The Jerusalem Puzzle

We stuck out among the corporate types on the train. Isabel was in her trademark tight indigo denims. I was in my thin suede jacket and black jeans. We both had black Berghaus backpacks. We might as well have put up a sign saying ON HOLIDAY over our heads.

This was my first time visiting Israel, but not for political reasons. If I was honest, I’d have to say I was glad I had a good reason to go now.

The queue for the flight was moving like a film being downloaded over a slow connection. We went through three separate security checks. Given the daily media reports about Israel, I wasn’t too surprised.

‘Do you think it’s going to kick off out there?’ said Isabel, pointing at a headline in a newspaper about Israel denouncing Iran.

I shrugged. The man ahead of her turned the page.

‘We certainly got our timing right,’ she said. ‘To get there for the start of the third world war.’

5

Henry Mowlam, a senior desk-based Security Services operative, threw the bottle of water towards the blue plastic recycling bin next to the back wall of MI5’s underground control room in Whitehall, central London.

It missed the bin and burst open. A shower of water sprayed over the pale industrial-yellow wall.

‘Bugger,’ said Henry, loudly.

Sergeant Finch was at the end of the row of monitoring desks. She looked up, then walked towards him.

‘You all right today, Henry? Working weekends not suit you?’

Her starched white shirt was the brightest thing in the room.

‘They do, ma’am.’ He saluted her abruptly.

She went over, pushed the plastic bottle towards the bin with her foot. It looked as if she was checking what the bottle was at the same time. Then she came back to him. The simulated outdoor lighting hummed above her head.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He was staring at his screen.

She walked away.

The report on the screen, which was the latest summary of the electronic monitoring of Lord Bidoner, a former member of the House of Lords only because of a title his father had inherited, had given him nothing new to go on. Lord Bidoner was one of those lords who didn’t apply himself to his responsibilities, and whose shady connections and wheeler-dealing made sure he’d never get an invitation to Buckingham Palace for a garden party.

But they still had nothing definite on Lord Bidoner. Taking a phone call from someone two steps removed from a plot to spread a plague virus in London was enough to put you on a watch list and get you investigated, but it was not enough to get you arrested.

‘We have new threats, Henry. We checked him out. You know there’s been a flood of suspects coming in from Pakistan and Egypt. We have to put Lord Bidoner on the back burner,’ was what Seageant Finch had said to him a week before.

But Henry wasn’t convinced.

He’d mentioned it again at their Monday morning meeting. The head of the unit had brought up Bidoner’s file on the large screen and had reeled off the details of the vetting he’d been subject to over the past six months.

‘He’s passed every check. His father was well respected, a pillar of the house. I know his mother was Austrian, but we don’t hold that against people anymore, Henry.’ There had been titters around the room. Henry hadn’t replied.

It wasn’t having an Austrian mother that made Henry suspicious. It was Bidoner’s use of encrypted telephone and email systems, his endless profits on the stock market from defence industry shares he picked with an uncanny prescience, and his political speeches at fringe meetings about population changes in Europe and the rise of Islam. Taken one by one they were all legitimate, but together they made Henry’s nose twitch.

He stared at his screen. He had other work to do. His hand hovered over the Bidoner report. He should delete it. And he should request that the Electronic Surveillance Unit discontinue the project.

He clicked another part of the screen. He would ask for the surveillance reports to be cancelled later. He had to review an incident in Amsterdam.

The victims of a bizarre double burning had been identified. They were a brother and a cousin of the men who had been arrested in London as part of the virus plot the previous August. The men arrested had known nothing about what they were doing that day. They had been dupes. But they were still in prison on remand.

It looked very much like whoever was behind that plot had just disposed of some people who could betray them.

There was another fact about this incident that concerned Henry. All these dupes were exiled Palestinians, from a village south of Jerusalem. A village where some sickening incidents had taken place.

6

In front of us in the queue there was a bald-headed giant of a man and his stony-faced partner. He must have been six foot eight. I was six one and he towered over me. I overheard a few words in Russian between them.

‘They look like they’re auditioning for the Organizatsiya,’ whispered Isabel.

I shook my head.

