The Sacred Blood

THE

SACRED BLOOD

A NOVEL

MICHAEL BYRNES

Brooklyn, 1967

******

“Today you come with me, Aaron,” Mordecai Cohen whispered, motioning for his son to stand. He gestured at the arched opening of a corridor leading behind the altar.

The thirteen-year-old’s gangly limbs froze. Glancing back over his shoulder, Aaron saw the last of the women coming down from the balcony and funneling out the synagogue’s front door. A hand tugged at his arm.

“Come,” his father repeated. “There’s nothing to fear, I assure you.” “I’m not afraid,” Aaron lied.

Mordecai splayed his hand between his son’s shoulder blades and urged

him up the main aisle of the sanctuary. “This is a very special day for you,

Aaron.”

“You are bringing me inside?”

“That’s right. Grandfather has asked to speak with you.” Aaron slid his trembling hands into the pockets of his black trousers. For as long as he could remember, following Saturday’s Shabbat services,

the ritual had always been the same. Father would send Aaron’s mother and four sisters home to prepare the fish and meats for the traditional Sabbath meal shalosh seudot, and then he’d disappear into a locked room situated behind the main altar. Meanwhile, Aaron would wait in the sanctuary and climb the steps to the balcony, even daringly approach the magnificent walnut cabinet, the Aron Ha-Kodesh, that housed the Torah scrolls and run his fingers along the cabinet’s intricate rosette carvings, stroke the smooth parokhet draped over its doors. An hour later, Father would emerge from the room and they’d discuss the Torah readings during their walk home.

But today, Aaron found himself being guided around the altar’s elevated pulpit, or bema, and entering a previously forbidden corridor that was long and painted with shadows. Deep in the darkness, a formidable oak door with a heavy brass dead bolt secured the synagogue’s most secret place.

Never had Father spoken of what lay beyond this door.

Never had Aaron asked why.

Mordecai placed a hand on the knob, hesitated, and turned to his son.

“Ready?”

Aaron looked up at him. At this moment, Father appeared much younger than before, his graying beard and earlocks darkened by the shadows, the hard creases round his blue-green eyes seemingly smoothed away. And his expression was one that Aaron would never forget: pride and solidarity intermingled with trepidation. They were two men about to embark on a journey.

“Ready,” Aaron tremulously replied, the thumping in his chest so fierce it resonated in his ears.

Mordecai rapped twice with his knuckles, then turned the doorknob. He eased the door open and held out his hand. “Inside, son.”

The sweet smell of incense rushed into Aaron’s nostrils as he stepped over the threshold. The space that lay beyond the door was more mystifying than he’d ever imagined.

The room was cubical and humble in size. A sunbeam lanced the haze through a single arched window set high in the rear wall. Beneath the window, Aaron’s grandfather knelt in front of a second Aron Ha-Kodesh even more magnificent than the one in the sanctuary. Bluish smoke wisped heavenward from a golden censer set before it.

Grandfather bobbed in prayer, a white prayer shawl called a tallit katan draped over his stooped shoulders, its tzitzit tassels swaying with his incantations.

Silently, Aaron swept his curious gaze around the room and studied an impressive collection of framed oil paintings that covered the wall to his left. Each depicted a scene from the Torah—a storyboard of images, from Moses and the Israelites to the Tabernacle and the lost temple. The wall to his right was dedicated to tall bookshelves packed tight with volumes, spines embossed in Hebrew. Was this a place meant to store sacred texts and vessels—a genizah? Aaron tried to imagine what his father had been doing in here every Saturday. Praying? Studying?

The old man eased off the kneeler, then took a few moments to tenderly fold the prayer shawl and tuck it away in one of the scroll cabinet’s drawers. When he finally turned to them, Aaron straightened and directed his gaze to his grandfather’s amazing aquamarine eyes, which brought tranquility to an otherwise fearsome façade. The family resemblance was unmistakable, to the point where Aaron felt he was looking at his own future visage. Beneath his prayer cap, or kippah, Grandfather’s earlocks curled in tight twists around his ears to a flowing gray beard.

“Shabbat shalom,” Grandfather greeted them.

“Shabbat shalom,” Aaron replied.

“Hands out of your pockets, my boy,” he instructed Aaron.

Blushing, Aaron liberated his hands and let them fall to his sides.

“Better,” Grandfather said approvingly, stepping closer. “We cover the tops of our heads to show humility to God as He watches over us,” he said, placing his hand on Aaron’s kippah, “but we praise Him with our hands. So be sure He can see them.” Pointing up, Grandfather winked—a small gesture that put Aaron more at ease. “Mordecai,” he said, addressing the boy’s father without taking his eyes off Aaron, “I ask if Mr. Aaron Cohen and I might have some time alone.”

“Certainly,” Mordecai replied.

Aaron watched his father leave the room, the door closing quietly behind him. The role-switching made the boy feel special, and when he glanced back at Grandfather, he could tell the old man intended it to do so. The electric silence was pierced by a fire truck screaming down Coney Island Avenue. Aaron’s eyes darted toward the window as the siren quickly faded.

“Now, Aaron,” Grandfather began, drawing his attention back from the street noise. “When I was a young boy—the same age as you are now—my father brought me to see my grandfather so that I could be told about my family’s legacy. First, do you understand what I mean by ‘legacy’?”

They remained standing, and it wasn’t until then that Aaron realized the room lacked any chairs. Aaron nodded, though it wasn’t too clear to him what his grandfather really meant.

“It is through our children that we leave behind or pass forward, if you will, our family history—and more precisely, its genealogy. Something you’ll learn much more about in the coming years. And through each of us, God transfers His gift across generations.”

“You mean . . . babies?” Now Aaron feared this was a prelude to a discussion on puberty. After all, he’d only read from the Torah during his bar mitzvah a week earlier. Though Jewish law now considered him a man, he had yet to feel like one.

This made Grandfather chuckle. “Not exactly. Though we can find God’s gift inside our progeny.”

Aaron blushed, fighting the compulsion to put his hands in his pockets again. Grandfather’s expression suddenly turned severe.

“You see, Aaron, there is something very unique about our ancestors. Something quite different than most families. In fact, it can be traced back thousands of years to a man who shares your honorable name. You see him there in the white robe?” He pointed to one of the framed scenes on the wall and the boy’s curious eyes followed.

The painting depicted events from Exodus; it showed a bearded man in a white robe and ceremonial headdress sacrificing a young lamb on a magnificent golden altar. Aaron was momentarily transfixed by the blood gushing forth from the animal’s slit neck.

“Your great ancestor Aaron was a very blessed man. You know him from the Torah, yes?”

Knowing his Saturday discussions with Father had paid off, he said in a proud tone, “The first high priest of the Hebrews, the kohen gadol . . . from the tribe of Levi.”

Grandfather paced over to admire the painting, hands behind his back. “That’s right. And Aaron had a very special brother whom his parents had given away to protect him.”

“Moshe,” Aaron confidently replied. Moses.

Pride showed in Grandfather’s eyes as he nodded and encouraged the boy to elaborate.

“In Egypt”—Aaron’s voice trembled slightly—“Pharaoh had commanded the killing of all newborn Israelite males. So Moses’s mother placed him in a basket and floated him down the river Nile. Moses was found by Pharaoh’s daughter when she went to bathe in the river. She adopted him.”

“And raised him in Pharaoh’s court,” Grandfather added. “Very good. As you know, Moses and Aaron were later reunited. Almost thirty-three hundred years ago, God sent Moses to free his brother, his family, and his people from bondage. The Israelites escaped the Egyptian army”—he pointed to the painting showing Moses with his sacred staff set low to release the seas onto the soldiers and chariots—“and fought for forty years to conquer the tribal lands promised to them by God. Moses was the first true messiah. The founder of a new nation. Legacy meant everything to Moses.”

“And we’re his family?”

“Thirty-three centuries later, Levite blood flows in my veins, your father’s veins . . .”

“And mine?”

“That’s right.”

Aaron was speechless.

“Your legacy, Aaron, is a priestly legacy we desperately need to preserve.” He held up his left hand, clenched it into a fist, and shook it to emphasize the importance of his message. “But our bloodline hasn’t remained pure, as God intended. Centuries have corrupted us.”

“The Diaspora?”

Grandfather nodded. “And other things too,” he said in a low tone, and paused. “Some of our ancestors have not been mindful of God’s plan. But one day, very soon, I am certain, we will make the bloodline pure again. And when that happens, a new covenant will be made between God and our people. After much tragedy . . .” He stammered as he thought mournfully about his over one million brethren who’d suffered—most fatally—alongside him in Auschwitz. “Israel is struggling to be a nation once more—to reclaim its lost lands. The tribes are still scattered. Much turmoil remains . . . an unclear future that only God knows.”

Only days earlier, Aaron’s father had told him that Israel’s air force had bombed Egyptian airfields to preempt a strike. Now Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian troops were amassing around Israel’s borders. Father had not stopped praying since it all began.

“A nation, I’m afraid, that still does not abide by God’s covenant,” the old man lamented, casting his eyes to the floor. “Only when the bloodline is restored can the covenant be restored. Then Israel will truly rise up like a phoenix.”

“But how will it be restored?”

Grandfather smiled once more. “You’re not ready for that yet, my ambitious grandson. But soon, when the time is right, you’ll learn the secrets entrusted to my father, me, my son”—reaching out, he gently pressed two fingers over the boy’s pounding heart—“and you. In the meantime, there is much you will need to learn,” he said, sweeping his hand across the brimming bookcases. “You will come here with your father every Saturday following service. From now on, it will be the three of us.”

Aaron grinned.

“Three generations,” he said, patting the boy’s cheek. A thought suddenly came to him. “Ah,” he said, holding up a finger. “Which means there is something I must give to you.”

Aaron watched as Grandfather paced to the scroll cabinet, slid open its smallest drawer, and rummaged through the contents. Finding what he was looking for, he held it tight in his hand, closed the drawer, and made his way back.

As he stared at the old man’s closed fist, Aaron’s face glowed with anticipation.

“For many, many centuries, our family has used a symbol to represent our ancestors. See here . . .”

Grandfather turned over his hand and opened his fingers to reveal a round object resembling a silver dollar. When Aaron pressed closer to examine its details, he realized it wasn’t a coin at all.

“Tell me what you see on this talisman.”

It was the strangest symbol. Certainly nothing that looked Judaic. In fact, the occultist images seemed to go against Jewish teachings concerning iconography. “A fish . . . wrapped around”—his brow crinkled—“a fork?”

“Yes, but not a fish, a dolphin. And not exactly a fork, but a trident.” Seeing the boy’s muddled expression, he sternly said, “You are never to speak about anything that you are taught in this room unless it is to someone who possesses this same talisman. And you must promise that you will never show this to anyone else. Not even your best friend in the yeshiva. Do you understand?”

“I understand, Grandfather.”

“Yasher koach.” And the boy would certainly need strong will, thought Grandfather. The world was fast changing. Snatching the boy’s left hand, he placed the talisman in Aaron’s palm and wrapped the boy’s fingers around it. “Protect this.” He clasped both hands around Aaron’s fist.

The cold metal disk pressed hard into Aaron’s sweaty palm, sending a shiver up his arm.

“Because from this moment forward,” Grandfather warned him, “you will dedicate your life to preserving everything this symbol stands for.”

1

******

Rome, Italy Present Day

A flock of pigeons took flight as Father James Martin moved swiftly around Caligula’s obelisk, which rose up from the center of Piazza San Pietro like a colossal dagger against the steel-gray sky. Its mid-September shadow would normally have let him know that it was just past five o’clock. But for the third consecutive day, the sun remained hidden behind a shroud of lifeless clouds. Glancing over at St. Peter’s Basilica, he saw the faithful pilgrims queued for the last tour. Even a typhoon couldn’t scare them away, he thought.

He pulled his raincoat tighter to fight off a damp chill. He’d need to move quickly to beat the imminent downpour.

Near the end of Via della Conciliazione, he heard a voice calling to him over the sounds of the traffic.

“Padre Martin?”

Stopping, Martin turned. A man waved to him, splashing through the shallow puddles in quick strides. Of medium height and build, he was ordinary looking—clean-shaven with dark hair and unreadable dark eyes. “Si?” Martin replied.

“Sorry to bother you on your way home,” he said, planting himself at arm’s length.

A laminated Vatican ID badge was prominently displayed on the lapel of his raincoat, just below his white priest collar. The unfamiliar face was forgettable. Italian? Lebanese? Maybe thirtysomething, or perhaps a youthful fifty, Martin guessed. “Have we met?”

The man shook his head. “Not yet.”

“What can I do for you, Father . . . ?”

“Fabrizio Orlando.” He extended his right hand.

Italian. When Martin reciprocated, he noticed that the priest’s skin was rough. Unusual for a cleric. Perhaps the man had spent time as a missionary? The Lord’s call doesn’t place everyone behind a desk, Martin reminded himself.

“I’ve just been appointed to the secretariat’s office.”

Why hadn’t he been notified? “I see. Welcome to Vatican City.”

“Grazie. Mind if I walk with you for a minute?”

Suspicion showed in Martin’s eyes. “Not at all.”

The two men proceeded down the sidewalk past the cafés and souvenir shops.

“I was told you’d been Cardinal Antonio Santelli’s secretary?”

“That’s right.” Martin’s gait quickened and the man kept pace be- side him.

“Very unfortunate, His Eminence’s death. A deep loss for the Holy See.” He tightened his lips in a show of solemnity. “He was a visionary.” As they approached Piazza Pia’s busy thoroughfare, his pitch rose to compete with the bus and scooter traffic. “Many had said he would be the Holy Father’s successor.”

“Yes, well . . .” Attempting to echo the priest’s fond words, Martin stalled, knowing that his own remembrances wouldn’t be nearly as complimentary. The fact remained that regardless of Santelli’s unsullied public image as having been a last great defender of Catholic dogma, the late cardinal had been merciless to his subordinates—a bulldog. Martin chose to bow his head in prayer.

“May God rest his soul,” Orlando said loudly as a whining Vespa sped past.

At the busy intersection, they remained silent to negotiate the crosswalk.

Martin resumed the conversation as he led the way down the cobbled walkway in front of Castel Sant’Angelo’s outer rampart. “So how can I assist you, Father?”

The priest’s chin tipped up. “Yes, about business then.” A momentary stare down at the roiling Tiber helped him collect his thoughts. “The secretariat has retained my services to assist in ongoing inquiries concerning the death of Dr. Giovanni Bersei.”

Martin stiffened. “I see.”

They angled onto Ponte Sant’Angelo.

The man went on to convey what his fact-finding mission had yielded thus far. Back in June, Italian anthropologist Giovanni Bersei had been commissioned by Cardinal Santelli to assist in a highly secretive project inside the Vatican. Only days later, Bersei had been found dead in the catacombs beneath Villa Torlonia. An elderly docent was also found dead on the premises and a routine autopsy showed he had been injected with heart-arresting toxins. Roman authorities had investigated the foul play. Santelli, too, Orlando conspiratorially reminded him, had succumbed to heart failure only a day later, though the Holy See had refused an autopsy.

By the time the Italian had finished, he’d trailed Martin to within a block of his apartment building.

There was no doubt Orlando was well informed. But Martin wasn’t looking to rehash the exhaustive questioning he’d endured in the weeks that followed the cardinal’s death. “I trust you have been informed that the carabinieri have completed their investigations?”

The man’s lips pulled tight. “Mine is an internal investigation,” he repeated.

Approaching the narrow alley that was the shortcut to his apartment building, Martin stopped. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I think it would be best for us to speak about this during business hours. After I’ve obtained permission from the secretariat’s office.”

Orlando forced a placated smile. “I understand.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Father Orlando.” Martin nodded.

“Likewise.”

Martin stuffed his hands into his pockets and turned down the alley. As he was about to pass a stocky deliveryman unloading produce boxes from an idling van, he heard the priest calling after him again, quick footsteps tapping along the ancient cobblestones.

“Father.”

Stopping in his tracks, Martin’s shoulders slumped. Before he could turn to address Orlando, the anxious priest had circled in front of him.

“If I could just have another moment.”

“What is it?”

Later, Martin would recall no answer. Just the priest’s eyes turning cold, slipping back to the sidewalk, then up to the windows overlooking the alleyway, and finally over Martin’s shoulder to the deliveryman.

Without warning, two strong hands grabbed at Martin’s coat, yanking hard, forcing his body into an uncontrolled spin, directly toward the van’s open cargo hold.

What in God’s name?!

A sharp blow to the knees forced him down onto the cold metal floor. “Aiut o ! ” he screamed out to anyone who might hear. “Aiu —”

2

******

The deliveryman responded instantly, crowding into the van and clamping his enormous hand over Martin’s mouth and nose. Orlando jumped in right behind him and slid shut the side door. Martin barely glimpsed the bald scalp and jagged profile of a third accomplice slumped low in the driver’s seat.

The transmission ground into gear. The van lurched forward, thumping its way over the cobblestones.

Martin’s terrified eyes met the deliveryman’s disturbingly calm gaze. As he struggled for breath, the smell of leeks and basil invaded his nostrils. The deliveryman straddled him and grabbed him in a powerful hold that demanded complete submission.

“I let go, we talk. You fight or scream, he shoots you.” His free hand pointed toward the man crouched near the windowless rear doors gripping a black handgun trained on Martin’s head.

