The Sacred Blood

He shook his head. “Not an option yet.”

“What? You told me that dément is still alive. How is going to the police not an option?”

“Because of this,” he said, holding up the pistol. “Standard issue for the IDF. Also used by Israeli intelligence field agents.” He set the pistol back in his lap.

The mere suggestion of it had her smiling. “So what?” She cranked the seat-back upright. “You think he’s one of them?”

“Too early to say. But look here,” he said, reaching into his breast pocket and flipping open his cell phone. “That’s him.”

Jules closely scrutinized the grainy picture. He liked the fact that she wasn’t panicking. Most people would fall apart if someone had just tried to off them. “As I was saying. I’ve got a friend, a contact inside Israeli intelligence. I’m going to forward this to him, see if he can figure out who this guy is—who he works for, perhaps. You never know. We might get lucky.”

“How would that be lucky? Someone obviously wants you dead.”

“If he wanted me dead, he would have shot me on the spot.”

“Too suspicious,” she said. “If you were killed in a cave collapse in Qumran, no one would suspect a thing.”

He glanced at her and grinned. “Not bad.” Maybe the gun in his lap had only been the guy’s insurance. The real plan was probably a lot simpler, just like Jules was suggesting. Clever. “Sounds like you may have done this yourself a time or two.”

“When you go through a shitty divorce, you can come up with all sorts of ways to pull off the perfect crime.”

She had a point. His second breakup, with Sarah, hadn’t gone too badly—dare he say, amicably. But the first . . . The fierce custody battle for his two girls, and the fallout from Jasmina having forfeited her professorship to stay home and raise them? Brutal. Could have driven a lesser man to fantasize about unspeakable remedies.

“Sorry about this,” he said. “I had no idea . . .”

She reached out and gave his thick, dusty arm a gentle squeeze. “It’s an adventure. And I’m a sucker for a good thrill. No need for apologies.”

Her words were sincere. But she’d once told him that her eye color changed with her moods. And the silver in her irises seemed more pronounced. “Glad I could entertain,” he said with a half smile. “Thanks, Jules.”

The Land Rover climbed Hanoch Albeck into downtown Jerusalem. The city was still waking up, so the sidewalks were empty.

Amit pulled over so Jules could run into a café to use the facilities and get some coffee and pastries. As she got out of the truck, he reminded her that it was imperative that she pay only with cash.

He kept the truck running, his wary gaze scouting for anyone who looked shady.

Ten minutes went by before she came scurrying out the door with a carrying tray holding two Styrofoam cups cradled in her left hand. In her right hand, she victoriously held up a white paper bag and made a dramatic face as if she were just crossing the finish line at a marathon. Chuckling, Amit reached across and threw open the passenger door for her. She handed him one of the cups, then hopped in.

Taking a sip of the slightly bitter coffee, Amit checked his watch. It was almost seven a.m. “In a little while, I’ll make some calls. Need to get some petrol, too,” he said, checking the fuel gauge. “Don’t worry, we’re going to get some answers.”

“Worry?” she mocked, eyeing the Jericho. “With you packing a pistol on top of your crotch? A girl couldn’t feel more secure.”

24

******

After topping off the tank, Amit pulled the Land Rover away from the pump and idled near the petrol station’s pay phone. He hopped out to place a call from the anonymous landline. His contact picked up in two rings.

“Boker tov!” Amit said cheerily.

“Good morning to you, Commander,” Enoch Blum replied through the receiver. “To what do I owe this pleasure . . . at nine a.m.? Need an extra shovel man at a dig?”

He chuckled. “Not a social call this time, I’m afraid.” On the other end of the call, he heard a car door shut, an alarm chirp.

“Must be very important,” he said.

“It is.” He could hear Enoch’s key chain jingle, then his hard soles clicking on cement. “You’re not in the tank yet, are you?” Amit had twice been called inside the Tel Aviv headquarters of Israeli intelligence to consult on hostage extractions in Gaza. And that’s the impression the cement and steel Bauhaus bunker left: like being in the belly of a Merkava tank.

“Just making my way inside,” he said over the whistle of a breeze blowing through the parking garage.

“Maybe you can hold off on that.”

The footsteps stopped.

“Your mobile isn’t monitored, is it?”

“No,” he said with some reservation. “They still allow me a couple of liberties.”

“They” were the Mossad Merkazi Le-modiin U-letaf kidim Meyuhadim, or the Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations— aka the Mossad. They’d assisted Amit’s IDF unit on many operations. It was the two separate hostage extractions—both times, Israeli border soldiers had been abducted by al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade and detained in Gaza City safe houses—that left the most indelible impression. The Mossad were a well-trained bunch.

Though the Mossad’s director reported to the office of the Israeli prime minister, its estimated fifteen hundred employees were civilians, among them communications techs, weapons specialists, psychological profilers, field agents, international operatives, and hired guns. Its organizational chart was a pyramid of deniability—top to bottom. And when your business objectives included hostage extractions, terror-cell infiltration, sabotage operations, and assassinations, it worked much better that way, Amit thought.

Like Enoch, many in the Mossad’s ranks had served in the Israel Defense Forces. Enoch had served his three-year conscription under Amit— back then, Enoch was a kid who had yet to shave and who was practically outweighed by his Galil (assault rifle).

“You all right?” Enoch asked with sincere concern.

“Eh. Been better. Have a few minutes for me?”

“Got a briefing in ten, but let’s hear it.”

Amit made sure to squeeze everything he could into a two-minute recap of last night’s assassination attempt. He mentioned the guy’s tactics: his silencer-equipped Israeli pistol, his knowledge of explosives. Deciding to play it safe, he left Jules out of the story. “Same kind of stuff we used to see in Gaza, if you know what I’m saying,” Amit told Enoch.

After a brief silence with more wind whistling through the receiver, Enoch finally came back with, “Hell, I don’t know what to say. Sounds to me like it has something to do with your excavations.”

“Definitely. The entire site was wiped out.”

An uneasy pause.

Enoch’s reluctance was not subtle. Amit couldn’t blame the guy— Enoch was a family man, and much better at it than himself. This was dangerous stuff that could have serious repercussions for him too. Then came the question Amit was hoping for.

“So how can I help?”

“I know it’s a huge ask—puts you in a very difficult position. But if someone on the inside wants me dead, I need to know.”

“If they want you dead, it won’t matter what you know.”

He had a point. Once you were caught in the agency’s crosshairs, the Mossad wouldn’t let up until a file could be rubber-stamped in red. Should’ve killed him, a tiny voice kept whispering to Amit. Killed him and hid the body. Then he’d at least stand a chance that the guy’s employer would think the job was a success—that Amit and Jules were buried in the rubble. “Just need a fighting chance. If there’s a directive, maybe you can find out about it. See if I’m marked. And if so, why?”

More wind whistling through the receiver.

Enoch groaned. “I’m in Collections now,” he finally replied. “Nowadays, they’ve got me monitoring wire transfers and chatter. So I don’t have clearance for that type of information anymore,” he said in a low, uneasy tone. “But I still know some people in Metsada. You’ve got to give me some time.”

Amit grinned and gave Jules a thumbs-up. “That’s great, Enoch. Really great.”

Of the institute’s eight branches, Metsada was the Mossad’s special operations unit—the coordinators of assassinations and paramilitary and covert operations. Its huge database contained the agency’s most guarded information.

“By the way,” Amit added, “I have something that might help. I took a picture of the guy. I’m no photographer, and I used my phone to take it. Anyway, it should be enough that someone might recognize him. Do you mind if I send it to your phone?”

“Do that. It can’t hurt. I need to get going. I’ll call you as soon as I have something.”

Ending the call, Amit powered on his mobile only long enough to push the pix image over the airwaves to Enoch’s phone. Then he powered it off just in case his hunter tried using it to triangulate his location. “Think he’ll help?” Jules asked as he got back into the Land Rover. “Yeah, I do. Enoch’s a good man.”

“What do we do in the meantime?”

He stroked his goatee. “I think we should take a ride to the Rockefeller Museum. Have a talk with my friend Jozsef Dayan.”

25

******

Rome

“You’re sure this is going to work?” Charlotte asked as the taxi pulled to the curb along Borgo Pio.

“I don’t see why not,” Donovan said. “We’ve come this far . . .” He held up his hands and smiled. After paying the driver 40, he and Charlotte got out of the taxi toting their small travel bags. “It will be fine.”

For some reason, she believed him. Just like she had when she let him talk her into driving to Phoenix Sky Harbor International immediately after they’d stopped at her home to get her passport and some essentials. Donovan had been wary of going to her house because he’d thought the men might have gone directly there after seeing the address on Charlotte’s driver’s license. But she’d informed him that after all that had happened at the Vatican, upon her return to the States she’d immediately switched her physical address to a local Mail Boxes Etc. store. That was the address that appeared on not only her license but all mail and correspondence as well. Conte couldn’t get all the credit for that, though; there were plenty of fanatics out there who put genetics on equal footing with abortion and murder. Some level of anonymity was prudent. However, since she’d left her purse at BMS, Donovan had put the pricey Continental airline tickets on his credit card.

Though the flight hadn’t departed till six a.m., neither of them had slept during the four-and-a-half-hour trip to Newark or the hour-and-ahalf layover there. Plenty of time for Charlotte to shed some more tears while Donovan tried his best to console her. It’d been the smooth eight hours crossing the Atlantic and Western Europe that had done the trick. They’d both woken up when the plane was in its final descent into Fiumicino around eleven a.m. Roman time.

She followed Donovan across the street.

“I’ll need your passport,” he said, and waited for her to retrieve it from her bag. Taking it, he cast his eyes heavenward and said, “Here’s to the luck o’ the Irish. Just give me a few minutes and wait here.”

She stood aside on the busy sidewalk. At the huge, ornate iron gateway crowned with a papal crest and flanked by Roman columns, she watched him approach a Swiss Guard wearing a blue jumpsuit, a sidearm, and a black beret. Over the busy commotion—cars and visitors queued in separate lines—she could barely hear the exchange. Though it didn’t matter, since Donovan seemed to be conversing with the man in Italian. He presented their passports and the guard looked over at her. Next, Donovan produced a badge that was no doubt his outdated Vatican ID. Satisfied, the guard went behind the gate and waved for him to follow. Donovan confidently glanced over at her, smiled, and held up an index finger. Universal for So far so good. I won’t be long.

When the first five minutes had gone by, crazy thoughts came to Charlotte—outlandish suppositions of why Donovan thought it best to come here, of all places. Could this be his elaborate plan to get her back into Vatican City—a trap? Maybe Conte was really alive, waiting behind the gate for Donovan’s instructions to nab her.

But the laptop was more important than she—that’s where the incriminating information really was. That’s when it hit her: My laptop. Christ, what if those men got hold of the files? She took some comfort in knowing that the data was encrypted. Still . . .

Should it be surprising that she hadn’t heard news reports concerning Conte’s death? After all, Donovan had indicated that Conte wasn’t even the mercenary’s real name. And it was just another unsolved murder in Italy. Not prime pickings for CNN. But Santelli’s death? Would that have made news in the U.S.? It’s not like he’d been the Holy Father himself, but he was the Holy See’s equivalent of vice president. Now she was wishing she’d had time to verify Donovan’s story.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she mumbled.

A kind-looking priest was just exiting the gate and walked past Charlotte. Seeing her troubled expression and puffy eyelids, he smiled politely, glanced quickly at her bag, and greeted her with a warm “Hello.” Lucky guess, she thought.

“Hello,” she said, smiling. Then she realized that her duffel bag, a complimentary joiner’s gift from her local YMCA, had the facility’s Phoenix address on it. The window of opportunity hadn’t closed. “Excuse me, Father?”

The man stopped and turned to her.

She took two steps to close the gap. “I know this may sound like an odd question . . .” She rolled her eyes.

“I’m a priest. I get many odd questions, my dear.”

The kind, aged face reminded her of her dad. “It’s quite embarrassing that I don’t know this,” she said, spreading her hands, “but is Cardinal Antonio Santelli still with the Vatican secretariat’s office?”

The man drew his lips tight and somberly shook his head. “Sorry if you haven’t heard. His Eminence passed away some months back.” “Oh.” She feigned distress. “That’s terrible. What happened?” “His heart gave out, I’m afraid. God rest his soul.”

She thanked the priest, and when she turned, Donovan was standing outside the gate waving her over. That’s when she realized it was a beautiful day in Rome—clear skies and mild. And rising up all around her, the Renaissance architecture helped calm her spirit. A big improvement over her last visit. She strode over to him.

“What was that all about?” Donovan asked, curious.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Just chatting.”

“You’ll need this,” he said, handing her a laminated badge encoded with numbers, her name, and a high-resolution scan of her passport photo set beneath the flickering hologram of a papal crest. “They’ll hold our passports till we leave. Things have a gotten a bit more strict, I’m afraid.”

She shrugged and clipped the badge to the lapel of her rumpled blazer. “As long as they still have showers in there, I won’t complain.”

Passing through the gate, Donovan led her through the Vatican’s tiny commercial district. As they passed Via dei Pellegrini she looked left, up at the rear face of the Apostolic Palace. W hen her eyes came down again, they were nearing the spot where she’d had a final showdown with Conte. The killer’s final words echoed in her thoughts: “Remember your confidentiality agreement, Dr. Hennesey. Or I’ ll have to come and find you.”

And it was virtually on that very spot that Charlotte noticed a familiarlooking priest awaiting them.

“Patrick! So good to see you!” the priest said.

Donovan embraced the man. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long.”

Donovan turned to Charlotte. “How rude of me. Charlotte, you remember Father James Martin? He was Cardinal Santelli’s assistant?”

The poor man chained to a reception desk outside the cardinal’s office. What she remembered most was the dark circles under his eyes and his pallid complexion, which seemed even worse in daylight. He looked like a creature of the night. “Of course. Good to see you again, Father,” she said, offering a handshake.

He took her hand in his. “Charlotte,” he said, cocking his head sideways as if trying to place her face. But really, hers was not a face to forget. He distinctly remembered—May God forgive my impure thoughts, he prayed— admiring her as she signed confidentiality agreements for Santelli’s secret project; the project that now put his sister and her beautiful family in jeopardy. “Yes, Dr. Charlotte . . . Henry, was it?” He purposely botched the last name to alleviate suspicion. He’d remembered her name yesterday, when he’d immediately called the mobile number his abductors had provided. And only minutes ago, he’d placed a second call to Orlando on a new number, alerting him to the duo’s unexpected arrival.

Her last name was printed in bold, twenty-point Times New Roman on her badge. Maybe he didn’t want to be rude and look down since it was hanging over her left breast? Charlotte wondered. “Close. Hennesey.”

“Sorry, I’m so terrible with names,” he said, some rosy color marbling his pale cheeks.

He finally let her hand free, leaving a damp, cold feeling behind.

“It’s such a pleasure to have you staying with us again. Anything you need during your visit, you just give the word.”

“Thanks so much for your hospitality.”

“You’re very welcome. Well then, let’s get you both situated. You can freshen up, take some time to rest.” He led them up a walkway cutting alongside the Apostolic Palace. “Are you available for lunch?” he asked Donovan. “Take some time to catch up? You too, of course, Charlotte.”

“If it’s all right with you, Charlotte,” Donovan replied.

“Sounds great.”

26

******

Tel Aviv, Israel

“So what do you make of all this?” Cohen asked.

Renowned professor of Israeli population genetics David Friedman leaned back in his chair. His protruding dull eyes were magnified through the lenses of thick bifocals. The gaunt thirtysomething had no hair or eyebrows, the result of an extremely rare disease called alopecia universalis. The complete baldness of his body, coupled with his protruding steel-gray eyes, could make one wonder if he’d been beamed to earth by a flying saucer. His mind-boggling intellect was otherworldly too. But it didn’t negate the fact that the man was socially awkward and irritable. And the fact that he staunchly denounced both God and Judaism was a huge tax on Cohen’s patience.

“There’s a lot of information here, Rabbi,” he said, looking exasperated. “I’m going only by data and pictures, not a specimen. I’d be speculating,” he warned. “And unless I was seeing this with my own eyes through a very powerful microscope . . .” He shrugged. The professor’s gaze wandered to his office window, through which he could see students milling about Tel Aviv University’s palm-treed quad.

“Please.” Cohen opened his hands and beseeched with uncharacteristic finesse. “Speculate.”

Moaning, Friedman circled his gaze back to the monitor at the plot of forty-eight chromosome pairs. He shook his head and said, “All right then. First off, I study the human genome. And this? This is too small to have come from a human.”

“How so?”

It had taken till midnight for Cohen to identify nine telling files that had been on Charlotte Hennesey’s laptop. Ziv had copied them onto a flash drive now sticking out of a port on Friedman’s juiced-up Macintosh. All nine files were running on multiple windows layered on the professor’s oversize plasma.

Friedman clicked a tab on the bottom toolbar, and a data file maximized to fill the screen. “See here,” Friedman explained, pointing to the different combinations and sequences of A, C, G, and T—each letter was assigned a different color. Running above them was a continuous series of vertical lines in varying thicknesses that resembled a bar code spread out to infinity. “You know how many base pairs we’d expect to find in the human genome?” The question was rhetorical. Aaron Cohen was an excellent study and could easily find a second career in Friedman’s lab.

“Three billion.”

“And what do you see here?”

On the monitor, next to a field labeled base pairs, was a number: 298,825,111.

“I understand it seems too small. But what if this is from a human specimen?”

“It’s not, Rabbi. I assure you. Look at this . . .” His growing frustration made his bony shoulders twitch as he brought another active window into full-screen view. Feeling like a doctor whose patient wouldn’t accept a cut-and-dried diagnosis, he said, “Here, use those good eyes of yours, Rabbi—the scientific ones. Check your mysticism at the door.” Friedman pointed to the video showing fluoresced chromosomes being extracted with a needle from a cell nucleus. “If this was real . . .” He shook his head again. “This looks like science fiction to me. Watch what happens here.” He waited. “Ah. There. See it? This pair of chromosomes here?”

The rabbi drew close. “Yes.”

“These two chromosomes are instantly replacing extracted genetic material. Rebuilding the genome.”

“Is that not possible?”

“On earth? Impossible.”

“So how do you explain this?”

The professor threw his hands up. “A computer-generated simulation. Hollywood. Who knows? I’m sorry to say that I think you’ve been duped.” Despite his harsh incredulity, the rabbi was not at all discouraged. In fact, he seemed quite pleased. Perhaps the professor himself was being duped? “Does this have something to do with the Cohen Gene project? Is someone making you empty promises? Or are you just testing me?”

“I’d be speculating,” the rabbi noncommittally replied. This actually wrenched a chuckle out of the cantankerous brainiac. “So there’s no way to tell from this if it’s real?” he persisted.

