The Moses Stone

75

As the footsteps of the three men receded down the tunnel, Bronson pulled on the rest of his clothes. He put his arms around Angela.

'At least we found the Silver Scroll and held it in our hands,' he said to her. 'That's something very few people will ever be able to say. It's just a shame we had to hand it over to Yacoub, but we had no choice. In the end, it was all for nothing.'

'Maybe,' Angela said, her voice low, 'or maybe not.' She didn't sound quite as disappointed as Bronson had expected.

'What do you mean?'

'The Sicarii claimed to have hidden something else here, something that was just as important to them. Perhaps even more important.'

Bronson whistled. 'Of course! The "tablets of the temple of Jerusalem". But do you know where to look?'

Angela grinned at him in the half-light of the torch. 'I think so, yes. I'm not finished quite yet. Are you?'

* * *

Bronson picked up his rucksack and led the way up the staircase. At the top, they stepped around the bodies of Dexter and Hoxton, but the third corpse was nowhere to be seen.

'Where's Baverstock?' Bronson wondered aloud.

'Maybe he managed to get away.'

'I doubt it. Yacoub shot the other two without hesitation, so why would he let Baverstock live?' Bronson glanced around the end of the tunnel, then strode across to one side of the platform, where there was a gap between the wood and the wall. He shone his torch beam downwards. 'Right, I can see his body down there. He must have fallen off the walkway when the bullets hit him.'

'I don't care, Chris. They all got what was coming to them, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over their deaths, not even Tony Baverstock's. Let's get out of here.'

As Bronson and Angela strode down the walkway towards the entrance to the water tunnel, there was a faint scuffling noise from the end by the cistern. A few moments later Baverstock hauled himself up and on to the walkway. He searched around in the dark for the pistol he'd dropped when he fell, and quickly found it.

One of the bullets fired at him had missed completely; the other had only nicked his shoulder, a wound that had bled quite a lot and stung like hell. When he'd fallen backwards off the walkway, he'd decided to play dead, hoping that none of the attackers would think to put another bullet into him.

And it had worked. He was alive and almost fully mobile, and now he had a pistol in his pocket. More importantly, he'd heard every word Angela had said to Bronson about the 'tablets of the Temple', and he knew exactly what she was talking about. He even knew where they were going to start looking.

Baverstock bent down again and felt around the wooden walkway until he found a torch, checked that it worked, then headed off down the water tunnel to the entrance.

Angela and Bronson stepped out of the tunnel and emerged into the fresh night air in the middle of the fortress of Har Megiddo. They climbed up the steps and paused for a few moments at the top to catch their breath, then set off towards the remains of the temples.

'If you think about the way the inscription was written,' Angela said, leading the way to the massive circular altar beside the temple ruins, 'it suggests that the Sicarii hid both the Silver Scroll and these tablets at the same location, the scroll in the cistern and the tablets in an altar. And when they were here at Har Megiddo, the only altar on the site was the one we're looking at right now.'

She stopped, reached into her pocket and pulled out the piece of paper she'd been studying that afternoon while Bronson slept beside her in the car. She shone the beam of the torch at the writing on it.

'Take another look at the inscription. It said "the tablets of ----- temple of Jerusalem", which logically translates as "the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem". The next relevant phrase is "----- ----- altar of ----- ----- describes a -----". There are several blanks in that, but I think it probably originally read something like "in the altar of stone that describes a circle". The next section is a bit easier to guess. We translated that as "----- four stones ----- the south side ----- a width of ----- ----- and height ----- ----- cubit to ----- ----- cavity within". I think that means "removing four stones from the south side of a width of some cubits and height of one cubit to expose the cavity within".'

' "Some cubits"?' Bronson asked. 'I can see why you think it's one cubit high, but the width is a bit bloody vague, isn't it?'

'Yes, but I don't think it matters. The important thing is that the inscription on the clay tablets claimed there's a cavity inside this altar, and they got access to it from the south side, by pulling out several stones. So that's what we're going to do.'

They stepped closer to the altar, using their torches to ensure they didn't trip over anything because the area was treacherous, criss-crossed by low walls and a succession of quite deep square pits whose purpose Bronson could only guess at.

Deciding which part of the altar lay on the 'south side' was easy. Bronson simply looked up at the sky, identified the Great Bear star formation and took Angela to the opposite side of the circular structure.

'That's north over there,' he said, pointing up at the night sky, 'so this is the south face of the altar.' He bent down and used his torch to look at the stones that formed the side of the structure. 'It doesn't look to me as if any of these have been touched for centuries.' He laughed shortly.

'Which they haven't, of course. So where do we start?'

'The only dimension the inscription provides for the height of the stones the Sicarii removed was one cubit, assuming that my translation of the Aramaic word was right and meant "cubit" rather than "cubits".'

'Remind me. How long was a cubit?' Bronson asked.

'Roughly eighteen inches,' Angela said. 'But they were removing stones to get access to a cavity inside this altar, and I think they would just have guessed at the size of the opening they created. From the look of these stones, taking out almost any two of them would leave an opening with a vertical height of about eighteen inches, so that's not much of a clue.'

Bronson looked again at the side of the ancient altar.

