anyone get their hands on the irreplaceable texts and not make sure they were being treated carefully. The library was one thing, but the Vatican Archives? Noah hadn’t seen them, but Neri had explained that some of texts were so frail they were stored in hermetically sealed chambers-low air content and pressure, moisture controlled environments. They weren’t just books on a shelf, waiting to be piled into a box and stacked up in a corner while they waited for the refurbishments to be made.
That had set him to thinking even harder.
He had needed Neri to confirm his suspicions. Neri had checked with the head of the Vatican Police, but they both knew what the answers were going to be before it came back. Three questions, three answers: Abandonato hadn’t returned to his apartment in nine days. He hadn’t shown for work in the library since his meeting with Noah. And finally, Nick Simmonds’ request to work in the library had been granted by Monsignor Gianni Abandonato.
They worked closely, mentor and student. He didn’t know who had recruited whom, but during the course of that one morning Noah had spent in his company Abandonato had spoken enough heresy to last a good Catholic a lifetime.
He should have known. It was right there in front of him. The priest was too sympathetic. Sometimes guilt was as much about what someone didn’t say as what they did. He tried to remember everything Abandonato had said, but couldn’t. It had all blurred into one incoherent mess inside his head. There were lots of prophecies and lots of anti-christs, that seemed to be about the gist of it, and at least oe a generation the world was supposed to be going to hell in a hand basket.
He had enlisted Neri’s help again, trying to find the missing Monsignor the old fashioned way, on foot, knocking on doors. If he wasn’t inside the Holy See, he had to be outside. But it was next to impossible. Rome was a big city, and it was filled with pilgrims in mourning, come to say farewell to Papa. Abandonato would have had to have been a six-foot-tall pink elephant in a tutu for people to notice him. A man in holy raiment was as good as invisible in Rome.
In return Noah gave Neri the photograph of the assassination Lethe had downloaded to his cell phone and told him to pass it on to the head of the Vatican’s police force. There was a rat in the Swiss Guard, and his face was ringed in red so no one could mistake him. Neri trusted Noah. And Noah knew it. He might have seen the news footage everyone else had seen, but he was trained to see beyond the surface. He recognized the fact that the angles didn’t allow for a single image of the dagger being driven home. So while everyone else was prepared to believe the evidence of their eyes, Neri was still willing to at least question.
Noah knew he had passed the photo on, but he had no idea whether the Gendarmerie ever acted on Neri’s skepticism-if the walls of the Holy See were good at one thing, it was keeping secrets. It wasn’t the Gendarmerie’s job to provide protection for the Holy Father; that was the remit of the Swiss Guard. It was however very much in their remit to investigate criminal activity. He just had to trust that they would do their job, put aside their blind faith in the goodness of mankind and investigate. As long as they didn’t the rat was free to wander the holy corridors.
Noah couldn’t help but think it was a little bit like telling Adam there was a snake in Eden. He didn’t know if it would change the final outcome, but he had to do it just the same. If they went and bit into the apple, at least he would know he had done his part.
Every day that nothing happened, the worse Noah feared what might happen the day something finally did. It was the basic rule of terrorism. He’d said it a hundred times: you make a threat, you keep it. The minute you broke those promises you diluted the fear every subsequent threat instilled in the public. It was like the boy who cried wolf, the boy who cried bomb. The suicides had promised forty days and forty nights of fear. They had all taken that to mean forty separate attacks across Europe, but after Berlin and Rome, then the murder of Peter II, what could they do? How could they escalate the horror? Because that was what terrorism was fundamentally about, escalating the horror. Blowing up an office block after something as insidious as poisoning the water of an entire city was de-escalation. It didn’t work in the same way. It made the fear mundane.
Rome was actually breathing easy again, as though its time in the spotlight had passed. It had survived. There had been losses, horrible losses, but it had survived. Now it was another city’s turn. They had suffered enough.
If he had been one of the unholy trinity-Mabus, Akim Caspi, or Miles Devere-he would have punished them for their presumption. He would have hit Rome again just to prove that no, they hadn’t suffered enough. He would tell them when they had; they would not tell him.
Noah thought about the note he had found on the “suicide bomber”: We have tested your faith. Today we break it. All of the messages had been enigmatic, laced with the vagueness of prophecy, but they had all come back to faith. The Church. The only two attacks to date, despite the promises of so much more, had come in Italy, home of the Catholic Church, and Germany, the country where the Pope happened to be on pilgrimage. The crowds outside St. Peter’s were proof that killing one man would not break a world’s faith. They had flocked to the square to show their love, and to show the terrorists their faith was not broken.
All of which meant something else was coming.
Something that would shake the very foundations of their unwavering faith.
Something that would make them all ask the same question their Messiah had: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And Abandonato was the key.
That was the truth.
It had to be.
And he couldn’t find the damned man anywhere.
Abandonato didn’t want to die.
He didn’t want to be a martyr to the truth
At the outset he had believed fervently enough that he not only wanted to do it, he had volunteered to be the one to go out into the square and burn. But that had changed. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe anymore. It wasn’t that he didn’t question. Solomon had found him and bound him to his cause with the truth of the testimony. He had been the first to translate it. No one else knew what they had. The Testimony of Menahem ben Jair, grandson of Judas Iscariot, founder of the Sicarii assassins, the world’s first fundamental terrorists. It was as close as anyone would ever get to a firsthand account of what happened in Gethsemane.
The Gospel of Matthew, written in Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, had to have been written after the fall of Jerusalem in AD70, possibly as late as AD100, and Mark, believed to be the oldest of the Gospels, also references the sacking of the Temple of Jerusalem, marking it as at least AD70; whereas Menahem’s testimony of would have been written prior to the mass suicide of the Sicarii in AD73 and couldn’t be any older. The Sicarii were at their height during the Jewish War, from the sacking of the Temple in AD70 to their suicide at Masada. That testimony was almost certainly Document Zero, the first account of the death of Judas. Unlike the Gospels, it showed a tragic hero, a man making the ultimate sacrifice. Of course the Gospels existed for a very different reason. They sought to deify the man Jesus, to prove him divine and elevate him above all others.
The Christ in ben Jair’s testimony was far from divine. He was a man with all the flaws of a man. Ben Jair didn’t claim that Judas was God’s son, far from it. The Judas Iscariot in his story was another very normal man. The testimony spoke of love and friendship and of sacrifice. And it was Judas, ben Jair’s grandfather, who had made the sacrifice, knowing what it would do to his family, but not really understanding how it would be warped and twisted through time. How could he have? How could ben Jair, really? They were living in that time. Reading it now, interpreting it, it was impossible not to read the document through the filter of our understanding, to apply our modern sensibilities to the reading.
The original Gospels didn’t want any of that story. And not just because of its contradiction, but fundamentally to suggest Iscariot’s death was murder over suicide would throw so much else into doubt. Judas would no longer be damned to eternity but elevated, and what of Matthew who had held the rope? Or Mark, Luke and the others who had cast the stones? What of their mortal souls if they went from enlightened beings carrying the teachings of Jesus Christ to the world and became murderers? What, then, was the truth of their ministry?
It undermined everything he had been taught to believe.
Solomon’s words had been sympathetic. He had asked again and again what was the Messiah’s destiny? Again and again, talkig about the line of David and the reconstruction of Israel. It wasn’t a message of war. It was all about peace. About a place in the world for people who had suffered for two and a half thousand years. And
