The Last Testament

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

T HE A FULA -B ET S HEAN ROAD , NORTHERN I SRAEL , W EDNESDAY , 8.15 PM

Their orders were very clear. Get in, search and possibly destroy, get out. Above all, don’t get caught. The Director of Operations had spelled it out: this was not to be a suicide mission.

There were four of them in the car. They had not met before and only went by the names they had been given: Ziad, Daoud, Marwan and Salim. Ziad would be in charge.

He checked his watch and worried again that this operation had begun with a fatal flaw. It was too early. Much better to strike in the dead of night. But the boss had said it was urgent; no time to waste.

‘OK. Turn off here.’ It was a slip road, narrowing rapidly into a dirt track. Suitable for a tractor, but tricky for a rented Subaru. ‘Drive off, into the crops. OK. Kill the engine.’

It was a cotton field, planted high enough to conceal a car, just as they had been briefed. The reconnaissance boys had done a good job.

The four men began to change into black clothing. Ziad handed each of them balaclavas to put over their faces and made sure they had removed any other form of identification. Each of them had a small torch in his pocket, a lighter, a knife and a Micro Uzi submachine gun. Ziad and Marwan had cyclists’ water pouches strapped to their backs. Both of these contained petrol.

They all knew the plan: they would walk twenty minutes through the fields belonging to the kibbutz until they were within sight of their target. Once they were certain no one was around, they would move fast and get out.

Ziad could see the lights of the perimeter. Soon the crops would give way to the asphalt of the visitors’ car park and service roads. They would be lit too. This would be the area of greatest danger.

Sure enough, he soon saw the sign in English and Hebrew, welcoming guests to ‘Kibbutz Hephziba, Home of the Legendary Bet Alpha Synagogue’. Silently, he gave the order to duck down. One at a time, the four men ran in a low crouch towards the area Ziad’s map had described as the site entrance. The door was locked, as anticipated. He gave the nod to Marwan, who produced a wire and jimmied the door open. They slipped in, Ziad looking back to make sure no one had seen the movement of the door in the lamplight of the car park.

Inside there was complete darkness. The men waited till they were deep within before switching on their torches: too risky to let light leak out through the glass walls of this visitors’ centre. Ziad was first to use his, shining it down on the centrepiece of this location, the treasure that had brought sightseers here since the 1930s.

It was a Roman-style mosaic, perfectly intact, stretching some ten metres long and five metres wide. Even in this light, Ziad could see the clarity of the colours formed by the countless tiny squares: yellows, greens, ochres, browns, a deep wine red, a coarser shade like reddish brick as well as sharp blacks, whites and multiple variants of grey. As he had been told, the floor was divided into three distinct panels. Furthest away, what seemed to be a sketch of a synagogue, including a pair of traditional Jewish candelabra, the menorah. At the bottom, a primitive, almost childlike, depiction of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac.

But the eye was drawn immediately to the larger, middle panel. It showed a circle, divided into twelve segments, one for each sign of the zodiac. Ziad let his torch pick out each image, stopping to take in the clearest: a scorpion, next to it a pair of twins, a ram, an archer. He had not meant to linger, but he couldn’t help it. This ancient artwork, over fifteen hundred years old, was so vivid that it was impossible to look away.

‘OK, you know what to do.’ Marwan began checking the top panel, Daoud the lower, while Salim examined the central zodiac. Even the slightest sign of recent activity-fresh digging or tampering of any kind-and they were to summon the others. If something had been buried here in the last few days, they were to find it.

Ziad, meanwhile, had specific instructions. He was to locate the museum office-and take it apart, searching it meticulously. Every drawer, every filing cabinet. If there was a safe, he should get it open and leave not a speck of dust unexamined. The Director had been clear: ‘He needed to hide this item in a hurry. He will not have been able to conceal it well. If it’s there, you’ll find it.’

Ziad worked through the desk drawers first. The usual crap: rubber bands, business cards, sticky tape, envelopes. There was an old metal box, like the kind that used to hold pipe tobacco, which seemed to have potential: it felt the right weight. But inside was simply a bundle of Friends of the Museum membership cards, tied together so that in the tin they sounded like a single thick object.

He was starting on the filing cabinet when he heard a noise, the crunch of a foot on the gravel outside. A beat later, and the room filled with a sweep of torchlight, as if a beam had been passed across the whole exterior of the building.

‘Mee zeh?’ Who’s there?

Without needing an order from Ziad, the team instantly killed their own flashlights and froze. Do that and, most times, a night-watchman will tell himself that what he had seen was a trick of the light, a reflection from his own torch, and walk away. Given the choice of going to the bother of opening a locked building or doing nothing, lethargy usually won out. The unheralded friend of intruders and thieves the world over: the sheer indolence of security staff.

But this man was different. He advanced, the beam thrown by his torch getting larger as he approached the glass door. Ziad, stock still in the office, his hand gripping the drawer he had just pulled out of the filing cabinet, heard the jangle of keys. In a second, this guard would discover that the lock had been forced.

There was no time to lose. Ziad drew his weapon from the holster and stepped out into the main lobby, where he had a clear line of sight to the door. He saw the guard look up and notice not Ziad or the others, but their shadows, now giant against the walls, rendered colossal by the guard’s very own torch. Without hesitation, Ziad aimed his Micro Uzi and sent a 9mm-calibre bullet straight through the glass and into the man’s skull.

The sound of the door shattering, and the guard’s brain exploding, were the cue for an immediate change of tactic. His aim was no longer to find the object but to disguise the nature of this mission. Ziad returned to the office and, abandoning his meticulous examination, now turned the place upside down. He yanked out each desk drawer, emptying its contents onto the floor, finding nothing. Next, he shoved the filing cabinets to the ground, before sweeping the desk with a single movement of his arm, so that every item was sent flying. Then, he used his gun to break each window in turn.

He turned around to find Marwan and Daoud, carrying the corpse of the guard like a stretcher. Silently they counted one, two, three then swung his body onto the ground, amid all the debris of the office. There was a crunch as the flesh landed on the shattered glass; then, in a single, smooth action, Marwan removed the cyclist’s water pouch from his back, took off the cap and began dousing the room with petrol.

Outside Salam was switching his torch back on, lighting up a wall covered in panels explaining the Bet Alpha exhibit. He produced a can of spray paint and, slowly and calmly, daubed the wall in red graffiti. In Arabic he wrote: ‘No peace for Israel till there is justice for Palestine. No sleep for Bet Alpha till there is sleep for Jenin’.

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 them-Ready? 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.’