by Rob Jones
“I expected nothing less of you,” Gates said. “Please brief the rest of us on your findings.”
“Of course. First, as I said back on the ship, the ox statue is certainly Bible-era and the same age as the eagle statue. Specifically, it’s Greek. Probably a little after the main Hellenistic era.”
“Hellenstic?” Jodie asked.
“We can break ancient Greek art into three broad periods – archaic, which is around 800BC to 500BC, classical, which is around 500BC to 323BC and then Hellenistic, which dates from the close of the classical period to around the first century BC.”
Jodie gasped with mock amazement. “Keep talking, Hunter. You’re turning me on.”
He gave her a wry smile and returned his attention to the photos. “So, I date this ox statue to around the very beginning of the first century, maybe as late as ten or fifteen AD.”
“Old,” Quinn said sarcastically.
“Yes,” Hunter said, turning to her with an arched eyebrow. “Old – and very interesting. On the body, obverse, we can see three women mourning a dead man laid out on a bier.”
“Beer?” Jodie asked.
Hunter shook his head and spelt it out. “It’s a kind of frame on which a corpse was laid out before its burial. They were sometimes carried to their graves or cremations on them. That picture is on the obverse.” He looked at Quinn and slowed down. “That’s the front.”
“You mean like the opposite of reverse?” she asked. “Fascinating. Is there no end to your genius?”
“Maybe,” he said, his head wobbling slightly. “But no one’s ever found it.”
Amy rolled her eyes. “All right, back to the statue.”
Hunter cleared his throat. “On the reverse – that’s the back – we have something even more interesting. We’re looking at a depiction of a god who seems to be sitting in judgement of the corpse on the front.”
“I think you mean obverse,” Quinn said with a wink.
“Thanks, Special Agent Mosley,” he said, returning her smile.
Quinn said, “And when you said the corpse was laid out, you meant the prothesis, right?”
Hunter turned to her. “I’m impressed.”
“Easily, I’d imagine.”
Blanco and Lewis laughed as Quinn and Jodie shared a high-five. Hunter could see it would be a long time before he got the better of Quinn Mosley.
“Moving on rapidly…” he said with a good-natured smile, “the curious thing here – aside from the insolent nature of some of the younger members of this team – is that this statue also has a verse written on it, but as I’ve already mentioned, it’s only a partial fragment.”
“But you have a fuller translation now, right?” Amy said.
He turned his eyes to her, smiling. “Of course. Would you like to hear it?”
“Well, duh,” Jodie said.
“Okay,” Hunter’s voice grew even more serious. “I’m an archaeologist, not a Bible scholar or any other type of historian. I know some Latin and some ancient Greek and I have a reasonably good knowledge of some older writing systems, most notably cuneiform and also some Assyrian and Egyptian hieroglyphs…”
“I wish someone told me it was Celebrate Max Hunter Day,” Quinn said. “I would have worn my Max Hunter t-shirt and brought in cookies with your face frosted on them.”
“Why wait for the actual day?” Hunter said with a smirk.
Amy stepped in. “Please continue, Max.”
“The point I was trying to make was that I’m not a historian. My translation of this verse from the ancient Greek is good, but that’s as far as I go.”
“Which is why we have a team,” Gates said. “Including Dr Ben Lewis, who is a highly educated and experienced historian specializing in the ancient world.”
“All true,” Lewis said. “And I’m also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs.”
“For now,” Gates said frowning, “just stick to the history.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Read what you have, Max,” Amy said.
“Certainly,” he said, peering down at his laptop screen. “The verse is fragmentary but now I have the full translation of it, and it reads like this: They must ask the Lion, the Ox, the Man and the Eagle. Combined with the inscription on the eagle, And the last word of God will unleash the Apocalypse and strike terror into Man this is all we have.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Amy asked.
“As I’ve already speculated, it’s definitely a reference to the Book of Revelation,” Lewis said. “No doubt at all. Apocalypse is a Greek word, but it just means revelation, as in the last book of the Bible. The lion, ox, eagle and man mentioned on the second statue are references to the Four Living Beings of Revelation.”
All eyes turned to the young scholar and the room grew quiet and tense. Gates broke the silence. “So, two references to the Book of Revelation?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I think you’d better tell us more,” Gates said. “This gets more interesting by the second.”
CHAPTER TEN
With the team hanging on his every word, Lewis sat up straighter in his chair and cleared his throat. Thoughts of Meg and his newborn son were banished as work quickly became his sole focus.
He said, “Both the statues are highly beautiful pieces with very few flaws, and now thanks to Max we have both verses translated. As I have said, the forms they take – an eagle and an ox are a reference to some future apocalypse, which is concerning.”
“Care to expand?” Hunter said. “I never went to Sunday school.”
“Yes.” Gates shifted in his seat. “More detail, Dr Lewis.”
“The last book of the bible is the Book of Revelation. It’s written by John the Apostle.”
“As in one of the Twelve Apostles?” Jodie asked.
