Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

‘Or maybe there’s nothing to know.’ She could barely hear her own voice.

‘Excuse me?’

She tried to repeat the words but there was no air. The pressure on her windpipe was too great. She was being strangled.

Miller made a gesture and the pressure eased. The arm, though, stayed fixed around her neck.

‘Say that again.’

‘I said, maybe there’s nothing to know.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Maybe we couldn’t find where Shimon Guttman hid the tablet because he hadn’t yet hidden it.’

‘Explain.’

Maggie tried to get up but she had no strength. She stayed there, on the ground, panting out the words. ‘The messages Guttman left-the DVD, the one in Second Life-they were all done on Saturday. So was the call with Kishon.’ She was gasping. ‘But what if he hadn’t finished doing what he needed to do? He planned to hide the tablet in the tunnels-and he would have done it. But events intervened: he got killed. He probably planned to do whatever he was going to do after the peace rally. He just never made it.’

Miller was listening closely. ‘So where’s the tablet now?’

‘That’s the whole point. I don’t know. And if I don’t know-when I’ve seen his last messages and had his son explain his childhood memories-that means nobody knows. And nobody will know.’

‘The tablet will be lost.’

‘Yes.’

Miller nodded slowly, not to her but to himself, as if he were weighing the pros and cons and had at last been persuaded. He got out of his chair and began to pace, circling around Maggie who remained a crumpled heap on the floor. Finally he delivered his verdict.

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 10.14AM

The driver took her the short distance to the hotel, but she didn’t want to go in straightaway. She had seen so little daylight, she just wanted to absorb some of it now. She stood and looked around.

The entrance was busy, taxis parked with their engines running, guests coming in and out with multiple suitcases. More out than in, Maggie guessed: tourists were probably abandoning Jerusalem after the troubles of the last few days. If they only knew.

She could hear a megaphone blaring. She turned around to see a white estate car, covered in orange stickers and posters, driving slowly up King David Street: inside, someone was shouting slogans denouncing, it seemed, Yariv and his imminent surrender of Israel’s patrimony. A minute later the car was joined by a van, this one blaring out a bland kind of Euro-pop. From the look of it, this was the peace camp, probably deriding Yariv for backing away from the negotiations.

She looked past the traffic lights, up the hill. The consulate’s just up there, she thought, where this whole thing began. She remembered sitting there in the garden, just off the plane, wondering about the brothers in the monastery. That had been just five days ago, though it felt more like five years. She and Jim Davis had talked about ‘closing the deal’. Maggie smiled bitterly.

She turned left, walking away from the hotel. Every part of her ached; her arms and neck especially. She imagined the bruises all over her body, even in those places you couldn’t see. She yearned for a long soak in a hot bath and a deep sleep. But she was not ready for that now: her mind wouldn’t let her rest.

She found instead a park, almost empty and looking unloved. The lawns were unkempt at the edges, the metal struts that supported a gazebo canopy in the middle had been allowed to rust. Maggie noticed that even the paving stones, and the benches, were made of that same golden Jerusalem stone: it was beautiful, but she reckoned people who lived here surely got tired of it. Like living in a town with a chocolate factory: visitors would love the smell, while the full-timers fast grew sick of it.

She sat on the bench and stared. When Miller told her she was free to go, that he had concluded she had nothing more to reveal, she had felt relief but no pleasure. It wasn’t only the pain that still throbbed through her; nor the humiliation of having been exposed, even in her most intimate parts, like some kind of animal carcass; nor even what Miller had revealed was the true nature of her mission to Jerusalem. No, what Maggie felt was something she guessed most people would not grasp. Perhaps only another mediator would understand it: the gnawing anxiety that comes when the other side has given in too easily. Miller had folded too soon and she didn’t know why.

She went over his words again and again, including the final statement he had delivered as he left the interrogation room. He warned her that if she tried to reveal what had happened, he would ensure that the Washington Post was briefed that poor Ms Costello had suffered a breakdown in Jerusalem, leaving her delusional and irrational, following a second affair while on duty. The authorities had given her a chance, after an earlier lapse had forced her to give up diplomatic work. But her curious weakness had thwarted their attempt to help. She couldn’t seem to avoid developing intimate relations with those with whom she was meant to engage professionally, administration sources would say, speaking on condition of anonymity. If she tried to fight it, they had the tapes and photographs showing her with Uri, late at night, drinking, kissing…

She shuddered and stared at her feet, in boots she barely recognized. All the time she had done this job she had refused to let her gender be the decisive fact about her. Sure, she knew her womanhood was a factor in any negotiation, sometimes a disadvantage, usually an asset, so long as you knew how to play it. But it was only one element among many, alongside her Irishness or her relative youth. It was not all she was. But Miller had made her feel differently and it repelled her. He saw her not as an experienced mediator, a skilled reader of human dynamics and a reliable analyst of international relations, but as a whore. That’s what it came down to. To him, her affair in Africa was the single most important line on her resumé. Along with her tits and her arse. She was there not for her savvy, or her intellect, or her years at assorted peace tables, but to get laid. Suddenly her manhandling in the souk felt like the least of it. She had been violated, she now understood, from the moment she took those tickets and got in the cab for Dulles Airport.

After Miller’s little speech of warning, he had surprised her. His expression, the cocky, jabbing neck movements, gave way to something else, something she hadn’t seen before. He leaned his head to one side and his eyes seemed to radiate sympathy. He held that look for a long time, before saying quietly, ‘We have to do horrible things sometimes, really horrible things. But we do them for the right reason.’

What maddened her now, as she sat in this barren piece of parkland, was that she almost agreed with him. She was not some pacifist, incense-burning mung-bean merchant who thought all power was inherently evil and that we should all be nice to each other. She understood how the world worked. Specifically, she understood-better than anyone-how critical it was to keep this tablet out of the combatants’ hands. Miller was right to do whatever it took to find it before they did. The President wanted to get re-elected and that meant he needed an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Who cared if his motives were shoddy? At least these two nations, who had been locked in a death embrace so long they could barely imagine life without the other, would finally get the accord they needed.

Maggie Costello would have signed up for all of that. She had been around the block enough times to know that peace settlements don’t come about because of an outbreak of niceness or because some priest persuades the leaders to do the right thing or even because a passionate young brunette from Dublin tells them to stop killing each other. They do it because their interests or, more often, the interests of the great powers change. Suddenly the big boys have no use for war and so it ends.