Laurence O’Bryan - The Jerusalem Puzzle

‘We’re out of here,’ I said. ‘Thanks for showing me what you’re working on. It was interesting.’ I gripped his arm.

Seconds later we were standing by the lifts. There were two dark-suited men in the corridor outside the room we’d just come out of. One of them had cropped hair. The other had longer hair and was younger. Their eyes were watchful. They looked as if they’d be suspicious of their own wives.

‘Is that the local CIA?’ I said, half jokingly, as the elevator went down.

‘Shush,’ said Talli. She glanced up at the small black dome of a security camera in a corner of the elevator.

When we got down below she turned to me. ‘That was the Security Service. I’d bet my pension on it.’

‘Simon is an important guy?’ asked Isabel.

Talli shrugged.

That was when I spotted the knot of people, maybe six or seven, waiting by a table near the revolving glass doors leading from the outside. Two blue-shirted female police officers were waving two-foot-long wands over people, before letting them pass in or out. We joined the queue.

I’d never seen people being checked leaving a place as well as entering it.

Talli threw her gaze to the ceiling as she waited. She whispered, ‘You never know what the Security Service is going to do next here.’

I was dealt with first. The older looking of the two officers held her hand out. ‘ID?’ She said. I gave her my passport.

She couldn’t have been much older than me, maybe a year of two, no more than forty for sure, and she was attractive. She had thick brown hair, big soft eyes, glowing skin, and an authoritative manner. She stood with her legs wide apart and her head back, as if she might bellow a command at me at any point.

‘What were you doing in this hotel?’ Her accent was soft.

‘We were visiting with a friend.’

‘Someone staying here?’ She was holding my passport, leafing through it slowly. She stopped on a page, brought it close to her face to examine it.

‘No, someone having a meeting here.’

‘Who?’

‘Simon Marcus, he’s upstairs.’

She snapped my passport shut and put it in the top pocket of her shirt.

‘I need that,’ I said.

‘How do you know Simon Marcus?’ The other policewoman was waving someone else through. Isabel was behind me.

‘He’s a professor. He knows a friend of mine. We were introduced a few hours ago.’

‘You are here to help him with his work?’ She was looking at me as if I was a conspirator, hiding something.

‘No. I’m not here to help him.’

‘Will you be staying in Jerusalem for much longer?’ It crossed my mind that she was actually saying I should leave Israel.

‘A few more days. We’ll be here less than a week. Why do you ask?’

She stepped back, looked me up and down. It appeared as if she was debating whether to arrest me or answer my question.

‘We have a lot of security troubles here in Jerusalem, Dr Ryan. We wouldn’t want anything to happen to one of our distinguished guests.’

She pointed at some high-backed chairs nearby.

‘Wait here. Do not go away.’ She turned, strode out through the glass doors, heading towards a police jeep that was pulled up outside. I moved towards the chairs, but I didn’t sit down. I stared after her. The jeep had darkened windows.

What the hell was she doing? I looked around. Two more men who looked like security guards were standing by the lifts. They were staring in my direction.

It was 5 p.m. in London. Henry was preparing to leave the office. He was back on normal hours, as his wife called them. He would be joining the crowds surging through Westminster Underground station in a few minutes.

Then a ping sounded from his workstation computer. It was a warning that a priority email had come in. He clicked through to the contents.

REQUEST: 3487686/TRTT

STATUS: CLOSED/EXCEPT: LEVEL 7

CASE: 87687658765-65436

No further information can be provided on the manuscript you requested.

He read the email twice. It gave nothing away. He knew from experience that no further response would be provided to any additional requests he made on the matter. Information on an item that was only available to Level 7 personnel would not be accessible to him. He was lucky he’d received even this response.

What intrigued him about it all was why an ancient manuscript, the one Sean Ryan and Isabel Sharp had discovered in Istanbul, would now be subject to such a restriction.

As he made his way out to the Underground platform heading north he thought about what could be in the document that was so important.

The policewoman had opened the back door of the police vehicle and climbed inside. I imagined her examining my passport in detail, photographing it maybe, or putting it through a computer check, but she could have been doing anything beyond those darkened windows.

‘What did she say to you?’ Isabel was beside me.

The other policewoman was checking people and keeping an eye on me. She needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t going to go anywhere without my passport.

‘She wanted to know if I was helping Simon. I got the impression she knew all about him.’

Isabel stood with me.

And then the policewoman reappeared. She’d only been gone a few minutes. She handed me back my passport.

‘Be careful in Israel, Dr Ryan,’ she said. ‘The situation here is difficult these days. We have to double-check everything. I am sorry for delaying you.’

I passed her by quickly. What she meant was clear. I’d been warned.

I watched as Isabel gave over her passport. The policewoman examined it carefully, asked a few questions then gave it back.

I wondered why she hadn’t asked us where we were staying. Maybe she didn’t need to. Our hotel had copied our passports in front of us when we’d checked in. They’d probably used the copies to register us with the police. And with the number of security cameras around, they probably knew more about our movements than if we had a stalker.

We walked back towards the Jaffa Gate.

‘What’s Simon’s phone number?’ I asked Talli.

‘He told you everything he knows. I’m sure of it,’ she said, after she gave it to me. ‘We have a good reputation for helping academics from other universities.’ She held her hand out to bid me goodbye.

‘Thanks, Talli. I appreciate all your help. It means a lot to me. Send me an email in a week or two about what

you’re working on. Maybe you can come and do a talk for us too.’

She beamed. Then she was gone, and Isabel and I were heading for a taxi that had pulled up. It was disgorging a family of American tourists.

I checked my phone again. Susan hadn’t called back. I tapped her number. I must have dialled it ten times since she’d rung me. The number still wasn’t available.

It was looking increasingly like the call had been an accident of some sort. Maybe her phone had been stolen. Maybe someone had turned it on briefly, pressed the redial button, before taking its SIM out.

‘Can you take us to Jabotinski?’ I said to the driver. He looked at me as if I was a piece of bait drifting on the top of a pool. Then he grinned. He was young, had a few days’ growth of beard and a t-shirt with swirling red and green paint stains on it.

‘You’re tourists, right? Where on Jabotinsky are you going? It’s a long stretch, my friend.’

‘Near the middle,’ I said. He moved off. Isabel traded pleasantries with him for a few minutes. I was trying to work out the significance of everything we’d heard from Simon. Was it relevant that he was involved in a red heifer project? Probably not. They were just another bunch of end-timers, weren’t they?