The Jerusalem Puzzle
She came towards us, looking solemn. She wasn’t the person I’d remembered from the last time we’d met. That had been someone who’d laughed a lot, poked at you, filled any room she was in with her energy. All that was gone.
After brief hellos, she said, ‘Let’s go.’ She motioned for us to go with her.
‘What happened to being here in an hour?’ I said. I tried not to sound too irritated. I don’t think I succeeded.
‘Do you want my help or not?’ Her cheeks were puffed up and bright pink, as if she’d been running.
‘Where are we going?’ Isabel was playing the part of the unruffled partner. She was smiling sweetly.
‘To the Hebrew University. Simon Marcus is expecting you. He’s waiting.’
‘Let’s go then,’ I said.
It took only twenty minutes to reach the Edmund J. Safra Campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was located on the spine of a hill a little to the west of the city centre. The buildings were modern concrete lecture and administration blocks. In between them was dry-looking grass, tall thin cypress trees, short pine trees, and the occasional palm tree.
Talli said Simon Marcus was holding a symposium that lunchtime in one of the teaching labs for his graduate students.
She drove us there in a pale blue beaten-up old Mercedes. She excused its appearance by telling us how badly academics were paid in Israel, and how high their taxes were these days.
We passed a sign for the Manchester teaching lab. Groups of students were hanging around outside the next building. Talli went straight up to the nearest person in one of the little groups and began talking. We waited a few feet away by a concrete bench. She was back with us in a minute.
She threw her hands up in the air. ‘Simon’s not here. It’s not like him, they say. He hasn’t even texted anyone.’ Her eyes rolled.
‘I spoke to him just before I met you. He told me he’d be here.’ She sighed. ‘Something must have happened.’ She looked at me accusingly.
I stared back at her. If something had happened to him she couldn’t blame it on me. On the way here I’d told her about Max Kaiser being burnt to death and about Susan Hunter disappearing. I was starting to regret having said anything.
‘One of the students has gone to look for him. I don’t know what to do after that.’ She waved a hand through the air dismissively, then sat down heavily on the bench.
A few spots of rain fell. Then a downpour started. We all ran.
Talli had parked her car in an underground car park near the sports centre. Once inside the doorway we shook off the rain and walked, squelching, towards the lower floor. As we turned a corner I heard a voice call my name.
I turned.
A young woman with an earnest face and shoulder-length curly black hair, wearing a pink, rain-spotted t-shirt and pale blue jeans was walking fast towards me. She waved, as if she knew me. Isabel was a few paces ahead of me. Talli was even further on. Then she went up to the next floor, the floor the car was on.
‘You’re a long way from home,’ the woman said.
‘I am.’
‘Don’t you remember me?’
‘When did we meet?’ I had a vague memory of her, maybe from the early days in Oxford. We used to get a lot of interns passing through when we first set up the institute.
She bent her head to one side, glancing over my shoulder.
I turned. Isabel was beside me. ‘Hi,’ she said, in a friendly manner. Talli’s car started up with a roar on the floor below. The noise of the engine filled the air.
The girl was backing away. She looked as if she’d expected me to remember something else about her. ‘I have to go,’ she said. She turned and walked away fast.
‘What was that all about?’ said Isabel.
I shrugged. ‘I think I met her in Oxford.’
‘You don’t remember her?’ said Isabel.
‘We get a lot of exchange students who intern at the institute. Some of them send long pleading emails. I stopped reading them. Beresford-Ellis does all that now. Maybe she was hoping for another job.’
Talli’s car was right behind us. She beeped the horn. We got in.
As we drove off the campus I kept an eye out for the girl, but I didn’t see her. Talli’s phone rang. She pulled over to take the call. We were parked in a dangerous place, half blocking a side road leading back into the university.
Within a few seconds I had figured out who she was speaking to. It was Simon Marcus.
Talli spoke in Hebrew, looking at us, gesticulating. Then she went silent. She was listening.
‘You don’t remember that girl?’ whispered Isabel.
‘We used to have a party before the interns left each May. We used to hire a room at the Randolph in Oxford and drink all night. We were asked to leave the last time we did it. Someone let off a fire extinguisher in one of the stairwells. It was a nightmare.’
