The Jerusalem Puzzle (11 page)

‘Ow,’ said Isabel. She clutched at her side.

I banged the door with my fist. It rocked on its hinges. ‘Open up, for God’s sake,’ I shouted.

I banged the door again and again.

Then it opened. ‘I told you, no visitors,’ said the friendly Mr Ginger.

Simon held up his ID card. ‘I am entitled to come in and inspect this dig. I’m a professor with the Hebrew University. I gave a reference to Max Kaiser to enable him to get on this dig. I need to see where he was working, because of what has happened. These people are my colleagues.’ He gestured towards us.

Ginger threw his hands in the air. ‘We’ve no time to give tours.’

‘We won’t be long. If I have to come back with my friend from the Antiquities Authority, it will take us a lot longer. He is a stickler for sites being run properly.’

Ginger frowned. ‘You gave Max his reference?’ he said. Simon nodded.

A look of recognition replaced the suspicion.

‘Are you working on a red heifer project?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘Max spoke about you.’

Simon smiled, thinly. ‘I don’t want to have to come back. You know who I am. Let us in.’

Ginger sighed. ‘Okay, come in. But your visit will have to be quick.’

He stood aside.

I went in first. Isabel followed me. Ginger shouted at us not to touch anything.

‘Be very careful,’ he said. ‘Visitors are not covered by any insurance.’ His words echoed through the building.

‘And don’t take any pictures. And I want a word with you.’ I looked back. He’d put a hand up to stop Simon in the doorway.

‘Have a look around,’ called Simon. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

We were inside. He’d done it. There was a muffled throbbing coming from somewhere below. A stairwell beckoned to us from the other side of the large dusty room we were in. One part of it led down. The other part led up. Describing the room as dusty would be a bit of an understatement.

It was dusty in the way a sandpit is dusty. There were drifts of sand and cobwebs in each corner, and a thick layer of it on the floor with boot marks and channels in it. There was a heap of dust near the stairs too, as if that section had been swept down from the upstairs rooms.

Had the house been abandoned for decades? It certainly looked like it. We headed down the stairs.

The room below was darker, full of cobwebs. It had no stairs going down, just a three-foot-wide hole in the floor. There was light streaming from the hole. The throbbing noise was coming from it. I looked down into it. Isabel was behind me. I couldn’t hear Ginger and Simon talking anymore. I could hear other voices, European voices. Someone was speaking German down there. The replying voice was German too. Who the hell was on this dig?

A shiny steel ladder led down into the hole. I took hold of it and swung myself onto it.

‘This is one time where I don’t think “ladies first” holds.’

I looked down.

I could see shiny equipment, a portable generator and some white airtight plastic boxes on the stone floor beneath. There was another hole of a similar size in the floor below us too.

‘You don’t have to come down if you don’t want to.’

‘Why don’t you try to stop me?’ said Isabel.

There was no polite answer to that.

At the bottom of the ladder the air felt heavy. The
generator
was running, and a red pipe, about an inch thick, ran out of it and down into the next hole. The inside of my mouth was coated in gritty dust. The walls on this level were ancient foot-square stone blocks. There was no plaster on them, as there was on the walls up above.

The voices had stopped talking. Whoever was down below had probably heard us coming.

I had a look around. There was a knee-high pile of broken, pale ancient wood in one corner. This room was a different shape to the ones above. It faced in a different direction, diagonal to those above, as if the building it had been part of had faced a different way. There was an oily scent coming from the pump too. And the noise from it was a lot louder now we were on the same floor as it.

The hole going down was in the far corner here. I could see the start of a proper stairway descending this time. We were far below street level now. There was a recessed door near the stairs, totally blocked by a pile of rubble. It looked as if it had been there a long time. Where did that door lead? Why had it been blocked up from the inside?

The temperature was high down here. I felt sweat run down my forehead. My shirt was getting damp at the small of my back too. Then a head appeared, poking up out of the unguarded stairwell. And wheover he was, he was angry.

