The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “This is the Holy Tomb, sir. Called the Edicule, or little house. Because Jesus was very important man, Byzantines and Crusaders spent a lot of money to make this tomb for him. It is fourteenth and final station of the cross. By the customs of Jews, always they buried the people outside the city. The present marble exterior is disintegrating and must be held together by iron bands. Come, sir? Get in the line? Madam?”

  Ibrahim continued his unrelenting recitation, but I was too disoriented to process it. I’d expected the tomb of Jesus to be a cave of some kind, situated in an open place, not this mausoleum in a dungeonlike medieval church.

  “The line’s moving,” Rachel said, helping me forward.

  Soon we were standing before the door of the Edicule. Here Ibrahim spoke with the respect I had expected from the beginning.

  “Inside the tomb we will see two rooms. Let us go in now.”

  In the first room I saw a podium with a glass case atop it. Inside the case lay a piece of stone.

  “This we call the room of the angel,” said Ibrahim. “Where the dead person wait until they prepare place to bury him. Here is kept a piece of the rolling stone where angels opened the tomb and Jesus raised up from the dead.”

  I noticed two holes in the wall to my right. Ibrahim said, “When the people have no fire for their Easter candles, the priest he stand here and give them from the Holy Fire, gives light from his big candle to theirs.”

  My attention had been drawn to a low door in the thick marble wall of the inner tomb. I stooped and moved through the door into a small inner chamber. A man and woman knelt in prayer before what appeared to be a marble altar slab. They had placed crucifixes on the stone, as though the objects would be blessed by contact. Above them hung ornate silver lamps on chains, and everywhere burning candles threw flickering light around the room. Vases of white roses scented the air, their odor cloying in the small space.

  “David?” Rachel whispered. “Is this what you came to see?”

  I leaned down and touched the marble stone before the praying couple. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but something. I’d felt more at Stonehenge when I climbed over the barrier and touched the sarsen stones. “This isn’t the place.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing happened here.”

  The kneeling man and woman looked up at me, their eyes wide.

  “Sir, you must not say this,” Ibrahim said from behind me. “This is most holy place.”

  “This isn’t the place,” I repeated. I ducked down and hurried back onto the floor of the rotunda.

  Rachel came after me. The people waiting in line stared at us, sensing trouble. I didn’t care. A wild feeling of panic had gripped me. Soon it would be dark outside, and I had not found what I’d come for.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” Rachel whispered.

  “Nothing happened in there. That’s not the place.”

  Someone in the line gasped.

  “What place?” asked Rachel.

  I turned to Ibrahim, who now had a walkie-talkie in his hand and seemed to be debating whether to call for help. “Is that the original stone in the tomb?”

  “No, sir. Marble stone was put there to cover the actual stone where Jesus’ body lay.”

  “You can’t see the actual stone?”

  Our guide’s face brightened. “Yes, you can see this. Touch also. Follow me.”

  He led us to the rear of the Edicule. There stood another chapel, much less ostentatious and open to the rotunda. It was far more colorful than the marble tomb we’d left, with bright wall hangings, wrought iron, and a casually dressed young man with a five-o’clock shadow tending it.

  “This is the holy tomb from the other side, sir,” Ibrahim said in a whisper. “Part of the Coptic chapel. Coptics are Christians from Egypt. Very devout.”

  The queue here was much shorter. It disappeared into the shallow chapel and stopped where a small curtain shielded something.

  “Sir, beyond that point lies exposed part of the actual stone where Jesus lay. Here the sick come to be cured, people to be blessed.”

  As I waited for the line to move, my skin began to itch as though from hives. At last my turn came. I went through the curtain, knelt, and laid my right palm on the bare stone.

  “David?” Rachel whispered from behind me.

  I shook my head. “Nothing.” For the first time in six months, I began to truly doubt my sanity.

  “I think we should go back to the hotel,” Rachel said. “Ibrahim is close to calling for help.”

  I scrambled up and left the chapel, my mind racing. Ibrahim was staring at me as though I might start shouting blasphemy, which the old guide had probably seen in his day. The walkie-talkie was still in his hand.

  “Nothing happened there either,” I told him. “That’s not the place.”

  “But, sir, this is the holy tomb.”

  “There’s no doubt of that?”

  “Well…some Protestant Christians believe the garden tomb outside the city is the site of Jesus’ tomb. But no archaeologist believes this. You have seen the actual tomb, sir.”

  A tall, plain woman carrying a King James Bible stepped out of the line before the chapel and said in English, “Does it really matter where the tomb is, brother? ‘He is not there. He is risen.’”

  “Does it matter?” I asked her. “Of course it matters. What if you found the actual tomb with Jesus’ bones still in it? It’s the difference between a legitimate religion and mass hysteria.”

  The woman almost jumped backward.

