The 13th Enumeration (24 page)

They walked on in pleasant conversation until they reached the cliffs.

“You want to hike around to the top?” Zane asked.

“Sure. There’s a trail up ahead that will take us there.”

Once up on top, they sat enjoying the view. It was eleven-thirty, and both of them were hungry. Opening their backpacks, they ate a simple lunch and rested.

When Zane had finished eating, he asked cautiously, “Have you been climbing lately?”

She smiled ruefully. “No, not since the accident. I sort of got out of the habit. And frankly, I am still a little shaken by what happened.”

Zane did not pursue the question further. Hopefully she would get over it, but he knew many people could not. He wouldn’t ask her, then, to belay him while he climbed.

“Well, you want to explore for a while before we head back?” Zane asked.

“Sure, let’s check the area out.”

Together they climbed steep hills and clambered over rocks, never heading into areas which required them to do any real climbing. Zane saw several good prospects for future climbs. He recorded them with the Climbing-Quest app Sam had made for him. After an hour and a half, Zane suggested they head back. They reached the dig at four p.m., and stopping at Rachael’s tent, Zane said, “I thank you for the pleasant day and the companionship. I really enjoyed it. I’ll be leaving later this evening, so I guess I’d better say good-bye now.”

Rachael looked a little at a loss for words, but she replied, “I enjoyed the day as well. Haven’t talked so much in a long time. Thank you for listening. Frankly, I am not looking forward to you leaving.”

She grinned. “We don’t have any volunteers for a few days. I’ll have to take over the girl-barrow.”

Smiling, Zane replied, “Well, you’ll have your work cut out for you then.” Sticking out his hand, he said with some regret, “Good-bye, then. I hope the dig goes well over the summer. It would be terrific if you found additional artifacts to confirm your Matthew theory.”

Shaking his hand in her strong clasp, she replied, “Take care of yourself, Zane Harrison. We will likely be here all summer, so if you want to come back, we would be glad to have you again.”

With a final good-bye, they parted. Zane headed back up to his campsite, packed his gear, and stowed it in his car. Then, walking once more down to the campsite, he sat on the rock and waited for the sunset. When it had finally set in the western sky with a splendid display of color, Zane walked back to his car with a sigh. Starting it up, he headed back to Tel Aviv and the long airplane ride home.

Chapter 52

Tel Aviv, Israel

Marcus Nayat and his team had rented a vacant building on the same side of the street and two lots up from the bakery—and they were watching. Right now, Marcus had a team excavating a tunnel to the city sewer main. He intended to install his own electromagnet. That done, he would be able
to
capture the capsules before they reached the bakery. He would then insert a tracking device on each new flash drive. Once their tracking device was in place, they would return the modified capsules to the baker’s electromagnetic snare.

So far, the bakery had received three more capsules. His surveillance team had just texted him that a new one had been snared thirty minutes ago. Hopefully, in three more weeks they would be able to regularly intercept the capsules on their journey.

Over the past few weeks they had learned that the baker turned on the magnet twice a week—once on Sunday and once on Wednesday night. He left it on from eleven p.m. until four a.m. They had also learned the leaden capsules were enclosed in some sort of water-soluble, semi
-
metallic shell. After just an hour or two, it completely dissolved and only the capsule remained. Clever bastards, whoever had come up with this idea. The holy grail in intelligence was anonymity. No dead drops or electronic messages to track, no person-to-person contact, just flush the message down the loo. The collectors of the capsules, like the baker, almost certainly didn’t know where or who the capsules came from. Even if he was caught, he wouldn’t be able to tell them anything.

Shaking his head again, Marcus thought how much luck was involved in finding this network. If it hadn’t been for someone flushing steel wool down the toilet just when the baker was out of town, they might never have found out. What were the chances of that? Was it really luck? Well, what else could it be? Just a confluence of events that had broken their way in just the right order and at precisely the right time.

Shrugging, he said out loud, “Not much different from how they say we evolved. Just a cosmic roulette wheel—sometimes you hit pay dirt and other times . . .” He laughed. “Well, there are still monkeys.” Timing was everything.

