The Jerusalem Puzzle

I didn’t take the bait. I wanted to see what he was doing.

We crossed a busy highway, passed modern-looking apartments. The air was cool now, and heavy with the promise of rain.

The Herod Citadel Hotel, a five-star hotel was a step up from the one I had picked for me and Isabel.

The Old Terrace restaurant was on the roof of the hotel. It had stunning views of the Old City, to the golden Dome of the Rock and the hills beyond. And it had a glass roof that looked as if it would stay intact in a meteor shower.

We waited near the elevators. Simon went off walking through the restaurant.

He arrived back a minute later with a tall, ultra-thin, black-haired, regally attractive woman beside him. Many of the male heads in the restaurant turned to look at her as she passed.

‘This is Rachel, my assistant,’ said Simon. ‘Come on. I have work to do.’

We went down to the meeting room. It had bright red and gold wallpaper and was set out for a presentation with rows of gold high-backed chairs and three tables lined up at the top of the room. There was a stack of brown cardboard boxes near the tables.

‘You can help us,’ said Simon. ‘If you want. Take the reports out of these boxes. Put one on each chair.’ He pointed at the chairs, then began opening boxes.

Isabel smiled at me. It was her let’s-be-nice smile. Simon had to be the pushiest person I had met in years. I was tempted not to cooperate. But I had some more questions to ask him. It’d be worth a few minutes of helping him out to get some answers. I took a pile of light blue reports, put one on each chair. Then I stopped.

My telephone was buzzing. I took it out and saw the name ‘Susan Hunter’ flashing across the screen, but as I pushed the green button, the line went dead. My elation at seeing the call turned to frustration in a second.

11

Susan Hunter prayed. She prayed for her husband waiting for her back in Cambridge and she prayed for her sister. And at the end she prayed for herself. She wasn’t used to praying. She hadn’t done it since she was eight years old. And she’d never been into it that much back then either.

But she had every reason to start now.

The basement was perfectly dark. She knew how many steps away each wall was, fifteen one way, twenty the other, but some times it felt as if the dark was endless, no matter what her brain told her. Her hands were pressed tight into her stomach.

Pain was throbbing through her.

She was doing all she could to ignore it.

She wanted to cry, to wail, but she wasn’t going to. He might be listening. And he’d enjoy it too much. That much she knew.

Where he had the microphone placed in the basement, she didn’t know, but its existence was irrefutable.

He had come down after a period of her whimpering and played a recording of the noises she’d made to cheer her up. That was how he’d put it.

But the sounds hadn’t cheered her up. They’d chilled her until her insides felt empty.

And then he’d taken her upstairs. The pain then had been horrific. And in the end he’d made her say things, which he recorded.

Then he told her he’d enjoy burning her again, if she didn’t do exactly what she was told every time he asked.

The thought of how he’d said that, his certainty, was enough to set her praying again.

12

The call went straight to voicemail. My deflation was immediate. Isabel must have seen it on my face.

‘Who was that?’

‘Susan Hunter. Can you believe it? Now her phone is off. I didn’t even get to speak to her!’

‘So she’s around somewhere?’

‘I have no idea. I’ll try her again in a few minutes.’

Simon was standing near me. ‘I can put those ones out,’ he said, putting his hand on the reports.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m doing them.’

He pulled his hand back. ‘I’m trying to help you, Dr Ryan.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m just a bit distracted.’

I turned, began putting the reports on the chairs again.

I tried Susan’s phone twice in the following five minutes. The response was the same as every time I’d called her in the past six days, since I’d heard about Kaiser.

‘The number you are trying to reach is unavailable. Please try again later.’ They must be the thirteen most frustrating words in the English language.

As I finished with the reports, Simon was putting a

stack of leaflets on one of the tables at the top of the room. On the other table a laptop had already been set up.

He sat in front of the laptop, turned and motioned me to him.

‘This is what I wanted to show you.’ He clicked at a file. It opened slowly.

‘Who’s coming to this meeting?’ I asked, bending down.

‘Some iron skull caps.’ He didn’t look up.

‘Iron skull caps?’

