The Apocalypse Fire (Ava Curzon Trilogy Book 2)

by Dominic Selwood

  “They’re some of the last Christians in the Middle East now,” Mary added. “But they’re fading fast. After World War Two they made up a quarter of the Palestinian population. Now they’re a small fraction of that. In the rest of the region they’re going, too – victims of genocide in sectarian wars.”

  Ava was watching the traffic behind them in the wing mirror, and could see that Uri was keeping a steady distance behind them.

  Had he radioed for another car to cut them off ahead?

  Was he planning something?

  She had no way of knowing.

  But she could not take any chances.

  The three of them in the car were armed, but any kind of confrontation with Uri was out of the question. She did not know what the Israeli Penal Code said, but was pretty sure that anyone opening fire on a serving member of Mossad, in Israel, would probably never breathe fresh air again.

  Up ahead, there was a sign for a turning off the highway.

  It was exactly what she had been hoping for.

  “We need to get in front of that.” She indicated a large ‘Maccabee Beer’ haulage lorry three places in front of them. “Do it quickly, and once you’re ahead of it, don’t let anyone tuck in behind us.”

  Mary nodded, and jabbed down hard on the accelerator, speeding ahead of the car immediately in front.

  Barely pausing, she did it again, so they were now immediately behind the lorry.

  Ava eyes were fixed on the large blue and white overhead signs and the road up ahead.

  They passed a farm of greenhouses on the right.

  “Do it now,” she urged Mary.

  Mary floored the pedal again, and they sped ahead, before tucking neatly in front of the lorry.

  “Now, slow a little,” Ava urged.

  She was clenching the map tightly. “And turn off…” She watched the surrounding traffic intently, waiting until the last possible moment. “Now!”

  Without indicating, Mary yanked the wheel over, and the car screeched right, onto the slip road.

  Behind them, Ava knew, Uri’s view would have been blocked by the lorry until the last minute, and he would not have seen them turn off until it was too late.

  He would shoot right past the turning.

  As they sped off along the slip road, Ava breathed out slowly and slumped back into the seat. “Okay. Let’s get to Nazareth, find a clean car, then head south to Jerusalem. We haven’t got time to waste.”

  Chapter 46

  Old Town

  Jerusalem

  The State of Israel

  AVA’S EXCITEMENT MOUNTED as they neared Jerusalem.

  Over the millennia, countless armies had approached the great city from the west, across the Hinnom Valley. In medieval times, the hill at the north end of the valley had been the Mont Joie – the Hill of Joy – which gladdened the hearts of pilgrims as they gained their first sight of the sacred city.

  Ava directed Mary through the traffic towards the centre of the city’s northern wall and up to the ancient Damascus Gate, where they parked the replacement car Mary had sourced for them in Nazareth.

  Once on foot and through the immense ancient stone tower, they headed into the Old Town’s warren of medieval streets.

  Voices and music filled the air.

  Ava was moving quickly, but it was not easy in the narrow streets, which were only a few people wide in places, with a ragbag of ancient buildings either side creating narrow tunnels for the pedestrians.

  Cluttering the narrow passageways were hundreds of shops and stalls. Goods were laid out everywhere – on barrows, handcarts, tables, counters, hanging on bars, suspended from the hotchpotch of low balconies, and just piled in the street.

  It was a chaotic Aladdin’s Cave of almost everything imaginable. At the first few stalls alone Ava spotted strawberries, nuts, sweet pastries, phones, jewellery, fabrics, bags, and lamps. The list was endless.

  She rushed on quickly down the hill, with Ferguson and Mary behind her.

  The mix of bright light, colours, and smells was heady, pulling Ava back to days when she had worked at the Amman museum in neighbouring Jordan, and had visited Jerusalem regularly.

  The ancient city was an exhilarating cocktail of cultures, with the buzz of Hebrew and Arabic all around, men in skullcaps, Orthodox Jews in their distinctive black coats and hats, men and women in traditional Palestinian dress, Christian priests, monks and nuns, and heavily armed young men and women in the dark green of the IDF.

  It was like nowhere else on earth, and its energy was addictive.

  There was so much history – in the stones and in the air. The city had seen a vast succession of conquerors and cultures, and few places had hosted and fervently worshipped so many different gods within their walls – Canaanite, Hebrew-Israelite-Jewish, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Christian, Muslim. It was a heady mix of the histories of all the peoples who had ever called it sacred.

  Turning right, she entered the Christian quarter, and headed for the Muristan.

  Although the voices about her were still a mishmash of Arabic, Hebrew, and English, an increasing number of stalls were now hawking Christian souvenirs – crosses, icons, and other sacred mementos.

  She ducked under an ancient stone arch, and as she emerged into a small open square, a muezzin began the call to prayer.

  She listened to the words ringing out across the stones. The syllables had a mesmerizing alliteration and rhythm, made all the more arresting by the haunting eastern tones.

  She waited until it was over, then moved further into the square, finding herself in front of the mighty Church of the Holy Sepulchre, with its distinctive honey-coloured crusader architecture and twin domes, all glowing softly in the sunlight.

