The Last Testament

by Sam Bourne

  Maggie wanted to shake her head in agreement. This man seemed to know her own mind better than she did. But she resisted, turning her head to stare out of the window.

  ‘Not that this is some kind of sport to you, I know that. It never was. Sure, you like the professional challenge. But that came second. To the goal. The pursuit of peace. You’re one of the few people on the planet who knows how much these efforts matter. What can happen if things go wrong.’ Her mistake.

  ‘And few matter more than this one, Maggie. Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have died in this conflict. It’s gone on and on and on. Our whole adult lifetimes. And it will keep going. You’ll turn on your TV set in ten years’ time and there’ll still be Palestinian kids shelled in playgrounds and Israeli teenagers blown to pieces on buses.’

  ‘And you think you can stop it?’

  ‘Me? I can’t stop it. I can’t stop anything. But you can.’

  ‘I don’t believe that. Not any more.’

  ‘Come on. You haven’t changed that much.’

  ‘Look, I didn’t suddenly forget that people are dying there and everywhere else. I know only too well how much death and killing goes on in every fucking corner of this planet. But I happen to have realized there is nothing I can do about it. So it’s better I stay out of it.’

  ‘The White House doesn’t agree.’

  ‘Well, the White House can just shove it, can’t it?’

  Bonham sat back, as if assessing his prey. After a pause he said, ‘This is because of…what happened, isn’t it?’

  Maggie stared out of the window, willing her eyes to stay dry.

  ‘Look, Maggie. We know what went on there. You fouled up very badly. But it was one black mark on an otherwise exceptional record. The White House view is that you’ve done your penance. And you don’t help anyone by staying in exile like this. You’re not saving any lives here. It’s time you came back.’

  ‘You’re saying I’m forgiven.’

  ‘I’m saying it’s time to move on. But, yes, if you like, you’re forgiven.’

  For the first time Maggie met his gaze. ‘But what if I haven’t forgiven myself?’

  ‘Ah, that’s a different problem, isn’t it? Shouldn’t be too tricky for you, though. That’s a Catholic specialty, isn’t it? Cancelling out the sin through repentance? Redemption and all that? So this is your chance.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘True. You’re not going to bring back the lives that were lost because of what happened. Your mistake. But you can prevent more lives being lost. And that’s got to count for something. Hasn’t it?’

  She was about to say that she had once promised Edward that she wouldn’t travel again. But she said nothing.

  ‘It’s your choice, Maggie. If you believe that nothing else matters but your life here, your relationship here-’

  She knew he’d heard the row in the kitchen.

  ‘-you’ll ignore me and send me away from here. But if you miss the work you were born to do, if you care about ending a conflict that’s spread so much bitterness around the world, if you want to make things right, you’ll say yes.’

  ‘Tell me something,’ she said after a long pause. ‘Why the house visit? Why all this cloak and dagger bullshit, pretending to be a client?’

  ‘We tried phoning you, but you didn’t return our calls. I didn’t think you’d let me into the building.’

  ‘You called?’

  ‘We’ve been leaving messages here since yesterday afternoon. We left a couple early this morning.’

  ‘But,’ she stammered. She was sure she had checked, sure that there was nothing on the machine.

  ‘Maybe someone deleted the messages before you got to them.’ She felt the air seep out of her lungs. Edward.

  Judd threw an envelope on the table, thick and heavy. ‘Tickets and briefing material. The plane for Tel Aviv leaves this afternoon. The choice is yours, Maggie.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  J ERUSALEM , S ATURDAY , 11.10 PM

  After-dark meetings were part of the tradition of this office. Ben-Gurion had done it in the fifties, debating and deciding till the early hours; Golda, too, always worked late at night, most famously when the Egyptians launched their surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973: legend has it the old lady barely slept for days. Somehow this room, with its single high-backed chair, reserved for the Prime Minister, lent itself to such encounters. It was small and intimate, with two couches forming an L-shape on which advisers or aides could sit around and talk for hours. The desk was functional, built for use rather than to impress. Rabin used to sit here alone deep into the night, with his own ink-pen, letters to the parents of soldiers-which, being Israel, meant every mother and father in the land.

