Zhilev realised he was short of breath and his joints were tingling with the adrenaline that had surged through them when the code appeared on the page.
He slumped into the chair to unwind and pull himself together. He now had all the time in the world for the last phase. Jerusalem was his for the taking, and he was going to destroy it. He was not a God-fearing man but if there was such a being, then Zhilev had surely been given his blessing.
He checked his watch. Breakfast was still being served in the restaurant downstairs. He would put on his new clothes, have a hearty meal and head for the old city. He would not bother to check out.What was the point? By lunchtime the hotel would not exist.
Stratton asked the taxi to pull over a hundred yards from the road that led to the entrance to his hotel.
‘That’s the hotel to the right of the minaret,’ he said to Abed, pointing at the stone tower. A small chamber at the top had been designed originally for a man to stand in, blasting the area with calls for Muslims to come to prayer. Now it concealed a set of tiny speakers. ‘It’s watched,’ Stratton added. ‘Understand?’
Abed nodded. He did not need Stratton to tell him to be aware of people watching and following him. He had been looking over his shoulder since the day he left Gaza.
‘Above the hotel, further up the road, are some shops. There’s a store where you can get something to eat. It looks a busy place. Find a way around from behind. Don’t go past the front of the hotel. I’ll see you inside the shop in an hour.’
‘Okay,’ Abed said as he opened the door and climbed out. Stratton tapped the driver on the shoulder and as the car drove away, Abed walked off in the opposite direction.
The taxi pulled up outside the hotel, Stratton paid the fare and the car drove away. He paused in the street long enough to glance up and down it, checking to see if there was any obvious evidence the entrance was being watched. There wasn’t and he didn’t expect there to be. The Israelis had had plenty of time to master the art of surveillance, and if they were here, he didn’t expect he would see them, even with his experience.
He walked into the hotel and asked for his key at the desk. The receptionist took it from a hook and plucked a piece of paper from a pigeonhole above it.
‘There’s a message from your friend Mr Stockton,’ she said with a pleasant smile. ‘He asks that you go to his room as soon as you get in. Number twelve. You can take the elevator through there or walk up to the first floor.’
‘Thanks,’ Stratton said as he took his key and headed through a stone arch and to the foot of the stairs. A minute later he was outside room twelve and knocking on the door.
Gabriel opened it and stood in the doorway looking accusingly at Stratton. ‘Where have you been?’ he demanded.
Stratton closed the door quickly, not wanting the rest of the hotel to hear whatever was upsetting Gabriel. ‘What’s up?’ Stratton said, emphasising his calmness to offset Gabriel’s vexation.
Gabriel walked to the dresser and leaned heavily on it as if he could no longer support himself.
‘You okay?’ Stratton asked.
‘No, I’m not okay.’ Gabriel said, looking defiantly at Stratton. He then noticed the streak of dried blood coming out of Stratton’s sleeve and down the outside of his hand, but it was nothing compared to what was troubling him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Gabriel spat, pushing himself off the desk and walking across the room away from Stratton. He stopped by an antique wardrobe near the balcony and held on to it as he looked through the patio doors.
‘Has anyone said anything to you about me being a faker?’ Gabriel asked.
Stratton did not answer. No one had, but Gabriel appeared to be heading off somewhere and needed no encouragement from him.
‘Well, I am. Surprised? Or not? You know how I got into this business? How I became a so-called psychic spy? I was a teacher. Mathematics. Not a very good one either . . . It all ended, or began if you like, fifteen years ago after a car crash. I was in hospital for weeks. They thought I was going to die . . . or maybe it was just me who thought that. I can’t remember. During rehabilitation, I started to become eccentric. That’s not true, I was always eccentric. But unlike the English,Americans don’t appreciate eccentricity. Far from it. They don’t like it. They don’t understand it.The habitually unusual unnerves them. But after the accident, I felt strangely free. I’d escaped death and I could be myself. I had a new start in life and I didn’t care what people thought about me any more. I had become brave.They say that often happens after a near-death experience. I’ve always had strange thoughts, daydreams if you like. Mostly fantasies about things I wanted to be or do. There was nothing psychic about them. But as I got older I daydreamed less and less, as if I had lost hope. There seemed no point to dreams anymore. My life was dull and I had no future and so why bother fantasising? But after the accident, the reborn eccentric in me started to enjoy those dreams once again. Freedom to think what you want is a wonderful thing. When you are dull and unambitious, you restrict your thoughts when they become absurd and unhealthy. I used to feel guilty about having them. Well I got rid of all of that. I allowed myself to think what I wanted, and even shared them with others, anyone who cared to listen. Sometimes I shocked people and I began to like doing that. The nurses thought I was mad. My psychiatrist spent a great deal of my medical insurance money listening to my thoughts. What I didn’t know was that he was fascinated with them. I would freethink away while sitting back in his armchair, enjoying an audience that even wrote down my ramblings for forty-five minutes a session.
