by K. T. Tomb
Judge moved the plywood roof out of the way and jumped up and over. Despite it being Sunday, Michael was dressed in his customary three-piece suit and bowtie.
“So, uh, how’s things, Mickey?” Judge asked sheepishly.
Michael looked at the younger man and noted how much he had changed since their first meeting. Judge had dropped his cockiness and fully embraced despondency. His spirit was gone.
“Judge, if you are going to kill yourself, that’s fine, but for the love of all things good, please don’t do it in my museum.”
Judge couldn’t believe Michael’s words. “I’m not going to commit suicide; are you crazy? I’m just laying low for a little while.”
“You can lie to yourself, Judge, but not to me. Every night you spend in this basement, where you’ve built your own jail, you are killing yourself. I see it as plainly as I see the bags on top of bags under your eyes. You are killing the Judge Foster who has saved countless pieces of history, hundreds of lives, and inspired thousands of young people to read their history books.”
Judge hung his head at Michael’s words. He knew he was a disappointment, but he didn’t know how to turn things around.
“So, do you want me to leave?” Judge meekly asked.
Michael raised his hands in exasperation. “No, Judge! I want you to wake up from this deadly fog and get back to work. I told you before that no one who matters blames you for Iraq. I know you do, and the CIA, and Sara. But you are all wrong! The only one to blame is the bastard who detonated the bombs!”
Judge felt the words wash over him, but they just wouldn’t sink in. “I should have figured out a better way to confront Jamir. I knew where they were going. I could have called ahead and had operatives stop them at the different destinations.”
“Shoulda, coulda, woulda, Judge,” Michael said. “You were trying to stop a terrorist from killing hundreds of people and destroying museums around the world. It is tragic that several people died in the hangar explosion, but that mission was still a success. And there is a lesson here that, as an archeologist, you should pick up on before anyone else.”
“What’s that?” Judge said. He didn’t really want to hear a lesson from Michael, but he was hoping if he let him say his piece, the older man would leave him alone or kick him out once he was done.
“The entire Iraq episode is in the past. You can either bury it and wait for it to resurface at some other time, or you can learn from it, catalog it, and put it under glass. That’s what we do in history; you either learn from it and become better, or bury it and risk letting it trip us up somewhere later on down the line. Which are you going to do?”
Judge locked eyes with Michael. “Is the lesson over? Are you going to kick me out or what?”
Michael sighed. “Go back to your cell if you want, but I hope the Judge I knew and admired will wake up tomorrow and come to work.”
“Don’t count on it,” Judge said, and he jumped over the crate wall. He counted Michael’s steps as he walked toward the elevator. When Judge was once again alone, he replayed Michael’s words over and over in his mind. He focused first on Michael’s accusations, but then slowly moved onto his words of encouragement and praise.
Maybe Michael is right, Judge thought to himself. Maybe I need to stop feeling sorry for myself and get back to being Judge Foster.
That thought kept Judge warm as he drifted off to sleep, and helped him wake up in the morning. He went about his normal routine, but his co-workers could sense a change in the dark cloud that normally sat above Judge’s shoulders. It didn’t last long though. That dark could threatened to return when he saw who had the artifacts he had to catalog for the day.
“So, Sara is in Jerusalem,” Judge muttered to himself. He looked over the invoice sheet and then saw a second name. “And she’s teamed up with Saul Gass. That’s just lovely.”
Around the archeological community, Saul Gass was known as a clinger. He found someone who was doing real work and latched on to them, hoping to piggyback on their success. In this case, Saul was clinging to Sara because she was working in Jerusalem, and that was his preferred area.
“So, let’s see what Sara and her clinger have found so far,” Judge said. He examined each piece thoroughly, typing into the computer each detail noted in the field, along with his own observations. It didn’t take long for Judge to recognize the differences between Sara and Saul’s work. Sara was thorough to a fault, while Saul’s observations were just above amateur.
