The Copper Scroll

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  * * *

  Bennett knew he had to move quickly.

  He rummaged through the closet looking for a weapon, but all he found were clothes Mordechai hadn’t worn in years and would never wear again. He scanned the guest room but found nothing. The kitchen was on the other side of the house—with knives, a meat cleaver—but he’d never reach it in time. He glanced into the hallway. No one was there. He slid off his shoes, then eased open the guest-room door and worked his way toward the great room, terrified of making a sound and drawing gunfire he couldn’t return. He found no one there or on the stairs. Nor could he see anyone outdoors on the deck overlooking the Old City. For the moment, at least, the coast was clear.

  He made his move, darting behind one of the leather couches and then working his way around to the fireplace. There he stopped for a moment to slow his breathing. He could hear one of the intruders probing room by room. Whoever it was, he obviously had never been in the house before, Bennett realized. He had no idea about the secret elevator. Was that where Erin had gone?

  Bennett glanced at his watch. The sun would be coming up before long, and they desperately needed to be able to make their way back to their temporary residence in the Moslem Quarter before daybreak, or there would be no place for them to hide. If he was going to do anything, it had to be now.

  Slowly, carefully, Bennett removed one of the cast-iron pokers from the stand beside Mordechai’s fireplace. Then he moved toward the hallway leading to the west wing and tried to steady his breathing. A few moments later, as he’d anticipated, he heard footsteps. They were heavy and determined and were coming quickly down the hall toward him. He raised the poker like a baseball bat and waited. When the gunman came through the archway into the great room, Bennett swung for the fences.

  The man was huge, at least six feet six, maybe 250 pounds, but he was caught completely off guard by the force of the poker, which struck him square across the upper lip, just below the nose. His head snapped back. He lost his footing and crashed onto his back. His weapon skidded across the hardwood floor toward the stairs.

  Bennett leaped for it. Seconds later, he had the AK-47 in his hands. He pivoted quickly to face his assailant, but it was too late. The man was already on top of him, knocking the gun away and pounding him with his fists. Bennett was stunned. He had no idea how the man could have recovered so quickly, but it hardly mattered. The two of them were now hurtling down the stairs, and soon they hit the floor with a bone-crunching thud.

  The man’s hands closed like a vise around Bennett’s neck. They were squeezing, squeezing. Bennett couldn’t break free. He was gagging and choking, but there was nothing he could do to wrest himself from the man’s grip. A wave of panic washed over him. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t think, and then—without warning—a single gunshot exploded in his ears. Bennett saw the man’s life drain from his eyes. He watched the man slump to the floor, blood pouring out of his mouth, and an involuntary shudder rippled through Bennett’s system.

  He shoved the body off of him and rolled away to safety. When he looked up, he saw his wife at the top of the stairs, the Beretta still pointed at the fallen man’s head, the acrid stench of gunpowder once again thick in the air. They stared at each other for a moment, and Bennett realized how close they had both once again come to dying in this house.

  Erin lowered her gun, scanned the great room behind her one last time, then made her way down the stairway. Bennett got up and went to embrace her but Erin stopped him abruptly.

  “Your BlackBerry,” she said as she pulled out her own.

  “What about it?” asked Jon.

  “Do you have it on you?”

  “Of course,” he replied. “Why?”

  “Quick, turn it off,” she replied as she did the same. “They must have tracked us here. That’s how they found us. They triangulated the signals from our phones. We need to get out of here—fast.”

  She was right. How could they not have thought of it sooner? Bennett turned off his Blackberry and pulled out his SIM card. On it were the addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail accounts of everybody he knew on Wall Street, in Washington, and in all of the capitals he and Erin had been to around the world over the last few years. It was not something he dared lose.

  “I checked the guys upstairs,” Erin said, rifling through the pockets of the man she’d just shot. “Nothing—no ID, no passport.”

  But this time was different. On him, she found a set of car keys and a cell phone—a cell phone with a built-in camera. She snapped a few shots of all three men before Bennett insisted they get out while they still could. Then they raced outside, found the men’s black Mercedes, and “borrowed” it, at least for a while.

  34

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 15 – 4:57 a.m. – JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  To their relief, everyone in the Shochat house was still asleep.

  They snuck down to the basement, and while Bennett took a quick shower, Erin booted up the desktop computer. She quickly logged back on to the CIA satellite account, reentered the coordinates for Mordechai’s house, and soon had a live, wide shot of his entire neighborhood. For the moment, all appeared calm—no police cars, no ambulances, no media. By daybreak, that would change. But at least they had a few hours’ head start.

  Next she hacked into the Israeli police department’s database, using a back door she had learned in her years with the CIA. She immediately uploaded the photos of the men who had tried to kill them and ran a trace. It came back negative. The men weren’t locals. She entered the license plate of the Mercedes they had used. Not surprisingly, it was stolen.

  Then she logged on to the Interpol database and tried again. This time she got hits on all three attackers. They were Italians—two from Rome, one from Milan. They were members of an underground radical faction known as the Legion, wanted for bombings, bank robberies, and assassinations in France, Spain, Holland, and Germany. The Interpol files had vital stats on all of the men—when and where they’d been born, names of their parents, criminal records, etc.—but little on the Legion itself. It was believed to be a splinter group of the Red Brigades, but that was about all Erin could glean without a higher clearance code.

