The Last Testament (49 page)

Maggie hesitated; a plan was forming in her head. This was a public place, exposed. Miller wouldn’t want to take her by force. Not here, not if he could help it. That was why he hadn’t yet pounced. She spoke again.

‘Is that any way for Bruce Miller, Special Assistant to the President of the United States, to be talking?’

THE LAST TESTAMENT

419

‘I’m the Political Counsellor to the President, if you don’t mind, young lady. Now give me that tablet.’

Maggie smiled. Nothing more important to a Washington man than his title.

Uri’s voice crackled again: ‘Maggie, what are you doing? Tell him about the camera! Tell him to call the consulate!’

Not yet.

‘You mean this?’ She held up the tablet, keeping it as straight and steady as she could. ‘What could be so important about this little object that you’ve got six men aiming their guns at me, an innocent woman – Maggie Costello, negotiator for the United States State Department?’

‘We’ve been over this, Maggie.’

‘It’s just a little bit of clay, Mr Miller. Not much bigger than a credit card. What could be so important about that?’

Uri was boiling over. ‘
Tell him!
’

‘Are you bluffing, Costello? You playing for time, ’cause you been had? Is that some dummy tablet in your hand? ’Cause if it is, you ain’t got nothing. No bargaining chip, no leverage, not a bean.’

‘Oh, I’ve got the real thing here, Bruce Miller, believe me.

The last will and testament of Abraham the patriarch. That’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it?’

‘
Maggie!
’ Uri was getting desperate, but she wasn’t done yet.

‘And that’s why Rachel Guttman had to die. And Baruch Kishon. And Afif Aweida and God knows who else. You got your men to kill those people, just because of this, didn’t you?’

‘Maggie, come on. You know why we had to take those people out. If we didn’t get that tablet into safe hands, many more would die. Thousands, maybe even millions.’

‘So you’re not ashamed of killing those people, even though they were innocent? You’re not ashamed of assaulting me and torturing Uri Guttman? Tell me honestly, Bruce Miller. Look me in the eye and tell me.’

420

SAM BOURNE

‘Ashamed? I’m proud of it.’

‘All right. I’ll give the tablet to you,’ she said, doing her best to keep her voice steady. She had heard what she needed to hear. But the guns remained locked on her.

‘But there’s something you ought to know, Mr Miller. You’ve just made what could be your greatest ever TV appearance.

There’s a camera on you right now, relaying this whole conversation onto the internet. Call the consulate. Get someone to log on to www.uriguttman.com. Ask them to describe to you what they see. Go on. If I’m lying you’ll soon find out and then you can do what the hell you like to me.’

She saw Miller pull out his mobile phone and whisper into it.

Uri spoke again. ‘Tell him to wave for the camera.’

Maggie could hear the confidence in Uri’s voice. ‘Come on, Bruce Miller, Political Counsellor to the President of the United States of America, give us a wave,’ she called out.

She heard two words of confirmation, from Miller’s own mouth. They were said quietly, but their meaning was unmis-takeable.

‘Holy shit.’

God only knew how, but Uri had not been bluffing. He did indeed have Miller on camera; it had held steady on his face as he had identified himself and confessed everything.

‘That’s mighty clever, Miss Costello. I’ll hand it to you. But with the greatest of respect, who cares about some no-name website? No one was watching that. It went into the ether and now it’s vanished.’

‘Not quite. We’re recording this as it goes out. People will be able to play it again and again.’ It was Uri’s voice, except this time it was not coming through the phone. He was emerging from the hillside, climbing back up through the trees – with a small, hand-held video-camera at his eye. Walking beside him was Mustapha. Maggie could only smile at the sheer cheek of it.

THE LAST TESTAMENT

421

‘Right now, we’ve got the news editor over at Channel 2

looking at these pictures. And who was it you just phoned, Mustapha?’

‘Al Jazeera. Ramallah bureau.’

‘They’re all watching this little scene. And before you get any ideas, Mr Miller, this is only a second camera. Getting what we call B-roll. The main camera is down there, safely hidden from view. You blast me now and my friend there will capture it in glorious Technicolor.’

Maggie could see Miller paling. He tried a smug smile, one of his characteristic TV expressions, but it came out crooked. Finally he stammered out some words. ‘Who’s going to believe this cock and bull story of yours?’

