The Templar Heresy

45

Farooq’s plan was a good one, but it did rather rely on their quarry making themselves visible, which is what both he and Khaled had expected. Because the spaces under the Temple Mount had not yielded the results they had anticipated, they had assumed that Bronson and Lewis would be back out on the streets, still searching for the key, perhaps at the Wailing Wall or somewhere nearby. Khaled assumed that the English couple must have broken the code and read the first part of the inscription, just as he had done, otherwise they would not be in Jerusalem at all.

What he hadn’t anticipated, though, was that Bronson and Angela were one step ahead of him in terms of the trail they were following.

After their breakfast, Angela and Bronson had returned to their room just minutes before Mahmoud, smartly dressed in a dark suit, had walked into the hotel as if he was just another guest, or perhaps a businessman meeting a guest, and had looked at the handful of occupants of all the public rooms. Just as in the previous establishments he’d visited, he had hoped to find a fellow Muslim with whom he could have struck up a conversation and discreetly enquired about the whereabouts of his ‘young female English friend’. Farooq had suggested this approach as being less likely to arouse suspicion than a direct approach to a concierge or receptionist. After all, it was just a short step between simple suspicion and contacting the police, especially in a city as laced and riven with racial tension as Jerusalem. And they definitely needed to keep the police out of their business.

But in that hotel dining room, Mahmoud could see that that gambit wasn’t going to work. The clientele appeared to be almost exclusively tourists, and European tourists at that.

Mahmoud walked out of the hotel entrance about five minutes after he’d walked in, took a pen from his pocket and made a neat tick beside the hotel name and followed it with a question mark. He glanced back at the building, then made a note on his sheet of paper to ensure that he would visit it again later that morning. So far, he had three hotels in total marked down as possibilities for similar reasons.

Then he opened the tourist map he’d been given by Farooq and on which all of ‘his’ hotels and streets had been marked, and strode briskly along the pavement towards the next one.