Isabel shook her head mock-disapprovingly. ‘No wonder you don’t remember people.’
That incident was the real reason we abandoned the intern parties, calming things down after our first years of successes. We’d been lucky no one had sent a picture of the foam on the stairs and people rolling in it to the media. We’d been applying for new research grants that year, and a picture of one of our researchers wielding an extinguisher would not have made good PR.
Talli was talking quickly on the phone. She sounded angry. Then she was listening again.
‘What did Irene think of these parties?’ Isabel asked quizzically.
‘She enjoyed them,’ I said. ‘But that was ten years ago.’
Isabel looked away.
She’d told me early on that an old boyfriend used to drink himself into oblivion. She’d finished with him when he’d refused to give up.
She was very different to Irene. Irene and I had enjoyed occasional benders right up until she died.
After that, grief had taken away any desire to get drunk. Drinking brought back too many memories.
Talli had finished her call. She was putting the car back into gear.
‘What did he say?’ I asked.
‘We’re to meet him in half an hour at a cafe.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘I’ll let him tell you himself.’
Twenty minutes later we were at a small Armenian cafe near the Jaffa Gate. The Jaffa Gate was history come to life. It had originally been built by Herod the Great in the early Roman era. Beside it was a gap in the old city wall, which cars could drive through. The gap had been made in 1898 to allow the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, to drive into the Old City.
On either side of the gate the crenulated city wall ran away left and right.
When General Allenby took Jerusalem in 1917, recovering the city from Islam after seven hundred years under its control, he entered the city on foot, through the original arched Jaffa Gate.
The gate is to the west of the warren of flat-roofed, sand-coloured buildings and alleys which make up the Old City. Once inside, to the right is the Armenian quarter, to the left the Christian quarter and straight on, the Muslim and Jewish quarters.
The road for cars curved to the right beyond the gate and there was a small paved area on the left lined with shops and cafes. These buildings were all three and four-storey high Ottoman-style shops with tall windows, rooftop balconies and arched entranceways. Plastic signs, canopies, and racks of postcards lined the pavement in front of the cafes, tourist offices and money changers.
‘I’ll have the lamb kebabs and a coke,’ said Isabel to the white-shirted waiter who hovered over us. I ordered the same, with a coffee. Talli just ordered coffee.
‘I hope he doesn’t let us down again,’ she said.
‘Let’s enjoy our lunch, whatever happens,’ said Isabel. ‘We don’t get lunch in Jerusalem every week.’
‘What do you do, Isabel?’ Talli asked.
Isabel spent the next few minutes telling Talli about the low-level job she used to work at in the British Consulate in Istanbul. I think she overplays all that. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else who makes their previous job out to be so lacklustre. Talli’s eyebrows kept going up as Isabel described rescuing drunken businessmen from the wrong bars near Taksim Square.
Beyond the window of the cafe, I watched people walking up from the gap in the Old City wall. Three policemen were talking to each other by a set of concrete bollards near a taxi rank on the far side of the road.
All kinds of people were passing the window: priests in black habits, monks in brown, nuns with their hair covered, a group of Arab women similarly modest, American tourists, Chinese tourists, Israeli girls giggling.
A white police car drove slowly by.
The rain had stopped but the clouds hadn’t gone away. They were stuck above us, like a lid over the city.
‘My grandfather’s brother died near this gate.’ Talli turned, pointing out the window.
‘When was that?’ I thought she was going to tell me about some suicide bombing incident.
‘In ’48. He was in the Haganah. He fought against the British, then against the Jordanians. At this gate the fighting was fiercest. The Arabs wanted to kick us all out of Israel. I’m not kidding. He was shot in the head. He lay right there for four hours before his comrades could get to him.’ She pointed at a spot halfway back to the gate.
‘We didn’t win the Old City that time, but he opened the way for Jerusalem to be free for Jews after fourteen hundred years of ill treatment and exile.’ She paused and looked down at the red and white chequered tablecloth.
