The Last Testament

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

J ERUSALEM , F RIDAY , 9.34 AM

‘You had me followed?’ Again she was disappointed by the weakness of her own question.

‘We had you followed everywhere. You knew that.’

‘But who’s “we”? Who the hell are you working for?’ It was as if the blood was finally reaching her brain. ‘You’re a traitor, that’s what you are. You’ve betrayed your country. You’ve betrayed your own fucking president.’

‘Maggie, can we skip the whole Irish outrage thing? You, Bono, that other asshole, what’s his name, Bob Geldof? Every other do-gooding, bleeding heart coming on with that big, guilt-tripping accent. It’s not going to work this time.’ He was leaning back, pivoting the chair on its two hind legs, chewing his nicotine gum as energetically as ever. ‘This is not some negotiation with a bunch of banana-munchers in Africa. You have something that I need. And you have no cards to play, Maggie. Not one. So tell me. Where is the fucking tablet?’

Negotiation. The mere mention of the word was enough to make her snap back into herself. She had always been good at what the shrinks call ‘compartmentalization’, shutting one aspect of her life out of another so that she could concentrate on the task at hand, and now, consciously, she forced herself to perform the trick again. To forget what had just happened, even her loathing of the monster opposite her, and do her job. To negotiate.

‘I won’t tell you a thing until you tell me what the hell is going on here.’

‘Look, Maggie. I don’t want to repeat myself. But you have no leverage here. I can force you to tell me what you know, if I have to.’

‘Oh, really? The President’s most trusted adviser personally directing the assault of a US citizen, a senior US diplomat-in an election year. That should play well in the polls.’

‘No one’s going to believe a word you say. A washed-up slut who can’t keep her legs closed, banging first the Africans and then some Israeli. How do you think that’ll look on the front page of the Washington Post?’

Maggie closed her eyes, involuntarily. She was proofing herself, like an animal instinctively hardening its hide against an incoming assault. She knew he was right. That her mistake in Africa, coupled with her relationship with Uri, could finish her off completely. That in a contest of credibility, which is what most political scandals came down to, she would lose to Bruce Miller every time.

‘Yeah. And the soccer mums are going to just love a president whose main man watches while masked goons perform an anal probe of one of his female colleagues. You’re already in the deepest shit imaginable. So why don’t you talk to me and then maybe I’ll talk to you?’

Miller eyed Maggie up, the suggestion of a smile on his lips. She could sense a poker player about to fold.

‘Like I said, you got spunk, Costello. In a different life, I could imagine you and me getting on, if you know what I’m saying.’

Maggie kept her expression fixed. If a change in your opponent was about to come, you never wanted to make the slightest move that might divert him. Never break the spell.

‘It’s not that complicated, really.’

She wanted to exhale her relief: he was going to talk. But her face stayed frozen.

‘We need a peace deal here, Maggie. And we were pretty fucking close. Then last weekend we hear there’s some tablet floating around that could be Abraham’s last will and testament-’

‘How?’

‘How what?’

‘How did you hear?’

‘Your boyfriend’s dad. Guttman. He calls Baruch Kishon, the Israeli journalist, and tells him. Not the whole story, but enough of it. Mentions the trader Afif Aweida, mentions his pal Ahmed Nour. And, as luck would have it, NSA were listening in.’

‘As luck would have it.’

‘OK, it wasn’t luck. We’d been bugging Kishon for years.’

‘Kishon? Why the hell would you be bugging him?’

‘You not been reading the files, Maggie? Kishon’s the guy who broke the Tel Aviv connection story all those years ago.’

Maggie cursed Uri for not mentioning it. He must have known. It had been the biggest diplomatic rift between Israel and the US for decades: three CIA agents had been double-crossing the Agency, leaking secrets to the Israelis. To this day, the Israelis constantly demanded the spies’ release from prison; even the most pliantly pro-Israel presidents repeatedly refused.

‘Kishon still talks to them in jail. Campaigns for their release. We’ve been monitoring him ever since.’

‘And so once you heard what Guttman had told him, you decided to kill him.’

