Authors: Michael Byrnes
“Of course. But if you could, please . . .” Yosi reached up to the shelf and pulled a fresh pair of latex gloves from a small box. He handed them to Cohen.
Cohen pulled the gloves over his pianist-like fingers. Then his attention went back to the jar.
It looked ordinary enough. Palming the sides, he gently lifted it from the light box. It was heavier than he’d have guessed—a robust piece. First, he checked inside to confirm that it was empty. Then he examined the outside. It was when he began rotating the jar that he spotted the symbol cleanly etched into its side. His eyes immediately went wide and his face drained. He actually had to suppress a gasp.
“Most unusual, isn’t it?” Yosi noted. “Looks to be the same symbol on the side of the ossuary we recovered in June.”
“Indeed,” Cohen said, doing his best to conceal his anxiety. As if to confirm it was real, he ran a finger over it—the imprint of a legacy. Grandfather’s words echoed:
“Yes, but not a fish, a dolphin. And not exactly a fork, but a trident.”
“Qumran, I take it?”
More hesitation. But it was no secret that Mizrachi had been sited there for some time now. Yosi nodded. “Just when you think the well has run dry.”
Carefully, Cohen returned the jar to the light box. As he peeled off the gloves, he eyed the archaeologist’s computer monitor. The screen had gone solid blue with a pop-up box in its center framing two blank fields labeled user name and password.
“Well then,” Cohen said. “I certainly look forward to your findings.”
“As do I,” Yosi said as he began slipping out of his lab coat. “I must lock up now. I’ve got a previous engagement to attend to.” This wasn’t a lie. “A symposium at the Israel Museum,” he added for good measure. He hung the coat on a rack behind the door.
“Ah, yes. Something about the Babylonians, as I recall?”
The rabbi surely knew exactly what the topic would be. “ ‘Relics from Babylonian Exile,’ to be precise.”
“Should be fascinating.”
“We shall see.” Forcing a smile, he motioned to the door. “I must get going if I’m to make it on time.”
Eyeing the jar and papyri one last time, Cohen went out into the corridor and waited as Yosi pulled the door shut and locked it with a key.
“Good seeing you, Rabbi.
Shalom.
”
“Shalom.”
Cohen folded his arms tight across his chest and watched the old man disappear around the corner. Then he studied the door lock.
Phoenix
“I don’t know what to say . . . ,” Donovan began, shrinking in the Volvo’s leather passenger seat. “I’m so very sorry, Charlotte. If I’d known they’d—” But as he glanced over at her again—the pain that contorted her face, the tears, the trembling hands gripping white-knuckled at the steering wheel—he knew there weren’t words to console her about such a thing.
Silent, with eyes staring emptily at the roadway, Charlotte was lost for words too. The moment she’d safely left the downtown high-rises in her rearview mirror, the fight-or-flight rush had given way to overwhelming shock and grief. It wasn’t just the man she thought she’d loved who had been mercilessly murdered before her eyes, but a visionary genius as well. A man who’d revolutionized genetics. It was a profound loss that would affect so many.
Heading north on Squaw Peak Parkway, she had yet to consider a specific plan or destination. Escape had been the only thing on her mind. But finally, she eased off the accelerator as more tears blurred her vision. “They’re going to follow us, aren’t they?” she finally said, opening the center console to pull out a tissue.
Hearing her speak was comforting. “I’m afraid so.”
She wiped her runny nose, then her moist eyes. “Who are they?”
He shook his head. “Not sure. But they’re definitely professionals. How they could find me so quickly . . .” He sighed and threw up his hands. “They’d need access to all sorts of information.”
“Did Conte send them?” she sniffled. “Is that what this is about?” Ever since the creep had chased her out of Vatican City and she’d landed a firm foot in his crotch, she’d feared his retaliation.
Donovan glanced out the window at the omnipresent freeway signboards for Paradise Valley before answering. “Conte’s dead, Charlotte,” he said with conviction. “It couldn’t have been him.”
This took Charlotte completely by surprise. “What? How?”
A pause.
“I killed him.” His brogue grew stronger. “I had to kill him,” he stressed. “There was no choice.”
“My God,” she gasped in repulsion. “How could you do such a thing? You’re a
priest.
