The Last Sicarius

by Van R. Mayhall Jr.

  Father Anton and the Swiss Guard had deployed throughout the church complex. Cloe, the monsignor, and Father Sergio climbed the steps to the church’s porch. J.E. had arrived earlier and was inside, according to Father Anton.

  Cloe noticed that the door to the church had been replaced. The Swiss had shot and chopped through the old door after the Kolektor had locked all the doors and taken them hostage. Cloe thought it eerie as she approached the door that it swung open at the monsignor’s touch as if nothing had happened. It bore no witness to the deadly fight that had taken place here only a few months earlier.

  As Cloe entered into the interior gloom, she stumbled, and Albert steadied her with his arm. One look in his eyes told her he fully understood. The church was beautiful in spite of the sacrilege that had taken place there at the Kolektor’s hands. Full-size icons of various saints adorned the walls overlooking the church. Irenaeus himself was there. Cloe remembered seeing his face with its rounded beard, so different from his death mask in the tomb. This was the place of the monumental discovery she and Albert had made the last time: two simple ancient Phoenician letters hidden in the death mask of Irenaeus. They were the link, she had thought then, between Irenaeus and Judas that would help them understand the Judas Gospel, but the link later proved to be something else altogether. There was a connection between them all right, but not in the way she had expected.

  J.E., standing near the altar rail, waved. “Hey, Mom, it’s like old home week, back in the Church of St. John where we first encountered the Kolektor and his thugs.”

  With the help of his crack, Cloe pushed these memories away and tapped into her scientist persona. She would not let the frightening past keep her from carefully examining what she had come to see. “Okay, let’s all spread out and see if there is anything on this level,” she said. “I really want to go into the tunnel, but I don’t want to miss anything that might be up here.”

  “What are we looking for?” asked J.E.

  “Our real focus is something your mother saw,” answered the monsignor, “maybe a door, when we were hustled through the tunnel under the Kolektor’s guard. But if you see anything out of place here, call out.” The group fanned out, with each of them studying a different section of the old church. As they proceeded toward the altar, Cloe burned with scientific curiosity about what had happened to them and how the Kolektor had made his escape with them as his hostages. It was all about the altar.

  “J.E., can you see the mechanism the Kolektor used to pull up the trap door?” asked Cloe after they had studied everything on the main floor of the church.

  J.E. turned and walked up the steps to the dais on which the altar rested. He circled the altar as Cloe and the others approached. When Cloe joined him, he was on his hands and knees, studying the floor behind the altar. She stooped down, and both of them continued running their hands over the floor area, looking for the trigger that would reveal the door and spiral staircase. The ancient floor was still cold as ice from the winter.

  The monsignor joined them, and after a bit he said, “What’s this?”

  Cloe looked carefully and saw what at first appeared to be a bit of an irregularity in the tile that formed the flooring directly behind the altar.

  “Try flicking it up,” she said. “Does it move?”

  The monsignor took his key ring from his pocket and used a small key to raise the very end of the irregularity, which, once extended, turned out to be a small bar hidden in a very cleverly crafted slot in the floor. The end came up and the monsignor seized it and gave the handle a tug.

  Cloe gasped and jumped aside as a trap door cleverly built into the floor fell away and a spiral staircase appeared. Had Cloe not jumped, she might have taken a nasty fall.

  “My, my,” said J.E., chuckling. “It’s a good thing the ancients never heard of IEDs. Otherwise, we would all be toast.”

  “Well, there it is,” said the monsignor. “Irenaeus himself may have used this in his day.”

  “Surely, the martyrs must have built this avenue to escape in the event of an attack by their persecutors,” added the young priest. “I’ve studied a lot of church history, but this is living history.”

  “But how can that be?” asked J.E. “I thought you said the original church that the martyrs would have used was destroyed.”

  “True enough, but not everything was ruined,” responded the monsignor. “Background I have read on the original church tells us that parts of the old walls and much of the stone flooring survived. We know from our last visit here that some of the underground features still exist.”

  “Let’s hope there is more church history somewhere below,” responded Cloe. She turned to J.E. to lead the way.

  J.E. pulled out small but powerful LED flashlights from his oversized pockets and handed them out to everyone. Cloe noticed that he was carrying a box about the size of a large toolbox. Good, she thought, they may have need of tools.

  “All right, let’s move carefully. Everything is very old and may not be entirely sound,” said J.E. “One at a time. I’ll go first. Mom, you come next with Father Sergio, and then the monsignor can protect our flank. With Father Anton and the Swiss outside, we don’t need to leave anyone in the church.”

  A dankness floated up to Cloe’s nostrils as she waited at the top of the stairwell for J.E. to give her the okay. She watched as J.E.’s light seemed to inch down the stairwell steps. She could hear his boots scraping on the stairs, but she could not see J.E. himself at all in the stygian blackness. About twenty feet down, Cloe saw his light suddenly stop and go out.

  “J.E.,” Cloe called, holding her breath, “what’s happened?”

  “Light’s out is all,” responded J.E. after a few seconds. Cloe could hear him banging the flashlight case against the tunnel wall. After a moment the light winked back on. “Come on down. All clear,” he said.

