The Jerusalem Puzzle Read online

  LAURENCE O’BRYAN

  The Jerusalem Puzzle

  ‘When the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger.’

  Henry V Act 3, Sc. 1, Wm Shakespeare.

  The best part of this story is true.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Epilogue

  The Istanbul Puzzle an extract

  An Interview with Laurence O’Bryan

  Visiting Jerusalem

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Flames burst into life with a whoosh. It was an unusually cold night for late February in Jerusalem. Lead-coloured clouds had been rolling in from the Dead Sea, east of the city, since midday. By ten o’clock that night the streets of the Old City’s Muslim quarter were deserted. Smells of cardamom coffee and kofta drifted from shuttered windows.

  At one minute past ten, the stepped passage of Aqabat at-Takiya echoed loudly with the sound of footsteps. Two men dressed in dusty suits and chequered keffiyehs were hurrying down the wide steps.

  The high masonry walls on each side gave the alley the appearance of a gap between prisons. As the men approached the arched entrance to Lady Tunshuq’s Palace they saw orange flames coming from the recessed doorway.

  They stopped, waited a few seconds pressed against the wall, then moved slowly forward, craning their necks until they could see what was burning. Whoever had set the fire was long gone into the warren of narrow alleys all around.

  As a gust of wind blew the flames up, they saw the body burning fiercely in front of the double-height, green steel doors. Then a throat-clogging smell of burning flesh hit them. The man who’d seen the flames first was already talking on his phone. He could feel the heat from the fire on his face, though they were fifteen feet away. He coughed, backed away. The acrid smell was getting stronger.

  They watched as the flames rose. The wail of an ambulance seemed far away as blackened skin slipped from the man’s face. Tendons and muscle glistened in the flames. A white cheekbone poked out.

  Above the head, paler smoke was drifting where hair should have been. The sickly smell was all around now. A man shouted from a half-shuttered window high up. A woman wailed to God.

  A spurt of hissing flames reflected on the alternating light and dark bands of Mamluk masonry and the stone stalactites hanging above the doorway. The sound echoed down the long passage.

  2

  I turned the radio down. Verdi’s ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ had passed its climax.

  ‘This website says Abingdon is the oldest continuously occupied town in Britain.’ I looked up. A squall of rain hit the side of the car.

  ‘It says people have lived there for 6,000 years. That’s got to make for one hell of a long list of mayors at the town council.’ It was hard reading while Isabel was driving, not just because it was a rainy morning in February, but also because the road we were on, the A415 from Dorchester, twisted and turned at that point under a high canopy of trees.

  ‘In 1084 William the Conqueror celebrated Easter here.’ I looked at Isabel.

  She kept her attention on the road ahead. ‘It is St Helen’s Church we’re looking for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘It was the first monastery to be established in England,’ she said. ‘It’s even older than Glastonbury. You could get four years out of purgatory for visiting it. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?’

  She was smiling. Her long black hair was tied up at the back. She looked good.

  ‘The church is still looking at all sorts of schemes to get people in the door. Did Lizzie tell you they had to go on a marriage preparation course before they used the church for their wedding?’ I said.

  ‘She doesn’t tell me things like that.’ She sniffed. It was barely audible, but its meaning was clear.

  I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to go there. Lizzie worked at the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford in the office next to mine. We’d always been friendly, though it had never led to anything. Her husband-to-be, Alex Wincly, had followed her around like a day-old puppy for years.

  ‘They spent three Wednesday evenings talking about their relationship,’ I said. ‘What a nightmare. How did they find enough to talk about?’

  ‘It sounds like a good idea to me.’ Isabel kept her attention on the traffic, but her eyebrow on my side was up half an inch, at least.

  ‘I reckon she’s pregnant,’ I said. ‘Why else would they get married in February?’

  ‘There’s a lot of reasons people get married in winter, aside from being pregnant.’

  The car radio buzzed as we swept under electricity cables strung between giant pylons. ‘This is the eleven o’clock news from Radio Three,’ said the announcer.

  There was another loud buzz. I missed a few seconds of the next sentence.

  ‘… the badly burnt body discovered in the Old City of Jerusalem early this morning was that of an American archaeologist named Max Kaiser, according to local sources. His death is being blamed on Islamic extremists. In other news …’

  Isabel slowed the car. A car behind, tailgating us, blew its horn.

  ‘Kaiser’s dead,’ she whispered.

  She gripped the wheel. The car sped up again.

  I got that out-of-body feeling you get when you discover someone you’ve heard of has died, as if all your senses have become heightened as you realise how fortunate you are to be alive.

