Godstone

Adam came home at around four. Gee had left me alone at the house most of the day. She said that she had to sort out a few things, but I guessed she had gone to the hospital for treatment. I had offered to go with her, but she had declined. So instead I hung around at the house. Maria made me lunch, a mixture of different types of salads with pita bread.

Before she left the house, Gee had given me a book from her bookshelf, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had heard of it, but I had not read it yet. It had only been published earlier that year.

“You might enjoy it,” she said with a smile. “It’s brilliant and funny. It will make you laugh.”

The house was quiet once she left. I could hear some traffic in the distance, but that was all. There was no breeze, and the air was still; nothing moved. I must have fallen asleep in the afternoon because the noise of Adam pushing open the front door woke me.

He was very excited to see me and told me about Super Mario Brothers, a video game that one of his friends had brought to school. His friend’s father had picked it up in Japan on a business trip.

Maria brought out some home-baked cookies. Adam and I both drank Coke. Once we had finished, Adam and I ended up playing cars again on the floor of the living room.

Adam had one car, an Aston Martin DB5 with James Bond guns and an ejector seat, that I had also had as a child. I asked Adam where he had gotten it, and he replied that his mum had given it to him. I could have sworn it was the actual car that I had as a child.

Gee arrived back an hour or so later, looking completely washed out. For the first time, she seemed pleased to see us playing together. Adam leapt up from the floor to give her a hug. Gee hugged him back, holding him for a long time. When she finally let him go, she told him to do his homework and have his bath; we would be having dinner in an hour. It was his favourite: pizza.

“I am glad you two are getting on so well,” Gee told me after Adam had left the room.

“It’s weird,” I replied, “but I feel that I have known him forever.”

Gee looked at me, trying to make up her mind about something. “Do you want some tea?” she asked. I followed her into the kitchen. It had already become the place for our serious conversations, and I wondered what she was going to tell me now. She obviously had something on her mind.

“I have some white tea,” she said. “Is that all right?” I had no idea what white tea was, but I said yes. Gee turned her back on me while she heated some water and fiddled around with the tea.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” she asked without turning to face me.

“Well,” I replied cautiously, “my mother believed in it. She always fed the birds in winter and would never kill any living thing, not even a mosquito. If she found a spider in the house, she would collect it and take it outside; it was the same for all insects. We used to joke that she was a reincarnation of Buddha.”

“But your father was a farmer,” Gee said, returning to the table, carrying a white porcelain teapot and cups. “He kept livestock. How did your mother cope with that?”

“Actually my mother kept a few pigs,” I corrected her. “She used to feed them on the waste apples from the orchards and the waste food from the farm. The pigs lived outside and had a great life. When one would get too old, she would send it off to the abattoir and then have the meat delivered back to the farm. My mother would then cut it up and put it in the freezer.

“It was a contradiction that I didn’t really understand, but she argued that if we didn’t keep the pigs, then they wouldn’t exist at all—and that it was better that they lived and died than didn’t live at all. It’s a funny way to look at things, but in a way, it makes sense. In any case, the pigs lived a good life, and we had the meat that we wanted.

“But I am sure that if it hadn’t been for my father, my mother would be a vegetarian. In fact, now that I think about it, she virtually never eats meat, only a tiny piece now and then, probably to please him.”

“What about you?” Gee asked, pouring the tea. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” The tea was white or, rather, transparent. I didn’t know whether I believed in reincarnation or not.

“Adam has a very old soul,” Gee said after a while. “He also has a destiny. Your role will be to guide him to that destiny.”

“Are you saying that Adam is a reincarnation?” I asked her with a laugh. It was more mocking than I had intended.

Adam luckily came back into the kitchen before Gee could answer. She warmed up a frozen pizza. We ate it with the salads that Maria had made earlier that day and that I had already had for lunch. While we ate, Adam talked about video games; he said that everyone at school except him had a console to play them on.

