2013: Beyond Armageddon (2 page)

He looked back at the scroll in astonishment. The faint whisper of a voice dead for four thousand years began to speak. He started to unroll more, but the Bedouin stopped him.

“No more, my friend. You might rip it, and then we would have a very bad problem on our hands.” His hand rested on the knife.

The priest looked at what he’d deciphered. In the wake of Qumran, forgeries were flooding the antiquities market, but if this was genuine, it would turn the world of paleography upside down.

I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.

According to Genesis—the only account there was—God had indeed sent two angels to escort Lot and his wife and two daughters to safety before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. If this was genuine, not only would it be the oldest writing ever discovered, it might shed light on one of the Bible’s darkest and most intriguing mysteries. After Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt, he and his daughters had made it to a cave. The daughters had gotten their father drunk on wine and had intercourse with him, wanting to keep the human race alive because they believed they were the only ones left in the world.

“What else did you see in that cave? Any signs of who might have lived there?”

“I saw some things.”

“What?”

“Bones.”

“Bones?”

“The skeleton of a man.”

According to the Bible both of Lot’s daughters had gotten pregnant, giving birth to children whose descendants became the Moabites and Ammonites. So they had obviously left the cave. Why had Lot stayed behind to die? And the scrolls apparently been left to die with him?

“Was there no other evidence you could bring?” Father Boyle asked. “Everything helps to understand this.” He pierced the Bedouin’s blank stare by adding, “More money for you.”

The fearful look flickered across the leathery features. “I’d had enough of caves. Do you want this or not?”

The priest needed to make a decision. The fragments they’d procured of the Qumran scrolls seemed to contain parts of the Old Testament, but they’d been written much later, around the time of Christ.

This was far older, written by someone who had
lived
during the Old Testament. In the time of Genesis. It was priceless—if it was genuine.

Lot
.

It defied all current knowledge of paleography that Lot could have written this. Lot was a shepherd, not a trained scribe. The priest hastily tried to come up with a hypothesis that would make the impossible possible.

Lot and his uncle, Abraham, had lived in Ur, a busy trade crossroads and intellectual haven of the day. They would have been exposed to many cultures. Eventually they left Ur and ended up in Egypt. According to the Bible, somewhere during that time God told Abraham he was to be the patriarch of the chosen people. Perhaps Abraham, feeling the enormity of that responsibility, decided it would be advantageous for his nephew to learn to write, so that records could be kept. Whatever the case, the overall crudeness of the writing supported the idea of an unskilled person as the author. But even allowing for this improbable theory, there was another problem.

If Lot wrote this, his use of parchment pre-dated its earliest known use by a thousand years. But there
was
some evidence that Egyptians had written on skins a thousand years before Lot.
And what’s so surprising about a shepherd writing on sheepskin?

He pulled the jar into the light.

Rust-colored terra cotta; crudely handmade; finger marks not smoothed out as a craftsman would have done. The clay appeared consistent with potsherds found near the Dead Sea from that era. Some marks were scratched near the base. He examined them with his magnifying glass.

An inscription. Three letters. He compared them to a similar grouping on the scroll. They matched.

Lot
.

He looked at the other words he’d written on his notepad:

God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.

Astonishing. The unknown story of Lot after he escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He had to read the rest of this.

“Well?” Tarik said.

If he turned out to be wrong, his career was over. It was a chance he had to take. He couldn’t know at this point. He had to go with his gut.

The checkbook was in a locked drawer in Donatelli’s desk. The lock could be picked with a paper clip and Donatelli’s signature was easy to forge. He’d already done it for supplies the miser was too cheap to buy. A check for a hundred thousand would be too big to hide, but if he could get the Bedouin down to a reasonable figure, he’d write the check and figure out a way to keep Donatelli from finding out about it.

“Tarik, I cannot be sure this is even genuine without a complete examination, but I am willing to trust you and take a chance. I can write you a check now for ten thousand dollars.”

The Bedouin shook his head and gestured impatiently to give him back the scroll.

