The Copper Scroll

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  * * *

  Exasperated, Bennett ran his hands through his hair.

  “I don’t believe you,” he said at last. “I really don’t believe you.”

  “I know it looks bad, Jon, but I—”

  “Looks bad? Erin, are you crazy? Have you completely lost your mind? You’re going to send us all to prison for the rest of our lives!”

  “That wasn’t my first concern,” she said.

  “What was?”

  “Surviving.”

  Bennett was beside himself. He wanted to scream at her, but he couldn’t afford to wake up Natasha or the rest of the house, much less the neighborhood.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said, his mind still reeling. “You actually asked Indira Rajiv to log on to a secure CIA satellite account, zoom into Jerusalem, map out a secure route from the apartment where we’re staying to Dr. Mordechai’s house and back, and then feed that imagery to a password-protected Web account that we can access on our BlackBerrys?”

  “Pretty much,” said Erin.

  “So despite the fact that we have a warm bed to sleep in, and a family willing to protect us, and access to friends in the White House and CIA who can help us out of this thing, you’re actually proposing that we leave this house, sneak back through the Moslem Quarter, and find our way to Dr. Mordechai’s house?”

  “Right.”

  “Because you have a death wish?”

  “No,” Erin shot back, “because someone has one for us.”

  “And what exactly are we supposed to find at Dr. Mordechai’s place?”

  “I don’t know,” said Erin. “Not exactly.”

  “Oh, great, that’s helpful.”

  “Look, Jon, I’m exhausted. We both are. But we don’t have a lot of choices right now, do we? We’ve got a lot of pieces to this puzzle, but I can’t seem to make them fit. Can you?”

  Bennett said nothing, so Erin continued. “When the sun comes up we’re going to be pinned down here for another night unless you want to go traipsing through the Moslem Quarter in broad daylight.”

  “Not with what tomorrow’s headlines are going to bring,” he said.

  “Precisely my point,” said Erin. “If we’re going to make a move, we have to make it now. I’m just hoping that if we can hack into Mordechai’s files, we might come across something helpful, something we can use to figure this all out, before it’s too late.”

  31

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 15 – 2:44 a.m. – JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  An hour later, they were standing outside Mordechai’s house.

  Officially, the house was under investigation and would be until the circumstances of Mordechai’s death had been thoroughly studied, but most of the detective work here had been done already. The question now was whether there remained any clues to Mordechai’s death that may not have been obvious to the Mossad or Shin Bet.

  Bennett followed his bride up the cobblestone path and realized this might very well be the last time they visited this remarkable home. He wondered how much this house carved into the hills would sell for—six, eight million? Ten?

  He recalled how intrigued he’d been the first time he visited. He’d been struck at the time by an almost overpowering sense that the house was a reflection of the man inside, eclectic and unconventional, shrouded in mystery, infused with a hint of magic. Tonight was no different. For old times’ sake, he wished they could ring the doorbell and once again hear the chimes echoing through the valley, as beautiful as those in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre not far away. Instead, he punched in the nine-digit security code Mordechai had taught them. To their surprise, it was still active, and they entered the front door. But this time they were not greeted by armed Mossad agents. They were greeted, instead, by an eerie silence.

  As they climbed the circular staircase into the great room—its walls covered with Jackson Pollock paintings, its shelves adorned with archeological relics from all over the Near East—Bennett thought he could still pick up the faint smell of the curry and coriander and turmeric with which Mordechai so often cooked, and the memories began to well up within him. It was on these very couches that he’d first heard the Ezekiel 38 and 39 prophecies. It was out there on the stone porch overlooking the Old City that Erin had first shared her faith in Christ with him. Below his feet were the thick Persian rugs once covered with the blood of Iraqi terrorists who had come in the middle of the night to hunt them down. And when he closed his eyes he could still see the chalk outlines around the bodies, all these years later.

  Erin made a right toward the kitchen and Mordechai’s bedroom and private study. Bennett, on the other hand, turned left to look through the guest rooms where they had so often stayed. The beds were all made with fresh linens no one would ever use. Clean bath towels and washcloths were stacked neatly in wicker baskets at the foot of each bed, and as always, each room had a collection of small soaps and bottles of shampoo, along with new toothbrushes and unused tubes of toothpaste, always prepared for another guest, though no more would ever come.

  He stopped over the section of hallway where his friend and colleague Dietrich Black had been killed, and where he had almost been, as well. So much had happened since that night, yet the memories were still vivid, still painful, and he wondered when, if ever, they would begin to fade. He wondered, too, how Deek’s family was holding up. He’d set up a scholarship fund for the girls and helped Katrina land a job outside of Philly as the executive secretary to a bank VP he’d known from Harvard. But it had been way too long since they had all seen each other. Erin and Katrina still e-mailed each other occasionally, but less often than they had, and less often than Bennett wished. They had sent Katrina an invitation to their wedding but had never received a reply. He made mental note to give her a call when he got back to the States.

