Angela sounded resigned more than anything as they continued walking towards the hotel. It wasn’t the first time Bronson had inflicted casualties on hostile forces during their searches for relics around the globe, and while she obviously didn’t condone what he’d done, she also wouldn’t condemn him: sometimes the only way to combat force was to use even greater force.
‘Definitely not,’ he replied. ‘The last thing we should do is leave in a hurry because that might attract unwelcome official attention. Anyway, I think we will be heading somewhere else quite soon, but for a different reason. Because of what was down there, under the Temple Mount.’
‘You mean you found something?’
‘Well, more didn’t find, really. The three men had broken open one of the interior gateways and had gone into the tunnels under the Mount, but when they came back, they saw me and that’s when the shooting started. Obviously you’d called the police right after that, which is why they pushed off after I’d killed that man. The problem I had was that I couldn’t do a proper search of the chamber they’d opened up because there simply wasn’t time. I heard the police sirens and I knew I had to get out almost immediately. But I heard the three of them talking as they headed back towards the main tunnel, and I’m pretty certain that they’d found nothing at all. Certainly not an inscription that could have been this mysterious key.’
‘But you don’t speak Arabic,’ Angela pointed out, ‘so how can you be sure?’
‘I can’t be sure, obviously, but they sounded both resigned and irritated, as if they’d been on a wild-goose chase. I had a very quick look inside the chamber they’d been exploring just before I left the area, and as far as I could see, all the walls were completely devoid of markings of any sort. And, with hindsight, if you look at the history of the Temple Mount, it’s difficult to see how anybody would have been able to get inside it, or at least get inside the areas under the old Jewish Temple, to leave a clue or a key.’
‘What do you mean?’ Angela asked.
‘You told me that the Temple Mount was built by Herod in the first century,’ Bronson replied. ‘And as far as we know, what he did was build retaining walls around the circumference of the Mount and supporting walls at various points on top of the existing hill, and he then laid a flat surface of stone over the top of all that, a level surface on which he was able to reconstruct and enlarge the temple. So around what’s known as the Foundation Stone, for example, he built a wall that enclosed the stone completely and once he put the level stonework on top of the walls, the only possible way in to that space would have been by digging down from inside the temple itself or worming your way in from the side and then cutting a hole in that perimeter wall.’
‘Okay, I see where you’re going with that,’ Angela said, nodding.
‘So over one millennium later, in the early Middle Ages, realistically there would have been no way that anybody could have got into these chambers undetected. In fact, it’s worth saying that the chambers within the Temple Mount, the various rooms that Charles Warren explored when he did his excavations at the end of the nineteenth century, in most cases weren’t really rooms at all, but just the voids left between Herod’s supporting walls, spaces basically filled up with earth and rubbish.’
At that moment, they reached the hotel, where every room apart from the reception hall was in darkness, and Bronson used his key to open the front door so they could go inside. To avoid waking anybody, people who might possibly be asked questions by the Jerusalem police at a later date, they stopped talking until they were inside their bedroom. And even then, they both made a conscious effort to keep their voices low.
‘So what you’re saying is that we’re in the wrong place altogether,’ Angela said, and sighed heavily. ‘We’ve picked the wrong “lost temple”, and we’ve just been wasting our time here.’
42
In another hotel room not that far away from the one occupied by Bronson and Angela, another debrief — or quite literally and more accurately a post-mortem — was being carried out.
‘So who was this man?’ Khaled demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ Farooq replied. ‘We saw him in the light from our torches for less than a second, and Salim immediately fired at him. That was a mistake, I agree, but it was a reflex action. Obviously we then needed to find him, so we could decide whether or not to kill him, but we never saw him again. At least, neither Mahmoud nor I saw him again.’
‘But you did see him, even if it was only for an instant, so what was your impression? Did he look European or Middle Eastern? You must have been able to tell if his skin was white or black at the very least.’
Farooq shut his eyes, trying to visualize the fleeting image that he had had of the man a little over an hour earlier. Then he nodded, and looked across at Khaled.
‘He was definitely white,’ he replied. ‘My impression is that he was quite heavily built, and he was wearing dark clothing, presumably because, just like us, he was down there for a different purpose. Because of what happened next, I’m quite certain he wasn’t just some passer-by who’d found the outer gate of the place unlocked and wandered inside. If that had been the case — or if he had been something to do with the Western Wall Tunnel — then he would have switched on the lights. But this man had obviously been very circumspect in his approach and had probably been observing us in that chamber for quite some time. We were only aware that there was anyone there when we heard a noise from the open doorway.’
‘You said he fired at you,’ Khaled said. ‘Could he have been a policeman, or an army officer, something like that?’
‘If he’d been police or army, he would have been armed, he wouldn’t have been by himself, and he would almost certainly have returned fire immediately. But he didn’t,’ Farooq pointed out. ‘Instead, he ran off along the tunnel. But what I don’t understand is why he only shot the once. He could have stayed within the safety of the chamber, shone his torch into the tunnel and picked off Mahmoud in a matter of seconds. So why didn’t he?’
‘Is that a rhetorical question,’ Khaled asked, ‘or are you expecting an answer?’
‘It would be good to have your thoughts.’
‘If the roles had been reversed, we both know that you would have fired, so that implies that the intruder has a different mindset, and in my opinion that almost certainly means that we know who it was.’
This time Farooq nodded.
‘Exactly,’ he said, ‘it must have been the woman’s husband, the man Bronson.’
‘And that means she is probably here with him. I know you found nothing under the Temple Mount, and I’m going to have to work out what that means. But in the meantime, I want you and your men to scour the streets and check all the hotels. If that was Bronson in the tunnel, then he and his interfering wife must be staying here in Jerusalem, and it’s not that big a place.’
‘So you want us to find them?’
‘Precisely. I want you to find them and then I want you to kill them.’
43
‘Actually,’ Bronson said, ‘I still think we’re in exactly the right place, but I think we’re probably misinterpreting the Latin and not looking in the places that we should.’
They were still talking together quietly. When they’d got to the room, Angela had taken Bronson into the bathroom, where he’d washed his face and hands before Angela gently cleaned and dressed the wound on his forehead. They were now lying side by side on the double bed, Angela resting her head on Bronson’s chest.