The Jerusalem Puzzle (29 page)

‘Is that all we have?’ he said in an incredulous tone.

As we came to an even smaller lane on the right, he turned to me.

‘There’s an Israeli security operation going on up ahead. Keep your mouth shut, at all times. I’ll answer their questions, explain why we’re here. Unless I ask you, don’t say anything. Is that clear?’

‘As glass.’

We turned right. Up ahead was a small door in a high stone wall. Beyond it was the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Looming above us to our left was the sheer edifice of the most sacred church in Christendom. My body was tense, and my brain was running fast, too fast. Images of what might have happened to Isabel had forced their way into my mind again.

I pressed my hand to my forehead. And in that moment I offered my own life up, to any power that might be listening, if only Isabel could be found and was all right.

The entrance to the courtyard was barred by a modern-looking green steel door. It had a foot square grating in it. The grating was blocked by a steel plate on the far side. Mark knocked on the door. A second later the grating opened. There was a spy hole in the door.

On the other side of the grating were blue uniformed Israeli policemen.

Mark took out an ID pass. One policeman leaned forward to look at it. Then he opened the gate. I thought we were going to be let in, but instead two burly monks in brown robes with a white rope tied around their middle and pale complexions came rushing out.

‘What’s going on?’ I said to the monks. I was in their path.

The taller of the two, who was well over six feet, answered me in a soft voice.

‘We do not know anything. Peace be upon you. Please let us pass.’ I stood back. They were gone.

‘They looked worried,’ said Mark.

‘Can we go in?’ I said loudly to the Israeli policeman. He was closing the gate.

‘Stop,’ said a woman’s voice. I turned. It was Xena. She was standing maybe five feet behind us and staring at me.

‘There is evil there,’ she said.

‘This is the holiest place in Christendom,’ said Mark. He was almost shouting. He turned back to the door. It was closed now, but the grating was still open.

‘Please get your superior officer.’

The policemen shook his head.

A surge of anger rose inside me.

‘What the hell’s going on? Why won’t you listen? This man is from the British Embassy!’ I said. The policeman was staring me in the eyes. Our gaze held for a few seconds. Then he took a step backwards and turned to an older officer behind him. That man was silver-haired, and had a commanding air. He came towards the gate.

‘I’m with the British Embassy in Cairo,’ said Mark.

‘The church is closed,’ said the older officer, in American-accented English.

Mark held his ID card up to the iron bars. The younger policeman had taken a step back. His hand was resting on a black machine pistol that could kill us all in seconds.

The senior officer moved forward, peered at the card, shook his head.

Mark took the ID back, pulled a second ID card from behind the first.

‘I have Mossad clearance,’ he said. ‘This card has my code name. Check it. Call your headquarters.’

The older policeman looked closely at the card and walked away. He took a small black walkie talkie from another soldier, spoke into it. Then he listened with the walkie talkie at his ear.

After another minute of waiting he came back over and barked something to the younger policeman.

Seconds later we were all inside the courtyard. Bright lights on an aluminium tripod lit it up as if it was daylight.

There was a huddle of priests and monks of various denominations in the first raised part of the courtyard. In front of them, to our left, there were steps down to the main flagstoned open area in front of the church.

Some of the priests were wearing round black Orthodox hats and had large gold crosses on their chests. Two others had thick beards and odd looking pointed black hoods. You could barely see their faces. One ancient grey-haired monk was wearing a dark brown robe.

‘I will find out what’s going on,’ said Xena.

‘How the hell can she do that? Why is she even here?’ I said to Mark, as I watched her head for the group of priests.

‘Xena can be very useful. She was brought up in an Orthodox Ethiopian nunnery. She’ll probably tell them she’s an abbess or something.’ He put a finger to his lips.

‘Actually, I think she was an abbess for a while, in the Sudan.’ He rubbed his forehead.

‘And you have clearance from Mossad?’ I said.

He shrugged.

Xena was coming back over to us.

‘There is something bad going on in the church,’ she said. ‘I told you.’ She stared at me, pressed her lips together, as if she was angry that I’d refused to believe her warning.

