Twenty minutes later, they were in Kallie’s modern apartment in a high-rise building on Bar-Lev Road, across the road from the Ammunition Hill national memorial and not far from Hebrew University, where she was completing her studies. As the temperature rose on the Crowne Plaza terrace and the intensity of the conversation grew, Kallie had suggested a change in venue. She was proud of her apartment. It was bright, sunny, and full of graceful touches that held deep meaning for her . . . the decorative, metal, mini Eiffel Tower that reminded her of her favorite city on earth; a framed print of Prague’s Charles Bridge at sunrise; and dozens of framed, family photos. She loved her family with a granite-hard passion that fueled her.
She grabbed a pitcher of iced tea and plunked it on the glass-topped coffee table along with some sturdy glass tumblers. But Kallie wanted to get down to business and wasn’t thinking of entertaining etiquette. While they were in the restaurant, she had to fight to keep from screaming at these knuckleheads as they unwrapped their incredible story.
At one point, Johnson, seeing the emotional outburst brimming just under the surface, had reached out and placed his hand on her arm. “Not here, Kallie,” he had whispered. “I know . . . I know. Take a breath. Hold on.”
Somehow, she made it through their story and had gotten out of the hotel without exploding. On the twenty-minute drive to her apartment, she remained silent, sifting the amazing story, stifling her anger at not being completely informed earlier, and measuring the apprehension that was growing in her heart. Now she could wait no longer; she had too much to say.
“First of all, I am really ticked off at you guys for keeping this from me. I know,” she said, warding off Johnson’s attempt to explain, “I know you didn’t want to put me in danger. Don’t you know how ridiculous that is? Anyone who chooses to live in Jerusalem, almost anywhere in Israel, does it with the knowledge and acceptance that danger is a reality of daily life. I could be picking out peppers in the market, sitting in class, or just walking down the street, and a random suicide bomber could snuff out my life. So that’s a bogus excuse.
“Second, I’m really ticked off at you because you don’t know how foolish you are and how your foolishness could have already put me in danger.”
Kallie looked at their innocent, questioning eyes, and some of her frustration escaped into the afternoon. They weren’t stupid, she thought, just ignorant. But whether ignorant or stupid, they had placed themselves in the crosshairs of Middle East conflict and, by arriving in Jerusalem with their avowed purpose, were inviting, almost requiring, an obligation on both sides to wipe them out. An obligation that would now extend to her if either side discovered the real purpose for the investigation and research she had undertaken for them over the past few months.
“Look, what you have just told me is a death warrant. Each one of you,” she said, deliberately pointing her finger at each, “is a dead man. And you pulled me into this without understanding the risk. I’m not talking about the guys with the lightning bolt crosses, that’s a whole different issue. What I’m saying is neither the Arabs nor the Israelis can allow you to leave this country alive. If they knew what you were planning, they wouldn’t allow us to live through the night. Dr. Johnson, I’m surprised that you, at least, didn’t understand the reality of the situation here in Israel and what your intentions would stir up.”
Unwilling to wait for an excuse or to give anyone else the floor, Kallie picked up her glass and her warning at the same time.
“To begin with, you are never going to get permission to dig anywhere on the Temple Mount. Excavating in Israel requires a license from the Department of Antiquities, which is granted only after very serious reviews of credentials, monetary and scholarly backing, and an approved site. All excavations must meet with the approval of the department. But that doesn’t help you at all because excavations cannot, under any circumstances, be carried out under or upon Temple Mount. Near the Mount is also problematic. Only one area is approved for exploration, the Jerusalem Archaeological Park, just to the south of the Temple Mount, and that area is already under the full authority of Israeli archaeologists.
“Did you really think that a group of Americans with some bags full of equipment could wander around the Temple Mount without raising any suspicion? The Temple Mount is under an intense amount of surveillance, day and night, and that includes all of the areas immediately around the Temple Mount. Don’t you think the Israelis and the Muslim Authority haven’t considered the possibility of intruders on the Temple Mount for any number of reasons? Don’t you think they both understand the intense emotional upheaval that will ensue if anything broaches the delicate and precarious balance of power? The Israelis have already experienced the street riots that erupted on the basis of rumors. How did you think they were going to respond once they discovered your plan to poke around under the Temple Mount? It’s impossible. Neither side can allow that to happen.
