Читать книгу The 13th Apostle - Richard Heller - Страница 16

Day Five, early morning

Entrance Gallery, Shrine of the Book

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Tuesday was Kids’ Day at The Shrine of the Book Museum. Hassan Ben Gaza hated the weekly intrusion. He hated the indulged children. Most of all, he hated their infidel parents and grandparents who had expropriated the land of his ancestors.

A group of schoolchildren blocked his way. He skirted around them with practiced skill. Had he been seen, Hassan would have been forced to endure their taunts. Twisted across the shoulders and back, his huge skull looked as if it might topple off his misshapen body. A matrix of wrinkles crisscrossed his face. It was no wonder that more than one child, confronted by Hassan in the hall, had whispered the word “mummy” to a giggling companion. Their derision held more truth than they would ever know. Like the mummies who filled the screens of the old horror movies that Hassan so loved, he too waited patiently to make his dream of retribution come true.

Four years earlier, Maluka had rescued Hassan from a life of misery and crime. Out of work and desperate for money in a city in which forty men competed for even the most menial of jobs, Hassan had been spending his nights breaking into cars. The few shekels for which he risked his life and freedom were barely enough to pay for his family’s basic necessities but kept them together as a family.

On the night that changed his life, Hassan lay flat on his back across the front seat of a car, attempting to dismantle the radio by flashlight. It was three in the morning and the street was deserted.

Maluka did not see the intruder until he was within a few feet of the car. Hassan had jumped up and caught Maluka with a stranglehold that Maluka did not attempt to resist. Hassan hesitated, uncertain whether to cut his victim’s throat or run. Quietly, Maluka suggested that Hassan join him for a cup of coffee at an all-night restaurant. Hassan anticipated some unscrupulous but profitable offer. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.

During the next two hours, Maluka elicited Hassan’s most deeply felt regrets and frustrations; a litany of the painful disappointments that had forced him to undertake such acts of desperation.

Never had Hassan met such a man. Maluka showed him understanding where others would have condemned him, offered compassion where others would have demanded punishment, and, in doing so, revealed himself to be the spiritual leader in whom Hassan could find hope and meaning.

Maluka put him to work as a gopher in his video production studio only a few miles from where he first found him that fateful night. Hassan’s days were filled with the fetching and delivering of the million things that were needed to make the famous Muslims for World Truth Videos. Shown each night of Ramadan, Maluka’s television specials were renowned for their powerful portrayal of the inhumanity of the West. Hassan never missed a broadcast. These were the product of Hassan’s loins as great as any child.

When Hassan had proven himself for two years, Maluka rewarded him with an opportunity greater than Hassan had ever imagined. He had been chosen to serve as the eyes and ears of MWT—down within the very belly of the enemy.

“Where no hope existed, Allah has provided the way,” Maluka said gently. At any time in the past, it would have been impossible to place Hassan within the all-Israeli workforce at the Israel Museum. With the signing of the exhibition agreement between the two Museums, however, all had been changed. Included in the agreement, at the Museum of Amman’s insistence, a minimal number of non-Israelis were to be added as long-term employees. It was only a token stipulation, meant to provide public relations opportunities intended to calm those opposed to the arrangement. Still, the stipulation provided the small window of opportunity that would allow Hassan to be interviewed, then hired.

“To others, your work will appear menial, to our cause it will be immeasurable,” Maluka explained. There, among the most sacred of Jewish and Christian archives and artifacts, within the Museum itself, Hassan would sweep floors and empty garbage while carrying precious information back to the man who had given him life.

He had been sent with one purpose: to provide proof of the secrets the Dead Sea Scrolls held and that the Museum concealed from the public eye for decades.

“Imagine,” Maluka said, “with each note you copy and photo you take, you will help us lay bare a conspiracy perpetrated by some of the most respected men in the world. The guardians of these antiquities, past and present, will stand naked, exposed as those who have helped to perpetuate the supreme hoax.

“Once revealed, the secreted messages within these scrolls will prove beyond doubt that Jesus was nothing more than a mere mortal man and that the Church has been but a means to enslave its people as well as our own.”

“And then…” Hassan urged.

“And then our people and our faith shall be vindicated,” Maluka said.

“And truth shall prevail,” Hassan added.

It had taken the first eighteen months of Hassan’s employ to work his way into invisibility. Moving from corridor to office, his sad lowly figure was barely noticed. With each office cleaning, with each access to more secure storage facilities, he was able to avail himself of greater proof of the secreted messages of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

His daily ritual was unerringly secure; all possible relevant information was stored below the plastic bags that lined the garbage cans within each room. He remained well into the night with the excuse that he was a bit slow and was willing to work longer hours in exchange for the Museum’s tolerance of his physical limitations.