‘They’re a type of Orthodox Jew,’ said Isabel.

She was on the other side of the table. She looked good in her black shirt.

‘You are right.’ He pointed a finger at Isabel. ‘But that doesn’t mean I endorse their views.’

‘What views?’

I was peering at what Simon had on his screen. It was a blown-up picture of a real DNA strand with lines and labels pointing to various features on the strand. We were looking at something 2.5 nanometres wide, a billionth of a metre wide. It’s hard to even imagine something that thin.

‘I’m not going to explain what they believe. But I’ll tell you this. They were looking for someone who can do non-destructive DNA splicing, someone who can manipulate down to the molecular level. And they were willing to pay good money for the research to make it happen.’

‘You’re involved in a red heifer project, aren’t you?’ Isabel’s eyes were wide.

He stared up at her, beaming.

‘What’s a red heifer project?’ I said.

‘It’s a project to create one of the biblical symbols of the coming of the Messiah,’ said Isabel.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Apocalyptic Christians want to breed a perfect red cow, an act which would signify the time was right to build a new Temple,’ Isabel explained.

If this was what Simon was working on, he was crazier than I thought.

Simon’s head went from side to side, as if he was throwing off water.

‘You haven’t been in Jerusalem long, have you?’ His expression was one of benign, irritating superiority.

‘There are more crazies per square mile in this city than anywhere else in the world. Stop people in the street and try this: ask them about their religious views. You’ll get predictions about the end of the world or about the Mahdi or about the Gates to Hell opening soon for non-believers.’ He had a determined look on his face.

‘Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but where does it say I have to believe the same things my sponsors believe? You must understand this, the two of you. Don’t tell me you don’t.’ He scrolled forward a few slides on his laptop, then back again.

‘You don’t think the Messiah is on his way?’ said Isabel.

‘My sponsors do. They run Bible studies classes here in Jerusalem. They’ve done it for years. They have a soup kitchen, and a matchmaking service. If someone like that is willing to cover the cost of a few years of our research, should I not take the money?’ He put his head back and looked straight up at me.

I didn’t answer. We had strict rules about who we would take money from. But we were lucky; we’d had major breakthroughs. And we were in Oxford. We could attract funding from many sources. And success spawns success in applied research, like in everything else.

‘What do you believe in, Sean?’ he asked.

‘Apple pie, the moon landings, lots of things.’

‘See, you can believe in anything you want. I didn’t ask you to fill in a questionnaire before I brought you here, did I? We’re all free to think what we want.’ He twisted his shoulders, as if he had back pain he was trying to ease.

‘What about your results,’ said Isabel. ‘Have you bred the perfect red heifer?’

He rubbed his chin. ‘We’ve bred over a thousand red heifers. The question is, are any of them perfect? The standard is high, very high. Not one single hair can be black or brown or white, God forbid.’

‘If you do breed one, a lot of people are going to claim the end of the world is nigh,’ said Isabel.

‘People are claiming that all the time. I don’t think it will lead to a panic.’

Isabel had come around the table and was looking closely at the slide on the screen. She spoke in a low voice. ‘Let’s hope you’re right.’

‘Can you tell us anything else about Max Kaiser?’ I said. It was time to get something out of all this.

‘With all due respect, you are strangers here, Dr Ryan. Our police are the best people to look for your friend Susan Hunter. I think you must talk with them, for your own good.’

Talli was standing beside us now. ‘Did you know Dr Ryan’s organisation, the Institute of Applied Research, runs one of the best academic conferences in the UK these days? Many of the world’s leading researchers attend. So I’ve heard.’ She gave me a tentative smile. It crossed my mind that maybe she wanted to speak at one of our events.

‘I wouldn’t want to make an enemy of them, that’s all I am saying, Simon,’ she continued.

Her description of our conference would have been disputed by some, but many cutting-edge researchers would have agreed with it. We’d built a reputation for having fun too, and avoiding some of the boring stuff you’d expect at such conferences.

Simon looked at me with an interested expression. Was this the route to get him to help us, or should I press another button?

I peered at the laptop screen. ‘You’re laser splicing at the single nanometre level, aren’t you? That’s unprecedented. What’s the damage threshold?’