  Cloe flicked her light on and headed into the abyss, wondering what lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 14

  At the bottom of the stairs, Cloe shone her light and looked around carefully at the tunnel. When she had come through here as the Kolektor’s prisoner, she had been forced to run to stay ahead of their Swiss pursuers. There had been little time for observation in the rush to escape.

  The tunnel was narrower than she recalled. Barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, it headed almost immediately downward. Many of the spider webs that had been broken with their prior passage had been rebuilt by their engineer occupants.

  Cloe remembered the passageway as rather straight and short. Doubtless this was a product of her predicament and the haste with which they had come through here. She looked at the monsignor and saw he was studying one side of the tunnel. “Albert, what do you see?” Cloe asked, shivering and moving to him.

  “It’s just the shoring for the walls and the ceiling,” replied the monsignor. “It’s very old, not decaying, but hardening almost like stone. I’ve been in my share of old archeological digs, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. This tunnel has been here for an exceedingly long period of time. It may be the oldest thing remaining on this campus.”

  J.E. had moved ahead, and Cloe heard him whisper almost to himself, “Hello. What do we have here?”

  They converged on him, and Cloe could see he was standing in front of a section of the passage that turned left and then, a few feet later, right. It was so narrow only one person at a time could pass.

  “Albert, I don’t remember this part at all,” Cloe mused.

  “I’m not surprised. We came through here so quickly, and at that point, J.E. was unconscious from the blow to his head and was being carried. You and I were being half-dragged in the Kolektor’s haste to escape. I vaguely remember this section because I was thrown against the wall by one of the Kolektor’s thugs,” replied the monsignor. “Apparently, I was not moving briskly enough for his tastes.”

  “I don’t recall it, but I sure know what it is,” said J.E. “It’s a defensive positio
n, sort of a man-made defile. With this, only a few defenders could hold off a large number of attackers because the attackers would be forced to go single file through that section. Archers and spearman could easily pick them off. The short sword would finish any who got through.”

  “Oh,” said the young camerlengo. “That’s how three hundred Spartans under King Leonides held off the entire Persian army at Thermopylae a half a millennium before the birth of Christ.”

  “Bingo!” cried J.E., smiling. “Serge, you might actually end up being useful for something.”

  “Yes, I might surprise you before this thing is over … jarhead,” responded the young priest.

  J.E. doubled over with laughter. “Jarhead? That’s the worst insult I’ve ever heard,” he said between gasps for breath. “You got me mixed up. Ground-pounder, yes. Meathead, yes. ‘Jarhead’ is reserved for our leatherneck friends in the Marines.”

  “From what I’ve seen thus far, I think it’s an apt description,” responded the camerlengo with disdain.

  Now J.E. was howling and drawing chuckles from Cloe and the monsignor.

  “Serge,” he said after a while, wiping tears from his eyes, “I think I’m going to like you.”

  ***

  The uproar had died down, and Cloe was once again walking along the wall searching, for exactly what, she wasn’t sure. Certainly, they were looking for possible clues as to where the Sicarii’s cave full of ancient jars that Thib had seen was located. But Cloe was unsure how to distinguish such clues from anything else—that is, if the Sicarii had even left any. Still, she had seen something the last time through, which was why they had come here first. There was something here.

  As they passed through the defile, J.E. remarked, “Mom, this passageway is protected on both ends. No one could have accessed it from the church without knowing it was there and about the secret lever. On the other hand, you couldn’t get through it from the outside because of the defile, if it were guarded.”

  Cloe saw a light ahead indicating the end of the tunnel. She had discovered nothing.

  “J.E.’s right,” said the monsignor. “The tunnel was an escape route, but it was more. Why fortify the exit side of the secret tunnel? Why arrange it so guards could prevent anyone from entering from the outside?”

  “Maybe this was done to protect whoever was inside the church from enemies using the tunnel for access,” observed Father Sergio.

  “Unnecessary,” replied J.E., studying the walls. “The trap door only opens from inside the church by means of the hidden lever. This was designed to be able to defend the interior of the tunnel.”

  “You would only do that if there were something to protect inside the tunnel itself,” reasoned Cloe. “We’ve missed whatever it is.”

  Cloe turned and led them back toward the church. In the area where the defile began, she scrutinized the walls, and within a slightly concave area she noticed what might be the very faint outline of a doorframe.

  “Here’s something,” she said, now remembering thinking that she had seen a door, maybe two, the last time through. As she stepped back and studied the wall, the outline of the door became more apparent. The door itself was covered with mold and looked very much like the earth that surrounded it. It was quite old and appeared not to have been opened in an exceedingly long time. Smallish by modern standards, it probably had been built at a time when people, on average, were much shorter, Cloe surmised. It was maybe five and a half feet by three and a half feet.

  “What do we have here?” asked the monsignor, coming up to look.

  “Don’t know, yet,” responded Cloe, totally focused on the portal. She began scraping the mold and dirt from the frame.

  The camerlengo jumped in to help. Pretty soon the door and its frame were plainly visible. There were no markings on it at all. It was an extremely stout, hard wooden door, but its surface had been planed almost smooth. Cloe could see no doorknob or latch. A keyhole as large as a quarter was the only feature on the door.

