He picked up the box cutter and got down to work, melting a section of the lead solder around the lid and running the box cutter through the softened metal. It took him ten minutes to work his way around the entire lid. When he was done he put down the torch and the box cutter and silently turned to Meg.
"You open it," she said with a smile that didn't go with the hard, almost dangerous look in her eyes. "You were just as responsible for finding it as I was."
Holliday nodded. The group around the table watched carefully. There was a muffled cough from somewhere. The Edwards woman looked coolly skeptical and Miles Bainbridge had one eyebrow lifted in mild, patronizing disbelief. His wife just smiled with her best Dale Evans-Partridge family sidekick look. The sixty-something blonde in the red dress and the Botox face looked suspiciously like her husband had prayed for a lobotomy and got his wish.
Holliday caught a shadowy hint of movement beyond the windows. He ignored it and carefully pulled off the lid and put it aside. The room was utterly silent. There was another muted cough. Holliday peered into the box and almost burst out laughing at what he saw.
The contents were a stroke of genius and a marvel of misdirection. He stepped aside and let Meg Sinclair do the honors since she had obviously masterminded the brilliant deception. There was another cough and this time Holliday realized it came from outside the door, but all eyes were on Meg.
She removed the contents of the True Ark one by one and laid them out on the soft surface of the moving blanket. The Holy Grail was exactly as she'd described it, a roughly turned wooden cup that looked as though it had been made on some ancient lathe, which it probably had; the Egyptians had used bow lathes a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Easy enough to find on the archaeological black market.
The Crown of Thorns was made of old rusted iron, a common torture device used by the early Romans. The cloth part of the device was long gone but the intent was still clear: a sack was fitted over the head coming down to the eyebrows in front and to the mid-neck in back, covering the ears. Heavy iron chain was sewn into the hem with the chain just above the eyes, around the ears and down to the middle of the neck in back.
The purpose of this was to weigh the sack and produce eight to ten pounds of downward pressure. Inside the cloth at the eye line and going all around were inward-facing, slightly downward-pointing thorns of iron. The weight of the chain pulled the iron thorns into the flesh of the head, and sometimes even through the skull and into the brain. The device was used well into the Middle Ages and was a favorite of the Spanish Inquisition.
The Ring of Christ was just as impossible to date for authentication as the chalice and the crown. It was a simple bronze ring, justifiably tarnished with age and with a coinlike upper surface. The Romans and the people they conquered in the Holy Land were very likely to have worn rings just like it in the first century.
The design on the coin on the upper surface showed the Chi-Rho X-shaped symbol that was the combination of the first two letters of Christ's name in Ancient Greek. Between the arms of the X were the symbols for alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. Together the Chi-Rho symbol was used as a sigil, or magic seal, by early Christians. The ring seemed terribly familiar and Holliday suddenly remembered seeing one almost exactly like it in a little museum at Kourion on the Island of Cyprus.
Meg Sinclair saved the best for last, reverently removing the shroud, which was actually nothing more than a large shred of rotting cloth. Holliday grinned.
He had no doubt that if tested the cloth would show remnants of human tissue and various organic stains, and if dated would show it to be contemporary with the time of Christ. The cloth was almost certainly byssus, the fine white linen typically used for the wrappings of late Pharaonic era Egyptian burials. Taken altogether the relics were a tour de force. Meg glanced into the box one last time and pulled out something else: two interlocking pieces of wood, probably imported cedar from the mountain slopes of Syria. Jean de Saint- Clair's Instrument of God, the early Jacob's Quadrant, that had allowed him to navigate his way to the Farther Shore and an exact copy of the one he'd found in the ancient vizier's tomb in Libya the year before.
Meg turned to him, smiling, and then she winked. Holliday paled as the truth sank in. Meg had known about the navigation instrument from the very beginning. That meant that Bernheim, the French naval historian, had been in Rex Deus's pocket well before they'd met in La Brasserie Malakoff in Paris.
And it was Bernheim who'd pointed him toward Brother Morvan and inevitably to his meeting with Meg Sinclair in the chapel on Mont Saint-Michel. He cursed himself for a fool. He'd been set up from the start and he hadn't seen it, even though part of him must have known that the meeting at the island fortress was too much of a coincidence, the first of many, in fact. Now it was going to cost him his life as well as Peggy and Rafi's.
Operation Assyrian began just like Byron's poem described-like a wolf coming down on the fold, the sheep in this instance being the members of Rex Deus. The only warning was the cracking triple bark of the Galil mounted grenade launchers and the shattering sound of breaking glass. By instinct Holliday dropped to the floor, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his ears. He had a pretty good idea of what was coming.
Three heavily armed soldiers clad in black armored vests, black balaclava ski masks and dark goggles rolled through the ruptured stained-glass windows, following the three grenades that were still spinning down the length of the refectory table.
Two of them were flash-bang stun grenades and the other was smoke. The flash-bangs went off first, blinding everyone at the table as every retinal receptor short-circuited along with an eardrum-rupturing blast of disorienting 180-decibel sound. A split second later the smoke grenade went off and the room began to fill with thick yellow smoke.
There were moans and screams all around Holliday as he climbed to his feet and peered into the smoke. People blindly stumbled into him as he struggled to find the door. There was a crashing sound and the door into the room burst open and he heard a loud voice bellowing, "Sa'al Holliday, to me!"
Sa'al was Israeli for Lieutenant Colonel. Holliday fought his way to the door along with the rest of the dazed, blind and deafened members of Rex Deus who were still standing.
One of them was the Pentagon general. Holliday elbowed him in the throat and the heavyset man went down. The only thing between him and the door was the reeling figure of Miles Bainbridge, the cash or credit card televangelist who was rubbing at his tear-stained cheeks and moaning. Holliday cocked his fist and punched him in the mouth as hard as he could, feeling the expensive capped teeth shattering beneath his knuckles. Finally he made it to the door.
A black-suited figure gripped him by the arm. "Colonel Holliday?"
"Yes."
"Long time no see, sir. Please come with me and hurry, the clock's ticking."
The man in black virtually dragged him out of the room. Holliday noticed a silenced Glock 17 in his hand. One of Katherine Sinclair's heavies was slouched on the floor, his own Glock on the floor beside him and his brains leaking onto the wall.
"He drew down on me," said the man in black. They rushed down the corridor to a narrow set of stairs leading down. "We have to hurry, sir, please." They clattered down the stairs with other black-suited soldiers close behind them.
"You're Shaldag? Unit 5101?" Holliday asked, referring to the Israeli Special Forces group. Shaldag was supposedly responsible for marking the target for Operation Babylon, the destruction of the nuclear reactor at Osirak in Iraq.
"We don't exist, sir," answered the man, gripping his arm again. They stepped out into the big commercial-style kitchen in the basement of Poplar Hill. "And we were never here, sir." The man's voice was familiar but Holliday couldn't quite place it. They reached the tunnel leading to the stables. Holliday saw another of Katherine Sinclair's guards sprawled across the floor. The results of those strange ethereal coughing sounds Holliday had heard.