The Moses Stone

'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 salmonpink 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 judgement 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.'

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.'

'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.'

'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?'

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.'

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-millimetre Parabellum shells into the magazine of a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic 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