The Dead Sea Deception (40 page)

Stick with plan A – where A stood for
absurd
.

He counted to three in his mind, then sat bolt upright. He took careful aim, even though he knew how well he must be showing up against the brightness of the fire at his back. A shot whucked past his shoulder, close enough to feel. A second smacked into the tiles between his legs.

Holding the out-breath, holding the target, he shut out the world and squeezed the trigger.

Instantly, the night turned into day: specifically, the
dies irae
, when God loses his patience and says enough is damned well enough.

It was endgame.

Tillman and the woman were effectively trapped in the building and the building was burning to the ground.

Mariam expected them to try the windows and was ready to push them back inside when they did. In fact, she felt almost certain she’d hit Tillman when he appeared at the bedroom window, where she was already aiming, and she would not have been surprised if they’d seen no more of either him or the woman.

It was Ezei who heard the sounds from the roof first. He whistled – two short notes, to get Mariam’s attention – and pointed up. She saw the movement there, abstract at first and then suddenly resolving into the woman’s head and shoulders. She fired and the woman ducked down out of sight.

Of course, out of sight was purely a matter of geometry. Mariam didn’t need to tell Ezei and Cephas what to do. In synchrony with her, they stepped back from the walls of the house. Two figures were moving up on the roof now, but they blended in with their background for the most part: it was only when some part of one or other body broke above the line of the roof and was picked out against the glow of the licking flames that they could be seen. Mariam raised her gun on to that line and waited.

Twice something bulked briefly against the flames and she fired. The second time, shots were returned and she had to duck back in closer to the wall out of Tillman’s line of sight.

She considered, for a moment, leaving it at that, allowing the two to burn to death in their own time, without further complications. But the roof wasn’t completely isolated, and Tillman and Kennedy had seemed to be moving to the rear, from where it might be possible to jump across to the nearest of the out-house buildings.

Mariam whistled and Ezei looked in her direction again.
To the back
, she signalled, and he took off at once. Quickly, she jogged along the front of the building until she could see Cephas on the other side. He looked round at her as she appeared and she gave him the same silent instruction.

She herself, Mariam decided, would stay at the front. It seemed impossible now that Tillman and Kennedy would duck back into the building, whose interior must be one undifferentiated mass of flame, and try to make it to the window again – but if they did, or even more inconceivably made a run for the door, then Mariam would be in place to shoot them down.

She watched approvingly as Ezei and Cephas circled, firing as they went. For a moment, she glimpsed the woman’s shoulder and part of her back. Kennedy appeared to have gotten most of the way to the rear end of the roof ridge, where the abrupt vertical of a chimney stack stood in her way, providing a little cover so long as she didn’t try to move past it. But if she stayed where she was, she had about a minute more before the roof collapsed, and in the meantime she stood out against the white-painted chimney every time she shifted her balance. Cephas took aim – but then suddenly shifted to fire at a different target, presumably Tillman. He squeezed off two shots.

The third shot came from the roof and Mariam
saw
it at the
same time that she heard it: a luminous red streak in the air, drawing the shortest possible line between two points. The first point was Tillman. The second was the truck in which he had arrived.

The explosion was spectacularly sudden and agonisingly bright. Burning air washed over Mariam and slapped her off her feet. A buffeting thunderclap arrived so long afterwards that it seemed to belong to a different explosion altogether.

Groggy, she raised her head and blinked into the roiling smoke. Her ears were ringing, her eyes were blind and the hot air she breathed was a soup of overcooked petroleum. She tried to shout for Cephas and broke into jagged coughs that ripped her seared throat as though she were chewing on broken glass.

Then she saw a strange thing: a vision. The world had turned to black and white, and a man drawn in soot on grainy chalk was doing a ridiculous slapstick dance, his movements discontinuous and unconvincing. He fell down, as Charlie Chaplin was accustomed to fall down, with such energy in the fall that he rolled himself almost upright again, only to fall a second time.

It was Cephas. And it wasn’t a dance or a comedic act. It was his death throes. The fire was all over him, clasping him like a lover, the burning petrol drenching his clothes and his skin, pulling the moisture from inside his body and turning it to vapour to fling it into the sky in a violent and terrible transubstantiation.

Mariam screamed, and the scream hurt so much that her mind almost shut down. She had to fight to stay conscious.

Her eyes streaming, she staggered to her feet. She saw Ezei running around the rear of the farmhouse, then stopping abruptly as he saw what she had seen: Cephas turned into an offering to God. ‘Ezei!’ she croaked, as she started towards him. She had to shape the sound with blistered lips. ‘Ezei, don’t—’

Don’t go near him
, was what she meant to say.
Don’t step into the light, you’ll only make yourself a target
. But Tillman’s gun sounded even as she spoke, and the spectacular lighting allowed Mariam to see Ezei’s fate with far too much clarity. The smoke beside his head rolled and reddened: some of that smoke was Ezei’s blood and brains, exiting through a hole made by a heavy shell at close to medium range. He stumble-stepped to a halt, already dead, and fell heavily to the ground.

Mariam was running before she knew it, running for the barn, because that was what they’d do now. They’d jump and they’d be vulnerable when they jumped, vulnerable when they landed. She could still bring this home, she could still avenge, she could still finish the mission.

The closed barn doors hung off their hinges. She tugged and heaved until they opened, stepped back and then launched herself into the darkness inside in a tight vertical roll. She tensed as she unfolded, gun in one hand,
sica
blade in the other. If she saw him before he saw her, she’d use the knife. If it came to a shoot-out, she’d trust to the gun first and pray he lived long enough for her to get in close and slit his throat.

From outside came a soft thump, and then a second. They’d climbed
over
the barn, not into it.

