Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

‘Stop!’ shouted one of her pursuers.

As she glanced over her shoulder, she thought she saw the second man, the one with the camera, draw a weapon and aim it at her. She yelped and ducked, but he could get no clear line of sight: the rocks twisted and turned too sharply.

At last she came to a set of narrow, metal stairs. She almost fell forward into them, and struggled to keep her balance. She clattered up them, breathing raggedly. Once at the top, she had to turn sideways just to get through, so tight was the gap. Behind her she heard a woman’s scream: someone had just seen the gun.

And then the space opened out again, so that she was in what appeared to be a Roman vault. Once her eyes adjusted, she could see that it was in fact another pool, this one full of thick, stagnant water. She stood for a second, her lungs screaming to extract oxygen from this musty, humid air. Where did this pool lead? Maybe it came out somewhere outside, away from here. She stood at the edge, contemplating a dive. She had always been a good swimmer. Perhaps she could hold her breath…

But then she heard the footsteps, just a yard or two away and her instinct led her to turn away from the pool and scramble through the only opening instead. The second she had, she was flooded with relief. For now she could see daylight. Up a path, through a turnstile and she was out.

Gulping at the air, blinking at the sudden sunlight, she found that she had come out onto a narrow street, busy with people. Directly opposite her was a sign: Sanctuaries of the Flagellation and the Condemnation. And out of the sanctuary came a monk in a brown cassock with a rope around his waist. She was on the Via Dolorosa, Christ’s route to the Crucifixion.

Maggie would have felt a moment’s ancient Catholic comfort in the familiarity of it, if she had had the time. But she had no such luxury. Waiting for her at the exit were two men, their faces covered, who stepped forward and, calmly and with minimal exertion, grabbed her.

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 8.32AM

Gloved hands gripped her wrists so hard it was as if they were made of steel rather than flesh and blood. She gasped but made no sound: other hands had already placed a small strip of material, like a rolled bandana, into her mouth. No one said anything.

They moved her backwards, off the street and back into the tunnels-away from public view. ‘What are you doing? Who are you?’ she tried to say through the gag. Knowing her words were useless, she added: ‘And what have you done with Uri?’

Two of the men in front of her stepped forward, as if anticipating, and seeking to prevent, a violent reaction from her. They were right: instinctively, she tried to lash out. She attempted to move her arms, but they were now bound in what felt like tight plastic tape, the kind that comes on a new product, so strong it can be cut only with a sharp blade. She tried to scream but this only succeeded in making her retch on the material jammed into her mouth. Now she was panting even harder, her lungs forced to sate their craving for air through her nose. She could feel her heart thumping, driven not just by the exertions of the chase but by fear for her life.

The two men in front of her came closer, so that she could see the small portion of their faces that was not hidden. The eyes of the taller man, on her left, were dark, flat and glassy, like a pond frozen in winter. He looked as if even this, the sight of a woman surrounded by masked men, fighting for breath, bored him. Maggie looked at his partner, or rather looked to him, as if hoping to find some spark of the human. But what she saw chilled her. For the green eyes of this man did indeed betray an emotion; and that emotion was pleasure.

It was he who approached now with another strip of black material in his hands. As he moved his hands around the back of her head, his face just inches away from hers, she came to a cold, certain realization. He was the man who had assaulted her a few hundred yards away from here, in the back streets of the market. And now she understood, as the blindfold was tightened and the world fell into blackness, that she was as good as dead.

She felt a shove in the centre of her back and stumbled forward, someone catching her arm to prevent her falling to her right. She must be listing, like a drunk.

After a few minutes of staggering in this manner, maybe much less, maybe much more, she detected a change in the acoustics: no longer the echo of hard stone walls. And the cold dankness of the air was lifting, its mustiness less pronounced. Was she deceiving herself, or did she perceive, even through the blindfold, a change in the light?

They were stopping. She could hear other voices, further away. She imagined the world outside these tunnels and wondered if she would ever see it again.

There was some whispered talk; she strained to hear the language, but it was just out of reach. Then she was shoved forward again, her feet stumbling on the uneven surface. And then she was certain of the change. There was street noise: people, cars, footsteps. The colour of the dark under her blindfold altered, as if someone had let off fireworks in a night sky. And, the real giveaway, she felt warmth on her skin. The warmth of sunlight.

It made no sense, but she was relieved. They weren’t going to kill her in those tunnels, then; she wouldn’t have to rot in an abandoned cistern, the air echoing with women muttering endless psalms.

But she was only outside for a second or two. She felt the same metal hand that had gripped her wrists now grasp her neck from behind, and push it downward. He was pushing hard, as if trying to cantilever her entire body. She resisted, holding her back firm, refusing to be folded. She sensed the frustration in his hand as he pushed harder. Eventually he, or perhaps it was someone else, spoke, a male voice, behind her, uttering a single word: ‘car’.

So that was it. They were shoving her into the back seat of a car. She gave way, glad for her little show of resistance. It wasn’t much, but she felt she had achieved something. It had forced these men to break the silence they had maintained since they had cornered her just outside the tunnels. They hadn’t wanted to speak, but they had just spoken. One word, admittedly, but it was a start. It had, in its own miniature way, been a negotiation. They had had to bend in order to win her co-operation. She may have been bound and gagged but, in mediation terms, she decided she had won the first round.

There seemed to be at least five people in this car: two men on either side of her, crammed in the back, and she could sense tension in the passenger seat by her right knee. They were still saying nothing to each other, but in the few seconds it had taken them to get in, she had heard a snatch of talk. It could have been people on the street, passers-by. Or it could have been the other members of the team of masked men who had hunted her down in the tunnels. Either way, there was no doubt what language she had heard. It was Arabic.

They drove for what she guessed was ten minutes. But it could have been half that or three times as long. It wasn’t only that she couldn’t check her watch or look at the clock in the car. Denied sight, her whole sense of time had been thrown off.

It sickened her that she was so close to these men, including, she felt certain, her assailant from the street market. Jammed into the back, her legs pressed against theirs, her knees couldn’t help but touch theirs. Maybe his. She wanted to shove them away from her, hard, but her hands were tied. Her skin crawled.

Finally she felt the car slow down, then bump over a ridge, as if entering a driveway. She heard the driver’s window wind down and then back up a moment later: perhaps he had had to show papers at some kind of checkpoint. Had she got the Arabic wrong? Was this in fact an Israeli team, taking her through the DCO to the West Bank? Were they going to do to her there what they would dare not do inside Israel proper?