Crucified

by Michael Slade

  "Thank you, Jesus," Wyatt said, clasping his hands.

  At the end of the bridge, the road pressed on between Rosyth and Inverkeithing. Time and tide wait for no man, the proverb warns, and like the highway branching east along the coast of Fife, time and tide were passing Inverkeithing by.

  The town made no tourist's list of "must-sees," and these days, most big boats are broken up in Asia, where labor is cheap and environmental safeguards lax. At Alang, India, ships crawl in at high tide and beach when the tide ebbs out. A horde of hungry workers sludge through the mud and break the vessels apart with hammers and pry bars.

  How does Inverkeithing compete with that?

  The salvage yard was off the docks of a run-down harbor besieged by warehouses, storage tanks, and housing estates.

  In daylight, it would be the color of rust, but tonight, the foggy pen was haunted by big, black machines. As they drove in through the open gate, Wyatt could make out the silhouettes of fragmentizers for breaking vehicles down to their basic components, mobile shears and baling presses for offsite destruction, and a separation plant to channel scrap to monstrous heaps of copper and brass, zinc, aluminum, stainless steel, and plastic-coated wires. The breakers' yard was surrounded by derrick cranes. A ship was half dissected, like the good old days, but it was a minnow, not a whale.

  The man advancing to meet them could have swung a clay-more at the Battle of Culloden. With his greasy hair, barrel chest, and forearms as thick as Popeye's, he would look awesome decked out in full Highland tartan. If only he weren't clad in grubby overalls.

  "Thanks for staying open after hours," Liz said, shaking his massive paw.

  "Aye, but you mentioned rrrriches," said he, rolling the r through a Scottish burr.

  "Wyatt Rook," Wyatt said, offering his hand. It came back feeling like the victim of a baling press.

  The salvage man led them across a minefield of puddles, dog shit, and junk fumbled by forklifts to the beckoning door of a Nissen hut. Wyatt wished he'd worn gumboots.

  Though he never got to sail on Captain Cook's Endeavour, Wyatt was reminded of the poop deck of that vessel—whatever a poop deck was—as he gazed around the inside of the hut. The floor was planking from a windjammer, and the artifacts clutter-ing it had circled the globe in the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. The sleek torpedo from the Black Devil seemed out of place in this world of crow's nests atop main-masts; tide clocks, sextants, and signal flags; steering wheels, portholes, buoys, and binnacles; octants and figureheads of bare-breasted mermaids.

  "Whatever treasure you seek, it's long gone," said the Scot.

  "I did some digging, as you see."

  The torpedo stretched along the floor for a length of twenty feet. It wasn't mounted. Not at more than three thousand pounds. The scavenger had removed the nose to get at the components. Basically, a torpedo has six parts: warhead, pistol, depth-control device, propulsion and guidance systems, and outside shell. U-boat submariners used to joke they were in the scrap-metal business, and in this case, the joke was on them.

  The warhead had been replaced with canisters of scrap, one of which lay open on a workbench.

  "Nothing but nuts and bolts. Same with the other cans. They were X-rayed by bomb men back when I found the torpedo off Fife. Tonight, I used a portable scanner to check again. The rest of the parts follow this Nazi blueprint exactly."

  The Scot ruffled a sheet on the bench.

  "Nuts and bolts, and nothing else?" Wyatt pressed.

  "Well, there are spikes in that one, if you want to get picky."

  "Spikes? You mean nails?"

  "Aye."

  "Open it up!" Wyatt said.

  + + +

  The canister was soldered shut to make it watertight. The scavenger used a blowtorch to melt the seal, then cracked the container open as gingerly as he could. Spikes by the hundreds clattered onto the bench, along with a pouch stuffed with documents wrapped around three more nails.

  "The Judas package!" said Liz.

  Most of the papers were Werner Heisenberg's notes for Hitler's atomic bomb. But some of the sheets appeared to be a letter from Rommel, with a map that detailed the wall of a building in Tobruk. Wrapped inside those documents were several parchments and a map of a city that must have ceased to exist as drawn a long time ago.

