about you.’
Simon smiled, thinly. ‘I don’t want to have to come back. You know who I am. Let us in.’
Ginger sighed. ‘Okay, come in. But your visit will have to be quick.’
He stood aside.
I went in first. Isabel followed me. Ginger shouted at us not to touch anything.
‘Be very careful,’ he said. ‘Visitors are not covered by any insurance.’ His words echoed through the building.
‘And don’t take any pictures. And I want a word with you.’ I looked back. He’d put a hand up to stop Simon in the doorway.
‘Have a look around,’ called Simon. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’
We were inside. He’d done it. There was a muffled throbbing coming from somewhere below. A stairwell beckoned to us from the other side of the large dusty room we were in. One part of it led down. The other part led up. Describing the room as dusty would be a bit of an understatement.
It was dusty in the way a sandpit is dusty. There were drifts of sand and cobwebs in each corner, and a thick layer of it on the floor with boot marks and channels in it. There was a heap of dust near the stairs too, as if that section had been swept down from the upstairs rooms.
Had the house been abandoned for decades? It certainly looked like it. We headed down the stairs.
The room below was darker, full of cobwebs. It had no stairs going down, just a three-foot-wide hole in the floor. There was light streaming from the hole. The throbbing noise was coming from it. I looked down into it. Isabel was behind me. I couldn’t hear Ginger and Simon talking anymore. I could hear other voices, European voices. Someone was speaking German down there. The replying voice was German too. Who the hell was on this dig?
A shiny steel ladder led down into the hole. I took hold of it and swung myself onto it.
‘This is one time where I don’t think “ladies first” holds.’
I looked down.
I could see shiny equipment, a portable generator and some white airtight plastic boxes on the stone floor beneath. There was another hole of a similar size in the floor below us too.
‘You don’t have to come down if you don’t want to.’
‘Why don’t you try to stop me?’ said Isabel.
There was no polite answer to that.
At the bottom of the ladder the air felt heavy. The generator was running, and a red pipe, about an inch thick, ran out of it and down into the next hole. The inside of my mouth was coated in gritty dust. The walls on this level were ancient foot-square stone blocks. There was no plaster on them, as there was on the walls up above.
The voices had stopped talking. Whoever was down below had probably heard us coming.
I had a look around. There was a knee-high pile of broken, pale ancient wood in one corner. This room was a different shape to the ones above. It faced in a different direction, diagonal to those above, as if the building it had been part of had faced a different way. There was an oily scent coming from the pump too. And the noise from it was a lot louder now we were on the same floor as it.
The hole going down was in the far corner here. I could see the start of a proper stairway descending this time. We were far below street level now. There was a recessed door near the stairs, totally blocked by a pile of rubble. It looked as if it had been there a long time. Where did that door lead? Why had it been blocked up from the inside?
The temperature was high down here. I felt sweat run down my forehead. My shirt was getting damp at the small of my back too. Then a head appeared, poking up out of the unguarded stairwell. And whoever he was, he was angry.
21
Henry Mowlam took the teabag out of his thin white plastic cup and dropped it into the stained bin. Working for the Security Service was not as glamorous as TV shows made it out to be.
He took his mid-afternoon tea back to his desk. He had a report to read. It was on one of his two smaller side screens. The report was a secure PDF, an un-printable and un-saveable document, which his password had allowed him access to. It could only be read on screen and the length of time it remained opened, and by whom, was being recorded as part of the document metadata.
The report was the latest impact assessment for a war between Israel and the US, and Iran and possibly Egypt too, as well as others, depending on which Arab governments got embroiled to prove their Islamic credentials.
Its contents were stark.
The human and economic impact of such a war would be greater than any conflict since the Second World War. Iran was a regional power now and had a standing army of 545,000 as well as a reserve of 650,000 men. It would be the largest and most advanced military force Israel had ever engaged. Israel had an active defence force of 187,000 and a reserve of 565,000. Israel’s population was 7.8 million. Iran’s 78 million.
The casualty predictions were based on a number of possible war scenarios. Even the most optimistic prediction for the loss of life in the region would be unacceptable to the public in any of the participating countries, should the information ever get out.
The second half of the document detailed the levels of long-term human and physical destruction if a limited
nuclear exchange took place. It included details of the Israeli nuclear arsenal and an estimate of the restricted Iranian nuclear capability, currently believed to lie within their military’s reach.
Henry was allowed to see the document only because the new remote pursuit protocol allowed him to track high-value permanent UK citizens outside the country for short durations, rather than hand over monitoring to MI6, the branch of the British Security Service focused on external threats.
The situation relating to Dr Susan Hunter, one of the UK citizens he was tracking, and the tension in Israel, where she had last been seen, necessitated he be aware of the latest intelligence for that country for his level of security clearance.
What he had to do now was evaluate the intelligence and decide how they should proceed regarding the Susan Hunter situation.
The report he had read before the war scenario document was the item he would have to take an operational decision about.
It claimed to have traced the report of a letter from the first caliph of Islam, regarding the fate of Jerusalem, to a statement by a Max Kaiser, the archaeologist who had died a week before, soon after he had given an interview to a journalist working for an Egyptian newspaper.
The article had only appeared the day before in Cairo, written in Arabic, and it had taken the translation service this long to prioritise and translate it.
It hadn’t even mentioned Max Kaiser’s death. Presumably, the reporter had interviewed him before he died and hadn’t bothered to update his story, if he had been made aware of Kaiser’s death at all.
A link between this article and Kaiser’s death was one question he had to consider. But why would any Islamists want to kill him? The letter was in their interests.
And how was all this related to Dr Hunter?
22
The man had slicked-back silvery grey hair and a big pale face. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and looked fifty-
something.
‘Heh, who are you?’ he asked, with a German accent.
‘We’re here to have a look at the dig. I was a colleague of Max Kaiser’s. I’m Sean Ryan, from the Institute of Applied Research in Oxford. This is my colleague, Isabel Sharp. A professor from Hebrew University is on his way down. He was Max’s reference to get on this dig.’
He