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Evil exists. Its name is Satan. Can he be stopped?
THE WAR THAT BEGAN IN HEAVEN MUST END IN HELL. December 21, 2012. The world did not end. But it changed forever. For better or worse? FACT: The alignment of the Earth, the Sun, and the galactic equator on the winter solstice of 2012 occurs only once every 26,000 years. That made it the first such conjunction in the history of civilization. In a calendar that runs for five thousand years, the Mayans chose it as the end of days. They called it Creation Day. But creation of what? What lies beyond this cosmic threshold? Apocalypse or Salvation? Find the shocking answer in 2013: Beyond Armageddon as it takes us on the ultimate archaeological dig: the dig for Hell. October 1947. Two ancient scrolls are discovered that give indisputable proof: HEAVEN AND HELL ARE REAL. THERE IS A GOD. THERE IS A SATAN. BEFORE THE BEGINNING... Their war began in the untime. Long before the universe existed, God's beloved archangel and his legion rebelled. They were cast into Hell. And Lucifer became Satan. Now the day of reckoning has come. Can the forces of Good defeat a seemingly unstoppable Evil? 2013: Beyond Armageddon takes Zeke Sloan on a demon-stalked quest to confront the root of all evil. From Satanic murders in Washington, D.C. to a necropolis deep beneath Jerusalem--where a man believing he is John the Baptist communes with God, and the dead await their Messiah. Then deeper, to the lowest point on earth: the Dead Sea. Then deeper still. For it is far below the mysterious body of water the Greeks called the Devil's Sea that the final battle will take place. ARMAGEDDON. |
5 months on Kindle Horror bestseller list
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2013: BEYOND ARMAGEDDON—1st Chapter
Watch, therefore, for
ye know neither the day nor the hour
wherein the Son of man cometh.
Matthew 25: 13
BOOK ONE
The Scrolls
And when I looked, behold,
A hand was sent unto me;
and, lo, a roll of a book was therein;
And he spread it before me;
and it was written within and without:
and there was written therein
lamentations, and mourning,
and woe.
Ezekiel 2: 9-10
CHAPTER 1
Jerusalem. October, 1947
The sharp knock at the door startled the priest. It sounded more than urgent.
Frightened.
Who could be calling at this ungodly hour? Hostilities were escalating daily between the Arabs and Jews. Ancient foes stalked the streets, looking for someone to kill. Even a priest in his rectory after midnight could get caught in the crossfire of their hatred.
Father Boyle smiled at his paranoid Catholic guilt. He’d been thinking sinful thoughts of pride and betrayal, so naturally a deadly penance had come knocking at his door.
He put down the magnifying glass he’d been using to study an ancient fragment of text, wiped his bleary eyes, and went to answer the door.
The familiar weatherbeaten face at the peephole, tanned almost black from a lifetime in the desert, made him click on the foyer light and open the door. He waved his visitor in and spoke to him in Arabic.
“Tarik. What are you doing here so late?”
“I got lost. I can never find this place.”
It always amused the priest that the Bedouin could find his way around the uncharted Judaean Wilderness, but got lost coming here. The Old City section of Jerusalem could be a confusing labyrinth, but Tarik had been here before. “Just turn off Via Dolorosa when you see that marker for the 5th Station of the Cross.”
“Hard to see when it’s darker than Jahannam.”
Gehenna, Father Boyle thought, automatically translating the Arabic word for Hell into its Hebrew equivalent. Something else was troubling the Bedouin. Tarik held something cradled against his chest. The priest couldn’t see what it was, but he could guess.
Since July, the Bedouin had been making incredible scroll discoveries and selling them wherever they could. The Vatican got word that they were missing out on possible Biblical texts, so they’d quickly dispatched himself and Monsignor Donatelli, their two top paleographers, to Jerusalem with the full resources of the Holy See behind them. Two adjacent failed shops in the Old City had been hastily converted into a scrollery and residence. Tucked away on a side street in the Christian Quarter, no sign announced its existence. The two priests had discreetly gotten word to the Bedouin that this was a good place to bring anything old with writing on it.
Tarik eyed Father Boyle’s sweatshirt and faded pajama bottoms with suspicion. He’d never seen him in his lay clothes.
The priest explained. “Once I’m in for the evening, I change into something more comfortable.” Tarik still looked skeptical, so he added,“It’s allowed.”
“Where is the old man?” The door was still open and the Bedouin looked around nervously at every rustle of the wind.
“He is at the Vatican on business.”
