Helios (Cerberus Group Book 2) Page 22

  “Actually, that may not be right either,” Pierce said. “The name Yahweh showed up later in history. Some scholars think it might have been borrowed from another culture. The oldest name for the deity worshipped by the Israelites seems to be ‘El Shaddai’ or simply ‘El.’”

  Fiona didn’t have the same encyclopedic knowledge of the subject as Pierce and Gallo, but she did know languages. “‘El’ is just the word for ‘God.’ The same root word as ‘Allah.’ It’s a title, not a name.”

  “Right. And Shaddai is usually translated as ‘almighty.’ Though there’s a lot of debate about its actual meaning. Some scholars think it meant ‘mountain’ or ‘wilderness.’ In fact, it could be the linguistic root for ‘Sinai,’ a reference to the time the Israelites spent there in the time of Moses. Or vice versa. Shaddai could also mean ‘destroyer,’ or possibly even ‘mother.’ The feminine form of the same word is ‘shekinah.’”

  “Shaddai, Sinai, Shekinah.” Fiona said, managing a wry smile. “Great Goddess Almighty.”

  “George, you’re confusing the girl,” Gallo said.

  “Jewish mystics believe that God has seven different names, all of them considered holy. Whatever the true name was, the one thing we do know is that it’s in an extinct language.”

  “The Mother Tongue,” Fiona said again, understanding what was being asked of her. Jeremiah had used the secret name of God as a key to lock up the cave where he had hidden the Ark of the Covenant. She was the key that would open it again.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  His whole life had been leading up to this moment. A quarter of a century had passed, and the dream that had begun in a movie theater was about to reach fruition. George Pierce was about to make the greatest discovery in the history of archaeology.

  He looked down at the GPS display on the phone. A red pin marked the coordinates Dourado had uploaded. A blue arrow marked his phone’s location. The two were nearly touching.

  He pulled the car to the side of the road and shut off the engine. The Mount Nebo overlook was behind them, less than a mile away. Pierce could distinguish the church and the sculpture of the Brazen Serpent silhouetted against the azure sky. In front of them, the slope fell away, descending three thousand feet to the blue waters of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the Earth’s surface, 1,407 feet below sea level. The pinned location was just two hundred feet north of the road, a spot that could not have been less remarkable.

  There was nothing there to suggest a cave, but as Dourado had indicated, that was the point.

  With Fiona and Gallo in tow, he started out across the arid ground, watching as the arrow tip moved ever closer to the red pin. Closer.

  A message flashed across the top of the screen.

  You have arrived at your destination.

  Pierce took a deep breath, savoring the moment, then turned to Fiona. “Anything?”

  She shook her head.

  He frowned. “Nothing at all? Did you try it with the sphere?”

  Fiona held up the orb and waggled it in front of his face. “Zip. Nada. Nothing. Just like on Mount Sinai.”

  She compressed the memory metal into a smaller crumple—about the size of a ping pong ball—and shoved it into her pocket.

  “Let’s try the GPR,” Pierce said, discouraged, but not ready to give up.

  He shrugged out of the backpack and took out the Groundshark. The ground penetrating radar would reveal any tunnels or void spaces up to ten feet below the surface. “Keep an eye out,” he said. “I’d rather not have to explain what we’re doing to any curious passersby.”

  He was not certain who owned the land on which they now stood. A ground penetrating radar survey was considered only marginally less invasive than actual digging, and if their activities were reported to the authorities the consequences would be severe. Pierce’s professional reputation and UN affiliation would make matters worse.

  Gallo turned toward the mountain, the likeliest place from which they might be observed. “All clear for now.”

  Pierce switched on the unit and knelt down, sweeping it back and forth. The display showed a dense subsurface—solid rock just below the thin layer of compacted sediment. He covered the target area and then started working outward, expanding the search area one square yard at a time. As he did, he felt less like Indiana Jones and more like a desperate treasure hunter with a metal detector and a crazy dream.

  He should have known better. Numerology was just an elaborate form of pareidolia, seeing patterns where none truly existed.

  Sacred cubits and recurring numbers, my a—

  Hold on.

  He stopped, then went back and swept the last section again, eyes riveted to the image on the screen.

  “There’s a void here!”

  THIRTY-SIX

  From his concealed position in the back of a minivan parked atop Mount Nebo, Craig Williams stared through the high-powered scope at the three figures. He settled the crosshairs on the kneeling figure—the man, George Pierce—watching him sweep a handheld device back and forth across the arid hardpan. Williams used the tick marks on the crosshairs to estimate the range to target and the time it would take for a bullet to travel that distance.

  Three seconds, he thought.

  He shifted the scope onto the older woman.

  Older maybe, but I’d tap that.

  He had not been told her name, but with her long black hair and olive complexion, she looked kind of like the lady in that last James Bond flick, the French actress.

  Sophie…no, Monica. Monica… Something.

  He decided to call the dark-haired woman ‘the French Chick.’ She was mostly standing still, though every few seconds, her head moved slowly from side-to-side, looking around.

  Williams moved to the last person, the younger woman—she looked like a kid. Black hair, dark skin… Mexican maybe? She wasn’t glamorous like the French Chick, but she wasn’t fugly, for damn sure.

