He blinked, almost as if emerging from a trance, then retreated and passed the knife to Simeon. ‘I’m glad you did that, Dr Wilde.’
‘For God’s sake, Ezekiel!’ said Dalton, appalled.
‘I’m not proud of myself, but it had to be done,’ Cross told him. He looked back at the trembling Nina. ‘Now. Where is the fourth angel?’
She still wanted to resist, but knew he had no compunctions about carrying out his threat. ‘The woman…’ she croaked, mouth bone-dry. She struggled to draw saliva, then spoke again. ‘From Revelation — the woman with the moon under her feet…’
‘Chapter twelve, verse one,’ said Cross, nodding. ‘“And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”’
‘I realised what the part about the moon is referring to. The Wilderness of Sin.’
‘Sin?’ Dalton echoed. He had returned to his seat, visibly disturbed by what had just happened. The former politician had been more than willing to order the use of violence by others, but the prospect of actually witnessing it in person had shaken him.
‘A region the Israelites passed through during the Exodus,’ Cross told him.
‘It’s nothing to do with sinfulness,’ continued Nina. ‘Sin was the name of a Semitic deity — one of the gods worshipped by the ancient Jews before they became monotheistic followers of Yahweh. That’s God, if you didn’t know.’
‘Yes, I know. I’m not completely ignorant,’ Dalton growled.
‘Sin was a moon god; what was written in Revelation is sometimes interpreted as a reference to the other gods being trampled underfoot as Yahweh became dominant, but it could literally mean walking over the desert named after him. Now, there’s also a mention of this woman — the Woman of the Apocalypse, as she’s known — going to a place prepared by God.’
‘“And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God”,’ said Cross.
‘Yeah. But I thought about what that might actually mean. It could be that God picked a spot and made it safe for her to stay. Or, more likely, that it was already an important religious site, which at some earlier point had been prepared, sanctified, whatever. Somewhere the Israelites had set up camp during the Exodus. I think that’s what the reference to the twelve stars means — the twelve wells they found as they travelled across the desert.’
The cult leader nodded. ‘That’s a fairly common interpretation.’
‘So the angel is in some sort of temple in this Wilderness of Sin?’ asked Dalton. ‘How hard will that be to find?’
Cross gave him a patronising smile. ‘Quite hard, Mr President. Nobody actually knows where the Wilderness of Sin is.’
‘It’s generally considered to be the region between Elim — the location of the twelve wells — and Mount Sinai, where Moses received the tablets containing the Ten Commandments from God,’ Nina explained. ‘Except nobody knows which mountain that is any more. It’s extremely unlikely that it’s the modern-day Mount Sinai in Egypt, because that location doesn’t fit any of the descriptions of the journey in Exodus or other books of the Torah or the Bible.’
‘So how does that help us?’ Dalton demanded.
‘I think she knows something more, Mr President.’ Cross turned back to Nina, awaiting an answer.
‘It’s only a theory,’ she insisted.
‘A theory you thought was important enough to hide. So tell us.’
She took a deep breath. ‘Okay. There’s a list in the Old Testament of the places the Israelites visited during the Exodus.’
‘The Book of Numbers,’ said Cross.
‘Right. I think there are forty-two stations?’ Another nod. ‘They start out in Egypt, and after forty years in the wilderness end up on the Moab plains, in modern-day Jordan. But the part that caught my attention is the journey from the Wilderness of Sin to a place called Dophkah.’
‘Numbers chapter thirty-three, verse twelve: “And they took their journey out of the Wilderness of Sin, and encamped in Dophkah.”’
‘Dophkah is in the Timna Valley, in southern Israel,’ said Nina. ‘Part of the Arabah desert. It’s an archaeological site — copper’s been mined there since at least the tenth century BC. That gives us a specific location to use as a starting point.’
Cross gestured towards the doors behind the pulpit. ‘Show me.’
The group went into the control room. He brought up a map on the video wall, zooming in on Israel to centre upon the Timna Valley. ‘There’s your starting point, Dr Wilde,’ he said. ‘Now where do we look?’
‘That’s a whole lot of nothing,’ Dalton remarked. Highways ran parallel to Israel’s eastern and western borders, heading to the country’s southern tip at the Red Sea, but between them the map was almost empty.
Cross tapped at a touch pad. The view changed to a satellite image. Features appeared, but they were all naturaclass="underline" rugged desert hills and mountains, their colours a universally arid sandy-brown. ‘Numbers thirty-three eleven tells us that the Israelites came from the Red Sea, so this’ — he swept a hand over the area south of Timna — ‘must be the Wilderness of Sin.’
‘Big area to cover,’ said Simeon. ‘Even if we stick inside the Israeli borders, that’s got to be a hundred square miles of desert.’
‘But it’s there somewhere,’ Cross said to Nina. ‘It’s all in Revelation. The moon is a reference to Sin; the twelve stars tie it to the Exodus. It makes sense. And following your line of thinking about an important religious site, the “place prepared of God” is most likely somewhere that the Israelites set up the Tabernacle. Yes?’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes,’ she replied. The Tabernacle was a portable shrine carried by the Israelites on their journey, containing their holiest treasures, including the Ark of the Covenant. ‘If they stayed at this place for some time, they could have set up a semi-permanent place of worship.’
Dalton took a closer look at the satellite view. ‘Why would anyone stay in that godforsaken hellhole?’
‘Because God gave them what they needed to survive,’ said Cross. ‘He provided water to drink, and manna to eat.’
‘There’s been water there in the past,’ Nina added. She pointed out channels cut into the mountains. ‘And that’s how I know what to look for.’
All eyes turned to her. ‘Well?’ said Dalton impatiently. ‘Tell us!’
‘It’s all there in Revelation,’ she answered. ‘Distorted as usual, coded, but John’s still telling us what he learned in Pergamon. The Woman of the Apocalypse was pursued into the wilderness by a dragon — one of the guises of Satan. God protected her, helped her reach the place prepared for her—’
‘“And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place”,’ Cross cut in.
‘But he also defended her while she was there,’ Nina went on. ‘She was pregnant, and the dragon wanted to devour her child right after it was born. He failed, but sent a flood to kill her in revenge. And I’m sure you’re about to give me the relevant quote,’ she said to Cross.
‘Chapter twelve, verse fifteen,’ he said. ‘But I’ll spare you the full text.’
‘Good. Because it’s the next verse that holds the answer. You can quote that to everyone if you like.’
He frowned, but recited the words. ‘“And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.”’ A long pause, during which Cross and his followers exchanged glances, as if waiting for their own revelations. None came. ‘How does that help us?’ he demanded.