The Messiah Secret cb-3

by James Becker

  Cross took the crowbar and jammed it into the wooden crate, where the lid met the side. But as he did so, the two-thousand-year-old wood disintegrated to reveal the dull gleam of metal within. He pulled out the remaining bits of wood and tossed them away.

  With the wood removed, a heavy but entirely plain and unmarked metal coffin became visible, resting on the floor of the stone oblong. Cross pulled out a knife and slid the point along its lid.

  ‘I think it’s made of lead,’ he said, looking at the silvery gleam of the cut surface in the light from his torch.

  ‘That settles it,’ Donovan said. ‘Even if we wanted to lift it intact and take it somewhere, it’s too heavy. We’d never get it out of this room, let alone down to one of the jeeps. We’re going to have to open it right here, right now.’

  Angela shook her head, and took a half-step backwards. She looked pale and shocked.

  Bronson felt a lurch of concern.

  ‘The lid’s sealed,’ Cross said. ‘There are half a dozen separate seals between the lid and the base, and there’s a kind of reddish stuff in the joint as well. Looks to me like they did their best to keep the whole thing air-tight.’

  ‘So in that case you might get a decent sample, Donovan,’ Masters remarked.

  ‘I should bloody well hope so, after all this,’ Donovan said, while in the background Killian snorted his disgust.

  Using his knife, Cross sliced through the seals that linked the lid and the base of the coffin, then ran the tip of the blade all the way around the joint, to try to break the seal between the two sections.

  ‘You’ll need to give me a hand,’ Cross said, motioning to Masters to help him lift the lid. The two men stood side by side as Cross drove the tip of the crowbar into the gap below the coffin lid and levered it upwards. There was a sudden hiss of escaping air as the seal was finally breached. They seized the lid and levered it up and to one side, where it thudded heavily back against the stone wall that surrounded the coffin. Then they both stepped back.

  For the first time in two thousand years the contents of the coffin were revealed in the yellow light from a handful of electric torches. For a few seconds nobody spoke.

  ‘So Josephus was right,’ Killian muttered.

  There was a sudden clang as Angela dropped her torch. She gave a sharp intake of breath that was almost a sob. ‘Oh. My. God,’ she whispered, and almost fell into Bronson’s arms.

  67

  ‘It can’t be,’ Donovan muttered. ‘That’s wrong. That’s so wrong. That can’t be Him. That’s not Jesus Christ.’

  Behind him, Masters crossed himself.

  ‘He wasn’t called Jesus Christ,’ Killian said, his voice echoing around the tomb. ‘Now that we’re finally in this sacred place, at the very least you should use His correct name. He was called Yehoshua or Yeshua, and that name in Hebrew means “God is saviour”. The appellation “Christ” is just a translation of the Greek Khristos or Latin Christus, meaning “the anointed one”. He was never called that when He was alive.’

  Nobody in the cave took the slightest notice of what he was saying. Everyone was looking into the coffin, with varying expressions of disbelief.

  ‘That’s not what I expected,’ Bronson muttered. ‘Not what I expected at all.’

  ‘You’re simply showing your ignorance, all of you,’ Killian snapped. ‘What did you expect? The skeleton of a man six feet tall, maybe still showing the remains of long hair and a beard? The image that almost everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike, has of Jesus Christ? The image that has not the slightest shred of historical evidence to support it? The image that only became accepted as a true representation over eight hundred years after He died? That image?’

  Still nobody responded.

  What the coffin contained wasn’t a skeleton. It was a body. The body of a man which looked so fresh and so vibrant that it was almost possible to believe he was still alive. It was wrapped in a discoloured but probably once-white cloth, the arms lying by its side, bare feet exposed at the end of the coffin.

  But the body wasn’t six feet in height, nothing like it. Bronson, who was used to estimating heights and distances as part of his job as a police officer, guessed the man had stood little more than five feet tall. He was heavily tanned and almost clean-shaven, just a few wisps of coarse hair dotted on his cheeks and chin. And his patchy fair hair was almost reddish in colour, and parted in the centre.

