The Testimonium (61 page)

Suddenly three sets of headlights came swooping in from the north, topped by flashing police lamps. A door slammed, and a voice called out.

“Are you all right, ma’am?” it asked.

“I am unhurt, but my fiancée has been shot,” she said. “And Dr. Castolfo is dead.”

“There is an ambulance right behind us,” the officer replied. “Who did this?”

“A tall black man in a sports car,” she said. “He has an African accent!”

The policeman sprinted back to his car, barking orders into his radio while the other two cars drove past her on the shoulder, taking off after the terrorist. She watched them go without a word, focusing instead on the ebbing life of her love, dying in her arms. His eyes were closed, but his breath still came feebly. She leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead, wanting him to know just how much he was loved in the last moments of his life.

A few seconds later an ambulance pulled up, and two medics rushed to her side with a stretcher. They lifted Josh out of her arms, and she tried to rise as they placed him on the stretcher. Her legs would not cooperate, but a policeman came to her side and lifted her to her feet. She staggered toward the ambulance, and one of the medics helped her climb in behind Josh. The second one had a stethoscope to his chest.

“I’ve got no pulse!” he shouted. “Get the paddles ready!”

Then the ambulance doors slammed shut, and it carried Joshua and Isabella away into the night.

* * *

Father MacDonald moved from one fallen soldier to the next, administering the last rites to them one by one. The firefight had been horrific, and over half of the escorting force had been killed or wounded before the last of the terrorists had fallen. The burning helicopter, crashed in a field next to the road, cast an eerie glare over the scene of the firefight. A second chopper had landed moments earlier on the other side of the road.

Through the confusion, a middle-aged Italian man in a dark suit approached. He had not been part of the escort, and Father MacDonald did not recognize him.

“Are you Father Duncan MacDonald?” he asked.

“That I am,” said the priest.

“I need you to come with me,” the man said. “I am Antonio Lucoccini, Italian State Security.”

MacDonald glared at him. “These men need my priestly offices!” he snapped. “You will just have to wait!”

“Father, I have something to tell you,” the agent said. Something in his voice sent a chill through MacDonald’s soul, and he rose to face the man.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“Somehow the terrorist who masterminded this attack found out that the scroll was being taken up the coast road,” explained Lucoccini. “He caught up with Dr. Castolfo and forced the car off the road. The Pontius Pilate scroll has been destroyed.”

MacDonald looked at him in amazement. “Bugger the stinkin’ papyrus, lad!” he snapped. “What of the people? Are Joshua, and Isabella, and Dr. Castolfo all right?”

Lucoccini hung his head. “Castolfo is dead,” he said. “The woman is all right, but the American has been shot. I just heard over the radio that he has no pulse. They are rushing him to a hospital in Cassino.”

MacDonald hung his head for a moment, and let out a stifled sob. Then he grabbed the Italian by the arm. “What are you waiting for, then?” he snapped. “Take me to them now!”

The helicopter delivered them to the emergency room only a few moments after Joshua had arrived. MacDonald found Isabella in the waiting room, and she rushed into his arms. She was covered with Joshua’s blood.

“There, there, lass,” the priest said as she buried her head on his shoulder. “I am sure they are doing all they can!”

She shook her head. “His heart stopped three times on the way here,” she said. “Oh, Duncan! There was so much blood!”

He saw the hospital’s tiny chapel off to one side of the ER waiting room. “Let us pray, lass,” he said, guiding her toward it. And pray they did, as they waited for someone to emerge from the operating room and tell them the inevitable news.

* * *

Joshua Parker opened one eye, then the other. Every muscle in his body screamed in protest, and the pain radiating from his abdomen was incredible. Harsh fluorescent lights made him squint, but then something came between his face and their glare. In a dim haze he saw Isabella’s face looking down at him.

“Am I still in heaven?” he asked faintly.

Through her tears, a smile touched the edges of her mouth. “No,” she said. She took his hand and squeezed it. “But now I am.”

She leaned down and gently kissed his forehead. He turned and saw his father’s tall frame filling the doorway.

“What happened?” he asked.

“You died, my boy,” his father said. “Three times in the ambulance and once on the operating table. You were gone for over ten minutes that last time; the surgeon said that he was about to cover you up when your heart started again. That bullet did a quite a bit of damage.”

Josh’s eyes widened as his memories returned. “The scroll!” he said.

“It’s gone,” said Isabella. “But you know that God did not live in that scroll. He lives in our hearts, just as He always has.”

Josh furrowed his brow. “Our hearts?” he asked.

“That’s right!” said Isabella, her smile widening even further. “Mine too! Now you will never go where I cannot follow!”

Josh closed his eyes, his pain forgotten as tears of joy ran down his face. He faded off for what seemed like a little bit, but when he opened his eyes the room was dark and his father was gone. Isabella still sat by the bed, however, and she came to his side the minute she saw his eyes open.

“What happened to the man who shot us?” he asked, which was going to be his next question before he passed out.

“The Italian police caught him as he tried to re-enter Naples,” she said. “And, according to Police Chief Zadora, not long after that, a helicopter lifted off the roof of the American embassy. No one knows where he is now.”

“That’s not entirely true,” said a voice from the doorway. A tall American with short cropped hair and a military bearing entered the room. He looked down at Josh and took him by the hand.