‘No one would have believed it, Bruce,’ Maggie conceded.

‘Not until you confirmed every last detail just now. For which we are eternally grateful. You know, when this bit of video finds its way onto YouTube and CNN and ABC and all the rest, I don’t think even you will be able to talk your way out of it.’

A mobile phone rang. Miller’s. He answered, only to turn from pale to transparent. He swivelled around, showing his back to Uri’s camera, though his voice was still audible.

‘Yes, Mr President. I can hear you clearly, sir. I understand: you can see me too. I agree, technology is an incredible thing, sir.’ He said nothing for a good half-minute, then spoke again.

‘I will draft the letter of resignation immediately, sir. And yes, I will make clear that this was a rogue operation, wholly my own initiative. Goodbye, Mr President.’

Without another word, Miller gestured at the armed men.

Their weapons still raised, they slowly withdrew back up the steps, away from the model, forming a kind of protective cordon around Miller’s retreat. A few seconds later and they were gone.

Uri lowered his camera and walked over to Maggie. As they hugged, he pointed towards the trees. ‘That’s who I was calling 422

SAM BOURNE

from the car. An old cameraman friend of mine who lives in En Kerem. I told him to get in position, hide himself and aim his longest lens here. Oh, and to bring his smallest microwave transmitter with him. With the sound from your phone, I’d say it was my best work.’

Maggie suddenly broke off the hug, seized by a thought.

‘Is that thing still on?’

Uri nodded.

It was the object in her hand that made her do it. It felt like an explosive, primed to go off at any moment. So many people had already been killed for it; she and Uri had been chased, beaten and shot for it. No one who held its secrets was safe.

‘Point the camera at me,’ she said to Uri. ‘Right now.’

He brought the viewfinder to his eye, steadied himself, then gave her a thumbs up.

‘My name is Maggie Costello. I’m a peace negotiator working for the United States government in Jerusalem. This,’ she held up the tablet, just as Shimon Guttman had done in the videomessage they had seen yesterday, ‘this tablet is nearly four thousand years old. Over the course of the last week, Bruce Miller and an American covert-ops team have bugged, burgled and murdered their way across this country and beyond trying to get hold of it. You heard Mr Miller confess to that a moment ago.

He wanted to keep the fact of this tablet’s existence, and above all its contents, a secret. And here’s why.’

At last she took a good look at the object she had peeled from its hiding place by the miniature Warren’s Gate, gripping it tightly ever since. When she finally saw it up close, she was almost disappointed. It was so small, the characters etched on it so tiny.

The whole thing was no bigger, and much slimmer, than a cigarette packet, hewn from rough, earthen clay. And yet her own government had been prepared to kill for it – along with any number of fanatics among both the Israelis and Palestinians. The THE LAST TESTAMENT

423

words carved here, so many thousands of years ago, would have the power to unleash a war of wars, one that would never stay confined to those two sides. What if Abraham had given Mount Moriah to Ishmael but the Israelis refused to hand it over? The world’s Muslims would insist they had been cheated of their birthright. The clash of civilizations would be made terrifyingly real. And if Abraham had bequeathed the Temple Mount to the Jews, would the Muslims simply give way, letting go of the site where Mohammed rose to the heavens? Whatever this small chunk of clay said, it could only spell victory for one side and disaster for the other.

As she turned it over, she looked for a small piece of tape on the bottom edge which she had noticed when she pulled the tablet from the ground. She had assumed it was part of the fixing that Shimon Guttman had cleverly devised to keep this treasure hidden in the shadows of the model city. But when she brought it up to her eye she saw that it was not just tape, though it was sticky on one side. It was instead a tiny clear plastic envelope, a small-scale version of the kind traffic wardens put on car windscreens to keep a parking ticket dry. Carefully, she peeled it away from the tablet. Then she removed from it a small white square of paper bearing three neat, if tiny, blocks of print. The first was in Hebrew, the second in Arabic and the third in English.

She skimmed the English paragraph and began to read aloud, into the camera.

‘This is a tablet dictated to a scribe by Abraham the patriarch, shortly
before his death in Hebron. It is in cuneiform script, in Old Babylonian
language. The translation of his words reads thus:

‘I Abraham, son of Terach, in front of the judges have attested thus.