  It was a spectacular building.

  Ahead of her, Mary was explaining its significance to Ferguson. “It’s the most important church in Christendom. Originally built by the Roman Emperor Constantine, it houses the mound where Christians believe Jesus was crucified, as well as enclosing the rock tomb where he was buried.”

  “So close together?” He sounded dubious. “Bit convenient isn’t it?”

  Mary shrugged. “This area used to be outside the ancient Roman city walls, on the site of an old olive grove – so who knows? Maybe it truly is where people were buried.”

  Ava bit back a desire to correct Mary. It had been a disused stone quarry in Jesus’s day, not an olive grove, so was, in fact, exactly the sort of place where the Romans crucified people.

  “The building is shared by a range of Churches – Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Roman,” Mary continued. “Running it is a nightmare.” She pointed to a window overlooking the courtyard. “See that, on the balcony?” She was indicating a rickety wooden ladder perched on a ledge just above the main entrance. “It’s been there for at least two hundred years because no one can agree what to do with it.”

  Ferguson shook his head in bemusement. “Better than the United Nations.”

  “Oh, far better,” she continued. “There are some mini-monasteries up on the roof. A few years ago, a Coptic monk guarding a section moved his chair eight inches into the Ethiopians’ territory. Eleven people were hospitalized in the punch-up that followed.”

  “None of them turned the other cheek?” Ferguson smiled.

  “They even fight over who opens the front doors,” Mary added. “To defuse the tensions, since the time of the crusades, two neutral Muslim families have been in charge of the keys. They open up at dawn and lock it up again at dusk.”

  Ava was now right behind them.

  “We need to split up,” she instructed as the three of them reached the main doorway. “We have to find the icon, and we need to assume that Durov is close by.”

  Or has already been and gone, she thought, but pushed the idea out of her head.

  She knew it was here.

  It had to be.

  Chapter 47

  Church of the Holy Sepulchre

&nbs
p; Shuk ha-Tsaba’aim Street

  Old Town

  Jerusalem

  The State of Israel

  FERGUSON AND MARY entered the arched crusader doorway first, and immediately peeled right.

  Ava followed close behind.

  As her eyes grew accustomed to the cavernous gloom, she spotted an old wooden bench to her left, just inside the door. There was a pile of leaflets stacked messily on it. She picked one up, and flipped through it, delighted to find a floor plan in the centre spread.

  As she scanned it, her heart sank at the realization that her search was going to be significantly more complicated than she had thought.

  The map revealed that the building contained a jumble of more than thirty separate chapels, altars, crypts, and tombs – all divided up between the assortment of religious denominations that shared the building.

  Looking for one icon in so many shrines was going to be like trying to find a bolt in a factory.

  On entering, Ferguson and Mary had gone right, towards the east end, so Ava turned left, directly into the Chapel of the Three Marys – built over the spot where tradition said the women had stood and watched the crucifixion.

  As she headed deeper into the ancient church, she scanned the low-lit interior for the icon of Our Lady of Philermos, but saw nothing resembling it among the wide-eyed saints hanging on every wall and decorating the innumerable altars.

  Checking her watch, she headed swiftly on, through an arcade of enormous pillars, and found herself in a colossal rotunda. Directly under the centre of the high dome, and encircled by crowds, she could see the Edicule – a tall, ornate, and balustraded Orthodox shrine. It was the centrepiece of the church, housing the rock tomb that Constantine believed Jesus was laid in after the crucifixion.

  To those who believed the Turin Shroud was real, it was the place where the linen was wrapped around Jesus’s mutilated body before he rose from the dead, from that very tomb.

  It was the epicentre of the miraculous anastasis – the resurrection.

  Next to Ava, a short bearded man with glasses was shuffling pieces of paper with diagrams on, trying to identify the different parts of the building.

  She glanced over his shoulder at the diagrams and saw that the Romans had originally built a temple of Venus over the two separate sites of Jesus’s execution and his subsequent burial. Then the Emperor Constantine had put up the Anastasis rotunda over the tomb, and built a separate structure, off to the east, around the place of the crucifixion.

  From the brief descriptions she could see on the man’s charts, they had both been pulled down by a mad caliph in 1009, before being rebuilt by the crusaders, who brought them both into the same building under one roof.

  The result was a confused but awe-inspiring journey through over a millennium and a half of sacred Middle-Eastern Christian architecture.

  Approaching the Edicule, which was incongruously buttressed with ageing steel girders, she started to scan the dozens of icons and images covering the shrine’s walls. But as she got closer and jostled her way around it – straining her eyes to take in all the busy details – she could clearly see that the icon she was looking for was not there.

  Turning towards the western end of the rotunda, she passed a Coptic chapel leaning up against the end wall of the Edicule. It was hung with yet more icons, but again there was no sign of Our Lady of Philermos.

  In the centre of the western wall, a narrow archway set into the ancient stone blocks opened into a run-down Syrian chapel. From there she ducked through a crack in the rock, then into a passageway and an area marked as the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, which contained a number of ancient rock-cut kokhim burial ledges.

