'Right. The name of the place is Megiddo, and it's normally prefixed by either "tel", meaning "mound", or more commonly "har" or "hill". It's not too big a jump to see how the name "Har Megiddo" could have been corrupted over the years into "Armageddon". Megiddo was one of the oldest and most important cities in this country, and the plain below it was the site of the first ever recorded pitched battle. In fact, there've been dozens of battles – over thirty in all, I think – at that location, and three "Battles of Megiddo". The last one took place in 1918 between British forces and troops of the Ottoman Empire. But the most famous was the first one, in the fifteenth century BC, between Egyptian forces under the Pharaoh Thutmose III and a Canaanite army led by the King of Kadesh, who'd joined forces with the ruler of Megiddo. Kadesh was in what's now Syria, not far from the modern city of Hims and, like Megiddo, it was an important fortified town. We know so much about this battle because a record of what happened was carved into the walls of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Egypt.'
'So it was the site of the first battle in recorded history, and will also be where the last one takes place?'
'If you believe what it says in the Book of Revelation, yes. According to that source, Har Megiddo, or Armageddon, will be the site of the "Battle of the end of days", the ultimate contest between the forces of good and evil. It really is the place at the end of the world.'
66
Dexter swung the wheel of the hired Fiat to the right and accelerated along the street that ran behind the hotel in Giv'at Sha'ul where, according to one of Hoxton's contacts in Jerusalem, Angela Lewis and Chris Bronson had taken two rooms.
In the passenger seat beside him, Hoxton was carefully feeding nine-millimetre Parabellum shells into the magazine of a Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic pistol. On the floor in front of him, tucked out of sight, was another pistol – an old but serviceable Walther P38 – that he'd already checked and loaded.
Two days earlier, he'd met with a former Israeli Army officer on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. The price the man had demanded for the weapons and ammunition – he'd bought three pistols from him – was, Hoxton knew, nothing short of extortionate, but the Israeli was the only person he knew in the country who could supply what he wanted and, just as important, not ask any questions.
'Stop somewhere here,' Hoxton ordered.
Dexter found a vacant space on the right-hand side of the road and parked the car in the early-morning sunshine.
'Their hotel's just around the corner,' Hoxton said, handing over the Walther.
'I'm not that good with guns,' Dexter muttered, looking down at the blued steel of the pistol in his hand. 'Do I really have to take this?'
'Damn right you do. I've come too far to let this pair beat me now. We're going to find the Silver Scroll, and the only way to guarantee we can do that is to grab all the information – photographs, translations, whatever – the two of them have got. If we have to kill Bronson and the woman to get their stuff, than that's what we'll do.'
Dexter still looked unhappy.
'It's easy,' Hoxton said. 'You just point the pistol and pull the trigger. We'll kill Bronson first – he's the most dangerous – and Angela Lewis will be a lot more cooperative if she's just watched her former husband die.'
The two men got out of the car, both tucking the weapons into the waistbands of their trousers, under their jackets. They walked around the corner, then down the street to the hotel, and straight in through the lobby.
67
'So where is Megiddo? I presume we'll be going there.'
'Oh, we'll certainly be going there. It's in northern Israel, on the Plain of Esdraelon overlooking the Jezreel Valley.'
Angela clicked the touchpad on her laptop and brought up a detailed map of Israel.
'This is Esdraelon,' she said, indicating an area close to the northern frontier of the country. 'The Jezreel Valley is shaped a bit like a triangle lying on its side, with the point at the Mediterranean coast and the base paralleling the River Jordan, just here. All that area was once under water. In fact, it was the waterway that linked the inland body of water that's now called the Dead Sea with the Mediterranean. About two million years ago, tectonic shift caused the land lying between the Great Rift Valley in Africa and this end of the Mediterranean to rise, and the waterway turned into dry land. Once the Dead Sea no longer had an outlet, its salinity started to increase, with the result we see today.'
'So what's at Megiddo? A ruined castle or something?'
'More or less. The point about Megiddo was that it had enormous strategic importance. In ancient times there was a major trade and military route known in Latin as the Via Maris or "Road of the Sea" and as Derekh HaYam in Hebrew. This ran from Egypt and up the flat land beside the Mediterranean to Damascus and Mesopotamia. Now, whoever occupied Megiddo controlled the section of this route that was known as the Nahal Iron – the word nahal means a dry river bed – and hence could control all the traffic along the route itself.
'Because of its location, Megiddo is one of the oldest known inhabited places in this part of the world. In fact, in any part of the world. The first settlement there dates from around 7000 BC – over nine thousand years ago – and it was finally abandoned in the fifth century BC, so the site was continually occupied for about six thousand five hundred years.'
'So when the Sicarii went there – assuming you're correct – the place would already have been a ruin?'
'Oh, yes,' Angela agreed. 'The site would have been deserted for well over half a millennium by that time.'
'And you think that could be the place referred to in the inscriptions? I mean, you now think it's more likely than Hezekiah's Tunnel or somewhere on the Temple Mount?'
'Yes, I do.' Angela looked apologetic. 'I suppose with hindsight I should have thought about it a bit more, and I should certainly have checked on what had been done in Hezekiah's Tunnel in the past. And – as you pointed out – with all the activity on and inside the Temple Mount over the years, the chances of anything like the Silver Scroll remaining undiscovered there were pretty slim.'
'So what about Megiddo, then? Has that had scores of archaeologists poring over it as well?' Bronson sounded uncertain.
'Oddly enough, no. It has been excavated, of course, but not as often, nor as exhaustively, as you might expect, given its history. Virtually nobody dug there at all until 1903, when a man named Gottlieb Schumacher led an expedition, funded by the German Society for Oriental Research. Twenty years later John D. Rockefeller financed an expedition by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, and that continued until the start of the Second World War.'
'Hang on, that's a dig lasting sixteen years,' Bronson pointed out. 'They must have pretty much covered the whole site.'
'It was a long expedition, true, but Megiddo is simply huge. The city mound itself covers about fifteen acres, and most archaeological digs tend to be focused in one fairly small area and are vertical rather than horizontal. They're usually interested in digging down through the different layers that represent the various civilizations that have occupied the site, and that's certainly what the Chicago team did.
'After that, not too much happened at Megiddo. An Israeli archaeologist named Yigael Yadin did a bit of work there in the 1960s, and since then there have been excavations on the site every other year, funded by the Megiddo Expedition based at the university here in Tel Aviv.'
'That still sounds like quite a lot of activity,' Bronson said doubtfully.