” Now she couldn’t dismiss the fear that maybe Donovan was somehow baiting her.
His wounded stare remained on the approaching desert hills, dotted with cacti. “Just before he tried to kill me, he told me he would come for you, Charlotte.” He could still hear the mercenary’s words clearly in his mind:
“Did the cardinal tell you she skipped off with her laptop . . . loaded up with all the data? . . . I’ve got to fix that too and her blood will be on your hands
...
if a freak accident should happen to befall the lovely geneticist . . .
the authorities would be none the wiser... Of course, I’ ll be sure to show her a good time before she goes.”
“I couldn’t handle another loss . . . after Dr. Bersei . . . the Israelis.”
Mute, Charlotte couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“I had a gun,” he went on. “There was a struggle . . .”
For a moment, Donovan was back at the misty grove atop Monte Scuncole, peering down at the ossuary he and Conte had dropped into the pit they’d dug. He remembered fixating on the crack that had snapped the stone lid in two—wide enough to reveal the sacred bones beneath. Conte intended to drop Donovan’s body in right behind the relic and use C-4 to finish the job.
“I managed to run from him . . . out onto the roadway. He was right behind me when the car came.” The images reeled through his mind, making his pulse drum. He needed to take a breath before continuing. “By the grace of God, it swerved and took him down—like the Angel of Death . . . but even with that, he was still breathing.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Only the devil himself could have kept him alive. But Conte was
breathing.
Had he somehow lived, there’s no telling what—” Trembling fingers went to his lips to repress the surge of emotion. The next words came fast: “So I took the gun and finished him.” He quickly crossed himself.
God, please have mercy and forgive me for these deeds.
No matter what the consequences, airing the confession felt good— cleansing. The Irish way of “stuffing it down” simply wasn’t good for the soul. However, Donovan still wasn’t prepared to offer up that when he’d stripped Conte’s body of its personal effects, he’d found a syringe filled with clear serum, which he’d snuck past the Vatican metal detectors to eliminate what he thought had been the final threat—the Vatican’s secretary of state. Otherwise Santelli would have stopped at nothing to complete what he’d set out to do: eliminate any trace of the Vatican’s involvement in the church’s greatest cover-up.
He allowed a few moments for the air to settle.
“Then Conte
did
kill Bersei?” She’d suspected that all along.
Donovan nodded. “Many others too.” Though he felt he’d already said too much, Charlotte would need to know the whole story. “There’s more,” he said. “I suppose there’s nothing to lose now,” he said, and sighed.
He went on to tell her how just weeks before she’d been summoned to Vatican City, he’d been given a book by an anonymous contact (“The book I showed you during our meeting with Cardinal Santelli,” he reminded her), how it had actually included a map showing the ossuary’s hidden burial vault beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. How when he realized the implications of what would happen if the ossuary was discovered by Israelis, he’d convinced Santelli to take action. Though he’d advocated a peaceful solution, the pragmatic cardinal immediately sent for Salvatore Conte. Upon assessing the job Conte had used untraceable Vatican funds to employ a team of men to forcefully extract the ossuary—an elaborate plan involving guns, explosives, even a stolen helicopter. Many Israelis had been killed during an ensuing firefight at the Temple Mount, Donovan explained.
She recalled hearing these things in the news. Even given Conte’s ruthlessness, which she’d witnessed firsthand, his involvement in such a huge heist came as a complete surprise. Wrapped in thought, Charlotte caught herself tailgating a semi that was chugging up the steep grade. She checked the mirrors, flipped on the turn signal, and maneuvered around it.
“Then he brought the ossuary to the Vatican,” Donovan said. “And, well . . . you know the rest.”
Trying to process the unbelievable story, Charlotte was silent for a solid minute. “I guess I should be thanking you,” she finally managed.
He raised a hand to dismiss any idea of it. There was no glory in what he’d done. Especially since he still wasn’t certain if Conte’s murder had incited what had happened today.
“At first I thought these men might have known that Conte was working for the Vatican,” Donovan explained. “Perhaps he hadn’t paid them for their services in Jerusalem. But they spoke about Conte as if he were a stranger. And no mention of money . . . or the ossuary, or the nails, or the book. Just the bones,” he grimly replied. “The
bones,
” he repeated in disbelief. “I can’t imagine why. Even if I were to give bones to them, how would they know they came from inside that ossuary? I suppose I could give them any skeleton . . . ,” he said, hands cast up.
