by James Becker
Bronson’s face was a picture of injured innocence.
‘I don’t recall suggesting we should deliberately try to break into the closed spaces down there,’ he replied. ‘On the other hand,’ he went on, with a slight smile, ‘if we did decide to take a quick look in the areas that are off-limits to tourists, I don’t think we’d find it too difficult.’
‘You do know that the Israeli police and soldiers are armed, don’t you? And that they very probably have orders to shoot first and find out what the hell’s going on sometime later?’
‘I do know that,’ Bronson agreed, ‘but the point about doing a kind of unauthorized expedition is that the only danger will be accessing the tunnel system. Once we’ve got the door open and we’re inside, we’ll be completely invisible.’
Angela shook her head.
‘You’re mad,’ she said. ‘Quite, quite mad.’
‘Very possibly,’ Bronson said agreeably, ‘but sometimes a touch of insanity – or at least the willingness to take a chance – is exactly what’s needed.’
‘In my opinion, breaking into the chambers underneath the Temple Mount would amount to quite a bit more than taking a chance,’ Angela replied. ‘On the other hand, I don’t have any problem whatsoever in taking one of the Kotel tunnel tours so we can at least see what we’re up against.’
Bronson nodded. He knew Angela as well as any man knows the woman with whom he has spent the better part of his life, and he had been quite certain that, once she had decided they were on the trail of something of major historic importance, she wouldn’t be prepared to let a minor inconvenience like a locked and barred gate, or even wandering platoons of armed soldiers, deflect her from her course. They had spent time in Jerusalem before, on an equally perilous quest, and had come through that unscathed, and Bronson was confident that they could do the same this time. Or at least, they would have a damned good try.
‘That also sounds like a plan,’ he said enthusiastically. ‘Let’s go right now. We don’t really have any time to lose.’
‘But we can’t just turn up,’ Angela reminded him. ‘We’ll have to pre-book a tunnel tour.’
At the back of the desk in the hotel room was a small wooden box containing a number of printed leaflets advertising various attractions, including Hezekiah’s Tunnel, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Western Wall Tunnels. She picked up one of the tunnel tour leaflets and dialled the number.
‘Good,’ she said, replacing the phone in the cradle. ‘There’s an English-language tour in just over an hour, and there’s enough space on it for the two of us to join in. Let’s go.’
It wasn’t that far from the hotel to the Kotel Plaza, and they made it with over half an hour to spare.
‘The Wailing Wall,’ Angela said, as they stopped as if by common accord and stared in awe across the open space to the vertical wall that dominated the area.
They looked at the mass of people gathered at the foot of the wall, some obviously praying, their heads moving back and forth somewhat in the manner of chickens feeding, while others busily forced scraps of what looked like cloth or paper into the spaces between the massive old stones.
‘Remind me why it’s called that?’ Bronson asked.
‘The root cause of the name goes back nearly two millennia,’ Angela explained. ‘In AD 70 the Romans destroyed what was known as the Second Temple and virtually the entire Jewish population was forced to leave the city.’
‘Hang on. I know quite a lot about the mediaeval history of this area, but not too much about the earlier stuff. Why was it called the Second Temple?’
Angela shook her head. ‘It was a lot more than a name,’ she replied, and glanced at her watch. She pointed at a nearby café with three or four vacant tables outside. ‘We’ve got a few minutes before the tour starts. Buy me a coffee to sustain me, and I’ll give you the potted history.’
They sat down at one of the tables. Bronson ordered two coffees and then looked expectantly at Angela.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘according to the history of early Judaism, the Ark of the Covenant was moved from one sanctuary to another over the years, until King David captured Jerusalem, and moved the Ark permanently to the city. The idea was to fuse three separate things – the Judaic monarchy, the Ark and the holy city itself – into a single entity that the various tribes of Israel could regard as the centre, something that would be a unifying force. King David chose what was then known as Mount Moriah, now the Temple Mount – the place where legend stated that Abraham had erected the altar on which he intended to sacrifice his son Isaac – as the location for the temple that would house it. David never lived to see the temple finished, but it was completed during the reign of his son Solomon, and finished – if my memory serves me correctly – in 957 BC.’