  But it was the face that shocked them the most. Every person standing in that cave — even Bronson, who was a committed atheist — had a mental image of Jesus as a man of noble, even patrician, bearing, but the body in the lead coffin had a face that was almost startlingly unattractive. It was pinched and narrow, dominated by a long and thin nose under thick eyebrows that almost met in the middle, giving the face a mean and unpleasant, almost equine, appearance. The corpse was about as far removed from the traditional picture of Jesus Christ as could possibly be imagined.

  ‘This must be a mistake,’ Donovan muttered, shaking his head.

  ‘If it is, you made it,’ Killian retorted. Of all the people in the cave, he was the only one who seemed unaffected by the sight of the corpse. In fact, from the moment the coffin lid had been removed, he’d acted as if the body inside it had been exactly what he’d expected.

  ‘What did you mean when you said “Josephus was right”?’ Angela asked him, staring wide-eyed at the corpse. She seemed to have recovered her composure somewhat, and was leaning forward, right over the base of the open coffin.

  ‘There are no extant first-hand contemporary accounts of what Jesus looked like,’ Killian said. ‘But in a very early Slavonic copy of the Capture of Jerusalem, Josephus — you do know who he was, I hope? — describes Jesus as being small in stature with a “long face, long nose and meeting eyebrows”. He also said He had dark skin, scanty hair parted in the middle like a Nazarite and with an undeveloped beard. And I think that’s a pretty good description of this man, wouldn’t you agree?’

  There was another long silence. ‘Could this really be the founder of Christianity?’ Donovan said at last. ‘Just look at him. Short — he’s almost a dwarf — and ugly with it.’

  ‘It’s not what He looked like that’s important,’ Killian said, his voice rising in anger. ‘It’s what He did, what He said and the lessons He gave us. Those are the building blocks, the very foundations, of the greatest religion the world has ever known.’

  ‘Look at the hands,’ Donovan said suddenly, and everybody’s focus shifted. ‘Do you see any nail marks? Stigmata?’

  But the corpse’s hands and wrists were unmarked.

  ‘That proves nothing,’ Killian said. ‘Nails were expensive. The Romans often tied their victims to the cross with ropes. It just meant they lasted a bit longer, made them suffer even more.’

  ‘What about the feet?’ Bronson asked. He couldn’t quite see into the base of the coffin. ‘Or did the Romans lash their legs to the cross as well?’

  Masters bent down to have a closer look. When he straightened up, his face was pale in the gloom of the cave, and he crossed himself again before he spoke.

  ‘Two old wounds,’ he said. ‘Looks like something was driven through both heels. He’d have found walking real painful.’

  Everyone looked at Killian who nodded. ‘Common practice,’ he said. ‘They usually turned the victim sideways, jammed his feet into a wooden box attached to the cross and drove one nail straight through both ankles.’

  His matter-of-fact explanation of the mechanics of perhaps the cruellest method of execution yet devised echoed around the cave.

  ‘Dear God,’ Angela whispered.

  ‘But you said they were old wounds,’ Bronson said, looking at Masters, and the mercenary nodded. ‘So this man must have lived after he was crucified. How?’

  ‘Crucifixion wasn’t always terminal,’ Killian said. ‘There were a few recorded cases of victims being granted a reprieve after they were put on the cross, and being taken down aga
in. Whether they survived depended on how long they’d been hanging there, and the way they had been secured to the cross. If three nails had been used, they’d eventually die from shock and blood loss or infection, but if their arms had been roped to the patibulum — that was the cross-piece — then they would have had a chance of living. And this man obviously did.’

  ‘But if this man really was Jesus Christ,’ Angela said, ‘this proves He didn’t die, or rise again — which would cut away the foundations of the entire Christian religion.’

  ‘Exactly,’ replied Killian. ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  Silence fell again in the chamber, then they all heard a faint crackling sound, almost like a repeated electric discharge. It appeared directionless, but seemed to emanate from somewhere within the cave.