“You pay me to get the job done, not punch a time clock,” he once remarked to the Director. DeVris had smiled, most likely with the thought that Hassan had little else to do to fill his nights.

Quite the contrary. Hassan worked late into the evening. Each hidden document had to be retrieved from its trash can, scanned into e-mail, then sent to Maluka on one of the computers for which Hassan had secured the password. When all had been transmitted, each document or photo had to be returned to its original location or destroyed. They were long days and longer nights, but Maluka’s e-mail of confirmation each evening made it all worthwhile.

Then all was changed in a heartbeat. It was a typical evening, and Hassan had been involved in the process of sending Maluka the translation of a relatively unimportant section of one of the scrolls. He was seated at DeVris’ computer and noticed a new e-mail had arrived from Ludlow. The Professor had no say in the decision to keep the most inflammatory sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls out of the reach of the public, so his communications were not among those that Maluka required Hassan to monitor.

On that night, however, the subject line of Ludlow’s e-mail to DeVris pulled Hassan’s attention from his task. On impulse, he opened it. The “secured the find” subject line on the e-mail was not explained in its message, but Hassan forwarded the e-mail to Maluka anyway.

In the three months that followed, Maluka had learned that an eleventh-century diary had been secured by Ludlow; one that could lead them to an artifact more valuable and more damning to the mythology of Jesus than any message contained within the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The cost of this knowledge had been sizable; two deaths of key personnel at the Israel Museum that the police attributed to a random mugging and a unforeseen suicide along with the temporary collapse of the Israel Museum’s entire data base. The latter Maluka had not anticipated. Once he had infiltrated the secure portions of the system, an irreversible fail-safe mechanism triggered a shut down of the entire database. Fortunately, Maluka had time to access and download the information that he needed and then, in the few minutes before the shutdown, was able to introduce a tourniquet program that concealed the breach while affording future access to all e-mail.

“But what about all of the months of work?” Hassan had asked with some disappointment. “Are we to leave all of that behind?”

“I have come to realize that the public is more fickle than I imagined. A sixty-year-old conspiracy holds no interest for them,” Maluka explained. “Others tried to expose the cover-up in the nineties as the Vatican Conspiracy but people quickly lost interest. With the power of MWT Videos behind me, I believed I could inspire the public to demand the truth, though recently I have begun to doubt it.

“This, on the other hand,” Maluka continued, “is a collusion in the making. And if we are able to procure the scroll described in the diary, if indeed—as Ludlow believes—it dates back to the time of Jesus, every eye in the world will be upon us. This, my friend, is a gift from the hand of Allah. A discovery so great that none will dare deny it. And, most importantly, one that might yet be acquired before the Christian Infidels can once again swallow it up.”

Hassan had been reluctant to give up so easily. “But if Ludlow and DeVris locate the scroll, they won’t hide it,” Hassan had protested. “Why don’t we let them find it and bring it to the world?”

“As others before them did with many of the Dead Sea Scrolls?” Maluka asked pointedly. “No, DeVris is a poor academic in a world of very wealthy supporters. He watches contributors, without blinking an eye, write checks for ten times his annual salary. He has become bitter and greedy and sees the scroll only in terms of the potential wealth it may bring him.”

“But Ludlow…” Hassan interrupted.

“Yes, Ludlow sees the scroll’s worth in terms of the truth it may hold. He is honest but weak. A bad combination. If they find this scroll, DeVris will sell it to the highest bidder, and Ludlow will have no say in the matter.”

Hassan hesitated. He knew better that to contradict his mentor. His fear of making so great an error in judgment would allow to him to give in. “But they worked together on The Cave 3 Scroll,” Hassan protested. “They were both instrumental in getting it here so that all the world might see it. Wouldn’t they do the same for the new scroll?”

Maluka shook his head. “Ludlow, yes. DeVris, never. When the two of them first arranged to get The Cave 3 Scroll brought here from the Amman Museum, DeVris had only one thing in mind. If he got the actual scroll in his hands, he hoped he might discover some clue to the treasure described in The Cave 3’s writings.”

“The treasure that no one has yet uncovered,” Hassan echoed thoughtfully.

“Exactly. If DeVris had believed that he could extract favors or fortune by keeping it hidden, he would have done so.”

Hassan had thought long and hard about Maluka’s answer.

If what Maluka says is true, what then might DeVris be willing to do in order to get his hands on the new scroll?