Relics

by K. T. Tomb

  “Aren’t you grasping at straws here?” Phoe asked. “Two men who rose from the dead for three days and wrote about it?”

  “I would be if one of those texts—that of Charinus—hadn’t been discovered.” Stefan put another text up on the screen.

  Nicodemus handed to me a folded cloth smelling of the spices that are often used in the burial rites. I, in turn, passed it on to Lenthius. I asked what he wanted us to do with it. He informed me that it covered the face of our crucified Lord. Having examined the cloth, Lenthius returned it to Nicodemus saying, “It must be preserved.”

  “How is that to be done?” Nicodemus asked.

  Lenthius went on to prescribe a list of spices and a process that would preserve the cloth, he knowing more about that sort of thing than I.

  Phoe stared at the text for a very long time. It was certainly a reference to the cloth and that it must be preserved, but it was going some to deduce from what was written that the cloth had been preserved. “That’s pretty flimsy evidence,” she said after a few moments.

  “Is it?” Stefan asked. “Do you not think that Nicodemus would have done everything in his power to follow out the command of Lenthius?”

  “Perhaps, but assuming that is not really evidence,” she responded.

  “It is if we can find a similar reference in the text of Lenthius,” Stefan responded.

  “Where is the text of Lenthius?” she asked.

  “We have some thoughts on that, but we haven’t quite pulled them all together just yet.”

  “Then you really don’t know if the cloth was preserved?” It was extremely flimsy as far as proof went, but it had, evidently, been enough to convince Kraus that recovering the cloth was worth pursuing; worth taking on Simon Kessler and kidnapping her. Kraus was, perhaps, in for a great deal of disappointment. She had, however, connected pieces of information much flimsier than that before and ended up finding whatever artifact that she’d been looking for; her team had, anyway. She really wished that she had her team with her.

  “We don’t have that proof yet, no.”

  “So, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Pretty much,” he replied. “If we can locate the text of Lenthius and uncover a few more clues, we might know a little bit more about how and where the cloth might have been preserved.”

  “Where is the text of Lenthius?”

  He pulled up a map of Israel during the time when Pilate was governor and put it up on the overhead display. He overlaid a map of modern Israel over the top of it, zoomed in on Jerusalem and then brought up a green line on the screen which he extended to the north and connected to the city of Ramallah. “Most scholars believe that Arimathea is the same place as Ramah, where Samuel was born, which is modern day Ramallah.”

  Chapter Nine

  “She hasn’t called me,” Charlotte replied. “Have you called Eric or Angelica, yet?”

  “I have,” Peter said. He could already hear the panic rising up in Charlotte’s voice.

  “She was going to the Met in New York City and she took Casey with her, mostly because Angelica insisted, but also because she felt like it would be a safe venture to take him on. Surely you don’t think anything happened to her at the Met.”

  “As far as we know, she never made it to the Met. The GPS on her phone indicates that it was turned off at 7:57 a.m. the morning before she and Casey were planning on going to the Met.”

  “Can we confirm that she never made it to the Met?” Charlotte asked.

  “Not that I know of, but Kadan is working on something and is supposed to be getting back to me.”

  “Cut to the chase, Peter,” Charlotte snapped. “You and I both know that she sometimes turns off her phone and goes incommunicado for a little while. Why are you asking questions? Do you think something happened to her?”

  Peter debated whether he should let Charlotte in on the fact that Simon was the one that had assigned him the task of finding her. He didn’t want to get everyone into a panic, but he was beginning to believe, especially since Phoe rarely went silent when she was working, that something might have actually happened to her. He might need Charlotte’s help to find her. He might need the whole team, actually. “She didn’t check in with Simon like she was supposed to yesterday afternoon. He called me at 3:30 this morning and asked me to start looking into why she hadn’t called him.”

  “I see.” Charlotte’s voice was much quieter as she spoke. She, no doubt, had made the same mental connection that he, Simon and Eric had. “What are we going to do, then?”

  “Kadan is working on something, as I mentioned before, and Eric is on his way over here right now,” Peter replied. “I haven’t tracked down Jeremy yet.”

  “I’m on my way as well,” Charlotte said, disconnecting the call.

  That little habit of nobody saying goodbye was starting to annoy him. It wasn’t a big deal, really, but it seemed a little out of the norm. Maybe he was just being too sensitive about everything.

  He had no sooner set his phone down on the kitchen table before it rang again. It was Kadan. “What’ve you got?” he asked without a greeting.

  “I was able to hack into the video of the Carlyle,” Kadan replied.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Peter muttered.

  “Because I am the shit and you know it,” Kadan countered.

  “So, did whoever kidnapped Casey and Phoe look straight into the camera, smile big and say hello?”

  “No,” Kadan replied. “However, how often have you encountered maids cleaning hotel rooms at 8:00 a.m. before?”

  “It’s not typical, but what does that have to do with anything?”

  “I’ve picked up two heavily-laden maid carts on the same floor where Phoe and Casey were registered at 8:03 a.m. That’s just about enough time to subdue someone or two someones, pile them into a cart and wheel them out.”

