by James Becker
Levi Barak, sitting in the passenger seat of a saloon car parked about seventy yards down the road from the hotel entrance, focused a pair of compact binoculars on the target building. As he watched, three men emerged and began walking down the road in the opposite direction. A few seconds later, a short, dark-haired woman stepped onto the street behind them, a newspaper tucked under her arm, and began following them, perhaps thirty yards back.
'Right, you know what to do,' Barak said. 'Keep me informed,' he added, as he stepped out of the car.
The three men seemed oblivious to the fact that they were under surveillance, and were just walking steadily towards a small car park – the hotel didn't have its own garage.
Barak stood on the pavement for a few moments, watching as his team of Mossad surveillance officers moved smoothly into position, covering the car park and all its possible exits.
Moments later, a white car drove out of the car park and turned into the road. Seconds after that a large motorcycle and a nondescript saloon car drove slowly down the street behind it. As soon as all three vehicles had moved out of sight, Barak strode across to the hotel entrance.
Less than five minutes later a technician carrying a bulky briefcase walked into the hotel lobby. Barak nodded to him, then strode across to the reception desk where the manager was already waiting, a pass-key in his hand. The three men stepped into the elevator, and the manager pressed the button labelled '3'.
The first thing Barak saw inside Tony Baverstock's room was a laptop computer sitting on the desk by the window. He gestured to the technician, who moved across to it and powered it up, but even before the operating system loaded, a password request appeared on the screen, and the man muttered in irritation. He knew they'd never be able to guess it, and there might be a logging system builtinto the laptop that would record anyone inputting the wrong password, so he pressed the start button and held it until the computer shut down. He had a simpler solution.
From one of the pockets at the back of his briefcase he took a CD-ROM, which he inserted in the computer's drive. This contained a boot program that would start the computer independently of the programs on the hard disk, and at the same time bypass the password screen. He sat down at the desk, switched on the laptop again and watched the screen. The boot program gave him access to all the folders on the hard disk, and as soon as the system had finished loading, he plugged a lead into one of the USB ports, attached a high-capacity external hard disk and copied all the datafiles he could find on the computer, as well as the emails and the list of websites the user of the machine had recently visited. While the copying process ran, he quickly scanned the folders he thought most likely to hold details or pictures of the tablet – principally the 'Documents' and 'Pictures' folders – but without finding anything useful or informative.
'Anything there?' Barak asked, several pieces of paper in his hand.
'Nothing obvious,' the technician said, shrugging as he disconnected the external drive and replaced it in his briefcase. He knew that the techies at Glilot would find the information, if it was there.
Barak nodded to the man as he left the room, his work completed, and looked round. His search hadn't been particularly productive, but he had found a half-empty box of nine-millimetre Parabellum ammunition in a suitcase in the wardrobe, which had considerably elevated his level of concern about these three Englishmen. He'd also found several pages on which words had been scribbled – words that he knew from his conversations with Eli Nahman and Yosef Ben Halevi might have been a part of the inscription on the clay tablet they were desperately searching for.
And there were two words that had leapt out at him from one sheet. Somebody had scribbled 'Hezekiah's Tunnel' on it, and that had prompted Barak to place an urgent call to the leader of the surveillance team following the Englishmen. That was one possibility he'd managed to cover.
Ben Halevi had called him that morning to report what the other two people involved – Christopher Bronson and Angela Lewis – had asked him when they met the previous evening. It looked as if there was a real possibility one of the two groups of searchers might be getting close to finding the relics. All the Mossad had to do was sit back and wait, then move in at the last moment. It was all, Barak thought, going as he'd hoped.
He ran a pocket-sized hand-held scanner over the pages he was interested in, then replaced the sheets of paper on the desk exactly as he'd found them. He took a final look round the room, nodded to the manager, and left.
61
'Is that it?' Bronson demanded, fanning his face with his hat. They'd done a bit of shopping, and Bronson was carrying a waterproof bag holding torches and spare batteries. Both he and Angela were now wearing shorts and T-shirts, and Crocs beach shoes.
They were standing close to the bottom of the V-shaped Qidron Valley, looking across towards the Palestinian village of Silwan. Below and to their right, the focus of Bronson's attention was a set of stone steps that descended steeply towards a masonry arch, beyond which all was black.
'This is one end of it, yes,' Angela confirmed. 'This is the entrance to the Gihon Spring. This tunnel was a significant feat of engineering, especially bearing in mind that it's nearly three thousand years old. Jerusalem is situated on a hill, and was fairly easy to defend against attackers because of its elevation. The one problem the defenders had was that their principal source of water, which is right in front of us, was located out here in the Qidron Valley and lay some distance outside the walls of Jerusalem. So a siege, which was the commonest way of taking most military objectives in those days, would always result in the capture of the city because eventually the stored water supplies would run out.
'In the mid-nineteenth century an American scholar called Edward Robinson discovered what's now known as Hezekiah's Tunnel, named after the ruler of Judea who constructed it in about 700 BC. It's also called the Siloam Tunnel because it runs from the Gihon Spring to the Pool of Siloam. The tunnel was obviously intended to function as an aqueduct and channel water to the city. It's more or less S-shaped, about a third of a mile long, and there's a slope of a little under one degree all the way down, which would ensure that the water flowed in the right direction.
