The Jerusalem Puzzle
Laurence O’Bryan
Behind Lady Tunshuq’s Palace in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem, archaeologist, Max Kaiser, has been found dead.In the same city, Doctor Susan Hunter who was translating an ancient script discovered in Istanbul, is missing.With his girlfriend Isabel Sharp, Sean Ryan is about to piece together the mystery of his colleague Max’s death and Susan’s disappearance. But as they explore the ancient and troubled city, they soon find themselves drawn into a dangerous and deadly game of fire.A taut thriller in the tradition of Dan Brown and Robert Harris.
LAURENCE O’BRYAN
The Jerusalem Puzzle
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Avon
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013
Copyright © Laurence O’Bryan 2012
Laurence O’Bryan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Elaine AM Smith, HA Corby and Michael Robertson to be identified as the authors of their stories
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9781847562890
Ebook Edition July 2013 ISBN: 9780007453313
Version: 2017-09-05
‘When the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger.’
Henry V Act 3, Sc. 1, Wm Shakespeare.
The best part of this story is true.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#ua96fc726-dfb1-5922-ac30-33db1144f648)
Copyright (#u9d0d22d4-841a-57ff-8425-290fa8a64d23)
Epigraph (#u55c58974-aebd-5287-9584-86ccf4f6d287)
Chapter 1 (#u0988950c-5c02-52c5-b67b-6008b2daec27)
Chapter 2 (#u90ba8c98-0196-5500-b0a4-e9706bea366a)
Chapter 3 (#u1512e4d0-291d-5924-a722-b7f6ba685bfb)
Chapter 4 (#u323026f0-cb1a-59d9-83a8-c036ba1a9d27)
Chapter 5 (#u4087348b-0d50-5fae-8fb9-69d1fa01b661)
Chapter 6 (#u726a257b-4500-5b09-98ca-28a82a48a23c)
Chapter 7 (#udc0c959c-7e7e-5264-b369-a03ba3076a88)
Chapter 8 (#uea8ef341-bedc-502f-9cd7-b456b674e81d)
Chapter 9 (#u85762101-f132-5a58-a1df-3544849ddb92)
Chapter 10 (#u4c513dce-3f8f-5fb4-9c97-00148aa2e001)
Chapter 11 (#u881e6460-31a6-54a1-a48e-529cae189a00)
Chapter 12 (#u4eea49a2-1082-54e3-883f-ace72018c6b0)
Chapter 13 (#u4a8f6ba2-d5b3-508d-9d53-4724b4e79876)
Chapter 14 (#u632bf903-4b77-5e62-aac8-f37e0cd2627b)
Chapter 15 (#uea060e1b-e3c0-59fa-84ad-61cf8d61c0bb)
Chapter 16 (#ucc643b26-92b6-5025-9ae1-a88a6fe6248d)
Chapter 17 (#u0dedd30c-b633-5be4-aa03-42be43e03e6f)
Chapter 18 (#uc24b4faa-9c70-5557-889f-b733455a4be5)
Chapter 19 (#u6f95e41a-7e67-5f86-8f51-2685a1ae8b23)
Chapter 20 (#ubea0682f-7621-5eab-a459-b899f1ac1894)
Chapter 21 (#uedc90fe6-4fe6-5d4b-a01d-cc9e53e7c7a8)
Chapter 22 (#uc36f6463-f53a-53aa-9b96-11d77418263d)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
The Istanbul Puzzle - an extract (#litres_trial_promo)
An Interview with Laurence O’Bryan (#litres_trial_promo)
Visiting Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)
Authonomy short story winners’ stories (#litres_trial_promo)
In the Name of Science (#litres_trial_promo)
Murder in the Morning (#litres_trial_promo)
Sticks and Stones (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1
Flames burst into life with a whoosh. It was an unusually cold night for late February in Jerusalem. Lead-coloured clouds had been rolling in from the Dead Sea, east of the city, since midday. By ten o’clock that night the streets of the Old City’s Muslim quarter were deserted. Smells of cardamom coffee and kofta drifted from shuttered windows.
At one minute past ten, the stepped passage of Aqabat at-Takiya echoed loudly with the sound of footsteps. Two men dressed in dusty suits and chequered keffiyehs were hurrying down the wide steps.
The high masonry walls on each side gave the alley the appearance of a gap between prisons. As the men approached the arched entrance to Lady Tunshuq’s Palace they saw orange flames coming from the recessed doorway.
They stopped, waited a few seconds pressed against the wall, then moved slowly forward, craning their necks until they could see what was burning. Whoever had set the fire was long gone into the warren of narrow alleys all around.
As a gust of wind blew the flames up, they saw the body burning fiercely in front of the double-height, green steel doors. Then a throat-clogging smell of burning flesh hit them. The man who’d seen the flames first was already talking on his phone. He could feel the heat from the fire on his face, though they were fifteen feet away. He coughed, backed away. The acrid smell was getting stronger.
They watched as the flames rose. The wail of an ambulance seemed far away as blackened skin slipped from the man’s face. Tendons and muscle glistened in the flames. A white cheekbone poked out.
Above the head, paler smoke was drifting where hair should have been. The sickly smell was all around now. A man shouted from a half-shuttered window high up. A woman wailed to God.
A spurt of hissing flames reflected on the alternating light and dark bands of Mamluk masonry and the stone stalactites hanging above the doorway. The sound echoed down the long passage.
2
I turned the radio down. Verdi’s ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ had passed its climax.
‘This website says Abingdon is the oldest continuously occupied town in Britain.’ I looked up. A squall of rain hit the side of the car.
‘It says people have lived there for 6,000 years. That’s got to make for one hell of a long list of mayors at the town council.’ It was hard reading while Isabel was driving, not just because it was a rainy morning in February, but also because the road we were on, the A415 from Dorchester, twisted and turned at that point under a high canopy of trees.
‘In 1084 William the Conqueror celebrated Easter here.’ I looked at Isabel.
She kept her attention on the road ahead. ‘It is St Helen’s Church we’re looking for, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It was the first monastery to be established in England,’ she said. ‘It’s even older than Glastonbury. You could get four years out of purgatory for visiting it. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?’
She was smiling. Her long black hair was tied up at the back. She looked good.
‘The church is still looking at all sorts of schemes to get people in the door. Did Lizzie tell you they had to go on a marriage preparation course before they used the church for their wedding?’ I said.
‘She doesn’t tell me things like that.’ She sniffed. It was barely audible, but its meaning was clear.
I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to go there. Lizzie worked at the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford in the office next to mine. We’d always been friendly, though it had never led to anything. Her husband-to-be, Alex Wincly, had followed her around like a day-old puppy for years.
‘They spent three Wednesday evenings talking about their relationship,’ I said. ‘What a nightmare. How did they find enough to talk about?’
‘It sounds like a good idea to me.’ Isabel kept her attention on the traffic, but her eyebrow on my side was up half an inch, at least.
‘I reckon she’s pregnant,’ I said. ‘Why else would they get married in February?’
‘There’s a lot of reasons people get married in winter, aside from being pregnant.’
The car radio buzzed as we swept under electricity cables strung between giant pylons. ‘This is the eleven o’clock news from Radio Three,’ said the announcer.
There was another loud buzz. I missed a few seconds of the next sentence.
‘… the badly burnt body discovered in the Old City of Jerusalem early this morning was that of an American archaeologist named Max Kaiser, according to local sources. His death is being blamed on Islamic extremists. In other news …’
Isabel slowed the car. A car behind, tailgating us, blew its horn.
‘Kaiser’s dead,’ she whispered.
She gripped the wheel. The car sped up again.
I got that out-of-body feeling you get when you discover someone you’ve heard of has died, as if all your senses have become heightened as you realise how fortunate you are to be alive.
We didn’t know Max Kaiser well. We’d only met him once in Istanbul when he’d helped us out of the water in the middle of the night, and allowed us to dry out on his yacht, but we were involved with him. He’d staked a very public claim to a manuscript we’d found in Istanbul so he wasn’t ever going to get my vote for person of the year, but he didn’t deserve to die like that.
‘Poor bastard,’ I said.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ she said.
‘Do you think he told Susan Hunter the truth?’
Isabel shrugged. She looked pale. ‘Susan wouldn’t have fallen for his bullshit,’ she said. She glanced at me. ‘They did say he was burnt to death?’
‘Yeah.’
She went silent.
Dr Susan Hunter was the Cambridge archaeologist who was producing a report for the Turkish government on the ancient manuscript we’d found in an aqueduct tunnel deep under Istanbul. It was the arrangement that had been agreed soon after the manuscript was found.
Dr Hunter was the leading expert on early Byzantine manuscripts in the world. The promise of her personal involvement had probably secured the agreement of the Turkish archaeological authorities for the manuscript to be studied in England.
‘I read that book she wrote on Byzantine superstitions. They believed some totally crazy stuff,’ said Isabel. She shook her head, as if shaking something off.
‘Looks like this storm is getting worse,’ I said, leaning forward to look out the window.
By the time the wedding reception was over we’d experienced the best that Abingdon had to offer. It rained for most of the afternoon, but the bride and groom managed to get wedding pictures by the hotel’s private mooring on the Thames. We enjoyed the reception, especially the all-girl band from Windsor, all mates of Carol’s apparently. We danced non-stop and thanks to Isabel not drinking we were able to drive back to London late that night.
On the journey I checked my email, scoured the online news sites to see if they were saying anything about Max Kaiser’s death. They weren’t. I reread the last email I’d received from Dr Hunter earlier that week. In it she’d said there was no definite delivery date on her final report yet. I’d replied, thanking her for keeping me informed, asking to be put on the circulation list as soon as the report was available. She hadn’t replied.
It was six months since our return from Istanbul. I’d expected Dr Hunter to say her report would be ready in another year or more. At least she hadn’t done that. We all despaired at the institute at some of the reasons academics gave for taking so long to do things. It was a running joke for us.
‘Do you think Kaiser’s death will make any difference to her report, Sean?’
I shrugged. ‘No idea,’ I replied.
After we got home I composed an email to Dr Hunter, asking whether she had heard about Kaiser. I also asked about his level of cooperation. It was probably a bit over the top, poking my nose in, but I couldn’t stop myself.
I needed to know whether she knew how important her report was to us. It had become a talisman. Alek, a colleague and a friend who’d worked with me at the institute and had gone out to Istanbul ahead of me, had been murdered there. The manuscript we’d found was something good that had come out of his death. It felt almost as if he’d given up his life for it. I had to know what was in it, what Dr Hunter’s translation would uncover.
My boss, Dr Beresford-Ellis, had postponed our final project review meeting on what had happened in Istanbul because of the report. My job was now tied up with it all. That was my mistake.
But I knew I was right not to let it go.
We’d stopped a plot to infect thousands with a deadly plague virus at a Muslim demonstration in London after investigating what had happened to Alek. But some of the people who’d been behind that plot had escaped.
That was the unsettling part. My friend Alek had died out there because of these people. Isabel and I had almost died too. And whoever had been digging under Istanbul, looking for that plague virus, were clearly people with substantial resources, whose reasons for going to all that trouble were still unclear.
The best thing that had happened, out of everything that had gone on, was that Isabel and I were getting on so well. She had taken an early retirement package at the Foreign Office. She wanted to leave her old life behind. She didn’t tell me all the details, but she told me enough for me to understand why she wanted out.
The rest of that weekend was uneventful. But on Monday morning I got another shock. I was checking the BBC News website before heading to Oxford for a meeting at the institute, when I spotted an article about a fire in Cambridge in which one person had died. The article didn’t name the person, but the fire had taken place in Elliot Way, a fact that made something twist inside me.
A conversation I’d had with Dr Hunter came back to me, in which she’d mentioned she wanted to move out of her house in Elliot Way, as it was too big for her needs now.
It had to be a coincidence. Was I getting paranoid?
Maybe my GP was right. It was going to take a long time to settle back into a normal life. He was the Zen master of common sense. I’d only gone to him because of Isabel’s pestering. Having your sleep disturbed week after week was the sort of problem I usually tried to solve myself. That’s a male thing, isn’t it? We think we should be able to fix everything, even ourselves.
I checked my email.
My mind was put to rest. There was an email from Dr Hunter. I opened it quickly. ‘Sean, I’m in Jerusalem. I’ll be back in London on Friday. Will call you then. There’s something we need to talk about. SH.’ It had been sent on Sunday afternoon.
I thought about replying, asking her what was so important, but I decided not to. I would find out soon enough. And I had to work on being patient.
I kept my mobile at hand all day on Friday, even though Isabel said I was losing the plot. I even left it on vibrate in a management meeting. Finances have been the main issue in these meetings for the past year, and we’ve all taken a pay cut. Our survival is not in question but what we spend our money on is. That evening I checked my junk mail to see if a new email from Dr Hunter had ended up in the wrong place. It hadn’t. I wasn’t overly concerned, but I looked up Dr Hunter on the internet. What I found out disturbed me.
3
Five minutes’ walk from Amsterdam’s flea market in Waterlooplein there is a side street with a bricked-up end wall. The red brick building at the end of the street had been a squat for a long time. Recently it had been converted into small apartments, rooms really, and let out by the week.
The two young men who had taken the top floor room ten days before had the appearance of derelicts. They were unshaven and dressed in dirty jeans, t-shirts and thin jackets when they arrived, though the sun in February in Amsterdam is a cool affair.
The fact that they didn’t appear out of their room for a week attracted no notice. It was only when the manager of the building, a big mousy-haired woman, knocked on their door that their existence came into question. That was because of the pungent smell that filled the tiny area between the door and the rickety stairs. When she opened the narrow door using her key the sight that greeted her was one she had never seen in all her sixty-six years. And she’d seen a lot, especially in the old days in the red-light district.
Both young men were tied to the bedstead. The mattress had been stripped from it and the iron frame had been upended. Both were naked. That wasn’t what upset her.
Their skin was black and shrivelled to the point where they resembled burnt wooden sculptures rather than humans. The window behind them was open and the room was freezing.
The Amsterdam Medical Office would later determine that local pigeons must have spent many hours feasting on the bodies, particularly the faces, before they were found. The cause of death was obvious. Both of them had suffered one hundred percent burns. But not in one go.
They had been burnt by a blowtorch or some other flammable device on each part of their body, without damaging the room, except for scorch marks on the bedstead. The cloth that had been stuffed into their mouths to keep them quiet must have caught alight, as in each case all that remained of it was a black mulch.
The coroner confirmed that one of the men had died five days before, the other four days before. It was likely that the torture of one of these men was used to encourage the other to talk. Whether he did or not is hard to know. He certainly didn’t benefit.
It would be another twenty-four hours before the National Criminal Database in the United Kingdom would tell the authorities who these men were and what they had been involved in.
4
Dr Hunter’s house had burnt down and her husband had died in the fire.
Even worse, Dr Susan Hunter had gone missing from where she was staying in Jerusalem. It was only a small article, an interview with an Israeli policeman looking
for anyone who might have seen her. But the article said she hadn’t been seen since Sunday night, just about when she’d contacted me. And the police were now looking for her.
I sent an email to Beresford-Ellis. Things had been tricky between us for a while, but I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t going to let the rumours about the collapse of our project in Istanbul impact on what I’d decided, even for a second.
I checked the visa requirements for visiting Israel and booked a flight. I heard Isabel calling me from the kitchen as I was staring at my itinerary. ‘I’m coming,’ I shouted.
Over dinner we discussed what I’d found.
I told her about my flight plans.
‘You really think it’s a good idea to go to Jerusalem?’ she said. Her right eyebrow was raised.
‘Yes.’ I said it softly.
‘You are crazy. You know that, don’t you?’ She leaned towards me. She had her serious expression on.
