by Sam Bourne
‘I hope the most crucial thing goes without saying. We keep following Costello and Guttman. And, whatever happens, we get to Baruch Kishon before they do. Go!’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
T HE A FULA -B ET S HEAN ROAD , NORTHERN I SRAEL , W EDNESDAY , 8.15 PM
Their orders were very clear. Get in, search and possibly destroy, get out. Above all, don’t get caught. The Director of Operations had spelled it out: this was not to be a suicide mission.
There were four of them in the car. They had not met before and only went by the names they had been given: Ziad, Daoud, Marwan and Salim. Ziad would be in charge.
He checked his watch and worried again that this operation had begun with a fatal flaw. It was too early. Much better to strike in the dead of night. But the boss had said it was urgent; no time to waste.
‘OK. Turn off here.’ It was a slip road, narrowing rapidly into a dirt track. Suitable for a tractor, but tricky for a rented Subaru. ‘Drive off, into the crops. OK. Kill the engine.’
It was a cotton field, planted high enough to conceal a car, just as they had been briefed. The reconnaissance boys had done a good job.
The four men began to change into black clothing. Ziad handed each of them balaclavas to put over their faces and made sure they had removed any other form of identification. Each of them had a small torch in his pocket, a lighter, a knife and a Micro Uzi submachine gun. Ziad and Marwan had cyclists’ water pouches strapped to their backs. Both of these contained petrol.
They all knew the plan: they would walk twenty minutes through the fields belonging to the kibbutz until they were within sight of their target. Once they were certain no one was around, they would move fast and get out.
Ziad could see the lights of the perimeter. Soon the crops would give way to the asphalt of the visitors’ car park and service roads. They would be lit too. This would be the area of greatest danger.
Sure enough, he soon saw the sign in English and Hebrew, welcoming guests to ‘Kibbutz Hephziba, Home of the Legendary Bet Alpha Synagogue’. Silently, he gave the order to duck down. One at a time, the four men ran in a low crouch towards the area Ziad’s map had described as the site entrance. The door was locked, as anticipated. He gave the nod to Marwan, who produced a wire and jimmied the door open. They slipped in, Ziad looking back to make sure no one had seen the movement of the door in the lamplight of the car park.
Inside there was complete darkness. The men waited till they were deep within before switching on their torches: too risky to let light leak out through the glass walls of this visitors’ centre. Ziad was first to use his, shining it down on the centrepiece of this location, the treasure that had brought sightseers here since the 1930s.
It was a Roman-style mosaic, perfectly intact, stretching some ten metres long and five metres wide. Even in this light, Ziad could see the clarity of the colours formed by the countless tiny squares: yellows, greens, ochres, browns, a deep wine red, a coarser shade like reddish brick as well as sharp blacks, whites and multiple variants of grey. As he had been told, the floor was divided into three distinct panels. Furthest away, what seemed to be a sketch of a synagogue, including a pair of traditional Jewish candelabra, the menorah. At the bottom, a primitive, almost childlike, depiction of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac.
But the eye was drawn immediately to the larger, middle panel. It showed a circle, divided into twelve segments, one for each sign of the zodiac. Ziad let his torch pick out each image, stopping to take in the clearest: a scorpion, next to it a pair of twins, a ram, an archer. He had not meant to linger, but he couldn’t help it. This ancient artwork, over fifteen hundred years old, was so vivid that it was impossible to look away.
‘OK, you know what to do.’ Marwan began checking the top panel, Daoud the lower, while Salim examined the central zodiac. Even the slightest sign of recent activity-fresh digging or tampering of any kind-and they were to summon the others. If something had been buried here in the last few days, they were to find it.
Ziad, meanwhile, had specific instructions. He was to locate the museum office-and take it apart, searching it meticulously. Every drawer, every filing cabinet. If there was a safe, he should get it open and leave not a speck of dust unexamined. The Director had been clear: ‘He needed to hide this item in a hurry. He will not have been able to conceal it well. If it’s there, you’ll find it.’
