The Scroll

by Grant R. Jeffrey

  TWENTY-THREE

  Four weeks later

  Officially, David Chambers was the leader of the multiple dig sites; unofficially, Chambers still reported to the sequestered Abram Ben-Judah and to John Trent. Landau and his superiors believed it best to let the world think Ben-Judah had died with the others. Although Chambers never asked, he assumed the other secret members of the new Sanhedrin had been informed of the ruse, but he had no way of knowing if such was the case.

  What he did know was that he spent more time traveling between sixteen search sites. Most came up empty, although several interesting artifacts had been found. And some very valuable ones. Using new satellite sweeps and airborne T-ray scans, Chambers, Nuri, and Amber had been able to find the tomb mentioned in lines five and six of the Copper Scroll. Since the land was littered with ancient tombs, finding the right one seemed impossible. The description, like all descriptions in the Scroll, was vague: “The third course of stones in the tomb, one hundred wrought gold articles.” The question was, which tomb?

  “It has to be a tomb well known to the Essene community at the site of our first find. Simply saying in ‘the tomb’ with no more details indicates a sepulcher of someone significant, maybe one of the sect’s leaders. Let’s focus on tombs near site one. There must be a cemetery in the area.”

  “It would probably be off the site,” Amber said. “They wouldn’t bury their dead in their compound.”

  Chambers assigned the search to Nuri, who surveyed the region using helicopter-mounted ground-penetrating radar followed by detailed electronic surveys over any promising site. It took two weeks, but Nuri found a likely candidate: a tomb buried two meters beneath a hillside slide. A one-meter-high stone marker lay on its side covered with the landslide debris. The team estimated that two acres of cliff-side material gave way, perhaps during an ancient storm.

  As before, Chambers wanted to take as much time as possible to excavate, but digging began almost immediately. The site looked like a military camp. Even then, Landau remained nervous. Surveillance aircraft buzzed overhead; every worker was searched before being allowed on the camp site; armed guards in military vehicles and on foot kept a ready perimeter around the area. No cameras other than those used by Amber were permitted.

  There were other changes. There would be no more aides. Chambers and Landau agreed that having people that close to the primary archaeologists was a danger to all involved. In a private moment, Chambers admitted to Amber that he could not stand the thought of losing someone like Joel Rubin again. His nights were often disrupted with nightmares; nightmares that included the image of Joel’s broken body being excavated from the rubble.

  Chambers and Nuri uncovered the tomb in short order. As a matter of professional protocol, David let Nuri oversee every aspect of the excavation, leaving David free to observe and occasionally help Amber with photo work and other recording of data.

  The Essenes had built the sepulcher from indigenous cut stone and laid it in an ingenious manner. It had endured centuries buried beneath the fallen side of the hill, yet its walls remained unbowed and with no signs of cracking, which was especially remarkable since friction, not grout, held the blocks in place.

  A thick stone covered the entrance, reminding Chambers of the wheel-like stone said to have been rolled in front of Jesus’ tomb.

  “A square sealing stone,” Amber had said. “We know what that means.”

  Nuri nodded. “It wasn’t a family tomb. No need to open it again.”

  “The Essenes were celibate, which means no families, therefore no need for a family tomb.” Chambers touched the thick stone door. “Of course, they might have used burial caves for the regular members. This is for someone special.”

  “Or something special,” Amber said. “Like a treasure.”

  “Only one way to find out.”

  The workers were sent home except for a crane operator, one of Landau’s men. It took several hours to prepare for the removal of the stone. When the nylon straps were in place, the crane operator gently removed it. Air that had been sealed in the tomb for twenty centuries rushed out the moment the door had been pulled away.

  With flashlights blazing, the three entered where no one had been since it was first closed.

  “I estimate the interior to be five meters by five meters.” Chambers scanned the room.

  “About the size of a bedroom,” Amber said.

  “Except the ceiling is also five meters up.” Nuri aimed the beam of his light up. “A perfect cube.”

