The Last Testament

CHAPTER SIX

Jerusalem, Monday 7.27pm

The street was jammed, cars parked on both sides, their tyres spilling onto the pavements. It was a well-to-do neighbourhood, Maggie could tell that much: the trees were leafy, the cars BMWs and Mercs. Her driver was struggling to get through, despite the discreet Stars-and-Stripes pennant flying from the bonnet. It had been getting chilly in DC. Here it was still warm in the late evening; there was a sweet, sticky smell coming off the trees.

The path to the building was packed, all the way to the front door. As she squeezed through, she noticed that look again from several of the men in line, their eyes following her as she went past.

‘You are from the embassy, no? From America?’ It was a man at the door, staff or relative Maggie couldn't tell. But clearly he knew she was coming. ‘Please, inside.’

Maggie was pressed into what would ordinarily be a large room. Now it was jammed with people, like rush hour on a subway train. Her height was an advantage: she could see the crowd of heads, the male ones covered in skull caps, and at the front a bearded man she took to be a rabbi.

Yitgadal, v'Yitkadash …

The room hushed for this murmured prayer for the dead man. Then the rabbi spoke a few sentences of Hebrew, turning occasionally to a row of three people sitting on strangely low chairs. From their red eyes and moist noses, Maggie guessed they were Guttman's immediate family: widow, son and daughter. Of the three, only the son was not weeping. He stared straight ahead, his dark eyes dry.

Maggie could feel the crowd behind her. She was not quite sure what she was supposed to do. She should wait her turn to meet the family, but the room was heaving. It would take an hour to get to the front. But if she left now, it could be interpreted – and written up – as a snub. Meanwhile, she could hardly turn to strangers and strike up chitchat. This was not a party.

She smiled politely as she inched her way through. Her height and black trouser suit persuaded most of the mourners that she was some kind of VIP and they made way for her. (Wearing the suit felt strange: it had been so long since she had dressed this way.) Still, she could only move slowly.

She was making progress until she was blocked by a large bookcase. In truth the whole room seemed to be filled with books. They were broken up by the odd ceramic pot or plate, including one with a strikingly ornate blue pattern, but mainly it was books. Across each wall, and from floor to ceiling.

Her face was pressed up close enough to read the titles. Most were in Hebrew; but there was a cluster of books on American politics, including several of the neo-conservative tomes which had once dominated the New York Times bestseller lists. Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Inside the New Jihad. The Coming Clash. The Gathering Storm. She felt she had a good handle on this Mr Guttman. After all, Washington was not short of men who shared his politics. She had encountered more than one of them, at some reception or other, as Edward worked the room while she stood watching, as if from afar, even when she was right next to him. The memory had barely popped into her mind when she felt the accompanying pang. Edward.

‘Please, please, come.’ Her unofficial host had somehow reappeared and now drew Maggie forward. People were forming a line to meet the mourners. She tried to hear what those in front were saying, but she could understand none of it: Hebrew.

At last, it was Maggie's turn to shake hands with the family, nodding respectfully to each one, trying to mould her lips into the shape of pity. First, the daughter, who gave her only a fleeting moment of eye contact. She looked to be in her mid-forties, with short, dark hair interrupted by a few strands of grey; she was attractive, with a face that radiated solid practicality. Maggie guessed she was the person in charge here.

Then the son. Half-standing, half-sitting, he looked at her coldly. He was tall, and more casually dressed than she would have expected in a house of mourning, in dark jeans and a white shirt, both of which looked expensive. His hair, a full, dark head of it, was well cut, too. From the way people hovered around him, it appeared that he was successful or important in some way. Late thirties, Maggie noted; no sign of a wife.

And finally the widow. Maggie's guide bent down, so that the grieving woman could hear him. Self-consciously he spoke in English.

‘Mrs Guttman, this lady is from United States. From the White House, from the President.’

Maggie toyed with correcting him and let it go. ‘I'm so sorry for your loss,’ she said, bending almost double and extending a hand. ‘We wish you to know that you and your family are in the prayers of the American people.’

The widow looked up suddenly. Her hair was dyed black, her eyes nearly the same colour. She gripped Maggie by the wrist, so that Maggie was forced to look into those dark eyes which, still wet, focused intently.

‘You are from the President of the United States?’

‘Well—’

‘You know my husband had an important message. For the Prime Minister.’

‘That's what I understand and it's such a tragedy—’

‘No, no you don't understand. This message, he had been trying to get it to Kobi for days. He called the office; he went to the Knesset. But they would not let him anywhere near. It drove him mad!’ Her grip on Maggie's wrist tightened.

‘Please don't upset yourself—’

‘What is your name?’

‘Maggie Costello.’