Ziad worked through the desk drawers first. The usual crap: rubber bands, business cards, sticky tape, envelopes. There was an old metal box, like the kind that used to hold pipe tobacco, which seemed to have potential: it felt the right weight. But inside was simply a bundle of Friends of the Museum membership cards, tied together so that in the tin they sounded like a single thick object.
He was starting on the filing cabinet when he heard a noise, the crunch of a foot on the gravel outside. A beat later, and the room filled with a sweep of torchlight, as if a beam had been passed across the whole exterior of the building.
‘Mee zeh?’ Who’s there?
Without needing an order from Ziad, the team instantly killed their own flashlights and froze. Do that and, most times, a night-watchman will tell himself that what he had seen was a trick of the light, a reflection from his own torch, and walk away. Given the choice of going to the bother of opening a locked building or doing nothing, lethargy usually won out. The unheralded friend of intruders and thieves the world over: the sheer indolence of security staff.
But this man was different. He advanced, the beam thrown by his torch getting larger as he approached the glass door. Ziad, stock still in the office, his hand gripping the drawer he had just pulled out of the filing cabinet, heard the jangle of keys. In a second, this guard would discover that the lock had been forced.
There was no time to lose. Ziad drew his weapon from the holster and stepped out into the main lobby, where he had a clear line of sight to the door. He saw the guard look up and notice not Ziad or the others, but their shadows, now giant against the walls, rendered colossal by the guard’s very own torch. Without hesitation, Ziad aimed his Micro Uzi and sent a 9mm-calibre bullet straight through the glass and into the man’s skull.
The sound of the door shattering, and the guard’s brain exploding, were the cue for an immediate change of tactic. His aim was no longer to find the object but to disguise the nature of this mission. Ziad returned to the office and, abandoning his meticulous examination, now turned the place upside down. He yanked out each desk drawer, emptying its contents onto the floor, finding nothing. Next, he shoved the filing cabinets to the ground, before sweeping the desk with a single movement of his arm, so that every item was sent flying. Then, he used his gun to break each window in turn.
He turned around to find Marwan and Daoud, carrying the corpse of the guard like a stretcher. Silently they counted one, two, three then swung his body onto the ground, amid all the debris of the office. There was a crunch as the flesh landed on the shattered glass; then, in a single, smooth action, Marwan removed the cyclist’s water pouch from his back, took off the cap and began dousing the room with petrol.
Outside Salam was switching his torch back on, lighting up a wall covered in panels explaining the Bet Alpha exhibit. He produced a can of spray paint and, slowly and calmly, daubed the wall in red graffiti. In Arabic he wrote: ‘No peace for Israel till there is justice for Palestine. No sleep for Bet Alpha till there is sleep for Jenin’.
His work done, he turned to the other three who were now standing outside the door of the museum office. A silent, interrogatory look to each of them-Ready? Ready?-then Ziad took his cigarette lighter, sparked it up and threw it to the ground, where it made instant contact with the petrol-soaked body of the security guard.
The flames erupted immediately, leaping so high that Ziad and the team could see them for most of their twenty-minute, wordless return hike through the fields of the kibbutz. The first fire engine arrived at about the same time the quartet found the car they had left in the c
otton fields. As they drove back to Afula, they counted at least two more fire trucks and several police cars, heading in the opposite direction. Ziad reached for his cellphone to send a text message to the Director: ‘The hiding place is no more.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
B EN -G URION A IRPORT , FIVE WEEKS EARLIER
Henry Blyth-Pullen hated flying at the best of times. Even before the war on bloody terror, and the fear that some maniac with a pair of scissors was going to ram the plane into Big Ben, he had been terrified of the damn things. Take-off was the worst. While everyone else was flicking through the Daily Telegraph or Hello! magazine, he would be gripping the buckle of his seat belt until his knuckles turned white. The grinding engines, the straining to lift off the ground, all of it sounded dangerous to Henry. And not just dangerous. Unnatural. As if this huge hunk of metal was meant to float in the air, defying gravity if not the will of the Almighty. No wonder there were so many accidents: it was God’s way of telling us to know our place, to keep our feet on the ground. Remember Icarus…
Henry gave himself this lecture every time he strapped himself into one of the bloody contraptions. It had acquired the status of a ritual. Though he would never admit to superstition, Henry had come to believe his little mental apology to the Creator-expressing regret for mankind’s hubris in taking to the skies-had protected him. If he ever failed to think it, if he took flying for granted, why, then the plane was sure to tumble through the clouds like a stone.
