DCI Jimmy Summerhill, with the tone creeping up the scale from professional detachment to foam-flecked stridency. Into the wastebasket with those: she was paying for this connection by the hour after all.

She also had an email from Izzy, who had agreed to look after Kennedy’s dad until Chrissie came to collect him at the weekend — assuming Kennedy wasn’t already back by then.

You left so suddenly. Gonna miss you, while you’re away. And, you know, hope nothing’s wrong.

She started a reply but scrapped it; started another that went the same way.

Lots of things wrong, she eventually wrote. But I’m still on the case. Maybe tell you about it over a drink some time?

After that, and with no real hope at all of getting an answer, she sent an email to Leo Tillman — the latest in a series — telling him where she was and what she was doing. It was terse, but it covered the bases.

Leo, as per last message I’m out in Arizona chasing the Michael Brand connection. No real news as yet, but I’ve made contact with local law enforcement and they’re being really helpful. Hope to have a lot to report tomorrow. In the meantime, am attaching AGAIN the analysis Doctor Gassan gave me of the Dovecote Farm files. Maybe you’ve read them already, but if you haven’t, you really should. This whole thing could maybe break wide open any time if we find the right crowbar — and everything suggests that Brand is it. Deal still stands. Let me know if you have anything to share.

— Kennedy

She attached the files and hit SEND. She could think of nothing else to do with Tillman now, other than to keep pinging him and hope that in the end she got some faint echo back.

And now, since the files were there, she opened them again herself. She felt like she knew the contents by heart, but rereading them kept it fresh — taking her back, every time, to her first and last face-to-face meeting with Emil Gassan, in the dismal, dilapidated safe house where they were keeping him until they certified his real life free from risk.

The one in which Gassan told her about the Judas tribe.

40

‘So it is a gospel?’ Kennedy demanded, bewildered.

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, the translated version is still a gospel? Barlow puts together a crack team, dedicates years of his time — sacrifices his life, in the end — to translate a gospel into another gospel?’

Emil Gassan shrugged, a little impatiently. They were sitting in a bare, bleak room: four tables, eight chairs, walls painted in the shade of dark green that exists nowhere outside of Victorian buildings that have become hospitals, police stations or lunatic asylums. A poster on the wall advocated safe sex with the aid of a cartoon unicorn wearing a condom on its horn. Gassan’s right hand rested on a slender, black-covered notebook, as though he were about to swear an oath on it.

It was ten days after Dovecote: ten days after the fire, and Combes’s death. Nine days and some odd hours, then, since she’d sent her own copy of the Dovecote disc to Gassan and asked him to put the files on there together into something that made sense. Gassan’s haggling had been minimal: he’d wanted chocolate — Terry’s Chocolate Oranges — some bottles of a good French Meursault, and the last three issues of Private Eye. Remind me that the world is still out there, he’d told her, essentially — and I’ll solve your puzzle for you. Hearing the tremor of eagerness in his voice, she’d gotten the impression that she could have refused him on every count and he’d still have agreed.

‘Yes, Sergeant,’ Gassan said, with petulance in his voice. ‘He translated a gospel into another gospel. But obviously I didn’t manage to make myself clear. What Stuart has done is … remarkable. Almost unbelievable, really. And if it weren’t for the fact that the side effects would include my now being dead, instead of merely in Crewe, I could wish with all my heart that I’d said yes when he approached me. Also, if it weren’t for the fear of those same side effects, I’d be running with this to every journal on my Rolodex, telling them to hold the front page into the foreseeable future. Not that I have access to my Rolodex, in this godforsaken place. Or a phone.’

As though complaining about the stringent security had made him aware of its temporary absence, Gassan got up, crossed to the door and opened it. A stolid constable sitting just outside nodded civilly at the professor, who closed the door again without a word.

‘Perhaps it would be better to be dead,’ Gassan murmured, as though to himself. ‘Dead, and famous, and relevant. Is that preferable to an indefinite parenthesis? I don’t know. I don’t know.’

‘Professor,’ Kennedy said, ‘I know this has been hard on you. But as you’re aware, we’re still pursuing the case. The more you can tell me, the better the chance that we can end this and get you back to your normal life.’

Gassan favoured her with a stare of utter contempt. ‘That would be a huge consolation,’ he said, acidly, ‘if it weren’t arrant, bloody nonsense. These people come and go as they please, and kill who they please. The only thing that’s keeping me alive is that I said no to Barlow when it counted, and now they’ve got me marked down on their great stone tablets somewhere as being safe to ignore. God help me if they ever change their minds about that.’

‘They’re not omnipotent,’ Kennedy said. The professor’s fatalism angered her, even disgusted her a little, but she tried to keep her face and her tone neutral.

‘They might as well be. Is anyone still alive who they wanted dead?’

‘Me. I think they wanted me dead.’ And Tillman, of course, but she wasn’t about to bring Tillman into this conversation.

‘With respect, they kill savants. People who know and understand. They only trouble with your sort when you accidentally step into their path.’

‘Which I’m aiming to do again,’ Kennedy answered, grimly. ‘And I repeat, the more you can tell me, the better chance I’ll have of finding them and bringing them to book.’ She meant to stop there. It was cruelty that made her go on. She was nettled in spite of herself by the line Gassan drew between people who understood and dull, plodding coppers. ‘The only alternative, professor, is for you to spend the rest of your life in places like this, hiding from a retribution that might not even be coming. Like Salman Rushdie or Roberto Saviano — except that they were hiding because they’d written something that made an impact on the world. You wouldn’t even have that consolation.’

She broke off. Gassan was staring at her, half-aghast and half in wonder. She thought for a moment that he was going to storm out of the room, retire to his tents, as Tillman (with much better reason) had now done, and leave her to figure it all out for herself.

Instead, the professor nodded. And then, with impressive calmness, humility even, he came and sat down opposite her again.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘If I’m irrelevant, it’s because I made myself irrelevant. I shouldn’t complain. And I end up being part of the process in any event, don’t I? The least I can do is act as Stuart Barlow’s amanuensis, since I refused all the more glamorous roles available.

‘Go on, Sergeant Kennedy, go on. Debrief me. Interrogate me. Bully and humble me. Beat me, even, if you want to. That would be novel, at least. Yes. Barlow translated a gospel into a gospel. After five hundred years of scholarship had failed to do as much.’

Kennedy let out a long breath. ‘But this new gospel — the one he found when he decoded the Rotgut — it’s one that wasn’t known before?’

‘Exactly. It’s unique. An undiscovered gospel dating — probably — from the first century after Christ.’

‘You can tell that? The Rotgut was medieval.’

‘The Rotgut was itself just a translation, as you already know. When Stuart went looking for the source document, the original from which it was translated, he went straight to the earliest codices and the scrolls that immediately preceded them — to Nag Hammadi and the Rylands Papyri. And he applied a cypher key he’d already observed, in tiny, tantalising fragments, in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He had plenty to go on. In fact, his problem was that he was spoiled for choice. Here. Have you ever seen this before?’

He opened the notebook and flicked through a few pages, then turned it to face her. Kennedy found herself reading a short, itemised list.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It was written on the back of a photograph that Stuart Barlow hid under the floor in his office. What does it mean?’

Gassan closed the notebook again, as though he felt uncomfortable having someone else examine its contents, even though he’d promised her complete disclosure. ‘All of these letters and numbers are shorthand,’ he said, ‘for specific scrolls and codices in specific locations. The prefix P indicates the Rylands Papyri. B stands for Bodmer and C for the Chester collection. NH, of course, is Nag Hammadi. I imagine you can guess what these specific documents all have in common. Or am I giving credit where none is due?’

Kennedy thought of the Rotgut. ‘They’re all early copies of John’s Gospel,’ she hazarded.

‘Exactly. The Gospel of John, or in some cases the Apocryphon of John — a related text. Some are whole, some partial, some very fragmentary indeed. But they’re all John. We don’t know which of the scrolls that Barlow looked at turned out to be the Rotgut source, but we can infer that it was a copy of the Gospel of John — complete or almost complete — dating from the late first century or early second century of the Common Era.’

‘And this is where I get lost,’ Kennedy admitted. ‘How do we get from the Gospel of John to this other text?’

‘By means of a code, of course.’ The answer was curt — stating the obvious. ‘Which was the entire point of Barlow’s work, and the core of his discovery.’

Kennedy was trying to think of a different way to frame the same question. She knew it was a code: what she needed to understand was the mechanics of it, the bread and butter stuff about what was being encoded as what. Gassan saw her hesitation and sighed.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Ab initio. Sergeant Kennedy, I believe I explained to you, when we first spoke, that a codex is a multipart text.’

‘You said that two or three separate books or documents could be bound together into a single codex,’ she said.

‘Exactly. The ancient world had no concept of the integrity or discreteness of the single message. Papyrus was scarce and costly to make, so you used what you had. If that meant making strange bedfellows — putting a Platonic dialogue next to a biblical tract — then you did it without a qualm. You probably wouldn’t even start a clean page: you’d just go directly from one document to the next, writing them one after, or one beneath, another.

‘So when scholars looked at the Rotgut, that was what they saw. The Rotgut has the whole of John’s Gospel, then seven verses of a different gospel. It seemed natural to assume that someone had looked at an Aramaic codex and begun to translate it, starting at the beginning and going on until, for some reason, they were interrupted.’

‘Okay.’

‘But suppose those two texts — or the one text and the tiny fragment of the second — had been put together for a different reason? If you were solving an anagram, you might write the original version down so that you could cross off letters until you worked out the solution. “Has to pilfer”, say, and then the answer, “a shoplifter”. Or “a rope ends it”, and the answer, “desperation”. And similarly, someone faced with a coded message might write the cypher down first and the decoded message afterwards.’

‘So the Gospel of John was the cypher?’

‘A specific copy of the Gospel of John was the cypher. As I said, I haven’t been able to determine which. Whoever wrote the Rotgut had found this version, this written copy of John, and had been told how the code worked or else had managed to work it out for himself. He — it was almost certainly a he — wrote out the surface meaning of the text and then began to decode the message, to write out the text hidden beneath. But he found it arduous: even knowing what he knew, he only succeeded in decoding seven verses before giving up. Or, just as likely, he switched to a different piece of paper. And since he neglected to write down the cypher key, the rest of the message was lost.’

‘I get it,’ said Kennedy.