‘Getting burnt to death is an especially bad way to go,’ she said. ‘Way too many people have died that way.’ Her eyes gave away how worried she was. ‘Bloody hell, even God does it to the Innocents in the Bible.’
I put my knife and fork down. I’d been eating slowly. Rain was lashing at the door out to the balcony. I stared into the darkness, my appetite gone.
‘I feel responsible,’ I said. ‘That manuscript we found in Istanbul, it’s like a bloody curse. Now Kaiser’s dead. And Susan’s missing. I don’t like coincidences.’
She put her knife and fork down too. ‘It’s not your fault Alek died,’ she said. Her powers of perception were one
of the things I liked about her, even when they made me uncomfortable.
‘I could have gone with him.’ I said it forcefully.
‘You told me he insisted on going alone.’
She was right of course, but I could have stayed in contact with him more. He might have told me that he’d found that cavern under Hagia Sophia. I could have gone out there, intervened. He might be alive if I had.
‘You’re not going to wait and see if they find her?’
I shook my head. ‘I can’t.’
‘I have to go out there.’ I spoke fast. ‘Waiting’s not an option. Nobody in Jerusalem will know anything about what Susan might be caught up in, her connection to the book.’
‘Well, I’m coming too,’ said Isabel. ‘It’ll be fun.’
I looked at her. Her loyalty impressed me, and if I was to be honest I was pleased she wanted to come. Her intelligence and wit were an asset – she’d already saved me from being kidnapped in Istanbul. ‘You need me, Sean. Admit it.’ She smiled.
I leaned and reached for her. She pulled away.
‘Have I ever denied it?’ I pushed the plates aside, leaned further and pulled her gently to me.
The following day I called Beresford-Ellis.
‘The authorities can do this a lot better than you, Sean,’ he said.
‘I want to see what’s going on for myself.’
He snorted. ‘This is not your business.’
‘It is my business. She’s been translating the book we found. Now she’s missing and her husband is dead.’
He made a honking noise, like a startled pig. ‘Have you gone stark raving mad, Ryan? You’re a research director, not a private investigator. This sort of stuff is not in your job description. Not in it at all.’ Mr Nice was long gone now. ‘Do you know anything about the situation out there?’ He didn’t wait for me to answer.
‘It’s a bloody powder keg waiting to go off. Think about it, Ryan. This is crazy. You’re crazy even talking about it.’
That made me more determined than ever.
‘Crazy or not, I’m going. And I’m doing it on my own time too, so it doesn’t have to be in my job description.’ I breathed deeply, working on keeping cool.
Now there was a bonus to going. I could enjoy Beresford-Ellis’s discomfort.
‘I’ve quite a lot of holiday time coming up and I can’t think of a better way to spend it. You told me yourself that I hadn’t taken off enough time after Istanbul.’ Check, mate.
‘Your contract is something we need to talk about, actually.’ The frustration in his voice told me everything I needed to know about what he thought of my contract.
‘Sure, when I get back.’
He hummed loudly. ‘Make sure to tell the authorities everything you get up to. I don’t want any policemen ringing me. Every department is having its budget revised this year, Ryan, particularly the wasteful ones. I was planning to tell you in a few days, but I think you should bear it in mind. We may need to make further cuts. That may include staff numbers too.’
It was as veiled a threat as a knife poked in your face. If he could persuade the management committee that I was wasting the institute’s funds, my chances of continuing Alek’s work and of buying new equipment for other projects, would rapidly approach zero. I was angry, but with myself now too. I should have expected this.
‘Keep me informed,’ he said.
I cut the call.
On the way to the airport Isabel showed me an online article about people being burnt to death. It listed the thousands killed by fire and brimstone in Soddom and Gomorrah, the people burnt to death for making the wrong offerings, and lots of other weirdness.
We stuck out among the corporate types on the train. Isabel was in her trademark tight indigo denims. I was in my thin suede jacket and black jeans. We both had black Berghaus backpacks. We might as well have put up a sign saying ON HOLIDAY over our heads.
This was my first time visiting Israel, but not for political reasons. If I was honest, I’d have to say I was glad I had a good reason to go now.
The queue for the flight was moving like a film being downloaded over a slow connection. We went through three separate security checks. Given the daily media reports about Israel, I wasn’t too surprised.
‘Do you think it’s going to kick off out there?’ said Isabel, pointing at a headline in a newspaper about Israel denouncing Iran.
I shrugged. The man ahead of her turned the page.
‘We certainly got our timing right,’ she said. ‘To get there for the start of the third world war.’
5
Henry Mowlam, a senior desk-based Security Services operative, threw the bottle of water towards the blue plastic recycling bin next to the back wall of MI5’s underground control room in Whitehall, central London.
It missed the bin and burst open. A shower of water sprayed over the pale industrial-yellow wall.
‘Bugger,’ said Henry, loudly.
Sergeant Finch was at the end of the row of monitoring desks. She looked up, then walked towards him.
‘You all right today, Henry? Working weekends not suit you?’
Her starched white shirt was the brightest thing in the room.
‘They do, ma’am.’ He saluted her abruptly.
She went over, pushed the plastic bottle towards the bin with her foot. It looked as if she was checking what the bottle was at the same time. Then she came back to him. The simulated outdoor lighting hummed above her head.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He was staring at his screen.
She walked away.
The report on the screen, which was the latest summary of the electronic monitoring of Lord Bidoner, a former member of the House of Lords only because of a title his father had inherited, had given him nothing new to go on. Lord Bidoner was one of those lords who didn’t apply himself to his responsibilities, and whose shady connections and wheeler-dealing made sure he’d never get an invitation to Buckingham Palace for a garden party.
But they still had nothing definite on Lord Bidoner. Taking a phone call from someone two steps removed from a plot to spread a plague virus in London was enough to put you on a watch list and get you investigated, but it was not enough to get you arrested.
‘We have new threats, Henry. We checked him out. You know there’s been a flood of suspects coming in from Pakistan and Egypt. We have to put Lord Bidoner on the back burner,’ was what Seageant Finch had said to him a week before.
But Henry wasn’t convinced.
He’d mentioned it again at their Monday morning meeting. The head of the unit had brought up Bidoner’s file on the large screen and had reeled off the details of the vetting he’d been subject to over the past six months.
‘He’s passed every check. His father was well respected, a pillar of the house. I know his mother was Austrian, but we don’t hold that against people anymore, Henry.’ There had been titters around the room. Henry hadn’t replied.
It wasn’t having an Austrian mother that made Henry suspicious. It was Bidoner’s use of encrypted telephone and email systems, his endless profits on the stock market from defence industry shares he picked with an uncanny prescience, and his political speeches at fringe meetings about population changes in Europe and the rise of Islam. Taken one by one they were all legitimate, but together they made Henry’s nose twitch.
He stared at his screen. He had other work to do. His hand hovered over the Bidoner report. He should delete it. And he should request that the Electronic Surveillance Unit discontinue the project.
He clicked another part of the screen. He would ask for the surveillance reports to be cancelled later. He had to review an incident in Amsterdam.
The victims of a bizarre double burning had been identified. They were a brother and a cousin of the men who had been arrested in London as part of the virus plot the previous August. The men arrested had known nothing about what they were doing that day. They had been dupes. But they were still in prison on remand.
It looked very much like whoever was behind that plot had just disposed of some people who could betray them.
There was another fact about this incident that concerned Henry. All these dupes were exiled Palestinians, from a village south of Jerusalem. A village where some sickening incidents had taken place.
6
In front of us in the queue there was a bald-headed giant of a man and his stony-faced partner. He must have been six foot eight. I was six one and he towered over me. I overheard a few words in Russian between them.
‘They look like they’re auditioning for the Organizatsiya,’ whispered Isabel.
I shook my head.
‘The Russian Jewish mob,’ she said.
‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I said. ‘What does that make us?’
‘Generation Z dropouts.’
‘Speak for yourself. I haven’t retired at thirty-six like some people I know.’
She gave me one of her smiles, then glanced away, as if she was looking for someone. I turned. There were too many people behind to work out who she’d been staring at.
‘Expecting a friend?’
‘No, it’s not that.’ She leaned toward me. ‘I thought I saw someone I know.’ She shook her head. ‘But it wasn’t him.’
On the plane I spent most of the time reading a guidebook about Israel. About halfway through the flight a small group of skull-capped men went to the front of the cabin and swayed back and forth, their heads down. They were praying.
Later, I looked out of the window when I heard someone say they could see the island of Mykonos. It was barely visible through a blue haze near the horizon. There wouldn’t be many people on the beaches there now.
As we began the descent and the seatbelt sign turned on again, I saw a plume of smoke spreading across the sky.
‘It’s a forest fire on Mount Carmel,’ said Isabel.
‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘There was an article about it on the Jerusalem Post website this morning.’
When we landed at the airport near Tel Aviv I felt the buzz of excitement around me. We reached immigration by passing along a wide elevated sunlit passage. There was a big queue for passport control in the area beyond, but it was moving quickly. Isabel’s ‘Russian mob friends’ allowed us to pass in front of them. I nudged her. There was a rosary in the woman’s hand.
Isabel made a face at me, as if to say, okay you were right.
We passed through immigration quickly. Outside the building there were young soldiers to the left and right in brown, slightly oversized uniforms with machine guns hanging from their shoulders and watchful looks in their eyes.
We took a taxi to Jerusalem, to the Hebron Road not far from the Old City. Coming towards the city on a modern motorway, with large green signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English was a surreal experience. We passed dark green tanks on dark green transporters going the other way. There must have been ten of them. As we neared the city, a glint of gold sparkled near the horizon, set against low hills and a crust of buildings.
‘That must be the Dome of the Rock,’ I said, pointing out the window. ‘Where Solomon built his famous temple.’
Isabel held my hand. ‘I’ve always wanted to come here,’ she said.
The highway turned. The spark of gold was gone. Pale cream, modern two and three-storey apartment buildings filled the low hills around us. As we got close to the city there were older buildings, and long tree-lined boulevards of apartments.
There was a lot of traffic too. Sunday’s the start of the week here, our driver said.
He had given us a running commentary on the latest news from Egypt and on the situation in Israel almost all the way from the airport. Our hotel, the Zion Palace, was a four-star, but it didn’t look it from the outside. The entrance was down a set of wide steps, like descending into a cave, but inside, the lobby was wide and marble-floored. There were brass coffee tables at the back, surrounded by chocolate-brown leather high-backed chairs. Huge blue ceramic pots sat in the corners of the lobby and paintings of Old Jerusalem hung on the walls.
The view from the small balcony in our room made me want to hold my breath. We stared out at the city. To our right were the pale gold sandstone walls of the Old City.
The hill of Mount Zion, crowned by the high upturned-funnel style roof of the Dormiton Abbey with its dome-capped tower was just visible to the far right.
There was an ancient magic to this view. There was history and religion in every glance, and something older overlaying it all. Countless wars had been fought over this patch of land and its fate was still in bitter dispute.
The hum of traffic, honking car horns and occasional shouts came up from the road below. Leaden clouds rolled slowly overhead.
I pointed at the Old City walls.
‘Just a bit further up that way is the Jaffa Gate,’ I said. ‘Do you see the valley to the right of the walls?’ Isabel nodded. ‘That’s where the followers of Ba’al and Moloch sacrificed their children by fire, while priests beat drums to hide the screams.’
‘Yeuch, that’s too sick.’
‘They call that place Gehenna, the valley of hell.’ I went to the edge of the balcony, as if drawn forward. The start of the valley, the part we could see, looked dried out, rocky, its low trees withered and dusty.
‘That’s where the entrance to hell is for a lot of Jews, and for some Christians and followers of Islam too. They think that’s where the wicked will line up to be punished at the end of the world.’
‘And now you can find it on a map,’ said Isabel.
Famished by the time we reached the hotel, we sat down immediately for dinner, eating in near silence, the fatigue of the journey capturing our thoughts. Back at our room I scoured Israeli websites for any news about Dr Hunter. There was nothing about her disappearance mentioned anywhere in the last few days. The only thing I found were the original articles about her going missing.
The main story on the Haaretz website was about a Jewish family that had been burnt to death in an arson attack the night before in a settlement near Hebron. The horror of it leapt off the screen. Pictures of a small blackened house with an ambulance in front of it, surrounded by Israeli soldiers, filled the news page. Isabel looked over my shoulder as I read it.
‘They’re blaming some local Palestinians,’ I said.
‘How many more people are going to get burnt to death?’ said Isabel.
‘You can get shot out here too,’ I said. I pointed at another article. It was about a funeral of a Palestinian youth who’d been shot in the back after being part of a demonstration in a village sandwiched between Jewish settlements. A Jewish settler was being blamed for that death.
‘It’s all sickening,’ said Isabel.
‘There’s a vicious fight going on here, unbending hatred,’ I replied. Opening my email, there was the usual array of special offers from every hotel, airline and social network I’d ever used and some I hadn’t. I spotted an email from Dr Beresford-Ellis. It had an attachment. I clicked on it. The message wouldn’t open. The screen just froze.
Had the internet stopped completely? I went to another tab and tried to download a page. It wouldn’t work either. Nothing would. I waited another minute.
‘I’ll go down and see if they can do anything about the signal; find out if it’s better in the lobby,’ said Isabel.
‘Can you see if you can get some fruit, I’m still hungry?’ I said.
The internet was still off ten minutes later and Isabel hadn’t come back. I let the door bang as I left the room, pushing the old-fashioned key into my pocket as I waited for the lift. I was hoping it would open to Isabel’s smiling face, but it was empty when it arrived.
In the lobby there was no sign of her either. I went to the reception. The dark-haired girl who’d checked us in was gone. In her place was an older guy with a bald spot he was trying to hide by brushing his hair over. He was standing in a corner of the reception area that was walled with blue and white Ottoman-era tiles.
‘No, I haven’t seen a lady in dark blue jeans with straight black hair,’ he said, after I described Isabel. His expression was quizzical, as if he was wondering whether I was asking him to find me a date.
‘Maybe she went to the shop. It’s down the road. Not far.’ He smiled, showed me his yellowing teeth.
‘Is there a problem with the Wi-Fi?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. It’s working perfectly.’
‘Not for me. How far away is this shop?’
‘Not far.’ He pointed towards the front of the hotel, then to the left.
I walked to the glass front door, then up the steps to the road to see if Isabel was coming. I’d never been this protective of Irene, my wife, a doctor who’d volunteered and then been murdered in Afghanistan two years before, but after what had happened to her my urge to look after Isabel couldn’t be ignored. Irene had been robbed of her life. I couldn’t bear for anything like that to happen to anyone else.
It was dark outside.
I had to tell myself to stop being paranoid. I looked back down at the hotel doors.
A man’s face was peering up at me through the glass door.
‘What are you doing out here?’ said a friendly voice behind me. ‘Did you miss me?’
I turned. Isabel was coming towards me from the other direction to the shop. She had a brown paper bag in her arms. ‘I got you your fruit.’
She held the bag forwards, smiled, then touched my arm as she passed. A ridiculous iron weight of fear lifted from my chest. When we got back to the room the Wi-Fi was working perfectly.
‘I got a call from Mark while I was out,’ she remarked. ‘He’s stationed in Cairo these days. Not a million miles from here.’
I spoke slowly. ‘Why does he keep calling you? I thought you two were over.’
She’d dumped him a year ago.
‘You are so jealous!’ she said. There was a sympathetic note to her voice.
I gave her my best see-if-I-care smile.
‘He wants to meet me again.’ She shook her head as if the idea was outrageous.
‘What?’ This was getting annoying.
‘I’m not going to, don’t worry.’
I opened the balcony door and went outside, staring over the lights illuminating the Old City walls. Isabel didn’t just have skeletons in her cupboard, she had live exhibits, waiting to be set free.
