Fiona took this news without comment, and for a fleeting second, Pierce wondered if perhaps he was being a little too cavalier about her abilities. But this close to the prize, there wasn’t time for sweet talk. Right now, he needed Fiona the Kohen, the Baal’Shem, the last speaker of the Siletz tribal language.
He shone his lamp down the passage, a straight shot angling toward the mountain as far as the light extended. “Nobody has been here in over two thousand years,” he said. “We’re walking in the footsteps of Jeremiah the prophet.”
Fiona shrugged. “The air’s pretty fresh.”
She wasn’t wrong about that. Pierce knew from experience that strange things happened to the air in tombs and caverns that were shut off from the outside world for long periods of time. Methane could seep through the rock and collect into deadly clouds. Decaying rock could produce radon and other poisonous gases. Fresh air could mean another entrance, and that was not a notion Pierce found at all comforting.
Gallo gave his hand a squeeze. She knew how much this meant to him.
There were no traps or snakes, which was a little disappointing but not surprising. Between the sealed cave entrance and the Ark’s own self-defense mechanism, there was little need for additional protection. The only real surprise was the length of the passage.
After walking for ten full minutes, Pierce broke the silence. “I thought the Ark would be near the entrance. The location of the Ark’s resting place should have been a function of the same calculation that brought us here. Now, the math is all messed up.”
“How far do you think we’ve come?” Gallo asked.
Pierce shrugged. “Half a mile? Less?”
“How much is that in Sacred cubits?” Fiona remarked.
Gallo snapped her fingers. “Of course. There was a third number in that account. Solomon had 80,000 stonecutters in the mountains, 70,000 bearers. And 3,600 overseers.”
“3,600 Sacred cubits,” Pierce said, grasping the significance. “The final distance Jeremiah would have to travel once he reached the entrance to the cave.”
“That’s about 7,500 feet,” Fiona said, doing the math in her head. “A mile and a half.”
A mile and a half. Pierce felt even more certain that they were on the right track. He started counting his steps and checking his watch to judge their pace. The passage itself was an anomaly, far too straight to be the work of nature, but he saw no obvious sign of tool marks on the walls that might indicate the handiwork of laborers.
Ten more minutes passed and Pierce’s eagerness to see the prize at the end of the passage grew to something resembling anxiety. The seconds were stretching out like Silly Putty. He checked his watch, expecting five minutes to have passed, and discovered that only thirty seconds had elapsed since his last check.
“Do you think the Ark is distorting time?” he said. “Like in that movie where time slows down the closer you get to a black hole?”
“It only seems to slow down from an outside point of view,” Fiona corrected. “It still feels normal to the person near the black hole.”
“There’s a name for what you’re experiencing,” Gallo told him. “It’s the watched-pot-never-boils effect.”
He knew she was right but that didn’t make it any easier.
Then, with no apparent warning, the passage opened up into a larger lobe-shaped chamber, at least two hundred feet across, and just as abruptly, it ended.
“It’s a cul-de-sac,” Pierce said, a gnawing feeling growing in his stomach. He ran to the far wall, then began skirting along the wall, making his way back to the mouth of the passage. “This can’t be right. Look around. Maybe there’s a secret door. Or…” He turned to Fiona. “Do you sense anything?”
She shook her head.
“George, look up there.” Gallo pointed to the ceiling in the center of the chamber. The beam of light from her headlamp had disappeared into a shadowy recess, a hole about eight feet across, and a good ten feet above their heads. “It’s an oculus. Like in the Pantheon. Could that be where we need to go?”
Pierce moved to stand under it and shone his light up into the opening. The oculus, a design feature of domed Roman temples from antiquity, was a hole that allowed both sunlight and rain to fall into the interior. This vertical shaft however was dark and without end, but it did underscore a fact that Pierce had not considered. The long passage had gone under the mountain ridge, which meant they were hundreds of feet underground.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Everything we’ve found suggests that Jeremiah came in through the same passage we did. I’ll sweep with the GPR. There has to be another way out of here.”
He started to unsling his backpack, but as he did, he realized there was something different about the floor beneath the opening, right where he was standing.
“No,” he whispered, dropping to his knees, tracing the carved outline with his fingers. “Oh, no.”
Gallo and Fiona were at his side a moment later.
Fiona pointed at the carving. “Is that…?”
“A Templar Cross,” Gallo supplied. “I’m afraid it is.”
“The Ark isn’t here,” Pierce said, his voice a whisper. “The Knights Templar took it eight hundred years ago.”
THIRTY-NINE
“Abba Paulos tells me that you are interested in the Ark of the Covenant.”
Carter stared at the man the priest had introduced as Abuna Mateos, the Bishop of Axum. Mateos had a high-pitched voice and spoke with a cadence that sounded almost musical. He was older, with tufts of wispy gray hair protruding out from under the cylindrical gold-colored cap, which matched his long vestments. But his clean-shaven face looked almost youthful, making it impossible to guess his age with certainty.
“You speak English?” she said.
Mateos, who had been looking at Lazarus, turned to face her with a perturbed expression. Carter knew that look welclass="underline" the why are you speaking to me, woman look. She had experienced it many times during her years working with relief agencies. To his credit, Mateos hid his displeasure with a smile. “Yes. Also French, Arabic, Hebrew, and of course, Amharic.”
Lazarus thumbed a button on his phone, disabling the babelfish. “I’m Erik Lazarus. This is Dr. Felice Carter.” She noted the emphasis on the title, an attempt to elevate her status somewhat in his eyes. “And yes, we’d like to talk about the Ark.”
Mateos listened, without comment or visible reaction, as they made the connection between the recent earthquakes and solar events with the Ark of the Covenant, and more time trying to establish that they were not kooks or treasure hunters.
After about five minutes of this, the clergyman raised his hands. “Let me understand. You believe that Ark can be used to stop these earthquakes. That is your only interest in it?”
“That’s right,” Carter said. “I know it sounds crazy—”
“Certainly not. God has power over the heavens and Earth. The question before us is whether it is His will to do so. In the Gospels, the Lord warned us that in the Last Days, there would be earthquakes in many places and great signs in Heaven.” His solemn face cracked with a smile. “He also said that we should not be troubled by such things, for the End is not yet come.”
He paused a moment, studying their faces, as if trying to decide whether or not to trust them. “Please, come with me. I want to show you something.”
He led them outside and around to the south end of the cathedral building. At the end of a sprawling courtyard stood the old cathedral, a more traditional looking structure from the seventeenth century. Silhouetted against the old church, separated from the courtyard by a tall wrought-iron fence, were a pair of smaller cube-shaped chapels, the larger of the two topped with an onion dome and a cross.