office and so I left the report on the table, completed my leaving routine and went home. In the early hours of the following day an agent banged on my door with orders to take me back to the agency. My papers had been processed as routine, and, to the decoders’ horror, everything I had seen had been happening as I was writing it down.’
Gabriel moved from the wardrobe and slumped on to the edge of the bed as if he no longer had the energy to stand up.
‘It’s a nuclear bomb, isn’t it?’ Gabriel asked, raising his eyes off the floor to look at Stratton. ‘That’s what the madman found in England and what he is now carrying.’
There was obviously no further point in lying to Gabriel. In fact, there was every reason to tell him the truth since this operation was far from over. If Stratton had any doubts about Gabriel, they were now gone. But he did not need to confirm Gabriel’s accusation. Gabriel could see it in his cold, dark eyes.
‘He’s here,’ Gabriel said. ‘But why are you? Aren’t you afraid?’
Stratton wanted to say it was his job, but that would have sounded pathetic. It would also have been a lie. Stratton was not about to die for anyone. It was his instincts that kept him chasing the Russian, but to analyse that any further would place him in the same confused netherworld as Gabriel.
‘I don’t like you, Stratton . . . No, that’s not entirely true. It’s your kind I don’t like.You’re the same as that man carrying his bomb.You may be the antithesis, but together you are one.You create each other and feed off each other. If you didn’t exist, he wouldn’t either.
Stratton could not agree with Gabriel. He wanted to say that for every force there had to be an opposing force.The concept of good could not exist without evil. If there was a question it was who were the good guys and where did the true evil lie. Perhaps Gabriel was right and that was why Stratton’s life often felt meaningless to him.
‘How big is the bomb?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Five miles.’
Gabriel shook his head sadly. ‘My God,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not just you . . . We’re all mad.’
A heavy knock on the door startled both of them, and Stratton got to his feet. Another energetic knock and Stratton opened the door to see Abed in the hallway.
‘He’s here,’ Abed said. ‘I saw him.’
‘The Russian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’ Stratton asked with urgency as he stepped out of the room.
‘I was at the top of the road, opposite the shops, when I saw him leave the hotel. It was not until he passed me that I recognised him.’
‘When?’ Stratton asked as he headed down the hall.
‘I came straight here but it took me a while to find you.’
‘Stratton,’ Gabriel called out from the door of his room.
Stratton stopped at the corner to the stairwell and looked back to see Gabriel holding on to the doorway.
‘Number seven,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Seven,’ Gabriel repeated. ‘I don’t know what it means, but it’s important to the Russian . . . It’s today, Stratton.’
Stratton stared at him, a myriad thoughts crashing through his mind, including how to get away from Jerusalem as quickly as possible. He forced that to the back. ‘I thought viewers could only see the present. ’
‘That’s true.’
‘Then the future. If it hasn’t happened yet, it can be changed?’ It was more of a question than a statement, and his immediate actions depended largely on the answer.
‘Not mine,’ Gabriel said darkly.
Stratton stared at him a moment longer, then he ran down the stairs at the sprint, Abed close behind him.
A minute later, they were running out of the hotel entrance and up the road.
‘Was he carrying anything?’ Stratton asked.
‘A bag, a sack, over his shoulder.’
Stratton clenched his teeth and increased his pace up the hill, past the shops and towards the bend at the top.
They passed a van outside a photographic shop, daubed in various colourful slogans advertising photographic equipment. There was no one in the front of the vehicle and the interior was concealed from view by a panel behind the front seats with a mesh screen in it. The Shin Bet agent inside videoed Stratton and Abed running towards him, then he moved to the back of the van and operated another camera and recorded them heading around the bend and out of sight.
Manachem Raz sat in the cramped press office that dealt with international media, which was situated on the third floor of the government building beside the busy Ben Yehuda precinct known for its cafes and tourist boutiques. He was scrolling through data on a computer screen, the smell from the Chinese restaurant on the floor below wafting in through the window.As he scanned through the most recent applications for press passes he had to wonder why a government building had rented one of its largest rooms to a private catering business, and a Chinese one to boot, when there was a general shortage of office space. It was indicative of the country’s poor economy where every avenue to making money was being explored. He wondered how many other governments rented out public buildings to private shops. It was all the more annoying because he didn’t like Oriental cuisine.
Raz received copies of new press-pass applications at the beginning of each week which included a colour photograph of the applicant, but the next batch was not due for a couple of days and he was curious about something. He had received a report about a member of the BBC entering Ramallah late the night before, and the soldier on duty at the DCO checkpoint remembered the date on the pass showed that it had been issued that very week. The soldier could not remember the man’s name, but then it was not the checkpoint’s task to record the details of media personnel passing in and out of Ramallah.
Raz reached the end of the list and leaned back to think. Only one member of the BBC had applied for a pass in the last two weeks and that was a female assistant producer. What had prompted Raz’s curiosity was Stratton’s early arrival at the American Colony that morning, yet he had not been seen leaving. If Raz showed a picture of Stratton to the soldier, he was confident it would fit the description of the BBC journalist. The driver with him had a press pass from the Ramatan studios in Ramallah, a Palestinian media group, but it would be more difficult to identify him since there were so many of them. If the BBC journalist was Stratton, then the driver was no doubt a member of the British spy network in the West Bank. That was no surprise to Raz. He would find the Ramatan spy eventually but there was no urgency. Besides, he did not have the manpower to spare, and the spy would be replaced before he was exposed. The British were always the most difficult to work against, but then they should be.They had been doing it longer than anyone else. The foundations of their intricate spy network had been set up during the days when they owned a quarter of the world and much of it was still in place today, even in countries they no longer had any influence over, including Israel.
Raz was interested in Stratton and what he was doing here, and his gut instinct warned him something was in the wind, but that hunch did not come from Stratton, who gave little away, but from his companion. He had looked stressed and nervous during the drive from the airport and appeared half-dead from worry. Raz had authorised a costly surveillance operation against Stratton and would soon have to provide his bosses with his reasons, and a hunch was not good enough to maintain it. He planned to keep up the watch at least until he had received Stratton’s brief and then he would re-evaluate the situation.
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was ten thirty. Time to contact Mr Stratton and hear what he had to