‘His girlfriend, Sheila, she never married. I met her once. Her eyes were pools of sadness. She was so incredibly beautiful when she was young. But she was old and grey when I met her. And now she’s dead.’
I glanced out the window. Two Orthodox Jews, seemingly pressed to each other for solidarity, moved fast past the window. Their long beards were black and thick, their shirts crisp and white.
Walking towards us was an older man in a faded cream suit. The girl who had approached me in the university car park was beside him. A vein thumped in my throat.
Why was she here?
9
The British Embassy in Cairo is in Ahmed Ragheb Street, in an affluent suburb called Garden City, on the eastern shore of the Nile, between the river and the city centre, just south of Tahrir Square. The cream, colonial-style building with its first floor balcony and lawns down to the river was in a style more suited to the days of the Raj. But behind its calm exterior a number of alterations had been made to the building to bring it into the twenty-first century.
The basement area had been extended. It now housed an intelligence suite, a situation monitoring station for the British Intelligence Service in Cairo.
That Monday afternoon it was 1.30 p.m. in Jerusalem, 12.30 p.m. in Cairo and 11.30 a.m. in London. Mark Headsell, seconded to the embassy after three and a half years in Iraq, was watching a large LCD screen on the far wall of the suite.
The screen was showing the border crossing from the Gaza strip to Egypt. The crossing was open and trucks were using it, a line of them heading slowly into Gaza. It appeared they weren’t being searched.
The last time this had happened, an Israeli air raid had taken place. Two people had died. The Israelis had claimed they could prove rocket parts, destined for Hammas, were on those trucks. Whatever the UN said about Israel, there was no escaping the fact that the country would defend itself whenever it felt under threat.
Mark’s worry at that moment was how far that defence would go. Since the post-Mubarak elections, things were unpredictable here. The players were changing and the military restive, eager to regain influence. The reaction of the Egyptian army to the next Israeli air strike could not be guaranteed.
Other things about Egypt worried him too. Some of them were displayed on other, smaller screens along the wall. One showed an anti-Israel demonstration in Tahrir Square. An army unit, from Zagazig, was stationed there that day and Mark’s concern was about how they would react to the demonstration.
A report on the movement of an Iranian submarine near the southern entrance to the Suez Canal also disturbed him. A satellite image, courtesy of the United States NSA office, of the last known position of the submarine, was displayed on a different screen. A radar map of the area was overlaid on the image.
But the big screen on his own desk was showing what he was chiefly interested in that day. A high definition security camera feed from the main entrance to the hotel in Jerusalem where Dr Susan Hunter had stayed. The feed was paused. The Herod Citadel Hotel was one of the best in Jerusalem, but Susan Hunter hadn’t chosen it for its five-star facilities.
She had chosen it because of its security arrangements. One of these, which she wasn’t even aware of, nor were the security staff at the hotel, was the fact that the British Intelligence Services had tapped into the security camera system.
The ability to tap into private security systems, to relay images of diplomats and high-powered businessmen anywhere in the world, was not something the British Security Service wanted to advertise.
Dealing with public outrage about invasions of privacy would waste resources. Explaining that almost everyone would be better off with people watching their backs was unlikely to assuage true liberals. People who never had to deal with the threat of a gun attack or a suicide bomber intent on exterminating their kind were apt to be unaware of what was being done every day in their name.
And if corporate titans, religious leaders and government tsars were afraid that pictures of them with teenage escorts or coincidentally young and clearly gay personal assistants would end up in the media, they could always clean up their act.
Mark leaned forward. The woman in the centre of the screen – the reason the security camera had gone into frame-hold mode, as the facial recognition software had thrown her up as a possible – was similar in complexion and hair colour to Susan Hunter, but it was definitely not her. He pressed Ctrl-X on his keyboard. The screen jumped back to showing real time.
He turned to his secure instant messaging screen. The message he had highlighted a few minutes before was in the centre in a small pop-out screen. Other social media posts, Tweets and Facebook updates were flowing past it. He tagged the post as important, then closed the pop-up.
