The Rosetta Key

“You lied?”

“It was a costly admission of failure. I was mutilated as punishment.

But the reason is that I did find old records, fragmentary accounts, suggesting a secret route to powers so great that a man such as Djezzar must never get them. The Spring of Gihon that feeds the Pool of Siloam, outside the city walls, may offer a way. If so, the Muslims would never see us.”

“The cisterns,” said Miriam, “might lead to the deepest places where the Jews may have hid the ark, the book, and other treasures.”

“Until, perhaps, they were uncovered by the Knights Templar,” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

7 1

Farhi added. “And, perhaps, re-hidden—after Jacques de Molay burned at the stake. There is one other problem, however, that has also discouraged me from pursuing any exploration.”

“The tunnels are blocked by water?” I had grim memories of my escape from the Great Pyramid.

“Possibly. But even if they are not, one record I found made reference to doors that are sealed. What was once open may now be closed.”

“Determined men can force any locked door, with enough muscle or gunpowder,” Jericho said.

“Not gunpowder!” Farhi said. “Do you want to arouse the city?”

“Muscle, then.”

“What if the Muslims hear us poking around down there?” I asked.

“That,” the banker said, “would be most unfortunate.”

¤

¤

¤

My rifle was complete. Jericho had carefully pasted two of Miriam’s hairs on its telescope to give an aiming point, and when I tested the gun outside the city I found I could reliably hit a plate at two hundred yards. A musket, in contrast, was inaccurate after fifty.

But when I took the piece up to watch for the French brigands from our rooftop, peering until my eye ached, I saw nothing. Had they left?

I fantasized that they hadn’t, that Alessandro Silano was here, secretly directing them, and that I could capture and interrogate him about Astiza.

But it was as if the gang had never existed.

Miriam has used bright brass to inset two replica seraphim on each side of the wooden stock as patch boxes where I kept my greased wadding. Pushed by the bullet, it cleans the barrel of powder resi-due with each shot. The seraphim crouched with wings outstretched like those on the Ark. She also made me a new tomahawk. I was so pleased I gave a dubious Jericho some instruction on how to win at pharaon, should he ever find a game, and bought a small golden Spanish cross for Miriam. I also wasn’t entirely surprised, when our evening of adventure came, that Miriam insisted she come along, despite 7 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

the custom to cloister women in Jerusalem. “She knows old legends that bore me,” Jericho admitted. “She sees things I don’t, or won’t.

And I don’t want to leave her alone with the French thieves skulking about.”

“We agree on that,” I said.

“Besides, the two of you need a woman’s sense,” she said.

“It’s important we move stealthily,” Jericho added. “Miriam said you have red Indian skills.”

Truth be told, my red Indian skills had consisted primarily of avoiding the savages whenever I could, and buying them off with presents when I couldn’t. My few scrapes with them had been terrifying. But I had exaggerated my frontier exploits to Miriam (a bad habit of mine), and it wouldn’t do to set the record straight now.

Farhi also came, dressed in black. “My presence may be even more important than I thought,” he said. “There are Jewish mysteries too, and since our conversation I’ve been studying what the Templars studied, including the numerology of the Jewish kabbalah and its Book of Zohar.”

“Another book? What’s this one for?”

“Some of us believe the Torah, or your Bible, can be read at two levels. One is the stories we all know. The second is that there is another story, a mystery, a sacred story—a story hidden between the lines—embedded in a number code. That is Zohar.”

“The Bible is a code?”

“Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet can be represented by a number, and there are ten more numbers beyond, representing the sacred sefiroth. These are the code.”

“Ten what?”

“Sefiroth. They are the six directions of reality—the four cardinals of east, west, north, and south, plus up and down—and the makings of the universe, being fire, water, ether, and God. These ten sefiroth and twenty-two letters represent the thirty-two ways of wisdom, which in turn point toward the seventy-two sacred names of God.

Can this Book of Thoth perhaps be read in the same way? What is its key? We will see.”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

7 3

Well, here was more of the same gibberish I’d encountered ever since I’d won the damned Egyptian medallion in Paris. Lunacy, apparently, is contagious. So many people seem to believe in legends, numerology, and mathematical marvels that I’d begun to believe too, even if I could rarely make heads or tails of what people were talking about. But if a disfigured banker like Farhi was willing to muck about in the bowels of the earth because of Jewish numerology, then it seemed worth my time, too.

“Well, welcome. Try to keep up.” I turned to Jericho. “Why are you shouldering a bag of mortar?”

“To brick up whatever we break into. The secret to stealing things is to make it look like no theft has occurred.” That’s the kind of thinking I admire.

We slipped out the Dung Gate after dark. It was early March, and Napoleon’s invasion had already begun. Word had come that the French had marched from El-Arish at the border between Egypt and Palestine on February 15, won a quick victory at Gaza, and were approaching Jaffa. Time was short. We made our way down the rocky slope to the Pool of Siloam, a plumbing fixture since King David’s time, me breezily giving advice to crouch here and scurry there as if it were really trusty Algonquin lore. The truth is, I’m more at home in a gambling salon than wilderness, but Miriam seemed impressed.

There was a new moon, a sliver that left the hillside dark, and the early spring night air was cold. Dogs barked from the hovels of a few shepherds and goatherds as we clambered over old ruins. Behind us, forming a dark line against the sky, were the city walls that enclosed the south side of the Temple Mount. I could see the form of El-Aqsa up there, and the walls and arches of its Templar additions.

Were Muslim sentries peering down? As we crept along, I had an uneasy feeling of being watched. “Someone’s out there,” I whispered to Jericho.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I feel them, but can’t see them.” He looked around. “I’ve heard nothing. I think you frightened the French away.”

7 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

I fingered my tomahawk and took my rifle in both hands. “You three go ahead. I’ll see if I can catch anyone behind.” But the night seemed as empty as a magician’s black bag. At length, knowing the others were waiting, I went on to the Pool of Siloam, a rectangular ink pit near the valley floor. Worn stone steps led downward to a stone platform from which women could dip their jars.

Sparrows, which nested in the pit’s stone walls, rustled uneasily. Only the faintest gleam of faces showed me where the others huddled.

And our group had grown.

“Sir Sidney did send help,” Jericho explained.

“British?” Now I understood my foreboding.

“We’ll need their labor underground.”

“Lieutenant Henry Tentwhistle of HMS Dangerous at your service, Mr. Gage,” their crouched commander whispered in the dark. “You will recall, perhaps, your success at outbluffing me in our games of brelan. ”

I groaned inwardly. “I was lucky in the face of your boldness, Lieutenant.”

“This is Ensign Potts, who you bested in pharaon. Took six months’

wages.”

“Surely not that much.” I shook his hand. “How desperately I have needed it to complete the Crown’s mission here in Jerusalem.”

“And these two lads you know as well, I believe.” Even in the midnight gloom of the Pool of Siloam, I could recognize the barricade gleam of a memorably wide and hostile smile of piano-key teeth.

“You owes me a tussle, after this,” the owner said.

“And our money back besides.”

But of course. It was Big Ned and Little Tom.

c h a p t e r

8

You should be honored, guv’nor,” Big Ned said.

“This is the only mission we’s ever volunteered for,” said Little Tom.

“Sir Sidney thought it best for us all to work together.”

“It’s because of you we’re along.”

“Flattered, I’m sure,” I said weakly. “You couldn’t advise me of this, Jericho?”

“Sir Sidney teaches: the fewer to speak, the better.” Indeed. Old Ben himself said, “Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

“So he sent four more along?”

“The way we figured it, there must be money at stake to draw in a weasel like you,” Little Tom said cheerfully. “Then they issued us picks and we say to each other, well, it must be buried treasure! And this Yankee, he can settle with Ned here as he promised on the frigate—or he can give us his share.”

“We’re not as simple as you think,” Big Ned added.

“Clearly. Well,” I said, looking at the decidedly unfriendly squad of sailors, trying to ignore my instinct that this was all going to turn out 7 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

badly, “it’s good to have allies, lads, who’ve met over friendly games of chance. Now then. There’s a bit of danger here, and we must be quiet as mice, but there’s a real chance to make history, too. No treasure, but a chance to find a secret corridor into the heart of the enemy, should Boney seize this town. That’s our mission. My philosophy is that what’s past is past, and what comes, comes best to men who stand with each other, don’t you think? Every penny I have goes into the Crown’s business, after all.”

“Crown’s business? And what’s that fine firearm you’re bearing, then?” Little Tom pointed.

“This rifle?” It did gleam ostentatiously. “Why, a foremost example. For your protection, since it’s my responsibility that none of you come to harm.”

“Costly little piece, it looks to me. As made up as a high-class tart, that gun is. Lot of our money went into that, I’ll wager.”

“It cost hardly a trifle here in Jerusalem,” I insisted. “Eastern man-ufacture, no knowledge of real gunnery. . . . Pretty piece of rubbish, actually.” I avoided Jericho’s glare. “Now, I can’t promise we’ll find anything of value. But if we do, then of course you lads can have my share and I’ll just content myself with the odd scroll or two. That’s the spirit of cooperation I’d like to enter with, eh? All cats are gray in the dark, as Ben Franklin liked to say.”

“Who said?” asked Tom.

“Bloody rebel who should have hanged,” Big Ned rumbled.

“And what the devil does it mean?”

“That we’re a bag of bloody cats, or something.”

“That we’re all one until the mission is over,” Tentwhistle corrected.

“And who’s this damsel, then?” Little Tom said, poking at Miriam.

She stepped distastefully away.

“My sister,” Jericho growled.

“Sister!” Tom stepped back as if he’d been given a jolt of electricity.

“You take your sister on a treasure hunt? What the devil for?”

“She sees things,” I said.

“The hell she does,” Ned said. “And who’s that back there?” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

7 7

“Our Jewish guide.”

“A Jew, too?”

“Molls are bad luck,” Tom said.

“Nor are we carrying her,” his companion added.

“As if I’d let you,” Miriam snapped.

“Be careful, Ned,” I warned. “Her knee knows where your cockles are.”

“Does it now?” He looked at her with more interest.

By the lawns of Lexington, wasn’t this a fine mess? I couldn’t have made a worse stew if I’d invited anarchists to draw up a constitution.

So, thoroughly unsettled, we stepped into the shallow pool and waded knee-deep water to its end. Current issued from a cavelike opening secured by an iron grate.

“Built to keep out children and animals,” Jericho said, hefting his iron pry bar. “Not us.” He applied muscle and leverage and there was a snap, the rusty grill swinging inward with a screech. Once inside, our ironmonger closed the gate behind us, securing it with his own new padlock. “For this one I have a key.” I looked behind at the well’s long rim. Had someone ducked out of sight? “Did you see anything?” I whispered to Farhi.

“I haven’t been able to see since we left Jericho’s house,” the old banker grumbled. “This is not my habit, splashing in the dark.” Soon the water was thigh-deep, cool but not cold. The tunnel passage we were wading into was as wide as my outstretched arms and from ten to fifteen feet high, bearing the texture of ancient picks.

This was a man-made tube built to bring natural spring water into King David’s old city, Farhi told us. Its bottom was uneven, making us stumble. When we were far enough into the tunnel for Jericho to risk lighting the first lantern, I splashed up to Tentwhistle. “There’s no chance you were followed down here, was there?” I asked.

“We paid our guides to keep their mouths shut,” the lieutenant said.

“Aye, and didn’t breathe a word in Jerusalem, neither,” Ned put in.

“Wait. The four of you English sailors went inside the city?”

“Just to get some tack.”

7 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“I told you to lie low until dark!” Jericho hissed with exasperation.

“We were in Arab sheets, and kept to ourselves,” Tentwhistle said defensively. “By the pulpit, I’m not getting all the way to Jerusalem and not have a look around. Famous town, it is.”

“Arab sheets!” I exclaimed. “All of you look as Arab as Father Christmas! Your beet-red faces couldn’t be any more obvious if you’d marched in with the Union Jack!”

“So we was s’posed to starve ourselves until nightfall and then dig you a hole?” Big Ned countered. “Meet us with some tucker if you’re so determined to keep us out of your precious city.” Well, what could we do about it now? I turned to Jericho, his face gloomy in the amber lantern light. “I think we’d better hurry.”

“I left a strong padlock at the grate. But you’re our rear guard, with your rifle.”

Suddenly Miriam yelped from the shadows. “Don’t touch me!”

“Sorry, did I brush against?” Little Tom said salaciously.

“Here, doll, I’ll keep you safe,” Ned added.

Jericho started to raise his pick, but I stayed his hand. “I’ll handle this.” As I pushed my way back to the rear of the file, I let the barrel of my new rifle drive into Ned’s groin. “Bloody hell!” he gasped.

“My clumsiness,” I said, swinging the stock away so abruptly that it nicely clipped the side of Little Tom’s face.

“Bastard!”

“I’m sure if we all keep our distance, we won’t bump.”

“I’ll stand where I bloody well . . .” Then Tom yelped and jumped.

“That bitch snuck up behind!”

“Sorry, did I brush against?” Miriam was holding a pry bar.

“I warned you, gentlemen. Keep distant if you value your man-hood.”

“I’ll geld you myself if you touch my sister again,” Jericho added.

“And I’ll give you both a dance with the lash,” Tentwhistle said.

“Ensign Potts! Keep discipline!”

“Yes sir! You two—behave!”

“Ah, we was just playing . . . Lord on high! What happened to him?” Farhi had passed through the lantern light, and the startled t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

7 9

sailors had their first look at his mutilated face: the cratered eye, the snoutlike nose, the butchered ear.

“I touched his sister,” the Jew said slyly.

The sailors went white and kept as far from Miriam as they could.

¤

¤

¤

If there was any advantage to the long slog through thigh-deep water, it was that it took some starch out of the panting sailors.

They weren’t used to close places or land work, and only their assumption of ancient coin kept them from balking entirely. To keep them wheezing, I suggested to Tentwhistle that Ned and Tom help carry Jericho’s bag of mortar.

“Why don’t we all just carry a hod of bloody bricks while we’re at it?” Ned complained. But he plodded on like a mule, all of us wading in a cocoon of lantern light. I paused once to listen while the others pushed ahead, darkness growing as they receded. There—was that the echo of a clang, of a padlock being broken far behind? Yet at such a distance it was hardly more audible than the drop of a pin, and I heard nothing else. At length I gave up and hurried to catch the others.

Finally there was the sound of running water and the tunnel began lowering toward the water surface. Soon we’d be crawling.

“We are nearing the natural spring,” Farhi said. “Legend says that somewhere above is the navel of Jerusalem.”

“I think we’re in the bloody arse, meself,” Little Tom muttered.

We hunted with our lanterns until we indeed found a dark slit overhead, tight as a purser’s pocket. I wouldn’t have guessed it led anywhere, but once we’d boosted each other up it opened and a passage angled back toward the main city, dry this time. We crawled over boulders fallen from the ceiling, Miriam more agile than any of us.

There was another mouse hole and the woman led the way, Big Ned cursing as he barely squeezed through, pushing the sack of mortar. He was covered in a sweaty sheen. Then the tunnel became regular again, man-made. It led upward at a steady slope, its ceiling only a foot 8 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

above our heads and its diameter too narrow for two men to easily pass. Ned kept bumping his crown and cursing.

“Legend has it that this passage was built just wide enough for a shield,” Farhi said. “A single man could hold it against an army of invaders. We’re on the right path.”

As we advanced the air grew stale and the lanterns dimmer. I had no idea how far we’d come or what time it was. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have been told we’d walked, waded and crawled back to Paris. Finally we came to dressed stone, not cave walls. “Herod’s wall,” Jericho murmured. “We’re passing under it, and thus under the Temple Mount platform itself, far above.” We pressed on, and once more I heard water ahead. Suddenly our passageway ended in a large cave barely bridged by our feeble light.

Jericho had me hold his lantern while he cautiously lowered himself into a pool below. “It’s all right, only chest deep and clean,” he announced. “We’ve found the cisterns. Be as quiet as you can.” At the other side the tunnel went on. We came to a second cistern and then a third, each about ten yards across. “In a wetter season all these passages would be underwater,” Jericho said.

Finally the passageway led upward again to a dry cavern, and at last our path abruptly ended. The ceiling was higher because of a cave-in of stone that half-filled the chamber, raising its floor as well. Beyond, we could see the top of an arched doorway made of stone. Trouble was, its door was gone and the opening had been entirely filled with mortared stone blocks, our way plugged.

“Bloody hell, it’s all for nothing then,” Ned wheezed.

“Is it?” Jericho said. “What’s behind this wall that its builders didn’t want us to get to?”

“Or let out,” Miriam added.

“We needs a keg of powder,” the sailor said, throwing down the mortar.

“No, quiet is the key,” said Farhi. “You must dig through before dawn prayers.”

“And seal it back up,” Miriam put in.

“Bollocks,” said Ned.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

8 1

I tried to focus the oaf. “Lost time is never found again, old Ben would say.”

“And men that cheats at cards should give back what they wrong-fully took, Big Ned says.” He squinted at me. “There better be something on the other side of that wall, guv’nor, or I’ll empty you by shaking from the ankles.” But despite his bluster he and Little Tom finally pitched in, the eight of us forming a chain, passing loose rock to make a trench to the base of the blocked arch. It took two hours of backbreaking work to push enough rubble aside to see the entrance whole. A broad underground gate was stoppered like a bottle by different-colored limestone.

“It made sense to seal it,” Tentwhistle offered. “This could be an entry point for enemy armies.”

“The ancient Jews built the arch,” Farhi guessed, “and Arabs, Crusaders, or Templars bricked it up. Some earthquake brought down the ceiling, and it’s been forgotten ever since, except for legend.” Jericho wearily hefted a bar. “Let’s get to it, then.” The first stone is always the hardest. We didn’t dare pound and break, so we chiseled out mortar and put Ned on one side and Jericho on the other to pry. Their muscles bulged, the block slid out like a stuck, stubborn drawer, and finally they caught its fall and set it quietly as a slipper. Farhi kept looking at the ceiling as if he could somehow see the reaction of Muslim guards far above us.

I bent to the puff of stale air that came out our hole. Blackness. So we worked on adjacent stones, cracking their mortar and leveraging them one by one. Finally the hole was big enough to crawl through.

“Jericho and I will scout,” I said. “You sailors stand guard. If there’s anything here, we’ll bring it to you.”

“Bloody ’ell with that!” Big Ned protested.

“I’m afraid I must agree with my subordinate,” Tentwhistle said crisply. “We are on a naval mission, gentlemen, and like it or not, we’re all agents of the Crown. By the same token, any property taken belongs to the Crown for later distribution under the prize laws. Your contributions will be fully taken into account, of course.”

“We’re not in your navy anymore,” Jericho objected.

8 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“But you’re in the pay of Sir Sidney Smith, are you not?” Tentwhistle said. “And Gage is his agent as well. Which means that we go through this hole together, in the name of king and country, or not at all.”

I put my hand on my rifle barrel, which I’d leaned against the cave wall. “You were sent as underground labor, not a prize crew,” I tried.

“And you, sir, were sent to Jerusalem as the Crown’s agent, not a private treasure hunter.” His hand went to his pistol, as did that of Ensign Potts. Ned and Tom grasped the hilt of their cutlasses. Jericho raised his pry bar like a spear.

We quivered like rival dogs in a butcher shop.

“Stop!” Farhi hissed. “Are you insane? Start a fight down here and we’ll have every Muslim in Jerusalem waiting for us! We can’t afford to quarrel.”

We hesitated, then lowered our hands. He was right. I sighed.

“So which of you wants to go first? There were snakes and crocodiles behind every hole in Egypt.”

Uneasy silence. “Sounds like you’re the one with experience, guv’nor.”

