Footsteps echoed up the hallway and a door crashed open. Callaghan strode in. His face was twisted in fury. Three more men filled the doorway behind him, pistols drawn.
‘Surprise visitor,’ Slater said.
Callaghan stared at her. ‘That was smart of you, Fiorante. But there’s a fine line between smart and dumb, and you just crossed it.’ He motioned to the other men. ‘Frisk her.’
They searched her roughly, but carefully. ‘She’s clean.’
Alex brushed wet hair from her face and glared defiantly at Callaghan. ‘What have you done with Zoë?’
Callaghan smiled. ‘You want to go meet her? Be my guest.’
Alex was dragged down a twisty, shady corridor by the agents as Callaghan and Slater led the way. There was a heavy iron-studded door in an alcove at the bottom of the passage, down some steps. Callaghan took a long iron key out of his pocket and unlocked it. He jerked the door open and the agents shoved Alex inside. She tumbled down a flight of stone steps and landed hard on a concrete cellar floor. She tasted blood on her lips as she staggered to her feet.
Slater casually descended the steps towards her, that twinkle in his eye. He stopped halfway down and leaned on the iron stair rail. ‘What a shame,’ he said, eyeing her up and down. ‘She’s so nice.’
Alex heard sobbing behind her. She turned. Zoë was slumped against the wall in the shadows. Her face was wet with tears and there was a cut over her eye. Alex went over to her and held her. ‘You bastards,’ she hissed at them.
Callaghan walked down the steps and stood next to Slater. ‘I guess this is where we part ways, ladies.’ He reached into his coat and drew out a Glock 9mm. He pointed it at Zoë, then swivelled it to aim at Alex. Alex refused to flinch. No way would she show him fear.
Zoë whimpered, clutching her hand.
‘Fuck you,’ Alex said.
‘I really like this woman,’ Slater said. ‘She’s feisty. Shame I can’t get to know her better.’
‘She’s a pest. And pests get eradicated.’ Callaghan squinted down the sights, getting ready to fire.
‘Wait,’ Slater said.
Callaghan lowered the gun impatiently. ‘What?’
‘Don’t shoot them.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t shoot them. I have a better idea.’ Slater grinned. ‘How often do you come out here?’
‘Not as often as I’d like,’ Callaghan said. ‘You know how it is.’
‘Say, once every four, five months?’
‘In a quiet year.’
‘This a quiet year?’
‘This is a crazy year.’
‘Well, how about we just shut these two up down here and come back in six months or so to see how they’re getting on?’
Callaghan made a face. ‘There’s going to be a hell of a stink down here.’
Slater shook his head. ‘I never told you about my dog, did I? I had this retriever, when I was a kid. It was OK for a while, but then I got tired of the damn thing, so I shut it up in a basement to see what would happen. Took a pretty long time to die, actually. But I can tell you that the stink dies off after a while, once the rats have eaten most of the meat away. Maggots take their share, then the body fluids all dry up. You’re left with kind of a dried-out husk.’
‘You’re a sick bastard,’ Alex said.
‘I like it,’ Callaghan said. ‘What do you think, ladies? Give you some time to get to know one another better. You might even try digging your way out. Only the foundations go down awfully deep and we’re built on solid bedrock here.’
‘It’ll give you something to do while you’re dying,’ Slater said with a grin. He checked his watch. ‘We’d better move. The senator’s plane is waiting for me.’
Alex scowled at him. ‘Senator?’
Slater’s grin widened. ‘Who did you think was bankrolling this thing, the Salvation Army?’
Alex blinked in disbelief. ‘A US senator is behind this?’
‘Oh, it’s not like he even knows about it,’ Slater said. ‘Bud Richmond’s just a rich boy evangelist jackass who barely knows what day of the week it is. I sign the cheques, not him. He might be the one being set up to lead the faithful, but this is my operation.’
‘What the fuck are you people doing?’ Alex yelled up at them.
Slater shrugged. ‘I hate the idea of a beautiful woman like you dying in ignorance. We’re just about to open the curtain on the biggest show on earth, though unfortunately you won’t be around to witness it. We aim big, and we’re starting big. Something that’ll make the Corfu bombing look like a firecracker.’