  We didn’t know Max Kaiser well. We’d only met him once in Istanbul when he’d helped us out of the water in the middle of the night, and allowed us to dry out on his yacht, but we were involved with him. He’d staked a very public claim to a manuscript we’d found in Istanbul so he wasn’t ever going to get my vote for person of the year, but he didn’t deserve to die like that.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ I said.

  ‘It’s hard to believe,’ she said.

&nb
sp; ‘Do you think he told Susan Hunter the truth?’

  Isabel shrugged. She looked pale. ‘Susan wouldn’t have fallen for his bullshit,’ she said. She glanced at me. ‘They did say he was burnt to death?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She went silent.

  Dr Susan Hunter was the Cambridge archaeologist who was producing a report for the Turkish government on the ancient manuscript we’d found in an aqueduct tunnel deep under Istanbul. It was the arrangement that had been agreed soon after the manuscript was found.

  Dr Hunter was the leading expert on early Byzantine manuscripts in the world. The promise of her personal involvement had probably secured the agreement of the Turkish archaeological authorities for the manuscript to be studied in England.

  ‘I read that book she wrote on Byzantine superstitions. They believed some totally crazy stuff,’ said Isabel. She shook her head, as if shaking something off.

  ‘Looks like this storm is getting worse,’ I said, leaning forward to look out the window.

  By the time the wedding reception was over we’d experienced the best that Abingdon had to offer. It rained for most of the afternoon, but the bride and groom managed to get wedding pictures by the hotel’s private mooring on the Thames. We enjoyed the reception, especially the all-girl band from Windsor, all mates of Carol’s apparently. We danced non-stop and thanks to Isabel not drinking we were able to drive back to London late that night.

  On the journey I checked my email, scoured the online news sites to see if they were saying anything about Max Kaiser’s death. They weren’t. I reread the last email I’d received from Dr Hunter earlier that week. In it she’d said there was no definite delivery date on her final report yet. I’d replied, thanking her for keeping me informed, asking to be put on the circulation list as soon as the report was available. She hadn’t replied.

  It was six months since our return from Istanbul. I’d expected Dr Hunter to say her report would be ready in another year or more. At least she hadn’t done that. We all despaired at the institute at some of the reasons academics gave for taking so long to do things. It was a running joke for us.

  ‘Do you think Kaiser’s death will make any difference to her report, Sean?’

  I shrugged. ‘No idea,’ I replied.

  After we got home I composed an email to Dr Hunter, asking whether she had heard about Kaiser. I also asked about his level of cooperation. It was probably a bit over the top, poking my nose in, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  I needed to know whether she knew how important her report was to us. It had become a talisman. Alek, a colleague and a friend who’d worked with me at the institute and had gone out to Istanbul ahead of me, had been murdered there. The manuscript we’d found was something good that had come out of his death. It felt almost as if he’d given up his life for it. I had to know what was in it, what Dr Hunter’s translation would uncover.

  My boss, Dr Beresford-Ellis, had postponed our final project review meeting on what had happened in Istanbul because of the report. My job was now tied up with it all. That was my mistake.

  But I knew I was right not to let it go.

  We’d stopped a plot to infect thousands with a deadly plague virus at a Muslim demonstration in London after investigating what had happened to Alek. But some of the people who’d been behind that plot had escaped.

  That was the unsettling part. My friend Alek had died out there because of these people. Isabel and I had almost died too. And whoever had been digging under Istanbul, looking for that plague virus, were clearly people with substantial resources, whose reasons for going to all that trouble were still unclear.

  The best thing that had happened, out of everything that had gone on, was that Isabel and I were getting on so well. She had taken an early retirement package at the Foreign Office. She wanted to leave her old life behind. She didn’t tell me all the details, but she told me enough for me to understand why she wanted out.

  The rest of that weekend was uneventful. But on Monday morning I got another shock. I was checking the BBC News website before heading to Oxford for a meeting at the institute, when I spotted an article about a fire in Cambridge in which one person had died. The article didn’t name the person, but the fire had taken place in Elliot Way, a fact that made something twist inside me.

  A conversation I’d had with Dr Hunter came back to me, in which she’d mentioned she wanted to move out of her house in Elliot Way, as it was too big for her needs now.

  It had to be a coincidence. Was I getting paranoid?

  Maybe my GP was right. It was going to take a long time to settle back into a normal life. He was the Zen master of common sense. I’d only gone to him because of Isabel’s pestering. Having your sleep disturbed week after week was the sort of problem I usually tried to solve myself. That’s a male thing, isn’t it? We think we should be able to fix everything, even ourselves.