Mariam screamed again – a profanity she wouldn’t even have admitted that she knew. She ran outside, but the burning truck and the burning building and the air super-saturated with smoke seeled her eyes more effectively than any blindfold. There were running footsteps in the darkness beyond the painful light. She ran after them, firing in that direction until the clip emptied and the trigger locked.

Then she tripped on something in the dark and sprawled on the rough ground, tearing the skin of her palms. The breath was knocked out of her. Her chest felt like it had been ripped open,
and the skin of her burned face was too tight on her skull, stretched like a death mask. She rolled over on her back in the long grass, spent. For a moment she felt she was dying. But the pain, which intensified with each breath, told her that she was still alive.

Through the agony, she began to glimpse the faint, uncertain outlines of a consolation. God wasn’t done with her, yet. And she wasn’t done with the monsters who had snuffed out the lives of her beloved cousins.

A moment came, in their running, when Tillman wondered what it was, exactly, that they were running from.

The shooters, obviously. But he’d laid out two of them, one with an exploding petrol tank, the other in a more conventional way, with a bullet. He’d tried to count, while he was up on the roof, and was almost certain that there could only be one or two more of them out there, in all.

But that meant one or two who’d actually fired: they could have reinforcements ready to hand and ways of bringing them to bear real quick. Maybe the scream they’d heard, after they jumped from the roof of the barn, was exactly that: a summons. It had sounded like a woman’s voice. He wondered, inconsequentially, if it was the woman from the boat, who’d landed a knife into his thigh at thirty yards. That wasn’t a woman to face in the dark, with an empty gun.

Better to run, then, and take stock later, rather than stay and fight what might be a premature last stand. Kennedy had the disc in her pockets: they’d gotten … something out of this, and it was something the pale assassins had swarmed to keep them away from. So it was worth having. It had to be.

Kennedy was keeping up with him, at first, and then suddenly she was outpacing him. His hip, still stiff from the knife wound,
slowed him down. He put on an extra burst of speed, in spite of the pain, and caught up with her as they reached a shallow ditch that seemed to be the southern edge of the property line.

Negotiating the ditch, Tillman walked into a barbed wire fence, but it was only a single length of cable and it did minimal damage. He clambered over it and found himself on a dirt path that led back down towards the distant road on a steep angle. He looked back at Kennedy, who was struggling over the wire behind him. She either didn’t see his offered hand or else chose to ignore it.

This was neutral ground: not Dovecote. They slowed at last, by silent consent deciding that they’d run far enough for now. Kennedy bent from the waist, hands gripping her knees, and gradually got her breath back under control. Tillman stayed upright, looking behind for pursuit: but they would already have heard any pursuit that wasn’t made up of ninjas.

‘Where now?’ Kennedy asked, haltingly. ‘We’re … in the middle of … bloody nowhere, and you blew up the truck!’

‘Felt like a good idea at the time,’ Tillman said.

Kennedy laughed – a harsh sound that seemed torn out of her. ‘Did the job,’ she observed, grimly, and then, ‘How? How did you do that?’

By the dumbest of dumb luck
, was the answer.
The mere chance that I couldn’t find a lighter to cauterise my wounds, back in Folkestone, and had to settle for matches; and a fun fact from a decades-ago chemistry lesson
. ‘I turned a regular bullet into an incendiary,’ he told her. ‘The miracle ingredient was ground-up match-heads: they’re mostly crystallised red phosphorus. Two-hundred-degree ignition point, more or less, which is about the same as the petrol in the tank – but you’ve only got to hit that temperature for a fraction of a second, say with impact friction, and then it sparks like crazy because it’s a
degraded form of white phosphorus, and that’s a natural pyrophore.’

He wound down because that was as much as he knew, really. As a kid, he’d done it with BB pellets, anointing the noses of the tiny leaden slugs with gritty red slime and then waiting for them to dry: shooting at cans of lighter fluid at ten metres on a home-made range, then marvelling at the angel of light and heat that spread its wings suddenly above their tiny backyard.

Kennedy looked at him, in silence, for a long time, seeming about to speak but saying nothing. Tillman waited anyway, knowing that something was coming.

‘That’s two people dead,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Two people dead. Extra-judicial killings. You killed them, Tillman.’

He shrugged, genuinely not sure what response she wanted from him. ‘So?’

‘So I’m meant to sodding arrest you. This is … messed up. I’m not your moll, or your sidekick, or your … anything else. We can’t go on meeting like this.’

He breathed out slowly, his own equilibrium escaping him. It had been a wild night even by his sloppy standards, and the deaths, in memory, left him with no sense of triumph. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We can’t. Not for much longer. But the deal stands, Kennedy. Whatever you get from those discs or the papers …’

‘Yes? Whatever I get?’

‘Well, I killed for it. So it’s mine, too.’

She stared at him in silence again, and again he waited her out. This time there was no sequel. Whatever it was she wanted to say, she didn’t manage to find the words for it. She walked on past him down the lane, heading towards the road. He respected her mood, allowed her a whole lot of distance all the way down.

What had happened at Dovecote Farm could not be hidden.

Kennedy called Division from the roadside, reporting the results of their search, Combes’s death and her encounter with the killers. She left out nothing – except that in her account, she’d made her own way to the farm after being separated from Combes, and she’d been alone when she escaped from the blaze. About Tillman, she was silent.

Squad cars and ambulances, fire tenders and vans with flashing lights began to arrive within the next half-hour. They cordoned off the site, put out the flames still feeding fitfully on the remains of the farmhouse and the truck, and began the long, involved task of working the scene. Kennedy wished them joy of it.

Summerhill himself was almost the last to arrive. There could be any number of reasons for that, but one was certainly his backtracking through the files before he left Division, looking for the data trail that led to this pandemonium, making damn sure he hadn’t given his blessing to it.