The Last Testament Part 7

'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. 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 a.s.signment 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 rea.s.sure both publics that there's nothing to worry about and that the talks should go ahead.

She checked the Haaretz 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?' 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 a.s.sured 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 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. 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 pa.s.sion for the ancient history of this land. He became what polite society refers to as a muscular archaeologistand 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 admirersand enemiessaid he had ama.s.sed 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 h.o.a.rd? 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 Shimon Guttman archaeologist.

The page filled up. A decade-old profile from the Jerusalem Post 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 Post called his 'patriotic pa.s.sion for excavating the Jewish past'. called his 'patriotic pa.s.sion for excavating the Jewish past'.

Next came Minerva 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 b.u.t.ton 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 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 Inst.i.tute 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 2003.

Salam had headed to school that morning more out of habit than expectation. He didn't really believe that his cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.smates 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 cla.s.s 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.

'What did you get?'

'Ah, now that would be telling, wouldn't it? But, as the Prophet, peace be upon him, says, "The h.o.a.rded treasures of gold and silver seem fair to men"and they certainly seem fair to me.'

'You got gold and silver?'

'And much else that will seem fair to men.'

'How long were you there for?'

'I was there all night. I went back five times. For the last four trips I took a wheelbarrow.'

Salam took in Ahmed's wide smile and made a decision. He would not let on that he too had been at the museum last night, not because he feared the lawthere was no law nowor any Baathist punishment, but because he was ashamed. What had he taken from the National Museum but a single useless lump of clay? He wanted to curse G.o.d for making him such a coward. For, as always, he had been too meek, holding back from danger and allowing others to barge past him to glory. It was the same on the football field, where Salam never plunged into a tackle, but kept his distance, gingerly avoiding trouble. Well, now that habit had cost him his fortune. Ahmed would make it, he would be a millionaire, he might even escape Iraq and live like a prince in Dubai or, who knows, America.

That evening Salam looked under his bed with none of the fever he had felt when he had checked there that morning. His booty was still in place but now as he pulled it out he saw it as drab and worthless. He imagined Ahmed's stash of rubied goblets and gold-encrusted figurines and d.a.m.ned himself. Why had he not found those treasures? What had sent him poking around in a dark bas.e.m.e.nt when the dazzling glories of Babylon were there for the taking? Fate was to blame. Or destiny. Or both of them, for ensuring that, no matter what, Salam al-Askari would be a loser.

'What's that?'

Salam instinctively doubled over the clay tablet, as if he had been winded. But it was no good: his nine-year-old sister had seen it.

'What's what?'

'That thing. On your lap.'

'Oh this. It's nothing. Just something I got at school today.'

'You said there was no school.'

'There wasn't. But I got this outside-'

Leila was already out of the room, skipping down the corridor to the kitchen: 'Daddy! Daddy! Salam has something he shouldn't have, Salam has something he shouldn't have!'

Salam stared at the ceiling: he was finished. Now he would take a beating and for nothing, for some worthless piece of dust. He held the tablet, stood on the chair by his bed and began fiddling with the window. He would chuck this chunk of clay out of the window and be done with it.

'Salam!'

He turned around to find his father in the doorway, one hand already moving to the buckle of his belt. He moved back to the window, working harder now, his fingers trembling. But it was jammed, it would open no more than an inch wide. No matter how hard he pushed, it was stuck.

Suddenly he felt a hand gripping his wrist, pulling his arm back. He could feel his father's breath. The two of them were wrestling, Salam determined to get that window open so that he could hurl this d.a.m.ned lump to the ground.

The chair beneath him began to wobble; his father was pushing against him too hard. He could feel himself toppling over, falling backwards.

He landed hard on his backside. He let out a cry of pain at the impact on the base of his spine. But that, he realized, was the only sound. There had been no crash, no shattering onto the stone floor. And yet the clay tablet was no longer in his hands. He looked up to see his father calmly pick it up from the bed where it had fallen.

'Dad, it's-'

'Quiet!'

'I got it from the-'

'Shut it!'

What a mistake this had been from beginning to end; how he wished he had never set foot in that museum. He began to explain: how he had got swept up in the fervour of last night, how he had been carried in there with the mob, how he had stumbled on this tablet, how everyone had taken something, so why shouldn't he?

His father was not listening. He was studying the object, turning it over in his hands. He paid close attention to the clay 'envelope' that held the tablet within.

'What is it, Father?'

The man looked up and fixed his son with a glare. 'Don't speak.' Then he headed out of Salam's bedroom, walking slowly and with extreme care, his eyes on the object in his hands. A moment later the boy could hear the m.u.f.fled voice of his father on the telephone.

Not daring to venture out of the bedroom, lest he provoke his father's anger anew, Salam perched on the end of his bed, thanking Allah that he had been spared a beating, at least for now. He stayed there like that until, a few minutes later, he heard his father open the apartment door and step out into the night. Salam pictured the ancient tablet that had been his for less than a day and knew, in that instant, that he would never see it again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

JERUSALEM, TUESDAY, 8.45PM.

Amir Tal knocked on the door with two brisk taps, then, without waiting for an answer, walked into the Prime Minister's office. Yaakov Yariv's chair was swivelled round, its back to the door: Tal could see only the corona of silver around his head. He wondered, as he had before, whether the old man was taking a catnap.

'Rosh Ha'memshalah?'

The chair spun around immediately, revealing that the Prime Minister was wide-eyed and alert. But, Tal noticed, there was no pen in his hand, no half-complete doc.u.ment on the table. No sign, in fact, that he hadn't been asleep. A trick the boss had learned in the army, no doubt.

