by A D Davies
“What like?”
“Like...” Valerio rocked on his heels. “Like... ‘You have something for me?’ That sort of thing.”
“Right. That would be cheesy.”
“But, y’know...” Valerio opened his hand. “It’s part of the deal.”
“Lay off the cheesy lines, it’s yours.”
Valerio held three fingers up to his shoulder. “Scout’s honor.”
Jules placed the bag in Valerio’s free hand. “Try to stiff me, and I’ll fight hard. I’ll lose, yeah, but you might be one of the others who don’t make it.”
Valerio made an exaggerated shiver, then addressed Horse, who now joined them. “See he’s rested. You too. And get him a change of clothes. We have a long walk later.”
The voyage north lasted eight hours, ending at a deserted bay, a rocky inlet apparently scouted ahead of time. Jules meditated rather than slept, refreshing himself nonetheless in readiness for the evening meal. Valerio spent a little time with Jules during which he explained he had borrowed the yacht from a Chinese businessman who did something complicated in finance circles, and it came equipped with a kitchen full of cooks who’d been employed for last night’s festivities but were more than happy to stay on for an extended shift. They probably didn’t expect to be serving gourmet food to hardened military men who’d spent the last half decade living in the jungle and remote villages.
Jules doubted they would repeat the gig.
He took his own food up onto the main deck, where the sun was setting over the ocean. Valerio dined alone up here, and he waved Jules to join him at his table with its white tablecloth.
From Tarzan bad guy to British Empire colonial. He just lacked a pit helmet.
Now wearing hiking pants and boots and a plaid cotton shirt in preparation for the coming trek, Jules ate at the opposite end of the vessel; the truce deal did not include a socializing clause. The biryani satisfied both protein and carbohydrate intake while at the same time tasting like something from heaven.
An hour later, he and Valerio sat side by side in the Indigo as it swept toward shore. Valerio kept his eyes front, and Horse positioned himself behind Jules. It took two trips to transport the militiamen and their equipment, reaching shore in darkness, where they unpacked and started hoofing it inland. Valerio bore a small rucksack, just enough for two bangles, the manuscript, and a hydration pack of water.
“We’re heading through the jungle at night?” Jules said.
“Yup.” Horse donned a helmet with what resembled stubby binoculars on a hinge. “Infrared scope.”
“Sure, that’ll work against snakes.”
Valerio pulled gaiters over his boots. “Animals are more scared of us than we are of them. We make enough noise, they’ll scatter.”
“Besides,” Horse added, “these guys know the terrain.”
Jules stared at the darkest part of the landscape, accelerating the adjustment to his plain old human night vision. The half-moon illuminated the clear night sufficiently to get by, so if he stuck close to Valerio, he guessed any further protection would benefit him too. “Where we going?”
Valerio just smiled, adjusted his silly hat, and tramped into the middle of the party. Jules could only follow.
Horse remained several feet behind. Jules’s vision adapted well, and his ears turned into satellite dishes, receiving every squawk, chitter, snap, and rustle the jungle emitted. The trail seemed fresh, beaten and cut by the advance group, occasionally merging with paths worn down by what were clearly large animals prowling their territory. The militiamen kept watch at varying distances, the lead party acting as sherpas to transport the equipment that Valerio and Horse guessed they’d need. Because it there was still a huge amount of guesswork.
“The location in the manuscript is not guaranteed,” Valerio explained after ten minutes of silence, although Jules could have gone the whole night without uttering a word. “It describes routes,” Valerio went on. “Landmarks, views that may no longer exist. Astrological references that are, frankly, inaccurate. Horse mapped the topography, and we found one location that matched. But it’s only an eighty-five-percent match.”
“Pretty good for two millennia of nature,” Jules said. “I found stuff with less than a fifty-fifty chance.”