This time, though, Henry’s anxiety had had days to build, long before he got anywhere near the runway. Inside his luggage was a consignment of clay tablets which he had decided to offload three thousand miles away from London. They would not make his fortune-the items that could do that were safely stashed away in a safe, waiting for a change in the political climate-but they would at least make his monthly bank balance look a little bonnier. Besides, he needed to tell Jaafar al-Naasri he had at least sold something. The fact that he was taking the goods back to Jaafar’s very own patch, or near as dammit, was a detail he would not share. Not with anyone, as it happened. It smacked so much of selling sand to the Sahara, that he was embarrassed by it.
How to get them there, that was the issue. You couldn’t just pitch up with a bag-load of bloody precious antiquities. Jaafar had gone to great lengths to get them out; Henry couldn’t just waltz them back in.
As it happens, it was lovable old Lucinda who hit on the answer. Not consciously of course, she wasn’t that bright. No, she just stumbled on it. She was burbling on about some ex-pat friends of hers who’d set up home in Barbados or somewhere, how they didn’t miss the English weather-no fear!-they didn’t miss the telly, but the one thing they did miss was the chocolate. Or choccy, as Lucinda, flush with her third G &T, put it. ‘Apparently the choccy there doesn’t taste of anything,’ she had said, halfway towards slurring. ‘Not even real chocolate. Made with vegetable extract or something.’ Henry was barely listening. ‘Anyway, now every time a friend comes over from Blighty, they’re under strict orders to bring a caseload of Fruit & Nut, Dairy Milk and as much Green & Black as they can afford. Sophie says they’ve both put on at least a stone…’
That was it, Henry had realized before Lucinda had even finished speaking. On his way home that night he had stopped at a garage, and picked up more chocolate than he had bought in his life, one of almost every bar on the market. The next day he had sat in the back office at the showroom, experimenting with a clay tablet in one hand and an Aero or Twix in the other, trying to find a perfect match for length, width, thickness and, crucially, weight. Finally, he struck gold with a mid-size bar of Whole Nut.
Methodically, he removed the paper sleeve, taking care not to tear it. Then he unfolded the inner foil, as if handling the most precious gold leaf. He removed the chocolate bar, putting the clay tablet in its place. Then, to both the head and foot of the bar, he glued two rows of Whole Nut, each row three squares wide. Then he refolded the foil and sheathed the whole hybrid chocolate-and-clay bar back in its paper wrapper. He got through close to a hundred bars that way, ripping the foil, tearing the paper, until finally he had twenty perfect specimens ready to transport to his fictitious, but chocolate-hungry ex-pat relatives.
He had laid them neatly in his small carry-on suitcase. He had wondered about packing them into a strongbox for safekeeping, but he knew that would look suspicious: Cadbury’s was good, but it wasn’t that good. So he just had to chance it, leaving them in his bag as casually as if they really were nothing more than a high-fat treat for a nephew or niece missing home.
The security check at Heathrow was his first worry. Talk of liquid explosives on planes had not only given nervous fliers like Henry more to panic about, it also led airport staff to be much more vigilant about previously ignored food items. But, Henry told himself, if he was stopped he would keep calm and stick to his story.
He placed the bag on the conveyer belt and walked through the metal detector, as nonchalantly as he could manage.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ one of the airport staff had said, stretching his arms out wide, inviting Henry to do the same. Some forgotten change in Henry’s trouser pocket had set off the beeper. They waved him forward.
He reached for the bag, just off the belt, exhaling his relief.
A hand stopped his. ‘One moment please, sir. Can you open the bag for me?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Henry smiled and unzipped the case.