‘The Russian Jewish mob,’ she said.

‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I said. ‘What does that make us?’

‘Generation Z dropouts.’

‘Speak for yourself. I haven’t retired at thirty-six like some people I know.’

She gave me one of her smiles, then glanced away, as if she was looking for someone. I turned. There were too many people behind to work out who she’d been staring at.

‘Expecting a friend?’

‘No, it’s not that.’ She leaned toward me. ‘I thought I saw someone I know.’ She shook her head. ‘But it wasn’t him.’

On the plane I spent most of the time reading a guidebook about Israel. About halfway through the flight a small group of skull-capped men went to the front of the cabin and swayed back and forth, their heads down. They were praying.

Later, I looked out of the window when I heard someone say they could see the island of Mykonos. It was barely visible through a blue haze near the horizon. There wouldn’t be many people on the beaches there now.

As we began the descent and the seatbelt sign turned on again, I saw a plume of smoke spreading across the sky.

‘It’s a forest fire on Mount Carmel,’ said Isabel.

‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘There was an article about it on the Jerusalem Post website this morning.’

When we landed at the airport near Tel Aviv I felt the buzz of excitement around me. We reached immigration by passing along a wide elevated sunlit passage. There was a big queue for passport control in the area beyond, but it was moving quickly. Isabel’s ‘Russian mob friends’ allowed us to pass in front of them. I nudged her. There was a rosary in the woman’s hand.

Isabel made a face at me, as if to say, okay you were right.

We passed through immigration quickly. Outside the building there were young soldiers to the left and right in brown, slightly oversized uniforms with machine guns hanging from their shoulders and watchful looks in their eyes.

We took a taxi to Jerusalem, to the Hebron Road not far from the Old City. Coming towards the city on a modern motorway, with large green signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English was a surreal experience. We passed dark green tanks on dark green transporters going the other way. There must have been ten of them. As we neared the city, a glint of gold sparkled near the horizon, set against low hills and a crust of buildings.

‘That must be the Dome of the Rock,’ I said, pointing out the window. ‘Where Solomon built his famous temple.’

Isabel held my hand. ‘I’ve always wanted to come here,’ she said.

The highway turned. The spark of gold was gone. Pale cream, modern two and three-storey apartment buildings filled the low hills around us. As we got close to the city there were older buildings, and long tree-lined boulevards of apartments.

There was a lot of traffic too. Sunday’s the start of the week here, our driver said.

He had given us a running commentary on the latest news from Egypt and on the situation in Israel almost all the way from the airport. Our hotel, the Zion Palace, was a four-star, but it didn’t look it from the outside. The entrance was down a set of wide steps, like descending into a cave, but inside, the lobby was wide and marble-floored. There were brass coffee tables at the back, surrounded by chocolate-brown leather high-backed chairs. Huge blue ceramic pots sat in the corners of the lobby and paintings of Old Jerusalem hung on the walls.

The view from the small balcony in our room made me want to hold my breath. We stared out at the city. To our right were the pale gold sandstone walls of the Old City.

The hill of Mount Zion, crowned by the high upturned-funnel style roof of the Dormiton Abbey with its dome-capped tower was just visible to the far right.

There was an ancient magic to this view. There was history and religion in every glance, and something older overlaying it all. Countless wars had been fought over this patch of land and its fate was still in bitter dispute.

The hum of traffic, honking car horns and occasional shouts came up from the road below. Leaden clouds rolled slowly overhead.

I pointed at the Old City walls.

‘Just a bit further up that way is the Jaffa Gate,’ I said. ‘Do you see the valley to the right of the walls?’ Isabel nodded. ‘That’s where the followers of Ba’al and Moloch sacrificed their children by fire, while priests beat drums to hide the screams.’

‘Yeuch, that’s too sick.’

‘They call that place Gehenna, the valley of hell.’ I went to the edge of the balcony, as if drawn forward. The start of the valley, the part we could see, looked dried out, rocky, its low trees withered and dusty.

‘That’s where the entrance to hell is for a lot of Jews, and for some Christians and followers of Islam too. They think that’s where the wicked will line up to be punished at the end of the world.’