It was a lie. Monsignor Donatelli was asleep in the back room, dead to the world. Father Boyle needed to keep him out of this. Two months ago a Bedouin had tried to sell a complete scroll to the “Official Vatican Paleographer for Jerusalem,” but the senile old fool had turned him away. Said it couldn’t be genuine. Father Boyle had assured him it was, but he wouldn’t listen to a twenty-four-year old assistant fresh from the seminary. Never mind that he’d been rated as a genius in languages from the time he was eight.
“I will come back,” Tarik said, turning to go.
“No. Wait. What have you got?”
The priest smelled his chance. If Tarik had something good, and he could procure it instead of Donatelli, it could be a shortcut to the title he coveted: Official Paleographer for the Vatican. Even then it might still take years. Donatelli had been working toward the position his whole life. Too bad. His time had passed. It was every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
Father Boyle waved the Bedouin in and closed the door.
Tarik held out a terra cotta jar, about eighteen inches high. “Two complete scrolls. Perfect condition. And the jar. It has writing also. Tell the old man it will cost him a hundred thousand American dollars.”
Father Boyle stifled a roar. He sensed a bluff. Something about the scrolls was making the Bedouin nervous. He wanted—needed—to get rid of them quickly. “Tarik.” He made a humble face. “I must see them first. Then we can decide what they are worth.”
“I tell you one hundred thousand. One of these already slipped through your fingers.”
Not mine. His. “My friend, be reasonable. Where would a lowly young priest like me get that kind of money?”
“Tell your Pope to sell one of his costumes.”
His attempt at humor was masking something else. Father Boyle knew he couldn’t come close to this man’s ridiculous asking price, yet he must see these scrolls. He couldn’t make the same mistake Donatelli had made.
“Let’s do this,” he said. “Come into my office, so I can see what you have. Then we can discuss terms. If we cannot agree, then there is no harm and I will wish you well. What do you say?”
“I say I will let you see them. I also say I will have my money.”
Father Boyle smiled and beckoned for Tarik to follow him. He glanced at Donatelli’s large, well-appointed office and felt the usual twinge of resentment when he entered his small hole on the other side of the hall. The light from his pole lamp near the desk barely reached the edges of the room. A picture of the Pope hung crookedly on one wall. He was smiling beatifically and waving a hand in benediction: God Bless This Mess.
The other walls were filled with shelves crammed with books. Stacks of research materials covered the floor. In the middle was his small rolltop desk and a battered wooden chair, looking like an island surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck.
Tarik followed along a narrow makeshift aisle in the stacks on the floor. He carefully placed the jar on the desk and remained standing.
The priest sat. Two full scrolls. Not maddening little pieces. Heart pounding, he took a breath and reached for the jar.
“Be very careful.” The Bedouin stood at the priest’s right elbow, scrutinizing his every move. His hand brushed open his jalabiyya and came to rest on the knife at his waist.
“Maybe you’d better open it then, to be on the safe side.”
“A good idea.” Tarik secured the jar in one arm and gently twisted.
The stopper was black and wrinkled. Bits of it flaked off. An animal skin, perhaps, wadded up for the purpose. The jars of the Qumran scrolls reportedly had lids, not stoppers, and were considerably larger. Father Boyle pushed the thought aside. He could figure all that out later. First he needed to close the deal—if what he saw was any good.
After much careful twisting the stopper came out. A sound, like a mournful sigh, escaped.
Startled, Father Boyle said, “What was that? A jinni?” He used the Arabic word rather than the American genie.
“You believe the Arab superstition?”
“Don’t you?”
Tarik tried to smile but his eyes betrayed him. The priest wanted to believe the sound was thousands of years of pent-up air being released—except that Tarik must have already opened the jar to know what was inside.
Father Boyle barely believed in God, so he wasn’t about to believe in genies, but maybe that explained the Bedouin’s haunted look. If he was worried about a curse, he’d be eager to part with the scrolls at any price. The priest fostered the idea.
“Do you think the jinni serves Allah—or the outcast Iblis, leader of the fallen ones?”
“I do not joke about such things. Neither should you.”
They stared at each other for several seconds before Tarik proceeded. Like a man handling nitroglycerine, he slowly removed the smaller of the two scrolls, then eased it onto blotter atop the desk. Father Boyle swung his hinged desk lamp over and shone the bright circle of light on the roll of parchment.
Since Donatelli’s colossal blunder, all they’d gotten were tiny fragments that had been driving them mad. Now they had a second chance at not one, but two complete scrolls. Perhaps their last chance.
The priest tried to control his accelerated breathing while he assessed the situation. Any ancient scroll should be humidified before opening to avoid damaging it, but there was no time. The old man’s bladder was like clockwork. He’d be getting up to go to the bathroom any minute now.
