SAM BOURNE

THE LAST TESTAMENT

For my father, a testament to my love and enduring admiration

Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

By Sam Bourne

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Baghdad, April 2003

The crowd were pushing harder now, as if they scented blood. They charged through the archway and their combined weight pressed against the tall oak doors until they went crashing to the ground. As they rushed through, Salam moved with them. It was not a decision. He was simply a part of a moving beast made up of men, women and children, some even younger than him. They were a collective animal and now they gave a mighty roar.

They burst into the first vast hall, the glass of the display cases glinting in the silver moonlight that spilled through the ceiling-high windows. There was a brief pause, as if the beast were drawing breath. Salam and his fellow Baghdadis contemplated the scene before them. The National Museum of Antiquities, once Saddam's treasure house, bursting with the jewels of Mesopotamia, now laid wide open. There was not a guard in sight. The last of the museum staff had abandoned their posts hours earlier; and the few remaining security men had fled at the sight of this horde.

The brief moment of silence was ruptured by a sledgehammer crashing through glass. On that cue, the room was instantly filled with thunderous noise, as one after another they started wielding pistols, axes, knives, clubs, even heavy strips of metal torn from wrecked cars – anything to spring these precious, ancient objects from their cases.

Pane after pane of glass shattered. Ivory statues tumbled; ancient ceramic plates smashed to powder as they hit the floor. The room, usually blanketed in museum quiet, echoed now with a mighty din: the breaking of stone and glass, even gunshots as the most impatient shot out locks that refused to surrender to a crowbar. Salam noticed two well-dressed men setting to work methodically with professional glass-cutting equipment.

The ground trembled as wave after wave of people stampeded into the museum, ignoring this first exhibition hall, looking for fresh pickings elsewhere. They collided with those anxious to get out, hauling their priceless booty on handcarts, wheelbarrows and bicycles, or struggling under heavy plastic crates and cardboard boxes. Salam recognized a friend of his father striding out, his face flushed and his pockets bulging.

Salam's pulse was throbbing. In all his fifteen years he had never seen anybody behave like this. Until a few days ago everyone he knew had moved slowly, heads down, eyes averted. In Saddam's Iraq you knew better than to break the rules or draw attention to yourself. Now these same people – his neighbours – were wild in their desire, stealing anything they could lay their hands on and destroying the rest.

Salam reached into a broken case for a necklace made of pale orange and amber stones. But someone grabbed his wrist before he could grasp it: a middle-aged woman, eyes ablaze, blocking Salam with her left hand, stealing the necklace for herself with her right. He backed away.

It was like a scene from the sacking of an ancient city, Salam thought: an orgy driven not by lust, but by greed, the participants writhing with avarice, slaking an appetite that had been pent up for decades. Suddenly he was pushed forward again: a new group of looters had arrived and they were making for the stairwell.

Salam was swept along as they headed down a flight of stairs: a rumour had spread that the museum staff had stashed all the best stuff in the storerooms. He saw a knot of men standing around a door which they had clearly just lifted off its hinges. Behind it stood a freshly-constructed wall of cinder blocks, the cement barely set. First one man, then two, began hacking away at the bricks with hammers; others joined them using bars, even their shoulders. They turned to Salam.

‘Come on!’

They passed him a metal table leg.

Soon the hastily-assembled wall gave way, a sandcastle crumbling in the waves. The leader of the group stepped through the hole and at once began to laugh. Others quickly joined him. Salam could soon see the source of their joy: the room was packed with treasure – stone carvings of princesses and kings; etchings of rams and oxen; statues of buxom goddesses and Nubian women; ceramic jars, urns and bowls. There were copper shoes, fragments of tapestry and, on the wall, a frieze of soldiers fighting some long-forgotten war.

Salam's eye caught a few of the museum labels, still stuck to these hidden treasures. One identified a ‘lyre from the Sumerian city of Ur, bearing the gold-encased head of a bull, dated 2400 BC’. That was soon carted off. Next was a ‘white limestone votive bowl from Warka, dated 3000 BC’: Salam watched as it disappeared inside a football kit bag. A ‘statue representing King Entemena from Ur, dated 2430 BC’ took two men to lift and a third to navigate through the newly-opened hole in the wall. Salam remembered what they had taught him at school: that the Baghdad Museum contained treasures that were five thousand years old. ‘Inside that museum lies not just the history of Iraq,’ his teacher had intoned, ‘but the history of all mankind.’

Now it resembled nothing grander than a vegetable market, the customers scrapping over the produce. Except these were not squashed tomatoes or bruised peppers, but artwork and tools that had survived since the birth of civilization.

Salam could hear raised voices: two of the ringleaders were arguing. One slapped the other and the pair began to fight, bringing a metal bookcase stacked with pots crashing to the ground. Someone produced a knife. A man gave Salam a hard push in the back, shoving him towards the violence. Instinctively, he wheeled around, dived out of the hole in the cinder-block wall and ran.

He rushed down the stairs, hearing a new clamour at each landing. Every one of the eighteen galleries in the museum was now undergoing the same plunder. The noise scared him.

Salam kept heading down, flight after flight, until he had left the crowds behind: no one was bothering to come this far down now with such easy pickings higher up. He would be safely away from them here.

Salam pushed open a door and it moved easily. In the gloom he could see a few boxes of papers overturned, their contents carpeting the floor. Whoever was responsible had been right not to linger: this was merely an office. He noticed a few decapitated wires, dangling like the roots of an upended tree: someone had stolen the phones and fax machine and left the rest.

Maybe they had missed something, Salam thought. He tugged at the desk drawers, hoping to find a gold pen or even a cash-box. But all he found were a few old sheets of paper.

There was a larger drawer underneath; he'd give that one last pull and then he'd go. Locked.

He headed for the door only to catch his foot on a ridge by the desk. Salam looked down to find a loose stone square. His bad luck: all the others were flat and perfectly even. Hardly thinking, Salam wedged his fingers into the gap between the squares and prized out the loose one. It being too murky to see, he felt for the ground below – but his hand just sank into a narrow but deep hole.

Now he felt something solid; cool to the touch. It was a tin box. At last: money!

He had to lie on the ground, his cheek against the stone, in order to reach down far enough. His fingers struggled to grasp their target. The box was difficult to lift, but at last he got it out. It was locked; but its contents seemed too silent for coins and too heavy for notes.

He stood up, peering through the darkness until he found what he assumed was a letter opener lying on the desk. He slid it under the thin tin of the lid, leaning on the blade to lever up the metal. He did that all the way along one side, opening the box like a can of beans. By tipping it to one side, he could make the object inside slide out. His heart was pounding.

The second he saw it, he was disappointed. It was a clay tablet, engraved with a few random squiggles, like so many of the others he had seen tonight, many of them just smashed to the ground. Salam was about to discard it, but he hesitated. If some museum guy had gone to such lengths to hide this lump of clay, maybe it was worth something. Salam sprinted up the stairs until he could see moonlight. He had come out at the back of the museum, where he could see a fresh horde of looters breaking their way in. He waited for a gap in the line, then stepped through the broken-down exit doors. Running flat out, he slipped into the Baghdad night – carrying a treasure whose true value he would never know.

CHAPTER ONE

Tel Aviv, Saturday night, several years later

The usual crowd was there. The hardcore leftists, the men with their hair grown long after a year travelling in India, the girls with diamond studs in their noses, the people who always turned up for these Saturday night get-togethers. They would sing the familiar songs – Shir l'shalom, the Song for Peace – and hold the trusted props: the candles cupped in their hands, or the portraits of the man himself, Yitzhak Rabin, the slain hero who had given his name to this piece of hallowed ground so many years earlier. They would form the inner circle at Rabin Square, whether handing out leaflets and bumper stickers or softly strumming guitars, letting the tunes drift into the warm, Mediterranean night air.

Beyond the core there were newer, less familiar, faces. To veterans of these peace rallies, the most surprising sight was the ranks of Mizrachim, working-class North African Jews who had trekked here from some of Israel's poorest towns. They had long been among Israel's most hawkish voters: ‘We know the Arabs,’ they would say, referring to their roots in Morocco, Tunisia or Iraq. ‘We know what they're really like.’ Tough and permanently wary of Israel's Palestinian neighbours, most had long scorned the leftists who showed up at rallies like this. Yet here they were.

The television cameras – from Israeli TV, the BBC, CNN and all the major international networks – swept over the crowd, picking out more unexpected faces. Banners in Russian, held aloft by immigrants to Israel from the old Soviet Union – another traditionally hardline constituency. An NBC cameraman framed a shot which made his director coo with excitement: a man wearing a kippa, the skullcap worn by religious Jews, next to a black Ethiopian-born woman, their faces bathed by the light of the candle in her hands.

A few rows behind them, unnoticed by the camera, was an older man: unsmiling, his face taut with determination. He checked under his jacket: it was still there.

Standing on the platform temporarily constructed for the purpose was a line of reporters, describing the scene for audiences across the globe. One American correspondent was louder than all the others.

‘You join us in Tel Aviv for what's billed as an historic night for both Israelis and Palestinians. In just a few days’ time the leaders of these two peoples are due to meet in Washington – on the lawn of the White House – to sign an agreement which will, at long last, end more than a century of conflict. The two sides are negotiating even now, in closed-door talks less than an hour from here in Jerusalem. They're trying to hammer out the fine print of a peace deal. And the location for those talks? Well, it couldn't be more symbolic, Katie. It's Government House, the former headquarters of the British when they ruled here, and it sits on the border that separates mainly Arab East Jerusalem from the predominantly Jewish West of the city.

‘But tonight the action moves here, to Tel Aviv. The Israeli premier has called for this rally to say “Ken l'Shalom”, or “Yes to Peace” – a political move designed to show the world, and doubters among his own people, that he has the support to conclude a deal with Israel's historic enemy.

‘Now, there are angry and militant opponents who say he has no right to make the compromises rumoured to be on the table – no right to give back land on the West Bank, no right to tear down Jewish settlements in those occupied territories and, above all, no right to divide Jerusalem. That's the biggest stumbling block, Katie. Israel has, until now, insisted that Jerusalem must remain its capital, a single city, for all eternity. For the Prime Minister's enemies that's holy writ, and he's about to break it. But hold on, I think the Israeli leader has just arrived…’

A current of energy rippled through the crowd as thousands turned to face the stage. Bounding towards the microphone was the Deputy Prime Minister, who received a polite round of applause. Though nominally a party colleague of the PM, this crowd also knew he had long been his bitterest rival.

He spoke too long, winning cheers only when he uttered the words, ‘In conclusion …’ Finally he introduced the leader, rattling through his achievements, hailing him as a man of peace, then sticking out his right arm, to beckon him on stage. And when he appeared, this vast mass of humanity erupted. Perhaps three hundred thousand of them, clapping, stamping and whooping their approval. It was not love for him they were expressing, but love for what he was about to do – what, by common consent, only he could do. No one else had the credibility to make the sacrifices required. In just a matter of days he would, they hoped, end the conflict that had marked the lives of every single one of them.

He was close to seventy, a hero of four Israeli wars. If he had worn them, his chest would have been weighed down with medals. Instead, his sole badge of military service was a pronounced limp in his right leg. He had been in politics for nearly twenty years, but he thought like a soldier even now. The press had always described him as a hawk, perennially sceptical of the peaceniks and their schemes. But things were different now, he told himself. There was a chance.

‘We're tired,’ he began, hushing the crowd. ‘We're tired of fighting every day, tired of wearing the soldier's uniform, tired of sending our children, boys and girls, to carry guns and drive tanks when they are barely out of school. We fight and we fight and we fight, but we are tired. We're tired of ruling over another people who never wanted to be ruled by us.’

As he spoke, the unsmiling man was pushing through the crowd, breathing heavily. ‘Slicha,’ he said again and again, each time firmly pushing a shoulder or an arm out of his way. Excuse me.

His hair was silver grey, his chest barrelled; he was no younger than the Prime Minister. This wade through the throng was exhausting him; his shirt collar was darkening with sweat. He looked as if he was trying to catch a train.

He was getting nearer to the front now and was still pushing. The plain clothes guard in the third row of the crowd was the first to notice him, immediately whispering a message into the microphone in his sleeve. That alerted the security detail cordoning the stage, who began scoping the faces before them. It took them no time to spot him. He was making no attempt to be subtle.

By now the plain clothes officer was just a couple of yards away. ‘Adoni, adoni,’ he called. Sir, sir. Then he recognized him. ‘Mr Guttman,’ he called. ‘Mr Guttman, please.’ At that, people in the crowd turned around. They recognized him too. Professor Shimon Guttman, scholar and visionary, or windbag and right-wing rabble-rouser, depending on your point of view; never off the TV and the radio talk shows. He had made his name several summers ago, when Israel pulled out of Gaza: he camped out on the roof of a Jewish settlement, protesting that it was a crime for Israeli soldiers to be giving back land to ‘Arab terrorists, thieves and murderers’.

He was marching on, squeezing past a mother with a child on her shoulders.

