The Sacred Cipher

by Terry Brennan

  “Doc, you’re the linguist, and I’m sure you translated the inscription correctly. But,” he said, reaching his hand out to Johnson’s shoulder, “I don’t see how this could be the Hall of Hewn Stone. Like you said, there was nothing left of the Temple, not one stone left upon another, when the Romans destroyed the Temple. It’s not possible for this room to be part of that Temple complex.”

  Rodriguez watched Johnson deflate just like the sleeping bags in the lake crossing. But just as quickly, he was blown back up again. “You’re right, Joe. You’re right. The hall is gone. But what is this room? And more importantly, where is this room? Why is there an inscription in here about the Great Beit Din? Look at the GPS. We’ve got to be close!”

  “There is one thing the GPS doesn’t show us.” Bohannon got up off the bench, looking again at the ceiling. “It doesn’t tell us how deep we are. It doesn’t tell us how there can be light in here. Let’s look around some more, take our time, see what we can find. Like a way out?”

  Yeah, a way out, thought Rodriguez. They had all been so stunned by the appearance of this room that none of them had even thought to look for an exit. Each of them cracked a cyalume stick and headed in different directions.

  “Hey, Doc, was that Ben Dit—”

  “Beit Din, Mr. Rodriguez.”

  “Yeah, okay, Ben Dit . . . wasn’t it the Sanhedrin that tried Jesus?” Rodriguez was scrambling over a larger pile of debris in what they had determined was the northwest corner of the room. There must have been a massive collapse of material here at one time, he thought, pulling himself to the top of a broken column.

  “Well, no, actually.” Johnson stopped. He had been searching carefully along the stone bench on the western side of the room. “Two bodies were labeled Sanhedrin. The Great Sanhedrin, which had dominion over all religious activities and met in the Temple, and the just-plain Sanhedrin, which had dominion over all legal and secular aspects of Jewish life. The secular Sanhedrin was chased out of the Temple courts by the Pharisees, who thought they profaned the Holy.

  This secular Sanhedrin met, it is written, ‘in the vicinity of the Temple Courts.’ Some writers said the secular Sanhedrin, ‘met below the Temple Courts.’ It was the secular Sanhedrin, the legal court, which tried Jesus.”

  “Hey, Doc,” chipped in Bohannon, “could this be the meeting place of the secular Sanhedrin, the lower place?”

  “Tom!” A shout of triumph from Johnson’s corner. “Yes, I think you’re right. This can’t be the Hall of Hewn Stone, but it could certainly be the meeting hall of the legal Sanhedrin. Joe, what do you think of that?”

  The sweep of their TAG lights as they moved their heads, the blue-light brightness of the cyalume sticks, joined with the dim natural light and covered the room with an eerie dance of light and shadow. Added to the disjointed effects of the lights was the odd fact that there was no echo in the room, no reverberation of sound at all, as if sound was being absorbed by the stones themselves.

  The room itself was silent, a silence they all heard.

  Rodriguez scrambled over a large fall, a pile of both natural and man-worked stone debris, in the northwest corner. Gingerly, Rodriguez stepped over two polished columns, now lying in a heap. His foot slipped. Awkwardly, both his feet came out from under him, and he was headed for a hard crash in the midst of some very jagged stone. Instinctively, his hands shot out, looking for help. The left one grabbed air, but the right locked onto a solid piece of stone that wasn’t moving.

  “Hey, Joe, are you okay?”

  He could hear Bohannon’s voice, but his heart was in his throat as he clung to the stone and hung over a ten-foot drop. Close. Swinging his body slightly, Rodriguez reached up with his left hand to also grasp the stone that suspended him. He took a deep breath and was about to reply, when he looked up between his grasping hands. And saw some very familiar symbols. One looked like a mouse with an eye and a long tail.

  “Joe, hey, Joe, where are you?” He could hear Bohannon’s voice, responding to the crash and clatter of falling stones where Rodriguez had once been visible. “C’mon, Joe, are you okay?”

  No, I’m not okay, thought Rodriguez. “Tom, Doc, you better come over to see this,” he said, not removing his eyes from the Demotic symbols above him. “And you better come over to rescue me, too.”