  “Gotta love their symmetry.” Amber’s voice echoed in the space.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Chambers didn’t have to turn to know it was Landau speaking. “There’s plenty of room.”

  “It’s empty.” Landau joined the three huddled in the middle. “I was expecting a corpse.”

  “Or a mummy, maybe.”

  “I’m not that ignorant, Dr. Aumann. I know the ancients didn’t mummify the dead. I mean there’s no bone box. There’s nothing here.”

  “So where do we start?” Amber said. “The Copper Scroll says ‘in the third section or course of stones.’ Does that mean the third up from the floor, or the third down from the top?”

  Chambers counted the courses. “I count fifteen courses of block, all the same size. Placing it low would make it easier to hide, but placing it high would make it more difficult to retrieve.” He considered the situation. “What little we know of the Essenes tells me they would choose the difficult over the easy.”

  “Makes sense,” Amber said. She directed the beam of the light to the ceiling, then moved it down three courses of stone. “That’s a tad out of our reach. It’s what? Twelve feet above the floor?” She looked at Landau, who got the hint.

  “Sure, all my training and experience makes me the ideal man to retrieve a ladder.”

  “You’re very gracious,” she said. “A little sarcastic, but gracious.”

  “You thinking what I’m thinking, Nuri?” Chambers moved to the back wall and touched it. The stone felt cool.

  “I am if you are thinking the tomb was partly built into the side of the hill—which would make it easier to create a space with a false wall.”

  “Exactly. But it’s still just a guess.”

  “As much as it pains me to agree with you,” Nuri said, “I think your guess is a good one. I’ll get the portable T-ray scanner and the GPR. If there is a space somewhere in the wall, we’ll find it.”

  They found it ninety minutes later. Three courses down from the ceiling and three meters from the east wall, the GPR revealed a cluttered space. Nuri set up the T-ray device, and Chambers operated the business end while Nuri analyzed the readings.

  A few moments later Nuri began to laugh. “Gold, my friends. We have strong readings of gold.”

  Chambers pushed against one of the stones, but it refused to budge. “There’s no way to get a hold of an edge.”

  “Leave that to me.” Nuri set down the monitor and exited the sepulcher, returning a few moments later with a cordless power drill and an extra battery. He also carried a large framing hammer. Chambers’s stomach turned, but he didn’t object. Silently he descended the ladder and surrendered to Nuri.

  Nuri had thought to bring a masonry bit. The hand drill filled the space with its high-pitched whine as the bit bored into the stone. Amber recorded every step of the process. Several minutes after he began, Nuri stepped down the ladder a few rungs and handed the power tool to Landau, then asked Chambers for the hammer. Chambers frowned as he handed it over.

  Back up the ladder, Nuri removed from his jeans pocket a cylindrical metal sleeve that he inserted into the borehole. He tapped it in with his hammer, then retrieved an eyebolt from his pocket. He threaded it into the expansion sleeve, which widened with every turn.

  “Mr. Landau, if you please.”

  Landau jogged from the tomb and returned with a coil of nylon rope, which Nuri threaded through the eyebolt and tied off. He descended
the ladder and moved it out of the way. He paused and looked at the others for a moment, as if seeking their permission to proceed.

  “Do it.” Thrill dulled the regret David felt about moving so fast with such an ancient find.

  Nuri tugged. Nothing. He tugged again, and Chambers thought he saw a tiny bit of grit fall from one of the joints.

  “Do you want me to give it a try?” Landau seemed eager to have something to do.

  Nuri didn’t hesitate to hand over the rope.

  “You can catch the stone when I pull it free.” Landau smiled. Chambers was stunned.

  “Hilarious.”

  Nuri didn’t return the grin. It was an odd change of behavior. As the days passed, Nuri became more sullen as Landau became a little more approachable, almost human. Chambers barely understood himself, so he had given up trying to understand others.

  “Stand by.” Landau tugged, then yanked. On his third try, he put his weight behind it. The stone came free, plunged to the floor, and broke into three pieces.

