The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  Bronson looked around them. It was now late afternoon and the last groups of tourists were beginning to make their way back to the exit.

  'We're going to have to leave here and then lie low for a while,' he said. 'I'd better move the car out of the parking area, too, and hide it somewhere nearby. I don't want to advertise our presence here, and I think it's fair to say that the two men who tried to jump us in the hotel this morning are probably still out there looking for us.'

  Angela looked concerned. 'I'm trying not to think about that,' she said. 'Let's just walk through the tunnel and see what the cistern looks like.'

  The tunnel, when they reached it, was a surprise.

  Bronson had been expecting something like Hezekiah's Tunnel, narrow and twisting with a low ceiling, but hopefully dry underfoot. But the Megiddo tunnel was arrow-straight, wide, tall – probably nine or ten feet in places – well lit and with a planked walkway that allowed visitors to stroll easily from one end to the other.

  There was nobody else in the tunnel as they walked its length. At the far end, steps led down to the well itself. Bronson and Angela stood on the lowest platform and peered over the edge at the water below.

  'It looks deep,' he said.

  'It is,' Angela agreed. 'Most wells are.'

  'And cold,' Bronson added with a sigh, knowing that it was he who was going to have to go down into it. 'The trick is going to be getting out afterwards. I'm glad I bought that rope.' He was silent for a few seconds as he thought this through. 'Right, we've seen what we needed to. Now let's go.'

  72

  It was mid evening and virtually dark when Bronson eased the Renault to the side of the road about a hundred yards beyond the Har Megiddo car park entrance, backed it into a patch of scrubland where it was hidden from view, and turned off the engine.

  They'd left the site about four hours earlier, driven a couple of miles down the road, and found an open café where they'd had a light meal. Then Bronson had parked the car in the shade of a clump of trees on some waste ground just outside Afula, and he'd tried to sleep for a while, knowing that he'd need all his reserves of energy for what was to come that night. While he slept, Angela had gone over all her research yet again to make absolutely sure there was nothing she'd missed. When Bronson woke up, he made a final check of the equipment he'd bought in Haifa, and then they both changed into dark-coloured tracksuits and trainers.

  They'd driven back to Har Megiddo into the face of the setting sun, the green fields of the Plain of Esdraelon slipping quickly into shadow as the sun started to dipbelow the peaks of the Mount Carmel ridge. Barely eighteen hundred feet at its highest point, the ridge is some thirteen miles long, and runs south-east from the Mediterranean coast near Haifa.

  Bronson turned to Angela. 'Ready?' he asked.

  'As ready as I'll ever be,' she replied.

  Bronson lifted the rucksack out of the boot, opened it to make a swift check of its contents, then hefted it up on to his shoulders. He locked the car and they set off.

  The main gate into the site would certainly be locked, but Bronson didn't think that would be a problem. A site as big as Har Megiddo was almost impossible to secure completely, and indeed parts of the site were protected only by low fences. In several places the steepness of the slope made any kind of a physical barrier pointless.

  'This should do,' Bronson said, leading the way up a reasonably steep slope to the end of one of the fences. Earlier that afternoon he'd noticed a gap that he reckoned they could both squeeze through.

  They reached the end of the fence. Angela went through the gap first, then Bronson passed the rucksack to her before following her through.

  'Go straight to the entrance to the water tunnel,' he said, keeping his voice low, 'and watch your step on these rocks. Some of them are pretty crumbly and loose.'

  He watched as she started making her way up the long and steep slope that rose to the top of the hill.

  The site was deserted, and they walked quickly across to the open pit that marked the entrance to Ahab's Tunnel, and down the steps to the bottom of the shaft. The steel door was secured with a hefty padlock. Bronson put his rucksack on the ground and opened the flap at the top. Reaching inside, he pulled out a pair of collapsible boltcroppers, extended the handles and fitted the jaws around the hasp of the lock. He squeezed the handles together, grimacing with the effort, the muscles of his arms bulging with the strain. With a sudden crack, the steel parted and the ruined padlock tumbled to the ground.