  Masters jumped backwards, away from the lead coffin, his face ashen.

  The eyelids of the corpse had flickered open, and the eyes, eyes of a pure and brilliant and unsullied cerulean blue, were staring straight up at the roof of the cave.

  68

  ‘You should have waited,’ Angela said calmly.

  ‘What?’ Donovan asked, still staring at the body.

  ‘You should have waited. You should have opened the coffin in a controlled environment, not way out here. There’s no way of stopping this now.’

  ‘Stopping what?’

  ‘You heard that noise, just like the rest of us. And now it’s too late. Far too late.’

  ‘Look!’ Masters said. ‘Look at the body.’

  Before their eyes, the corpse had started to change, the flesh shrinking and changing colour, and a sudden odour of decay, sharp and unpleasant, the smell of rotting and long-dead meat, permeated the cave.

  ‘Sealing the coffin would have arrested the decay process,’ Angela said, her voice strained. ‘That crackling sound was some of the bones starting to crumble, and the eyes snapping open must have been caused by the muscles of the eyelids contracting as they decayed. Now the body’s making up for lost time. That’s why you should have waited.’

  ‘Nooo!’ Donovan howled, the sound loud in the confined space, and he leapt forward.

  He plunged his hands into the coffin, grabbing for the corpse itself. Seizing the right hand, he ripped off one of the fingers, holding it up in triumph.

  ‘This is all I’ll need!’ he shouted. ‘This will be enough.’

  The others recoiled in horror, but only one of them moved.

  ‘Sacrilege!’ Killian screamed, and launched himself across the end of the open stone coffin straight at Donovan.

  The two men tumbled to the ground in a tangle of arms and legs, rolling over and over. They crashed into the crumbling skeleton that lay beside the coffin, a cloud of dust erupting from the ancient body as they crushed it against the ground.

  Masters took a couple of steps towards them, to try to separate the two battling figures, then stopped, his head cocked on one side.

  ‘You hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ Then Bronson heard it too. A dull rumbling that seemed to emanate from the very walls all around them. And one glance told him what was causing it.

  ‘Get out!’ he yelled. ‘Get out now.’

  Bronson grabbed Angela and shoved her towards the entrance to the outer cave. An entrance that was closing fast as the noise grew in intensity, a deafening rumbling that now echoed around the stone chamber.

  They were caught in a trap that had been waiting for them for two millennia.

  69

  Cross darted through the opening, Masters barely a yard behind him. Bronson pushed Angela into the fast-closing gap.

  It was now so narrow that she had to turn sideways to slide through. The moment she stepped into the outer cave she reached back for Bronson. But before she could grab his arm, a powerful hand seized her from behind and pulled her away from the entrance.

  Masters reached into the gap and jammed the crowbar lengthwise at chest-height between the cave wall and the moving stone door, and the rumbling sound suddenly diminished.

  ‘Now!’ he yelled. ‘Get out now! This won’t hold it for long.’

  Bronson didn’t hesitate, just ducked down and forced himself head-first into the gap. As he eased his body through, he could feel the stone door vibrating as some ancient unseen mechanism tried to force it closed against the flimsy steel barrier of the crowbar.

  ‘Chris!’ Angela was growing frantic in the outer cave.

  Bronson thrust his torso through the gap at the base of the stone door, kicking out strongly with his legs to force his body through.

  In the cave’s inner chamber, Donovan kicked Killian’s unconscious body to one side and dived across the stone floor. Somebody was in front of him, trying to wriggle through the remaining gap. Donovan reached out, grabbed the man’s leg and pulled as hard as he could.

  Bronson felt the tug on his leg and looked back. He could see Donovan right behind him, doing his best to drag him back into the inner chamber, and kicked out. The sole of his foot connected with Donovan’s face, and he lurched backwards, blood streaming from his broken nose, his grip on Bronson’s leg instantly loosening.

  Bronson made a final effort and pulled himself through the gap, rolling across the floor of the cave to clear the opening as quickly as possible.

