Authors: Michael Byrnes
He answered with a question. “See this stone beneath your feet?”
Charlotte glanced down at it. Surely it had significance or the Muslims wouldn’t have built around it. She couldn’t remember much about Islam, but she could recall from a college class she’d taken on world religions what this place was meant to commemorate. “Where Muhammad rose to heaven.”
This immediately made the rabbi’s face contort.
“That is a fabrication made up by zealous Muslim caliphs who’d have used any excuse to expand their empire,” he growled. “Now listen to what I say to you.” Pacing over to her, he began circling like an animal of prey. “This is the Foundation Stone,” he said, sweeping his hands out as if presenting it to her as a gift, “where God created the world and breathed life into Adam. It is the place where Abraham built an altar to sacrifice his own son to God. And it is where Jacob saw the gateway to God’s eternal domain—to the Light.”
“And what does the Ark have to do with all that?” The question seemed to disappoint him.
“Everything,” he answered with utmost passion. “Around this very stone, Solomon erected his temple, as instructed by God. Where you now stand, the walls of its most sacred sanctuary would once have protected the Foundation Stone. And when Zion was first established as a nation, there was one thing that held it together.” He motioned to the Ark.
“A box?”
“The Ark isn’t just a box, Charlotte. Don’t test Him with blasphemy,” he warned, pointing heavenward. “The Ark is a direct link to God. In it, his covenant has been preserved, awaiting atonement . . . awaiting the Chosen One to bring its divine powers back to Zion. And everything you see here”—his broad hand gestures indicated not only the shrine, but everything around it—“will all be taken down. Not a stone unturned. Just as Jesus foretold. A new temple will rise up according to God’s plan—an earthly kingdom built to honor Him, so that all nations will worship in peace and harmony.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she scoffed. “But I don’t think the Muslims are going to appreciate that.”
“They don’t belong here,” he soberly replied. “Their shrine is a mockery of God. Their place is in Mecca—eight hundred miles from here. When God passes his judgment, these Muslims can return to their homeland, or they will perish.”
The sound of helicopters sweeping overhead drew the rabbi’s eyes up to the cupola. “Free her hands and bring her to me,” he ordered, moving to within a meter of the Ark.
The priests sliced away Charlotte’s bindings and brought her be- side him.
“Now, Charlotte,” he said with more urgency. “We are going to open the Ark. You and I. We’re going to restore the Testimony so that a new covenant will be made. Then it will be up to God to determine the fate of this place.” He spread his hands and rolled his eyes up to the cupola.
“It can’t be that easy.”
“Wait and see,” he promised.
From the shadows, Amit had watched as Cohen and his men hurried into the Dome of the Rock with the Ark and the female hostage, then pulled the doors closed.
He’d been tempted to pick off the remaining two gunmen with the Beretta. But the short-barreled pistol wasn’t suited for long-distance shooting.
There was also the option of rushing them, trying to take them by surprise. But the gap was wide, the pistol was no match for a machine gun, and Amit was no small target. Not to mention that the choppers were quickly closing in. And if the Israelis confused him for the enemy, he’d be gunned down on sight.
“Amit!” a voice suddenly called.
He spun around. It was Enoch . . . coming up through the hole the rabbi’s men had burrowed beneath the Temple Mount.
“What took you so long?” Amit said with open arms.
Keeping a careful eye on the choppers zigzagging overhead, Enoch ran over to him. “What the hell is going on up here? Are we too late?”
“Not sure,” Amit said, eyeing his friend curiously. Enoch was barefoot and soaked to the bone. His pale face, tinted blue, had him looking like the walking dead. Under his right arm were three Galils. “What in God’s name happened to you?”
“Long story,” he glibly replied, preoccupied with that fact that Amit had actually considered taking on the enemy with his puny handgun. “Get rid of that peashooter and take one of these.” He tossed a Galil to Amit.
“Much appreciated,” he said, catching it smoothly with his left hand.
“They’re in the shrine, aren’t they?” Enoch ejected the magazine from the third Galil before abandoning it in the flower garden.
“Afraid so,” Amit gloomily replied.
“The rabbi and how many others?” he asked, pocketing the magazine.
“Nine left. I think only two or three with weapons.”
“Better odds than Gaza.”
“Much better.”
“And the woman?”
