The Last Testament (31 page)

All this knowledge Maggie tried to impart to her aching bones and muscles as she came through the automatic door of the hotel to see Uri, pacing, head down, in the lobby. She wanted him to have no idea what had happened to her in the market. Growing up, she had never understood the girls at her school who had THE LAST TESTAMENT

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not breathed a word about Father Riordan, despite everything he had done to them. But she understood now.

Fortunately, Uri didn’t ask how she was, only what she had found out. She told him about the real Afif Aweida, the trader in looted antiquities who had lived while his fruit-selling cousin had been murdered. As she explained, Uri was smiling a bitter, rueful smile.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s just that this happened before. Not to me. But some colleagues of mine.’

‘What happened?’

‘A very bad case of mistaken identity. It happened during the second Lebanon war, just a few years ago. Israeli special forces snatched the man they thought was the leader of Hizbullah. It was a big coup for Israeli intelligence. Only problem, he was just a Beirut shopkeeper. Same name. Wrong man.’

‘You think it was Israeli intelligence who killed Afif Aweida?’

‘I’m not saying that. Just that dumb mistakes like that happen.

Anyone could have made it.’

They were walking along Shlomzion Ha’Malka Street towards his car. She had wanted to go upstairs to her room, to freshen up, but Uri had been adamant: there was no time. As she got into the passenger seat, she explained what she believed had happened: that Shimon Guttman had visited Aweida’s shop, translated several clay tablets and come across one of profound political significance. Some text that would have a huge impact on the peace process. He had called Baruch Kishon, his long-time political partner, to discuss how they could best publicize his find. And then he had set about getting this information to the Prime Minister.

‘For my dad to get so excited, it must have been something that showed the Jews have been here forever. Some fragment in Hebrew going back a million years.’

‘Like the Bet Alpha synagogue?’

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‘Maybe.’

Maggie bit her lip and looked outside, at the passing streets.

Men in black coats and the trademark wide-brimmed hats, some of them edged in fur, even in this Middle Eastern heat. Women in long, shapeless dresses darting in and out of shops, plastic bags swinging. Uri caught Maggie’s gaze.

‘The religious. Taking over this place. Anyway, we’ll know what it was my father saw soon, I reckon. His lawyer was out of the country until today. He got back this morning and saw this letter waiting for him.’

‘Did he say how long it had been there?’

‘Apparently my dad dropped it off last Saturday. By hand.’

Uri and Maggie looked at each other.

‘I know,’ said Uri. ‘I thought the same thing. Like he knew something was going to happen to him.’

They drove on in silence, Maggie replaying the events of that morning, and of the previous night. If only there was a way to try to make sense of it all. Maybe she should tell Uri what had happened in the market: maybe together they could work out who her attackers were. But she had already revealed so much about herself last night. She was about to say something when Uri reached for the car radio, turning on the noon headlines.

Once again he translated each story as it came.

‘They’re saying that there are fears across the world for the Middle East peace process after both sides admitted they had effectively broken off negotiations. Satellite pictures show Syrian army units mobilizing on the border. The Egyptian military have cancelled all leave. And apparently the President of Iran has said that if Israel refuses this last chance to be accepted in the region, then the region will have to remove Israel once and for all. Cast this cancer out, he said. Washington has said any first use of nuclear weapons against Israel will be punished, er, how do you say that? “In kind”?’

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Jesus
. Miller and the others were not kidding. The world really was watching; failure in Jerusalem would trigger some geopolitical catastrophe. Then she heard in the stream of Hebrew babble two familiar and unexpected words. ‘Uri?’ she said.

‘What’s happened?’

He held up his hand to silence her. Then he paled, the colour visibly leaving his face. Finally he spoke, his voice barely audible.

‘They said tributes are coming in for veteran journalist Baruch Kishon, killed in a car accident in Switzerland. Just outside Geneva.’

‘Uri. Pull the car over. Now.’

But Uri was stuck in traffic; he couldn’t move across. Maggie’s mind was racing. Somebody was one step ahead of every move they were making. She and Uri had deciphered the name of Afif Aweida at Kishon’s apartment; within hours a man called Afif Aweida was lying in a pool of his own blood in the Jerusalem market. They had been the only people to get into Kishon’s home and to have discovered that Kishon had received Guttman’s last phone call. And now he too had been hunted down.