‘I’m so glad. And for centuries thereafter, that status quo remained unchanged. Until Stuart Barlow came along and — alerted by some clue or some leap of logic or intuition — started to take a really close look at the Nag Hammadi texts and these other early documents. He found the relevant version of John. And he found — on the papyrus itself — some sort of substitution code that depended on subtle, almost invisible variations on the standard letter shapes. He found a second message encoded in the same symbols: a buried gospel, lying beneath the obvious gospel.’

Gassan got up and crossed to the window. He looked out anxiously, although there was nothing to see: the window looked on to a light well that was interior to the building, a brick-sided shaft eight feet on a side. Kennedy waited a minute or two and then joined him. She knew how frustrated Gassan was at his enforced isolation — and underneath that, how terrified he was that by picking up the Rotgut project he’d become contaminated by its curse. Kennedy would have liked to reassure him, but the only comfort she could offer was a despairing one — that after Dovecote Farm had been wiped off the face of the earth, and Josh Combes became a burned offering, Michael Brand had vanished down whatever hole he normally inhabited. They might all be safe now simply because they offered him no credible threat.

She stared out with Gassan at nothing. ‘So each letter, each symbol on the papyrus, was two letters?’ she asked him.

‘Essentially, yes. Each letter had a standard referent and a coded referent.’ He didn’t turn to look at her, but his tone, listless at first, picked up a little as he explained the technicalities. ‘The code uses a combination of two features that are completely meta-textual. The first is the number of additional stylus strokes used to write the letters. For example the Aramaic letter “heh”’ — he drew it in the condensation on the window — ‘is typically drawn as a single stroke with an acute angle and a curve, and then a separate downstroke. Two movements of the brush or stylus, you see? But it’s possible for a scribe to raise the marking tool from the papyrus twice in the course of making the complex stroke. Or once. Or he could do it as a single, continuous shape, without lifting the brush at all. That gives you three states of the letter. And then the simple stroke, similarly, could be one or two movements: the tool could be rested partway, leaving a slight thickening of the line. That gives six states — two times three.

‘The other feature is the relative length of strokes within a letter, where the possible states are, to put it crudely, short, medium and long. In heh, the simple stroke is typically drawn down further by the scribe than the enfolding arms of the complex stroke on either side. But it could stop at the same level, or not come down so far, remaining above the arms. Now we have at the very least eighteen states of the letter: probably more, in that the encoding of comparative length probably also brings in comparative distance between one feature of the letter and another, or possibly between each letter and its neighbour.’

Kennedy thought about this slightly dizzying prospect, trying hard to get a handle on it.

‘And each of those … states, as you call them …’

‘Corresponds, within the cypher, to a different symbol. So this heh might then become gamal, or daleth, or zain. It would still be read as heh in the parent text, but it would stand as something else entirely in the decoded text.’

‘Why would someone do this?’ Kennedy asked. ‘Isn’t a gospel supposed to spread the word about your religion? If you have to hide it, then it loses most of its point, doesn’t it?’

Gassan snorted through his nose. ‘There are lots of stegano-graphic texts — hidden messages — from that period, Sergeant. The early Christian sects were at war with each other, and often with their local governments as well. They had every reason to hide their messages away.’

‘But hiding one Christian message behind another …’

‘… rather suggests that the Christians, or perhaps a specific group of Christians, were your target audience, doesn’t it? With a code like this, you could disseminate your gospel and hide it at the same time. And your readers could carry the message from place to place without having to look over their shoulder. Anyone who examined the text would see only John’s Gospel: canonical, unobjectionable.’

‘Whereas the hidden message is a heresy?’

‘It’s safe to say, Sergeant, that the hidden message is heresy on the most breathtaking scale imaginable.’

‘So what the hell is it?’

‘You didn’t read it?’ Gassan turned from the window at last, to give Kennedy a stare of horrified indignation.

‘I read some of the parts that had already been rendered into plain text. They didn’t seem to be anything special — just Jesus talking to his disciples, most of the time. I couldn’t find my way through the files — there were too many of them and they all seemed to be hundreds of pages long.’

Gassan hesitated: his disapproval at being asked for a précis fought against his desire to stand on a soapbox and hold forth. In the end, it was no contest.

‘You’re going after these people?’ he asked. ‘The people who killed Barlow and Catherine Hurt, and the others?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I suppose you need to know what you’ll be facing. You’ll lose, though. I probably ought to make that clear up front.’

‘Thanks, professor. For the vote of confidence, I mean.’

‘Believe me, Sergeant, I wish it were otherwise. If you could beat them, I could go back to living a life worthy of the name. But then, of course, if you could beat them …’

He walked back to the centre of the room, touched the cover of the black notebook, then the table, as if to reassure himself that both the words and the world were still where he’d left them.

‘If I could beat them?’

He looked around at her, his eyes desolate. ‘Well, then they wouldn’t still be out there, would they? Not after all those centuries. If they were vulnerable on any conceivable level, someone would have beaten them already.’

41

Sheriff Gayle collected Kennedy from the front of the hotel at nine the next morning. The night before, when he had taken her back to the hotel, he’d used a police black-and-white. This morning, he was driving a car only a little smaller than a football pitch, its colour scheme two-tone, equally divided between sky blue and rust. In places there were actual holes in the bodywork.

Seeing her dubious expression, Gayle assured her earnestly that the car would get them to where they were going. ‘Never let me down yet, Sergeant. If there was enough room at the cemetery, I think I’d aim to be buried in her.’

The scenery here was flatter and less dramatic than along the banks of the Colorado, but Kennedy experienced the same sense of colossal scale as they drove out of Peason along Interstate Highway 93. Distant mountains to their right piled up layer on layer, the stone audience in a planet-sized amphitheatre. To their left the horizon formed a single perfect curve. Highway 93 made the dividing line, a human act of ordering on a par with God’s dividing the waters above from the waters beneath. For most of the journey, theirs was the only car on the road.

The town of Santa Claus, though, showed the bathos underlying human aspirations. At its height, Gayle had told her, the place had had a population of ten thousand: now it was a cluster of cutesy cottages from a Disney cartoon slowly being reclaimed by the desert. They’d been painted to look like gingerbread houses: red and white striped walls; candy-pink fascia boards; bright-green shutters with rounded tops, set permanently open. All was falling into ruin. A leprous Santa Claus leered from a porch whose railings hung askew like shattered ribs. Twin strips of abraded metal, joined by a few surviving railway sleepers, were visible here and there between the battered buildings: they seemed to have been built to serve a kiddie-sized red locomotive that now leaned against the side of a house, forever out of steam, its cow-catcher half-buried in the sand.

To either end of the street was an advertising billboard, perfectly well maintained. The southern one advertised computers, the northern one — on which the leper Santa fixed his hideous grin — incontinence pads. Just beyond this second sign, where Sheriff Gayle was pointing now, stood a small row of aluminum-frame sheds like scaled-down aircraft hangars.

‘Third one’s ours, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘’Less you want to go tell Santa what you want for Christmas.’

‘What every girl wants,’ Kennedy said, joining in the joke. ‘A pony and a Barbie doll. Peace on earth.’

‘There you go,’ Gayle said, leading the way. ‘I think the old feller winked at you just then, so you probably got that to look forward to now. Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.’

He’d taken the heavy key ring from his belt and was sorting through it slowly and carefully. Finally he selected a big brass key with a hollow shank and inserted it into a keyhole that was perfectly circular. He didn’t turn it, just pressed it in and then pulled it out again. There was a two-tone metallic sound: tchikclunk. Gayle shoved the metal door sideways on its runners and they stepped into a dark space as hot as the inside of a furnace.

‘There’s an AC unit here,’ Gayle said, fumbling with some switches on the wall just inside the door. ‘You might want to give it a few minutes.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ Kennedy said. As the lights flickered on, she moved out into the wide, undifferentiated space. It was just a single storeroom, with long metal shelf units dividing it up into aisles. At the nearer end she saw a desk with a couple of A4 folders on it, one blue and one red.

The shelves were full of boxes, no doubt bought en masse from the storage solutions company whose logo they all bore: EZ-STACK. Each box also had a number, and Gayle now flipped open the top folder on the desk, the blue one, to show her the master list.

He flicked over a page or two, found the Bs and ran his finger down the left-hand margin. ‘Michael Brand, Michael Brand, Michael Brand,’ he muttered. ‘There you go. Box number 161.’

The boxes had been ranged sequentially, and every single one was in its proper place, so finding 161 was as simple as walking down the second aisle to the right spot and sliding it out. Gayle brought it back to the desk and set it down, nodding to Kennedy. ‘Be my guest, Sergeant.’ She slid the lid off the box and looked inside.

Each of the objects in the box had been separately bagged. Most were items of clothing: shirt, trousers, jacket, pants and socks. Sheathed in anodyne plastic, they looked — on first glance — like they’d just come back from the dry cleaner’s. But the cleaner had done a really bad job, leaving red-black bloodstains here and there on pretty much everything.

In the bottom of the box, underneath the ruined clothes, she found a sparse sprawl of objects. A till receipt, also stained red-brown at one corner: it was for a newspaper and a pack of Big Red gum, paid for with cash at one of the Walden Books stands at LAX. A black plastic comb. A wallet, already emptied. A separate bag containing bills and coins that had been found in the wallet, to the total value of $89.67. An opened packet of paper tissues. A half-empty blister pack of cinnamon chewing gum, presumably the one described in the till receipt. And that was it: the total worldly goods of Michael Brand.

‘No passport,’ Kennedy remarked. She hadn’t had high expectations, but felt a little deflated anyway.

‘Stuff from the flight got scattered over a lot of ground, Sergeant — and this is a desert. Most likely it’s still out there somewhere. Unless someone picked it up and handed it in at a local police station — or kept it as a souvenir, or sold it on. But his passport was scanned when he joined the flight. All that information’s on record.’

‘I know,’ Kennedy said. ‘I wasn’t thinking of the passport itself, so much.’

‘Baggage stub?’

‘Yeah, that.’

‘We already cross-referenced all that stuff, working off the flight manifests that Coastal sent us. Brand didn’t bring a case on board. He had no stowed luggage at all.’

With Gayle’s permission, Kennedy put on gloves and examined the disappointing haul. She turned the till receipt over, making sure the obverse was blank: no hidden messages or enigmatic lists. She rooted through the wallet, looking for slips of paper that had been missed, torn linings in which something might have been secreted, inscriptions or markings on the leather itself. There was nothing.

Someone had marked one of the dollar bills, though: three parallel lines drawn in red marker, running from top centre to bottom right. Someone had tried to cross out Ben Franklin’s face and missed by a good half-inch or so. Kennedy puzzled over the note for a while, then gave it up.

‘What about the unmatched stuff?’ she asked Gayle.

