The Moses Stone (37 page)
“Warren also discovered that there were numerous tunnels running underneath the triple gate passage, and below the base level of the Mount. They led in different directions, but he had no idea about their function or purpose. And, of course, since Warren’s nineteenth-century investigation, nobody else has been allowed inside the Mount to check them out.”
“And we can’t get inside the gates or the tunnels?”
“No,” Angela replied. “Back in 1910 there was a case of an Englishman named Montague Parker who bribed the Muslim guards on the Temple Mount and started digging at night near Warren’s Shaft. There was a huge outcry when he was discovered, riots even, and he was lucky to escape with his life. It was a complicated story, involving a Finnish mystic who claimed that he’d found clues encoded in the Hebrew Bible—in Ezekiel, in fact—that indicated the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant. Here,” she added, “I’ll show you on the Internet.”
She input a search string into Google, selected one of the hits and double-clicked on the link. The page opened, and she scrolled part-way down.
“That’s Montague Parker,” she said, pointing to a photograph of a man, his features indistinct, who was wearing what appeared to be a Royal Navy officer’s cap and standing on the terrace of a hotel, its name partially visible behind him.
She reached for the touchpad again, but Bronson stopped her with a gesture. “Did you read that?” he said, pointing at the text below the photograph.
“No,” Angela said, looking more closely. After a couple of minutes she sat back. “Bugger! I wish I’d seen this Web site before we went to Gihon Spring. I didn’t know they’d done that.”
The text they were looking at explained in some detail how Montague Parker’s expedition had spent almost three years digging and widening in Hezekiah’s Tunnel in a desperate search to find the Ark of the Covenant.
“That’s really irritating,” Angela said, her features clouded with annoyance. “I should have done more research. Not only was it a waste of time, but we nearly got killed in the process.”
“What about these other cisterns?” Bronson asked, tactfully changing the subject.
“Oh, yes. Right, mostly they’re of very varied design and construction, presumably because they were built by several different groups of people over the centuries. Some of them are just chambers roughly cut out of the rock, while others were constructed with more care and attention. A couple of them—the ones normally known as cisterns one and five—might possibly have had some kind of religious function connected with the Second Temple altar, because of their location on the Mount. Cistern five also contains a doorway blocked with earth, so there could well be a further chamber or chambers beyond what’s known to exist now.”
“How big are these cisterns? Do they just hold a few gallons of water, or are they really big?”
“Some of them are huge. Cistern eight can hold several hundred thousand gallons, and number eleven has the potential to store nearly a million gallons. Most of the others are smaller, but they were all designed as proper cisterns, with reasonably high capacities. Don’t forget, in antiquity water conservation was absolutely essential, and these cisterns were intended to hold every drop of rainwater that fell.”
“But from what you’ve said, they can’t be accurately dated, so we have no idea which of them were already in existence when the Sicarii were looking for a hiding place for their relics?”
“Exactly.”
“Let me have another look at the translation we did, please,” Bronson asked.
Angela opened her handbag and pulled out half a dozen folded sheets of paper. Bronson riffled through them.
“I thought so,” he said. “The text specifically states ‘the cistern,’ and that’s followed by two words we haven’t cracked, then ‘place of,’ another blank and then ‘end of days.’ Our interpretation of that was ‘the cistern at the place of the end of days.’ If there was more than one cistern in the place where the Sicarii hid the relic, wouldn’t it make sense for them to have written ‘the cistern at the northern edge of the Mount’ or something like that? I think what they wrote implies that there was only a single cistern in the place they chose, and that it would be a cistern everybody would be aware of.”
“That’s why I thought Hezekiah’s Tunnel was the right location. It was certainly in existence at the time, and it was the biggest and most famous of all the cisterns near Jerusalem. But this information destroys that theory.”
“Then there’s only really one conclusion we can draw,” Bronson said.
“Which is what?”
“That we’ve been looking in completely the wrong place. Wherever the Sicarii hid the relics, it probably wasn’t in Jerusalem.” He yawned—it had been a very long day. “We need to look at the whole inscription again.”
