The Jerusalem Puzzle Read online

  ‘You’re lucky you’re with me. A lot of independent tourists have been turned back in the last few weeks,’ said Mark, after we got our passports back.

  ‘Why’s that?’ I said.

  ‘There was a roadside bomb on the Israeli side of the border last month. With everything that’s going on because of the new elections, and all the stuff that’s happening in Gaza, everyone’s jittery,’ he said.

  I was tired at that point. My eyes were hurting after looking out at the sunbaked landscape for too long.

  Luckily, Mark had tuned the radio to the BBC on a digital radio he had set up in the car. I couldn’t have taken listening to him chattering for hours. But as we approached the Israeli border he turned the radio down and began talking.

  ‘Taba was an Egyptian Bedouin village before ’46,’ he said. ‘The Israelis didn’t even want to return it after the Sinai Peninsula was handed back to Egypt in ’79. It didn’t actually become Egyptian again until 1988.’

  Isabel groaned. ‘I’m sure Sean doesn’t want a history lesson, Mark,’ she said.

  Mark shook his head. ‘You were always a bit touchy when you were tired, Isabel.’ He kept his gaze on the road ahead.

  ‘It only seems to happen when I’m around you,’ she said.

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  There was a long pause before Mark replied. ‘If you want anything else after this, Isabel, make sure you lose my number.’

  She didn’t reply to that. We were coming up to what looked like the border post. We’d joined another highway and the Gulf of Aqaba was to our right now. It was a deep-looking, wave-flecked blue stretching away into a distant haze of land beyond it, which must have been Jordan.

  Mark parked near a two-storey white concrete building with a glass entrance hall. The Egyptian flag was flying in front of the building. There were two sand-coloured military jeeps and four soldiers standing nearby cradling black machine guns. They were all staring in our direction.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Mark.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ said Isabel.

  We waited, then waited some more. After half an hour I got out and had a walk around. There was a row of shops on the main road. I went and got water for Isabel. There was an English language Egyptian paper, The Egypt Times in the newspaper rack. I bought it, stopping to look at the front page before I went back.

  The lead story was an interview with an unnamed Egyptian army spokesperson. The article claimed there was a possibility of an Israeli surprise attack on Egypt in the near future. It said the Egyptian army was making all necessary plans to defend the nation. The army, they claimed, was confident they could defeat the Israelis.

  The article was accompanied by a photo of a group of Egyptian schoolgirls wearing gas masks. A list of the military units defending Egypt, including 205 F-16s ready for action, was given in a side box along with a picture of

  an air force pilot giving a thumbs up from his cockpit against a desert backdrop. Another article gave details of an anti-Israeli demonstration in Tahrir Square, planned for later that day, which a million people were expected to attend.

  There was an article below that about an imam in Cairo who had been murdered. The headline had made reading it hard to resist: Evil Spirits Kill Imam Say Locals.

  By the time I got back to the car Mark had returned.

  ‘It’s all done,’ he said when I got in. ‘You can go through. I’ll drop you at the next checkpoint. But remember one thing.’ He turned to Isabel. ‘My friend won’t do this again. If you get into anymore trouble or meet anyone who was involved in your deportation, you’re on your own.’ He looked at me. His eyes were as hard as blue marbles.

  ‘We’re washing our hands of both of you.’

  He drove us to the next checkpoint. The area was a mess of lamp posts, low concrete buildings, security cameras and rolls of razor wire on top of high mesh fences. The traffic going through was light. He pulled up near a pedestrian crossing, where other cars had stopped. He turned to us as he killed the engine.

  ‘I can drive you back to Cairo, Isabel. Why don’t you forget all this? You shouldn’t put yourself in anymore danger.’

  ‘What happened to you?’ she said. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Someone knock you on the head?’

  ‘No.’ He turned further in his seat. ‘I just don’t like the idea of you going back into Israel, that’s all.’

  ‘Should we be worried about something?’ she said. ‘Is there something you’re not telling us?’

