The Sword of the Templars (23 page)

“Look at the edge of the pool—those dark stains on the limestone walls.”

“High tide,” said Holliday, brightening suddenly. “This is a tidal pool.”

“Which means it must have an outflow somewhere; the runoff from that waterfall has to empty somehow,” nodded Wanounou.

“Look,” said Peggy, pointing.

They turned. Behind them, at the mouth of the passageway leading to the pool, they could see the faint, wandering beams of multiple flashlights playing over the rock walls.

“Come on,” whispered Holliday urgently.

They made their way around the narrow shelf between the edge of the water and the wall of the cavern, looking for the pool’s outlet. A third of the way around they found it: a narrow tunnel in the stone only a few feet wide, barely visible in the shadows of the jutting, smooth rock walls. The tide was clearly low, and the flow seemed to be only about knee-high, if the high-water mark on the wall of the cavern was any indication.

“Quick!” Holliday urged, looking over his shoulder. The flashlight beams behind them were getting brighter as their pursuers approached. They had to get into the relative safety of the outlet tunnel before Kellerman’s men reached the cave.

“What if it gets deeper?” Wanounou asked nervously. “I told you, I can’t swim.”

“I’ll protect you.” Peggy grinned. She put her arm around the professor’s waist, and they stepped into the water with Holliday right behind, holding the alabaster jar.

The swift undertow took all three of them by surprise, sweeping them off their feet and tumbling them into the lake’s narrow outlet. Wanounou yelled, but the sound was swallowed up as he drank in a mouthful of the freezing water and gagged. He began flapping his arms and struggling in the water, but Peggy managed to get his head above the surface, her arm now crooked, elbow under his chin, as they hurtled along the underground river.

“You’re okay! You’re okay!”

Peggy turned her head, looking for Doc in the almost absolute darkness, then spotted the sweeping beam of his flashlight a few yards behind, swinging wildly back and forth as the speeding current dragged him along.

Suddenly Peggy felt something hard slam against her back and realized that it was the stone bottom of the stream. It was getting shallower, not deeper. She began to call out a warning to Holliday, but before she could speak the world dropped out from beneath her, and then she and Wanounou were sliding down a long curving tube, the rock slippery with the same sort of microbial muck she’d felt under her feet when she swam out to the island in the pool.

She and Wanounou clutched each other desperately as the tube descended, slamming them back and forth with every twist and turn, the rush of water from the pool following the course it had carved through the rock for a million years. Then, abruptly, there was daylight, and just as abruptly they were thrown out into the air as the tube emptied into another cave, this one with an entrance open to the sea.

They dropped six or seven feet, straight down into the ocean, and once more Wanounou was struggling as he breathed in water, choking and flailing. Again Peggy dragged him to the surface as she oriented herself, then pointed him toward a narrow shelf of beach a few yards away. He slapped the water with both hands, doing a frenzied version of the dog paddle.

After three steps she felt the bottom beneath her feet. Wanounou reached safety first and slumped down onto the sand. There was a loud splash behind her, and Peggy turned as Doc came flying out of the water’s yawning exit point on the sidewall of the cave and plummeted into the water. A few seconds later he surfaced, the alabaster jar still clutched under one arm. Peggy gave him a hand, and they staggered to the shore and dropped down on the little beach.

Finally they had a moment to get their bearings.

“I lost the hammer,” said Peggy, pushing hair out of her eyes and getting to her feet. “Where the hell are we?” Beside her, Wanounou, gasping and retching, was still coughing out the last of the water from his lungs.

Holliday looked around the chamber. It was a typical sea cave, narrow and relatively shallow, perhaps fifty feet across and a hundred feet deep, the far end sloping up into a sandy beach with darker limestone chert pebbles strewn around. The walls arched steeply up to a rotted stone ceiling, and there was sea salt encrusted here and there, left by the rising and falling tides. At the sea end of the cave the Mediterranean glowed like sapphire in the early-afternoon sun.

There was evidence of recent occupation everywhere: rusting fifty-gallon drums lined up at the far end of the cave beyond the high-tide line, a coil of rope, several broken crates, and something that looked like a portable air compressor of some kind.