  Bohannon gladly sacrificed his toothbrush—he had no one down here to impress. Doc was frantically brushing away dust and dirt from every crevice and corner, while he and Joe stood looking over Doc’s shoulder, their precious scroll held between them.

  “It’s Demotic, Joe. You’re right, it’s definitely Demotic. But”—Bohannon squinted—“what is that other language?”

  “It’s Aramaic,” said Johnson, not breaking his rhythm. “And the third language is Greek.”

  “Then it’s like the Rosetta Stone?” Bohannon asked.

  “Yes,” said Johnson, putting down the toothbrush. Before them, now resting on the room’s stone bench, was a stone stellae similar to the Rosetta Stone, but much smaller. “Yes,” said Johnson, a note of excitement rising in his voice. “But it’s much more like our scroll. Look at the symbols. Look at how they are inscribed.”

  Like the Rosetta Stone, this stellae had three languages inscribed on its face. Unlike the Rosetta Stone, the languages were inscribed in vertical columns.

  “Holy cow,” said Rodriguez. He was pointing to a symbol at the far end of the inscription. “That’s our guy, right . . . that’s Abiathar?”

  Johnson grabbed the survey book and his pencil. “Would you please bring the scroll over here, next to the stellae?”

  Rodriguez watched intently as Doc, shifting his gaze back and forth from one list of symbols to the other, began furiously writing on the page. Ten minutes later, he stopped, but from the look on his face, Rodriguez knew he wasn’t finished.

  “What is it, Doc?” Bohannon asked. “You look as if someone just threw you a curveball.”

  Johnson ran his hand through his hair, turning his silver locks into a dusty gray, but cleaning his hand. “I’m confused,” Johnson admitted. “I thought I had the message. I do have the message. I can check it against the Aramaic. But then, near the end, it changes . . . and just stops.” He was shaking his head back and forth. “I don’t understand.”

  Joe put his hand on Doc’s shoulder. “What is it? What do you have so far?”

  “Well, from what I can tell so far, the message on the stellae is a letter from Meborak of Egypt to Abiathar. Writing in 1093, Meborak is instructing Abiathar on how they are going to oppose the usurper David Ben Daniel. You remember how Kallie told us about him? Ben Daniel had swindled his way to the title of Exhillarch of Egypt. Meborak and Abiathar led the opposition and deposed him.”

  “And Meborak wrote this letter in Demotic?” asked Rodriguez.

  Johnson had been very still since he had translated the letter. Now, sitting with his back to the bench, the survey book in his lap, Bohannon and Rodriguez propped on the bench on either side of him, his voice had none of the excitement that Bohannon expected.

  “No, Joe, he wrote the letter in Aramaic. Very straightforward. Very simple,” Johnson said, his voice barely a whisper.

  “Then why have the other two languages? What are they for?”

  “It’s for making a code.” A pause. “These two men were leading the opposition against the most powerful Jewish ruler of their time. If Ben Daniel discovered their conspiracy, he probably would have them executed. Any communication between them would be inherently dangerous, so Meborak gave Abiathar a master cipher, a way to translate any message into a secret code. Meborak used Demotic symbols, an ancient, extinct Egyptian language that Abiathar would never understand. To Abiathar, Demotic was just a list of symbols. All Abiathar had to do was take the Demotic symbols and convert them to Aramaic in order to understand the communication. He would do the same thing in reverse for any communication he sent to Meborak. Mix-’em-up; shake-’em-up; and you’ve got yourself a ri
ddle for the ages.”

  “So that’s how Abiathar wrote the scroll,” Bohannon exclaimed, the revelation breaking through his weariness. “Meborak sent him the code from Egypt six years earlier, showed him how to take his Aramaic and convert it into Demotic symbols. Pretty slick. Meborak gave Abiathar the key for secret communication using a Demotic cipher.”

  Bohannon had his arm draped over the top of the stone stellae. He and Rodriguez had rerolled the scroll for the time being, trying to keep it clean in the dust-laden air. His finger traced the shape of one symbol, over and over.

  “You know, Doc, there is an even more intriguing question raised by this stellae,” said Bohannon, inspecting the face of the stone from above. “How do you mail a rock?”