Then he told her what it was, clearly enjoying the look on her face as she listened in horror.
‘You’re mad,’ she breathed. ‘You’re completely insane.’
‘Just moving things along, Agent Fiorante,’ Callaghan said. ‘Don’t think of it as our agenda. This is God’s plan. If it leads to war, then that’s the way God wants it to be.’
‘Though personally, you can keep the God bit,’ Slater added. ‘Callaghan is the religious nut here.’
The CIA agent threw him a hard look.
‘You can’t get away with it,’ Alex protested. ‘They’re expecting Zoë to turn up in England. When she doesn’t, alarm bells will be ringing.’
Callaghan smiled and shook his head. ‘Wrong again. They’re not expecting her any more.’
‘They made me call my parents from the car,’ Zoë sniffed. ‘Made me tell them I’d met someone and wouldn’t be back for a while.’
‘And they’re pretty used to that, aren’t they?’ Callaghan added.
‘Then Murdoch will notice I’m missing,’ Alex said. ‘Either way, this will come back on you.’
‘Listen, honey,’ Slater cut in. ‘By the time anybody cottons on to anything, the world will be a very different place. They’ll have more to worry about than you two.’
‘You can kill us,’ Alex said evenly. ‘But Ben Hope will be coming for you.’
Slater and Callaghan exchanged amused glances. ‘Nice sense of timing, Agent Fiorante,’ said Callaghan. ‘Because right now it’s coming up to 11.25 a.m. That’s
6.25 p.m. Israeli time. Your boyfriend is walking into a trap, right as we speak. In five minutes, he’ll be dead.’
Slater chuckled. ‘Have a nice time, girls.’
The two men turned and headed back up the cellar steps. Then the heavy door slammed shut and Alex and Zoë were left in darkness.
Chapter Sixty
The Jewish Quarter, Jerusalem
6.29 p.m. Israeli time
Ben found the crumbling old apartment building at the end of a narrow, cobbled alleyway. The street was quiet. A woman in traditional headgear saw him coming and retreated hurriedly through a doorway. He looked at his watch. Dead on time.
He checked the notebook again as he stepped into the cool shade of the apartment building. His footsteps echoed off the stone floor and the craggy walls as he climbed the stairs, glancing at the numbers on the doors.
It was a very ordinary abode. A sleeper working for an agency like the CIA needed to blend in totally with their environment, indistinguishable in their lifestyle from any normal member of the community. Sometimes their spouses were completely in the dark about their double life. They were usually people from an unassuming background, who would never attract the attentions of the police or other authorities. Their role was to gather low-grade intelligence, sometimes to act as messengers or assist more senior agents on missions in their area.
Ben came to the apartment number he’d been given and knocked on the door. He listened. There was no sound from inside. He checked his watch. He was right on time for the rendezvous. He knocked again.
The door opened. The man in the doorway was lean and hawklike, with cropped black hair and a thick beard, casually dressed in jeans and a white shirt. His eyes were dark and intense. ‘Mr Hope?’
Ben nodded.
‘Come this way,’ the man said, motioning him inside.
>
Ben followed him into a living room. The place was small and sparsely furnished, the walls bare and white. They’d clearly been expecting him. On a table was a slim card file, the bottom edge of some papers visible. Next to the file was a Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol, action locked open, and a loaded magazine. On a nearby couch was a disassembled sniper rifle with silencer and scope. ‘If this comes to a sniper-counter-sniper situation,’ Murdoch had said.
‘Callaghan told me you had something for me,’ Ben said.
‘That is correct,’ the man answered with a mysterious smile. ‘Something important. But first, you will take coffee?’
‘I don’t have time for coffee.’
The man smiled again. ‘You are right. You do not.’
The movement was sudden and violent. Ben felt the wind of the attacker rushing up behind him before he could react. Something flashed in front of his face. He instinctively raised his hands to defend himself. The garrotte bit harshly into his fingers. Ben desperately tried to wrench it away, but the attacker was powerful, dragging him backwards off his feet. The wire sliced through his flesh. He kicked and struggled.