  Ava peered around in the gloom, but there was no sign of the icon.

  Heading back out into the main body of the church, she skirted the north side of the rotunda, passed through the Archway of the Virgin, and started towards the central nave.

  Everywhere she looked, she was confronted with displays of icons and images on walls, screens, altars, and shelves.

  The visual assault of saints and biblical scenes was becoming overwhelming.

  She blinked hard, trying to stay focused.

  As she approached the main nave and Katholikon, her hopes mounted on seeing that the church’s principal altar was shielded by a traditional Orthodox iconostasis screen.

  Before entering the church, she had already decided that – as the Romanovs and Rasputin were Orthodox – the icon was probably going to be in one of the Orthodox areas. That meant she had ruled out the sizeable number of Roman Catholic chapels.

  It also meant that this central iconostasis was exactly the sort of place the icon might be.

  She approached, increasingly aware of the screen’s height and grandeur. But as she neared it, she could plainly see that the ceremonial screen was decorated with large painted panels rather than being hung with individual icons.

  Disappointed, she turned and headed back down the nave, past a stone basin set into the middle of the exquisite mosaic floor.

  She recognized it immediately as an omphalos – an ancient Greek marker to show the centre of the world.

  The most famous one was at Delphi, but she noted from the sign that Christian tradition claimed this exact spot in Jerusalem was the one true centre – the umbilicus mundi –where earth was connected directly to heaven. However, the omphalos was alone in the centre of the nave, and there were no icons anywhere nearby.

  The more she took in the differing sections of the building, the more baffling it all became, and the more uncertain she was about finding the icon.

  Where would it be?

  She was sure it was here.

  Had she missed a clue?

  She looked around, spotting an area of low columns that almost certainly dated back to Constantine’s original structures.

  She ran over Rasputin’s first cryptograph in her mind again, anxious to ensure she had not overlooked anything.

  CITY OF ST PETER was Jerusalem.

  ANASTASIS had to mean the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And so did the skull, which represented Golgotha.

  Then there was Rasputin’s second cryptograph, which she was sure alluded to the Virgin Mary and the Knights of Saint John.

  Most of what she could see around her was undoubtedly crusader architecture.

  The Knights of Saint John had been here, as crusaders.

  Was that the connection?

  She forced herself to concentrate.

  Think!

  With a growing sense of desperation, she looked down at the leaflet, and saw that the church’s other main Orthodox area was at the opposite end of the building, at the Crucifixion altar – built over the site where Jesus’s cross was supposed to have been driven into the rock.

  Keenly aware of time passing, she abandoned all sense of propriety and jogged back to the main entrance door, then headed up the curved honey-coloured stone stairwell leading to the hill of Calvary.

  At the top, the smooth worn steps opened out into a room with three altars. The central one was an elaborate Orthodox shrine, festooned with lamps and icons. Around it, a large throng of people was crushing for the chance to crawl under the altar and insert an arm through a metal covering laid into the floor, through which they could touch the tip of the rock of Golgotha.

  Ava jostled her way into the crowd, and made it to the front more quickly than she had anticipated.

  Now she had a clear view of the altar, she scanned its icons, taking them in quickly one by one, running her eyes up the left side and down the right of the extravagantly ornate shrine.

  When she reached the last image, she was almost ready to shout with frustration.

  It was not here.

  None of the icons resembled Our Lady of Philermos.

  Exhausted, she threaded her way out of the crowd and stared down at the leaflet’s floor plan again, scanning through the seemingly endless list of chapels and altars.

  It was overwhelmi
ng.

  The icon could be in any one of them.

  And then, suddenly, one of the lines caught her eye.

  CHAPEL OF ADAM

  (GREEK ORTHODOX)

  She frowned.

  A chapel to Adam?

  That did not make sense.

  Why would a church have a chapel to him?

  Adam was not a saint or martyr.

  He was not even a Christian.

  It was one thing having a statue or painting of him in a church. Like Abraham, Moses, or any of the other towering figures of the Old Testament, Adam had his role in the history of the Hebrew people. But a chapel where he could be venerated?

  She had never heard of such a thing. Chapels were to honour Jesus and those who believed in him.

  She flicked to the page with details about the chapel.

  CHAPEL OF ADAM

  Early Christian traditions relate that Adam was buried at ‘Golgotha’, the Place of the Skull, where Jesus was crucified. They recount that the Cross of the Crucifixion was driven into the ground over Adam’s grave, with the base of the cross resting on Adam’s skull. In this chapel, the crack in the rock from the earthquake at the time of Jesus’s death is still visible. Some traditions maintain that Jesus’s blood flowed through the crack and filled Adam’s skull, redeeming him.

  Ava froze.

  Oh God.

  Rasputin’s first cryptograph had a cross resting on a skull.

  More than that, she now realized that the letters either side of the skull – AD and AM – were not abbreviations for anno domini and ante meridiem.

  They were a name.

  ADAM.

  She sprinted across the room, pushing her way through the crowd, before flinging herself down the stairs at the far end.

  As she descended, she heard a small bell ringing to summon the Orthodox to a service in the Golgotha chapel.