Laughing again, Marcus said to himself, “Since when did you become a philosopher, Marco?”

* * *

Several days later, Darius received an envelope which had been delivered to his Dubai Trade Center PO box. Opening the envelope, he took the lead-encased capsule to a nearby utility closet. There, he opened the capsule and reattached a USB connector to the end of the flash drive. Taking the drive back to his office, he inserted it into his computer. After decoding the message, he read the brief note:

Capernaum dig progressing well. Major New Testament era artifact found. Possibly the house of the biblical Matthew, also known as Levi ben Cheleph. Will advise when more information becomes available.

The rest of the note gave a brief update of several other digs. None seemed to offer any great potential, but you never knew. He could wait. He had been searching for evidence of the secret for over a decade. He knew he was getting closer to the truth, but he was not there yet.

Darius pulled out the flash drive and placed it into his pocket. He would dispose of this later. Turning his attention to his reports, he saw that everything was still going according to plan. He was happy the Order and their minions had not made any overt moves to stop his efforts. He knew the events in New York had to have hurt them terribly. His attack had come out of left field, and blaming it on Iran had been a masterstroke. The fools—if they thought it was bad now, a few months from now they would be looking back at today with fond memories. They would probably leave him alone for now, as long as he kept getting deeper in debt. Once he was sufficiently indebted, they would begin to apply the pressure. He laughed coldly. If they waited much longer, it would be too late to stop him.

Alexandra was making incredible progress getting their machines in place and producing clean water for the poor of the world. She had done more for the planet’s impoverished in the last seven months than the United Nations had done in its entire existence. Darius knew this would be causing some serious repercussions. He knew as well as anyone that there were incredibly powerful vested interests in keeping the third world poor and chaotic. After all, as his own people had learned over the course of the past hundred years, the New World Order did not want any strong, independent nations protecting their own natural resources.
Looking out over the waters of the Persian Gulf toward his homeland, he whispered to no one but the walls of his office, “The Age of Aquarius is here, and I will have my revenge.”

Chapter 53

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Dylan Gallos was concerned. He had never questioned Darius’s actions or leadership, but what Darius was doing now made absolutely no sense—in fact, it was suicidal. He was burdening AES with so much debt and leverage that he was putting the company in a very vulnerable position. Dylan knew eventually the predators on Wall Street would realize their advantage and mercilessly pursue it. Based on his current private model, they had about five more months until AES was in an untenable position. Darius was worth trillions of dollars—he could have financed many of these transactions with his own money. Sure, he couldn’t sell all his shares at once, but given enough time, Dylan could have sold many of Darius’s shares and raised the money he wanted.

What really bugged him, he had to admit, was that Darius no longer consulted him on his transactions. Dylan had been relegated to watching and managing the share price of AQES. Sure, that was important, he knew—but what was Darius doing? Should he ask what was going on? Surely Darius would have asked if he had wanted his advice. One thing was for sure: while he tried to decide if he was going to broach the subject with Darius, he would be raising his own cash position in the company. His stock was worth many hundreds of billions of dollars. He was going to sell at least half of it in the next couple of months. If Darius was going to run this company into the ground, he wasn’t going to go down with the ship. Anyway, he had been working 24/7 for the past twelve months with very little rest. He was beginning to fray at the edges. He needed a break. Maybe he would take some time off.

Turning to the monitor that showed the live stock price of AQES, he watched the stock price trade. AQES was now trading at $236.89 a share. The share price had been on a relentless rise for the past eight months. On another monitor, he pulled up his personal trading account. He had over 4.9 billion shares of AQES in his trading account. He had only sold fifty million shares so far. His account value was a ludicrous 1.1 trillion dollars. He laughed outright. That amount of money was absurd. A billion dollars was more than he could probably spend in his lifetime. But one thing was for sure: he couldn’t spend any of it if it was not cash in his account.