Henry Mowlam took the teabag out of his thin white plastic cup and dropped it into the stained bin. Working for the Security Service was not as glamorous as TV shows made it out to be.

He took his mid-afternoon tea back to his desk. He had a report to read. It was on one of his two smaller side screens. The report was a secure PDF, an un-printable and un-saveable document, which his password had allowed him access to. It could only be read on screen and the length of time it remained opened, and by whom, was being recorded as part of the document metadata.

The report was the latest impact assessment for a war between Israel and the US, and Iran and possibly Egypt too, as well as others, depending on which Arab governments got embroiled to prove their Islamic credentials.

Its contents were stark.

The human and economic impact of such a war would be greater than any conflict since the Second World War. Iran was a regional power now and had a standing army of 545,000 as well as a reserve of 650,000 men. It would be the largest and most advanced military force Israel had ever engaged. Israel had an active defence force of 187,000 and a reserve of 565,000. Israel’s population was 7.8 million. Iran’s 78 million.

The casualty predictions were based on a number of possible war scenarios. Even the most optimistic prediction for the loss of life in the region would be unacceptable to the public in any of the participating countries, should the information ever get out.

The second half of the document detailed the levels of long-term human and physical destruction if a limited
nuclear exchange took place. It included details of the
Israeli nuclear arsenal and an estimate of the restricted Iranian nuclear capability, currently believed to lie within their
military’s reach.

Henry was allowed to see the document only because the new remote pursuit protocol allowed him to track high-value permanent UK citizens outside the country for short durations, rather than hand over monitoring to MI6, the branch of the British Security Service focused on external threats.

The situation relating to Dr Susan Hunter, one of the UK citizens he was tracking, and the tension in Israel, where she had last been seen, necessitated he be aware of the latest intelligence for that country for his level of security clearance.

What he had to do now was evaluate the intelligence and decide how they should proceed regarding the Susan Hunter situation.

The report he had read before the war scenario document was the item he would have to take an operational decision about.

It claimed to have traced the report of a letter from the first caliph of Islam, regarding the fate of Jerusalem, to a statement by a Max Kaiser, the archaeologist who had died a week before, soon after he had given an interview to a journalist working for an Egyptian newspaper.

The article had only appeared the day before in Cairo, written in Arabic, and it had taken the translation service this long to prioritise and translate it.

It hadn’t even mentioned Max Kaiser’s death. Presumably, the reporter had interviewed him before he died and hadn’t bothered to update his story, if he had been made aware of Kaiser’s death at all.

A link between this article and Kaiser’s death was one question he had to consider. But why would any Islamists want to kill him? The letter was in their interests.

And how was all this related to Dr Hunter?

The man had slicked-back silvery grey hair and a big pale face. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and looked fifty-
something.

‘Heh, who are you?’ he asked, with a German accent.

‘We’re here to have a look at the dig. I was a colleague of Max Kaiser’s. I’m Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. This is my colleague, Isabel Sharp. A professor from Hebrew University is on his way down. He was Max’s reference to get on this dig.’

He rubbed his forehead. ‘We were expecting visitors after what happened to Max. It shocked us all. I’m Dieter Mendhol from the University of Dusseldorf. My colleague, Walter Schleibell, is below.’

We followed him down the stairs. The floor below was a totally different scene. The walls were covered in yellowing plaster. One wall had faded wall paintings, the sort that you’d see at Pompeii, with toga clad people in stylised poses.

A tingle of excitement ran through me. This was the real thing; a room that had been used almost two thousand years ago. Contemporaries of Christ and Caesar might have been here.

There were niches in the walls, where you could put busts. And the floor was whiter than the one above, smoother too. It looked as if it was made out of a similar sandstone as used in other parts the building, but from a different source, from a higher quality quarry.

Another Germanic-looking man, of the same vintage as Dieter, and wearing the same type of pale sand-coloured trousers and matching shirt, was standing by the far wall with his hands on his hips. He nodded steadily as we came down.

Introductions were made. We all shook hands. I gave them my card. Each of them examined it. I told them their colleague up above had allowed us in for a quick visit and the reason why. They looked at each other, then shrugged their shoulders.

