13th Apostle (9 page)

Later that afternoon
Office of the Translator

He had completed his Internet searches and had been waiting for more than three hours. Now she walked in like she didn't have a care in the world.

“Where the hell were you?” Gil asked.

“I beg your pardon,” she said sarcastically. “You're not talking to me like that, are you?”

“You're damn straight I am. I've been sitting here for God knows how long with my thumb up my rear end, waiting for you to get back. You could at least have given me your cell phone number,” Gil added.

“And what would you call me with?”

He had never noticed. There were no phones in the room. He didn't remember seeing any in the outer office either. And the guard confiscated his cell phone for “safe keeping” every morning, not that it would have worked here anyway.

Gil continued to glare but considered it wise not to respond.

“If you're ready to take your foot out of your mouth and your thumb out of your rear end, I'll tell you what I found out at the library. It took a while because I had to cross-reference several collections of medieval history, but I think it was worth it.”

Sabbie kicked off her high heels and walked over to the desk. The thought of her opening the drawer, removing the gun, and shooting him in the middle of the forehead fast-forwarded across Gil's mind. She opened the left-hand bottom drawer, removed a pair of sneakers, then joined him on the other side of the room. She sat down on the floor, and laced them up.

“I realized we needed to know more about Elias,” she began. “Do you remember a CNN interview you did about tracking down the inventor of the CyberStrep computer virus so you could figure out how to stop him?”

Gil looked up in surprise

“First rule of Internet forensics, you said, is to know your man. You said, ‘Once you can think as he does, finding him comes easily.'”

“You remember that?” Gil asked in surprise.

“Of course. I thought it was brilliant as well as amazingly chauvinistic. You made it sound as if only men could be cyber criminals. Your approach to tracking one down, however, was unusual to say the least.”

The creator of the CyberStrep virus had been in police custody when Gil had been called in. A backdoor to the virus program had been found, but no one had been able to figure out the password.

Whenever an attempt was made to disarm the virus, it would offer the prompt, “Say, ‘Good Night,'” and wait for the correct response in order to allow access. A legion of cryptanalysts had typed in the obvious responses in every language and code they could come up with. Nothing worked.

Gil had taken a different approach. He spent several weeks learning everything he could about the creator of the program and never even looked at the virus in action. In the end, the simple knowledge that the inventor of the virus was a devotee of old radio shows, especially Burns and Allen, gave Gil all the info he needed.

After listening to a dozen Burns and Allen's radio recordings, Gil knew the correct response.

“Say ‘Good night,'” the CyberStrep program prompted, refusing entry until the proper response was supplied. “‘Gracie,'” Gil responded. There were the famous parting words of the Burns and Allen radio show, held in affection by all of the show's fans. By taking the time to know the man behind the code, Gil had conquered the worst computer virus the Internet had ever known. And he had done it in less than five minutes at the computer.

“So I went in search of Elias, and here's what I found,” said Sabbie.

The life of a monk, she explained, was spent less in devotion and more in making money for the Church. Prayer services took place every three hours, day and night. At the time when Elias would have entered the brotherhood, the few monks who could read and write divided their hours between meditation and study. Those who were illiterate were privileged to be allowed to work long hours in order to support those devoted to higher spiritual pursuits. As the years passed however, things changed. A monastery's devotion came to be judged far more by the magnitude of its contribution to mother Church than by the pious meditation and scholarly achievements of its monks.

The luxury of devotion and study quickly gave way to a lifetime spent in copying manuscripts or weaving tapestries for the wealthy. The Church sanctified the work as holy. Monks, holed up in scriptoriums or weaving rooms for the duration of their lives, were told they were engaged in the highest form of devotion; a prayer through action.

“Sort of like a monk's sweatshop,” Gil bantered with a wry smile.

“Actually, you're more on target than you know.”

For centuries, she explained, abbeys held the monopoly on the copying of texts and the making of tapestries in what now would be called a kind of price-fixing scheme. Some monasteries grew enormously wealthy and powerful. A somewhat cutthroat competition sprang up between abbeys as to who could contribute the most to the Church. The greater the contributions, the greater the preferential treatment for the Abbots, if not for the lowly monks.

Sabbie checked her notes. “From odd bits and pieces of his entries in the diary, it seems that after Elias' brother, William, was put to death, the Abbot took possession of his lands. He had Elias moved out of the scriptorium and banished to the weaving shop where the old monks, or as Elias put it, ‘those who were stupid, old, or infirm,' were set to work making mediocre tapestries for the rich. All of the tapestries were designed by the Abbot, leaving a weaver nothing to do but work like an automaton on someone else's brainchild.”

“Sounds miserable. I wonder why he stayed.”

“Good question. Look, I want to show you this.” She handed him a page from the second half of the diary. Like the others, it was in Latin, and bore her red markings of two-word by two-word deciphering.

“It says that Elias beseeched the Abbot to allow him to design a tapestry of his own. He describes how important the design of his own tapestry was to him and how he wished his brother could have seen it. Now that I've said it out loud,” she continued, with a sigh, “it sort of sounds like medieval soap opera. Don't you think?”

“Just the opposite,” Gil announced triumphantly. “It all makes sense.”

At first, Gil had assumed the missing page Sabbie had given him could not possibly hold the key. How could a couple of paragraphs that contained no apparent pattern possibly tell them where the mate to The Cave 3 Scroll was hidden? The answer was that it couldn't! The brevity of the note was not the problem, it was the
answer.

By making the shortest entry the most important one, Elias ensured that anyone trying to uncover a covert communication would quickly realize that it contained no secret pattern and, therefore, no hidden message.

“Look,” Gil said. “It's right here in the last paragraph.