  Rabin was long gone now, taking the ashtrays that accompanied his chain-smoking habit with him. The current incumbent preferred, when stressed, to nibble on sunflower seeds, a habit which made him the peer of bus drivers and stallholders across the country. He gestured now to the man from Shin Bet, Israeli’s internal security service, to begin speaking.

  ‘Prime Minister, the dead man was Shimon Guttman. We all know who we’re talking about: the writer and activist, aged seventy-one. The first reports suggesting he was armed have now been discounted. Our investigators found no sign that he carried any weapon. Examination of the body showed he was killed by a bullet to the brain.’

  The PM grimaced, then cracked one more seed shell between his front teeth.

  ‘As you know, he was found clasping a handwritten note, addressed to yourself. Intelligence say it will take some days to piece it together, the words were obscured by the blood-’

  The Prime Minister waved him quiet. The head of Shin Bet put away the paper he had been consulting. The Deputy Prime Minster stared at his shoes; the Foreign and Defence Ministers stared at the PM, trying to gauge his reaction: none wanted to be the first to speak.

  Amir Tal, special adviser to the PM and the youngest man in the room, decided to fill the quiet. ‘Of course, this has immediate political implications. First, we will come under fire-’

  The Prime Minister raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Sorry. We will be criticized for making a bad mistake, killing an innocent man. That kind of flak could come our way anytime. But, second, if we are about to sign a peace deal, this will make things much harder. The right were already boiling; now they’re claiming their first martyr. They insist it is not a coincidence: Guttman was one of our loudest critics. And not just ours. He said the same thing during Oslo and again during Camp David: “Anyone who talks peace with the Arabs is a criminal who should be on trial for treason.” Arutz Sheva was on the air an hour ago saying “So now we know the government’s plan; they want to silence dissent with gunfire”.’

  ‘Could they be right?’ It was the Foreign Minister, addressing Tal, avoiding the boss’s eye.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I don’t mean that we deliberately killed him. But that it was not a coincidence. Could it be deliberate in the other direction, the opposite of what Arutz Sheva are saying?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, was this a set-up? Guttman knew how things worked. You can’t just rush towards the Prime Minister, shouting and screaming, and then reach into your jacket. He was a smart guy. He’d have known that.’

  ‘Are you saying-’

  ‘Yeah. I’m wondering if Guttman wanted to get shot. If he was deliberately luring us in, daring us to kill a famous opponent of the government.’

  ‘This is crazy.’

  ‘Is it? This is a guy who his whole life has gone in for the grand spectacular gesture, the great protest. And now, finally, it’s the big one: we’re about to make peace with the Arabs, to give away holy Judea and sacred Samaria. To prevent such a calamity, a fanatic like Guttman would have to come up with the biggest possible gesture. One that might actually mobilize the right.’

  ‘He would sacrifice his own life?’

&
nbsp; ‘He would.’ The Prime Minister had uttered his first two words since the meeting began. Until now, he had sat back, listening to the debate. That was his style. First, hear the arguments among the competing members of his court. Then, pepper them with questions. So how should we respond? What are our options? The cabinet had braced itself for just such an interrogation. But instead the Prime Minister had just leaned forward, saying nothing, cracking open yet another salty seed shell. Until those words: ‘He would.’

  After a long pause, as if completing a thought that had been unspooling in his own head, he added, ‘I know this man. Inside out.’

  The Chief of Staff, dressed in pressed olive green trousers and beige shirt, with a beret under his epaulette-the uniform of the soldier whose battlefield was politics-broke the silence that followed with what felt to him like a related question. He asked what everyone in the room-along with everyone who had heard the eye-witness accounts on TV-had wanted to know from the beginning. ‘How come he called you Kobi?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Prime Minister.

  ‘I thought he hated your guts. Yet here he’s talking to you like you’re old chums.’