The bearded man was smiling. He slowly reached for the gun on the table.
Ben was fighting for his life. The man with the garrotte twisted and sawed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a door open. Another man walked in, holding a long, curved knife.
The trap was sprung. Callaghan had lured him to his death.
Then he’d die fighting. He threw himself down to the floor. The strangler went down with him, tightening the wire even more. Ben could feel himself choking. He lashed out with his foot, kicking out in a wide arc over his body. It connected with the guy’s face. Suddenly the garrotte was loosening.
The knife guy was moving in closer.
Ben rolled across the floor and threw a sideways kick at the knifeman’s knee. Hit the joint sideways with brutal force and felt the crunch. The guy screamed and dropped the blade to the floor.
Then Ben was on his feet. He grabbed the strangler’s hair and drove a knee hard into his face. Whirling round, he delivered a web-hand strike to the knifeman’s throat that crushed his windpipe. Then he spun back round to the strangler, putting all his weight into a backwards elbow blow to the face that impacted hard and smashed his teeth down his throat. The guy crashed to the floor, rolling on his back. Ben stamped down on his neck. Blood spurted out of his mouth.
The bearded man was fumbling with the gun, slamming in the magazine and chambering the first round. He raised the pistol and fired. The report was deafening in the small room. Ben felt the shockwave of the bullet. Plaster stung his cheek as the shot ploughed into the wall six inches from his head. Ben tore a picture frame from the wall and hurled it. It spun sideways across the room and caught the man’s wrist. Glass splintered. The man cried out and dropped the gun. Ben threw himself at him, punching and gouging. The man was quick. A grab of the wrist, a twist of the body and Ben was flying through the air. He landed on a glass-topped coffee table and crashed right through it. Then the man was on top of him, a knee hard in his chest and raining blows down on him. Ben lashed out with his foot and caught him in the solar plexus, sending him flying back. But the man recovered his feet in a backward roll and was closing in again.
The fight was fast and furious. Strike, block, strike, block, a blur of fists. Ben drove a hard punch into his throat. The man staggered back a pace, but he had an iron grip on Ben’s arm and used it to send him spinning into a corner bookcase. Ben crashed hard into it and it collapsed on top of him. Books and broken glass and bits of shattered shelving everywhere. Ben grabbed a hardback volume and sprang to his feet.
The man was running at him again, unstoppable. Ben rammed the book edge-on into his face. Blood sprayed from burst lips. He followed the blow up with an elbow strike, felt the solid impact. The man screamed, his face covered in blood now. He went down. Ben was straight on him. He grabbed a fistful of hair and dashed his head against the floor. And again. And again.
Suddenly Ben could feel his phone buzzing in his pocket. The distraction made him hesitate for quarter of a second too long. The man twisted up and fought back like an animal, scratching and pummelling wildly. They rolled across the floor, locked together. Then the man’s scrabbling hand was on the fallen gun. The muzzle swayed up, its small black eye staring right into Ben’s. He desperately grappled for it, fingers clawing at the cool steel. The muzzle twisted away. It was a contest of pure strength now, whoever could gain control of the weapon.
Then the gunshot blasted through the wrecked room.
Chapter Sixty-One
Alex was scouring the cellar for a way out, anything. The door was solid. The torch she found on a cobwebbed shelf cast a yellow, fading pool of light into the recesses of the dark space. She was hoping for a trapdoor, a coal chute.
Nothing. They were trapped. She sat on the hard stone steps, her head in her hands. She could think of only one thing.
Ben. It was a trap. She wanted to reach out to him, warn him, do something. But it was probably too late. They wouldn’t have taken any chances with him. They’d have killed him. She felt her eyes well up.
‘Alex?’ Zoë whispered from the shadows. ‘They must have gone by now. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Don’t be funny.’
‘I’m not. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Zoë, we’re trapped. We can’t get out of here.’
But as Alex was staring at the shadows, she saw the little screen light up and her heart jumped. She shone the torch. ‘Where in hell did you get a phone from?’
‘I took it from the Neanderthal sitting next to me in the car. He never noticed.’