  He centered the crosshairs on the side of her head, his trigger finger curling almost subconsciously.

  No wind. Three seconds to target.

  His finger curled.

  “Bang,” he whispered.

  With a sigh of pent-up frustration, he moved the crosshairs back onto Pierce, the only member of the group who appeared to be doing anything. Exactly what he was doing was a mystery to Williams, but he had been hired to observe, nothing more.

  No sniping today.

  The scope wasn’t even attached to a rifle. The man who had contracted him and the rest of the Alpha Dog team had fronted them the money to buy black market weapons, ‘just in case,’ but he had made it clear that killing Pierce and the others was not the primary objective.

  Williams was a veteran of the Iraq war, where he had been a sniper before being discharged. He took a job with a private military contracting firm called Alpha Dog Solutions, so he could keep doing what he did best: kicking ass and taking names.

  Alpha Dog’s leadership had made some bad decisions, lost key personnel in botched field ops, and ultimately gone bust, but their misfortune had been Williams’s opportunity. He had dusted off the name and rebooted the defunct company. The contracts weren’t as exciting as they had been back in the glory days, but the Alpha Dog name still held a certain cachet with potential clients, especially those who didn’t know any better.

  Actually, this was their first big A-list gig, and Williams did not want to screw it up. If the man said watch, then watch he would.

  Pierce was no longer on his knees. Instead, he was standing, gesturing wildly. Found something, did you?

  The French Chick was smiling—she was too cool to get excited—and the Mexican Girl just looked a little worried. Nevertheless, she took a step forward, positioning herself on the exact spot where Pierce had been kneeling a moment before. Her lips began moving, though she didn’t appear to be speaking to anyone.

  Then, she took a step forward and vanished.

  Williams jerked the scope back and forth, trying to locate
her again. He reduced the magnifying power of the scope from 25x to 15x, then to 10x. He could see the other two, standing there, staring at that same spot, but there was no sign of the girl.

  Where the hell did she go?

  Suddenly, she popped back into view. Part of her, anyway. The girl’s head and shoulders protruded from the desert floor, but everything below the center of her chest was concealed.

  What is that, a trap door or something? he thought.

  She made a ‘come on’ gesture and then was gone again. After a moment, Pierce and the French Chick stepped forward and also vanished.

  Williams scanned the area trying to find the hidden door through which the group had passed but there wasn’t one. The trio had stepped into the ground and disappeared. He set the scope down and turned to look at his employer.

  “Mr. Fallon, you are not going to believe this.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Axum, Ethiopia

  Carter’s face was hidden by a netela—the traditional head covering worn by many Ethiopian women, but when she turned her head to look at him, Lazarus saw an uncharacteristic anxiety in her eyes. Felice Carter was one of the strongest women—no, that was wrong—one of the strongest people he had ever known. She had to be, to bear the burden fate had laid upon her. That strength took the shape of exceptional mental discipline. She wasn’t without emotion like Spock from Star Trek, but she knew how to keep emotion and fear from short-circuiting rational thought.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She looked at him, smiled, and gestured out the window of their taxi. “It’s just this place. Ethiopia. This is where it happened.”

  Lazarus nodded. For all their time together, this was something they had never discussed in detail. He had learned of the event before meeting her for the first time, and there had never been cause to question her further about the particulars of that incident. He knew that Carter had been in Ethiopia as part of an expedition looking for prehistoric genetic material in the Great Rift Valley, where the remains of the oldest primate ancestors of humanity had been discovered. They had spent much of their two years together on the African continent, but their travels had never brought them back to Ethiopia, the place where Carter had been exposed to the paleo-historic retrovirus that had turned her into a living evolutionary kill-switch.

  Everyone had their issues, and hers was a doozy. But his was pretty intense, too.

  “We’re at least three hundred miles from there,” he said. He meant it to sound reassuring, but they had traveled thousands of miles from Switzerland to Ethiopia. Three hundred miles didn’t seem all that far by comparison.

  Axum had been the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Aksum, but now it was a small city of fifty thousand inhabitants, poised on the edge of the ever-encroaching desert. There were as many camels as cars on the main paved road. There was an airport though, about five miles from the center of town. The architecture was simple and traditional, mostly adobe-covered brick buildings. Lazarus saw no evidence of earthquake damage. The inhabitants of the region had been spared that additional hardship.

  Carter offered a sad smile. “Same country. Same people. We were here for weeks before it happened. I got to know some of the locals very well. And one of them…” She trailed off, her smile slipping along with a measure of her control.

  Lazarus didn’t press the issue. “Is that when you learned about the rumor of the Ark being here?”

  She shifted, packing the emotions away. “Rumor isn’t the right word for it. The Ark is part of Ethiopia’s cultural heritage. Every single Ethiopian Orthodox church in the world has a consecrated replica of the Ark. That’s a tradition that goes back at least to the fourth century. The traditional belief that the Ark is here goes back even further. The Kingdom of Aksum, which is where this city got its name, converted to Judaism in the time of Solomon.”

  “You did your homework before you came here, didn’t you?”