65
“I was so sure we were right,” Angela said. “It all seemed to fit so well, especially as Hezekiah’s Tunnel is the most obvious of all the cisterns.”
It was early morning in the holiest of cities, a salmon-pink sky presaging yet another blisteringly hot day. They’d been woken by the electronically amplified cries of the muezzins summoning the faithful to worship, a discordant and unforgettable dawn chorus borne on the still air from the mosques of Jerusalem.
They were again sitting in Angela’s room, drinking bad instant coffee made worse by powdered creamer. Bronson had slept like a log, but Angela’s face was pale and she had dark shadows under her eyes. He guessed she’d stayed awake for much of the night puzzling over the meaning of the inscription and the location of the lost scroll.
Bronson picked up the sheets of paper on which they’d written out the translation of the inscription and glanced through the disjointed text, hoping for inspiration.
“This phrase about the ‘end of days’ would fit very neatly with the Well of Souls, the cave on the Temple Mount where Muslims believe that the dead will gather to wait for judgment when the world ends,” he said, then paused for a few seconds. “No—hang on a minute. The Sicarii weren’t Muslims. In fact, Islam as a religion didn’t even exist until about half a millennium
after
the fall of Masada, so our premise about the location must be wrong.”
after
the fall of Masada, so our premise about the location must be wrong.”
Angela shook her head. “It’s not that simple, Chris. I wasn’t suggesting the hiding place had anything to do with the Well of Souls. My interpretation of the ‘end of days’ expression was that it referred to the Jewish beliefs about the Third Temple—they think the end of the world will come shortly after it’s built. Yosef Ben Halevi talked to us about this, if you remember. Like the Muslims, the Jews also think that the ‘place of the end of days,’ the place where the world will end, is most likely to be the Temple Mount.”
Bronson looked crestfallen. “Damn,” he muttered, “I thought I’d spotted the fatal flaw in your argument. So if Armageddon is definitely going to take place here in Jerusalem, the Sicarii must have hidden the Silver Scroll somewhere here. All we can be certain of is that they didn’t stick it in Hezekiah’s Tunnel.”
For a few seconds Angela just stared at him, an inscrutable expression on her face.
“What?” Bronson demanded.
“Did I ever tell you you were a genius?” Angela asked, her eyes shining.
“Nothing like often enough,” Bronson said modestly. “What did I do this time?”
“You’ve just made the obvious connection that I missed. I was so sure about the Temple Mount that I completely forgot about Armageddon—and that’s somewhere very different.”
“But I thought Armageddon was an event, not a place?”
“When most people talk about it they assume it means the end of the world. But in fact it
is
an actual place. It’s called Har Megiddo, the hill of Megiddo, and it’s about fifty miles north of Jerusalem. That’s where, according to the Bible, the ‘battle of the end of days’ will take place, when the forces of good and evil confront each other for the last time.”
is
an actual place. It’s called Har Megiddo, the hill of Megiddo, and it’s about fifty miles north of Jerusalem. That’s where, according to the Bible, the ‘battle of the end of days’ will take place, when the forces of good and evil confront each other for the last time.”
“The ‘place of the end of days’ would fit, then?”
“It would match the expression very well. I don’t know too much about the site, so I’ll need to do some more research.”
“But how do you get ‘Armageddon’ from ‘Har Megiddo’?” Bronson asked.
“Well, it’s not exactly a mistranslation from the Bible,” Angela said, “not like the camel passing through the eye of a needle.”
“That’s a mistranslation?” Bronson asked. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. Why on earth would a
camel
want to go through the eye of a needle? It’s yet another biblical expression that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but which has been trotted out in pulpits by preachers for hundreds of years, none of whom stopped to wonder what the expression was supposed to mean. Of course it’s a mistranslation.”
camel
want to go through the eye of a needle? It’s yet another biblical expression that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but which has been trotted out in pulpits by preachers for hundreds of years, none of whom stopped to wonder what the expression was supposed to mean. Of course it’s a mistranslation.”
“So what should it be?” Bronson asked.
