The Jerusalem Puzzle (24 page)

‘You’re not going to the police.’ It was a statement, rather than a question.

‘I’m going to give it twenty-four hours. Most police forces don’t even follow up on missing persons before that time.’ I’d made a decision while I was talking to Mark. I had to follow up any leads I had myself, then, if there was no other choice, I would go to the police. It was unlikely they would start a major search for her today in any case. I had no evidence that she hadn’t decided to just take a break from me.

He stared at me for a few seconds then said, ‘I’ll come with you.’ He put the pistol into a battered leather holster under his arm. It had a faded Star of David in raised brown on its front.

‘You were in the military?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I was a fresh-faced paratrooper in ’67.
We stopped the dynamiting of the mosque on the Temple Mount when we took Jerusalem. What a thing we did that day.’

‘I read about it,’ I replied.

His face changed, as if he was angry. ‘They say we made a big mistake.’

I was thinking about Isabel. Had she been threatened, tricked? ‘You think we’ll need the gun?’

‘Maybe. I have a permit. I can take it anywhere I want.’ He patted the leather holster.

‘Do you want to borrow it?’ he said softly. His smile was crooked.

I shook my head. My hands were shaking a little as I ran them through my hair. It wasn’t fear. It was frustration. I wanted to do something.

‘It’s tempting. But if I get arrested with that, they’ll
probably
throw away the key.’

He nodded.

We took a taxi from down the street. It dropped us at the Jaffa Gate. It was midday by the time we got to the cafe on the Via Dolorosa where we’d sat down with Isabel a few days earlier.

Before going in we stopped and looked behind us, to check if anyone was following us. I told Simon we were wasting our time. We’d never spot a professional tail. He kept going with the pretence, looking at his watch as if he was waiting for someone.

We’d left a message on the wall by the door to Simon’s apartment, just in case Isabel went back there. It was a piece of paper behind a pipe, and it simply said
call me
. And it had my name and number on it.

I didn’t care about releasing my number to potential strangers. Let them have it. But my phone didn’t ring.

As soon as we were finished with our tail-evasion exercise we took up a position at the cafe not far from the narrow lane leading to the dig entrance. Some of the other cafes were closed. We ordered coffee. I couldn’t eat anything. I felt sick, light-headed.

I was hoping that someone on the dig that day would come out for lunch, or for something they’d forgotten. They’d have to pass us if they did.

There hadn’t been a demonstration on the Via Dolorosa, but the entrance to the lane at that side was still blocked by a now permanent-looking steel barrier. It must have been ten feet high, at least.

Walls of desert-tinged sandstone rose high above us. Only distant grilled windows broke the cliff face of the walls. This was the environment that secret Crusader organisations were born in, where Ottoman conspirators connived and where Franciscan monks pursued century-long agendas.

We were at the edge of the Christian quarter. On the other side of the Via Dolorosa, to the east, was the Muslim quarter. The only giveaway in the thin alley as to where we were was a rough wooden cross high up on a wall, far beyond the reach of prying hands. It was grey and ancient, as if it had been put up there hundreds of years ago.

It probably had. And its significance there was most likely a convoluted story involving pilgrims and suffering.

The cafe faced into the street. It didn’t have one of the cream sun awnings that other shops on the marginally grander streets nearby had, but I suppose that was understandable, given the alley it faced onto was barely wide enough for three big men to walk abreast.

The cafe was more of a tourists’ rest stop than a restaurant. A radio was playing in a corner and bursts of music and rapid talking could be heard from it. There were four old men in the back listening to the radio. They wore their hair cropped so tightly you could see the bumps on their heads mixed with the spiky grey of their hair.

‘What language is that?’ I asked Simon. ‘It sounds familiar.’

‘It’s Greek,’ said Simon. ‘They have a special dialect here. There’s a Greek Orthodox hospice nearby.’

The coffee was okay, if a little watery.

Isabel had me spoiled with a smooth coffee blend we bought in the Portobello Road. I thought about our recent Saturday morning shopping trips in that area of London. A pang of fear hit me. It was almost too much to bear, only two years after Irene had been murdered.

