The Moses Stone

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, than 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.

67

'So where is Megiddo? I presume we'll be going there.'

'Oh, we'll certainly be going there. It's in northern Israel, on the Plain of Esdraelon overlooking the Jezreel Valley.'

Angela clicked the touchpad on her laptop and brought up a detailed map of Israel.

'This is Esdraelon,' she said, indicating an area close to the northern frontier of the country. 'The Jezreel Valley is shaped a bit like a triangle lying on its side, with the point at the Mediterranean coast and the base paralleling the River Jordan, just here. All that area was once under water. In fact, it was the waterway that linked the inland body of water that's now called the Dead Sea with the Mediterranean. About two million years ago, tectonic shift caused the land lying between the Great Rift Valley in Africa and this end of the Mediterranean to rise, and the waterway turned into dry land. Once the Dead Sea no longer had an outlet, its salinity started to increase, with the result we see today.'

'So what's at Megiddo? A ruined castle or something?'

'More or less. The point about Megiddo was that it had enormous strategic importance. In ancient times there was a major trade and military route known in Latin as the Via Maris or 'Road of the Sea' and as Derekh HaYam in Hebrew. This ran from Egypt and up the flat land beside the Mediterranean to Damascus and Mesopotamia. Now, whoever occupied Megiddo controlled the section of this route that was known as the Nahal Iron – the word nahal means a dry river bed – and hence could control all the traffic along the route itself.

'Because of its location, Megiddo is one of the oldest known inhabited places in this part of the world. In fact, in any part of the world. The first settlement there dates from around 7000 BC – over nine thousand years ago – and it was finally abandoned in the fifth century BC, so the site was continually occupied for about six thousand five hundred years.'

'So when the Sicarii went there – assuming you're correct – the place would already have been a ruin?'

'Oh, yes,' Angela agreed. 'The site would have been deserted for well over half a millennium by that time.'

'And you think that could be the place referred to in the inscriptions? I mean, you now think it's more likely than Hezekiah's Tunnel or somewhere on the Temple Mount?'

'Yes, I do.' Angela looked apologetic. 'I suppose with hindsight I should have thought about it a bit more, and I should certainly have checked on what had been done in Hezekiah's Tunnel in the past. And – as you pointed out – with all the activity on and inside the Temple Mount over the years, the chances of anything like the Silver Scroll remaining undiscovered there were pretty slim.'

'So what about Megiddo, then? Has that had scores of archaeologists poring over it as well?' Bronson sounded uncertain.

'Oddly enough, no. It has been excavated, of course, but not as often, nor as exhaustively, as you might expect, given its history. Virtually nobody dug there at all until 1903, when a man named Gottlieb Schumacher led an expedition, funded by the German Society for Oriental Research. Twenty years later John D. Rockefeller financed an expedition by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, and that continued until the start of the Second World War.'

'Hang on, that's a dig lasting sixteen years,' Bronson pointed out. 'They must have pretty much covered the whole site.'

'It was a long expedition, true, but Megiddo is simply huge. The city mound itself covers about fifteen acres, and most archaeological digs tend to be focused in one fairly small area and are vertical rather than horizontal. They're usually interested in digging down through the different layers that represent the various civilizations that have occupied the site, and that's certainly what the Chicago team did.

'After that, not too much happened at Megiddo. An Israeli archaeologist named Yigael Yadin did a bit of work there in the 1960s, and since then there have been excavations on the site every other year, funded by the Megiddo Expedition based at the university here in Tel Aviv.'

'That still sounds like quite a lot of activity,' Bronson said doubtfully.

'Perhaps it is,' Angela agreed, 'but the point is that if any of these expeditions had found the Silver Scroll, the whole world would know about it already. And don't forget, none of these archaeologists were looking for what might be described as buried treasure. They were just trying to uncover the history of the site. We're not. We're going there to look for one very specific object, in one very specific place.'

'So there is a cistern somewhere on the hill?' Bronson asked.

'In fact, there isn't,' Angela said, with a slight smile, 'and that's good news. A cistern is where you store water, but a well or a spring is a source of water. When we were checking our transcriptions using the online dictionary, it suggested that the Aramaic word I'd translated as 'cistern' more accurately meant a well. And what's at Har Megiddo is a well, not a cistern. That's another indicator that we're now on the right track.'

'Right,' Bronson said. 'There's no time to lose. I'll just go and get my things together. We can look at the route once we're in the car and heading north.' He looked at his watch. 'Ready in five?'

68

'They're on the third floor,' Hoxton muttered, as he pushed the button to call the lift. 'Adjoining rooms, 305 and 307. This shouldn't take long.'

They stepped out of the lift together, and walked down the narrow corridor. Outside number 305 they stopped.

Hoxton leant forward, pressing his ear against the door.

'I can hear movement inside,' he whispered, stepping back and easing the Browning out of his waistband. 'You cover the other door,' he told Dexter. He watched as his companion moved a few feet down the corridor. 'Ready?'

Dexter looked unhappy but took a firm grip of the pistol and nodded. Hoxton rapped sharply on the door.

'Who is it?' Bronson asked.

'Maintenance,' an indistinct but clearly male voice replied. 'There's a problem with one of the lights in your room that we need to fix.'

Bronson stepped back. Two things bothered him about what he'd just heard. First, every member of hotel staff they'd talked to so far had spoken English to some extent, some of them haltingly, others quite fluently. But the man outside the door didn't just speak English: as far as Bronson could tell, he was English. Why would an Englishman be working as a maintenance man in a small hotel in Jerusalem?

The second thing was that all the lights in the bedroom and bathroom were working perfectly.

'I've just got out of the shower,' Bronson said. 'Let me put on some clothes.'

Walking quickly across the room, he stuffed the rest of his possessions into the overnight bag he'd been packing, and then crossed to the connecting door with room 307 and knocked gently.

'I'll only be a few seconds,' he said aloud, as the connecting door opened.

Swiftly, Bronson slipped through into Angela's room, pushed the door to behind him and locked it. 'We've got company,' he said. 'Get your stuff together. We need to get out of here right now.'