‘So that was the First Temple,’ Bronson said.
‘Exactly. It acted as a sanctuary, the final resting place for the Ark of the Covenant, and as a place of worship for the entire people. Oddly enough, the building wasn’t that big, but it had a huge courtyard in which thousands of people could stand. The temple contained five altars and three rooms, and the most important of those was the Holy of Holies where the Ark was kept, a room that only the high priest could enter and only on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
‘The First Temple stood for a little under half a millennium, but in about 600 BC the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar sacked the place and removed all of the temple treasures, very possibly including the Ark of the Covenant, though of course the ultimate fate of that relic has never been established. According to the Bible, it was supposed to be made of acacia wood that was then covered in gold leaf, so there’s a possibility that it may simply have rotted away over the centuries. There have been all sorts of claims about where it ended up, but the truth is that nobody knows for sure. Anyway, Nebuchadnezzar came back about fifteen years later and completely destroyed the building. He also captured much of the Jewish population and hauled them off to Babylonia as slaves. Less than a hundred years later, the Persians defeated the Babylonians and the descendants of those Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, where they rebuilt the temple. This was the Second Temple, erected on the spot where the First Temple had stood, but a significantly smaller structure than the original.’
She paused for a moment as the unsmiling waiter delivered two small cups of coffee and a surprisingly large bill.
‘Interestingly,’ she went on, taking a cautious sip, ‘the Second Temple also lasted for about half a millennium. It had been desecrated but it was still standing when Herod the Great, the King of Judaea, came to power in 37 BC, and he ordered the temple to be rebuilt, a process that began in 20 BC and took almost half a century.’
‘So Herod wasn’t entirely bad news,’ Bronson suggested.
‘Nobody is entirely bad news,’ Angela commented drily. ‘It was claimed that even Mussolini made the trains run on time, though of course he didn’t. But you’re right: Herod wasn’t all bad. It was a major rebuilding programme. They started off by doubling the size of the Temple Mount, then raised and enlarged the Temple, facing it with stone, and built a number of additional chambers and facilities, and the new building again became the centre of Jewish religious life in the city. What happened next, really, was the fault of the Jews, because in AD 66 they rebelled against Roman rule, which was at least understandable as it was a rebellion against an occupying power. The Jewish Revolt was put down by the Romans with massive bloodshed and ended in AD 73 when the fortress of Masada finally fell, the defenders committing mass suicide rather than submit to Roman rule. As a part of the campaign, in AD 70, the Romans completely destroyed the temple, which is where I started the story.
‘And then the Romans deported most of the surviving Jews. They were forbidden to return to Jerusalem until the early Byzantine period, about three hundred years later, and even then they were only allowed to visit the city on the anniversary of the destruction of the temple. The only bit of the building that was
left – and in fact it wasn’t actually a part of the temple at all, merely one of the supporting walls – is what we’re looking at now, the Western Wall. The Jews who visited realized that the temple had gone for ever, and so they began praying at the closest point to the original structure, and they howled and lamented their loss, hence the Wailing Wall.’
‘And those bits of paper that some of them are forcing between the stones are prayers?’
‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘In fact, all this is really to do with Shechinah. That more or less translates from the Hebrew as the “divine presence”, but actually it’s rather more complicated than that. The word Shechinah is not so much God but more the place where God would be expected to reside. And in Orthodox Judaism, that location would have been the Holy of Holies in the innermost chamber of the First Temple, where the Ark of the Covenant would have been kept. Even after the First Temple was destroyed, the assumption was that the divine presence would have remained in the same place within the Second Temple, and when that was reduced to rubble the spirit would have stayed in the same location, and the closest point to that spot on the top of the Temple Mount that is still accessible to the Jews is the Wailing Wall. So that’s the place where they leave their prayers.’