‘And now you can find it on a map,’ said Isabel.

Famished by the time we reached the hotel, we sat down immediately for dinner, eating in near silence, the fatigue of the journey capturing our thoughts. Back at our room I scoured Israeli websites for any news about Dr Hunter. There was nothing about her disappearance mentioned anywhere in the last few days. The only thing I found were the original articles about her going missing.

The main story on the Haaretz website was about a Jewish family that had been burnt to death in an arson attack the night before in a settlement near Hebron. The horror of it leapt off the screen. Pictures of a small blackened house with an ambulance in front of it, surrounded by Israeli soldiers, filled the news page. Isabel looked over my shoulder as I read it.

‘They’re blaming some local Palestinians,’ I said.

‘How many more people are going to get burnt to death?’ said Isabel.

‘You can get shot out here too,’ I said. I pointed at another article. It was about a funeral of a Palestinian youth who’d been shot in the back after being part of a demonstration in a village sandwiched between Jewish settlements. A Jewish settler was being blamed for that death.

‘It’s all sickening,’ said Isabel.

‘There’s a vicious fight going on here, unbending hatred,’ I replied. Opening my email, there was the usual array of special offers from every hotel, airline and social network I’d ever used and some I hadn’t. I spotted an email from Dr Beresford-Ellis. It had an attachment. I clicked on it. The message wouldn’t open. The screen just froze.

Had the internet stopped completely? I went to another tab and tried to download a page. It wouldn’t work either. Nothing would. I waited another minute.

‘I’ll go down and see if they can do anything about the signal; find out if it’s better in the lobby,’ said Isabel.

‘Can you see if you can get some fruit, I’m still hungry?’ I said.

The internet was still off ten minutes later and Isabel hadn’t come back. I let the door bang as I left the room, pushing the old-fashioned key into my pocket as I waited for the lift. I was hoping it would open to Isabel’s smiling face, but it was empty when it arrived.

In the lobby there was no sign of her either. I went to the reception. The dark-haired girl who’d checked us in was gone. In her place was an older guy with a bald spot he was trying to hide by brushing his hair over. He was standing in a corner of the reception area that was walled with blue and white Ottoman-era tiles.

‘No, I haven’t seen a lady in dark blue jeans with straight black hair,’ he said, after I described Isabel. His expression was quizzical, as if he was wondering whether I was asking him to find me a date.

‘Maybe she went to the shop. It’s down the road. Not far.’ He smiled, showed me his yellowing teeth.

‘Is there a problem with the Wi-Fi?’ I asked.

‘No, sir. It’s working perfectly.’

‘Not for me. How far away is this shop?’

‘Not far.’ He pointed towards the front of the hotel, then to the left.

I walked to the glass front door, then up the steps to the road to see if Isabel was coming. I’d never been this protective of Irene, my wife, a doctor who’d volunteered and then been murdered in Afghanistan two years before, but after what had happened to her my urge to look after Isabel couldn’t be ignored. Irene had been robbed of her life. I couldn’t bear for anything like that to happen to anyone else.

It was dark outside.

I had to tell myself to stop being paranoid. I looked back down at the hotel doors.

A man’s face was peering up at me through the glass door.

‘What are you doing out here?’ said a friendly voice behind me. ‘Did you miss me?’

I turned. Isabel was coming towards me from the other direction to the shop. She had a brown paper bag in her arms. ‘I got you your fruit.’

She held the bag forwards, smiled, then touched my arm as she passed. A ridiculous iron weight of fear lifted from my chest. When we got back to the room the Wi-Fi was working perfectly.

‘I got a call from Mark while I was out,’ she remarked. ‘He’s stationed in Cairo these days. Not a million miles from here.’

I spoke slowly. ‘Why does he keep calling you? I thought you two were over.’

She’d dumped him a year ago.

‘You are so jealous!’ she said. There was a sympathetic note to her voice.

I gave her my best see-if-I-care smile.

‘He wants to meet me again.’ She shook her head as if the idea was outrageous.

‘What?’ This was getting annoying.

‘I’m not going to, don’t worry.’

