‘Six! Hundred threescore! And six! The number of the Beast!’ he sang tunelessly. ‘Yeah, definitely not as catchy.’
‘What was that noise?’ demanded Jared.
‘Tchah! Kids today don’t appreciate the classics. So are you supposed to put three stones with sixes on them on to the scale?’
‘Seems like it,’ Nina told him . . . though with a hint of doubt.
‘I can do that right now,’ Jared called out. ‘It’s using the Hebrew system, so the symbols we need are tav resh, six hundred . . .’ He plucked a pebble from the group, then located a second. ‘Samekh for sixty, and then . . . here – vav, six. Six hundred plus sixty plus six. So I put these on the scale and the door should open, yes?’ He picked them up, about to deposit them on the bronze slab— ‘No, no!’ Nina suddenly yelled. ‘Don’t do anything!’
‘What’s wrong?’ Eddie asked, alarmed – though not nearly as much as Jared, who froze with one hand above the scale.
‘Give me a second. I need to think.’ She closed her eyes for a moment. ‘The number might not be six-six-six. That’s the generally accepted version today, but there are several ancient copies of Revelation where it’s written as six-one-six. The Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, Papyrus 115 from the Oxyrhynchus excavation in Egypt . . . they pre-date the King James Bible by over a thousand years.’
‘Both versions can’t be right,’ said Eddie.
‘No, they can’t. One of them is a transcription error . . . but there’s no way to know which.’
Jared put the stones back in the niche. ‘So should I change the second number to yud, ten?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Nina.
‘It’s a fifty-fifty chance,’ Eddie pointed out.
‘I don’t want to risk Jared’s life on a coin-toss.’
‘What should I do?’ asked Jared. ‘Shall I come back over?’
‘Hold on.’ Nina stared at the alcove, then redirected her flashlight. ‘Jared, can you move sideways so I can see the door?’
The Israeli reluctantly leaned aside, holding the rope for support. ‘What is it?’ asked Eddie. ‘You found something?’
‘Maybe.’ The light shone upon the symbol of the menorah. ‘That’s the sign of the twenty-four Elders – the people who contained the meteorite fragments in the angels, then dispersed them for safe keeping. Cross showed me a photo he took inside the ruins – the same symbol was there too.’ She frowned, trying to tease out a memory. ‘There was some writing with it, something about numbers . . . Jared, what exactly does it say there about the number of God?’
Jared checked the text upon the door. ‘As near as I can tell, it reads, “The number that is Yahweh is seven.”’
‘That’s what it said in the temple Cross found,’ Nina said thoughtfully. ‘Seven is the number of God . . . and man is always less than God.’
‘So the number of a man would be six?’ suggested Eddie.
The truth came to her as she finally remembered the rest of the translation the cult leader had shown her at the Mission. ‘Yes – but the Elders said more than that. “Three times shall it be said” was how they put it. And in the catacomb in Rome, they said it again: “It is three times spoken, the dragon’s number is that of man.” It’s not just the number six on its own, and it’s not six hundred sixty-six – it’s six, repeated three times for emphasis. Just like in your song,’ she added with a smile. ‘Six! Six! Six! That’s the number of man – and that’s the answer to the test.’
She called out across the cenote. ‘Jared! The stone that represents the number six – put it on the scale three times.’
‘You mean, put it on, take it off, then put it back again twice more?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘That’s it exactly. But for God’s sake, keep hold of the rope in case I’m wrong!’
Jared took a firm hold of the line as he used his other hand to pick up one particular stone. With a nervous look back at Nina, he placed it on the scale.
The metal shelf dropped slightly under its weight. Everyone held their breath . . .
The bridge remained intact. ‘Well, that’s a start,’ said Eddie, exhaling.
‘It made a noise,’ the Israeli reported. ‘There was a clank from behind it, like two pieces of metal hitting each other.’
‘Do it again,’ Nina said.
Jared picked up the stone. The scale rose back to its original position. He repeated the process. Another faint sound came from whatever mechanism was hidden behind the wall. A third time; a much louder bang resounded through the shaft. Jared grabbed the rope with both hands – but the bridge stayed in place.
