Sacred Sword (Ben Hope 7) (31 page)

‘You fucking sure?’ Cutter demanded. On cue, Grinnall’s pistol muzzle ground harder against the side of her head. She let out a little squeal of pain and fear, then nodded frantically a second time.

‘What room?’ Cutter hissed. ‘Let her speak, Terry.’

‘She’ll scream.’

‘No, she won’t.’ Cutter slipped out a double-edged stiletto knife and pressed it lightly against her trembling throat. ‘What room, darling?’ The girl babbled something in Hebrew. Cutter grabbed her hand impatiently. ‘Use your bloody fingers, girl.’ Understanding, she held up seven trembling fingers, then eight.

‘Room 78. Move.’

‘What about her?’ Grinnall asked.

‘Let’s do her,’ Doyle said, glancing at the neatly made bed. ‘We got time.’

‘We’re not going to do her,’ Cutter said. He drew back his fist and punched the girl hard in the face, knocking her out. Grinnall chuckled. They left her sprawled on the carpet, shut the room and continued up the corridor. Reaching the door of Room 78, they paused a moment to check their weapons one last time.

Then kicked in the door with a splintering crash.

The blond-haired man who’d been reclining on the bed jerked bolt upright in panic as the four armed intruders burst into his room. He was wearing only a pair of Calvin Klein boxer shorts, and his legs were scrawny and shaved smooth. He had silver rings in both nipples. He scrabbled for his spectacles on the bedside table, jammed them onto his nose and gawked up in speechless horror. His younger travelling companion had just emerged from the shower, naked except for a pink bathrobe draped over his narrow shoulders. He froze, terrified, and seemed about to burst into tears.

‘Ah,
fuck
,’ said Cutter, lowering his gun.

Ben managed to sleep a while despite the thoughts and questions that filled his head. He was awake early the following morning and met Jude downstairs for breakfast. Jude ate voraciously but Ben wasn’t hungry. He demolished a pot of coffee, then the two of them headed out of the hotel to hail a taxi. Ben showed the driver the address on Hillel Zada’s card, and the car took off. They headed west, with road signs pointing north for Ramallah and southwards towards Bethlehem.

Jerusalem is one city in two countries. Hillel’s home was in the suburbs west of the Green Line, the 1949 armistice demarcation line that marked the division not just between West and East Jerusalem, but also between Israel and Palestine, where heavily armed customs officials stopped all traffic and checked passports. Ben and Jude were waved through into a very different section of the city. Suddenly the shop signs were all in Arabic instead of Hebrew, and the Islamic influence was noticeably stronger. A gang of youths hurled stones at the passing Israeli-registered taxicab. The driver pressed on with barely a glance at them.

It was just after eight when they reached Hillel Zada’s home, a large, sprawling villa set among gardens ringed by a high wall. A tall arched entrance was closed off by wooden gates. Ben let the taxi driver go, then pressed the buzzer by the entrance. Moments later, he and Jude heard a powerful engine fire up from inside the wall. The gates swung open automatically and a Toyota Land Cruiser with oversized wheels, grilles over the headlights and clusters of spotlamps on the roof and radiator came roaring out of the entrance. From the noise, the exhaust was either some kind of high-performance add-on, or it was about to drop off. Hillel Zada’s bearded face appeared at the driver’s window. ‘I have been waiting for you,’ he said solemnly. ‘Get in.’

As they charged off at high speed in Hillel’s tank, he explained that he had all seven of his children currently visiting, with all sixteen of his grandchildren. With a full house, it was easier for them to talk elsewhere. Besides, he added enigmatically, there was something he wanted to show them.

‘Where are we going?’ Ben asked over the bellowing racket of the Land Cruiser.

‘I will take you to where it began,’ Hillel said sadly. ‘Where I first made my discovery, nearly fifty years ago.’

As Hillel went carving back through the city with very little regard for other traffic and none at all for red lights, Ben gripped the handle of the passenger door and wondered if he drove his pristine Jaguar this way too. The Israeli seemed perfectly calm, but there was a look of deep sadness in his eyes and he looked drawn, as if he’d been up for much of the night grieving for his dead acquaintances.