Valerio paused. “Us too. We located a stash of jewels and what was once silk that experts believed belonged to Cleopatra, something she had hidden in what we might call a ‘safe house’... in Ethiopia. My archeology expert gave us a twenty-percent chance of it being there, buried in the sarcophagus of a Christian convert in his father’s church.”
“What happened to the archeologist?”
At one of the Ravi brothers’ urging, Valerio trudged on. “I released a trap door under his feet and let the alligators feed on him.”
Jules was annoyed at himself for smiling as he kept up. “But seriously.”
Valerio laughed at his own joke. “He’s still with us. Older chap pretending to work for the British, but thanks to a dreadful pension, he’s proved sooooo useful to us over the years.”
“Henry.”
“Oh, you met him?” Valerio slashed at a tiny branch with the machete so he didn’t have to sidestep the six inches to go around. “Is he visiting with old Colin?”
“He was on the plane, yeah.”
“He say anything?” Horse asked.
“About you guys? No, he was pretty quiet.”
Valerio laughed again. “Horse keeps advising me to kill the poor guy. But we still have receipts and several photos that his wife and colleagues would find, uh... disappointing.”
“Why keep me alive? Why not cut off my hand or something?”
“Because you’re special. More special alive. You might be more useful.”
“Huh.” Jules processed it in silence for around ten seconds. When Valerio did not break into it, he came to a conclusion. “The bangles only work when I’m alive.”
They had climbed hundreds of feet, but the land was starting to even out. Not enough for altitude to kick in, yet Valerio already seemed breathless.
He paused again to speak. “You, my friend, are ridiculously quick.”
“Not only alive,” Jules said, thinking it through, replaying the scenario on the Lady Mel. He made a mistake, got zapped, out cold, lying at their mercy until he came to. “Conscious. You already tried when I was out of it on the boat.”
“We know from the world of physics that matter reacts differently when observed, although we’re getting into quantum stuff here. You must have heard of the ‘slit test’?”
“I read something about it. Neutrons fired through several slits in a card.”
“Yes. They emerged on the other side in a cloud. Hit the paper the other side in a scattershot pattern. But when the test was left running with no eyes or cameras, scientists returned to find the neutrons had shot straight through the slits and hit the target in straight lines.”
“So you think I need to observe the bangles as well as touch ’em.”
Horse nodded for him to continue moving. Like they were on a clock.
“Honestly, I was going to kill you,” Valerio answered between heavy breaths. “Wasn’t until I saw the stunt in the harbor that I was glad we failed.”
Jules held up two fingers. “Twice.”
Valerio gave a chuckle. “Now we know what you are, you’re fairly safe.”
“‘What I am?’ I’m just a guy.”
“You’re chosen.”
“Ain’t no such thing as ‘chosen.’”
“I don’t want this conversation again, Jules. Now fall back.” He paused again. “Horse.”
Horse brought the party to a halt and spent five minutes feeding Valerio pills and water. Then they proceeded onward, into the dark, where Valerio placed buds in his ears and listened to what he claimed was “a series of podcasts I’ve been meaning to catch up on.”
That suited Jules. He preferred the noises of the jungle anyway.
Learjet, Pak
istani Airspace
“We can track him, but then we’re always one step behind,” Bridget said. “Charlie, you were working on a computer model for pinpointing the tomb.”
“Right, it’s here.” She opened the laptop that had been returned by the authorities, and all gathered around, sitting on the floor of the Learjet in a semicircle. While she set up the program, she asked, “Have you translated anything else?”
They were under orders to leave India immediately, and Dan plotted a course for Pakistan, where some of Harpal’s old contacts smoothed things over with the Pakistani authorities and Dan’s influence secured safe passage to an air force base a hundred miles over the border. Now they circled over the base with autopilot engaged and full permission to be there. They’d land shortly to refuel, but Toby insisted on finalizing their next move away from prying ears—which rooms on a foreign military base would most certainly possess.
“I had some time in Singapore and here,” Bridget said in reply to Charlie. “I’m still working out the finer details, so let me summarize first to get my head straight.”
