The Last Testament

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , 8.32 AM

Gloved hands gripped her wrists so hard it was as if they were made of steel rather than flesh and blood. She gasped but made no sound: other hands had already placed a small strip of material, like a rolled bandana, into her mouth. No one said anything.

They moved her backwards, off the street and back into the tunnels-away from public view. ‘What are you doing? Who are you?’ she tried to say through the gag. Knowing her words were useless, she added: ‘And what have you done with Uri?’

Two of the men in front of her stepped forward, as if anticipating, and seeking to prevent, a violent reaction from her. They were right: instinctively, she tried to lash out. She attempted to move her arms, but they were now bound in what felt like tight plastic tape, the kind that comes on a new product, so strong it can be cut only with a sharp blade. She tried to scream but this only succeeded in making her retch on the material jammed into her mouth. Now she was panting even harder, her lungs forced to sate their craving for air through her nose. She could feel her heart thumping, driven not just by the exertions of the chase but by fear for her life.

The two men in front of her came closer, so that she could see the small portion of their faces that was not hidden. The eyes of the taller man, on her left, were dark, flat and glassy, like a pond frozen in winter. He looked as if even this, the sight of a woman surrounded by masked men, fighting for breath, bored him. Maggie looked at his partner, or rather looked to him, as if hoping to find some spark of the human. But what she saw chilled her. For the green eyes of this man did indeed betray an emotion; and that emotion was pleasure.

It was he who approached now with another strip of black material in his hands. As he moved his hands around the back of her head, his face just inches away from hers, she came to a cold, certain realization. He was the man who had assaulted her a few hundred yards away from here, in the back streets of the market. And now she understood, as the blindfold was tightened and the world fell into blackness, that she was as good as dead.

She felt a shove in the centre of her back and stumbled forward, someone catching her arm to prevent her falling to her right. She must be listing, like a drunk.

After a few minutes of staggering in this manner, maybe much less, maybe much more, she detected a change in the acoustics: no longer the echo of hard stone walls. And the cold dankness of the air was lifting, its mustiness less pronounced. Was she deceiving herself, or did she perceive, even through the blindfold, a change in the light?

They were stopping. She could hear other voices, further away. She imagined the world outside these tunnels and wondered if she would ever see it again.

There was some whispered talk; she strained to hear the language, but it was just out of reach. Then she was shoved forward again, her feet stumbling on the uneven surface. And then she was certain of the change. There was street noise: people, cars, footsteps. The colour of the dark under her blindfold altered, as if someone had let off fireworks in a night sky. And, the real giveaway, she felt warmth on her skin. The warmth of sunlight.

It made no sense, but she was relieved. They weren’t going to kill her in those tunnels, then; she wouldn’t have to rot in an abandoned cistern, the air echoing with women muttering endless psalms.

But she was only outside for a second or two. She felt the same metal hand that had gripped her wrists now grasp her neck from behind, and push it downward. He was pushing hard, as if trying to cantilever her entire body. She resisted, holding her back firm, refusing to be folded. She sensed the frustration in his hand as he pushed harder. Eventually he, or perhaps it was someone else, spoke, a male voice, behind her, uttering a single word: ‘car’.

So that was it. They were shoving her into the back seat of a car. She gave way, glad for her little show of resistance. It wasn’t much, but she felt she had achieved something. It had forced these men to break the silence they had maintained since they had cornered her just outside the tunnels. They hadn’t wanted to speak, but they had just spoken. One word, admittedly, but it was a start. It had, in its own miniature way, been a negotiation. They had had to bend in order to win her co-operation. She may have been bound and gagged but, in mediation terms, she decided she had won the first round.

There seemed to be at least five people in this car: two men on either side of her, crammed in the back, and she could sense tension in the passenger seat by her right knee. They were still saying nothing to each other, but in the few seconds it had taken them to get in, she had heard a snatch of talk. It could have been people on the street, passers-by. Or it could have been the other members of the team of masked men who had hunted her down in the tunnels. Either way, there was no doubt what language she had heard. It was Arabic.

They drove for what she guessed was ten minutes. But it could have been half that or three times as long. It wasn’t only that she couldn’t check her watch or look at the clock in the car. Denied sight, her whole sense of time had been thrown off.

It sickened her that she was so close to these men, including, she felt certain, her assailant from the street market. Jammed into the back, her legs pressed against theirs, her knees couldn’t help but touch theirs. Maybe his. She wanted to shove them away from her, hard, but her hands were tied. Her skin crawled.

Finally she felt the car slow down, then bump over a ridge, as if entering a driveway. She heard the driver’s window wind down and then back up a moment later: perhaps he had had to show papers at some kind of checkpoint. Had she got the Arabic wrong? Was this in fact an Israeli team, taking her through the DCO to the West Bank? Were they going to do to her there what they would dare not do inside Israel proper?

The sound changed again. The car had gone down a ramp and now seemed to be indoors. Maybe they were in an underground car park. An image burst into her head, one that shocked her. She saw two bodies, dumped in the gloom of a subterranean garage, visible only in the bilious yellow of a fluorescent light. The two bodies, both dead, belonged to Uri and to her.

The car had stopped now, the engine off. She heard the rear doors open and the metal hand was on her back again, shoving her out. She didn’t resist this time: she wanted to be out of that suffocating, confined space.