  Jerusalem?

  That would explain the three nails.

  No wonder some religious fanatic with scars through his palms was willing to kill anyone to get hold of these. Of all Christian relics, what could be more significant than the nails actually used to crucify Christ?

  Thumthumthumthumthumthum ...

  Wyatt's heart surged from the adrenaline, but that was nothing compared to the jackhammer beat that overtook it as he examined one of the nails.

  "Can it be?" he wondered.

  A sudden thump to his side broke his train of thought, for the Scot had crumpled to the floor as if having a heart attack.

  Only as Wyatt bent over him did he spot the dart in his neck.

  Then . . .

  "What the hell?"

  . . . he felt a sharp jab, too.

  The light went dark and the floor came up to meet him.

  I AM LEGION

  Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

  Wyatt emerged from his blackout to the sound of metal clanging on metal and the sight of bars caging his eyes.

  He couldn't move his head. It was bolted to the wall. And his mouth had been invaded by some sort of bridle with four wicked prongs gouging his cheeks and tongue. From the taste of it, blood dribbled down his jaw.

  His wrists and ankles were also fastened to the wall, cuffed by U-shaped clamps that kept his feet together and stretched his hands as wide as Christ's on the cross. He was lucky. That's as close as he came to crucifixion.

  Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

  The Scot, on the other hand, was being nailed to the floor.

  The salvage man was also clamped in a Christ-like pose, but he had a ball stuck in his mouth, instead of a witch's bridle. The demon who had ambushed them with a dart gun was kneeling beside the supine man with a hammer raised in his hand. Down came a blow hard enough to drive the nail flat against the palm.

  Clang . . .

  Surely the Scot was screaming, yet not a peep escaped his mouth.

  Clang . . . clang . . . clang . . .

  The tortured man thrashed and writhed.

  All Wyatt could do was watch.

  And wait his turn.

  How many paintings of hell had he seen? Every rendition of the Last Judgment showed monsters, demons, and tortures await-ing sinners who didn't embrace Jesus. As an agnostic, Wyatt doubted that he would encounter such a fate after death. So it was ironic that he seemed doomed to suffer it here instead.

  Death was one thing.

  An ugly death was another.

  And no death was uglier than this.

  Stiff upper lip be damned!

  Wyatt was terrified.

  So he did what any intelligent agnostic would do in his place.

  He hedged his bets.

  He prayed.

  A trickle of blood from the Scot's wounds ran across the planks to Liz, spread-eagled beside him. Her wrists and ankles weren't cuffed with U-clamps like the men's. Instead, Liz was tied to the clamps with ropes, so her limbs were loose enough to allow triangular wooden blocks to be wedged beneath her joints.

  Wedged beneath her elbows, and wedged beneath her knees.

  Wyatt winced.

  He knew what the blocks were for.

  When he was finished nailing the Scot to the floor, the demoniac followed the trail of blood from the outstretched hand to Liz. Except for a silver crucifix hanging upside down from his neck, the killer Wyatt knew as Lenny was dressed in bible black. Crouching, he pulled a knife and slit open Liz's blouse, then he began searching every inch of her bare skin.

  Like the Scot, Liz was gagged with a ball. Thai meant she could speak only through
her eyes, and the silent shriek Wyall saw in them deafened him.

  Dissatisfied, the demoniac flicked the blade at Liz's bra. Then used the tip to flip the released cups from her heaving breasts When he failed to find what he sought, the inquisitor slashed her pant legs from her ankles to her groin. He gave up once Liz was naked except for a swath around her waist. Even now, the fallen Christian couldn't shed his prudery. His fig leaf out of Eden.

  "No witch's tit," he declared. "Virgin flesh. I heard you say in the car that you're agnostic. Before I'm through with you, you will believe in me. I am Legion!"

  The Inquisition wheel had spokes and a heavy iron rim.

