The Last Testament
‘Mr al-Shafi is ready. Please, please come.’ Maggie collected her small, black leather case and followed the guide out of the room and into another, smaller one. Furnished more sparely, it looked as if proper work was done here. On one couch and in several chairs, assorted aides and officials. On the wall, a portrait of Yasser Arafat and a calendar showing a map of the whole of Palestine, including not just the West Bank and Gaza, but Israel itself. An ideological statement that said hardline.
Khalil al-Shafi rose from his seat to shake Maggie's hand. ‘Ms Costello, I hear you have broken your retirement to come here and stop us children squabbling.’
The joke, and the inside knowledge it betrayed, did not surprise her. The briefing note from Davis had told her to expect a smart operator. After more than a decade in an Israeli jail, convicted not only on the usual terrorism charges but also on several counts of murder, he had become a symbol of ‘the struggle’. He had learned Hebrew from his jailers and then English, and had taken to issuing, via his wife, monthly statements – sometimes calls to arms, sometimes sober analyses, sometimes subtle diplomatic manoeuvres. When the Israelis had released him three months earlier, it had been the most serious sign yet that progress was possible.
Now al-Shafi was recognized as the de facto leader of at least one half of the Palestinian nation, those who did not back Hamas but identified with the secular nationalists of Arafat's Fatah movement. He held no official title – there was still a chairman and a president – but nothing on the Fatah side could move without him.
Maggie tried to read him. The photos, of a stubbled face with broad, crude features, had led her to expect a streetfighter rather than a sophisticate. Yet the man before her had a refinement that surprised her.
‘I was told it was worth it. That you and the Israelis were close to a deal.’
‘“Were” is the right word.’
‘Not now?’
‘Not if the Israelis keep killing us in order to play games with us.’
‘Killing you?’
‘Ahmed Nour could not have been killed by a Palestinian.’
‘You sound very certain. From what I hear, Palestinians seem to have killed quite a lot of other Palestinians over the years.’
His eyes flashed a cold stare. Maggie smiled back. She was used to this. In fact, she did it deliberately: show some steel early, that way they'll resist the temptation to dismiss you as some lightweight woman.
‘No Palestinian would kill a national hero like Ahmed Nour. His work was a source of pride to all of us and a direct challenge to the hegemony and domination of the Israelis.’ Maggie remembered: al-Shafi had taken a doctorate in political science while in jail.
‘But who knows what else he was doing?’
‘Believe me, he was the last person on this earth who would collaborate with the Israelis.’
‘Oh come on. We know he wasn't a big fan of the new government. He couldn't stand Hamas.’
‘You're informed well, Ms Costello. But Ahmed Nour understood we have a government of national unity in Palestine now. When Fatah went into coalition with Hamas, Ahmed accepted it.’
‘What else could he say publicly? Last time I checked, collaborators weren't wearing T-shirts with “collaborator” written on the chest.’
Al-Shafi leaned forward and looked unblinking at Maggie. ‘Listen to me, Miss Costello. I know my people and I know who is a traitor and who is not. Collaborators are young or they are poor or they are desperate. Or they have some shameful secret. Or the Israelis have something they need. None of these fit Ahmed Nour. Besides—’
‘He knew nothing.’ Suddenly Maggie realized the obvious. ‘He was a middle-aged scholar. He didn't have any information to give.’
‘Yes, that's right.’ Al-Shafi looked puzzled; he was looking for the trap. The American had folded too early. ‘Which is why it must have been the Israelis who killed him.’
‘Which would explain the strange accent of the killers.’
‘Exactly. So you agree with me?’
‘What would be their motive?’
‘The same as always, for the last one hundred years! The Zionists say they want peace, but they don't. Peace scares them. Whenever they are close, they find a reason to step back. And this time they want us to step back, so they kill us and drive our people so mad that Palestinians will not allow their leaders to shake the hand of the Zionist enemy!’
‘If the Israelis really wanted to wind up the Palestinians, wouldn't they kill a whole lot more people than just one old man?’
‘But the Zionists are too clever for that! If they drop a bomb, then the world will blame them. This way, the world blames us!’
