by James Becker
‘And because you left a dead man down there, I suppose now we have to get out of Jerusalem as quickly as we can. So that’s the end of it? The search, I mean?’
Angela sounded resigned more than anything as they continued walking towards the hotel. It wasn’t the first time Bronson had inflicted casualties on hostile forces during their searches for relics around the globe, and while she obviously didn’t condone what he’d done, she also wouldn’t condemn him: sometimes the only way to combat force was to use even greater force.
‘Definitely not,’ he replied. ‘The last thing we should do is leave in a hurry because that might attract unwelcome official attention. Anyway, I think we will be heading somewhere else quite soon, but for a different reason. Because of what was down there, under the Temple Mount.’
‘You mean you found something?’
‘Well, more didn’t find, really. The three men had broken open one of the interior gateways and had gone into the tunnels under the Mount, but when they came back, they saw me and that’s when the shooting started. Obviously you’d called the police right after that, which is why they pushed off after I’d killed that man. The problem I had was that I couldn’t do a proper search of the chamber they’d opened up because there simply wasn’t time. I heard the police sirens and I knew I had to get out almost immediately. But I heard the three of them talking as they headed back towards the main tunnel, and I’m pretty certain that they’d found nothing at all. Certainly not an inscription that could have been this mysterious key.’
‘But you don’t speak Arabic,’ Angela pointed out, ‘so how can you be sure?’
‘I can’t be sure, obviously, but they sounded both resigned and irritated, as if they’d been on a wild-goose chase. I had a very quick look inside the chamber they’d been exploring just before I left the area, and as far as I could see, all the walls were completely devoid of markings of any sort. And, with hindsight, if you look at the history of the Temple Mount, it’s difficult to see how anybody would have been able to get inside it, or at least get inside the areas under the old Jewish Temple, to leave a clue or a key.’
‘What do you mean?’ Angela asked.
‘You told me that the Temple Mount was built by Herod in the first century,’ Bronson replied. ‘And as far as we know, what he did was build retaining walls around the circumference of the Mount and supporting walls at various points on top of the existing hill, and he then laid a flat surface of stone over the top of all that, a level surface on which he was able to reconstruct and enlarge the temple. So around what’s known as the Foundation Stone, for example, he built a wall that enclosed the stone completely and once he put the level stonework on top of the walls, the only possible way in to that space would have been by digging down from inside the temple itself or worming your way in from the side and then cutting a hole in that perimeter wall.’
‘Okay, I see where you’re going with that,’ Angela said, nodding.
‘So over one millennium later, in the early Middle Ages, realistically there would have been no way that anybody could have got into these chambers undetected. In fact, it’s worth saying that the chambers within the Temple Mount, the various rooms that Charles Warren explored when he did his excavations at the end of the nineteenth century, in most cases weren’t really rooms at all, but just the voids left between Herod’s supporting walls, spaces basically filled up with earth and rubbish.’
At that moment, they reached the hotel, where every room apart from the reception hall was in darkness, and Bronson used his key to open the front door so they could go inside. To avoid waking anybody, people who might possibly be asked questions by the Jerusalem police at a later date, they stopped talking until they were inside their bedroom. And even then, they both made a conscious effort to keep their voices low.
‘So what you’re saying is that we’re in the wrong place altogether,’ Angela said, and sighed heavily. ‘We’ve picked the wrong “lost temple”, and we’ve just been wasting our time here.’
42
Jerusalem
In another hotel room not that far away from the one occupied by Bronson and Angela, another debrief – or quite literally and more accurately a post-mortem – was being carried out.
‘So who was this man?’ Khaled demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ Farooq replied. ‘We saw him in the light from our torches for less than a second, and Salim immediately fired at him. That was a mistake, I agree, but it was a reflex action. Obviously we then needed to find him, so we could decide whether or not to kill him, but we never saw him again. At least, neither Mahmoud nor I saw him again.’
‘But you did see him, even if it was only for an instant, so what was your impression? Did he look European or Middle Eastern? You must have been able to tell if his skin was white or black at the very least.’
Farooq shut his eyes, trying to visualize the fleeting image that he had had of the man a little over an hour earlier. Then he nodded, and looked across at Khaled.
‘He was definitely white,’ he replied. ‘My impression is that he was quite heavily built, and he was wearing dark clothing, presumably because, just like us, he was down there for a different purpose. Because of what happened next, I’m quite certain he wasn’t just some passer-by who’d found the outer gate of the place unlocked and wandered inside. If that had been the case – or if he had been something to do with the Western Wall Tunnel – then he would have switched on the lights. But this man had obviously been very circumspect in his approach and had probably been observing us in that chamber for quite some time. We were only aware that there was anyone there when we heard a noise from the open doorway.’
‘You said he fired at you,’ Khaled said. ‘Could he have been a policeman, or an army officer, something like that?’
‘If he’d been police or army, he would have been armed, he wouldn’t have been by himself, and he would almost certainly have returned fire immediately. But he didn’t,’ Farooq pointed out. ‘Instead, he ran off along the tunnel. But what I don’t understand is why he only shot the once. He could have stayed within the safety of the chamber, shone his torch into the tunnel and picked off Mahmoud in a matter of seconds. So why didn’t he?’