As Judge examined one of Saul’s pieces, he found something strange. At first glance, it looked like a large unadorned serving bowl, but a small scratch on the inside of the rim caught Judge’s attention. Judge grabbed his water bottle, wet a rag he kept at his workstation, and then delicately rubbed along the lip of the bowl. As he removed the dirt, Hebrew characters surfaced. They were small, barely an eighth of an inch, so Judge used a magnifying glass to read them once he had cleaned the entire lip. He wrote them down and translated the message. It started with two words: Micah’s Mumblings. The message continued with four sentences:
The seven lights can be found in the dark once you’ve fallen from the chamber.
Your rights after the altar will equal your commandment.
The sand is fast but not bottomless.
Hold the right hand of the star.
Judge stared at what he’d written down and wondered what it could mean. They were obviously clues to find something, but what? The first line gave a hint. The seven lights sounded like the seven candle holders of a menorah. The rest of the riddle made little sense to Judge, but he had an idea of who would be able to decipher the riddle. He just wasn’t sure if he was ready for that conversation. So instead, he called Michael.
“Hey, Mickey!” Judge said, sounding as upbeat as he could.
“Yes, Judge?” came Michael’s cautious reply.
“I have something here that I think you should take a look at,” Judge said. “Can you come down?”
Ten minutes later, Michael was looking at the bowl and Judge’s interpretation. He then turned to Judge with a raised eyebrow. Judge shrugged.
“I don’t know, Mickey. I’m as stumped as you are. Obviously, Saul missed it and Sara didn’t see this piece before it was shipped out; kind of makes you wonder what else he’s ‘taken care of’ without her signing off on his conclusions. Why don’t you give her a call and let her know what her partner missed?”
A questioning look spread over the older man’s face.
“I have a feeling it might be better coming from you,” Judge explained, handing the piece of paper with the interpretation to Michael. “Besides, she really doesn’t want to hear from me, no matter what I have to say to her.”
Michael took the piece of paper, looked at it, and then handed it back. “That’s probably true, but if I call her, she’ll know it’s from you anyway and figure out that you’re avoiding her.”
“And? So what? I don’t have a problem with that,” Judge said.
“Well, you should. Quit hiding from this whole thing and call her,” Michael said as he left the cataloging room, “and do it soon. It’s almost midnight in Jerusalem.”
Judge glanced at the phone and saw Sara’s smiling face projected there instead of the buttons. “Fine, I’ll call her, how bad could it be?”
Then the image of Sara’s smiling face was replaced with her frowning, angry visage, the one Judge had last seen after the debacle in the hangar in Iraq. He could almost hear her voice, accusing him of trying to sabotage her dig out of jealousy and anger. Judge knew it was all a trick of his mind, to keep him from calling her, but it actually persuaded him to call.
“She thinks she’s so smart. Hell! She is so fucking smart but she’s the worst at judging character. As usual, her partner is bringing her down and she needs to know about it,” Judge said as he picked up the phone.
He punched in Sara’s number, which he still knew by heart, and listened to the clicks and beeps of the call going intern
ational. Finally, he heard the phone ring and the call was picked up.
“This is Sara,” she answered.
Judge’s mind was blank for a moment, not sure what to say. It was a strange situation for him. He’d faced down armies, grave robbers, and even pyramid trapdoors, but he froze at the sound of Sara’s voice.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” Sara asked.
Snap out of it! Judge’s mind yelled.
“Sara, it’s Judge. Please…don’t hang up,” Judge finally said, and this time, it was Sara who went silent, so he continued. “I’m at the American Museum, cataloging your find in Jerusalem, and I think Saul missed something.”
Sara found her voice. “What are you doing cataloging? Shouldn’t you be out somewhere detonating dinosaur bones?”
Judge laughed at the insult, which he knew was not what Sara wanted to hear. “Good one, Sara. Ummm, so, back to your find. Saul sent back a serving bowl, but didn’t try to clean it. I noticed something and after carefully rinsing it off, I found some sort of inscription. I think it’s a message.”