“Listen to me, Palestinians don’t exactly love Americans to begin with, but the four of you start investigating access points to the base of the Temple Mount and the Palestinians will immediately come to one conclusion: that you are planning to undermine the Haram al-Sharif—the Noble Sanctuary, containing the Dome of the Rock. That, for whatever reason, you intend to collapse the holy mosque. To the Western mind, this is a true overreaction. To the Middle Eastern Muslim, this is a natural and automatic conclusion.
“Alarms would be going off all over the place. The Waqf, both in Jerusalem and in Amman, Jordan, will approach Israeli authorities, demanding explanations, promises, and guarantees. The Islamic Movement, a group of radical Israeli Arabs, will once again sound the cry that ‘Al-Aqsa is in danger!’ There will be riots atop the Mount, stone-throwing youths, angry Jerusalemite Palestinians. Word will sweep across the Arab world in minutes with cries for help and threats of war.”
Stabbing into the brief space when Kallie took a breath, Johnson asked, “Are you talking about Hamas or Fattah?”
Shaking her head and her strawberry curls, Kallie dismissed the question with a backhand wave. “Hamas would not be in the picture. Their base is in Gaza and Ramallah, and access to Jerusalem is denied and cut off. Fattah, after their near civil war with Hamas, is relegated to the West Bank, and they have been severely weakened. Both will threaten and gesture, but this holds little weight in Jerusalem. What you will have to worry about are the local Jerusalemite Arabs. They have access, and they will use it. They are not very well organized, but there is a dangerous splinter organization of the Northern Islamic Front—En Sherif—that comes from Umm El Fahum, the headquarters. They do have contacts in east Jerusalem and are very radical in their paranoia over Jewish designs on the Temple Mount. If the Northern Front ever got a sense of what you were trying to prove, they would exercise no reluctance in slitting your throats.
“That’s one side,” she said, then drained her iced tea. “But should the Israeli authorities catch wind of your plans, they will immediately suspect that you are one of two things—foreign radicals intent on bringing about some biblical calamity or fulfilling some strange, messianic urge. Or they would suspect you were acting together with the Jewish Underground, a banned Jewish terrorist organization committed to blowing up Muslim structures on the Temple Mount.
“Whoever you are, the Israelis would be swift in deciding on a course of action. If they had even the faintest hint that you had designs on excavating the Temple Mount, you wouldn’t be investigated; you would be immediately arrested, thoroughly interrogated, and then dumped into a jail cell until they could arrange an unceremonious removal from the country and the revocation of any future right to enter the State of Israel.”
Kallie’s neck was getting stiff, both from tension and from the fact that she was punctuating her words with emphatic thrusts of her head and hands. “But,” she said, rolling her head back over her shoulders, sitting back in her chair, “if any of them dreamed that you were searching for the Third Temple, if they understood that you guys beli
eve it exists, you’d be squashed like bugs, me along with you. A Third Temple? That would mean war, all-out war. The Israelis would probably have to go nuclear to hold off the Arabs. Your lives, my life, they would mean nothing to either the Israelis or the Arabs as a price to prevent a nuclear war.”
Kallie had closed her eyes at the thought of nuclear war. If Israel went nuclear against the Arabs, someone would go nuclear against Israel . . . Iran, Moscow, perhaps even the North Koreans.
Opening her eyes, she watched in silent contemplation as each of her guests weighed the implications of her words and recognized, for the first time, the enormity of the outcome should their information prove correct.
“What do you think, Joe?” Bohannon asked.
“I’m beginning to wonder,” said Rodriguez, “not only about our chances of finding the Temple, but also our chances of surviving the next few days and returning home in one piece. Maybe it would make sense to leave the backpacks of equipment at the hotel, hightail it to the airport, and get out of Israel as fast as possible. Why not leave now?”