Desperation flooded Martin’s gaze as he moved his head up and down. The deliveryman eased off and sat across from him with his thick arms crossed over a propped-up knee.

Martin almost retched as he gasped for air.

“Sit up, Father,” Orlando instructed him, motioning with the gun.

After a few steady breaths, Martin eased himself up against the metal sidewall and threw down his hands as the van slowed abruptly and made a right turn. The thumping cobblestones gave way to smooth pavement. “What do you want?”

“We have questions for you. Details concerning Bersei’s death.”

“I told you ...I’ve answered all the carabinieri’s questions. I—” “Only hours before he went into the catacomb,” the Italian said, overriding him, “Bersei had contacted the carabinieri . . .”

The imposter’s accent had changed to something completely different, suggesting he wasn’t from Italy. And the detached manner in which the man referred to the Italian authorities suggested to Martin that he wasn’t one of them either.

“He left a message for a Detective Perardi, stating that he had information concerning a Roman link to an artifact stolen from Jerusalem. And only days later, that artifact was miraculously returned to Israel in a shipping crate originating out of Rome.”

“The . . .” Martin’s brow crinkled. “The stone box? Is that what you’re referring to?” He remembered seeing the news reports on CNN International.

“The ossuary,” the imposter corrected. “The bone box.”

Bone box? The van made another turn and rocked Martin sideways as it sharply accelerated, then settled into a cruising speed. Where were they taking him? Confused and frustrated, Martin shook his head and said, “What does this have to do with me?”

“Patience, Father. Dr. Bersei was murdered in that catacomb. And multiple eyewitnesses saw a suspicious man leaving Villa Torlonia shortly thereafter.”

“So why don’t you find him?”

The deliveryman leaned forward and brandished a massive fist that made Martin flinch. Orlando held up a hand for the man to stand down. The muscles in the deliveryman’s jaws clenched as he slunk back to a sitting position.

“We did find him, Father Martin—in the Italian countryside with a bullet in his head.”

Martin cringed.

He dipped into his breast pocket, pulled out a photo, and handed it to Martin. “Recognize him?”

The face in the color photo—set against the stainless steel of a gurney—was ghost white, the eyes murky with death. Above the right ear, the skull was blown apart—a ragged mess of purple flesh and bone. Yet the features were unmistakable. Martin’s reaction signaled he’d indeed met the deceased. When he looked up, he could tell that the gunman was pleased by this.

The gunman snatched the picture back and gave it a glance. “Israeli authorities also believe this man was involved in a heist that took place at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in June.”

Martin couldn’t recall hearing this in any news report.

He slipped the photo back into his pocket. “Many innocent people died because of this man. Soldiers. Police. Now, please. I want you to think very hard and tell me his name, please.”

Unlike that of the imposter waving a gun in his face, the mercenary’s first impression had been lasting. And Martin wasn’t about to cover for him. After all, the man’s only link to the Vatican was the late Cardinal Santelli. “Salvatore Conte.”

The deliveryman pulled a notepad and pen from his pocket, verified the spelling, and jotted down the name.

Salvatore Conte. Orlando regarded the picture once more to match the name with the face. “Now let me connect the dots for you, Father. Salvatore Conte stole that ossuary from the Temple Mount and brought it to Rome. He was involved in the death of Giovanni Bersei, who, at that time, was commissioned for a project inside Vatican City. The study of a yet undetermined artifact, as coincidence would have it. A project of which the Vatican denies all knowledge.”

Martin stared at the floor. How could Orlando know these things? Following Santelli’s death, the secretariat’s office had collected the cardinal’s computer, files, and personal effects. He could only guess that any sensitive information had been destroyed or locked away in the Secret Archive. As far as the Italian authorities were concerned, the Vatican had never seen or heard of Salvatore Conte, and Dr. Bersei had merely consulted on restoration work taking place inside the Vatican Museums’ Pio Christian Museum.

“Look at me, Father,” Orlando insisted.

The priest complied.

“Bersei was found broken to pieces at the bottom of a pit, Salvatore Conte assassinated in the Italian wine country. All within days of Conte’s theft in Jerusalem. Leads one to think that the Vatican is the common thread. Like many times in the past, the Vatican, with its—how would you say?—infallible influences, has persuaded the carabinieri to disregard these matters. We, however, cannot be bought.”

“Who are you?” Martin asked again.

The gunman merely gave a smug smile before resuming the interrogation. “Much of these formalities are of no concern to us. There is one matter, however, that is of grave concern. So I have only one simple request to make of you, Father.”

He swallowed hard. “What is it?”

Orlando leaned close, saying in a low voice, “The ossuary was returned empty. I need you to tell me what happened to its contents.”

“Contents?”

He shook his head, cocked the Glock’s trigger, and pressed the barrel against Martin’s forehead.

The priest’s eyes snapped closed as his face reflexively turned sideways. The cold steel bit his skin. “I don’t . . . don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The bones, Father Martin. That ossuary contained a skeleton. Where are the bones?” He pressed the gun barrel harder against the priest’s temple.

At first, Martin was dumbfounded. Bones? The idea that these men had abducted him for such a thing seemed preposterous. The gun rocked his head back against the van’s wall, sending crushing pain through his skull.

“Father Martin!” the man spat. “I don’t think you’re listening to me! Dr. Bersei was a forensic anthropologist. Forensic anthropologists don’t study paintings or sculptures. They study bones.”

“I don’t know! I swear!”

Holding the gun in place, the man reached into his pocket again to produce a second photo. “I want you to look at this very closely,” he said, holding it out for the priest.

As he trembled, Martin’s eyes went wide when he saw the family in the portrait—a handsome couple, early forties, a young boy and his slightly older sister.

“The most efficient path to truth comes from the blood of loved ones. Your sister is very beautiful. Her daughter looks very much like her, though the boy is his father’s son.”

“God save you,” Martin contemptuously replied.

“Insurance, Father,” he said. “Help us and I assure you that their lives will be spared. Now, once again . . . Where are the bones?”

A sour taste came into the priest’s mouth, and his limbs quaked uncontrollably. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know!”

A pause as the gunman studied the priest’s eyes and body language.

“Then tell me who does.”

Martin’s brain went into hyperdrive as he recalled the events. At Cardinal Santelli’s behest, he’d indeed arranged Dr. Bersei’s June visit to the Vatican Museums to examine and authenticate an “important acquisition.” Confidentiality agreements had been signed too. But Santelli had never disclosed to Martin what the artifact was. This ossuary, perhaps? Bones? Another scientist had been summoned as well. An American geneticist— though her name now escaped him.

Nonetheless, there was one man who he was certain had the answers these men were seeking. And with frightened eyes glued to the picture, Martin gave them his name.

3

******

Qumran, Israel

Stepping out from beneath the blue origami canopy that sheltered the team’s provisions, Amit Mizrachi’s glum gaze shot halfway up the sheer sandstone cliff to a lanky twenty-year-old Israeli harnessed to a rappelling line. Dangling directly beside the student was a boxlike device on wheels that resembled a high-tech lawn mower.

“Anything?” Amit yelled, his deep baritone echoing along the chasm. The student planted his feet on a craggy outcropping and pushed himself closer to the ground-penetrating radar unit. Pressing his face close to its LCD, he paused for a three-count to inspect the radargram. Zero undulation in the line pattern. “Nothing yet.”

Amit had grown somewhat accustomed to this response, yet he couldn’t

help but curse under his breath. He made a futile attempt at swatting away the tiny desert flies swarming about his face.

“Keep going to the bottom?” the student called down.

Going to the bottom. Just like Amit’s career if something meaningful wasn’t soon found. With excavations at Qumran approaching the two-year mark, the team’s findings thus far were unremarkable: broken clay shards from Hasmonean oil lamps and amphorae, clichéd Roman and Herodian coins, a first-century grave site with male skeletal remains that replicated earlier discoveries found nearby.

“Go to the bottom,” he instructed. “Then take a break before you move to the next column. And stay hydrated. You won’t be much good to me if you get heatstroke.”

The kid snatched the water bottle from his utility belt and held it up in a mock toast.

“Mazel tov,” he grumbled. “Now get moving.”

The burly, goateed Israeli pulled off his aviator sunglasses and used a handkerchief to blot the sweat from his brow. Even in September, the Judean Desert’s dry heat was unrelenting and could easily drive a man mad. But Amit wasn’t going to let Qumran beat him. After all, patience and resolve were paramount for any archaeologist worth his chisel and brush.

The project’s benefactors, on the other hand, followed a much different clock. Their purse strings were drawing tighter by the month.

As he watched the student holster the water bottle, then lower the GPR unit two meters for the next scan, he felt a sudden compulsion to swap places with him. Maybe the rookie was missing something, misinterpreting the radargrams. But Amit’s forty-two-year-old oversize frame didn’t take well to rock climbing—particularly the harness, which crushed his manhood in unspeakable ways. No doubt those of slight stature were best suited to archaeology. So Amit approached things the pragmatic way: delegate, delegate, delegate.

Glaring at the cliff—the wily seductress who’d stolen away his want or need for anything else—he grumbled, “Come on. Give it up. Something.” This project had single-handedly accounted for his most recent marital casualty—Amit’s second wife, Sarah. At least this time there weren’t kids being played like pawns.

A second later, he heard someone screaming from a distance. “Professor! Professor!”

He turned around and spotted a lithe form moving through the gulch with athletic agility—the most recent addition to his team, Ariel. When she reached him, she planted herself close.

“Everything all right?”

Ariel used an index finger to push back her glasses, which had slid down her sweaty nose, and reported between heaving breaths, “In the tunnel . . . we . . . the radar is picking up something . . . behind a wall . . .”

“Okay, let’s slow it down,” he said soothingly. New interns were prone to overreacting at the slightest blip on the radar, and no one was greener than nineteen-year-old Ariel. “What exactly did you see?” He fought to keep his frustrated tone on an even keel.

“The hyperbolic deflections . . . they were deep.”

Reading a radargram was more art than science. One had to be careful with interpretation. “How deep?”

“Deep.”

Amit squared his shoulders and his barrel chest puffed out against his drenched T-shirt. The creases on his overly tanned cheeks deepened as he considered this. Don’t get too excited, he told himself. It’s probably nothing. Though radar was quite effective in penetrating dry sandstone, subterranean scans were temperamental due to excessive moisture that choked the UHF/UVF radio waves. A deep deflection suggested a considerable hollow in the earth.

She sucked in more air and went on. “And this wall—it’s not stone . . . well, not exactly. We began to clear away the clay—”

“You what?”

“I know, I know.” She raised her palms up as if to tame a lion. “We were going to come get you, but we needed to be sure about— Anyway, we found something. Bricks.”

A rush of cold ran up his spine. “Show me. Now.”

These days, when Amit pushed his body to anything beyond a light trot, he felt like a rhinoceros on a treadmill. But as he trailed close behind Ariel, there was a fluidity in his stride that he hadn’t felt since he was dodging hostile gunfire in Gaza over twenty years earlier. As seren, or company commander, he could easily have pursued a military career with the Israel Defense Forces, but by then he’d had enough of Israel’s gummy politics concerning the occupied Palestinian territories. So Amit set his sights on a much different pursuit at Tel Aviv University that swapped a Ph.D. in biblical archaeology for his three-olive-branched epaulets.

A hundred yards from the tent, Ariel led him through a ravine, into a cool wash of shade. Ahead, the crevasse narrowed and dipped over the cliff where winter flash floods would rage down to the sapphire-blue Dead Sea. Just over the rise, she stopped at the foot of a tall ladder propped at an angle against the vertical rock.

Catching his breath, Amit glanced at the cave opening—a good four meters up.

His mind rewound four weeks, when the GPR registered this subsurface anomaly buried behind what amounted to almost two meters of rubble, clay, and silt. It had taken ten days to clear it all out; every ounce of soil was thoroughly screen-sifted for the slightest commingled artifacts. Nothing found. What lay beyond, however, wasn’t a cave per se, but a tunnel that rose sharply into the cliff ’s belly.

Ariel went up the ladder first—an effortless ascent. At the top, she pulled herself into the darkened opening.

Drawing breath, Amit clutched the sides of the ladder with his meaty paws. His heartbeat quickened. Keeping his eyes on the opening, he started cautiously upward, the aluminum rungs groaning. Feeling suddenly vulnerable—it happened any time his feet left earth—he fought the urge to look down. Keep moving. Eyes on the prize.

At the top, he clawed the opening’s stone rim and heaved himself up and in.

“Show me.”

“It’s far in . . . at the end, actually,” she said, waving for him to follow. Snatching a flashlight off the floor, she flicked it on, then made her way up the tight passage in short steps.

Amit trailed close behind her, bending slightly at the waist to avoid the low ceiling while twisting his torso to prevent jamming his broad shoulders in the narrow channel. Within seconds, what little sunlight penetrated the tunnel had dissipated. The subterranean air chilled his damp neck and the redolence of minerals stirred up into his nose—what he liked to call “Bible smell.”

A few meters up the grade, the glow from work lights pierced the darkness. Amit could hear echoing voices and the dry sound of gravel being scooped into buckets. He detected a swish swish swish—a brush dusting stone. “Stop what you’re doing!” His scream rippled along the tunnel.

The outburst made Ariel flinch and hit her head on the ceiling. She stopped, cupped her hand over the tender spot, then checked it under the light. Only dirt.

“It’ll only be a bruise,” Amit said, noting the lack of blood on her hand.

Shaking her head, Ariel proceeded upward. The sounds of work had stopped, but the mumbling had just begun, mixed with some giggles.

The tunnel reached its high point and flattened out, yielding to a wide hollow. Amit straightened with half a meter to spare overhead. Immediately his eyes found the cleared section in the chamber’s rear, a square meter, he guessed, crisply lit by two pole lights. Three more eager students stood in silence around the spot, buckets and tools at their feet, looking like they’d just been called to the principal’s office.

Huffing, he made his way closer. He fumed, “I can’t tell you again how critical it is to—” But the words were lost as his eyes took in the remarkable sight set before him. Moving forward and dropping to his knees, he pressed his face close to a neat patchwork of angular bricks the students had mindfully exposed. His heart seemed to skip a beat. Early on, Amit had given Mother Nature full credit for this chamber, since its interior surfaces displayed no telltale scarring from tools. Now that hypothesis had to be completely discounted. “Oh my,” he gasped.

4

******

A radargram was a far cry from a Polaroid. But as Amit studied the wild undulations in the GPR’s frequency patterns, he concurred with young Ariel. These deflections were definitely deep. He rolled the scanner away from the bricks and patted his fingers against his lips in rapid motion.

“What do you think, Professor?” Ariel finally said.

Mind racing, Amit stared at the brickwork a few seconds before answering. “This wall isn’t very dense. Probably less than half a meter.” For scale, he propped a ruler and a chisel against the bricks, then proceeded to snap some digitals with his trusty Nikon. After twice reviewing the images on the camera’s display, he was pleased. He turned to Ariel and said, “I need a detailed diagram of this space, with laser measurements all around.”

“I can do it,” she confidently replied.

“I know you can.” The kid not only had a knack for academia, but she was an excellent artist. Extremely useful for field study and precisely why she’d been handpicked to join his team. “Take some video too. Use plenty of light.”

Beaming, Ariel nodded in fast motion.

Then he addressed the others. “The rest of you start tagging the bricks. Then we’ll see what they were looking to hide.”

“They,” the students immediately understood, were the Essenes— the reclusive Jewish sect that had inhabited these hills for two centuries beginning in the second century b.c.e., until their mass genocide by the Romans in 68 c.e. Their primary settlement was set along the shore of the Dead Sea, a cluster of crude clay brick dwellings that included sleeping quarters, a refectory, and ritual bathing pits called mikvahs. But the site’s dominant building had been a long hall furnished with drafting tables—a scriptorium where multiple copies of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, as well as a plethora of apocryphal texts, had been fastidiously transcribed. The Essenes had been the scribes, librarians, and custodians of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

“Think we’ll find scrolls, Professor?”

Irritated by the ask-it-and-kiss-your-fortunes-good-bye query, Amit turned to the nineteen-year-old Galilean named Eli, who was all nose and ears beneath a tight knit of black curls topped off by a brightly embroidered kippah. A spasm rippled Amit’s lower left eyelid as he agitatedly replied, “Anything’s possible.”

An hour later, when Amit nudged free the brick pin-tagged “C027,” he saw a black space open up behind the wall’s final layer. Grinning ear to ear, he carefully handed the block to the Galilean kid, who used it to start a new column in the ordered matrix of bricks laid neatly on the chamber floor.

Amit held a tape measure along the top of the recess. The radargram had been right on the shekels. “Half a meter.”

“Exciting stuff,” Eli said, rubbing his hands together and crouching to peek through the hole.

“You getting all this?”

“Every brick,” he assured Amit as he grabbed his clipboard and wrote “C027” on the inventory sheet.

Grabbing a flashlight, Amit shone the beam through the gap, moving it side to side, up and down. The light clung to two meters of tight walls and ceiling—another passage?—before being swallowed by a much larger void. A second chamber? His knees popped as he stood. “Let’s get the rest of this cleared away,” he instructed the interns.

5

******

After another two hours, under Amit’s close supervision, the ancient wall had been completely dismantled.