I shifted my chair, looking around, stupidly hopeful every moment that I might see her.

‘Are you okay?’ said Simon.

I nodded, shifted my chair. I had an excellent view of the entrance to the lane where the dig was happening now.

We were two rows back from the small plate glass window of the cafe.

Occasionally, someone exited or went into the alley
opposite
, but no one I recognised. And then, at 12:50 p.m., Dieter, one of the friendly Germans appeared.

He was hurrying directly towards us.

Attracted by a tombstone headline saying WAR in big black letters, I’d bought a Herald Tribune at a news-stand near the Jaffa gate. But I hadn’t been able to read more than the first paragraph of the story. My mind was elsewhere.

I lifted the paper in front of my face now as Dieter walked towards us. For a stomach-turning moment I imagined him coming in and sitting near us. How long would I be able to keep up the charade of interest in this newspaper?

‘He’s gone,’ said Simon. He’d been studying the menu, as if it was a map to the Holy Grail.

‘I’m going to follow him, get a picture of his face,’ I said. ‘Wait here.’ I raced out of the cafe, my heart pounding. Would he spot me?

I was twenty yards behind Dieter and had to slow down not to catch up with him. He turned a corner. I ran to get to it, then slowed again as I realised people were turning to stare at me. When I rounded the corner he’d disappeared. I was sweating, all clammy inside my clothes.

Had I lost him? Was this all a stupid distraction? Then I spotted the shop a little further along. It was down two steps from the road and had bottles of water piled at the door. Was he in there?

I took my phone out, kept it to my face as I neared the door of the shop. It would be better if he didn’t see me, but I’d survive if he did. He wouldn’t be able to hold me. I just had to be ready. I went onto the balls of my feet.

And there he was, at the counter at the far end of the shop. As he turned, his eyes down on his change, I snapped. It was enough. I walked on. There was another cross on the wall high above. I faced it, my back to the shop and snapped again. I kept taking pictures like an avid tourist, fascinated by the wall and the cross.

Actually, I was waiting for a hand on my shoulder. The sweat was drying on my forehead and my back. And then something tap-tapped at my arm.

I jumped inside.

Was it the police, or Dieter?

But it wasn’t either of them.

It was a boy no more than ten years old. His head was close shaven, brown from the sun. He shook it, motioned at the cross above us and wagged his finger. He looked worried.

‘No photo,’ he whispered, in a lilting accent.

A few feet away a small woman with a black shawl around her head and a black wooden cross dangling at her chest said something loudly I didn’t understand. The boy turned and was gone. Dieter was nowhere to be seen. I guessed he’d got what he was looking for and had gone back to the dig. When I arrived back at the cafe Simon waved me over excitedly.

‘You missed it,’ he said. He put a hand out towards me as I sat down.

‘Missed what?’

He pointed to the old men at the back. They were talking hurriedly and were in a sort of huddle, an angry huddle. You could tell from the grim faces that turned to me occasionally.

‘Your friend, Dr Susan Hunter, she was on the radio. It came on in English! It was a recording of her talking. It’s causing a sensation.’ He waved towards the men at the back of the room.

‘They all started shouting,’ he said.

Just then a wailing broke out. It was the sound of an air raid warning. I’d heard something similar once on an RAF base in Essex but this one was wailing faster and the noise was coming from multiple directions.

Simon’s eyes flickered one way then the other, then he bent towards me, beckoning me to lean close.

‘This is not good,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard those sirens in a long time.’

It was three o’clock in London. Henry had phoned his wife to tell her to go shopping without him.

He was looking at a report on his screen. It was about Lord Bidoner.

He hadn’t sent a notice to his colleagues in electronic data gathering to downgrade the surveillance on Bidoner. He planned to do that on Monday. And if anything threatening national security in the United Kingdom emerged regarding Bidoner between now and then, he wouldn’t have to downgrade at all.

That would suit him just fine.

