Greek culture saturated with the notion of divine justice, the citizens of Thessaloniki paid heavily for their shameful behavior, enduring two years of privation. Food, fuel, and other basic necessities were in short supply. Hundreds perished from hunger. His own mother, forced to let go of the servants, took in laundry and learned to cook. Mercurius and his two sisters collected tinder in a small red wagon to ignite their mother’s pitiful cook fire. One day, toward the end of the occupation, he saw a Nazi officer leaving his mother’s bedroom. That night, a chicken miraculously appeared in their stewpot.
Soon after the war ended, the de Léon family immigrated to Chicago, a hirsute uncle with two spare bedrooms opening his door. In an episode similar to the one with the German officer, Mercurius caught his uncle Nikos buttoning his trousers as he left his mother’s bedroom. At the time, he’d considered it an act of disloyalty to his dead father. It wasn’t until many years later that he realized Melina de Léon had been forced to trade the only commodity she had—her extraordinary beauty—to provide for her children. Not only did Uncle Nikos, a butcher, daily provide fresh meat, he provided something that turned out to be priceless to Mercurius—a college education.
In his teen years, knowledge had been an escape. From the drudgery of mopping up entrails in his uncle’s butcher shop. From the shameful guilt of finding Rock Hudson more attractive than Elizabeth Taylor. In his twenties, while a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, knowledge became a gateway. A mind-blowing, consciousness-altering entry to the other side.
And, then, like a mugging in a dark alley, knowledge became a dangerous thing.
It was 1966. Twenty years earlier, the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls had been discovered by Arab Bedouin in the caves of Qumran. The scrolls, consisting of some nine hundred separate documents, had been hidden by a cloistered sect of Jews known as the Essenes. Contemporaries of the Christian Messiah, they’d maintained an impressive library in their secret grotto.
The amazing discovery proved to be the largest cache of biblical texts ever found. Moreover, the scrolls were of immense value to all three religions of the Book, containing writings from the Old Testament, noncanonical Apocryphal texts, and various sectarian manuscripts. All uncensored and unedited. And that worried religious leaders who feared the scrolls might ultimately prove “sacrilegious.” A direct challenge to accepted orthodoxy.
Early on, Mercurius became fascinated with one scroll in particular—the famous Copper Scroll. He’d just completed his doctoral work in ancient and extinct Semitic languages and had finagled a prestigious appointment at the Archaeological Museum in Amman, Jordan, to study the unique metal scroll. Unique, because of all the hundreds of scrolls, it was the only one not written on parchment or papyrus.
Unearthed in 1952, a preliminary translation was made, the Copper Scroll once again proving unique in that it didn’t contain any biblical scripture or commentary. Instead, it contained a detailed list of sixty-four different locations where an immense treasure trove of gold and silver had supposedly been hidden.
Was it any wonder that he’d been thrilled at the prospect of traveling to Jordan to study those twenty-three pieces of copper?
From the onset, Mercurius thought it odd that the scroll had been scribed on copper—of all materials!—and composed in an early square-form Hebrew script with intermittent Greek letters. An avid fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s, he approached the Copper Scroll like a detective rather than an academic.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
And the truth was astounding.
Soon after his arrival in Amman, he uncovered a secret code embedded in the Greek letters that punctuated the Hebrew script. But more surprising than that, the cleverly devised code spelled the name Akhenaton. He knew from his studies of ancient Egypt that the pharaoh Akhenaton had instituted a monotheistic religion that worshipped a sun god called Aten. The plot thickened when he discovered that Akhenaton and the Hebrew patriarch Moses had been contemporaries.
Suddenly, the biblical assertion that “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” took on new meaning for Mercurius. Could there have been a connection between the ancient Israelites and the monotheistic pharaoh? If he could prove that a link existed, it would certainly shed new light on the origins of Judaism.
Excited by the discovery, he shared his findings with several of his colleagues. Who among those esteemed academics was responsible for the catastrophe that followed, he couldn’t say. At the time, he didn’t much care who was to blame. He was too devastated by the fact that all of his research—twelve months’ worth—was stolen from his small windowless office at the Archaeology Museum and that a single word, punctuated with a bold exclamation point, had been scrawled on the wall next to his overturned desk—Heretic! Uncannily similar to the scare tactic used by the Nazis, who would scrawl the word Juden! on a house or storefront before shipping someone off to Auschwitz.
Afraid that he might be dealing with the same kind of blind hatred, Mercurius heeded the warning and never again mentioned the secret code embedded in the Copper Scroll. The ransacked office bespoke an incontrovertible truth—that human institutions are fundamentally corrupt; education, religion, and government were a sham hoisted upon mankind to deceive us into believing that we have some measure of control over our lives. We earn a degree, we bend a knee, we cast a vote. It was mere stagecraft to camouflage the evil that lurked in our midst. The perpetuation of a three-thousand-year-old deception. One that led all the way back to Akhenaton and Moses.
That long-ago day, as he stood in the small windowless office, it simply sufficed that he’d discovered the heretofore unknown connection between those two disparate figures. Later, many years later, in fact, he would comprehend the significance of that connection. For it was the root of all evil.
As providence would have it, the incident in Armana was significant for another reason—it was the Second Sign that he had been consecrated at birth for a great and glorious purpose. The First Sign had been revealed twenty-three years earlier—on that fateful night when his father, Osman de Léon, and the Kabbalist Moshe Benaroya had been forcibly marched to the train station.
You must always remember, little one, that you were named for the Bringer of the Light.
Do not fear the Light, Merkür. For it will lead you to your life’s purpose.
Another thirty-seven years would pass before the next sign was revealed to him. Thirty-seven years before he learned that his ordained purpose was to extinguish the dark fire that had brightly burned for countless centuries. By summoning a firestorm to douse the flames.
But to do so, he had to find the sacred relic.
Stepping into his study, Mercurius walked over to the window to draw the drapes, the glass reflecting the setting orb in the western sky. He pulled the heavy fabric panels, catching a glimpse of the dormant rose garden just beyond the window, beautifully splashed with bloody streaks.
Again, he considered the metal box that Saviour had seen Caedmon Aisquith carry into the hotel room. The more hidden a thing, the more holy. He smiled, well aware of what the Knights Templar had hidden in their New World colony. He knew because Moshe Benaroya, his father’s milk brother, had exposed the relic’s provenance in explicit detail.