by Jon Steele
“Yeah, but I can’t go that bloody way.”
Without warning, the monocle’s compass and X-ray capabilities stopped functioning. Harper pulled it from his eye, tapped the side of it. He reset the monocle, but only the night-sight function was working now. Krinkle’s brief had gotten him this far and that was it. Harper was back in the wonderful world of “You’ll figure it out.”
“Sure I will.”
He walked ten yards. The monocle’s night sight registered a ChemLight twenty-nine yards off his bearing to the north. He walked that way, found an old goat path heading into the high hills north of Qumran. The ChemLight was next to the path, stuffed under a clump of desert brush. Next to the ChemLight was a piece of paper anchored to the earth by a stone. Harper bent down, pulled the paper free, unfolded it. It was a handwritten message in Hebrew.
It took Harper eighteen seconds to upload the language:
Follow the light.
Pick them up along the way.
This is a national park.
No littering allowed.
Harper scanned the path for tracks. He saw the one pair of Israeli Army–issue boots.
iii
Harper counted his paces. Nearing a mile’s worth now. He had not seen one ChemLight the entire way. Not that it mattered. He was walking through a narrow, winding valley through the sandstone hills. The walls on either side were twenty feet high at least. There was no way to go but ahead. Above the high walls was the night. When the valley wound this way, Harper saw stars; that way, he saw the waning moon. Now and again moonlight poured into the valley and highlighted strange patterns in the sandstone walls. Closed shapes, open shapes; swirls and cubic curves; comets and stars. The patterns appeared deliberate, as if the walls were spilling with high-value, encoded intel. Maybe it was him trying to not imagine he was walking into a trap; or maybe it was the real deal. What he did know was everything about this narrow valley, starting with how he got there, said unknown to the world.
He had followed the infrared ChemLights into the foothills north of Qumran, collecting them as ordered in the note. He came to a sandstone outcrop that looked like a dead end. His monocle’s night sight spotted a ChemLight through a low opening tucked in a hidden corner. He crawled through the opening, found himself in this hidden valley. He saw the same Israeli Army–issue boot prints in the dirt and followed them. Then he saw fossilized human footprints; some barefoot, some wearing sandals. If he were a trained archaeologist, he would classify the human prints as “really, really old.”
Another sixteen hundred winding paces and he came to a crack in the left wall. He stopped to have a peek at the outside world. He was looking down on the tourist center. Without realizing it he had climbed three hundred feet from the desert floor and circled around the center by an angle of sixty degrees. Just beyond the tourist center, on a high plateau blanketed in moonlight, were the ruins of Qumran. Harper saw the low stone walls of what was left of the place. The ruins were neatly laid out in rectangles and squares marking the scriptorium and libraries, dining halls, living quarters, cisterns and baths. From the layout Qumran looked to be a neat and ordered place before the Fifth Cohort of Rome’s Tenth Legion destroyed it. That was Harper’s first impression. Second was, like the view of Jerusalem from the River Jordan, the place looked familiar . . . More of those bloody wonders never ceasing, boyo.
The west side of the plateau dropped hundreds of feet into a huge canyon. There sandstone towers rose from the floor like archipelagos from the sea. Harper saw the mouths of caves at the very tops of the towers. Some of the caves had openings on two sides and the moonlight flowed through like water. An episode of the History Channel raced through Harper’s eyes. He didn’t bother flashing the title; he knew he was staring at the very caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1948. In one of those caves, cave four to be exact, the Book of Enoch was found. Once denied as never existing, then discovered at Qumran in ’52, then denied again as a “holy book” of the Bible.
Funny that, Harper thought.
The closest thing there was to the truth of Harper’s kind on earth was written in something called the Apocrypha, books considered so full of falsehoods, or containing writings so esoteric, they suggested forbidden paths to knowledge that could undermine the authority of any organized religion. The bad guys had done their work well, Harper thought. They had infiltrated the religions of men and with a simple bait-and-switch maneuver . . . Your soul seeks truth? Follow me and forget about the scrolls in cave number four.