The land where I took my son, there to make a sacrifice of him to
the Mighty Name, the Mountain of Moriah, this land has become
424

SAM BOURNE

a source of dissension between my two sons; let their names here
be recorded as Isaac and Ishmael. So have I thus declared in front
of the judges that the Mount shall be bequeathed as follows—’

She fell silent the instant the shot rang out. When she hit the ground, her hand stayed tightly wound around the tablet, clinging on to it, as if to life itself.

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

JERUSALEM, FRIDAY, 1.44PM

The camera fell from his hand with a thud. Uri dashed over to her, crouching over her body to see where she had been hit.

Less than a second later he heard a bullet whizzing past his own ear. Now he too fell flat, trying to lie on top of Maggie, to shield her body from the incoming fire.

He looked across and saw Mustapha, also prone on the ground.

With a tiny movement of his finger, the Palestinian gestured for Uri to look upwards. There, directly above them, leaning over the parapet that overlooked the model city, were the barrels of several guns, firing into the trees opposite. Were these Miller’s men, regrouped? Were they trying to kill the hidden cameraman, as if that would somehow save them and their boss?

There was a rustle from the trees and then a Hebrew cry of

‘
Al tira!
’

Don’t shoot.

From above, Uri heard a response: ‘
Hadel esh!
’

Hold your fire.

He gradually raised himself up. Maggie was on the ground, deathly still.

426

SAM BOURNE

Now, he could hear a clamour of Hebrew voices as more than a dozen men pounded down the steps: Israeli police. Their semi-automatic weapons were aimed squarely at two men standing on the hillside just below the model.

‘Identify yourselves!’ the police commander barked.

There was silence.

‘Identify yourselves or we shoot!’

Were these Palestinians, their Hebrew learned in jail, come here to mount some suicide mission? If they hesitated even a second longer, Uri knew what would happen: they would be shot in the head, the only sure way to prevent them setting off a bomb.

But they wore no bulky clothes, the usual giveaway. They were dressed casually; truth be told, they looked Israeli.

‘We are The Defenders of United Jerusalem,’ the older of the pair said eventually in unaccented Hebrew. And now, as the police circled them, Uri could see clearly, perched on the back of each of their heads, a knitted kippa, or skullcap – the unambiguous badge of the Jewish settler movement.

‘So they were after us as well.’

Uri wheeled round to see Maggie sitting up, rubbing her eyes.

‘Maggie! You’re alive!’

‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know I was such a wuss.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m meant to be a big tough diplomat. I’m not meant to faint the moment someone fires a gun.’

The police kept all three of them, Uri, Maggie and Mustapha, for several hours, asking each of them to give long, detailed statements. At their side throughout was a lawyer, Uri’s brother-in-law, who insisted on his clients’ right to keep their private property, including the clay tablet, private. After his intervention, the tablet stayed with them at all times. As for the tiny THE LAST TESTAMENT

427

white square of paper, Maggie hid that deep in a pocket and never let it go.

When they emerged from the police station, it was to a scene Maggie and Uri had seen plenty of times on TV but which neither ever expected to experience directly. Hundreds of camera lenses were aimed at them, flashbulbs strobing, arc lights on full glare.

They had barely set foot outside the building when this vast crowd gave a collective roar, as dozens of photographers and reporters called out in unison: ‘Maggie! Maggie! What did he say? Maggie, what did Abraham say? What does the tablet say?’

Uri and Mustapha flanked her on either side, each of them shoving people out of the way in order to get to the taxi that was waiting for them. The driver had to do two full circuits before he had shaken off the chasing vans and motor cycles, eventually reaching Maggie’s hotel.

In the sanctuary of her room, Maggie switched on the television. She had some clue what to expect from her mobile phone, returned to her by the police with a flashing message announcing
Inbox Full
. She listened to the first few voice messages: BBC, NPR, CNN, Reuters, AP, the
New York Times
, all requesting an interview as soon as humanly possible. The
Daily Mail
in London offered a six-figure sum if she would tell them the exclusive story of a single woman’s quest for the tablet of Abraham. There were also several messages from the White House.