The Last Testament (36 page)

Maggie looked down at the scribbled instructions taken from Liz’s email. To get to the room where she would find the virtual Maggie Costello, the venue for the peace simulation game, she had to hit the
Map
button, then find the
My Landmarks
pulldown menu and look for Harvard University, Middle East Studies. It was there, close to the top. Once selected, she hit
Teleport
and smiled as the computer gave off a suitably sci-fi whoosh sound, suggesting a Star Trek-style leap across the universe. The screen darkened, lit up with a message that said ‘Second Life, Arriving . . .’

and then, an instant later, she saw the girl in the skinny jeans and croptop standing somewhere else entirely, still in the foreground, as if in the lens of a camera hovering overhead.

Now she was surrounded on all sides by buildings, arranged as if on a university campus. Some were rendered in traditional brick, others constructed in more modish steel and glass. As the avatar walked ahead, the arms swinging metronomically, Maggie noticed the surface of the ground, cobbled just as a campus path should be.

In front of her was a ramp, with words printed on it which became legible only as you approached.
Welcome to the Faculty for
Middle East Studies
. She moved upward, marvelling at the change in perspective as she did so. There were pictures in the lobby, which swivelled as she hit the arrow keys. There was a reception desk and, at shoulder level, a series of signposts. Maggie took the one marked Peace Simulation.

Suddenly she was inside a room laid out in classic negotia-THE LAST TESTAMENT

303

tion style: a long, wide wooden table with space for more than twenty people around it. It seemed to be full, avatars sitting in each place, with namecards in front of each one. There was one for the American President, another for the Secretary General of the UN and several more for the leaders of assorted interested parties: the perennial ‘moderate’ Arab states, Egypt and Jordan, the European Union, Russia and others. Away from the table, ringing the room, were chairs laid out for officials, from the US

Secretary of State on down. She moved her cursor over the American team, revealing Bruce Miller and Robert Sanchez, until she came across a female avatar, with long brown hair and a trim figure, wearing a dully vacant expression. A black information bubble appeared:
Maggie Costello, US mediator
.

‘At least I’m in the room,’ Maggie muttered to herself. She guessed these were dumb avatars, inert mannequins installed inside Second Life as props to add to the authenticity of the scene. You had to give it to the geek community: they certainly cared about detail.

It was then Maggie noticed that two of the figures around the table were not still, but wobbling. They were facing each other, identified by their on-screen bubbles as Yaakov Yariv and Khalil al-Shafi. They had the faces of the two men too, or a very close computer simulation of them. Only the bodies and clothes didn’t fit. They were computer-game generic, presumably allocated automatically by Second Life software. Either that or Israel’s aged Prime Minister still maintained an ostentatiously muscled chest, while the Fatah leader secretly liked to dress like an urban clubber, complete with tight-fitting T-shirt. Now that she was this near, her avatar standing halfway between the door and the head of the table, she could eavesdrop on their conversation. She checked her watch. Early evening on the East Coast: these were probably a couple of postgrads putting in some extra hours of role play.

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SAM BOURNE

A speech bubble appeared by the Yaakov Yariv avatar. A single line of yellow text.
Hello? Can we help you? Are you taking part in
the peace simulation?

Maggie was flummoxed. What on earth should she say? Should she pretend to be someone else? There was only one thing for it. She would have to stay in character. Valley girl, she decided.

She hit the
Chat
key and typed. As the words appeared on the screen, she noticed her avatar change posture: its arms were now raised up, the hands flapping. Maggie realized her on-screen alter ego was miming typing.

hope i’m not crashing in here guys, but i’m doing my major in int
rels and if i could listen in, it could really help.

Yariv came back a second or two later, the hands of his avatar now waggling in front of him, as if hitting the keys of an unseen keyboard.

Where do you study?

Maggie hesitated, looking again at Liz’s avatar.

burbank community college.

There was a pause.

OK
.

Maggie waited, enjoying this strange little game. She wondered what kind of antics Liz got up to here. Did she have the boyfriend in Second Life that she lacked in the first one?