‘His message was urgent, Miss Costello. A matter of life and death. Not just his life or Kobi's life, but the lives of everyone in this country, in this whole region. He had seen something, Miss Costello.’

‘Please, Mrs Guttman—’ It was the man who had introduced them, but the widow waved him away.

Maggie crouched lower. ‘You say he had seen something?’

‘Yes. A document, a letter maybe, something, I don't know for sure – but something of the greatest importance. For the last three days of his life, he did not sleep. He just said the same thing over and over. “Kobi must know of this, Kobi must know of this”.’

‘Kobi? The Prime Minister?’

‘Yes, yes. Please understand, what he had to tell Kobi still needs to be told. My husband was not a fool. He knew the risk he took. But he said nothing was more important. He had to tell him what he had seen.’

‘And what had he seen?’

‘Ima, dai kvar!’ It was the son, his voice firm, the voice of a man used to giving instructions. Mother, enough already.

‘He didn't tell me. I only know it was some document, something written. And he said, “This will change everything.” That's what he said. “This will change everything”.’

‘What will change everything?’

The son was now getting up.

‘I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. For my safety, he said.’

‘Your safety?’

‘I know my husband. He was a serious man. He would not suddenly go crazy and run and shout at the Prime Minister. If he had something to say, it must have been just as Shimon said – a matter of life and death.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Beitin, the West Bank, Tuesday, 9.32am

He wouldn't need to be here long. Just ten minutes in the office, collect the papers and leave.

Except ‘office’ was not quite the right word. The two heavy padlocks guarding the metal door testified to that. ‘Workroom’ was more like it, even ‘storehouse’. Inside, it smelled like a potting shed. The fluorescent strip lights flickered on to reveal shelves filled not with papers, files or computer discs but stiff cardboard boxes. And inside those were fragments of ancient pottery, material Ahmed Nour had excavated from this very village.

He worked this way on every dig. Set up a base as close to the site as possible, allowing the latest findings to be brought back, catalogued and stored right away. He liked to do the job daily if he could: leave even a few burnt pottery shards around for too long and they would soon vanish. Looters, the curse of archaeologists the world over.

Ahmed found his desk: modest, metal, as if it belonged to the foreman on a construction site. Not so far off, he thought to himself. We're both in the business of human homes: they build new ones, I dig up old ones.

The papers he needed for his meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority's Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage were right there, in a neat pile. Sweet Huda, he thought to himself. His young protégée had left everything in order: the permit renewal form, seeking permission to carry on digging in Beitin, and the application for a grant, begging for the cash to do it. Huda took care of all contact with the outside world now. She left him alone with no distractions – no phone calls, no emails, no blaring radio or crackling TV – so that he could bury himself in his work. If he concentrated hard, he could shut out modernity altogether.

That's what he had done this weekend. And he would have carried on doing it all week if it hadn't been for this damned meeting. The head of antiquities was an ignoramus. With no archaeological training, he was little more than a political hack. He wore a beard, which meant that the politics in question were of the new variety: religious.

‘My preference, Dr Nour,’ he had explained to Ahmed in their first meeting, ‘is for the glorification of our Islamic heritage.’ No surprise there. The new government was half Hamas. Translation: I'll pay for anything after the seventh century; if you want to dig up anything older, you're on your own.

The irony of it was not lost on Ahmed. Once he had been a hero to the Palestinian political class. He had been a founder member of a group of scholars who, decades ago, had insisted on looking at the ground beneath their feet in a radically new way. Until then, ever since the expeditions of Edward Robinson in the nineteenth century, those taking a shovel to this landscape were looking for one thing only: the Bible. They weren't interested in Palestine or the people who had lived here for thousands of years. They were searching for the Holy Land.

They were outsiders, of course, Americans or Europeans. They would arrive at Jaffa or Jerusalem giddy with scripture, yearning to see the route Abraham trod, to gaze at the Tomb of Christ. They longed to find the vestiges of the ancient Israelites or of the early Christians. Palestinians, ancient and modern, were an irrelevance.

The new generation, Ahmed among them, was trained in biblical archaeology – what other kind was there? – but they soon developed their own ideas. In the 1960s, several of them assisted a team of Lutheran Bible scholars from Illinois as they excavated Tell Ta'anach, a mound not far from Jenin in the West Bank. The Americans dug there for several years, such was their excitement. Ta'anach was mentioned in the Bible as one of the Canaanite cities conquered by Joshua, military leader of the Israelites.

