“Bloody hell!” It was Ned and Tom, kicking at the chests. Ned hurled one against the stone wall, a great crash turning it into a spray of splinters. “There’s nothing here! It’s all been robbed!” Robbed, retrieved, or removed. If there had ever been treasure here—and I suspected there had been—it was long gone: taken by the Templars to Europe, perhaps, or hidden elsewhere when their leaders went to the stake. Maybe it had gone missing since the Jews were enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar.
“Silence, you fools!” Farhi pleaded. “Do you have to break things t h e
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so Muslim guards can hear? This Temple Mount is a sieve of caves and passages!” He turned on Tentwhistle. “Are English sailors’ brains of oak, too?”
The lieutenant flushed.
“What do the walls say?” I asked, looking at the curious characters.
No one answered, because not even Farhi knew. But then Miriam, who’d been counting, pointed at a small ledge where walls and dome joined. There were sconces sculpted out of the stone, as if to hold candles or oil lamps.
“Farhi, count them,” she said.
The mutilated banker did so. “Seventy-two,” he said slowly. “Like the seventy-two names of God.”
Jericho went closer. “There’s oil dripping into them,” he said with wonder. “How could that be, after so many years?”
“It’s a mechanism triggered by the door,” Miriam suggested.
“We’re to light them,” I said with sudden conviction. “Light them to understand.” This was Templar magic, I guessed, some way to illuminate the mystery we’d discovered. And so Jericho lit a scrap of trunk wood with the wick of his lantern, and touched the oil in the nearest sconce. It lit, and then a tendril of flame moved along an oily channel to light the next one.
One by one they flared to life, igniting in a chain around the circle of the dome, until what had been dim was now a place pulsing with light and shadow. Nor was this all. The dome had stone ribs reaching upward to its apex, I saw, and in each rib was a groove. Now these grooves began to glow from the heat or light below, an eerie purple color similar to what I’d seen in electrical experiments with vacuumed tubes of glass.
“Lucifer’s den,” Little Tom breathed.
At the dome’s highest point, a sunlike orb I thought had been merely gilded began to glow as well. And from it issued a beam of purple light, like the gleam I’d conjured from electricity at Christmas, which fell straight back down to the pedestal in the room’s center.
Where a book or scroll might have been kept, to be read.
Jericho and Miriam were crossing themselves.
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There was a hole in the pedestal’s center, I saw, which would have been blocked had a book or scroll rested there. Without them, the light from above could shine through. . . .
And then there was a grinding squeal, like a rusted wheel turning.
The sailors stopped and listened. I looked at the ceiling for signs of collapse.
“It’s the Black Virgin!” Ensign Potts shouted from the stairs leading back into the Templar meeting room. “She’s turning!”
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We ran back upstairs to the statue as if to witness a miracle. The arm that had been immobile before was now pivoting, the Black Madonna turning with it, and a door similar to one behind the White Madonna was opening. When the statue stopped, she seemed to be pointing to the newly opened door.
“By the saints,” Ned declared. “It’s got to be the treasure!” Potts had his pistol out and ducked in first, climbing a steep, winding passageway.
“Wait!” I cried. If the weird display of light had somehow triggered this opening, it was only because the book was missing from the pedestal, allowing the beam to penetrate that hole. So was the pedestal hole some kind of key that led to more treasure—or a Templar alarm, set off when the book was gone? “We don’t know what this means!” But all four sailors were charging up the passageway, and Jericho and I reluctantly followed, Miriam and Farhi bringing up the rear.
The stairway’s rough-hewn walls reminded me of the workmanship of the water tunnel from the Pool of Siloam: it was old, far older than the Templars. Did it date from Solomon’s time, or even Abraham’s?
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The tunnel climbed, spiraling, and then it ended at a stone slab with a great iron ring in it. “Pull, Ned!” Tentwhistle commanded. “Pull like the devil and let’s finish this business! It’s almost dawn!” The sailor did so, and as he slowly hauled the portal open I noticed the far side of the door was uneven rock. This latest door would seem, from its other side, to merely be part of the wall of a cave. Had people above ever known this passage existed?
“Where the bloody hell are we?” Potts asked.
There was a wider cave ahead, and light. “I’m guessing we’ve come out in the cave under the holy rock itself,” I said with a whisper.
“We’re right under Kubbet es-Sakhra, the sacred stone, root of the world, and the Dome of the Rock.”
“Right under what once was Solomon’s Temple,” Farhi said excit-edly, gasping from exertion at the tail of our party. “Where Temple treasures might have been kept, or even the ark itself . . .”
“Right where any guardians of the mosque can hear intruders below,” Jericho warned. This was all going too fast.
“You mean the Muslims . . .”
The seamen weren’t waiting. “Treasure, boys!” Ned and his comrades pushed into the corridor. Then there was an Arabic cry and a shot and poor Pott’s head exploded.
One moment the ensign was dragging me with him in mad enthusiasm, and the next his brains sprayed us all. He dropped like a puppet with cut strings. Gun smoke filled the narrow passage with its familiar stink. “Get down!” I shouted, and we dropped.
Then a roar of gunfire and bullets pinged madly around us.
“Allah akbar!” God is great! The Muslims had heard us blundering into their most sacred precincts and had called their janissary guard!
We’d stirred up a hornet’s nest, all right. Through the smoke I could see a cluster of men reloading.
So I fired, and there was a scream in response. Tentwhistle’s pistol went off, too, hitting another, and now it was the janissaries’ turn to tumble to cover.
“Retreat!” I shouted. “Hurry, by God! Back through that door!” Yet even as we began to swing it shut, the janissaries charged and a t h e
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dozen Muslim hands grasped the rim from the other side. Ned gave a great cry and cleaved at some with his cutlass, severing fingers, but more guns went off and Little Tom took a ball in the arm. He bucked backward, cursing. The door was inexorably being pushed open, so Ned roared like a bear and waded into them, chopping like a dervish until the arms disappeared. Then he slammed it shut, taking one of our pry bars to jam it temporarily closed until they could ram it open.
We ran back down the twisting stairway to the empty Templar room.
Behind and above, we could hear the heavy slam of a hammer as the Muslims beat on the stone door.
If they caught us, they’d butcher us for sacrilege.
Only through the archway might we have a chance. In the passage back to the spring, Farhi had said, one man could block an army. We sprinted through the corridor with its frieze of skulls to the hole we’d excavated just an hour before. I’d buy time while the others fled, using cutlass and rifle. What a bloody mess!
Yet something had changed. The opening we’d made through the stone archway had shrunken. The stones were somehow reassembling themselves and the hole was too small to crawl through. What magic was this?
“Au revoir, Monsieur Gage!” a familiar voice called through the shrunken hole. Once again, it was the voice of the so-called customs inspector who’d tried to rob me in France, and who I’d fought in Jerusalem when his henchmen accosted Miriam. This time he was calling through what was now the space of a single block! So there was no magic after all, just Silano’s perfidy. The final stone slid back into place in our faces, sealing us in. The French must have followed us as I feared, broken Jericho’s lock on the grating at the Pool of Siloam, and heard our cries when we found no treasure. Then they’d started to brick up our escape route with the bag of mortar Big Ned had carried.