  ‘Rav Aluf, you of all people should know the answer to that question.’ The PM sat back, though he still preferred to look into middle distance rather than at any of his colleagues. ‘Kobi was the man I was a long, long time ago.’ The Defence Minister shuffled awkwardly in his seat, shooting a glance at the General. ‘It was what my friends called me. In the army. We were a good unit, one of the best. In ’67 we took a hill, just us: thirty-odd men. And you know who was the bravest, much braver than me, despite what Amir here tells the newspapers? A young scholar from the Hebrew University by the name of Shimon Guttman.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  J ERUSALEM , M ONDAY , 9.28 AM

  For the first time since she got here the people checking her bags were Arabs. Everyone she had met since coming off the overnight flight at dawn this morning had been Israeli Jews. Now at the entrance to the US Consulate on Agron Street, she was waiting to be processed by Palestinian Arabs-albeit wearing shirts bearing the crest of the United States. Ordinarily an official of the United States government, as she now was once more, would be waved through. But these were extra-tense times, the driver explained, so it would take a little longer. One of the guards wanted Maggie to hand in her mobile phone, until a more senior man waved him away.

  She was ushered into a small security lobby, staffed by a US marine behind thick glass watching a bank of TV monitors. As she gazed at the flickering images, she rewound her scene with Judd Bonham for the dozenth time. He had played her like a master, making every move she would have made. He had appealed to her conscience and flattered her ego, just as she had done to countless delegates, ambassadors and presidential aides. He had both dangled a stick, revealing what he knew, and offered a carrot. And, just as the rulebook dictates, the latter had been designed to reach the reluctant party’s weakest spot: in her case, her desire to wipe the slate clean. You always tried to know a participant’s greatest vulnerability. It pained her to think hers was so obvious.

  Bonham must have known it would be a breeze. First some light intimidation, then a show of apparent kindness and empathy. It was the classic pattern. Police interrogator kicks away the chair, then puts a hand on the shoulder and offers to take the pain away. Good cop, bad cop, even if it was the same person. She had done it herself a dozen times.

  Her gaze went to the marine. She couldn’t quite believe she was back to all this again. Instinctively, she scrutinized the scene before her. Natural that the serious security would be entrusted only to an American. The choice of local hires was also a statement. Use of Palestinian staff to underline that the consulate in Jerusalem was the US mission to the Palestinians; a wholly different operation from the embassy in Tel Aviv, which represented America to the Israelis.

  A door buzzed, opening up for a tall, fair-haired man. ‘Welcome to the madhouse! Jim Davis, Consul, good to see you.’ He stuck out a hand to shake.

  ‘As you can see, we work in the most beautiful pair of buildings the State Department owns anywhere in the world,’ he said as they walked into a garden, a wide, square lawn laid out before a grand, colonial house. The noise of Agron Street was shut out now. The only sound was the hummed melody of an aged gardener, bending over to prune a rosebush.

  ‘And this is our newest acquisition, the Lazarist Pères Monastery.’ Davis pointed to his left, to a structure that seemed part church, part fortress. It was modest; no fussy steeples or fancy turrets, but each arched window was decorated with a brick surround, as if reinforced against incoming fire. And all of it was built in the same pale, craggy stone that dominated this city. Every building, every house, every office, every hotel, even the supermarkets-they were all made of it. ‘Jerusalem stone’ the driver had called it on the way from the airport. ‘It is the law, it is the law!’ he had said, his stubbled face peering over his shoulder, prompting Maggie to nod eagerly towards the road, encouraging him to do the same.

  She had been here before, a couple of times, nearly a decade ago. But she hadn’t been close to the action. The White House ran that show: they were happy to let the do-gooders of State do Africa or East Timor and, on a good day, the Balkans. But the Middle East was the glamour assignment, the diplomatic big one, the only foreign story that consistently made the front page. So Maggie had always been kept back.

  She looked up, shielding her eyes with the palm of her hand. The light was so bright here, reflecting and bouncing off all that pale, sand-coloured stone. A monastery in Jerusalem. Had probably been here centuries, all the way back to the Crusades. It reminded Maggie of the convent of her schooldays.

