Christopher, Paul - Templar 08

by Lost City of the Templars (v5. 0)

  “And in a Mossad agent,” grumbled Peggy.

  “I have not been, am not now and will never be a Mossad agent,” said Rafi.

  “Can it,” said Holliday. “We have to stay focused. Why this place? Is there anything special about it?”

  “There are arguments about that, as well.”

  “What arguments?”

  “Why three pools, why so close to the aqueduct—it runs right above us—and why are they so small in relation to the half dozen other cisterns scattered throughout the community?”

  “You have a theory?”

  “Yes, but it’s not readily accepted.”

  “Why?”

  “I think it’s a mikvah, a ritual cleansing pool. The three pools together, their lack of depth in relation to the other cisterns and the fact that these were very holy men. The mikvah would be a necessary ritual every day, and this is the most likely spot.”

  The wind began picking up again, roaring over the plateau and driving what few tourists had come for a visit back to their cars. Holliday felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising, and all his senses were suddenly on high alert. He felt terribly exposed. Maybe it was just Eddie’s fantasmal, and maybe not.

  He felt the Cuban’s big black hand grip his shoulder. “I feel it, too, amigo,” he said quietly.

  Holliday dragged himself back to the matter at hand. “What are the arguments against its being a mikvah?”

  “Theoretically a mikvah must have running water; a man cannot cleanse himself in the taint of the previous user. None of the three pools has running water available; like all the other cisterns, they are merely vessels for storing water.”

  “What would it take to make this running water?” Holliday asked.

  Eddie shrugged. “Every bathtub must have a plug, yes?”

  “A drain,” said Peggy.

  “There is no drain,” Rafi said.

  “To prove your theory is correct, there has to be a drain, right?”

  “But there isn’t one. They’ve gone over this settlement a thousand times in the past eighty years. They would have found a drain if there was one.”

  “Just like they didn’t find the Dead Sea Scrolls for two millennia,” said Holliday.

  “So, what’s the answer?” Peggy asked.

  “I know what he is going to say,” said Eddie, rolling his eyes and grinning.

  “So what am I going to say, you Cuban sabelotodo?” asked Holliday.

  “Your Cuban is getting real good, mi coronel.”

  “Answer the question, smart-ass.”

  “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” quoted Eddie. “Your favorite saying of the great detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Okay, then, where is the drain?” Rafi demanded, sweeping his arm around the twelve-foot-diameter pool.

  Holliday thought for a moment, letting his mind wander over the whole problem and its possible answer. He had a glimmering of something, but he couldn’t quite see it. “It can’t be a drain,” he said finally.

  “Really helpful,” said Rafi.

  “Think about it. How were these baths used? What did they do?”

  “They stripped off their clothes, then immersed themselves.”

  “How much of themselves?”

  “Total immersion was the prescribed way if it was possible, like the original baptisms. Total immersion and then a rebirth without your sins.”

  “So they’d come down the steps until they were completely underwater.”

  “Presumably.” Rafi nodded.

  “But how?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They must have had a way of filling the pool, using the aqueduct, or drawing it from the other cisterns, right?” Holliday paused. “They had to fill it up, probably almost up to the top step.” He indicated the top of the pool a few feet above their heads.

  “Obviously,” said Rafi. “We’ve been over this.”

  “Would they use the same water over and over again to bathe themselves?”

  “That makes no sense,” said Eddie.

  “So that means they had to empty it,” said Holliday.

  “Through a nonexistent drain,” said Rafi.

  “Which would be like emptying a bathtub; it hardly rates as running water,” Holliday said.

  “So?” Peggy asked.

  “Richard Nixon,” said Holliday.

  “Qué?” Eddie said.

  “A water gate. The Egyptians had them for irrigation. Like the floodgates on a dam. They’d have a series of pulleys to raise and lower it; as the holy men came into the water, the gate would be slowly opened, letting the water rush out in a controlled way. Running water.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Peggy said, staring.

