by E. M. DAVEY
“The Way of Sorrows,” Davis smirked. “Not wrong eh, mates?”
Coppock-Davoli smiled weakly. Sweat had formed beads around his eye-sockets.
“You nervous, fella?” said Davis.
“Not at all,” replied the youngster unconvincingly.
“No need to be. The Chinese are pussies – you could probably take them singlehandedly.”
“We don’t actually know it’s the Chinese,” said McCabe.
“Of course it fucking is.”
A black dot skimmed over the street, ducking and weaving like a dragon fly.
“There she goes,” said McCabe.
The drone passed twenty feet above the compound walls before disappearing from view and attaching itself to the front door of the safe house itself.
A radio crackled. “The charge is in position,” said Parr.
She was on the roof of the Armenian Hospice with a sniper rifle and a UV scope that could see through the safe house’s reinforced door as if it was glass.
Frank licked his lips. “Now we wait.”
“No we don’t,” said Parr. “Someone’s walking towards the front door. It’s a woman. She’s fiddling in a handbag. About to leave the house.”
Coppock-Davoli’s fingers tightened around his machine pistol.
“Relax,” Davis soothed him.
Parr’s voice had become stiff. “In three, two, one … get ready, get ready.”
At the explosion all three agents were out of the car and sprinting.
*
Damien di Angelo was born into a blue-collar African-American family in the Ellwood district of Baltimore. The gaily-coloured terraces where he grew up could have passed for an Edwardian seaside town, were they not mostly boarded up – his formative years were spent amid the most diabolical crack epidemic in US history. Unusually for the neighbourhood, di Angelo’s parents were married. But his mother was an alcoholic and his father suffered from chronic anxiety, while two older brothers resided in Maryland Penitentiary. Two things saved di Angelo from the same. First, he had been born with a very high IQ, and second, he played baseball. The eccentricity of the American education system meant it was the latter that elevated him to the University of Pennsylvania to study law. Displaying a characteristic single-mindedness he prospered, and looked set for a prestigious clerkship in the Supreme Court. But an unexpected veer in direction was in store, for one cold November day he stunned his tutors by announcing he was to join the US Army. And he did it for love.
Di Angelo knew he was gay at thirteen. Like the ancient Greeks, he considered the male torso the ultimate expression of beauty. But in nineties Baltimore that was not a sentiment to be voiced, and he arrived in Pennsylvania having never been kissed. Andy Carlson was the straightest guy in his fraternity: buzz cut, military family, legs like New England oak trees and clean cut as they come. Perhaps that’s why a kid from the crack wastelands of Baltimore was drawn to him. Naturally, di Angelo never expressed his feelings. But they became friends, and when Carlson joined the army and deployed to Iraq, di Angelo followed suit. The need to impress him was imprinted on his psyche.
Then Carlson was hit with a rocket propelled grenade.
He lost a chunk of his torso and was brain damaged by blood loss from a severed femoral artery. When di Angelo visited the family home it was like paying a social call to a tuber. Right then and there he decided to stay in the army. Like Serval summiting K2 for a dying Australian, this was to be his tribute.
Brainpower is valuable in any organisation, but perhaps somewhat rarer in armies than in law firms. It also saves lives; di Angelo rose fast. Soon he was in military intelligence, directing drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia where more than one terrorist had been turned into a ‘bugsplat’ on his recommendation. The CIA came calling soon after.
This explained how Damien di Angelo came to be in a safe house in Jerusalem with a half-completed Sudoku, thinking about the explosion which turned a love affair with Carlson from fantasy to impossibility.
There was a blast downstairs and the whole building shook.
*
Dr Robin Matthews, the history lecturer from Warwick University, landed in the Holy Land two hours and seven minutes after MI6’s team. The documentation Jenny had arranged in London was sound: with his side parting, tweed jacket and elbow patches the toughest immigration officers on earth didn’t give Jake a second look.
