Silver

23

He wore the dagger in a ceremonial sheath nestled beneath his left armpit.

The crowds cheered and waved their flags as they pressed up against the barriers, hoping to get a glimpse of the Pope. The noise of the people sent a thrill through his skin. It had been so long in the planning, so long since there had been honesty in the world. But it was coming. It was close. And when it returned they would have something to see.

His fingers strayed toward the dagger. He felt its weight so close to his heart. It wasn’t an ominous weight. It wasn’t portentous. Like his task today, it was an honest weight.

They had found the silver dagger in one of the suicide tombs unearthed by the earthquake at Masada. It had been returned to them while the world adjusted to the new millennium. No truth can lay hidden forever. That is the way of great truths.

The tomb had contained the desiccated skeletal remains of a man, along with a document. They had no way of knowing exactly what the roll of papyrus actually was, what it said and whose words they were, because by the time they had unearthed it, it had been in such a wretched condition the individual folios had fused together, forming a thick pulp.

But they had suspicions.

How could they not?

The world knew what had happened as the Roman legions had built their ramp up the side of the mountainside of Masada. It was the last fortress of the Sicarii, the freedom fighters bound to the service of the bloodline of the true Messiah, Judas Iscariot.

And on the day when they took their own lives and ended the bloodline, it had been home to Menahem ben Jair and his brother Eleazar, the grandsons of Iscariot. If either of them had penned the testimony, the wisdom it contained would be priceless. What truths might it contain?

But the papyrus was ruined beyond anything they had the resources to salvage. Mabus had wanted to try anyway. They had skills, they could find people they could trust. But the other man-the one who had taken the name Akim Caspi after they had found the dagger-had said no, that they could not risk the truth, so long lost, being destroyed.

Caspi had brought the truth to him, and entrusted the silver dagger to his care. He welcomed the truth, pledging himself to the Disciples of Judas. They didn’t know the secret of the blade until they deciphered the Testimony.

They had turned it over to the Vatican’s experts, knowing even as they did that there was no way the Church of Lies would release the truth it contained. That meant they would have to steal it back, but not until it had been restored and translated. It had involved careful thought and planning, like everything else, but because it was driven by truth, God had seen them through. Of course, he had never doubted. Why would He not want the truth known? After all it was His truth. They had put their own man on the inside, a priest who worked in the library. He monitored the restoration, then, anted ext was ready to be deciphered, sent word to Caspi so he could send in his own expert to oversee the translation and spirit the Testimony out of the Vatican before the truth could be buried again.

The first revelation was its writer. What they had discovered in the hidden tomb was no less than the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair, grandson of Judas Iscariot, founder of the Sicarii zealots. Menahem ben Jair was the grandson of the true Messiah.

The second revelation came in the body of the text itself. Learning the truth had not been easy. There were levels of truth in the words: first the bloodline itself, Menahem son of Jair, Jair son of Judas and Mary, the same Mary Magdalene the Church of Lies had painted as a harlot. The truth played out in the garden at Gethsemane, where he begged Judas to stay strong, to deliver him to the Romans, knowing to do so would break his friend. How could any man ask someone who loved him to deliver him to death? Still faithful to his friend, Judas shared that last kiss knowing he was damning himself because of the guilt he felt; because he knew he would not be able to live with it.

He never met the son he fathered. But instead of being father of one he proved himself father of many. In that act of love not merely was Judas a saved man, he became the Messiah, the true Messiah in the Judaic tradition, the man whose sacrifice bought salvation for his people, the man who reunited them and offered them peace. There was nothing about Jesus, the Christian Messiah, being God the Father come to earth in the skin of a mortal man. The truths differed starkly.

This was the truth that Menahem had cherished and held close, the promise he had made to Jair that he would never forget his grandfather’s story, and in turn would not let the world forget. From that promise he had forged the Sicarii, men of the dagger, named for his grandfather’s sacrifice.

The third secret had been the forging of the dagger, what it was made from and the truth it represented. The blade had been fashioned by Eleazar and Menahem in the armory of Masada from the silver shekels paid to Judas Iscariot, the coins that bought the sacrifice-for it was not a betrayal, not remotely, it was a sacrifice-that an entire religion was founded upon.