‘There’s a whole lot of that,’ he said. ‘Boxes and boxes — takes up most of the last aisle. You’d be talking about a good six or seven thousand items. I don’t think there’s enough hours in the day for you to go over it all.’

‘Do you have a list?’

‘Most definitely we do. That’s the second folder. The red one.’

Kennedy read through the list, looking for anything that stood out from the background. A number of things caught the eye for a moment, maybe a little longer: part of glass unicorn; medallion with skull and marijuana leaf; dildo decorated with stars and stripes motif. But how could she know what Michael Brand had been carrying or what it might have meant to him? More significantly, she noted three dozen or so cellphones whose owners hadn’t been identified — but when she got to that page and looked up at Sheriff Gayle, he was shaking her head before she could even frame the question.

‘I can’t let you turn any of those on, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘It’s not legal without a warrant, and there’s no way I’d be able to get a warrant without showing probable cause — of which there ain’t a shred, really, for any of these people. Not even for your Michael Brand, when you come right down to it.’

‘No,’ Kennedy agreed, reluctantly. ‘A lot of this is more gut instinct than anything else.’

‘And gut instinct is fine. I wouldn’t hear a word said against it — but it limits my scope, if you see what I mean. There’s things I can do and things I can’t.’

Kennedy almost laughed. It could have been herself talking: herself before she met Tillman and waded into this mess so far she couldn’t see dry land any longer. ‘I totally understand, Sheriff,’ was all she said, still holding the plastic evidence bag containing Michael Brand’s cash. She held it up and showed it to Gayle. ‘Listen, can I get a photocopy of this dollar bill here? The one with the red lines on it?’

‘Surely. Let me sign it out and we can bring it into town with us now. Connie can copy it for you while we go on over to the morgue. Why, you reading something into those lines?’

‘A code, maybe. The people we’re dealing with seem to like codes. Might be nothing anyway. Most likely is. But I’d like to think about it.’

Gayle solemnly filled out a chitty, which he took from the top drawer in the desk, stamped holes in it with a tiny hole-punch (second drawer) and inserted into the evidence file. Then — just as the straining air-conditioning unit was starting to make some kind of an impact on the superheated air in the great hangar, they stepped back out into the desert.

42

‘So who are the big villains, would you say, in the Bible?’ Professor Gassan asked. He stood at the table as though at a lectern, even though there were only the two of them in the room. Old habits died hard: or maybe it was just a way of defining their relative status here.

Kennedy was in even less of a mood for a study session on the Bible than she’d been the first time they’d spoken. The gleam in the professor’s eyes oppressed her spirit in much the way a snake’s stare was supposed to paralyse a rabbit. But she suspected it might be the only way Gassan was prepared to give her what she needed to know — and the only way for him to keep functioning despite his fears and inner conflicts.

‘Cain,’ she hazarded. ‘Judas. Pontius Pilate. Or did you mean tribes, like the ones who couldn’t say “shibboleth”?’

‘No, I meant individuals. And Cain and Judas were the two I was certain you’d mention. Most people would come up with those two names, I think. Most people, that is, outside of the Gnostic tradition. You’ve heard of the Gnostics, I assume?’

He looked at her hard, signalling that despite her impatience, he was coming to the point in his own way.

‘Early Christian sect,’ Kennedy said. ‘Stuart Barlow’s book — the one that the Rotgut research grew out of — was meant to be a study of them.’

‘Exactly. But let’s say sects, plural. There were many, with some beliefs in common. The Gnostics were contrarians. Religious extremists. And they were already that long before Christ came along: he just gave them a new focus and a new momentum. They embraced the teachings of Jesus because Jesus was ready to stir up the hornets’ nest. They must have felt they’d found a spiritual leader in their own image.

‘The Gnostics started from the assumption that most of the Bible — all of the Bible really, as it had been handed down — was utter nonsense. The scribblings of people who really didn’t understand the miracles they were attesting to. The word “Gnostic” comes from the Greek gnosis, which meant “knowledge”. These sects believed that a hidden truth existed behind everything: behind the world and behind the word. When God spoke to man, as He did to Adam, and to Moses, and later to New Testament prophets like John the Baptist, He wasn’t ever, at any point, handing down simple, univocal truths — because the universe isn’t a simple place and the truth is a complex thing that has to be hidden from the eyes and ears of the vulgar.’

‘When you say “hidden truth”,’ Kennedy asked, ‘are you talking about codes? Is that the point here?’

Gassan raised an austere eyebrow at the interruption from the floor. A hectoring edge crept into his voice. ‘The point, Sergeant Kennedy, is that your enemies — the people who killed your partner, and Stuart Barlow’s team — don’t share your world view. I’m trying to allow you to see them as they are, without the parallax errors you impose by your own values. No, I don’t mean codes, as such. That’s only a small part of what I mean. The Gnostics did use cyphers, and clearly the cypher that Barlow found has to be read in that context. But these people saw the whole of the created world as one colossal hidden message: the will and word of God, expressed in other things. And they believed that most holy texts are just … ham-fisted approximations of a message that the great mass of people are born without the capacity to understand.

‘I’m telling you this because what I say next would sound strange without that preamble. In the Gnostic tradition, the heroes and villains of the Bible are not those you’d be most likely to recognise.’

‘They think Jesus went over to the dark side of the Force?’

‘No, the Gnostic tradition is very kind to Jesus. It’s God they have a problem with.’

Kennedy smiled and shrugged: I’ll bite.

‘The Gnostic sects believed that the creator and ruler of our world, commonly worshipped as the ultimate god and source of all goodness, was actually a far lesser being — a flawed entity sometimes known as Laldabaoth. The real god is somewhere else, far above our perceptions and our plane of existence.’

‘Wait,’ Kennedy pleaded. ‘If these Gnostics were renegade Christians, or renegade Jews, or whatever, then they had to believe that God made the world. It’s right there in the Bible — even if you didn’t manage to read past chapter one.’

‘Certainly, a god made the world. But which one? Remember, these are people who pride themselves on reading between the lines — on finding the meanings that the ignorant miss. In their teachings, the ultimate God is a being of transcendent goodness and purity, who does not himself inhabit the universe of created things. Within that universe — our universe — there are beings of great power: beings who would be like ants compared with the ultimate God, but would still appear as gods to us. One of these beings, whatever you decide to call them, made the earth. And he’s quite happy to claim our worship, even though, in the Gnostics’ opinion, he doesn’t deserve it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not what, Sergeant? Please frame your questions as complete sentences.’

Kennedy ground her teeth, not enjoying this at all. A trail of murdered men and women shouldn’t lead to a schoolroom, especially one where you had to put your hand up before you could speak. ‘Why does the god-who-made-the-world not deserve to be worshipped?’ she asked, stonily.

‘Because he did such a terrible job of it. Because he made evil, and sickness, poverty and hunger; the imperfect balance of the seasons which makes us die of too much heat or too much cold; flood and fire and pestilence and all the rest of it. Frankly, the Gnostics thought the world was a botched job and they weren’t interested in clapping its creator on the shoulder and telling him how wonderful he was. They were looking up, past him, to the sphere of perfection beyond — which they called, some of them, sometimes, when they sullied it with a name at all, the realm of Barbelo.

‘Read in this way, and with Yahweh seen — for the most part — as another name for the imperfect, the limited and limiting god of the fallen world, the Bible becomes a very different story. Those biblical figures who are paragons of obedience become fools and vectors of folly, to be shunned rather than revered. Adam is a coward who willingly takes the yoke. Eve is the brave soul who looks behind the curtain, plays outside the rules.’

‘And is punished for her sins.’

‘Oh, they’re both punished, Sergeant. And so are their blameless children, and their children’s children, and so on. God — the lesser god, Laldabaoth — is a sadist and a psychopath: doing what you’re told is no defence against his whimsical sense of justice. So the heroes of Genesis are disobedient Eve, the wise serpent who taught her, and Cain, her rebellious son. And when we get to Jesus, the moral perspective changes even more radically.’

‘You said Jesus still got to be the hero.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘The son of god.’

‘The son of …?’

Kennedy breathed out heavily. ‘The son of the big, pure god. Not the evil one.’

‘Exactly, Sergeant. Jesus came from Barbelo, bringing his precious wisdom to the fallen world. And although he died for it, that too was part of the plan. Sounds a lot like the New Testament you already know and love, I imagine.’

‘It’s familiar,’ Kennedy allowed.

‘Well, don’t get too comfortable. In 1983, in Geneva, a professional intermediary — not a fence, strictly speaking, but someone who knew fences and did a broadly similar job — offered for sale to interested bodies or institutions a document. A codex. A priceless antiquity. It was a lost gospel.’

‘You told me once that there were hundreds of those things out there, professor.’

‘Not like this one. This was the Gospel of Judas.’

‘The Judas? Backstabbing Iscariot Judas? The man who betrayed the Messiah?’

‘Or,’ said Gassan, with something like a bravura flourish, ‘the man who became the Messiah.’

He allowed a pause for effect that was probably longer than necessary. Kennedy waited him out, tired of the choric role that he’d allotted her. Eventually, with an austere sniff, like a man casting pearls before swine, the professor resumed. ‘The Gospel of Judas, so called — the Codex Tchacos, to give it its official designation — is an appallingly damaged document. And most of that damage came when the idiot who’d dug it up, and his friends, agents and satraps, were hauling it around the world in an attempt to sell it and make their fortunes. They did everything that you’re not supposed to do to a fragile papyrus, except possibly to wipe their backsides upon it. You might be forgiven for thinking that some of its interim custodians wanted to destroy rather than preserve it.

‘So the Judas Gospel, as we have it — as we have it in the Codex Tchacos — is in a very fragmentary form. Only thirteen pages of the original thirty-one survived even in partial form, and the decay and disintegration were extreme. Still, enough remained to make it clear that the actual work must be an astounding document indeed.’

‘Astounding in what way?’ Kennedy demanded.

‘It focuses on the relationship between Judas and Christ — and it portrays that relationship as unique and intense. In fact, the other eleven disciples feature mainly as comic relief. They understand nothing of Jesus’s true mission on earth, and their misinterpretations cause Jesus to get somewhat snitty and sarcastic with them at several points. Judas, by contrast, gets it — gets the message without being told. He’s a Gnostic: one of the many different sorts and varieties. He belongs to an already ancient cult that reads between the lines of the Bible. He knows that great truths must be hidden and he knows why. Consequently, it’s to Judas that Jesus entrusts the most delicate part of his plan.’

