Authors: Michael Byrnes
“Keep moving. I’m right behind you.”
In the front corner of the upper chamber, empty polyethylene toolboxes and storage bins were stacked three high. The clunky radar unit was parked in front of it all, next to a small generator. Behind the organized clutter, a sizable gap ensured there would be no contact with the chamber walls. But now, contact had been made—not by the gear, but by Jules and Amit as they squeezed in tight to shield themselves. Since the stack was barely a meter in height, Jules was practically flat against the cool stone floor. Amit could only fit sideways, lying on his left side.
Amit’s head peeked out the side just enough to monitor the shadows playing across the floor in front of the passage opening. Thus far, it sounded like only one set of footsteps. A looter, he guessed. His fingers wrapped tighter around the handle of a hefty pickax he’d grabbed from a tool rack. It would only be a matter of time before . . .
The scuffing sounds grew louder as the dark silhouette stretched in front of the passage.
The intruder was coming.
Amit craned his head back at Jules and signaled for her to stay low. Keeping his head out of view, his ears fixed on the footsteps to monitor the movement.
Chssst, chsst.
Pause.
Chssst, chssst,... chssst, chsst.
The intruder was now in the chamber. Amit hoped his decoy would divert any search behind the boxes.
Then he could hear the quiet footsteps easing down the steps toward the loud voice spouting academic jargon in the lower chamber.
Waiting till he counted seven footfalls, Amit quietly got up on his haunches and crawled over to the steps, careful not to let the pickax scrape along the stone. It wouldn’t take long for the looter to realize that the lower chamber was empty and that a small digital recorder was playing back Amit’s dictation at high volume from the bottom of the bathing pit.
The intruder figured it out sooner than expected. Amit heard a gruff male voice curse in Hebrew, then footsteps rushing back to the steps. He dropped the pickax and scrambled for the stone slab set just beside the hole. With all his might he began pushing the slab over the opening.
The first muffled spitting sound confused Amit as something ricocheted off the edge of the slab, taking a chunk of the stone with it. It took a split second for it to sink in: the man was shooting at him! The gun was equipped with a silencer—not what he’d expect from a run-of-the-mill grave robber. “Jules! Get out of here! He’s got a gun!” he yelled.
The feet were rushing up the steps. No time to think. Amit gave another huge push and the stone fell into place.
Another obscenity came from below.
The archaeologist’s eyes darted around for something to pull over the top of the slab. Nothing heavy enough to keep the man trapped for long.
The slab suddenly fractured in the middle. Once. Twice. Each time with a
thwunk.
The guy was shooting it to pieces. Amit didn’t bother with the pickax, but grabbed his flashlight and doused the lights.
Jules was already in the outer chamber as Amit began scurrying through the passage on all fours. “Don’t wait! Go!” he screamed to her.
With flashlight in hand, Jules dashed into the tunnel.
Amit killed the lights in the front chamber too, then flicked on his flashlight. From the other side of the passage, he could hear the large pieces of slab tumbling onto the floor. He raced down the tunnel.
Up ahead, Amit spotted Jules. She was regrouping from a nasty fall, blood pouring down her right knee. “Keep moving!”
He caught up to her as she was beginning to make her way down the ladder, raw fear glinting in her eyes. “I want you to run as fast as you can, back the way we came,” he instructed in a low voice. “And zigzag. Don’t run in a line. Turn off the flashlight when you’ve made it out about fifty meters.”
She nodded quickly. He liked the fact that she knew when wisecracking wasn’t appropriate.
Amit was already a third of the way down the ladder when Jules hit the ground running. She looked back over her shoulder and paused when she saw that he wasn’t following her.
“Go!”
Luckily, she listened.
There was a sharp bend to the cliff wall, just beneath the outcropping that formed a rim beneath the cave. Immediately switching off his light, Amit threw his back up against the stone face behind the ladder. He hoped the intruder wouldn’t see him there.
As she sprinted through the gorge, Jules’s flashlight cut side to side, up and down.
Go, Jules, go.
She seemed even faster than his intern Ariel.
Then the gun spat overhead.
