13th Apostle

by Richard F. Heller

  Apparently finished with the conversation, Sabbie turned and walked to the other side of the room to return the ancient paper to the wall safe.

  Images of Ludlow lying dead from a dozen causes flashed across Gil’s mind. A deep sadness washed over him. Poor old guy.

  Remembering Sabbie’s belittlement of the phrase, Gil raised a third finger in the air toward the back Sabbie had turned toward him. It was a stupid, impotent gesture but, save for smacking her in the head, it was all he had available to him at the moment.

  God, what a bitch she was.

  Chapter 18

  Later that morning

  Office of the Translator

  It only took four steps to cross the tiny office. Gil had been pacing for an hour and, as far as he could figure, he must have covered the same ground several hundred times.

  Where the hell is she? She can’t keep disappearing like this.

  He had found Elias’ message! It was right there in the message he had hidden in the binding. Not a number substitution, not a word frequency count. Nothing a code breaker would have looked for. This was a cybersleuth’s kind of pattern. It made you work for the pleasure of the discovery and, once you nailed it, it put you to work all over again.

  The sound of the door opening stopped Gil mid-pace.

  “Where the hell have you…”

  “Uh uh uh,” DeVris said as he entered. He shook his index finger in mock rebuke. “Thou shalt not curse within these hallowed halls.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t expect you.”

  “Obviously.”

  DeVris sorted through a stack of books on the floor. He opened each volume and riffled through the pages.

  “Everything okay?” Gil asked. He had not seen the Director since his first day at the Museum. At the time, he had seemed quite imposing. Now, outside the confines of his richly decorated office, DeVris looked a great deal less impressive.

  “Do me a favor,” the Director said, pointing to Sabbie’s old oak desk. “Reach into the top right-hand drawer and see if there’s a three-by-five yellow index card in there. It should have all the phone extensions of…”

  Gil stared at the open drawer. It held a yellow index card, a pair of white cotton gloves, and one more thing; a very small, very shiny revolver.

  “Oh, the gun. Don’t mind that,” said DeVris with a smile. “She won’t use it on you unless you give her a hard time.”

  Gil stared at him.

  “Hey, I was only joking,” DeVris said with a smile.

  Gil nodded, closed the drawer, and stepped away from the desk.

  “Look, this is Israel,” DeVris began.

  “And do most of your translators carry guns?” Gil asked.

  DeVris admitted that it was not common practice but added that Sabbie’s personal history made her actions quite understandable.

  “It was not a simple homicide,” DeVris began. “The man she killed was one of those who had sexually assaulted her. The others remain free. Who knows, she may still be in danger after all these years, so carrying a gun makes all the sense in the world.”

  She killed one of them!

  DeVris continued. “If the Military Board of Aleph had not turned their back on her, she…”

  “They threw her out of the army?” Gil asked.

  “No, Aleph is a Special Police Unit, the crème de la crème of counterterrorism. It started out as a branch of the Yamam but later became an independent SWAT force unto itself. Sabbie was one of Aleph’s best.”

  She had gotten her training in the Lochamot MaGav, the Women’s Border Police, DeVris explained. An excellent sharpshooter and brilliant strategist. Her skills and her drive had “anti-terrorist unit” written all over them. When her first tour of duty with the Border Police was completed, Yamam snatched her up for Aleph, a special elite and highly experimental SWAT team.

  “It was the first of its kind, a SWAT team for women, hence the name,” DeVris explained. “When Aleph broke ranks with Yamam, Sabbie chose to go with them. If she’s one thing, she’s loyal.”

  DeVris continued to rummage through the books as he spoke. “It never made sense that, after she was arrested, Aleph turned on her like they did. Not a single one of her fellow officers ever testified for her at her trial. They claimed that when they found out she had gone after the other men as well…”

  “Other men? She killed more than one?”

  “You should really be discussing this with her, you know,” DeVris concluded and took a step toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” Gil interrupted. “I can’t just say to her, ‘Oh, by the way, I hear you’re a convicted murderer.’”

  “You’re overreacting,” DeVris said. He made it a point to look Gil in the eye for emphasis.

  “Look,” DeVris continued, “she was tried and found guilty, that’s true, but she was given a suspended sentence based on an elaborate rehabilitation plan. She went to England, enrolled in graduate school and, essentially, turned her life around. Now, her love of antiquities and her dedication to their translation has become her life. Still, if she’s sometimes overzealous, I think we can afford to be a little compassionate.”

  “How come she’s back in Israel?”

  “Ludlow met her at the University of London, where he was doing research and teaching. Actually, Ludlow was introduced to her by one of our off-campus artisans, a man by the name of Sarkami…”

  Gil looked up sharply at the sound of the name.

  DeVris registered the reaction and continued.

  “Anyway, Ludlow and his wife, Sarah, apparently took Sabbie under their wing. So, when he brought her to me a couple of years ago and begged me to give her a real job, how could I refuse?”

  Gil shook his head.

  So Ludlow’s death must have hit her like a ton of bricks. But she didn’t mention it for days.

