Empire of Dust (23 page)

250-17-4
. On page 250, the fourth word in the seventeenth line was
The
. A propitious beginning, he thought, much better than
Reagan
or
perversions
or
anti-Christians
, other words to be found on the same page.

He went on.
19-2
indicated the second word on the nineteenth line of the same page. It was
Lord
.
The Lord
—so far, so good.

293-4-3
was
did
.
26-6
gave him
not
.
29-10
was
die
. With three more words, he had the sentence:

The Lord did not die on the cross
.

This was the book. It had to be. He felt his heart pounding so hard that he was afraid Miriam would hear it in the next room. Although he knew he should stop, return the backpack to its previous spot, and rejoin Miriam in bed before she woke up, he had to do just one more sentence, to prove to himself that the words weren't just a coincidence, a simulacrum of the infinity of monkeys and typewriters writing Shakespeare.

He flipped through the pages, reading the numbers, counting the lines and words, until he had another full and cogent sentence:

He was placed living in the tomb.

Tony's mouth felt as dry as sandpaper, or as sand, the same sand that had been used as a canvas by whatever had made the drawings of which Miriam had dreamed. But those drawings were far from Tony's mind now. All he could think about was Christ, his savior, who had supposedly risen from the dead, now never having died at all, and about what it meant to both Tony's personal salvation and to the world.

He wanted to go on decoding, but he thought he heard a sound in the other room, and he whipped the heat lamp switch to the off position and listened in the silence.

"Vincent?" It was Miriam's voice, and from the muffled nature of it, he was sure she was still in bed, her face against the pillows.

He opened the bathroom door a crack. "I'll be there in a minute," he whispered, then shut the door and placed Miriam's things in her backpack. Finally he put the code back into his wallet and opened the door.

He carried the backpack low, on the opposite side from the bed, and crossed to the door. She did not look up. He let the backpack slip to the floor and jiggled the security chain. "Just wanted to make sure the door was locked," he said, sliding his wallet underneath his pants.

Then he climbed in beside her. "You okay?" he asked, and felt her nod. He cupped her chin and raised her face so that he could kiss her. He had intended it to be brief and gentle, for what he had read in the bathroom had taken his mind far from lovemaking.

So it was with surprise and a bit of a shock that he felt Miriam extend the kiss, her lips parting. She molded her body to his own, and he moved against her, instantly filled with desire for this wonderful woman who trusted him enough to lie with him, and now enough to love him.

They made love, and it was long and soft and sweet, and he placed the book and the code, the dead men and the sand drawings, his partners and their mission, far back in his mind, until he forgot about them. He even forgot about the prisoner, forgot everything but the two of them.

He made love to the woman he loved, Christ forgotten. The gold cross between them pressed itself into their flesh, and the cold metal grew warm from being couched between their bodies.

A
t 6:30 the next morning, Tony opened his motel room door and looked both ways, preparatory to letting Miriam slip through with her backpack. It had been she who'd insisted on leaving that early, so as not to be seen by "Vincent's" colleagues, Drs. Kelly and Tompkins.

Just before she went through the door, she kissed him deeply and held on to him tightly.

"I want to see you again," he told her.

"When?"

"All the time," he said, meaning it. "In the morning when I get up and when I go to bed at night, and all the time in between."

A blush reddened her cheeks, and she shook her head as though confused by his words. "Vincent, I don't . . . I don't
do
this kind of thing. I mean, I didn't intend for . . .
any
of this to happen, but I think that I want to see you again, too. I don't mean just, like,
see
you, but more like, well, what you said." She shook her head again. "I feel like such an idiot."

He kissed her on the tip of her nose. "You're not an idiot. Look, I don't know exactly what's going on today, but if I can take you along, I want to. You were a big help yesterday. Were you going to go out and shoot some pictures?"

"Tell you what," she said, "I'll hang out at my hotel until around noon. Give me a call when your plans firm up." She smiled, and he felt like he was in high school again. "Truth is, I could use a little more sleep."

"You're sure you can get back okay?"

"I'll be fine," she said, and kissed him again. "Goodbye, Vincent." Then she was through the door and walking down the hall. She didn't look back, but he didn't take his eyes off her until she turned the corner.

Then he quickly got dressed and went outside. He saw her diminishing figure two blocks away, heading for her hotel closer to the center of town. He kept watch until she was gone from sight, and then he watched the spot where he had last seen her.

He took a deep breath and finally looked away. Jesus, he was in love. Goddamn, he
loved
this woman, it was no use denying it. He felt like some stupid puppy mooning outside the window of a girls' dorm, waiting for a glimpse of his sweetie at the window. But he couldn't help it. He wanted to run after her, never let her out of his sight again.

Then he shook his head in self-disgust. He was too damn old to feel like this, and too damn smart.

No, he wasn't.

Best to get his mind off her, he decided, and onto work, what he was out on the street for. He didn't know where the hell he was going to find a copy of Michael LaPierre's
My Partnership with Christ
in Gallup at 6:40 in the morning, but he figured he had better start looking. He could've asked Miriam for her copy, but their farewell at the door hadn't been the right time for a line like,
Gee, I'm out of reading material. Got anything good?
So he started walking toward the center of town.

