The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  They were again sitting in Angela's room, drinking bad instant coffee made worse by powdered creamer. Bronson had slept like a log, but Angela's face was pale and she had dark shadows under her eyes. He guessed she'd stayed awake for much of the night puzzling over the meaning of the inscription and the location of the lost scroll.

  Bronson picked up the sheets of paper on which they'd written out the translation of the inscription and glanced through the disjointed text, hoping for inspiration.

  'This phrase about the "end of days" would fit very neatly with the Well of Souls, the cave on the Temple Mount where Muslims believe that the dead will gather to wait for judgement when the world ends,' he said, then paused for a few seconds. 'No – hang on a minute. The Sicarii weren't Muslims. In fact, Islam as a religion didn't even exist until about half a millennium after the fall of Masada, so our premise about the location must be wrong.'

  Angela shook her head. 'It's not that simple, Chris. I wasn't suggesting the hiding place had anything to do with the Well of Souls. My interpretation of the "end of days" expression was that it referred to the Jewish beliefs about the Third Temple – they think the end of the world will come shortly after it's built. Yosef Ben Halevi talked to us about this, if you remember. Like the Muslims, the Jews also think that the "place of the end of days" – the place where the world will end – is most likely to be the Temple Mount.'

  Bronson looked crestfallen. 'Damn,' he muttered, 'I thought I'd spotted the fatal flaw in your argument. So if Armageddon is definitely going to take place here in Jerusalem, the Sicarii must have hidden the Silver Scroll somewhere here. All we can be certain of is that they didn't stick it in Hezekiah's Tunnel.'

  For a few seconds Angela just stared at him, an inscrutable expression on her face.

  'What?' Bronson demanded.

  'Did I ever tell you you were a genius?' Angela asked, her eyes shining.

  'Nothing like often enough,' Bronson said modestly. 'What did I do this time?'

  'You've just made the obvious connection that I missed. I was so sure about the Temple Mount that I completely forgot about Armageddon – and that's somewhere very different.'

  'But I thought Armageddon was an event, not a place?'

  'When most people talk about it they assume it means the end of the world. But in fact it is an actual place. It's called Har Megiddo, the hill of Megiddo, and it's about fifty miles north of Jerusalem. That's where, according to the Bible, the "battle of the end of days" will take place, when the forces of good and evil confront each other for the last time.'

  'The "place of the end of days" would fit, then?'

  'It would match the expression very well. I don't know too much about the site, so I'll need to do some more research.'

  'But how do you get "Armageddon" from "Har Megiddo"?' Bronson asked.

  'Well, it's not exactly a mistranslation from the Bible,' Angela said, 'not like the camel passing through the eye of a needle.'

  'That's a mistranslation?' Bronson asked. 'I didn't know that.'

  'Yes. Why on earth would a camel want to go through the eye of a needle? It's yet another biblical expression that doesn't make the slightest bit of sense, but which has been trotted out in pulpits by preachers for hundreds of years, none of whom stopped to wonder what the expression was supposed to mean. Of course it's a mistranslation.'

  'So what should it be?' Bronson asked.

  'Most of the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, with a few chapters of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic, but the New Testament was in Koine Greek. The first translation was started by a man named John Wycliffe and finally completed by John Purvey in 1388. For the King James Bible, a group of over fifty scholars worked on not only the original Hebrew and Greek versions of the two books, but also looked at all the extant translations that had been made.

  'It was translation by committee, and not surprisingly mistakes were made. There are two very similar words in Greek: camilos, meaning "rope", and camelos, which translates as "camel". Whoever was doing that bit of the New Testament misread the "i" in the Greek as an "e", and the Church has been stuck with his mistake ever since. Amazing, isn't it?'

  Bronson shook his head. 'Now I think about it, I suppose it is. So what about Armageddon?'