He reclaimed his kneeling spot.

“Let’s have a look.” Crouching, he shone the flashlight into the rocky gullet while trying not to inhale the stagnant air spilling out of the breach. Just beyond the opening, he studied the angular passage and ran his fingers over its scooped chisel hashes. Definitely quarried. A tap on his shoulder made him turn. It was Ariel, holding out a silver-cased Zippo lighter.

“To check for oxygen,” she explained.

“Right,” Amit said, taking it from her. She’d obviously noticed that he’d left his fancy digital oxygen sensor back at the tent. So the crude method would have to suffice. Flicking the top open with a small ting, he lit it up. The tang of butane filled his nostrils as he extended the Zippo into the passage. The robust flame held steady. All clear. “Here goes.”

Crawling through the short passage, flashlight in his left hand, Zippo in his right, Amit hesitated when he quickly reached the end. A large void opened up in front of him.

Craning his neck, he swung the light in wide arcs through the black soup. The light melted deep into the space—a sizable angular chamber hewn from the mountain’s innards.

Confusion came fast. The space seemed to be empty. But there was lots of Bible smell here.

Working his way inside, Amit stood and rolled his neck. Though the Zippo’s quivering taper suggested questionable air quality, he wasn’t about to vacate the chamber. He hadn’t felt this exhilarated in years. Pulling in shallow breaths, he paced the level floor and examined the symmetrical walls and ceiling—a ten-meter cube, he guesstimated, every surface blank. Why would the Essenes brick up an empty cubicle?

“Speak to me,” he muttered.

On cue, his Doc Martens scuffed across an uneven surface in the center of the floor—a variation so slight he could easily have dismissed it. Then the ground seemed to shift slightly beneath his weight. He dipped the flashlight onto the spot and eased onto his knees. Flicking the Zippo shut, he slid it into his shirt pocket. He trailed his fingers through a dust layer blanketing the floor and detected a ridge. Pressing his face close to the floor, he gently blew away the dust to reveal a tight seam that cut a hard angle. He repeated the process until he’d uncovered a sizable rectangle cut into the floor.

A stone slab?

He tried working his meaty fingers into the seam. Nothing. Snapping to his feet, he paced to the passage opening, crouched down, and called to Ariel. “Bring in the tools . . . a pry bar too. And let’s get some lights in here. Quickly!”

“I’m on it,” she called back.

Once the interns funneled in with the gear, Amit had them set up batteryoperated pole lights around the chamber’s center. He momentarily mused on their lit faces, their untamed excitement. It brought back pleasant memories of his first student excavation at Masada.

Working a pry bar into the seam, Amit instructed Eli to mirror the action on the slab’s opposite side. He could see that the gangly kid was a bundle of nerves. “On three,” he said. Eli nodded. “One . . . two . . .”

The first attempt was sloppy but managed to unseat the slab. The second pinched Amit’s fingers when he prematurely slipped them beneath the stone—hard enough to take some skin and elicit what he considered a rather girlish yelp. A third tandem try levered the stone up enough for Ariel to wedge a pry bar into the opening, enabling Amit to fully grip the thing and drag it off to the side.

Catching his breath, Amit knelt along the edge, where carved steps dropped down into the hollow they’d uncovered. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

Ariel immediately handed over his flashlight. Then the video camera was back in her hand and she started humming the theme to the Indiana Jones movies. “Da da da-dah, da da dah . . .”

The other students laughed, and Amit allowed himself a chuckle too as he clicked on the light and aimed it down the steps. He counted twelve treads cascading to a stone floor. “All right. Let me get a look down there, see what we’ve got.” These were the moments that defined the quest, he thought. He stood, dropped his left foot onto the first carved tread, and began his steady descent.

It was another tight fit for the Israeli as he folded and tucked himself against the hewn walls, the light playing shadow dances along the chiselscarred rock.

When Roman legions had swarmed over Qumran, they’d torched the village and slaughtered its inhabitants. Though there’d been little warning, the Essenes had managed to stash their most vital scrolls in these desert hills—a time capsule to preserve their heritage. But none of Qumran’s caves contained excavated rooms like this one. And why so purposely sealed away? What could the Essenes have been doing here? he wondered.

Adrenaline pumped through him as he negotiated the last three steps and touched down onto the floor. He deliberately closed his eyes for a three-count as he brought the light to waist level. Then he opened them.

What he saw made him gasp.

6

******

Belfast, Ireland

It had been nearly three months since Father Patrick Donovan had taken a sabbatical from the Vatican and returned to his childhood neighborhood in Belfast. Yet not a day passed that he didn’t think about the events leading up to his hasty departure.

And it was no wonder why.

Back in June he’d presented to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Antonio Santelli, an authentic first-century codex containing eyewitness testament to Christ’s ministry, crucifixion, and secret burial beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. To preempt the discovery of Christ’s mortal remains by Israeli engineers who were set to study the Mount’s structural integrity, the cardinal had employed a master thief named Salvatore Conte to forcefully extract the relic. Conte and his mercenary team had succeeded, but only after engaging in a sloppy firefight that left thirteen Israeli soldiers and police dead.

Conte had safely brought the procurement to Vatican City, where Donovan had arranged for its confidential authentication by two prominent scientists: Italian forensic anthropologist Dr. Giovanni Bersei and American geneticist Dr. Charlotte Hennesey.

The scientists’ findings had been astounding.

Upon the project’s completion, Cardinal Santelli ordered Conte to eliminate any trace of the relics, and those who’d studied it. Conte cleverly murdered Dr. Bersei in a Roman catacomb, but Dr. Hennesey managed to flee Vatican City before he could get to her. When Donovan had accompanied the killer to the Italian countryside on a mission to destroy the ossuary, the bones, and relics, Conte had made it known that Charlotte was to be marked for death in the United States. After a nasty struggle with fists and guns, however, Donovan had managed to put an end to Conte first.

Yes, with all that had happened, he was glad to be home.

There was a certain comfort here: a familiar damp chill to the air, the quilted gray clouds that washed away the lush peaks of Cavehill, the steely swells of the river Lagan.

But his homecoming had been bittersweet.

Following the Irish Republican Army’s voluntary disarmament in 2005, Donovan had been told, the last of his old schoolmates had uprooted their families to seek better opportunities in cities like Dublin, London, and New York. He’d also learned that in 2001, his best friend, Sean, had been imprisoned in Lisburn’s HMP Maghaberry for stabbing to death a prominent Protestant businessman during the Troubles—a fate Donovan himself had barely escaped when he was just a young man.

Donovan had moved in with his ailing eighty-one-year-old father, James, in the rebuilt two-bedroom redbrick row house off Crumlin Road standing on the footprint of his childhood home, which had been burned to the ground by rioting Unionists in 1969.

Most days were spent watching over the old man’s quaint luncheonette on Donegall Street, aptly named Donovan’s. As a young boy, Donovan had spent many hours in the store making change at the register, refreshing coffee, buttering rolls, sorting the newspapers, and restocking the refrigerated cases. So the routine brought a sense of comfort and familiarity.

However, it’d also been here where a smooth-talking patron named Michael had exploited fifteen-year-old Patrick Donovan’s naïveté and recruited him as an errand boy for the IR A. Prior to Donovan’s entering the seminary at eighteen, Da had considered renaming the establishment Donovan and Son. But like Abraham himself, Da couldn’t have been more pleased to lose his son to serve the Lord, especially after learning how Michael had so dangerously manipulated his only child.

It had taken a solid month for Donovan to get back up to speed: to learn how to run credit cards through the machine, work the new coffeemakers, and deal with the latest generation of vendors. The first two weeks, Da sat behind the counter coaching him, wearing a continuous smile beneath the rubber tubes running down from his nostrils to a portable oxygen tank. Then Da’s condition abruptly worsened to the point that he was homebound. So Donovan would tend the store during the day and spend quiet nights sipping whiskey and playing cards with him, making some small talk about politics and the day’s happenings at the store.

Never had the events that transpired in Vatican City been discussed. Donovan simply explained that he needed some time to sort things out.

In mid-August, the old man lost his decade-long battle with emphysema. The service at Holy Cross Church had drawn a few neighbors, some old acquaintances, and dozens of store patrons. On that day, Donovan buried his father at Milltown Cemetery in a reserved plot alongside his loving wife, Claire, who had passed on ten years earlier.

So it seemed that here Donovan’s recent past had been buried as well.

Until today.

The store was empty when the two men arrived just before noon, each claiming a stool at the end of the counter, close to the door.

Donovan folded the Eire Post and made his way over to greet them. He could tell immediately they weren’t locals. Tourists, most likely. One was of medium height and build, the second tall and broad.

“Dia duit,” he said in Gaelic, followed up quickly with, “Top o’ the morn’.” Though twelve years with the Vatican had suppressed his brogue, Belfast had slackened his tongue. “Coffee, lads?”

“That would be wonderful,” the smaller one said.

“Coming right up.” Donovan grabbed two mugs and set them on the counter. As he retrieved the coffeepot from the burner, the pair removed their rain-dampened overcoats in tandem. Turning back to them, he immediately noticed that each wore a black shirt with a white square covering the collar button. Priests.

As he filled the mugs, Donovan tried to place the smaller man’s plain face, but conjured no recollection. The accent, too, certainly wasn’t local. “Cream, sugar?”

“No, thank you, Patrick.”

The taller priest simply shook his head.

“Sláinte,” Donovan said with a friendly nod and another glance at the man’s priest collar. “Forgive me, but”—he backed up a few steps to return the pot to the burner—“have we met?”

“No,” the smaller one said. He sipped the coffee, steam wafting over his dark eyes. “But we come on behalf of the Holy See.” Orlando made his introductions, referring to his colleague as “Father Piotr Kwiatkowski.”

“I see,” Donovan said.

“It wasn’t easy finding you,” he said, embellishing the truth. Passport tracking had indicated Donovan’s entry into Northern Ireland on July seventh. And though he hadn’t used credit cards, a recent obituary for his father, as well as the deceased’s estate transference records—including a deed for a family home in Ardoyne and ownership of this establishment— had been easily found in their search of public records.

Donovan gave him a stiff stare.

“Seems you left in quite a hurry after Cardinal Santelli’s, shall we say, sudden demise.”

“The reasons for my departure are no one’s business,” Donovan dourly replied, snatching up a rag and buffing the counter. “Best for you to state your business, Father.”

“We’ll waste no time then.” Clawing his mug with sinewy fingers, the man slurped another mouthful of coffee before going on. “We’ve been informed about your involvement with Dr. Giovanni Bersei . . . and the ossuary he’d been studying in the Vatican Museums.” He paused to gauge the Irishman’s reaction. But the man didn’t react or even look over. “I’m sure you take great comfort in knowing that the carabinieri have closed their investigation into Dr. Bersei’s accidental death.” Father Martin certainly had.

Uneasy, Donovan glanced over as the man reached into his pocket and produced a photo.

“I’m certain you will recognize this man, though he’s a bit pale in this photograph,” he said, flattening Salvatore Conte’s morgue shot onto the counter. As Donovan cautiously stepped closer and looked down at it, Orlando could see a reaction—a subtle twist in the jaw, apprehension pulling at the eyelids. Orlando unabashedly laid out the connections for Donovan—the ossuary, Bersei’s death in the catacombs, Santelli’s timely passing, Conte’s murder. “All of this within days of a theft that took place in Jerusalem.”

“I’m afraid the only man who has the answers you are looking for,” Donovan replied, “is Cardinal Santelli. And as you’ve stated, he’s taken those answers to his grave.” Moving back to the coffeemaker, he moved the rag fast along the stainless steel, polishing it to a soft glow.

“His Eminence appreciates your dedication, Patrick. Our intention is not to levy accusations.”

“Then what might your intention be?” Donovan said with a note of challenge.

Orlando’s face tightened. “First, we need to determine why the ossuary had been brought inside Vatican City. There’s also a matter of locating relics that supposedly had been contained inside the box.”

“And Cardinal Lungero requests this information?”

Without diverting his firm gaze, Orlando faltered for a split second. “That’s correct.”

Donovan calmly set down the rag. Lungero was the name of someone in Vatican City, but certainly no cardinal. If these men weren’t envoys from the Vatican, then who could have sent them? Perhaps they’d aided Conte in Jerusalem and failed to receive their cut prior to his demise? “What relics might he be questioning?” his asked, his brogue thickening.

“You know better than most that an ossuary is a bone box. As such, it stands to reason that there had been bones inside it. Other relics too.”

Would mercenaries be at all interested in the bones? Donovan wondered. “I’m not sure if I’ll be able to assist you. But there is something . . .”

“Yes?”

He shook his head dismissively. “I was asked to sign confidentiality agreements prior to my leaving the Vatican. I’m not supposed to—”

“Those agreements are meant for those outside the Holy See.”

Strike two. Donovan had signed no such agreements prior to his departure. The fact remained that the Holy See still wasn’t aware of what had truly transpired and thought it best not to pursue such inquiries. There wouldn’t be a strike three.

At that moment, the front door opened and a man wearing mud-stained yellow coveralls came strolling in. “Patrick-me-boy!” he said cheerily.

Donovan straightened and conjured a smile. “Conas tá tú, Kevin?”

“Eh,” the man responded with a tired shrug. He eyed the priests as he lumbered past. “Mornin’, fathers.” His grin revealed a mouthful of tobacco-stained, crooked teeth.

“Good morning,” the short one tersely replied. He watched as the man trudged to the farthest stool at the end of the counter.

“A moment, please,” Donovan said apologetically, then went to tend to the patron.

Orlando monitored the ensuing exchange. The man in coveralls was animatedly talking with his hands, most likely about his mundane morning digging a trench somewhere. Then he finally placed an order with Donovan. All somewhat garbled, but spoken very loudly. The conversation, however, was happening in Gaelic.

“What’s he saying?” Kwiatkowski asked inconspicuously.

“No idea.” He cursed under his breath. Had Donovan sought refuge in any other country in the EU or anywhere in the Middle East, he could have easily deciphered the local dialect, even read their lips if the volume was insufficient.

Then Donovan slipped through a doorway, as if to get something for the patron.

Kwiatkowski immediately reacted, making to get up from his stool.

Orlando grabbed his arm. “Give it a moment.”

Moments went by. No Donovan.

“My heavens! What did you order, my son?” Orlando called with playful sarcasm to the laborer.

“Coffee, just like you, Father.” The scraggly man gave another toothy grin. “If it’s good for your soul, it can only help the fire in me.”

This caused both men to push back their stools and spring into action.

The laborer’s eyes widened as he saw them darting his way—particularly the tall one, a giant of a man. He coiled into himself. “I’ll drink tea if it’ll make ya ’appy!” he said, cowering.

But the two paid him no mind as they whisked by, rounded the corner of the counter, and disappeared through the door.

7

******

It was easy for Orlando to see that the rear room was meant for storage: it was filled with dried goods and cans lined neatly on shelves, and stock glassware. There was a large walk-in refrigerator to one side, its door open wide. “Check it,” he said.

Kwiatkowski reached it in three strides and poked his head in. Lining the floor and shelves were crates of milk and eggs, cases of soda and beer, bins of cheeses, wrapped meats, and butter. No Donovan. “Not here.”

Then just outside a solid metal door in the room’s rear, they both heard the muffled sounds of an engine coming to life.

Donovan had considered blocking the door with something, but in the narrow alley, there was only a large Dumpster that wasn’t budging. Hopping onto his motorcycle, he jammed the key into its ignition and started it up, forgoing the helmet in the rear stow box. He pulled back on the throttle just as the door swung open behind him.

The cold V-twin sputtered before yanking the Kawasaki Vulcan forward with a squeal of rubber. Donovan shot a glimpse over his shoulder and spotted the two men dressed as priests scrambling out the doorway and into the alley—each brandishing a handgun.

Donovan’s eyes shot forward, sharpening on the opening ahead—a good fifty meters, nothing but brick wall corralling him on both sides.

An easy target for a straight shot.

Pressing his chest down against the fuel tank, he cranked the throttle to the max and serpentined the bike as best he could, trying to avoid skidding out on the rain-slicked pavement. The first shot ricocheted low off the wall in front of him. A second punctured the exhaust pipe and made the bike produce an ear-numbing grumble. Clearly the men could shoot. But they didn’t seem to be aiming directly at him. Were they attempting to blow out a tire?

In a panic, Donovan made a split-second correction to maneuver around a pothole that caught the rear tire. The Kawasaki jerked hard and forced him close to the wall just as a third shot nearly grazed his calf and pinged off the chrome engine block. Another five meters and he gripped the brakes and skidded out into the roadway, leaning right to force a wide turn. In the process, he clipped the bumper of an oncoming truck, whose horn was blaring.

The bike slid hard to the opposing curb, forcing Donovan to throw out his leg to keep from rolling into an older woman who was walking her poodle. The muffler’s throaty rumbling covered her shouted obscenities as he pulled the bike upright and raced away.

8

******

Jerusalem, Isr ael

Descending the precipitous steps from the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, Rabbi Aaron Cohen gazed over at the fortified Temple Mount complex, which covered thirty-five acres of Mount Moriah’s summit like an artificial mesa with its huge filled rectangle of retaining walls, parapets, and embankments. A second, lesser platform rose up from the Temple Mount’s center to support the shrine that had dominated the site since the late seventh century—an elaborate building with a massive gold cupola perched upon an octagonal base of marble and colorful Arabian tiles.

