The Christos Mosaic

by Vincent Czyz

  A black car pulled over just ahead of Drew and double-parked. Drew hugged a shop front. He couldn’t see in the tinted windows, but his heart drummed a warning.

  Breaking into a trot as though he were a few minutes late to the café where his girlfriend was waiting, he passed the car and finally got a look at the driver through the windshield. An Egyptian woman who looked thoroughly bored.

  Drew turned down a side street.

  He turned again, following a zigzag pattern from where he’d started.

  A few blocks down he found El Shams Internet Café, the sign written in both English and Arabic. Its logo was a yellow sun.

  The café reminded him of the ones he’d been to in Istanbul—kids absorbed in video games, a few serious-looking men, a couple of whirring fans affixed high on the plastered walls, a lot of smoke and flies. There were only two vacant computers. He took the one farthest from the door. The computer’s tower had no housing, and the dusty electronic guts were exposed.

  Drew put his phone on the table, the wooden veneer peeling, exposing pressboard. A boy slipped the corner of a receipt under the monitor stand. Drew pulled a balled-up tissue out of his pocket and wiped grit off the screen. Glancing at the glass door, he reminded himself that Zafer was watching, that this was Cairo—not Baghdad—that kidnappings didn’t happen to foreigners checking their e-mail.

  When he saw an e-mail from Yasemin, he felt a vague tingling in his legs. He regretted every accusatory word he’d written this morning. She was going to ask him not to write anymore, not to call, not to have anymore contact with him.

  The subject heading was Your letter.

  Dear Drew,

  He took a deep breath and held it.

  This is the first thing you’ve written to me since we split up that has made me feel something. I mean, the other ones made me angry or bitter, but this one … something in me broke.

  Relieved, he exhaled heavily, and the little slip of paper held down by the monitor fluttered.

  You can’t imagine how I would love to go back to the night I met you in a restaurant in Taksim and start all over again. Really, Drew, I never loved anyone the way I loved you. That’s why I married you. And your letter seemed to hit me in all of my weakest places. I’m crying now as I write this. Especially remembering all those photos of us.

  Look, no promises, no big decisions over the Internet. But let’s talk. I love you, too.

  Yasemin

  PS – When are you coming back from Egypt? And why doesn’t your cell phone work?

  “Yes!” he hissed and raised his fists as though he’d just won a world title. He started typing so rapidly every other letter was a typo.

  Yazz,

  We *can* start over. We can still have a family. No doctor has been able to find anything wrong with you or me. We’ll go to the best clinic in Istanbul. I’ll be back from Egypt in a day or two. I’ll explain when I get back.

  Love always, Drew

  He wanted to take the next flight back to Istanbul. He wanted his wife back. He wanted their life together back. Well … half of him did. The other half was desperate to see this thing through to the end. Especially now that he understood why Jesus couldn’t have been the Messiah. It was so obvious, he still couldn’t believe no one else had noticed. Or, if someone had, he hadn’t gotten the chance to tell many people.

  How ironic: Yasemin used to accuse him of having no ambition, of letting life carry him along, and now he was city-hopping looking for an ancient manuscript that was responsible for the deaths two men, at least, and might force scholars to rewrite Christian history. Some of it anyway.

  He zipped off an e-mail to Rob Mearns, a website designer who’d been a close friend in high school. Cyberspace had its own archaeological deposits, and Rob knew how to excavate it. He’d be able to tell Drew when the Ebionites’ website went up and the last time it had been modified.

  A kid screamed as though a snake had bitten him. Drew snapped his head around, but no one seemed to need a paramedic. Probably an on-screen spaceship had been blown up or someone had failed to save the computer-generated world.

  Drew’s eyes flicked to the door again.

  The fan and the weak air-conditioning didn’t help much; he was pouring sweat. Swiping at a fly on the monitor, he began an e-mail to himself called DEAD SEA SCROLL EVIDENCE.

