by Chuck Dixon
The dark-haired student priest stepped along with the Nazoreans, offering prayers and comforting words. He walked with the village ledger beneath his arm.
The prisoners were brought into the Roman camp. The tents had been struck to create an open space. The men and boys were gathered at the center with soldiers standing at ease about them. A table was brought from the prefect’s tent and set up with a camp chair for Titus Brocious, the prefect’s new lictor, to sit. The ledger was taken from the young priest by the tribune and offered to the lictor, who opened it to the current tally of male villagers with their birth dates marked in a column by their names. The young priest stood at his side, offering assistance with the pronunciation of names and the numbers of the obtuse Jewish calendar. Lictor Titus had a sheet of vellum prepared to set down his own tally of the captives.
The prefect remained in his tent with his boys. Purpurio wondered if he was awake even though the sun was climbing to its highest point.
Names were called and written on the vellum sheet in Titus’s careful hand. The soldiers were spelled by ranks and allowed a cup of watered vinegar and a handful of dried fruit. The tribune sipped diluted wine poured by his aquilifer. It was as tedious a process as Purpurio had anticipated.
At the end, after the last name was called and the final Jew had stepped forward, there was a discrepancy of six names between the ledger and the freshly penned list on the lictor’s sheet.
The young priest was questioned but had no answers.
The tribune summoned old Bachus forward and told him to take three centuries into the town and find the six fugitives. The prisoners were ordered to sit on the ground. The remaining soldiers stood guard over them, leaning on shields and speaking quietly. The young priest was in agitated conversation with the lictor. Troublesome damned Jews, thought Purpurio, and repaired to his tent until Bachus returned with the slackers.
The troops dispatched to the town returned at sundown with only four of the missing six. Bachus reported that they indeed found all the fugitives but were forced to kill two as they resisted capture. A third man and a woman were killed as well when they protested the taking of their son. Bachus candidly added that the town was in a bit of an uproar since their young men were taken. The soldiers left under a hail of stones thrown by some of the town’s children. The centurion decided to withdraw his men rather than make an issue of it.
“Best that you did,” Purpurio agreed. “You’d be half the night pursuing the little bastards through that labyrinth. And even then not come up with one of them.”
“Aye, sir.” Bachus nodded. “What of the four we found?”
“Ligatures for them,” the tribune sniffed. “They’ll be the first to die.”
The four miscreant Jews were dragged before the others and strangled with bowstrings until their tongues turned black and legs ceased kicking. A moan of terror rose amongst the Jews, and they backed from the executions until halted by the spear points at their spines.
“What is this?” The young priest rushed forward spouting his atrocious Latin.
“What did you think this was?” Purpurio snarled. “I told you they were not to be conscripted. To what other purpose do you think we would put this filthy lot? They are to be executed.”
“By whose order? What have they done?” the young priest cried, turning to the lictor crossing six names from his list with the stroke of a stylus.
“It is by order of the prefect Gratus, and therefore the Syrian legate, and through him the command of Tiberius Rex himself!” Purpurio said heatedly.
“I would speak with this prefect!” the young priest proclaimed.
“What is your name, Jew?” the lictor asked, stylus poised above vellum.
“I am Yusef Kayifas.”
The lictor spelled the name as best he could at the bottom of his tally.
Joseph Caiaphas.
Titus wished to recall the name of this Jew. He was intelligent yet pliable, qualities valuable in the law and politics. A political Jew of some standing might be of use one day to Titus either in his service as lictor or in any higher post he sought.
“I am of the priestly course of the Sadducees, and so passively interested in the affairs of Rome. I offer no offense other than to ask for what crime these men will be murdered!” Kayifas demanded.
“Executed,” came a quavering voice.
Valerius Gratus exited his tent, walking like a man twice his age. His eyes shone black as polished ebony, and his skin appeared like candle-lit parchment in the failing sun.
