The Jerusalem Puzzle Read online

  ‘You’re tourists, right? Where on Jabotinsky are you going? It’s a long stretch, my friend.’

  ‘Near the middle,’ I said. He moved off. Isabel traded pleasantries with him for a few minutes. I was trying to work out the significance of everything we’d heard from Simon. Was it relevant that he was involved in a red heifer project? Probably not. They were just another bunch of end-timers, weren’t they?

  Still, I felt uneasy.

  The taxi pulled up a few minutes later on a long street heading up a hill with three-storey white apartment buildings on either side. The buildings were set back from the road. Palm trees, carob trees, eucalyptus and other shrubs separated the buildings from the street. There was a small roundabout at the top of the hill.

  ‘This is the centre of Jabotinsky. You can walk either way from here, but there’s not a lot to see.’

  I was deflated. This wasn’t going to be easy. I’d hoped for a busy street with shops, cafes maybe, people we could talk to, ask if they’d seen an American of Kaiser’s description. He hadn’t been a quiet guy who could escape attention. But this was a long street full of anonymous apartment buildings.

  ‘What’s your plan?’ said Isabel.

  ‘I thought we might have dinner? Look at all the restaurants,’ I gestured around us.

  She put her hands on her hips, turning on her heel. ‘Yes, what a big choice.’

  A pizza delivery motorbike went past. ‘There is pizza somewhere,’ I said.

  ‘Wonderful, are you going to run after him?’ The noise of the disappearing motorbike faded into the distance.

  ‘Let’s walk that way.’ I pointed back down towards the Old City. ‘He has to have stayed one side of this roundabout. That gives us a fifty percent chance of being right.’ We walked onto the pavement.

  The weather was getting even more gloomy. It was 3.30 p.m. and colder than I’d expected, like London in mid-March. All we needed was for it to start raining.

  Up ahead, where the road curved, a red car was parked. As we watched, it pulled away. A group of young people were coming towards us. They were moving like a rolling party, the boys swirling around the outside of the group in long t-shirts mostly with the names of obscure bands on them. The girls were laughing, linking arms.

  As they came near I approached one of the boys. He was tall, had Clark Kent glasses and a puzzled expression.

  ‘Do you know an American archaeologist living around here?’ I said.

  His accent was all New York when he answered. ‘Yeah right, half the professors in our university look like American archaeologists.’

  One of the girls stopped in front of us. ‘What are you people doing in Israel?’ she said. She had a thick wave of curly brown hair and a friendly smile.

  ‘We’re looking for a friend of ours who got lost,’ said Isabel.

  They were all in their late teens or early twenties.

  ‘Everybody’s looking for somebody,’ said the girl.

  The guy was eyeing up Isabel; most men found her attractive I’d noticed. He was giving her a big grin. ‘You wanna come with us for a few beers,’ he said. He didn’t even look at me. Isabel’s straight black hair and dark tight jeans took at least five years off her age. She could have easily passed for someone in her late twenties.

  ‘You can come too,’ said the girl. She pushed her hair away from her face. ‘We’re all going to a party. Are you Jewish?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It don’t matter,’ she said. ‘I can hear an American accent under there.’

  ‘I grew up in the States,’ I said. ‘Then my dad was stationed in England.’

  ‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘Having to listen to Oasis every day.’

  ‘I like Oasis.’

  Isabel was looking at me sceptically. I motioned for us to go along with them. We might be able to ask them a few questions about what went on in this neighbourhood.

  As we walked, the girl turned to her friend. She was taller than the first girl. She was grinning at me. I looked away. The next time I looked at her she had a big joint in her mouth and there was a trail of blue smoke coming from it like a steaming power plant. This was not what I needed. Getting arrested was not in the plan.

  ‘I think you better throw that away,’ I said, turning back to the girl. ‘There’s a police car right behind us.’ It was true. I’d just spotted it. They had to be trailing this group.

