by Jeff Long
They entered the cell. The clone remained sitting. “Shlaa-ma umook,” said Nathan Lee. Peace be with you.
The clone was not friendly. “Ishmael and Nathaniel. Why do they send you?” he demanded. They: their captors and keepers.
“They sent us.” Nathan Lee kept it blunt.
“Who are you?” the clone demanded. That was supposed to be their question. “You’re not who you seem to be.”
Too true, thought Nathan Lee. They were a roomful of fakes.
“Tell us your name,” said Izzy.
“You’re one of them,” the clone realized.
“Name,” repeated Izzy.
“Eesho,” the clone said. “Yeshua, they call me. Jesus, you say. The meshiah.”
“Christ?” said Izzy.
“That, too.”
“There are many people named Jesus,” said Nathan Lee. “Are you the one they call Jesus Barabbas?”
It was a trick question. If this Eesho was simply repeating whatever was given to him, he would agree to being the wrong Jesus, the one who wasn’t crucified. The hoax could end right here.
Eesho was contemptuous. “Would you be honoring me if I were a lestai?”
“Honoring him!” Izzy barked in English. “Is that what he thinks?”
“What’s a lestai?” said Nathan Lee.
Izzy frowned. “Never heard the word.”
“Let’s start there then,” said Nathan Lee. “Pick him to pieces. Use his own words.”
Izzy fired off a burst of Aramaic. They spoke for a minute. “It’s something like an assassin,” Izzy said. “A political terrorist.” He listened as the clone went on talking. “That’s it. Sicarri, another term. Like Judas Iscariot. Judas the Sicarri. A Zealot.”
“Watch it,” breathed Nathan Lee. “Don’t give him more names. He’s creating himself out of our mistakes.”
“I didn’t,” said Izzy. “He came up with the name Judas himself.”
The clone saw Nathan Lee hesitate. A look of satisfaction came over his face.
“Oh, boy,” Nathan Lee muttered. Eesho, if that was his name, knew more of the story than he’d feared.
For the next two hours, they worked through the logical questions. Where were you born? Who were your family members? Name your neighbors. Who was the governor? Who were your teachers? Describe your travels. Did you ever visit Jerusalem? How many times? Why?
The clone answered dutifully, even mechanically. He had been born in Bethlehem, he claimed. In a cave. His father was a carpenter, descended from King David who was descended from Abraham. To prove it, he delivered a long list of names from memory, linking his father generation by generation to the great prophets. The names echoed off the stainless steel walls.
“Are you the son of David, then,” Nathan Lee asked, “or the son of God?”
“I am the Nazarene,” the clone declared simply. He was perfectly at ease. Any contradictions were his interrogator’s to unravel.
“But you said you were born in Bethlehem,” he said.
Eesho answered. “The Lord spoke through the prophet Hosea. He said,‘Out of Egypt I called my Son.’”
There, thought Nathan Lee. The Egypt reference again. “Clever,” he said to Izzy. “He’s been setting us up from the start.”
“How do you mean?” said Izzy.
“He prophesied his own coming. He called this place Egypt that first day in the yard. The Son was called from Egypt. Therefore, he’s the Son.”
“But who gave him the Bible references?”
“Keep digging,” said Nathan Lee. “We’ll catch him out.”
Eesho said he’d had four brothers named James, Joset, Simon, and Jude, and three sisters whom he didn’t bother naming. His teachers had included John the Baptist. He’d spent years wandering the banks of the Dead Sea. He once meditated in the desert. Yes, it was true, he had attacked the merchants and money changers in the Temple. “After that, I was a marked man,” said Eesho. “They executed me.”
“Who executed you?”
Eesho recited the Passion Narrative perfectly. It was identical to the Gospel accounts, filled with evil Jews, treachery, and cowardice. Judas, the Zealot, had betrayed him. He was arrested and brought before the Temple intelligentsia, where his captors spit on him and slapped him and called him a blasphemer, then turned him over to Pontius Pilate who condemned him. Just like in the Bible, Pilate had washed his hands of the verdict.
