The Dead Sea Deception (58 page)

‘Ha ana mashadr
,’ she said. ‘Do you know the equipment already, Kuutma? I know many people spend a season at the pump station, when they’re young, to learn the rudiments.’

‘That practice came in after my time,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’m good with machines generally, though, and I’m familiar in theory with what you do.’

‘Of course.’ She nodded. ‘And I imagine that the only machines you’ll need to operate tomorrow will be the sluices.’

She showed him where they were and what they did. There were four, two drawing from the Cutzamala reservoirs and two directly from the aquifer below the city which was all that remained of Lake Texcoco. Selaa was very proud of the system, and she had reason to be. ‘In the last decades,’ she boasted, ‘the city outside has suffered continual crises of water shortage. It’s sinking into the lake bed at the rate of three inches a year, Kuutma. Did you know that? That’s how quickly Ciudad de Mexico is using up the resources of its own water table. But our water flow has never been interrupted. It’s never even suffered
a drop in pressure. The people take what they need, as God allows.’

Kuutma pulled her back to the practicalities. ‘One of these sluices has been modified, I assume,’ he said to her. ‘Which one, and how does it work?’

‘It’s not a sluice,’ she said. ‘It’s just a tank here – one of the purification tanks – which will feed into the flow through the sluice when it reaches the third station. That’s this bank of controls here. The water comes in at station one, runs through the aqueduct under Em Hadderek, and out through these branch channels. But all the branch channels will be closed after we leave. The water will flow straight through and back into Cutzamala – back into the main water supply of Ciudad de Mexico. All you have to do is open the sluice gate with this lever, and then whenever you’re ready, dump the concentrate from the tank into the water.’

She made the sign of the noose. Kuutma raised an eyebrow.

‘I’m sorry,’ Selaa said, a little sheepishly. ‘I’d feel sad even for the death of so many animals.’

‘But you wouldn’t ask God to bless their carcasses.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Thank you, watermaster. I think this will be easy enough. Isn’t there a control, though, called the
tsa’ot khep
?’

Selaa looked puzzled. ‘The “Voice of the Flood”? That’s a defence mechanism, Kuutma. There won’t be anything left that needs to be defended.’

‘I know. But I’m curious. Please show it to me.’

‘With the biggest pumps removed, it won’t work in any case. Not as it’s meant to work anyway. It’s this control here: the sluices slaved to this lever, and the channels re-routed through the slides – ten of them in all – along here.’

‘Will all these controls still be functional tomorrow?’

Selaa nodded. ‘The power runs to the whole bank,’ she said. ‘I can’t turn off parts of the station house: nobody ever saw a need to.’

‘No. Of course. Again, thank you for your time. You must be very busy. I presume you have a set of keys to hand to me?’

She gave him her own, taken from a loop on her belt. ‘There’s a copy set in my office,’ she said. ‘But it should be these that lock the doors for the last time: they were given to me by Chanina, who was watermaster when I first came here. Please keep them when you’re done, Kuutma. It would make me happy for you to have them. Unless you think you’d have no use for such a souvenir.’

‘I’ll keep them until I die,’ he promised her. He bowed formally and withdrew.

I’d feel sad even for the death of so many animals
. It was a sentimental thought, and sentimentality was something he’d seen little of in Ginat’Dania. It felt and looked like weakness – a weakness the people, because of their tiny numbers, could not afford to indulge. But what of his own weakness? What of the holes in his own armour, made by equally indefensible emotions?

He was going to kill twenty million. And yet he only cared about one.

Nethqadash shmakh
, oh Lord. Help me to draw a breath in which there is only You.

Crossing the border turned out to be easier than Tillman had imagined. But thinking about it in safe hindsight as he threaded the back roads of a nameless hinterland just south of Chihuahua, he could see why it worked that way.

The resources of the state of Arizona were bent on stopping Mexicans from coming north across the border. What patrols they saw – and he knew there were a whole lot – had all been looking at the traffic in that one direction, and were not inclined to view one white man heading south in a suspicious light.

