The Jerusalem Puzzle (27 page)

There was a seam around the old ones. I bent down, followed the seam to where it ran up against the bare plaster wall. Dust along the wall had piled up recently or something had piled it up.

The seam was wider near the wall too. And it went on under a wooden bench. I moved the bench. The seam was wide enough now for me to see that there was empty space beneath the floor. There was a dark space down there.

This was it. I’d found the basement. My fingers scrabbled at the seam.

‘Isabel,’ I shouted into the floor. ‘Are you down there?’

There was no reply.

I couldn’t get a grip on anything. My hands seemed useless. The skin on the tips of my fingers was breaking as I followed the seam in the tiles with my fingers, pushing at it, just to see if there was any way I could get the trapdoor that had to be there open.

I looked around for something to use to lever the trapdoor up. There was nothing. With each passing second the
anticipation
and desperation I’d been suppressing flowed through me until my fingers were shaking. I pushed the wooden bench further along to see the whole of the seam in the floor.

Then I heard it.

The sound of scratching, as if someone or something was on the other side of the trapdoor, trying to get out.

‘Isabel!’ I shouted.

Sergeant Finch leaned forward, peering at the messages – Tweets, Facebook and blog posts – which were streaming down Henry’s main monitor. They were all being translated into English in real time.

‘Is the volume still rising?’ she said.

‘It’s doubled in the past three hours,’ Henry replied. ‘And that’s just the Egyptian feed. He pointed at the smaller screen to the right of the main screen.

‘The Israeli feed has picked up a lot too.’

Sergeant Finch turned to take in messages flowing down the second screen.

‘This is exactly the way things developed in Libya and in Syria before the fighting broke out. Are you getting updates on the operation to find Dr Hunter?’

Henry nodded. ‘We’re tracking them,’ he said.

He pointed at a third screen on which a map showed a blinking dot, a red heartbeat.

‘I’m going to come back later. I don’t like the look of this,’ said Sergeant Finch. ‘Call me if anything kicks off.’ She tapped the pocket of her puffy black jacket.

‘My phone will be on,’ she said.

I turned. Mark was right behind me. For a moment I thought he was going to interrupt. I was ready to roar at him if he did. I looked back at him only for a second. My hands were shaking as they went along the gap in the floor again. The gap that meant there was something down there.

We were in the right place. I could feel it.

‘There’s a basement down there,’ I said, pointing at the crack in the floor. ‘There has to be. I heard scratching.’

Mark leaned towards me. ‘Did you see any tools, anything, when you were looking around?’

‘No. Sorry. Wait. Maybe there were some garden tools under the stairs. I think I saw a spade.’

He was gone.

I shouted into the seam again. I hadn’t heard anymore tapping. Had I imagined it? I ran my fingers all over the floor, the walls, looking for a catch, a button, something. I put my mouth to the gap.

‘Isabel!’

There was no answer, and no obvious catch to get the trapdoor open.

Mark arrived with a flat-headed spade and a torch. He pushed the head of the spade into the crack in the floor. It didn’t make any difference. He tried again.

I peered closer at the gap. Then I saw it, a piece of flat steel was holding the trapdoor tight. I looked at the wall beyond it. There was a small tile there. I tried to move it. It came out. There was a catch. I pushed and pulled at the trap door, jamming it hard each way. It lifted. We were in!

‘Isabel,’ I shouted into the hole as it opened. I saw a wooden platform, stairs going down into dusty gloom.

As I stepped down, the smell hit me.

I’d been hoping that Isabel would be waiting for us on the other side of the trapdoor, perhaps too exhausted to respond to me, but I was wrong.

The agony of bitter disappointment sucked at me as I looked into the bare basement below.

It was big. It could have been as big as the whole floor we were on. And it had been used for holding people. There were plastic bowls and water bottles in a corner. But there was no one down there.

Mark was beside me. He flashed the torch quickly around, lingered on an open doorway that led to a small toilet, a hole in the ground.

There were no bodies here, which was some relief.

Then one of the steel bowls moved and a long shadow flitted across the floor.

A rat!