The Dome of the Rock, Islam’s third-most-holy shrine.

And when Cohen’s eyes defied him and caught a glimpse of it, he cringed severely. He muttered a prayer to suppress the deep-rooted emotions that surged every time he thought of the grand Jewish temple that once graced the world’s most hallowed hilltop. The feelings of loss and insult came in equal measure.

At the bottom of the steps, he made his way to the security checkpoint for the Western Wall Plaza. As always, he set off the metal detector. Casually stepping aside, he held up his arms. The young IDF soldier, dressed in olive fatigues and beret with an Uzi slung casually over his left shoulder, shook his head as he got up from his stool. He grabbed a black security wand off the bag scanner. “Shalom, Rabbi.”

“Shalom, Yakob.”

The soldier lackadaisically ran the handheld metal detector over the Hasid’s limbs and torso. As always, it let out a high-pitched screech along the left thigh and hip. Sighing, the guard discreetly patted the area to confirm nothing was there. “No way to get rid of that stuff, Rabbi?” he asked with a polite smile as he rounded back to his stool.

“Not if I want to keep walking.” Cohen shook his head. “Better get used to it.”

The deeply embedded shrapnel was a physical reminder of the suicide bombings at Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market that left sixteen dead and dozens more wounded, including Cohen, who’d stood mere meters away from the shaheed ’s detonation. Despite four surgeries and five months at Hadassah Medical Center, nails and pellet-shaped metal remained where surgical extraction would guarantee paralysis. For two years following the incident, he’d relied on a cane for walking.

Normally, Cohen would present a medical badge prior to triggering metal detectors. But that badge wasn’t required here. Everyone here knew Rabbi Aaron Cohen—very well. Over the past two decades the fifty-threeyear-old Brooklyn-born Haredi had become one of Israel’s most influential religious and political voices—a staunch proponent of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the return of Zion, and the official state adoption of the Halakha— Jewish laws of the Torah—to govern public life. As a younger man, he’d served two terms in the Knesset’s leftist National Religious Party, whose credo had been “The land of Israel, for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel.” And his teachings at Israel’s most prestigious yeshivas had earned him much acclaim. Jewish and secular Israelis considered him the next contender for Chief Rabbi.

“Have a great day,” the soldier said.

Cohen tipped his wide-brimmed zayen to him, then strolled outside with a slight hobble, the white tassels of a prayer scarf worn under his black vest swinging in rhythm with his quick shuffle. The strands of his long black beard and tightly twisted payess danced against a gentle breeze.

The spacious open plaza led up to an exposed section of the Temple Mount’s western retaining wall that was fifty-seven meters wide and nineteen meters high—the Kotel. Normally the place would be full of Jews chanting prayers, rending their garments, and shedding tears for the lost temple—all of it exemplifying how the place had earned its most famous nickname: the Wailing Wall. And for good fortune, tourists would stuff prayer notes into the razor-thin seams between the wall’s enormous Herodian stone blocks.

But for the past month, the scene here had been much different.

Barricades zigzagged through the plaza. Backhoes ferried debris out to dump trucks parked outside the Dung Gate, where tour buses typically queued. Judaism’s most holy site now looked like a construction zone.

Cohen headed to a tall arched entry on the plaza’s north end that accessed the Western Wall Tunnel—an underground network of ancient roadways, cisterns, and water passages running deep beneath the buildings of the Muslim Quarter along the Temple Mount’s western foundation. Prior to its recent closure, tourists could’ve walked the subterranean passage from the Western Wall Plaza all the way to steps leading up and out onto Via Dolorosa beneath the Temple Mount’s northwest corner. An archaeological marvel. But more important, Cohen thought, a direct link to first-century Jerusalem.

He greeted half a dozen IDF soldiers chatting in a loose circle. He’d insisted on the added security detail prior to his agreeing to assist overseeing the sensitive and highly secretive project now under way here. Death threats from Muslim fanatics had already been received, with many more to follow, he was certain.

Inside, the cool air refreshed him. Wilson’s Arch swept high overhead— the remnant of a grand first-century bridge connecting the Upper City to the Temple Mount courtyards. A series of connected vaults formed a spacious hall normally used as a synagogue. Near where the Torah Ark had been only four weeks ago, Cohen maneuvered around heaps of limestone brick and mounds of cement aggregate. He descended a metal staircase that accessed the next level of the tunnel.

Emotions came quick in this mystical place—a gateway to an ancient world his grandfather had taught him so much about in a secret room in Brooklyn.

Swapping his zayen for a bright yellow hard hat, he entered a massive subterranean chamber—the Large Hall—where tour groups would normally assemble for an orientation about the Temple Mount’s first-century construction by Roman and Egyptian architects employed under the visionary architect King Herod the Great.

Cohen stayed close to the massive, beveled Herodian blocks that formed the mount’s base—one was the largest stone in Israel and weighed over six hundred metric tons.

Work lamps flooded white light over dozens of men working atop tall scaffolds who were repairing heavy fractures in the hall’s four lofty interlocking vaults. In many spots, massive gaps remained where whole sections of the thirteenth-centuryb.c.e. arches had forcefully dislodged.

The earthquake that caused the damage had happened almost six weeks ago. Part of the Lord’s plan, Cohen was certain. Another sign that the prophecy was being fulfilled.

His eyes fell to the tiered seating in the rear of the hall, set in front of a miniature model of the mount and the temple precincts atop it circa 70 c.e., now crushed beneath three massive stones. Amazingly, the tourists who’d been present when the tremor hit had not been injured, or anything worse.

“Good morning, Rabbi!” a worker yelled over the clanging jackhammers.

Cohen waved to him.

The 5.3-magnitude quake, which had originated in the Great Rift Valley and cut through the Dead Sea to the east, paled in comparison to 1927’s 6.3 quake fifteen miles north in Jericho, which had claimed over two hundred casualties. Jerusalem’s Old City, however, built predominantly from unreinforced ancient limestone, sat upon layers of debris left behind by centuries of destruction and rebuilding. Seismic waves, therefore, came with amplified effect.

And so did the political aftershocks.

For over a decade, the tunnel’s ongoing excavation had been a flashpoint for Jewish and Muslim dissension over control of the Temple Mount—the world’s most coveted religious ground. And the unilateral restoration now under way here had drawn much protest from all Muslim and Palestinian groups—the Waqf, Hamas, the PLO . . .

Cohen gazed woefully up at the vaults once more. What sat above them contributed hugely to the controversy—the residential Muslim Quarter.

Over the centuries, the Muslims had constructed the stone vaults to raise their dwellings up to the level of the Temple Mount’s esplanade and facilitate easy access to the mosques. Over the centuries, the tunnel hollows had filled with mud and debris, which helped stabilize the superstructure. Therefore, Muslims contended that the recent Israeli excavations threatened the integrity of the structures above. Which was why it was so critical that no Muslim or Palestinian witness the extent of the damage that had truly taken place—because the riots and deaths that marked the 1996 opening of the tunnel would be nothing compared to the violence that could stem from this. As such, the Israeli government was funding this project while actively spinning its purpose.

Cohen proceeded to a temporary door painted in red letters: authorized personnel only. He punched a code into its digital keypad and the lock opened. Pushing through, he closed the door behind him.

Poured cement slabs paralleled the Temple Mount’s bare foundation wall to form a narrow corridor, crisscrossed overhead by steel stabilizer girders. Underfoot, the ground sloped steadily upward.

He moved fast through the passage and up some steps leading to the approximate midpoint of the Temple Mount’s western wall. The ceiling opened up high above and the foundation stones gave way to a massive sealed archway that crested at six meters—Warren’s Gate, discovered by British archaeologist Charles Warren in 1867.

Shortly after Saladin’s twelfth-century recapturing of Jerusalem, this opening to the lower structure of the Temple Mount platform had been blocked off. But now, a sizable breach had been made in its center, and light spilled out from the burrow.

He crouched down and peeked inside, where a second crew was busy clearing debris. Though the men wore the same uniforms as the crew in the main hall, they were not under the employ of Israelis. These men were one of Cohen’s many teams.

He couldn’t help but smile when he saw how far they’d already penetrated beneath the Mount.

Deep beneath the Temple Mount esplanade, their ear-pounding jackhammers still had Cohen concerned about what might be heard above. This secret dig, however, was in close proximity to the Large Hall, so he was certain that the noises would be easily confused with the sounds of the renovations taking place there.

A vibration against his chest startled him. He dipped into his breast pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and checked the display’s caller ID: an inside line at the Rockefeller Museum. Fortunately, the Israeli crews had installed signal-relay boosters throughout the tunnel to make outside communications more efficient. Flipping it open, he loudly said, “Hold a moment.”

He moved away from the archway and further up the tunnel. “Yes, what is it?” he finally asked.

Through the static, he listened to what the man on the other end had to say. News of a remarkable discovery in Qumran.

“Is it . . . authentic?” he asked, a slight tremor running over his fingers.

The caller said he believed it was.

“And who found it?”

The caller told him, and his hand shook even harder.

“Who did Mizrachi ask to handle the transcription?”

Cohen didn’t like this answer either.

“I’ll be there in an hour.”

9

******

Jezreel Valley, Israel

Cresting the massive earthen mound crowned by fortified ruins, Amit parked his Land Rover and hopped out onto the dusty trail. He took a moment to admire the lush expanse of the Jezreel Valley spreading for kilometers around the tell until it broke like waves against the distant rolling mountains. The unassuming plain had hosted countless battles in antiquity as empires had fought to control this busy interchange where trade and communications were channeled between the East and the Mediterranean.

For centuries, the mound had been used as a strategic stronghold. Its sinister name derived from the Hebrew Har Megedon, or “hill of Megiddo.”

Armageddon.

Designated in Revelation as ground zero for an apocalyptic showdown between the forces of good and evil.

Armageddon’s past tenants included a host of Old Testament kings, among them Solomon and Josiah. All had left their mark somewhere within Megiddo’s summit, the tell’s visible foundations a mere veneer covering over twenty successive settlements hidden beneath.

Winding through the maze of ancient foundations, Amit stopped beneath a cluster of fragrant palms and peered down into a deep, neatly cut excavation trench staked along the rim with yellow flags. Below, a small team of archaeologists was busily working their way deeper with trowels and brushes, one micro-thin layer at a time.

On hands and knees, sporting a wide-brimmed pink sun hat, he spotted world-renowned Egyptologist Julie LeRoux. It was the imprint of the Egyptian pharaohs that had brought her here—Thutmose III, to be precise, he recalled. Recent digs had uncovered a treasure trove of relics left behind during the king’s occupation in the late fifteenth century b.c.e. Julie had flown in from Cairo the very next day. It had been almost four months since her arrival.

“Hey, Jules. Reach China yet?”

Without diverting her attention from dusting a partially exposed, orblike artifact lodged in the earth, she called out with a fine-tuned French accent, “Monsieur Amit? That you?”

“The one and only.”

“Zut alors!” Setting down the brush, she stood and looked up at him, silver-blue eyes squinting tight against the imposing sun.

Something about Jules had always managed to make Amit swoon. Three kids and forty-three years had done little to affect her athletic, trim form. Her face—wide-eyed, cheeky, and insolently youthful—was arguably not her best physical asset. But the radiance it emanated was infectious. Funny that she seemed so content, so happy, seeing as her marital record bore a striking similarity to his own—though the number of her failed attempts to substitute a spouse for archaeological mysteries had only reached one.

“Where is your shovel?” she said.

A jab only an archaeologist could appreciate. Jules considered shovels sacrilege—a tool relegated to only the impatient and the irreverent. He shrugged with a boyish grin. “Seem to have forgotten it.”

“Pity. Why don’t you come on down here and let me teach you a thing or two?” She motioned to a tall aluminum ladder leaning against the rim of the pit.

“So what brings you to Armageddon?” Jules asked.

Helping her dust the artifact, Amit was now able to decipher the orb—a clay decanter covered in hieroglyphs. The coincidence tickled him. “Egypt, actually.”

The words caressed her ears. “You don’t say,” she seductively replied. He glanced over his shoulder at her understudies, none of whom

seemed interested in listening in on the conversation. “A hieroglyph, more precisely.”

“Ahh. Looks like the gods have anticipated your visit to the oracle,” she teased, eyeing the jug. “Best be gentle with this one,” she instructed him, pointing at the amphora. “She’s flaking.”

Grinning, Amit treated it more tenderly.

“A glyph, you say. I suppose you’ve brought it with you?” Jules eased back on her knees. Amit nodded. “Then let’s have a look,” she said.

Amit set down his brush. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a photo, and handed it to her.

“I found this etching, you see, and . . .” He pointed to it, realizing it pretty much spoke for itself.

She bit her lip, her head tilted to one side as she studied it for only a moment. “Clear enough.” She refolded the paper and gave it back to him with a taunting smile.

“Well?” He pocketed the print.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were in Egypt?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Oh,” she said, confused. “Just seems like the only place you’d be able to take pictures of something like that.”

“What does it mean?”

“It represents a nome.”

A nome was ancient Egypt’s equivalent of a province. “Are you going to make me beg for the name?”

“Maybe I’ll just have you work for it. Now let me think of clues.”

Jules’s trademark trivia caught the attention of one of her students. The attractive young woman made eye contact with Amit, smiled, and shook her head in a sympathetic gesture.

Jules’s eyes scrunched, pinching subtle crow’s-feet at the corners. “Okay, it’s probably the most famous of ancient Egypt’s forty-two nomes, and today it exists only by name, though the place to which it applies is not its original location.” She glanced at him with anticipation. After ten seconds, she correctly assumed that he needed some help. “Hints: Book of the Dead, Atum, Horus, Ra—”

“Heliopolis?”

“Parfait!” she exclaimed, giving him a pat on the knee. “Yes, the legendary City of the Sun.”

He exchanged a victorious glance with the student, who bestowed her solidarity with a thumbs-up. Then, briefly falling into a trance, he tried to determine what purpose the glyph could possibly serve among the seemingly unrelated discoveries he’d unearthed at Qumran.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

Rousing, he said, “No . . . It’s nothing.” He waved it all away. “I knew I could count on you to figure this one out. Would have taken me hours of sifting through books.”

“You’re welcome.” She smiled. “Care to tell me what this is all about?”

“I’d love to, Jules, but it’s not something I’m at liberty to discuss,” he softly replied, motioning with his eyes to her nearby crew.

“Oooh . . . mysterious.” Her eyebrows flitted up and down and she poked his large belly with a stiff index finger, making him laugh out loud. “You know, it’s okay to ask for help if you need it. If you found that glyph here in Israel, there’s no one better than me to help you decipher its context. So why don’t you show me what you’ve found?” she challenged him.

How feisty could this woman possibly be? He scowled and shook his head. “Not sure if I’m ready to—”

“Jezza,” she called to the student, cutting him off.

“Yes?” the young woman responded.

“Think you can watch over things for the rest of the day?”

“Of course.”

“Excellent.” She turned back to Amit. “Then it’s settled.” Springing to her feet, she grabbed a towel and wiped her hands.

He groaned as he got up.

She tossed the towel to him, then stepped over to the ladder. “Off we go.”

10

******

Phoenix, Arizona USA

Another call went to voice mail as Charlotte Hennesey pored over the genoscan data again. Finally pushing aside the reports, she swiveled her leather chair and gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her sleek sixteenth-floor corner office. BioMedical Solutions had spent lavishly on its corporate headquarters: an expanded state-of-the-art genetics lab, refurbished offices, and a cavernous mahogany paneled conference room. Times were good. BMS was growing like wildfire. And she was the second in command—executive vice president of genetic research.

Seeing as she’d recently cheated bone cancer, by all measures, things couldn’t be better.

Just beyond the glass, the city’s panorama spread wide before the serrated peaks of the Phoenix Mountains. The desert’s perfect blue sky offered tranquility. Nowadays, she still needed to remind herself to take stock of life’s more simple beauty. A fancy job title and stock options were fleeting novelties that she likened to new-car smell. A new lease on life, however? That was a transformative event that left a permanent, humbling impression. And it was an impression that she was anxious to share with the world.

Rubbing her eyes, she swiveled back to the computer monitor, where two images were paneled side by side.

“Just makes no sense,” she muttered.

The image on the left was a spectral karyotype plotting twenty-four fluoresced chromosome pairs in a grid. The image on the right was virtually identical, except for the label on the last pair—XX instead of XY. Nothing wrong there.

Sample XX had been extracted from the nucleus of her own blood cell. Female.

Sample XY had been extracted from a two-thousand-year-old skeleton found inside the ossuary she’d secretly studied at the Vatican Museums back in June. Male. Identity? . . . The possibility still sent shivers down her spine.

But the real difference—the aberration—was plainly evident in both images. It was the chromosome pair marked “23.” The strands indeed had a normal wormlike shape, but lacked the visible bands of a compressed helix. Closer study had revealed why: pair 23’s genes weren’t structured in tightly wound strands. In microscopic view its structure resembled . . . rock candy? Adding to the genetic mind-bender was the fact that the nucleobases—guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine—found in all other chromosomes were not present in 23. Which led to a most amazing discovery: a previously undocumented coding nucleobase she and her boss Evan Aldrich had, for the time being, simply dubbed “chromosome 23” or just “23.”

