The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  'Come on, Angela,' Bronson said. 'We're out of here.'

  Hoxton waited until the splashing sounds had diminished almost to nothing as Bronson and Angela scrambled away down the tunnel, heading towards the Pool of Siloam.

  'Right,' he said, turning to Dexter and putting away his pistol. He aimed the beam of his torch at the dark surface of the water. 'That's where they said it fell, so why don't you find out what it was?'

  'Me?' Dexter asked.

  'There's nobody else here, is there? I'll stand guard, make sure those two don't come back.'

  Dexter muttered something under his breath, then handed his torch to Hoxton, took a deep breath and reached down. His head went below the surface as his hands searched the floor of the tunnel, and a few seconds later he popped up again, holding a round object.

  'What is it?' Baverstock demanded eagerly as he walked up to join his two companions.

  Hoxton focused the beam of his torch on the object, then muttered in disappointment. Dexter was holding nothing more than a round rock, about four inches in diameter.

  'Is that it?'

  'It's all I could find down there on the floor,' Dexter said, 'but I'll take another look.'

  He handed the stone to Hoxton and submerged again.

  'There's nothing else down there,' Dexter said a few seconds later, standing upright and shaking the water out of his hair.

  Hoxton shone his torch up and around them, then focused on the same ledge Bronson had spotted. 'It had to have come from up there,' he said, his voice sharp with bitterness. 'Christ – what a let-down. I really thought that was it. I guess it's been sitting on that ledge for the last few million years. Right, let's move on.'

  Bronson and Angela stepped out of the dark archway and emerged blinking into bright sunlight at the Pool of Siloam. Their transit through Hezekiah's Tunnel had taken them well over an hour, but they'd covered the last section as quickly as they could, not knowing who the armed men behind them were, or what they wanted. And they were still empty-handed, apart from the small waterproof bag holding their torch batteries.

  The Pool was at the bottom of an oblong space between some of Jerusalem's old stone buildings. Almost opposite the archway, a flight of concrete steps, the open side protected by a steel banister, led up to the street above.

  About half a dozen young children wearing tattered shorts played in the water, splashing about, laughing and calling to each other, their gaiety in stark contrast to Bronson's mood.

  'Well, that was a complete waste of time,' he grumbled, as he and Angela climbed the steps out of the Pool. They were both dripping wet and still cold, though the heat of the sun was already starting to dry their light clothes.

  'Not the most pleasant experience of my life,' Angela agreed.

  'But we're out and safe, that's the main thing. Are you sure that what you dislodged from that ledge was just a stone, not a cylinder or anything like that?'

  'No, definitely not. It was round and heavy. To me, it felt just like a rock, and that's what it sounded like when it hit the wall of the tunnel. Now, who the hell were those two men?'

  'I don't know, but I do know that we're in serious danger. This is the second time in two days that we've been threatened by a man with a gun. Both times we've been really lucky to get away, and I have no idea how long our luck's going to hold. I don't know who those two men were – they sounded too English to be part of Yacoub's gang – but they're obviously looking for the same thing as us. Look, why don't we call it a day? No ancient relic is worth dying for, surely?'

  'I'm sorry, Chris, but if our deduction is right, many people have already died over the centuries, either looking for it or trying to protect it. I'm not about to give up, not when I think we're so close to finding it. I'm determined to see this through to the end, whatever the cost.'

  64

  Bronson and Angela decided to spend the night in Jerusalem. Their choice of accommodation in Tel Aviv had proved too dangerous – or too easy for somebody dangerous to identify – so Bronson was determined to avoid the bigger places.

  He drove around the outskirts of the city and finally selected a small hotel in the north-western suburb of Giv'at Sha'ul. The district was set on mainly sloping ground up in the Judean Hills, and dominated by a huge cemetery. The hotel was down a narrow, steep and flagstoned side-street, barely wide enough for a small car to negotiate. Bronson didn't even bother trying, just parked the hire car round the corner, walked back to the building and took two rooms on the third floor.