‘Is that a rhetorical question,’ Khaled asked, ‘or are you expecting an answer?’
‘It would be good to have your thoughts.’
‘If the roles had been reversed, we both know that you would have fired, so that implies that the intruder has a different mindset, and in my opinion that almost certainly means that we know who it was.’
This time Farooq nodded.
‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘it must have been the woman’s husband, the man Bronson.’
‘And that means she is probably here with him. I know you found nothing under the Temple Mount, and I’m going to have to work out what that means. But in the meantime, I want you and your men to scour the streets and check all the hotels. If that was Bronson in the tunnel, then he and his interfering wife must be staying here in Jerusalem, and it’s not that big a place.’
‘So you want us to find them?’
‘Precisely. I want you to find them and then I want you to kill them.’
43
Jerusalem
‘Actually,’ Bronson said, ‘I still think we’re in exactly the right place, but I think we’re probably misinterpreting the Latin and not looking in the places that we should.’
They were still talking together quietly. When they’d got to the room, Angela had taken Bronson into the bathroom, where he’d washed his face and hands before Angela gently cleaned and dressed the wound on his forehead. They were now lying side by side on the double bed, Angela resting her head on Bronson’s chest.
‘I thought the Latin was reasonably clear,’ she said.
‘It is, but “clear” doesn’t necessarily mean we’re interpreting it correctly. There’s a persistent legend that when the Knights Templar arrived in Jerusalem, they spent a long time – most repo
rts say that it was as long as nine years – digging down into the lower levels of the Temple Mount, presumably looking for something. They were accommodated, not in what is now the Dome of the Rock, which is believed to have been the site of both the first and second Jewish temples, but in the present Al Aqsa Mosque. Obviously, nobody knows what they were looking for or whether or not they found it, but roughly nine years after they started digging, they stopped, and then began asking noblemen from around Europe to join the order. And as we know, they were very successful in their recruitment drive.
‘Now, the Temple Mount is quite a large area, and despite the fact that the Templars must have been excavating under the Al Aqsa Mosque rather than the Dome of the Rock, in that nine-year period I have no doubt that they could have dug vertical shafts down to the bedrock and then tunnelled sideways to reach the area under the so-called Lost Temple. After all, that was pretty much exactly what Charles Warren did in his excavations. He couldn’t get permission to dig on the Mount itself, so he began excavating near it, and when he’d dug down a reasonable distance he told his men to change direction and tunnel horizontally. He managed to get inside the chambers and produce a fairly detailed map of what lay underneath the platform on which the two Islamic shrines now stand.’
‘What do you think they were looking for? The Templars, I mean,’ Angela asked.
Bronson smiled in the darkness and squeezed her hand.
‘That depends entirely upon which particular legend or conspiracy theory you subscribe to,’ he replied. ‘The suggestions I’ve read about include the Ark of the Covenant, obviously, because that’s the biggie, and it features in just about every story that’s even vaguely connected to Jerusalem. Other contenders include the Jewish Menorah, and the True Cross, or at least bits of it, the body of Jesus Christ, and a whole raft of other not particularly believable relics from the earliest days of civilization.
‘Obviously these days there’s no way of telling what the Templars were digging for, or even if they were digging at all, but they must have been doing something. Those original nine knights arrived in Jerusalem ostensibly to provide protection for pilgrims on the dangerous roads around the city. That was their remit, if you like. But there’s no evidence at all that they actually did this, or at least, not as you might have expected. Logically, a force of only nine men, even nine heavily armed and mounted knights, couldn’t do much more than provide a token force on the roads. If that really was their objective, you would have expected them to immediately begin recruiting more knights to join them in their mission.
‘But they didn’t do that. As far as we can tell, they occupied the Al Aqsa Mosque for nine years and apparently did nothing about their principal task. So the idea that they were digging under the building does make a kind of logical sense. And, using the same argument, the suggestion that they then found whatever they were looking for after nine years also has merit, because then everything changed. The order started its recruitment drive, it was recognized suspiciously quickly by the Pope, and immediately began to expand. That could mean that the Templars had found something that gave them considerable religious power, something that could either have impressed the Vatican or – perhaps more likely – have frightened the Pope into recognizing the order so quickly.
‘If they had discovered the Ark of the Covenant, to pick the most popular but perhaps the least likely relic, I think the Pope would have run scared. If the Ark really did function as it was supposed to do – basically, to act as a machine for talking to God – then that would have been pretty definitive proof that the Jews were the chosen people, because God would be communicating with the Jews through the Ark and not using it to discuss anything with the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. I think if the Templars had told the Vatican that they’d found the relic and made the implications clear, the Pope would probably have been forced to do more or less whatever they wanted him to. But of course, all of this really is just speculation.’
‘But what do you think personally?’ Angela asked, sounding sleepy.
Bronson gave a short laugh.
‘Me? I have no idea.’
What seemed only minutes later, Bronson’s alarm sounded and they both climbed somewhat wearily out of bed.
