A Walk in the Darkness - [Kamal & Barnea 03]

by Jon Land

  “How much of the scroll had you had a chance to study?” Ben asked.

  Lev’s voice faded, reduced to a dull monotone as he replayed that last day in Ephesus in his mind. “I remember working alongside Professor Daws in his tent. We unrolled the scroll slowly, a little at a time so not to worsen the tears in the parchment that were already present. Much of it was yellowed, with the consistency of dried-out leaves. I used a magnifying glass over the faded portions of the parchment and did my best to fill in the gaps that were illegible.

  “According to the portion of Josephus’ tale that Professor Daws and I managed to translate, a doctor was waiting in his home the night Christ was crucified. A pair of Roman guards brought a critically injured man to him. His wounds were identical to the ones inflicted upon Christ in all versions of the gospel. But the man was alive—just barely, but alive. It was clear from the scroll that the doctor knew exactly who he was treating, that he was part of some conspiracy hatched by the Jews, the Romans, or a combination of both.

  “Somehow they had concocted a plan to make sure Jesus survived the crucifixion. Our interpretation was that things hadn’t gone as planned; the conspirators underestimated both the crowds and the severity of the wounds. Something went wrong and their original plan to assure Christ’s survival had to be abandoned. In the end, according to the scroll, they resorted to some kind of switch, another dead body replacing that of Jesus before it was placed in the tomb. Think about it!”

  Ben was already doing just that.

  “This would explain why they blocked the entrance to the tomb. But the replacement wouldn’t bold up to thorough scrutiny, so they removed or, more likely, buried his body in the cave itself. They didn’t expect Jesus to live at this point, so the problem was moot. Low and behold, though, the doctor performed a miracle. Jesus survived, but left Jerusalem, never to return.” Rabbi Lev raised his dead stare to the synagogue’s plain ceiling. “You know what this means.”

  “Those people who claimed they saw Christ later on the road, in a town ...”

  Lev nodded. “Yes, it was the actual man, not the apparition. But much more is involved than that, much more at stake. If the scroll Daws discovered proves Jesus didn’t die on the cross, then the resurrection never took place! The very foundations of Christian theology and dogma will crumble!”

  “But why should you care? Leader of a group that believes the rest of the world can go to hell.”

  The rabbi smiled slightly. “Who do you think blinded me, Inspector? Who do you think wiped out Daws’s entire team?”

  “The church?” Ben posed reluctantly.

  Lev nodded. “Just as they killed your nephew to protect the same secret.”

  “You saw them. ...”

  “Briefly.”

  “Do you remember ... a tattoo of a—”

  “Red cross, Inspector?” Lev completed, strangely emotionless. “It was the last thing I saw, before I turned to run, before one of them shot me in the skull and left me for dead. The bullet is still up there.” He squeezed his knees with his hands. “You’re right; I don’t care about their theology. Except proving their Messiah was merely a man will provide the best revenge possible on the people who did this to me. And Josephus’ lost scroll contains just that proof.”

  “Because without the resurrection—”

  “Christianity cannot exist, at least as it is defined now. The church will fall into chaos, the same church that did this to me and murdered your nephew!” Lev said, his voice rising as he gestured toward his eyes. “The execution of Christ, considered alone, is at worst a miscarriage of justice, an abuse of power. But the resurrection turns that tragedy into a glorious victory. Without it, Christianity is nothing more than a fairy tale. The concept of redemption, of recovery from sin, crumbles and the foundation of the entire religion falls with it.”

  “And you get your revenge.”

  “Help me and you get yours too. They killed your own flesh and blood, Inspector. Recovering that scroll is the best way to make them pay for their sins.”

  “By exposing the truth.”

  “It’s what you want, Inspector, what you’ve wanted for some time.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because I know you.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 51

  A

  n oil rig,” Danielle said, mostly to herself.

  Shoshanna Tavi snickered, crinkling the lower edge of her scar. “Not just an oil rig. This is the Ulysses GBS,” she said as the chopper sank toward a massive oil platform anchored in the seas of the North Atlantic.

  Danielle shuddered as she recognized icebergs dotting the waves and fields of ice covering the nearby land masses. She guessed that the land was a part of Newfoundland, just off the Grand Banks. But she had never seen or heard of anything like the platform Tavi had called the Ulysses GBS. It spired over seven hundred feet at its highest point, rising out of the sea upon five concrete modules that made it look like some kind of robotic monster constructed by an alien race.

  The chopper bucked and squirmed in the biting wind. Danielle could feel that wind’s frigid snap every time it pasted the chopper with its power.