“I am Colonel Lincoln Bertrand, with the CIA,” he said. “The man who tried to kill you is Ibrahim Abbasside, an Al Qaeda agent that we have wanted to get our hands on for a very long time. Officially, we don’t ‘have’ him, if you know what I mean—but we know very well where he is. And I am about to go have a long and heartfelt conversation with him when I leave here. Any message you want me to convey?”

Joshua shook his head, but Isabella spoke.

“Tell him,” she said, “that God is indeed merciful. But He is also just!”

The CIA officer smiled grimly, nodded, and then turned and left the room.

Joshua looked at the face of the most beautiful woman he had ever known, and smiled at her.

“How long was I out?” he asked.

“Three days,” she said. “And most of this afternoon and evening.”

“Well,” he replied, “I think you and I have some wedding plans to make.”

She kissed his lips very gently. “Get well first,” she said. “And then we will have all the time in the world . . . and whatever time comes after.”

EPILOGUE

Joshua Parker and Isabella Sforza were actually married twice—once in Italy, in the presence of all her friends, extended family, and co-workers; then again, two weeks later, back in Oklahoma at Reverend Parker’s church. Both weddings took place in October, six months after the discovery of the chamber on Capri and its remarkable contents. At the time of this writing, they are excavating a Clovis culture site in West Texas, and planning to return to Italy in the spring. They just found out that Isabella will be bringing their first child into the world next fall. The baby’s gender is not yet known, but if it is a boy, it will be named Giuseppe.

Reverend Parker and Father MacDonald co-officiated at both weddings. The lanky Texan pastor and the gray-bearded Scottish priest had become close friends, and while they continued to re-fight the battles of the Protestant Reformation in their lengthy conversations and emails, they did so in a way that honored St. Augustine’s ancient dictum:
“In the essentials, unity; in the non-essentials, liberty; and in everything, charity.”
Father MacDonald’s parishioners commented that his homilies sounded increasingly Protestant, while some of Reverend Parker’s more conservative church members groused that he was starting to sound like a “dad gum priest.”

The destruction of the
Testimonium
made any final pronunciation on its authenticity impossible. Father MacDonald managed to locate a few tiny fragments of ash by the roadside, and they carbon dated to 2,000 years, with a 115-year margin of error. Critics were quick to point out that all that really proved was that the document had been written on ancient paper.

That fall, Maria Tintoretto and David Hubbard co-authored a book attempting to debunk the entire discovery at Capri. Entitled
The Grand Deception: How the Church Engineered the Discovery of Pilate’s Testimony
, it claimed that the chamber on Capri had actually been discovered by priests in the late 1700s, and that the Pope had ordered the
Testimonium
to be forged on an ancient papyrus sheet and planted in the cabinet to be discovered at some later date. Other than the fact that there had been a similar earthquake on Capri during that timeframe, the duo was able to present very little in the way of proof of their hypothesis. That did not keep the book from quickly rising to the top of the bestseller lists.

But the general public was more sympathetic to the claims put forward by the Capri team. Every other artifact in the chamber had been dated to the first century, and the evidence that the chamber had never been disturbed was overwhelming, even though most of the dust samples had perished in the museum attack. Pastors around the world shared and discussed the contents of the
Testimonium
with their congregations, and some new study Bibles were already including its text as an appendix to the New Testament. Church attendance in America increased markedly, and the number of citizens identifying themselves as atheists or agnostics began to decline for the first time in two decades. Even in jaded, cynical Europe, the moribund Protestant and Catholic Churches showed signs of revival. The
Testimonium
had everyone talking about Jesus again.

As for Ibrahim Abbasside, no official record of his arrest exists, and the U.S. Government denies having him in custody. However, in the months since the death of Dr. Castolfo and the destruction of the
Testimonium
, nineteen senior terror leaders have been killed or captured, and numerous sleeper cells taken into custody. The Italian Security Agency, with the aid of a sixteen-year-old hacker from London, finally traced the source of the intercepts found on Abbasside’s computer, and “the Spider” was arrested two months ago.

About a month after they were married, Josh and Isabella agreed to appear on the Will Mayor show, opposite Dr. Tintoretto and David Hubbard. Even with the host joining the two atheists in questioning the
Testimonium’s
authenticity, the newlyweds handled themselves quite well. The parting exchange illustrates the whole tone of the debate:

Tintoretto:
Surely you must agree, Dr. Parker, that the destruction of the scroll on the eve of its most rigorous testing is awfully convenient for those who want to proclaim its authenticity!

Parker:
Actually, ma’am, being shot through the stomach and having one of my kidneys destroyed was a considerable inconvenience! The only way that it would have been ‘convenient,’ as you put it, was if the scroll was faked and we were aware of that fact. But the scroll was real and ancient, as all of us who discovered it knew from the beginning, so its destruction was a real shame, as the testing would have borne out our claims completely.

Hubbard:
But now the only real proof of your god is a little pile of ashes!

Parker:
(laughs for several seconds) That is the saddest thing I have ever heard anyone say! The real proof of God is all around us every day. It is in the love we feel for each other, our capacity for compassion, in the wondrous complexity of the cosmos, and most of all in the historical record of the Gospels. We don’t need some carbon-14 date to “prove” that God is real. All we need is the evidence of our own heart. After all, that is what faith is all about, isn’t it?”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LEWIS BEN SMITH
is a pastor, a Christian school teacher, an avid collector of Indian Artifacts, a third degree black belt, a computer game junkie, and the father of 20 year old twin daughters. He has a Master's Degree in history and has studied the early history of Christianity for many years. With so much spare time on his hands, he decided to start writing novels.