Code Four

by Colin Conway

  I said, “Don’t worry. I’m sure she’s as nervous as you. In fact, if she found an open window, she may be out of the city by now.”

  The muscles around Chase’s jaws contracted as he tried not to react, knowing many pairs of eyes were on him.

  He looked down toward his feet and mumbled, “I’m getting married to a woman I’ve known for only six months. This tuxedo feels like it’s two sizes too small. And my best man—who is hated by half the people here—stopped taking his medication, so he may or may not experience hallucinations during the ceremony. To top it off, now he suddenly thinks he’s funny.”

  “I’m not funny,” I said. “And I am honored you asked me to be here with you.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “Just make sure you have the ring ready.”

  “I’m sure one of us over here has it,” I said.

  This time, Chase couldn’t help but turn to me. There were no groomsmen, so it was only the two of us on our side, the priest in the middle, and a bridesmaid opposite us. My giant friend looked down at me.

  “Hallucinations jokes. Now. Really? Maybe Savannah has been too good for you.”

  Life in Savannah had been good to us over the past year. Bethany had become a private investigator, and I joined her by working behind the scenes. Unfortunately, business had been pretty terrible thus far. Other than a few low-level divorce cases and one missing person who showed up before we could collect a fee, we hadn’t been able to make Coastal Casework Investigations, or CCI, profitable. It wasn’t that we had a bad reputation. In fact, we didn’t want to be a high-profile firm. The problem was CCI had no reputation in a city that grasped onto legacies the way struggling swimmers latch onto life preservers. On the bright side, we’d been expecting trouble from my past to catch up with us, and it hadn’t come. Nothing. Although the absence of danger should have put us at ease, the silence from what Chase liked to call the Eastern European Drug Cartel, or EEDC, was deafening.

  The music started and all attention turned toward the back of the church. Bethany and I had just met Lauren Hahm in the days leading up to the wedding, and we liked her immediately. A pediatrician with a practice outside the city, she’d met Chase online and the two had bonded over a mutual love of exercise and an obsession with Alfred Hitchcock movies. While one might think an imposing burglary detective and a soft-spoken suburban doctor would be an odd pairing, the two seemed to be as in love as any couple I’d ever known. Of course, as a former cop and recovering addict in my mid-forties, living with a woman significantly younger, who was I to judge?

  As the bride made her way down the aisle in her white dress, I looked on as Chase seemed to finally lose himself in the moment. He watched her approach, and I could sense calm coming over him when he realized he was doing the right thing—which was the case with him nearly all the time. I rarely smile but began to feel the urge right up to the point when I glanced over at Bethany. She was absolutely stunning in her dress, her short, reddish hair standing out among the onlookers consisting mostly of the couple’s friends and family. Bethany looked at me, at the bride, then the groom, and back to me. The urge to curl my lips disappeared as she mouthed one word to me—the man who, considering he’d been waiting for a drug gang to assassinate him, hadn’t even thought about proposing marriage.

  It didn’t take expert lip-reading skills to interpret the word, and one didn’t need years of investigative experience to derive the meaning.

  Soon.

  Okay, I thought. Apparently, we would be engaged soon. Given Bethany’s disregard for tradition, I didn’t know if that meant I would be doing the proposing or if she would simply let me know when we were betrothed. Regardless, wedding bells were in our future. While the prospect of getting married didn’t bother me one bit, there were other considerations. One issue was the fact we were operating a fledgling business and, while we were being careful with money, the funds left over from our last case wouldn’t last forever.

  “We are gathered here…” the priest began.

  As an investigator, Bethany was a natural. We had a nice, and necessary, arrangement in which Bethany would be the face of CCI and I would work behind the scenes. However, given our dwindling bank account balance and my limited contributions to the enterprise, I was going to have to talk to her about my finding another job. She wasn’t going to be happy with the idea, but having me twiddle my thumbs between the few cases we had wasn’t going to pay the bills.

  “Do you have the ring?” I heard a voice say.

  Chase eyed me with apprehension, but I produced the ring.

  Then there was the question as to what kind of normal job I could get? I couldn’t go back into law enforcement. Forty-something, former narcotics detectives with psychological problems don’t get jobs in law enforcement. And all that any government or private sector employer had to do was a quick Google search of my name to discover I’d been locked away in a psychiatric facility for going on what some publications had callously called a “killing spree.” I didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, but I was relatively sure Killing Spree wasn’t a popular search term with corporate recruiters.

  Being a private investigator, albeit unlicensed, had led me down a dangerous path, and while I felt I’d done some good, I had caused a great deal of pain. Hence, it was important I stay behind the scenes at CCI as to not scare off potential clients. Also, Bethany could keep me from being overly invested in any big cases—should we actually get any big cases.

  “…man and wife.”

  Soon, she’d mouthed. Soon.

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  Preface to Mass Madness in 2025

  In the nineteenth century, after meticulous comparative examination of the New Testament, both secular and devout scholars concluded that a lost voice existed. Named Quelle, German for the word “source,” it became known as the Q Document.