  She e-mailed images of each man to Indira Rajiv at Langley, along with a brief note explaining what had just happened at Mordechai’s house.

  can you trace this and get back to me, raj? i need info on the legion asap . . . thanks—erin.

  She hit Send and closed her eyes for a few minutes. She was exhausted, but the attack must mean they were doing something right. The very fact that someone was gunning for them meant Mordechai and Barak and their little band of treasure hunters had been on to something. Someone was systematically hunting down anyone trying to solve the mystery of the Copper Scroll. It didn’t prove the Cracker Jack box contained a prize. But it did prove that someone somewhere was rattled by the thought.

  Suddenly, Erin opened her eyes, sat up straight in her chair, and began typing on the computer again. She brought up the Yahoo! home page, clicked on Mail, and typed in Mordechai’s ID. She guessed at his password. She was wrong.

  Invalid ID or password, came the response in bright red letters. Please try again.

  So she did. She tried every password she could think of—his name, his wife’s name, the numbers of his birthday, the numbers of his birthday backward, his wife’s name backward, and so forth. But she struck out every time.

  The door opened behind her.

  “Mordechai’s password,” Erin called over her shoulder. “Do you know it?”

  “To what?” Bennett asked as he dried and combed his hair.

  “His Yahoo! account.”

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  Erin swiveled around in her chair. “Come on. You know the passcodes to get into his house, onto his elevators. You’re telling me you don’t know how to break into his e-mail account?”

  Bennett shook his head. “He never asked me to read his mail.”

  �
�Well, think, Jon, think.”

  “Why? What are you after?”

  “It’s just a hunch,” Erin demurred. “I could be wrong, but . . . ”

  “A hunch about what?” Bennett pressed.

  “Just help me break in.”

  * * *

  Bennett was still at it as the sun came up.

  Erin stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around herself, and came to check on his progress. He had three pages of possible passwords that he had written down, entered into the Yahoo! system, and then crossed off as rejected.

  “How’s it going?” she asked, oddly refreshed though she hadn’t slept a wink. She leaned over his shoulder and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “It’s no use,” he said, his eyes at half-mast, desperate to crawl back into bed and take her with him. “Spymaster Rule #1—you can’t break into a Mossad chief’s e-mail account. It simply can’t be done. Period. End of sentence. It’s impossible. You should know that better than anyone.”

  “Wait a minute—that’s it,” she said.

  “What’s it?”

  “Can I sit there a moment?” said Erin.

  “Sure, if you tell me what’s going on.” Nevertheless, he got up and let her have the chair, looking on over her shoulder.

  She did a quick search for English translations of the Bible. From there she narrowed the search to New Testament translations online. Then she picked one and typed in the word impossible. Thirteen results popped up. She scanned the list.

  There it was. Luke 1:37—“For nothing is impossible with God.” It was Mordechai’s life creed. She found the log-in page again and tried Luke1:37 as the password. It didn’t work. She tried Luke137. Nothing.

  “Come on, we need some sleep,” Bennett insisted. “We’ll try again later.”

  Erin sighed. “I know, you’re right,” she whispered and began shutting off the lights. “I just can’t believe I can’t crack this thing.”

  “You will,” he promised her as he headed over to the couch to lie down. “Just for a few minutes,” he insisted. “You just need some rest. We both do, and then I promise we’ll get up and pray about it and I’m sure God will show us something. Jeremiah 33:3—isn’t that what Mordechai was always quoting to us?”

  That was it, Erin realized. “Call to Me and I will answer you, and I will tell you great and mighty things, which you do not know.”

  She turned the lights back on, logged back on, entered Jeremiah33:3 and waited. Again she got an error message. She tried Jeremiah333, but that didn’t work either. Finally, in desperation, she tried J333 and gasped.

  “We’re in!” she declared, only to find her husband already fast asleep.

  * * *

  Hundreds of e-mails were sitting there unopened.

  They were waiting for replies that would never come. Erin had no idea where to begin. She wasn’t even entirely sure what she was looking for. All she had was a hunch—perhaps the “clue” that had stirred up this hornet’s nest had come in by e-mail. Perhaps Mordechai had written to Doron or Barak or the rest of the team about the clue. This was a man, after all, who had communicated with most people most of the time by e-mail. It was inconceivable to her that there wouldn’t be something useful here. And the huge number of unopened e-mails was an encouraging sign. Maybe she’d gotten there first.

  She quickly sorted the in-box by date received, then isolated all the e-mails that had come in during the first two weeks after the firestorm. As best as she could recall, that was roughly the time Mordechai had first come across the clue, according to Doron.

  But the more she hunted for the proverbial needle in the haystack, the more Erin was taken aback by the enormous number of e-mails she found that Mordechai had written and received that had to do with her—with finding her, with letting the White House and CIA know she had been found, with organizing an extraction to get her and Jon out of Russia after the firestorm had hit. There were e-mails to senior officials in the Mossad, to Ken Costello, to Indira Rajiv, to Ruth Bennett, and to dozens of colleagues and associates of Mordechai’s located throughout Iran and the former USSR.

