“It’s connected to a labyrinth of caves that lies under Budapest. The tunnels can be accessed at numerous points around the city.”
“Really?” Brandt asked. “You’ve had a mission here before?”
Almost embarrassed, Lopez pulled out the tourist map they had bought to find the church. “No. I just read up on it in the car.”
Okay, this was pretty much the bottom of the fucking barrel. The enemy probably had the architectural survey plans of the church, along with intense satellite video surveillance of the entire city, and all they had was this flimsy two-color map. Yeah, he missed the Den, all right, but you took help where you could get it.
He clapped Lopez’s shoulder. “Excellent. Let’s head to the entrance of the cave system.”
“Um, that’s the problem. There are only four caves open to the public, and they are situated across the city. It’s at least three miles to the nearest access point.”
Brandt felt his stomach twist another forty degrees. He really did not know how much tighter it could turn without rupturing.
Despite the bad news, Davidson smiled. “Who said we need a public entrance?”
“Explain,” Brandt barked.
“Svengurd, how much of the explosive paste do we have left?”
The taller man dug through his pack. “Looks like all of it.”
“We won’t need that much, at least if we don’t want to draw a crowd with the noise. We’ll have to pick somewhere deserted and well insulated.”
“Let’s move like we have a purpose,” Brandt said as he headed eastward toward a cluster of buildings.
* * *
Rebecca read the first passage aloud. “For he who bore James sought the center of Pest. There he would find those who revered both Moses and Jesus. Those who knew Isaiah and John to be one and the same. The dualist would protect forever the most favored brother.”
Angered, Lochum put on his reading glasses as he read the second stanza. “He who was pure returned as if he had lived ten lives, his beard long enough to rival Moses. The man without contempt wished to carry him within the house along with the others of the Knot, but he would not allow it. His life was seeping from him, and he wished all to know that he had learned of the four and one. That James was protected by the stag.”
“Do you see what I mean?” Rebecca asked as she brought up the two texts side by side. “The first section stressed the importance of the number two. Whereas this passage specifies the four and one, whatever that is, and the stag. An image not at all referred to in the first.”
Their driver laying on the horn quieted them both. Crowds surged around their car. They hadn’t gotten more than a few hundred feet closer to the Lancid, also known as Chain Bridge. The great stone structure towered before them. A pair of carved lions stared down their majestic noses, sizing up anyone who dared pass. At a span of three hundred fifty- seven meters, the bridge was the first to connect Buda and Pest, but right now revelers crammed the narrow bridge.
The horn finally let up, so Rebecca pointed to the computer screen. “Not only do they not match, they contradict one another.”
Lochum waved off her concern, as he always did. “What scriptures ever agree? You know the adage. If two ancient passages agree, then one of them is a forgery.”
Despite herself, Rebecca felt a grin flicker across her lips at the old saying. It usually held true, but there was something more than the section’s differences that bothered her. “But taking the two—”
“What would have us do, ‘Becca?” the professor asked, his face surprisingly calm. “Spend weeks wrangling over syntax? We both know that there is only one place in Hungary that meets the first criterion. Are we to ignore that self-evident fact in favor of the second, much more vague, passage?”
“Had you let me finish,” Rebecca said, “I meant that we need to reconcile the two sections. You said it yourself. They would have spoken in code to avoid the Romans discovering their most sacred relics.”
“Your program takes into account such variables, does it not? Or are you telling me your vaunted software is not up to the task?”
Rebecca shook her head in frustration. Long ago she thought Lochum near to a god because he seemed to work in such mysterious ways, but now he was just a dog with an old bag of tricks. Whenever in danger of running afoul of his own logic, the professor would cast aspersions on his verbal opponent.
Not rising to the bait, she responded coolly, “Perhaps code was not the correct term. Parable may be closer to what I’m thinking. You don’t actually believe the man came back aged a hundred years, do you?”
Lochum had to shake his head. “No. No. In ancient texts, rapid aging usually implies guilt or suffering.”
Rebecca was about to elaborate when someone hit the hood hard enough to shake the vehicle. Glancing up, she thought she saw Brandt. Nearly panicked, she searched the crowd, but when Rebecca found the man she thought was the sergeant, he was walking away… in a leather skirt.
Definitely not Brandt’s style.
Grief certainly played tricks on the mind.
Shaking off the mirage, Rebecca opened the cab door.
“Where are you going?” Lochum asked.
“To Pest.”
“But—”
She indicated the thriving city. “We’re getting nowhere. It’s time to take to our feet, Lochum. Tread the same path as he who was pure.”
He looked ready to argue, but then he smiled. “How right you are.”
Lochum paid the very disgruntled cab driver as Rebecca followed the jubilant parade over the carved bridge. Plebeians, Senators, and more fierce warriors than she could count bustled around her.
She took it all in. The sun on her shoulders. The glistening Danube River beneath them. The firm stone beneath her feet. She could not take back leaving Brandt in Paris, nor the plane plunging to its destruction, but she could be certain that she’d never let anything beautiful go unnoticed again.