  Chambers stepped to the fragments. “It’s thinner than I expected. More of a veneer stone.”

  “Makes sense.” Amber stood by his side. “The wall isn’t structural. At least not this part of it.”

  “Make room.” With Landau’s help, Nuri muscled the ladder back in place. “Time to demonstrate my genius again.”

  Chambers and Amber stepped back and gave the man the room he needed. He wasted no time climbing to the opening left behind by the stone. He directed the beam of his flashlight into the void.

  “What do you see?” Amber asked.

  “Nothing, my dear.” He reached into the space. “Nothing but gold.” He removed an ingot of dust-covered gold. “And this little one has many friends.”

  True to the description in the Copper Scroll, there were one hundred bars.

  There were other finds: the remains of a small, simple wood chest filled with nearly two hundred ancient shekels; a clay jar holding a vellum scroll with guidelines for life in an Essene compound. Opening the scroll was delicate work, and Chambers assigned the work to specialists at the Institute, but he was able to see enough of the writing on the fragments broken away over the years to recognize it as a copy of a document found in the fifties. Presumably, every conclave of Essenes had one or more of the documents.

  Chambers met with Ben-Judah weekly in the hospital room that had been converted to a small apartment. Often the meeting included a teleconference with Trent. In each of those cases, the background behind the billionaire was different. Chambers got the idea that Trent was in a different location every time.

  This time the meeting was just between the professor and Chambers. Landau drove Chambers to these meetings. He explained it was for security reasons. The explanation was unnecessary since Chambers had become a member of the society of paranoids. Having nearly been killed and buried at the same time had made him suspicious of nearly everyone. He didn’t question Landau’s circuitous path from the hotel to the hospital. It was never the same. Chambers guessed that several of Landau’s men followed in other cars.

  This night, they entered the hospital through the emergency room. Seeing the place where he had been a patient made David uneasy, but this night, at least, he wasn’t in need of stitches or a leg brace. For that he was thankful.

  Landau escorted Chambers past the ever-present guards and into Ben-Judah’s room. As was Ben-Judah’s custom, he rose the minute Chambers entered the room and embraced him.

  “David, my son. Seeing you always does my heart good.” Ben-Judah led him to the seating area.

  “Always a pleasure to spend time with you, Professor.”

  They sat, and Ben-Judah settled into the leather side chair. Chambers had always known his mentor to be a frugal man with simple tastes and doubted that he had such a nice chair in his own home.

  “Do they ever let you out of here?” Chambers sat on the end of the sofa closest to Ben-Judah’s chair.

  “They do, David, but I can’t say more than that. It is for my own security, and I find it quite comfortable here. I am able to do my work and follow your progress. I do the same here I would do from my office. It is important to keep things as they are.”

  “I’m glad you’re comfortable.”

  Ben-Judah stroked his beard. “Your latest find is more than amazing, David. So much gold in one place, and the way you discerned its location. You are amazing.”

  “It was Nuri who made the find. He is a technical whiz. It pains me to admit it.”

  “You still do not like him? After all these weeks? After the success you and he have had?”

  “And Amber. I have no problem with Nuri’s research and field skills. He just rubs me the wrong way. Always has.”

  “Of course. I did not mean to exclude her. You harbor ill will because you think he is taking Amber away from you.”

  Chambers cut his gaze away. “Amber doesn’t belong to me. We’re not a couple anymore.”

  “Not yet.” A moment later, Ben-Judah added, “But this is none of my business. You are adults, and I am not your father.”

  “I don’t always act like an adult.”

  Ben-Judah gave an exaggerated nod. “Yes, this is very true.”

  “You were supposed to contradict me.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  They shared a laugh, then Ben-Judah turned serious. “David, great progress has been made in finding the treasures of the Copper Scroll. Two significant treasures amounting to tens of millions of dollars …”

  “But …”

  “But I need you to focus on the nonprecious metals. Continue your search of course, but we are most eager to find the other artifacts.”