So: this was Jerusalem. Modern outskirts, brown brick housing developments full of Orthodox Jews in all the clobber, flyovers swooping over every hill, as improbable in their curves as their defiance of gravity. Modern Israel might not be a perfect society, but you certainly can’t fault the engineering. Jerusalem’s core was the Old City, wrapped in its shell of Ottoman ramparts. On this small plateau King David was buried and Jesus crucified; Mohammed was raised up to heaven. Jake entered by the Jaffa Gate, past a Mamluk citadel with its crooked minaret. The fort stood on the foundations of Herod’s palace, the ancient blocks five times larger than the medieval stones.
Inside the city walls it was calm. The only sign of fault lines were the Israeli Defence Force soldiers, hale twenty-year-olds with shaved heads and perfect teeth. Jake navigated souks manned by shrewd Palestinians, packed with Nigerian pilgrims in multi-coloured robes. He was near her.
There was an explosion two blocks away, too loud for a backfiring car.
Locals deduced terrorism, muscling past in practised silence. At the second explosion their flight became ruthless. The blasts had come from the direction Jake was heading in, and he felt a swooping sensation rise up his windpipe. He broke into a run, against the flow of the crowd.
*
McCabe slapped a charge onto the door in the outer wall, blew that off its hinges too. A nest of video cameras observed the commandos as they darted into the courtyard: guns first, cheeks glued to their weapons, as if the barrels were pulling them on. The safe house was three storeys high and centuries old. The steel door had been propelled into the building, a smoking cave left in its wake. The hit squad fanned across the courtyard, taking position either side of the doorway.
“The woman’s lying underneath the door at the end of the corridor,” radioed Parr. “She’s alive.”
Davis raised three fingers.
Two fingers.
One finger.
He and McCabe rotated into the doorway, firing a controlled blast with their machine pistols. The bullets ricocheted off the inch-thick steel, imprinting it with thimbles.
Beneath it Senior Special Agent Wendy Valdez’s left shoulder was in tatters.
“I’m hurt bad,” she shouted. “I need help here, guys.”
Davis paused. “American?”
McCabe nodded grimly. “Sounds like it. Evelyn, do we pull back?”
A hesitation. “Proceed. But for goodness sake, no survivors.”
“Bien sûr, Madame,” said Davis.
He tossed a flash grenade down the corridor, there was a colossal bang and the doorway was illuminated solar white. Davis and McCabe swung in from each side with guns trained and advanced. The door was blackened and bent, wobbling slightly.
“Be careful,” shouted Parr. “She’s …”
Valdez popped up from beneath the door and got three shots off with a Beretta before Davis blew off the top of her skull with a single bullet that buzzed from the silenced machine pistol like a supersonic bee, opening up a skylight into her brain.
“I’m hit.” McCabe’s tone was of mild surprise.
“Is it bad?” said Davis.
McCabe touched his shoulder, where blood glistened. “It grazed me.”
Jamie Fung emerged from the far end of the corridor and shot McCabe in the stomach. He concertinaed inward, crumpled to the floor and let out a howl of pain. Davis took two paces forward: stepping like a ballerina, shrinking to the left of the corridor. When Fung tried his luck again Davis shot him in the head.
“With me now, Alexander,” he said.
Coppock-Davol
i stepped into the corridor, mouth gaping at the carnage. McCabe squirmed at his feet, whimpering now and blood foaming between his fingers. A tattered handbag spilled out its contents: phone, molten lipstick, a singed copy of Eat, Pray, Love. Blood pooled beneath the warped door; brains were splattered across the far wall. Fung’s hand protruded from the end of the corridor, his ring finger twitching.
Cordite hung in the air.
“Evelyn, could you be a sweetheart and us lend a hand?” said Davis mildly.
“I need to cover the exits.”
“Evelyn, lend a hand.”
Not a question this time – like the captain of an aeroplane, Davis trumped all ranks when it came to matters paramilitary. Forty seconds later she was by his side.