* * *
Brandt stopped as he entered the Turkish bath. A square pool of aquamarine water lay in the center of an enormous room lined with towering columns. Slits in the roof allowed beams of sunlight to dance across the water’s surface. The entire structure seemed to be hewn out of rock, giving it a quiet, romantic, almost surreal atmosphere. In this oppressive heat, the cool water invited you to strip down and dive right in.
Rebecca would have loved this place and its history. Even to his untrained eye, the bath ached of untold stories. He was sure Rebecca could have told him the exact mineral content that made these waters medicinal. She and Lochum would have argued over the exact date when the columns were imported.
But neither doctor was here, and it was time to correct that problem. It had turned out to be a lot harder to find a place to blow up than they had first thought. Then Lopez had mentioned the baths from the brochure.
Svengurd was haggling over the price, but Brandt flashed a wad of American bills. The attendant’s eyes widened. His team may not have much ammunition, but cash, cash they had. He had feared they might have to bribe their way out of Ecuador, so Brandt had made sure they had been well funded.
“Tell him we want somewhere far from the street.”
As Svengurd translated, the attendant clearly thought they were gay, but who cared if it meant more privacy? Peeling off another hundred-dollar bill, Brandt watched as the money disappeared into the man’s pocket before he hurried down a set of steep stone stairs.
At the end they found a mineral spring carved out of the earth itself.
Once the attendant left, Lopez pulled out the map. A tunnel connecting the chapel was right under their feet. But how much rock were they going to have to blow through? Exactly how much sound would leak to the street?
“Sarge, do you feel that?” Davidson asked.
He stopped searching but felt nothing. “Feel what?”
“A cool breeze,” Lopez answered.
Then Brandt realized there was a cold draft. “Up ther
e.”
Davidson scrambled up the rock wall. “Oh, yes! There’s a shaft. Svengurd, hand me a glow stick.” The private shook the tube until it glowed green, then dropped it down the shaft. “We’ve got tunnel.”
Finally, luck had turned in their favor.
CHAPTER 13
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Fifth District, Budapest
Lochum tugged almost frantically at Rebecca’s hand, but she refused to let him drag her through the Fifth District. Budapest boasted twenty-three districts, much like New York’s boroughs, but this district was unique within the city. It had been so long since she had visited Pest, she had forgotten how unalike the two cities were. While Buda was all about the distant past, Pest was the future. Commerce was key. Shopping, shopping, and more shopping was the order of the day.
It was strange to see Prada and Ralph Lauren sold out of buildings centuries old, but that was the magic of Pest. The streets were lined with hundreds of merchants, each trying to outdo the other. She likened it to a medieval city—but only the serfs were peddling Gucci.
Even this far from the Parliament building, where the parade was intended to conclude, the streets were bustling with costumed shoppers. All around her she heard foreign languages. Budapest might only be the seventh-largest European city, but today it seemed to be number one for power shopping. Italian, German, and Austrian euros flowed as freely as Hungarian forints.
Women dressed in Saks Fifth Avenue suits mingled with girls in burkas and grandmothers in saris. An excited chatter swelled from the shops. These merchants knew that the bulk of their sales came from bargain-conscious tourists, and they made sure to cater to all cultures. At every corner there were tiny cafés and upscale restaurants. If you didn’t know better, there were times you might think yourself in Paris.
At night, she knew these streets transformed into a city of youth. Many of the restaurants had nightclubs above them and once the sun went down, neon signs would glow so brightly as to make it seem like daylight. The windows pulsed with enough techno music to satisfy the most discriminating überelite clubber. Rebecca understood there was a healthy new business of “stag” weekends, where guys from all over Europe would fly in on dirt-cheap flights to get a taste of Budapest’s nightlife.
“Please, ‘Becca, contain your spending genes and hurry. The synagogue is just down the next block.”
Allowing him to pick up the pace, Rebecca noticed how quickly they transitioned from capitalism central to a decidedly residential neighborhood. The shops were replaced by three and four-story apartment buildings. Most showed distress—crumbling bricks, rusted iron, a cracked pot as a meager adornment. But they still had a charm to them.
Strangely, the first things Rebecca spotted were the synagogue’s decidedly Moorish domes. If you did not know the place was a temple, you would swear you were walking up to a mosque. She had forgotten how Eastern the synagogue had felt. More Turkish than Christian. While historians noted the unique duality of the temple, they had forgotten the Islamic influence. What she saw dominating Pest’s skyline was not an example of duality but a trifecta—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim.
As they approached the building, her initial reaction was reinforced. Beneath the Moorish blue and gold domes were Christian-inspired steeples. The walls were made of rows upon rows of tan brick, giving the appearance that the synagogue was striped. Each window was built into Catholic-like alcoves, while each corner had smaller blue-tiled domes. Again, in every square inch of the synagogue there were three influences.
If she had held misgivings about the location before, Rebecca was now certain this wasn’t the resting place for James, but Lochum remained unmoved. He tugged her until they practically ran the last block to the Great Synagogue. This area of town was drained of its population as the parade made its way south to the Parliament building.
Nearly out of breath, Lochum went to open the large gate that led to an inner courtyard, but a security guard stopped him.
“Megnezhetern a jogositv any at?”
