The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (19 page)

“Look, it’s time for a reality check here,” said Deirdre. She was standing in the alcove, a stack of dishes in her hands as she prepared to set the table for dinner. “You guys are tossing around the Ark of the Covenant, Aaron’s staff, and the garden of Eden like you’re putting together a shopping list for the grocery store. Don’t you realize how crazy this all sounds? And even if the most bizarre story in the history of the world happened to be true, then what? What are you going to do? Take out a map and measure out the distance to the garden … check out the road conditions? Come on … so what if the Prophet’s Guard is looking for Aaron’s staff, even if we assume you’re right and this staff was Moses’s H-bomb. What are they going to do? Where are they going to find it? How could it make any difference at all?”

Annie sat in an uncomfortable Danish chair that was all angles and hardwood. Tom and Joe were across the room on the sofa. She was so conflicted, she remained stuck in this ungodly chair, unsure whether to join in the conjecture or join in something more real, like cooking gravy or setting the table.

“It makes a difference to them,” Annie said, peeling herself from the vinyl and walking over to the sideboard to grab a handful of forks and napkins. “They want something desperately, the secret of which they protected for nearly one thousand years. They think we are the key, or the roadblock, to them finding what it is they seek: the power to conquer, the power to rule, the power to enshrine Allah as master of this world.” Placing the last fork, she moved alongside Deirdre and took her hand. “No matter how crazy these theories may seem … and this
is
dime-novel stuff, the one reality we can’t escape is that the Prophet’s Guard will not stop, will not allow one of us to stand in their way, until we are all dead, they are all dead—or they have Aaron’s staff in their hands.”

“I understand all that.” Deirdre shook her massive copper curls. “If, in fact, Jeremiah intended to return the staff to the Tree of Good and Evil in the garden of Eden, the garden was engulfed by the flood of Noah. Then there were thousands of years between the flood and when Jeremiah went to Babylon. How did he know where to look? And there’s another twenty-five hundred years between Jeremiah and today. How could anyone ever expect to find the garden after all these years? I wasn’t totally asleep during my Catholic education, so if anyone
could
find the garden, what about the angels with the flaming swords?”

Deirdre’s logic was persuasive, but Annie knew there was another element to consider. “If it couldn’t be found, why was Spurgeon so fearful about anyone discovering the sprockets? Why did he say the sprockets were more dangerous than anything discovered before? Look, I don’t think there’s any getting out of this for us. I can’t speak for the rest of you, but if finding this staff is the thing that finally sets us free, then I’m finding that staff.”

Deirdre shook her head, her blue eyes flashing like drawn sabers. “So now what?”

Rizzo emerged from the kitchen, balancing a large bowl of red gravy in his arms. Alarmed, flashing back to Grandma’s dining room at the same time, Annie reached down and took the heavy bowl. She turned to the rest. “Let’s eat while everything is hot. We can save the world after we’re fed.”

Absently tapping his fork against his empty plate, Joe wondered again about his reason for being here on this quest, with these people. Was he really considering the garden of Eden a real place? After all that had happened, what did he really believe? A lapsed Catholic, the object of Deirdre’s constant prayers, Joe never felt out of place in the “born-again” Bohannon family he married into. They loved him for who he was—not the guy who walked away from his faith and the Catholic Church when he went off to college, but a devoted husband and father, a man of character and integrity.

He inspected the back of his fork as his mind slipped back to the dawn of August 25—four days and a world ago. What had he witnessed that morning, other than a desperate and bloody battle on Temple Mount? How could he explain what he felt in his heart—above the fear—when the pillar of fire turned into a pillar of cloud as dawn broke over the smoldering canyon that was once the Mount? How could he reconcile the answers to Tom’s prayers, what seemed like one miracle after another, with the deaths of so many? What was happening? What did it mean? And, why him? Why was he here? He felt a stirring in a place he hadn’t scratched in an age. What if there was more behind Tom’s faith than Joe was willing to accept? What if …

An Irish brogue brought him back to the present.

“These have all been interesting discussions, I must say.” Brandon McDonough looked down the table, past the gravy-splattered plates and the now-empty bowls. “I’ve been both exhilarated and appalled at the glib way in which we have considered marching off to the garden of Eden. It’s an alluring fairy tale, but …”

Rizzo twiddled with a chunk of rigatoni on his otherwise vacant plate. “Putting it that way makes it sound like we’d have a better chance swiping a leprechaun’s gold than finding the staff.”

His head nodding agreement, McDonough pointed his fork at Rizzo. “For once I agree with you, Samuel. But beyond the unlikely nature of success in this endeavor, there is at least one other question that we have failed to consider.”

“Will global warming cook my eggs in the morning? Does a stitch in time really save nine?” Rizzo’s cherubic countenance was trumped by the mischief in his eyes.

“Ummm … excuse me …” McDonough stammered. “What?”

“Skip it, Paddy-boy. What was your question?”

“Well, Samuel, assuming it can be found,” said McDonough, “why take the staff from the garden? If Eden is where it came from, and if it’s been safe there for the last twenty-five hundred years, why move it? Why remove it and bring it … where? Where would it be safe? Jerusalem? London? In a vault somewhere? If Aaron’s staff is, in fact, the most powerful weapon in the history of the world, why bring it out of hiding, from a place no one can find—perhaps no one can enter? It just doesn’t make sense, eh?”

