His work done, he turned to the other three who were now standing outside the door of the museum office. A silent, interrogatory look to each of themReady? Ready?then Ziad took his cigarette lighter, sparked it up and threw it to the ground, where it made instant contact with the petrol-soaked body of the security guard.
The flames erupted immediately, leaping so high that Ziad and the team could see them for most of their twenty-minute, wordless return hike through the fields of the kibbutz. The first fire engine arrived at about the same time the quartet found the car they had left in the cotton fields. As they drove back to Afula, they counted at least two more fire trucks and several police cars, heading in the opposite direction. Ziad reached for his cellphone to send a text message to the Director: "The hiding place is no more."
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE.
BEN-GURION A AIRPORT, FIVE WEEKS EARLIER FIVE WEEKS EARLIER.
Henry Blyth-Pullen hated flying at the best of times. Even before the war on b.l.o.o.d.y terror, and the fear that some maniac with a pair of scissors was going to ram the plane into Big Ben, he had been terrified of the d.a.m.n things. Take-off was the worst. While everyone else was flicking through the Daily Telegraph Daily Telegraph or or h.e.l.lo! h.e.l.lo! magazine, he would be gripping the buckle of his seat belt until his knuckles turned white. The grinding engines, the straining to lift off the ground, all of it sounded dangerous to Henry. And not just dangerous. magazine, he would be gripping the buckle of his seat belt until his knuckles turned white. The grinding engines, the straining to lift off the ground, all of it sounded dangerous to Henry. And not just dangerous. Unnatural Unnatural. As if this huge hunk of metal was meant to float in the air, defying gravity if not the will of the Almighty. No wonder there were so many accidents: it was G.o.d"s way of telling us to know our place, to keep our feet on the ground. Remember Icarus...
Henry gave himself this lecture every time he strapped himself into one of the b.l.o.o.d.y contraptions. It had acquired the status of a ritual. Though he would never admit to superst.i.tion, Henry had come to believe his little mental apology to the Creatorexpressing regret for mankind"s hubris in taking to the skieshad protected him. If he ever failed to think it, if he took flying for granted, why, then the plane was sure to tumble through the clouds like a stone.
This time, though, Henry"s anxiety had had days to build, long before he got anywhere near the runway. Inside his luggage was a consignment of clay tablets which he had decided to offload three thousand miles away from London. They would not make his fortunethe items that could do that were safely stashed away in a safe, waiting for a change in the political climatebut they would at least make his monthly bank balance look a little bonnier. Besides, he needed to tell Jaafar al-Naasri he had at least sold something. The fact that he was taking the goods back to Jaafar"s very own patch, or near as dammit, was a detail he would not share. Not with anyone, as it happened. It smacked so much of selling sand to the Sahara, that he was embarra.s.sed by it.
How to get them there, that was the issue. You couldn"t just pitch up with a bag-load of b.l.o.o.d.y precious antiquities. Jaafar had gone to great lengths to get them out; Henry couldn"t just waltz them back in.
As it happens, it was lovable old Lucinda who hit on the answer. Not consciously of course, she wasn"t that that bright. No, she just stumbled on it. She was burbling on about some ex-pat friends of hers who"d set up home in Barbados or somewhere, how they didn"t miss the English weatherno fear!they didn"t miss the telly, but the one thing they did miss was the chocolate. Or choccy, as Lucinda, flush with her third G&T, put it. "Apparently the choccy there doesn"t taste of anything," she had said, halfway towards slurring. "Not even real chocolate. Made with vegetable extract or something." Henry was barely listening. "Anyway, now every time a friend comes over from Blighty, they"re under strict orders to bring a bright. No, she just stumbled on it. She was burbling on about some ex-pat friends of hers who"d set up home in Barbados or somewhere, how they didn"t miss the English weatherno fear!they didn"t miss the telly, but the one thing they did miss was the chocolate. Or choccy, as Lucinda, flush with her third G&T, put it. "Apparently the choccy there doesn"t taste of anything," she had said, halfway towards slurring. "Not even real chocolate. Made with vegetable extract or something." Henry was barely listening. "Anyway, now every time a friend comes over from Blighty, they"re under strict orders to bring a caseload caseload of Fruit & Nut, Dairy Milk and as much Green & Black as they can afford. Sophie says they"ve both put on at least a stone..." of Fruit & Nut, Dairy Milk and as much Green & Black as they can afford. Sophie says they"ve both put on at least a stone..."