“Get a sample. Then I’ll tell you if it’s real—and which planet it comes from.”

Cohen smirked. “Bring up the other image,” he insisted. “The one with the two chromosome plots side by side.”

Luckily, Charlotte Hennesey’s file-naming system was descriptive. This one was named “karytope.subjectA-henneseyB.” And Ziv had easily discerned from the file’s attributes that this had been the last file running on the geneticist’s laptop prior to its recovery in Phoenix.

Friedman switched windows.

“If I were to bring a sample to you— from Hollywood,” the rabbi said, keeping it light to hold Friedman’s tiny suspicions at bay, “which sample would you need? The one on the left, or the one on the right?” Not that he’d dare share such a thing.

With little enthusiasm, the professor played along with the charade. “This one labeled ‘subject’ is hypothetically from a male,” he said. “And this one here is obviously female, this one labeled ‘Hennesey,’ whatever that means. They seem identical, give or take the sex chromosomes, of course. In this fantasy world, it’s this chromosome set here that really matters. For fun, let’s call these two the ‘builders.’ Easy to spot because it doesn’t even look like a human chromosome.” He tapped twice on the monitor— first on subject’s unbanded chromosome pair, then on Hennesey’s identical pair. “So since the builders can single-handedly manufacture all the other chromosomes in the genome, I’d say that’s where the magic is. Your Hollywood starlet,” he joked. “And hypothetically speaking, since the builder chromosomes are present in both your male and female specimens, either sample would suffice.” He shrugged.

Either sample. Cohen’s smile grew even wider.

Outside the Genetic Studies building, Cohen’s driver had kept the Buick Lucerne sedan running. The rabbi ducked into the back seat. “Has the jet returned from Rome?”

“Twenty minutes ago,” the driver replied. “They’re refueling now. I’ve

already informed your pilot that we’ll depart immediately for Inshas.” “Excellent. Take me directly to the airport.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cohen sat back in his seat and let down the window to invite in the

sweet Mediterranean air sweeping across Tel Aviv. It brought back memories of his first visit to Israel when he was fifteen—two years after he’d

first been brought into his grandfather’s secret circle, which set his life

in motion. The teachings had been so detailed, so indelibly inked into

his subconscious, that even then he’d felt a connection to this land—an

innate familiarity. And by this afternoon, a different breeze blowing across

ancient sands would meet him at the Nile Delta—the brother-land of his

ancestors. The land that gave birth to Yahweh’s gift—a family legacy.

27

******

At the Rockefeller Museum, located directly outside the Old City’s northern wall, Amit and Jules waited patiently in a blank corridor lined with administrative offices. Amit knocked a second time on Jozsef Dayan’s office door—still no answer. He reached down and tried the door handle. Definitely locked.

“Strange. I’ve never seen this door closed. He practically lives here.” The guy had no kids and his wife had lost a tough battle with cancer only four years ago. The old man had been using this tiny room to fill the lonely void ever since.

“Where are the scrolls?” Jules asked.

“I left them with him, inside.”

“Don’t you have a key?”

He shook his head.

“Maybe your friend took off with them.”

“Not a chance,” he said without hesitation. “We need to get in there.” The archaeologist squatted along the door frame to assess the lock, then

withdrew his keys from his cargo pants.

“I thought you didn’t have a key.”

“Not exactly.”

Amit pinched open the key ring and slid off two small matte-black tools

that looked to Jules like they’d been lifted from a dentist’s surgical tray. “Just keep an eye out,” he instructed. Though security was tight at the

museum entrances, and particularly in the galleries, Jozsef ’s lab, like his

gentle personality, lacked any fancy protocols. When Amit was in the IDF,

the main barriers to entry at a Gaza safe house would be masked kids with

Uzis who’d drunk too much from fundamentalist Islam’s spiked punch

bowl. But once they’d been taken out, the door locks had been a lot less

sophisticated than this one. Still, he’d give it a go. Inserting the flat tension

wrench into the brushed aluminum lockset, Amit turned it clockwise. Jules tried to play hall monitor, but she was more preoccupied with

what Amit was doing. She snuck glances as he snaked the second tool

into the keyhole alongside the first—a hooked-end thing that would have

looked at home in her late grandmother’s crochet basket.

Amit twisted the hook along the jagged innards of the housing, fishing

for the tumbler’s smooth pin pairs. He popped them up sequentially, click,

click, click . . . Five seconds later, he palmed the handle and gently turned.

Clunk. He signed to Jules, who answered with raised eyebrows. “Where did you learn how to do that?” Jules asked.

“Standard IDF field training— at least when you’re stationed in hostile

places like Gaza, rooting out Islamic terrorists. Let’s just say that ringing

doorbells wasn’t an option.”

Pocketing the tools, he stood and opened the door.

The pair slipped inside the unlit office and Amit closed the door quietly

behind them.

“If you wanted to get me alone in a dark room,” Jules said, “you could’ve

just asked.”

“Save that thought,” he replied. He felt along the wall for the light

switch.

A small click preceded a sterile wash of halogen light.

Immediately, Amit went for the light boxes. That’s where yesterday

morning, he’d watched Jozsef carefully cut away the jar’s wax seal and

remove the lid to reveal three loosely rolled papyri. Before Yosi pulled

out the scrolls, he’d tried to temper Amit’s excitement by explaining that

most old vellums were too frail to open—something about collagen in the

sheepskin being exposed to moisture, then drying. “Now we may have to

send them out for X-ray analysis,” Yosi had said. “I’ve read about a new lab

in Oxfordshire too . . . developed a light source ten billion times stronger

than the sun that can decipher writings on scrolls too brittle to open. Can

you believe this? Incredible!”

But when Yosi had pulled them out and laid them on the light box,

ever so delicately testing their spring with a gloved index finger, he’d been

pleased. Further prodding and a “quick look-see” under intense magnification gave him the confidence to attempt to open one himself. The first

unfurled with little effort, as did the second and the third. To Yosi’s surprise, the condition of the klaf was nearly as good as the day it had been

limed and frame-stretched. “I’ve never seen such a thing,” he said. Then

he’d sandwiched the vellums on the light box beneath a protective glass

cover.

But all that meant nothing at this moment, because Amit was staring

at the blank top of the light box. The one beside it was vacant too—no jar.

Not even the wax Yosi had scooped into a glass dish had been left behind.

Amit felt like he’d just been punched in the throat. “Damn.” “Still so sure he didn’t skip town?”

This time, Amit was silent. He was already mourning the loss of his

life’s greatest discovery—and the blunt dagger had just been pushed deeper.

Not to mention that he’d lost the best evidence implicating the guy whose

face was a pix file on his cell phone. So it wasn’t the opportune time to

entertain any notion that his great friend was Judas in disguise. Suddenly the door opened.

Startled, both Jules and Amit spun to it. It stayed empty for a moment.

Then there was the sound of squeaking rubber on the tiles.

Jules tensely waited as a young man, maybe twenty, rolled through the door in a wheelchair—frail looking, pale as snow. Beneath his disk-shaped prayer cap, he had tightly cropped black hair with earlocks spinning down

along his protruding ears.

“Oh, Professor Mizrachi,” the young man said in a timid voice. “Sorry

to disturb you.”

“Joshua,” Amit said, his neck muscles slackening. He was the docent

from the main gallery, son of the museum’s most exalted benefactor—the

controversial Rabbi Aaron Cohen. Amit clearly recalled Joshua walking

these same galleries only two years ago. But then he’d manifested some

type of neurodegenerative disease that crippled him in mere months. A

terrible thing for such a young man.

“It’s just . . . the door was locked earlier”—he began nervously chewing

at his fingertips—“and I saw that the light was on.”

“No need to apologize,” he said. Since Amit was under the employ of

the Israel Antiquities Authority, whose main offices were housed inside the

museum, it was no surprise that his presence hadn’t fazed the kid. Amit took a moment to introduce Jules.

Joshua could barely maintain eye contact with the attractive Frenchwoman, his eyes fixating too much on the Egyptologist’s slim, tan legs and

the bandage covering her right knee.

“I was just looking for Yosi,” Amit explained. “He’d given me a copy of

his key . . .” Amit held up his hands. “Figured we’d wait for him.” Joshua’s eyes went to the floor and his lips curled down. “So you haven’t

. . . heard yet?” The finger-gnawing intensified.

That’s not good, Amit thought. “Heard what?”

“He died last night.”

“He what?”

“A neighbor found his door open. He was on the floor. I think they

were saying something about his heart.”

Amit was thinking about an entirely different diagnosis as he looked

back at the empty light boxes.

“That’s awful,” Jules said with heartfelt sadness, even though she hadn’t

known the man.

“I know this may sound like an awkward question,” Amit said. “But did

you see him leave yesterday?”

Joshua nodded. “Right after my father talked to him.”

“And was Yosi carrying anything with him? A box, a briefcase—anything like that?”

He shook his head. “No. I think he had gone to some lecture at the

Israel Museum. So he left everything here.”

Another punch to the throat. “Poor man,” Amit said. It was tough to

shake the feeling that he’d put Yosi in harm’s way. Crushing. “Well, it’s probably best that we get going,” Jules said with some urgency, placing a consoling yet insistent hand on Amit’s shoulder. “Right,” Amit agreed. “If you hear anything about services for

him ...,” Amit said to Joshua.

“Of course. An e-mail will be sent to everyone. You’re on the list,

right?”

“I am.”

They waited for him to reverse the wheelchair into the corridor. Amit

turned out the lights, then he and Jules went outside and shut the door. “Good to see you, Joshua,” Amit said.

Joshua bid them farewell. He worked the hand rims to swivel the chair,

then proceeded down the corridor toward his post.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“Wait. There’s one more thing before we go,” Amit said, his eyes not

budging until Joshua had squeaked around the corner. “This way,” he said,

waving for her to follow.

28

******

Amit led Jules through the octagonal Tower Hall with its Byzantine vaults, then swiftly through the South Octagon, where Jules caught a glimpse of a glyph-covered stele of Pharaoh Seti I. They headed straight for the South Gallery—one of the museum’s two long, rectangular halls used in the 1950s and ’60s as a scrollery for deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Amit greeted the pretty young docent named Rebecca, who was pacing the room with arms crossed behind her back; then he made for the room’s center.

The refurbished gallery, with its elongated, high-set windows and Romanesque coffered ceiling, was filled with boxy, four-legged glass display cases that had been in use since the 1920s British Mandate era (all in keeping with tradition). Among the relics here, one could view the physical remains of Israel’s ancient peoples: a two-hundred-thousand-yearold human skull excavated from Galilee; human remains from Mount Carmel, circa 100,000 b.c.e.; and human heads from Jericho dating to 6000 b.c.e.

Nothing, however, could compare to the gallery’s most recent acquisition.

He stopped in front of a modern display case with ultrathick security glass. The podium that was its base was solid; it hid an elaborate security system. The relic housed in the case was gently lit from top and bottom.

“Take a look at this,” he said to Jules. “You know about this ossuary, right?”

She studied the compact stone box covered in etched designs: rosettes and hatch patterns. Its arched lid was beautiful, though she noticed restoration work had corrected a jagged widthwise crack along its middle. Nothing came to mind. “Should I?”

He gave her a surprised look. “The theft at the Temple Mount? Back in June? It was all over the news. A firefight, explosions . . .”

To Jules, this was all vague at best. “I was excavating outside Tanis in June,” she said defensively. “It’s not like I brought a TV with me into the desert. You know how digs can be . . . the isolation?”

“Yes. Of course,” replied Amit.

“So stop being a bully.”

He shook his head before proceeding to give her the Reader’s Digest version of the crime that had taken place, explained how the situation had gotten so dire that a synagogue had been hit by a Muslim female suicide bomber (or as Amit preferred to call them, “homicide bomber”) and that in desperate response to the act, the Israeli police had almost wrongfully pegged a colleague of his named Graham Barton as an accomplice. Barton had been released only after Israeli authorities tracked the stolen ossuary to the home of a Muslim cleric who’d orchestrated the theft. The ossuary was then studied and brought here for safekeeping.

“This is what the thieves stole?” She regarded the relic more levelly now. “An ossuary?” It didn’t compute. “Why?”

“Lots of conspiracy theories about that, but no one knows for sure. Probably had a lot to do with what had been inside it.”

“Which was . . . ?”

He shrugged. “It came back empty,” he said, keeping his voice low in the echoing hall. “So that’s where the rumors get really interesting.” Thinking he heard the wheelchair’s squeaky tires, he paused and glanced over his shoulder. Nothing. “Take a look at this.” He pointed to the side of the box.

Jules sidestepped and bent to see what he was so interested in. That’s when she noticed the carved relief that matched the strange pagan images they’d seen on the wall painting hidden beneath the hills of Qumran. “That’s weird.”

“Certainly is.” Her troubled expression showed him that she’d made the connection.

“So what do you think it means?”

“Tough to say, really. But some have interpreted it to be an early Christian symbol.”

“How so?”

“Well, when Jesus died in thirty-four c.e. or thereabouts, those who tried to continue his ministry were sought out by the Romans. So they concealed their identity by using pagan symbols.”

“A c ode ? ”

“A seal, to be more precise. It’s meant to represent Jesus’s crucifixion. Greeks and Romans revered dolphins as magical creatures that brought spirits to the afterlife.”

“Like angels,” Jules said.

“Like saviors,” he corrected her. “And the trident is said to represent a lance that killed the dolphin.”

“The cross.”

“The cross,” Amit confirmed. “Not to mention the trident’s three tines—”

“The Trinity.”

“Good thing you weren’t a Roman back then,” he said. “Again, this is the type of stuff some are suggesting, and—”

“So they think this ossuary contained the body of an early Christian?”

He grinned. “Oh, something like that. But not just any Christian.”

“Peter? Paul?”

“Think bigger.”

She looked at the ossuary and fished for the impossible. “No way. Not Jesus.”

Amit nodded.

This made Jules snicker. “Amit, you’re talking to an Egyptologist,” she reminded him. “You know how I feel about the whole Jesus thing.”

“And?” But he already knew where this was going.

“There’s no evidence that Jesus was a living historical figure.”

He already knew her stance. “So he’s a literary creation?”

“Jesus reads like an Egyptian folk hero. Let me remind you—Osiris was brutally mutilated, his body parts collected by the female goddess Isis and put in a stone tomb, only to be resurrected three days later so that he ascended up into the sky. Crucifixion, burial, resurrection on day three, and ascension into heaven?” She spread her hands. “Osiris, mind you, who judged souls in the hereafter, weighed the heart against Ma’at’s feather and either granted the deceased eternal bliss or fed him to Ammit, the Devourer . . .”

“Heaven and hell,” he admitted. With Jules getting more impassioned, the female docent was now casting curious glances at them. Amit held an index finger to his lips so Jules would lower her volume.

“And in the Book of the Dead,” she continued more quietly, “Osiris’s son, Horus, fed five thousand with just a few loaves of bread.”

“Jesus feeds the multitudes,” he said, playing along.

“The five thousand, to be precise,” she said. “There’s the image of Horus suckling the breast of Isis, later spun as the Madonna and child,” she sarcastically added.

Amit knew there were dozens of parallels between Jesus and Horus— everything from virgin birth to consecration through ritual baptism, and both were even portrayed as a shepherd or a lamb. So he only hoped Jules would keep it short.

“And let’s not forget this one: Isis, the healer and life giver”—she stuck out her right index finger; “Osiris, the judge of souls”—the middle finger went up; “and Horus, ruler of the heavens who happens to be the son of Osiris.” When the splayed ring finger went up, she tightly fused it with the other two. “Sound familiar? Three separate gods recast as one?”

“The Trinity.” He nodded.

“And Jesus’s assertions about the afterlife and the judgment of souls? That’s philosophical thinking that’s got Egypt written all over it. Just think about the ba,” she said.

The ba, Amit recalled, was the ancient Egyptian equivalent of a soul, which separated from the body at death to roam at will. And it was depicted as a bird, which Jules would no doubt consider the forerunner of the Holy Spirit.

“Forgive me if I’m not racing off to church every Sunday,” she said skeptically, crossing her arms tight in front of her chest and leaning back on her left leg.

He held up his hands in peaceful surrender. “Got it, Jules. ‘All things Egypt.’ We could go through the same motions with the Old Testament too, and come up with the idea that the whole Jesus story was made up.” He began spouting off a few examples, tipping his head side to side to emphasize the parallels between stories: “David was born in Bethlehem”— head to the left; “Jesus was born in Bethlehem”—head to the right. “Moses went up on Sinai for forty days”—left; “Jesus went into the desert for forty days”—right.

Her eyes now seemed apologetic.

“You could also point out that Jesus’s father was descended directly from David and Abraham and his mother descended directly from Moses’s first high priest, Aaron, the Levite; a convenient fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy—making the Messiah a priest and a king. And of course the whole thing with God offering his own son the same way Abraham tried to sacrifice Isaac—”

“Okay,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Do I sound that crazy?”

He shrugged. “You don’t really think Jesus is just a created literary figure, do you?” He could only hope she wasn’t aware that Jesus exhibited nineteen of the twenty motifs associated with the heroes of Greek mythology.

She sighed wearily—the way any sympathetic minimalist would. “Then how do you explain that historians who lived during the time of Jesus— Philo and Josephus, to name a couple—never mention anyone even remotely close to Jesus or his disciples? Let’s face it, a guy who walks on water, feeds multitudes with a sack lunch, and raises the dead isn’t exactly B-list material.”

“Sure, no direct mention of Jesus himself. But Josephus’s accounts vividly described the Essenes as one of three Jewish sects in first-century Judea. Philo wrote about them as well.”

“So what does that have to do with it?”

A knowing smile pulled at Amit’s goatee. Doubters overlooked the historical record time and time again. “ ‘Essene’ is actually a bad transliteration of the word Josephus and Philo ascribe to the Jews at Qumran. It was actually pronounced ‘Esaoin’—a word with roots in Greek, Aramaic, and Arabic. Since you live in Cairo, I’m sure you can figure this one out.” He could tell by the softened look on her face that she already had. Finally, something broke through her armor.

“ ‘Follower of Jesus,’ ” she said with some reluctance in a low voice.

“Right. ‘Follower of Jesus,’ ” he repeated. “And this Jesus happens to have an Egyptian spin to his name. So if you ask me, history does provide an account of a group many believe were the earliest Christians.”

“Now you’re stretching it a bit.”

“Perhaps. But we both saw this same symbol in that chamber at Qumran,” he said, pointing to the ossuary’s relief again. “And like I said, some very intelligent archaeologists are whispering that this ossuary belonged to Jesus.”

Jules gave the ossuary another once-over, this time more seriously.

Seeing that she still looked skeptical, he decided to lay it on thicker. “You remember John the Baptist?”

