Holliday dropped down into the boat and made his way to the console. It looked simple enough: five gauges, all in Hebrew, a key-slot ignition, a starter button, a throttle lever, and a padded plastic wheel for steering.
There was a small panel underneath the wheel. Holliday reached down, opened it, and pulled out a handful of wires. There was a green one, a yellow, and a red. Presumably the red was the hot wire, and the green was the crank.
He stripped off the insulation on both and touched them to each other. All the gauges lit up. Leaving the two wires connected, he hit the starter button, and the engine fired instantly.
“Your chariot awaits,” said Holliday.
Peggy untied the boat, and she and Wanounou climbed down into it. Holliday eased them away from the pier, then spun the wheel, turning the small boat in a tight circle until the bow was facing toward the cave exit and the open sea.
“Which one of these gauges is fuel?” Holliday asked.
“That one,” answered Wanounou, pointing. “According to it we’ve got half a tank.”
“How far is Haifa?” Holliday asked.
“Bat Galim is about seven miles or so. The harbor is a little farther around the headland,” said Wanounou.
“Then let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” said Holliday, and he pulled back on the throttle.
22
The inflatable made the short trip up the coast in a little less than half an hour, with Wanounou turning several shades of green in the process. Not only wasn’t he a swimmer, he wasn’t much of a sailor either.
Rather than get into a tangle of bureaucracy by trying to return the boat to its rightful owners Holliday simply drove it up onto the beach in front of the Méridien Hotel and left it there.
Getting back to Jerusalem with the alabaster vase turned out to be just as simple. At the hotel they bartered with a taxi driver named Bashir for a two hundred shekel ride back to the Land Cruiser, which they found exactly where they’d left it, apparently unharmed and untouched. There was no sign of any other vehicle except for a fresh set of tread marks in the soft dirt by the side of the road. A good-sized truck or SUV, from the width of the tires.
As far as Holliday could tell no one followed them on their return to Jerusalem. After a completely uneventful journey on the busy highway they arrived back at the university shortly after five o’clock that afternoon. They went to Wanounou’s lab in the basement of the Archaeology Building.
The lab was a long, narrow, windowless room approximately twenty feet wide and the length of an Olympic swimming pool. The length of one entire wall was taken up with floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units, and the opposite wall was a collection of benches, computer work stations, and equipment pods that ranged from spectroscopes and comparison microscopes to laser saws, portable X-ray machines and megasonic cleaning tanks.
The center of the room, from one end to the other, was taken up by a long row of light-box tables for sorting, examining, and preliminary sorting of artifacts. On the tables were trays of tools, solvents, acids, and adhesives to aid in conservation, ongoing maintenance, and reconstruction of individual finds.
It was midsummer, and the laboratory was empty except for Peggy, Holliday, and the professor; the rest of the faculty and most of the grad students were either in the field or on holiday.
Wanounou took the vase to one of the light-box tables and switched it on. The table glowed bright white. He sat down on a stool, with Peggy and Holliday on either side. He took a pair of disposable gloves out of a pop-up box, then selected a long-bladed X-Acto knife from one of the trays. He weighed the jar on a small digital scale and noted the weight in a notebook he’d taken from a drawer in the table. That done, he pulled over an illuminated fluorescent magnifier and examined the jar more closely.
“Sealed with some sort of mastic,” said Wanounou.
“Mastic?” Peggy asked.
“A resin gum. They used it for medicinal purposes in the Middle Ages, but they also used it as a sealant, like a gummy varnish. It dries that yellowy color and gets very brittle.”
“Isn’t there some kind of solvent?” Holliday said, eyeing the X-Acto knife.
“Sure, there’s even some pretty inert ones, but it’s safer to chip it off; less likely to damage whatever’s inside.”
Using the scalpel-bladed knife, Wanounou scored the surface of the sealant covering the ceramic stopper of the jar, working the gouge deeper and deeper until after about ten minutes’ patient work the knife slipped into the crack between the stopper and the vase itself.
As Peggy and Holliday watched, Wanounou put the knife down, chose a pair of long-nosed, locking surgical forceps, and gently lifted the lid off the vase. He set the lid aside and tilted the vase so the light from the magnifying lamp shone into it.
“Anything inside?” Peggy asked.
“Something.”
“What?”
“Hold on.”
The professor picked up the forceps again and eased them down into the neck of the vase. Concentrating hard, he worked the forceps around for a moment, then withdrew them.
“Wrong tool,” he said. He rummaged around in the tray and found what he was looking for. He held it up.
“Looks like something I saw at my gynecologist’s,” said Peggy uncomfortably. They looked like the surgical version of cooking tongs with blades that locked like vise grips.
“Close,” answered Wanounou. He teased the device down into the vase. “They’re obstetrical forceps for delivery babies.” He used his free hand to lock the smooth steel blades of the forceps in place and then gestured to Holliday. “Hold the vase steady.”
