by Robert Ryan
“I’ll be up shortly,” Zeke said. She pecked him on the cheek and left. Zeke saw Mordecai staring absently, shaking his head. “What’s the matter?”
“I was just thinking about the fact that we’re on a mission to find Satan himself. I can’t help but wonder what kind of a being we might find, considering all the mythology developed to explain him through the centuries.”
“Catholic mythology, primarily,” Zeke said. “We practically invented Satan.”
Mordecai smiled. “Well, if you didn’t invent him, you certainly perfected him. Still, no one knows the precise nature or form of the Devil. We know what we saw last night on the television, but perhaps that is just one of many forms.”
He leaned forward and raised a forefinger.
“I was thinking of all the religious tradition, the theology—mythology—that has been passed along through the ages, like a torch. Now we are the keepers of that flame. The Hell Squad, carrying that torch into the darkness, searching for one of the two forces, good and evil, that spawned all religion. For thousands of years, all those religions have developed their own versions of good and evil. The three Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—are all represented right here at this table. We are certainly qualified to speak for them. But what had me shaking my head was that, through all these thousands of years of discussion, one voice has been conspicuously absent.”
They waited for him to supply the name. A long moment later, he did. “Who speaks for Satan?”
The voice from the doorway hit them like a blast of icy air.
“I do.”
CHAPTER 47
Michael Price emerged from the shadows and saw their startled looks.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare everyone. I tried calling you Zeke, to let you know I was on my way from the airport, but there wasn’t any answer. You said to just come on ahead whenever I was ready.”
Zeke had turned his cell phone off so they could talk in peace. He made a mental note to start making sure all the outer doors were locked every night and beckoned Price over. “This is Michael Price, the man I told you about. The expert in Satanic murders. And Satanism in general.” No one moved to shake his hand, so Price merely pulled up a chair and sat to the left of Zeke. “Explain to these gentlemen what you meant about speaking for Satan.”
Price told of his Ph.D. in Abnormal Psychology, his career interviewing “the devil made me do it” murderers on death row, and his exhaustive research into Satanism.
Hassan seemed troubled. “Did you come to believe in Satan yourself?”
“In some cases, yes. Sitting in the cell with them, closer than I am to you, I could look deep into their eyes. Windows to the soul, as they say. And I know I saw—if not the Devil, then certainly something not human. Pure, depraved evil was leering back at me. This was in the very worst cases. Cases where—whatever name you want to give it—evil had clearly, inarguably, defeated good.”
“Cases such as?” Mordecai asked, warily.
Price detailed a litany of atrocities committed under alleged Satanic influence that had them wincing and moaning in revulsion.
He told of a baby disemboweled by a babysitter who was a devoted follower of Satanic metal music; of a steelworker who murdered his two young sons by boiling them in a cauldron of molten ore on Christmas Day; of a teenager claiming to be a vampire and slaughtering his family as they slept.
The clinical way in which Price described the horrors disturbed his listeners almost as much as the stories themselves. As Zeke’s newly reborn faith struggled to shield him from thinking of these incidents as victories over God, he wondered if too much time spent in the presence of such evil might not cause a person to absorb it to some degree. Possibly even embrace it. “Do you think Satan can be defeated?” he said.
“I don’t know. The idea has never really been put to the test. According to the Bible, Jesus banished Satan when he tried to tempt Him in the desert. But then Jesus got crucified. If you believe the Devil was behind that—and many do—then he has already proven he can win. In my personal experience good is often defeated by evil. Not only that, but I think an overconfident reliance on the Bible’s account of things could be deadly when the time came. As powerful a Book as it is—no offense to anyone’s religion—it’s still ambiguous hearsay evidence.”
Zeke wanted to argue the point but couldn’t. When it came down to it he believed the same thing.
He looked at his watch. Almost ten. They had a pre-work meeting at five-thirty. “Let’s call it a night. We can talk about whatever we need to talk about in the morning.”
Zeke and Mordecai went into the lobby and waited while Price got what he needed from his rental car. Zeke watched him bringing in his bags and suddenly felt very weary. Mordecai was also watching, a bothered expression on his face. “What’s wrong?” Zeke asked him.
“This man worries me. When I raised the question of who speaks for Satan, it was rhetorical. I don’t know that we need a spokesman for the Devil. I know I haven’t given him enough time, but…considering that you said he once gunned down an innocent family—and that he must know how enormously difficult that made it for you to invite him—he seems a little lacking in humility.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be keeping him on a short leash. And, not to quibble, but I think ‘spokesman’ for the Devil is the wrong word. ‘Expert’ is more like it.”
“Expert. One of my classmates when I was at Texas A&M gave me a definition for ‘expert’ that I never forgot.”
“What’s that?”
“An expert is a man from out of town with a briefcase.”
They turned to see Price depositing a briefcase beside two other pieces of luggage.
“Then we’ve got us one,” Zeke said.
CHAPTER 48
Driven by the growing conviction that they were on the verge of a great discovery, and with the solstice deadline looming, Zeke and Mordecai hardly slept for the next week. When they weren’t at the dig itself, they were tending to the countless details of adding personnel and equipment.
