67
“So where is Megiddo? I presume we’ll be going there.”
“Oh, we’ll certainly be going there. It’s in northern Israel, on the Plain of Esdraelon overlooking the Jezreel Valley.”
Angela clicked the touchpad on her laptop and brought up a detailed map of Israel.
“This is Esdraelon,” she said, indicating an area close to the northern frontier of the country. “The Jezreel Valley is shaped a bit like a triangle lying on its side, with the point at the Mediterranean coast and the base paralleling the River Jordan, just here. All that area was once under water. In fact, it was the waterway that linked the inland body of water that’s now called the Dead Sea with the Mediterranean. About two million years ago, tectonic shift caused the land lying between the Great Rift Valley in Africa and this end of the Mediterranean to rise, and the waterway turned into dry land. Once the Dead Sea no longer had an outlet, its salinity started to increase, with the result we see today.”
“So what’s at Megiddo? A ruined castle or something?”
“More or less. The point about Megiddo was that it had enormous strategic importance. In ancient times there was a major trade and military route known in Latin as the
Via Maris
or “Road of the Sea” and as
Derekh HaΥam
in Hebrew. This ran from Egypt and up the flat land beside the Mediterranean to Damascus and Mesopotamia. Now, whoever occupied Megiddo controlled the section of this route that was known as the
Nahal Iron
—the word
nahal
means a dry riverbed—and hence could control all the traffic along the route itself.
“Because of its location, Megiddo is one of the oldest known inhabited places in this part of the world. In fact, in any part of the world. The first settlement there dates from around seven thousand BC—over nine thousand years ago—and it was finally abandoned in the fifth century BC, so the site was continually occupied for about six thousand five hundred years.”
“So when the Sicarii went there—assuming you’re correct—the place would already have been a ruin?”
“Oh, yes,” Angela agreed. “The site would have been deserted for well over half a millennium by that time.”
“And you think that could be the place referred to in the inscriptions? I mean, you now think it’s more likely than Hezekiah’s Tunnel or somewhere on the Temple Mount?”
“Yes, I do.” Angela looked apologetic. “I suppose with hindsight I should have thought about it a bit more, and I should certainly have checked on what had been done in Hezekiah’s Tunnel in the past. And—as you pointed out—with all the activity on and inside the Temple Mount over the years, the chances of anything like the Silver Scroll remaining undiscovered there were pretty slim.”
“So what about Megiddo, then? Has that had scores of archaeologists poring over it as well?” Bronson sounded uncertain.
“Oddly enough, no. It has been excavated, of course, but not as often, or as exhaustively, as you might expect, given its history. Virtually nobody dug there at all until 1903, when a man named Gottlieb Schumacher led an expedition, funded by the German Society for Oriental Research. Twenty years later John D. Rockefeller financed an expedition by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, and that continued until the start of the Second World War.”
“Hang on, that’s a dig lasting fourteen years,” Bronson pointed out. “They must have pretty much covered the whole site.”
“It was a long expedition, true, but Megiddo is simply huge. As I said, the city mound itself covers about fifteen acres, and most archaeological digs tend to be focused in one fairly small area and are vertical rather than horizontal. They’re usually interested in digging down through the different layers that represent the various civilizations that have occupied the site, and that’s certainly what the Chicago team did.
“Since then, not too much has happened at Megiddo. An Israeli archaeologist named Yigael Yadin did a bit of work there in the 1960s, and since then there have been excavations on the site every other year, funded by The Megiddo Expedition based at the university here in Tel Aviv.”
“That still sounds like quite a lot of activity,” Bronson said doubtfully.
“Perhaps it is,” Angela agreed, “but the point is that if any of these expeditions had found the Silver Scroll, the whole world would know about it already. And don’t forget, none of these archaeologists were looking for what might be described as buried treasure. They were just trying to uncover the history of the site. We’re not. We’re going there to look for one very specific object, in one very specific place.”
“So there
is
a cistern somewhere on the hill?” Bronson asked.
“In fact, there isn’t,” Angela said, with a slight smile, “and that’s good news. A cistern is where you
store
water, but a well or a spring is a
source
of water. When we were checking our transcriptions using the on-line dictionary, it suggested that the Aramaic word I’d translated as ‘cistern’ more accurately meant a well. And what’s at Har Megiddo is a well, not a cistern. That’s another indicator that we’re now on the right track.”
“Right,” Bronson said. “There’s no time to lose. I’ll just go and get my things together. We can look at the route once we’re in the car and heading north.” He looked at his watch. “Ready in five?”
68
“They’re on the third floor,” Hoxton muttered, as he pushed the button to call the lift. “Adjoining rooms, 305 and 307. This shouldn’t take long.”
They stepped out of the lift together, and walked down the narrow corridor. Outside number 305 they stopped. Hoxton leaned forward, pressing his ear against the door.
“I can hear movement inside,” he whispered, stepping back and easing the Browning out of his waistband. “You cover the other door,” he told Dexter. He watched as his companion moved a few feet down the corridor. “Ready?”
Dexter looked unhappy but took a firm grip of the pistol and nodded. Hoxton rapped sharply on the door.
“Who is it?” Bronson asked.
“Maintenance,” an indistinct but clearly male voice replied. “There’s a problem with one of the lights in your room that we need to fix.”
Bronson stepped back. Two things bothered him about what he’d just heard. First, every member of hotel staff they’d talked to so far had spoken English to some extent, some of them haltingly, others quite fluently. But the man outside the door didn’t just
speak
English: as far as Bronson could tell, he
was
English. Why would an Englishman be working as a maintenance man in a small hotel in Jerusalem?
