Jack cleared his throat. “Let me see, that would normally take a degree in archaeology, probably a master’s, a track record of several years, and impeccable references, not to speak of several months coming up the hard way washing potsherds and pushing wheelbarrows.”
“Not if you’re Jack Howard’s daughter. Not if you’ve been seen on our films excavating at Troy and at Herculaneum. Two days after being accepted on the team, I had my own special hole in the ground, one that I’d selected myself.”
“And how did you manage that?”
“I took a page out of Uncle Hiemy’s book. Maurice once told me that the best way to get to grips with an excavation is to go there at night when nobody else is around. So I sweet-talked my friend Doron, the night watchman, into letting me stay here one evening, and I spent the entire night searching every cavern and tunnel I could find in this place. I was looking for somewhere near the arch that looked as if it might once have led deeper into the rock, actually beneath the Western Wall. I finally broke my way into this tomb. That far wall of rubble was plastered over, but the plaster looked to me to be relatively recent, within the last couple hundred years rather than ancient. It might have been put there by an excavator in the nineteenth century to seal up a discovery. That was nearly good enough for me to have a go breaking through, but I wanted some more definitive indication that this might have been Wilson’s hole. So I looked carefully around, and I found this.”
She reached up to a ledge and took down an old smoke-blackened tobacco pipe. She passed it to Jack, who turned it over in his hands. “Intriguing,” he said. “Probably Victorian, pretty high-quality ebony. The kind of thing that British officers smoked.”
“Take a look at the initials on the bowl.”
Jack turned the pipe over and wiped away the dust. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “CRW. It’s Charles Richard Wilson.”
“That’s what clinched it for me,” Rebecca said, her voice taut with pent-up excitement. “I can just see him sitting here after he’d plastered up that hole, contemplating his golden find and the explorations he’d just undertaken beneath the Temple Mount. Smoking a pipe would have been a very British thing to do. Later he realizes he’s left it inside on that ledge, but by then he’s sealed up the entrance to the tomb as well and decides not to bother trying to retrieve it. He was probably having to act covertly as well, wary of men like Abdullah’s great-grandfather and the other tomb robbers and shady characters trying to dig under Temple Mount at that time. He’d found something he wanted to conceal, and he was successful in doing that. What I found in there hadn’t been disturbed since he left it.”
“So how did you make this tomb your own?” Jeremy asked.
“I rediscovered it — so to speak — the next day, after I’d asked to explore this corner of the excavation site, an area that hadn’t yet been cleared. The night before, I’d also discovered this.” She leaned over and carefully lifted the hanging sheet, revealing the remains of an ancient plastered wall with fragments of red fresco adhering to it. “This was once a painted tomb, probably late prehistoric. I played up the fact that wall paintings were my specialty. The excavation director had seen me on TV helping Professor Dillen uncover the painting of the lyre player at Troy. I insisted that if I were to take this on, I’d need to do it alone and without disturbance because of the fragility of the fresco, and he agreed. I even insisted that there should be no electrical extension here, as the light might damage the painting. As a result I was able to break through Wilson’s plaster and rubble fill without being seen, to get beyond and then to rebuild the rubble after returning.”
“And you’re going to take us through there again?” Jeremy asked.
She turned to the rubble face, put her hand on a protruding rock, and glanced at them. “Stay back.” They shifted to the rear of the tomb, and Rebecca gingerly pulled at the stone. Nothing happened, and she tried again, this time more forcibly. Suddenly the entire wall shimmered and collapsed in a grinding roar, narrowly missing Rebecca as she leapt back in a cloud of dust. They all put their shirts to their mouths until the dust settled, and then stared at the black hole left in the wall where the rubble had been. Rebecca looked apologetically at them, her face white with dust. “Whoops.”
A voice called down. “Rebecca. Are you all right?”
“Fine, Danny,” Rebecca shouted back. “Just spilled my bucket.” She turned to Jack, whispering. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I thought I’d balanced the rocks so they’d fall inward.” She scrambled over the rubble, coughing in the dust, and peered through the hole in the wall. “Okay. Everything looks stable beyond here. Headlamps to maximum.”
Jack replaced Wilson’s pipe on the shelf and brought up the rear, crawling forward behind Jeremy and bending to avoid a jagged rock sticking down from above. Any of his old discomfort about enclosed spaces was eclipsed by his concern that Rebecca might be taking them on a reckless adventure, but he was committed now and there was little sense in trying to hold her back unless the way ahead was clearly too dangerous. He came out at the beginning of a tunnel where Rebecca and Jeremy were crouched. “What about the entrance?” he said to Rebecca. “We could be followed.”
“The site director is away until tomorrow, and none of the other excavation teams come down my hole without being invited. It would take too long and be too noisy to rebuild that barrier, and we’d only have to take it down again when we go out. But Danny will see to it that we’re undisturbed. And we don’t need to be in here for more than twenty minutes.”
Jeremy aimed his torch high, revealing an immense block of masonry above their heads. “Are we where I think we are?”
Rebecca nodded, her eyes ablaze. “Directly beneath the Western Wall of Temple Mount.” She pointed back the way they had come. “That way is present-day Jerusalem. This way, we’re crawling into three-thousand-year-old history.”
“That way, we’re legal,” Jack said. “This way, we’re transgressing the strictest religious laws on the planet.”
Rebecca peered at him. “I’ve never known laws of any description to put off Jack Howard.”
He paused for a moment, giving Rebecca a long appraising stare, and then nodded. “Okay. Just this time. We’ll talk about boundaries later. You lead.”
Five minutes later they came out of the tunnel into a cavern at least five meters across, their headlamp beams dancing across the walls. Jack had noticed that the tunnel was scored with the marks of picks, whereas the cavern walls were irregular in shape, with cracks and fissures that rose out of sight and showed no obvious signs of being hewn by human hands.
“It’s a natural cave,” Rebecca said, echoing his thoughts. “The rock beneath Jerusalem is riddled with them, where water has eroded away layers of softer rock within the dolomite. I read everything I could about the geology and archaeology of underground Jerusalem in the weeks before I came out here. But this cave is unusually large and well proportioned, the kind of place that could have served as a refuge for several dozen people or as a storeroom. The first thing I noticed was how smooth that outcrop of dolomite is in the center, like the sacred omphalos you showed me inside the Diktaean Cave in Crete. You can see that many hands must have worn it smooth, and that it has enough of a flat surface for objects to be placed on it.”