  It would be rolled across the blocked-up lengths between a victim's wrist and elbow, elbow and shoulder, ankle and knee, knee and hip, splintering the bones into sharp shards that pierced the skin. The salvage museum didn't offer a big, rolling wheel, but it did have a heavy gun carriage from the battery deck of a man-o'-war. If that rumbling wagon was pulled across Liz's wedged limbs, her bones would be pulverized to dust.

  Near her sat a bronze bowl and a cage of mice.

  What were they for?

  A diabolic coup de grace?

  Rumble, rumble . . .

  The gun cart was on the move.

  Wyatt couldn't bear the thought of witnessing this, so ho jerked at his shackles as violently as he could, hoping a miracle would tear the bolts from the metal walls. His mouth worked so hard to shout at the killer—anything to distract him—that the spikes of the witch's bridle jabbed through his cheeks.

  The gun carriage stopped rumbling.

  The demoniac turned.

  "You want to go first?" he asked.

  From inside the cage around his head, Wyatt watched the priest drag an old steering wheel assembly from a sailing ship over to him. Using his knife, the demoniac slashed Wyatt's clothes to bare his belly, breastbone to groin.

  "Does your agnosticism extend to ignorance about the death of St. Erasmus?"

  It didn't.

  Wyatt had seen Poussin's painting The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus in the Vatican Museums. The bishop had been killed for preaching the gospel during Emperor Diocletian's persecution of the Christians in 303 A.D. Roman executioners slowly wound his bowels out of his belly using a sailor's windlass.

  Wyatt knew he was minutes away from such a disemboweling, and he quivered as the killer's fingers probed his abdomen to find where to insert the knife. The demoniac would slit a small hole in his gut, just large enough to extract a coil of bowel, then hook one end of his entrails to this steering wheel and turn, turn, turn, winding his ropey viscera around the wheel's axle like a fireman does to reel in his fire hose.

  To feel your belly emptying!

  Slither, slither, slither . . .

  To be hanged, drawn, or quartered.

  Which was the worst?

  Wyatt braced himself for the stab of the knife.

  The man he knew as Lenny moved in close to stare directly into his eyes.

  "I.. . am . . . Legion!"

  Then both eyes bugged out of his head.

  And the side of his face away from the door blew out in a blast of blood and bone.

  + + +

  Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

  The silencer-equipped gun whispered as the Art Historian to the Vatican pulled off three shots. At least one of the bullets struck the Legionary in the side of his head. Knife clattering to the floor, he dropped like a stone between the old steering wheel and Wyatt Rook.

  The anemic ghost at the door shuffled toward the treasure on the workbench. His co-conspirators had been motivated by their need to save the Catholic Church, but he was trying to save his earthly life. With that at stake, he couldn't chance betrayal by the priests. For all he knew, the Secret Cardinal would give the Holy Grail to the pope with no thought of curing his leukemia first. Or worse yet, the Legionary—if he was indeed possessed by Satan—would hurl it into the Firth of Forth to destroy any proof that Jesus Christ is the son of God.

  Thirty pieces of silver.

  That's all it took to entice Judas to nail Christ to the cross.

  Imagine the value of the nails in the secular marketplace.

  How much is your life worth to you?

  No, he couldn't risk letting anyone betray him for a motive either sacred or profane.

  Not with his life depending on it.

  So the Art Historian had supplied the Legionary with the tools he needed for the British leg of his crusade: tracking devices, the pistol he fired at Rook in Sussex, and the dart gun that subdued the three captives in this Nissen hut. But to keep track of the Vatican's attack dog, the dying man also had his own receiver monitoring the bug on Liz Hannah's car, as well as a GPS tracker hidden in the receiver used by the Legionary. That's how the Art Historian could assure the Secret Cardinal that the possessed priest was on his way to York. And how, tonight, he had tracked Liz, Wyatt, and the demoniac to Inverkeithing.

  Struggling against weakness to reach the workbench, the doomed man closed his hand around the nails that had cured his meningitis as a boy.

  "Cure me, Christ," he prayed, raising the relics toward heaven as a shudder shook him to his diseased soul.

