The Last Testament Part 6

'Yeah, but not only. Also kids who were shooting at settlers or maybe trying to launch a rocket.'

The car dipped suddenly, caught by a deep pothole. Maggie kept staring out of the window. Here, as in almost every other place she had worked, the two sides had ended up killing each other's children. It seemed everyone doing the killing or being killed was young. She always knew that, but in the last few years she couldn't see anything else. Time after time, in place after place, she had seen it and it just sickened her. An image, the same as always, floated into her head and she had to close her eyes tight to push it away.

They threaded through crammed roads, pa.s.sing a coffee shop filled with women in black headscarves. Lee dodged a couple of wagons, pulled by young boys, loaded with fruit: pears, apples, strawberries and kiwis. Everyone used the road: people, cars, animals. It was slow and noisy, horns blaring and beeping without interruption.

'Here we are.'

They had parked by a building that looked different from the others: it was substantial, the stone clean, the gla.s.s in the windows solid. She saw a sign, thanking the government of j.a.pan and the European Union. A ministry.

Inside, they were ushered into a wide s.p.a.cious office with a long L-shaped couch. The room was too big for the furniture inside it. Maggie suspected that grandiosity had dictated the size, with practicality and need coming a remote second.

A thickset man came in carrying a plastic tray bearing two gla.s.ses of steaming mint tea, for her and her Marine escort. Maggie had seen a half dozen more men like him on her way up, sitting around like drivers at a taxi dispatch office, smoking, sipping coffee and tea. She guessed they were officially 'security'. In reality, they were that group she had seen in countless corners of the world: hangers-on, blessed with a brother-in-law or cousin who had found them a place on the state payroll.

'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, a.s.sorted aides and officials. On the wall, a portrait of Ya.s.ser 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 statementssometimes calls to arms, sometimes sober a.n.a.lyses, 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 t.i.tlethere was still a chairman and a presidentbut 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 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!' 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. Of course. Al-Shafi was not speaking to her, she realized. He was Al-Shafi was not speaking to her, she realized. He was performing. performing. His real audience was the other men in the room. 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 gla.s.ses, 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 b.a.l.l.s.e.xcuse meby 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 onea strange onefrom someone he does not recognize.'

'Has he spoken with colleagues? Maybe it's someone he worked with.'

'Of course. But his a.s.sistant 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 stoneand, 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 h.e.l.l 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 circ.u.mstances, were a reliable warning of serious trouble ahead.

She reached for the minibar. With a gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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 m.u.f.fled 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 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.'