The Temple Mount Code

by Charles Brokaw

  Lourds pulled the camera back to him and let his excitement show as it did when he was in the classroom.

  ‘The tortoiseshell had to have been left behind with someone that would mark the way for others of the tribe. He was probably a wise man, a shaman. We’ll know more when the archaeologists at the Jiahu site reveal their findings. Someone from this place had to return to Jiahu with the tortoise map.’

  Lourds stepped back, allowing the cameraman to frame him and the cavern in the shot.

  ‘When the Yellow River overflowed its banks in the past, the floods have always been horrendous. I feel confident in saying that the floods that struck in 5800 BC were terrifying. Added to that, the people living there had drawn the ire of an enemy. Maybe it was just a predacious encroachment. Robbers taking what they could from a peaceful community. Maybe it was a more hostile intent. That community was in a good spot until the flood. Their developed fields alone would have been worth a war to another people that had been uprooted by another flood. We may never know.’

  Taking a breath, Lourds pointed at the scholar’s rocks. The cameraman stayed locked on him, but Rory looked impatient.

  ‘Possibly the people who came here thought their respite would be brief. Instead, they became stuck here because there was no home to go back to, or because the travel was hard, and they didn’t want to chance it again if they could meet their needs here. We do know their lives were harsh while living here. But they concealed their greatest secret.’

  As every eye in the chamber stared at him, Lourds hoped he was right. He’d piled on promises, and he was expected – like a magician – to pull a rabbit from his hat.

  Now it was time to produce the rabbit.

  14

  Scholar’s Rock Temple

  Himalaya Mountains

  People’s Republic of China

  July 28, 2011

  Lourds grinned into the camera as nervous energy spiked his system. ‘One hundred and sixteen figures stand in this chamber. Each of them weighs several hundred pounds at least. Some of them weigh a thousand pounds. My original thinking was that the people dragged the rocks into this cavern.’ He turned toward the figures. ‘Then I thought about all that work. And that didn’t explain how all of them are smooth.’

  Waving to the cameraman, Lourds walked down into the chamber while the expedition and the monks looked on. He felt like David Copperfield about to make an invisible elephant appear.

  Except the elephant wasn’t even in the room.

  ‘As I considered the problem, I knew that the people needed a way to smooth the scholar’s rocks. I also realized they needed a source of water and food. Lake water can smooth rock, but nothing wears down edges as fast as running water.’

  Lourds stopped beside the scholar’s rock of the flat-backed tortoise. He gestured to it, and the cameraman panned in for a full-frame shot.

  ‘Professor Lourds.’ Rory, his patience exhausted, trailed after the cameraman. ‘Please. That camcorder battery is only going to last a little while longer. It takes hours working a hand generator to charge them.’

  Ignoring the director, Lourds continued.

  ‘Why make the tortoise with a flat back? I kept missing that. I mean, it was apparent. It looks like a serving dish. Or maybe a table.’ He pointed to the extremities. ‘Then it came to me. This tortoise was used as a staging platform.’ He whirled and pointed at the surrounding figures. ‘If you look at them, you’ll quickly realize that each and every one will fit on the back of this turtle.’

  In the back of the crowd, Brother Shamar smiled proudly and nodded. The old man hadn’t known the secret before, but he was catching on quickly.

  ‘If this tortoise is a staging platform, as I believe, then there has to be a support mount for a rope to run through somewhere on the ceiling of this cavern.’

  Lights swiveled toward the cavern’s ceiling. Hooking his fingers and toes into the craggy rock, Lourds climbed. The going was rough, and he wasn’t nearly as graceful as the monks, but he reached the ceiling nearly twenty feet above the stone floor. Some of the monks and BBC crew climbed with him, and Gloria followed as well. They all held on one-handed and shined their flashlights around the uneven ceiling.

  For a long few minutes, Lourds feared his hypothesis was incorrect.

  Then Thompson shouted. ‘There! Do you see it?’

  He waggled his light over a thick stalactite, and the beam jumped through the hole that had been augured through the stone.

  Lourds grinned.

