The Jerusalem Puzzle (31 page)

They dragged me outside, pushed me up against a wall. The courtyard was empty of priests now. Three of the policemen held me with a cold gun barrel pressed into my chest, while a troop of men dressed in yellow jackets, carrying fire extinguishers, raced into the church.

That was the moment my stomach reacted. I put my hand to my mouth, bent forward. The police stepped back. I vomited. I’d been holding my stomach, but the punch and the smoke I’d inhaled had turned it. Two different policemen, without armour, arrived as I was straightening up, wiping my mouth. One of them spoke into a walkie talkie as the other started reciting the laws I’d broken by entering the church out of hours.

They said they were going to arrest me. I shouted, and started gesticulating at the church door.

‘Are you mad? I fought the man who started that fire! I was trying to stop him! You can’t arrest me!’ I shouted.

There was smoke coming from the front door of the church. It was hanging from its hinges with a gaping hole in each leaf. That explained how the police had got in. Presumably whoever had the key hadn’t turned up quickly enough.

I pointed a finger at the door.

‘I need to go back in. Let me go!’ I took a step forward. I wanted to see if Isabel was in there.

The policemen grabbed my arms, one on each side, twisting them backwards painfully. I was lifted an inch from the ground.

‘You won’t do that, sir.’ The officer on my right spoke quickly, politely. ‘Describe the man who started the fire.’

I did, there wasn’t much to say, and as I glanced at the door of the church and watched people running in and out, it dawned on me that they hadn’t found him.

‘I had a hold on him, until you broke the bloody doors in! You have to check the whole building!’ The only reply I got was a dismissive stare.

Seconds later I was being hurried out of the courtyard and down a back lane, accompanied by four riot-helmeted and bulletproof vest-clad policemen. We passed through a blue and white police line, where a crowd of Arabs
in keffiyehs, black robed priests, brown and white clothed monks, sombre looking nuns and a mixture of tourists had
gathered
.

There were shouts. I heard the words, ‘Bashokh aleek!’ It sounded like an insult.

Questions were shouted at me in English as we passed too.

‘What have you done, blasphemer?’ was the most memorable of them. The voices were all angry.

Beyond the police line there were two ambulances with a white Star of David on them parked in front of King David’s Tower, inside the Jaffa Gate.

My mind was racing. I’d nearly caught him. I should have smashed his head in. What more could I do? Had I blown my chance to rescue Isabel?

Rage at myself for not finishing the fight tightened my fists.

I thought I was being taken to the police station, so it was a pleasant surprise when I was led to the nearest ambulance.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. My injuries weren’t serious, but they were real. My head was bruised, ringing oddly, sounds were echoing, and my stomach was aching. A few minutes later Mark arrived. He waved to me, then showed his ID and spoke to the blue uniformed police officer with a concrete hard expression, who was standing near the back door of the ambulance keeping an eye on me.

After the officer had closely examined the ID and had spoken into his buzzing walkie talkie, he let Mark approach the vehicle.

Mark leaned in the door.

‘They didn’t arrest you?’ I said.

He smiled. ‘The Israeli authorities are back in cooperating mode.’ He paused, leaned towards me, as if examining me for injuries. ‘You almost got yourself killed in there.’

‘Did they find Isabel?’ I was dreading that her body might have been somewhere in that burning building.

He shook his head. ‘I personally went through the whole church. She’s definitely not there.’

I nodded. ‘The bastard got away, didn’t he?’

Mark nodded. ‘He must have had a key to a back door that hasn’t been used in years.’

I closed my eyes. ‘I had him!’ I gripped the crisp blue sheet under me. Our best chance of finding Isabel had slipped away through my fingers!

Then something else came to me. ‘Do they know who he is?’

Mark climbed into the ambulance. That was when I noticed a cut on the side of his forehead.

‘No,’ he said.