When we finished eating, Adam asked me if I could put him to bed. I followed him upstairs. It was the first time I had been to his room. I was shocked to see that his bedroom walls were painted in light yellow and green, exactly the same colours as my own bedroom while I was growing up on the farm.

There was a desk up against the wall, the same one I had as a child. Only the bed coverings and pillows were different: his were decorated with Ninja Turtles. Adam told me that his mum had gotten them for him from America.

I kissed Adam goodnight. He put his arms around my neck and held on. I held him for a while and eventually had to pull myself away.

“Mum is sick, isn’t she?” he said.

My stomach knotted, and I had no idea how to answer him. But I didn’t need to answer him. He already knew.“You aren’t going away, are you?” he asked. “You’re going to stay with me if anything happens to Mum, right?”

“I will,” I replied, thinking of the papers that I had signed earlier that day. Adam put his arms tight around my neck again. When he pulled away again, I saw that he was crying—not sobbing, just a couple of tears rolling down his pale, freckled cheeks.

“Is everything going to be all right?” he asked.

“Yes,” I told him. “Everything is going to be all right.”

“I think I know where the other half of the stone is,” I told Gee the next morning as soon as Adam had left for school. Gee was clearing the table and stacking the dishwasher.

“Where?” she asked. I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t believe me.

“Adam gave me the clue. Yesterday he misplaced one of his favourite cars, but then he found it almost immediately in the toy garage in his bedroom. I asked him how he knew it was there, and he told me that everything has a sort of magical way of going back to where it came from—that everything has a certain place where it belongs and that his car belonged in the garage.”

“So where does the stone belong?” Gee asked me. She still had her back to me, still stacking the dishwasher.

“Where did it come from in the first place?” I asked.

“No one knows,” she replied. “Your uncle had it analysed and found that it wasn’t a stone from this planet—that it was possibly from a meteorite.”

“Yes, I know that. He told me,” I replied. “But where did the stone first appear?”

“Mount Sinai,” she replied quickly. “You think it is there?”

“I know it is there. I don’t know how I know, but I know.” Gee stopped what she was doing and turned to look at me.

“Have you seen the morning paper?” she asked. She passed the International Herald Tribune over the table to me. There was an article on the front page about the summit meeting that had taken place between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev the previous month in Iceland.

The article said that the Reykjavik Summit showed “that nuclear disarmament was within reach as long as political leaders had the courage to break through bureaucratic politics and the maze of arcane nuclear balance theories.”

It then explained that the summit had come close to an agreement on the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. To keep the momentum going, a new summit was being urgently prepared for the end of the month. The newspaper said that it would likely take place at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt.

“So it looks as if it will happen,” I told Gee. “It looks as if the world will finally be rid of nuclear weapons. We have nothing to worry about.”

“We have everything to worry about,” Gee corrected me. Saint Catherine’s Monastery is at the foot of Mount Sinai.”

We both remained quiet for a moment.

“I have already been to Saint Catherine’s Monastery,” Gee continued quietly. “A few years ago I went to the monastery looking for the stone. I found nothing except for a few monks and a strange old man who looked as if he were a thousand years old. But you should still go. It is worth trying again.”

“I think I will,” I told her just as quietly. “It’s just too much of a coincidence that the next summit is going to be held at Mount Sinai. Call it instinct, but I think I will find the stone there.”

That evening, Gee invited two friends around for an early dinner of pizza and salad, but this time, we had vegetarian pizza. When the friends arrived at six, I was shocked—and then delighted—to see Aaron. I hadn’t known that he was a friend of Gee’s, but I should have guessed.

Aaron introduced me to his wife, Abbey, a nurse at the city’s main hospital. Aaron held me back in the hallway while Abbey disappeared into the kitchen with Gee. He wanted to warn me that Abbey didn’t know that he and I already knew each other. He asked if we could keep it that way. He had told her that he had only gone to Turkey to study its wine production.

