by Glenn Meade
“I think so.”
“You know what else I believe?”
“What, Dad?”
“That once we depart into that dimension there’s no coming back. We can no longer be part of this earthly life and the loved ones we’ve left behind. But we can observe them, at least be with them in spirit until we join with them again.”
Robert Cane looked out over the mighty splendor of the Cheops pyramid, and his voice filled with emotion. “The ancients believed that the spirits of the dead lingered near their tombs. I sometimes get that feeling when I’m here. The hairs rise on the back of my neck. It makes me feel as if I’m touched by something powerful, something magnificent and unearthly. It’s almost as if the dead can touch us.”
“You mean physically?”
His father smiled. “No, not in that sense, Jack. But I believe the spirit world can induce feelings in us, like intuitions and emotions, or invoke unnatural phenomena. You hear people talking about guardian angels, that they feel there’s something supernatural watching over them. It’s that kind of feeling. A chill down your back that’s more than an intuition, that might warn you something bad’s going to happen. A feeling of a presence in an empty room. A sudden gust of wind, yet there’s no wind nearby.”
“Those things have happened to you, Dad?”
“Sometimes. I once remember sitting by my own father’s grave. It was a difficult time for me. I had problems to deal with and no one to turn to. That day I strongly felt his presence, sensed him near me in spirit. It was uncanny, but I was sure I felt his hand touch my shoulder, just the way he used to when I was in need of comfort. He’d look at me and say, ‘Bob, whatever it is that’s on your mind, I want you to share it with me and let me bear some of the burden.’ And I would, and he always did. I felt that same feeling that difficult day.”
His father paused and met his son’s stare. “Jack, you’re at an age when you’ll start to question your beliefs, your future direction, even the reasons for your existence. It’s all part of growing up. But trust me on this one—there’s an afterlife.”
Robert Cane put an arm around his son, hugged him close, and winked. “So promise me something? Someday when I’m gone I want you to know that even though I won’t be here in flesh, I’ll be here in spirit. You can still talk to me. Anything you want to say, anything you need to discuss, come sit by my grave and talk. Same with your mom. We’ll be listening, okay? You won’t see or touch us, but we’ll be standing next to you. Don’t ever forget that, Jack.”
Years later, Jack wondered if his father had spoken those words simply to provide his only son with a small blanket of comfort—a touchstone to lessen the pain of loss after his parents had gone. Jack never knew the answer, only that talking worked. Some people talked to their dog, or to their image in the mirror. He talked over his parents’ graves and afterward felt the better for it. So long, Dad, Mom. We’ll talk again.
And yet, despite his belief that he was being listened to in some unearthly dimension, always the questions came that were tiny seeds of doubt. Do we really meet again? Does the love we nurtured on this earth go on forever, beyond this universe, for all eternity?
When he had finished his final words to his dead, he picked up the empty water bottle, stood, and turned toward the Land Cruiser.
He heard a noise, looked up. Not a hawk this time but a sound like a metallic wasp—a distant helicopter, a speck in the sky. Shielding his eyes, Jack stared at the speck and then the noise faded and it was gone.
7
FIVE THOUSAND FEET in the air Hassan Malik sat in the Bell helicopter and watched the Land Cruiser depart. He nodded to the pilot and ten minutes later the chopper touched down near the graves with a flurry of sand.
The swish of the rotors died and Hassan climbed out, followed by Nidal. The scorching heat of the late afternoon ripped the air from their lungs, but they had known this desert furnace all their lives.
In the distance, Hassan saw the faint plume of Cane’s Land Cruiser disappear toward Qumran.
Hassan stood there, hearing the light murmur of the desert wind, as if he were listening for something, he wasn’t sure what. But for a moment, he could almost hear the ghostly echo of voices carry on the wind. In one of those flashes of recall, he was fifteen again, a poor Arab boy wearing cheap jeans and a pair of his father’s worn sandals, digging among the ruins of Qumran. And from that to now, so much in between.
