Staff of Judea

by Alex Archer

  “No, I don’t imagine she would,” his employer answered after a moment’s consideration.

  “Exactly. Neither do I. Which is why we have to get there first. And I know just how to do it. Let’s go see if our guest is ready to talk, shall we?”

  They crossed the camp to where a new, large canvas tent had been erected. Johnson and Daniels stood guard outside.

  “Any problems?” Grimes asked.

  “Quiet as a mouse,” Daniels replied.

  The smile Grimes flashed in response was far from pleasant. “Let’s see if we can make him more talkative then, shall we?”

  The three men stepped inside the tent, leaving Johnson to stand guard outside. The encounter in the desert last night had been more a massacre than a firefight. They had taken twenty shots for every one the men on horseback had managed. It was only by sheer luck that any of the horsemen had escaped. If Beck’s truck hadn’t blown a tire at an inopportune moment, they probably would have slaughtered them to a man. As it was, only a few of them had gotten away.

  Unfortunately, one of those who’d escaped had been carrying Annja.

  No matter, he thought, we’ve got everything we need right here.

  A portable hoist, the kind the archaeologists had brought along to remove heavy rocks or, if they got lucky enough, loads of treasure, out of the earth stood in the center of the tent.

  Hanging from it was Professor Ephraim Yellin.

  The cords that had been used to tie his hands together had been looped over the hook at the center of the hoist and then the hoist had been cranked up to its highest setting. Ephraim’s feet, also bound together, were left hanging about an inch off the floor. It wasn’t much, just a small distance, really. If he stretched himself to the limit he could touch the toes of his shoes to the floor and take a little of the weight off his arms for a moment or two. But he couldn’t hold the position for long. His arms and legs would start trembling. That in turn would set his body to rotating slightly on the hook above his head, and he’d be right back to where he was, hanging with all his weight on his arms. If left in that position, he’d eventually suffocate as the muscles in his chest failed from the strain.

  Grimes expected him to break long before that point.

  Beck had needed to let off a little steam so Grimes had allowed him to work the old man over and it showed. The professor’s face had taken a beating; one eye was swollen completely shut, the nose looked broken and at least two teeth were missing.

  It was really too bad, Grimes thought. The professor could have saved himself a lot of trouble by cooperating.

  Grimes stepped around in front of Ephraim. The old man’s head was hanging down against his chest, but Grimes noted with satisfaction that the prisoner was still conscious. Ephraim tracked Grimes’s movement with his one good eye.

  “This doesn’t have to continue, you know, Professor,” Grimes told him. “Simply agree to do what we ask and we’ll have you down from there in a jiff. What do you say?”

  There was a moment of silence as the professor worked his lips.

  Grimes leaned closer. “Yes?”

  The professor finally found his voice. “Go to hell.”

  Grimes laughed. He couldn’t help it. The old man’s obstinacy was refreshing. “As you wish, Professor, as you wish.”

  With a wave of his hand he summoned Daniels over to him.

  “Sir?”

  Grimes waved a hand in the professor’s direction. “He still has too much fight in him. Soften him up more so we can have another chat. Leave his face alone for now though. I need him to be able to speak.”

  “Understood.”

  As Grimes followed Connolly back out of the tent, he could hear the sounds of Daniels’s heavy fists thudding into the professor’s body like it was a slab of meat.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS LATER Grimes stepped back into the tent. He carried a tablet computer in one hand and a cell phone in the other.

  The professor was in rough shape. His breath was coming in harsh gasps as he flailed about, trying to stretch far enough to stand on his toes and get a break. Daniels was sitting in a camp chair a few feet away, watching the man struggle and occasionally giving him pointers on how to keep himself from spinning.

  Daniels jumped to his feet when he saw Grimes come through the door.

  “Take him down,” Grimes said.

  The other man walked over to the hoist controls and hit the release button. The professor collapsed to the floor.

  Grimes picked up the camp chair Daniels had been sitting in and placed it next to the professor. “Sit,” he said.

  Ephraim only lay there, gasping for breath and shuddering.

  At a gesture from Grimes, Daniels hauled the prisoner off the floor and slammed him into the chair. A firm hand on the man’s shoulder kept him from sliding off.

  “I want you to watch something, Professor. When you’re finished I’m going to ask you a question. I would think hard before I answer that question if I were you. Do we understand each other?”

  Grimes didn’t wait for a reply. He thrust the tablet in front of Ephraim and swiped a finger across the screen. It wasn’t a long video, just a few minutes in length, but the screams as his men advanced on one of the female students they’d captured along with the professor was enough to bring tears flooding down the man’s cheeks.

  Another flick of a finger and the screams were mercifully cut off.

  “I want you to take us to the staff, Professor Yellin. I will see to it that the students who agreed to follow you on your escape attempt will come to no further harm. So here’s my question, Professor—will you take us to the Staff of Judea?”

  Chapter 30

  The transcription work took a couple of hours, after which Annja needed some time to look it over. Ephraim had tried to give her as much information as possible in the short time he’d had available to him and as a result had used abbreviations and drawn connecting arrows between seemingly unrelated notations that took some time to decipher. When she thought she had it all straight in her head, Annja took it to Roux.

