The Covenant (35 page)

“Where is she?!” he shouted, shaking Jon.

Jon said nothing. He felt the vicious kick to his face and heard his teeth crack.

“Where? Where is she? Talk or die!”

With effort, Jon allowed a small smile to curl his bleeding lips.

Bahama went wild. “Where is she, where is she, where is she?!” He panted, each exclamation punctuated by another vicious blow.

In a good place, Jon prayed. In a good place, he repeated to himself until, mercifully, he lost consciousness.

Chapter Thirty-two

Hotel Intercontinental
Fast Jerusalem, Israel
Friday, May 10,2002
7:00
A.M.

J
ULIA AWOKE WITH
a feeling of heaviness behind her forehead, and the drumming of small hammers at her temples that were, she knew, her body’s familiar disciplinary actions against itself for three or four gin-and-tonics too many. Still, she had no regrets. There had been an excellent reason for every single one of them.

The first was for being left standing outside the prime minister’s office after the press conference, searching in vain for her driver, not to mention her erstwhile boyfriend, the Polish charmer, who had disappeared like a genie in a bottle. The second was for having to listen to Jack Duggan’s threats all day Thursday if she failed to get hold of the second video in time for the evening news. Drinks three and—maybe—four had to do with the fact that Ismael Abadi was not answering his cell phone, and had disappeared with the staff car and presumably the videotape as well. He was nowhere; beamed up whole by aliens, she thought irritably. Without him, she reluctantly admitted to herself, she was just one more clueless blond Brit with a microphone in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. And to top it all off, the bureau was holding her responsible for all of it. As if!

She groped her way into the bathroom, surveying the evening’s damage in the mirror. God.

She splashed cold water on her mascara-streaked cheeks and wiped off the lipstick mustache. With unsteady hands, she tore a brush through her
hair. At least that was all right. That and her eyes, those blue eyes (although contact lenses to deepen the color would be a worthy investment, she often thought).

Lovely eyes, she contradicted herself defiantly. Golden hair.

Screw Milos.

She tossed her head and went back to find her cell phone, once again dialing his number. The fact that he had been filming Ismael, and the fact that both of them had very conveniently disappeared at the same time, left her with questions she wanted answered… No one picked up. Then she tried Ismael’s number. It rang and rang and rang.

Listless, she flicked on the television, flipping through the channels. She stopped, stunned. There it was, on a two-bit local station, the Hebrew-language channel two news: her video! BCN’s exclusive! Dr. Margulies and the child, and the gun-toting Hamas militant spouting belligerent Islamic rhetoric, all accompanied by a voice-over in Hebrew!

Her video! Her network exclusive!

No wonder Ismael was nowhere to be found. That little rat…!

She flipped to the other stations. CNN was broadcasting. Sky was broadcasting. BBC was broadcasting. Only BCN had nothing.

She stood there in her underwear, livid, confused, and worst of all, helpless. All day yesterday, she had been expecting Ismael to deliver the tape to her at any moment. That, at least, had been the agreement between them as they discussed it in the car on the way to the press conference. She’d allowed herself to be persuaded by him that to go back personally to the sheik’s would be a waste of time and an unnecessary danger. He was better off, he’d told her, handling it alone. At the time, she’d been secretly delighted. Who needed another bumpy ride into the wilds of the terrorist-infested countryside? Besides, she’d calculated it would give her extra time, time she’d planned to spend with Milos… She watched the video, furious. That smooth-talking Islamic rat had stabbed her in the back—and after she’d gone out of her way to be so understanding, so sympathetic! Her phone, she saw, had sixteen messages. She flipped through them. All of them were from Jack Duggan, with the exception of one or two from Sean Morrison. She’d be back on the next plane to Heathrow. No one would help her with her bags. And this would be her last foreign assignment, if they didn’t fire her altogether.

What had she done wrong? What? she asked herself despondently, when suddenly the answer dawned on her, a bright neon light flashing in her consciousness with a one-word revelation: Milos. Outside of Duggan and Morrison, he was the only other person besides herself who knew about Ismael’s involvement in acquiring the first tape, and the coming delivery of the second. And now the tape—
her
tape—was being whored around, common property of practically everyone except her own network.

Could Milos have tipped someone off, even unwittingly? And what could have gone wrong with Ismael? Had he been bribed? Threatened? And why would these men she liked and trusted do this? To her?! When she’d been so professional, so kind, so… stupid, she thought, her hands shaking with fury as she dialed Milos’s bureau number. Someone answered in Polish. “Can I speak to Milos Jankowski, please? No. I can’t understand you. Oh bloody hell, just put him on, will you?” she screamed. “What did you call me, you piece of Eastern Eurotrash!” she said hotly, before slamming down the phone. They said he didn’t work there. Had they misunderstood? Or had she?

There was no point in trying to call. She’d have to physically track Milos down, then find Ismael. Worse came to worse, she thought with a touch of desperation, she could always get Jack to find another fixer and make her way back out to the sheik’s house alone. What if she got an exclusive interview with the sheik? Or maybe… her heart began to pound… or maybe an exclusive interview with the Jewish doctor…

The brilliance of the ideas, the possibilities for a triumphant comeback, took her breath away. She considered the risks. Well, BCN was known to be an advocate for Palestinians… But some of these Palestinian types, however just their cause and however much they’d suffered, hadn’t actually seemed all that sympathetic. But there was no time to think about it, or go wobbly, she scolded herself, putting on her makeup, giving particular care to her eyeliner and shadow. You’ve gotten yourself into this mess, dearie, and you’ll just have to do whatever you can to climb back out, however far up and however slippery-steep the slope. She pulled on the white suit that had just come back from the cleaners and the dark, sensual emerald blouse. She put on her sunglasses and a green velvet hairband. It looked lush against her light hair, she thought with satisfaction. There was no point in even
attempting to get men to behave and cooperate if you looked like hell.