Holliday did as he was told, leaning forward and gripping the vase with both hands. With slow, agonizing care Wanounou slipped the forceps out of the vase, their captured prey in tow.
“It’s a boy,” said Peggy, staring. “Either that or a piece of the muffler from my old Ford Escort.”
“It’s a scroll,” said Wanounou, excitement in his voice.
“I don’t want to say what it looks like,” said Holliday.
“What he means,” said Peggy drily, “is that it looks like a big dookie.”
She was right. The object caught in the locked rounded blades of the forceps was ten inches long, roughly circular, lumpy, dark in color, and with a crusty surface.
“Corrosion,” explained Wanounou. “Silver tarnish taken to its logical conclusion.”
“How do you get it off?” Peggy asked.
“Carefully,” said the professor. “First an electrolytic bath, then run some current through it, and after that give it a few minutes in the megasonic cleaner to shake off anything left.”
“After that?” Peggy asked. “Will you be able to unroll it?”
“Doubtful,” said Wanounou. “It would probably crumble.” He shook his head. “After it’s been cleaned I’ll put the scroll into the laser saw and cut it into strips. If there’s corrosion within the scroll I’ll have to put each strip into the electrolytic bath again. Then I’ll x-ray the strips, photograph them, put them between sheets of inert plastic, and then maybe you can read what’s on it—if anything.”
“So what’s the next step?” Holliday said.
“Go back to your hotel. Have dinner in the old city. Go to a place called Amigo Emil. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall place in the El Khanka Street Bazaar. Tell Emil I sent you. Call me in the morning, and I might have something for you to see. I’ll probably be at this all night.”
“We could hang around,” said Peggy.
“No, we couldn’t,” said Holliday firmly. “Leave the man alone to do his job.”
“Sure you don’t want us to stay?” Peggy said.
“Go, let me work,” said Wanounou. “You’d be bored stiff in half an hour if you stuck around.” He grinned. “Buy a book about the Copper Scroll at the university book store on your way out. There’s lots of them. Educate yourself.”
“All right,” she said.
“Come on,” said Holliday, he
ading for the door. Peggy followed, but not before she leaned over and gave the startled professor a quick peck on the cheek.
The Old City of Jerusalem is an ancient walled district occupying an area of slightly less than half a square mile in the southwestern corner of the modern city. Since the mid-1800s it has been divided into four distinct zones: the Christian Quarter in the northwest, the Muslim Quarter in the northeast, the Jewish Quarter in the southeast, and the Armenian Quarter, the smallest of the four areas occupying a sliver of territory in the southwest corner.
During the British Mandate period of the 1920s a man with Walt Disney-like foresight named Sir Ronald Storrs, the newly installed governor of the city, decreed that all construction within the city, new and old, would use locally quarried “Mezzah,” or Jerusalem stone. Not only did it provide needed jobs for an almost bankrupt city, it also gave the city a uniform look and prevented the Old City from being radically altered over the years. Conservationists, town planners, and tour guides still praise his name.
The walled area of the Old City looks like a complex web of winding streets that has been grasped in a pair of giant hands and squeezed down to Lilliputian dimensions. There are less than a score of streets wide enough to support traffic, and many of the alleyways in the old city are no wider than an average person’s outstretched arms.
Amigo Emil’s was just as Wanounou had described it, a hole-in-the-wall on a narrow street just inside the Damascus Gate in the Christian Quarter, the restaurant marked only with a rudimentary oval sign over the door painted with a cup, knife and fork, and something that looked like a steaming bowl of soup.
The dining area inside looked as though it had been carved out of native stone. The tables were blond wood inset with blue patterned ceramic tiles, the seats were straight-backed wooden chairs with comfortable cushions, and the food was wonderful. Peggy had once done a month-long shoot in war-ravaged Beirut so she worked the menu, ordering up a meze of Arabic dishes in square, white ceramic bowls and a pile of freshly baked pita bread.
They ate their way through an array of tapas-like portions of hummus; baba ghanoush; spicy kibbeh, a meat dish; carabage halab, an Arab pastry; tahini; and muhammara, a hot pepper dip. All of this was washed down with icy bottles of Maccabee pilsner.
The meal finished, Emil, the owner, took them down a few steps into the tiny establishment’s back room, where they rested on enormous lounging pillows and had coffee and several slices of tooth-numbingly sweet baklava.
“Trapped in a crusader castle one minute, defying dental hygiene the next,” said Peggy happily, licking honey syrup off her fingers. “This is the life for me.”
“Let’s not forget a body count that’s up to five now,” said Holliday. He sipped his coffee. “This isn’t a game of Where in the World Is Carmen Electra or whatever her name was.”
“Sandiego,” said Peggy. “Cool your jets, Doc. I was just trying to lighten things up.”
“Sorry,” answered Holliday. “But I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last little while, and things aren’t adding up.”
