Luke felt a wild surge of relief. Stratton’s right hand was here, just ten metres from his position. What was she doing with her sniper rifle at the ready? Preparing to take out a dignitary? Maybe the Israeli Prime Minister was to come to the wall for the first day of the Hanukkah celebrations? Or maybe she was there to cause a diversion while the day’s real business got underway? But Maya Bloom wasn’t going to kill anyone else today. He fucking had her.
He held his breath and kept the Sig pointing in her direction, one finger lightly on the trigger. Five metres. He fought the temptation to plug her there and then. This was the bitch who’d killed Chet. And his boy.
But he also wanted her to talk.
He was no more than three metres from her position when it all started to go to shit. It was the fault of the fucking gulls. They’d remained undisturbed as he silently approached, but suddenly his movement disturbed them and they flew off the wall together, squawking as they went. Maya Bloom reacted instantly. She spun round on to her back and, in the same movement, pulled a small, suppressed snubnose from a shoulder holster and raised it towards Luke’s body.
If he’d acted a nanosecond slower, he’d have been fucked. As it was, he just had time to lurch forward and stamp his left foot on the woman’s wrist as she discharged the weapon. The round flew harmlessly to the other side of the roof, while Luke violently ground her wrist against the hard pitch. Full of the urge to hurt her, he allowed his body to fall with its full weight so that his right knee dug with fierce momentum against her chest. He felt the softness of her breasts beneath his shin; more than that he felt her ribcage sink a good couple of inches.
Maya Bloom started to cough and gasp, the air clearly knocked from her lungs. Luke didn’t let up. He nudged the ribcage down again to stop her breathing, then smashed the barrel of his handgun hard against her right cheek. Once. Twice. Three times. He felt something crack, and a spray of blood and mucus spattered from her nose.
Only then did he speak.
‘OK, honey,’ he said. ‘This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to tell me exactly what that cunt Stratton’s got planned. You’ve got ten seconds. Fuck me about and the first round will go in your bladder. I’ll only finish you off when you beg me.’
The woman’s breathing was strained and noisy. She still managed to give him a look of absolute hatred. Luke shunted his weight on to her ribcage again. Maya strained and spluttered once more as he held the gun directly to her forehead.
‘Five seconds.’
‘ I don’t know. ’ Her voice was barely there.
‘Not good enough, honey.’ He hit the weapon against the same side of her face again.
Maya Bloom’s sudden movement came as a total surprise. Luke felt a deadening thump in the small of his back as she raised her right knee and dug it viciously into his spine. Now it was his turn to have the wind knocked from him. With unexpected strength, and in the same movement, she sat up and hurled him away. Luke scuttled hard on to his back two metres from where she was now sitting. He felt the flesh on his back scraping, but more worryingly he saw her retrieve the snubnose from the ground where it had fallen from her hand.
Luke made to discharge the Sig almost on autopilot. Nothing. He hurled the handgun in her direction and it hit her wrist just as she fired the snubnose. There was a dull thud, but the round flew harmlessly a couple of feet to Luke’s left. He dived towards her, knocking her head back down on to the ground and wrestling the gun from her fist. Jumping back, he aimed the suppressed weapon at its owner.
‘Two seconds,’ he said.
Maya Bloom was a mess. Her nose gushed blood and the side of her face was bruised and swollen. Neither injury looked like it bothered her a bit. Her eyes flashed.
‘ What’s he planning? ’ Luke pressed as he pushed himself back to his feet.
‘You stupid squaddie, you’ve got it all wrong… ’
‘Listen to me, you bitch. You think I’m not going to kill you? I want to kill you. Does the name Chet Freeman mean anything?’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘Friend of mine,’ Luke said.
‘You’re going to fuck everything up…’ She painfully, defiantly started to stand.
He lunged forward and, with brutal force, brought his knee up into her stomach. She doubled over and Luke slammed his gun down on the back of her head with all the strength he had.
The woman collapsed. A limp, silent heap on the floor.
Luke stood there for a moment, sweat pouring from his body, breathing heavily. A number of gulls landed back on the perimeter walls.