He scanned the higher hills farther west.
Somewhere up there was another cave, where a scribe had left behind new scrolls more explosive than anything Enoch could have dreamed of. Maybe, boyo. Keep moving. He walked another four thousand, nine hundred, seventy-six paces, hit the enclosed end of the valley. There was a hole in the wall with a ChemLight waiting on the other side. He crawled through the opening, found himself in a rocky tunnel with enough overhead clearance for a man to stand up properly.
“Why does there always have to be a bloody tunnel?”
The passage climbed at an angle of eighty degrees. There was a trench carved into the rock floor and water flowed in it. Harper bent over, dipped in his fingertips, and tasted them. The water was fresh, clean. He scooped a couple handfuls, wiped his mouth.
“At least the water is good.”
He brushed sandstone dust from his knees and coat. He started to climb. After twenty minutes the angle of ascent was forty degrees; ten minutes later it was ten degrees and the only way up was by way of steps carved in the rock floor. The stream of fresh water continued to flow down the trench, now dropping step by step like a terraced waterfall. The air was as fresh as the water here. Must be coming close to an exit, he thought. Then he felt something: lightness, dizziness almost. He worked it out. He was breathing in negative ions from the waterfall; the ions kicked off a flood of serotonin in his form; the serotonin was finding its way to the millions of 5-HT receptors in the raphe nuclei of his brain stem. Result: like downing a couple of glasses of fine wine.
He kept climbing to where the passage leveled off into a cavern. There was a fissure in the rock floor and water flowed up from the ground. The more Harper looked at it, the more he realized he was looking at an ancient well. Here, the negative ions were thick. The sort of place a person might like to rest awhile. Breathe, dream; breathe, dream. He had another handful of water, scanned the cavern. Three shafts opened on the far wall; fresh air was coming in through all three. He walked closer, saw a ChemLight fifteen yards ahead in the left tunnel.
“Right.”
He walked that way. Eight hundred forty-eight paces later he came out on a high ridge overlooking Qumran and the Dead Sea. He saw a ChemLight ten yards along the ridge. Thirty yards farther there was police tape surrounding a hole in the ground, and dim light was coming from it. The tip of a metal ladder poked out of the hole. Harper walked over, stepped over the police tape, and looked down. The ladder dropped fifteen feet through a shaft that opened to a cave. The source of the light was not in view, but he saw boot prints in the dirt. Someone was down there. Someone who had been pacing the place, waiting.
“Hello?” Harper said.
“Shalom,” a woman’s voice answered.
Silence.
“Mind if I come down?”
“Why not? That is why you came, lo?”
Harper thought about pulling his SIG but binned the idea. After all, someone had been nice enough to lead him here. He pulled the monocle from his eye and stuffed it in the pocket of his trench coat. He drew the strap of the reliquary box over his head, let the box hang across his back. He mounted the ladder, climbed down through the shaft, and came into a small cave. He almost stopped to turn around and see the someone waiting for him, but he binned that idea, too. No quick or sudden moves. He stepped off the ladder, turned slowly around with his hands out at his sides. Battery-powered electric lamps slapped his eyes. Adjusting, he didn’t know what to
focus on first: the plaster footprint casts on the hardened dirt floor; the reed mat on the ground like a forgotten bed; the quill pens, unused vellum scrolls, and ink-making tools; the old table and stool in the corner. Everything in the cave was tagged with small, yellow evidence cards bearing Hebrew numbers. Everything except the raven-haired Israeli soldier sitting at that table in the corner. Her uniform was olive green, her eyes were amber-colored. Harper made her for mid-thirties. She held a micro assault rifle in her hands. Harper didn’t know the make, but it looked like cracking kit. Laser and infrared targeting, bolt mechanism fitted behind the trigger. The weapon was compact as a carbine but maintained the barrel length of a rifle, and a rifle’s muzzle velocity. And just now that chrome-lined barrel was pointed at Harper’s chest. Harper heard the click of the safety. The soldier’s weapon was fire-ready.
