witness claims they saw a man disperse a white powder in the subway under the city a few days ago. The timing is right, but so far no one’s been able to make a connection between the incident and the spread of the virus.”
“The witness just happened to be a friend of ours,” Lev added. “Sarah Adams, the flight attendant who was with you on the plane that crashed in the Mediterranean last year. She was also infected, but amazingly she survived, which is another mystery, because no one else has. Except for her, the disease has been one hundred percent fatal to anyone who was infected.”
“A hundred percent … and she’s the only one who survived. Do they know why?”
“So far it’s a complete mystery, but the situation is still evolving. There may be other survivors we don’t yet know about.”
Leo could sense the underlying tension in the room. “What else is going on? I have a feeling there’s more.”
“We’ve uncovered something else in the code, Leo. We’re not exactly sure what it means, but we’ve discovered a phrase in Genesis that leads us to believe there are other prophetic messages still hidden somewhere in this chapel. That’s why Morelli is rushing the excavation along the back wall. It’s possible we may have missed something when we explored this area last year.”
“But we’ve gone over every inch of this chapel … there’s nothing else in here.”
“Exactly. Up until now we’ve focused on the inside of the chapel and the one exterior wall that was visible. The other three exterior walls have been covered over for almost two-thousand years. A few weeks ago, we put a team of Vatican archaeologists to work digging the dirt away from those walls. It’s possible, even likely, that there are other cryptic messages just like the ones we found last year.”
“Let’s hope your theories will prove fruitful,” the pope said, looking up at the large Christian cross carved into the wall at the far end of the chapel. Leo and Lev both knew that the mystery of who had built this ancient place of Christian worship was one that kept the pope awake at night.
Morelli was sweating when he returned and squeezed through the small opening. “It looks like they’ve just finished excavating the back wall. We may have found what we’re looking for.”
With eyes that glistened with all the excitement of treasure hunters, they all followed Morelli back out through the opening and around to the opposite exterior wall of the chapel. The men who had excavated the area had left for lunch, but it was evident that they had worked through the night to clear a four-foot-wide passage along a wall constructed by the ancients using pinkish-colored limestone blocks.
Morelli waited for everyone’s eyes to adjust to the glare from the halogen floodlights before pointing to the faint outline of a painted image directly above their heads. The others let out a collective gasp, for right before their eyes was the faded outline of a trefoil-a small central circle that served to join three larger ones that had their outward portions erased, like three sets of horns joined together by a center ring and pointing outward. It was the universal symbol used throughout the modern world to indicate a biological hazard, and it had been painted on a wall that had been hidden from view for over two-thousand years.
Leo was beginning to feel a growing sense of dread as he studied the faded image. “How is this possible?”
“Remember where you’re standing, Leo,” Morelli said. “Nothing about this chapel surprises me anymore.” He motioned the men forward. “There’s more.”
Moving a few steps further down the wall, he pointed to a different section. There, at eye level and still partially covered with dirt, was the painted image of a golden stalk of wheat. Two painted lines led down and away in opposite directions to join with two other painted images of stalks of wheat. Then, below the strange images of wheat, was another image-the unmistakable image of a man. Once again, two descending diagonal lines pointed in opposite directions to two more man-like images. Then, below all of the images there were three words written in Latin-
“I’m afraid I’m not as proficient in Latin as you gentlemen are,” Lev said.
Pope Michael folded his arms and stared at the words.
“Basically, it says …
“What in heaven’s name does that mean?” Leo scratched the hair under his red skull cap.
“I have no idea,” the pope said, “but since one of the world’s largest cities has just suffered a biological attack, and we’ve all just seen a modern biohazard symbol painted on a chapel wall that’s been covered over for two thousand years, then I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s some kind of connection.”
Lev stepped back and snapped a few pictures of the paintings on the wall with his cell phone. “I’ll send these to Daniel in Israel as soon as we get back upstairs. Since we’ve already found several references to this chapel encoded within the Old Testament, these images may help him when he begins a search for new encoded messages in the Bible.” Lev paused as he inhaled the musty scent of the catacombs. “I have a feeling these images were left here for us as a warning.”
CHAPTER 7
All four men sat staring down at the red Persian carpet in the pope’s study. With the grace of the track star he had once been, Pope Michael rose from behind his heavy wooden desk and walked around the room, refilling everyone’s wineglass before returning to his seat.
Reclining in his chair, he studied the faces of his guests as they sipped their wine in contemplative silence, each trying to draw some meaning from the images they had just seen on a wall that had been buried for two thousand years.
The pope wanted to hear from Lev Wasserman first. “Professor, I must confess that I am at a total loss as to how you and your team utilize this Bible code of yours to uncover future events. I mean, if it is really all that you say it is, then why didn’t one of your cryptographers find some kind of warning about the virus that struck New York?”
“Well, with all due respect, Your Holiness, the code is not mine. It belongs to the world as a true message from God … I am only one of its discoverers. Unfortunately, many people have made the mistake of assuming that the code is prophetic in the literal sense. It is not.”
Listening to the discussion, Morelli glanced down at the pope’s coffee table and noticed that someone had added a newly-released book on the Bible Code to his daily stack of reading material.
The pope smiled. “It’s obvious, Professor, that I still have a lot to learn about the subject. The world is changing so quickly and there is so much information to process, that I am forced to rely on others to obtain and analyze a lot of the information I need to make decisions for the Church. The rest I leave to God’s providence.”
Lev managed a tired grin. His actual face-time with the pope over the past year probably amounted to no more than a total of thirty minutes. Now, as he was becoming better acquainted with him, he was starting to see that this pope was not only a very special individual, but somewhat of a regular guy in the company of men.
“I’ve heard much about it, of course,” the pope continued, “but up until now the bulk of my information has been anecdotal, so for the most part, this supposed code within the Old Testament remains a total mystery to me. Would you be so kind as to enlighten an old Jesuit?”
“It would be my pleasure, Your Holiness. The discovery of the code in the Torah has been replicated in the United States by several senior cryptographers at the National Security Administration, using their most powerful computers. Its validity has not only passed academic peer review, as mentioned in several leading scientific journals, but has come under close scrutiny by many world renowned mathematicians who’ve been working independently at some very prestigious universities, both in America and here in Europe. To date, all of those who have set out to disprove the fact that the code exists have discovered just the opposite. Also, as you know, the code was instrumental in leading us to the discoveries we made last year, both here in Rome and in the Negev Desert.”
“Yes, most impressive, Professor, but I have to tell you that some of my most trusted advisors believe that the whole concept of a code embedded within our most sacred text seems almost heretical. What led you to the belief that there was a code in the Bible in the first place?”
“I’m sure a lot of people feel the same way your advisors do when they first hear about some kind of code