I opened the balcony door and went outside, staring over the lights illuminating the Old City walls. Isabel didn’t just have skeletons in her cupboard, she had live exhibits, waiting to be set free.

I felt a hand on my back and Isabel whispered in my ear. ‘Come to bed, Sean. I want to prove to you that there is no one else.’ Taking my hand she pulled me back inside. It was another hour before I got to sleep.

7

Arap Anach took the thick yellow candle from its holder. It burned with a blue-white flame and gave off a sweet scent; olive oil mixed with myrrh, the ancient incense Queen Esther had bathed in for six months to beautify herself for her Persian King.

Myrrh was used at times of sacrifice. Arap knew its scent from his childhood. One man in particular had smelled of it. A man who’d brought pain.

He closed his eyes, breathing the ancient smell in. Myrrh came from a thorny shrub which wept from the stem after it was cut. Some varieties are worth more than their weight in gold.

He put his left hand out and held it over the flame. The pain was familiar. The walls of the room danced around him as the shadows from the candle played on the walls. He wrenched his thoughts away from the flame, focusing on the wall hangings. The thick red one with the stylised flames embroidered on it was the one he liked most.

He bent his back. The searing pain in his hand grew in steps, as if ascending towards an ultimate crescendo. He threw his head back and opened his eyes. Not much longer. Seconds. One …

The low white roof, its plaster filled with tiny cracks, swam in his vision. The cracks were moving. It always amazed him what pain could do to your consciousness.

His need to take his hand away was making his arm tremble now. It was moving, rocking as muscle spasms from the pain were shooting up his nerves. He kept his hand to the flame.

He had to. It was the only way. He had to know the pain he would inflict on others, the better to enjoy inflicting it when the moment came.

He jerked his hand away, breathing in and out slowly. It was time to make the call.

He turned on the mobile phone, pressed at the numbers quickly, his hand trembling, the pain of the scorched skin pulsing in waves. As he put it to his ear he heard the ring tone at the other end of the line.

‘Rehan,’ said a voice.

‘Father Rehan, I am so glad I found you. I am just checking that everything is in order.’ Arap Anach forced himself to sound friendly. His breathless eagerness he didn’t have to feign.

‘Yes, yes, my son. Your donation has been received. We are all very grateful. Is there anything we can do for you?’

Arap Anach hesitated. ‘No, not really, Father. I’m just happy to be able to help with the restoration of the church.’ He coughed.

‘Please, there must be some small thing we can do for you while you are here.’

Arap coughed again, then spoke. ‘There is a small thing. It would make me so happy. I have prayed for it for a long time.’

8

I woke in the middle of the night. There was fear in my dream. Fear and flames. I wondered for long seconds where I was. My face was hot, sweaty.

The gray shape of the curtains and the yellow glimmer of street lights in the gap between them brought everything back. We had come to look for Dr Hunter, to find out what had happened to Max Kaiser.

For months after we got back from Istanbul I’d wanted to have a long conversation with Kaiser, to give him my honest opinion about him claiming that the book we’d found in Istanbul was his. He needed someone to puncture his ego. It would have ended up in a shouting match or worse, but I didn’t care.

But now he was dead, and in such a horrible manner that my instinct for revenge had turned to pity. He’d reaped what he’d sown. God only knew how many people he’d enraged before me.

I was hoping the dream wouldn’t come back when I fell asleep again, but it did, and the flames were nearer this time and hotter.

But this time I was woken by a voice.

‘Sean, Sean, wake up.’ Isabel’s tone was concerned. I was breathing fast. I sat up.

‘Was it the same as before?’ she asked. She hugged me.

‘Yeah.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell her about the flames. That part was new. The fear wasn’t.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘No, I’ll be ok,’ I said.

I lay down again. Isabel had spent a couple of nights asking me all about what had happened to Irene; how I felt about everything that had happened. It had been good to talk, but this felt different and after her speech about people being burnt to death before we came here, it didn’t seem right to tell her what had got into my dreams.

It was light when I next woke. I’d slept a long time. Isabel was in the shower. The hum of cars, a distant car horn honking and the morning sounds of Jerusalem filled the air when I opened the balcony door. I was glad the night was over.