Father Boyle rolled it back up and handed it to him. “So you don’t mind having the jinni follow you around for the rest of your life?”

Tarik made a dismissive wave and put the stopper back in the jar.

“Fifteen thousand,” Boyle said.

“Seventy-five.”

“Twenty.”

“Sixty.”

“Thirty.”

“Fifty. Take it or leave it.”

“Wait here.”

He closed the door behind him and went into Donatelli’s office, already thinking of ways to cover his tracks. The odor of spices and incense that had once been sold here still lingered. They combined with the cheap cologne the old man bathed in to create the smell of something going bad.

It took barely a minute to pop the lock and forge the check. He had just inserted the paper clip to lock the desk drawer back up when he heard the familiar irritating slide of slippers coming down the hall.

He yanked on the paper clip. It was stuck. The footsteps were at the door. He jammed the check in his pocket and left the paper clip dangling.

Donatelli came through the doorway in his stained pajamas, eyes blinking against the light, wisps of white hair sticking up wildly from his liver-spotted scalp. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. Boyle hurried to intercept him.

“What are you doing in my office?”

“I was doing some work on those new materials and couldn’t find my magnifying glass. I thought you might have left yours on your desk.”

“What kind of paleographer loses his magnifying glass?”

“A tired one.” Donatelli shuffled toward his desk. Father Boyle walked ahead of him. “I’m sorry I woke you. We should both go to bed. Those fragments will need all of our concentration.”

“I’ve been telling you that.” Donatelli looked at his desk as if to see if anything was amiss, eyes blinking as they tried to focus. He drifted behind the desk. The light from the pole lamp glinted off the paper clip. The priest hurried to click the light off, leaving only the dim light that spilled in from the hallway.

“Come, Monsignor, let’s go to bed. I will have the coffee ready for you in the morning.”

Donatelli allowed himself to be led from the room. “Stay out of my office unless I am here. You know I like everything just so.”

“Yes. I will. Good night.”

Father Boyle watched the stooped old man become a silhouette down the hall. He heard his own office door open behind him. Tarik came out and saw the figure disappearing into the darkness.

“Who is that? I thought you said—”

“It is a priest visiting from Bethlehem. He is staying in the Monsignor’s room while he is away.” The Bedouin’s dark eyes bore into him. The priest reached into his pocket. “Here.”

Tarik studied the check, then said, “I was not here.”

“What do you mean?”

“You never saw me tonight. There was no scrolls.”

Father Boyle started to ask why but thought better of it. He knew the most likely reason. Tarik had found his scroll far outside the territory of his Ta’amireh tribe. All assets were supposed to be given to his sheikh, who would then decide how to divide them up. Tarik didn’t want to share. The priest didn’t blame him. Neither did he.

At the door the Bedouin lingered a moment. Father Boyle saw something in his face. Concern, perhaps. “What is it, Tarik?”

“There is more to these scrolls than meets the eye.”

Father Boyle frowned. “What do you mean?”

“They have a power. Something about it. Something not good. I felt it in the cave. Like something guarding the jar, something that did not want me to take it. Did you not feel it?”

Bedouin were superstitious, but no more so than many groups he’d studied. There had been that ominous sigh when Tarik opened the jar…“No. Only the power of the words.”

Tarik stared at him for a long uncomfortable moment. “Very well,” he said. “My conscience is clear.” He disappeared into the darkness.

The Bedouin’s words nagged at the priest, but back at his desk he quickly became absorbed by what he’d deciphered:

I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.

Tarik’s parting words came back to him, and he felt a growing unease.

He stared at the jar, aching to get to work on the scroll, but it would have to wait. He needed to start fresh, not when he was barely able to keep his eyes open. Its secrets would have to wait a little longer. He hid the jar behind some books and went to bed.

In the twilight world between sleep and wakefulness, he saw a shadow in the corner of the room. For a moment he thought Donatelli might have wandered in, but the shadow was far too big. He was so exhausted he tried to ignore it, but each time he opened his eyes it was still there. And each time it was closer.