  “Yeah!” said Joe, punching Bohannon in the shoulder. “Why a rock? Why aren’t we looking at another scroll?”

  Bohannon looked to Johnson for an answer.

  “The stellae is here for us. It was meant to be discovered,” Johnson said with finality. “Although he could have sent the stellae, it’s more likely Meborak would have originally sent the message on a scroll. It certainly would have been easier to transport. But a scroll, even in a mezuzah like the one we have, would be more fragile, more likely to be damaged or destroyed. No, I think it quite reasonable to assess that Abiathar, or one of his artisans, transcribed Meborak’s message onto this stellae with the express intention that it would survive the test of time and serve as the final clue to the location of the hidden Temple.”

  Doc had a smile on his face that would light up Broadway.

  “Then, what’s the clue?” asked Bohannon.

  The lights dimmed.

  “Yes. That is my dilemma,” Johnson muttered, turning away from Bohannon to look once again at the stone. “I can’t find the clue. The last part of the message makes no sense. For some reason, it appears they changed the code. What is on the stellae does not match what is on our scroll. I don’t know if I can decipher it.”

  A heavy weight began to settle on Bohannon’s chest. He closed his eyes. No matter how he tried, a withering sense of dread and discouragement began to suck the life out of his bones. God, no, Bohannon pleaded in his mind, not after we’ve come this far. What have I done to deserve this?

  His elbows were on his knees, his head in his hands. He felt as if he would fall flat on his face. He didn’t know what to say; he didn’t know what to pray. He didn’t know what to do.

  God, please, we need your help, Bohannon prayed silently. The Bible says you will never leave us or forsake us. But I sure feel forsaken right now. How can you do this to us? Bring us to this point and just leave us here? Have I disappointed you that much?

  “I’m not disappointed with you at all. You have been faithful. Look at the scroll.”

  Bohannon looked up to see who had been speaking to him. Joe was in the middle of the room, pacing. Doc had his head down, working at something in the survey book.

  “What did you say, Doc?” Bohannon asked.

  Johnson looked up from his doodling. “I’m sorry?”

  “Didn’t you just say something?”

  “I’m sorry, Tom,” said Johnson, shaking his head. “I was looking again at this message, looking for some evidence of a clue. I didn’t say anything.”

  Bohannon’s eyes refused to leave Johnson’s face. He was expecting a different response. Could Johnson be playing some sort of prank? Could he be that heartless?

  “Tom,” Johnson said with true concern, “what’s wrong?”

  As if shaking off the hand of judgment, Bohannon snapped to his feet. “Joe, let’s look at that scroll again.” Bohannon grabbed the mezuzah and brought it over in front of the stellae. “C’mon, the answer has got to be here somewhere, either in the scroll or in the stellae.”

  Bohannon held the mezuzah while Rodriguez gently unrolled the scroll in front of the stellae. Smaller than the scroll, holding three languages instead of just one, the stone tablet had only three vertical columns of Demotic instead of the twenty-one on the scroll. “Doc, how did you figure out the message so far, since there are only three columns of Demotic on this stone?” Bohannon asked.

  Johnson picked himself off the floor and knelt in front of the bench.

  “None of the three columns on the stone matched exactly to columns on the scroll. But it was easy to translate because I had the Aramaic to compare it with until I got here.”

  Johnson’s eraser pointed to the last few symbols on the stone.

  “Hey, that’s the sled,” said Joe. “I remember that symbol from the scroll. It looks like a sled all ready to go downhill on the snow.”

  “It’s the letter Q,” said Johnson. “But do you see that symbol just above it? Well, that’s where the Aramaic and the Greek stop. There are no corresponding Aramaic or Greek letters for those last few Demotic symbols, nothing we can use to determine which of the possible thousands of meanings are intended here. I don’t understand. Why did he get this far and not finish the message?”

  The three of them sat staring at the dumb, stone tablet, trying to will the three inanimate symbols to release their hidden meaning. There was Q, the sled. Below, and just to the right, off center, was a symbol that looked like a lightning bolt, or an italic “s.” Below that, again slightly offset to the right, was a symbol that looked like a small arch, or a lower case “n.”

  “Doc, what are the other two symbols?” asked Rodriguez.