“Still alive.”
“Right.” He took a deep breath. The icicles in his lungs were starting to thaw. “You have your mobile with you?” Thanks to the cistern, Enoch’s own phone had fizzled out the moment he tried to power it on.
“Yeah,” Amit said, pulling it out of his pocket.
Enoch put a call in to Mossad headquarters, and after providing his agent ID number, he informed the desk that Cohen and his crew had already made it inside the Dome of the Rock with an unidentified procurement and a hostage. He didn’t need to insist on backup or provide instruction. Necessary protocols had already begun.
“We can’t wait for backup,” Amit said. “If Cohen hears them coming—”
“I know,” Enoch replied. He handed the phone back. “I have no intention of dying in there. So let’s make it count. Shall we?”
“We shall,” Amit proudly replied. How the kid had grown. Not exactly like old times.
The two raced up the steps and across the platform. There was a double door centered on the lower marble-clad tier of the shrine’s wall. As in the other seven walls, there were seven stained-glass windows positioned in line above the doors, where the wall’s marble cladding gave way to magnificent Arabian tiles. So there wasn’t much concern about anyone on the inside seeing them coming.
Once they reached the wall, Enoch immediately raised his machine gun to blow out the doors’ center lock. But Amit quickly waved it away and dug into his pocket for his trusty lock-picking set.
Standing over the Ark, Charlotte was surprised by its robust dimensions. She could easily curl up inside it. Dominating the front of the box was a cartouche set above a large engraved disk with lines radiating down, each connecting to an ankh—no doubt a depiction of the sun. Small ideograms in neat columns covered the remainder of the front side, as well as the Ark’s side panels. She guessed the rear panel was similarly engraved. The designs could have come from only one place. “These Egyptian symbols and hieroglyphs,” she said. “Why are they . . .” Her voice trailed off.
The rabbi smiled knowingly. “Long ago, Egypt had been the dwelling place of the inexplicable life force the Egyptians called
ka,
the source of ultimate power attributed to the sun and the eternal light. Ancient Egyptians worshipped hundreds of gods, but the sun god
always
reigned supreme. Their entire society embodied it—from buildings to funerary rituals. And their secrets had been encoded in stone for thousands of years, in temples, tombs, pyramids. Through the centuries, they’d given it many, many names: Ra, Atum, Amun, Aten. But a single visionary pharaoh understood it best.”
Cohen went on to explain that around 1350 b.c.e.,Egypt’s first and only monotheistic ruler, Akhenaton, came to power and commanded that a new capital be constructed on the Nile’s east bank, set between the power centers of Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south—a city entirely dedicated to a single supreme god and creator. In the process, the pharaoh had completely abandoned the traditional polytheistic temple system, which had brought tremendous wealth and power to the centuries-old Egyptian priesthood, the priests of Amen.
“Akhenaton made many enemies,” Cohen continued. “So when terrible plagues befell Egypt during his reign, the priests of Amen expeditiously blamed the misfortune on Akhenaton’s religious digressions. They claimed that the pharaoh had tampered with
Ma’at
—the spiritual bonds uniting all elements in the universe. Hence a rebellion began brewing throughout the land, fueled by the pharaoh’s increasing number of political dissenters. Fearing not only assassination and reprisals against his family but destruction of his new capital, Akhenaton entrusted the clandestine export of his most powerful relics to his closest vizier.”
Just like in 154
B
.
C
.
E
.,
when Onias fled the rogue Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, took the Ark from its hiding place in Qumran, and brought it to safety in Heliopolis,
Cohen thought. “The vizier was a virtuous man who had mastered the ancient secrets during his tenure as high priest in Akhenaton’s temple. His name was Moses.”
“
The
Moses?”
“That’s right,” Cohen replied.
Cohen was on the verge of ranting—a man teetering on the precipice of a lifetime’s endeavors all coalescing in a single event. Charlotte could tell that Cohen needed to tell his story, almost as if to ensure that should his ambitious plan fail, his secret knowledge (perhaps even his justification for his actions) might be passed on. And she wanted to encourage him, because if she could keep him talking, stall him a little longer, perhaps the Israelis might get to him before anything worse could happen.
“Luckily, Moses did agree to Akhenaton’s request. But Moses feared an even more calamitous reprisal against those who’d always believed in the one true god: an industrious and mysterious group of Semitic tribes tens of thousands strong who had lived in the Nile Delta for over four centuries.”