  Over the decades, conflicting theories of its purpose evolved: apostolic message heralding the Messiah’s return, prologue undergirding existing scripture, or intentionally suppressed evidence of historic deceit.

  Thus, in the twenty-first century, word of a newly discovered text ignited a global contagion of savagery.

  The Madness Begins

  Chapter One

  Friday, February 21, 2025

  A hard rap at the ancient door was the last thing he wanted to hear.

  Dr. Pablo Zurbarán was intently fixed on a scrap of two-thousand-year-old parchment secured beneath the aperture of his microscope when the unwelcome knock intruded. Because of the relentless parade of calls, he escaped to his cramped laboratory below the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. The deluge began after the annual meeting of The Ecumenical Apostles a fortnight earlier in America where he presented his latest archeological finding. Since then, he’d been the target of a full-blown media barrage. Requests for interviews arrived by old-fashioned door knocks and phone calls, as well as the ambush approach on the street and every possible e-based means. The pressure compelled him to seek sanctuary where piles of maps, books, bones, and antiquities were stacked against the stone walls. Because there was no telephone or cell signal, it was the only place where he could work in peace.

  When the knock came, he looked away from the ocular and rubbed his eyes. He’d been staring at the lettering of Fragmento Diecisiete for nearly an hour. All pages in the newly recovered codex were wonderful to view with the clarity of magnification. But that one passage was breathtaking. Two days earlier, after fully decoding the seventeenth document, he found its contents so astonishing that he pronounced it “El Fragmento de la Santa Mierda” to an administrative priest from the diocese of Galicia. In English, it meant “The Holy Shit Fragment.”

  He almost
called out, “Who’s there?” Instead, he decided to ignore the knock, hoping the unwanted visitor would give up and go away.

  The media onslaught made him a celebrity within religious circles. The callers wanted interviews and photographs of him and the documents. In exchange, some extended invitations to prestigious events. The more aggressive appeals were not from reporters, but from priests, ministers, rabbis, churches, synagogues, diplomats, lawyers, and publishers. Some were complimentary, some were angry, and some were from people without knowledge of his work, yet ready to challenge the integrity of his research.

  That morning, his wife, who’d been with him at the excavation in Israel, fielded two calls offering money, and one anonymous voice threatening academic condemnation. Afterward, she described the volume of inquisitors to be endless in both variety and motivation. Yet there was one consistent fact. Not one entreaty made it to his underground hideaway lab.

  The cathedral had only one entrance to the cellar’s meandering corridors. It was inside the basilica, through the carefully guarded Door of Fidelity near the small Quintana Chapel. Once admitted, the visitor descended a spiral staircase to the underground labyrinth where there was no directional signage. Because of these safeguards, all public appeals had arrived only at his home or university office.

  Ignoring the knock did not work. The rap came again, harder and louder.

  “¿Quién es?”

  “I am sorry, professor. No hablo Español. My name is Archbishop Tasso Tadros. I am with the Vatican Antiquities Lab. Many messages have been left for you pertaining to my visit this evening.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Sir, I am an emissary of Our Most Holy Father on a matter of great urgency. I must speak with you.”

  That explained his being admitted to the underground through the Door of Fidelity. The cathedral guards would not challenge an archbishop. And with papers authorizing him as an envoy of the Pope, they’d happily escort him through the maze to his subterranean office.

  “Un momento, Your Grace.”

  Zurbarán stood and shuffled to the door, which was among the oldest in the cathedral and made of black mulberry brought from the Holy Land after the Third Crusade. He glanced at his image in the small mirror by the coat rack. His eyes were tired. He needed a shave and his gray hair, always disorderly, was overdue for a trim. He tucked the rumpled edges of his shirt into his trousers, unlatched the bolt, and tugged steadily on the handle.

  The man standing in the semi-darkened corridor was smiling, hands clasped at the front. He was attired in full collar shirt and cassock adorned with magenta piping, overlaid with a matching amice vestment that draped his shoulders. Atop his amice hung an ornate Latinate cross with a noticeably short crossbar and uniquely long vertical shaft.

  Only after scanning the traditional vestments of the faith did Zurbarán turn to his visitor’s countenance. The face was stout and hardy, with features denoting a long-lineage Mediterranean native of Greek or other Middle Eastern heritage. He had fully rounded lips of a healthy pink, like those seen on robust courtesans in Baroque paintings by Caravaggio. His deep-set eyes were moist with kindness and his cheeks glowed with ruddy ardor. The overall appearance led to only one possible conclusion: this man was important.

  “Your Grace, this is an honor.” He peered into the corridor to see if the visitor was accompanied by cathedral guards, but he was alone.

  The archbishop smiled. “It is only me. At my request the kindly basilica attendants provided directions. I got lost once, but not very badly.”

  “I see. Please come in.”

  “Thank you. I apologize for not speaking Spanish.”