  Ibrahim looked stricken. “Sir! You must not say these things!”

  “You’re a Muslim, Ibrahim. You don’t believe any of this.”

  “Please, sir—”

  I walked away from the Edicule, not knowing where to turn or what to do.

  Rachel appeared at my shoulder. “David, what is it you’re looking for?”

  “The place where Jesus was resurrected.”

  “But you don’t believe in God. How can you find the place where Jesus was resurrected when you don’t believe that he was?”

  Ibrahim had caught up to us. “Sir? Some people believe Jesus rose from the death at another place. I will show you.”

  He led us across the rotunda to the door of a large church wholly contained within the bounds of the greater one.

  “This is the Catholicon.” He pointed toward a chandelier. “Below the cupola of this church is a marble basin called the Omphalos. The navel of the world. Some Greeks believe Jesus was resurrected here, and will return here to judge the world one day.”

  “Can we see it?”

  “This church is usually closed, but I can take you to it.”

  He led us past a chain toward a stone chalice standing on an inlaid floor. High above stood a dome with an ethereal image of Christ painted in pastel hues. I looked down at the stone hemisphere, essentially a large bowl. Then I leaned down and touched it. I felt no more than I would had I touched a birdbath in someone’s backyard.

  Rachel instantly read my reaction. “What are you hoping for? An electric shock? A voice from heaven?”

  I turned to our guide, who was shaking his head. “What have I not seen, Ibrahim?”

  “Many things. Most important is Golgotha. In Latin called Calvary. The place where Jesus was crucified.”

  “It’s inside the church?”

  “Of course, sir. Follow me.”

  He led us out of the Catholicon and over to a steep staircase. I counted eighteen steps as I plodded upward, my spirits sinking lower the higher I climbed.

  The moment I reached the top of the stairs, I felt a quickening in my blood. The room was crowded, but to my left, above the heads of the people, I saw a life-size sculpture of Jesus hanging on a cross. He wore a silver cloth around his waist and a crown of silver on his head. It wasn’t the sculpture that moved me, but something in the room itself. I felt as if I were standing close to a high-voltage cable,
with static electricity raising every hair on my body.

  “What?” Rachel asked. “What is it?”

  “Something in me is vibrating.”

  “You’ve felt that before. That’s a textbook precursor to a hypnagogic hallucination.”

  “No…this is different.”

  “Ibrahim?” said Rachel.

  “Yes, madam?”

  “We’re going back to the car.”

  “Yes,” he said with relief.

  I stepped away from them. To my right, a mural showed Jesus lying on the cross, which lay flat on the ground. Some people standing before the mural parted, revealing a cabinet with panels of hammered silver. As I walked toward the mural, pain radiated up my arm from my left hand. For a moment I thought I was having a heart attack. Then pain shot up my right arm as well. I clenched both hands into fists, but it did no good. I turned to Ibrahim.

  “What is this place?”

  “This is the eleventh station, sir. Where Jesus was nailed to the cross.”

  I moaned.

  “We have to get him out of here,” Rachel said. “Can you get help?”

  “He is walking,” Ibrahim said. “Let us go now.”

  “I don’t think he’ll go.”

  Some people in the room were staring at me as if I might be mad.

  “I can get soldiers,” Ibrahim said. “But I would rather not do this.”

  “No,” Rachel said quickly. “I mean, yes. That’s not necessary.”

  A group of pilgrims moved away from the sculpture of Jesus, revealing a fantastically ornate altar. I stepped forward, my eyes locked on a silver-clad Madonna standing below the cross. The altar before her seemed to be sitting on a large glass case, and under the glass I saw rough gray rock.

  “What’s that?”

  “Golgotha,” Ibrahim answered. “The place of the skull. That is the mountain itself, where the rock cracked when Jesus’ blood fell down from the cross. Then came the earthquake.”

  Searing white light blotted out the scene before me. I saw the mountain as it had been before the church was here, a bare, rocky hill beside a mountain riddled with tombs. Three crosses stood on the hill, but no one hung from them. The sky darkened and went black, and I fell to my knees.

  I found myself staring at a shining silver disk with a hole in it. The disk lay on the marble base of the altar, a foot off the floor. I put out my shaking right hand and laid my palm on the disk.

  The pain in my hands instantly eased.

  “This is the place,” I said. “This is where Jesus left the earth.”

  “He is right,” said Ibrahim. “That disk marks the spot where the cross stood in the ground. To the right and left are black disks where the thieves’ crosses stood, one being good, another being bad. Afterward, Jesus was taken away to the tomb of Joseph of Aramathea and rose from the death three days later.”

  “No,” I said.

  Ibrahim blanched. “Sir, you cannot say such things here!”

  “Whisper,” Rachel pleaded.