Once again, Judge heard nothing. There was dead silence from the other end of the line for a full minute. Then finally, Sara said, “Well? What’s the message?”
Judge explained some more about what he’d found and then asked, “Where did Saul find that piece?”
“I’m not sure; what is the item number?” Sara asked.
Judge looked at the label. “Item number 845602.”
Sara wrote it down and said, “I don’t have the log books at the site, but I think that was about fifteen miles outside Jerusalem’s Old Town.”
Judge put that in his memory and asked, “Any idea what it could mean?”
Sara said, “The name Micah is familiar, and so is Eamon. I need to do some research. Thank you, Judge.” Then she hung up, leaving Judge holding a dead line.
“You’re welcome, I guess,” Judge said as he slowly dropped the phone back in its cradle. He didn’t expect Sara to be overly friendly or invite him to her site, but her complete lack of interest in him at all left Judge shattered inside.
Almost 6,000 miles away in Jerusalem, Sara hit her forehead with her hand. “Dammit, Sara, you could have at least asked how he was doing! He called to help you, and you treated him like shit,” she said to herself. Around her were half a dozen people examining a cave opening they had uncovered at one of the three sites she had up and running with the help of the American Museum and the Israeli Museum of History.
Sara turned to her assistant. “I’m going back to the office to look something up and probably bitch-slap Saul.” She turned to the cave opening. “And I will do the same to anyone who steps foot inside that cave before me. Is that understood?”
Her assistant nodded several times, in obvious fear of her boss. She had seen Sara whittle down men twice her size with her words. Sara jumped into her Jeep and sped off. The names Eamon and Micah kept dancing in her head during the drive. There were bits and pieces of history swirling around those names, but she wasn’t sure how they were connected. Sara’s mind kept picking up the names and pushing them around, hoping in vain to figure it out. It also kept her from thinking about the call from Judge, about how he sounded, and how much she missed and hated him at the same time. By the time she arrived at the office she shared with Saul Gass, Sara thought she remembered why the names Eamon and Micah were so familiar. She rushed through the door and went straight to a bookshelf, grabbed a book that was close to 8 inches thick and dropped it heavily onto her desk. She flipped through the first fifty pages until she found a page with a glossy photograph. In the picture was an ancient ledger, which named all of the guards and keepers of Solomon’s Chamber at the time the Babylonians sacked the city. Close to the top of the list was the name, Eamon, and lower down was the name, Micah, Son of Eamon.
As Sara thought about the possibilities of this discovery, Saul walked into the office, with a bag of Bamba peanut snacks. “Hey, Sara, want one?”
Sara looked at Saul and wondered for the thirtieth time why she had let him join her dig. “No thanks, Saul. Do you remember finding a serving bowl, item number 845602?”
Saul cocked his head and looked up. “Um, no? But it should have been put down in the ledger if I found it.” He put his snack on his desk, rubbed his crumb-covered fingers on his pants and flipped through his ledger. “Here it is, yes, serving bowl, plain, found outside Megadim. What about it?”
Sara inwardly groaned at his description of the bowl. She had no doubt that Saul had used those same words in the notes that accompanied the bowl back to the American Museum. “What about it?” Sara asked sarcastically. “Well, the people cataloging our findings back in D.C. noticed some carvings on the lip of the bowl; an inscription of sorts. It turned out to be writing that named two keepers of Solomon’s Chamber.”
“Wow! Really?” Saul said, popping another Bamba in his mouth. “That’s great! Refresh my memory, what is Solomon’s Chamber again?”
Sara could only stare at her so-called partner. She knew Saul had book smarts and a good working knowledge of history. What infuriated her was, she also knew he was lazy, but he did have several great money connections. He was the one who had secured the financial backing of Asa Rama, who had financed her work in Iraq. Asa hadn’t trusted Sara at first because of how that had turned out, but Saul had worked his magic on him.