So I wriggled through the hole, waited a moment to make sure nothing was biting me, and then pulled through a lantern to lift.

I started. Skulls grinned back at me.

They weren’t real skulls, just sculpture. Still, it was disquieting to see a carved row of skulls and crossbones running like a molding around the junction of walls and ceiling. I’d seen nothing like that in Egypt. The others were crawling in behind me, and as they spied the morbid frieze the sailors’ exclamations ranged from “Jesus!” to a more anticipatory “Pirate treasure!”

Farhi had a more prosaic explanation. “Not pirates, gentlemen. A Templar style, that skeletal molding. You knew, Mr. Gage, that the skull and crossbones dates back at least to the Poor Knights?”

“I’ve seen it in connection with Masonic rites as well. And in church graveyards.”

“Mortality occupies us all, doesn’t it?” The skulls decorated a corridor, and we passed down it to a larger t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

8 3

room. There I saw other decorations that I assumed had originated with Masons as well. The floor was paved with marble tile in the familiar black-and-white checkerboard of the Dionysian architects, except down the center was a curious pattern. Black tiles zigzagged against white to make a slashing symbol, like an enormous lightning bolt. Odd. Why lightning?

The entrance we’d come through was flanked on this side by two enormous pillars, one black and one white.

In alcoves on either side were two statues of what looked like the Virgin, one alabaster and the other ebony: The white and black Virgins. Mary the Mother and Mary Magdalene? Or the Virgin Mary and ancient Isis, goddess of the Sirian star?

“All things are dual,” Miriam murmured.

The roof was a vaulted barrel, rather plain, but sturdy enough to hold up the Herodian platform somewhere above. At the far end was a stone altar, with a dark alcove beyond. The rest of the room was barren. It had the scale of a dining hall, and perhaps the knights had feasted here when they weren’t busy tunneling into the earth in search of Solomon’s hoard. Other than that, it was disappointingly empty.

We walked across the room, fifty paces in length. Mounted on the face of the altar was a double plaque. On one side was a crude drawing of a domed church. On the other, two knights were mounted on a single horse.

“The Templar seal!” Farhi exclaimed. “This confirms they built this. See, there’s the Dome of the Rock, just like the mosque above us, symbolizing the site of Solomon’s Temple, origin of the Templar name. And two knights on a single horse? Some believe it was a sign of their voluntary poverty.”

“Others contend that it means the two are aspects of the one,” Miriam said. “Male and female. Forward and backward. Night and day.”

“There’s bloody nothing here,” Big Ned interjected, looking around.

“An astute observation,” Tentwhistle said. “It appears we’ve gone to a lot of labor for nothing, Mr. Gage.”

“Except the Crown’s business,” I shot back sourly.

8 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Aye, the American has given us the business all right,” Little Tom muttered.

“But look at this, then!” Ensign Potts called. He’d gone over to examine the White Madonna. “A servant’s door, maybe? Or a secret passageway!”

We clustered around. The ensign had pushed on the Madonna’s outstretched hand, raised as if in blessing, and she had pivoted. When she did so, stone had slid away behind her to reveal a winding circular stair, with an opening so narrow you had to squeeze sideways to enter it. It climbed steeply upward.

“That would go to the Temple platform above,” Farhi said. “Communication with the old Templar quarters, in El-Aqsa Mosque. It’s probably blocked, but we must be quieter than ever. Sound would carry up that like a chimney.”

“Who cares what they ’ear,” Ned said. “There’s nothing down here anyway.”

“You’re on Muslim holy ground, fool, and sacred Jewish soil as well. If either group hears us they’ll bind us, circumcise us, torture us for trespassing, and then tear us limb from limb.”

“Ah.”

“Let’s try the Black Madonna as well,” Miriam said.

So we went to the opposite side of the room, but this time no matter how hard Potts pushed on the arm, the statue didn’t move.

Miriam’s dualism didn’t seem in effect. We stood, frustrated.

“Where’s the Temple treasure, Farhi?” I asked.

“Did I not warn that the Templars got here before you?”

“But this chamber looks European, like something they built, not something they discovered. Why would they construct this? It’s a laborious way to get a dining hall.”

“No windows down here,” Potts observed.

“So this was for ceremonies,” Miriam reasoned. “But the real business, the research, must have been in another chamber. There must be another door.”

“The walls are blank and solid,” her brother said.

I remembered my experience at Dendara in Egypt and glanced at t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

8 5

the floor. The black-and-white tiles formed diagonals that radiated out from the altar. “I think Big Ned should push on this stone table here,” I said. “Hard!”

At first nothing happened. Then Jericho joined him, and finally Little Tom, Potts, and me, all of us grunting. Finally there was a scrape and the altar began to rotate on a pivot set at one corner. As it slid sideways across the floor, a hole was revealed underneath. Stairs led down into darkness.

“This is more like it, then,” Ned said, panting.

We descended, crowding into an anteroom below the main chamber. At its end was a great iron door, red and black with rust. It was marked by ten brass disks the size of dinner plates, green with age.

There was one disk at the top, then two rows of three each descending. Between them but lower was a vertical column of three more. In the center of each was a latch.

“Ten doorknobs?” Tentwhistle asked.

“Or ten locks,” Jericho said. “Each of these latches might turn a bar into this jamb of iron.” He tried one handle but it didn’t move. “We’ve no tools to dent this.”

“Which means that maybe it ain’t been opened and ain’t been robbed,” Ned reasoned, more shrewdly than I would have given him credit for. “That’s good news, it seems to me. The guv’nor may have found something after all. What would you have that’s so precious that you’d put a door like this in front of it, eh, and down at the bottom of a rabbit hole to boot?”

“Ten locks? There are no keyholes,” I pointed out.

And as Jericho and Ned pulled and pushed on the massive door, it didn’t quiver. “It’s frozen in place,” the blacksmith said. “Maybe it’s not a door after all.”

“And time is growing short,” Farhi warned. “It will be dawn on the platform above, and Muslims will be coming to pray. If we start pounding on that iron, someone is bound to hear us.”

“Wait,” I said, remembering the mystery of the medallion in Egypt.

“It’s a pattern, don’t you think? Ten discs, shaped like the sun . . . ten is a sacred number. This meant something to the Templars, I’m guessing.” 8 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“But what?”

“Sefiroth,” Miriam said slowly. “It’s the tree.”

“A tree?”

Farhi suddenly stepped back. “Yes, yes, I see it now! The Etz Hayim, the Tree of Life!”

“The kabbalah,” Miriam confirmed. “Jewish mysticism and numerology.”

“The Knights Templar were Jews?”

“Certainly not, but ecumenical when it came to searching for ancient secrets,” Farhi reasoned. “They’d have studied the Jewish texts for clues for where to dig in the mount. Muslim too, and any other. They would have been interested in all symbols aiding their quest for knowledge. This is the pattern of the ten sefiroth, with keter, the crown, at the top, and then binah, intuition, opposite chokhmah, wisdom—and so on.”

“Greatness, mercy, strength, glory, victory, majesty, foundation, and sovereignty, or kingdom,” Miriam recited. “All aspects of a God that is beyond understanding. We cannot grasp him, but only these manifestations of his being.”

“But what does it mean on this door?”

“It’s a puzzle, I think,” Farhi said. He had brought his lantern closer. “Yes, I can see the Jewish names engraved in Hebrew. Chesed, tiferet, netzach . . .”

“The Egyptians believed words were magic,” I remembered. “That reciting them could summon a god or powers . . .” Big Ned crossed himself. “By our Lord, heathen blasphemy! These knights of yours adopted the works of the Jew? No wonder they were burned at the stake!”

“They didn’t adopt, they used,” Jericho said patiently. “Here in Jerusalem we respect other faiths, even when we quarrel with them.

The Templars meant something by this. Perhaps the latches are to be turned in the correct succession.”

“The crown first,” I offered. “Keter there, at the top.”

“I’ll try it.” Yet that latch budged no more than the others.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

8 7

“Wait, think,” Farhi said. “If we make a mistake perhaps none will work.”

“Or we’ll trigger some trap,” I said, remembering the descending stone monoliths that almost pinned me in the pyramid. “This might be a test to keep out the unworthy.”

“What would a Templar choose first?” Farhi asked. “Victory? They were warriors. Glory? They found fame. Wisdom? If the treasure were a book. Intuition?”

“Thought,” Miriam said. “Thought, like Thoth, like the book Ethan is seeking.”

“Thought?”

“If you draw lines from disc to disc they intersect here in the center,” she pointed. “Does not that center represent to the kabbalistic Jews the unknowable mind of God? Is not that center thought itself?

Essence? What we Christians might call soul?”

“You’re right,” Farhi said, “but there is no latch there.”

“Yes, the only place without a latch is the heart.” She traced lines from the ten disks to this central point. “But here is a small engraved circle.” And before anyone could stop her, she took the pry bar she had poked Little Tom with and rammed the end of the barrel against the iron at precisely that point. There was a dull, echoing boom that made us all jump. Then the engraved circle sank, there was a click, and suddenly all ten latches on all ten brass disks began to turn in unison.

“Get ready!” I raised my rifle. Tentwhistle and Potts held up their naval pistols. Ned and Tom unsheathed their cutlasses.

“We’re all going to be rich,” Ned breathed.

When the latches stopped turning Jericho gave a shove and, with a grinding rattle, the great door pivoted inward and down like a draw-bridge, its top held by chains, ponderously lowering until it landed with a soft whump on a floor of dust beyond. A gray puff flew upward, momentarily obscuring what lie beyond, and then we saw the door had bridged a crevice in the floor. The chasm extended downward into blackness.

8 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Some fundamental fault in the earth,” Farhi guessed, peering down. “This has been a sacred mountain since time began, a rock that addresses heaven, but perhaps it has roots to the underworld as well.”

“All things are dual,” Miriam said again.

Cool air wafted upward from the stone crevasse. All of us were uneasy, and I for one remembered that pit of hell in the pyramid. Our greed made us step across anyway.

This chamber was much smaller than the Templar hall above, not much bigger than a drawing room, with a low, domed ceiling. The dome was painted with a riot of stars, zodiacal signs, and weird creatures from some primordial time, a swirl of symbolism that reminded me of the ceiling I’d seen in Egypt at Dendara. At its apex was a seemingly gilded orb that likely represented the sun. In the center of the room was a waist-high stone pedestal, like the base for a statue or a display stand, but it was empty. The walls bore writing in an alphabet I’d never seen before, neither Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, nor Latin. It was different than what I’d seen in Egypt, too. Many characters were geometrical in shape, squares and triangles and circles, but others were twisting worms or tiny mazes. Wood and brass chests were heaped around the room’s periphery, dry and corroded from age.

And inside them there was . . .

Nothing.

Again, I was reminded of the Great Pyramid, where the book’s depository was empty. Cruelty upon cruelty. First the book gone, then Astiza, and now this joke. . . .

“Bloody hell!” It was Ned and Tom, kicking at the chests. Ned hurled one against the stone wall, a great crash turning it into a spray of splinters. “There’s nothing here! It’s all been robbed!” Robbed, retrieved, or removed. If there had ever been treasure here—and I suspected there had been—it was long gone: taken by the Templars to Europe, perhaps, or hidden elsewhere when their leaders went to the stake. Maybe it had gone missing since the Jews were enslaved by Nebuchadnezzar.

“Silence, you fools!” Farhi pleaded. “Do you have to break things t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

8 9

so Muslim guards can hear? This Temple Mount is a sieve of caves and passages!” He turned on Tentwhistle. “Are English sailors’ brains of oak, too?”

The lieutenant flushed.

“What do the walls say?” I asked, looking at the curious characters.

No one answered, because not even Farhi knew. But then Miriam, who’d been counting, pointed at a small ledge where walls and dome joined. There were sconces sculpted out of the stone, as if to hold candles or oil lamps.

“Farhi, count them,” she said.

The mutilated banker did so. “Seventy-two,” he said slowly. “Like the seventy-two names of God.”

Jericho went closer. “There’s oil dripping into them,” he said with wonder. “How could that be, after so many years?”

“It’s a mechanism triggered by the door,” Miriam suggested.

“We’re to light them,” I said with sudden conviction. “Light them to understand.” This was Templar magic, I guessed, some way to illuminate the mystery we’d discovered. And so Jericho lit a scrap of trunk wood with the wick of his lantern, and touched the oil in the nearest sconce. It lit, and then a tendril of flame moved along an oily channel to light the next one.

One by one they flared to life, igniting in a chain around the circle of the dome, until what had been dim was now a place pulsing with light and shadow. Nor was this all. The dome had stone ribs reaching upward to its apex, I saw, and in each rib was a groove. Now these grooves began to glow from the heat or light below, an eerie purple color similar to what I’d seen in electrical experiments with vacuumed tubes of glass.

“Lucifer’s den,” Little Tom breathed.

At the dome’s highest point, a sunlike orb I thought had been merely gilded began to glow as well. And from it issued a beam of purple light, like the gleam I’d conjured from electricity at Christmas, which fell straight back down to the pedestal in the room’s center.

Where a book or scroll might have been kept, to be read.

Jericho and Miriam were crossing themselves.

9 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

There was a hole in the pedestal’s center, I saw, which would have been blocked had a book or scroll rested there. Without them, the light from above could shine through. . . .

And then there was a grinding squeal, like a rusted wheel turning.

The sailors stopped and listened. I looked at the ceiling for signs of collapse.

“It’s the Black Virgin!” Ensign Potts shouted from the stairs leading back into the Templar meeting room. “She’s turning!”

c h a p t e r

9

We ran back upstairs to the statue as if to witness a miracle. The arm that had been immobile before was now pivoting, the Black Madonna turning with it, and a door similar to one behind the White Madonna was opening. When the statue stopped, she seemed to be pointing to the newly opened door.

“By the saints,” Ned declared. “It’s got to be the treasure!” Potts had his pistol out and ducked in first, climbing a steep, winding passageway.

“Wait!” I cried. If the weird display of light had somehow triggered this opening, it was only because the book was missing from the pedestal, allowing the beam to penetrate that hole. So was the pedestal hole some kind of key that led to more treasure—or a Templar alarm, set off when the book was gone? “We don’t know what this means!” But all four sailors were charging up the passageway, and Jericho and I reluctantly followed, Miriam and Farhi bringing up the rear.

The stairway’s rough-hewn walls reminded me of the workmanship of the water tunnel from the Pool of Siloam: it was old, far older than the Templars. Did it date from Solomon’s time, or even Abraham’s?

9 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

The tunnel climbed, spiraling, and then it ended at a stone slab with a great iron ring in it. “Pull, Ned!” Tentwhistle commanded. “Pull like the devil and let’s finish this business! It’s almost dawn!” The sailor did so, and as he slowly hauled the portal open I noticed the far side of the door was uneven rock. This latest door would seem, from its other side, to merely be part of the wall of a cave. Had people above ever known this passage existed?

“Where the bloody hell are we?” Potts asked.

There was a wider cave ahead, and light. “I’m guessing we’ve come out in the cave under the holy rock itself,” I said with a whisper.

“We’re right under Kubbet es-Sakhra, the sacred stone, root of the world, and the Dome of the Rock.”

“Right under what once was Solomon’s Temple,” Farhi said excit-edly, gasping from exertion at the tail of our party. “Where Temple treasures might have been kept, or even the ark itself . . .”

“Right where any guardians of the mosque can hear intruders below,” Jericho warned. This was all going too fast.

“You mean the Muslims . . .”

The seamen weren’t waiting. “Treasure, boys!” Ned and his comrades pushed into the corridor. Then there was an Arabic cry and a shot and poor Pott’s head exploded.

One moment the ensign was dragging me with him in mad enthusiasm, and the next his brains sprayed us all. He dropped like a puppet with cut strings. Gun smoke filled the narrow passage with its familiar stink. “Get down!” I shouted, and we dropped.

Then a roar of gunfire and bullets pinged madly around us.

“Allah akbar!” God is great! The Muslims had heard us blundering into their most sacred precincts and had called their janissary guard!

We’d stirred up a hornet’s nest, all right. Through the smoke I could see a cluster of men reloading.

So I fired, and there was a scream in response. Tentwhistle’s pistol went off, too, hitting another, and now it was the janissaries’ turn to tumble to cover.

“Retreat!” I shouted. “Hurry, by God! Back through that door!” Yet even as we began to swing it shut, the janissaries charged and a t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

9 3

dozen Muslim hands grasped the rim from the other side. Ned gave a great cry and cleaved at some with his cutlass, severing fingers, but more guns went off and Little Tom took a ball in the arm. He bucked backward, cursing. The door was inexorably being pushed open, so Ned roared like a bear and waded into them, chopping like a dervish until the arms disappeared. Then he slammed it shut, taking one of our pry bars to jam it temporarily closed until they could ram it open.

We ran back down the twisting stairway to the empty Templar room.

Behind and above, we could hear the heavy slam of a hammer as the Muslims beat on the stone door.

If they caught us, they’d butcher us for sacrilege.

Only through the archway might we have a chance. In the passage back to the spring, Farhi had said, one man could block an army. We sprinted through the corridor with its frieze of skulls to the hole we’d excavated just an hour before. I’d buy time while the others fled, using cutlass and rifle. What a bloody mess!

Yet something had changed. The opening we’d made through the stone archway had shrunken. The stones were somehow reassembling themselves and the hole was too small to crawl through. What magic was this?

“Au revoir, Monsieur Gage!” a familiar voice called through the shrunken hole. Once again, it was the voice of the so-called customs inspector who’d tried to rob me in France, and who I’d fought in Jerusalem when his henchmen accosted Miriam. This time he was calling through what was now the space of a single block! So there was no magic after all, just Silano’s perfidy. The final stone slid back into place in our faces, sealing us in. The French must have followed us as I feared, broken Jericho’s lock on the grating at the Pool of Siloam, and heard our cries when we found no treasure. Then they’d started to brick up our escape route with the bag of mortar Big Ned had carried.

We were trapped by our own foresight.

“The mortar can’t have set!” Ned roared. But either the lime fused quickly, or the stonework was braced from the other side with rubble and beams. He bounced off like a ball. The sailor began beating on the blocked archway with his fists, while Little Tom staggered like 9 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

a drunk, holding his arm with a hand that dripped blood from his fingertips.

“We’ve no time for this!” Tentwhistle snapped. “The Muslims are going to get through the stone door above and come down the stairs of the Black Madonna!”

“The stairs of the White Madonna!” Farhi cried. “It’s our only chance!”

Back to the Templar hall we ran. There was a crash, and an echo of warlike Arabic cries spilled down from the stairway of the black statue. They were through! Tentwhistle and I ran to the bottom of it and fired blindly upward, the balls pinging and forcing some hesitation. On the opposite side Farhi squeezed past the White Madonna and began climbing those stairs, Jericho pushing his sister hard on the Jew’s heels. Then the rest of us retreated across the Templar hall too, squeezing upward one by one. Finally Big Ned shoved even me ahead of him. “I’ll take care of that rabble!” The goliath seized the White Virgin, muscles almost bursting, and broke her loose. Now our pursuers were entering the Templar hall, looking about in wonder, and then shouting as they spotted us on the opposite side. Turning sideways, Ned barely squeezed into the stairway entrance while dragging the Madonna’s head with him, jamming her stone body in the narrow entrance. That gave a partial plug between us and our pursuers. We turned and scrambled upward.

A wave of Muslims, running wildly, dashed against the obstruction and recoiled, howling with outrage and frustration. They began pulling to break the Madonna free.

