“Ah! Yes, I see. Well, come then. Let us find another stick.” He stood and pulled Angelo up with him. Birhan jumped to the bridge rock and reached back to help Angelo over the gap. There was level ground on the other side. And another stone to be rolled away. It, too, seemed to just be part of the mountain, but Angelo knew what to look for now. So did Birhan.
“Time to open the box, yes?”
Angelo nodded, reached into his satchel, and pulled out the stone box. The black and pearly ash rose up on a gentle breeze that had not been there moments before, and just as it had at Maror, it slid fingers around the stone and rolled it back. But this was not a cave; it was a tomb. The opening was cut into the mountain, straight and sure.
Angelo hesitated. A somberness settled on him, a sense of knowing this was a last step, that he was finishing something, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to be over.
“Let us see what Allah has for us this time,” Birhan said softly at his side, a tender hand on his back.
Angelo nodded and stepped into the tomb.
The body was at the back of the carved-out space, which ran about twenty feet deep into the mountain. A table had been cut into the wall and the body laid to rest there. The stone at the man’s feet was engraved with a name. Joachim. Like the opening lines of the poem that had guided them here—I am beyond the waters raised by God. It was an introduction. I am Joachim: Raised by God. They had followed him full circle.
“I am sorry to disturb your rest, Joachim,” Angelo said quietly. “But I think you called me here.” He was certain this was the man who had written the gold book, who had hidden the map and beckoned someone to find the treasure he had left behind. Angelo looked down at the empty eye sockets and the shockingly white teeth and tried to imagine a face. He felt like he knew this man, like he had shared a similar struggle, a life determined not by his own choices but by some unseen hand pointing him toward a destiny whether he wanted to go or not. Joachim had written about loss and anger. Had he also had a mission like Angelo’s? Had he failed?
“Angelo,” Birhan whispered, pointing to the skeletal hand resting on the side nearest them. “Another stick.”
This one was thinner and tapered to a point, finger-wide. Angelo carefully lifted the bony hand and eased the stick free. He passed it to Birhan and then leaned over the body. Something shiny had caught Angelo’s eye.
Under the other hand was another gold plate.
Angelo flipped it over, but the back was smooth and empty.
Birhan sighed, his shoulders slumped. “No more map? No new place to look? Just sticks.”
“I’ve got a feeling these aren’t just sticks.”
After seeing this last piece, Angelo thought he knew what the three sections of wood made once they were all put together, and it was anything but useless or benign. Excitement welled up in him, a boyish anticipation brightening his voice. “Well, they are sticks, but together, I think they make—” His phone buzzed.
It was Kitty. AXUM? HOW INTERESTING! BE THERE BY 4. MEET ME AT THE AIRPORT?
“Shit.” He looked at the time on his phone. He texted back—THERE’S A COFFEE SHOP NEAR THE MAIN EXIT.—then grabbed Birhan and steered him out of the tomb as he shoved the gold plate in his bag.
“Wait! Aren’t you going to read the plate? Maybe there is new secret poem.” Birhan sounded eager for more adventure.
But Angelo was driven by another emotion that silenced all the others—panic.
“We need to get back to the airport,” he said, leading the way down the hillside, straining in his hurry and giving no time or breath for Birhan’s questions until they got in the car.
“Where we going now?” Birhan asked, panting.
“Cairo.” Angelo was already searching for flights on his phone.
Birhan looked over at him, an eyebrow raised. “Indiana Jones also goes to Cairo.”
Angelo half-smiled, his tension easing a little as he found a flight that would have them on their way before Kitty landed. “Cairo is just the closest place that gives us what we need.”
“What is it we need?”
“Modern resources and someplace big enough to hide while we wait.”
“Wait for what?”
But Angelo just shook his head.
Birhan chewed at his lip. “Is someone chasing us?”
Angelo had not said anything about the Reverend or Kitty to Birhan—he wanted to keep the boy as far away from them as possible—so he hesitated now, but Birhan gave himself an answer first.
“Someone else want these sticks and that gold book—yes?”
