The Scroll

by Grant R. Jeffrey

“When does the rest of the team get here?”

  “Any minute. I want us to be the first in the tunnel. The others know the tunnel well. They’re the workers the professor’s been using since I turned the project over to him and the Institute.”

  Landau opened the back door for Chambers, and the driver slipped from his place and did the same for Amber. Both archaeologists retrieved backpacks and donned them. It took all of Chambers’s restraint not to jog to the concrete block building that covered the opening to the eleven-mile tunnel running beneath the streets of Jerusalem to Jericho. The building was about the size of a two-car garage and had no windows. A pair of steel doors blocked its only entrance. Landau worked the heavy lock that kept out the curious. Chambers and Amber stood to the side as Landau swung the doors open. Just inside the doors was another set of doors, except these looked as if someone had stolen them from a prison. Chambers looked at the space just beyond the bars. The building was not here when he last left Jerusalem, but such precautions were not out of the ordinary. The curious, and sometimes thieves, felt entitled to help themselves to whatever they could find and slip into a pocket or a sack. Iron bars kept pillaging down. In this case, they also kept people from hurting themselves. Chambers remembered the size of the hole in what was now the floor of the building. It would be bad for man or beast to fall down such a pit.

  The barred doors swung on noisy hinges, filling the space with a fingernail-on-blackboard screech. Chambers entered first, careful with each step. His eyes had not adjusted to the dark, and the only light came from the open door. Until Landau flipped a switch.

  “Better?”

  “Much. Thanks.” Chambers stepped to the door. Another barricade made of rebar welded together covered the one-meter-wide entrance to the tunnel below and was held in place by a lock on one end and hinge on the other. It took both Landau and his man to lift the grate up and out of the way.

  “Is this the way you left it, Dr. Chambers?” Landau stood at the edge of the hole looking down.

  “No. We had a small metal shed over the hole and that was it. The concrete floor and the metal sleeve in the hole came later.” He looked around. “The forced-air system is my design.”

  “Not enough air down there?” Landau leaned over the hole.

  “Not fresh air. Subterranean archaeology has dangers all its own: cave-ins and tick-borne fever to name a few.”

  “Ticks? You’re kidding me, right?” Landau took a step back. “I hate bugs.”

  Chambers laughed. “Then tunnel work isn’t for you. You’d be surprised to see what kind of creepy-crawlies live below. The ticks carry a disease called cave fever. It’s a relapsing fever. The infection is caused by Borrelia persica, an organism that can change its surface antigens, causing recurring episodes of fever. Ornithodoros tholozani ticks transmit the infection through their bites leading to TBRF—tick-borne relapsing fever. It affects about ten percent of Israeli caves and tunnels.”

  “Now I am creeped out.”

  “Not to worry, Mr. Landau. Remember, it’s a recurring fever, which, to an optimist like you, means that you only have the fever part of the time.”

  “Thanks, I feel much better now.”

  Amber stepped next to Chambers at the edge of the hole. “Now David, you know it’s not nice to tease the security people.”

  “Are you going to need me down there?” Landau asked.

  “No. The fewer the better. The workers will be here soon enough.” He moved to the back wall and removed two caver helmets, each with an attached light. He handed one to Amber and donned the other. “We’ll have light down there once I start the generator.” He motioned to a yellow-painted machine in the corner, then spoke to Landau. “It’s gas. If it dies, put some more gas in. There are a few five-gallon gas cans over there.” Several backpacks and a portable GPS unit sat in one corner. Chambers had tried to anticipate what he might need. He’d even included two types of electric hammers, similar to the handheld pneumatic hammer used by Nuri at the Dead Sea compound.

  “I hope it exhausts to the outside,” Landau said.

  “It does. You might want to keep the door open just in case. The generator provides power for our ventilation system.” Chambers turned on the generator, tightened the strap of his helmet, and stepped to the opening. An aluminum ladder bridged the distance from the floor of the shed to the floor of the tunnel. He started down.