He turned to his secure email system and read his messages. A signal from Dr Susan Hunter’s phone had been picked up. It had only lasted ten and a half seconds, and tracing the exact location of the transmission hadn’t been completed, but the most interesting thing was that a signal had been picked up at all.
It could be a trick, of course, or a summons, but it could also be an amateur mistake on the part of her captors. The length of time the signal had been active made that a real possibility. Someone hoping to lure them would have left Susan Hunter’s phone on for longer. It was well known that it took thirty seconds for a phone’s location to be reliably established.
Few people knew about the latest, ultra-fast location tracking software the Israelis were using. It wasn’t always right, but with a bit of luck they would soon be able to identify the location of Susan Hunter’s phone and some other interesting information too.
The screen to his left was showing rolling news from the Nile News Channel, the state-owned Egyptian news service. He watched it for a few seconds, then turned up the sound.
The image on the screen was of the burnt-out house where a poor Jewish family had been found a few days before. The Arabic script flowing across the screen, from left to right, said that a ‘no questions asked’ reward of one million dollars had been offered by an American-Israeli group to anyone who could help them to arrest the perpetrators.
Whoever had blocked the doors and burnt that house would have to hope that everyone who knew they’d done it was as dedicated to the cause as they were.
And what would happen if someone pointed a finger at a terrorist who had recently crossed from Egypt?
What would the Israelis do then? Start bombing the crossings into Gaza?
10
The girl who had spoken to me peeled away from Simon Marcus just before he reached the cafe. Isabel was saying something to me now, but my mind was elsewhere, in the past.
‘Earth to Sean. Come in, Sean.’ She was waving her hand in front of my face.
‘Very funny. Did you see who’s coming?’
She turned fast, just in time to see Simon Marcus entering through the front door.
I leaned over the table, whispering to Isabel, ‘We’ll probably need your people skills with this guy.’
‘I love a challenge,’ she said.
Talli was halfway out of her seat already. ‘Simon, good to see you.’
He sat beside me, facing Talli. ‘Is this the man you told me about?’ He turned to me and put his hand out.
I took it. His skin was rough, his grip hard. He shook hands with Isabel too.
He must have been six foot three. He was wearing faded jeans and a floppy navy corduroy jacket. He had a big face and his blonde hair was balding a little, but that didn’t take away from the image he presented, which was of an ageing Viking.
‘Who was that with you outside?’ I gestured with my thumb.
‘She’s a graduate student. She’s helping me with some important work I’m doing.’ His smile was thin, his expression puzzled. ‘Do you know her?’
‘She may have worked briefly as an intern with my institute.’
‘She was in England studying. She would have joined us, but her mother is sick. She had to go.’ He shrugged.
Talli leaned over and began talking in Hebrew to Simon. She spoke fast. I had no idea what she was saying. It was disconcerting.
Finally, Simon put his hands up, turned to me and spoke in English. ‘Is this about Dr Hunter?’
I nodded. ‘We’re trying to find her. She was doing some translation work on a book we found in Istanbul.’ I pointed at Isabel, then back at myself.
Simon smiled at Isabel. It was a warm smile, as if he was keen to get to know her. Isabel smiled back.
My phone rang. It took me half a minute to get it out. That’s what happens when you wear baggy chinos with voluminous pockets.
‘Is that Mr Sean Ryan?’ said a woman’s voice with a Scottish accent.
‘Yes.’
‘This is a courtesy call, Mr Ryan. Your phone has been used in a country you have never previously visited. This call is simply to verify that it hasn’t been stolen.’
‘You’re getting very security conscious.’
‘We look out for our customers,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?’
I agreed, after she told me they might have to restrict my phone service if I didn’t. She asked me my date of birth, and all the other usual questions that are asked at moments like this. I turned away from the table, dropped my voice as I answered.
When I was finished, Isabel and Simon were having a deep conversation about London.
‘Did you see Dr Hunter when she was here?’ I asked him, jumping in.
‘No, I didn’t.’ He shook his head.
‘Did you hear what happened to Max Kaiser?’
‘Yes, yes, I did. It was terrible.’ He looked me in the eye. ‘You must be careful, Mr Ryan. These are dark days.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill someone like that?’
