The Expected One (26 page)

Derek yawned. “Because they want her to lead them to the Magdalene book once and for all so they can destroy it. After that, your friend will be history, too — before she has the chance to write about it.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Tammy asked carefully.

“Because I want Jean-Baptiste to go down with his leader. And I figure that once your Grand Master Sinclair knows he’s been duped, he’ll eliminate that problematic frog for me.”

Tammy wanted to scream at him then, wanted to tell him that Sinclair and the others in their organization weren’t like Derek and the hate-mongers in his Guild. But she didn’t dare say a word to tip her hand before she was safely out the door.

Derek wasn’t finished. “Meanwhile, let’s just say that if I were you I’d get that redhead the hell out of the Languedoc as soon as possible.”

Tammy turned toward the door and then stopped. She had to ask one final question, had to know just how badly she had been duped by Derek all these years.

“How do
you
feel about all this?” she asked quietly.

“Don’t care one way or the other, really,” Derek replied, sounding supremely bored and more than ready to return to his wine-induced slumber. “Although your friend seems nice enough, she’s still a Jesus spawn and that makes her my natural enemy. And that’s just the way it is. Maybe you can’t understand it, but our beliefs go back a long way. As for the actual discovery of the whore’s scrolls, everyone seems certain that it will happen this time because your girl fits all the points of the prophecy, and not just some of them. But I’m not worried about it. What’s the big deal, anyway?”

He laughed for a second and rolled onto his side, raising himself up on one elbow to look at her. “See, here’s the funny thing.
Nobody
wants what’s in those scrolls. The Vatican won’t want to recognize them because of the content, nor will any of the other mainstream Christians. Historians don’t want them because it will make all the academics and Bible scholars look like idiots. So chances are that our own enemies will bury them before the public ever knows what’s in there. Saves us the trouble of having to deal with it — that’s how I look at it.”

He yawned again as if the whole topic was too mundane to be dealt with further and rolled onto his back again as he added, “Of course, we despise it because we know it will contain lies about John the Baptist. And because it was written by a whore.”

Tammy wanted to run from the hotel, get away from Derek and his hateful Guild philosophy as quickly as possible. She had a death grip on her cell phone and whipped it out of her pocket as soon as she was outside. There was no time to think, no time to do anything but find out where Maureen was now.

She hit the speed dial for Roland and wanted to cry when she heard his comforting Occitan accent. The connection was terrible, and she had to yell several times to be heard. “Maureen! Where is Maureen now, do you know?”

Damn it! She couldn’t hear his reply. She yelled again. “What? I can’t hear you. Yell, Roland. Yell so I can hear you.”

Roland yelled. “Maureen. Is. Here.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. She was looking for you, she…”

And they were cut off.
That’s just as well,
thought Tammy.
I don’t want to explain anything to Roland until I’ve had time to think about it all.
As long as Maureen was safely in the Château des Pommes Bleues, there was time to regroup. She would meet with Sinclair before dinner to strategize.

Tammy checked the time on her cell phone. She was scheduled to meet the chauffeur in less than half an hour near the gates of the city. It wasn’t a long walk from where she was, but she felt weak and wasn’t sure she could trust her wobbly legs to get her there quickly. She began to walk, trying to breathe while considering all of the shocking things she had learned from and about Derek. As it all came back to her in vivid color, she felt her stomach turn. Noticing the garden of a small hotel just ahead, Tammy ran and reached the bushes just in time to vomit violently.

Château des Pommes Bleues
June 25, 2005

M
AUREEN WAS FEELING WILDLY GUILTY
about neglecting Peter. But when she returned from her outing with Jean-Claude, he was nowhere to be found.

“I have not seen the Abbé since this morning,” Roland informed her. “He had a late breakfast, then I saw him leave shortly after in your hired car. But it is Sunday. Perhaps he went to church? We have many in the area.”

Maureen nodded, not giving it too much more thought. Peter was wordly and spoke fluent French, so it was logical that he may have planned to go in search of a mass and then to take in more of the sights in this extraordinary region.

She was scheduled to have dinner in the château later with Tammy — something she was anxious to do, but not at the expense of hurting Peter’s feelings. She asked Roland, “Do you have any way of contacting Tamara Wisdom? I forgot to ask if she has a cell phone with her.”

“Oui, she does. And I can do that for you as I need to ask her something for Lord Bérenger. Is something wrong?”

“No, I was just wondering if she would mind if Peter joined us for dinner.”

“I am sure it will not be a problem, Mademoiselle Paschal. In fact, I believe she is expecting the Abbé to attend. She requested that I set dinner for the four of you at eight o’clock.”

Maureen thanked Roland and retreated to her room. She stopped first at Peter’s door and knocked — no reply. She jiggled the gilded knob and pushed the door gently open, peeking her head in. Peter’s things were laid out neatly by the side of the bed — his leather-bound Bible and his crystal rosary beads. But he was nowhere to be seen.

Maureen returned to her palatial suite and removed the larger of her Moleskine notebooks. She wanted to write about Montsegur while it was fresh in her mind. But as she slid the elastic strap off the notebook and opened the pages, she was surprised when another story of martyrdom came to her mind.