  “What, no ladies first?” Amber said.

  “Doors yes, ancient tunnels no. I’m just going down to scare off the scorpions.”

  “Now you’re just being cruel.”

  “It’s a gift.” Chambers started down, taking care that each step was secure before making the next and that his backpack cleared the edge of the opening. The moment his head dropped below the floor line, his chest began to tighten and his breathing increased. He paused, took a breath, and fought to ignore the boiling emotion. For years he had told himself, “It doesn’t matter how you feel; what matters is what you do.” It was pop psychology, but it worked—some of the time.

  Lights had been strung down this area of the tunnel, each connected to a thick orange wire. He doubted the string of lights ran the full eleven miles. Most likely there was a similar generator in Jericho and an identical set of lights coming up the tunnel. Even so, there was bound to be skin-crawling darkness along the way.

  Amber descended the stairs. “Scorpions all gone?”

  “Most of them.”

  “Most?” She sighed and stepped to the solid surface of the tunnel floor. “I don’t see any bugs.”

  “Just goes to show how effective I am.” He removed his tablet PC from the backpack and read the notes he had made on it. He had been careful not to provide any context with the cryptic comments and numbers. Should someone come into possession of the document, he or she would see only a series of numbers. Chambers, however, knew which numbers were accurate and what they stood for; the others were just a ruse, a magician’s misdirection.

  “I read about this place in your book and the journal articles you wrote. It’s more impressive in person.”

  “She’s a beauty all right. I often wonder if ol’ King Herod walked this tunnel during his last years.”

  Amber shrugged. “Every historian knows the man’s front-porch light was a little dim, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, but paranoid as he was—and he probably had reason to be paranoid—he did some remarkable building. Just look at this place.” He motioned around him. “Tunnel building is an exact and demanding science today. Imagine how difficult it was two thousand years ago to dig beneath the city of Jerusalem and the surrounding region for eleven miles without getting off course—and using hand tools at that.” His enthusiasm had squelched his claustrophobia for the moment. “They had to do this by torchlight. I imagine that made the air foul. I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly how they did this.”

  She smiled. “It’s good to see you excited again. And to think you wanted to leave all this behind.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe next year.”

  Amber saddened for a moment, and David’s mind raced for something witty to say but came up empty. Instead, he stepped to the ladder. “Hey, Landau, how about you send one of your guys down with the portable GPS.”

  “Gotcha.”

  In a few moments, the long wood handle with the emitter head was lowered through the opening. Chambers took it. Then a pair of boots appeared, followed by their owner—Landau.

  “I thought you were afraid of bugs and ticks.”

  “I didn’t say I was afraid; I said I didn’t like them. Besides, I haven’t heard you screaming like a Girl Scout, so I figured it was safe.”

  “You have such an encouraging way with words.”

  “I am a man of many levels, Chambers. Do you need anything else from topside?”

  “There’s a distance-measuring wheel in one of the corners up there. I could use that. It’s a little more scientific than pacing off the distanc
e. When the crew arrives, have them bring the electric hammers and shovels.”

  Landau ascended the ladder just enough that his head poked above the floor. Chambers heard him pass on his request and the information about the crew.

  The device Landau’s men handed down was a bright-yellow contraption with a wheel on one end of an aluminum pole and a handle with a digital readout on the other, an improvement over the older analog devices with a mechanical counter.

  Glancing at the PC’s display, Chambers mumbled, “Three hundred meters. About four hundred cubits by the standard of the day.” He looked down the long tunnel and remembered the first time he had walked its length. It was more cluttered then but still in remarkable shape. The floor was now clear of debris. Spaced unevenly along the path were heavy wood supports used to shore up areas that workers thought might be subject to cave in. The posts and beams gave the tunnel the feel of a mine.

