The Sacred Blood

Up ahead, Amit spotted Jules. She was regrouping from a nasty fall, blood pouring down her right knee. “Keep moving!”

He caught up to her as she was beginning to make her way down the ladder, raw fear glinting in her eyes. “I want you to run as fast as you can, back the way we came,” he instructed in a low voice. “And zigzag. Don’t run in a line. Turn off the flashlight when you’ve made it out about fifty meters.”

She nodded quickly. He liked the fact that she knew when wisecracking wasn’t appropriate.

Amit was already a third of the way down the ladder when Jules hit the ground running. She looked back over her shoulder and paused when she saw that he wasn’t following her.

“Go! ”

Luckily, she listened.

There was a sharp bend to the cliff wall, just beneath the outcropping that formed a rim beneath the cave. Immediately switching off his light, Amit threw his back up against the stone face behind the ladder. He hoped the intruder wouldn’t see him there.

As she sprinted through the gorge, Jules’s flashlight cut side to side, up and down.

Go, Jules, go. She seemed even faster than his intern Ariel.

Then the gun spat overhead.

Dread came over Amit when he saw Jules stumble . . . no, not stumble. The shot must have pinged off something in front of her, forcing her to duck and weave. Then her flashlight disappeared. And so did Jules— swallowed by the dark gorge.

Another curse echoed from above.

There was a long pause. Too long. Was the gunman trying to figure out where Amit had gone to?

But less than two minutes later, the man mounted the ladder to make his descent.

Amit made his move. He lunged forward, throwing both hands against the ladder. It took everything he had to lever the man’s weight away from the wall. The gun swung as the ladder teetered sideways.

The gunman landed flat on his back against some jagged stones and let out a moan. The ladder came down right on top of him, trapping his gun hand between its rungs.

Then the dazed assassin—dressed all in black, including a mask—was scrambling beneath the ladder, trying to train the gun on the giant Israeli target. That’s when the C-4 the assassin had planted throughout the chambers, tunnel, and cave opening detonated.

Amidst a pulsing rush of orange fire, rock and debris shot out from the cave opening, the blast rumbling like a thunderclap through the gorge. The powerful shock wave pulled Amit off his feet and landed him right on top of the ladder, his mass instantly snapping the gunman’s protruding forearm between the rungs. The broken limb bent unnaturally to one side, a spear of bloody bone jutting through the black sleeve. The man howled in pain.

Amit covered his head with his hands. Rocks showered down on him, pounding his back. When the deluge ended, he quickly looked up to see that the gunman was struggling to use his good arm to retrieve the fumbled handgun.

Amit got to the gun first. Then came the rage.

“Stay where you are!” he shouted in Hebrew, pointing the gun at the man’s face. The weapon felt very familiar. The man’s dropped flashlight sat beside them, and Amit could see the blood seeping out of a tear in the mask where the man had taken a stone to the head. He reached down to pull off the man’s hood. As it loosened from under his shirt the man reached to his hip for a knife.

As the blade darted quickly into the light, Amit reacted, throwing out his free hand to grab the wrist. Instinct and adrenaline told him to shoot the man. Instead, he brought the gun up high and slammed it against the man’s head where the rock had started the job. He went out cold.

Amit peeled back the mask and tried to place the face. The guy was young, maybe mid-twenties—appeared to be an Israeli. A quick search of his pockets yielded no identification. Nothing but two magazines full of ammo. He pocketed them.

Amit wasn’t about to pull him down the gorge. And forget about calling the authorities. Qumran was situated in the West Bank, policed by the Palestinian Authority. He knew the political kowtowing he’d endured just to get permission for these excavations. The last thing he needed was to be connected to an explosion and a rogue Israeli hit man.

He took out his cell phone, swapped the gun for the flashlight, and snapped a mediocre picture of the man’s face.

Folding the phone, he slid it into his pocket and picked up the gun. Dismay came fast as he pointed the flashlight up through the heavy dust. The blast had completely collapsed the cave. He had to remind himself that the scrolls still remained—that he and Jules were still alive.

But it crushed him to see that the discovery of a lifetime had just been obliterated.

And he was determined to find out why.

21

******

Jerusalem

Despite the high-speed connection with an IP address assigned to an Internet cafe located in Phoenix, Arizona, the streaming data feed had taken over three hours to finish. The entirety of the data stored on the American geneticist’s laptop had been transferred to a new hard drive located in Jerusalem’s Old City, in an office beneath the Temple Institute’s unassuming museum gallery in the Jewish Quarter.

The delay had been prolonged by the sophisticated encryption and password protection layers that had locked down the hard drive. However, highly secretive code-breaking algorithms were standard issue on the mobile phones of field operatives.