The Jerusalem Puzzle (6 page)

‘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.

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.

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.