The Jerusalem Puzzle

15

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?

16

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.’

He turned and looked up at the front of the building.

‘Yes, it was terrible,’ he said. ‘Mr Kaiser didn’t deserve that. He was always so friendly when we met him.’

He started walking back to the house.

Isabel was beside me. ‘Did he tell you where he was working in the city?’ she asked.

He stopped, turned. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘We worked with Max on a project in Istanbul,’ I said. We were forced together briefly by circumstances was the truth, but I wasn’t going to say that.

I pulled my wallet out, took out one of my cards and handed it to him.

He looked at it as if it was dirt.

‘We’re trying to work out what happened to Max.’

‘He never told me where he worked. I can’t help you. Good night.’

There was a woman by the door of the apartment block watching us. She had a black cat in her arms.

‘Maybe he told your wife,’ I said.

He shrugged. I went after him. He stopped at the door, turned.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. The woman was staring at me with a suspicious expression. ‘We’re trying to find out what happened to Max Kaiser. Did he ever tell you where he was working here in Jerusalem?’

She looked at her husband. He shrugged.

‘It was so terrible what happened to him,’ she said. ‘You know, you are the first people to come by here, to take an interest in him. How did you know him?’

‘We met him in Istanbul. I used to work for the British Consulate there,’ said Isabel.

The woman smiled. ‘My mother fled to England during the war,’ she said.

I wanted to press her again, but I decided to wait.

She put her hand to her cheek. ‘We used to meet Mr Kaiser on the stairs. He was always covered in dust, always in a hurry.’

‘Did he say where he was working?’

‘No.’

I was about to turn and go when she said. ‘But I heard him saying something about Our Lady’s Church. Don’t ask me where it is. I was looking for my little Fluffy over there and he was getting into a taxi with another man.’ She patted her cat’s head, then pointed at the bushes near the road.

‘I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.’ She looked from me to Isabel.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I had no idea if the information was going to be helpful, but at least we’d gained something.

We walked back towards the roundabout. I expected to see the police car again. But they didn’t come. Finally, we saw a taxi with its light on. We were back in the hotel fifteen minutes later.

‘Can you tell me where Our Lady’s Church is?’ I said to the receptionist.

The man behind the desk shook his head. ‘There’s one somewhere in the Old City,’ he said. ‘That’s all I know.’

Upstairs I looked it up on the internet. The Wi-Fi was working, slowly again, but at least it was up and running.

‘Any luck?’ said Isabel, as she came back into the room from the bathroom.

‘The nearest to that name is an Our Lady’s Chapel just off the Via Dolorosa.’

‘That’s the street where people carry the cross at Easter, right?’ said Isabel.

‘Not just at Easter, all year round.’

‘Wonderful, we’re getting into the thick of it.’

‘Maybe Kaiser was just doing a bit of sightseeing,’ I said.

‘At some obscure chapel?’

‘Let’s go and take a look tomorrow.’

Seeing the Via Dolorosa was the kind of sightseeing most people do here. Irene had wanted to come to Jerusalem for a long time. She’d been interested in all this stuff. I’d always been too busy. I’d always thought there was going to be more time.

Irene had been brought up on High Church Sunday school stories of Jerusalem. I’d been brought up a Catholic, but there were one too many scandals, and all the outdated rules had put me off. But now I wanted to see the Via Dolorosa.

A memory of my dad going to mass came back to me. He’d never forced me to go with him, but I always knew he wanted me to.

After I left home I never went again. Irene had nagged me about it, asking me what I believed in. I never had a good answer, unless you count being flippant as an acceptable retort. I was good at all that back then.

For Irene, it had all meant more. She wasn’t a church goer, but she’d believed in helping people.

She’d volunteered to go out to Afghanistan. She didn’t have to. She’d been managing an emergency room at a busy hospital. She’d been the youngest in her class to rise to that position. She had responsibilities, and a lot more besides. But she wanted to give back.

I could feel the old anger bubbling.

For a while, since I’d been around Isabel, the anger had dissipated. Being here in Jerusalem, looking for Susan, was bringing it up again.

We made love that night. Isabel looked so beautiful. But I felt distracted, in a way I hadn’t before with her. Being in Jerusalem was unsettling me.

One of my problems was that I’d never wanted anyone else in the ten years I’d been with Irene. I know that doesn’t sound real, but it was true. I’d closed my mind to other women. Sure, I found some attractive, but Irene had been everything I’d ever wanted.

And I found it difficult to open up to anyone else after she died.

Isabel was the first person I felt I could really trust. One of the comments she’d made had stuck in my mind. You’re strong, Sean, but it’s not enough; you need love.

It was the best part of being with Isabel. I felt cared for.

I felt loved.

17

‘There’s something weird going on,’ said Henry. He shook his head. The social media tracking screen in front of him was blinking with the amount of data scrolling down it.

Normally he’d have let the automated systems deal with the feeds. They hunted for genuinely suspicious posts among the billions of Twitter, Facebook and forum posts, and spam ads and emails that filled the web each day. The algorithms they used were as important to the service as their best code-breaking tools.

The volume of postings on one subject was cresting like a wave. There’d been a thousand posts an hour about it yesterday. Now there was ten thousand an hour. And the rate was climbing.