Something in al-Shafi's tone struck Maggie as odd. What was it? A false note, his voice somehow a decibel too loud. She had heard this before: once in Belgrade, a Serb official talking at the same, unnatural volume. Of course. Al-Shafi was not speaking to her, she realized. He was performing. His real audience was the other men in the room.
‘Dr al-Shafi, do you think we could talk in private?’
Al-Shafi looked to the handful of officials and, with a quick gesture, waved them out. After a rustle of papers and clinking of tea glasses, they were alone.
‘Thank you. Is there something you want to tell me?’
‘I have told you what I think.’ The voice was quieter now.
‘You've told me you believe that the men who killed Ahmed Nour yesterday were undercover agents of Israel.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you don't really believe that, do you? Is there something you didn't want to say in front of your colleagues?’
‘Is this how you make peace, Miss Costello? By reading the minds of the men who are fighting?’ He gave her a rueful smile.
‘Don't try flattering me, Dr al-Shafi,’ Maggie said, returning the smile. ‘You suspect Hamas, don't you?’ Taking his silence as affirmation, she pressed on. ‘But why? Because he was a critic of theirs?’
‘Do you remember what the Taliban did in Afghanistan, just before 9/11? Something that grabbed the world's attention.’
‘They blew up those giant Buddhas, carved in the mountainside.’
‘Correct. And why did they do this? Because the statues proved there was something before Islam, a civilization even older than the Prophet. This is something the fanatics cannot stand.’
‘You think Hamas would kill Nour just for that, because he found a few pots and pans that predated Islam?’
Al-Shafi sighed and leaned back in his chair. ‘Miss Costello, it's not just Hamas. They are under pressure from Islamists all around the world, who are calling them traitors for talking to Israel at all.’
‘Al-Qaeda?’
‘Among others, yes. They are watching what is happening here very closely. It's possible that Hamas felt they had to show their balls – excuse me – by killing a scholar who uncovered the wrong kind of truth.’
‘But why would they disguise that as a collaborator killing? Surely they would make it look like a state execution, if they wanted to boost their standing with al-Qaeda.’ Maggie paused. ‘Unless they also wanted to make it look like Israel, so that Palestinians would be too angry to go ahead with the peace deal. Is that possible?’
‘I have wondered about it. Whether Hamas is getting, how do you say, cold feet?’
Maggie smiled. She was always wary of first impressions, including her own. But something about the knot of angst on this man's forehead, the way his mind seemed to be wrestling with itself, made her trust him.
Al-Shafi rubbed his beard. Maggie tried to read his expression. ‘There's something else, isn't there?’
He looked up, his eyes holding hers. She did not break the contact; or the silence.
At last, he got up and began to pace, staring at his feet. ‘Ahmed Nour's son came to see me an hour ago. He was very agitated.’
‘Understandably.’
‘He said he went through his father's things this afternoon, looking for an explanation. He found some correspondence, a few emails. Including one – a strange one – from someone he does not recognize.’
‘Has he spoken with colleagues? Maybe it's someone he worked with.’
‘Of course. But his assistant does not recognize the name either. And she handled all such matters for him.’
‘Maybe he was having an affair.’
‘It's a man's name.’
Maggie began to raise her eyebrows, but thought better of it. ‘And the son thought this person might somehow be linked to his father's death?’
Al-Shafi nodded.
‘That he might even be behind it?’
He gave the slightest movement of his head.
‘What kind of person are we talking about?’
Al-Shafi looked towards the door, as if uncertain who might be listening. ‘The email was sent by an Arab.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Jerusalem, Tuesday, 8.19pm
Maggie lay back on her bed at the David's Citadel Hotel. The hotel was cavernous, built in a modern, scrubbed version of Jerusalem stone – and, as far as she could tell, packed with American Christians. She had seen one group form a circle, their eyes closed, in the lobby while their Israeli tour guide looked on, patiently.
Davis had put her here. It was a block away from the consulate; she could see Agron Street from her window. She and Lee had driven back from Ramallah in the twilight, the road even emptier than before, and in silence. Maggie had been thinking, doing her best not to believe that this mission, far from being destined to save her reputation, was doomed to fail.