“Yes,” Lewis said. “And he wrote Revelation after experiencing a vision of Jesus who told him about mankind’s future. The Four Living Beings – the Lion, the Ox, the Man and the Eagle were part of that vision. My opinion is that there are two more statues – the Lion that Markovich talked about, which we now know is in Rome – and a Man.”
“Which we have no knowledge of,” Amy said.
“No,” Hunter said, stepping in. “But I concur with Ben’s analysis of there being two more statues, so at least we know what game we’re playing.”
“And it could be a dangerous one,” said Gates. “So far, we have two statues, which when put together make part of a verse heavily implying some sort of apocalypse is going to be unleashed on mankind.” He slipped on his glasses and peered down at his notes. “And the last word of God will unleash the Apocalypse and strike terror into Man… I’m not happy about heavily armed Russian terrorists being so keen to get hold of these statues.”
“And there’s also the Kandarian angle,” Amy said, frowning. “We don’t know what he’s doing in all this.”
“Not much now he’s in custody,” Gates said. “We’re doing okay.”
“Sure,” Amy said, “but we’d be doing a lot better if I hadn’t let the Russians steal the statue in the raid on the ship. I feel like I let everyone down.”
“No, you didn’t,” Gates said firmly. “You were viciously attacked and whoever did it is going to pay. Before that, you had the foresight to ask Agent Mosley to photograph the statue and it’s thanks to those photos Drs Hunter and Lewis have been able to study it. Please continue, Ben.”
“In my view, the other two statues are likely going to contain another line of this verse on each of them and when put together they will lead us to something John the Apostle was trying to hide from the world.”
The room quietened. “So, Professor Barton was right then,” Quinn said. “There really is a missing chapter of the Book of Revelation. I wonder why he hid it?”
“We don’t know that yet, Quinn,” Lewis said. “I’m just flying a kite.”
“An impressive kite,” Hunter said. “I take it you went to Sunday school?”
<
br /> “I did,” Lewis said. “And I studied theology as part of my undergrad degree.”
“That’s why he’s on the team, Hunter,” Jodie said. “Quit giving him a hard time.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“Take it easy, people,” Gates said. “You can save the chest-beating and territory marking for when you’re on your own time. Go on, Ben.”
“I think we need to tread carefully here, sir. If we look at what John wrote in Revelation about the end of the world, we could be facing something much worse than the Creed. It’s possible – and I stress this is just a theory – John had other visions he was too terrified to share with the world and decided to hide them in some sort of codex.”
“Sounds a bit far-fetched,” Amy said.
“I don’t think so,” said Lewis. “Maybe there’s another whole chapter of the Bible out there that no one has ever seen. Revelation 23. Maybe that’s what this is all about. Maybe that’s why he made the statues – to mark the place he hid his secret writings.”
“C’mon, Ben!” Jodie said. “You can’t believe this stuff is real.”
“I’m just making the point that there’s a lot of stuff in the Bible which we simply cannot accept at face value.”
“You don’t know that,” Jodie said. “No one knows that. Not today. It was too long ago.”
“If it’s literal, then we have some real concerns,” Lewis said.
Gates took off his glasses and twiddled them around by one of the arms. “And why does it give us concerns?”
“Because you do not want to mess with some of the stuff in the Bible.”
Amy broke the tension and changed the subject. “Maybe Ben is right and it’s more than that,” Amy said. “Maybe John knew more than he wrote about in the main Revelation text and wanted to keep what he knew hidden from the world. Perhaps it was just too frightening.”
“More frightening than the rest of Revelation?” Hunter said. “Good luck with that.”
“Wait just a second,” Quinn said. “Isn’t the real question why we’re trying to unearth something that might trigger the Apocalypse?”
“That is a very good question,” Jodie said.
Deep in thought, Amy ignored her. “But why would John of Patmos be leaving hidden messages on statues?”
“He wasn’t always John of Patmos,” Lewis said. “He was originally from Galilee and spent much of his time in Rome. He was boiled in oil in the Colosseum, but survived and as a result he was exiled to Patmos by the Roman authorities.”
“Wait a minute,” Quinn said. “Didn’t you say the Bible was not literal?”
“Sure.”
“Then how can you believe survived being boiled in oil?”
“I don’t,” Lewis said coolly. “This story has to be allegorical.”
“Why was he boiled in oil?” Gates asked. “Allegorically.”
“He forgot his tax return,” said Blanco, raising a gently laugh.
“Heresy,” Lewis said. “He was dangerous. What he was writing was dangerous. Remember, the Book of Revelation was prophetic, meaning he was writing about things still to come and predicting events, including ones with political implications. This was against the law of Rome during the period when he lived there. Hiding the information somewhere and then leaving cryptic clues on the four statues might have been the safest thing to do.”
Gates blew out a long breath as he calculated everything he had heard. “All right. We have two statues. One I found in Mexico nine years ago that refers obliquely to the Apocalypse, and one uncovered this morning on a raid in New York which gives us a similar reference. We have the verses and some kind of cryptic clue, but it’s only a fragment and we know another of the set, a lion, went to an Italian collector named Gallo. All good so far?”
Amy nodded. “All good so far.”
