“How long do you think this has been here?” Hopkins asked. His voice was flat in the closed space.
“Hundreds of years. For as long as there’s been a monastery, maybe. It must have been created specifically for the Ark.”
“That would imply they knew they would have to hide it some day.”
“Or that they kept it hidden all the time.”
“Why would they do that?”
Rick shook his head. “I’m not su -- whoa!”
The shaft had abruptly opened up, its narrow confines falling away to empty space. Rick brought himself to a stop and called for Hopkins to do the same. Hopkins jerked to a halt several feet above him, one boot just barely missing his head. Rick hardly noticed. He swung his light in a slow arc to take in the sight that surrounded them.
They hung over a vast void, with meters of empty air on all sides. The shaft had dropped them into a cavern, their twin beams of light cutting through the darkness. It wasn’t the size of the place that had left Rick speechless, however. It was the large stone face staring directly at him.
“Are you seeing this?”
“Yeah.” Hopkins sounded properly awed.
It was nearly as large as he was, a full three-dimensional relief wrought from the raw rock. It appeared to be pushing itself out of the cavern wall to regard him with hollow eyes and strangely blank features. A slick of condensation covered it, made it seem more flesh than stone.
As Rick swung his light down, illuminating his own misting breath, he saw it wasn’t just a face. There was a body as well, twenty feet tall or more. It stood with arms outstretched -- no, not arms. Wings. Four of them, two pairs raised beside its face and two folded downward. Its legs plunged to the bottom of the cavern, disappearing into a pool of dark water.
“Rick,” Hopkin said. “There’s another one.”
It took a moment for his words to sink in. Then Rick tore his gaze from the massive figure and twisted around. Sure enough, a second towering sentinel gazed back at him from the darkness, directly opposite the first. It, too, had four wings and blank, almost minimal facial features. Only the eyes -- a pair of hollow pits -- had any life to them.
“Cherubim,” he whispered. The acoustics of the cavern were strange, bouncing his voice back at him from all directions. “The same angels that guarded the Ark in Solomon’s Temple.”
“So…that’s a good thing, right?” Hopkins asked. “That means it’s here?”
Rick nodded, but for the first time in a long time, the Ark wasn’t at the forefront of his mind. “How could they have built this? An island of monks -- this masonry is beyond anything we saw on the surface. It must have taken decades. Centuries, maybe.”
Hopkins grunted. “Guess you’ve got a lot of time on your hands when you’re a monk living on an island. Plus, you said the Ark was here for eight hundred years, right? Wouldn’t that be plenty of time?”
“I guess. I just never imagined…” Rick let out a low breath, a pearly cloud of vapor forming before his face to obscure the stone one that was looking back at him. He raised his wristband and snapped a picture. “Kai’s not going to believe this.”
“I don’t believe it. Come on. Let’s get to the bottom.”
Rick had to make an effort to spur himself into motion. It was another twenty feet down; they practically sailed the rest of the way, stopping just after Rick’s boots plunged into the water.
“Can you see how deep it is?” Hopkins asked.
The water was cloudy and dark. Carefully, Rick lowered himself the rest of the way, jaw clenched as the water crept up to his knees. “God, that’s cold. Not too deep, though.”
Hopkins splashed down beside him, less gracefully. Rick unclipped his belt, then Hopkins’. They stood back to back, each of them craning their necks to stare up at the gigantic cherubim.
“We must be under the lake,” Hopkin said. Rick nodded. “So why isn’t this cave more flooded? There’s water bubbling up on the surface.”
“No idea. I’m not complaining. Horse mouths and all that.”
Hopkins pulled his gaze from the cherubim, boots sloshing as he turned on the spot to survey the rest of the cavern. “I don’t see anything. Where’s the Ark?”
The cavern did indeed appear to be empty. Apart from the statues, there was nothing but water and stone. Tooth-like stalagmites breached the surface of the pool, rising in strange undulating clusters. A pile of rubble sat to one side of where they stood, debris from when the chapel floor collapsed. Rick could make out a shattered wooden altar. “It has to be here,” he said. “You don’t just build twenty-foot-tall angels for no reason.”