What Judd Bonham had billed as a simple matter of closing the deal was deteriorating instead into yet another Middle East disaster. No one had kept count of how many times these two peoples had seemed ready to make peace, only to fail and sink back into war. Each time it happened the violence was worse than before. Maggie dreaded to think what hell awaited if, in the next few days, they failed all over again. She had learned to recognize the telltale signs, and high-profile killings on both sides, whatever the circumstances, were a reliable warning of serious trouble ahead.
She reached for the minibar. With a glass honeyed by a whisky miniature, she sat at the desk and stared out of the window. She could see a man emerge from the neon-lit convenience store across the street, carrying a flimsy plastic bag: inside it, a plastic bottle of milk, maybe a jar of honey. A man off home for the night.
It was such a simple sight yet it fascinated Maggie. For some reason such basic, humdrum domesticity had eluded her. She envied that man, heading home with a bottle of milk for the children to drink with their bedtime story. He probably did the same thing every night. Somehow he had managed it without ever trying to break free.
Draining her glass, she considered calling Edward. She wondered if her number would show on his phone and, if it did, whether he would pick up. She imagined what they would say, whether he would apologize for what he had done, or expect her to apologize for having gone to Jerusalem. Maggie sat still, drinking one and a half more whiskies as Edward's words two days ago, slung across the kitchen of their apartment in Washington, did circuits in her head. Was he right, that she always ran away, that she couldn't stick long enough at anything to make it work? Maybe he was. Maybe a normal person would have got over what happened last year and moved on by now.
She dialled his number, using her mobile so he would know it was her and would have a choice to screen her out if he wanted to. As she heard the first ring, she looked at her watch. Half-past one in Washington. He picked up.
‘Maggie.’ Not a question, not a greeting. A statement.
‘Hi, Edward.’
‘How's Jerusalem?’ A pause. Then, ‘You save the world yet?’
‘I wanted to talk.’
‘Well, now's not a great time, Maggie.’ She could hear the clink of silverware and low string music in the background. Lunch at La Colline, she reckoned.
‘Just give me two minutes.’
She could hear the muffled sound of Edward excusing himself from the table, pulling back his chair and finding a quiet corner. Truth be told, he wouldn't have been so unhappy to do it: interrupting a meal to take an urgent phone call was standard Washington practice, a way of signalling your indispensable importance.
‘Yeah,’ he said finally. Fire away.
‘I just wanted to talk about what's going to happen with us.’
‘Well, I was planning on you coming to your senses and coming back home. Then we could take it from there.’
‘Coming to my senses?’
‘Oh come on, Maggie. You can't be serious about all this, playing the peacemaker.’
Maggie closed her eyes. She wouldn't rise to it. ‘I need to know you understand why I was so angry. About those boxes.’
‘Look, I don't have time for this—’
‘Because if you don't understand, if you can't understand—’
‘Then what, Maggie? What?’ He was raising his voice now. People at the restaurant would be noticing.
‘Then I don't know how—’
‘What? How we can carry on? Oh, I think we're past that, don't you? I think you took that decision the moment you got on that plane.’
‘Edward—’
‘I offered you a life here, Maggie. And you didn't want it.’
‘Can we just talk—?’
‘There's nothing more to say, Maggie. I've got to go.’
There was a click and eventually a synthetic voice: The other person has hung up, please try later. The other person has hung up, please try later.
Maggie expected to cry, but she felt something worse. A heaviness spreading inside her, as if her chest were turning to concrete. She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. It was over. Her attempt at a normal life had failed. And here she was again, in a foreign hotel room, quite alone.
It was all because of what happened last year, she understood that. She had thought her relationship with Edward might slay the ghost, but in the end it had been consumed by it. She raised her head and gazed out at the darkness of Jerusalem, knowing that it was quite within her to stay like that, staring and frozen, all night. The prospect was appealing, and she surrendered to it for the best part of an hour.