The second thing was that all the lights in the bedroom and bathroom were working perfectly.
“I’ve just got out of the shower,” Bronson said. “Let me put on some clothes.”
Walking quickly across the room, he stuffed the rest of his possessions into the overnight bag he’d been packing, and then crossed to the connecting door with room 307 and knocked gently.
“I’ll only be a few seconds,” he said aloud, as the connecting door opened.
Swiftly, Bronson slipped through into Angela’s room, pushed the door to behind him and locked it. “We’ve got company,” he said. “Get your stuff together. We need to get out of here right now.”
Quickly Angela shoved all her clothes into her carry-on bag. Bronson closed her laptop and slid it, with the papers and notes, into her leather computer case. As he did so, there was a splintering sound from the adjoining room.
Striding over to the door, Bronson transferred his bag to his left hand, and turned the handle gently with his right. But as he eased the door open, a figure on the other side kicked out, slamming the door back against the wall, just missing Bronson. And, as Bronson looked out into the corridor, he immediately registered the pistol the man was holding in his hand.
Bronson reacted instantly. He swung his overnight bag toward the man’s face, then kicked out with his right foot. His blow caught the stranger’s forearm and knocked the pistol off aim, and Bronson followed up the kick with a hard right-hand punch to the man’s stomach. The gunman bent forward, retching, and the pistol clattered to the floor. Bronson brought his right knee up, hard, into the man’s face.
The gunman yelled in pain, as spurts of blood from his broken nose splattered the carpet in the hallway.
“Run,” Bronson shouted, pointing down the corridor, toward the fire escape.
As Angela sprinted down the corridor, Bronson reached down and tried to grab the fallen pistol, but the gunman was too quick for him and grabbed for it himself. Bronson kicked out, sending the weapon skittering across the floor and out of reach, then turned and then ran after Angela. Behind him, he heard cursing amid the cries of pain, and guessed that his attacker’s companion was chasing after him.
There was a right-angle bend in the corridor, which Bronson took at speed, but then he slammed to a halt. The rest of the corridor was straight, and Angela was still only about halfway down it. Unless he could manage to slow down their pursuer, they’d both be sitting ducks as soon as the man rounded the corner.
He looked around for a weapon—any weapon. Absolutely the only thing there was a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall beside him. That would have to do. He dropped his bag and snatched it off the bracket.
Bronson moved slightly forward until he was right at the corner, and listened to the sound of running footsteps, trying to calculate just how close his pursuer was. Then he stepped forward, swinging the extinguisher in a vicious arc at waist height.
The man running toward him, an automatic pistol gripped in his right hand, had no chance to react. The extinguisher hit him full in the stomach and he fell backward, gasping for breath. But he held on to his pistol and, even as he tumbled to the floor, he pulled the trigger.
The crash of the shot in the confined space was deafening. The bullet missed Bronson by feet, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling. He knew the man would recover in seconds, and didn’t hesitate, just threw the extinguisher at his attacker, grabbed his bag and ran for it.
At the end of the corridor the emergency exit doors beckoned. Bronson caught up with Angela just as she reached them, and pushed hard on the horizontal safety bar holding them closed. As the doors smashed open a siren began wailing. Bronson pushed Angela outside just as another shot echoed down the corridor, the flat slap of the bullet hitting the wall behind them clearly audible.
In front of them was a small square concrete platform, sections of steps descending from it in a zigzag pattern down to the street below, and another flight reaching up to the upper floors of the building.
“You first—quick,” Bronson said. He glanced back down the hotel corridor. At the far end he saw the man he’d knocked down walking quickly toward him, holding his stomach with his left hand, the pistol in his right.
Then he fired another shot, and Bronson knew he couldn’t wait any longer.
He shifted his bag to his left hand and jumped down the four steps to the first platform, grabbed the safety rail and swung himself round to go down the next set of steps.
Below him, Angela was already nearing the bottom.
“Run!” Bronson shouted. “Get round the side of the building.” Seconds later, he saw her sprint away from the fire escape, her bags in hand.
He reached the bottom steps and looked up. His attacker had stepped onto the concrete platform and was leaning over the rail, taking aim with his pistol. Bronson knew the platforms and steps made hitting him virtually impossible. Once he moved away he would become an easier target.
But he had to move. The obvious route was to follow Angela—the corner of the building was a mere twenty feet away—but Bronson guessed that the man with the gun would expect him to run in that direction. Instead, he vaulted over the safety rail and ran for the other corner of the hotel, zigzagging from side to side.
He could heard movement as the gunman crossed to the other side of the platform; then two shots in quick succession smashed into the paving slabs close behind him. Then he reached the corner and dodged around it. He was safe—at least for the moment.
Sprinting round to the front of the hotel, he found Angela standing by the wall, looking nervously back the way she’d come.
“Here,” he called, taking her by the arm. “Quick. Follow me.”
They ran away from the hotel, down the street and along to the spot where Bronson had parked the car. He unlocked it, tossed their bags onto the back seat, started the engine and drove away, watching his mirrors the whole time.
Angela was trembling slightly, from exertion or fear, or more likely both. “Don’t say it,” she muttered.
“I’m not going to. You know that I think what we’re doing is dangerous, but I’m in it with you to the bitter end. Armageddon—here we come!”
“I think that bastard broke my nose,” Dexter muttered as the two men walked quickly away from the hotel. “I can feel it.”
“That’s about the fifth time you’ve told me,” Hoxton snapped, his breath still wheezing slightly. “Just shut up about it and walk.”