The Sacred Blood

“God save you,” Martin contemptuously replied.

“Insurance, Father,” he said. “Help us and I assure you that their lives will be spared. Now, once again . . . Where are the bones?”

A sour taste came into the priest’s mouth, and his limbs quaked uncontrollably. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know!”

A pause as the gunman studied the priest’s eyes and body language.

“Then tell me who does.”

Martin’s brain went into hyperdrive as he recalled the events. At Cardinal Santelli’s behest, he’d indeed arranged Dr. Bersei’s June visit to the Vatican Museums to examine and authenticate an “important acquisition.” Confidentiality agreements had been signed too. But Santelli had never disclosed to Martin what the artifact was. This ossuary, perhaps? Bones? Another scientist had been summoned as well. An American geneticist— though her name now escaped him.

Nonetheless, there was one man who he was certain had the answers these men were seeking. And with frightened eyes glued to the picture, Martin gave them his name.

3

******

Qumran, Israel

Stepping out from beneath the blue origami canopy that sheltered the team’s provisions, Amit Mizrachi’s glum gaze shot halfway up the sheer sandstone cliff to a lanky twenty-year-old Israeli harnessed to a rappelling line. Dangling directly beside the student was a boxlike device on wheels that resembled a high-tech lawn mower.

“Anything?” Amit yelled, his deep baritone echoing along the chasm. The student planted his feet on a craggy outcropping and pushed himself closer to the ground-penetrating radar unit. Pressing his face close to its LCD, he paused for a three-count to inspect the radargram. Zero undulation in the line pattern. “Nothing yet.”

Amit had grown somewhat accustomed to this response, yet he couldn’t

help but curse under his breath. He made a futile attempt at swatting away the tiny desert flies swarming about his face.

“Keep going to the bottom?” the student called down.

Going to the bottom. Just like Amit’s career if something meaningful wasn’t soon found. With excavations at Qumran approaching the two-year mark, the team’s findings thus far were unremarkable: broken clay shards from Hasmonean oil lamps and amphorae, cliched Roman and Herodian coins, a first-century grave site with male skeletal remains that replicated earlier discoveries found nearby.

“Go to the bottom,” he instructed. “Then take a break before you move to the next column. And stay hydrated. You won’t be much good to me if you get heatstroke.”

The kid snatched the water bottle from his utility belt and held it up in a mock toast.

“Mazel tov,” he grumbled. “Now get moving.”

The burly, goateed Israeli pulled off his aviator sunglasses and used a handkerchief to blot the sweat from his brow. Even in September, the Judean Desert’s dry heat was unrelenting and could easily drive a man mad. But Amit wasn’t going to let Qumran beat him. After all, patience and resolve were paramount for any archaeologist worth his chisel and brush.

The project’s benefactors, on the other hand, followed a much different clock. Their purse strings were drawing tighter by the month.

As he watched the student holster the water bottle, then lower the GPR unit two meters for the next scan, he felt a sudden compulsion to swap places with him. Maybe the rookie was missing something, misinterpreting the radargrams. But Amit’s forty-two-year-old oversize frame didn’t take well to rock climbing—particularly the harness, which crushed his manhood in unspeakable ways. No doubt those of slight stature were best suited to archaeology. So Amit approached things the pragmatic way: delegate, delegate, delegate.

Glaring at the cliff—the wily seductress who’d stolen away his want or need for anything else—he grumbled, “Come on. Give it up. Something.” This project had single-handedly accounted for his most recent marital casualty—Amit’s second wife, Sarah. At least this time there weren’t kids being played like pawns.

A second later, he heard someone screaming from a distance. “Professor! Professor!”

He turned around and spotted a lithe form moving through the gulch with athletic agility—the most recent addition to his team, Ariel. When she reached him, she planted herself close.

“Everything all right?”

Ariel used an index finger to push back her glasses, which had slid down her sweaty nose, and reported between heaving breaths, “In the tunnel . . . we . . . the radar is picking up something . . . behind a wall . . .”

“Okay, let’s slow it down,” he said soothingly. New interns were prone to overreacting at the slightest blip on the radar, and no one was greener than nineteen-year-old Ariel. “What exactly did you see?” He fought to keep his frustrated tone on an even keel.

“The hyperbolic deflections . . . they were deep.”

Reading a radargram was more art than science. One had to be careful with interpretation. “How deep?”

“Deep.”

Amit squared his shoulders and his barrel chest puffed out against his drenched T-shirt. The creases on his overly tanned cheeks deepened as he considered this. Don’t get too excited, he told himself. It’s probably nothing. Though radar was quite effective in penetrating dry sandstone, subterranean scans were temperamental due to excessive moisture that choked the UHF/UVF radio waves. A deep deflection suggested a considerable hollow in the earth.

She sucked in more air and went on. “And this wall—it’s not stone . . . well, not exactly. We began to clear