‘That’s right,’ said Nina. She examined the altar, then turned her attention to the curtain. ‘Okay. If God is going to strike us dead, he’ll do it about… now.’
She parted the veil. Swathes of the material disintegrated like gossamer as her hand brushed it. She cringed in dismay at the damage, but pressed on through.
The last room was square. The only thing in it was a large box, coated in gold.
All three recognised it instantly.
They had found the Ark of the Covenant.
27
‘God,’ whispered Nina, adding: ‘Literally.’
Jared stared open-mouthed. ‘It… it’s the Ark,’ he managed to say. ‘It really is the Ark of the Covenant!’
Eddie whistled a few bars of ‘The Raiders March’. ‘We need our own cool theme tune,’ he said. ‘This is it? The real thing?’ Nina nodded. ‘Bloody hell! This is a massive find — and you weren’t even looking for it!’
‘No, but here it is.’ Awed, Nina circled the relic. It did not quite match the popular image from classical paintings and a certain Steven Spielberg movie, the smaller details differing, but it perfectly fitted the description given in the Biblical Book of Exodus. The main body of the gold-covered chest was a little under four feet long, finely detailed patterns similar to those in the Jewish catacombs and the tunnel outside inscribed into the plating. Rings of the precious metal supported two long poles on each side, covered in gold leaf.
Atop the Ark was the mercy seat. Despite what the name suggested, it was not a place of rest, rather an elaborate lid. A pair of cherubim stood upon it. Two of each of their four wings extended backwards, meeting above the centre of the chest. She peered at one of the cherubim, feeling a thrill of recognition as she saw the face of the angel — rather, the faces, plural. Both creatures had four positioned around their heads, each looking in a different direction: a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man. She had seen the same arrangement on the mechanical guardians of the Garden of Eden. The image had been remembered and passed down over many millennia as a symbol of fearsome, godly power.
She stepped back, almost overcome by excitement at the magnificence of the find — before remembering that it was not why she was there. She reluctantly turned away to cast her light around the rest of the room. ‘There’s nothing else in here?’
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ Jared confirmed.
‘Then the angel must be in the Ark.’ She produced a camera and took several photos for the record, then returned to the chest, suppressing her professional disquiet at what she was about to do. ‘Can you lift the lid?’
Now it was Eddie’s turn to hesitate. ‘You sure? You know what’s supposed to happen if you open this thing. Lightning, firestorms, melting Nazis…’
‘And I thought you weren’t superstitious.’
‘No, but I’m movie-stitious.’
‘We don’t have a choice — the clues to the angel’s location in Revelation pointed here. Cross is already in Israel, and sooner or later he’ll realise he needs to widen his search, so we’ve got to get it out of here before that happens. We can’t leave it and hope that he gets melted when he opens it.’
‘Maybe I should close my eyes,’ Eddie grumbled, but he moved to one end of the chest. Jared gave Nina an uncertain look, but went to the other. The Englishman warily tapped one of the poles before risking touching the lid itself. ‘Not struck dead on the spot. That’s a start.’
‘Okay,’ said Nina, ‘now very carefully, lift it up.’
The two men strained to raise the mercy seat. ‘It’s heavy,’ grunted Jared. ‘The statues must be solid gold.’ They pulled harder.
With a scrape of metal, the Ark of the Covenant began to open.
The Bell 430 continued its monotonous search of the empty desert. Dalton made a show of checking his watch for the third time in as many minutes. ‘How much fuel has this damn thing got left?’ he complained.
‘We’ll go back to Ovda after we check the next valley,’ Cross replied. ‘Then you can get out. I’m sure that’ll be a relief.’ For everyone, he didn’t need to add.
‘Just remember that you wouldn’t even be here without my help,’ Dalton snapped. ‘I was the one who told you Nina Wilde was the best person to find the angels, I got you into Israel without—’
‘There’s someone down there!’ Simeon barked. The ex-politician was instantly forgotten as all eyes went to the windows. ‘I can see a truck.’ He raised his binoculars as Paxton slowed the helicopter. ‘No sign of anybody with it.’
Cross brought up his own field glasses. Sunlight flashed off the windows of a 4x4 parked near the foot of a cliff. He looked up the sheer rock face, spotting the faint line of a rope. It led to a narrow yet tall cleft in the massif, a very thin pass snaking away to…
‘A sinkhole,’ he said, seeing what lay at its end. ‘There’s a sinkhole on that mountain.’
Dalton craned his neck to peer at the landscape below. ‘It can’t be the one we’re looking for. I thought we were checking the valleys, not the hills.’
‘We were,’ said Cross with growing realisation. ‘And we were wrong!’ He snapped the binoculars back to the cliff. Faint sparkles in the rock marked where the intense sunlight glanced off copper deposits. ‘It reflects the sun. “Clothed with the sun” — that’s what John meant! And you’d need the wings of eagles to get up there…’
‘Wilde lied to us?’ said Anna.
‘Maybe — or she hadn’t figured it out when she told us where to look. But she has now. She’s down there!’
‘Wilde’s here?’ said Dalton, disbelieving. ‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s her. I’m certain.’ He turned to the pilot. ‘Paxton, bring us down as close to the sinkhole as possible.’
Dalton became even more unhappy. ‘We’re not going back to refuel?’
‘We won’t need to. The angel’s down there.’
‘And so are Wilde and Chase,’ Simeon reminded him.
‘Not for long,’ said Cross as the helicopter began its descent.
Nina watched with nervous anticipation as the mercy seat was inched upwards.
‘Almost there,’ Eddie told Jared. ‘Move it over on three.’
Jared nodded. The Yorkshireman counted down, then with loud grunts they shuffled sideways to set it down on the stone floor with a heavy clunk.
Nina leaned over the chest to see what was inside. Her flashlight beam found the very items named by legend. A scroll, supposedly the first part of the Torah, written by Moses himself; a wooden staff, which she took to be the rod of Aaron, brother of Moses; an earthenware jar, which had contained some of the manna sent by God to feed the Israelites in the desert… and two flat slabs of stone, inscribed with ancient Hebrew text.
Her heart quickened. She was looking at the tablets holding the original Ten Commandments.
But she forced herself to ignore them for now. There was one more relic inside the Ark.
The fourth angel.
It was of the same design as the other two she had seen, a dense ceramic body shrouded by metallic wings. The head of this figure was that of a man, his brow creased in stern warning. She carefully lifted it out, feeling the weight of the deadly meteoric material trapped in its core. ‘That’s what you’re looking for?’ Jared asked.
Nina nodded. ‘The last angel — the last harbinger of the apocalypse, if you believe Cross. But we’ve beaten him to it. Whatever he had planned, he can’t go ahead with it without this.’
‘Unless he decides, “You know what? Bollocks to it, I’m going to do it anyway”,’ Eddie said grimly. ‘He’s still got one angel he can release somewhere.’