  “Okay, did you pick up where they went from there? Get a make, model and license plate number of a van pulling away from the hotel loading dock too?”

  “No,” Kadan replied. “I only got that one image, like someone had suddenly realized that they were on camera and did their best to avoid detection from that point on. That, in itself, is rather suspicious, no?”

  “It is,” Peter said. “But without a little more to go on, we’re still stuck.”

  “But we know that they were kidnapped,” Kadan replied.

  “Do we?” Even though the evidence was adding up, it was still hard for Peter to accept that somebody had just snatched Phoe and Casey out of their suite at the Carlyle and gone undetected.

  “Come on, Peter, cleaning maids at 8 o’clock in the morning?”

  “We don’t know if that has anything to do with anything, Kadan,” Peter countered. His irritation was growing, something that wasn’t a typical characteristic for him. He usually remained calm and under control. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to regain his focus. “Okay, check into that, then. Try to figure out which staff might have been on duty that early, even who was watching the security monitors. Maybe they have an alternate explanation.”

  “I’ve already pulled up the schedule,” Kadan answered. “They wouldn’t have started their shifts for another thirty minutes.”

  “Okay. Well, everybody but Jeremy is going to be here in a little bit. You might as well be here too,” Peter sighed.

  “Why isn’t Jeremy coming?” Kadan asked.

  “I haven’t tracked him down yet,” Peter answered.

  “Not a problem. I’ll track him down and get him there. What’s the plan?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m not even sure that she’s missing yet. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing solid.”

  “I’ll keep digging until we have solid,” Kadan assured him.

  “I thought you were going to track down Jeremy?”

  “Already done,” Kadan quipped. “He’s on his way to come pick me up so I can stay on the computer and keep working.”


  Peter was impressed, but not surprised that Kadan had tracked down Jeremy so quickly.

  “Hey! I just had a thought!” Kadan exclaimed.

  “Yeah?”

  “Has anyone thought of Casey’s phone?”

  “I don’t think anyone has, until now,” Peter replied.

  “Okay, well, I’m on it. I’ll have something for you by the time we get there.”

  “Great. That might…” Again, he was speaking to dead air.

  “Again!” he exclaimed, giving his phone a toss onto the sofa.

  “Again, what?” Eric said, opening the door just as Peter spoke.

  Eric had gotten familiar enough with Peter that he didn’t bother to knock when he came to the house; he just opened the door and went right on in. Peter considered saying something about it, but there wasn’t much point in it. Eric was Eric and he’d do his own thing. “Nothing,” he sighed.

  “Hey, you didn’t call Mom, did you?” Eric asked.

  “No. I was hoping to sort of keep this under wraps a little longer before anybody got too stirred up about it,” Peter replied.

  “That’s good, ‘cause she would freak if she even got the hint that something had happened to Phoe. Especially with Casey along.”

  “That’s sort of what I figured.”

  “You didn’t call Aunt Sylvia either, then?”

  “I don’t even have her number, so, no.”

  “I don’t think I even have her number, but, yeah, she’d freak too.”

  A knock at the door interrupted his response. He opened it, expecting either Jeremy and Kadan or Charlotte. It was Charlotte.

  “Hey. I’m here,” Charlotte announced as she stepped through the door. “I called Angelica and Casey’s mother. Neither one of them has talked to her either.”

  She had no sooner finished speaking before Peter’s cell phone rang. He picked it up and pressed the button to connect the call without even looking at it.

  “What has happened to Phoe?” Angelica Phoenix’s voice started in without any formal greeting. “Has she been kidnapped? I thought this was supposed to just be some routine research. You do realize that her nineteen-year-old cousin, Casey, is with her right? My sister is hammering me for information and I have nothing to tell her. What’s going on here?”

  That was exactly the reason that both he and Eric had avoided calling Angelica Phoenix. He tried to calm himself, though the tone of her voice and the rapid-fire questions were working against him. “We really don’t know yet,” he responded. For all he knew, Phoe had simply turned her phone off and had some other reason for not checking in, though even he was beginning to think the worst might have happened. Still, he had to try to downplay the situation for Angelica. “She didn’t check in with Simon yesterday afternoon and he is concerned, so we’re looking into it. It’s probably nothing.”

  Chapter Ten

  Phoe studied the map for several seconds. Stefan had been grasping at straws at every turn and she wasn’t convinced that he had a single shred of solid evidence for the existence of anything, so she decided to play devil’s advocate a little bit more. She remembered another Israeli city to the northwest of Jerusalem that had a similar name and pointed it out. “How do you know that Arimathea and Ramah were not Ramla, which was very near Lod or Lydda at the time of Pilate’s rule and, I might add, on the other side of Emmaus, where the risen Christ walked with some of his disciples?”

  It was Stefan’s turn to be stumped. “I guess we don’t know that.”

  “What is the purpose of all of this anyway?” Phoe asked. “How does the location of Arimathea help us locate the text of Lenthius?”

  “Basically, we think that the conversation between Nicodemus, Lenthius and Charinus took place in or around Arimathea,” he replied.

