Steven Fisher, his back against a tree, tipped up the peak of his baseball hat. ‘Nope, not a thing. Don’t know what Ziff’s doing in there. Reciting all six hundred-thirteen mitzvot, or something.’
‘If you weren’t Jewish yourself, I’d swear you were anti-Semitic,’ said the woman beside the documentary’s bearded director. Lydia Spur was a blonde New Zealander who still had the look of a tomboy despite being in her mid-thirties.
Fisher grinned at her. ‘Self-loathing is what Judaism is all about.’ She smiled back.
‘I’ll see what they’re doing,’ said Nina, going to the tent’s entrance. She called to a chunky Hispanic man who was stretched out sunbathing. ‘Jay? Get your camera ready, we might be shooting soon.’
‘I’ll get right on that, boss,’ replied Jay Rivero, scarcely bothering to veil his sarcasm. He didn’t move. Nina shot an annoyed look at Fisher.
‘We’ll go when we’ve got a reason to, okay?’ the director told her. ‘Howie’s getting drone coverage’ — he gestured towards the fourth member of the small documentary crew, who was operating the quadcopter from a slim laptop — ‘and we’ve got nothing to shoot until they let us in there.’
‘We’ll be in there in five minutes,’ Nina told him, irked by their attitude. It wasn’t just that they had no particular excitement about what they were doing, treating it as just another job; it was also that as the shoot progressed, they had developed a personal animosity towards her. The same thing happened on the Atlantis documentary, none of her original crew returning. What the hell was their problem? ‘Be ready.’
She entered the tent. Inside were four men, two Israeli and two Jordanian archaeologists, engaged in a discussion. She went to the oldest. ‘David, what’s the hold-up?’
Dr David Solomon Ziff turned to her. ‘There isn’t a hold-up, Nina,’ he said. ‘We are just proceeding with due attention, that’s all.’
She looked past the balding, white-bearded man into a steeply sloping tunnel. Spotlights revealed stonework at the bottom — a section of the First Temple’s outer wall. Only a cracked stone slab separated the scientists from what lay within.
And they had been vacillating over how, or even whether, to move that slab for most of the day. ‘I think you’ve given it as much attention as humanly possible,’ she said. ‘All the potential risks have been taken into account — so let’s just do it.’
‘I’d remind you that you’re not in charge here, Dr Wilde,’ said Ziff pointedly. ‘I am. I’ll decide when to open the temple.’
She folded her arms. ‘All right, so when are you going to open the temple?’
‘Soon.’
‘Soon? Five minutes is soon. Ten minutes?’
Ziff shook his head. ‘Why are you in such a rush, Nina? The First Temple has been buried for over two thousand years. It will still be here tomorrow. And the day after, and a week from now.’
‘But my camera crew won’t be,’ she said. ‘We’re almost at the end of our schedule. But this gives us an ending, brings everything full circle. The Ark was once kept in the First Temple, and now what we found with the Ark has brought us back to it. It’s perfect.’
‘We are not here so you can have a happy ending on television,’ said Mohammad Talal, one of the Jordanians. ‘This is real archaeology.’
Nina gave the young man a chilly stare. ‘Well y’know, Atlantis, the pyramid of Osiris, the vault of Shiva, El Dorado, Valhalla — oh, and the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant — seemed pretty real too when I found them all.’ Talal looked away, his expression a mixture of anger and humiliation. She turned back to Ziff. ‘David, this isn’t about satisfying my ego. This is my way of doing archaeology; it might be unconventional, but it works. It’s about showing the world something remarkable — something that we’ve all dedicated our lives to finding.’
Ziff adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. ‘Finding Solomon’s temple is my lifelong ambition, not yours. But…’ A long, slow exhalation. ‘You are right. There’s no reason to delay any longer.’ He smiled at her for the first time since her entrance. ‘After all, why have a lifelong ambition if you stop when you are about to reach it?’
‘I know what you mean,’ she said, returning the smile. ‘Atlantis was my obsession. But there was still a lot more for me to find afterwards.’
He nodded. ‘So much that you must wonder if there’s anything left. But yes, we will open the temple. It is time.’
‘Thank you,’ said Nina, feeling a little unsettled by the first part of his reply. She shook off the feeling and went to the tent’s door. ‘Okay, we’re going to open up the First Temple,’ she told those outside. ‘Five minutes, just like I said.’ The redhead gave Fisher a smug smirk, then tied her hair into a ponytail. ‘Everyone get ready.’
It actually took rather more than five minutes, but eventually all the preparations were made. The archaeologists took up position at the tunnel’s end, two men carefully inserting long crowbars into cracks on each side of the obstructing slab while Talal positioned himself to take the block’s weight should it tip forward. Nina and Ziff crouched expectantly before the opening, the Israeli holding a still camera to photograph the procedure.
Behind them were the film crew. Rivero was closest, his rugged Sony Handicam on his shoulder and the viewfinder fixed to his eye like a cybernetic attachment. The camera was such an integral part of the Californian that he looked odd to Nina without it. Beside him, Lydia held a microphone on a boom. The mic was connected to a pair of expensive but travel-scuffed headphones and a digital sound mixer in a padded bag hanging from her neck.
Fisher peered over their shoulders. ‘We all set?’ he asked.
‘Good to go, man,’ drawled Rivero. He switched on a light atop his camera.
Lydia adjusted a knob on her mixer. ‘Audio is good. Ready when you are.’
‘Okay, roll it,’ said Fisher.
‘David, can I have a few seconds?’ said Nina. ‘I want to do a piece to camera.’
Talal muttered impatiently in Arabic, but Ziff nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Thanks.’ She gathered her thoughts, then looked into the lens. ‘Behind this doorway is a chamber of the First Temple, buried here on the Temple Mount for two and a half thousand years. What’s inside, nobody knows. It may be nothing — or something wondrous that we hadn’t even imagined. Either way, we’ll know in a few moments.’ She faced the entrance again.
Ziff took the cue, issuing an instruction. The two men strained at the crowbars. Metal rasped on stone, red dust spitting out from the cracks…
The slab moved.
With a deep crunch, it lurched forward by half an inch. The pair wielding the bars pushed harder. The great stone shifted again. ‘It’s coming,’ Nina whispered as it crept from its resting place. ‘It’s tipping outwards at the top. Mohammad, get ready to catch it.’
The Jordanian reached up to the stone’s upper edge. ‘I can feel a gap!’ he cried. ‘A little more…’
A crackle of ancient, dusty cement — and the slab came loose.
Talal arrested its fall, the two other men hurriedly dropping the crowbars and gripping it. They carefully edged it aside.
Nina looked back at the camera. ‘This is it,’ she said, trying with little success to contain her excitement. ‘The door is open — and now we’ll be the first people to enter the First Temple in over two millennia.’
Ziff aimed a powerful flashlight inside, casting a disc of light on a plastered wall. Nina’s own light joined it. ‘It’s some sort of antechamber,’ she said, moving closer. ‘Carvings on the walls, but… they look decorative rather than being inscriptions.’