The Templar Heresy

35

The two biggest problems Bronson had encountered in booking a flight were that the majority seemed to arrive in Israel in the very early hours of the morning, and most also involved an intermediate stop at Brussels, Amsterdam or Rome. He was keenly aware from what they knew had happened to Stephen that it would be fairly easy for someone to track down their whereabouts once there was a record of them booking a flight.

It cost more — a lot more, in fact, almost double — but eventually he’d found a direct Air France Airbus out of Charles de Gaulle to Tel Aviv, and they’d bought the tickets when they’d arrived at the airport the following morning, at the very last minute.

As they had expected, security on arrival at Ben Gurion Airport was both obvious and comprehensive, and it took some time to get through the system and into the arrivals hall.

‘Shall we hire a car?’ Angela asked.

‘That’s probably not a good idea,’ Bronson replied, scanning the crowded building as he spoke. ‘We’ve already left an electronic trail by using a credit card to pay for the flight, and if they are as organized as they seem to be, they’ll already know that we’re here in Israel. It’ll take longer, but I’m sure we’ll be a whole lot safer if we just become two more anonymous passengers on a bus. And according to my map it’s not that far to Jerusalem.’

They headed to the bridge on the second floor of the airport and crossed over it to the bus stop for the short ride to the Egged bus station at Airport City. There, they disembarked and took the next available number 947 to the Central Bus Station in Jerusalem, a journey that was completed in just under an hour and a quarter.

‘Shall we look for a hotel first?’ Angela said as they stepped into the bright sunshine of late afternoon.

‘Definitely. We’ll take a taxi to somewhere near the Temple Mount and see what we can find. On the map it looks like about two miles from here to the Old City, which would take us a while to walk. Not to mention that we’d probably get lost if we tried.’

Modern Jerusalem surrounds and entirely encloses the Old City, but planning laws have mandated against high-rise buildings and most development has been restricted to the higher ground, leaving the valleys as open spaces, so it provides a sensation of space and openness. And it was a British regulation, imposed when Great Britain governed the area, that specified local limestone — Jerusalem Stone — was to be used for all the façades. Pinkish-white in colour, the shade changes throughout the day as the light alters, meaning that the colours and appearance of the buildings, of the whole city, in fact, changes as well.

A quarter of an hour later, Bronson paid off the cab driver at the Jaffa Gate, the gate to the west of the Old City near the Tower of David and one of the busiest entrances penetrating the sixteenth-century wall — built on the orders of the Ottoman ruler Süleyman I — that surrounded the ancient heart of Jerusalem. In his hand were three business cards for local hotels, given to him by the taxi driver.

The Old City lay before them, within the mediaeval wall. It was not particularly big — very roughly square shaped, with the Temple Mount occupying about half of the eastern side, directly opposite the Jaffa Gate, and a little over half a mile from north to south and roughly the same from east to west. Within the boundary wall the Old City was divided into four quadrants representing the dominant religions that had occupied Jerusalem over the centuries. Running clockwise from the north, there was the Muslim district — which included the Temple Mount — then the Jewish, Armenian and Christian districts.

All three of the hotels the driver had suggested were in the Christian and Muslim quarters and were, the man had assured them, both very high quality and very reasonably priced. They passed along a section of the main axis of the ancient city, skirting the permanent Arab market or suq. One of the most dominant features of Jerusalem life, it was crowded with shoppers talking and haggling over the prices asked for goods.

They walked east along David Street, heading directly towards the Western Wall, but then turned north up Shuk ha-Basamim Street and continued past the Alexander Nevski Church. One of the hotels recommended by the taxi driver was only about a hundred yards in front of them.

Jerusalem has been a melting pot of cultures and religions for centuries, and the streets teemed with people. Orthodox Jews, black hats perched seemingly precariously on the tops of their heads and black curls dangling down both sides of their faces, bustled around, some alone, others in small groups talking earnestly together. None of them ever seemed to smile. Arabs moved steadily through the crowds, their pace relaxed and sedate. Tourists from almost every nation on the planet stood and walked and talked and took photographs of the almost indescribably ancient buildings.