Father Boyle grabbed a small spray bottle of water and lightly spritzed the scroll. That would have to do. “If it starts to crumble I’ll stop immediately.”
Tarik gave a curt nod and set the jar on the desk.
The priest pulled two bars of solid glass and a ruler from a cubbyhole in his desk and placed them within easy reach. The glass bars were about eighteen inches long and an inch thick, rounded except for one flat side, to which a strip of felt had been glued. Father Boyle’s invention, he called them his “papyrusweights.”
With hands as steady as a surgeon’s, the priest unrolled a few inches until the first words became visible. With quick deft movements, he used one glass bar to keep the unrolled scroll from springing closed and the other to secure the leading edge. The exposed portion now lay flat on the desk. He measured the width of the scroll at ten inches. He could only guess at its length when fully unrolled. Probably a foot or so. His eyes rapidly scanned the text.
The state of preservation was astonishing. The ink had hardly faded at all. For several minutes he stared at the writing. It was perfect Hebrew, written with an untrained hand. “Where did you find this?”
“In a cave.”
“Near Qumran?”
“No. South of there.”
“How far south?”
“Below Ein Bokek.”
Ein Bokek was very far south of Qumran. Still on the western shore of the Dead Sea, but near the edge of the southern basin. Which meant this scroll—if it was genuine—could not have come from the same community.
He couldn’t make sense of it. The hand was crude, non-scribal, and yet there was a fluency to the language. Slowly, as though a blurred photograph were coming into focus, he began to decipher the opening lines. Donatelli would have needed weeks. He jotted his translation onto his notepad, then stared in disbelief at what he had written.
He looked back at the scroll in astonishment. The faint whisper of a voice dead for four thousand years began to speak. He started to unroll more, but the Bedouin stopped him.
“No more, my friend. You might rip it, and then we would have a very bad problem on our hands.” His hand rested on the knife.
The priest looked at what he’d deciphered. In the wake of Qumran, forgeries were flooding the antiquities market, but if this was genuine, it would turn the world of paleography upside down.
I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.
According to Genesis—the only account there was—God had indeed sent two angels to escort Lot and his wife and two daughters to safety before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. If this was genuine, not only would it be the oldest writing ever discovered, it might shed light on one of the Bible’s darkest and most intriguing mysteries. After Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt, he and his daughters had made it to a cave. The daughters had gotten their father drunk on wine and had intercourse with him, wanting to keep the human race alive because they believed they were the only ones left in the world.
“What else did you see in that cave? Any signs of who might have lived there?”
“I saw some things.”
“What?”
“Bones.”
“Bones?”
“The skeleton of a man.”
According to the Bible both of Lot’s daughters had gotten pregnant, giving birth to children whose descendants became the Moabites and Ammonites. So they had obviously left the cave. Why had Lot stayed behind to die? And the scrolls apparently been left to die with him?
“Was there no other evidence you could bring?” Father Boyle asked. “Everything helps to understand this.” He pierced the Bedouin’s blank stare by adding, “More money for you.”
The fearful look flickered across the leathery features. “I’d had enough of caves. Do you want this or not?”
The priest needed to make a decision. The fragments they’d procured of the Qumran scrolls seemed to contain parts of the Old Testament, but they’d been written much later, around the time of Christ.
This was far older, written by someone who had lived during the Old Testament. In the time of Genesis. It was priceless—if it was genuine.
Lot.
It defied all current knowledge of paleography that Lot could have written this. Lot was a shepherd, not a trained scribe. The priest hastily tried to come up with a hypothesis that would make the impossible
possible.
Lot and his uncle, Abraham, had lived in Ur, a busy trade crossroads and intellectual haven of the day. They would have been exposed to many cultures. Eventually they left Ur and ended up in Egypt. According to the Bible, somewhere during that time God told Abraham he was to be the patriarch of the chosen people. Perhaps Abraham, feeling the enormity of that responsibility, decided it would be advantageous for his nephew to learn to write, so that records could be kept. Whatever the case, the overall crudeness of the writing supported the idea of an unskilled person as the author. But even allowing for this improbable theory, there was another problem.
If Lot wrote this, his use of parchment pre-dated its earliest known use by a thousand years. But there was some evidence that Egyptians had written on skins a thousand years before Lot. And what’s so surprising about a shepherd writing on sheepskin?
He pulled the jar into the light.
Rust-colored terra cotta; crudely handmade; finger marks not smoothed out as a craftsman would have done. The clay appeared consistent with potsherds found near the Dead Sea from that era. Some marks were scratched near the base. He examined them with his magnifying glass.
An inscription. Three letters. He compared them to a similar grouping on the scroll. They matched.