  “What’s the hole in the disk for?” I asked, my hand caressing the cool silver.

  “You may put fingers through and touch Golgotha. The rock of Calvary.”

  I closed my eyes and slipped two fingers through the hole. My fingertips scraped rough stone.

  “Did you dream of this?” Rachel asked.

  I couldn’t speak. Something was flowing into me from the living rock. Rachel’s voice receded and did not return. I felt as if my bones were singing, vibrating in sympathy with something in the earth. At first the feeling was something like joy, but as the intensity built, I began to shake, then to jerk spastically.

  It’s a seizure, said a familiar voice in my head. My medical voice. A tonic-clonic seizure. Through the fog of receding consciousness, I heard people yelling in several languages. Then I fell, and Rachel screamed.

  The impact of the floor was like water.

  Chapter

  31

  WHITE SANDS

  At 7:52 A.M. mountain standard time, Peter Godin went into code blue. Ravi Nara wasn’t in the hospital hangar, but he was sleeping nearby, and he got to Godin’s bedside in less than two minutes. He’d been expecting the old man to crash. Without a shunt to relieve the pressure in the fourth ventricle of the brain, hydrocephalus was inevitable. But when Ravi arrived in the Bubble, he found the old man suffering a garden-variety heart attack.

  Godin’s two nurses had already intubated and bagged him, and one was defibrillating his heart. Ravi read the EKG and confirmed their diagnosis: ventricular tachycardia. They were using the paddles because Godin had no pulse. It took two drug combinations and a 360-joule shock to bring the heart back to a sinus rhythm. Ravi drew blood to check for cardiac-specific enzymes that would tell him how much damage had been done to the heart muscle. Then, since Godin remained unconscious, Ravi sat down for a moment to decompress.

  He hated clinical medicine. Something was always coming out of left field to surprise you. Godin had had a coronary bypass fifteen years ago, and a cardiac stent implanted in 1998. The risk of an MI was constant, but under the strain of treating the brainstem glioma, Ravi had let the cardiac risk recede in his mind. The nurses had noticed his hesitancy during the code. Not exactly what they expected from a Nobel laureate in medicine. After years in research labs, he was out of practice. So what? A veterinarian could run the protocols of a code blue.

  As a nurse started to attach the ventilator to Godin’s breathing tube, the old man tried to speak, but his effort produced only squeaks.

  Ravi leaned down to his ear. “Don’t try to talk, Peter. You had a little arrhythmia, but you’re stable now.”

  Godin held up his hand for something to write with. A nurse gave him a pen, then held a hard-backed pad up to his hand.

  Godin scribbled: DON’T LET ME DIE! WE’RE SO CLOSE!!!

  “You’re not going to die,” Ravi assured him, though he was far from sure himself. Hypoxia could easily trigger the fatal hydrocephalus he’d been expecting. He squeezed Godin’s shoulder, then ordered the nurses to put him on the ventilator. It would make the old man furious, but he would endure it.

  To avoid Godin’s protests, Ravi left the Bubble. As he closed the hatch, he saw Zach Levin rush into the hangar.

  “What is it?” Ravi asked. “What’s happened?”

  Levin had to catch his breath before he could speak. “Fielding’s model is cracking the final algorithms! He’s got the memory area linked to the processing areas, and he’s creating all new interface circuitry. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You mean Fielding’s model is doing all that.”

  “Yes, yes. But I’ve got to tell you, even with the machine running at only fifty percent capacity, I can feel him in there. It’s like talking to the man I worked with for the past two years. Like he’s alive again.”

  “You’re at fifty percent efficiency?”

  Levin grinned. “And rising. I should have had more faith in Peter’s instincts.”

  Ravi tried to conceal his shock. Ninety percent efficiency was the point at which Godin had predicted that a neuromodel would become fully conscious—a condition he had termed the Trinity state.

  “You said ‘talking,’” Ravi thought aloud. “Is the voice synthesizer working? Is Fielding talking to you?”

  “He’s trying. He can’t really explain what he’s doing, but the efficiency is creeping steadily upward. We’ve got a definite timeline now.”

  Despite the complexities of his personal situation, Ravi couldn’t suppress his excitement. “How long?”

  “Twelve to sixteen hours.”

  “To Trinity state?”

  Levin nodded. “And I’d bet closer to twelve. We’ve got a pool going in Containment.”

  Ravi looked at his watch. “How certain are you?”

  “As certain as anything gets in this business. I’ve got to tell Peter what’s happening.”

  Ravi didn’t want Godin hearing about this until he h
ad talked to Skow. “You can’t go in right now. He won’t hear you. Peter coded twenty minutes ago.”

  Levin stiffened in alarm. “He’s not dead!”

  “No, but he’s on the ventilator.”

  “Conscious?”

  “Not enough to understand you. And he can’t speak.”