‘Look!’ cried Nina. ‘It’s opening!’ The door swung slowly inwards. It stopped after moving only a foot, but that was enough for Jared to step on to a solid floor. He pushed it wider. ‘What can you see?’
‘Another tunnel,’ he replied.
‘Wait for me. I’m coming over.’
‘We’re coming over,’ Eddie corrected. ‘And you’re not taking any risks, either. Hold on.’ He hooked Nina’s climbing harness to the rope. ‘Right, now you can go. But take it easy.’
‘Okay, Dad,’ she huffed.
‘Hey, I actually am going to be a dad, so I’m allowed to be overprotective.’
‘Point taken.’ They smiled at each other, then Nina set off, sidestepping across the bridge with both hands on the rope. A moment of worry as she reached the broken plank, but she picked her way over without incident. Once clear, she hurried to the doorway, standing on the step before detaching the harness.
‘You okay?’ Jared asked as he helped her through.
‘Fine, thanks.’ She panned her light around the new passage. It had the same rounded cross-section as on the other side of the shaft, but its decorations were far more elaborate, gold leaf and precious stones set around the paintings of religious scenes. The door was not merely a barrier; it also marked the boundary of an inner sanctum, a place of great importance to the ancient Israelites.
Eddie made his way across behind them. ‘All right, so what have we got?’
‘This must be the entrance to their temple,’ Nina said, pointing the flashlight along the tunnel. The ornate walls curved away out of sight. There was no sign here of the mushrooms growing around the cenote; the door had apparently acted as a seal, keeping the air inside dry. ‘Come on.’
‘Will there be any more traps?’ asked Jared, eyeing the paintings with suspicion as they started down the tunnel.
‘I don’t think so. This place was protected by a combination of obscurity and inaccessibility, and probably had people defending it too. Revelation said it had been “prepared”, so somebody had to be here to do that. That door was the final barrier, to make sure that only people who knew the true meaning of the Elders’ texts would be able to get in.’
‘All the same,’ said Eddie to Jared, ‘keep an eye out, will you? Just in case anything pops out of the walls.’ The younger man hurriedly redirected his flashlight beam to the sides of the passage.
No booby-traps interrupted their progress, however. Before long, something came into view ahead. ‘Ay up,’ said Eddie, surprised. ‘There’s a light in there.’ The tunnel opened out into a larger chamber, where they could clearly see the gleam of gold even without their torches.
‘It’s not daylight,’ Nina noted. There was an almost rainbow-like iridescence to the illumination. She entered the room – and stopped in astonishment. ‘Oh . . .’
Eddie moved up beside her, equally amazed. ‘Christ, that’s impressive. What is this place?’
She surveyed the wonders before her, almost unable to believe what she was seeing. ‘Based on the description in the Book of Revelation . . . I think we’ve just found God’s temple.’
The chamber was an expansive oval, an existing cave made much bigger by years, even decades of patient excavation. The walls were largely covered by drape-like hanging tapestries bearing Hebrew symbols. The dominant feature was a massive opal over two feet across embedded in
the rock of the high ceiling. There was evidently a fissure in the mountain above that reached to the surface, letting in sunlight, which was then refracted by the great gemstone into a brilliant prismatic display.
The brightest spot was directly beneath the opal, a dazzling beam shining downwards like a laser. It landed upon a large golden throne, which stood on a patch of highly polished quartz set into the floor. More thrones, similar in design but somewhat smaller, encircled it. Nina started counting them, but already knew how many there would be. ‘Twenty-four,’ she said, confirming her belief. ‘These are the thrones of the twenty-four Elders.’
Eddie glanced at the central seat. ‘So whose is number twenty-five?’
‘God’s. He sits in the middle of everything, with his followers around him.’ Nina moved hesitantly into the ring. She was not religious by nature, but couldn’t help feeling a reverential awe. ‘Everything matches John’s description. The circle of thrones around God’s seat, the rainbow surrounding it . . .’ She indicated where the opal was casting a spectrum of light on the floor, catching the swathe of quartz. ‘Even this; John described it as a “sea of glass”, which considering that he was having a vision based on something he’d only read is pretty accurate. And then there’s the altar, the seven lamps . . .’ A large menorah stood before the throne, near a golden dais with a horn-like protrusion at each corner.