  “All right,” Roux asked as she spread her notes out in front of them. “What have we got?”

  “Well, according to Ephraim’s notes, the clues in the scroll passages put the staff inside the Fortress Mal’akh near the Makhtesh Gadol.”

  Roux smiled cheerfully. “Right. Again please, and this time in English, if you don’t mind.”

  That made her laugh, which was something she hadn’t done in a while and which she desperately needed. “All right, in English. According the legend, Mal’akh was one of three major fortresses built by Herod the Great sometime between 30 and 45 BCE as places of refuge in the event of a revolt by his people. Unlike the other two—Masada and Herodium—Mal’akh was built in secret, its location known only to the king’s closest family and confidants. Legend states that Herod slaughtered everyone involved in the construction of the fortress in order to keep its location an absolute secret. He must have done a decent job, too, because the fortress has never been found. Most people think it’s a myth.”

  Roux looked at her closely. “And you? What do you think?”

  “If you’d asked me a month ago I would have said it’s about as real as Noah’s Ark. After what I’ve seen this week I’d be lining up right behind Noah if you told me it was going to rain.”

  She glanced at Roux, saw he had no idea what she was talking about and quickly continued with, “So, yes, I do think it is real. More importantly, so does Ephraim. And he’s given us a location where he thinks we’ll find it.”

  “This Makhtesh Gadol or whatever you call it?” Roux’s French accent butchered the pronunciation.

  “Right,” she replied, stifling another laugh. She pulled out a map of Israel that Roux had brought for their
discussion and opened it. She put it down on the table in front of them so that they had a good look at the lower half of the country.

  “This is the northern Negev,” she said, indicating a section of the map about two-thirds of the way down the length of the country. “And this—” pointing at a small dot on the map labeled Yeruham “—is one of the first of Israel’s development towns, new communities created to help settle the influx of refugees from other nations shortly after Israel became a state.”

  Annja slid her finger across the map to the left, where a long, slim area was shown as a darker shade. “Just to the west is Makhtesh Gadol. A makhtesh,” she went on, before Roux could interrupt, “is a peculiar kind of formation caused by massive erosion over a geographically short period of time. Think of it as an oversize box canyon, if that makes sense, formed by the collapse of soft material under the weight of harder material above. It is essentially a deep valley surrounded by steep walls of resistant rock. Gadol means large in Hebrew and for many years Makhtesh Gadol was thought to be the largest makhtesh in all of Israel.”

  “But it’s not any longer?” Roux asked.

  Annja shook her head. “When it was named, no one knew about Makhtesh Ramon, which is just over forty kilometers in length. In contrast, Makhtesh Gadol is only ten kilometers long and five kilometers wide.”

  Roux studied the map. “Why would anyone build a fortress at the bottom of a canyon? Your enemies could surround you before you even knew they were coming.”

  Tactical considerations aside, Annja thought she understood. “Remember, if the legends are correct, Mal’akh was supposed to be the king’s ultimate hiding place. He had Masada and Herodium to act as fortresses. Mal’akh was supposed to be his hidden bunker that he could retreat to in the worst-case event. You would want a place like that to have the lowest profile possible and hiding it in a canyon that most people avoid is about as low a profile as you can get.”

  “And this is where we’ll find the staff?”

  “According to Ephraim it is and he’s rarely been wrong when I’ve worked with him in the past. It was his reasoning that helped us find the first two caches of treasure listed on the Copper Scroll.”

  Roux shrugged and Annja took that as tacit approval. “From what I overheard,” she continued, “Connolly’s goal was the staff all along. Our work at the first two treasure sites was simply a test to see if Ephraim and I were reading the information contained in the scrolls properly. My guess is they’ll bypass the rest of the sites and head directly for Mal’akh.”

  Roux glanced pointedly at the damaged iPad. “Do you have any idea if that was backed up?”

  Annja shrugged. “Connolly was paranoid about translations of the scrolls getting out into other people’s hands so the only copy in camp was in that. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have one somewhere else, though.”

  “Let’s say he does have one,” said Roux. “How long will it take him to work this out?” He waved his hands over the notes that Ephraim had given them.

  It was a good question. “I don’t know. I’m hoping the theft of the iPad sets him back some. If our plan worked and Ephraim managed to make it back to Jerusalem and go to ground, that should slow him up even more. The trouble is that I don’t know how much information Connolly had before he started this endeavor. He might have been sitting on the location the entire time.”

  “Then we need to beat him to it,” Roux replied.

  Annja borrowed a satellite phone from Roux and tried to call Ephraim, but the professor didn’t answer either his cell phone or his office line. A check of her own voice mail told her that he hadn’t tried to call, either. That worried her, but there wasn’t much she could do about it now.

  With time at a premium, Roux made the decision to leave the camp intact and travel immediately to Makhtesh Gadol. Annja agreed, even though she wasn’t looking forward to the hours in an SUV driving through the desert.

