by James Becker
'I am an academic, but I've always been quite happy to do a bit of freelancing on the side. Rather like you, in fact.'
'And if we give you the scroll, you'll let us go?' Angela asked.
'Don't be so naïve,' Hoxton snapped. 'If we let you live, you'll tell somebody about this scroll and the Middle East will be full of treasure hunters within a matter of days. Your career, and your life, are going to end right here.'
'I'm a British police officer,' Bronson warned him. 'Kill me and you'll have every copper in Britain looking for you.'
'If we were in a cellar in England, I'd agree with you, but we're standing underneath a deserted fortress in the middle of Israel. Nobody's going to know you're dead; no one will ever know you were even here. Both your bodies will simply vanish. That well behind you is deep enough to hold your bones for all eternity. Now, hand over that scroll.' Hoxton pointed at Baverstock. 'Get it, Tony.'
Baverstock took a step towards the staircase leading down to the platform to take the relic, his pistol pointing at Angela, but Bronson had one desperate card left to play.
He grabbed the scroll and jumped back, holding the relic directly above the dark water of the well.
'One more step and I'll drop this,' he threatened. 'I've no idea how far down this spring goes, but I can promise you it is deep. You'll need specialist diving equipment to recover it – if you ever do. As you said, this well could hold its secrets for all eternity.'
For several seconds nobody spoke or moved, and then a single shot rang out, the echo crashing and reverberating around the cavern, shockingly loud in the confined space.
And then a man screamed in pain.
74
Dexter tumbled sideways, his pistol clattering to the floor as he grabbed at his leg, the shock of the bullet's impact momentarily stunning him. Then the pain hit him and he screamed.
Baverstock dived to the ground, trying to roll clear of the line of fire. Hoxton span round, swinging his torch beam back up the tunnel, desperately searching for the origin of the shot as he brought his own pistol to bear. The light flashed over three motionless figures, standing barely twenty feet away.
The moment he heard the shot, Bronson dropped the scroll on to the wooden platform and pushed Angela bodily to one side and down into what cover there was behind the rocks that lined the chamber.
Before Hoxton could bring his weapon up to the aim, he was blinded by two beams of light and heard the sound of a second shot.
He felt a crashing impact in his chest at the same moment, and tumbled backwards onto the wooden walkway. Then a numbing, crushing sensation spread across his torso as the lights around him seemed to fade into blackness. And then he felt nothing at all.
The beams of the torches shifted, the men holding them looking for new targets. They fixed on Baverstock, cowering at the side of the walkway and clutching a pistol. Two shots echoed round the chamber, so close together that they sounded like a single report, and Baverstock slumped backwards, tumbling off the walkway and onto the rocky floor of the tunnel below.
An ominous silence fell as the echoes of the shots died away, and then again someone screamed in pain.
'Jesus, Chris! What the hell's happening up there?' Angela whispered.
'Keep down. I don't think anybody's shooting at us. Not yet, anyway.'
Bronson grabbed the rucksack and reached inside it. He pulled out a crowbar and stood up, tucking the cold steel tool behind him, into the waistband of his trousers. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was all he had. He'd managed with less before, he told himself. Far less.
'Like rats in a trap.' The voice was soft, barely audible over Dexter's howls of pain.
The three men moved forward cautiously, their torch beams dancing on the floor.
One stopped beside Dexter and looked down at the injured man, the light from his torch playing over the widening pool of blood around his shattered thigh.
'Help me, please,' Dexter sobbed, through the agony of his wound. 'I need an ambulance or I'll bleed to death.'
'No you won't,' the softly spoken man told him, 'and you won't need an ambulance either.'
Almost casually, he aimed his pistol at Dexter's head and pulled the trigger.
One of the other men stepped to the opposite side of the walkway, shone his torch downwards at Baverstock's crumpled and bloodstained form, and grunted in satisfaction. The third crossed to where Hoxton's body lay motionless. He swiftly searched the dead man's clothing, found something in one of the pockets and called out to his companion.