'Building it would have been a massive undertaking given the tools the inhabitants of the city were known to possess, and current theories suggest that the tunnel was actually partly formed from a cave that already ran most of the way. An inscription was found at one end of the tunnel stating that it was constructed by two teams of workmen, starting at opposite ends. The spring was then blocked and the diverted water allowed to flow to Jerusalem itself. That's basically the legend and more or less what the Bible claims.
'But in 1867, Charles Warren, a British army officer, was exploring Hezekiah's Tunnel and discovered another, much older, construction now called Warren's Shaft. This consisted of a short system of tunnels, which began inside the city walls and ended in a vertical shaft directly above Hezekiah's Tunnel near the Gihon Spring. It allowed the inhabitants to lower buckets into the water in the tunnel without exposing themselves outside the walls. Dating it accurately has proved difficult, but the consensus is that it was probably built in about the tenth century BC.'
'Wow,' Bronson said. 'Three thousand years ago – that's pretty old. And I guess you're going to insist on exploring it thoroughly.' He looked without enthusiasm at the gaping entrance to the spring. 'Let's get on with it. You said it'll be wet?'
'That's why we're wearing what we're wearing. This isn't just your usual damp tunnel. This is actually an aqueduct. At best we'll have to wade, and if it's really deep we might even have to swim.'
'Terrific,' Bronson muttered, and started towards the steps.
They walked down the stone stairs and passed under the arch, then stopped for a few seconds to let their eyes grow accustomed to the dark.
'It looks deep,' Bronson said, staring at the water, which appeared almost black in the gloomy interior. 'And cold,' he added.
H
e undid the waterproof bag and took out two torches. He checked that both worked properly, then handed one to Angela and resealed the bag, which still held the spare batteries.
'I hope the guy in the shop was right when he said these torches were waterproof as well,' he said.
'As long as one of them works, we'll be fine. There aren't any turnings, so all we have to do is keep walking until we get to the other end.'
'Just remind me what you think we might find down here.'
'Right. This tunnel was already almost eight hundred years old when the Sicarii were looking for a place to hide the Silver Scroll,' Angela said. 'I think the reference in the clay tablets to a cistern could mean they hid it down here.
So we'll be looking for any cracks in the rock that could conceal something, or any cavities that could have been chipped out by them. If it is somewhere in this tunnel, I'm hoping that the archaeologists might have missed it, because everybody believes that this tunnel is just an aqueduct, nothing more. As far as I know, nobody has ever done a serious search for hidden relics down here, because nobody in their right mind would hide anything in a well or cistern.'
'Except that we know they did.'
'Precisely.' Angela hesitated. 'This was my idea, so do you want me to go first?'
Bronson put his hand on her shoulder, immediately remembering that she'd never been fond of dark and confined spaces. 'No, I will,' he said, switching on his torch and stepping forward into the dark water.
'Watch your head,' Angela said, following close behind him. 'The lowest roof height is under five feet.'
Within a few steps they were both in water – cold water – up to their knees. Their flashlights illuminated walls and ceiling of grey-brown rock, peppered with thousands of small white spots.
'They're the marks left by the picks and other tools when King Hezekiah's men dug this tunnel,' Angela explained.
'You're right. This would have been a mammoth undertaking,' Bronson said, his voice echoing slightly as they moved deeper into the darkness.
The light from his torch suddenly showed that the tunnel branched to the left, the ceiling height dropping steadily. He turned that way, crouching down and shining his torch upwards. The short tunnel ended abruptly, but above them was an opening in the ceiling. Bronson stopped and moved slightly to one side so that Angela could crouch beside him.
'What's that?' he asked. 'It looks like it could be a tunnel or shaft going vertically upwards.'
'That's exactly what it is. What you're looking at is the bottom of Warren's Shaft. Up there is where the inhabitants of Jerusalem would have come with their buckets to collect water. They'd have lowered them down that shaft.'
Bronson could feel his heart thumping with anticipation as they shone their torches up at the stone walls above them. But there were no signs of any possible hiding places.
'I'd have been very surprised if there was anything up there,' Angela said. 'This area and that shaft have been thoroughly explored from both directions. If the scroll is somewhere in here, it won't be anywhere as obvious as that.'
They backed out and moved on, the water level and the height and width of the tunnel varying considerably as they progressed. It was very cold and very dark, and both of them were already shivering, their clothes soaked through. Instead of the light shorts and T-shirts they were wearing, Bronson realized they'd have been better advised to bring wetsuits or even thigh waders. They walked on, the temperature dropping still further and the water becoming deeper. As his shivering increased, Bronson began to wonder just how long either of them would be able to continue.
62
'Are you sure this is the place?' Dexter asked, the beam of his flashlight playing over the walls of the tunnel.
All three men were standing in water up to their thighs, their shorts and the lower parts of their shirts soaked. So far they'd found nothing at all.
