He took another sip from his coffee.
‘Violent events . . .’ Luke muttered.
‘That’s what they say.’ He waved his hand dismissively at the computer. ‘I’m sure your . . . machine knows all about it. I’m told they know about everything.’
But Luke wasn’t looking at the computer. Alistair Stratton was a warmonger. Violent events stuck to him like shit to a shovel.
‘You know,’ the old man continued, almost as though he was talking to himself, ‘the world makes a mistake when it believes the only fundamentalists belong to Islam. Oh, it’s true that there are many who would destroy the Western Wall and return the Temple Mount to the sole control of the Arabs. But there are many Christian men and women who live in expectation of Armageddon, and who believe it will be preceded by a great conflict in the biblical lands . . .’ He stopped short. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m boring you.’
He picked his hat up from the table, placed it on his head and started to stand.
‘Wait,’ Luke said.
The old man inclined his head.
‘If the Arabs destroyed the Western Wall, what would happen?’
For a moment he didn’t answer. Halfway between sitting and standing, he forced his gnarled body upright.
‘Destroyed the Western Wall?’
Luke nodded.
‘With the countries of the world on a knife’s edge and armies circling the Middle East like vultures around carrion?’ The old man glanced towards the computer screen where the webpage Luke had been reading was still up. ‘Well then, it will be as the Book of Daniel has foretold,’ he said. ‘To the end there shall be war.’ He smiled, then raised his hat a little. ‘Good evening to you,’ he rasped, ‘and happy Hanukkah.’ He headed to the exit and didn’t look back before he disappeared into the night.
Luke sat there stunned. He was vaguely aware that the woman behind the counter was still looking at him, that her lips were slightly parted and her dark eyes full of meaning.
But his thoughts were elsewhere.
The pieces of the jigsaw were falling into place.
Alistair Stratton had already persuaded Maya Bloom to orchestrate one atrocity in Britain. Now it was just a matter of time before she orchestrated a second here in Jerusalem. And with the world on the brink of war, this was the final act that would push it over the precipice. Stratton hadn’t got into bed with the Grosvenor Group for money. His aims were altogether more apocalyptic than that. He was insane, of course, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. Quite the opposite. He was manipulating the Palestinians into bringing about their own destruction. And when that happened . . .
Luke jumped to his feet, startling the young woman behind the counter. Recovering herself, she asked, ‘You don’t want another coffee? Something to eat?’
But Luke had already put a note on the counter and was heading for the door.
‘I get off work soon . . .’ the young woman called after him. A great crack of thunder echoed across the skies. Luke was already outside and running – sprinting – towards Jerusalem’s Old Town.
TWENTY-EIGHT
A pair of eyes stared out of the open window of a dark attic. They were perfectly still as they looked across the ramshackle rooftops. They were unblinking, when a crack of rainless thunder seemed to shake the very bones of the city.
But it did not shake Maya Bloom.
She stared, and she stared. Two hundred metres away, over the last of the roofs, she could just see the top of the Western Wall. And rising above it, bathed in light, was the cupola of the Dome of the Rock. The place from where, according to Islam, the Prophet Muhammad ascended into heaven.
Her lip curled. People could worship their imaginary gods if they wanted to. Maya Bloom had long since given up any belief in the supernatural. Death was death. She’d learned that at a young age when her parents were taken from her by a cowardly Palestinian; she had learned it when her brother, the only human being for whom she had retained a spark of feeling, had been killed by the Arabs in Iraq. She did not know which angered her more: the golden dome, so honoured by the people she hated with every scrap of her being; or the Western Wall, where men offered up prayers to a God who had failed to protect her family.
The thunder cracked again. Maya Bloom continued to stare as the face of Alistair Stratton rose in her mind.
The Book of Daniel.
She heard his voice as clearly as if he was in the tiny room with her.
It tells us it is here that the End Times will start. It’s quite clear about that, Maya. Quite clear.