'You were right,' he said. 'He did have a tablet,' and he held up the piece of fired clay he'd just recovered from Hoxton's pocket.
The other man walked across, took it from him, and studied it in the light from his torch.
'It's a different one,' he said. 'Put it in your pocket while I finish up down there.'
On the lower platform, Bronson and Angela could hear only the murmur of voices now that the shooting had stopped. Then there was a silence, followed by the sound of approaching footsteps.
Bronson looked up cautiously. He could see a tall man descending the staircase, a pistol in his hand and his face in shadow. Behind him, two other men stared down at them, their own weapons poised. There was absolutely nothing Bronson could do apart from put his hands in the air, at least until the man moved closer.
The figure reached the platform and stood there, staring at Bronson and Angela. The beam of the torch held by one of the figures above swept briefly across his face, and Bronson gave a smile when he saw the half-paralysed face and single white eye.
'I can't say I'm surprised, Yacoub,' he said. 'After I saw you in Tel Aviv I expected you to turn up here.
I suppose you've had people following us since we arrived in Israel?'
Yacoub nodded and smiled. The effect was chilling.
'You're a clever man, Bronson, which is why I let you live back in Morocco. I knew then that you would go looking for the Silver Scroll, and I thought it likely that you might even find it.' He gestured towards the greenish metal cylinder on the platform. 'And you did. I'll take it now.'
'It should go to a museum,' Angela said, standing up.
For a few seconds, the Moroccan stared at her.
'Everybody calls me Yacoub,' he said conversationally, 'but that's not my real name. Do you know why I'm called that?'
Angela shook her head.
'You must have heard of Jacob's Ladder?'
'It's a kind of rope ladder, used on ships,' Bronson said.
'Quite right,' Yacoub said, 'and it's also a plant. But there's a third meaning. In the Christian Bible, Jacob had a vision of a ladder reaching to heaven. That's why people have called me "Yacoub" since I was about fifteen, because I've shown a lot of people the way to heaven.' He paused. 'I'm armed, and so are my colleagues. You are not.
Hand over the scroll now, and you can walk out of here.
Argue about it, and I'm quite prepared to shoot both of you and take the scroll anyway.'
'You've just shot three men in cold blood,' Bronson said, 'and your men killed the O'Connors in Morocco. If you're prepared to do that just to retrieve a clay tablet, how do we know you won't kill us anyway?'
'You don't, Bronson. Now make up your minds. I'm not a patient man.'
Bronson handed the scroll to Yacoub. The crowbar still hung uselessly from his trousers, but with two pistols pointing straight at him, he knew he'd be dead long before he could reach for it. 'What will you do with it?' he asked.
'This scroll contains a list of the locations of Jewish treasure. I intend to find as many items as I can but, unlike those three pieces of garbage' – he gestured up the staircase, to where Bronson now knew the bodies of Dexter, Hoxton and Baverstock lay – 'who were just going to loot the treasures for themselves, I intend to sell most of what I recover to museums and collectors in Israel. I'll just keep a few of the very best pieces for my own collection. And then I'll give the money the Jews pay me to the Palestinians, to he
lp them rid this country of the Israeli vermin that infest it. It's a kind of justice, really, using Jewish money to help the enemies of the Jews.'
He looked once more at Angela, who was still standing defiantly beside Bronson, then turned his back on both of them, walked up the staircase and motioned to his men to start the trek back up the tunnel. Behind him, Angela and Bronson stood alone in the dark, listening to the sound of footsteps on the wooden walkway.
75
As the footsteps of the three men receded down the tunnel, Bronson pulled on the rest of his clothes. He put his arms around Angela.
'At least we found the Silver Scroll and held it in our hands,' he said to her. 'That's something very few people will ever be able to say. It's just a shame we had to hand it over to Yacoub, but we had no choice. In the end, it was all for nothing.'
