The Labyrinth of Osiris (10 page)

‘What the fuck does that mean?’

‘Basically, they’re God,’ said Dewey, who was feeling amazingly clear-headed given how hammered he’d been less than an hour previously. ‘They control the whole system. They can do what they want, go where they want, look at whatever they want.’

‘Accounts? E-mails?’

‘Everything.’

‘
My
e-mails?’

Dewey nodded.

‘Christ fucking Jesus!’

‘They must have got hold of someone’s login and used that to access the SAM file,’ said Springer, sounding nerdishly impressed. ‘Then all they’ve got to do is copy it, run a password recovery program . . .’

Alan Cummins had started breathing very hard.

‘A dictionary attack, a Rainbow Table algorithm—’

Cummins slammed his fist down on the table, narrowly missing Dewey’s keyboard.

‘Shut up! Just shut up and get them out.’

‘We can’t get them out, sir,’ said Dewey, who was rather enjoying himself, like he was in a sci-fi movie or something. Playing the hero. Bruce Willis. Or, better, Steven Seagal. ‘They control the system. All we can do is shut the whole thing down.’

‘Then do it!’ yelled Cummins. ‘If the environment brigade gets hold of a fraction of the—’ He broke off, clenching and unclenching his fist.

‘Sir, to shut the system down every single employee in every single office in every single city has to logout,’ said Springer. ‘Basically the company has to stop operating.’

Cummins pulled at his hair. ‘We’ll lose millions,’ he groaned. ‘Millions.’

There were a lot of people in the office now, all of them crowded around Dewey’s desk, including the spicy security guard, who had stuck around for no obvious reason and was now standing just behind Cummins, his hand on his sidearm like some sort of half-arsed gunslinger. Everyone was silent.

‘Sir?’ asked Dewey.

Cummins was still tugging at his hair.

‘Sir?’

A few more seconds passed, then the CEO of Deepwell Gas and Petroleum let out a pained sigh and dropped his hands.

‘Do it,’ he said. ‘Close it down. All of it.’

Dewey reached for his phone. As he did so, the screen in front of him suddenly morphed from pale blue to brilliant red. There was a pause, then a flurry of white letters appeared, whirling around like leaves in a breeze before resolving themselves into five words that filled the entire screen: WELCOME TO THE NEMESIS AGENDA.

Despite himself, Dewey McCabe smiled. Whatever was going on here, it sure as hell beat laying a crap on Denise Sanders’ mouse mat.

J
ERUSALEM

The Kishle detectives worked out of a dingy suite of ground-floor rooms on the opposite side of the station to Leah Shalev’s office. They used to be up on the first floor, but a couple of years back the station had been reorganized and they’d been dumped down here, much to their collective annoyance.

The section was accessed by a low door at the back of the building, and Ben-Roi paused here to give Sarah another call. This time he got through. She was still pissed off with him for ducking out of the scan, although less so than she had been earlier and they were able to conduct a reasonably civil conversation, which made a change. The upshot was that all was well with the baby – ‘Bubu’, as they had nicknamed him or her – and another antenatal appointment had been scheduled in six weeks. He didn’t bother writing down the date and time – Sarah would remind him of them at least once a week until the appointment came round.

‘And please don’t forget about tomorrow,’ she said.

Tomorrow was Saturday, his day off, and he had promised to go over to her flat in Rehavia – what had used to be
their
flat – to decorate the baby’s room.

‘Of course I won’t forget,’ he said.

‘Somehow your “of courses” don’t fill me with confidence.’

Ben-Roi grunted, acknowledging that he was indeed an un reliable fuck-up. There was a silence, then Sarah spoke again, her voice softer suddenly, more intimate.

‘There’s lots of movement today. It feels like Bubu’s turning cartwheels.’

Ben-Roi smiled, leaning back against one of the air-conditioning units bolted to the wall beside the detective-section door.

‘The features were so clear on the scan,’ she said. ‘The nose, the eyes. I think he’s going to be very handsome. Or she’s going to be very beautiful.’

‘Takes after their mother, thank God.’

