by James Becker
Bronson stared at it for a moment.
Angela had written:
THE TRUTH OF THE TRUTH LIES
IN KRAK DE MONT REAL LXII DOWN
‘I don’t know about you,’ Bronson said, irritation evident in his voice, ‘but I’m getting a bit fed up with this. Every time we seem to get close to the answer, we get handed another riddle that doesn’t make sense. Is that accurate? And what the hell does it mean?’
‘It’s as accurate as I can get it, and I have no idea. But I’m going to find out.’
‘I presume that’s the number sixty-two,’ Bronson said, pointing at the ‘LXII’ notation.
‘Yes. But I don’t know its significance.’
Angela woke up her laptop, opened the web browser and began typing while Bronson continued staring at the cryptic clue.
‘“Mont Real” is French, of course,’ he said, after a few moments, ‘or probably, anyway, but “Krak” isn’t. I think it usually means a castle, like “Krak de Chevaliers”.’
‘You’re right,’ Angela replied. ‘I don’t know the root of the word, but it does mean a castle. And now I do know where the writer was talking about.’
She turned the computer round so that Bronson could see the screen.
On it was the image of a more or less conical hilltop, similar terrain distantly visible behind it. But the hilltop was far from barren, being dominated by the impressive ruins of a castle, the grey-brown stone walls seeming almost to grow straight out of the bedrock.
‘That,’ Angela said, ‘is Shobak Castle, and it’s nowhere near France. It’s in Jordan, not far from the old Nabatean city of Petra.’
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Bronson said. ‘And we were looking for a place called Krak de Mont Real.’
‘That was its old name,’ Angela replied. ‘Krak de Mont Real or Krak de Montreal. It was never a Templar stronghold, according to this, but it was a Crusader castle. It was built in 1115 by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, and it was the first of a whole bunch of fortifications he put up to guard the road between Damascus and Egypt. It withstood several sieges, but was finally conquered in 1189 and largely dismantled. When the Mamluks had finished driving the Templars out of the Holy Land in the fourteenth century, this was one of the places that they occupied and restored.’
Bronson nodded.
‘That must raise a bit of a question mark,’ he said. ‘If what you’ve just found out is correct, then during the time of the Templars the castle must only have been a ruin. So if that were the case, why would whoever authored that inscription have left anything in the building? And if they did, surely the Mamluks would have found whatever it was when they took over the place a century or so later?’
‘Good points, but I have a feeling that neither the Mamluks nor anybody else would necessarily recognize the importance or even the meaning of what was in the castle. Let’s face it, without having foreknowledge of the inscription from the temple in Iraq, neither of us would have even given that carving of the letters and the face of the bearded man that we found in the Western Wall Tunnel so much as a second glance. We would just have assumed it was a piece of well-carved graffiti. My guess is that whatever was left at Shobak Castle is the same kind of thing. A carving or something of the sort that would be completely meaningless to anyone who hadn’t already deciphered the other clues. And at least this time the author of the inscription is pretty much telling us where to look. I’m sure that the number sixty-two will mean something when we get to the castle.’
‘So you’ve made up your mind already?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not necessarily, but having come this far it seems to me to be stupid not to take that one last step. What do you think? What do you want to do?’
‘I’ll follow you, Angela, as I always do. Don’t worry about that. But if we get absolutely nowhere at this castle, then maybe we should rethink what we do next, because I get the feeling we’re being played with, sent from one place to another while we decipher and follow some pretty obscure clues. Really, this is worth doing only because we might have a one per cent chance of tracking down the lost treasure of the Templars, but the last bit that you deciphered suggests to me that maybe we’re not following the trail of the treasure but the trail of the “truth”, and I have a shrewd suspicion that that might not be an iron-bound box full of bullion but something completely different.’
‘So do you want carry on? Yes?’
‘Yes, at least for the moment.’
Bronson took his mobile phone out of his pocket.
‘Tell me again where this Shobak Castle is,’ he said.
Angela referred back to the webpage.
‘It’s in Jordan,’ she confirmed, ‘and it’s roughly one hundred miles north-east of Aqaba, which is down on the coast, next to Eilat in Israel.’
Bronson found it on the mapping app and zoomed in so that he could see the individual roads.
‘Is it way out in the bundu, or is there a town close by?’
‘There’s a reasonable-sized town called Wadi Musa, which is also on the way to Petra, and there’s what looks like a village with the same name – Shobak – fairly close to the castle.’
‘Got it,’ Bronson said. ‘In fact, in a straight line, it’s only about a hundred miles from where we’re sitting right now. We could drive it in two or three hours.’
Angela looked suddenly doubtful.
‘I wonder how easy it is to get across the border into Jordan?’ she mused.
‘We’ll tackle that when we have to,’ Bronson said confidently. ‘In the meantime, let’s get everything packed and then we can see about hiring a car.’
‘And you want to do this today?’
‘The longer we spend in one place, the more chance there is of being tracked down, so I’m very happy to keep on the move. We probably won’t get to Shobak today, but I’m sure we can find somewhere to stay in Jordan, maybe in Wadi Musa, and if we stick to doing everything with cash, we’ll be a lot more difficult for anyone to find.’