That was it, Henry had realized before Lucinda had even finished speaking. On his way home that night he had stopped at a garage, and picked up more chocolate than he had bought in his life, one of almost every bar on the market. The next day he had sat in the back office at the showroom, experimenting with a clay tablet in one hand and an Aero or Twix in the other, trying to find a perfect match for length, width, thickness and, crucially, weight. Finally, he struck gold with a mid-size bar of Whole Nut.
Methodically, he removed the paper sleeve, taking care not to tear it. Then he unfolded the inner foil, as if handling the most precious gold leaf. He removed the chocolate bar, putting the clay tablet in its place. Then, to both the head and foot of the bar, he glued two rows of Whole Nut, each row three squares wide. Then he refolded the foil and sheathed the whole hybrid chocolate-and-clay bar back in its paper wrapper. He got through close to a hundred bars that way, ripping the foil, tearing the paper, until finally he had twenty perfect specimens ready to transport to his fict.i.tious, but chocolate-hungry ex-pat relatives.
He had laid them neatly in his small carry-on suitcase. He had wondered about packing them into a strongbox for safekeeping, but he knew that would look suspicious: Cadbury"s was good, but it wasn"t that good. So he just had to chance it, leaving them in his bag as casually as if they really were nothing more than a high-fat treat for a nephew or niece missing home.
The security check at Heathrow was his first worry. Talk of liquid explosives on planes had not only given nervous fliers like Henry more to panic about, it also led airport staff to be much more vigilant about previously ignored food items. But, Henry told himself, if he was stopped he would keep calm and stick to his story.
He placed the bag on the conveyer belt and walked through the metal detector, as nonchalantly as he could manage.
"Excuse me, sir," one of the airport staff had said, stretching his arms out wide, inviting Henry to do the same. Some forgotten change in Henry"s trouser pocket had set off the beeper. They waved him forward.
He reached for the bag, just off the belt, exhaling his relief.
A hand stopped his. "One moment please, sir. Can you open the bag for me?"
"Yes, of course." Henry smiled and unzipped the case.
"A computer?"
"Yes."
"The sign says, computers must go in separately, sir. Please will you do it again?"
Henry could feel his hands go clammy. What were the chances that the twenty chocolate bars could evade discovery twice twice?
And yet, as the bag went through a second time, he saw the man charged with examining the x-ray monitor turn away to share a joke with his colleague. He stayed away from the screen for three or four seconds, just as the clay tablets, now bereft of the computer which had shielded them the first time around, lay exposed and in full view. Henry went on his way.
While Henry"s fellow pa.s.sengers watched the in-flight film, Henry replayed that scene in his head over and over, thanking G.o.d, Jesus and anyone else who came to mind for his luck. But as the plane began its descent for Tel Aviv, relief at the first stage of his journey gave way to anxiety about the next.
He had no luggage to collect, so he headed straight for immigration control.
"And why you are in Israel?" the girl, who could have been no more than eighteen, asked him.
"I"m visiting my nephew who" s studying here."
"And where is he studying?"
"At the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem." Henry had a couple of Jewish friends whom he"d called up last week: as casually as he could, he had asked after their sons, both of whom were currently on gap years, and promptly taken down and memorized all the details.