  'We're in,' he said. He replaced the bolt-croppers in his rucksack and opened the door.

  'Creepy,' Angela whispered, as they stepped into the darkness. 'I hadn't imagined how much scarier an ancient place like this would be at night.'

  'We can't turn on the lights in case they alert a guard.

  We're going to have to rely on our torches.'

  The two narrow beams helped. At least with the torches switched on they could see where they were going, but Angela was right – it was creepy. They were both very conscious of the weight of rock and earth above, and of the weight of history that surrounded them.

  There was no point in looking for anything in the tunnel itself – the deciphered inscription had specifically mentioned a well or cistern. If the relic was still in the ruins, they'd find it in the spring itself, and nowhere else.

  At the end of the tunnel there was an arrangement of steps and platforms, allowing visitors to get close to the well. They climbed down to the lowest one, just a couple of feet above the surface of the water. Bronson opened the rucksack again and pulled out a coil of rope. Swiftly, he tied one end of it around the steel handrail attached to the last section of the staircase then, as a precaution, also lashed it around the wooden balustrade that bordered the platform directly above the water. This meant that he'd be able to climb up and down the rope from the platform itself. Before he tossed the rope over the side to dangle in the waters of the spring, Bronson tied a series of knots in it, about a foot apart.

  'What are they for?' Angela asked, shining the torch on Bronson's hands so he could see what he was doing.

  'When I come out of the water I'll be cold – I wasn't kidding when I said it would probably be freezing in there – and my hands will be numb. The knots should give me something more to grip on when I climb up the rope.'

  Swiftly, Bronson removed his shoes and socks, then stripped off his shirt, lightweight trousers and underwear.

  Standing there naked in the gloom, he smiled briefly at Angela. Then, pulling a face-mask from his bag, he slipped the band around his head, then picked out a heavy black rubberized torch, bigger than the one he'd taken into Hezekiah's Tunnel.

  'Can you pass me the torch once I get in the water? I daren't jump in because I don't know how deep it is or what rocks or other stuff there might be lurking under the surface.'

  Angela leant forward suddenly and hugged him. 'Be careful, Chris,' she whispered.

  Bronson swung his leg over the wooden balustrade, grabbed the dangling rope with both hands, and swiftly lowered himself down into the mouth of the cistern.

  'Jesus, that's cold,' he muttered as he slid feet-first into the water. Holding on to the rope with one hand he adjusted his face-mask, then reached up for the torch.

  Bronson first shone the beam all around him, checking the walls of the cistern, but they appeared to be fairly smooth and featureless. He glanced up at Angela, gave her a reassuring smile, and then lifted his legs to dive down into the dark water.

  About three or four feet below the surface, Bronson gripped a protruding piece of rock to give him some stability and to stop him rising straight back to the surface.

  The mouth of the spring was really too narrow to allow him to swim around, so he knew he'd have to keep on diving down and grabbing hold of something to keep him submerged while he searched the walls.

  The good news was that the waterproof torch was working well, its beam illuminating the grey-brown rock that formed the walls of the sprin
g. The bad news was that those walls appeared to be fairly smooth, with no convenient holes – natural or man-made – that could have been used to secrete anything.

  He started searching carefully, holding the torch in his left hand as he circled the wall, moving from one handhold to another, then released his grip on the rock as he headed for the surface to take a breath.

  'Anything?' Angela asked as he broke the surface.

  Bronson shook his head, took another deep breath and dived down again. This time he went a little deeper, down to maybe six feet, but the result was the same. Solid greybrown rocks surrounded him.

  Back at the surface, he lifted the mask from his face. 'I've been down about six feet,' he said, looking up at Angela, 'and there's nothing there. The people who hid the relic can't have dived down much deeper than that, could they?'

  'I've no idea, but you're assuming that the water level in the spring was the same then as it is now, and it probably wasn't. If the level was, say, ten feet lower when they hid the relic, and they dived to six feet, it'll be sixteen feet below the surface now.'

