The Jerusalem Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  I moved away from the door.

  ‘Further.’

  I moved again. He pointed his gun at the lock. He was on my side of the door now. Any ricochets would hopefully go off in a different direction.

  There was a loud popping noise. It echoed in my ears.

  I stepped around him. There was a jagged hole where the lock had been. I pushed at the door. I knew I was putting myself in the line of fire, but I didn’t care. I tensed as the door swung open to reveal a narrow corridor. I walked straight in. Ariel was beside me, his gun pointing forward.

  ‘Let’s check upstairs first,’ said Ariel. ‘Stay with me, and don’t touch anything.’

  There were four rooms on the upper floor. We checked them all, even under the beds, then went downstairs. I knocked over two wooden chairs in my haste. There was no sign of Isabel or anything amiss, except for the fact that there were no clothes or personal items in any of the rooms.

  A bed was unmade upstairs and the bathroom upstairs looked as if it had been used recently.

  Xena was inside when we got back down. We went in and out of all the rooms. The furniture was dark and heavy and the floors were tiled in red. There was a large sitting room with two heavy sofas and a big LCD TV, a room with only a table in it, and a kitchen at the back of the house with another dining table.

  By the time I had finished going in and out of each room the disappointment was sickening.

  The only thing that was odd downstairs, which made me think we were in the right place, was a big steel bowl on a tripod at the back of the building. In the bowl, it must have been three feet across, there was a thick pile of ash. I could feel the heat coming from them when I put my hand an inch away from the top of the thick grey crust.

  ‘Stay out here,’ said Ariel. He disappeared back into the building.

  There was a bad smell coming from the bowl, as if God only knew what had been burnt out here.

  Mark had reappeared by this time. He said he’d seen nobody on his travels all around the building. He joined me as I was looking for something to poke the ashes in the bowl with. I found a long white stick, started poking away.

  ‘Not our lucky day,’ he said. He was looking through unopened letters, ripping each one, examining the bills inside.

  ‘Who lives here?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. All these bills are more than six months old. They look like they’re from a previous occupant.’ He put the bills beside a steel bin nearby.

  ‘There are no recent letters at all?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Anything in there?’ he said, nodding towards the ashes.

  ‘No.’ That was, of course, the moment the stick hit something.

  ‘Maybe.’ I poked some more, leaned forward, and

  pushed the hard thing I’d encountered towards the edge of the bowl.

  The heat came up in waves off the ashes.

  ‘What’s that?’ he said. The ashen, curled edges of what could have been a book had appeared in the bowl. I pushed at it. It was a notebook. The top and bottom of the notebook were clumps of ash, but right in the centre of it, a part of it still hadn’t burnt.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said.

  I put the stick under the notebook, pushed it out of the side of the bowl. It fell in a cloud of ash onto the rough red-tiled floor of the veranda.

  ‘I was thinking we should wait for proper equipment,’ said Mark.

  ‘There’ll only be a pile of ash soon,’ I said.

  ‘There’s not much more than that now.’

  I bent down and poked at the ragged, ash-edged remains of the notebook. I turned pages. Some were empty. Some had handwriting on them. Many of the words were scrawled out. Whoever had put it in there, hadn’t gone long.

  Mark bent forward, started sniffing. ‘I know that smell,’ he said.

  He was right. There was a familiar, sickly smell in the air.

  ‘That smells like burning flesh.’ He pointed at the steel bowl.

  ‘I remember it from Iraq. I was in a village where every house was burnt. Thirty-two people died. I’ll never forget the smell.’ His face was twisted, his head shaking from side to side as if he wanted to throw something off.

  I held my nose, peered close at the pages, and rifled through them. Some of the writing wasn’t in an alphabet I recognised. It was symbols; squares, circles, triangles, moon shapes, wavy lines.

  ‘That looks like a lot of magic bullshit,’ said Mark.

  ‘Someone’s into some weird stuff,’ I said. I took my phone out and took a picture of the ashy remnants of the book. Mark had his phone out too.

