Thief on the Cross: Templar Secrets in America (Templars in America Series Book 2)

by David S. Brody

  “The Holy Grail?”

  “Not literally. But many theologians believe the Holy Grail is really a symbol of God’s grace, available only to those who are spiritually advanced and pure. As I said, God chose me to find His true word. Perhaps He chose you as well.”

  Cam let the comment hang. Sometimes a fish was just a fish. Even when it was really a camera. “How far down is the cave?” He couldn’t take his eyes off the monitor. Was he really standing atop a cave filled with ancient artifacts? He glanced quickly at the river in the distance—if the cave symbol on the map stone marked his present location, the river in the distance led to the Ohio River and eventually the Mississippi.

  “About 30 feet.” January eased the camera down the hole until the line went slack. “Bottom.” He pulled the cord to raise the camera up a few feet and turned the monitor toward Cam. “Have a look.”

  Cam had craned his neck to view the monitor; he now knelt to view the images straight on. He almost jumped back as an angry face—teeth bared, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowed—stared back at him. The fearsome face was carved onto a wall of the cave like a prehistoric Jack-O-Lantern. Cam studied it. “He seems to have Negroid features.”

  “I think he’s a sentry. The Phoenicians often employed Africans as guards and soldiers.” January rotated the camera 90 degrees. “We’re in a small room.” The outline of an arched doorway led out to what was presumably the main cave complex.

  “How big was that face?” It was tough to get any kind of scale.

  “About two feet tall.” January rotated the camera another 90 degrees. “There. Take a look at that.”

  A series of hieroglyphic-like markings appeared on the cave wall opposite the sentry. “This script matches a lot of the artifacts Burrows pulled out of the cave,” January said. “It’s a variation of Phoenician. But so much of it is covered with dust that I haven’t been able to translate it.” Whatever it was it didn’t look like any Native American writings or carvings Cam had ever seen.

  January raised the camera another foot. Above the writing the camera shone on a square alcove, the size of a small television, recessed into the cave wall. A pair of flat round pottery pieces sat inside the alcove. “Lamps?” Cam asked.

  “Yes. Probably filled with oil.” January flicked at the camera, the lens angle changing as the fish bounced slowly. “You can see the soot along the top of the niche.”

  “Makes sense. You’d need light in there, especially if you wanted to read what was written on the wall.”

  January rotated the camera another 90 degrees, aiming toward the back of the room. After fiddling for a few seconds he grunted. “There.” A stone platform ran along the wall. As a cold wind blew across the ridge, Cam peered in, waiting for the image to settle. Atop the platform lay a skeleton, the skull turned toward the middle of the room, its eyes staring vacantly into the camera. Cam shivered, unable to tear his eyes away. “I see why you think the carving was a sentry.”

  “Yes. He’s guarding the corpse. The writing is probably some kind of obituary. This is a crypt, one of a number Burrows found in the cave. He was careful not to disturb any of the bodies or burial sites.”

  Cam swallowed. The body probably hadn’t been disturbed in 2,000 years. “If you can get that body, you can do DNA testing on the molars.” Which, if January was correct, would totally rewrite history. Amazing.

  “Exactly.” January coughed into his handkerchief. “But it won’t be me who gets the body, Mr. Thorne. It will have to be you.”

  For the first time Cam actually considered helping his adversary. January happened to be a nut case, but that didn’t mean the cave itself was a hoax. He felt a moment of pity for the dying man. “So you won’t ever know the truth about this—about the cave, about the body.”

  January grinned, his eyes dilated and afire. “Oh, that’s not true. I’ll know the truth long before you will. Where I’m going there are no secrets.”

  The 7:30 display on the digital clock in January’s pickup surprised Cam. Was it possible they had been at the cave site for only an hour? The images from the cave, and the apparent ramifications of the find, were enough to fill weeks of space in his brain. There was no longer any need for him to feign interest in January’s artifacts as a ruse to protect Amanda. If the whole thing was a hoax, it was an incredibly elaborate one. And one that would seem to be beyond the capacity of a single Illinois truck driver. Cam had been tempted to grab a shovel and begin digging right then, in the dark.

