The Book of Lies

5

Cal, you need to hurry,” the man with the ponytail called out across the park. “He’s starting t—”

“Ready!” shouted the one called Cal.

From the front seat of his sedan, Ellis stared through his windshield, watching the scene and knowing that coincidences this perfect were never just coincidences. Next to him, in the passenger seat, his dog rumbled and growled—first at the rain, then at the flashlight, the bobbing and glowing light-stick in the distance.

“Easy, girl. . . . Good girl,” Ellis whispered, patting his dog’s neck as they spied the two homeless volunteers shouting at the far end of the little park. Cal. One of them was named Cal. From this side of the park, it was hard to hear much. But Ellis heard enough.

“Zero seven eight, zero five, one one two zero,” yelled the ponytailed man.

Ellis pulled out the file folder the Judge’s office had put together and checked the Social Security number against the one on the pink sheet from Hong Kong. The driver picking up the Book of Lies: Harper, Lloyd.

Ellis’s amber eyes narrowed as his thick eyebrows drew together. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

He’d been following Lloyd for barely ten minutes—following the simpleminded courier just to make sure the shipment got through. But what Ellis had seen . . . when the flash of the gun erupted and Lloyd stumbled in the park . . . No, Lloyd wasn’t simpleminded at all. Lloyd Harper might not’ve known exactly what was inside, but he knew the value of what he was carrying. Ellis shouldn’t’ve been so surprised. His own father was a liar, too. And a far worse trickster.

The dog raised her head, always reading Ellis perfectly.

“I’m okay, girl,” he promised.

Across the dark park, there was a burst of light as the door of the van flew open. Ellis saw an older man with white hair— No. He had an open, boyish face and loose-jointed movements. Like a giant marionette out of sync. He was young. Young with white hair.

Ellis flipped through the pages, still rubbing his thumbnail across the corner of the file folder. White hair, twenty-eight years old. There it was. Known relatives. Calvin. Cal.

One of them was named Cal. And the way he was running—the shock and fear on his face as he came bursting out into the rainy night—Cal knew exactly whom he’d found.

For a moment, Ellis laughed to himself. Of course. It had to come back to father and son. Just as it began with Adam and Cain. Just as it was with Mitchell and Jerry Siegel.

It was the same when he’d first heard the truth about his own family—the lifelong lie his father had told him. In that instant, Ellis realized how much of his life was a construct. But Ellis wasn’t sad. He was thrilled. He knew he was meant for something bigger. No question, that’s why his mother left him the diary, the softbound journal with the water-stained leather cover.

For over a year he’d been studying the diary’s pages, absorbing the theories that his grandfather and great-grandfather—both Leadership officers—spent so many years working on. Throughout the books, his name was spelled differently—Cayin, Kayin, Kenite—depending on the translation and where the story originated. But there was no mistaking the world’s first murderer. Or the first man God forgave—and empowered. The man who held the secret of God’s true power.

Ellis still remembered—his hands shaking in the estate lawyer’s office—the first time he read the words his great-grandfather had written during his time at the Cairo Museum. Ellis had to go find a Bible—check the language himself. Like most, he’d grown up thinking Cain killed Abel with a stone. But as he flipped through the pages, speed-reading through chapter 4 of Genesis: “And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” That was all the Bible said. No mentions of stones or rocks or any sort of weapon.

Time and history added other ideas, filling texts with theories of clubs, sticks, and wooden staffs. The Zohar, the most important work of the Jewish Kabbalah movement, insisted that Cain bit Abel’s throat, which led others to proclaim Cain as the world’s first vampire. And in ancient Egypt, archaeologists found hieroglyphics depicting a weapon made from an animal’s jawbone and sharpened teeth.

It was this theory of the jawbone that filled up half the diary. Shakespeare wrote that Cain’s weapon was a jawbone, featuring it in Hamlet. Rembrandt depicted the same instrument in one of his portraits, even including Abel’s dog barking in the background.

But for Ellis’s Cairo-based great-grandfather, the real question was: How did this obscure theory from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics suddenly become such a rage in seventeenth-century Europe? For years, there was no logical explanation—until his great-grandfather read the story of a small group of Coptic monks who emigrated from Egypt to the north, where they hoped to hide the small but priceless object they’d stumbled upon. The object from God Himself.

Then the Leadership took interest. The group was new then. Untested. But extremely enthusiastic—like Ellis, especially now that he was so close.

There was only one thing in his way.

Across the park, Cal slid on his knees, his flashlight shining into Lloyd Harper’s terrified face.

A trickster, Ellis decided. Every family had a trickster.

In the passenger seat, Benoni cocked her head, which meant Ellis’s phone was about to—

The phone vibrated in Ellis’s pocket. Somehow the dog always knew.

“Officer Belasco,” Ellis answered as he readjusted the badge on his uniform.

“You still with the driver—what’s his name again?” the Judge asked.

“Lloyd,” Ellis replied, watching Cal’s father across the park and unable to shake the feeling that the bleeding old man was far more than just a driver.

“He get the Book yet?”

“Soon. He stopped for some help first,” Ellis said as he eyed just Cal.

In 1900, the Book—one writing called it a “carving,” another an “emblem”—whatever it was, it was stolen from the Leadership. Ellis’s grandfathers hunted it for decades, tracing it to father and son. Always father and son. And tonight, seeing Cal and his dad, Ellis finally understood how near the end was. All he had to do was wipe out these villains. Then Ellis—for himself, for his family—would finally be the hero.

“Is that concern in your voice?” the Judge asked.

“Not at all.” Ellis scratched Benoni’s nose, barely even hearing the ambulance siren that approached behind them. “Lloyd Harper can bring as many dogs as he wants into this fight. It won’t take much to put ’em down.”