“Speak to me,” he muttered.
On cue, his Doc Martens scuffed across an uneven surface in the center of the floor—a variation so slight he could easily have dismissed it. Then the ground seemed to shift slightly beneath his weight. He dipped the flashlight onto the spot and eased onto his knees. Flicking the Zippo shut, he slid it into his shirt pocket. He trailed his fingers through a dust layer blanketing the floor and detected a ridge. Pressing his face close to the floor, he gently blew away the dust to reveal a tight seam that cut a hard angle. He repeated the process until he’d uncovered a sizable rectangle cut into the floor.
A stone slab?
He tried working his meaty fingers into the seam. Nothing. Snapping to his feet, he paced to the passage opening, crouched down, and called to Ariel. “Bring in the tools . . . a pry bar too. And let’s get some lights in here. Quickly!”
“I’m on it,” she called back.
Once the interns funneled in with the gear, Amit had them set up batteryoperated pole lights around the chamber’s center. He momentarily mused on their lit faces, their untamed excitement. It brought back pleasant memories of his first student excavation at Masada.
Working a pry bar into the seam, Amit instructed Eli to mirror the action on the slab’s opposite side. He could see that the gangly kid was a bundle of nerves. “On three,” he said. Eli nodded. “One . . . two . . .”
The first attempt was sloppy but managed to unseat the slab. The second pinched Amit’s fingers when he prematurely slipped them beneath the stone—hard enough to take some skin and elicit what he considered a rather girlish yelp. A third tandem try levered the stone up enough for Ariel to wedge a pry bar into the opening, enabling Amit to fully grip the thing and drag it off to the side.
Catching his breath, Amit knelt along the edge, where carved steps dropped down into the hollow they’d uncovered. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Ariel immediately handed over his flashlight. Then the video camera was back in her hand and she started humming the theme to the Indiana Jones movies. “Da da da-dah, da da dah . . .”
The other students laughed, and Amit allowed himself a chuckle too as he clicked on the light and aimed it down the steps. He counted twelve treads cascading to a stone floor. “All right. Let me get a look down there, see what we’ve got.” These were the moments that defined the quest, he thought. He stood, dropped his left foot onto the first carved tread, and began his steady descent.
It was another tight fit for the Israeli as he folded and tucked himself against the hewn walls, the light playing shadow dances along the chiselscarred rock.
When Roman legions had swarmed over Qumran, they’d torched the village and slaughtered its inhabitants. Though there’d been little warning, the Essenes had managed to stash their most vital scrolls in these desert hills—a time capsule to preserve their heritage. But none of Qumran’s caves contained excavated rooms like this one. And why so purposely sealed away? What could the Essenes have been doing here? he wondered.
Adrenaline pumped through him as he negotiated the last three steps and touched down onto the floor. He deliberately closed his eyes for a three-count as he brought the light to waist level. Then he opened them.
What he saw made him gasp.
6
******
Belfast, Ireland
It had been nearly three months since Father Patrick Donovan had taken a sabbatical from the Vatican and returned to his childhood neighborhood in Belfast. Yet not a day passed that he didn’t think about the events leading up to his hasty departure.
And it was no wonder why.
Back in June he’d presented to the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Antonio Santelli, an authentic first-century codex containing eyewitness testament to Christ’s ministry, crucifixion, and secret burial beneath Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. To preempt the discovery of Christ’s mortal remains by Israeli engineers who were set to study the Mount’s structural integrity, the cardinal had employed a master thief named Salvatore Conte to forcefully extract the relic. Conte and his mercenary team had succeeded, but only after engaging in a sloppy firefight that left thirteen Israeli soldiers and police dead.
Conte had safely brought the procurement to Vatican City, where Donovan had arranged for its confidential authentication by two prominent scientists: Italian forensic anthropologist Dr. Giovanni Bersei and American geneticist Dr. Charlotte Hennesey.
The scientists’ findings had been astounding.
Upon the project’s completion, Cardinal Santelli ordered Conte to eliminate any trace of the relics, and those who’d studied it. Conte cleverly murdered Dr. Bersei in a Roman catacomb, but Dr. Hennesey managed to flee Vatican City before he could get to her. When Donovan had accompanied the killer to the Italian countryside on a mission to destroy the ossuary, the bones, and relics, Conte had made it known that Charlotte was to be marked for death in the United States. After a nasty struggle with fists and guns, however, Donovan had managed to put an end to Conte first.
Yes, with all that had happened, he was glad to be home.
There was a certain comfort here: a familiar damp chill to the air, the quilted gray clouds that washed away the lush peaks of Cavehill, the steely swells of the river Lagan.
But his homecoming had been bittersweet.
Following the Irish Republican Army’s voluntary disarmament in 2005, Donovan had been told, the last of his old schoolmates had uprooted their families to seek better opportunities in cities like Dublin, London, and New York. He’d also learned that in 2001, his best friend, Sean, had been imprisoned in Lisburn’s HMP Maghaberry for stabbing to death a prominent Protestant businessman during the Troubles—a fate Donovan himself had barely escaped when he was just a young man.
Donovan had moved in with his ailing eighty-one-year-old father, James, in the rebuilt two-bedroom redbrick row house off Crumlin Road standing on the footprint of his childhood home, which had been burned to the ground by rioting Unionists in 1969.
Most days were spent watching over the old man’s quaint luncheonette on Donegall Street, aptly named Donovan’s. As a young boy, Donovan had spent many hours in the store making change at the register, refreshing coffee, buttering rolls, sorting the newspapers, and restocking the refrigerated cases. So the routine brought a sense of comfort and familiarity.
However, it’d also been here where a smooth-talking patron named Michael had exploited fifteen-year-old Patrick Donovan’s naïveté and recruited him as an errand boy for the IR A. Prior to Donovan’s entering the seminary at eighteen, Da had considered renaming the establishment Donovan and Son. But like Abraham himself, Da couldn’t have been more pleased to lose his son to serve the Lord, especially after learning how Michael had so dangerously manipulated his only child.
It had taken a solid month for Donovan to get back up to speed: to learn how to run credit cards through the machine, work the new coffeemakers, and deal with the latest generation of vendors. The first two weeks, Da sat behind the counter coaching him, wearing a continuous smile beneath the rubber tubes running down from his nostrils to a portable oxygen tank. Then Da’s condition abruptly worsened to the point that he was homebound. So Donovan would tend the store during the day and spend quiet nights sipping whiskey and playing cards with him, making some small talk about politics and the day’s happenings at the store.