Breakfast was a kind of buffet affair, and Bronson made a second visit to the main table, returning with another collection of pastries. Angela looked askance at his choice of food.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘Full of sugar and empty calories,’ she said, pointing.
‘I know, but I’m hungry. They’re not even particularly nice pastries, but at least the coffee’s good.’
Angela watched him take a bite out of the local equivalent of a Danish pastry, then took another sip of her own drink.
‘We didn’t get to it last night, because I fell asleep,’ she said, ‘but you said no one had found anything in that place, and you gave the impression that that was a good thing, which I don’t understand.’
Bronson glanced round the dining room, and although he didn’t think anybody was close enough to overhear their conversation, he was still going to be circumspect in what he said.
‘I didn’t mean that it was good I couldn’t find anything, but it occurred to me while I was down there that it also wasn’t entirely bad,’ he replied. ‘I told you last night that when I was reasonably sure the other two men had gone, I went into the area that they’d opened up and had a very quick look around, maybe only for thirty seconds or perhaps a minute.’
‘Not what you might call a comprehensive or exhaustive search, then.’
‘No, but I think it was informative. I looked at the inner walls and went across to some of the other structures in there. The one thing I noticed immediately was that, unlike the stones in the Western Wall Tunnel, there were no marks on any of the stones, apart from those that had very obviously been made by masons. No graffiti, no names, no messages. And that makes sense, bearing in mind what you told me about the way Herod had constructed the Temple Mount. It would all have been a new build, probably done fairly quickly, and once the platform had been erected over the top of the bedrock, most of the chambers would have been effectively sealed.’
‘But doesn’t that kind of give the lie to the idea of the Knights Templars digging there and finding something in one of those chambers?’ Angela pointed out.
Bronson shook his head.
‘Not necessarily, because if Herod, or more likely the Jewish priesthood, wanted to keep some object or objects safe and securely hidden for all time, concealing them in a chamber that would effectively become part of the foundations of the new Jewish Temple might have seemed like a very good idea. As you’ve already told me, that was a turbulent time in the history of the city, and perhaps they were worried that some new invader might appear and that would result in the temple being sacked, as it had been in the past. Maybe they looked at their treasures and decided to keep them as close as possible to the new temple, buried in the mount directly beneath it, where their spiritual influence or whatever you want to call it would hopefully be felt by the worshippers, but at the same time they would be completely safe, even if the temple itself were to be totally destroyed. Which is, of course, exactly what happened a few decades later.’
Angela looked at him.
‘Now that,’ she began, ‘is a very interesting idea. Not a new idea, but definitely interesting. It’s been claimed, but of course we can’t definitively prove it, that the Ark was hidden in a special chamber located deep underneath the temple before Nebuchadnezzar and his Babylonian forces swept through the city back in about 600 BC. Herod’s construction of the Temple Mount came much later, of course, but I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t have made a similar arrangement. The Ark of the Covenant, their most precious relic, could well have been hidden in that way, which could explain why the Arch of Titus in Rome has a very clear carved image on it of the Jewish Menorah, an important part of the spoils of war from the Judaean campaign, but no
image at all that could possibly be the Ark itself.’
Bronson inclined his head in an ironic bow.
‘It is only an idea,’ he emphasized, ‘a simplistic deduction based on what little I know of this area, and I can’t offer you a shred of evidence in support of it.’
‘However,’ Angela went on, ‘if that hypothesis is correct, I don’t quite know how it helps us. Your idea, basically, is that the Jewish priests could have hidden treasures within the Temple Mount, and over a millennium later the Knights Templar could have tunnelled inside and dug them up and then, presumably, secreted them somewhere else, possibly to indulge in a little creative blackmail of the Pope, depending on exactly what they’d found. So these two separate events – hiding the treasure or relics or whatever and the Templars discovering them – would have taken place in the first and twelfth centuries respectively. But the Latin translation of the inscription seems to me to refer to the Temple Mount, and the author seems fairly clear that this key – this word or whatever that we need to translate the second half of the text – is inscribed on stone in one of the subterranean chambers. So if the chambers were sealed when Herod built the platform on the Temple Mount, Mount Moriah, how did somebody get inside the structure during – and I’m guessing here – the mediaeval period?’
‘It wouldn’t have been that difficult,’ Bronson said. ‘Although the Temple Mount is basically closed and off-limits to everybody today, that wasn’t always the case. There’s a large vaulted cavern on the south-east side of the Mount that’s usually referred to as King Solomon’s Stables, though Solomon had nothing to do with it and the chamber was actually built by Herod when he enclosed Mount Moriah. We’re almost certain that the Templars used it as stabling for their horses, so obviously access to it was open in that period, which is kind of early mediaeval, I suppose. There are also about half a dozen cisterns within the Temple Mount that were obviously used for water collection, but more importantly there are several gates, all now bricked up but which were open in antiquity. Most of these led into the Mount itself and terminated in sets of steps that gave access to the platform where the two mosques now stand. Basically, most of these gates and the tunnels and steps inside the Mount simply served as shortcuts for people from Jerusalem who wanted to climb up to the temple to worship.’
