[Betrayed 01.0] 30 Pieces of Silver

by Carolyn McCray

  The old man tried to shake his head, but it caused him to swallow his own blood. Choking and sputtering, Lochum looked near death.

  “Turn him on his side!” Brandt yelled from the tunnel. He still fired into the darkness.

  She did as instructed, and the professor finally coughed up a pool of clotted blood. Nearly retching herself, Rebecca realized her veil was already soaked through. Ripping the yoke from her collar, she used the thicker cloth to stanch the wound.

  “He was—” Another jagged cough rattled his thin frame. She hadn’t realized how frail he had become until now. “We’re not looking—”

  This time Rebecca feared he wouldn’t stop choking, then Brandt was suddenly at her side, clapping the professor hard on the back until Lochum gagged, then fell quiet.

  “I was just trying to immobilize him, Rebecca…” The sergeant looked as distraught as she felt. “To keep him away from the Knot. I never thought they would…”

  Rebecca couldn’t take time to comfort Brandt. Lochum was fading.

  “It’s okay, Archibald. Just rest. Lopez will patch you right up.”

  She smoothed his normally wild white hair back, but by now it was matted with sweat and blood. He would be devastated if he knew how he looked. Old and crumpled.

  As Lochum’s breaths came in shorter and shorter gasps, she looked over at Brandt, but he shook his head. There was nothing else they could do.

  Tears overflowing, Rebecca indicated toward the tunnel opening. “You better check the hallway.”

  The sergeant was about to argue, but then nodded curtly, giving her the time with Lochum that she needed.

  Ever so carefully, Rebecca rested her mentor’s head in her lap, cleaning the blood from his lips. The wound wasn’t gushing the way it used to, but she knew that wasn’t a good sign. Lochum simply didn’t have any more blood to pump.

  “You were…” She almost couldn’t get the words out. To go from thinking she had a hand in killing him only to have him brought back to her, then snatched away, ravaged her heart. Rebecca honestly didn’t know how much more of this she could take.

  “Archibald, you were my first…” She had planned to tell him how much he had meant to her academic career. To her understanding of proto-Christianity. But instead these words came out. “You were my first great love, Lochum. I owe you more than you could ever know.”

  The struggle went out of his face. He was too weak to respond. He couldn’t even smile at her, but she could see the impact of her words in his eyes. It had been decades since he had looked at her like that.

  His breath became just a rattle. Maybe he would go peacefully, Rebecca hoped, then his eyes flew open as he struggled to take in oxygen. The wound was barely oozing. Knowing she couldn’t do anything more, Rebecca just held him close as he took in his last breath then, with a hiss, air flowed out of his chest of its own accord.

  Lochum was dead.

  And she couldn’t stop crying.

  * * *

  Brandt could hear Rebecca sobbing, but didn’t know what he could do. The enemy had fled, but for how long? She had her grief, but he had equally weighty matters.

  Like how the hell were they going to get out of here? Do they go back the way they had come and wait until nightfall to exit into the census office? Then what? Find a change of clothes, hide out all night inside the Palace, then slip out with the morning crowds? That was too much hiding for Brandt’s taste.

  Or do they follow the tunnel that Petir and Tok had vanished down? The shorter man seemed injured, but Brandt didn’t think he had even hit him. Plus, they flushed way too easily. Was it a trap? Would they get halfway down the black hallway, only to have it collapse on them? Neither option sounded very palatable.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Rebecca was still huddled over Lochum’s body, covered in the older man’s blood. Behind her, the marble slab was empty.

  Empty.

  An image flashed of Svengurd face down in the water. For what?

  Anger swelled and got him moving. The corporal’s death wasn’t going to be for nothing. Not if he and Rebecca were still breathing.

  “Get up,” he ordered, but she just continued sobbing. “Damn it, Rebecca. Look at me.”

  His voice must have penetrated her shroud of tears. She had to blink twice before he felt she could really see him.

  “Figure it out,” Brandt said.

  “Figure out what?” she asked. Her throat was thick with grief.

