The Last Testament (42 page)

She suddenly became self-conscious. She glanced up to see a man gazing at her, then looking away. Had she been muttering?

She was so tired it wouldn’t have surprised her if, in her desperation, she had started thinking out loud. She could feel her cheeks grow hot.

The guide shepherded the group around a glass panel in the ground, which revealed they were in fact walking on a bridge, with a well-like hole directly below. ‘This is only thirteen hundred years old,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Because this is not the original bridge, but one that was added later by the Muslims.’

They walked on, until they were under another vaulted ceiling.

The smell of damp was getting stronger. They were, the guide explained, walking through a series of cisterns whose arches supported the houses built above. ‘See the holes in the ceiling,’ he said, as everyone looked up. ‘They would drop a bucket from those, then pull it up, full of water.’

Maggie was barely listening, studying instead the two illumi-nated signs that had been placed down here: incongruously, they listed the foreign donors, the Schottensteins and Zuckermans, who had made these excavations possible. She scanned the names, looking for a Guttman or an Ehud Ramon or a Vladimir or a Jabotinsky, anything which might give her some clue. This place was so big, a maze of tunnels: how on earth was she meant to find anything here? She fully understood Uri’s exasperation with his father: why couldn’t he have been clearer?

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The guide was calling them forward, to see what he introduced as Wilson’s Arch. He pointed to a small opening, through which they could glimpse again the solid oblong stones of the Western Wall, no different from those they had seen outside.

Most of their view was blocked, though, by a ‘women’s prayer area’ that, even at this hour, was busy.

Enough of this, she decided. Tagging along in a tour party was never going to lead her to the tablet. She needed to search properly. And that meant alone. She walked, as quietly and unob-trusively as she could, away from the group and towards the first available opening.

It was a flight of newly-constructed metal stairs she had spotted when they came in. She went down, pressing her heel into each step to prevent her boots making the clacking noise that would give her away. At the bottom, she saw a deep rectangle that seemed to have been neatly carved out of the earth, with steps on each side. Some kind of bathing pool.

Go west, young man, and make your way to the model city, close
to the Mishkan. You’ll find what I left for you there, in the path
of ancient warrens.

There was nothing here that connected this place to Guttman’s clue. She moved forward, into a wider space, where a group of men in yellow hard hats were working: Arabs, Maggie couldn’t help noticing. She remembered the note in the briefing material, noting the irony that the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, like Israel’s security barrier or wall, which were so hated by the Arabs, were almost always built by Arab hands.

Facing her was the newly-exposed section of the Western Wall. She skim-read the sign: five tons each, finely cut, bev-elled edges and neat borders, one longer than a bus, weighs in at five hundred and seventy tons, heavier than a 747 loaded 358

SAM BOURNE

with passengers and all their luggage.
Shit
. When was she going to see something that made sense?

She searched for an opening. There was only one and she took it, finding herself on a narrow path, faced on one side by an enormous arch that seemed to have been bricked up, filled in with a coarse, craggy rubble. Next to it was a sign: Warren’s Gate.

Thank God for that. Guttman was not messing them around after all. Had not his clue spoken of the ‘path of ancient warrens’? Both she and Uri had taken that to mean this warren of ancient tunnels, but Guttman had been far cleverer than that.

He meant this place: not warrens at all, but Warren’s. And here she was.

She looked up, down and around, confident that the hiding place was about to reveal itself. Yet all she could see was this wall of stone and brick, each piece apparently solid and unyielding. She began tapping and pulling, hoping to find a loose brick that might come away easily. None yielded.

Her confidence waning, she fell to her knees. She would work methodically, starting with the bottom line of stones. She began grabbing and tugging, the skin of her fingers scratching and tearing on the coarse brick. The wall was rock solid. Her hands moved frantically across the next line of stones, then the next.

Nothing.

She stood up to look at the wall opposite. Perhaps the hiding place was here. She gazed high above and then below. Where in God’s name had Guttman hidden it?

And then she saw him.