  The girl turned her head fast, then looked back at me. ‘Goddamn it,’ she said.

  The joint fell from her fingers.

  ‘We’ll catch up with you later,’ I said. I took Isabel’s arm.

  ‘They’re all going to get arrested any minute now.’ Isabel waved goodbye as we peeled away from them. We headed for an entranceway, as if we were going into one of the apartment buildings.

  ‘I don’t think spending a night in the cells is going to help us.’

  ‘They might have known something,’ said Isabel.

  I shook my head. ‘There has to be a better way than this.’

  I stopped, bent down to tie the laces on my trainers. I was facing back towards the road. The police car passed us at walking speed. The officer on our side, who had big glasses on, stared intently at us as they passed. I gave her a smile in return. What could they do to us, charge us with talking to someone?

  ‘I have an idea,’ I said.

  ‘I hope it’s better than your last one.’

  ‘Come on.’

  We walked to the bottom of the road. Ten minutes later we were at the nearest takeaway pizza place.

  ‘No, I want to sit down and eat,’ said Isabel. ‘Not eat pizza at the side of the road.’

  ‘You don’t have to eat anything,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  I pulled two red two hundred shekel notes from my wallet. Then I went to the delivery guy by the big glass window of the pizza place. He was leaning against his motorbike and had big earphones on. I began talking. He took the earphones off.

  ‘Hi, can you help us? I’m supposed to meet a friend of mine here for a party. He’s an American, a guy called Max Kaiser. He’s a big guy, with bushy black hair, a young-looking professor. He lives on Jabotinsky, but for the life of me I can’t remember which number. If you can tell me where he lives, I’ll give you this.’ I pushed the two notes forward. ‘I don’t want to miss my chance with that one.’ I nodded towards Isabel.

  The boy, he seemed more Arab than Jewish, looked at me as if I was certifiable. He had patches of beard on his face and a collection of beaded necklaces hanging from his neck.

  ‘Can’t help,’ he said. ‘Don’t know who you’re talking about.’ He turned away, making it clear that even if he did know something, he wasn’t going to tell me anything useful.

  ‘How many delivery guys does this place have?’

  He glanced at me, then looked away, putting his phone to his ear as if he’d suddenly remembered he had an urgent phone call to make.

  I went into the shop, asked the guy behind the counter how many delivery people they had. He looked at me as if he had no idea what language I was even speaking in. He pointed up at the plastic sign above his head. Another bigger guy was looking at us steadily, as if getting ready to pull a baseball bat out at the first sign of trouble. Though, considering what country we were in, he probably had a legally held UZI under the counter.

  ‘Which pizza you want?’ the first man said. He sounded as if he’d been smoking for a hundred years.

  Isabel leaned over the counter. The man was staring at her.

  ‘Have you got a guy called David doing deliveries?’ she said.

  They looked at each other, clearly trying to work out why a woman like Isabel would be trying to find a particular pizza delivery guy. You could almost see their brains grinding through the possibilities.

  ‘We have no David here, sorry.’ He shook his head.

  ‘How many delivery guys do you have?’

  ‘Two. There is the second one. And he’s not a Da
vid.’ He pointed.

  I turned. A second delivery motorbike had pulled up outside. The guy on it was huge. The bike looked tiny under him. I went out, walked up to him.

  ‘Your boss said you would help us.’ I pointed back inside. The guy behind the counter waved at us. The delivery guy looked from him to me.

  ‘We’re looking for an American called Max. He’s got bushy hair. We’re supposed to be going to his place tonight, but I lost his number. I know he lives somewhere on Jabotinsky.’

  I leaned towards him. ‘Your boss said I can give you this.’ I had the two notes in my hand. I pushed them forward.

  He looked at them, then back up at me. ‘Yeah, I know your American friend, but you’re too late. His apartment’s burnt out. He ain’t been there in weeks. You can’t miss the place if you walk up Jabotinsky. But you won’t want to go there tonight. He won’t be entertaining anyone.’ He took the notes from my outstretched hand and went past me into the pizza shop.

