Читать книгу The 13th Apostle - Richard Heller - Страница 22

A few minutes later

Office of the Translator, Shrine of the Book

“It couldn’t be that simple,” Sabbie said softly.

“That’s the beauty of it,” Gil said. “Look, first disregard all the dates, punctuation, and numbers. They’re meant to misdirect you. Now, read the first two words, skip two words, read two words, and skip the next two. Go ahead.”

26^th day of January 1097 in the year of our Lord

1–18 1 4 19 I am here with Elias. A poor simple monk living outside Caston within the great city walls of Halcourt near Weymouth Monastery.

27^th day of January 1097 in the year of our Lord

5–8 3 1 79 He knows I put lies in this tale and wrongs to ink.

25^th day of February 1097 in the year of our Lord

4–12 3 6 9 He angers for I have no fear that one day all shall come to be lost.

3^rd day of March 1097 in the year of our Lord

14-2 13 26 7 He rages should I never again fail to try and do so.

“But it’s so obvious,” she protested. “It could be seen by anybody.”

“That’s what makes it work. The best place to hide a tree is in the forest. Look how long it took us to get it. And we knew it was there,” he added.

“What are you talking about?”

“Elias knew that people see what they expect to see,” Gil explained. “It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. The ancient Greeks used to tattoo secret communiqués on the shaved heads of slaves. They’d let the hair grow in and send the slave off to the intended recipient. The recipient would shave the slave’s head and read the message. No enemy along the way expected a message to be tattooed on the scalp, so no one ever looked for it. Elias knew the best way to keep his message safe was to be sure that no one to knew it was there.”

“Seems much too risky to me. I don’t think he’d take the chance,” she argued.

“Look,” Gil continued, trying another approach. “You said it yourself. Most people couldn’t read back then and even if they could read and they were looking for a hidden message, chances are they’d be looking for a simple code, a substitution system—letter for letter.”

“Like I was,” Sabbie said thoughtfully.

“Exactly.”

She was up out of her chair, gathering papers, using the two-word pattern to translate and dictate phrases as fast as Gil could write them down. With alternate two-word phrases discarded, sentence after sentence revealed itself, simple and powerful in its honesty and its pain.

The words were those of Brother Elias, monk of Weymouth Monastery in England.

To Elias, there had been given a scroll, made of copper and brought from the Holy Land by William, Lord of Weymouthshire and knight of the Crusades. Lord William was Elias’ brother though not by birth. The monk and the knight were brothers, the monk explained, by “spirit and upbringing if not by blood.”

Lord William’s story was both heroic and tragic. While serving God and King in the Holy Land, he had been wounded and left among the legions of dead and dying on their battleground near Qumran. A Muslim in soldier’s garb brought the knight to a cave nearby, where he tended William’s injuries and brought him food and drink.

Each morning the Muslim soldier left the cave and joined the fighting legions that William could hear in the distance. Each night, the soldier returned, bringing fresh food and drink. They shared no common language but were able to make themselves understood, one to the other, of their intent and their feelings. As the days passed, William grew strong yet he wondered if his benefactor would ever permit him to leave.

On the morning that William was first able to stand on his own, the soldier brought him to the backmost section of the cave and revealed to him an ancient copper scroll secreted in a wooden casket. William appreciated well the importance of this find and knew, as well, that for some reason the soldier did not wish it to fall into the hands of his Muslim comrades. In words that he hoped the soldier might understand, William pledged his liege to protect that which was so important to one who had been so merciful.

That evening the soldier left and never returned.

William waited for several days, consuming what food and drink remained, then in the dark of night, he left in hopes of making his way home. As he had promised, he took the scroll with him.

After many long months, William returned to his beloved England. Home, however, did not afford him the sanctuary he anticipated. While he had been away, sustaining wounds in the name of the Church, the local Abbot had usurped William’s castle and lands and was now unwilling to return so profitable of an acquisition.