  January guided the pickup back through the cornfields toward the airport. “Like I said, Burrows was trespassing so he never brought anyone to the cave. But he took out thousands of artifacts, sold most of them for twenty, thirty bucks each to a local antiques dealer. Showed up at her door a couple of mornings every week, covered in dirt, with a satchel full of carved stones.”

  Decent money, but not enough to get rich on. Especially when you figure in the time it would have taken Burrows to carve the pieces, assuming it was a hoax. “Anybody ever study the stones? You know, scientifically?”

  January nodded. “There were quite a few people, amateur historians, who believed Burrows’ story. They bought the artifacts and studied them. What was interesting, and this is what first caught my attention, was that there was not a single piece of hard evidence that called into question the artifacts themselves—no microscopic debris from modern tools, no linguistic error on any text stone, no image inconsistent with ancient religious practices. All the skepticism was centered on Burrows himself.”

  “And the fact he wouldn’t show anyone the cave.”

  “Which didn’t make sense then, but makes perfect sense now that we know he was trespassing.”

  In the end, the Burrows side of the equation was really irrelevant; if the artifacts were tested and proven to be authentic, it didn’t matter who found them. What was fascinating was the question of who carved the stones and how they got to Illinois. “So who were these cave people?”

  “Good question, one I’ve spent 20 years trying to answer. I’ve retained many experts and paid them dearly over the years, but none of them can give me a definitive answer.” January turned out of the cornfields and onto the main road. “The one thing they all agree on is that the pieces all tie back to the Mediterranean region, ranging from 500 BC to the time of Christ. Somehow these explorers made their way to the Gulf of Mexico and then up the Mississippi River.”

  Cam sensed there was more to the story, or at least more to January’s version of the story, than the man was letting on. For that matter, Cam still had no idea what exactly January wanted from him. As if sensing that Cam was about to ask questions he didn’t want to answer, January pulled out his cell phone and called Vincent. “Have the plane ready to take off in ten minutes.”

  Cam had experienced firsthand how dismissive and narrow-minded the mainstream academic community could be. Even so, was it really possible Burrows had stumbled upon the greatest archeological find in the nation’s history and that the experts had passed it off as a fraud or hoax without proper investigation?

  Five minutes later they turned into the airport. The leather seats in the jet’s cabin had been reconfigured so two of the seats on the right side faced each other, with a small table between them. A white cloth covered irregularly-shaped items on the table.

  January dropped into the rear-facing seat and motioned for Cam to sit opposite. “If you were to research Burrows Cave on the Internet, you’d be hard-pressed to find any commentator supporting its authenticity.”

  “But I don’t imagine they have seen the cave you just showed me.”

  “No. But let’s put the cave aside for a minute. Fascinating as it is, there is nothing in there that would have been impossible for Burrows to fabricate. The carvings, the lamps, even the body could have been planted.” He made an effort to lift himself higher in his chair. “In the end, we must examine the artifacts.”

  He folded the white cloth back onto itself, revealing a 12-inch high c
arving of a human head. “It is a piece of uncommon beauty and grace, a sculpture no amateur like Russell Burrows could hope to produce. Please hold it tightly as we are about to take off.”

  BURROWS CAVE STONE HEAD

  Cam turned the sandstone sculpture toward him, slowly rotating it and examining it on all sides. As January said, the sculpture was a gracefully elongated, artistic rendition of an African—perhaps Egyptian—face. It was similar to the sentry carving in the cave, with the forehead slanting back, a long narrow nose and prominent lips. It reminded Cam of one of the giant carvings on Easter Island. But artistry didn’t necessarily establish authenticity. If January was trying to make a case for the legitimacy of Burrows’ pieces, he was going to have to do better. “My understanding is that sandstone is pretty easy to work with.”

