Authors: Michael Byrnes
Another low-flying helicopter made the cupola rattle. Cohen’s anxiety visibly deepened.
Eyeing the Ark again, she fished for another question. “And the two angels on the lid? What are they?”
His reply was curt: “Each is a depiction of the winged female goddess that embodied the harmony of creation: Ma’at. But that is enough, Charlotte. It is time to proceed. Kneel before the Ark,” Cohen urged her in an appeasing tone. “Then I want you to remove the lid.”
She took a step back and held up her hands. “You’re a good storyteller. I’ll give you that. But I’m not on board with this whole end-of-times thing you’ve got going on here—”
“I’d hate to have to drug you and pull your hands like a puppet,” he soberly replied. “After all that we have gone through to get here . . .” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “One way or another, the Ark is going to be opened,” he flatly stated. “After all that you’ve sacrificed, and after all the hidden truths I’ve just shared with you, wouldn’t you like to be awake to see with your own eyes the secrets of the universe? Wouldn’t you like to see what Moses carried off from the Egyptians? Don’t you long to know that everything that has happened to you has had a purpose—a divine design? Do you think God is in you by accident?”
She didn’t know what to say. Her reluctance was starting to dissolve.
“You must be very curious as to what we’ve protected for so many centuries, no?”
Perhaps he was right, but she could tell that his curiosity easily trumped hers. The guy was practically jumping out of his skin. If this was the real deal ...
Then, as she looked back at the lid, a plan began unfolding in her mind. “Fine. Let’s open it.” Now she was the one going all-in at the poker table. However, the real question loomed large: was
he
bluffing?
Cohen’s face softened with a smile. “Handle it carefully,” he reminded her.
This wasn’t the first time she’d been asked to open Pandora’s box. Granted, the Vatican’s approach had been more pragmatic. As she eased down onto her knees before the Ark, her heart was jackhammering behind her breastbone. Now she began a silent prayer of her own. She could feel the rabbi drawing close behind her to watch over the ritual, and the final part of her plan fell into place. “Won’t this be too heavy?” she asked, hesitating and eyeing the lid. “It’s gold, right?”
“A thin gold sheathing covering acacia wood. A purposeful design, since the Israelite priests would’ve been incapable of carrying a solid gold box of this size. You’ll have no problems.”
Charlotte looked around for any opportunity to escape, but the two surviving gunmen were posted on opposing sides of the shrine, behind the rock’s cordons. And they were watching vigilantly.
“I beseech You, O Lord,” Cohen chanted in Hebrew, raising his hands up. “Grant atonement for the sins, iniquities, and transgressions that the entire house of Israel has committed against You. As it is written in the books of your servants Moses and Jesus, atonement shall be made for You on this day to purify all sins. Before the Lord shall we be purified.”
The priests unanimously responded with “Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom, forever and ever.”
Charlotte reached out and positioned both hands on the short sides of the lid, the tingling sensation coursing up through her fingers.
Cohen watched in astonishment as Charlotte’s hands spread over the elaborate lid—the
Kaporet
(“atonement piece”) or Mercy Seat. His focus homed in on the void beneath the outstretched wings of the gilded cherubim. For there, God’s presence, the Shechinah, would begin to converge to reign over Abraham’s altar, to judge and purify—to speak to humankind and provide guidance and law.
Curling her fingers tight under the lid’s braided rim, Charlotte took a deep breath and applied pressure.
At first, the Ark’s lid resisted.
Charlotte dug her fingers in tighter until they turned white.
Then came a muffled
pop
, followed by the hissing sound of escaping gas. The sound immediately brought a flashback of her and Dr. Giovanni Bersei’s opening Jesus’s ossuary in the Vatican Museums.
Another incredibly preserved ancient seal had just been breached.
As the lid unseated from the Ark, Charlotte could already detect a faint glow emanating from deep within, forming a rectangular halo around the lid. At the same time, the tingling sensations had quickly migrated up her arms and spread into her chest. Now her curiosity was giving way to a raw, primordial terror that signaled danger.
