The Templar Heresy

51

‘They’ve just left the hotel on foot,’ Farooq said quietly into his mobile phone.

Just over a hundred yards away, Khaled grunted an acknowledgement, and then stood up to stare down the street.

‘Are they leaving? Have they checked out, I mean?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ Farooq replied. ‘They’ve got bags with them.’

‘Good. Tell your men to follow them until you can isolate them somewhere and finish the job.’

Khaled ended the call, tossed a few coins on to the café table to cover the cost of his drink, and then began heading down the street, towards the hotel Farooq and his men had had under surveillance. He didn’t want to be seen, but at the same time he definitely wanted to be close enough to make sure the job was done properly.

His mobile rang again and he answered immediately.

‘Yes?’

‘I had expected them to take a taxi,’ Farooq said quietly, ‘and I already have one of my men in a cab and another on a motorcycle, but the two targets seem to be heading towards a car hire company.’

‘What do you mean by that? Surely they are or they aren’t?’

‘What I mean is they’ve turned down a street and the only commercial establishments there, as far as we can see, are two car rental agencies. Do you want us to stop them now? There are about a dozen other people in the street.’

Khaled paused before replying, then shook his head, his action invisible to Farooq.

‘No. That’s too many witnesses. I want to get out of this alive. Just keep following them, and keep this line open.’

‘And if they hire a car and drive away? What then?’

‘You have one man in a taxi already. Whichever car hire company the two targets go to, send one of your men into the other one and tell him to rent another vehicle.’

Farooq cleared the line briefly to issue the appropriate orders, then called Khaled back. He was less than happy with the fluidity of the situation, and with having to adjust his plans so quickly and frequently. Now, if Khaled let the situation slide, Farooq knew that they could even end up in some kind of a car chase, and that had definitely never been a part of his plan. But Khaled was the man with the money, so he knew that the final decision rested with him.

Farooq lounged in a shadowed doorway on the opposite side of the road to the two car hire companies and simply watched.

The targets stepped into the car rental office and disappeared from view. Moments later, one of Farooq’s men crossed the road from an alleyway and entered the office of the second company just a few doors down.

For what seemed like a very long fifteen minutes, nothing else happened. And then, from the premises of the second company, Farooq’s man appeared behind the wheel of a small Ford saloon. Moments later, he pulled the car to a stop right beside where Farooq was standing and pushed open the passenger door.

‘I’m now in the hire car,’ Farooq reported over the open mobile connection. ‘A white Ford Fiesta. There’s no sign of the targets yet.’ Then he ended the call as he saw Khaled approaching.

Just a few seconds later, the rear door of the Ford opened and the other man sat down on the seat, wiping the perspiration off his brow with a large purple handkerchief.

‘The street’s quieter now,’ Farooq said, gesturing in both directions. ‘We can probably take them as soon as they come out. Finish what we came to do.’

‘No. We wait. We will follow them until we reach a quiet area where we can take our time with them.’

‘I thought you just wanted them dead?’ Farooq asked.

‘I do. But I don’t want to attract attention, and if you’re right and Bronson still has the pistol, then we could easily find ourselves involved in a gunfight in the middle of the street. We need to let them get out of Jerusalem and then hit them somewhere where there are no witnesses at all. There are plenty of open stretches of road between here and the airport.’

‘Here they come,’ Farooq said, watching another vehicle — a white Renault — turn out of the yard beside the car hire company.

He and Khaled immediately ducked down so that they were below the level of the windows of the Ford. The driver, in response to a brief command from Farooq, took his mobile phone out of his pocket and pretended to be having a conversation on it as the Renault drove past. All three of them watched the vehicle as Bronson drove it down the road and made a right turn at the end.

‘Keep well back and don’t crowd him.’

As the driver accelerated gently to follow the Renault, Farooq used his mobile to call two numbers in quick succession and issued crisp orders.

‘The taxi will act as the principal vehicle,’ he said to Khaled, ‘because the streets are full of cabs, with the motorcycle as the backup. We’ll keep out of sight as much as possible, in case we have to take over unexpectedly.’

Farooq’s mobile rang and he answered it immediately.

‘Good,’ he said after a few moments.

‘What?’ Khaled asked.

‘Aziz is on the motorcycle. He’ll monitor everything that happens and provide me with a running commentary. At the moment, the targets are heading north, probably intending to pick up one of the main roads to the north of the Old City. That’s probably the fastest way to the airport.’

But just a few minutes later something unexpected happened. Farooq listened intently to what Aziz was saying, the purr of the motorcycle’s engine a constant background noise behind his words.

‘They’ve turned right, not left,’ Farooq said. ‘That will take them away from the airport, not towards it. Maybe they’ve just taken a wrong turning.’

Khaled nodded, but seemed somewhat distracted.

Farooq noticed the change of mood in his companion. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

For a moment Khaled didn’t reply. Then he glanced at Farooq before looking back through the windscreen, just catching sight of the white Renault as it manoeuvred through the traffic perhaps eighty yards in front of them.

‘Maybe they haven’t taken a wrong turning,’ Khaled said finally, a reflective tone to his voice. ‘I’ve been puzzling over the fact that they’ve hired a car ever since I took your call. You and your men went into the Temple Mount and found absolutely nothing—’

‘There was nothing to find,’ Farooq retorted, bristling at the implied criticism. ‘Mahmoud saw as much as I did, and I even took some photographs. There was nothing there. No carvings, no inscriptions. Not even any graffiti.’

‘I’m not saying that there was, Farooq. I have no doubt that you had time to do a thorough search, and I’m quite satisfied that what we expected to find simply wasn’t there. And Bronson couldn’t have had more than a minute or two to carry out his own search. Realistically, I doubt very much if he would have spotted anything in that time that you hadn’t seen.’

Farooq couldn’t see where that particular argument was heading, so he didn’t reply.

‘So if you didn’t find anything, and it seems fairly certain that Bronson couldn’t have found anything, why is he driving along the road in front of us in a rental car?’

Khaled looked expectantly at Farooq.

‘My point is that if Bronson and the woman had come away just as empty-handed as us, why didn’t they climb into the back of a taxi and tell the driver to take them to Ben Gurion Airport? Why haven’t they just given up?’

Farooq spread his hands in a gesture of helpless ignorance. ‘I have no idea. Unless you really think that Bronson did see something that we missed, and that they are still following the trail?’

Khaled nodded.

‘That would seem to make sense,’ he replied. ‘My best guess is that we were looking in the wrong place. Somehow, I think Bronson guessed where the right place was and found something: a clue that we don’t have and that they’re now following.’

‘So killing them is a really bad idea?’ Farooq suggested.

‘No, killing them is a really good idea,’ Khaled said, ‘but only after we’ve found out where they’re heading and why.’