The al-Shafi character began.
Have you seen the Silwan map, the
latest one?

There was a delay of a second or two. Then a bubble popped up by the Yariv avatar.
We saw it. It involves a bypass route for the
water main.

Khalil al-Shafi:
Yes
.

Yaakov Yariv:
Who would pay for that?

Khalil al-Shafi:
We propose three years from the EU
-
UN fund, eventually to be self-sustaining
.

Yaakov Yariv:
With access to the Jordanian aquifer?

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305

Khalil al-Shafi:
We imagine so. But we would need your in-principle agreement before we would put that to the Jordanians
.

Maggie nodded her head in professional admiration. You had to hand it to these kids: they were certainly taking their studies seriously, not trading platitudes but getting into the real detail of the negotiations. Water was one of those issues whose importance eluded most outsiders to the Middle East conflict: too busy thinking about oil.

Good for them, she thought. She went back to her keyboard, back to the busty Valley girl.

you guys are really smart! thanks a bunch but i think i’d better study
some more before i’m ready for this stuff, wish me luck!

Having said her goodbyes, Maggie mis-hit the arrow keys, haphazardly staggering forward and back. Then, embarrassed, as if she really were in a room with two Harvard post-grads and was fumbling her exit, she hit the
Fly
button. Sure enough, the glamorous avatar rose from the ground and, with a little help from the forward arrow, took flight.

Immediately, she collided with a neighbouring building, smacking her virtual head on it, watching her virtual self flinch for no more than a second. But a few moments later she was soaring above the Harvard campus. The graphics were extraordinarily detailed, like architects’ three-dimensional projections, showing the white stucco cladding on the Dunster House clock-tower, even the newsstands and bicycle racks of Harvard Yard.

She carried on flying, her arms outstretched, her body horizontal, like a heavy-chested Superman. Occasionally she would swoop down to take a closer look. She saw hodge-podge buildings, as if constructed one extension at a time, surrounded by their own bumpy landscapes: private homes, she soon realized, with gardens. She flew over a stretch of water, spotting a palm-fringed island. Once she got lower, a notice popped up on her screen: a promotional ad for a concert to be performed there by 306

SAM BOURNE

some eighties rocker tomorrow night. Maggie shook her head in bemused awe.

She carried on flying for a few minutes longer, imagining her sister losing herself in this world of sharp lines and vivid colours.

Maggie spotted a cluster of avatars and descended, her curiosity roused the way it would be if she saw a real crowd on a real street. As she landed, her knees bent.

The neon signs gave it away: Second Life’s red-light district.

Mannequins were wearing shiny PVC corsets, which, as your cursor hovered near, revealed a price tag. Whips, rubber masks, they had it all. Instantly she felt unclothed, her pneumatic breasts an embarrassment. But she was Lola Hepburn now. She could do what she liked.

She approached a male avatar, an absurdly muscled creature who, Maggie guessed, had been designed with the gay market in mind. A graphic popped up immediately, shaped like a pie-chart, each slice given over to a different option:
Chat, Flirt, Touch
Me
were the ones Maggie noticed first. She hesitated, looking at the screen showing these two ludicrous cyber-creations – one of them, for now, being her – and wondered what people would make of this scene. In the dead of night, in a room filled with sleeping fax machines and abandoned desks, a US diplomat in a Jerusalem hotel, scoping what looked like internet porn during the darkest hour of the peace process. What, she wondered, would it be like to touch without touching? What could this machine do to simulate that feeling? She remembered the man asleep in her bed upstairs.

Now another man, a bearded avatar with seventies Afro and tight trousers, had entered the room, close enough to address them both with a line of text.

Shaftxxx Brando: Hi guys? What’s going down?

Maggie instantly hit the
Fly
button, fleeing this room and the whole sex district. She was now zooming over seas, city skylines, THE LAST TESTAMENT

307

holiday resorts, once descending to find she was in a perfectly reproduced Philadelphia city centre, the streets laid out in a neat three-dimensional grid.

