King Solomon's Curse

2

A hot and gritty wind blew across the Temple Mount, making Dr Nina Wilde narrow her eyes behind her sunglasses. Despite the discomfort, however, the archaeologist was still in awe of her surroundings. The hilltop was one of the holiest sites of three religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — with a history dating back over five thousand years, and the splendid buildings dominating the walled enclosure, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque, were two of the world’s oldest Islamic structures.

It wasn’t simply the air of history that excited her, though. Something new was about to be discovered. And she was not just involved with it; she was largely responsible for it.

Six years earlier, Nina had been kidnapped by a religious fanatic intent on uncovering a deadly secret encoded in the Book of Revelation. The trail led her to a cave in the desert of southern Israel, where she found a statue: one of the angels that would supposedly herald the apocalypse. It was the container in which it was hidden that had been the most amazing discovery, however.

The Ark of the Covenant.

The golden chest had waited undisturbed for millennia until she, her husband Eddie Chase and young Mossad agent Jared Zane found it. The Ark contained the items promised by biblical legend, including the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments — a world-shaking find.

That had only been the beginning, though. Once Israeli archaeologists secured the site, they unearthed more relics — including some leading back to the Temple Mount. Records from the era of the great King Solomon revealed the precise location of a place long thought lost: the First Temple, dedicated to Yahweh, god of the Israelites, by Solomon himself. The temple had been destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, its remains buried and forgotten as later places of worship were built over it… but now, thanks to her, the archaeologists knew exactly where to look.

And they had found it.

She gazed down the slope. Amongst the trees was a large tent covering a newly excavated entrance to the hidden ruins. Nina had been given a privilege rare for a Western archaeologist by being allowed to participate; the politics of the Temple Mount were tangled, riven by centuries of religious and national hostility, and it had taken a great deal of bargaining with the Israelis, who controlled access to the site, and the Jordanians, who controlled the site itself, for the work to be permitted at all. But her reputation as the world’s most famous archaeologist held weight, and now she was here, to witness the opening of the First Temple.

An astounding discovery… for which she would have an audience.

Nina glanced up. A small drone was flying over the hill, getting aerial footage of the Temple Mount for later editing into a documentary series. Her series. Two years earlier, she had been offered a new challenge: to recount her discovery of the lost civilisation of Atlantis for television. Those who knew her had been surprised that she accepted, given that her prior appearances in the public eye were slightly begrudging, but a movie based on her first adventure had been — to her mind — a ludicrous collection of chases, gunfights and exploding helicopters, and she wanted to set the record straight about what really happened. (Even though it had indeed involved chases, gunfights and exploding helicopters.)

The series had been successful enough for the network to request a follow-up. The obvious choice was her biblical discoveries, bringing her to the Middle East along the trail of the Ark of the Covenant. There was also the bonus that with excavations ongoing, something amazing might be discovered on camera: an irresistible hook for any executive.

That was, she mused irritably, if the other archaeologists ever got their asses in gear…

Nina finished a bottle of water and went to the tent. The drone, a quadcopter fitted with a high-definition camera, tracked her. The clip might be used to bridge together scenes of her exploration of the Temple Mount, or not at all, but the production team wanted as much material to work with as possible. With filming now entirely digital, the only limitation on how much they could shoot was hard drive space, and the crew always had many terabytes available for original footage, with multiple backups.

Her team was waiting outside the tent, some relaxing in the shade of the olive trees while others made the most of the sun. ‘Have I missed anything?’ she asked.

Steven Fisher, his back against a tree, tipped up the peak of his baseball hat. ‘Nope, not a thing. Don’t know what Ziff’s doing in there. Reciting all six hundred-thirteen mitzvot, or something.’

‘If you weren’t Jewish yourself, I’d swear you were anti-Semitic,’ said the woman beside the documentary’s bearded director. Lydia Spur was a blonde New Zealander who still had the look of a tomboy despite being in her mid-thirties.

Fisher grinned at her. ‘Self-loathing is what Judaism is all about.’ She smiled back.

‘I’ll see what they’re doing,’ said Nina, going to the tent’s entrance. She called to a chunky Hispanic man who was stretched out sunbathing. ‘Jay? Get your camera ready, we might be shooting soon.’

‘I’ll get right on that, boss,’ replied Jay Rivero, scarcely bothering to veil his sarcasm. He didn’t move. Nina shot an annoyed look at Fisher.