Fifteen minutes later, they were ready to go. Bronson settled the bill in cash, and obtained the name and address of a car hire company that allowed its vehicles to be taken out of Israel.
Then they stepped out into the street and started walking.
51
Jerusalem
‘They’ve just left the hotel on foot,’ Farooq said quietly into his mobile phone.
Just over a hundred yards away, Khaled grunted an acknowledgement, and then stood up to stare down the street.
‘Are they leaving? Have they checked out, I mean?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ Farooq replied. ‘They’ve got bags with them.’
‘Good. Tell your men to follow them until you can isolate them somewhere and finish the job.’
Khaled ended the call, tossed a few coins on to the café table to cover the cost of his drink, and then began heading down the street, towards the hotel Farooq and his men had had under surveillance. He didn’t want to be seen, but at the same time he definitely wanted to be close enough to make sure the job was done properly.
His mobile rang again and he answered immediately.
‘Yes?’
‘I had expected them to take a taxi,’ Farooq said quietly, ‘and I already have one of my men in a cab and another on a motorcycle, but the two targets seem to be heading towards a car hire company.’
‘What do you mean by that? Surely they are or they aren’t?’
‘What I mean is they’ve turned down a street and the only commercial establishments there, as far as we can see, are two car rental agencies. Do you want us to stop them now? There are about a dozen other people in the street.’
Khaled paused before replying, then shook his head, his action invisible to Farooq.
‘No. That’s too many witnesses. I want to get out of this alive. Just keep following them, and keep this line open.’
‘And if they hire a car and drive away? What then?’
‘You have one m
an in a taxi already. Whichever car hire company the two targets go to, send one of your men into the other one and tell him to rent another vehicle.’
Farooq cleared the line briefly to issue the appropriate orders, then called Khaled back. He was less than happy with the fluidity of the situation, and with having to adjust his plans so quickly and frequently. Now, if Khaled let the situation slide, Farooq knew that they could even end up in some kind of a car chase, and that had definitely never been a part of his plan. But Khaled was the man with the money, so he knew that the final decision rested with him.
Farooq lounged in a shadowed doorway on the opposite side of the road to the two car hire companies and simply watched.
The targets stepped into the car rental office and disappeared from view. Moments later, one of Farooq’s men crossed the road from an alleyway and entered the office of the second company just a few doors down.
For what seemed like a very long fifteen minutes, nothing else happened. And then, from the premises of the second company, Farooq’s man appeared behind the wheel of a small Ford saloon. Moments later, he pulled the car to a stop right beside where Farooq was standing and pushed open the passenger door.
‘I’m now in the hire car,’ Farooq reported over the open mobile connection. ‘A white Ford Fiesta. There’s no sign of the targets yet.’ Then he ended the call as he saw Khaled approaching.
Just a few seconds later, the rear door of the Ford opened and the other man sat down on the seat, wiping the perspiration off his brow with a large purple handkerchief.
‘The street’s quieter now,’ Farooq said, gesturing in both directions. ‘We can probably take them as soon as they come out. Finish what we came to do.’
‘No. We wait. We will follow them until we reach a quiet area where we can take our time with them.’
‘I thought you just wanted them dead?’ Farooq asked.
‘I do. But I don’t want to attract attention, and if you’re right and Bronson still has the pistol, then we could easily find ourselves involved in a gunfight in the middle of the street. We need to let them get out of Jerusalem and then hit them somewhere where there are no witnesses at all. There are plenty of open stretches of road between here and the airport.’
‘Here they come,’ Farooq said, watching another vehicle – a white Renault – turn out of the yard beside the car hire company.
He and Khaled immediately ducked down so that they were below the level of the windows of the Ford. The driver, in response to a brief command from Farooq, took his mobile phone out of his pocket and pretended to be having a conversation on it as the Renault drove past. All three of them watched the vehicle as Bronson drove it down the road and made a right turn at the end.
‘Keep well back and don’t crowd him.’
As the driver accelerated gently to follow the Renault, Farooq used his mobile to call two numbers in quick succession and issued crisp orders.
‘The taxi will act as the principal vehicle,’ he said to Khaled, ‘because the streets are full of cabs, with the motorcycle as the backup. We’ll keep out of sight as much as possible, in case we have to take over unexpectedly.’
Farooq’s mobile rang and he answered it immediately.
‘Good,’ he said after a few moments.
‘What?’ Khaled asked.
‘Aziz is on the motorcycle. He’ll monitor everything that happens and provide me with a running commentary. At the moment, the targets are heading north, probably intending to pick up one of the main roads to the north of the Old City. That’s probably the fastest way to the airport.’
But just a few minutes later something unexpected happened. Farooq listened intently to what Aziz was saying, the purr of the motorcycle’s engine a constant background noise behind his words.
‘They’ve turned right, not left,’ Farooq said. ‘That will take them away from the airport, not towards it. Maybe they’ve just taken a wrong turning.’
Khaled nodded, but seemed somewhat distracted.
