59

'But how can Yacoub still be alive, Chris?' Angela demanded, returning to a theme she'd already visited several times during what had turned out to be a very long and uncomfortable night. 'Are you absolutely sure it was him?'

They were sitting in their hire car in the car park of an all-day restaurant outside Jerusalem, waiting for the place to open so they could have breakfast.

Bronson had seen nobody in or near the hotel when he'd run there after leaving Angela in the bar. He'd checked around the building as thoroughly as he could, then gone in, packed their few belongings, paid the bill by shoving a handful of notes at the puzzled night clerk, and driven away. They'd been on the road more or less ever since, because trying to find a hotel open to new arrivals after midnight had proved fruitless. In the end, Bronson had given up and headed for Jerusalem, and the restaurant car park had seemed as good a place as any to wait out what remained of the night.

Once they'd stopped, he had gently washed the ragged cut on the bottom of Angela's left foot. It wasn't too deep, though it was certainly painful. He'd placed a thin pad over it and secured it with strips of plaster he'd bought from an all-night pharmacy in Tel Aviv. Angela had pulled on a pair of trainers and tried a few steps. The trainers weren't elegant, but with them on her feet she could at least walk again – she wouldn't be running anywhere for a while.

Bronson sighed. 'Look,' he said, 'Yacoub doesn't have the kind of face it's easy to forget. And I didn't tell you this before, but what Jalal Talabani did when he rescued us back in Rabat just seemed too easy to me. One man – even with the element of surprise in his favour – would find it difficult to take out three armed men, especially if he was tackling them in a house he'd never set foot inside before. I think he had help, and the only reasonable explanation is that Yacoub must have set it up for him.'

'But Talabani did kill those men, didn't he?' Angela asked.

'Definitely. I checked Ahmed's body myself.'

Angela shivered. 'So Yacoub must have been prepared to sacrifice at least three of his men – Ahmed and the two we saw upstairs – just for what?'

'To convince us that he – Yacoub, I mean – was dead so we would feel happy about following the trail he'd prepared.

The word "ruthless" barely covers what he's prepared to do. He wanted us – or rather you – to be so determined to find the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant that you'd come out here to Israel and lead him straight to the relics. And it wasn't a bad plan, really, because you've got the contacts and the knowledge to pull this off. All he would have to do was follow you, and that's what he's been doing.'

'But that gunman tried to kill you, Chris.'

Bronson nodded. 'I know. I can only assume Yacoub's losing patience. He probably wanted me dead so that he could kidnap you. Then he'd try to persuade you to tell him where to look for the relics.'

Angela's face looked pale in the early-morning light. 'Dear God. I'm really glad you're out here with me, Chris. Yacoub simply terrifies me. He wouldn't even need to torture me – one look at his face and I'd just tell him everything.'

Bronson shifted his gaze from the road beyond the car park – ever since they'd stopped, he'd been checking the passing vehicles, just in case they needed to make a quick getaway. Now he looked across at Angela. 'Look,' he said, 'if you want to give this up right now, it's no problem. We can be sitting on a flight out of Ben Gurion back to Britain in a few hours, never come back to Israel, and forget all about these lost relics. It's your decision. I'm really just along for the ride.'

Angela didn't reply for a few moments, just sat there with her head slightly bowed, her hands clasped in her lap, almost a Madonna figure. Then she shook her head and swung round to face Bronson. 'No,' she said firmly. 'If I walk away now I know I'll always regret it. This is the biggest opportunity of my career – of any archaeologist's career, in fact – and I'm not prepared to give it up. We'll just have to make sure we stay one step ahead of Yacoub and his band of pistol-toting thugs. And that's your job, Chris,' she added, with a small smile.

'So no pressure, then,' Bronson said, an answering smile on his face. 'Right, if you're determined, let's decide where we go from here. Once this place finally opens and we've got some food inside us, I mean.'

As he spoke, the illuminated signs of the restaurant suddenly flickered into life, and Bronson saw figures moving around inside the building.

'At last,' he muttered. 'Let's eat.'

An hour later they walked back to their car.

'Any ideas?' Bronson asked, sitting down in the driver's seat. Angela had taken several pages of notes with her into the restaurant, and had read through them carefully while they had breakfast. She had said little during the meal.

'Possibly, just give me a few minutes.'

Bronson nodded as if he'd just made a decision, and leant across to Angela. 'Can I ask you something? Something personal?'

'Yes,' she replied cautiously, drawing out the word.

'What?'

'Yosef Ben Halevi? You worked with him, right?'

'Yes, about five years ago, I think it was. Why?'

