Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

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.’

TEL AVIV , ISRAEL , WEDNESDAY , 8.45PM

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.

‘OK, his building is number six. Let’s park here.’ They were on Mapu Street, which, judging by the class of cars parked at the kerb, seemed to be one of Tel Aviv’s more upscale neighbourhoods. The building itself was nothing special, rendered in the same white concrete. They walked through a kind of underpass, past the lines of metal mailboxes, and found the entrance and its intercom. Uri pressed number seventy-two.

There was no reply. Impatient, Maggie reached past Uri and pressed the button again, for much longer. Still nothing.

‘Try the phone again.’

‘It’s been on voicemail all afternoon.’

‘And you’re sure this is the right apartment?’

‘I’m sure.’

Maggie began pacing. ‘How come there’s nobody in? They can’t all be out.’

‘There is no “they”. It’s just him.’

Maggie stopped, puzzled.

‘He’s divorced. Lives alone.’

‘Bollocks. What the hell can we do now?’

‘We could break in.’

Maggie suddenly became aware of the cold. What on earth was she doing here, shivering on a Tel Aviv street corner when she should have been picking out sofa-beds in Georgetown? She should be home, with Edward, cosy on their couch, ordering takeout, watching TV or whatever it was normal people did once they stopped being twenty-five-year-old maniacs who worked all hours, hopping from one nuthouse country to the next. Edward had managed it, making the transition from backpacking idealist to Washington suit, so why couldn’t she? God knows, she had tried. Maybe she should just call Judd Bonham and tell him she was pulling out. They weren’t using her properly anyway. She was a mediator, for Christ’s sake, she should be in the room. Not playing at being a bloody amateur detective. She reached into her pocket and felt her cellphone.

But she knew what Bonham would say. That there was no point in her being in the room until the two sides were ready. And the way things were going, that moment was getting more remote by the day. Pretty soon, there’d be no room to be in. Her job was to get the two sides back on track, and that meant closing down this Guttman/Nour problem, whatever it was. They couldn’t afford for her to fail. She knew, better than anyone, what happened if a peace effort came close only to fall apart. For an instant she saw it again, the flash of memory she worked so hard to keep out. She had to succeed. Otherwise, that would be her career, even her life story. It would be reduced to one single, lethal mistake.

Quietly, she turned back to Uri and said, ‘No, we can’t break in. Imagine if we got caught: I’m an official of the United States government.’

‘I could do it.’

‘Yeah, but you’re with me, aren’t you? Still trouble. Is there any other way?’

Uri shook his head and punched his fist against the door of the building, sustaining what looked like serious pain without so much as a wince.

‘All right,’ said Maggie, turning away. ‘Let’s think. What happened when you called the newspaper?’

‘It was just the night news desk-said they didn’t know the movements of their columnists. Gave me his cellphone number.’

‘Which we already had.’

The silence lasted for more than a minute, Maggie straining to think of a next move. Then, suddenly, Uri leapt to his feet and all but sprinted back to the car.

‘Uri? Uri, what is it?’

‘Just get in the car.’

As they drove, Uri explained that in the army he had dated a girl whose brother had gone to India with Baruch Kishon’s son. When he saw Maggie’s face, a scrunch of incredulity, he smiled and said only, ‘Israel’s a small country.’

A few calls later and he had a cellphone number for Eyal Kishon. Uri had to shout into the phone: Eyal was in a club. Uri tried explaining the situation, but it was no good. They would have to go there.

While they drove, Uri put on the radio news, giving a brief translation at the end of each story. Violence on the West Bank, some Palestinian children dead; Israeli tanks re-entering Gaza; more Hizbullah rockets in the north. Talks with the Palestinians now in the deep freeze. Maggie shook her head: this whole thing was unravelling. Then: ‘A poll in America has the president five points behind. He did badly in the TV debate, apparently.’ Last item: ‘They’re getting reports of a fire at a kibbutz in the north. Might be arson.’

They parked on Yad Harutzim Street and walked straight into the Blondie club. The noise was immediate, a pounding rhythm that Maggie could feel in her guts. There was a steady bombardment of light, including one sharp, white beam that swept across the dance floor like a searchlight.