  Since the day he had been hired by the president of the United States to help bring about an Arab-Israeli peace treaty, he had known personally fifty-three people who were now dead. Funny how the mind kept track of the details. Most deaths he had witnessed firsthand. But of all of them, Mordechai’s was by far the most painful. Already Bennett missed him more than he had thought possible, more even than his own father, and though he knew with great certainty that he would see his old friend once again one day, it wasn’t the same, and there was no use pretending that it was. There would be no more talks late into the night about politics and prophecy, no more marathon Scrabble tournaments that Bennett would always lose and Erin would sometimes win. All that was over, and over too quickly. The only way to redeem it was to figure out why.

  His BlackBerry began to vibrate. He glanced at the screen. It was his mother. He gritted his teeth. She had the most incredible timing.

  “Hey, Mom, now is not the best time,” he said, cupping his hand over his mouth to keep as quiet as possible.

  “Why are you whispering? Is everything all right?” asked Ruth Bennett from her town house in Orlando.

  “I’m actually in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course I will.”

  “You promise?”

  “Of course I promise,” he sighed. “Every Saturday morning, 9 a.m.—have I missed one yet?”

  “You’re a good boy. I’m so, so sorry about Dr. Mordechai. Are you going to the funeral?”

  “There’s not going to be a funeral, Mom.”

  “What are you talking about? There has to be a funeral. He was a great man.”

  “They don’t think of him that way here. But look, I really need to go. I’ll call you tonight.”

  “You know, I think I’ve settled on a church,” his mother continued, oblivious to the urgency in his voice. “It’s a big one, about fifteen minutes from me. The pastor is wonderful. You and Erin really need to come down and hear him. He’s doing a series on the End Times right now. Fas-cinating. Absolutely fascinating. He actually quoted Dr. Mordechai last week. I just about fell out of my chair. I wanted
to stand up and shout, ‘I know that guy. I know him!’”

  Bennett had to bite his tongue. He loved his mother dearly. The last thing he wanted was to communicate any disrespect. But sometimes . . .

  “Anyway, the pastor said Dr. Mordechai had an intriguing theory. Since nobody knows when Jesus is going to return—Jesus said even He didn’t know; He said only His Father knew—that would mean that Satan doesn’t know either. Which means Satan has always had to be prepared for any eventuality. That means that for almost two thousand years, he’s had to have at least one Antichrist on the earth, in position, ready to go, in every generation since the Resurrection. Which is why there have been so many evil dictators throughout history. So there has to be someone out there, right now, walking around the planet at this very minute. Waiting. Preparing. Plotting. It could be somebody you know. It could be someone I know. It’s scary, don’t you think?”

  Bennett took a deep breath. That was enough for now. He again told his mother how much he loved her and promised to call her the moment he had the chance. Then he went looking for Erin, whom he found in Mordechai’s private study.

  32

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 15 – 3:12 a.m. – JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  The room had been stripped bare.

  All the books of every shelf were gone. So were the papers and the file cabinets. A PC still sat on the old man’s desk, but its hard drive had been ripped out. Even his favorite swivel chair was gone.

  “You think Mossad took it all?” Bennett asked, putting his arm around Erin.

  “I guess,” said Erin, still trying to make sense of it.

  “What do you think they were looking for?”

  “Same thing we are,” Erin replied. “Any scrap that could point in the right direction.”

  Bennett noticed something under the desk. He bent down to see what it was only to find a shattered picture frame. He carefully picked through the shards of glass and pulled out a small black-and-white photograph. It was Mordechai and his wife, Yael, on their wedding day at a synagogue in west Jerusalem.

  He dusted it off and handed it to Erin, angered by what he was seeing. A murder investigation was one thing; the wholesale removal of a man’s most personal possessions from his own home was another thing entirely.

  “Didn’t Dr. Barak tell us that Mordechai had come to him with new information about the Copper Scroll sometime shortly after the firestorm?” Bennett suddenly asked.

  “Yes,” Erin replied.

  “And isn’t that new information what prompted Mordechai to go to Doron and urge him to put together the whole group with Murray and Jaspers?”

  Erin nodded.

  “And he said that Murray had been meeting with a literary agent the day he died.”

  “I don’t remember that,” said Erin.

  “You don’t?”

  “No,” she said. “Is that what you and Dr. Barak were talking about when we got back from Amman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I was talking to Natasha, remember? I didn’t hear what you guys were saying.”

  Bennett strained to recall the details of the conversation. “Barak said something about how Jaspers had called him and told him Murray was shopping a book proposal around New York, something about the Copper Scroll. Barak was furious with Murray and called him up and said he was jeopardizing everything. Murray told him they had nothing to worry about.”

  “Okay, so . . . ?”

  “So what was Mordechai’s lead? What did he have? Where did he get it from, and where is it now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Erin. “Nobody knows. Natasha said she didn’t even know. Her grandfather never told her.”

  “But someone thought the answer lay in this room,” said Bennett.

  “Which is why they took everything,” Erin agreed. “The big question is, would they know what they were looking for?”

  “I’ve got a bigger question than that,” said Bennett.

  “What’s that?”

  “Shouldn’t there be a backup of all the files that were on Mordechai’s PC?”