  “For a trained sculptor, yes. Not for Russell Burrows. He was a truck driver and before that a prison guard.”

  “Hardly an airtight case. Maybe his wife did it.”

  January grinned, his yellowing teeth wet with saliva, seemingly oblivious to the plane hurtling down the runway. “Excellent, Mr. Thorne. I was hoping you’d be a tougher sell than that—extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I want you to be completely convinced. How about this then? I’ve had the sandstone analyzed by a geologist. That type of sandstone predominates in northern Africa.”

  Cam nodded. It was unlikely Burrows would have imported the stone as part of a hoax. “So it was brought here by some Mediterranean seafarer?”

  “Probably as some kind of funerary object. The head represented an ancestor, or even a god. But the features, and the stone itself, take us back to northern Africa and the Middle East.”

  “If you’re talking seafarers from that area of the world, you’re probably talking the Phoenicians, maybe 500 BC, right?”

  January nodded, smiling, seemingly pleased Cam had chosen that date. “Precisely, yes.” Hand shaking, he wrestled with the cap on a bottle of water. Finally he pried the top off and drank noisily, spilling a few drops down his chin as the plane nosed its way into the air. “Now, please take a look at the middle artifact, the small black stone.”

  Cam pulled the cloth back further and cupped a smooth, calculator-sized stone in his palm. Carved into it was a 7-stemmed candelabrum along with some form of ancient writing. “This looks like a Jewish menorah, except I think menorahs have nine arms instead of seven,” Cam said.

  BURROWS CAVE MENORAH STONE

  January nodded. “Very astute. Continue.”

  Cam assumed more valuable he was to his manic host, the more leverage he would have to ensure Amanda’s safety. “And the writing is the same style as on the wall of the cave.” He paused. “And I think also the map stone.”

  “Again, correct.”

  “So what’s the significance of this stone?”

  “First, the fact the menorah has seven arms instead of nine is odd, but not unprecedented—it is a representation of the giant golden menorah that stood in the Temple of Solomon in ancient times. I suppose we could envision a scenario in which Burrows dug through some arcane library book and learned this fact and carved a menorah from biblical times rather than a modern one.” January shrugged his bony shoulders. “Though I doubt it. But note the triangular base. This is very rare—most menorahs, even seven-stemmed ones from biblical times, stand on tripods, with a vertical bar above the triangle. There are only two known versions of menorahs with triangular bases without the vertical tripod bar, both from the first century B.C. Only the most expert scholars would know of these prototypes. It is next to impossible that Russell Burrows would.”

  “Maybe Burrows just got lucky with the triangular base.”

  “Please, Mr. Thorne. Neither of us believes in that kind of coincidence. That’s not the way the world works.”

  Cam nodded; January was correct. He barely noticed they were now ascending. This was good, solid analysis. The kind of thing Cam could sell a jury on. “Does that mean the writing is also first century BC?” If not, then the argument would collapse on itself.

  “Precisely. The writing is, again, Phoenician. It says ‘Tyre,’ an ancient port city south of modern-day Beirut. The Phoenicians had been conquered long before the first century BC, but their alphabet survived. What is especially interesting is that one of the letters, the circle with the vertical line bisecting it, appears at first glance to be a mistake—it should have both a vertical and horizontal line within the circle. But in certain areas of the Mediterranean the vertical line alone was used. You can count on one hand the number of experts in the world who possess this knowledge.” His wet eyes held Cam’s. “Needless to say, Russell Burrows is not one of them.”

  Cam lifted the third stone in the collection, a rectangular piece of white marble about the size and thickness of a hotel bible. A head, perhaps a Roman soldier, appeared carved in profile, along with a few letters of undecipherable script.