Rebecca guessed that the man asked for identification, because the professor drew up to his full height. “I, my dear man, am a personal friend of the rabbi.”
The guard snorted. “Ah, as are all Americans.” Before Lochum could respond, the man continued in heavily accented English, “Still, I must see documentation before entering.”
“What is the meaning of such—”
Rebecca stepped in front of the enraged professor. She pulled out their fake passports. “Here you are.”
As the man scanned the documents, she whispered to Lochum, “Tight security works in our favor, Archibald.”
To deter any more objections, Rebecca pointed halfway down the building. They were repairing a section of the torched and charred tan wall.
“They are as worried about suicide bombers as we are.”
She didn’t have to argue further, as Lochum turned to the guard with his “charming” demeanor instead of his insufferably arrogant one.
“Forgive me, of course you have a job to do,” he said. “And truly if there is any question about our documentation, please ask Rabbi Milgramisk about his old friend from Oxford.”
The guard must have known a little about the chief rabbi’s history to know that he had graduated from Oxford, for he nodded with more respect.
“You may buy tickets.” The guard pointed inside the gateway where a theater-like ticket window awaited.
“But—”
“Just pay the woman, Archibald,” she hissed as she simultaneously smiled at the guard. Once inside the small courtyard, she continued, “And while we are on the run from psychopathic pseudo-historians, we might not want to be name-dropping.”
After paying the elderly woman behind the glass, she gave Lochum two tickets and a yarmulke, which he dutifully put on. Twelve years ago, when they had last visited the synagogue, they had gone through none of these procedures because they traveled with a full archaeological team. This time around they were on the down low.
All of Lochum’s frustration seemed to vanish as they entered the shul itself. The enormous interior could seat more than three thousand worshippers amongst its rows and rows of pews. Above them ran two balconies with stained glass windows on either side—the women’s gallery.
As they walked down the richly carpeted aisle, Rebecca couldn’t help but be struck by the history of the place. It had the rich odor of housing worshippers for centuries. Wood and stone could not shelter such for too long without embedding their very essence into the structure. The smell was not unpleasant. Not of dust or mold, just of age.
This synagogue had survived the Ottoman Empire, World War II, and Communist rule. Despite all of this, she was not sure if it had enough history. In her discipline, twelve hundred years old barely qualified you as a teenager. Could the structure’s intent and purpose stretch back another millennium?
“Do you doubt now?” Lochum asked, but Rebecca did not answer.
While the vaulted ceilings and chandeliers were of Gothic design, if someone looked just a little closer, the mosaic tile work above these classically Christian elements were etched in blue and gold, one hundred percent Byzantine artistry. Even the dramatic inlay above the altar echoed the Moorish shape to the spires outside. Despite knowing the passage on John’s bones, Rebecca still felt as she did over a decade ago that the synagogue’s architects were just attempting to assimilate into a predominately Muslim and Christian world.
They were not necessarily dualists but survivalists.
Yet studying her professor’s face, Rebecca saw none of her own concerns. He was engrossed in the artwork displayed on either side of the main aisle. Another very Christian influence. She knew he was searching the reliefs for signs of James or the man who bore his bones.
“Sir, please do not touch the art,” a man said with an almost African accent, as his voice echoed off the high ceiling.
Rebecca turned to find a small dark-skinn
ed man hustling down the long center aisle, waving Lochum back from the walls. “Please, it will take us a week to get the oils off.”
The professor, however, did not back away. “I’m sure if you just—”
“Yes, yes. The guard radioed ahead, but you cannot visit with the Chief Rabbi until his Bible study class is finished.”
Surprisingly, Lochum didn’t yell. In fact, he spoke quite calmly. “Just let him know his ancient Christianity instructor has been resurrected.”
“I don’t understand. Ancient Christian?”
“Just tell him that, and I will be satisfied.”
“I… I give no guarantees,” he stammered.
Hesitating just a moment longer, the man turned and nearly ran back down the aisle. That was the professor’s talent. He could win the battle of wits by either bowling you over or luring you into his confidence.
* * *
Lochum leaned over a rather remarkable painting of Moses parting the Red Sea when a call came from deep within the synagogue, “Archibald!”
His student of old, Bartholomew Milgramisk, now all grown up, came barreling out of the beth midrish. The years had been kinder to Bartholomew than to him. The rabbi had a full head of hair and looked far more athletic than Lochum remembered back at Oxford. The two met in a friendly embrace.
“You scoundrel! I sat shiva for you!”
Lochum was nothing but sincere. “I am so sorry, Bart. It was a ruse that I could not break, not even for an esteemed colleague such as yourself.”
“Please, no apologies. I am just so glad to see you alive! And with Rebecca! Do miracles never cease?”
The rabbi hugged her as well. “You never write. You never call.”
“Believe me, I would have, but I was under orders to never contact our common acquaintances.”
Rebecca’s excuse might have sounded sincere, but Lochum knew the truth. After his “death,” the girl had shunned the world. She had retreated deeper into her laboratory or disappeared into uncharted jungles. He had kept tabs on her through the years, disappointed that she had turned from their work and concentrated on her silly radiation theories. But now she was back in the fold.
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