The Jerusalem Puzzle (32 page)

All I said in reply was ‘Okay.’ I didn’t care about consequences. I wanted out of there. I buttoned up my shirt, rubbed at the scuff marks on my suede jacket, gave up, put it on.

A haughty expression was just what I needed now. I walked straight up to the quarterback, held the ID card out.

‘I’ll be back. Keep an eye on our guest.’ I pointed my thumb in Mark’s direction.

The quarterback put a hand up.

He hadn’t fallen for it. His eyes narrowed as he took the ID card, examined it. My heart pumped.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked. His voice was gravelly, as if he’d been smoking since he was a child.

‘I’ve got to make a call,’ I said, as calmly as I could. My voice sounded odd, lower than normal, but there was no way he could tell that.

He handed me back the ID card and looked away.

I’d done it.

Two minutes later I was sitting in a busy modern reception area. Near me was a Palestinian family, at least ten of them. Beyond them was an Israeli couple with a young child. Behind me was an older Bedouin woman with a sad expression. The other rows of seats were similarly busy. I was asked, by a dark-haired, sweetly smiling girl, if I’d come in to have my bandage changed.

‘My friend is coming.’ I said. ‘He won’t be long.’ She smiled at me.

The noise of a police siren poured in through the doors as someone exited. A surge of adrenaline flowed through me. I stood up, walked around, waiting for the police to rush in looking for me.

Should I run for it?

I was getting weird looks, but I couldn’t sit down.

‘You look a sight,’ said a voice.

I spun around. It was Mark.

Ten minutes later we had exited via a side door and we were in a taxi. I could smell leather and a strong pine deodorant. It almost made me sick after the tension of the last few hours. American rock music was playing loudly on the radio.

‘Where are we going?’ I said.

Mark didn’t look at me. He said something to the driver in what I guessed was Hebrew. The driver shrugged. The taxi sped up.

Mark turned to me.

‘You need new shoes,’ he said.

I looked down at my feet. My shoes were stained and scuffed badly. The taxi pulled over on King David Street outside a small shoe shop.

‘I don’t give a damn about my shoes,’ I said, after the taxi was gone.

‘Neither do I,’ said Mark.

‘So where are we going?’

‘We’re meeting Ariel.’

He started walking quickly. We passed a group of children who were squabbling loudly. There were five of them, Arab and Jewish children. They were shouting at each other, fighting over a bright yellow football that one of them was holding.

‘This way,’ said Mark. A green Toyota Land Cruiser, different to the last one we’d been in, was pulled up half on the kerb near a bus stop. Mark climbed into the front beside Ariel.

‘You two look like trouble,’ said Ariel, as I got in.

‘Don’t blame me,’ said Mark.

Ariel turned, looked me over, as if he was checking me.

‘You are a lucky man,’ he said ‘Breaking into an historical monument is an offence punishable by up to five years in prison.’

‘Thanks for pointing that out,’ I said.

I leaned forward. ‘Do you have any news about Isabel?’ My tone was so sharp Ariel turned halfway round to me.

‘Sit back, Mr Ryan. Don’t ask too many questions, unless you want to go back to your hotel to calm down.’

I sat back.

Ariel inched the car out behind two white buses.

A phone rang. I put my hand to my pocket, then remembered my phone was lost. Ariel had his out and was talking fast in Hebrew a few seconds later. Then he finished the call.

‘Look out the back window and you will see a column of smoke,’ he said, softly.

I looked. He was right. It was coming from the Old City and rising up towards the lid of clouds above us.

‘A house, just off the Via Dolorosa, is on fire.’

I watched the smoke rise. ‘We visited that area,’ I said.

‘You went to the house where Max Kaiser worked,’ said Ariel. ‘Where that classified dig’s been going on.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s the one that’s on fire,’ he said.

My mouth opened. Then I realised I didn’t care. I had to find Isabel.

‘Is there any news about that bastard I met in the church?’

My whole body felt bruised, but it didn’t bother me.