“So, are you the man of signs and wonders, or are you just another false prophet?”
TWENTY-TWO
i
Harper saw a dark blue beret with an insignia pin on the table. The pin held a stylized flower with two sharp leaves set in a Star of David. Equals plant as weapon, Harper thought.
“I brought you your ChemLights,” he said. “They’re in the pockets of my coat.”
“Toda.”
“What would you like me to do with them?”
“Hang on to them.”
Harper smiled jokingly. “What if they explode?”
The soldier did not smile. “They won’t, unless I lift my left foot from the remote detonator. If you rush me, knock me over, and the detonator is not double-tapped by the exact same body weight within three seconds, then the ChemLights in your pockets will explode.”
“Powerful enough to kill us both?”
“Shit happens.”
Her voice registered hard truth. If Harper couldn’t prove he was who she needed him to be, then the mission was over.
“A lot of false prophets come this way, do they?” he said.
“Many.”
“It’s the same where I come from. They’re everywhere.”
“I am not concerned with the false prophets where you come from. I only care about the false prophets who come to this land to destroy it.”
The soldier wore an olive green satin jacket with blue lambskin collar over her uniform. No rank or name to be seen. He grabbed a look at the beret again.
“You’re with Israeli intelligence,” Harper said.
The soldier did not acknowledge the comment.
“That’s a lily in the beret pin,” Harper said. “A lily blooms in the night, closes in the day. It does its work covertly.”
“Or perhaps because in ancient times Hebrews used the juice of the bulb as invisible ink.”
“Which is it?” he asked.
The soldier gave it ten, silent seconds.
“My name is Chana.”
“Is there more to your name?”
“You do not need to know it.”
“Right. I’m Jay Harper.”
Five seconds.
“What is in the box you carry, Jay Harper?”
“More stuff from ancient times.”
“You remember my left foot is on a detonator? Good. Put the box on the table. Open it. Turn it toward me. Now, very slowly, put the contents on the table so I can see them.”
Harper did as instructed. He lifted the first object. It was bound in old leather. He laid it on the table and unwrapped it. The soldier glanced quickly at the ancient copper sextant with the first series of prime quadruplets hammered into the arc. As the soldier’s eyes met his again, Harper knew she recognized it even as she played dumb.
“What is this used for?” she said.
“I only know what it was used for last.”
“Which was what?”
“It tracked the path of a recent comet over Europe.”
“The comet that appeared from the constellation Draco, three weeks ago.”
“You know about it?”
“Who doesn’t? It was in all the newspapers. So were you. You jumped off Pont des Arts in Paris, then cometh the comet.”
Ten seconds.
“How was the sextant used to track the comet?”
“The coordinates were fed into a supercomputer in Lausanne. The computer ran a set of triangulations to build a cosmic clock based on the Cartesian coordinate system.”
“To tell the time?”
“To plot the exact position of the planet Earth in the universe.”
“Because time is motion and motion is time.”
“Sorry?”
“I studied quantum mechanics at Hebrew University. Is there anything else I should know about this box, Jay Harper?”
“There’s a false bottom to it.”
“More ancient stuff underneath?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s see it. Slowly.”
Harper lifted the false bottom and removed two small leather-covered items. The soldier did not take her eyes off Harper as he laid the items on the desk.
“Nothing else?” Chana said.
“Nothing.”
“Take six steps back and open your trench coat.”
Harper did. The soldier saw the kill kit strapped to Harper’s sides. SIG Sauer, killing knives, small glass vials containing iridescent liquid.
“The vials contain what?”
“Something to help me disappear if required.”