“The Israelites?” Charlotte said.
“Very good,” he said approvingly. “After secreting the temple relics north and preparing them for transport across the Sinai, Moses secretly went to the elders of the Israelite tribes. He knew that their ancestral beliefs traced back to a great patriarch named Abraham, who legend told had been the first to speak with the one god. Legend also told that the one god had promised Abraham’s progeny a return to their tribal lands in the north. So Moses convinced the elders that the time of the prophecy had arrived. And under the cover of darkness, the Israelites abandoned their villages and rendezvoused with Moses at the Sinai.”
“And the exodus began,” she muttered.
Cohen nodded and his nervous eyes began scouting the shrine. He waved a couple of the robed men closer.
Keep him occupied!
Charlotte thought. Frantic, she tried to remember the biblical account of the exodus. But at the forefront of her brain was the film adaptation produced in the 1950s with Charlton Heston raising a magical staff to part the sea for the Israelites, the Egyptians giving chase, the waters crashing down upon them. “So then why did the pharaoh send his armies after Moses? Did he change his mind?”
Cohen managed to chuckle. “Those were not Akhenaton’s armies that pursued Moses and the Israelites. Those soldiers were dispatched from Memphis by Akhenaton’s coregent, Smenkhkare—a malevolent schemer who supported the priests of Amun, a snake who had even had an affair with Akhenaton’s wife, Nefertiti, and fathered her son.”
“
The
Nefertiti?” she asked. This exodus story was fast becoming a who’s who of Egypt.
“That’s right. But that beautiful, iconic Egyptian queen was a very treacherous woman.” His eyes pinched tight. “With six daughters and no heir to his throne, Akhenaton had been so elated to have a son, he never suspected his wife’s infidelity.”
Cohen considered stopping here but felt compelled to finish the story. After all, the woman deserved to understand the necessity of what was to happen next.
“But Nefertiti’s ambitions had only just begun,” said Cohen. “After Moses successfully fled Egypt, Nefertiti conspired with Smenkhkare to kill her husband by poisoning. Smenkhkare then attempted to erase Akhenaton’s name from dynastic history—the deepest insult to an Egyptian pharaoh. For in the remembrance of the name, the spirit lived on.
Akhenaton’s new capital city was abandoned, his cartouches scratched off temples and tombs . . .” He sighed. “And to honor Smenkhkare and restore honor to the priests of Amun, Nefertiti changed her son’s name from Tutankhaten, ‘the living image of Aten,’ to Tutankhamun, ‘the living image of Amun.’ ”
This took a moment to sink in. “Wait. You mean King Tut?”
Cohen nodded. “And only a year after murdering her husband, Nefertiti poisoned Smenkhkare too, so that Tut’s true paternity would remain a secret. Naturally the boy inherited the throne in Thebes. Then Tut became Nefertiti’s pawn,” he scoffed. “God’s retribution eventually did come, though it took almost a decade. The priests of Amun turned against Tut and his manipulative mother. Both were assassinated. An ironic twist of fate, wouldn’t you say?”
Charlotte didn’t answer, though the story was indeed reminiscent of a Sophoclean tragedy.
“Without the treasures of Aten, however, even the priests of Amun could never return the kingdom to its past glory. Egypt was never to rise again.”
“And how do you know all this?” she had to ask.
“The most profound knowledge is not found in books, Charlotte. That is why legacies are so vital to humanity. The written word deceives. The most awesome truths—the most
fearsome
truths—are those handed down through the righteous words of our most trusted ancestors. There is much to learn from history. Yet people forget. Pride. Vanity. Complacency . . .”
Now she was sensing that Cohen’s patience had run out. But she needed to try to keep up the charade. She pointed to the glyphs. “And what does all this say?”
“That is the story of God,” he reluctantly replied, more abrupt now. “The origins of the universe and creation. It is also a warning given by Moses about what resides within the Ark, how it should be feared and respected. And see there?” Centered on the Ark’s front side, he pointed to glyphs representing a feather, sun disks, water, and an ibis—all framed within an oval outline. “That is Akhenaton’s royal cartouche. His seal.” Charlotte regarded the Ark with equal doses of fear, reverence, and skepticism.