If it was a garage, they weren’t in it for long. The car seemed to have parked right by a door. She was pushed through it, then up some stairs, guided by the man stuck to her right side. A few more paces forward and a door shut behind her.

‘OK.’

She was so taken aback to hear a word spoken that she hardly listened or paid any attention to the voice that had spoken it. It was male, but more than that, she couldn’t tell. What accent was it? She imagined it as Israeli and, playing the sound back in her head, it could have been. But then she tried the memory of it as Palestinian and it fitted that too. It could have been anybody, from anywhere, in any language.

A few seconds later she understood what the word meant. It was an instruction, a go-ahead. For now she felt a series of hands on her, some touching her legs, others moving, almost in caresses, around her back. She was confused. Unthinking, she cried out, only to hear the muffled choke of her voice against the gag. She felt herself retching again.

The hands were moving methodically, patting up and down each leg and down her arms, like an airport security check. Of course, she realized. They were searching her for the tablet. She felt them go into her trouser pockets, pulling out her mobile phone and the small wallet she carried. They would see her ID. The only time she had ever been as terrified as this was at a rogue roadblock in the Congo. Back then, the discovery of her identity was what she dreaded most: if they had known she was a diplomat, she would have been too valuable to let go. But it made no sense to fear that now: these people knew who she was.

There was a pause, in which she imagined some kind of silent consultation was taking place. Perhaps they had realized she had nothing, and they were debating whether to let her go. Perhaps this whole nightmare was about to…

But a second later, the hands were back. This time, though, there was no patting. Instead, they were rapid and determined, reaching immediately for their target.

They began with her shoes, removing them swiftly. Then she felt hands on the buckle of her belt, undoing it, then releasing the top button of her jeans, tugging down the zip and pulling her trousers clean off her. She cried out, a horrible, stifled, snotty roar.

Meanwhile another pair of hands was working on her top, struggling to pull it off, obstructed by her bound wrists. There was a delay, until she could feel the plastic tape severed. Except her arms were not free. Each was now held tightly and lifted, so that another pair of hands could pull up her T-shirt and take it off.

She was now standing in only her underwear. She wanted to be tall, to overwhelm these men with the force of her rage, but she could feel a different urge rising in her-the desire to cower and shrink, to disappear from their gaze. Near-naked before them, and blind, she had never felt weaker.

And now the hands started again, touching her all over. Examining the small of her back, her armpits, running through her hair. There was a pause. Still nothing.

The voice spoke again. ‘OK.’

Her bra came off first, not ripped off but unhooked slowly, a parody of a lover’s touch that made Maggie’s stomach churn. Once off, she could hear someone tearing at the material of the bra, as if expecting something to fall out of a hidden compartment.

Next they moved to the last thing left covering her, a pair of briefs that were not even hers but borrowed, along with everything else, from Orli.

And now two male hands were pulling them down, exposing her entirely. She tried to cover herself up, but the hands holding her wrists were too strong: she would have to stand there, uncovered.

She fought the urge to weep. She couldn’t give them that victory. To deny them tears, that was her only resistance now. But it was so hard to hold them back. And then she felt the hand, from behind, pressing on her back.

It was the same action that had shoved her in the car, the hand trying to make her bend over at the waist. Is that what this was? Not a search, but a gang rape? Was this how it was going to end?

The shrinking humiliation was replaced by a hot torrent of anger. She tried to punch out, her arms charged with a strength she hadn’t felt before. She could tell that the man restraining her wrists had to work hard to keep hold of them.

At the same time, her legs moved in what was meant to be a kick. She got some movement on the right, but it was soon clamped down by another pair of hands. She wondered why they didn’t bind her ankles.

She soon understood. Once they had crushed her rebellion, with men restraining each one of her limbs, she felt someone nudge her feet a few inches away from each other. That made possible the next manoeuvre. Two hands landed on her inner thighs, just below her buttocks, and with one clean shove, they pushed her legs apart. Then the same hands touched the buttocks themselves, parting them, too.

Now she could make no sound; the shock and shame were too great. She could only tremble as she felt her anus being forced open and an object pushed inside. Whether it was a finger or some kind of medical implement, she could not tell; all she could feel was the bolt of pain shooting deep inside her.

She could see the scene as if she was outside herself. She could picture it: her naked body presented to this group of masked men, her bottom in the air, her arsehole stretched open for their inspection. An involuntary spasm of protest made her muscles convulse. But she could barely move.

The object withdrew, roughly, and she screamed into her gag. But her pain was mixed with relief. For surely now this would be over.

She felt the hands turn her whole body around, so that now she was facing the men. They pushed her back, so that she felt herself land on some kind of surface, perhaps a table. Now they pulled her legs apart and through the blindfold she sensed a torchlight shone down at her; then she felt fingers probing inside her vagina. Her scream of outrage was grotesquely muffled by the gag. She wished tears would come, but her eyes were dry. As if this horror were too great for them to register.

There was a sound, of a door opening, of someone else entering the room.

‘That’s enough,’ said a voice, just a few feet away. Amid the banging sound inside her own head, the pounding of her heart and the effort to swallow her tears, she couldn’t make sense of the voice, couldn’t even tell if it was the same man who had spoken before. Until he spoke again.

‘Get her dressed.’

Now it came to her, unmistakable. She knew that voice all right. Because she knew that man.