“They are to be executed for crimes against the Empire,” Gratus said, stepping up to Kayifas and holding himself in a parody of the decorum expected from a man of his station.
“What crimes?” Kayifas demanded.
“They are Jews. And Jews cause no end of trouble. These will be done away with as a reprisal for those crimes; as an object lesson in the dangers of defying the will of Tiberius and all who hold his imprimatur.” Gratus’s voice trailed away at the end into a wracking cough.
“But execution.” Kayifas stepped closer to the prefect. Purpurio made to grab the Jew’s arm but Gratus waved him away.
“Allow him to speak, Tribune. These Jews provide me distraction with all their talk, and his accent is amusing for now.” Gratus tittered. “Tell us, Jew. What alternative do you offer?”
“They might be sold as slaves,” Kayifas offered. “Near a hundred able young men you hold here. They are worth a fortune to flesh traders.”
Gratus’s eyes swam in his head at this. He put a hand to the back of the lictor’s chair to steady himself.
The wily young Jew had discerned the weakness in their prefect, Purpurio realized. He suspected this current action was motivated by payment of some kind. Now Gratus’s mind was whirling with the possibility of compounding the graft in his purse with the sale of these captives.
“You speak well and you speak plain, Jew.” Gratus nodded slowly. “I will sleep upon this decision. These prisoners live until morning at the very least. We shall see with the sun’s rise whether my mercy will be further strained.”
With that, the cagey old pedophile stumbled back to his tent.
Kayifas turned to the huddled men and spoke honeyed words. Each man dropped to his knees, keening prayers in their mongrel language until shouted into silence by Bachus. The soldiers laughed at this. Purpurio ordered the prisoners be hobbled with lengths of rope and be fed a single bowl of watered gruel. A full watch would be kept that night to prevent escape.
Late the following morning, prefect Gratus stepped from his tent to pronounce that the captives would be marched across Galilee to the slave market in Philippi. Three centuries of the Twenty-third would take them there, along with the lictor Titus to see to the sale. Those men would be paid a bonus from the proceeds of the sale with the balance going into the coffers of the prefecture. The remainder of the legion, under the command of the tribune Purpurio, would see the prefect and entourage safely back to his palace.
The young prisoners—tanners, metalsmiths, orchard workers, students, and carpenters—were unhobbled and marched from the camp under guard to follow the road north to Syria and slavery.
The prefect watched the growing dust cloud with what Purpurio thought was a fragile smile of avarice.
8
The Ocean Raj, Somewhere South of Cyprus
Morris Tauber was incredulous at the level of credulity his sister expected from him.
“You expect me to believe this?” He laughed.
“With everything we’ve been through the past year,
I would have expected you to have a more open mind,” Caroline said.
“Having an open mind doesn’t mean I can’t still be analytical, Sis. I can be broad-minded and still know sheer insanity when I hear it.”
“Samuel saved us from those Harnesh guys who took us to the future. To the future, Mo! You believe that, right?”
“I believe it. As incredible as it is, that’s the only e
xplanation that makes sense.”
“It’s not an explanation,” Dwayne put in. “It happened. To us. In the future.”
They were down in Morris’s lab below decks aboard the Ocean Raj. It was fashioned from the walls of Conex containers and reinforced by girders welded in place by the ship’s crew. To any casual inspection, the main deck and holds below were filled with stacks of the steel cargo containers. But they formed a shell that covered a multi-level lab complex including a control center, mainframe computer cold room, a shielded mini-reactor, and the large chamber where the Tauber Tube rested around its raised walkway.
While the rest of the team vanished to the four corners of the world, Dr. Tauber remained on board to take advantage of the solitude to fine tune the time-challenging device he and his little sister had created. And, in any case, someone with the know-how needed to keep an eye on the mini-reactor had to be on hand. Parviz and Quebat, the ex-pat Iranians with a fatwa on their heads, were taking a train tour of Scandinavia. Morris monitored their stolen nuclear device.
