The Last Testament (44 page)

Negotiation
. The mere mention of the word was enough to make her snap back into herself. She had always been good at what the shrinks call ‘compartmentalization’, shutting one aspect of THE LAST TESTAMENT

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her life out of another so that she could concentrate on the task at hand, and now, consciously, she forced herself to perform the trick again. To forget what had just happened, even her loathing of the monster opposite her, and do her job. To negotiate.

‘I won’t tell you a thing until you tell me what the hell is going on here.’

‘Look, Maggie. I don’t want to repeat myself. But you have no leverage here. I can force you to tell me what you know, if I have to.’

‘Oh, really? The President’s most trusted adviser personally directing the assault of a US citizen, a senior US diplomat – in an election year. That should play well in the polls.’

‘No one’s going to believe a word you say. A washed-up slut who can’t keep her legs closed, banging first the Africans and then some Israeli. How do you think that’ll look on the front page of the
Washington Post
?’

Maggie closed her eyes, involuntarily. She was proofing herself, like an animal instinctively hardening its hide against an incoming assault. She knew he was right. That her mistake in Africa, coupled with her relationship with Uri, could finish her off completely. That in a contest of credibility, which is what most political scandals came down to, she would lose to Bruce Miller every time.

‘Yeah. And the soccer mums are going to just love a president whose main man watches while masked goons perform an anal probe of one of his female colleagues. You’re already in the deepest shit imaginable. So why don’t you talk to me and then maybe I’ll talk to you?’

Miller eyed Maggie up, the suggestion of a smile on his lips.

She could sense a poker player about to fold.

‘Like I said, you got spunk, Costello. In a different life, I could imagine you and me getting on, if you know what I’m saying.’

Maggie kept her expression fixed. If a change in your opponent 376

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was about to come, you never wanted to make the slightest move that might divert him. Never break the spell.

‘It’s not that complicated, really.’

She wanted to exhale her relief: he was going to talk. But her face stayed frozen.

‘We need a peace deal here, Maggie. And we were pretty fucking close. Then last weekend we hear there’s some tablet floating around that could be Abraham’s last will and testament—’

‘How?’

‘How what?’

‘How did you hear?’

‘Your boyfriend’s dad. Guttman. He calls Baruch Kishon, the Israeli journalist, and tells him. Not the whole story, but enough of it. Mentions the trader Afif Aweida, mentions his pal Ahmed Nour. And, as luck would have it, NSA were listening in.’

‘As luck would have it.’

‘OK, it wasn’t luck. We’d been bugging Kishon for years.’

‘Kishon? Why the hell would you be bugging him?’

‘You not been reading the files, Maggie? Kishon’s the guy who broke the Tel Aviv connection story all those years ago.’

Maggie cursed Uri for not mentioning it. He must have known.

It had been the biggest diplomatic rift between Israel and the US

for decades: three CIA agents had been double-crossing the Agency, leaking secrets to the Israelis. To this day, the Israelis constantly demanded the spies’ release from prison; even the most pliantly pro-Israel presidents repeatedly refused.

‘Kishon still talks to them in jail. Campaigns for their release.

We’ve been monitoring him ever since.’

‘And so once you heard what Guttman had told him, you decided to kill him.’

‘Oh, don’t start fucking preaching to me, young lady. We knew immediately what was at stake here. The Arabs and the Israelis are about to do the business, which means doing the business THE LAST TESTAMENT

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on Jerusalem, split the fucking place down the middle, and now we’ve got God Almighty himself, or near as dammit, saying that no, it belongs to the Jews. The whole deal would be off.’

Maggie had to work hard to stay cool.
He had seen the text: he
knew what it said
. She couldn’t let him know that she hadn’t and didn’t. ‘So you were frightened that the Israelis would walk away, because Abraham bequeathed the Temple Mount to them?’

‘Or to the Muslims. It made no difference which one got it.

Either way, the peace process would be over. We had to be sure neither of them got their hands on it.’

That allowed her a moment of relief: he was not ahead after all. Miller knew as little of the tablet’s contents as she did. She would stay on the offensive. ‘So it’s been you all along. Killing Kishon, Ahmed Nour, Afif Aweida, Guttman, Guttman’s
wife
–

anyone who might know what’s in the tablet and who might talk.’