‘We’ll go when we’ve got a reason to, okay?’ the director told her. ‘Howie’s getting drone coverage’ — he gestured towards the fourth member of the small documentary crew, who was operating the quadcopter from a slim laptop — ‘and we’ve got nothing to shoot until they let us in there.’

‘We’ll be in there in five minutes,’ Nina told him, irked by their attitude. It wasn’t just that they had no particular excitement about what they were doing, treating it as just another job; it was also that as the shoot progressed, they had developed a personal animosity towards her. The same thing happened on the Atlantis documentary, none of her original crew returning. What the hell was their problem? ‘Be ready.’

She entered the tent. Inside were four men, two Israeli and two Jordanian archaeologists, engaged in a discussion. She went to the oldest. ‘David, what’s the hold-up?’

Dr David Solomon Ziff turned to her. ‘There isn’t a hold-up, Nina,’ he said. ‘We are just proceeding with due attention, that’s all.’

She looked past the balding, white-bearded man into a steeply sloping tunnel. Spotlights revealed stonework at the bottom — a section of the First Temple’s outer wall. Only a cracked stone slab separated the scientists from what lay within.

And they had been vacillating over how, or even whether, to move that slab for most of the day. ‘I think you’ve given it as much attention as humanly possible,’ she said. ‘All the potential risks have been taken into account — so let’s just do it.’

‘I’d remind you that you’re not in charge here, Dr Wilde,’ said Ziff pointedly. ‘I am. I’ll decide when to open the temple.’

She folded her arms. ‘All right, so when are you going to open the temple?’

‘Soon.’

‘Soon? Five minutes is soon. Ten minutes?’

Ziff shook his head. ‘Why are you in such a rush, Nina? The First Temple has been buried for over two thousand years. It will still be here tomorrow. And the day after, and a week from now.’

‘But my camera crew won’t be,’ she said. ‘We’re almost at the end of our schedule. But this gives us an ending, brings everything full circle. The Ark was once kept in the First Temple, and now what we found with the Ark has brought us back to it. It’s perfect.’

‘We are not here so you can have a happy ending on television,’ said Mohammad Talal, one of the Jordanians. ‘This is real archaeology.’

Nina gave the young man a chilly stare. ‘Well y’know, Atlantis, the pyramid of Osiris, the vault of Shiva, El Dorado, Valhalla — oh, and the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant — seemed pretty real too when I found them all.’ Talal looked away, his expression a mixture of anger and humiliation. She turned back to Ziff. ‘David, this isn’t about satisfying my ego. This is my way of doing archaeology; it might be unconventional, but it works. It’s about showing the world something remarkable — something that we’ve all dedicated our lives to finding.’

Ziff adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Finding Solomon’s temple is my lifelong ambition, not yours. But…’ A long, slow exhalation. ‘You are right. There’s no reason to delay any longer.’ He smiled at her for the first time since her entrance. ‘After all, why have a lifelong ambition if you stop when you are about to reach it?’

‘I know what you mean,’ she said, returning the smile. ‘Atlantis was my obsession. But there was still a lot more for me to find afterwards.’

He nodded. ‘So much that you must wonder if there’s anything left. But yes, we will open the temple. It is time.’

‘Thank you,’ said Nina, feeling a little unsettled by the first part of his reply. She shook off the feeling and went to the tent’s door. ‘Okay, we’re going to open up the First Temple,’ she told those outside. ‘Five minutes, just like I said.’ The redhead gave Fisher a smug smirk, then tied her hair into a ponytail. ‘Everyone get ready.’

It actually took rather more than five minutes, but eventually all the preparations were made. The archaeologists took up position at the tunnel’s end, two men carefully inserting long crowbars into cracks on each side of the obstructing slab while Talal positioned himself to take the block’s weight should it tip forward. Nina and Ziff crouched expectantly before the opening, the Israeli holding a still camera to photograph the procedure.

Behind them were the film crew. Rivero was closest, his rugged Sony Handicam on his shoulder and the viewfinder fixed to his eye like a cybernetic attachment. The camera was such an integral part of the Californian that he looked odd to Nina without it. Beside him, Lydia held a microphone on a boom. The mic was connected to a pair of expensive but travel-scuffed headphones and a digital sound mixer in a padded bag hanging from her neck.

Fisher peered over their shoulders. ‘We all set?’ he asked.

‘Good to go, man,’ drawled Rivero. He switched on a light atop his camera.

Lydia adjusted a knob on her mixer. ‘Audio is good. Ready when you are.’