‘I thought there was some theory that the Ark had ended up in Ethiopia, assuming it ever existed and had managed to last the centuries,’ Bronson said.
‘Yes, it has been suggested, though I don’t believe it,’ Angela replied. ‘According to legend, a place called Aksum in Ethiopia was where the Queen of Sheba lived, and she was believed to have married Solomon, the man who built the First Temple. They had a son, Menelik, who became the first Emperor of Ethiopia, and he’s supposed to have travelled to Jerusalem and, presumably with Solomon’s permission, removed the Ark and carried it back to his own country. There’s a small chapel there, lived in by a single priest, whose only job is to guard the Ark, which is never displayed or seen by anyone else. That’s the first problem, because he could be guarding something completely different, or even looking at an empty room.
‘But, there’s another very obvious problem with this story. The Ark of the Covenant was the single most important treasure that the Jewish people possessed, and I can think of no cogent reason why Solomon would have given it away. During his reign there was no threat to Jerusalem or to the Temple, so there would have been no reason to take it elsewhere for safe keeping. But even if it had been, once the perceived danger had passed presumably it would have been returned, and that’s not what the legend says happened. If Solomon had given away the Ark, and the people had found out about it, he would probably have been lynched, because it really was that important to them. The whole point about Solomon’s Temple was that it was intended to be the final resting place for the relic, the sanctuary where it would remain for ever, so for me this theory really doesn’t hold water.’
Angela took a last sip of coffee then glanced across the Kotel Plaza to where a group of people had begun to assemble near the Western Wall Heritage, the entrance to the tunnel system.
‘That must be our tour,’ she said, gesturing towards them. ‘We should probably get over there.’
Bronson left some money on the table and they strode across the plaza to wait for the tour to begin.
The walk through the tunnel system took a little over one and a quarter hours, but neither Bronson nor Angela were concentrating entirely upon what the guide was telling them. Instead, they kept to the back of the group, looking about them in all directions and taking pictures of anything and everything they saw – any kind of carving or inscription that could possibly be construed as a key.
Not that anything they photographed looked particularly hopeful. There were occasional marks on the stones, some of them possibly left by the masons who had fabricated them, others clearly carved graffiti of one sort or another, most probably dating from countless centuries earlier, and other occasional marks for which they had no obvious explanation.
But at the end of it, neither of them seriously believed that they’d seen anything that could possibly be what they were looking for, and both were feeling somewhat despondent when they emerged from the tunnel system.
‘We’ll need to look at these images on the computer just to make sure,’ Angela said, ‘but I didn’t see anything that appeared to be even slightly hopeful. Did you?’
‘Nothing,’ Bronson replied flatly. ‘I still think it was worth taking the tour, but I’m afraid you’re probably right. This key that the inscription talked about is most likely to be in one of the chambers right under the Temple Mount, and the only way we’re going to be able to find it is to pay a nocturnal visit and hope we can get deep inside the structure.’
Angela nodded but didn’t respond.
‘I checked the door locks when we went in,’ Bronson continued, ‘and they’re better than I had expected, but they’re certainly not top quality. I’m not an expert, but I’m pretty certain that I could pick them, as long as I had about five minutes without interruption. And I didn’t see any cameras inside the tunnels or any infrared detectors, so if we could get in there we’d be safe enough unless they’ve got some guard prowling around during the night who might come along and check the doors. And even then, I might be able to lock the door from the inside.’
Angela glanced at him as they walked along, heading back towards the hotel. ‘You’re determined to go through with this, aren’t you?’
‘I’d rather we didn’t have to,’ Bronson replied, ‘but right now I don’t see any alternative. If we walk away I think there’s a good chance that both of us will be targets of that terrorist group. Our best option is to try to beat them to whatever it is they’re looking for. But I don’t want you to get involved,’ he added. ‘I can go back in there myself. There’s no need for you to take the risk as well.’