  BURROWS CAVE ROMAN SOLDIER

  January spoke as Cam studied the piece. “The marble itself is probably from the Mediterranean region, which is telling. But the important thing is the damage and erosion along the bottom half. Notice how it appears that the stone was partially submerged in water, which washed away much of the detail—and dirt—below the soldier’s neck. This type of erosion occurs over many decades, perhaps centuries. My experts believe it probably occurred during periodic storms when the cave flooded and streams of water rushed through. It would be nearly impossible for Burrows to fabricate weathering and erosion like this.”

  Three different types of stone and three different types of carvings. And most importantly three different cultures represented—Phoenician, Jewish and Roman. No wonder the experts laughed in Burrows’ face. But, paradoxically, in some ways the outlandishness of the collection was compelling evidence of its authenticity. Why would a hoaxster go to such elaborate lengths to make the pieces seem authentic and then so carelessly mix pieces of conflicting cultures together?

  Cam rubbed his face with his hands. January was a nut and probably delusional, but his artifacts were stunning. They were either part of an incredibly elaborate hoax or one of the most important archeological finds in history. “So what is the story these pieces are telling?”

  The old man sat back in his seat as the plane leveled. “They tell the story of an ancient people from the Middle East settling in the American heartland in the centuries before Christ was born.” He took a deep breath, leaning his craggy face forward and locking his watery blue eyes on Cam’s. “I am a dying man, and this has been my life’s work. So I am admittedly biased. But the artifacts don’t lie. I am convinced these people are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. You can read all about them in the Book of Mormon.”

  CHAPTER 5

  “You were smart to mention it. This January guy and his theories are just the kind of thing that could kill the Governor’s chances.” Georgia Johnston motioned to the waiter for a refill of her seltzer water. What she really wanted was a martini, but her Mormon companions didn’t drink. It was a small but painful price to pay for saving the country from the liberal loonies.

  “How so? If January has artifacts that prove the Book of Mormon, that helps the Governor, not hurts him. How can proving the validity of our sacred text be a negative?” Fred Bigelow was a humorless, stork-like attorney with the most prominent Adam’s apple Georgia had ever seen. A senior partner at one of Boston’s largest law firms, he was well-connected and normally pretty savvy. But he was about to step in front of a train with this Book of Mormon thing. Unless she stopped him.

  Georgia chewed on an ice cube, formulating her response. She and her dozen cohorts, all men, had been meeting monthly for almost two years, alternating between Boston, Washington, D.C. and Salt Lake City, strategizing in preparation for the next Presidential election. They were seated around a large table in a private, wood-paneled room at Concord’s Colonial Inn on the Monday night before Thanksgiving, a musket shot from where the battles of Concord a
nd Lexington began. The choice to meet at the birthplace of the American Revolution was not a random one for a group that bled white and blue along with red. Trey Buckner, a short, square-jawed man with steely-gray eyes who rarely spoke, reported directly to the Mormon leadership in Salt Lake City. Others had gained the candidate’s trust over the years either through business, politics or family connections, in addition to their religious ties. Whatever their connection to the candidate, all were committed to seeing him elected President.

  “Look, what makes your guy such a good candidate,” she began, “is that he looks like something out of a 1950s movie, Mr. All-America, someone you’d want to have as a neighbor.” Or a lover. Not that she had a chance with a guy like him. In her prime Georgia would have been described as full-figured and brainy—not traits that were particularly popular to men in rural Texas, where she grew up. And her prime was a good 30 years in the rearview mirror. Unwilling to settle for just some guy, she had never married. Which left her plenty of time to indulge in her passion for politics as well as her second career—for the past two decades she had worked as a CIA analyst, her day job as one of the country’s top political consultants providing the ideal cover for her spy work.

  She continued. “But anything that reminds the voters he is somehow different from them is very dangerous. Obama won because he did a great job acting and sounding like your neighbor—you never heard him slide into ghetto lingo or jive like Jesse Jackson. So the less about Mormons and their church, the better.”