Tethered to a roughly hewn pier carved out of the ancient rock was what appeared to be a perfectly sea-worthy RIB—a rigid-inflatable boat, military grade, painted in shades of dull gray and brown, with a shield and bat wing emblem on the prow. It was about fourteen feet long with a center-mounted console and some kind of inboard drive.

“Is that our ride?” Peggy asked.

“It is if I can get it started,” answered Holliday. He handed Peggy the alabaster vase, then crossed the little strip of beach and climbed up onto the stone pier. He walked along it to the point where the boat was tethered. The boat was neatly attached to a very old-looking iron ring with a round turn and two half hitches, a sailor’s knot that even a hurricane couldn’t undo.

Holliday dropped down into the boat and made his way to the console. It looked simple enough: five gauges, all in Hebrew, a key-slot ignition, a starter button, a throttle lever, and a padded plastic wheel for steering.

There was a small panel underneath the wheel. Holliday reached down, opened it, and pulled out a handful of wires. There was a green one, a yellow, and a red. Presumably the red was the hot wire, and the green was the crank.

He stripped off the insulation on both and touched them to each other. All the gauges lit up. Leaving the two wires connected, he hit the starter button, and the engine fired instantly.

“Your chariot awaits,” said Holliday.

Peggy untied the boat, and she and Wanounou climbed down into it. Holliday eased them away from the pier, then spun the wheel, turning the small boat in a tight circle until the bow was facing toward the cave exit and the open sea.

“Which one of these gauges is fuel?” Holliday asked.

“That one,” answered Wanounou, pointing. “According to it we’ve got half a tank.”

“How far is Haifa?” Holliday asked.

“Bat Galim is about seven miles or so. The harbor is a little farther around the headland,” said Wanounou.

“Then let’s get the hell out of Dodge,” said Holliday, and he pulled back on the throttle.

22

The inflatable made the short trip up the coast in a little less than half an hour, with Wanounou turning several shades of green in the process. Not only wasn’t he a swimmer, he wasn’t much of a sailor either.

Rather than get into a tangle of bureaucracy by trying to return the boat to its rightful owners Holliday simply drove it up onto the beach in front of the Méridien Hotel and left it there.

Getting back to Jerusalem with the alabaster vase turned out to be just as simple. At the hotel they bartered with a taxi driver named Bashir for a two hundred shekel ride back to the Land Cruiser, which they found exactly where they’d left it, apparently unharmed and untouched. There was no sign of any other vehicle except for a fresh set of tread marks in the soft dirt by the side of the road. A good-sized truck or SUV, from the width of the tires.

As far as Holliday could tell no one followed them on their return to Jerusalem. After a completely uneventful journey on the busy highway they arrived back at the university shortly after five o’clock that afternoon. They went to Wanounou’s lab in the basement of the Archaeology Building.

The lab was a long, narrow, windowless room approximately twenty feet wide and the length of an Olympic swimming pool. The length of one entire wall was taken up with floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units, and the opposite wall was a collection of benches, computer work stations, and equipment pods that ranged from spectroscopes and comparison microscopes to laser saws, portable X-ray machines and megasonic cleaning tanks.

The center of the room, from one end to the other, was taken up by a long row of light-box tables for sorting, examining, and preliminary sorting of artifacts. On the tables were trays of tools, solvents, acids, and adhesives to aid in conservation, ongoing maintenance, and reconstruction of individual finds.

It was midsummer, and the laboratory was empty except for Peggy, Holliday, and the professor; the rest of the faculty and most of the grad students were either in the field or on holiday.

Wanounou took the vase to one of the light-box tables and switched it on. The table glowed bright white. He sat down on a stool, with Peggy and Holliday on either side. He took a pair of disposable gloves out of a pop-up box, then selected a long-bladed X-Acto knife from one of the trays. He weighed the jar on a small digital scale and noted the weight in a notebook he’d taken from a drawer in the table. That done, he pulled over an illuminated fluorescent magnifier and examined the jar more closely.

“Sealed with some sort of mastic,” said Wanounou.

“Mastic?” Peggy asked.

“A resin gum. They used it for medicinal purposes in the Middle Ages, but they also used it as a sealant, like a gummy varnish. It dries that yellowy color and gets very brittle.”

“Isn’t there some kind of solvent?” Holliday said, eyeing the X-Acto knife.