‘You mean Jesus actually wanted—’

‘Yes, Sergeant. Jesus asks Judas to betray him. It was essential to his mission. He must suffer, and die, so that his message would never be lost. He must be attacked and destroyed by someone close to him and trusted by him: the power of that narrative was the means by which his teachings would be dispersed to the world. Judas was an active collaborator in Christ’s thoroughly worked-out plan.’

‘All right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I admit, that’s novel. Arresting, even. But it’s not something anyone would kill for, is it?’

‘It was once. Irenaeus warned against the Judas Gospel explicitly in his Adversus Haereses, of which we’ve already spoken. Athanasius of Alexandria talked in rather more sinister terms about “cleansing the church of defilement” by texts like this. People did die for reading and disseminating the Judas Gospel. They died in large numbers, and they — by they, I mean the Gnostic churches, those who professed the faith of the serpent, Eve, Cain and Judas — ultimately disappeared from history.

‘In the modern world, though … well, the Judas Gospel in the truncated form of the Codex Tchacos has been in the public domain for several years now. The translation we have — partial translation, I mean, with holes you could drive a bus through — dates from 2006. Rodolphe Kasser and his people were the authors, and National Geographic helped with the funding. Nobody in that group, so far as I know, has been fired upon, stabbed through the heart or flung down a staircase.’

Gassan paused again and sat down with a gesture of resignation, giving up the charade. Maybe that reference to Stuart Barlow’s death had soured the pleasure of showing off his erudition.

‘So what’s changed?’ Kennedy asked, as Gassan stared at his hands, folded in his lap.

‘The Rotgut text,’ the professor said, in an entirely different tone of voice. ‘It’s an intact version of the Judas Gospel. Moreover, it has sleeve notes — instructions to whoever was carrying it as to what to do, and what not to do, with the message.’

‘Go on,’ Kennedy said, because it looked at that moment as if Gassan might come to the point and then shy away from it, unable or unwilling to elucidate the real mystery.

‘Well, you see, Sergeant, if Jesus’s plan was to die in agony on the cross, the disciple who understood his needs well enough to help with that plan was the greatest of all, and carried out a service to the Godhead that was infinitely precious. If Christ ransomed and redeemed us, it was through Judas’s sacrifice that he was able to do so.’

‘Judas’s sacrifice?’ Kennedy repeated, momentarily thrown. ‘What did Judas sacrifice?’

Gassan shrugged as though the answer were obvious. ‘The respect of his peers. The goodwill of all the world. The verdict of history. And his life, of course, but one imagines that was a relatively small part of the equation. Still, the death of Judas bears comparison with that of Christ. And in the complete gospel — in the Rotgut version, I mean, as translated by Barlow — Judas is offered a reward, in exchange for his faithful service.’

‘Thirty pieces of silver?’

Gassan smiled faintly. ‘No. That’s a different gospel. Matthew, to be precise. But the figure thirty does appear, in a way that makes it seem likely that Matthew was referring to something specific when he chose that figure. Should I read you the text?’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘Shoot.’

Gassan took up the notebook again. ‘There’s a digital version,’ he said. ‘A clean text, which I’ll send to you. I imagine you’ll want to read it in its entirety before you saddle up and go into battle again. I also sent a copy, with all of Barlow’s notes and my own, to my solicitor, along with a letter telling him to publish after my death. I’ll have nothing left to lose, then, will I? And I’ll have earned the right to have my name added to the list of the gospel’s discoverers, if I’ve already died for it.’

He found his place at last and read aloud, in a voice from which much of the tonal colour had drained away. ‘Then Judas said unto Him, All will be done as you have laid it down, oh lord. And Jesus said, yes, even so, all will be done in that wise. And you will be reviled by them that know you not, yet afterward you will be raised up higher than them that hate you.

‘And when shall I be raised, oh lord?

‘Jesus said, from this moment in which I speak unto you thenceforward until the ending of the seed of Adam, they will execrate your name.

‘But my Father has given dominion to the seed of Adam only for a certain time. And afterwards he will end them, that the world might be given unto you and yours.

‘And Jesus gave unto Judas thirty silver pieces, saying, how many bronze prutahs have I given unto you? For so many years will the seed of Adam enjoy this world: for so many years will their lease endure. But afterward they will be cast down, and the world will belong to you and yours for ever.’

The professor looked up at Kennedy, perhaps expecting a question. The only one Kennedy could think of was pretty banal. ‘What’s the answer?’ she asked. ‘How many bronze whatevers?’

‘Three thousand. There were a hundred prutahs in one shekel. Three thousand years, then the children of Judas get their turn in the big chair.’

‘Guess we’ve still got a while, at least.’

Gassan frowned. ‘Why do you say that, Sergeant?’

‘Even if the gospel was written right after Christ died,’ Kennedy said, with a shrug, ‘it’s only two thousand years.’

‘True. Unfortunately, nobody in Judea in those days counted anything from Christ. In Judea and Samaria, where this text was presumably written, it was customary to count from the unification of the tribes, in 1012 BCE. Three thousand and twenty years ago, give or take. I hate to rain on your parade, but our lease is up.’

Kennedy closed her eyes, rubbed them with thumb and forefinger. There was no headache yet, but she could feel the beginnings of one, forming like a thunderhead in the vaulted roof of her skull. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So we got a chunk of the Gnostic Bible, and it was a big secret, once upon a time. I’m with you all the way, professor. But it still leaves me missing a piece, somewhere along the line. Nobody kills for a word. Or at least … not a word this old.’

Gassan’s depressed spirits flared up in sudden irritation, his arms flailing in truncated, awkward arcs. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Sergeant. Everybody kills for words! What else is there to kill for? Money? Money is words from a government saying they’ll give you gold. Laws are words from judges saying who gets to live free and who doesn’t. Bibles … Bibles are words from God saying do all the awful, awful things you want to do and you’ll be forgiven anyway. It all comes down to words. And in every case, the people who kill for them are the ones who think they own them.’

He seemed to realise, suddenly, that his voice was too loud in the empty, echoing room — almost a shout. He turned away from her, embarrassed and still bristling. With a formless wave of his hand, he indicated the notebook.

‘Read it,’ he suggested. ‘Read it all. Not just the gospel, but the words around the gospel — the messages that went with it. You need to see for yourself.’

43

The morgue was way over in Bullhead. It seemed that Peason kept nothing within its city limits: it was a sort of outsourced town.

Bullhead, though, was very different from Santa Claus: it was a small but busy urban hub, with an even busier morgue. Kennedy couldn’t quite believe how busy, how many freezer rooms the place had and how many doors were marked full. Coming in through the parking lot, they had passed several windowless vans with massive freezer units attached, and Kennedy had clocked enough hours on enough different task forces to know them for what they were: mobile refrigeration units of the kind normally sent into disaster areas to put a lot of dead people on ice quickly and prevent the spread of epidemics.

‘What’s going on here?’ she asked Gayle, as they stepped off the baking asphalt into the air-conditioned chill.

He didn’t get what she meant, then he followed her gaze and grunted. He seemed about to speak, but a white-coated assistant who looked to be still in his teens was already heading in their direction, smiling a professional consultative smile he’d learned from his elders and smoothers. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Gayle muttered. ‘It’s kind of a taboo subject around here.’

They no longer had Brand’s body on the premises, the assistant told them unnecessarily. He had been released for burial three weeks before, although in fact the state authorities had decided to cremate him, along with two other unclaimed bodies from the plane. Surely the sheriff’s office was already aware?

‘We didn’t come to see the body, son,’ Gayle broke in. ‘Just the file.’

‘The file is public access. It’s available via—’

‘Yeah, but that’s just a summary. I mean the full file, with all the whistles and bells, photos and prints and what all. It’s on my authority, and county’s already approved it, but you’re going to want to check in with your supervisor before you set us up, and we’re happy to wait while you go ahead and do just that, long as it doesn’t take more than two minutes out of my already over-full day.’

His script pulled out from under him, the lad scampered away without another word. Kennedy was impressed. Gayle’s style, high on casual warmth and low on intimidation, but with an underlying steeliness to it that warned you not to mess with him, seemed to work like a charm. She felt glad she wasn’t negotiating this maze by herself.

The assistant came back well inside of two minutes. He ushered them into a tiny windowless office, on the wall of which the original ‘dangling kitten’ motivational poster — hang in there! — had been pinned, with the overlay of a rifle sight zeroed on the kitten’s head. Instead of the original legend, it was captioned with the words: Hanging’s too good for the little bastard. Police morgues were entitled to police humour, which was always robust.

The assistant used his log-in and password to get them into the digital records, asked them — politely, and without ever managing to look Gayle entirely in the eye — to restrict themselves to the file they’d officially requested, and left them to it.

‘You need me to stay here?’ Gayle asked.

‘No,’ said Kennedy. ‘Thanks, Sheriff. I can manage.’

‘Okay. I got a phone call to make, and I guess I’ll get a coffee along the way. You want me to bring you one back?’

Kennedy asked for milk, no sugar, and Gayle headed out. She turned to the file and immersed herself in its cold certainties.

Brand’s corpse, like most of those that had fallen with the plane, presented with numerous abraded and crush injuries, friction artefacts and depressurisation traumas. The list ran to a page and a half, but could be summarised in four words: Brand was a mess. With such a spectacularly damaged body, it was almost meaningless to state a cause of death, although the usual conclusions, with the usual provisos, had been reached. The lining of Brand’s lungs had been ripped when the cabin depressurised at speed. Oxygen concentrations in venous tissue suggested that trapped air had been forced through the lungs into the man’s thoracic cavity, where the oxygen had formed bubbles in both major and minor blood vessels. The heart would have stopped in short order, but the brain would have been starved of blood in any case. Unconsciousness and death would have followed swiftly enough that it was almost impossible Brand was still alive when the plane hit the ground.

So much for the big picture. Smaller details were then sketched in lightly as observations and speculations, usually with no firm conclusions drawn. Abrasions to Brand’s knuckles might indicate a physical altercation with another passenger, possibly in the panic of the initial forced descent. Broken fingernails and damage to the tissue of the fingertips on both hands was harder to explain: had he perhaps clawed at the frame of a window or door, trying to escape? It seemed likely, in any case, that Brand had been on his feet when the depressurisation occurred, because unsecured bodies collected more — and more widely distributed — trauma artefacts than those that were fixed in one position. It could be stated with more confidence that he had not been wearing his seat belt: seated and belted passengers, without exception, had a pattern of bruising across the hips caused by sudden shifts in air speed pushing the body hard against the restraining belt. Brand didn’t have those particular bruises.