And 23 operated like a super organic nanomachine, rebuilding and recoding damaged cells in the remaining chromosome set—a synthesis she still couldn’t fathom. And when introduced into an organism—like an unsuspecting thirtysomething female geneticist with bone cancer—it swept through the bloodstream like a virus to repair damaged coding, system-wide.

She still couldn’t believe Evan had been so daring as to inject her with it. For all he’d known, it could’ve killed her. Then again, he wasn’t the type to leave things to chance. When he’d spotted the anomaly while performing a routine genome scan on the ancient bone sample she’d sent him months back, he knew what he’d stumbled upon. He just couldn’t explain exactly what it was.

When they’d returned from Rome in June, that job had been delegated to her.

So far, her search to find answers had only brought bigger questions. Where had 23 come from? How could it have only existed in a twothousand-year-old man? A chromosome that could selectively undo countless centuries of adverse genetic mutation? It was an epigenetic riddle of unprecedented proportion.

Charlotte sank back into her chair and sighed.

She couldn’t help but contemplate an idea serious researchers considered taboo: the “origin—unknown” variable that pointed to something bigger than scientific rationale. Irreducible complexity? Don’t think it, she told herself. But she did anyway. Intelligent design? If her analysis even hinted at creationism, she could kiss her career good-bye.

“Come on,” she admonished herself. You can find the answer. You can do this.

But even if she could, what about the commercial aspects of the research? This thing would be the Pandora’s box of medicine. Eradicating every disease could have daunting implications—like the complete collapse of the medical-industrial complex.

“Just breathe,” she muttered to herself.

“Take a breath for me too,” a voice called from the door.

She turned. It was Evan, looking like a billboard ad in his Armani navy double-breasted suit and a tasteful periwinkle and white striped tie that made his blue eyes flash—a more serious corporate image (adopted not by his own volition, but at the insistence of the board of directors). She still opted for the company’s standard-issue white lab coat over her 40-percentoff Ann Taylor Loft pantsuit.

“How ya doin’?” He stayed leaning against the door frame.

“Oh, you know. Trying to figure out how we trapped the Garden of Eden in a test tube,” she said with great sarcasm.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

She shrugged.

He tipped his chin up at the monitor. “Your sample still stable?”

“Yes.” Enzyme levels normal, blood cell counts immaculate, no trace of cancer cells. Remission.

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“I’m not complaining,” she said with a smile. “Still think we should keep this under lock and key?”

He nodded slowly and sharply. “One step at a time. This little wonder has already helped BMS redesign its gene sequencers. And now those puppies can pick out just about every known disease.”

That was putting it mildly, she thought. Beta testing of the Genocodifier XMT by the country’s leading genetic researchers had led to unbiased euphoric reviews in the industry’s most prestigious journals and had set the entire health-care market buzzing—from pharmaceutical companies to biotech firms to fertility clinics. The orders were flooding in from all corners of the globe, presenting Evan with a CEO’s most invited dilemma— how to keep up with production and growth. He’d been meeting nonstop with venture capitalists to arrange funding for BMS’s global expansion. Wall Street was already whispering about “the next Microsoft.” Hence the spiffy suit. What a difference a few months had made, she thought.

“A bit premature to follow up with a potential cure-all,” he said, “especially when my best researcher can’t quite explain what it is.” He folded his arms to await her rebuttal to the dig.

“Is that right?” she said, feigning offense.

He shrugged. “There could still be side effects,” he reminded her.

“Like what? Me growing a beard?” she quipped.

Aldrich laughed. “We just need to be patient.”

The smile faded from her lips. He’d recently applied those same words to their relationship. Given the circumstances, his noble reasons had been justified—the huge corporate responsibilities now commanding all his time and energy. Problem was, those circumstances wouldn’t be getting any easier going forward.

Sensing what she was thinking, he parried with “I was going down to Starbucks for a coffee. Want me to pick you up one of those frappa-mochasoy-latte Frankenbrews you like?”

She snickered. “I’ve already exceeded my caffeine quota for today, but why not. And it’s ‘venti,’ not ‘medium.’ ”

“Right.” He made to leave, but paused to offer some encouragement. “Remember, Charlotte: we know the world isn’t flat and the sun is the center of our solar system. The answer is there,” he said, pointing to the monitor. “You’ll figure it out.” He gave a wink and made his way into the corridor.

Through the clear glass partition, she watched as he got onto the elevator. “But I’m not Copernicus,” she mumbled as the doors slid closed in front of him.

As she twirled her chair back to the computer, the desk phone chimed. She pressed the speakerphone button. “BMS Genetic Studies Department.”

“Doc, it’s Lou.”

Charlotte immediately recognized the security guard’s distinct Brooklyn accent. The big voice complemented the man’s imposing stature. “Hey, Lou. What’s up?”

“Just a sec . . .”

Through the receiver she could hear his heavy footsteps, then a door closing to block out the sound of voices in the background. Then came the groaning of upholstery and some heavy breathing as Lou settled into a chair.

“Sorry ’bout that. Had to come into the office before I talked to you. Anyway, we got a guy down here—out front at the desk. Askin’ for you. Told him you ain’t workin’ here no more. Seven freakin’ times I told him.”

Charlotte straightened in the chair.

After all she’d told Evan about what had happened in Vatican City— that goon, Salvatore Conte, quite literally chasing her out the front gate—they’d agreed it would be best to leave her name off the company directory. To further limit her exposure, Aldrich had taken her off media duty too. She’d even gotten a new cell phone number and home number.

Lou continued, “But this stubborn mother—uh, pardon my French— refuses to vacate the premises till we tell ’im where you’re at. I’m gonna call the police, but—”

“Did you get a name?”

“Sure. But he sounds like a leprechaun,” he said, digressing. “I think he’s after your Lucky Charms—”

“My folks were Irish too, Lou,” she reminded him. “Remember, I’ve got the reddish curly hair, green eyes?”

“Ooh. Sorry ’bout that. But you’ve got that great tan—”

“His name, Lou?” Down at the front desk, she’d overheard the ex– nightclub bouncer sizing up the female employees. Best to cut him off before he started commenting on her great “rack.”

“Right. Just a sec.”

There was a pause, then she heard his chair creak, the crinkle of paper.

“Name’s Donovan. Patrick Donovan.”

Father Donovan? Here?

“Just thought I’d tell ya before I call the black-and-whites. Case he says something and they call ya.”

“Wait, Lou,” she said, still caught up in confusion. “Is he bald, about five-nine . . . mid, late forties maybe?”

“Bald as a baby’s butt cheek. And he ain’t no NBA draft pick, age or height, I can tell ya that.”

“Give him a pass and send him up.”

“You sure?” he asked, disappointed.

“He’s safe. I’ll vouch for him.”

“If you say so. Just give a shout if he gets fresh.”

She disconnected the call and sat back in her chair. What could possibly bring Donovan all the way from Vatican City?

11

******

Each time the elevator doors opened, Charlotte reacted like a little girl waiting for her daddy to come home. She even caught herself nibbling at her unmanicured fingernails.

During her short stay in Vatican City—which Patrick Donovan had arranged with BMS—the priest had been a consummate host, looking out for her at every turn. She’d dismissed any notion that he could have been responsible for siccing Conte on her when she made to leave Vatican City unannounced. That look in Donovan’s eyes when Conte first wheeled the crated ossuary into the Vatican’s lab? Conte was certainly not under his control.

When the doors smoothly parted for the third time, a man in jeans and a short-sleeve plaid shirt with a white guest badge plastered across its pocket stepped off the elevator looking lost. Even without the black suit and white collar, she immediately recognized him. Rising from her chair, she smiled and waved to him through the glass, then made her way to the door.

“Can I hug a priest?” she asked.

“If you don’t squeeze too hard and make all the confessions come out,”

he said with a wide grin.

“It’s so great to see you,” she said, bending slightly for a quick embrace.

“Quite a surprise.”

“Yes. So sorry, Charlotte. Rather rude, me showing up unannounced

like this.”

His soothing voice delighted her. “Don’t be silly.” Right away she could

sense something was troubling him. “I take it this isn’t a social visit?” Smiling tightly, he said, “We must talk for a few minutes. It’s quite

urgent, I’m afraid.”

Immediately she felt her stomach flutter. “Sure. My office okay?” He looked over her shoulder. All the walls were clear glass and he could

see a young woman who appeared to be Charlotte’s assistant in an adjacent

glass cubicle. He seemed to think it was private enough, because he said,

“Certainly.”

Charlotte led him inside, locked the door to avoid interruptions, and

motioned to the small oval conference table set by the window. She watched

as he sat with hands folded on the table, his posture timid and vulnerable. “Lovely view,” he couldn’t help but comment.

“Scores high in our employee satisfaction surveys,” she replied, taking

the seat across from him. He smiled genuinely for the first time—the

smile she remembered from their strolls in the papal gardens. “Speaking of

which, how are things at the Vatican?”

Donovan contemplated his hands for a moment. “Oh, you know . . . as

long as there are sinners out there, business will be good, I suppose.” “A nd C a rd ina l Sa ntel li ? ”

His eyes met hers for a moment, then went back to his woven hands. “I

take it you haven’t heard.” He told her about the cardinal’s death, which,

for now, he explained simply as unexpected heart failure. Only he and God

were privy to the true nature of Santelli’s demise.

“I’m sorry” was all Charlotte could muster.

“Well, I’m sure he’s in good hands now.” Whether they were God’s or

Satan’s, Donovan wasn’t certain. Before proceeding, he knew he had to

address something else too. “And Dr. Bersei—”

“I read about it,” she said, her voice suddenly choked. “I still can’t believe . . .” Eyes watery, she had to stop herself. “Was it really an accident?”

she managed in a low voice.

The emptiness in Donovan’s chest felt instantly larger. The Vatican

could spin anything. “About that . . . ,” he said, but reconsidered. “Later,

actually. No time now. You see, I left the Vatican . . . after all that had happened. Returned to Ireland. Back to the homeland,” he said. “Temporary leave?”

“Permanent, perhaps. Anyway, it worked out fine . . . got to spend time

with my father before he passed on, God rest his soul.”

She tsked and reached out to touch his hands. “So sorry.” “Lived a full life. He was a good man. God will take him with open

arms.” Unlike me, he thought, and drew a breath before going on. Leaning forward, he looked deep into her eyes. “Something very troublesome

happened to me yesterday. When I couldn’t reach you by phone, I had no

choice but to come find you immediately.”

Luckily, his checkered past in Belfast meant always keeping his Italian

passport (the de facto standard for Vatican citizens) alongside his wallet,

and a small travel bag was always at the ready in his motorcycle’s stow box.

After the incident at the store, he’d headed straight for Belfast International and immediately got standby seating on an Aer Lingus flight bound

for New York. A second booking on Continental got him to Phoenix by

late morning.

“Two men came looking for me,” he explained, “asking about the ossuary we’d studied.” The fear this brought into her eyes pained him. Guilt

came fast.

Confusion rumpled her brow. “I saw the ossuary in the news. Tough

to miss the dolphin-trident etching. They said it’d been stolen,” she said,

without trying to make it sound like an accusation. “Then it was anonymously returned to Jerusalem. Right after Dr. Bersei was found dead.”

Hearing her own words made her consider the facts. Conspiracies immediately began spinning in her head. “Was it him?”

Donovan shook his head. “Not Bersei.”

She studied his shamefaced expression. “You?”

A reluctant nod.

“To set things right,” he said, trying to defend himself. “A long story I

don’t have time to explain just yet. But the big problem is . . . I returned

it empty. And it seems these two men were looking to get the skeleton

back.”

“The bones?”

“Yes. They were very insistent. And when I chose to remove myself from the conversation”—he looked up with hard lines creasing his brow—

“they came after me with guns.”

Charlotte’s face blanched. Oddly, the first thought that struck her was

industrial espionage. Could it be the miraculous gene code they were after?

But only she and Evan knew about that. “Wow” was all she could say. “Besides me, I’m afraid you are the only person left who’s worked on

the project. And . . .” His voice trailed off and he spread his hands to

compensate for the lost words. He’d never anticipated all of this when he’d

first acquired the ancient manuscript that told of the ossuary’s existence

beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount.

“You don’t think . . .” She looked hard at him. “You think they might

come after me?”

Looking down again, he nodded. “I had to warn you.”

At that moment, he happened to divert his eyes to the corridor, where

two technicians were just coming off the elevator. They were attired like

Charlotte—spotless white lab coats covering business-casual clothing. But

the taller man’s coat wasn’t buttoned because his broad shoulders pulled at

it too tightly.

Donovan’s eyes went wide when he spotted the fellow’s companion—

an ordinary, forgettable man. It took only a split second before the man

made the connection too. “Jesus save us!” Donovan yelled, jumping up

from the chair.

The shorter man snarled as he went for the door and began fussing with

the lock.

A second later, the elevator doors parted and Evan emerged with a to-go

cup clutched in each hand.

“Oh no!” Charlotte cried. “Evan!” But her scream was subdued by the

glass partition. She watched in horror as Evan stopped in his tracks, his

confused gaze bouncing from the two lab techs to Donovan, who was frantically waving his arms, shouting for Evan to move away. But Evan failed

to grasp the gravity of it all.

Instead of retreating, Evan stepped up to the tall man and scrutinized

the tiny photo on the security badge dangling over his chest. When he

surmised that the two lab techs were imposters, his temper flared. While

trying to urge the short one away from the door, Evan attempted to sidestep the tall man. But the giant blocked his advance so that Evan’s face

collided with his chest. Some verbal sparring ensued, all inaudible on the

other side of the glass.

“We’ll have to let him handle it,” Donovan implored her. “We’ve got to

leave right now.” But Charlotte was frozen. “Let’s go!” Donovan yanked

her up from the chair.

“We can’t just—”

“Get moving!” He pulled her arm even harder.

Overwhelmed, Charlotte couldn’t take her eyes off the scene as the

large man planted a huge hand on Evan’s chest and thrust his arm like a

piston, sending Evan stumbling backward. By the time Evan regained his

footing, the giant had reached beneath his lab coat, produced a gun, and

raised it to Evan’s face. Horrified at the dire turn of events, Evan threw the

two cups at the man and tried to run for the fire exit. The gunman barely

reacted as the scalding coffee hit his chest and splashed up under his chin,

steam swirling into his face.

With unwavering aim, he snapped off a shot that drilled a red circle

through the back of Evan’s head and ripped open bone and skin in a

red spray as it exited his face. Evan’s body catapulted forward onto the

tiles.

It wasn’t the crack of the gunshot that caught the assistant’s attention;

it was Charlotte’s bloodcurdling scream. When through the glass partition

she spotted the two men near the elevator and Evan’s body sprawled in a

pool of blood, she panicked and darted for the metal security door leading

to the labs. She fumbled for the employee ID card clipped to her suit jacket

and slid it through a reader on the lock.

Donovan swung open a second glass door leading into the assistant’s

cubicle, dragging Charlotte behind him.

“Wait!” Charlotte protested. “Evan!” she cried.

“Stay down!”

An instant later, the door leading to the elevator let out a loud clack as

cracks webbed out from a single hole blown through the center of its tempered glass. The round thwacked into the windowpane behind Charlotte’s

head, making her snap into action.

The assistant was just making her way through the metal door, and

Donovan muscled Charlotte through right behind her. He stole a glimpse

of the large gunman, who was throwing his shoulder against the fractured

glass. A third attempt brought the door down in a thousand pieces, the

man stumbling forward into the office.

“Come on! ” Donovan screamed. He ducked into the doorway,

Charlotte at his heels. He yanked the safety door shut just as another round thudded close to the handle. “How do we get out of here?” he

panted.

“Follow her,” Charlotte replied, her tone full of dread. She pointed

to her assistant, who was already halfway down the corridor. Adrenaline was helping her to pretend that she hadn’t just witnessed Evan’s

murder.

12

******

Orlando unclipped the geneticist’s ID badge from a neck strap he’d spotted on her desk and waved it in the air. “Hey! Take this,” he called loudly. On the other side of the glass partition, his partner was trying unsuccessfully to unlock the door through which the three had escaped and was preparing to blast a hole through the lock. The facilities on this floor required higher security access than what was permitted by the badge he’d forcefully “borrowed” from the undersize tech he’d stuffed into a utility closet in the parking garage.

Kwiatkowski—his shirt and lab coat drenched with coffee; the front of his neck blistered and red—raced in to retrieve the key card.

“I’ll handle this,” Orlando said, eyeing the computer monitor. “You go.” He waved toward the metal door. “And put that away,” he ordered, eyeing the man’s Glock.

Tucking the gun into a concealed underarm holster, Kwiatkowski rushed next door, opened the metal door with the first card swipe, and disappeared beyond.

Orlando grinned when he saw a laptop patched into the workstation’s dummy terminal. Shortly after giving up Donovan’s name, the Vatican priest, Father Martin, had since called to inform him of an American geneticist’s involvement in the project too. The cleric couldn’t recall her name, but he’d remembered invoices paid to her Phoenix-based employer, BioMedical Solutions, Inc.

After Donovan had fled his shop, Orlando and Kwiatkowski had scoured Belfast for his motorcycle, with no results. It was while they were ransacking his home that the call came through on Orlando’s cell phone— results from traces run on Donovan’s passport and credit cards. By then, Donovan’s Aer Lingus flight to JFK International had already lifted off Belfast International’s runway.