Bending down, he put two fingers to her jugular. A faint pulse. He knew how hard he’d knocked her. She wasn’t waking up any time soon.
Time check: 10.36 hrs. Twenty-four minutes to go. No time to get information out of her. Too dangerous to risk her waking up and becoming active again. He looked her up and down. He bent down and started to remove the laces from her boots. Rolling her on to her front, he yanked her arms behind her back and tied her wrists together, binding one of the laces several times round and finishing it off with a sturdy sledge knot — impossible to untie. With the other lace he bound her legs together. Tied up like that, the only way she was getting off the roof was by jumping.
With Maya Bloom immobilised, Luke turned his attention to her weaponry. The sniper rifle was still lying in its position. To its right was a black rucksack. Luke emptied the contents on to the roof. There were rounds for the snubnose and the sniper rifle; a set of binoculars; and a knife. Its handle was black, its blade white. Luke picked it up. It was light.
Ceramic. Which meant no metal.
He looked over his shoulder at the woman as she lay there out cold. Why would she have a ceramic knife unless she intended to pass through metal detectors with it? Luke felt a brief, grudging measure of professional respect. She knew her trade.
Suddenly he became aware of something from the corner of his eye. He looked over the edge of the rooftop, back towards the Dung Gate. A white van had pulled up on the side of the road nearest the building. Even from this distance Luke could tell it wasn’t a tourist bus. Nor did it have the yellow and white paintwork of a shared taxi. He got down on all fours and took Maya Bloom’s earlier position at the sniper rifle, closing his left eye and examining the scene through the scope with his right.
The scope was powerful, with fine, calibrated cross hairs. Luke moved the sights so they were focused on the palm trees by the gate. He was looking for movement of the leaves, anything that would tell him which direction the wind was blowing. The rifle might not have been zeroed in for him, but he could increase the accuracy of his shots, if it came to that, by taking account of the conditions.
No movement. The wind was still. He redirected the rifle to the white van.
His heart was thumping. What if he did see suspicious individuals? He had no way of making a positive ID. No way of knowing whether he was shooting terrorists or innocents.
A minute passed.
Two.
No movement from the white van. That in itself was suspicious.
A second vehicle approached. A bus. It passed behind the white van before parking up immediately adjacent to it. Luke trained his scope on the side of this second vehicle. He saw Hebrew lettering along the side, and then, underneath, in English, ‘scheiber elementary school’.
‘Shit,’ he muttered.
There was another thirty-second pause before anything happened.
The side door of the van slid open. Luke concentrated on the interior of the vehicle. He could see movement, but there was insufficient light in there for it to be distinct. On the periphery of his vision, he could see the front passenger door of the school bus opening and was aware of a figure stepping out.
Back to the van. Two men climbed out. They were wearing traditional Hassidic garments and, once they had emerged, they stepped back from the vehicle to allow two more figures to exit. One of these was a man. He was dressed like the other two; the second figure, however, was female. She wore a black headscarf and rather dowdy shawl. But the most noticeable thing about her was her swollen belly. She looked heavily pregnant and waddled awkwardly.
As soon as she was clear of the van, a shadowy figure closed the side door from the inside. The van pulled out into the road and drove away.
Every instinct Luke had told him that these were his people. Every ounce of experience screamed this at him. They’d arrived when Maya Bloom was keeping stag and minutes before the atrocity was planned to kick off. If she was there to cause a diversion, she needed to know they’d arrived. They’d stayed in the vehicle for longer than he’d have expected. Were they receiving a final briefing?
Luke aimed the cross hairs at the head of one of the three men. His finger twitched on the trigger. He didn’t have any more time to delay. The decision had to be made.
Now.
He had to go with his gut…
‘ Fuck… ’
His line of sight was blocked. Four little girls had appeared, all plaits and ponytails, holding hands in pairs and walking across the scope’s field of view. Behind them was a tall woman with dark, curly hair, and then more kids. The woman turned and appeared to announce something to the girls and they congregated in a group in the precise vicinity of Luke’s four targets. Ten seconds later, as one, they all started to cross the road.
He tried to pick out the targets, but they were just part of a crowd now. A crowd that was heading through the Dung Gate and into the Old Town.