  On the other side of the moving door, Donovan thrust himself forward, diving headlong into the narrow space.

  ‘Nick, help me!’ he shouted as he started to force his way through the gap.

  Masters stepped forward and reached down to grab Donovan’s out-stretched arm.

  Then the stone door gave a sudden lurch and Masters looked up. The crowbar was starting to bend under the enormous pressure of the moving slab of stone. He grabbed Donovan’s hand and started to pull, but even as he did so he knew it was too late.

  Donovan felt an enormous, intolerable pressure on his chest as the stone door started moving again, started closing the gap. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move.

  He felt a snap as the first of his ribs broke, then his chest caved in, a sudden excruciating shaft of agony that seared through his very being. And then he felt nothing at all as the crowbar snapped and the stone slab finally slammed into place, the ancient stone rollers crumbling to dust with the impact, jamming the door closed for another eternity.

  70

  ‘We’re out of here,’ Masters said, as they stepped outside the mouth of the cave. ‘The Indian Army or Air Force are going to be swarming all over this valley lookin’ for whoever blew their shiny Hind gunship out of the sky, so we need to be history before they get here. You gonna be OK?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Bronson said, shaking the American’s hand. ‘Our truck’s parked down at the bottom of the valley, but I suppose you knew that already.’

  Masters nodded and grinned, then turned, his mind already on his exit strategy as he selected a number on his sat-phone.

  In the open space outside the cave, Bronson took Angela in his arms and for a few seconds just held her tight.

  ‘I thought that was it,’ Angela murmured, her cheeks damp from tears of relief. ‘I really thought you’d be crushed by that stone door closing. What do you think happened?’ She turned back to look through the dark mouth of the cave.

  ‘A clever booby-trap is how I see it,’ Bronson said. ‘When we pushed the slab all the way over to the right, the top of it was resting against another lump of stone. Somehow that must have tripped a trigger of some kind, because that second slab then started moving down, pushing against the first one. That was the noise we heard — the second slab starting to move.’

  Before he’d left the cave he’d looked over the right-hand side of the slab. On the far side of the stone door was another rough-cut lump of stone which had clearly forced the slab closed as it pivoted downwards.

  ‘That’s just like some of the pyramids,’ Angela said. ‘An anti-theft mechanism. Open the first door and something triggers the mechanism. Then gravity does the rest.’

 
‘I wonder why Yus Asaph’s followers didn’t trigger it themselves, and seal the door using the second slab when they hid the body here?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘Maybe it would have made it too obvious that something was hidden in the inner chamber. If you knew that there was a secret room in there, you could hack your way through the stone door.’ Angela shuddered against Bronson’s body. ‘Let’s get out of here, Chris. Let’s go home.’

  Bronson took her hand, and together they started picking their way over the rutted boulder-strewn surface of the valley down to where they’d left their jeep. Night had fallen, and above them the sky was a black velvet blanket pierced by the light of countless millions of stars. It felt good to be alive.

  Several minutes later, Killian recovered consciousness inside the inner chamber. At first, he could see nothing at all, then pulled a small torch from his pocket, switched it on and glanced around him. The others had all gone, which suited him perfectly. Now he had the time to complete the task he’d been set by God himself.

  He walked across to the stone structure and ran his hand slowly over the top of the lead coffin and looked down, a contented smile on his face. Inside, the body he believed to have been Jesus the Nazarite had simply ceased to exist, turned to dust by the inexorable process of decay. That was something he’d completely failed to anticipate, but ultimately that was exactly what he’d intended. He had expected to have to destroy the tomb and its contents with explosives, but a force of nature had saved him the job. And it simply didn’t matter what Donovan or any of the others said or claimed now — there was not the slightest shred of proof that the coffin had ever contained a human body, far less the body of the Messiah Himself.

  Killian’s smile deepened. He truly had been blessed. For the first time in two millennia, a small group of people had been granted the most sublime and utterly divine gift possible. For a few moments they had been permitted to stare at the face of the Saviour of mankind, at the man revered by countless millions of worshippers as the Son of God.