Mordecai had leased two more boats from a broker in Tel Aviv he’d given a lot of business to over the years. One was a 72-foot liveaboard catamaran that had been used for scuba tours in the Mediterranean. Already set up to accommodate divers, the only major piece of equipment they’d needed to add was an airlift to suck away the silt of digging. The other boat was a 30-foot outboard for use as a shuttle to and from the base to the site.
Twenty more marine archaeologists had been hired. Most of them were assigned to what had originally been called The Wall. With all four sides now almost completely uncovered, it had been renamed The Building.
Extensive tests on the two male corpses had determined that they were between three and four thousand years old. This put them within the period of Sodom and Gomorrah, but still didn’t prove they were from there. The site where they were discovered had apparently been their home. A six-person team was restoring the structure to as close to its original condition as possible. No longer needed there, Jack Shelby and Mordecai were now co-supervising the much more complex excavation of The Building.
A security expert who’d set up safe rooms for top Israeli government officials had converted an empty room on the top floor into a secure location for housing the relics. Bars had been installed over the windows and the new steel-reinforced door could only be opened with a security code. Access to the floor from the stairways at either end was now sealed off by steel-reinforced sliding pocket doors that also required a security code. “You will either need the combination or a bulldozer to get through these,” the security expert had said. He’d also talked about reinforcing the walls, floor, and ceiling of the safe room, but Zeke had decided it was overkill. Anyone that determined would either need a helicopter or to come in with guns blazing, and that wasn’t going to happen. To further put Anthony Unger’s mind at ease, Zeke had given him the adjoining room for his lodging, where he could keep a close eye on th
e relics. He’d have the whole secured floor to himself.
Hassan had been helping Leah in the War Room, but with the addition of two administrative assistants she no longer needed him. He and Zeke had used most of the week to complete their dive training for the unique conditions of the Dead Sea, and were ready to be used underwater where needed.
Now it was just past midnight and Zeke was getting ready for the drive to Jerusalem to pick up Anthony Unger and the relics. He was behind the bar in the lounge, lost in contemplation of what this next step in his bizarre journey might bring as he fixed himself a cup of coffee for the road. Beyond the glow of a small service light behind the bar, the lounge was dark and silent.
“Good morning,” a voice said from the other side of the bar.
Startled, Zeke looked up to see the shadowy figure of Michael Price. “Jesus, man. We need to get you a bell or something. What are you doing up?”
“I don’t sleep well. I’m often up this time of night. I was going to get some coffee, maybe do some research at my desk. I’m trying to learn as much as I can about Sodom and Gomorrah and the Dead Sea.”
It took a few seconds before Zeke could respond to this sudden and unwanted need for conversation. “I’ve got a lot of information on that,” he said. “Remind me when I get back and I’ll give it to you.”
“Are you going somewhere?”
“I’m going to pick up the guy I told you about. The eschatologist I want you to work with.”
“The one who dresses like a monk.”
“It’s not just dress for him. He’s living the part. He might look a little strange, but I want everyone to make him feel welcome.”
“No problem.”
Zeke put the lid on his travel mug and came from behind the bar. “Time for me to hit the road. I’ll see you sometime later today.”
“Before you go…This might sound a little hokey, but since I’m here to give my opinion on Satanic matters, I’ve been thinking: if there is a Hell, why here? So I’ve already started doing some research on this location. It turns out we’re on one of the biggest fault lines in the world. It runs all the way from the Mideast down into Africa.”
“Right. The Great Rift, it’s called.”
“Going back to the earliest religions, there’s been a strong belief that such places are an opening between this world and the underworld. Places where the boundary between the living and the dead—between good and evil— is at its weakest.”
“I studied a lot of those ancient beliefs when I went back to college after the Army. They always struck me more as superstition and folklore. Man-made constructs in our endless need to know the unknowable. Things like whether we have a soul, and what happens to it after death.”
“No doubt. I’ve studied ancient belief systems, too, as part of my work in trying to understand evil and where it comes from. And you’re right about our endless need to know the unknowable; to prove what so far has been unprovable. But even allowing for that, since the dawn of civilization countless thousands of accounts have been recorded having to do with the otherworld. Myth, superstition, paranormal activity, call it what you will—I can’t dismiss it all as nonsense. I can’t accept that all that testimony has been pulled out of thin air and is based on nothing. Especially in more recent times. A lot of very intelligent, credible people have spent their lives studying these phenomena and compiled a lot of very compelling data. None of it proves anything beyond a doubt, I grant you. But to me it boils down to this: where there’s this much smoke, there must be some fire.”
That hit home. Zeke had been thinking the same thing ever since beginning his research into the Dead Sea and Sodom and Gomorrah. “What exactly are you telling me?” he said.
“Well, I guess, if we believe what this mission is all about, I’m saying be careful.”
Zeke could not yet look into Price’s eyes without instantly remembering how crazed they’d been that night in the jungle. A sarcastic reply leapt to mind, a reflexive urge to inflict pain on the man who had caused so much, but this was supposed to be a time for forgiveness.
