Solomon's Jar (7 page)

There was a riot going on at the Temple Mount.

Jerusalem was above all else a city of contradictions. Contrasts, between cultures, between faiths, between old and new, what had been celebrated or lamented into the ground centuries before were on studied display like trinkets in a tourist-trap window. The quaint biblical streets of the Old City, narrow and winding, were appropriately inconvenient. Mostly Annja found the place hot, dusty and tense. And that was before the riot.

Walking past a pair of Israeli soldiers standing in front of a coffee shop, their bulky battledress casting grotesque late-afternoon shadows down one of the broader streets, Annja found herself wondering why the
Holy City didn't make more of an impression on her. Although biblical archaeology wasn't her field, the fabled jar of King Solomon would have held at least academic interest for her, if not more.

Perhaps it was the depressing present. From the evident hostility among rival Christian creeds and sects, to the division between Arab and Israeli, to the less known but virulent differences among the Israeli people themselves, the city that should have been a haven of spiritual peace was a hotbed of worldly strife.

Annja had little plan at the moment. She was fairly sure the jar wasn't where legend had it, the demons King Solomon had subsequently bound within it had built him a mighty temple. Yet Roux had suggested she seek the source for knowledge.

The disturbance—maybe she had been premature in characterizing it as a
riot,
but she could feel something coming on, like a thunderhead rising from just beyond the horizon—was packed into the plaza where the Moroccan quarter had once stood, hard up against the retaining wall built by King Herod to aggrandize the temple, and also to keep the sides of Mount Moriah from slumping into what was even then a substantial urban concentration. Its gray stone face, knobbled like a collection of knees, age pitted and sprouting random tufts of brush like hair on moles, was turned all orange and gold by the setting sun. The crowd's sullen mutter
washed against it and broke back like storm surf. Cutting through the white noise came the stridency of an electronically amplified voice whose words Annja could not make out.

She had passed through the forty-foot stone walls Süleyman the Magnificent had surrounded the Old City with in the sixteenth century at the New Gate and made her way through the Christian quarter. She wore what she considered standard adventure tourist drag: white cotton blouse with long sleeves rolled up, khaki cargo pants with many invaluable pockets, sunglasses and Red Wing low-top hiking shoes, unfashionable but likewise indestructible. The clothes were of good quality and were far from being glamorous or provocative. Annja knew conservative religious elements, of all three major faiths with spiritual interests vested in the country, had a record of hassling or even attacking female tourists whose dress they considered scandalous. Her ensemble was designed to make her unremarkable, as inconspicuous as her height and willowy build and looks allowed. She had a bulky pack that could serve as a daypack or masquerade as a big utilitarian purse slung over one shoulder. A digital camera rode around her neck on a strap.

As she approached the Western Wall, she noticed that the tourists and idlers and even businesspeople suddenly began to thin from the streets like townsfolk in
advance of a gunfight in a Western movie. She started seeing more Galil-toting soldiers, then riot police standing between the mob and the Wailing Wall itself. The riot squad wore dark blue helmets and bulky synthetic body armor that looked startlingly like the armor of the Roman legionnaires.

Then she spotted that most infallible sign of trouble brewing, more certain than circling vultures. Vans from the international news services were parked around the edge of the big plaza, with satellite antennae sprouting from their roofs.

She didn't read Hebrew, so many of the signs being waved by the protesters, most of whom wore yarmulkes, meant nothing to her. But there were plenty of signs written in English to clarify the situation.

This particular disturbance, she gathered, was being pitched by West Bank settlers resisting government attempts to remove them from their claims outside the country's acknowledged boundaries. Some of the anti-government sentiments were astonishingly vitriolic, making her wonder what the signs she could not read might say. As she drew near she heard the cries of the protesters as they hurled insults at the riot cops and the soldiers who formed a loose cordon along the outside of the crowd.

