The Ripper Secret

by The Ripper Secret (retail) (epub)

  She leaned forward and lowered her voice slightly.

  ‘In particular, I would like you to explore under the Temple Mount and any other religious site that you can manage to get into. You’re a surveyor, and so I expect you to be able to produce detailed maps showing exactly what lies underneath the old city. It would be helpful if you could also examine any writing or other evidence that you find which might clarify our picture of life in biblical times.’

  ‘Surely you would be better to employ an archaeologist for such a task?’

  Baroness Coutts shook her head decisively.

  ‘If I was interested in obtaining detailed information about one very small area of Jerusalem, that would be the right course of action. But I’m not. I want somebody who can produce a map, as I’ve said, who will be able to find a way around any bureaucratic hurdles he might encounter, and a man prepared to employ any means necessary to achieve the objective. You, according to your senior officers, are such a man.’

  ‘Very well. I will need to speak to my commanding officer,’ Warren began. ‘I will need to seek a leave of—’

  ‘You will not,’ Baroness Coutts interrupted. ‘I have already been in conversation with the general, and he is entirely in favour of your undertaking this commission. As is Vicky, I might add.’

  Warren nodded. He was intelligent enough to recognize a fait accompli when he was confronted with one. The ‘Vicky’ the Baroness had referred to was her best friend, a woman better known to the wider world as Queen Victoria. Whatever his personal feelings, he knew he had absolutely no choice in the matter.

  ‘Very well,’ he said again. ‘I will prepare a list of the equipment I will need, and begin selecting the men who will accompany me.’

  Warren had already made something of a name for himself by climbing and surveying the Rock of Gibraltar, which was one reason why the Baroness had chosen him. Shortly after this meeting in London, he was officially loaned for an indefinite period to the Palestine Exploration Fund, an organization set up by Baroness Coutts in 1865 with a donation of 500 pounds sterling, and his stated task was to research the archaeology and history of biblical Palestine, a vague and extremely flexible brief. In private, and during the course of a second and third meeting, the Baroness had delivered much more specific and detailed instructions: he was to investigate the site of the ancient Temple, Jerusalem’s old fortifications, the City of David itself, and the authenticity of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But as she had indicated at their original meeting, she was especially interested in what lay under the ancient Jewish site of the Temple Mount, and that, she told him several times, was to be his highest priority.

  And so, in February 1867, Warren – who was then aged only twenty-seven – had arrived in Jerusalem with Henry Birtles, a corporal in the Royal Engineers, who had assisted the lieutenant on the Gibraltar climb, two other corporals, a surveyor and a photographer, and some eight mules carrying all the equipment they thought they’d need.

  The Holy Land and Jerusalem were then ruled by the Ottoman Turks, and because the permit to begin the dig – a document known as a firman – had not yet arrived from Constantinople, Warren had immediately justified Baroness Coutts’s faith in him and used his initiative to get his expedition started as quickly as possible.

  He’d asked the British consul to arrange for him to meet the pasha, the Turkish ruler of Jerusalem, to try to obtain his permission whilst awaiting the firman. Using his considerable powers of persuasion, Warren managed to convince the pasha to approve digging around the Haram es-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary, the Temple Mount. But Warren was strictly for bidden from conducting any excavations within the Haram, the third holiest site in the world of Islam, upon which stood both the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

  That wasn’t exactly what Warren had wanted, because he was in Jerusalem with Baroness Angela Coutts’s most specific instructions still ringing in his ears, instructions which stated that he principal task was to explore the subterranean world that was believed to lie under the Temple Mount. But Warren was not the kind of man to be deterred by such a minor matter as a blanket prohibition.

  He had come up with a scheme that would allow him to both apparently comply with the limited permission the pasha had provided for him, and at the same time satisfy the aims of the PEF. He surveyed the area, then employed local diggers to begin excavating a number of vertical exploratory shafts located some distance from the outer walls of the Temple Mount. Once one of these shafts had reached a satisfactory depth, he ordered his men to take over the dig and change direction, and to begin to excavate a tunnel which led straight towards the Mount. The work absolutely consumed Warren, who spent so much of his time underground that the people of Jerusalem nicknamed him ‘the mole’.

  A short time after they had reached the subterranean world under the Temple Mount, the firman – the permission to dig – finally arrived from Constantinople. But when he read it, Warren was dismayed to discover that his expedition had been given permission to dig almost everywhere, with the sole exception of all religious sites, which were of course the only ones he was interested in. He had hoped the firman would have allowed him to excavate the Temple Mount directly, rather than having to rely on his mole-like tunnelling activities, but instead of that he now had two separate permissions, both of which forbade him from doing what he was already doing. And what he, naturally, intended to continue doing.

  The only good thing was that Warren now had a piece of paper he could wave around if anybody asked him if he had permission to dig in the area, and that would work perfectly right up until the moment when somebody asked to actually read it. But, fortunately, nobody ever had.