She didn’t want to mention Uri; saying it might make it true.

‘Don’t get carried away, Costello. Guttman was killed by the Israeli secret service. The guy looked like he was about to pull a gun on Yariv, what were they supposed to do?’

‘And that kibbutz in the north. The arson attack. That was you too?’

‘Guttman was one of the main archaeologists of that site. We thought he might have hidden it there.’

Now it was Maggie’s turn to say nothing. She stared at her wrists, red welts etched deep into both of them. She started shaking her head.

‘What’s that for?’ Miller asked, irritated. She said nothing.

Then, slamming his fist on the table, he shouted, ‘Why are you shaking your fucking head?’

She looked up, glad she had needled him. ‘Because I cannot believe how deeply, profoundly stupid you are.’

‘How dare you—’

‘You did all this because you worried that the release of the 378

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testament would derail the peace process? All this killing, of people on both sides?’ There was a mirthless laugh in her voice.

‘You did all this to
prevent
the breakdown in the peace process?

Did you not think, for one second, that tit-for-tat killings, in the most delicate stage of negotiations, might actually fuck the peace talks up all by themselves? I mean, it beggars belief. What is it with you Americans? Like, Iraq poses a threat: so let’s invade and make it a thousand times
more
of a threat! And now you’ve made the same mistake all over again.’

‘You have no right to lecture me—’

‘I have every right. I have been running around this country, risking my life, desperate to get to the bottom of whatever was causing all this violence, because I wanted to help save the peace process, because I actually believed in it. And now I find the real source of the trouble and of the violence that’s been destroying everything, wasn’t Hamas or Jihad or Fatah or the settlers or the Mossad or any of them. It was you!’

Miller had collected himself. ‘I always knew you were naive, Maggie; it was part of your charm. But this is too much. You don’t think these guys would have got started the moment they knew about the testament? Of course they would. There’s been plenty of killing going on here all week that had nothing to do with us. Qalqilya. Gaza. The schoolbus in Netanya. If we’d done nothing, all that would still have happened, all by itself. Same with Hizbullah and the Iranians going batshit.’
Eye-ranians
. ‘That’s the real world, my girl. You’re facing a disease that’s ’bout to spread, you kill the first beast that gets it. Otherwise, it’ll kill the whole herd.’ It was the down-home, farm-boy shtick that Miller deployed to such good effect on the Sunday morning talk shows in Washington. It always intimidated the press, made them feel like soft-handed city boys.

‘So that’s what this was, eh? You derail the peace process a bit, before the lunatics derail it even more.’

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‘There are no good choices in this game, Maggie. You should know that by now.’

‘And I suppose it was working. Until I came along and started poking around.’

‘Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.’

‘Why? You’d have pulled it off, wiping out anyone who knew about the tablet. Abraham’s secret would have remained a secret.

But I waded in, didn’t I, obsessing night and day to uncover what you had decided should stay hidden. What a bloody fool I am.’

‘You want to ease up on yourself, Maggie.’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because you’ve done exactly what we wanted you to do –

from the very beginning.’

C H A P T E R F I F T Y - S E V E N

JERUSALEM, FRIDAY, 9.41AM

Maggie stared at the ground. She needed to steady herself and this was the way she would do it. If she looked up, if she looked at him, she would lose her balance.

A shift had just taken place between them, they both knew that. Now she needed something from him as badly as he did from her. She was in a position of weakness. Had this been a negotiation about a border, or water, or even weekend access and custody of the house in the Hamptons, she would have known how to disguise the situation, how to conceal her need-iness. But the most skilled negotiator becomes a dunce when negotiating on his own behalf. Maggie’s colleagues told repeatedly the story of the UN mediator who, despite winning a Nobel peace prize, had tried and failed to land himself a pay rise.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean: I did exactly what you wanted me to do?’

Miller smiled. He knew as well as she did the mistake she had just made, revealing her need.

‘Oh, come on, Maggie. Let’s not dwell on this. We’ve got work to do. Believe it or not, we have a peace process to save.’

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‘Like you care.’