  “I have to ask you not to relate any of this to her,” DeVris added. “I’d hate to see any animosity come out of all of this. She wasn’t so sure you were right for the job, you know.”

  “And why was that?” Gil asked.

  “I think we better drop the whole thing. Could you do that, please? I think we can afford to cut her a little slack, don’t you?”

  “Why? Because of all she’s been through?” Gil asked, a little more scornfully than he intended.

  DeVris’ voice softened. “No, because there’s something very special about her, don’t you think? Something you can’t quite put into words. She draws you to her and, when she pushes you away, she pulls you right back in. I’m not just talking about sex appeal, though that’s certainly there, too.”

  DeVris waited a moment, then abruptly changed the subject.

  “If you like, you can use the computer in the next room. For security reasons, you can’t send out any e-mail, but it might help you pass the time until she comes back.”

  Gil readily agreed and settled into the pleasantly familiar experience of the keyboard and screen. A few minutes earlier, he couldn’t wait for Sabbie to return. Now, he was hoping she would take her time. He needed to know more about her than DeVris could provide; sure as hell, a lot more than she would ever tell him.

  DeVris quietly left and closed the door behind him.

  The yellow index card remained untouched in the drawer of the desk next door.

  Chapter 19

  Later that afternoon

  Office of the Translator

  He had completed his Internet searches and had been waiting for more than three hours. Now she walked in like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Where the hell were you?” Gil asked.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said sarcastically. “You’re not talking to me like that, are you?”

  “You’re damn straight I am. I’ve been sitting here for God knows how long with my thumb up my rear end, waiting for you to get back. You could at least have given me your cell phone number,” Gil added.

  “And what would you call me with?”

 
He had never noticed. There were no phones in the room. He didn’t remember seeing any in the outer office either. And the guard confiscated his cell phone for “safe keeping” every morning, not that it would have worked here anyway.

  Gil continued to glare but considered it wise not to respond.

  “If you’re ready to take your foot out of your mouth and your thumb out of your rear end, I’ll tell you what I found out at the library. It took a while because I had to cross-reference several collections of medieval history, but I think it was worth it.”

  Sabbie kicked off her high heels and walked over to the desk. The thought of her opening the drawer, removing the gun, and shooting him in the middle of the forehead fast-forwarded across Gil’s mind. She opened the left-hand bottom drawer, removed a pair of sneakers, then joined him on the other side of the room. She sat down on the floor, and laced them up.

  “I realized we needed to know more about Elias,” she began. “Do you remember a CNN interview you did about tracking down the inventor of the CyberStrep computer virus so you could figure out how to stop him?”

  Gil looked up in surprise

  “First rule of Internet forensics, you said, is to know your man. You said, ‘Once you can think as he does, finding him comes easily.’”

  “You remember that?” Gil asked in surprise.

  “Of course. I thought it was brilliant as well as amazingly chauvinistic. You made it sound as if only men could be cyber criminals. Your approach to tracking one down, however, was unusual to say the least.”

  The creator of the CyberStrep virus had been in police custody when Gil had been called in. A backdoor to the virus program had been found, but no one had been able to figure out the password.

  Whenever an attempt was made to disarm the virus, it would offer the prompt, “Say, ‘Good Night,’” and wait for the correct response in order to allow access. A legion of cryptanalysts had typed in the obvious responses in every language and code they could come up with. Nothing worked.

  Gil had taken a different approach. He spent several weeks learning everything he could about the creator of the program and never even looked at the virus in action. In the end, the simple knowledge that the inventor of the virus was a devotee of old radio shows, especially Burns and Allen, gave Gil all the info he needed.

  After listening to a dozen Burns and Allen’s radio recordings, Gil knew the correct response.

  “Say ‘Good night,’” the CyberStrep program prompted, refusing entry until the proper response was supplied. “‘Gracie,’” Gil responded. There were the famous parting words of the Burns and Allen radio show, held in affection by all of the show’s fans. By taking the time to know the man behind the code, Gil had conquered the worst computer virus the Internet had ever known. And he had done it in less than five minutes at the computer.

  “So I went in search of Elias, and here’s what I found,” said Sabbie.

  The life of a monk, she explained, was spent less in devotion and more in making money for the Church. Prayer services took place every three hours, day and night. At the time when Elias would have entered the brotherhood, the few monks who could read and write divided their hours between meditation and study. Those who were illiterate were privileged to be allowed to work long hours in order to support those devoted to higher spiritual pursuits. As the years passed however, things changed. A monastery’s devotion came to be judged far more by the magnitude of its contribution to mother Church than by the pious meditation and scholarly achievements of its monks.

  The luxury of devotion and study quickly gave way to a lifetime spent in copying manuscripts or weaving tapestries for the wealthy. The Church sanctified the work as holy. Monks, holed up in scriptoriums or weaving rooms for the duration of their lives, were told they were engaged in the highest form of devotion; a prayer through action.

  “Sort of like a monk’s sweatshop,” Gil bantered with a wry smile.

  “Actually, you’re more on target than you know.”