  It seems clear that at least some of the scrolls were written in the second half of the first century. The coins found on the site corroborate this and so does some of what the scrolls actually say. If that’s true, how could the authors, some supposedly writing about James and Paul, fail entirely to mention Christ’s ministry, his death, his resurrection? How could they mention James and not in the same breath refer to him as the brother of the Messiah? Even IF Jesus, not James, was the Teacher of Righteousness, there is nothing about a resurrection after the Teacher’s death. There is nothing about the Crucifixion.

  No way it could have gone unnoticed. And if James was the Teacher of Righteousness, then where was Jesus? It would be unthinkable to write about James as though he were the Messiah—it is through the Teacher that “the faithful will be saved”—if his brother had been the Messiah.

  He sent it off to his own email. He might lose his notebook or his flash drive, but the file he’d just written was now stored in a server.

  Stephen must have known years ago that Jesus was entirely absent from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe that was what he had been hinting at every time he reminded Drew that the Scrolls were primary source material—no Christian scribe could have added or deleted anything.

  But if Jesus wasn’t the Messiah, who was? The obvious candidate was John the Baptist. John had been put to death for exactly the same— alleged—reason as Jesus: he was a threat to the ruling authorities. In John’s case it had not been Pontius Pilate, but Herod Antipas.

  And what about the Teacher of Righteousness? Could he have been John rather than James? John, after all, must have had ties to the Qumran community.

  There was something else. John was descended from Zadok, which meant he was an heir to the title of high priest. It was even possible that James was not Jesus’ brother but John’s. According to Luke, John and Jesus (and therefore James) were cousins, which might have been an allusion to their actual kinship. Hadn’t the Essenes been waiting for a messiah descended of the line of David and a savior from the line of Zadok?

  “Why not?” Drew asked a little too loudly.

  A few faces turned his way, but most likely assumed his world had flown apart in sparkling pixels or his virtual hero had been lasered out of existence, and went back to their screens.

  Opening another e-mail, Drew jotted down parallels between John and Jesus:

  1. Just as the angel Gabriel told Elizabeth’s husband that Elizabeth was going to bear a child who would be great in the sight of the Lord, Gabriel tells Mary she’s going to conceive.

  He did a quick search and re-read Luke 1:15, which mentioned the birth of John.

  2. While the Holy Spirit was reputed to be the father of Jesus, it was prophesied that John “shall be filled with the Holy Spirit even from the womb.” Pretty damn close.

  3. Both were the products of miraculous births—Jesus to a young virgin; John to a barren, middle-aged woman. (A kind of reversal here.)

  4. John was an itinerant preacher who gave sermons in the wilderness. Jesus also had a wandering ministry, preached in rural areas, and ventured into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan.

  5. John’s following became large enough that he was perceived as a threat to the authority of Herod Antipas; Jesus was executed for being a threat to Roman rule.

  6. John, like Jesus, was a passionate speaker who warned of the coming apocalypse. When the Sadducees and Pharisees come to hear him speak he scolds them: “Brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”

  That was somewhere in Matthew. Another search and Drew found it. He read through chapter three, stabbing a finger at the m
onitor when he found what he was looking for. John’s trademark chant was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” A few verses later, Jesus shouts, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”

  7. Jesus’ ministry is based on John’s. There’s a passage from Matthew that even foreshadows Jesus’ resurrection: “At that time, Herod the Tetrarch heard the report about Jesus and said to his servants, ‘This is John the Baptist; he is risen from the dead, and therefore these powers are at work in him’.” (Matt. 14:1)

  Drew recalled there was also some confusion in Luke about who the Christ was. He pulled up Luke 3:15: “Now as the people were in expectation, and all reasoned in their hearts about John, whether he was the Christ or not …”

  He started typing again.

  8. Jesus doesn’t seem to exist before he is baptized by John. Mark, the earliest Gospel, gives no account of Jesus’ birth—virgin or otherwise. And nothing of Jesus’ childhood. Jesus simply goes to John, who quietly bows down to him, yet scholars have always been puzzled as to why the Messiah would have an inferior baptize him.