  I checked my email.

  My mind was put to rest. There was an email from Dr Hunter. I opened it quickly. ‘Sean, I’m in Jerusalem. I’ll be back in London on Friday. Will call you then. There’s something we need to talk about. SH.’ It had been sent on Sunday afternoon.

  I thought about replying, asking her what was so important, but I decided not to. I would find out soon enough. And I had to work on being patient.

  I kept my mobile at hand all day on Friday, even though Isabel said I was losing the plot. I even left it on vibrate in a management meeting. Finances have been the main issue in these meetings for the past year, and we’ve all taken a pay cut. Our survival is not in question but what we spend our money on is. That evening I checked my junk mail to see if a new email from Dr Hunter had ended up in the wrong place. It hadn’t. I wasn’t overly concerned, but I looked up Dr Hunter on the internet. What I found out disturbed me.

  3

  Five minutes’ walk from Amsterdam’s flea market in Waterlooplein there is a side street with a bricked-up end wall. The red brick building at the end of the street had been a squat for a long time. Recently it had been converted into small apartments, rooms really, and let out by the week.

  The two young men who had taken the top floor room ten days before had the appearance of derelicts. They were unshaven and dressed in dirty jeans, t-shirts and thin jackets when they arrived, though the sun in February in Amsterdam is a cool affair.

  The fact that they didn’t appear out of their room for a week attracted no notice. It was only when the manager of the building, a big mousy-haired woman, knocked on their door that their existence came into question. That was because of the pungent smell that filled the tiny area between the door and the rickety stairs. When she opened the narrow door using her key the sight that greeted her was one she had never seen in all her sixty-six years. And she’d seen a lot, especially in the old days in the red-light district.

  Both young men were tied to the bedstead. The mattress had been stripped from it and the iron frame had been upended. Both were naked. That wasn’t what upset her.

  Their skin was black and shrivelled to the point where they resembled burnt wooden sculptures rather than humans. The window behind them was open and the room was freezing.

  The Amsterdam Medical Office would later determine that local pigeons must have spent many hours feasting on the bodies, particularly the faces, before they were found. The cause of death was obvious. Both of them had suffered one hundred percent burns. But not in one go.

  They had been burnt by a blowtorch or some other flammable device on each part of their body, without damaging the room, except for scorch marks on the bedstead. The cloth that had been stuffed into their mouths to keep them quiet must have caught alight, as in each case all that remained of it was a black mulch.

  The coroner confirmed that one of the men had died five days before, the other four days before. It was likely that the torture of one of these men was used to encourage the other to talk. Whether he did or not is hard to know. He certainly didn’t benefit.

  It wo
uld be another twenty-four hours before the National Criminal Database in the United Kingdom would tell the authorities who these men were and what they had been involved in.

  4

  Dr Hunter’s house had burnt down and her husband had died in the fire.

  Even worse, Dr Susan Hunter had gone missing from where she was staying in Jerusalem. It was only a small article, an interview with an Israeli policeman looking

  for anyone who might have seen her. But the article said she hadn’t been seen since Sunday night, just about when she’d contacted me. And the police were now looking for her.

  I sent an email to Beresford-Ellis. Things had been tricky between us for a while, but I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t going to let the rumours about the collapse of our project in Istanbul impact on what I’d decided, even for a second.

  I checked the visa requirements for visiting Israel and booked a flight. I heard Isabel calling me from the kitchen as I was staring at my itinery. ‘I’m coming,’ I shouted.

  Over dinner we discussed what I’d found.

  I told her about my flight plans.

  ‘You really think it’s a good idea to go to Jerusalem?’ she said. Her right eyebrow was raised.

  ‘Yes.’ I said it softly.

  ‘You are crazy. You know that, don’t you?’ She leaned towards me. She had her serious expression on.

  ‘Getting burnt to death is an especially bad way to go,’ she said. ‘Way too many people have died that way.’ Her eyes gave away how worried she was. ‘Bloody hell, even God does it to the Innocents in the Bible.’

  I put my knife and fork down. I’d been eating slowly. Rain was lashing at the door out to the balcony. I stared into the darkness, my appetite gone.

  ‘I feel responsible,’ I said. ‘That manuscript we found in Istanbul, it’s like a bloody curse. Now Kaiser’s dead. And Susan’s missing. I don’t like coincidences.’

  She put her knife and fork down too. ‘It’s not your fault Alek died,’ she said. Her powers of perception were one

  of the things I liked about her, even when they made me uncomfortable.