‘Sir, stop right there!’ the guard called out.

Guttman ignored him.

Now the agent began making his own journey through the crowd, breaking through a small cluster of teenagers. He considered pulling out his weapon, but decided against it: it would start a panic. He called out again, his voice was instantly drowned out by sustained applause.

‘We do not love the Palestinians and they do not love us,’ the Prime Minister was saying. ‘We never will and they never will…’

The agent was still three rows away from Guttman, now advancing towards the podium. He was directly behind the older man; one long stretch and he could grab him. But the crowd was more tightly packed here; it was harder to push through. The agent stood on tiptoes and leaned over, just lightly brushing his shoulder.

By now Guttman was within shouting distance of the stage. He looked up towards the Prime Minister, who was coming to the climax of the speech.

‘Kobi!’ he yelled, calling him by a long-forgotten nickname. ‘Kobi!’ His eyes were bulging, his face flushed.

Security agents from all sides were now closing in, two on each side, as well as the first man advancing from behind. They were ready to pounce, to smother him to the ground as they had been taught, when a sixth agent, standing to the right of the stage, spotted a sudden movement. Perhaps it was just a wave, it was impossible to tell for sure, but Guttman, still staring maniacally at the Prime Minister, seemed to be reaching into his jacket.

The first shot was straight to the head, just as it had been rehearsed a hundred times. It had to be the head, to ensure instant paralysis. No muscular reflex that might set off a suicide bomb; no final seconds of life in which the suspect might pull a trigger. The bodyguards watched as the silver-haired skull of Shimon Guttman blew open like a watermelon, brains and blood spattering the people all around.

Within seconds, the PM had been bundled off the stage and was at the centre of a scrum of security personnel shoving him towards a car. The crowd, cheering and clapping thirty seconds earlier, was now quaking with panic. There were screams as those at the front tried to run away from the horrible sight of the dead man. Police used their arms to form a cordon around the corpse, but the pressure of the crowd was almost impossible. People were screaming, stampeding, desperate to get away.

Pushing in the opposite direction were two senior military officers from the Prime Minister's detail, determined to break the impromptu cordon and get to the would-be assassin. One of them flashed a badge at a police officer and somehow ducked under his arms and inside the small, human clearing formed around the body.

There was too little of the dead man's head to make out, but the rest of him was almost intact. He had fallen face down and now the officer rolled the lifeless body over. What he saw made him blanch.

It was not the shattered bone or hollowed eye sockets; he had seen those before. It was the man's hands, or rather his right hand. Still clenched, the fingers were not wrapped around a gun – but gripping a piece of paper, now sodden with blood. This man had not been reaching for a revolver – but for a note. Shimon Guttman hadn't wanted to kill the Prime Minister. He had wanted to tell him something.

CHAPTER TWO

Washington, Sunday, 9.00am

‘Big day today, honey.’

‘Uh?’

‘Come on, sweetheart, time to wake up.’

‘Nrrghh.’

‘OK. One, two, three. And the covers are off—’

‘Hey!’

Maggie Costello bolted upright, grabbed at the duvet and pulled it back over her, making sure to cover her head as well as her body this time. She hated the mornings and regarded the Sunday liein as a constitutionally protected right.

Not Edward. He'd probably been up for two hours already. He wasn't like that when they met: back in Africa, in the Congo, he could pull the all-nighters just like her. But once they had come here, he had adapted pretty fast. Now he was Washington Man, out of the house just after six am. Through a squinted eye jammed up against the pillow, Maggie could see he was in shorts and a running vest, both sweaty.

She was still unconscious, but he'd already been for his run through Rock Creek Park.

‘Come on!’ he said, shouting from the bathroom. ‘I've cleared the whole day for furnishing this apartment. Crate and Barrel; then Bed Bath & Beyond; and finally Macy's. I have a complete plan.’

‘Not the whole day,’ Maggie muttered, knowing she was inaudible. She had a morning appointment, an overspill slot for clients who could never make weekdays.

‘Actually not the whole day,’ Edward shouted, the sound of the shower not quite drowning him out. ‘You've got that morning appointment first. Remember?’

Maggie played deaf and, still horizontal, reached for the TV remote. If she was going to be up at this hideous hour, she might as well get something out of it. The Sunday talk shows. By the time she clicked onto ABC, they'd already started the news summary.

‘Nerves on edge in Jerusalem this hour, after violence at a peace rally last night, where Israel's prime minister seemed to be the target of a failed assassination attempt. Concern high over the impact of the latest events on the Middle East peace process, which had been hoped to yield a breakthrough as early as—’

‘Honey, seriously. They'll be here in twenty.’ She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. The show was hopping back and forth between correspondents in Jerusalem and the White House, explaining that the US administration was taking steps to ensure all the parties kept calm and carried on talking. What a nightmare, thought Maggie. The last minute external event, threatening to undo all the trust you've built, all the patient progress you've made. She imagined the mediators who had brought the Israelis and Palestinians to this point. Not the big name politicians, the secretaries of state and foreign ministers who stepped into the spotlight at the last moment, but the backroom negotiators, the ones who did all the hard graft for months, even years before. She imagined their frustration and angst. Poor bastards.

‘The time coming up to 9.15 on the east coast—’

‘Hey, I was watching that!’

‘You haven't got time.’ As if to underline his point, Edward was towelling himself in front of the TV set, blocking her view of the blank screen.

‘Why do you suddenly care so much about my schedule?’

He held the towel still and faced Maggie. ‘Because I care about you, honey, and I don't want your day getting off on the wrong note. If you start late, you stay late. You should be thanking me.’

‘OK,’ Maggie said, finally hauling herself upright. ‘Thank you.’

‘Besides, you don't need to follow all that stuff any more. It's not your problem now, is it?’

She looked at him, so different from the man in chinos and grubby polo shirt she had met three years ago. He was still attractive, his features straight and strong. But he had, as she would have said back in her school days in Dublin, ‘scrubbed up’ since they'd moved to Washington. Now an official at the Commerce Department, dealing with international trade, he was always clean-shaven, his Brooks Brothers shirts neatly pressed. His shoes were polished. He was a creature of DC, not too different from any of the other juiceless white males they would see at the suburban brunches and cocktail parties they went to, now that he was part of official Washington. These days only she would know that somewhere under that button-down exterior was the stubbled, unkempt do-gooder, working for an aid organization, distributing food, she had fallen for.

They hadn't got together straight away. He had been transferred to South America soon after they first met. By the time he came back to Africa, she had moved on to the Balkans. That was how it was for people like them, an occupational hazard. So it remained no more than a spark, a maybe-one-day, until they met again just over a year ago, back in Africa. She was falling through the air after the episode they almost never spoke about these days – and he caught her. For that, she would never stop being grateful.

She stumbled into the shower and was still drying off when the intercom sounded: the clients, down at the entrance to the apartment building. She buzzed them in. Allowing for the lift journey, she would have about a minute to get dressed. She scraped her hair back into a rapid ponytail and reached for a loose grey top, which fell low over her jeans. She flung open a cupboard and grabbed the first pair of low-heeled shoes she could see.

Just time for a quick glance at herself in the mirror by the front door. Nothing too badly out of place; nothing anyone would notice. This had been her habit since she had come to Washington. ‘Dressing to disappear,’ Liz, her younger sister, had called it, when she was over on a visit. ‘Look at you. All greys and blacks and sweaters that a family could camp in. You dress like a really fat person, do you know that, Maggie? You've got this drop-dead gorgeous figure and no one would know it. It's like your body's working undercover.’ Liz, blogger and would-be novelist, laughed enthusiastically at her own joke.

Maggie told her to get away, though she knew Liz had a point. ‘It's better for the work,’ she explained. ‘In a couples situation, the mediator needs to be a pane of glass that the man and woman themselves can look through, so that they see each other rather than you.’

Liz was not convinced. She guessed that Maggie had got that bullshit out of some textbook. And she was right.

Nor did Maggie dare let on that this new look was also the preference of her boyfriend. With gentle hints at first, then more overtly, Edward had encouraged Maggie to start tying her hair back, or to put away the fitted tops, tight trousers or knee-length skirts that constituted her previous urban wardrobe. He always had a specific argument for each item: ‘That colour just suits you better’; ‘I think this will be more appropriate’ – and he seemed sincere. Still, she couldn't help but notice that all his interventions tended to point her in the same direction: more modest, less sexy.

She wouldn't breathe a word of that to Liz. Her sister had taken an instant, irrational dislike to Edward and she didn't need any more ammunition. Besides, it wouldn't be fair on him. If Maggie dressed differently now, that was her own decision, made in part for a reason that she had never shared with Liz and never would. Maggie had once dressed sexily, there was no denying it. But look where that had led. She wouldn't make that mistake again.

She opened the door to Kathy and Brett George, ushering them towards the spare room reserved for this purpose. They were in the couples' programme devised by the state authorities in Virginia, a new ‘cooling off’ scheme, in which husbands and wives were obliged to undergo mediation before they were granted a divorce. Normally, six sessions did it, the couple working out the terms of their break-up without any need to call a lawyer, thereby saving on heartache and money. That was the idea anyway.

She gestured to them to sit down, reminded them where they had got to the previous week and what issues remained outstanding. And then, as if she had fired a starting gun, the pair began laying into each other with a ferocity that had not let up since the day they had first walked in.

‘Sweetheart, I'm happy to give you the house. And the car for that matter. I just have certain conditions—’

‘Which is that I stay home and look after your kids.’

‘Our kids, Kathy. Ours.’

They were in their early forties, maybe seven or eight years older than Maggie, but they might as well have come from another generation, if not another planet. She had listened with incomprehension to the rows about who got to use the summer house in New Hampshire, which in turn triggered an almighty clash over whether Kathy had been a good daughter-in-law to Brett's father when the old man was sick, while Kathy insisted that Brett had been consistently rude whenever her parents came to stay.

She had just about had it with the Georges. The two of them had sat there on that couch, slugging it out for four consecutive weeks without taking a blind bit of notice of a word she said. She had tried it soft, saying little, offering a gentle nod here and there. She had tried it hands-on, intervening in every twist and turn of the conversation, directing and channelling it like a stream running through the middle of the room. She preferred it this second way, firing off questions, chipping in with her opinions, no matter if Little Missy over there turned up her nose or if Mr Rod-Up-His-Arse squirmed in his seat. But that didn't seem to work either. They still came back in as much of a mess as when they first started.

‘Maggie, do you see what he did there? Do you see that thing he does?’

Listening to the pair of them made Maggie despair that she'd ever made this move in the first place. It had made sense at the time. ‘Mediator’ the job spec said and that's what she was. OK, this was not quite the area she was used to, but mediation was mediation, right? How different could it be? And, after all, she couldn't face going back to the work she had done before. She had become frightened of it, ever since she had seen what could happen when you failed.

But Jesus Christ, if these two weren't convincing her she'd made a terrible mistake.

‘Look, Maggie, I hope this is already firmly on the record. I am more than happy to pay whatever maintenance budget we all decide is reasonable. I'm no miser: I will write that cheque. I just have one condition—’

‘He wants to control me!’

‘My condition, Maggie, is very, very simple. If Kathy wants to receive my money for the upbringing of our children, in other words, if she wants me to effectively pay her to bring them up, then I would expect her to do no other job at the same time.’

‘He won't pay child support unless I give up my career! Do you hear this, Maggie?’

Maggie could detect something in Kathy's voice she hadn't noticed before. Like a rambler spotting a new path, she decided to follow it, see where it led.

‘And why would he want you to give up your career, Kathy?’

‘Oh, this is ridiculous.’

‘Brett, the question was directed at Kathy.’

‘I don't know. He says it's better for the kids.’

‘But you think it's about something else.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, for Christ's sake—’

‘Go on, Kathy.’

‘I wonder sometimes if, if … I wonder if Brett kind of likes me being dependent.’

‘I see.’ Maggie saw that Brett was silent. ‘And why might that be?’

‘I don't know. Like, maybe he likes it when I'm weak or something. You know his first wife was an alcoholic, right? Well, did you also know that as soon as she got better, Brett left her?’

‘This is outrageous, to bring Julie into this.’

Maggie was scribbling notes, all the while maintaining eye contact with the couple. It was a trick she had learned during negotiations of a different kind, long ago.

‘Edward, what do you say to all this?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I'm sorry. Brett. Forgive me. Brett. What do you make of all this, this suggestion that you are somehow trying to keep Kathy weak? I think that was the word she used. Weak.’

Brett spoke for a while, refuting the charge and insisting that he had wanted to leave Julie for at least two years but didn't feel it was right until she had recovered. Maggie nodded throughout, but she was distracted. First, the intercom had sounded while Brett was speaking, followed by the sound of several male voices, Edward's and two or three she did not recognize. And, worse, by her ridiculous slip of the tongue. She wondered if Kathy and Brett had noticed.

Regretting that she had opened up this theme – more therapist territory than mediator's – Maggie decided on a radical change of tack. OK, she thought, we need to move to final status. ‘Brett, what are your red lines?’

