The Last Testament

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , 9.21 AM

‘They don’t usually show people this part of the building, Maggie. It’s a pity. Perhaps they should.’

As he spoke, she could feel multiple hands fussing over her, draping the T-shirt back over her head, placing her legs back into her jeans. They were working at speed, like stage hands making a rapid costume change before the next scene. They came to her face last, untying the gag-which triggered an instant spasm of coughing-and finally removing her blindfold. With that, they pushed her downward, into a hard, wooden chair.

In the time it took her to adjust to the light, the men in ski-masks had cleared the room. It was bare and featureless, the walls a dirty white; there were no windows and nothing on the walls. In front of her was a table. Perhaps this was the one the men had bent her over just a few moments earlier. And on the other side of it, sitting on a simple chair, just like hers, was him.

‘I can only apologize for what happened just now, Maggie. Really. The strip-search, the body cavity thing. Horrible. Know what they call that in prisons back home? Booty check. How d’you like that? Anyway, like I say, I’m sorry. Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’

Now that she could see him she felt dismayed by her own reaction. She thought she would want to rush at him, hands outstretched to squeeze at his neck, strangling his last breath. She expected she would long for acid to issue from her pores, until it dissolved him into nothing. But those feelings refused to come. They were subsumed by sheer disbelief, her dumbfounded incomprehension at the sight of this man here, in this place. They were overwhelmed by her confusion, which was total. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ was all she could manage to say.

‘Let’s not go too fast, Maggie. First I need to know the location of that tablet.’

‘But, you? Why would you…?’

‘The question is, if you’re not carrying it, if it’s not hidden somewhere in the recesses of your body-and I have seen for myself that it isn’t-where the hell is it?’ He was raising his voice now, the way she had heard him do before.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come on, Maggie. I know you’ve got it all worked out. You expect me to believe you don’t know where it is?’

‘And you expect me to talk to you, after what your thugs just did to me? I’ll never say a fucking word to you again.’ And then, a surprise to her as much as to him, she spat in his face.

‘I like that, Maggie, you know I do. A girl with spunk. And you look good naked, too. That’s what I’d call a killer combination.’

Maggie could say nothing. If her body was still reeling from the humiliation it had endured in this room, her mind was going through the very first convulsions of shock. Here was a man she had trusted, whom she had believed wanted the same things she wanted.

‘Does this mean you were behind it all? All those killings?’

‘It’s our policy never to discuss the details of intelligence operations. You know that, Maggie.’

And he smiled. The knowing, complicit smile of one cynical political insider to another. The smile that Bruce Miller, senior counsellor to the President of the United States, had flashed a thousand times before.