I was propped up on one of the gurneys. My arms were still trembling from the exertion of the fight. The sickly sweet burning smell lingered in my nostrils. A medic, dressed all in green, had checked me over already and had disappeared. He reappeared now, climbing into the ambulance.

‘Are you coming with us, sir?’ he asked Mark.

‘Yes, I need to get this cut checked,’ said Mark, pointing to his face.

The medic examined Mark, and made him lie down on the other gurney. He strapped us both in. Then he knocked on the sliding window that separated us from the driver and with our siren blaring we moved away.

The medic was sitting on a little fold-down seat and was talking loudly on his mobile phone behind us.

Mark took his phone out of his pocket and checked something on it. Echoes of the questions and curses that had been shouted at me while I was being bundled away from the church were playing in my mind. They were a demented chorus to my despair at having let the bastard slip away.

I thought about my phone and ran my hands through my pockets, groaning as the realisation came over me that I’d lost it.

‘The police will find it if it didn’t get burnt or smashed up,’ said Mark when I told him. ‘You’ll get it back eventually. They put that fire out very quickly. You saw what he was burning, didn’t you?’

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about Isabel.

I’d imagined, initially, as I broke into the building, that she might have been in that church somewhere, being tortured. When I saw that sick pile of bodies, I thought she might be among them but I’d quickly seen that none of them were her.

But if she wasn’t there, where was she?

Mark and I were taken to adjoining cubicles in the emergency room at the hospital when we got there. There were two Israeli policemen on guard near us. One was sitting on a chair.

The other one was over six foot six tall and built like a quarterback I’d seen once at a New York Giants game. His circumference must have equalled his height and he had arms as thick as my thighs. He could block a double doorway just by standing near it.

Presumably he was the muscle in case we did anything funny. Actually, it was probably me they were worried about.

I refused any pain killers, I didn’t want to feel woozy, and after they’d put a dressing on my forehead they probed at my side to determine if anything was wrong in there. They wanted to keep me in overnight for observation, a nurse told me.

I wanted out of the place.

She also told us she’d seen the fire at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on TV, after I’d explained where we’d come from. Apparently the whole incident had been relayed live to the world.

‘Do you have immunity from prosecution here?’ I asked Mark, leaning out of my cot towards him. I still wasn’t sure if I was going to be locked up for breaking into the church. I wouldn’t be much good to Isabel in a cell.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘But you don’t.’

His phone rang.

I didn’t hear the first part of his conversation, as he turned his head away from me, but I did hear the next bit.

‘Good news at last,’ he said. He smiled at me. ‘Now all we have to do is get away from our friends.’ He glanced at the policemen. They were both staring at us.

Susan was sleeping, but she might have been unconscious. She’d talked for a long time about what she’d figured out from the book.

She’d been whispering, mostly, and had ended up rambling about the early Greek miniscule script alphabet, why it had been used in Jerusalem by scribes in Herod’s day, and how that style in the quire pages alone proved that the manuscript was genuine.

Isabel’s thirst was nagging fiercely at her again. He’d given them a bottle of water and a tub of cooked rice when he’d left them here, but it was all gone and panic wasn’t far away now.

The darkness didn’t help. She’d got a good look at the cave they were in. She’d seen it was no more than twenty foot by thirty, and that there was no other way out, before he’d sealed the way they’d come in – a three foot wide hole in the roof above her – by pulling a rock over it.

She’d always hated confined spaces.

She’d managed to take her jacket off and drop it below the exit hole before the darkness had come, to mark that spot, enable her to keep her bearings, as she’d learnt in the Foreign Office kidnap training course. But it had been years since she’d done the course and she couldn’t remember a lot of it.

What she did remember was one important part, the critical section about keeping hope alive. Because that was what she was having trouble doing.

The endless darkness was beating her down like a physical force.

She’d dreaded being held without light again when he’d taken her blindfold off and she’d seen the hole, seconds before she’d been forced down the ladder into the cave. And for a long time now she’d been battling frightening thoughts that wouldn’t go away.

