Authors: Michael Byrnes
“And this?” She crouched to get a better look at a massive limestone block etched with ornamental rosettes and hatch patterns.
He walked over to her and read the Hebrew placard. “Apparently, that’s going to be the Third Temple’s cornerstone.”
“These designs . . . ,” she said, pressing her face closer to the etchings. “Look familiar?”
Drawing nearer, he saw what she meant. “Same as the ossuary I showed you today. Amazing.” More gears clicked in Amit’s mind. Jules’s suggestion of a tour was actually paying off.
Passing beneath a sign reading the holy of holies in Hebrew and English, they entered a final exhibit room and stood before the display that was its focal point. Dramatic orchestral music played low through hidden speakers. Here, a raised platform sat in the room’s center—empty.
“Not much to see
here,
” Jules said with a smirk.
Amit put his hands on his hips, assessing the space. “Well, before Herod’s temple was destroyed by the Romans,” he offered, “its most sacred room, the Holy of Holies, actually
had
been empty.”
“Why would the Jews build a temple around an empty shrine? That’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” he said. “What it had once contained wasn’t something that could ever be replaced.”
“And what was that?” But she noticed his attention had wandered, strangely enough, to the room’s faux stone block walls. “Hello?”
“My God,” he gasped. The short hairs on his neck bristled. “That’s it.”
She followed his eyes and wasn’t seeing a damn thing. “What do you mean,
it
?”
Now her failure to piece these things together was starting to disappoint him. But he needed to remind himself that he was dealing with an Egyptologist, not a biblical archaeologist. “The walls, Jules,” he calmly replied. “The ceiling, the floor?” He pointed to them in turn. “Look at the shape they form. Don’t you see it?”
Her frustration was setting in too as she scanned the space again. “What? You mean the squares?”
“The cube,” he sternly whispered. “This room is a cube. The ideal of perfection used in the design of the Tabernacle’s innermost sanctuary.
And
those vaults I showed you in Qumran.”
She shrugged. “Okay, I get it. They were cube shaped.”
“Exactly!” He anxiously eyed the empty platform at the room’s center one last time, then stared up at the surveillance camera mounted close to the ceiling. “We need to leave. Right now.”
Egypt
It was at Inshas Airport’s security gate where the problem began. Rabbi Cohen’s returning Peugeot hadn’t aroused suspicion, but the blue pickup truck following closely behind it had.
As instructed, Cohen and his driver waited in the car, idling in front of the lowered security barrier. A mustached guard stood by them while two others circled around the truck to question the driver and inspect the sizable wooden crate stowed in its bed.
Cohen had already explained to the Egyptians that his diplomatic privileges should not be questioned. He’d shown them his passport and the diplomatic papers that he maintained as a former member of the Knesset. But the stubborn guard wasn’t hearing any of it, and the rabbi knew why. Though Egypt showed no outward hostility toward Israel, the two still remained ideologically, politically, and theologically split—bitter enemies. And Cohen was no ordinary Israeli; he was a Hasid . . . a Hasid bringing a very suspicious package onto the airstrip.
Gazing out across the runways, he could see his blue-striped jet oriented directly toward Israel, exhaust haze streaming out from its running engines. Calculations ran through his head. How long would it take to break through the barrier, load the crate, and take off before the Egyptians could do anything to stop them? The place was heavily secured. But he was willing to gamble they wouldn’t risk shooting down an Israeli jet, no matter what they suspected was inside the crate.
Cohen turned in his seat, craning his neck to see what was happening behind them.
One guard stayed with the truck’s driver, machine gun at the ready.
The second guard was circling the truck’s cargo bed, scrutinizing the crate’s Arabic markings, which suggested that its contents were auto parts. The inspector pulled out a black security wand that blinked wildly as he ran it over the crate’s lid.
This caused more commotion as the guards began screaming back and forth to one another.
Cohen gritted his teeth. No matter what the cost, he’d be returning to Tel Aviv with the cargo. He spoke quietly to the driver in Hebrew. “You know what to do if this gets messy.”
The driver nodded. He let his hand drop slowly along the seat, ready to take up the Uzi concealed there.