Ariel glanced at me in the rear-view mirror. He had a grave look that did nothing to reassure me.

My anxiety ticked higher. Was he saying nothing because he knew something he didn’t want to tell me?

‘What kind of person burns people to death?’ I said to no one in particular.

No answer came.

‘Where’s Isabel?!’ I slammed my hand into the door.

Ariel looked at me in his mirror, but didn’t change speed.

‘You break anything, you pay for it,’ he said.

‘Can you tell me how you’re picking up these phone signals you’re tracking?’

‘That’s classified.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Just give me a bloody clue.’

There was silence for a minute, then Ariel spoke. ‘When we pick up a signal from someone’s phone who’s gone missing these days, we can identify all other phones used from that location in the last week or the last month or the last year. Clever, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s all he needs to know,’ said Mark.

‘What about Xena?’ I said. ‘What’s happened to her?’

‘She’s busy,’ said Mark.

Ariel manoeuvred the car into the outside lane of the two lane highway and put his foot down. We passed a line of military vehicles, mostly trucks, with a few jeeps. The road ran between steep hills, then curved to the left. I had no idea which way we were heading out of the city. Then a sign went by that pointed straight ahead for Bethlehem.

I looked at my watch. It was half past ten at night. The traffic was sparse. That sickly burning smell was in my nostrils again. The smell of those bodies. The smell of death.

‘Sit back, Mr Ryan. We will be there soon,’ said Ariel.

I couldn’t. My right hand was pressed across my stomach, pushing the ache inside away. I took a deep,
long breath and held it. I had to be calm, believe that Isabel was safe, that she was alive. I couldn’t give up. I wouldn’t.

The highway curved through low, tightly packed hills. We passed the lights of a town. They stretched up one hill, as if the houses were on stilts. I looked out the back window. The lights of the occasional cars behind us corkscrewed back into darkness.

Then we went through a tunnel.

When we came out there were more hills. We slowed. There was a wide, brilliantly lit military checkpoint up ahead. Young olive green-clad soldiers carrying guns waited, standing off on each side. Ariel opened the window, waved as we came up to the metal barrier. The barrier lifted. We were through.

Ariel’s phone rang again. He put it to his ear, didn’t speak for a minute, then said something rapid in Hebrew and cut the call.

‘What’s going on?’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Your friend has made two calls. The first one was from this road. The second was from south of here. That’s where we’re going.’

‘Can’t we go faster?’ I said.

Ariel increased our speed a little.

Headlights flashed past us in the opposite direction. The road wasn’t a highway anymore. There wasn’t even a dividing line.

As we rounded a curve, a packed yellow minibus passed us at a suicidal speed. The driver must have been certifiable. He’d been totally on the wrong side of the road, right on the bend, going as fast as he could.

I closed my eyes, said part of a prayer I’d learned in a boarding school in Briarwood, New York, that I’d been at for just one year.
A periculis cunctis libera nos simper.
From all danger deliver us always.

I’d repeated that Latin phrase over and over all that year in the school. I did it now too. Nobody paid attention to my muttering.

That had been the year my dad had been transferred to England for active duty. We followed him the next year.

I couldn’t remember the rest of the prayer, but repeating that part now was enough. I would take help from any place I could get it.

The road twisted and turned. Signs in Arabic only flashed by. We passed a group of men standing at the side of the road beside a barrel that had a fire burning in it.

They all seemed to be dressed in black. Ariel accelerated as we swept past them. Then we turned a corner and a sparkling cobweb of lights filled the steep rolling hills to our left, like a scene from a sci-fi movie set on an alien planet.

Henry Mowlam was still at his desk. He’d been on duty for twelve hours. If he stayed on duty for fifteen his presence would be flagged to the duty manager.

He didn’t care.

Events in Jerusalem justified him staying late, never mind the fact that the operation to find Susan Hunter and Isabel Sharp was, he knew from experience, at a critical point.

