Mosaic Covenant. Now, even then, Jerusalem was the most important city in the whole of Judea, and I don't think it's too wild a suggestion that they might have hidden the relics somewhere there.'
'But if they had done that,' Bronson objected, 'surely they'd have been found by now. Jerusalem's been continuously occupied and fought over for at least two thousand years. How could anything like the Silver Scroll have stayed hidden?'
'Actually,' Angela said, 'the first settlement on the site dates from about 3500 BC; but I didn't really mean
Back in 2007, a group of workmen in Jerusalem employed by archaeologists to search for the old main road out of the city discovered a small drainage channel, and that led directly to a huge unknown tunnel that might have run as far as the Qidron river, or possibly even to the Shiloah Pool at the southern end of Jerusalem, from the Temple Mount. There's a possibility that it might have been used by the inhabitants of the city to get out of Jerusalem during the Roman siege of AD 70, and it was a probable escape route for some of the treasures of the Temple. The Qidron river – Wadi Qidron – heads eastwards from the city, but about halfway to the Dead Sea it splits, one arm continuing to the Dead Sea while the other heads directly to Khirbet Qumran.'
'Qumran again,' Bronson observed.
'Yes,' Angela said. 'One interpretation is that when the Roman siege began, trusted Jewish priests and fighters gathered together all the scrolls of the Second Temple and escaped with them down that tunnel to Qumran, where they hid the scrolls in the caves near the settlement – those documents that became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's as convincing a suggestion as any I've heard.'
'But what about the relics we're looking for? Where do you think they could be?'
'I've got an idea. Obviously the people who buried the Silver Scroll would have had no idea of the tortuous history that would eventually unfold around the Temple Mount, but I think there's a good chance that they might have selected one of the existing tunnel systems under or near the rock as being a secure location for the relics.
Now, in the present political climate in Jerusalem, there's no possible way we can get access to the tunnels under the Mount – not even bona fide Israeli archaeologists can manage that.
'But,' she continued, 'the inscription on the clay tablets refers explicitly to one very particular kind of underground space – a cistern. I think at the last count something like forty-five different cisterns have been identified in the various caves and chambers that run under the Temple Mount, so that does make sense. I think that the Sicarii who hid these relics deliberately chose a hiding place underneath what all three major religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – now believe to be the holiest site in Jerusalem, perhaps in the world.'
'But which cistern?' Bronson asked. 'If there are more than forty of them, and we can't get into the tunnels, that's it, isn't it? Even if we could work out exactly which cistern the relic is hidden in, there's no way we can recover the relic.'
'Not necessarily,' Angela replied, a smile playing over her lips. 'I've been studying our translation of the inscription, and I've just spotted something. The inscription doesn't say 'a cistern', it says 'the cistern', and that suggests it's referring to a very specific cistern, one whose location would have been generally well known. And around the beginning of the first millennium, there was one obvious place close to the Temple Mount that everybody would have known was a cistern. The writer of the tablets would certainly have been familiar with it.'
'Which was?'
'Hezekiah's Tunnel,' Angela said. 'I hope you like water.'
60
'They're on the move.' The young woman sitting in the lobby of the Tel Aviv hotel lowered her newspaper and bent her head forward slightly so that her lips were close to the tiny microphone clipped under the lapel of her jacket. 'All three of them are just leaving the hotel. I'm right behind them.'
The hotel had been under intense scrutiny by the Mossad team ever since Hoxton, Dexter and Baverstock had flown in from Heathrow.
'Copied. All mobile units, heads up and stand by. Acknowledge.'
A chorus of radio calls confirmed that all the Mossad surveillance team members were on the net and ready.
Levi Barak, sitting in the passenger seat of a saloon car parked about seventy yards down the road from the hotel entrance, focused a pair of compact binoculars on the target building. As he watched, three men emerged and began walking down the road in the opposite direction. A few seconds later, a short, dark-haired woman stepped onto the street behind them, a newspaper tucked under her arm, and began following them, perhaps thirty yards back.
'Right, you know what to do,' Barak said. 'Keep me informed,' he added, as he stepped out of the car.
The three men seemed oblivious to the fact that they were under surveillance, and were just walking steadily towards a small car park – the hotel didn't have its own garage.
Barak stood on the pavement for a few moments, watching as his team of Mossad surveillance officers moved smoothly into position, covering the car park and all its possible exits.
Moments later, a white car drove out of the car park and turned into the road. Seconds after that a large motorcycle and a nondescript saloon car drove slowly down the street behind it. As soon as all three vehicles had moved out of sight, Barak strode across to the hotel entrance.
Less than five minutes later a technician carrying a bulky briefcase walked into the hotel lobby. Barak nodded to him, then strode across to the reception desk where the manager was already waiting, a pass-key in his hand. The three men stepped into the elevator, and the manager pressed the button labelled '3'.
The first thing Barak saw inside Tony Baverstock's room was a laptop computer sitting on the desk by the window. He gestured to the technician, who moved across to it and powered it up, but even before the operating system loaded, a password request appeared on the screen, and the man muttered in irritation. He knew they'd never be able to guess it, and there might be a logging system builtinto the laptop that would record anyone inputting the wrong password, so he pressed the start button and held it until the computer shut down. He had a simpler solution.
From one of the pockets at the back of his briefcase he took a CD-ROM, which he inserted in the computer's drive. This contained a boot program that would start the computer independently of the programs on the hard disk, and at the same time bypass the password screen. He sat down at the desk, switched on the laptop again and watched the screen. The boot program gave him access to all the folders on the hard disk, and as soon as the system had finished loading, he plugged a lead into one of the USB ports, attached a high-capacity external hard disk and copied all the datafiles he could find on the computer, as well as the emails and the list of websites the user of the machine had recently visited. While the copying process ran, he quickly scanned the folders he thought most likely to hold details or pictures of the tablet – principally the 'Documents' and 'Pictures' folders – but without finding anything useful or informative.
'Anything there?' Barak asked, several pieces of paper in his hand.
'Nothing obvious,' the technician said, shrugging as he disconnected the external drive and replaced it in his briefcase. He knew that the techies at Glilot would find the information, if it was there.
Barak nodded to the man as he left the room, his work completed, and looked round. His search hadn't been particularly productive, but he had found a half-empty box of nine-millimetre Parabellum ammunition in a suitcase in the wardrobe, which had considerably elevated his level of concern about these three Englishmen. He'd also found several pages on which words had been scribbled – words that he knew from his conversations with Eli Nahman and Yosef Ben Halevi might have been a part of the inscription on the clay tablet they were desperately searching for.
And there were two words that had leapt out at him from one sheet. Somebody had scribbled 'Hezekiah's Tunnel' on it, and that had prompted Barak to place an urgent call to the leader of the surveillance team following the Englishmen. That was one possibility he'd managed to cover.
Ben Halevi had called him that morning to report what the other two people involved – Christopher Bronson