Only one more stop: Customs. As a white middle-aged man, the sorry truth was that he had always pa.s.sed through customs at Heathrow like a breeze, watching the poor souls, almost always black or Asian, who were asked to empty out their suitcases, take out their clothes and squeeze every last tube of toothpaste. Racism was a hideous thing to behold, of course, but for a traveller like Henry Blyth-Pullen, it could be rather convenient.
Except this time he was stopped, the first time it had ever happened. A bored, unshaven officer waved him over to one side and then nodded wordlessly at Henry"s suitcase, which he"d been wheeling behind him. Henry pulled it up onto the metal counter between them and unzipped it.
The guard rifled through the Y-fronts, socks, toilet bag, before coming to the stash of chocolate. He looked up at Henry, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
"And what is this?"
"It"s chocolate."
"Why you bring so much?"
"It"s for my nephew. He misses home."
"Can I open it?"
"Sure. Why don"t I help?"
Henry was certain his hands were trembling, but he kept them busy enough so that the officer wouldn"t notice. He picked a bar at random, pushed up the chocolate an inch, just as he had practised on his kitchen table, and tore off the foil to reveal a solid three squares of English milk chocolate.
"OK."
Without thinking, Henry broke off the chocolate and offered it to the customs official, an expression that said "peace offering?" on his face. The man refused and then nodded his head towards the exit. Henry"s examination was over. Which was lucky, because if the guard had looked closely he would have seen the next row of the bar he had tested was strangely lacking in nuts, whether whole or half, and was instead unappetizingly solid.
Clutching the handle of his suitcase more tightly than ever, Henry left the airport and joined the queue for a taxi. When it came to his turn, he said loudly, pumped up with relief, "Jerusalem please. To the Old City market."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.
TEL A AVIV, ISRAEL, WEDNESDAY, 8.45 PM PM.
For a small country, Maggie couldn"t help thinking, Israel couldn"t half be confusing. They had been driving less than an hour and yet she felt as if she had travelled through time. If Jerusalem was a town carved in the pale stone of Biblical times, each rock, each narrow cobbled path, coated in the stale must of ancient history, Tel Aviv was noisily, brashly, chokingly modern. On the horizon were gleaming skysc.r.a.pers, their highest storeys lit like checkerboards, and by the roadside line after line of concrete apartment blocks, their roofs covered with solar panels and bulbous cylinders which, Uri explained, were hot water tanks. As they pulled off the highway and into the city streets, Maggie was transfixed by the frenzy of billboards and shoppers, burger bars and pavement cafes, traffic jams and office blocks, girls in crop-tops and boys whose hair peaked in a series of peroxide spikes. Just a short drive from Jerusalem, where holiness hung like a cloud, Tel Aviv seemed a temple to throbbing, urgent profanity.
"OK, his building is number six. Let"s park here." They were on Mapu Street, which, judging by the cla.s.s of cars parked at the kerb, seemed to be one of Tel Aviv"s more upscale neighbourhoods. The building itself was nothing special, rendered in the same white concrete. They walked through a kind of underpa.s.s, past the lines of metal mailboxes, and found the entrance and its intercom. Uri pressed number seventy-two.
There was no reply. Impatient, Maggie reached past Uri and pressed the b.u.t.ton again, for much longer. Still nothing.
"Try the phone again."
"It"s been on voicemail all afternoon."
"And you"re sure this is the right apartment?"
"I"m sure."
Maggie began pacing. "How come there"s n.o.body in? They can"t all be out."
"There is no "they". It"s just him."
Maggie stopped, puzzled.
"He"s divorced. Lives alone."
"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. What the h.e.l.l can we do now?"
"We could break in."
Maggie suddenly became aware of the cold. What on earth was she doing here, shivering on a Tel Aviv street corner when she should have been picking out sofa-beds in Georgetown? She should be home, with Edward, cosy on their couch, ordering takeout, watching TV or whatever it was normal people did once they stopped being twenty-five-year-old maniacs who worked all hours, hopping from one nuthouse country to the next. Edward had managed it, making the transition from backpacking idealist to Washington suit, so why couldn"t she? G.o.d knows, she had tried. Maybe she should just call Judd Bonham and tell him she was pulling out. They weren"t using her properly anyway. She was a mediator, for Christ"s sake, she should be in the room. Not playing at being a b.l.o.o.d.y amateur detective. She reached into her pocket and felt her cellphone.