  J.E. put his shoulder to the door, but it would not budge. He hit it several times, and the monsignor pitched in. There was no give in it at all. Indeed, the last time they hit it, there was a low rumble from above.

  “Careful … force does not seem to be the answer,” said Cloe. She knelt down and tried to peer through the keyhole but could see only darkness. When she used one of the little flashlights, she could see a little farther, but the keyhole channel narrowed somewhat an inch or so from the opening. She could not see beyond that point. “Interesting,” she said under her breath. In the stillness they all heard her.

  “What’s interesting, Mom?” asked J.E., rubbing his shoulder and staring at the door.

  “The interior of the lock is not made of metal but of what looks like some type of gemstone, maybe jade,” Cloe replied, amazed and wondering if this could be right.

  “Jade?” mused the monsignor as each man took a look at the interior of the lock.

  J.E. took his cell phone from his hip holster and carefully photographed the keyhole.

  “Not only is the interior formed of some gemstone substance such as jade, but there are also mechanical gears in there made of the same substance,” continued the monsignor.

  “What does all that mean?” asked the camerlengo.

  “It means the lock was built of a material that would long outlast metals, particularly those of the ancients. Whoever built this wanted this lock to be here a long time,” answered Cloe. “It also means that this mechanism was added later because the first- or second-century Christians would not have had this technology.”

  “I agree,” stated the monsignor, standing up after his examination of the lock’s interior. “I think we have to consider the possibility that the builders of the tunnel were the early Christians who founded the Church of St. John. That would have been Irenaeus and the early Christian martyrs. If so, this tunnel dates from a time within a couple hundred years of Christ’s death. This door and this lock are something else altogether and could have been added later. Somehow, circumstances changed, and maybe even the whole purpose of the tunnel changed.”

  “The metals of that early era were rather crude, but this lock is more like a piece of art at which the makers were very adept, at least a few hundred years later,” said Cloe, picking up the thread. “The key must mesh with these fine gears to open the door.”

  “True, and this also means there is likely only a single unique key that can connect properly with the gears and open the lock,” noted the monsignor. “Given the detail in the interior of the lock, I’m guessing that trying to open this door without the correct key may also cause unpleasant consequences.”

  J.E.’s head jerked up. “Monsignor, are you saying you think this door is booby-trapped?”

  CHAPTER 15

  “Almost certainly, young sir,” replied the monsignor. “I don’t see the builders going to the trouble of making the tunnel almost assault-proof and later creating a lock with a Jules Verne–like mechanism and then neglecting to penalize anyone who attempts to circumvent their handiwork.”

  Cloe smiled at the monsignor’s understatement, another talent of his she had come to appreciate.

  “We’re going to need the key,” J.E. said, slumping back against the wall.

  Cloe was bent over, studying the keyhole as if she might open it by force of mental effort. “I have seen that peculiar shape before,” she said at last.

  The monsignor stooped and examined the area very carefully. Standing again, he said, “You are right. There’s something familiar about it. We need to think of it less as a key and more as a special tool that is designed to open this specific door.”

  “It’s got to be in the church,” said Father Sergio. “Doesn’t it? Where else could it be?”

  “Right, Serge, if the ancients needed the key, they would want it to be close at hand,” said J.E. “It’s got to be nearby, but where?”

  “All right,” said Cloe. “Let’s check the walls of the tu
nnel very carefully to see if we have missed anything. I thought I saw a second door the first time through.”

  After another thirty minutes of searching, even Cloe had to agree there was nothing further to be found. If she had seen a second door, it most certainly had been in her imagination.

  They rallied back at the door, and Cloe said, “We need to go upstairs and search the church again carefully, this time with an eye toward finding something that will open this door. We need that key!”

  Cloe led the group back the way they had come, up the spiral staircase and into the church. “J.E., you and Father Sergio search the back of the church from about the midway point to the door. The monsignor and I will look forward and into the altar area. When we are all finished, if we have found nothing, we’ll meet at the niche where St. Irenaeus is buried.”

  Cloe looked around the old church. Even though it had been decommissioned as a house of worship, it was still filled with niches, alcoves, and icons, any one of which could conceal a hundred such keys. Without any more information, Cloe worried they wouldn’t find anything, even though it might be in plain sight.

  “Plain sight,” said Cloe out loud, “just like the clues in Irenaeus’s death mask.”

  “What?” asked the monsignor, having heard her but not seeming to understand.

  “Albert, you remember when we searched Irenaeus’s tomb for clues relating to the library of St. John?”

  “Yes, the day before our meeting with the Kolektor, we searched the niche and tomb area and found the ancient Phoenician letters yuhd and shin embedded in the death mask, roughly the equivalents of the English I and S. At that point, we thought they referred to ‘IS’ for Iscariot, proving that Irenaeus was connected with the Greek version of the Gospel of Judas. Of course, later events proved that to be incorrect.”

  “Right, but the clues were in plain sight. We did not need to find them; we just needed to understand them,” Cloe continued. “What if the key is hidden the same way?”