'Maybe,' Angela said, her voice low, 'or maybe not.' She didn't sound quite as disappointed as Bronson had expected.
'What do you mean?'
'The Sicarii claimed to have hidden something else here, something that was just as important to them. Perhaps even more important.'
Bronson whistled. 'Of course! The "tablets of the temple of Jerusalem". But do you know where to look?'
Angela grinned at him in the half-light of the torch. 'I think so, yes. I'm not finished quite yet. Are you?'
* * *
Bronson picked up his rucksack and led the way up the staircase. At the top, they stepped around the bodies of Dexter and Hoxton, but the third corpse was nowhere to be seen.
'Where's Baverstock?' Bronson wondered aloud.
'Maybe he managed to get away.'
'I doubt it. Yacoub shot the other two without hesitation, so why would he let Baverstock live?' Bronson glanced around the end of the tunnel, then strode across to one side of the platform, where there was a gap between the wood and the wall. He shone his torch beam downwards. 'Right, I can see his body down there. He must have fallen off the walkway when the bullets hit him.'
'I don't care, Chris. They all got what was coming to them, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over their deaths, not even Tony Baverstock's. Let's get out of here.'
As Bronson and Angela strode down the walkway towards the entrance to the water tunnel, there was a faint scuffling noise from the end by the cistern. A few moments later Baverstock hauled himself up and on to the walkway. He searched around in the dark for the pistol he'd dropped when he fell, and quickly found it.
One of the bullets fired at him had missed completely; the other had only nicked his shoulder, a wound that had bled quite a lot and stung like hell. When he'd fallen backwards off the walkway, he'd decided to play dead, hoping that none of the attackers would think to put another bullet into him.
And it had worked. He was alive and almost fully mobile, and now he had a pistol in his pocket. More importantly, he'd heard every word Angela had said to Bronson about the 'tablets of the Temple', and he knew exactly what she was talking about. He even knew where they were going to start looking.
Baverstock bent down again and felt around the wooden walkway until he found a torch, checked that it worked, then headed off down the water tunnel to the entrance.
Angela and Bronson stepped out of the tunnel and emerged into the fresh night air in the middle of the fortress of Har Megiddo. They climbed up the steps and paused for a few moments at the top to catch their breath, then set off towards the remains of the temples.
'If you think about the way the inscription was written,' Angela said, leading the way to the massive circular altar beside the temple ruins, 'it suggests that the Sicarii hid both the Silver Scroll and these tablets at the same location, the scroll in the cistern and the tablets in an altar. And when they were here at Har Megiddo, the only altar on the site was the one we're looking at right now.'
She stopped, reached into her pocket and pulled out the piece of paper she'd been studying that afternoon while Bronson slept beside her in the car. She shone the beam of the torch at the writing on it.
'Take another look at the inscription. It said "the tablets of ----- temple of Jerusalem", which logically translates as "the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem". The next relevant phrase is "----- ----- altar of ----- ----- describes a -----". There are several blanks in that, but I think it probably originally read something like "in the altar of stone that describes a circle". The next section is a bit easier to guess. We translated that as "----- four stones ----- the south side ----- a width of ----- ----- and height ----- ----- cubit to ----- ----- cavity within". I think that means "removing four stones from the south side of a width of some cubits and height of one cubit to expose the cavity within".'
' "Some cubits"?' Bronson asked. 'I can see why you think it's one cubit high, but the width is a bit bloody vague, isn't it?'
'Yes, but I don't think it matters. The important thing is that the inscription on the clay tablets claimed there's a cavity inside this altar, and they got access to it from the south side, by pulling out several stones. So that's what we're going to do.'
They stepped closer to the altar, using their torches to ensure they didn't trip over anything because the area was treacherous, criss-crossed by low walls and a succession of quite deep square pits whose purpose Bronson could only guess at.
Deciding which part of the altar lay on the 'south side' was easy. Bronson simply looked up at the sky, identified the Great Bear star formation and took Angela to the opposite side of the circular structure.
