“How many will have to die for that to happen?” Berlinger asked. “The Muslims control the Temple Mount. They will not relinquish it without a bloody fight. They will never allow any Third Temple, and the mount is the only place it can be built.”
“Then they will die.”
“In a war we cannot win.”
More weak talk. He was sick to death with weakness. No one seemed to possess the courage to do what had to be done. Not the politicians, the generals, or the people.
Only him.
“Tom Sagan is the Levite,” Berlinger said. “He has been selected by the method prescribed. Only he can find our treasures.”
“By Columbus? You can’t be serious. How did that man come to possess such power?”
“When the treasures were entrusted to him and he took them to the New World.”
“You know a great deal.”
“He was given a duty, which he performed. He was one of us.”
“And how would you know that?”
“In his day only Jews were experts in cartography, a skill Columbus excelled in. Jews were the ones who perfected nautical instruments and astronomical tables. Jewish pilots were in high demand. The notes Columbus wrote in his books, that have survived, show a deep appreciation for the Old Testament. I saw some of those myself in Spain. He dated a marginal note 1481, then gave the Jewish equivalent of 5241. That, in and of itself, is conclusive enough for me.”
And Zachariah knew why.
No one, other than a Jew, would have bothered adding the required 3,760 years to the Christian calendar.
“I’ve seen the portrait of him in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence,” Berlinger said. “It is the only one crafted by someone who might have actually seen him alive. To me his features are clearly Semitic.”
Nothing he did not already know. He’d studied the same image.
“We financed his first voyage,” Berlinger said. “History notes that. For those Sephardi Jews, Columbus’ dreams were their salvation. They truly believed that they could live in peace in Asia, that they could escape the Inquisition. Columbus sailed to the New World mainly to find a new home for them.”
“Unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to achieve that goal. His family, though, did provide us a home in Jamaica for 150 years.”
“Which is why we must respect all that he did, and all that was done after. How that task is accomplished from this point forward is now in Tom Sagan’s hands. You and I cannot affect that.”
The old man sat straight-backed and stiff-legged, hands resting on the arms. This icon had lived a long time.
But Zachariah had heard enough.
He stood. “I see I am wasting my time. You will tell me nothing.”
Berlinger remained seated.
He leveled the gun.
The old man raised a hand. “Might I say a prayer before I die?”
He shot the rabbi in the chest.
Only a soft pop from the sound-suppressed pistol disturbed the silence.
Berlinger gasped for breath then his eyes glazed over, his head drooping to one shoulder. The mouth opened and a trickle of blood oozed down the chin.
He checked for a pulse and found none.
“The time for prayer is over, old man.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
TOM INSERTED THE KEY INTO THE SILVER BOX AND TURNED THE lock. Whatever was inside had been placed there by his grandfather. He felt a connection to the man, one he’d never experienced before. Now he was the last link in an unbroken chain that stretched back to the time of Columbus. Hard to believe, but it was true. He thought about all of the other men who’d assumed this duty, what they might have thought. Most of them probably had little to do except pass the information on to the next in line. Saki, though, was different. And he could understand why his grandfather had been paranoid. There’d been pogroms in the past, Jews had suffered and died, but never on the scale they endured from 1939 to 1945.
An unprecedented time called for unprecedented actions.
He was alone inside a room off the nave in the Maisel Synagogue. An older woman had opened the glass display case and removed the silver box, never saying a word. She’d laid it on a wooden table and left, closing the door behind her. His thoughts flew back to the room at the cemetery and Abiram’s coffin, lying on a similar wooden table.
A lot had gone unsaid between the two of them.
Now there were no more opportunities to right any wrongs.
True, as Berlinger had said, time had brought everything into focus, but it was not an image he wanted to see.
