Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

She carried on flying for a few minutes longer, imagining her sister losing herself in this world of sharp lines and vivid colours. Maggie spotted a cluster of avatars and descended, her curiosity roused the way it would be if she saw a real crowd on a real street. As she landed, her knees bent.

The neon signs gave it away: Second Life’s red-light district. Mannequins were wearing shiny PVC corsets, which, as your cursor hovered near, revealed a price tag. Whips, rubber masks, they had it all. Instantly she felt unclothed, her pneumatic breasts an embarrassment. But she was Lola Hepburn now. She could do what she liked.

She approached a male avatar, an absurdly muscled creature who, Maggie guessed, had been designed with the gay market in mind. A graphic popped up immediately, shaped like a pie-chart, each slice given over to a different option: Chat, Flirt, Touch Me were the ones Maggie noticed first. She hesitated, looking at the screen showing these two ludicrous cyber-creations-one of them, for now, being her-and wondered what people would make of this scene. In the dead of night, in a room filled with sleeping fax machines and abandoned desks, a US diplomat in a Jerusalem hotel, scoping what looked like internet porn during the darkest hour of the peace process. What, she wondered, would it be like to touch without touching? What could this machine do to simulate that feeling? She remembered the man asleep in her bed upstairs.

Now another man, a bearded avatar with seventies Afro and tight trousers, had entered the room, close enough to address them both with a line of text.

Shaftxxx Brando: Hi guys? What’s going down?

Maggie instantly hit the Fly button, fleeing this room and the whole sex district. She was now zooming over seas, city skylines, holiday resorts, once descending to find she was in a perfectly reproduced Philadelphia city centre, the streets laid out in a neat three-dimensional grid.

She went back to the Map key, taking a few seconds to work out what she had to do. Homesickness decided her first destination. She typed in ‘Dublin’ and then hit Teleport .

A whoosh later and she was standing in a landscape which, even reproduced like this, she found instantly familiar. The water on the Liffey was too static, but the Temple Bar area was there, complete with the clubs and pubs she remembered so well from her teenage years, when she and the other convent girls drank vodka like Russian sailors. But it looked desolate tonight, just her and a few wastrels mooching down Dame Street.

She sniffed at the thought of it. Pathetic really, a grown woman staring at a screen in the middle of the night to remind her of home. She was meant to have given all this up, this wandering the globe, and to have put down roots with Edward in Washington. Yet here she was, in the blue light of a hotel business centre at gone three in the morning, pining for her home town thanks to a glorified computer game. She sat back in her chair, wondering why her plan to settle down had failed. Wrong city? Wrong time? Or wrong man?

She shut the computer down, crept out of the glass-walled business centre and headed for the lifts. She thought of the Dublin she had just seen. Not like any Dublin she remembered. Cleaner, tidier and infinitely lonelier.

Maggie stepped inside the lift and it was only when the doors slid shut that it hit her. Of course . That’s what Shimon Guttman had meant. The wily old bastard! How could she not have seen it till now?

‘Come on, come on,’ she said, desperate to get back and wake Uri. She looked up at the numbers, counting the floors. Seven, eight, nine . Here.

Hesitantly, she peered out of the lift doors, just in case her shadow, the man or men who had been following her since God knows when, had decided to station himself right outside her hotel room. No one there.

She padded along the corridor, ensuring her heels barely landed on the carpet. She wanted to make no sound. Slowly she slid her keycard into the lock, until it flashed green. She pushed the door open, began crying out Uri’s name when she felt a hard, quick blow to the back of the neck. She fell to the floor, making barely a sound.

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY ,AN HOUR EARLIER

First he heard the double click, the signal that they were speaking on a secure line. As always, the boss got straight to the point.

‘My worry is that things are spiralling out of control.’

‘I understand.’

‘We obviously need that tablet.’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean we need it now . Things are getting crazy. The cure is beginning to look worse than the disease.’

‘I know how it looks.’ He could hear a deep sigh on the other end of the phone.

‘How long do you think we should give this whole thing?’

That was the drawback of a job like this, working for the big decision-maker. Such men always expected action immediately, as if merely uttering that something should happen was enough to make it happen. All political leaders became like this eventually, coming to regard their own words as divine speech acts. I said, Let there be light. Why isn’t there light?

‘Well, now we’ve started, I don’t see how we can stop. You’ve seen the latest. Hizbullah firing rockets at towns and villages in the middle of the night, maximizing risk of casualties. We can’t let ourselves be dictated to by them.’

‘What about Costello? Has she got anything?’

‘We’re following her very closely. I think she’s making progress. And what she knows, we know.’

Another sigh. ‘We need to have this tablet in our possession. We have to know what’s in it before they do. So we can act first. Shape events.’

‘You know it’s always possible that no one will get it. Neither us, nor them.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean Costello could lead us to it. Or she could fail. The tablet could disappear with Shimon Guttman. It would be as if the whole issue never arose.’

The voice on the end of the secure line did not need to hear more. He could put the pieces together.

‘That’s not bad.’

‘Almost a win-win.’

‘If she gets it, we get it. If she doesn’t get it…If she, for some unforeseen reason, cannot advance this mission, then no one gets it. Problem solved.’

‘Could be.’

‘OK. Let’s talk in the morning.’

He heard the familiar second click, then terminated the call and scrolled through his contacts to find the number of the surveillance team, the unit tracking Guttman and Costello. He was connected within a single ring.

‘Do you have the subjects within view? Good. We need to talk about a change in plan.’

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 3.11AM

At first she wasn’t sure if she had opened her eyes. The room was in complete darkness. She raised her neck, a reflex, to check the clock, but immediately felt a spasm of pain. Only then did she remember what had happened. She had come out of the lift, ready to tell Uri what she had discovered; she had opened the door and then, in a second, she had been struck.

Where was she now? Flat, the palms of her hands detected the cotton softness of bedclothes. She squinted, just making out the outline of curtains ahead. She was, then, still in her room. What the hell had happened?

Suddenly there was a voice, alarmingly close to her ear.

‘I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry, Maggie.’

Uri.

She tried to haul herself up, but the pain shot through her again.

‘I woke up and saw the bed was empty. I thought maybe something had happened to you. I waited by the door and then-’

‘And then you hit me.’

‘I didn’t know it was you. I’m so sorry, Maggie. How can I make it better?’