  Isabel was still talking to the man behind the counter. If Kaiser’s apartment had been on fire, there’d be a good chance that would be visible from the street. We had to go back to Jabotinsky.

  But a part of me didn’t want to.

  I didn’t want to see what had happened to his apartment. His death had been a distant thing up until this point.

  Now I couldn’t escape thinking about what had happened to him. That made a queasy feeling rise up inside me.

  I was imagining what it must have been like. The flames burning him. I couldn’t imagine a worse torture. Soon, I wouldn’t need to imagine it.

  15

  The screen on Mark Headsell’s laptop was glowing blue. He’d dimed the lights in the suite on the fifteenth floor of the Cairo Marriot on El Gezira Street as soon as he’d entered it.

  The hotel was a difficult landmark to miss if you were aiming to bring down a symbol of Western decadence, but as it had hardly been scratched in the Arab Spring that had overturned Mubarak and his family, it was probably as safe a place as any in this turbulent city.

  Being only forty-five minutes from the airport helped too, as did the fact that it was built on an island in the Nile and that it had excellent room service and bars full of expatriates. You could even fool yourself for an hour in Harry’s Pub that you were back in London.

  What was keeping Mark out of Harry’s Pub that night was a series of Twitter posts that an astute colleague had been tracking. The one that particularly interested him was one that had been sent an hour ago from an unknown location in Israel.

  Whoever was sending the Tweets was covering their tracks well. The fake IP address they’d been using had been broken through, but it had only left them with a generic address for an Israeli internet service provider. Whoever was logging in to make the posts was being very careful. That alone ticked the warning boxes.

  We are ready to hatch the brood, was the latest message. It was an innocent enough Tweet on its own, it could have been about pigeons, but the cryptic nature of the others in the stream from the same source gave more cause for concern, as did the trouble they were having locating where the messages were coming from.

  The fact that Twitter could be monitored anywhere in the world meant that it could be used to receive signals as to when to commence a whole range of activities. Such things weren’t unknown. The Portuguese Carnation coup of 1974 had been triggered by the singing of the nation’s Eurovision song contest entry in that year’s program.

  And this was where things got interesting. His colleague had managed to uncover that over a hundred people across Egypt were following this particular series of messages.

  And most of the people searching and watching the Twitter feed were registered to IP addresses on Egyptian military bases or air force bases. It was that final piece of news that prompted his colleague to pass the details of what they’d been tracking onto him and place URGENT in the subject line.

  If the Egyptian air force were planning something, then a source inside Israel could be useful to them.

  But what were they planning?

  16

  The apartment building on Jabotinsky had four floors and eight apartments, two on each floor. It had been easy to figure out which building was likely to be Kaiser’s; there was a big black stain above the balcony at the front. We’d also walked all the way up to the roundabout and back. It was the only building with any smoke damage, never mind anything worse.

  It looked like a giant bat had wiped itself out against the front wall, halfway up.

  The windows of the apartment were smeared with soot, and the door to the small balcony was blackened as if smoke had streamed through it.

  The entrance to the apartments was at the side of the building. The main door was wooden and painted black; secure and sturdy looking. After three failed attempts of pressing the buzzer on each apartment and saying we needed entry to a party, we got in.

  We went up in a tiny metal elevator. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was locked. Nobody answered when I knocked lightly. There was blue and white tape barring to it, so I hadn’t really expected anyone to come. The door was also a different colour to the other ones on the floor. The door to what had been Kaiser’s apartment was unpainted.

  It looked as if someone had battered the original door down and then replaced it. The people in the rest of the block had been lucky that the fire hadn’t burnt the whole building down. Someone must have called the fire brigade pretty quickly.