The demonstrators were also throwing physical items that looked like bits of stone pried from the ancient
walls and streets of Jerusalem itself. That tightened her brow and mouth and narrowed her eyes. She had to remind herself that more important issues lay at stake here than the preservation of random antiquities. But it ran altogether contrary to her archaeologist's instincts to think that anything could be more important.

Annja moved around outside the cordon of glumly businesslike soldiers. She still wasn't sure what she was doing here, what it was she expected to see. She felt an increasing sense of urgency, though. She was meant to be here; that much she knew.

The electronically amplified individual voice emanated from a podium erected hard by the wall itself. A tall man in a business suit with a yarmulke perched on an expensive-looking dark blond coiffure and some kind of cincture around his neck in lieu of a tie, urged the protesters to peace, love and moderation, in what Annja belatedly realized was English. Distortion and the setting's strangeness had conspired to prevent her from recognizing the calming words.

She frowned. She wasn't an avid follower of popular culture—at least, not more modern than five hundred years old or so. Still, she had the itching impression of having seen that rather handsome face, perhaps on the cover of a celebrity magazine on a table in a dentist's waiting room. She felt as if she
ought
to know who he was.

To her amazement the police and soldiers stoically
endured the stones pelting off their helmets and riot shields as if they were raindrops. Occasionally a demonstrator would turn and try to loft a rock up over the top of the wall toward the black dome of al-Aqsa Mosque, peeking over the wall's top. None of them had the range.

Some protesters turned their ire on a passing businessman—an Arab she guessed from his appearance and hunched, harried posture, though he wore a shabby tan Western-style suit. For a moment he just pulled his head farther down between his shoulders and tried to weather the abuse. Then something stung; he straightened, turned, spit something.

Instantly a pair of soldiers pounced on him and slammed him to the irregular gray flagstones with the metal butts of their rifles.

The mob surged outward, flowing around the other soldiers like water between tree boles. Whether they were themselves trying to attack other, largely Arab, passersby or simply started like a flock of pigeons by a sudden eruption of the violence that charged the air like electricity before lightning, Annja couldn't tell. The soldiers grabbed futilely at the protesters, or pushed them with their assault rifles. The mob largely ignored them, thrusting them rudely aside and flowing past, until a trooper managed to catch a handful of somebody's shirt.

Motivated, Annja guessed, by little more than the policeman's predator pounce reflex, the riot phalanx
charged. They hit the mob from behind like a mobile wall. She noticed they used Roman techniques, too: jabbing with their short-sword-sized batons, then clubbing in lieu of hacking with the
gladii.

Tentacles of the mob blew forth like debris from an explosion. One group blasted straight at her. It consisted mostly of unshaved young men who, in her flash impression, seemed more like middle-class kids dressing down than the proletarian types their work shirts and dungarees suggested. They spotted her and veered toward her, screeching in a combination of rage and triumph. Whether they took her for a possibly unsympathetic journalist or just felt like venting their feelings in some good old-fashioned foreigner bashing she couldn't tell. It didn't much matter. Annja turned and darted into the maze of narrow streets and alleys that veined the Old City.

Their cries pursued her. With the pedestrian traffic and obstructions littering her path she couldn't move very quickly. Indeed, because her pursuers had fewer compunctions about shoving people out of the way or simply running over them, they quickly gained on her.

When an age-bent man with a black hat, frock coat and snowy beard and earlocks opened a half-sprung screen door directly in her path, Annja's pursuers caught up. As she reared and stopped, without space even to dodge for fear of bowling the old man over, a hand roughly seized her right shoulder from behind.

It was almost a relief to be able to act rather than flee. As the man who held her pulled she did not resist, but rather clapped her left hand over his and turned the way he urged her. At the same time she peeled the hand off and twisted it painfully down against itself, then turned it to lock the man's elbow. Before he knew it her attacker was doubled over and immobilized.

Three more men closed in on her from behind. The lead attacker, who was skinny with a bluish white complexion emphasized by his white shirt and the blue-black hair spilling out from beneath his yarmulke, had arms spread as if to catch her in a bear hug. Sensing her first foe was controlled for the moment, Annja fired a high front snap kick straight at the point of the young man's chin. He was wide open and the kick came as quickly as a boxer's jab. His teeth clacked together, his eyes rolled up and he toppled, stunned, against a crumbling wall.