Finally, the Land Cruiser broke free of the outskirts of Jerusalem and hit a winding sand-dusted road that led eastwards into the desert. Conversation was almost impossible over the engine noise, so Ben leaned back in the passenger seat, cracked the window open a few inches and smoked in silence. Jude was quiet in the back seat. From time to time Ben glanced over his shoulder at him, and the content of Michaela’s letter would come flooding back into his mind, leaving him with a knotty feeling in his stomach.

The Land Cruiser wasn’t the only vehicle heading into the desert. A thin stream of cars and vans, as well as a tour bus, were venturing out in the same direction. The road carved its way onwards across an ocean of sandy rubble that stretched out to the rocky escarpments in the distance. A few lonely shrubs and small trees lined the roadside. Road signs flashed by in Arabic and English.

After almost an hour’s driving, the snaking road cleared a rise and Jude let out a whistle as a spectacular vista opened up ahead. ‘The Dead Sea,’ Hillel said over the engine noise, motioning grandly through the dusty windscreen towards the vast expanse of salt lake that stretched out ahead of them in the middle distance, before the seemingly limitless desert closed in again. Somewhere across the sands lay the Jordanian border.

‘And there,’ Hillel said, pointing up at a huge sandy mountain that towered high over the water, casting a giant shadow across the sands, ‘is Masada.’

‘What is this place?’ Jude asked in fascination, leaning forward between the front seats and craning his neck upwards as high as he could to see the top of the mountain.

‘Masada was a fortress,’ Ben told him, speaking loudly to be heard, ‘where the great Jewish rebellion against the Roman Empire made its last stand, forty years after the death of Christ. Nine hundred men, women and children, who’d fled from the sack of Jerusalem and the Roman purge against their race. They held out here for three years while a massive Roman army camped at the foot of the mountain and built a siege embankment and an assault ramp to storm the fort.’

‘I’m guessing the Romans killed them all,’ Jude said, straining to make out the fortress on the very top of the rocky crag far, far above the desert.

‘They didn’t get the chance. According to the Roman historian Josephus, when the soldiers eventually breached the stronghold, all they found were mounds of dead bodies. The Jewish resistants had committed mass suicide rather than let themselves be taken. Each man slaughtered his own wife and children, then a team was elected to kill everyone remaining before finally falling on their own swords.’

‘Shit,’ Jude said, shaking his head. ‘Nine hundred people.’

‘That’s what the history books say,’ Ben said.

‘What would the Romans have done to them if they’d captured them?’

‘Probably a lot worse.’

‘Those Romans were mean mothers.’

‘You are a historian?’ Hillel asked, glancing at Ben as he drove.

‘Hardly. I studied theology with his father,’ Ben replied, motioning back at Jude. ‘I’ve read a few background texts about this place, that’s all.’

‘Then you must know that for many centuries, the site of the great martyrdom was lost to knowledge,’ Hillel said. ‘Masada was rediscovered in 1842, and it was not until 1963 that excavations began, led by an Israeli archaeologist called Yigael Yadin. Such a huge task required a very large workforce. They hired men by the truckload. One of them, a boy of sixteen who was willing to do the hardest work to help support his family.’ Hillel prodded his chest with his thumb. ‘Me. That is where my story begins.’

‘What is it you want to show us, Hillel?’

‘The same thing I showed to Wesley, and then later to Simeon and the Frenchman.’

The Land Cruiser followed the other traffic into a parking lot near to a cable car station, from which thick steel cables soared skywards towards the looming mountain. Along with a mixed handful of tourists, the rowdiest of which was a contingent of Italians, Ben, Jude and Hillel boarded the next cable car. There was a delay while a corpulent American family squeezed themselves aboard, adding drastically to the cable car’s payload. It was the size of a minibus, offering all-around views as it glided up the mountain on a track running parallel to a second cable car bringing visitors back down to earth.

Jude shivered. ‘You wouldn’t expect it to be so chilly in the desert.’

In SAS desert operations in the Gulf, Ben had seen sleet, snow and soldiers suffering from frostbite and hypothermia. It wasn’t a memory he wanted to share with a cable car-load of tourists.

Despite the cold, Masada evidently attracted its fair share of seasonal visitors. Hillel informed Ben and Jude, not without a measure of pride, that it was Israel’s most visited archaeological site. The tourists noisily expressed their appreciation as the cable car made its way up the side of the mountain. Even Ben was struck by the sight, realising for the first time the incredible scale of the Roman military operation to take such an inaccessible fortress.