Lot.
He looked at the other words he’d written on his notepad:
God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.
Astonishing. The unknown story of Lot after he escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He had to read the rest of this.
“Well?” Tarik said.
If he turned out to be wrong, his career was over. It was a chance he had to take. He couldn’t know at this point. He had to go with his gut.
The checkbook was in a locked drawer in Donatelli’s desk. The lock could be picked with a paper clip and Donatelli’s signature was easy to forge. He’d already done it for supplies the miser was too cheap to buy. A check for a hundred thousand would be too big to hide, but if he could get the Bedouin down to a reasonable figure, he’d write the check and figure out a way to keep Donatelli from finding out about it.
“Tarik, I cannot be sure this is even genuine without a complete examination, but I am willing to trust you and take a chance. I can write you a check now for ten thousand dollars.”
The Bedouin shook his head and gestured impatiently to give him back the scroll.
Father Boyle rolled it back up and handed it to him. “So you don’t mind having the jinni follow you around for the rest of your life?”
Tarik made a dismissive wave and put the stopper back in the jar.
“Fifteen thousand,” Boyle said.
“Seventy-five.”
“Twenty.”
“Sixty.”
“Thirty.”
“Fifty. Take it or leave it.”
“Wait here.”
He closed the door behind him and went into Donatelli’s office, already thinking of ways to cover his tracks. The odor of spices and incense that had once been sold here still lingered. They combined with the cheap cologne the old man bathed in to create the smell of something going bad.
It took barely a minute to pop the lock and forge the check. He had just inserted the paper clip to lock the desk drawer back up when he heard the familiar irritating slide of slippers coming down the hall.
He yanked on the paper clip. It was stuck. The footsteps were at the door. He jammed the check in his pocket and left the paper clip dangling.
Donatelli came through the doorway in his stained pajamas, eyes blinking against the light, wisps of white hair sticking up wildly from his liver-spotted scalp. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. Boyle hurried to intercept him.
“What are you doing in my office?”
“I was doing some work on those new materials and couldn’t find my magnifying glass. I thought you might have left yours on your desk.”
“What kind of paleographer loses his magnifying glass?”
“A tired one.” Donatelli shuffled toward his desk. Father Boyle walked ahead of him. “I’m sorry I woke you. We should both go to bed. Those fragments will need all of our concentration.”
“I’ve been telling you that.” Donatelli looked at his desk as if to see if anything was amiss, eyes blinking as they tried to focus. He drifted behind the desk. The light from the pole lamp glinted off the paper clip. The priest hurried to click the light off, leaving only the dim light that spilled in from the hallway.
“Come, Monsignor, let’s go to bed. I will have the coffee ready for you in the morning.”
Donatelli allowed himself to be led from the room. “Stay out of my office unless I am here. You know I like everything just so.”
“Yes. I will. Good night.”
Father Boyle watched the stooped old man become a silhouette down the hall. He heard his own office door open behind him. Tarik came out and saw the figure disappearing into the darkness.
“Who is that? I thought you said—”
“It is a priest visiting from Bethlehem. He is staying in the Monsignor’s room while he is away.” The Bedouin’s dark eyes bore into him. The priest reached into his pocket. “Here.”
Tarik studied the check, then said, “I was not here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never saw me tonight. There was no scrolls.”
Father Boyle started to ask why but thought better of it. He knew the most likely reason. Tarik had found his scroll far outside the territory of his Ta’amireh tribe. All assets were supposed to be given to his sheikh, who would then decide how to divide them up. Tarik didn’t want to share. The priest didn’t blame him. Neither did he.
At the door the Bedouin lingered a moment. Father Boyle saw something in his face. Concern, perhaps. “What is it, Tarik?”
“There is more to these scrolls than meets the eye.”
Father Boyle frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It has a power. Something about it. Something not good. I felt it in the cave. Like something guarding the jar, something that did not want me to take it. Did you not feel it?”
Bedouin were superstitious, but no more so than many groups he’d studied. There had been that ominous sigh when Tarik opened the jar... “No. Only the power of the words.”
Tarik stared at him for a long uncomfortable moment. “Very well,” he said. “My conscience is clear.” He disappeared into the darkness.
The Bedouin’s words nagged at the priest, but back at his desk he quickly became absorbed by what he’d deciphered:
I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this
cave.
Tarik’s parting words came back to him, and he felt a growing unease.
He stared at the jar, aching to get to work on the scroll, but it would have to wait. He needed to start fresh, not when he was barely able to keep his eyes open. Its secrets would have to wait a little longer. He hid the jar behind some books and went to bed.
