The Sacred Blood

by Michael Byrnes

The 5.3-magnitude quake, which had originated in the Great Rift Valley and cut through the Dead Sea to the east, paled in comparison to 1927’s 6.3 quake fifteen miles north in Jericho, which had claimed over two hundred casualties. Jerusalem’s Old City, however, built predominantly from unreinforced ancient limestone, sat upon layers of debris left behind by centuries of destruction and rebuilding. Seismic waves, therefore, came with amplified effect.

  And so did the political aftershocks.

  For over a decade, the tunnel’s ongoing excavation had been a flashpoint for Jewish and Muslim dissension over control of the Temple Mount—the world’s most coveted religious ground. And the unilateral restoration now under way here had drawn much protest from all Muslim and Palestinian groups—the Waqf, Hamas, the PLO . . .

  Cohen gazed woefully up at the vaults once more. What sat above them contributed hugely to the controversy—the residential Muslim Quarter.

  Over the centuries, the Muslims had constructed the stone vaults to raise their dwellings up to the level of the Temple Mount’s esplanade and facilitate easy access to the mosques. Over the centuries, the tunnel hollows had filled with mud and debris, which helped stabilize the superstructure. Therefore, Muslims contended that the recent Israeli excavations threatened the integrity of the structures above. Which was why it was so critical that no Muslim or Palestinian witness the extent of the damage that had truly taken place—because the riots and deaths that marked the 1996 opening of the tunnel would be nothing compared to the violence that could stem from this. As such, the Israeli government was funding this project while actively spinning its purpose.

  Cohen proceeded to a temporary door painted in red letters: authorized personnel only. He punched a code into its digital keypad and the lock opened. Pushing through, he closed the door behind him.

  Poured cement slabs paralleled the Temple Mount’s bare foundation wall to form a narrow corridor, crisscrossed overhead by steel stabilizer girders. Underfoot, the ground sloped steadily upward.

  He moved fast through the passage and up some steps leading to the approximate midpoint of the Temple Mount’s western wall. The ceiling opened up high above and the foundation stones gave way to a massive sealed archway that crested at six meters—Warren’s Gate, discovered by British archaeologist Charles Warren in 1867.

  Shortly after Saladin’s twelfth-century recapturing of Jerusalem, this opening to the lower structure of the Temple Mount platform had been blocked off. But now, a sizable breach had been made in its center, and light spilled out from the burrow.

  He crouched down and peeked inside, where a second crew was busy clearing debris. Though the men wore the same uniforms as the crew in the main hall, they were not under the employ of Israelis. These men were one of Cohen’s many teams.

  He couldn’t help but smile when he saw how far they’d already penetrated beneath the Mount.

  Deep beneath the Temple Mount esplanade, their ear-pounding jackhammers still had Cohen concerned about what might be heard above. This secret dig, however, was in close proximity to the Large Hall, so he was certain that the noises would be easily confused with the sounds of the renovations taking place there.

  A vibration against his chest startled him. He dipped into his breast pocket, pulled out his cell phone, and checked the display’s caller ID: an inside line at the Rockefeller Museum. Fortunately, the Israeli crews had installed signal-relay boosters throughout the tunnel to make outside communications more efficient. Flipping it open, he loudly said, “Hold a moment.”

  He moved away from the archway and further up the tunnel. “Yes, what is it?” he finally asked.

  Through the static, he listened to what the man on the other end had to say. News of a remarkable discovery in Qumran.

  “Is it . . . authentic?” he asked, a slight tremor running over his fingers.

  The caller said he believed it was.

  “And who found it?”

  The caller told him, and his hand shook even harder.

  “Who did Mizrachi ask to handle the transcription?”

  Cohen didn’t like this answer either.

  “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  9

  ******

  Jezreel Valley, Israel

  Cresting the massive earthen mound crowned by fortified ruins, Amit parked his Land Rover and hopped out onto the dusty trail. He took a moment to admire the lush expanse of the Jezreel Valley spreading for kilometers around the tell until it broke like waves against the distant rolling mountains. The unassuming plain had hosted countless battles in antiquity as empires had fought to control this busy interchange where trade and communications were channeled between the East and the Mediterranean.

  For centuries, the mound had been used as a strategic stronghold. Its sinister name derived from the Hebrew Har Megedon, or “hill of Megiddo.”

  Armageddon.

  Designated in Revelation as ground zero for an apocalyptic showdown between the forces of good and evil.

  Armageddon’s past tenants included a host of Old Testament kings, among them Solomon and Josiah. All had left their mark somewhere within Megiddo’s summit, the tell’s visible foundations a mere veneer covering over twenty successive settlements hidden beneath.

  Winding through the maze of ancient foundations, Amit stopped beneath a cluster of fragrant palms and peered down into a deep, neatly cut excavation trench staked along the rim with yellow flags. Below, a small team of archaeologists was busily working their way deeper with trowels and brushes, one micro-thin layer at a time.