One white man, alone, because Kennedy lay slumped in the back of the Lincoln under a blanket, completely out of sight and asleep most of the time. She was still in a lot of discomfort from her injuries. Tillman didn’t have much to give her by way of pain relief, but he did have some more of the desflurane. When the pain got to be too much, he gave her a little of it to sniff on a paper tissue, after which she fell into a deep, scarily motionless slumber.

For the border crossing, he shifted her, with apologies, to the wheel well in the boot. Kennedy was afraid that folding herself into the narrow space would open up the wound in her side, but Tillman insisted. They couldn’t take the chance that a casual search would find her. He was proved right when the
guards at the border station north of Nogales threw open the boot and rummaged through his luggage – the innocuous parts of it anyway, since the guns and explosives were inside the gutted and rebuilt rear seats – before sending him on his way.

He stopped as soon as he dared, about two miles further on, and helped Kennedy out of her confinement. The bloodied bandages at her side showed that her fears had been justified. Tillman got her to strip to the waist and changed the dressing quickly and expertly. He admired her breasts as he did so, because they were impressive and right there in front of his face, but he tried his best to edit out the memory afterwards, or at least to keep his mind on other things. Normally when he doled out medicine to fellow soldiers, they were neither man nor woman to him: you needed a level of detachment when doing running repairs on the failing body of someone you’d been swapping jokes with an hour or two earlier.

This seemed to be a good time to give Kennedy the clothes he’d brought along for her: anonymous blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a loose-fitting black jacket, serviceable trainers. Kennedy struggled into them, Tillman helping to manoeuvre her bound-up arm. Nothing fit her perfectly, but it was all more or less okay, and there was no denying she was a lot less conspicuous now. Like a tourist from north of the border, trying to look stylish but casual and failing in both aims.

‘I don’t think I’m going to make this,’ Kennedy groaned. ‘It’s another seven hundred miles. A whole day’s driving – a day and a night probably – and every time we go over a bump it’s like someone stuck a knitting needle in my kidneys.’

‘Take some more desflurane,’ Tillman suggested. ‘You can sleep all the way. Then we’ll take a couple of hours once we get there for you to put your brains back together.’

Kennedy shook her head emphatically. ‘I need to be awake for this,’ she said.

‘A day and a night,’ he reminded her. ‘You’re not going to stay awake the whole time, Heather. And if the pain gets to be too much, you might go into shock. Then I’d have to take you to a hospital, where they’d most likely match us up to the descriptions in some police APB. We just need to meet one person who’s more than half-awake and we’re solidly screwed.’

Kennedy chewed it over. ‘Yeah,’ she said at last, glumly, reluctantly. ‘Okay.’

She stretched out on the Lincoln’s back seat and Tillman doped her again: a stronger dose this time, but still well below the red line on the dosage chart he’d gotten along with the drug. Desflurane was a general anaesthetic after all, and sending Kennedy down too deep – into the realms where she’d need mechanical assistance even to breathe – was a real danger.

Tillman looked down at her, lying insensate, and experienced an unfamiliar twinge of conscience. Had he sucked Kennedy into his own madness or had they just met each other at a moment when she was mad enough to resonate on the same frequency? He covered her with a blanket, strapped her in at shoulder and waist with the seatbelts. He felt glad anyway, that he hadn’t told her her bed was mostly made of plastic explosive.

He kept to the back roads, even though the back roads were rougher and more treacherous. As night came on, he flicked the headlights to full beam and slowed down to forty, a compromise between their need to cover the distance before the search for them crossed the border and the more immediate need to drive around the crater-deep potholes instead of into them.

The desert night was as wide as a continent, and they were its sole inhabitants: a ghostly caterpillar threading the dark, with the beams of their headlights for its body and the Lincoln rocking
along at its tail end. Tillman found himself drifting into reverie: Rebecca and the children spoke to him, or at least he saw their faces and heard sounds suggestive of their voices. There were no real words, though, and no need for him to reply. The burden of what they were saying was:
soon
.