  His expression was troubled, as if he was struggling with himself.

  ‘There’s lots I’m not telling you,’ he said.

  She sighed. ‘What about giving us a clue then? A hint as to why we shouldn’t go back.’

  His voice went down a notch and he looked out of the window as he spoke. ‘Susan Hunter has been kidnapped. A brief signal from her phone was picked up west of Jerusalem a few days ago.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. It was what I’d feared. She hadn’t gone off into the desert somewhere, or into hiding.

  ‘Has there been any contact with whoever’s holding her?’ asked Isabel.

  ‘Not so far.’

  This meant Susan could have been tortured or murdered grotesquely or she could be facing years in hellish captivity.

  ‘I won’t run back to London because of what’s happened to Susan,’ said Isabel.

  ‘It’s not just her being kidnapped that worries me,’ said Mark flatly.

  ‘What then?’ I said.

  He turned to me, as if he was hoping I might persuade Isabel to reconsider. ‘You went to Max Kaiser’s apartment in Jerusalem, didn’t you?’

  I nodded. Isabel must have told him.

  ‘Did you go inside?’

  ‘No.’

  He let out his breath in a I knew it groan. ‘Well, if you had, you might think twice about sticking your noses into all this.’

  He pointed at me. ‘I saw pictures of what happened there. We’re not dealing with ordinary criminals or angry Palestinians. This is way beyond that.’ He turned to Isabel and spoke slowly.

  ‘Someone was strapped to a kitchen chair in that apartment. I can only assume it was Max Kaiser. Then they were tortured. From the residue found near the chair, his skin was melted with a blowtorch. There were chunks of human flesh in puddles on the floor.’

  The hairs on the back of my neck were right up now. Poor bastard. No one deserved that.

  ‘It’s the sickest thing I’ve seen in a long time,’ said Mark. ‘And I have no idea if he was dead when they took his body and dumped it in the old city, but I hope so.’

  ‘Do you have any idea why someone would do all that?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘There’s a lot of shit getting stirred up at the moment.’ He paused. ‘I don’t know if it’s all connected, but I don’t like the smell right now.’ He sniffed, as if a bad smell had come into the car.

  ‘My God, Mark, can’t you just tell us what else is going on?’ Isabel sounded annoyed. She was usually a cool customer.

  Mark looked out of the window. He spoke then, as if he was talking to himself. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to tell us what he said next, but he found it easier if he did it this way? Or maybe I was just guessing at his motivation? He could just as easily have been leading us up the garden path.

  ‘There are a lot of rumours going around,’ he said. ‘There was a firestorm of activity on Twitter the other day about a letter from the first caliph of Islam, Abu Bakr, that’s supposedly been found.’

  ‘What did it say?’ I asked. I had a strange feeling, as if something about this was connected to us, to me.

  ‘It claims that if Jerusalem fell to Islam, it would be a Muslim city for all eternity. It claims that that is what the Christian Patriarch of Jerusalem agreed to, so that Christians could keep their churches open after Islam took over.’ He turned to me.

  ‘The implication is that those were the terms agreed to in 637 AD, when Jerusalem fell to Isla
m for the first time.’

  I sat forward. ‘Yeah, that’s going to stand up in a court of law. If we kept to every agreement from fourteen hundred years ago, the Byzantine Empire would rule half of Europe and the rest of us would still be paying tributes to Constantinople,’ I said.

  ‘It’s crazy, I know,’ said Mark. ‘I don’t know why it’s sparked things off, but people are using it to attack Israel’s control of Jerusalem. It’s like they’ve found a justification for their anger.’

  ‘It’ll blow over,’ said Isabel. ‘We used to get lots of mad rumours in Istanbul. They disappear like a snowstorm after a few days.’

  Mark looked at me. He didn’t seem convinced.

  ‘Our flights are on Sunday,’ said Isabel. Her voice sounded strong, unaffected by what we’d heard. ‘We’ll only be in Israel for three days, Mark. We’re not running away because of a few rumours.’