But she knew what Bonham would say. That there was no point in her being in the room until the two sides were ready. And the way things were going, that moment was getting more remote by the day. Pretty soon, there"d be no room to be in. Her job was to get the two sides back on track, and that meant closing down this Guttman/Nour problem, whatever it was. They couldn"t afford for her to fail. She knew, better than anyone, what happened if a peace effort came close only to fall apart. For an instant she saw it again, the flash of memory she worked so hard to keep out. She had to succeed. Otherwise, that would be her career, even her life story. It would be reduced to one single, lethal mistake.
Quietly, she turned back to Uri and said, "No, we can"t break in. Imagine if we got caught: I"m an official of the United States government."
"I could do it."
"Yeah, but you"re with me, aren"t you? Still trouble. Is there any other way?"
Uri shook his head and punched his fist against the door of the building, sustaining what looked like serious pain without so much as a wince.
"All right," said Maggie, turning away. "Let"s think. What happened when you called the newspaper?"
"It was just the night news desksaid they didn"t know the movements of their columnists. Gave me his cellphone number."
"Which we already had."
The silence lasted for more than a minute, Maggie straining to think of a next move. Then, suddenly, Uri leapt to his feet and all but sprinted back to the car.
"Uri? Uri, what is it?"
"Just get in the car."
As they drove, Uri explained that in the army he had dated a girl whose brother had gone to India with Baruch Kishon"s son. When he saw Maggie"s face, a scrunch of incredulity, he smiled and said only, "Israel"s a small country."
A few calls later and he had a cellphone number for Eyal Kishon. Uri had to shout into the phone: Eyal was in a club. Uri tried explaining the situation, but it was no good. They would have to go there.
While they drove, Uri put on the radio news, giving a brief translation at the end of each story. Violence on the West Bank, some Palestinian children dead; Israeli tanks re-entering Gaza; more Hizbullah rockets in the north. Talks with the Palestinians now in the deep freeze. Maggie shook her head: this whole thing was unravelling. Then: "A poll in America has the president five points behind. He did badly in the TV debate, apparently." Last item: "They"re getting reports of a fire at a kibbutz in the north. Might be arson."
They parked on Yad Harutzim Street and walked straight into the Blondie club. The noise was immediate, a pounding rhythm that Maggie could feel in her guts. There was a steady bombardment of light, including one sharp, white beam that swept across the dance floor like a searchlight.
The place was hardly full, but already there seemed to be lithe, sweaty bodies in every corner. Maggie was struck by the range of faces. In front of her were two girls, blonde with porcelain skin, while just behind was a tall black man with an Afro and thin, sharp features. Dancing alongside were a man and woman, each with dark, corkscrew curls. Maggie thought back to the briefing pack Bonham had given her, the page about the multiple tribes of Israel: Russians, Ethiopians, the Mizrachim Mizrachim, those from Arab countries. They were all here.
Maggie caught a glimpse of herself on a mirrored wall and was sufficiently shocked by what she saw to stop and stare. All her working life, she had been the youngest in the room. At negotiations between middle-aged men, she was the novelty: not only a woman, but a young and, let"s be honest, attractive woman. They didn"t know what to make of her. How many times had she been asked when her boss, the mediator, would be along? Or asked to be a love and bring three coffees over to the French delegation. Or told how nice it was to have some decoration in these dull, grey talks.