  “I do,” said Rafi. He had his paintbrush and water bottle out and began brushing dust and old mortar away from the side of the stairwell. It didn’t take very much time at all. Within fifteen minutes he’d discovered a section on the side of the stairway seven feet high and three feet wide.

  “Bricks, not stones,” he said. “Put in a long time after the pool was built. He stared at what he had discovered, shaking his head. “It was probably sealed up by Fitzmartin or whoever left that sign. A thousand years and nobody noticed.”

  “Nobody was looking for it,” said Holliday.

  Rafi stood back and examined the section of brick wall revealed by his water and his paintbrush. “This hardly rates as accepted archaeological practice, but what the hell?” He raised his leg and slammed at the brickwork with the sole of his heavy hiking boot. The brickwork, its mortar decayed or nonexistent, crumbled under the attack. A hole appeared with nothing but darkness behind. The others joined in and soon the opening was big enough to step through. Rafi fished a large Maglite out of his bag and switched it on.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s see what’s on the other side.”

  28

  Stepping through the ragged hole in the brickwork, they suddenly found themselves in a cool, slightly damp environment filled with the faintly comforting scent of a basement that was something just short of paradise after the savage heat and the blowing sandstorm they’d left behind them.

  As they walked through the darkness, guided by the cold circle of light produced by Rafi’s flashlight, a few details came to light. The tunnel or watercourse or whatever it was had a hewn stone floor and was built as a single arch with quarried stone of some kind other than the local material of the plateau. The stones were fitted together perfectly without a crack between them, perhaps a faint reminder of an earlier period of history when Hebrew hands had built the pyramids of Egypt. Was this the work of the descendants of Moses’ people, led out of the Pharaoh’s land and into the desert?

  “Real masons,” said Peggy. “This wasn’t done by men in funny hats and barbecue aprons.”

  “Put this on the History Channel and they’d build a whole story around alien plumbers. Fit you in right between American Pickers and Cajun Pawn Stars,” grunted Holliday.

  The passage branched several times, but inevitably the roving circle of light would find the Templar cross and the lion rampant guiding the way.

  “He’s leaving us a trail of bread crumbs,” said Rafi.

  “The question is, where is he leading us?”

  “Maybe he’s leading us to Harrison Ford.”

  “Peggy?” Holliday said.

  “Yes?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You know how I get when I’m in little dark spaces.”

  “Shut up anyway.”

  “Okay, Doc.”

  The passage seemed to both narrow and become less high. Both Eddie and Holliday were forced to stoop, and all of them could feel their shoulders brushing the side walls.

  “I don’t like this,” said Peggy, her voice beginning to quaver. The jokes were gone.

  “Relax,” said Rafi. “It’s just the Bernoulli effect. They turned this part of t
he aqueduct into a venturi tube.”

  “Liquids forced through a narrower channel increase in speed,” said Holliday.

  “I knew that,” said Peggy

  “They knew about this so long ago?” Eddie asked.

  “They didn’t know the theory. It was all observation. I’ll bet you we’re going up an incline. To give the water the velocity necessary to overcome gravity, they narrowed the conduit.”

  A hundred feet farther on, the tunnel opened up and they could walk freely. Holliday could actually feel a slight incline, and then the tunnel branched again. Fitzmartin’s sign was there to guide them again, so they turned to the right. Another hundred feet and they were suddenly faced with an obstacle that appeared impossible to overcome.

  “The ceiling collapsed,” said Rafi, pointing the Maglite at an enormous pile of rock and stone barring their way.

  “The collapse could be yards thick; there’s no way we can clear it,” Holliday said.

  “Any sign of the knight’s mark?” Peggy asked.

  Rafi swung the flashlight beam around.

  “There!” Eddie said, pointing. On the right side of the collapse, barely visible, was the top half of the Templar cross. Eddie scrambled up the pile of fallen rock. He began to hand the fallen stones down to Rafi and Holliday, who piled them off to one side. Eventually the Cuban had revealed the top of a narrow arch.