The traffic was heavy on the road outside. A bell tolled far away. I stared at the old walls of the city. They looked like props from a movie about Crusaders and Saracens. A rolling blanket of clouds filled the sky.

I looked up Max Kaiser on the internet. There were quite a few pieces about his body being found at the back of Lady Tunshuq’s Palace. The police had questioned some local hard-line Islamists. Others were being sought. It was clear who they thought had murdered him.

I found an older article about some work Kaiser had done with a scientist attached to the Hebrew University. His name was Simon Marcus. Had Kaiser met him again while he was out here?

I trawled the Hebrew University website looking for anyone I might know. I needed someone to introduce me to Simon Marcus, someone he would trust.

After almost giving up, I finally found what I was looking for. A Dr Talli Miller in the Laser Research Unit. We had a tenuous connection, but it was better than nothing. She’d presented a paper at a conference I’d spoken at and we’d been at the same table for lunch. It was enough.

I found a contact number and picked up the hotel phone to call her. The number at the university rang and rang. I looked at my watch. It was just past 9.00 a.m. Surely they were open?

Finally a voice answered.

‘University’ was the only word I understood. It was a thin voice. She was speaking in Hebrew, the main language in Israel, the ancient language of Judaism. I knew only a few words of it. Easy words, like shalom: hello.

‘Dr Talli Miller,’ I said.

Normally I’d have spent time learning a language if I was visiting somewhere. My German wasn’t bad following a project we’d worked on in the Black Forest, but a day and a half wasn’t long enough to learn any language, no matter how dedicated you were.

The line sounded dead. Had she hung up?

Then it fizzed.

‘Shalom,’ said a woman’s voice. Talli’s voice.

‘Hi, it’s Sean Ryan. I’m in Jerusalem.’

There was a long silence.

‘Who?’

It was nice to be recognised so quickly. ‘Sean Ryan, I was on the panel when you gave a speech about high temperature lasers at the University of London.’

‘Sean, Sean.’ She repeated my name slowly. ‘How are you?’ Suddenly she was friendly and her voice returned to normal. We reminisced for a few minutes. Then I asked her if she knew Dr Simon Marcus. She did, but not well.

‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I need to speak to him urgently.’

‘I may be able to do something. I’ll call you in a few minutes. What hotel are you in?’

I told her. My spirits lifted. I’d done it. My connections were going to get me to Simon Marcus.

We ate breakfast in a long high-ceilinged dining room. There were groups of people in the room speaking French, Polish and Spanish, all pilgrims visiting their Holy City.

The breakfast, a selection of cheeses, scrambled eggs, olives, jams and soft bread would have satisfied anyone.

One of the waiters, a black-haired, smiling man, came to our table with a wireless telephone handset as we were finishing.

‘Dr Ryan?’ he said.

I nodded. I never used my title in public, but Talli might have used it when she rang the reception. I took the phone.

‘Hello.’

‘I’ll be at your hotel in one hour. Be ready.’ The voice was Talli’s, but the friendliness was gone. In its place was a distinct hardness, the sort of attitude she probably reserved for her most disrespectful students, the ones who insulted her in a lecture.

The line went dead.

‘She’s on her way,’ I said.

An hour later we were in the hotel lobby. I went outside to see if she was coming. It was cool, but my suede jacket was enough to keep me warm. After a while I went back inside.

An hour and a half later we were still waiting.

By then it was nearly eleven. I called the Hebrew University. A receptionist answered. She checked, then came back and told me that Dr Talli Miller was not available.

By 11.30 a.m. I was properly pissed off. We took turns

going back up to the room. God only knew what had happened to Talli. Had I misheard her about the time? No, I couldn’t have. I even tried asking the hotel if they could bring up the number of the person who’d called me. They couldn’t.

For something to do I looked up the main hospitals in Jerusalem and went to their websites on my phone using the hotel lobby Wi-Fi. I was thinking about calling them, asking them if a Dr Susan Hunter had been admitted. We might just get lucky. I took a note of their telephone numbers. I was about to start calling when Talli appeared through the revolving main door of the hotel. Her hair was a mess.