‘Not a chance,’ Angela said. ‘You’ll need somebody to hold the torch and keep a lookout while you’re working on the locks. Plus, two pairs of eyes are better than one if we do manage to get into the locked chambers. What I’m trying to say is that where you go, I’m going to go as well, so you’d better start getting used to it.’
Bronson gripped her hand and squeezed it.
‘Thanks,’ he said simply.
38
Jerusalem
‘It all looks quiet enough,’ Angela murmured.
She and Bronson were standing on the Kotel Plaza opposite the Wailing Wall, about twenty yards or so down a side street, a position from which they could see almost all of the open space in front of them. They’d been waiting for about ten minutes and in all that time they’d seen only two people – a couple walking arm in arm – cross the square. At a little after two in the morning, the lack of activity was hardly surprising, and exactly what they were hoping for.
‘Right, then,’ Bronson said quietly. ‘There’s no time like the present, I suppose. Let’s go.’
They stepped forward, arm in arm, looking as much as possible like a couple returning from a night out. The last thing they wanted was to be stopped, since in the pockets of Bronson’s lightweight jacket he was carrying three pairs of pliers and two screwdrivers, half a dozen crudely made skeleton keys that he had fabricated during the afternoon, as well as his version of a torsion wrench, a device to apply turning pressure to the barrel of a lock. It was, by any standards, a comprehensive, if home-made, DIY burglary kit, and he was in no doubt that if he was stopped and searched, he would be spending the rest of that night in a police cell.
They wandered casually across to the Wailing Wall, and for a few seconds just stood beside it, again checking that they were unobserved. Then they moved into the shadows cast by the Western Wall Heritage building and stood motionless for a moment.
‘So far, so good,’ Angela murmured.
‘That was very definitely the easy bit,’ Bronson said.
‘From now on, if anybody sees us or stops us, we’re in big trouble.’
He bent down to examine
the lock on the outer gate, while Angela shone a light so that he could see what he was doing.
That afternoon, as well as buying the tools that were now in his pocket, Bronson had also purchased four torches, two small and two larger and more powerful, and half a dozen spare batteries for each. He’d then taken one of the small torches and placed electrical tape over the glass so that the beam of light it emitted was reduced to little more than the diameter of a pencil. That, he knew, would give him more than enough light to work by, but hopefully would not be bright enough to attract the attention of any passers-by.
He gripped the handle of the gate firmly, but even as he did so, something totally unexpected happened: the gate swung open silently at his touch.
‘What?’ he muttered.
‘It’s already open,’ Angela whispered, stating what was surprisingly obvious to them both.
‘They definitely wouldn’t have forgotten to lock it,’ Bronson said, equally quietly. ‘I don’t think we’re the first intruders to get inside here tonight.’
Angela gripped his arm.
‘You mean they’re already here? Somewhere inside the tunnel? We should go back, just forget this.’
‘I really don’t want to do that.’ Bronson’s tone was firm. ‘Whatever they’re doing in the tunnels, they’re bound to leave traces. That means the Israeli authorities will know that someone was in here, and they’ll immediately step up their security. The only chance we have of getting in there is tonight. Right now, in fact. Whoever’s inside won’t know that we’re behind them, so hopefully we can just follow them while they do the searching for us.’ He paused. ‘Look, are you still up for this?’ he asked. ‘You know, right now you can still walk away. I can do this by myself.’
Angela didn’t respond for a moment, her face a pale oval in the dim moonlight. Then she shook her head.
‘If those are the same people that massacred my colleagues in Iraq,’ she whispered, ‘then I definitely don’t want to go in there tonight. Walking into a black tunnel where there are men carrying guns isn’t my idea of good thinking, and you shouldn’t go in there either, not without a weapon.’