He did have a lot of scars, though. Whoever had performed the autopsy had been punctilious in recording them. Bullet wounds, stab wounds, impact wounds, all remaining from previous brushes with death, all old enough to have mostly healed over. In one place, a newer stab wound had crossed the scar tissue from an older injury. This merited an exclamation mark from the coroner, who must have wondered exactly what kind of lifestyle Michael Brand had been enjoying. Given his age, it was a most astonishing history of prior injuries. I can honestly say, I have never seen even in a career soldier at the end of his active service such a fascinating and varied collection.

Given his age? Kennedy went back up to the head of the document and cross-referenced with the summary of Michael Brand’s passport data included as an addendum. Then she went to the photographs.

There were several full-face shots, identical as far as Kennedy could see. They all showed a bloated face, the skin blotched and mottled from broken blood vessels. He could be any dead man, at any stage of life. But underneath the damage, how old was he? How much had Michael Brand lived, before he fell out of the sky like Icarus, imploding as he died?

Not long enough, was the answer. Or too long, depending how you looked at it.

The door was kicked open from the outside, slamming back against the wall. Kennedy was rising as she turned, hands flying into a defensive block.

It was Gayle: he had used his foot to open the door because he had a styrofoam cup of coffee in each hand.

‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ he said, staring at her with something like concern. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. Don’t know my own strength.’

Her heart pounding, she lowered her hands. When she took the coffee, she saw from the look on his face that he could feel the tremor in her fingers, but he maintained a casual tone as he asked her if she’d got what she wanted.

‘I got … something,’ she admitted.

‘Glad to hear it. Something good?’

‘I think I caught Michael Brand out in a lie. A big one, maybe. Could I have a few minutes longer?’

‘We’re not on the clock here,’ Gayle said, easily. ‘You go ahead. I’ll watch the traffic go by.’

Kennedy finished her notes. She was doing it for form’s sake now, and to let her breathing and heart rate return to normal, but her gaze caught on one small detail in the brain work. Extensive damage to serotonergic neurons cannot be explained by or linked to other injuries, singly or in combination. Coupled with 5-HT depletion in the hippocampus, the nerve damage suggests prolonged and repeated exposure to a sympathomimetic drug such as methamphetamine, in extremely large doses.

What makes people weep blood? Stress or drugs, Ralph Prentice had said. She believed she was seeing the drugs part of that equation. Michael Brand — and probably the pale assassins she’d met twice now — used some substance in the methamphetamine family, maybe to increase speed, strength and alertness. And it cost them: they took damage from it. As a cop, even one with very little formal narco training, she knew more than a little about what that damage might include. It was another fact for the file, abstract and useless for the moment, maybe relevant later.

She closed the Brand file and looked up. Despite his joke about watching the traffic, Gayle was actually looking at her, his expression thoughtful and maybe expectant.

He’d been the soul of professional discretion, but he had a right to expect her to share. Yet how could she explain the theory forming in her mind: particularly, how could she explain it to this bluff, friendly, uncomplicated man who seemed to embody a sort of homespun courtesy she imagined had disappeared from the world?

‘I’m thinking crazy thoughts,’ was what she said, almost apologetically.

Gayle shrugged with his eyebrows, acknowledging the proviso, inviting her to say more.

‘I think Brand might be the answer to one of your questions. I think maybe he brought down the plane.’

Gayle looked at her in mild puzzlement. ‘Why would you think that?’

Kennedy showed him what she’d found in the files: the evidence that Brand had been in a fight, and the damage to his fingertips — which he might have sustained in trying to pull the door open before the pressure seal broke. It was nothing much, when you thought about it, but Gayle nodded thoughtfully.

‘Brand came on board late,’ he told her. ‘That was the call I just made — to the FAA. He bought his ticket when the plane was already boarding, got to the gate with a minute to spare. He was in a hurry to get to New York, that’s for sure.’

‘Or maybe not,’ said Kennedy. ‘Maybe he was just in a hurry to get on board that particular plane.’

‘So he could sabotage it?’

Kennedy made a non-committal gesture. ‘Possibly. Yes. I’m thinking yes.’

‘Why?’

‘It had come in from Mexico, right?’

‘Mexico City.’

‘How did they come in? What was the flight plan?’

‘I have no idea, Sergeant. Mostly the airlines like to take the planes out over water if there’s any to hand, so I guess it would have come up the Gulf and maybe clipped the south-western corner of the state before it turned west.’

‘What’s down there, Sheriff?’

‘The desert. Then Tucson. Then more desert.’

Kennedy pondered.

‘Could we find out,’ she ventured at last, ‘whether 124 filed a change in its flight plan at any point?’

‘I guess we could. The FAA keeps all that stuff on record for twenty years, I seem to remember. Why? What’s on your mind?’

What was on her mind sounded ridiculous even to Kennedy. She shook her head, meaning either I don’t know or I can’t tell you.

Either way, Gayle appeared to accept the head-shake as all the answer he was going to get for now. ‘I’ll call them from the car,’ he said, dropping his coffee cup neatly into the waste bin. ‘Let’s move on out.’

On the way back to Peason, she remembered to ask again about the refrigeration trucks.

Grayle chewed on the question in silence for a while, as though thinking how best to answer it. ‘Well, that’s a thing that happens every summer,’ he told her at last. ‘We got a whole lot of illegals coming in from Mexico, across the border. Used to be it was only a problem in the southern parts of the state. You know, down around Tucson. But there’s a lot more patrols out now, since the state legislature said we got to get tougher on this. So the coyotes — the people traffickers — they gotta stay further out from cities, further out from roads, and go through a lot more desert before they can do the hand-off. They’ll cross the 8 and the 10, before they turn east. And that’s a lot of desert. So every year, and specially in summer, there’s a lot of them don’t make it.’

‘Jesus.’ Kennedy was appalled. ‘But if each of those trucks holds, what? Ten? A dozen bodies? That means—’

‘Even this far north, we can get twenty or thirty in a bad month. Plus we take in some of the overspill from further south. It’s hundreds, Sergeant. Maybe thousands. Thousands every year. Bodies wear down quick in the desert, get covered up with sand and dust. Get eaten, maybe. Get so you don’t know if the bones are a year old or a couple of centuries. So don’t nobody have a proper count of it.’

Kennedy said nothing, but something floated up to the surface of her mind: a quote that she’d read in a history textbook once. Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.

‘The only other place I’ve seen those trucks used …’ she ventured at last.

‘Was after an earthquake or something. A disaster. Sure. Well, this is our disaster, I guess. Arizona armageddon. Just happens to be in slow motion.’

The silence was somewhat hard to break after that. Giving up on light conversation, Gayle got Connie to place a second call to the FAA and patch him through. Obviously curious, the despatch clerk offered to call on Gayle’s behalf and put whatever questions he needed answered. Gayle thanked her kindly but said he’d handle it himself, after which Connie maintained a sullen silence over the airwaves as she did as she was told.

But the call was a waste of time. There had been nothing anomalous about the flight plan of CA124 on the day of the disaster. It had come up along the line of the Gulf, as Gayle had guessed, and stayed west of Tucson, flying over Puerto Peñasco and then a whole lot of nothing until it veered off towards LA at Lake Havasu City.

Kennedy looked out of the car window at the desert through which the road wound like an electric cable: plugging Arizona into the world beyond, whose existence was otherwise so easy to forget. The smell of wild sage came in through the open window of the car, sweet and strong.

Why bring down a plane? Why move from one-at-a-time murder to hecatombs of dead stacked perilously in the freezer boxes of already overstrained mortuaries?

Assuming she was right at all, what made Flight 124 worth killing?

44

Kennedy flipped through the pages — what Gassan had called the full transcripts — with a gathering sense of unreality.

‘There’s …’ she said, but the sentence she was trying to frame made no sense. She had to abandon it and start again. ‘The gospel, it’s … it stops being about Judas, here, and becomes …’

‘It’s a sort of meta-commentary,’ Gassan agreed. He was standing over by the window again, as if hungry for the meagre light that was coming in there. The safe house had no windows at ground level and those higher up were kept shuttered whenever the security rating of the inmates seemed to warrant it. ‘There are sections like this in the Old Testament. And in the Koran, too, I believe — instructions for how the sacred text itself is to be handled. To be complete, the message must include instructions designed to ensure its own survival. The recipe specifies not just the cake but the recipe for more recipes.’

‘But …’ Kennedy was struggling with unfamiliar concepts that she didn’t even want to understand. ‘The penalties that are written down here. You’re not suggesting …’

Gassan laughed — a hollow, unnerving sound. ‘I’m not suggesting anything. Think, though, about what happened when that American preacher, Jones or whatever his name was, threatened to burn a copy of the Koran at the site of the 9/11 attacks. Islamists in Iraq bombed churches: dozens died. Some have posited that the inflexible interpretation of the word of God is the very essence of fundamentalism. The divine word, to the fanatic, is reified — it’s a physical thing, a fact of existence, and since it’s also the cornerstone of existence, it must be revered. There seems to be no rational limit to how far people with that mindset will go to avenge themselves on those they see as the enemies of the word.’

The professor turned his gaze on the sheaf of papers in Kennedy’s hand. ‘I presume,’ he said, ‘that you’ve reached the passage on page forty-one, commencing, “This testament shall not be read or known”.’

Kennedy nodded, read aloud from the page. ‘This testament shall not be read or known by any outside the kindred, or delivered to them in any wise. But if they come to know it, they shall be cut down …’

Gassan took up the recitation. ‘… and their mouths stopped, and their days counted. For His bargain was not with them, but with us who bear our lives from Judas, from Cain, and from the serpent their father.’ Gassan tailed off. The corners of his mouth quirked downwards, as if he were about to cry. ‘That was their death sentence,’ he murmured. ‘Barlow worked out the answer and they killed him for it.’

Kennedy was aware of the anger building up inside her, powerful enough now to affect the rhythm of her breathing. She’d been struggling against it for some time, but without much effect because she didn’t really understand where it had come from. Now she understood, but that did nothing, really, to help rein in her feelings. It was the same anger that Tillman must have felt. She’d gotten the wrong answer: this dry explanation and the nightmares she’d lived through seemed grotesquely, horribly mismatched.

‘Gnostics,’ she said, as though the word meant cobblers. ‘You expect me to believe that Gnostics are out there killing people because their security was compromised. On a two-thousand-year-old text.’

Her tone was furiously sarcastic, but Gassan merely nodded. ‘I doubt they call themselves Gnostics any more, Sergeant,’ he observed, mildly. ‘Assuming they ever did. Think of them as the Judas people. Although clearly, they claim a line of descent that runs back through Judas to the dawn of human time — and we must assume, there were proto-messages of theirs embedded in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which sent Stuart Barlow off on this tangent. I’ve wondered about that.’

