The Moses Stone (42 page)

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Authors: James Becker

Tags: #Mystery, #Thriller, #Suspense, #Adventure

BOOK: The Moses Stone
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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 flashlight downward 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 beam from his flashlight.
“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 flashlight held by one of the figures above swept briefly across his face, and Bronson gave a smile when he saw the half-paralyzed 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 chiling. “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 toward 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
why
I’m called that?”
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. “You will also no doubt be aware that 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, Angela and Bronson stood alone in the dark, listening to the sound of footsteps on the wooden walkway.
75
 
As the footsteps of the three men receded down the tunnel, Bronson pulled on the rest of his clothes. He put his arms around Angela.
“At least we found the Silver Scroll and held it in our hands,” he said to her. “That’s something very few people will ever be able to say. It’s just a shame we had to hand it over to Yacoub, but we had no choice. In the end, it was all for nothing.”
“Maybe,” Angela said, her voice low, “or maybe not.” She didn’t sound quite as disappointed as Bronson had expected.
“What do you mean?”
“The Sicarii claimed to have hidden something else here, something that was just as important to them. Perhaps even more important.”
Bronson whistled. “Of course! The ‘tablets of the temple of Jerusalem.’ But do you know where to look?”
Angela grinned at him in the half-light of the flashlight. “I think so, yes. I’m not finished quite yet. Are you?”
 
Bronson picked up his rucksack and led the way up the staircase. At the top, they stepped around the bodies of Dexter and Hoxton, but the third corpse was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Baverstock?” Bronson wondered aloud.
“Maybe he managed to get away.”
“I doubt it. Yacoub shot the other two without hesitation, so why would he let Baverstock live?” Bronson glanced around the end of the tunnel, then strode across to one side of the platform, where there was a gap between the wood and the wall. He shone his flashlight beam downward. “Right, I can see his body down there. He must have fallen off the walkway when the bullets hit him.”
“I don’t care, Chris. They all got what was coming to them, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over their deaths, not even Tony Baverstock’s. Let’s get out of here.”
 
As Bronson and Angela strode down the walkway toward the entrance to the water tunnel, there was a faint scuffling noise from the end by the cistern. A few moments later Baverstock hauled himself up and onto the walkway. He searched around in the dark for the pistol he’d dropped when he fell, and quickly found it.
One of the bullets fired at him had missed completely; the other had only nicked his shoulder, a wound that had bled quite a lot and stung like hell. When he’d fallen backward off the walkway, he’d decided to play dead, hoping that none of the attackers would think to put another bullet into him.
And it had worked. He was alive and almost fully mobile, and now he had a pistol in his pocket. More importantly, he’d heard every word Angela had said to Bronson about the tablets of the Temple, and he knew exactly what she was talking about. He even knew where they were going to start looking.
Baverstock bent down again and felt around the wooden walkway until he found a flashlight, checked that it worked, then headed off down the water tunnel to the entrance.
 
Angela and Bronson stepped out of the tunnel and emerged into the fresh night air in the middle of the fortress of Har Megiddo. They climbed up the steps and paused for a few moments at the top to catch their breath, then set off toward the remains of the temples.
“If you think about the way the inscription was written,” Angela said, leading the way to the massive circular altar beside the temple ruins, “it suggests that the Sicarii hid both the Silver Scroll and these tablets at the same location, the scroll in the cistern and the tablets in an altar. And when they were here at Har Megiddo, the only altar on the site was the one we’re looking at right now.”
She stopped, reached into her pocket and pulled out the piece of paper she’d been studying that afternoon while Bronson slept beside her in the car. She shone the beam of the flashlight at the writing on it.
“Take another look at the inscription. It said ‘
the tablets of ----- temple of Jerusalem
,’ which logically translates as ‘the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem.’ The next relevant phrase is ‘
----- ----- altar of ----- ----- describes a -----
.’ There are several blanks in that, but I think it probably originally read something like ‘in the altar of stone that describes a circle.’ The next section is a bit easier to guess. We translated that as ‘
----- four stones ----- the south side ----- a width of ----- ----- and height ----- ----- cubit to ----- ----- cavity within
.’ I think that means ‘removing four stones from the south side of a width of some cubits and height of one cubit to expose the cavity within.’ ”
“ ‘Some cubits’?” Bronson asked. “I can see why you think it’s one cubit high, but the width is a bit bloody vague, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but I don’t think it matters. The important thing is that the inscription on the clay tablets claimed there’s a cavity inside this altar, and they got access to it from the south side, by pulling out several stones. So that’s what
we’re
going to do.”
They stepped closer to the altar, using their flashlights to ensure they didn’t trip over anything because the area was treacherous, crisscrossed by low walls and a succession of quite deep square pits whose purpose Bronson could only guess at.
Deciding which part of the altar lay on the “south side” was easy. Bronson simply looked up at the sky, identified the Great Bear star formation and took Angela to the opposite side of the circular structure.
“That’s north over there,” he said, pointing up at the night sky, “so this is the south face of the altar.” He bent down and used his flashlight to look at the stones that formed the side of the structure. “It doesn’t look to me as if any of these have been touched for centuries.” He laughed shortly. “Which they haven’t, of course. So where do we start?”
“The only dimension the inscription provides for the height of the stones the Sicarii removed was one cubit, assuming that my translation of the Aramaic word was right and meant ‘cubit’ rather than ‘cubits.’ ”
“Remind me. How long was a cubit?” Bronson asked.
“Roughly eighteen inches,” Angela said. “But they were removing stones to get access to a cavity inside this altar, and I think they would just have guessed at the size of the opening they created. From the looks of these stones, taking out almost any two of them
would
leave an opening with a vertical height of about eighteen inches, so that’s not much of a clue.”
Bronson looked again at the side of the ancient altar. “Well, I suppose we could just start more or less in the middle and see where that gets us.”
“There’s probably an easier way,” Angela said. “There’s no mortar between the stones, and one of the things I put in your rucksack was a wire coat-hanger. Untwist it and we’ve got a thin strong probe about three feet long. Slide it between the stones and see if you can locate the cavity that way.”
“Brilliant.” Bronson pulled out the hanger and a pair of pliers and began untwisting the steel. In a couple of minutes he’d got the whole thing straight apart from a “T” shape at one end that he could use as a handle.
“Start here,” Angela said, gesturing to a large gap between two of the stones.
Bronson slid the probe into the space, but it penetrated for only about eight or ten inches before meeting a solid object, probably another course of stones behind the outermost ones. He pulled it out and tried again, but with the same result.
“This might take a while,” he said, forcing the probe into another gap, “but it’ll still be a lot quicker than pulling out stones at random.”
After almost ten minutes, he had found no sign of any cavity behind the stones. Then, with a suddenness that surprised him, the improvised probe vanished deeper, much deeper, into one space. He pulled it out and tried again, with the same result. Instead of stopping after perhaps ten inches, the steel rod was penetrating well over two feet.
“There’s definitely a space behind here,” Bronson said. “Come on—let’s start looking.”

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