'Sir, I have some important news. The technicians say they've cracked the note left by Shimon Guttman. They've cleansed it of blood and human material and got it to a point where it can be read. The lab will send over the results in the next few minutes.'

'Who else knows about this?'

'No one else, sir.'

There was another tap on the door: the Deputy Prime Minister. 'I hear we have some news. From the lab?'

The PM shot Tal a weary look. 'Convene a meeting here in fifteen minutes. Better have Ben-Ari here too.'

Yariv pulled out of his desk drawer the text that he had been working on for the last twenty-four hours. Drafted in the White House, it bore the hand-written annotations of the President himself: they had all worked on this so long, Yariv could recognize his oddly-sloping scrawl instantly. The President had summarized the points of agreement and the remaining differences. Yariv had to hand it to him, he had done a brilliant job, cleverly emphasizing the former and distilling the latter so concisely that they took only a few words. Yariv exhaled deeply as he reflected that those short half-sentencessome of them describing disputed strips of land not two yards wide, no bigger than a gra.s.s vergeprobably looked to most outsiders like mere technical matters, fine-print detail that surely could be resolved by two teams of lawyers. But Yariv knew that each one could, in fact, represent the difference between serenity for his people, at long last, and another generation of bloodshed and weeping.

When he heard Tal and the others return, he shoved the paper back inside the drawer and, in the same moment, pulled out a bag of garinim garinim, the sunflower seeds that had become his trademark. None of his cabinet colleagues had seen the American president's draft. Nor would they, until he and his Palestinian counterpart had agreed on it. No point in fighting a cabinet revolt over a hypothetical peace accord: he would save that for the real thing. He nodded at Tal to get things started.

'Gentlemen, the scientists at Mazap, the Criminal Identification Department, have worked 24/7 to see through the blood and tissue fragments and reveal what message it was Shimon Guttman wished to convey to the Prime Minister. They warn that the version they have is provisional, contingent on final tests-'

The Defence Minister, Yossi Ben-Ari, cleared his throat and began fidgeting with the yarmulke on his head. It was of the crocheted variety, a sign that Ben-Ari was not just religious but from one of Israel's specific tribes: a religious Zionist. Not for him the black suit and white shirt uniform of the ultra-orthodox, many of whom had little interest in, if not outright hostility towards, a secular state. Rather, Ben-Ari was a modern, muscular Israeli and a raging nationalist, the leader of a party whose core belief was that Israel should have the largest, most expansive borders possible. Guttman had denounced him as a traitor to their cause just for sitting in Yariv's cabinet, as had the rest of the hardcore settler movement. Ben-Ari believed he was doing vital patriotic work, acting as the brake on Yariv that would prevent him 'selling the Jewish people's birthright for a mess of pottage', as he liked to put it. He would stop Yariv giving away land that was too historically significant to be surrenderedor at least he would keep those losses to their barest minimum. And, if the Prime Minister went too far, Ben-Ari would simply quit the cabinet, thereby unravelling Yariv's fragile coalition, mockingly referred to in the press as 'Israel's national disunity government'. That gave him enormous veto power, but there was a cost: if he ever used it, Yossi Ben-Ari would be cast in Israel and abroad, now and forever, as the man who prevented peace.

Tal saw the fidgeting and understood what it meant. He cut to the chase. 'It turns out this was more than a note. It was a letter. Guttman had written on both sides of the paper, in a tiny crabby script, which is why it took the technicians so long to decipher. I'll read it out: My dear Kobi,I have been your enemy for longer than I was your comrade in arms. I have said some harsh things about you, as you have about me. You have good grounds to distrust me. Perhaps that is why every attempt I have made to contact you has been blocked. That is why I have resorted to this desperate move tonight. I could not risk giving this letter to one of your staff, so that they could throw it straight into the trash. Forgive me for that.I write because I have seen something that cannot be ignored. If you were to see what I have seen, you would understand. You would be changed profoundlyand so would everything you plan to do.I have toyed with sharing this knowledge with the public, through the media. But I believe you have a right to hear it first. Accordingly, I have tried to keep this knowledge a secretone so powerful it will change the course of history. It will reshape this part of the world and so the world itself.Kobi, I am not a hysterical man, despite what you have seen on TV. I have exaggerated sometimes, perhaps, in the cause of politics, but I am not exaggerating now. This secret puts me in fear for my life. The knowledge it contains is timeless and yet, in the light of everything you are doing, impossibly urgent. Do not forsake me, do not cast me out. Hear what I have to say: I will tell you everything, holding nothing back. But I will tell only you. When you have heard it, you will understand. You will tremble as I have doneas if G.o.d himself had spoken to you.My number is below. Please call me tonight, Kobifor the sake of our covenant.Shimon Tal put the paper down quietly, aware that a new atmosphere had entered the room, one he did not want to disturb by moving too briskly. He noticed the Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister glance at each other, then away. He found he couldn't bring himself to meet the boss's eye and realized then that he had no idea how the Prime Minister would react. The silence held.

'He'd obviously cracked.' This from the Deputy PM, Avram Mossek. 'A bad case of Jerusalem Syndrome.' The term referred to an acknowledged medical condition, cited by psychiatrists to describe those whose heads had been turned by the Holy City. You could spot them from the Via Dolorosa to the back streets of the Jewish Quarter, usually men, usually youngwith the beard, sandals and wild staring eyes of those convinced they could hear the voices of angels.

Ben-Ari ignored that remark; now was not the time to defend religious fervour. 'Can I see that?' he asked Tal, nodding in the direction of the text.