  “Give me the flashlight please,” said Eddie. Rafi handed it up and Eddie poked the beam into the opening.

  “What can you see?” Holliday called up the pile.

  “A ladder,” he said. “A ladder of iron rungs set into the stone. Very old and very rusty.”

  “How high?”

  “Twenty meters, maybe a little more,” said Eddie. “The light does not reach the top.”

  “What’s that in American?” Peggy asked.

  “Sixty-five feet, give or take a few inches,” answered Rafi.

  “No way, José. This place is bad enough. You won’t get Maggie Blackstock’s baby girl climbing any two-thousand-year-old rusty ladder.”

  “Harrison Ford would do it,” teased Holliday. “He does all his own stunts.”

  “Yeah, and he’s getting thirty million a pop for each movie he’s in. No chance I’m going up that ladder.”

  Eddie had already enlarged the aperture. Within five minutes there was a hole they could squeeze through.

  “Coming?” Holliday asked as Rafi scrambled up the tumble of stone and vanished into the hole.

  “Oh, crap,” said Peggy. “Of course I am.”

  She followed Holliday up the rocks and slipped in through the hole.

  • • •

  The chimney up through the stone of the Khirbet Qumran plateau was a rough oval eight feet across, and natural rather than hewn by man’s hand. On the right a strange climbing apparatus had been bolted to the stone. A ladder had been created by bolting a series of long lengths of iron together, bolting those lengths into the rock, then driving iron bars through the lengths at right angles to form a long procession of T rungs that disappeared up into the darkness.

  “It’s a ‘compline ladder,’” said Rafi, shining his light on the ancient ironwork. The hammer marks of the long-dead blacksmith were still visible.

  “A what?”

  “The old Hermetics used them to climb down into their holes or up into their caves. They were usually made of wood because that’s all they had at hand. Some sects even think it is a symbolic image of the Crucifixion. In monastic terms it represents Jacob’s ladder, the story told within the call to evening prayer.”

  “So, who goes first?” Peggy asked.

  “You do,” said Rafi.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “You’re the lightest, then me, then Doc and then Eddie. Relax, kiddo. We’ll be right behind you. I won’t let you fall.”

  “Just don’t look down, right?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  They began to climb, Peggy’s breathing becoming more ragged with each rung. Behind her Rafi’s wobbling light guided the way upward. Several times Peggy froze, the creaking of the bolts holding the rusted contrivance to the rock wall grinding and half pulling out of their settings in the stone. Rafi calmly urged her on and one by one they reached the summit.

  Rafi switched off the light as he came up through the narrow orifice. “It’s a cave,” he said, calling down to Holliday and Eddie. It was small, barely high enough for Holliday and Eddie to stand upright, the walls and ceiling covered with some sort of gray-brown stuccolike substance that had cracked and broken off with time. Enough light came in through the cave entrance to light the full interior. From the sight lines of the opening, which extended to the steep side of the plateau as well as the hills far beyond, Holliday could see that the entrance would be almost always in shadow, invisible except for brief moments during the day. The wind howled around the entrance like a living thing, fighting to get inside.

  “It’s empty,” Peggy said, looking around. “We went through all that to find an empty cave? Was this Fitzmartin guy playing a joke, or what?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Rafi. “Look at the wall.”

  “I see it,” said Holliday.

  Rafi slipped the pack off his back and dug around, coming up with a small rock hammer. Here and there deep scratches on the stone were revealed by the flaking off of the stucco.

  Rafi went to work, using the hammer to gently break away the fragile stucco, revealing several lines of strange-looking characters that had been etched into the wall of the cave two thousand years before.

  “What is it?” Holliday asked.

  “Nabatean Aramaic,” said Rafi.

  “The language used by the people of Jerusalem and the Essenes at the time of Christ,” said Holliday.

  “Can you read it?” asked Holliday.