She went back to the
Map
key, taking a few seconds to work out what she had to do. Homesickness decided her first destination. She typed in ‘Dublin’ and then hit
Teleport
.

A whoosh later and she was standing in a landscape which, even reproduced like this, she found instantly familiar. The water on the Liffey was too static, but the Temple Bar area was there, complete with the clubs and pubs she remembered so well from her teenage years, when she and the other convent girls drank vodka like Russian sailors. But it looked desolate tonight, just her and a few wastrels mooching down Dame Street.

She sniffed at the thought of it. Pathetic really, a grown woman staring at a screen in the middle of the night to remind her of home. She was meant to have given all this up, this wandering the globe, and to have put down roots with Edward in Washington. Yet here she was, in the blue light of a hotel business centre at gone three in the morning, pining for her home town thanks to a glorified computer game. She sat back in her chair, wondering why her plan to settle down had failed. Wrong city? Wrong time? Or wrong man?

She shut the computer down, crept out of the glass-walled business centre and headed for the lifts. She thought of the Dublin she had just seen. Not like any Dublin she remembered.

Cleaner, tidier and infinitely lonelier.

Maggie stepped inside the lift and it was only when the doors slid shut that it hit her.
Of course
. That’s what Shimon Guttman had meant. The wily old bastard! How could she not have seen it till now?

‘Come on, come on,’ she said, desperate to get back and wake Uri. She looked up at the numbers, counting the floors.
Seven,
eight, nine
. Here.

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SAM BOURNE

Hesitantly, she peered out of the lift doors, just in case her shadow, the man or men who had been following her since God knows when, had decided to station himself right outside her hotel room. No one there.

She padded along the corridor, ensuring her heels barely landed on the carpet. She wanted to make no sound. Slowly she slid her keycard into the lock, until it flashed green. She pushed the door open, began crying out Uri’s name when she felt a hard, quick blow to the back of the neck. She fell to the floor, making barely a sound.

C H A P T E R F O R T Y - F O U R

JERUSALEM, FRIDAY, AN HOUR EARLIER

First he heard the double click, the signal that they were speaking on a secure line. As always, the boss got straight to the point.

‘My worry is that things are spiralling out of control.’

‘I understand.’

‘We obviously need that tablet.’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean we need it
now
. Things are getting crazy. The cure is beginning to look worse than the disease.’

‘I know how it looks.’ He could hear a deep sigh on the other end of the phone.

‘How long do you think we should give this whole thing?’

That was the drawback of a job like this, working for the big decision-maker. Such men always expected action immediately, as if merely uttering that something should happen was enough to make it happen. All political leaders became like this eventually, coming to regard their own words as divine speech acts.
I
said, Let there be light. Why isn’t there light?

‘Well, now we’ve started, I don’t see how we can stop. You’ve seen the latest. Hizbullah firing rockets at towns and villages in 310

SAM BOURNE

the middle of the night, maximizing risk of casualties. We can’t let ourselves be dictated to by them.’

‘What about Costello? Has she got anything?’

‘We’re following her very closely. I think she’s making progress.

And what she knows, we know.’

Another sigh. ‘We need to have this tablet in our possession.

We have to know what’s in it before they do. So we can act first. Shape events.’

‘You know it’s always possible that no one will get it. Neither us, nor them.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean Costello could lead us to it. Or she could fail. The tablet could disappear with Shimon Guttman. It would be as if the whole issue never arose.’

The voice on the end of the secure line did not need to hear more. He could put the pieces together.

‘That’s not bad.’

‘Almost a win-win.’

‘If she gets it, we get it. If she doesn’t get it . . . If she, for some unforeseen reason, cannot advance this mission, then no one gets it. Problem solved.’

‘Could be.’

‘OK. Let’s talk in the morning.’

He heard the familiar second click, then terminated the call and scrolled through his contacts to find the number of the surveillance team, the unit tracking Guttman and Costello. He was connected within a single ring.