Maureen had climbed the rugged mountains of the Dead Sea region at sunrise on her visit to the Holy Land, hiking the rocky, serpentine trail alongside a handful of seekers. She was unsure just what drove her to undertake the arduous climb. Even so early, the heat was powerful. The others on the path that morning were all Jewish, and for them this was an obvious and emotional pilgrimage. Maureen could make no such claim of heritage or religion.

She paused many times on the way up to admire the almost painfully beautiful vistas of light and color as they played over the strange, lunar landscape and glittered off the salt crystals of the dormant water. The view inspired her, giving her the strength to push her screaming muscles farther up the mountain.

She listened to snippets of conversation from the other pilgrims as they climbed. She did not understand the Hebrew language, but their passion for their journey was unmistakable. She wondered if they were discussing the Masada martyrs who chose to die rather than live in bondage or subject their women and children to Roman slavery and debasement.

Reaching the summit, she explored the remains of what was once a great fortress, wandering through ruined rooms and crumbling walls. Because it was a surprisingly large space, she soon found herself alone, separated from the other pilgrims, who were exploring for their own reasons elsewhere on the sacred site. There was an absorbing stillness in this place, a calm silence that felt like a ruin unto itself, as tangible as the stones. She was immersed in that sensation as she stared almost absently at the ruins of a Roman mosaic. Then, she saw her.

It happened fast and came completely unbidden, like her other visions. She couldn’t recall how she knew the child was there; she just knew that there was a presence in the room. About ten feet away, a child of no more than four or five was staring up at her with huge, dark eyes. Her clothes were torn and filthy; tears mixed with the mud that splashed across her face. She did not speak, but in that moment Maureen knew the child’s name was Hannah — and that she had witnessed events that no child should ever endure.

Maureen also knew that somehow the child had survived the unspeakable tragedy of Masada. She had left this place and taken the stories of it with her. That was her legacy, to share the truth of what had occurred there to her people.

She did not know how long the child appeared before her. There was a sense of timelessness to her visions. Were they minutes? Seconds? Or eternities?

Later, Maureen spoke with one of the Israeli guides at Masada. He was young and open, and she surprised herself by telling him of the encounter. He shrugged and said he did not believe it was unnatural or uncommon to see such a thing in so emotional a place. He explained that there were legends of survivors from Masada, of a woman and several children who hid in a cave and ultimately escaped, taking the true story with them and preserving it in their way.

Maureen believed that little Hannah was one of those children.

She had wondered so many times since that day why she had seen that vision, why it had happened to her. She felt unworthy of it, undeserving of such a profound encounter with the sacred history of the Jewish people. But after her experience at Montsegur, it all began to come together in a beautiful pattern that Maureen was finally beginning to understand. Little Hannah and the Cathar girl known as La Paschalina were related, in spirit if not in blood. They were the children left to carry on and hold the stories within them, so that the truth would never be lost. It was their destiny to become humanity’s most sacred teachers. These little girls, and what they grew to become, embodied the history and survival of the human race. Their experiences had no boundaries; these stores belonged to all people, regardless of ethnic identity or religious beliefs.

By grasping that connection, couldn’t we all come together in the knowledge that we are all one tribe, ultimately?

Maureen thanked Hannah and La Paschalina in a whisper as she finished her journal entry.

Tammy ran into the château, hoping to avoid contact with anyone before she could take a shower. She was exhausted and felt that every inch of her body was dirty. But solitude was not to come so easily. She was intercepted by Roland as she reached the door of her room.

He opened it for her and stepped inside. “You are all right?” he asked with grave concern.

“I’m fine.” She had practiced a speech in her head all the way home, but one look at the enormous Occitan and her heart melted. She was so relieved to be here, safe in the house and safe with him, that she threw herself against the massive strength of his body and cried.

Roland was stunned. He had never seen vulnerability in this woman before. “Tamara, what has happened? Did he hurt you? You must tell me.”

Tammy tried to steady herself. She stopped crying and looked up at Roland. “No, he didn’t hurt me. But…”

“But what, what has happened?”

She reached up and touched his face, the angular, masculine face that she was growing to love.

“Roland,” she whispered. “Roland…you were right about who killed your father. And now I think we can prove it.”

…Easa was the child of the prophecy, this was something everyone knew. And the prophecy brought with it a destiny that had to be fulfilled in an exact way. Easa did this; not for any glory to himself, but to make his role as the messiah easier to understand and embrace for the children of Israel. The closer Easa’s role came to fulfilling the exact nature of the prophecy, the stronger the people would be when he was gone.

But even for all of that, we did not expect it to happen the way that it did.

Easa entered Jerusalem on the back of an ass fulfilling the prophet Zechariah’s words about the arrival of the anointed one. We followed him with palms and sang hosannas. A great crowd joined us as we entered Jerusalem, and there was a sense of joy and hope in the air. Many followed us in from Bethany, and we were met by Simon’s compatriots, the Zealots. Even representatives of one reclusive Essene movement had left their desert dwelling to accompany us on this triumphant day.

The children of Israel rejoiced that this chosen one had come to liberate them from Rome and the yoke of oppression, poverty, and misery. This son of the prophecy had grown to be a man and a messiah. There was strength in our heaArts, and in our numbers.

T
HE
A
RQUES
G
OSPEL OF
M
ARY
M
AGDALENE,
T
HE
B
OOK OF THE
T
IME OF
D
ARKNESS