The Last Testament

‘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 (#u08150d5a-4cd8-5f64-be55-b99da7515ae9)

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?’