  'Right. The name of the place is Megiddo, and it's normally prefixed by either "tel", meaning "mound", or more commonly "har" or "hill". It's not too big a jump to see how the name "Har Megiddo" could have been corrupted over the years into "Armageddon". Megiddo was one of the oldest and most important cities in this country, and the plain below it was the site of the first ever recorded pitched battle. In fact, there've been dozens of battles – over thirty in all, I think – at that location, and three "Battles of Megiddo". The last one took place in 1918 between British forces and troops of the Ottoman Empire. But the most famous was the first one, in the fifteenth century BC, between Egyptian forces under the Pharaoh Thutmose III and a Canaanite army led by the King of Kadesh, who'd joined forces with the ruler of Megiddo. Kadesh was in what's now Syria, not far from the modern city of Hims and, like Megiddo, it was an important fortified town. We know so much about this battle because a record of what happened was carved into the walls of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt.'

  'So it was the site of the first battle in recorded history, and will also be where the last one takes place?'

  'If you believe what it says in the Book of Revelation, yes. According to that source, Har Megiddo, or Armageddon, will be the site of the "Battle of the end of days", the ultimate contest between the forces of good and evil. It really is the place at the end of the world.'

  66

  Dexter swung the wheel of the hired Fiat to the right and accelerated along the street that ran behind the hotel in Giv'at Sha'ul where, according to one of Hoxton's contacts in Jerusalem, Angela Lewis and Chris Bronson had taken two rooms.

  In the passenger seat beside him, Hoxton was carefully feeding nine-millimetre Parabellum shells into the magazine of a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol. On the floor in front of him, tucked out of sight, was another pistol – an old but serviceable Walther P38 – that he'd already checked and loaded.

  Two days earlier, he'd met with a former Israeli Army officer on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The price the man had demanded for the weapons and ammunition – he'd bought three pistols from him – was, Hoxton knew, nothing short of extortionate, but the Israeli was the only person he knew in the country who could supply what he wanted and, just as important, not ask any questions.

  'Stop somewhere here,' Hoxton ordered.

  Dexter found a vacant space on the right-hand side of the road and parked the car in the early-morning sunshine.

  'Their hotel's just around the corner,' Hoxton said, handing over the Walther.

  'I'm not that good with guns,' Dexter muttered, looking down at the blued steel of the pistol in his hand. 'Do I really have to take this?'

  'Damn right you do. I've come too far to let this pair beat me now. We're going to find the Silver Scroll, and the only way to guarantee we can do that is to grab all the information – photographs, translations, whatever – the two of them have got. If we have to kill Bronson and the woman to get their stuff, than that's what we'll do.'

  Dexter still looked unhappy.

  'It's easy,' Hoxton said. 'You just point the pistol and pull the trigger. We'll kill Bronson first – he's the most dangerous – and Angela Lewis will be a lot more cooperative if she's just watched her former husband die.'

  The two men got out of the car, both tucking the weapons into the waistbands of their trousers, under their jackets. They walked around the corner, then down the street to the hotel, and straight in through the lobby.

  67

  'So where is Megiddo? I presume we'll be going there.'

  'Oh, we'll certainly be going there. It's in northern Israel, on the Plain of Esdraelon overlooking the Jezreel Valley.'

  Angela clicked the touchpad on her laptop and br
ought up a detailed map of Israel.

  'This is Esdraelon,' she said, indicating an area close to the northern frontier of the country. 'The Jezreel Valley is shaped a bit like a triangle lying on its side, with the point at the Mediterranean coast and the base paralleling the River Jordan, just here. All that area was once under water. In fact, it was the waterway that linked the inland body of water that's now called the Dead Sea with the Mediterranean. About two million years ago, tectonic shift caused the land lying between the Great Rift Valley in Africa and this end of the Mediterranean to rise, and the waterway turned into dry land. Once the Dead Sea no longer had an outlet, its salinity started to increase, with the result we see today.'

  'So what's at Megiddo? A ruined castle or something?'