Hassan stepped over to the gravesite. He stared down at the lilies lying on the tomb, within the neat border filled with gravel chips. His own parents were long gone, buried in the chalk earth, his father dead on the same day as Jack Cane’s.
He would never forget that day. Never.
That same night his mother had traveled to her cousin in Jerusalem and never came back. The police told Hassan that she had hung herself. Hassan knew why. His Bedu mother would rather endure death than the indignity of a barren life without a husband or an income. His brother, Nidal, and his sister, Fawzi, were inconsolable. Hassan too, but after the numbness wore off a fierce determination blazed inside him. He was not going to leave little Nidal and Fawzi to the fate of an orphanage. They were all going to stay together.
First Hassan had buried his parents, and then he had buried his dignity, begging on the streets of Jerusalem, putting barely enough food in their bellies to keep from starving.
He and Nidal and Fawzi had slept in filthy doorways, searched for scraps among garbage in rat-infested alleyways. In winter, he kept his little brother and sister warm by giving them his own filthy coat, while he himself froze from the cold.
Nidal was always a weak child. Living malnourished on the streets had not helped, and his bouts of sickness had more than once brought him close to death. But somehow Nidal had survived, as if his small body had fire in its belly.
All of it happened a long time ago, but what was it his father liked to say? We can never escape our past.
Nor can we rewrite it, Hassan thought. But we can change our future. And in changing our future, we can right the wrongs of our past.
Nidal touched his arm, taking him from his reverie. “We are late for our appointment, Hassan.”
“Right now, this is our most important appointment.”
Nidal noted his brother’s voice was very quiet, but as always infinitely dangerous, his dark eyes glittering with purpose. “Of course, Hassan. It is as you say.”
“Go back to the helicopter. I’ll join you in a moment.”
Nidal retreated without a word. Hassan watched his brother walk back toward the chopper. The sight of Nidal’s rake-thin body always brought out a protective streak in him.
He heard a bird cry overhead, looked up, and saw a hawk circling. He tried to focus, knew that this moment was important. Not one to be rushed but savored. What happened in Rome had changed everything, he felt sure of it.
Now Hassan turned to stare down at the graves of Robert and Margaret Cane. He stared for long time until a wave of fury exploded inside him. Without a word he violently crushed the lilies with his shoe until they were a trampled mess of green stalks and white flowers. He stamped and kicked, scattering the gravel chips. All control gone now, Hassan hawked a mouthful of saliva and spat upon the graves.
Then he wiped his lips with his sleeve and strode back to join his brother.
8
QUMRAN
DEAD SEA
ISRAEL
“IT’S PRETTY INCREDIBLE. Take a look for yourself. I wanted you to be the first to know, Jack. You’re the one who found it, after all.”
Jack Cane, wearing a pair of white latex gloves, steadied the magnifying glass in his hands. “Are you sure about all this, professor?”
His excitement mounting, Jack studied the faded images on the two-thousand-year-old parchment. It lay partially unrolled on the table, the scroll edges sepia brown, fragile from centuries of lying buried in an earthenware jar. They were in Professor Green’s tent, a stand-up affair cluttered with boxes
of reference books, a cot, a table, and folding chairs.
Jack tried to read by the light of an overhead butane lamp and using the magnifier. Faded lines of ancient Aramaic characters had been exposed in the unraveling. “I mean, really sure?”
Professor Donald Green frowned. “Sure about all what, Jack?”
“Your translation.”
Green’s delight was replaced by a tone that bristled with irritation. “Of course I’m sure. Yasmin and I stayed up working on it after everyone went to bed. Once I managed to unravel another three inches of the parchment, which was about as much as I could without causing damage, I went to work deciphering the exposed text. I wouldn’t have had Yasmin fetch you from your bunk if I hadn’t been certain.”
Jack rubbed his gritty eyes, tried to focus on the ancient writing in front of him and ignore Green’s annoyance. It was, after all, past 5 A.M. “I’m glad you did, professor. I was half awake and couldn’t sleep either.”