“Like invisible ink.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Close all the buttons of your trench coat. Slowly. Good. Put your hands on top of your head. Wait. Show me your hands.” She saw the bioskin gloves covering Harper’s palms. “Continue to put your hands on your head. Do not move. I am very good at hitting a target while looking the other way.”
Harper watched the soldier’s left hand unwrap the third of a clay cup and the carpenter nail. She gave them a two-second glance, then back to him.
“What do you know of these things?” she said.
“They’re from the first century AD.”
The soldier nodded. “This pottery fragment has been precisely cut from a drinking cup,” she said. “Judging from the discoloration I would say it was used for wine. There are traces of blood on this nail. It could be because the carpenter was clumsy, or it could be because of something else.”
“Maybe.”
The soldier leaned into the desk, reset her aim.
“Let us try it from this angle. What do you know of these things? Tell me everything you know. Do not leave anything out.”
She spoke English with a European accent. Russian, Harper thought. He nodded to the things on the table.
“They were hidden near the volcanic pluton at Montségur. They had been in one family’s possession for more than thirteen hundred years. The last descendant of that family told me the things had been given to them by creatures men call angels. In 1244 the sextant was carried to Paris and hidden in a cavern by someone named Bernard de Saint-Martin. The cup and the nail were left in Montségur.”
“Who is Bernard de Saint-Martin?”
“A lord from pre-French Occitania. It’s the land north of the Pyrenees near the Mediterranean.”
“I know where it is. I want you to tell me about Bernard de Saint-Martin.”
Harper flashed the Paris job, after he was hauled from the cavern beneath Paris. He was dragged to Christophe Astruc’s hideout on Rue Visconti in the 6th. That’s when Inspector Gobet hit Harper with intel.
“He fought to defend the Cathars from slaughter at the hands of French Crusaders. He had two hundred fighters with which to defend two hundred civilians at the fortress above Montségur. He held off ten thousand French Crusaders for nine months. In the end the Crusaders won out. Saint-Martin was condemned to burn at the stake as a heretic with two hundred Cathars. He received the Cathar sacrament the night before. It’s called Consolamentum. He survived the fires.”
“Nice trick, surviving a heretic’s fire, lo? Or was it b
ecause he was one of those creatures men call angels?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Were you Bernard de Saint-Martin in 1244?”
“That’s what I was told.”
The soldier nodded to the pottery fragment and carpenter nail. “And these? What is the provenance of these things?”
“The provenance?”
“Their origin and ownership since the time of their origins. Art history was my minor at university.”
He sensed she already knew the bloody provenance.
“All I know is an archaeologist from la Sorbonne passed through Montségur in the nineteenth century. He was shown the cup and the nail. The archaeologist said the pieces were at least two thousand years old. Brought to Montségur from the Near East by Roman soldiers during the occupation of Gaul, most probably. He said the nail may have been used in a crucifixion.”
The soldier shrugged. “The Romans crucified people all over the empire. It was their preferred method of dealing with troublesome locals.”
Harper smiled. “That’s what I told the man in Montségur when he showed me the cup and the nail. In fact, those were my exact words.”
Five seconds.
“Do not get ahead of yourself,” the soldier said. “Get one answer wrong and you’re dead. Atta mevin?”
“I understand.”
“The sextant used to track the path of the comet, how old is it?”
“I’m not sure. I would guess thousands of years old. It may come from Persia. From the time of Zoroaster, 1000 BC maybe.”
“It is a little older that that. It does not come from Persia, but Zoroaster did possess it when he lived. And that was in the sixth century BC.”
Harper stared at her. New intel, he thought, and rather interesting at that. His own kind had not known it. Or maybe they did and did not tell him.
“You don’t say?” Harper said.
“I do. Which raises the question: What was Zoroaster’s sextant doing in Montségur with a clay cup fragment and one carpenter nail, both from first-century Israel?”
“I was told the sextant was carried from Persia as a gift to a child born in Bethlehem.”