  ‘Took that over just a while back,’ Davis was explaining. Unusually for a long-time diplomat, his Southern accent was perfectly intact. ‘The brothers, or fathers, strictly speaking, have vacated most of the building. A few of them are hanging on, in a little corner that will stay theirs. Otherwise it now belongs to the United States of America.’

  He was babbling, a male reaction Maggie was used to. She had seen it in Davis’s eyes the moment he had greeted her, the initial instant of surprise, followed by a regrouping and the concentrated effort to act normally. She had thought this would stop as she moved into her late thirties, that she would become less of a magnet for male attention. But, even with the dressing down, it hadn’t faded much. She was still tall, at five foot nine, and her figure had held its shape pretty well. Her hair was still thick and warm brown and, when she let it down, it was long enough to trail over her shoulders.

  ‘So here’s the deal.’ Davis had led them to a cluster of iron chairs, shaded by the cypress trees. ‘As you know, the White House is convinced this is the week. Aiming for a permanent agreement signed in the Rose Garden within a matter of days. Just in time for election day.’

  ‘On re-election day as I think the President likes to call it,’ she said. ‘Is he going to get what he wants?’

  ‘Well, we’ve had two delegations over at Government House sitting face to face for nearly two weeks now. That’s a breakthrough right there.’

  ‘What, that they’ve done two weeks?’

  ‘No, I meant talks on the ground.’

  ‘Right. Sorry.’ Maggie swallowed. This would take some time; she was rusty.

  ‘It’s never happened before. Camp David, Wye River, Madrid, Oslo, you name it. But never here. Camp David’s been spooked since 2000. And the White House, in its infinite wisdom, decided it would be good for the parties to do the business in their own backyard.’

  ‘And are they? Doing the business?’

  ‘Course not. We could have told them that. These guys are leaking to their media more than they’re talking to each other. You can’t do a news blackout when you’re right in the middle of the freakin’ conflict zone.’

  ‘But the White House went ahead anyway?’

  ‘It’s their show. But, believe me, they’re running to us every t
ime someone sneezes.’

  ‘No change there, then.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Forget it. So State’s having to do some of the heavy lifting?’

  ‘Some? Try most. But everyone’s trying to get their oar in. EU, UN, the British. Arab states, Indonesia, Malaysia. We got a billion Muslims on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what happens. Imams and mullahs from here to Mohammadsville, Alabama preaching that this is the front line in the war between Islam and the West. Armies being mobilized in the Arab world. If they all decide the Palestinians are being pushed into some kind of sellout deal, some surrender to the evil West, then it’s not going to be just a few angry folks in Gaza or the odd demo in Damascus. The whole region could go boof.’ He made a little mushroom cloud of his hands. ‘And that’s World War Three, right there.’

  Maggie nodded, allowing Davis to know his little dramatic exposition had struck home.

  ‘Up till now things have gone OK. But it’s crunch time now, R & J, and the parties are getting antsy.’

  ‘They haven’t talked about refugees and Jerusalem until now?’ She wanted Davis to know that she knew the code. Like every field, diplomacy had its jargon; within that, Middle East diplomacy had its own dialect. After a year spent a million miles away, Maggie hoped she’d be able to keep up.

  ‘There’s been a ton of groundwork on right of return,’ said Davis. ‘Though, one tip: don’t let anyone catch you saying those words or the Israelis will eat your lunch. It’s not a “right”, it’s a claim. And it’s not necessarily “return”, because some of the Palestinians came from somewhere else first. And it’s not “home” because this is the homeland of the Jewish people, blah, blah. You know all this.’

  Maggie nodded, but she had stopped listening. She was remembering the row she had had with Edward. He hadn’t even attempted to deny that he had deleted those messages from Judd: he simply said he had done it for Maggie’s own good. She had been furious, accusing him of trying to cage her, to tame her into some little Washington wife with a sideline in couples’ therapy. He was denying who she really was, or at least who she had been. He said she had swallowed too many counselling manuals and was now simply vomiting them back up. She insisted that he was on some weird mission to prevent her ever getting over what had happened in Africa, as if he somehow liked her in the state he had found her: broken.