  Warren’s men drove numerous shafts into the ground around the Temple Mount over the next few months, sometimes hacking their way down through over a hundred feet of rubble and rubbish before finally reaching bedrock. Other shafts terminated in parts of existing underground systems: the area was a honeycomb of ancient caves and shafts and tunnels. The digging was both difficult and dangerous because of the unstable nature of the ground above them, the debris which formed the walls of the shafts frequently moving and occasionally crumbling away. Several times they had to dodge for their lives as falling stones tumbled down from above them.

  Charles Warren knew from the start that he and his team couldn’t openly dig anywhere on the Temple Mount, but he did manage to establish friendly relations with the guards and was able to examine both the Dome of the Rock itself and a part of the network of cisterns that was known to lie under it. In all, during both his legal examinations on the Temple Mount and his illegal excavations under it, he had established that there were at least thirty-four reservoirs hacked out of the rock there, of a variety of sizes, the largest holding some two million gallons of water.

  He was the first person to explore beneath the Temple Mount in modern times. He was not to know that he would also be the last.

  * * *

  The morning after his discovery, Warren gave his team the day off, suggesting they take the opportunity to wash off the dirt of the expedition and enjoy what recreational facilities were offered by Jerusalem, which he knew were few and very limited. But at least they would be able to enjoy a decent meal or two, and perhaps even find a drink somewhere: the expedition camp was dry with no alcohol being permitted there. Warren himself, he declared, would remain at the excavation writing up his notes and preparing a number of drawings showing the location of the chambers and passages and other features they’d explored.

  Warren waited until everyone else had departed, then began work, writing up his notes, as he had said he would, and starting to prepare a drawing, which he displayed prominently on his desk. That would, he hoped, provide some kind of an explanation for his absence if any of the expedition members returned unexpectedly early. He would be able to say that he’d needed to descend into the shaft once again to check the dimensions of one or two of the chambers.

  He pulled on his old d
igging clothes, then took two Davy lamps, three sacks, and a pick and shovel, and descended the shaft he and Birtles had used the day before. In a few minutes he’d retraced his steps to the low and restricted entrance to the chamber they’d found. There, he used the shovel to remove some of the earth that still partially blocked the doorway. The ground was hard-packed and difficult to even get the shovel into, but Warren persevered, driving the blade of the tool as hard as he could into the earth, the sweat running down his face and body as he did so.

  As he worked, he wondered if the almost complete blocking of the entrance had been deliberate, if the ancient workers in these tunnels had known about the prize that lay within the cleft in the rock and had done their best to conceal not only the object within the chamber, but the entrance to the chamber as well. Most of the spaces he and his men had explored had been fairly open and much easier to get inside, but this one had been almost completely hidden. In fact, it was only a glimpse he’d caught of the corner of a piece of worked masonry that had indicated there was anything there at all.

  Within twenty minutes he’d opened up the entrance far enough to allow him to slide into the inner chamber reasonably easily; more importantly, he hoped the gap would now be big enough to allow him to extricate the object he’d discovered.

  Inside the chamber, Warren stood up and walked directly across to the opposite corner, where the cleft in the rock appeared as a dark vertical slash in the light from the Davy lamp. As he’d done before, Warren wedged the lamp into a narrow section of the cleft to allow him to use both hands. It was still quite difficult to see exactly how the object had been lodged in the opening, and for a few moments he debated about lighting a piece of magnesium wire to provide much greater illumination.

  This was a technique that he and Birtles had used on many occasions during their explorations, the wire burning with a fierce white light. But the problem with doing that was that it would completely destroy his night vision for several minutes after the wire burnt out. In the circumstances, Warren thought, it would be better to just rely on the Davy lamp, which would provide a much dimmer, but reliable and continuous, illumination.

  He stared into the opening at the bulky dark fabric, which at a casual glance still looked remarkably like a jumbled collection of rocks a couple of feet high, then reached out and seized it in both hands, lifting and pulling the material up and towards him, to try to uncover the object underneath.

  That didn’t work, and it was quickly apparent to Warren that the fabric wasn’t simply covering the object, but was wrapped tightly around it. So then he grasped the section of metal which he had uncovered the previous day and began moving it back and forth, assessing the degree of movement available and trying to work out if it was jammed into the gap in the rock or simply lying at the bottom of the crevice.

  It seemed to move relatively freely, and he realized that it was probably only the considerable weight of the relic that was preventing him easily removing it from its hiding place. In fact, it was quickly obvious that the object was actually standing upright, the heavy base resting on a flattened area of rock, and to him that made perfect sense, because now he not only knew exactly what the relic was, but precisely why it had been placed in that particular part of that specific chamber. The reason had been obvious to him that morning, as soon as he’d examined the maps and drawings he’d been making of the subterranean maze.

  He seized the object with both hands, gripping it through the fabric, and began to lift it. It was an awkward manoeuvre, because he was having to stretch deep into the crevice, and use all the strength in his arms to move it at all.

  But he managed it. Slowly, inch by inch, he manoeuvred the fabric-covered object out of the gap in the rock, taking care not to knock it against the sides, because he was desperate not to damage it.