Right then, Dylan decided to sell one billion shares. He turned to another monitor which ran his black-box algo. In the modeling module of his program, he punched in the one billion shares and looked at the results. They showed that, at current price, volume, and market conditions, barring any unforeseen adverse events, it would take one month to sell the one billion shares without adversely affecting the share price.

The model also told him that he could sell all one billion shares in one week, but the share price of AQES would drop about five percent in that scenario. The one billion shares would sell for an average of $221.53 for a total of two-hundred-twenty-one-billion dollars. Dylan decided to test the accuracy of his model. He entered a one billion share sell order to be executed over the next seven trading days and punched the sell order into the trading module of his algo. Immediately, he could see the increase in volume. For a few minutes he watched it in fascination, and standing up, he stretched and left his office. He didn’t need to watch; his program would take care of the rest. He needed to think about what he wanted to do with the money once he sold his shares. He knew he should diversify and get it to a safe place. Laughing, he thought,
It would take several places to park that much money.

Chapter 54

Dallas
, Texas

Zane returned to the States jet-lagged as always. He was soon back in the grind of school, preparing for his final exams and working on his research paper. The first thing he did when he got settled in was to e-mail Rachael a copy of his research paper. A few days later, she e-mailed him in return with an update on the Capernaum dig. They were still working on cleaning out the sub-ground level of the house. The only real thing of interest they had found was the precision and care with which the walls of the cellar had been finished. Large, expertly dressed stones had been used and laid in an almost seamless fashion. Quite a work of art, she had noted, and most likely expensive. This type of workmanship was normally only seen on more monumental buildings such as the nearby synagogue.

Finally, she ended her note by thanking him for sending her a copy of his research paper and offering some thoughts on the time factor:

Zane, one thing has struck me in your research regarding the time factor. I don’t think you will find what you are looking for unless it is based on a reckoning of time which would have been familiar to the Jewish people of that era. Most of the examples you describe in your research are either a Gentile-based reckoning of time or a theoretical deluge-based reckoning of time. If there is an answer to this puzzle I believe you will find it in a reckoning of time based in the context of the Second Temple era.

Take care and keep me posted,

Regards,

Rachael

Over the past couple of weeks, Zane had been giving her advice serious thought. Tonight he sat trying to put down on paper what he had learned and some of his thoughts concerning it.

What exactly was a Second Temple Jewish reckoning of time? He thought he had the answer, but as with many things in life, it wasn’t as simple as it sounded.

He had found the first biblical definition of time in Genesis:

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years. (Genesis 1:14)

The lights in the heaven—sun, moon, and stars—were to divide the day from the night. They were also to be for “signs,” Hebrew
owth,
for signal or remembrance, and “seasons”—Hebrew
mow’ed
or appointed times, for days and years.

The biblical calendar, then, was based upon the function of the sun, moon, and stars. Its days were based upon the rising and setting of the sun and its months upon the cycle of the moon. During the Second Temple Era, according to rabbinic tradition, the months began with the first sighting of the waxing moon. It was this lunar cycle which the feast days, or
mow’eds,
were based upon. The first month began in spring and was variously called “Aviv” (Green Barley), “Nisan,” and “the first month” at different places in the Scripture. This month began the religious biblical calendar of the Jewish people. The spring feast of Passover was celebrated in the first month. In the seventh month, the fall biblical festivals of Yom Teruah (Trumpets), Yom Kippur (Atonement), and Sukkoth (Tabernacles) were celebrated.

This was all pretty straightforward. Where the difficulty arose was in the changing of the years. The lunar calendar was based on a 29.53-day cycle, and the solar calendar was based upon a 365.24-day cycle. Twelve lunar months only equaled 354.36 days. This made the lunar “year” roughly eleven days short when compared to the solar year. In order to keep the lunar and solar year synchronized, an intercalary month was added every three years or so. This makeup month was called Veadar. So he was stuck with a Jewish calendar that varied and a lunar year which sometimes varied and then had to be recalibrated, so to speak, with the solar yearly cycle. How was he supposed to figure out anything based upon a calendar which had varying year lengths? No wonder Sir Robert Anderson had chosen to use a Noahadic year of three-hundred-and-sixty days! Nothing else seemed to work.

