The Templar Heresy

41

Angela had been as good as her word.

She’d waited in the shadows by the entrance to the Western Wall Heritage, doing her best to keep out of sight and listening intently. The sound of the two shots from somewhere deep inside the tunnel complex had both shocked and alarmed her and she’d immediately dialled the Israeli police. But not from her mobile. She’d jogged away from the Kotel Plaza and made the call from the first public phone she’d found, telling the person who responded that she’d heard shots from inside the complex and that the door to the building was open.

The officer or dispatcher or whoever it was had told her firmly to remain exactly where she was, but Angela had replaced the receiver and immediately walked to an entirely different location which gave her a good view of the entrance to the Western Wall Heritage and just waited.

She looked and had sounded calm and in control on the phone, but her mind was in turmoil. Those shots could only have meant one thing: Chris must have been spotted by whoever had entered the complex before they got there. Even while her mind raced, imagining him dying alone and in the dark, lying in a spreading pool of his own blood on the ancient stones of some anonymous chamber or passage, another part of her brain was silently cursing him for his stupidity in going inside the tunnel complex at all, knowing that somebody else was already in there. And perhaps worse than that, for thinking he could take on men armed with guns when all he had with him was a length of steel.

For a few minutes, nothing happened. Then she faintly heard what sounded like another single shot, quickly followed by two more, but she was now so far away from the entrance to the tunnel complex that she couldn’t be sure. And moments after that she heard the unmistakable sound of a police siren.

She didn’t move, apart from slinking further back into the shadows and making sure that she could not be easily seen. She was determined to hold her position and to wait there until, hopefully, she would see the bulky figure of Bronson emerge from the open gate.

But that didn’t happen. Instead, two men stepped out of the gate, glanced in both directions and then exchanged a few brief words. Then they set off, heading away from the Kotel Plaza in opposite directions, not running but moving quickly. In the light from the moon, all she could tell was they had dark hair, and appeared to have swarthy complexions.

Less than two minutes later, four uniformed police officers ran into the square and headed straight for the Western Wall Heritage entrance, briefly examined the lock on the open gate and then vanished inside, pistols drawn and torches in their hands.

At that moment Angela knew that there was no point in waiting where she was any longer. If Bronson was still alive somewhere in the tunnels, the police would arrest him and he’d spend the rest of the night in a police cell, and probably the next several months or years in some Israeli jail. If he was dead, they’d remove the body, and if he was wounded but still alive, they’d take him to hospital.

Those, as far as Angela could see, were the only possible outcomes, and there was nothing she could do to influence or help Bronson with any of them if she stayed where she was. In fact, the longer she remained in the area, the more chance there was of being arrested herself, if only because she was on the spot and might have been the woman who had made the call about the gunshots. If, against all the odds, Bronson had survived and had been arrested, then the best place for her to be was out on the streets so that she could find him a lawyer or talk to the embassy or consulate or whatever British government presence there was in the city.

She took a last lingering glance across the square, emitted a sound that was almost a moan of pain, then turned away and began walking slowly through the streets, heading back towards the hotel because she had no idea where else to go or what else to do.

As she walked, she was aware of more sirens sounding in the streets around the Old City, and a couple of times she ducked out of sight into sheltered doorways when she heard the sound of running feet nearby. She guessed these were people making for the Kotel Plaza and the growing commotion there, but nobody actually passed her as she walked away from the scene, head down.

She walked slowly and appeared calm, but her mind was racing, selecting and discarding possibilities and scenarios. The only glimmer of hope she had was that she had clearly heard two shots and then — she was almost certain of this — a third, and then two more. Bronson didn’t have a pistol, and that meant that it had to have been one or both of the two men she’d seen coming out of the Western Wall Heritage who’d been doing the shooting. And the fact that it hadn’t just been two quick shots might have meant that the bullets hadn’t killed Bronson, otherwise there would have been no point in firing again. So maybe, just maybe, he’d been spotted in the tunnels and they’d shot at him but missed, and then made their escape when they heard the sound of the sirens.