  They both thought about that for a moment.

  “The war room,” said Erin.

  They bolted for Mordechai’s closet, pushed through the racks of clothes, and found the hidden elevator that had once saved their lives when Saddam Hussein had ordered Operation Last Jihad. Erin entered the passcode from memory, and thirty seconds later they were in the subterranean chamber that once had been used as a clandestine Mossad operations center. It was here that Erin and Mordechai had worked so feverishly to keep Bennett alive after that ferocious gun battle with Iraqi terrorists, and it was here that they had watched the U.S. launch its massive attack on Saddam Hussein and his Republican Guard. But this, too, was now all cleaned out.

  Gone were all the video monitors and the computers, once cross-linked to the Mossad and CIA mainframes. Gone were the mini-medical center and the weapons-storage closet and the data-storage system that had helped Mordechai track the latest world developments and do all the analysis for which he’d become so famous. It had all been ripped out. The room was now just a ghost of what it had been, filled with nothing more than frayed wiring and bittersweet memories. They had hit a dead end.

  As frustrated as they were exhausted, they made their way back to the elevator and headed up. Erin checked her watch. They had only a few minutes before the neighborhood security patrol would finish its rounds and come back to check Mordechai’s house.

  “What now?” Bennett asked as the door slid open and they stepped back into Mordechai’s closet.

  But Erin didn’t answer. She stuck out her arm to block him from moving forward, then pulled out her Beretta.

  Down the hallway, someone was whispering.

  Erin carefully slid off her shoes, moved to the door, and motioned for him to stay put for a moment. Bennett’s pulse was racing. His palms were sweaty. Who was out there, and why? It couldn’t be the security patrol. There would be no reason for them to whisper. But why else would anybody be in the house? Unless they were hunting the same clue—or hunting for them.

  Bennett had no weapon. He did, however, have access to the best intel money could buy. He quickly put his BlackBerry on silence mode, then used the tracking wheel to find the live CIA satellite downlink that had helped them get here in the first place. He double-clicked and waited for the connection to kick in. It never did. He got an error message instead: Server connection lost. That was strange, Bennett thought. It had worked just moments earlier. Now, when they needed it most, it went down?

  Erin took a quick peek into the hallway, then darted across the hall to the master bedroom. She cleared that room and caught Jon’s eye again.

  Downstairs, she signaled, then come back up on the other side.

  He climbed into the elevator and headed down. When the doors reopened, he crossed through the former ops center and found the other elevator shaft on the opposite wing. He climbed in and pressed the button.

  Nothing happened.

  He pressed it again. Still nothing. It was out of order, and suddenly he could feel perspiration running down his back.

  * * *

  The main floor was now stone silent.

  The whispers had ceased. Whoever was out there knew she was here too.

  Erin did another quick peek down the hallway. That’s when they unleashed. She pulled back and pressed herself against the bedroom wall, only to see the wall at the end of the hallway torn to shreds by twenty or thirty rounds of automatic-weapons fire.

  As soon as the shooting stopped for a moment, she pivoted around, squeezed off six rounds, and dove back into the walk-in closet. She hit the elevator button and waited. Gunfire erupted again in the hall. There were two of them, she realized. One would fire a short burst, then the other. They were tag teaming down the hallway. They were coming for her, and they could be only eight or ten yards away at most by now.

  Erin pressed the elevator button again. She could hear the muffled sounds
of the motor kicking in, but it was still a good ten seconds away. She didn’t have that long.

  33

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 15 – 4:02 a.m. – JERUSALEM, ISRAEL

  Bennett could hear the gunfire above him.

  It was moving east to west, toward Erin. Should he go back up the west elevator? And do what? He still had no weapon. If Erin was pinned down, the only good he could do would be to try to ambush these guys from behind. But how?

  Desperate, he checked every door for a stairway to the main floor, but found none. Instead, he ducked back into the broken elevator and noticed an access panel in the ceiling. He grabbed an old wooden chair, set it in the elevator, climbed on top of it, and pushed the access panel free, then pulled himself up onto the top of the elevator.

  The shaft was nearly pitch-black, pierced only by the lights inside the elevator carriage itself. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to find the metal maintenance ladder bolted to the side of the back wall, and that’s all he needed. A moment later, Bennett reached the top of the ladder. He pried open the elevator door, climbed onto the main floor, and found himself in a closet in one of the east-wing guest rooms. That put him at the far end of the house. Now the shooting stopped, but the gunman let fly a storm of profanities.

  Bennett’s only solace: if Erin were dead, he had no doubt the cursing would stop.

  * * *

  Despite the cursing, Erin could hear the elevator rising behind her.

  She could also hear both men ejecting spent magazines. It was her only chance and she took it. She pumped five shots through the closet wall into the hallway and hit pay dirt. Someone dropped to the floor. She lowered her aim and fired five more shots through the drywall into the hallway. The screaming ceased, but now someone else was approaching, and he was coming fast.

  Just then the elevator door opened behind her. She dove in, hit the down button, and dropped to the floor as a barrage of AK-47 fire filled the closet.