Sergeant Finch looked down at him. She adjusted her glasses so they were further down her nose. She looked like a schoolmistress. A large and commanding school-mistress.

‘I hope this isn’t another one of your hunches,’ she said.

He smiled up at her. ‘This is no hunch. It’s a prophecy.’

‘You’re a prophet now?’ The smile at the corner of her mouth was either conspiratorial or from her anticipation of how she would describe this exchange to her boss over a coffee.

Henry didn’t care. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘This is about what’s been trending on Twitter and Facebook in Egypt over the last twenty-four hours.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’ Her eyes had darted to another monitoring screen operator who had raised a hand. The room was responsible for real-time monitoring about a hundred current threats to the UK’s national security.

‘All these posts are about a claim that a letter from the first Caliph of Islam has been found. Apparently, it states that Jerusalem, once captured by Islam, will remain Islamic for all time.’

‘Do we know if this letter is real?’

‘It’s being looked into.’

‘Let me know what they find, Henry. Another religious prophecy is the last thing they need in the Middle East. The place is a tinderbox right now. It could burst into flames at any moment.’

18

The following morning we took a taxi to the Via Dolorosa. If you imagine the Old City of Jerusalem as a roughly drawn square, a warren of narrow lanes, then the hill of the Temple Mount, with the golden Dome of the Rock floating above it to the bottom right. And the Via Dolorosa runs almost right to left across the middle, east to west that is, just above the Temple Mount. I say almost advisedly, because there’s a kink in the road as the two sides of it don’t exactly line up in the middle.

The Via Dolorosa ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the long venerated site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his tomb. The Holy Sepulchre was founded by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great in 326 AD, after her son became the first Christian Roman Emperor. Miraculously, she also found the cross Jesus had died on, despite the total physical destruction of Jerusalem carried out by Titus in 70 AD.

The Via Dolorosa was first venerated in Roman times, before the city fell to Islam in April 637 AD. Later, the Franciscans kept the Christian rituals alive whenever they could. They established many of the rites that surround the route to this day. Some misinterpretations of the route still happen though. An archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum, for instance, constructed in the second century, is still believed by many pilgrims to be the place where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd.

Myth, faith and bloody history come face to face in Jerusalem.

Our taxi let us out at the Jaffa Gate. We walked through the Old City towards the chapel of Our Lady. The streets were narrow, intense with souvenir shops and small cafes. The pavements were stone slabs. The first lane went downhill in small steps. Arches and canvas awnings blocked out the early morning sun. At the start of the Via Dolorosa we passed a group of Christian pilgrims following a tall Eastern-European man with a cross on his shoulders.

The closely packed shops were selling wooden crosses, icons, statues of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads, Bibles, pottery, glasses, t-shirts, mugs and a hundred other souvenirs. Some of them had Persian carpets and Turkish kilims hanging outside. Many had low wooden trestle tables jutting out in front.

It was 10.30 a.m. now and the street was busy. There were monks in long habits, mostly brown or black, Arabs in headdresses, women with their heads covered, and tourists with cameras as well as, at the major intersections where one busy and narrow lane crossed another, sharp-eyed Israeli soldiers with guns, watching us all.

Finally we found the chapel. We almost missed it. There was a crowd gathered at the entrance to a lane directly opposite it. They had caught my eye. The Via Dolorosa was wider here, maybe twenty feet across, and the entrance to the chapel was between two high stone buildings in that distinctive Mamluk style, which features layers of alternating light and dark stone.

The crowd on the opposite side of the street was made up mostly of Arab men, bareheaded or in keffiyehs, which flowed loosely over their shoulders. There was a camera crew filming it all.

I approached the cameraman. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

He looked at me, spat on the ground and returned to his work.

We went over to the chapel. It had an ancient grey wooden door, which looked as if it had been new when the Crusaders were here. The door was closed and there was a plaque above it. The plaque was in Greek. Another plaque, in polished brass, simply said Chapel of Our Lady.

Was this the end of us chasing ghosts? I looked around. There was a group of blue-shirted policemen beyond the crowd. They were blocking the entrance to a laneway.

‘What about getting coffee? Look, there’s a place over there,’ I said. I pointed at an old-fashioned looking cafe back the way we’d come. It had a red plastic sign above its door and a menu stuck to its window.

A few minutes later we were sipping thick black coffee in a quiet corner of the coffee shop. We couldn’t get a table near the window. The rest of the tables were full of tourists looking at maps or locals huddled over tea in glass cups or yoghurt drinks. ‘There’s a police station back near the Jaffa Gate,’ said Isabel. ‘In some place called the Qishle building. Maybe we can ask them if they know anything about Susan Hunter? I’m not sure we’re getting anywhere wandering around aimlessly.’ She sounded worried.

‘We’re not wandering around aimlessly. We’re seeing the sights.’

‘What did you think we were going to find here? Kaiser’s dead. He was probably just talking about this place.’

‘So what are all those people here for?’

She looked at the menu.

A nun in a black habit had come into the cafe. She must have been in her eighties. Her skin was creased, translucent, like the cover of a book that was about to fall apart. There were blue veins around her eyes. Her habit was made of rough faded wool, and her back was bowed.