Farooq had waited until just after one in the morning before he and his men had approached the Western Wall Heritage building. He knew that was taking a chance, because they were more likely to be seen at that time of night by residents returning home. But they were only going to get one chance, one night during which they could explore the underground labyrinth, because as soon as their intrusion had been detected, security would be put in place and after that the only way back in would be to use considerable violence. So the earlier they could get inside, the better.
Part-way along the tunnel, the light from the torch Farooq was holding glinted on a series of vertical black bars, and he widened the focus of the torch to show the entire structure. It was a heavy metal gate secured not with a lock into the frame but with two substantial heavy-duty padlocks, one at each end of a thick horizontal steel bar.
He bent forward and inspected the padlock at one end of the bar. It was a high-quality unit, but like every lock ever made it had a weakness, and his visual inspection quickly revealed what that was. The hasp was thick stainless steel, which would have been difficult to either cut through with a hacksaw or sever using a set of bolt-croppers. But the metal plate to which it was attached was much less substantial.
‘Mahmoud, use the croppers and cut here and here,’ he instructed, pointing to the metal above and below the hasp of the padlock.
The man he’d addressed extracted a set of heavy-duty bolt-croppers from the canvas bag he was carrying and closed the jaws of the tool around the metal, then steadily squeezed the ends of the handles together, his face tensing with effort.
After a few seconds there was a sharp crack as the croppers did their work. Immediately, Mahmoud opened the jaws of the tool and closed them over the top of the steel plate. He pressed the handles together, and again there was another cracking noise as the jaws snapped together, having severed the metal. The section of the plate that he’d cut out tumbled to the floor.
‘Do the same again at the other end of the bar,’ Farooq instructed, then pulled the padlock towards him.
It didn’t come free, and when he shone his torch at the end of the metal bar he realized that there was just enough left of the circle of steel to hold the hasp of the padlock in position.
‘Hand me a pry bar,’ he ordered, and the other man standing beside him reached down and removed the tool from Mahmoud’s bag.
Farooq inserted the tip of the steel bar behind the hasp of the padlock and pressed sharply down on the other end of the tool. The padlock was immediately freed from the steel embrace of the door frame and tumbled down to land with a thud by Farooq’s feet.
Moments later, Mahmoud completed the second cut on the frame at the other end of the bar, pulled the padlock out of position and then lifted away the steel bar from in front of the metal gate.
Farooq reached out, grasped the steel bar on one side of the gate and pulled it open, the hinges protesting with loud squeals. It sounded as though that particular entrance hadn’t been used in a very long time. Behind it was what looked like a normal wooden door, and for a moment Farooq wondered if they would have to pick the lock or break it down, a noisy option that he really wanted to avoid. But when he reached out and turned the handle, the door opened, though not without a certain amount of shoving to get the aperture wide enough to step through.
Beyond, another void beckoned — even blacker, if that were possible, than the unlit tunnel. Farooq aimed the beam of his torch through the doorway, then led the way inside.
When Farooq switched off the torch for a moment, the darkness was impenetrable, though as their eyes adjusted a faint bluish glow became evident, a glow that moved very slightly as he turned to look at it. After a second, he realized that it was the barely luminous numbers on the face of the analogue watch Mahmoud was wearing on his wrist.
Farooq slid the small torch into his pocket and took out a much larger one with a long aluminium barrel and pressed the button to turn it on. He swung the beam around them in a semicircular arc so that they could see what lay to their front, and then turned round to check the wall behind them.
The massive stones of the inner wall extended in a more or less straight line behind them in both directions, while in front the ground was lumpy and uneven, a mixture of dark earth and protruding rock, presumably the bedrock upon which the Temple Mount had been built. A short distance in front of them, another wall, formed from equally substantial blocks of cut and dressed stone, paralleled the structure to their rear, though this was nothing like as long.
Farooq took a printed copy of the Warren map from his pocket, unfolded it and studied the shapes and dimensions of the structures the English army officer had identified well over a century earlier.
‘I think we’re somewhere near Warren’s Gate,’ he said, his voice seeming unnaturally loud in the silence of the subterranean chamber. ‘If so,’ he went on, ‘that wall right in front of us’ — he moved the beam of the torch left and right over the ancient greyish stones — ‘must be the perimeter wall around the Foundation Stone. And that means the Qubbat as-Sakhra, what the infidels refer to as the Dome of the Rock, is almost directly above us. It seems that we have entered the underworld of the Haram Ash-Sharif almost exactly where we had planned.’
Farooq lowered the beam of his torch slightly, illuminating the rocky and broken ground directly in front of them, and led the way over to the wall.
‘You two go around it to the right,’ he instructed, ‘and I’ll go left. Remember what I told you: if you see any kind of carving or inscription, especially if it’s enclosed in a border like the one in the photographs from the underground temple in Iraq, take several photographs of it and remember its position, because I will want to see it as well. We are not interested in anything painted on the wall, only carvings, and not just initials or individual letters. The key we are seeking will almost certainly be two or more words.’
The three men separated, the other two switching on their own torches as they walked away, and began working their way along the wall.
Farooq knew the history of the Noble Sanctuary as well as any Muslim — it was, after all, the third most holy Muslim shrine after Mecca and Medina — and he was supremely conscious, not just of his close proximity to the Qubbat as-Sakhra, but also to the Foundation Stone itself, the last place on earth that the prophet Muhammad trod after his Night Journey and immediately before he ascended to heaven.
He was also aware — and this produced an entirely different emotion — of the tens of thousands of tons of stone and bricks and masonry and wood and other materials that lay above them, a colossal weight that was supported, at least in part, by the wall that he was now inspecting, a wall that looked substantially less impressive in the light of that knowledge. Farooq put the thought out of his mind and concentrated on the search at hand.
He reached the corner without having seen anything of interest, the ancient stones appearing largely featureless apart from the marks made by the nameless masons who had dressed them two millennia earlier. He shone his torch ahead of him and immediately saw a potential problem. Close to the wall were two oblong stone structures that he guessed had been referred to by Warren as Cohain’s Mikva. Those were not the problem, and he would examine them as part of his search, but directly behind them was another wall, a structure that abutted the wall around the Foundation Stone, and which extended up to the north.