The first assailant was struggling and complaining in energetic Hebrew. Still keeping his wrist twisted and her forearm pressed against his arm Annja brought a knee up into his midsection. The breath burst from him. He doubled over even tighter.

The two still standing had fanned out left and right. They also wore white shirts, black pants and pasty complexions; one sported thick glasses. I'm beating up a bunch of nerds, she thought.

“We can call this off anytime,” she told them.

They rolled their eyes wildly at each other. The one she'd kicked sat rubbing his jaw and weeping.

The two still on their feet issued inarticulate screams and charged. The one to Annja's left hugged the wall. She spun the man she was still holding and launched him into the man with a thrusting side kick. They went down in a tangle of limbs.

The last assailant closed, flailing punches. Annja ducked down behind raised forearms, fending off the flurry of swipes with motions of her elbows. The young man breathed like a bellows; his spittle sprayed Annja's face.

“Enough,” she said. She quit blocking with her right, allowing a clumsy blow to glance off her lowered forehead. The hand she'd freed seized the front of the youth's shirt and yanked him toward her. She met him with a head butt to the bridge of the nose.

She heard cartilage crunch. She pushed the man away. He stumbled back several paces, sat down and stared at her. Blood cascaded from his broken nose and streamed into his lower jaw, which hung slack with astonishment. He gagged as he became aware of the taste of his own blood. Then he covered his face with both hands and began to wail.

Annja shook her head. She wasn't sure what had motivated the young men to attack her.

A furious shout brought her head up and around. Men crowded into sight around a dogleg in the claustrophobic lane behind her. Those she could see well enough in the thickening gray shadows and velvet gloom wore yarmulkes and protesters' armbands.

That ended their similarities to the quartet of fervent young students who lay moaning and disheveled in the gutter at Annja's feet. These men wore the same workmen's clothes. But these looked used. They were more filled out, too, especially in the area of chest, shoulders, and biceps—and bellies. Their hands were strong and work roughened. They gripped the tools of clubs and staffs and a length of metal pipe or two as if used to wielding hard things.

Burly as they were, they came fast. Annja turned and fled.

She vaulted a pile of crates. She paused long enough to scatter the pile across the narrow passage between stone walls irregular and grimed with not particularly graceful age. A couple of the lead pursuers duly tripped over them and sprawled hard on the cobblestones in sprays of splinters and curses in English and Hebrew. At least she assumed the Hebrew was cursing.

They swore louder as their mates trampled right over them, dogged in pursuit. Others smashed the crates to jagged slats.

Annja had long legs and a runner's wind. She should
have left the mob in her dust with ease; though the deep-tanned look of some of them indicated they had the kind of endurance to labor all day in the hot Holy Land sun, that sort of thing didn't translate well into running either fast or far.

But with random loose stones underfoot, various cornices or piles of goods intruding in the inadequate right of way, and the constant intrusion of passersby who simply couldn't get out of the way fast enough, she could run little if any faster than her pursuers. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw one of them stiff-arm an elderly man face-first into a wall.

Anger kindled within her, a smolder fanning rapidly to a blaze. She longed to invoke the sword and dispense some well-earned justice. A dozen armed and burly men pursuing a single woman was not some semiharmless emotional venting but a lynch mob. Why they were after her she didn't know, but they obviously didn't intend to sit her down for an earnest discussion of internal Israeli politics if they caught her. She knew she had every right to take their lives if they raised their weapons against her. She formed her hand as if grasping a simple hilt, began to summon her will….

Annja stopped herself. She ducked left down an alley, tripped over the supporting slanting stanchion of a shabby gray-and-black-striped awning, fell, rolled and was up again barely slowed, her trousers
streaked with dust and alley grime. Her leading pursuers went down with furious yells, tearing at the cloth that wrapped them up and barking their shins on the planks.