‘This is really something down here,’ I said.

‘Ja, it certainly is. First century is what we think,’ said Dieter. ‘Late Herodian era. Everything points to it. We’ll be presenting a paper on the discovery, of course, and we’ll include carbon dating analysis to back up our judgement. That will prove it all, for sure.’

‘The History Channel will give you a whole series.’

He shrugged, as if he didn’t care.

‘How many rooms have you found like this?’

‘Just this one and the one below.’

There was another hole, a jagged one, right in the far corner. A blue plastic sheet and some rolls of wide black plastic tape lay near it. Were they covering the hole at times?

‘You’re afraid of contamination?’

‘Ja, moisture in particular. The rooms have been airtight for a long time. The moisture gets in at night as the temperature in the air above us goes down. We seal the lower floor as tightly as we can. Come, have a look.’ He sounded keen to show their find off.

Beside the hole there were two stacks of see-through plastic boxes. They were all about a foot wide and six inches tall. Some of them, the pile on the left, had something in them; scraps of parchment, pieces of wood, a piece of marble. Each box was numbered. I looked down into the hole. The site that confronted me was extraordinary.

It looked like an ancient rubbish pit into which people had thrown the contents of several buildings. There were pieces of wood sticking up out of the mess, like whitened bones in an ancient charnel house.

Some of the pieces of wood looked like boards from shelves, others were carved intricately. I could see a lot of scrolls too, some were crushed, some were just fragments, but many were whole. Among the debris were pieces of masonry, broken bits of furniture. The whole lot of it covered the floor below completely. I couldn’t even make out how deep the pile of ancient rubbish was.

There was a shiny steel ladder leading down. I put my hand out to hold it.

‘We don’t want anyone else to go down there,’ said Dieter, quickly. ‘We had a problem a few weeks ago. We think our security was breached.’ He moved towards me and put a wide hand on top of the pile of boxes.

‘As a trained archaeologist you know we have to make sure everything that comes from this find is properly recorded; that each item is identified, photographed in its layer and in its original position, before it is moved.’ He sounded as if he was giving me a lecture, and he was only on his first slide.

‘How far have you got with all this?’ said Isabel.

‘We’re selecting sample items for testing right now.’ He looked at his colleague, then back at Isabel. ‘We expect the Israeli Antiquities Authority will take over this site after we present our findings. They’ll organise the removal of the artefacts in sections to preserve impressions and any organic remains. If the site is what we think it is, there will be many years of work in this place. All we have done is open it up.’ He sounded pleased with that idea. His colleague did not look so happy.

‘We’ve put in for an extension to our licence, of course. But it’s hard to say what will happen, after Max being murdered and everything that’s going on up there.’ He pointed at the ceiling.

I didn’t argue with him. I was distracted by the wealth of ancient material below.

‘Why do you think all that stuff is down there like that, all jumbled up?’ asked Simon. He had come down the stairs as Dieter was talking.

‘We have a theory, if you’d like to hear it,’ said Walter.

‘Sure.’

My forehead was hot, my skin tight. It was certainly warm enough and dry enough down here to preserve anything. The recommendation for preserving archaeological finds,
particularly
organic compounds, is to allow a 3% fluctuation in relative humidity from the conditions in which the item was found.

It was a tiny amount, given daily fluctuations at ground level here were probably as high as 30% at this time of year. Preserving finds was one of Susan Hunter’s areas of expertise. Was that why she came out here?

‘We think most of the material was in this room or nearby before someone dumped it all down there. It’s unusual to find a room full of material like that, but we think we know the reason. In 66 AD, a group of Zealots, extremists called the Sicarii, took over this part of the city. They were a fun lot. They used to go to the forum and stab Romans who passed by. They were trying to drive them all out. In the end though, all they did manage to drive out was Herod Agrippa’s troops. At the time, Roman officials might have taken refuge in this house and others like it. They might have thrown racks of scrolls down into that room to give themselves more living space as they waited for rescue.’