“Maybe it was here,” Hopkins said. “But it’s not now.”
Rick shook his head. “No. There’s nowhere else. This has to be it.”
“Ok. So…where?”
Rick moved to the nearest stalagmite, struggling through the knee-high water. He ran his light over it, feeling its smooth surface with his fingers. It appeared for all the world to be a natural formation. Nothing special.
“Damn it,” he whispered. The cave bounced his swear back at him. He turned to Hopkins. “Come on. Help me look.”
Together they made a slow, noisy circuit of the cavern, Rick splashing in one direction, Hopkins the other. He studied the ankles of the cherub carefully, hoping to find a hidden door or cavity or something. It remained sturdy and unyielding to his touch. By the time they returned to the rope dangling in the center of the pool, Rick’s legs were feeling numb from the cold and his spirits as damp as his feet. The thrill of discovering this place was quickly giving way to frustration. He refused to accept that he’d struck out twice in a row.
“Now what?” Hopkins asked. “Head back up?”
“Just -- let me think a moment.”
The cherubim were here for a reason. The Ark had been here for hundreds of years. The monks shaped this place specifically to hold it -- not only that, but to reflect its original place in Solomon’s Temple by recreating the angelic guardians. This entire place would have been thought of as a temple, the real temple, a recreation of Solomon’s. The chapel up above was just an antechamber. A vestibule. Which would make this place the Holy of Holies, the chamber where the Ark had been kept --
No, Rick thought with a start. Not the Holy of Holies. That’s not how the original temple had been laid out. First came the small vestibule, then hekhal -- the Holy Place, second and largest chamber in the temple. Then the Holy of Holies. But where…?
“Rick?”
“The temple was divided into three sections,” Rick said, speaking to himself rather than answering Hopkins. “Vestibule, hekhal, Holy of Holies. The Ark was in the Holy of Holies…”
Think. He pictured a temple, flipped like a skyscraper so its vestibule became the penthouse. That would put the Holy of Holies at the bottom.
“The debris,” Rick said, finding the pile with his light. “It’s off-center. Someone came down and moved it after the floor collapsed.”
“Why?”
He looked down, shining his light through the water. There, at his feet, in the center of the pool, was something round and metallic.
A ring.
“It’s here,” he breathed.
“What?” Hopkins stared at him, then followed his gaze down. “Under the water?”
“The Holy of Holies was always separated from the rest of the temple by a barrier. In the Temple of Solomon it was a thick curtain, but here it’s water -- and stone.” His heart was suddenly pounding. “Help me with this!”
Together they crouched so that the water came up nearly to their chins and plunged their hands beneath its surface. Together they grasped the heavy iron ring.
“Pull it up!” Rick heaved.
Hopkins grunted, teeth clenched. “It’s -- not moving.”
“It will!”
They pulled, Rick straining until his muscles burned. Come on. The wound where the bullet had grazed his shoulder was burning, but he bore through it and d
idn’t let up.
Bubbles erupted around them, followed almost immediately by a blooming cloud of silt. All at once the resistance vanished, so quickly that he nearly lost his grip. Something was coming up, emerging from the bottom of the pool, moving as smoothly and easily as if on ball-bearings.
A shape began to breach the surface. Wide, rectangular -- a stone box, the ring fastened atop it. It streamed and gushed water, looking almost like a child-sized sarcophagus. When it was too tall to maintain leverage on the ring they shifted their grip, wrapping their arms around the sarcophagus and lifting. It rose until it was almost completely above the water, and then it would go no further. Rick felt more than heard something clunk solidly into place beneath his feet.
Panting and gasping, they both stumbled back a few steps. The sarcophagus did not sink back into the water but remained in place. He raised his wristband to shine light on it. The sides were smooth, reddish in color -- granite or something similar. At first he thought the stone had been pitted and eroded by the steady hands of water and time. He took a step closer and saw that the stone wasn’t eroded, but carved. Lines of close text wrapped around it, covering every inch of stone from top to bottom.