Dread came over Amit when he saw Jules stumble . . . no, not stumble. The shot must have pinged off something in front of her, forcing her to duck and weave. Then her flashlight disappeared. And so did Jules—swallowed by the dark gorge.
Another curse echoed from above.
There was a long pause. Too long. Was the gunman trying to figure out where Amit had gone to?
But less than two minutes later, the man mounted the ladder to make his descent.
Amit made his move. He lunged forward, throwing both hands against the ladder. It took everything he had to lever the man’s weight away from the wall. The gun swung as the ladder teetered sideways.
The gunman landed flat on his back against some jagged stones and let out a moan. The ladder came down right on top of him, trapping his gun hand between its rungs.
Then the dazed assassin—dressed all in black, including a mask—was scrambling beneath the ladder, trying to train the gun on the giant Israeli target. That’s when the C-4 the assassin had planted throughout the chambers, tunnel, and cave opening detonated.
Amidst a pulsing rush of orange fire, rock and debris shot out from the cave opening, the blast rumbling like a thunderclap through the gorge. The powerful shock wave pulled Amit off his feet and landed him right on top of the ladder, his mass instantly snapping the gunman’s protruding forearm between the rungs. The broken limb bent unnaturally to one side, a spear of bloody bone jutting through the black sleeve. The man howled in pain.
Amit covered his head with his hands. Rocks showered down on him, pounding his back. When the deluge ended, he quickly looked up to see that the gunman was struggling to use his good arm to retrieve the fumbled handgun.
Amit got to the gun first. Then came the rage.
“Stay where you are!” he shouted in Hebrew, pointing the gun at the man’s face. The weapon felt very familiar. The man’s dropped flashlight sat beside them, and Amit could see the blood seeping out of a tear in the mask where the man had taken a stone to the head. He reached down to pull off the man’s hood. As it loosened from under his shirt the man reached to his hip for a knife.
As the blade darted quickly into the light, Amit reacted, throwing out his free hand to grab the wrist. Instinct and adrenaline told him to shoot the man. Instead, he brought the gun up high and slammed it against the man’s head where the rock had started the job. He went out cold.
Amit peeled back the mask and tried to place the face. The guy was young, maybe mid-twenties—appeared to be an Israeli. A quick search of his pockets yielded no identification. Nothing but two magazines full of ammo. He pocketed them.
Amit wasn’t about to pull him down the gorge. And forget about calling the authorities. Qumran was situated in the West Bank, policed by the Palestinian Authority. He knew the political kowtowing he’d endured just to get permission for these excavations. The last thing he needed was to be connected to an explosion and a rogue Israeli hit man.
He took out his cell phone, swapped the gun for the flashlight, and snapped a mediocre picture of the man’s face.
Folding the phone, he slid it into his pocket and picked up the gun. Dismay came fast as he pointed the flashlight up through the heavy dust. The blast had completely collapsed the cave. He had to remind himself that the scrolls still remained—that he and Jules were still alive.
But it crushed him to see that the discovery of a lifetime had just been obliterated.
And he was determined to find out why.
Jerusalem
Despite the high-speed connection with an IP address assigned to an Internet café located in Phoenix, Arizona, the streaming data feed had taken over three hours to finish. The entirety of the data stored on the American geneticist’s laptop had been transferred to a new hard drive located in Jerusalem’s Old City, in an office beneath the Temple Institute’s unassuming museum gallery in the Jewish Quarter.
The delay had been prolonged by the sophisticated encryption and password protection layers that had locked down the hard drive. However, highly secretive code-breaking algorithms were standard issue on the mobile phones of field operatives.
Analysis of the computer’s contents had then been entrusted to the ever-capable, waiflike twenty-one-year-old computer whiz named Ziv.
“There’s an awful lot to look at here. So I began by sorting the files, pulling out all the program-specific stuff. I usually look at source tags first; tells me where data is originating,” she explained to Cohen. Beside her workstation—which, with its multiple plasma screens, armada of slim drive towers, and blinking lights, looked like command central for a space mission—the surly rabbi stood with arms crossed.
Cohen let the mousy computer genius spout some technical jargon. It seemed to give her confidence. And he needed her to stay motivated.