The inspector paced back inside the security post and came out with a second device that Cohen couldn’t identify.
“If they even attempt to open the crate . . . ,” Cohen whispered to the driver.
With another subtle nod, the driver’s hand went down further along the seat.
Back at the truck’s rear, the guard fidgeted with the device, which looked like some kind of handheld vacuum. Once it powered on, he used the thing to scan the top and sides of the crate.
Cohen’s hands curled into fists.
After a few more sweeps, the inspector finally yelled out his findings in Arabic to the mustached guard who’d taken a post at the car. Though the man’s accent was thick, Cohen could make out that he was saying everything seemed all right—then something about there being no radioactive material.
The mustached guard slung his machine gun over his shoulder and bent down along the Peugeot’s window. “We cannot be too careful these days,” he said by way of a mediocre apology. “You are free to go.”
The security gate opened and the car moved forward, followed by the blue pickup.
Unclenching his fists, Cohen breathed a sigh of relief and checked his watch—almost three p.m. The unanticipated complications in packaging the relic had substantially delayed their departure. Difficult to fault the priests (the relic’s custodians), since the meticulous protocols hadn’t been carried out in almost two millennia.
Regardless, within an hour they’d arrive in Tel Aviv, with the crate. He’d then instruct the pilot to continue on directly to Rome, where another urgent delivery would be awaiting pickup.
Vatican City
Following the leisurely two-and-a-half-hour lunch, Father Martin brought Donovan to the Swiss Guard security office. There he made good on his promise to help restore Donovan’s clearances to the Secret Archives, the clerical offices of the Apostolic Palace and the Palace of the Governorate, the museums, and the various administrative buildings throughout Vatican City.
Though Donovan acted outwardly enthusiastic about Martin’s offer to arrange meetings for the following morning with the archbishop in charge of the Pontifical Commission, as well as the inspector general of the Corpo della Gendarmeria (Vatican City’s police force in charge of general security and criminal investigations), he was most interested in performing an investigation of his own—an investigation that would commence at the heart of Vatican City: St. Peter’s Basilica.
Donovan knew little about the cunning enemies he was dealing with. Nevertheless, of one thing he was certain. The critical information they’d been given could only have come from someone inside Vatican City. And earlier that afternoon, he’d very discreetly sprung a trap to test his hypothesis.
***
Donovan didn’t use his new key card to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, since his last after-hours visit there back in June had left a digital trail in the security center’s activity log. And what needed to be done here required utmost furtiveness.
At six thirty, he came in the grand front entrance, just like every other tourist. And for the next half hour, he slowly paced the voluminous nave and transepts, reacquainting himself with the shrines and statues, which spoke to him like old friends.
Soon the docents announced the basilica’s seven p.m. closing and began shepherding everyone outside. That’s when Donovan nonchalantly slipped through the balustrade leading to the deep grotto set at the foot of the main altar, beneath Bernini’s towering baldachino.
He moved quickly down the semicircular marble steps, past St. Peter’s shrine and the Confessio set before it, back beneath the mammoth white plaster-covered arches supporting the basilica’s main floor. Deeper he went into the underground graveyard where late popes and dignitaries had been laid to rest in massive sarcophagi and elaborate crypts, until he came to the tomb of Benedict XV.
Looking back over his tracks, he made sure he still had a straight sight line to the Confessio and St. Peter’s shrine. Then he crouched beside the mammoth
cippolino
marble sarcophagus topped by an incredibly lifelike bronze effigy of the late pope laid in state.
It took another fifteen minutes before he heard a docent descend the steps for a final run-through. Staying low, Donovan quietly shifted around the tomb’s base to stay out of view as the docent roved past, whistling.
Five minutes later, the sconces throughout the grottoes dimmed to blackness, and security lights glowed gently in the necropolis’s main corridors.
Now he would wait.
If the four-course meal served up at the Apostolic Palace—antipasti, braciole,
zuppa di faro,
and
linguine al pescatore
—hadn’t made Charlotte’s eyelids heavy, the two glasses of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo certainly had. She’d endured the most stressful day of her life, short of the hellish Monday back in March when her oncologist first told her she had bone cancer.
