Rolling back his right sleeve beyond his elbow, to keep the material clear of the blood, the tall man rested the point of the dagger gently on the man’s chest, feeling for one of the spaces between the ribs, then began slowly increasing the pressure on the handle of the weapon. As the point pierced his skin, the captive cried out, a muffled grunt lost in the folds of the rudimentary gag.

The tall man pressed harder still and the front of his captive’s
jellaba
suddenly turned a deep red as blood spurted from the wound. The tall man worked the knife in slowly, his gaze never leaving the dying man’s face. When he estimated that the point of the weapon was about to touch the heart, he paused for a few seconds, changed his grip on the knife and twisted it sideways, the tip of the blade ripping his victim’s heart virtually in half.

“Spread the word,” he said, as he and his men headed back toward the
souk
. “Make sure everyone knows that Hassan al-Qalaa died because of what he did; ensure that everyone knows that if they talk to the police, they will suffer the same fate. And offer a reward for the recovery of the tablet. We
must
find it, whatever it takes.”

ALSO BY JAMES BECKER

The First Apostle

ONYX

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First Onyx Printing, March 2010

eISBN : 978-1-101-18560-5

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PROLOGUE

Masada, Judea AD 73

“We can wait no longer.”

Elazar Ben Ya’ir stood on a heavy wooden table almost in the center of the fortress and looked down at the faces of the men and women who surrounded him.

Outside the massive stone walls, a torrent of sound—shouted orders, the noise of digging, and of stone falling on stone—formed a loud and continuous backdrop to his words. The racket was interspersed with the occasional thud and crack, as a missile from one of the
ballistae
, the massive Roman siege engines, crashed into the fortress walls.

Ben Ya’ir had led the Jewish Sicarii rebels for the last seven years, ever since they’d seized Masada from the resident Roman garrison. The Sicarii were radical Zealots. They were so radical, in fact, that they now numbered even the Zealots themselves, as well as almost everyone else in Judea, among their enemies. For over two years they’d used the hilltop fortress as a base for raiding both Roman and Jewish settlements throughout the country.

The previous year, Lucius Flavius Silva, the Roman governor of Judea, had finally lost patience with the Sicarii and attacked Masada with the
Fretensis
legion—some five thousand battle-hardened soldiers. But Masada was a tough nut to crack, and all the Romans’ initial attempts to breach its defenses had failed. As a last resort, they had built a containing wall—a
circumvallation
—around part of the fortress and had then begun creating a ramp that could reach high enough to use a battering ram on the massive wall that surrounded the citadel.

“You’ve all seen the rampart that is now touching our walls,” Elazar Ben Ya’ir said, his voice strong but tinged with resignation. “Tomorrow, or the day after at the latest, the rams will breach our defenses. We can no longer prevent that, and when they break through the Romans will overrun us. We number less than a thousand—men, women and children. Outside the walls, our enemies can muster five times that number. Make no mistake about this, the Romans
will
prevail, no matter how fiercely or bravely we fight.”

Elazar Ben Ya’ir paused and looked around. A salvo of arrows flew through the air from beyond the battlements, whistling over the heads of the assembled defenders, but hardly any of them so much as glanced up.

“If we fight,” Ben Ya’ir continued, “most of us—the lucky ones—will be killed. Any who survive will be either executed, probably by crucifixion, or sold in the slave markets on the coast.”

An angry murmuring rose and fell in the crowd in response to the words of their leader. The Romans had employed a refinement that had severely restricted the ability of the Sicarii to retaliate: they had forced slaves to construct the ramp, just as they would no doubt use slaves to drive the battering rams. And to attack a fortress held by Jews, the Romans had used Jewish slaves. To protect themselves, the Sicarii would have had to kill their own enslaved countrymen—something that even they, who were not noted for their compassion or tolerance toward anyone—found distasteful.

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