  Until now, Erin had had no idea just how involved Mordechai had been with their extraction. She knew he was a key player, of course. She and Jon had, after all, been flown not to Washington after leaving Russian airspace but to Jerusalem. They’d spent weeks recovering from their ordeal in Mordechai’s guest rooms. Only now did it suddenly dawn on her how much Jon and Mordechai had shielded her from the specifics of her rescue so she could focus solely on the rest and medical care she so badly needed after being held by Gogolov’s forces.

  What’s more, she had unexpectedly uncovered a treasure trove of Mordechai’s thinking on all kinds of political and spiritual issues, issues about which he was corresponding with people all over the world. She was eager to explore more, but there was one e-mail that now caught her eye.

  A gift, was all the subject heading said.

  It was from someone named Kenneth Donovan. It was not a name she recognized, but she was curious about what might be inside.

  35

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 15 – 6:28 a.m.—JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  “Jon, get up—you need to see this.”

  He heard the words, and the urgency in Erin’s voice, but it took a moment to make sense of it all. He stared at the ceiling and at the ceiling fan he’d been too busy to notice earlier, but he dreaded the notion of being awake so soon.

  “What have you got?” he groaned.

  “Black gold,” Erin replied. “Texas tea.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He forced himself off the couch and stumbled over to her. His bleary eyes took a while to adjust to the words on the screen, but when they did, he was suddenly and completely awake.

  Dear Dr. Mordechai:

  Please don’t toss this into your spam file.

  You don’t know me. In fact, you’ll never meet me. But you know my kid brother. Or rather, you did, until his death in October 1996.

  My brother was Raymond S. Donovan. Most of his family and friends believed (and still do, to this day), that Ray was a pilot for Continental. But you were among a handful of people who knew the truth--that he was a NOC officer in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations.

  I only learned the truth upon being informed of his death by a phone call from the director of Central Intelligence and becoming executor of his will. That’s when I gained access to his safe-deposit box and to the secrets it contained.

  I am writing to you now because in the box was a large, sealed envelope with your name on it. I assumed Ray wanted me to get this to you, but frankly, I didn’t know how. I had no idea who you were. The CIA proved to be no help. I couldn’t find a shred of information about you on the Internet. So I finally gave up.

  But now your "Ezekiel Option" memo has hit the news, and suddenly the whole world knows who you are. I see you have a Web site and an e-mail address. So I’m passing this whole mess on to you.

  But first, a confession: When I couldn’t track you down back in ’96, I decided to open the envelope and see what was inside. It was the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, and I’ve done some pretty stupid things in my day. Inside was an audiocassette, made by Ray. There was also a copy of an old leather journal he bought somewhere in southern Syria. It’s all in Arabic. It makes no sense to me. But the tape is pretty clear, and it has shattered my life.

  I thought I knew my brother. But the more I learn of the life he was really living, the more I realize how little I knew. We weren’t as close as I thought. Little Ray was living a lie. It turns out he was a felon and a traitor, and I don’t know how I could have failed him so badly.

  As I don’t have a mailing address for you, I’ve converted the audiocassette to an MP3 file and the journal into a PDF file. I’ve been living with this nightmare for too long. It’s yours now. May you have more strength than I.

  Sincerely,

  Kenneth J. Donovan

  Eri
n double-clicked on the audio file, and suddenly they were listening to the voice of Ray Donovan.

  “Dr. Mordechai, greetings from the hereafter. If you are listening to this, it can only be for one reason. I have failed, and thus I am dead, and my brother, Kenny, has found a way to track you down and get you this tape and the accompanying journal.

  “You and I first met at the Farm nine years ago, when you addressed my class of new Agency recruits. We met again three years ago when you were helping my colleague Craig Harkin and me train Kurdish rebels to run sabotage missions in northern Iraq. Ring any bells? Remember me now? If not, perhaps this will jog your memory. About eighteen months ago, you took Craig and me to meet with some Bedouin trackers you thought we should hire. We were scheduled to meet them at that archeological museum in Qumran, and while we were waiting for them to show up, you and I got into a big argument over the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  “You said they were proof that the Bible we have today is the exact same one people had two thousand years ago. No changes. No alterations. Word for word, the same. I said religion was fine for old people who needed a crutch but had no serious basis in science and history. You were very gracious about the ‘old people’ crack, for which I want to apologize again. But I’ll never forget the story you told me next, the story of the Copper Scroll. You insisted that one day the Key Scroll would be found as well, that the Second Temple treasures would be found, that the Ark of the Covenant would be found, and that all these would be further proof—if more were needed—that the Bible is not a myth, not a legend, not some sort of superstitious fiction, but rock-solid history, history that one day would explode into the headlines.

  “To your face, I suggested we just agree to disagree. Inside, I was laughing at you all the way back to my hotel. But I have to admit, I was intrigued by what you’d said—not about the religious part, mind you. What intrigued me was the idea of buried treasure—billions of dollars of buried treasure—scattered throughout the West Bank.