He clicked on the lamp by his bed.

Nothing.

Turning off the light, he put his pillow over his head. Listening to the darkness, he almost expected to hear breathing. A gust of wind rattled his window, then all was quiet. The silence seemed different, stealthy somehow, and he was unable to shake the feeling of being watched.

Tarik and his mumbo-jumbo. There were no such things as jinn.

He took the pillow off his head. Nothing moved in the darkness. The window rattled again. He looked toward it. Two fiery red dots hovered outside. The priest’s eyes locked onto them, trying to figure out what they were.

Cigarettes of soldiers on patrol? Some kind of reflection? The eyes of a bird?

Eyes
.

An instant later they were gone. Father Boyle pulled the pillow back over his head and tried to convince himself he had been imagining things.

He could not.

Washington, D.C. Christmas Day, 1972

“In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritu Sancti.”

The priest made the sign of the cross on nine-year-old Zeke Sloan’s forehead. The boy’s mother, holding her son’s hand as they rolled toward the emergency room, knew that wasn’t a good sign. Extreme Unction called for the anointing of all five senses, unless the priest thought there wasn’t time. Then he only did the forehead.

Extreme Unction.
The Last Anointing
. With Herculean effort she shoved that boulder from her mind, but another one quickly rolled in to replace it.

Her husband’s plane had been shot down yesterday in a bombing raid over Hanoi. The Air Force was looking for Hank, but—

I can’t lose them both, Rita thought.
I can’t.

Zeke’s closed eyelids fluttered as the priest gently forced the communion wafer into his mouth. The gurney stopped at the ER doors. One of the emergency team saw what the priest was doing and shook her head. There wasn’t time for the wine.

The priest took his hand off the cruet as the boy was whisked through the swinging doors. “God bless and keep your soul,” he said, hoping the blessing would catch up to the fast-disappearing gurney.

Rita Sloan turned to follow through the still-swinging doors. Before going in she stopped and turned. “What is your name, Father?”

“Connolly. James Connolly.”

She squeezed his hand. “Thank you, Father Connolly.”

She rushed into the emergency room. A nurse hurrying by tried to intercept her. “I’m sorry ma’am, you can’t—”

“I’m his mother. I’m staying. I’ll keep out of the way.”

The nurse looked to the nearest doctor for help. He shrugged and a circle of green-clad ER personnel closed around Zeke. His mother found a spot several feet behind and kept glancing nervously at the heart monitor. Her son’s heartbeat was weak and irregular.

Why did I have to get him a sled for Christmas?

Thank God for Freddie. Zeke’s best friend had come running to tell her that a car had slammed into Zeke at the bottom of his very first run.

The beep of the heart monitor suddenly became a continuous hum. Rita looked at the flat line in horror. Someone called out an emergency procedure she couldn’t understand. Several people sprang into action. Every cell in her body screamed that a mother should go to her son, but she willed herself to stay out of the way. The defibrillator was rolled into place. Rita’s burning eyes kept flicking from the heart monitor to her son’s closed eyes, while six strangers worked frantically to bring Zeke back from the dead.

In a single instant all the power went out and the room went black.

Zeke floated in a pure white cloud of nothingness. He felt as if a pair of arms were cradling him, holding him suspended in midair. From somewhere above came a soothing voice:

“I am the one who sits nearest the throne of glory. He has sent me to bless and keep you, Ezekiel. You shall be put to the supreme test. If you pass, you shall become the portal through which the Messiah will come. You are the beginning and the end.”

Vietnam, near Dien Bien Phu. September 13, 1993. 2330 hours

Captain Zeke Sloan led his eight-man Delta Strike Force team quietly through the jungle. Night-vision goggles enabled them to see clearly as they pushed through smothering humidity and a leafy curtain of darkness. A tiny sliver of moon hung overhead like the blade of a scythe. The maniacal zing of insects sounded a scream of protest. Or warning.