  “Put this on, if you don’t want to freeze.” And Tavi tossed her a waterproof winter parka from under her seat.

  Danielle draped it over herself like a blanket, unwilling to remove her safety harness for the time it would take to pull her arms through the coat. The helicopter continued to battle the swirling winds as it hovered over a concrete landing grid. She thought her ears were ringing, then quickly realized the sound was a combination of the gusts butting up against them and the powerful wave swells nearly a thousand feet below.

  “This must be the place those American geologists called home,” Danielle surmised, almost shouting to carry her voice hardly four feet.

  “At least the company they worked for. We’re about to land on the largest oil rig ever, constructed over three billion barrels of oil just waiting to be sucked up.”

  “And how many barrels are there in the West Bank?”

  “A bit too early to tell, I’m told.”

  “What did the Americans think?”

  “Fifteen billion conservatively, making it the fourth richest field the planet’s got to offer.” Shoshanna Tavi said that with pride, enjoying the fact that she was privy to so much more information than Danielle.

  They touched down at last with a final jolt and Danielle could hear the rotor blade rotating down.

  Tavi unfastened her seat belt. “I don’t expect you’ll have call to try anything stupid way out here.”

  “I was thinking about making a phone call.”

  The woman from Shin Bet shook her head. “Sorry.” She tightened her parka around her body and pulled up the hood. “You better put yours on too, if you want to be alive come nightfall; the windchill’s below zero and today’s as warm as it gets.”

  Shoshanna Tavi yanked open the doors to the chopper’s rear compartment and Danielle gasped as she felt the sting of the frigid air against her face. Coming from the dry heat of the desert, the wet cold of the North Atlantic’s Grand Banks seemed to freeze her breath. She knew the water temperatures could drop to thirty degrees and the wind gusts routinely topped seventy miles an hour.

  “I’ll avoid walking near the edge, if you don’t mind,” Danielle said, as she climbed out.

  Shoshanna Tavi barely glanced back at her. “Suit yourself. I’m a patient woman.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 52

  F

  ather Mike dabbed at his forehead with a napkin, a fresh layer of perspiration rising as soon as he was finished. “A wives’ tale, a myth that’s made the rounds for centuries, only never before associated with Josephus.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Ben told him.

  “Then you must also find the historical inconsistencies and contradictions to be rather extreme. Hundreds of witnesses were still about when Christ was removed from the cross
. Dozens watched him laid out in the tomb, and the cave was guarded continuously for the period until his body was found missing.”

  “Guarded by whom, Father?”

  “Roman soldiers, of course.”

  “And if they were part of this conspiracy?”

  “The rock placed before the cave entrance weighed upward of a ton. Not something that could simply be moved in the dark of night to remove, or even bury, the body of this supposed imposter, as your rabbi friend alleges.”

  “Unless there was another way out. A tunnel, a secret passage ...”

  Father Mike leaned forward, the steam no longer rising off the coffee cradled between his now-white hands. “Did the fanatic Lev say that?”

  “No. I was just thinking out loud.”

  “My God, man, whose side are you on?”

  Ben said nothing.

  * * * *

  M

  ordecai had taken a deep breath to settle himself. “Daws cabled word of our discovery to select experts all over the world. He wanted to have his authentication, and subsequent translation, confirmed on-site to avoid all possible accusations of forgery or possible hoax.” The old rabbi’s shoulders sagged. “Forty-eight hours later, everyone except me was dead. No trace of the box, containing the scroll was ever found. It was thought to have been destroyed by the killers, who had been sent to make sure the world never learned of its contents.” Mordecai Lev shifted in the pew closer to Ben. “And now you have heard a tale about a man burying just such a box in a cave in the Judean Desert.”

  “A man with the tattoo of an upside-down red cross on his arm. In 1948,” Ben noted.

  The rabbi nodded, dead eyes staring ahead. “The man your witness remembers from his boyhood could have come to the West Bank from Ephesus, intending to bury the box somewhere it would never be found again . . . but then the Americans came and dug it up.”

  “And proceeded to make the same mistake Daws did: they must have contacted outside experts to inform them about what they had found.”

  “It is doubtful they were sure. But someone tied somehow to the church who was listening was sure enough, someone determined to make certain the secrets hidden in that ancient box were never revealed, no matter what it took.”

  “Including mass murder.”

  “The church had done it once before, Inspector. Why not again?”

  “The same force both times . . .”

  Lev nodded. “You’ve seen their work firsthand. They will kill anyone who draws close to the secret they may have been protecting for almost two thousand years. That means me.” Lev reached out and felt for Ben’s shoulders. “That means you.” He almost smiled. “Unless we reveal the truth first.”