“Thanks for the heads up,” Zeke said. “I will.”
Knowing that every word that passed between them had the potential for disaster, he walked away quickly.
CHAPTER 49
The Dead Sea
By ten that morning the team excavating The Building had uncovered a ten-foot swath of the floor enclosed by the four walls. In the control room above, Mordecai was taking a last look at the live feed on the monitor before heading down with his ten-man replacement team.
Jack Shelby came up beside him. “Have we figured out the overall dimensions yet?”
Mordecai clicked the mouse and a computer image of the site appeared on another monitor next to the one showing the live video footage. He pointed to highlighted numbers beside the lines representing the walls of the structure: 150 feet long, 80 feet wide, 40 feet high. “The stone walls are about 6 feet thick,” he added. “It was built to last.”
Shelby remembered a bit of trivia from a recent sightseeing visit he and his wife had made to D.C. “It would have been about the same size as the White House.”
“Three, four thousand years ago, a building that size would have been this city’s White House—its center of dominance. A palace perhaps. Or a temple.”
Everyone had been astounded that, although badly damaged in places, the walls were still standing. Apparently, the earth had collapsed around them in a way that maintained equal pressure on both sides of the walls, supporting them all these years. The excavators had been careful to dig at the same rate on both sides to maintain the equilibrium. Braces had been placed at key pressure points along the way to maintain stability. Once the walls had been fully exposed, they’d dug down to the floor of the structure. Strewn along the floor were several large chunks of stone that must have been part of the collapsed roof. A fresh team of divers had gotten them out of the way so the digging could continue. Aided by the extreme buoyancy of the water and gas-filled lift bags, they were able to maneuver the heavy pieces of stone into a pile outside the anomaly to be dealt with later. For now the priority was getting the structure exposed in its entirety, and that meant clearing the rest of the floor.
Mordecai turned from the monitor and smiled at Shelby. “Are you ready to move some mud?”
“Does a giraffe have a long neck?”
Only a thin layer of silt remained over the floor, and it was coming away easily. “Mowing” from one end of the structure to the other, the phalanx of excavators steadily fanned the dirt into two airlifts instead of one to speed up the process. In an hour they’d cleared a third of the floor.
“Hold it.” Mordecai’s voice crackled inside the divers’ masks. “Come look at this.” The team glided into place around him. He pointed to a pattern on the floor that was starting to be revealed.
“This might be the beginning of a floor painting. Which would fit into the timeline of Sodom and Gomorrah, since mosaics weren’t used until much later.” While the excited murmur died down, he checked his dive computer to see how much bottom time they had left. “We have at least two more hours. Let’s see if we can get the rest of this image cleared. Don’t rush, though. We need to be extra careful not to damage this.”
The divers fanned back out, following the curved line on the floor that seemed to encircle a scene within. When they finished clearing it an hour later, Mordecai struggled against runaway speculation. Again the preservative qualities of this unique underwater world had proved remarkable. Only a few small patches of the painting had been worn away by the millennia.
The floor of the building was about seventy feet from the water’s surface. Ascending that distance now meant they’d need a short decompression stop on the way up. Even though they had plenty of time, there was no need to cut it close. Mordecai was anxious to get a good look at the painting, but despite having two airlifts, the water was still too murky. Besides, the best view would be on the monitor in the contro
l room, after the video had passed through the visibility enhancement unit.
“Time to head up,” he said into his mike. As the group dispersed he touched the videographer on the arm. “Jim, I want you and I to stay down for a few minutes to get some more shots of the floor painting. Then we can watch the recording in the control room.”
“Copy.”
Forty-five minutes later, after getting out of their dive outfits and rinsing off, Mordecai and Shelby were studying the visually-enhanced recording of the floor painting on the large-screen monitor.
Inside a circle about fifty feet in diameter was a scene comprised of three distinct images. The largest was at the top. Two somewhat smaller ones completed a triangular arrangement underneath.
The predominant top image was of a man’s bearded face. On the left beneath it was the side view of a bull, standing upright on its two hind legs. Its erect sex organ was clearly visible. Opposite, the third corner of the triangle was a woman’s face in profile, looking toward the bull. From her mouth a forked tongue undulated several inches, seemingly in the direction of the bull’s maleness.
Below these images, an inscription curved along the bottom edge of the circle. Mordecai turned to Shelby for his expertise in Bronze Era epigraphy. “Any idea what it says?”
“It appears to predate anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. “There are some familiar elements, but also some things I don’t recognize. It will take a lot of study to be anything close to certain. I can recognize enough, though, to hazard a guess at the general meaning.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I believe it says something like: ‘All Men’s Pleasures Ascend Unto Bera, Our King.’”
By the end of the day the entire interior of the structure had been cleared. In addition to the floor painting, another major piece of evidence had been uncovered to support the theory that this had once been a temple or palace. About thirty yards beyond the floor painting, just inside the northern wall of the building, another stone structure had been found, virtually intact. From its shape, proportions, and elaborate design, it could only be one thing.