She caught a taxi and slammed the car door shut with urgency, telling the driver: “Center of town,” while she considered where, exactly, she was planning to go. What was the name of Milos’s fleabag hotel? “Hotel Judah, on King George Street,” she told the driver.

The best scenario was to get her fixer back. She had a hunch that if she found Milos, she’d find Ismael. Anyway, it was worth a try.

Hotel Judah was more like a hotel where you rented rooms by the hour, not the day, she noted, glancing distastefully at the grimy windows, the half-torn curtains, the broken Venetian blinds hanging at a forty-five-degree angle. And there was such a nice little hotel right nearby… Why did he have to pick this one? She took out her press card and showed it to the security guard. Unimpressed, he motioned for her to open her purse, then passed a metal detector over her body with more thoroughness, she thought, than was strictly necessary.

“Moron,” she said under her breath as she took the elevator up to Milos’s room. Arabs, Jews. Palestinians, Israelis. No wonder the Middle East was a sewer. They were all brain-dead, she thought. Thank God for London!

Not surprisingly, there was no answer to her insistent knock. Livid, she returned to the lobby. “Pardon me, but can you tell me where I might find one of your guests, a Milos Jankowski?” she asked the reception clerk, a heavy Russian bleached-blonde with a bad attitude.

“Not detective agency. Hotel. You leave message.” The woman shrugged, concentrating on holding a glass of hot tea by her fingertips. She placed a cube of sugar on her pink tongue.

“Well, thanks so much. I don’t think I could have managed to come up with that brilliant idea all by myself,” she retorted in clipped, icy syllables, followed by a poisonous smile. “If I’d wanted to leave a message, I’d have called,” she said.

The woman looked up from her tea unsympathetically and shrugged. “English, not good.”

“Well then, can you at least tell me if he’s still registered? Or if anyone saw him come back last night? Or if he ate breakfast here this morning?”

The clerk sucked the tea through the sugar cube, then licked her forefinger and turned the page of a local Russian-language paper, ignoring her.

”Well, thanks for nothing!” Julia shouted, slamming her hand on the counter. She pushed the revolving door into the startled faces of two Nigerian Christian tourists, who had no choice but to hurry through.

Out in the morning heat, she felt the Middle Eastern sun bake the top of her head like the worst setting on a two-thousand-watt hair dryer. Her temples pounded, and her cell phone rang and rang. Finally, she picked it up. “Look, Jack, I’m doing my best. No, I haven’t heard from Ismael. I was about to ask you the same thing. After all, you know him better than I do. But there must be another Palestinian fixer to take his place. There is? When and where is he picking me up?”

She took out a pen and wrote it down. “David’s Harp, King David Street? At one? That’s four hours from now! All right, all right. Jack?” She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry about the tape. I honestly don’t know what went wrong.” Her face turned a bright red as she listened to the voice of the bureau chief. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Jack. I didn’t tell Milos anything.” She paused, her face flaming. “And I don’t agree that I think with my vagina.” She hung up the phone.

Everyone knew, of course.

She walked slowly down the street. They’d all be sorry! She was going back into the lion’s den, and they could all eat her dust. Maybe she’d even get Duggan fired? Or get a better-paying job at CNN… And maybe—why not?—she’d even wrangle another exclusive with that settler woman! See her reaction to the second tape. After all, the baby was fine, wasn’t it? No harm had really been done. She shifted uncomfortably. No, better not, she thought, remembering the old woman. That bridge was burned. Well then, maybe she’d find the mother of the Palestinian in the headband with the gun, find out something about his upbringing, his hardships… Kind of woman-to-woman…

She had four hours to kill. She turned, heading aimlessly along King George Street. Just ahead she saw Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue with its pillars and stained glass. There was a bus stop crowded with people. A woman with a baby carriage, an old man wearing a light gray fedora, two teenagers giggling on cell phones, a female soldier with a heavy backpack. Maybe she’d just interview them, random Israelis in the center of a city where people blew themselves up. It suddenly occurred to her that their simple act of waiting for a bus might be considered by some an act of courage and defiance.

She turned away, surprised at the thought. At herself. How must it be to live in a city where your steps were dogged by armed terrorists whose only job in life was to find unarmed civilians and cause maximum slaughter? The question made her queasy and she looked for a distraction.

She spied a little bookstore called Stein’s with boxes of dusty used books on the pavement in all languages. That would be interesting, she thought. To see what kinds of books people were reading. She knelt, rifling through them. A few novels by Steinbeck. A graying book of 1950s etiquette. A wrinkled text of German grammar. The journals of Anai’s Nin. Now, this was interesting, she thought, picking up a book called
Perfumes and Cosmetics in the Ancient World.
It looked fairly new too. She stood up and began flipping through the pages. They fanned her face, which suddenly felt strangely cold in the morning sun.

For no reason, she suddenly looked up and into the glass of the storefront. A dark shadow passed behind her, filling her with inexplicable fear. She thought: I should turn around and see who it is, that dark figure, so dark in the morning sun.

The force of the explosion was a noise she had never heard before, a sound that was a personal attack, a statement of purpose both obscene and emphatic, whose meaning was unmistakable. And then there was a strange and eerie silence. Time was suspended, removed from the context of measurable units, each second an eternity. She watched, mesmerized, as the glass of the storefront shattered and flew out toward her, like something in a cartoon. She watched, fascinated, never even attempting to cover her face with her hands. Everything was suddenly silent, slow motion, dreamlike. One of those old, voiceless films.