The Third Day

I instructed Markowitz and Bryson to keep their eyes on the soldiers to our rear, to warn us if they started to advance. Meanwhile, the rest of us could do nothing but observe the gathering storm to our front, as we racked our brains in search of options.

  Suddenly, Lavon cried out. “That’s Decius! He’s the one in command.”

  Without further discussion, the archaeologist stood up and shouted something my translation software didn’t catch.

  “There’s no use trying to hide our identities,” he said as he turned back to us. “Perhaps we can stall them by negotiating long enough for our return ticket to be validated.”

  This was true enough, and very smart thinking.

  By now, the Romans had advanced to within a hundred feet of our position. There, they paused and lowered their shields to the ground.

  While his men rested, Decius shouted back.

  “Your bravery and skill are worthy of Rome. I heard the governor promise that he will spare your lives.”

  Lavon translated this for us before turning back to the Roman.

  “Will the governor also promise that we will not spend the rest of those lives in slavery?” he replied.

  Decius paused to converse with another optio. After the second man nodded, the Roman turned his eyes back to us.

  “Yes, you will be allowed to go free. We will keep you as prisoners only until the king has gone back to Galilee. Afterwards, you may depart and return to your homes.”

  “Why that long?” Lavon shouted.

  “We must maintain appearances,” said Decius. “Surely you understand?”

  This made sense, though I didn’t relish the thought of spending one second in a Roman dungeon. Governors have been known to change their minds.

  “And our women?” said Lavon. “What of them?”

  “Herod has insisted upon the return of his property. But do not worry: a brave and resourceful man such as yourself will have no difficulty finding others of equal quality.”

  Before Lavon could reply, Naomi leapt up and unleashed a torrent of violent abuse.

  The Romans laughed, at least at first, but this time, I could detect nothing good-natured in her tone. As her tirade continued, several of the soldiers grew visibly angry.

  At last, Naomi ran out of steam and slumped down, dejected, behind the cover of a pile of stones.

  Decius waited for a brief moment, and then spoke, one last time.

  “In recognition of your service to us, I will offer you a final opportunity to surrender peacefully. If you refuse, then my conscience is clear, and the responsibility for your deaths will rest entirely upon your own heads.”

  I glanced back to Bryson’s pendant: still that nasty puke-yellow.

  “Ask him if he’ll let us discuss it among ourselves,” I said. “Tell him we’re all free men, and thus each of us must choose his own individual fate.”

  Lavon did so, and the Roman granted us a momentary reprieve.

  My mind raced as I tried to work out which tactic would provide us with the greatest delay: whether we should demonstrate that we would resist – perhaps causing the soldiers to reconsider their battle plan – or whether we should feign cooperation.

  Though we risked being separated after our capture, my inclination was to go for the latter option.

  “If we fight,” I said to Lavon, “they’ll kill us in short order. You know this.”

  The archaeologist reluctantly agreed, and we both rose slowly, as if to make a grand demonstration of our peaceful intent.

  ***

  Some times in life, we get to make our own choices. On other occasions, despite our most careful calculations, our choices are made for us.

  This became such a moment.

  As we considered Decius’s ultimatum, Lavon and I had focused so single-mindedly on delaying the Romans long enough for the LED to turn green that neither of us recognized that Naomi had reached her final tipping point.

  Before we could stand fully upright to surrender, she cut loose with an unrestrained burst of profanity, berating both the Romans and our own party with equal vigor.

  Her face reflected a volatile mixture of anger and betrayal, and it was only with great difficulty that Lavon managed to prevent her from grabbing a weapon.

  It suddenly dawned on me why.

  “She thinks we’re selling her out!” I shouted.

  She did indeed. Despite Lavon’s best efforts to persuade her to the contrary, he could do nothing but hang on for dear life to prevent her from hurting either him or herself.

  Sharon ran over to help, but by this point, Decius had lost patience. Somewhat reluctantly, he signaled for the dozen men at his side to proceed ahead.

  I took one glance back, where I saw Bryson huddled behind a rock. Then I picked up my sword.

  “Might as well go down fighting,” I said.

  The Romans advanced slowly and methodically, reluctant to take casualties when the result of the engagement seemed so certain.

  “What color, Professor?” I asked.

  “Still yellow,” he muttered. “I don’t know what could be keeping her.”

  He mumbled some other excuses, too, but I had lost any desire to listen. By now, the legionnaires had come to within twenty five yards of our position.

  I called Sharon to come over to my side.

  “Twenty yards!” I cried out.

  Lavon understood, though he continued to wrestle with Naomi. If we timed it just right, we’d have time to fall on our own swords afterward.

  “Fifteen! What color, Professor?”

  Still yellow.

  “Ten!” I shouted, though this time, I did so more to buck up my own courage than to convey any meaningful information.

  I was struggling to keep my eyes open, to look my impending doom square in the face, when a man who had gotten us into so much trouble saved us in the end.

  I heard a shout – really more of a primeval scream – coming from just behind where I stood.