  “Perhaps they destroyed the scroll for good this time. No more chances.”

  Lev shook his head demonstratively. “They would not have tried to kill you the other night, if they had nothing more to fear. No, Inspector, the killers did not find the box at the murder scene. It is somewhere else. Someone else has it.”

  “And you want me to find it for you.”

  Lev pulled his hands from Ben’s shoulders. “For me, Inspector, and for yourself.”

  * * * *

  F

  ather Mike patted his forehead again, using a balled-up, soaked napkin to keep up with the sweat.

  Ben’s voice grew distant. “The old rabbi knew me well, Father, as well as I know myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Ben’s stare sharpened a little. “He knew about my family back in Detroit and my nephew here. He knew about me losing my faith, that I didn’t have much to believe in anymore.”

  “Because you chose not to.”

  “I think he knew that too, maybe most of all. After what happened to my wife and kids, I didn’t want to believe in anything because if there is a god, if God is real, then how could He let something like that happen? My children suffered, Father, and no one in your line of work has been able to justify that to me.”

  Father Mike let his napkin fall to the table. “Faith isn’t about justification.”

  “Then what is it about?” Ben started trembling as he spoke, the memories vivid and ugly. “If good people die terribly, how can we believe in anything faith alone teaches us? How can we believe in God?”

  “This is what Lev knew about you. ...”

  “Yes.”

  “That you were on a walk in the darkness.”

  “He didn’t phrase it that way.”

  “But it makes you the perfect person to do his bidding for him, because it’s your own desire too now, isn’t it, Ben?”

  Ben spoke with his eyes staring down at the tablecloth. “If I can find that box, and the scroll says what Lev claims it says ...”

  “You’ll have your vengeance, both of you.”

  Ben looked up. “It’s more than that. If I can find that box, then things will make sense, because there is no God as you and I, and all Christians, understand Him.”

  “Then it’s a different kind of revenge you want, my son: to punish God for what He let happen to you six years ago.”

  “What if that scroll is the truth, Father?”

  Father Mike slid his chair backward, the legs squeaking against the old stone floor. “Why did you come to me tonight, Ben?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “For confession? For absolution?”

  “There’s. . . something else. Something Lev didn’t know about.”

  “What?”

  Ben swallowed hard. “I’m going to be a father again.” Someone else’s voice, someone else’s words, but it sounded good hearing them.

  “Danielle Barnea?”

  Ben nodded.

  Father Mike smiled slightly. “And how does that make you feel about God?”

  “Pakad Barnea does not want my help in raising the child,” Ben replied, the pangs of hurt clear in his raspy voice.

  “And you accepted that.”

  “She didn’t leave me much choice.”

  “So you’re giving up.”

  Ben shrugged. “Respecting her wishes.”

  “And you blame God for your own decisions? He’s giving you a second chance, my friend. Can’t you see that?”

  “He’s already taken two of my children, Father. Now he wants to take a third. The joke’s on me. You should be laughing it up.”

  But Father Mike wasn’t even smiling. “So you want to find this scroll to get Him back.”

  “Least I can do.”

  “Even if it does irrevocable damage to the church, perhaps even destroys our way of life.”

  “The truth hurts sometimes. Believe me, I know.”

  “It’s your way of life too, Ben. You should consider that before you join forces with Lev, before you make your deal with ...”

  “The devil, Father?”

  Father Mike’s features twisted into a frown, then went flat again. “Depends on your perspective.”

  “Yes,” said Ben, “it does.”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 53

  D

  anielle leaned against a steel storage shed to buffet herself from the wind on the deck of the Ulysses GBS. She could feel its bite through the parka Shoshanna Tavi had provided, sharp teeth prickling the top layers of her flesh. She tightened the fur collar against her neck.

  “You really don’t get it, do you, Captain?”

  “I guess you’re ahead of me again, Pakad.”

  “Unless you help me figure a way out of this we’re both going to die here.”

  Tavi shrugged her off. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to get something to eat first.”

  Danielle reached out and grabbed her parka, twisting Shoshanna Tavi around toward her. The cold wind numbed her fingers through the Thinsulate gloves she had found in the parka’s pockets.

  “Listen to me, you ass. We’re floating out here in the middle of nowhere. Sitting ducks, as soon as they figure out where I’ve been taken. They probably already know.”

&n
bsp; “Who?”

  “The same people who killed the Americans in the desert and J. P. Wynn. They tried for me once. They’ll try again.”

  “Here?”