She waited until all were watching her, ready for any snide comments or sarcasm. When none came, she continued.
“The Thomas manuscript is dated to around 50 or 60 AD, a transcription of the original text stolen from Herodias. Then Thomas added a journal to the original text, covering his travels after setting up his ministry in Kerala. But we don’t have all of it. We don’t know dates exactly, so we can’t tell if it was before or after his recorded death in Mylapore.
“And it’s not important to be exact on this subject,” Toby said.
“Right. This is about places, not dates. We know from his diary he went to what is modern-day Mongolia, but when he fell ill, he returned to India. To be buried in the place where he found a use for the bangles.”
Dan’s patience wore thin. “We know all this. He sent one back to Africa because he didn’t know Philip was dead yet and left the other with his pal the Buddhist.”
“But part of the writing predates Aramaic. Why would some parts be Indus and others be Aramaic?”
Dan shrugged. “My butt’s tingling with anticipation.”
“The only reason I can think of is that’s it’s another transcription. The Indus wise men translated the ancient language in whatever place the bangles are from, but there was no direct translation into Aramaic.”
“So Thomas copied it verbatim,” Toby said.
Harpal frowned. “Verbatim?”
“It means word-for-word, copied exactly.”
“I know what ‘verbatim’ means, Professor Obvious. I just wanted to know why.”
“Because it was clearly important,” Bridget said. “Written down to send back with the Herodias bangle. But stating his final resting place... that’s why he wanted to be buried there instead of back in his homeland or Kerala. He was pointing the other apostles to his tomb to ensure they understood what the bangles represented.”
“If he made it there,” Charlie said.
“If he did, they never got the chance to find him,” Toby added. “Until we came along.”
Dan scoffed. “Until a bunch of street assholes killed the parents of a fourteen-year-old anally retentive gymnast.”
“I will rest for all time in the light beneath the midnight gaze of Zephon,” Bridget intoned. “Or burning beneath the midnight gaze... because that’s what the original said, and he...”
“Verbatimed it,” Harpal said. “Got it.”
“Only we worked out the constellations wrong.” Charlie showed a two-thousand-year-old star map overlaying India and its neighbors. “This is the view of how the stars would look perpendicular to the ground. But, the star above a certain point at midnight would be different now because our solar system constantly hurtles through the Milky Way. Over decades or even centuries, it looks almost identical, even to an advanced civilization, but the stars do move over millennia. It’d be different to today in 60 AD although not by a huge amount. However, it’d be very different thirty-some thousand years ago. So we don’t know exactly which star ‘Zephon’ is.”
“Zephon,” Bridget said once again. “Both names—Zephon and Zendor—mean ‘life giver.’ Zendor is ancient Sumerian, and Zephon is inspired by Judeo-Christian myth. The angel who Gabriel sent to earth in search of Satan.”
“I agree with Bridget,” Toby said. “We should assume this is the correct star. Subsequent to Jules’s beacon confirming the direction.”
“We couldn’t use it before because we didn’t have a reference point, or even an approximate place in time. Now we have that. Can we narrow it down?”
Charlie played with the mouse, and the stars beat like a heart and twisted, some moving closer together, new ones forming, until a fresh rash of silver dots covered the land map. She pointed to a red dot on the coast of the Gujarat region in India’s far northwest, bordering Pakistan. “This is Jules two hours ago.” The dot tracked a path inland, a circuitous route hugging the hills’ contours. “This is the Kerala Christians’ Zephon. At least, if you looked up directly into the sky through a chimney or tube, this is where Zephon would have shone. At midnight. Thirty thousand years ago.”
An inch and a half from Jules’s position, a star pulsed.
“What is that?” Dan asked.
Charlie cleaned up the image without the star map, leaving only Zephon and Jules, and zoomed in to an HD image of the land.
A town. Nestled amid wild hills and jungle.
“An altitude of two thousand feet,” Charlie said.