  Upon closer inspection – done while hanging from a climbing harness attached to pitons driven into the ceiling by the Sherpas – Lourds determined that the hole had been used for hauling.

  ‘The lips and inside are worn smooth.’ He hung upside down while talking to the cameraman. ‘If you’ll pass that camera up here – ’

  ‘He most certainly will not.’ Rory stepped protectively toward the expensive equipment.

  Lourds laughed and took a small digital camera from his shirt pocket. ‘Your loss. These digital images will have to suffice.’ With a quick, practiced pull on the ropes, he righted himself and took pictures of the hole. It was wide enough that he could have thrust both arms in and had room left over. And it was at least four feet deep. There had been plenty of leverage for the ropes.

  At the top of the cavern, Lourds looked down. He had that much of the puzzle figured out, but where had the rocks come from? Then, on the eastern wall, he saw a crack near the top.

  When he climbed up to the top of the eastern wall, Lourds found the gap he’d spotted. It was only a few inches wide, nothing that would have been seen from the ground or by anyone not looking for it. Upon closer inspection, he found a seam that had been mortared into place. Cool air and the sound of rushing water sounded beyond.

  A sandblaster couldn’t have peeled the smile from his face.

  ‘Wall is false.’ Gelu pounded on the section of the wall with his pickax.

  The rock sounded empty.

  ‘Hollow on other side.’

  Lourds turned in the climbing harness and shouted down to Rory. ‘If your cameraman has a stout heart, now would be the time to get him up here. Otherwise you’re going to miss that big reveal you’ve been waiting so impatiently for.’

  When the cameraman was lashed securely in place to pitons, with a pair of Sherpas watching over him, Lourds and Gelu attacked the false rock with crowbars. Shamar had given his blessings to the endeavor.

  ‘Rock made good.’ Gelu growled as he shoved. ‘Put into place much good.’

  Lourds silently agreed and leaned more heavily on his borrowed crowbar. The rock broke, and he had to find a new leverage place. In the end, though, the mortar gave way to the crowbars. Lourds and Gelu tried to hold on to the piece, but it was no use.

  ‘Look out!’

  The carefully shaped section, eight feet wide and ten feet tall, toppled backwards and skidded down the twenty-foot slope. Thankfully, no one was standing that close, and the slab stopped well short of the first line of the scholar’s rocks.

  Lourds took out his mini-Maglite and shined the beam into the dark recesses on the other side of the opening. Another cave wall gleamed dully forty feet away. He climbed over to the opening and stood peering down into the darkness.

  He couldn’t estimate the distance for certain, but he guessed that somewhere around a hundred feet below was a rushing stream cutting its way through the guts of the mountain. Cold air seeped into the cavern from the closed-off area.

  ‘The monks are going to hate us for all the draft we’ve brought into their homes.’ As Lourds stood there, the beam reflecting off the water, he thought he saw another opening near the bottom. ‘I need a flare.’

  Gelu called out to one of his men, and an emergency flare was tossed up.

  Lourds grabbed it, banged the end to set it off, then tossed it into the abyss. He counted the seconds of the fall as the brightly burning red star fell into the crevice, then into the water. A hundred feet
was about right.

  And there was another opening at the bottom near the waterline.

  After the river carried the flare’s light away, Lourds turned to Gelu. ‘Can you get us down there?’

  The Sherpa nodded. ‘Sure. No problem. Is what we do.’

  True to Gelu’s word, the Sherpas quickly hammered in pitons and laid climbing ropes down the rock face.

  Bundled up in cold-weather clothing again, Lourds rappelled down into the crevice. The BBC crew was more than a little put out that filming the discovery had gotten so difficult. To make matters worse, they’d had to stop filming except in bits and pieces to save the batteries.

  Four of Rory’s crew worked on the hand generators to power up the batteries. They looked like mad monkey dervishes as they kept winding and handing the units back and forth as they took breaks. The monks joined in, but the effort required a lot to produce a little.