“We also know there is a group of hostile Russians with a serious interest in these statues. Half-terrorists, half-relic smugglers, they’re called the Wolf Pack and they already shot up my team, assaulted my deputy, stole one of the statues and killed several FBI agents and counter-terror operatives in the raid this morning.”
“They were lethal, all right,” Blanco said.
Hunter nodded. “I’ll say. Those men were very highly trained. As part of my old life with the Guards, I worked with special ops teams in the past and there’s something about the way they do business. You can tell, often just by watching the way they talk and their body language. They’re a special type of person. Under fire, they react differently to regular soldiers, and it’s my opinion that the men who stormed the Goa Express were without a doubt very highly trained special ops men. Our intel is right.”
“That’s also my view,” Blanco said. “Like Max, I collided with special ops guys from time to time back when I was in the army. That might have been several hundred years ago, but special ops guys don’t change.”
The team chuckled at Blanco’s self-effacing comment, but Hunter saw he was clearly aware of his older age and slightly uncomfortable with it.
“Ben?” Gates asked. “Is that your view, too?”
“Yes, sir,” Lewis said. “Was a marine and know the drill. These men were very highly trained and totally ruthless. We can’t take any risks with them.”
Gates nodded pensively. “Okay, thanks. As we know, we already have a positive ID on Neverov and most of his team and they’re not going to get away with what they did today. No one pisses in my yard and gets away with it.” In his customary manner, he changed subject without warning, his mind working ahead of everyone else’s by several seconds. “Now I want to brief you about this Gallo character in Rome before you leave the States.”
Amy started making notes. “What did you find on him?”
“Not much. Full name is Giuseppe Gallo. On the surface he is an Italian philanthropist, using money made from a highly successful fund management company based in Singapore.”
“And under the surface?” Blanco asked.
“It gets murky.”
“I thought it might.”
“You don’t have dig very deep around Gallo until you start finding evidence of the active role he plays in several esoteric secret societies, including the Knights of Rome and the Crucifanomen.”
Amy made a note. “Never heard of either.”
“Most haven’t,” the director went on. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not out there, and Gallo is a key player in both. Considering many of these secret societies are no more than subsidiary branches of the Creed, the obvious deduction is he is also a part of them.”
“But he might not be?” Hunter said.
“No,” Gates said. “But he might be.”
A tense silence fell over the meeting room. No one on the team would ever forget their first mission together, fighting against the Creed in the search for Atlantis. Driven by something deeper than any normal lust for money or power, which they had in abundance, the world’s most secret society had fought like animals to secure a long-forgotten Atlantean weapon called the fire lance. The HARPA team had won the fight and secured both the lance and the Atlantean site, but at a heavy cost.
Jodie broke the silence. “Like Hunter just said, Gallo’s membership in the Creed is just speculation, right?”
“At this time,” Gates confirmed. “But like normal, we’re going to proceed on the precautionary principle. Take it easy, review what little evidence we have in depth and presume the worst.”
“Sounds like my love life,” Quinn said deadpan.
It raised a light laugh, but the tension soon returned when Lewis said, “The last thing we need is to bring the Creed into this. Seems to me if we’re not careful we could be fighting on two fronts on this one.”
Gates nodded. “Possible, but so is the chance the Creed are already involved. Maybe they’re outsourcing the heavy lifting to some better trained military hands after their defeat in Atlantis.”
Lewis absent-mindedly scratched his forehead. �
��Not liking the sound of that, Jim.”
Gates looked at him with sympathy, fully aware that the young man was thinking about the two people in the picture in his wallet. “It’s what it is, Ben.”
“Just speculation, is what it is,” said Amy. “Just as Jodie said.”
“Okay people,” Gates said. “You fly first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Why the delay? We need to go right now,” Hunter said. “If Neverov and his team have translated this they’re probably already on their way to Gallo.”
“They need to know about him first,” Gates said. “So just take it easy. We got Gallo’s name from Kandarian and now he’s in custody.”
“But there was another black market relic trader in Beirut,” Hunter said. “Markovich mentioned him. Neverov was former KGB and he’s been relic smuggling for thirty years! We have to presume he already knows about Gallo.”
“We’re not in some James Bond movie, Dr Hunter,” Gates said. “When on official business, FBI agents travel on official passports and visas must be obtained. As it happens, US citizens may enter Italy for up to ninety days without a visa, but I still want to discuss the matter with my counterpart in Rome. I also have to arrange two pilots, have an aircraft fuelled and a flight plan filed with the proper authorities. This is law enforcement, not a spy movie.”
Hunter raised his palms. “I’m just saying the Russians have a head start.”
Gates looked at his watch. “You’ll be airborne before dawn, so take some time out to take a shower and get prepared for trouble. Dismissed.”
Outside the briefing room, Amy grabbed hold of Hunter’s elbow and waited until Gates and the rest of the team had moved out of sight.
“What is it?” Hunter asked.
“Something important.”
He looked at her, eyes narrowing but sensing some levity. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Wanna have dinner with me tonight, before we fly to Italy?”
“You know they have food in Italy, right? Quite nice food, in fact.”