‘Don’t go any further.’ Ariel’s voice. I could feel him behind me. I didn’t turn.

‘If this place is booby-trapped we’re dead already,’ I said.

Ariel growled. ‘If you told me you were going to bring this klutz with you Mark, I wouldn’t have helped you at all.’

Before he had a chance to stop me I stepped onto the stairs, walked down slowly, taking the place in.

I saw things that made me put my fist to my mouth to stop it shaking. My nostrils flared in and out as I breathed in the dead, stench-tinged air.

There was a trail of blood from the stairs leading to the centre of the rough stone wall on the far side of the basement. And there was pool of it caked there on the floor. Someone had suffered down here. Suffered badly.

A pounding started up deep in my forehead.

Where had they taken her?

I looked up. There was something painted on the wall behind the stain on the floor. It was painted in red.

It was a symbol. A symbol I recognised.

It was the square and arrow from that book we’d found in Istanbul. I was starting to wish I’d never picked it up in that water-filled drain. Maybe none of this would have happened if I hadn’t.

‘We get a lot of crackpots in Israel,’ said Ariel, loudly. ‘Some wackos become messianic when they come here. They start pulling all sorts of crazy shit.’ He went up close to the wall, sniffed at it, jerked away from it.

‘I don’t like the smell down here,’ he said.

‘Jerk offs use this sort of stuff for belief reinforcement. It fires up their warped little brains.’

‘What’s that?’ Mark was pointing at an ancient pillar. There was one at each end of the wall. There was only the base of the pillars visible, standing maybe six inches proud of the stone floor, but they were clearly carved with swirling leaf patterns.

They looked as if they’d been used to form part of the retaining wall of the building.

‘There are pillars like those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,’ said Ariel. ‘That could be Crusader-era work.’

‘They must have been here when this house was built,’ said Mark.

I didn’t care. I was examining the walls for a door, a passageway, anything, a clue.

‘We’ll test these blood stains, see if we can do DNA matching with any traces in your girlfriend’s baggage, Mr Ryan. Will you permit us to do that?’ said Ariel. He had a small plastic bag in his hand and was puling thin white plastic gloves on.

‘Do not touch anything,’ he said. His voice was stern.

I wasn’t planning to touch anything.

I was finding it hard to breathe.

‘Some idiots believe they can summon up demons with stuff like this,’ said Ariel.

‘Who believes all this garbage?’ There was a tremble in my voice.

‘This site could have real historical significance,’ said Mark. ‘The Crusaders picked sites that had been occupied before they took them over.’

He pointed above the symbol. ‘Look, there are words up there.’

He was right. They were faint, small, and inscribed in a similar dark red material as the symbol. I walked up close, skirting the stain on the floor. Ariel and Mark had their flashlights pointed at the section of the wall between the top of the symbol and the old wooden beams of the roof.

I could just make out the words
fame ad mortem
. Latin. Familiar. Goddammit, they were the same words that were in that book we’d found.

‘Latin was hated in the first century in these parts. It was the demonic language of the Roman oppressors,’ said Ariel.

‘That looks like an invocation,’ said Mark. ‘A magic spell.’

‘I don’t want to hear any of that,’ I said. The basement felt cold. A chill was coming up through my feet.

I bent down to the stain on the floor. Maybe this was Isabel’s blood. I swallowed some bile that came into my mouth. My hand was pressing into my side. I could feel my blood pounding.

Mark spoke softly. ‘Some evil bastard has them, and he’s moved them.’

‘Evil is right,’ I said, looking around.

‘Dante had a phrase for this sort of place,’ said Ariel. ‘
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate
– all hope abandon ye who enter here.’

‘You must leave,’ said a woman’s voice from behind us. I turned. It was Xena. She was standing on the stairs. She’d stopped halfway down, as if she didn’t want to come all the way.

‘Yes, yes. We must go,’ said Ariel. He walked quickly toward the stairs, his arms out wide, as if to sweep us all back up.

‘Follow me, gentlemen, at once.’ His tone made it clear he expected compliance.

I went. I’d been down there long enough.

‘We should walk every inch of this farm, make sure we haven’t missed anything,’ said Mark, as we went back up the stairs.