We climbed as desperately as the damned. I could hear the mob below scream in frustration as they battered the statue blocking our escape route. More guns went off, but the bullets ricocheted harmlessly on the lower stairs. Alarms were called, no doubt alerting compatriots on the Temple Mount above of our imminent emergence. We came to an iron grate that locked us in. Tentwhistle blew its lock apart with his pistol and slammed it aside. It rang like a gong. I used the pause to reload my own rifle. We emerged atop the Temple Mount in the El-Aqsa Mosque. I noticed how it had been modified by the t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

9 5

Crusaders, its line of arches and high windows giving the cavernous space an architectural cross between an Arabic palace and a European church. As Farhi had guessed, the stairway of the White Madonna must have been built to allow secret access from the main Templar headquarters to the chambers and tunnels below.

We ran to the mosque’s door. The vast temple platform, dimly lit by a predawn sky, was swarming with hundreds of crudely armed Muslims, like so many bees in a hive that’s been disturbed. I could see the blue tile and golden crown of the serene Dome of the Rock beyond, its door boiling as men ran in and out in consternation. The mob was chanting, shouting alarms, and waving cudgels. Thankfully there were few janissaries and few guns. Finally some of them saw us, and with a great shout they turned as if one and began to charge.

“What a bollocks you make of things,” Ned said to me.

So I took aim.

¤

¤

¤

El-Aqsa Mosque is illuminated at night by enormous hanging brass lamps that can be lowered from white cotton ropes for lighting. One of these lamps—with several dozen individual flames on metalwork ten feet wide, its grillwork weighing well over a ton—

hung above the main door of the mosque. As the mob surged through, I sighted through my rifle-mounted spyglass, put the rope and its hook on the ornate ceiling in my crosshairs, and fired.

My shot shredded the rope and the lamp came down like a guillotine, landing with a great crash as it buried the head of the mob and scattered the rest. Our pursuers momentarily recoiled, looking warily upward. It was enough to give our crew of filthy, bleeding troglo-dytes the precious seconds necessary to retreat toward the back of the mosque.

“They have the sacred relics of Muhammad!” I heard the mob cry.

And I suddenly wondered if the Prophet’s midnight journey to Jerusalem and his ascension to heaven was just a myth, or if he too had truly been here once, seeking and perhaps finding wisdom. Had he, 9 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

too, heard of the Book of Thoth? What had Jesus learned in Egypt, or Buddha in his wanderings? Were all the faiths, myths, and stories an endless interweaving and embroidery of ancient texts, wisdom built on wisdom, and mystery concealed by yet more mystery? Heresy—but here at the religious center of the world, I couldn’t help but wonder.

We raced over worn red carpets that covered the flagstones of the mosque and into the small anterooms beyond the great hall, dreading a dead-end that would trap us. But at the point where the El-Aqsa and the Temple Mount joined the city’s periphery wall there was another locked door. Big Ned ran at it full tilt and this time smashed it open, the torn splinters like fresh wounds in old wood. We looked out. The wall led off the southern end of the Temple Mount at a downward slope, to enclose Jerusalem. At a tower it turned westward, encompassing the city below.

“If we get into the maze of streets we can lose them,” Farhi gasped.

He, Miriam, and the injured Little Tom began trotting along the rampart toward the steps that led downward at the Dung Gate, staggering with exhaustion, while Tentwhistle and I reloaded on the rampart and Ned and Jericho stood ready with swords. When our first pursuers filled the doorway we’d just exited, we fired. Then our swordsmen charged into the smoke, swinging. There were howls, retreat, and Ned trotted back, speckled with blood.

“They’re thinking now,” he said with a toothy grin.

Jericho looked sickened, his blade wet. “This is evil you’ve brought,” he told the sailor.

“If I remember, blacksmith, it’s been you and your doxy sister leading the way.”

And we retreated yet again.

If the mob had been better armed, we would have been dead.

But we ran a gauntlet of only a few shots, bullets passing with that peculiar hot sizzle that paralyze if you stop to think about it. Then we were down the stairs of the wall and onto a Jerusalem street, the Dung Gate bolted shut by a squad of janissaries, scimitars ready so we couldn’t run outside. Above us, the battlements were crammed with screaming Muslims racing for the stairs.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

9 7

“Into the Jewish Quarter!” urged Farhi. “It’s our only chance!” Now there were calls of alarm from the minarets, and Christian bells were ringing. We’d roused the entire city. Shouting people streamed into the streets. Dogs were howling, sheep bleating. A terrified goat galloped past us, going the other way. Farhi, panting, led us uphill toward the Ramban Synagogue and Jaffa Gate, the Muslim mob behind lit by torches in a snake of fire. Even if I could find time to load again, my single shot would be no deterrent to the anger we’d aroused by trespassing under the Dome of the Rock. Unless we got help, we were doomed.

“They want to burn the Ramban and Yochanan ben Zakkai synagogues!” Farhi shouted to the anxious Jews as they poured into the streets. “Get Christian allies! The Muslims are rioting!”

“The synagogues! Save our holy temples!” And with that, we had a shield. Jews ran to block the mob surging into their quarter. Christians warned that their real goal was the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Mob collided with mob. In moments there was chaos.

With it, Farhi disappeared.

I grabbed the others. “We split up! Jericho and Miriam, you live here. Go home!”

“I heard Muslims call my name,” he said grimly. “We cannot stay in Jerusalem. I was recognized.” He glared at me. “They’ll sack and burn my house.”

I felt sick with guilt. “Then take what you can and flee to the coast.

Smith is organizing the defense of Acre. Seek protection with him there.”

“Come with us!” Miriam pleaded.

“No, alone you two can likely travel unmolested, because you’re native. The rest of us stand out like snowmen in July.” I pressed the seraphim into her hands. “Take these and secrete them until we meet again. We Europeans can run or hide, sneaking when it’s dark.

We’ll go the other way to give you time. Don’t worry. We’ll meet in Acre.”

“I’ve lost my home and reputation for an empty room,” Jericho said bitterly.

9 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“There was something there,” I insisted. “You know there was. The question is, where is it now? And when we find it, we’ll be rich.” He looked at me with a combination of anger, despair, and hope.

“Go, go, before it’s too late for your sister!” At the same time, Tentwhistle pulled at me. “Come, before it’s too late for us!”

So we parted. I looked back at brother and sister as we ran. “We’ll find it!”

I and the British sailors headed toward the Zion Gate. I looked back once, but Jericho and Miriam were lost in the mobs like flotsam in a tossing sea. We stumbled on, too slow and desperate. Little Tom, his arm sticky with blood, couldn’t hurry but kept manfully on. We entered the Armenian Quarter and came to the gate. Its soldiers had gone, probably to control the rioting or search for us: our first stroke of luck in this entire fiasco. We unbolted the great doors, pushed hard, and passed into open country. The sky was just pinking. Behind, flames, torchlight, and the coming dawn had turned the sky orange above the city’s walls. Ahead was sheltering shadow.

To our right was Mount Zion and the Tomb of David. To the left was the Valley of Hinnom, the Pool of Siloam somewhere in the darkness below. “We’ll circle the city wall to the north and take the Nablus Road,” I said. “If we travel at night we can make Acre in four days and get word to Sidney Smith.”

“What about the treasure?” Tentwhistle asked. “Is that it? Do we give up?”

“You saw it wasn’t there. We have to figure where next to look. I hope to God they didn’t catch Farhi. He’ll know where to try next.”

“No, I think he’s betraying us. Why’d he slip off like that?” I wondered that too.

“It’s our own skins first,” said Big Ned.

And with that his lieutenant jerked and the sound of a shot echoed up the hill. Then another and another, bullets whapping into the dust.

Tentwhistle sat down with a grunt. Then I heard the words in French:

“There they are! Spread out! Cut them off!” It was the group that had tried to brick us up in the tunnels, the t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

9 9

same Frenchmen who had accosted Miriam. They’d crawled back out of the Pool of Siloam, heard the chaos, and waited under the wall for someone to appear.

I crouched by Tentwhistle and aimed. My lens found one of our ambushers and I fired. He went down. Pretty rifle. I feverishly reloaded.

Ned had taken Tentwhistle’s pistol and he fired too, but our assail-ants were not within pistol range. “All you’ll do is draw their aim with your flash,” I told him. “Get Tom and the lieutenant back through the gate. I’ll hold them here a moment and then we can lose them in the Armenian Quarter.”

Another bullet whined overhead. Tentwhistle was coughing blood, his eyes glazed. He would not live long.

“Right, guv’nor, you buy us time.” Ned began dragging Tentwhistle back, Tom groggily following. “Potts dead, two more of us wounded.

Bloody inspiration, you are.”

It was getting lighter. Bullets pinged as the Frenchmen swarmed closer. I fired again, then glanced behind me. The sailors were back through the gate. No time to reload, time to go! In a crouch, I sidled backward toward it. Dark forms were closing like circling wolves.

Then I heard a creak. The gate was closing! I scuttled rapidly, and just made it to the city wall when the gate boomed shut, locking me out. I heard the thud of its bar being slid home.

“Ned! Open up!” There was a French command and I threw myself flat just before a volley went off. Bullets hammered against the iron like hail. I was like a condemned man at an execution wall. “Hurry, they’re coming!”

“I think we’ll be going our own way, guv’nor,” Ned called.

“Own way? For God’s sake . . .”

“I don’t think these frogs will care that much about a couple of poor British sailors. You’re the one with the treasure secrets, ain’t you?”

“What, you’re leaving me to them?”

“Maybe you can lead ’em on like you did us, eh?”

“Damn, Ned, let’s stand together, as the lieutenant said!”

“He’s done, and so are we. Doesn’t pay to cheat honest seamen at cards, guv’nor. Lose your friends, you do.” 1 0 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“But I didn’t cheat, I outsmarted you!”

“The same bloody thing.”

“Ned, open this gate!”

But there was no reply, just the mute slab.

“Ned!” Lying prone, I hammered on the unyielding iron. “Ned!

Let me in!”

But he didn’t, of course, as I strained to hear their retreat over the city’s tumult. I turned back. The French had crept to just yards away, and several muskets were trained on me. The tallest one smiled.

“We said good-bye beneath the Temple Mount and yet we meet again!” their leader cried. He doffed a tricorn hat and bowed. “You do have a talent of being everywhere, Monsieur Gage, but then so do I, do I not?” His was a torturer’s grin. “Surely you remember me, from the Toulon stage? Pierre Najac, at your service.”

“I remember you: The customs inspector who turned out to be a thief. So is Najac your real name?”

“Real enough. What happened to your friends, monsieur?” Slowly I stood. “Disappointed in a game of cards.”

c h a p t e r

1 0

Iknew I was in hell when Najac insisted on showing me his bullet wound. It was the one I’d given him the year before, red and scabby, on a torso that couldn’t have seen soap or a washcloth for a month. The little crater was a few inches below his left nipple and toward his left side, confirming that my aim had been off by degrees. Now I knew he smelled bad, too.

“It broke a rib,” he said. “Imagine my pleasure when I learned after my convalescence that you might be alive and that I could help my master track you down. First you were stupid enough to make inquiry in Egypt. Then, when we came here we caught a doddering old fool who squealed about meeting a Frank carrying Satan’s gold angels, once we’d roasted him enough. That’s when I knew you must be close.

Revenge is sweeter the longer it is delayed, don’t you think?”

“I’ll let you know when I finally kill you.” He laughed at my little joke, stood, and then kicked the side of my head so hard that the night dissolved into bright bits of light. I toppled over by the fire, bound hand and foot, and it was the smoldering of my clothes and resulting pain that finally jarred me enough to wriggle away. This greatly amused my captors, but then I always 1 0 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

did enjoy being the center of attention. Afterward the burn kept me feverish. It was the night after our departure from Jerusalem, and fear and pain were the only things keeping me conscious. I was exhausted, sore, and frightfully alone. Najac’s party of bullyboys had somehow swelled to ten, half of them French and the rest bedraggled Bedouin who looked like the kitchen grease of Arabia, ugly as toads.

Missing, besides half this complement’s teeth, was the Frenchman I’d stabbed in the fight over Miriam. I hoped I’d finished him, a sign I was getting better at dispatching my enemies. But maybe he was convalescing too, dreaming of the day he could capture and kick me as well.

Najac’s mood wasn’t improved by his discovery that I carried nothing of value but my rifle and tomahawk, which, being a thief, he appropriated. My seraphim I’d entrusted to Miriam, and in all the excitement I hadn’t noticed that someone—Big Ned or Little Tom, I assumed—had also relieved me of my purse. My insistence that we’d found nothing underground, that Jerusalem was as frustrating as Egypt, did not sit well.

What was I doing if nothing was to be found down there?

Seeing the root stone of the world from its other side, I answered.

They pounded on me but hesitated to kill me. The passageways under the Temple Mount were as stirred up as an ant nest, the Muslims probably puzzling over what we’d been looking for. The ruckus eliminated any chance of this French-Arab gang going back, so I was the only clue they had.

“I’d roast you right now if Bonaparte and the master didn’t want you alive,” Najac snarled. He let the Arabs amuse themselves by using their daggers to flick embers on my arms and legs, but not much more. Time enough later to make me scream.

So I finally lapsed into exhausted blackness until I was yanked painfully awake the next morning for a breakfast of chickpea paste and water. Then we continued down a trace from the Jerusalem hills to the coastal plain, the horizon marked by columns of smoke.

The French army was hard at work.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 3

¤

¤

¤

Despite my captivity, I had an odd sense of homecoming when we reached Napoleon’s camp. I’d marched with Bonaparte’s army and encountered Desaix’s division at Dendara. Now, pitching white tents before the walls of Jaffa, were men in European uniforms again. I smelled familiar food, and once more heard the lilting elegance of the French tongue. As we rode through the ranks, men looked curiously at Najac’s gang and a few pointed at me in surprised recognition. Not long before I’d been one of their savants. Now here I was again, a deserter and a prisoner.

Jaffa itself was familiar, but viewed this time from the vantage of the besieger. Canopies and hanging carpets had disappeared, its ramparts bearing the fresh bite of cannonballs. Similarly, many of the orange trees that sheltered Napoleon’s army showed raw wood where Ottoman fire had smashed their tops. Fresh earth and sand were being thrown up for siege works, and long lines of French cavalry horses shifted nervously where they were picketed in the shade, whinnying and shuffling as cannon popped. Their tails flicked at flies like met-ronomes, and their manure had that familiar sweet scent.

Najac went inside Napoleon’s broad canvas pavilion while I stood hatless in the Mediterranean sun, thirsty, dazed, and feeling fatalistic.

I’d fallen once on a cliff above the St. Lawrence River, pivoting endlessly, and felt this same vague sense of sickening regret that time—

only to bounce off a bush, over the rocks, and into the river.

And here, perhaps, came my savior bush. “Gaspard!” I called.

It was Monge, the famed French mathematician, the man who’d helped solve some of the puzzle of the Great Pyramid. He’d been a confidant of Napoleon since the general’s triumphs in Italy and had mentored me like a wayward nephew. Now he was accompanying the army into Palestine.

“Gage?” Monge squinted as he came closer, his civilian dress increasingly shopworn, his knees patched, coat ragged, and face rough 1 0 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

with stubble. The man was fifty-two, and tired. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to go home to America!”

“I tried. Listen. Do you have word of Astiza?”

“The woman? But she went with you.”

“Yes, but we were separated.”

“Took a balloon, the two of you did—that’s what Conte told me.

Oh, how furious he was at that prank! Floated away, how the rest of us envied you . . . and now you’re back in this asylum? Good God, man, I knew you weren’t a true savant, but you seem to have no sense at all.”

“On that point we can agree, Doctor Monge.” Not only did he know nothing of Astiza’s fate, he clearly didn’t know of our entry into the pyramid, and I quickly decided it best not to tell him. If the French ever became aware there were things of value down there, they’d blow the edifice apart. Better to let Pharaoh rest in peace.

“Astiza fell into the Nile and the balloon eventually came down in the Mediterranean,” I explained. “Is Nicolas here too?” I was a little nervous at meeting Conte, the expedition’s aeronaut, having stolen his observation balloon.

“Fortunately for you he’s back in the south, organizing the shipment of our siege artillery. He had a rather brilliant plan to construct multiwheeled wagons to carry the guns across the desert, but Bonaparte has no time for new inventions. We’re risking bringing the train by sea.” He stopped, realizing he was relating secrets. “But what are you doing here, with your hands tied?” He looked puzzled. “You’re filthy, burned, friendless—my God, what’s happened to you?”

“He’s an English spy,” said Najac, emerging from the tent. “And you risk suspicion too, scientist, simply by talking to him.”

“English spy? Don’t be ridiculous. Gage is a dilettante, a hanger-on, a dabbler, a wanderer. No one could take him seriously as a spy.”

“No? Our general would.”

And with that Bonaparte himself appeared, the tent flap billowing grandly as if infused with his electricity. Like all of us he was browner than when we’d left Toulon nearly a year before, and while he was t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 5

still just thirty, success and responsibility had given new hardness to his face. Josephine was an adulteress, his plans to reform Egypt on French republican lines had been answered with his condemnation as an infidel, and he’d had to put down a bloody uprising in Cairo. His idealism was under siege, his romanticism breached. Now his gray eyes were icy, his dark hair shaggy, his countenance more hawklike, his stride impatient. He marched up to me and stopped. At five-foot-six he was shorter than me, and yet inflated with power. I couldn’t help flinching.

“So. It is you! I’d thought you dead.”

“He went to the British, mon général,” Najac said. The man was like a schoolroom tattletale, and I was beginning to wish I’d shot him in the tongue.

Bonaparte leaned into me. “Is this true, Gage? Did you desert me for the enemy? Did you reject republicanism, rationality, and reform for royalism, reactionaries, and the Turk?”

“Circumstances forced us apart, General. I’ve simply been trying to discover the fate of the woman I’d acquired in Egypt. You remember Astiza.”

“The one who shoots at people. My experience is that love does more harm than good, Gage. And you expected to find her in Jerusalem, where Najac caught you?”

“As a savant, I was trying to make some historical inquiry . . .” He erupted. “No! If there is one thing I’ve learned, you are not a savant! Don’t waste my time anymore with damned nonsense! You’re a turncoat, a liar, and a hypocrite who fought in the company of English sailors! You probably are a spy, as Najac said. If you weren’t so silly, as Monge also points out.”

“Sir, Najac there tried to rob me of my critical medallion in France when I was already committed to your expedition. He’s the traitor!”

“He shot me,” Najac said.

“He’s a henchman of Count Alessandro Silano and an adherent of the heretical Egyptian Rite, enemy of all true Freemasons. I’m certain of it!”

“Silence!” Bonaparte interrupted. “I’m well aware of your dislike 1 0 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

of Count Silano, Gage. I also know he has shown admirable loyalty and perseverance despite his tumble at the pyramids.” So, I thought: Silano is alive. The news was going from bad to worse in a hurry. Had the count pretended his fall from the balloon had been from the pyramids? And why did nobody say anything about Astiza?

“If you had Silano’s loyalty, you wouldn’t have condemned yourself now,” Bonaparte went on. “By the saints, Gage, you were accused of murder, I gave you every opportunity, and yet you switch sides like a pendulum!”

“Character tells, mon général,” Najac said smugly. I longed to strangle him.

“You were actually looking for treasure, weren’t you?” Napoleon demanded. “That’s what this is all about. American mercantilism and greed.”

“Knowledge,” I corrected, with some semblance of truth.

“And what knowledge have you found? Speak honestly, if you value your life.”

“Nothing, General, as you can see from my condition. That’s the truth. All I tell is the truth. I’m just an American investigator, caught up in a war not of my . . .”

“Napoleon, the man is clearly more fool than traitor,” the mathematician Monge interrupted. “His sin is incompetence, not betrayal.

Look at him. What does he know?”