“Of course.”

“Many biblical scholars contend that his teachings echo teachings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. He too was a minimalist who practiced ritual immersion, or baptism. And if you recall, he lived in the desert and baptized his followers in the Jordan River, which flows directly into the north end of the Dead Sea. Jesus was baptized by him, then remained in the desert for forty days. And where is Qumran located?”

She rolled her eyes. “The northwest shore of the Dead Sea.”

“After Herod Antipas beheaded John, Jesus continued John’s ministry. A changing of the guard, some might say.” He stared at the ossuary again. “And what if I told you that the thief also returned a book that was determined to be the oldest Gospel ever recovered, dating to the early first century, and regarded as the original source for the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke?”

“Makes for a compelling case,” she admitted.

“It certainly does. But the interesting part is that the last four pages of the text were purposely cut out so that the story ended with the crucifixion.”

“So I take it someone didn’t like the ending?”

He nodded. “The conspiracy builds. Another great example of how editing can rewrite history. And if you choose to believe the rumors, this same editor also didn’t like what was inside this ossuary.” Jules still looked incredulous as she put it all together. Stubborn as always, he thought.

“So somewhere out there are four pages of the oldest Gospel and the physical remains of Jesus?” she clarified.

“That’s the rumor.”

“Any way to get in touch with this Barton fellow you mentioned earlier?” she suggested. “Maybe he can help us.”

Amit quickly dismissed the idea. Not only had the English archaeologist gone through his own tribulations, he explained, but there was a high probability that Barton was still being closely surveilled by Israeli intelligence, even though he’d long since returned to his home in London.

A boisterous American tour group suddenly poured into the gallery.

“Let’s go,” Amit suggested.

They wove through the tourists, back toward Tower Hall. But halfway through the South Octagon, Amit spotted Joshua’s wheelchair parked near the front entrance.

Amit grabbed Jules’s arm and yanked her behind Seti’s stele.

“What are you—”

“Quiet!” he demanded in a hushed tone. He peeked out to confirm that Cohen’s son was talking to a man of medium height with an awfully familiar face. Amit panicked when he saw the fresh laceration just below the man’s hairline, then the fresh white cast wound round his right forearm.

“My father told me to call you if anyone came asking about Yosi,” Joshua reported.

“You said someone was in his office?” the tall man said. The kid’s voice message to him hadn’t been very clear.

“Two people actually. Amit Mizrachi. And he was with a very pretty—”

“Are they still here?” the man broke in, looking like he’d just touched a live wire.

“I ...I think so.” Joshua backed the chair up a bit, because the man looked like he was going to explode. Then his wild eyes began scanning the hall. “They might still be in the South Gallery—”

But before he could finish, the man broke into a full sprint, practically bowling over the American tour group assembling in the hall.

29

******

Egypt

Exiting Inshas Airport, the driver turned the dusty Peugeot south onto highway 41.

Rabbi Aaron Cohen checked his watch: 12:32.

His private jet had covered the four hundred kilometers from Ben Gurion International in less than forty minutes. He’d instructed the pilot to expect to have the jet on the tarmac for a return trip later that afternoon. They’d need to work quickly before Egyptian authorities could start asking questions, he’d reminded everyone. But he took great comfort in knowing that the VIP charter flights coming in and out of Inshas enjoyed far more liberties than El-Al flights heading to Cairo International.

“You called ahead to let the others know we’ve arrived?”

“I did,” the driver replied.

Cohen settled into his seat.

The road paralleled the glistening Ismailiya Canal, where a magnificent sailboat was lazily motoring its way south, its mainsail down, an Egyptian flag flapping gently atop its mast. On the spacious aft deck, Cohen spotted a lithe woman with obviously surgically enhanced breasts and hair like raven’s wings, sunning herself in a bikini. The shirtless, beerdrinking helmsman—also Egyptian—was much older than the woman and looked very, very proud. In a country full of Muslim fundamentalists who aspired to be the next great hope for an Islamic state, it flew in the face of Sharia, Islamic law, and exemplified how wealth came with great exception.

Vanity and pride have no place in the eyes of God.

He diverted his gaze out the right window to the flat swaths of sugarcane and rice fields.

They were heading to Heliopolis. Not the modern suburb on the outsk ir ts of Ca iro t hat loc a ls referred to a s Misr el- Gadida— or “New Ca iro”— but its ancient namesake about twenty kilometers north.

With Amit Mizrachi still alive, Cohen wasn’t taking any chances; the archaeologist or the French Egyptologist who’d accompanied him to Qumran might have somehow deciphered the hidden meaning of the hieroglyph. Centuries of planning could potentially be undone. Besides, with the prophecy already set into motion, the timing for this visit couldn’t have been better.

The driver turned west, following signs for Kafr Hamra.

Minutes later, they passed a tiny Coptic church with a mosaic on its belfry depicting Joseph guiding a donkey burdened with Mary. The Holy Mother was tightly cradling the baby Jesus. Laid out in colorful tiles, the narrative placed them along the palm-treed Nile, three distant pyramids rising up on the opposing riverbank. The imagery always made Cohen smile.

Churches like this could be found throughout the Nile Delta—Tel Basta, Farama, Wadi al-Natrun, Bilbeis, Mostorod, even Cairo. Each venerated its own ancient folklore built around the Holy Family’s refuge in Egypt after escaping Herod’s supposed infanticide in Judea: water springs brought forth by the baby Jesus; caves and sacred trees that had given the Holy Family shelter; wells from which the Holy Family drank; a granite trough used by the Virgin for kneading dough; the Holy Child’s footprint and handprint set in separate stones; pagan idols that crumbled in the Holy Child’s presence.

Despite these tales, Grandfather had taught him that many truths could also be found here in Egypt—and many facts had bled into ancient Christian scriptures deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.

Like the Essenes at Qumran who’d preserved the Dead Sea Scrolls from Roman destruction, the ancient Egyptian Christians, called Gnostics, had hidden their Coptic texts in buried jars. In 1945 thirteen leatherbound Gnostic codices had been accidentally unearthed by local peasants at Nag Hammadi. This caused much controversy for the Vatican since the texts spoke at great length about the resurrected Jesus as a spiritual being. How the Vatican had twisted the truth, he lamented. And still they stop at nothing to protect their lies.

Cohen particularly admired the stunning accuracy of the Gnostic codex entitled the Dialogue of the Savior, in which Jesus himself denounces the weakness of the flesh: “Matthew said, ‘Lord, I want to see that place of life, [the place] where there is no wickedness, but rather, there is pure light!’ The Lord said, ‘Brother Matthew, you will not be able to see it as long as you are carrying flesh around . . . Whatever is born of truth does not die. Whatever is born of woman dies.’ ” And in the codex called the Apocryphon of James, Jesus’s words resonated with Cohen even more so: “For it is the spirit that raises the soul, but the body that kills it . . .”

The spiritual being—the eternal spark—was paramount to the Gnostics, as well as to their brothers in Judea, the Essenes—all members of Cohen’s legacy. Those who understood the weakness of the flesh were the enlightened—“Sons of Light.” And they had been given secret knowledge that from the one true God did all light (spiritual essence) flow in perpetuity.

Heading north on Highway 400, they approached their destination— Tel el-Yahudiyeh, or “Mound of the Jews.” Across the expansive delta plain, the tightly packed buildings of Shabin al Qanatir could easily be seen in the distance.

As they rounded a bend in the road, Cohen peered over at the ancient heap of marl and sand that rose up from the dust. It resembled a huge sand castle built too close to an ocean swell, washed over and stripped of detail. Some of the ancient fortifications could still be made out along the mound’s expansive boomerang footprint.

This ruin had once been a grand temple-fortress built by Cohen’s ancient ancestor.

The car drove past the mound and a wide-open field separating it from an industrial, corrugated steel warehouse. The driver slowed as he approached the warehouse and turned onto the short drive leading up to it. He waited as the bay door rolled back on creaking hardware.

Squeezing the Peugeot in beside a dilapidated tractor, the driver slid the gearshift into park. In the rearview mirror, he watched a man dressed in a white tunic press the button to close the door.

“Did you see anything suspicious?” Cohen inquired.

“Nothing,” he confirmed.

“Good.” He waited for the driver to open his door.

Cohen stepped out onto the cement floor. The warehouse’s expansive, raw interior was lined with steel support columns and had a high ceiling with exposed rafters. Corralled into crude work bays were tool chests and various machines dismantled to their bare mechanical guts.

The moist air stank of motor oil and acetylene.

The building had been registered with the municipality as a machine repair shop. To legitimize that claim, the priests spent considerable time tending to local clients’ broken-down tractors, tillers, and farm machinery. Lately, the decoy operation had expanded to include car repair too. A healthy profit fed the coffers of the Temple Society.

Cohen turned to the driver. “Have them prepare the truck. I want to be out of here in an hour.”

Strutting with a slight limp—too much time sitting always aggravated his damaged hip—to the rear of the building, he opened the door to the office and stepped around a beat-up metal desk that hosted a greasy computer monitor and a stack of crisp yellow invoices.

He dragged a box of motor parts off a stain-covered Persian rug centered on the plank floor. Then he half squatted to grab a corner of the rug and peeled it back. What lay beneath was a rectangular hatch. He threaded his finger through its O-shaped hasp, heaved the door up, and let it fall open with a dull thud.

Patting dust from his black vest, he proceeded downward into complete darkness, the wooden treads groaning under his weight.

“...Eleven ... twelve,” he muttered, counting the last steps.

He remembered that the priest who’d first brought him down here had performed the same counting ritual, which he’d always assumed was a tribute to either the twelve tribes or the twelve whom Jesus had recruited.

The final footfall connected with a spongy clay floor. Groping at the cool air just in front of his face, he found the pull-cord for the overhead light. A single bare bulb crackled to life just above Cohen’s zayen.

The square basement was modest in size, just large enough to accommodate twelve shelving units along its mud brick walls, neatly stocked with chemical containers, tools, and welding supplies. Moving to the storage unit on the rear wall, he snaked his hand between some boxes until he felt a cold metal handle. He hooked it with his fingers and tugged. The shelving and the faux-brick laminate behind it noiselessly swung out on concealed hinges.

The solid metal door that lay behind it looked like the entry to a bank vault.

30

******

Jerusalem

In full stride, Jules was in the lead, Amit close at her heels. They’d doubled back through the South Gallery, slaloming through the dallying Americans. This had caused great alarm among the docents and tourists, but no one was moving to stop them.

Through the South Room they angled a hard right into a coin gallery. “Go through that door!” Amit said.

Up ahead, Jules saw exactly the one he meant. It was a fire exit. She

threw herself at the door and activated the shrill alarm. The door flew open hard enough to knock over an employee who’d been out back smoking. Facedown on the pavement, the poor man shouted his protest, but she wasn’t stopping to make any apologies.

Now they were along the rear drive reserved for employees and deliveries. The Land Rover sat only twenty meters away. With key chain in hand, Amit had remotely opened it the moment he was outside.

Jules was already in the passenger seat and pulling her door closed as Amit was fumbling with the driver’s-side door latch.

“Come on! Hurry!” he heard her yelling on the other side of the glass.

Yanking the door back, Amit hopped in.

Back at the exit door, the befuddled smoker was back on his feet, assessing the ragged tear in his pants, just over the right knee. Amit couldn’t hear the swearing, but the guy looked awfully pissed off and was throwing his hands into the air. It would only be another second before his mood would surely worsen, Amit thought, jamming the key into the ignition.

By the time Amit looked back up, the smoker had been knocked facedown onto the ground again, his left leg blocking the door that was once more being forced open from the inside. There was a split second where Amit considered reaching for the pistol stashed in the center console. He’d left a round chambered, safety off. But as he made to get it, Jules screamed.

“Go! ”

Cranking hard on the gearshift, Amit stepped down on the accelerator just as the arm-casted assassin muscled his way around the door and used the smoker’s back like a doormat. In his good hand, he was clutching a replacement for the Jericho pistol taken from him last night. And now he was positioning himself for a clean shot.

Should’ve killed him when I had the chance, Amit thought again. “Down, Jules!” He reached over and pushed her head below the dashboard.

The Land Rover’s tires screeched as he ducked and pulled the wheel hard to the left. The gunshot was loud, the report of breaking glass just as harsh. The would-be assassin’s left-handed aim wasn’t so great. He’d only managed to take out the driver’s-side rear passenger window. Amit peeked up over the dash just in time to cut a hard right that avoided a thick gatepost at the lot’s exit. A successful maneuver, yet the Rover’s rear tire caught the curb that stuck out beneath it, bouncing the truck into the air. Amit and Jules catapulted up from their seats, both smacking their heads on the roof.

But it was a fortunate thing, because the second shot that had cracked an instant earlier on a direct line for Amit’s skull instead blew out the spare tire bolted to the truck’s lift gate.

“Holy shit!” Jules yelled, cradling her pounding head in her hands.

Amit sped around the building. Then he confused Jules by bringing the truck to a sudden halt. He hit the switch that rolled down his window, then flipped open the console and pulled out the pistol.

“What the ’ell are you doing?” The French accent was really thick now. “Trust me.” He gave it about ten seconds. “Get down and stay down.” “Amit, I don’t think—”

“Do it!”

She did.

Then he eased down on the accelerator again and cornered stealthily onto the front circular drive.

His timing was good. The gunman was already outside working his car remote like a lobster with the two mobile fingers of his cast hand. Before the guy could figure out what was happening, Amit stomped on the accelerator and steered straight for him. Clutching the Jericho, Amit stuck his arm out the window, aimed, and squeezed off a shot that spat through the silencer. Unlike the assassin, Amit was a seasoned lefty.

The shot was close but missed. It did, however, force the guy to duck for cover behind his Fiat coupe.

That gave Amit just enough time to slow the Land Rover and maneuver for another shot. But this time, it wasn’t the assassin he was going for. It was the front tire of the Fiat. He took aim and held the trigger down, forcing the pistol into semiautomatic mode. A slight circular sweep emptied three successive rounds into the Fiat’s front wheel well and tire rim. A fourth tore apart the tire with a loud pop.

The assassin tried to come up over the hood for a shot, but Amit fired again to force him back down.

Satisfied, Amit ducked low and gunned the engine. One more shot came, but it merely shattered the driver’s side mirror. Amit made a wild right onto Sultan Suleiman Street, which ran parallel to the Old City’s northern wall. Not wanting to attract attention from the IDF guards stationed outside the Damascus Gate up ahead, he immediately slowed.

“You are one crazy bastard,” she said.

“Best defense is a good offense,” he reminded her.

31

******

Vat ic a n Ci t y

It was nearing one o’clock when Charlotte heard a knock at the door. “Just a sec,” she called out from the bathroom.

She checked her mascara and lipstick in the mirror one last time, hoping

she hadn’t overdone it. “Sexed up” was not the look she was going for with a pair of priests. Just a little something to put some color back in her cheeks and jazz up her swollen eyes. With the amount of crying she’d done up until now, she might as well have poured acid over her eyelids.

But she had to remind herself that the last time she’d stared into a mirror inside a guest room at the Vatican’s Domus Sanctae Marthae, her eyes showed a different kind of pain that no makeup could conceal. And she’d relied on chemo pills to suppress it, not Revlon.

Charlotte was glad she’d accepted Father Martin’s offer to have her pantsuit dry-cleaned by housekeeping. As promised, it had been freshly pressed and discreetly hung on her door in a plastic garment bag by noon.

She snapped her black clutch shut, then decided there wasn’t much need for it. After all, her passport was with the Swiss Guard, and everything else—money, keys, credit cards—was all left behind in Phoenix. And Donovan had said that Father Martin was hosting them inside the city.

“Keep it together,” she told herself. That’s what her father would surely tell her in a situation like this. Being alone, even for this short time, hadn’t settled her one bit. She just kept seeing Evan with a bullet in his head, over and over again. The thought of having company comforted her, got her mind moving in a different direction.

She went and opened the door. Déjà vu came over her when she laid eyes upon Donovan standing in the hall wearing a black suit and priest collar. It seemed he was feeling it too.

“Bringing back some memories?” he said with a smile, breaking the ice.

“You could say that.” She pocketed her key card and pulled the door shut. In the unflattering fluorescent-lit hall, Donovan looked especially fatigued. No doubt his harrowing experience in Belfast and the marathon transatlantic flights had taken a lot out of him. Yet still the man managed to keep smiling. And she could tell that it was more for her benefit than his.

“So let’s see what the Vatican is serving up, shall we?” he said.

32

******

Since the Holy Father was still enjoying a five-day retreat at Castel Gandolfo, Father Martin had managed to reserve the sumptuous dining room that typically hosted international dignitaries and diplomats. Being the personal assistant of the secretary of state did, after all, come with many privileges.

“ Salve! Welcome,” Father Martin warmly greeted them at the wide entryway. He gave Donovan and Charlotte a double-clasped handshake.

“This is quite impressive, James,” Donovan said. He’d never actually been inside this room. The man was full of surprises.

Charlotte thought “impressive” was an understatement. The Apostolic Palace’s main entryway was over twenty-four feet high, flanked by Bernini’s mammoth doors sheathed in bronze, which had been taken from ancient Roman temples. The Clementine Hall—the main reception foyer—was cavernous, covered in marble and trimmed with friezes. Three frescoes paid tribute to St. Clement’s baptism, martyrdom, and apotheosis; a fourth honored the arts and sciences. Swiss Guards in full regalia were posted throughout.

“When I informed His Eminence that the legendary Father Patrick Donovan was making a return with a world-renowned guest . . .” He spread his hands. “How could he refuse?”

“I’m not exactly the prodigal son,” Donovan reminded him in a whisper. He was trying to keep things lighthearted, but he couldn’t help but look back at the two armed Swiss Guards standing at attention beside the door. “So the honor is all yours, Charlotte,” he said to his companion.

“If you put it that way ...I’m flattered,” she said.

“Come, let us sit,” Martin said, his right hand sweeping an arc to the far end of the room, where a cozy cluster of chairs faced the tall windows overlooking Piazza San Pietro and St. Peter’s Basilica.

The dining hall pulled Charlotte’s eyes in all different directions as she walked the ornate parquet floors around the grand Louis XIV dining table set beneath a magnificent chandelier.

There were more frescoes painted by the hands of masters—Cherubino Alberti and Baldassare Croce among them, Martin subtly boasted. Furthermore, he was quick to point out that the magnificent tapestry dominating the north wall was an original Raphael that had been among those used to cover the walls of the Sistine Chapel during the 2005 conclave.

Martin smiled when Charlotte picked a wingback chair, making her think she’d violated etiquette. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no,” Martin said, holding up a hand. “It’s just that your country’s president sat in that same chair during his visit with us last month.”

