30 Pieces of Silver (29 page)

Tok had always been fond of the man. While the rabbi had only peripheral knowledge of their secret, he knew enough to be of help in eliciting clues from the various scriptures he collected. Until now he had been a neutral source of information. In this moment, however, after assisting Lochum, he was an enemy.

“
Perhaps your circumcision was not done fully enough the first time?” Tok asked through Petir.

The rabbi’s eyes dilated as Tok predicted they would. Torture was bearable in theory. However, once you began describing the actual technique and the bodily focus of such attention, most became cooperative before the knife was ever brought to bear.

Bartholomew took the key out of his pocket and walked to the metal curtain, unlocking the hidden room. The beautifully inscribed, gilded doors had always impressed Tok, but today his focus was on the Ark’s contents—the rolls and rolls of ancient Torahs.

“
Perhaps you might point out the one of most interest?”

The rabbi tried to look everywhere but to the far side of the room. Tok walked to the back and touched the edges of the scrolls. It was clear which ones had recently been unrolled and then re-rolled. One in particular had been hastily returned to its place.

Tok removed it from its binding and unrolled the parchment upon the glass cabinet. The upper left corner was torn. And this injury was not suffered in antiquity. The inner fibers along the edge were starkly white compared to the aged yellow on the surface.

He turned to the rabbi. “Oh, Bartholomew, what have you done?”

Petir’s knife reflected in the Ark’s polished doors.

* * *

Their enemy approached, but they had yet to find a single loose board. Rebecca chanced a look out the window. Their pursuers were heading into the house directly across the courtyard. It would not take them long to work their way around to this home. She finished tapping the inner wall of the water closet and moved onto the floor under a child’s bed.

She and Lochum’s lives were in jeopardy, but Rebecca couldn’t help but turn the riddle of the Torah’s passage over in her mind.

Obviously Bart had known, or at least suspected, far more than he had let on. Was he familiar with the translation of that passage before they had arrived, or did he only realize its significance once he saw the transcription from John’s bone?

And why did he send them into this dead-end neighborhood? Granted, the Ghetto might have hiding places, but couldn’t he have just gotten them a cab to take them far away from here, unless…

Hadn’t a small historical journal with an even smaller footnote suggested a reason the Romans had banished the Jews across the Danube into Buda? The author proposed that the Jews had been flushed from Pest after they joined the native Magyars in protesting a new temple to Apollo. They had insisted that the ground was sacred and had been banished for it.

Rebecca searched her memory for what happened to that Roman temple. After the fall of the Empire, the Huns had burnt the sanctuary to the ground. The trail ended there.

Frustrated, she moved onto the western wall, while Lochum tried to pry the floorboards open. His fingertips were bleeding. He was so desperate to get beneath the house.

Beneath.

Wait. Wasn’t the parchment specific that they could not build
over
the stag’s sacred resting place? But what about beneath it? Pest was known for its enormous series of tunnels lying under the entire city. More than ten thousand people had lived underground throughout the bombings of World War II. They even had postage delivered down there. The connecting tunnels made up a sprawling network. Some lay just beneath their feet.

And why was there a water closet in a home such as this? Even before the neighborhood had become a ghetto, this house had been no estate. In Eastern Europe, even as late as the 1930s, indoor plumbing had been reserved for the gentry. Unless…

“
Lochum, help me here,” she whispered, sure of her instincts.

He seemed eager for a new tactic as he helped her tug at the wood around the toilet. “We’re making too much noise. They’ll hear us.”

“
Just pull harder.”

Lochum stopped until she indicated the Star of David above his head. In the center of the Jewish symbol was etched the tiniest fish, the icon that proto-Christians used to identify themselves. Not only was it a symbol that identified secret meeting places that predated the cross by a millennium, but it was also mentioned in the Torah’s passage. Strength seemed to find its way to his limbs. They worked together, but the damn thing would not budge.

Then she remembered the gate. “Lift it.”

“
What?” he asked. Then, with very little effort, Rebecca lifted the china basin, and the entire floor gave way to a darkened stairwell.

They both just stood there, stunned that her ploy had actually worked.

“
I think… I think we need to go down there,” she said, not quite sure she wanted to follow the steps.

“
Yes,” Lochum answered with little enthusiasm, then found his passion again. “Yes, we must.”

With no more hesitation they headed beneath.

* * *

A bullet whizzed past his ear.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The enemy must have circled around. Until now his team had managed to avoid any dead ends, but this place was a fucking maze.

As his men returned fire, Brandt grabbed Svengurd’s arm. “We need a new fucking plan.”

The tall man yelled over the gunfire. “I say we go deeper.”

Up until this point they had avoided passages that slanted downward. They needed to get to the surface, pronto. However, the tunnels that sloped toward the surface ended up meandering and circling back, but now it wasn’t about getting out of here so much as staying alive.

“
Do it.”

As Lopez and Davidson laid down suppression fire, Brandt and Svengurd made for the next downward passage, but bullets came from that direction as well.

He didn’t even bother to cuss. They were screwed. Pinned between two superior forces. Why the fuckers hadn’t just lobbed some grenades at them and end this quickly, Brandt didn’t know.

Or maybe he did. Their enemy must have a sense of self-preservation. Even a small fragmentation grenade could cause enough damage to destabilize the tunnel. And a percussion grenade? Forget it. An entire section of caves could collapse.

Wait a minute.

