The Jerusalem Puzzle (13 page)

I think my mouth opened in shock at that point. They say your jaw drops when you’re surprised, and it’s true, it does.

The other policeman was talking to a male nurse who had appeared. The second policemen had receding hair and a wiry frame, as if he hardly ate.

Isabel moved to get off the examination table, on the other side to where he was. He didn’t like that.

‘Stop, Isabel Sharp, do not move,’ he shouted. Oddly, the sound in the ward went from a hush to a sudden buzz, as if swarms of bees had exited from the walls around us.

‘I’m only getting off the bed,’ said Isabel, politely.

The policeman who was nearest Isabel had his gun out. He was pointing it at her. My heart thudded. What were they expecting? That Isabel was going to blow herself up?

‘There’s no need for that,’ I said loudly.

‘You will follow our instructions,’ said the policeman.

‘There’s no need for you to pull your gun.’ I spoke slowly, hoping to calm things.

‘We’re tourists, that’s all.’

I turned to Isabel.

‘Let’s do what they say. This must be some mistake. I’m sure we can sort it out.’

She held her wrists out in front of her. The policeman had his cuffs on Isabel a second later. His expression told me that maybe I was being optimistic.

‘We understand your treatment is finished here, that you are fit to leave,’ he said to Isabel.

‘You got the news before I did,’ she said.

I could have said something about the doctor not having told her himself, but the cut on her leg was relatively minor and it had been bandaged with an impressive looking skin-toned plaster.

And I was right about being optimistic. They’d made no mistake about who they’d arrested.

We were taken to a large concrete bunker-like police station. It was only ten minutes’ drive from the hospital, but I had no idea what part of Jerusalem it was in. It was on a main road with low office blocks set behind trees.

We were taken to it in the back of a white police car with blue stripes, no door handles in the back, and tinted windows. It brought us into an underground car park beneath the station.

After being thoroughly body-searched in separate rooms and having passed through metal detectors, we were brought down a windowless corridor together. As I looked at a pale-faced Isabel I had a vision of a long period of incarceration without trial, of being stuck in an Israeli prison not knowing what would happen to us next.

Then we were split up. I had no idea why they brought us back together just to walk down a corridor, but they probably had a reason.

Maybe they hoped Isabel would plead with me about something we’d done as soon as she saw me, but she didn’t. If anyone imagined her as someone who scared easily, they were wrong.

Judging from what she’d told me about some of her
escapades
in Istanbul before we met, and from her behaviour during incidents when we were there together, a period in police custody wasn’t likely to faze her.

It took them two hours to get the basics straight about us; to verify that we were staying where we said, that we were who we said we were, that we had return airline tickets, that I was one of the founders of The Institute of Applied Research in Oxford and that we had a good reason for visiting that site in the Old City.

I wasn’t too concerned during all this. We’d done nothing wrong, in my opinion. In fact, we were trying to help them by looking for Dr Hunter.

It took them only another thirty minutes to decide to deport us. There is something to be said about the speed of Israeli justice. It was the exact opposite of what I’d imagined.

Isabel and I met up again in a room at the back of the police station. We were also reunited with our belongings from the hotel. That was the next of the surprises for me that night. It seemed as if they knew what was going to happen to us from the moment they picked us up.

Our backpacks had been searched thoroughly too. They’d been turned inside out. It wasn’t hard to figure this out. Every item that had been in them had been put back in a different place. Clearly they didn’t care whether we knew what they’d done or not.

The good news was that everything from the hotel was in our bags. Nothing was missing. Not even the old newspaper from the bedside table, which had been stuffed into my bag.

What surprised me most though was their decision to deport us. Sure, we’d pushed our way into that dig, and maybe we had broken several important regulations about who’s allowed onto archaeological sites, but I’d never imagined that someone trespassing at a dig would be treated this way.

It didn’t matter to them that we’d been taken there by Simon either. They would deal with him separately, they said. And we were lucky not to be facing criminal charges.