I felt a hand on my back and Isabel whispered in my ear. ‘Come to bed, Sean. I want to prove to you that there is no one else.’ Taking my hand she pulled me back inside. It was another hour before I got to sleep.
7
Arap Anach took the thick yellow candle from its holder. It burned with a blue-white flame and gave off a sweet scent; olive oil mixed with myrrh, the ancient incense Queen Esther had bathed in for six months to beautify herself for her Persian King.
Myrrh was used at times of sacrifice. Arap knew its scent from his childhood. One man in particular had smelled of it. A man who’d brought pain.
He closed his eyes, breathing the ancient smell in. Myrrh came from a thorny shrub which wept from the stem after it was cut. Some varieties are worth more than their weight in gold.
He put his left hand out and held it over the flame. The pain was familiar. The walls of the room danced around him as the shadows from the candle played on the walls. He wrenched his thoughts away from the flame, focusing on the wall hangings. The thick red one with the stylised flames embroidered on it was the one he liked most.
He bent his back. The searing pain in his hand grew in steps, as if ascending towards an ultimate crescendo. He threw his head back and opened his eyes. Not much longer. Seconds. One …
The low white roof, its plaster filled with tiny cracks, swam in his vision. The cracks were moving. It always amazed him what pain could do to your consciousness.
His need to take his hand away was making his arm tremble now. It was moving, rocking as muscle spasms from the pain were shooting up his nerves. He kept his hand to the flame.
He had to. It was the only way. He had to know the pain he would inflict on others, the better to enjoy inflicting it when the moment came.
He jerked his hand away, breathing in and out slowly. It was time to make the call.
He turned on the mobile phone, pressed at the numbers quickly, his hand trembling, the pain of the scorched skin pulsing in waves. As he put it to his ear he heard the ring tone at the other end of the line.
‘Rehan,’ said a voice.
‘Father Rehan, I am so glad I found you. I am just checking that everything is in order.’ Arap Anach forced himself to sound friendly. His breathless eagerness he didn’t have to feign.
‘Yes, yes, my son. Your donation has been received. We are all very grateful. Is there anything we can do for you?’
Arap Anach hesitated. ‘No, not really, Father. I’m just happy to be able to help with the restoration of the church.’ He coughed.
‘Please, there must be some small thing we can do for you while you are here.’
Arap coughed again, then spoke. ‘There is a small thing. It would make me so happy. I have prayed for it for a long time.’
8
I woke in the middle of the night. There was fear in my dream. Fear and flames. I wondered for long seconds where I was. My face was hot, sweaty.
The gray shape of the curtains and the yellow glimmer of street lights in the gap between them brought everything back. We had come to look for Dr Hunter, to find out what had happened to Max Kaiser.
For months after we got back from Istanbul I’d wanted to have a long conversation with Kaiser, to give him my honest opinion about him claiming that the book we’d found in Istanbul was his. He needed someone to puncture his ego. It would have ended up in a shouting match or worse, but I didn’t care.
But now he was dead, and in such a horrible manner that my instinct for revenge had turned to pity. He’d reaped what he’d sown. God only knew how many people he’d enraged before me.
I was hoping the dream wouldn’t come back when I fell asleep again, but it did, and the flames were nearer this time and hotter.
But this time I was woken by a voice.
‘Sean, Sean, wake up.’ Isabel’s tone was concerned. I was breathing fast. I sat up.
‘Was it the same as before?’ she asked. She hugged me.
‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the flames. That part was new. The fear wasn’t.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No, I’ll be ok,’ I said.
I lay down again. Isabel had spent a couple of nights asking me all about what had happened to Irene; how I felt about everything that had happened. It had been good to talk, but this felt different and after her speech about people being burnt to death before we came here, it didn’t seem right to tell her what had got into my dreams.
It was light when I next woke. I’d slept a long time. Isabel was in the shower. The hum of cars, a distant car horn honking and the morning sounds of Jerusalem filled the air when I opened the balcony door. I was glad the night was over.
The traffic was heavy on the road outside. A bell tolled far away. I stared at the old walls of the city. They looked like props from a movie about Crusaders and Saracens. A rolling blanket of clouds filled the sky.
I looked up Max Kaiser on the internet. There were quite a few pieces about his body being found at the back of Lady Tunshuq’s Palace. The police had questioned some local hard-line Islamists. Others were being sought. It was clear who they thought had murdered him.
I found an older article about some work Kaiser had done with a scientist attached to the Hebrew University. His name was Simon Marcus. Had Kaiser met him again while he was out here?
I trawled the Hebrew University website looking for anyone I might know. I needed someone to introduce me to Simon Marcus, someone he would trust.
After almost giving up, I finally found what I was looking for. A Dr Talli Miller in the Laser Research Unit. We had a tenuous connection, but it was better than nothing. She’d presented a paper at a conference I’d spoken at and we’d been at the same table for lunch. It was enough.
I found a contact number and picked up the hotel phone to call her. The number at the university rang and rang. I looked at my watch. It was just past 9.00 a.m. Surely they were open?
Finally a voice answered.
‘University’ was the only word I understood. It was a thin voice. She was speaking in Hebrew, the main language in Israel, the ancient language of Judaism. I knew only a few words of it. Easy words, like shalom: hello.
‘Dr Talli Miller,’ I said.
Normally I’d have spent time learning a language if I was visiting somewhere. My German wasn’t bad following a project we’d worked on in the Black Forest, but a day and a half wasn’t long enough to learn any language, no matter how dedicated you were.
The line sounded dead. Had she hung up?
Then it fizzed.
‘Shalom,’ said a woman’s voice. Talli’s voice.
‘Hi, it’s Sean Ryan. I’m in Jerusalem.’
There was a long silence.
‘Who?’
It was nice to be recognised so quickly. ‘Sean Ryan, I was on the panel when you gave a speech about high temperature lasers at the University of London.’
‘Sean, Sean.’ She repeated my name slowly. ‘How are you?’ Suddenly she was friendly and her voice returned to normal. We reminisced for a few minutes. Then I asked her if she knew Dr Simon Marcus. She did, but not well.
‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I need to speak to him urgently.’
‘I may be able to do something. I’ll call you in a few minutes. What hotel are you in?’
I told her. My spirits lifted. I’d done it. My connections were going to get me to Simon Marcus.
We ate breakfast in a long high-ceilinged dining room. There were groups of people in the room speaking French, Polish and Spanish, all pilgrims visiting their Holy City.
The breakfast, a selection of cheeses, scrambled eggs, olives, jams and soft bread would have satisfied anyone.
One of the waiters, a black-haired, smiling man, came to our table with a wireless telephone handset as we were finishing.
‘Dr Ryan?’ he said.
I nodded. I never used my title in public, but Talli might have used it when she rang the reception. I took the phone.
‘Hello.’
‘I’ll be at your hotel in one hour. Be ready.’ The voice was Talli’s, but the friendliness was gone. In its place was a distinct hardness, the sort of attitude she probably reserved for her most disrespectful students, the ones who insulted her in a lecture.
The line went dead.
‘She’s on her way,’ I said.
An hour later we were in the hotel lobby. I went outside to see if she was coming. It was cool, but my suede jacket was enough to keep me warm. After a while I went back inside.
An hour and a half later we were still waiting.
By then it was nearly eleven. I called the Hebrew University. A receptionist answered. She checked, then came back and told me that Dr Talli Miller was not available.
By 11.30 a.m. I was properly pissed off. We took turns
going back up to the room. God only knew what had happened to Talli. Had I misheard her about the time? No, I couldn’t have. I even tried asking the hotel if they could bring up the number of the person who’d called me. They couldn’t.
For something to do I looked up the main hospitals in Jerusalem and went to their websites on my phone using the hotel lobby Wi-Fi. I was thinking about calling them, asking them if a Dr Susan Hunter had been admitted. We might just get lucky. I took a note of their telephone numbers. I was about to start calling when Talli appeared through the revolving main door of the hotel. Her hair was a mess.
She came towards us, looking solemn. She wasn’t the person I’d remembered from the last time we’d met. That had been someone who’d laughed a lot, poked at you, filled any room she was in with her energy. All that was gone.
After brief hellos, she said, ‘Let’s go.’ She motioned for us to go with her.
‘What happened to being here in an hour?’ I said. I tried not to sound too irritated. I don’t think I succeeded.
‘Do you want my help or not?’ Her cheeks were puffed up and bright pink, as if she’d been running.
‘Where are we going?’ Isabel was playing the part of the unruffled partner. She was smiling sweetly.
‘To the Hebrew University. Simon Marcus is expecting you. He’s waiting.’
‘Let’s go then,’ I said.
It took only twenty minutes to reach the Edmund J. Safra Campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was located on the spine of a hill a little to the west of the city centre. The buildings were modern concrete lecture and administration blocks. In between them was dry-looking grass, tall thin cypress trees, short pine trees, and the occasional palm tree.
Talli said Simon Marcus was holding a symposium that lunchtime in one of the teaching labs for his graduate students.
She drove us there in a pale blue beaten-up old Mercedes. She excused its appearance by telling us how badly academics were paid in Israel, and how high their taxes were these days.
We passed a sign for the Manchester teaching lab. Groups of students were hanging around outside the next building. Talli went straight up to the nearest person in one of the little groups and began talking. We waited a few feet away by a concrete bench. She was back with us in a minute.
She threw her hands up in the air. ‘Simon’s not here. It’s not like him, they say. He hasn’t even texted anyone.’ Her eyes rolled.
‘I spoke to him just before I met you. He told me he’d be here.’ She sighed. ‘Something must have happened.’ She looked at me accusingly.
I stared back at her. If something had happened to him she couldn’t blame it on me. On the way here I’d told her about Max Kaiser being burnt to death and about Susan Hunter disappearing. I was starting to regret having said anything.
‘One of the students has gone to look for him. I don’t know what to do after that.’ She waved a hand through the air dismissively, then sat down heavily on the bench.
A few spots of rain fell. Then a downpour started. We all ran.
Talli had parked her car in an underground car park near the sports centre. Once inside the doorway we shook off the rain and walked, squelching, towards the lower floor. As we turned a corner I heard a voice call my name.
I turned.
A young woman with an earnest face and shoulder-length curly black hair, wearing a pink, rain-spotted t-shirt and pale blue jeans was walking fast towards me. She waved, as if she knew me. Isabel was a few paces ahead of me. Talli was even further on. Then she went up to the next floor, the floor the car was on.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ the woman said.
‘I am.’
‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘When did we meet?’ I had a vague memory of her, maybe from the early days in Oxford. We used to get a lot of interns passing through when we first set up the institute.
She bent her head to one side, glancing over my shoulder.
I turned. Isabel was beside me. ‘Hi,’ she said, in a friendly manner. Talli’s car started up with a roar on the floor below. The noise of the engine filled the air.
The girl was backing away. She looked as if she’d expected me to remember something else about her. ‘I have to go,’ she said. She turned and walked away fast.
‘What was that all about?’ said Isabel.
I shrugged. ‘I think I met her in Oxford.’
‘You don’t remember her?’ said Isabel.
‘We get a lot of exchange students who intern at the institute. Some of them send long pleading emails. I stopped reading them. Beresford-Ellis does all that now. Maybe she was hoping for another job.’
Talli’s car was right behind us. She beeped the horn. We got in.
As we drove off the campus I kept an eye out for the girl, but I didn’t see her. Talli’s phone rang. She pulled over to take the call. We were parked in a dangerous place, half blocking a side road leading back into the university.
Within a few seconds I had figured out who she was speaking to. It was Simon Marcus.
Talli spoke in Hebrew, looking at us, gesticulating. Then she went silent. She was listening.
‘You don’t remember that girl?’ whispered Isabel.
‘We used to have a party before the interns left each May. We used to hire a room at the Randolph in Oxford and drink all night. We were asked to leave the last time we did it. Someone let off a fire extinguisher in one of the stairwells. It was a nightmare.’
Isabel shook her head mock-disapprovingly. ‘No wonder you don’t remember people.’
That incident was the real reason we abandoned the intern parties, calming things down after our first years of successes. We’d been lucky no one had sent a picture of the foam on the stairs and people rolling in it to the media. We’d been applying for new research grants that year, and a picture of one of our researchers wielding an extinguisher would not have made good PR.
Talli was talking quickly on the phone. She sounded angry. Then she was listening again.
‘What did Irene think of these parties?’ Isabel asked quizzically.
‘She enjoyed them,’ I said. ‘But that was ten years ago.’
Isabel looked away.
She’d told me early on that an old boyfriend used to drink himself into oblivion. She’d finished with him when he’d refused to give up.
She was very different to Irene. Irene and I had enjoyed occasional benders right up until she died.
After that, grief had taken away any desire to get drunk. Drinking brought back too many memories.
Talli had finished her call. She was putting the car back into gear.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘We’re to meet him in half an hour at a cafe.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I’ll let him tell you himself.’
Twenty minutes later we were at a small Armenian cafe near the Jaffa Gate. The Jaffa Gate was history come to life. It had originally been built by Herod the Great in the early Roman era. Beside it was a gap in the old city wall, which cars could drive through. The gap had been made in 1898 to allow the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, to drive into the Old City.
On either side of the gate the crenulated city wall ran away left and right.
When General Allenby took Jerusalem in 1917, recovering the city from Islam after seven hundred years under its control, he entered the city on foot, through the original arched Jaffa Gate.
The gate is to the west of the warren of flat-roofed, sand-coloured buildings and alleys which make up the Old City. Once inside, to the right is the Armenian quarter, to the left the Christian quarter and straight on, the Muslim and Jewish quarters.
The road for cars curved to the right beyond the gate and there was a small paved area on the left lined with shops and cafes. These buildings were all three and four-storey high Ottoman-style shops with tall windows, rooftop balconies and arched entranceways. Plastic signs, canopies, and racks of postcards lined the pavement in front of the cafes, tourist offices and money changers.
‘I’ll have the lamb kebabs and a coke,’ said Isabel to the white-shirted waiter who hovered over us. I ordered the same, with a coffee. Talli just ordered coffee.
‘I hope he doesn’t let us down again,’ she said.
‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, whatever happens,’ said Isabel. ‘We don’t get lunch in Jerusalem every week.’
‘What do you do, Isabel?’ Talli asked.
Isabel spent the next few minutes telling Talli about the low-level job she used to work at in the British Consulate in Istanbul. I think she overplays all that. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who makes their previous job out to be so lacklustre. Talli’s eyebrows kept going up as Isabel described rescuing drunken businessmen from the wrong bars near Taksim Square.
Beyond the window of the cafe, I watched people walking up from the gap in the Old City wall. Three policemen were talking to each other by a set of concrete bollards near a taxi rank on the far side of the road.
All kinds of people were passing the window: priests in black habits, monks in brown, nuns with their hair covered, a group of Arab women similarly modest, American tourists, Chinese tourists, Israeli girls giggling.
A white police car drove slowly by.
The rain had stopped but the clouds hadn’t gone away. They were stuck above us, like a lid over the city.
‘My grandfather’s brother died near this gate.’ Talli turned, pointing out the window.
‘When was that?’ I thought she was going to tell me about some suicide bombing incident.
‘In ’48. He was in the Haganah. He fought against the British, then against the Jordanians. At this gate the fighting was fiercest. The Arabs wanted to kick us all out of Israel. I’m not kidding. He was shot in the head. He lay right there for four hours before his comrades could get to him.’ She pointed at a spot halfway back to the gate.
‘We didn’t win the Old City that time, but he opened the way for Jerusalem to be free for Jews after fourteen hundred years of ill treatment and exile.’ She paused and looked down at the red and white chequered tablecloth.