But eventually another feeling surfaced, the sense that she had been handed a chance to break free of those dreadful events of a year ago, to balance the ledger somehow. To seize that chance she would have to do what she had done so many times before, push away her feelings and concentrate only on the job. She would have to make this current assignment work. She could not afford to fail.
OK, she thought, as she splashed her face with water, forcing herself to make a fresh start. What is the problem? Internal opposition on both sides, prompted by two killings: Guttman and Nour. First priority is to get to the bottom of both cases and somehow reassure both publics that there's nothing to worry about and that the talks should go ahead.
She checked the Haaretz site again and saw the same picture she had seen five hours ago: Ahmed Nour, smiling that enigmatic smile. She whispered almost aloud, ‘What happened to you?’ And then: ‘Is this entire peace deal going to screw up because of you?’
She had done her best with al-Shafi, urging him to keep the faith, to stick with the process. She had assured him that if Hamas were going wobbly, there were things the US could do to bring them back on side. She stressed Washington's absolute conviction that the Israelis were serious, that a Palestinian state could be theirs within a matter of days. She said he bore a historic responsibility and, not meaning to, had glanced up at the portrait of Arafat as she said it.
There was no way of knowing if it had worked. He had ushered her out of his office quietly, summoning his aides and colleagues back in. He was in a corner, she understood that: suspicious of his coalition partners in Hamas, suspicious even of his own inner circle, doubtful of their loyalty. He feared he was being led into a trap, extending his hand to Israel only to be denounced by the Islamists as a traitor. That would secure their domination for decades, if they could cast Fatah as patsies of Israel. He had not spent seventeen years in an Israeli jail for this.
She stared at the picture of Nour as if her eyes might somehow drill down into his and extract the answers she needed. If they could only resolve the Nour killing, tidy it up and put it out of the way, then maybe things could get back on track.
She scrolled down, to see that Haaretz had now posted an extended ‘appreciation’ of the life of Shimon Guttman. She could see from the items around it that the story was still running big. ‘Settlers' leaders demand state inquiry into Guttman slaying,’ ran one headline. ‘Militant rabbi calls for holy curse on Prime Ministerial protection squad’, reported another.
She skimmed this new, longer profile. The same details were there: the early war record; the bluff, bullish persona; the inflammatory rhetoric. But now there were more anecdotes and longer quotations. She was two thirds down and about to give up, when her eye caught something.
In the 1967 campaign and afterwards, Guttman showed his debt to those earlier Israeli heroes Moshe Dayan and Yigal Yadin. He, like them, combined his military prowess with a scholar's passion for the ancient history of this land. He became what polite society refers to as a muscular archaeologist – and what the Palestinians call a looter in a tank. Every hill taken and every hamlet conquered were seen not only as squares on the war planners' chessboard, but as sites for excavation. Guttman would swap his rifle for a shovel and start digging. His admirers – and enemies – said he had amassed a collection of serious importance, a range of pieces dating back several thousand years. All of them had one quality in common: they confirmed the continuous Jewish presence in this land …
Maggie cracked open another miniature bottle of Scotch. Maybe this was just a coincidence: Guttman and Nour, both archaeologists, both nationalists, both killed within twenty-four hours of one another. She read on.
… he was self-taught but became a respected authority, with ancient inscription an esoteric specialism. Did he cut corners, both ethical and legal to build up his hoard? Probably. But that was the man, the last of the Zionist swashbucklers, an adventurer who belonged in the generation of 1948, if not of 1908 …
Two men, not that far apart in age, both digging up the Holy Land to prove it belonged to them, to their tribe. It was a fluke, Maggie told herself. But it was odd all the same. One killing had fired up the Israeli right, the second was whipping up the Palestinian hardliners and both now threatened to shut down the best hope for peace these two nations were likely to see this side of the Second Coming.
Maggie glanced over at the minibar, pondering a refill. She looked back at the screen, heading for the Google window. She typed in a new combination: Shimon Guttman archaeologist.
The page filled up. A decade-old profile from the Jerusalem Post; a Canadian Broadcasting transcript of Guttman interviewed in a West Bank settlement, describing the Palestinians as ‘interlopers’ and a ‘bogus nation’. Both made frustratingly fleeting reference to what the Post called his ‘patriotic passion for excavating the Jewish past’.
