Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

Within a few moments a car had arrived, a rugged, muddied SUV. Maggie sized it up and concluded that these rebels were supremely well organized. She didn’t doubt that they had a fleet of such vehicles on hand, patrolling the battle lines not only of the Arms Around Jerusalem demo, but of the entire anti-Yariv campaign. If what she had read was right, much of the money would have been funnelled from Christian evangelicals in the States. Once again, she was reminded that, even if they were to calm things down and bring the parties back to the table, the peacemakers would face the most enormous obstacles.

Maggie thanked the rabbi and got in the car. A dark, burly man in shorts, with tanned, meaty forearms, was in the driver’s seat. He raised his eyebrows in a question.

‘Could you take me to the Old City please?’

Within a few minutes they were back on the main road, retracing the dawn journey she had made with Uri, winding steadily upward back to the centre of Jerusalem. She felt her ears pop.

Now the traffic was thicker, but hardly a regular urban rush hour. ‘Shabbat, shabbat,’ the driver said, gesturing to the view outside the windscreen. The city was emptying out for the sabbath, which would come with the darkness that evening.

And soon she could see it, as the car ascended Hativat Yerushalayim Street, the long, solid wall that marked the western boundary of the Old City. She was hardly looking, staring into space, thinking only of what might have happened to Uri. Had he really taken a bullet just so that she could break free? The heaviness on her chest, the sense of dread, almost broke her. Another mistake; another betrayal. Angrily, she forced herself to channel her emotions into an unbending determination: she would find the people who had shot Uri and she would do it by finding the tablet. She sensed she was getting close. The last testament of Abraham could not be very far away.

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 7.50AM

The car turned through the Jaffa Gate, stopping almost immediately in a small square, a paved plaza fringed by a souvenir shop selling the usual kitsch and a couple of rundown backpacker hostels. She would have to walk from here. Maggie thanked the driver, waved him off and took a good look. In front of her was the Swedish Christian Study Centre. Close by was the Christian Information Centre and next to that, the Christ Church Guest House. A distant memory of slide shows in Sister Frances’s geography lessons rose to the surface. Maggie realized she had heard about such places long ago. These were all missions-missions to convert the Jews.

Straight ahead of her was what looked to be a central police station, complete with a tall communications mast sprouting multiple aerials. She began to walk towards it. She would report Uri missing, she would tell them about the shooting, they would send out patrol cars and find Uri and bring him back to her…

But then she stopped still. She would have to explain the stolen car and why they were being chased in the dead of night; why Uri was dressed in a stolen bellboy uniform. No one would believe a word of it. The police would immediately get on the phone to the consulate to check her out and she only had to imagine that call, as Davis, Miller and Sanchez were told that Maggie Costello had spent the night with Uri Guttman.

She stood there, frozen. If Uri was alive, he needed her help. But there was no one she could turn to, no one who would understand or believe what they now knew. Her only hope was the tablet. If she had that, she would have the answers: she would know who was behind these killings and who had Uri. If she could just find the tablet, she would have her own bargaining chip. Then all she had to do was decide how best to use it.

She looked around, trying to get her bearings. She had found this place almost suffocatingly intense as soon as she had arrived, but here in the Old City the sensation was heightened, as if all Jerusalem’s fervour, its fevered history, was cooped up between these solid, sandy walls. No wonder people spoke of Jerusalem as if it were a form of mental illness.

She stopped a man with an oversized camera around his neck, wearing sandals and socks, and asked for the Western Wall. He pointed at an archway directly opposite the Jaffa Gate. This, she remembered, was the way to the souk .

It felt like plunging down a hillside, taking that steep, downward path that had been smoothed by millions of feet over hundreds if not thousands of years. It seemed different from the market she had seen twenty-four hours ago. It was still early; almost all the stalls were locked up behind green metal shutters, and, instead of the thick crowds of tourists and shoppers, there was just a boy pushing a handcart, occasionally jumping on the small tyre he kept loosely chained to the back that, when dragged along the ground, functioned as a makeshift brake.

She looked at the names of the shops, now visible thanks to the absence of people. She could imagine the older Guttman browsing here, visiting Sadi Barakat & Sons, Legally Authorized Dealers or the grandiosely named Oriental Museum, always on the lookout for some quirky item of ancient treasure. How he must have quaked when he came into Aweida’s shop that day.

She passed a bearded man in full black robes. Was he a rabbi or an orthodox priest, maybe Greek or Russian? She had no idea and, in this city, any of those was possible. Coming from another direction, a gang of eight-year-old Arab boys and, walking around them, an old woman reading from a prayer book, muttering incantations, as if she couldn’t afford to waste even a minute away from worship of the divine.

Finally Maggie saw a simple sign in English which appeared handwritten. To the Western Wall , it said, with an arrow indicating a right turn. She followed it, heading down some more steps until she saw another more formal sign, with a series of bullet points, all in English:

You are entering the Western Wall plaza.

Visitors with pacemakers should inform the security personnel…

There was an airport-style metal detector to go through, watched by a couple of Israeli police guards. A policewoman frisked her, all the while laughing and chatting with her colleagues, and then waved her through.

And now it stretched before her, a sloping, paved plaza already teeming with people and at one end of it the solid, enormous stones of the Western Wall. It seemed to belong to another world: its scale was not human. One stone was almost as tall as a man. The weeds sprouting from its cracks were small trees. And yet this dated from a temple built here some two and a half thousand years ago.

People were milling everywhere. Bearded men striding about as if they had trains to catch, others handing out skullcaps, while still a few more were smiling, like charity collectors hoping pedestrians might stop for a chat. She avoided eye contact, listening instead as a teenaged American boy allowed himself to be buttonholed.

‘Er, Aaron.’

‘Hi, Aaron. I’m Levi.’ Lay-vee . Have you got somewhere to spend shabbes tonight?’

‘Er, maybe. I’m not sure.’

‘Do you wanna spend shabbes with a family, having chicken soup like at home? Maybe daven a little at the Kotel ?’ The last word was pronounced to rhyme with hotel, though with the emphasis on the first syllable. The driver had used the same word. Kotel . The Wall.

Now she could see more clearly the sets of white plastic garden chairs arrayed in front of the Wall. There was no pattern to them. Instead, there seemed to be a dozen different gatherings and services taking place at once. It was a scene of spiritual chaos, more like a railway terminal than any shrine she had ever been to.