Her eyes went wide as the void beneath the wings of the cherubim began to noticeably change—the distortion she’d detected the first time she’d touched the Ark. Like a tiny, gathering cloud, something was forming there. Mist? Smoke?
The rabbi’s excitement built with the Ark’s response. “Few have ever laid eyes upon this wonder. Moses, David, Solomon . . . Behold!”
Eyes fixated on the opaque orb, Charlotte detected a brilliant white glow at its core—a pinpoint of light that burned with the blinding intensity of a welder’s torch.
An electrostatic energy began to build, lifting short strands along her hairline. The atmosphere was changing.
Impossible.
Adrenaline poured through her system, threatening panic. But the tingling that had spread through her entire body brought forth a sudden transformation—an inexplicable calm.
“Now see what is inside,” Cohen urged her.
Tearing her attention from the orb, she reared up on her haunches to see what she’d uncovered, carefully resting the lid upon her lap.
On the right of the Ark’s interior were indeed neatly piled stone tablets—though it appeared to be hieroglyphs that covered them, not some form of ancient Hebrew as legend suggested. Laid atop them was a beautiful gold, gem-encrusted scepter in the shape of a serpent, its tail straightened along the short staff and coiling near the top to its fanged head, an ankh between its eyes.
But Charlotte was transfixed by the source of the most unearthly luminescence being generated on the Ark’s interior left half—a neatly packed human skeleton. And the eye sockets of its smooth skull were glaring directly up at her.
“Moshe
,
”
Cohen gasped in vindication. “Moses,” he repeated for Charlotte’s benefit.
Could it be?
Charlotte wondered.
He began reciting Deuteronomy 34: “ ‘Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo and the Lord showed him all the land . . . saying: “This is the land I promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you will not cross into it.” So Moses died there as the Lord had said. God buried him in the valley and no one to this day knows where his grave is. Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eyes were not weak, and his vitality had not left him.’ ”
She stared at the bones during his utterance. “So God interred Moses in the Ark?”
“Yes, Charlotte,” he replied, remaining behind her. “But notice in the words I just spoke that the Torah states that Moses did not die from physical ailment. He was a perfectly healthy one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old with the body of a young man.”
“So either he killed himself,” she surmised, “or . . . God killed him?”
“God
sacrificed
Moses’s body to free his spirit for the next realm,” he said in a soft tone. “The covenant—the
Testimony
—isn’t just the laws written on those tablets. It is an elevation of the human spirit to a boundless existence. These remains left behind—Moses’s
bones,
” he said, pointing inside the Ark, “are a physical connection to the most sacred legacy. The bones are the vessel through which the Testimony had been passed on to the next Messiah.”
“Jesus?”
He nodded. “And when the Spirit passed into Jesus, he preached the Lord’s word, then sacrificed himself atop Golgotha to seal the covenant God had spoken through Him—the Second Covenant. Or if you prefer, the New Testament.”
“I don’t remember Jesus willingly killing himself,” Charlotte countered. “Judas betrayed Him.” There was that whole story about Gethsemane when soldiers came to arrest him.
Cohen smiled. “Misinterpretation,” he sternly replied. “Judas was an Essene, certainly no traitor. Jesus sent him to the Sanhedrin to facilitate the final sacrifice.”
“That can’t be right,” she insisted.
“Oh?” He tilted his head. “I ask you, then: when Jesus named his betrayer at the final meal, did the other disciples try to stop Judas?”
Good point,
she thought. “No.”
“In fact, they all went to the Mount of Olives to await the Temple Authority, just as Jesus had planned. The words are there, yet the truth is missed,” he said. “Another reason why the oral legacy is so vital.” He made a ball of his fist. “If one reads the texts according to their historical context, the Bible tells a most remarkable story of human existence, an evolution of spirituality that shifted from metaphorical rituals of animal sacrifice in the First Covenant to the slaughter of our own egos and pride that God taught through Jesus in His Second Covenant—the metaphors transformed into parables. Now we herald a Third Covenant.” He spread his hands over her head to indicate the glowing orb.
Charlotte watched as one of the priests presented something to Cohen —shiny, long.
“But like each of its predecessors, the New Covenant begins with blood. Sacred blood.”
