The Last Testament

by Sam Bourne

  She fell silent the instant the shot rang out. When she hit the ground, her hand stayed tightly wound around the tablet, clinging on to it, as if to life itself.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 1.44 PM

  The camera fell from his hand with a thud. Uri dashed over to her, crouching over her body to see where she had been hit. Less than a second later he heard a bullet whizzing past his own ear. Now he too fell flat, trying to lie on top of Maggie, to shield her body from the incoming fire.

  He looked across and saw Mustapha, also prone on the ground. With a tiny movement of his finger, the Palestinian gestured for Uri to look upwards. There, directly above them, leaning over the parapet that overlooked the model city, were the barrels of several guns, firing into the trees opposite. Were these Miller’s men, regrouped? Were they trying to kill the hidden cameraman, as if that would somehow save them and their boss?

  There was a rustle from the trees and then a Hebrew cry of ‘Al tira!’

  Don’t shoot.

  From above, Uri heard a response: ‘Hadel esh!’

  Hold your fire.

  He gradually raised himself up. Maggie was on the ground, deathly still.

  Now, he could hear a clamour of Hebrew voices as more than a dozen men pounded down the steps: Israeli police. Their semiautomatic weapons were aimed squarely at two men standing on the hillside just below the model.

  ‘Identify yourselves!’ the police commander barked.

  There was silence.

  ‘Identify yourselves or we shoot!’

  Were these Palestinians, their Hebrew learned in jail, come here to mount some suicide mission? If they hesitated even a second longer, Uri knew what would happen: they would be shot in the head, the only sure way to prevent them setting off a bomb.

  But they wore no bulky clothes, the usual giveaway. They were dressed casually; truth be told, they looked Israeli.

  ‘We are The Defenders of United Jerusalem,’ the older of the pair said eventually in unaccented Hebrew. And now, as the police circled them, Uri could see clearly, perched on the back of each of their heads, a knitted kippa, or skullcap-the unambiguous badge of the Jewish settler movement.

  ‘So they were after us as well.’

  Uri wheeled round to see Maggie sitting up, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘Maggie! You’re alive!’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know I was such a wuss.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m meant to be a big tough diplomat. I’m not meant to faint the moment someone fires a gun.’

  The police kept all three of them, Uri, Maggie and Mustapha, for several hours, asking each of them to give long, detailed statements. At their side throughout was a lawyer, Uri’s brother-inlaw, who insisted on his clients’ right to keep their private property, including the clay tablet, private. After his intervention, the tablet stayed with them at all times. As for the tiny white square of paper, Maggie hid that deep in a pocket and never let it go.

  When they emerged from the police station, it was to a scene Maggie and Uri had seen plenty of times on TV but which neither ever expected to experience directly. Hundreds of camera lenses were aimed at them, flashbulbs strobing, arc lights on full glare.

  They had barely set foot outside the building when this vast crowd gave a collective roar, as dozens of photographers and reporters called out in unison: ‘Maggie! Maggie! What did he say? Maggie, what did Abraham say? What does the tablet say?’

  Uri and Mustapha flanked her on either side, each of them shoving people out of the way in order to get to the taxi that was waiting for them. The driver had to do two full circuits before he had shaken off the chasing vans and motor cycles, eventually reaching Maggie’s hotel.

  In the sanctuary of her room, Maggie switched on the television. She had some clue what to expect from her mobile phone, returned to her by the police with a flashing message announcing Inbox Full. She listened to the first few voice messages: BBC, NPR, CNN, Reuters, AP, the New York Times, all requesting an interview as soon as humanly possible. The Daily Mail in London offered a six-figure sum if she would tell them the exclusive story of a single woman’s quest for the tablet of Abraham. There were also several messages from the White House.

  Now when she clicked through the channels she kept catching sight of herself, holding the clay tablet up to Uri’s camera. Fox News was playing, in an apparent loop, the tape of Bruce Miller confessing his multiple sins, culminating in the line, ‘Ashamed? I’m proud of it.’ Finally, Maggie settled on BBC World.

