‘You know?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘So tell me,’ Angela demanded.
‘I’ll do better than that,’ Bronson replied. ‘I’ll show you.’
He led her over to the edge of the path and to the remains of the internal boundary wall, then pointed down into the valley below, to the south of the fortification.
‘Do you see that, down there?’ he asked.
‘I see a lot of stuff. What am I supposed to be looking at?’
‘Pretty much at the bottom of the valley. What looks like a very small building or perhaps just a biggish box shape. Made of the same sort of stone as the castle. It’s not an old structure, though what’s underneath it has been there for millennia.’
Angela kind of sighted down his outstretched arm, then nodded.
‘Yes, now I see it,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘What every castle needs if it’s going to have the slightest hope of surviving a siege.’
For a moment, Angela looked blank, then she smiled and nodded.
‘Got it. A cistern, or a spring. Some kind of a source of water, anyway.’
‘Precisely,’ Bronson said. ‘I didn’t hear exactly what the guide said it was, but that was where they obtained their water when the place was under siege. And,’ he added, turning back and pointing towards an opening in the ground encased by two walls, ‘that’s the start of the staircase that they had to walk down in order to reach the water. Think it through. That staircase would have been one of the first things the Crusaders constructed when they built this castle, because there would have been no point in erecting any kind of a fortress here without having a water source and a protected access to reach it. And irrespective of what construction and destruction went on here over the centuries, the steps leading down to the well or the cistern would never have altered. So that’s where the clue is, on or near the sixty-second step below the entrance — that has to be what the reference to sixty-two down means — and all I have to do now is get down there and find it.’
‘Don’t you mean we have to go down there and find it?’
‘I think it’s best that I go alone,’ Bronson replied. ‘That staircase is almost certainly off-limits to visitors, and if both of us vanish somebody might well notice, which would be bad news. In fact, I think the best thing would be if you go back to the visitor centre right now and get in the car ready to leave. That way, if I am spotted and have to make a run for it, you’ll be ready and waiting to pick me up.’
Angela glanced at the deep shadow that filled the entrance to the long staircase and shook her head, apprehension washing over her.
‘You’ve got a torch and a camera?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ Bronson handed her the keys to the hire car and then looked around them.
The party being escorted around the perimeter of the castle walls was virtually out of sight in front of them and, apart from two men who appeared to be examining the stones on the wall about forty yards behind them, there was nobody anywhere near them.
‘This is as good a time as any,’ Bronson said. ‘Go now. I’ll be as quick as I can.’
Angela stretched up, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then turned and walked away, heading back towards the castle gate and the road that led down to the visitor centre.
After a few seconds, she looked behind her, but Bronson was already out of sight.
55
Farooq and Amir had entered the castle less than five minutes after their quarry, and had had no difficulty in locating Bronson and the woman. With Khaled’s specific instructions fresh in their minds, they had hung well back, making sure that neither of the people they were following realized that they were under surveillance. That wasn’t difficult, because there were plenty of visitors wandering around the old stones, looking at the view, taking photographs and examining the tumbledown remains of the fortress.
They’d seen Bronson stop and talk to the woman, and lead her over to the edge of the path to show her something that lay outside the fortress, but a few moments later, something unexpected happened.
The woman had turned and started walking straight towards them. Immediately, both men had turned away, pretending to be engrossed in an examination of a surviving part of the fortress wall, until she walked past them, apparently heading for the castle gate. As she moved away, both men turned to stare at her retreating figure, and when they looked back to where Bronson had been standing, they were stunned by the realization that he had vanished.
For a few seconds, neither man moved, then Farooq roused himself.
‘Find him,’ he snapped at Amir as he pulled his mobile from his pocket. ‘He can’t have gone far. I’ll tell Khaled what’s happened.’
Predictably, Khaled was unhappy at the news.
‘Find him as quickly as you can,’ he ordered. ‘I’m quite certain it’s him we need to pursue, not her. He probably sent the woman away while he investigates. I’ll watch for her coming back down from the castle. You two find him, and more importantly find whatever it is he’s looking at.’
Farooq ended the call just as Amir came trotting up to him.
‘He’s not with the group they were following before,’ Amir said. ‘And I went far enough beyond those people to make sure he hadn’t overtaken them, and he’s nowhere in sight.’
‘He didn’t pass me heading back to the gate, so he must still be here somewhere,’ Farooq said. ‘When we last saw him, he was over by that wall, so that’s where we’ll start looking.’
The two men walked over to the ancient L-shaped wall, and as soon as they reached it they were able to guess precisely where Bronson must have gone.
‘There’s a staircase going down,’ Farooq said, gesturing at the dark opening.
Then he held up his hand for silence, and the two men just listened. Barely audible above the ever-present sighing of the wind, they both heard the sounds of faint movement from somewhere below their feet.
Farooq made an instant decision.
‘You don’t speak English,’ he said to Amir, ‘so I’ll have to follow him. I’ll pretend to be one of the guides, and I’ll try to persuade him to come back up here, once I’ve seen what it is he’s looking for. Call Khaled right now and tell him what’s happened, and what I’m going to do. And,’ he added after a moment’s thought, ‘if I do manage to discover the clue that Bronson’s hoping to find, as soon as he comes back up the staircase, he can have an accident. I think he’s going to stumble and fall and pitch himself over the wall. It’s a long drop to the rocks underneath.’
Amir made the call while Farooq started to investigate the first few steps of the underground staircase. A few seconds later, he slid his mobile back into his pocket and nodded to Farooq.
‘Khaled says you can kill him, but only if you’re completely certain that you have identified the clue. And you can kill him down there, underground. It doesn’t have to look like an accident. Just get it done.’
‘Right,’ Farooq said, and promptly disappeared from view down the staircase, his pistol in his right hand.
56
One of the obvious problems Bronson had was not knowing precisely which step he should use to begin counting. There were about half a dozen steps leading from the level of the path in the castle itself to the entrance to the staircase proper, but he figured that if he started looking for some kind of carving or inscription from about the fiftieth to the seventieth step that ought to cover all possible permutations.
So he included those first six steps in the total number in his mental count as he strode as quickly as he could down the broken and uneven stone stairs that angled away from the castle and towards the location of the cistern or well. The light from his torch illuminated his path well enough. Constructing the tunnel had clearly been a major undertaking, hacking a route through solid rock, and the marks of the picks were still visible on the walls and roof of the narrow passageway. In several places, he had to duck when the roof level was even lower than elsewhere, a reminder that adult males of the twenty-first century were appreciably taller than their mediaeval counterparts.