“That’s right.”
“Like Indiana Jones.” His eyes were wide and excited.
“We need to watch some new movies, Birhan.” Angelo had pulled out the stone box and put the new gold plate on top of the others, nestling them all back in the resin Petra statue, but the three sticks were still stacked between his legs. He hadn’t figured out what to do with them yet.
Birhan had been watching from the corner of his eye. He reached his hand over and tapped Angelo’s forearm crutches. “Tube is hollow, yes?”
Angelo looked up, grinning, and began to dismantle the padded armrests from the metal legs. He worked the largest section of stick in first—it was so thick it barely fit into the tube. He had to twist it down into the opening and tried not to think about any damage he was doing to a potentially millennia-old artifact. The thinner two pieces went in the other crutch easily. “That was brilliant, Birhan!”
The boy smiled smugly. “I also watch James Bond.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Birhan slept on the plane to Cairo. Angelo did not. He had more decisions to make. They needed to hit the ground running.
Kitty had landed in Ethiopia, and she didn’t sound happy to find them gone: NOW EGYPT? I’M TIRED OF PLAYING CAT AND MOUSE. STAY PUT UNTIL I GET THERE.
Angelo had not responded—he had no intention of staying put. He’d been trained to play cat and Mouse by the best, and the first rule was to keep on the move. The second was to plan ahead, but only by a little and with several contingencies. The underlying principle was to avoid predictability.
When they cleared the airport, Angelo steered them through the throng of taxis to a shuttle bus headed for downtown Cairo. He waited through several stops until they were in a commercial area. Several people were getting off.
He nudged Birhan toward the door. “Let’s go.”
“Hotel near here?” Birhan asked as the bus drove away.
“No hotel yet. We need an electronics store.”
Birhan looked around and then pointed. “They tell us where to go.”
He headed across the street to a group of teenage boys who were skateboarding on pink granite surrounding a statue. He spoke with them for just a few minutes and then jogged back to Angelo.
“City Star Mall they say. Take taxi they say. Quicker than bus. We want quick, yes?”
“The quicker the better.”
Angelo paid cash for the taxi and then for the burner phones at the mall.
“You already have phone. Why you need two more?” Birhan asked as they left the store.
“One is for you actually.” Angelo handed it over. It was an older model—another of Mouse’s rules: simple things left fewer bread crumbs. “I’m going to text you so you have my number. Don’t use the phone to call or text anyone else but me. Okay?”
Birhan nodded, his brow creased but a smile spread across his face. “So people chasing us cannot find us?”
“More James Bond?” Angelo asked as he stepped into a hallway leading back to restrooms and offices and out of the loud squall of shoppers. He pulled out some cash and handed it to the boy. “Will you go grab us some food while I make a call?”
As soon as Birhan left, Angelo punched in the number Mouse had made him memorize. She had made him practice what to say, too. His heart was pounding. He’d never dealt with criminals before. It was surprisingly easy and professional. He gave the cod
e word, then someone asked for the necessary information. He gave them what they needed. They told him where to go and when to be there. It was over in less than five minutes.
Birhan returned with the food. They ate as they walked. Another taxi, lousy traffic, and an hour and a half later, they were sitting in an internet café filled with neon blues and pinks, flashing screens, and a clash of video game soundtracks interrupted by the groans of defeat and yells of triumph from dozens of gamers plugged into their alternate realities. It was a perfect place to commit a crime—surrounded by the protection of a public place in the midst of preoccupied alibis.
Birhan was playing a racing game. Angelo drank coffee and used one of the café’s computers to upload a picture of the boy as he’d been instructed. The shot was of Birhan in the airport at Asmara; he’d wanted a last photo of himself in Eritrea. Now there was nothing left to do but wait.
Angelo stared out over the glaring screens, not really seeing them, playing instead with his suspicion about the pieces of wood hiding in the hollow aluminum tubes of his crutches. Smooth and simple, the three pieces were clearly part of a whole. Together they would make a staff or a rod, something about the size of a hiker’s walking stick. But why would anyone go to the trouble to separate and hide a simple staff?