‘A week after they sent me home, someone came to visit me. A man from the state department, or so he said. He was never very clear about that, although I remember he had great difficulty trying to avoid saying who he specifically worked for. I think he really wanted to tell me. You know how Americans are. Always wanting people to think they are special. Unlike you British who seem to revel in pretending to be nobodies. You can’t fool us though. We know you do it in the hope people will think you really are somebody . . . The man wasn’t the best communicator. It took some time before I realised he was actually trying to recruit me. Eventually he spelled it out and asked if I would attend an interview with a secret government intelligence department. He never said the words Central Intelligence Agency or Defence Intelligence but it was quite obvious.’
Stratton moved to the desk and sat in a chair beside it. Whatever it was Gabriel had to say he was taking the long route, talking more to himself it seemed, and Stratton didn’t feel like interrupting him.
‘A few days later,’ Gabriel went on, ‘I found myself in a sterile room in the Federal building sitting in front of several people who I later discovered were a mixture of psychiatrists, spooks and military personnel. Whatever it was they were looking for, I was apparently in ample possession of, and at the end of the interview they offered me a job that was considerably easier than teaching and far better paid. Basically, I was invited to spend my time sitting with a group of like-minded people searching the universe for matters concerning national security. It made no sense to me whatsoever and even sounded a little absurd but, being the pragmatist I am, I signed on the dotted line as soon as I could.
‘And so I became a remote viewer, a psychic spy. I couldn’t believe how my luck had changed. From a tiring, daily ritual teaching ill-disciplined children I did not respect, nor them me, to a revered position within the country’s national security advisory. And the job was very easy too. All I had to do was spend my time perusing the id and declaring my thoughts, no matter how bizarre, and collect a cheque at the end of each month. Sometimes a subject or person was introduced, a name or a picture, and we would go into session, and, at the end of it, after our thoughts were transcribed, they were taken away for evaluation. We didn’t always know what became of the transcriptions.
‘I took it quite seriously at first, even started to believe I could actually do it, but eventually I had to admit, to myself at lea
st, that I was faking it. Of course, I wasn’t about to tell any of them that. It had become too attractive a lifestyle to throw away just because of an attack of honesty. So I kept schtum and worked on a technique of feeding off the others, importing strings of their thoughts, building on them and exporting my own versions. I must have been very good at it because one day I learned I had received the largest portion of the credit for finding the Lockerbie bomb. I expect there were other fakers in the group but it was near impossible to tell. Who could judge you? From our point of view the answers were all there somewhere in our ramblings, and it was up to the decoders to find them; if they could not, it was their fault, not ours.
‘Then one day some people from Stanford University arrived who believed they had found a way of accurately evaluating our abilities. The CIA had been spending a fortune on the institute’s research department. I was horrified. The lifestyle to which I had grown accustomed looked as if it was about to fall apart. Worse still, I was about to be exposed as a fraud. Iraq was the turning point. When we couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, the hierarchy came down pretty hard on us and I came clean and told them I couldn’t do it any longer.And that’s when it happened. Perhaps it was because I had broken free of so many chains that restricted my clarity. I don’t know. But there I was, sitting alone in the viewing room, a tranquil place designed to be alpha provoking, waiting for the department head to call me upstairs to sign my release papers, when I saw the tanker and the horrors that were taking place on it. It was so real it frightened me. I automatically did what we always did during viewing sessions so that nothing was lost to memory and I wrote down what I had seen and drew sketches and doodled images; everything, no matter how trivial or bizarre, was placed on paper. I was called upstairs to the office and so I left the report on the table, completed my leaving routine and went home. In the early hours of the following day an agent banged on my door with orders to take me back to the agency. My papers had been processed as routine, and, to the decoders’ horror, everything I had seen had been happening as I was writing it down.’
Gabriel moved from the wardrobe and slumped on to the edge of the bed as if he no longer had the energy to stand up.
‘It’s a nuclear bomb, isn’t it?’ Gabriel asked, raising his eyes off the floor to look at Stratton. ‘That’s what the madman found in England and what he is now carrying.’
There was obviously no further point in lying to Gabriel. In fact, there was every reason to tell him the truth since this operation was far from over. If Stratton had any doubts about Gabriel, they were now gone. But he did not need to confirm Gabriel’s accusation. Gabriel could see it in his cold, dark eyes.
‘He’s here,’ Gabriel said. ‘But why are you? Aren’t you afraid?’
Stratton wanted to say it was his job, but that would have sounded pathetic. It would also have been a lie. Stratton was not about to die for anyone. It was his instincts that kept him chasing the Russian, but to analyse that any further would place him in the same confused netherworld as Gabriel.
‘I don’t like you, Stratton . . . No, that’s not entirely true. It’s your kind I don’t like.You’re the same as that man carrying his bomb.You may be the antithesis, but together you are one.You create each other and feed off each other. If you didn’t exist, he wouldn’t either.
Stratton could not agree with Gabriel. He wanted to say that for every force there had to be an opposing force.The concept of good could not exist without evil. If there was a question it was who were the good guys and where did the true evil lie. Perhaps Gabriel was right and that was why Stratton’s life often felt meaningless to him.