Though the priest had been one step ahead, they hadn’t been far behind.

Their employer’s private Learjet had swiftly begun closing the gap. While in the air, another credit card trace came through, showing Donovan had purchased a second fare on Continental Airlines. A search of flight manifests had him en route to Phoenix—home of BioMedical Solutions, Inc. The Learjet arrived an hour ahead of Donovan’s flight, plenty of time for Orlando to make a preliminary visit to BioMedical Solutions’s downtown headquarters. While the guard at the security desk provided him directions to the nearest men’s room, Orlando had discreetly stuck a dimesize microphone to the underside of the granite countertop. When Donovan finally arrived, the adversarial conversation he had with the guards had been crisply transmitted to Orlando’s cell phone.

Next, Orlando studied the geneticist’s desk.

Luckily, whatever she had been working on wasn’t on the company’s main server. That saved lots of time and risk in trying to decrypt passwords and navigate sophisticated firewalls. He unplugged the laptop and tucked it under his arm.

Was this woman Donovan’s accomplice? Whatever the case, the fact that she was a geneticist was troublesome. Because if she’d examined the bones ...

His eyes made a quick inventory of the framed photos on her desk. Mostly shots of an older man whose facial similarities suggested he was her father. He snatched the photo that showed her face most clearly.

Next came the desk. In the top drawer, he found some business cards among the paper clips, Post-it pads, and pens. “Dr. Charlotte Hennesey. Executive vice president of genetic research,” he read, impressed. He slipped one into his pocket.

The bottom drawer gave up her abandoned Coach purse. He pulled it out, unzipped it, and rifled through the wallet. The bad news was her credit cards were left behind and there were no keys. The trail would be that much harder to follow. The good news was her Arizona driver’s license had been left behind too, so accessing all her records would be that much easier. He tucked the wallet into his pocket.

Then he hastened through the shattered glass and into the corridor.

Luckily, no other employees had come by during the commotion—less killing, fewer complications. To his right was another solid keyed entryway marked lab 11—level 4 clearance only. To his left, sprawled in front of the elevator, the dead executive lay in a swirled pool of blood, coffee, and brain matter.

“Nice suit,” Orlando said, staring into the man’s lifeless blue eyes. Sidestepping the mess, he calmly made his way to a fire exit sign that pointed to a door at the end of the hall.

13

******

In the genetics lab, Kwiatkowski was attempting to be low-key while trying to figure out where the geneticist and priest had headed. He could tell he was on the right path when one of the female techs became frightened at the sight of him. She grabbed at a phone to attempt a call to security.

Promptly, he strode over and squeezed the thin hand that held the receiver while the middle finger of his free hand pressed down on the base’s disconnect button. “Don’t even think about it,” he growled.

“Don’t hurt me!” the woman pleaded through quivering lips. “Which way did they go?”

Without hesitation, she pointed across the pristine workstations to a

fire door. When he scanned the room and didn’t spot anyone else paying attention, he jabbed his right fist once at the woman’s face, knocking her out cold onto the floor.

Then he sprinted through the stainless steel islands heaped with microscopes and gadgets and slammed through the door. In the stairwell, he paused to listen. Quick footsteps echoed, sounding close to the bottom.

Swearing, he bounded downward, taking the treads in huge leaps.

Just as he passed a placard for the fifth floor, he heard a door slam far below. He swore again and quickened his pace.

By the time he made it to the bottom he could already hear tires squealing. Pulling the Glock, he threw open the door. But the front end of the speeding car swerved to push it right back at him, knocking him down and cranking his ankle sideways. Pain shot up his calf.

He cursed, sprang to his feet, and leapt out the door, crouching for a shot. But the car was just rounding out onto the roadway.

Cursing again, he tested the ankle. Nothing broken, maybe only a slight sprain. That’s when Orlando appeared on the street, spotted him, and came rushing over.

“I couldn’t make out the license plates.” Kwiatkowski agitatedly shook his head. “But it was a silver Volvo. Convertible with Arizona plates.”

“Doesn’t matter; I’ve got plenty,” Orlando said, patting the laptop.

14

******

Jerusalem

Jozsef Dayan was no stranger to handling ancient papyri. The seventytwo-year-old had dedicated five decades to deciphering the ancient secrets buried beneath his homeland. His transcriptions and interpretations of the historical treasure trove found in the hills overlooking the Dead Sea had earned him worldwide notoriety, as well as numerous citations from the Israeli government. His most recent book on the subject, The Essenes and Qumran: Unlocking an Ancient Mystery, was considered mandatory reading for any biblical archaeologist worth his salt. Fluent in all the biblical languages—including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek dialects—he’d been instrumental in revealing a world that had been lost for centuries.

Qumran’s first set of scrolls had been found accidentally by a Bedouin herder whose search for a lost sheep led to a cave filled with ancient clay jars. Shortly thereafter, when the United Nations helped Israel to raise its flag in 1948, the texts began surfacing in the underground antiquities market at a time when Israeli nationalists were paying handsomely for artifacts substantiating Jewish heritage.

Ever since, the discoveries had kept coming. To date, the Israel Antiquities Authority had cataloged over nine hundred scrolls.

But none compared to what his colleague Amit Mizrachi had brought to him only yesterday.

The sand-colored clay jar containing the papyri had been what first captured Dayan’s attention. It was twenty-three centimeters in height; had a cylindrical, bulbous form; and was slightly tapered from top to bottom— just what he’d expect. But a most peculiar symbol had been traced into its side prior to the clay’s firing. And its domed lid had been sealed with wax. Most unusual. So he’d known straightaway that whatever had been stored inside carried great importance and promised to be excellently preserved.

On a light box to his left, the lid rested beside the empty jar and a glass dish containing the fragments of the wax seal.

A separate light box, set to barely a glow, sharpened the Greek text on three papyri laid out beneath protective glass.

The papyri had been meticulously preserved, the best he’d yet seen, in fact. A bit brittle along the edges, but no distortions, stains, or discolorations. It was obvious that no moisture had gotten past the jar’s seal.

And the text was so perfectly legible—so cleanly inked by the quill along horizontal guidelines cut superficially into the sheepskin vellum, all written by the same steady and patient hand; the characters’ unique formation was undoubtedly first century. Surprisingly, careful analysis with an ultraviolet wand detected none of the alterations or overwrites typically found when scribes corrected for errors. Incredible specimens.

At an adjacent computer terminal, Dayan typed out the final lines of the transcription, backspacing numerous times to correct for the typos that resulted from his severely trembling fingers. The Hungarian couldn’t shake the growing dread that had quickly overcome his initial euphoria.

The ancient message was shocking. Something so profound that Dayan knew these texts might never find their way to the scroll vaults beneath the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum.

He managed to type out the final line of the transcription, then saved the document. Next, he opened his e-mail account, scrolled through his extensive contact list, and selected Amit Mizrachi. After attaching the document, he began his message:

Dear Amit:

In all my years, I’ve never seen anything like this. So many have tried to extrapolate meanings from the Qumran texts, seeking connections to the Gospels—contradictions, perhaps. But as you know, only ambiguous

interpretations exist. If these scrolls truly date to the first century, and I have no doubt they do, what you have discovered will challenge everything we know. I fear that such a controversial message might

“Yosi?” A gruff voice interrupted his typing.

The septuagenarian gave a start as his head swung to the figure dressed all in black standing in the open doorway. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” he said in a dry voice. He coughed before getting his next words out. “You nearly scared me to death, Rabbi.”

“Everything all right?” Cohen cautiously moved into the lab. “Of course.” The response sounded as insincere as it felt. He quickly clicked the send button on the message window before the Hasid could get within sight range.

“Did I interrupt something?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not at all.”

Hands folded behind his back, Cohen approached the light boxes and first scrutinized the clay jar. “I’ve heard that Amit Mizrachi has come up with a most unique find,” he said, his tone almost accusatory.

“Indeed he has,” Yosi feebly replied.

“Please,” the rabbi insisted, tipping his head at the jar. “Tell me.”

“Well, it’s all very early on,” he said, getting up from the chair and joining the rabbi at the table. “We must perform a luminescence study to validate the pottery . . . radiocarbon on the vellums too, of course.” He swept his hand over the three papyri.

“I understand. But nothing provides better validation than your gut, Yosi,” the rabbi said with an air of flattery. “You’re the best of the best. So why not tell me what you already know the tests will confirm?”

Reluctant to share, the archaeologist needed to buy more time. It was only right that he speak with Amit before discussing the remarkable transcription. “It would be premature, I’m afraid. There are some inconsistencies here, and . . .” He let the lie fall flat. Perspiration was welling beneath the sparse white hairs of his high widow’s peak.

“Is that so?” Cohen said, eyeing the pristine writings. “Seems quite clear to me. Greek, is it?”

“That’s right.”

A closer look tightened his squint. “Koine Greek, if I’m not mistaken?”

Yosi didn’t like where the rabbi was going. But if he didn’t take the bait . . . “Correct. You have a keen eye.”

He assessed the three pages, which were dense with writing. “Only three sheets. Surely you’ve finished the transcription already?”

“I have,” he finally confessed.

“Perhaps you could give the museum’s largest benefactor a first look?”

Yosi’s timid gaze dropped to the flattened scrolls. The rabbi didn’t need to remind him of his merit here—no doubt attributable to the seemingly unlimited funding his organizations had supplied Israel’s museums and IA A research programs with. As far as the IA A was concerned, Rabbi Cohen was to be treated on equal footing with the organization’s president. But Yosi also knew that the man’s intimate work with the Ministry of Religious Affairs had caused much controversy—particularly his involvement in preserving grave sites accidentally uncovered by construction crews in and around Jerusalem. He’d personally witnessed Cohen laying his body in front of a backhoe to stop the desecration of a first-century tomb uncovered during a high-rise project in Talpiot, all in defense of the strict Jewish laws—Halakha—that demanded respect for the dead.

This discovery would surely put up the rabbi’s defenses. Yosi was keenly aware that he was walking a fine line. “Forgive me, but I don’t think that would be wise, just yet.”

The rabbi cocked his head sideways in silent frustration, lips pursed. “Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind if I have a look?” He pointed to the jar.

“Of course. But if you could, please . . .” Yosi reached up to the shelf and pulled a fresh pair of latex gloves from a small box. He handed them to Cohen.

Cohen pulled the gloves over his pianist-like fingers. Then his attention went back to the jar.

It looked ordinary enough. Palming the sides, he gently lifted it from the light box. It was heavier than he’d have guessed—a robust piece. First, he checked inside to confirm that it was empty. Then he examined the outside. It was when he began rotating the jar that he spotted the symbol cleanly etched into its side. His eyes immediately went wide and his face drained. He actually had to suppress a gasp.

“Most unusual, isn’t it?” Yosi noted. “Looks to be the same symbol on the side of the ossuary we recovered in June.”

“Indeed,” Cohen said, doing his best to conceal his anxiety. As if to confirm it was real, he ran a finger over it—the imprint of a legacy. Grandfather’s words echoed: “Yes, but not a fish, a dolphin. And not exactly a fork, but a trident.” “Qumran, I take it?”

More hesitation. But it was no secret that Mizrachi had been sited there for some time now. Yosi nodded. “Just when you think the well has run dry.”

Carefully, Cohen returned the jar to the light box. As he peeled off the gloves, he eyed the archaeologist’s computer monitor. The screen had gone solid blue with a pop-up box in its center framing two blank fields labeled user name and password.

“Well then,” Cohen said. “I certainly look forward to your findings.”

“As do I,” Yosi said as he began slipping out of his lab coat. “I must lock up now. I’ve got a previous engagement to attend to.” This wasn’t a lie. “A symposium at the Israel Museum,” he added for good measure. He hung the coat on a rack behind the door.

“Ah, yes. Something about the Babylonians, as I recall?”

The rabbi surely knew exactly what the topic would be. “ ‘Relics from Babylonian Exile,’ to be precise.”

“Should be fascinating.”

“We shall see.” Forcing a smile, he motioned to the door. “I must get going if I’m to make it on time.”

Eyeing the jar and papyri one last time, Cohen went out into the corridor and waited as Yosi pulled the door shut and locked it with a key.

“Good seeing you, Rabbi. Shalom.”

“Shalom.”

Cohen folded his arms tight across his chest and watched the old man disappear around the corner. Then he studied the door lock.

15

******

Phoenix

“I don’t know what to say . . . ,” Donovan began, shrinking in the Volvo’s leather passenger seat. “I’m so very sorry, Charlotte. If I’d known they’d—” But as he glanced over at her again—the pain that contorted her face, the tears, the trembling hands gripping white-knuckled at the steering wheel—he knew there weren’t words to console her about such a thing.

Silent, with eyes staring emptily at the roadway, Charlotte was lost for words too. The moment she’d safely left the downtown high-rises in her rearview mirror, the fight-or-flight rush had given way to overwhelming shock and grief. It wasn’t just the man she thought she’d loved who had been mercilessly murdered before her eyes, but a visionary genius as well. A man who’d revolutionized genetics. It was a profound loss that would affect so many.

Heading north on Squaw Peak Parkway, she had yet to consider a specific plan or destination. Escape had been the only thing on her mind. But finally, she eased off the accelerator as more tears blurred her vision. “They’re going to follow us, aren’t they?” she finally said, opening the center console to pull out a tissue.

Hearing her speak was comforting. “I’m afraid so.”

She wiped her runny nose, then her moist eyes. “Who are they?” He shook his head. “Not sure. But they’re definitely professionals. How

they could find me so quickly . . .” He sighed and threw up his hands. “They’d need access to all sorts of information.”

“Did Conte send them?” she sniffled. “Is that what this is about?” Ever since the creep had chased her out of Vatican City and she’d landed a firm foot in his crotch, she’d feared his retaliation.

Donovan glanced out the window at the omnipresent freeway signboards for Paradise Valley before answering. “Conte’s dead, Charlotte,” he said with conviction. “It couldn’t have been him.”

This took Charlotte completely by surprise. “What? How?” A pause.

“I killed him.” His brogue grew stronger. “I had to kill him,” he stressed.

“There was no choice.”

“My God,” she gasped in repulsion. “How could you do such a thing?

You’re a priest.” Now she couldn’t dismiss the fear that maybe Donovan

was somehow baiting her.

His wounded stare remained on the approaching desert hills, dotted

with cacti. “Just before he tried to kill me, he told me he would come for

you, Charlotte.” He could still hear the mercenary’s words clearly in his

mind: “Did the cardinal tell you she skipped off with her laptop . . . loaded

up with all the data? . . . I’ve got to fix that too and her blood will be on your

hands ... if a freak accident should happen to befall the lovely geneticist . . . the authorities would be none the wiser... Of course, I’ ll be sure to show her a good time before she goes.” “I couldn’t handle another loss . . . after Dr.

Bersei . . . the Israelis.”

Mute, Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“I had a gun,” he went on. “There was a struggle . . .”

For a moment, Donovan was back at the misty grove atop Monte Scuncole, peering down at the ossuary he and Conte had dropped into the pit

they’d dug. He remembered fixating on the crack that had snapped the

stone lid in two—wide enough to reveal the sacred bones beneath. Conte

intended to drop Donovan’s body in right behind the relic and use C-4 to

finish the job.

“I managed to run from him . . . out onto the roadway. He was right

behind me when the car came.” The images reeled through his mind,

making his pulse drum. He needed to take a breath before continuing.

“By the grace of God, it swerved and took him down—like the Angel of

Death . . . but even with that, he was still breathing.” He shook his head

in disbelief. “Only the devil himself could have kept him alive. But Conte

was breathing. Had he somehow lived, there’s no telling what—” Trembling fingers went to his lips to repress the surge of emotion. The next

words came fast: “So I took the gun and finished him.” He quickly crossed

himself. God, please have mercy and forgive me for these deeds. No matter what the consequences, airing the confession felt good—

cleansing. The Irish way of “stuffing it down” simply wasn’t good for the

soul. However, Donovan still wasn’t prepared to offer up that when he’d

stripped Conte’s body of its personal effects, he’d found a syringe filled with

clear serum, which he’d snuck past the Vatican metal detectors to eliminate what he thought had been the final threat—the Vatican’s secretary of

state. Otherwise Santelli would have stopped at nothing to complete what

he’d set out to do: eliminate any trace of the Vatican’s involvement in the

church’s greatest cover-up.

He allowed a few moments for the air to settle.

“Then Conte did kill Bersei?” She’d suspected that all along. Donovan nodded. “Many others too.” Though he felt he’d already said

too much, Charlotte would need to know the whole story. “There’s more,”

he said. “I suppose there’s nothing to lose now,” he said, and sighed. He went on to tell her how just weeks before she’d been summoned to

Vatican City, he’d been given a book by an anonymous contact (“The book

I showed you during our meeting with Cardinal Santelli,” he reminded her), how it had actually included a map showing the ossuary’s hidden burial vault beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. How when he realized the implications of what would happen if the ossuary was discovered by Israelis, he’d convinced Santelli to take action. Though he’d advocated a peaceful solution, the pragmatic cardinal immediately sent for Salvatore Conte. Upon assessing the job Conte had used untraceable Vatican funds to employ a team of men to forcefully extract the ossuary—an elaborate plan involving guns, explosives, even a stolen helicopter. Many Israelis had been killed during an ensuing firefight at the Temple Mount, Donovan

explained.