  “You bastards!”

  “Noooo!” yelled Bryson.

  But it was too late.

  One Roman had gone out ahead of his comrades, but the man slipped on a damp stone and fell hard. Immediately upon seeing this, Markowitz rushed forward to take his revenge – his people’s revenge.

  His blow caught the legionnaire squarely in the eye as he rammed the point forward with all his might. Then he yanked the sword back out and screamed for his next opponent just as three others tossed their long javelins.

  At that range, the soldiers could not miss, and what their spears started, they finished with their swords.

  Our party could only stare in shock at the dismal scene. As the Romans resumed their final advance, I reached around to grasp the back of Sharon’s neck.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, as I held up my blade.

  I kept it pointed toward the Romans, hoping to wait until the absolute last infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond to carry out the awful deed that I knew I had to perform.

  ***

  And that was it. The next thing I recalled, the five of us lay sprawled on a smooth white floor. I rolled over, grabbed my weapon, and quickly jumped to my feet, looking left and right, like a wild man ready to pounce.

  It was only then that I realized we had made it home.

  Chapter 66

  I tossed my sword to one side, completely indifferent to any damage I might have done to the polished ceramic floor.

  While I verified that I still possessed the correct number of appendages, all connected in their proper places – a legacy habit from hundreds of low altitude parachute jumps – the sliding panel opened, and Juliet Bryson rushed in to embrace her husband.

  The others just sat on the floor in stunned silence, though they gradually relaxed as they, too, realized that we were no longer in mortal peril.

  Everyone but Naomi, that is. She huddled against Lavon, and her eyes darted back and forth like a panicked animal.

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

>   I reached down to help her up, but she didn’t budge. Instead, she squeezed Lavon even tighter and stared into his eyes with an imploring, questioning gaze.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  Lavon smiled. “We’re back, in our country, as we promised.”

  To no one’s surprise, she remained doubtful, although we had clearly gone somewhere.

  “How did we get here? Where are the soldiers?”

  I didn’t wait for his answer. However Lavon chose to explain it, his response couldn’t be quick.

  Instead, I slid through the open door and continued into the changing room. There, I rummaged through the kit I had left behind and found five bottles of water, a handful of MREs, and a dozen energy bars.

  When I returned to the chamber, I could see that despite Naomi’s remaining uncertainty, Lavon had at least managed to reassure her that we had no intention of abandoning her to the Romans or to Herod’s goons. Sharon’s relaxed attitude also bolstered her confidence that nothing untoward would happen.

  I passed around the MREs, and we attacked the food like ravenous wolves; likewise, we drained the water in seconds. Unlike the rest of our group, though, Naomi did not cast her bottle aside after finishing it. Instead, she slowly rotated it, puzzled by the odd transparent material.

  Lavon tried to explain, but quickly discovered how much background information we take for granted.

  And that wasn’t her only worry.

  “This writing: these are Roman letters.”

  Though she couldn’t read, she recognized the script, and her tone reflected a concern that perhaps we had not escaped trouble after all.

  Lavon took the bottle and examined the label. “Hydro-max Pure Spring Water,” he deadpanned. “Ideally Formulated for Low-Carb Diets.”

  Seriously, it said that.

  We all laughed, and between our amusement and the wildly varying typefaces on the bottle, Lavon managed to convince her that we had left our pursuers far behind.

  To make things even more interesting for her, I reached into my bag and pulled out another surprise.

  I handed her a flashlight, and Lavon directed her to press the large yellow on-switch.

  She fumbled it in sudden alarm the first time, but after she saw us laugh, she picked it back up and switched it on and off, over and over again. As she did so, her expression shifted from a tentative apprehension to open delight.

  “Light, without fire,” Lavon explained. “Did I not promise that if you helped us, you would see wonders beyond your imagination?”

  She barely acknowledged his reply. Instead, she continued to flip the switch on and off and to dance the beam across the room. The effect was like watching a small child who had just unwrapped the hottest new toy.

  This would be fun.

  A few seconds later, Naomi focused the light on me, with a huge, playful smile on her face.

  “Welcome to our world,” I said. “And to America, a magnificent country, where the food is fat free but the people are not.”

  Lavon flashed his best smile as he translated, though he skipped the last part. Some things just couldn’t be explained.

  I was certain she would adapt over time. I could only hope that she would have a more peaceful experience in our country than we had had in hers.

  ***

  And that brought us back to our unfinished business.

  Juliet had finally overcome the initial shock of seeing her husband, once again alive and well, and she glanced around the room to assess us more carefully.

  Her head count came up two short.

  “Where are Ray and Scott?” she asked.

  “Dead,” I replied, without any real emotion in my voice. “It’s a long story.”

  She gasped, although she couldn’t have been completely surprised at the news. When we failed to return after a brief interval, she had to have suspected that our endeavor had run into unexpected difficulties, if not outright disaster.

  After a moment’s silence, her husband whispered something into her ear. Whatever he said was instantly reassuring; for she recovered her composure and gestured toward Naomi for the first time.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “She helped us,” said Lavon. “It will take some time to explain how.”