It could only mean one thing: they were being followed and their every conversation bugged. That was it. There could be no other explanation.

Uri was hooting at the cars in front, desperately trying to pull over.

Unless.

Where did Uri say he had done his army service? In intelligence. He was the only person who knew all she knew. She had not mentioned Kishon’s name to anyone, yet here he was dead, almost certainly murdered.

She had trusted Uri immediately and completely. Maybe she had made a mistake. After all, she had misjudged people before.

She was feeling queasy, her palms clammy with sweat as she looked at him. She thought of the man who had grabbed her 262

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that morning, his hand squeezing her
there
. She had not been able to see his face or place his voice. The accent was so strange; maybe, she now wondered, it was the sound of someone disguising his voice. Was it possible that Uri had followed her there?

Could that man in the mask have been . . . ? She waited for the traffic to bring the car to a halt and, when it did, she swiftly reached for the handle to open the door.

But Uri got there first, using the button on his side to lock all the doors. She was trapped here; he had her cornered.

He turned to her and in a voice steady and calm said, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’

C H A P T E R T H I R T Y - E I G H T

JERUSALEM, THURSDAY, 2.25PM

‘Uri, I want to get out.’

‘Maggie, you’re not going anywhere.’

‘Let me out. NOW!’ Maggie only very rarely raised her voice, and she knew the sound of it was shocking. Uri finally pulled over.

‘Listen, Maggie. You can’t walk out on me now. Just because this is getting frightening.’

‘It’s you I’m frightened of, Uri.’

‘Me? Are you crazy?’

‘Whenever we’ve found a name, that person has ended up dead. First Aweida, now Kishon. And I know
I
didn’t kill them.’

‘So you think it was me?’

‘Well, you’re the only one who knew what I knew.’

Uri was shaking his head in disbelief, staring down at his lap, the car engine still running. ‘This is insane, Maggie. How could I have run a guy off a road in Switzerland, when I was here?’

‘You could have told someone.’

‘I didn’t know he was in Switzerland!’ He tried to collect himself. ‘Look, I just want to find out what happened to my parents.

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Someone killed my mother, Maggie. I’m sure of it. And I want to know who it was. That’s all.’

She felt the anxiety recede, as if the blood in her veins was subsiding. ‘But you could be passing on what you know to Israeli intelligence.’

‘Why would I do that? It was Israeli security who shot my father, remember. They may even be the people behind all this.

So why would I help them?’

It was true. It didn’t make much sense: a secret agent who loses both his parents, just to maintain his cover. She had allowed herself to panic.

‘OK. I believe you. Now unlock the doors.’

He clicked them open and waited for her to get out. When he saw that she wasn’t moving, he spoke. ‘I only locked them because I need you, Maggie. I can’t do this alone.’ He held the silence a moment longer. ‘I don’t want you to go.’ She held his gaze until she saw in his eyes what she had seen there last night.

The same warmth, the same spark. She wanted to dive into that look, to stay inside it. Instead she turned away, nodding, as if to signal that it was time for him to drive on.

He had driven about a hundred yards when, in a sudden movement, he reached for the volume knob on the radio and cranked it up loud. Then he re-tuned until he had found some pounding rap music. The car seemed to be shaking.

Maggie, her head hurting from the noise, reached for the same knob and turned it down, only for Uri to reach back and turn it even louder, his hand lingering there to block any attempt she might make to reverse his decision. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

she shouted.

Uri looked back at her, his eyes wide as if he had made an important realization.
Bugs
, he mouthed silently.
The car could be bugged
.

Of course. Security had always been a key factor in past mediation efforts and she had, in her time, taken some extreme THE LAST TESTAMENT

265

precautions, once briefing a Foreign Minister in a hotel bathroom while the water was running. But that was when she was dealing with negotiations. This, she had assumed, was different.

Her panic over Uri and now this. She suddenly felt very stupid: her year out, nursemaiding warring couples, had left her rustier than she realized.

He was right, they needed to assume they were being bugged.

