Free The Jerusalem Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan Page B

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    The volume of postings on one subject was cresting like a wave. There’d been a thousand posts an hour about it yesterday. Now there was ten thousand an hour. And the rate was climbing.
    Sergeant Finch looked down at him. She adjusted her glasses so they were further down her nose. She looked like a schoolmistress. A large and commanding school-mistress.
    ‘I hope this isn’t another one of your hunches,’ she said.
    He smiled up at her. ‘This is no hunch. It’s a prophecy.’
    ‘You’re a prophet now?’ The smile at the corner of her mouth was either conspiratorial or from her anticipation of how she would describe this exchange to her boss over a coffee.
    Henry didn’t care. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘This is about what’s been trending on Twitter and Facebook in Egypt over the last twenty-four hours.’
    ‘Are you going to tell me?’ Her eyes had darted to another monitoring screen operator who had raised a hand. The room was responsible for real-time monitoring about a hundred current threats to the UK’s national security.
    ‘All these posts are about a claim that a letter from the first Caliph of Islam has been found. Apparently, it states that Jerusalem, once captured by Islam, will remain Islamic for all time.’
    ‘Do we know if this letter is real?’
    ‘It’s being looked into.’
    ‘Let me know what they find, Henry. Another religious prophecy is the last thing they need in the Middle East. The place is a tinderbox right now. It could burst into flames at any moment.’

18
    The following morning we took a taxi to the Via Dolorosa. If you imagine the Old City of Jerusalem as a roughly drawn square, a warren of narrow lanes, then the hill of the Temple Mount, with the golden Dome of the Rock floating above it to the bottom right. And the Via Dolorosa runs almost right to left across the middle, east to west that is, just above the Temple Mount. I say almost advisedly, because there’s a kink in the road as the two sides of it don’t exactly line up in the middle.
    The Via Dolorosa ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the long venerated site of Jesus’ crucifixion and his tomb. The Holy Sepulchre was founded by Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great in 326 AD, after her son became the first Christian Roman Emperor. Miraculously, she also found the cross Jesus had died on, despite the total physical destruction of Jerusalem carried out by Titus in 70 AD.
    The Via Dolorosa was first venerated in Roman times, before the city fell to Islam in April 637 AD. Later, the Franciscans kept the Christian rituals alive whenever they could. They established many of the rites that surround the route to this day. Some misinterpretations of the route still happen though. An archway of Hadrian’s lesser forum, for instance, constructed in the second century, is still believed by many pilgrims to be the place where Pilate presented Jesus to the crowd.
    Myth, faith and bloody history come face to face in Jerusalem.
    Our taxi let us out at the Jaffa Gate. We walked through the Old City towards the chapel of Our Lady. The streets were narrow, intense with souvenir shops and small cafes. The pavements were stone slabs. The first lane went downhill in small steps. Arches and canvas awnings blocked out the early morning sun. At the start of the Via Dolorosa we passed a group of Christian pilgrims following a tall Eastern-European man with a cross on his shoulders.
    The closely packed shops were selling wooden crosses, icons, statues of the Virgin Mary, rosary beads, Bibles, pottery, glasses, t-shirts, mugs and a hundred other souvenirs. Some of them had Persian carpets and Turkish kilims hanging outside. Many had low wooden trestle tables jutting out in front.
    It was 10.30 a.m. now and the street was busy. There were monks in long habits, mostly brown or black, Arabs in headdresses, women with their heads covered, and tourists with cameras as well as, at the major