As he mulled over the problem he watched a taxi drive through the checkpoint from the Jerusalem side and, since it was leaving the city, continue without being stopped. Zhilev watched as it came to a stop a short distance down the road and a Palestinian, wearing the black-and-white patterned kaffiyeh headdress of his tribe, climbed out of the back seat dragging several large bags with him.
Zhilev’s mind raced through the possible scenarios as he studied the dented vehicle with its cracked windscreen, wondering if it would turn around and head back into the city. Inspired more by intuition than any firm plan he quickly opened his bag on the passenger seat and took out a bottle of water, unscrewed the top, dug his passport out of his pocket and carefully poured water down one edge of it, partially wetting the pages. He put the bottle down and opened the passport to check the effect. A good portion of each page had been soaked causing the fine anti-forgery patterns to run. He found the page that contained his UK entry stamp and carefully rubbed moisture over it until it became smudged and illegible. His aim was simple and surprisingly desperate considering his planning so far but the momentum was taking him along and having decided to go for it, he chose to ignore the obvious risks. If the soldier asked for his ID Zhilev would offer the passport with the explanation that it accidentally got wet in his bag and he was heading through Jerusalem on his way to Tel Aviv and the Russian embassy to have it renewed. Not completely satisfied with the plan but committed, he climbed out of the car as he watched the taxi pull away and turn in the road to join the back of the line of cars entering the city. Zhilev shouldered his pack and headed briskly up the hill. The taxi was three cars from the checkpoint as he approached it from the back, opened the rear door and climbed in.
The driver, a large, unshaven, gruff-looking man in a sweat-stained t-shirt with a cigarette in his mouth, turned to look at him and said something in Hebrew which Zhilev did not understand.
‘Jerusalem, old city,’ Zhilev said, expecting that was the answer to the question.
The driver said something else but when his passenger did not reply he realised it was because he was not being understood.
‘English?’ the driver asked in a harsh accent.
‘A little,’ Zhilev said.
The driver studied his passenger a moment before removing his cigarette to smile, revealing a bad set of brown teeth that still had food in between them from his last meal. ‘
Gavaritye pa-russki
,’ he said, more a statement than a question.
Zhilev looked at the man again who was deeply tanned with black hair. Now that he was speaking in Zhilev’s native tongue and asking him if he was Russian, it was suddenly obvious the driver was neither Arab or Israeli.
‘
Da
,’ Zhilev replied, deciding it made no difference if the man knew he was Russian or not. He had not spoken a word of his language since leaving home and Russians were not famously suspicious characters in Israel. On the contrary, thousands escaped Russia during the communist era by pretending to be Jews and were shipped to Israel.
The man was pleased to have a fellow country-man in his cab and began to rattle on as if they were old friends.
‘Where are you from?’ he said in Russian. ‘I’m Moscovite.’
‘Latvia,’ Zhilev said. It was pointless saying otherwise because of his accent.
The taxi driver nodded although his smile waned as his eyes checked out Zhilev more closely. Zhilev suspected a hint of discrimination in the man’s look but ignored it. In his younger days, he would have baited anyone who acted derisively regarding his so-called impure Russian blood. More than one fellow Spetsnaz had suffered crushing blows from his massive fists for making disparaging remarks about his nationality, but this was not the time or place.
A slam on the bonnet startled both of them and they looked up to see an Israeli soldier in full combats and carrying a Canadian M16. There were no other cars in front of them and the soldier had obviously become frustrated with his attempts to wave the taxi forward to his cubicle.
As the driver wound down his window, the young soldier began to complain but the driver, obviously the short-tempered type and not remotely intimidated, interrupted heatedly in what appeared to Zhilev to be an offensive tone.The car behind honked its horn and the taxi driver immediately switched his attention to that driver, shouting back from inside the car. Zhilev looked behind to see an irate Israeli family packed inside a small car with the man at the wheel gesticulating abusively. The soldier banged the roof again to get the driver’s attention, which he got in the form of further abuse. The young soldier was becoming increasingly agitated and pulled open the door, raising his voice and demanding something of the driver. The driver climbed out of the taxi, obeying the soldier, but without interrupting his own vitriolic dialogue.They walked to the back of the car and the driver opened the boot. A moment later, he slammed it back down but the catch did not operate and the boot bounced open. The driver then proceeded to take out his anger on it, repeatedly slamming it shut until the catch finally hooked. He returned to his door continuing his verbiage as if in chorus with the soldier and climbed back into the car. It seemed he was talking more to himself than the soldier as he slammed his door shut hard enough to rattle the glass, put the engine into gear, revved it far too high and jerked away out of the checkpoint and up the hill.
