O Jerusalem - Laurie R. King [143]
We caught them up in the courtyard in front of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. One of them whirled around with a gun in his hand and pulled the trigger wildly. The bullet missed Holmes by inches, and then Ali and Mahmoud were on him. One of the remaining pair sprinted up the path to the right, with Holmes fast on his heels; the other dived through the mighty doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—from which, thanks be to God, Allenby and his notables were long gone. By the time I was past the startled Moslem guards and inside the dim, echoing space, he had vanished into the recesses.
And the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is nothing but recesses, one chapel after another, galleries up the walls, every square inch of floor space in this holy of holies heavily used and bitterly contested (hence the Moslem guards, who can be depended upon to treat each division of Christianity with equal scorn). Candles and incense, sparkling gilt and dark shadows, prayers in all languages and people shifting about—it was a confusion of the senses.
I stood for an instant, searching desperately for the robe and kuffiyah I had followed in, but they were not in sight—and worse, the guards had decided I did not belong here and were coming out of their station to do something about it. I had no choice but to plunge towards the more populous left side, hoping both to lose them and to find my quarry.
I found instead his robe, kicked into the corner of a small unoccupied chapel off of the main rotunda. I muttered a phrase most unsuited to the setting, popped out of the chapel, and was spotted by an irate guard, but before I could turn and dive into the crowd, a familiar figure loomed up from the darkness behind him and seized his arm.
Ali—and by God he’d never been a more welcome sight. I stepped behind a pair of high-hatted priests and continued my search, but for what, or whom, I did not know. What had the man—was it Ellison?—been wearing under his shed robe? The second habit stolen from Wadi Qelt? The habit of a nun? A city suit? I continued slowly, searching every cranny and every face for anything at all that seemed not to fit.
I had cleared the rotunda and was coming out of its adjoining Greek church when Ali joined me.
“He dropped his robe,” I told him. “How did you get rid of the guard?”
“I said you were my troublesome younger brother and I would give you a beating you would never forget. Did you see our man at all? Was it Ellison?”
“I don’t know,” I said in frustration. “I’ve never met Ellison. All I saw was a glimpse of the man’s hand—his skin is light. Do you know if there are any exits back here?”
Without pausing to answer he slipped away, leaving me to press ahead into a corridor that curved around the end of the Greek church-within-a-church. Tiny chapels heavy with incense and the smell of candles lay on my left, then a set of stairs going down, where I hesitated.
Did our quarry have a gun? Almost certainly. Would he use it? Probably not, if he could avoid it. A gunshot would bring half the Christians in Jerusalem down on his head, and a handful of Moslems as well. Ali would return at any moment; until then, I just had to make certain that the enemy did not find a back way out.
I started down the stairs, my heart in my throat; when running boots skidded along the floor behind me I nearly shrieked.
Ali spoke in my ear, so low I could barely hear him over the sound of my heart and the voices from the space below. “He did not get out through the monastery.”
“Do these stairs go anywhere?” I asked.
“More chapels.”
“But no exit?”
“Not unless he removes a solid stone wall.”
“Then we—” I froze as his words hit me, and whirled to look at him in horror. “Oh, my God, you don’t think he has—I mean to say, this place is hideous, but… dynamite?”
“Holmes said two of the salt smuggler’s detonators