Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

So she knew how things were. If Miller or Davis or Bonham-and it pained her to think they were probably all involved in this-had ever come clean, explained the problem and why they needed her help, she would have agreed. She would have found her own way to do it. Instead they didn’t trust her to know what the big boys knew. She was merely a tool to be deployed, a piece set down on the chessboard whose sole duty was to get fucked.

It was getting cold, or at least she was. Probably the tiredness. She would go back to the hotel, speak to no one and, once she had slept, she would go to the airport. Where would she go? She had no idea.

Once back in the cavernous lobby of the Citadel, she walked with her head down, determined to make eye contact with no one. She realized it made no sense, but she felt as if everyone knew what had happened to her these last few hours and she couldn’t bear to be seen.

‘Miss Costello! Hello!’ It was a clerk at reception, her ponytail swinging as she bounced up and down, waving a piece of paper, loudly calling across the lobby. ‘Miss Costello, please!’

If only to shut her up, Maggie marched across the polished floor, hoping no one else had caught this little scene.

‘Ah, Miss Costello. He said it was most urgent. You just missed him. He was here a minute ago, I told him-’

‘Please, you’ll have to slow down. Who said what was urgent?’

‘The man who came here. I told him he could leave a voicemail message from the house phone but he refused. He wanted me to give you this.’ She handed Maggie a piece of paper, torn from the hotel’s message pad.

Meet me in an old moment. I know what we have to do. Vladimir Junior.

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY ,TWO HOURS EARLIER

The throbbing was softened now, reduced to a rhythmic ache. He wondered if they had given him something, perhaps a jab in the thigh as they bundled him back into the Merc. Or maybe later. He wouldn’t have noticed if they had.

He had come round half an hour ago. Or maybe it was an hour. It had taken him a while to realize that he was not staring into a darkened room, but was blindfolded. For several long minutes he thought he was staring at the underside of his own eyelids. Then he remembered the bullet and wondered, in earnest, if he was experiencing the consciousness of the dead.

Sensations returned only slowly, as if in succession. After the eyes came his arms, which told him they were immobile. He tried to remember: had he been shot there, too? Might he be paralysed? He did not panic. Instead he felt his heart plumb to the slow, low pressure deployed in extremis . It was as if the body went into emergency deep freeze, knowing it was now in a battle to survive. He knew all this, because he had experienced it once before.

Back then, the wound had been psychological. He had been in a tank across the Lebanese border when it was struck by a Hizbullah roadside bomb. The driver and gunner had been killed instantly. As the commander, he should have been the most vulnerable: he was poking his head outside. But, perversely, that had saved him. He lowered himself back into the tank to see his two comrades slumped and still and knew instantly that he was sitting in a deathtrap. At that moment, when his heart should have raced with fear, his organs went instead into a mode altogether more frightening, for it was beyond regular terror. It was a still, slow calm; a prelude to death.

And he felt it again now. Coolly, he remembered the incident on the Jerusalem highway: it could only have lasted thirty seconds. He had seen the car behind, unmistakably following them. He had slowed down, swerving into the beauty spot lay-by, at an angle he hoped would allow Maggie to drop out unseen. In the instant, split-second he had had for a decision, that is what he had decided: that whatever happened to him, she should live.

Once Maggie was out and clear, he had attempted to spin the car around and repeat the manoeuvre, so that he too could bail out undetected. But the turn had proved impossible and by then the pursuers had caught up. He had taken no more than a step outside the car when the bullet had struck his leg. He had fallen, with none of the drama they showed in the movies, but rather like a puppet whose strings had been severed.

Now came a new signal, from his wrists. His neurological pathways, usually nanosecond fast, seemed to have reverted to the age of steam: the messages were reaching his brain so slowly. But the wrists were saying they could feel something, an abrasion that was not mere pain but external. A restraint. He was, he finally realized, bound. The blindness, the immobility, were not signs of the physical shutdown that might precede death, but of something less final. He had been shot and bundled in the car not as a corpse, but as a prisoner. His heart began to beat faster.

He began to struggle, to jiggle his wrists. He soon understood that they were not only bound to each other, but to the chair he was sitting on. He wanted to inspect his wound, but he could not touch it and, in the blackness, he could barely be certain which leg it was that had been struck.

Who had taken him? He pictured masked men, dressed in black; but that could have been a trick of the memory. He tried to remember what he had heard when they shoved him in the car. The name Daoud surfaced. He had heard someone call it, as if in a question, twice. It must have been a symptom of his delirium though, because in Uri’s mind he heard the name, this Arabic name, called out in an accent that was distinctly American.

The thoughts were flowing more freely now. Uri wondered what Maggie had done. He guessed she had somehow found her way straight back to Jerusalem, to the tunnels. But where would she have even begun? His father’s clue-was it really left inside some computer game, or was that also the fruit of his fevered imagination?-directed them only to the subterranean catacombs of the Western Wall, which covered a significant distance. Uri knew: he had refused his father’s repeated requests to come back from New York and take the tour, but he had read about it. It took at least an hour to walk through.

In the dark like this, Uri at last had a chance that had not come since he took the phone call six days ago. The truth was, he had avoided it. But now he had little alternative but to think about his father. He had surprised him more in death than he ever had in life. Until this week, Uri would have described his father as predictable, the way all ideologues are predictable. He knew his views on everything. They were unbending and therefore, to Uri’s mind, irretrievably dull. Uri had often wondered, only to himself and never out loud, of course, if that was why he had rejected his father’s brand of hardline politics-on aesthetic rather than moral grounds. Had he become a left-winger simply to avoid being a bore like his dad?

Yet in the last few days, his father had proved him wrong. He had harboured many secrets, including one that had clearly given him the greatest thrill of his career-and they had cost him his life.

Of them all, the one that shocked most remained the one that he had heard first, courtesy of Maggie Costello. His father had traded archaeological know-how with the enemy, with a Palestinian, even giving him an Israeli codename, an anagram. What was it, Ehud Ramon? He might have been an arsehole, his father, but he was not stupid.

He heard a door unlock, followed by the sound of men. He knew what was coming and felt oddly armed against it. He would do what he had read survivors of all forms of brutality had done: he would stay within his own head.

He heard a voice with an American accent, the one he thought he had imagined in the car. ‘OK, let’s go to work.’

Next he could feel a bandage on his right leg being steadily unwound. Perhaps he was in hospital and he was about to be treated. Maybe these men were not torturers, but doctors.