The same man she had made eye contact with during the tour, except now he was standing, alone, at the other end of this narrow pathway. Maggie registered no embarrassment, only recognition.

She had seen his face before. But where? Her mind was so addled with exhaustion, it was like wading through deep water THE LAST TESTAMENT

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to find the memory. It was recent, she knew that. Just the last few days. Was it at the hotel? At the consulate? No, she suddenly realized. Oh no. It was not there at all.

It had been at the nightclub in Tel Aviv where she and Uri had tracked down Baruch Kishon’s son. Maggie had noticed him at the entrance, shortly after they had arrived. She had almost given him a sympathy smile: another thirtysomething, out of place in a club heaving with lithe and gorgeous kids. He had followed her then – and he had followed her now.

His purpose was beyond doubt. Whatever she was about to discover, he would want for himself, to pass on to God knows who. To the men who had killed Uri’s mother, Kishon, Aweida and maybe even Uri. The men who would doubtless do the same to her, right here, right now, in this catacomb of age-old secrets.

C H A P T E R F I F T Y - T H R E E

JERUSALEM, FRIDAY, 8.21AM

Her legs made the decision before she did. She stood up and ran, rushing through a narrowing of the passageway, in which perhaps a dozen women were standing, each of them holding a prayer book. Their heads were covered with hats or crocheted snoods and their faces were pictures of intensity. As Maggie pushed past them, she could see they were all but touching a wall that was trickling with water, their lips nearly brushing it.

Two other women, tourists probably, were standing apart from the rest. Maggie overheard them: ‘The Foundation Stone is just through there, on the other side of the wall. Did you hear what they said? That those drops are God’s tears.’

Maggie shoved them out of the way. She looked over her shoulder to see the stalker had now been joined by another man, a videocamera around his neck. They were getting closer. She picked up speed.

Now the pathway became a long, low, narrow tunnel. She ran on, hunched over. When she glanced back she saw them gaining on her, even as they ran in their own awkward crouch.

In panic, she whirled around and dashed forward, only to smash THE LAST TESTAMENT

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her forehead on a metal rafter lodged in the ceiling. She gasped, then jumped as the wall on her left suddenly disappeared: an alcove, inside which was a wizened woman, dressed entirely in black, clutching a prayer book. Maggie felt dizzy.

Now the ground beneath her feet changed: a glass square looking down onto what might have been a cistern or a room below. The men were only about ten yards behind her.

Suddenly the tunnel passageway ended, opening out into another cistern. At last she could raise her head. She was desperate to find a way off the official path, so that she might give these men the slip. But there only seemed to be one opening each time. She would just have to stay ahead of them until she could break back out into the daylight. But how much longer would that be?

She was panting now, as she found herself in what looked like a corner of a long-buried Roman market. She faced two pil-lars, topped by a portico. Alongside it were two square slabs of stone, dumped on top of each other, as if the construction workers of two millennia past had simply downed tools and abandoned their task. She could hear heavy footsteps behind her. She looked for an exit but could see only one.

The path narrowed again, turning ninety degrees away from the Western Wall which had remained, until then, reliably on her right. Now, instead of the neat, regimented stones, she seemed to have entered some kind of underground gorge, a canyon of steep walls, as high as a cathedral, hugging her on both sides.

They were wet and made up of solid, striated layers of colour, like the inside of a cake.

‘Stop!’ shouted one of her pursuers.

As she glanced over her shoulder, she thought she saw the second man, the one with the camera, draw a weapon and aim it at her. She yelped and ducked, but he could get no clear line of sight: the rocks twisted and turned too sharply.

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At last she came to a set of narrow, metal stairs. She almost fell forward into them, and struggled to keep her balance. She clat-tered up them, breathing raggedly. Once at the top, she had to turn sideways just to get through, so tight was the gap. Behind her she heard a woman’s scream: someone had just seen the gun.