  For centuries, she explained, abbeys held the monopoly on the copying of texts and the making of tapestries in what now would be called a kind of price-fixing scheme. Some monasteries grew enormously wealthy and powerful. A somewhat cutthroat competition sprang up between abbeys as to who could contribute the most to the Church. The greater the contributions, the greater the preferential treatment for the Abbots, if not for the lowly monks.

  Sabbie checked her notes. “From odd bits and pieces of his entries in the diary, it seems that after Elias’ brother, William, was put to death, the Abbot took possession of his lands. He had Elias moved out of the scriptorium and banished to the weaving shop where the old monks, or as Elias put it, ‘those who were stupid, old, or infirm,’ were set to work making mediocre tapestries for the rich. All of the tapestries were designed by the Abbot, leaving a weaver nothing to do but work like an automaton on someone else’s brainchild.”

  “Sounds miserable. I wonder why he stayed.”

  “Good question. Look, I want to show you this.” She handed him a page from the second half of the diary. Like the others, it was in Latin, and bore her red markings of two-word by two-word deciphering.

  “It says that Elias beseeched the Abbot to allow him to design a tapestry of his own. He describes how important the design of his own tapestry was to him and how he wished his brother could have seen it. Now that I’ve said it out loud,” she continued, with a sigh, “it sort of sounds like medieval soap opera. Don’t you think?”

  “Just the opposite,” Gil announced triumphantly. “It all makes sense.”

  At first, Gil had assumed the missing page Sabbie had given him could not possibly hold the key. How could a couple of paragraphs that contained no apparent pattern possibly tell them where the mate to The Cave 3 Scroll was hidden? The answer was that it couldn’t! The brevity of the note was not the problem, it was the answer.

  By making the shortest entry the most important one, Elias ensured that anyone trying to uncover a covert communication would quickly realize that it contained no secret pattern and, therefore, no hidden message.

  “Look,” Gil said. “It’s right here in the last paragraph.

  It is my humble hope that this shall not come to be and these words may stand as a signpost and a testament to that which has been sacrificed but not lost. Then the heavens…

  “I don’t get it,” Sabbie said.

  “Haven’t you ever noticed that the real reason that someone calls you is the last thing that person brings up right before they say ‘good-bye’? That’s what Elias is doing here. He’s saying that, beyond everything else, this diary is a testament and a signpost. A signpost!”

  She still didn’t make the connection.

  “There are basically two ways to hide something while keeping it in full view. The first is misdirection, where your attention is pulled away from the object that someone wants to hide. Like the magician that has you look at one hand while he’d doing things you never notice with the other. The second way of hiding things in full view is to reveal only a piece of it at a time, while at the same time, telling you where you need to look for the next piece of the puzzle. Essentially, it sends you on a hunt. Actually, it leads you, like a signpost that tells you which way to go to get to your goal. It’s simple and it’s obvious but, at the same time, easy to miss,” Gil concluded.

  “But a thousand years ago nobody would have thought to use the term ‘signpost,’” she protested. “So how could Elias have used it intentionally in a hidden message?”

  “The idea was there, even way back then, and Elias understood it. I think he’s trying to tell us to keep going, that there’s more to the diary than we know.”

  “Like the location of the scroll?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s more to come.”

  She looked like she was going to argue, then decided against it. Gil knew she was unconvinced but the truth was, she had no other option but to go along with his hunch.

  “All r
ight, let’s look at what we know right now,” she said.

  “First, according to the two-word alternating entries, we know there is, indeed, a second scroll, and that the scroll contains a firsthand account of the messiah, Yeshua,” Gil said.

  “Not the messiah, necessarily. A man who is viewed as a messiah and who is also named Yeshua,” she corrected him.

  “Okay,” Gil agreed. “We can’t be absolutely certain the scroll tells the story of Jesus, The Messiah, until we find it. Satisfied?”

  She nodded and Gil continued. “Next, we know that the scroll was taken from Qumran to Weymouth Monastery in England, where Elias lived and William was killed. And where the diary was found.”

  “And,” Sabbie continued, “because Elias says the scroll was found by William in an area that sounds very much like Qumran, if it turns out to be made of copper, Elias’ scroll could be the mate to The Cave 3 Scroll and could point the way to riches that have been buried since the time of Christ.”

  Last, and most importantly, Gil added, they could be pretty sure the diary was left as a signpost to tell them to search within Weymouth Monastery.

  “Unless I miss my guess, we need to find Elias’ tapestry,” Gil said.

  “Why his tapestry?” Sabbie asked.

  “This diary is a signpost pointing to the tapestries, to one in particular. How did you put it…? Yes, you said that Elias described how important the design of his own tapestry was to him and how he wished his brother could have seen it. Don’t you get it? Find Elias’ tapestry and you find the scroll,” Gil concluded.

  She spoke softly, as if allowing the depth of Elias’ sacrifice to sink in. “So, that’s why he stayed, to write the diary, weave the tapestry, and protect the scroll.”

  “And to make certain it was found by those who would someday come to rescue it. This can’t only be about the gold and silver mentioned in The Cave 3 Scroll,” Gil added.

  “To some it will be,” she said thoughtfully, then seemed to change direction. “We’re wasting our time here. We should be on our way to Weymouth.”