Deirdre got up and started clearing the plates. Annie picked up a bowl and then turned to McDonough.

“I’ve wondered the same thing a couple of times myself,” said Annie, “and I keep coming back to what’s probably the most important point for me. Don’t you think this is the completion of the task … the final step of the calling God’s put on our lives? Finding Aaron’s staff is apparently the root of all that has gone before. Charles Spurgeon finds this mezuzah and sends it to the Bowery Mission, where it sits in a safe for over a hundred years gathering dust and it just happens to be found now?”

That’s what I’m saying
, thought Joe.
Why now? Why us?
A thought helped him find his voice.

“There’s one other consideration.” Joe looked down the table at McDonough. He pulled his hands through his unruly salt-and-pepper hair. “The Temple Guard and Prophet’s Guard have been fighting over this mezuzah for more than a thousand years, trying to complete their understanding of the riddles and clues on the mezuzah and scroll … trying to track down this staff of power. Well, we’ve figured it out—almost, I guess. But let’s assume all this conjecture we’re tossing around is true—that Jeremiah took the staff back to Babylon, looking for the garden. If we can figure it out, why can’t somebody else figure it out? What if the Prophet’s Guard were to find out what we know? What would they do with it … the Muslim Brotherhood? They haven’t given up. Don’t you think it would be a risk if we just gave up?”

Bohannon joined his wife in clearing the table. “Annie’s right about one thing. The Prophet’s Guard isn’t going to let us just walk away from this. I’m beginning to think that, whether we like it or not, we’re involved, and they are going to force us to finish it. I’d rather it be on my terms than theirs.” He looked around the table. “I think we need to go back to the synagogue. We only looked at a small section of the book of Jeremiah this morning. There could be other clues in other parts of the book, in other notations. But remember what the rabbi said to us as we were leaving? Aaron’s staff, with the Ark, could be the weapon of Armageddon, the weapon God uses to destroy all the armies that come to attack Israel. Can we afford to take a chance that weapon falls into the wrong hands? What if the Prophet’s Guard could harness and use the power of Aaron’s staff?”

Tom walked down the table and put his hand on McDonough’s shoulder. “And there’s another thing to consider. What would Doc do? If he were here right now, what would Doc Johnson be telling us we should do? Give up? Go home? Or continue to seek what might be the most amazing archaeological discovery of history?”

11:26 a.m., New York City

“You know, I’m not as much of a Neanderthal as you think,” said Manthey. “I know about Skype.”

Connor Bohannon was adjusting the screen of the laptop to give as wide an angle as possible. “That’s great. How many times have you used it?” He turned away from the screen to glance at Manthey, who stood to his right. The Mission’s CFO held a hand against the bandage on his right side where the Urgent Care doctor had sewn a dozen stitches to close the knife wound he’d received in the taxi. The cut was painful, but no longer threatening.

“Use it?” he mumbled. “But I know about it.”

Connor shook his head. “How’s that cut? Can you sit?”

“I may not Skype, but I can sit.”

“Okay … here, sit. Left click on that icon.”

Roberta Smith was at her desk early that morning, waiting for the connection to open. She would have stayed up all night if necessary.

For forty years, Smith had been the driving force behind the Demotic Dictionary Project at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. Over those years, many team members had toiled, tarried, and then moved on. But Roberta Smith stayed. This was her passion. This was her baby. And six months ago, she gave birth.

After decades working mostly in relative obscurity, the University of Chicago announced that the Oriental Institute’s Demotic Dictionary Project was complete. Smith’s team had researched each of the twenty-three core Demotic symbols and recorded every one of the possible definitions of each symbol. Their dictionary was massive, over two thousand pages in length.

Because Demotic was a spoken language in Egypt long before anyone ever wrote it down, not only had various dialects developed over the one thousand years it was spoken, but the symbols had also taken on a wide range of disparate definitions depending on the populations speaking it.

So the Demotic symbol that was identified by the letter
H
—and there were four of them—had over seven hundred pages of symbol variations and explanations, and more than eight thousand different definitions. The least complex symbol, the symbol for
F
, was recorded with
only
one hundred definitions over ten pages. By adding the nuances of meaning that emerged from combining two Demotic symbols, it was easy to see a very simple truth.

Even at the Oriental Institute, where they knew more about ancient languages than anywhere else in the world, the team
may have
deciphered the various definitions of the symbols. They
may have
even gotten to the point where—they believed—they could make informed assessments of the general meaning or purpose of certain documents. But they still couldn’t claim to know what any of the thousands of Demotic examples currently known to be in existence really meant.

Now, after all that immersion in Demotic, after all her years of research and nearly four decades of shepherding the dictionary to completion, Roberta Smith sat in front of her computer with the excitement of a first visit to the circus.

Several months ago she had been introduced by a colleague to Dr. Richard Johnson Sr., former chair of the Antiquities College at Columbia University and, now retired from academia, director of the Collector’s Club in New York City. Johnson had come to her with the most remarkable document she had seen in her entire professional life. It was a complete, intact scroll containing a lengthy message in Demotic symbols. The message was written in a code that Johnson and his colleagues had broken, allowing them to decipher the message. Not by translating from the Demotic, which would have been a miracle, but by deciphering the code and then comparing the code symbols to the Rosetta Stone—inscribed with three languages: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphics—converting the Demotic symbols into Greek symbols and thereby breaking the secret of the scroll.