  ‘We’re joined now by Ernest Freundel of the British Museum here in London, one of the very few people in the world capable of reading the cuneiform text in which this crucial tablet was allegedly written. Dr Freundel, what do you make of this claim?’

  ‘Well, ordinarily any report of this kind would be treated with the utmost scepticism. But I understand this tablet was found and translated by Professor Shimon Guttman, who was one of the greatest authorities on this subject. If he said it was authentic, then I am inclined to believe him.’

  ‘And your reaction to the notion that this is the last will and testament of Abraham himself?’

  ‘Well, there will be tests and so on. But Guttman was not a gullible man. One has also to say that if the Americans were going to such lengths to obtain this tablet, it does suggest that they at least were persuaded that it was real.’

  ‘And an emotional moment for a scholar like yourself, Dr Freundel?’

  ‘I cannot deny that I would give almost anything to have had the chance to see this tablet, or hold it, myself. Alas, I never had that chance. But it is of immeasurable significance.’

  As Maggie perched on the end of the bed, Uri came over, clutching a laptop computer. He clicked through a series of websites: Al-Ahram, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Times of India and China Daily. They were all covering the same story. Finally, he showed her the headline on the front page of the Haaretz site.

  A world on tenterhooks; Israelis and Palestinians await the word of Abraham.

  Underneath was a news account of that afternoon’s events at the Israel Museum. It said that Israeli police had arrested settlers’ leader Akiva Shapira, the suspected leader of The Defenders of United Jerusalem. What’s more, the police spokesman added, they had gathered evidence that Uri Guttman and Maggie Costello had also been within the sights of a radical Islamist cell linked to the wanted militant Salim Nazzal.

  Maggie clicked and clicked. There were endless columns and debates devoted to discussing what Abraham might or might not have said. There were cries on all sides that it must be a fake, especially, said the Israeli hawks, if Abraham gave the Temple Mount to the Muslims and especially, said the Palestinian hardliners, if Abraham gave the Haram al-Sharif to the Jews. The blogosphere was replete with conspiracy theorists, insisting the timing of the tablet’s release was just too neat to be real.

  ‘You know, Maggie, you’re going to have get the truth out, the full text of the testament. It can’t wait.’

  Maggie looked back at the TV. It now showed the British prime minister, standing in Downing Street, declaring that ‘History is holding its breath’.

  Maggie sighed. ‘I know, Uri. I just need to work out who should be the one to say it.’

  When she looked back on it, as she would many times in the years ahead, she would conclude that Bruce Miller’s most valuable lapse was a single sentence: There’s a back channel too, so they’re talking, believe me. That’s what he had said. Other people would probably have forgotten it, but not Maggie, nor any other mediator. Back channels were too intriguing to forget. Even under the duress of the body search and the battering from Miller’s men, the reference had lodged in her head and stayed there.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised her; it was common for even the bitterest enemies to keep a line of communication open, whether through some trusted business tycoon, a personal friend of a prime minister or a fo
reign government. Of course the Israelis and Palestinians would have maintained a way to keep talking.

  She thought of it again now, as she lay on the hotel bed, allowing herself to drift off into a few minutes of exhausted sleep. She dreamed she was roaming the streets of Jerusalem not in her own body, but as the bra-topped avatar created by her sister in Second Life. She was floating above the golden Dome of the Rock, soaring high above the Western Wall. The men down below, in their beards, black coats and prayer shawls were looking up at her, their mouths agape…

  She woke suddenly, her forehead clammy with sweat. Could it be? Was it possible? She grabbed at the computer and headed straight for Second Life, logging on again as Shimon Guttman’s alter ego, Saeb Nastayib. She teleported straight back to the seminar room at Harvard University. Please be there.