Enoch snapped some bullets out of the spare magazine to fill the empty slots in Amit’s Galil and flipped the safeties off. He then insisted on going through the door first. His rationale was sound: “I’m a much smaller target,” he told Amit. “Standard protocol.”
Point taken. “Fine. I’ve got the right,” Amit said.
“Okay.”
“Just don’t shoot the hostage this time,” Amit teased. During one of the Gaza raids, Enoch had planted three rounds in the buttocks of an Israeli diplomat.
“Funny,” he grunted.
“You scared?”
“Scared shitless,” he responded with a big smile.
“Godspeed, my friend,” Amit said, clasping his friend’s hand.
Since there were no exterior handles or knobs, Amit wedged his fingertips under the left door’s vertical stop and squeezed slightly to lever the door just enough to confirm that the lock was indeed breached.
In a sideways stance, Enoch was a meter from the door, weapon raised to his sodden right shoulder. His left hand stabilized the muzzle along his sight line, and his right index finger was hooked at the ready on the trigger—hunt-and-scope mode. Rolling his neck, he drew breath, held it, and signaled to Amit.
Before Charlotte could turn to get a better look at what Cohen had in his right hand, the fingers of his left hand had snaked through her hair and cranked her head back. A knee simultaneously jammed into her spine.
“Before the Lord shall we be purified!” he declared, his bestial eyes riveted to the bare flesh of her neck.
Now she had an upside-down view of the meaty gold blade Cohen was bringing down over her throat in preparation for a broad slice.
Just as her fingers clutched the glowing Mercy Seat, there came a loud disturbance from behind, immediately followed by gunfire.
The rabbi’s face showed surprise, but his gaze did not falter. He bared his teeth and prepared to cut her to the bone, to seal the covenant—at any cost.
But Charlotte had a different plan. As he crouched deeper to position the blade for a long, sweeping slash, she swung the Ark’s lid up into his face. It was unavoidable that the blade would cut her. How deep was the only uncertainty.
The sharp-edged wings of the gilded angels caught him below the chin. Crackling tendrils spat across the sphere’s surface and webbed over his face. Instinctively, he dropped the dagger midpull as his hands went for the lid.
Charlotte rolled out from under him, clutching at the blood spewing from the left side of her neck.
Grasping both sides of the lid like a serving tray, Cohen tried to throw the thing away, but the light held him steady between the angels, physically grasping at him, pulling his face forward. Shrieking in pain, he tried shaking his head free, but to no avail. The beard, earlocks, and hair sizzled away almost instantly. Then the light turned on the flesh, unfastening it, stretching it from the bones of his face, tearing it away in wet slabs.
More agonizing screams; tremors shaking the body . . .
Simultaneously, Cohen’s hands succumbed to the fury, the flesh rising up into horrid boils that blackened and split to release the ghastly red-brown ooze beneath. He fell to his knees before the Ark, pitching forward so that the lid fell back into place on the Ark’s base. Beneath the vestments, the entirety of his body was roasted within seconds, his organs bursting.
Then the robes went up in flames.
The light did not relinquish its hold until Cohen’s entire body had burned so fiercely that the gold frontlet and breastplate had melted into his blackened bones. Only then did the blinding glow subside and let the hideous remains slide onto the rock.
The fetid stench of burnt hair and flesh had Charlotte gagging as she scrambled away on hands and knees, blood trailing beneath her in splotches. The room seemed to be spinning as she struggled for air. How deep had Cohen cut her?
When she lifted her eyes and tried to get to her feet, her spotty vision captured one of the blue-suited gunmen in triplicate. He was pinned down behind one of the huge marble columns supporting the cupola. He swung his machine gun at her, his face snarling with hate. In that instant, she knew that her luck had run out.
She hoped that Cohen had been right—that God did have a plan for everything, that her life had meant something or had some divine destiny. Perhaps, as Donovan had suggested, in death there’d be another realm where the spirit would defy the flesh and roam free . . .
Knowing she’d cheated death one too many times, Charlotte Hennesey shut her eyes in peaceful surrender, just before she heard the gun let loose its fury.