* * *
There was something uncomfortable about its monolithic appearance, its dark red color, as if the stone had drank blood, the ancient script covering it. Oppressive. Booker half-imagined he could feel its weight pressing down on him, constricting the walls of the airy cavern.
You’re exhausted, he decided, and shook his head. “Are we gonna open it?”
“Hang on.” Rick stared at it from a distance for a moment longer, then circled it snapping pictures with his wristband, then slowly approached and knelt beside it. He raised a hand, fingers hovering less than an inch from the stone. Booker saw his lips move silently.
“Don’t tell me you can actually read that.”
“Been a while since I translated any ancient Semitic languages,” Rick muttered. “But maybe…”
He trailed off, leaving Booker to wait. Occasionally Rick would mutter something, like “Standard Biblical Hebrew” or “Canaanite shift” or “Glory to Yahweh, the Lord, the God of our fathers, blah blah blah…”
Finally he stood, hands on his hips. “Huh.”
“What?” Booker’s stomach sank. “Don’t tell me it’s not in there.”
“No, I think it is.” He gestured at the chest. “All this writing, it’s -- well, a warning. Talks about the Seat of Yahweh being submerged in the primordial waters to sate His holy wrath, and woe to anyone who removes it before the time for the redemption of Israel has come. Typical Old Testament stuff.”
Booker eyed him. “You’re not actually worried?”
“Of course not. It’s just different from anything I’ve read about the Ark.”
“Different how?”
“I’m not sure. Why did they leave it here? Why not bring it back…” He trailed off again.
Booker sighed, stepping forward. “You can puzzle it over later. Let’s get this thing open and make sure we’ve actually got the Ark. Then we can figure out how we’re getting it out of this cave.”
Rick didn’t respond. He was still staring at the chest, brow creased in a frown.
“Hey. You hear me?”
“What?” He blinked, looking up at Booker. “Right.” He drew a deep breath. “Let’s do this.”
They each took up position at one end of the chest. Two narrow slots, like handholds, were recessed into the stone at each end. Flush with the tops of the cavities was a seam, just barely visible, where the lid fit perfectly against the rest of the stone. Booker slid his hands into the cavities on his side, glancing at Rick as he did the same.
“Ready?” he asked softly.
Rick nodded. “One, two -- lift.”
They heaved. After only a brief moment of resistance, the lid lifted. Square pegs at each corner slid free from their corresponding holes in the chest, and Booker noted that no water dripped from the pegs or had pooled in the holes. This chest had been designed to be airtight.
Moving carefully, they shuffled to the side and set the lid down next to the chest, submerging it beneath the water. Then, with almost synchronized motions, they peered inside.
It sat in the sarcophagus with only a few inches of space between it and the surrounding stone, and was covered by a purple veil, thin enough to reveal a flash of gold in the light of Booker’s wristband. He heard Rick draw a sharp breath, and realized he was holding his own. The gauzy material was perfectly dry, and it draped over the peaked forms of two cherubim, their wings extended forward to touch over the middle of the lid. The mercy seat, he recalled, where God Himself would manifest to the Israelites.
And for a moment Booker could see a luminescent cloud, a fog, hovering between the wings of the cherubim. It was a trick of the light, his wristband’s glow catching in the gauzy veil and becoming diffused, but it still made his heart skip a beat. Booker hadn’t expected to feel this way -- it was as if the air in the small chamber had thickened, become electrified, by this Biblical artifact.
Biblical. The weight of that word, of what it meant, settled on Booker like a stone. He was standing before something ancient, thousands of years old, central to the oldest religions in the world…
“Is it real?”
“I think so,” Rick replied, in a similar hushed tone. He slowly knelt before the chest, raised a hand, paused, then reached inside. He plucked the veil away and revealed the Ark of the Covenant in its full glory. The gold seemed to flash for an instant, like lightning. Booker felt a sudden, giddy urge to laugh and clapped a hand over his mouth, grinning.