  Brandt looked toward the empty table. “Where he went.”

  “He’s not here. What else does it matter?”

  Brandt knelt next to her. “You promised him, Rebecca.”

  “Oh, don’t even,” she hissed. “His quest died with him.”

  “It might have, but you’ve still got the Knot hanging over your head.”

  “Whatever,” Rebecca spit out, but he knew her too well already.

  “Bullshit, you said it yourself. We find Christ, or you’re dead. Now get up.” Tugging Rebecca to her feet, Brandt noted that the doctor didn’t exactly rise on her own, but neither did she resist his help. “What the hell happened here? Did the Knot take the body, or was it removed long ago?”

  Rebecca wiped her eyes with the back of her hand since her palms were soaked in blood. Before answering him, she circled the marble table, bending over so that her face was level with the slab. She blew, and dust lifted from the surface, then drifted back down in the wan light given off by an abandoned flashlight.

  “No, the Knot didn’t take him,” she finally concluded.

  “When was he removed?” Brandt demanded.

  When she looked up, her hand was on her hip. With the same set to her lips as she had in Ecuador. “You know what? Why don’t you worry about how you are going to get out of here and leave the archaeology to me?”

  With a tight grin, Brandt turned toward the tunnel, satisfied they were in good hands.

  The bitch was back.

  * * *

  Rebecca studied the slab, anger burning through her veins. She knew that had been Brandt’s intent, to turn her grief into tangible energy, but she wasn’t mad at him.

  She was mad at Lochum. After extracting her from Ecuador, the bastard had co-opted her own quest for his own. He had entangled her in a messy, bloody battle that she wanted no part of, and now with him gone, her life hung in the balance. Even though Lochum hadn’t slit his own neck, the professor had set the knife to his throat by helping the Knot.

  The old fool. They didn’t respect him. They had used him.

  Clearly he had made the same connection between the silver coins and the Roman mint as she had. Then not only had Lochum divined another path to the crypt, which didn’t surprise her given his in-depth knowledge of ancient Rome, but shared it with Tok. Her old professor had done the Knot’s heavy lifting for them.

  But with his body only a few feet away and not yet cold, Rebecca felt a tinge of guilt. Lochum was Lochum. There had not been one like him, and there never would be again.

  Sighing, realizing there was nothing of value to the pedestal, Rebecca turned to the walls. Before, when there was gunfire flashing and blood spraying, she hadn’t noticed the raw quality to the artwork. The murals were in the style of the era when Jerusalem had fallen to Rome, yet the strokes were not as refined. Almost as if there was a rage behind them.

  The abstract-style brushstroke would not flourish for a millennium, yet many of these images were incomplete. But at the same time, the unfinished nature seemed to be the painter’s purpose.

  Rebecca squinted at one panel, which represented the return of Jesus from his trials in the desert. At first, she thought the man standing beside Christ was his brother James, but then realized her mistake when she read the scrawled Latin. The man so close to Jesus was Judas.

  Her mistake was not without precedence. There were numerous contemporary accounts, mostly in the Gnostic Gospels, that the savior and his betrayer were as close as brothers and even looked the part.

/>   Many scholars used Jesus’ and James’ dissimilar features to strengthen their belief that Mary was a perpetual virgin. That she and Joseph never had sex and never gave birth to other children. These detractors asserted that anytime the Bible stated that Jesus had brothers and sisters, they were in fact just cousins.

  Lochum had scoffed at such theories. The Bible was pretty clear. Jesus had siblings. Blood siblings. And this painting supported that notion as James stood nearby and was described clearly to be the brother of Christ with no disclaimers. Another figure, a little boy, was identified as Ameil. Now she had a face to put with the name on the Knot’s roll call, but still didn’t know who the child was, or his significance.

  At the bottom of the picture, like an artist’s signature, was the symbol of the Knot. The image so similar to the Buddhist Love Knot that it had condemned Svengurd.