  Using a spotter light on his forehead, Lourds descended into the darkness. Except for the rushing water, everything was still. The rope sang through his gloves and the D-ring on his climbing harness. He caught himself on his feet, then pushed off and shot down at a controlled speed again.

  He was on the cavern near the bottom of the crevice before he knew it. He overshot the wall and ended up sliding out of control into the cavern. His head whipped about, and he couldn’t tell what he’d gotten himself into.

  ‘Thomas!’ Gelu bellowed behind him.

  Half-in and half-out of the cavern, holding on with one hand on the rope and the other on the cavern mouth, Lourds yanked his head up and focused on his predicament. Fear gave way to astonishment as he peered inside the chamber.

  ‘Thomas!’

  ‘I’m here. I’m fine.’ Lourds spoke more quietly to himself. ‘My God, I’m fine.’ He dug in his boots and climbed up into the cave as Gelu slid down beside him and perched expertly on the chamber lip.

  The Sherpa grinned. ‘Thought you lost.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Water maybe bad. Take underground.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right about that.’ In the cave, Lourds pulled a flare from his backpack, banged it on the nearest stone wall, and held the blazing tube aloft.

  Around him, the final resting place of several dozen Jiahu immigrants lay undisturbed. Desiccated remains lay in hollowed shelves in the walls.

  Gelu stood at Lourds’s side and gazed around in wonder. ‘Not monks.’

  ‘No, definitely not monks.’

  The monks practiced sky burial, laying the bodies of the dead out in the wild for carrion birds and ground predators to take.

  Slowly, Lourds walked forward. Tortoiseshells lay at the head of each body, and there were dozens of them in the tomb. Picking up one, he examined it in the spotter light. Nine symbols had been etched into the plastron.

  Lourds only recognized two of them from the sixteen that scholars had found while digging at Jiahu. Not only that, beside the next body lay a delicate bone flute about eight inches long and half an inch in diameter.

  The instrument alone was enough to make a career.

  Hu handled the bone flute with reverence. So far it was the only one they had found. ‘You know what you’ve done, don’t you, Thomas?’

  ‘What we’ve done, you mean?’ Lourds smiled and looked at the chamber and at Gloria Chen organizing a quick cataloguing effort of the find. ‘Yes, I know what we’ve done. Opened up a whole new field of study for people involved in the Jiahu dig.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know if those people are going to love us or hate us. We’ve increased their workload considerably.’

  ‘As long as they get additional funding to support their efforts, they’ll love us.’ The older man’s hazel eyes gleamed with joy. ‘You also realize we’ll have to prepare a paper on this discovery soon.’

  ‘I do. And we will.’ Lourds yawned tiredly. Staying up half the night was wearing on him after the day he’d had. But he wouldn’t have traded any of the experiences for anything.

  Rory and the BBC crew had a very small area they could rove in, and they weren’t happy about it, but the monks and the Sherpas enforced the restricted space.

  ‘Seriously, Professor Lourds, we should be getting all of this on camera.’ Rory fumed, but didn’t try to bypass the Sherpas or the monks. ‘We should be involved with aspects of this story. If it weren’t for us, you wouldn’t be here now.’

  Lourds turned to the man. ‘Rory, I like you. You’re a good guy. You know your stuff when it comes to what you do. But this is what I do, and I know better than to let an amateur walk through what we have here. What we’ve found here is important. Maybe it seems like what someone found in an attic to you, but these are the kinds of finds that can teach the world a lot about how people lived thousands of years ago. Believe it or not, all those decisions all those years ago still have an impact on how we define ourselves as people.’

  Rory scowled, but didn’t object.

  Lourds took the boon flute from Hu. ‘This is a gudi, a truly rare find in the Jiahu dig. They’re made from the wings of red-crowned cranes. They were used to make music, probably in sacrificial rites as well, and most certainly in bird hunting. But I’m sure you already knew that.’

  Self-consciously, Rory dropped his gaze, then held up a hand in surrender. ‘All right. Fine. Have it your way.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Lourds smiled. ‘As we dig these things out, carefully, we’ll show them to you. Take as many pictures as you want, as much footage. Interview me, Professor Hu, or any of these graduate-level students accompanying us.’