  “By other artifacts, you mean things listed in the scroll that have to do with the ancient priestly work?”

  “Am I that obvious?”

  “No, just logical. You want to rebuild the temple, and a temple is useless without a priesthood.”

  “Gold and silver hordes we’ve found prove the validity of the scroll, so we can trust that these items are there, too. For us to reach our goal—our larger goal—then we must focus on the greater treasure: the holy artifacts of the temple.”

  The change in emphasis did not surprise Chambers. He had been expecting it. During the first phase of the search, they had focused on things that high-tech space, air, and ground surveys could show them: underground cavities, tunnels, and tombs. Since so many of the locations described in the Copper Scroll were intentionally vague and the terrain so different after two thousand years, Chambers focused on “hard sites,” with well-defined structure that could be detected at a distance.

  “You know those will be the most difficult things to find.”

  “Of course I know that.” Ben-Judah paused. “I am sorry, David. For the first time in my professional career, I have been afflicted with impatience.”

  “Impatience is an archaeologist’s greatest obstacle.”

  Ben-Judah lowered his gaze. “The student quotes the teacher’s lesson back to him.”

  “I meant it as a compliment.”

  Ben-Judah rose and paced the room, his hands clasped behind his back, head down, eyes fixed on the carpet. Chambers let the man have his silence. Finally:

  “There’s more I have to tell you, David. It has to do with a tunnel. Your tunnel.”

  “My tunnel. Which one … You mean Herod’s tunnel?”

  “Yes. We’ve found something.”

  Chambers sat in silence pondering the sudden revelation. Ben-Judah took the silence to mean Chambers was upset.

  “I am sorry to give you this news so suddenly. I should have been more up-front with you, but you have been. I’m not sure how to say this.”

  “Reactive?”

  “Yes, yes. Reactive. That is a good word. On several occasions you’ve been emotional.”

  “Don’t I get some credit for coming back?” He hoped his grin softened his words.

  The professor stopped his pacing. “Of cour
se, David. Of course, it’s just that I needed you to focus on proving the reality of the Scroll’s treasures. You have done that.” He pursed his lips before speaking again. “After your discovery of Herod the Great’s escape tunnel and the initial survey and investigation, you handed the research over to the Institute and the Israel Antiquities Authority.”

  “I remember.” Chambers remembered wanting to finish his portion of the work so he could leave the world of biblical archaeology behind.

  “I’m sure you do. What you do not know is that I took an initiative and called in some favors. I oversaw the ongoing research.”

  “That’s wonderful, Professor. I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have finish the work.”

  “I only provided oversight and direction. Others did the hard work.”

  “Why are you telling this to me now?”

  Ben-Judah took his seat again, leaned forward and stared into Chambers’s eyes. “We found something.” He took a breath. “Another tunnel.”

  “Another tunnel. You mean an adjoining tunnel?”

  “Yes. Cleverly hidden. It was in a debris area. We think it was built at the same time as the original tunnel.”

  Chambers leaned back and tried to take in what he was hearing. “Another tunnel—branching off the one I discovered? How could I have missed that?”

  “You were in a hurry to leave. You had made up your mind to never return to God’s land.”

  The words stung. He had missed a great find, probably one of significance. “What did you find when you opened it?”

  “It hasn’t been opened, David. That’s for you to do. I continued the work while you and the others were searching for the treasures. The area has been cleared, and we have done GPR and echo work to identify the size and shape of the opening. The builders went to great trouble to conceal the location.”

  “Wait. No one has been in the tunnel? Why?”

  “Because, David, it may hold what we’re looking for. It may hold priestly treasures.”

  Chambers rose and began his own pacing. “This is remarkable.”

  “You are not angry with your old professor?”

  “Angry with you? Of course not. I knew work would continue after I left, although I admit that an adjoining tunnel hadn’t occurred to me. No, I’m not angry with you. I am, however, angry with myself.”