The Jerusalem Puzzle (28 page)

This highly venerated basilica, a focus for millions of pilgrims down through the centuries, is Christianity’s most contentious site. The first church here, one of the oldest, had been built by Constantine the Great in 330 AD.

No other Christian church has six, often sparring, Christian denominations in charge of it.

The custodian, a Muslim, is a direct descendant of an ancestor who’d been given the position by Saladin himself in 1187, after the Islamic recapture of Jerusalem, following the fall of the main Crusader state.

The custodian is well aware of the significance of his duties. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre contains what has long been believed to be the tomb of Jesus, the site of Golgotha, the Hill of Calvary where he was crucified, and the chapel of Adam, the place where Adam’s skull was believed to have been buried.

The custodian inserts an ancient iron key and locks the main door of the church. Then he folds the wooden steps he stood on and passes them through a hatch in the right hand door to the Armenian sexton, who, along with a Latin and a Greek sexton and other priests, will spend the night in the church praying and awaiting its reopening at four the following morning. The sextons are trained to stay awake to ensure that no one breaks the rules of the status quo, the system for governing the church set down by the Ottomans in 1853.

The only people remaining in the church that night are eight priests, a mixture of Orthodox, Latin and Armenians and a specially allowed visitor.

That evening, as the custodian removed the key from the lower lock he thought about the odd thing that had happened only a few hours before. The special visitor, a man who had arrived with Father Rehan, had turned up only minutes before the closing ceremony. He was planning to spend the night inside the church in prayer and contemplation, but he’d seemed a very stony-faced character to be carrying out such a penance.

The custodian shook his head, dismissing his fears. He had seen many stony-faced Christians and quite a few odd overnight visitors to the church.

And the letter the man had presented to him, and the telephone confirmation of its authenticity, were all the checks he needed to officially make.

The other odd thing that the custodian had noticed was the fact that the special visitor had a black rucksack with him, which looked bigger and heavier than was normal for just one man.

But he hadn’t done anything about that.

The custodian was allowed to request a spot search of all visitors to the sacred site, but he’d never requested a search of a special visitor. The fights between monks and priests over such matters as the moving of a chair and the leaving of a door open in the church, meant he was unlikely to do so for just one visitor either, unless he did it for all special visitors for all the denominations. It had crossed his mind that this self-imposed restriction might one day prove to be a horrendous mistake.

As he walked away across the courtyard, now that the doors of the church were officially closed, with Christian pilgrims all around, he said a prayer to Allah that no mistake regarding the church would occur in his lifetime.

Inside the church, in the yellow light from dim bulbs inside a string of glass lanterns, Father Rehan was standing listening to the evening prayer roster being read aloud.

The sing-song voice filled the air.

Arap Anach’s right hand was feeling for the clasp on his backpack, which he was holding in front of him. He pulled the opening wide and reached inside without looking down.

Then he turned his head. There were only four priests in the small side chapel with him.

He flipped the switch on the mobile phone service disruptor. It would cause all mobile phone signals within 250 metres to become garbled.

Then he opened, by touch alone, the slim metal case containing the MP5-NX version of the famous Heckler and Koch short barrel machine pistol, a favourite of Navy special forces around the world. This version was fitted with a short carbon fibre sound suppressor. He’d tested it himself only a few days before. It worked well, as it should.

It was the best available at disguising the noise of short bursts of automatic fire in confined spaces.

As Arap Anach pulled the MP5 from his bag, he swung the gun up to point it at the side of the head of Father Rehan. As he pulled the trigger and bullets pumped out, causing his arm to jerk, Arap felt a warm surge pour through him.

The power of life and death is addictive, if you’ve no qualms about using it.

The next sound, apart from the low whump of the special 9mm cartridges slicing into flesh and bone as he turned the pistol in an arc, were the astonished shouts of the other priests as he killed each man with two soft-point expanding bullets.

The Hague Convention had banned such bullets, but that didn’t mean they weren’t available, if you knew where to ask.

In any case, using them was the most appropriate thing to do. Better to kill a man at once, with a bullet that expanded and disintegrated inside his brain, rather than have to go round and finish him off, and let him see his own death approaching.

One of the priests got all of five feet away, he must have been highly attuned to self-preservation, and was running fast when the back of his body disintegrated. Arap Anach’s training sessions with the MP5 were paying off.

Murdering these priests had taken only a few seconds. He knew their shouts would bring the Greeks shortly, and possibly the other priests too, though they were further away and conducting a noisy prayer service, but he knew none of that mattered.

Once you can kill in extravagant numbers without flinching there is little anyone without a weapon can do to stop you at close quarters. He looked down. The marble floor of the chapel was slick with blood already. Adrenaline was spiking inside him.

The hunt had started.

Soon he would be searching out any last priest who had decided to hide. After that he would have the church to himself.

At one time there had been a secret back door into the Holy Sepulchre, used by the Orthodox priests, but it had been bricked up owing to the outcry its existence had caused, due to fears that Orthodox monks who sneaked in might attempt to make physical changes to the building, which the other denominations had not agreed to.

The underground tunnel that led away from the church to a thick wooden door in a basement on El Khanqa, a lane at the back of the church, which was locked for a similar reason, would provide no escape for the priests who remained alive either. Father Rehan had the key for that door in his pocket.

But it would provide an escape route for Arap Anach when the time came.

He held his gun at his side as he waited for the other priests to arrive. When none came he pulled a giant Victorian-era wooden painting off the wall. Then another. The noise would bring them out.

The accelerant he’d brought with him, a mixture of lighter fuel and ethanol, was capable of starting a conflagration in a wet woodpile. It would have no difficulties with the bodies, paintings, intricately carved woodwork, embroidered altar coverings and candles that he would pile up.