Charlotte instinctively raised her arms off the elegant fabric as if it were on fire. “Seriously?”

“Oh yes. But if you don’t mind me saying so, it suits you much better.”

She laughed genuinely, knowing that his preference referred to something other than appearances.

“I was thinking we could have a drink before we eat,” Martin said.

“Sounds great,” Charlotte replied.

Two glasses of Italian red wine and an Irish whiskey on the rocks were delivered by a nun wearing a white habit that covered all but her face and hands. Martin gave a toast, then settled into his chair. “It’s good to have you back, Patrick,” he said. “You’ve been missed.”

“I’m sure the archives have functioned just fine without me.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. As luck would have it, the prefect’s position is still vacant.” He gave Donovan a look of anticipation.

Donovan’s noncommittal smile hinted that nothing was beyond the realm of possibility.

For the next fifteen minutes, they spoke of happenings inside the Vatican, both pleasant and distressing. Martin was good at pulling Charlotte into the conversation, but every so often, she was content to sip her Chianti and gaze out at Bernini’s colonnades and Michelangelo’s dome.

Soon thereafter, Martin sensed that Donovan was ready to segue into an explanation for his surprise return. So he allowed a gap of silence to encourage him.

Not knowing quite how to begin, Donovan explained, “Lest I state the obvious . . . our visit doesn’t concern my return to Vatican City.”

“I had a feeling that was the case,” Martin replied.

“And I’m sure you’re wondering why Dr. Hennesey has accompanied me here.”

The priest’s lips puckered. “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about that too,” he confessed, watching Donovan’s expression turn conflicted, contemplative. “Tell me. What’s troubling you?”

Some clarification of the events preceding his July departure was required. “I’m sure you recall the secrecy of the project we’d arranged for Dr. Hennesey and Giovanni Bersei?”

“Certainly.” Then he looked to Charlotte and said, “Let me express my deepest condolences for Dr. Bersei’s passing.”

At a loss for words, Charlotte nodded.

“Though I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of that project . . . ,” Donovan continued.

“I understand.”

Tentative, Donovan went on. “It seems that someone outside the Vatican has information on the work that took place here—the analysis performed on certain relics acquired for the museum. Relics of extreme significance . . . and value.” Donovan paused to drain his whiskey—a superb pot-stilled Jameson—down to the halfway mark. Keep it simple, he reminded himself. “Both Charlotte and I were separately approached by two men looking for these relics. There were threats. They had guns—”

Martin gasped. “That’s unbelievable.” His wide eyes rolled to Charlotte, and his mouth was agape. Recalling how the two men had thrown him into the back of the van made his response seem sincere.

“Bottom line is . . . I feel we’re in serious danger. And I’ve come here to seek help—and protection.”

“There’s no safer place for you to be than inside these walls,” Martin said with forced conviction. “And you are officially a citizen of Vatican City.”

These words gave Donovan great comfort, because only roughly seven hundred clergy and one hundred Swiss Guards were granted official Vatican citizenship. The other three thousand lay workers, including Father Martin himself, lived outside the city—most in Rome. In accordance with Italy’s Lateran Treaty, Vatican citizenship was granted iure officii, meaning that once employment was terminated, the cleric’s citizenship would revert back to his original country of origin. Martin had assisted in arranging documentation with the secretariat’s office to make Donovan a dual citizen—a privilege granted to only two hundred and fifty others. Therefore, his “leave of absence” to attend to “family matters” was still considered temporary.

“You are still provided full legal representation,” Martin confirmed, “as well as complete access to the secretariat’s resources, which, as you know, are quite extensive. If you are both in some kind of . . .” He paused. But he could tell they had already filled in the blank. “Let’s just say that there’s no better place to be.”

“That’s what I was hoping,” Donovan said, visibly relieved. “Thank you.” Being a fellow Irishman, Donovan felt his bond with Martin went deeper than the cloth. And once again, Father Martin had come to his rescue. He emptied the glass, rattling the ice. “And Dr. Hennesey?”

“I’ll see to it that she’s given the same protections.”

“Thank you very much, Father,” Charlotte said. She noticed his mood was confident and his complexion was looking much better this evening. Perhaps it was the ambient lighting. But she also registered a lingering suspicion about the man. After all, he’d reported directly to Cardinal Santelli—the lunatic who, according to Donovan, had ordered Conte to murder her.

“I know this may be uncomfortable for you,” Martin urged, “but perhaps you could tell me more about these relics. Then maybe I can better determine how to direct my inquiries.”

The nun silently approached with a tray holding a fresh tumbler of whiskey. Donovan invited the interruption, because he wasn’t sure how to respond to Martin. Slowly, he swapped glasses, then took a deep breath.

“You can trust me, Patrick,” Martin stated. “You know that.”

If it hadn’t been for Martin, Cardinal Santelli’s untimely demise might have been scrutinized far more closely—particularly since Donovan had left the cardinal’s office just before Martin had found him dead. If an autopsy had been permitted, the poison Donovan had emptied through a syringe into the cardinal’s shoulder could have been traced. But trust wasn’t the issue. There was so much more at stake. Then again, it was the Vatican that had gotten Charlotte and him into this mess. And as it stood now, the Vatican provided the only hope of resolving matters.

Donovan looked over his shoulder and waited for the nun to disappear from the room. Then he looked to Charlotte for any sign of disagreement. She nodded for him to continue. “Earlier this year, I was given a book,” he explained. “A very, very old book . . .”

33

******

Egypt

Next to a keypad on the door frame, Rabbi Aaron Cohen pressed his thumb on a small glass pane. Within seconds, the biometric “key” was accepted and the keypad illuminated. Next he punched in the twelve-digit password, each keystroke emitting a tiny digital chirp. The panel flashed three times, then a series of mechanized bolts slid out from around the door frame. The massive door disengaged, automatically opening inward on smooth hydraulic pistons. A motion sensor turned on the crisp LED lights in the space beyond.

On the right side of the door, Cohen placed his fingers over a slim golden mezuzah case angled toward the open door and inscribed with the Hebrew letter shin (w), representing one of God’s Old Testament names, Shaddai.

Stepping across the threshold, the rabbi paused at the beginning of what resembled a mine tunnel. He vividly recalled the claustrophobia he’d felt when he was first introduced to this place by the Levite priests.

The year was 1974—a time of both great tragedy and personal transformation . . .

Aaron had just celebrated his twentieth birthday and had been in the second term of his junior year at New York’s Yeshiva University. It was a snowy afternoon in late January when he received the portentous call from his oldest sister, Ilana. “Father is dead” were the first words she’d said, in an eerily clinical fashion (at the time, she’d been an RN at Beth Israel). As shock had chilled over him, she’d gone on to explain in certain terms that earlier that fateful morning, the B41 bus slid on ice through a Flatbush Avenue intersection and plowed over three pedestrians caught in the crosswalk, injuring one critically, two mortally—including Mordecai Cohen.

“A father should never outlive his son,” Grandfather had said, weeping for the first time Aaron could recall. Not until his son had been put into the ground had the old man stopped rending his garments and chanting, “Baruch dayan ha-emet”—“Blessed is the Judge of truth.”

Following the prompt burial and compulsory seven-day shiva, Grandfather had summoned Aaron to his office and, without a word, handed him a first-class ticket to Cairo. When Aaron had asked him what it was for, Grandfather cryptically replied, “It is up to you now, my honorable grandson. Your future awaits. The fate of Zion rests with you.” Instructions had been provided, along with what would prove to be Grandfather’s last pearls of wisdom. Aaron would later learn that Grandfather had died in his sleep as his plane departed for Egypt.

When his flight arrived at Cairo International’s terminal, young Cohen was greeted outside customs by a white-robed Egyptian with crooked teeth and a horribly pockmarked complexion partially camouflaged by a patchy beard. The man discreetly presented a dolphin-and-trident talisman before asking Aaron to do the same. The Egyptian then escorted him to a beat-up pickup truck and insisted on blindfolding him for the ride to the warehouse—a scary episode for a young Jew in a hostile, foreign land less than a year after the Yom Kippur War.

The first thing he recalled about the warehouse was its grimy odor. When the blindfold finally came off and he found himself in the back office of a huge garage surrounded by a group of similarly dressed Egyptians, confusion and anxiety racked his thoughts. He remembered wondering how this place could possibly be the sacred ground Grandfather had spoken of.

“Sorry for this,” one of the men said, dangling the blindfold. “I’m sure you understand that precautions are necessary.”

Though Grandfather had told Aaron that the Diaspora had scattered the bloodline all over the world, he’d been nonetheless taken aback when he first saw the Egyptian man’s dark skin. Later in life he’d recall the episode when he learned that 99.9 percent of the human genome was identical, despite any outside appearances. The priest’s amazing aquamarine eyes and the gleaming silver talisman hanging over his heart on the front of his white tunic, however, further confirmed a distant yet distinct familial bond.

“You look just like your father, Mr. Aaron. A bit taller, perhaps. He was a very, very good man. God’s light will shine perpetually upon him.” The man’s English was nearly perfect. “My name is Khaleel.” He’d offered a warm handshake. “It is an honor to have you here.”

Aaron was speechless, though Khaleel’s kind words had eased his anxiety. He watched as one of the men worked on opening a door built into the floor.

“I trust your trip was comfortable?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Please, Aaron, call me Khaleel.”

His tone was remarkably calm. Aaron nodded.

Khaleel grinned. “Well then, come. Let us begin,” he said, pointing to the dark opening. “We have so much to discuss.”

In the cramped, dank basement, Khaleel had unlocked a crude, dented metal door with a skeleton key. Its hinges groaned grittily when he opened it. On the other side, he groped for a light switch that brought to life a string of work lights dangling along the center of a tunnel. “Not great,” he admitted, looking up at the dull bulbs, “but it’s a huge improvement over the torches we’d been using up until the twentieth century.”

That managed to bring forth Aaron’s first smile. Khaleel, he’d quickly determined, was a gentle, wise man.

Aaron watched the Egyptian swing the creaking door back into place, his long fingers turning the dead bolt. Realizing he’d been locked in an obscure pit in the Egyptian no-man’s-land, he felt his hands begin trembling. He stuffed them into his pockets. Grandfather wouldn’t have liked it, but even God would have trouble seeing his hands (or his head) down here.

Khaleel placed his right hand on Aaron’s shoulder and extended his left invitingly down the tunnel. “It may not look like much, but what it leads to is very special. Come.”

They walked abreast, the tunnel just wide enough to accommodate them.

Aaron flinched when he saw a scorpion darting along the earthen floor. Khaleel, however, paid it no mind as it skittered over his sandal.

“Your grandfather has told me you’ve learned quite a lot. ‘An excellent student,’ he says.”

“I know it is very important to study our history,” Aaron replied.

“Our history is the doorway to our future,” Khaleel agreed. “You have read about Onias and the tell?”

“Yes, sir ...I mean, Khaleel.”

To calm his anxiety, Aaron told him what he’d learned from reading Josephus’s detailed accounts in The Jewish War. In the second century b.c.e., Onias had been the high priest at the Jerusalem temple. He’d vehemently opposed the pagan sacrifices being allowed on Yahweh’s sacred altar. The temple had been poisoned by Hellenic culture—defiled. When the Syrian king Antiochus threatened war against the Jews, Onias fled to Alexandria to seek refuge under Ptolemy (who detested Antiochus). Onias was granted this land in what had then been the nome of Heliopolis. And here Onias had constructed a fortress city atop a man-made mound. Upon its highest point, he’d built a new sanctuary—a new temple to God, modeled after the one in Jerusalem, but on a smaller scale, and free from any pagan influences.

“It happened just as Isaiah prophesied,” Khaleel added. “The prophet told us that in a place called the City of the Sun, the language of Canaan would be spoken in the land of Egypt, and an altar to the Lord would rise up. And just as Isaiah had said, here is where the Savior came to begin His mission to rescue the Israelites.”

They walked further down the passage in silence. Halfway down the tunnel, they turned along a slight bend. The lighting remained dim, so Aaron could barely make out what lay at the tunnel’s terminus—a rectangular outline of some kind.

“You know what happened to Onias’s temple, yes?” Khaleel asked, testing him.

“The Romans burned it down. Not long after they destroyed the Jerusalem temple in seventy c.e.” Josephus, Aaron recalled, had been very explicit about that too. “The Romans were looking to destroy any hope of another Jewish rebellion. Not only was Onias a priest, but he had his own army here in Heliopolis. The Romans considered this the last Jewish stronghold—a rallying point for further sedition.”

“Excellent, young Aaron,” Khaleel said. “And since the days of Onias, time and nature have colluded without hindrance to reclaim what little remains of his grand temple city. Up there”—he pointed through the five meters of earth that hovered overhead—“we’re left with only ravaged foundations. But down here, Onias’s real legacy has been preserved. Are you ready to learn about it so that you may truly become a Son of Light?” “Yes.”

“Are you ready to see it? To see what Onias’s army was protecting?” See it? “I ...I think so.” When he looked into Khaleel’s eyes, he experienced the same rush he’d felt when his father was about to bring him into Grandfather’s secret room—two men embarking on a journey. “You cannot be a Kohen without first going to Egypt,” Grandfather had told him. “There, everything you have learned will become clear.”

Khaleel’s voice suddenly dropped low. “Did your grandfather also tell you that Yeshua walked down this very same tunnel?”

This shocked Aaron. “Jesus?”

“That is right. As Isaiah foretold, the Savior came here, just as you have. To le a r n. To u nder s t a nd . To b e l ie ve.”

They stopped at the intimidating steel door that materialized from the shadows.

As Khaleel worked a second key into its lock, he said, “And inside this room, Jesus was given God’s most wondrous gift.”

I am a Son of Light, Cohen thought.

The earthen walls looked the same now as they had in 1974, with the exception of some steel reinforcement beams recently retrofitted along some of the crumbling ancient stone arches, and the electrical conduit that snaked between the modern overhead light fixtures.

Five meters below the surface, the subterranean passage ran a perfect line stretching two hundred meters to a secret chamber beneath Tel elYahudiyeh’s foundation. The dusty parcel situated directly above it attracted little attention, but it hosted the faint remains of a massive elliptical fortification built by the Hyksos in the seventeenth century b.c.e.; like the mound, the site was protected by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Therefore, excavations required SCA authorization—virtually impossible to attain. The last meaningful excavation performed here had been in 1906 by Flinders Petrie (the incriminating findings were published in Hyksos and Israelite Cities)—and luckily, even though the renowned father of modern archaeology had pinpointed this as the city of Onias, he had not been granted permission to dig below the tell’s foundation.

At the tunnel’s terminus, the rabbi stopped in front of the second security door, which looked nothing like the one Khaleel had trusted to a simple lock and key. Unlike the tunnel and its improved entrance door, here Cohen had insisted upon major modifications. Regularly, new safeguards and enhancements were added to keep pace with ever-improving technology.

Cohen pressed his thumb on the lock’s scanner, then keyed in a second password. The panel flashed blue three times. The steel door’s mechanical guts came to life, multiple jamb bolts smoothly disengaging. The pressure seal released a small pop just before the door began opening along a smooth arc. Beyond, a dense matrix of iridescent green lasers snapped off.

Cohen entered the cube-shaped vault.

Stainless steel panels sheathed steel-reinforced zero-slump concrete slabs (with special additives that made their crush value ten times greater). Behind that, the two-meter-thick ancient block walls constructed by Onias’s builders had been maintained.

Cohen stared in wonderment at the supervault’s extraordinary centerpiece.

Less than a minute later seven priests in white tunics funneled through the entry and awaited instructions.

34

******

Jerusalem

Amit and Jules entered the Old City’s southern wall through the Zion Gate. They kept close to the stone sidewalls to avoid the cars negotiating the tight L-shaped bend in the tunnel.

“So exactly where are we going?” Jules asked in a loud voice. Amit had been tight-lipped as he parked the Land Rover in the tourist lot outside the gate. Contemplating a plan, she intuited.

Amit didn’t want to compete with the sounds of tire rubber squealing along the glass-smooth ancient paving stones. So he provided the answer only once they’d emerged into the Armenian Quarter along busy Shaar Tsiyon, lined with cafés and souvenir shops.

“We are going to the Jewish Quarter,” he told her.

Passing through a security checkpoint and metal detectors at the entrance to the Jewish Quarter, Amit only hoped that their sly pursuer wouldn’t be able to circumvent the metal detectors. A Mossad agent like Enoch could easily bypass security barriers. The agency’s outside contractors, however, didn’t have that luxury.

He brought Jules through the Roman Cardo, down through Hurva Square (where the only people she spotted were Hasidim), and through the narrow maze of streets that put them on Misgav Ladach. Finally, he stopped in front of a nondescript three-story building neatly edged in Jerusalem stone. A bronze placard engraved in Hebrew and English with the temple society hung above the unassuming entry, which seemed little more than a storefront.

“Here?” she asked, looking up at the sign. “What are we doing here?” “Rabbi Cohen’s office,” he flatly replied, thumbing at the door. “I figured we might ask him if the scrolls were still in Yosi’s office when he met with him yesterday. If the scrolls had been moved, he might know it.”

“That’s your plan?”

Exactly the reaction he’d expected. “Got anything better?” She put her hands on her hips and huffed. “Yikes. We are screwed.” “To be determined,” he optimistically replied. He reached out and

pulled the door open. “After you, mademoiselle.”

“Rrrr,” she growled as she walked past him.

They entered the reception foyer, whose walls were covered in Torahthemed scenes that would have impressed Michelangelo himself: Moses raising his staff to part the seas; Moses atop Sinai; Moses presenting God’s sacred commandments to the Israelites. A massive gold-plated menorah rose tall behind a reception desk. Seated directly beneath it was a middleaged woman wearing an ultraconservative navy blouse buttoned to the collar. Like that of many Hasidic women, her thick, wavy hair was a wig.

“ Shalom aleichem,” Amit greeted her.

She responded in kind, then asked, “May I help you?”

“Yes, I’ve come to speak with Rabbi Cohen,” Amit replied. This seemed to confuse her. “Sorry, but my husband is out of the country on business. Did you have an appointment with him?”

“Not exactly,” Amit said, his optimism immediately deflated.

“Perhaps I might be of assistance then?” she pried. “What is it you’d like to speak with him about?”

“Well . . . ,” he sighed. “W hen do you expect him back from . . . ? ” Amit let the words linger, hoping she’d fill in the blank. Surprisingly, she did.

“I expect him to return from Egypt this evening.”

“Cairo, was it?” Amit pressed.

That’s when Cohen’s wife realized that she’d already said too much. “If you’d like to leave your name, telephone number . . . I’ll certainly see that it gets to him.”

“That’s okay. I’m sure I’ll see him at the Rockefeller Museum. It’s nothing urgent.”