  I put my hand over the seat. She held it.

  ‘I’m with Isabel on this,’ I said.

  The thought of those idiots at that dig winning was highly irritating. Susan being kidnapped and a Twitter storm about an old letter weren’t enough not to go.

  ‘Have a good trip then,’ said Mark.

  We got out of the car. I turned back to look at him as we walked away. He was watching us with a sullen look on his face, as if he regretted bringing us here.

  The Egyptians let us through the border without difficulty. The Israelis were different.

  But we had a story ready, that we were on our way back to Israel after having done the tourist thing in Cairo, and we were heading home to London in a few days. And it was all true, even if our itinerary was a bit odd. Why had we flown to Athens and then Cairo, not come through Taba, the guard wanted to know? He was holding my passport open at the page with the Egyptian visa in it, from Cairo airport.

  I told him we’d heard the border was closed, that when we’d found out it was open again we’d already booked our flights.

  ‘And one drive through the desert is enough for me, thanks,’ I said, at that point.

  The Israeli border guard, in his short-sleeved blue shirt, with his harried face, nodded, then asked me where we’d stayed in Cairo. He kept us waiting for ten more minutes, asking us questions about how we’d gone from Tel Aviv to Cairo and checking his computer constantly, to see if there was any reason for him to stop us, I suppose. A few German tourists behind us moved to another line, we were taking so long.

  I kept calm. I reckoned we had a good chance to get past him, if the record about us on their database had been changed, as Mark had promised. And as we’d agreed voluntarily to leave Israel a few days before, they hadn’t stamped our passports to say we’d been deported.

  I could see now why Isabel had been so keen not to fight the request for us to leave Israel. It was one thing to have a record of what happened on a computer system. It was something very different to have a big DEPORTED stamp in your passport.

  She told me while we were waiting in the line at Taba that they’d stopped stamping passports with a deportation notice in all but the most serious cases. Many Arabs, and even some Europeans, had started using Israeli deportation stamps as a symbol of their resistance to Israel, she said. They had become a collector’s item for some people.

  Eventually, after examining our passports with his eye up close to each one, the guard let us pass.

  On the Israeli side of the border everything looked more modern. There was an official taxi rank, a place to change money, big posters on the walls, maps. The first taxi driver in the rank didn’t want to take us to Jerusalem. Neither did the second. The third one was willing to talk about it at least. His English was accented, but word perfect. He sounded Russian, and had a bald head and a thin face with deep wrinkles. His car was a modern Mercedes. It had air conditioning. I wanted to go in his taxi.

  ‘If we go by the Dead Sea, if you want to see Masada, Qumran, that will take longer. There’s been an incident at Tzofar. Someone’s been shooting at cars on Highway 90. There’s a diversion there. It’s not a good road. The price will be different if we go that way,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the alternative?’

  ‘We go through Mitzpe Ramon and Be’er Sheva. It’s highway all the way too. Seven hundred and fifty shekels will cover it, if we go that way. A thousand if you want the Dead Sea with the delays. That road will be six hours, maybe more. The other will be four, maybe less.’

  ‘Is that the official fare?’ said Isabel.

  ‘If you don’t trust me, you can try another one.’ He pointed his thumb behind him. ‘Just make sure their air conditioning is working. Mine is.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, as much to Isabel as to the driver. I wasn’t going to spend four hours in a taxi with dodgy air conditioning.

  ‘Let’s do this,’ I said to Isabel.

  We got in. To drive past Masada would have been interesting, but it was four o’clock in the afternoon and if we wanted to find a hotel in Jerusalem without attracting too much attention we should get there before it got late. Daylight wasn’t going to last much longer.

  Not long after leaving Taba, the driver pointed towards the sand coloured hills to our left.

  ‘Look, over there, the oldest copper mines in the world.’ He pointed in the direction of a long escarpment. ‘The Pharaoh’s slaves worked those mines for generations. Families were born, they lived and then they died around them.’ He shifted in his seat and turned the radio on low. It played slow jazz.