Could this report be enough? It was about Lord Bidoner’s commercial interests. It noted that he sat on the board of The Ebony Dragon Hedge Fund. There was nothing illegal about that. Ebony Dragon was one of the largest hedge funds in the world.

What was worrying though, was the recent positions the fund had taken in a range of firms associated with Israel. The Israeli stock market was opening as usual on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. local time, 7 a.m. in London. The head of the Israeli Securities Authority had, the day before, placed a request to the financial directors of three major firms likely to do well in times of war, to explain why they had recently issued billions in new share capital.

An out-of-hours buy-up of defence stocks on Wall Street was underway too.

The Israeli Securities Authority email had been intercepted and the link with Ebony as the main new investor had been identified by the automated electronic data gathering system.

It looked very much, to an objective outsider, as if Ebony was building a position that would surge in value if a war took place involving Israel. Each of the firms identified would benefit from immediate major orders from the Israeli defence forces in the event of a conflict, and immediate stock market share spikes, which could be capitalised on.

Would Ebony sell out when their investment doubled? Would they make billions in days?

He closed the document and tagged it.

Proving what he’d just theorised was going to be the difficult part. The very difficult part. Exposing how investors could profit from war would create a scandal. Leaking the details of what he’d found out had to be considered. Henry looked up the contact details of a journalist who’d appreciate this sort of tip off. Then he phoned Sergeant Finch.

‘I missed the beginning of what she said, but I heard the last bit clearly.’ Simon shook his head, as if he still didn’t believe it.

‘What did she say? Where the hell has she been for the last ten days?’ I said.

‘The audio was from a YouTube video put up last night. That’s what they said after it all played out. They didn’t say where the recording was made. But they did say she was still missing.’ He looked sorrowful.

I took a long deep breath. It was good Susan was alive; that she was sending out messages. It meant Isabel might well be alive too. One of the knots inside me loosened a little.

‘What did she say?’ I was talking slowly.

‘She said she’d translated a letter from the first caliph. She said it claimed the transfer of Jerusalem for all eternity into the hands of Islam.’

He raised his eyes to heaven, glanced at the old men. One of them was gesticulating, his hands sweeping through the air.

I sat back. Great. Publicising such a claim was just about the last thing anyone needed in a city on the edge of a cliff.

‘Surely it won’t be taken seriously, some ancient claim on Jerusalem from over a thousand years ago? No one will give a damn in a few days’ time.’ I was hoping he’d agree.

Simon shook his head vigorously. ‘Every proof of legitimacy for one side or the other here is like winning the world series or the world cup for whoever finds it. If us Jews say an ancient scroll talks about us in Jerusalem, it’s taken as proof of our right to own this city. And the other side do the same for any evidence they find.’

He glanced up as a young woman came into the cafe. She was different to most people I’d seen in the city. She wore a leopard pattern coat and high heeled boots and her hair was long and bright yellow.

Simon turned back to me. ‘You’d be surprised how people try to take our historical legitimacy away, to minimise how long Jews have lived here, or claim we were different back then to who we are now. The lies would amaze you.’

He leaned close again. ‘All this madness about a letter looks like an attempt to stir up the Arab street to me. How come such a find has never been publicised before, eh? And how would such a document have survived? No, no, it’s a forgery. It has to be. There’s a long, evil tradition of this sort of thing.’

‘What do the Palestinians make of it?’

His head went down. He stared at the table. ‘They are celebrating in Ramallah and Nablus. There’s talk of a march on Jerusalem.’

I sipped from the plastic bottle of water I’d ordered with my coffee. Was all this trouble brewing because of the manuscript Isabel and I had found under Hagia Sophia in Istanbul?

‘I know where the letter came from,’ I said.

I told him about the manuscript, how we’d found it in an underground tunnel in the old part of Istanbul.

‘It could still be a fake,’ he said. ‘Or Susan Hunter could be twisting the translation after getting her own arm twisted.’ He gestured in the air, as if he was wringing a wet rag.

‘They better not twist Isabel’s arm,’ I said.

‘I hope not,’ said Simon. He put a hand to his forehead and held it.