Sitting in his car, Will took a minute to call the Public Defender’s Office in New York. He figured he’d just leave a voice mail for his informant there, asking him to call back the following week. To Will’s surprise, one of the lawyers, who was working late, answered the phone. But when Will asked for the voice mail of his contact, he heard something that made his heart sink.
“Sorry, he’s no longer with the office here. Took a job overseas, I think. I’m not sure.”
“You have no idea where he went?”
“No. I’m afraid not.”
“He didn’t tell me anything about this,” Will said with a tinge of desperation in his voice.
“I think it happened kind of suddenly—all in the last week or so.”
“How do you suggest that I contact him? It’s very important.”
“Well, you can contact our personnel director on Monday. But I do know that, as a matter of policy, they don’t give out forwarding addresses of former employees.”
After hanging up Will thought that the only thing he could do would be to break his promise of anonymity and lead the fire investigators to the public defender’s office in New York. Surely, the personnel director would give the forwarding address information to law-enforcement officers.
The problem with that plan, however, was that if the investigators did track the lawyer down, Will had no assurance whether he would tell them the truth. What if he denied having met with Will at all that day? If that happened, Will Chambers would be notched up from a suspect to “prime suspect.”
Further, what if his job change had had something to do with the fact that he had divulged classified information to Will? What if the man had been “relocated,” as with the witness protection program? What if he could never be found?
It certainly seemed foolhardy to invite the fire investigators to try to track down his New York informant unless Will could contact him first. But now that looked impossible.
Driving over to the office, Will tried to forget about the arson issue. He tried to refocus on how he would allocate his time over the weekend to prepare for the Monday-morning court hearing before Judge Kaye.
He tallied off the parts of the file he would need in his argument against Sherman’s Summary-Judgment motion. He also wanted to pick up the Bible on his desk and take it to the apartment with him. Will had read the four Gospels through in their entirety, and he had just finished a first reading of the book of Acts.
MacCameron had suggested that Will be conversant with Acts because it was the immediate historical successor to the Gospel accounts. Will had learned that it recorded the events after the resurrection of Jesus, starting with his departure from Earth and then going on to the founding of the first-century church. Now he wanted to read the book through a second time during his evenings alone in his apartment.
As Will approached the front of his law office building, the thought flicked through his mind that he might telephone Fiona on Saturday when he took a break in his work. Then he recalled their last conversation. He considered that to have been a complete and final “Dear John” sendoff. No, he would not call her. Though he had powerful feelings for her, none of that could matter anymore. If he truly had respect for Fiona, then he must honor her resolve that there could be nothing between them.
Will noticed, as he parked his car across from his office, that there was a man leaning against the front of the old, red-brick building, just to the left of the front door. He was dark-complexioned, possibly Middle Eastern, and he was reading a newspaper.
Just down the street, perhaps thirty feet away, there was a white, windowless van. Another dark-complexioned man was there, at the van’s back. He was looking down at his keys, appearing to be busy.
As Will started across the street he felt uneasy about entering through the front door. There was something odd about these two men, though he could not put his finger on it. He decided to cross the street at a diagonal and head to the alley that ran along the side of the building. He could loop around the side of the building and enter through the back door.
While walking down the alley between his building and the next one, Will glanced in the side mirror of a car parked along the alley. Adrenaline shot through him as he saw the two men walking rapidly, shoulder to shoulder, after him.
Will ducked into the side doorway at his right. He grabbed the door handle and pulled hard, but it was locked. He turned and saw that the two men were now at a full run in his direction.
Will ran down the alley and turned the corner. One of the cleaning staff was coming out of the rear door of the next-door building, lugging a floor polisher. Will frantically squeezed past him and ran full speed down the hallway to the front entrance. He planned to cross the street to his convertible and take off. He knew that the van would be no match for his Corvette.
But the front door was locked. Will looked for a release but found none. He heard loud voices and yelling at the back as his two pursuers forced their way past the custodian, and into the building after him.
Will ran up the stairs to the second floor, two steps at a time. He could hear one of the men yelling in a foreign language as he came up the steps after him.
At the top, Will looked in both directions. He saw a fire escape to the right at the end of the hallway. He decided to go for it, and sprinted down to the door marked “Fire Exit” without looking back. The alarm started sounding as he smashed the lock, swung the door open, and started noisily scampering down the metal fire escape stairs that zigzagged toward the ground. He leaped down the last four steps.
Running hard and breathless now, he was heading for the street at the front of the building. The alley was clear. Only fifty feet or so to cross the street, leap into his car, and jam it into gear. Nothing to it. In thirty seconds he would be roaring down the street, with those guys, whoever they were, standing in the trail of his exhaust.
As Will reached the end of the alley he quickly glanced behind him, but saw no one following.
Then he got a very bad feeling.
His brain flashed a warning to stop short before he reached the corner, but his legs were unable to respond quickly enough.