So while Father Donovan sorted out the administrative details of his return to Vatican City, she’d returned to the dormitory, emotionally drained and physically spent. Though it violated her cardinal rule for skipping multiple time zones—
immediately acclimate to the local time and let your body adjust
—she surrendered to a late afternoon nap.
When the alarm clock went off around six p.m., she hit the snooze button three times, then shut it off altogether.
Her sleep was deep, yet far from peaceful.
Images of Evan’s murder kept cycling through her subconscious— oddly, in black and white, as if it were a movie from the forties: the strange gunman disguised as a lab tech . . . the gun arcing up at Evan . . . the silent shot ...Evan’s head snapping forward in slow motion ... a gush of black liquid ... falling ... falling ...
She could see herself, there in the office, screaming through the deafening silence. Helpless.
Wake up... WAKE UP!
. . . The gunman turns to her, two words growling from his twisted lips:
“The bones!”
...
Then Donovan sitting in the Volvo, calmly saying, “The bones? Why would they want the bones?” ’
...Cut to chromosomes furiously replicating and dividing in microscope view to the roar of unearthly shrieking and howling . . . souls tormented by hellfire . . .
Silence.
Next: blackness giving way to blinding light.
A skeleton on a stainless steel table.
Gouged ribs.
Ground-up bones around the wrists and feet.
Broken knee bones.
...A leather whip streaming through the air—
WHOOOOSH
—its barbed thongs tearing across bare flesh . . . blood spilling out from long, ragged gashes . . .
again
... slashing ...
again
... ripping ...
again
... shredding ...
A sturdy wooden beam laid upon rocks . . . a bloodied, semi-naked figure splayed across it . . . indiscernible shapes shifting through the surrounding thick haze . . . limbs pulled and stretched over the wood . . . sinewy fingers clamping down . . . more hands clutching jagged spikes . . . silent screams . . . pressure on the wrists . . . a hammer cutting the air . . .
WAKE UP!
Charlotte awoke with a start.
Though the images in her nightmare had instantly disappeared, the pressure on her wrists had not—a sharp pain bolted up to her shoulders.
There was an instant where she thought she was still dreaming. But the pain—the terror—was all too real.
When she tried to scream, an enormous hand came down over her mouth and nose. She detected some kind of fabric against her lips and nostrils, the pungent smell of chemicals.
The broad-shouldered man came into her sights as he jumped onto the bed, straddling her stomach. The one who’d broken through her office door! The gunman who’d murdered Evan! Recoiling, she tried to kick, to flail, to bite. But any resistance was ineffectual.
Through blurring vision, she spotted the second intruder only an instant later, turning the door lock, racing over.
...Can’t breathe...
Her starving lungs struggled for air, only to pull in more chemicals, their smell much sharper this time.
Within seconds, a numb pressure settled over her limbs and torso, as if concrete was being poured over her body. Her head felt impossibly heavy—woozy.
The hand fell away from her face.
As they lifted her from the bed, her head fell limply back. The last thing she saw was the crucifix nailed above the headboard.
Then her field of vision telescoped backward. Total blackness.
The Temple Mount
Ghalib’s searing caramel irises glared out the window at the Dome of the Rock, his wiry fingers steepled beneath his chin. The lights circling the shrine’s cupola made King Hussein’s gold leaf blaze against the darken
ing sky—a magnificent juxtaposition. It pleased him immensely to know that Israelis from all over Jerusalem and its surrounding hills could see this most potent symbol of Islam’s occupation of the world’s most sacred ground—this fiery torch lighting the darkness.
Oh, the fury the Jews must endure as they weep in the valley below.
But never could this victory be taken for granted. And that was exactly what the Waqf had done: shirked their duties. Oversight of the Temple Mount was not limited to mere religious functions. This place was a fortress that needed to be closely guarded. The preeminent post within the Waqf was that of Keeper. Just as the name implied, by accepting this assignment, Ghalib had sworn to preserve Islam’s foothold not only in Jerusalem, but throughout God’s world.