She had got used to it and, of course, used it to her advantage. It wrongfooted the negotiators, made them more candid than they intended to be. They said things to her they would not have said to a "real" mediator, as if talks with her were a kind of dress rehearsal. Only once the deal was done would they fully understand that she was indeed the real thing. But her greatest a.s.set was the compet.i.tion. Without realizing it, these suits would compete for her attention. She first spotted it when she ran a back-channel session for the Sri Lankan civil war, held in a log cabin in Sweden. At mealtimes, she noticed, the partic.i.p.ants would jostle to be seated near her. They wanted her to laugh at their jokes, to nod at their insights. They couldn"t help themselves: it was how they were conditioned to behave around an attractive woman. But for her it was inestimably useful. Every little move she pushed them to make, inch by tortured inch, was one they knew would keep them in her affections. If they held out over this word in a treaty, or that line on a map, she would be disappointed in them. And they didn"t want that.
But she didn"t look like that here. Now, surrounded by these gorgeous creatures, none older than twenty-five, with their glowing skin and skimpy tops, she realized she must be the oldest person in the place. She saw the black trousers, Ann Taylor jacket and Agnes B shirt of her own outfit: fine for work, positively elegant when meeting diplomats and ministers. But here it was dull. And those crow"s feet around her eyes, or the creases when she smiled...
"He"s over there."
Uri gestured towards a man sitting back watching the dancing, his hand around the neck of a beer bottle, nodding to the music. He looked part-stoned, part-drunkand fully out of it.
Uri sat beside him and, after a brief, seated embrace, spoke into his ear. While they spoke, Maggie scoped the club. By the entrance she could see a man, newly arrived, who looked as out of place as she was. He wore rimless gla.s.ses, which declared him "adult" amongst these partying children.
She could see from Eyal"s expression that Uri had reached the point in the story where he had lost both his parents. Eyal was shaking his head and pulling on Uri"s shoulder, as if initiating another hug. But Uri was already bringing out the cellphone to show Eyal that the last call Shimon Guttman had made had been to Baruch Kishon.
Eyal shrugged apologetically; he didn"t know anything. Uri kept up the questions, now turning back to Maggie with s.n.a.t.c.hes of translation. When had he last spoken with his father? On Sunday morning. His father was off on "a.s.signment". Nothing unusual there. The old man was always going away; that"s why he and Eyal"s mother had broken up. Had he said anything about where he was going? Nothing Eyal could remember. Mind you, he had been off his face the night before. Eyal smiled.
"Eyal, did your father mention a trip to Geneva?"
Careful, thought Maggie.
"As in, like, Switzerland? No. He usually tells me when he"s going abroad. Likes me to check on his apartment. Pretty a.n.a.l that way."
"So you don"t think he"s abroad?"
"Nope."
"But you haven"t spoken to him since Sunday? And you"re not worried?"
"I wasn"t worried. Till you guys started freaking me out."
They drove back fast, with Eyal, no longer blissed out, in the back. Uri kept up the questioning, extracting only one more detail: that when Eyal and his father spoke on Sunday morning, Baruch Kishon had seemed in a good mood. He said he had a "hot" story to work on. Or maybe it was cool. Eyal couldn"t remember.
The eleven o"clock news came on, Uri pa.s.sing on only that the kibbutz arson story was now the lead item: they had found among the wreckage some charred human remains. An IDF spokesman said there was firm evidence that this was a terror attack, mounted by Palestinians from Jenin. Speculation was already mounting over the political fallout. This raid was bound to be seen as a threat to the already fragile peace talks in Jerusalem, and a further blow to the standing of Prime Minister Yariv.
Maggie pulled out her phone and saw that she had missed a call. The noise of the club had drowned it out, no doubt, dulling her senses even to the silent vibration of an incoming call. She listened to the voicemail: Davis, letting her know about Bet Alpha. "An attack on a kibbutz now, Maggie. The Deputy Secretary asked me to give you this message. "Whatever else Maggie Costello is up to, remind her that her job is to stop relations between these two sides deteriorating any further. Make sure she"s got that." OK, you got it, verbatim. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."