Next came Minerva, the International Review of Ancient Art and Archaeology. She couldn't see any obvious pieces about Guttman, so she did a text search and even then it was barely visible. Just his name, small and italicized, alongside someone else's at the foot of an article announcing the discovery of an unusual prayer bowl traced to the Biblical city of Nineveh.
She scoured the text, looking for … she didn't know what. It made no sense to her, all the talk of ‘embellishments’ and ‘inlays’ and cuneiform script. Perhaps this was a dead end. She rubbed her forehead, pressed the shutdown button on the computer and began closing the lid.
But the machine refused to turn off. It asked instead if she wanted to close all the ‘tabs’, all the pages she was looking at. Her cursor was hovering over ‘yes’ when she saw Guttman's name again, small and italic. And now, for the first time, she read the name next to it: Ehud Ramon.
Maybe this man would know something. She Googled him, bringing up only three relevant results: one more of them a reference in Minerva, all three appearing alongside Shimon Guttman. Of Ehud Ramon on his own, as an independent person in his own right, there was nothing.
She found a database of Israeli archaeologists and typed Ehud Ramon into the search window. Plenty of Ehuds and one Ramon but no Ehud Ramon. Same with the Archaeological Institute of America. Who was this man, tied to Guttman yet who left no trace?
And then she saw it. Her skin shivered, as she fumbled for a pen and paper, scribbling letters as fast as she could, just to be sure. Surely this name, apparently belonging to an Israeli or American scholar couldn't be … And yet, here it was, materializing before her very eyes. There was no Ehud Ramon. Or rather there was, but that wasn't his real name. It was an anagram, just like the ones Maggie had unscrambled at uncanny speed as a teenager during those interminable, dreary Sunday afternoons at the convent. Ehud Ramon was a scholar, committed to exhuming the secrets of the soil. But he was the unlikeliest partner for Shimon Guttman, right-wing Zionist zealot and sworn enemy of the Palestinians. For Ehud Ramon was Ahmed Nour.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Baghdad, April 2003
Salam had headed to school that morning more out of habit than expectation. He didn't really believe that his classes would go ahead as normal, but he had gone along anyway, just in case. Under Saddam, truancy from school was, like any other act of disobedience, a risk no one who valued their safety would ever take. Saddam might have been on the run, his statue in Paradise Square toppled for the world's TV cameras, but amongst most Baghdadis, the caution bred over the course of twenty-four years endured. Salam was not the only one who had dreamed of the dictator rising like Poseidon from the Tigris, drenched and angry, demanding that his subjects fall to their knees.
So he went to school. Clearly others had suffered the same fear: half of Salam's classmates were milling around outside, kicking a ball, trading gossip. They made no outward show of exhilaration: too many of their teachers were Baathists, apparatchik supporters of the regime, to risk that. Even so, Salam sensed a nervous energy, an electrical charge that seemed to pulse through all of them. It was a new sensation, one none of them would have been able to articulate. Had they known the words, and had they been free of the fear that was bred into them, they would have said that they were, for the first time, excited by the idea of the future.
Ahmed, the class bigmouth, sauntered over, with a quick glance over his shoulder. ‘Where were you last night?’
‘I was nowhere. At home.’ The reflex of fear.
‘Guess where I was?’
‘I don't know.’
‘Guess.’
‘At Salima's?’
‘No, you dumb ape! Guess again.’
‘I don't know. Give me a clue.’
‘I was making a fortune for myself, man.’
‘You were working?’
‘You could call it that. Oh, I was hard at work last night. Made more money than you'll ever see in your whole lifetime.’
‘How?’ Salam whispered it, even though Ahmed was happily broadcasting at full volume.
Ahmed beamed, showing his teeth. ‘At a store packed with the most priceless treasures in the world. They had a special offer on last night: take as much as you want, free of charge!’
‘You were at the museum!’
‘I was.’ The proud smile of the young businessman. Salam noticed the fluff on Ahmed's chin, and realized his friend was trying to style it into a beard.