Professor Green was a bear of a man, bristling with energy. Distinguished-looking with gray hair, he wore a khaki tropical shirt with epaulettes, one of them hanging loose and missing a button. He removed his half-moon glasses and gave an excited nod. “Okay, go ahead. Translate lines three and four.”
“Give me a chance, professor. My Aramaic’s pretty basic and not up to your standards, and here and there the writing’s faded.” Jack’s mind felt sluggish, despite his elation. Like most of the other forty-strong crew he had stayed up late, drinking beer to celebrate the scroll’s discovery in one of Qumran’s caves. He’d only climbed into his cot two hours before being woken again by Green’s niece.
The professor hovered at his shoulder. “Let me tell you again what it says—”
“It’s okay, I think I’ve got it.” Jack studied the faded parchment symbols and his voice was hoarse with shock. “You’re right. It’s incredible.”
Green said excitedly, “Of course I’m right. No scroll like this has ever been discovered at Qumran. We both know with absolute certainty that this scroll’s unique.”
Jack knew that Green was right. In 1947, two hundred yards farther up the valley of Qumran, the first of many hundreds of the famous Dead Sea scrolls had been discovered by Bedouin tribesmen. Most of the finds dated from between 250 B.C. and 70 A.D. and had been hidden by the Essene community. They had remained hidden for thousands of years.
The discovery was to rock the world.
The leather parchment, papyrus, and copper scrolls documented the life of the Essenes—an austere Jewish religious group that had been in existence during the time of Jesus Christ. Copies of parts of the Old Testament, as well as unknown New Testament records, were also found.
The restoration and translation of the scrolls was directed by Father Roland de Vaux, director of the Ecole Biblique, a French-Arab theological school in Jerusalem. Dominated mostly by Catholic priests, the process had taken decades and became mired in controversy.
It took almost fifty years after the discovery for the Vatican to finally claim that all the contents had been made public. But the slow pace of de Vaux’s work and its extreme secrecy fueled a theory that some senior Vatican churchmen wished to suppress damaging information revealed in the scrolls. The theory was never proven, but the Dead Sea caves produced such a rich mother lode that digs were ongoing, even after more than six decades.
And now he, Jack Cane, had uncovered another ancient scroll. But one that was very different from all the others that had been discovered.
Yesterday afternoon, digging in one of the many cave recesses that dotted the Qumran landscape, in the southern part of the location known as Area A, he had found a two-foot-long sealed terra-cotta pot. Breaking the seal, inside the pot he discovered a single rolled leather parchment wrapped in frayed linen. The scroll appeared fragile but reasonably intact. Cane was elated.
Judging by its material condition and its written language, Aramaic, Jack believed it came from the same period as those already uncovered. When Professor Green unrolled the first two inches of the leather—as much as he dared risk at first without causing damage—they saw that it had already suffered partial destruction.
Portions of the inked parchment were obliterated, leaving holes and frayed gaps in the parchment. However, it was still possible to decipher several word clusters. Two in particular—faintly visible on the second line—leaped out and made Cane’s pulse race:
Yeshua HaMeshiah
Yeshua HaMeshiah— Jesus the Messiah. Jesus Christ. Jack knew that the presence of that name was remarkable, for one very simple reason.
The Dead Sea scrolls that had already been discovered in the last sixty years were mostly Jewish documents. They had almost nothing Christian in them. Jesus’ name was never mentioned once in the 870 scrolls and the tens of thousands of scroll fragments found—not a single reference made to him or to his followers. Until now.
Green said, “Do you have a knife handy?”
“Sure.” Jack unfolded a well-worn four-inch Gerber folding pocketknife. The sharp-tipped titanium blade was his favorite implement for picking away any fine debris, and he handed it to Green. “Be my guest.”
The professor’s enthusiasm rose as he used the tip of the knife to raise the edge of the parchment. “Take a look at the sentences that comprise the first lines. You can just make out the words. There’s definitely something very odd going on here. You see?”
Green’s left index finger hovered over the first faded words of Aramaic.