But Charlotte knew that was not the case. Those bones hid a one-ofa-kind imprint. And if these men knew what made them so special . . . A cold chill ran over Charlotte’s body.
There was a more direct answer she was hoping for. So she just needed to go for it. “That skeleton I studied ...It belonged to
Jesus,
didn’t it?” She’d thought it impossible. But Dr. Bersei had been the first to suggest this, finally convinced after deciphering the strange relief carved into the ossuary’s side—a dolphin wrapped around a trident.
Charlotte’s hands clamped harder on the wheel as she awaited Donovan’s slow reply.
A trembling hand went loosely over his mouth while he tried to formulate a response. “You saw the bones and the relics with your own eyes. If archaeologists had found them first, the evidence would have left little doubt—”
“Was it
him
?” she firmly insisted.
Exasperated, Donovan swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“And you have no doubts about that?” Charlotte said. After seeing the incredible genes hidden in the bones, their healing powers . . . Could there be any doubt that it had been Jesus’s remains she’d studied in secret at the Vatican Museums?
“There’s always room for error, but . . .” Donovan shook his head.
“You . . . a priest . . . ,” she said, stalling. “You’re basically telling me that there was no resurrection or ascension?”
“Not in a physical sense.”
“Then what about the Gospels?” Charlotte bitterly replied. “Is it all just made up?”
“The biblical accounts of events immediately following Christ’s burial are highly suspect, dare I say . . . falsified.”
“How so?”
The proof was fairly complicated, but he started at the easiest point. He explained that the oldest Gospel—Mark—originally ended with the empty tomb and that verses 16:9 through 16:20, where Jesus makes His appearances to Mary and the disciples, then ascends into heaven, were an addendum, written by a completely different hand. The Vatican’s oldest manuscripts from the fourth century, the Codex Vaticanus and the Codex Sinaiticus, didn’t include the long ending, but by the fifth century Mark had
four
different endings that spoke about resurrection and ascension.
Charlotte could tell that Donovan was calm about all this but also felt somewhat cheated. To her, it seemed too big a conspiracy to have been kept under wraps for so long. “And nobody figured this out?” she asked, incredulous.
“Oh, it’s no secret,” Donovan insisted. “Any good Bible will reference this omission in its footnotes. Not to mention that even if you read these added verses verbatim, Jesus’s post-burial appearances are still referenced in
metaphysical
terms.”
Giovanni Bersei had told her this too. But she was interested in the priest’s perspective. So she asked for examples.
Donovan went on to give a sampling from all four Gospels, noting that each read like many of the omitted apocryphal texts the Catholic Church had considered heretical. He told her that immediately following the resurrection accounts in John 20 and Mark 16, Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene and was unrecognizable to her; she’d actually mistaken Him for a gardener. And in Luke 24, two of the disciples not only doubted His identity when he appeared to them, but then Christ literally disappeared from their sight—
vanished!
In Donovan’s opinion, however, John 20 was the most telling of a metaphysical resurrection. He said, “John stated that the disciples were hiding in a sealed chamber and Jesus suddenly appeared in the room among them . . . from out of thin air,” he pointed out. “So you see, all four Gospels contain specific language suggesting that the Jesus who appeared after the resurrection was not that same Jesus who was buried in the tomb. So I ask the scientist in you, Charlotte: does that sound like a physical body to you?”
“No.” There were too many things it sounded like, she thought. But disappearing from sight? Appearing out of thin air into a locked room? How else could that be explained? Another wave of mixed emotions crested over her as she came to terms with the notion that the DNA inside her could actually have been taken from Christ. She sighed. “I suppose I’d rather be an apparition in the next life too,” she said.
To a scientist, this actually made more sense anyway, she thought. After all, the body’s “spirit” was really an electrical charge running through the nervous system. And Einstein’s most basic principle maintained that in a closed system, energy could never be lost or gained—merely transferred. If one viewed a dead body as a battery that had lost its charge, then logically, the body’s energy would be given back to the system.
What
system, however, was anyone’s guess.