The Last Testament

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

J ERUSALEM , T HURSDAY , 7.15 AM

Maggie bolted upright, her heart thumping. She was confused, taking a second or two to look around the room and realize where she was. It was the phone that had done it, shocking her out of deep sleep. No matter that she had arranged a wake-up call from the hotel operator for this hour. Any sudden sound, whether an alarm clock or a telephone, always came as a shock.

‘Yerrrr.’

‘Maggie? This is the Deputy Secretary.’

Jesus. Maggie pushed the phone away from her mouth and cleared her throat. ‘Yes. Hello.’

‘I need to see you in fifteen minutes. Meet me downstairs.’

Over coffee, Robert Sanchez set out just how bad things were. Both sides seemed to be trying to keep the lid on the violence, though there had been armed clashes in Jenin and Qalqilya and Israel had reoccupied whole swathes of the Gaza Strip. Palestinians meanwhile claimed a dozen children had been killed in the last two days of fighting, while word was coming through of a minibus full of Israeli school pupils that had been blown up that morning by a suicide bomber just outside Netanya.

Worse, the whole region seemed to be preparing for war. Not only was Hizbullah hurling rockets from Lebanon onto Israel’s northern towns and villages, but now Syria was mobilizing its troops around the Golan Heights. Egypt and Jordan had both recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv. Sanchez held a clutch of printouts from the American press: both the New York Times and Washington Post were drawing comparisons with 1967 and 1973, wars that engulfed the entire Middle East. ‘This time it will be worse,’ said Sanchez. ‘Half of these countries have got nukes now. They’ll soon suck in the whole damn world.’

The prognosis could not have been gloomier. Yet Maggie found it comforting to be sitting with Robert Sanchez again. He was one of the very few people in the current State Department she knew at all, and certainly the only familiar face in the US team in Jerusalem. His reappointment as number two had surprised Washington; he was a holdover from the previous administration. Press consensus said he was there to hold the hand of the new Secretary, an immediate vote of no confidence from the President in his own choice for the top job. But Maggie couldn’t have cared less about all that. She had worked with Sanchez twice before and come to respect and, even rarer in this business, trust him. He had led the second string US team on the Balkans to which Maggie was attached when she was a novice and she had watched his patient, deliberate method of working. No grandstanding, no media leaking, dogged preparation. He had slipped quite naturally into the role of mentor then and later, when they met again during the north-south talks in Sudan.

He was a doubly unusual fixture on the Washington diplomatic landscape. For one thing he was a real diplomat, not just some high-dollar donor to the party in power, rewarded with a juicy ambassadorship. As a career officer rather than a political appointee, he had gone as far as he could go: he could never be Secretary of State. That he had become the deputy was rare in itself.

More relevant, at least to Maggie, was that Sanchez was one of the few Hispanic-Americans to be found at the upper reaches of the US government. They made an unlikely pair, the big, bear-like guy from New Mexico and the slender girl from Dublin, but among the buttoned-up white males of the State Department, they were both outsiders. That much they had in common.

‘It’s only lucky we’re not in Camp David or somewhere,’ Sanchez was saying. ‘If we were, the parties would have gone home by now. As it is, Government House is virtually empty.’

Maggie forced herself to wake up, glugging back the coffee. ‘Don’t tell me: the two sides have pulled back their negotiators for “consultations”?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And this started with the killings?’

‘Yep. First it was Guttman, then Nour. To say nothing of the Jenin raid on the kibbutz last night-’

‘Sorry, Jenin raid?’

‘Yep. Turns out it was some kind of Palestinian cell from Jenin. They crossed over and got through to Bet Alpha.’

‘The Israelis know that for sure?’

‘Yeah, the terrorists sprayed some slogan on the wall. No sleep for Bet Alpha till there is sleep for Jenin.’

‘And the Israelis are saying that’s grounds to break off talks.’

‘Well, they haven’t gone that far yet.’

‘Just “consultations”.’

‘Right. But what’s got them freaked is that they thought they had stopped attacks from Jenin. Ever since they built the wall-’

‘I think you mean the “security barrier”, Robert.’ Maggie was smiling.

‘Whatever you want to call it, it’s been keeping out attacks from the West Bank. Yariv’s got the right wing killing him, saying that he’s been so busy sucking up to the Palestinians that he’s left the country exposed, so now he’s negotiating under fire.’

‘And does Yariv know how they got through?’

‘That’s the thing, Maggie. Even our intel guys are stumped by it. The Israelis say they’ve checked the length of the wall-excuse me, the barrier-and they can’t find a breach.’

‘So what could it be?’

Sanchez lowered his voice. ‘The Israelis are worried it represents some kind of escalation. That maybe the Palestinians are stepping up the degree of sophistication. As a warning.’

‘Have the Israelis responded?’

‘Only a statement. Unless you count the killing last night.’

‘What killing?’

‘Didn’t you get the CIA note?’

Doubtless sent at 6am, thought Maggie. When the rest of the State team in Jerusalem were already up, showered and briefed she was sleeping off a light night in the bar with-

‘There was a stabbing in East Jerusalem last night. In the street market. Some trader.’

Maggie paled. ‘A trader? What kind of trader?’