Noticing a jerk from one of the bodies, he bent to check if there was a pulse from the priest. He could smell blood as he leaned over. It always amazed him how you could smell the iron from blood, almost taste it on your lips, if you were near enough to a still pumping source.

There was a noise.

When he turned, a Greek priest in his black robes was only three feet away. He had a six foot silver candelabra in his hands.

It didn’t matter.

Arap shot him in the face and the man crumpled with a hole the size of a milk bottle in his upper cheek, from which red blood pumped in an insistent fashion that spoke about the energy of the human body and its fragility too.

It was time to hunt the remaining priests. He set off.

The first one he found was trying to escape through the main door, though it was locked from the outside. He was banging frantically at it as he died. Another was at a window waving, but it was too dark in that upper corridor for anyone to see him. Arap Anach came up right beside that one, his heart beating fast with pleasure, before pulling the trigger.

When he was finished, he pulled the bodies to the main floor of the church in front of the staircase leading up to the chapel of Golgotha. It would be fitting indeed that the corpses of these priests would burn and be sacrificed at the place of the skull.

When he was finished he took out something from his backpack. It was a sealed plastic container with Palestinian scarves, a wiring controller, known to be used by suicide bombers, and a pair of slippers stolen from a well-known Palestinian terror cell organiser. There would be enough DNA on these items to convict the Pope.

It was this that would make the coming conflagration worthwhile. Only indisputable evidence that Palestinians had committed an act of global-scale religious terrorism would be enough to stir things up as was needed.

He put each item around the church to look as if they’d been discarded in haste. One or two of them might be consumed by the coming conflagration, but the most likely outcome was that some would be found in the trawl for evidence. The fire would damage the church and many of its greatest treasures, but it was unlikely to reduce the building to rubble.

There was one more task to do before he started spreading the accelerant. He took the phone out of his pocket and placed it on the carved stone half-altar by the stairs to Golgotha. Then he reached inside his backpack and turned the mobile phone disruptor off. Within seconds he heard phones ringing from the bodies of the dead priests.

He picked his phone up, tapped out the number. It had cost quite a bit to get the number of a leading Hamas player, but all he would have to do to establish another indisputable link to the Palestinians would be to keep the call open for a few seconds. This time he would speak slowly, so he would be understood.

Soon, the blame for all this could not be denied.

The sound of a telephone ringing broke the silence inside the Range Rover. For a moment I thought it was my phone ringing. Then I remembered my ringtone was different.

Xena, who was beside me in the back seat, slid her phone out of her pocket. She said, ‘Halo.’ Then she listened. After a few seconds she cut the call.

‘What was that about,’ said Mark, turning towards her.

‘Just a man,’ said Xena.

‘There’s always a few running after you, isn’t there?’ said Mark.

I looked out into the darkness. It suited my mood.

‘They’re getting more rain here then they’ve had for twenty years,’ said Mark.

I didn’t give a damn. I didn’t care about anything but finding Isabel. And I was wondering why we were really going back to Jerusalem. Sure, there’d been a report that the phone they’d been tracking, which had led us to that farm, had been triangulated to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but all that meant was that someone had passed near the place and had turned the phone on.

This could so easily be a stupid bloody wild goose chase. If it was, should I go back to that farm, ask some questions, look around? Some neighbour might know the person who was living there and where they were from.

I put my hand on the door and gripped it.

‘We made a big mistake,’ said Xena. Her tone was calm, but her hand, which was on her knee, was closing and unclosing, as if she was a little psychotic.

‘What mistake?’ said Mark. He sounded irritated.

‘There are forces at work here that we know nothing about.’ She started banging her forehead with her fist. At first it was a light tapping, but within seconds she was doing it rapidly, fast enough to hurt herself.

‘Stop that,’ said Mark.

I reached over, grabbed her arm. She was strong, wiry. I was lucky to be able to hold her. Her arm slid in my grip.

‘Stop, Xena,’ said Mark.

Suddenly she stopped and turned to look at me. Her eyes were wide, bloodshot, as if she was on something from the psych trolley.

‘You think we’re wasting our time,’ she said.

A mind reader. That was just what I needed.

Mark was half-turned in his seat. The driver moved to the inside lane, as if he was getting ready to pull over. The traffic was busy. The Sabbath was finished now.

‘You mustn’t go there,’ said Xena, looking at me.

‘Go where?’ I said.

‘To the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is not safe for you.’ Her tone became more insistent with each word.

‘Make him listen, Mark.’ She tapped Mark’s shoulder, hard.

His gaze flickered to me. His mouth was half-open, as if he was about to say something.

‘Don’t bother,’ I said, loudly. ‘I’m not listening.’ If Xena wanted me not to go to the Holy Sepulchre, that was exactly where I wanted to go.

Twenty minutes later the driver dropped us at the Jaffa Gate. Xena disappeared immediately into a group of green-clad Israeli soldiers passing by.

Mark just let her go.

‘She’s free to do what she wants,’ he said. There was a wistful look in his eye. Not for the first time I wondered if there was a relationship between them.

‘Let’s do this,’ I said.

My mind was turning over sick images of the basement at that house. Had someone brought Isabel back to Jerusalem to murder her the way they’d murdered Kaiser? A bitter rage flowed inside me at the thought of that. It had been bad luck that we hadn’t got to that farm quick enough.

If someone did that to Isabel I wouldn’t be able to bear it.

We were walking fast. We reached Christian Quarter Road, turned left into it. The narrow street was lined with tourist shops selling carpets, crosses, icons, leather goods, antiques of dubious provenance, blue Hebron glass, silver work, Christian icons and jewellery.

Some of the shops were closed, but most had black-haired proprietors outside staring with the dead-eyed look of salesmen at the end of a rejection-filled day.

Mark was on his phone. I could hear his frustration.