“Your name?”

Amit wasn’t about to give his own. “If you could tell him Yosi stopped by?”

“Certainly.”

“We came to see the museum as well,” Jules tactfully cut in, as if reminding Amit. She pointed to a sign above a door to Mt. Sinai’s left side— an arrow next to the word museum.

“That’s right,” Amit quickly agreed. “I heard you’ve recently remodeled the galleries?” He could tell this lightened Mrs. Cohen’s mood.

“We just reopened two weeks ago.”

“Then two tickets, please,” he cheerily replied, reaching for his wallet.

35

******

The spacious gallery was bustling with tourists, many of whom, Amit could tell, were American Jews eager to decipher their heritage. “Do we really have time for this?” he protested.

“Do you really want to draw more suspicion to yourself ?” Jules quickly rebutted. “Why didn’t you just go ahead and wrestle the woman? Besides, we might learn something here. And it’s certainly safer than walking the streets.”

In the main exhibit hall, the walls were covered in wonderfully detailed oil paintings—a virtual storyboard going back to 1300 b.c.e. to trace Moses and the Israelites along their grueling trek out of Egypt, through the forty-year desert pilgrimage and the centuries-long Canaan wars, to King David’s conquest of Jebus in 1000 b.c.e.—the capital city he’d renamed “Jerusalem”—and Solomon’s construction of the first temple shortly thereafter.

In a separate room, the Babylonian invasion and subsequent exile of the Jews was recounted on twelve framed canvases, and over three dozen more bridged the Jewish dynasties and occupying empires leading up to Rome and its destruction of Herod’s temple in 70 c.e. A large display table in the room’s center sat beneath a sign reading, in English and Hebrew, the third temple. Encased in a Plexiglas cube was an elaborate architectural model showing the Temple Society’s vision for a new Temple Mount, absent all Islamic buildings currently on the site, including the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque.

“What do we have here?” Jules asked, stepping up to it.

“That,” Amit said, “is what these guys think should be sitting on top of the Temple Mount—in place of the Dome of the Rock.”

“That’s one ambitious building project,” Jules whispered.

“Mmm.” Amit studied the model more levelly now, something clicking in his thoughts. This wasn’t the re-creation of Herod’s temple that many of Cohen’s conservative predecessors had imagined, but a modern complex of glass and stone set in three concentric courtyards, each with twelve gates. The design seemed vaguely familiar. But he couldn’t place it.

They moved on to the next exhibit room, where rectangular glass kiosks housed authentic replicas of the sacred vessels to furnish the Third Temple. Amit explained some of them to Jules: the gold-plated ceremonial shofar ram’s horn, the handled gold cup called the mizrak used to collect sacrificial blood, the ornate silver shovel used to collect ash from burnt offerings, the Table of Showbread to display the twelve loaves representing the Israelite tribes, the crimson lottery box used during Yom Kippur to draw lots for sin offerings, and the gold oil pitcher used to replenish menorah lamps. There were even beautifully crafted harps and lyres for Levitical priests to play orchestral music in the temple courtyards.

“Seems like they’re ready to move in,” Jules said in a hushed tone.

“Indeed.”

“And what do we have over here?” she asked, eyeing a life-sized mannequin wearing a cobalt robe interlaced with gold thread, a gold breastplate encrusted with twelve gems, and an elegant turban with a gold tiara. “Who’s the genie?”

Amit chuckled. “Those are the vestments for the temple’s high priest.” “Snazzy,” she said, shaking her head.

Amit read the placard aloud: “And to Moses God said”—he took the liberty of saying “God” where the placard read “G-d” in compliance with the Jewish law forbidding the writing out of God’s name—“ ‘Have your brother Aaron, with his sons . . . come to you from the Israelites to serve Me as priests . . . You are to instruct all the skilled craftsmen, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, to make Aaron’s garments for consecrating him to serve Me . . .’ ” The excerpt was noted as Exodus 28.

But Jules was already moving on to the next display.

“And this?” She crouched to get a better look at a massive limestone block etched with ornamental rosettes and hatch patterns.

He walked over to her and read the Hebrew placard. “Apparently, that’s going to be the Third Temple’s cornerstone.”

“These designs . . . ,” she said, pressing her face closer to the etchings. “Look familiar?”

Drawing nearer, he saw what she meant. “Same as the ossuary I showed you today. Amazing.” More gears clicked in Amit’s mind. Jules’s suggestion of a tour was actually paying off.

Passing beneath a sign reading the holy of holies in Hebrew and English, they entered a final exhibit room and stood before the display that was its focal point. Dramatic orchestral music played low through hidden speakers. Here, a raised platform sat in the room’s center—empty.

“Not much to see here,” Jules said with a smirk.

Amit put his hands on his hips, assessing the space. “Well, before Herod’s temple was destroyed by the Romans,” he offered, “its most sacred room, the Holy of Holies, actually had been empty.”

“Why would the Jews build a temple around an empty shrine? That’s a bit ridiculous, isn’t it?”

“Not really,” he said. “What it had once contained wasn’t something that could ever be replaced.”

“And what was that?” But she noticed his attention had wandered, strangely enough, to the room’s faux stone block walls. “Hello?”

“My God,” he gasped. The short hairs on his neck bristled. “That’s it.”

She followed his eyes and wasn’t seeing a damn thing. “What do you mean, it?”

Now her failure to piece these things together was starting to disappoint him. But he needed to remind himself that he was dealing with an Egyptologist, not a biblical archaeologist. “The walls, Jules,” he calmly replied. “The ceiling, the floor?” He pointed to them in turn. “Look at the shape they form. Don’t you see it?”

Her frustration was setting in too as she scanned the space again. “What? You mean the squares?”

“The cube,” he sternly whispered. “This room is a cube. The ideal of perfection used in the design of the Tabernacle’s innermost sanctuary. And those vaults I showed you in Qumran.”

She shrugged. “Okay, I get it. They were cube shaped.”

“Exactly!” He anxiously eyed the empty platform at the room’s center one last time, then stared up at the surveillance camera mounted close to the ceiling. “We need to leave. Right now.”

36

******

Egypt

It was at Inshas Airport’s security gate where the problem began. Rabbi Cohen’s returning Peugeot hadn’t aroused suspicion, but the blue pickup truck following closely behind it had.

As instructed, Cohen and his driver waited in the car, idling in front of the lowered security barrier. A mustached guard stood by them while two others circled around the truck to question the driver and inspect the sizable wooden crate stowed in its bed.

Cohen had already explained to the Egyptians that his diplomatic privileges should not be questioned. He’d shown them his passport and the diplomatic papers that he maintained as a former member of the Knesset. But the stubborn guard wasn’t hearing any of it, and the rabbi knew why. Though Egypt showed no outward hostility toward Israel, the two still remained ideologically, politically, and theologically split—bitter enemies. And Cohen was no ordinary Israeli; he was a Hasid . . . a Hasid bringing a very suspicious package onto the airstrip.

Gazing out across the runways, he could see his blue-striped jet oriented directly toward Israel, exhaust haze streaming out from its running engines. Calculations ran through his head. How long would it take to break through the barrier, load the crate, and take off before the Egyptians could do anything to stop them? The place was heavily secured. But he was willing to gamble they wouldn’t risk shooting down an Israeli jet, no matter what they suspected was inside the crate.

Cohen turned in his seat, craning his neck to see what was happening behind them.

One guard stayed with the truck’s driver, machine gun at the ready.

The second guard was circling the truck’s cargo bed, scrutinizing the crate’s Arabic markings, which suggested that its contents were auto parts. The inspector pulled out a black security wand that blinked wildly as he ran it over the crate’s lid.

This caused more commotion as the guards began screaming back and forth to one another.

Cohen gritted his teeth. No matter what the cost, he’d be returning to Tel Aviv with the cargo. He spoke quietly to the driver in Hebrew. “You know what to do if this gets messy.”

The driver nodded. He let his hand drop slowly along the seat, ready to take up the Uzi concealed there.

The inspector paced back inside the security post and came out with a second device that Cohen couldn’t identify.

“If they even attempt to open the crate . . . ,” Cohen whispered to the driver.

With another subtle nod, the driver’s hand went down further along the seat.

Back at the truck’s rear, the guard fidgeted with the device, which looked like some kind of handheld vacuum. Once it powered on, he used the thing to scan the top and sides of the crate.

Cohen’s hands curled into fists.

After a few more sweeps, the inspector finally yelled out his findings in Arabic to the mustached guard who’d taken a post at the car. Though the man’s accent was thick, Cohen could make out that he was saying everything seemed all right—then something about there being no radioactive material.

The mustached guard slung his machine gun over his shoulder and bent down along the Peugeot’s window. “We cannot be too careful these days,” he said by way of a mediocre apology. “You are free to go.”

The security gate opened and the car moved forward, followed by the blue pickup.

Unclenching his fists, Cohen breathed a sigh of relief and checked his watch—almost three p.m. The unanticipated complications in packaging the relic had substantially delayed their departure. Difficult to fault the priests (the relic’s custodians), since the meticulous protocols hadn’t been carried out in almost two millennia.

Regardless, within an hour they’d arrive in Tel Aviv, with the crate. He’d then instruct the pilot to continue on directly to Rome, where another urgent delivery would be awaiting pickup.

37

******

Vat ic a n Ci t y

Following the leisurely two-and-a-half-hour lunch, Father Martin brought Donovan to the Swiss Guard security office. There he made good on his promise to help restore Donovan’s clearances to the Secret Archives, the clerical offices of the Apostolic Palace and the Palace of the Governorate, the museums, and the various administrative buildings throughout Vatican City.

Though Donovan acted outwardly enthusiastic about Martin’s offer to arrange meetings for the following morning with the archbishop in charge of the Pontifical Commission, as well as the inspector general of the Corpo della Gendarmeria (Vatican City’s police force in charge of general security and criminal investigations), he was most interested in performing an investigation of his own—an investigation that would commence at the heart of Vatican City: St. Peter’s Basilica.

Donovan knew little about the cunning enemies he was dealing with. Nevertheless, of one thing he was certain. The critical information they’d been given could only have come from someone inside Vatican City. And earlier that afternoon, he’d very discreetly sprung a trap to test his hypothesis.

***

Donovan didn’t use his new key card to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, since his last after-hours visit there back in June had left a digital trail in the security center’s activity log. And what needed to be done here required utmost furtiveness.

At six thirty, he came in the grand front entrance, just like every other tourist. And for the next half hour, he slowly paced the voluminous nave and transepts, reacquainting himself with the shrines and statues, which spoke to him like old friends.

Soon the docents announced the basilica’s seven p.m. closing and began shepherding everyone outside. That’s when Donovan nonchalantly slipped through the balustrade leading to the deep grotto set at the foot of the main altar, beneath Bernini’s towering baldachino.

He moved quickly down the semicircular marble steps, past St. Peter’s shrine and the Confessio set before it, back beneath the mammoth white plaster-covered arches supporting the basilica’s main floor. Deeper he went into the underground graveyard where late popes and dignitaries had been laid to rest in massive sarcophagi and elaborate crypts, until he came to the tomb of Benedict XV.

Looking back over his tracks, he made sure he still had a straight sight line to the Confessio and St. Peter’s shrine. Then he crouched beside the mammoth cippolino marble sarcophagus topped by an incredibly lifelike bronze effigy of the late pope laid in state.

It took another fifteen minutes before he heard a docent descend the steps for a final run-through. Staying low, Donovan quietly shifted around the tomb’s base to stay out of view as the docent roved past, whistling.

Five minutes later, the sconces throughout the grottoes dimmed to blackness, and security lights glowed gently in the necropolis’s main corridors.

Now he would wait.

38

******

If the four-course meal served up at the Apostolic Palace—antipasti, braciole, zuppa di faro, and linguine al pescatore—hadn’t made Charlotte’s eyelids heavy, the two glasses of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo certainly had. She’d endured the most stressful day of her life, short of the hellish Monday back in March when her oncologist first told her she had bone cancer.

So while Father Donovan sorted out the administrative details of his return to Vatican City, she’d returned to the dormitory, emotionally drained and physically spent. Though it violated her cardinal rule for skipping multiple time zones—immediately acclimate to the local time and let your body adjust—she surrendered to a late afternoon nap.

When the alarm clock went off around six p.m., she hit the snooze button three times, then shut it off altogether.

Her sleep was deep, yet far from peaceful.

Images of Evan’s murder kept cycling through her subconscious— oddly, in black and white, as if it were a movie from the forties: the strange gunman disguised as a lab tech . . . the gun arcing up at Evan . . . the silent shot ...Evan’s head snapping forward in slow motion ... a gush of black liquid ... falling ... falling ...

She could see herself, there in the office, screaming through the deafening silence. Helpless.

Wake up... WAKE UP!

. . . The gunman turns to her, two words growling from his twisted lips: “The bones!” ...

Then Donovan sitting in the Volvo, calmly saying, “The bones? Why would they want the bones?” ’

...Cut to chromosomes furiously replicating and dividing in microscope view to the roar of unearthly shrieking and howling . . . souls tormented by hellfire . . .

Silence.

Next: blackness giving way to blinding light.

A skeleton on a stainless steel table.

Gouged ribs.

Ground-up bones around the wrists and feet.

Broken knee bones.

...A leather whip streaming through the air—WHOOOOSH—its barbed thongs tearing across bare flesh . . . blood spilling out from long, ragged gashes . . . again ... slashing ... again ... ripping ... again ... shredding ...

A sturdy wooden beam laid upon rocks . . . a bloodied, semi-naked figure splayed across it . . . indiscernible shapes shifting through the surrounding thick haze . . . limbs pulled and stretched over the wood . . . sinewy fingers clamping down . . . more hands clutching jagged spikes . . . silent screams . . . pressure on the wrists . . . a hammer cutting the air . . .

WA K E UP !

Charlotte awoke with a start.

Though the images in her nightmare had instantly disappeared, the pressure on her wrists had not—a sharp pain bolted up to her shoulders.

There was an instant where she thought she was still dreaming. But the pain—the terror—was all too real.

When she tried to scream, an enormous hand came down over her mouth and nose. She detected some kind of fabric against her lips and nostrils, the pungent smell of chemicals.

The broad-shouldered man came into her sights as he jumped onto the bed, straddling her stomach. The one who’d broken through her office door! The gunman who’d murdered Evan! Recoiling, she tried to kick, to flail, to bite. But any resistance was ineffectual.

Through blurring vision, she spotted the second intruder only an instant later, turning the door lock, racing over.

...Can’t breathe...

Her starving lungs struggled for air, only to pull in more chemicals, their smell much sharper this time.

Within seconds, a numb pressure settled over her limbs and torso, as if concrete was being poured over her body. Her head felt impossibly heavy—woozy.

The hand fell away from her face.

As they lifted her from the bed, her head fell limply back. The last thing she saw was the crucifix nailed above the headboard.

Then her field of vision telescoped backward. Total blackness.

39

******

The Temple Mount

Ghalib’s searing caramel irises glared out the window at the Dome of the Rock, his wiry fingers steepled beneath his chin. The lights circling the shrine’s cupola made King Hussein’s gold leaf blaze against the darkening sky—a magnificent juxtaposition. It pleased him immensely to know that Israelis from all over Jerusalem and its surrounding hills could see this most potent symbol of Islam’s occupation of the world’s most sacred ground—this fiery torch lighting the darkness.

Oh, the fury the Jews must endure as they weep in the valley below. But never could this victory be taken for granted. And that was exactly what the Waqf had done: shirked their duties. Oversight of the Temple Mount was not limited to mere religious functions. This place was a fortress that needed to be closely guarded. The preeminent post within the Waqf was that of Keeper. Just as the name implied, by accepting this assignment, Ghalib had sworn to preserve Islam’s foothold not only in Jerusalem, but throughout God’s world.

He was a sentinel for Allah.

“ ‘Glory to Allah for taking His most righteous servant from the sacred mosque to the most distant mosque,’ ” he muttered, his unblinking eyes still trained on the gold dome.

Oh, how the kalifah had taken the divine words of the Great Prophet to weave the grand tale that made this place the third-most-sacred shrine in Islam. The cryptic Qur’anic reference at the onset of the sura entitled Bani Isra’il gave very little detail about what place had truly been designated the Distant Mosque. But the oral traditions in the hadith told a great story that it was this very place—the site where the grand Jewish Temple presumably once stood. How clever the caliphs had been when they’d conquered Jerusalem in the seventh century and re-created Jerusalem’s identity—al-Quds. Just as the Jewish king David had once laid claim to this site, so too had the kalifah. And the Jews’ most sacred place was hence transformed into the Islamic Haram esh-Sharif—the Noble Sanctuary.

“As-salaam alaikum,” a soft voice said from over his shoulder.

Swiveling round in his chair, Ghalib studied the young man who stood in the doorway—average height, slight of stature, Palestinian by blood. But his pale complexion, green eyes, and soft features had often been confused for Israeli—one might even guess that he was a Sephardic Jew. Precisely the reason Ghalib had summoned him here. He knew him by first name alone: Ali—Arabic for “protected by God.” And as requested, Ali had shaved away his beard. The added effect was quite dramatic.

“Wa alaikum al salaam,” Ghalib said, waving him forward. “Come, let us talk.”

Ali sat tall in the guest chair, eyes cast down at his hands in a show of respect.

“You can look at me, Ali,” Ghalib insisted. The green eyes shifted up, blazing with a familiar fire. He got right to the point: “I’ve been told that you have offered to give your life for Allah . . . for your people. You wish to be a martyr?”

“Yes,” he replied simply, without emotion.

“Tell me. Why do you believe that you are worthy to make such a sacrifice?”

Ghalib already knew the answer. He’d heard it many times before from countless young Muslims—mostly male but occasionally female—who flooded the rightist Islamic madrassas throughout the Middle East and Europe to be consumed by the radical interpretations of Islam’s oral tradition. A common thread bound them all: their lives had been stripped of hope, opportunity, and dignity.

Like many others, Ali and his family had lost their home and land to Israeli settlements funded by American Christian evangelists and zealous Jews. His older brother had been gunned down for throwing stones during the second intifada. Ali had grown up witnessing frequent Israeli raids and the destructive aftermath of rocket attacks. His family was locked behind concrete and barbed wire eight meters high—Israel’s ever-growing security barrier. They lived in a camp and relied on handouts, or zakah, from Hamas for their survival. And the Israelis forbade them to enter Jerusalem to pray at the great mosques.

No home. No freedom. No land. No future. The perfect martyr.

The worst thing any man could take from another man is his dignity, Ghalib thought.

“I give myself to Allah—body, soul,” Ali replied with utmost certainty. “I am His now. And to honor Him, I must fight against what is happening to our people. I fight for Palestine. For what is rightfully ours.”