“Because the ‘lightning bolts’ are still looking for our sorry rear ends,” Rizzo answered.
“And because they are still looking for the scroll,” added Johnson. “We can’t go home now. Your families would still be in danger, and we would be in danger. Our lives are at risk whether we stay here or go. But here, it’s only us at risk—us and Kallie. We go home without determining whether the Temple is real or not, the risk returns with us. The lightning bolt guys are after the scroll. They know it exists. It was likely in their possession at one time. They may not know all that it means, but obviously, they believe it’s important enough to kill for it. Perhaps this is the same group that Spurgeon feared. Who knows? And it doesn’t really matter. We’ve got this scroll, we know its message, and it’s up to us to find out if it’s true. That’s all we have control over at the moment.”
Joe Rodriguez ran his hand through the thick, black curls on his head. “Maybe next time we go walking around the Mount, we should wear disguises.”
The stiff throbbing at the back of Kallie’s neck intensified. Too many long days hunched over digs in small pits, meticulously sweeping away grains of sand with a toothbrush. “What do you mean, next time?”
Kallie saw a momentary flicker of understanding in Rodriguez’s eyes. “After the reception last night, we walked down David Street to the Western Wall Tunnel. We stood there for a while, talking about Warren’s Gate and the Foundation Stones. Then we walked over to the Western Wall. We were wondering if maybe we were there too long.”
“You didn’t go into the Western Wall Tunnel?” she asked.
“No,” said Dr. Johnson, “we just stood there and watched for a while. I was surprised how many people were still entering the tunnel so late at night. Kallie, what is it?”
“How long were you standing there?”
The four of them looked at each other, each now exhibiting a growing anxiety. The others deferred to Bohannon.
“We might have been standing there for twenty or thirty minutes,” he said. Bohannon got out of his chair and stepped toward one of the apartment’s sunny windows. “We’re in trouble, aren’t we? We made a mistake.”
None of them needed to hear the answer.
“There are thousands of hidden surveillance cameras all over Jerusalem,” said Kallie, suddenly feeling empty inside, “and hundreds scattered around the Temple Mount. As a society living with the constant threat of terrorism, Shin Bet’s internal security apparatus is incredibly effective. The city is reduced to sectors, and each sector has a sophisticated communications center monitoring the feeds from all of the cameras in that sector. If you were standing outside the Western Wall Tunnel for thirty minutes last night, Shin Bet has you on tape. You may already be under surveillance.”
31
“Do you know these men?”
They were inside a low, stone building. Once a family’s dwelling, but now caught in the no-man’s-land between Jordan and the land the Jews stole in 1967. The floor was dusty, the tabletop dusty, the air was dusty. The Imam looked down at his once spotless white robe now coated in gray.
Mahamoud drew closer to the photo. It was clearly a copy. But the four men were visible, their features distinct.
“No. I don’t know who they are.”
“Shin Bet is concerned,” said the Imam. As the iron-willed leader of En Sherif, the outlawed faction of the Northern Islamic Front, the Imam had cultivated many impeccable sources of information. “They are running the photos through facial recognition and have reached out to Interpol. As yet, they know nothing. Only that these four stood at the entrance to the Western Wall Tunnel for thirty minutes.”
“Who is the one?” asked Mahamoud, pointing to the one in the shorts “Israeli? But if Israeli, why would Shin Bet be concerned? Unless . . . unless he was a rogue . . . Jewish Underground, perhaps?”
“I don’t know,” said the older man, his kaffiyeh hanging down past his long gray beard. “But I am also concerned. Leonidas has proven his value again. We pay him well; we will continue to need his service. But for now, alert Yazeer. Get his team activated. Find these men. Find them quickly.”
Rizzo was at Kallie’s computer, pulling up Google Earth while Kallie was huddled around the kitchen table with Bohannon, Rodriguez, and Johnson, two maps overlapping one end of the table, four thick reference books stacked on the other.