He put his thumb and finger together in front of him, pressed them together. ‘Some people enjoy being evil.’ He spread his hands out on the table, as if he was holding it down. ‘I pray they catch the terrorists who did it. Are you investigating his death?’
Isabel spoke. ‘Kaiser may have met Susan Hunter. We’re looking for her. If we find out where Kaiser was working, we might be able to track her down too.’
‘He was working on a dig, I know that much. He used me for a reference to get onto it, but no one told me exactly where the dig is. Max was off in a world of his own,’ Simon replied.
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘What general area is the dig in?’
‘In Jerusalem, somewhere.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry, I know that’s not much good.’
Talli joined the conversation. ‘I’m sure you’ll find Dr Hunter. Have you spoken to the police?’
‘Not yet, but we will,’ I said. I turned back to Simon. ‘What happened to your meeting at lunchtime?’
He spoke slowly. ‘We had a bomb scare in my apartment. There are a lot of idiots around. The police wouldn’t let me take my car out. At the beginning they said I could. Then they changed their mind.’ He put a hand to his forehead and rubbed it.
‘Some people make me crazy. I’m a busy man.’ He lowered his head. ‘But I have to accept it. It’s all in the name of security.’ He put his palms together, bowing his head as if he was praying.
Then he looked up at me. ‘What is your area of expertise?’
‘Digital analysis, pattern recognition. I helped found the Institute of Applied Research. We have multidisciplinary research teams. We’re academics who want advanced research to be used for practical purposes, and as soon as possible.’
He looked interested. ‘Good, good. I believe I’ve heard of you. You would like what I’m working on. Perhaps we’re ahead of even the great Oxford University.’ He grinned. It was one of the grins I’d seen academics use before, when they thought they might have discovered something interesting or at least more interesting that what you were working on.
‘What’s the project?’ I asked.
‘It’s not published yet, so I can’t tell you.’ His smile was enigmatic. ‘But I will send you the article when it comes out.’
‘What area is it in?’ Isabel had her head to one side.
‘The use of lasers for manipulation of molecules, cells and tissue. It’s called biomedical optics. It’s a whole new science. We got our own journal only in 2011.’
I joined the conversation. ‘Two of our researchers have published papers in that journal this year. We’re the only research institute in the world to have published that number in it so far.’ If it had been a spitting contest, I’d have hit the far wall.
His cheeks reddened.
‘Then you should see what we’re doing. We’re ahead of everyone.’ He jabbed his finger at me.
The waiter was hovering. Simon ordered a coffee. We’d finished our kebabs. They’d been good; soft and spicy.
Isabel talked about how interesting Jerusalem was. Talli gave her some advice on where we should go while we were here. Simon’s coffee came. I watched him stir it.
‘A lot of people come here for their souls,’ he said. He gestured toward the pedestrians passing beyond the window. ‘They think they will find it in the old stones here. They look, and then they look some more, but a soul is not easy to find.’
‘They need better maps,’ said Talli, solemnly.
‘You know about the show in the Tower of David?’ Simon motioned over his head towards the museum and walled fortress on the far side of the road.
‘It’s not from King David’s time though, is it?’ said Isabel.
‘It’s a perfect illustration of the layers of misunderstanding in this wonderful city. The citadel is called the Tower of David because Byzantine Christians thought it was built by him. But it was built by Herod the Great.’ His hands were in the air. ‘A madman who murdered his family.’
Talli put her hand on his arm. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be somewhere?’ she said. Simon looked at his watch.
‘Yes, yes, what am I thinking?’ He pointed at me and Isabel.
‘You will come with me,’ he said. ‘You will see what we are working on. And you will tell all your friends in Oxford when you go back how advanced we are.’ He stood.
We paid for our food.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as we headed towards the Jaffa Gate.
‘To another citadel.’ He gripped my arm. I put my hand on his, squeezed back, in a friendly, but determined way.
He leant towards me. ‘I have a meeting this afternoon at the Herod Citadel hotel. I am presenting at 5.30. The meeting will be private, but I’d like you to see the presentation. I think you will be surprised at what we’re doing. And a little jealous, perhaps!’