As they climbed, the traces of the Roman military camps dotted around the base of the mountain were clearly visible. Ahead, the great russety-red sandstone mountain loomed closer and closer under the cloudy sky. They glided over the tiny matchstick figures of people ascending the mountain on foot via a winding path, like pilgrims from some bygone age.

The cable car neared the fragile-looking docking station precariously erected on the face of the cliff. Finally, and to Jude’s obvious relief, they made it all the way to the top without being brought crashing down to the rocks by the weight of the lardy American family.

‘Holy shit, get a load of this,’ Jude breathed when they stepped out on the wide flat summit of the mountain and the full panoramic breadth of the view opened up. They were so high above the sweeping vista of the desert and the hazy Dead Sea that it was like looking down from the windows of an aircraft.

Ben gazed around him at the extensive stone remains of the fortress and could see that the modern-day excavation work had been almost as massive in scale as the Romans’ attempts to destroy the place nearly two thousand years earlier.

‘It did not look like this back in 1963,’ Hillel said. ‘Then it was only a field of rubble, half erased by time and the hand of nature.’ He pointed out the black painted lines that were visible on many of the buildings, archways and columns. ‘Those mark where the original stonework ends and the reconstructions begin.’

‘It’s very impressive,’ Ben said. ‘But as you know, we didn’t come here to do the tourist thing.’

Hillel nodded. ‘This way,’ he said, leading them through the ruins. As he walked, he began to tell his story.

‘I was the eldest of ten children. My family were very poor. My mother worked in a factory where the conditions were very bad and the pay was even worse. My father worked as a stonemason, until one day, when I was thirteen years of age, he fell from a ladder and his legs were smashed. He never walked again and was always in great pain. With my poor father crippled and no longer able to earn any money, much responsibility fell on me. I worked delivering goods for Jerusalem merchants. I stole eggs and resold them. I even stole a chicken once. We struggled every day just to stay alive and pay the rent for a tiny hovel that was not fit for a dog to live in.’

Hillel paused to run his hand admiringly along a wall, as if he’d built it himself. ‘When I heard of the huge workforce that was being gathered for the excavation of the Masada site, I signed on. I was big and strong and already used to hard work. Now, follow me through this set of arches, and I will show you.’

A few yards on, Hillel stopped to contemplate a section of the thick, craggy rampart wall. Beyond it was a sheer drop protected by a modern-day steel railing, and the dizzying view for miles towards Jerusalem. He crouched down low and delicately brushed some sand away from a crevice near the foot of the wall. ‘This is the place,’ he said, twisting his head up to look at Ben. ‘Come. See.’

The crevice was a horizontal gap in the ancient masonry where stones of uneven size had been used to build the wall. It was about four feet long and only just wide enough for a man to insert his fist.

‘It was June, 1963. I was assigned to this section with two other workers,’ Hillel said. ‘We were dying in the heat, tired and thirsty, while our foreman, a man called Samir, gulped water from his canteen and shouted at us whenever we stopped. I remember how much I hated him.’ Hillel scraped a small handful of sand and stones from the crevice and let it slip through his fingers.

‘Each man had his own piece of wall to work on. Mine was almost buried. I was digging away sand and stone with my bare hands when I found the hole and, deep inside it, something wrapped in a bundle of cloth. We had orders to report any find immediately to the foremen. I turned towards Samir and was about to call him when I saw that he was swallowing more water from his canteen, drinking like a hog so that it was pouring from his mouth and splashing on the ground. I was so thirsty, and so angry, that I did not call him. Instead, I pulled out the bundle and, careful to let nobody see me, I unwrapped it.’

‘And it was a sword,’ Ben said.

Hillel stood up and dusted the sand off his hands. ‘Yes. A very beautiful sword. Its handle was made of bronze that shone like gold in the sun, the blade shaped like this, and so long.’ He traced a curved line through the air, then spaced his palms a distance apart. Ben saw that his measurement estimate from Fabrice Lalique’s sketch had been more or less right, about three and a half feet overall.

‘I could see it was very, very old,’ Hillel went on, ‘and that it must have been hidden here for longer than time itself. I knew nothing of history, but this was surely an object of great value. Again I turned to Samir, but he was now standing talking to another foreman, sharing a joke and smoking cigarettes. I looked at Samir’s fat belly, and thought of my poor crippled father at home, and my mother working like a slave in the factory.’