  Giv'at Sha'ul was a strange mix of building styles. In stark contrast to the ancient heart of Jerusalem, where you could actually touch stone walls that had been in place for millennia, most of the buildings in the suburb were small, single-storey houses, many of them in poor condition, despite being well under half a century old. Interspersed with these were a number of featureless concrete apartment blocks, most of them low-rise, though a few boasted a dozen or more floors, and the occasional detached building that hinted at long-gone days of elegance and sophistication. A handful of hotels, cafés and restaurants completed the picture.

  The predominantly square-edged concrete and stone architecture was relieved in just a few spots by tree-shaded open areas, but Giv'at Sha'ul had no pretensions – it was a district where people lived and worked and prayed. It was functional and basic, and Bronson hoped they could just vanish from sight there. His only worry was that the hotel receptionist had insisted on copying their passports, because Israeli hotels had to charge VAT to all non-tourists, and Bronson's offer to pay both the tax and the hotel bill in cash had been dismissed. The law, the receptionist explained somewhat stiffly in fractured English, was the law.

  Once they'd checked in, Bronson and Angela walked out of the building. They were both starving, having eaten nothing since their very early breakfast, but the hotel's small dining room didn't open for another hour. They walked towards the centre of Giv'at Sha'ul and quickly found a café that was already serving dinner. They took a table right at the back, allowing Bronson a clear view of the door, and ate their meals quickly and with a minimum of conversation.

  When they stepped outside, the daylight was fading and another spectacular sunset decorated the western sky.

  'Beautiful, isn't it?' Angela murmured, stopping on the cracked pavement for a few seconds to stare at the irregular bands and swirls of colour that marked the position of the setting sun.

  'Yes, it is,' Bronson agreed simply, taking her hand as he stood beside her. Again he wished they were just tourists, two people taking a holiday, instead of being embroiled in a search that seemed to him to be getting more dangerous with every hour that passed.

  'Right, let's get back to the hotel. We've got a lot to do.'

  Bronson smiled wryly as he turned to follow Angela.

  Five seconds to enjoy a sunset, then back to work. The search for the relics had really got to her.

  There were no mini-bars in their rooms at the hotel so, as Angela headed up the stairs, Bronson picked up a couple of gins and a bottle of tonic from the bar as a nightcap.

  When they were settled in her room, their drinks on the tiny round table in front of them, Bronson asked the obvious question.

  'Well, Hezekiah's Tunnel was a complete wash-out, so what do we do now?'

  'What I would expect any competent police officer to do,' Angela said, looking across at him impatiently. 'We look at the evidence. We reread the Aramaic text and assess it again.'

  She leant back in her chair.

  'As I see it, there are only three possibilities. First, and most obviously, we have been searching in the right place, but over the last two millennia somebody else went looking in Hezekiah's Tunnel, found the Silver Scroll and sold it, or melted it down or something, so it's simply no longer around to be found. Obviously, I hope that didn't happen.'

  'Could that be the case, though? Are we chasing something that isn't there any more?'

  'It's possible, but I don't think it's likely.
Something unique and robust like the Silver Scroll would almost certainly have survived intact. Anybody finding it would probably guess that the value of the metal itself was far outweighed by the historical importance of the inscription.

  And if it had been found, I think there'd be something in the historical record about it.

  'The second possibility is that the relic is still hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the Temple Mount, but not in Hezekiah's Tunnel. If that is the case, we've got problems.

  There are a lot of tunnels known to exist under the Mount, but access to them is impossible because the entrances have been bricked up or are blocked by tons of rubble. And then there are the forty-odd cisterns on the Mount itself, on what's known as the Lower Platform, and some of those are huge.

  'You have to remember that the Temple Mount is one of the oldest building sites in history; over the centuries dozens of architects and builders have left their mark on it.' She paused, then reached for her laptop bag. 'Look, it'll be easier if I can show you on a picture.'