She recalled hearing these things in the news. Even given Conte’s ruthlessness, which she’d witnessed firsthand, his involvement in such a huge

heist came as a complete surprise. Wrapped in thought, Charlotte caught

herself tailgating a semi that was chugging up the steep grade. She checked

the mirrors, flipped on the turn signal, and maneuvered around it. “Then he brought the ossuary to the Vatican,” Donovan said. “And,

well . . . you know the rest.”

Trying to process the unbelievable story, Charlotte was silent for a solid

minute. “I guess I should be thanking you,” she finally managed. He raised a hand to dismiss any idea of it. There was no glory in what

he’d done. Especially since he still wasn’t certain if Conte’s murder had

incited what had happened today.

“At first I thought these men might have known that Conte was working for the Vatican,” Donovan explained. “Perhaps he hadn’t paid them

for their services in Jerusalem. But they spoke about Conte as if he were

a stranger. And no mention of money . . . or the ossuary, or the nails, or

the book. Just the bones,” he grimly replied. “The bones,” he repeated in

disbelief. “I can’t imagine why. Even if I were to give bones to them, how

would they know they came from inside that ossuary? I suppose I could

give them any skeleton . . . ,” he said, hands cast up.

But Charlotte knew that was not the case. Those bones hid a one-ofa-kind imprint. And if these men knew what made them so special . . . A

cold chill ran over Charlotte’s body.

There was a more direct answer she was hoping for. So she just needed

to go for it. “That skeleton I studied ...It belonged to Jesus, didn’t it?”

She’d thought it impossible. But Dr. Bersei had been the first to suggest

this, finally convinced after deciphering the strange relief carved into the

ossuary’s side—a dolphin wrapped around a trident.

Charlotte’s hands clamped harder on the wheel as she awaited Dono

van’s slow reply.

A trembling hand went loosely over his mouth while he tried to formulate a response. “You saw the bones and the relics with your own eyes.

If archaeologists had found them first, the evidence would have left little

doubt—”

“Was it him?” she firmly insisted.

Exasperated, Donovan swallowed hard. “Yes.”

16

******

“And you have no doubts about that?” Charlotte said. After seeing the incredible genes hidden in the bones, their healing powers . . . Could there be any doubt that it had been Jesus’s remains she’d studied in secret at the Vatica n Museums ?

“There’s always room for error, but . . .” Donovan shook his head.

“You . . . a priest . . . ,” she said, stalling. “You’re basically telling me that there was no resurrection or ascension?”

“Not in a physical sense.”

“Then what about the Gospels?” Charlotte bitterly replied. “Is it all just made up?”

“The biblical accounts of events immediately following Christ’s burial are highly suspect, dare I say . . . falsified.”

“How so?”

The proof was fairly complicated, but he started at the easiest point. He explained that the oldest Gospel—Mark—originally ended with the empty tomb and that verses 16:9 through 16:20, where Jesus makes His appearances to Mary and the disciples, then ascends into heaven, were an addendum, written by a completely different hand. The Vatican’s oldest manuscripts from the fourth century, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, didn’t include the long ending, but by the fifth century Mark had four different endings that spoke about resurrection and ascension.

Charlotte could tell that Donovan was calm about all this but also felt somewhat cheated. To her, it seemed too big a conspiracy to have been kept under wraps for so long. “And nobody figured this out?” she asked, incredulous.

“Oh, it’s no secret,” Donovan insisted. “Any good Bible will reference this omission in its footnotes. Not to mention that even if you read these added verses verbatim, Jesus’s post-burial appearances are still referenced in metaphysical terms.”

Giovanni Bersei had told her this too. But she was interested in the priest’s perspective. So she asked for examples.

Donovan went on to give a sampling from all four Gospels, noting that each read like many of the omitted apocryphal texts the Catholic Church had considered heretical. He told her that immediately following the resurrection accounts in John 20 and Mark 16, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and was unrecognizable to her; she’d actually mistaken Him for a gardener. And in Luke 24, two of the disciples not only doubted His identity when he appeared to them, but then Christ literally disappeared from their sight—vanished!

In Donovan’s opinion, however, John 20 was the most telling of a metaphysical resurrection. He said, “John stated that the disciples were hiding in a sealed chamber and Jesus suddenly appeared in the room among them . . . from out of thin air,” he pointed out. “So you see, all four Gospels contain specific language suggesting that the Jesus who appeared after the resurrection was not that same Jesus who was buried in the tomb. So I ask the scientist in you, Charlotte: does that sound like a physical body to you?”

“No.” There were too many things it sounded like, she thought. But disappearing from sight? Appearing out of thin air into a locked room? How else could that be explained? Another wave of mixed emotions crested over her as she came to terms with the notion that the DNA inside her could actually have been taken from Christ. She sighed. “I suppose I’d rather be an apparition in the next life too,” she said.

To a scientist, this actually made more sense anyway, she thought. After all, the body’s “spirit” was really an electrical charge running through the nervous system. And Einstein’s most basic principle maintained that in a closed system, energy could never be lost or gained—merely transferred. If one viewed a dead body as a battery that had lost its charge, then logically, the body’s energy would be given back to the system. What system,

however, was anyone’s guess.

“The real question is, should this knowledge impact one’s faith or discredit Christ’s teachings . . . His mission?” Donovan added. “A physical

body doesn’t negate the teachings found in the Gospels. Nor does it downplay that God’s kingdom does promise eternal peace for the righteous. But

after all these centuries, the Vatican has emphasized an archaic interpretation of Christ’s physical death. So you can imagine the threat a body would

pose.”

He tried his best to explain how the Vatican had for centuries speculated about a physical body and feared one might turn up. Occasionally,

charlatans had attempted to blackmail the Vatican with anonymous relics

lacking any provenance whatsoever. But with today’s scientific methods,

Donovan pointed out, had a genuine relic been excavated, in its context

from beneath the Temple Mount, the threat would then be very, very real.

He stayed silent for a few seconds, then said, “Now we just need to figure

out why these two men want the bones so badly.”

Charlotte shifted uneasily in her seat. One thought kept repeating itself—Evan Aldrich had used those bones to save her life. Now those same

bones had made him a casualty. And though Donovan was fishing for an

explanation in the theological realm, there was only one thing that could

logically be their true motivation.

“I think I might know what these men are after.”

17

******

The Volvo idled at a scenic overlook along Camelback Mountain. The two passengers inside had just reversed roles; now Donovan was hearing Charlotte’s confession. And what she had to say—had to release—was something far more astounding than anything weighing on his soul.

Far across the valley below, beyond the unnatural green swaths of golf courses set amidst suburban sprawl, Donovan’s empty eyes were locked on BMS’s gleaming edifice, which rose high above the buildings clustered around it—an ungodly Tower of Babel forged of glass and steel, where humans challenged God on an entirely new level.

“There’s something else you need to know about what we discovered,” she said. “I’d been very sick back in June . . .”

“I gathered that,” Donovan weakly replied. “I was told you’d left behind things in your room. The drugs were for cancer, weren’t they?”

She nodded. “Multiple myeloma.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d heard of this aggressive disease, and he couldn’t hold back the grim expression that immediately came over him. How ironic that it attacked the bones, he thought.

Picking up on his distress, she quickly added, “But I don’t have cancer anymore.”

Amazed, he looked up at her. “Praise God,” he said, beaming. “That’s incredible! A miracle.”

“Yes . . . and no,” she said. “You see, that same gene I just told you about—” Her voice choked off.

“Go on,” he encouraged her. The same words he’d used countless times in the confessional.

Glancing over at him, she could tell he didn’t fully comprehend. “The DNA . . . Jesus’s DNA? It has special qualities.” The genetic synthesis was fairly complicated—something she still couldn’t completely decipher—so she needed to keep it simple. “It’s like a virus, but a good one. And when introduced into someone who’s sick . . .” She tried to envision 23 intelligently replicating system-wide at super speed to destroy the malicious cancer cells.

Donovan slumped in his seat.

“His DNA is inside me,” she said, her voice low, reverent. “It cured me. Probably minutes after it got into my bloodstream.”

Now Donovan was practically hyperventilating. On impulse, he crossed himself.

“So it seems we both have secrets.” He looked like he was going to have heart failure. So she reached over with a soothing hand and laid it on his forearm.

The fingers of his right hand went back to his quivering lips once more. The implications of what they’d uncovered in Jerusalem kept coming. “What have we done?”

“Isn’t everything God’s plan?” she said defensively, mostly to ease her guilt.

There may have been a time when he believed that. It would be comforting to think that God played puppeteer when Donovan killed Conte and Santelli. And it would offer great solace to know that the desecration of Christ’s ossuary was divinely sanctioned. But could God possibly have intended these consequences? “I don’t know, Charlotte. I just don’t know.” He looked out to the horizon. “What I do know is that we’re in this together,” Donovan grimly replied.

“Well, here’s what I’m thinking: what if these men somehow found out about my genetic studies?” It seemed impossible, given the unbelievable secrecy and security protocols she and Evan had built around the study. She pulled her hand back. “Maybe that’s why they’re coming for us?”

Sitting up, Donovan thought about this. At first, it actually seemed possible. Then he shook his head. “You saw how they got into your building. It was easy for them. Why would they have wasted time trying to come for me first?”

It was a good point. “Because I don’t have the bones?” she guessed.

“But you just told me you don’t need the bones. Your small sample can be replicated easily, right?”

“I see what you mean,” she said—a major hole in the hypothesis. “So you don’t think they actually know about the DNA?”

Based on the interaction he’d had with them in Belfast, he said, “I don’t think that’s what they’re after—at least not directly. But it’s evident that they want one of us to show them where the bones are hidden.”

Her eyes flashed with curiosity. She’d forgotten all about this. “Where did you hide them?”

“Best I not tell you that. For your own safety,” he insisted. He could see she was disappointed. “But I promise that if we get through this, I’ll show you.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “So where do we go from here?”

Donovan sighed. “We can’t stay here, that’s for sure. Apparently they can track us everywhere we go.”

“Why not just call the police? I mean, they murdered—” She felt her throat close off. The tears came again.

He shook his head. “These men are professionals. We don’t have names, a plausible motive. Nothing. They won’t be found. The real investigation that needs to be done . . . well, I think we’d agree that they just wouldn’t believe our story. Police won’t matter. We’d be sitting ducks,” he soberly replied. Looking up at her watery eyes, he could see she agreed. “Until we figure this all out, we need to be in a place where even if they know where we are, they can’t get to us. Someplace with very, very tight security.”

“We’d need to hire bodyguards. Lots of bodyguards.”

“No need,” he said, grinning. “Someone’s already done that for us.”

Obviously he had an idea. “Share, please.”

He simply replied, “I’ve been on sabbatical long enough.”

18

******

The Temple Mount, Israel

Sheikh Ghalib Hamzah ibn Mu’adh al-Namair claimed the leather armchair at the head of the teak conference table. The arched window behind him had been cranked open to allow a gentle breeze to freshen the cramped meeting room, but more important, to give the Waqf ’s assembled council members the necessary vantage to set eyes on the brilliantly sunlit Dome of the Rock, situated across the esplanade—visual reinforcement of their duty to protect the sanctity of the Haram esh-Sharif.

To further emphasize that duty, he’d slotted the early evening meeting immediately following Asr—the fourth of the five daily prayers that preceded the setting of the sun. And Ghalib had insisted that those now present recite the silent prayer inside the Dome of the Rock. He felt it would better set the mood.

Ghalib sat back tall and rigid, with forearms aligned perfectly on the chair’s armrests. Loose, wiry hands hung from the sleeves of his bright white tunic. Beneath a white prayer cap, or kufi, wisps of jet-black hair framed his wide, bony face and blended seamlessly with a patiently grown and meticulously groomed beard and mustache. An ever-present sneer favoring his right cheek gave a permanent crook to his lips. He was only thirty-eight, remarkably youthful for such a post—a testament to the fact that youth tended to preserve the fight in a man.

“As-salaam alaikum,” he said, greeting the dozen prominent elders and Muslim clerics gathered around him. He bowed his head, closed his eyes, and said, “Praise to Allah, the merciful and the beneficent. May He guide us and watch over us.” Then he tipped his head back and opened his eyes. It wasn’t only the stuffy room that needing airing. “I’m well aware that some of you have voiced concerns about my appointment here.” His caramel irises swam in pure white orbs resting behind taut eyelids, passing over the innocent with no regard, tightening accusatorily on the known dissenters.

And some dissension was expected. As a star pupil of the right-wing Wahhabi brand of Islam, Ghalib was a highly vocal fundamentalist with strong ties to Islamic militant groups, a regular teacher at universities throughout the Arab region, and hailed as the next great voice in Palestinian liberation.

“So let us talk,” he said. “Voice our concerns. Discuss our ongoing mission to preserve Islam and its sacred shrines.” His head tipped right as his accusatory stare went directly for the man who most opposed him. “Why don’t we start with you, Muhammad?” The turbaned sixty-two-year-old shifted uncomfortably in his chair and cleared his throat. “The Israelis continue to dig beneath the Haram while the Waqf sits idly by . . . watching, waiting,” Ghalib said in a sharp tone. “What do you suppose we are waiting for? Do you believe that your prayers will stop the bulldozers?”

“Of course not,” Muhammad said defensively. “You know that is not the case.”

Ghalib spread his hands. “Then defend your case.”

Another dry cough. “Ever since the theft in June . . . since your predecessor was indicted as an accomplice,” he reminded Ghalib, “our power has been greatly diminished.”

Ghalib’s crooked lip tilted higher. His predecessor, Farouq bin Alim Abd al-Rahmaan al-Jamir, was still in custody with the Israeli authorities and facing severe charges for conspiring to commit a theft that left thirteen Israeli police and soldiers dead. Though Israel’s only state-sanctioned execution had been the May 1962 hanging of Nazi SS leader Adolf Eichmann (who’d been captured hiding in Argentina by Mossad agents), many high-ranking Israelis in parliament insisted that Farouq should be put to death for treason.

Ghalib shook his head, his lips turned down. “Your power has not changed. But your will has surely weakened.” He knew what made the man soft and sympathetic. Though Palestinian by blood, Muhammad was Israeli by passport. It was evident that it wasn’t just the cover of his immigration documents that had changed from green to blue. And unlike his suffering brethren, Ghalib knew, righteous Muhammad lived on the prosperous side of Israel’s separation fences that cut away the West Bank and Gaza with hundreds of kilometers of poured concrete, steel, and wire.

Anxiety building quickly, Muhammad was hoping someone at the table would support him. None spoke up. “There was an earthquake,” he stressed. “Mild, yes. And when it first happened we were granted permission to see what had happened. I personally viewed the tunnel . . . you too, Safwan,” he said, pointing to the gaunt Arab wearing a kaffiyeh who sat across from him. “You saw it with your own eyes. Tell them.”

Safwan was silent; his charcoal eyes went to his hands.

Muhammad persisted, “Considerable damage was done—”

Ghalib overrode him. “Need I remind you that the damage was done long ago when you sat idly by over the past decade and allowed Jews to excavate the tunnels beneath the Muslim Quarter?”

“It was a trade-off,” he insisted. “They got the tunnel; we were permitted to restore the Marwani Mosque.” He held his hands and balanced them like scales.

“And see where that got you? You cleared the way for thieves to blow a hole through it.”

The Marwani Mosque had been the thieves’ entry point to the arched vaults beneath the mount—and a hidden chamber sealed behind its rear wall, which they’d accessed with C-4 plastic explosive.

Muhammad’s face reddened. He was playing right into Ghalib’s hands. And the man was certainly looking to make an example out of him. One thing was now clear: Ghalib’s appointment here was indicative of a subversive political agenda playing out on a much higher level. Given the current state of affairs, he still couldn’t imagine how the Israelis had even granted Ghalib entry into the country. Most likely, Ghalib had been snuck in by his Lebanese Hezbollah contacts. Ghalib had yet to step foot off the Haram, refused all media appearances, and corresponded under the assumed name Talal bin Omar. However, the Israelis weren’t stupid, so Muhammad could only guess that they preferred having Ghalib within easy reach. “The proper resolution we’ve always sought has been peace. Cooperation. Coexistence. Just as the Prophet teaches us.”

Ghalib sneered. “Peace? Coexistence?” He mockingly held his hands out at the man and let his gaze circle the table. “There is no peace in Jerusalem. Peace is a hopeless ideal that appeals only to the weak. There will never be peace in a place where Jews burrow like vermin beneath the great Prophet’s sacred mosque. And coexistence is an excuse for your fear of their guns and nuclear weapons. Only victory will bring peace. And in the name of Allah, we will prevail.” The teacher in him shone through, ever ready to provide Qur’anic tafsir favoring jihad. “Do you not agree?”

Scowling faces swung toward Muhammad. The Keeper’s question was a loaded gun. He paused to consider an appropriate rebuttal. “I do not condone what is now happening, but—”

“My ears have heard this digging!” another elder burst out. “While praying in the mosque . . . below my feet . . . I hear chipping sounds!” He cupped a hand around his ear and tried to imitate it: “Chh-chh-chh. Chh-chh-chh. This is what I hear. It is true. The Jews seek to destroy the Haram!”

