And now, beside him in bed, after a long silence...
“I’ve been thinking...”
“Great.” Dan dragged himself back from the borderlands of sleep. “Does that mean you’re giving up this ca-ca idea of bringing that corpse home?”
“Please don’t refer to her so coarsely. Please?”
“Okay. Just for your sake. Not because I believe it.”
“Thank you. Now tell me: Who do you think wrote the scroll?”
“A clever, phony bastard.”
“All right,” she said with exaggerated patience. “Let’s humor Sister Carrie and assume that the scroll is genuine. Who wrote it?”
“We’ve been over this already. A Pharisee. An educated man.”
“But what of that passage where he says ‘I do not fear killing. I have killed before, slipping through the crowds in Jerusalem, stabbing with my knife. And I fear not damnation. Indeed, I am already thrice-damned.’ That doesn’t sound like a Pharisee.”
“What’d you do, memorize that translation?”
“No. But I’ve read it a few times.”
More than a few, Dan bet.
He said, “Some of the upper-class Israelites, a few Pharisees among them, got involved with the anti-Roman rebels, some with the zealots. These were a rough bunch of guys, sort of the Israelite equivalent of the IRA. They mounted guerrilla attacks, they murdered collaborators and informants and generally did whatever they could to incite revolt. These were the guys who gathered at Masada after the fall of Jerusalem. They held out for three years, then all 950 of them chose to die rather than surrender to the Roman siege. This scroll writer is patterned after that sort of zealot.”
“He was a pretty tough cookie then.”
“Extremely. Not the kind you’d want to cross.”
“I wonder what happened to him?”
“He’s probably hanging around, laughing up his three-striped sleeve, waiting for someone to chase the wild goose he created.”
He regretted the words immediately, but he was tired, dammit.
Carrie yanked the sheet angrily and turned onto her side, her back to him.
“Good night, Dan. Get some sleep. We’re out of here at dawn.”
“Good night, Carrie.”
But exhausted as he was, thoughts of the forger kept sleep at bay. And the more Dan thought about how this slimy bastard had sucked Carrie in, making her believe all this nonsense, the more he wanted to get back at him.
And removing that corpse or whatever it was from its cave was the perfect way.
Then it wouldn’t matter who came searching for the secret atop the tav rock—the New York Times, the Star, or even a mission from Vatican itself—all they’d find was an empty cave. The tomb is empty! There’d be no turmoil, no orthodox confusion, no Catechismal chaos. And the forger would be left scratching his head, wondering where his clever little prop had disappeared to.
Dan smiled into the darkness. Two can play this game, Mr. Forger.
Tomorrow Carrie would have enthusiastic help in her efforts to smuggle the forger’s prop out of Israel.
After that, Dan would have plenty of time to coax her back to her senses. If he could. He was more than a little worried about Carrie’s mental state. She seemed to be drifting into some religious fantasy realm. He sensed some strange chemistry between her and that body that he could not begin to comprehend. A switch had been thrown inside her, but what circuits had been activated?
Maybe it all went back to her childhood. Maybe it was all tied up in the abuse by her father. Little Carrie had been a virgin and no one had protected her; now here she was with what she believed to be the Virgin Mary and the grown-up Carrie was going to become the protector.
More parlor psychoanalysis. But perhaps it gave some clue as to why this artifact was so important to her.
Too important, perhaps.
And that frightened him. How would she react when it finally became clear—as it must eventually—that the body she thought belonged to the Blessed Virgin was a hoax? What if she cracked?
Whatever happened, he’d be there for her.
But what if he couldn’t bring her back?
He stared into the darkness and wished Hal had brought him another sort of gift from the Holy Land. Anything but that damned scroll.
‡
Tel Aviv
Kesev watched the morning news on TV while he sipped his coffee and considered the journey ahead of him. Oppressed by some nameless sense of urgency, he’d left Devorah’s in the early morning hours, fighting the urge to jump into his car and drive into the Wilderness.
Instead he’d driven home and attempted to sleep. Wasted hours. He’d had not a minute of slumber. He should have driven to the Resting Place. He’d have been there by now and all these vague fears would be allayed.
He’d called into Shin Bet with an excuse about a family emergency that would keep him from the office all day, but he wondered if this trip were even necessary. He’d be on the road all day, probably for nothing. Only 80 air miles, but three times that by car. And for what? To satisfy a nameless uneasiness?
Idly, he wondered if he could get a helicopter and do a quick fly-by, but immediately discarded the idea. He’d made a spectacle of himself back there in ‘91 during the Gulf War when he’d refused to leave the SCUD impact site until all the investigations had been completed. He’d actually camped out there until the last missile fragment had been removed and the final investigator had returned home. There’d been too many questions about his undue interest in that particular piece of nowhere. If he requested a copter now...
He sighed and finished his coffee. Better get moving. He had a long drive ahead of him, and he’d know no peace until he’d reassured himself.
Absence...guilt twisted inside of him. He wasn’t supposed to be away from the Resting Place. Ever. He’d promised to stay there and guard it.
He shook off the guilt. How long could you sit around guarding a place that no one even knew existed?
The Resting Place was as safe as it ever was, protected by the greatest, most steadfast guardian of all—the Midbar Yehuda.
‡
The Judean Wilderness
Carrie held her breath going through the little passage to the second chamber. But then the beam flashed against the Blessed Mother and she let it out.
“She’s still here! Oh, thank God, Dan! She’s still here!”
“What did you expect?” Dan muttered as he crawled in behind her with the electric lantern. “Not as if we left her on a subway.”
She knew Dan was tired and irritable. Anyone seeing him stumbling around the guest house this morning would have thought he’d been drinking all night. Her own back ached and her eyes burned, but true to her word, Carrie had awakened him at first light this morning and had them on the road by the time the sun peeked over the Jordanian highlands on the far side of the Dead Sea. It had glowed deep red in the rearview mirror as it crept up the flawless sky, stretching the Explorer’s shadow far before them as they bounced and rolled into the hills.
And now as she stood in the chamber, staring down once more at the woman she knew—knew—was the Mother of God, she felt as if her heart would burst inside her. She loved this woman—for all her quiet courage, for all the pain she must have suffered in silence. But the Virgin didn’t look quite like what she’d expected. In her mind’s eye she’d imagined finding a rosy-cheeked teenager, or at the very least a tall, beautiful woman in her early twenties, because that was the way Carrie had always seen her pictured. But when she thought about it, the Virgin probably had been average height for a Palestinian woman of two thousand years ago, and must have been pushing seventy when she died.