I asked him if Gee had asked him to go there to keep an eye on me, and he told me she had. He said he had done his best but had lost me in Antalya when we changed buses for the five-hour trip to Kaz.

I quickly told Aaron about Salim, about the fire in the hotel in Kaz, and about my arsenic poisoning. He said that he had not liked Salim from the moment that he had met him.

The girls came out from the kitchen with Adam helping them to carry the food. Abbey was talking about a recent bombing in Tel Aviv and described how some of the victims had been bought to her hospital in Jerusalem.

We ate our pizza in the sitting room, and Adam took the dirty plates into the kitchen.

“So, William, what are you doing here?” Abbey asked. “You’re not Jewish, are you?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m not. I went to school in England, so I guess, if anything, I belong to the Church of England. Neither of my parents was religious.”

“So you are just sightseeing—a tourist?” Abbey asked the question with a hostile edge to her voice. She seemed to be implying that I shouldn’t be in Israel if I wasn’t Jewish.

Adam came back into the living room with a tub of vanilla ice cream and five bowls. I wasn’t sure if he had heard the conversation, and for a moment, I wondered if he was going to tell Abbey that I was here because I was his father. In the end, he said nothing.

“William is going to Egypt tomorrow—to the Sinai Peninsula,” Gee said to fill what was becoming an awkward silence. “He wants to visit Saint Catherine’s Monastery.”

Abbey told me that I shouldn’t go to Egypt. Israel and Egypt had signed a peace treaty—the Camp David Accords—seven years earlier, but she still felt that Egypt was Israel’s enemy, as was the whole Arab world.

“But Saint Catherine’s is a monastery,” Gee told her as she served the ice cream. “It’s at the foot of Mount Sinai, where Moses received the Ten Commandments. Moses is considered a prophet in the Muslim faith as well as in Judaism and Christianity. But then I am sure you know that already, Abbey.

“There’s a letter in Saint Catherine’s written by the Islamic prophet Muhammad, bestowing his protection upon the monastery. That’s why the Muslims didn’t destroy the place during the Ottoman Empire—that and the fact that the monastery also houses a mosque,” Gee continued.

“But it doesn’t have a synagogue,” I added unhelpfully.

After the two friends had left, I put Adam to bed and then asked Gee if she knew anything about Ivan, the giant who had pulled me out of the fire in the hotel in Kaz.

“Oh, him,” she replied with a cheeky smile. “He’s your uncle’s accountant from the Isle of Man, probably just on holiday at the time. But I thought I had told you that already.”

I realised then that Gee only told me what she wanted to tell me. She didn’t lie directly, only by omission.

The next morning, Tariq drove me to the Egyptian consulate to get an Egyptian visa. I didn’t have enough shekels, and I had to go in the still-pouring rain to the American Express office to change some more travellers’ cheques, getting a few Egyptian pounds at the same time. Then I went back to the consulate, where I handed in my passport, paid the money, and was told to come back the next day for the visa.

Gee had arranged to meet me in a café in town for lunch after I had been to the Egyptian consulate. She was in the café when I arrived and had already ordered chicken soup and a tuna sandwich for me. The café was packed with people sheltering from the rain, and the combined body heat turned the place into a sauna.

A young American couple came over, introduced themselves as Grant and Sarah, and asked if they could share their table with us. Grant was from Pennsylvania, and Sarah was from Brooklyn. They were in Jerusalem visiting Sarah’s extended family.

Grant told me that he was a student at the Gettysburg College, an Evangelical Lutheran establishment in Adams County near the Gettysburg Battlefield National Park. I wondered how Sarah’s family felt about the possibility of her marrying a Lutheran.

We chatted for a while as we finished our meal and then left them to it. We had arranged for Tariq to pick us up at 2:00 p.m., just around the corner from the café. It was still raining hard, and the traffic was such a mess that Gee was worried Tariq wouldn’t be able to wait for us. We turned the corner, and just as she had thought, the car wasn’t there.