A pair of arms reached out and clotheslined Will at the neck. Will fell to the ground with the man going down on top of him. Will smashed his fist into his face, crunching his nose. The man was shouting something in his language—and then there was a second pair of arms from the other side, wrestling him back down to the ground. Both men were yelling excitedly in an unrecognizable tongue, then the second man stuck something sharp into Will’s neck.
Will felt the needle prick. As the man depressed the syringe, Will saw a brilliant flash of light that consumed everything. And then, in the brilliance of that light, he fell into unconsciousness.
There was a vision. Two rows of men, carrying guns, facing each other as if in a military ceremony. Off in the distance, beyond the rows of what might have been soldiers, and through an arched gate, there was an incandescent, glowing light. The light was getting closer. Out of it came a man in a robe. His robe was white—whiter even than the brilliant light around him. The man in the white robe was walking down between the rows of men, toward Will.
He spoke.
“Will Chambers, why do you struggle against the truth?”
“Who are you?”
The man in the white robe reached his hand toward Will and answered.
“I am…”
When he spoke those words, the men with the guns were thrown down to the ground, as if they were toy soldiers.
“I am the One you are searching for.”
“Am I dreaming?” Will asked, barely able to speak.
“Is this a dream?” Will asked again, trembling in the presence of something so overpowering that—if it were not for the ocean of calm in the robed man’s voice, a voice that sounded as if it could still the rushing of a thousand waters—Will feared his heart might stop in his chest.
Will regained consciousness, coming
to the awareness of a rushing, roaring noise all around him. He had no idea how long he had been out. His head felt as though it were splitting.
Then he became aware that, even though he was awake, he was in darkness. Will felt some rough material wrapped around his head, covering his eyes. His hands were tied behind his back, and he was lying on his side, on a hard surface. He seemed to be floating—up, and then down, then up again.
Just below the edges of the blindfold Will caught a glimpse of the riveted metal floorboards he was lying on. As he struggled to sit upright he heard a man near him yell, and then he felt a blow to the side of his head that knocked him down. As he hit the floor, his blindfold loosened and he saw a man in a seat in front of him, seated at the controls—of a helicopter.
Will lay quiet, still groggy and confused. He heard the men talking back and forth in a language he couldn’t recognize. While he lay there he tried to connect the bizarre events he was starting to remember.
He had been chased, and caught. But where was that? And he remembered having a dream.
Struggling to think, Will recalled that he had been pursued near his office. Two men. A van. He had been caught, and something had been stuck in his neck. He must have been given a drug.
Where was he being taken? He was sure he was being kidnapped. What did these men want with him? What was the reason behind it?
Then something hard and cold was put underneath his blindfold, between his eyes. He recognized a gun barrel, and heard the click as the hammer was pulled back. One of the men was laughing.
The gun barrel moved from between his eyes to the middle of his forehead. Then the laughing stopped.
Now there was no more thought about reasons, no more wondering about answers. There was only the reality of the gun at his head. Only Will’s belief that he was now just seconds from death.
Will was praying silently, feeling the gun barrel pressed against his forehead, hearing only the roar of the helicopter’s engine above him.
“God, please help me. I think this is the end.”
50
IN HIS OFFICE AT THE STATE BUILDING, Department Undersecretary Kenneth Sharptin received a call. When he picked up the phone he heard the familiar digital voice requesting that he dial a specific number. He did so immediately.
In his research center in Maryland, Dr. Albert Reichstad received the same call, heard the same familiar computer voice, dialed the same number out, and became part of a three-way teleconference.
The third party led the conference.
“Dr. Reichstad, enlighten us about the status of your case. You are going to court on Monday morning are you not?”
“Yes. Sherman’s firm is arguing our motion for a Summary Judgment.”
“And you will prevail?”
“Sherman tells me our chances are excellent.”
“I don’t care about ‘excellent’ chances. Chance and probability, to me, are meaningless. Before the event, they are empty guesses. After the event, it is too late for such things to do any good. I prefer certainty. I’m sure you know that by now.”
“Sherman is a typical lawyer that way, I’m afraid,” Reichstad explained. “He says he can’t guarantee the results. But he feels very certain that we will win both of the issues we are going after. And if we win both issues, we will not need to turn over the 7QA fragment at all.”
“And if you don’t win both issues on Monday?”
“Then we have to turn over 7QA for their inspection that same afternoon.”
“That is exactly what I was trying to avoid,” the third party said.
“It’s not the end of the world if another set of experts has to inspect 7QA. Though I’ve fought off the rest of the academic world up to now, I really thought it was going to happen eventually,” Reichstad continued. “But this way, if we have to, then we produce it to MacCameron’s two experts. I would much rather submit 7QA to those ‘experts’: Dr. Giovanni—this disgruntled former nun—and the other one, that materials engineer who has never dealt with antiquities before. Better those two, who have to comply with all our court-ordered restrictions, than the whole of the archaeological world.