Frustrated, Zane pushed back from his desk and stood up. He needed to get some fresh air. Outside, he considered his options on the research paper. He had not found a solution, and his paper was due in two weeks. Even as it stood now, he needed a week of editing to make it presentable. He had two options, as he saw it. Don’t turn it in at all, or clean it up and present the evidence he had found. Ruefully, he knew neither option was great. Option 1 was really no option at all. As for Option 2, turning in a research paper which showed that Jesus did not fulfill, contrary to established consensus, one of the most important messianic prophecies of the Scripture was not exactly a pleasant prospect. Well, he was not a coward, and he was not a quitter. He would have to clean it up and present the facts as he understood them.

With his decision made, he returned to his room and sat down to rewrite his research paper and put it into a presentable format for his professor. For the next several hours he wrote and edited, and finally, at eleven p.m., he had enough and stopped. He was satisfied with what he had accomplished tonight, even if he wasn’t satisfied with the content. Cleaning up his desk, he ordered his papers and went to bed.

Over the next several days, Zane worked on the paper. It took him until Tuesday of the following week to accomplish the task. His paper was forty pages of thoroughly documented scriptural evidence, along with a substantial amount of historical references, all of which pointed to the conclusion that Daniel’s prophecy of seventy weeks, as currently interpreted by the majority of scholars since the time of Sir Robert Anderson, did not meet a reasonable level of proof to show that Jesus was its fulfillment.

Zane reread his paper one last time with mixed emotions. He definitely felt uncomfortable reading a paper his own hand had written which undermined claims concerning Jesus. On the other hand, he knew his research was thorough and well documented, his paper well organized, and his thoughts fluid and understandable.

Don’t be afraid of the truth,
he reminded himself.

Putting the paper back on his desk, he placed it in a small binder and set it with his books for tomorrow’s class. While Zane was not satisfied with the conclusions he had reached, he also knew he would never rest until he had solved the problem of Daniel’s seventy weeks. The prophecy spoke to the coming of the Messiah, and he wanted an answer. If it was not Jesus whom this prophecy spoke about, then whom?

Zane sat back down at his desk. He had one more task to do before he called it a day. He opened his laptop and then his e-mail client.

June 5

Dear Rachael,

It is with mixed emotions that I send you the final draft of my research paper. I have not reached a satisfactory conclusion, but I am out of time for the present. I have not given up, but I must turn in my paper this week. Please find attached a copy of what I will be turning in to my professor tomorrow. I’m sure it will be a big hit! Any thoughts or comments you might have would be welcome.

How is the dig coming? After school, I will be returning to Arizona for the rest of June and all of July to visit with my parents. Will you still need help at the Capernaum dig in August? I would like to return if I can be of help.

Yours truly,

Zane Harrison

* * *

The next evening Rachael checked her inbox and found Zane’s e-mail. After reading his brief note, she opened the attached file and read the final draft of his research paper. Since he had sent her the first draft, she had been checking out his references and thinking about the prophecy. The prophecy clearly spoke of a coming Messiah. So far she hadn’t found any faults in Zane’s reasoning or evidence. She didn’t see how Daniel 9 could be speaking of Yeshua unless there was something they were all missing. She understood now the ease with which Sir Robert Anderson and others had assumed that Nehemiah and Ezra were contemporaries of Artaxerxes Longimanus. There weren’t really any alternatives that would work without creating more problems than they solved.

Reading the paper once more, she was impressed with the clear and concise arguments Zane had made. This young man was clearly smart—and independent. It took character to go against the flow and challenge assertions made centuries ago. What she had researched in just the past few weeks told her that Zane’s assertions would not be well received. She knew from the little they had talked that he must be conflicted about this.