“Like what?”
“Lots. Like Broadbent’s father finding the sword with Uncle Henry, for instance. We know that was a lie. Carr-Harris never mentioned his name, so how did Broadbent junior even know about the sword?”
“What else?”
“How did Kellerman’s men know we were going to England? They knew we were in Friedrichshafen from the minute we got off the ferry. That monk . . .”
“Brother Timothy?” Peggy asked.
“Right. How did Brother Timothy know we were coming to the Villa Montesano exactly when we did? It was almost as though he expected us.” He paused. “And then there’s the good professor to consider,” he said slowly.
“Raffi?” Peggy frowned. “What about him?”
“He’s almost too good to be true.”
“The guy in Toronto, Braintree, was the one who suggested him,” argued Peggy. “Are you saying he’s involved in some kind of worldwide conspiracy, too?”
“I don’t know, Peg. I told you, it’s just that none of it makes any sense.”
“I think you’re just being paranoid.”
“Carr-Harris is dead. One of the guys shooting at him is dead. Two of Kellerman’s guards are dead. The old man, Drabeck, is dead. That’s not paranoia, that’s fact.”
“None of which has anything to do with Raffi.”
“He’s too convenient,” grumbled Holliday.
“What exactly is that supposed to mean?” Peggy said.
“The code on the gold wire takes us to Castle Pelerin. The Castle is in a military zone. Lo and behold, Raffi Wanounou has a pal who gets him clearance. We get trapped with someone on our tail, and there just happens to be a boat waiting to spirit us away. I don’t believe a word of it.”
“The man Raffi phoned at the Méridien to tell him where the boat was explained that,” said Peggy. “They were going to use it for some special exercise next weekend or something.”
“Or something, sure,” scoffed Holliday.
“You’re just worried that he likes me too much and that the feeling is mutual,” replied Peggy.
“That, too,” grunted Holliday.
“You’re being an old fogey,” laughed Peggy. “Have another piece of baklava.”
Emil materialized at the top of the stairs with the kind of fixed smile on his face that suggested he wanted to close up for the evening. Holliday looked at his watch. It was past eleven.
“Time to get back to the hotel,” he said. They were staying at the American Colony Hotel, a Jerusalem landmark just a ten-minute walk from the Damascus Gate. They paid the bill, thanked Emil for a wonderful meal, and stepped out of the restaurant onto the narrow street known as Souk El-Khanka. It was getting cool, and Peggy shivered.
Even though it was late, the quarter was still busy, and the little street was crowded with tourists and de liverymen balancing huge trays of fruit and bread on their heads. The air smelled of hot stone and spices, and a dozen kinds of music could be heard over the chatter of voices speaking half a dozen languages.
Take away the rock and roll and add a few donkeys and it could have been two thousand years in the past. Halfway back to the Damascus Gate Holliday could feel the hairs on the back of his neck rising. He tensed, then gripped Peggy’s elbow.
“What’s the matter?”
“We’re being followed.”
23
“You’re sure?” Peggy said.
“Certain,” answered Holliday. “He was outside the restaurant, smoking a cigarette. Waiting. Dark hair, jeans, sneakers, and one of those zip-up hoodie things, dark blue.”
“He could be a student.”
“He looks like a cop. Moves like one, too.”
“Why would cops be following us?”
“I have no idea, but I’m going to find out.”
They reached the corner of Souk El-Khanka and turned right, heading south down Bab Khan El-Zeit, a busy market street, well-lit and with lots of stalls and shops still open.
“This isn’t the way back to the hotel,” said Peggy. “We should have turned the other way, back toward Damascus Gate.”
“I know that,” said Holliday.
“So what are we doing?”
“Finding out what’s going on, once and for all.”
Holliday turned again onto a narrow side street called El-Khayat that ran behind. It was darker here, lit only at the entry to the alley. They went down a short flight of old stone stairs and kept on walking. A few seconds later, the man in the hoodie appeared and turned down the alley, as well.
“Is he still behind us?” Peggy asked nervously.
“Yes,” said Holliday. “That proves it; he’s on our tail.”
“Now what?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Maybe we should just go back to the hotel,” said Peggy, “ask Raffi about it tomorrow.”
“You ask him,” said Holliday. “I want answers no
w.”
“You’re sure he’s a cop?”
“I’m not sure of anything. He could be just a mugger, but I don’t think so.”
“A mugger in Jerusalem?”
“They have suicide bombers, why not muggers?”
“It’s creepy, like pickpockets in Bethlehem. It’s just not right.”
They reached the end of the street and turned south again, this time onto a slightly wider street called Christian Quarter Road, once more filled with strolling tourists and lined with shops and restaurants. A lot of the folding wooden shutters were closed, and half of the sky was blotted out by wooden, shelf-like awnings that jutted out over the paving stones. Every few yards the dark, shadowy entrance to a narrow laneway loomed.
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