“Completely blown out,” Bersei gasped. “Look at those tears in the cartilage and the hairline fractures below the knee.”
“His knees were broken?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What do you mean?”
Bersei straightened and flipped his lenses up. His complexion was ashen. “It’s quite clear what happened here. This man was crucified.”
17
******
Temple Mount
“Surely you don’t expect me to desecrate the remains of the dead.” Utterly insulted, Razak folded his arms across his chest and frowned at Barton. “Have you no conscience?”
“It’s important, Razak.” He held out the gloves again.
Razak pushed the gloves away. “I will not permit this!” His voice reverberated loudly off the chamber’s walls. “You’ll have to get authorization from the Waqf.”
Akbar peered through the blast hole, looking alarmed.
Avoiding the guard’s glare, Barton spoke quietly. “You and I both know
that will yield no results. In the interest of time, we’ll need to take some initiative to find answers. That’s why we’re here.”
Still fuming, Razak turned to Akbar. “Everything’s fine.” He motioned for the guard to go away. He rubbed his temples, then turned back to the archaeologist. “What good can come of this? They are only bones in those boxes.”
“That’s not certain.”
Razak spread his hands. “If that isn’t the case, then why didn’t the thieves take these boxes too?” He motioned toward the ossuaries.
“We need to be sure,” Barton remained steadfast. “Every possibility must be explored. As it stands, the only clues we have are in this room. It would be a major oversight to forgo studying these ossuaries.”
For a few seconds, the crypt was deathly silent.
“All right,” Razak finally yielded. “One box at a time. But this you will do alone.”
“Understood.”
“Allah save us,” Razak muttered. “Go on, then. Do what you must.” He turned to face away from the scene.
Relieved, Barton knelt in front of the first ossuary, inscribed with the Hebrew characters that translated to “Rebecca.” “This may take awhile,” he called out.
“I will wait.”
Reaching out with both hands, Barton firmly clasped the sides of the flat stone lid. He glanced over at Razak. The Muslim still had his back to him. Drawing a deep breath, Barton jostled it loose, pulling it away.
Two hours after he opened the first ossuary, Graham Barton was just replacing the skeletal remains that he had taken out of the seventh ossuary. Much like the specimens he had found in the preceding six burial boxes, this one was remarkably well preserved.
Though forensic anthropology wasn’t his specialty, he had studied enough bones in his time to understand the fundamentals. Certainly, the names on each ossuary eliminated much of the speculation concerning gender, but clues present on the skull sutures, joints, and pelvic bones led him to certain conclusions regarding the age of these skeletons. The four younger females—the daughters, he guessed—deceased very young, ranging in age between late teens and early twenties. The three younger males—by the same logic, the sons—also seemed to fall into the same range. Typical of families during the first century, the children were numerous and born in rapid succession to ensure family survival.
Yet as far as Barton could tell, their remains showed no outright anomalies. No telling signs of trauma.
Assuming these siblings were all born of the father and mother interred in ossuaries eight and nine, it seemed uncanny that all could have died so young. Even in the first century, where normal life expectancy of those surviving their grueling early years might have been as low as thirty-five, this seemed statistically improbable. In fact, it appeared as if they’d all died at the same time.
Strange.
Barton stood to stretch for moment. “Still doing okay over there?” He glanced across the chamber where the Muslim was seated in a meditative position, facing the wall. At one point, he had heard him chanting prayers.
“Yes. How much longer will you need?”
“Just two more to go. Say half an hour?”
The Muslim nodded.
The archaeologist rolled his neck then squatted down in front of the eighth ossuary containing Yosef’s spouse, Sarah. Having established a good system by now, he deftly pulled away the lid, flipped it, and rested it on the stone floor so it could be used as a pallet for the extracted bones.
The hollow eye sockets of a glossy smooth skull stared back at him from inside the box, looking like a ghoulish plaster mold painted in beige shellac.
Unsure of what he was even looking for, Barton was starting to lose any hope that anything extraordinary was contained in these remaining boxes. Could the thieves really have known this and purposely left these behind like Razak had suggested? Certainly the contents within the tenth ossuary couldn’t have been as pedestrian as these. It had him perplexed as to what the thieves knew about the missing relic and how they could’ve obtained such specific detail in advance.
Palming the skull, Barton rotated it, then shined the flashlight inside, so that it illuminated like a macabre jack o’lantern. The fusion along the sutures suggested that Sarah had probably been in her late thirties. He set it down on the lid. Then one by one, he plucked the larger bones out and stacked them neatly beside the skull. The small