An idea had come to Angelo in Joachim’s tomb as he’d held the third piece and looked down on the skeleton, which had been wrapped in woven cloth. Faint shades of color, not yet bleached by time, had revealed a striped pattern, broad lines running parallel to a darker central stripe, that draped over Joachim’s bony shoulder. An image had flashed through Angelo’s mind, a scene from a movie he’d watched with his fellow seminary students years ago—The Ten Commandments. They’d laughed and made fun of the movie, mostly for the outdated special effects, but some of the visuals had stayed with Angelo, especially Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea. It was the image of the patterned Hebrew cloth draped over Heston’s Moses that made the connection in Angelo’s head—the stripes ran over his shoulders and down to outstretched arms and a hand gripping the rod that commanded the water to part so the Israelites could escape the pharaoh’s vengeance. The staff of Moses.
Angelo remembered reading something in seminary about the staff, but he couldn’t recall the details. He typed a couple of keywords in the search engine and found a digital copy of the book he was looking for.
The staff wasn’t Moses’s—well, not his alone. It had also belonged to his brother, Aaron, who was a shepherd and had most likely used the staff to nudge wayward sheep. But the staff proved to be much more than a simple tool. By God’s command, Aaron used it to threaten Pharaoh during the plagues and turned it into a snake that swallowed up all the other staff-snakes cast by Pharaoh’s sorcerers. Moses used it to part the sea and draw water from a rock. Later, the rod miraculously bloomed to settle a dispute among the Israelites—another show of power.
Those were just the conventional biblical stories, but Angelo had never settled for conventional. He’d never admit it to Birhan, but he had once daydreamed about being Indiana Jones. As a student, he’d been hooked by the mystery of a magic staff, just like he’d been caught up in trying to find the lost tribes of Israel. Angelo’s research had taken him to rabbinical teachings arguing that Moses’s staff and Aaron’s rod were one and the same. The rabbis believed that the rod was actually made by God in the earliest days of creation and given to Adam as protection against evil when he was exiled from the Garden. The rod had passed from hand to hand by God’s blessing—used by Abraham, by Isaac, by Moses and Aaron, by David as he killed Goliath, and by the kings who followed him, until it was placed in the Ark of the Covenant to wait for a Messiah who would use it to annihilate the heathen at the end of days.
It might not be the Book of the Just, but if his hunch was right, Angelo had found the weapon he’d been looking for—a weapon he had no idea how to use. And it was crammed in an aluminum crutch in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world.
“Your coffee, sir.”
Angelo looked up, confused. But the waiter set a cappuccino down on the table with one hand and slid a brown envelope into Angelo’s lap with the other.
Angelo tipped him and then tapped Birhan on the shoulder.
“Time to find a place to sleep, my friend.”
He picked a place at random—not a nice hotel—and paid cash. Birhan got the shower first. Angelo sank onto the bed. He was both terrified and tempted by what he now felt sure rested inside his crutches. He had thought he was beyond awe. Awe and excitement belonged in a world with Mouse in it. But the magnitude of history, the symbolic gravitas of those simple pieces of wood and what they meant to Jews and to Christians and to Muslims, pulled at him. He smiled as he imagined sharing this moment with Mouse.
And, again, Kitty interrupted. MY PLANE LANDS IN FIVE HOURS. GATE 2 IN THE INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL. BE THERE. NO MORE GAMES. I’VE FLAGGED YOUR PASSPORT SO DON’T TRY RUNNING AGAIN.
He texted back, I’LL BE THERE. NOT RUNNING. JUST CHASING DOWN LEADS. I HAVE SOMETHING.
Angelo bent down and pulled the Petra statue from his bag.
“No more hot water. Sorry. You wait, yes?” Birhan’s hair was dripping on the soiled carpet. When he saw the gold plates laid out on the bed, he clapped Angelo on the back. “More adventure?”
“Not for you.” Angelo put down the pencil he’d used to make a rubbing of the last plate and stacked the gold book back in the box with the ash.