I was thinking about what Xena had said. It had sounded as if she knew what the basement was used for.

When we reached the veranda I caught up with her. I felt lightheaded, after being in that hellhole.

‘Do you know what went on in that basement?’

She shook her head, too fast. ‘No.’ She looked scared. She walked away, quickly.

Mark called out to me, ‘Sean, this way.’

He was walking across the rough ground at the back of the house, heading towards an orchard of thin, bushy carob trees.

I followed him.

It was twenty minutes past six, and dark and cool among the trees. The sun had gone down while we were inside the house. There was no moon visible either, because of the clouds.

I took the torch from Mark and walked ahead of him, stumbling a few times in my rush to check everywhere. My need to find Isabel was pushing me like an arm in the back. My ankle turned at one point and I was in pain for the next few minutes, but I didn’t care.

We went on through the trees for about half a mile before we came to a wall made from misshapen sandstone rocks. The wall was six feet high, and there was a dip on this side of it, which made it seem double that height. In the dip there were other bigger stones that would break your ankle if you dropped onto them.

‘Oh my God,’ said Mark, suddenly.

I turned. The villa was on fire. It was clearly outlined through the woods with a sheet of flame coming from its roof.

We ran back along a rough path we’d found. I was clammy with sweat by the time we reached the end of the trees.

Mark didn’t say anything. He just stared. We both stared. I could smell wood and plaster burning. The flames were reaching higher now. I could feel their warmth from fifty feet away. Thick black pieces of soot drifted in the air.

Our driver, Xena and Ariel were standing to our right, like us transfixed by the sight, and well away from the building.

I expected to hear the sound of a fire engine in the distance at any moment. But I heard nothing, only the crackling hum of the fire as it reached its zenith. We walked around towards the others, moving slowly, in a daze.

Anxious thoughts ran through my mind. Were there clues in the house to where Isabel might be which we’d missed?

‘What the hell happened?’ I shouted. We’d reached the others.

Ariel shrugged. Xena was just staring. ‘I didn’t see anyone else,’ said the driver. He put his hands up, as if he was going to restrain me. ‘Don’t go near the building, sir.’

‘You must know what happened,’ I said. I was standing between Ariel and the house.

‘Maybe it was booby-trapped after all,’ he said. He looked me in the eyes. ‘If you hadn’t gone rushing into the basement I might have had time to check it properly.’ He was angry.

‘That’s bullshit. A booby trap goes off straight away.’

‘Fires start from nothing in a place like that,’ said Xena.

I turned to her.

‘Don’t feed me superstitious crap,’ I said. ‘I’m allergic to it.’

‘We have to go,’ said Ariel. ‘The local police will be here soon. I can’t keep them away.’

Mark’s phone buzzed. It had a weird ringtone, more like an alarm clock than a phone.

He walked off into the trees as he talked. Ariel made a call on his phone. A minute later Mark was back.

‘We’re going to Jerusalem,’ he said. ‘We’ve another lead.’

As we walked back to the front gate, the fire hissing loudly behind us, I questioned Mark, then Ariel. I didn’t get much out of them. Nothing at all out of Ariel in fact. And all Mark told me about his lead was that a phone signal of interest had been picked up somewhere near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

‘You think they’ve been taken back to Jerusalem?’

‘Don’t get ahead of yourself. The phone we’ve been tracking could have been stolen. It could be a waste of time.’

As we clambered over the wall and said goodbye to Ariel, I could still smell the fire on our clothes. A dark plume of smoke reached up to the sky behind us as we drove away.

There were no police cars though. I didn’t see another policeman until we were back in Jerusalem.

A line of traffic, like an exodus, was heading out of the city as we approached it. There wasn’t much talking in the car. Mark told the driver to speed up.

‘Watch out!’ he shouted at the driver as we came off the highway and had to slow down sharply for a bus. After that the tension in the car was almost poisonous.

I stared out the window wishing we’d got to that villa earlier. It felt as if something had slipped from my grasp.

At one minute to seven, every evening in the winter, the official custodian of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem mounts the ladder which he has put up against the left hand door of the church.