‘His girlfriend, Sheila, she never married. I met her once. Her eyes were pools of sadness. She was so incredibly beautiful when she was young. But she was old and grey when I met her. And now she’s dead.’
I glanced out the window. Two Orthodox Jews, seemingly pressed to each other for solidarity, moved fast past the window. Their long beards were black and thick, their shirts crisp and white.
Walking towards us was an older man in a faded cream suit. The girl who had approached me in the university car park was beside him. A vein thumped in my throat.
Why was she here?
9
The British Embassy in Cairo is in Ahmed Ragheb Street, in an affluent suburb called Garden City, on the eastern shore of the Nile, between the river and the city centre, just south of Tahrir Square. The cream, colonial-style building with its first floor balcony and lawns down to the river was in a style more suited to the days of the Raj. But behind its calm exterior a number of alterations had been made to the building to bring it into the twenty-first century.
The basement area had been extended. It now housed an intelligence suite, a situation monitoring station for the British Intelligence Service in Cairo.
That Monday afternoon it was 1.30 p.m. in Jerusalem, 12.30 p.m. in Cairo and 11.30 a.m. in London. Mark Headsell, seconded to the embassy after three and a half years in Iraq, was watching a large LCD screen on the far wall of the suite.
The screen was showing the border crossing from the Gaza strip to Egypt. The crossing was open and trucks were using it, a line of them heading slowly into Gaza. It appeared they weren’t being searched.
The last time this had happened, an Israeli air raid had taken place. Two people had died. The Israelis had claimed they could prove rocket parts, destined for Hammas, were on those trucks. Whatever the UN said about Israel, there was no escaping the fact that the country would defend itself whenever it felt under threat.
Mark’s worry at that moment was how far that defence would go. Since the post-Mubarak elections, things were unpredictable here. The players were changing and the military restive, eager to regain influence. The reaction of the Egyptian army to the next Israeli air strike could not be guaranteed.
Other things about Egypt worried him too. Some of them were displayed on other, smaller screens along the wall. One showed an anti-Israel demonstration in Tahrir Square. An army unit, from Zagazig, was stationed there that day and Mark’s concern was about how they would react to the demonstration.
A report on the movement of an Iranian submarine near the southern entrance to the Suez Canal also disturbed him. A satellite image, courtesy of the United States NSA office, of the last known position of the submarine, was displayed on a different screen. A radar map of the area was overlaid on the image.
But the big screen on his own desk was showing what he was chiefly interested in that day. A high definition security camera feed from the main entrance to the hotel in Jerusalem where Dr Susan Hunter had stayed. The feed was paused. The Herod Citadel Hotel was one of the best in Jerusalem, but Susan Hunter hadn’t chosen it for its five-star facilities.
She had chosen it because of its security arrangements. One of these, which she wasn’t even aware of, nor were the security staff at the hotel, was the fact that the British Intelligence Services had tapped into the security camera system.
The ability to tap into private security systems, to relay images of diplomats and high-powered businessmen anywhere in the world, was not something the British Security Service wanted to advertise.
Dealing with public outrage about invasions of privacy would waste resources. Explaining that almost everyone would be better off with people watching their backs was unlikely to assuage true liberals. People who never had to deal with the threat of a gun attack or a suicide bomber intent on exterminating their kind were apt to be unaware of what was being done every day in their name.
And if corporate titans, religious leaders and government tsars were afraid that pictures of them with teenage escorts or coincidentally young and clearly gay personal assistants would end up in the media, they could always clean up their act.
Mark leaned forward. The woman in the centre of the screen – the reason the security camera had gone into frame-hold mode, as the facial recognition software had thrown her up as a possible – was similar in complexion and hair colour to Susan Hunter, but it was definitely not her. He pressed Ctrl-X on his keyboard. The screen jumped back to showing real time.
He turned to his secure instant messaging screen. The message he had highlighted a few minutes before was in the centre in a small pop-out screen. Other social media posts, Tweets and Facebook updates were flowing past it. He tagged the post as important, then closed the pop-up.
He turned to his secure email system and read his messages. A signal from Dr Susan Hunter’s phone had been picked up. It had only lasted ten and a half seconds, and tracing the exact location of the transmission hadn’t been completed, but the most interesting thing was that a signal had been picked up at all.
It could be a trick, of course, or a summons, but it could also be an amateur mistake on the part of her captors. The length of time the signal had been active made that a real possibility. Someone hoping to lure them would have left Susan Hunter’s phone on for longer. It was well known that it took thirty seconds for a phone’s location to be reliably established.
Few people knew about the latest, ultra-fast location tracking software the Israelis were using. It wasn’t always right, but with a bit of luck they would soon be able to identify the location of Susan Hunter’s phone and some other interesting information too.
The screen to his left was showing rolling news from the Nile News Channel, the state-owned Egyptian news service. He watched it for a few seconds, then turned up the sound.
The image on the screen was of the burnt-out house where a poor Jewish family had been found a few days before. The Arabic script flowing across the screen, from left to right, said that a ‘no questions asked’ reward of one million dollars had been offered by an American-Israeli group to anyone who could help them to arrest the perpetrators.
Whoever had blocked the doors and burnt that house would have to hope that everyone who knew they’d done it was as dedicated to the cause as they were.
And what would happen if someone pointed a finger at a terrorist who had recently crossed from Egypt?
What would the Israelis do then? Start bombing the crossings into Gaza?
10
The girl who had spoken to me peeled away from Simon Marcus just before he reached the cafe. Isabel was saying something to me now, but my mind was elsewhere, in the past.
‘Earth to Sean. Come in, Sean.’ She was waving her hand in front of my face.
‘Very funny. Did you see who’s coming?’
She turned fast, just in time to see Simon Marcus entering through the front door.
I leaned over the table, whispering to Isabel, ‘We’ll probably need your people skills with this guy.’
‘I love a challenge,’ she said.
Talli was halfway out of her seat already. ‘Simon, good to see you.’
He sat beside me, facing Talli. ‘Is this the man you told me about?’ He turned to me and put his hand out.
I took it. His skin was rough, his grip hard. He shook hands with Isabel too.
He must have been six foot three. He was wearing faded jeans and a floppy navy corduroy jacket. He had a big face and his blonde hair was balding a little, but that didn’t take away from the image he presented, which was of an ageing Viking.
‘Who was that with you outside?’ I gestured with my thumb.
‘She’s a graduate student. She’s helping me with some important work I’m doing.’ His smile was thin, his expression puzzled. ‘Do you know her?’
‘She may have worked briefly as an intern with my institute.’
‘She was in England studying. She would have joined us, but her mother is sick. She had to go.’ He shrugged.
Talli leaned over and began talking in Hebrew to Simon. She spoke fast. I had no idea what she was saying. It was disconcerting.
Finally, Simon put his hands up, turned to me and spoke in English. ‘Is this about Dr Hunter?’
I nodded. ‘We’re trying to find her. She was doing some translation work on a book we found in Istanbul.’ I pointed at Isabel, then back at myself.
Simon smiled at Isabel. It was a warm smile, as if he was keen to get to know her. Isabel smiled back.
My phone rang. It took me half a minute to get it out. That’s what happens when you wear baggy chinos with voluminous pockets.
‘Is that Mr Sean Ryan?’ said a woman’s voice with a Scottish accent.
‘Yes.’
‘This is a courtesy call, Mr Ryan. Your phone has been used in a country you have never previously visited. This call is simply to verify that it hasn’t been stolen.’
‘You’re getting very security conscious.’
‘We look out for our customers,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’
I agreed, after she told me they might have to restrict my phone service if I didn’t. She asked me my date of birth, and all the other usual questions that are asked at moments like this. I turned away from the table, dropped my voice as I answered.
When I was finished, Isabel and Simon were having a deep conversation about London.
‘Did you see Dr Hunter when she was here?’ I asked him, jumping in.
‘No, I didn’t.’ He shook his head.
‘Did you hear what happened to Max Kaiser?’
‘Yes, yes, I did. It was terrible.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘You must be careful, Mr Ryan. These are dark days.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill someone like that?’
He put his thumb and finger together in front of him, pressed them together. ‘Some people enjoy being evil.’ He spread his hands out on the table, as if he was holding it down. ‘I pray they catch the terrorists who did it. Are you investigating his death?’
Isabel spoke. ‘Kaiser may have met Susan Hunter. We’re looking for her. If we find out where Kaiser was working, we might be able to track her down too.’
‘He was working on a dig, I know that much. He used me for a reference to get onto it, but no one told me exactly where the dig is. Max was off in a world of his own,’ Simon replied.
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘What general area is the dig in?’
‘In Jerusalem, somewhere.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry, I know that’s not much good.’
Talli joined the conversation. ‘I’m sure you’ll find Dr Hunter. Have you spoken to the police?’
‘Not yet, but we will,’ I said. I turned back to Simon. ‘What happened to your meeting at lunchtime?’
He spoke slowly. ‘We had a bomb scare in my apartment. There are a lot of idiots around. The police wouldn’t let me take my car out. At the beginning they said I could. Then they changed their mind.’ He put a hand to his forehead and rubbed it.
‘Some people make me crazy. I’m a busy man.’ He lowered his head. ‘But I have to accept it. It’s all in the name of security.’ He put his palms together, bowing his head as if he was praying.
Then he looked up at me. ‘What is your area of expertise?’
‘Digital analysis, pattern recognition. I helped found the Institute of Applied Research. We have multidisciplinary research teams. We’re academics who want advanced research to be used for practical purposes, and as soon as possible.’
He looked interested. ‘Good, good. I believe I’ve heard of you. You would like what I’m working on. Perhaps we’re ahead of even the great Oxford University.’ He grinned. It was one of the grins I’d seen academics use before, when they thought they might have discovered something interesting or at least more interesting that what you were working on.
‘What’s the project?’ I asked.
‘It’s not published yet, so I can’t tell you.’ His smile was enigmatic. ‘But I will send you the article when it comes out.’
‘What area is it in?’ Isabel had her head to one side.
‘The use of lasers for manipulation of molecules, cells and tissue. It’s called biomedical optics. It’s a whole new science. We got our own journal only in 2011.’
I joined the conversation. ‘Two of our researchers have published papers in that journal this year. We’re the only research institute in the world to have published that number in it so far.’ If it had been a spitting contest, I’d have hit the far wall.
His cheeks reddened.
‘Then you should see what we’re doing. We’re ahead of everyone.’ He jabbed his finger at me.
The waiter was hovering. Simon ordered a coffee. We’d finished our kebabs. They’d been good; soft and spicy.
Isabel talked about how interesting Jerusalem was. Talli gave her some advice on where we should go while we were here. Simon’s coffee came. I watched him stir it.
‘A lot of people come here for their souls,’ he said. He gestured toward the pedestrians passing beyond the window. ‘They think they will find it in the old stones here. They look, and then they look some more, but a soul is not easy to find.’
‘They need better maps,’ said Talli, solemnly.
‘You know about the show in the Tower of David?’ Simon motioned over his head towards the museum and walled fortress on the far side of the road.
‘It’s not from King David’s time though, is it?’ said Isabel.
‘It’s a perfect illustration of the layers of misunderstanding in this wonderful city. The citadel is called the Tower of David because Byzantine Christians thought it was built by him. But it was built by Herod the Great.’ His hands were in the air. ‘A madman who murdered his family.’
Talli put her hand on his arm. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?’ she said. Simon looked at his watch.
‘Yes, yes, what am I thinking?’ He pointed at me and Isabel.
‘You will come with me,’ he said. ‘You will see what we are working on. And you will tell all your friends in Oxford when you go back how advanced we are.’ He stood.
We paid for our food.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as we headed towards the Jaffa Gate.
‘To another citadel.’ He gripped my arm. I put my hand on his, squeezed back, in a friendly, but determined way.
He leant towards me. ‘I have a meeting this afternoon at the Herod Citadel hotel. I am presenting at 5.30. The meeting will be private, but I’d like you to see the presentation. I think you will be surprised at what we’re doing. And a little jealous, perhaps!’
I didn’t take the bait. I wanted to see what he was doing.
We crossed a busy highway, passed modern-looking apartments. The air was cool now, and heavy with the promise of rain.
The Herod Citadel Hotel, a five-star hotel was a step up from the one I had picked for me and Isabel.
The Old Terrace restaurant was on the roof of the hotel. It had stunning views of the Old City, to the golden Dome of the Rock and the hills beyond. And it had a glass roof that looked as if it would stay intact in a meteor shower.
We waited near the elevators. Simon went off walking through the restaurant.
He arrived back a minute later with a tall, ultra-thin, black-haired, regally attractive woman beside him. Many of the male heads in the restaurant turned to look at her as she passed.
‘This is Rachel, my assistant,’ said Simon. ‘Come on. I have work to do.’
We went down to the meeting room. It had bright red and gold wallpaper and was set out for a presentation with rows of gold high-backed chairs and three tables lined up at the top of the room. There was a stack of brown cardboard boxes near the tables.
‘You can help us,’ said Simon. ‘If you want. Take the reports out of these boxes. Put one on each chair.’ He pointed at the chairs, then began opening boxes.
Isabel smiled at me. It was her let’s-be-nice smile. Simon had to be the pushiest person I had met in years. I was tempted not to cooperate. But I had some more questions to ask him. It’d be worth a few minutes of helping him out to get some answers. I took a pile of light blue reports, put one on each chair. Then I stopped.
My telephone was buzzing. I took it out and saw the name ‘Susan Hunter’ flashing across the screen, but as I pushed the green button, the line went dead. My elation at seeing the call turned to frustration in a second.
11
Susan Hunter prayed. She prayed for her husband waiting for her back in Cambridge and she prayed for her sister. And at the end she prayed for herself. She wasn’t used to praying. She hadn’t done it since she was eight years old. And she’d never been into it that much back then either.
But she had every reason to start now.
The basement was perfectly dark. She knew how many steps away each wall was, fifteen one way, twenty the other, but some times it felt as if the dark was endless, no matter what her brain told her. Her hands were pressed tight into her stomach.
Pain was throbbing through her.
She was doing all she could to ignore it.
She wanted to cry, to wail, but she wasn’t going to. He might be listening. And he’d enjoy it too much. That much she knew.
Where he had the microphone placed in the basement, she didn’t know, but its existence was irrefutable.
He had come down after a period of her whimpering and played a recording of the noises she’d made to cheer her up. That was how he’d put it.
But the sounds hadn’t cheered her up. They’d chilled her until her insides felt empty.
And then he’d taken her upstairs. The pain then had been horrific. And in the end he’d made her say things, which he recorded.
Then he told her he’d enjoy burning her again, if she didn’t do exactly what she was told every time he asked.
The thought of how he’d said that, his certainty, was enough to set her praying again.
12
The call went straight to voicemail. My deflation was immediate. Isabel must have seen it on my face.
‘Who was that?’
‘Susan Hunter. Can you believe it? Now her phone is off. I didn’t even get to speak to her!’
‘So she’s around somewhere?’
‘I have no idea. I’ll try her again in a few minutes.’
Simon was standing near me. ‘I can put those ones out,’ he said, putting his hand on the reports.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m doing them.’
He pulled his hand back. ‘I’m trying to help you, Dr Ryan.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m just a bit distracted.’
I turned, began putting the reports on the chairs again.
I tried Susan’s phone twice in the following five minutes. The response was the same as every time I’d called her in the past six days, since I’d heard about Kaiser.
‘The number you are trying to reach is unavailable. Please try again later.’ They must be the thirteen most frustrating words in the English language.
As I finished with the reports, Simon was putting a
stack of leaflets on one of the tables at the top of the room. On the other table a laptop had already been set up.
He sat in front of the laptop, turned and motioned me to him.
‘This is what I wanted to show you.’ He clicked at a file. It opened slowly.