  When he’d got the object part of the way out, he changed his grip to seize it around the central shaft, which both confirmed his belief about what he’d found and made it much easier to lift and to manoeuvre. Then, when he’d lifted it completely clear of its hiding place, he lowered it gently to the earth floor, resting it on its base. Then he moved the Davy lamp so that he could see that what he was doing. Warren had a folding knife in his pocket, but rather than risk scratching the relic, he decided to unwrap it, carefully unwinding the fabric from around it.

  It looked as if whoever had secreted the object in the chamber had been just as concerned about keeping it undamaged as Warren, because he ended up removing a very long piece of linen, almost like a burial shroud, from around it, the material having covered and padded every part of the relic apart from the bottom of the base. He wadded up the cloth and replaced it in the crevice, and only then did he turn back and examine the object.

  It didn’t look particularly impressive, in part because of the dark paint which had been applied to its surface, perhaps in an attempt to conceal the material from which it was made. The workmanship was good, but he could still make out faint hammer marks on the metal, a kind of silent confirmation of the way it had reputedly been made. Although Warren knew exactly what it was, he’d never actually seen anything like it before. He knew, without the slightest scintilla of doubt, that the object he was looking at pre-dated Christianity by centuries, possibly by over one millennium, if the Bible was right. It was, at one and the same time, probably the most valuable single religious object ever created. So important was it, that virtually every citizen of an entire nation would happily kill just to possess it. And members of other faiths would just as readily kill to destroy it.

  And as he stared at the black-painted relic, Warren’s mind span backwards as he recalled what little he knew – and what little the rest of the world knew, in fact – about this most sacred of all religious artefacts.

  Its blood-soaked history extended back to the period even before the wandering Israelites crossed the Jordan River, and it had been seized many times as a prize by victorious armies contesting ownership of Jerusalem and Palestine. Biblical sources suggested that in 586BC, when it had already been in the possession of the Israelites for well over 500 years, it had been transported to Babylon by Nebuzaradan, the commander of Nebuchadnezzar’s guard, who had been responsible for the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and the deportation of the people of Judah.

  It had been restored to the Temple about forty years later, and then almost half a millennium later it was captured by the Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes when he sacked Jerusalem in 167BC, killing forty thousand Jews in the process and selling another forty thousand into slavery.

  Recorded, rather than biblical, history took up the story in the first century AD, when the relic was looted by the victorious Roman army, led first by Vespasian, and then by his son Titus, as the legions suppressed the Great Jewish Revolt. It was one of the most brutal conflicts in history. At the end of the long siege, Jerusalem had quite literally been surrounded by the crucified bodies of tens of thousands of Jews who had tried to flee from the beleaguered city. Estimates suggested that as many as 100,000 Jews died during the siege, and an almost equal number were captured by the Romans and marched in chains to Rome and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, to be sold in the slave markets.

  The relic was carried into Rome, paraded in triumph with the other treasures of the Second Temple, then placed on display in the city’s Temple of Peace, where it probably remained until the fifth century, when the city was sacked, first by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410 AD and then by the Vandals almost fifty years later. Historians’ opinions were divided, but the consensus was that it had most likely been the Vandals who had seized the relic, carrying it off to their capital city of Carthage.

  More spilled blood followed when Carthage itself was attacked by a Byzantine army under General Belisarius in 533 AD and, according to one contemporary source, a writer named Procopius, the object was later carried through the streets of Constantinople as part of the general’s triumphal procession, a reprise of the events in Rome half a millennium ear
lier. Procopius had also claimed that the relic was then returned to Jerusalem, but no modern historians had been able to find any documents or accounts which lent support to this suggestion.

  All this Warren knew. Well before he’d travelled to Jerusalem he’d made a study of the history of the region, so that he would properly be able to understand the significance of the ruins he would be excavating and the historic finds he and the PEF, and especially Angela Coutts, had hoped he would uncover.

  And now, in the dark underground chamber, lit only by the dim light from the Davy lamp, Warren knew that Procopius had been right. The most sacred relic of the Jewish civilization, arguably even more important and significant than the Ark of the Covenant, had indeed been returned to Jerusalem.

  People had been looking for it for at least one and a half millennia, and he’d found it, almost by accident, in a place where nobody had ever looked before and where he wasn’t supposed to be.

  And nobody knew anything about it except Warren himself.

  Part One

  Jerusalem

  1886

  Mount of Olives, Jerusalem

  They’d first broken the ground with very little ceremony. After all, the whole area had seen countless buildings erected, repaired, rebuilt and ultimately demolished over the centuries, and it was only one more church.

  The builders of the new house of worship were familiar to the local inhabitants, although they were neither Jews nor Arabs. They were Christians, from one of the oldest extant religious groups, by tradition tracing their history back to the Apostle Andrew, although it wasn’t until the end of the tenth century that Russian Orthodox Christianity came to prominence under Prince Vladimir I of Kiev, who adopted Byzantine Rite Christianity as the state religion. The Russian Orthodox Mission had only arrived in Jerusalem in 1858, so they were relative newcomers, but when the Russians had decided to build their own church on the Mount of Olives, it didn’t seem to be in any way an inappropriate location.