  He was right beside me. ‘The Canaanites were overlords in this area after Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the first Jewish temple. They used symbolic magic to invoke their fire goddess.’

  A shiver passed through me. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.’

  ‘This is a definite connection to what happened to Kaiser.’

  ‘I’m not stupid. I can work things out,’ I said.

  The idea that Isabel was in the hands of some sick fire worshippers was almost worse than her being missing.

  He stepped back. ‘We have to find her,’ he said, softly.

  An edge of a page had caught my attention. I pushed it open quickly with my fingers, The paper was hot. A part of a hand-drawn map was still visible.

  ‘Look.’ The edges of the page were smouldering. As I watched, a piece of it burnt away. I took another picture.

  It was a map of Jerusalem. I could make out the Tower of David and the Ottoman-era city walls encircling the Old City. There were two spots on the map. They had traces of a waxy substance on them, as if someone had spilled candle wax on the page.

  ‘Those spots are where the Via Dolorosa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are.’ Mark peered closer at the map. ‘They’re the most venerated Christian places in Jerusalem.’

  ‘In the world,’ I added.

  I turned the other pages of the notebook. There were no other drawings or maps on any of them.

  ‘I bet this map is some ceremonial thing,’ said Mark. ‘There are a lot of superstitions about fire, you know, like blowing out candles and wishing for things.’

  ‘This wasn’t used at a birthday party,’ I said.

  He shrugged, pulled the page with the remaining part of the map from the ashen notebook with one quick tug at its edge. He took a small see-through plastic bag from his pocket and slid the map page into it, sealing it and flattening it with one stroke. Half the Old City was burnt away now on the map.

  ‘Did you see a basement in there?’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you guys doing out here?’ said Ariel. He had just arrived.

  ‘Checking the barbecue out,’ said Mark.

  ‘You should get your forensics to go through all this.’ He pointed at the bowl, and at the ashen remains of the notebook on the tiles. ‘God only knows what’s in there.’

  Ariel bent down. His hands didn’t stay still for long, I noticed. They were either out in the air, or at his face, or smoothing his hair, or picking dust from his jacket.

  ‘You said you traced a call from here.’ He looked at Mark.

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Who was it to?’

  There was a tiny hesitation, then Mark said. ‘We didn’t get that far. The call was encrypted. All I can tell you is it was to someone in London.’

  His expression was impassive. He’d have made a good poker player.

  ‘Did you find a basement in there?’ I said. I pointed at the villa.

  ‘No,’ said Ariel. He turned slowly on his heel taking the whole place in. ‘Not yet anyway. But you’re right. This sort of farmhouse should have a basement. Maybe the entrance is out here.’

  ‘Why don’t we have another look in the kitchen?’ said Mark. ‘That looked like a new floor in there.’

  ‘Don’t disturb anything,’ said Ariel.

  I walked fast into the kitchen, bent down and started examini
ng the tiled floor. Mark was tapping the walls. I was relieved to be doing something. I was thinking about digging the floor up when I noticed that the floor in the storeroom, at the back of the kitchen, was different. The tiles looked older. Why hadn’t they put new tiles in there as well?

  There was a seam around the old ones. I bent down, followed the seam to where it ran up against the bare plaster wall. Dust along the wall had piled up recently or something had piled it up.

  The seam was wider near the wall too. And it went on under a wooden bench. I moved the bench. The seam was wide enough now for me to see that there was empty space beneath the floor. There was a dark space down there.

  This was it. I’d found the basement. My fingers scrabbled at the seam.

  ‘Isabel,’ I shouted into the floor. ‘Are you down there?’

  There was no reply.

  I couldn’t get a grip on anything. My hands seemed useless. The skin on the tips of my fingers was breaking as I followed the seam in the tiles with my fingers, pushing at it, just to see if there was any way I could get the trapdoor that had to be there open.