  'I never thought of that,' Bronson admitted. He nodded, replaced his mask and vanished again.

  For the next twenty minutes he repeated the process, diving down, grabbing hold of something to keep him in place, and searching in vain for any kind of a hole or crevice in the rock walls. And every time he surfaced, he felt colder and more tired.

  'I can't do this for much longer,' he said at last, his teeth chattering. 'Another three or four dives and that's it.'

  'You've done your best, Chris. I never thought you'd have to go that deep to find it.'

  'Nor did I,' Bronson said, replacing his mask. If it's here at all, he thought, as he plunged down again into the depths.

  This time he powered down five or six feet below the depth he'd reached previously, grabbed another section of rock and looked around him. Far above he could see the dim circle of light that was the surface of the water in the spring, illuminated by the light from Angela's torch. And around him, the spring seemed to be opening up somewhat, the opposite wall barely visible in the light from his torch. It looked as if the spring was shaped like a bell, with a narrow throat at the top and widening considerably at his depth, which he guessed at about twenty or twenty-five feet.

  Conscious that he could only stay submerged for perhaps another twenty seconds, Bronson turned his attention to the wall beside him. Unsurprisingly, it looked very much the same as all the other sections of wall he'd looked at so far. He changed position, pulling himself sideways to look at the next few feet, and then the next.

  Nothing.

  His lungs starting to protest, Bronson released his grip on the rock and allowed himself to start drifting upwards.

  And as he did so, the beam of his torch briefly illuminated something different, something he hadn't seen before. An object that seemed regular in shape, not rounded like the rocky protrusions he'd been using as handholds, but projecting horizontally from the stone wall of the spring.

  And then he was past it, heading upwards towards the light and the life-giving air.

  'The padlock's been cut off,' Hoxton muttered, shining his torch at the broken lock lying on the ground at his feet. 'They've got here before us.'

  They'd driven up to Har Megiddo from Tel Aviv, a noisy journey with Dexter lying across the back seat and moaning about the pain from his broken nose. Baverstock had misread a couple of the road signs outside Haifa, which had delayed their arrival slightly, but they, like Bronson and Angela, had waited until the site closed before they entered it over the boundary fence. They were now standing beside the entrance gate to the water tunnel.

  'Good,' Dexter said. 'I owe Bronson for what he did to my nose.'

  'If it is Bronson,' Hoxton said, 'we know how dangerous he can be. So we take it carefully and surprise him. No torches, no talking, no noise. It's three against two, and we're all armed, so it should be no contest. We'll make it look like a couple of tragic accidents, or maybe just weigh the bodies down and dump them in the cistern. Understood?'

  Dexter and Baverstock nodded.

  'We've all seen the pictures of the tunnel,' Baverstock told them. 'There's a wooden walkway with handrails either side, so once we're on that we can feel our way along. Bronson will probably be using a torch or lantern and we'll see the light from that long before we reach them.'

  Without another word, the three men moved slowly forward into the underground tunnel. When they stepped on to the wooden walkway, Baverstock stopped them for a few moments to let their eyes adjust to the almost total blackness.

  'See that glow?' he whispered, pointing straight ahead. 'They're already at the cistern. No more talking, just walk slowly and carefully, and stop well before the steps at the end.'

  Making barely a sound, the three men began moving cautiously towards the dim light at the end of the water tunnel.

  * * *

  Bronson surfaced again and grasped the dangling rope.

  'Anything?' Angela asked, more in hope than expectation.

  'I think I saw something. I'm going to have one last go.'

  Bronson inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating to purge the carbon dioxide from his lungs, before gulping a huge lungful of air and diving underwater again.

  He forced himself down into the wider part of the spring, to the area that he'd been searching on his previous dive, trying to spot the object he'd seen before. But once again the stone walls all looked the same, with no obvious differences from one part of the cistern to another. He could feel the pressure to breathe increasing as he swam around, the beam of his torch roaming over the rocky walls.