‘Seriously?’ Kennedy laughed, and the laugh had a harsh, ugly ring to it. ‘Did you wonder whether you were awake?’

‘I’ve wondered,’ Gassan repeated, ‘when they speak of Cain and Judas, whether they had in mind a physical lineage that links them or something more spiritual. In a sense, anyone who rebels against Laldabaoth, the usurper god who represses and tyrannises, would be the spiritual successor of Cain, and of Judas: but “bear our lives from” suggests a more literal reading. A Judas tribe.’

‘I repeat. A document from two thousand—’

‘Your murders, Sergeant,’ he cut across her, ‘are very much of the here and now.’

‘Exactly.’ She threw up her hands. ‘That’s why I don’t think they were committed by Gnostics.’

Gassan tilted his head a little to one side — a patronising and infuriating gesture, suggesting that he was listening to her arguments with minute care. ‘Do you know,’ he asked her, ‘what Judas’s name meant?’

‘Judas? It’s just another form of Judah, isn’t it? “The lion”?’

‘Judah didn’t mean “lion”, it meant “praise”. The lion was only his symbol. But I was talking about Judas’s other name. Iscariot.’

‘I have no idea,’ Kennedy admitted.

‘There are two theories. One is that it referred to a place: a town. Judas from Kerioth. The other is that it denoted his membership of a specific group. And this group, in turn, took their name from their favourite weapon …’

Driving back into London later, Kennedy found herself turning over Gassan’s next words again and again. Somewhere in those many repetitions, the idea of the Judas people crystallised, or — what was that other word the professor had used — reified for her: became something real that she now had to deal with.

‘… their favourite weapon, which was a short knife — a sica. Judas Iscariot could have meant “Judas Sicarius”. “Judas the knife-man”. And you know what knife I mean, Sergeant Kennedy, because they used it on you, and on that poor man who worked with you. They have a sense of tradition, you see. Or possibly they see all of their battles as phases of the same battle, century after century.’

A lost tribe, then. Or, no, not lost, but hidden: an entire race that had retreated from the world and scuffed sand over their own footprints so that nobody would know they’d existed. But they came out of hiding whenever they had to. Not all of them, but some. Gassan’s parting shot, as she was leaving, had made that clear.

‘Page fifty-three, Sergeant. The Judas people send out two kinds of emissary into the world, to make contact with ordinary humanity: the Elohim and the Kelim, the Messengers and the Vessels. I don’t know what the Vessels did, but it’s pretty clear from the wording what the Messengers were for.

‘“Send out your Elohim where there is need, that none shall trouble or persecute the people. Let those who would bring harm to the people be prevented, and their eyes sealed up, and the door of the grave closed upon them. They that do this thing are holy and righteous in God’s sight.”’

‘The Messengers were sanctified killers, Sergeant. And I think they still are. I think that’s who you’ve been dealing with.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Kennedy muttered.

Gassan nodded in sombre agreement. ‘Remember that they trace their line back past grandfather Judas to great-great-great-grandfather Cain.

‘Perhaps that’s why they’re so comfortable with murder. It’s in their blood.’

45

Gayle dropped Kennedy off at the EconoLodge. He had duties to attend to elsewhere, he told her, so he’d have to leave her to her own devices for a while; but he’d check in with her later in the day, and be her chauffeur again if need be.

Up in her room, Kennedy powered up the laptop and sent another email to Tillman. Then for good measure she called him — knowing he wouldn’t answer — and left a message on his voicemail.

‘Leo, there’s something I have to tell you. Something really important. It changes everything and it means your trail hasn’t gone cold after all. Call me. Or else answer the email. Just do something to let me know you’re listening and I’ll tell you. But I’m not going to shout this out into the void and you know bloody well why. Call me. Please.’

She was planning to get down to some serious research after that, but she paced around the room for a good half an hour, unable to settle, finding pointless things to do with the few belongings she’d brought with her.

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.

46

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.’

47

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?

But that couldn’t be it. Anything as permanent as that would be seen by the passengers of every flight that took this route. What she was looking for — what she needed — was something transitory: it would have been a one-off event. So the flight could give her a sense of the possible scale of the thing, but that was all. She was up here to play twenty questions, and she was still at the ‘Is it bigger than a breadbox?’ stage.

Roads, then, but not the traffic on the roads. Manmade structures, if they were very tall or reasonably extensive. Other planes: she saw several of those, passing by at leisurely speeds in the middle distance.

And lights. As evening came on, the landscape turned into a lattice, some areas lit up, others in profound darkness. Okay, that might be something: a light where no light should be? But of course, as it got darker, it got harder to see the salient features of the landscape, so you had less and less to orient yourself by. Who could say where a light shouldn’t be or where it was in relation to anything else? The pilot would know. And the copilot. They’d have instruments to go by, as well as sight. Would Brand have downed a whole plane to kill the cabin crew?

She watched one of the lights below flashing on and off, with a fixed periodicity: visible for three seconds, dark for five. It was over towards the coast, so she guessed it was a lighthouse. Could 124 have seen and registered some other kind of beacon, lit to send a signal meant only for the Judas people? They loved their codes after all: maybe they spoke to each other across the darkness with flashing torches or those massive, slatted searchlights that RAF bomber command used back in the Second World War.

In the age of the mobile phone, that would be a really asinine thing to do, wouldn’t it?

The plane began its descent into Mexico City — after the sparseness of the deep desert, a cluster of lights within lights as thick as enfolded galaxies — and Kennedy gave it up at last as a bad job.

She had almost three hours to kill before the return flight. She wandered the concourse like a grim ghost, finding most of the shops and cafés already closed for the night. Finally she found a bar, sat down and ordered a large margarita. When in Rome, she figured, you should at least make a token effort.

A woman at the other end of the bar was watching her, covertly and intermittently. She looked young; maybe pretty, too, but wearing way too much make-up. Not Kennedy’s type exactly, because Kennedy preferred larger than life curves, but interesting all the same, with a slender and no doubt quite supple body. She was wearing very drab casuals: blouse and slacks in indeterminate earth colours, which she could have gotten away with if she’d had more of a tan but just looked muddy and off-white next to the clear, light skin of her arms.

Kennedy didn’t feel the least bit horny, but she was as tense as hell and she considered, for the first time in a long time, the possible restorative effects of a quick tumble. As a first, exploratory step in that direction, she kept her gaze on the woman — so that the next time she shot Kennedy a furtive glance, their eyes met.

The effect wasn’t what Kennedy was expecting. Without moving, the woman drew in on herself. Not like someone shy or withdrawn, but like someone tensing for a confrontation. Christ. Kennedy had obviously read her wrong. Maybe the woman had made her as a cop somehow. Maybe she had a thing against cops.

Kennedy was about to finish her drink and leave, but the woman beat her to it. She put her glass down, with a little more force than was necessary, beckoned the barman over and spoke with him for a few seconds before putting a wad of bills into his hands. The barman shrugged, counted, nodded. The woman left and Kennedy checked out her retreating bum with a vestigial twinge of regret.

She took her time with the margarita, allowing the alcohol to soothe her back from partial arousal to something close to calm, closer to resignation. She made a sign to the barman to bring her the tab and he shook his head.

‘You’re good, ma’am,’ he said.

‘I’m what?’

‘You’re good. The lady covered your drink. And she said to give you this.’

He put something down on the bar in front of Kennedy. It looked like a quarter until she picked it up and registered first its weight, then its irregular shape, finally the partially erased uncial letters around its edge. She had the twin of that coin in her wallet, given her by Tillman in the Crown and Anchor on Surrey Street.

She dropped the coin and sprinted out of the bar. She quartered the whole concourse at a quick jog-trot, hoping against hope that she might run into the woman again. There were few enough people around that she would have spotted her at once, but of course the woman wouldn’t have left the coin if she’d intended to stay. Kennedy slowed to a walk at last, breathless from more than just the running, her heart pounding in her chest.

It had been … what had it been? A taunt. A provocation. A promise. The woman at the bar was one of the people she was looking for: the Judas tribe. And she’d allowed herself to be seen, as if to say to Kennedy that it didn’t matter how easy or how obvious they made it for her, she still wouldn’t get there, still wouldn’t put all the pieces together.

Or maybe, that it didn’t even matter if she did.

Anger had swept through Kennedy like a hot wave, but now it broke, and she found herself strangely calm. Whoever the woman was, revealing herself like this had been a reckless thing to do: seen in the context of centuries or millennia of obsessive secrecy, it was an inexplicable mistake. Possibly she saw it as a show of strength, but it wasn’t, couldn’t be that. It was some emotion that she hadn’t entirely been able to control, working through her and distorting her judgement. Kennedy remembered, suddenly, that she and Tillman had heard a woman’s voice, screaming, on the night when Dovecote burned. Was it possible that this could be the same woman? That she’d followed Kennedy all the way across the Atlantic? Wildly unlikely: if they’d been so ready to kill her on that night of blood and fire, why hold back now?

Someone else, then. But someone who wanted her to know that she was known: that she was pursued, even as she continued with her own pursuit.

So the real confrontation wouldn’t be long in coming. And now Kennedy was forewarned, so if she wasn’t forearmed that was shame on her.

It was two in the morning when the shuttle flight landed at Bullhead, and after three when she got back to the hotel in Peason. John-Bird was her driver once again, but she forestalled his Colorado anecdotes by falling asleep instantly in the back of the cab. He kept right on talking anyway. Surfacing from her doze every now and again, Kennedy experienced the wash of words as bizarrely comforting: it felt good not to be alone right then. By way of thanks, she mumbled a ‘really?’ in response to whatever fluvial fact he was regaling her with, then promptly drifted off to sleep again.

Staggering up to her room, she intended to collapse face down on the bed and sleep some more, probably without even bothering to get undressed. But the red light on the bedside phone was flashing. She picked up the receiver and dialled 3 for voicemail, holding the handset jammed under her chin as she wrestled her shoes off her slightly swollen feet.

‘Hey, Sergeant.’ Webster Gayle’s voice, hale and hearty and over-loud. ‘I hope you got something out of your trip south of the border besides cheap tequila. Can’t wait to hear how it went. Listen, we can’t put this off any more. You got to talk to Moggs, so’s you and her can put your heads together and reach critical mass. I promise I’ll stand way back out of the blast radius. She’s an early riser, so I thought we could do breakfast. I’ll be waiting for you downstairs at seven-thirty. Sleep tight.’