  But she couldn’t think like that. Instead, beneath the symbol was the name James. Not surprising. She glanced around the room to find another twenty-nine Knot symbols with the name of one of the conspirators under it. She pulled the list she had transcribed from Magdalene’s bones and found it confirmed here. All members of the Knot.

  But the intriguing fact was that under the primary member’s name was a list of another dozen or so people. Rebecca was reminded of Tok’s cryptic statement. “The Knot is but a tangling of threads, not without their frayed ends.”

  Before it had been an interesting theoretical concept, but now seeing the names scrawled on the walls with their sect’s followers, it became tangible. Names were listed such as Perl the Menter, Simon of Butin, and many, many more.

  Much as John the Baptist and Jesus had their own congregation, these thirty had a personal cult that traveled down through the centuries—acting independently of the Knot. It had been John’s sect that had bombed Paris. Might she be dealing with a similar situation?

  Which brought her to “the man without contempt,” the man who stole Christ from the Virgin, the man who carried Jesus to his final resting place. Perhaps he was listed here. Maybe she could divine if he moved the body and why. But when she searched the wall she found the moniker, “the man with contempt.”

  With contempt? Was it a misspelling? The penmanship might be frantic, but it was bold and precise. When had the man found contempt? What had happened?

  That’s when it hit her. Jesus’ body had not been moved in antiquity, or stolen, or destroyed.

  Christ had never been here at all.

  * * *

  Out of the corner of his eye, Brandt saw Rebecca stumble backward into the marble slab, clutching it to stay upright. Fearful an occult injury was rising to the surface as her adrenaline waned, the sergeant rushed over.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She pushed his worried hands away. “He was never here.”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus.” Rebecca looked into his eyes. “The man who hid him lied.”

  Brandt was totally confused. “What man and what lie?”

  “The man with contempt…”

  He grabbed her shoulders. “Rebecca, you’ve got to tune in. Catch me up.”

  Her eyes seemed to refocus. “Okay, you know the bones’ inscriptions hold clues to where the next set of remains is hidden. With me?”

  “Yeah. John to Magdalene to Mary to Jesus.”

  Rebecca took a deep breath, seeming to get her wind back. “But I just realized that those clues are not necessarily linear.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Clearly frustrated, the doctor drew images of the different bones in the dust covering the slab. “Just because something is transcribed onto John’s bones does not mean it relates to finding Magdalene’s body, and so forth.”

  “Then what does it relate to?”

  Making lines that intersected the different bones, she brought the lines together at a nexus. “To finding Jesus’ body. Not even Mary’s bones contain all the clues necessary to find Christ. You need to piece together many clues from the other bones as well.”

  Brandt nodded. “Got it. It’s a multidimensional puzzle.”

  “Exactly. So I went over all the clues in my mind and realized that some of the statements I thought related to Magdalene’s bones actually referred to Christ and that…”

  The sergeant waited for a breath, then another, but Rebecca didn’t answer, so he finished for her, “That the man who was entrusted with carrying Jesus lied to the Knot?”

  “Which I should have suspected. I mean, he agreed to take the bones with Mary, but lied. In the dark of night he stole the bones and was gone for years. When he returned he told them that he buried them here, but he didn’t. He lied again.”

  “But he’s a member of the Knot, right? Why would he lie to them?”

  Rebecca pointed to a name on the wall. “He found contempt.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  She looked into his eyes. “The Knot. For some reason they pissed him off, but royally. He took the bones and hid them from everyone. Even built this false crypt in case anyone came looking.”

  Brandt felt like stumbling back, but not out of disappointment like Rebecca, but out of relief. Christ was safely hidden away. “So we have no way of finding Jesus?”

  He might have been relieved, but she looked crushed. Brandt pulled her into his arms. “It’s okay. The Knot knows the same thing. Whatever they were so desperately hiding is safe. They can crawl back into their hole. You’re off the hook. We can come in from the cold.”