'I keep telling you that I don't know,' Baverstock said, his voice angry. 'This was my best guess, based on the mention of a cistern in the clay tablets. Hezekiah's Tunnel was the most important water source the people of Jerusalem had, so logically it was certainly somewhere we had to check. And it's close enough to the Temple Mount to match the "end of days" reference as well.'
'The trouble is that this is just a tunnel hacked out of the rock,' Dexter said. 'There are virtually no hiding places anywhere in it, as far as I can see.'
'Well, we certainly won't find anything if we just stand here talking,' Baverstock growled. 'Keep moving, and keep looking. I only want to do this once.'
* * *
Bronson and Angela had been walking for perhaps twenty-five minutes when their torches picked out an almost pagoda-shaped and fairly low section of the roof, the rock in the centre forming a graceful downward curve while the edges extended slightly upwards. That section of the tunnel was fairly wide.
'This is the meeting point,' Angela said. 'This is where the two tunnelling crews met back in 701 BC.'
'That's amazing,' Bronson said, 'especially when you think how easily they could have missed each other. Look at the technology they had to use in the Channel Tunnel to make sure both teams arrived at the same place at the same time.'
They moved on, and a few moments later Bronson stopped again.
'There's another really short tunnel here,' he said. 'It's only a few feet long.'
'There are two of these,' Angela told him. 'It looks as if they were started by the workmen who were digging towards the spring, but then they must have realized they were heading in the wrong direction and abandoned them.'
They checked every inch of the false tunnel, above and below the water level, then carried on to the second one, where they repeated the process.
'The walls and roof are pretty rough in places, but I've not noticed anything that could be a hiding place for a box of matches, far less a two-foot-long scroll,' Bronson said.
'And I assume what we're looking for would be at least that sort of size?'
'Probably, maybe even bigger than that.' Angela sounded fed up. 'I still think this was the most likely place for them to have hidden it, but maybe I misread the clues.
Anyway, we're here now, so let's keep looking.'
A few minutes later, as they approached the Pool of Siloam and the ceiling height rose considerably, Bronson spotted a dark oval in the wall high above them.
'That's worth a look,' he said, moving his torch around to try to illuminate the opening better. 'I think that's a cavity.'
Angela peered up as well. 'You could be right,' she said, sounding more hopeful.
Bronson found a small ledge and carefully placed his torch on that to provide some light. 'I reckon it's about ten feet up,' he said. 'If you stand on my shoulders you should be able to reach inside it.'
Angela switched off her own torch and tucked it inside the pocket of her shorts.
Bronson cupped his hands together. Angela put her foot in the stirrup he'd formed, rested her back against the wall of the tunnel and lifted herself up. As she placed her feet on his shoulders, Bronson moved slightly forward and braced his arms against both sides of the narrow tunnel.
'Can you reach it?' he asked.
'Yes. I'm just about to feel inside.' There was a pause, and then Angela's voice, high and breathy with excitement, announced: 'There's something here!'
63
'Can you hear voices in front of us?' Dexter asked.
Baverstock was dismissive. 'Yes, but don't worry about it. A lot of tourists come here to do this walk.
They think it gets them closer to God. Just keep looking.'
'I won't be sorry to get out of here,' Hoxton muttered.
'This place gives me the creeps.'
Bronson could feel Angela's feet moving slightly on his shoulders as she stretched up to reach into the cavity.
'What is it?' he asked.
'I don't know. Something round and solid. Hang on. I'll try to pull it out.'
She reached up again and tugged at the ob
ject her fingers had found. There was a scraping sound, and then she lost her grip on it. Something tumbled down, clattering against the rock wall, and fell with a splash into the water.
'Oh, damn it.'
* * *
Less than twenty yards behind them, Tony Baverstock stopped dead and stood in absolute silence, listening. Then he turned to Hoxton.
'I recognize that voice,' he whispered. 'That's Angela Lewis, which means the man with her is probably her exhusband.
These are the two I told you about. That means she's following the same trail we are. She's been looking at the same clues as I have, and she must have come to the same conclusion.'
'But has she found the Silver Scroll?' Hoxton asked.
'That's all that matters.'
'I don't know,' Baverstock said, 'but we'd better get up there and find out.'
Without a word, Hoxton and Dexter moved forward, heading down the tunnel towards the sound of the two voices, Hoxton pulling a small semi-automatic pistol from his pocket as he did so.
'Was that it, Angela?' Bronson asked.
'It was definitely something. Hang on – let me just check and see if there's anything else in the hole.' She paused, then added: 'No, and it isn't really a cavity, more like a small ledge.'
Quickly, she climbed down off Bronson's shoulders and back onto the floor of the tunnel.
'It landed just about there,' Bronson said, shining his torch at the water.
'Good,' a new voice said, and two torches snapped into life, their beams instantly dazzling Bronson and Angela.
'Who the hell are you?' Angela demanded.
Nobody responded immediately, but Bronson heard the unmistakable snicking sound as the slide of an automatic pistol was pulled back to chamber a round.
'Get behind me, Angela,' he said.
'Very noble,' the voice mocked. 'But if you don't get the hell out of here right now, you'll both be dead. You've got five seconds.'
'We—' Angela said, then stopped talking as Bronson grabbed her arm and began pulling her down the tunnel.