Alex laughed in amazement. ‘Smart move.’
‘I was a useful little pickpocket when I was fifteen,’ Zoë said. ‘Some things you never forget. And guess what – I’ve just recorded everything those bastards said. Thought it might come in handy.’
‘Let’s make a call,’ Alex said.
Zoë jumped up to her feet, moving about the cellar. ‘Reception is really weak. Wait. I’m getting one bar. What’s the number for police here, 911?’
‘Don’t call the cops. Give it to me.’ Alex ran over and grabbed the phone from her. The reception was dicey. The single bar flickered off, then on again. She tried desperately to remember the number Ben had given her. It came back to her in a rush. She prodded the keys as fast as she could.
Dial tone. She listened tensely. It kept ringing and ringing.
‘Oh God. I think they got him.’
Halfway across the world, Ben staggered to his feet and looked down at the corpse of his attacker. Half the man’s face was blown away, blood and flesh and bits of skull and jawbone strewn across the floor from the point-blank gunshot.
Ben was breathing hard, shaking with adrenalin. The blood on his face was a mixture of his own and that of the three men lying dead in the smashed-up apartment.
The phone was still buzzing in his pocket. Should he answer it?
He fished it out with bloody fingers and stared at it for a moment. Then he pressed the reply key and held it to his ear.
‘Ben? Is that you?’
‘Alex?’ He was startled by the sound of her voice. From her tone he knew instantly that something was wrong.
‘You’re all right. Thank God.’
‘He didn’t help much.’
‘Callaghan is one of them,’ she said.
‘I just found that out myself, the hard way. Where are you?’
‘I’m with Zoë. We’re shut in Callaghan’s basement.’ She quickly told him everything – how she’d followed Callaghan’s car, how Slater had caught her. What he’d told her about the Christian US Senator. ‘But Richmond doesn’t know what’s going on,’ she said, her words spilling out in a rush. ‘They’re just using him as some kind of figurehead.’
‘All right, listen,’ Ben said, thinking fast. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. Don’t call the police. Can your vet
friend Frank be trusted?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Then call him. Retrace your steps with him, so he can find you.’
‘I think I know more or less where we are.’
‘Good. There’s got to be some way he can get you out of there. Make up whatever story you want, but he has to keep his mouth shut about this. Then you and Zoë need to lie low and stay safe. I’ll contact you.’
‘There’s more,’ she said. ‘I know what they’re going to do. There’s an important Islamic prayer sermon taking place at a mosque in Jerusalem. The president and four members of the Supreme Muslim Council will be there. They’re going to blow it up.’
Ben’s heart leapt into his mouth. ‘Which mosque?’
‘It’s at the Temple Mount,’ Alex said.
‘When is this happening?’
‘Seven o’ clock, Israeli time.’
He looked at his watch. ‘But that’s only twenty minutes from now.’
‘Go, Ben. You have to stop it.’ Then Alex ended the call and he was staring at a dead phone.
It was as though the air had been sucked out of the room. A thousand thoughts rushed through his mind at once.
The enormity of it almost knocked the breath out of him. How stupid he’d been, how completely blind, not to have seen this coming. In its own terrible, horrible way it was a strategic decision of the most perfect kind.
The Temple Mount in the heart of the Old City was one of the most bitterly disputed sites in religious and political history. For Christians it was the spot where God had created the earth, and the seat of his Final Judgement; Islamic lore named it the Noble Sanctuary, where the Prophet Mohammed had ascended to Heaven. It had once been the home of the greatest and holiest Jewish temple of all times, until the Romans had destroyed it in AD 70.
Built on the ruins of the great temple was the most sacred site of the Islamic world after Mecca and Medina. The Qubbat al-Sakhra. The Dome of the Rock, a huge and magnificent octagonal mosque crowned with a golden dome that could be seen far and wide across the city. It was the epicentre of two millennia of Jerusalem’s bloody religious past, fought over by dozens of nations in its time and now, since the Israeli Government had reluctantly handed over stewardship of the temple to the Muslims in 1967, the ultimate symbol of the struggle between Judaism and Islam.
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