  ‘I bet one of the tenants calls the police because we pressed all those buzzers,’ said Isabel. ‘We shouldn’t hang around. They’ll think we’re back to burn the rest of the building.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing like being an optimist,’ I said.

  ‘I wasn’t being an optimist.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘You should get your own show.’ She pressed the button beside the elevator.

  I pushed at the door to Kaiser’s apartment. We were out of luck. It didn’t open. I checked the ledge above the door, another one above a small window nearby. Someone might have left a key behind. I even checked under a dusty aloe vera plant on the window ledge. No luck.

  The elevator arrived. As we got in, Isabel said, ‘Do you really think this will help us to find Susan?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The doors closed. There was a smell of cleaning fluid.

  ‘You remind me of a Yorkshire terrier we once had. When he got something between his teeth he was a demon for hanging on.’

  She was right, of course. We shouldn’t be here, pushing our luck again. We should be back in London, especially after what we’d got ourselves into in Istanbul.

  But a stubborn part of me said, to hell with all that; you sat back once, Sean, before Irene died. All that’s over for you. You’re not the guy who sits on his ass anymore.

  And I didn’t care what it brought down on me either.

  ‘Maybe I’m just a sucker for drama,’ I said.

  We went outside.

  ‘No, you’re a sucker for trying to do the right thing.’ Isabel’s tone was soft. ‘And you blame yourself for way too much.’

  She was right. But it was like I needed someone saying it over and over for it to go in.

  I touched her arm. ‘Look, that’s where they keep the garbage,’ I said. I pointed at a row of black plastic bins in a corner under a wooden cover. They each had a number on them.

  ‘Have fun,’ she said.

  I went to the bin marked three in white paint on its side. There was nothing inside it. The police must have taken the rubbish.

  A door slammed, footsteps echoed. I felt like a criminal standing by the garbage cans. I started walking back to where Isabel was waiting near the road.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said a reedy voice.

  I turned. There was an old man standing there. He had white hair and looked dishevelled. I made a split-second decision.

  ‘We came to see what they did to Max’s place.’

  He turned a
nd looked up at the front of the building.

  ‘Yes, it was terrible,’ he said. ‘Mr Kaiser didn’t deserve that. He was always so friendly when we met him.’

  He started walking back to the house.

  Isabel was beside me. ‘Did he tell you where he was working in the city?’ she asked.

  He stopped, turned. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  ‘We worked with Max on a project in Istanbul,’ I said. We were forced together briefly by circumstances was the truth, but I wasn’t going to say that.

  I pulled my wallet out, took out one of my cards and handed it to him.

  He looked at it as if it was dirt.

  ‘We’re trying to work out what happened to Max.’

  ‘He never told me where he worked. I can’t help you. Good night.’

  There was a woman by the door of the apartment block watching us. She had a black cat in her arms.

  ‘Maybe he told your wife,’ I said.

  He shrugged. I went after him. He stopped at the door, turned.

  ‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said. The woman was staring at me with a suspicious expression. ‘We’re trying to find out what happened to Max Kaiser. Did he ever tell you where he was working here in Jerusalem?’

  She looked at her husband. He shrugged.

  ‘It was so terrible what happened to him,’ she said. ‘You know, you are the first people to come by here, to take an interest in him. How did you know him?’

  ‘We met him in Istanbul. I used to work for the British Consulate there,’ said Isabel.

  The woman smiled. ‘My mother fled to England during the war,’ she said.

  I wanted to press her again, but I decided to wait.

  She put her hand to her cheek. ‘We used to meet Mr Kaiser on the stairs. He was always covered in dust, always in a hurry.’

  ‘Did he say where he was working?’

  ‘No.’

  I was about to turn and go when she said. ‘But I heard him saying something about Our Lady’s Church. Don’t ask me where it is. I was looking for my little Fluffy over there and he was getting into a taxi with another man.’ She patted her cat’s head, then pointed at the bushes near the road.