There was an amused grunt at the other end of the line. For a moment he thought she was going to say something nice. If she had, he would have said something nice back. It was a while since they’d done that. As it was, she just told him to look after himself, not to forget about the decorating and rung off. He stared down at the phone and sighed. Although he put on a tough front – a typical
sabra
, as his sister never stopped reminding him – the truth was, he missed Sarah. And not just because she was carrying his child. Sometimes he wondered if they shouldn’t give it another try. For a mad, fleeting instant he thought about buying some flowers, getting in the car and driving over to surprise her. It only lasted couple of seconds. Then, with a shake of the head as if to say ‘Don’t be so bloody ridiculous’, he slipped his phone into its holder and headed into the office.

Give Bibi Kletzmann his due. When Ben-Roi got to his desk and turned on his computer, the photographer had already downloaded pictures of the dead woman on to the system. There were several dozen of them, from various different angles, plenty of face shots, not exactly pretty but then it wasn’t a modelling competition. He chose one and copied it into a separate folder.

There were two other case-related items on his computer, sitting on the keyboard rather than cheering up the screen. One was a note from Dov Zisky giving his cell phone number – ‘Just in case you need it.’ The other was the plastic sample bag containing the library request slip he’d found in the victim’s slacks pocket back in the cathedral. Pushing aside Zisky’s note, Ben-Roi focused on the slip.

It would have been great if it had actually been filled in, since as well as the date, and the title and author of the publication they were requesting, readers were also required to provide their name. As it was, the form was blank, limiting its use as a lead. It still
was
a lead, though. Just about the only one they’d got at this stage, and Ben-Roi turned it back and forth in his hand, the voice of his mentor, old Commander Levi, echoing at the back of his head, as it always seemed to do at the start of an investigation. ‘Building a case, Arieh, is like forging a chain,’ he used to say. ‘You start with a crime and a clue, and from there you join the links, one link to the next, one clue to the next, the chain getting longer and longer until eventually it leads you to your perpetrator. Forge a good chain, and you forge a good case.’

The library slip was the first link in the chain. Ben-Roi wondered where it was going to lead.

‘Anyone any idea which library this is from?’ he asked, holding the slip up.

There were two other detectives in the room: Yoni Zelba and Shimon Lutzisch, both working the
yeshiva
student stabbing. Lutzisch had never been near a library in his life. Zelba, on the other hand, was a serious bookworm and, coming over, he took the slip from Ben-Roi.

‘National Library,’ he said without hesitation. ‘Over at Givat Ram.’

Ben-Roi nodded, took the slip back and Googled the library, getting the phone number. Once he’d got through to someone in Reader Services, he explained the situation and e-mailed over the jpeg of the dead woman, warning the man at the other end that it wasn’t a pretty sight. Two minutes later he came back with a name: Rivka Kleinberg. Jewish Israeli by the sound of it. Certainly not Armenian. Ben-Roi scribbled it down. Second link.

‘She’s a journalist,’ said the librarian, whose name was Asher Blum and who sounded distinctly shaken – not surprising, given the state of the body. ‘Used the library quite a lot. I think she works for
Ha’aretz
.’

The name didn’t ring any bells, but then Ben-Roi had always been more of a
Yedioth Ahronoth
man himself. He made another note. Third link.

‘Do you have contact details?’

The librarian was able to give him Kleinberg’s address, e-mail, home phone number and also date of birth – she had been fifty-seven. They had no record of a mobile phone – ‘Although she definitely had one. We were always having to tell her to stop using it in the reading room’ – and no details of next of kin.

‘Do you know when she was last in?’ asked Ben-Roi.

‘She was definitely here last week,’ said the man. ‘I saw her up in General Reading, on the microfilm readers. I don’t know if any of my colleagues have seen her more recently. I could ask around.’

‘If you could,’ said Ben-Roi. He doodled a moment, then: ‘Any idea what she was looking at on the readers?’

Something from the library’s newspaper archive, apparently, although what exactly the man couldn’t say. Which was a shame. Small things like that had been known to open a case right up. Ben-Roi gave him his mobile number in case he thought of anything else, thanked him and rang off. Outside in the corridor Amos Namir was standing at the water cooler. Scribbling the victim’s name and details on a separate sheet of paper, Ben-Roi waved him over and handed him the information. While Namir went to circulate it round the rest of the team, Ben-Roi put in a call to Natan Tirat, a journalist friend on
Ha’aretz
. The two of them had done their military service together – in the Golani Brigade – and had stayed in touch, developing a reciprocal arrangement whereby Ben-Roi slipped Tirat the odd story and Tirat tipped off Ben-Roi if he heard anything interesting on the grapevine, which he seemed to do at least once a week. ‘We’re just detectives with better grammar,’ Tirat used to joke.