The detail was rougher than he had imagined or had ever seen in depictions, the cherubim less defined. More abstract; perhaps the details had been worn down by time. All of it was far less ornamented, far more plain -- barring the gold that covered every surface, of course. Yet that roughness seemed to add to its aura, its authenticity. Popular depictions had always shown the Ark as having intricate bas reliefs and rococo detailing, but why would it? It had been made thousands of years ago, by a group of wandering exiles in the middle of a desert. Even if it had at one time been exquisitely crafted, the years would surely have worn away all but the simplest detail.
None of that took away from its magnetism. And Booker found himself being drawn forward, extending a hand, reaching for one of the cherubim. Ancient fingers had crafted those wings, its shape imagined by a mind that was impossibly old --
“Stop!”
Rick’s voice was sharp, making Booker jump and draw his hand bach sharply -- but not before it brushed a single outstretched wing.
The cherub snapped clean off the lid and toppled over.
The air seemed to go out of the cavern, the water at their feet turning to ice. Booker stared at it, lying on its side like a cheap hood ornament, then slowly, painfully, raised his eyes to Rick. The man stood frozen in a crouch, one arm outstretched in warning, eyes fixed on where the cherub had been.
“Oh – no,” Booker began.
“Are you…” Rick drew a breath. “Fucking kidding me?”
“No – see, what happened was –”
“Are you fucking kidding me?!”
“– just kind of brushed it, I mean, you shouted and I, like, jumped a little –”
“Are you fucking kidding me!”
“– can probably fix it –”
“Fix it!” Rick threw his head back and laughed like a maniac, the sound echoing crazily in the cavern. “Fix it. Fix it? You just broke the Ark of the Covenant! It’s been perfectly fine for three thousand years, but here comes Agent Booker Fucking-Asshole-Fucking Hopkins, lumbering along –!”
Booker mustered a frown. “Hey, let’s just --”
“Just what? Tell me, oh wise master, oh guru, oh ex-fucking-FBI-fucking-agent! Jesus, you’re useless, you know that? A complete and utter dead weight. No wonder you got fired, no wonder Estelle dumped your ass --”
Before
he knew what he was going to do Booker was rushing around the sarcophagus and plowing his fist into Rick’s chin. It connected hard enough to hurt his hand, sending Rick stumbling backwards. He fell with a resounding splash, head disappearing beneath the water for a moment before resurfacing with a splutter.
“Enough,” Booker hissed. He was shaking, rage coursing through him. “Just -- enough. Stop talking, for one fucking second.”
Rick was sitting on his ass in the water, staring up at him as if still processing what had just happened. One hand idly rubbed his chin where a bit of blood seeped.
“You are not the only one with a stake in all this,” Booker went on. “You’re not the only one who cares, alright? You’re not the only person in this whole fucking world who matters. We’ve all been through shit to get here, me, Estelle -- hell, her dad is dead because of this! And I’ve burned all my bridges, lost my fucking job, completely blown up any life I had -- just to get here! Just to get this stupid box!” He lashed a kick at the sarcophagus, and pain lanced up his foot. “Owgodfuck!” He hopped to one side, lost his balance, and fell in the frigid water beside Rick, snorting some of it up his nose. Booker propped himself up, flailing and coughing.
“It’s solid stone, man,” Rick said. “What’d you expect?”
Booker stifled his pain and glared over at him, breathing heavily. “Are you gonna cut the shit, or is it going to be like this the entire way? I need to know right now. Because if it’s the latter, then you can haul this box up out of here by yourself.”
Rick met his gaze with a sullen look, hair hanging in strands over his brow, chin still bleeding. Then he glanced away. For a long moment he said nothing. Then: “Look -- it’s all I had, alright?”
“What’s all you had?”
“This, the --” Rick raised a hand to gesture at the cavern, spraying water in an arc. “History. Old shit. In Houston, we -- there wasn’t a whole lot to make life bearable. But when I read about history I could…could disappear. Pretend. It helped, a little.” He was speaking two or three words at a time, taking long pauses between, as if the act was causing him physical pain. He glanced over at Booker. “It matters to me. More than it matters to you or Estelle or Nasim or anyone.”
A Covenant of Thieves Page 51