  Sure enough, there were the avatars she had seen before: Yaakov Yariv and Khalil al-Shafi. She approached, hit the Chat button and typed a simple message: I have the information the world is waiting for.

  The reply did not come instantly, for reasons she would later understand. It turned out that both Yariv’s office and al-Shafi’s would dump ‘sleeping’ avatars in Second Life’s Harvard seminar room, just to maintain a presence there. That way they could keep the channel open, ensuring that each side was available to the other twenty-four hours a day. Amir Tal, the personal aide to the Israeli prime minister, would check in hourly during the day and several times at night while his Palestinian counterpart would do the same. It had been al-Shafi’s idea: he had read about internet simulations of the Middle East peace process while in jail and had logged on to one, taking the role of Khalil al-Shafi, soon after his release. All it needed, he realized, was a senior Israeli to join in and they would have their own back channel. No need for midnight flights to Oslo or clandestine weekends in Scandinavian wood cabins. This dialogue could take place in full daylight, with total deniability. If anyone asked what was going on, ‘Yaakov Yariv’ and ‘Khalil al-Shafi’ could say they were simply American students, playing a game.

  The first reply came from al-Shafi. She asked him to telephone her, to verify that it was really him and, sure enough, she soon heard that familiar voice down the telephone. She arranged to meet his closest aide in an hour’s time.

  Then she made the same arrangement with Amir Tal.

  They gathered in the plush, west Jerusalem home of an American businessman. Maggie was too tired for pleasantries and got straight to the point.

  ‘As you know, I have the tablet. Today I was about to reveal the full text, on camera, because I feared that if I didn’t, if something happened to me, the last testament of Abraham would be lost forever. But now it is safe.’

  She explained that she would not yet show them the tablet-that would have to wait until the leaders themselves met. She produced instead Guttman’s translation, reading the English out loud to the two men, then passing the paper so that the two of them could read the words again, in their own languages. They both paled in unison.

  ‘Of course you’ll have every chance to verify the authenticity of the tablet and this translation as soon as we move to the next stage,’ Maggie said quietly, anxious to give them as much time as they needed to absorb what they had just read.

  ‘And what is the next stage, Miss Costello?’ the Palestinian asked.

  Maggie explained that it was up to the two leaders to tell the world what Abraham had decided. It wasn’t right for the announcement to come from her, an outsider. Instead they should call a joint press conference for the next day, straight after the Jewish sabbath. Uri Guttman and Mustapha Nour would be at their side, representing their late fathers, as the two leaders made the announcement.

  Maggie watched the press conference on television. It would have been fun to be there, but she didn’t want to create another media zoo like the one at the police station. Besides, in the background was where she belonged. For this to work, the words had to come from Yariv and al-Shafi, no one else.

  She wondered how they would do it. Would Yariv go first, in Hebrew, then al-Shafi in Arabic, followed by an interpreter? Or would they do it the other way around? In the end, they came up with something much, much better.

  Al-Shafi went first and he spoke in English, introducing this as the tablet dictated by Abraham the patriarch and then reading the text:

  ‘I Abraham, son of Terach, in front of the judges have attested thus. The land where I took my son, there to make a sacrifice of him to the Mighty Name, the Mountain of Moriah, this land has become a source of dissension between my two sons.’

  Then he paused and Yaakov Yariv took over, also in English:

  ‘Let their names here be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front of the judges that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows-’

  Then the two men paused, veteran showmen the pair of them, before reading on, in unison, their voices chiming perfectly:

  ‘That it shall be shared between my two sons and their descendants in a manner of their choosing. But that they be clear that it belongs to neither one of them, but to both, now and forever. That they be entrusted as its guardians and custodians, to protect it on behalf of the Mighty Name, the one Lord who is sovereign over everything and all of us. Sworn with the seal of Abraham, son of Terach, witnessed by his sons, in Hebron, this day.’