  ‘The students?’

  ‘Yes, the students. As of this moment, they’re the foremost experts in the field on this find.’

  15

  Quarter Café

  Tiferet Yisrael Street

  Jerusalem, the State of Israel

  July 28, 2011

  ‘Lev, you know you shouldn’t be here. It’s dangerous.’

  Smiling slightly, unwilling to admit how scared he was these days – not even to himself – Lev Strauss shook his head. ‘I am here with you, Ezra. How could I not be safe?’

  Ezra Goldstein sat on the other side of the small table at the back of the café. In his late-twenties, he was far too serious for his years. The Mossad made them that way these days, though. When Lev had been with the intelligence agency, they had still been solemn, but there were times when they could play.

  ‘This isn’t funny, Lev. The work you’re doing, what you’re looking for, it’s important.’

  ‘You really think so?’ Lev tore off a piece of his bagel and popped it into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed, but these days he didn’t taste much – his stomach always stayed sour with fear. He wasn’t afraid of what might happen to him. Rather, he was afraid of what might happen if he failed at his self-appointed task. ‘Because I don’t think your taskmasters take what I’m trying to do any too seriously.’

  ‘Whether they do or not, I’m here.’ Ezra met Lev’s gaze with an earnestness that almost shamed him. ‘I’m with you, Lev, and I’m putting my life on the line every time you walk out of your flat.’

  That made Lev feel bad because he knew it was true. ‘I know, and I apologize, but I can’t sit inside those four walls the rest of my life.’

  ‘Don’t think like it’s going to be for the rest of your life. Think like it’s just going to be for a few more days.’

  ‘Is it? Is that all it’s going to be? Because I’ve invested over a year of my life in this search so far, my friend, and I’ve got precious little to show for it. Even your superiors have doubts about this.’ Lev sighed and dropped the remains of his bagel onto his plate.

  ‘You should eat.’

  ‘I can’t. Nothing tastes right.’

  ‘Don’t taste it. Eat it. Your stomach doesn’t care if anything tastes good. It just wants to be fed.’ Ezra sat there, fit and trim, broad-shouldered, and probably with a gun tucked at the back of his waist under his long-tailed shirt.

  He was
a man of action, a man of possibilities, and in that moment, Lev resented the younger man for that. On days like this, when he was filled with anger and fear, Lev’s missing left foot ached something fierce. He wanted to reach down to massage it, but he’d left it somewhere in the Dead Sea region.

  ‘I have to get out and walk.’ Lev tried the bagel again. He still couldn’t taste it, but he didn’t care. Eating it gave his hands something to do. ‘I need to walk so my mind will work. Staying in that apartment causes me to freeze up.’ He peered over Ezra’s shoulder.

  In the distance, the Western Wall stood at the foot of Temple Mount. The familiar gold dome atop the temple gleamed in the fading afternoon light. Pedestrians – many of the tourists, not citizens – walked along the sidewalks.

  The way Ezra saw the world, all of them were potential assassins. It was a view that would keep him alive for a while.

  ‘You were in the Gaza Strip only a few days ago.’ Ezra sipped his tea and watched the café’s diners.

  ‘Under careful watch.’ Lev shook his head. ‘That wasn’t like truly being out.’

  Ezra started to say something, then hesitated.

  ‘Tell me. You might as well. If you don’t, you’ll be around me the rest of the day acting like you’ve got something stuck in your throat.’

  ‘You remember the men we had guarding you in the Gaza?’

  A chill ghosted through Lev, and he knew something bad had happened. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Two of them went missing after we got you out of there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Without inflection, Ezra went on. ‘They were captured, tortured, and killed.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Their heads and feet were received by their families today.’

  Sickness swirled in the pit of Lev’s stomach.

  Ezra leaned forward and tapped the tabletop. ‘Some people know what you’re after, Lev. And they believe what you’re searching for exists. That has caught the attention of my superiors. That is why they won’t believe I am letting you walk around the city today.’