  ***

  The Professor spent the next half hour outlining the basics of our excursion. Finally, though, the rest of us grew impatient. The moment of truth had arrived.

  Juliet led us into the conference room, and after a brief pause for Naomi to grow comfortable with wall-mounted light switches and overhead projectors, we all settled into the chairs closest to the drop-down screen.

  By that point, I wasn’t sure who was more nervous. Although Naomi might not have understood the intricacies of how we commanded light to appear on a whim, she also had no conception of the infinitely more transcendent mystery that Bryson’s device was about to reveal.

  I, for one, felt a veritable swarm of butterflies emerge from their cocoons in my stomach as Juliet booted up the computer. From the others’ expressions, I could see that they did as well.

  The screen displayed the familiar blue backdrop while the Professor hooked his camera to the machine. When he finished, he glanced around the room and we all took a deep breath.

  “Here we go,” he said.

  Then he pressed ‘play.’

  As with his earlier venture, the screen first displayed only the date and time: 2029 04 15; 02 30 00.

  Bryson started to explain that the camera’s date couldn’t be set before the year 1950, but we had already gotten the idea: Sunday, April 15, of the year 29 AD, at two-thirty in the morning.

  A few seconds later, we could begin to make out the tomb in the full moonlight. A Temple guardsman, dressed in full uniform with his right hand resting on the hilt of his sword, stood on each side of the entrance.

  “That’s the tomb?” exclaimed Juliet.

  We all mumbled our concurrence without taking our eyes off the screen. The guards weren’t moving around much, though it was obvious that neither man was asleep.

  “Where did you get caught?” I asked Bryson.

  “I tried to sneak up behind the location where I placed the camera,” he said, admitting for the first time what we had suspected: that his real goal had been to witness the event in person.

  “But I had the bad luck to run into the spot where the relief crew was taking a break,” he continued.

  Personally, I thought he had become disoriented in the twists and turns of the quarry’s many trails, but whatever had really transpired, it was no longer our primary concern.

  We all kept our full attention focused on the image on the screen, though for nearly an hour, very little happened.

  The guards appeared to chat back and forth – undoubtedly complaining, like soldiers everywhere, about why they got stuck standing out in the cold all night while their colleagues dozed comfortably in their beds.

  But their voices were too low and the camera too far away for the microphone to pick up enough details for Naomi to translate.

  2029 04 15; 03 27 42

  A few minutes later, we saw the first real movement. The initial two guards stepped away from their posts as two others took their places.

  “Shift change, by the look of it,” said Lavon.

  The same relative inactivity continued as before, though, and I couldn’t help but chuckle as the others grew restless. Ordinary sentry detail remained as boring as it ever was, two millennia later. Some things truly never changed.

  2029 04 15; 04 08 17

  “When does it start getting light?” asked Sharon.

  Juliet had printed out a sunrise/sunset table and read out the numbers.

  “Nautical twilight begins at 4:17. Civil twilight, the time when dawn first begins to break, starts at 4:46.”

  Upon hearing this, my butterflies began to leap around in a renewed burst of activity. For that matter, everyone’s did. Whatever was going to happen would do so
very soon.

  2029 04 15; 04 16 52

  Though the guards remained at their posts, they suddenly perked up, and one of them noticed something to his left. He craned his head and called out to his colleagues.

  Then suddenly, we saw a brilliant white flash – and then nothing at all.

  ***

  The rest of us stared at the screen in silence as Bryson rewound, then replayed, then rewound, then replayed the last couple of minutes, over and over.

  Each time the result was the same, and when he repeated the drill in slow motion, we could see no discernable difference.

  To a believer, what we had just witnessed could represent the incredible surge of energy that accompanied the resurrection, or the brilliance of glowing angels, afire with God’s power.

  To those taking the other side, it could be the result of an unknown quantum effect that altered the device’s memory during our return to the present. Or, perhaps, the flash could have derived from the more mundane possibility of an equipment malfunction, or even a guard moving a torch too close to the camera’s primary lens.

  What was clear, was that the recording wouldn’t convince anyone either way.

  From the very beginning, it had been matter of faith.

  It always would be.

  Epilogue

  Eighteen months later

  I glanced down at the directions Lavon had emailed a few days earlier and then back over to my map, curious once more as to the reason he insisted that I drive eight hours without knowing exactly why.

  In truth, though, I didn’t really mind.

  I had some time on my hands, and no more financial concerns, either, courtesy of the Brysons, who had mourned the loss of their brilliant student – and who worked out a plan to get him back.

  Their scheme was straightforward enough. It called for me to return to our original cave just a few minutes before we had “landed” on our earlier journey. As long as the Professor remained in Boston, he couldn’t simultaneously appear in Judea to bowl over his assistant and knock him silly.

  I would therefore have a brief window to pull the kid to safety before the Romans turned him into a pincushion. As an additional bonus, I could pull Markowitz out of the cave, too.