Within blocks he came upon an all-night grocery with a small wall of magazines and two wire paperback racks, one of which was filled with tracts and religious books. There were two copies of LaPierre's book, and he bought them both, to the apparent approval of the proprietor, who tried to proselytize Tony to join the Christian Coalition on the spot. Tony paid for the books, declining membership.

L
aika was lying in bed, watching the local morning news, when the phone rang. It was Tony, or "Dr. Antonelli," who told her that he had something very important to share with her and Dr. Tompkins, and wondered if they could meet for breakfast as soon as possible.

Laika agreed. It was 7:30, and they had been scheduled to meet in an hour anyway. Tony said he would be in the coffee shop across the street.

At 7:45 she met Joseph coming out of his room and they went to the coffee shop, where Tony sat in a back booth. He looked grim. "All right," Joseph said, "what's the big deal? Miriam call you with another dream?"

Tony's face changed subtly then, and Laika thought that he might be trying to hide something. Then his expression grew fixed. "Yeah, she had another dream. But that's not what I want to talk about now. It's the book code—I cracked it."

This
was
something, Laika thought. Even Joseph seemed startled. "You cracked it?" Laika said. "What was the book?"

Tony reached onto the bench seat beside him and brought up two copies of
My Partnership with Christ
. Joseph snorted in disgust. "Jesus,
that
guy."

"Right, that guy," Tony said. "I got two copies because I thought two of us could decode it at once, but I couldn't wait. I started in my room . . . and finished." He held up several sheets of writing on motel stationery.

"What does it say?" Joseph asked excitedly.

Tony looked around. The nearest people were two truckers at the counter who were discussing baseball scores. A vacationing family was three booths away, chattering over a Triple-A guidebook, arguing about where to go that day. "I think it's a bunch of shit," Tony said in a low voice. "It sounds nuts."

"Let us offer a second opinion," said Joseph, holding out a hand. "Give."

Tony handed him the papers, and Joseph set them on the table where both he and Laika could see them. As she read, Laika began to feel more and more disconnected, as though this entire thing were happening to someone else. It was just too weird, even after what they had seen. Tony was right: it couldn't be true.

The message stated that Jesus had not died on the cross, that he'd been alive when he was taken down, that the Roman soldiers had been unable to kill him, either by crucifixion or by stabbing him in the side. However, they'd assumed that although he was not dead, he would die from loss of blood, and had allowed his family and friends to take him away, with the stipulation that he be placed in a tomb and allowed to die there.

They had placed the living Jesus in the tomb and set two Roman soldiers to guard it, but Jesus himself had rolled away the stone, overcome the soldiers, and rejoined his disciples. He'd told them to travel the world, spreading his gospel, and said that he was going to do the same, by going to lands far to the east. Then he'd walked away, and not been seen again by that generation.

He'd traveled to India, to southeast Asia, and even, some said, to the Americas. By the time the immortal Christ had returned to the Holy Land, hundreds of years later, Christianity had taken over the Roman Empire, and the papacy had been firmly established. Jesus came before the Pope in the year 502, declared himself to be the still-living Christ, and told the Pope to have one of his courtiers strike him with a sword to prove it. When the sword did not harm him, the Pope knew the claim to be true.

But the Pope reasoned that if he admitted that this man was Christ, his own power and the power of the Roman Catholic Church would be severely diminished. So he declared Jesus to be an impostor, a demon sent by the antipope, and ordered him imprisoned in St. Peter's deepest crypt.

One lie had led to another, and one cover-up had led to centuries of cover-ups. As later popes had learned what their predecessor had done, they had to become accessories in the imprisonment, for were Jesus ever freed, it would be learned that it was a pope who had imprisoned him and other popes who had acquiesced to his continuing imprisonment. The papacy would be revealed as a corrupt institution that had buried away its own god in order to preserve its temporal power. Papal infallibility would be a joke and the power and wealth of the church destroyed.

For nearly 1500 years, the message went on, the church maintained its hold on Jesus, with the tacit approval of every pope. At intervals, the holy prisoner was moved from country to country, always in a lead box, for reasons unknown. Likewise, he was always imprisoned in lead as well.

Then followed the information that the accompanying list was of the cities and other locations where Jesus had been held captive over the centuries. The message ended with a charge to the reader to obey the will of God and do everything possible to find and free the captive Jesus Christ, in order for his kingdom to come to pass upon the earth.

When Laika finally looked up from her reading, Joseph had finished and was gazing out the window. Tony was looking at Laika expectantly. "What do you think?" he said quietly.

"You're sure it's correct?" she said, then waved the question away, realizing how stupid it must sound. Of course it was correct. Random words wouldn't tell a story like this. "This would explain the list, then," she said.

"It explains a lot more than that," Tony said, sadness in his voice. "It's amazing . . . yet somehow terrible." He passed a hand over his forehead, shielding his eyes from her. "I don't want this to be true, yet in another way, I do."

Joseph turned from the window and looked at Tony. "What you're saying is that you want your faith in Jesus Christ fulfilled, and that would happen if he turned out to be an actual living entity, and not a dead first-century prophet. But what you don't want is for the faith in which you were brought up and the church in whose tenets you believe to be revealed as nothing but a pack of self-serving priests who have lied to their flock for a millennium and a half." He nodded brusquely. "I can see the pull of emotions there."