Inside the room, Grinnall kept his hand tightly over her mouth, clutching her head to his chest with a pistol at her temple. She squirmed and rolled her eyes in terror at the sight of the gun. He hadn’t had this much fun since plugging the motel reception girl back in America. It made up for the humiliation of losing Holland’s trail and returning empty-handed.
Cutter took out the photo prints he’d shown the manager downstairs. Hope’s was taken from his business website, Arundel’s from college records. ‘You seen these men?’ he asked the girl, flashing the pictures in front of her. She didn’t understand a word of English, but his meaning was very clear. She squinted at the pictures. She’d only seen the foreigners a couple of times since they’d checked in, but she was fairly certain it was them. She nodded.
‘You fucking sure?’ Cutter demanded. On cue, Grinnall’s pistol muzzle ground harder against the side of her head. She let out a little squeal of pain and fear, then nodded frantically a second time.
‘What room?’ Cutter hissed. ‘Let her speak, Terry.’
‘She’ll scream.’
‘No, she won’t.’ Cutter slipped out a double-edged stiletto knife and pressed it lightly against her trembling throat. ‘What room, darling?’ The girl babbled something in Hebrew. Cutter grabbed her hand impatiently. ‘Use your bloody fingers, girl.’ Understanding, she held up seven trembling fingers, then eight.
‘Room 78. Move.’
‘What about her?’ Grinnall asked.
‘Let’s do her,’ Doyle said, glancing at the neatly made bed. ‘We got time.’
‘We’re not going to do her,’ Cutter said. He drew back his fist and punched the girl hard in the face, knocking her out. Grinnall chuckled. They left her sprawled on the carpet, shut the room and continued up the corridor. Reaching the door of Room 78, they paused a moment to check their weapons one last time.
Then kicked in the door with a splintering crash.
The blond-haired man who’d been reclining on the bed jerked bolt upright in panic as the four armed intruders burst into his room. He was wearing only a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts, and his legs were scrawny and shaved smooth. He had silver rings in both nipples. He scrabbled for his spectacles on the bedside table, jammed them onto his nose and gawked up in speechless horror. His younger travelling companion had just emerged from the shower, naked except for a pink bathrobe draped over his narrow shoulders. He froze, terrified, and seemed about to burst into tears.
‘Ah, fuck,’ said Cutter, lowering his gun.
Chapter Forty-Six
Ben managed to sleep a while despite the thoughts and questions that filled his head. He was awake early the following morning and met Jude downstairs for breakfast. Jude ate voraciously but Ben wasn’t hungry. He demolished a pot of coffee, then the two of them headed out of the hotel to hail a taxi. Ben showed the driver the address on Hillel Zada’s card, and the car took off. They headed west, with road signs pointing north for Ramallah and southwards towards Bethlehem.
Jerusalem is one city in two countries. Hillel’s home was in the suburbs west of the Green Line, the 1949 armistice demarcation line that marked the division not just between West and East Jerusalem, but also between Israel and Palestine, where heavily armed customs officials stopped all traffic and checked passports. Ben and Jude were waved through into a very different section of the city. Suddenly the shop signs were all in Arabic instead of Hebrew, and the Islamic influence was noticeably stronger. A gang of youths hurled stones at the passing Israeli- registered taxicab. The driver pressed on with barely a glance at them.
It was just after eight when they reached Hillel Zada’s home, a large, sprawling villa set among gardens ringed by a high wall. A tall arched entrance was closed off by wooden gates. Ben let the taxi driver go, then pressed the buzzer by the entrance. Moments later, he and Jude heard a powerful engine fire up from inside the wall. The gates swung open automatically and a Toyota Land Cruiser with oversized wheels, grilles over the headlights and clusters of spotlamps on the roof and radiator came roaring out of the entrance. From the noise, the exhaust was either some kind of high-performance add-on, or it was about to drop off. Hillel Zada’s bearded face appeared at the driver’s window. ‘I have been waiting for you,’ he said solemnly. ‘Get in.’
As they charged off at high speed in Hillel’s tank, he explained that he had all seven of his children currently visiting, with all sixteen of his grandchildren. With a full house, it was easier for them to talk elsewhere. Besides, he added enigmatically, there was something he wanted to show them.
‘Where are we going?’ Ben asked over the bellowing racket of the Land Cruiser.
‘I will take you to where it began,’ Hillel said sadly. ‘Where I first made my discovery, nearly fifty years ago.’
As Hillel went carving back through the city with very little regard for other traffic and none at all for red lights, Ben gripped the handle of the passenger door and wondered if he drove his pristine Jaguar this way too. The Israeli seemed perfectly calm, but there was a look of deep sadness in his eyes and he looked drawn, as if he’d been up for much of the night grieving for his dead acquaintances.
Finally, the Land Cruiser broke free of the outskirts of Jerusalem and hit a winding sand-dusted road that led eastwards into the desert. Conversation was almost impossible over the engine noise, so Ben leaned back in the passenger seat, cracked the window open a few inches and smoked in silence. Jude was quiet in the back seat. From time to time Ben glanced over his shoulder at him, and the content of Michaela’s letter would come flooding back into his mind, leaving him with a knotty feeling in his stomach.
The Land Cruiser wasn’t the only vehicle heading into the desert. A thin stream of cars and vans, as well as a tour bus, were venturing out in the same direction. The road carved its way onwards across an ocean of sandy rubble that stretched out to the rocky escarpments in the distance. A few lonely shrubs and small trees lined the roadside. Road signs flashed by in Arabic and English.
After almost an hour’s driving, the snaking road cleared a rise and Jude let out a whistle as a spectacular vista opened up ahead. ‘The Dead Sea,’ Hillel said over the engine noise, motioning grandly through the dusty windscreen towards the vast expanse of salt lake that stretched out ahead of them in the middle distance, before the seemingly limitless desert closed in again. Somewhere across the sands lay the Jordanian border.
‘And there,’ Hillel said, pointing up at a huge sandy mountain that towered high over the water, casting a giant shadow across the sands, ‘is Masada.’
‘What is this place?’ Jude asked in fascination, leaning forward between the front seats and craning his neck upwards as high as he could to see the top of the mountain.
‘Masada was a fortress,’ Ben told him, speaking loudly to be heard, ‘where the great Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire made its last stand, forty years after the death of Christ. Nine hundred men, women and children, who’d fled from the sack of Jerusalem and the Roman purge against their race. They held out here for three years while a massive Roman army camped at the foot of the mountain and built a siege embankment and an assault ramp to storm the fort.’
‘I’m guessing the Romans killed them all,’ Jude said, straining to make out the fortress on the very top of the rocky crag far, far above the desert.
‘They didn’t get the chance. According to the Roman historian Josephus, when the soldiers eventually breached the stronghold, all they found were mounds of dead bodies. The Jewish resistants had committed mass suicide rather than let themselves be taken. Each man slaughtered his own wife and children, then a team was elected to kill everyone remaining before finally falling on their own swords.’
‘Shit,’ Jude said, shaking his head. ‘Nine hundred people.’
‘That’s what the history books say,’ Ben said.
‘What would the Romans have done to them if they’d captured them?’
‘Probably a lot worse.’
‘Those Romans were mean mothers.’
‘You are a historian?’ Hillel asked, glancing at Ben as he drove.
‘Hardly. I studied theology with his father,’ Ben replied, motioning back at Jude. ‘I’ve read a few background texts about this place, that’s all.’