‘I'm sorry?’

‘Your red lines. Those things on which you absolutely, positively will not compromise. Here.’ She tossed over a pad of paper, followed by a pencil, thrown a tad too sharply for Brett's taste. ‘And you too, Kathy. Red lines. Go on. Write them down.’

Within a few seconds, the two were scratching away with their pencils. Maggie felt as if she was back at school in Dublin: the summer, exam season, the nuns prowling around to check that she wasn't copying her answers off Mairead Breen. Except this time she was one of the nuns. At last, she thought. A moment of peace.

She looked at this couple in front of her, two people who had once been so in love they had decided to share everything, even to create three new lives. When she had met up with Edward again after, after … everything that had happened, she had dreamed of a similar future for herself. No more war zones, no more anonymous hotel conference rooms, no more twenty-hour days fuelled by coffee and cigarettes. On the wrong side of thirty-five, she would settle down and have a family life. Fifteen years later than the girls she had gone to school with, admittedly, but she would have a family and a life.

‘You finished, Brett? What about you, Kathy?’

‘There's a lot to get down here.’

‘Remember, not everything's a red line. You've got to be selective. All right, Kathy. Give us your three red lines.’

‘Three? You kidding?’

‘Selective, remember.’

‘All right.’ Kathy began chewing the top of her pencil, before she realized it wasn't a pen and pulled it out of her mouth. ‘Child support. My kids have to have financial security.’

‘OK.’

‘And the house. I have to have the house, so that the kids can have continuity.’

‘And one more.’

‘Full custody of the children, obviously. I'm having them. There's no shifting on that.’

‘For Chrissake, Kathy—’

‘Not yet, Brett. First you gotta give me your red lines.’

‘We've been over this like a thousand times—’

‘Not this way we haven't. I need three.’

‘I want the children with me at Thanksgiving, so that they have dinner with my parents. I want that.’

‘All right.’

‘And spontaneous access. So that I can call up and say, I dunno, “Hey Joey, the Redskins are playing, wanna come?” I need to be able to do that without giving, like, three weeks' notice. Access whenever I want.’

‘No way—’

‘Kathy, not now. What's number three?’

‘I have others—’

‘We're doing three.’

‘It's the same one I said before. No child support unless Kathy is a full-time mom.’

‘Are you sure that's not just saying no to Kathy's first red line? You can't just block hers.’

‘OK. I'll put it this way. I'll pay for child support only if I'm getting a five-star service for my money. And that means the kids get looked after by their mom.’

‘That is not fair! You're using our kids to blackmail me into giving up my career.’

And they were off again, back to shouting at each other and ignoring Maggie. Just like old times, she thought to herself with a smile. After all, this was what she was used to. Negotiating a divorce between people who couldn't stand the sight of each other, who were tearing each other's throats out. An image flashed into her mind, which she quickly pushed out.

But it helped. It gave her an idea, or rather it made her see something she had not realized until that moment.

‘OK, Brett and Kathy, I've made a decision. These sessions have become useless. They're a waste of time, yours and mine. We're going to end it here.’ Maggie snapped shut the file on her lap.

The two people on the couch opposite suddenly turned their attention away from each other and stared at her. She could feel their eyes on her, but she ignored them, busying herself with her papers instead.

‘You don't need to worry about the paperwork. I'll get all that to the Virginia authorities tomorrow. You've both got lawyers, haven't you? Course you have. Well, they'll take it from here.’ She stood up, as if to usher them out.

Brett seemed fixed to the spot; Kathy's mouth hung wide open. At last, Brett forced himself to speak. ‘You can't, you can't do this.’

‘Do what, exactly?’ Maggie had her back to him, as she put the file back on the shelf behind her.

‘You can't just abandon us!’

Now Kathy joined in. ‘We need you, Maggie. There is no way we can get through this without you.’

‘Oh, don't you worry about that. The lawyers will get it sorted.’ Maggie kept moving around the room, avoiding eye contact. Outside she heard the buzzer go again, and the sound of another person or people moving in and out of the apartment. What was going on?

‘They'll kill us,’ said Brett. ‘They'll take all our money and make this whole thing even more of a nightmare than it already is!’

This was working.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘We'll sort this out, we promise. Don't we, Kathy?’

‘We do.’

‘OK? We're promising. We'll get this done. Right here.’

‘I think it's too late for that. We set aside a period of time to resolve everything—’

‘Oh, please don't say that, Maggie.’ It was Kathy, now imploring. ‘There's not such a lot of work to do here. You heard those red lines. We're not so far apart.’

Maggie turned around. ‘I'll give you ten minutes.’

In fact it took fifteen. But when they left Maggie's office and walked into the sunshine of a Washington September morning, Kathy and Brett George had resolved to share the costs of child support proportionate to their income, Brett paying more because he earned more, Kathy's financial contribution shrinking to zero if she gave up paid work to look after the kids. From now on, he would pay his way even if she carried on working, though she would have a genuine incentive to stay home. The children would live in their own house with their mother, except for alternate weekends and whenever either the kids or their father fancied seeing each other. The rule would be no hard and fast rules. Before they left they hugged Maggie and, to their surprise as much as hers, each other.

Maggie fell into a chair, allowing herself a small smile of satisfaction. Was this how she would make up for what she had done more than a year ago? Bit by bit, one couple at a time, reducing the amount of pain in the world? The thought was comforting for a moment or two – until she contemplated how long it would take. To balance all the lives lost because of her and that damned, damned mistake, she would be here, in this room, for all eternity. And still it wouldn't be enough.

She looked at her watch. She should be getting on. Edward would be waiting for her outside, ready to hit the full range of Washington's domestic retail outlets in a bid to equip their not-quite-marital home.

She opened the door to a surprise. Flicking through one of Maggie's back numbers of Vogue, in the tiny area that served as Maggie's waiting room, was a man who oozed Washington. Like Edward, he had the full DC garb: button-down shirt, blue blazer, loafers, even now, on a Sunday. Maggie didn't recognize him, which didn't mean she hadn't met him. One of the troubles with these Washington men: they all looked the same.

‘Hello? Do you have an appointment?’

‘I don't. It's kind of an emergency. It won't take long.’

An emergency? What the hell was this? She headed down the corridor, opening the door onto the kitchen. There she saw Edward, signing on one of those electronic devices held out by a man wearing delivery overalls.

‘Edward, what's going on?’

He seemed to pale. ‘Ah, honey. I can explain. They just had to go. They were taking up too much space, they messed up the whole place. So I've done it. They've gone.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘Those boxes which you've had sitting in the study for nearly a year. You said you would unpack them, but you never did. So this kind gentleman has loaded them onto his truck and now they're going to the trash.’

Maggie looked at the man in overalls, who stared at his feet. Now she understood what had happened. But she could not believe it. She stormed past Edward, flung open the door to the study and, sure enough, the space in the corner was now empty, the carpet on which those two cartons had once sat more compacted, a different shade from the rest. She flew back to the kitchen.

‘You bastard! Those boxes had my, my … letters and photographs and, and … whole fucking life and you just THREW THEM OUT?’

Maggie rushed to the front door. But, doubtless sensing trouble, the trash guy had made his getaway. Swearing, she pressed the lift button again and again. ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered, tensing her jaw. When the lift came, she willed it down faster. As soon as it arrived on the ground floor and the door opened a crack, she squeezed through it, running through the main doors of the building and out onto the street. She looked left and right and left again before she saw it, a green truck pulling out. She ran hard to catch up, coming within a few yards. She was waving wildly, like someone flagging down traffic after a road accident. But it was too late. The van picked up speed and vanished. All she had was half a phone number and what she thought was the name: National Removals.

She rushed back upstairs, frantically grabbing the telephone, her fingers trembling over the butons. She called directory information, asking for a number. They found it and offered to put her through. Three rings, then four, then five. A recorded message: We're sorry, but all our offices are closed on Sunday. Our regular opening hours are Monday to Friday … If she waited till tomorrow it would be too late: they would have destroyed the boxes and everything they contained.

She went back into the kitchen to find Edward standing, defiant. She began quietly. ‘You just threw them out.’

‘You're damn right I threw them out. They made this place look like a student shithole. All that junk, all that sentimental crap. You need to drop it, Maggie. You need to move on.’

‘But, but …’ Maggie wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the ground, trying to digest what had just happened. Not just the letters from her parents, the photographs from Ireland, but the notes she had taken during crucial negotiations, private, scribbled memos from rebel leaders and UN officials. Those boxes contained her life's work. And now they were in a dumpster.

‘I did it for you, Maggie. That world is not your world any more. It's moved on without you. You've got to do the same. You need to adjust to your life now, as it is. Our life.’

So that's why he had been so keen to get her locked away in the consulting room this morning. And she thought he just wanted her to get a punctual start to the day. She had even thanked him! The truth was that he just wanted the garbage men in and out before she had a chance to stop them. For the first time, she met his gaze. Quietly, as if unable to believe her own words, she said, ‘You want to destroy who I am.’

He looked back at her blankly, before finally nodding towards the other end of the apartment. In a voice that was ice cold, he said, ‘I think someone's waiting for you.’

She almost staggered out of the room, unable to absorb what had happened. How could he have done such a thing, without her permission, without even talking to her? Did he really hate the Maggie Costello he had once known so much that he wanted to erase every last trace of her, replacing her with someone, different, bland and subservient?

She stood in the landing that served as the waiting area, her head spinning. The man in blue was still there, now turning the pages of Atlantic Monthly.

‘Bad time? I'm sorry.’

‘No, no,’ Maggie said, barely out loud. On autopilot, she added. ‘Is your wife coming?’

He made a curious smirk. ‘She should be along soon.’

Maggie gestured him into the consulting room. ‘You said it was some kind of emergency.’ She was struggling to remember his case, to remember if he was one of the handful of clients she said could contact her out of hours.

‘Yes. My problem is that I'm finding it hard to adjust.’

‘To what?’

‘To life here. Normality.’

‘Where were you before?’

‘I was all over. Travelling from one screwed-up place to another. Always meant to be doing good, always trying to make the world a better place and all that bullshit.’

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘You could say that. I try to save lives.’

Maggie could feel her muscles tensing. ‘And now you're finding it hard to adjust to being back home.’

‘Home! That's a joke. I don't know what home is any more. I'm not from DC; I haven't lived in my hometown for nearly twenty years. Always on the road, on planes, in hotel rooms, sleeping in dumps.’

‘But that's not why you're finding it hard to adjust.’

‘No. It's the adrenaline I miss, I guess. The drama. Sounds terrible, doesn't it?’

‘Go on.’ Maggie was remembering everything that was in those boxes. A handwritten letter of thanks she had received from the British prime minister, following the talks over Kosovo. A treasured photo with the man she had loved through her mid-twenties.

‘Before, everything I did seemed to matter so much. The stakes were high. Now nothing even comes close. It's all so banal.’

Maggie stared hard at the man. The words were coming out of him but his eyes were flat and cold. She began to feel uneasy at his presence here. ‘Can you say more about the work you were doing?’

‘I started with an aid organization in Africa, working with people there during a particularly vicious civil war. Somehow – it was a fluke really – I ended up being one of the few people who could talk to both sides. The UN started using me as a go-between. And I got results.’

Maggie shivered. Her mind was racing, wondering whether she should call for Edward, though that was truly the last thing she wanted to do.

‘Eventually I became known as a sort of unofficial diplomat, a professional mediator. The US government hired me for a peace process that had stalled. And one thing led to another. Eventually they were sending me around the world, to peace talks that had hit the buffers. They called me “the Closer”. I was the one who could close the deal.’

Could she make a run for it? But something told her not even to glance at the door: she did not want to provoke this man. ‘Then what happened?’ Her voice betrayed nothing: years of practice.

‘I was the best in my field. Sent everywhere. Belgrade, Baghdad. Back to Africa.’

Maggie swallowed hard.

‘And then I made a mistake.’

‘Where?’

‘In Africa.’

Maggie's voice stayed low, even as she said, ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘I think you know who I am.’

‘No, I don't. So tell me, who are you and what are you playing at? Tell me now or I'll call the police.’

‘You know who I am, Maggie. You know very well. I'm you.’

CHAPTER THREE

Washington, Sunday, 10.43am

It wasn't a surprise. She had known that much the moment he had mentioned Africa and the UN. He had been telling her own life story back to her, pretending it was his own. It was a nasty little trick.

Still, that wasn't why she had grown agitated: she was used to dealing with creeps. This man seemed to know everything about her. Including her – what had he called it? – ‘mistake’.

‘I'm not here to taunt you.’

‘But you're not here for bloody divorce mediation either, are you?’

‘There's no wife for me to divorce. I'm like you used to be. Married to the job.’

‘And what job is that exactly?’

‘I work for the same people you used to work for. The United States government. My name is Judd Bonham.’ He extended a hand.