‘Lower than your dreams.’

‘You’ll be looking for Nobel prizes, if you can get the right people to promote your case.’

His expression bordered on conceit now. No wonder he wanted to show me what he was up to. Not a lot of people would understand the real breakthrough he’d achieved.

‘How did you get to this point?’ People like Simon usually yearn for an audience, people who will hear them out and understand how truly clever they are.

He looked pleased as he began to tell me the history of their project.

I let him talk. He loved listening to himself. His eyes grew wider, as if he was in the headlights of a truck, as he went through the ins and outs of his work: how he’d discovered the breakthrough himself, how a colleague had let him down in the early stages, had even disputed his findings. And how he’d been vindicated in the end. It was the usual academic front-and-back-stabbing stuff.

When he’d run out of steam, Isabel said. ‘You should definitely be at the institute conference next year. Shouldn’t he, Sean?’

She had an enthralled look on her face. I hadn’t known she was so interested in optical science.

‘I forgot to ask, do you remember where Kaiser was staying the last time he was here?’ she said.

He smiled at her, answered quickly. ‘Somewhere on Jabotinsky.’

‘What number?’ I said. I hadn’t heard of the place, but I assumed you’d need more than a street name to find out where Kaiser had been staying. Jabotinsky could run all the way to Tel Aviv, for all I knew.

‘I don’t remember.’ He shrugged dismissively.

He knew more. He had to.

Isabel was still looking at the screen. ‘Did you meet him there?’ Her tone was soft, friendly.

‘I picked him up a couple of times, no more than that. He was, without doubt, the most arrogant archaeologist I’ve ever met.’

‘How were you helping him?’ asked Isabel.

‘He used my name to get himself admitted to a dig. I got a call from someone checking up on him, to see if he was who he said he was. They didn’t say where the dig was though. But they’d heard of me.’

‘Do you even know what section of Jabotinsky he was staying on?’ said Isabel.

‘Somewhere near the middle. Honestly, I can’t tell you any more. I was never in his apartment. I picked him up on the street, twice. Once at a bus stop near the middle. Another time at a coffee shop at the end. Maybe if you go door to door someone will remember him.’ He gave Isabel a sympathetic look.

‘It’s a very long street,’ said Talli, looking at me. ‘There are lots of apartment buildings. If you go door to door you’ll be days at it.’

‘I can’t help you any more,’ said Simon. He looked at his watch. ‘My meeting is starting soon and …’ He didn’t finish his sentence. It was clear he wanted us to get going. There was tightness around his eyes, as if he was about to miss the last train home for Yom Kippur.

‘We’re out of here,’ I said. ‘Thanks for showing me what you’re working on. It was interesting.’ I gripped his arm.

Seconds later we were standing by the lifts. There were two dark-suited men in the corridor outside the room we’d just come out of. One of them had cropped hair. The other had longer hair and was younger. Their eyes were watchful. They looked as if they’d be suspicious of their own wives.

‘Is that the local CIA?’ I said, half jokingly, as the elevator went down.

‘Shush,’ said Talli. She glanced up at the small black dome of a security camera in a corner of the elevator.

When we got down below she turned to me. ‘That was the Security Service. I’d bet my pension on it.’

‘Simon is an important guy?’ asked Isabel.

Talli shrugged.

That was when I spotted the knot of people, maybe six or seven, waiting by a table near the revolving glass doors leading from the outside. Two blue-shirted female police officers were waving two-foot-long wands over people, before letting them pass in or out. We joined the queue.

I’d never seen people being checked leaving a place as well as entering it.

Talli threw her gaze to the ceiling as she waited. She whispered, ‘You never know what the Security Service is going to do next here.’

I was dealt with first. The older looking of the two officers held her hand out. ‘ID?’ She said. I gave her my passport.

She couldn’t have been much older than me, maybe a year of two, no more than forty for sure, and she was attractive. She had thick brown hair, big soft eyes, glowing skin, and an authoritative manner. She stood with her legs wide apart and her head back, as if she might bellow a command at me at any point.