‘Sure I know her,’ he said when Ben-Roi put the name Rivka Kleinberg to him. ‘Used to work here. Why do you ask?’

Ben-Roi hesitated. He knew Leah Shalev and Commander Gal were hoping for a bit more breathing space before the press got hold of the story. Then again, there was no question the press
would
get hold of it, and he figured it was better to give first bite to someone who was at least sensitive to the needs of a police investigation. He filled his friend in. Just the basics, enough to give him the picture.

‘It was always on the cards, I suppose,’ said Tirat when he’d finished. ‘Rivka wasn’t exactly popular.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, she was a serious investigative journalist. And I mean
serious
. Turned up a lot of stuff a lot of people didn’t want turned up. Made a whole load of enemies. Powerful enemies.’

Ben-Roi leant forward, interested. ‘Any names?’

Tirat gave a hollow laugh. ‘Where do you want me to start? Remember the Meltzer kickbacks scandal?’

How could Ben-Roi forget? It had dominated the headlines a few years back. A group of planning committee MPs had been pocketing bungs running into tens of millions of shekels from a consortium of Russian-backed construction companies. As far as he knew, the ring-leaders were still serving time in Maasiyahu.

‘She broke that?’

‘Certainly did. And the IDF shoot-to-kill story. The Hamas rape videos. The Likud funding scandal. That poisoned kiddie-food thing back in . . . when was it? . . . 2003. The list goes on. Palestinians, settlers, right-wing, left-wing, security services, politicians – she pissed off just about everyone it’s possible to piss off. To be honest I’m surprised she lasted this long.’

‘Any specific death threats?’

Again that hollow laugh. ‘Only a couple a day. Switchboard used to log them. I think the record was twenty after an expose she did on some dodgy
tzadik
over in Mea Sharim.’

Ben-Roi tapped his pen on the desk. He’d been hoping to narrow the field. From what Tirat was saying, it now seemed half of Israel and the Territories had a motive.

‘You said she used to work there.’

‘They showed her the door a couple of years back. Probably closer to three.’

‘Reason?’

‘Well, she was a nightmare to work with, for starters. Rude. Argumentative. Used to give the subs hell if they changed a single word of what she’d written. We’re talking screaming here. Which was fine so long as she was producing the goods. But towards the end of her time . . .’

‘She stopped producing the goods?’

‘It was more a case of her getting a bit . . . conspiracy-happy.’

The click of a lighter echoed down the line followed by the sound of a deep inhalation – Tirat firing up one of his appropriately named News cigarettes.

‘We’ve got this phrase in the business,’ he continued after a pause. ‘Shadow-chaser. Basically, it’s a journalist who starts seeing plots and cover-ups everywhere. A story is never just a story – there always has to be something going on behind it. Some conspiracy. Something dodgy. You obviously need a bit of that if you’re going to be any good as a journalist, and believe me, Rivka was bloody good, certainly when she was younger. But while most of us tend to start with the facts and see where they lead us, more and more Rivka was starting with the assumption she was going to uncover some earth-shattering intrigue and then scraping around for the facts to support that. She began coming up with some very weird ideas, did a couple of stories that landed us in some pretty hot legal water. I mean we all know Liebermann’s a fucking arsehole, but I can’t see even him presiding over a plot to blow up the
Haram al-Sharif.
’

From his experience of the Israeli extreme right-wing, Ben-Roi wasn’t so sure about this, but he kept the thought to himself.

‘Anyway, the powers that be decided she’d become a liability and gave her the boot. I was sorry to see her go. A lot of us were. She could be hard work, but when she was on the ball she was like a bloody Exocet. No one got to the heart of a story quite like Rivka Kleinberg. Totally fearless. Suicidally fearless, some would say.’

Ben-Roi was scribbling notes.

‘Where did she go after she left?’ he asked. ‘To another paper?’