I tried to grin stupidly—not easy for a man of my basic sense—but I figured the mathematician’s assessment was an improvement over Najac’s. “I can tell you the politics of Jerusalem are very confused,” I offered. “It is unclear where the loyalty of the Christians and the Jews and the Druze truly lie . . .”

“Enough!” Bonaparte looked sourly at all of us. “Gage, I don’t know whether to have you shot or let you take your chances with the Turk. I should send you into Jaffa and let you wait for my troops there. They are not patient men, my soldiers, not after the resistance at El-Arish and Gaza. Or perhaps I should send you to Djezzar, with a note saying you are a spy for me.”

I swallowed. “Perhaps I could aid Doctor Monge . . .” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 7

And then came the sound of gunfire, horns, and cheering. We all looked toward the city. On the south side, a column of Ottoman infantry was boiling out of Jaffa while Turkish guns thudded. Flags thrashed, men skittering down the hill toward a half-finished French artillery emplacement.

French bugles began to sound in response.

“Damn,” Napoleon muttered. “Najac!”

“Oui, mon général !”

“I’ve a sally to attend to. Can you find out what he really knows?” The man grinned. “Oh yes.”

“Then report back to me. If he’s truly useless, I’ll have him shot.”

“General, let me talk to him . . .” Monge tried again.

“If you talk to him again, Doctor Monge, it will be only to hear his last words.” And then Bonaparte ran toward the sound of the guns, calling his aides.

¤

¤

¤

I’m no coward, but there’s something about being hung upside down above a sand pit in the Mediterranean dunes by a gang of hooting French-Arab cutthroats that made me want to tell them anything they want to hear. Just to stop the damned blood from welling in my head! The French had repulsed the Ottoman sally, but not before the plucky Turks overran the uncompleted battery and killed just enough Frenchmen to get the army’s fire up. When told I was an English spy, several soldiers enthusiastically offered to help Najac’s gang excavate the pit and construct the palm-log scaffold I was suspended from. Officially, the idea was to wring from me any secrets I hadn’t already shared. Unofficially, my torture was a reward to Najac’s particular assortment of sadists, perverts, lunatics, and thieves, who existed to do the invasion’s dirty work.

I’d already told the truth a dozen times. “There’s nothing down there!” And, “I failed!” And, “I didn’t even know exactly what I’m looking for!”

But then truth isn’t really the point of torture, given that the victim 1 0 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

will say anything to get the pain to stop. Torture is about the torturer.

So they roped my ankles and hung me upside down from the cross-beam over the sandy pit, my arms free to flap. They’d dug the hole a good ten feet deep before striking something hard, declaring it good enough for my grave. Now one of the Bedouin came forward with a wicker basket and emptied its contents. Half a dozen snakes fell to the bottom of the pit and writhed in indignation, hissing.

“An interesting way to die, is it not?” Najac asked rhetorically.

“Apophis,” I replied, my voice thickened by being where my feet should be.

“What?”

“Apophis!” I said it louder.

He pretended not to understand, but the Arabs did. They recoiled at the name, given that it was the moniker of that old Egyptian snake god revered by the renegade murderer Achmed bin Sadr. Yes, I’d encountered the same scaly bunch all right, and they twitched at my knowledge as if shedding their own skin. It put doubt in their heads.

Just how much did I really know—I, the mysterious electrician of Jerusalem? Najac, however, pretended to be oblivious to the name.

“A snake bite is horribly painful and agonizingly slow. We’ll kill you quicker, Monsieur Gage, if you tell us what you’re really after, and what you really found.”

“I’ve had more agreeable offers. Go to hell.”

“You first, monsieur.” He turned to the men holding my ropes.

“Lower away!”

The rope began to unreel in jerky movements. My upside-down head descended to ground level, my body swaying above the pit, and all I could see was a line of boots and sandals, their owners jeering.

Then more rope. I pulled my head back up, curving my back to look straight down. Yes, the snakes were there, slithering as snakes do. It reminded me of poor Talma’s treacherous death, and all the rotten misdeeds Silano and his rabble had committed to get to the book.

“I’ll curse you with the name of Thoth!” I shouted.

The rope stopped again, and an argument broke out in Arabic.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 0 9

I couldn’t follow the furious flood of words but I heard fragments like “Apophis” and “Silano” and “sorcerer” and “electricity.” So I had acquired a reputation! They were nervous.

Najac’s own voice rose over that of his henchmen, angry and insistent. The rope was let down again another foot and stopped again, the arguing continuing. Suddenly there was the crack of a pistol shot, a jerk as I fell two more feet, and then a halt again. All of me was now in the pit, the snakes four feet below.

I looked up. A Bedouin who’d argued too long with Najac lay dead, one sandaled foot draped over the edge of my pit.

“The next man who argues with me shares the grave with the American!” Najac warned. The group had fallen silent. “Yes, you agree with me now? Lower him! Slowly, so he can beg!” Oh, I begged all right, begged like a man possessed. I’m not proud when it comes to avoiding snakebite. But it did no good, except to keep my descent incremental so I could provide entertainment. They must have thought me born for the stage. I called out anything I thought they might want to hear, pleading, twisting, and sweating, my eyes stinging as perspiration ran. Then, when my abject wailing began to bore, someone pushed so I swung back and forth. It was dizzying. Much more of this and I would black out. I saw serpent after serpent coiling in excitement but then noticed something else.

“There’s a shovel down here!”

“To fill your own grave, once you have been bitten, Monsieur Gage,” Najac called. “Or would it be easier to explain what you saw under the Temple Mount?”

“I told you, nothing!”

So they lowered it a foot again. That’s what telling the truth will get you.

The blasted snakes were hissing. It was unfair how angry the reptiles were, since it wasn’t me who had put them down there.

“Well, maybe something,” I amended.

“I am not a patient man, Monsieur Gage.” The rope went down again.

“Wait, wait!” I was beginning to truly panic. “Haul me up and I’ll 1 1 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

tell you!” I’d think of something! A couple of the serpents were swaying upward, getting ready to strike at my head.

The sun had climbed, its illumination crawling across my grave. I saw the shovel again, snakes curling across it, and the scraped rock my grave excavators had stopped at. Except now I didn’t think it was a rock at all because it had the red clay color of a jar or a roof tile. It was also regular in shape I saw, cylindrical if the hump of covering sand was any indication. It looked almost like a pipe. No—it was a pipe.

A pipe, now that I thought about it, which extended toward the sea.

“I think you can tell me from down there,” Najac said, peering over the lip.

I extended my dangling arms downward as far as I could. I was still a foot too short to reach the abandoned shovel. My tormentors saw what I was trying to do and lowered me inches further. But then a snake struck toward my palm and I jerked my arms upward, half curling, a move that brought peals of laughter. Now they began betting on my ability to grab the shovel before I was bitten by crawling reptiles.

Down I went another inch, and another. Oh, the fun my captors were having!

“If you kill me, you’ll lose the greatest treasure on earth!” I warned.

“So tell me where it is.” Down a few more inches.

“I can only lead you to it if you spare my life!” I was eyeing the shovel and the snakes, swinging myself by twisting my torso so I would pass over its wooden handle.

“And what is this treasure?”

Another snake struck toward me, I yelped, and there was another chorus of laughter. If only I could be so amusing to Paris courtesans.

“It’s . . .” The rope dropped more, I reached, fingers straining, the snakes rose in readiness, and then as they jerked I seized the shovel and swung desperately. It caught two of the reptiles and threw them against the sand walls, starting a small cascade. They thrashed in fury as they fell back into the pit.

“Up, up, please, by the grace of God, get me up!”

“What is it, Monsieur Gage? What is the treasure?” I could think of nothing else to do. I took the shovel in both hands, t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 1

bent myself as far upward as I painfully could, took careful aim, and then dropped back down, letting my weight drive the crude shovel’s wooden beak against the clay pipe. It shattered!

Liquid gushed into the pit.

No one was more surprised than I was.

The rope fell another foot as the men above cried out in surprise, and my hair was in effluent stinking of sewage and seawater. Was this some wretched outfall from Jaffa? I squeezed my eyes tight, ready for the bite of fangs on my nose or ears or eyelids. Instead, the angry hissing was receding.

I blinked open. The snakes had crawled to the sides of the pit to get away from the gushing stink. They were desert serpents, as unhappy about all this as I was.

My head dropped again, and now my forehead dragged in the greasy cesspool. By Hamilton’s dollar, was I to escape the venom only to drown head down?

“The Grail!” I roared. “It’s the Grail!” And with that Najac snapped an order and they began to hoist me.

The Arabs were in an uproar, declaring I was a sorcerer who’d performed some electric miracle by bringing water out of sand. Najac was looking at the shovel in my hands with disbelief. Below, the pit kept filling, the snakes trying to climb away and dropping back down.

And then my head was above ground level, my ankles still bound, my torso swaying like a hooked side of beef.

“What did you say?” Najac demanded.

“The Grail,” I grasped weakly. “The Holy Grail. Now, will you please just shoot me?”

And of course he’d like to. But what if my claim proved important to Bonaparte? And then an angry mutter, growing to an indignant roar, began to rise from the entire besieging army.

c h a p t e r

1 1

Atrocities cannot be justified, but sometimes they can be explained. Bonaparte’s troops had been struggling with disillusion since landing in Egypt last summer.

The heat, the poverty, and the enmity of the population had all come as shocks. The French had expected to be welcomed as republican saviors, bringing the gifts of the Enlightenment. Instead they’d been resisted, viewed as infidels and atheists, the remnants of the Mameluke armies raiding from the desert. Garrisons in villages lived under the constant threat of poisoning or a knife in the dark. Napoleon’s answer was to march on.

There had been unexpectedly fierce resistance at Gaza. Turkish prisoners had been paroled on the promise not to fight again, but officers with telescopes had spied the same units now manning the walls of Jaffa. This was a breach of a fundamental rule of European warfare! Yet even this might not have ignited the massacres to follow.

What caused the thunder roll of outrage was the decision by Ottoman commander Aga Abdalla to answer Napoleon’s offer of surrender terms by killing the two French emissaries and mounting their heads on poles.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 3

It was rashness by a proud Muslim outnumbered three to one. The French army roared in protest, like a provoked lion.

Now there could be no mercy. Within minutes, the bombardment began. There would be a bark, a sizzle as a cannonball cut through the air, and then an eruption of dust and flying fragments as it struck the town’s masonry. With each hit the troops cheered, until the pounding extended hour into hour and became monotonous in its steady erosion of Jaffa’s defenses. On the east and north sides, each gun fired every six minutes. On the south, where cannon pointed across a thickly vegetated ravine that would give good cover to attacking troops, the guns roared every three minutes, slowly smashing a breech. Ottoman artillery replied, but with old ordnance and rusty aim.

Najac took the time to watch his snakes drown and then chained me to an orange tree while he watched the bombardment and considered what I’d said. The battle was mayhem he preferred not to miss, but I assume he found a minute to inform Bonaparte of my babbling about the Holy Grail. Night came, fires pulsing in Jaffa, but I got no food or water, just the monotonous thud of artillery. I fell asleep to its drums.

Dawn revealed a large breach in the city’s southern wall. The wed-ding-cake stack of white houses was pockmarked by dark new holes, and smoke shrouded Jaffa. The French aimed their guns like surgeons, and steadily the breach widened. I could see dozens of spent shot lying in the rubble at the base of the wall, raisins in rumpled dough. Then two companies of grenadiers, accompanied by assault engineers carrying explosives, began assembling in the ravine. More troops readied behind them.

Najac unchained me. “Bonaparte. Prove your usefulness or die.” Napoleon was in a cluster of officers, shortest in stature, biggest in personality, and the one who gestured most vigorously. The grenadiers were filing past into the ravine, saluting as they approached the breach in Jaffa’s wall. Ottoman cannonballs were crashing, thrashing the foliage like a prowling bear. The soldiers ignored the inaccurate fire and its rain of cut leaves.

“We’ll see whose head ends on a pole!” one sergeant called as they tramped past, bayonets fixed.

1 1 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

Bonaparte smiled grimly.

The officers ignored us for a time, but as the advance troops began their assault, Napoleon abruptly swung his attention to me, as if to fill the anxious time waiting for success or failure. There was a rattle of musket fire as the grenadiers emerged from the grove and charged into the breach, but he didn’t even look. “So, Monsieur Gage, I understand that now you are performing miracles, wringing water from stones and smothering serpents?”

“I found an old conduit.”

“And the Holy Grail, I understand.”

I took a breath. “It is the same thing I was looking for in the pyra -

mids, General, and the same thing that Count Alessandro Silano and his corrupt Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry is pursuing to the possible harm of us all. Najac here is himself in league with scoundrels who . . .”

“Mr. Gage, I’ve endured your rambling over many months, and don’t recall benefiting whatsoever. If you remember I offered you partnership, a chance to remake the world through the ideals of our two revolutions, French and American. Instead you deserted by balloon, is this not correct?”

“But only because of Silano . . .”

“Do you have this Grail or not?”

“No.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No, but we were looking when Najac here . . .”

“Do you know what it even is?”

“Not precisely, but . . .”

He turned to Najac. “He obviously knows nothing. Why did you pull him out?”

“But he said he did, in the pit!”

“Who wouldn’t say anything, with your damned snakes snapping at his head? Enough of this nonsense from you and him! I want an example made of this man: he is not only useless, he is boring! He will be paraded before the infantry and shot like the turncoat he is. I am tired of Masons, sorcerers, snakes, moldering gods, and every other t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 5

kind of imbecilic legend I have heard since starting this expedition. I am a member of the Institute! France is the embodiment of science!

The only ‘Grail’ is firepower!”

And with that, a bullet plucked off the general’s hat and slammed into the chest of a colonel behind, killing the man.

The general jumped, staring in shock as the officer toppled over.

“Mon dieu!” Najac crossed himself, which I considered the height of hypocrisy, given that his piety had as much value as a Continental dollar. “It’s a sign! You should not speak as you did!” Napoleon momentarily went pale, but regained his composure. He frowned at the enemy swarming on the walls, looked at the sprawled colonel, and then picked up his hat. “It was Lambeau who took the bullet, not me.”

“But the power of the Grail!”

“This is the second time my stature has saved my life. If I had the height of our General Kléber, I would be dead twice over. There’s your miracle, Najac.”

My captor was transfixed by the hole in the general’s hat.

“Perhaps it’s a sign we can all still help each other,” I tried.

“And I want the American gagged as well as bound. Another word, and I will have to shoot him myself.”

And with that he stalked away, my plight unimproved. “All right, they have a foothold! Lannes, get a three-pounder into that breach!”

¤

¤

¤

I missed much of what happened next and am grateful for it. The Ottoman troops fought ferociously, so much so that a captain of engineers named Ayme had to find his way through Jaffa’s cellars to take the enemy from behind with the bayonet. With that, angry French soldiers began fanning into Jaffa’s alleys.

Meanwhile, General Bon on the northern side of town had turned his diversionary attack into a full-fledged assault that broke in from that direction. With French troops swarming, the defenders’ morale collapsed and the Ottoman levies began to surrender. French fury at 1 1 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

the foolish emissary beheadings hadn’t been slaked, however, and killing and looting first went unchecked, then turned into mob frenzy.

Prisoners were shot and bayoneted. Homes were ransacked. As the bloody afternoon gave way to concealing night, whooping soldiers staggered through the streets heavy with plunder. They fired muskets into windows and waved sabers wet with blood. The looters refused to even stop to help their own wounded. Officers who tried to stop the massacre were threatened and shoved aside. Women’s veils were ripped from their faces, their clothes following. Any husband or brother who tried to defend them was shot down, the women raped in sight of the bodies. No mosque, church, or synagogue was respected, and Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike died in the flames.

Children lay screaming on the corpses of their parents. Daughters pleaded for mercy while being violated on top of dying mothers.

Prisoners were hurled from walls. Flames trapped the elderly, the sick, and the insane in the rooms where they hid. Blood ran down the gutters like rainwater. In one monstrous night, the fear and frustration of nearly a year’s bitter campaigning was taken out on a single helpless city. An army of the rational, from the capital of reason, had gone insane.

Bonaparte knew better than to try to stem this release; the same anarchy had reigned in a thousand sackings before, from Troy to the Crusader pillages of Constantinople and Jerusalem. “One should never forbid what one lacks the power to prevent,” he remarked. By dawn the men’s emotion had been spent and the exhausted soldiers sprawled like their victims, stunned by what they’d done, but satiated as well, like satyrs after a debauch. A hungry, demonic anger had been fed.

In the aftermath, Bonaparte was left with more than three thousand sullen, hungry, terrified Ottoman prisoners.

Napoleon did not shrink from hard decisions. For all his admiration of poets and artists, he was at heart an artilleryman and an engineer.

He was invading Syria and Palestine, a land with two and a half million people, with thirteen thousand French soldiers and two thousand Egyptian auxiliaries. Even as Jaffa fell, some of his men were displayt h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 7

ing symptoms of plague. His fantastic goal was to march to India like Alexander before him, heading an army of recruited Orientals, carving out an empire in the East. Yet Horatio Nelson had destroyed his fleet and cut him off from reinforcements, Sidney Smith was helping organize the defense of Acre, and Bonaparte needed to frighten the Butcher into capitulation. He dared not free his prisoners, and he couldn’t feed or guard them.

So he decided to execute them.

It was a monstrous decision in a controversial career, made more so by the fact that I was one of the prisoners he decided to execute. I wasn’t even to have the dignity and fame of being paraded before assembled regiments as a noteworthy spy; instead I was herded by Najac into the mass of milling Moroccans and Sudanese and Albanians as if I were one more Ottoman levy. The poor men were still uncertain of what was happening, since they’d surrendered on the assumption their lives would be spared. Was Bonaparte marching them to boats bound for Constantinople? Were they being sent as slave labor to Egypt? Were they merely to be camped outside the city’s smoking walls until the French moved on? But no, it was none of these, and the grim ranks of grenadiers and fusiliers, muskets at parade rest, soon began to ignite rumor and panic. French cavalry were stationed at either end of the beach to prevent escape. Against the orange groves were the infantry, and at our back was the sea.

“They are going to kill us!” some began to cry.

“Allah will protect us,” others promised.

“As he protected Jaffa?”

“Look, I haven’t found the Grail yet,” I whispered to Najac, “but it exists—it’s a book—and if you’ll kill me, you’ll never find it either. It’s not too late for partnership . . .”

He pressed the point of his saber into my back.

“This is a crime, what you’re about to do!” I hissed. “The world will not forget!”

“Nonsense. There are no crimes in war.” I described the ensuing scene at the beginning of this story. One of the remarkable things about readying to be executed is how the senses 1 1 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

sharpen. I could sense the fabric layers of the air as if I had butterfly wings, I could pick out the scents of sea, blood, and oranges, I could feel every grain of sand under my now bootless feet and hear every click and creak of weapons being readied, harness being twitched by impatient horses, the hum of insects, the cries of birds. How unwilling I was to die! Men pleaded and sobbed in a dozen languages. Prayers were a hum.

“At least I drowned your damned snakes,” I remarked.

“You will feel the ball go into your body as I did,” Najac replied.

“Then another, and another. I hope it takes you time to bleed away, because the lead hurts very much. It flattens and tears. I would have preferred the snakes, but this is almost as good.” He strode away as the muskets leveled.

“Fire!”

¤

¤

¤

There was a crash, and the rank of prisoners reeled. Bullets thwacked home, flesh and droplets flying. So what saved me?

My Negro giant, arms lifted in supplication, ran after Najac as if the villain might grant reprieve, which put him between me and the muskets just as the volley went off. The bullets hurled him backward, but he formed a momentary shield. A line of prisoners collapsed, screaming, and I was spattered with so much blood that initially I feared some might be my own. Of those of us still standing, some fell to their knees, and some rushed at the ranks of the French. But most, including me, fled instinctively into the sea.