Maggie ignored it, heading slowly backwards towards her chair. She was reeling. First Edward and the boxes and now this. Initially, she had him down as some psycho stalker, a jilted husband who blamed her for his divorce. It wouldn't be too difficult to Google her whole life story, then trick his way in to scare her, to freak her out. But she had read him wrong. He was here on official business. But what on earth could it be? She hadn't done anything for the Agency or State Department since … then. That had been well over a year ago and she had cut all her ties instantly. Not a phone call, not a letter. Nothing. If she had had it her way, she wouldn't even be living in bloody America. She couldn't have gone back to Ireland, couldn't face that; but she had thought about following Liz to London. Instead she had ended up in sodding Washington, inside the belly of the beast. To be with Edward.

‘Gotta hand it to you though. You haven't lost your touch.’

She looked up at him.

‘You're still good. The old jet-on-the-runway trick. Engines revving up, ready to fly any moment. Love it.’

‘What?’

‘Your last appointment, Kathy and Brett. Threatening to walk out on the parties: they should teach that at negotiator school. Didn't Clinton do it at Camp David? Get the chopper all fired up, blades spinning. The mediator says he – or she – will walk and the parties get scared. Realize how much they need you and how much they need the talks. They suddenly see that any deal they'd make outside the room would be worse. And it brings them together, both sides desperate to keep the talks going. You mediation guys call it a “shared project”, don't you? Something like that. Even unites them against a common enemy: you. Genius.’

‘You were listening.’

‘It's the training, what can I say?’

‘You arsehole.’

‘I like how you say that. Ahhhrse-hole. Sounds sexy in your accent.’

‘Get out.’

‘Though I see you don't really do sexy so much these days. No more of the hair-tumbling-down-in-front-of-the-eyes routine. Is that Edward's influence?’

‘Go.’

‘Oh, I'll go. But first I have a little proposal to make.’

Maggie stared at him.

‘Don't worry, not that kind of proposal. Not that I couldn't be tempted, should you ever get tired of Edward—’

‘I'm going to call the police.’ She reached for the phone.

‘No you're not. And we both know why.’

That stopped her; she put the phone down. He knew about her ‘mistake’. And he would tell. The Washington Post, some blog, it didn't matter. The true reason for her exile, currently known only to a few diplomatic insiders, would become public. What was left of her reputation would be ruined.

‘What do you want?’ Almost a whisper.

‘We want you to come out of retirement.’

‘No.’

‘Come on, first rule of any negotiation: you have to listen.’

‘I am not having a negotiation with you. I want you to piss off.’

‘The people I work for tend not to take no for an answer.’

‘And who is it you work for exactly? “The United States government” is a bit vague.’

‘Let's say this has come from as close to the top as you can get in this town. You have a reputation, you know. Miss Costello.’

‘Well,’ you can tell them I'm flattered. But the answer is no.

‘You're not even curious?’

‘No, I am not. I don't do that work any more. I work here now. I mediate between husbands and wives. And I don't take emergency cases. Which means you have about one minute to get up and leave.’

‘I won't insult your intelligence, Maggie. You read the papers. You know what's happening in Jerusalem. We're this close to a deal.’ He held his thumb and forefinger half an inch apart. ‘We've never been so close before.’

Maggie ignored him.

‘And you also know what happened yesterday.

An attack on the Israeli Prime Minister. Or what looked like an attack. Israeli security ended up killing some internal critic of the peace process. Could screw the whole thing.’

‘The answer's no.’

‘The powers that be have decided that this is too important an opportunity to be lost. They need you to go in there and do your thing. Work your magic. Come on, you've still got it. I could hear that just now. And this is something that really matters. Middle East peace, for Christ's sake. How could you pass that up? This is the World Series of peacemaking!’

‘I don't play baseball.’

‘No. OK.’ He was talking more quietly now and in a different tone. She recognized it for what it was, a change in tactics. ‘What I mean is, you're a mediator. It's your calling. It's what you were born to do. You're good at it and you love doing it. This is the chance to return to the work you love. At the highest possible level.’

She thought of the pictures she had seen on TV that morning, and the feeling she had had, but not admitted, even to herself. Envy. She had envied the men and women sitting at the head of the negotiating table in Jerusalem, the people charged with that weightiest and most thrilling of tasks, brokering peace. She had pictured them the instant she saw the news item. Like fishermen, reeling in a rare and prized specimen, they would be exerting both enormous strength and great gentleness. Pulling with all their might one moment, then backing off, letting out some more line the next. Knowing when the rod could bend, and knowing what would make it break. It was skilled, demanding work. But it was also the most exhilarating activity she had ever known.

Bonham read her face. ‘You must miss it. You wouldn't be human if you didn't. I mean counselling couples is valuable, no question. But the stakes are never as high, are they? You're never going to feel the thrill you did at Dayton or Geneva. Not here. Are you?’

Maggie wanted to shake her head in agreement. This man seemed to know her own mind better than she did. But she resisted, turning her head to stare out of the window.

‘Not that this is some kind of sport to you, I know that. It never was. Sure, you like the professional challenge. But that came second. To the goal. The pursuit of peace. You're one of the few people on the planet who knows how much these efforts matter. What can happen if things go wrong.’ Her mistake.

‘And few matter more than this one, Maggie. Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have died in this conflict. It's gone on and on and on. Our whole adult lifetimes. And it will keep going. You'll turn on your TV set in ten years' time and there'll still be Palestinian kids shelled in playgrounds and Israeli teenagers blown to pieces on buses.’

‘And you think you can stop it?’

‘Me? I can't stop it. I can't stop anything. But you can.’

‘I don't believe that. Not any more.’

‘Come on. You haven't changed that much.’

‘Look, I didn't suddenly forget that people are dying there and everywhere else. I know only too well how much death and killing goes on in every fucking corner of this planet. But I happen to have realized there is nothing I can do about it. So it's better I stay out of it.’

‘The White House doesn't agree.’

‘Well, the White House can just shove it, can't it?’

Bonham sat back, as if assessing his prey. After a pause he said, ‘This is because of … what happened, isn't it?’

Maggie stared out of the window, willing her eyes to stay dry.

‘Look, Maggie. We know what went on there. You fouled up very badly. But it was one black mark on an otherwise exceptional record. The White House view is that you've done your penance. And you don't help anyone by staying in exile like this. You're not saving any lives here. It's time you came back.’

‘You're saying I'm forgiven.’

‘I'm saying it's time to move on. But, yes, if you like, you're forgiven.’

For the first time Maggie met his gaze. ‘But what if I haven't forgiven myself?’

‘Ah, that's a different problem, isn't it? Shouldn't be too tricky for you, though. That's a Catholic specialty, isn't it? Cancelling out the sin through repentance? Redemption and all that? So this is your chance.’

‘It's not as simple as that.’

‘True. You're not going to bring back the lives that were lost because of what happened. Your mistake. But you can prevent more lives being lost. And that's got to count for something. Hasn't it?’

She was about to say that she had once promised Edward that she wouldn't travel again. But she said nothing.

‘It's your choice, Maggie. If you believe that nothing else matters but your life here, your relationship here—’

She knew he'd heard the row in the kitchen.

‘—you'll ignore me and send me away from here. But if you miss the work you were born to do, if you care about ending a conflict that's spread so much bitterness around the world, if you want to make things right, you'll say yes.’

‘Tell me something,’ she said after a long pause. ‘Why the house visit? Why all this cloak and dagger bullshit, pretending to be a client?’

‘We tried phoning you, but you didn't return our calls. I didn't think you'd let me into the building.’

‘You called?’

‘We've been leaving messages here since yesterday afternoon. We left a couple early this morning.’

‘But,’ she stammered. She was sure she had checked, sure that there was nothing on the machine.

‘Maybe someone deleted the messages before you got to them.’ She felt the air seep out of her lungs. Edward.

Judd threw an envelope on the table, thick and heavy. ‘Tickets and briefing material. The plane for Tel Aviv leaves this afternoon. The choice is yours, Maggie.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Jerusalem, Saturday, 11.10pm

After-dark meetings were part of the tradition of this office. Ben-Gurion had done it in the fifties, debating and deciding till the early hours; Golda, too, always worked late at night, most famously when the Egyptians launched their surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973: legend has it the old lady barely slept for days. Somehow this room, with its single high-backed chair, reserved for the Prime Minister, lent itself to such encounters. It was small and intimate, with two couches forming an L-shape on which advisers or aides could sit around and talk for hours. The desk was functional, built for use rather than to impress. Rabin used to sit here alone deep into the night, with his own ink-pen, letters to the parents of soldiers – which, being Israel, meant every mother and father in the land.

Rabin was long gone now, taking the ashtrays that accompanied his chain-smoking habit with him. The current incumbent preferred, when stressed, to nibble on sunflower seeds, a habit which made him the peer of bus drivers and stallholders across the country. He gestured now to the man from Shin Bet, Israeli's internal security service, to begin speaking.

‘Prime Minister, the dead man was Shimon Guttman. We all know who we're talking about: the writer and activist, aged seventy-one. The first reports suggesting he was armed have now been discounted. Our investigators found no sign that he carried any weapon. Examination of the body showed he was killed by a bullet to the brain.’

The PM grimaced, then cracked one more seed shell between his front teeth.

‘As you know, he was found clasping a handwritten note, addressed to yourself. Intelligence say it will take some days to piece it together, the words were obscured by the blood—’

The Prime Minister waved him quiet. The head of Shin Bet put away the paper he had been consulting. The Deputy Prime Minster stared at his shoes; the Foreign and Defence Ministers stared at the PM, trying to gauge his reaction: none wanted to be the first to speak.

Amir Tal, special adviser to the PM and the youngest man in the room, decided to fill the quiet. ‘Of course, this has immediate political implications. First, we will come under fire—’

The Prime Minister raised an eyebrow.

‘Sorry. We will be criticized for making a bad mistake, killing an innocent man. That kind of flak could come our way anytime. But, second, if we are about to sign a peace deal, this will make things much harder. The right were already boiling; now they're claiming their first martyr. They insist it is not a coincidence: Guttman was one of our loudest critics. And not just ours. He said the same thing during Oslo and again during Camp David: “Anyone who talks peace with the Arabs is a criminal who should be on trial for treason.” Arutz Sheva was on the air an hour ago saying “So now we know the government's plan; they want to silence dissent with gunfire”.’

‘Could they be right?’ It was the Foreign Minister, addressing Tal, avoiding the boss's eye.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I don't mean that we deliberately killed him. But that it was not a coincidence. Could it be deliberate in the other direction, the opposite of what Arutz Sheva are saying?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, was this a set-up? Guttman knew how things worked. You can't just rush towards the Prime Minister, shouting and screaming, and then reach into your jacket. He was a smart guy. He'd have known that.’

‘Are you saying—’

‘Yeah. I'm wondering if Guttman wanted to get shot. If he was deliberately luring us in, daring us to kill a famous opponent of the government.’

‘This is crazy.’

‘Is it? This is a guy who his whole life has gone in for the grand spectacular gesture, the great protest. And now, finally, it's the big one: we're about to make peace with the Arabs, to give away holy Judea and sacred Samaria. To prevent such a calamity, a fanatic like Guttman would have to come up with the biggest possible gesture. One that might actually mobilize the right.’

‘He would sacrifice his own life?’

‘He would.’ The Prime Minister had uttered his first two words since the meeting began. Until now, he had sat back, listening to the debate. That was his style. First, hear the arguments among the competing members of his court. Then, pepper them with questions. So how should we respond? What are our options? The cabinet had braced itself for just such an interrogation. But instead the Prime Minister had just leaned forward, saying nothing, cracking open yet another salty seed shell. Until those words: ‘He would.’

After a long pause, as if completing a thought that had been unspooling in his own head, he added, ‘I know this man. Inside out.’

The Chief of Staff, dressed in pressed olive green trousers and beige shirt, with a beret under his epaulette – the uniform of the soldier whose battlefield was politics – broke the silence that followed with what felt to him like a related question. He asked what everyone in the room – along with everyone who had heard the eyewitness accounts on TV – had wanted to know from the beginning. ‘How come he called you Kobi?’

‘Ah,’ said the Prime Minister.

‘I thought he hated your guts. Yet here he's talking to you like you're old chums.’

‘Rav Aluf, you of all people should know the answer to that question.’ The PM sat back, though he still preferred to look into middle distance rather than at any of his colleagues. ‘Kobi was the man I was a long, long time ago.’ The Defence Minister shuffled awkwardly in his seat, shooting a glance at the General. ‘It was what my friends called me. In the army. We were a good unit, one of the best. In ′67 we took a hill, just us: thirty-odd men. And you know who was the bravest, much braver than me, despite what Amir here tells the newspapers? A young scholar from the Hebrew University by the name of Shimon Guttman.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Jerusalem, Monday, 9.28am

For the first time since she got here the people checking her bags were Arabs. Everyone she had met since coming off the overnight flight at dawn this morning had been Israeli Jews. Now at the entrance to the US Consulate on Agron Street, she was waiting to be processed by Palestinian Arabs – albeit wearing shirts bearing the crest of the United States. Ordinarily an official of the United States government, as she now was once more, would be waved through. But these were extra-tense times, the driver explained, so it would take a little longer. One of the guards wanted Maggie to hand in her mobile phone, until a more senior man waved him away.