‘I don’t know. But listen, Maggie. I know you’ve been trying to talk to the settlers, to al-Shafi, find out what’s going on. But we’ve got to raise our game here. Seems the bad guys on both sides are trying to derail this thing. OK. Shhh.’

Maggie turned around to see exactly why Sanchez had clammed up. Bruce Miller was strolling past the breakfast buffet towards their table. Damn. She wanted to finish hearing what Sanchez knew. Now he would be on his best behaviour in front of the President’s man. The Deputy Secretary of State rose slightly for Miller, as if to render in physical form their precise positions along the Washington hierarchy.

‘Hello, Bruce. I was just bringing Maggie Costello here up to speed.’

Maggie offered a hand, which Miller took, keeping hold of it a moment too long. He did a tiny dip of his head-the Southern gentleman-as he said, ‘Pleasure’s all mine.’

Maggie couldn’t help but notice that this little performance allowed Miller to give her a good once-over, his eyes examining her body from her ankles to her chest.

‘So,’ he said finally, apparently satisfied with the results of his inspection. ‘Whatcha got so far?’

Maggie proceeded to tell him how she believed there was a link between the Guttman and Nour killings and that she was using the relationships she had built up on both sides to discover what that link might be. (She noticed something flicker across Miller’s face at the mention of the word ‘relationships’.) She couldn’t bring herself to describe the Nour anagram, but said only that she was now certain that, whatever this connection was, it would explain the current threat to the peace process.

‘What kind of connection, Ms Costello?’

‘Archaeology.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Both Guttman and Nour were archaeologists. I believe they had even worked together. Guttman had seen something that he told his wife would change everything. Two days later he’s dead-and so’s she.’

‘Police said that was suicide. She couldn’t handle the grief.’

‘I know that’s what the police say, Mr Miller. But her son is convinced otherwise. And I believe him.’

‘You working pretty closely with him, Ms Costello?’

Maggie could feel her neck reddening. This is what happened last time, she thought, cursing herself. She, who could keep everything hidden during negotiations, holding the secrets of each side without ever betraying so much as a hint to the other, would always crack when the subject at issue was not demilitarization of a buffer zone or access to seaports, but herself. Then she would go to pieces, giving it all away. She had done that back then, too. It had cost her so dear, you would have assumed she’d have learned to control it. But no. Here she was, repressing a blush.

‘Uri Guttman has proved an invaluable resource.’

‘Archaeology, you say?’ Bruce Miller was tucking the napkin into his shirt collar. ‘Does that make last night a coincidence or what?’

‘Last night?’

‘The attack on Bet Alpha.’

‘You mean, the kibbutz?’

‘Yeah, it’s a kibbutz.’ Kiboootz. ‘Also the site of one of the great archaeological treasures of Israel. Take a look.’

He passed over the English language edition of Haaretz. ‘Page three.’

She turned to see the top half of the page dominated by a photograph of a night sky turned orange as a building burnt to the ground. The caption identified it as the Bet Alpha Museum and Visitors’ Centre, which ‘last night appeared to have been the target of a Palestinian raid’.

Inset was a smaller photo depicting a stunning mosaic, divided into three panels, the middle section devoted to what seemed to be a wheel. The caption explained that this was the mosaic floor of the oldest synagogue in Israel, estimated to date from the Byzantine period of the fifth or sixth century. ‘Preserved intact for 1500 years, experts now worry for its survival.’

While she was reading, Miller had turned to Sanchez to discuss their next moves. No point in the Secretary coming now, they agreed, with the two sides not even talking. Smarter to hold him back for the final phase-

‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ Maggie said, aware that she was interrupting two much more senior officials.

‘Bet Alpha?’

‘Yes. So far everyone hurt on both sides since this sudden deterioration has been connected with all this,’ she gestured at the photograph in the paper. ‘With archaeology, with ruins. With the past.’

Miller gazed at her, a smile on his lips, as if Maggie was somehow amusing him. ‘You think we gotta ghost problem? Spirits of the ancient come to haunt the present?’ He made a spooky, Hallowe’en gesture with his hands.

Maggie chose to ignore the condescension. ‘I don’t yet know what it is, but I bet you it explains why these talks are in meltdown.’

‘Face it, Ms Costello. Everything in this goddamn country-’ He suddenly remembered himself and lowered his voice. ‘Everything in this place is tied up to all this,’ he picked up the newspaper, scrunching up the page showing the Bet Alpha mosaic. ‘It’s all rocks and stones and temples. That’s the whole freakin’ point. It don’t explain nothing. We have a serious political problem here, which is gonna take some serious political solving. And I need you to start living up to your goddamned five star reputation and do some solving right now. Do I make myself clear, Ms Costello?’

Maggie was about to insist that she was not wasting her time, that the connection was real, when they were interrupted by a buzzing sound on the table. Miller’s BlackBerry, vibrating to announce a new message.

‘Israeli police have just confirmed the name of the man killed in the market last night.’

‘I bet he was a trader of antiques, wasn’t he, Mr Miller? Antiquities? Archaeological relics? Am I right, Mr Miller?’

He looked back at the handheld device, using his thumb to scroll down through the message.

‘As a matter of fact you’re wrong, Ms Costello. The dead man was, it seems, a seller of fruit and vegetables. Nothing ancient about that. He was a greengrocer. Name of Afif Aweida.’