  “It’s not the whole message. There’s more beneath it.”

  Rafi spent another few minutes chipping off the last of the stucco, revealing the entire message. The final blow of the hammer was enough to break off a large section of the stucco, exposing some kind of niche cut into the wall below it.

  “Chicken tracks,” said Peggy, staring at the squiggly series of lines on the wall.

  “What does it say?” Holliday asked.

  Rafi studied the message again, his lips moving slightly as he formed and translated the ancient message.

  “It says, ‘The King of the Jews is dead. The Messiah is reborn in the East.’”

  “There is a box in the opening beneath the message,” said Eddie, pointing.

  Between them the three men managed to pull the stone box out of the niche and place it carefully on the floor. The box was a little more than two feet long and about eighteen inches high. The top was a loosely fitted slab of the same kind of stone. Inside was a collection of old bones without a skull and a few scraps of fabric or what might have been skin or parchment.

  “It’s an ossuary,” said Rafi. “Bodies would be entombed until decomposition was complete and a year or so later the bones would be placed in a box like this and taken to a crypt of some kind.”

  “Any idea who the bones belong to?”

  “Given the message on the wall, I can hazard a guess,” Rafi said. He went back to his pack and brought out his bristle paintbrush. He turned the ossuary on its side and gently eased away the dust of centuries. A simple line of lettering appeared, this time in what Holliday thought looked like some form of ancient Hebrew.

  yeshua ben yosef

  “Yeshua Ben Yosef, Joshua, son of Joseph, Christ’s name before the world and the Greek translators got to it,” Rafi said. “The relic, the Ark of the Covenant, vanished with Christ into the East, and somehow Fitzmartin knew where.”

  Suddenly the wind dropped and the cave was flooded with light. Peggy went to the mouth of the cave and stared out, shading her eyes. “Would you look at that?” she said, smiling and turning back to look at Rafi and the others. “All of a sudden it’s
a beautiful day out there.”

  Without a sound the large-caliber sniper’s bullet struck at the base of Peggy’s cervical spine before exploding out through her neck in a haze of blood. She never heard the sound of the echoing shot that killed her so quickly it was as though her soul leaped out of her body so fiercely she simply dropped in place, the smile still on her ruined face.

  “Peggy!” Rafi screamed, standing and hurling himself toward her curled-up figure on the floor of the cave.

  “Rafi! No!” Holliday yelled.

  Rafi reached Peggy’s body, a wailing scream rising from deep within him. He leaned forward, pressing his hand over the ragged hole in her throat, trying to stop blood that had already ceased to flow. Holliday crawled toward them on his elbows and knees. “Get down!”

  The second shot was a little off center, catching Rafi under his left lung, splintering ribs and tearing down through his kidney and spleen, the rest of his vital organs struck by sharp shards of his splintered ribs. He gave a single heaving breath of surprise, slumping down beside Peggy, what was left of his lungs heaving, forcing blood up his gullet and into his mouth.

  The sound of the shot echoed, and then there was a screaming cluster of shots that struck the interior of the small space like a swarm of angry hornets. Then there was silence.

  Holliday’s brain worked without conscious thought. Twelve hundred yards, he’s firing at shadows. A pro special forces from some army. Super sniper; a few of those in Vietnam, more now after Iraq and Afghanistan. He won’t hang around. Still, Holliday kept low, finally reaching Rafi and Peggy. Rafi was still breathing, but barely. There was no hope for him; he was going to die and he knew it. He reached up and grabbed Holliday’s hand.

  “Don’t . . . don’t let them get away with this. Don’t let them find the Ark. Nobody should have that kind of power.” He coughed out a gout of blood that painted his chest glistening red. “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” said Holliday, gripping Rafi’s hand. He watched the light fade in the archaeologist’s eyes, but he held his hand for a few moments longer, making sure Rafi felt a friend’s touch as he died. He turned then and, weeping, stared down at Peggy. He reached out and softly touched her hair. “I promise,” he said.