In the twilight world between sleep and wakefulness, he saw a shadow in the corner of the room. For a moment he thought Donatelli might have wandered in, but the shadow was far too big. He was so exhausted he tried to ignore it, but each time he opened his eyes it was still there. And each time it was closer.
He clicked on the lamp by his bed.
Nothing.
Turning off the light, he put his pillow over his head. Listening to the darkness, he almost expected to hear breathing. A gust of wind rattled his window, then all was quiet. The silence seemed different, stealthy somehow, and he was unable to shake the feeling of being watched.
Tarik and his mumbo-jumbo. There were no such things as jinn.
He took the pillow off his head. Nothing moved in the darkness. The window rattled again. He looked toward it. Two fiery red dots hovered outside. The priest’s eyes locked onto them, trying to figure out what they were.
Cigarettes of soldiers on patrol? Some kind of reflection? The eyes of a bird?
Eyes.
An instant later they were gone. Father Boyle pulled the pillow back over his head and tried to convince himself he had been imagining things.
He could not.
The sharp knock at the door startled the priest. It sounded more than urgent.
Frightened.
Who could be calling at this ungodly hour? Hostilities were escalating daily between the Arabs and Jews. Ancient foes stalked the streets, looking for someone to kill. Even a priest in his rectory after midnight could get caught in the crossfire of their hatred.
Father Boyle smiled at his paranoid Catholic guilt. He’d been thinking sinful thoughts of pride and betrayal, so naturally a deadly penance had come knocking at his door.
He put down the magnifying glass he’d been using to study an ancient fragment of text, wiped his bleary eyes, and went to answer the door.
The familiar weatherbeaten face at the peephole, tanned almost black from a lifetime in the desert, made him click on the foyer light and open the door. He waved his visitor in and spoke to him in Arabic.
“Tarik. What are you doing here so late?”
“I got lost. I can never find this place.”
It always amused the priest that the Bedouin could find his way around the uncharted Judaean Wilderness, but got lost coming here. The Old City section of Jerusalem could be a confusing labyrinth, but Tarik had been here before. “Just turn off Via Dolorosa when you see that marker for the 5th Station of the Cross.”
“Hard to see when it’s darker than Jahannam.”
Gehenna, Father Boyle thought, automatically translating the Arabic word for Hell into its Hebrew equivalent. Something else was troubling the Bedouin. Tarik held something cradled against his chest. The priest couldn’t see what it was, but he could guess.
Since July, the Bedouin had been making incredible scroll discoveries and selling them wherever they could. The Vatican got word that they were missing out on possible Biblical texts, so they’d quickly dispatched himself and Monsignor Donatelli, their two top paleographers, to Jerusalem with the full resources of the Holy See behind them. Two adjacent failed shops in the Old City had been hastily converted into a scrollery and residence. Tucked away on a side street in the Christian Quarter, no sign announced its existence. The two priests had discreetly gotten word to the Bedouin that this was a good place to bring anything old with writing on it.
Tarik eyed Father Boyle’s sweatshirt and faded pajama bottoms with suspicion. He’d never seen him in his lay clothes.
The priest explained. “Once I’m in for the evening, I change into something more comfortable.” Tarik still looked skeptical, so he added,“It’s allowed.”
“Where is the old man?” The door was still open and the Bedouin looked around nervously at every rustle of the wind.
“He is at the Vatican on business.”
It was a lie. Monsignor Donatelli was asleep in the back room, dead to the world. Father Boyle needed to keep him out of this. Two months ago a Bedouin had tried to sell a complete scroll to the “Official Vatican Paleographer for Jerusalem,” but the senile old fool had turned him away. Said it couldn’t be genuine. Father Boyle had assured him it was, but he wouldn’t listen to a twenty-four-year old assistant fresh from the seminary. Never mind that he’d been rated as a genius in languages from the time he was eight.
“I will come back,” Tarik said, turning to go.
“No. Wait. What have you got?”
The priest smelled his chance. If Tarik had something good, and he could procure it instead of Donatelli, it could be a shortcut to the title he coveted: Official Paleographer for the Vatican. Even then it might still take years. Donatelli had been working toward the position his whole life. Too bad. His time had passed. It was every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
Father Boyle waved the Bedouin in and closed the door.
Tarik held out a terra cotta jar, about eighteen inches high. “Two complete scrolls. Perfect condition. And the jar. It has writing also. Tell the old man it will cost him a hundred thousand American dollars.”
Father Boyle stifled a roar. He sensed a bluff. Something about the scrolls was making the Bedouin nervous. He wanted—needed—to get rid of them quickly. “Tarik.” He made a humble face. “I must see them first. Then we can decide what they are worth.”