  Ironically, his tire had been punctured by a nail on the road approaching the yard. Too weak to change it, the Art Historian now required a substitute means of escape, for he had no intention of spending his soon-to-be-recovered life in prison. He wondered if the salvage yard had a motorboat. With the fog thickening by the minute, he might be safer by sea than chancing a road accident in a car stolen from what would soon be a murder victim.

  Retrieving the knife the Legionary had dropped, the Art Historian cut the tape around the Scot's mouth, yanked out the ball, and aimed the gun between the man's eyes.

  "Do you have a boat?"

  The pent-up pain from the spikes piercing his flesh must have been too much, for the Scot cried out in what the Art Historian assumed was Scottish Gaelic.

  It was.

  "Mharaigh!"

  Translation: "Kill!"

  + + +

  Wyatt saw the shadow before he saw the fur and fangs. It came from the open door moments after the Scot's command and was in the air before the gunman whirled toward it in fright.

  The jaws of the shadow tore into the fleshy throat, and the beast took the sickly man down with its pouncing weight.

  Wyatt recalled the minefield of puddles, litter, and shit on the path from the car to the Nissen hut.

  Every salvage man keeps a junkyard dog.

  EUCHARIST

  LONDON

  Three days later

  If the Holy Grail equals holy blood, what could be closer to the blood of Christ than the nails that actually crucified him? Not some cup that supposedly collected his blood after death, and not some putative offspring of Mary Magdalene.

  So Holy Grail equals holy nails.

  What makes more sense than that?

  The Empress Helena, legend holds, found both the True Cross and the crucifixion nails. Returning to Constantinople, she had one nail added to the helmet of her son, Constantine, to protect his head from the weapons of Rome's enemies.

  A second nail formed the bridle for his horse, to shield the steed from injury.

  Today, more than thirty "holy nails" are venerated in Europe, but like the fragments of the True Cross brought back from Constantinople, they are medieval frauds.

  No wonder archconservatives in the Roman Catholic Church were willing to kill to get their hands on the Judas relics.

  The holy nails! Now that Wyatt had acquired translations of the Aramaic parchments and Rommel's letter, he knew how strong their pedigree was.

  Earthshaking.

  The Judas relics had traces of what was believed to be Christ's blood, as well as a chip of bone that was probably caught when the nails were yanked out.

  DNA lasts at least two thousand years.

  That's what got Wyatt thinking when he first examined the nails.

  And th
at's why Wyatt was here in this DNA lab, where the human genome had been broken into all its constituent genes so scientists could map the Darwinian blueprint of life all the way back to the primordial ooze.

  Christ's DNA.

  What could be more threatening to the Vatican than that?

  "The Church draws her life from the Eucharist," Pope John Paul II maintained. "For this very reason the Eucharist . . .stands at the center of the Church's life.. . . The Eucharist is too great for anyone to feel free to treat it lightly and with disregard for its sacredness and universality."

  That's because the Eucharist isn't simply a representation of Christ. Through Transubstantiation at Mass, the Host becomes the actual body of Christ.

  In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. Other Christian denominations are not true churches, he declared, because they don't have the "means of salvation" provided by Mass and the Eucharist.

  "Christ established here on earth only one Church," he said.

  Other Christian gatherings "cannot be called churches in the proper sense," because they don't have apostolic succession—

  that is, the ability to trace their priests back to Christ's original apostles.

  Back to St. Peter and his keys to heaven.

  Back to Christ himself.

  Back to the son of God, the product of Immaculate Conception.

  So a lot was riding on this DNA test.

  If the DNA recovered from the holy nails showed two parents, a male and a female, the thinking man could only conclude that Jesus Christ wasn't the son of God, and that his resurrection was a hoax. This would particularly be so if that male parent—like all humans alive today—shared 99 percent of his genes with a chimpanzee.

  But if the DNA showed just one parent, then the only rational explanation would be that Jesus was created by Immaculate Conception by an unseen God.