  By 4.30 p.m. shadows were lengthening all around us. The scrubland and hills had turned orange in the setting sun. I stared out the window. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t trust the driver not to relate everything he heard to his next passenger. And I wanted the journey over, to be in Jerusalem.

  I was wondering what we might find there. There was definitely something odd going on at that archaeological dig. We had to be careful. Whoever had murdered Kaiser might well know that we were taking an interest now. The people who’d tortured and burnt Max to death might even know about us.

  That thought put me on edge. I would have to make doubly sure that Isabel was kept away from any danger. If anything happened to her I would blame myself.

  Rightly too.

  Mark had given me ample opportunity to tell her we should abandon this trip. Had I done the right thing coming back?

  And was it a coincidence that the person, Susan Hunter, who was compiling a report on the ancient book we’d found in Istanbul was now missing?

  We passed a few camels and oil trucks, other taxis and tourist buses and a line of army trucks going the other way, and then Bedouins standing by the side of the road as it got dark, as if they were waiting for something.

  We stopped only once on the journey, at Mitzpe Ramon, a town in the Negev about halfway to Jerusalem. The petrol station was called Yellow. The sign at the front was in Hebrew, English and Arabic. The houses in Mitzpe Ramon were low flat-roofed desert buildings one or two storeys high.

  ‘My cousin lives here,’ said the driver, as we neared Jerusalem on a fast highway that twisted and turned through low, steep hills. There were modern buildings, cream-coloured apartment and office blocks, going up the sides of some of the hills and there was a lot more traffic now.

  ‘What will you do here?’ he asked.

  ‘Sightseeing,’ I said.

  ‘Where will you stay?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘We’re going to look for a hotel.’

  ‘You like a proper hotel?’ said the driver. He turned to look at us.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘You will like this one,’ he said. ‘My cousin, he works there.’

  I was expecting a small hotel, somewhere we’d have to say no to if the rooms were tiny, but I was wrong. The hotel he took us to was the famous King David, overlooking the Old City. Winston Churchill, Bill Clinton and Madonna had all stayed in the King David. The driver had worked out that we had money.

  He dropped us under t
he stone entrance arch in front of the hotel. He had called ahead on his phone to tell his cousin we were coming. I paid the driver, gave him a tip.

  The foyer of the King David was like the inside of an Egyptian temple but through the lens of a Hollywood studio. It had a polished marble floor, white pillars and a blue ceiling with golden lotus designs. Thick red rugs and cane furniture added to the illusion. The thin, dark-suited manager who registered us welcomed us as if we’d just travelled on foot from Taba.

  Ten minutes later we were in a double room with a proper double bed. We were asleep an hour after that.

  In the morning, at ten minutes to five, I woke. I could hear, faintly, the Muslim call to prayer. I’m not sure if it had woken me or if being back in Jerusalem was making me jumpy. At seven I heard distant bells ringing from one of the Christian churches. They rang slowly, mournfully. We were definitely back in Jerusalem.

  The breakfast terrace of the King David had a view of the hotel’s beautiful garden. Beyond it were the sand-coloured walls of the Old City.

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about Susan,’ said Isabel, after we’d brought our breakfast over from the buffet table. She still hadn’t got her appetite back. All she was eating was a croissant.

  ‘Maybe we can help them find her,’ I said.

  We sat in silence for a minute as we ate.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what we should do next,’ she said.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  She looked at me with a quizzical expression.

  ‘I think we should find out more about that archaeological site. If they’re willing to get us deported for the stupidest of reasons, they’re up to something. Maybe Kaiser and Susan found out what it is. Who knows what you’d find in a collection of scrolls from Pontius Pilate’s era.’

  The waiter came, filled up our coffee cups.

  ‘I’d like to get inside Max’s apartment,’ said Isabel, lowering her voice.

  ‘I doubt if there’s anything left to see. Won’t the Israeli forensic teams have scrubbed the place clean?’