The big container ship was anchored in international waters well away from the shipping lanes. Boats and his mostly Ethiopian crew were here as well and collecting their paychecks doing light maintenance and spending the rest of their days loafing.
“So, Samuel knows things, Mo,” Caroline said. “He’s from the future. He’s seen stuff we can’t imagine, and he already knows how the movie ends if we don’t act.”
“If he can travel through time so easily, then why doesn’t he do this himself? Why does he need the help of a bunch of wildcat treasure hunters?” Morris said and took at a seat at his computer console and began fiddling with connections inside a CPU tower he’d taken apart.
Caroline grabbed the seat back and yanked him away from the console. She spun him in the chair and leaned on the arms to put her face inches from his.
“We’re off the grid, brother. Our movements through space and time are unaccounted for by Sir Neal and his people. They know about Samuel, and it’s all he can do to stay one step ahead of them. I’m not asking you to believe anything. But this is major, or I wouldn’t be asking you to set it up. It’s important, and we need to do it.”
“But those men on Rhodes who took you and Dwayne,” Morris said quietly. “They knew about us.”
“And they’re dead,” Dwayne said. “For them, the trail went cold right there. That timeline is a dead end for Harnesh and his group. We are still off their radar.”
“Have you asked the other Rangers if they want to involve themselves in this? There’s no treasure this time,” Morris said.
“We haven’t put it to them yet.” Dwayne shrugged. “But they have plenty of cash. They might agree to a freebie. I know Jimmy will. He’s still disappointed he bailed on our last outing.”
“Well, we still have operating capital. So, if you can convince the others...” Morris said.
“I love you, bro!” Caroline leaned closer and kissed him on the forehead.
“Only because I always give in to you eventually,” he said as she stood up, releasing his chair to roll back.
“It’s the basis of our relationship.” She grinned.
“If this Samuel really knows about future events, did you ask him any questions?” Morris asked.
“Like what?” Dwayne said.
“Like whether Sis is having a boy or a girl.”
With a groan, Dwayne smacked himself on the forehead.
9
Bern, Switzerland
The guys agreed to meet Dwayne in Bern, and Caroline finally agreed to check into the private clinic there.
“I don’t like hospitals,” she said.
“It’s more like a resort, babe,” he assured her. “You put your feet up and concentrate on making our baby.”
“I like making our baby, but I don’t want to be babied,” she said before he left her in the lobby in the care of a concierge.
“Give it a chance. I’ll be back in three hours,” he promised and went back to the limo.
After being shown around her private suite, a needle hot shower followed by a massage, a pedicure, and a lunch of fruit cup, mahi-mahi bruschetta, and herb tea, Caroline decided that being babied wasn’t so bad after all.
Lee Hammond booked the Rangers a sub-basement conference room at Von Spettenfried Privatbanc, a very, very private bank in the city. None of them had an account there, but the bank’s state-of-the-science secure meeting rooms could be rented at ten thousand euros a day. The intense privacy that was once guaranteed by Swiss banks was being slowly eroded by world intelligence agencies and changing finance laws in the United States and other cash-starved world economies. So a lot of the banks were adding to their bottom line by monetizing their greatest asset: secrecy. They opened their super-shielded offices and meeting rooms to high-roller consumers who wanted the nature and attendees of their meetings kept from prying eyes and ears. “You can never be too careful,” was their unspoken motto.
The four former Rangers took seats around the black-granite-topped table in the windowless room blasted from Alpine bedrock. Bottles of Bitburger Pilsner were chilling in a silver ice bucket on a banquet. A platter of cold meat and cheeses and a selection of breads lay by it.
Dwayne laid out the mission for them. “Holy shit,” James “Jimbo” Smalls said.
Chaz Raleigh spat out a mouthful of his sandwich. “This sounds like a clusterfuck in the making,” Lee said.
“We’re in the right place at the right time,” Dwayne said. “We’re the only ones who can make this happen.”