‘Who’s coming to this meeting?’ I asked, bending down.
‘Some iron skull caps.’ He didn’t look up.
‘Iron skull caps?’
‘They’re a type of Orthodox Jew,’ said Isabel.
She was on the other side of the table. She looked good in her black shirt.
‘You are right.’ He pointed a finger at Isabel. ‘But that doesn’t mean I endorse their views.’
‘What views?’
I was peering at what Simon had on his screen. It was a blown-up picture of a real DNA strand with lines and labels pointing to various features on the strand. We were looking at something 2.5 nanometres wide, a billionth of a metre wide. It’s hard to even imagine something that thin.
‘I’m not going to explain what they believe. But I’ll tell you this. They were looking for someone who can do non-destructive DNA splicing, someone who can manipulate down to the molecular level. And they were willing to pay good money for the research to make it happen.’
‘You’re involved in a red heifer project, aren’t you?’ Isabel’s eyes were wide.
He stared up at her, beaming.
‘What’s a red heifer project?’ I said.
‘It’s a project to create one of the biblical symbols of the coming of the Messiah,’ said Isabel.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Apocalyptic Christians want to breed a perfect red cow, an act which would signify the time was right to build a new Temple,’ Isabel explained.
If this was what Simon was working on, he was crazier than I thought.
Simon’s head went from side to side, as if he was throwing off water.
‘You haven’t been in Jerusalem long, have you?’ His expression was one of benign, irritating superiority.
‘There are more crazies per square mile in this city than anywhere else in the world. Stop people in the street and try this: ask them about their religious views. You’ll get predictions about the end of the world or about the Mahdi or about the Gates to Hell opening soon for non-believers.’ He had a determined look on his face.
‘Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but where does it say I have to believe the same things my sponsors believe? You must understand this, the two of you. Don’t tell me you don’t.’ He scrolled forward a few slides on his laptop, then back again.
‘You don’t think the Messiah is on his way?’ said Isabel.
‘My sponsors do. They run Bible studies classes here in Jerusalem. They’ve done it for years. They have a soup kitchen, and a matchmaking service. If someone like that is willing to cover the cost of a few years of our research, should I not take the money?’ He put his head back and looked straight up at me.
I didn’t answer. We had strict rules about who we would take money from. But we were lucky; we’d had major breakthroughs. And we were in Oxford. We could attract funding from many sources. And success spawns success in applied research, like in everything else.
‘What do you believe in, Sean?’ he asked.
‘Apple pie, the moon landings, lots of things.’
‘See, you can believe in anything you want. I didn’t ask you to fill in a questionnaire before I brought you here, did I? We’re all free to think what we want.’ He twisted his shoulders, as if he had back pain he was trying to ease.
‘What about your results,’ said Isabel. ‘Have you bred the perfect red heifer?’
He rubbed his chin. ‘We’ve bred over a thousand red heifers. The question is, are any of them perfect? The standard is high, very high. Not one single hair can be black or brown or white, God forbid.’
‘If you do breed one, a lot of people are going to claim the end of the world is nigh,’ said Isabel.
‘People are claiming that all the time. I don’t think it will lead to a panic.’
Isabel had come around the table and was looking closely at the slide on the screen. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Let’s hope you’re right.’
‘Can you tell us anything else about Max Kaiser?’ I said. It was time to get something out of all this.
‘With all due respect, you are strangers here, Dr Ryan. Our police are the best people to look for your friend Susan Hunter. I think you must talk with them, for your own good.’
Talli was standing beside us now. ‘Did you know Dr Ryan’s organisation, the Institute of Applied Research, runs one of the best academic conferences in the UK these days? Many of the world’s leading researchers attend. So I’ve heard.’ She gave me a tentative smile. It crossed my mind that maybe she wanted to speak at one of our events.
‘I wouldn’t want to make an enemy of them, that’s all I am saying, Simon,’ she continued.
Her description of our conference would have been disputed by some, but many cutting-edge researchers would have agreed with it. We’d built a reputation for having fun too, and avoiding some of the boring stuff you’d expect at such conferences.
Simon looked at me with an interested expression. Was this the route to get him to help us, or should I press another button?
I peered at the laptop screen. ‘You’re laser splicing at the single nanometre level, aren’t you? That’s unprecedented. What’s the damage threshold?’
‘Lower than your dreams.’
‘You’ll be looking for Nobel prizes, if you can get the right people to promote your case.’
His expression bordered on conceit now. No wonder he wanted to show me what he was up to. Not a lot of people would understand the real breakthrough he’d achieved.
‘How did you get to this point?’ People like Simon usually yearn for an audience, people who will hear them out and understand how truly clever they are.
He looked pleased as he began to tell me the history of their project.
I let him talk. He loved listening to himself. His eyes grew wider, as if he was in the headlights of a truck, as he went through the ins and outs of his work: how he’d discovered the breakthrough himself, how a colleague had let him down in the early stages, had even disputed his findings. And how he’d been vindicated in the end. It was the usual academic front-and-back-stabbing stuff.
When he’d run out of steam, Isabel said. ‘You should definitely be at the institute conference next year. Shouldn’t he, Sean?’
She had an enthralled look on her face. I hadn’t known she was so interested in optical science.
‘I forgot to ask, do you remember where Kaiser was staying the last time he was here?’ she said.
He smiled at her, answered quickly. ‘Somewhere on Jabotinsky.’
‘What number?’ I said. I hadn’t heard of the place, but I assumed you’d need more than a street name to find out where Kaiser had been staying. Jabotinsky could run all the way to Tel Aviv, for all I knew.
‘I don’t remember.’ He shrugged dismissively.
He knew more. He had to.
Isabel was still looking at the screen. ‘Did you meet him there?’ Her tone was soft, friendly.
‘I picked him up a couple of times, no more than that. He was, without doubt, the most arrogant archaeologist I’ve ever met.’
‘How were you helping him?’ asked Isabel.
‘He used my name to get himself admitted to a dig. I got a call from someone checking up on him, to see if he was who he said he was. They didn’t say where the dig was though. But they’d heard of me.’
‘Do you even know what section of Jabotinsky he was staying on?’ said Isabel.
‘Somewhere near the middle. Honestly, I can’t tell you any more. I was never in his apartment. I picked him up on the street, twice. Once at a bus stop near the middle. Another time at a coffee shop at the end. Maybe if you go door to door someone will remember him.’ He gave Isabel a sympathetic look.
‘It’s a very long street,’ said Talli, looking at me. ‘There are lots of apartment buildings. If you go door to door you’ll be days at it.’
‘I can’t help you any more,’ said Simon. He looked at his watch. ‘My meeting is starting soon and …’ He didn’t finish his sentence. It was clear he wanted us to get going. There was tightness around his eyes, as if he was about to miss the last train home for Yom Kippur.
‘We’re out of here,’ I said. ‘Thanks for showing me what you’re working on. It was interesting.’ I gripped his arm.
Seconds later we were standing by the lifts. There were two dark-suited men in the corridor outside the room we’d just come out of. One of them had cropped hair. The other had longer hair and was younger. Their eyes were watchful. They looked as if they’d be suspicious of their own wives.
‘Is that the local CIA?’ I said, half jokingly, as the elevator went down.
‘Shush,’ said Talli. She glanced up at the small black dome of a security camera in a corner of the elevator.
When we got down below she turned to me. ‘That was the Security Service. I’d bet my pension on it.’
‘Simon is an important guy?’ asked Isabel.
Talli shrugged.
That was when I spotted the knot of people, maybe six or seven, waiting by a table near the revolving glass doors leading from the outside. Two blue-shirted female police officers were waving two-foot-long wands over people, before letting them pass in or out. We joined the queue.
I’d never seen people being checked leaving a place as well as entering it.
Talli threw her gaze to the ceiling as she waited. She whispered, ‘You never know what the Security Service is going to do next here.’
I was dealt with first. The older looking of the two officers held her hand out. ‘ID?’ She said. I gave her my passport.
She couldn’t have been much older than me, maybe a year of two, no more than forty for sure, and she was attractive. She had thick brown hair, big soft eyes, glowing skin, and an authoritative manner. She stood with her legs wide apart and her head back, as if she might bellow a command at me at any point.
‘What were you doing in this hotel?’ Her accent was soft.
‘We were visiting with a friend.’
‘Someone staying here?’ She was holding my passport, leafing through it slowly. She stopped on a page, brought it close to her face to examine it.
‘No, someone having a meeting here.’
‘Who?’
‘Simon Marcus, he’s upstairs.’
She snapped my passport shut and put it in the top pocket of her shirt.
‘I need that,’ I said.
‘How do you know Simon Marcus?’ The other policewoman was waving someone else through. Isabel was behind me.
‘He’s a professor. He knows a friend of mine. We were introduced a few hours ago.’
‘You are here to help him with his work?’ She was looking at me as if I was a conspirator, hiding something.
‘No. I’m not here to help him.’
‘Will you be staying in Jerusalem for much longer?’ It crossed my mind that she was actually saying I should leave Israel.
‘A few more days. We’ll be here less than a week. Why do you ask?’
She stepped back, looked me up and down. It appeared as if she was debating whether to arrest me or answer my question.
‘We have a lot of security troubles here in Jerusalem, Dr Ryan. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to one of our distinguished guests.’
She pointed at some high-backed chairs nearby.
‘Wait here. Do not go away.’ She turned, strode out through the glass doors, heading towards a police jeep that was pulled up outside. I moved towards the chairs, but I didn’t sit down. I stared after her. The jeep had darkened windows.
What the hell was she doing? I looked around. Two more men who looked like security guards were standing by the lifts. They were staring in my direction.
13
It was 5 p.m. in London. Henry was preparing to leave the office. He was back on normal hours, as his wife called them. He would be joining the crowds surging through Westminster Underground station in a few minutes.
Then a ping sounded from his workstation computer. It was a warning that a priority email had come in. He clicked through to the contents.
REQUEST: 3487686/TRTT
STATUS: CLOSED/EXCEPT: LEVEL 7
CASE: 87687658765-65436
No further information can be provided on the manuscript you requested.
He read the email twice. It gave nothing away. He knew from experience that no further response would be provided to any additional requests he made on the matter. Information on an item that was only available to Level 7 personnel would not be accessible to him. He was lucky he’d received even this response.
What intrigued him about it all was why an ancient manuscript, the one Sean Ryan and Isabel Sharp had discovered in Istanbul, would now be subject to such a restriction.
As he made his way out to the Underground platform heading north he thought about what could be in the document that was so important.
14
The policewoman had opened the back door of the police vehicle and climbed inside. I imagined her examining my passport in detail, photographing it maybe, or putting it through a computer check, but she could have been doing anything beyond those darkened windows.
‘What did she say to you?’ Isabel was beside me.
The other policewoman was checking people and keeping an eye on me. She needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t going to go anywhere without my passport.
‘She wanted to know if I was helping Simon. I got the impression she knew all about him.’
Isabel stood with me.
And then the policewoman reappeared. She’d only been gone a few minutes. She handed me back my passport.
‘Be careful in Israel, Dr Ryan,’ she said. ‘The situation here is difficult these days. We have to double-check everything. I am sorry for delaying you.’
I passed her by quickly. What she meant was clear. I’d been warned.
I watched as Isabel gave over her passport. The policewoman examined it carefully, asked a few questions then gave it back.
I wondered why she hadn’t asked us where we were staying. Maybe she didn’t need to. Our hotel had copied our passports in front of us when we’d checked in. They’d probably used the copies to register us with the police. And with the number of security cameras around, they probably knew more about our movements than if we had a stalker.
We walked back towards the Jaffa Gate.
‘What’s Simon’s phone number?’ I asked Talli.
‘He told you everything he knows. I’m sure of it,’ she said, after she gave it to me. ‘We have a good reputation for helping academics from other universities.’ She held her hand out to bid me goodbye.
‘Thanks, Talli. I appreciate all your help. It means a lot to me. Send me an email in a week or two about what
you’re working on. Maybe you can come and do a talk for us too.’
She beamed. Then she was gone, and Isabel and I were heading for a taxi that had pulled up. It was disgorging a family of American tourists.
I checked my phone again. Susan hadn’t called back. I tapped her number. I must have dialled it ten times since she’d rung me. The number still wasn’t available.
It was looking increasingly like the call had been an accident of some sort. Maybe her phone had been stolen. Maybe someone had turned it on briefly, pressed the redial button, before taking its SIM out.
‘Can you take us to Jabotinski?’ I said to the driver. He looked at me as if I was a piece of bait drifting on the top of a pool. Then he grinned. He was young, had a few days’ growth of beard and a t-shirt with swirling red and green paint stains on it.
‘You’re tourists, right? Where on Jabotinsky are you going? It’s a long stretch, my friend.’
‘Near the middle,’ I said. He moved off. Isabel traded pleasantries with him for a few minutes. I was trying to work out the significance of everything we’d heard from Simon. Was it relevant that he was involved in a red heifer project? Probably not. They were just another bunch of end-timers, weren’t they?
Still, I felt uneasy.
The taxi pulled up a few minutes later on a long street heading up a hill with three-storey white apartment buildings on either side. The buildings were set back from the road. Palm trees, carob trees, eucalyptus and other shrubs separated the buildings from the street. There was a small roundabout at the top of the hill.
‘This is the centre of Jabotinsky. You can walk either way from here, but there’s not a lot to see.’
I was deflated. This wasn’t going to be easy. I’d hoped for a busy street with shops, cafes maybe, people we could talk to, ask if they’d seen an American of Kaiser’s description. He hadn’t been a quiet guy who could escape attention. But this was a long street full of anonymous apartment buildings.
‘What’s your plan?’ said Isabel.
‘I thought we might have dinner? Look at all the restaurants,’ I gestured around us.
She put her hands on her hips, turning on her heel. ‘Yes, what a big choice.’
A pizza delivery motorbike went past. ‘There is pizza somewhere,’ I said.
‘Wonderful, are you going to run after him?’ The noise of the disappearing motorbike faded into the distance.
‘Let’s walk that way.’ I pointed back down towards the Old City. ‘He has to have stayed one side of this roundabout. That gives us a fifty percent chance of being right.’ We walked onto the pavement.
The weather was getting even more gloomy. It was 3.30 p.m. and colder than I’d expected, like London in mid-March. All we needed was for it to start raining.
Up ahead, where the road curved, a red car was parked. As we watched, it pulled away. A group of young people were coming towards us. They were moving like a rolling party, the boys swirling around the outside of the group in long t-shirts mostly with the names of obscure bands on them. The girls were laughing, linking arms.
As they came near I approached one of the boys. He was tall, had Clark Kent glasses and a puzzled expression.
‘Do you know an American archaeologist living around here?’ I said.
His accent was all New York when he answered. ‘Yeah right, half the professors in our university look like American archaeologists.’
One of the girls stopped in front of us. ‘What are you people doing in Israel?’ she said. She had a thick wave of curly brown hair and a friendly smile.
‘We’re looking for a friend of ours who got lost,’ said Isabel.
They were all in their late teens or early twenties.
‘Everybody’s looking for somebody,’ said the girl.
The guy was eyeing up Isabel; most men found her attractive I’d noticed. He was giving her a big grin. ‘You wanna come with us for a few beers,’ he said. He didn’t even look at me. Isabel’s straight black hair and dark tight jeans took at least five years off her age. She could have easily passed for someone in her late twenties.
‘You can come too,’ said the girl. She pushed her hair away from her face. ‘We’re all going to a party. Are you Jewish?’
I shook my head.
‘It don’t matter,’ she said. ‘I can hear an American accent under there.’
‘I grew up in the States,’ I said. ‘Then my dad was stationed in England.’
‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘Having to listen to Oasis every day.’
‘I like Oasis.’