‘You kidding? Are you fucking kidding?’ The smile was gone now. ‘What do you think we were doing here? This whole operation was about
saving
the peace talks. We knew they’d be deader than a turkey in November the second that tablet got out.’ He gave Maggie a look of deep disgust. ‘You just don’t get it, do you? Not any of you smug East Coast, European, liberal elite assholes.’ He leaned across the table, his eyes flashing. ‘You love all the nice stuff, the talks, the meetings, the plans, the counter-plans, the roadmaps, the UN resolutions, the ceremonies, the White House handshakes – you love all
that
. But d’you ever stop for one goddamned second and wonder how all that is possible?

You ever wonder what drags a bloodthirsty bastard like Slobodan Milosevic to Dayton to sit down for one of your fucking peace treaties? Do you?

‘Well, I’ll tell ya. It’s evil fuckers like me and my masked friends outside, that’s what. Milosevic didn’t do the deal because you flashed your pretty eyelashes at him. Just like your brethren in the IRA didn’t sign on the dotted line because you or someone like you wiggled your ass in their direction. No, they did it because someone like me was threatening to drop a megaton of dynamite on their heads if they didn’t. And not just threatening.

Sometimes we did it, too.

‘Sure, we let you guys get the credit and the peace prizes and the book deals and the interviews on Charlie Rose. Sure, let the
New York Times
suck your dick. I don’t care. I’ll be the son of the devil, I can take it. But don’t fool yourself, missy. There’d be no peace unless there were guys like me ready to make war.’

Maggie took a deep breath. ‘And that’s what you were doing here? A bit of war so that we could make peace, that’s what—’

‘You’re damn right, that’s what we were doing. And it made sense, too. The two sides are still in the room—’

‘Technically.’

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‘There’s a back channel too, so they’re talking, believe me.

Besides technically’s better than nothing. And nothing and nowhere is where we would have been if this bastard tablet had got out. I’m proud of what we did.’

‘Did everyone know apart from me?’

Miller was quieter now, examining his own fingers. ‘The opposite. This was need-to-know. Me and a small team recruited for the job. Ex-special forces.’

‘The team who grabbed me in the street market. They did all the killing too?’

‘I leave operational details to them and their commander.’

‘And the rest of us were out of the loop? The Secretary of State? Sanchez?’

‘All of them. Except you.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘You should feel proud.’

‘Proud?’

‘Of what you did. You nearly got us there. To the tablet. Just like we hoped.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh come on, this ain’t
Little House on the Prairie
. You know how it works. Why do you think we sent Bonham over there to get you?’

‘To close the deal. The two sides were nearly there and you wanted me to close the deal.’ Maggie’s voice was wobbling.

‘Yeah, whatever.’

‘That’s what Bonham said!’

‘Course that’s what he said,’ Miller was staring hard at Maggie now. ‘But come on, Maggie. You think the State Department’s not crawling with people like you, skilled diplomats who couldn’t do this job? Specialists on the Middle East conflict? Don’t tell me you didn’t wonder why, out of all the people we had, we THE LAST TESTAMENT

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had to have you. We needed you because of your – how can I put this delicately? – because of your unique expertise.’

Maggie could feel herself paling. ‘What are you saying?’

‘We needed someone to get close to Guttman Junior. If anyone knew where the old sonofabitch had hidden this tablet, it would be him.’

‘You brought me here to, to . . .’ She couldn’t say the words.

‘Well, let’s face it, Maggie, you had the right resumé. You got close to that lunatic in Africa and we thought, given the right context, you’d do the same here. And you did. Like I said, you should be proud.’

A moment of puzzlement, followed by a strange feeling, one that Maggie had not known before, as if she was being crushed from the inside. So that’s what this was about, that’s what it had been about from the very beginning. Maggie heard again the voice of Judd Bonham, how he had recruited Maggie for this enterprise. Cancelling out the sin through repentance, he had said. He even mentioned redemption.
This is your chance
. He had spoken so softly, his voice sweet with reason. And yet he had been telling the opposite of the truth. He did not want her to come to Jerusalem to undo her mistake in Africa, but to repeat it. He, Miller and God knows who else had deployed her not because of her strengths – all that bullshit about the indispensable Maggie Costello, the great ‘closer’ – but because of this one weakness. All that praise; and she had believed every word of it.