A chunk of skull crunched underfoot.
21
Jenny was attempting to recite every Shakespearean sonnet she’d learned at A Level when the first explosion shook the building, right beneath her. A louder explosion followed at the perimeter wall. Someone was blasting their way in, the wrong way round. This was not how Jake operated. She slapped her palms on the cell door, shook the handle, screamed for them to let her out. The door was opened moments later by a black guy in his thirties, tall and thin with cheekbones like chevrons.
“My colleagues are trying to hold them off,” said di Angelo. “We have to go. Right now.”
The accent was Eastern Seaboard; so she was with the Americans.
“This is not a goddamn suggestion,” said di Angelo, levelling a gun at her. “Come with me or we cut our losses.”
Jenny could sense his panic. “Okay, you win. Let’s go.”
As she stepped out of the cell a needle went into her arm and her world became woozy. But it was more of a serum than a knockout blow. She was steered to a spiral staircase, could only comply. They descended, traversed an underground passage, ascended a spiral staircase at the far end and emerged into an antique shop. An American behind the counter was shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”
On the Way of Sorrows the daylight was dazzling.
Jake rounded the corner. There was the hospice, the Church of the Condemnation, the compound with its high walls and razor wire. It was like stepping into the photograph. A rake-thin man walked away at speed, oblivious to Jake’s presence. Leaning in to him, obviously drugged, was Jenny. He knew those shoulders like his own reflection. That neck, the fall of her hair.
There are few instances when violence dispensed without warning is the best course of action, but this was one of them. Displayed outside the antique shop was an Ottoman cannon ball, ten kilograms of polished granite. Jake grabbed the missile, caught up with di Angelo and brought it down on his cranium with all his might. Five trickles of blood began at the agent’s crown and ran down all sides of his head. He emitted a little moan and sank to the ground.
Jenny had a black eye and her pupils were dilated, but Jake saw a jolt of recognition. She tried to say something, failed.
She tried again: “Jake.”
In her good eye a single tear welled, and Jake felt his own vision prickle with salt water too.
“You came,” she murmured.
“There was never a doubt, Jenny. Never a doubt.”
They were a team again.
A helicopter whizzed overhead as the first wave of soldiers surged into view, the Star of David on their arms.
Jenny was trying to say something else. “Be … Be …”
“Be what?” said Jake. “Be careful?”
“Beloff.”
22
The door opened enough to reveal a pair of eyes with clods of mascara heavy on the lashes. Black shadows encircled them: the markings of the freshly bereaved. Every journalist knows them.
“Mrs Beloff?”
“Yes? Who are you?”
“I’m so sorry to intrude on you like this. I’m a reporter. I …”
The door clicked shut.
“I thought you were meant to be good at this short of thing?” said Jenny.
She had regained control of her tongue, although the letter S still caused difficulty.
“I’m not really a death knock specialist,” he muttered.
“Oh, let me try.”
The door opened before Jenny’s finger had left the button.
“Leave me alone,” said Mrs Beloff. “Or when I return to the UK I’ll report you both to Ipso. For intruding on private grief.”
The door closed again.
“What now?” said Jenny. “We can’t stay here long …”
They were in the Jewish Quarter, a labyrinth of apartment blocks made from a pleasant cream stone, like a particularly well-kept estate back home. This neighbourhood had been destroyed by the Romans, destroyed in the Arab-Israeli War, regenerated each time.
“I’ll write her a note,” said Jake.
Jenny gave him a blank stare. “Well, that might work.”
She was making it clear: nothing had changed. Jake sighed. Once the warmth between them was a mighty thing. He jotted down an appeal and posted it through the door, which opened straight away.
“I apologise for my rudeness.” The widow’s voice was gravelly-Hampstead. “Most journalists are, you’ll excuse me, locusts. But come in, Jake Wolsey. You’re always welcome in my home.”