We sheltered in a shop doorway, and after a few minutes, a car that I thought was Gee’s pulled up beside us. We stepped out onto the pavement, and I looked inside the car. Tariq wasn’t driving; it was someone I didn’t recognise.

“Run!” Gee shouted as something hard hit me on the back of my neck. Everything went black.

It was still black when I woke up. It was also difficult to breath. I realised that I had some sort of rough cloth hood over my head. I tried to move my arms, but my hands were tied behind me. I was sitting on the floor, my legs outstretched and my back against a wall. I tried to stand up but realised that my legs were also tied together.

As I struggled, I called out Gee’s name and heard a muffled reply from somewhere on my right side. I shuffled across the floor as best I could until I felt her body against mine.

“Are you OK?” I asked. Again there was a muffled reply. I couldn’t make out whether it was a yes or a no, but at least she was alive. Gee said something else and then kept repeating the same thing. It took me a while to work out what she was saying.

“The stone,” she said. “Do you still have the stone?”

I moved my body to try to feel the weight of the stone in my pocket but realised that I wasn’t wearing my jacket.

“Gone,” I told her. “I don’t have the stone.”

Despite not wearing a jacket, the hood was making me hot; sweat dripped down the back of my neck. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious, but I needed a pee. I called out but received no answer. I called out louder and was rewarded with a hard, painful kick on my buttocks.

“Toilet,” I said as bravely as I could. “Toilet. I need to go to the toilet.”

I felt someone untying my legs. A strong pair of hands pulled me onto my feet and pushed me across the room. I had lost the feeling in my feet and I half fell against something hard; I guessed it was a table. I heard a door being opened and was pushed through it. Then we passed through another door, and someone undid my belt, pulled down my trousers and underpants, and pushed me onto a toilet.

I peed, but because my trousers hadn’t been pulled down far enough, I peed on them as well. The same hands hoisted me back on my feet but didn’t pull my trousers back up properly. I hobbled back through the two doors and then was pushed back down onto the floor.

There was a scuffle to my right side, and I sensed that Gee was being pulled to her feet. She called out my name, but I heard a dull whack that I feared was her being hit hard on her head. She didn’t say anything else, and I was powerless to help. The door opened, and I heard her being dragged across the floor. Then the door closed. I listened as hard as I could, but I heard nothing more. I was alone.

I must have fallen asleep again and was woken by someone pushing a bottle up under my hood and against my mouth. Whoever it was forced my head back and tipped water into my mouth. I had a tough time not choking on it. Most of the water sloshed down onto my chest, but I appreciated the little that I did manage to drink. Then, the bottle gone, the door opened and closed, and I was alone again.

I tried to see if I could somehow free my hands, but the rough rope cut into my wrists; all I was doing was tightening the knots. My back and my bum ached from the hard floor and wall. I twisted around on myself in an attempt to lie down sideways, but my shoulder soon began to ache more than my back did. I tried to sit up again, but I couldn’t. I eventually fell asleep again, my face pressed against the rough concrete floor.

Whether hours or minutes later, I don’t know, but I was woken up by a hard kick in my back. Hands pulled me back into the sitting position and, from behind me, took off my hood. I had a few seconds before a blindfold replaced the hood, and I saw that I was in a room, empty except for a metal desk and two metal chairs.

Whoever was behind me then pulled me to my feet. The same hands pushed me over to one of the chairs and sat me down. I asked for some water but got no reply. Although my hands had been untied, I didn’t dare take off the blindfold. The door opened, and a few words were exchanged in Arabic. The door closed again. The metal chair opposite me scraped across the floor, and I heard someone sit down.

“English?” The accent was Middle Eastern, and the voice sounded strangely familiar.

I nodded. My mouth and lips felt so dry that I thought my face would crack if I tried to speak. A plastic bottle was pushed into my hand; I took it and drank some of the water.

“Your friend—American?”

“English,” I replied.

“American,” the voice corrected me. “Jewish.”