  “Well that’s just dandy,” she retorted. Though she was eager to unravel the mystery, she was also well aware that as intelligent as Stefan might have been, he wasn’t an equal to the least experienced of her own team. “The conversation could have taken place in Jerusalem or either of the two locations that could be Arimathea or it could have taken place on the road to Emmaus as well. We really don’t know and even if we did, how does that help us to find the text of Lenthius, which may or may not point out where Lenthius hid a text that he may or may not have written. It’s all circumstantial.”

  Engel had entered the room at the exact moment that she had started into her argument. Phoe turned toward him. “If I had my team here, we might have a chance of unraveling this mystery, but without them, we’re just looking at a large pile of electronic crap.”

  The room filled with silence after her outburst.

  “Would you like me to show you to your quarters?” Engel asked softly.

  “What I’d like is to go back home and be left completely alone by amateur archeologists and German terrorists, but that isn’t going to happen, is it?” she snarled.

  Engel stared at her for several seconds. Her words seemed to have hurt him a little bit. What part of what she said had stung him? The part about him being a German terrorist? She quickly turned away, not wanting to reveal that she had noticed the weakness in him. She had no idea what chord she had just struck, but she decided that it might be useful later on and she had to cover up the fact that she had discovered it.

  “Perhaps a break…?” Engel started to ask in a soft tone.

  “No, Casey can’t afford for me to take a break,” she whirled back toward Engel, hoping to pick up on whatever it was that had hit him before. “You do remember that Casey is being held as a hostage until I recover an item that doesn’t exist, right?”

  “Mr. Kraus and I have every confidence that you will find exactly what you’ve been asked to find,” he smiled.

  Engel had evidently recovered himself, because she got no other reaction from him. “Well, I would do a lot better with my own team.”

  “Just tell us what you want,” Greta broke in. “We will do our best to find it for you.”

  Phoe glanced at Stefan, who had withdrawn from her when she had her outburst. No doubt, such a show of aggression made him extremely uncomfortable. The outburst had been a natural reaction to all of the frustrations that had built up since she’d been snatched from her hotel suite in the Carlyle. With them out of her system, she tried to draw her mind back to focusing on what was in front of her as though it was any other venture that she’d been asked to undertake. If Simon was unsuccessful in finding her, then it would be up to her to make certain that she and Casey would make it out alive. She could count on absolutely no one but herself at that moment.

  “I was about to tell you that based on where Charinus text was found, we had a pretty good guess at where we might find that of Lenthius,” Stefan said meekly, pushing his glasses up off of his nose.

  “That is reasonable in one sense, but not in another,” she replied, forcing herself to stay in control. “They could have purposely gone in different directions. However, let’s get back to where we were. You’re assuming that because they were only allowed to be on the earth for three days after their resurrection that they couldn’t have gone far. If the conversation took place in what is now Ramallah, then anything within a three-day journey in any direction would be possible.”

  “Actually,” Stefan said. “We have reason to believe that they didn’t have a full day. What they wrote may have been written the night before their last day.”

  She considered what he told her. “How was the text of Charinus found?”

  “It was discovered in an excavation near Ramallah.”

  “Are there any others taking place near there?” she asked. “I think we can safely rule out the first one. I don’t think they would have placed their texts together or near each other. They were supposed to be sealed and secret, right?”

  “As far as we know,” Stefan replied.

  “Okay, then.” She turned toward Greta. “Do we have all of the information that can be gotten about every excavation taking place with
in a day’s journey of Ramallah? We can consider the dates of the artifacts that are being extracted from those digs and see if any of them match up with the time frame that we’re working with.”

  Both Greta and Heinrich turned toward their computers and started tapping keys on their keyboards.

  She turned back toward Heinrich and Stefan. “I will need to get whatever permission necessary to attend to those dig sites and get a look and a feel of what is taking place there.”

  “I don’t know if Mr. Kraus will approve that,” Engel responded.

  “If he wants me to find the shroud, he will. Otherwise, this is all just an academic research project.”

  Engel nodded toward Stefan. “Once you have narrowed down some sites to Miss Phoenix’s liking, let me know. I will make the call.”

  “I would like to get something decent to eat and lie down for a little while, if that is okay with you?” She looked directly into the eyes of Engel. Again, she picked up a trace of softness as he responded to her.

  “As you wish, Miss Phoenix,” he replied.

  Engel led her out of the research lab, down the hall and into an elevator. They went up three floors and then exited the elevator into another hallway. She glanced up at him several times as they went, but was unable to pick up the slightest hint of what she had seen earlier. No doubt, he had read her reaction to him as well and had recovered his poise. She’d have to remain sharp; Casey’s life depended on her.

  “Here are your quarters, Miss Phoenix,” Engel announced, opening the door to what she had to confess was a very nice room, even nicer than the suite at the Carlyle. “Make yourself comfortable and I will have something sent up for you to eat. Mr. Kraus wants to make certain that you are made comfortable and that your stay, even under the circumstances, is not an unpleasant one.”