Farooq noticed the change of mood in his companion. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
For a moment Khaled didn’t reply. Then he glanced at Farooq before looking back through the windscreen, just catching sight of the white Renault as it manoeuvred through the traffic perhaps eighty yards in front of them.
‘Maybe they haven’t taken a wrong turning,’ Khaled said finally, a reflective tone to his voice. ‘I’ve been puzzling over the fact that they’ve hired a car ever since I took your call. You and your men went into the Temple Mount and found absolutely nothing—’
‘There was nothing to find,’ Farooq retorted, bristling at the implied criticism. ‘Mahmoud saw as much as I did, and I even took some photographs. There was nothing there. No carvings, no inscriptions. Not even any graffiti.’
‘I’m not saying that there was, Farooq. I have no doubt that you had time to do a thorough search, and I’m quite satisfied that what we expected to find simply wasn’t there. And Bronson couldn’t have had more than a minute or two to carry out his own search. Realistically, I doubt very much if he would have spotted anything in that time that you hadn’t seen.’
Farooq couldn’t see where that particular argument was heading, so he didn’t reply.
‘So if you didn’t find anything, and it seems fairly certain that Bronson couldn’t have found anything, why is he driving along the road in front of us in a rental car?’
Khaled looked expectantly at Farooq.
‘My point is that if Bronson and the woman had come away just as empty-handed as us, why didn’t they climb into the back of a taxi and tell the driver to take them to Ben Gurion Airport? Why haven’t they just given up?’
Farooq spread his hands in a gesture of helpless ignorance. ‘I have no idea. Unless you really think that Bronson did see something that we missed, and that they are still following the trail?’
Khaled nodded.
‘That would seem to make sense,’ he replied. ‘My best guess is that we were looking in the wrong place. Somehow, I think Bronson guessed where the right place was and found something: a clue that we don’t have and that they’re now following.’
‘So killing them is a really bad idea?’ Farooq suggested.
‘No, killing them is a really good idea,’ Khaled said, ‘but only after we’ve found out where they’re heading and why.’
52
Israel and Jordan
‘Where are you planning on crossing the border into Jordan?’ Angela asked, looking up from a map of Israel she had open on her lap and staring through the windscreen.
‘The only obvious junction, as far as I can see, is near Jericho, so we might as well try that first. After all, we’re just a couple of tourists, so there shouldn’t be a problem. If we can’t get across there for some reason, my Plan B is to head south and drive all the way down to Eilat, because I know there’s a border post there, and we could cross into Aqaba. Then we’d basically have to do a U-turn and head north again, but this time on the Jordanian side of the border. It’d take us longer to do that, but it would work as an alternative.’
Angela nodded and looked back at the map, tracing the route with the tip of her finger and looking at the roads on the Jordanian side of the border, which were also marked on it.
‘Well, I just hope we’re right about all this, and there’ll be something at Shobak Castle that makes sense. Have you got any idea at all what might be meant by that number sixty-two?’
Bronson shook his head.
‘I was rather hoping that inspiration might strike us when we see the place.’
‘From what I gathered when I looked on the Internet, there didn’t seem to be a huge amount of the structure left. The original castle was about seven storeys high above the top of the hill, and I think that all that’s left now are the foundations, then the lowest level, which is more or less intact, and some bits of the level above that.’
‘Then we may have to do a bit of lateral thinking to identify the location, a
nd just hope that whoever left the clue there inscribed it in a fairly permanent fashion on a bit of stone that’s still in place. I’m assuming that we’ll be looking for a carving or an inscription again, because that seems to be the one common feature about the trail that we’re following.’
Angela nodded and laced her fingers together on her lap.
‘And the other obvious question that we need to answer,’ she said, ‘is whether or not we’re being followed.’
Bronson shrugged, but didn’t take his eyes off the road.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see any sign of anyone behind us when we picked up the hire car. And for anybody to have followed us, they would have had to find out which hotel we were staying in, which we made as difficult as possible.’
He glanced briefly at Angela.
‘So far I haven’t spotted a tail. There was a taxi a couple of cars behind us for a while, travelling on exactly the same route as us, but he turned off a few minutes ago. The traffic is heavy, though, and there are just too many cars out there for me to keep track of all of them. It’ll be a lot easier to see if anyone is following us once we get outside the built-up area.’
A few minutes later the traffic did begin to thin out as they drove along a twisting road that skirted the southern edges of a patch of woodland – according to the map Angela had in front of her, it was called the Hatsofim Forest – and then drove under the 417 dual carriageway to pick up the northbound lane. The road curved around to the north-east, past Mishor Adumim and Mitspe Yeriho, and then continued east as far as Beit HaArava. There, Bronson turned north on route 90, driving past the site of biblical Jericho, and a little under ten miles later turned east again towards the Jordanian border.
He stopped the car a short distance beyond the junction and pulled it off the road.
‘We might be stopped and searched at the border,’ he explained, ‘so I just need to get the pistol out of sight.’
Bronson wasn’t certain how thorough any search might be, and in the end opted for wrapping the weapon in a piece of cloth, tucking it under the carpet in the boot of the Renault, putting one of their bags on top of it and hoping for the best.