Towards the wall.
He jumped to his feet. Maya Bloom was still lying motionless. He had to leave her there. But first he clicked the mag release catch between the magazine and the trigger guard and removed the mag from the sniper rifle. The remaining hardware — including her snubnose and his Sig — he stashed in the Bergen. The ceramic knife he kept in his hand. Without hesitating for another second, he ran across the roof, past the skylight and back down the ladder, gripping the knife between his teeth.
At the base of the building, he dumped the rucksack in one of the bins. He took a moment to collect his thoughts. To gather his breath. To steady his nerve.
And then he ran towards the Dung Gate.
Alistair Stratton’s study at Albany Manor was dark.
He had closed the curtains and locked the door. The only source of light was the television against the wall, set to BBC News 24. The sound was down low, but the image showed an aerial view of an American warship ploughing through the waves. The text banner along the bottom of the screen rolled continuously: ‘american troops continue to mobilise in the middle east… president states he will stand “shoulder to shoulder with our israeli allies in the fight against terror”… middle east peace envoy alistair stratton’s negotiations with hamas administration “inconclusive”… unconfirmed reports of anti-western riots in the gazan capital…’
Stratton sat perfectly still in an armchair. His clothes were still torn and dirty. His face was still bruised and his broken nose had started to bleed again. He ignored the moistness that dripped from his right nostril, over his lips and on to his chin. He hadn’t showered, changed or received medical attention since Gaza.
He didn’t care.
To his right was an occasional table with a powered-up laptop on it. He had directed the browser to a live webcam image of the Western Wall. It was grainy and juddering, refreshing only every few seconds, but it was sufficient for him to see the exposed section and the crowds around it. Sufficient for him to witness his work, even though he was many miles away.
The picture on the TV changed, to show footage of the current Prime Minister shaking hands with his Israeli counterpart in a conference room in Tel Aviv. The caption read: ‘iran states it will see western aggression towards any islamic country as “an act of war”
… un observers report “substantial activity” on the libya-egypt border…’
Stratton glanced at the time in the top-left corner of the screen. 08.37. Which meant 10.37 in Jerusalem.
Twenty-three minutes to go.
He remained seated. Still. His pale face was bathed in the light of the television and the laptop. His eyes were darting between the two and his lips were moving constantly. But they made no sound.
Miss Leibovitz felt like she needed eyes in the back of her head. The entrance to the Western Wall plaza was crowded and although there were three other teachers as well as her to look after the girls, it was difficult to keep tabs on them. They were swarming in a rather disorganised way around the security gates, chattering happily, clearly excited and totally oblivious to the stern-faced troops on the other side of the body scanners.
‘Girls… girls! ’ Even though her voice was raised, it had little effect on her charges. But then she saw something that made her raise her voice even louder. ‘Clara… excuse me, Clara! What do you think you’re doing?’
If there was one thing Miss Leibovitz couldn’t stand, it was inconsiderate behaviour from her girls. She was looking at such behaviour right now. Little Clara, normally such a well-behaved thing, was so excited that she had barged right in front of a pregnant lady who was just approaching the security gates.
‘Clara, please be more considerate to the people around you,’ the teacher snapped. The child hung her head, shamefaced. And the pregnant woman stopped for a moment. She was wearing a headscarf and a shawl round her shoulders and she looked rather taken aback.
Her eyes flickered towards the armed guards on the other side of the gate.
She looked at Miss Leibovitz, and at Clara.
And then she too cast her eyes to the floor and walked through the body scanner. It made no sound and the guards didn’t give her a second look.
‘Now then, girls,’ Miss Leibovitz called. ‘Form an orderly queue, please. I want you to be a good example of your school, and I really don’t want to have to speak sharply to anybody else, today of all days
…’
The plaza was filling up.
There was a buzz about the place, a sense of celebration. The Israeli flag flew from a pole at the back of the square. Little groups of friends and family had gathered here and already the crowd of worshippers by the wall itself was three people deep — the men segregated to the left, the women to the right. A military aircraft flew overhead; seconds later an enormous bang resounded across the skies as it broke the speed barrier. Most of those assembled looked up; but the sight and noise of the aircraft did nothing to spoil the atmosphere. It was Hanukkah, after all.