So if her hopeful reconstruction of events was right, it was possible that her ex-husband might still be alive. Wounded, perhaps, and by now in police custody, but alive. She would have to wait until the normal routine of the city had started later in the morning, and then she could start searching by phone, checking the hospitals and of course the local police station.

And then all her tentative plans and schemes vanished completely from her mind as a dark figure stepped out of an alleyway just a few feet in front of her.

Angela gave a gasp of surprise, then a murmur of recognition. She ran the few paces that separated them, wrapped her arms around him and squeezed as if she would never let him go.

‘Dear God,’ she murmured, her voice muffled by the clothes he was wearing, ‘I thought you were dead. When I heard those shots—’ She broke off, stifling a sob, and stared into his face. ‘You’re hurt,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ Bronson said. ‘It’s just a scratch. I got hit by a ricochet from one of the first shots they fired.’

‘Let me see,’ Angela said tenderly, and steered him back into the alleyway from which he had appeared, where the light from her torch would hopefully not attract attention.

She shone the dim beam at his forehead, altered the angle a couple of times to see better, and then nodded.

‘It might just be a scratch, but it has bled rather a lot.’

She reached into her pocket, pulled out a packet of tissues and wiped off the blood, which was already starting to clot.

She took out another tissue, folded it to make a pad and then instructed Bronson to spit on it.

‘What the hell happened in there?’ she asked, ignoring his quizzical expression. She cleared more blood from Bronson’s forehead with the dampened tissue. ‘You can’t infect yourself,’ she added. ‘That’s why you’re spitting on the tissues, not me.’

‘There were three of them,’ Bronson began, but Angela stopped him almost immediately.

‘I only saw two come out.’

Bronson sighed.

‘Yes,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘The third one is still down there in the tunnel.’

‘But couldn’t he identify you?’ Angela began, but then stopped as Bronson gave a small shake of his head. ‘Oh… You mean he’s in no fit state to talk? To ever talk?’

‘Let me put it this way: he won’t be causing us, or anybody else, any problems in the future. He was about to shoot me so I didn’t really have a choice. It was him or me.’

‘Are you okay?’ she whispered. ‘Who was he?’

‘I have no idea. I checked his pockets before I left, but all he had were a few spare rounds for his pistol and a wallet containing some cash. I took them both, because he obviously wasn’t going to be able to use either. And his pistol as well, just in case we need a bit of firepower before all this is over.’

‘You’ve always told me that professionals never carry ID,’ Angela said, a look of worry again crossing her face. ‘So do you think that’s what he was? A professional, but a professional what? I mean, what did he look like?’

‘Black hair, dark skin and fairly pronounced features, but basically unremarkable. I’ve never been a believer in coincidence, and in my view the chances of there being another group of people — a group unrelated to those people in Iraq, I mean — exploring the interior of the Temple Mount at the same time as us is nil. I don’t know who he was, but I’d bet money that he was a part of the group that hit your camp and destroyed the inscription. So that’s another reason why I don’t feel too bad about what happened to him.’

Angela didn’t respond, and Bronson glanced at her as they walked along the street.

‘And are you OK?’ he asked.

‘No, not really. I had kind of hoped that when we got here we’d be well ahead of our pursuers, so we could find whatever clue there’s left under the Temple Mount and then get out of Israel to somewhere a bit safer. But if you’re right, that means those people have also cracked the hidden message in the inscription, otherwise they wouldn’t be here.’

‘Well, the decryption wasn’t all that easy, but it also wasn’t desperately difficult. I’ve no doubt that whoever these guys are, they would have done exactly the same thing and reached precisely the same conclusion that we did. And as they’re here now, assuming I’m right, it even took them roughly the same length of time to crack it as us.’

‘That makes sense,’ Angela said, sounding subdued. ‘And obviously it’s wonderful that you got out of the tunnel before the police arrived, but we can’t be too blasé about the fact that you killed a man tonight. Whether or not he deserved to die doesn’t matter, because pretty soon the entire Israeli police force will be looking for his murderer.’

They were silent for a moment.

‘And how did you get out?’ she asked as another thought struck her. ‘I kept watch until the police arrived, and the only people who came out of the entrance were those two men I told you about.’