  But for all his reassurance, Rebecca still cried. He stroked her hair, murmuring comforting words, but Brandt’s mind was racing. It now made sense why Tok had made such a hasty retreat. There was no reason to linger. The chamber was useless. Which meant he and Rebecca were safe to follow their path out. Why bother springing a trap when there was nothing left to trap?

  Therefore they could reconvene with his team, call for an extraction, get a good night’s sleep, and be home by this same time tomorrow.

  He kissed the top of her head. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Rebecca didn’t put up much resistance to being guided from the room until they passed Lochum’s body. “Help me.”

  “I know you don’t want to just leave him here, but we can’t risk carrying a body—”

  “Just help me,” she said in a tone that made him take the professor’s limp body into his arms as Rebecca prompted, “Over here.”

  As she indicated the slab, Brandt realized what she was doing.

  The world thought the professor dead. There would be no one to attend his funeral, even if the government allowed one. Why not leave him here? In a chamber created to house a great man?

  Rebecca was right. With the Vatican overhead, Lochum would be in good company.

  The Betrayal

  Jerusalem

  AD 42

  Judas laughed easily at Peter’s good-humored jest that Thomas did not believe that Magdalene’s haroset had been made from fresh figs until he tasted it himself. This was the best of Passover Seders. The lamb was tender and fragrant, filling the spacious room with the scent of God’s love. The tishpishti, always his favorite, was soaked in the most flavorful honey. His only disappointment was that Ameil was not present.

  With both the Romans and the Temple priests frowning upon Jesus’ presence in Jerusalem this Passover, Kyle had feared a raid. Judas had assured his brother-in-law that the location was well kept from prying eyes, but Kyle had taken the boy to his cousin’s home in Bethany for the Seder.

  For once in the longest time, the Twelve were well suited. The tension of the arduous trek to the Holy City seemed to melt as Mary’s butter did over her pastella, for Jesus was alive. His ministry bloomed as the growing number of pilgrims for the holiday flocked to his sermons, yet still no arrest. So as savory as the lamb tasted, their mouth watered for freedom. Tomorrow, as the crowds drained from Jerusalem, so did the threat.

  “More haroset?” Magdalene asked.

  His belly was full of th
e kaftes and artichokes, so he declined. “Your meal has been too bountiful. I can take no more.”

  But the woman seemed unsettled by his words. “Did you not find the almonds crushed to your liking?

  Judas felt near to bursting, but he did not wish to disappoint Magdalene. Taking a slice of the unleavened loaf, Judas dipped the corner into the thick jam. “Thanks be to you.”

  Magdalene nodded as Mary entered with the symbolic fifth glass of wine. They had already drunk the fourth chalice to commemorate God’s promise of Redemption. This fifth was meant for the prophet Elijah so when he returned to earth he might drink to declare God’s final salvation.

  The table quieted as she stood before Jesus. Mary looked hesitant, but her son nodded solemnly. With great care, the mother of Christ laid the cup down in front of her son. She then kissed the decanter of wine and filled the chalice.

  Judas had been to many Seders and had never seen this ritual. The glass was normally set before an empty seat. Jesus surveyed those on either side of the table, then brought the cup to his lips.

  But before drinking, he dipped a bit of coarse bread in the haroset, then ate it. “This is my body.” Then to the amazement of all, Christ drank the holy wine meant for Elijah. “This is my blood.”

  The others were in various states of rapture. For months now the Twelve had begged the Savior to embrace his heritage and announce to all that he was Elijah reborn, but Judas felt a weight settle upon his heart, for he knew this proclamation heralded only pain.

  Judas glanced to James, whose lips were set in a straight, unyielding line. This act bode poorly. Jesus was not awaiting Rome or Herod to act, but signaled for himself the beginning of the end. The high priests would never tolerate one who claimed to be Elijah to walk amongst them. Their retribution would be swift and cruel.

  Jesus raised a hand to quiet the assembly for his tone was somber. “Before this night is banished by the dawn, one of you will betray me.”

  As voices rose in protest, Judas sought James’ gaze. What did his brother mean? But James would not meet his stare, instead the taller man’s eyes bored into Christ.