“Thank you, General. That means a lot to me, sir.”
“I know. Now haul out of there, mister. You don’t have much time. The Israelis are making rapid advance. Godspeed, son. Godspeed.”
The voice was gone and the lights went out at the same time, leaving Bohannon staring dumbly at this space-age marvel in his hand. He was almost transported to a land of make-believe until he saw the look on the two faces opposite him.
“That’s gotta be bad news,” said Rodriguez, “that’s gotta be real bad news.”
Deep inside the earth of southwestern Israel, beneath the cover of a small petroleum depot that helped hide their many satellite dishes (made to look like storage tanks) and antennas, the Israeli army’s clandestine communications center constantly scanned all electronic communications wavelengths.
“I’ve got a hit,” said the lieutenant. “Satellite phone . . . encrypted.”
“Location?” asked the captain.
The lieutenant clicked and scrolled, closed in on the coordinates. He looked at the captain. “Temple Mount.”
“Lock in the coordinates. I’ll call the general.”
45
“We’ve got to move, right now.” That was all Bohannon said.
Within minutes, their gear was packed. Leaving dust squalls in their wake, they were up and over the debris field in the northwest corner, squeezing through the hole in the limestone wall. Bohannon was the last one through when Rodriguez suddenly shucked his pack. “Here, hold this, I’ll be right back.” And he was gone, back through the hole. One . . . two . . . three long, anxious minutes, before Rodriguez launched himself through the hole and scrambled to his feet. “Get back!”
It sounded and felt and tasted like the tremor that awoke them, perhaps on a smaller scale, but just as dramatic because of its proximity. A huge crash on the other side of the wall, the rumbling sounds of caving earth, billows of blinding dust shooting through the hole from the room on the other side. Pressed into the darkness, his helmet slammed onto his head at the last minute, Bohannon looked at his brother-in-law.
“So? I closed the door. That column over there was just rockin’ on an edge, didn’t take much to make it decide its fate. Now, even if the soldiers find that room, they’ll have a tough time finding out how we left.”
“Okay, but, next time, how about a little warning so we don’t get clobbered.” Bohannon reached over and gave the pack back to Rodriguez. “Doc, listen, we should . . .”
Bohannon had turned, the beam on his TAG lamp illuminating a portion of a hallway. The wall to the right, and a portion of the floor, were intact, but everything else looked like a mountain had caved in on it. And Johnson was nowhere to be seen.
Jonathan Whitestone was seated in an armchair, situated between and dominating the two facing sofas in the Oval Office. His hair was black, his suit was black, and his eyes were on fire. At that moment, his withering stare had fallen upon the FBI director.
“Well then, you will find out who they are, Bill, and you will find out, now!”
Whitestone’s fury swept all those in the room. The election was five months away and the polls had him in a dead heat. Now, three Americans were burrowing under the Temple Mount and inciting a Middle Eastern crisis that could impact the entire world. And his advisors, some of the most powerful men in the world, knew nothing.
“This has disaster written all over it.” Whitestone seethed. “Find out all you can about these men and give everything you find to the Israelis. They must be found, and they must be stopped. I don’t care how. They must be stopped.”
Blue light was shimmering up ahead, to the right, the side that had not been destroyed. Bohannon and Rodriguez had been prepared to shout Doc down, find out where he went, until they realized they may no longer be alone . . . that sound could travel long distances in these underground caverns. So they chased his shadow.
Inside the portal opening, they found Doc in a small anteroom or closet, the blue cyalume stick in his hand held high to light the wall at which he was staring. He was talking to himself. In Aramaic. Here we go, thought Bohannon, back to the surreal.
Rodriguez got right in his face. “Doc, why did you take off? Don’t you know the whole Israeli army is coming after us, along with a few thousand Muslims pledged to end our lives? Do you think that’s a good time to take a stroll?”
Johnson looked blankly at Rodriguez.