One margarita, Kennedy reflected, wearily, as she rolled into bed and pulled the covers half-over her. One margarita, and nothing to look forward to but breakfast with ghosts. Not nearly tight enough.

48

It was clear to Kennedy inside of a minute that the relationship between Eileen Moggs and Webster Gayle went way beyond the professional. A minute or so after that, she could also tell that the man and the woman saw the relationship in different terms.

Sheriff Gayle was casual and matter-of-fact in introducing Moggs, calling her ‘a very good friend of mine’. The phrase came from the lexicon of TV talk-show hosts and meant — in itself — as near to nothing as made no difference. But Moggs’s smile as he said it seemed charged, momentarily, with both pride and pain. It asserted that the sheriff had no better friend; and it admitted, at the same time, that there was no better word for what she was to him.

The two women shook hands and sized each other up. ‘Oh, you’re a cop, all right,’ Moggs said, with a chuckle.

‘Got the look?’ Kennedy asked, ruefully.

‘In spades, darlin’, and you can take that as a compliment. My papa was a cop and so are both of my brothers. Anyone who’s got that set to their shoulders, I tend to think of them as being at the very least a kissing cousin.’

Which explains why you’re dating the sheriff, Kennedy thought. She allowed Moggs to shoo her through a bead curtain into the kitchen, where waffles, eggs and bacon awaited her. They were surprisingly good, as was the coffee and the orange juice — the latter, apparently, squeezed by hand using an old-fashioned crank-operated juicer that had pride of place on one of the countertops. Kennedy had been feeling physically and emotionally lagged, but the breakfast restored her, and her replies to Moggs’s good-natured interrogation became steadily less monosyllabic.

So how long had Kennedy been in the Detective Division? Six years, give or take.

And had she always wanted to be a cop? Pretty much always. It was a family tradition (‘Usually is,’ Moggs agreed).

Was this her first visit to the States? No, second. Kennedy had spent a week in New York once, with a girlfriend — or girl friend, rather; one of many false moves in a relationship that had remained bafflingly platonic despite all the signs of developing into something more primal and fulfilling. Kennedy didn’t mention the girl: she had no idea how Moggs and Gayle felt about homosexuality, and she didn’t want to bring additional awkwardness into a situation that was already slopping over with the stuff.

‘I went to London once,’ Moggs confided. ‘Had a really rotten time there. It was high summer and it didn’t do anything but rain. Took the next month or so just to get dry again. Also, I had to point at the menus in restaurants because I discovered I couldn’t speak the language — even though it’s meant to be the same language!’ She laughed uproariously at her own joke. Kennedy laughed along.

‘So anyway,’ Moggs said, just as suddenly serious. ‘This murder investigation of yours … Web won’t talk to me about it because he doesn’t want to abuse his position — me being a journalist and him being an officer of the law — but he said that you might want to talk about it, and if you did, he couldn’t stop you. So I thought, hell, if I show you mine, you might be prepared to show me yours. What do you say?’

Kennedy decided to go for blunt honesty. ‘I can’t answer that until I know what yours is.’ And if it turns out to be ghosts, I’m probably going to have to throw your hospitality back in your face.

Moggs conceded the point with a grin. ‘That’s true. That’s very true. Listen, though. Web’s a good man, isn’t he? I mean, you only just met him and I bet you could tell that. He’s so good, he thinks everyone else is good, too. That’s kind of a weakness, in a cop.’

‘Sitting right here!’ Gayle protested.

‘Shut up, Web,’ Moggs told him, with affection. She kept her eyes on Kennedy the whole time and there was maybe a bit of a glint in them. ‘But I’m a news hack, Sergeant, so I know most folks is dirty. I imagine you’d agree with that, right?’

‘I’d say fifty-fifty,’ Kennedy allowed, warily.

‘Well,’ said Moggs. ‘I wouldn’t. I’d say the odds are way longer than that. So here’s how it works. Web gets a message from an out-of-towner, a fellow cop, and it’s a request for help. And Web’s first thought in that situation is, How can I help this person? Whereas my first thought is, What’s the scam, here? What do I stand to lose? What does this look like if you walk around it a few times and poke it with a stick? You get me?’

Kennedy saw the question behind the question and knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that she’d been blown out of the water. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I get you.’

‘So while Web rolls out the red carpet for you and tells me all these amazing things about you — how smart you are, and how polite, and the amazing accent and everything — I can’t help thinking, So who is this Sergeant Kennedy and what exactly is her angle? Because everyone’s got an angle, right?’

‘Yeah,’ Kennedy said. ‘I guess that’s true.’

‘And your angle is that you’re not a cop any more. You got busted back down to civilian, or else you quit — depends who I ask. But you forgot to mention that to Web when you asked him to assist you in your investigation.’

Kennedy was surprised to find herself blushing. She knew it was just a matter of time before someone checked her credentials and found that they were no good. She hadn’t expected the moment to be so painful when it came.

She turned to Gayle. ‘I’m really sorry, Sheriff,’ she said, meaning it. ‘You must think I was using you pretty cynically, and maybe I was. But you wouldn’t believe what I’ve done already to make this case. What I’ve lost. And I couldn’t give it up. Even when it stopped being mine, when I stopped being police, I couldn’t give it up.’

She stood, ready to leave either on her own or in his custody, but Gayle broke into a chuckle at her strained, solemn face.

‘Sit down, Sergeant,’ he told her. ‘I don’t see what you said as a lie, so much. I reckon there’s some people are cops before they get a badge, and they go on being cops after they give the badge back. Or they never get a badge, like Moggs here, but still got the instincts and the way of looking at the world.’

‘It’s in the blood,’ Moggs said, immodestly. ‘Seriously, Ms Kennedy — I guess I shouldn’t call you sergeant — I wasn’t trying to rub your nose in any of this. I was just telling you that we know. We figured you out. But you don’t have any jurisdiction over here anyway, and I know for a fact that you were working this case until your last day on the job. All you done wrong, in the world’s eyes, is not to stop. And the other thing is, Web hasn’t broken any rules in helping you. All of this is public domain stuff, as far as that goes. The County Sheriff can tell who he likes about a case in progress, if they ask.’

‘Although he generally doesn’t,’ Gayle interjected. ‘I wouldn’t want you to think I’d be this indiscreet with anyone who just walked in off the street, Sergeant.’

‘Hell,’ said Moggs, ‘the plain truth of it is, you’re working on our very own favourite cabbage patch, and that’s why we wanted to break bread with you, and that’s why I want to share with you. So what do you say?’

She thrust out a hand. Still blushing, Kennedy took it — not in a formal shake but in a slap and thumb-lock that felt a lot more intense and reassuring.

‘Come on through to the living room,’ Moggs said. ‘And I’ll show you what I got.’

She led the way back through the curtain and across a narrow hall into the warm and welcoming space, full of soft furniture and sunset colours. A massive sofa wore a crocheted throw adorned with a stylised but splendid American eagle. ‘Actually,’ Moggs said, as soon as she had Kennedy sat down on the sofa, ‘this might be the kind of thing where we need to fortify ourselves with some more coffee. I’ll go brew a fresh pot.’

She scooted back through into the kitchen and after a minute Gayle followed her, muttering something about helping to carry the tray. Left alone, Kennedy read the walls while her heart rate slowed to normal. The walls were covered with photographs, and Eileen Moggs herself showed in none of them. There was a wall of portraits, some of which Kennedy recognised: Webster Gayle (twice), George Clooney, Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Bono, Donald Rumsfeld scowling like the devil on crack. The facing wall was all places: the Grand Canyon, Route 66 complete with iconic sign and biker flotilla, Anasazi ruins, cactuses, the state legislature being mobbed by hundreds of demonstrators, and one very disturbing image of a desert setting where a group of uniformed police or state troopers (Kennedy didn’t know the uniform code well enough to tell for sure) posed solemnly around the corpse of a black man.

Gayle came in carrying three mugs on a tray, backing through the beads with his head ducked down. Moggs followed with a plate of cookies and — a little incongruously — a bottle of Jim Beam. Gayle set the tray down and Moggs twisted the cap off the bourbon. ‘I usually have a shot of this in my coffee,’ she said to Kennedy. ‘Just a small one. Symbolic, really, but it takes the edge off edgy things.’

She spiked her own drink, looked at Kennedy with the bottle raised and ready.

‘Are we going to be talking about edgy things?’

Moggs grinned. ‘Didn’t we already?’

‘Go ahead,’ Kennedy said, and Moggs poured.

‘I’ll pass,’ Gayle said. ‘I gotta go back to work after this.’

‘I’m still on the clock,’ Moggs growled.

‘Sure. But everyone expects a newshound to be drunk.’

They ribbed each other with the easy intimacy of lovers. They didn’t need to laugh at each other’s jokes. Moggs went across to an over-sized L-shaped desk in a corner of the room and returned with a very thick olive-green file folder, which she put down on the table between them, pushing the plate of cookies over to one side to make space: the pièce de résistance.

‘Okay,’ she said, with the air of someone getting down to brass tacks. ‘This is our dead-men-walking file.’

Kennedy hadn’t been feeling any thrill of anticipation, but experienced a sinking feeling, all the same. ‘The ghosts of Flight 124?’ she said.

‘Absolutely,’ Moggs confirmed. ‘Take a look. I promise you revelations, signs and wonders.’

‘I’m … not a believer in this stuff,’ Kennedy protested, queasily but without much force.

‘Oh, me neither, Sergeant. Read it anyway. Then we’ll talk.’

A half-hour later, Kennedy was still reading, watched by her indulgent hosts — but the signs and wonders had yet to put in an appearance. In fact, the contents of the file were exactly what she would have expected them to be: a warmed-over soup of urban legends, done-in-one-sentence spooky stories and sad self-delusions.

All the usual suspects were in there: the man who sent emails full of indecipherable gibberish from his office computer when his body was lying on a slab in an Arizona morgue; the woman who felt her dead husband’s hand on her shoulder and his kiss on her cheek at the exact moment that the plane went down; the car left running on a driveway in the middle of the night (‘My wife’s keys were in the ignition — she had them on her when she died, I swear it!’); the mother-and-child stick figures drawn in the condensation of a nursery window, and the sweet old lady identifying them unhesitatingly, and tearfully, as the work of her granddaughter (‘She always drew herself with curly hair, even though she grew the curls out a year ago’). And so on, and so forth, with minor and uninteresting variations. The tales people tell each other to convince themselves, against all the odds, that death is not the end.