Isabel was looking at me sceptically. I motioned for us to go along with them. We might be able to ask them a few questions about what went on in this neighbourhood.
As we walked, the girl turned to her friend. She was taller than the first girl. She was grinning at me. I looked away. The next time I looked at her she had a big joint in her mouth and there was a trail of blue smoke coming from it like a steaming power plant. This was not what I needed. Getting arrested was not in the plan.
‘I think you better throw that away,’ I said, turning back to the girl. ‘There’s a police car right behind us.’ It was true. I’d just spotted it. They had to be trailing this group.
The girl turned her head fast, then looked back at me. ‘Goddamn it,’ she said.
The joint fell from her fingers.
‘We’ll catch up with you later,’ I said. I took Isabel’s arm.
‘They’re all going to get arrested any minute now.’ Isabel waved goodbye as we peeled away from them. We headed for an entranceway, as if we were going into one of the apartment buildings.
‘I don’t think spending a night in the cells is going to help us.’
‘They might have known something,’ said Isabel.
I shook my head. ‘There has to be a better way than this.’
I stopped, bent down to tie the laces on my trainers. I was facing back towards the road. The police car passed us at walking speed. The officer on our side, who had big glasses on, stared intently at us as they passed. I gave her a smile in return. What could they do to us, charge us with talking to someone?
‘I have an idea,’ I said.
‘I hope it’s better than your last one.’
‘Come on.’
We walked to the bottom of the road. Ten minutes later we were at the nearest takeaway pizza place.
‘No, I want to sit down and eat,’ said Isabel. ‘Not eat pizza at the side of the road.’
‘You don’t have to eat anything,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’
I pulled two red two hundred shekel notes from my wallet. Then I went to the delivery guy by the big glass window of the pizza place. He was leaning against his motorbike and had big earphones on. I began talking. He took the earphones off.
‘Hi, can you help us? I’m supposed to meet a friend of mine here for a party. He’s an American, a guy called Max Kaiser. He’s a big guy, with bushy black hair, a young-looking professor. He lives on Jabotinsky, but for the life of me I can’t remember which number. If you can tell me where he lives, I’ll give you this.’ I pushed the two notes forward. ‘I don’t want to miss my chance with that one.’ I nodded towards Isabel.
The boy, he seemed more Arab than Jewish, looked at me as if I was certifiable. He had patches of beard on his face and a collection of beaded necklaces hanging from his neck.
‘Can’t help,’ he said. ‘Don’t know who you’re talking about.’ He turned away, making it clear that even if he did know something, he wasn’t going to tell me anything useful.
‘How many delivery guys does this place have?’
He glanced at me, then looked away, putting his phone to his ear as if he’d suddenly remembered he had an urgent phone call to make.
I went into the shop, asked the guy behind the counter how many delivery people they had. He looked at me as if he had no idea what language I was even speaking in. He pointed up at the plastic sign above his head. Another bigger guy was looking at us steadily, as if getting ready to pull a baseball bat out at the first sign of trouble. Though, considering what country we were in, he probably had a legally held UZI under the counter.
‘Which pizza you want?’ the first man said. He sounded as if he’d been smoking for a hundred years.
Isabel leaned over the counter. The man was staring at her.
‘Have you got a guy called David doing deliveries?’ she said.
They looked at each other, clearly trying to work out why a woman like Isabel would be trying to find a particular pizza delivery guy. You could almost see their brains grinding through the possibilities.
‘We have no David here, sorry.’ He shook his head.
‘How many delivery guys do you have?’
‘Two. There is the second one. And he’s not a David.’ He pointed.
I turned. A second delivery motorbike had pulled up outside. The guy on it was huge. The bike looked tiny under him. I went out, walked up to him.
‘Your boss said you would help us.’ I pointed back inside. The guy behind the counter waved at us. The delivery guy looked from him to me.
‘We’re looking for an American called Max. He’s got bushy hair. We’re supposed to be going to his place tonight, but I lost his number. I know he lives somewhere on Jabotinsky.’
I leaned towards him. ‘Your boss said I can give you this.’ I had the two notes in my hand. I pushed them forward.
He looked at them, then back up at me. ‘Yeah, I know your American friend, but you’re too late. His apartment’s burnt out. He ain’t been there in weeks. You can’t miss the place if you walk up Jabotinsky. But you won’t want to go there tonight. He won’t be entertaining anyone.’ He took the notes from my outstretched hand and went past me into the pizza shop.
Isabel was still talking to the man behind the counter. If Kaiser’s apartment had been on fire, there’d be a good chance that would be visible from the street. We had to go back to Jabotinsky.
But a part of me didn’t want to.
I didn’t want to see what had happened to his apartment. His death had been a distant thing up until this point.
Now I couldn’t escape thinking about what had happened to him. That made a queasy feeling rise up inside me.
I was imagining what it must have been like. The flames burning him. I couldn’t imagine a worse torture. Soon, I wouldn’t need to imagine it.
15
The screen on Mark Headsell’s laptop was glowing blue. He’d dimed the lights in the suite on the fifteenth floor of the Cairo Marriot on El Gezira Street as soon as he’d entered it.
The hotel was a difficult landmark to miss if you were aiming to bring down a symbol of Western decadence, but as it had hardly been scratched in the Arab Spring that had overturned Mubarak and his family, it was probably as safe a place as any in this turbulent city.
Being only forty-five minutes from the airport helped too, as did the fact that it was built on an island in the Nile and that it had excellent room service and bars full of expatriates. You could even fool yourself for an hour in Harry’s Pub that you were back in London.
What was keeping Mark out of Harry’s Pub that night was a series of Twitter posts that an astute colleague had been tracking. The one that particularly interested him was one that had been sent an hour ago from an unknown location in Israel.
Whoever was sending the Tweets was covering their tracks well. The fake IP address they’d been using had been broken through, but it had only left them with a generic address for an Israeli internet service provider. Whoever was logging in to make the posts was being very careful. That alone ticked the warning boxes.
We are ready to hatch the brood, was the latest message. It was an innocent enough Tweet on its own, it could have been about pigeons, but the cryptic nature of the others in the stream from the same source gave more cause for concern, as did the trouble they were having locating where the messages were coming from.
The fact that Twitter could be monitored anywhere in the world meant that it could be used to receive signals as to when to commence a whole range of activities. Such things weren’t unknown. The Portuguese Carnation coup of 1974 had been triggered by the singing of the nation’s Eurovision song contest entry in that year’s program.
And this was where things got interesting. His colleague had managed to uncover that over a hundred people across Egypt were following this particular series of messages.
And most of the people searching and watching the Twitter feed were registered to IP addresses on Egyptian military bases or air force bases. It was that final piece of news that prompted his colleague to pass the details of what they’d been tracking onto him and place URGENT in the subject line.
If the Egyptian air force were planning something, then a source inside Israel could be useful to them.
But what were they planning?
16
The apartment building on Jabotinsky had four floors and eight apartments, two on each floor. It had been easy to figure out which building was likely to be Kaiser’s; there was a big black stain above the balcony at the front. We’d also walked all the way up to the roundabout and back. It was the only building with any smoke damage, never mind anything worse.
It looked like a giant bat had wiped itself out against the front wall, halfway up.
The windows of the apartment were smeared with soot, and the door to the small balcony was blackened as if smoke had streamed through it.
The entrance to the apartments was at the side of the building. The main door was wooden and painted black; secure and sturdy looking. After three failed attempts of pressing the buzzer on each apartment and saying we needed entry to a party, we got in.
We went up in a tiny metal elevator. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was locked. Nobody answered when I knocked lightly. There was blue and white tape barring to it, so I hadn’t really expected anyone to come. The door was also a different colour to the other ones on the floor. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was unpainted.
It looked as if someone had battered the original door down and then replaced it. The people in the rest of the block had been lucky that the fire hadn’t burnt the whole building down. Someone must have called the fire brigade pretty quickly.
‘I bet one of the tenants calls the police because we pressed all those buzzers,’ said Isabel. ‘We shouldn’t hang around. They’ll think we’re back to burn the rest of the building.’
‘Ain’t nothing like being an optimist,’ I said.
‘I wasn’t being an optimist.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘You should get your own show.’ She pressed the button beside the elevator.
I pushed at the door to Kaiser’s apartment. We were out of luck. It didn’t open. I checked the ledge above the door, another one above a small window nearby. Someone might have left a key behind. I even checked under a dusty aloe vera plant on the window ledge. No luck.
The elevator arrived. As we got in, Isabel said, ‘Do you really think this will help us to find Susan?’
‘I don’t know.’ The doors closed. There was a smell of cleaning fluid.
‘You remind me of a Yorkshire terrier we once had. When he got something between his teeth he was a demon for hanging on.’
She was right, of course. We shouldn’t be here, pushing our luck again. We should be back in London, especially after what we’d got ourselves into in Istanbul.
But a stubborn part of me said, to hell with all that; you sat back once, Sean, before Irene died. All that’s over for you. You’re not the guy who sits on his ass anymore.
And I didn’t care what it brought down on me either.
‘Maybe I’m just a sucker for drama,’ I said.
We went outside.
‘No, you’re a sucker for trying to do the right thing.’ Isabel’s tone was soft. ‘And you blame yourself for way too much.’
She was right. But it was like I needed someone saying it over and over for it to go in.
I touched her arm. ‘Look, that’s where they keep the garbage,’ I said. I pointed at a row of black plastic bins in a corner under a wooden cover. They each had a number on them.
‘Have fun,’ she said.
I went to the bin marked three in white paint on its side. There was nothing inside it. The police must have taken the rubbish.
A door slammed, footsteps echoed. I felt like a criminal standing by the garbage cans. I started walking back to where Isabel was waiting near the road.
‘Can I help you?’ said a reedy voice.
I turned. There was an old man standing there. He had white hair and looked dishevelled. I made a split-second decision.
‘We came to see what they did to Max’s place.’
He turned and looked up at the front of the building.
‘Yes, it was terrible,’ he said. ‘Mr Kaiser didn’t deserve that. He was always so friendly when we met him.’
He started walking back to the house.
Isabel was beside me. ‘Did he tell you where he was working in the city?’ she asked.
He stopped, turned. ‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘We worked with Max on a project in Istanbul,’ I said. We were forced together briefly by circumstances was the truth, but I wasn’t going to say that.
I pulled my wallet out, took out one of my cards and handed it to him.
He looked at it as if it was dirt.
‘We’re trying to work out what happened to Max.’
‘He never told me where he worked. I can’t help you. Good night.’
There was a woman by the door of the apartment block watching us. She had a black cat in her arms.
‘Maybe he told your wife,’ I said.
He shrugged. I went after him. He stopped at the door, turned.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. The woman was staring at me with a suspicious expression. ‘We’re trying to find out what happened to Max Kaiser. Did he ever tell you where he was working here in Jerusalem?’
She looked at her husband. He shrugged.
‘It was so terrible what happened to him,’ she said. ‘You know, you are the first people to come by here, to take an interest in him. How did you know him?’
‘We met him in Istanbul. I used to work for the British Consulate there,’ said Isabel.
The woman smiled. ‘My mother fled to England during the war,’ she said.
I wanted to press her again, but I decided to wait.
She put her hand to her cheek. ‘We used to meet Mr Kaiser on the stairs. He was always covered in dust, always in a hurry.’
‘Did he say where he was working?’
‘No.’
I was about to turn and go when she said. ‘But I heard him saying something about Our Lady’s Church. Don’t ask me where it is. I was looking for my little Fluffy over there and he was getting into a taxi with another man.’ She patted her cat’s head, then pointed at the bushes near the road.
‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.’ She looked from me to Isabel.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I had no idea if the information was going to be helpful, but at least we’d gained something.
We walked back towards the roundabout. I expected to see the police car again. But they didn’t come. Finally, we saw a taxi with its light on. We were back in the hotel fifteen minutes later.
‘Can you tell me where Our Lady’s Church is?’ I said to the receptionist.
The man behind the desk shook his head. ‘There’s one somewhere in the Old City,’ he said. ‘That’s all I know.’
Upstairs I looked it up on the internet. The Wi-Fi was working, slowly again, but at least it was up and running.
‘Any luck?’ said Isabel, as she came back into the room from the bathroom.
‘The nearest to that name is an Our Lady’s Chapel just off the Via Dolorosa.’
‘That’s the street where people carry the cross at Easter, right?’ said Isabel.
‘Not just at Easter, all year round.’
‘Wonderful, we’re getting into the thick of it.’
‘Maybe Kaiser was just doing a bit of sightseeing,’ I said.
‘At some obscure chapel?’
‘Let’s go and take a look tomorrow.’
Seeing the Via Dolorosa was the kind of sightseeing most people do here. Irene had wanted to come to Jerusalem for a long time. She’d been interested in all this stuff. I’d always been too busy. I’d always thought there was going to be more time.
Irene had been brought up on High Church Sunday school stories of Jerusalem. I’d been brought up a Catholic, but there were one too many scandals, and all the outdated rules had put me off. But now I wanted to see the Via Dolorosa.
A memory of my dad going to mass came back to me. He’d never forced me to go with him, but I always knew he wanted me to.
After I left home I never went again. Irene had nagged me about it, asking me what I believed in. I never had a good answer, unless you count being flippant as an acceptable retort. I was good at all that back then.
For Irene, it had all meant more. She wasn’t a church goer, but she’d believed in helping people.
She’d volunteered to go out to Afghanistan. She didn’t have to. She’d been managing an emergency room at a busy hospital. She’d been the youngest in her class to rise to that position. She had responsibilities, and a lot more besides. But she wanted to give back.
I could feel the old anger bubbling.
For a while, since I’d been around Isabel, the anger had dissipated. Being here in Jerusalem, looking for Susan, was bringing it up again.
We made love that night. Isabel looked so beautiful. But I felt distracted, in a way I hadn’t before with her. Being in Jerusalem was unsettling me.
One of my problems was that I’d never wanted anyone else in the ten years I’d been with Irene. I know that doesn’t sound real, but it was true. I’d closed my mind to other women. Sure, I found some attractive, but Irene had been everything I’d ever wanted.
And I found it difficult to open up to anyone else after she died.
Isabel was the first person I felt I could really trust. One of the comments she’d made had stuck in my mind. You’re strong, Sean, but it’s not enough; you need love.
It was the best part of being with Isabel. I felt cared for.
I felt loved.
17
‘There’s something weird going on,’ said Henry. He shook his head. The social media tracking screen in front of him was blinking with the amount of data scrolling down it.
Normally he’d have let the automated systems deal with the feeds. They hunted for genuinely suspicious posts among the billions of Twitter, Facebook and forum posts, and spam ads and emails that filled the web each day. The algorithms they used were as important to the service as their best code-breaking tools.
The volume of postings on one subject was cresting like a wave. There’d been a thousand posts an hour about it yesterday. Now there was ten thousand an hour. And the rate was climbing.
Sergeant Finch looked down at him. She adjusted her glasses so they were further down her nose. She looked like a schoolmistress. A large and commanding school-mistress.
‘I hope this isn’t another one of your hunches,’ she said.
He smiled up at her. ‘This is no hunch. It’s a prophecy.’
‘You’re a prophet now?’ The smile at the corner of her mouth was either conspiratorial or from her anticipation of how she would describe this exchange to her boss over a coffee.
Henry didn’t care. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘This is about what’s been trending on Twitter and Facebook in Egypt over the last twenty-four hours.’
‘Are you going to tell me?’ Her eyes had darted to another monitoring screen operator who had raised a hand. The room was responsible for real-time monitoring about a hundred current threats to the UK’s national security.
‘All these posts are about a claim that a letter from the first Caliph of Islam has been found. Apparently, it states that Jerusalem, once captured by Islam, will remain Islamic for all time.’