When they reached a traffic light, Uri leaned across to her, so that he could whisper into her ear without his voice being picked up. ‘The computers, too.’ She could feel the words as much as she could hear them, Uri’s breath caressing her ear. She could smell his neck. ‘They will have seen whatever we saw. From now on, talk just like normal.’

He turned the music back down. ‘You don’t like it? Rap’s very big in Israel right now.’

Maggie was too thrown to play-act. If their session on Shimon Guttman’s home computer had been monitored, then whoever was doing the monitoring would know all they knew – including the truth about Ahmed Nour. And now, this morning, something had got them rattled; rattled enough to want to scare her away.

By seeing Aweida, she was getting too close for their comfort.

Uri pulled over. Once they were out of the car, she began speaking immediately, only for Uri to shake his head and put his finger across his lips.
Hush
.

‘Yeah, there’s a really thriving music scene here now,’ he said, still in fake chat mode. ‘Mainly in Tel Aviv of course.’ He made a beckoning gesture with his hand, urging her to follow his lead.

Maggie stared at him. He was stubbled from several days without a shave, his hair loose and unkempt, the curls tumbling around his face; and now she couldn’t think of a single thing to say, about music, or anything else. Instead, she gave him a look of near-complete bafflement.

He leaned in to her ear. ‘Our clothes too,’ he whispered.

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Reflexively, she patted her pockets, feeling for a tiny microphone.

He smiled, as if to say, ‘There’s no point, you’ll never find it.’

They were walking towards what looked like an apartment building, not the law office she was expecting. Were they calling on the Guttman family lawyer at home?

Uri pressed the buzzer by the main entrance. ‘Hi, Orli?’

Maggie heard a woman’s voice crackle through the intercom.

‘
Mi zeh?
’

‘Uri.
Ani lo levad
.’ I’m not alone.

The door buzzed open and after two flights they came to an apartment door that was already open. Framed in the doorway, looking bewildered, was a woman Maggie decided was at least five years younger than her – and unnervingly beautiful. With long dark hair that fell in easy curls, wide brown eyes and a slim figure that even loose, faded jeans could not conceal, Maggie found herself hoping this was Uri’s sister – but fearing it was his girlfriend.

Instantly, the pair embraced, a long, closed-eyes hug that made Maggie want to disappear. Were they family? Was this woman consoling Uri on his double loss? A moment later, they were inside, Maggie still standing apart, unintroduced.

Without needing direction, or asking permission, Uri made for the stereo, putting on a CD and turning up the volume. Over Radiohead, he began explaining to Orli what had happened and what he suspected. Then, to Maggie’s surprise, he pointed towards what she assumed was the bedroom, urging her to follow him.

Now the three of them were in there. Still whispering over the music, Uri introduced the two women to each other, each offering an embarrassed nod and polite half-smile. Then he turned to Maggie and explained in an even lower voice that, first, Orli was an ex-girlfriend and, second, Maggie needed to get undressed.

Then in a louder, more deliberately normal voice, he continued: ‘Orli trained as a designer in London. I thought maybe THE LAST TESTAMENT

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you’d like to take a look at some of her latest clothes.’ He made a listening gesture, cupping his ear with his hand, then started pointing. The bug could be anywhere: shirt, shoes, trousers, anywhere.

Next, Uri opened up a cupboard and began to pull out men’s clothes. Were those his, still stored here, despite his insistence that the gorgeous Orli was an ex? Or did they belong to Orli’s new boyfriend?

She couldn’t stare for long because Orli was now standing Maggie before her own closet, assessing her up and down with the brutality women reserve only for each other. As it happened, while Maggie might not have Orli’s skinny arms, they weren’t too far apart: she would be able to fit most of the clothes on the rail.

Orli picked out a long, shapeless skirt – no mistake that, Maggie suspected. ‘What about those?’ Maggie said, indicating a pair of neat, grey trousers. She noticed a T-shirt and fitted cardigan that would complete the outfit just fine. Reluctantly, Orli handed them over. Pushing her luck, Maggie also nominated a pair of chic leather boots at the bottom of the cupboard. If she was going to wear another woman’s clothes, she thought, she might as well enjoy it.