“Fire!” Another rank blasted and prisoners spun, toppled, tripped.

One next to me gave an awful, bloody cough; another lost the crown of his head in a spray of red mist. The water splashed upward in blinding sheets as hundreds of us ran into it, trying to escape a nightmare too horrific to seem real. Some stumbled, crawling and bawling in the shallows. Others clutched wounded arms and legs. Pleas to Allah rang out hopelessly.

“Fire!”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 1 9

As bullets whined over me, I dove and struck out, realizing as I did so that most of the Turks around me didn’t know how to swim.

They were paralyzed, chest deep in water. I went several yards and looked back. The pace of firing had slackened as the soldiers rushed forward with bayonets. The wounded and those frozen by fear were being stuck like pigs. Other French soldiers were calmly reloading and aiming at those of us farther out in the water, calling to each other and pointing targets. The volleys had dissolved into a general maelstrom of shooting.

Drowning men clutched at me. I pushed them off and kept going.

About fifty yards offshore was a flat reef. Waves rolled over its top, leaving shallows one or two feet in depth. Scores of us reached this jagged table, pulling ourselves up on it and staggering toward the deeper blue on the seaward side. As we did so we drew fire; men jerked, spun, and fell into froth that was turning pink. Behind me the sea was thick with the bobbing heads and backs of Ottomans shot or drowned, as French waded in with sabers and axes.

This was madness! I still was as miraculously unhurt as Napoleon, watching from the dunes. The reef ended and I plunged into deeper water with a wild hopelessness. Where could I go? I drifted, paddling feebly, down the outer edge of the reef, watching as men huddled until bullets finally found them. Was that Najac running up and down the sand, furiously looking for my corpse? There was a higher out-cropping of reef that rose above the waves nearer Jaffa itself. Could I find some kind of hiding place?

Bonaparte, I saw, had disappeared, not caring to watch the massacre to its end.

I came to the rock where men clung, as pitifully exposed as flies on paper. The French were putting out in small boats to finish off survivors.

Not knowing what else to do, I put my head underwater and opened my eyes. I saw the thrashing legs of the prisoners clinging to our refuge, and the muted hues of blue as the edifice descended into the depths. And there, a hole, like a small underwater cave. If nothing else, it looked blessedly removed from the horrible clamor at the 1 2 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

surface. I dove, entered, and felt with my arm. The rock was sharp and slimy. And then at my farthest reach my hand thrashed in empty air.

I pulled myself forward and surfaced.

I could breathe! I was in an inner air pocket in an underwater cave, the only illumination a shaft of light from a narrow crack overhead.

I could hear the screams and shots again, but they were muffled. I dared not call out my discovery, lest the French find me. There was only room for one, anyway. So I waited, trembling, while wooden hulls ground against the rocks, shots rang out, and the last blubber-ing prisoners were put to the sword or bayonet. The soldiers were methodical; they wanted no witnesses.

“There! Get that one!”

“Look at the vermin squirm.”

“Here’s another to finish off!”

Finally, it was quiet.

I was the only survivor.

So I existed, shivering with growing cold, as the curses and pleas faded. The Mediterranean has almost no tide, so I was in little danger of drowning. It was morning when we were marched to the beach and nightfall by the time I dared emerge, my skin as corrupted as a cadaver’s from the long soaking. My clothes were in shreds, my teeth chattering.

Now what?

I numbly treaded water, bobbing out to sea. A corpse or two floated by. I could see that Jaffa was still burning, banked coals against the sky. The stars were bright enough to silhouette the line of vegetation along the beach. I spied the flicker of French campfires and heard the occasional shot, or shout, or ring of bitter laughter.

Something dark floated by that wasn’t a corpse and I grabbed it: an empty powder keg, discarded by one side or the other during the battle. Hour followed hour, the stars wheeling overhead, and Jaffa grew dimmer. My strength was being leached by the chill.

And then in the glimmer of predawn, almost twenty-four hours since the executions had begun, I spied a boat. It was a small Arab lighter of the kind that had taken me from HMS Dangerous into Jaffa.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 2 1

I croaked and waved, coughing, and the boat came near, wide eyes peering at me over the gunwale like a watchful animal.

“Help.” It was barely more than a mutter.

Strong arms seized me and hauled me aboard. I lay at the bottom, spineless as a jellyfish, exhausted, blinking at gray sky and not entirely certain if I was alive or dead.

“Effendi?”

I jerked. I knew that voice. “Mohammad?”

“What are you doing in the middle of the sea, when I deposited you in Jerusalem?”

“When did you become a sailor?”

“When the city fell. I stole this boat and sculled out of the harbor.

Unfortunately, I have no idea how to sail it. I’ve just drifted.” Painfully, I sat up. We were well offshore I saw with relief, out of range of any French. The lighter had a mast and lateen sail, and I’d sailed craft not too dissimilar to this one on the Nile. “You are bread upon the waters,” I croaked. “I can sail. We can go find a friendly ship.”

“But what is happening in Jaffa?”

“Everyone is dead.”

He looked stricken. No doubt he had friends or family that had been caught up in the siege. “Not everyone, of course.” But I was more honest the first time.

Years from now historians will labor to explain the strategic reasoning for Napoleon’s invasions of Egypt and Syria, for the slaughter at Jaffa and the marches with no clear goal. The scholars’ task is futile. War is nothing about reason and everything about emotion. If it has logic, it is the mad logic of hell. All of us have some evil: deep in most, indulged by a few, universally released by war. Men sign away everything for this release, uncapping a pot they scarcely know is boiling, and then are haunted ever after. The French—for all their muddle of republican ideals, alliances with distant pashas, scientific study, and dreams of reform—achieved above all else an awful catharsis, followed by the sure knowledge that what they’d released must eventually consume them too. War is poisoned glory.

1 2 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“But do you know a friendly ship?” Mohammad asked.

“The British, perhaps, and I have news I need to bring them.” And some scores to settle, too, I thought. “Do you have water?”

“And bread. Some dates.”

“Then we are shipmates, Mohammad.”

He beamed. “Allah has his ways, does he not? And did you find what you were looking for in Jerusalem?”

“No.”

“Later, I think.” He gave me some water and food, as restorative as a tingle of electricity. “You are meant to find it, or you would not have survived.”

How comforting it would be to have such faith! “Or I shouldn’t have looked, and I’ve been punished by seeing too much.” I turned away from the sad glow from shore. “Now then, help me set this sail.

We’ll set course for Acre and the English ships.”

“Yes, once more I am your guide, effendi, in my new and sturdy boat! I will take you to the English!”

I lay back against a thwart. “Thanks for your rescue, friend.” He nodded, “And for this I will charge only ten shillings!”

Part Two

c h a p t e r

1 2

I came to Acre a hero, but not for escaping the mass execution at Jaffa. Rather, I paid back the French with timely information.

Mohammad and I found the British squadron the second day of our sail. The ships were led by the battleships Tigre and Theseus, and when we coasted into the lee of the flagship I hailed none less than that friendly devil himself, Sir Sidney Smith.

“Gage, is that really you?” he called. “We thought you’d gone back over to the frogs! And now you’re back to us?”

“To the French by the treachery of your own British seamen, Captain!”

“Treachery? But they said you deserted!” How’s that for a cheeky lie by Big Ned and Little Tom? No doubt they thought me dead and unable to contradict them. It’s just the kind of truth-twisting I might have thought of, which made me all the more indignant. “Hardly! Locked out from brave retreat by your own bully seamen, I was! You owe us a medal. Don’t they, Mohammad?”

“The French tried to kill us,” my boat mate said. “He owes me ten shillings.”

1 2 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“And here you are in the middle of the Mediterranean?” Smith scratched his head. “Damnation. For a man who turns up everywhere, it’s hard to know where you belong. Well, come aboard and let’s sort this out.”

So up we climbed, the eighty-gun ship-of-the-line a behemoth compared to the feeble lighter we’d been sailing in, which was taken in tow. The British officers searched Mohammad as if he might produce a dagger at any moment, and gave sharp looks at me. But I’d already determined to act the wronged one, and had a trump besides.

So I launched into my version of events.

“. . . And then the iron gate slammed shut against me as the ring of French and Arab scoundrels closed in. . . .” Yet instead of the outrage and sympathy I deserved, Smith and his officers regarded me with skepticism.

“Admit it, Ethan. You do seem to go too easily from one side to the other,” Smith said. “And get out of the damndest fixes.”

“Aye, he’s an American rebel, he is,” a lieutenant put in.

“Wait. You think the French let me escape from Jaffa?”

“The reports are that no one else did. It’s rather remarkable, finding you.”

“And who’s this heathen, then?” another officer asked, pointing at Mohammad.

“He’s my friend and savior, and a better man than you, I’ll wager.” Now they bristled, and I was probably on the brink of being called out for a duel. Smith hurriedly intervened. “Now, there’s no need for that. We have the right to ask hard questions, and you have the right to answer them. Frankly, Gage, I hadn’t heard all that much useful from you in Jerusalem, despite the Crown’s investment. Then my sailors report you’d acquired a quite expensive, rather remarkable rifle?

Where’s that?”

“Stolen by a blasted French thief and torturer named Najac,” I said.

“If I’d joined the French, what the devil am I doing in rags, wounded, burned, bobbing in a boat with a Muslim camel driver and without a weapon?” I was angry. “If I’d gone to the French, why am I not sipping t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 2 7

claret in Napoleon’s tent right now? Aye, let’s sort the truth. Call those rascal seamen up right now. . . .”

“Little Tom lost his arm and has been sent home,” Smith said.

Despite my indignation, the news gave me pause. To lose a limb was a sentence of poverty. “Big Ned has been assigned ashore, with much of the Dangerous crew, to bolster Djezzar’s defenses in Acre.

Perhaps you can discuss it with him there. We’ve got a stew of stout men to hold off Bonaparte, a mix of Turks, Mamelukes, mercenaries, rascals, and English bulldogs. We’ve even got a French royalist artillery officer who’s joined our side, Louis-Edmond Phelipeaux. He’s strengthening the fortifications.”

“You’re allied with a Frenchman, and you’re questioning me?”

“He helped arrange my escape from Templar Prison in Paris and is as faithful a comrade as you could wish for. Curious how men choose up sides in a dangerous time, isn’t it?” He looked at me closely. “Potts and Tentwhistle dead, Tom crippled, nothing gained, yet here you are. Jericho says he thought you dead or deserted as well.”

“You’ve talked to Jericho, too?”

“He’s in Acre, with his sister.”

Well, there was glad news. I’d been distracted by my own problems, but I felt a flush of relief of hearing that Miriam was safe for the moment. I wondered if she still had my seraphim. I took a breath.

“Sir Sidney, I’m done with the French, I can assure you. Hung me upside down over a snake pit, they did.”

“By God, the barbarians! Didn’t tell them anything, did you?”

“Of course not,” I lied. “But they told me something, and I can prove my loyalty with it.” It was time to play my trump.

“Told you what?”

“That Bonaparte’s siege artillery is coming by water, and with luck we can capture it all before his troops reach Acre.”

“Really? Well, that would change things, wouldn’t it?” Smith beamed. “Find me those guns, Gage, and I will give you a medal. A fine Turkish one—they’re bigger than ours and nicely gaudy. They 1 2 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

hand them out by the basket load, and you can bet I’ll spare one if you’re telling the truth. For once.”

¤

¤

¤

Of course it rained, dampening our chances of spying the French flotilla, and then fog moved in, lowering visibility even more.

The murk soon had the English thinking I was a double agent again, as if I controlled the weather. But if we had difficulty finding the French, they had a worse time evading us. Fog was their enemy, too.

So the French stumbled upon us on the morning of March 18

when Captain Standelet tried to round Cape Carmel and enter the huge bay bounded by Haifa at the south and Acre at the north. Three boats, including that of Standelet, escaped. Six more did not, however, and siege guns, which fire a twenty-four-pound ball, were trussed in their holds. In a single blow, we’d captured Napoleon’s most potent weapon. With a morning’s work I was proclaimed bulwark of Acre, fox of Jaffa, and watchman of the deep. I got a jeweled medal, too, the Sultan’s Order of the Lion, which Smith then bought back to cover my payment to Mohammad, plus a few coins besides. “If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the philosopher’s stone,” he lectured. “I’ve been reading your Franklin.” And so I came to the old Crusader city. Our route by water was paralleled on land by columns of smoke marking the advance of Napoleon’s troops. Reports had come of a steady string of skirmishes between his regiments and the Muslims of the interior, but it was at Acre that the contest would be decided.

The city is on a peninsula that juts into the Mediterranean at the north end of the Bay of Carmel, and thus is two-thirds surrounded by sea. The peninsula extends southwest from the mainland, and its harbor is formed by a breakwater. Acre is smaller than Jerusalem, its sea and land walls less than a mile and a half in circumference, but is more prosperous and about as populous. By the time I arrived the French were already sealing off the city from the landward side, flapping tricolors marking the arc of their camps.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 2 9

Acre is a lovely city in normal times, its seawalls bounded by aqua-marine reefs and its land walls bordered by green fields. An ancient aqueduct, no longer in use, led from its moat to the French lines.

The great copper green dome of its central mosque, coupled with a needle-like minaret, punctuate a charming skyline of tile, towers, and awnings. Upper stories arch over twisting streets. Markets shaded by bright awnings fill the main thoroughfares. The port smells of salt, fresh fish, and spices. There are three major inn-and-warehouse complexes for maritime visitors, the Khan el-Omdan, the Khan el-Efranj, and the Khan a-Shawarda. Balancing this prettiness is the ruler’s palace on the northern wall, a grim Crusader block with a round tower at each corner, softened only because its harem windows look down on cool gardens between mosque and palace. The stout fort and rambling medieval town of tile roofs called to my mind a stern, forbidding headmaster overlooking a lively class of redheaded children.

The government and religious area occupies the northeastern quarter of the city, and the land walls face north and east, their corner joined at a massive tower. This would be so key to the ensuing siege that it would eventually be called by the French la tour maudite: the accursed tower. But could Acre be defended?

Clearly, many thought not. We took Mohammad’s little boat ashore, following the Tigre’s longboat, and when we reached the quay the waterfront was jammed with refugees anxious to flee the city.

Smith, Mohammad, and I pushed through a crowd close to panic.

Most were women and children, but not a few were rich merchants who’d paid Djezzar steep bribes to leave. In war, money can mean survival, and stories of slaughter had raced up the coast. People clutched the few belongings they could carry and bid for passage on the mer-chantmen offshore. A sweating woman cradled a silver coffee service, her toddlers clutching at her gown and howling. A cotton merchant had stuffed loaded pistols into a sash sewn with golden coins. A lovely dark-eyed girl of ten with trembling mouth held a squirming puppy.

A banker used a wedge of African slaves to push his way to the fore-front.

“Never mind this rabble,” Smith said. “We’re better without them.” 1 3 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Don’t they trust their own garrison?”

“Their garrison doesn’t trust itself. Djezzar has spine, but the French have crushed every army they’ve met. Your cannon will help.

We’ll have bigger guns than Boney has, and we’ll put a battery of them right at the Land Gate, where the sea and land walls meet. But it will be the corner tower that’s the nut the devil cracks his tooth on.

It’s the farthest from the support of our naval artillery, yet the strongest point in the wall. It’s Acre’s bloody knuckle, and our real secret is a man who hates Boney even more than we do.”

“You mean Djezzar the Butcher.”

“No, I mean Napoleon’s classmate from the Ecole Royale Mili-taire in Paris. Our Louis-Edmond le Picard de Phelipeaux shared a desk with the Corsican rascal, believe it or not, and the aristocrat and provincial kicked each other’s legs blue when they were teens. It was Phelipeaux who always bested Bonaparte on tests, Phelipeaux who graduated with higher honors, and Phelipeaux who got the best military assignments. If the revolution hadn’t occurred, forcing our royalist friend out of France, he’d likely be Napoleon’s superior. He slipped into France as a clandestine agent last year and rescued me from Temple Prison, posing as a police commissioner who pretended he was transferring me to a different cell. He’s never lost to Napoleon, and won’t this time. Come and meet him.” Djezzar’s “palace” looked like a transplanted Bastille. The Crusader keep had been remodeled to include gunports, not charm, and two-thirds of the Butcher’s ordinance was aimed at his own people, not the French. Square and stolid, the citadel was as implacable as Djezzar’s iron-fisted rule.

“There’s an armory in the basement, barracks on the ground floor, administrative offices in the next, Djezzar’s palace above that, and the harem at the very top,” Smith said, pointing. I could see grilled harem windows, like the cage of pretty birds. As if in sympathy, swallows flitted between them and the palms below. Having broken into a harem in Egypt, I had no desire to explore this one. Those women had been scary.

We passed hulking Ottoman sentries and a massive wooden door t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 1

studded with iron, and entered the gloomy interior. After the dazzling light of the Levant, the inside had the air of a dungeon. I blinked as I looked about. This was the level that was quarters for Djezzar’s loyal-ist guards, and there was a military sparseness about it. The soldiers looked at us shyly from the shadows, where they were cleaning muskets and sharpening blades. They looked about as cheerful as recruits at Valley Forge. Then there were quick footsteps from the stairs and a lithe and more energetic Frenchman bounded down, in a rather stained and careworn white uniform of the Bourbons. This must be Phelipeaux.

He was taller than Napoleon, elegant in his movements, and with that languid self-confidence that comes with high birth. Phelipeaux gave a courtly bow, his wan smile and dark eyes seeming to measure everything with an artilleryman’s calculation. “Monsieur Gage, I am told you may have saved our city!”

“Hardly that.”

“Your captured French guns will be invaluable, I assure you. Ah, the irony of it. And an American! We are Lafayette and Washington!

What an international alliance we are forming here: British, French, American, Mameluke, Jew, Ottoman, Maronite . . . all against my former classmate!”

“Did you really school together?”

“He peeked at my answers.” He grinned. “Come, let’s peek at him now!”

I liked his dash already.

Phelipeaux led us up a winding stair until we came out on the roof of Djezzar’s castle. What a magnificent view! After the rain of recent days the air was dazzling, distant Mount Carmel a blue ridge far across the bay. Nearer, the assembling French were as sharp as lead soldiers.

Tents and awnings were blossoming like a spring carnival. From Jaffa, I knew what life would be like in their lines: plentiful food, imported drink to bolster the courage of assault groups, and cadres of prostitutes and servant women to cook, clean, and provide warmth at night, all at exorbitant prices cheerfully paid by men who felt there was a good chance they were about to die. About a mile inland was a hill 1 3 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

a hundred feet in height, and there I could see a cluster of men and horses amid flapping banners, out of range of any of our fire.

“I suspect that is where Buonaparte will set his headquarters,” Phelipeaux said, drawing out the Italian pronunciation with aristocratic disdain. “I know him, you see, and know how he thinks. We both would do the same. He’ll extend his trenches and try to mine our walls with sappers. So I know that he knows the tower is key.” I followed the sweep of his finger. Cannon were being swung up onto the walls, and there was a stone-lined dry moat just beyond, about twenty feet deep and fifty wide. “No water in the moat?”

“It hasn’t been designed for it—the bottom is above sea level—but our engineers have an idea. We’re building a reservoir on the Mediterranean near the city’s Land Gate that we’ll pump full of seawater.

It could be released into the moat at a time of crisis.”

“That plan, however, is still weeks from completion,” Smith said.

I nodded. “So in the meantime, you’ve got your tower.” It was massive, like a promontory at the edge of a sea. I imagined it looked even taller from the French side.