“And all these files here”—her wiry fingers tapped the keyboard at hyperspeed and a list came up on the center monitor—“caught my attention. Seems they all came off a server—an intranet actually.” Her eyes showed fatigue from the hours she’d spent staring into glowing plasma crystals, not to mention overt frustration at Rabbi Cohen’s keeping her well after the workday ended. It was already nine p.m., and he seemed to have no intention of quitting. The rabbi looked a bit edgy too, she thought.
Get on with it,
Cohen thought.
“Point is, they all originated from the same domain and country code: dot V-A.” She looked up at him with excited eyes, quickly realizing he didn’t get it. “That’s the server for Vatican City. Remember, you asked me to see if I could find anything unusual?”
The rabbi’s arms fell limp and his mouth dropped open. “You’re positive?”
“Oh yes. Couldn’t have come from anywhere else.”
“What kind of files are they?”
“Pictures mostly. Documents too.”
He leaned close to study the file names. When he saw some of the labels, he felt light-headed. Not only were the file details imprinted from Vatican City’s host server, the files were tagged with June dates—mere days after the ossuary’s theft from Jerusalem, and immediately preceding the date stamped on the ossuary’s shipping container when it was anonymously sent back to Jerusalem from a DHL office in Rome.
“Open this one,” he instructed, tapping the screen midway down the list.
Ziv worked the mouse and brought up the image. She made a sour face when it appeared in high resolution on the monitor. “Yikes. That’s creepy.”
The rabbi’s knees felt weak as he studied a clear snapshot of a complete skeleton laid out upon a black rubber mat. He could make out the sleek edges of a stainless steel table. Just as he’d suspected. The ossuary definitely hadn’t been empty.
The ancient texts of the priests are never wrong,
he thought
.
“I want to see all of them,” he said, voice quivering.
“Are you okay?” Three shades paler than usual, the rabbi looked like he’d seen a ghost.
He nodded without taking his eyes off the image.
“Pull up a chair,” Ziv said. “There’s actually a PowerPoint file here that has most of the pictures in a slide show.”
Ziv ran through the highly detailed PowerPoint presentation with the rabbi three times. And it was really starting to bother her. To say the images were disturbing would be an understatement.
The pictures had been marked up with a virtual pen to leave yellow highlights and circles around the areas of interest. Cohen had studied every detail: the skeleton’s gouged ribs; the ground-down bones joining at the wrists and feet, and the rust marks left there; the fractured knees. He spent little time on the image of three black, jagged spikes, even less on two coins laid side by side.
Shots of the ossuary from various angles had plenty of yellow “ink” pointing to the dolphin-and-trident relief on the side of the box. He could practically hear his grandfather screaming blasphemy from his grave.
Only minor highlights pointed to the less fascinating rosettes and hatch patterns carved into the ossuary’s front face and arched lid. Cohen couldn’t help but notice that the lid wasn’t cracked in these photos. Perhaps it had broken during its clandestine shipment from Rome?
There were slides with bullet points that no doubt summarized the study’s findings, which were detailed in the document files Ziv had pulled up. The message was clear: this first-century specimen, otherwise a picture of perfect health, had died from crucifixion. And patina tests performed on the ossuary reinforced the conclusion that he had been buried in Israel.
Beneath the Temple Mount
.
Where the Levites had purposely hidden his os
suary to fulfill the prophecies.
Now the prophecies had been jeopardized—a centuries-old plan, maliciously interrupted. By the Vatican, nonetheless.
The bullet point that spoke to ethnic origin listed one telling word: “UNKNOWN”—the rabbi’s worst fear confirmed. They’d analyzed the DNA. He didn’t even realize that he was loudly grinding his teeth.
Ziv took a two-minute break before the final viewing to stretch, pee, and refill her coffee mug. When she returned, the rabbi hadn’t budged. The haunted look in his eyes had only gotten worse.
At the moment, the rabbi was stuck on a most impressive digital recreation that used meticulous calculations of the laser-imaged skeleton to re-create what the thirtysomething man would have looked like prior to his brutal death.