“Sounds like the wrong place and the way-wrong time to me,” Lee said.
“I’m in,” Chaz said after a swallow of beer.
“You are?” Lee looked at him, wide-eyed. “That easy?”
“You ask me if I want to go back and save Jesus,” Chaz said. “Yeah, I want to go back and save Jesus.”
“Then why not just go back and pull him down off the cross?” Lee said.
“I take you’ve never read the Bible,” Chaz said. “I read Bill O’Reilly’s book. Does that count?”
“No.”
“I’ll make this plain,” Dwayne cut in. “This Sir Neal, the same fucker who nearly had me and Caroline killed, has his own version of the Tauber Tube. He’s using it to change the rules. His people are going back in time and affecting key events. Or that appears to be the strategy, anyhow.”
“So how does someone kidnapping teenaged Jesus change things?” Lee asked.
“Samuel doesn’t think it’s a kidnapping. He thinks it was supposed to be murder, but there was some kind of fuckery, and Sir Neal didn’t get what he paid for,” Dwayne said.
“Okay,” Lee said, waving a hand before him. ”This Samuel guy. He’s from the future? He knows all this shit for sure? Like it’s already happened and he’s reading it in yesterday’s newspaper. How can we believe all this?”
“Do you believe me? Do you believe me and Caroline entered the field and then showed up four days later in Rhodes with Caroline six months pregnant?”
Lee raised his hands in surrender.
“You may be an agnostic on all this, Lee. But Jesus Christ did exist. And even if you don’t buy the son of God thing, you have to admit that the man influenced the world. A lot. And taking him out of the picture before he’s twenty-one means he doesn’t walk the road he was supposed to and none of what we know about him ever happened.”
“So, no Christmas or Easter,” Lee said.
“You can’t be this dumb, man,” Chaz said with some heat. “Jesus changed the world. We’d still be worshipping trees and shit. There’d be no Christianity or America or nothing. I don’t want to live in that world, bro. I won’t live in that world if there’s something I can do about it.”
“Okay, if this is the real messiah then wouldn’t his father be intervening here to make it right?” Lee said. “You telling me this Harnesh guy is fucking with God’s plan? And getting away with it?”
“Maybe w
e’re part of God’s plan,” Dwayne said.
“Avenging angels.” Chaz smiled.
“We’re on a mission from God,” Jimbo proclaimed, speaking for only the second time since the mission was sketched out. “Elwood Blues, right?”
“Whatever changes get made, they’ll make a world where Sir Neal calls the shots,” Dwayne said. “Whatever this is and whatever it means, it’s what that fucker wants. That can’t be good for anyone, and particularly not us.”
“It hasn’t changed, has it? We’re sitting here talking about Jesus right now,” Lee said.
“Because there’s still time to change what happened,” Dwayne said and lifted a laptop onto the table and opened it. “But there’ll be a point where it’s too late to fix what’s broken.”
“We know this how?” Lee asked.
“Samuel. It’s all way over my head but, the way he explains it, time doesn’t act in the cause-and-effect way that we think it does,” Dwayne said as he tapped keys. “He said that traveling back in time is like lifting a sheet from a bed and dropping it back in place. The sheet’s in the same position and the fabric is the same, but the wrinkles are different.”
The three men regarded Dwayne with blank expressions.
“Yeah, I don’t get it either.”
“Shit, as long as you promise to stop trying to explain it, I’m in too.” Lee shrugged. “Color me curious.”
“Jimbo?” Dwayne said to the silent Pima nursing a beer at the end of the table.
“And miss a second chance to play gladiator?” Jimbo grinned. “No fucking way, Maximus.”
Dwayne turned the laptop so they could see the screen.
“This is our area of operations.” Dwayne stood to touch the screen and bring up details. “Our rescue target should still be in transit from here to here.” His finger touched the screen to highlight a winding north/south road that stretched from what was now northern Israel and into southern Lebanon.