F Paul Wilson - Novel 03 (14 page)

           
 
"How can you tell that?"

           
 
"Well, he's educated. Hal told me the
scroll was written in the Aramaic of the time with Greek and Latin words and
expressions thrown in. The striped blue sleeve he mentions, and his former free
access to the Temple—he's got to be a Pharisee."

           
 
"He talks about the inheritance he left
behind."

           
 
"Right. A rich Pharisee."

           
 
"But weren't the Pharisees proud? This
guy's wearing rags and he says even the lice won't bite him. And he tried to
drown himself."

           
 
"In the Dead Sea, apparently—it was
called the Sea of Lot back in those days. Okay. So he's a severely depressed
Pharisee who's fallen on hard times and suffers from a heavy-duty lack of
self-esteem."

           
 
Carrie smiled. God, he loved that smile.
"Sounds like he'd fit right in at Loaves and Fishes," she said.
"But what's this about Hellenists?"

           
 
Dan reread the passage. The pieces began
falling into place. "You know . . . he could be referring to St. Paul's
wing of the early church. The two groups had a falling out."

           
 
"I knew there were disagreements,
but—"

           
 
"More than disagreements. A complete
split. James and his followers remained in Jerusalem as observant Jews,
sticking to all the dietary laws and customs while they awaited the Second
Coming of the Messiah, which they assumed would happen any day. St. Paul, on
the other hand, was out in the hinterlands, working the crowds, converting Jews
and Gentiles alike to his own brand of Christianity. His father was a Roman and
so Paul had a different slant on Jesus's teachings, one that sacked the dietary
laws and most Jewish traditions. It mentions here 'the brother's fear of the
Hellenists using the mother's remains for their own purposes'—the scroll has
got
to be referring to St. James's
rivalry with St. Paul's movement."

           
 
Dan stared at Carrie, his heart pounding, his
spirits soaring. Good God, it all fit! The scroll described an encounter with
St. James and the remnant of the Jerusalem church shortly before James was
martyred.

           
 
"Carrie, this is incredible! Why hasn't
anybody else—?" Then he slammed on the brakes as he remembered.
"Wait. Just wait." He shook his head to clear away the adrenalin
buzz. "What am I doing?"

           
 
"What's wrong?"

           
 
"Everything's
wrong. The scroll is a fake, Carrie. The ink is two or three years old.
We've got to remember that. A damn skillful job, but a proven forgery. Almost
had me going there, wondering why nobody else had put these pieces together.
Then I realized why: nobody bothered to try. Why waste time interpreting a
fake?"

           
 
"No," Carrie said, shaking her head
defiantly. "This is true."

           
 
"Carrie," he said, stroking her arm.
"Somebody tried to pull a fast one on the world."

           
 
"Why? Why would someone want to do such a
thing?"

           
 
"Maliciousness. Like calling in a bomb
scare to a concert and watching everybody scramble out. Malicious mischief on
an international scale. If the scroll had been released to the world as
authentic, someone would have come to the same conclusion as we. The liberal
and fundamentalist sects of the Christian world would be up in arms, the
Vatican would be releasing encyclicals, the Judean Desert would be filled with
expeditions in search of the remains of the Mother of God. There'd be years of
chaos. And all the while, our forger would be sitting back, giggling, knowing
he caused it all."

           
 
"But to what end? I don't get it."

           
 
Dan looked at her. No, Carrie wouldn't get it.
This sort of maliciousness was beyond her comprehension. That was why he loved
her.

           
 
"A power trip, Carrie. Pure ego. The
Christian world is in chaos, all because of your clever forgery. All 1 can say
is it's a damn good thing the Rockefeller Museum did a thorough testing
job."

           
 
"I don't care what the tests say,"
she said, tapping the sheets on her lap. 'This is true."

           
 
"Carrie, the ink—"

           
 
"I don't care! I don't care if the ink's
still
wet!
This man speaks the truth.
Can't you feel it? There's real pain here, Dan. Whoever wrote these words is
isolated—from his friends, from his family, from his God. The loneliness, the
anguish . . . it seeps through in every sentence."

           
 
"Then how do you explain the carbon
dating?"

           
 
"I can't. And I'm not going to try. But I
am going to prove the truth of these words. And you're going to help."

           
 
Dan had a sudden bad feeling about what was
coming.

           
 
"I am?"

           
 
"Yes, dear. Somehow, some way, you and I
are going to Israel and we're going to find the earthly remains of the Virgin
Mary."

           
 
Dan smiled, humoring her. She was just a
little crazy now. She'd get over it. Besides, there was no way they'd be able
to get away to
Israel
together.

           
Summer

The Judean Wilderness

           
 
"Let's find a shady spot and take a
break," Dan said, wiping his face on his sleeve as they drove through the
barren sandy hills.