  Maybe he'd been mistaken. Maybe his eyes had deceived him, or perhaps he'd simply misinterpreted what he'd seen. He was about to give up when the torchlight suddenly illuminated something a few feet above his head, something with squared edges that seemed to be sticking out of the wall. He'd dived too deep, and had been searching too far down.

  Bronson kicked out and rose up, never allowing the beam of the torch to waver, keeping its light on the object. Then he was beside it, his lungs bursting, but determined to find out exactly what it was.

  It looked almost like a log of wood, but the moment his hand closed around the end of it he knew it was some kind of metal. Bronson tugged at it, but it seemed to be jammed into a natural fissure in the rock. He changed his grip and pulled again, bracing himself against the wall of the cistern with his other hand, his fingers still awkwardly clutching the torch.

  This time he felt the object move. He pulled again, and in a cloud of debris it suddenly came free.

  Bronson kicked out, away from the wall and up towards the surface. As his head popped out of the water he sucked in a long breath, then another.

  He passed the torch up to Angela and grabbed for the rope.

  'What is it?' she asked, her voice high with anxiety.

  'I don't know,' Bronson said, still panting for air. 'It was jammed into a crevice in the wall of the spring. I think it's metal. Here.'

  Angela got down on her knees and stretched out both hands to him. Taking the object from him, she placed it carefully on the platform beside her as he began hauling himself up the knotted rope.

  The climb wasn't as bad as Bronson had feared, because he could use his feet on the side of the cistern as well as the rope, and in a few seconds he was standing shivering beside Angela on the platform.

  She rummaged in the rucksack and pulled out a towel.

  Shivering and stamping his feet to get warm, Bronson dried himself and started to get dressed. Then she moved the beam of her torch to shine on whatever it was he'd found in the cistern.

  'It looks like a sheet of metal, rolled into a cylinder,' she said, her voice husky with emotion, and Bronson could see her beginning to shake too. 'It's covered in algae, but I think I can see marks on it. God, Chris, I think this might be it. I think you've found the Silver Scroll.'

  73

&nbs
p; 'And so do I,' said a new voice, somewhere above Bronson and Angela.

  Suddenly the darkness was split by a trio of powerful torch beams that dazzled them. It was like Hezekiah's Tunnel all over again, except that this time there was nowhere for them to run to. They were trapped in a dead end, unarmed and helpless.

  Bronson and Angela were pinned by the light, standing on the wooden platform and staring up at the men holding torches at the top of the final staircase.

  Hoxton moved his torch backwards slightly to illuminate the pistol he held in his right hand.

  'As you can see, we're armed,' he said, 'so don't try anything stupid.'

  'What do you want?' Bronson demanded.

  'I'd have thought that was obvious,' Baverstock said. 'We're here to take that scroll. Thanks for finding it for us. We didn't even need to get our feet wet.'

  Angela recognized his voice immediately. 'Tony? I should have guessed. What are you doing here?'

  'The same as you, Lewis. Looking for the treasure the Sicarii hid here two millennia ago. I'm so pleased you've found it. This is going to make me very rich.'

  'Nonsense,' Angela objected, her tone sharp and angry.

  'If this is the Silver Scroll, it needs to be properly analysed and conserved. It must go to a museum.'

  'Oh, it'll end up in a museum eventually, don't worry about that,' Baverstock assured her. 'What you've got there is probably the world's most famous treasure map.

  And when we've translated the text we'll have access to the greatest collection of buried treasure in history. We'll spend the next few years digging it all up and carefully selling a few of the best bits on the black market – Dexter here is an expert in that field – and then we can all retire on the proceeds. Then I'll trot back to the British Museum with the scroll. My name will be as famous as Howard Carter's.'

  'I always thought you were an academic, Tony,' Angela said, her voice dripping scorn. 'But you're really just a grubby little tomb-robber, aren't you?'