“English mother, American father. Not Jewish,” I insisted.

“American passport,” the voice replied. “That is what matters.” There was a pause. “She is on her way to Beirut.” The voice was matter of fact. It had a way of speaking that I felt I had heard before.

I sensed the person opposite me lean across the table. He roughly pulled off my blindfold. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the light, and my heart leapt when I saw the stone in front of me on the metal table.

The man sitting opposite me was in his midthirties, fit, and good looking. He had cropped hair and a beard that was fashionably trimmed below his chin. He would not have looked out of place in a Mayfair nightclub.

I looked around the room: bare concrete walls and floor, a small window high on one wall. I guessed that it was a storage room of some sort, probably for fruit. It smelled vaguely of apples—the same smell as in the fruit store on my father’s farm in Devon.

The man looked at me as if for the first time, studying my face.

“The girl,” I said. “She has a son. There is no one to look after him. Let her go. Keep me.”

The man grunted. “She is American. She has a rich father. She was working for peace, kidnapped in Israel. All that will be good for the American media—good for us.” He laughed. “It is even good for the Israelis.

“But don’t worry,” he added. “We will not harm her. She will be kept safe and well-looked after during the negotiations.”

An image came into my mind of two men lying on a café floor in Turkey, their throats neatly cut. I thought of the glass vial that Gee had crushed in her bare hand. I knew I had no need to worry. But she was right; I did have to worry about the stone.

“My father is rich,” I lied. “He will pay a ransom for me.”

“Your father is a farmer. He grows apples. He is not rich.”

I felt my eyes widen in surprise. I had no idea how, or why, he knew that. But I did know that I had indeed heard that voice before. Who was he?

“My name is Imad,” he continued as if he had read my thoughts. “My father was a farmer in the village of Tayr Dibba in southern Lebanon. Our family grew olives and lemons, beautiful orchards. He sent me to study engineering at the American University of Beirut. I was there when the Americans invited Israel to invade our beautiful country. My father, my mother, my two brothers—all killed. The orchards destroyed.”

I thought about my own two brothers, my father’s farm, and the apple orchards. I wondered how I would have felt if our farm had been invaded and my family killed while I was away, studying at university.

Imad sighed loudly and then stood up. “The Americans, the Israelis…they invade our land and kill our families. Then they call us terrorists. Is that what you think I am: a terrorist?”

“I think nothing,” I replied truthfully. “Your battles do not interest me.”

“So you don’t think I am a terrorist?”

“Israel thinks you are a terrorist; Lebanon thinks you are a freedom fighter,” I said with a slight shrug of my shoulders. “I told you—I think nothing.”

Imad was still on his feet. I looked at the stone on the metal desk in front of me. I thought about making a grab for it, but then what? Gee had told me I had to use the stone, but how? Imad caught my gaze; he picked the stone up from the table and treasured it in his hand. I wondered for a second if I could fight him for it, but I didn’t reckon much as to my chances of winning.

“William, you are not strong enough to be involved in all this,” he said, again as if he had read my thoughts. “You made a mistake coming here. You should have stayed in London.”

Suddenly I knew where I had heard his voice before. His was the voice on the telephone in the middle of the night. In that moment, everything became clear. Imad was the man that Mary had been seeing each month. It was for him that she had put on her little black dress and high heels.

“How did someone like you travel so freely—and so often—to London?” I asked him. I heard the sudden bitterness in my own voice.

Imad’s eyes widened slightly. He had realised that I had recognised his voice. “Maybe you should ask your government that,” he replied. “Hey, why don’t you ask your uncle? After all, he was the one that organised my visas and my travel.”

“My uncle?” I said, genuinely shocked.

“Yes, your uncle, Charles Becket. Perfidious Albion: treacherous, devious England. I work for him. Well, at least he thinks I work for him.”

“Who were…who are you working for?” I asked.

“The other people,” Imad replied with a half-suppressed laugh. “But I am grateful to your uncle. Not only did he arrange my travel, but he also told me about the stone.”

