The Dead Sea Deception (63 page)

Tillman was shaking. For a moment, Kuutma thought it was fear that made him tremble, but then realised that the man’s once-powerful frame was wracked with wrenching tears. ‘Alive!’ Tillman sobbed. ‘Grace is alive! My Grace is alive!’

In an excess of rage, Kuutma clubbed the huddled, helpless ruin in front of him again and again with the butt of the gun. ‘She hates you!’ he bellowed. ‘Didn’t you hear me? She hates you!’

Kuutma’s own hands were shaking now and there was little force to his blows. Crouched like a rat in a rainstorm, Tillman weathered them.

Kuutma touched the Sig once again to the back of the man’s skull. He still had the final, the unanswerable argument. It was a sublime instinct after all, that had made him start with Rebecca and save the worst for last.

‘Your sons—’ he began.

Movement from above caught his eye. Something falling. Kuutma jumped aside and the ornamental urn, pushed from a balustrade on a terrace way up over his head, smashed to the ground exactly where he’d just stood. Jagged shards of stone hit his face and body.

‘How much does God love you, Kuutma?’ a voice said, speaking from the air all around him.

It was Rebecca’s voice.

Six months in narcotics: the shortest posting you could take and still claim it on your CV as valid experience. What Kennedy didn’t know about drugs would fill whole libraries.

Ironically, what she knew about methamphetamine came from a homicide bust. A woman who’d killed her two flatmates and fellow addicts in their sleep with the spiked end of a mallet intended for tenderising steak. She’d tenderised them very thoroughly indeed. She’d also been happy to explain why: they’d been trying to kill her with microwaves and with poison soaked into the fabric of her pillow.

One in five long-term meth users will eventually succumb to an intractable mental illness known to clinicians as amphetamine psychosis. And Brand had been using regularly for at least thirteen years. He had to be at least a little crazy, even by the exacting standards of religious maniacs.

Kennedy walked slowly down the stairs towards Brand – or Kuutma, as he seemed to call himself – and Tillman. She’d lost the gun Tillman had given her, but she had a chair leg that she’d picked up along the way. She held it close to her side, where she hoped it would be hard to spot.

She was improvising desperately. All she’d really wanted to do was to stop the bastard from finishing that sentence. But she
seemed to have got his attention anyway: all she had to do now was keep it.

‘How much does God love you?’ she repeated, in the same cold, stern tone.

Kuutma didn’t answer. He seemed unable to speak. He stared at her as she came towards him, and took an involuntary step back.

‘Seems to me,’ Kennedy said, ‘that those he loves, he protects. He gives the faithful their reward on earth and he smites the heathen. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? And you’re the arm that does the smiting, so I reckon you should know if anybody does.’

Kuutma laughed suddenly, which wasn’t at all the reaction Kennedy was expecting – or hoping for. ‘Just you!’ he said. ‘I thought for a moment …’ He seemed to pull himself away from an interior precipice, a shudder running through his body. ‘God loves the people,
rhaka
. His covenant is with us. Only the fallen one cares about you.’

Kennedy had reached the bottom of the steps now, only ten feet from Kuutma. She looked at her watch, then met his stare and shrugged. ‘Getting a little late, isn’t he?’ she asked, mildly.

Kuutma’s eyes narrowed. ‘You’re going to die with a blasphemy on your lips,’ he told her.

Kennedy went on as though she hadn’t heard him. ‘More than twenty years late. You were supposed to wait for thirty centuries and then you’d get your turn in the big chair. But thirty centuries came and went, and you’re still living here in the dark like roaches. Hiding from the rest of the world. Sticking more and more fingers into more and more holes in the dike because the world is getting smaller all the time. Satellite surveillance, data monitoring, biometric passports and genetic fingerprinting. Even your electricity bills betray you, Kuutma. And you wait, and you wait, and still God doesn’t turn up, until you must feel
like the shy girl in the corner who never gets asked up for a dance.

‘And what are all your murders worth, in the end, if you’re not holy? If God didn’t bless you and tell you to fight, then what about all that blood on your soul?’

‘There is no blood on my soul,’ Kuutma said. She’d slowed to a halt and now he took a step towards her. The gun still in his hand, and aimed at her heart, he unhooked one of the nasty, angled knives from his waist. ‘I am forgiven.’

‘But only for killing,’ Kennedy reminded him. ‘Not for lies. So tell me the truth about one thing, Kuutma, before you kill me.’

Holding the knife at chest height, between index finger and forefinger, he tilted the blade to a sixty-degree angle and crooked his hand back to throw.

‘Ask me,’ he invited her.

‘Was the whole of this sorry spectacle because you couldn’t do the nasty with Rebecca Beit Whatever-her-name-was? Because I’ve heard of lovers’ balls, man, but this is really, really sad.’

Kuutma threw the knife.

Kennedy made a judgement call and threw herself to the right. It was the wrong direction, but the movement saved her anyway: her plaster cast had been built around a steel frame and the knife hit one of the struts, exposed by its recent baptism. The blade creased Kennedy’s cheek as it bounced up and away into the dark.

Kuutma drew a second blade. Kennedy threw herself forward, and with a wild swipe of the chair leg knocked the knife out of his hand. That just left the Sig-Sauer. It came up while she was still off-balance, and Kuutma had begun to pull back on the trigger, when the deafening peal of an explosion made him look
down, in shock, at his own chest. A supernova of blood expanded there, covering the whole of his torso in two vertiginous seconds.

Tillman hadn’t trusted his aim: he was too sick, too dizzy, his hands too unsteady. Even getting the Unica from his belt and thumbing the safety had taken every ounce of concentration that he could bring to bear.

He’d dragged himself laboriously to his feet, while Kuutma debated theology with Kennedy, and moved towards them one baby-step at a time. Kuutma hadn’t seemed to notice him, but Kennedy had. She held her ground and kept on talking, presenting the world’s easiest target.

And Tillman had brought the gun up at last, a scant inch from the back of Kuutma’s hand-woven linen jacket.

Had held it on the right line.

Had pressed the trigger.

Had pressed harder because the trigger didn’t want to give way under his sapless grip.

Had fired and lost the gun at once to the unexpected kick of a recoil he normally took in his stride.

But one shot was all it took. Kuutma sank to his knees, still staring at Kennedy in blank-eyed astonishment.

‘God …’ he choked. ‘God is my …’

‘God thinks,’ Kennedy told him, her cold voice grinding like a stone dragged across the mouth of a cave, ‘that you’re a lying, murdering bastard.’

Kuutma opened his mouth to answer but death got there first.

SUMMARY INTERVIEW WITH OFFICER FELIPE JUAREZ, CIUDAD DE MEXICO PTD, CONDUCTED BY LT JESUS-ERNESTO PENA, POLICIA FEDERAL. START TIME: 3.30 P.M.