‘What were you doing in this hotel?’ Her accent was soft.

‘We were visiting with a friend.’

‘Someone staying here?’ She was holding my passport, leafing through it slowly. She stopped on a page, brought it close to her face to examine it.

‘No, someone having a meeting here.’

‘Who?’

‘Simon Marcus, he’s upstairs.’

She snapped my passport shut and put it in the top pocket of her shirt.

‘I need that,’ I said.

‘How do you know Simon Marcus?’ The other policewoman was waving someone else through. Isabel was behind me.

‘He’s a professor. He knows a friend of mine. We were introduced a few hours ago.’

‘You are here to help him with his work?’ She was looking at me as if I was a conspirator, hiding something.

‘No. I’m not here to help him.’

‘Will you be staying in Jerusalem for much longer?’ It crossed my mind that she was actually saying I should leave Israel.

‘A few more days. We’ll be here less than a week. Why do you ask?’

She stepped back, looked me up and down. It appeared as if she was debating whether to arrest me or answer my question.

‘We have a lot of security troubles here in Jerusalem, Dr Ryan. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to one of our distinguished guests.’

She pointed at some high-backed chairs nearby.

‘Wait here. Do not go away.’ She turned, strode out through the glass doors, heading towards a police jeep that was pulled up outside. I moved towards the chairs, but I didn’t sit down. I stared after her. The jeep had darkened windows.

What the hell was she doing? I looked around. Two more men who looked like security guards were standing by the lifts. They were staring in my direction.

13

It was 5 p.m. in London. Henry was preparing to leave the office. He was back on normal hours, as his wife called them. He would be joining the crowds surging through Westminster Underground station in a few minutes.

Then a ping sounded from his workstation computer. It was a warning that a priority email had come in. He clicked through to the contents.

REQUEST: 3487686/TRTT

STATUS: CLOSED/EXCEPT: LEVEL 7

CASE: 87687658765-65436

No further information can be provided on the manuscript you requested.

He read the email twice. It gave nothing away. He knew from experience that no further response would be provided to any additional requests he made on the matter. Information on an item that was only available to Level 7 personnel would not be accessible to him. He was lucky he’d received even this response.

What intrigued him about it all was why an ancient manuscript, the one Sean Ryan and Isabel Sharp had discovered in Istanbul, would now be subject to such a restriction.

As he made his way out to the Underground platform heading north he thought about what could be in the document that was so important.

14

The policewoman had opened the back door of the police vehicle and climbed inside. I imagined her examining my passport in detail, photographing it maybe, or putting it through a computer check, but she could have been doing anything beyond those darkened windows.

‘What did she say to you?’ Isabel was beside me.

The other policewoman was checking people and keeping an eye on me. She needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t going to go anywhere without my passport.

‘She wanted to know if I was helping Simon. I got the impression she knew all about him.’

Isabel stood with me.

And then the policewoman reappeared. She’d only been gone a few minutes. She handed me back my passport.

‘Be careful in Israel, Dr Ryan,’ she said. ‘The situation here is difficult these days. We have to double-check everything. I am sorry for delaying you.’

I passed her by quickly. What she meant was clear. I’d been warned.

I watched as Isabel gave over her passport. The policewoman examined it carefully, asked a few questions then gave it back.

I wondered why she hadn’t asked us where we were staying. Maybe she didn’t need to. Our hotel had copied our passports in front of us when we’d checked in. They’d probably used the copies to register us with the police. And with the number of security cameras around, they probably knew more about our movements than if we had a stalker.

We walked back towards the Jaffa Gate.

‘What’s Simon’s phone number?’ I asked Talli.

‘He told you everything he knows. I’m sure of it,’ she said, after she gave it to me. ‘We have a good reputation for helping academics from other universities.’ She held her hand out to bid me goodbye.

‘Thanks, Talli. I appreciate all your help. It means a lot to me. Send me an email in a week or two about what

you’re working on. Maybe you can come and do a talk for us too.’

She beamed. Then she was gone, and Isabel and I were heading for a taxi that had pulled up. It was disgorging a family of American tourists.