  “I saw a special about it on the Discovery Channel.” Carter smiled.

  “So do you believe the Ark is here?”

  She shrugged. “Until last night, I didn’t even think it was a real thing. But George seems to think it’s real enough, so maybe it is.”

  “Do you think it’s here?” Lazarus asked.

  Before she could answer, the taxi stopped in front of a dirt road that cut through a wooded area for at least a hundred yards before ending at an enormous, and almost futuristic-looking domed structure.

  Lazarus handed their driver two hundred birr notes—about twenty dollars—and thanked the man. “Betam ahmesugenalew.”

  The voice was not his own, but an auto-tuned approximation, the Amharic translation supplied courtesy of Dourado’s babelfish translation system. The driver replied in the same language, and a fraction of a second later, Lazarus heard the English translation in his earpiece. “No problem.”

  They got out and started down the dirt path to The Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo cathedral said by some to house the Ark of the Covenant. Along the way, they passed several locals, all wearing long white garments and head coverings. The women, like Carter, wore netela scarves, and the men were similar in wraps called kutas. Directly ahead, lay the front of the domed building, with a façade of large arches, the largest of which framed the wooden double doors leading inside.

  Lazarus muted the phone so the babelfish translators wouldn’t translate their conversation. “That’s a church? It looks more like a moonbase.”

  “That cathedral was built in the 1950s. Modern architecture was all the rage then, I guess. But there’s been a church here almost as long as there have been Christians in Ethiopia.”

  She said nothing more on the subject, remaining silent as they ascended the steps and passed through the large wooden doors and into the church.

  Lazarus was a bit surprised at the interior’s brightness. The apse was well-lit thanks to a ring of windows atop the dome and several arched windows with clear and colored glass. The peach-colored walls were adorned with murals and icons, all rendered in bright colors. The blue sky in several of the paintings stood in stark contrast to the red carpet and the orange curtains behind the Eucharist altar. He was still trying to process the explosion of color when Carter pointed to the altar. “There it is.”

  He focused on the rectangular structure, adorned with a relief that he could not quite make out from the entrance, and a gilt overlay. “That’s the Ark?”

  “In a manner of speaking. It’s a tabot, a replica, but it does contain a copy of the Ten Commandments made from the original. So in a way, it is an Ark of the Covenant.”

  “But it won’t have what we need to shut down the Black Knight.” He kept studying the altar. He repeated the question that she had avoided answering. “Do you think the real Ark is here?”

  She sighed. “I don’t know. I think Pierce is right that there were powerful political reasons for the Ethiopian rulers to claim that the Ark was here, but I also think you can’t just ignore the fact that millions of Ethiopians believe it, and have for more than two thousand years.”

  “A lot of people think Elvis is still alive. That doesn’t make it true.”

  A faint grin touched her lips. “It doesn’t make it untrue either.”

  “Point taken.” He nodded his head in the direction of the altar. “If every Ethiopian church has one, how are we going to recognize the real deal? How do we tell the real Elvis from the impersonators?”

  “The real Ark is covered in gold. I’m guessing they didn’t go that extra mile with the copies. And then there’s the lid with the angels.”

  He noticed a priest, a middle-aged man wearing gray vestments, moving in their direction. “Game time,” he said. “How do we want to play this?”

  “I may not be a believer, but I don’t feel comfortable lying to a priest.”

  “Cards on the table, then.” He unmuted the mic on the phone and took a step toward the priest. “Good afternoon. I’m Erik Lazarus,
Director of Operations for the Cerberus Group. Who can I talk to about borrowing the Ark of the Covenant?”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jordan

  Walking through not-quite-solid rock was a little like walking through dense fog. Although Pierce had donned his headlamp before, he couldn’t see the light, or anything else, until the crossing was complete and he stepped out onto the floor of a rough natural cave. Fiona was already there, her headlamp shining down the unexplored passage.

  The passage, a narrow slot in the rock just higher than he was tall, reminded him of the Siloam Tunnel in Jerusalem, a seventeen-hundred-foot long tunnel carved in the days of King Hezekiah to provide water to the city during times of siege. This passage was wider, and of course, bone dry.

  His excitement was back with a vengeance, but now that the prize was at last within his grasp, he was mindful of the other lessons he had learned from his fictional hero. “Okay, watch your step in here. There might be traps or…”

  “Snakes?” Gallo asked with a wry smile.

  “I was going to say other dangers, but yes, snakes or some other kind of guardian creature. We need to be on the lookout for stuff like that. Remember those things in Arkaim? I think long-term exposure to Originator relics can have an effect on evolution.”

  Fiona glanced down at the sphere in her hand. “Maybe I shouldn’t be hanging onto this thing then?”

  “I’m sure you’re safe,” Pierce said. “In fact, I know it.”

  Gallo raised an eyebrow. “Why do I get the impression there’s something you’re not telling us?”

  “Remember how I told you that only the Kohen—someone from the line of Moses’s brother Aaron—could safely approach the Ark? Well I think there’s a scientific explanation for that. A genetic trait that makes them immune to the more dangerous effects of Originator technology. Fiona has that trait.”