‘Do we know if this letter is real?’
‘It’s being looked into.’
‘Let me know what they find, Henry. Another religious prophecy is the last thing they need in the Middle East. The place is a tinderbox right now. It could burst into flames at any moment.’
18
The following morning we took a taxi to the Via Dolorosa. If you imagine the Old City of Jerusalem as a roughly drawn square, a warren of narrow lanes, then the hill of the Temple Mount, with the golden Dome of the Rock floating above it to the bottom right. And the Via Dolorosa runs almost right to left across the middle, east to west that is, just above the Temple Mount. I say almost advisedly, because there’s a kink in the road as the two sides of it don’t exactly line up in the middle.
The Via Dolorosa ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the long venerated site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his tomb. The Holy Sepulchre was founded by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great in 326 AD, after her son became the first Christian Roman Emperor. Miraculously, she also found the cross Jesus had died on, despite the total physical destruction of Jerusalem carried out by Titus in 70 AD.
The Via Dolorosa was first venerated in Roman times, before the city fell to Islam in April 637 AD. Later, the Franciscans kept the Christian rituals alive whenever they could. They established many of the rites that surround the route to this day. Some misinterpretations of the route still happen though. An archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum, for instance, constructed in the second century, is still believed by many pilgrims to be the place where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd.
Myth, faith and bloody history come face to face in Jerusalem.
Our taxi let us out at the Jaffa Gate. We walked through the Old City towards the chapel of Our Lady. The streets were narrow, intense with souvenir shops and small cafes. The pavements were stone slabs. The first lane went downhill in small steps. Arches and canvas awnings blocked out the early morning sun. At the start of the Via Dolorosa we passed a group of Christian pilgrims following a tall Eastern-European man with a cross on his shoulders.
The closely packed shops were selling wooden crosses, icons, statues of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads, Bibles, pottery, glasses, t-shirts, mugs and a hundred other souvenirs. Some of them had Persian carpets and Turkish kilims hanging outside. Many had low wooden trestle tables jutting out in front.
It was 10.30 a.m. now and the street was busy. There were monks in long habits, mostly brown or black, Arabs in headdresses, women with their heads covered, and tourists with cameras as well as, at the major intersections where one busy and narrow lane crossed another, sharp-eyed Israeli soldiers with guns, watching us all.
Finally we found the chapel. We almost missed it. There was a crowd gathered at the entrance to a lane directly opposite it. They had caught my eye. The Via Dolorosa was wider here, maybe twenty feet across, and the entrance to the chapel was between two high stone buildings in that distinctive Mamluk style, which features layers of alternating light and dark stone.
The crowd on the opposite side of the street was made up mostly of Arab men, bareheaded or in keffiyehs, which flowed loosely over their shoulders. There was a camera crew filming it all.
I approached the cameraman. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.
He looked at me, spat on the ground and returned to his work.
We went over to the chapel. It had an ancient grey wooden door, which looked as if it had been new when the Crusaders were here. The door was closed and there was a plaque above it. The plaque was in Greek. Another plaque, in polished brass, simply said Chapel of Our Lady.
Was this the end of us chasing ghosts? I looked around. There was a group of blue-shirted policemen beyond the crowd. They were blocking the entrance to a laneway.
‘What about getting coffee? Look, there’s a place over there,’ I said. I pointed at an old-fashioned looking cafe back the way we’d come. It had a red plastic sign above its door and a menu stuck to its window.
A few minutes later we were sipping thick black coffee in a quiet corner of the coffee shop. We couldn’t get a table near the window. The rest of the tables were full of tourists looking at maps or locals huddled over tea in glass cups or yoghurt drinks. ‘There’s a police station back near the Jaffa Gate,’ said Isabel. ‘In some place called the Qishle building. Maybe we can ask them if they know anything about Susan Hunter? I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere wandering around aimlessly.’ She sounded worried.
‘We’re not wandering around aimlessly. We’re seeing the sights.’
‘What did you think we were going to find here? Kaiser’s dead. He was probably just talking about this place.’
‘So what are all those people here for?’
She looked at the menu.
A nun in a black habit had come into the cafe. She must have been in her eighties. Her skin was creased, translucent, like the cover of a book that was about to fall apart. There were blue veins around her eyes. Her habit was made of rough faded wool, and her back was bowed.
I overheard her ordering tea. Her accent was cut glass English. I stood up and went to her side.
‘Sorry to disturb you,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help but overhear you.’ I smiled. ‘Do you speak English?’
She looked me up and down as if she was wondering what stupidity might come out of my mouth next.
I put my hands up. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want anything from you.’ I hesitated deliberately, then went on. ‘Well, not anything material.’
Her eyes narrowed. I imagined she was wondering if I was one of those people who suffer from the Jerusalem syndrome when they get here, imagining they’re the Messiah, with the power to change the world.
‘It’s just that I was wondering what all those people were gathering for out there. Do you know?’
She breathed in through her nose. Her nostrils pinched together. ‘Young man, I am not a news service.’ She looked down at the ground, as if to avoid speaking anymore. A waiter put a lidded paper cup in front of her.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I need a little help.’
‘You’re a journalist, I suppose,’ she said.
I opened my mouth to deny it, but decided not to.
‘I expect you want to know about the djinn they all claim has been released at that dig.’ She sniffed again, gazed piercingly into my eyes, as if she knew what I was thinking, even if I didn’t.
‘Well, I can offer you nothing about such superstitions.’ She clutched her tea with a claw-like hand, and shot a glance over my shoulder as if checking out someone behind me.
‘That poor man was found near here, you know.’ She leaned towards me. ‘He was burnt to death. They all think it was the work of a djinn.’ She glanced out the window.
‘I hope,’ she crossed herself. ‘You’re not going to write about evil spirits on the Via Dolorosa, because there aren’t any. It’s all superstition.’
I shook my head. ‘I definitely won’t.’
‘Bless you, I hope so. It’s bad enough already here. We don’t need stories about evil spirits.’ She put her hand to her mouth, as if she’d said too much. Then she crossed herself.
‘God be with you.’ She turned away. I saw a gold cross glint at her neck. It was plain, heavy looking.
Back at the table Isabel whispered in my ear, ‘I hope you weren’t hassling her.’
‘I’ve only found out there’s a dig going on over there.’ I pointed towards the crowd. ‘And that people think a djinn has been dug up or disturbed or something. They think it has something to do with Max’s death.’
‘What the hell is a djinn?’
‘It’s a spirit, you know, a genie, if you believe in that sort of thing.’
‘You think Kaiser was working over there?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What sort of dig is it?’
I shrugged. ‘Let’s ask around, discreetly, see if anyone knows.’
It seemed such a simple idea, but it took two hours for it to sink in that we were not going to get any answers. Nothing at all, not a whisper. Four shopkeepers asked us to leave their shops, with varying intensity, after I asked them about the dig opposite Our Lady’s Chapel.
The only useful piece of information we gathered was from a policeman. After showing him my card, he said that I would have to put my request in through an Israeli university.
After we’d finished with him we went to a juice bar nearby.
‘Let’s call Simon Marcus,’ I said.
Isabel sipped her fresh orange juice. She was looking out of the window. The Via Dolorosa was almost impassable. What had been a small group was now a crowded demonstration with cheers and jeers, and young soldiers in khaki and efficient-looking policemen in blue watching everything.
I called Simon on my phone. It took three tries to get a signal.
He did not sound pleased when he answered. ‘Did you talk to the police in the lobby when you exited the hotel?’ he said, before I even had a chance to go into why I’d called him.
‘She asked where we’d been. I had to tell her.’
‘Half the people who were supposed to come yesterday didn’t turn up, Mr Ryan. I found out later that some of them were turned back at a security checkpoint in the lobby. Someone has been making stupid claims about what we’re doing.’
‘That wasn’t me. I didn’t make any claims about your work.’ I paused. ‘We need some help, Simon, please.’ There was silence for a few seconds.
‘What sort of help?’ He did not sound keen.
‘We’re trying to find out about this dig Kaiser was working on. We’re getting stonewalled.’
Isabel was motioning for me to give her the phone. ‘Isabel wants to speak to you.’ I gave the phone to her.
She spoke to him for a few minutes. It sounded as if they were getting on well. Too well.
‘That’s really nice of you to offer to meet us,’ she said, after a long gap listening to him. ‘We’re at a juice bar on the Via Dolorosa near Our Lady’s Chapel. We think this is where Kaiser was working. Do you know it?’
He said something. She thanked him again.
‘You were laying it on thick,’ I said when the call was over.
‘Do you want his help or not?’
‘Yeah, but he gets a quick put-down if he asks you for a date.’ I pointed a finger at her.
‘I’d say he’s after something else.’
I thought about that for a second. ‘You think he wants to work with the institute?’
‘Wouldn’t you? Your institute is leading the world in academic research in loads of areas. That’s what your website says anyway. Is it a lie?’
‘You were on our website?’
‘Just making sure you weren’t an imposter.’
‘Very funny.’
But she was right. He’d probably looked us up after we’d left the hotel. And he hadn’t put the phone down on me, even though he’d been angry.
I ordered another juice. We watched the people around us. There was a bunch of shaven-headed American men
at a table nearby. It looked as if they were all praying. They had their eyes closed and one of them was whispering something I couldn’t catch. There was a guy with a long beard with them. He looked like an Old Testament prophet. He was reading from a heavy gilt-edged book and muttering.
‘Djinn is a word derived from the Arabic root meaning to hide,’ said Simon an hour later, after he arrived and I’d told him what we’d learned so far.
‘It’s an interesting word,’ said Isabel.
‘It’s interesting people still believe in such things,’ I said.
Simon leant his head to one side and gave me his best condescending expression.
‘But Max’s death was evil, wasn’t it? So evil is not dead, Sean. The other words derived from the word djinn are interesting too. They are majnu-n – mad – and janin – an embryo.’
‘What sort of dig’s going on over there?’ said Isabel. She was giving him one of her super-friendly smiles. I kicked her under the table. Her smile became even warmer.
‘I can do better than that,’ he said. His chest puffed up as he spoke. ‘I asked around after you told me Kaiser was probably working here. One of my archaeologist colleagues was involved in the early days of this dig. He told me all about what they claim they’ve found.’ He paused, smiled.
‘But best of all, if this is the site I gave Max his reference for, they should be willing to let me look around. I have every reason to see the site after what happened to him.’
‘Why don’t we go over there?’ I half rose.
‘Don’t you want to know what I found out about the dig?’ said Simon.
I sat back down. ‘Go on.’
He looked around first, as if he had something important to say.
‘First, I must warn you, as my colleague warned me.’
He must have registered the look on my face, as he then said, ‘We must all be sceptical about wild claims for sites in this city. I strongly advise you do that.’ He cut the air with his hand, emphasising the words strongly advise.
‘So, what are these wild claims about the dig?’ said Isabel.
‘My friend said they’d found the basement of a first-century Roman villa.’
‘That’s it?’ I said.
‘No, no, that’s not it.’ He looked over his shoulder. The Americans were still praying. Simon moved his plastic chair forward, lowered his voice.
‘They found a reference to Pontius Pilate.’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘You mean the guy who sentenced Jesus to death?’ Isabel had a look of wonder in her eyes. She was a good actress.
‘Yes, yes.’
‘I thought there was no proof he even existed,’ I said.
‘That’s not true.’ Isabel shook her head. ‘They found an inscription to Pilate in the city of Maritima a few years ago.’
Simon smiled at her.
‘So what have they found here?’
‘Something amazing,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to believe it.’
19
The tile-covered trapdoor was heavy, even for Arap Anach. He knew Susan Hunter would be desperate by now. The light streaming in when he lifted it would probably half-blind her, if she was near it when he opened it. After twenty-four hours in darkness, your eyes can hurt when they see light again.
Her thirst would have weakened her too. She might even be unconscious and need a slap to wake her.
He pushed the lid to the side and waited. It was possible, of course, that she would come at him like a wildcat with a piece of brick in her hand.
Nothing happened.
He could see the stone stairs descending, part of the earth floor below. As he walked down, the light from the kitchen filled every corner of the basement room.
She was sitting, hugging her knees against the far wall. Her gaze was fixed on a point in front of her, as if she was trying to ignore him. No appeal came from her mouth, no despairing cry for mercy.
He was tempted to admire her for that. But the feeling didn’t last.
He put the litre bottle of water down. ‘This is for you. You are more useful to me alive than dead.’
Her head bobbed once, as if the thought of the water had brought an involuntary response from her which she’d controlled as soon as she could. She didn’t speak.
‘Here is some rice.’ He held up a plastic tub of rice mixed with egg. ‘And now you will do one more thing for me.’
Her eyes were on him. They were the eyes of a cat watching a predator many times its size.
He walked towards her, put a sheet of paper on the ground, a lead pencil beside it.
‘You will write a few sentences as to why you came to Israel on this paper and then sign your name.’
He stepped back. The eyes followed him.
‘I hope I can release you soon, Dr Hunter,’ he said. ‘You have suffered enough and I do not want to hold you any longer than is necessary. I am negotiating for your release right now. After you write what I say, I will send it to the people I am talking with.’
She didn’t move.
He picked up the water bottle, held it in the crook of his arm with the container of rice, then turned, heading to the stairs.
‘This is what they asked for, proof that you are still alive. Maybe you will be more cooperative tomorrow,’ he said. ‘When you are a bit weaker.’
‘I’ll do it.’ Her voice was still strong. That was good.
It took her only a minute to write the few sentences he dictated, adding her signature. Then she drank greedily from the bottle. She didn’t even reach for the plastic tub, but he left it with her anyway.
Upstairs, after he’d pushed the lid back and the floor tiles looked perfect again, he went out to the iron brazier on the patio. It stood four feet off the ground and had three legs. Its bowl, hanging at the top from a thin iron chain, was blackened from use and age.
He’d bought it many years before from a man who claimed it was found in a temple to Ba’al discovered only a few hundred feet from where he was. It was the reason he’d rented the olive farm and the old Ottoman farmhouse. The bowl was in the shape of a pair of hands cupped together.
He’d performed the ceremony a few dozen times. It helped to remove all doubt. He hadn’t suffered from the affliction for a long time, but it was important to still carry out the ceremony. It reminded him of what was important, that the end justifies the means.
The ancients knew how the human mind worked. When tribes vied for dominance they needed a ceremony to help their people enter into a mindset where it was enjoyable to kill another human, to vanquish your enemy, to watch someone suffer, then die and relish it.
It was a ceremony that harked back to a time before Mohammad, before Christ, before Moses even, with all their soft talk about compassion and loving thy neighbour.
He crumpled the paper Susan had written on, placing it in the bowl. Then he took the knife that hung from the top of one of the legs, put the tip in the candle flame, and pricked the back of his hand. A drop of blood welled. He tipped his hand so the drop fell onto the paper. It made a deep red stain.
He touched the beeswax candle burning nearby to the paper. In seconds it was gone. Only ash remained. He pinched it with his fingers, smearing it on his face. Everything was done now. Her hopes had been raised. It was time.
The end game could begin. Death was waiting for her starring role.
20
‘Pontius Pilate was the Governor of the province of Judaea at the time of Jesus. Roman governors in the early Empire in eastern provinces kept all the records of their term of office, including records of executions, at their villa for security reasons.’
Simon stopped. The hubbub of the street outside washed over us. I looked up as a Japanese tourist and his wife entered the juice bar. They looked alarmed by the demonstration outside. Isabel nudged me.
‘My colleague, after a little arm twisting, told me they’d found a reference to Pontius Pilate at this dig.’ Simon was talking quietly, almost whispering.
‘Amazing,’ said Isabel. ‘Pontius Pilate!’