‘Oh, don’t start fucking preaching to me, young lady. We knew immediately what was at stake here. The Arabs and the Israelis are about to do the business, which means doing the business on Jerusalem, split the fucking place down the middle, and now we’ve got God Almighty himself, or near as dammit, saying that no, it belongs to the Jews. The whole deal would be off.’

Maggie had to work hard to stay cool. He had seen the text: he knew what it said. She couldn’t let him know that she hadn’t and didn’t. ‘So you were frightened that the Israelis would walk away, because Abraham bequeathed the Temple Mount to them?’

‘Or to the Muslims. It made no difference which one got it. Either way, the peace process would be over. We had to be sure neither of them got their hands on it.’

That allowed her a moment of relief: he was not ahead after all. Miller knew as little of the tablet’s contents as she did. She would stay on the offensive. ‘So it’s been you all along. Killing Kishon, Ahmed Nour, Afif Aweida, Guttman, Guttman’s wife-anyone who might know what’s in the tablet and who might talk.’ She didn’t want to mention Uri; saying it might make it true.

‘Don’t get carried away, Costello. Guttman was killed by the Israeli secret service. The guy looked like he was about to pull a gun on Yariv, what were they supposed to do?’

‘And that kibbutz in the north. The arson attack. That was you too?’

‘Guttman was one of the main archaeologists of that site. We thought he might have hidden it there.’

Now it was Maggie’s turn to say nothing. She stared at her wrists, red welts etched deep into both of them. She started shaking her head.

‘What’s that for?’ Miller asked, irritated. She said nothing. Then, slamming his fist on the table, he shouted, ‘Why are you shaking your fucking head?’

She looked up, glad she had needled him. ‘Because I cannot believe how deeply, profoundly stupid you are.’

‘How dare you-’

‘You did all this because you worried that the release of the testament would derail the peace process? All this killing, of people on both sides?’ There was a mirthless laugh in her voice. ‘You did all this to prevent the breakdown in the peace process? Did you not think, for one second, that tit-for-tat killings, in the most delicate stage of negotiations, might actually fuck the peace talks up all by themselves? I mean, it beggars belief. What is it with you Americans? Like, Iraq poses a threat: so let’s invade and make it a thousand times more of a threat! And now you’ve made the same mistake all over again.’

‘You have no right to lecture me-’

‘I have every right. I have been running around this country, risking my life, desperate to get to the bottom of whatever was causing all this violence, because I wanted to help save the peace process, because I actually believed in it. And now I find the real source of the trouble and of the violence that’s been destroying everything, wasn’t Hamas or Jihad or Fatah or the settlers or the Mossad or any of them. It was you!’

Miller had collected himself. ‘I always knew you were naive, Maggie; it was part of your charm. But this is too much. You don’t think these guys would have got started the moment they knew about the testament? Of course they would. There’s been plenty of killing going on here all week that had nothing to do with us. Qalqilya. Gaza. The schoolbus in Netanya. If we’d done nothing, all that would still have happened, all by itself. Same with Hizbullah and the Iranians going batshit.’ Eye-ranians. ‘That’s the real world, my girl. You’re facing a disease that’s ’bout to spread, you kill the first beast that gets it. Otherwise, it’ll kill the whole herd.’ It was the down-home, farm-boy shtick that Miller deployed to such good effect on the Sunday morning talk shows in Washington. It always intimidated the press, made them feel like soft-handed city boys.

‘So that’s what this was, eh? You derail the peace process a bit, before the lunatics derail it even more.’

‘There are no good choices in this game, Maggie. You should know that by now.’

‘And I suppose it was working. Until I came along and started poking around.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.’

‘Why? You’d have pulled it off, wiping out anyone who knew about the tablet. Abraham’s secret would have remained a secret. But I waded in, didn’t I, obsessing night and day to uncover what you had decided should stay hidden. What a bloody fool I am.’

‘You want to ease up on yourself, Maggie.’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because you’ve done exactly what we wanted you to do-from the very beginning.’