The Jerusalem Puzzle

‘When the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger.’

Henry V
Act 3, Sc. 1, Wm Shakespeare.

The best part of this story is true.

Table of Contents

Flames burst into life with a whoosh. It was an unusually cold night for late February in Jerusalem. Lead-coloured
clouds had been rolling in from the Dead Sea, east of the
city, since midday. By ten o’clock that night the streets of the Old City’s Muslim quarter were deserted. Smells of cardamom coffee and kofta drifted from shuttered windows.

At one minute past ten, the stepped passage of Aqabat at-Takiya echoed loudly with the sound of footsteps. Two men dressed in dusty suits and chequered keffiyehs were hurrying down the wide steps.

The high masonry walls on each side gave the alley the appearance of a gap between prisons. As the men approached the arched entrance to Lady Tunshuq’s Palace they saw orange flames coming from the recessed doorway.

They stopped, waited a few seconds pressed against the wall, then moved slowly forward, craning their necks until they could see what was burning. Whoever had set the fire was long gone into the warren of narrow alleys all around.

As a gust of wind blew the flames up, they saw the body burning fiercely in front of the double-height, green steel doors. Then a throat-clogging smell of burning flesh hit them. The man who’d seen the flames first was already talking on his phone. He could feel the heat from the fire on his face, though they were fifteen feet away. He coughed, backed away. The acrid smell was getting stronger.

They watched as the flames rose. The wail of an ambulance seemed far away as blackened skin slipped from the man’s face. Tendons and muscle glistened in the flames. A white cheekbone poked out.

Above the head, paler smoke was drifting where hair should have been. The sickly smell was all around now. A man shouted from a half-shuttered window high up. A woman wailed to God.

A spurt of hissing flames reflected on the alternating light and dark bands of Mamluk masonry and the stone stalactites hanging above the doorway. The sound echoed down the long passage.

I turned the radio down. Verdi’s ‘Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ had passed its climax.

‘This website says Abingdon is the oldest continuously occupied town in Britain.’ I looked up. A squall of rain hit the side of the car.

‘It says people have lived there for 6,000 years. That’s got to make for one hell of a long list of mayors at the town council.’ It was hard reading while Isabel was driving, not just because it was a rainy morning in February, but also because the road we were on, the A415 from Dorchester, twisted and turned at that point under a high canopy of trees.

‘In 1084 William the Conqueror celebrated Easter here.’ I looked at Isabel.

She kept her attention on the road ahead. ‘It is St Helen’s Church we’re looking for, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It was the first monastery to be established in England,’ she said. ‘It’s even older than Glastonbury. You could get four years out of purgatory for visiting it. Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?’

She was smiling. Her long black hair was tied up at the back. She looked good.

‘The church is still looking at all sorts of schemes to get people in the door. Did Lizzie tell you they had to go on a marriage preparation course before they used the church for their wedding?’ I said.

‘She doesn’t tell me things like that.’ She sniffed. It was barely audible, but its meaning was clear.

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to go there. Lizzie worked at the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford in the office next to mine. We’d always been friendly, though it had never led to anything. Her husband-to-be, Alex Wincly, had followed her around like a day-old puppy for years.

‘They spent three Wednesday evenings talking about their relationship,’ I said. ‘What a nightmare. How did they find enough to talk about?’

‘It sounds like a good idea to me.’ Isabel kept her attention on the traffic, but her eyebrow on my side was up half an inch, at least.

‘I reckon she’s pregnant,’ I said. ‘Why else would they get married in February?’

‘There’s a lot of reasons people get married in winter, aside from being pregnant.’

The car radio buzzed as we swept under electricity cables strung between giant pylons. ‘This is the eleven o’clock news from Radio Three,’ said the announcer.

There was another loud buzz. I missed a few seconds of the next sentence.