Green added, “The entire literal translation of the first lines reads, ‘This story concerns the man known as Jesus the Messiah. Having traveled from Caesarea to Dora, where his name had become well-known, he failed miserably to cure the blind and the sick, despite his promises to do so. Soon after, he was arrested in Dora by the Romans, tried and found guilty, and sentenced to be executed.’”
Green wiped a patina of sweat from his forehead as he finished reading, put down the knife, and looked up at Jack. “Which is bizarre. Because so far as history records there’s no mention of Jesus ever having visited Caesarea or Dora, or being arrested and sentenced there to be executed. He’s recorded to have traveled to places in Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon, but never to Caesarea or Dora, which are on the Mediterranean coast, in the northwest of Israel.”
“You’ve no doubt about your biblical history?”
Green grinned, stuck a hand in his pocket, and held up a Black-Berry. “As technology is my witness.”
“You checked.”
“I may be an expert on the period, but even I still double-check. I consulted a couple of excellent online Bible study sites to be absolutely certain.”
“What did you learn?”
“Jesus was known to have frequented a fairly small stomping ground in Judea. Caesarea and Dora were Mediterranean coastal towns, about sixty miles away. Dora at that time was in a Roman-controlled province of Syria. Its population wasn’t Jewish. In fact, it feuded with the Jews. Caesarea was in Samaria province. And as for failing miserably to cure the blind and the sick …” Green spread his hands and gave a dramatic shrug. “Like I said, it’s bizarre. None of it makes sense. It’s certainly going to confound the Bible scholars.”
Jack rubbed his eyes, stared at the scroll’s writing once more, and shook his head. Green was an Aramaic language expert, so Jack discounted any possibility of a mistake. “It sure is a puzzle, professor.”
Green tossed his reading glasses on the table in a gesture of defeat. “One that’s got me stumped for now, I’m afraid.”
Jack removed a worn leather notebook from his Chinos pocket. “Do you mind if I copy down the text in my notebook?”
“Feel free, you’re the one who found it. Here’s hoping that the rest of the scroll reveals more information and helps us put the words into context. But to tell the truth I did manage to get the scroll open just a fraction more before I gave up and decided to let things be. The text I saw had me confused.”
“What do you mean?
”
“It read like gibberish. The Aramaic characters all looked legible, apart from a few holes in the parchment, but the few words that I saw didn’t make any sense. Like they were jumbled or written in an alien language.” Green tried to rub the sleep from his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “It’s probably my own exhaustion. It’s been over twenty-four hours since I last slept. My eyeballs feel like they’ve been smacked around a pool table.”
Jack put down the magnifying glass. “You went as far as you could go with it tonight. We’ll get expert help to unravel the rest of the parchment. We don’t want to continue and cause damage.”
The professor let out a sigh. “That’s what I thought. All in all, it’s been an astonishing find. The name Jesus Christ is not mentioned once in any of the scrolls and fragments already found over the decades. Yet here it is, clearly legible. You’ve found a truly unique document, Jack. One that may cast significant new light on Jesus himself. You deserve a big pat on the back.” Green slapped Jack’s shoulder heartily.
“Thanks, professor.”
“Most importantly, this find will serve to confirm the very existence of Jesus. That kind of solid evidence is hard to come by outside the Bible. I think this calls for another celebration.”
Green crossed to a scuffed leather trunk by his cot. “The rest of the crew are going to be even more amazed when they hear this news. You’ll join me in a drink? Of course you will.”
Jack finished writing and smiled tiredly. “Mind if I pass, professor? I had quite a few beers already. Tomorrow’s another long day.”
“No way, we can’t let a moment like this pass.” Green grabbed a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glass tumblers from the trunk. “Don’t force me to twist your arm.”
“Maybe just one.” Jack stuffed his notebook in his breast pocket.
Green pulled off the corked top on the Wild Turkey bottle with his teeth, spat it out, and splashed a generous measure into their glasses. “Get that down you. You deserve it, Jack.”
