The Sacred Blood

eyeing the lid. “It’s gold, right?”

“A thin gold sheathing covering acacia wood. A purposeful design, since the Israelite priests would’ve been incapable of carrying a solid gold box of this size. You’ll have no problems.”

Charlotte looked around for any opportunity to escape, but the two surviving gunmen were posted on opposing sides of the shrine, behind the rock’s cordons. And they were watching vigilantly.

“I beseech You, O Lord,” Cohen chanted in Hebrew, raising his hands up. “Grant atonement for the sins, iniquities, and transgressions that the entire house of Israel has committed against You. As it is written in the books of your servants Moses and Jesus, atonement shall be made for You on this day to purify all sins. Before the Lord shall we be purified.”

The priests unanimously responded with “Blessed be the Name of His glorious kingdom, forever and ever.”

Charlotte reached out and positioned both hands on the short sides of the lid, the tingling sensation coursing up through her fingers.

Cohen watched in astonishment as Charlotte’s hands spread over the elaborate lid—the Kaporet (“atonement piece”) or Mercy Seat. His focus homed in on the void beneath the outstretched wings of the gilded cherubim. For there, God’s presence, the Shechinah, would begin to converge to reign over Abraham’s altar, to judge and purify—to speak to humankind and provide guidance and law.

Curling her fingers tight under the lid’s braided rim, Charlotte took a deep breath and applied pressure.

86

******

At first, the Ark’s lid resisted.

Charlotte dug her fingers in tighter until they turned white. Then came a muffled pop, followed by the hissing sound of escaping

gas. The sound immediately brought a flashback of her and Dr. Giovanni

Bersei’s opening Jesus’s ossuary in the Vatican Museums.

Another incredibly preserved ancient seal had just been breached. As the lid unseated from the Ark, Charlotte could already detect a faint

glow emanating from deep within, forming a rectangular halo around the lid. At the same time, the tingling sensations had quickly migrated up her arms and spread into her chest. Now her curiosity was giving way to a raw, primordial terror that signaled danger.

Her eyes went wide as the void beneath the wings of the cherubim began to noticeably change—the distortion she’d detected the first time she’d touched the Ark. Like a tiny, gathering cloud, something was forming there. Mist? Smoke?

The rabbi’s excitement built with the Ark’s response. “Few have ever laid eyes upon this wonder. Moses, David, Solomon . . . Behold!”

Eyes fixated on the opaque orb, Charlotte detected a brilliant white glow at its core—a pinpoint of light that burned with the blinding intensity of a welder’s torch.

An electrostatic energy began to build, lifting short strands along her hairline. The atmosphere was changing. Impossible. Adrenaline poured through her system, threatening panic. But the tingling that had spread through her entire body brought forth a sudden transformation—an inexplicable calm.

“Now see what is inside,” Cohen urged her.

Tearing her attention from the orb, she reared up on her haunches to see what she’d uncovered, carefully resting the lid upon her lap.

On the right of the Ark’s interior were indeed neatly piled stone tablets—though it appeared to be hieroglyphs that covered them, not some form of ancient Hebrew as legend suggested. Laid atop them was a beautiful gold, gem-encrusted scepter in the shape of a serpent, its tail straightened along the short staff and coiling near the top to its fanged head, an ankh between its eyes.

But Charlotte was transfixed by the source of the most unearthly luminescence being generated on the Ark’s interior left half—a neatly packed human skeleton. And the eye sockets of its smooth skull were glaring directly up at her.

87

******

“Moshe,” Cohen gasped in vindication. “Moses,” he repeated for Charlotte’s benefit.

Could it be? Charlotte wondered.

He began reciting Deuteronomy 34: “ ‘Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo and the Lord showed him all the land . . . saying: “This is the land I promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you will not cross into it.” So Moses died there as the Lord had said. God buried him in the valley and no one to this day knows where his grave is. Moses was one hundred and twenty years old when he died; his eyes were not weak, and his vitality had not left him.’ ”

She stared at the bones during his utterance. “So God interred Moses in the Ark?”

“Yes, Charlotte,” he replied, remaining behind her. “But notice in the words I just spoke that the Torah states that Moses did not die from physical ailment. He was a perfectly healthy one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old with the body of a young man.”

“So either he killed himself,” she surmised, “or . . . God killed him?”

“God sacrificed Moses’s body to free his spirit for the next realm,” he said in a soft tone. “The covenant—the Te stim ony —isn’t just the laws written on those tablets. It is an elevation of the human spirit to a boundless existence. These remains left behind—Moses’s bones,” he said, pointing inside the Ark, “are a physical connection to the most sacred legacy. The bones are the vessel through which the Testimony had been passed on to the next Messiah.”

“Jesus?”