‘You cannot be unaware of the importance of archaeological laws in Israel,’ was how the policeman put it, while explaining what was going to happen to us.

In the end I didn’t believe all that. Someone high up had decided we weren’t welcome and that was it. We were history.

My hopes of helping to find Susan were gone.

The next big surprise was that we were allowed to pick which city we’d be deported to. That was a decision we were asked to make on the drive to Ben Gurion International Airport.

They had the siren on whenever we met traffic, so the journey took only thirty minutes. The main thing of interest I saw on that drive was a long line of military vehicles, tanks on trailers and odd-looking trucks pulling sand-coloured containers, which we passed, all heading for Jerusalem. There must have been fifty of them. Something else was going on here.

We were told by the friendlier policeman in the car that there were flights to London, Istanbul, New York, Frankfurt and Athens in the next few hours.

Isabel nudged me with the side of her hand. Then she turned to me. There was just the two of us in the back of the police car. She spoke to the policemen in front as her eyes were on me.

‘We’ll take the flight to Athens,’ she said. She granted me a thin smile. It said don’t argue.

I decided to go along with her. I shouldn’t have.

I was hoping Isabel might have a plan. I assumed she still had enough contacts in London in the Foreign Office to help us in some way.

When we reached the airport I got another shock. Standing right in front of the terminal building, talking on his telephone, was one of the old white-haired preacher’s sidekicks from the dig in the Old City. It was a weird coincidence. So weird my alarm bells were ringing and dancing at the same time.

It looked very much as if our swift departure from Israel had been precipitated by a complaint from this guy’s buddies. It wasn’t just about us breaking a regulation.

But why the hell was it so important that we left Israel, that someone had to make sure it happened?

‘Did you see your friend outside?’ I said to Isabel, as we waited for our bags to be scanned.

Isabel didn’t even turn her head. She just smiled. When we got past the security check she asked the policemen whether she could go to a news-stand nearby. They nodded their agreement. She bought a copy of
The
Jerusalem Post
. The front page was about a military call up. All reservists had been told to report to their units.

Half an hour later, after buying expensive tickets and getting fast-tracked through two further security checks, we were waiting in the departure area. Our policemen were sitting nearby, keeping an eye on us. Thankfully they hadn’t insisted on handcuffing us. That was, they said, because we’d agreed to leave immediately, and hadn’t challenged the deportation order.

They’d made it clear that if we hadn’t agreed, it would have meant a few days in prison, or longer, maybe even ten days, as we waited for a hearing. And if we lost that we’d never be allowed back into Israel again. This way we could come back, if we applied to an Israeli embassy first.

‘So why are we really going to Athens?’ I said, leaning close to Isabel.

Our heads were almost touching. ‘Simon Marcus told me something while you were in the bathroom in that juice bar in Jerusalem. It came back to me while I was in the police station.’

‘What did he say?’

She spoke quickly. ‘He said Kaiser was obsessed with Ibn Killis.’

‘Who?’

‘That’s what I thought,’ she said. ‘Simon said he was a Grand Vizier in Cairo. He was Jewish apparently. He helped establish the Fatimid dynasty in the tenth century.’ She said all this as if I was supposed to know why any of this had any relevance to today.

‘So?’

‘Apparently Kaiser was planning to go to Cairo this week, to visit the Museum of Antiquities.’

‘You think we should go there?’

‘Yes. And if we want to get to Cairo from Israel by plane, Athens is the place to go. There are no direct flights.’

Egypt has been so much in the news, not only in the last few years with all the ousting Mubarak drama, but recently too, as some of the changes there had begun to have an impact. An hour later we were in the air.

It was after lunch on Wednesday before our Egypt Air flight took off from Athens, almost sixty minutes late. The flight only took one and a half hours, and there was another delay at Cairo Airport’s Terminal 3 after we arrived.

We had to queue to buy a visa and then queue again at passport control. The process seemed endless. While we waited, Isabel gave me some facts about Cairo. It was, apparently, the largest city between the Americas and India, and that includes the rest of Africa and all of Europe.

