“There are a lot of them, and they don’t care if they live or die.”
“Well, they’re all going to be disappointed when we shut down the Black Knight. Permanently.”
Dourado let out a cheer and in a gruff voice said, “Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!”
Carter was a little more subdued. “You found the sun chariot?”
“Not exactly.” He recounted their misadventure with the shekinah creatures and the revelation in the Cave of Moses. Dourado interrupted only once with the cryptic pronouncement, “So there is a cow level.”
Pierce assumed it was a pop culture reference. Dourado made a lot of those.
“The Ark of the Covenant,” Fallon mused. “It’s a real thing?”
For the first time since making the call, it occurred to Pierce that he was being a little too free with information. “That’s right,” he said.
“And it’s an artifact from the same aliens that made the Black Knight?”
Fallon was quick, and well-informed. He also knew more about the meta-material than any of them. Okay, Pierce thought. Time to extend a little trust. I just hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.
“Tanaka has the Roswell fragment, and I think we know what he plans to do with it. Unfortunately, since we don’t know where he’s going to do it from, finding the Ark and using it to shut down the Black Knight is our best option.”
“We don’t have much time,” Fallon pointed out. “Do you know where it is? In the movie, it was in Egypt. But then they took it to Area 51. Is that where it is?”
“No. Though it pains me to say, that was just a movie. And the premise was flawed. According to the movie, the Pharaoh Shishak — or Shoshenq — took the Ark when he raided the Temple of Solomon in 980 B.C.E. The raid actually happened, but Shoshenq didn’t get the Ark. It’s mentioned again in the Bible record during the reign of King Josiah more than three hundred years later.”
Carter spoke up again. “The Ark is in Ethiopia. In a chapel in Axum.”
Pierce smiled to himself. “That’s one of many rumored locations. There are so many different Ark stories, it’s no wonder it’s never been found. The Ethiopian legend is based on a Bible reference about the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon. Two thousand-odd years later, the Christian emperor of Ethiopia built on that story to legitimize his right to rule. According to this new version, Sheba was another name for Ethiopia. Solomon secretly married the Queen and she bore him a son, Menelik, the first emperor and progenitor of the Menelik dynasty, which supposedly endured until 1975. Solomon entrusted the Ark to Menelik, who bore it away secretly to Sheba, where it has been ever since.” He shook his head. “It’s a pretty fanciful story, concocted for political reasons.
“For my money, the most plausible story is recorded in the Second Book of Maccabees. Shortly before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and carried all the Jews off into exile, the prophet Jeremiah was ordered by God to take the Ark and the Tabernacle and hide them in a cave on Mount Nebo, the place where Moses died. He shut the cave up and never told anyone its location, promising that it would only be revealed when God gathered his people together again and showed them mercy.
“Jeremiah was the son of a Kohen, a Levite priest descended from Moses’s brother Aaron, and incidentally the derivation of the modern Jewish name Cohen. The Bible account is very explicit about the fact that only a Kohen could safely enter the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and approach the Ark. To me, that weighs in favor of Jeremiah being the one to relocate the Ark.”
When no one raised an objection, Pierce went on. “Mount Nebo is in modern-day Jordan, but there’s some disagreement about whether that identification is accurate. Judging by the fact that nobody’s found the Ark in the last twenty-six-hundred years, I’m guessing it’s not.
“Cintia, head back to Rome and start digging in the archives. See if you can give us a better search area. We’ll head on to Amman and get in position.”
“What about me and Erik?” Carter asked.
“Do what you can to help Cintia.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Lazarus said, speaking for the first time. “I should have been there with you.”
“From what Cintia’s told me,” Pierce countered, “It’s a good thing you weren’t.”
“All the same, I’m no use to anyone staying in the rear with the gear.”
Pierce weighed the offer a moment. As much as he would have liked to have the big man with him, looking out for them, there really wasn’t a need for additional protection. With Tanaka’s deception exposed, the security leak that had led the gunmen to them in Sinai was plugged. Besides, Tanaka would almost certainly shift his resources to the matter of finding another transmitter and guarding it. Finding the Ark was going to require actual archaeology — solving an age old mystery and digging in the ground — not the brawling, gun-toting, tomb-raiding of an Indiana Jones.
“I appreciate it,” Pierce said, “But I’m hoping we’ll have this wrapped up in a few hours. Stay with Felice.”
Lazarus didn’t press the issue, and it occurred to Pierce that his last statement might have been misinterpreted. He had meant to imply that Carter might be in need of comfort in the wake of the devastating news out of the Northwest, but perhaps the big man had understood it to mean something else.
Stay with Felice so that you’ll be together when the end comes.
If he failed to find the Ark, to solve a mystery that had confounded searchers for more than two thousand years, it just might come to that.
“You know, on second thought, if the Ark isn’t at Mount Nebo, we’re going to be back to square one. We need to cover our bases. Erik, you and Felice head to Ethiopia and check out the church in Axum. If we both strike out, at least we’ll have crossed two possibilities off the list.”
He tried to sound upbeat when giving them the assignment. It was busy-work, giving them something to do so they wouldn’t feel useless. The odds of the Ark being in Ethiopia were about a billion-to-one. However, as he had once pointed out to a certain cheerleader who had given him similar odds of ever going out with him, a billion-to-one meant there was still a chance.
“On it,” Lazarus said.
“What about me?” Fallon asked. “What can I do?”
Pierce resisted the impulse to tell Fallon that he had done quite enough. He settled for something only slightly more diplomatic. “We’ve got this under control, and I’m sure you’ve got some house cleaning to do. If the world doesn’t end, you’ll know we succeeded.”
THIRTY-ONE
A car was waiting for Tanaka at the front entrance to Tomorrowland. He did not recognize the driver, but that was not unexpected. The Children of Durga were many, but scattered far and wide, separated not only by physical geography, but also by culture and faith.
Not all of Durga’s children recognized their mother, but they did share a common unifying vision: a belief that the end of the world was not merely imminent, but urgently needed. For some, the end would bring a Rapture of the faithful or entry into a paradisiac afterlife. Others believed that destruction was a necessary part of the phoenix-like cycle of rebirth, and that a cleansed planet would bring about a new and better age. Only a few shared the true vision of Durga: the enlightened knowledge that life was a bitter joke from a cruel universe.
Tanaka didn’t know Durga’s true identity. No one did, though Tanaka thought Shiva might have. But while the two of them had shared a bond far deeper than mere friendship, Shiva had only hinted at the depths of his relationship with Durga.