counterpart in a conference room in Tel Aviv. The caption read: ‘iran states it will see western aggression towards any islamic country as “an act of war”
… un observers report “substantial activity” on the libya-egypt border…’
Stratton glanced at the time in the top-left corner of the screen. 08.37. Which meant 10.37 in Jerusalem.
Twenty-three minutes to go.
He remained seated. Still. His pale face was bathed in the light of the television and the laptop. His eyes were darting between the two and his lips were moving constantly. But they made no sound.
Miss Leibovitz felt like she needed eyes in the back of her head. The entrance to the Western Wall plaza was crowded and although there were three other teachers as well as her to look after the girls, it was difficult to keep tabs on them. They were swarming in a rather disorganised way around the security gates, chattering happily, clearly excited and totally oblivious to the stern-faced troops on the other side of the body scanners.
‘Girls… girls! ’ Even though her voice was raised, it had little effect on her charges. But then she saw something that made her raise her voice even louder. ‘Clara… excuse me, Clara! What do you think you’re doing?’
If there was one thing Miss Leibovitz couldn’t stand, it was inconsiderate behaviour from her girls. She was looking at such behaviour right now. Little Clara, normally such a well-behaved thing, was so excited that she had barged right in front of a pregnant lady who was just approaching the security gates.
‘Clara, please be more considerate to the people around you,’ the teacher snapped. The child hung her head, shamefaced. And the pregnant woman stopped for a moment. She was wearing a headscarf and a shawl round her shoulders and she looked rather taken aback.
Her eyes flickered towards the armed guards on the other side of the gate.
She looked at Miss Leibovitz, and at Clara.
And then she too cast her eyes to the floor and walked through the body scanner. It made no sound and the guards didn’t give her a second look.
‘Now then, girls,’ Miss Leibovitz called. ‘Form an orderly queue, please. I want you to be a good example of your school, and I really don’t want to have to speak sharply to anybody else, today of all days
…’
The plaza was filling up.
There was a buzz about the place, a sense of celebration. The Israeli flag flew from a pole at the back of the square. Little groups of friends and family had gathered here and already the crowd of worshippers by the wall itself was three people deep — the men segregated to the left, the women to the right. A military aircraft flew overhead; seconds later an enormous bang resounded across the skies as it broke the speed barrier. Most of those assembled looked up; but the sight and noise of the aircraft did nothing to spoil the atmosphere. It was Hanukkah, after all.
The defiant party spirit extended to every corner of the plaza and even a little way along the Western Wall tunnel. The further north you went along the tunnel, however, the less populated it became. About 200 metres down and on the left was a little anteroom. This was occupied by a small group of people, huddled by the doorway so that they could see if anybody approached.
They were eight in number. Three young men in traditional dress, one woman in a shawl and headscarf, her belly swollen. These four oozed anxiety. The men were sweating; the woman’s hands were trembling. One of the four remaining young men by their side had stubble, a black and white skullcap, baggy jeans, earphones round his neck and a mobile in his hand; and three others were similarly dressed, brandishing phones and appearing a lot cooler than their companions.
The stubble-faced man looked around. Then, from the large pockets of his hooded top, he brought out a clear freezer bag, sealed at the top and with a length of fishing line attached to it. The bag was filled with one-, two- and five-shekel coins. Some people used the word shrapnel to describe loose change like this.
They didn’t know how accurate they were.
There were eleven more such bags in his top. He divided the whole lot between the three men and one woman — four bags each. The men slipped the bags between the buttons of their shirts and into the pouches they were wearing beneath. For the woman it was different. Her undergarments were not so easy to access, so she merely placed the coins into her shoulder bag. It didn’t matter that they were not close to the explosives. She had more taped to her belly than the others. The coins would easily do their work on the crowd, while the plastic explosive took care of her, her unborn child and of course the wall.
When the improvised shrapnel had been dealt with, the four young men removed their synchronised watches and handed them over to the others.
‘The detonators?’ the woman asked in Arabic when the watches were all fastened.
The man with the stubble nodded and unplugged his phone. He handed it to the woman, then detached the lead from the earphones, unthreaded it from under his top and handed it over. The woman plugged the lead back into the phone and pulled the earbuds from the other end of the lead to reveal two wire probes. These she inserted into a section of the plastic explosive that was just peeping from below her right sleeve. As she did this, the remaining phones were handed over to the three men — each device with a lead ending in two probes that they pushed into their C4 body casings.
The other four men stood back warily. ‘You don’t need to do anything,’ said the guy with the stubble. ‘We’ll call the numbers at eleven.’
The bombers looked at each other, then back at their point men, who were edging away now.
‘
The stubble-face man replied in kind, but he did not sound enthusiastic. Ten seconds later he was out of sight of the bombers and so were his companions.
The four of them were on their own now. The pregnant woman nervously checked her watch. 10.40 exactly.
Twenty minutes to go.
Twenty minutes to paradise.
Twenty minutes until they changed the world forever.
The bombers whispered a quiet prayer and, after one last, long look at each other, left the anteroom, split up and walked slowly, unassumingly to their positions.
Luke sprinted across the main road, causing the traffic to brake and swerve as he burned towards the Dung Gate. He passed an armed IDF man at the entrance to the gate. As he ran past, the guy shouted something at him in Hebrew. Luke didn’t stop. He could see the security gates to the Western Wall plaza fifty metres ahead. He crossed that distance in seconds but was brought to a halt by a line of men and a line of women, queuing to go in.
Somewhere nearby a bell tolled. Three strikes. 10.45 hrs. Luke was still brandishing the ceramic knife, the black handle in his right hand, the white blade pressed up against the inside of his arm. Looking behind him, he saw the IDF man making chase. He cursed under his breath and quickly slipped the blade into his trousers, covering the handle of the knife with his T-shirt.
The soldier was covering the ground quickly. Thirty metres between him and Luke. Closing.
Luke sidestepped, then barged along the length of the queue to the front. A father and his young son were the next to go through the body scanner, but Luke pushed in front of them. He heard shouts from behind, harsh instructions in Hebrew, and it didn’t take much intuition to realise it was his pursuer. As he stepped through the security gate, he almost winced, expecting the alarm to go off; but it didn’t, and a few seconds later he was running down towards the plaza.
He stopped at its edge, his heart sinking. The square was five times as crowded as it had been the night before. Scanning the crowd, he estimated that there had to be a couple of hundred Hassidim here, all dressed in the same way as the bombers; and a similar number of women were crowding round the female section of the wall.
He froze with indecision. Try to find his targets here? It was like looking for a needle in a fucking