           
 
"There is no shade," Carrie said.
"But I'll drive if you want."

           
 
Dan peered through the Explorer's dusty
windshield at the undulating landscape shimmering before them. They'd been
wandering through the desert mountains most of the morning, following one wadi,
then another, turning this way and that. .Still Dan was unable get a handle on
his surroundings. He'd never seen anything like it. So barren, so desolate, so
close to the sky, so
alone.
No wonder
the prophets went to the desert to find and talk to their God—this was a place
devoid of earthly distractions.

           
 
Except, perhaps, survival.

           
 
"No. Better if I drive and you
navigate."

           
 
"Okay. But we're going to find it soon.
It's somewhere up ahead, I just know it."

           
 
"How can you possibly know it?"

           
 
She looked at him. Her face was flushed, just
like it got in the shelter kitchen, but her eyes were brighter and more exited
than he could remember.

           
 
"I can feel it. Can't you?"

           
 
Dan shrugged. The only thing he felt was hot.

           
 
The air conditioner had given out somewhere
around Enot Qane and they'd been sweltering ever since. At least Dan had. Not
Carrie. The heat didn't seem to affect her. Or perhaps she was too excited to
notice.

           
 
Carrie had changed. She'd always been driven,
and her boundless energies had been focused keeping St. Joe's homeless kitchen
operating at peak efficiency, doing as much as possible for as many as
possible. But her focus had shifted since that evening when she discovered the
translation of the forged scroll. She'd become obsessed with finding this
so-called
Resting Place
.

           
 
Nothing would turn her from the quest. Dan had
argued with her, pleaded with her, tried to reason with her that she was
falling victim to an elaborate hoax. He threatened to make her go alone, even
threatened to expose to Mother Superior the true reason for the leave of
absence she'd requested this summer.

           
 
Carrie had only smiled. "I'm going, Dan.
With you or without you, whether Mother Superior knows or not, I'm going to
Israel
this summer."

           
 
For a while he'd hoped that money, or rather
the lack of it, would keep her home. Neither of them had any savings— their
vows of poverty saw to that—and this pipe-dream trip of Carrie's was going to
be costly. But money turned out to be no problem at all. Her brother Brad had
seen to that years ago when he'd presented her with an American Express card in
her name but drawn on his account. Keep it handy in case of an emergency, he'd
told her. Or use it to buy whatever you need whenever you need it.

           
 
Carrie had filed it away, literally forgetting
about it until she decided that she needed two tickets to
Israel
. She said Brad wouldn't mind. He had deep
pockets and was always trying to buy her things . . . trying to assuage his
guilt, she'd said, although she wouldn't say what kind of guilt he was
assuaging.

           
 
And so it came to pass that a certain Ms.
Carolyn Ferris and a male companion arrived in Tel Aviv at the height of the
summer, hopped a tour bus to Jerusalem where they spent two nights in the
Hilton, toured the Old Town for a day, then rented a four-wheel-drive, off-road
vehicle, stocked it with a couple of flashlights, a cooler filled with
sandwiches and soft drinks, and headed south.

           
 
And now here they were, trekking through the
Judean Wilderness—the
Midbar Yehuda
of
yore—in a Ford Explorer on a wild-goose chase.

           
 
But it was Carrie's wild-goose chase. And that
was why Dan was along.

           
 
But weren't you supposed to protect the one
you loved from harm, from the pain of dashed hopes at the end of wild-goose
chases?

           
 
Well, even though Dan knew this quest of hers
was a hoax, the trip wasn't a total loss. They'd seen the
Holy Land
. During their day in Jerusalem they'd
walked the Via Dolorosa—the original Stations of the Cross—and visited the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Garden of Gesthemane, and the Pater Noster
Church on the Mount of Olives.

           
 
Through it all, Carrie had been so excited,
like a child on her first trip to Disney World. "We're really here!"
she'd kept saying. "I can't believe we're really here!"

           
 
And all along the Via Dolorosa: "Can you
believe it, Dan? We're actually walking in Jesus's footsteps!"

           
 
That look on her face was worth anything.
Anything except . . .

           
He glanced over at her, sitting in
the passenger seat, scanning the cliffs ahead as the Explorer bounced up the
dry drainage channel. A yellow sheet of paper sat in her lap. Dan had drawn a
large t on it—a tow, the Hebrew equivalent of the letter T, or Th. Carrie was
hunting for a cliff or butte in the shape of that
tav.
Dan doubted very much they'd find one, but even if they did,
there'd be no Virgin Mary hidden in a cave there.