But Ahmed and his colleagues began to see something else. They returned to the site, their focus now not Biblical Ta'anach but the Palestinian village at the foot of the mound: Ti'innik. These new archaeologists wanted to learn all they could about day-to-day life in this ordinary community, which had sat on the same spot for most of the last five millennia. Every heave of the archaeologist's shovel, every push of a spade, was making a political statement: this would be a Palestinian excavation of Palestine.

That put Ahmed Nour firmly into the bosom of the burgeoning Palestinian national movement. In whispers he was told that the Palestine Liberation Organization, then still secret, banned and run from abroad, approved of his work. He was nurturing ‘national pride’ and handily proving, at a time when most Israeli leaders were still denying even the existence of a Palestinian people, that the communities of these lands had the deepest possible roots.

His reputation only increased when he led students on a dig at an abandoned refugee camp, digging up the trash, the old sardine cans and plastic bags which revealed the way of life of people just a generation gone, those who had fled their homes in 1948. And his work here at Beitin had boosted his reputation yet further.

Previous scholars had thrilled at this place as the Bet-El of the Bible, the spot where Abraham, heading south, stopped and built an altar, the place where Jacob rested his head on a pillow of stone and dreamed of the angels going up and down a ladder. But Ahmed was determined to examine not just the ruins around Beitin, but the village itself. For humble, tiny Beitin had been ruled by Hellenists, by Romans, by Byzantines, by Ottomans. It had been Christian and it had been Muslim: in the late nineteenth century, a mosque had been built on the ruins of a Byzantine church. You could still see the remains of a Hellenistic tower, a Byzantine monastery and a Crusader castle. All three. To Ahmed's mind, that was the glory of Palestine. Even in a forgotten speck like Beitin, you could see the history of the world, one layer on top of another.

That gave him an idea. He reached for one of the newer boxes, one that would contain the freshest finds from the site. He peered inside, his nose crinkling at the musty smell: human skulls from the early Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago, along with storage jars and cooking pots. He smiled, knowing he could do better, that he could go back even further. He unlocked a cupboard, to find the flint tools and animal bones that had first been found at Beitin in the 1950s and which had been traced back some five millennia before Christ. He would tell that oaf at the antiquities department about the traces of blood that had been spotted, a sure sign of ritual sacrifice, establishing that Beitin had once been the site of a Canaanite temple. Maybe it was playing the old biblical game, thought Ahmed with a pang of guilt, but he had to use whatever he'd got.

It still might have no effect. The man from Hamas would doubtless perk up at the reference to the nineteenth-century mosque and yawn at the rest. Or perhaps there was a chance he would see Beitin for what it really was, a place packed with the history of this land.

On tiptoes, stretching to put the most precious box back on the top shelf of the locked cupboard, he heard a noise. Metallic.

‘Hello? Huda?’

No reply. Probably nothing. He must have left the metal door to the workroom ajar and the wind had clicked it shut. No matter. He would seal this box and be on his way.

But then there was another sound. This time a footstep, unmistakable. Ahmed turned around to see two men coming towards him. Both were wearing black hoods which covered their faces entirely. The taller man was holding up a finger, which he theatrically placed over his lips. Hush.

‘What? What is this?’ said Ahmed, his knees buckling.

‘Just come with us,’ said the tall man, something strange in his accent. ‘Now!’ And for the first time Ahmed saw the gun, lifted and aimed straight at him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The US Consulate, Jerusalem, Tuesday, 2.14pm

‘Our information is that the body, riddled with bullets, was dumped by two hooded men in Ramallah's main square about 10.45 local time. The corpse was propped up and displayed to the crowd for about fifteen minutes, then taken away by the same two hooded men who'd brought it there.’

‘Collaborator killing?’

‘Exactly.’ The CIA station chief turned towards Maggie, offering extra tuition to the newcomer to the class. ‘This is standard punishment meted out by Palestinians to any Palestinian deemed guilty of collaborating with Israeli intelligence. Usually they're accused of tipping off Israel as to the whereabouts of wanted terrorists or have warned the Israelis when an attack's coming.’

‘What's the Israeli reaction?’ The questions were coming out of a speakerphone pulled to the centre of the polished wood table: the voice of the Secretary of State in Washington. He had left it to his deputy to manage this last stage of talks on the ground. He had wanted to keep his distance, in case of failure.

‘So far pretty muted. Some boilerplate about Palestinians needing to prove they believe in the rule of law. But that was only a low-level spokesman, when prompted in a media interview. Nothing from any of the principals. I think they want to treat this as an internal—’

‘No chance they'd break off talks over this?’

‘We don't think so, sir.’

‘Unless they're looking for an excuse.’

‘Which they're not at this stage.’ It was his deputy, raising his voice to be picked up by the phone. ‘The talks are painfully difficult right now, but no one's walking away.’

‘Still hung up on refugees?’