  'More or less. The point about Megiddo was that it had enormous strategic importance. In ancient times there was a major trade and military route known in Latin as the Via Maris or "Road of the Sea" and as Derekh HaYam in Hebrew. This ran from Egypt and up the flat land beside the Mediterranean to Damascus and Mesopotamia. Now, whoever occupied Megiddo controlled the section of this route that was known as the Nahal Iron – the word nahal means a dry river bed – and hence could control all the traffic along the route itself.

  'Because of its location, Megiddo is one of the oldest known inhabited places in this part of the world. In fact, in any part of the world. The first settlement there dates from around 7000 BC – over nine thousand years ago – and it was finally abandoned in the fifth century BC, so the site was continually occupied for about six thousand five hundred years.'

  'So when the Sicarii went there – assuming you're correct – the place would already have been a ruin?'

  'Oh, yes,' Angela agreed. 'The site would have been deserted for well over half a millennium by that time.'

  'And you think that could be the place referred to in the inscriptions? I mean, you now think it's more likely than Hezekiah's Tunnel or somewhere on the Temple Mount?'

  'Yes, I do.' Angela looked apologetic. 'I suppose with hindsight I should have thought about it a bit more, and I should certainly have checked on what had been done in Hezekiah's Tunnel in the past. And – as you pointed out – with all the activity on and inside the Temple Mount over the years, the chances of anything like the Silver Scroll remaining undiscovered there were pretty slim.'

  'So what about Megiddo, then? Has that had scores of archaeologists poring over it as well?' Bronson sounded uncertain.

  'Oddly enough, no. It has been excavated, of course, but not as often, nor as exhaustively, as you might expect, given its history. Virtually nobody dug there at all until 1903, when a man named Gottlieb Schumacher led an expedition, funded by the German Society for Oriental Research. Twenty years later John D. Rockefeller financed an expedition by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, and that continued until the start of the Second World War.'

  'Hang on, that's a dig lasting sixteen years,' Bronson pointed out. 'They must have pretty much covered the whole site.'

  'It was a long expedition, true, but Megiddo is simply huge. The city mound itself covers about fifteen acres, and most archaeological digs tend to be focused in one fairly small area and are vertical rather than horizontal. They're usually interested in digging down through the different layers that represent the various civilizations that have occupied the site, and that's certainly what the Chicago team did.

  'After that, not too much happened at Megiddo. An Israeli archaeologist named Yigael Yadin did a bit of work there in the 1960s, and since then there have been excavations on the site every other year, funded by the Megiddo Expedition based at the university here in Tel Aviv.'

  'That still sounds like quite a lot of activity,' Bronson said doubtfully.

  'Perhaps it is,' Angela agreed, 'but the point is that if any of these expeditions had found the Silver Scroll, the whole world would know about it already. And don't forget, none of these archaeologists were looking for what might be described as buried treasure. They were just trying to uncover the history of the site. We're not. We're going there to look for one very specific object, in one very specific place.'

  'So there is a cistern somewhere on the hill?' Bronson asked.

  'In fact, there isn't,' Angela said, with a slight smile, 'and that's good news. A cistern is where you store water, but a well or a spring is a source of water. When we were checking our transcriptions using the online dictionary, it suggested that the Aramaic word I'd translated as "cistern" more accurately meant a well. And what's at Har Megiddo is a well, not a cistern. That's another indicator that we're now on the right track.'

  'Right,' Bronson said. 'There's no time to lose. I'll just go and get my things together. We can look at the route once we're in the car and heading north.' He looked at his watch. 'Ready in five?'

  68

  'They're on the third floor,' Hoxton muttered, as he pushed the button to call the lift. 'Adjoining rooms, 305 and 307. This shouldn't take long.'

  They stepped out of the lift together, and walked down the narrow corridor. Outside number 305 they stopped.

  Hoxton leant forward, pressing his ear against the door.

  'I can hear movement inside,' he whispered, stepping back and easing the Browning out of his waistband. 'You cover the other door,' he told Dexter. He watched as his companion moved a few feet down the corridor. 'Ready?'

  Dexter looked unhappy but took a firm grip of the pistol and nodded. Hoxton rapped sharply on the door.