The situation with the Israeli stock market, due to open Sunday morning, had been enough to get him to stay for the afternoon, but the search for the two women, to avoid them meeting the same fate as Max Kaiser, was now uppermost in his mind.

If they were still alive, the next move for whoever was holding them had to be to kill them in a horrific way. He’d seen it before. When a mission looks like it’s failing, the principles lash out, killing captives and followers who might betray them.

That thought left Henry without any desire to go home. He was needed here.

The cooperation from the Israelis had been first class, access to second-by-second mobile phone data and clearance at the highest level for Mark Headsell to participate in
operations
alongside their Security Service had meant the search for Susan and Isabel had proceeded as quickly as could be hoped.

And because of that cooperation, they had another lead.

The rising tension, bombings, tit-for-tat military deployments and media frenzy in Egypt over that caliph’s letter, and reports of dirty tricks by Mossad to hide the letter and its translator, were all unwelcome distractions.

An even more unwelcome distraction would be a war between Egypt and Israel. A war, precipitated by mistakes on both sides and political posturing, which seemed eminently possible now, when it had seemed an unlikely, distant possibility only a week before.

The situation had moved so suddenly up the international agenda that a meeting of the UN Security Council had been called for the following morning in New York. Twelve hours from now.

What a lot of people were worried about though, was what might happen in those twelve hours.

Israeli military units had been deployed to front line positions and the Egyptians had recently responded. Sorties by their air force had resulted in two incidents with Israeli F-16I Sufa fighters. Missile systems had locked on and pursuits had been initiated.

All it would take would be some jumpy pilot to stray into a military zone, rockets to be fired in retaliation, and the slide to war would accelerate down a cliff.

The news from Jerusalem was only making matters worse. Already there had been vociferous international condemnation of the mass murder of priests and the significant damage to Christianity’s holiest site. Commentators were speculating that Christ’s tomb had been destroyed in the fire. Other media channels, Twitter among them, had leaked that clues pointing to a Palestinian terror group’s involvement had been found.

The US news networks were running interviews with Christian preachers who were talking about signs of the second coming, Armageddon.

An email message came into his inbox. He scanned it.

The message was an automatically generated report on Lord Bidoner. It had arrived in a secure PDF format.

The report showed the contents of an email Lord Bidoner had sent to a private US security company. The message, which had been intercepted by GCHQ, was a request for a global ‘all archives’ search for any current or past references to a symbol, a picture of which was attached.

The picture was, he was surprised to see when he opened it, of the square and arrow symbol that was in the manuscript Susan Hunter had been translating.

Henry put his head in his hands. He was tired. It was approaching 1 a.m.

Had he uncovered a connection between Lord Bidoner and what was going on in Israel?

And why was the good Lord recruiting a global security company to instigate an expensive search which would include internet, academic libraries, museum libraries and a hundred other non-internet enabled repositories of data?

And why had the search request specifically suggested an international search of graveyards, mausoleums and burial places?

What the hell was going on?

Was it time to call Sergeant Finch back in? He reached for the phone on his desk. Then his hand hesitated.

The cream, flat-roofed houses, rising up the sides of the hills, were lit up with strings of lights. The steep hills behind the houses went up, almost perpendicular into the air, the houses covering the hills layer upon layer, precipitously on top of each other.

We sped on, curving and twisting between hills. Two black flags flipped past at a turn-off. I heard a popping sound, a burst of gunfire. The Israeli army maybe, or Palestinian factions fighting each other.

Then the lights all disappeared and we were curving through empty rock-covered, twisting hills, visible as shades of grey beyond our headlights. Ten minutes after that we pulled off the main road. The road we turned onto had no lights and no sign posts.

A line of scrawny trees to the right petered out after a while, as did a bent and mostly broken mesh fence on one side. After a minute travelling, our headlights picking out the rough tarmac road ahead, we turned onto another side road.

Ariel turned all our lights off. We drove slowly forward, our eyes getting used to the near darkness. The only light in the car was a low blueish glow from a GPS by Ariel’s knees. He adjusted it and the glow almost disappeared.