Zhilev remained silent in the back, revelling in his good fortune. He had been completely ignored in the heat of the exchange. It occurred to him he might have been overly concerned in the first place. Whatever, he was through the checkpoint and on his way into Jerusalem.
‘Goddamned soldiers,’ the driver continued in Russian. ‘It makes my blood boil to be talked to like that by a twelve-year-old with a gun. I hate the Israelis. I hate the fucking Arabs too. Where did you say you were going?’
‘The old city.’
‘Hmmph . . . Fucking Israel,’ he went on.‘My stupid father and mother came here thirty years ago. They lied about being Jews. Russia was a shit hole. Now Israel is a shit hole and I’m stuck here. I have cousins in Russia who are rich.They make ten times, a hundred times more money than I can earn all my life in this shit hole. The economy is fucked. No one comes because of fucking war. Shit hole . . .You a tourist, eh?’
‘Yes.’
‘First tourist I’ve had in a week. How’s a man supposed to keep a wife and children alive?’
The driver went on for a while, castigating the Israelis and Arabs, pausing only to hurl abuse at other cars which impeded his selfish, aggressive driving as he made his way through the colourless city that appeared to be built of either concrete or stone.
‘I’m going to get into prostitution,’ the driver announced.‘I’ve been saying it for years but I’m going to do it soon. What do you do?’
‘I’m a postman,’ Zhilev said.
The driver glanced at him in his rear-view mirror. ‘Postman? How can you live as a postman, even in Latvia?’
Zhilev didn’t answer.
‘These Jews are horny people. Especially the Hasidic. There is no law against slavery here. They bring in whores by the truck load. The Hasidic is so ugly he has to pay for his pussy, and he likes his pussy. Fucky, fucky, fucky all the time. And most of the women come from Russia and Eastern Europe. I have contacts. I could open a whorehouse with the best pussy from Russia and clean up. Soon, I tell you . . . You live in Latvia?’
Zhilev didn’t answer and the driver glanced at him again.
‘Why don’t you make some money and round up some women when you get back home and send them to me. I’ll make you rich. Eh?’
‘How far are we from the old city?’ Zhilev asked.
The driver was miffed at being ignored. ‘Five minutes,’ he said. He then pulled a bottle of vodka from under his seat, unscrewed the top, took a swig and offered it to Zhilev.
‘You want?’
‘No,’ Zhilev said.
The driver shrugged, screwed the top back on and replaced it under his seat. ‘Which gate you want?’
‘What?’ Zhilev asked.
‘Which gate? I can’t drive into the old city. You must walk. Which gate? There are eight.’
‘Any will do.’
‘Where you staying? You need a hotel? I know a good hotel. Cheap.’
Zhilev could only imagine what this man’s hotel recommendations would be like. ‘No, thanks,’ he mumbled.
The driver shrugged as they pulled to a stop at a set of traffic lights and he pulled his bottle from under the seat and took another swig.
Zhilev had not thought about staying in a hotel, but now that the driver had mentioned it, it sounded like a sensible idea. There was no rush. He had originally planned to plant the bomb as soon as he arrived, but there were several good reasons why a delay of one day made sense. He wanted to make a final check of the device to ensure he had bypassed the protection protocols, and run through another arming rehearsal. He would need complete privacy for that. There was also the possibility that something might prevent him from carrying out his plan right away and he would need a base. On top of all of that, the thought of a hot bath and spending the night in a comfortable bed with clean sheets was very appealing.
‘I want a good hotel,’ Zhilev announced.
‘Good? How good?’
‘The best.’