“I tell you one hundred thousand. One of these already slipped through your fingers.”
Not mine. His. “My friend, be reasonable. Where would a lowly young priest like me get that kind of money?”
“Tell your Pope to sell one of his costumes.”
His attempt at humor was masking something else. Father Boyle knew he couldn’t come close to this man’s ridiculous asking price, yet he must see these scrolls. He couldn’t make the same mistake Donatelli had made.
“Let’s do this,” he said. “Come into my office, so I can see what you have. Then we can discuss terms. If we cannot agree, then there is no harm and I will wish you well. What do you say?”
“I say I will let you see them. I also say I will have my money.”
Father Boyle smiled and beckoned for Tarik to follow him. He glanced at Donatelli’s large, well-appointed office and felt the usual twinge of resentment when he entered his small hole on the other side of the hall. The light from his pole lamp near the desk barely reached the edges of the room. A picture of the Pope hung crookedly on one wall. He was smiling beatifically and waving a hand in benediction: God Bless This Mess.
The other walls were filled with shelves crammed with books. Stacks of research materials covered the floor. In the middle was his small rolltop desk and a battered wooden chair, looking like an island surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck.
Tarik followed along a narrow makeshift aisle in the stacks on the floor. He carefully placed the jar on the desk and remained standing.
The priest sat. Two full scrolls. Not maddening little pieces. Heart pounding, he took a breath and reached for the jar.
“Be very careful.” The Bedouin stood at the priest’s right elbow, scrutinizing his every move. His hand brushed open his jalabiyya and came to rest on the knife at his waist.
“Maybe you’d better open it then, to be on the safe side.”
“A good idea.” Tarik secured the jar in one arm and gently twisted.
The stopper was black and wrinkled. Bits of it flaked off. An animal skin, perhaps, wadded up for the purpose. The jars of the Qumran scrolls reportedly had lids, not stoppers, and were considerably larger. Father Boyle pushed the thought aside. He could figure all that out later. First he needed to close the deal—if what he saw was any good.
After much careful twisting the stopper came out. A sound, like a mournful sigh, escaped.
Startled, Father Boyle said, “What was that? A jinni?” He used the Arabic word rather than the American genie.
“You believe the Arab superstition?”
“Don’t you?”
Tarik tried to smile but his eyes betrayed him. The priest wanted to believe the sound was thousands of years of pent-up air being released—except that Tarik must have already opened the jar to know what was inside.
Father Boyle barely believed in God, so he wasn’t about to believe in genies, but maybe that explained the Bedouin’s haunted look. If he was worried about a curse, he’d be eager to part with the scrolls at any price. The priest fostered the idea.
“Do you think the jinni serves Allah—or the outcast Iblis, leader of the fallen ones?”
“I do not joke about such things. Neither should you.”
They stared at each other for several seconds before Tarik proceeded. Like a man handling nitroglycerine, he slowly removed the smaller of the two scrolls, then eased it onto blotter atop the desk. Father Boyle swung his hinged desk lamp over and shone the bright circle of light on the roll of parchment.
Since Donatelli’s colossal blunder, all they’d gotten were tiny fragments that had been driving them mad. Now they had a second chance at not one, but two complete scrolls. Perhaps their last chance.
The priest tried to control his accelerated breathing while he assessed the situation. Any ancient scroll should be humidified before opening to avoid damaging it, but there was no time. The old man’s bladder was like clockwork. He’d be getting up to go to the bathroom any minute now.
Father Boyle grabbed a small spray bottle of water and lightly spritzed the scroll. That would have to do. “If it starts to crumble I’ll stop immediately.”
Tarik gave a curt nod and set the jar on the desk.
The priest pulled two bars of solid glass and a ruler from a cubbyhole in his desk and placed them within easy reach. The glass bars were about eighteen inches long and an inch thick, rounded except for one flat side, to which a strip of felt had been glued. Father Boyle’s invention, he called them his “papyrusweights.”
With hands as steady as a surgeon’s, the priest unrolled a few inches until the first words became visible. With quick deft movements, he used one glass bar to keep the unrolled scroll from springing closed and the other to secure the leading edge. The exposed portion now lay flat on the desk. He measured the width of the scroll at ten inches. He could only guess at its length when fully unrolled. Probably a foot or so. His eyes rapidly scanned the text.
The state of preservation was astonishing. The ink had hardly faded at all. For several minutes he stared at the writing. It was perfect Hebrew, written with an untrained hand. “Where did you find this?”
“In a cave.”
“Near Qumran?”
“No. South of there.”
“How far south?”