  “Because John wasn’t inferior,” Drew muttered. The more Drew thought about it, the more sense it made. In all the Gospels, Jesus is tried by Pontius Pilate, but Luke added an extra trial under Herod Antipas, who was John’s executioner. Had Luke inserted that deliberately as an allusion to what really happened? Had John been the real-life Savior, the actual Teacher of Righteousness, on which the legend of Jesus had been based?

  The glow of the screen seemed to intensify.

  Drew punched in a few keywords and came up with a quote he could recall only in fragments: “Truly, I say to you, among those born of women, there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist.” John and Jesus were nearly the same age and both had had mortal mothers, so was Jesus just being humble? Or was Matthew in effect saying John was the Savior? And why had Drew never noticed this before?

  If John had been the Savior, then Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan hadn’t been an actual event but a metaphor: John was passing the torch. Not to his superior but to a fiction created by the Gospel authors. Didn’t John himself say something to that effect?

  In a dusty, stifling Internet café in Cairo, among screaming kids, virtual invasions, and video combat, Drew thought maybe, just maybe, he was peering over the edge of revelation.

  He punched in another set of search words, and a quote in bold letters popped up on his screen: He must grow greater while I must become less. John 3:30. There it was in John the Baptist’s own words. He was passing the torch.

  Drew had always treated the Bible as a literary work open to interpretation, but he now realized that there was more to it than that. Much more. The Gospel authors had left allusions and written in double-meanings, which, if deciphered, revealed entirely different Gospels. Seen from this perspective, Luke’s addition of Jesus’ interview before Herod Antipas was a way of signaling that, if Jesus and John the Baptist weren’t one and the same, they were inextricably related.

  And then there was Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness—John’s milieu—which had never made any sense to Drew. How could Satan, powerful as he was, tempt the Son of God? What could anyone offer the Son of God that He didn’t already have? But what if John was the one who had been tempted? Not by Satan but by Herod Antipas? What if John had been brought before Herod and offered a handsome reward to give up his ministry? A scenario like this made far more sense.

  The door opened, and Drew whipped his head around.

  A kid in jeans and a ragged t-shirt with Purdue University written across it came in.

  Relieved, Drew sent the e-mail to himself.

  His cell phone rang.

  5: 9

  THE KNIGHTS OF MALTA

  DREW PICKED UP THE PHONE. “Zafer?”

  “I just spotted Nathan.”

  “Shit.”

  “Stay where you are. Don’t leave the café. I’ll be right there.”

  “I’m at the last computer on the left. Hurry.”

  He’d hardly ended the call when the door swung open.

  Nathan was in jeans, a T-shirt, and black sneakers. No jacket under which he could at least pretend to conceal a weapon. All he carried was a manila folder.

  “Good to see you again, Drew.”

  “How the hell did you find me?”

  The door opened again, and Zafer came in with Kadir.

  Nathan acknowledged them with a nod. “Nice move you guys pulled back at Amal’s.”

  “You were there?” Drew asked.

  “We knew you would go so see Amal—you had to. The Sicarii knew that, too. There are only a three ways to get to Amal’s street, and when you guys came out … well, wearing jalabiyas wasn’t a bad idea, but two guys and a dwarf are hard to miss. And you know if I could follow you here—”

  “So could the Sicarii.” Zafer finished the sentence.

  “This is for you …”

  He opened the folder, and Drew saw a photograph of the man the Egyptian police had carted off.

  “This is Jean Saint-Savoy.” Nathan’s dark hands sorted through more photos taken from various angles and distances. “Thirty-five years old, former agent for SGDN—French intelligence. Trained in hand-to-hand, various weapons, surveillance.

  “And this is his pal Raymond Duvall, thirty-seven, French national. These two work together in Cairo. There is at least one more Cairo operative—maybe several—but we don’t know who they are. And there are at least two more in Istanbul.