A cold wind gusted in through the open window. She felt it blowing the hair back from her face.
Do you want to be part of history?
A church bell rang in the air. Maya Bloom counted the chimes. Ten. When the last one had faded away, she turned and looked into the tiny, anonymous room – the only place in all Israel where she felt sure she could be safe. On the small single bed, laid out neatly, was a small arsenal. A Knights Armaments M110 sniper rifle. Two handguns. Silencers. Match-grade ammunition in ten-round magazines. A twenty-centimetre knife with a black handle and a white blade.
Thunder echoed across the skies. The city shook. Maya Bloom stared implacably through the window as she waited for Hanukkah to arrive.
23.03 hrs.
If he’d been here with the Regiment, Luke would have had all the assets he needed. Every square centimetre of Jerusalem Old Town would have been covered by detailed mapping. The expertise of the Israeli law-enforcement agencies would have been at his disposal. He’d have had unmarked vehicles, sights, scopes and men at his disposal; he’d have had access to the intelligence feeds of all the major agencies. And enough weaponry to start a small war.
But tonight was very different.
His imagery consisted of the tourist map he’d swiped from the café. It told him that the Western Wall was located in the eastern part of the Old Town. It was part of the Temple Mount compound and no more than fifty metres from the Dung Gate, one of the entrances in the high wall that surrounded the Old Town. He had no vehicle. And far from having men and access to intelligence, every time he saw a police officer or a member of the IDF, he put his head down. He was familiar enough with the way things worked to be sure his image had already been circulated and he couldn’t risk being recognised. But if Stratton truly was planning an atrocity at the Western Wall, Luke needed to get eyes on the potential strike area as quickly as possible: to work out
how
the place was most likely to be attacked and to spot any suspicious activity in advance of the hit.
The entrance to the Western Wall compound was buzzing with security. In the fifty metres between the entrance and the perimeter wall of the Old Town he counted eight armed soldiers among the hundred or so members of the public that were milling around even at this late hour. There were two security gates, one for men, one for women. Each gate had a metal detector. Luke knew that a small amount of metal – a watch or a bracelet – probably wouldn’t set one of these devices off; the Sig in his Bergen, however, definitely would.
He retreated from the entrance and made his way back into the Old Town, down narrow, winding commercial streets with few pedestrians and even fewer cars. Here he soon stumbled across an alleyway where big metal bins and overflowing bin bags were parked against one wall. He slipped into the alleyway and secreted the Bergen underneath a pile of bin bags. He’d be back within an hour to pick it up, he reckoned. It should be safe for that time.
Luke hurried back to the security gates. There were about fifteen people in the male queue and it moved slowly as each visitor passed through the gates and one or two were patted down by the soldiers on guard. Luke drew some strange looks in only his trousers and a T-shirt when the December night air was cold, but he could live with that. It was if anyone recognised his face that he had to worry. He passed through the metal detector with no problem and less than a minute later he was standing alone at the back of a large plaza which extended some seventy-five metres from his position. At the end of the plaza, lit up in the darkness, was a landmark he knew from the TV: the Western Wall.
The section of the wall he could see was about twenty metres high and fifty metres wide. Ancient. Sturdy. There were maybe fifty people standing close to it and praying – half of them at the male section to the left, many wearing traditional black suits and wide-brimmed hats; the other half at the female section to the right. The two sections were separated by a barrier about a metre high. A further hundred or so people were milling around the plaza. At each end the wall was illuminated by a large spotlight which lent the honey-coloured stones a mystical air. Easy to see how people could be impressed, but Luke wasn’t here to have his breath taken away. He was here to stake the place out.
If Stratton was planning an atrocity at the wall, how would he do it? You couldn’t attack from the air, because the second an unknown aircraft violated Israeli airspace it would be taken down. A ground attack? He’d seen for himself how high the security was at ground level. Smuggling weapons into the Western Wall plaza through the metal detectors was almost impossible.