  “The second one, the one that looks a little bit like an ‘s,’ that’s the Demotic letter C. And the last one, the arch, is the Demotic letter H.”

  “Hey, Doc,” said Bohannon, looking at the twenty-one columns of Demotic on the scroll. “We have the same letters on our scroll as the ones on the stellae, right? And we figured out what they meant against Elgar’s cipher, right?

  And back in New York, you told us about those two symbols that always went together, but didn’t go together on our scroll, right? And all of us believed we would need the scroll one more time to find a final clue, right?”

  Bohannon stopped and looked up.

  “Right,” both men echoed.

  “Well, let’s take the last three letters of the stellae and match them up against the same letters on the scroll, write down how those same letters were translated on the scroll, and see what we can figure out from the translations that we know. Hey, Abiathar brought us this far, he’s not going to forsake us now.”

  Bohannon almost laughed at himself because of his curious use of words. But, like the others, he was almost immediately caught up in a fever of anticipation.

  Johnson was back on the floor with the survey book in his lap and the translation of the scroll message tucked under the survey book’s flyleaf, scribbling wildly with Rodriguez and Bohannon peeking over his shoulders.

  “The arch, H,” said Johnson, not looking up from the pages in front of him, “Abiathar uses it for representing the Temple. In Aramaic, I remember the same letter was often translated to mean ‘heaven,’ a room that entered into a holy place. That makes sense.”

  “There’s the sled a couple of times,” said Rodriguez. “What is that referring to, that first one?”

  “The most excellent of rulers,” said Johnson. “It was Abiathar’s way of referring to Meborak in the scroll. But meanings change when you change the construction of Demotic. That’s what makes it so infuriating. Look, that C, in the scroll it’s translated as great when Abiathar was writing about the great cavern. But I know that this letter C is the most commonly used Demotic letter. The last time I looked, it had more than 160 pages of definitions in the Chicago dictionary.”

  Johnson started taking the possible definitions and began moving them around, substituting one, then another possible meaning. “This could take forever,” he mumbled.

  “No, Doc,” said Bohannon, grabbing his shoulder. “Look, neither of these guys is going to be playing games with us at this point, not after all they went through. They’re going to want the Temple to be found
if anybody got this far. This has got to be straightforward. It has to be a simple meaning.

  “These last few letters are telling us something about the Temple,” he continued, picking up steam. “It’s telling us about the holy place, right? You said it: that’s why the stellae is here, to give us the final clue. Well, it’s right there. Put the three letters together, the three translations we have from the scroll. The great and exalted holy place of heaven. The last three letters are describing the Temple. The Temple is here, it’s got to be here, right around us.”

  “I know, Tom,” said Johnson, “but where, here?”

  The question startled Bohannon out of his euphoria.

  “Excuse me, guys,” interjected Rodriguez. “But why aren’t those letters written straight up and down like all the rest? Why are they going off at an angle?”

  Johnson jumped to his feet, turning to take in his two compatriots. He was beaming, grinning from ear to ear.

  “You know, Joe, you are brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It’s direction, Joe. Once again, you have given me direction. The letters are written off center because, amazingly, they are giving us a direction. Northwest.”

  Reflexively, Bohannon and Rodriguez swiveled their heads to the northwest corner. “Why is there so much rubble in the northwest corner, when there is relatively little in the rest of the room?” asked Johnson. “Unless . . .

  “Unless someone collapsed the room on purpose,” enthused Bohannon, “to seal off what’s on the other side.”

  “And to hide the way,” added Johnson. “Behind that wall. It’s behind that wall.”

  43

  Rodriguez was already asleep, curled up in his sleeping bag. They spent hours, like crazed men in gold lust, tearing a hole in the wall at the northwest corner of the room. First they shoveled out mounds of debris, trying to reach the floor, hoping for an easier way in than breaking through the huge blocks of solid limestone. Just above floor level, they found a place where two limestone blocks had been removed from the wall. But the resultant opening had ultimately been sealed with a form of plaster. Luckily, it was sealed more than one thousand years before and was beginning to crumble. An hour of determined digging in shifts, and the sealed portal yielded a small hole in its center. By the time they completely cleared the portal, they were physically and mentally exhausted. There was no more they could do. Whether it was day or night, they needed rest.