“Then promise me.”
“Erin, really, you’ve got to—”
“Promise.”
“Fine,” Rajiv lied. “I promise. Now what do you need?”
There was a long pause. Rajiv feared Erin wouldn’t believe her, but then she said, “I think we’ve found it, Indira.”
“What?”
“The Temple treasures.”
“Really?” asked Rajiv. “How? Where?”
“I’ll explain later,” said Erin. “Right now, I don’t have much time.”
“Why? Where are you headed?” Rajiv pressed.
“Hezekiah’s Tunnel,” said Erin. “We’re in Dmitri’s helicopter.”
“Dmitri Galishnikov?”
“Yeah. We should touch down in about five minutes.”
“How can I help?” asked Rajiv.
“I need satellite coverage over the tunnel.”
“Expecting trouble?”
“Hoping for it, actually,” said Erin. “We’ll have guys watching both ends of the tunnel, but we need to buy as much time as possible.”
“Who’s helping you?”
“Dmitri’s security team will be guarding the tunnel,” said Erin. “So you’ll do this for me?”
“For you? Anything,” Rajiv answered. “Where should I route the feed?”
Rajiv no longer had access to American spy satellites. But Erin didn’t know that. And this phone call was the break she needed. Now she just had to get the Bennetts’ location to Mariano and his men.
63
They landed in the Kidron Valley, about a mile away.
Any closer and Bennett feared they would attract too much attention. But that meant they had quite a hike ahead of them — uphill no less — with much gear and not much time. As they touched down, two of Galishnikov’s security men jumped out of the chopper, armed with MP5 machine guns and communications gear to keep everyone connected. Bennett, Erin, and Natasha were right behind them. Each grabbed an Uzi, ammo, and a backpack stuffed with sledgehammers, picks, flashlights, batteries, and bottles of drinking water, and began racing up the hill, through the Arab village of Silwan, toward the Old City. When they looked back, Dmitri and the chopper were gone.
Ten minutes later, they had reached the Gihon Spring. For thousands of years the spring had been the only source of freshwater for Jerusalemites, who would exit the city gates each morning, fill pails with water, and bring them back to their homes. Now Bennett prayed it would somehow quench their thirst for justice.
The key, Natasha had convinced him, was Hezekiah’s Tunnel. In 701 BCE, the Israelite king Hezekiah — fearing an imminent siege by the Assyrians — ordered his advisors to find a way to channel the water directly into the walled city in such a way that the Assyrians could neither find Jerusalem’s water supply and cut it off nor use it to sustain their own troops. But in order to complete the vital task before Sennacherib and his forces arrived, Hezekiah divided his men into two teams. One began digging from deep underneath the city toward the spring. The other began at the spring and chiseled their way toward the city. The result was a marvel of ancient engineering — a 1,750-foot-long, S-shaped tunnel, snaking its way through the limestone mountains to the Pool of Siloam, which at the time was located inside the walls of Jerusalem.
And according to the Scriptures, it was finished just in time. Israel’s enemies were driven back, and the city and its Temple were saved. How history would play out this time, Bennett had no idea.
He glanced at his watch. On Tuesdays, the tunnel was only open to tourists from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon. It was now 2:47. He held the Uzi tight to his chest and peeked around a stone wall, then across the courtyard. There was no one there. The ticket booth was closed. The door leading to the tunnel was padlocked.
Bennett turned and nodded to the others, and they made their move. While Arik and Roni — Galishnikov’s security men — scanned the grounds for signs of movement, Bennett cut the lock and waved the others through. Everyone entered except for Roni. He would stay and watch their backs.
“Miss Erin?”
“Yes, Roni,” she whispered back.
“I still can’t log on to the satellite feed you were telling me about.”
“Neither can I,” said Arik.
“Don’t worry,” said Erin. “I just talked to my friend. I’m sure it will come online any minute. Keep trying. And call us on the radios if anything comes up.”
“Will do,” said Roni. “Godspeed.”
“Thanks.”
With that, the rest of the group scrambled down the stairs to the tunnel entrance, turned on their flashlights, and began their journey, with Bennett in the lead, and Erin right behind him.
Mariano’s satphone rang again.
He instantly recognized the number. It was Rajiv, and he was furious. “I told you to stay put and not make any more calls.”
“I don’t take orders from you,” Rajiv shot back.
“He’ll meet you,” Mariano countered. “I told you he would. But I don’t know when, and quite frankly, I’m in the middle of something right now.”
“That’s not why I’m calling.”
“Then why?”
“Just shut up and listen,” Rajiv barked. “Where are you?”
“Why does it matter?”
“It just does. Now where are you?”
Mariano didn’t have time to play games. But given all Rajiv had given them so far — and the fact that she had left the CIA and her husband and was holed up in his hotel room in Rome — she probably deserved to be listened to for a few more minutes.
“We just left Tiberias.”
“Headed where?” she asked.
“Jerusalem.”
“What’s your ETA?”
“Thirty, forty minutes tops. Why?”
“What about the team in Jordan?”
“In Tel Aviv, waiting for orders. Why? What’s all this about?”
“Erin Bennett.”
“What about her?”
“She just called.”
The water was knee-deep and freezing cold.
It was January, after all. But at least it kept the team moving. The bigger problem was the fact that though the tunnel rose to a height of some sixteen feet at the other end, in this stretch it was barely five feet high, making it all but impossible to run. They were moving as quickly as they could, but for Bennett it wasn’t nearly fast enough.
“Why didn’t these guys just dig in a straight line?” he asked, hunched over and trying not to smack his head as he followed the serpentine route through the mountain.
“Most archeologists say it was just the imperfections of their engineering knowledge at the time,” said Natasha, having to raise her voice to be heard over all their sloshing. “But I think the more compelling theory is a more recent one.”
“What’s that?”
“It seems that there was actually a series of small, natural, limestone caves riddled through the mountain like Swiss cheese. Hezekiah’s people were basically digging from cave to cave to connect them all into one long pipeline.”
“You’re saying they were playing connect-the-dots down here?” asked Bennett.
“Yes,” said Natasha. “You could say that.”
The team kept advancing toward their objective. They were almost to the halfway point of the tunnel.
Even as he tried not to think about the possibility of losing all his toes to frostbite, it struck Bennett that they were moving through 2,700 years of history. Every chisel mark his flashlight pointed to had been carved out by men who had lived a full seven centuries before Jesus. Somewhere along the way, perhaps during the Middle Ages — though no one seemed to know for sure — the tunnel had fallen into disuse and disrepair. According to Natasha, it had been all but forgotten until an American by the name of Edward Robinson stumbled upon it in 1838.