The defiant party spirit extended to every corner of the plaza and even a little way along the Western Wall tunnel. The further north you went along the tunnel, however, the less populated it became. About 200 metres down and on the left was a little anteroom. This was occupied by a small group of people, huddled by the doorway so that they could see if anybody approached.
They were eight in number. Three young men in traditional dress, one woman in a shawl and headscarf, her belly swollen. These four oozed anxiety. The men were sweating; the woman’s hands were trembling. One of the four remaining young men by their side had stubble, a black and white skullcap, baggy jeans, earphones round his neck and a mobile in his hand; and three others were similarly dressed, brandishing phones and appearing a lot cooler than their companions.
The stubble-faced man looked around. Then, from the large pockets of his hooded top, he brought out a clear freezer bag, sealed at the top and with a length of fishing line attached to it. The bag was filled with one-, two- and five-shekel coins. Some people used the word shrapnel to describe loose change like this.
They didn’t know how accurate they were.
There were eleven more such bags in his top. He divided the whole lot between the three men and one woman — four bags each. The men slipped the bags between the buttons of their shirts and into the pouches they were wearing beneath. For the woman it was different. Her undergarments were not so easy to access, so she merely placed the coins into her shoulder bag. It didn’t matter that they were not close to the explosives. She had more taped to her belly than the others. The coins would easily do their work on the crowd, while the plastic explosive took care of her, her unborn child and of course the wall.
When the improvised shrapnel had been dealt with, the four young men removed their synchronised watches and handed them over to the others.
‘The detonators?’ the woman asked in Arabic when the watches were all fastened.
The man with the stubble nodded and unplugged his phone. He handed it to the woman, then detached the lead from the earphones, unthreaded it from under his top and handed it over. The woman plugged the lead back into the phone and pulled the earbuds from the other end of the lead to reveal two wire probes. These she inserted into a section of the plastic explosive that was just peeping from below her right sleeve. As she did this, the remaining phones were handed over to the three men — each device with a lead ending in two probes that they pushed into their C4 body casings.
The other four men stood back warily. ‘You don’t need to do anything,’ said the guy with the stubble. ‘We’ll call the numbers at eleven.’
The bombers looked at each other, then back at their point men, who were edging away now.
‘ Allahu Akbar,’ the pregnant woman muttered.
The stubble-face man replied in kind, but he did not sound enthusiastic. Ten seconds later he was out of sight of the bombers and so were his companions.
The four of them were on their own now. The pregnant woman nervously checked her watch. 10.40 exactly.
Twenty minutes to go.
Twenty minutes to paradise.
Twenty minutes until they changed the world forever.
The bombers whispered a quiet prayer and, after one last, long look at each other, left the anteroom, split up and walked slowly, unassumingly to their positions.
Luke sprinted across the main road, causing the traffic to brake and swerve as he burned towards the Dung Gate. He passed an armed IDF man at the entrance to the gate. As he ran past, the guy shouted something at him in Hebrew. Luke didn’t stop. He could see the security gates to the Western Wall plaza fifty metres ahead. He crossed that distance in seconds but was brought to a halt by a line of men and a line of women, queuing to go in.
Somewhere nearby a bell tolled. Three strikes. 10.45 hrs. Luke was still brandishing the ceramic knife, the black handle in his right hand, the white blade pressed up against the inside of his arm. Looking behind him, he saw the IDF man making chase. He cursed under his breath and quickly slipped the blade into his trousers, covering the handle of the knife with his T-shirt.
The soldier was covering the ground quickly. Thirty metres between him and Luke. Closing.
Luke sidestepped, then barged along the length of the queue to the front. A father and his young son were the next to go through the body scanner, but Luke pushed in front of them. He heard shouts from behind, harsh instructions in Hebrew, and it didn’t take much intuition to realise it was his pursuer. As he stepped through the security gate, he almost winced, expecting the alarm to go off; but it didn’t, and a few seconds later he was running down towards the plaza.