‘A computer?’
‘Yes.’
‘The sign says, computers must go in separately, sir. Please will you do it again?’
Henry could feel his hands go clammy. What were the chances that the twenty chocolate bars could evade discovery twice?
And yet, as the bag went through a second time, he saw the man charged with examining the x-ray monitor turn away to share a joke with his colleague. He stayed away from the screen for three or four seconds, just as the clay tablets, now bereft of the computer which had shielded them the first time around, lay exposed and in full view. Henry went on his way.
While Henry’s fellow passengers watched the in-flight film, Henry replayed that scene in his head over and over, thanking God, Jesus and anyone else who came to mind for his luck. But as the plane began its descent for Tel Aviv, relief at the first stage of his journey gave way to anxiety about the next.
He had no luggage to collect, so he headed straight for immigration control.
‘And why you are in Israel?’ the girl, who could have been no more than eighteen, asked him.
‘I’m visiting my nephew who’ s studying here.’
‘And where is he studying?’
‘At the Hebrew University. In Jerusalem.’ Henry had a couple of Jewish friends whom he’d called up last week: as casually as he could, he had asked after their sons, both of whom were currently on gap years, and promptly taken down and memorized all the details.
Only one more stop: Customs. As a white middle-aged man, the sorry truth was that he had always passed through customs at Heathrow like a breeze, watching the poor souls, almost always black or Asian, who were asked to empty out their suitcases, take out their clothes and squeeze every last tube of toothpaste. Racism was a hideous thing to behold, of course, but for a traveller like Henry Blyth-Pullen, it could be rather convenient.
Except this time he was stopped, the first time it had ever happened. A bored, unshaven officer waved him over to one side and then nodded wordlessly at Henry’s suitcase, which he’d been wheeling behind him. Henry pulled it up onto the metal counter between them and unzipped it.
The guard rifled through the Y-fronts, socks, toilet bag, before coming to the stash of chocolate. He looked up at Henry, raising a sceptical eyebrow.
‘And what is this?’
‘It’s chocolate.’
‘Why you bring so much?’
‘It’s for my nephew. He misses home.’
‘Can I open it?’
‘Sure. Why don’t I help?’
> Henry was certain his hands were trembling, but he kept them busy enough so that the officer wouldn’t notice. He picked a bar at random, pushed up the chocolate an inch, just as he had practised on his kitchen table, and tore off the foil to reveal a solid three squares of English milk chocolate.
‘OK.’
Without thinking, Henry broke off the chocolate and offered it to the customs official, an expression that said ‘peace offering?’ on his face. The man refused and then nodded his head towards the exit. Henry’s examination was over. Which was lucky, because if the guard had looked closely he would have seen the next row of the bar he had tested was strangely lacking in nuts, whether whole or half, and was instead unappetizingly solid.
Clutching the handle of his suitcase more tightly than ever, Henry left the airport and joined the queue for a taxi. When it came to his turn, he said loudly, pumped up with relief, ‘Jerusalem please. To the Old City market.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
T EL A VIV , I SRAEL , W EDNESDAY , 8.45 PM
For a small country, Maggie couldn’t help thinking, Israel couldn’t half be confusing. They had been driving less than an hour and yet she felt as if she had travelled through time. If Jerusalem was a town carved in the pale stone of Biblical times, each rock, each narrow cobbled path, coated in the stale must of ancient history, Tel Aviv was noisily, brashly, chokingly modern. On the horizon were gleaming skyscrapers, their highest storeys lit like checkerboards, and by the roadside line after line of concrete apartment blocks, their roofs covered with solar panels and bulbous cylinders which, Uri explained, were hot water tanks. As they pulled off the highway and into the city streets, Maggie was transfixed by the frenzy of billboards and shoppers, burger bars and pavement cafés, traffic jams and office blocks, girls in crop-tops and boys whose hair peaked in a series of peroxide spikes. Just a short drive from Jerusalem, where holiness hung like a cloud, Tel Aviv seemed a temple to throbbing, urgent profanity.