Harpal zoomed out so it incorporated Ladoh and stared a moment. “It’s a long way from Valerio’s base of operations, outside the radius of his LiDAR explorations.”
Toby stood and straightened himself out. “Within a small margin of error, I think we can safely say we have a destination.”
Ladoh Border Region
Trekking into hills that morphed into mountains farther away, Jules’s lungs required more breaths per minute as the altitude increased, slow going over the circuitous route, obviously plotted taking Valerio’s deteriorating condition into account.
The jungle thinned. The foliage switched to more arid climes, and the nearly constant animal noises faded into the distance, replaced by the occasional rustle, distant yelp, or hoot. At around four a.m., having climbed to what felt like two thousand feet above sea level, they rested for an hour in the increasingly cool air, ate starchy food, and drank coffee and high-performance drinks full of sugar, then continued.
The trail fell gradually until—as the sun cast a yellow glow through the mist—Jules could see a village a mile in the distance under the shadow of a huge hill.
They paused, the view filled with vivid greens fading out in the mist of low morning clouds. Mountains towered far beyond, much higher than their location, but the mound ahead lorded over a narrow valley that plateaued into a basin in which the village nestled—a frying pan–shaped aerie overlooking a steep drop into another valley extending farther than Jules could see.
But it was the giant molehill before them that Jules focused on: an upturned green and gray cone with paths etched around its circumference. It soared another five hundred feet over them, and they were already on a rise hundreds of feet up from where its base originated—the panhandle valley carving a path into the village.
The village itself appeared even smaller than the one Jules encountered by the coast, although this one looked more populated. He asked for binoculars, and after a bit of wrangling and phrases such as “What can it hurt?” Horse handed them over.
Sparse activity. No modern conveniences that he could see. The thirty or so houses were constructed from rocks of varying sizes, the roofs made of vegetation from the forest and lower down in the jungle. The land seemed flat, hard-packed dirt forming streets set in concentric circles around two major features: a well with a wooden seal over the mouth and what was unmistakably a church. Big enough for fifty worshippers, maybe a handful more. A satellite dish
sat on one roof.
Without seeing who, without needing to, Jules felt a hand rest on his left shoulder, easing him to the side. The other hand guided the binoculars to the hill’s peak, lush with green shrubs and grass, which tapered almost to a point from this distance but up close would be dozens of feet across. Without lowering the glasses, Jules went with it, listening.
Valerio’s breath exhaled hot on his ear. “If you were to stand on that very spot at midnight thirty thousand years ago and look to the heavens, the star we know today as SDSSp I991256 would be twinkling directly above your head. The Kerala Christians called it ‘Zephon.’ Those who wrote the original manuscript copied by Thomas and his guides called it ‘Zendor.’ See the similarity in pronunciation? Perhaps it was the people who forged our bangles who gave it that name.” Valerio broke away, coughed, then leaned on Jules’s right shoulder. “Nearest translation we can find is ‘the life giver.’ How about that?”
Jules lowered the binoculars. “You think there’s a cave system? Some old buildings?”
“I think it’s the birth of civilization in this region. The manuscript speaks of a natural disaster. A flood, possibly a landslide—it’s a fuzzy interpretation at best—but beneath that mound, maybe deep, deep down, we’ll find a village, a town, maybe an Indian Pompeii.”
“The well,” Jules said, indicating the modern construction in the center of the current village. “Towns are built on rivers. You think down there, under thousands of years of geological movement, there’s a magic cure.”
Valerio inched away toward the edge of the path, gazing down on their goal. “Those people down there, those peasants... they’re descendants of the Kerala Christians who pilgrimaged to Thomas’s great legacy. Maybe they took him back to Mylapore, or maybe Thomas rests here, virtually under our feet. Where it all began.”
“Where what all began?”
“The bangles open the gate to what Thomas discovered. And more importantly, the place the manuscript was describing. Right at the beginning of Thomas’s section of that book. The additions he made to the copy given to him by the apostle Philip.”