  EPILOGUE

  JERUSALEM , TWO DAYS LATER

  She had all her papers on her lap, in a neat black portfolio case. Less was always more when it came to a negotiation, she believed: a blank note pad should really be enough. Only at the very last stage did you need sheaves of documents, usually maps. And they were not at that stage. Not yet, anyway.

  She took a look at this room, at the large dark wooden table stretching out before her, its faded elegance typical of this building. The same vintage as the American Colony Hotel, she reckoned, a leftover of the grand imperial past and the delusions of nearly a century ago. She looked at her watch, again. She had got here twenty minutes early. Another five minutes and they would get started.

  The sheer drama of the joint press conference had had an even more powerful effect than anyone had anticipated. Television is a sentimental medium and the sight of those two old warhorses joining together, incanting the words of their common ancestor, had proved irresistible. The news networks stayed in twenty-four-hour mode-all Abraham, all the time-wiping out the coverage of the earlier violence. The pundits began wondering if peace was in fact the Middle East’s age-old destiny, a destiny of which it had been cruelly cheated. Time magazine put a renaissance image of Abraham on its cover above a single line: The Peacemaker.

  A euphoric Amir Tal and his Palestinian counterpart had been on the phone just before midnight on Saturday, asking Maggie what she wanted in return for throwing their bosses an extraordinary political lifeline, allowing them to take credit for a discovery that would endow them both with enormous, enduring authority.

  ‘Only that the two sides resume face-to-face talks immediately,’ she had said. Not through officials: just the two leaders in a room with a single mediator.

  The tablet meant there was now no excuse for failure to solve the last remaining question: the status of the Temple Mount. They should aim to have a final peace accord ready for signing within a week, one that their peoples would accept, one that would have the blessing of Abraham himself.

  The two officials offered their provisional agreement. Maggie pressed home her advantage.

  ‘And there’s one last thing I want.’

  ‘And what is that, Miss Costello?’

  ‘Well, it relates to the identity of the mediator.’

  That had been two days ago. She had spent the forty-eight hours since that phone call preparing herself. She had read every note, every minute, of the talks so far, every official document prepared by both sides, occasionally demanding translations of key texts used by the Israeli and Palestinian teams internally. She also bought herself some new clothes.

  In
between it all, she saw Uri. After she had watched the press conference on TV-and the moment when Mustapha and Uri had hugged before the cameras had been one of the highlights-they had met up at Someone to Run With, the late-night café where they had hammered away at the computer before fleeing, fearing pursuit from Miller’s men. ‘We’re still the oldest people here,’ she said and he smiled. Each asked the other about their plans and each shrugged. Uri said he had some things to sort out here in Jerusalem, his parents’ house, his father’s papers.

  ‘Your father gave you one last surprise, didn’t he?’

  ‘You know, it’s funny. The whole world is going crazy over this tablet. Everything it means. But for me the most amazing thing is that my dad did so much to keep it safe. Even though it says what it says.’

  ‘He was a scholar.’

  ‘Not just that. Remember what he told my mother, over and over? That this changes everything? Maybe it changed him.’

  Hesitantly, Maggie steered the conversation round to Bruce Miller and why she had been sent to Jerusalem. She told Uri that Miller had wanted them to sleep together, that she had been-she hesitated before the word-a honeytrap. She told him how ashamed it made her, that she felt sickened by it.

  He listened hard, unsmiling. ‘But you didn’t know you were a trap, did you, Maggie? It wasn’t your fault. You can’t be a trap if you don’t know you’re a trap. And it’s my fault for walking into you. Besides, you’re much rarer than honey.’

  They hugged, a long, tight hug, and then shyly, like teenagers at summer camp, they exchanged email addresses. Neither had a physical address they could be sure of. When Maggie began to say goodbye, he placed a finger over her lips. ‘Not goodbye,’ he said. ‘L’hitraot. It means “Until we see each other again”. And we will. Soon.’ And then they kissed, until both of them knew that promise was not vain.