Brandt turned to Svengurd. “You still have that C-4?”

“
Yeah, why?”

A savage smile crossed his face. He might not have the book smarts like Lochum, but he could be an evil genius when he needed to be.

* * *

Lochum followed Rebecca down the steep stone stairs. The steps were cut from the walls themselves. His hands trembled in anticipation. How glad he was that he had brought her along. For all her flaws, she had a brilliant, deductive mind. He never could have cross-referenced all the new information so quickly to find this path.

As they exited the stairwell, the temperature dropped a good fifteen degrees, but the goose bumps on his arms were not from the cold. He could see a dim light in the distance. It was more a glow. Rebecca looked anxiously at him, but there was no turning back.

He led the way down the slick slope to find the source of the light. A pool of water glowed in the dark cave. Water dripped from the ceiling and walls, but none of that liquid shone like the pool. A pure, white light washed over them.

Surprisingly, it was Rebecca who put a finger into the water. She swirled her digit around the edge of the pool. “It’s bioluminescent bacteria. But this deep in a cave?”

His student was right. With the exception of the New Zealand glow worm, most light- producing species were confined to the twilight zone of any given cave system. Bioluminescence was a costly biological product, which took enormous energy input. Bacteria this far down simply should not be able to produce light.

“
Are you seeing this? The fish aren’t albino. Shouldn’t they be albino?” she asked, her voice full of both disbelief and wonder.

Not only were the darting fish not white, they were a rainbow of colors—yellow, red, orange, and turquoise—far more brilliant than even marine creatures. They looked almost painted. If they found nothing else, this pond alone would be the biological find of the year.

But he noticed a rectangular object far deeper in the water. “Is there something at the bottom?”

Rebecca plunged her arm into the water. “I think… Yeah, yeah, my fingers are touching something flat and smooth with—”

She stopped abruptly and pulled her hand from the water. “I think…”

Lochum felt like shaking the answer from her, but instead he carefully put his arm into the water, then he, too, retracted his hand.

“
I think,” Rebecca finally found her voice, “it’s the ossuary box.
The
box.”

The professor felt his head nod up and down far too vigorously. He really should stop, but he could not.

She looked like a little girl. “The fish. They are protecting him.”

His mouth watered at the thought.

“
It’s going to take both of us,” she said, and again all he could do was bob his head.

Together they leaned over and felt along the edges until they found purchase under the box.

“Ready?” she asked and off his incessant nod, Rebecca heaved. His back complained, but he did not stop lifting until the small stone box was above the water’s surface.

Carefully they set the sacred relic on the smooth ground. They both sat back on their heels and studied the lid.

“
The dearest brother,” she read breathlessly.

He felt all the air in his lungs escape at once. Even now he did not believe it possible. Not until she said those precious words. It could be none other than James.

“
It’s heavy, but I think we can carry it out of here intact.”

His head bobbed on its own. He could not talk. It might not be Jesus, but it was his brother. His brother.

Sounds drifted down from the long stairwell.

“
We’d better hurry,” Rebecca said trying to lift her end, but could not.

Lochum assisted, but found it far heavier than before. And was the pond not as bright? The more they tried to lift the box, the heavier it seemed. Rebecca tried dragging it, but even that would be too slow.

With a concerned look, she pulled out a Swiss Army knife. He had taught her well. The tool was a paleoarchaeologist’s best friend.

“
I’m going to open it, right?”

As the sounds from above grew louder, Lochum nodded, but felt that there should be a thousand photographers to document this moment. Instead there were just some fish and a dimming pond to mark the event.

It did not take long for her to break the seal, but she looked hesitant to open the lid. He leaned forward and lifted the stone lid.

There they were.

James’ skeleton and a single silver coin.

He touched one of the bones as the light from the pond softened to barely a glow. Lochum could feel the tiny inscriptions in the bone.

Instructions to find Jesus.

A loud crash indicated their pursuers had broken through to the stairwell.

“
We’d better take off,” Rebecca said as she gathered the bones and tried to awkwardly fit them into her laptop satchel.

“
No,” Lochum said as he pulled out a pillowcase he had taken from the bed upstairs. “After last time, I think I should carry them.”

As the light fully extinguished, Lochum followed his student into a steeply graded tunnel with James’ bones on his back.

James’
bones.

He was just one clue away from Christ.

CHAPTER 17

Dohany Street Synagogue, Budapest

Tok walked solemnly through the history museum wing of the Great Synagogue. The stark pictures of human suffering reminded him of the days when Rome crucified hundreds of Jews a day trying to quell the Jerusalem uprising. Power always sought to snuff out religion for faith was beyond the state’s control. Christians in China. Muslims in Bosnia.

He shook his head. Such suffering.

“
They have found them,” Petir said from behind.

“
Where?”

His mentor led him out the back, past the Weeping Willow Memorial, and into the alley. So many noises greeted him at once. The sounds of life. Someone was singing, very off-key, down the street. Another couple was arguing over dinner. Had he wronged her, or vice versa? Then from a window, a child laughed. Not just laughed but belly guffawed. Snorting and giggling. Was there any finer sound in the entire world?

The first time he heard it, Tok had not known how to react. Was laughter a signal of aggression? But then he saw a group of children rolling onto their sides in glee. Then he understood. Understood how vital his mission was to the world. He had always known the parameters of his work. He had known the how and the what of it all, but until that moment he had not known the why. But now he did.