“As you well know, Saul,” Sara began, “Solomon’s Chamber is where ancient Israelites kept the original Menorah on an altar made of olive wood. When the Babylonians raided Jerusalem 2,500 years ago, they took the menorah, along with everything else that wasn’t nailed down in the Temple…then they burned the rest to the ground.”
“That rings a bell. So why do we care about this bowl?” Saul asked with his mouth full.
Sara scowled at the man’s bad manners, but answered. “We care because the first line mentions the seven lights that can be found in the dark once you’ve fallen from the chamber. What does that sound like to you? What has seven lights?”
Saul dropped his bag on the desk and licked his fingers. “You think they’re instructions to find the first Menorah? But what about the Babylonians taking it?”
Sara leaned back in her chair. “What if thousands of years of history are wrong? What if the Babylonians didn’t steal the Menorah? Maybe it was gone when they got to The Chamber? Or someone replaced it with a fake? What if the carvings on the serving bowl are clues to where the first Menorah, the last existing piece of the original Jerusalem Gold, can be found?”
Saul nodded his head, and then smiled big. “Good thing I found that bowl, huh?”
Sara rolled her eyes. “No, it is a good thing that Judge Foster found what you missed on that bowl.”
Saul’s head turned quickly at the mention of Judge’s name. “Really? How did he find it? Did you send it to him?”
“No, he’s currently working at the American Museum where I sent it. Coincidentally, and luckily, he in charge of cataloging the field submissions; but that isn’t important. What is important is that we now have a way to possibly find one of the most important artifacts in the Jewish religion,” Sara said. “What we need now is to find the starting point, which would be The Chamber.”
“That means a possible excavation at Temple Mount, which will not be easy. No one is ever allowed to dig there. I’m going to talk to Asa, see if he can work out something for us, and maybe get us a little more venture capital,” Saul said, and headed for the door.
Sara didn’t even look up as he left. She logged into her computer and pulled up an image of ancient Israel on one monitor, while pulling up a recent satellite image of Temple Mount. That was where King Solomon built the First Temple thousands of years before. The Babylonians had destroyed the site after sacking Jerusalem. Since then, Temple Mount had become home base for the three biggest religions on the planet, and a bone of continuous contention between them.
“Digging there will be impossible,” Sara said to herself, “but maybe
we don’t need to dig. Maybe we just need to fall.” She had a plan, but even though she hated admitting it, Sara needed Judge to pull it off.
Chapter Nine
Five miles away, Saul pulled into the Mamilla Hotel.
As the valet took his car, Saul raced into the hotel and made his way to the penthouse, where Asa Rama had taken up residence. Saul knew Asa would want to hear about the latest discovery, but he was a little worried about the man’s reaction.
Asa’s family had made their billions in oil before Saddam Hussein rose to power. They kept the money by placating the dictator during his reign. Asa had hated the man and his petty ways, feeling he cheapened Iraq and the country’s image on the world stage. When America had knocked him out of power, Asa had been pleased, hoping his beloved country would return to greatness. His patience was wearing thin, though, and he now had two new targets for his hatred.
Saul knocked on Asa’s door, and a wall of a man opened it. Saul recognized Asa’s main bodyguard, Jamaal, right away. “I need to see him. It is urgent news.”
Jamaal towered over Saul by almost two full feet. His dark suit and dark skin covered a frame that screamed power. He didn’t move until Asa called from within the room.
“Jamaal, let Saul in, please. I am intrigued to find out what he thinks is urgent.”
Saul tried to push past Jamaal, but only succeeded in getting his head stuck between the doorjamb and the man’s shoulder. As Saul pushed in vain, Jamaal finally moved, sending the smaller man sprawling onto the floor, and landing at Asa’s feet, who was sitting on a couch, eating grapes.
Asa smiled at the prostrate Saul. “No need to crawl in my presence, Saul. A simple hello would do.”
Saul stood up and glared at Jamaal over his shoulder. He turned back to Asa, smoothing out his clothes and said, “Sorry to disturb you so late, but I’ve made an important discovery at the dig. It may lead to the First Menorah!”
