It started early the previous morning, in Jerusalem, when I woke up from not enough sleep with the phone ringing and my sister’s nephew shouting, “Sammy, it’s for you!”
I hate when people call me Sammy. It smacks of one of those old cheesy movies with Ze’ev Revach, like Snooker Party. But I have to put up with the kid. As well as my sister. And her husband. And their two other kids. All crammed into my shoe-box apartment because of — well, you know.
So I took the phone from the kid and I said, “Hello,” and it was Y., my boss. And Y. said, “Sam, we need you to come in.”
So I said, “Sure,” and he told me where to go. Our old headquarters was in Tel Aviv, of course, but afterwards whatever was left of the Service had to move into temporary accommodation near the Knesset building. There was talk of Y. becoming the new Head, but in the event it was K. who got the job, which just goes to show, it’s all politics, even national security. I got dressed, and shaved, and had to kick my sister’s no-good husband out of the shower before he finished all the hot water. When I stepped out of the apartment the streets were as full as always. You’d think with everything that’d happened there would be less people around, not more, but of course everyone who got out in time, or was outside of the city when it happened, all those people suddenly without homes and shops and offices and jobs — they all came to Jerusalem. So there were a lot of beggars out that morning, and people sleeping rough outside the shops, but they knew not to hassle me by now.
I was a bit surprised, to be honest, because Y. didn’t tell me to come to the Service building. He told me to go to the Prime Minister’s office. I wondered what could be so important. Maybe they needed me back in London, or Paris. I wouldn’t have minded that. Things were a bit rough in the country, as you can imagine. And I always saw myself more as an overseas operative. Well, it figures, doesn’t it? I mean, the Service isn’t supposed to operate within the country’s borders. Which, if I’d only thought about it then, should have given me a warning.
I didn’t have to push my way through security. Y. himself was waiting for me outside and he whisked me straight in through a side entrance. “What’s going on?” I asked him.
He just shook his head and said, “Follow me.”
I followed him through the corridors and over to an unmarked door and Y. pushed it open and we went in. Behind the desk sat the Prime Minister.
“Please,” the Prime Minister said. “Sit down.”
“Sir?” I said. The Prime Minister looked tired. Before him on the table was an open file. I saw my name on it.
“Prime Minister,” Y. said, “this is Sam. You remember the Sheikh Al-Nazim incident in Amsterdam — ”
Cyanide capsule. Simple and effective.
The Prime Minister nodded. “ — and the case of the Hezbollah financiers group in Kuala Lumpur — ”
An explosive device hidden inside a laptop computer. Elegant.
“ — and that potentially very embarrassing situation with M.?”
“I remember that,” the Prime Minister said.
So did I. M. was one of ours. A honey-trap specialist. Until she decided to quit and sell her story to the British tabloids. That one was delicate. It took all of my powers of persuasion to get her to change her mind.
I still get a Rosh Hashana card from her once a year. She lives in Cannes now, and she’s married, but . . . some things you never forget.
“One of my best men,” Y. said, and I smiled a sort of modest smile, and the Prime Minister said, “We want you to go into Tel Aviv.”
I said, “What?” and the smile kind of melted away from my face.
“Tel Aviv,” Y. said. “It has been decided that an experienced agent must be deployed on a penetration and surveillance mission into the — ”
“But Tel Aviv is within borders,” I said, interrupting him.
“That,” the Prime Minister said, “is open to interpretation.”
I said, “What?” again. The Prime Minister reached into a drawer and returned with two sheets of paper. “These are satellite images,” he said, “from before we lost contact. Take a look. This one’s from earlier on — ”
He pushed the nearer one towards me. I scanned it. A large, sprawling urban area, bordered by sea. A turbulence of some sort on the water, like a gathering storm.
“ — and this one from the moment just before we lost contact. Go ahead, take a look.”
It wasn’t the same picture. Or rather, it looked like a second picture had been superimposed over the previous one. There was a . . . for one thing, there was a great big mountain rising in the middle of the urban sprawl, like something that had hatched out of the ground and pushed everything away as it grew. And beyond it were . . .
I said, “What is that?”
“That’s what we’re hoping you’ll find out,” Y. said.
Beyond the mountains, barely discernible but there, were other mountains, impossibly tall, and a vast plane, and rivers, and —
If you believed the image, beyond Tel Aviv was a new, alien world.