  I looked around for something to use to lever the trapdoor up. There was nothing. With each passing second the anticipation and desperation I’d been suppressing flowed through me until my fingers were shaking. I pushed the wooden bench further along to see the whole of the seam in the floor.

  Then I heard it.

  The sound of scratching, as if someone or something was on the other side of the trapdoor, trying to get out.

  ‘Isabel!’ I shouted.

  43

  Sergeant Finch leaned forward, peering at the messages – Tweets, Facebook and blog posts – which were streaming down Henry’s main monitor. They were all being translated into English in real time.

  ‘Is the volume still rising?’ she said.

  ‘It’s doubled in the past three hours,’ Henry replied. ‘And that’s just the Egyptian feed. He pointed at the smaller screen to the right of the main screen.

  ‘The Israeli feed has picked up a lot too.’

  Sergeant Finch turned to take in messages flowing down the second screen.

  ‘This is exactly the way things developed in Libya and in Syria before the fighting broke out. Are you getting updates on the operation to find Dr Hunter?’

  Henry nodded. ‘We’re tracking them,’ he said.

  He pointed at a third screen on which a map showed a blinking dot, a red heartbeat.

  ‘I’m going to come back later. I don’t like the look of this,’ said Sergeant Finch. ‘Call me if anything kicks off.’ She tapped the pocket of her puffy black jacket.

  ‘My phone will be on,’ she said.

  44

  I turned. Mark was right behind me. For a moment I thought he was going to interrupt. I was ready to roar at him if he did. I looked back at him only for a second. My hands were shaking as they went along the gap in the floor again. The gap that meant there was something down there.

  We were in the right place. I could feel it.

  ‘There’s a basement down there,’ I said, pointing at the crack in the floor. ‘There has to be. I heard scratching.’

  Mark leaned towards me. ‘Did you see any tools, anything, when you were looking around?’

  ‘No. Sorry. Wait. Maybe there were some garden tools under the stairs. I think I saw a spade.’

  He was gone.

  I shouted into the seam again. I hadn’t heard anymore tapping. Had I imagined it? I ran my fingers all over the floor, the walls, looking for a catch, a button, something. I put my mouth to the gap.

  ‘Isabel!’

  There was no answer, and no obvious catch to get the trapdoor open.

  Mark arrived with a flat-headed spade and a torch. He pushed the head of the spade into the crack in the floor. It didn’t make any difference. He tried again.

  I peered closer at the gap. Then I saw it, a piece of flat steel was holding the trapdoor tight. I looked at the wall beyond it. There was a small tile there. I tried to move it. It came out. There was a catch. I pushed and pulled at the trap door, jamming it hard each way. It lifted. We were in!

  ‘Isabel,’ I shouted into the hole as it opened. I saw a wooden platform, stairs going down into dusty gloom.

  As I stepped down, the smell hit me.

  I’d been hoping that Isabel would be waiting for us on the other side of the trapdoor, perhaps too exhausted to respond to me, but I was wrong.

  The agony of bitter disappointment sucked at me as I looked into the bare basement below.

  It was big. It could have been as big as the whole floor we were on. And it had been used for holding people. There were plastic bowls and water bottles in a corner. But there was no one down there.

  Mark was beside me. He flashed the torch quickly around, lingered on an open doorway that led to a small toilet, a hole in the ground.

  There were no bodies here, which was some relief.

  Then one of the steel bowls moved and a long shadow flitted across the floor.

  A rat!

  ‘Don’t go any further.’ Ariel’s voice. I could feel him behind me. I didn’t turn.

  ‘If this place is booby-trapped we’re dead already,’ I said.

  Ariel growled. ‘If you told me you were going to bring this klutz with you Mark, I wouldn’t have helped you at all.’

  Before he had a chance to stop me I stepped onto the stairs, walked down slowly, taking the place in.

  I saw things that made me put my fist to my mouth to stop it shaking. My nostrils flared in and out as I breathed in the dead, stench-tinged air.