‘I used the other entrance, or rather the exit from the Western Wall Tunnel. Just picked the lock and walked away. I didn’t dare risk going out the way I’d come in, just in case one of the men was still waiting for me or — maybe even worse — if the police had got there quicker than I’d expected and found me standing there holding a length of rebar covered in blood and with an unlicensed pistol in my pocket.’

‘Where did you put it? The rebar, I mean, because your fingerprints and obviously his blood would be all over it.’

‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ Bronson replied. ‘This city is full of holes and crevices because of all the different layers that have been built on it over the centuries. I found a narrow slit between two buildings, wiped the bar and then dropped it down into the opening. It fell quite a long way before I heard a clunk, so I reckon the chances of anybody finding it are pretty much nil.’

‘And because you left a dead man down there, I suppose now we have to get out of Jerusalem as quickly as we can. So that’s the end of it? The search, I mean?’

Angela sounded resigned more than anything as they continued walking towards the hotel. It wasn’t the first time Bronson had inflicted casualties on hostile forces during their searches for relics around the globe, and while she obviously didn’t condone what he’d done, she also wouldn’t condemn him: sometimes the only way to combat force was to use even greater force.

‘Definitely not,’ he replied. ‘The last thing we should do is leave in a hurry because that might attract unwelcome official attention. Anyway, I think we will be heading somewhere else quite soon, but for a different reason. Because of what was down there, under the Temple Mount.’

‘You mean you found something?’

‘Well, more didn’t find, really. The three men had broken open one of the interior gateways and had gone into the tunnels under the Mount, but when they came back, they saw me and that’s when the shooting started. Obviously you’d called the police right after that, which is why they pushed off after I’d killed that man. The problem I had was that I couldn’t do a proper search of the chamber they’d opened up because there simply wasn’t time. I heard the police sirens and I knew I had to get out almost immediately. But I heard the three of them talking as they headed back towards the main tunnel, and I’m pretty certain that they’d found nothing at all. Certainly not an inscription that could have been this mysterious key.’

‘But you don’t speak Arabic,’ Angela pointed out, ‘so how can you be sure?’

‘I can’t be sure, obviously, but they sounded both resigned and irritated, as if they’d been on a wild-goose chase. I had a very quick look inside the chamber they’d been exploring just before I left the area, and as far as I could see, all the walls were completely devoid of markings of any sort. And, with hindsight, if you look at the history of the Temple Mount, it’s difficult to see how anybody would have been able to get inside it, or at least get inside the areas under the old Jewish Temple, to leave a clue or a key.’

‘What do you mean?’ Angela asked.

‘You told me that the Temple Mount was built by Herod in the first century,’ Bronson replied. ‘And as far as we know, what he did was build retaining walls around the circumference of the Mount and supporting walls at various points on top of the existing hill, and he then laid a flat surface of stone over the top of all that, a level surface on which he was able to reconstruct and enlarge the temple. So around what’s known as the Foundation Stone, for example, he built a wall that enclosed the stone completely and once he put the level stonework on top of the walls, the only possible way in to that space would have been by digging down from inside the temple itself or worming your way in from the side and then cutting a hole in that perimeter wall.’

‘Okay, I see where you’re going with that,’ Angela said, nodding.

‘So over one millennium later, in the early Middle Ages, realistically there would have been no way that anybody could have got into these chambers undetected. In fact, it’s worth saying that the chambers within the Temple Mount, the various rooms that Charles Warren explored when he did his excavations at the end of the nineteenth century, in most cases weren’t really rooms at all, but just the voids left between Herod’s supporting walls, spaces basically filled up with earth and rubbish.’

At that moment, they reached the hotel, where every room apart from the reception hall was in darkness, and Bronson used his key to open the front door so they could go inside. To avoid waking anybody, people who might possibly be asked questions by the Jerusalem police at a later date, they stopped talking until they were inside their bedroom. And even then, they both made a conscious effort to keep their voices low.

‘So what you’re saying is that we’re in the wrong place altogether,’ Angela said, and sighed heavily. ‘We’ve picked the wrong “lost temple”, and we’ve just been wasting our time here.’