With extraordinary dispassion, Eesho went on to describe his whipping, the crown of thorns, the soldiers’ mockery, and his passage through the narrow streets and out the west gate to Golgotha. He was nailed to the wood. His cross was erected between two others. A thief hung on either side of him.
“And then I died,” he said without emotion.
Nathan Lee looked at Eesho’s wrist, and the tracery of veins was blue under the smooth olive skin. A nail had driven through that bone and meat. Yet he was oblivious. Or else a liar.
“You died,” repeated Nathan Lee. “What do you remember after that?”
“Everything that there is to remember.”
All in all, from cradle to cross, it was a sterling performance, straight out of the Gospels. “Someone scripted him,” said Nathan Lee. They were back to that again.
“But who? Why bother?”
“Someone with lots of time. It must have taken weeks, or months, to school this guy. He’s got the story down cold. And all the quotes are in Aramaic. Whoever it was had a good command of Aramaic. That rules out Ross and the other guards. Maybe it wasn’t an insider. A visitor, maybe? From the outside.”
“I don’t know,” said Izzy. “Someone might be able to override the security system once or twice. But not for weeks at a time.”
“Maybe he wasn’t prepped here.” Nathan Lee began flipping through 2YZ-87’s file again. “He was warehoused in South Sector for half a year before getting transferred here. It’s possible someone wired him with this Christ stuff while he was down there.”
Izzy shook his head. “You make him sound like an act of sabotage. A car bomb. You’re saying someone rehearsed him for his Jesus role, then planted him in our midst, and then waited all these months to trigger the mischief? That’s just so intricate. So premeditated.”
“The best forgeries usually are,” said Nathan Lee. But he was merely keeping up his end of the wild theory. Izzy was right. It was farfetched.
“Why set him off now?” asked Izzy.
“I don’t know.”
“Why have you waited to reveal yourself?” Izzy asked the clone. “Why tonight?”
Eesho’s face relaxed. Easy question. He raised a finger. “The Apocalypse has arrived.” He reminded Nathan Lee of that Frenchman in Kathmandu, calmly certain.
“People have been predicting apocalypses since the beginning of time,” Nathan Lee responded. “Tell him, every time the sun goes down at night, someone preaches doom. Which apocalypse does he mean?”
Eesho replied at length. “He said he sees the plague in our eyes,” Izzy translated. “He said, the Lord God has brought an extraordinary plague upon us, a great and lengthy plague, a deadly illness. All the diseases of Egypt, plus diseases that we’ve never heard about, so that all of us will be destroyed. This is because we haven’t obeyed the Word. Now our tribes will wither. They’ll lose all memory of themselves, and that’s the worst kind of death. It is the end of time.” He finished, “That apocalypse.”
“Okay, who told him about the plague?”
“Maybe he’s just blowing smoke,” said Izzy. “He does have an attitude.”
“No, he knows. Someone got to him. Might as well ask him who.”
Eesho answered, “The voice of God.” He pointed upward, and for an instant Nathan Lee was sure he was pointing at the speaker mounted flat in the ceiling.
“But you cried out that God has forsaken you. Why?”
“I cried out because I am upon my cross,” Eesho replied mildly, “and I am in my misery.”
Nathan Le
e gave him a hard look. “What is it you want?”
It was a stupid question, really. The man was a prisoner. He would want what any prisoner wants. Freedom.
Abruptly Eesho squeezed his eyes shut. He held out his opened palms and began rocking forward in quick bounds, mumbling prayers. Nathan Lee had seen it before, elsewhere, from the Wailing Wall to Rongbuk. It was the kind of rapid-fire chanting that ascetics around the world used to erase demons from a busy mind. Nathan Lee was, to him, nothing more than background noise.
IT WAS JUST AFTER DAWN when Nathan Lee emerged from the basements of Alpha Lab. He went to the rooftop, and sunlight was creasing the edges of the mesa. A crowd of several thousand was gathered on the street.
They stood quietly on the road, very civil, no jostling. Here and there people were chatting across the yellow Crime Scene tape with the Pro Force troops in black uniforms. A lady was handing Styrofoam cups of coffee across the tape. They were all on the same side out there. They were neighbors.