  There was a trail of blood from the stairs leading to the centre of the rough stone wall on the far side of the basement. And there was pool of it caked there on the floor. Someone had suffered down here. Suffered badly.

  A pounding started up deep in my forehead.

  Where had they taken her?

  I looked up. There was something painted on the wall behind the stain on the floor. It was painted in red.

  It was a symbol. A symbol I recognised.

  It was the square and arrow from that book we’d found in Istanbul. I was starting to wish I’d never picked it up in that water-filled drain. Maybe none of this would have happened if I hadn’t.

  ‘We get a lot of crackpots in Israel,’ said Ariel, loudly. ‘Some wackos become messianic when they come here. They start pulling all sorts of crazy shit.’ He went up close to the wall, sniffed at it, jerked away from it.

  ‘I don’t like the smell down here,’ he said.

  ‘Jerk offs use this sort of stuff for belief reinforcement. It fires up their warped little brains.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Mark was pointing at an ancient pillar. There was one at each end of the wall. There was only the base of the pillars visible, standing maybe six inches proud of the stone floor, but they were clearly carved with swirling leaf patterns.

  They looked as if they’d been used to form part of the retaining wall of the building.

  ‘There are pillars like those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,’ said Ariel. ‘That could be Crusader-era work.’

  ‘They must have been here when this house was built,’ said Mark.

  I didn’t care. I was examining the walls for a door, a passageway, anything, a clue.

  ‘We’ll test these blood stains, see if we can do DNA matching with any traces in your girlfriend’s baggage, Mr Ryan. Will you permit us to do that?’ said Ariel. He had a small plastic bag in his hand and was puling thin white plastic gloves on.

  ‘Do not touch anything,’ he said. His voice was stern.

  I wasn’t planning to touch anything.

  I was finding it hard to breathe.

  ‘Some idiots believe they can summon up demons with stuff like this,’ said Ariel.

  ‘Who believes all this garbage?’ There was a tremble in my voice.

  ‘This site could have real historical significance,’ said Mark. ‘The Crusaders picked sites that had be
en occupied before they took them over.’

  He pointed above the symbol. ‘Look, there are words up there.’

  He was right. They were faint, small, and inscribed in a similar dark red material as the symbol. I walked up close, skirting the stain on the floor. Ariel and Mark had their flashlights pointed at the section of the wall between the top of the symbol and the old wooden beams of the roof.

  I could just make out the words fame ad mortem. Latin. Familiar. Goddammit, they were the same words that were in that book we’d found.

  ‘Latin was hated in the first century in these parts. It was the demonic language of the Roman oppressors,’ said Ariel.

  ‘That looks like an invocation,’ said Mark. ‘A magic spell.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear any of that,’ I said. The basement felt cold. A chill was coming up through my feet.

  I bent down to the stain on the floor. Maybe this was Isabel’s blood. I swallowed some bile that came into my mouth. My hand was pressing into my side. I could feel my blood pounding.

  Mark spoke softly. ‘Some evil bastard has them, and he’s moved them.’

  ‘Evil is right,’ I said, looking around.

  ‘Dante had a phrase for this sort of place,’ said Ariel. ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate – all hope abandon ye who enter here.’

  ‘You must leave,’ said a woman’s voice from behind us. I turned. It was Xena. She was standing on the stairs. She’d stopped halfway down, as if she didn’t want to come all the way.

  ‘Yes, yes. We must go,’ said Ariel. He walked quickly toward the stairs, his arms out wide, as if to sweep us all back up.

  ‘Follow me, gentlemen, at once.’ His tone made it clear he expected compliance.

  I went. I’d been down there long enough.

  ‘We should walk every inch of this farm, make sure we haven’t missed anything,’ said Mark, as we went back up the stairs.

  I was thinking about what Xena had said. It had sounded as if she knew what the basement was used for.

  When we reached the veranda I caught up with her. I felt lightheaded, after being in that hellhole.

  ‘Do you know what went on in that basement?’