Sam Bourne: The Last Testament

He was marching on, squeezing past a mother with a child on her shoulders.

‘Sir, stop right there!’ the guard called out.

Guttman ignored him.

Now the agent began making his own journey through the crowd, breaking through a small cluster of teenagers. He considered pulling out his weapon, but decided against it: it would start a panic. He called out again, his voice was instantly drowned out by sustained applause.

‘We do not love the Palestinians and they do not love us,’ the Prime Minister was saying. ‘We never will and they never will…’

The agent was still three rows away from Guttman, now advancing towards the podium. He was directly behind the older man; one long stretch and he could grab him. But the crowd was more tightly packed here; it was harder to push through. The agent stood on tiptoes and leaned over, just lightly brushing his shoulder.

By now Guttman was within shouting distance of the stage. He looked up towards the Prime Minister, who was coming to the climax of the speech.

‘Kobi!’ he yelled, calling him by a long-forgotten nickname. ‘Kobi!’ His eyes were bulging, his face flushed.

Security agents from all sides were now closing in, two on each side, as well as the first man advancing from behind. They were ready to pounce, to smother him to the ground as they had been taught, when a sixth agent, standing to the right of the stage, spotted a sudden movement. Perhaps it was just a wave, it was impossible to tell for sure, but Guttman, still staring maniacally at the Prime Minister, seemed to be reaching into his jacket.

The first shot was straight to the head, just as it had been rehearsed a hundred times. It had to be the head, to ensure instant paralysis. No muscular reflex that might set off a suicide bomb; no final seconds of life in which the suspect might pull a trigger. The bodyguards watched as the silver-haired skull of Shimon Guttman blew open like a watermelon, brains and blood spattering the people all around.

Within seconds, the PM had been bundled off the stage and was at the centre of a scrum of security personnel shoving him towards a car. The crowd, cheering and clapping thirty seconds earlier, was now quaking with panic. There were screams as those at the front tried to run away from the horrible sight of the dead man. Police used their arms to form a cordon around the corpse, but the pressure of the crowd was almost impossible. People were screaming, stampeding, desperate to get away.

Pushing in the opposite direction were two senior military officers from the Prime Minister’s detail, determined to break the impromptu cordon and get to the would-be assassin. One of them flashed a badge at a police officer and somehow ducked under his arms and inside the small, human clearing formed around the body.

There was too little of the dead man’s head to make out, but the rest of him was almost intact. He had fallen face down and now the officer rolled the lifeless body over. What he saw made him blanch.

It was not the shattered bone or hollowed eye sockets; he had seen those before. It was the man’s hands, or rather his right hand. Still clenched, the fingers were not wrapped around a gun-but gripping a piece of paper, now sodden with blood. This man had not been reaching for a revolver-but for a note. Shimon Guttman hadn’t wanted to kill the Prime Minister. He had wanted to tell him something.

WASHINGTON , SUNDAY , 9.00AM

‘Big day today, honey.’

‘Uh?’

‘Come on, sweetheart, time to wake up.’

‘Nrrghh.’

‘OK. One, two, three. And the covers are off-’

‘Hey!’

Maggie Costello bolted upright, grabbed at the duvet and pulled it back over her, making sure to cover her head as well as her body this time. She hated the mornings and regarded the Sunday lie-in as a constitutionally protected right.

Not Edward. He’d probably been up for two hours already. He wasn’t like that when they met: back in Africa, in the Congo, he could pull the all-nighters just like her. But once they had come here, he had adapted pretty fast. Now he was Washington Man, out of the house just after six am. Through a squinted eye jammed up against the pillow, Maggie could see he was in shorts and a running vest, both sweaty. She was still unconscious, but he’d already been for his run through Rock Creek Park.

‘Come on!’ he said, shouting from the bathroom. ‘I’ve cleared the whole day for furnishing this apartment. Crate and Barrel; then Bed Bath & Beyond; and finally Macy’s. I have a complete plan.’

‘Not the whole day,’ Maggie muttered, knowing she was inaudible. She had a morning appointment, an overspill slot for clients who could never make weekdays.

‘Actually not the whole day,’ Edward shouted, the sound of the shower not quite drowning him out. ‘You’ve got that morning appointment first. Remember?’

Maggie played deaf and, still horizontal, reached for the TV remote. If she was going to be up at this hideous hour, she might as well get something out of it. The Sunday talk shows. By the time she clicked onto ABC, they’d already started the news summary.

‘Nerves on edge in Jerusalem this hour, after violence at a peace rally last night, where Israel’s prime minister seemed to be the target of a failed assassination attempt. Concern high over the impact of the latest events on the Middle East peace process, which had been hoped to yield a breakthrough as early as-’

‘Honey, seriously. They’ll be here in twenty.’

She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. The show was hopping back and forth between correspondents in Jerusalem and the White House, explaining that the US administration was taking steps to ensure all the parties kept calm and carried on talking. What a nightmare , thought Maggie. The last minute external event, threatening to undo all the trust you’ve built, all the patient progress you’ve made. She imagined the mediators who had brought the Israelis and Palestinians to this point. Not the big name politicians, the secretaries of state and foreign ministers who stepped into the spotlight at the last moment, but the backroom negotiators, the ones who did all the hard graft for months, even years before. She imagined their frustration and angst. Poor bastards .

‘The time coming up to 9.15 on the east coast-’

‘Hey, I was watching that!’

‘You haven’t got time.’ As if to underline his point, Edward was towelling himself in front of the TV set, blocking her view of the blank screen.

‘Why do you suddenly care so much about my schedule?’

He held the towel still and faced Maggie. ‘Because I care about you, honey, and I don’t want your day getting off on the wrong note. If you start late, you stay late. You should be thanking me.’

‘OK,’ Maggie said, finally hauling herself upright. ‘Thank you.’

‘Besides, you don’t need to follow all that stuff any more. It’s not your problem now, is it?’

She looked at him, so different from the man in chinos and grubby polo shirt she had met three years ago. He was still attractive, his features straight and strong. But he had, as she would have said back in her school days in Dublin, ‘scrubbed up’ since they’d moved to Washington. Now an official at the Commerce Department, dealing with international trade, he was always clean-shaven, his Brooks Brothers shirts neatly pressed. His shoes were polished. He was a creature of DC, not too different from any of the other juiceless white males they would see at the suburban brunches and cocktail parties they went to, now that he was part of official Washington. These days only she would know that somewhere under that button-down exterior was the stubbled, unkempt do-gooder, working for an aid organization, distributing food, she had fallen for.