Ghalib smiled. It wasn’t the promise of countless virgins in a garden paradise that fueled this one. Just as the Merciful One had created Adam from clay, so too Ali’s spirit had been molded by the teachings. But as much as Ghalib would have loved to strap shrapnel bombs to the shaheed ’s torso and send him into a nightclub on Ben Yehuda Street, there was a more pressing matter at hand.

“You will be greatly rewarded when the final day comes, Ali,” Ghalib said in praise of him. “In the meantime, there is something very important I would like for you to do.”

“Anything you ask.”

Reaching under the table, Ghalib brought out a neatly folded blue jumpsuit and set it in front of Ali. The embroidered white insignia on the front pocket—depicting a menorah inside a circle—brought much confusion to Ali’s fair-skinned face, as did the identification badge and security access card Ghalib placed atop it.

40

******

Vat ic a n Ci t y

The figure appeared much sooner than anticipated—a dark shadow descending from above, sweeping down the gentle curve of the staircase, faint footsteps echoing off the marble-clad grotto. From the shadows deep within the necropolis, Donovan leaned out from behind the tomb in wait.

The face was difficult to make out beneath the dim glow from the oil lamps circling St. Peter’s shrine. But Donovan had little doubt about the intruder’s identity. And he was relieved to see that the traitor had come alone. There was a sizable bag in the figure’s left hand—far too big for what he’d come to steal.

***

Father Martin knelt before the arched niche where the golden casket shimmered behind a glass door. He glanced up into the eyes of Christ’s mosaic set behind it and crossed himself.

With a trembling hand, he raised a key to the door frame and turned the lock. Slowly he pulled open the glass door.

“And what ever happened to the bones that you found in the ossuary?” he’d asked Donovan over lunch. Though at first Donovan had been reluctant to respond, he’d come back with “Just after I left Santelli’s office, I put them in a very safe place.”

That was when Martin recalled the night of Santelli’s death, when he’d found Donovan here in the basilica, after hours, creeping up from this very shrine. Donovan said he’d been praying. But Martin remembered that he’d been carrying an empty satchel. There would have been no way for him to have hidden the bones in one of the papal sarcophagi or tombs, since all were permanently sealed. He’d have needed tools, and no doubt someone to help him. But that night, there’d been neither.

That left only one possibility.

With gleaming eyes, Martin studied the golden ossuary.

The photograph of his sister’s family came into his mind’s eye, along with the haunting words: “The most efficient path to truth comes from the blood of loved ones.” Now, by the grace of God, he could spare them by giving Orlando what he wanted. He hadn’t asked to be dragged into this mess. This wasn’t his war. Donovan and the American geneticist would take responsibility for what had happened.

“You get the bones and have them ready for us,” Orlando had told him on the phone earlier that afternoon. “You’ll also need to find a way to get us into the city.”

There came a moment of doubt when Martin considered the size of the box. Could such a small vessel hold an entire human skeleton? Reaching out with both hands, Martin wrapped his fingers around the relic’s ornate lid, his movement more urgent now. He pulled the lid away and set it down on the marble tiles at his knees. The shadows made it difficult to see inside the box and he scrambled for the bag to retrieve the flashlight he’d brought along.

He leaned over the box and shined the light down into it. Reflections shone crisply off some glass vessels stored inside. Cruets filled with ceremonial oils?

“What?” Despair immediately gripped him, knocking the wind out of his chest.

“The bones aren’t there, lad,” a voice suddenly called out in a heavy brogue.

Taken aback, Martin spun wildly. In the process, he slipped on the relic’s lid and it scraped along the tile, making him fall backward against the wall and hit his head. The flashlight fell out of his hand, hit the tile, and rolled away until it partially spotlighted Donovan—his face visible but blended into the darkness. The glow from the overhead lamps silhouetted his hairless skull.

“Where are the bones?” Martin demanded, scrambling to his feet.

Donovan’s muscles tightened. Martin stopped at arm’s length, the light shining up under his chin making his wild eyes more pronounced—demonic looking. “Not here; not in Vatican City,” Donovan bitterly replied. “You will never know. I promise you that.” When he’d left Vatican City, the bones had left with him. And now they were in a much safer place.

“I must, Patrick! I must know!” he ranted, stepping closer to Donovan, limbs quaking. “You don’t understand!”

“Get hold of yourself,” he replied in disgust. “There’s plenty I understand. Especially deceit. I’ve seen too much of it inside these walls. But I never expected it from you.”

Then Martin broke down. “They’ve threatened to kill my sister . . . the children. If I don’t give them what they want . . .” He dropped to his knees, sobbing.

“You have no idea what you’ve done. People have already died because of what you’ve said.”

Martin buried his face in his hands, shaking his head in denial, not wanting to hear the words.

“Tell me who they are. I’ll help you. We’ll find a way to protect your sister and her family. We can bring them here until we find these men.”

“Just give them the bones,” he weakly pleaded.

“I can’t. I won’t.” It took everything in his being not to lash out at him. Donovan dropped to one knee and yanked Martin’s face up into the light. “Who are they?” he growled in frustration.

Martin shook his head, his lips quivering. “Do you think I know?” he sobbed. “Do you think they actually told me? I have no idea who they are!” He pulled away and dropped to the floor like a wounded animal. “It doesn’t matter now anyway,” Martin murmured.

Donovan didn’t like the way this sounded.

“They’re already here, in the city. When I don’t give them the bones tonight ...”

Adrenaline surged through Donovan and he lunged at Martin, seizing the lapels of his jacket, shaking hard. “You let them in here? Are you insane!”

“It wasn’t only the bones they wanted,” Martin whispered, his body flaccid. “They wanted her too ...Charlotte.”

Stunned, Donovan shoved Martin back against the wall. Wasting no time, he sprang to his feet and raced up the steps into the basilica.

“It’s too late!” Martin screamed after him. “You can’t save her now!” His next words went unheard by Donovan. “God forgive me.”

41

******

Jerusalem

“Why are we going here?” Jules asked as Amit turned the Land Rover off Jaffa Road and its headlights swept across Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station—a modern eight-story pile of Jerusalem stone and glass. “Are we skipping town?”

“I need to check my e-mail,” he told her, “and I’m not about to go to my apartment to do it. Suicide bombers like to target buses. So security here is super tight. Lots of cameras, police, metal detectors.”

“Good idea.”

“Thanks.”

“And you’re still not going to tell me what you’re thinking?” The stubborn Israeli had raced her out of the Old City saying barely a word. And he’d given her no clue as to why the Temple Society’s tribute to the hypothetical Third Temple shrine had spooked him.

“If I tell you what I’m thinking right now, trust me, you’ll think I’m completely nuts,” he told her.

“Too late for that,” she grumbled.

Winding through the underground garage, Amit parked the Land Rover close to the elevator. He waited a good minute with the Jericho grasped firmly in his hand, making sure no one was following them inside. Once he was satisfied that the area was secure, he locked the pistol in the glove box.

“Let’s go,” he said, jumping out. “There’s an Internet café upstairs that one of my students told me about.”

Along the shopping concourse, Amit strode quickly to Café Net, with Jules double-timing her steps to keep up with him. At the counter, he paid seven shekels for fifteen minutes of Web surfing. While he settled in at a terminal close to the front, Jules perused the pastry and sandwich selections at the display case running along the opposite wall.

By the time Amit had fussed with the access code and gotten the browser up and running, Jules had returned with a tray holding a café au lait and omelet ciabatta for each of them.

“Might as well get something to eat while we’re here,” she said. She set a mug and a plated sandwich in front of him.

“Good thinking.” Famished, he immediately went for the sandwich.

“So what exactly are you looking for?” Her tone was more conciliatory now. It was obvious that Amit was putting together the pieces of a very intricate puzzle.

It took him a moment to finish chewing before he said, “Yosi always sends me an advance copy of his transcriptions,” Amit explained. “To keep us both out of trouble, he sends them to my Yahoo account.”

“Sneaky,” Jules said.

“Smart,” Amit corrected. “Yahoo affords some pretty sophisticated firewalls and encryption. Not to mention my name is not attached to my account. So it’s all fairly anonymous.” He clicked on his in-box and the screen filled with unread messages. “And this transcription would have been very easy for Yosi—quick. So if we’re lucky . . .” He cast his eyes heavenward.

She swallowed her first bite of the ciabatta. “Any stuff in there I’m not supposed to see?”

He shook his head.

“How about this one?” she inquired, pointing to a new message with the subject line enlarge your penis—1 inch in 3 days. “Are you sure your account is anonymous?”

Amit chuckled. “I guess the secret’s out,” he said. “Junk mail.” But the smile dissolved quickly when he scrolled down and spotted the message from Yosi, the subject line stating one ominous word in caps: “URGENT.” “Ah. Here we go.”

Jules leaned closer.

“Listen to this.” Amit quietly read aloud Yosi’s message: “ ‘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.’ ” His voice began to waver slightly. “ ‘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’ ”—he had to pause to clear his throat—“ ‘challenge everything we know.’ ” But the last sentence stumped him, because it stopped abruptly.

Jules picked it up for him: “ ‘I fear that such a controversial message might—’ ” And she let her voice break off just as the words had. “What happened there?”

“He obviously sent this in a rush. Didn’t get a chance to finish.” Amit checked the time and date of the transmission. “See here . . . this came yesterday, right before Joshua said Yosi left the museum.”

“You mean when he was talking with that rabbi?”

Amit’s face went pale. “Exactly.” He tried to imagine the timing of it all. “Rabbi Cohen must have interrupted him.” The thought of this troubled him deeply. Cohen was a powerful man.

“Yet he still felt the urge to get the e-mail off to you?”

“Yeah.” Amit could only guess that what the transcription revealed had profoundly unnerved Yosi. Now, with great trepidation, he stared at the tiny paper clip icon next to the subject line. Could Yosi have felt that he was in danger?

“Come on. Open it,” Jules urged.

He quickly moved the mouse pointer over the paper clip icon to open the document Yosi had attached. The moment it came up, he knew it was the transcription. But there was no time to read it. Amit clicked the print button. “We’ve got to get out of here right now,” he told Jules, jumping up from the chair.

“What are you—”

But he was already at the printer snatching up the pages. Verifying that he’d gotten the whole document, he paid the cashier for the printout. Then he raced back, logged off his e-mail account, and grabbed his sandwich. Jules was already standing, emptying her mug.

Amit threw back his coffee too.

“Ready,” she said, and followed him out. “What’s with the sudden rush?”

“This guy is most likely monitoring everything. My credit cards, my passport ...I’m sure he’s already traced all of Yosi’s e-mail. Which means he already knows that Yosi sent this e-mail to me. So I have no doubt that my Yahoo account is being monitored too.” He explained how stationary computers were open books and that techs with even basic knowledge of Internet protocol addressing could easily pinpoint where activity was originating.

As they moved through the throngs of commuters, Amit’s radar was working overtime—his eyes scanning faces, storefronts, escalators . . .

“So now what?”

“We get ourselves safely away from here and read this transcription. But first, I need to use a pay phone.” His eyes motioned to a cluster of phones next to the entrance doors.

Once again, Enoch picked up in two rings.

“Hey, it’s me,” Amit said loudly over the bustling commuters moving

about the terminal. “Find out anything yet?”

“Plenty. Got some very interesting info for you,” the Mossad agent said

without formality. “Good news and bad news.”

Amit’s fingers tightened around the receiver. “I could use some good

news.”

“Good news is, the tank hasn’t marked you.”

That definitely came as a relief. “Bad news?”

“That picture you sent me? Outside contractor. And I don’t think I

need to tell you his specialty.”

His fingers clamped tighter. “Assassinations?” Jules was standing close

beside him, and her eyes went wide.

“Among other things.”

His worried eyes swept over the sea of faces moving all around him,

looking for anyone suspicious—particularly a man with a fresh head

wound. “Were you able to get a name?”

“Come on, Amit. You know how those guys work.”

“Right. Aliases and anonymous bank account numbers.” Deniability. “You got it,” Enoch said. “And I picked up lots of activity with the

credit bureaus, immigration, the works. Not in-house. Someone on the

outside, trying to track you down.”

“Can you trace it?”

“Tried. No good. The connections bounce through phantom routers,

stay live for less than a minute at a time. But he’s got all your information.”

“So this guy has help?”

“Very good help.”

“Great,” Amit grumbled. “You know Rabbi Aaron Cohen, right?” “Who doesn’t?”

“I have a feeling he might be involved in all this. Call it a hunch. I

found out today that he took a last-minute trip to Egypt. Can you find out

where he went, what he’s up to?”

A tired sigh on the other end of the line preceded Enoch’s reply. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

“You’re the best. I’ll be in touch shortly.” Amit hung up the phone and

turned to Jules. “Come on.”

He led her down the escalator to the main level, in the direction opposite where they’d come into the station.

This was all happening way too fast for Jules and she was getting frustrated. “Slow down,” she said, tugging his thick arm. “We parked back

there,” she said, pointing behind her.

“Forget my truck. I’m sure that’s being watched too. We’ll take a taxi

from here.”

42

******

Vat ic a n Ci t y

Donovan was in full sprint as he flew out the rear exit of St. Peter’s Basilica onto Via del Fondamento. He had no cell phone to call ahead to Charlotte’s room—to warn her that Martin had snared them in his trap. And there was no time to double back to the Swiss Guard barracks to arrange a rescue team.

Worst of all, Donovan was unarmed.

He only hoped that the dormitory’s deskman had stopped the men from entering the building, or at least called ahead to security if anything seemed suspect.

As he rounded Piazza di Santa Marta, a group of nuns scattered from the sidewalk to make way for him, gasping as he tore past. A searing burn was radiating up his leg muscles as he pushed harder.

Breathless, he slid to a stop at the dormitory entrance, yanked open the door, and darted into the vestibule. “Call secur— !” he began to yell to the curved front desk. But no one was there. He quickly hurled himself halfway onto the counter to try to see if the deskman was in the rear office through the open doors on the left and right. “Ao ! ” Donovan yelled, not seeing any trace of the guy. “Ao ! ”

But then his eyes caught reflections glinting off the pool of red spreading over the tiled floor beneath the desk. The deskman was sprawled out on his back, lifeless eyes frozen in terror, a clean hole pierced through his forehead.

Donovan recoiled, his chest heaving up and down.

The bank of security monitors was still live, and on the closed circuit for the second floor, he spotted a large man pushing a bulging laundry bin toward the elevator. This time the man wasn’t wearing a lab coat. Father Piotr Kwiatkowski, or whatever his name was, had donned the gray uniform of a maintenance worker.

Donovan feared he might already be too late. The Petrine Gate was very close by, as was the Arch of Bells. If Martin had gotten them into the city legally, they would easily make their exit past the Swiss Guards posted there. Then a couple of quick turns onto Via Gregorio VII and they’d surely disappear.

If, however, Donovan could immediately warn the Swiss Guard, they might respond in time to stop the intruders prior to their leaving the city. He reached across to the desk phone and snatched up its receiver. The line had been cut.

On the monitor, the elevator doors had just closed. He could hear the machinery come to life behind him.

Did deskmen carry guns? His frenzied eyes went back to the body, the navy blazer that had flapped open when it hit the floor. No gun belt or underarm holster.

His eyes scanned furiously for anything resembling a weapon. The far wall—a red fire extinguisher, and a formidable ax encased in safety glass beside it.

43

******

The instant the elevator doors parted, Donovan sprang out with the extinguisher’s hose aimed straight. With Kwiatkowski in clear view, Donovan pulled on the cylinder’s unpinned lever and sprayed a blast of ammonium phosphate directly at his face.

The stunned assassin’s reaction was a split second off—his hands came up only after the searing chemicals jetted into his eyes. He went down screaming and simultaneously thrust the linen bin out at Donovan, knocking him back onto the floor.

Donovan relinquished the extinguisher and scrambled for the fire ax. Jumping back to his feet, he jigged around the bin, hooked his free arm inside the elevator, and jabbed blindly at buttons on its control panel. Kwiatkowski was already getting to his feet, struggling to see.

When he lunged for the closing doors, Donovan swung down at his outstretched arm; the ax blade split open his thick forearm with a wet thwack and blood sprayed wildly. The assassin howled in pain, giving Donovan a final opportunity to plant a firm kick that made him stumble and collapse against the rear wall of the elevator car. Another quick poke at the panel inside the car brought the doors together and sent the shocked assassin on his way to the fifth floor.

Trembling all over, Donovan pulled back the sheet covering what was inside the laundry bin. Charlotte was there, curled into a ball, unconscious . . . but still breathing.

“Thank God!” Donovan cried.

Next he went for the fire alarm near the stairwell. But as he made to pull down on the handle, he heard a commotion on the stairs. He only glimpsed the man storming down at him and knew immediately that it was Kwiatkowski’s partner.

Donovan yanked on the handle and ran past the bin. There wasn’t time to get Charlotte to safety, but at least security would respond. The fire alarm immediately began squelching in fast intervals—the sound was so ear-splitting that Donovan didn’t even hear the shot.

But he certainly felt the force of its impact as the round punched through his left shoulder and tore out of his chest. His body pitched violently forward and spun, then smashed down against the marble floor.

Seconds later, Father Donovan went still. An ice-cold sensation crawled over his skin as the piercing alarm faded to silence.

44

******

Jerusalem

The taxi turned off Ruppin Boulevard and climbed the steep tree-lined drive leading up to Jerusalem’s most famous complex of art and history galleries—the Israel Museum. My third museum today, Amit mused.

As the roadway crested, he stared out the window at the Knesset building dominating the nearby hillside in Givat Ram—a bland, 1960s rectangular eyesore with a flat, overhanging roof supported on all sides by flared rectangular columns. It was lit up against the night sky, making it even harder for him to imagine that its unnatural symmetry and harsh lines had been inspired by the temples of Egypt. But what did impress him was the huge power base Rabbi Aaron Cohen had built inside its unicameral hall during his tenure with the Israeli parliament.

Cohen was a powerful man whom many considered a visionary. But he was also a Zionist at heart—as pure as they came. Amit somehow knew that he was responsible for what happened at Qumran, not to mention Yosi’s coincidental death, followed by the disappearance of the scrolls. Now in his pocket he had the printed translation that might answer many questions concerning the rabbi’s motive.

Outside the museum’s entrance, Amit settled up with the driver and he and Jules proceeded through the glass entry doors.

Jules was busy watching some guests arriving by limousine, who were dressed elegantly in gowns and tuxedos. Some impolite stares came back at her. “I’m feeling a bit grungy,” she muttered. “What’s going on here?”

“Probably a private showing for VIPs. And don’t worry, you look fabulous,” Amit added.

She smiled.