“Then after the analysis, we can tell the whole world we have permitted 7QA to be examined by ‘outside experts.’ That will shut the mouths of the critics who have been complaining that I’ve kept it all to myself. And even if MacCameron’s people disagree with my conclusions about the fragment, we can still bury them in terms of public opinion. I mean, just look at their lack of credentials, and their lack of world-class credibility compared to me and my group.”
“It sounds like win–win to me,” Sharptin commented.
“Mr. Sharptin, I’m glad you see eye-to-eye with Dr. Reichstad on that,” the third party said, “but I am still not satisfied that it gives us the kind of control I want over the big picture. I really don’t want to see your case go to trial. I know you were going to have Sherman talk settlement with attorney Chambers.”
“He tried,” Reichstad said, “but he wasn’t successful.”
“Not surprisingly,” the third party replied. “Which is exactly why I thought that Chambers was going to be a problem in the first place. Which is why I’m going to have to take matters into my own hands regarding the quixotic Mr. Chambers.”
“Can I just point out that I am very uncomfortable with this conversation right now?” Sharptin interjected.
“Would you like to be more uncomfortable?” the third party shot back. “How would you like your name to be taken off the top of the shortlist for the vice-presidential slot?”
“Yes, I understand. But I need some assurance of my chances,” Sharptin replied.
“Then let me reassure you again,” the third party said. “If you can simply adapt to playing the ultimate game of hardball—if we all play our parts, you, Kenneth, will be the vice-presidential selection on the ticket.”
Then the third party focused back on Dr. Reichstad.
“Do you still think you can use this lawsuit to get the remaining information we need?”
“Yes,” Reichstad responded eagerly. “As you know, we have already had our experts analyze the recorded message that Richard Hunter left for MacCameron. Chambers just produced it to us a few days ago. That was one of the benefits of our lawsuit, you see. I left you an encrypted e-mail on that, with the exact wording of the message, together with my attempts to decode his reference to the ‘resurrection order.’”
“I have reviewed that, and we are already taking steps to follow that up. We are taking a direct operations approach.”
“May I also join Kenneth in saying,” Reichstad added, “ that ‘direct operations’ in this have never been my idea—nor my preference. I have never been a man of violence.”
“I really get a kick out of you, Reichstad,” the third party said. “Do I need to tell you your own business? Do I need to repeat the great history lesson of Middle Eastern archaeology? Now, you remember the key to understanding the Egyptian hieroglyphics? All of those magnificent records—right there in front of the world—but the human race couldn’t read them. We didn’t have the code. Somehow the human race needed to build a bridge of knowledge between the ancient Egyptians and the modern world. Then comes Napoleon Bonaparte.”
“Yes,” Reichstad interrupted, “I’m very familiar with the story…”
“But you haven’t learned the point of the story,” the third party said. “Napoleon wages a silly, useless military campaign, starting in France and extending all the way into Egypt. It costs the lives of thousands of his troops. Napoleon gains little strategic or military benefit from all that blood—all that violence. But what did he discover while in Egypt? The Rosetta Stone. The archaeological find that would open up for us the meaning of all the other ancient hieroglyphics. How many treasures beneath the sand have owed their discovery to blood shed upon the sand? That even has a bit of a biblical flair to it, don’t you think? The shedding of blood that, in turn, leads to truth.”
“When do we get past this 7QA issue—and on to the second phase?” Sharptin asked.
“Hopefully,” the third party explained, “after we get a victory in court on Dr. Reichstad’s case, we can lift the media blackout. We can hit the press—starting with the Washington Herald, of course. Spread the word around the world that the 7QA discovery has been upheld by a federal court in Washington, D.C. Then we move into the second phase.”
“And what if Reichstad is not successful in court?” Sharptin asked.
“I have contingency plans for everything,” the third party added. “I want the second phase to be implemented, regardless.”
“How soon after the election?” Sharptin asked.
“We’ll talk, you and I, about that,” the third party answered. “You know, I have a few more ideas to build some more bridges between East and West. After the election, there is the traditional Christmas tree–lighting ceremony. I thought there ought to be some kind of joint celebration for the Christians and the Muslims—maybe something about the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, you know, just like everybody coming to the Bethlehem stable to see Jesus. It could all happen at the same time, right there on the front lawn of the White House. What do you think?”
“Sounds inspirational,” Sharptin replied.
“Of course,” the third party responded. “I’m an inspired person.”
51
THE OCEAN WAS CALM AS THE HUGE Portuguese freighter cut its engines and dropped anchor off the coast of Newfoundland. From the air, it looked like any other shipping vessel. Just below the water line, however, it was carrying a small five-person, submarine attached to its hull, in the event that a quick escape was needed for its passengers.
The lookout in the tower was peering through his binoculars when he spotted the approaching helicopter, off in the distance. A radio announcement crackled throughout the vessel. Soon the helicopter was hovering near the lookout. He waved to the pilot and his passenger.
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