Jared nervously followed Nina and Eddie into the circle, having to force himself not to avert his eyes from the throne beneath the opal. ‘It feels like this is something I shouldn’t be allowed to see.’
Nina noticed something at the chamber’s far end. ‘If you’re worried about being struck down by God, then you really shouldn’t get any closer to that.’
Beyond the golden circle was something extremely incongruous in the splendour of their surroundings: a simple tent made from animal skins. It was rectangular, around fifteen feet wide and three times as long. Time had dried and decayed the hides in the stillness of the chamber, but they had clearly been exposed to the harsh elements of the desert beforehand. The entrance was draped in woven curtains, the faded remnants of once-vibrant colours still showing after uncounted centuries.
‘Okay, that doesn’t really go with the other furniture,’ Eddie said.
‘You don’t know what it is?’ she replied. ‘Oh, right; you always skipped Sunday school when you were a kid, didn’t you?’
‘I had better places to be. Like literally anywhere.’
‘I know what it is,’ gasped Jared. ‘It’s . . . it’s the Tabernacle, the communion tent!’
Eddie couldn’t hold back a smile. ‘So the Ark of the Covenant is actually here? In your face, Indiana Jones!’
Nina started towards the tent. ‘Wait, wait,’ said Jared, suddenly worried. ‘Should we go in there?’
She gave him an incredulous look. ‘Are you going to tell me that because we’re not Levites, we’ll be killed if we get too close?’
‘No, but . . . it’s a holy place. The most holy place.’
‘And this is why I didn’t go to Sunday school,’ said Eddie, joining his wife. ‘So this kind of thing doesn’t scare me off. If the angel’s here at all, it must be in there or we would have seen it by now. We’ve got to find it.’
The younger man nodded reluctantly. ‘Okay. But be careful. I don’t want to be the one who destroys the Tabernacle!’
‘You think I do?’ Nina hooted.
They approached the entrance. Nina shone her flashlight over the curtains, then removed her backpack before hesitantly moving them aside and slipping through. The two men followed.
The animal-skin walls were thick enough to block the glow from the crystal. Jared added his light to Nina’s. The space they had entered occupied two thirds of the tent’s total length, but was only sparsely furnished. A wooden table stood to one side, whatever offerings had been placed upon it long since turned to dust. Near it was a seven-branched menorah on a tall stand, dark smears of old oil upon the metal lamps. Beyond them, before a white curtain, was a golden altar, glinting in the torch beams.
‘Is that the Ark?’ Eddie asked.
Nina shook her head. ‘That must be the Altar of Incense. If the Ark’s in here, it’ll be beyond the veil.’ She indicated the curtain.
‘That’s where that saying comes from, is it? Huh. Learn something every day.’
‘Stick with me, kiddo,’ she told him with a smile, leading the way through the room. ‘On the other side of the veil is—’
‘The Holy of Holies,’ said Jared. ‘I learned all this at school,’ he added to Eddie, who grinned.
‘That’s right,’ said Nina. She examined the altar, then turned her attention to the curtain. ‘Okay. If God is going to strike us dead, he’ll do it about . . . now.’
She parted the veil. Swathes of the material disintegrated like gossamer as her hand brushed it. She cringed in dismay at the damage, but pressed on through.
The last room was square. The only thing in it was a large box, coated in gold.
All three recognised it instantly.
They had found the Ark of the Covenant.
27
‘God,’ whispered Nina, adding: ‘Literally.’
Jared stared open-mouthed. ‘It . . . it’s the Ark,’ he managed to say. ‘It really is the Ark of the Covenant!’
Eddie whistled a few bars of ‘The Raiders March’. ‘We need our own cool theme tune,’ he said. ‘This is it? The real thing?’ Nina nodded. ‘Bloody hell! This is a massive find – and you weren’t even looking for it!’