“Most of the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, with a few chapters of Ezra and Daniel in Aramaic, but the New Testament was in Koine Greek. The first translation was started by a man named John Wycliffe and finally completed by John Purvey in 1388. For the King James Bible, a group of over fifty scholars worked on not only the original Hebrew and Greek versions of the two books, but also looked at all the extant translations that had been made.
“It was translation by committee, and not surprisingly mistakes were made. There are two very similar words in Greek:
camilos
, meaning ‘rope,’ and
camelos
, which translates as ‘camel.’ Whoever was doing that bit of the New Testament misread the ‘i’ in the Greek as an ‘e,’ and the Church has been stuck with his mistake ever since. Amazing, isn’t it?”
camilos
, meaning ‘rope,’ and
camelos
, which translates as ‘camel.’ Whoever was doing that bit of the New Testament misread the ‘i’ in the Greek as an ‘e,’ and the Church has been stuck with his mistake ever since. Amazing, isn’t it?”
Bronson shook his head. “Now I think about it, I suppose it is. So what about Armageddon?”
“Right. The name of the place is Megiddo, and it’s normally prefixed by either ‘tel,’ meaning ‘mound,’ or more commonly ‘har’ or ‘hill.’ It’s not too big a jump to see how the name ‘Har Megiddo’ could have been corrupted over the years into ‘Armageddon.’ Megiddo was one of the oldest and most important cities in this country, and the plain below it was the site of the first ever recorded pitched battle. In fact, there’ve been dozens of battles—over thirty in all, I think—at that location, and three ‘Battles of Megiddo.’ The last one took place in 1918 between British forces and troops of the Ottoman Empire. But the most famous was the first one, in the fifteenth century BC, between Egyptian forces under the Pharaoh Thutmose III and a Canaanite army led by the King of Kadesh, who’d joined forces with the ruler of Megiddo. Kadesh was in what’s now Syria, not far from the modern city of Hims and, like Megiddo, it was an important fortified town. We know so much about this battle because a record of what happened was carved into the walls of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt.”
“So it was the site of the first battle in recorded history, and will also be where the last one takes place?”
“If you believe what it says in the Book of Revelation, yes. According to that source, Har Megiddo, or Armageddon, will be the site of the ‘Battle of the end of days,’ the ultimate contest between the forces of good and evil. It really
is
the place at the end of the world.”
is
the place at the end of the world.”
66
Dexter swung the wheel of the hired Fiat to the right and accelerated along the street that ran behind the hotel in Giv’at Sha’ul where, according to one of Hoxton’s contacts in Jerusalem, Angela Lewis and Chris Bronson had taken two rooms.
In the passenger seat beside him, Hoxton was carefully feeding nine-millimeter Parabellum shells into the magazine of a Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol. On the floor in front of him, tucked out of sight, was another pistol—an old but serviceable Walther P38—that he’d already checked and loaded.
Two days earlier, he’d met with a former Israeli Army officer on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The price the man had demanded for the weapons and ammunition—he’d bought three pistols from him—was, Hoxton knew, nothing short of extortionate, but the Israeli was the only person he knew in the country who could supply what he wanted and, just as important, not ask any questions.
“Stop somewhere here,” Hoxton ordered.
Dexter found a vacant space on the right-hand side of the road and parked the car in the early-morning sunshine.
“Their hotel’s just around the corner,” Hoxton said, handing over the Walther.
“I’m not that good with guns,” Dexter muttered, looking down at the blued steel of the pistol in his hand. “Do I really have to take this?”
“Damn right you do. I’ve come too far to let this pair beat me now. We’re going to find the Silver Scroll, and the only way to guarantee we can do that is to grab all the information—photographs, translations, whatever—the two of them have got. If we have to kill Bronson and the woman to get their stuff, then that’s what we’ll do.”
Dexter still looked unhappy.
“It’s easy,” Hoxton said. “You just point the pistol and pull the trigger. We’ll kill Bronson first—he’s the most dangerous—and Angela Lewis will be a lot more cooperative if she’s just watched her former husband die.”
The two men got out of the car, both tucking the weapons into the waistbands of their trousers, under their jackets. They walked around the corner, then down the street to the hotel, and straight in through the lobby.
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