“Below Ein Bokek.”
Ein Bokek was very far south of Qumran. Still on the western shore of the Dead Sea, but near the edge of the southern basin. Which meant this scroll—if it was genuine—could not have come from the same community.
He couldn’t make sense of it. The hand was crude, non-scribal, and yet there was a fluency to the language. Slowly, as though a blurred photograph were coming into focus, he began to decipher the opening lines. Donatelli would have needed weeks. He jotted his translation onto his notepad, then stared in disbelief at what he had written.
He looked back at the scroll in astonishment. The faint whisper of a voice dead for four thousand years began to speak. He started to unroll more, but the Bedouin stopped him.
“No more, my friend. You might rip it, and then we would have a very bad problem on our hands.” His hand rested on the knife.
The priest looked at what he’d deciphered. In the wake of Qumran, forgeries were flooding the antiquities market, but if this was genuine, it would turn the world of paleography upside down.
I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.
According to Genesis—the only account there was—God had indeed sent two angels to escort Lot and his wife and two daughters to safety before Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. If this was genuine, not only would it be the oldest writing ever discovered, it might shed light on one of the Bible’s darkest and most intriguing mysteries. After Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt, he and his daughters had made it to a cave. The daughters had gotten their father drunk on wine and had intercourse with him, wanting to keep the human race alive because they believed they were the only ones left in the world.
“What else did you see in that cave? Any signs of who might have lived there?”
“I saw some things.”
“What?”
“Bones.”
“Bones?”
“The skeleton of a man.”
According to the Bible both of Lot’s daughters had gotten pregnant, giving birth to children whose descendants became the Moabites and Ammonites. So they had obviously left the cave. Why had Lot stayed behind to die? And the scrolls apparently been left to die with him?
“Was there no other evidence you could bring?” Father Boyle asked. “Everything helps to understand this.” He pierced the Bedouin’s blank stare by adding, “More money for you.”
The fearful look flickered across the leathery features. “I’d had enough of caves. Do you want this or not?”
The priest needed to make a decision. The fragments they’d procured of the Qumran scrolls seemed to contain parts of the Old Testament, but they’d been written much later, around the time of Christ.
This was far older, written by someone who had lived during the Old Testament. In the time of Genesis. It was priceless—if it was genuine.
Lot.
It defied all current knowledge of paleography that Lot could have written this. Lot was a shepherd, not a trained scribe. The priest hastily tried to come up with a hypothesis that would make the impossible
possible.
Lot and his uncle, Abraham, had lived in Ur, a busy trade crossroads and intellectual haven of the day. They would have been exposed to many cultures. Eventually they left Ur and ended up in Egypt. According to the Bible, somewhere during that time God told Abraham he was to be the patriarch of the chosen people. Perhaps Abraham, feeling the enormity of that responsibility, decided it would be advantageous for his nephew to learn to write, so that records could be kept. Whatever the case, the overall crudeness of the writing supported the idea of an unskilled person as the author. But even allowing for this improbable theory, there was another problem.
If Lot wrote this, his use of parchment pre-dated its earliest known use by a thousand years. But there was some evidence that Egyptians had written on skins a thousand years before Lot. And what’s so surprising about a shepherd writing on sheepskin?
He pulled the jar into the light.
Rust-colored terra cotta; crudely handmade; finger marks not smoothed out as a craftsman would have done. The clay appeared consistent with potsherds found near the Dead Sea from that era. Some marks were scratched near the base. He examined them with his magnifying glass.
An inscription. Three letters. He compared them to a similar grouping on the scroll. They matched.
Lot.
He looked at the other words he’d written on his notepad:
God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this cave.
Astonishing. The unknown story of Lot after he escaped the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He had to read the rest of this.
“Well?” Tarik said.
If he turned out to be wrong, his career was over. It was a chance he had to take. He couldn’t know at this point. He had to go with his gut.
The checkbook was in a locked drawer in Donatelli’s desk. The lock could be picked with a paper clip and Donatelli’s signature was easy to forge. He’d already done it for supplies the miser was too cheap to buy. A check for a hundred thousand would be too big to hide, but if he could get the Bedouin down to a reasonable figure, he’d write the check and figure out a way to keep Donatelli from finding out about it.
“Tarik, I cannot be sure this is even genuine without a complete examination, but I am willing to trust you and take a chance. I can write you a check now for ten thousand dollars.”
The Bedouin shook his head and gestured impatiently to give him back the scroll.
Father Boyle rolled it back up and handed it to him. “So you don’t mind having the jinni follow you around for the rest of your life?”
Tarik made a dismissive wave and put the stopper back in the jar.
“Fifteen thousand,” Boyle said.