She was ushered into a small security lobby, staffed by a US marine behind thick glass watching a bank of TV monitors. As she gazed at the flickering images, she rewound her scene with Judd Bonham for the dozenth time. He had played her like a master, making every move she would have made. He had appealed to her conscience and flattered her ego, just as she had done to countless delegates, ambassadors and presidential aides. He had both dangled a stick, revealing what he knew, and offered a carrot. And, just as the rulebook dictates, the latter had been designed to reach the reluctant party's weakest spot: in her case, her desire to wipe the slate clean. You always tried to know a participant's greatest vulnerability. It pained her to think hers was so obvious.

Bonham must have known it would be a breeze. First some light intimidation, then a show of apparent kindness and empathy. It was the classic pattern. Police interrogator kicks away the chair, then puts a hand on the shoulder and offers to take the pain away. Good cop, bad cop, even if it was the same person. She had done it herself a dozen times.

Her gaze went to the marine. She couldn't quite believe she was back to all this again. Instinctively, she scrutinized the scene before her. Natural that the serious security would be entrusted only to an American. The choice of local hires was also a statement. Use of Palestinian staff to underline that the consulate in Jerusalem was the US mission to the Palestinians; a wholly different operation from the embassy in Tel Aviv, which represented America to the Israelis.

A door buzzed, opening up for a tall, fair-haired man. ‘Welcome to the madhouse! Jim Davis, Consul, good to see you.’ He stuck out a hand to shake.

‘As you can see, we work in the most beautiful pair of buildings the State Department owns anywhere in the world,’ he said as they walked into a garden, a wide, square lawn laid out before a grand, colonial house. The noise of Agron Street was shut out now. The only sound was the hummed melody of an aged gardener, bending over to prune a rosebush.

‘And this is our newest acquisition, the Lazarist Pères Monastery.’ Davis pointed to his left, to a structure that seemed part church, part fortress. It was modest; no fussy steeples or fancy turrets, but each arched window was decorated with a brick surround, as if reinforced against incoming fire. And all of it was built in the same pale, craggy stone that dominated this city. Every building, every house, every office, every hotel, even the supermarkets – they were all made of it. ‘Jerusalem stone’ the driver had called it on the way from the airport. ‘It is the law, it is the law!’ he had said, his stubbled face peering over his shoulder, prompting Maggie to nod eagerly towards the road, encouraging him to do the same.

She had been here before, a couple of times, nearly a decade ago. But she hadn't been close to the action. The White House ran that show: they were happy to let the do-gooders of State do Africa or East Timor and, on a good day, the Balkans. But the Middle East was the glamour assignment, the diplomatic big one, the only foreign story that consistently made the front page. So Maggie had always been kept back.

She looked up, shielding her eyes with the palm of her hand. The light was so bright here, reflecting and bouncing off all that pale, sand-coloured stone. A monastery in Jerusalem. Had probably been here centuries, all the way back to the Crusades. It reminded Maggie of the convent of her schooldays.

‘Took that over just a while back,’ Davis was explaining. Unusually for a long-time diplomat, his Southern accent was perfectly intact. ‘The brothers, or fathers, strictly speaking, have vacated most of the building. A few of them are hanging on, in a little corner that will stay theirs. Otherwise it now belongs to the United States of America.’

He was babbling, a male reaction Maggie was used to. She had seen it in Davis's eyes the moment he had greeted her, the initial instant of surprise, followed by a regrouping and the concentrated effort to act normally. She had thought this would stop as she moved into her late thirties, that she would become less of a magnet for male attention. But, even with the dressing down, it hadn't faded much. She was still tall, at five foot nine, and her figure had held its shape pretty well. Her hair was still thick and warm brown and, when she let it down, it was long enough to trail over her shoulders.

‘So here's the deal.’ Davis had led them to a cluster of iron chairs, shaded by the cypress trees. ‘As you know, the White House is convinced this is the week. Aiming for a permanent agreement signed in the Rose Garden within a matter of days. Just in time for election day.’

‘On re-election day as I think the President likes to call it,’ she said. ‘Is he going to get what he wants?’

‘Well, we've had two delegations over at Government House sitting face to face for nearly two weeks now. That's a breakthrough right there.’

‘What, that they've done two weeks?’

‘No, I meant talks on the ground.’

‘Right. Sorry.’ Maggie swallowed. This would take some time; she was rusty.

‘It's never happened before. Camp David, Wye River, Madrid, Oslo, you name it. But never here. Camp David's been spooked since 2000. And the White House, in its infinite wisdom, decided it would be good for the parties to do the business in their own backyard.’

‘And are they? Doing the business?’ ‘Course not. We could have told them that. These guys are leaking to their media more than they're talking to each other. You can't do a news blackout when you're right in the middle of the freakin' conflict zone.’

‘But the White House went ahead anyway?’

‘It's their show. But, believe me, they're running to us every time someone sneezes.’

‘No change there, then.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Forget it. So State's having to do some of the heavy lifting?’

‘Some? Try most. But everyone's trying to get their oar in. EU, UN, the British. Arab states, Indonesia, Malaysia. We got a billion Muslims on the edge of their seats, waiting to see what happens. Imams and mullahs from here to Mohammadsville, Alabama preaching that this is the front line in the war between Islam and the West. Armies being mobilized in the Arab world. If they all decide the Palestinians are being pushed into some kind of sell-out deal, some surrender to the evil West, then it's not going to be just a few angry folks in Gaza or the odd demo in Damascus. The whole region could go boof.’ He made a little mushroom cloud of his hands. ‘And that's World War Three, right there.’

Maggie nodded, allowing Davis to know his little dramatic exposition had struck home.

‘Up till now things have gone OK. But it's crunch time now, R & J, and the parties are getting antsy.’

‘They haven't talked about refugees and Jerusalem until now?’ She wanted Davis to know that she knew the code. Like every field, diplomacy had its jargon; within that, Middle East diplomacy had its own dialect. After a year spent a million miles away, Maggie hoped she'd be able to keep up.

‘There's been a ton of groundwork on right of return,’ said Davis. ‘Though, one tip: don't let anyone catch you saying those words or the Israelis will eat your lunch. It's not a “right”, it's a claim. And it's not necessarily “return”, because some of the Palestinians came from somewhere else first. And it's not “home” because this is the homeland of the Jewish people, blah, blah. You know all this.’

Maggie nodded, but she had stopped listening. She was remembering the row she had had with Edward. He hadn't even attempted to deny that he had deleted those messages from Judd: he simply said he had done it for Maggie's own good. She had been furious, accusing him of trying to cage her, to tame her into some little Washington wife with a sideline in couples' therapy. He was denying who she really was, or at least who she had been. He said she had swallowed too many counselling manuals and was now simply vomiting them back up. She insisted that he was on some weird mission to prevent her ever getting over what had happened in Africa, as if he somehow liked her in the state he had found her: broken.

After that, there wasn't much to say and they hadn't said it. She had packed her bags quickly and left for the airport. She felt guilty, knowing all that Edward had done for her when she was at her lowest. And she felt tremendous sadness, that her attempt at a normal life had collapsed so spectacularly. But she could not, in all conscience, say she felt she had made a mistake. Why, she wondered now, had she never unpacked those boxes? She knew what she would say if this were about someone else: that unconsciously she was holding back, that she was refraining from ever fully moving in with Edward. Like a child who refuses to take his coat off at school, those two boxes, waiting to be unpacked, were her way of saying she was just passing through.

So she had boarded the plane, looked down at Washington as it receded, imagining Edward receding with it, and then promptly distracted herself by plunging into the three-hundred-page briefing pack Bonham had prepared for her.

‘So you can imagine, this assassination thing has everyone extra jumpy. They're all on a hair trigger at the best of times, but now more than ever. Which is why they sent in the cavalry.’ He gestured towards her. ‘Closing the deal.’

‘Right. Though not in the room just yet.’

‘How's that?’

‘Washington has decided that the mood has “deteriorated” in the few hours I was in the air. Apparently, the moment is not “ripe” for me to come in just yet.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘For now my immediate role is to keep everyone calm. Out and about, keeping the constituencies on side.’

‘Ah, the “constituencies”.’ Davis made little quote marks with his fingers. ‘Well, after what happened last night, the Israeli right are the first guys who are gonna need stroking. They're going ape, saying the dead guy's a martyr.’

‘They think it was deliberate?’

‘They're saying all kinds of things.’ A look of sudden comprehension crossed Davis's face. ‘So that's why you're going to the shiva house.’

‘What?’

‘The house of mourning. I just got passed a note saying you're to go, as an unofficial representative. The Israelis asked for it, apparently. Shows respect to the guy, proof that he wasn't being taken out because he opposed the “US-backed” peace process; proof that no one regarded him as an enemy.’

‘But not too official, or it looks like we're endorsing his views.’

‘Right. They think it might help cool things down.’

‘And we've agreed.’

‘We have. Funeral was this morning, as soon as they got the body back from the autopsy. They do them quick here; religious thing, like everything else in this place. But the shiva goes on all week. You've probably got the details on your BlackBerry.’

‘Ah. No BlackBerry, I'm afraid.’

‘Oh, Comms will fix you up with one of those, no problem. I'll get—’

‘I mean, I don't use a BlackBerry. Never have. Keeps you on too tight a leash. Means you're listening to Washington or London or whoever, when you should be listening to the people in the room. Can't stand the things.’

‘Okay.’ Davis looked as if Maggie had admitted a heroin addiction.

‘I wouldn't carry a cellphone either if I could get away with it. Same reason.’

Davis ignored that. ‘Your hotel's just a block away. You can freshen up and the driver will take you there. Widow's name is Rachel.’

CHAPTER SIX

Jerusalem, Monday 7.27pm

The street was jammed, cars parked on both sides, their tyres spilling onto the pavements. It was a well-to-do neighbourhood, Maggie could tell that much: the trees were leafy, the cars BMWs and Mercs. Her driver was struggling to get through, despite the discreet Stars-and-Stripes pennant flying from the bonnet. It had been getting chilly in DC. Here it was still warm in the late evening; there was a sweet, sticky smell coming off the trees.

The path to the building was packed, all the way to the front door. As she squeezed through, she noticed that look again from several of the men in line, their eyes following her as she went past.

‘You are from the embassy, no? From America?’ It was a man at the door, staff or relative Maggie couldn't tell. But clearly he knew she was coming. ‘Please, inside.’

Maggie was pressed into what would ordinarily be a large room. Now it was jammed with people, like rush hour on a subway train. Her height was an advantage: she could see the crowd of heads, the male ones covered in skull caps, and at the front a bearded man she took to be a rabbi.

Yitgadal, v'Yitkadash …

The room hushed for this murmured prayer for the dead man. Then the rabbi spoke a few sentences of Hebrew, turning occasionally to a row of three people sitting on strangely low chairs. From their red eyes and moist noses, Maggie guessed they were Guttman's immediate family: widow, son and daughter. Of the three, only the son was not weeping. He stared straight ahead, his dark eyes dry.

Maggie could feel the crowd behind her. She was not quite sure what she was supposed to do. She should wait her turn to meet the family, but the room was heaving. It would take an hour to get to the front. But if she left now, it could be interpreted – and written up – as a snub. Meanwhile, she could hardly turn to strangers and strike up chitchat. This was not a party.

She smiled politely as she inched her way through. Her height and black trouser suit persuaded most of the mourners that she was some kind of VIP and they made way for her. (Wearing the suit felt strange: it had been so long since she had dressed this way.) Still, she could only move slowly.

She was making progress until she was blocked by a large bookcase. In truth the whole room seemed to be filled with books. They were broken up by the odd ceramic pot or plate, including one with a strikingly ornate blue pattern, but mainly it was books. Across each wall, and from floor to ceiling.

Her face was pressed up close enough to read the titles. Most were in Hebrew; but there was a cluster of books on American politics, including several of the neo-conservative tomes which had once dominated the New York Times bestseller lists. Terrorism: How the West Can Win. Inside the New Jihad. The Coming Clash. The Gathering Storm. She felt she had a good handle on this Mr Guttman. After all, Washington was not short of men who shared his politics. She had encountered more than one of them, at some reception or other, as Edward worked the room while she stood watching, as if from afar, even when she was right next to him. The memory had barely popped into her mind when she felt the accompanying pang. Edward.

‘Please, please, come.’ Her unofficial host had somehow reappeared and now drew Maggie forward. People were forming a line to meet the mourners. She tried to hear what those in front were saying, but she could understand none of it: Hebrew.

At last, it was Maggie's turn to shake hands with the family, nodding respectfully to each one, trying to mould her lips into the shape of pity. First, the daughter, who gave her only a fleeting moment of eye contact. She looked to be in her mid-forties, with short, dark hair interrupted by a few strands of grey; she was attractive, with a face that radiated solid practicality. Maggie guessed she was the person in charge here.