“I don't get it,” Sabbie said.

“Haven't you ever noticed that the real reason that someone calls you is the last thing that person brings up right before they say ‘good-bye'? That's what Elias is doing here. He's saying that, beyond everything else, this diary is a testament and a signpost. A signpost!”

She still didn't make the connection.

“There are basically two ways to hide something while keeping it in full view. The first is misdirection, where your attention is pulled
away
from the object that someone wants to hide. Like the magician that has you look at one hand while he'd doing things you never notice with the other. The second way of hiding things in full view is to reveal only a piece of it at a time, while at the same time, telling you where you need to look for the next piece of the puzzle. Essentially, it sends you on a hunt. Actually, it leads you, like a signpost that tells you which way to go to get to your goal. It's simple and it's obvious but, at the same time, easy to miss,” Gil concluded.

“But a thousand years ago nobody would have thought to use the term ‘signpost,'” she protested. “So how could Elias have used it intentionally in a hidden message?”

“The idea was there, even way back then, and Elias understood it. I think he's trying to tell us to keep going, that there's more to the diary than we know.”

“Like the location of the scroll?”

“I don't know. But there's more to come.”

She looked like she was going to argue, then decided against it. Gil knew she was unconvinced but the truth was, she had no other option but to go along with his hunch.

“All right, let's look at what we know right now,” she said.

“First, according to the two-word alternating entries, we know there is, indeed, a second scroll, and that the scroll contains a firsthand account of the messiah, Yeshua,” Gil said.

“Not
the
messiah, necessarily. A man who is viewed as
a
messiah and who is also named Yeshua,” she corrected him.

“Okay,” Gil agreed. “We can't be absolutely certain the scroll tells the story of Jesus, The Messiah, until we find it. Satisfied?”

She nodded and Gil continued. “Next, we know that the scroll was taken from Qumran to Weymouth Monastery in England, where Elias lived and William was killed. And where the diary was found.”

“And,” Sabbie continued, “because Elias says the scroll was found by William in an area that sounds very much like Qumran, if it turns out to be made of copper, Elias' scroll could be the mate to The Cave 3 Scroll and could point the way to riches that have been buried since the time of Christ.”

Last, and most importantly, Gil added, they could be pretty sure the diary was left as a signpost to tell them to search within Weymouth Monastery.

“Unless I miss my guess, we need to find Elias' tapestry,” Gil said.

“Why his tapestry?” Sabbie asked.

“This diary is a signpost pointing to the tapestries, to one in particular. How did you put it…? Yes, you said that Elias described how important the design of his own tapestry was to him and how he wished his brother could have seen it. Don't you get it? Find Elias' tapestry and you find the scroll,” Gil concluded.

She spoke softly, as if allowing the depth of Elias' sacrifice to sink in. “So, that's why he stayed, to write the diary, weave the tapestry, and protect the scroll.”

“And to make certain it was found by those who would someday come to rescue it. This can't only be about the gold and silver mentioned in The Cave 3 Scroll,” Gil added.

“To some it will be,” she said thoughtfully, then seemed to change direction. “We're wasting our time here. We should be on our way to Weymouth.”

“One more thing,” she added. “What about the rest of the page?”

“What's that about?” she asked.

“I don't know,” Gil said simply. “Elias hasn't told me yet.”

Later that afternoon
White Americans To Save Christianity (WATSC)
Headquarters
Near Stone Mountain, Georgia

“This information is very important to us,” McCullum said. “But of course, you know that.”

They had been speaking for less than an hour but, within that time, McCullum had learned more about DeVris' day-to-day activities and moment-to-moment deceptions than he had ever suspected. His guest's willingness to initiate contact with WATSC, make the trip, and offer facts unknown to McCullum—without expectation of compensation—was a clear sign of loyalty.

“My granddaddy always said that friendships were forged by the exchange of vital information,” McCullum continued.

“And services,” his guest added.

“And services.”

“If I may speak freely, Anton DeVris not only did you an injustice by lying to you, and putting your future acquisition of the mate to The Cave 3 Scroll in jeopardy, he insulted you, your family, and this incredible institution. We are, none of us, responsible for our parentage. I would be the first to acknowledge that fact, but I think one must draw the conclusion that DeVris is little more than Jewish scum.”

McCullum couldn't have been more pleased. His first impression had been accurate. Appearances notwithstanding, here was someone who could be counted on to support, in both word and deed, the cause of white supremacy.

Best of all, WATSC's newest supporter came replete with personal connections and singular experiences that, in the near future, might prove extraordinarily useful. God had provided the perfect person to fill a most unusual niche, and McCullum was most grateful.

He offered his guest a brandy-dipped cigar. “If you don't mind my saying it, appearances being what they are, one would never suppose your allegiance.”

His guest accepted the amenity and nodded with agreement. “I learned a long time ago that prejudice can work for or against you. You can allow the assumptions of others to prevent you from getting what you want or you can use their blindness as a layer of invisibility that prevents them from seeing your true actions.”

“People see only what they believe,” McCullum agreed.

“Some. Others believe only what they see.”

“And which are you?” McCullum asked pointedly.

“Now that's a whole other conversation.”

McCullum apologized for his lack of consideration. He was aware that his guest had traveled a long distance and, understandably, might be a bit tired. A chauffer and town car, WATSC's VIP penthouse suite, and personal chef awaited. If desired, companionship could be provided.

“Let's talk in the morning before you leave. I'll be traveling so call me on my cell and I'll call you back on a secure land line. I have some ideas I want to run past you. I think you'll agree that this may be the start of a beautiful friendship,” McCullum added. The quote from his favorite Bogart movie, so perfect in this context, was completely lost on his guest.