I couldn’t believe that my uncle had shared that secret with him. “Why would he tell you about the stone?” I asked.

“Your uncle told me about the stone in—how can I say it?—an unguarded moment one morning, when we were in bed together.” Imad sighed. “Did I mention that your uncle and I were lovers? No, maybe I didn’t.”

I wondered if Imad was playing with me. I had no idea if he was telling me the truth. But in all honesty, I didn’t care whether my uncle and he were lovers. I only cared about Imad’s relationship with Mary.

“Mary and I were also lovers,” Imad told me, again with that uncanny ability to read my thoughts.

I looked at him again, still undecided as to whether he was telling the truth. “Mary was with me,” I said calmly.

“That is correct, William. She was with you because of the stone,” Imad said. There was neither contempt nor anger in his voice.

“Mary and I were partners,” Imad continued. “We were together long before you knew her. I met her when she was very young, when she was still at school. I…well, I recruited her.”

“Recruited her?” I repeated stupidly.

Imad nodded. “When your uncle told me about the stone, I obviously told Mary. She said that you were his nephew and that you attended the same university she did. She said she would get to know you. She said she could persuade you that the stone should be put to use, to do some good in the world. After all, your family has had the stone for centuries and done nothing with it. Such a waste.

“Mary died before you knew that the stone even existed,” Imad continued. “With Mary dead and you in America, I realised that if I wanted the stone, I would have to get it myself. I broke into your uncle’s house to steal it but failed.”

“So you tried to kill my uncle?” I asked.

“No,” Imad replied. “I would never have killed your uncle. But he has many enemies. He is not as strong as he appears. He talks too much, and he has a weakness for young men.”

A thought suddenly occurred to me. “You said that you were partners with Mary, but you were also working with Salim.”

Imad put the stone back on the table in front of me. “I was Salim’s friend,” he said. “We helped each other out.”

“So you planted Salim in my house, just as you planted Mary in my life.”

“I did not ‘plant’ Salim in your house,” he replied. “When you came back from America, I decided to get you out of the way. I put a bomb in your house. I never suspected that Salim would be able to get close to you. He convinced me that you could lead him to the other half of the stone. By keeping you alive, he hoped to have not just one half but the whole stone. So I agreed he should disconnect the bomb.”

“But then, why did he try to poison me?” I argued. “It makes no sense.”

Imad shrugged. “Perhaps he decided to kill you when he finally realised that you really didn’t know where the other half of the stone was. But I don’t think he wanted to kill you. He had told me earlier that he wanted to keep you under control; manageable was the word he used. I guess he was using poison to weaken you.

“But who knows what his real motives were,” he continued. “Salim was an eco-terrorist who wanted to save the world by wiping out most of humanity. But he was also obsessed with the idea of a Muslim bomb. He knew that a nuclear holocaust would kill mainly Christians and leave most Muslim countries untouched. I realised too late that he wanted the stone to wage religious war. Salim was not a true Muslim. He was a disgrace to our faith.”

“So if Salim wanted the stone to wage religious war, what do you want it for?” I asked.

“To wage religious peace,” he replied. “Islam is a peaceful religion. Mary and I had the idea to use the stone to impose peace. But we had no fixed plan. All we knew was that we had to get the stone before someone else did.”

There was something in the way he said it, his forced sincerity, that suggested he wasn’t telling me the whole truth. I suspected that he wanted to give the stone to his Soviet masters. I couldn’t be sure, but somehow I felt that Mary had a different plan.

“You talk of peace,” I said, “but you were willing to blow me to pieces.”

“At one stage, yes, that was true,” Imad replied. “But it was a mistake, and I regret it.”

“What do you mean you regret it?” I asked. I didn’t believe him.

“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” he replied. “Maybe I still blamed you for Mary’s death.”

I tried to say something, but Imad held up his hand. “I learned that you uncle planned to give you the stone. I thought it would be easier to get the stone from him than from you, so I decided to kill you.”