He was actually feeling naked without the Jericho, so the metal detectors and security guards inside provided great relief. “We’ll be safe here for the time being,” he told Jules, recognizing one of the security guards on detail—an older, gaunt man with pure white hair.

When the guard stood and reached out for a handshake, Jules noticed his sleeve hike up, revealing some numbers tattooed just above his wrist.

“Amit, how are you, my friend?” he said with a heavy Polish accent.

“Good, David. Yourself ?”

“Another day aboveground,” the old fellow cheerily replied, as if he’d just won the lottery. When his eyes turned to Jules, he couldn’t help but whistle. “With this lovely lady at your side, you should have no complaints.”

Amit formally introduced his companion.

“You know we closed at nine tonight?” David said, verifying on his watch that it was already past the hour. “I don’t mean to be rude . . . ,” he said, giving both their outfits an obligatory once-over as more sweetsmelling guests in sleek black filtered through the lobby. “It’s a private function, I’m afraid.”

“We’re not looking to crash the party. Just wanted to show Jules a few things.”

Looking both ways, David leaned closer and stage-whispered to her, “He may not be on the list, but he’s certainly a VIP in my book.” He winked and motioned with his head to the inside. “Get going.”

“I appreciate that,” Amit said.

“Just don’t cause any trouble in there, eh?”

“By the way, David,” Amit said before heading in. “Tell me, were you here for the symposium yesterday?”

“Of course.”

“Yosi came, didn’t he?”

This immediately saddened David. “Sure. He was here. The poor fellow. What a shame. I guess God was ready for him.”

Amit was sure that God was surprised to see him, but he said, “Came as a shock to me too.” He let the moment pass before asking, “This may sound like an odd question, but was he carrying anything when he came in? A briefcase? Anything like that?”

David scrunched his eyes, pondering for a second, then shook his head. “Everything was going through the scanner,” he said, pointing to the conveyor-belted machine behind him. “He did have a fancy pen in his pocket that made him ring. Besides that . . .” He shook his head.

“You’re sure he wasn’t carrying anything else?”

Now David took mock offense. “I may not be a kid anymore, but my wheels keep turning.” He pointed to his brain.

Amit knew there was no chance Yosi would’ve left the scrolls in his car. He would have fretted about the humidity, the heat—not to mention the possibility that they might get stolen. And David’s story did agree with Joshua Cohen’s recollection of Yosi leaving the museum empty-handed. “Thanks, David. You take care of yourself and tell your wife I send my love.”

“Make an honest man out of him, will you?” David said to Jules, and waved them through the metal detectors.

45

******

The delivery van that had awaited Rabbi Aaron Cohen’s arrival on the tarmac at Ben Gurion International was parked behind the modern wing next to the Rockefeller Museum exhibit halls.

Adjacent to the Israel Antiquities Authority’s director’s office, Cohen’s entourage entered a handsomely appointed octagonal meeting room set below a domed ceiling. Along each wall, eight niches were furnished with seats for the Archaeological Advisory Council’s auditors. And onto the room’s central table, Cohen’s men carefully set down the heavy consignment safely returned from Egypt.

Unlike the ossuary on display in the Rockefeller Museum’s South Gallery, what was inside this crate was certainly not intended for exhibition. This was not something to be admired. It was to be respected and feared. And soon, for the first time in over three millennia, fear would return to the enemies of Zion.

“Lock the doors,” Cohen instructed his men. He pointed to the windows. “And shut the blinds.”

Luckily, the return to Tel Aviv hadn’t been nearly as eventful as the departure from Inshas. The perilous journey was nearly complete.

“Open it,” he ordered them. He stood back and watched them unpack their tools.

Like Moses preparing to claim the lands of Canaan, Cohen stood upon the threshold of a New Jerusalem—a new world. The bitter conflicts in the Middle East and Israel; the fall of the modern Babylon, Iraq; the godlessness and lasciviousness of Western culture poisoning the world; even the scourge of new pandemics like AIDS and the volatile climatic shifts that churned up more frequent tsunamis and hurricanes— all telling signs that the prophecies were finally being realized.

Since 1948, the promised land had virtually been reclaimed, and the tribes had gathered from around the world. Cohen knew that the return of God’s law patiently awaited the final signs, just as He’d promised to Ezekiel: “Although I sent them far away among the nations and scattered them among the countries . . . I will gather you from the nations and bring you back from the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you back the land of Israel again . . . And I will also purge you of those who rebel and transgress against me.”

Only one spark remained, one single event culminating a final conflict that would usher in the Day of Judgment—a bloody clash between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.

As the men lifted the lid off the crate, Rabbi Aaron Cohen grinned widely.

As Grandfather had only dreamed, soon Zion would rise up like a phoenix.

The muted chiming of his cell phone inside his briefcase interrupted the moment. On the opposite side of the conference table, he set the briefcase down and opened it. He fished for the phone, which had slipped between the three plastic-sealed papyri safely recovered from Yosi’s office and an aerial schematic of the Temple Mount showing a bright blue line drawn through its midsection from west to east.

Agitated, he hit the receive button. “What is it?”

What the caller told him was gravely unsettling.

“You hold him there. I’m on my way. Do nothing until I arrive.”

46

******

Amit turned right off the main walkway, splitting away from the herd of well-attired invitees en route to the Samuel Bronfman wing. Jules kept pace beside him up a paving-stone path cut through the lush campus surrounding the Israel Museum’s Shrine of the Book exhibit hall. A warm breeze sharpened the bouquet of the garden’s fragrant flowers and cypress trees.

“Let’s sit over here for a few minutes,” he suggested, pointing to the stone wall angling around a colossal basalt monolith.

While Amit unfolded the printout, Jules gazed across the plaza at the shimmering reflection pools and fountains around the illuminated shallow white dome of the exhibit hall.

“Ready?” he asked her.

“Ready,” she said, turning to him.

He paused a moment to look into her eyes. “I know this isn’t the best date you’ve been on,” he said, “but I’m really glad you’re here with me.”

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You really know how to show a girl a good time. There’s no place I’d rather be.” Funny enough, she actually meant it—danger and all. “So let me hear it.”

Amit let out a long breath and began reading . . .

For forty days Moses convened in the light of God at Sinai. There, God bestowed unto Moses the Testimony so that the Israelites would walk the righteous path. When the people abided by the Testimony, good fortune followed them and He protected them. When His children were blinded by pride, great punishment was delivered unto them. Through great sacrifice and bloodshed, the lands promised to the tribes of Abraham were thus delivered unto them so that a new nation might rise in honor of God.

The covenant was fulfilled, as told in the books of our ancestors. King David built a city upon Abraham’s rock, and there his son Solomon erected a temple to honor Yahweh. In the Sanctuary, the Testimony was placed, for it was the heart of a new empire. There was peace and rejoicing throughout Zion.

The great empires to the south and to the east and to the north did look upon Israel with lust, for God’s blessing came with great fortune and prosperity.

Many kings did come after Solomon, though none as wise. The Israelites had forgotten their promise to Yahweh and Israel became weak. From over the mountains came armies that surrounded the walls of Jerusalem and threatened to lay siege. Thinking God had forgotten his children, the kings of Israel bowed down not before the Testimony, but before their enemies.

And so the righteous sons of Aaron who guarded the Testimony prepared for the day when Israel’s most sacred shrine would be plundered. The great prophet Isaiah counseled King Hezekiah, telling him, “The time will surely come when everything in your palace and all that your fathers have stored up until this day will be carried off to Babylon.” He then told the king that God had ordered a safe place to be built for the Testimony. For if it was lost, so too the Israelites would perish. So Hezekiah followed God’s will.

The kingdom of Babylon did rise up like a lion to devour Israel. They laid waste to the city and took away the many treasures from the temple. But when they entered the Innermost Sanctuary they found it empty.

As this is written, many more kings and empires have come and gone and a new temple is rising high above Abraham’s rock. But the Idumean king Herod the Great builds it not in humility to God, but to honor vanity and pride. So too the priests blaspheme God by straying from His laws. Therefore its grand Sanctuary will remain empty. For to restore the Testimony, Israel must once again turn to God, disavow false idols, and see that it is not Rome that oppresses them, but faithlessness.

As Moses spoke the Testimony to the Israelites who knelt before the false idol, I too bring a message of hope for all children of God, for a new covenant will be made. Those who seek the light will be enlightened. And as Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son to God, so too a new sacrifice in blood will be offered upon Mount Moriah.

For this, the unbelievers will make a great mockery of me. They will gather against me. They will pierce my flesh and hang me from a tree. Fear not, for the flesh will be sacrificed so that the eternal spark may live on. Only then will I be given back to God to prepare the way for His eternal Kingdom.

Hear now that Israel will then perish, its idolatrous temple laid to ruin, and those who do not fall to the sword will be scattered. Many will lay claim to Abraham’s altar before the glorious temple rises up again, many lifetimes from now. You will know when that day comes, for my broken body will be reclaimed from beneath the sacred rock as a sign that a new covenant will be made.

Look not for the Testimony here, for Onias and the Sons of Aaron have brought it to a more righteous place in the land where the Israelites had once been captives. Forty days after God shakes the land of Zion shall it be brought and set upon Abraham’s rock.

Then the spirit of the Son of Man will descend upon the Chosen One to restore the Testimony.

The disbelievers will heed not the signs put forth before them. Thus a great battle will follow between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness. But fear not, O Israel, for out of the ashes, the sheep will lie with the wolf and all peoples in all lands will look in wonder upon Zion and praise God.

Letting out a prolonged breath, Amit was speechless.

“If that’s what those scrolls said”—Jules had to get up and pace in a circle—“sounds to me like they were written by—”

“Jesus,” Amit said.

“Do you know what this means?” she rhetorically asked. “The implications? My God, this is the find of the century!”

“Was the find of the century, Jules,” he reminded her.

Her enthusiasm immediately shrank.

“Obviously someone doesn’t want this to be made public.” And more and more Rabbi Aaron Cohen fit the bill.

“But why? It’s tremendous.”

“If you don’t mind me saying, I’m not sure that you’re quite getting it right,” he said. “This is a prophecy, Jules. A prophecy triggered by the discovery of Jesus’s bones beneath the Temple Mount. And all this talk of the Testimony . . .” He shook his head.

She wasn’t hearing him. “So what do you think the rabbi wants out of this?”

A much clearer picture was forming in Amit’s mind now. And it was a terrifying proposition. When he looked over at the Shrine of the Book’s white dome, a final puzzle piece snapped into place in his mind. “Let me show you,” he said, getting to his feet and waving for her to follow.

47

******

Mediterranean Sea 38Ú N, 19Ú E

Charlotte’s consciousness was a patchy haze, her senses tuning in and out in wild disarray.

Smells came first—spicy, pleasant. Cumin? Cloves? Maybe an exotic Middle Eastern dish. Strange.

Sounds came next—muffled, distant. Then sharper. Voices—maybe two, maybe five. It all seemed to blend together so that only their pitch created any distinction between them. But certainly men. A blaring whine came and went through her head, loud enough to make her wince. Then the voices became clearer. They were speaking in a foreign tongue. Definitely no romance language. Yiddish, maybe?

No sight. This scared her at first, until she could feel her eyelashes sweeping against the blindfold wrapped over her eyes. There was no hope of removing it, because her wrists were pulled tight behind her back with some kind of strap. And when she tried to move her left ankle, she felt resistance there too. Her leg had been tied to something.

She felt like she could vomit.

Then the numbness in her arms and legs began to give way to sharp pins and needles. Twisting cramps came next—neck, shoulders, back, hands . . . It took all of her power not to scream out. As she squirmed to ease the pain, the reclined leather seat she’d been propped in groaned.

She froze.

The voices went on.

There was definitely a sense of motion—smooth coasting. The way the sounds resonated around her, it certainly was too big to be a car. A bus was a possibility. Then a brief interval of turbulence dispelled any guesswork. The seat belt indicator chimed briefly overhead. More bumps, rougher this time.

The voices were laughing now. One of the men was taking a ribbing, probably because he was overreacting to the bumpy flight.

Then the pain ripped up her spine and circled up the back of her head, making her moan loud enough for them to hear.

The voices stopped. There came a brief exchange that she knew was something along the lines of:

“You do it.”

“I already checked on her. It’s your turn.”

One of them let out a tired groan and she could hear his heavy feet thumping along the cabin floor.

She tried her best to pretend she was still out. But she could feel him close, leaning over her, his warm breath reeking of scotch. The smell of metal came up into her nostrils too. She felt a large hand cup her breast and squeeze.

“Get off me!” she screamed, recoiling from his touch—more pain exploded along her shoulders.

The laughing intensified.

“Sounds like she needs more drugs,” another voice called over.

Then the blindfold was stripped away.

Charlotte’s eyes squinted against the cabin’s bright lights. When everything came into focus, she saw the tall man from Phoenix, his complexion clammy (except for the blotchy, blistered burns below his chin where Evan’s coffee had left its mark), his tearing eyes glazed red. And his left arm was wrapped in a blood-soaked towel, the hand immobile and blue. It was a grotesque sight.

“See what your friend did to me?” he slurred.

Donovan! What had they done to him? Then Charlotte’s stomach revolted and she retched violently.

“Bitch!” the man cursed furiously, just before jabbing a syringe into her thigh.

“Good night,” was the last thing she heard.

48

******

Jerusalem

Once past security, the rabbi stormed in hobbled strides across the Western Wall Plaza toward the blazing white work lights that lit up the entry to the Western Wall Tunnel. He tried his best to be cordial to the teenage IDF soldiers guarding the entrance, but because of their incompetence he now had another mess to clean up.

Past the pallets of stone and portable cement mixers, he trounced down the stairs and cut through the massive subterranean visitors’ hall without giving it a cursory glance. His eyes were locked on the security door up ahead.

At the door, he grumbled as he swept his key card through the reader to free the lock. What good was such a useless protocol now?

Through the narrow channel running along the Temple Mount’s foundation he came to the group of men huddled outside Warren’s Gate.

“What happened?” Cohen yelled before he’d even reached them.

The men separated and fell back, revealing the subject they’d surrounded—a young man, hands tied behind his back, on his knees. One of the men maintained his hold on a handgun pressed firmly behind the man’s ear.

“How did he get through?”

“He had a key,” one of the men replied. “An ID badge too.” He handed both to the rabbi.

“Eleazar Golan,” he read from the authentic ID. Cohen squared off in front of the intruder, arms folded across his chest, glaring down at the top of his head. “Look at me,” he said.

No response.

The man holding the gun grabbed a fistful of Ali’s hair and jerked his head back so that the green eyes had no choice but to see the rabbi. Deep red blotches on the Palestinian’s cheekbones were already darkening to blue, and his nose was bloodied and bent sharply to the right. His left eyebrow was split in half by a ragged gash oozing blood as thick as oil.

“You look Israeli, I’ll give you that,” Cohen said. “Very deceptive indeed.”

“He went inside,” the gunman informed him, pointing to the breach in the Temple Mount foundation. “Saw everything. It wasn’t until I spotted him making a phone call that we figured it out.”

Rage flushed over Cohen. “Give me his phone.”

The man passed it to him.

Immediately the rabbi huffed. He could tell by its cheap design that it was of the prepaid variety, most likely bought on a street corner for cash. His slim fingers adroitly navigated its simple menu to find any stored numbers. As expected, it was empty. Then he hunted for the last outward call—no doubt a second drone—and hit a green button to patch the number through. Someone picked up within two rings, but no reply came. On the other end, a muezzin’s chant swirled in the background. Cohen summoned his best Arabic and offered “As-salaam alaikum.”

The call immediately disconnected.

Cohen smashed the phone against the wall. Then he bent at the waist and pressed his face close to the Muslim’s. “Whatever your real name is,” he hissed with teeth bared, “it will die with you today. No honor will come to your family because of what you’ve done here, I assure you. And for you, there will be no garden paradise on the other side, no rivers of honey, no virgins to pleasure you.”

The Palestinian’s green eyes boiled with hatred—a pulverizing stare. “Allahu Akbar,” he proclaimed. Then he spat on Cohen’s shoes.

“God is indeed great. However, though your words may honor him, your deeds mock Him. Blasphemy!”

And in Leviticus, the prescription for blasphemy was clearly written.

Cohen straightened, went over to a nearby wheelbarrow heaped with debris, and palmed a jagged rock. He stepped aside, told the gunman to remain where he was, and signaled to the others to come forth. Eleven more men came in turn, each taking up a formidable stone.

Crouching before Ali, Cohen held the rock tauntingly, turning it over in his palm. The Arab trembled, and it pleased him. “ ‘And he that blasphemes the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death; and all the

congregation shall certainly stone him.’ ”

The eleven men fanned out around the Palestinian.

The gunman backed away, still aiming the gun at Ali.

The Muslim bowed his head and began to loudly pray in Arabic. Tilting his chin up, Cohen held out the stone in his right hand, paused

. . . then brought his left hand down upon it as a sign to commence the

execution.

The first stone flew through the air and struck bluntly, tearing open the

scalp. Ali teetered severely but remained on his knees, his chant pressing

on in an unrecognizable garble.

Four more stones pummeled the Palestinian, peeling the flesh and

hair clean back from the skull, dropping him to the ground. The prayer

abruptly ceased; the green eyes rolled back into their sockets, so that only

twitching white orbs were visible. Froth bubbled from his lips. Another six stones pulverized his face—the nose flattened, the cheekbones mashed, the jaw snapped inward. Teeth clattered out across the

ground.

Cohen handed the twelfth stone to the gunman, who now stood with

the pistol lowered.

The final bludgeoning strike brought forth brain matter in globules. “Throw the body into the cistern,” Cohen instructed the men. “Then

prepare with haste,” he said, pointing to the breach. “For the time is

upon us.”

49

******

Jerusalem

Since the Shrine of the Book housed the majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls recovered from Qumran, it was Amit’s home away from home. Thus the IA A had granted him his own key, thanks in part to the clout of his late friend, Jozsef Dayan.

Unlocking the glass entry door, he urged Jules into the dim space beyond—a corridor designed to invoke the feeling of spelunking through a cave. Coming in behind her, he led the way to the main gallery, which had been constructed in 1965. American architects Frederick Kiesler and Armand Bartos had designed the Shrine of the Book’s domelike roof to resemble the lid of one of the clay jars in which the ancient scrolls had been stored. Inside, the ceiling rose in concentric coils to a central oculus, lit by a gentle amber light.

Directly below the dome, an elevated platform commanded the center of the circular exhibition hall. There, a meticulous reproduction of the great Isaiah Scroll was displayed in an illuminated glass case that wrapped around a huge podium resembling a scroll handle. Other display cases spread along the room’s circumference featured additional scroll reproductions.

Amit had studied many of the originals, which were stored in an airtight safe beneath the gallery.

