A gleaming metallic panel popped up. Juliet punched a code and placed her right eye on the scanner. A second later, the panel light turned green, and we heard a whoosh as a section of the floor in front of us dropped, exposing a ladder leading to a chamber below.
“We need to keep the prep room away from prying eyes,” she said by way of explanation. “Our staffers are very bright; curiosity is part of their job description.”
Fluorescent lights came on automatically as we descended into a room about twenty-five feet square. The ubiquitous industrial tiles made up the ceiling, while several wooden benches had been bolted to the floor. Apart from a few spots of exposed cinder block, a variety of lockers and storage cabinets covered the walls.
I helped Lavon lower the boxes he had brought from Georgia. Once we had climbed down and closed the entrance above, Lavon opened the nearest box and removed three thigh-length brown tunics. He kept the darkest one for himself, then handed the others to Markowitz.
“Take your pick.”
“Does it matter?”
“No.”
Markowitz selected the tan one, and after he had put it on, Lavon opened a second box and extracted a long brown-striped robe. Markowitz donned it, shook a couple of times to adjust the fit, and then stood in front of the mirror, quite pleased with himself.
“We’ll fit right in,” he said.
Lavon warned us that he couldn’t entirely be sure. Even with years of training and field experience, he had to admit that much of what he “knew” about the ancient world was more informed conjecture than a true comprehension of the facts.
So few articles of clothing from the first century had survived that he couldn’t help but wonder whether we could suffer the fate of the occasional tourist in Miami or Los Angeles who got murdered because he unwittingly wandered into the wrong part of town wearing the colors of a rival gang.
“Hey, what about underwear?” asked Markowitz. “All I have are my Fruit of the Looms.”
“That should be fine,” Lavon mumbled as his eyes dropped to the floor.
“One more unknowable,” he said to me, out of the earshot of the others.
I glanced over to Sharon, who had laid out five different robes and head coverings, and sat in deep contemplation trying to pick the one she liked best.
“What about her?” I asked.
The modern notion of an independent single woman was inconceivable in the time of Christ. A woman
“I’m working on it,” he said. “For her own protection, she needs to be noble.”
“Makes sense.”
“The trouble is, — ”
“Hey, what about this one?” Markowitz interrupted in a loud voice.
We looked up to see that he had opened another box and taken out a gleaming white robe, bordered with a deep purple stripe.
Lavon shook his head. “No, Ray, leave that one here.”
“Why?” he asked as he held it up to the mirror. “It makes me look dignified.”
“We’re not trying to look dignified. We’re trying to blend in, as best we can. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves if we can help it.”
***
While Lavon checked on the others, I waited until Juliet’s back was turned and then stuffed a few items — well, maybe more than a few — from my gym bag into my travel pouch, just in case we had to stay longer than we had planned.
I also took a more careful look at my traveling companions. For obvious reasons, we’d have to defer to Lavon’s judgment; and I took comfort in the fact that over the past few days, he had struck me as competent and efficient.
Still, I couldn’t be sure who would fall apart if our venture didn’t proceed according to expectation — if, for instance, the others had to witness a man being eviscerated in front of their own eyes, as I once had.
Our modern world is so incongruous in this regard.
On one hand, our televisions beam a constant barrage of twenty-first century atrocities into our living rooms, ranging from mass rape as an instrument of policy in parts of Africa, to youthful militias routinely hacking off the limbs of members of rival tribes, to women, even to this day, being stoned.
Yet the viewers watching these horrors buy their meat from grocery stores in shrink-wrapped plastic, and inhabit a society where leading animal training schools have to ensure that incoming students won’t be traumatized by having to kill
***
The more I considered our party, the more I realized that it was my client’s son who worried me most. Though sober and level-headed in comparison to many of his peers, Markowitz had never quite shaken the attitude common to men born into great wealth — a superficial acknowledgement of authority that only partially concealed a central belief that the rules did not apply to them.
I walked over and pulled him away from the others.
“Ray, you do understand the seriousness of what we’re about to undertake?”
“Sure.”
My stern gaze did not change.
“Relax, Bill. It’ll be just like Everest. A man could get killed there, too, if he wasn’t careful.”
The mention of Everest was not altogether reassuring. Back in my Army days, I had trained with a New Zealander whose brother had spent years as a Himalayan guide.
The bars of Kathmandu resounded with complaints about would-be adventurers who believed that payment of their $60,000 fee entitled them to an ironclad guarantee that they would reach the summit, regardless of poor weather or their own limited mountaineering abilities.
“I mean it, Ray. This isn’t a joke.”
“Bill, on Everest, when the guides talked, I listened. It was the same when I learned to fly helicopters, and I’ll do the same here. Trust me.”
As Markowitz stepped away, I glanced over to see Lavon slide next to Sharon.
“I hate to ask this, but it could be important,” he said. “Are you close to, um, your time of the month?”
She smiled, though more at his hesitation than from the nature of the question.
“Happened last week,” she said.
I just sat there and shook my head. A woman’s monthly cycle; such a simple thing, yet I had not thought of that.
Chapter 12
We didn’t have any more time to reflect, though. Bryson knocked on the back door of the chamber. A few seconds later, a geeky kid in coke-bottle glasses opened it from the other side.
“Allow me to introduce my assistant,” she said. “This is Scott Ellison. He’s one semester away from completing his Ph.D. I’m serving as his informal dissertation advisor.”
“What is your specialty?” asked Markowitz.
The young man’s eyes lit up. “I’m writing about Non-Abelian Anyons and Topological Quantum Computation.”
He waved his hands excitedly as he launched into a description of his work. “It is inevitable that the next generation of quantum devices will depend on the existence of topological states of matter whose quasiparticle excitations are — believe it or not —