“It’s the strongest on the wall,” Phelipeaux said, “but it can also be fired upon and assaulted from two sides. If the republicans break it, they will be into the gardens and can fan out to seize our defenses from behind. If they cannot, their infantry will perish uselessly.” I tried to survey the scene with his engineer’s eye. The ruined aqueduct ran off from the walls toward the French. It broke just short of our wall near the tower, having once delivered water. I saw the French were digging trenches alongside it because it provided cover from harassing fire. To one side was what looked like a dried pond.

The French were setting survey stakes inside it.

“They’ve drained a reservoir to provide themselves a protective depression to site a battery,” Phelipeaux said as if reading my mind.

“Soon it will be filled with the lighter guns they brought overland.” I looked down. The garden was an oasis of shade amid the military preparation. The harem women were probably accustomed to visiting there. Now, with so many soldiers and sailors manning the ramparts above, they’d be locked away.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 3

“We’ve added nearly a hundred cannon to the city’s defenses,” Phelipeaux said. “Now that we’ve captured the heaviest French guns, we must keep them at a distance.”

“Which means not allowing Djezzar to give up,” Smith amended.

“And you, Gage, are the key to that.”

“Me?”

“You’ve seen Napoleon’s army. I want you to tell our ally it can be beaten, because it can be if he believes. But first you have to believe it yourself. Do you?”

I thought a moment. “Bonaparte buttons his breeches like the rest of us. He just hasn’t met anyone yet as pugnacious as himself.”

“Exactly. So come meet the Butcher.”

We did not have to wait for an audience. After Jaffa, Djezzar recognized his own survival depended on his new European allies.

We were ushered into his audience chambers, a finely decorated but nonetheless modest room with an ornately carved ceiling and a carpet of overlapping oriental rugs. Birds tweeted from golden cages, a small monkey hopped about on a leather leash, and some kind of large jungle cat, spotted, eyed us sleepily from a cushion, as if deciding whether we were worth the trouble of eating. I had much the same sense from the Butcher, who was sitting erect, his aging torso still conveying physical power. We sat cross-legged before him while his Sudanese bodyguards watched us carefully, as if we might be assassins instead of allies.

Djezzar was seventy-five and looked like a fiery prophet, not a kindly grandfather. His bushy beard was white, his eyes flint, and his mouth had a cruel set. A pistol was tucked in his sash, and a dagger lay near to hand. Yet his gaze also betrayed the self-doubt of a bully up against another tough: Napoleon.

“Pasha, this is the American I told you about,” Smith introduced.

He took me in at a glance—my borrowed seaman’s clothing, stained boots, skin leathered by too much sun and saltwater—and didn’t try to hide his skepticism. Yet he was curious, too. “You escaped Jaffa.”

“The French meant to kill me with the other prisoners,” I said. “I 1 3 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

swam out to sea and found a small cave in the rocks. The massacre was horrible.”

“Still, survival is the mark of remarkable men.” The Butcher himself was a wily survivor, of course. “And you helped capture the enemy’s artillery?”

“Some of it, at least.”

He studied me. “You are resourceful, I think.”

“As are you, Pasha. As resourceful as any Napoleon.” He smiled. “More so, I think. I have killed more men and fucked more women. So now it is a test of wills. A siege. And Allah has forced me to use infidels to fight infidels. I don’t trust Christians.

They are always conspiring.”

This seemed ungrateful. “Right now we’re conspiring to save your neck.”

He shrugged. “So tell me about this Bonaparte. Is he a patient man?”

“Not in the least.”

“But he’s energetic at pushing for what he wants,” Phelipeaux amended.

“He’ll come at your city hard, early, even without the guns,” I said. “He believes in a quick strike of overpowering force to break an enemy’s will. His soldiers are good at what they do, and their fire is accurate.”

Djezzar took a date from a cup and examined it as if he’d never seen one before, then popped it in his mouth, chewing it to one side as he talked. “So perhaps I should surrender. Or flee. He outnumbers my garrison two to one.”

“With the British ships you outgun him. He’s hundreds of miles from his Egyptian base and two thousand miles from France.”

“So we can beat him before he gets more cannon.”

“He has almost no troops to garrison anything he captures. His soldiers are homesick and tired.”

“Sick in another way, too,” Djezzar said. “There have been rumors of plague.”

“A few cases appeared even in Egypt,” I confirmed. “I heard there t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 5

were more at Jaffa.” The Butcher was a shrewd one, I saw, not some Ottoman weakling imposed by the Sublime Porte in Constantinople.

He gathered information about his enemies like a scholar. “Napoleon’s weakness is time, Pasha. Every day he stays in front of Acre, the sultan in Constantinople can order more forces to surround him.

He gets no reinforcements, and no resupply, while the British navy can bring both to us. He tries to accomplish in a day what other men require a year to complete, and that’s his weakness. He’s trying to conquer Asia with ten thousand men, and no one knows better than he that it’s all bluff. The moment his enemies stop fearing him, he’s finished. If you can hold . . .”

“He goes away,” Djezzar finished. “This little man no one has beaten.”

“We will beat him here,” Smith vowed.

“Unless he finds something more powerful than artillery,” another said from the shadows.

I started. I knew that voice! And indeed, emerging from the gloom behind Djezzar’s cushioned perch was the hideous countenance of Haim Farhi! Smith and Phelipeaux blinked at this mutilation but did not recoil. They’d seen it before, too.

“Farhi! What are you doing in Acre?”

“Serving his master,” Djezzar said.

“We left Jerusalem an uncomfortable place, Monsieur Gage. And with no book, there was no reason to stay there.”

“You went with us for the pasha?”

“But of course. You know who modified my appearance.”

“It was a favor to him,” the Butcher rumbled. “Good looks allow vanity, and pride is the greatest sin. His scars let him concentrate on his numbers. And get into heaven.”

Farhi bowed. “As always, you are generous, master.”

“So you escaped Jerusalem!”

“Narrowly. I left you because my face draws too much attention, and because I knew further research was required. What do the French know of our secrets?”

1 3 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“That Muslim outrage bars them from further exploration of the tunnels. They know nothing, and threatened me with snakes to try to learn what I knew. We’ve all come away empty-handed, I think.”

“Empty-handed of what?” Smith asked.

Farhi turned to the British officer. “Your ally here did not go to Jerusalem merely to serve you, Captain.”

“No, there was a woman he inquired about, if I recall.”

“And a treasure desperate men are seeking.”

“Treasure?”

“Not money,” I said, annoyed at Farhi’s casual sharing of my secret.

“A book.”

“A book of magic,” the banker amended. “It’s been rumored for thousands of years, and sought by the Knights Templar. When we asked for your sailor allies, we weren’t looking for a siege door into Jerusalem. We were looking for this book.”

“As were the French,” I added.

“And me,” said Djezzar. “Farhi was my ear.” It was appropriate he used the singular, since the scoundrel had cut off his minister’s other one.

Smith was looking from one to the other of us.

“But it wasn’t there,” I said. “Most likely, it doesn’t exist.”

“And yet agents are making inquiries up and down the province of Syria,” Farhi said. “Arabs, mostly, in the employ of some mysterious figure back in Egypt.”

My skin prickled. “I was told Count Silano is still alive.”

“Alive. Resurrected. Immortal.” Farhi shrugged.

“What’s your point, Haim?” Djezzar said, with the tone of a master long impatient with the meanderings of his subordinates.

“That, as Gage said, what all men seek might not exist. Yet if it does, we have no way to look for it, locked up as we are by Napoleon’s army. Time is his enemy, yes. But it’s our challenge too. If we are besieged too long, it may be too late to find first what Count Alessandro Silano is still seeking.” He pointed at me. “This one must find a way to look for the secret again, before it is too late.” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 3 7

¤

¤

¤

I followed the smell of charcoal to find Jericho. He was in the bowels of the armory in the basement of Djezzar’s palace, his muscles illuminated by the glow of a smithy furnace, hammering like Thor on the tools of war: swords, pikes, forked poles to push off scaling ladders, bayonets, ramrods. Lead cooled in bullet molds like black pearls, and scrap was piled for conversion into grapeshot and shrapnel. Miriam was working the bellows, her hair curled on her cheeks in sweaty tendrils, her shift damp and disturbingly clingy, perspiration glistening in that vale of temptation between neck and breasts. I didn’t know what my reception would be, given that they’d lost their Jerusalem house in the tumult I’d caused, but when she saw me her eyes flashed bright greeting and she flew to me in the hellish glow, hugging. How good she felt! It was all I could do to keep my hand from slipping onto her round bottom, but of course her brother was there. Yet even taciturn Jericho allowed a reluctant smile.

“We thought you dead!”

She kissed my cheek, setting it on fire. I held her a safe distance away lest my own enthusiasm at our reunion be too physically obvious.

“And I feared the same for the two of you,” I said. “I’m sorry our adventure has left you trapped here, but I really thought we’d find treasure. I escaped from Jaffa with my friend Mohammad in a boat.” I looked at Miriam, realizing how much I’d missed her, and how angel-ically beautiful she really was. “The news of your survival was like nectar to a man dying of thirst.”

I thought I saw a blush beyond the soot, and certainly I’d erased her brother’s smile. No matter. I wouldn’t release her waist, and she wouldn’t release my shoulders.

“And now here we all are, alive,” Jericho said. “All three of us.” I finally let her go and nodded. “With a man called the Butcher, a half-mad English sea captain, a mutilated Jew, a disgruntled school-1 3 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

mate of Bonaparte, and a Muslim guide. Not to mention a burly blacksmith, his scholarly sister, and a ne’r-do-well American gambler.

Quite the merry men, we are.”

“And women,” Miriam said. “Ethan, we heard what happened at Jaffa. What happens if the French break in here?”

“They won’t,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “We don’t have to beat them—we just have to hold them off until they’re compelled to retreat. And I have an idea for that. Jericho, is there any spare heavy chain in the city?”

“I’ve seen some about, used by ships, and to chain off the harbor mouth. Why?”

“I want to drape it from out towers to welcome the French.” He shook his head, convinced I was daft as ever. “To give them a hand up?”

“Yes. And then charge it with electricity.”

“Electricity!” He crossed himself.

“It’s an idea I had while in the boat with Mohammad. If we store enough spark in a battery of Leyden jars, we could transfer them with a wire to a suspended chain. It would give the same jolt I demon-strated in Jerusalem, but this time it would knock them into the moat where we could kill them.” I’d become quite the sanguinary warrior.

“You mean they wouldn’t be able to hold onto the chain?” Miriam asked.

“No more than if it were red hot. It would be like a barrier of fire.” Jericho was intrigued. “Could that really work?”

“If it doesn’t, the Butcher will use the links to hang us.”

c h a p t e r

1 3

Ineeded to generate an electric charge on a scale even Ben Franklin had not dreamed of, so while Jericho set to work collecting and linking chain, Miriam and I set out to assemble glass, lead, copper, and jars in sufficient quantity to make a giant battery. I’ve seldom enjoyed a project so much. Miriam and I didn’t just work together, we were partners, in a way which recaptured the alliance I’d had with Astiza. The demure shyness I’d first encountered had been lost somewhere in the tunnels beneath Jerusalem, and now she exhibited a brisk confidence that stiffened the courage of anyone she worked with. No man wants to be a coward around a woman. She and I worked shoulder to shoulder, brushing more than necessary, while I remembered exactly the spot on my cheek where her kiss had burned. There’s nothing more desirable than a woman you haven’t had.

While we labored we could hear the echo of the French guns, seeking the range as their first trenches advanced toward the walls.

Even the bowels of Djezzar’s palace would tremble when an iron ball crashed into the outer walls.

Franklin gave the name “battery” to lines of Leyden jars because 1 4 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

they reminded him of a battery of guns, set hub to hub to give concentrated fire. In our case, each additional jar could be connected to the last to add to the potential shock of French soldiers that I intended.

We soon had so many that the task of energizing them all with friction—by turning a crank—looked Sisyphean, like rolling a boulder endlessly uphill.

“Ethan, how are we going to turn your glass disks long enough to power this huge contraption?” Miriam asked. “We need an army of grinders.”

“Not an army, but a broader back and a dimmer mind.” I meant Big Ned.

Ever since I had stepped ashore in Acre I’d been contemplating my reunion with the hulking, cranky sailor. He had to be paid back for his treachery at the Jerusalem gate, and yet he remained a dangerous giant still resentful about his gambling losses. The key was not to blunder into him when I was at a disadvantage, so I carefully planned my lesson. I learned he’d heard of my miraculous reappearance and boasted he still owed me a tussle, once I left the protection of my woman’s skirts. When I was informed he’d been assigned to help hurriedly patch the moat masonry at the base on Acre’s key tower, I appeared to give a hand from the sallyport above.

A wall is strongest without cracks for cannonballs to pry at, so that’s why Smith and Phelipeaux wanted repairs made. It was a bold job, British marksmen traded sniper fire with French sharpshooters in their trenches while a few volunteers, including Ned, labored outside the walls below in the dark. Despite my problems with Ned and Tom, I’d come to admire the flinty determination of the English crew, a working man’s porridge of the poor and illiterate who had little of the idealism of the French volunteers but a dogged loyalty to crown and country. Ned had that same starch. As muskets flashed and banged in the dark—how I missed my rifle!—baskets of stone, mortar, and water were lowered to the repair crew while they chipped, scraped, and fitted. Near dawn they finally scrambled back up a rope ladder like scurrying monkeys, bullets pinging, my arm giving each a hand inside. Finally there was only Ned below. He gave the ladder a good tug.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 1

The look on his face when his escape route came loose and rattled down to make a heap at his feet was priceless. There’s something to be said for revenge.

I leaned out. “Not fun to be locked out, is it, Ned?” His head flamed like a red onion when he recognized me fifty feet above. “So you’ve dared come out of the pasha’s palace, Yankee tinkerer! I thought you wouldn’t come within a hundred miles of honest British seamen after the lesson I taught you at Jerusalem! And now you plan to leave me in this moat and let the French do your work for you?” He cupped his hands and shouted. “He’s a coward, he is!”

“Oh, no,” I countered. “I just want you to get a taste of your own base treachery, and see if you’re man enough to face me honestly, instead of slamming gates in my face or hiding in a ship’s bilge.” His eyes bulged as if pumped full of steam. “Face you honestly! By God, I’ll rip you limb from limb, you cheat, if you ever have the pluck to stand toe to toe like a man!”

“It’s a bully’s way to rely on size, Big Ned,” I called down. “Fight me fairly, sword to sword like gentlemen do, and I’ll teach you a real lesson.”

“Bloody thunder, indeed I will! I’ll fight you with pistols, marlin-spikes, cudgels, daggers, or cannon fire!”

“I said swords.”

“Let me up then! If I can’t strangle you, I’ll cleave you in two!” So with our duel set to my satisfaction I lowered a rope, hoisted the ladder back up, and got Ned back into Acre just before the dawn light would make him a target.

“I just showed you more mercy than you showed me,” I lectured as he glowered, dusting mortar from his clothes.

“And I’m about to return the mercy you showed at cards. Let’s cross blades and be done with our business once and for all! I wouldn’t let you buy your way out now if you had money to pay me back ten times!”

“I’ll meet you in the palace gardens. Do you want rapier, saber, or cutlass?”

“Cutlass, by God! Something to cut through bone! And I’ll bring 1 4 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

my bullyboys to watch you bleed!” He glared at the other men who were enjoying our exchange. “Nobody crosses Big Ned.”

¤

¤

¤

My willingness to duel such an animal came from thinking a few cards ahead. Franklin was always an inspiration, and while working at Jericho’s new forge I mused how the sage of Philadelphia might use ingenuity instead of brawn. Then I set to work.

Ned’s sabotage was simple. I disassembled the cloth-and-wood handle from his cutlass, bolted on a copper replacement, roughened the handle to let my opponent take firm hold, and polished the entire assembly. Metal is conductive.

Mine was more complicated. I hollowed its haft, lined it with lead, doubled its wrapping for my own added insulation, and—just before my opponent arrived—held its butt end against a stout wire leading from the cranking machine I had built to generate a frictional charge.

I was spinning away, storing electricity in the steel of my weapon, when my opponent appeared in the courtyard.

Ned squinted. “What’s that then, you bloody Yankee tinkerer?”

“Magic,” I said.

“Hey, I wants a fair fight now!”

“And you shall get it, blade to blade. Your muscle to my brain.

Nothing fairer than that, eh?”

“Ethan, he’ll split you like a bolt of wood,” Jericho warned, as I’d coached. “This is madness. You stand no chance against Big Ned.”

“Honor requires that we cross blades,” I recited with equally rehearsed resignation, “no matter what his skill and size.” I suppose it’s not sporting to lead on a bull, but what matador doesn’t wave a cape?

I gave some minutes for a crowd of assembled sailors to bet against me—I covered them all, with a loan from the metallurgist, figuring I might as well make a profit from all this bother—and then took a fencing stance on the garden path where we’d duel. I liked to think the harem girls were watching from above, and I knew Djezzar was.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 3

“On guard, you big bully!” I cried. “If I lose I’ll give you every shilling, but if you lose, then you’re beholden to me!”

“If you lose, I’ll take what I’m owed from the steaks and chops I’ll have turned you into!” The crowd roared at this wit and Ned preened.

Then he charged and swung.

I parried.

I wish I could report there was some gallant and expert swordplay as I deftly countered his brute force with athletic skill. Instead, as steel touched steel, there was simply a blaze of sparks and a sharp report like a gunshot that made the spectators cry and jump. Our blades merely touched, yet Ned flew backward as if he’d been kicked by a mule. His cutlass went flying, narrowly missing one of his shipmates, and he crashed down like Goliath and lay there, eyes rolled back in his head. The sword stung in my own hand, but I’d been insulated from the worst of the jolt. The air had a burning smell.

Was he dead?

I touched him with my sword tip. He jerked like one of Galvani’s frogs.

The crowd was utterly silent, in awe.

Finally Ned shuddered, blinked, and cringed. “Don’t touch me!”

“You shouldn’t test your betters, Ned.”

“Blimey, what did you do?”

“Magic,” I said again. I pointed my sword at the others. “I won at cards fairly, and won this duel. Now. Who else wants to challenge me?” They backed off as if I had leprosy. A boatswain hurriedly tossed me the purse of bets he’d held. God bless the foolish gambling instincts of British sailors.

Ned woozily sat up. “No one’s ever bested me before. Not even my pappy, not once I got to be eight or nine and could thrash him.”

“Will you respect me finally?”

He waggled his head to clear it. “I’m beholden, you said. You’ve got strange powers, guv’nor. I see that now. You always survive, no matter what side you’re on.”

“I just use my brain, Ned. If you’d ally with me, I’d teach you to do the same.”

1 4 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Aye. I wants to serve with you, not fight.” Clumsily, he struggled to his feet and swayed. I could imagine the unearthly tingling he still felt. Electricity hurts. “You others, you listen to me,” he croaked.

“Don’t cross the American. And if you do, you have to deal with me.

We’s partners, we is.” He gave me a hug, like a giant ape.

“Don’t touch the sword, man!”

“Oh yes.” He stepped hastily away.

“Now, I need your help making more magic, but this time against the French. I need a fellow who can crank my apparatus like the devil himself. Can you do that, Ned?”

“If you don’t touch me.”

“No, we’re even,” I confirmed. “Now we can be friends.”

¤

¤

¤

There was an odd lull as the French burrowed like ants toward the walls of Acre, putting their remaining cannon in place. They dug and we waited, with that sluggish fatalism that wears down the besieged. It was Holy Week, so in the spirit of the holidays, Smith and Bonaparte agreed to a prisoner exchange, trading back the men taken in raids and skirmishing. Djezzar paced his walls like a restless cat, muttering about the damnation of Christians and all infidels, and then sat in a great chair on the corner tower to motivate his soldiers by glaring with his fierce eye. I labored on my electrical scheme, but it was difficult to get Jericho’s help because the Butcher, Smith, and Phelipeaux kept sending down a steady stream of armory requests. In close combat on the ramparts, with little time to reload, steel would be as important as gunpowder.