And as a constant reminder of the state of religious and political flux that characterized Jerusalem, and of the troubles that sporadically flared up between the nations, armed Jewish soldiers stood on corners, their eyes flicking from one face to another, looking for the first sign of trouble, their hands resting on the pistol grips of their Galil assault rifles.

But perhaps even more than the diversity of the people, it was the buildings that entranced them. The sense of age, of centuries, millennia even, was almost palpable. It was as if the countless years of occupation by disparate civilizations had weighed down the buildings and the streets, investing the very structure of the city with an unmistakable sense of timeless occupation. Above all, Bronson detected a sense of sadness, as though the fabric of Jerusalem, the very stones themselves, had somehow absorbed some of the emotions experienced by the inhabitants when the peace of the city had been brutally shattered by one or another of the invading armies that had breached the defences over the millennia and, all too often, massacred everyone they found inside the walls.

‘This is quite a place,’ he said, painfully aware of the complete inadequacy of his words to convey more than a fraction of what he was feeling.

‘Yes,’ Angela replied thoughtfully, and Bronson could see that she was feeling exactly the same way.

The hotel stood on the corner at the crossroads they were approaching and, as far as Bronson could see, it didn’t look too bad.

‘This should do us,’ he said as he led the way to the main entrance.

Twenty minutes later, they were standing side by side in their compact double room on the first floor of the building, and looking out of the window across the rooftops of the Old City towards the Temple Mount.

‘It looks bigger than I remember it,’ Angela said. ‘The Mount, I mean.’

‘Last time we were here, if I remember correctly, we were a bit too busy to do any sightseeing, and I doubt we’ll get much opportunity now either. The chances are that our pursuers are here already, either because they’ve tracked us or because they’ve also managed to decipher the first part of that inscription. They can’t know about this hotel, of course, but they’ll know that the only reason we would have for flying to Israel is because we think the clue referred to in the inscription is here, somewhere under the Temple Mount. So we’ll need to keep our eyes open and stay alert. They’ll have photographs of us by now, or at least of you, culled from some professional journal, so they’re already one step ahead of us.’

Angela looked worried at his last remark.

‘In a country like this,’ she said, ‘my fair skin and blonde hair are going to really stand out. When we leave the hotel I’ll put my hair up and wear a hat or scarf or something. I guess I’ll need to do that anyway, especially if we’re going to any of the religious sites, like the Kotel tunnels behind the Western Wall.’

‘That should be our first stop,’ Bronson agreed. ‘And with a bit of luck it might be our last stop as well, assuming that whatever we’re looking for is still there.’

‘But what are we looking for?’

‘Now that is a bloody good question. And our biggest problem. Logically I’d assume it must be a carving or another inscription or something of that sort — something that will provide the code word that we need to complete the decryption. What I’m hoping is that it will be recognizable, that it will have some characteristic or feature that will link it to the inscription you found in Iraq. But, frankly, I think we’ll just have to look at everything and photograph as much as we can and hope that we’ll somehow spot what we’re looking for.’

‘I feel like the odds are against us. And one more thing: I thought that the Kotel tunnels only ran along the very edge of the Temple Mount, and that most of the chambers were deep under the Mount and completely inaccessible from all entrances. If we take the translation literally, we should be looking for a cavity under either the Dome of the Rock or the Al Aqsa Mosque, depending upon what we believe is meant by the word “temple”, and one thing I do know is that there is no possibility at all of getting into those subterranean rooms.’

‘You may well be right,’ Bronson said. ‘It’s entirely possible that the key, whatever it turns out to be, will be hidden way beyond our reach, and if that’s the case we’ll have to rethink. But it’s worth trying, and maybe we’ll get lucky. If there’s nothing in the tunnel system that we can access, the only other possibility, I suppose, is that we try a little bit of discreet unauthorized surveying, and see if we can find anything that way.’

Angela looked at him for a few seconds before she replied.

‘I hope you’re not suggesting what I have a horrible feeling that you are suggesting,’ she said.