Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

He was about to speak, to ask for their help, when he felt fingers exploring the outside of his wound; he inhaled sharply at the sting. And then, a moment later, he felt a pain that made him howl as he had never howled before.

‘Funny, ain’t it, what one little finger can do?’

The pain stopped for a second.

‘That’s all it is, one little finger. All I have to do is push it right there, into this hole in your leg, and-’

Uri screamed at the agony. He had vowed to withstand their torture, not to let them see him suffer. But he could not hold back the pain. His wound was live and raw, every one of its nerve endings exposed.

‘Get off me, you bastards, get off!’

At that, the red he had seen turned to white. The pain leapt in intensity and then disappeared, as if off the register. This blankness lasted only a few seconds, before he heard a voice that seemed to be far away.

‘…in fact, if I kept on pressing, I’d probably be able to touch your bone. Like that.’

‘What do you want? I don’t know anything!’

Whiteness again, also for just a few short seconds. When it ended, Uri realized what was happening; that the agony was so excruciating, he was moving in and out of consciousness.

Now when the finger probed into his bullet wound, he prayed for oblivion to come. He waited through the pain, hoping for the relief of nothingness. Instead he heard himself scream again, as two fingers forced their way inside, widening the opening, pushing and prodding.

‘Just tell us what you know.’

‘You know what I know.’

Next he heard the wailing as if it were someone else. And suddenly a voice in some inner chamber of the self spoke to him. Now, it said. This is your chance; force yourself to do it. Detach yourself from the pain. Stay inside your head .

He tried to remember where his thoughts had been just before the men came in. He had been thinking of his father’s ingenious codename, Ehud Ramon. Hold on to it, he thought; hold on. He repeated the name to himself, even as he felt his own body tremble from the agony. Ehud Ramon. Ehud Ramon. Ehud, Ehud, Ehud …

And then a memory surfaced that had lain buried for decades, a memory of the bedtime story he had loved as a child, the one he made his father read to him over and over, about a wonderfully naughty little boy. For a fleeting second, interrupting the red and white colours of his pain, Uri could picture the book cover: My brother, Ehud . What had his father said in that video message? I have put it somewhere safe, somewhere only you and my brother could know .

Of course, Uri thought, willing himself to stay on this train of thought and not to fall into the pits of hell below. Of course. It hadn’t been a real brother that his father had spoken of. Rather he was referring to the fictitious brother in a story he assumed his son would immediately remember. And it was meant to lead him to another fictitious creation, the mythic Ehud Ramon.

The probing intensified now; they were using some kind of implement. And the questions kept on. Where is the tablet? Where is it? But Uri stayed in his head. What a typical Guttman rhetorical flourish, he thought. The professor had just seen the ancient, hand-chiselled words of Abraham, speaking of his two sons, Isaac, the father of the Jews and Ishmael, the father of the Muslims. Two brothers, Jew and Arab. ‘My brother…’ Shimon Guttman had said. If he could have, Uri would have smiled. His father, the fire-breathing, flint-hearted nationalist, was using that weariest cliché of the kumbaya-singing, hand-holding, soppy left-that Jews and Arabs are brothers.

Even here, with his body battered and his senses overloaded by the sharpest of torments, he felt a surge of admiration for his old man: it was a brilliant piece of cryptography. Was there a codebreaker in the world who would realize that when a fanatic hawk referred to ‘my brother’, the man he meant was none other than the stubborn Palestinian nationalist, Ahmed Nour?

JERUSALEM , FRIDAY , 11.50AM

Maggie stared at the message, her brow slowly smoothing into a smile. She only knew one Vladimir, and that was Vladimir Jabotinsky, mentor and pseudonym of Shimon Guttman. Vladimir Junior could only be one person. With a relief that flowed through her as a wave of exhaustion, she understood what Uri was telling her. That he was alive. Somehow he had survived the gunshot on the highway; somehow he had endured whatever agonies Miller’s goons had inflicted on him. And now he was in ‘an old moment’. She had to smile at that. He knew she would remember it, because they had talked about it: the café that used to be Moment .

When she opened the door, she saw him immediately, in the same seat she had found him in two days ago. Except now he was looking up, straight at her.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I normally insist on going somewhere new for a second date.’

He tried to smile, but only a wince would come. She sat beside him, planting a long kiss on his lips. She had been relieved when she got the note, but that was nothing next to her feelings now. She moved to hug him, stopping when he let out a yelp of pain.

He pointed at his leg, explaining that underneath these jeans was a thick bandage covering a bullet wound. He told her about the shooting and the interrogation, her face registering each new agony as he described it. And he told her how his tormentors, in the middle of their work, had received a phone call, one that made them stop. They had dressed him in new clothes and driven him to the centre of town, dumping him ten minutes from here. They left him with a warning: ‘You saw what happened to your parents. If you don’t keep your mouth shut, the same will happen to you.’ He had been blindfolded throughout.

‘Uri, did the men who…did they ever tell you who they were?’

‘They didn’t have to.’

‘You guessed?’

‘I guessed even before they spoke in English. They were speaking to each other in Arabic. Calling their leader Daoud, the whole thing. Their accents weren’t bad. But they were like mine.’ He tried to smile. ‘They had intelligence-officer Arabic. You know, an accent learned in a classroom. Mine’s the same. I wondered if they were Israelis at first. I spoke to them in Hebrew.’ He shook his head. ‘Not a word. So I worked it out. Later, when they were torturing me, they didn’t even hide it. That’s what frightened me the most.’

Maggie’s eyebrows shaped themselves into a question.

‘When they don’t care if you know who they are, that can only mean one thing. That they’re going to kill you. Their secret is going to be safe.’

When she described what had happened to her, trying hard not to spell out the physical details, his eyes held hers with a seriousness she hadn’t seen before. His face registered fury and resolve but, above all, sorrow. Finally and quietly, he said: ‘Are you OK?’

She tried to speak, to say that she was all right, but the words were caught in her throat. Her eyes were stinging too. She hadn’t cried until this moment, not until Uri had asked her that question. He held her hand, squeezing it as if in compensation for the words she wasn’t saying. And he kept holding it.

When she told him about Miller, keeping her voice low, his face showed only mild surprise. ‘You do realize,’ she said, ‘that this goes all the way to the top.’

‘Of course it does. Special forces don’t just deploy themselves.’

And then she felt it again, that same unease she sensed when Miller had let her go. She reached into her pocket, pulling out the piece of paper from the hotel, with Uri’s message on it. On the other side, she scribbled a question.