Secret of the Scroll (Greg McKenzie Mysteries) (12 page)

The door opened, and a man of about my height with dark, shaggy hair peered out through thick-lensed glasses. He was barefoot, dressed in a brown knit shirt and khaki pants. He had a broad brow, permanently rumpled.

“McKenzie?”

I nodded and held out my hand.

“Come on in. Does that cardboard contain what I suspect it does?”

“Yes,” I said. “Actually, the last thing Dr. Welch told me was that I needed to bring the scroll to you.”

Fear flickered in his eyes. “Why? I’m still in shock over his murder.”

“He said it contained Bible codes and that you could decipher it.”

“That’s surprising. We’ve had some pretty healthy disagreements over the codes.”

He waved me toward a sofa covered by a large afghan. I leaned the scroll bundle against a small coffee table and sat down. The first thing I noticed was the smell of tobacco smoke and a pack of cigarettes on the table.

David glanced at the table, then at me. “Cigarette?”

I felt the pack of gum in my pocket. I looked at the scroll package and I thought about Jill and what she faced. The pressure finally got me. I nodded. “Yeah.”

He took the pack, shook one part way out and reached it toward me. I stuck the cigarette in my mouth and looked up. “Thanks. Got a light?”

He pulled out a lighter and flicked it. I took a long drag and sat back, the familiar smoke coursing through me. God, I needed it. For a second my hand trembled, then steadied.

“Dr. Welch translated the scroll,” I said. “It tells quite a tale. One that could bring somebody a lot of money.”

David looked at me through dark, troubled eyes. “You’re sure J. Q.’s murder had something to do with this?”

“I’m sure. There are some people who would do anything to get their hands on that scroll.”

“Have you told the police about this?”

I took a deep drag on my cigarette, fighting my turmoil. “I want to, but right now I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” The way it came out I was sure he wanted to add “you blooming idiot.”

My cell phone began to ring in the pocket of my jacket. It was Ted Kennerly.

“I’m just about to
Smyrna
,” he said. “I should be at the county line in a few minutes. Where are you now?”

“Not far off I-24. Hold a second.” I turned to Wolfson. “It’s a friend of mine just getting to town. Is it okay if he comes here? I can save a lot of time by giving both of you the story in one telling.”

Wolfson walked to a window and peered around the curtain. “Tell him to come on.”

I gave Ted directions to the apartment. He was only about ten minutes away. Then I got out my pocket knife and went to work on Dr. Welch’s tape job. “While we’re waiting, I might as well show you what I brought back from
Israel
. Quite unaware of it, I might add. Your friend J. Q. fixed it up for me so it wouldn’t suffer any more damage from handling.”

“With this amount of care he must have felt it was authentic.”

“Yes,” I said. “From the first century A.D.”

As David began to study the old Hebrew characters on the scroll, some of his tension left him, his curiosity about the scroll taking over. I told him what the professor had said regarding his translation.

“I can read the words,” he said, staring in awe at the document, “but J. Q. could better understand the real meaning of it. Menorahs from Solomon’s
Temple
. . . that’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it.”

“Some extremist people believe it.”

“Yeah. And no doubt they want to discover where the golden lampstands are located. The scroll says the secret is hidden within, correct? If this guy was a kabbalist, I’m sure that means he coded it in something like Atbash. I can put this into my computer and decipher it with the click of a mouse.”

“No kidding?”

“Piece of cake.” But his anxiety had returned.

“I wonder if that’s why they sent it over here, because they had somebody with a computer who could do the same.”

David fingered a corner of the parchment. “I’d say that’s a good bet. Can you figure this thing being two thousand years old?”

“Give or take half a century,” I said. “By the way, you mentioned being a statistician. What kind of business are you in?”

“I’m co-owner of a market research firm. We do a lot of public opinion polling.”

“How does that tie in with the Bible codes?”

“It doesn’t. No, in a way it does. We do statistical analysis, in which we deal with the probability that certain things are true, or that certain things will happen. We calculate the probability of something happening by random chance, so we can establish the validity of what occurs. Through this process, some high-powered mathematicians and physicists figured out a way to determine the probability of the Bible codes being for real, rather than occurring by mere chance.”

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me in plain language what’s in the codes.”

“Ancient Jewish tradition holds that the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, were dictated to Moses by God, letter by letter. This was passed down by word of mouth for many hundreds of years until it was finally put into writing. Then the Hebrew words were meticulously copied and recopied by scribes as the parchments deteriorated over the years. The result is that today’s Torah is believed to be almost identical to that which God dictated to Moses.”

“So God authored the Torah,” I said. Keeping David talking held his fear back.

He nodded. “Jewish mystics held that there were many different ways of interpreting the Torah’s text. One was called ‘skipping letters.’ They found that by taking, say, the third letter of each word in a passage of Genesis, it would spell out a hidden message they believed was placed there by God. They claimed, for example, that it would give some historically important person’s name and several facts about his life. Early this century, a prominent Slovakian rabbi discovered some thirteenth century mentions of the codes. He did a lot of research and became convinced they were genuine.” He tapped ash from his cigarette, lost in thought. “By the second half of the century, others had taken up the process and expanded on it. A system was developed called Equidistant Letter Sequence, or ELS, in which letters occurring at a certain interval through a biblical passage were extracted and found to refer to specific people and events. Some Israeli researchers, for instance, turned up details in Genesis concerning the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat on
October 6, 1981
.”