‘We haven’t got time for this,’ said Mark. ‘What else did they say?’

She looked from Mark to me. Her eyes narrowed.

‘They said that the Greek Orthodox Patriarch’s secretary gets a call every hour to tell him everything is okay in this church. They’ve been doing that since there was some fight in there in the middle of the night a few years ago.’ She leaned forward.

‘The last two calls tonight did not happen. And no one is answering their phone inside.’ She had a resigned look on her face, as if she knew there was a lot worse to come out.

‘Why don’t they just go in, open the door?’ I waved towards the two Romanesque pointed-arch doorways in the far corner of the courtyard. One of them had been bricked up long ago. The other was a double-leaved wooden door that looked as old as the Crusader-era stones around them.

‘Don’t they have keys?’ I waved towards the group of priests.

‘No, they don’t,’ said Xena.

‘The rules about opening and closing this place were set out in an international treaty,’ said Mark.

I didn’t care about any of that.

‘I’m sure they’ve torn up the rules before.’

‘Not since 1853,’ he said. ‘This church is shared by six Christian denominations. And none of them have keys.’

‘This church is the centre of the world,’ said Xena. ‘Not even the Pope breaks the rules here.’

‘And what about that?’ I pointed at the upper level windows. There were three large high-arched windows in the wall of the church above the doorways.

Reflected in the windows was a flickering light. It could have been from candles inside the church or it could have been from a fire.

Or it could have been from someone being burnt to death.

A few of the priests turned and looked up at the windows, following my pointed finger. I assumed there would be an immediate mad eruption, that people would race for the doors to break them down, open the church up and find out if there was any danger, never mind if someone was being murdered inside.

But I was wrong.

The priests who’d looked up simply returned to watching the monk who was talking in front of them. Or maybe he was praying. His bowed head certainly gave off that impression. Were they going to wait until flames were coming out of the roo
f
?

Had they even seen what I’d seen?

To the right of the entrance arches there were steps leading up to a domed single storey sandstone entrance portal. It appeared to be blocked off, no longer in use. The structure had thin marble pillars and numerous ledges.

I groaned.

I knew what I was going to do.

Once, when I was drunk, I’d scaled the front of a mansion in Maida Vale, when Irene and I were in college. I’d been looking for her. I could have killed myself, but it had left me with a stupid belief that you can climb the outside of buildings, if there are enough ledges. And there were definitely enough ledges here.

All I would have to do was reach that wide first ledge. I walked slowly forward. No need to attract attention. I went down the steps into the main section of the courtyard.

From behind I heard a voice.

‘The Crusaders built most of what’s here in 1170, after they captured Jerusalem.’ It was Mark talking. He was following me. ‘The original early Byzantine church was twice the size of this one. It was destroyed by the Fatamids in 1009, if I remember rightly.’ He paused.

‘Where are you going, Sean?’ His voice had risen an octave.

I didn’t answer. I kept walking. When I reached the sandstone wall of the church I went up the steep stone stairs to the right of the main doors. At the top I put my foot on a ledge to the left, part of the main church wall.

I braced myself against an indentation in the wall, reached up to the wider ledge above. The sandstone was rough under my fingers. I could smell dust. And my own sweat.

‘You are fucking crazy,’ Mark said.

I looked up. The wall loomed above like a cliff. My heart was audibly pounding.

‘Stop!’ A shout echoed so loudly in the courtyard it made my fingers slip from the bottom of the ledge I was reaching for.

I didn’t look around. I knew what was happening. I pushed up again, reached as far as I could. I wouldn’t have much time. My fingers scrabbled at the bottom of the ledge.

To say my heart was in my mouth would be an understatement. It was trying to find a way out of it.

I wasn’t going to be able to reach the next ledge.

‘Jump up,’ a voice said. Mark’s voice.

I felt a push on my thigh, then on the calf of my other leg. I was going to get a lift. I would make it!

There was a clamour of shouts behind me, an echo of feet slapping on stone.