He stopped at its edge, his heart sinking. The square was five times as crowded as it had been the night before. Scanning the crowd, he estimated that there had to be a couple of hundred Hassidim here, all dressed in the same way as the bombers; and a similar number of women were crowding round the female section of the wall.
He froze with indecision. Try to find his targets here? It was like looking for a needle in a fucking haystack.
It was noisy. The noise of a crowd. But suddenly, from somewhere near the wall, came the ancient, wavering, piercing sound of a horn being blown. Luke looked in the direction of the sound and could just make out the end of a long, gnarled animal’s horn, held up to the lips of an old man with a white beard. The sound continued for a good ten seconds before it was accompanied by another noise.
Shouting. Behind him. Luke looked over his shoulder. The IDF guy was there — only now he had three others with him and they’d spotted him.
He looked into the crowd. Could he lose himself among them in time? He had to. Luke burst forwards and seconds later he was engulfed by people. They were pushing, shoving — jostling to get towards the wall. For a couple of seconds Luke felt himself being taken along with the tide.
And then there was a tap on his shoulder. He spun round. One of the soldiers was there, glaring at him and talking quickly in Hebrew. Luke felt his knuckles clenching as he looked left and right, trying to decide on an escape plan. But then he realised the soldier had switched to English.
‘This,’ he snapped. ‘You dropped it.’ He was holding something up in his hand — a black wallet.
Luke shook his head. ‘Not mine,’ he said in a level voice.
A pause. The soldier looked rather offended that he’d chased after Luke for no reason. He sighed heavily before forcing his way back out of the crowd, barking orders as he went.
Luke checked his watch. 10.48. Sweat poured from his body as he turned and used his bulk to force his way towards the wall.
On a nearby rooftop, Maya Bloom’s eyes shot open.
The first thing she felt was pain. A stinging, burning pain across her face and a dull ache in her abdomen. She could deal with that.
The second thing she felt was anger. That she couldn’t deal with. Not one bit.
She sat up suddenly. A wave of giddiness crashed over her. It took her two seconds to realise she was tied and another two to realise she was alone.
A sound drifted through the air. A horn. The shofar, which she had heard ever since she was young girl. And it was coming from the Western Wall. It meant the people had congregated.
She looked around.
Her assailant had removed her bag. That meant she had no weapons and no blade. She closed her eyes. Breathed deeply.
And then she looked around again.
Her eyes fell upon the skylight and immediately she had a strategy. Lying down lengthwise, she rolled towards the glass before sitting up again with the lower part of her legs stretched out upon it. She inhaled deeply again and, with a sudden, violent strike, raised the heels of her boots as high as possible and brought them slamming down on the glass. There was a splintering sound and a crack webbed out from the point of impact. She raised her heels again and slammed on the glass for a second time.
As it shattered she felt a hot stinging as the sharp edge of the glass remaining round the edge cut into the skin on the back of her legs. She quickly realigned her body so that she was lying on her back diagonally across one corner of the skylight. Fumbling blindly, she manoeuvred her wrists so they were touching a jagged shard, and started to make small movements back and forth.
It was impossible to slice just the bootlaces and not her skin. As she rocked her wrists back and forth, she felt flesh tear and moisten. But she barely noticed the pain. She rubbed away at the laces and in just over a minute she felt the tension around her hands suddenly release. Rolling off the glass, she brought her hands round to the front. They were gashed and bloodied, but that didn’t slow her down at all. The knot around her ankles she couldn’t untie, so she broke a shard of glass off the remnants of the skylight. It was about the size of her palm and shaped almost like an arrow tip with an evil-looking point, which she used like a saw to hack away at the second bootlace.
Seconds later she was free.
She jumped to her feet just as she heard the shofar ring out a second time. The image of her assailant rose in her mind.
He was going to ruin everything.
She wasn’t going to let that happen.
Maya Bloom stashed the piece of glass in a pocket and rethreaded the remnants of her laces into her boots, ignoring the way the blood oozed over her hands and nails.
That done, she ran to the other side of the rooftop and started climbing down the ladder. She was at ground level in thirty seconds, and already sprinting.