Ursula Beloff was an expensive-looking woman in her seventies with a pink twinset and a bronze bouffant, like a raddled Jackie Onassis. The house was small, but when Jake entered the sitting room he saw where the money went. The décor was Liberace let loose on Versailles, and that was as nothing compared to the view.
“Wow,” said Jenny.
They were looking out over the Wailing Wall, where black-clad figures leaned and bobbed. To their left the Dome of the Rock shone golden in the dying sun; the West Bank Barrier zig-zagged across distant mountains, like the plates along the spine of a stegosaurus. Devosge’s Peace of Amiens dominated the room and Jake traced the Etruscan characters with his finger.
“A picture’s worth a thousand words,” he muttered. “Napoleon said that, you know.”
Next to it hung a painting of Nelson’s Victory, pounding a French warship into submission at the Battle of Trafalgar.
The widow went to make tea.
“How did you convince her?” Jenny asked.
“Michael Beloff wrote popular history. And – worse in the eyes of the literati – he was a billionaire businessman. Envy oils the wheels of journalism. He could have been Edward bloody Gibbon and he’d have got a pasting from the broadsheets. But history for the masses is no bad thing, if you ask me. And his last book was a good effort. I gave Beloff his only good review.”
“I want to thank you,” Mrs Beloff said when she returned. “Not one reporter’s asked me about Michael’s books, not one. And they were bestsellers! The only interest was from the Foreign Office, if you can believe it.”
Jenny met Jake’s eye. “Excuse me?”
“That’s right, the Foreign Office! A very rude woman. She was meant to help with the formalities, but all she wanted was the notes for Michael’s next book. How’s that their business? I told her where to go.”
“What did she look like, this woman?”
“Oh, my age, slim, silver hair. A real Cruella de Vil.”
An uncomfortable silence developed.
“Amazing view you have here,” offered Jenny.
“My husband was a very devout man …” Mrs Beloff’s voice wavered. “Until recently. He was happy to pay top dollar to be near Solomon’s Temple. What remains of it, at least.”
“Until recently?” said Jake.
She sighed. “Off the record?”
“Of course.”
“He lost his faith, almost overnight. I … I don’t know why.”
Jake met Jenny’s eyes again.
“You’ll probably think I’m a crazy old bat,” Mrs Beloff was saying. “But when your husband turns his back on god like that and then gets struck by lightning” – she looked skyward – “you half wonder …”
/>
“I don’t think you’re crazy, Mrs Beloff.” Jenny squeezed her hand. “Not at all.”
The widow manoeuvred her cup and saucer with a clatter. Her irises were filmy, brown like old stockings.
Suddenly Jake saw how elderly she was.
“I think your husband’s next book could have been important,” he said.
“You’re darn right it could have been important.” She clasped three of Jake’s fingers in hers. “Michael was the most under-appreciated scholar of our age. But bless you for saying so.”
“I want the world to know about it. Would you let me see his notes?”
“I’d like that. I … I trust you, Jake Wolsey.” The widow fumbled for a tiny key. “There were documents he was protective of. Things he kept in his safe.”
Michael Beloff would have his epitaph.
23
The billionairess had regained her composure by the time she placed a leather box file before him. “It’s all yours, darling.”
When Jake thought of the madness this Pandora’s Box might contain he wanted not to open it.
“It was you who sent me that stuff on the beach,” he said to Jenny. “Wasn’t it?”
“What stuff?”
“Quotations from Napoleon, all typed up on card. They started arriving two weeks ago. I …”
His voice died out at the sight of Jenny’s face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
He handed her the bundle and she leafed through the cards with growing consternation.
“Are these quotations genuine?”
“Yes, all of them,” he said. “I’ve checked.”
“Jesus god in heaven.”
“Then it was MI6,” said Jake. “These were meant to rekindle my interest.”
Jenny glanced at the side of his head; she looked thoughtful.
“They wanted to use you,” she said.