I lunged up. The hands pushed me, then let me go.

A raucous cry sounded from below, as if a herd of cranes were wheeling beneath me.

‘Stay back.’ Mark’s voice was insistent.

A whistle sounded. A police whistle. It was a loud shriek. Shouts accompanied it.

‘Get down, get down.’ There were a chorus of voices. Some echoed in different languages. They all meant the same thing.

I was hanging by one hand from an upper ledge now, half dangling in space. But I’d reached the ledge. I put my other hand on it, right in the corner. If someone tugged at my feet right now I would be back on the ground in a second and in police custody within a few more.

But no one tugged at me, and I swung my leg to brace myself against a thin stone pillar and pushed myself up.

Below me, Mark was in handcuffs and Xena was remonstrating with a policeman who was holding her arm. The older policeman was nearby looking up at me. He gestured for me to get down.

I’m not sure exactly what Mark had done, but he’d stopped them from pulling me back. There was a priest right below me now, one of the round-hatted Orthodox Greek priests. He was leaning up to reach my foot and pull me down onto my head, breaking it if he could, I’m sure.

Further along, the ledge widened. There was a sun-bleached wooden ladder leaning up against a window made of dull glass in large leaded sections. I headed towards it, touched the wooden ladder accidently as I looked in through the grimy glass. A gasp came up from below. The short ladder toppled, fell off the ledge and down onto the priests and monks. Outraged shouts echoed.

I reached up. There was a half-inch crack in the iron window frame, in its centre. I put my fingers into the crack. The upper part of the window opened. It creaked loudly as it did. I could see flames reflected in the glass as it moved. And I could smell burning too. It was a sweet smell.

The smell of burning flesh.

‘Stop! We will shoot!’ came another shout from below in the courtyard. Could they not see that the church was in danger?

I pulled myself head first through the window, falling about four feet onto a narrow red and white tiled upper floor. My shoulder jolted against the floor as it hit. Pain shot up my arm. I found myself in a heap on the floor, but I rose quickly to my feet. An acrid burning smell filled the air now that I was inside.

Was Isabel dead already?

I closed the window. The shouts from outside grew faint. I looked over the stone balcony.

I was looking into the famous Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It had two stone colonnaded levels below a high dome decorated with a golden sunburst. I was on the upper level. Below was a flagstone floor, the main part of the church. In the centre of the floor was a pillared stone aedicule with a cupola on top of it where millions believe Jesus’ body lay after he died.

A shout echoed distantly from outside. ‘Desecrate this holy place and your soul is doomed!’

I didn’t have time for any desecrating. There was a column of black smoke coming up from below. And flames were being reflected off the marble pillars and even off the sandstone walls.

I had to get down there.

I didn’t want to find out what the fire most likely meant, but I had no choice. I couldn’t fail Isabel. I moved fast along the balcony. The stairs down were in darkness. I hugged the wall as I went, felt a breeze move past me. The sweet smell of burning flesh was strong.

I wanted to retch at the thought of what that smell meant. My shoulder scraped a part of the sandstone wall that jutted out into the stairwell. It felt as if someone had touched me. My heart was thumping as if I’d been running. I reached the door at the bottom of the stairs. It was open an inch and radiating a pillar of light. I wasn’t going to make any sudden exits.

I moved my head to the gap and saw, to the right, the back of a man who had scrawniness written all over him. His shoulders were hunched and his skull was prominent. He was wearing a black suit.

The man was looking at something beneath his feet. I couldn’t see what it was.

But I knew what I had to do. I pushed the door slowly open, dreading its creak. But it didn’t make a sound.

I took a step forward. The door closed behind me with a sigh. I hadn’t expected that. Would he turn? I kept walking.

Every second felt like a minute.

He was twenty feet away.

I could see where the smoke was coming from now. There was a mound of rags. No, it wasn’t rags –
it was mostly black clothed bodies
– behind him, in front of a yellowing marble altar. The shiny stone and marble floor and a line of silver candelabras beyond reflected the flames coming from the mound.