“But the inscriptions,” said Johnson, turning to point at the wall with his cyalume stick.
They were exhausted. None of them was thinking clearly. There was so much input competing for a place on their memory cards. Before Rodriguez could react, Bohannon put a hand on his shoulder and stepped between them. He turned his head to get his eyes in front of Johnson’s. “Doc, I know, this is amazing . . . Doc . . . c’mon, we’ve got to figure out our next step.”
With a start, a look of surprise, Johnson’s focus switched from the wall. “But this is our next step.”
“Gefen, we got the coordinates from a satellite communication—31°47' north; 35°10' east. Get there.”
He had the cell phone open before the second ring. “Yes?”
“A satellite communication into the Temple Mount was intercepted,” Leonidas said without preamble. “The coordinates are 31°47' north; 35°10' east. Israeli soldiers are on their way. Do what you will. But the Israelis are getting suspicious. This may be my last communication.”
The Imam felt a twinge of regret and a stab of resistance. “You have been of great service, Leonidas. You will be rewarded handsomely . . . but only once these men are dead, or in our hands. Do you understand?”
His cell phone lost its signal, providing a simple answer.
They were on the floor of the anteroom, Doc’s maps spread out in front of them.
“You see, Winthrop and I agreed that Tuvia Sigva got it right, that his theory on the Temple placed it between the location of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. We thought that location also worked for Warren’s Gate, that Warren’s Gate was about as close as anyone could come to the original site of the Most Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, of the Temple. We also agreed that if Abiathar and his father, Elijah, were determined to construct a temple under the Temple Mount, they would try to do it in as close proximity as possible to the original Temple’s location.
“We always thought the area around Warren’s Gate would be the most likely location for Abiathar’s Temple. Except, now we know the Western Wall Tunnel runs right past Warren’s Gate. And there has been no secret Temple discovered.
“But if you accept Tuvia Sigva’s location, then the Holy of Holies would have been much farther south than where Warren’s Gate now sits.”
Johnson turned to them, expectantly, but Bohannon was drawing a blank, he didn’t know where this was going.
“Okay, let me make it easy,” said Johnson, beginning to draw on his map. “Down here are the Hulda Gates, in the south wall. The Triple Gate, the one to the east, had tunnels leading up to the Temple Mount. We believe we just came through the meeting hall of the Sanhedrin, that would have been above, higher than, the Hulda Gates, in the vicinity of the Temple. And that’s where we found Meborak’s stellae with the master code. So Abiathar had to have been in that Sanhedrin room. Here is Warren’s Gate over here, on the Western Wall. Here’s the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa. If the Temple sat in the space between the Dome and Al-Aqsa, it would have been in here.” Johnson drew an oval on his map, between the two buildings. “Here is where the Hulda Gate tunnels likely would have surfaced.” Johnson made a mark, that touched his oval. “There was a Herodian street that ran along the western side of the Temple Mount, from the Damascus Gate to the Pool of Siloam.” He drew in the street, touching the western side of the oval. “With the Dome of the Rock on the north and the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the south and the Western street on the west, there was only one way for Abiathar to gain access to the area around the Temple’s location with the lowest level of risk, from the southeast. As we have d
one.
“So, looking at the likely location for the Temple, where should we look for Abiathar’s secret cavern?” Johnson asked.
Bohannon looked down at the map and wondered, if it was so simple, why they hadn’t figured it out before.
“Look at your GPS,” said Johnson.
Rodriguez got to his quickly and held it up for all of them to see. A small, green star flashed on and off. “Throw on the Temple Mount coordinates,” said Johnson. Rodriguez punched in a few numbers, and an outline formed on the screen.
“We’re right here.” Rodriguez tapped the map, right on the oval, in the middle of where the Hulda Gate tunnels should have risen to the surface of the Temple Mount.
Bohannon watched while a huge, cheek-to-cheek smile broke out all over Johnson’s face.