Then the son. Half-standing, half-sitting, he looked at her coldly. He was tall, and more casually dressed than she would have expected in a house of mourning, in dark jeans and a white shirt, both of which looked expensive. His hair, a full, dark head of it, was well cut, too. From the way people hovered around him, it appeared that he was successful or important in some way. Late thirties, Maggie noted; no sign of a wife.

And finally the widow. Maggie's guide bent down, so that the grieving woman could hear him. Self-consciously he spoke in English.

‘Mrs Guttman, this lady is from United States. From the White House, from the President.’

Maggie toyed with correcting him and let it go. ‘I'm so sorry for your loss,’ she said, bending almost double and extending a hand. ‘We wish you to know that you and your family are in the prayers of the American people.’

The widow looked up suddenly. Her hair was dyed black, her eyes nearly the same colour. She gripped Maggie by the wrist, so that Maggie was forced to look into those dark eyes which, still wet, focused intently.

‘You are from the President of the United States?’

‘Well—’

‘You know my husband had an important message. For the Prime Minister.’

‘That's what I understand and it's such a tragedy—’

‘No, no you don't understand. This message, he had been trying to get it to Kobi for days. He called the office; he went to the Knesset. But they would not let him anywhere near. It drove him mad!’ Her grip on Maggie's wrist tightened.

‘Please don't upset yourself—’

‘What is your name?’

‘Maggie Costello.’

‘His message was urgent, Miss Costello. A matter of life and death. Not just his life or Kobi's life, but the lives of everyone in this country, in this whole region. He had seen something, Miss Costello.’

‘Please, Mrs Guttman—’ It was the man who had introduced them, but the widow waved him away.

Maggie crouched lower. ‘You say he had seen something?’

‘Yes. A document, a letter maybe, something, I don't know for sure – but something of the greatest importance. For the last three days of his life, he did not sleep. He just said the same thing over and over. “Kobi must know of this, Kobi must know of this”.’

‘Kobi? The Prime Minister?’

‘Yes, yes. Please understand, what he had to tell Kobi still needs to be told. My husband was not a fool. He knew the risk he took. But he said nothing was more important. He had to tell him what he had seen.’

‘And what had he seen?’

‘Ima, dai kvar!’ It was the son, his voice firm, the voice of a man used to giving instructions. Mother, enough already.

‘He didn't tell me. I only know it was some document, something written. And he said, “This will change everything.” That's what he said. “This will change everything”.’

‘What will change everything?’

The son was now getting up.

‘I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. For my safety, he said.’

‘Your safety?’

‘I know my husband. He was a serious man. He would not suddenly go crazy and run and shout at the Prime Minister. If he had something to say, it must have been just as Shimon said – a matter of life and death.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Beitin, the West Bank, Tuesday, 9.32am

He wouldn't need to be here long. Just ten minutes in the office, collect the papers and leave.

Except ‘office’ was not quite the right word. The two heavy padlocks guarding the metal door testified to that. ‘Workroom’ was more like it, even ‘storehouse’. Inside, it smelled like a potting shed. The fluorescent strip lights flickered on to reveal shelves filled not with papers, files or computer discs but stiff cardboard boxes. And inside those were fragments of ancient pottery, material Ahmed Nour had excavated from this very village.

He worked this way on every dig. Set up a base as close to the site as possible, allowing the latest findings to be brought back, catalogued and stored right away. He liked to do the job daily if he could: leave even a few burnt pottery shards around for too long and they would soon vanish. Looters, the curse of archaeologists the world over.

Ahmed found his desk: modest, metal, as if it belonged to the foreman on a construction site. Not so far off, he thought to himself. We're both in the business of human homes: they build new ones, I dig up old ones.

The papers he needed for his meeting with the head of the Palestinian Authority's Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage were right there, in a neat pile. Sweet Huda, he thought to himself. His young protégée had left everything in order: the permit renewal form, seeking permission to carry on digging in Beitin, and the application for a grant, begging for the cash to do it. Huda took care of all contact with the outside world now. She left him alone with no distractions – no phone calls, no emails, no blaring radio or crackling TV – so that he could bury himself in his work. If he concentrated hard, he could shut out modernity altogether.

That's what he had done this weekend. And he would have carried on doing it all week if it hadn't been for this damned meeting. The head of antiquities was an ignoramus. With no archaeological training, he was little more than a political hack. He wore a beard, which meant that the politics in question were of the new variety: religious.

‘My preference, Dr Nour,’ he had explained to Ahmed in their first meeting, ‘is for the glorification of our Islamic heritage.’ No surprise there. The new government was half Hamas. Translation: I'll pay for anything after the seventh century; if you want to dig up anything older, you're on your own.

The irony of it was not lost on Ahmed. Once he had been a hero to the Palestinian political class. He had been a founder member of a group of scholars who, decades ago, had insisted on looking at the ground beneath their feet in a radically new way. Until then, ever since the expeditions of Edward Robinson in the nineteenth century, those taking a shovel to this landscape were looking for one thing only: the Bible. They weren't interested in Palestine or the people who had lived here for thousands of years. They were searching for the Holy Land.

They were outsiders, of course, Americans or Europeans. They would arrive at Jaffa or Jerusalem giddy with scripture, yearning to see the route Abraham trod, to gaze at the Tomb of Christ. They longed to find the vestiges of the ancient Israelites or of the early Christians. Palestinians, ancient and modern, were an irrelevance.

The new generation, Ahmed among them, was trained in biblical archaeology – what other kind was there? – but they soon developed their own ideas. In the 1960s, several of them assisted a team of Lutheran Bible scholars from Illinois as they excavated Tell Ta'anach, a mound not far from Jenin in the West Bank. The Americans dug there for several years, such was their excitement. Ta'anach was mentioned in the Bible as one of the Canaanite cities conquered by Joshua, military leader of the Israelites.

But Ahmed and his colleagues began to see something else. They returned to the site, their focus now not Biblical Ta'anach but the Palestinian village at the foot of the mound: Ti'innik. These new archaeologists wanted to learn all they could about day-to-day life in this ordinary community, which had sat on the same spot for most of the last five millennia. Every heave of the archaeologist's shovel, every push of a spade, was making a political statement: this would be a Palestinian excavation of Palestine.

That put Ahmed Nour firmly into the bosom of the burgeoning Palestinian national movement. In whispers he was told that the Palestine Liberation Organization, then still secret, banned and run from abroad, approved of his work. He was nurturing ‘national pride’ and handily proving, at a time when most Israeli leaders were still denying even the existence of a Palestinian people, that the communities of these lands had the deepest possible roots.

His reputation only increased when he led students on a dig at an abandoned refugee camp, digging up the trash, the old sardine cans and plastic bags which revealed the way of life of people just a generation gone, those who had fled their homes in 1948. And his work here at Beitin had boosted his reputation yet further.

Previous scholars had thrilled at this place as the Bet-El of the Bible, the spot where Abraham, heading south, stopped and built an altar, the place where Jacob rested his head on a pillow of stone and dreamed of the angels going up and down a ladder. But Ahmed was determined to examine not just the ruins around Beitin, but the village itself. For humble, tiny Beitin had been ruled by Hellenists, by Romans, by Byzantines, by Ottomans. It had been Christian and it had been Muslim: in the late nineteenth century, a mosque had been built on the ruins of a Byzantine church. You could still see the remains of a Hellenistic tower, a Byzantine monastery and a Crusader castle. All three. To Ahmed's mind, that was the glory of Palestine. Even in a forgotten speck like Beitin, you could see the history of the world, one layer on top of another.

That gave him an idea. He reached for one of the newer boxes, one that would contain the freshest finds from the site. He peered inside, his nose crinkling at the musty smell: human skulls from the early Bronze Age, some five thousand years ago, along with storage jars and cooking pots. He smiled, knowing he could do better, that he could go back even further. He unlocked a cupboard, to find the flint tools and animal bones that had first been found at Beitin in the 1950s and which had been traced back some five millennia before Christ. He would tell that oaf at the antiquities department about the traces of blood that had been spotted, a sure sign of ritual sacrifice, establishing that Beitin had once been the site of a Canaanite temple. Maybe it was playing the old biblical game, thought Ahmed with a pang of guilt, but he had to use whatever he'd got.

It still might have no effect. The man from Hamas would doubtless perk up at the reference to the nineteenth-century mosque and yawn at the rest. Or perhaps there was a chance he would see Beitin for what it really was, a place packed with the history of this land.

On tiptoes, stretching to put the most precious box back on the top shelf of the locked cupboard, he heard a noise. Metallic.

‘Hello? Huda?’

No reply. Probably nothing. He must have left the metal door to the workroom ajar and the wind had clicked it shut. No matter. He would seal this box and be on his way.

But then there was another sound. This time a footstep, unmistakable. Ahmed turned around to see two men coming towards him. Both were wearing black hoods which covered their faces entirely. The taller man was holding up a finger, which he theatrically placed over his lips. Hush.

‘What? What is this?’ said Ahmed, his knees buckling.

‘Just come with us,’ said the tall man, something strange in his accent. ‘Now!’ And for the first time Ahmed saw the gun, lifted and aimed straight at him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The US Consulate, Jerusalem, Tuesday, 2.14pm

‘Our information is that the body, riddled with bullets, was dumped by two hooded men in Ramallah's main square about 10.45 local time. The corpse was propped up and displayed to the crowd for about fifteen minutes, then taken away by the same two hooded men who'd brought it there.’

‘Collaborator killing?’

‘Exactly.’ The CIA station chief turned towards Maggie, offering extra tuition to the newcomer to the class. ‘This is standard punishment meted out by Palestinians to any Palestinian deemed guilty of collaborating with Israeli intelligence. Usually they're accused of tipping off Israel as to the whereabouts of wanted terrorists or have warned the Israelis when an attack's coming.’

‘What's the Israeli reaction?’ The questions were coming out of a speakerphone pulled to the centre of the polished wood table: the voice of the Secretary of State in Washington. He had left it to his deputy to manage this last stage of talks on the ground. He had wanted to keep his distance, in case of failure.

‘So far pretty muted. Some boilerplate about Palestinians needing to prove they believe in the rule of law. But that was only a low-level spokesman, when prompted in a media interview. Nothing from any of the principals. I think they want to treat this as an internal—’

‘No chance they'd break off talks over this?’

‘We don't think so, sir.’

‘Unless they're looking for an excuse.’

‘Which they're not at this stage.’ It was his deputy, raising his voice to be picked up by the phone. ‘The talks are painfully difficult right now, but no one's walking away.’

‘Still hung up on refugees?’

‘And Jerusalem. Yes.’

‘Remember, we can't let this go on forever. If we're not careful, it's one delay, then another and before you know it—’

‘—it's November.’ This from Bruce Miller, officially titled Political Counsellor to the President, unofficially his most trusted consigliere, at his side since his first run for Attorney General in Georgia more than twenty-five years earlier. They spent more time together than either man did with his wife. His presence in Jerusalem confirmed what they all knew. That this push for peace was inseparable from American domestic politics.

‘Hello, Bruce.’ Maggie detected a sudden meekness in the Secretary of State.

‘I was just about to agree with you, Mr Secretary,’ Miller began, his voice twanging between a down-home southern accent and the Nicorette gum he chewed from morning till night. He had given up cigarettes eleven years ago, aided by a variety of nicotine substitutes. The patch had gone, but not the gum: it was his new addiction.

‘I mean, they've only had sixty years to think of an answer to all this. Jesus! We can't maintain this pitch forever.’ He was leaning forward now, his wiry frame hunched so that his mouth would be closer to the telephone. His neck seemed to jut out at key moments, the two horns of hair bestriding his bald pate floating upward as he did so. Maggie tried to work out what he reminded her of. Was it a cockerel, its head popping forward and back metronomically? Or a feisty bantamweight in an illegal ring, somewhere in the backstreets of old Dublin, ready to fight dirty if he had to? He was mesmerizing to watch.

‘We keep saying—’ he gestured at a TV set in the corner, silently showing Fox News, ‘this is about to get resolved this week. If nothing happens, we're back to square one. Only trouble is, there's no such place in the Middle East. Doesn't fucking exist! You never can just stand still. Screw it up here, and you go right back. Look what happened after Camp David. Israelis were shooting Arabs in the streets and Arabs were blowing up every café in Jerusalem.

Because the folk who sat in these chairs tried to get it right and they screwed up.’

Silence, including from the speakerphone. They knew what this was: a rollicking from the top, doubtless with more to come.

‘We do have more on this collaborator killing,’ said the CIA man, a tentative attempt to alter the mood.

‘Yes?’ The Secretary of State.

‘As I said earlier, ordinarily such a minor incident wouldn't warrant any discussion at all. At the height of the last intifada, these summary executions were happening all the time, at the rate of nearly one a week. But since the parties are supposed to be on a ceasefire, even an internal infraction like this one could turn—’

‘This is background. You said you had more information.’ Miller, conveying another message from the boss: cut to the chase, there's no time to waste.