And then the space opened out again, so that she was in what appeared to be a Roman vault. Once her eyes adjusted, she could see that it was in fact another pool, this one full of thick, stag-nant water. She stood for a second, her lungs screaming to extract oxygen from this musty, humid air. Where did this pool lead?

Maybe it came out somewhere outside, away from here. She stood at the edge, contemplating a dive. She had always been a good swimmer. Perhaps she could hold her breath . . .

But then she heard the footsteps, just a yard or two away and her instinct led her to turn away from the pool and scramble through the only opening instead. The second she had, she was flooded with relief. For now she could see daylight. Up a path, through a turnstile and she was out.

Gulping at the air, blinking at the sudden sunlight, she found that she had come out onto a narrow street, busy with people.

Directly opposite her was a sign: Sanctuaries of the Flagellation and the Condemnation. And out of the sanctuary came a monk in a brown cassock with a rope around his waist. She was on the Via Dolorosa, Christ’s route to the Crucifixion.

Maggie would have felt a moment’s ancient Catholic comfort in the familiarity of it, if she had had the time. But she had no such luxury. Waiting for her at the exit were two men, their faces covered, who stepped forward and, calmly and with minimal exertion, grabbed her.

C H A P T E R F I F T Y - F O U R

JERUSALEM, FRIDAY, 8.32AM

Gloved hands gripped her wrists so hard it was as if they were made of steel rather than flesh and blood. She gasped but made no sound: other hands had already placed a small strip of material, like a rolled bandana, into her mouth. No one said anything.

They moved her backwards, off the street and back into the tunnels – away from public view. ‘What are you doing? Who are you?’ she tried to say through the gag. Knowing her words were useless, she added: ‘And what have you done with Uri?’

Two of the men in front of her stepped forward, as if anticipating, and seeking to prevent, a violent reaction from her. They were right: instinctively, she tried to lash out. She attempted to move her arms, but they were now bound in what felt like tight plastic tape, the kind that comes on a new product, so strong it can be cut only with a sharp blade. She tried to scream but this only succeeded in making her retch on the material jammed into her mouth. Now she was panting even harder, her lungs forced to sate their craving for air through her nose. She could feel her heart thumping, driven not just by the exertions of the chase but by fear for her life.

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The two men in front of her came closer, so that she could see the small portion of their faces that was not hidden. The eyes of the taller man, on her left, were dark, flat and glassy, like a pond frozen in winter. He looked as if even this, the sight of a woman surrounded by masked men, fighting for breath, bored him. Maggie looked at his partner, or rather looked
to
him, as if hoping to find some spark of the human. But what she saw chilled her. For the green eyes of this man did indeed betray an emotion; and that emotion was pleasure.

It was he who approached now with another strip of black material in his hands. As he moved his hands around the back of her head, his face just inches away from hers, she came to a cold, certain realization. He was the man who had assaulted her a few hundred yards away from here, in the back streets of the market. And now she understood, as the blindfold was tightened and the world fell into blackness, that she was as good as dead.

She felt a shove in the centre of her back and stumbled forward, someone catching her arm to prevent her falling to her right. She must be listing, like a drunk.

After a few minutes of staggering in this manner, maybe much less, maybe much more, she detected a change in the acoustics: no longer the echo of hard stone walls. And the cold dankness of the air was lifting, its mustiness less pronounced. Was she deceiving herself, or did she perceive, even through the blindfold, a change in the light?

They were stopping. She could hear other voices, further away.

She imagined the world outside these tunnels and wondered if she would ever see it again.

There was some whispered talk; she strained to hear the language, but it was just out of reach. Then she was shoved forward again, her feet stumbling on the uneven surface. And then she was certain of the change. There was street noise: people, cars, footsteps. The colour of the dark under her blindfold altered, THE LAST TESTAMENT

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as if someone had let off fireworks in a night sky. And, the real giveaway, she felt warmth on her skin. The warmth of sunlight.

It made no sense, but she was relieved. They weren’t going to kill her in those tunnels, then; she wouldn’t have to rot in an abandoned cistern, the air echoing with women muttering endless psalms.