‘… the badly burnt body discovered in the Old City of Jerusalem early this morning was that of an American archaeologist named Max Kaiser, according to local sources. His death is being blamed on Islamic extremists. In other news …’

Isabel slowed the car. A car behind, tailgating us, blew its horn.

‘Kaiser’s dead,’ she whispered.

She gripped the wheel. The car sped up again.

I got that out-of-body feeling you get when you discover someone you’ve heard of has died, as if all your senses have become heightened as you realise how fortunate you are to be alive.

We didn’t know Max Kaiser well. We’d only met him once in Istanbul when he’d helped us out of the water in the middle of the night, and allowed us to dry out on his yacht, but we were involved with him. He’d staked a very public claim to a manuscript we’d found in Istanbul so he wasn’t ever going to get my vote for person of the year, but he didn’t deserve to die like that.

‘Poor bastard,’ I said.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ she said.

‘Do you think he told Susan Hunter the truth?’

Isabel shrugged. She looked pale. ‘Susan wouldn’t have fallen for his bullshit,’ she said. She glanced at me. ‘They did say he was burnt to death?’

‘Yeah.’

She went silent.

Dr Susan Hunter was the Cambridge archaeologist who was producing a report for the Turkish government on the ancient manuscript we’d found in an aqueduct tunnel deep under Istanbul. It was the arrangement that had been agreed soon after the manuscript was found.

Dr Hunter was the leading expert on early Byzantine manuscripts in the world. The promise of her personal involvement had probably secured the agreement of the Turkish archaeological authorities for the manuscript to be studied in England.

‘I read that book she wrote on Byzantine superstitions. They believed some totally crazy stuff,’ said Isabel. She shook her head, as if shaking something off.

‘Looks like this storm is getting worse,’ I said, leaning forward to look out the window.

By the time the wedding reception was over we’d experienced the best that Abingdon had to offer. It rained for most of the afternoon, but the bride and groom managed to get wedding pictures by the hotel’s private mooring on the Thames. We enjoyed the reception, especially the all-girl band from Windsor, all mates of Carol’s apparently. We danced non-stop and thanks to Isabel not drinking we were able to drive back to London late that night.

On the journey I checked my email, scoured the online news sites to see if they were saying anything about Max Kaiser’s death. They weren’t. I reread the last email I’d received from Dr Hunter earlier that week. In it she’d said there was no definite delivery date on her final report yet. I’d replied, thanking her for keeping me informed, asking to be put on the circulation list as soon as the report was available. She hadn’t replied.

It was six months since our return from Istanbul. I’d expected Dr Hunter to say her report would be ready in another year or more. At least she hadn’t done that. We all despaired at the institute at some of the reasons academics gave for taking so long to do things. It was a running joke for us.

‘Do you think Kaiser’s death will make any difference to her report, Sean?’

I shrugged. ‘No idea,’ I replied.

After we got home I composed an email to Dr Hunter, asking whether she had heard about Kaiser. I also asked about his level of cooperation. It was probably a bit over the top, poking my nose in, but I couldn’t stop myself.

I needed to know whether she knew how important her report was to us. It had become a talisman. Alek, a colleague and a friend who’d worked with me at the institute and had gone out to Istanbul ahead of me, had been murdered there. The manuscript we’d found was something good that had come out of his death. It felt almost as if he’d given up his life for it. I had to know what was in it, what Dr Hunter’s translation would uncover.

My boss, Dr Beresford-Ellis, had postponed our final project review meeting on what had happened in Istanbul because of the report. My job was now tied up with it all. That was my mistake.

But I knew I was right not to let it go.

We’d stopped a plot to infect thousands with a deadly plague virus at a Muslim demonstration in London after investigating what had happened to Alek. But some of the people who’d been behind that plot had escaped.

That was the unsettling part. My friend Alek had died out there because of these people. Isabel and I had almost died too. And whoever had been digging under Istanbul, looking for that plague virus, were clearly people with substantial resources, whose reasons for going to all that trouble were still unclear.