‘Just a couple of oddities. First, the dead man was in his late sixties. That's older than the usual profile, which tends to match that of the militants themselves.’

Miller raised a damning eyebrow. Militants.

‘Or rather the terrorists themselves. Second, we've had a word with our Israeli counterparts today and they tell us this man was precisely what he seemed to be, an elderly archaeologist. He had done no work for them that they knew of.’

‘So the Palestinians got the wrong guy?’

‘That's possible, Mr Secretary. And death by mistaken identity is not unheard of in this part of the world. But there are other possibilities.’

‘Such as?’

‘It could be the work of a rebel faction. Security's so tight in Israel just now that they can't pull off a terrorist outrage here—’ He left a subtle emphasis on the word ‘terrorist’, for Miller's benefit. ‘So killing one of their own, especially an innocent, well-respected Palestinian like Nour, is the next best thing. It sows dissension among the Palestinians and could provoke the Israelis into breaking off negotiations. Destabilizes the process.’

‘Sounds a long shot to me,’ said Miller, still craning forward in concentration. ‘Israel could say it shows Palestinians are lawless, can't be trusted with their own state. But Israeli public opinion would never swallow it. Break off the whole peace process just because one Arab's blown away? Never. What else?’

‘The other curiosity relates to eye-witness reports from Manara Square in Ramallah. The hooded men hardly spoke but when they did, we're told they had unusual accents.’

‘What kind of accent?’

‘I don't have that information, sir. I'm sorry.’

‘But they could be Israeli?’

‘It's a possibility.’

Miller fell back into his chair, took off his glasses and addressed the ceiling. ‘Christ! What are we saying? That this might be an undercover Israeli army operation?’

‘Well, we know Israel has always run undercover units. Codenamed Cherry and Samson; special forces dressed as Arabs. This could be their latest operation.’

Still rubbing his eyes, Miller asked: ‘Why the hell would they do that now?’

‘Again, it might be an effort to destabilize the peace talks. It's widely known that elements within the Israeli military are fiercely hostile to the compromises the Prime Minister wants to make—’

‘And if this got out, then the Palestinians would be so pissed, they'd walk away. The killing of one of their national heroes.’

‘Yes. And even if the Authority were ready to let it go, the Palestinian street wouldn't let them.’

‘Hence the accidentally-on-purpose slip of the accent.’ The words were barely audible through the chewing.

‘Its one of the lines of enquiry we're pursuing.’

‘It's like a hall of fucking mirrors here!’ Miller threw himself back in his chair. ‘We have the Israelis and the Palestinians at each other's throats. And now we've got rogue elements on both sides.’

‘The possibility at least. Which is why we're taking a close look at the Guttman killing.’

‘What's that got to do with it?’

‘We're asking some questions about the security detail that protects the Prime Minister, wondering if it's possible it was infiltrated. We don't want to rule out the scenario that the man who shot Guttman did so deliberately, following some other agenda.’

Maggie leaned forward, about to mention her strange encounter with the Guttman widow, the previous night. His message was urgent, Miss Costello. A matter of life and death. Maybe it would sound flaky to bring that up here. On the other hand—

It was too late. Miller was getting up out of his chair.

‘OK, people, I think that's enough Oliver Stone for one session. Mr Secretary, we're going to keep pushing the talks at this end as if none of this other stuff was happening. Is that OK with you?’

‘Of course.’

‘And shall I leave you to brief the President?’

‘Sure. Yes.’ Everyone in the room, including the Secretary of State seven thousand miles away, knew this was an empty courtesy: Miller and the President spoke a dozen times before breakfast, no matter how many time zones stood between them. If there was any briefing to be done he would be doing it, probably within minutes.

Miller looked up. ‘Anything else?’ He looked towards Maggie, who shook her head, and then to the consul who did the same. ‘OK.’

The room broke up, every official eager to show the man from the White House that they were hurrying to return to their duties. Maggie filed out behind Davis.

They all left too fast either to see Miller pull out his cellphone or to hear the three short, staccato words he whispered into it once he was connected to Washington: ‘Everything's on track.’

CHAPTER NINE

Jerusalem, Tuesday, 3.17pm

Maggie headed to the room Davis had set up for her, a work space for all State Department visitors. Just a desk, phone and computer. That's all she would need. She closed the door.

First, she checked her email. One from Liz, in response to a message Maggie had left on her phone, telling her of the sudden trip to Jerusalem. Subject: You go, girl!

So my serious sister, you've finally made it into my crazy world. You know you're now a character in Second Life? You know, the online thing where I waste WAY too much of my time. Seriously. You're in some Middle East peace talks simulation thing. It even looks like you: though they've given you a better arse than you deserve. Here's a link: take a look …

Maggie clicked on it, intrigued. Liz had mentioned Second Life to her a couple of times, insisting it was not just another dumb game but a virtual addition to the real world. Liz loved it, evangelizing about the way you could travel and meet people – not orcs or dragon-slayers but real people – without ever leaving your computer. It sounded horrendous to Maggie, but her curiosity was piqued. What did Liz mean, that Maggie was now a ‘character’ in it? A ‘peace talks simulation thing’ she understood: there were several of those online, where graduate students would role-play their way through the latest round of Middle East negotiations. Impressive that they already knew she was in Jerusalem. She guessed there had been a paragraph in one of the Israeli papers.

The computer eggtimer was still showing, before eventually freezing in defeat. A message popped up saying something about a security block on the consulate network. Never mind, thought Maggie. Some other time.

She went back through the inbox. Still nothing from Edward. She wondered if that would be it, if they would ever speak again, other than to arrange the removal of what was left of her stuff. Which, thanks to him, was not much.

She clicked her email shut then, out of habit, brought up the New York Times and Washington Post websites. The Times had a story about the Israel shooting on Saturday night, including a profile of the dead man. Happy for the distraction, she read through it.

Shimon Guttman first came to prominence after the Six Day War in 1967, in which he was said to have performed with military distinction. Seizing the chance to make the most of Israel's new control of the historic West Bank territories of Judea and Samaria, Guttman was among the group of activists who famously found an ingenious way to re-establish a Jewish presence in the heavily Arab city of Hebron. Disguised as tourists, they rented rooms in a Palestinian hotel, ostensibly to host a Passover dinner, or seder. Once installed, they refused to leave. In the stand-off with the Israeli authorities that followed, Guttman was especially vocal, insisting that the Jewish connection to Hebron was stronger than with anywhere else in the land of Israel. ‘This is the spot where the Oak of Abraham stands, the ancient tree where Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father, pitched his tent,’ he told reporters in 1968. ‘Here is the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are all buried. Without Hebron, we are nothing.’ Guttman and his fellow activists eventually struck a deal with the Israeli authorities, vacating the hotel and moving instead to a hill north-east of Hebron where they established the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba. That hilltop outpost has since flourished into the modern city that exists today, though speculation mounts as to its fate in the new peace accord which could be signed as soon as this week.

That would explain it, thought Maggie. Guttman was worried that the settlement he had founded was about to be surrendered to the Palestinians, along with the scores of other Jewish towns and villages Israel was bound to give up. He had been trying to persuade the Prime Minister to change his mind. And he clearly enjoyed the dramatic gesture. He had climbed a roof in Gaza a few years back and had, she now saw, seized a hotel in Hebron a generation before that. A regular performance artist, she thought.

She Googled him, looking into the handful of English language websites carrying Israeli news. They all told similar stories. Guttman had been first a war hero and then a right-wing extremist with a knack for the big stunt. One site contained a clip of video, apparently from a protest, Guttman at the front of a crowd on some dusty hilltop, all of them waving Israeli flags. Maggie guessed it was some settlement, either about to go up or come down.

He had been an imposing figure, a thick plume of grey hair blowing in the breeze, a healthy belly spilling over the top of his trousers. He filled the frame. ‘The Palestinians need to look at the history,’ he was saying. ‘Because the history says it as clear as can be: the Jews were here first. This land belongs to us. All of it.’

It all seemed pretty straightforward. He was a hawk, determined to make his last stand by appealing to the Prime Minister direct. He got too close and was gunned down. Simple.

And yet there was something about what Rachel Guttman had said, and the way she had said it, that nagged at her. She had insisted that her husband had seen something – a document, a letter – that would change everything, in the last three days of his life. Maggie looked at her wrist, where the widow had gripped her so tightly. Poor woman. To be so stricken with grief that she had started ranting at her, a total stranger. Maggie had seen other people who had lost loved ones trying, madly, to detect some higher meaning in the violent death of their husband, wife, mother or child. Claiming that the slain person had somehow foreseen their own death; that they were about to do one last great deed; that they were poised to make everything right. Maybe Rachel Guttman was suffering from that same, melancholy delusion. Maggie rubbed her wrist.

There was a knock on the door. Without waiting for an answer, Davis walked in.

‘OK, the United States has decided to deploy its secret weapon.’

‘Oh yes, what's that?’

‘You.’

Davis explained that, as feared, the Palestinian delegation to Government House were now threatening to pull out over the death of the archaeologist. They suspected the hand of Israel. ‘We need you to talk them off the ledge. Deputy Secretary wants to see you in five minutes.’

Maggie collected her papers and moved to turn off the computer. She was about to shut down the website of the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, the last one she had searched for information on Guttman, when she changed her mind, quickly checking the front page, just in case there was fresh word on the Nour case.

There was a news story, which she skim-read. It was written up as a straight collaborator killing: no mention of any possible Israeli involvement. But accompanying it was a picture of the dead Palestinian, what seemed to be a snap from a family album. The archaeologist, with his thick salt-and-pepper moustache, was smiling at the camera, holding up a glass. A disembodied arm was draped over his shoulder, as if he were posing with an unseen friend.

Maggie got up to go, following Davis, but something drew her back to the picture on the screen. She had seen something familiar, without being able to identify what it was. She looked at Nour's eyes, but they gave nothing away. What was it she had seen? For a fleeting moment, she thought she had grasped it – only for it slip back below the surface, out of reach. She would see it again, though – and much sooner than she expected.

CHAPTER TEN

Ramallah, the West Bank, Tuesday, 4.46pm

Her first surprise was at the brevity of the journey. She had climbed into the back of one of the consulate's black Land Cruisers only fifteen minutes earlier and yet now her driver, Marine Sergeant Kevin Lee, was telling her that she was crossing the Green Line, out of ‘Israel-proper’ and into the lands the country took in the Six Day War of 1967.

But it was an invisible border. There were no markings, no guards, no welcome signs. Instead, they were in what looked like another residential Jerusalem neighbourhood – one apartment building after another in that smooth, gleaming stone – when Lee gestured, ‘This is Pisgat Ze'ev. Even the people who live here don't realize this is across the Green Line.’ He turned to look at Maggie. ‘Or they don't want to realize.’

Maggie stared out of the window. No wonder everything about these negotiations was a nightmare. The plan was for Jerusalem to be divided between the two sides – ‘shared’ was the favoured US euphemism – becoming a capital for both countries. But she could now see that splitting it would be all but impossible: east and west Jerusalem were like trees which had grown so close, they had become entwined. They refused to be untangled.

‘Now you get more of a sense of it,’ Lee was saying, as the road began to bend. ‘Pisgat Ze'ev on one side,’ he said, pointing to his right. ‘And Beit Hanina on the other.’ Gesturing to the left.

She could see the difference. The Arab side of the road was a semi-wasteland: unfinished houses made of grey breeze blocks, sprouting steel rods like severed tendons; potholed, overgrown pathways, bordered by rusting oil barrels. Out of the car's other window, Pisgat Ze'ev was all straight lines and trim verges. It could have been an American suburb, cast in Biblical stone.

‘Yep, it's pretty simple,’ said Lee. ‘The infrastructure here is great. And over there it's shit.’

They drove on in silence, Maggie's eyes boring into the landscape around her. You could read a thousand briefing notes and study a hundred maps, but there was no substitute for seeing the ground with your own eyes. It was true in Belfast and in Bosnia and it was true here.

‘Hold up,’ Lee said sharply, looking ahead. ‘What have we got here?’

Two thin lines of people were standing on either side of the highway.

‘Can we stop?’ Maggie asked. ‘I want to see.’

Lee pulled off the road, the gravel crunching under the vehicle's tyres. ‘Ma'am, let me get out first. To see if it's safe to proceed.’

Ma'am. Maggie tried to guess the difference in age between herself and this Marine Sergeant Lee. He could have been no more than twenty-two: she was, theoretically anyway, old enough to be his mother.

‘OK, Miss Costello, I think it's clear.’

Maggie got out of the car, to see that the people were forming a line that stretched off the side beyond the road, trailing down the hillside and into the distance. In the other direction, on the other side of the road, the same thing. Some were holding banners, the rest were holding hands. It was a human chain, breaking only for the highway itself.