‘How big is the bomb?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Five miles.’
Gabriel shook his head sadly. ‘My God,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not just you . . . We’re all mad.’
A heavy knock on the door startled both of them, and Stratton got to his feet. Another energetic knock and Stratton opened the door to see Abed in the hallway.
‘He’s here,’ Abed said. ‘I saw him.’
‘The Russian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’ Stratton asked with urgency as he stepped out of the room.
‘I was at the top of the road, opposite the shops, when I saw him leave the hotel. It was not until he passed me that I recognised him.’
‘When?’ Stratton asked as he headed down the hall.
‘I came straight here but it took me a while to find you.’
‘Stratton,’ Gabriel called out from the door of his room.
Stratton stopped at the corner to the stairwell and looked back to see Gabriel holding on to the doorway.
‘Number seven,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Seven,’ Gabriel repeated. ‘I don’t know what it means, but it’s important to the Russian . . . It’s today, Stratton.’
Stratton stared at him, a myriad thoughts crashing through his mind, including how to get away from Jerusalem as quickly as possible. He forced that to the back. ‘I thought viewers could only see the present. ’
‘That’s true.’
‘Then the future. If it hasn’t happened yet, it can be changed?’ It was more of a question than a statement, and his immediate actions depended largely on the answer.
‘Not mine,’ Gabriel said darkly.
Stratton stared at him a moment longer, then he ran down the stairs at the sprint, Abed close behind him.
A minute later, they were running out of the hotel entrance and up the road.
‘Was he carrying anything?’ Stratton asked.
‘A bag, a sack, over his shoulder.’
Stratton clenched his teeth and increased his pace up the hill, past the shops and towards the bend at the top.
They passed a van outside a photographic shop, daubed in various colourful slogans advertising photographic equipment. There was no one in the front of the vehicle and the interior was concealed from view by a panel behind the front seats with a mesh screen in it. The Shin Bet agent inside videoed Stratton and Abed running towards him, then he moved to the back of the van and operated another camera and recorded them heading around the bend and out of sight.
Chapter 14
Manachem Raz sat in the cramped press office that dealt with international media, which was situated on the third floor of the government building beside the busy Ben Yehuda precinct known for its cafés and tourist boutiques. He was scrolling through data on a computer screen, the smell from the Chinese restaurant on the floor below wafting in through the window.As he scanned through the most recent applications for press passes he had to wonder why a government building had rented one of its largest rooms to a private catering business, and a Chinese one to boot, when there was a general shortage of office space. It was indicative of the country’s poor economy where every avenue to making money was being explored. He wondered how many other governments rented out public buildings to private shops. It was all the more annoying because he didn’t like Oriental cuisine.
Raz received copies of new press-pass applications at the beginning of each week which included a colour photograph of the applicant, but the next batch was not due for a couple of days and he was curious about something. He had received a report about a member of the BBC entering Ramallah late the night before, and the soldier on duty at the DCO checkpoint remembered the date on the pass showed that it had been issued that very week. The soldier could not remember the man’s name, but then it was not the checkpoint’s task to record the details of media personnel passing in and out of Ramallah.
Raz reached the end of the list and leaned back to think. Only one member of the BBC had applied for a pass in the last two weeks and that was a female assistant producer. What had prompted Raz’s curiosity was Stratton’s early arrival at the American Colony that morning, yet he had not been seen leaving. If Raz showed a picture of Stratton to the soldier, he was confident it would fit the description of the BBC journalist. The driver with him had a press
pass from the Ramatan studios in Ramallah, a Palestinian media group, but it would be more difficult to identify him since there were so many of them. If the BBC journalist was Stratton, then the driver was no doubt a member of the British spy network in the West Bank. That was no surprise to Raz. He would find the Ramatan spy eventually but there was no urgency. Besides, he did not have the manpower to spare, and the spy would be replaced before he was exposed. The British were always the most difficult to work against, but then they should be.They had been doing it longer than anyone else. The foundations of their intricate spy network had been set up during the days when they owned a quarter of the world and much of it was still in place today, even in countries they no longer had any influence over, including Israel.
Raz was interested in Stratton and what he was doing here, and his gut instinct warned him something was in the wind, but that hunch did not come from Stratton, who gave little away, but from his companion. He had looked stressed and nervous during the drive from the airport and appeared half-dead from worry. Raz had authorised a costly surveillance operation against Stratton and would soon have to provide his bosses with his reasons, and a hunch was not good enough to maintain it. He planned to keep up the watch at least until he had received Stratton’s brief and then he would re-evaluate the situation.
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was ten thirty. Time to contact Mr Stratton and hear what he had to say, although he was not expecting very much. Whatever the Englishman was up to, Raz was no doubt going to have to find out for himself.
His mobile phone rang in his pocket and he dug it out, hit the key and put it to his ear. ‘Raz.’
As he listened, he got to his feet and headed for the door, knocking papers off a desk and not stopping to pick them up. Seconds later he was running out through the entrance, past the building’s security guard and down the broad stone steps, waving for his driver who was waiting outside reading a newspaper.
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