           
 
And that worried him. He didn't want to see
Carrie hurt. She'd invested so much of herself in this quest, allowed it to so
consume her for months that there was no telling what the painful truth might
do to her. Let them spend their entire time here driving in endless circles,
finding nothing, then heading home disappointed and frustrated that the desert
had kept its secret, but leaving still alive the hope that somewhere in this
seared nothingness there remained the find of the millennium, guarded by time
and place, and perhaps even God Himself. Better than that to see her crushed by
the realization that she'd been duped.

           
 
Ahead of him, the wadi forked into two
narrower channels, one running northwest, the other southwest. The trailing
cloud of dust swirled around them as Dan braked to a halt. He coughed as some
of it billowed through the open windows.

           
 
"Where to now?"

           
 
"I'm not sure," Carrie said.

           
 
Without waiting for the dust to settle, she
stepped out of the Explorer and stared at the cliffs rising ahead of them. Dan
got out, too, as much to stretch his legs as to look around. A breeze drifted
by, taking some of his perspiration with it.

           
 
"You know," he said, "I do
believe it's gotten cooler."

           
 
"We're finally above sea level,"
Carrie said, still staring ahead as if expecting to find a road sign to the
tav
cliff. The light blue short-sleeve
shirt she wore had dark rings of perspiration around her armpits and across her
shoulder blades where they'd rested against the seat back. Her loose,
lightweight slacks fluttered around her legs. She stood defiantly in the sun,
unbowed by the heat.

           
 
Dan looked back the way they'd come. Rolling
hills, dry, sandy brown, almost yellow, falling away to the Dead Sea, the
lowest spot on earth—the world's navel, someone had called it. The hazy air had
been unbearably thick down there, chokingly laden with moisture from the
evaporating sea; leaden air, too heavy to escape the fifty-mile trench in which
it was trapped. Maybe it wasn't cooler up here, but it was drier. He could
breathe.

           
 
Above, the sky was a flawless turquoise. The
land ahead was as dry and yellow-brown and barren as behind, but steeper here,
angling up sharply toward a phalanx of steep cliffs. Looked like a dead end up
there.

           
 
He plucked a rag from the floor by the front
seat and began wiping the dust from the windshield.

           
 
"When's the next rain?" he said.

           
 
"November, most likely."

           
 
Dan had to smile. Carrie had done her
homework. She'd spent months preparing for this trip, studying the scroll
translation and correlating its scant geographical details with present day
topographical maps of the area. He bet she knew more about the region than most
Israelis, but that probably wasn't saying much. They hadn't seen another soul
since turning off the highway. They were completely alone up here. The
realization gave Dan a twinge of uneasiness. They hadn't thought to get a car
phone—not that there'd be a cell out here anyway—and if they broke down, they'd
have to start walking. And if they got lost . . .

           
 
"We're not lost, are we?" Dan said.

           
 
"I don't think so. I'm sure he came this
way."

           
 
How could she be certain? Sure, she'd put a
lot of research into this trip, but there hadn't been much to go on to begin
with. All they knew was that the fictional author of the scroll—
fictional
was an adjective Dan used
privately when referring to the character who had supposedly written the
scroll; never within Carrie's hearing; she
believed
—
had turned west from his southward trek and left the shore of what he called
the Sea of Lot to journey into the Wilderness.

           
But where had he turned?

           
 
"I don't know, Carrie . . ."

           
 
"This has to be the way," she said.
She seemed utterly convinced. Didn't she have even a shade of a doubt?
"Look: He mentioned being driven out of
Qumran
—that's at the northern end of the sea. He
says he headed south toward
Masada
and
Zohar but he never mentions getting there. He doesn't even mention passing En
Gedi which was a major oasis even then. So he must have turned into the
wilderness somewhere between
Qumran
and
En Gedi."

           
 
"No argument there," Dan said.
"But that stretch is more than thirty miles long. There were hundreds of
places we could have turned off the road. Why did you pick that particular spot
back there?"

           
 
Carrie looked at him and her clear blue eyes
clouded momentarily. For the first time since their arrival she seemed unsure
of herself.

           
 
"I don't know," she said slowly.
"It just
seemed
like the right
place to turn. I've read the translation so many times I feel as if I know him.
I could almost see him wandering south, alone, depressed, suddenly feeling it
was no use trying to find other people to take him in, that he was unfit for
human company, and turning and heading into the hills."

           
 
Dan was struck by the thought that she might
be describing her own feelings as a fourteen-year old entering the Convent of
the Blessed Virgin.

           
 
That moment back on the highway had been kind
of spooky. They'd been cruising south on Route 90 along the Dead Sea shore when
Carrie had suddenly clutched his arm and pointed to a rubble-strewn path,
little more than a goat trail, breaking through the roadside brush and winding
up into the hills.

           
 
"There!" she'd cried. "Follow
that!"

           
 
So Dan had pressed the
4x4
button on the Explorer's dash and followed the trail here.