Even for its age, the dagger forged by Eleazar ben Jair was an exquisite piece of craftsmanship. To think this silver had been held by the true Messiah.

Again his hand strayed to the dagger at his side, lingering over the blade.

He wished he could read its story with his touch.

He wished he could understand it all.

Akim Caspi had found him in Geneva. He was young, impressionable, ripe to be imprinted with idealism. He had been drawn to Caspi. The man was enigmatic, but more than that he was inspirational. He talked about the lies of Matthew, whose Gospel sought to force the truth of Judas into fitting some Old Testament prophecy and how the Bible itself contradicted the death of Judas Iscariot. In the Acts of the Apostles he is said to have fallen down head first in a field and burst asunder in Akeldama, the field of blood. Matthew had Judas hang himself from a tree-and in doing so doom himself as a suicide to exile from heaven. He listened while Akim Caspi talked with such passion about how Matthew’s words sought to bury the truth, how so much of these lies of the Church was founded upon were the reworkings of reality. Why paint Mary Magdalene as a whore if not to take away her importance to the true Messiah? Why not even mention Judas, most loyal, most beloved at all, in the Gospel of Peter?

That Peter did not mention Judas of course led others to believe the silver itself could not exist if the man himself didn’t; after all, how could you buy betrayal from a man who had never walked the earth?

But why would anyone be surprised by this? Victors wrote the words remembered by posterity, which is why the Testimony of Menahem ben Jair was so fundamental to what Caspi believed. It was more than just words; it was the truth delivered first hand, truth that supported the Gospel of Judas itself. Jesus told Judas: You shall be cursed for generations. You will come to rule over them. You will exceed all of them, for you will sacrifice the man that clothes me. Matthew and Mark excoriate Judas: Alas for that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.But who gains from these lies? the would-be assassin asked himself. Who gains from these twisted truths?

Caspi had been passionate in his sharing, and he clearly believed his truth. And even now, with the white Mercedes Benz nearing the stage, the young Swiss Guard knew it was a truth worth believing.

It was a truth that made his heart race, his skin creep with anticipation. It was a truth that the world needed to know, needed to understand, simply because it was honest.

It had taken almost a year before Caspi had shared his plan with him.

It was a simple plan, filled with tragic symmetry.

Two millennia after the silver brought about the death of Jesus those same coins, melded now into the form of a dagger, would be used to kill the Bishop in white, the Pope of the Church of Lies. If Matthew wanted to twist lies about the Messiah to fit prophecies from Zechariah, then they would take prophecies of their own, from every man who had predicted the rise of the Antichrist, and use this death of the False Father to prove these prophecies true.

There were patterns within the patterns. The Prophecy of the Popes given by Malachy, the 12^th-century Bishop of Armagh, offered 112 future Popes, according each an enigmatic phrase to identify them. The list, like all so-called prophecies, was enigmatic and open to interpretation, but there were truths in it that Caspi had identified. Truths that helped him believe their path was preordained, that now was the time. Those short phrases were important: Paul VI, Flower of Flowers; John Paul I, the Middleness of the Moon; John Paul II, the Labor of the Sun; Benedict XVI, the Glory of the Olive; and finally, the 112th name on the list, the final Pope, Petrus Romanus.

The signs all pointed to the truth. The Flower of Flowers bore the Fleur-de-lis on his coat of arms, the flower of purity and chastity. The Middleness of the Moon, Albino Luciani as he was born in Belluno, so close to bela luna, Beautiful Moon, reigned for only 33 days, dying before the new moon. The Labor of the Sun, born and died within a solar eclipse. The Glory of the Olive that would bring peace to a troubled world by demanding a sovereign state for Palestine, one might have reasonably thought, yet Caspi taught him otherwise. The Glory of the Olive, he argued, was the glory of the Olivet Discourse in the Gospel of Matthew, that the time of Tribulation was at hand. The prophecy of the Popes led them by the hand to the truth, that the true Messiah’s return was at hand, the one who was everything this Christ of the Christians was not.

The car turned into the square and the faithful began to cheer.

His heart burned with the birth of the truth.

Soon the world would know.

Soon.