The strain was showing. The metallurgist’s somewhat cherubic face had grown tauter, his eyes shadowed. The French guns banged around the clock, he seldom saw daylight, and he was uneasy about my growing closeness to Miriam. And yet he was the kind of man who couldn’t refuse anyone, nor allow a lapse in quality. He worked even when Miriam and I collapsed in opposite corners of the armory, in fitful, exhausted sleep.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 5

Thus the ironmonger awakened us in the predawn darkness of March 28 when the tattoo of the French guns accelerated, signaling an impending attack. Even deep in Djezzar’s cellar, the beams overhead trembled from the bombardment. Dust filtered down. The quaking made sparks fly up from the forge.

“The French are testing our defenses,” I guessed groggily. “Keep your sister down here. You’re both more valuable as metallurgists than targets.”

“And you?”

“It’s not ready yet, but I’m going to see how my chain might be used!”

It was four in the morning, the stairs and ramps lit by torches. I was swept up in a tide of Turkish soldiers and British sailors mounting the walls, everyone cursing in their own language. At the parapet the bombardment was a rolling thunder, punctuated by the occasional crash as a cannonball hit the wall, or a shriek as one sailed overhead.

There were stabs of light on the French line, marking where their cannons were.

Smith was there, a weird smile on his lips, pacing behind a contingent of Royal Marines. Phelipeaux was racing madly up and down the walls, using a garbled mixture of French, English, Arabic, and anxious hand gestures to direct the city’s cannon. At the same time signal lanterns were being hoisted on the corner tower to elicit naval support.

I looked into the gloom but couldn’t see the enemy troops. I borrowed a musket and fired to where I guessed they might be, in hopes of drawing answering pinpricks of light, but the French were too disciplined. So I followed Phelipeaux to the tower. It was trembling like a tree being chopped at.

Now our own cannon were beginning to bark back, their flashes interrupting the steady drum of French fire, but also giving the enemy artillerists a reference for aiming. Shot began flying higher, and then there was a bang as a cannonball clipped the wall’s crenellation and rock fragments spewed like the pieces of a grenade. A Turkish cannon was dismounted and flopped over, blinded men screaming.

“What can I do?” I asked Phelipeaux, trying to contain the natu-1 4 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

ral shake in my voice. The whole business hurt my ears. The walls and moat tended to echo and amplify the crashes, and there was that acrid, intoxicating stench of burnt powder.

“Get Djezzar. He’s the only man his men are more frightened of than Napoleon.”

I was grateful for an excuse to run back to the palace, and almost collided with Haim Farhi in the pasha’s chambers.

“We need your master to help stiffen his soldiers!”

“He can’t be disturbed. He’s in the harem.” By Casanova’s trousers, the ruler could rut at a time like this? But then a door opened on a stairway leading upward and the Butcher appeared, shirtless, bearded, his eyes bright, a cross between a satyr and the prophet Elijah. Two pistols had been stuffed into his sash and he held an old Prussian saber. A slave brought a rusty coat of medieval mail and a felt undershirt. Before he closed the door behind, I could hear the excited chattering and weeping of the women.

“Phelipeaux needs you,” I said unnecessarily.

“Now the Franks will come close enough that I can kill them,” he promised.

The first pale light was silhouetting Napoleon’s observatory hill when we returned to the tower. British ships had moved close inshore in Acre Bay, I saw, but their fire couldn’t reach the assault column.

Now I could make out a mass of men in shallow trenches below, like a great dark centipede. Many were carrying ladders.

“They’ve made a breach in the tower just above the moat,” Phelipeaux reported. “It’s not big, but if they get inside the Turks will bolt.

There’ve been too many rumors about what happened at Jaffa. Our Ottomans are too nervous to fight and too frightened to surrender.” I leaned over the edge to look at the black pit of the dry moat far below. The French could get into it easily enough, but could they get out? “Use a barrel of gunpowder,” I suggested. “Or half a barrel, and the rest nails and ball. Drop it on them when they try the breach.” The royalist colonel grinned. “Ah, my bloodthirsty Américain. You have a warrior’s instincts! We will light the way for the Corsican!” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 7

“Napoleon!” Djezzar roared, climbing to stand on his observatory chair so that he was visible as a flag. “Try this Mameluke now! I will fuck you like I just fucked my wives!” Bullets whizzed by, miraculously not hitting him. “Yes, fan me like my women!” We dragged him down. “If you’re killed, all is lost,” Phelipeaux lectured.

The Butcher spat. “That is what I think of their marksmanship.” His mail shirt swung at the hem as he strutted from side to side of the tower, making sure his soldiers stood fast. “Don’t think my eye isn’t upon you!”

As the landscape turned pale gray with the coming sun, I saw how hasty Bonaparte had been. His trenches were still too shallow and a score of his men had already been hit. Several French guns had been disabled in his reservoir battery because their earthworks were inadequate, and the old aqueduct was chewed by our fire, spraying his huddled troops with masonry. Their ladders looked absurdly short.

Nonetheless, there was a great shout, a waving of the tricolor, and the French charged. Always, they had élan.

This was the first time I’d seen their reckless courage from the other side, and it was a frightening sight. The centipede charged and swallowed the ground between trenches and moat with alarming swiftness. The Turks and British marines tried to slow them with gunfire, but the expert French covering fire forced our heads down.

We picked off only a few. They spilled down the lip of the moat to its bottom. Their ladders were too short to reach—their scouting had been hasty—but the bravest jumped down, braced the stunted ladders, and allowed comrades to follow. Others fired across the moat into the breach they’d made, killing some of our defenders. The Ottoman troops began to moan.

“Silence! You sound like my women!” Djezzar roared. “Do you want to learn what I will do to you if you run?” Now the French infantry propped their scaling ladders on the other side of the moat. The tops were several feet short of the breach, an inexcusable miscalculation. This was the moment, when pull-1 4 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

ing themselves up, that they might grasp a suspended chain. Left uncharged, it would allow them to flood inside the city and Acre would suffer the fate of Jaffa. But if electrified . . .

The bravest Turks leaned over to fire or hurl down stones, but as soon as they did they were hit by Frenchmen aiming across the moat.

One man gave a great cry and fell all the way to the bottom. I fired a musket myself, cursing its inaccuracy.

A few Ottomans began to desert their guns. The British sailors tried to stop them, but they were panicked. Then Djezzar descended from the top of the tower to block their exit, waving his Prussian saber and roaring. “What are you afraid of?” he shouted. “Look at them! Their ladders are too short! They can’t get in!” He leaned out, discharged both pistols, and handed them to a Turk. “Do something, old woman! Reload these!”

His men, chastened, started firing again. As frightened as they were of the formidable French, they were terrified of Djezzar.

Then a flaming meteor fell from the tower.

It was the keg of gunpowder I’d suggested. It hit, bounced, and exploded.

There was a thunderous roar and a radiating cloud of wood splinters and metal bits. The clustered grenadiers reeled, the closest blown to bits, others severely wounded, and still more stunned by the blast.

Djezzar’s men whooped and began firing into the milling French in earnest, adding to the havoc below.

The assault thus ended before it could properly begin. With their own cannon unable to fire too close to their charge, their ladders too short, the breach too small, and the resistance newly stiffened, the French had lost momentum. Napoleon had gambled on speed over tedious siege preparation, and lost. The attackers turned and began scrambling back the way they’d come.

“See how they run?” Djezzar shouted to his men.

And indeed, the Turkish troops began to shout in amazement and new confidence. The ruthless Franks were retreating! They were not invincible after all! And from that moment a new confidence seized the garrison, a confidence that would sustain them in the long dark t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 4 9

weeks to come. The tower would become the rallying point not just for Acre but for the entire Ottoman Empire.

When the sun finally crested the eastern hills and fully lit the scene, the havoc was apparent. Nearly two hundred of Napoleon’s troops lay dead or wounded, and Djezzar refused to slacken fire to let the French recover their injured. Many died, screaming, before the survivors could finally be carried to safety the next night.

“We have taught the Franks Acre’s hospitality!” the Butcher crowed.

Phelipeaux was less satisfied. “I know the Corsican. That was just a probe. Next time he will come stronger.” He turned to me. “Your little experiment had better work.”

¤

¤

¤

The failure of Napoleon’s first assault had a curious effect on the garrison. The Ottoman soldiers were heartened by their successful repulse, and for the first time attended to their duties with proud determination instead of fatalistic resignation. The Franks could be beaten! Djezzar was invincible! Allah had answered their prayers!

The British sailors, in contrast, sobered. A long succession of naval victories had made them cocky about “facing the frogs.” The courage of the French soldiers, however, was noted. Bonaparte had not retreated. Instead his trenches were being dug forward more vigorously than ever. The seamen felt trapped on land. The French used scarecrows to draw our fire and dug out our cannonballs to fire back at us.

It didn’t help that Djezzar was convinced the Christians in Acre must be plotting against him, even though the attacking French were from a revolution that had abandoned Christianity. He had several dozen, plus two French prisoners, sewn into sacks and cast into the sea. Smith and Phelipeaux could no more stop the pasha than Napoleon could have stopped his troops at the sack of Jaffa, but many English concluded their ally was a madman who could not be controlled.

Djezzar’s restless enmity was not limited to followers of the cross.

1 5 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

Salih Bey, a Cairo Mameluke and old archenemy, had fled Egypt after Napoleon’s victory there and came to make common cause with Djezzar against the French. The pasha greeted him warmly, gave him a cup of poisoned coffee, and threw his corpse into the sea within half an hour of his arrival.

Big Ned told his fellows to put their trust in “the magician”—me.

The same trickery that had allowed me to defeat him, a man twice my size, would help us prevail against Napoleon, he promised. So at our direction, the sailors built two crude wooden capstans on either side of the tower. The chain would be hung like a garland across its face, the elevation controlled by these hoists. Next I moved my Leyden jars and cranking apparatus to a floor halfway up the tower, which contained the sally door from which I’d challenged Big Ned. A smaller chain with a hook would link with the larger one, and that chain in turn would be touched by a copper rod connected to my jars.

“When they come, Ned, you must crank like the very devil.”

“I’ll light the frogs up like a fire at All Hallows, guv’nor.” Miriam helped set the apparatus up, her quick fingers ideal for linking the jars. Had the ancient Egyptians known such sorcery, too?

“I wish old Ben was here to see me,” I remarked when we rested in the tower one evening, our metal sorcery gleaming in the dim light from the tower’s arrow slits.

“Who’s old Ben?” she murmured, leaning against my shoulder as we sat on the floor. Such physical closeness no longer seemed remarkable, though I dreamt of more.

“An American wiseman who helped start our country. He was a Freemason who knew about the Templars, and some think he had their ideas in mind when he made the United States.”

“What ideas?”

“Well, I don’t know, exactly. That a country is supposed to stand for something, I guess. Believe in something.”

“And what do you believe, Ethan Gage?”

“That’s what Astiza used to ask me! Do all women ask that? I ended up believing in her, and as soon as I did, I lost her.” She looked at me sadly. “You miss her, don’t you?” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 1

“As you must miss your betrothed who died in the war. As Jericho misses his wife, Big Ned his Little Tom, and Phelipeaux the mon-archy.”

“So here we are, our circle of mourning.” She was quiet a moment.

Then, “Do you know what I believe in, Ethan?”

“The church?”

“I believe in the Otherness the church stands for.”

“You mean God?”

“I mean there’s more to life’s madness than just madness. I believe that in every life there are rare moments when we sense that Otherness that is all around us. Most of the time we are sealed up, lonely and blind, like a chick in its egg, but occasionally we get to crack the shell for a peek. The blessed have many such moments, and the wicked not one. But when you do—when you’ve sensed what is truly real, far realer than the nightmare we live in—everything is bearable.

And I believe that if you can ever find someone who believes like you do, who strains against the egg that constrains us—well, then the two of you together can smash the shell entirely. And that’s the most we can hope for in this world.”

I shivered inwardly. Was the monstrous war I’d been trapped in the past year some false dream, some enclosing shell? Did the ancients know how to crack open the egg? “I don’t know if I’ve ever had even a single moment. Does that make me wicked?”

“The wicked would never admit it, not even to themselves.” Her hand felt my stubbled jaw, her blue eyes like the abyss off the reef at Jaffa. “But when the moment comes you must seize it, to let in the light.”

And so she kissed me, fully this time, her breath hot, her body straining against mine, her breasts flattened against me, and her torso trembling.

I fell in love then, not just with Miriam, but with everyone. Does that sound insane? For the briefest of breaths I felt linked to all the other troubled souls of our mad world, a weird sense of community that filled me with heartbreak and love. So I kissed her back, clinging.

Finally, I was forgetting the pain of long-lost Astiza.

1 5 2

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“I kept your golden angels, Ethan,” she murmured, pulling a velvet pouch that she had hung between her breasts. “You can have them back now.”

“Keep them, as a present.” What use did I have for them?

And then there was a roar, a spit of mortar, and our entire tower quaked as if a giant hand was shaking it to spill us out. For a moment I feared it would go over, but it slowly stopped swaying and just settled slightly, its floor at a slight tilt. Bugles sounded.

“They set off a mine! They’re coming!”

It was time to try the chain.

c h a p t e r

1 4

Ipeered out the sally port into a fog of smoke and dust. “Stay here,” I told Miriam. “I’m going to try to see what’s happening.” Then I galloped for the top of the tower.

Phelipeaux was already there, hatless, leaning over the edge of the parapet and heedless of French bullets pattering about.

“The sappers dug a tunnel under the tower and packed it with gunpowder,” he told me. “They misjudged, I think. The moat is rubble, but we only breached. I don’t see cracks all the way up.” He pulled himself back and grasped my arm. “Is your devilry ready?” He pointed. “Bonaparte is determined.”

As before a column of troops trotted beside the ancient aqueduct, but this time it looked like a full brigade. Their ladders were longer than last time, bobbing as they jogged. I leaned out myself. There was a large gap at the base of the tower and a new causeway of rubble in the moat.

“Rally your best men at the breach,” I told Phelipeaux. “I’ll hold them with my chain. When they bunch, hit them with everything we have from down there and up here.” I turned to Smith, who’d come up breathless. “Sir Sidney, ready your bombs!” 1 5 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

He gulped air. “I’ll drop the fire of Zeus on them.”

“Don’t hesitate. At some point, I’ll lose power and they’ll break my contraption.”

“We’ll finish them by then.”

Down Phelipeaux and I dashed, he to the breach and I to my new companion. “Now, Ned, now! Come to our room and crank for all you’re worth! They’re coming, and our battery of jars must be fully charged!”

“You lower the chain, guv’nor, and I’ll give it a spark.” I put a few sailors at each of the capstans, telling them to crouch until it was time to lower. A full-scale artillery duel had broken out since the mine explosion, and the scale and fury of the battle was breathtaking. Cannon were firing everywhere, making us shout against their thunder. As balls smashed into the city, bits of debris would fly into the air. Sometimes the shadowy stream of the missiles could be spied sailing overhead, and when they struck there was a great crash and puff of dust. Our own balls were throwing up great gouts of sand where they fell amid the French positions, occasionally flipping or destroying a field piece or powder wagon. The leading French grenadiers were breaking into a run, ladders like lances, making for the moat.

“Now, now!” I shouted. “Lower the chain!” At both ends, my sailors began letting the capstan cables out. The suspended chain, like a holiday garland, began scraping and sliding down the side of the tower toward the breach at its base.

When it reached the gap I had them tie it off, the chain hanging across the hole in the tower like an improbable entry bar. The French must have thought we’d gone mad. Whole companies of them were firing volleys at our heads atop the wall, while we returned the compliment with grapeshot. Metal whined and buzzed. Men screamed or gasped in shock as they were hit, and the ramparts were becoming slick with blood.

Djezzar appeared, still in his old mail like a crazed Saracen, striding up and down past the sprawled or crouched bodies of his soldiers, heedless of enemy fire. “Shoot, shoot! They’ll break when they t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 5

realize we won’t run! Their mine didn’t work! See, the tower still stands!”

I dashed down the tower stairs to the room where my companions were. Ned was cranking furiously, his shirt off, his great torso gleaming with sweat. The glass disk spun like a galloping wheel, the frictional pads buzzing like a hive. “Ready, guv’nor!”

“We’ll wait for them to get to the chain.”

“They’re coming,” Miriam said, peering out an arrow slit.

Running madly despite the withering fire decimating their ranks, the lead grenadiers charged across the causeway of rubble that half filled the moat and began clambering toward the hole their mine had made, one of them holding a tricolor banner. I heard Phelipeaux shout a command and there was a rippling bang as a volley from our men inside the base of the tower went off. The lead attackers pitched backward and the standard fell. New attackers scrambled over their bodies, shooting back into the breach, and the flag was raised again.

There was that familiar thud of lead hitting flesh, and the grunts and shouts of wounded men.

“Almost there, Ned.”

“All my muscle is in those jars,” he panted.

The leading attackers reached my iron garland and clung. Far from a barrier, it was more like a climbing aid as they reached back to hoist up comrades behind them. In no time the chain was thick with soldiers, like wasps on a line of treacle.

“Do it!” Miriam cried.

“Give a prayer to Franklin,” I muttered. I pushed a wooden lever that rammed a copper rod from the batteries against the small chain connected to the big one. There was a flash and crackle.

The effect was instantaneous. There was a shout, sparks, and the grenadiers flew off the chain as if kicked. A few could not detach themselves, screaming as they burned, and then hanging on the chain shuddering, their muscles putty. It was ghastly. I could smell their meat. Instantly, confusion reigned.

“Fire!” Phelipeaux shouted from below. More shots from our tower, and more attackers fell.

1 5 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“There is strange heat in that chain!” the grenadiers were shouting.

Men touched it with their bayonets and recoiled. Soldiers tried to lift or tug it and dropped like stunned oxen.

The contraption was working, but how long would the charge hold? Ned was wheezing. At some point the attackers would notice how the chain was suspended and break it down, but now they were milling uncertainly, even as more troops poured into the moat behind them. As they bunched, more of them were shot down.

Suddenly I realized an absence and looked wildly about. “Where’s Miriam?”

“She went to carry powder to Phelipeaux below,” Ned grunted.

“No! I need her here!” The breach would be a butcher’s shop. I ran for the door. “Keep cranking!”

He winced. “Aye.”

Two floors below, I stepped into the full fury of battle. Phelipeaux and his band of Turks and English marines, with fixed bayonets, were jammed in the tower’s base, firing and fencing through the ragged breach with French grenadiers trying to get under or over the chain.

Both sides had hurled grenades, and at least half our number were down. On the French side, the dead lay like shingles. From here the breach looked like a yawning cave open to the entire French army, a hideous hole of light and smoke. I spied Miriam at the very front, trying to drag one of the wounded back from French bayonets.

“Miriam, I need you above!”

She nodded, her dress torn and bloody, her hair a wild tangle, her hands red with gore. Fresh troops rushed, touched the chain and screamed, and hurled backward. Crank, Ned, crank, I prayed under my breath. I knew the charge would become exhausted.

Phelipeaux was slashing with his sword. He took a lieutenant through the chest, then slashed at another’s head. “Damned republicans!”

A pistol went off, narrowly missing his face.

Then there was a female scream and Miriam was being dragged from us. A soldier had crawled under and caught her legs. He began t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 7

hauling her back with him as if to throw her on my device. She’d be cooked!