‘Okay, roll it,’ said Fisher.

‘David, can I have a few seconds?’ said Nina. ‘I want to do a piece to camera.’

Talal muttered impatiently in Arabic, but Ziff nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘Thanks.’ She gathered her thoughts, then looked into the lens. ‘Behind this doorway is a chamber of the First Temple, buried here on the Temple Mount for two and a half thousand years. What’s inside, nobody knows. It may be nothing — or something wondrous that we hadn’t even imagined. Either way, we’ll know in a few moments.’ She faced the entrance again.

Ziff took the cue, issuing an instruction. The two men strained at the crowbars. Metal rasped on stone, red dust spitting out from the cracks…

The slab moved.

With a deep crunch, it lurched forward by half an inch. The pair wielding the bars pushed harder. The great stone shifted again. ‘It’s coming,’ Nina whispered as it crept from its resting place. ‘It’s tipping outwards at the top. Mohammad, get ready to catch it.’

The Jordanian reached up to the stone’s upper edge. ‘I can feel a gap!’ he cried. ‘A little more…’

A crackle of ancient, dusty cement — and the slab came loose.

Talal arrested its fall, the two other men hurriedly dropping the crowbars and gripping it. They carefully edged it aside.

Nina looked back at the camera. ‘This is it,’ she said, trying with little success to contain her excitement. ‘The door is open — and now we’ll be the first people to enter the First Temple in over two millennia.’

Ziff aimed a powerful flashlight inside, casting a disc of light on a plastered wall. Nina’s own light joined it. ‘It’s some sort of antechamber,’ she said, moving closer. ‘Carvings on the walls, but… they look decorative rather than being inscriptions.’

The senior Israeli also advanced, subtly but firmly positioning himself in front of her. ‘Yes, I’ve seen similar designs in the ruins at Gezer. The timescale would match the era of Solomon.’

‘Almost three thousand years ago,’ she said in an aside to camera. Carved stones were visible in places through the crumbling surface layer of plasterwork. ‘Look at the workmanship, though. The stone blocks are cut far more precisely than anything at Gezer.’

‘Solomon would have demanded that the First Temple be made to the highest standard,’ Ziff mused. ‘Equal to anything in Egypt, or better. This place was dedicated to God — it had to be worthy of Him.’

He stepped into the doorway and swept his light to take in the rest of the room. Nina joined him… and suppressed a feeling of disappointment. The whole chamber was just fifteen feet by twenty, the only other apparent exit choked by debris. She examined the floor, but if the room contained anything, it had been buried under rubble. Putting on a brave face, she signalled to Rivero. ‘Can we get a shot of this before everyone comes in?’

She stepped back so the cameraman could film the interior. Ziff also retreated, his companions peering into the chamber past him. ‘It is not the Holy of Holies,’ said Raphael Yaron, the other Israeli, ‘but still, it is amazing. The First Temple! Here for all this time, right underneath us.’

‘What’s in there?’ Fisher asked.

‘Not much, man,’ Rivero replied. He slowly panned his camera around the room, then moved back to record the archaeologists’ entrance.

‘Huh. Disappointing,’ said Lydia.

‘What did you expect?’ Nina re-entered the chamber, sniffing the air. Past experience had led her to expect a damp, musty atmosphere — water had a way of finding its way through to any open space — but this felt dry, even desiccated. Had it been deliberately sealed up before the temple was destroyed? ‘I already found the Ark of the Covenant; there wasn’t going to be a spare in here.’

Ziff went to the blocked exit and regarded a cracked section of plasterwork beside it. ‘There is some Old Hebrew text here.’

The other members of his team joined him, Rivero filming over their shoulders. Nina watched as they puzzled over the inscription, shining her flashlight across the chamber… then her gaze went to the beam itself. The dust they had kicked up on entering was still in the air, drifting motes catching the bright light.

It was where they were drifting that caught her attention. She would have expected them to move away from the entrance as fresh air came in from outside. But they seemed to be moving perpendicular to it, towards one wall…

She turned to investigate. Fractured plasterwork greeted her, the temple’s underlying stonework showing through. Again, the precision of the blocks stood out. The Solomonic-era ruins in Gezer, about twenty miles from Jerusalem, were much more irregular, gaps filled with copious amounts of mortar. The ones before her, cracks and chips of age notwithstanding, were so smooth-faced they could almost have been cut by a laser. Each block, each row, was perfectly aligned with the next—

Except where they weren’t.