‘The best?’ the driver said with a smirk. He had already begun to smell Zhilev and was wondering if the man could pay his taxi fare. He looked in his rear-view mirror and this time Zhilev was looking him in the eye. The driver’s smirk melted as he saw something in the big Latvian’s eyes that was clearly a warning.
‘What kind of hotel you want?’ the driver asked. ‘Israeli or Palestinian?’
Zhilev considered the question. He cared for neither in particular, but the Palestinian was closest to his enemy and the thought of bedding down amongst them before he ended their lives appealed to him. ‘Is there a good Palestinian hotel?’
‘We are coming to it,’ the driver said. ‘And it’s just a five-minute walk to the old city.’
They approached a roundabout, took the first exit and a few yards up a slight hill the driver pulled the car into the kerb and stopped. Zhilev looked out of the window at a bronze plaque on a wall by an entrance that advertised the American Colony.
‘It’s called American Colony but it’s Palestinian,’ the driver said. ‘Expensive.’
Zhilev opened the door.
‘Thirty shekels,’ the driver said, holding out his hand and putting on his mean expression just in case Zhilev thought of running.
Zhilev pulled a US five-dollar bill from his pocket and put it in the driver’s hand.
‘That’s not enough,’ the driver said.
‘It’s enough,’ Zhilev said as he climbed out of the vehicle with his bag and closed the door.
The driver rolled down his window and called out an expletive as he drove away. Zhilev ignored him as he walked to the entrance and stopped to look inside the grounds, the hotel being mostly hidden by trees and groomed vegetation. It was inviting and he could already feel himself soaking in the hot bath. He looked down at his feet, his trousers and the sleeves of his shirt. They were grubby and worn. If he was going to clean up, he should not do it by halves. Some new clothes were in order, the question was, should he buy them now before he entered the hotel, or after, when he was refreshed. The obvious answer was to have something clean to put on after his bath.
He looked up and down the street.There were no shops in the immediate area, but further up the hill, at the top of the road, there were what appeared to be several stores. Perhaps others were around the corner.
He shouldered his bag and walked up the hill.
As Zhilev reached the top of the hill and the first of the shops, a car turned into the road at the bottom, past the spot where he had alighted from the taxi and drove in through the old stone entrance of the hotel. It slowly navigated a sharp turn around an ellipse of dense foliage that led into a tight-fitting portico where it stopped outside the main doors of a three-storey stone colonial building.Tastefully overgrown creepers and huge-leaved plants hugged the pillars, portico and walls of the building and much of the entrance and driveway were in the shadow of a variety of tall trees.The hotel, in exceptional condition, was a marriage of old European walls and Middle Eastern windows.
A bellhop stepped through a pair of modern heavy glass doors set behind what appeared to be the original oak doors and opened the rear passenger door where Stratton and Gabriel sat together.
‘This is where the East meets the West,’ Raz said.
Stratton glanced inside the lobby at its highly polished stone floors covered in rich Persian carpets and bedecked in a tasteful collection of Eastern and antique European furniture. It looked very chic and very expensive.
‘You will be comfortable here,’ Raz said. ‘It’s more popular among Europeans and Americans than other hotels. Just be careful what you say or where you say it. Nearly everyone here is either a spy or a member of the media. It’s Palestinian and one of the best hotels in the city . . . and the most expensive. I know how cheap your English bosses are,’ he smiled. ‘You can tell them you had no choice since I would not take you anywhere else.’
Stratton wondered if there was a meaning behind the gesture, and why he had not taken them to an Israeli hotel.
Gabriel climbed out of the car with his bag and Raz watched him walk into the hotel. His eyes then fell on Stratton.
‘Your friend. Is he okay? He doesn’t look well.’
‘He just needs some rest.’
‘If he needs a doctor, let me know. I don’t want anything happening to my guests.’
As Stratton opened his door, Raz stopped him. ‘I’m going back to my office,’ he said. ‘When would you like to give your brief?’
Stratton paused, trying to decide how best to stall him. Of course they would expect a brief but no one said anything about it to Stratton on the aircraft. Sumners would have prepared one. He probably deliberately omitted to mention it after Stratton cut him off. He wondered what else the petulant bastard had forgotten to give him.