“It’s just over here,” Amit said, moving quickly along the looping ambulatory.

He stopped in front of a curved glass display case where faux vellums were laid against a black backdrop, top-lit by dim lights.

“This scroll came from Qumran, Cave Eleven,” he told Jules. “It’s called the Temple Scroll. Nineteen parchments totaling just over eight meters in length. The longest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. See the characters there? That’s Assyrian square script.” He pointed to the scribe’s writings, inked just below horizontal guidelines cut superficially into the parchment with a stylus.

She nodded.

“This was written by an Essene.”

“A follower of Jesus,” Jules proudly replied in a show of solidarity.

He smiled. “The Temple Scroll speaks about a revelation made by God through Moses. God basically explains what the true temple should look like—explicit dimensions, precise layout, how it is to be decorated, you name it. And its design is much grander than what Solomon or Herod built.”

“So what should it have looked like?”

He pointed up to a placard hanging in shadow above the case.

“See there?”

She moved closer, squinting to make out the details.

“The gray area is the Temple Mount that exists today,” he said. “The outermost square would be the footprint of the new and improved Temple Mount—a fivefold expansion to about eighty hectares that would virtually swallow Jerusalem’s Old City and connect the Kidron Valley to the Mount of Olives.”

This was tough for Jules to envision, since at fourteen hectares of surface area, the Temple Mount was already a massive construct, even by modern standards. “That’s a mighty ambitious building project.”

“ ccording to the Temple Scroll, that’s what God specifically commanded. And of course you’ll notice where the temple sanctuary must reside.”

Focusing on the rectangular bull’s-eye inside the squares, she answered, “Directly over the foundation of the Dome of the Rock.”

“ nd does the design of the temple look familiar?”

It did. “Nested courtyards . . . twelve gates . . . ,” she muttered. She blanched. “Same as the model we saw at the Temple Society.”

“Parfait,” Amit said, praising her. “The courtyards mimic the original Israelite desert encampments where Moses and the twelve tribes would have set up camp around the tent that acted as the first mobile Tabernacle.”

Amit further explained that from the middle courtyard, there would be three gates in each of the four walls, each named for one of the twelve tribes of Israel. The expansive outer court extended eight hundred meters in each direction, enclosed by a perfectly square wall. From there, another twelve gates led out to bridges spanning a fifty-meter moat to the residential precincts surrounding the Temple City.

“The scholars who’ve studied the Temple Scroll, me included, have theorized that the Gospels are encoded with this stuff.”

“How so?”

“Three inner courtyards and three rooms in the temple—the Trinity. Twelve gates—twelve disciples gathered from twelve tribes. It’s built into the temple’s physical design,” he said, spreading his hands. “And Jesus himself references the temple’s design in Matthew nineteen, verse twentyeight. Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I assure you: in the Messianic Age when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed Me will also sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’ ”

She pursed her lips. “Amit, you know any theologian will say those passages are a metaphor for the afterlife and heaven.”

“Not so,” he said, correcting her. “Religious authorities in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all agree that the Messianic Age is a time of great peace and prosperity, which the Messiah will bring to the living earth prior to the Final Judgment—the End of Days, or whatever you choose to call it. This reference clearly describes a new kingdom in the here and now. And Jesus refers to himself as ‘the Son of Man,’ not only in this passage, but throughout the Gospels.”

Amit explained that the phrase “Son of Man” had actually been ascribed to many great prophets—human prophets—by God Himself. He used Ezekiel as an example.

“In the first sentences of Ezekiel two, when the prophet is standing in God’s presence, God says to him: ‘Son of Man, stand up on your feet and I will speak with you.’ Then Ezekiel states: ‘As He spoke to me the Spirit entered me and set me on my feet.’ ‘Son of Man’ is then used numerous times throughout the text. It’s a reference to an earthly prophet transformed by the essence of God. Same with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the others.”

“But still in human form?”

“Of course.”

The implications shook her to the core.

“The Temple Scroll also goes on to spell out how this new kingdom should be governed and protected with a praetorian guard. There’s another scroll in the Dead Sea collection that is dedicated to a New Jerusalem—it details how this Temple City would flourish during two millennia of peace under messianic rule. That’s a lot of time to grow, so they’d certainly have envisioned a mighty big palace. I’m sure you’ll also remember that in the Gospels, Jesus points to the buildings on the Temple Mount and tells his disciples, ‘Don’t you see all these things? I assure you: Not one stone will be left here on another that will not be thrown down!’ ”

“Jesus’s prediction about the Roman destruction of the temple in seventy c.e.?”

He shook his head.

She rolled her eyes. “So what does the learned Amit Mizrachi have to say about it?”

“It could just as easily mean that Jesus was announcing the Essenes’ plan for the Temple Mount’s refurbishment—knock it down and rebuild according to God’s original plan given to Moses.” He paused to study the diagram again. “Which leads one to ask: was Jesus one of the architects of the Third Temple?”

“All right, smart guy. So do you have any idea what he was planning to put in the empty room?” she added.

He shot her a confused glance.

“The Sanctuary? The Holy of Holies?” She was thinking back to the Temple Society’s last exhibit. “I doubt Jesus would have planned on leaving it empty, right?”

Amit’s face went ghost white. “That’s right.” He checked his watch. “There’s a phone in the back office. Let me make a quick call to Enoch, see what else he’s got for us.”

50

******

Charlotte’s numbed senses responded sluggishly as consciousness returned once more. Slowly her eyes opened, eyelids fluttering spasmodically against the intrusive overhead lighting.

Something was covering her mouth, straining her breathing. When she tried to touch her face, she found that her hands were still immobilized. Looking down, she saw a thick silver strap—duct tape? —digging so tightly against her wrists that her fingers felt nothing but pins and needles. Her forearms were pinned to the armrests of a metal chair. The tight pressure around her chest and shoulders was another thick wrapping of silver tape that kept her snug against the chair back. Testing her feet confirmed that each of her ankles had been bound to a leg of the chair. Her cracked lips barely moved against the tape wrapped tight over her mouth.

What the hell . . . ?

Her eyes darted back and forth. Definitely not a plane. This time she was in a cramped, windowless room. She was facing a metal door and it was shut tight.

No sign of Donovan.

The room’s storage shelves, stacked with cleaning utensils, brought to mind Salvatore Conte’s makeshift surveillance room in the basement of the Vatican Museums. Could these bastards have hurt Donovan . . . or done something worse? God, the idea of it was torturous. They’d already killed Evan.

What wack-job is behind all this? she wondered.

Wriggling her fingers, she tried to get some blood back to her milkwhite hands.

Panic began to set in, making it even harder to breathe. Nothing good could come from being terrified. She had to keep her wits. Calm down, she repeated in a loop. Breathe... use that yoga.

She meditated deeply to ease the cramping that was quickly setting into her tight muscles. This would be the point in the movie, she mused, where the crafty heroine would produce a hidden blade, a nail clipper, or a roughedged fingernail to cut the bindings. Nothing doing here. Wrong script, wrong heroine. Even her nails were nonexistent—snipped as short as short could be. Prissy nails had no place in the clinical confines of a laboratory. Now she wished she had the whole package—half-inch talons with perfect cuticles and a French manicure.

Helpless. Utterly helpless.

Just to spice things up a bit, the place was like a sauna too. Charlotte was drenched in sweat. Not that that was having any effect on the integrity of the damn duct tape. What a great product testimonial this would make, she thought. She could picture the thirty-second spot featuring her taped to this stupid chair. Rolls of the stuff would be flying off stores’ shelves.

Now she turned her attention to the room, her eyes poring over its contents. That’s when she realized something peculiar. On a shelf just over her right shoulder, there were dried food containers, stacked canned goods, and juice bottles. The awkward sight angle made the labels tough to read, but the ones she could make out had both English and Hebrew writing. And there was a common symbol on the packages that she could swear certified the goods as being Kosher. First the Yiddish, now this?

That’s when a tiny red light blinking high up near the ceiling caught her eye. Craning her neck to the limit, she was able to glimpse the circular lens glaring down at her.

Not for the first time, someone was watching.

The nausea was threatening an encore. She needed food. Water.

Then came sounds from outside the door. Cocking her head sideways, Charlotte watched the lit crack beneath the door as a heavy shadow swept into view.

She heard the tinging sounds of a key ring.

Then there was the scratchy metal-on-metal sound of a key being pushed into the lock.

The doorknob slowly turned until the bolt disengaged with a clunk.

Last, the door swung open in three clumsy stages, revealing the person on the other side.

Charlotte was completely taken aback. It was a young Jewish man, plain looking, wearing a crisp white shirt, black trousers, black shoes. And he was confined to a wheelchair.

51

******

Tempted to lash out at her invalid captor—not that she could have if she wanted to, thanks to the tenacity of her bindings—Charlotte merely watched in puzzlement as the frail young man rolled into the room. Clearly someone in such a condition couldn’t possess the physical stamina to perpetrate an abduction. So how could he be involved in all of this?

The man’s sallow complexion looked ghostly beneath the fluorescent bulbs. At first he appeared to be much older than she was. Much older. But upon closer examination, Charlotte thought that he actually appeared more boy than man.

“Are you all right?” he asked in a hushed tone. “Nod if you are.”

All right? Is he kidding? Eyes tightening with frustration, Charlotte shook her head.

“I’m not supposed to talk to you,” he confessed in a whisper. His paranoid gaze went back to the door. “I’ll take the tape off your mouth if you promise not to scream.” Another glance at the door. “They will hear you,” he confided.

Unsure what to make of the situation, Charlotte nodded.

“Okay.”

Working the hand rims, the boy maneuvered the wheelchair closer. Reaching out, he worked his spidery fingertips under the edges of the tape strip covering Charlotte’s mouth.

Charlotte noticed the kid’s front teeth gnawed incessantly at a callus on his lower lip. There were raw calluses on the fingers too—some almost bleeding. Obviously some type of compulsion disorder. The kid was a wreck.

“This might hurt,” he said apologetically. Digging his fingertips in deeper, he squeezed the tape and tugged it free.

Charlotte immediately drew some fresh air into her lungs and exhaled. Though her breath was one notch below toxic, she wasn’t making any apologies. Her throat felt like a sandbox. With an unblinking stare steeped in resentment, she remained silent, waiting to see what the boy would say.

Slouching in the wheelchair, the boy dropped his eyes to his lap, where he wiped Charlotte’s sweat onto his pants. He began neatly folding the tape. “You’re very pretty,” he muttered, glancing up.

Unlike most people, who were usually fascinated by Charlotte’s emerald eyes, this guy was fixating on her long, shiny chestnut curls. Give the kid a chance, she told herself, fighting like hell to curb her tongue. “Why am I here?”

The boy’s timid eyes retreated to the tape folding. “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

“The man who was with me . . . Is he okay?” Adrenaline rushed into her. He’d better be okay.

Without looking up, he mulled the question for a five-count before responding. “I don’t know,” he replied.

“Is there someone else here with me?” she clarified. “A man . . . a bald man?”

Looking confused, he shook his head.

Charlotte fought against despair. It was too early to assume the worst. Time to get down to business. “You—those men. Are you terrorists?” she asked matter-of-factly.

The boy flashed her a surprised glance, then giggled.

“It’s not funny,” Charlotte chastised him. “Taking people hostage is not funny.”

Curling into himself, he raised a trembling finger to massage a twitch that flicked his eyelid. “Sorry,” he said.

“Who did this? Who are you? Who are those men?”

Unwilling to respond, he shook his head.

“I have a right to know.”

More shaking.

“God, this is ridiculous,” Charlotte grumbled.

The kid’s head snapped up, eyes wide. “You can’t say that,” he said in a hushed tone, eyelid pulsating. “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

You’ve got to be kidding me. “I don’t recall the Lord endorsing kidnapping,” Charlotte curtly retorted. “Why am I here?” she repeated succinctly.

He cowered and dropped his eyes back down to his hands. The tape was now wrapped into a tight square, his chewed fingernails picking at its frayed ends. Two reluctant words emanated from the boy’s lips: “The bones.”

A jolt shot through Charlotte. This was definitely the time to play stupid. “What bones?”

His expression hardened as he confidently looked up. “The Messiah’s bones. You touched them. You know where they are. They need to be returned. You shouldn’t have touched the bones,” he coldly added.

No answer.

The kid’s head was shaking again. That damn head just kept shaking. Her frustration was building fast. “Listen, I don’t know who you are, but you need to help me. This is all one big mistake. I don’t know where the bones are.”

“Joshua!” a voice blasted from the doorway.

Startled, both Charlotte and the boy jumped at the same time.

An older woman of medium height and build with a stern face, wearing a wig and a black ankle-length dress, stormed into the room like a raging bull.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the woman roared, grabbing the boy’s wrist and squeezing so hard that her fingertips turned white.

“Owww . . . you’re hurting me, Mother,” the boy whined.

“If your father ever heard what you just said . . . ,” she gravely warned him.

Mother? Father? Charlotte couldn’t believe what was happening. So this was some kind of family affair? Really creepy.

The woman’s bitter stare swung to Charlotte. “It’s best for you not to say anything more.”

Sensing that the mother wasn’t on board with whatever was happening—judging from her wavering tone, rapid breathing, and guilty eyes— Charlotte nodded and kept her mouth shut.

Relinquishing her crushing grip, the mother clasped the wheelchair’s handles while the boy rubbed at the red marks she’d left behind. Pulling her son out of the room, she parked the wheelchair in the corridor. Then she came back in clenching and unclenching her hands, pacing around Charlotte’s chair.

“I’ll free your hands and feet,” she offered. “Only if you realize that should you try to escape, they will kill you.” Her eyes motioned to the corridor.

“I understand,” Charlotte softly replied, now realizing the woman was equally terrified.

From a shelf situated behind Charlotte, the mother retrieved a pair of scissors and began cutting into the bindings. “Listen to what I say. This is very serious, what is happening to you—to everyone. I’ll bring you food, water. He is coming back shortly to speak with you.”

“Who?”

“My husband.”

52

******

Thank heavens the woman cut away the bindings, Charlotte thought. Not that any great debt was owed to a woman who took part in an abduction. Luckily she’d kept her promise to bring food and water, though the food was predominantly matzo and some mushy, bland cheese that would no doubt bring her bowels to a screeching halt. That wasn’t a bad thing, she thought, considering the “bathroom” was a metal bucket in a corner, well within the surveillance camera’s range.

The sound of a key turning in the knob broke the room’s dead silence. Charlotte sat up as the door eased open.

A morose Orthodox Jewish man came into the room, looking like he’d walked straight out of Manhattan’s Diamond District, where she and Evan had ventured after a pharmaceutical convention and dared to windowshop for an engagement ring only two months ago.

“Dr. Charlotte Hennesey,” the rabbi said accusatorily, claiming a second folding chair beside hers.

The way he sat immediately annoyed Charlotte: his shoulders were pulled back and his chin was tipped up as if he’d just reclaimed his throne.

Her lack of response brought a smirk to his face. “Let me make this very easy. Your coercion with the Vatican has caused me great difficulty. What they stole belongs to me and to this nation—”

“What nation?”

“Israel, of course.”

“Israel?” This rendered her mute for a three-count. “I don’t know what—”

But he held up a hand to silence her, shaking his head. “We recovered your laptop. I’ve seen everything. So let’s not waste time playing games. You’ve witnessed many things, Dr. Hennesey. Many marvelous things. Your PowerPoint presentation was most impressive. But how little you know, child. Those were no ordinary bones you so unceremoniously unpacked from that ossuary. Then again, you know that better than anyone, don’t you? I must admit that even I was surprised to learn about the physical secrets Yeshua possessed. You, a geneticist, must have been astounded.”

To this she didn’t respond. The answer would be obvious.

Charlotte pulled her arms tight across her chest. Could this lunatic be after the DNA codes, the formula for the viral serum? No doubt, its commercial potential was incalculable. And in the hands of an unscrupulous opportunist . . .

If she could just figure out what was charging this guy’s batteries.

Then the Hasid’s expression registered something very odd: admiration? His guarded posture—arms drawn protectively over the chest, shoulders rounded, hands overlapping in a tight clasp—showed vulnerability.

“You’ve acquired the gift. That’s a critical omission on your part.”

“Gift?”

“Come now, Dr. Hennesey. I am smarter than that. So I ask you this: how is it a woman who was in contact with the bones of the Messiah just so happens to have acquired His most precious gift?”

“I’m still not following.”

“ ‘Hennesey’ is an Irish name. Safe to assume you’re a Catholic, yes?”

“I was raised Catholic, although I haven’t been to church in quite some time.” Over a decade ago, cancer had stolen her mother away. It was tough to find solace in scripture after seeing someone die so mercilessly.

“But you believe in Jesus, don’t you? The stories . . . the miracles?” She stared at him for a good five seconds. “The sacred writings tell us that by simply laying his hands on the sick, he could make their ailments disappear. The sacred writings tell us that, like you, he sought truth. He too wanted to believe. That was how he was given the gift. The question is, how did it find its way to you?”

Could he possibly know about the serum, how it cured her? Even if he’d seen the genetic data, how would he have known what he was looking at? “Why don’t you tell me what the ‘gift’ is, then perhaps I can tell you if I’ve got it.”

Grinning, the rabbi combed his beard with his fingers. “You strike me as a very complicated woman. Intelligent. Brave. Strong. I would venture to guess that you’re wondering if science could ever explain miracles. Am I right?”

“You don’t need to be a scientist to be a cynic.”

He smiled tightly. “I’d like for you to explain something to me. See if your science may provide some insight.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Devora!” he called loudly. He waited for a response.

Seconds later, quick footsteps sounded in the corridor and the rabbi’s wife popped her head into the room.

“Yes,” she quietly replied, eyes cast to the floor.

“Bring Joshua to me.”

“I’m not so sure he’s ready—”

“Don’t question me!” he snapped.

“As you wish.” She immediately acquiesced.

“Most women are not like you, Charlotte.”

She felt her stomach turn.

It didn’t take long before Devora reappeared in the doorway. Charlotte was confused when she didn’t see her guiding the son’s wheelchair into the room. In fact, she hadn’t even heard the wheelchair’s squeaky rubber tires.

The mystery behind the son’s noiseless approach was quickly revealed when the terrified boy walked into the room.

53

******

The Temple Mount

The Dome of the Rock was empty as Ghalib—the Waqf ’s Keeper—silently crept barefoot along the ornate blood-red carpeting lining the octagonal inner ambulatory. Beneath the qubba, or dome, the Sakhrah—the rock— glowed in ocher light, looking like the stark terrain of a distant moon.

Throughout the shrine, ladders had been erected in and around the cupola, and at key positions along the outer ambulatory. Half a dozen men busily went up and down them, running wire, installing small brackets and hardware.