Stewart, after they had tracked down Goliath via the Urim telecommunications monitoring unit, the same unit where Sarit had served.
The unit functioned like a well-oiled machine. Anything that was flagged by the system as important was then sent for human analysis to ‘Unit 8200’, the Signals Intelligence centre in Herzliya. Any intercepts that were found to be encrypted were also sent there. From there, the messages were deciphered or simply analysed for relevant content and disseminated to the appropriate department or organization, such as the Mossad – based in the same building – or military intelligence.
In this case, the key word that they had picked up on was the name ‘Joel Hirsch’ that Audrey Milne had given them. This had given the monitors at Urim both the number of Goliath’s cell phone and the means to track him in the future.
But Sarit’s initial instructions were to proceed to the hospital and find out what was going on on the ground. When she arrived, she saw several police cars, and police milling about, along with dozens of onlookers both outside the building and in the reception area.
‘What happened?’ she asked a nurse in Arabic.
‘A nurse was killed.’
‘How?’ She made sure to sound surprised.
‘By a madman. A big man. He ran away.’
‘How did he kill her?’
‘With his bare hands. He broke her neck.’
The nurse seemed to be enjoying herself as she told the story. But at the back of Sarit’s mind, a question was nagging away: had he got the sample of Joel’s clothes? She went to the reception desk.
‘I’m here to find out about a patient called Joel Hirsch.’
The receptionist looked mildly alarmed.
‘Are you related to him?’
She had to think carefully. If she said yes and it didn’t check out, she’d have some explaining to do. She knew why he had been brought in and she understood the panic. She decided to use it to her advantage.
‘No. I’m a journalist. I heard that he was ill. I was just wondering if it was contagious?’
‘We have no evidence to suggest he was contagious.’
The receptionist’s tone was defensive, and her left hand looked like it was itching to reach for the intercom.
‘ Was contagious?’
‘He died last night.’
‘From what?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t know that yet. There’ll have to be a post-mortem.’
‘Yes, but I mean it was from the illness, right? He wasn’t killed or anything?’
The receptionist looked puzzled.
‘Why do you ask?’
Sarit knew that there was no backing down now.
‘Well, I just heard about a nurse being killed. I was wondering if there’s any connection.’
‘I’ll have to refer you to my superiors,’ said the receptionist, reaching for the intercom. ‘What did you say your name was?’
Sarit turned sharply on her heel and left.
Chapter 21
‘I still don’t like it,’ said Daniel, feeling self-conscious as they walked into Heathrow Airport from the car park.
‘Would you prefer that we just sat around doing nothing?’
‘I can’t help thinking I should be trying to clear my name instead of running off in pursuit of academic glory.’
‘And how do you propose to do that? Do you have the investigative resources of a police force? Their authority to arrest people? Access to a forensic lab perhaps? A computer to co-ordinate all the information?’
Daniel sighed. ‘No, but I can try and find out what Harrison was talking about… about the plague and the fiery snakes and all that.’
‘And how are you going to find out? Are you planning on consulting a medium?’
He looked at her in shock. She was being surprisingly cold and heartless considering that it was her uncle who was dead – the uncle with whom she had spent so many summers as a child and later as a teenager. But he sensed that she was using aggression to keep her grief at bay.
‘If I leave now I’m breaching my bail conditions. That’ll make me a more credible suspect in their eyes.’
Gabrielle was shaking her head.
‘I don’t think it’ll make a difference one way or the other.’
‘What if they stop me when I try and pass through to airside?’ he asked nervously.
‘You think they’ve got a list of everyone who is out on bail?’
‘In this day and age? It wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘Well, you can quit worrying. They may have a list of people who have jumped bail or people who have outstanding warrants against them. But they wouldn’t have a list of everyone on bail. If they did that, they wouldn’t have needed to hold on to your passport.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I am right. Now stop worrying. Let’s check in and get airside. Then we can see if we can track down a copy of Uncle Harrison’s paper. If he sent it to an American journal, someone must know about it.’
What Daniel didn’t realize was that now that he had switched on his mobile phone, it was transmitting his location again. That meant that someone thousands of miles away was tracking him.
Chapter 22
The curator was sweating, but it wasn’t just from the heat. It wasn’t such a warm day and the air conditioning was on. It was something on the inside and he felt like he was going down with flu. And it had started soon after that visit from Gabrielle Gusack.
It must be swine flu. Damn!
He decided to check the symptoms online. Fever, sweating, headache, aching muscles, limb and joint pain, tiredness. On the other hand there was no diarrhoea, no sore throat, no runny nose and no sneezing. And there was something else. He was itching all over his torso, like he had measles or even chickenpox. But he had had both of those as a child.
He opened his shirt and looked at his torso only to be confronted by a frightening sight. His body was covered in red marks – not streaks but more like the elongated letter S or several such letters strung together. He touched one and his mind shrieked with pain, like he was burning. But now he realized that with this fever, his whole body felt like it was burning. The touch only made it worse.
A wave of fear swept over him. His mind panicked as he wondered what it could be. He had come into contact with people from a foreign country where hygiene standards are not so high and now he was going down with something that produced these S-shaped marks and a fiery pain on his flesh.
He felt his legs going weak.
Is that just fear or the disease itself?
Whatever it was, he knew that he had to act quickly. He leaned over to grab the phone and called 999.
‘Emergency services, which service do you require?’
‘Ambulance,’ he rasped as he felt the heat rise up in his stomach. He wanted to say more, but he felt his