  “Raymond made captain in the French Foreign Legion before he changed allegiances. Since he seems to travel the most and had the highest military rank, we think he’s the team leader.”

  Raymond’s blond hair was cut to stubble. His eyes were eerily pale in the black-and-white photo, and his face had no excess flesh, making the cheekbones and jaw line severe. Something about his eyes, beyond their strange pallor, worried Drew. Even in flat reproduction, they seemed to have the crackle of static electricity.

  Nathan looked at Zafer. “He knows weapons, explosives, surveillance techniques, hand-to-hand.”

  He slipped another photo out of the folder.

  “This is one of the Istanbul operatives.”

  Drew looked down at a pale man with a thin face, a mustache, and black hair cropped short on the sides but surprisingly long on top; it looked like he used the wind for a comb.

  “Francis Collins, 36, American. A university professor when he’s not employed by the Ecole Biblique. Comparative religion. Paid for college by serving in the Air Force.”

  Nathan closed the folder. “This is all the background information we could gather on these three. We’re working on the others. We think there are a dozen or so hardcore Sicarii. But there are more who do small jobs—surveillance mostly.” He handed the folder to Zafer.

  Zafer nodded appreciatively. “Nice work.”

  “You should also know about the Knights of Malta. Members have to be Catholic, and they have to have a military background. The Knights are a legitimate organization with Permanent Observer status at the United Nations. We think the Sicarii are an elite within the Knights.”

  “They’re recognized by the UN?” Drew asked.

  Nathan nodded. “They have an interesting history. After World War II, quite a few high-ranking Nazis were smuggled out of Germany to Australia, Argentina, Canada, even the US. The Vatican called it Operation Ratline.”

  “In honor of their cargo?”

  “Fitting, but no. A ratline is an old nautical term. It’s a rope ladder that leads to the top of the main mast. It’s the last place a sailor can go when the ship is sinking. Catholic Nazis were provided with Knights of Malta passports and new identities. Reinhard Gehlen, who ran Hitler’s intelligence operations on the eastern front, was flown out of Germany in General Eisenhower’s personal airplane and made an officer in the US Army.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Nathan’s smile was close-lipped and ironic. “I wish I were. But you
have to understand, this was not the Church. This was a handful of men maneuvering secretly within the Vatican, just as a handful of men within the United States’ government operated without President Truman’s knowledge.”

  “Why Nazis are important for us?” Kadir asked.

  “Because you need to know who you’re dealing with. Allen Dulles was a Maltese Knight. He was director of the Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland during World War II. He engineered Gehlen’s escape to the US. William Donovan, another Knight, helped Dulles transform the OSS into the CIA. John McCone, director of the CIA after Dulles, and William Casey, director under President Reagan, were both Knights. For years, CIA Counter Intelligence and the CIA’s Vatican desk were headed by a Knight named James Jesus Angleton.”

  “Jesus? Was his father a preacher?” Drew asked.

  “Not exactly. He grew up in Italy and was assigned to the Rome desk of the OSS after Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943. The Maltese Knights, it just so happens, are headquartered in Rome. Angleton and Dulles funneled millions into the Vatican to make sure Italian communists lost in the elections after World War II, so the Vatican repaid the CIA by opening doors for Nazis desperate to escape Germany and prosecution.” Nathan paused. “Do you understand now?”

  “Yeah,” Zafer said. “The Sicarii don’t recognize national boundaries.”

  “Exactly. A Knight’s first allegiance is to other Knights. You also need to know that the Vatican has its own intelligence service. Worse, Casey not only opened up CIA files to the Vatican, he gave the Vatican access to CIA resources, like satellite reconnaissance. I think it’s safe to assume that the Sicarii are able to log into the CIA’s database. This puts us at a very serious disadvantage.” Nathan tapped the folder Zafer was holding. “This is a show of good faith. All we want is the Habakkuk Scroll.”

  “How much you can pay?” Kadir asked.