Swiftly, Bronson removed his shoes and socks, then stripped off his shirt, lightweight trousers and underwear.
Standing there naked in the gloom, he smiled briefly at Angela. Then, pulling a face-mask from his bag, he slipped the band around his head, then picked out a heavy black rubberized torch, bigger than the one he'd taken into Hezekiah's Tunnel.
'Can you pass me the torch once I get in the water? I daren't jump in because I don't know how deep it is or what rocks or other stuff there might be lurking under the surface.'
Angela leant forward suddenly and hugged him. 'Be careful, Chris,' she whispered.
Bronson swung his leg over the wooden balustrade, grabbed the dangling rope with both hands, and swiftly lowered himself down into the mouth of the cistern.
'Jesus, that's cold,' he muttered as he slid feet-first into the water. Holding on to the rope with one hand he adjusted his face-mask, then reached up for the torch.
Bronson first shone the beam all around him, checking the walls of the cistern, but they appeared to be fairly smooth and featureless. He glanced up at Angela, gave her a reassuring smile, and then lifted his legs to dive down into the dark water.
About three or four feet below the surface, Bronson gripped a protruding piece of rock to give him some stability and to stop him rising straight back to the surface.
The mouth of the spring was really too narrow to allow him to swim around, so he knew he'd have to keep on diving down and grabbing hold of something to keep him submerged while he searched the walls.
The good news was that the waterproof torch was working well, its beam illuminating the grey-brown rock that formed the walls of the spring. The bad news was that those walls appeared to be fairly smooth, with no convenient holes – natural or man-made – that could have been used to secrete anything.
He started searching carefully, holding the torch in his left hand as he circled the wall, moving from one handhold to another, then released his grip on the rock as he headed for the surface to take a breath.
'Anything?' Angela asked as he broke the surface.
Bronson shook his head, took another deep breath and dived down again. This time he went a little deeper, down to maybe six feet, but the result was the same. Solid greybrown rocks surrounded him.
Back at the surface, he lifted the mask from his face. 'I've been down about six feet,' he said, looking up at Angela, 'and there's nothing there. The people who hid the relic can't have dived down much deeper than that, could they?'
'I've no idea, but you're assuming that the water level in the spring was the same then as it is now, and it probably wasn't. If the level was, say, ten feet lower when they hid the relic, and they dived to six feet, it'll be sixteen feet below the surface now.'
'I never thought of that,' Bronson admitted. He nodded, replaced his mask and vanished again.
For the next twenty minutes he repeated the process, diving down, grabbing hold of something to keep him in place, and searching in vain for any kind of a hole or crevice in the rock walls. And every time he surfaced, he felt colder and more tired.
'I can't do this for much longer,' he said at last, his teeth chattering. 'Another three or four dives and that's it.'
'You've done your best, Chris. I never thought you'd have to go that deep to find it.'
'Nor did I,' Bronson said, replacing his mask. If it's here at all, he thought, as he plunged down again into the depths.
This time he powered down five or six feet below the depth he'd reached previously, grabbed another section of rock and looked around him. Far above he could see the dim circle of light that was the surface of the water in the spring, illuminated by the light from Angela's torch. And around him, the spring seemed to be opening up somewhat, the opposite wall barely visible in the light from his torch. It looked as if the spring was shaped like a bell, with a narrow throat at the top and widening considerably at his depth, which he guessed at about twenty or twenty-five feet.
Conscious that he could only stay submerged for perhaps another twenty seconds, Bronson turned his attention to the wall beside him. Unsurprisingly, it looked very much the same as all the other sections of wall he'd looked at so far. He changed position, pulling himself sideways to look at the next few feet, and then the next.
Nothing.
His lungs starting to protest, Bronson released his grip on the rock and allowed himself to start drifting upwards.
And as he did so, the beam of his torch briefly illuminated something different, something he hadn't seen before. An object that seemed regular in shape, not rounded like the rocky protrusions he'd been using as handholds, but projecting horizontally from the stone wall of the spring.
And then he was past it, heading upwards towards the light and the life-giving air.
'The padlock's been cut off,' Hoxton muttered, shining his torch at the broken lock lying on the ground at his feet. 'They've got here before us.'
They'd driven up to Har Megiddo from Tel Aviv, a noisy journey with Dexter lying across the back seat and moaning about the pain from his broken nose. Baverstock had misread a couple of the road signs outside Haifa, which had delayed their arrival slightly, but they, like Bronson and Angela, had waited until the site closed before they entered it over the boundary fence. They were now standing beside the entrance gate to the water tunnel.
'Good,' Dexter said. 'I owe Bronson for what he did to my nose.'
'If it is Bronson,' Hoxton said, 'we know how dangerous he can be. So we take it carefully and surprise him. No torches, no talking, no noise. It's three against two, and we're all armed, so it should be no contest. We'll make it look like a couple of tragic accidents, or maybe just weigh the bodies down and dump them in the cistern. Understood?'
Dexter and Baverstock nodded.
'We've all seen the pictures of the tunnel,' Baverstock told them. 'There's a wooden walkway with handrails either side, so once we're on that we can feel our way along. Bronson will probably be using a torch or lantern and we'll see the light from that long before we reach them.'
Without another word, the three men moved slowly forward into the underground tunnel. When they stepped on to the wooden walkway, Baverstock stopped them for a few moments to let their eyes adjust to the almost total blackness.
'See that glow?' he whispered, pointing straight ahead. 'They're already at the cistern. No more talking, just walk slowly and carefully, and stop well before the steps at the end.'
Making barely a sound, the three men began moving cautiously towards the dim light at the end of the water tunnel.
* * *
Bronson surfaced again and grasped the dangling rope.
'Anything?' Angela asked, more in hope than expectation.
'I think I saw something. I'm going to have one last go.'
Bronson inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating to purge the carbon dioxide from his lungs, before gulping a huge lungful of air and diving underwater again.
He forced himself down into the wider part of the spring, to the area that he'd been searching on his previous dive, trying to spot the object he'd seen before. But once again the stone walls all looked the same, with no obvious differences from one part of the cistern to another. He could feel the pressure to breathe increasing as he swam around, the beam of his torch roaming over the rocky walls.
Maybe he'd been mistaken. Maybe his eyes had deceived him, or perhaps he'd simply misinterpreted what he'd seen. He was about to give up when the torchlight suddenly illuminated something a few feet above his head, something with squared edges that seemed to be sticking out of the wall. He'd dived too deep, and had been searching too far down.