by Sam Bourne
She shuddered and stared at her feet, in boots she barely recognized. All the time she had done this job she had refused to let her gender be the decisive fact about her. Sure, she knew her womanhood was a factor in any negotiation, sometimes a disadvantage, usually an asset, so long as you knew how to play it. But it was only one element among many, alongside her Irishness or her relative youth. It was not all she was. But Miller had made her feel differently and it repelled her. He saw her not as an experienced mediator, a skilled reader of human dynamics and a reliable analyst of international relations, but as a whore. That’s what it came down to. To him, her affair in Africa was the single most important line on her resumé. Along with her tits and her arse. She was there not for her savvy, or her intellect, or her years at assorted peace tables, but to get laid. Suddenly her manhandling in the souk felt like the least of it. She had been violated, she now understood, from the moment she took those tickets and got in the cab for Dulles Airport.
After Miller’s little speech of warning, he had surprised her. His expression, the cocky, jabbing neck movements, gave way to something else, something she hadn’t seen before. He leaned his head to one side and his eyes seemed to radiate sympathy. He held that look for a long time, before saying quietly, ‘We have to do horrible things sometimes, really horrible things. But we do them for the right reason.’
What maddened her now, as she sat in this barren piece of parkland, was that she almost agreed with him. She was not some pacifist, incense-burning mung-bean merchant who thought all power was inherently evil and that we should all be nice to each other. She understood how the world worked. Specifically, she understood-better than anyone-how critical it was to keep this tablet out of the combatants’ hands. Miller was right to do whatever it took to find it before they did. The President wanted to get re-elected and that meant he needed an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Who cared if his motives were shoddy? At least these two nations, who had been locked in a death embrace so long they could barely imagine life without the other, would finally get the accord they needed.
Maggie Costello would have signed up for all of that. She had been around the block enough times to know that peace settlements don’t come about because of an outbreak of niceness or because some priest persuades the leaders to do the right thing or even because a passionate young brunette from Dublin tells them to stop killing each other. They do it because their interests or, more often, the interests of the great powers change. Suddenly the big boys have no use for war and so it ends.
So she knew how things were. If Miller or Davis or Bonham-and it pained her to think they were probably all involved in this-had ever come clean, explained the problem and why they needed her help, she would have agreed. She would have found her own way to do it. Instead they didn’t trust her to know what the big boys knew. She was merely a tool to be deployed, a piece set down on the chessboard whose sole duty was to get fucked.
It was getting cold, or at least she was. Probably the tiredness. She would go back to the hotel, speak to no one and, once she had slept, she would go to the airport. Where would she go? She had no idea.
Once back in the cavernous lobby of the Citadel, she walked with her head down, determined to make eye contact with no one. She realized it made no sense, but she felt as if everyone knew what had happened to her these last few hours and she couldn’t bear to be seen.
‘Miss Costello! Hello!’ It was a clerk at reception, her ponytail swinging as she bounced up and down, waving a piece of paper, loudly calling across the lobby. ‘Miss Costello, please!’
If only to shut her up, Maggie marched across the polished floor, hoping no one else had caught this little scene.
‘Ah, Miss Costello. He said it was most urgent. You just missed him. He was here a minute ago, I told him-’
‘Please, you’ll have to slow down. Who said what was urgent?’
‘The man who came here. I told him he could leave a voicemail message from the house phone but he refused. He wanted me to give you this.’ She handed Maggie a piece of paper, torn from the hotel’s message pad.
Meet me in an old moment. I know what we have to do. Vladimir Junior.
CHAPTER SIXTY
J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , TWO HOURS EARLIER
The throbbing was softened now, reduced to a rhythmic ache. He wondered if they had given him something, perhaps a jab in the thigh as they bundled him back into the Merc. Or maybe later. He wouldn’t have noticed if they had.
He had come round half an hour ago. Or maybe it was an hour. It had taken him a while to realize that he was not staring into a darkened room, but was blindfolded. For several long minutes he thought he was staring at the underside of his own eyelids. Then he remembered the bullet and wondered, in earnest, if he was experiencing the consciousness of the dead.
Sensations returned only slowly, as if in succession. After the eyes came his arms, which told him they were immobile. He tried to remember: had he been shot there, too? Might he be paralysed? He did not panic. Instead he felt his heart plumb to the slow, low pressure deployed in extremis. It was as if the body went into emergency deep freeze, knowing it was now in a battle to survive. He knew all this, because he had experienced it once before.
Back then, the wound had been psychological. He had been in a tank across the Lebanese border when it was struck by a Hizbullah roadside bomb. The driver and gunner had been killed instantly. As the commander, he should have been the most vulnerable: he was poking his head outside. But, perversely, that had saved him. He lowered himself back into the tank to see his two comrades slumped and still and knew instantly that he was sitting in a deathtrap. At that moment, when his heart should have raced with fear, his organs went instead into a mode altogether more frightening, for it was beyond regular terror. It was a still, slow calm; a prelude to death.