“I’ve been doing some of my own work while I was waiting for you to get over here,” Kallie was saying as she pulled open one of the huge books. “I thought . . . well . . . I thought you guys were doing a treasure hunt. I Googled all of you when Sammy first got in touch with me. And, Doc, forgive me. I saw there was this big stink in the past about selling counterfeit antiquities, and well, I don’t know, for a while I was worried that you might not have legitimate motives. I’m sorry about that. But it didn’t take long for me to put that aside and turn my energy to figuring out why you were coming all the way to Israel.
“So I started taking the few pieces of information that you shared with me combined with what I knew from the research I did for you, and I began running down every thread as far as I possibly could.
“Sammy,” Kallie said through the doorway, “have you zeroed in on that area and pulled up that interactive map of Israel?” When Rizzo grunted an affirmative, Kallie addressed the table again. “Come on, I’m going to show you something interesting.”
Rizzo made room for Kallie at the computer. He hopped up on another chair to remain by her side. “Okay . . . here’s the Temple Mount . . . you can see the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, even some of the walls. Now, the satellite photo can’t get us close enough, so let’s pull up the map of Israel and Jerusalem. Okay, here, on the right of the Temple Mount is the Kidron Valley. Down there is the Gihon Spring and the City of David. I figured if you were going to find a way under the Temple Mount, one that wasn’t closely guarded or overrun with tourists, it would have to come from around Gihon. There have been several interesting discoveries there recently by Israeli archaeologists. It had always been assumed that King Hezekiah built his water tunnel from Gihon to the Pool of Siloam to protect Jerusalem’s water supply in time of siege. But they have just discovered the foundations of a wall much farther down the slope to the Kidron Valley, a wall that would have enclosed the Gihon Spring. It even had guard towers on either side of the spring, obviously for protection. So Hezekiah’s Tunnel was not to supply water.
“That’s one of the amazing things about Jerusalem, how little has been done archaeologically over time and how limited our information is. Why, just recently a team uncovered a tunnel that was totally unknown—”
“The King’s Garden Tunnel, right?” asked Johnson. “Larsen and I also believed that would be a possible point of access. It runs in the right direction, passes very close to where archaeologists have theorized the Holy of Holies exists, and is large enough to have been a conduit for the material
needed to build the Temple. That would be my guess.”
Nolan was nodding her head in agreement. “You’re right, Doc. That is exactly where I was looking. I figured the only challenge for us would be initially getting into the tunnel. Now that it has been discovered, security has been increased in that area. But I’ve been checking it out over the past several weeks, using my garden guide status to visit at different times of the week, different times of the day or night. And there is good news. The tunnel entrance is nearly hidden from the Old City and the Temple Mount, on the down slope of a hillock, surrounded by high bushes. It has not been opened to the public, so there are no tourists. And most importantly, it’s not guarded after midnight.”
Bohannon’s heart skipped. “That’s great!” he blurted. “Right?”
“It’s good,” Kallie said calmly. “It’s good. It’s a place to start. But there is no guarantee. And there is a second good possibility, Zechariah’s Tomb. Joe, would you get that book from the table for me? Thanks.”
She flipped a few pages and then turned the book around for the others to read. “This is the family lineage of the Jewish priesthood, from Aaron through the seventeenth century. It goes on for several pages. Turn over two pages, look at the one on the left, about halfway down.”
Rizzo spotted it first. “There’s our boy, Abiathar, son of Elijah.”
“Okay,” said Kallie, “now track his lineage backward about two thousand years. Look for the prophet Zechariah. Found it? Okay, now look to the side. What does it say?”
Rodriguez followed the lineage lines from Zechariah to a line that ran parallel through generation after generation. “It says Zechariah was from the priestly family of Beni Hazir.”
“Okay,” Kallie continued, “go back to Abiathar.”
Rodriguez flipped the pages. “It says Abiathar was also from the priestly family of Beni Hazir. Is that normal? Are all priests from Beni Hazir?”
The Sacred Cipher Page 23