'Well, I suppose we could just start more or less in the middle and see where that gets us.'

'There's probably an easier way,' Angela said. 'There's no mortar between the stones, and one of the things I put in your rucksack was a wire coat-hanger. Untwist it and we've got a thin strong probe about three feet long. Slide it between the stones and see if you can locate the cavity that way.'

'Brilliant.' Bronson pulled out the hanger and a pair of pliers and began untwisting the steel. In a couple of minutes he'd got the whole thing straight apart from a 'T' shape at one end that he could use as a handle.

'Start here,' Angela said, gesturing to a large gap between two of the stones.

Bronson slid the probe into the space, but it penetrated for only about eight or ten inches before meeting a solid object, probably another course of stones behind the outermost ones. He pulled it out and tried again, but with the same result.

'This might take a while,' he said, forcing the probe into another gap, 'but it'll still be a lot quicker than pulling out stones at random.'

After almost ten minutes, he had found no sign of any cavity behind the stones. Then, with a suddenness that surprised him, the improvised probe vanished deeper, much deeper, into one space. He pulled it out and tried again, with the same result. Instead of stopping after perhaps ten inches, the steel rod was penetrating well over two feet.

'There's definitely a space behind here,' Bronson said. 'Come on – let's start looking.'

He opened his rucksack again and pulled out the steel crowbar. He slid the point of the tool between two of the stones and levered. Nothing happened, so he switched to the opposite side and heaved on the other end. This time, it moved a fraction. Bronson repeated the process on the top and bottom, and slowly the stone began to loosen. After a couple of minutes he'd freed it up enough to permit him to ram the jemmy deep into the gap at the top of the stone and lever it out of the wall. The stone crashed to the ground with a dull thud. Bronson moved it to one side and then he and Angela peered into the hole it had left.

Disappointingly, there was another stone directly behind the one Bronson had removed.

'I think that's the reason the probe went straight through,' he said, pointing into the hole. 'That corner of the stone I've just shifted lined up almost exactly with the one directly behind it. Everywhere else I tried to run the wire through, it must have been hitting the face of one of the stones in the row behind.'

'Try the probe again,' Angela suggested.

This time, when Bronson slid the thin length of steel into the gaps around the stones of the inner course, it met almost no resistance and clearly entered some kind of a void.

'I'll move another stone from the outer layer,' he said, 'just to give me room to work, then take out a couple from the second course.'

With one stone already removed, shifting a second one was easy. Bronson was concerned about the security of the stones above the hole he'd made in the side of the altar, but they showed no sign of falling out. The inner layers of stones were actually easier to move, because they were slightly smaller, and Bronson quickly pulled out three of them to reveal a small open space.

'Pass me that torch, please,' he muttered, crouching down on his hands and knees to peer into the cavity.

'What can you see?' Angela demanded, her voice quavering with excitement. 'What's in there?'

'It looks to me like it's empty. No, hang on – there's something lying flat on the floor of the cavity. Give me a hand. It looks as if it's quite heavy.'

Bronson eased the thick tablet of stone out of the hole he'd made and with Angela's help rested it against the side of the altar. They both stood back and for a few seconds just looked at it.

'What the hell is it?' Bronson asked. 'And there's another one in there, I think.'

In less than a minute, they'd lifted out the second tablet and placed it gently beside the first one.

'That's it,' he said, then looked back into the hole he'd made, using the beam of the torch to inspect it. 'There's nothing else in the cavity,' he reported, 'except rubble and a lot of dust.'

They both looked intently at the two stone tablets. They were roughly oblong with square bases and rounded tops, maybe an inch thick and perhaps fifteen inches high and nine or ten inches wide. Both surfaces of each slab had been carefully inscribed, and it looked to Bronson as if the two inscriptions were probably written in Aramaic – he'd seen enough of the language lately to be fairly certain he recognized it – and appeared to be identical.

'Dust?' Angela asked after a moment, glancing at him.

'Yes. The dust of two millennia, I suppose.'

Angela pointed at the tablets. 'But there's not a speck of dust on either of these.'

Bronson looked more carefully. 'Maybe I knocked it all off when I dragged them out,' he suggested. 'What are they? The Aramaic could almost be some kind of a list. It looks like a series of individual lines of writing rather than a solid block of text.'

For a few seconds Angela didn't reply, just knelt down and stared at the two tablets, the tips of her fingers gently tracing the Aramaic characters. Then she looked up at him, her face pale.

'I never thought we'd find anything like this,' she said softly. 'I think these could be described as "the tablets of the Temple of Jerusalem and of Moses". It looks to me as if these could be early – really early – copies of the Decalogue.'

'The what?' Bronson noticed that Angela seemed almost to be having difficulty breathing.

'I mean the Ten Commandments, the Mosaic Covenant. The tablets God gave to Moses on Mount Sinai. The covenant between God and man, the actual tablets that laid out the rules of the faith.' She paused for a few seconds, then looked at Bronson, her eyes wide, almost scared. 'Forget about the Ark of the Covenant. We could be looking at two copies of the Covenant itself.'

'Who says they're copies?' asked Baverstock, stepping out from behind them, a pistol in his hand.