‘Okay, weird,’ Nina said to herself, gazing at the discrepancy.

‘What’s weird?’ Lydia’s voice. The redhead looked around in brief surprise before realising that the New Zealander’s boom mic had picked up her whisper.

Rivero faced her; Nina addressed the camera as much as the curious Ziff behind it. ‘These bricks here,’ she pointed at one of the gaps, ‘don’t line up with the ones on each side.’

‘Not surprising,’ said Ziff. ‘The First Temple stood for over four hundred years, and Jerusalem has been hit by many earthquakes. It is probably just where damage was repaired.’

‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied. ‘I looked at this in the first place because I saw dust drifting in a breeze, but there’s nowhere a breeze could be going. Unless…’ She stared at the wall — then ducked through the entrance to collect one of the crowbars.

Ziff reacted in alarm. ‘Nina, what are you doing?’

Fisher followed her back in. ‘Keep filming,’ he told Rivero. The cameraman moved to cover both Nina and the Israeli as they converged on the wall.

‘I think there’s another room behind here,’ Nina announced, pointing the crowbar at the cracked plaster.

‘You — you are not going to use that to break open the wall, are you?’ asked Ziff, his eyes going wide.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’m going to use it to move these stones on the floor to see if there’s a threshold.’

‘Good, that— No, wait!’ he said, relief vaporising as he realised she was announcing an action rather than a plan, but by then she had already jammed the crowbar into the rubble. ‘Stop! We haven’t even photographed the chamber, never mind catalogued it!’

‘David, there’s nothing to catalogue,’ said Nina, pushing at the crowbar. ‘Not on the floor, anyway.’

‘There could be valuable finds underneath it!’

‘There won’t be. Trust me, I know.’ She realised that Rivero was filming the argument, but pressed on regardless. ‘This rubble’s just junk left over from when they blocked up that doorway. But the wall might be something a lot more interesting.’

Ziff scowled, glancing at the camera. For a moment he seemed about to demand that filming be stopped, but then he continued; either he considered making his point a higher priority, Nina thought, or he wanted to ensure some screen time for himself. ‘This is extremely unprofessional, Dr Wilde. You are rushing! Archaeology does not work to a shooting schedule.’

‘You’d be surprised how often I’ve had a ticking clock,’ Nina said. ‘But it’s got nothing to do with avoiding overtime. It’s got to do with…’ With a grunt, she levered up a gritty clod of debris. ‘Being right. Look!’

She pointed at the newly exposed hole. ‘There,’ she went on, indicating a horizontal slab at the wall’s base. ‘I’d say that’s the threshold of an entrance that was sealed up and plastered over. A secret chamber.’ She looked at the camera, knowing that last would make a good dramatic moment.

‘Why would they hide it?’ asked Talal, unconvinced.

‘Jerusalem was under siege by Nebuchadnezzar,’ said Nina, carefully probing the wall above the slab. The plaster flaked at her touch. ‘The priests of the First Temple knew he would loot and destroy the heart of their religion. They couldn’t get out of the city without being seen by the Egyptian army, so anything they wanted to protect would have to be hidden. But they had to act in a hurry. See this?’ She waited for Rivero to zoom in, then rubbed the crumbling plaster, more fragments breaking away. ‘It’s why there aren’t any inscriptions here; it’s much too coarse. It was applied in a rush. And like I said, the brickwork behind it isn’t aligned with the other visible sections.’ She stood. ‘I think that if we clear away this plaster, we’ll find another doorway behind it.’

Ziff took out a pouch of small tools and produced a brush, carefully swiping it across the plasterwork before blowing away dust. ‘A draught…’ he said, surprised, as the particles gently wafted past his face. ‘You are right, there is a draught. Very small, but…’

‘You think there is another room?’ Yaron said.

‘There could be, yes,’ replied the bearded Israeli, deep in thought. ‘There could be…’

‘So what do we do about it?’ said Nina. She tried not to sound too pointed, but it was clear to all that she had only one opinion on the proper course of action.

Ziff contemplated the cracked surface, then stepped back. ‘Photograph this entire wall,’ he ordered. ‘A full record. Then we will remove a small piece of the plaster and investigate further.’ He turned to Nina. ‘Is that acceptable?’

‘For now, absolutely,’ she said. Ziff nodded, then issued more detailed instructions. Nina looked back at the watching camera, composing herself for another sound bite. ‘If there really is a secret chamber behind that wall, then hopefully… we’ll soon find out what’s hidden inside.’