Laurence O’Bryan - The Jerusalem Puzzle

‘We’re looking for an American called Max. He’s got bushy hair. We’re supposed to be going to his place tonight, but I lost his number. I know he lives somewhere on Jabotinsky.’

I leaned towards him. ‘Your boss said I can give you this.’ I had the two notes in my hand. I pushed them forward.

He looked at them, then back up at me. ‘Yeah, I know your American friend, but you’re too late. His apartment’s burnt out. He ain’t been there in weeks. You can’t miss the place if you walk up Jabotinsky. But you won’t want to go there tonight. He won’t be entertaining anyone.’ He took the notes from my outstretched hand and went past me into the pizza shop.

Isabel was still talking to the man behind the counter. If Kaiser’s apartment had been on fire, there’d be a good chance that would be visible from the street. We had to go back to Jabotinsky.

But a part of me didn’t want to.

I didn’t want to see what had happened to his apartment. His death had been a distant thing up until this point.

Now I couldn’t escape thinking about what had happened to him. That made a queasy feeling rise up inside me.

I was imagining what it must have been like. The flames burning him. I couldn’t imagine a worse torture. Soon, I wouldn’t need to imagine it.

The screen on Mark Headsell’s laptop was glowing blue. He’d dimed the lights in the suite on the fifteenth floor of the Cairo Marriot on El Gezira Street as soon as he’d entered it.

The hotel was a difficult landmark to miss if you were aiming to bring down a symbol of Western decadence, but as it had hardly been scratched in the Arab Spring that had overturned Mubarak and his family, it was probably as safe a place as any in this turbulent city.

Being only forty-five minutes from the airport helped too, as did the fact that it was built on an island in the Nile and that it had excellent room service and bars full of expatriates. You could even fool yourself for an hour in Harry’s Pub that you were back in London.

What was keeping Mark out of Harry’s Pub that night was a series of Twitter posts that an astute colleague had been tracking. The one that particularly interested him was one that had been sent an hour ago from an unknown location in Israel.

Whoever was sending the Tweets was covering their tracks well. The fake IP address they’d been using had been broken through, but it had only left them with a generic address for an Israeli internet service provider. Whoever was logging in to make the posts was being very careful. That alone ticked the warning boxes.

We are ready to hatch the brood , was the latest message. It was an innocent enough Tweet on its own, it could have been about pigeons, but the cryptic nature of the others in the stream from the same source gave more cause for concern, as did the trouble they were having locating where the messages were coming from.

The fact that Twitter could be monitored anywhere in the world meant that it could be used to receive signals as to when to commence a whole range of activities. Such things weren’t unknown. The Portuguese Carnation coup of 1974 had been triggered by the singing of the nation’s Eurovision song contest entry in that year’s program.

And this was where things got interesting. His colleague had managed to uncover that over a hundred people across Egypt were following this particular series of messages.

And most of the people searching and watching the Twitter feed were registered to IP addresses on Egyptian military bases or air force bases. It was that final piece of news that prompted his colleague to pass the details of what they’d been tracking onto him and place URGENT in the subject line.

If the Egyptian air force were planning something, then a source inside Israel could be useful to them.

But what were they planning?

The apartment building on Jabotinsky had four floors and eight apartments, two on each floor. It had been easy to figure out which building was likely to be Kaiser’s; there was a big black stain above the balcony at the front. We’d also walked all the way up to the roundabout and back. It was the only building with any smoke damage, never mind anything worse.

It looked like a giant bat had wiped itself out against the front wall, halfway up.

The windows of the apartment were smeared with soot, and the door to the small balcony was blackened as if smoke had streamed through it.

The entrance to the apartments was at the side of the building. The main door was wooden and painted black; secure and sturdy looking. After three failed attempts of pressing the buzzer on each apartment and saying we needed entry to a party, we got in.

We went up in a tiny metal elevator. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was locked. Nobody answered when I knocked lightly. There was blue and white tape barring to it, so I hadn’t really expected anyone to come. The door was also a different colour to the other ones on the floor. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was unpainted.

It looked as if someone had battered the original door down and then replaced it. The people in the rest of the block had been lucky that the fire hadn’t burnt the whole building down. Someone must have called the fire brigade pretty quickly.

‘I bet one of the tenants calls the police because we pressed all those buzzers,’ said Isabel. ‘We shouldn’t hang around. They’ll think we’re back to burn the rest of the building.’

‘Ain’t nothing like being an optimist,’ I said.

‘I wasn’t being an optimist.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘You should get your own show.’ She pressed the button beside the elevator.

I pushed at the door to Kaiser’s apartment. We were out of luck. It didn’t open. I checked the ledge above the door, another one above a small window nearby. Someone might have left a key behind. I even checked under a dusty aloe vera plant on the window ledge. No luck.

The elevator arrived. As we got in, Isabel said, ‘Do you really think this will help us to find Susan?’

‘I don’t know.’ The doors closed. There was a smell of cleaning fluid.

‘You remind me of a Yorkshire terrier we once had. When he got something between his teeth he was a demon for hanging on.’

She was right, of course. We shouldn’t be here, pushing our luck again. We should be back in London, especially after what we’d got ourselves into in Istanbul.

But a stubborn part of me said, to hell with all that; you sat back once, Sean, before Irene died. All that’s over for you. You’re not the guy who sits on his ass anymore.

And I didn’t care what it brought down on me either.

‘Maybe I’m just a sucker for drama,’ I said.

We went outside.

‘No, you’re a sucker for trying to do the right thing.’ Isabel’s tone was soft. ‘And you blame yourself for way too much.’

She was right. But it was like I needed someone saying it over and over for it to go in.

I touched her arm. ‘Look, that’s where they keep the garbage,’ I said. I pointed at a row of black plastic bins in a corner under a wooden cover. They each had a number on them.

‘Have fun,’ she said.

I went to the bin marked three in white paint on its side. There was nothing inside it. The police must have taken the rubbish.

A door slammed, footsteps echoed. I felt like a criminal standing by the garbage cans. I started walking back to where Isabel was waiting near the road.

‘Can I help you?’ said a reedy voice.

I turned. There was an old man standing there. He had white hair and looked dishevelled. I made a split-second decision.

‘We came to see what they did to Max’s place.’