Kennedy closed the file, still only half-read, to signify that she was done with it. If anything, she’d drawn it out because she felt more or less convinced now that Gayle and Moggs were evangelists for one of the more surreal American churches and she was about to have to tell them both that their sandwich quotient was deficient for picnicking purposes. ‘Like I said,’ she repeated, as neutrally as she could manage, ‘I don’t really subscribe to the whole life after death thing. This is interesting, but it’s really not my kind of—’

‘Interesting?’ Moggs was incredulous. ‘Why would you say that, Ms Kennedy? Why, most of this is the same garbage the supermarket crap-sheets try to feed us every damn day of the week. It’s so far from interesting, I can’t get through six pages of it without losing the will to live.’

‘Well, then …’ Kennedy foundered. ‘Why show it to me?’

‘That’s the right question,’ Moggs said. ‘And I’m gonna answer it with another question. What do you notice about this nonsense? What’s the pattern?’ There was something a little sly or smug in her voice: the tone of the teacher who already knows the right answer and is waiting for you to chip in with the wrong one.

Kennedy went back to the file, scanned the first few pages again with no more enthusiasm than she’d managed the first time. ‘No actual sightings,’ she said. ‘Not much that’s verifiable. Nothing at all that couldn’t have been faked or imagined. It’s perfect tabloid-fodder: facts and names kept to a minimum, so it’s hard to cross-check anything and there’s maximum room to manoeuvre. Stories from one agency picked up and polished by another …’

‘Absolutely,’ Moggs said. ‘I’ve seen it all before, Ms Kennedy. Listen, can I call you Heather? Thank you. I’ve seen it all before, Heather, and it sounds like you have, too. But like they say, you have to look to the exception to prove the rule — and this time around, the exception is a pretty big, glaring one.’

Kennedy shrugged with her hands. ‘I’m not seeing it.’

She could see Gayle yearning to break in but holding himself back — presumably seeing this as Moggs’s show rather than his own.

‘The truth is,’ Moggs said, backing off just a fraction, ‘it took me a pretty fair time to see it, too. Web was driving me crazy with this stuff. Even when he wasn’t talking about it, he had a look on his face that said he was thinking about it. So I picked up this here scrapbook, basically so I could beat him round the head with it — show him all the different ways it was moonshine. Then it hit me — I think because it was all in the same place, and Web had tried to sort it by date and time and everything. That was sort of the key. Go back to the start, Heather, and bear in mind that the file’s in chronological order.’

The first article concerned Peter Bonville, the clerk whose work routine was so powerful that death couldn’t hold him back from turning up at the office, fixing himself a cup of coffee, firing up his computer and working through his inbox. Something nagged at the edge of Kennedy’s attention. She checked the dateline: the fifth of July. Three days after CA124 went down.

‘This isn’t the first,’ she said. ‘There was one datelined on the fourth.’

‘Sylvia Gallos,’ Moggs confirmed, approvingly. ‘Right. That threw me, too, at first — but it’s a parallax error. You see, Gallos called into a local radio station — late-night talk show, same night it happened. So there’s no time lag. It happens on the fourth and it’s filed on the fourth. The Bonville story hits a day later but it happened two days earlier. It’s just that it didn’t turn into news until someone thought to notice.’

Clearly, they were getting to the meat of the matter now. Moggs didn’t actually lower her voice but she leaned in close as though what she was about to say deserved the theatrical attributes of conspiracy. ‘There were a lot of different versions of Peter Bonville’s story, with a crazy range of details about what he supposedly did when he checked into work that day. Like, Bonville swiped in with his own ID. Wrong. No one found any evidence of him coming or going. Bonville fixed himself a cup of coffee and left it half-drunk in his cubicle. Wrong. As far as I can tell, only the office area, which was open-plan, got a visitation: the kitchen space was elsewhere and it wasn’t touched. Bonville talked to some of his fellow employees, who didn’t know they were seeing a ghost until later. Wrong. Nobody saw him. All the evidence that he’d been there came from his computer, his workstation, which had been turned on and used.’

‘Used for what?’ Kennedy asked. She felt a prickle of tension on the back of her neck, on her forearms. Was there actually some pea of truth buried under the damp mattresses of all these lazy, overused fairy tales?

‘Well, again, there’s different versions,’ Moggs said. ‘Some of them have Bonville surfing porn sites. Most of them say he sent emails: either full of random gibberish or scary complaints about being lost in a desert somewhere where the sun never comes up. Again, I checked all that with Bonville’s employers, the New York Department of Public Works. They didn’t have to talk to me, of course — wouldn’t even have had to talk to Web, if he’d called, because his jurisdiction ends at the county line. But they wanted to talk. They were kind of griped by all the crazy stories going around and they wanted to set the record straight. They said Bonville’s mail program hadn’t been opened and neither had his browser. All he did — all whoever it was did — was access a few files and delete them. So they assumed it had to be a routine hacker attack rather than a ghostly visitation.’

That preliminary prickle had become something a lot more urgent now, which had Kennedy sitting forward too, as though she was about to lean across the table and kiss Moggs — which might have caused Sheriff Gayle to revise his good opinion of her. ‘Which files? Do we know what they were?’

‘No, we don’t. And they don’t — because the department’s main server got a big viral infection later that day and all the back-up storage got wiped clean before they could do anything about it. All that was left was a registry table with the names of some of the files on it, but they’re not informative. Data 1, data 2, data 3, stuff like that.’

Kennedy’s first thought was an obvious one: Rotgut? But no, that was vanishingly unlikely. If anyone on Stuart Barlow’s team had been talking to a minor official in a public agency in New York, she would have come across the data trail long before now. This was different: not Rotgut. But sufficiently like Rotgut for the response to have been the same. Send in Michael Brand.

Moggs was still talking. ‘So there’s not much to work from at that end. But here’s what got me going, Sergeant. I said this was the earliest of the ghost incidents. I didn’t tell you just how early. That registry table had precise date stamps for the last time each of the files was modified — which was when they were deleted. They’re clustered really tight together, in a five-minute period starting at 11.13 a.m. on July the second. In other words, the files got wiped while Flight CA124 was still in the air: a good ten minutes or so before Peter Bonville became a ghost.’

Kennedy checked the times for herself and then observed a minute of silence for Moggs’s detective work: or five seconds of silence, anyway. ‘You’re right,’ she said, full of admiration. ‘You’re totally … you nailed it, Miss Moggs. Eileen. This was a pre-emptive haunting.’

Moggs laughed, clearly liking both the term and the praise. ‘Pre-emptive haunting, then two days of nothing, then all these other ghost stories kick in. So by the time Bonville’s supervisor figures out they’re missing some files and tells head office, all this other stuff is already starting to come out. And that’s how it was reported — another ghost from Flight 124.’

Kennedy nodded slowly, thinking backwards and forwards along that chain of logic. ‘That’s actually really clever,’ she murmured. ‘You cover your trail as far as you can, but when you realise it’s not covered enough, you throw out a whole lot of false trails so it looks like it doesn’t lead anywhere.’

‘“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.’

49

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”?’

50

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.’

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.’

51

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.

Kennedy abandoned her pantomime of total immobility and launched herself into a much faster crawl, quickly covering the distance that separated her from Gayle’s body. The woman turned, saw her, began to break into a cold smile and then realised, an instant later, what Kennedy was aiming for. As Kennedy reached the sheriff, the woman slammed the magazine home into her semi-automatic, aimed and fired in one quick, liquid movement. Too quick: the cartridge hung up as it entered the chamber and the gun clicked to no effect.

The woman dropped the gun and ran towards Kennedy.

Kennedy pulled the snap-lock strap away from the holster on Gayle’s belt and drew the FN Five-Seven from its sheath. She didn’t even have time to see whether he was still alive, still breathing. She thumbed the safety as she rolled on to her back. Was that the safety? It was where she would expect the safety to be, to the back of the grip and on the left, but maybe she’d just ejected the magazine.

The gun seemed too light and had a plastic feel, like a child’s toy. The sun was in her eyes now, but the woman’s body as she ran towards Kennedy occulted the sun. That plus the distance compensated for the clumsy, one-handed grip and the blurring of her vision. She thrust her arm out straight in front of her and fired.

People who like the Five-Seven are impressed by its capacity of twenty rounds. Those who hate it are appalled by the muzzle flash it spits out sometimes, like a searchlight beam full in your eye. Through strobe bursts that seared white on black against the inside of her eyeballs, Kennedy pulled the trigger again and again and again in a steady, mechanical rhythm, moving her wrist through small increments to right and left to give a quartering fire.

Finally, the gun was empty and the trigger wouldn’t yield any more. She let it fall from her hands.

When she could move again, the first thing she did — even before ripping up her shirt with her right hand and her teeth to make tourniquets — was check on the woman’s condition. As it turned out, only two of those twenty shots had hit, and one was a surface wound to the woman’s calf.

The other had gone through the left side of her chest, and from the sounds she was making, it was pretty clear that it had punctured a lung.

There wasn’t a whole lot that Kennedy could do for her. In any case, Gayle came first. Stanching the sheriff’s shoulder wound with only her right hand in play and the bones of her left arm grating against each other whenever she moved was like juggling chainsaws with barbed wire mittens on. It took a long time and by the time she’d finished, the blood in her own wound was flowing sluggishly, starting to clot. She didn’t dare pull the knife out and start it flowing again, and she couldn’t dress the wound with the knife in place, so she just left it there.

Gayle’s breathing was so shallow his chest didn’t even seem to move. Kennedy could only detect it by putting her cheek to his mouth and feeling the slight stir of air.

She called the incident in using the radio in the Biscayne, probably not making much sense by this time because her mind was starting to float away a little. She heard Connie — the bulldog at the despatch desk — shouting, ‘Is Web okay? Is Web okay?’ again and again. Then, ‘Anstruther. Anstruther’s coming.’ Then silence.

In the silence, the woman’s voice: an obscene chorus of choking, bubbling sounds. Kennedy stumbled across to her, found her livid face painted red like a Hollywood Indian, with the burns and with her own blood.

Gayle had left his jacket on the Biscayne’s back seat. Kennedy was able to wad it up and get it under the woman’s head and shoulders, which she thought might clear her airways marginally. It didn’t seem to make much difference, though.

The woman was still trying to talk: in some foreign language at first, full of liquid labials (much less pretty to hear when the liquid was blood) and occasional glottal concatenations, but then in English and finally in some sort of pre-linguistic mewling.

Before she died, her dark gaze fixed on Kennedy’s face with a feral intensity, she whispered a secret.

It seemed to give her some comfort that Kennedy heard it and that Kennedy wept.