And he felt it again now. Coolly, he remembered the incident on the Jerusalem highway: it could only have lasted thirty seconds. He had seen the car behind, unmistakably following them. He had slowed down, swerving into the beauty spot lay-by, at an angle he hoped would allow Maggie to drop out unseen. In the instant, split-second he had had for a decision, that is what he had decided: that whatever happened to him, she should live.
Once Maggie was out and clear, he had attempted to spin the car around and repeat the manoeuvre, so that he too could bail out undetected. But the turn had proved impossible and by then the pursuers had caught up. He had taken no more than a step outside the car when the bullet had struck his leg. He had fallen, with none of the drama they showed in the movies, but rather like a puppet whose strings had been severed.
Now came a new signal, from his wrists. His neurological pathways, usually nanosecond fast, seemed to have reverted to the age of steam: the messages were reaching his brain so slowly. But the wrists were saying they could feel something, an abrasion that was not mere pain but external. A restraint. He was, he finally realized, bound. The blindness, the immobility, were not signs of the physical shutdown that might precede death, but of something less final. He had been shot and bundled in the car not as a corpse, but as a prisoner. His heart began to beat faster.
He began to struggle, to jiggle his wrists. He soon understood that they were not only bound to each other, but to the chair he was sitting on. He wanted to inspect his wound, but he could not touch it and, in the blackness, he could barely be certain which leg it was that had been struck.
Who had taken him? He pictured masked men, dressed in black; but that could have been a trick of the memory. He tried to remember what he had heard when they shoved him in the car. The name Daoud surfaced. He had heard someone call it, as if in a question, twice. It must have been a symptom of his delirium though, because in Uri’s mind he heard the name, this Arabic name, called out in an accent that was distinctly American.
The thoughts were flowing more freely now. Uri wondered what Maggie had done. He guessed she had somehow found her way straight back to Jerusalem, to the tunnels. But
where would she have even begun? His father’s clue-was it really left inside some computer game, or was that also the fruit of his fevered imagination?-directed them only to the subterranean catacombs of the Western Wall, which covered a significant distance. Uri knew: he had refused his father’s repeated requests to come back from New York and take the tour, but he had read about it. It took at least an hour to walk through.
In the dark like this, Uri at last had a chance that had not come since he took the phone call six days ago. The truth was, he had avoided it. But now he had little alternative but to think about his father. He had surprised him more in death than he ever had in life. Until this week, Uri would have described his father as predictable, the way all ideologues are predictable. He knew his views on everything. They were unbending and therefore, to Uri’s mind, irretrievably dull. Uri had often wondered, only to himself and never out loud, of course, if that was why he had rejected his father’s brand of hardline politics-on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. Had he become a left-winger simply to avoid being a bore like his dad?
Yet in the last few days, his father had proved him wrong. He had harboured many secrets, including one that had clearly given him the greatest thrill of his career-and they had cost him his life.
Of them all, the one that shocked most remained the one that he had heard first, courtesy of Maggie Costello. His father had traded archaeological know-how with the enemy, with a Palestinian, even giving him an Israeli codename, an anagram. What was it, Ehud Ramon? He might have been an arsehole, his father, but he was not stupid.
He heard a door unlock, followed by the sound of men. He knew what was coming and felt oddly armed against it. He would do what he had read survivors of all forms of brutality had done: he would stay within his own head.
He heard a voice with an American accent, the one he thought he had imagined in the car. ‘OK, let’s go to work.’
Next he could feel a bandage on his right leg being steadily unwound. Perhaps he was in hospital and he was about to be treated. Maybe these men were not torturers, but doctors.
He was about to speak, to ask for their help, when he felt fingers exploring the outside of his wound; he inhaled sharply at the sting. And then, a moment later, he felt a pain that made him howl as he had never howled before.
‘Funny, ain’t it, what one little finger can do?’
The pain stopped for a second.
‘That’s all it is, one little finger. All I have to do is push it right there, into this hole in your leg, and-’
Uri screamed at the agony. He had vowed to withstand their torture, not to let them see him suffer. But he could not hold back the pain. His wound was live and raw, every one of its nerve endings exposed.
‘Get off me, you bastards, get off!’
At that, the red he had seen turned to white. The pain leapt in intensity and then disappeared, as if off the register. This blankness lasted only a few seconds, before he heard a voice that seemed to be far away.
‘…in fact, if I kept on pressing, I’d probably be able to touch your bone. Like that.’
‘What do you want? I don’t know anything!’
Whiteness again, also for just a few short seconds. When it ended, Uri realized what was happening; that the agony was so excruciating, he was moving in and out of consciousness.
Now when the finger probed into his bullet wound, he prayed for oblivion to come. He waited through the pain, hoping for the relief of nothingness. Instead he heard himself scream again, as two fingers forced their way inside, widening the opening, pushing and prodding.
‘Just tell us what you know.’
‘You know what I know.’
Next he heard the wailing as if it were someone else. And suddenly a voice in some inner chamber of the self spoke to him. Now, it said. This is your chance; force yourself to do it. Detach yourself from the pain. Stay inside your head.