Its eighteen million inhabitants lived in one of the most densely populated places on earth, three times the
population
density of London. The pyramids of Giza were in its western suburbs and most of its good hotels, on the opposite east bank of the Nile, particularly on their higher floors, had amazing views out to the pyramids and on to the desert.

The city had been Roman, Greek, and then Muslim under various caliphates including the Umayyads, the Fatimids and the Ottomans. Each had left a layer behind in the city.

Saint Peter had written his first epistle here too. Coptic Christians, a long protected minority in Egypt, had held onto much of the oldest teachings of the Christian Church.

The greatest library in the world had been located here too, in the tenth century, under Fatimid rule. The Fatimids had, according to legend, been among the most tolerant sects in Islam, allowing Christians and Jews to partake fully in the affairs of the state.

After the Fatimids came Saladin, the Grand Vizier of Cairo, the man who pushed the Crusaders out of Jerusalem.

Finally, we were through the queue. We headed straight for the taxi rank. We ended up in a new, air-conditioned taxi, and had a slow, but uneventful journey to the Rameses Hilton on the east bank of the Nile, a ten minute walk from the famous, or infamous, Tahrir Square, where demonstrators had toppled Mubarak and still gathered regularly. The Museum of Antiquities, Cairo’s must-see attraction, with its permanent exhibition of ancient mummies and Pharaonic-era gold, was even closer.

‘You can see the Mediterranean from up there,’ said the taxi driver in hesitant English, as he dropped us off. He was pointing to the top of the hotel tower. It certainly was tall enough. I found out later it had thirty-six storeys.

The hotel was at a busy intersection and there was a constant honking of horns as traffic sped by. There was a faint smell of burning in the air too, as if fires were somewhere not far away.

We checked in and were given a double room with, much to my displeasure, two single beds. Isabel claimed we were given that room because we weren’t married. I asked for another room with a double bed to prove her wrong. I was told there were none available, as there was a convention on and all the rooms were booked.

We’d been lucky to get a room at all – so the unsmiling man said.

I pushed the twin beds together. Isabel showered first, coming out of the bathroom in a fluffy white bathrobe.

‘You look good,’ I said.

‘I don’t feel it. My stomach is acting up.’ She stood by the window looking out over the city. It was dark, 6.30 p.m., and the evening rush hour was filling the streets below us with bright streams of headlights.

She looked pensive, as if being here was troubling her.

‘If you want to go back to London, let me know,’ I said.

She turned to me, held her hand out. I took it.

‘No, we’re in this together. You have your demons to vanquish and I’m going to help you.’

‘This feels more like following a thread than vanquishing demons,’ I said.

She pulled me to her. ‘I think we’re following the right thread,’ she said.

We held each other, staring out at the endless streams of headlights. It felt as if we were at the centre of an illuminated cobweb.

While I was showering she set up a meeting with Mark Headsell, her ex-husband. I can’t say I was delighted with the fact that we were going to meet him again.

It crossed my mind to say something to him about the way he’d treated her. He’d done some stupid things, not the least of which was leaving her behind in a house, while it was being shot up by gunmen in Iraq. I wondered why she’d stayed with him after that.

When I came out of the shower Isabel had put a black skirt on. It wasn’t short – it came to just above her knee – but it was a totally different look to the black or blue jeans she normally wore. She was applying make-up at the mirror.

‘You look good,’ I said, as I towelled my hair dry. ‘Is this for Mark?’

‘Don’t be crazy. Mark Headsell is an idiot, but he can help us.’

She looked me up and down. ‘Can you be ready in ten?’

‘That quick?’

‘There’s some event going on here which Mark’s attending tonight. If we want to see him we’ll have to be quick.’ She went back to fixing her make-up.

We were in the Sherlock Holmes pub, one of the features of the hotel, ten minutes later. My hair was still damp and I was tired from the journey. Thirty minutes after that, when Mark still hadn’t turned up, I was feeling for Isabel.