Miranda came up behind him. “It’s posted all over the Net. Everyone’s talking. It’s taking on a life of its own. How did it go in the dungeons?” She saw his face. “You look…defeated.”
“Tired, that’s all. He gets stronger by the word. More complicated.”
“You didn’t put a dent in him,” she summarized.
“He’s a piece of work,” said Nathan Lee. “He didn’t go off message once. If you buy the Book, you’d buy him.”
“Do you?”
“Of course not,” he said. “This guy doesn’t buy himself. He seems astounded by all our attention. I think Jesus Christ is a total alien to him. The real messiah was supposed to be a military leader rising up from among the people and striking down their conquerors, sort of like Conan the Barbarian. He acts amused that we’re even listening to this myth of a wandering healer who got nailed to a cross. He’s got the whole routine down, mastered all the parts. But he’s all Word, no gritty reality. His story’s too perfect. Somebody rehearsed him. I’m convinced of it.”
“Convince them,” Miranda said, gesturing at the crowd. “It’s Wednesday morning. They’re supposed to be going to work.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“We don’t need a white paper with footnotes. We’re at risk from an illusion,” Miranda said. “Unplug him.”
“I doubt very many of them believe a bit of it.”
“My lab is surrounded by a police line,” she fumed. The crowd offended her, Nathan Lee saw. Or threatened her. It wasn’t their numbers, which were manageable, nor their fervor, which was meek, nor the hour, which was breakfast. For most of them, work didn’t start until eight. But they were scientists. They simply didn’t belong out there.
“He’s wearing a mask, Miranda. I can’t take it off. He’s going to have to take it off himself.”
“You’re going too easy on him. They’ve become your comrades.”
Nathan Lee didn’t know what they were to him, not patients, not subjects. But not comrades. “I don’t think so. Especially not this one. Before this morning, I never spoke to him.”
“You’re too close to see it,” she said. “It’s like the Stockholm syndrome, only in reverse. Instead of the captive identifying with his captor, you’ve made yourself one of them.”
“That was the whole strategy. It’s how Izzy and I got inside.”
“It’s gone on too long.” She headed for the door. “I want this over with.”
“What are you doing, Miranda?”
“We’re making a mistake, dealing with him at his level,” she said. “Let him deal with us at ours.”
By the time he reached the elevators, she had already descended. He went to the cells, but Miranda had taken Eesho, with Izzy, to the cloning floor. Nathan Lee returned to the elevator and punched the button.
They were in the incubation chamber when he arrived. Eesho was in shock. His world—the steel cell and their yard of plain walls—was suddenly stripped away. In the blue light of this birth factory, he was faced with a genesis beyond his imagination.
Nathan Lee hadn’t visited the incubation chamber in months. The cloning had largely stopped. Only one of the chamber tanks was occupied. The fetus—a nearly complete man—hung suspended in fluid.
“Tell him,” Miranda was saying to Izzy. She had hold of Eesho’s arm, forcing him up against the Plexiglas. She was ferocious. This was personal. Nathan Lee had never seen her like this.
“Tell him what, Miranda?” Nathan Lee said quietly. “He’s already terrified.”
Eesho was staring into the tank. Humidity streaked his face. Upside down in his fetal sac, the unborn clone was waking to them. The lids of his eyes opened. He stared at Eesho.
“God didn’t make him,” Miranda said to Eesho. She stood a head taller than the clone. “And God didn’t make you. I did.”
But still Eesho would not renounce his words.
THAT SAME AFTERNOON, Nathan Lee got a call. “Pack your mule bag,” the voice instructed.
Time collapsed. Years had passed, but it could have been yesterday. Pack your mule bag. The call to arms.
“Ochs?” Nathan Lee ground the phone against his ear, as if to trap the words. Years of being crowded with rage. Nathan Lee had given up trying not to be changed by his hatred, half hoping the fire would burn itself cold. The plastic made a snapping noise. He loosened his grip on the phone. “Where are you?”
“Nowhere you can reach me,” Ochs said.
“South Sector,” Nathan Lee told him.
“Do you know how unpleasant it is to have you lurking out there?” Ochs asked.
