‘And so I became a remote viewer, a psychic spy. I couldn’t believe how my luck had changed. From a tiring, daily ritual teaching ill-disciplined children I did not respect, nor them me, to a revered position within the country’s national security advisory. And the job was very easy too. All I had to do was spend my time perusing the id and declaring my thoughts, no matter how bizarre, and collect a cheque at the end of each month. Sometimes a subject or person was introduced, a name or a picture, and we would go into session, and, at the end of it, after our thoughts were transcribed, they were taken away for evaluation. We didn’t always know what became of the transcriptions.
‘I took it quite seriously at first, even started to believe I could actually do it, but eventually I had to admit, to myself at least, that I was faking it. Of course, I wasn’t about to tell any of them that. It had become too attractive a lifestyle to throw away just because of an attack of honesty. So I kept schtum and worked on a technique of feeding off the others, importing strings of their thoughts, building on them and exporting my own versions. I must have been very good at it because one day I learned I had received the largest portion of the credit for finding the Lockerbie bomb. I expect there were other fakers in the group but it was near impossible to tell. Who could judge you? From our point of view the answers were all there somewhere in our ramblings, and it was up to the decoders to find them; if they could not, it was their fault, not ours.
‘Then one day some people from Stanford University arrived who believed they had found a way of accurately evaluating our abilities. The CIA had been spending a fortune on the institute’s research department. I was horrified. The lifestyle to which I had grown accustomed looked as if it was about to fall apart. Worse still, I was about to be exposed as a fraud. Iraq was the turning point. When we couldn’t find any weapons of mass destruction, the hierarchy came down pretty hard on us and I came clean and told them I couldn’t do it any longer.And that’s when it happened. Perhaps it was because I had broken free of so many chains that restricted my clarity. I don’t know. But there I was, sitting alone in the viewing room, a tranquil place designed to be alpha provoking, waiting for the department head to call me upstairs to sign my release papers, when I saw the tanker and the horrors that were taking place on it. It was so real it frightened me. I automatically did what we always did during viewing sessions so that nothing was lost to memory and I wrote down what I had seen and drew sketches and doodled images; everything, no matter how trivial or bizarre, was placed on paper. I was called upstairs to the office and so I left the report on the table, completed my leaving routine and went home. In the early hours of the following day an agent banged on my door with orders to take me back to the agency. My papers had been processed as routine, and, to the decoders’ horror, everything I had seen had been happening as I was writing it down.’
Gabriel moved from the wardrobe and slumped on to the edge of the bed as if he no longer had the energy to stand up.
‘It’s a nuclear bomb, isn’t it?’ Gabriel asked, raising his eyes off the floor to look at Stratton. ‘That’s what the madman found in England and what he is now carrying.’
There was obviously no further point in lying to Gabriel. In fact, there was every reason to tell him the truth since this operation was far from over. If Stratton had any doubts about Gabriel, they were now gone. But he did not need to confirm Gabriel’s accusation. Gabriel could see it in his cold, dark eyes.
‘He’s here,’ Gabriel said. ‘But why are you? Aren’t you afraid?’
Stratton wanted to say it was his job, but that would have sounded pathetic. It would also have been a lie. Stratton was not about to die for anyone. It was his instincts that kept him chasing the Russian, but to analyse that any further would place him in the same confused netherworld as Gabriel.
‘I don’t like you, Stratton . . . No, that’s not entirely true. It’s your kind I don’t like.You’re the same as that man carrying his bomb.You may be the antithesis, but together you are one.You create each other and feed off each other. If you didn’t exist, he wouldn’t either.
Stratton could not agree with Gabriel. He wanted to say that for every force there had to be an opposing force.The concept of good could not exist without evil. If there was a question it was who were the good guys and where did the true evil lie. Perhaps Gabriel was right and that was why Stratton’s life often felt meaningless to him.
‘How big is the bomb?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Five miles.’
Gabriel shook his head sadly. ‘My God,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not just you . . . We’re all mad.’
A heavy knock on the door startled both of them, and Stratton got to his feet. Another energetic knock and Stratton opened the door to see Abed in the hallway.
‘He’s here,’ Abed said. ‘I saw him.’
‘The Russian?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’ Stratton asked with urgency as he stepped out of the room.
‘I was at the top of the road, opposite the shops, when I saw him leave the hotel. It was not until he passed me that I recognised him.’
‘When?’ Stratton asked as he headed down the hall.
‘I came straight here but it took me a while to find you.’
‘Stratton,’ Gabriel called out from the door of his room.
Stratton stopped at the corner to the stairwell and looked back to see Gabriel holding on to the doorway.
‘Number seven,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Seven,’ Gabriel repeated. ‘I don’t know what it means, but it’s important to the Russian . . . It’s today, Stratton.’
Stratton stared at him, a myriad thoughts crashing through his mind, including how to get away from Jerusalem as quickly as possible. He forced that to the back. ‘I thought viewers could only see the present. ’
‘That’s true.’
‘Then the future. If it hasn’t happened yet, it can be changed?’ It was more of a question than a statement, and his immediate actions depended largely on the answer.
‘Not mine,’ Gabriel said darkly.
Stratton stared at him a moment longer, then he ran down the stairs at the sprint, Abed close behind him.
A minute later, they were running out of the hotel entrance and up the road.
‘Was he carrying anything?’ Stratton asked.
‘A bag, a sack, over his shoulder.’
Stratton clenched his teeth and increased his pace up the hill, past the shops and towards the bend at the top.
They passed a van outside a photographic shop, daubed in various colourful slogans advertising photographic equipment. There was no one in the front of the vehicle and the interior was concealed from view by a panel behind the front seats with a mesh screen in it. The Shin Bet agent inside videoed Stratton and Abed running towards him, then he moved to the back of the van and operated another camera and recorded them heading around the bend and out of sight.
Chapter 14
Manachem Raz sat in the cramped press office that dealt with international media, which was situated on the third floor of the government building beside the busy Ben Yehuda precinct known for its cafés and tourist boutiques. He was scrolling through data on a computer screen, the smell from the Chinese restaurant on the floor below wafting in through the window.As he scanned through the most recent applications for press passes he had to wonder why a government building had rented one of its largest rooms to a private catering business, and a Chinese one to boot, when there was a general shortage of office space. It was indicative of the country’s poor economy where every avenue to making money was being explored. He wondered how many other governments rented out public buildings to private shops. It was all the more annoying because he didn’t like Oriental cuisine.