Outside Zacatecas, with maybe three hundred miles still to go, he looked for a billboard next to the road. When he found one, he pulled off the asphalt and eased the car in behind it, so it would be out of sight unless someone was actually looking for it.

He didn’t bother to lie down. He just slid the seat back a couple of inches, closed his eyes and slept at the wheel.

His dreams were formless and hideous things, but Rebecca’s face floated above all of them, calling him onwards.

Kennedy woke around seven, with sun-up. She muttered and turned, but couldn’t keep the light out of her eyes. Her throat was so dry she couldn’t swallow, dry to the point of agony, and her head throbbed to the rhythm of her own heartbeat.

They were still moving, or maybe moving again: the car yawed on its clapped-out shocks like a rubber dinghy in a squall.

‘Jesus,’ Kennedy groaned, thickly. ‘Where … where are we?’

‘Lopez Mateos,’ Tillman said. ‘It’s been all built up for the last thirty miles or so, but we’re not properly in the city yet – and Xochimilco is to the south. Say another hour.’

Without taking his eyes off the road, he reached over the back of the seat to hand Kennedy a bottle of water. She sat up, groggily, to drink it. She kept the first sip in her mouth, swilling it around, and then let it trickle down her throat in tiny increments. Even so, it made her stomach heave and her head spin. She persevered, while Tillman drove on in silence. Once the swollen membranes of her throat had eased a little, she could take larger swigs. Eventually she emptied the whole bottle. It did nothing to dull the ache in her head, but she felt a little more able to think around the pain.

She watched the anonymous suburbs and barrios roll by,
while her mind came back into focus by fits and starts. When Tillman pulled in, about halfway along an interminable row of one-storey breeze-block buildings, she didn’t realise at first why he was stopping. Then the smell of cooking reached her: eggs and bread and something spiced. Kennedy’s stomach turned a few more aggrieved pirouettes, but underneath the nausea she found she was hungry.

In the rear corner of the bare and busy cantina, they ate huevos rancheros and tiny bread rolls still hot from the oven. Kennedy kept the jacket on, draped loosely over her shoulders to hide the cast on her arm, and ate one-handed. The food tasted unexpectedly delicious, and Tillman let her wolf the breakfast down in silence. When she finally came up for air, he got straight to business.

‘I need to know where we’re going,’ he told her. ‘Xochimilco, you said, and we’re almost there now. But is there an address? Some place specific we’re headed?’

‘There’s no address,’ said Kennedy, pushing the empty plate away. She’d popped two Tylenol along with the eggs and sausage and, between the food and the lessened pain, was starting to feel more like a human being. ‘But I know it’s in the area served by a particular electrical generating station – and I think it’s going to turn out to be something big. Something like a whole office block or a row of office blocks.’

She told Tillman about Peter Bonville and the unexplained hiccups in power usage that had first put him on the track of the Judas tribe. Tillman frowned in concentration, drinking the information in. He waited until she’d finished before he asked any questions.

‘This was all recent?’

‘Up to a couple of months ago. Bonville was on his way back from Mexico City when Flight 124 went down – why he was on
it. And the crash happened on the same day Stuart Barlow was murdered.’

‘But you don’t think there was a connection?’

Kennedy shrugged. ‘It doesn’t sound likely. As far as we know, Barlow and Bonville never met and never communicated. They didn’t exactly move in the same circles. The only connection is that they both represented a threat to Michael Brand and his … well, his people, I suppose. The people who sent him out into the world.’

She fell silent, thinking about the words of the Judas Gospel: the Elohim and the Kelim, the two types of emissary that this group of ancient sectarian ninja maniacs sent out into the world. She made a connection suddenly – probably because her brain was cross-wired right then, and begun working in ways slightly aslant to its usual functioning.