“Seventy-five.”
“Twenty.”
“Sixty.”
“Thirty.”
“Fifty. Take it or leave it.”
“Wait here.”
He closed the door behind him and went into Donatelli’s office, already thinking of ways to cover his tracks. The odor of spices and incense that had once been sold here still lingered. They combined with the cheap cologne the old man bathed in to create the smell of something going bad.
It took barely a minute to pop the lock and forge the check. He had just inserted the paper clip to lock the desk drawer back up when he heard the familiar irritating slide of slippers coming down the hall.
He yanked on the paper clip. It was stuck. The footsteps were at the door. He jammed the check in his pocket and left the paper clip dangling.
Donatelli came through the doorway in his stained pajamas, eyes blinking against the light, wisps of white hair sticking up wildly from his liver-spotted scalp. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. Boyle hurried to intercept him.
“What are you doing in my office?”
“I was doing some work on those new materials and couldn’t find my magnifying glass. I thought you might have left yours on your desk.”
“What kind of paleographer loses his magnifying glass?”
“A tired one.” Donatelli shuffled toward his desk. Father Boyle walked ahead of him. “I’m sorry I woke you. We should both go to bed. Those fragments will need all of our concentration.”
“I’ve been telling you that.” Donatelli looked at his desk as if to see if anything was amiss, eyes blinking as they tried to focus. He drifted behind the desk. The light from the pole lamp glinted off the paper clip. The priest hurried to click the light off, leaving only the dim light that spilled in from the hallway.
“Come, Monsignor, let’s go to bed. I will have the coffee ready for you in the morning.”
Donatelli allowed himself to be led from the room. “Stay out of my office unless I am here. You know I like everything just so.”
“Yes. I will. Good night.”
Father Boyle watched the stooped old man become a silhouette down the hall. He heard his own office door open behind him. Tarik came out and saw the figure disappearing into the darkness.
“Who is that? I thought you said—”
“It is a priest visiting from Bethlehem. He is staying in the Monsignor’s room while he is away.” The Bedouin’s dark eyes bore into him. The priest reached into his pocket. “Here.”
Tarik studied the check, then said, “I was not here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You never saw me tonight. There was no scrolls.”
Father Boyle started to ask why but thought better of it. He knew the most likely reason. Tarik had found his scroll far outside the territory of his Ta’amireh tribe. All assets were supposed to be given to his sheikh, who would then decide how to divide them up. Tarik didn’t want to share. The priest didn’t blame him. Neither did he.
At the door the Bedouin lingered a moment. Father Boyle saw something in his face. Concern, perhaps. “What is it, Tarik?”
“There is more to these scrolls than meets the eye.”
Father Boyle frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It has a power. Something about it. Something not good. I felt it in the cave. Like something guarding the jar, something that did not want me to take it. Did you not feel it?”
Bedouin were superstitious, but no more so than many groups he’d studied. There had been that ominous sigh when Tarik opened the jar... “No. Only the power of the words.”
Tarik stared at him for a long uncomfortable moment. “Very well,” he said. “My conscience is clear.” He disappeared into the darkness.
The Bedouin’s words nagged at the priest, but back at his desk he quickly became absorbed by what he’d deciphered:
I am Lot, nephew to Abraham. God hath sent his two most trusted angels to lead us safely west from Zoar to this
cave.
Tarik’s parting words came back to him, and he felt a growing unease.
He stared at the jar, aching to get to work on the scroll, but it would have to wait. He needed to start fresh, not when he was barely able to keep his eyes open. Its secrets would have to wait a little longer. He hid the jar behind some books and went to bed.
In the twilight world between sleep and wakefulness, he saw a shadow in the corner of the room. For a moment he thought Donatelli might have wandered in, but the shadow was far too big. He was so exhausted he tried to ignore it, but each time he opened his eyes it was still there. And each time it was closer.
He clicked on the lamp by his bed.
Nothing.
Turning off the light, he put his pillow over his head. Listening to the darkness, he almost expected to hear breathing. A gust of wind rattled his window, then all was quiet. The silence seemed different, stealthy somehow, and he was unable to shake the feeling of being watched.
Tarik and his mumbo-jumbo. There were no such things as jinn.
He took the pillow off his head. Nothing moved in the darkness. The window rattled again. He looked toward it. Two fiery red dots hovered outside. The priest’s eyes locked onto them, trying to figure out what they were.
Cigarettes of soldiers on patrol? Some kind of reflection? The eyes of a bird?
Eyes.
An instant later they were gone. Father Boyle pulled the pillow back over his head and tried to convince himself he had been imagining things.
He could not.