The landscape changed the farther away I got from Jerusalem. I drove the jeep down the old Bab el-Wad road, with the remnants of shelled vehicles lying by the side of the road, still remains from the war for Jerusalem all that time ago. The air turned warmer as the altitude dropped. There was little traffic going in the same direction. These days north and south were almost independent entities, with little movement of people or cargo between them. As I drove down the lonely highway towards Tel Aviv I thought of all the times I’d followed this road before, coming in at Ben Gurion Airport, as the plane doors open and you step out into the hot Mediterranean air and the smell of Israel hits you. It has that kind of smell . . . hot and a little angry and still beautiful, like a woman who is no longer quite young but still desirable. It is a smell made of the memory of oranges, and diesel fumes, and smoke and traffic and brewed coffee and imported perfume. I used to come in to land from some foreign assignment and take the car and drive into Tel Aviv and to the Service building for a debrief. Now the Service was badly hit and I was being sent not to Paris or Rome or Islamabad but Tel Aviv, at least what was left of it.
The farther I drove into Tel Aviv the stranger the land became. The highway here was deserted. There were no cars, no people. In the back of the jeep I had an Uzi and a GPS and some clever toys the boys from R&D gave me just before I left. On my belt was my Desert Eagle .50. I was wearing Ray-Ban shades. I tried the radio but got only static. It made my head hurt and I switched it off.
I began to see the city as I drove. Before, it wasn’t quite there. You could look directly in that direction and not see anything, or rather, see the absence of something, but it was more than that: it was like your eyes couldn’t fasten onto what was there and just kept moving away, not registering. But now as I entered it I encountered no resistance.
Driving along, burned traffic signs and places where the road had been jolted out of place. On my left the foundations of a house, filled with water, and dark shapes darting in the depths. I pressed on the accelerator. Tel Aviv’s cityscape was lower. The few tall buildings remaining were broken, deformed things. I saw something huge fly high in the sky, swoop once and disappear. As I followed its path I realized the ground had risen towards the centre, and then it was as if I had passed an invisible boundary and —
I saw the mountain.
It rose in the middle of the city like an enormous, impossible island. I could not see the summit. I had the sense of something immense and alien, thought I saw snow-covered peaks in the haze, though that could have been just my imagination, the mind supplying details in an incomplete picture. It was then, while not paying attention to the road, that the wheels all failed at once and the jeep skidded and I lost control of the steering wheel. The jeep swerved and I felt myself rising in the air with it as it overturned, the impact jarring my body, once, twice, and on the third time it stopped. I was afraid it would explode. I unhooked the safety belt and half-fell half-slithered out of the seat onto the hot asphalt, dragging myself away from the jeep. My whole body was in pain.
That was when the attackers found me.
There is no more government. There is no more Prime Minister, no more Chief Rabbi, no more rabanut to marry you or a chevra kadisha to bury you, no more army reserves to call you to duty, no more taxes, no more voting, no more by-laws, no more in-laws. There is no more television. There are no more newspapers. In the ruined coffee shops the tables are empty and filmed with dust and worse. There is no more money, not as it was, not shekels, and there are no more banks. There are no more trains, no more buses, no more shared taxis. There is no longer a Jerusalem, a Haifa, there are no longer weekend holidays to Turkey, no more shopping in London, no more trips to New York. They do not exist for you. There are no more post-army-service backpacking trips to India and Thailand. No more hiking to remote Laotian villages. No more getting stoned in Phnom Penn or Bangkok. There are no more girls to chat up and woo because the girls that remain carry knives and trust no one; no more old ladies to help crossing the road with the shopping, because the old ladies will shoot you if you come too close. There are no more barbershops, no more florists, no more wedding-dress stores. There are no more afternoon walks by the Yarkon river because you are likely to get shot, raped, or captured for the copper-wire mines if you walk there. There are no more letters to arrive, and all the post boxes are quiet and empty. There are no more phones, no familiar voices on the other end, only silence.
There are no more takeaways, no more late-night ice creams, no more hot showers, no more safe drinking water, no more relaxation. There is vigilance and fear and caution and memories of what had gone before, which are best suppressed. The nights are very dark. There is no more Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Education, Minister of Security, Minister of Justice, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Internal Affairs, Minister of Energy, Minister of Tourism — none of these things exist, and you are the government and the courts and the rabbinic authority, justice and security are yours alone to make.
There is no more before, and there is no more where.
There is only now, only here.
There is only you.