The room erupted.

Smiling, Ghalib savored the moment. A half minute later, he finally raised his hands up to silence them. “Infestation. Like termites. That is what we are dealing with. There is a plague here that must be eliminated. We must free our house from defilement. It is not a choice. It is our sworn duty.”

The council members barked their support.

“We must avoid drastic action,” Muhammad delicately pleaded as he rose to his feet and placed a hand flat on the table. “Hostility will only cost innocent lives,” he said, patting the hand twice. “Has this not been proven time and time again?”

Rebuking shouts drowned him out. Ghalib once again intervened to settle them down. Then he jabbed a spindly finger toward Muhammad and commanded, “Sit down!”

Muhammad’s firm expression withered into despair. He threw his hands up in surrender. “I cannot support this . . .” He made to leave the room.

Ghalib’s right hand sliced the air like an ax blade. “I am not finished!” he roared, nostrils flaring.

Muhammad froze and turned back to him.

“Jews have no place here!” Ghalib held up a balled fist and swung it like a hammer. “This is a truth that cannot be questioned! Be assured that our response to recent events will be swift and concise. And our voice must be one. It is evident that your disgraceful words are solely your own and will not poison our ears. Therefore, your services are no longer required by this council. Now go, and don’t come back.” His hand chopped an arc to the door. “And let me remind you that anything you say outside these walls will have very serious consequences.” His face twisted. “Very serious indeed.”

Glaring eyes bored into Muhammad like needles in a pincushion as he slunk out of the room.

The room erupted again, the men boisterously voicing their approval of Ghalib’s fervent patriotism.

19

******

Qumran

By the time Amit steered the Land Rover off Kaliah-Sedom (Highway 90) and up the drive leading to an empty parking lot, the sun was setting over the hills of Jordan, making the Dead Sea glow amber and sapphire. He claimed the spot closest to the planted palm grove bordering the tiny makeshift oasis that was Qumran’s visitors’ center.

“Isn’t this romantic,” Jules said. “We have the place all to ourselves.” “Too bad I didn’t bring some wine.”

“Always a step behind,” she teased, shaking her head.

He grinned tightly, knowing she wouldn’t be saying this after he’d

shown her what he’d found up in the hills.

They both hopped out.

Amit circled to the Land Rover’s rear and lifted the hatch to retrieve

some provisions.

Meanwhile, Jules took a few seconds to admire the picturesque sea with its white mineral-crusted shore, the stark umber hills jutting up into the amethyst glow spreading into the sky above.

The Land Rover locked with a quick flash of lights and a tiny chirp as Amit pocketed his keys. He came to her side holding flashlights and a black rucksack.

“God, it’s so beautiful,” Jules said.

“Sure is. And smell that?” He breathed through his nostrils, long and steady—the distinctive aroma of clay, potash, and bromine.

She sampled it too, her thin nose flaring at the sides.

“That’s history . . . the Bible; what keeps me coming back,” he said.

“Smells a bit like a swimming pool,” she said in a snooty French accent, “but whatever floats your ark.”

“You’re ruthless.” Shaking his head, he handed her a light.

He led her up some paved steps past the squat gift shop and ticket center, out back to the gravel trails leading to the sheer cliffs that formed a continuous wall to the north and south. To their left were the excavated ruins—mainly foundations—of the village the Essenes had inhabited up until the first century. Not far beyond them was a deep gorge extending from the sea to a huge mineral-coated crevasse cut into the cliffs by the winters’ flash flood runoff. They were headed to a zigzag path running up it.

“How far up?” she asked, eyeing the towering cliffs.

“Pretty far,” he flatly replied.

“Fabulous,” she huffed.

Peppered around a sliver of a crescent moon, winking stars were starting to break through the darkening sky as Amit led Jules to the ladder set beneath the cave opening.

Drenched in sweat and complaining incessantly about the buzzing flies, Jules was razzing him about how they were going to make it back down the cliff in the dark. She was still upset that some spots had required them to climb over boulders.

“The hike down is much less challenging,” he said, stretching the truth. Despite her complaints, he knew the payoff was certain. He flicked on the flashlight and pointed it up at the opening.

As Jules craned her neck back, her flashlight lit up the tight curves where her sweat-soaked white T-shirt clung to her chest. The opening was another climb, but nothing like the clamber up the gorge. When her gaze snapped back to Amit, she caught him quickly diverting his bashful eyes from her raised nipples. “I’d hate to think you dragged me up here to look at my tits.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and squeezed her breasts together, to make matters worse for the Israeli.

His face went red. “I was just . . . just . . .” Then he decided that his attraction didn’t require an apology. “It’s hard not to stare, that’s all. Take it as a compliment.”

“Compliment taken.” She actually blushed. “Now can we get moving?” She waved for him to get up the ladder.

The episode had taken away his fear of climbing, because he stepped off the ladder and into the cave without care. He snuck another forbidden peek when he clasped her hand and helped her up.

“We’re heading all the way in,” he informed her, his voice taking on a professional air. “Watch your footing. It gets a bit dodgy in spots.”

“Lead the way so I can check out your ass,” she quipped.

“Enjoy the show,” he said, and began the steady climb up the tight passage.

“Double feature,” she said, shining the light on his rump.

The tricky tunnel forced Jules to concentrate for the remainder of the climb. When Amit spilled out into a wide hewn chamber, she wasn’t quite sensing the magic.

“You okay?” he asked, making his way to a light pole.

“Oui.” She ran her flashlight over a bunch of bricks arranged neatly on the floor. It was when the work light went on that she saw the wide opening in the rear wall. She moved closer.

“Hands and knees for this one. But it’s only a couple meters.” He could see some agitation building in her skeptical gaze.

Amit took the lead again, shuffling along on all fours into the rear chamber. When he stood, he immediately went for a second pole light close to the opening. The room came to life as Jules clambered in and got to her feet.

For a few seconds she said nothing as she paced the perimeter of the square chamber, skipping a corner where equipment and tools were heaped, pausing in spots to run her fingers along the hash marks cut into the stone walls. “Who made this?” she finally asked.

“I’m almost positive it was the Essenes.”

“Ah, the Essenes,” she incredulously replied. “Our scroll-writing friends again. A busy bunch, weren’t they?”

And he hadn’t even shown her just how busy they’d been. “Those bricks you saw on the ground out there”—he pointed to the passage—“had sealed the opening and were covered in earth and clay so no one would ever find this place.”

“Okay. So let’s say they carved this room.” Downplaying the significance, she shrugged. “So? Why?” But she could tell by the shit-eating grin on the Israeli’s face that he knew more—lots more. “And I’m still not seeing the glyph.”

“The good stuff is down below,” he promised, pacing over to the toolboxes placed around the opening in the floor to prevent anyone from falling in. With Jules watching over his shoulder, he slid some of the stuff aside to access the steps. “Why don’t you go first?” he said to her.

A tentative pause. Then she took a step closer and angled her flashlight downward. “Sure.”

Amit’s widening grin pinched his goatee at the corners. Now she was doing a lousy job of suppressing her excitement. “Careful on the steps.”

Jules kept her right hand on the wall as she made her way down, fingertips rising and falling over countless other hash marks. Her hiking boots squeaked on the smooth treads. At the base of the steps, she made some room for Amit to stand beside her.

While she stood frozen in place, mouth agape, Amit reached over to turn on another pole light that sucked out the darkness from the spacious, cube-shaped chamber. When he looked back to Jules, her breasts were rising and falling fast, and she wasn’t paying much attention to the fact that he noticed. The cool air had only improved the show.

Her mesmerized gaze was glued to the huge painting covering the wall opposite the steps. It was a magnificent specimen—white with colorful designs—and looked like it had only been painted yesterday. She strode over to it.

“I’m sure I don’t need to remind you not to touch it,” he teased.

“Ha-ha,” she said without taking her eyes off the image. “It’s amazing.”

In the center of the wall painting was a small arched niche carved into the underlying sandstone—empty. Spreading out around it, concentric circles made a sunburst, drawn upon a larger design—an equilateral cruciform, wrapped by grapevine tendrils. The ends of the cross widened into spades, each painted with Judaic symbols—two shofars, the ceremonial horns used to usher in the Jewish New Year, on the north and south axis; two lemon-shaped etrogs—fruits used during Sukkot, the feast of the Tabernacle—at the east and west points.

But most intriguing were the four quarter circles that curved between the arms of the cross, each containing a most unusual symbol—a dolphin entwined around a trident.

“I wonder what was here,” she said, pressing her face close to the empty niche.

“A clay jar, actually,” he knowingly replied. “And it contained three scrolls.”

Her astounded eyes finally gave him some time. “You’re kidding! Where are they?”

“Certainly would not have been wise to leave them here,” he reminded her. “I brought them to the Rockefeller Museum for transcription.”

“Jesus,” she gasped. “This is amazing.” Hands on her hips, she studied the painting a few moments longer, eyes squinting tight at the strange dolphin-trident symbol. “This symbol . . . what’s it doing here?”

He moved close to her side and took it in once again. “Crazy, right? Seems almost pagan.”

“Exactly.” She gave it a few seconds longer, then shook her head in defeat.

“We have a sacrificial altar too,” he added, moving to an enormous raised stone commanding the room’s center. It had been carved into a cube, its top scooped out like an ancient sink.

“Spooky,” she said, giving it only a cursory once-over.

“A nd a mikvah.” He pointed to the far corner, where more steps sank into a wide rectangular pit cut into the floor—once filled with water and used for ritual bathing and purification. The finding was consistent with other mikvahs found in the village near the sea and underscored the Essenes’ strict hygienic practices.

“You’d think they were using the place as a temple,” she said with some sarcasm.

But that’s precisely what Amit had thought too. “The plot thickens,” he replied simply.

“And the glyph?”

“Right. Over here,” he said, waving her to the corner closest to the stairs.

“On the wall there.” He pointed to an etching that wasn’t easy to discern until they were within a meter of it.

Jules aimed the flashlight directly at it to pull the shadows out from the lines. “So I take it you’re thinking the Essenes did this?”

“It would make the most sense. The room was sealed away. The jar was still here when we opened this chamber. If anyone else had come in, they’d at least have taken the jar, don’t you think?”

Looters were looters. “I see your point.” She ran a finger along the lines. “And this is very clear. A clear message. Even its positioning near the steps . . . the last thing one would see when exiting the chamber.”

“So the question is,” he asked, “why leave a glyph for Heliopolis?”

She considered this. “A forwarding address, I suppose.”

He hadn’t thought of this. “How so?”

“Well, whatever was here, maybe upstairs in the other chamber, must have been moved to Egypt.”

Amit blanched. “My God, Jules. That actually makes sense,” he muttered.

“Good thing you brought me here.” She patted his solid shoulder. “Question is, what was in the chamber upstairs?”

“Maybe the scrolls have something to say about it,” he surmised, stroking his goatee. That’s when he heard the first faint sounds coming from above, trickling down the steps.

“But if these symbols—”

“Shhh,” he cut her off, grabbing her wrist. “Hear that?” he whispered.

“What?”

“Shhhhhh.”

Then Jules did hear it. Subtle scraping sounds. Feet scuffing along stone? “Are you expecting someone?” she whispered.

He shook his head. A program started running in the back of his brain—a hardwired protocol from his IDF days, activated only during the silent infiltrations of radical Islamic safe houses in Gaza. “Let’s get up top,” he suggested, pulling her to the steps. Then, as an afterthought, he quickly unzipped the rucksack and pulled out a tiny device.

“What are you doing?”

“Keep moving. I’m right behind you.”

20

******

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.

21

******

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 evercapable, 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.”

22

******

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 ossuary 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.

The rabbi had zoomed in on the face, captivated by the man’s aquamarine eyes, which mirrored his own.

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”

His bloodshot eyes broke from the monitor. “We will be just fine.”

“We”? Who else is he answering for? she thought.

Sighing, he sat back and wove his hands behind his head. “I’m very much interested in how they came up with this image,” he said, pointing with his chin to the monitor. Having spent plenty of time in genetics labs, he was certain that the equipment was far too sophisticated to bring into Vatican City. Most likely, a sample would have been sent off-site. God willing, the geneticist’s laptop would have some record of it. “So I want you to search every file for anything pertaining to genetic studies.” The request seemed to overwhelm Ziv.

“I’m not exactly a scientist.”

“You don’t need to be geneticist,” he corrected. You don’t need to be Dr. Charlotte Hennesey, he bitterly thought—the name the field operative had found on the geneticist’s business card and driver’s license. A search of her passport activity would certainly show that she’d been in Rome back in June. Though it seemed unnecessary, he made a mental note to have his contact at Immigration Control run the query.

Looking apologetically at Ziv, Cohen realized he’d be better suited for this task. “Just get me a list of all the files. I’ll select the ones for you to look at.”

“Of course.” Lightning-fast fingers back at the keyboard, she stripped out unneeded information, filtered, refined.

In the quest to reclaim the purity of his family’s sacred bloodline, Aaron Cohen had become proficient in human genome studies—specifically the genetic research pioneered by Israeli professor Karl Skorecki in 1997, which traced unique gene markers in the patrilineal Y-chromosomes of Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (Spanish, North African, and Middle Eastern) Jews claiming to be Kohanim—the priestly descendants traced back over 3,300 years directly to Aaron and Moses. The Cohens. Of the world’s seven million male Jews, less than 5 percent bore the unique genetic markers passed down by Moses’s brother, Aaron. And since the mutations were preserved exclusively in the male Y-chromosome, intermarriages resulting from intercontinental Diaspora had virtually no effect.

Not surprisingly, the study’s expansive database showed that Cohen’s own Cohen Modal Haplotype had been the most pure to date, just as his late grandfather had promised—now vindicated by genome analysis. The problem with his own DNA was that countless mutations, or polymorphisms, had corrupted God’s original perfection. Genetic distortions had been passed down from generation to generation. No doubt it underscored God’s scorn.

The whittled-down list took almost fifteen minutes.

“Not too bad,” she said. “Looks like there wasn’t much here—at least important stuff, that is.” She clicked a command on the screen and the printer came to life, spitting out a seven-page directory of files sorted alphabetically and grouped by file type. Scooping the sheets up, Ziv passed them to the rabbi. “Just let me know what you want to see.”

23

******

In the Land Rover’s fully reclined passenger seat, Jules was fast asleep, snoring like a barnyard animal, hands crossed over her chest.

A new sun was rising over Jerusalem as Amit put the truck in drive with a scab-knuckled hand. He was bleary eyed, exhausted to the bone. The falling rocks had pounded his back, bringing a physical pain that was oddly reminiscent of the automatic gunfire he’d once taken to his Kevlar vest in Gaza—nothing broken, but definitely some deep bruising. Even if he tried, he wouldn’t be able to sleep—not without something to numb the pain . . . and his growing paranoia.

For the time being, he felt they needed to keep moving. Call it instinct. And for good measure, the flat black Jericho 941F pistol he’d recovered from the assassin rested on his lap, its two spare magazines weighing down the deep pocket of his cargo pants.

As the Rover lurched forward, Jules stirred and her bandaged knee touched up against the dash, making her flinch. Amit glanced down to verify that the bleeding had stopped. He’d done a good job cleaning the wound with the iodine from the truck’s first aid kit. The cuts beneath the second tight wrap of gauze were deep, but nothing that required stitches. All things considered, last night could have ended much worse.

He checked the mirrors to make certain that no suspicious vehicle was tailing them.

A few hours earlier, when she’d first spotted him from her hiding place in the ruins of the Essenes’ scriptorium down near Qumran’s visitors’ center, she ran up and threw her arms around him. “What the hell just happened back there?!” she’d cried, squeezing too tight around his tender ribs. But he liked it nonetheless. It’d been a while since Amit felt like any kind of hero.

Now he was still searching for an answer to Jules’s question.

Why would a professional assassin try to kill them? Was what he’d uncovered at Qumran so shocking that its complete destruction was warranted? It made no sense. Sure, the wall painting was highly unusual and the unique chambers brought to mind all sorts of possibilities. And the glyph? Well, the glyph for Heliopolis could mean just about anything.

Then there was the matter of tactics. The assassin came with gun in hand, precisely when he and Jules had been seemingly trapped inside. The run-in, therefore, had been no coincidence. Amit wondered how long the man had been waiting to make his move, because there’d been no other vehicle in the parking lot last night. What had his plan been?

The jar. At least the jar was safely locked away at the Rockefeller Museum. The jar and its scrolls.

The scrolls?

Gears were turning in Amit’s busy mind. Maybe his dear friend Jozsef Dayan could shed some light on matters. No doubt he’d finished the translations already. The man was a machine. The IA A would never get him to leave his post. And why should they? Age had only improved him. And years had only added to the trust Amit shared with the old man. “Morning.”

It was Jules. He hadn’t even noticed she’d stopped snoring. With hands folded behind her head, she was arced in a stretch.

“Hey.” Out of the corner of his eye, Amit couldn’t help but notice that her shirt had hiked up to expose her lovely flat stomach. And her puckered navel was an innie. Nice. “Sleep okay?”

“Not too bad. Been a while since I’ve been laid out on a guy’s car seat.” She yawned. “So what’s the plan?”

He shrugged. “Tough to say. I’ll need to make some calls. I’ve got a friend who can probably help us.”

“A friend? How about the police?”