Was this what he’d planned for them? A slow, lingering death, starving, dying of thirst? Was she going to sit here while Susan’s body decomposed nearby and the worms started eating at it? Would that be her fate too?

There was, she had to admit, very little chance that they’d be discovered accidently. Where they were, in a tomb-like cave under a rock in a barren valley that was littered with many other rocks, made sure of that. Being an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, as far as she could work out – time was difficult to calculate when you were petrified – meant they’d left civilisation far behind. And with it, almost all chance of being found by accident. It might as well have been the first century out here, not the twenty-first. Sean could walk these valleys for the rest of his life and not find her. Even if he knew what part of the country she was in it wouldn’t help.

She’d seen only barren rocks – no houses anywhere near –
when the bastard had taken their blindfolds off, just before he’d pushed them, while waving his gun around, down the ladder into the tomb they were now held in.

‘When are you going to free us?’ she’d shouted at him defiantly, as she went down. His reply, a promise of eventual freedom if they did what they were told, was worthless, she knew, even as he spoke it.

His leaving them here at least meant one thing, of that she was sure. He had gone off to do something. And he didn’t want them dead yet.

The ladder had been a real problem for Susan. She’d swayed on it at the top, and Isabel had in the end half caught her when she fell the last few feet to the rough stone floor.

That had winded them both.

Then he’d thrown down the plastic bag with rice and water in it. And without another word, he’d pulled up the ladder and had pushed the rock slowly over the entrance hole. It was probably one of the rocks she’d seen nearby in the valley; irregular, several feet wide giant lozenges. There was no possible way anyone could know they were under this particular one.

She’d wondered if the rock presented him with a difficulty too, how to make sure he knew which one to move to find them.

Unless, of course, he didn’t intend to come back.

Stop thinking that, she said to herself. Stay positive.

She’d tried to reach the entrance hole by jumping. It was only about five feet above her head, from what she remembered, but she’d failed to touch the roof at all. And it had been like jumping in a nightmare. And so, after a while, as she lost her determination in the blackness, and heard a hollowness under her that spooked her, she’d given up on it.

Then an idea came to her.

What if she could dig away at the rock walls and pile up rubble under where the entrance hole was? At least she knew where to pile up the rocks she dug up.

It was a chance. If she could dig out enough rocks from the walls and floor, she might be able to reach the roof.

After doing it for a long time – she wasn’t exactly sure how long she’d spent trying to break stones free from the walls – she had accumulated only five large rocks and some loose rubble, which, all together, added barely two inches to her height.

And her thirst got worse from the exertion. It was nagging at her relentlessly now.

She heard a cough. For a second she was disoriented. The cough had sounded near, but its owner was invisible in the endless blackness.

Now a wheeze. It was Susan. But her voice sounded different when she spoke.

‘I heard you, moving … Please, don’t disturb them … don’t disturb the scorpions … The yellow one’s bite can kill you in a few minutes.’ Her voice was reedy, changed.

Isabel’s skin flushed cold.

What was that noise?

She listened, concentrating hard for even the tiniest of sounds. She knew that scorpion bites were painful as well as possibly being deadly if a poisonous bite went deep enough or you received more than one.

But all she could hear was her own breathing. It was coming fast.

Then she heard another sound.

A fevered rustling, as if a horde of insects had been released somewhere nearby. And it was getting louder by the second.

‘Take this,’ said Mark. He handed me a small laminated ID card. There was no picture on it. It just gave his name and title: SECURITY OFFICER – HER MAJESTY’S EMBASSY, CAIRO.

‘We have to get out of here. Say you need to make a call. Flash this at the two policemen. I’ll back you up if they ask. If they let you pass, find the main reception area. I’ll follow you as soon as I can. I’ll get someone from Mossad on the phone to tell the policemen to forget what happened.’

‘Why don’t you just go up to them now, and get your Mossad contact on the phone?’

‘It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. This way there isn’t much point in them making a big deal of it.’