“Ned, stop cranking! Pull back the copper rod!” I shouted. But there was no chance he could hear me. I plunged after her.

It was a charge into a wedge of Frenchmen who had crawled under. I grabbed a dropped musket and swung wildly, knocking men aside like tenpins, until it broke at the stock’s wrist. Finally I grabbed Miriam’s kidnapper and the three of us began to writhe, she clawing at his eyes.

We stumbled in the debris, hands clutching at us from both sides, and then I received a blow and she was pulled from me and hurled against the chain.

I braced, waiting for my witchcraft to kill what I now loved.

Nothing happened.

The metal had gone dead.

There was a great cheer, and the French surged forward. They hacked at the chain ends and it fell. A dozen men dragged it away, inspecting it for the source of its mysterious powers.

Miriam had fallen with the chain. I tried to crawl under the surging grenadiers to reach her, but was simply trampled. I grasped the hem of her dress, even as booted soldiers charged and stumbled over the top of us. I could hear shots and cries in at least three languages, men snorting and going down.

And then there was another roar, this one even louder than the mine because it was not confined underground. A massive bomb made from gunpowder kegs had finally been hurled from the tower top by Sidney Smith. It fell into the mass of Frenchmen who had bunched before the chain and now it exploded, its force redoubled by the moat and tower that bounded it. I hugged the rubble as the world dissolved into fire and smoke. Limbs and heads flew like chaff. The men who had been trampling us turned into a bloody shield, their bodies falling on us like beams. I went briefly deaf.

And then hands were digging at us to drag us backward. Phelipeaux was mouthing something I couldn’t hear, and pointing.

1 5 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

Once more, the French were retreating, their casualties far heavier than before.

I turned back, shouting a shout I couldn’t hear myself. “Miriam!

Are you alive?”

She was limp and silent.

¤

¤

¤

I carried her from the wreckage and out of the tower to the pasha’s gardens, my ears ringing but beginning to clear. Behind, Phelipeaux was shouting orders for engineers and laborers to begin repairing the breach. The garden air was smoky. Ash sifted down.

I lay my helpmate on a bench beside a fountain and put my ear to her lips. Yes! A whisper of tremulous breath. She was unconscious, not dead. I dipped a handkerchief in the water, pink from blood, and wiped her face. So soft, so smooth, under the grime! Finally the coolness brought her back. She blinked, shivering a little, and then abruptly jerked up. “What happened?” She was shaking.

“It worked. They retreated.”

She put her arms around my neck and clung. “Ethan, it’s so hor -

rible.”

“Maybe they won’t come back.”

She shook her head. “You told me Bonaparte is implacable.” I knew it would take more than an electric chain to defeat Napoleon.

Miriam looked down at herself. “I look like a butcher.”

“You look beautiful. Beautiful and bloody.” It was true. “Let’s get you inside.” I boosted her up and she leaned against me, one arm around my shoulders for support. I wasn’t quite sure where to take her, but I wanted to get away from Jericho’s foundry and the combat wall. I began to walk us toward the mosque.

Then Jericho appeared, led by an anxious Ned.

“My God, what happened?” the ironmonger asked.

“She got caught up in the fighting in the breach. She performed like an Amazon.”

“I’m all right, brother.”

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 5 9

His voice was accusatory. “You said she’d simply help with your sorcery.”

She interceded. “The men needed ammunition, Jericho.”

“I could have lost you.”

Then there was silence, and the strain of two men wanting a woman for different reasons. Ned stood mutely to one side, looking guilty as if it was his fault.

“Well, come back down to the foundry, then,” Jericho said tightly.

“No cannonballs will reach us there.”

“I’m going with Ethan.”

“Going? Where?”

They both looked at me, as if I knew. “Going,” I said, “where she can get some rest. It’s noisy as a factory at your forge, Jericho. Hot and dirty.”

“I don’t want you with her.” His voice was flat.

“I’m with Ethan, brother.” Her voice was soft but insistent.

And so we went, she leaning on me, the metallurgist left standing in the garden in frustration, his hands closing on nothing. Behind us, artillery rumbled like distant drums.

My friend Mohammad had taken quarters at Khan el-Omdan, the Pillars Inn, rather than sail away and leave us to Napoleon. In the excitement of working on the chain I’d forgotten about him, but I sought him out now. I’d wrapped a cloak around Miriam, but when we appeared at his apartment we both looked like refugees: smoke-stained, filthy, and torn.

“Mohammad, we need to find a place to rest.”

“Effendi, all the rooms are taken!”

“Surely . . .”

“Yet something can always be found for a price.” I smiled wryly. “Could we share your room?” He shook his head. “The walls are thin and water scarce. It’s no place for a lady. You don’t deserve better, but she does. Give me the rest of the money Sir Sidney gave you for your medal and your winnings at the duel.” He held out his hand.

I hesitated.

1 6 0

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Come, you know I won’t cheat you. What good is money, unless you use it?”

So I handed it over and he disappeared. In half an hour he was back, my purse empty. “Come. A merchant has fled the city and a young physician has been using his home to sleep, but rarely gets to.

He rented me the keys.”

The house was dark, its shutters drawn, its furnishing draped and pushed against the wall. Its desertion by its owner had left a desolate air, and the doctor who had taken his place was only camped there. He was a Christian Levantine from Tyre named Zawani. He shook my hand and looked curiously at Miriam. “I’ll use the money for herbs and bandages.” We were far enough from the walls that the guns were muted. “There’s a bath above. Rest. I won’t be back until tomorrow.” He was handsome, his eyes kind, but already hollowed from exhaustion.

“The lady needs to recover . . .”

“There’s no need to explain. I’m a doctor.” We were left alone. The top floor had a bathing alcove with a white masonry dome above its pool that was pierced by thick panes of colored glass. Light came through in shafts of multiple colors like a dismantled rainbow. There was wood to heat the water, so I set to work while Miriam dozed. The room was full of steam when I woke her. “I’ve prepared a bath.” I made to leave but she stopped me, and undressed us both. Her breasts were small but perfect, firm, her nipples pink, her belly descending to a thatch of pale hair. She was a virginal Madonna, scrubbing both of us of the dirt of battle until she was once more alabaster.

The merchant’s mattress was elevated as high as my waist on an ornately carved bed, with drawers underneath and a canopy overhead.

She crawled up first and lay back, so I could see her in the pale light.

There’s no sight lovelier than a welcoming woman. The sweetness of her swallows you, like the embrace of a warm sea. The topography of her body was a snowy mountain range, mysterious and unexplored.

Did I even remember what to do? It felt like a thousand years. An odd, sudden memory of Astiza intruded—a knife to the heart—but then Miriam spoke.

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 1

“This is one of those moments I told you about, Ethan.” So I took her, slowly and gently. She wept the first time, and then clung fiercely, crying out, the second. I clung too, shaking and gasping at the end, my eyes wetting when I thought first of Astiza, then of Napoleon, then of Miriam, and how long it would be before the French came again, as furious now as they’d been at Jaffa. If they got inside, they’d kill us all.

I turned my head so she couldn’t see any tear or worry, and we slept.

Near midnight, I was jostled awake. I clutched a pistol, but then saw it was Mohammad.

“What the devil?” I hissed. “Can’t we have some privacy?” He put his finger to his lips and beckoned with his head. Come.

“Now?”

He nodded emphatically. Sighing, I climbed out, the floor cold, and followed him out to the main room.

“What are you doing here?” I grumbled, holding a blanket around myself like a toga. The city seemed quiet, the guns taking a rest.

“I’m sorry, effendi, but Sir Sidney and Phelipeaux said this shouldn’t wait. The French used an arrow to fire this over the wall. It has your name on it.”

“An arrow? By Isaac Newton, what century are we in?” A small piece of burlap was tied to the arrow. Sure enough, a tag, with fine pen, read, “Ethan Gage.” Franklin would have admired the postal efficiency.

“How do they know I’m here?”

“Your electric chain is like a banner announcing your presence.

The whole province is talking about it, I would guess.” True enough. So what could our enemies be sending me that was so small?

I unwrapped the burlap and rolled its content onto the palm of my hand.

It was a ruby ring, its jewel the size of a cherry, with a tag attached that read, simply, “She needs the angels. Monge.” My world reeled.

The last time I’d seen the jewel, it had been on Astiza’s finger.

c h a p t e r

1 5

Mohammad was watching me closely. “This ring means something to you, my friend?”

“This is it? No other message?” Monge undoubtedly was Gaspard Monge, the French mathematician I’d seen at Jaffa.

“And it is not just the size of the jewel, is it?” Mohammad pressed.

I sat down heavily. “I knew the woman who wore it.” Astiza was alive!

“And the French army would catapult her ring for what reason, exactly?”

What reason indeed? I turned the ring over, remembering its origin. I’d insisted Astiza take it from the subterranean treasure trove we’d found under the Great Pyramid, despite her protestations that such loot was cursed. Then we’d briefly forgotten it until she was trying to climb the tether of Conte’s runaway balloon into my wicker basket, a desperate Count Silano clinging to her ankles. She remembered the curse and pleaded with me to get the ring off, but I couldn’t.

So, rather than drag me down within range of French soldiers, she cut the tether and fell with Silano, screaming, into the Nile. The balloon shot up so tumultuously that I didn’t see their landing, there t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 3

was a volley from the French troops, and by the time I peered into the sun-dazzled waters . . . nothing. It was as if she’d vanished from the earth. Until now.

And the angels? The seraphim we’d found. I’d have to take them back from Miriam. “They want me to come looking.”

“So it is a trap!” my companion said. “They fear you and your electrical magic.”

“No, not a trap, I think.” I didn’t flatter myself that they considered me such a formidable enemy that they had to lure me outside the walls simply to shoot me. What I did suspect is that they hadn’t given up our mutual quest for the Book of Thoth. If there was one way to enlist me again, it was the promise of Astiza. “They simply know I’m alive, because of the electricity, and they’ve learned something I can add to. It’s about what I was searching for in Jerusalem, I’m guessing.

And they know that the one thing that would make me come back to them is news of this woman.”

“Effendi, you cannot mean to leave these walls!” I glanced back to where Miriam was sleeping. “I have to.” He was baffled. “Because of a woman? You have one, right here.”

“Because there’s something out there waiting for rediscovery, and its use or misuse will affect the fate of the world.” I thought. “I want to help the French find it, but then steal it from them. For that I need help, Mohammad. I’ll have to escape through Palestine once I have Astiza and the prize. Someone with local knowledge.” He blanched. “I barely escaped Jaffa, effendi! To go amid the Frankish devils . . .”

“Might give you a share of the greatest treasure on earth,” I said blandly.

“Greatest treasure?”

“Not guaranteed, of course.”

He considered the matter. “What share?”

“Well, five percent seems reasonable, don’t you think?”

“For getting you through the Palestinian wilderness? A fifth, at least!”

“I intend to ask other help. Seven percent is the absolute maximum I can afford.”

1 6 4

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

He bowed. “A tenth, then, is utterly reasonable. Plus a small token if we get the help of my cousins and brothers and uncles. And expenses for horses and camels. Guns, food. Hardly a pittance, if it’s really from the greatest treasure.”

I sighed. “Let’s just see if we can get to Monge without being shot, all right?”

There was, of course, a nagging matter as we began our brisk planning. I’d just slept with the sweetest woman I’d ever met, Miriam, and was planning to take back my seraphim and sneak off to learn the truth about Astiza without leaving the poor woman so much as a word. I felt like a cad, and hadn’t the faintest idea how to explain myself without sounding caddish. It wasn’t that I was disloyal to Miriam, I was simply also loyal to the memory of the first woman, and loved them both in different ways. Astiza had become to me the essence of Egypt, of ancient mystery, a beauty whose quest for ancient knowledge had become my own. We’d met when she helped try to assassinate me, Napoleon himself leading the little charge that captured her. Then she’d saved my life, more than once, and filled my empty character with purpose. We’d not just been lovers, we’d become partners in a quest, and nearly died in the Great Pyramid.

It was perfectly reasonable to go looking for Astiza—the ring had ignited memories like a match to a trail of gunpowder—but a trifle awkward to explain to Miriam. Women can be grumpy about this kind of thing. So I’d go find the meaning of Astiza’s ring, rescue her, put the two of them together, and then . . .

What? Well, as Sidney Smith had promised, it’s splendid how these things work out. “So convenient it is to be a reasonable creature,” Ben Franklin had said, “since it enables one to do everything one has a mind to do anyway.” Old Ben had entertained the ladies himself, while his wife stewed back in Philadelphia.

“Should we wake your woman?” Mohammad asked.

“Oh no.”

¤

¤

¤

t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 5

When I asked Big Ned to come along, he was as hard to convince as a dog called for a walk by its master. He was one of those men who do nothing by halves; he was either my most implacable enemy or my most faithful servant. He’d become convinced I was a sorcerer of rare power, and was merely biding my time before distributing the wealth of Solomon.

Jericho, in contrast, had long since given up all talk of treasure.

He was intrigued when I woke him to explain that the ruby ring had belonged to Astiza, but only because the distraction might keep me away from his sister.

“So you must take care of Miriam while I’m gone,” I told him, trying to salve my conscience by leaving him in charge. He looked so pleased that for a moment I considered whether he’d somehow sent me the ring himself.

But then he blinked and shook his head. “I can’t let you go alone.”

“I won’t be alone. I have Mohammad and Ned.”

“A heathen and a lunkhead? It will be a contest to see which of the three leads you into disaster first. No, you need someone with a level head.”

“Who is Astiza, if she’s alive. Smith and Phelipeaux and the rest of the garrison need you more than I do, Jericho. Defend the city and Miriam. I’ll still cut you in when we’ve found the treasure.” You can’t dangle wealth in a man’s mind and not have him think nostalgically about the prospect, however slim.

He looked at me with new respect. “It’s risky, crossing French lines.

Maybe there’s something to you after all, Ethan Gage.”

“Your sister thinks so too.” And before we could quarrel about that issue, I set off with Mohammad and Ned. We’d be caught in cross fire if we simply strolled outside the walls, so we took the boat Mohammad had fled Jaffa in. The city was a dark silhouette against the stars, to give the French as few aiming points as possible, while the glow of enemy campfires produced an aurora behind the trenches. Phospho-rescence was silver in our wake. We landed on the sandy beach behind the semicircle of French lines and crept to their camp the back way, crossing the ruts and trampled crops of war.

1 6 6

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

It’s easier than you might guess to walk into an army from its rear, which is the province of the wagon masters, sutlers, camp followers, and malingerers who aren’t used to reaching for a gun. I told my compatriots to wait in a thicket by a tepid stream and marched in with that superior air of a savant, a man who has an opinion on everything and accomplishment in none. “I have a message for Gaspard Monge from his academic colleagues in Cairo,” I told a sentry.

“He’s helping at the hospital.” He pointed. “Visit at your own peril.”

Had we already wounded that many? The eastern sky was beginning to lighten when I found the hospital tents, stitched together like a vast circus canvas. Monge was sleeping on a cot and looked sick himself, a middle-aged scientist-adventurer whom the expedition was turning old. He was pale, despite the sun, and thinner, hollowed out by sickness. I hesitated to wake him.

I glanced about. Soldiers, quietly moaning, lay in parallel rows that receded into the gloom. It seemed too many for the casualties we’d inflicted. I bent to inspect one, who was twitching fitfully, and recoiled at what I saw. There were pustules on his face and, when I lifted the sheet, an ominous swelling at his groin.

Plague.

I stepped back hastily, sweating. There had been rumors it was getting worse, but confirmation brought back historic dread. Disease was the shadow of armies, plague the handmaiden of sieges, and only rarely confined to one side. What if it crossed the walls?

On the other hand, the disease gave Napoleon a tight deadline.

He had to win before plague decimated his army. No wonder he had attacked impetuously.

“Ethan, is that you?”

I turned. Monge was sitting up, tousled and weary, blinking awake.

Again, his face reminded me of a wise old dog. “Once more I’ve come for your counsel, Gaspard.”

He smiled. “First we thought you dead, then we guessed you were the mad electrician somehow inside the walls of Acre, and now you materialize at my summons. You may indeed be a wizard. Or the t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 7

most baffled man in either army, never knowing to which side you belong.”

“I was perfectly happy on the other side, Gaspard.”

“Bah. With a despotic pasha, a lunatic Englishman, and a jealous French royalist? I don’t believe it. You’re more rational than you pretend.”

“Phelipeaux said it was Bonaparte who was the jealous one at school, not he.”

“Phelipeaux is on the wrong side of history, as is every man behind those walls. The revolution is remaking man from centuries of superstition and tyranny. Rationalism will always triumph over superstition. Our army promises liberty.”

“With the guillotine, massacre, and plague.” He frowned at me, disappointed at my intransigence, and then the corners of his mouth twitched. Finally he laughed. “What philosophers we are, at the end of the earth!”

“The center, the Jews would say.”

“Yes. Every army eventually tramps through Palestine, the crossroads of three continents.”

“Gaspard, where did you get this ring?” I held it out, the stone like a bubble of blood in the paleness. “Astiza was wearing it when I last saw her, falling into the Nile.”

“Bonaparte ordered the arrow missive.”

“But why?”

“Well, she’s alive, for one thing.”

My heart took off at full gallop. “And her condition?”

“I haven’t seen her, but I’ve had word. She was in a coma, and under the care of Count Silano for a month. But I’m told she’s recovered better than he has. He entered the water first, I suspect, she on top of him, so he broke the surface. His hip was shattered, and he’ll limp for the rest of his life.”

The beat of my pulse was like drums in my ears. To know, to know . . .

“Now she cares for him,” Monge went on.

It was like a slap. “You must be joking.” 1 6 8

w i l l i a m d i e t r i c h

“Takes care, I mean. She hasn’t given up the peculiar quest you all seem to be on. They were furious to hear you’d been condemned at Jaffa—that was the work of that buffoon Najac; I don’t know why Napoleon wouldn’t listen to me— and horrified that you’d been executed. You know something they need. Then there were rumors you were alive, and she sent the ring. We saw your electrical trick. My instructions were to inquire about angels. Do you know what she means?”

Once more I could feel them pressing my skin. “Perhaps. I must see her.”

“She’s not here. She and Silano have gone to Mount Nebo.”

“Mount what?”

“East of Jerusalem, across the Jordan River. There Moses finally spied the Promised Land, and died before he could enter it. Now why are they so interested in Moses, Ethan Gage?” He was watching me carefully.

So Monge, and probably Bonaparte, didn’t know everything. What kind of game were Silano and Astiza playing? “I have no idea,” I lied.

“And what do you know about these angels of yours that makes them as anxious to find you as you are to find them?”

“I have even less idea of that,” I said truthfully.

“You’ve come alone?”

“I have some friends, waiting in a safe place.”

“No place is safe in Palestine. This is a pestilential country. Our friend Conte has devised elaborate wagons to transport more siege artillery from Egypt, since the perfidious British captured our guns at sea, but it’s been a running skirmish to get them here. These people don’t know when they are beaten.”

If Napoleon was expecting big guns, time was short. “What happens at Mount Nebo?”

Monge shrugged. “If you’d confide in your fellow savants, Gage, perhaps we could illuminate your future with more precision. As it is, you keep your own counsel, and end up in trouble. It’s like your goose chase over the Pascal’s triangle that was inscribed on your medallion—say, did you finally get rid of that old toy?” t h e

r o s e t t a k e y

1 6 9

“Oh yes.” Monge had become convinced my medallion in Egypt had been a modern fraud. Astiza, out of his hearing, had called him a fool. He was not a fool, but burdened by the certainty that comes with too much education. The correlation between schooling and common sense is limited in the extreme. “There’s nothing to confide. I was simply conducting electrical experiments when you sent this ring over our walls.”