  “It is all right.”

  “In fact, I do speak the language, though not well. It is such a beautiful tongue that I do not wish to offend with improper grammar.”

  “Are you permanently posted to the Vatican?”

  “Oh yes, yes,” the archbishop said with enthusiasm. From a pocket in his cassock he withdrew papers. “I am here at the direct request of the Holy See. I will return directly to His Holiness at St. Peter’s to brief him on our conference.”

  “Oh, my,” Zurbarán said, betraying a sense of flattery. He pushed the ancient door closed and reset the latch. He wasn’t a religious man, though he was a lifelong Catholic and could hardly deny admission to this esteemed visitor. After moving stacks of writing pads, boxes filled with bones, and other office clutter, he gestured for the archbishop to sit on a rusty metal fold-up chair. It was not appropriate to his guest’s high office, but he had no other. “Your Grace, please tell me, how I may assist?”

  “I, too, am an archeologist,” Archbishop Tadros began after sitting. “As I said, I am with the Vatican Antiquities Lab.” He glanced around with friendly acknowledgement at the professor’s restricted quarters. “My office is also in a crypt.” His eyes glinted with humor. “Mine, however, is below the Vatican, which is considerably more spacious than your…laboratorio pequeño.”

  Zurbarán nodded at his office clutter. He patted the nearest human skull within easy reach. “It is true, Your Grace. I must make do with what can be spared by the archdiocese here in the Galician province. I have a university office, but it’s little more than a cubicle. Therefore, I do my research here. Beyond that back wall lies the body of none other than St. James himself. I occasionally think my proximity to him is preferable to having greater space.”

  The archbishop chuckled politely at Zurbarán’s repartee. “Getting down to business, if I may, I am here, of course, because of your presentation to the recent gathering of The Ecumenical Apostles in the American city of Dallas.”

  “Yes?”

  “Professor, it was there that you announced discovery of the Quelle Document, the long missing source for much of Matthew and Luke.”

  “Yes. None other.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Oh, yes. It is indisputably the Quelle Document. It is in fragments of course. As I explained earlier this month in Texas, there are seventeen remnants of the full Q Codex available to us.”

  “Yes. And only the final four were encoded?”

  “Correct. Only the final four. As I announced, the first thirteen are straight affirmations of the two gospels. They did not fully survive the passing of two millennia because the amphora suffered damage. It was secreted in a tunnel below Megiddo Church in Israel. Thankfully, the remnants that did survive are quite legible.”

  “Professor, I regret the unpleasant nature of this next question, but His Holiness very much wishes to know. Did you present a translation of any fragment, or photos of the document, at any time during your visit to America?”

  “Oh, no. The only photos I presented were of the tunnel, the amphora, and the papyri bundle before separation.”

  “Ah, very good. But you did announce to the audience that the final four fragments were written in code and that you were, at that time, laboring on decryption?”

  The professor responded slowly.

  “Yes,” he said, wondering if the archbishop’s tone was becoming aggressive.

  “And you also announced that you would continue a study of all seventeen fragments with the eventual goal of publication? You told the gathering to be patient, that a great announcement would be forthcoming. I believe you used the word ‘soon.’”

  “Well, yes-s-s. That is what I do,” Zurbarán said. “I am a scholar of papyrology and an archeologist of ancient Judaism and Christianity. I am working on an article and have plans for a wider, more thorough presentation of my discovery.”

  “Hmm,” the archbishop said, his eyes growing less friendly.

  “Your Grace, I am confused. My presentation in Dallas was a matter of public record. Additionally, I work only with photos. The original fragments were immediately dispatched to St. Peter’s. As an archeologist and supervisor with the Vatican’s antiquities lab, have you not seen and worked with them yourself?”

  Tadros was ready for the question.

>   “Yes, yes, of course I have.” He gave a small eyeroll, as if to say it should be obvious. “But you see, the team I oversee is also working only with photos. The original papyri are now subjected to preservation under UV light, and will remain isolated for some time. Professor, this visit isn’t about photos versus originals, or about what I have or have not seen. As I explained, His Holiness wishes me to make direct inquiry as to your announcement in Texas so that we may incorporate your findings with our own.”

  “Ah, yes. I understand now.”

  “So then, are you still trying to decrypt the final four fragments?”

  “Oh, more than merely trying. That job is done. They are now fully decrypted.”

  The archbishop’s lips thinned and turned inward, which Zurbarán took to be an expression of disapproval. Seeing that, Tadros quickly recovered with a deceptive question.

  “It is very curious, isn’t it, Professor? Tell me, why do you suppose our Lord chose to conceal his voice with a first-century cipher?”

  “Oh, I do not ponder such things.” Zurbarán pushed his gray hair from his forehead with one hand, while giving a small dismissive wave with the other. “Yes, of course I was raised in the faith. I am also a scientist. It is my job to find, uncover, discover, and preserve. But explain the mysteries of Our Father? Truly, Your Grace, that I cannot attempt.”