'That's north over there,' he said, pointing up at the night sky, 'so this is the south face of the altar.' He bent down and used his torch to look at the stones that formed the side of the structure. 'It doesn't look to me as if any of these have been touched for centuries.' He laughed shortly.
'Which they haven't, of course. So where do we start?'
'The only dimension the inscription provides for the height of the stones the Sicarii removed was one cubit, assuming that my translation of the Aramaic word was right and meant "cubit" rather than "cubits".'
'Remind me. How long was a cubit?' Bronson asked.
'Roughly eighteen inches,' Angela said. 'But they were removing stones to get access to a cavity inside this altar, and I think they would just have guessed at the size of the opening they created. From the look of these stones, taking out almost any two of them would leave an opening with a vertical height of about eighteen inches, so that's not much of a clue.'
Bronson looked again at the side of the ancient altar.
'Well, I suppose we could just start more or less in the middle and see where that gets us.'
'There's probably an easier way,' Angela said. 'There's no mortar between the stones, and one of the things I put in your rucksack was a wire coat-hanger. Untwist it and we've got a thin strong probe about three feet long. Slide it between the stones and see if you can locate the cavity that way.'
'Brilliant.' Bronson pulled out the hanger and a pair of pliers and began untwisting the steel. In a couple of minutes he'd got the whole thing straight apart from a 'T' shape at one end that he could use as a handle.
'Start here,' Angela said, gesturing to a large gap between two of the stones.
Bronson slid the probe into the space, but it penetrated for only about eight or ten inches before meeting a solid object, probably another course of stones behind the outermost ones. He pulled it out and tried again, but with the same result.
'This might take a while,' he said, forcing the probe into another gap, 'but it'll still be a lot quicker than pulling out stones at random.'
After almost ten minutes, he had found no sign of any cavity behind the stones. Then, with a suddenness that surprised him, the improvised probe vanished deeper, much deeper, into one space. He pulled it out and tried again, with the same result. Instead of stopping after perhaps ten inches, the steel rod was penetrating well over two feet.
'There's definitely a space behind here,' Bronson said. 'Come on – let's start looking.'
He opened
his rucksack again and pulled out the steel crowbar. He slid the point of the tool between two of the stones and levered. Nothing happened, so he switched to the opposite side and heaved on the other end. This time, it moved a fraction. Bronson repeated the process on the top and bottom, and slowly the stone began to loosen. After a couple of minutes he'd freed it up enough to permit him to ram the jemmy deep into the gap at the top of the stone and lever it out of the wall. The stone crashed to the ground with a dull thud. Bronson moved it to one side and then he and Angela peered into the hole it had left.
Disappointingly, there was another stone directly behind the one Bronson had removed.
'I think that's the reason the probe went straight through,' he said, pointing into the hole. 'That corner of the stone I've just shifted lined up almost exactly with the one directly behind it. Everywhere else I tried to run the wire through, it must have been hitting the face of one of the stones in the row behind.'
'Try the probe again,' Angela suggested.
This time, when Bronson slid the thin length of steel into the gaps around the stones of the inner course, it met almost no resistance and clearly entered some kind of a void.
'I'll move another stone from the outer layer,' he said, 'just to give me room to work, then take out a couple from the second course.'
With one stone already removed, shifting a second one was easy. Bronson was concerned about the security of the stones above the hole he'd made in the side of the altar, but they showed no sign of falling out. The inner layers of stones were actually easier to move, because they were slightly smaller, and Bronson quickly pulled out three of them to reveal a small open space.
'Pass me that torch, please,' he muttered, crouching down on his hands and knees to peer into the cavity.
'What can you see?' Angela demanded, her voice quavering with excitement. 'What's in there?'
'It looks to me like it's empty. No, hang on – there's something lying flat on the floor of the cavity. Give me a hand. It looks as if it's quite heavy.'