“And now, do you still want to kill me?”

“No. When I realised that Salim was poisoning you, I went to your hotel. He and I argued and fought, knocking over a candle. I dragged you from the fire.”

“You dragged me from the fire?”

“Yes, and I took you to the clinic.”

Now I knew that he was lying. The police had told me that the description given by the nurse clearly matched the description that I had given them of Ivan. He was such a giant; it would have been difficult to confuse him with anyone else. But if Imad was lying about that, perhaps he was lying about everything. Perhaps he had even made up the story about his father’s orchards. Perhaps he had just wanted me to identify with him.

“So now that you have the stone,” I asked, “what are you going to do with it?”

“This morning,” Imad replied, “you went to the Egyptian consulate to get a visa. I cannot imagine that you want to go to Egypt to see the pyramids. I guess you have learned that the second half of the stone is there.” He paused a moment, waiting for me to reply. I said nothing. “William,” he continued, “is the other half of the stone in Egypt?”

“I honestly don’t know,” I replied, looking him hard in the eye. Imad studied my face carefully, trying to work out if I was lying. “And even if I did,” I added, “I wouldn’t tell you.”

“But, William,” he replied, “we can work together just as Mary and I had planned to work together. We can use the stone to bring a lasting peace to the world. That is what Mary wanted. We owe it to her.”

I glanced at the stone lying on the metal table in front of me. Looking at it, I had that same sensation of overwhelming love that I had had every time I had looked into it. Maybe Imad was right: maybe Mary had loved him, and maybe at first she had been with me only to get the stone. But in the end, I knew she had loved me. She was telling me that now through the stone. I made up my mind.

“Have you looked into it?” I asked Imad. “I mean, really looked into it?”

He turned to me and then moved his head the same way that Gee had moved hers the first time I had suggested that she look into the stone. He was afraid. “What will I see if I do look into it?” he asked.

“You’ll see whatever the stone wants you to see. You will see your true self, and you will see your god.”

Imad took the stone from the metal table and lifted it to his eyes. “I see nothing,” he said, his hands visibly trembling.

“Here, let me show you,” I told him. I stood up and took the stone gently from his hands, holding it between the two of us. I looked into the stone, half expecting to see Mary. Instead, I saw Gee and me in the crowded café, having lunch with the young American couple. “You see that?” I asked him. “It’s my get-out-of-jail-free card.”

When I got back from the toilet, Gee had finished her tuna sandwich and was ready to leave. I tried to sit down without her seeing the pee stains on my trousers, but I failed. She looked at me with a mixture of surprise and disgust.

“Let’s stay here awhile,” I told her. “It’s still raining hard. Let’s get another coffee. There’s no hurry.”

“But Tariq is waiting. He won’t be able to wait long; the streets are busy.”

I reached out my hand and put it on Gee’s arm. I realised that I was trembling.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Her look of surprise had turned to alarm.

“Yes, I’m fine,” I replied. “I just fancy another coffee. Would you mind getting it for me?”

She went to the counter, and I waited while Grant and Sarah finished their meal. I asked them what they planned to do that afternoon, and they said they were taking a bus to Eilat. Sarah had relatives there, and they planned to stay a few days with them before going back to the United States.

As they left, I told them to stay safe. It was a meaningless thing to say; if Fatah could kidnap Americans in Jerusalem, then nowhere was safe.

Once they had gone, Gee asked me what was wrong. I told her what had happened, and at first, she didn’t believe me. I could hardly believe it myself. I was sitting in a crowded café, and nothing had yet happened. All that I had experienced hadn’t happened. It was about to happen. It was only when I showed her the rope marks on my wrists that she believed me.

“You have to leave Israel at once,” I told her. “Take Adam with you. We will go back to the house now, pick him up, and get you to the airport.”

I looked around the café. “There must be a back way out of this place,” I told her. “Come with me.”