  Chambers moved slowly, letting the three-hundred-millimeter wheel move along the sloping base of the tunnel, clicking off the distance as it did. They walked the length of a football field, and Chambers stopped. “This should be it.” He turned to his right, studied the wall, and saw four chalk marks left by the team that discovered the anomaly behind the wall.

  “I see the marks,” Amber said, “but I’m having trouble believing there’s an opening behind the surface. The material looks the same all along. I’ve not seen any breaks, cracks, or anything else to indicate that a surface material was used to cover the opening.”

  Landau placed a hand on the wall. “How could they do that? Especially back then?”

  “I don’t know.” Chambers set the measuring wheel aside.

  Landau scoffed. “I was led to believe that you know everything, that you have all the answers.”

  “Nonsense,” Chambers said. “I do, however, know all the questions. I’ll tell you one. In one of the remaining walls of the second temple, there is a stone that weighs over six hundred tons, the equivalent of three hundred or more cars compressed into a twelve-meter by three-meter by four-meter space—bigger than the stones used in the pyramids. Tell me how they excavated that and moved it to its present location, and I’ll tell you how they did this.” Chambers studied the wall. “One of the greatest mistakes archaeologists can make is assuming ancient people were stupid. They might not have had cell phones, but they knew how to build structures that have lasted centuries. I doubt anything we’re building these days can last as long.”

  Chambers removed his pack and set it to the side. “I want to verify the location.” He set up the handheld ground-penetrating radar unit. “Amber, you run the computer. Give your video camera to Landau. You can work a camera, can’t you, Mr. Landau?”

  “I think so. I can even chew gum and walk at the same time. I’m just full of surprises.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to demean you, I was just … never mind. The more I talk, the deeper I dig my hole. So to speak.”

  In a few minutes, Chambers was running the sensor head along the wall. It took only moments to confirm that the material behind the wall’s surface was less dense and of a less compact material than that to either side of the tunnel.

  “It’s amazing they found this. There has to be close to a million square feet of surface area on the two walls and spread along eleven miles of tunnel.”

  “And that’s not counting the surface area of the floor. You can add another third to that number.” Amber kept her eyes fixed on the computer readout.

  Landau lowered the camera, and the deep, ghostly shadows cast by the tunnel lighting returned, exaggerating the height of the three. “Do you think they scanned everything?”

  Chambers shrugged. “I don’t know. I have some of Ben-Judah’s notes, but I doubt I have everything. Maybe the crew can tell us when they get here. Although the lead archaeologist is out of the country for a few weeks. Inconvenient if you ask me. I guess we’ll have to ask you-know-who.”

  Even though the people who were standing alone in the tunnel with him all knew Ben-Judah was alive, Chambers had grown paranoid enough to assume that somehow, some way, someone was eavesdropping. A moment later he added, “That doesn’t matter now. We have our mystery before us. That’s what we need to focus on.” He stepped back and looked at the chalk marks. The hidden opening was less than a meter wide and one-and-a-half meters high.

  “A tight fit,” Amber said.

  Chambers nodded. “A king escaping through a tunnel would need it to be wide and tall to accommodate guards, aides, and family, although Herod cared little for his own family.”

  “What’s that mean?” Landau looked puzzled.

  Chambers faced the man. “Herod the Great was extremely paranoid. He believed that some in his family were trying to kill him. Maybe they were. Anyway, he had several of his family killed. He also saw to the execution of many rabbis. He was worried that when he died no one would mourn, so he ordered many respected dignitaries to come to Jericho. He planned to have them killed so that there would be tears in the land. Not a nice guy.”

  “I guess not,” Landau said. “So why build this side tunnel?”

  “I don’t think he did. Herod died about 4 BCE—some think as late as 1 BCE. The temple was still safe at that time.”

  “So someone else created a side tunnel to hide temple artifacts?” Landau sounded genuinely interested.

  “Most likely. We won’t know until the investigation is complete, and that might take some time, but it’s a reasonable hypothesis. The Antonia Fortress is very close to the temple. Although it was a place where many Roman soldiers spent their time, so most Jews stayed away. Do you know much about the trials of Christ, Landau?”