Now she understood it. They were all wearing orange, the colour of the protest movement that had sprung up to oppose the peace process. She looked at the placards. With blood and fire, Yariv will go, said one. Arrest the traitors, said another. The first had mocked up a portrait of the Prime Minister wearing a black and white keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headdress. The second had Yariv wearing the uniform of a Nazi officer, down to the letters SS on his collar.

The woman holding the keffiyeh banner saw Maggie looking. She called over: ‘You want to save Jerusalem? This is the way!’ A New York accent.

Maggie came closer.

‘We're “Arms Around Jerusalem”,’ the woman said, handing Maggie a flier. ‘We're forming a human chain around the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people. We're going to stay here until Yariv and all the other criminals are gone and our city is safe again.’

Maggie nodded.

The woman lowered her voice, as if enlisting a co-conspirator. ‘If it were down to me we would have called it “Hands Off Jerusalem”. But you don't win every battle. You should stay here a while, see what true Israelis feel about this great betrayal.’

Maggie gestured towards the car, her features crinkled into an apology. As she walked back, she could hear a song drifting up from the hillside. It was out of time, as different people in different places struggled to keep up with each other; but even so it was a haunting, beautiful melody.

As Sergeant Lee ushered her back into the car and they continued on their way, Maggie thought about what she had seen. Against opposition this committed, Yariv surely had no chance. Even if he were able to make the final push with the Palestinians, he had his own people to overcome. People who were prepared to ring an entire city, day and night, for weeks or even months.

By now they were on a smooth road with hardly any traffic on it except the odd UN 4×4 or a khaki vehicle of the Israel Defence Force, the IDF. Any other vehicles, Lee explained, belonged to settlers.

‘Where are the Palestinians?’

‘They have to get around some other way. That's why they call this a bypass road: it's to bypass them.’

Lee slowed down to join a checkpoint queue. A sign in English indicated who was allowed to approach: international organizations, medical staff, ambulances, press. Below that, a firm injunction: ‘Stop Here! Wait to be called by the soldier!’

The driver reached across for Maggie's passport, wound down the window and passed it to the guard. Maggie dipped her head in the passenger seat, to get a good look at his face. He was dark and skinny, with a few random wisps on his chin. He couldn't have been more than eighteen.

They were waved through, past an empty hulk of a building that Lee identified as the City Inn Hotel. It was pocked all over with bullet holes. ‘During the second intifada they fought here for weeks. Took the IDF ages to finally clear the Pals out.’ He turned to smile at Maggie. ‘I hear the room rate's real low now.’

Just a few minutes after they had been driving through Israeli suburbia, they were in a different country. The buildings were still made of the pale stone she had seen in Jerusalem, but here they were dustier, forlorn. The signs were in Arabic and English: Al-Rami Motors, the Al-Aqsa Islamic Bank. She saw a clutch of wicker rattan chairs on a street corner, young men loafing on them, thin cigarettes between their lips. The furniture was for sale. Walking in the road, sidestepping the potholes, were children on their way from school, labouring under oversized rucksacks. She looked away.

On every wall and pasted on the windows of abandoned stores were posters showing the faces of boys and men, the images framed by the green, white, red and black of the Palestinian national flag.

‘Martyrs,’ said Lee.

‘Suicide bombers?’

‘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, passing a coffee shop filled with women in black head-scarves. 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 glass in the windows solid. She saw a sign, thanking the government of Japan and the European Union. A ministry.

Inside, they were ushered into a wide spacious 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 glasses 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, assorted aides and officials. On the wall, a portrait of Yasser 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 statements – sometimes calls to arms, sometimes sober analyses, 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 title – there was still a chairman and a president – but 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 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. Al-Shafi was not speaking to her, she realized. He was performing. 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 glasses, 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 balls – excuse me – by 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 one – a strange one – from someone he does not recognize.’

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

‘Of course. But his assistant 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 stone – and, 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 hell 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 circumstances, were a reliable warning of serious trouble ahead.

She reached for the minibar. With a glass 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 glass, 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 muffled 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.

‘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.’

‘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.

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 assignment 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 reassure both publics that there's nothing to worry about and that the talks should go ahead.

She checked the 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?’

She had done her best with al-Shafi, urging him to keep the faith, to stick with the process. She had assured 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 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 passion for the ancient history of this land. He became what polite society refers to as a muscular archaeologist – and 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 admirers – and enemies – said he had amassed 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 hoard? 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.

The page filled up. A decade-old profile from the 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 called his ‘patriotic passion for excavating the Jewish past’.

Next came 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 button 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, 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 Institute 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

Salam had headed to school that morning more out of habit than expectation. He didn't really believe that his classes 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 classmates 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 class 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 hoarded 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 law – there was no law now – or 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 God 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 damned himself. Why had he not found those treasures? What had sent him poking around in a dark basement 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 damned 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 muffled 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 document 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 handwritten 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-sentences – some of them describing disputed strips of land not two yards wide, no bigger than a grass verge – probably 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, 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 surrendered – or 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 profoundly – and 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 secret – one 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 done – as if God himself had spoken to you.

My number is below. Please call me tonight, Kobi – for 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 young – with 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.

His eyes scanned it. ‘It doesn't sound like Guttman at all. He was not an especially religious man. A nationalist, of course. But not religious. Yet here he implies that God himself has spoken to him. And he quotes the Rosh Hashana liturgy: “Do not forsake me, do not cast me out.” I wouldn't put it as robustly as Mossek here but maybe Guttman had indeed lost his mind.’

They all looked to Yariv, waiting for his verdict. A one-word dismissal, even a gesture, and the matter would be forgotten. But he simply sucked on a sunflower seed, staring at the copy of the text Tal had handed him.

As so often, his assistant found the silence awkward and moved to fill it. ‘One curiosity: he says he has “tried” to keep this knowledge a secret. That suggests he may not have succeeded. If we decide to take this further, we will have to find out who else Guttman spoke to: friends, family members. Maybe, despite what he says about the media, some right-wing journalists. He certainly knew plenty of those. Second: the stuff about fearing for his life could backfire very badly. On us, I mean. If the right were to get hold of this text, it would fuel their conspiracy theories: a man whom we insist was killed by accident was in fear for his life. Third: this is all clearly about the peace talks. “In the light of everything you are doing,” he says. Adding that you, Prime Minister, would “tremble” if you knew what he knew. Which implies that you would realize you are making a terrible mistake and would not go ahead.’

Guttman was against the peace process – there's a big surprise,' said Mossek dryly.

Yariv raised his hand and leaned forward. ‘These are not the words of a madman. They are urgent and passionate, yes. But they are not incoherent. Nor is this a martyr's letter, despite the premonition of his own death. If it were, he would have spoken clearly and transparently about the treachery of giving up territory and so on. He would have wanted a text to rally his troops. This is too,’ he paused, sucking a tooth as he tried to find the right word, ‘enigmatic for that. No, I believe this is what it says it is: a letter from a man desperate to tell me something.

‘The task now is to ensure that no one breathes a word of the contents of this letter. Amir will say that the lab tests were inconclusive, that no words can be made out clearly. If so much as a syllable of it leaks out, I will sack both of you and replace you with your bitterest party rivals.’ Mossek and Ben-Ari drew back, astounded by this sudden show of suspicion, which both interpreted as pentup anger. ‘And Amir here will tell the press you betrayed a crucial state secret to the enemy during the peace negotiations. Whether through malice or incompetence we will let the press decide. Meanwhile, Amir, it is clear that Shimon Guttman harboured a secret for which he was prepared to risk his life. Your job is to find out what it was.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Jerusalem, Tuesday, 10.01pm

She was meant to travel nowhere except with her official driver, but there was no time for that. Besides, something told her this was a visit best paid discreetly, and it was hard to be discreet in an armour-plated Land Cruiser. So now she rattled towards Bet Hakerem in a plain white taxi.

She had moved fast. Once she had unpicked the anagram, everything else seemed to fit into place. She had stared hard at the photograph of Nour, to find whatever it was that had nagged away at her when she first saw it. She had looked into his eyes, as she had done before, but then her gaze had shifted to the background.

He was clearly standing indoors, in a home rather than an office, in front of what seemed to be a bookcase. Visible was a complex floral pattern in blue and green. When Maggie clicked on the image to make it larger, she could see that this was not wallpaper, as she had first guessed, but a design on a plate, resting on the shelf just behind Nour's shoulder.

Of course. She had seen that pattern before; indeed, she had been struck by its beauty. She had seen it just twenty-four hours earlier, when she had made a condolence call at the home of Shimon Guttman. In a house full of books, the ceramic plate had stood out. And here was Nour, standing in front of one just like it. Could it be that the two of them had discovered this pottery together, perhaps taking a piece each? Were these two men, whose politics made them sworn enemies, in fact collaborators?

She smiled to herself at the very thought. The CIA chief had declared Nour's death a typical collaborator killing: maybe he was right, he just had the wrong kind of collaboration in mind.

And then her eye had moved away from the ceramic, noticing again the disembodied arm looped over Nour's shoulder. Was it possible that this picture had been taken in front of the very bookcase Maggie had seen on Monday night, right here in Jerusalem? Did that arm embracing the Palestinian belong to none other than the fierce Israeli hawk, Shimon Guttman?

She had reached for her cellphone, about to call Davis with her discovery. Or to go up a level, to the Deputy Secretary of State who had sent her to see Khalil al-Shafi. But she paused. What exactly did she have here? A coincidence that was odd, granted, but hardly clear evidence of anything. On the other hand, the chances that there really was an Ehud Ramon toiling away in some university faculty somewhere, leaving no trace on Google, were close to zero.

The truth was, this connection between the two dead men had gripped her because of the conversation she had had in the mourning house with Rachel Guttman. So far she had said nothing about that to anyone. If challenged, she would have said that she had not taken the old lady's words seriously, that she had regarded them as the ramblings of a traumatized widow. That was at least halftrue. But Mrs Guttman's words had nagged away at her. And now this link – if that's what it was – to the dead Palestinian.

It was all too speculative to be worth briefing colleagues about, at least in this form. She didn't want them concluding that her spell in the wilderness had turned her into a conspiracy nut. Yet she couldn't quite leave it either. The solution was to make this one visit, find out what she could, then present her findings to her bosses. The CIA station chief would be the obvious destination: she should tell him what she knew and he could see what it meant. All she needed was to ask the Guttman widow a couple of questions.

That decision had been taken no more than half an hour ago. Now, the taxi pulled up on the corner of the Guttmans' street: soon she would have her answers. ‘I'll walk from here,’ she told the driver.

The vigil that had been held there since Saturday night – right-wingers and settlers, determined to keep up the pressure on the government – was smaller now. A handful of activists with candles, keeping a respectful distance from the house.

Maggie checked her watch. It was late to visit like this, unannounced, but something told her Rachel Guttman wouldn't be asleep.

She looked for a doorbell, finding a buzzer with a Hebrew scrawl on it which she took to be the family name. She pressed it quickly, to minimize the disturbance. No reply.

But the lights were on and she could hear a record playing. A melancholy, haunting melody. Mahler, Maggie reckoned. Someone was definitely home. She tried the metal knocker on the door, first lightly, then more firmly. At her second attempt, the door came open a little. It had been left ajar, just like the mourning houses Maggie remembered from Dublin, open to all-comers, day and night.

The hallway was empty, but the house felt warm. There was, Maggie felt sure, even the smell of cooking.

‘Hello? Mrs Guttman?’

No reply. Perhaps the old lady had dozed off in her chair. Maggie stepped inside hesitantly, not wanting to barge into this stranger's house. She made for the main room, which last night had been jammed with hundreds of people. It took her a second to get her bearings, but she soon found it. There, in the space between the tall, leather-bound volumes, was the ceramic plate. No mistaking it: the pattern was identical to the one in the newspaper picture of Ahmed Nour.

She tried again. ‘Hello?’ But there was no response. Maggie was confused. The house was open and gave every sign of being occupied.

She stole another glance at the plate, turned out of the main room and tried to follow the warmth and the smell. It took her down a corridor and eventually a door onto what Maggie guessed was the kitchen.

She pushed at it but it was tightly shut. She knocked on the door, almost whispering. ‘Mrs Guttman? It's Maggie Costello. We met yesterday.’

As she spoke, she turned the handle and opened the door. She peered into the dark. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, to make out the shape of a table and chairs at one end, all empty. She looked towards the sink and the kitchen counter. No one there.

Only then did her gaze fall to the floor, where she saw the outline of what seemed to be a body. Maggie crouched down to get a better look – but there was no doubt about it.

There, cold and lifeless, its hand gnarled around a small, empty bottle of pills, was the corpse of Rachel Guttman.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Baghdad, April 2003

He only had a rumour to go on. His brother-inlaw had mentioned it at the garage yesterday, not that he would dare ask him about it now. If he did, he would only demand why he was asking and before long it would get back to his wife and he would never hear the end of it.

No, he would find this out himself. He knew where the café was, just after the fruit market on Mutannabi Street. Apparently everyone had been coming here.

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