‘No, but here it is.’ Awed, Nina circled the relic. It did not quite match the popular image from classical paintings and a certain Steven Spielberg movie, the smaller details differing, but it perfectly fitted the description given in the Biblical Book of Exodus. The main body of the gold-covered chest was a little under four feet long, finely detailed patterns similar to those in the Jewish catacombs and the tunnel outside inscribed into the plating. Rings of the precious metal supported two long poles on each side, covered in gold leaf.
Atop the Ark was the mercy seat. Despite what the name suggested, it was not a place of rest, rather an elaborate lid. A pair of cherubim stood upon it. Two of each of their four wings extended backwards, meeting above the centre of the chest. She peered at one of the cherubim, feeling a thrill of recognition as she saw the face of the angel – rather, the faces, plural. Both creatures had four positioned around their heads, each looking in a different direction: a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man. She had seen the same arrangement on the mechanical guardians of the Garden of Eden. The image had been remembered and passed down over many millennia as a symbol of fearsome, godly power.
She stepped back, almost overcome by excitement at the magnificence of the find – before remembering that it was not why she was there. She reluctantly turned away to cast her light around the rest of the room. ‘There’s nothing else in here?’
‘It doesn’t look like it,’ Jared confirmed.
‘Then the angel must be in the Ark.’ She produced a camera and took several photos for the record, then returned to the chest, suppressing her professional disquiet at what she was about to do. ‘Can you lift the lid?’
Now it was Eddie’s turn to hesitate. ‘You sure? You know what’s supposed to happen if you open this thing. Lightning, firestorms, melting Nazis . . .’
‘And I thought you weren’t superstitious.’
‘No, but I’m movie-stitious.’
‘We don’t have a choice – the clues to the angel’s location in Revelation pointed here. Cross is already in Israel, and sooner or later he’ll realise he needs to widen his search, so we’ve got to get it out of here before that happens. We can’t leave it and hope that he gets melted when he opens it.’
‘Maybe I should close my eyes,’ Eddie grumbled, but he moved to one end of the chest. Jared gave Nina an uncertain look, but went to the other. The Englishman warily tapped one of the poles before risking touching the lid it
self. ‘Not struck dead on the spot. That’s a start.’
‘Okay,’ said Nina, ‘now very carefully, lift it up.’
The two men strained to raise the mercy seat. ‘It’s heavy,’ grunted Jared. ‘The statues must be solid gold.’ They pulled harder.
With a scrape of metal, the Ark of the Covenant began to open.
The Bell 430 continued its monotonous search of the empty desert. Dalton made a show of checking his watch for the third time in as many minutes. ‘How much fuel has this damn thing got left?’ he complained.
‘We’ll go back to Ovda after we check the next valley,’ Cross replied. ‘Then you can get out. I’m sure that’ll be a relief.’ For everyone, he didn’t need to add.
‘Just remember that you wouldn’t even be here without my help,’ Dalton snapped. ‘I was the one who told you Nina Wilde was the best person to find the angels, I got you into Israel without—’
‘There’s someone down there!’ Simeon barked. The ex-politician was instantly forgotten as all eyes went to the windows. ‘I can see a truck.’ He raised his binoculars as Paxton slowed the helicopter. ‘No sign of anybody with it.’
Cross brought up his own field glasses. Sunlight flashed off the windows of a 4x4 parked near the foot of a cliff. He looked up the sheer rock face, spotting the faint line of a rope. It led to a narrow yet tall cleft in the massif, a very thin pass snaking away to . . .
‘A sinkhole,’ he said, seeing what lay at its end. ‘There’s a sinkhole on that mountain.’
Dalton craned his neck to peer at the landscape below. ‘It can’t be the one we’re looking for. I thought we were checking the valleys, not the hills.’
‘We were,’ said Cross with growing realisation. ‘And we were wrong!’ He snapped the binoculars back to the cliff. Faint sparkles in the rock marked where the intense sunlight glanced off copper deposits. ‘It reflects the sun. “Clothed with the sun” – that’s what John meant! And you’d need the wings of eagles to get up there . . .’