'I'm a British police officer,' Bronson warned him. 'Kill me and you'll have every copper in Britain looking for you.'
'If we were in a cellar in England, I'd agree with you, but we're standing underneath a deserted fortress in the middle of Israel. Nobody's going to know you're dead; no one will ever know you were even here. Both your bodies will simply vanish. That well behind you is deep enough to hold your bones for all eternity. Now, hand over that scroll.' Hoxton pointed at Baverstock. 'Get it, Tony.'
Baverstock took a step towards the staircase leading down to the platform to take the relic, his pistol pointing at Angela, but Bronson had one desperate card left to play.
He grabbed the scroll and jumped back, holding the relic directly above the dark water of the well.
'One more step and I'll drop this,' he threatened. 'I've no idea how far down this spring goes, but I can promise you it is deep. You'll need specialist diving equipment to recover it – if you ever do. As you said, this well could hold its secrets for all eternity.'
For several seconds nobody spoke or moved, and then a single shot rang out, the echo crashing and reverberating around the cavern, shockingly loud in the confined space.
And then a man screamed in pain.
74
Dexter tumbled sideways, his pistol clattering to the floor as he grabbed at his leg, the shock of the bullet's impact momentarily stunning him. Then the pain hit him and he screamed.
Baverstock dived to the ground, trying to roll clear of the line of fire. Hoxton span round, swinging his torch beam back up the tunnel, desperately searching for the origin of the shot as he brought his own pistol to bear. The light flashed over three motionless figures, standing barely twenty feet away.
The moment he heard the shot, Bronson dropped the scroll on to the wooden platform and pushed Angela bodily to one side and down into what cover there was behind the rocks that lined the chamber.
Before Hoxton could bring his weapon up to the aim, he was blinded by two beams of light and heard the sound of a second shot.
He felt a crashing impact in his chest at the same moment, and tumbled backwards onto the wooden walkway. Then a numbing, crushing sensation spread across his torso as the lights around him seemed to fade into blackness. And then he felt nothing at all.
The beams of the torches shifted, the men holding them looking for new targets. They fixed on Baverstock, cowering at the side of the walkway and clutching a pistol. Two shots echoed round the chamber, so close together that they sounded like a single report, and Baverstock slumped backwards, tumbling off the walkway and onto the rocky floor of the tunnel below.
An ominous silence fell as the echoes of the shots died away, and then again someone screamed in pain.
'Jesus, Chris! What the hell's happening up there?' Angela whispered.
'Keep down. I don't think anybody's shooting at us. Not yet, anyway.'
Bronson grabbed the rucksack and reached inside it. He pulled out a crowbar and stood up, tucking the cold steel tool behind him, into the waistband of his trousers. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was all he had. He'd managed with less before, he told himself. Far less.
'Like rats in a trap.' The voice was soft, barely audible over Dexter's howls of pain.
The three men moved forward cautiously, their torch beams dancing on the floor.
One stopped beside Dexter and looked down at the injured man, the light from his torch playing over the widening pool of blood around his shattered thigh.
'Help me, please,' Dexter sobbed, through the agony of his wound. 'I need an ambulance or I'll bleed to death.'
'No you won't,' the softly spoken man told him, 'and you won't need an ambulance either.'
Almost casually, he aimed his pistol at Dexter's head and pulled the trigger.
One of the other men stepped to the opposite side of the walkway, shone his torch downwards at Baverstock's crumpled and bloodstained form, and grunted in satisfaction. The third crossed to where Hoxton's body lay motionless. He swiftly searched the dead man's clothing, found something in one of the pockets and called out to his companion.
'You were right,' he said. 'He did have a tablet,' and he held up the piece of fired clay he'd just recovered from Hoxton's pocket.
The other man walked across, took it from him, and studied it in the light from his torch.
'It's a different one,' he said. 'Put it in your pocket while I finish up down there.'
On the lower platform, Bronson and Angela could hear only the murmur of voices now that the shooting had stopped. Then there was a silence, followed by the sound of approaching footsteps.
Bronson looked up cautiously. He could see a tall man descending the staircase, a pistol in his hand and his face in shadow. Behind him, two other men stared down at them, their own weapons poised. There was absolutely nothing Bronson could do apart from put his hands in the air, at least until the man moved closer.
The figure reached the platform and stood there, staring at Bronson and Angela. The beam of the torch held by one of the figures above swept briefly across his face, and Bronson gave a smile when he saw the half-paralysed face and single white eye.
'I can't say I'm surprised, Yacoub,' he said. 'After I saw you in Tel Aviv I expected you to turn up here.
I suppose you've had people following us since we arrived in Israel?'
Yacoub nodded and smiled. The effect was chilling.
'You're a clever man, Bronson, which is why I let you live back in Morocco. I knew then that you would go looking for the Silver Scroll, and I thought it likely that you might even find it.' He gestured towards the greenish metal cylinder on the platform. 'And you did. I'll take it now.'
'It should go to a museum,' Angela said, standing up.
For a few seconds, the Moroccan stared at her.
'Everybody calls me Yacoub,' he said conversationally, 'but that's not my real name. Do you know
Angela shook her head.
'You must have heard of Jacob's Ladder?'
'It's a kind of rope ladder, used on ships,' Bronson said.
'Quite right,' Yacoub said, 'and it's also a plant. But there's a third meaning. In the Christian Bible, Jacob had a vision of a ladder reaching to heaven. That's why people have called me 'Yacoub' since I was about fifteen, because I've shown a lot of people the way to heaven.' He paused. 'I'm armed, and so are my colleagues. You are not.
Hand over the scroll now, and you can walk out of here.
Argue about it, and I'm quite prepared to shoot both of you and take the scroll anyway.'
'You've just shot three men in cold blood,' Bronson said, 'and your men killed the O'Connors in Morocco. If you're prepared to do that just to retrieve a clay tablet, how do we know you won't kill us anyway?'
'You don't, Bronson. Now make up your minds. I'm not a patient man.'
Bronson handed the scroll to Yacoub. The crowbar still hung uselessly from his trousers, but with two pistols pointing straight at him, he knew he'd be dead long before he could reach for it. 'What will you do with it?' he asked.
'This scroll contains a list of the locations of Jewish treasure. I intend to find as many items as I can but, unlike those three pieces of garbage' – he gestured up the staircase, to where Bronson now knew the bodies of Dexter, Hoxton and Baverstock lay – 'who were just going to loot the treasures for themselves, I intend to sell most of what I recover to museums and collectors in Israel. I'll just keep a few of the very best pieces for my own collection. And then I'll give the money the Jews pay me to the Palestinians, to help them rid this country of the Israeli vermin that infest it. It's a kind of justice, really, using Jewish money to help the enemies of the Jews.'
He looked once more at Angela, who was still standing defiantly beside Bronson, then turned his back on both of them, walked up the staircase and motioned to his men to start the trek back up the tunnel. Behind him,