As he examined the wall from a distance, he became aware of a group of people approaching from his left. No more than ten, their cameras marking them immediately out as tourists, and one of them – a fat man with a jowly face – wearing a T-shirt under his denim jacket with the words ‘Cincinnati, Ohio’. Fucking idiots, Luke thought, visiting a place like this at a time like this. One of them – a young man – stood apart from the others. He spoke with a slightly raised voice, in English, but with a strong Israeli accent that immediately reminded him of Maya Bloom.
‘The Western Wall is constructed on the site of the original Temple,’ he announced, sounding like he’d spoken these words a thousand times before. ‘Half of it dates from the end of the Second Temple period and was constructed around 19 bc by Herod the Great. The rest of it was added around the seventh century. It has long been an object of conflict. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, it came under Jordanian control. Israelis were banned from the site for nineteen years until the Old City was recaptured in 1967. What you can see from here is the exposed section. It continues behind the buildings to our left, and extends as far as the Muslim Quarter of the city . . .’
The tourist group moved on, leaving Luke to continue his examination of the area. From his vantage point he tried to spot any plainclothes operators. These would be men or women pretending to be visitors, but who stuck around for a suspicious amount of time. He saw no one, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there – any decent security arrangement would involve some kind of rotation; and the guys – or girls – guarding this place would be pros. He counted six armed IDF soldiers, in their olive-green uniforms, circulating around the plaza itself and even approaching the wall. Clearly the security restrictions didn’t extend to their assault rifles and he immediately identified that as a security weak spot. Might an Israeli soldier be involved in an atrocity here? Men could be bought, of course, and a couple of guys with M16s could kill a lot of people. But what had Stratton said?
When the wall falls . . .
It would take more than an assault rifle to cause the sort of damage he’d implied.
Luke needed a closer look at the wall itself. With his head down, he started walking across the plaza, losing himself in a little crowd of tourists who were doing the same thing. They passed a post, about a metre high, bearing a tourist sign written in Hebrew and English: ‘on the sabbath and holy days, smoking, photography and cellphone use are strictly forbidden.’
A voice. Behind him. ‘Excuse me.
Excuse me!
’ It was urgent. Luke felt his fist clenching as he turned to look. A thin man with a wispy beard and square spectacles was running towards him, suspicion on his face. ‘You, sir. Stop.’
Thirty metres to the exit. If he wanted to get out of here, he needed to do it now.
‘You cannot approach the wall bare-headed,’ the man said.
‘What?’
The guy held out a thin cardboard skullcap. Luke felt his muscles relaxing.
‘Right,’ he muttered. ‘Thanks.’ He put on the cap and continued his approach. On his left, he passed a low, sand-coloured building with a series of arches built into the foundations. Most of his attention, however, was on the wall itself.
The lowest seven courses of the wall were made from blocks about a metre wide and half a metre high; above that, they were a quarter the size. The blocks were sturdy, certainly, but also crumbling away in places and with weeds and plants growing out of the mortar here and there. It struck him that a Regiment demolitions expert could bring the wall down in minutes. He observed a couple of tourists squeezing hand-written notes into the cracks. It occurred to him that the cracks in the wall could easily be filled with explosives, but he discarded that idea as soon as it came to him. The wall was surely guarded 24/7 – stick anything except a prayer note in it and you’d be flat on your face with an M16 in the back of your head.
Think like the enemy, he told himself. Anticipate their movements.
Prepping for a combat situation, he would learn in advance what he could about the enemy’s SOPs. In Iraq they’d been alert to the dangers of roadside bombs. In the Stan, IEDs. He understood the psychology of war. He understood that if a method of combat worked well once, chances were it would work well again. The Micks had never stopped using car bombs or letter bombs just because Special Branch were cute to it. Even the Yanks and the British were addicted to their drones and guided missiles. In battle, you do whatever gets the job done best.