‘Shussh,’ he said. He held his hand up and looked around quickly to see if anyone was listening.
‘It’s not confirmed yet.’
‘What’s not confirmed?’ Mr Get-straight-to-the-point, that was me.
He leaned closer. He was whispering now. ‘Apparently they’ve found a cache of scrolls under some Roman-era rubble. There’s a layer of soot above the rubble, which means the site has most likely lain undisturbed since 70 AD, when this part of Jerusalem was destroyed, after Tacitus put down the great Jewish revolt. This was all well before Islam started. Getting access to such a cache would be a wonderful thing for an archaeologist.’ He made a low humming noise.
‘Do those people out there know anything about this?’ I gestured towards the crowd outside. They were a little way up the street, but they were still close enough for us to hear the chanting they’d started.
‘Don’t know,’ said Simon.
I had no idea what they were saying, but there was real tension in the air. Almost everyone in the juice bar was craning their neck every few seconds to see what was going on. Outside on the street people were hurrying past.
I leaned forward, stretching until I could see the demonstration. The crowd had grown since the last time I’d looked. It was totally blocking the Via Dolorosa now.
‘What are they chanting?’ said Isabel.
‘They’re saying that no one should be allowed to dig in this area,’ said Simon. ‘They’re saying that there used to be a Mamluk madrasa over there, that it was burnt down during a revolt five hundred years ago with all its students in it. They say the dig is desecrating a gravesite.’ He finished his juice noisily.
‘Is it?’ I said.
‘There are bones under every house in this city,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised they got permission for this dig at all.’
‘One thing’s for sure,’ I said. ‘A hell of a lot of people will be interested in this site.’
He held his hand flat on the table. ‘I have no idea what the site will prove. But you are right, there are people who will be worried about any records from Pontius Pilate’s era, in case they might show that the truth of that time is any different to what the Bible says.’
‘Maybe there’ll be universal rejoicing,’ I said.
‘And you still think you can get us onto this dig?’ said Isabel.
Simon looked from her to me, then back again. I glanced at Isabel. Her black hair was tied up in a bun, but it was still unruly looking with odd hairs sticking out. She looked good with it that way.
‘Come on then, let’s see if I can.’ Simon stood.
We walked all the way around to the other end of the lane from where the crowd was demonstrating. The lanes behind the Via Dolorosa were only four to six feet wide in places. The high walls of the buildings, constructed mainly out of sandstone, made them seem even narrower too. As did the windows, which were barred as if we were walking beside a prison, and mostly too far up to reach no matter how high you could jump.
Many of them were shuttered anyway, with thick sand-coloured planks. Some had iron bars too. Most of the thin, half-width, wooden doorways had one or two worn sandstone steps leading up to them. In some places canvas awnings and stone arches high up blocked the light out completely.
This wasn’t a medieval warren like you’d find in European cities. It was a Biblical-era warren.
A group of young men pushed past us. Then three more followed. They were all in a hurry.
After making another turn, we found the building they had come from. It looked like a school of some sort. Young men were hurrying out of it with bags under their arms or backpacks on their backs.
After we passed the school there were less people about. The lane we turned into as we circled back to the Via Dolorosa was narrower than any of the others we’d passed through. It seemed as if we were being squeezed by the buildings rising up on either side. There wouldn’t be much we could do if someone with a knife held us up here, demanding our valuables.
Finally we turned another corner and our way was blocked by a shoulder-high blue plastic barrier. There were Israeli soldiers in khaki behind it. Their black helmets had see-through plastic wrapped around them to cover their faces.
As we came up to the barrier, we were the only other people in the lane beside the soldiers. Simon waved an ID card in the air. One of the soldiers shouted something at him. Simon held the card over the barrier. Half a minute later the barrier moved back and to the side.
Beyond it, up against the wall behind the soldiers, was a stack of plastic shields. Two of the soldiers had what looked like black paintball guns in their hands. They were probably tasers or something worse. They looked as if they were prepared for almost anything.
Simon said something in Hebrew as one of the soldiers examined his ID card. It was passed to the oldest looking soldier, perhaps all of twenty-two or twenty-three years old, who pushed his helmet back and started talking fast in Hebrew.
Simon replied calmly. Then he turned to us.
‘Have you got your passports with you?’ he said.
I took mine out of the back pocket of my trousers. I held it in front of me with the photograph page open. The soldier took it from me, peered at it, looking at each page. Luckily it was a new one. It had no stamps that he wouldn’t like.
Isabel took hers and a small bottle of water out of her bag. That action brought four guns to bear on us.
Simon threw up his hands, said something that ended in ‘Ayyyyyeeeee.’
Isabel showed them her passport with one hand, drank from the bottle of water with the other, then passed it to me.
The soldier took Isabel’s passport, looked through it for what seemed like ages. Eventually he passed it back to her. Then they let us pass.
Seconds later we turned a corner and could see the high steel barrier blocking the other end of the lane. There was a group of helmeted Israeli soldiers between us and the barrier. I could hear the chanting in Arabic beyond it.
Suddenly a pair of hands appeared and a walnut brown face peered over the top of the barrier. The soldiers standing on this side banged near the hands with metal truncheons. The face dropped back, but a cry went up, as if the man had been injured, or maybe it was the sight of us beyond the barrier that had set him off.
Whatever the reason, the next thing a shower of stones came over the barrier raining in our direction.
I put my arm up to protect Isabel.
The door we were in front of, a narrow one with a sandstone step, was like the others in the lane, closed tight. It had a notice stuck to it with blue tape around the edges. Simon banged the door. Nothing happened. Stones were dropping around us.
Simon banged on the door again, harder this time. Then it opened and we were looking at a man who took up the whole width of the doorway. He had a freckly-gingery look, ginger eyebrows and ginger hair. His skin was pale pink. And his shirt, which he was bulging out of, had a faded red stripe around the middle.
‘What do you want?’ Mr Ginger said, in a most unfriendly manner. He sounded as if he was from deep in the American south. For a second I thought I might be able to call on a little empathy, seeing how I held a US passport. Then he opened his mouth again and almost snarled at us.
‘No visitors,’ he said. He closed the door, fast. Stones fell around us.
‘Ow,’ said Isabel. She clutched at her side.
I banged the door with my fist. It rocked on its hinges. ‘Open up, for God’s sake,’ I shouted.
I banged the door again and again.
Then it opened. ‘I told you, no visitors,’ said the friendly Mr Ginger.
Simon held up his ID card. ‘I am entitled to come in and inspect this dig. I’m a professor with the Hebrew University. I gave a reference to Max Kaiser to enable him to get on this dig. I need to see where he was working, because of what has happened. These people are my colleagues.’ He gestured towards us.
Ginger threw his hands in the air. ‘We’ve no time to give tours.’
‘We won’t be long. If I have to come back with my friend from the Antiquities Authority, it will take us a lot longer. He is a stickler for sites being run properly.’
Ginger frowned. ‘You gave Max his reference?’ he said. Simon nodded.
A look of recognition replaced the suspicion.
‘Are you working on a red heifer project?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Max spoke about you.’
Simon smiled, thinly. ‘I don’t want to have to come back. You know who I am. Let us in.’
Ginger sighed. ‘Okay, come in. But your visit will have to be quick.’
He stood aside.
I went in first. Isabel followed me. Ginger shouted at us not to touch anything.
‘Be very careful,’ he said. ‘Visitors are not covered by any insurance.’ His words echoed through the building.
‘And don’t take any pictures. And I want a word with you.’ I looked back. He’d put a hand up to stop Simon in the doorway.
‘Have a look around,’ called Simon. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
We were inside. He’d done it. There was a muffled throbbing coming from somewhere below. A stairwell beckoned to us from the other side of the large dusty room we were in. One part of it led down. The other part led up. Describing the room as dusty would be a bit of an understatement.
It was dusty in the way a sandpit is dusty. There were drifts of sand and cobwebs in each corner, and a thick layer of it on the floor with boot marks and channels in it. There was a heap of dust near the stairs too, as if that section had been swept down from the upstairs rooms.
Had the house been abandoned for decades? It certainly looked like it. We headed down the stairs.
The room below was darker, full of cobwebs. It had no stairs going down, just a three-foot-wide hole in the floor. There was light streaming from the hole. The throbbing noise was coming from it. I looked down into it. Isabel was behind me. I couldn’t hear Ginger and Simon talking anymore. I could hear other voices, European voices. Someone was speaking German down there. The replying voice was German too. Who the hell was on this dig?
A shiny steel ladder led down into the hole. I took hold of it and swung myself onto it.
‘This is one time where I don’t think “ladies first” holds.’
I looked down.
I could see shiny equipment, a portable generator and some white airtight plastic boxes on the stone floor beneath. There was another hole of a similar size in the floor below us too.
‘You don’t have to come down if you don’t want to.’
‘Why don’t you try to stop me?’ said Isabel.
There was no polite answer to that.
At the bottom of the ladder the air felt heavy. The generator was running, and a red pipe, about an inch thick, ran out of it and down into the next hole. The inside of my mouth was coated in gritty dust. The walls on this level were ancient foot-square stone blocks. There was no plaster on them, as there was on the walls up above.
The voices had stopped talking. Whoever was down below had probably heard us coming.
I had a look around. There was a knee-high pile of broken, pale ancient wood in one corner. This room was a different shape to the ones above. It faced in a different direction, diagonal to those above, as if the building it had been part of had faced a different way. There was an oily scent coming from the pump too. And the noise from it was a lot louder now we were on the same floor as it.
The hole going down was in the far corner here. I could see the start of a proper stairway descending this time. We were far below street level now. There was a recessed door near the stairs, totally blocked by a pile of rubble. It looked as if it had been there a long time. Where did that door lead? Why had it been blocked up from the inside?
The temperature was high down here. I felt sweat run down my forehead. My shirt was getting damp at the small of my back too. Then a head appeared, poking up out of the unguarded stairwell. And whoever he was, he was angry.
21
Henry Mowlam took the teabag out of his thin white plastic cup and dropped it into the stained bin. Working for the Security Service was not as glamorous as TV shows made it out to be.
He took his mid-afternoon tea back to his desk. He had a report to read. It was on one of his two smaller side screens. The report was a secure PDF, an un-printable and un-saveable document, which his password had allowed him access to. It could only be read on screen and the length of time it remained opened, and by whom, was being recorded as part of the document metadata.
The report was the latest impact assessment for a war between Israel and the US, and Iran and possibly Egypt too, as well as others, depending on which Arab governments got embroiled to prove their Islamic credentials.
Its contents were stark.
The human and economic impact of such a war would be greater than any conflict since the Second World War. Iran was a regional power now and had a standing army of 545,000 as well as a reserve of 650,000 men. It would be the largest and most advanced military force Israel had ever engaged. Israel had an active defence force of 187,000 and a reserve of 565,000. Israel’s population was 7.8 million. Iran’s 78 million.
The casualty predictions were based on a number of possible war scenarios. Even the most optimistic prediction for the loss of life in the region would be unacceptable to the public in any of the participating countries, should the information ever get out.
The second half of the document detailed the levels of long-term human and physical destruction if a limited
nuclear exchange took place. It included details of the
Israeli nuclear arsenal and an estimate of the restricted Iranian nuclear capability, currently believed to lie within their
military’s reach.
Henry was allowed to see the document only because the new remote pursuit protocol allowed him to track high-value permanent UK citizens outside the country for short durations, rather than hand over monitoring to MI6, the branch of the British Security Service focused on external threats.
The situation relating to Dr Susan Hunter, one of the UK citizens he was tracking, and the tension in Israel, where she had last been seen, necessitated he be aware of the latest intelligence for that country for his level of security clearance.
What he had to do now was evaluate the intelligence and decide how they should proceed regarding the Susan Hunter situation.
The report he had read before the war scenario document was the item he would have to take an operational decision about.
It claimed to have traced the report of a letter from the first caliph of Islam, regarding the fate of Jerusalem, to a statement by a Max Kaiser, the archaeologist who had died a week before, soon after he had given an interview to a journalist working for an Egyptian newspaper.
The article had only appeared the day before in Cairo, written in Arabic, and it had taken the translation service this long to prioritise and translate it.
It hadn’t even mentioned Max Kaiser’s death. Presumably, the reporter had interviewed him before he died and hadn’t bothered to update his story, if he had been made aware of Kaiser’s death at all.
A link between this article and Kaiser’s death was one question he had to consider. But why would any Islamists want to kill him? The letter was in their interests.
And how was all this related to Dr Hunter?
22
The man had slicked-back silvery grey hair and a big pale face. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and looked fifty-
something.
‘Heh, who are you?’ he asked, with a German accent.
‘We’re here to have a look at the dig. I was a colleague of Max Kaiser’s. I’m Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. This is my colleague, Isabel Sharp. A professor from Hebrew University is on his way down. He was Max’s reference to get on this dig.’
He rubbed his forehead. ‘We were expecting visitors after what happened to Max. It shocked us all. I’m Dieter Mendhol from the University of Dusseldorf. My colleague, Walter Schleibell, is below.’
We followed him down the stairs. The floor below was a totally different scene. The walls were covered in yellowing plaster. One wall had faded wall paintings, the sort that you’d see at Pompeii, with toga clad people in stylised poses.
A tingle of excitement ran through me. This was the real thing; a room that had been used almost two thousand years ago. Contemporaries of Christ and Caesar might have been here.
There were niches in the walls, where you could put busts. And the floor was whiter than the one above, smoother too. It looked as if it was made out of a similar sandstone as used in other parts the building, but from a different source, from a higher quality quarry.
Another Germanic-looking man, of the same vintage as Dieter, and wearing the same type of pale sand-coloured trousers and matching shirt, was standing by the far wall with his hands on his hips. He nodded steadily as we came down.
Introductions were made. We all shook hands. I gave them my card. Each of them examined it. I told them their colleague up above had allowed us in for a quick visit and the reason why. They looked at each other, then shrugged their shoulders.
‘This is really something down here,’ I said.
‘Ja, it certainly is. First century is what we think,’ said Dieter. ‘Late Herodian era. Everything points to it. We’ll be presenting a paper on the discovery, of course, and we’ll include carbon dating analysis to back up our judgement. That will prove it all, for sure.’
‘The History Channel will give you a whole series.’
He shrugged, as if he didn’t care.
‘How many rooms have you found like this?’
‘Just this one and the one below.’
There was another hole, a jagged one, right in the far corner. A blue plastic sheet and some rolls of wide black plastic tape lay near it. Were they covering the hole at times?
‘You’re afraid of contamination?’
‘Ja, moisture in particular. The rooms have been airtight for a long time. The moisture gets in at night as the temperature in the air above us goes down. We seal the lower floor as tightly as we can. Come, have a look.’ He sounded keen to show their find off.
Beside the hole there were two stacks of see-through plastic boxes. They were all about a foot wide and six inches tall. Some of them, the pile on the left, had something in them; scraps of parchment, pieces of wood, a piece of marble. Each box was numbered. I looked down into the hole. The site that confronted me was extraordinary.
It looked like an ancient rubbish pit into which people had thrown the contents of several buildings. There were pieces of wood sticking up out of the mess, like whitened bones in an ancient charnel house.
Some of the pieces of wood looked like boards from shelves, others were carved intricately. I could see a lot of scrolls too, some were crushed, some were just fragments, but many were whole. Among the debris were pieces of masonry, broken bits of furniture. The whole lot of it covered the floor below completely. I couldn’t even make out how deep the pile of ancient rubbish was.
There was a shiny steel ladder leading down. I put my hand out to hold it.
‘We don’t want anyone else to go down there,’ said Dieter, quickly. ‘We had a problem a few weeks ago. We think our security was breached.’ He moved towards me and put a wide hand on top of the pile of boxes.
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