“That’s right, that’s right. We are in what is left of one of the passages that rose from the Triple Gate, the eastern-most Hulda Gate, up to the Temple Mount. These passageways, like everything else, were filled with the massive debris that occurred when the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 A.D. Remember, every stone was thrown down and Herod’s Temple was enormous. That’s why all of this stuff is underground. The Romans knocked it all down; the Muslims smoothed it out and built again on top of the rubble. Two thousand years ago, we would have been in the middle of a busy passageway. Today, we are hundreds of feet below the surface of the Temple Mount.
“So, Mr. Rodriguez, since you appear to be more alert this morning than your near relative, where would you say we should look for Abiathar’s cavern?”
“Holy Christmas, Doc,” spurted Bohannon. “We got posses breathing down our necks from every direction, and you want to play twenty questions?”
Johnson looked deeply offended, wounded that Bohannon wouldn’t indulge what was obviously a triumphant moment. “I’m sorry, Doc. My apologies, you’re doing great. So, where do we look?”
With a nod of his head as absolution, Johnson swept up his map, grasped the still glowing cyalume stick, and stood to his feet. “Gentlemen, follow me.”
Johnson turned on his heel and went back down the Hulda passage, hugging the wall to his right.
It was as if they had been moving through the middle of a landslide. A seemingly impassable wall of rubble rose to their left, filling most of the Huldah passage, the debris precariously stacked above their heads, wedged against the wall of the Huldah passage on their right. Johnson gingerly navigated the tight corridor and reached the space where they had broken through the wall. The limestone walls of the Sanhedrin meeting room facing him, Johnson barely broke stride.
He turned to his left and squeezed past the corner of the limestone block wall, into a crevice about four feet high, between some of the fallen stones and the finished block wall.
“Come along,” said a muffled voice.
Bohannon stood in front of the narrow opening. If Johnson had not disappeared into this crack in the debris, Bohannon would never have looked at it twice. Rodriguez measured the thin crevice with his eyes, took off his backpack, and slid it through the opening in front of him. Then he lay down on his side, wriggled his body in several contortionist positions, and finally slipped from sight.
Johnson was much thinner than Rodriguez. Rodriguez, younger and more athletic than Bohannon, was also much thinner than Bohannon, particularly around the middle.
“I’m never getting through there,” Bohannon groaned.
He could hear the voice in front of him, chattering away, talking as much to the rocks as to anyone else. And he could see the blue cyalume light that left a trail of illumination bright enough for him to navigate without bashing his head. But that was all he knew of Johnson, or his progress. At each turn, the Doc had moved on, waiting for no man.
Rodriguez would have kicked himself if his foot could have reached his butt. He had forced himself through that tight space, wanted to show Tom he could do it, and now his back hurt like . . . well, it hurt. It was a pain he knew; and a pain he knew wasn’t going away.
“It’s hard to tell the difference in the debris.”
Doc’s voice drifted over the rocks from somewhere ahead.
“But there should be a difference. They were a thousand years apart.”
Rodriguez had quickly given up on the idea of pushing his backpack in front of him. The space was too narrow—too irregular—it kept getting stuck. So now his backpack rested on his right hip as, on his left side, he pulled, pushed and twisted himself, foot by foot, along this narrow crevice. Where was Doc going?
“Oh . . . oh . . . excellent,” came from the blue light in the distance.
Rodriguez was grateful for two things, the four ibuprofen tablets he had just washed down and the fact that he could sit, with his legs stretched out. He and Johnson were catching their breath, each glad to be out of that snaking little crevice.
“That was part of the debris that must have come down when Abiathar collapsed the entrance to the Temple cavern,” said Johnson, who was taking deep breaths and gnawing on an energy bar. “He and his men could never have come through an obstacle like that. And the floor is relatively flat. This must have been a much more open space in his time.”
“Where are we, Doc?”
As Johnson unfolded his map, they could hear Bohannon grunting, cussing, and squeezing. “It’s a good thing that crevice slopes downhill. Otherwise, he might never get through.