  “Not really. Being a good Jewish boy in the States, I didn’t attend many churches.”

  “Jesus went through three trials. Some say six, but it depends on what you classify as a trial. The Pharisees and others stacked the trials against Him. They wanted nothing more than to see Jesus dead, yet when asked to bring their charges against Him, they did so from the doorway of Pontius Pilate’s building. They didn’t want to defile themselves by stepping on Gentile floors. Herod, however, was a different animal. Just to be clear, this Herod is a descendent of Herod the Great I mentioned a moment ago. Rome appointed Herod Antipas to power after his father’s death. He was one of three leaders who ruled various parts of the land. Herod Antipas ruled over Galilee but was in Jerusalem for Passover and during Jesus’ trial and execution. Antipas didn’t mind associating with Gentiles, since they provided his wealth and power. He would have no problem escaping from the temple or his palace to the Antonia Fortress and out a tunnel.”

  Landau’s radio crackled. “Go.”

  “The workers are here,” said the voice on the radio.

  “I’ll be right there.” Landau handed the camera to Chambers. “I need to go. I want to check each worker myself.”

  “You have radio reception down here?” Amber said.

  “My man probably descended the ladder. Our radios are good, but not that good.” He jogged up the tunnel.

  “Do you think we’ll find temple artifacts?”

  Chambers rubbed the back of his neck. “We’ll know soon.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  President Baker Meyers slipped into the Oval Office three hours later than he had intended. His guests were seated around an art deco–style coffee table. The room was a mixture of disparate furnishings, something Meyers preferred to call eclectic but his wife called a mishmash. One year into his term, he agreed to let her hire an interior decorator to convert the place into something more suitable to the head of the world’s most powerful country. If he had his way, the building would be midcentury modern, but his wife convinced him that a head of state should have something more refined than furniture that looked like it had been culled from the set of an old Perry Mason television show. The only thing he insisted on keeping was the contrasting cross-pattern floor of quarter-sawn oak and walnut laid down during George W. Bush’s p
residency. His wife objected, but the floor stayed. After all, he was the president of the United States and that gave him veto power.

  He removed his jacket and hung it on an oak coatrack near his nineteenth-century walnut desk. “I’m sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting. I know we planned this as a lunch, but I got hung up with the secretary of the interior. There’s been another blowout on an offshore oil rig. Just what I need—another oil-soaked coastline.”

  By the time he stepped to the seating area in the center of the room, two men and one woman were standing. “We understand, Mr. President.” Tony Cleese was an old friend who insisted on formality when in the Oval Office. They had come a long way from his days as a California congressman. Back then it was just “Baker,” at least when they were alone, but once Meyers took the oath, Tony ceased calling him by his first name.

  Meyers shook hands with Vivian Roller, secretary of state; Hobert Allen, NSA; and Lewis Conah, CIA. Then he took his seat. The others followed his example.

  “I’m sure Tony has brought everyone up to speed on my concerns.” The president leaned back in the chair and steepled his fingers before him. “I caught Al-Malik’s interview last night. I got a chill, and when I get a chill, it means something is going on but I can’t identify it. Am I off base here?” They looked at one another. “You lead off, Lew. What does CIA know about Al-Malik?”

  Although the man held a folder on his lap, he spoke from memory. “Dr. Hussein Al-Malik, PhD. His doctorate is in archaeology. He did his graduate and postgrad work at the U. of Chicago and graduated with honors. He’s a Palestinian with connections to the PLO, and we believe he’s behind several bombings and assassination attempts. There is reason to believe that he is the functional head of the PLO, although not the public leader. He is brilliant. His IQ runs north of one-forty-five. As a young man, he worked as a field archaeologist and taught a few years in Chicago, then he moved to Jordan, where he is officially retired from teaching and research. He maintains several layers of protection around him at all times, often working through subordinates.”