I checked my phone again. Susan hadn’t called back. I tapped her number. I must have dialled it ten times since she’d rung me. The number still wasn’t available.

It was looking increasingly like the call had been an accident of some sort. Maybe her phone had been stolen. Maybe someone had turned it on briefly, pressed the redial button, before taking its SIM out.

‘Can you take us to Jabotinski?’ I said to the driver. He looked at me as if I was a piece of bait drifting on the top of a pool. Then he grinned. He was young, had a few days’ growth of beard and a t-shirt with swirling red and green paint stains on it.

‘You’re tourists, right? Where on Jabotinsky are you going? It’s a long stretch, my friend.’

‘Near the middle,’ I said. He moved off. Isabel traded pleasantries with him for a few minutes. I was trying to work out the significance of everything we’d heard from Simon. Was it relevant that he was involved in a red heifer project? Probably not. They were just another bunch of end-timers, weren’t they?

Still, I felt uneasy.

The taxi pulled up a few minutes later on a long street heading up a hill with three-storey white apartment buildings on either side. The buildings were set back from the road. Palm trees, carob trees, eucalyptus and other shrubs separated the buildings from the street. There was a small roundabout at the top of the hill.

‘This is the centre of Jabotinsky. You can walk either way from here, but there’s not a lot to see.’

I was deflated. This wasn’t going to be easy. I’d hoped for a busy street with shops, cafes maybe, people we could talk to, ask if they’d seen an American of Kaiser’s description. He hadn’t been a quiet guy who could escape attention. But this was a long street full of anonymous apartment buildings.

‘What’s your plan?’ said Isabel.

‘I thought we might have dinner? Look at all the restaurants,’ I gestured around us.

She put her hands on her hips, turning on her heel. ‘Yes, what a big choice.’

A pizza delivery motorbike went past. ‘There is pizza somewhere,’ I said.

‘Wonderful, are you going to run after him?’ The noise of the disappearing motorbike faded into the distance.

‘Let’s walk that way.’ I pointed back down towards the Old City. ‘He has to have stayed one side of this roundabout. That gives us a fifty percent chance of being right.’ We walked onto the pavement.

The weather was getting even more gloomy. It was 3.30 p.m. and colder than I’d expected, like London in mid-March. All we needed was for it to start raining.

Up ahead, where the road curved, a red car was parked. As we watched, it pulled away. A group of young people were coming towards us. They were moving like a rolling party, the boys swirling around the outside of the group in long t-shirts mostly with the names of obscure bands on them. The girls were laughing, linking arms.

As they came near I approached one of the boys. He was tall, had Clark Kent glasses and a puzzled expression.

‘Do you know an American archaeologist living around here?’ I said.

His accent was all New York when he answered. ‘Yeah right, half the professors in our university look like American archaeologists.’

One of the girls stopped in front of us. ‘What are you people doing in Israel?’ she said. She had a thick wave of curly brown hair and a friendly smile.

‘We’re looking for a friend of ours who got lost,’ said Isabel.

They were all in their late teens or early twenties.

‘Everybody’s looking for somebody,’ said the girl.

The guy was eyeing up Isabel; most men found her attractive I’d noticed. He was giving her a big grin. ‘You wanna come with us for a few beers,’ he said. He didn’t even look at me. Isabel’s straight black hair and dark tight jeans took at least five years off her age. She could have easily passed for someone in her late twenties.

‘You can come too,’ said the girl. She pushed her hair away from her face. ‘We’re all going to a party. Are you Jewish?’

I shook my head.

‘It don’t matter,’ she said. ‘I can hear an American accent under there.’

‘I grew up in the States,’ I said. ‘Then my dad was stationed in England.’

‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘Having to listen to Oasis every day.’

‘I like Oasis.’

Isabel was looking at me sceptically. I motioned for us to go along with them. We might be able to ask them a few questions about what went on in this neighbourhood.

As we walked, the girl turned to her friend. She was taller than the first girl. She was grinning at me. I looked away. The next time I looked at her she had a big joint in her mouth and there was a trail of blue smoke coming from it like a steaming power plant. This was not what I needed. Getting arrested was not in the plan.