  She pulled up a plan of the Temple Mount and began pointing out the salient features.

  'The Mount is constructed from four walls that surround a natural hill and form a pretty big flat-topped structure. The walls to the east and south are visible, but the one supporting the northern side is completely hidden behind later houses and other buildings. The northern end of the Western Wall is also hidden by later construction, and a large section of it is actually under the ground.

  There's a further flat platform built on the top of the Mount, and this section also includes the bedrock of the original hill itself. The Dome of the Rock – that's the spectacular structure topped with a gold dome – is the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem, and it's built on this platform.

  'The bedrock – the Foundation Stone – forms the centrepiece of the building, because that was where Muslims believe that Mohammed started his journey to heaven. Below the Foundation Stone is a small cave known as the Well of Souls, where Muslims believe that the spirits of the dead will assemble for judgement by God when the world comes to an end.'

  'Right,' Bronson said. 'I'm with you so far.'

  'Good,' Angela grinned, and Bronson had to stop himself from leaning forward to kiss her.

  'Now, all that's on the upper platform, but it's the lower platform that covers the majority of the surface of the Temple Mount. At one end is the al-Aqsa Mosque – that's the building with the grey dome. There are gardens on the eastern and northern sides and an Islamic school right at the northern tip. There's a fountain known as al-Kas on the platform that originally obtained its water from what were known as Solomon's Pools up at Bethlehem, fed by another aqueduct. Today, it's connected to Jerusalem's main water supply.'

  Angela indicated a spot on the edge of the plan of the Mount.

  'There are several gates in the walls, and probably the best known is the Golden Gate. According to tradition, that's the one the Jewish Messiah will use when he finally enters Jerusalem, but he'd better remember to bring a hammer and chisel with him, because that entrance is completely blocked with masonry at the moment. In fact, all the gates are sealed up. Others include the two Huldah Gates, known as the triple and double gates because one has three arches and the other two. These were the original entrance and exit to the Mount from the oldest part of Jerusalem, known as Ophel. Then there's Barclay's Gate – nothing to do with the bank, obviously – and Warren's Gate. That was named after Charles Warren. I've mentioned him a couple of times already, but you should definitely know who he was.'

  'Me? Why?'

  'Ever heard of Jack the Ripper?'

  'That Charles Warren? The Commissioner of Scotland Yard? What the hell was he doing in Jerusalem?'

  Angela smiled again. 'Before he failed to catch the most notorious mass-murderer in British history, he was an officer – a lieutenant – in the Royal Engineers. In 1867 he was tasked with exploring the Temple Mount in an expedition financed by the Palestine Exploration Fund. The investigation revealed several tunnels that ran underneath both Jerusalem itself and the Temple Mount, including some that passed directly under the old headquarters of the Knights Templar. Other tunnels ended in various cisterns, and so presumably were disused aqueducts.

  'As well as these tunnels, he also explored inside the various blocked gates. The Golden Gate, Warren's Gate and Barclay's Gate opened onto passages and staircases that originally led up to the surface of the Temple Mount. Behind the Huldah Gates were tunnels that went some distance under the Mount before sets of stairs led to the surface north of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

  'The interesting bit is that to the east of the passage leading from the triple gate is a large vaulted chamber, usually referred to as King Solomon's Stables, though there's definitely no connection with Solomon. That chamber was built by Herod when he was carrying out his extensive works, and there is evidence that the area was used as a stable, probably by the Crusaders. Warren established that one function of this section was to support the corner of the Temple Mount itself.

  'Warren also discovered that there were numerous tunnels running underneath the triple gate passage, and below the base level of the Mount. They led in different directions, but he had no idea about their function or purpose. And, of course, since Warren's nineteenthcentury investigation, nobody else has been allowed inside the Mount to check them out.'

  'And we can't get inside the gates or the tunnels?'