  On hands and knees, sporting a wide-brimmed pink sun hat, he spotted world-renowned Egyptologist Julie LeRoux. It was the imprint of the Egyptian pharaohs that had brought her here—Thutmose III, to be precise, he recalled. Recent digs had uncovered a treasure trove of relics left behind during the king’s occupation in the late fifteenth century b.c.e. Julie had flown in from Cairo the very next day. It had been almost four months since her arrival.

  “Hey, Jules. Reach China yet?”

  Without diverting her attention from dusting a partially exposed, orblike artifact lodged in the earth, she called out with a fine-tuned French accent, “Monsieur Amit? That you?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Zut alors!” Setting down the brush, she stood and looked up at him, silver-blue eyes squinting tight against the imposing sun.

  Something about Jules had always managed to make Amit swoon. Three kids and forty-three years had done little to affect her athletic, trim form. Her face—wide-eyed, cheeky, and insolently youthful—was arguably not her best physical asset. But the radiance it emanated was infectious. Funny that she seemed so content, so happy, seeing as her marital record bore a striking similarity to his own—though the number of her failed attempts to substitute a spouse for archaeological mysteries had only reached one.

  “Where is your shovel?” she said.

  A jab only an archaeologist could appreciate. Jules considered shovels sacrilege—a tool relegated to only the impatient and the irreverent. He shrugged with a boyish grin. “Seem to have forgotten it.”

  “Pity. Why don’t you come on down here and let me teach you a thing or two?” She motioned to a tall aluminum ladder leaning against the rim of the pit.

  “So what brings you to Armageddon?” Jules asked.

  Helping her dust the artifact, Amit was now able to decipher the orb—a clay decanter covered in hieroglyphs. The coincidence tickled him. “Egypt, actually.”

  The words caressed her ears. “You don’t say,” she seductively replied. He glanced over his shoulder at her understudies, none of whom

  seemed interested in listening in on the conversation. “A hieroglyph, more precisely.”

  “Ahh. Looks like the gods have anticipated your visit to the oracle,” she teased, eyeing the jug. “Best be gentle with this one,” she instructed him, pointing at the amphora. “She’s flaking.”

  Grinning, Amit treated it more tenderly.

  “A g
lyph, you say. I suppose you’ve brought it with you?” Jules eased back on her knees. Amit nodded. “Then let’s have a look,” she said.

  Amit set down his brush. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a photo, and handed it to her.

  “I found this etching, you see, and . . .” He pointed to it, realizing it pretty much spoke for itself.

  She bit her lip, her head tilted to one side as she studied it for only a moment. “Clear enough.” She refolded the paper and gave it back to him with a taunting smile.

  “Well?” He pocketed the print.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were in Egypt?”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Oh,” she said, confused. “Just seems like the only place you’d be able to take pictures of something like that.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It represents a nome.”

  A nome was ancient Egypt’s equivalent of a province. “Are you going to make me beg for the name?”

  “Maybe I’ll just have you work for it. Now let me think of clues.”

  Jules’s trademark trivia caught the attention of one of her students. The attractive young woman made eye contact with Amit, smiled, and shook her head in a sympathetic gesture.

  Jules’s eyes scrunched, pinching subtle crow’s-feet at the corners. “Okay, it’s probably the most famous of ancient Egypt’s forty-two nomes, and today it exists only by name, though the place to which it applies is not its original location.” She glanced at him with anticipation. After ten seconds, she correctly assumed that he needed some help. “Hints: Book of the Dead, Atum, Horus, Ra—”

  “Heliopolis?”

  “Parfait!” she exclaimed, giving him a pat on the knee. “Yes, the legendary City of the Sun.”

  He exchanged a victorious glance with the student, who bestowed her solidarity with a thumbs-up. Then, briefly falling into a trance, he tried to determine what purpose the glyph could possibly serve among the seemingly unrelated discoveries he’d unearthed at Qumran.

  “Something wrong?” she asked.

  Rousing, he said, “No . . . It’s nothing.” He waved it all away. “I knew I could count on you to figure this one out. Would have taken me hours of sifting through books.”

  “You’re welcome.” She smiled. “Care to tell me what this is all about?”

  “I’d love to, Jules, but it’s not something I’m at liberty to discuss,” he softly replied, motioning with his eyes to her nearby crew.

  “Oooh . . . mysterious.” Her eyebrows flitted up and down and she poked his large belly with a stiff index finger, making him laugh out loud. “You know, it’s okay to ask for help if you need it. If you found that glyph here in Israel, there’s no one better than me to help you decipher its context. So why don’t you show me what you’ve found?” she challenged him.

  How feisty could this woman possibly be? He scowled and shook his head. “Not sure if I’m ready to—”

  “Jezza,” she called to the student, cutting him off.

  “Yes?” the young woman responded.

  “Think you can watch over things for the rest of the day?”

  “Of course.”