He tried to remember where his thoughts had been just before the men came in. He had been thinking of his father’s ingenious codename, Ehud Ramon. Hold on to it, he thought; hold on. He repeated the name to himself, even as he felt his own body tremble from the agony. Ehud Ramon. Ehud Ramon. Ehud, Ehud, Ehud…
And then a memory surfaced that had lain buried for decades, a memory of the bedtime story he had loved as a child, the one he made his father read to him over and over, about a wonderfully naughty little boy. For a fleeting second, interrupting the red and white colours of his pain, Uri could picture the book cover: My brother, Ehud. What had his father said in that video message? I have put it somewhere safe, somewhere only you and my brother could know.
Of course, Uri thought, willing himself to stay on this train of thought and not to fall into the pits of hell below. Of course. It hadn’t been a real brother that his father had spoken of. Rather he was referring to the fictitious brother in a story he assumed his son would immediately remember. And it was meant to lead him to another fictitious creation, the mythic Ehud Ramon.
The probing intensified now; they were using some kind of implement. And the questions kept on. Where is the tablet? Where is it? But Uri stayed in his head. What a typical Guttman rhetorical flourish, he thought. The professor had just seen the ancient, hand-chiselled words of Abraham, speaking of his two sons, Isaac, the father of the Jews and Ishmael, the father of the Muslims. Two brothers, Jew and Arab. ‘My brother…’ Shimon Guttman had said. If he could have, Uri would have smiled. His father, the fire-breathing, flint-hearted nationalist, was using that weariest cliché of the kumbaya-singing, hand-holding, soppy left-that Jews and Arabs are brothers.
Even here, with his body battered and his senses overloaded by the sharpest of torments, he felt a surge of admiration for his old man: it was a brilliant piece of cryptography. Was there a codebreaker in the world who would realize that when a fanatic hawk referred to ‘my brother’, the man he meant was none other than the stubborn Palestinian nationalist, Ahmed Nour?
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , 11.50 AM
Maggie stared at the message, her brow slowly smoothing into a smile. She only knew one Vladimir, and that was Vladimir Jabotinsky, mentor and pseudonym of Shimon Guttman. Vladimir Junior could only be one person. With a relief that flowed through her as a wave of exhaustion, she understood what Uri was telling her. That he was alive. Somehow he had survived the gunshot on the highway; somehow he had endured whatever agonies Miller’s goons had inflicted on him. And now he was in ‘an old moment’. She had to smile at that. He knew she would remember it, because they had talked about it: the café that used to be Moment.
When she opened the door, she saw him immediately, in the same seat she had found him in two days ago. Except now he was looking up, straight at her.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I normally insist on going somewhere new for a second date.’
He tried to smile, but only a wince would come. She sat beside him, planting a long kiss on his lips. She had been relieved when she got the note, but that was nothing next to her feelings now. She moved to hug him, stopping when he let out a yelp of pain.
He pointed at his leg, explaining that underneath these jeans was a thick bandage covering a bullet wound. He told her about the shooting and the interrogation, her face registering each new agony as he described it. And he told her how his tormentors, in the middle of their work, had received a phone call, one that made them stop. They had dressed him in new clothes and driven him to the centre of town, dumping him ten minutes from here. They left him with a warning: ‘You saw what happened to your parents. If you don’t keep your mouth shut, the same will happen to you.’ He had been blindfolded throughout.
‘Uri, did the men who…did they ever tell you who they were?’
‘They didn’t have to.’
‘You guessed?’
‘I guessed even before they spoke in English. They were speaking to each other in Arabic. Calling their leader Daoud, the whole thing. Their accents weren’t bad. But they were like
mine.’ He tried to smile. ‘They had intelligence-officer Arabic. You know, an accent learned in a classroom. Mine’s the same. I wondered if they were Israelis at first. I spoke to them in Hebrew.’ He shook his head. ‘Not a word. So I worked it out. Later, when they were torturing me, they didn’t even hide it. That’s what frightened me the most.’
Maggie’s eyebrows shaped themselves into a question.
‘When they don’t care if you know who they are, that can only mean one thing. That they’re going to kill you. Their secret is going to be safe.’
When she described what had happened to her, trying hard not to spell out the physical details, his eyes held hers with a seriousness she hadn’t seen before. His face registered fury and resolve but, above all, sorrow. Finally and quietly, he said: ‘Are you OK?’
She tried to speak, to say that she was all right, but the words were caught in her throat. Her eyes were stinging too. She hadn’t cried until this moment, not until Uri had asked her that question. He held her hand, squeezing it as if in compensation for the words she wasn’t saying. And he kept holding it.
When she told him about Miller, keeping her voice low, his face showed only mild surprise. ‘You do realize,’ she said, ‘that this goes all the way to the top.’
‘Of course it does. Special forces don’t just deploy themselves.’
And then she felt it again, that same unease she sensed when Miller had let her go. She reached into her pocket, pulling out the piece of paper from the hotel, with Uri’s message on it. On the other side, she scribbled a question.