Well, at least he is coming back to . . . coming back to the dig.
What was she about to think? Was she interested in this young man? To be honest with herself, yes, she was interested. Interested, not smitten or infatuated. She found his company agreeable. Okay, more than agreeable. She enjoyed it. He didn’t talk endlessly about himself. For that matter, he didn’t talk all that much. What he did say was thoughtful, often considerate. One thing was for sure, his actions spoke way louder than his words. Yes, Zane Harrison was a man of action. So far she hadn’t felt uncomfortable around him at all. Being with him seemed natural. He gave no indication that he felt intimidated around her, which was often the case with other young men. She didn’t have to be on guard with her words or actions around him.

Thinking back to the first time they had met, she remembered the first words she had spoken to him: “Don’t be foolish, you can’t make that move.” She had learned that day that “don’t” and “can’t” weren’t words Zane Harrison had in his vocabulary. And what were the first words he had spoken to her. “Shut up”? She blushed, remembering. He was right—she had been wasting her words and his. He had ignored her and done what was necessary anyway. She couldn’t even make herself angry about his sharp words. She understood him, and frankly, she respected him more for it.

She smiled. She couldn’t speak for other women, but she liked men who acted like men. Rough around the edges, but with a good heart. Laughing softly, she said to herself, “Rachael, that’s enough boy thoughts for one night.”

Turning her thoughts back to the dig, she considered the progress they had made so far. Another week or two, and the lower-level cellar would be completely cleared. Another four weeks and they would have the house walls completely exposed and cleared. Say another two weeks for a final site survey and miscellaneous details. The excavations would be done around the middle of August. All that would be left then would be the hauling of the debris piles up to the dump site.

For the first couple of weeks after the discovery of the Levi inscription, they had turned away volunteers. When nothing additional was found, the excitement wore off and volunteers were harder to come by. The past couple of weeks there had only been two, and they had only stayed for a few days each. Laughing, she remembered that neither of them had been able to drive the girl-barrow. They had managed to make a couple of trips with the kiddy-barrow and then given up. Since then she had been hauling most of the debris herself—with Zane’s girl-barrow. It was quite a job, but she was far too proud and stubborn to ever touch the kiddy-barrow again.

Young Mr. Harrison, you have ruined me, sir,
she thought. She doubted they would get any strong young volunteers so late in the dig. She guessed it would take four weeks by herself to move those piles. With Zane’s help, they could get it done in two or less. For more than one reason, she hoped he would come back.

Out in the camp, she could hear Efran Finkelstein’s voice discussing the dig with the site archeologist, William Flinders. She wondered about Efran lately. He seemed unusually restless. And he seemed to be hanging on at the dig for no apparent reason. What was he waiting for, anyway? He didn’t need to stay, and it looked like the excitement was over.
What gives?

As far as digs went, Capernaum was a great success. They had found a major artifact. This excavation would look good on Efran’s resume. Maybe he just wanted to make sure nothing went wrong.
Come on, Rachael,
she said to herself,
give him the benefit of the doubt.
After all, he had acted almost human for the past several months. And best of all, he had left her alone.

Before turning in for the evening, she e-mailed Zane:

Dear Zane,

I got your last e-mail. I read the final draft of your research paper and found it interesting and informative. Thanks to you, I learned something I might otherwise not have known. I appreciate you letting me read your paper.

Regarding the dig, it is winding down now. We have at the most another six–eight weeks of excavation left. After that, another two–four weeks of hauling debris depending on how many strong young volunteers we get. Your girl-barrow really misses you, so feel free to come back in August. We could really use your help.

Warm regards,

Rachael

P.S. I have been practicing your one-handed trick on the girl-barrow. I have not mastered it yet but remain undaunted.

* * *

The next morning as Zane was preparing to leave for classes, he received Rachael’s e-mail. After reading it, he laughed. He bet she would have the one-handed wheelbarrow trick mastered by the time he returned—or die trying. She was that kind of girl. Well, heck, with that kind of invitation, how could he stay away? After all, it wasn’t every day you got an invitation from a girl-barrow that missed you. Laughing, he walked out the door of his dorm room.