“Here, I would say we are here.” Johnson pointed to the Triple Gate. “But I believe we are behind the gate—inside the gate—and lower than the gate. I believe this is where Elijah, Abiathar’s father, decided to dig out his cavern. I admit, we may have taken a wrong turn somewhere in our decisions. Perhaps they didn’t deal with that lake of water, or maybe, at that time, there was no lake, or most likely, there was more than one way to gain access to the cavern. But I have no doubt that both Elijah and Abiathar used the meeting room of the Sanhedrin as the headquarters room for their work. And if their desire was to have their Third Temple as close to the site of the Second Temple as possible, without being discovered, this is where they would have looked.”
Rodriguez wasn’t sold. There could be thousands of arguments that would be just as valid, even if this Third Temple did exist. And he was beginning to have his doubts. This whole crazy chase had just been a bunch of ignorant guys bumbling their way from one fiasco to another. At least, that was one way to look at it.
Bohannon pulled himself into the open space.
“Your brother-in-law is a dolt.” Johnson projected the petulance of a child. His head was bowed, the silent GPS unit in his lap.
“You’re just flat wrong, Doc,” Rodriguez snapped. “There’s no need to get your nose out of joint. I simply don’t agree with your conclusions.”
“It is truly sad to discover your reasoning is so fatally flawed,” Johnson snarled.
Bohannon felt as if he had just been squashed by a steamroller. All he wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. That was out of the question. If he didn’t get between Doc and Joe right now, his brother-in-law was likely to make coleslaw out of Doc’s brains.
“Lighten up, Doc,” said Rodriguez, “I hear what you’re saying about the Huldah entrance tunnel and the guy’s theory on the Temple location. But we’re hundreds of yards south of where most archaeologists believe Herod’s Temple would have been located. I don’t think we’re going to find anything around here. And we’ve got to get moving. There’s probably only enough time for us to probe one site, and we’ve still got to find a way to get out. We can’t waste our time on a site that is so obviously not a possibility.”
Bohannon slid between the two combatants, pulling himself to a sitting position.
“Look.” He was stunned by the raspy, weak sound of his voice. But his words matched his physical state. “Joe’s right. We have one shot at this, maybe not even one shot. If Ethan Larsen is right, our time is up. We’ve got one choice.
“But Doc could be right, too. Either we try to probe the
area on the other side of this wall, or we all agree that there’s another location that is more promising, we get there as quickly as possible, and hope that we have enough time to send in the cameras. So, what’s it going to be? Do we sit here arguing with each other, or do we take advantage of the one chance we have?”
Bohannon rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes. “Personally, I think we’ve come a long way and sacrificed too much to blow the one chance we have.”
“But that’s the challenge, isn’t it?” said Johnson. “How do we decide where to look?”
Bohannon opened his eyes. They were both looking to him for guidance.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Bohannon felt desperation rising in his chest, bringing fear as a companion. “We need a miracle.”
And he knew.
“Listen, I don’t know how to decide what to do, but I believe we can discover what to do.”
The other two men looked in his direction. Understanding and agreement rose like an underground sun. “We could pray. Will you pray with me?”
Johnson began to stammer his uncertainty, but Rodriguez was immediately at Bohannon’s side.
“Let’s go. I’m willing to believe you’ll get the answer. I’ll join with you, but you’re the guy who’s connected.”
They both looked at Doc.
“All right, I guess we don’t have much choice.” Johnson slid the short distance to their sides.
God, this is weird, Bohannon thought. Praying with an audience, a relatively unbelieving audience, but an audience who, nevertheless, expect a miracle. No pressure there.
He closed his eyes.
He thought about the other times, the times he had called out to God in need, in pain, in fear, in doubt, and how often God had given him answers in the past. And he was confident, they had no other choice.
He set his heart.
He slowed his mind. He felt hands reach out for his.
The Sacred Cipher Page 34