  Annja helped Roux and Henshaw pack what little gear they couldn’t leave behind. She, of course, was traveling light, with only the iPad and its case. She thought about leaving them behind, but at the last second had stuffed the damaged unit back into its case and slipped the case into one of Roux’s bags. When there was time, she intended to see what other information might be stored on the device. If she could access any of it.

  When she went to load the gear, there wasn’t a vehicle in sight.

  Her confusion must have shown on her face because Roux laughed. “You didn’t think I drove here from Jerusalem, did you?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “I thought Henshaw drove you.”

  The comment elicited a rare burst of laughter from Henshaw, who received a scowl from Roux in return. The butler pretended not to notice.

  “This way, Ms. Creed,” Henshaw said as he hefted a duffel over one shoulder and led the way out of camp along a narrow footpath into the scrubland. They made their way through a thick boulder field for several minutes and then up and over a few hills before coming to a small valley.

  Below them sat an unmarked black helicopter.

  “Your ride, Ms. Creed.”

  Chapter 31

  Flying time from their current location to Makhtesh Gadol was a little more than three hours. Annja spent the time going over Ephraim’s notes in more detail, doing her best to understand the directions he’d given her. She was so engrossed in her study that she didn’t notice they’d arrived until the helicopter began descending.

  She looked out the window and took in the canyon below them. It looked like a giant hand had reached down and scooped out a long furrow in the earth. Annja marveled at its beauty. The strata in the rock were clearly visible, the darker bands of harder rock at the top sinking down into the softer, lighter bands at the bottom.

  “Can you do a flyby of each canyon wall?” she asked Henshaw over the headset. The canyon was just over five kilometers wide; there shouldn’t be an issue.

  Henshaw arced the bird over and took them down into the canyon. He got as close as possible to the western wall and then advanced down the length of the canyon, giving both Roux and Annja time to study the stone, looking for any discernible clue as to the location of the fortress. When they were done with the west side, they turned around and did the same in the opposite direction. Truth be told, Annja really didn’t expect to find anything. If it was that easy to spot, someone would have done it long before now. She believed in being thorough, however, and not taking the time to do a visual search just seemed wrong.

  When the flyby didn’t turn up any clues, Annja instructed Henshaw to put the chopper down on the canyon floor close to the south end. Given the width of the canyon he had no problem and quickly had the bird on the ground. They waited for the dust to settle and the rotors to stop spinning before climbing out.

  The canyon around them was quiet. Annja felt uneasy all of a sudden. She had the sense she was being watched, being observed. As if the rocks were waiting to see what they would do next.

  Then Roux spoke and the feeling vanished.

  “Let’s gear up and find this staff. We don’t know how much time we have before Connolly catches up.”

  Henshaw pulled several large equipment bags out of the back of the helicopter and lined them up on the ground. Roux and Annja dug through them, taking out the gear they thought they would need and repacking it into smaller daypacks they could carry with them. Annja took water, climbing rope, a set of caming devices, a knife with a decent-size blade, a change of clothes, a compass, a small camp cloth and a headlamp. The usual assortment of gear for a trip into a place where she didn’t know what to expect.

  When they were finished, Roux turned to Henshaw. “There’s no telling what Connolly will do when he gets here. Take the bird up on the ridgeline so you’ve got more room to run if you need to. Keep us informed by radio as long as you can and defend yo
urself if need be.”

  Henshaw nodded. “Of course, sir. Will that be all?”

  Annja shook her head, chuckling to herself. Henshaw had to be the most unflappable butler she’d ever met.

  Go park the helicopter somewhere else and, oh, by the way, if somebody starts firing at you for no reason, feel free to blow them out of the sky.

  Of course, sir. Very good sir.

  She and Roux moved a short distance away. Henshaw got back into the helicopter and fired it up. The dust that was whipped up by the spinning rotors caused Annja to turn away for a moment, and when she looked back, Henshaw had taken the chopper out of the canyon to await their return from a safer location.

  “Shall we?” Roux asked when the wind and noise had died down.

  Annja turned and looked out at the expanse of canyon before them. The canyon itself was a few kilometers in length, its walls climbing hundreds of feet off the ground. The canyon floor, especially near the outer edge, was littered with boulders and the remains of thousands of years worth of rockfalls. The sun beat down, hot and heavy, while a thin breeze barely stirred the air.

  Somewhere in there was the entrance to a hidden fortress that no human being had set foot inside in two thousand years. A fortress that they were supposed to find using clues left behind in a couple of ancient scrolls. With nothing but a few pages of notes and some old-fashioned guesswork.

  Piece of cake.

  “Let’s go!”

  * * *

  “WELL?”

  Douglas made one last adjustment to the tracking device on the table, then closed the access panel and handed it to Grimes.

  “Finished, sir. Sorry it took so long.”

  “Just as long as it works, Douglas.”

  “Oh, it will, sir. I guarantee it.”

  Connolly will hold you to that, son. Grimes kept that thought to himself. By now the men who worked for him knew better than to boast about something without being able to back it up. All Grimes had to do was flip this switch on the side and they’d know, one way or another, whether Douglas had done his job properly.