'So you don't really know him that well?'

Angela shrugged. 'No, not really, I suppose. He was just a colleague.'

'Right. It's just – I don't know – there's something about him that I don't like. It's almost as if he's hiding something. And I didn't like the way he kept probing, trying to find out what we were really looking for.'

Angela shook her head. 'He's an expert on ancient languages and Jewish history. The kinds of questions we were asking were bound to intrigue him. He can probably sense that we're on the track of something, and he'd like to be a part of it. I'm sure that's all it is.' She smiled slightly. 'You're not jealous of him, are you?' she asked.

Bronson shook his head firmly. 'No, definitely not. I'd just rather we didn't get involved with him any further. I really don't think I trust him.'

Angela smiled again, wondering how much of Bronson's instant distrust of the man was due to Ben Halevi's undeniable physical attractiveness, and how much was just his policeman's instinct working overtime. Not that she suspected the Israeli of anything underhand, but she recognized that it would perhaps be better to keep him out of the loop from now on, now she hoped they were getting close to their goal.

'Right,' she said, looking back at her notes. 'I've been trying to put myself in the position the group of Sicarii would have found themselves in back in AD 73. They've got three important Jewish relics to hide. They put one in a cave at Qumran – which was not perhaps the most secure of locations, though as it turned out it kept the Copper Scroll hidden for two millennia – and went on somewhere else with the remaining two, the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant. Now, even then, Jerusalem was the most important city in the whole of Judea, and I don't think it's too wild a suggestion that they might have hidden the relics somewhere there.'

'But if they had done that,' Bronson objected, 'surely they'd have been found by now. Jerusalem's been continuously occupied and fought over for at least two thousand years. How could anything like the Silver Scroll have stayed hidden?'

'Actually,' Angela said, 'the first settlement on the site dates from about 3500 BC; but I didn't really mean in Jerusalem. I meant it was more likely that they chose a hiding place under it. The whole of the city and the Temple Mount is like a honeycomb. There are tunnels everywhere.

Back in 2007, a group of workmen in Jerusalem employed by archaeologists to search for the old main road out of the city discovered a small drainage channel, and that led directly to a huge unknown tunnel that might have run as far as the Qidron river, or possibly even to the Shiloah Pool at the southern end of Jerusalem, from the Temple Mount. There's a possibility that it might have been used by the inhabitants of the city to get out of Jerusalem during the Roman siege of AD 70, and it was a probable escape route for some of the treasures of the Temple. The Qidron river – Wadi Qidron – heads eastwards from the city, but about halfway to the Dead Sea it splits, one arm continuing to the Dead Sea while the other heads directly to Khirbet Qumran.'

'Qumran again,' Bronson observed.

'Yes,' Angela said. 'One interpretation is that when the Roman siege began, trusted Jewish priests and fighters gathered together all the scrolls of the Second Temple and escaped with them down that tunnel to Qumran, where they hid the scrolls in the caves near the settlement – those documents that became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's as convincing a suggestion as any I've heard.'

'But what about the relics we're looking for? Where do you think they could be?'

'I've got an idea. Obviously the people who buried the Silver Scroll would have had no idea of the tortuous history that would eventually unfold around the Temple Mount, but I think there's a good chance that they might have selected one of the existing tunnel systems under or near the rock as being a secure location for the relics.

Now, in the present political climate in Jerusalem, there's no possible way we can get access to the tunnels under the Mount – not even bona fide Israeli archaeologists can manage that.

'But,' she continued, 'the inscription on the clay tablets refers explicitly to one very particular kind of underground space – a cistern. I think at the last count something like forty-five different cisterns have been identified in the various caves and chambers that run under the Temple Mount, so that does make sense. I think that the Sicarii who hid these relics deliberately chose a hiding place underneath what all three major religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – now believe to be the holiest site in Jerusalem, perhaps in the world.'

'But which cistern?' Bronson asked. 'If there are more than forty of them, and we can't get into the tunnels, that's it, isn't it? Even if we could work out exactly which cistern the relic is hidden in, there's no way we can recover the relic.'

'Not necessarily,' Angela replied, a smile playing over her lips. 'I've been studying our translation of the inscription, and I've just spotted something. The inscription doesn't say "a cistern", it says "the cistern", and that suggests it's referring to a very specific cistern, one whose location would have been generally well known. And around the beginning of the first millennium, there was one obvious place close to the Temple Mount that everybody would have known was a cistern. The writer of the tablets would certainly have been familiar with it.'

'Which was?'

'Hezekiah's Tunnel,' Angela said. 'I hope you like water.'