Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

In the time it took her to adjust to the light, the men in ski-masks had cleared the room. It was bare and featureless, the walls a dirty white; there were no windows and nothing on the walls. In front of her was a table. Perhaps this was the one the men had bent her over just a few moments earlier. And on the other side of it, sitting on a simple chair, just like hers, was him.

‘I can only apologize for what happened just now, Maggie. Really. The strip-search, the body cavity thing. Horrible. Know what they call that in prisons back home? Booty check . How d’you like that? Anyway, like I say, I’m sorry. Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’

Now that she could see him she felt dismayed by her own reaction. She thought she would want to rush at him, hands outstretched to squeeze at his neck, strangling his last breath. She expected she would long for acid to issue from her pores, until it dissolved him into nothing. But those feelings refused to come. They were subsumed by sheer disbelief, her dumbfounded incomprehension at the sight of this man here, in this place. They were overwhelmed by her confusion, which was total. ‘What on earth are you doing?’ was all she could manage to say.

‘Let’s not go too fast, Maggie. First I need to know the location of that tablet.’

‘But, you? Why would you…?’

‘The question is, if you’re not carrying it, if it’s not hidden somewhere in the recesses of your body-and I have seen for myself that it isn’t-where the hell is it?’ He was raising his voice now, the way she had heard him do before.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come on, Maggie. I know you’ve got it all worked out. You expect me to believe you don’t know where it is?’

‘And you expect me to talk to you, after what your thugs just did to me? I’ll never say a fucking word to you again.’ And then, a surprise to her as much as to him, she spat in his face.

‘I like that, Maggie, you know I do. A girl with spunk. And you look good naked, too. That’s what I’d call a killer combination.’

Maggie could say nothing. If her body was still reeling from the humiliation it had endured in this room, her mind was going through the very first convulsions of shock. Here was a man she had trusted, whom she had believed wanted the same things she wanted.

‘Does this mean you were behind it all? All those killings?’

‘It’s our policy never to discuss the details of intelligence operations. You know that, Maggie.’

And he smiled. The knowing, complicit smile of one cynical political insider to another. The smile that Bruce Miller, senior counsellor to the President of the United States, had flashed a thousand times before.

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 9.34AM

‘You had me followed?’ Again she was disappointed by the weakness of her own question.

‘We had you followed everywhere. You knew that.’

‘But who’s “we”? Who the hell are you working for?’ It was as if the blood was finally reaching her brain. ‘You’re a traitor, that’s what you are. You’ve betrayed your country. You’ve betrayed your own fucking president.’

‘Maggie, can we skip the whole Irish outrage thing? You, Bono, that other asshole, what’s his name, Bob Geldof? Every other do-gooding, bleeding heart coming on with that big, guilt-tripping accent. It’s not going to work this time.’ He was leaning back, pivoting the chair on its two hind legs, chewing his nicotine gum as energetically as ever. ‘This is not some negotiation with a bunch of banana-munchers in Africa. You have something that I need. And you have no cards to play, Maggie. Not one. So tell me. Where is the fucking tablet?’

Negotiation . The mere mention of the word was enough to make her snap back into herself. She had always been good at what the shrinks call ‘compartmentalization’, shutting one aspect of her life out of another so that she could concentrate on the task at hand, and now, consciously, she forced herself to perform the trick again. To forget what had just happened, even her loathing of the monster opposite her, and do her job. To negotiate.

‘I won’t tell you a thing until you tell me what the hell is going on here.’

‘Look, Maggie. I don’t want to repeat myself. But you have no leverage here. I can force you to tell me what you know, if I have to.’

‘Oh, really? The President’s most trusted adviser personally directing the assault of a US citizen, a senior US diplomat-in an election year. That should play well in the polls.’

‘No one’s going to believe a word you say. A washed-up slut who can’t keep her legs closed, banging first the Africans and then some Israeli. How do you think that’ll look on the front page of the Washington Post ?’

Maggie closed her eyes, involuntarily. She was proofing herself, like an animal instinctively hardening its hide against an incoming assault. She knew he was right. That her mistake in Africa, coupled with her relationship with Uri, could finish her off completely. That in a contest of credibility, which is what most political scandals came down to, she would lose to Bruce Miller every time.

‘Yeah. And the soccer mums are going to just love a president whose main man watches while masked goons perform an anal probe of one of his female colleagues. You’re already in the deepest shit imaginable. So why don’t you talk to me and then maybe I’ll talk to you?’

Miller eyed Maggie up, the suggestion of a smile on his lips. She could sense a poker player about to fold.

‘Like I said, you got spunk, Costello. In a different life, I could imagine you and me getting on, if you know what I’m saying.’

Maggie kept her expression fixed. If a change in your opponent was about to come, you never wanted to make the slightest move that might divert him. Never break the spell.

‘It’s not that complicated, really.’

She wanted to exhale her relief: he was going to talk. But her face stayed frozen.

‘We need a peace deal here, Maggie. And we were pretty fucking close. Then last weekend we hear there’s some tablet floating around that could be Abraham’s last will and testament-’

‘How?’

‘How what?’

‘How did you hear?’

‘Your boyfriend’s dad. Guttman. He calls Baruch Kishon, the Israeli journalist, and tells him. Not the whole story, but enough of it. Mentions the trader Afif Aweida, mentions his pal Ahmed Nour. And, as luck would have it, NSA were listening in.’

‘As luck would have it.’

‘OK, it wasn’t luck. We’d been bugging Kishon for years.’

‘Kishon? Why the hell would you be bugging him?’

‘You not been reading the files, Maggie? Kishon’s the guy who broke the Tel Aviv connection story all those years ago.’

Maggie cursed Uri for not mentioning it. He must have known. It had been the biggest diplomatic rift between Israel and the US for decades: three CIA agents had been double-crossing the Agency, leaking secrets to the Israelis. To this day, the Israelis constantly demanded the spies’ release from prison; even the most pliantly pro-Israel presidents repeatedly refused.

‘Kishon still talks to them in jail. Campaigns for their release. We’ve been monitoring him ever since.’

‘And so once you heard what Guttman had told him, you decided to kill him.’

‘Oh, don’t start fucking preaching to me, young lady. We knew immediately what was at stake here. The Arabs and the Israelis are about to do the business, which means doing the business on Jerusalem, split the fucking place down the middle, and now we’ve got God Almighty himself, or near as dammit, saying that no, it belongs to the Jews. The whole deal would be off.’