  'Who is it?' Bronson asked.

  'Maintenance,' an indistinct but clearly male voice replied. 'There's a problem with one of the lights in your room that we need to fix.'

  Bronson stepped back. Two things bothered him about what he'd just heard. First, every member of hotel staff they'd talked to so far had spoken English to some extent, some of them haltingly, others quite fluently. But the man outside the door didn't just speak English: as far as Bronson could tell, he was English. Why would an Englishman be working as a maintenance man in a small hotel in Jerusalem?

  The second thing was that all the lights in the bedroom and bathroom were working perfectly.

  'I've just got out of the shower,' Bronson said. 'Let me put on some clothes.'

  Walking quickly across the room, he stuffed the rest of his possessions into the overnight bag he'd been packing, and then crossed to the connecting door with room 307 and knocked gently.

  'I'll only be a few seconds,' he said aloud, as the connecting door opened.

  Swiftly, Bronson slipped through into Angela's room, pushed the door to behind him and locked it. 'We've got company,' he said. 'Get your stuff together. We need to get out of here right now.'

  Quickly Angela shoved all her clothes into her carry-on bag. Bronson closed her laptop and slid it, with the papers and notes, into her leather computer case. As he did so, there was a splintering sound from the adjoining room.

  Striding over to the door, Bronson transferred his bag to his left hand, and turned the handle gently with his right. But as he eased the door open, a figure on the other side kicked out, slamming the door back against the wall, just missing Bronson. And, as Bronson looked out into the corridor, he immediately registered the pistol the man was holding in his hand.

  Bronson reacted instantly. He swung his overnight bag towards the man's face, then kicked out with his right foot. His blow caught the stranger's forearm and knocked the pistol off aim, and Bronson followed up the kick with a hard right-hand punch to the man's stomach. The gunman bent forward, retching, and the pistol clattered to the floor. Bronson brought his right knee up, hard, into the man's face.

  The gunman yelled in pain, as spurts of blood from his broken nose splattered the carpet in the hallway.

  'Run,' Bronson shouted, pointing down the corridor, towards the fire escape.

  As Angela sprinted down the corridor, Bronson reached down and tried to grab the fallen pistol, but the gunman was too quick for him and grabbed for it himself. Bronson kicked out, send
ing the weapon skittering across the floor and out of reach, then turned and ran after Angela. Behind him, he heard cursing amid the cries of pain, and guessed that his attacker's companion was chasing after him.

  There was a right-angle bend in the corridor, which Bronson took at speed, but then he slammed to a halt. The rest of the corridor was straight, and Angela was still only about halfway down it. Unless he could manage to slow down their pursuer, they'd both be sitting ducks as soon as the man rounded the corner.

  He looked around for a weapon – any weapon. Absolutely the only thing there was a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall beside him. That would have to do. He dropped his bag and snatched it off the bracket.

  Bronson moved slightly forward until he was right at the corner, and listened to the sound of running footsteps, trying to calculate just how close his pursuer was. Then he stepped forward, swinging the extinguisher in a vicious arc at waist height.

  The man running towards him, an automatic pistol gripped in his right hand, had no chance to react. The extinguisher hit him full in the stomach and he fell backwards, gasping for breath. But he held on to his pistol and, even as he tumbled to the floor, he pulled the trigger.

  The crash of the shot in the confined space was deafening. The bullet missed Bronson by feet, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. He knew the man would recover in seconds, and didn't hesitate, just threw the extinguisher at his attacker, grabbed his bag and ran for it.

  At the end of the corridor the emergency exit doors beckoned. Bronson caught up with Angela just as she reached them, and pushed hard on the horizontal safety bar holding them closed. As the doors smashed open a siren began wailing. Bronson pushed Angela outside just as another shot echoed down the corridor, the flat slap of the bullet hitting the wall behind them clearly audible.

  In front of them was a small square concrete platform, sections of steps descending from it in a zig-zag pattern down to the street below, and another flight reaching up to the upper floors of the building.