“Why not?” Birhan’s voice was already tight with suspicion.
Angelo shoved the brown envelope toward him and waited as Birhan scanned through the documents inside.
“This says I am Brian Lucas. Why am I Brian Lucas?”
“It’s a fake passport. It comes with all the other necessary papers to prove that you are indeed Brian Lucas, an Italian citizen.”
“So we can hide from the people who are chasing us?”
“Yes.”
“Who are you now?” Birhan asked.
Angelo smiled sadly. The prepaid account with Mouse’s secret contact only covered one new identity. “These are bad people chasing us, Birhan. They do whatever they want when they want. They have no guilt and no compassion. They take and they kill. They murdered the last person who helped me.”
“This is the blood on your hands you talk about at Mount Maror?” Birhan asked.
“Yes. And I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. I need you to go somewhere safe.”
“That is not your choice to make.” Birhan shook his head. “I stay with you.”
“I’ve got you a flight to Rome and then a friend is going to pick you up at the airport and take you a few hours outside of the city to a monastery at Fossanova, where I grew up.”
“I stay. My choice.”
“I’m going to come to you just as soon as I can,” Angelo said, but he could feel the lie in his voice. He didn’t know if he’d live long enough to see Birhan again.
Birhan heard it, too. He put his hands on Angelo’s shoulders and made him look him in the face. “We run together from these bad people.”
“I can’t run fast enough,” Angelo said.
“I carry you.”
Angelo swallowed against the knot in his throat. “Not this time. I need for you to carry something else.”
Birhan backed away, his head hanging down as he leaned against the wall behind him. “What?”
“I need you to take the stone box with the ash so when I get away from these people, I can come to you and we can figure out how the sticks and the ash work together.”
“What about the gold book?”
“I think we’ve gotten everything we can from it. It has no more secrets to tell. I’ll give it to these people. That should satisfy them, and they’ll let me go.” It was more hope than expectation.
“What if they don’t?”
Angelo didn’t answer.
“Is there more poem, more clue?” Birhan pointed at the rubbing.
“There’s something, but I haven’t read it yet.”
“Read it now.”
“If I do, will you promise to go to Rome with the box of ashes like I ask? Regardless of what this may say?” There wasn’t time to go anywhere else anyway, even if the poem gave them a new clue.
Birhan stared at the floor for a minute and then answered. “I will, but you must promise to call me if you find trouble.”
“I promise.” Angelo put his hand out, but rather than shake, Birhan pulled him into a hug.
Angelo cleared his throat and then turned to the rubbing of the last plate he’d just made. “‘Be unto you,’” he read, his voice still heavy with emotion. “Ah, that goes with the ‘Peace’ at the end of the earlier poem. ‘Peace be unto you,’” he said. “‘Soldier of sorrow, Soul of my soul, Behold your treasure.’”
Birhan leaned forward.
“‘A hardened heart hungry for justice, dead to the world, mighty in righteousness. Be it so with you as it was with me.’” Angelo paused, the weight of the bitter words sinking into him. “‘May the Book of the Just protect you. May your heart be restored to you. From ashes have we come, to ashes we must go. Amen.’” Angelo bent to lay the paper back on the bed, but stopped short and snatched his hand back.
The stone box, sitting on the bed near the pillows, was shaking.
“Go, Birhan. Get out!” Angelo said, but Birhan didn’t move.
The tremors grew stronger, shaking the whole bed. The gold plates were now sliding out between the lip of the stone top and the edge of the box’s bottom. Something was lifting them up—something growing inside the box.
Angelo looked at his crutches, also lying on the bed; they, too, appeared to be shaking. In a flash, he imagined the ash, called to life by the poem, resurrecting Aaron’s rod, and unleashing its power or a swarm of demons, like the ones from the church at Onstad. He lurched toward the bed, grabbing the box and clamping his fingers around the sides, trying desperately to close the lid, to contain the ash, but the box shook so violently that the lid pressed against his fingers, grating stone against stone, and then, a heartbeat later, it went still.
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