BY THE EAST WALL OF THE TEMPLE MOUNT, ACROSS THE KIDRON Valley, a narrow road leads up to the Mount of Olives. The sign says Al-Mansuriya Street. We take it.
At this hour, and with all the security in the central part of the city, there are only a handful of tourists making their way to the holy sites and even fewer going to the Mount of Olives itself.
Fifty meters up, there’s another checkpoint. A couple of Israeli soldiers emerge from behind a stack of sandbags, flag us down, check our passes, smile at Hetta and wave us through.
Hetta takes the turning a hundred and fifty meters further on, but a set of gates stops us from going further.
We park and get out.
A sign in Russian and English lets us know we’ve reached the Church of St Mary Magdalene in the Garden of Gethsemane and that it opens at 9 a.m. I try the gates. They’re padlocked.
I stare through the two-centimeter-wide gap. Beyond a grove of trees, I spot the gold domes. A warm wind carries the scent of earth and pine. Birdsong breaks the silence, and somewhere distant a mu’ezzin calls the faithful to prayer.
I haul myself to the top of the gates, turn and give Hetta my hand. Once inside, we make our way through the trees to the steps at the base of the entrance.
I am contemplating my next move when the doors open and a nun appears. We stare at each other for several moments.
Hetta walks up the steps and produces her badge.
The nun peers at it over the top of her glasses. ‘God damn it,’ she says under her breath.
All of a sudden, I’m in New Jersey.
Hetta looks like she’s been slapped in the face. ‘Who are you, ma’am?’
‘Sister Martha. And you’re trespassing.’ She stares at Hetta’s ID. ‘This is the third inspection of our church in as many days.’
‘I know, ma’am. I’m sorry. My associate and I, we were hoping we could come in and take another look around.’
‘I just said …’ Sister Martha checks herself. ‘Of course. Forgive me. You’re doing your job. My sisters are at prayer. You may enter, but he can’t.’
She gestures behind her to the singing I can now hear beyond the thick wooden doors. ‘No men allowed during the liturgy.’
Hetta turns and hands me her phone. ‘Read this. Christy’s intelligence assessment.’
She follows Sister Martha inside. The door bangs shut.
I walk into the garden and sit on a wall that looks out over the Old City. I open the attachment and scroll down.
Christy’s team has used a form of artificial intelligence – machine learning – to sift Engineer sightings over the past decade.
Some of the references come from classified assessments; others from open-source accounts: papers, blogs, websites, Twitter feeds, Facebook. They’ve been fed back into something like the pattern-mining search algorithm we used to scan the images from the cabin.
The places name-check against many of those identified by Sergeyev: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan. Christy’s geeks plotted the sightings against accounts of unrest. They’d matched his reported movements against shootings, bomb blasts, riots: all the usual trace elements of high- and low-intensity conflict.
And they discovered the opposite of what they expected.
The locations he appeared to have visited were remarkable for their absence of violence.
Which is what led Christy and her team to conclude that we were chasing a ghost. Johansson’s blowback. That the Engineer really was a myth.
And the chatter? All those snippets picked up from the jihadist community in the backwaters of the Web?
She doesn’t know.
I do, though. Cover, deliberately planted. The cabal kicking over its traces.
Only, I can’t prove it right now. I can’t prove anything.
I look up. Beyond the Dome of the Rock – the spot where Muslims believe Mohammed was taken to heaven – I can make out the Hall of the Assembly.
It’s coming up to six-thirty. In an hour, Thompson and his fellow leaders gather in preparation for the day’s agenda.
At nine, the Pope lands.
At eleven, he arrives at the venue.
At midday, he makes his speech.
Then Thompson takes to the podium.
I stare out across the Old City, then turn and look back up the Mount to its summit.
What do I see?
Through the trees, a tower.
The doors of the church open. Four or five doves perched above the entrance take flight as Hetta rushes down the steps.
‘Nothing,’ she says when she reaches me. ‘I told you. The place is clear. Just a bunch of nuns.’
Sister Martha reappears.
‘What in God’s name are you looking for?’
As Hetta draws breath to answer, her phone vibrates in my hand. I look at the screen. Graham. She takes it and walks to a part of the garden where she won’t be overheard.
Sister Martha comes and sits next to me.
‘How long have you lived here?’ I ask.
‘Fifty-three years.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Hoboken. You?’
‘No fixed abode.’
‘And right this minute?’
I manage a smile. ‘I was thinking about the priest at my father’s funeral. He spoke about Jesus coming like a thief in the night. I was twelve. I had no idea what that meant – I still don’t – but I’ve just remembered that this is the place Christ spoke those words.’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘The day and the hour unknown. Therefore, keep watch, because you know not on what day your Lord will come.’
She takes my hand in hers. ‘What’s your name?’
I tell her.
‘Do you believe in God, Joshua?’
There’s a noise behind me.
Hetta bounds around the corner of the church. ‘Josh,’ she blurts, seemingly oblivious to Sister Martha’s presence. ‘We’ve got to get back. Graham is going nuts and Cabot wants to kill us.’
I let go of Sister Martha’s hand and stare back up toward the tower.
Do I believe in God?
The very first words Gapes spoke to me.
Hetta shields her eyes against the sun. ‘What is that?’
‘It marks the spot where Christ ascended. We’re looking in the wrong direction, Hetta. With all those spooks looking over our shoulder, Duke would never have pointed you and me straight to it. He’s aimed us toward the zone, and left the rest to us. Do you have a secure line to Christy?’ I get to my feet. ‘I need a place name on the Iraq–Syria border.’
‘Something’s going to happen, isn’t it? I feel it.’ Sister Martha takes my hand in hers again. ‘Don’t you?’
The Orthodox Church compound we glimpse through another set of locked gates comprises a chapel, a convent and a hostel. Hetta and I haul ourselves over these too, and drop to the gravel. When I look up, I see a beautifully simple stone church and, behind it, four stories high, arches on each level, stark in the bright white sunlight, the tower.
We walk toward it, past the church and up a flight of steps.
I give the door a tug, expecting it to be locked. It isn’t. The hinges groan as it swings open.
We take a last look around. Nothing stirs. We head inside. The stairwell provides a glimpse of the level above. A breeze gets up and rushes past my face.
I stop.
‘What is it?’ Hetta asks.
‘He’s here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I feel it.’
‘Feel what?’
‘What I felt when I stepped onto the ladder at St John’s. Moments before I climbed into the bell chamber with Gapes. He’s here, I’m telling you.’
I step forward.
‘Josh, wait.’ She draws her .357 and indicates I should tuck in behind her.
But this doesn’t feel right. I indicate that I should go first.
She frowns, shakes her head. ‘We need to do this by the book. Call back-up.’
I agree. But the strangest instinct is telling me that I need to do the negotiation. And that there is no time to waste.
If the device is at the bottom end of the low-yield spectrum, Hetta might survive if she’s able to shelter somewhere in the shadow of the Western Wall, but her refusal to entertain this in our lightning-quick discussion makes it academic.
My fallback position is to point out that the SEALs – or whoever is tasked with taking down a nuclear-armed terrorist – will take ten minutes, maybe less, to get here, and she will need to liaise with them when they arrive.
Which means I get to go on up.
She looks like she’s about to argue, then says, ‘Here, you’d better take this,’ and hands me her .357. ‘I’ve got a back-up in the vehicle.’