“Sure, there’s even some pretty inert ones, but it’s safer to chip it off; less likely to damage whatever’s inside.”

Using the scalpel-bladed knife, Wanounou scored the surface of the sealant covering the ceramic stopper of the jar, working the gouge deeper and deeper until after about ten minutes’ patient work the knife slipped into the crack between the stopper and the vase itself.

As Peggy and Holliday watched, Wanounou put the knife down, chose a pair of long-nosed, locking surgical forceps, and gently lifted the lid off the vase. He set the lid aside and tilted the vase so the light from the magnifying lamp shone into it.

“Anything inside?” Peggy asked.

“Something.”

“What?”

“Hold on.”

The professor picked up the forceps again and eased them down into the neck of the vase. Concentrating hard, he worked the forceps around for a moment, then withdrew them.

“Wrong tool,” he said. He rummaged around in the tray and found what he was looking for. He held it up.

“Looks like something I saw at my gynecologist’s,” said Peggy uncomfortably. They looked like the surgical version of cooking tongs with blades that locked like vise grips.

“Close,” answered Wanounou. He teased the device down into the vase. “They’re obstetrical forceps for delivery babies.” He used his free hand to lock the smooth steel blades of the forceps in place and then gestured to Holliday. “Hold the vase steady.”

Holliday did as he was told, leaning forward and gripping the vase with both hands. With slow, agonizing care Wanounou slipped the forceps out of the vase, their captured prey in tow.

“It’s a boy,” said Peggy, staring. “Either that or a piece of the muffler from my old Ford Escort.”

“It’s a scroll,” said Wanounou, excitement in his voice.

“I don’t want to say what it looks like,” said Holliday.

“What he means,” said Peggy drily, “is that it looks like a big dookie.”

She was right. The object caught in the locked rounded blades of the forceps was ten inches long, roughly circular, lumpy, dark in color, and with a crusty surface.

“Corrosion,” explained Wanounou. “Silver tarnish taken to its logical conclusion.”

“How do you get it off?” Peggy asked.

“Carefully,” said the professor. “First an electrolytic bath, then run some current through it, and after that give it a few minutes in the megasonic cleaner to shake off anything left.”

“After that?” Peggy asked. “Will you be able to unroll it?”

“Doubtful,” said Wanounou. “It would probably crumble.” He shook his head. “After it’s been cleaned I’ll put the scroll into the laser saw and cut it into strips. If there’s corrosion within the scroll I’ll have to put each strip into the electrolytic bath again. Then I’ll x-ray the strips, photograph them, put them between sheets of inert plastic, and then maybe you can read what’s on it—if anything.”

“So what’s the next step?” Holliday said.

“Go back to your hotel. Have dinner in the old city. Go to a place called Amigo Emil. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall place in the El Khanka Street Bazaar. Tell Emil I sent you. Call me in the morning, and I might have something for you to see. I’ll probably be at this all night.”

“We could hang around,” said Peggy.

“No, we couldn’t,” said Holliday firmly. “Leave the man alone to do his job.”

“Sure you don’t want us to stay?” Peggy said.

“Go, let me work,” said Wanounou. “You’d be bored stiff in half an hour if you stuck around.” He grinned. “Buy a book about the Copper Scroll at the university book store on your way out. There’s lots of them. Educate yourself.”

“All right,” she said.

“Come on,” said Holliday, heading for the door. Peggy followed, but not before she leaned over and gave the startled professor a quick peck on the cheek.

The Old City of Jerusalem is an ancient walled district occupying an area of slightly less than half a square mile in the southwestern corner of the modern city. Since the mid-1800s it has been divided into four distinct zones: the Christian Quarter in the northwest, the Muslim Quarter in the northeast, the Jewish Quarter in the southeast, and the Armenian Quarter, the smallest of the four areas occupying a sliver of territory in the southwest corner.

During the British Mandate period of the 1920s a man with Walt Disney-like foresight named Sir Ronald Storrs, the newly installed governor of the city, decreed that all construction within the city, new and old, would use locally quarried “Mezzah,” or Jerusalem stone. Not only did it provide needed jobs for an almost bankrupt city, it also gave the city a uniform look and prevented the Old City from being radically altered over the years. Conservationists, town planners, and tour guides still praise his name.