“That sounds pretty far out,” I said.

“True, but in the last few years, a group of prominent mathematicians and physicists have continued the research in an effort to prove or disprove it. Using computer programs, they’ve found all sorts of coded information. But so far, nobody has been able to disprove the codes. A Jewish psychiatrist who is also well versed in math and physics published a very revealing book in 1998. He had a former cryptologic mathematician at the National Security Agency run a calculation that took nineteen days on his home computer. It was a guy I knew when I worked there. His computation showed the likelihood of some Israeli code findings being false was one in sixty-two-thousand five hundred. That is miniscule.”

I shook my head. “It’s still hard to believe, though.”

“I know. The author–his name is Satinover–concluded that the jury is still out. He gets into a lot of complex statistics and even delves into quantum mechanics. But I like his basic reasoning. He says the Bible condemns sorcery and he doesn’t believe the codes can be used to predict the future, as some claim. He contends that valid decoded messages can only be found if we have both a name and a date, meaning it has to be something from the past. His suggestion is that their main purpose is to confirm the existence of God as an omniscient creator.”

There was a knock at the door. David reared up, fear rushing back into him, all of his scholarly armor stripped away.

“Easy,” I said. “It’s my friend.”

David looked sick. “This is all–all too much.”

“Want me to get the door?”

“No.”

David opened it to a tall, stocky man dressed like a commando raider–black pants, windbreaker and black wool knit cap.

“It’s my friend Ted Kennerly,” I called, before David got even more frightened.

David managed a smile, then held out his hand. “David Wolfson. Come on in.”

Ted stepped inside and looked around, spotting the spread out parchment on the coffee table. “What the hell is that?”

“A scroll from first century
Israel
,” I said. “It’s the key to my problems.”

“You were going on a trip to the
Holy Land
, weren’t you?”

I nodded. “We just got back. Around this time last night, in fact.” As I rubbed tired fingers over my eyes, I felt that old nemesis jet lag dragging at me. I needed another cigarette.

“So where’s Jill?”

I looked at David, then back to Ted. “Both of you sit down and I’ll tell you what’s going on.” I smiled sheepishly at David. “Got another smoke?”

“I thought you quit,” Ted said. “Jill won’t like it.”

For the next forty-five minutes I detailed everything that had happened from the encounter in
Jaffa
to the last phone call on
Bell Road
. After I had explained my belief that the caller was part of the group that was holding Jill, David spoke up.

“You said they were Palestinians?”

“Most likely.” I blew smoke, watching it. An old friend was back.

“Well, these people from the
Temple
Alliance
certainly wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”

“What is the
Temple
Alliance
?” I asked.

“It’s a militant Jewish organization that’s raising money around the world to build the
Third
Temple
.”

“The
Second
Temple
was the one destroyed in 70 A.D.?”

“Right. They want to rebuild it in the same spot.”

I looked at him incredulously. “On the
Temple
Mount
?”

“Yeah. Right where the Dome of the Rock now stands.”

“Isn’t that the third most holy place to Muslims?” Ted asked.

“Yeah. Just behind
Mecca
and
Medina
.”

“Trying to tear it down to build another temple could set off World War III in the
Middle East
. Muslims around the world would–”

“Remember the violence and bloodshed when Ariel Sharon took his walk around the
Temple
Mount
with a cordon of policemen?”

“So these guys from the
Temple
Alliance
are after the golden lampstands, too?” Ted asked.

“They want to pay me for the document, so it sounds that way,” I said. “How they found out about me is another mystery.”

David ran his fingers through his hair. “Guess they want to find the menorahs to put in their new temple. The characters holding your wife are probably interested only in the money they would bring.”

I glanced at my watch. It was after
11:30
. I looked across at David. “How long would it take to enter this in your computer and run the codes program?”

He studied the scroll for a moment. “I can prop it up here and input the characters in my laptop. Wouldn’t take too long. But my codes program is in the computer at the office. I couldn’t run that before tomorrow.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what I’d like to do. We’ll leave the scroll with you while Ted and I head for
Riverside Drive
and try to locate that green van. We’ll mount a rescue operation–”

“Hold on,” David said, raising his hands, his face turning white. “You want me to keep that thing after what happened to J. Q.?”

“I’m sure these people don’t know where you live or anything else about you,” I said. “You should be perfectly safe.”

“I
should
be perfectly safe?” David looked sick.

“You still think we shouldn’t bring the police in on this?” Ted asked, assessing David.

I was adamant. “Right. I’ve ruffled too many feathers down there. And if Detective Adamson talked to Colonel Erikson, I’m sure he got an earful of crap like how I was always a maverick who believed in making up my own rules.” I turned to David. “Will you keep the scroll and copy it? I’ll come back to get it as soon as we’re finished in
East Nashville
.”

“If you’re sure it’s safe.”

“There’s risk, David, but it’s small. I’m fighting for my wife. I don’t know what else to say.”

David nodded. As I was leaving he offered the remnants of the cigarette pack. “Thanks,” I said. “You’re a life saver.”

Outside the apartment, I told Ted to climb into my Cherokee so we could set our strategy. But first I had to clear up one point that had been disturbing me.