Upon hearing of William’s prize from the Holy Land, which the knight had brought to his brother, Elias, for translation, Father Abbot declared the scroll to be the work of the devil and called for ritual redemption by fire. As was the law, upon the death of the knight, the Church would become the beneficiary of all property, land and otherwise, previously held by the heretic.

William was executed, burned at the stake, though not before Elias revealed to him the true contents of the scroll. Elias realized William had discovered the writings of one who walked and talked with the messiah, Yeshua, which is what he might very well have been called at that time.

“Jesus!” Gil exclaimed.

“Exactly,” Sabbie replied. “If what this diary says is true, the scroll William took from the cave contained the only firsthand account in existence of the life and the death of Jesus, then called Yeshua.

“Can you imagine what such a find would mean?” she continued with excitement. “To know, with certainty, exactly what happened in Jesus’ life, to see it as if we were there?”

Gil shook his head at the enormity of it.

“There’s more,” she said. “Remember, the last section of The Cave 3 Scroll says that he who finds its mate will discover the key to the locations of the many treasures described in The Cave 3 Scroll. If Elias’ scroll turns out to be the mate to The Cave 3, it could be expected to hold even more than priceless proof of the life of Jesus. At the same time it may very well provide a map to a storehouse of riches beyond measure.”

Before Gil could respond, Sabbie continued, her face far more serious than it had been a moment ago. “It also means that any person or organization that seeks power or wealth, religious vindication or domination, will do anything they can to get hold of this scroll. Anything, including killing anyone who stands in its way. They may have begun already,” she added thoughtfully.

“But we still have no idea where the scroll is.”

“Yes, but they don’t know that,” she said.

“Well, I don’t know who ‘they’ is,” he said, trying to minimize her latest detour into paranoia. “All I know is that this is all that Elias left behind, so there must be a clue to where the scroll is hidden in these.” Gil held up a stack of deciphered pages.

“Or somewhere else,” Sabbie said.

Gil looked up in surprise.

She walked to the safe, opened it, and handed Gil a new stack of papers. These copies were crisp and clear. Each was formatted in the same accounting layout as the muddy copies they had just deciphered but these pages were easily read. Most importantly, these pages contained information he had never seen before.

“The pages we just deciphered comprise only half of the diary, the second half,” she explained. “These new pages make up the first half of the diary.”

“So Elias’ story was actually part two?” Gil asked.

“Exactly.”

“Then why didn’t you give me the first section in the beginning?”

“Nobody has a copy of this,” she said.

“Not even DeVris?”

“Especially not DeVris. Ludlow has never trusted him. Said the man has no conscience and … no soul.”

“And what’s your take on DeVris?” Gil asked.

“I think Ludlow was being kind.”

Gil picked up a pencil and began to circle every other two-word combination.

“That’s not going to work,” Sabbie said. “The words in these pages can’t be arranged into sentences. They are simply names and places. They document who bought which tapestry and for how much, just like any other accounting journal.”

“Because that’s exactly what it is,” Gil said simply.

This diary, both parts of it, was almost certainly one of the Church’s Books of Record, Gil explained. Elias was probably the most literate of the monks. It would have been natural to choose him as the official Keeper of Records for his monastery.

From what Gil could surmise, Elias had used the first section of the diary for the record-keeping for which the book was intended and had used the second half of the book as his personal diary. By putting his hidden message into the same format as the accounting pages that filled the front of the diary, then placing it in the back part of the book, all of the pages looked alike from start to finish; especially to those who couldn’t read.

“But what if someone could read?” Sabbie asked.

“Elias must have thought that wasn’t likely or he wouldn’t have done it this way,” Gil said.

He shook his head slowly. There was something else he wasn’t seeing. It kept popping into his thoughts, then disappearing before he could get hold of it.

“But you think it’s in here?”

“The location of the scroll? Yeah, it’s got to be,” Gil concluded. “I’d bet my life on it.”

Gil waited for Sabbie’s usual comeback. She looked up with no trace of a smile. Her silence scared the hell out of him.