  'No,' Angela replied. 'Back in 1910 there was a case of an Englishman named Montague Parker who bribed the Muslim guards on the Temple Mount and started digging at night near Warren's Shaft. There was a huge outcry when he was discovered, riots even, and he was lucky to escape with his life. It was a complicated story, involving a Finnish mystic who claimed that he'd found clues encoded in the Hebrew Bible – in Ezekial, in fact – that indicated the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant. Here,' she added, 'I'll show you on the internet.'

  She input a search string into Google, selected one of the hits and double-clicked on the link. The page opened, and she scrolled partway down.

  'That's Montague Parker,' she said, pointing to a photograph of a man, his features indistinct, who was wearing what appeared to be a Royal Navy officer's cap and standing on the terrace of a hotel, its name partially visible behind him.

  She reached for the touchpad again, but Bronson stopped her with a gesture. 'Did you read that?' he said, pointing at the text below the photograph.

  'No,' Angela said, looking more closely. After a couple of minutes she sat back. 'Bugger! I wish I'd seen this website before we went to Gihon Spring. I didn't know they'd done that.'

  The text they were looking at explained in some detail how Montague Parker's expedition had spent almost three years digging and widening in Hezekiah's Tunnel in a desperate search to find the Ark of the Covenant.

  'That's really irritating,' Angela said, her features clouded with annoyance. 'I should have done more research. Not only was it a waste of time, but we nearly got killed in the process.'

  'What about these other cisterns?' Bronson asked, tactfully changing the subject.

  'Oh, yes. Right, mostly they're of very varied design and construction, presumably because they were built by several different groups of people over the centuries. Some of them are just chambers roughly cut out of the rock, while others were constructed with more care and attention. A couple of them – the ones normally known as cisterns one and five – might possibly have had some kind of religious function connected with the Second Temple altar, because of their location on the Mount. Cistern five also contains a doorway blocked with earth, so there could well be a further chamber or chambers beyond what's known to exist now.'

  'How big are these cisterns? Do they just hold a few gallons of water, or are they really big?'

  'Some of them are huge. Cistern eight can hold several hundred thousand gallons, and number eleven has the potential to store nearly a million gallons. Most of the others are smaller, but they wer
e all designed as proper cisterns, with reasonably high capacities. Don't forget, in antiquity water conservation was absolutely essential, and these cisterns were intended to hold every drop of rainwater that fell.'

  'But from what you've said, they can't be accurately dated, so we have no idea which of them were already in existence when the Sicarii were looking for a hiding place for their relics?'

  'Exactly.'

  'Let me have another look at the translation we did, please,' Bronson asked.

  Angela opened her handbag and pulled out half a dozen folded sheets of paper. Bronson riffled through them.

  'I thought so,' he said. 'The text specifically states "the cistern", and that's followed by two words we haven't cracked, then "place of", another blank and then "end of days". Our interpretation of that was "the cistern at the place of the end of days". If there was more than one cistern in the place where the Sicarii hid the relic, wouldn't it make sense for them to have written "the cistern at the northern edge of the Mount" or something like that? I think what they wrote implies that there was only a single cistern in the place they chose, and that it would be a cistern everybody would be aware of.'

  'That's why I thought Hezekiah's Tunnel was the right location. It was certainly in existence at the time, and it was the biggest and most famous of all the cisterns near Jerusalem. But this information destroys that theory.'

  'Then there's only really one conclusion we can draw,' Bronson said.

  'Which is what?'

  'That we've been looking in completely the wrong place. Wherever the Sicarii hid the relics, it probably wasn't in Jerusalem.' He yawned – it had been a very long day. 'We need to look at the whole inscription again.'

  65

  'I was so sure we were right,' Angela said. 'It all seemed to fit so well, especially as Hezekiah's Tunnel is the most obvious of all the cisterns.'

  It was early morning in the holiest of cities, a salmonpink sky presaging yet another blisteringly hot day. They'd been woken by the electronically amplified cries of the muezzins summoning the faithful to worship, a discordant and unforgettable dawn chorus borne on the still air from the mosques of Jerusalem.