  “Excellent.” She turned back to Amit. “Then it’s settled.” Springing to her feet, she grabbed a towel and wiped her hands.

  He groaned as he got up.

  She tossed the towel to him, then stepped over to the ladder. “Off we go.”

  10

  ******

  Phoenix, Arizona USA

  Another call went to voice mail as Charlotte Hennesey pored over the genoscan data again. Finally pushing aside the reports, she swiveled her leather chair and gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her sleek sixteenth-floor corner office. BioMedical Solutions had spent lavishly on its corporate headquarters: an expanded state-of-the-art genetics lab, refurbished offices, and a cavernous mahogany paneled conference room. Times were good. BMS was growing like wildfire. And she was the second in command—executive vice president of genetic research.

  Seeing as she’d recently cheated bone cancer, by all measures, things couldn’t be better.

  Just beyond the glass, the city’s panorama spread wide before the serrated peaks of the Phoenix Mountains. The desert’s perfect blue sky offered tranquility. Nowadays, she still needed to remind herself to take stock of life’s more simple beauty. A fancy job title and stock options were fleeting novelties that she likened to new-car smell. A new lease on life, however? That was a transformative event that left a permanent, humbling impression. And it was an impression that she was anxious to share with the world.

  Rubbing her eyes, she swiveled back to the computer monitor, where two images were paneled side by side.

  “Just makes no sense,” she muttered.

  The image on the left was a spectral karyotype plotting twenty-four fluoresced chromosome pairs in a grid. The image on the right was virtually identical, except for the label on the last pair—XX instead of XY. Nothing wrong there.

  Sample XX had been extracted from the nucleus of her own blood cell. Female.

  Sample XY had been extracted from a two-thousand-year-old skeleton found inside the ossuary she’d secretly studied at the Vatican Museums back in June. Male. Identity? . . . The possibility still sent shivers down her spine.

  But the real difference—the aberration—was plainly evident in both images. It was the chromosome pair marked “23.” The strands indeed had a normal wormlike shape, but lacked the visible bands of a compressed helix. Closer study had revealed why: pair 23’s genes weren’t structured in tightly wound strands. In microscopic view its structure resembled . . . rock candy? Adding to the genetic mind-bender was the fact that the nucleobases—guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine—found in all other chromosomes were not present in 23. Which led to a most amazing discovery: a previously undocumented coding nucleobase she and her boss Evan Aldrich had, for the time being, simply dubbed “chromosome 23” or just “23.”

  And 23 operated like a super organic nanomachine, rebuilding and recoding damaged cells in the remaining chromosome set—a synthesis she still couldn’t fathom. And when introduced into an organism—like an unsuspecting thirtysomething female geneticist with bone cancer—it swept through the bloodstream like a virus to repair damaged coding, system-wide.

  She still couldn’t believe Evan had been so daring as to inject her with it. For all he’d known, it could’ve killed her. Then again, he wasn’t the type to leave things to chance. When he’d spotted the anomaly while performing a routine genome scan on the ancient bone sample she’d sent him months back, he knew what he’d stumbled upon. He just couldn’t explain exactly what it was.

  When they’d returned from Rome in June, that job had been delegated to her.

  So far, her search to find answers had only brought bigger questions. Where had 23 come from? How could it have only existed in a twothousand-year-old man? A chromosome that could selectively undo countless centuries of adverse genetic mutation? It was an epigenetic riddle of unprecedented proportion.

  Charlotte sank back into her chair and sighed.

  She couldn’t help but contemplate an idea serious researchers considered taboo: the “origin—unknown” variable that pointed to something bigger than scientific rationale. Irreducible complexity? Don’t think it, she told herself. But she did anyway. Intelligent design? If her analysis even hinted at creationism, she could kiss her career good-bye.

  “Come on,” she admonished herself. You can find the answer. You can do this.

  But even if she could, what about the commercial aspects of the research? This thing would be the Pandora’s box of medicine. Eradicating every disease could have daunting implications—like the complete collapse of the medical-industrial complex.

  “Just breathe,” she muttered to herself.

  “Take a breath for me too,” a voice called from the door.

  She turned. It was Evan, looking like a billboard ad in his Armani navy double-breasted suit and
a tasteful periwinkle and white striped tie that made his blue eyes flash—a more serious corporate image (adopted not by his own volition, but at the insistence of the board of directors). She still opted for the company’s standard-issue white lab coat over her 40-percentoff Ann Taylor Loft pantsuit.

  “How ya doin’?” He stayed leaning against the door frame.

  “Oh, you know. Trying to figure out how we trapped the Garden of Eden in a test tube,” she said with great sarcasm.

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  She shrugged.

  He tipped his chin up at the monitor. “Your sample still stable?”

  “Yes.” Enzyme levels normal, blood cell counts immaculate, no trace of cancer cells. Remission.

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “I’m not complaining,” she said with a smile. “Still think we should keep this under lock and key?”