Nathan Lee backed off. He took a breath. “We need to talk, David.”
Ochs wasn’t fooled. “You need to listen.”
“Where is she?” Nathan Lee snarled.
“All things in their season.”
What season? “The plague is everywhere,” he said.
“I’m taking over,” Ochs told him.
“Taking over what?”
“Your inquisition. Your enquiry, whatever it is you’re doing to the prisoner. You’re leaving, and I’m coming out of the bushes. I’m taking over your job. You’re not qualified.”
Nathan Lee was taken off guard. All these months he’d been waiting to find the man, and now the man had found him. The muddy waters began to clear. The professor of Biblical antiquities wanted the clone, of course. Ochs must have been chewing his liver all these months, watching while Nathan Lee brought the Year Zero tribe to life. The Jesus controversy would be irresistible to him. Then another thought occurred to Nathan Lee. “You’re the one,” he said.
Ochs faltered. “The one?”
“You stuffed his head with this craziness.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was your voice pouring scripture into his ear.”
“Why would I do that?” For a moment, Ochs sounded…humble.
Nathan Lee didn’t put another thought into it. He didn’t care. They were trading places, the inside for the outside. Ochs could have the clone. “Where is she?” Nathan Lee said.
“Everything’s arranged,” said Ochs. “You only need to go.”
“Where?”
“She never really knew you existed, you know. She was only four when you disappeared. Lydia got rid of any pictures of you.”
“Have you spoken with her?”
“Trust me.” And because he knew that was ludicrous, Ochs added, “You’ll be bringing Lydia in with you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“It was too soon. Conditions weren’t right. I had to hold you in reserve.” Ochs made no sense.
“So Grace is alive,” Nathan Lee’s voice flattened. It was like sediment coming to rest.
Ochs heard his dead calm. “Good,” he approved. “I think it’s finally time for your journey, Nathan Lee. It’s time to bring them in from the storm.”
29
Grace
OCTOBER 10
Nat
han Lee had heard of deck sweeps. They were legend, and the raiders who descended to the ground level—or deck—lived in their own camp on the furthest edge of South Sector. You never saw them in Los Alamos. It was said they were too brutal to mingle with ordinary people.
Floodlights lit the airfield. By the time Nathan Lee joined them, most of the three platoons were in their moon suits and variously armed. Some carried rifles or shotguns. Others had nets, chains, aluminum baseball bats, and collapsible poles. They eyed him coldly. Their hair was white from the decon chemicals.
Nathan Lee understood their hostility. He didn’t belong. They had their own code. He was nothing to them. He didn’t mind. He was going to bring his daughter home.
Suiting up was complicated. Riggers helped with the equipment. A wiry man with quick fingers worked on Nathan Lee. He rattled off the factoids. “This is your second skin for today, a Tevlek biohazard rig, fourth generation, brand new. Use once, throw away. We don’t recycle around here.”
Nathan Lee pulled a pair of steel-toed fireman boots over the outside of his plastic-wrapped feet. They came up to his knees. “It’s mean down there,” the rigger said. “Avoid the sharps. Broken glass. Pieces of metal. Bone tips, they’re the worst, auto-contagious, right? Think fast. Move slow. Place your feet. Anything that can put a hole in your rig, keep away from it.”
“How many times have you gone down?” asked Nathan Lee.
“Me? Are you kidding?”
Nathan Lee triple-gloved: latex under latex, under ribbed Kevlar. The rigger fitted him with a headset to wear inside his hood. The band was filled with soldiers talking to soldiers. He harnessed Nathan Lee with a respirator unit that sterilized every breath with ultraviolet light.
“This is your camel back.” He draped a bladder with shoulder straps along Nathan Lee’s spine. “It holds two gallons of water. You’re going to get hot and hungry inside the suit. It’s important to stay hydrated. Water discipline. Every fifteen minutes, take a sip from this.” He held the tube running from the camel back to Nathan Lee’s lips. “It’s a glucose and protein mix. Did they screen you for claustrophobia?”
They had not. There had been no time for any preparation. “I’ll be fine,” said Nathan Lee.