God's Lions - The Dark Ruin (12 page)

“But that’s just my point, Leo. In your position there will always be intrigue, and everything you do is dictated by the Vatican while I sit in the shadows like some kept woman until everything is
official
.”

Leo reached for the bottle of wine and refilled their glasses. “I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt this way.”

“That’s the other part of the problem, Leo. You’re so wrapped up in events that you don’t have time for us. Don’t get me wrong ... you’re an important man with important problems, but I won’t be put on the back burner indefinitely.”

“But you’re with me now. You’re just as involved in all of this as I am ... we’re in it together.”

“Together means being man and wife.” Evita took a deep breath as the tears began to flow again. “I think I need some time alone to think things out.”

“Just what exactly are you saying?”

“That I need time to myself for awhile. We’ve been thrust together in a situation that forces us to cling to one another for comfort in the face of a terrible threat. I don’t want it to be like that. I want us to be free to live our lives out of the shadows away from all the drama we’ve been forced to endure for the past few months. Maybe then we’ll both be able to see things more clearly.”

“Now it’s my time to ask,” Leo said, taking her by the hand. “I have to admit that I’m a little rusty when it comes to matters of romance, but are you still in love with me?”

“Yes ... oh yes. The problem isn’t you, my love. It’s your position, and I’m feeling a little confused and overwhelmed right now.” Removing her hand from his, she stood and faced the curtains. “I wanted to tell you before dinner that I’m flying back to Spain in the morning. I need to get away from this place. Something’s not right. I can feel it. Maybe I just need a few days in Madrid alone in my apartment with my books.”

Leo followed the strong curve of her back with his eyes, knowing that she had obviously thought this through before telling him of her decision to leave. She wasn’t the type of woman to create drama to gain attention.

“When will you be back?”

“I don’t know yet. I hope you find what you’re looking for on Patmos. I’ll call you from Madrid.” Without waiting for him to reply, she disappeared through the billowing curtains, leaving a bewildered and saddened Leo alone with his thoughts.

The Carmela’s tiny landing pad grew larger as Nava set her new helicopter down on a big blue H painted inside a white circle on the top deck. As soon as the helicopter’s rear door slid open, Leo and the others were greeted with a blast of humid sea air mixed with the smell of jet fuel as they made their way down a narrow set of stairs behind the bridge to the yacht’s high tech communications room.

“Leo!” Lev Wasserman exclaimed, jumping from his seat. Looking over the Cardinal’s shoulder, he spotted Morelli and Mendoza. “Anthony ... Javier! It’s good to see you two safely back where you belong. We’ve been worried sick about you out there in that awful place ... we’ve heard rumors about that part of the country.”

“Unfortunately the rumors are true, but our work remains unfinished,” Mendoza responded.

“Then you’ll be returning?”

“We have no other choice, Professor.”

“And where’s the lovely Evita?”

“She flew back to Spain this morning,” Leo said, ignoring the puzzled stares. “Family matter.”

“I’m sure it’s only temporary,” Lev said, backing away from the subject. “Let me catch you all up to speed on what we’ve been doing here in Patmos. Daniel found some coordinates in the code that led us to a specific cave, and we’re hoping it has some connection to the site in Turkey. If so, we may be able to find out what Eduardo was searching for. Also, there’s something else. We’ve come across some information that may confirm your suspicions that Eduardo was looking in the wrong place.”

“In the code?” Mendoza asked.

“No, this time we’re using some good, old-fashioned detective work. We already know that the Turkish workers he hired believed he left without finding anything, and a few nights ago, in a bar down the street from the house you are staying in, one of them began to talk after a few drinks with one of Danny Zamir’s men.”

Leo’s eyes narrowed. “One of Danny’s men?”

“Yeah, he’s been keeping an eye on you at my request,” Lev winked. “Anyway, the worker said that something very interesting was buried in the hills outside the Turkish village of Orencik, and the villagers there have been, shall we say, less than cooperative in opening up about it for some reason.”

“We know,” Leo frowned. “We visited with the village elder yesterday and were basically shown the door.”

“Sounds like you’re one step ahead of me,” Lev shrugged. “What did you find out?”

“They’re afraid,” Morelli said. “It’s nothing more than simple fear. I’ve seen it before on other digs in this part of the world. Some places have ancient curses attached to them, and this one seems to have the mother of all curses hanging over it.”

“He may have saved your lives. The worker who spoke to Zamir’s man told him that people who went wandering around the hills outside their village usually didn’t come back.”

A shaft of light fell over the group as a bearded young man with long brown hair opened the door and stepped into the darkened communications room. Wearing khaki shorts and a loose-fitting white shirt that seemed one size too large, Daniel Meir closed the door and stood facing the new arrivals. “Thank God they fixed the air conditioning. I heard the chopper land. I figured it was you guys. Did you tell Leo how we discovered the cave?”

“I haven’t had time. Why don’t you do the honors?”

“You’re not talking about the same cave John wrote Revelation in, are you?” Leo asked.

“No,” Daniel replied, reaching forward to flick on a computer screen. “That was our first inclination, but we found the coordinates of another cave in the code. Here, I think you’ll find this interesting.”

Crowding around, they all saw a page from Genesis flash up on the screen. At the top of the page they saw the word
Patmos
which was followed by the phrase
cave of the sign
, and at the bottom of the page were some numbers they had guessed were geographical coordinates.

“We followed these coordinates a few days ago and discovered a hidden cave concealed behind some tall boulders and thick underbrush.”

“Cave of the sign?” Morelli scratched his head as he looked around at the others. “That’s pretty cryptic. Any idea what it means?”

“We have no idea.” Daniel’s responses were usually monosyllabic bursts; a reminder to others that they were dealing with a man who lived in a world of mathematics and secret codes—a world where the spoken word was seen as a tiresome necessity when he was forced to separate himself from his work to speak to other people.

“Do you think it might be possible that John wrote something else around the same time he wrote Revelation?” Morelli asked. “Something he left behind in a different location to be discovered later on?”

“That’s an intriguing possibility, Bishop,” Daniel replied, pushing his horn-rimmed glasses up into his thick brown hair. “But like I said, at this point we just don’t know. The coordinates you’re looking at are the ones that led us to the cave here on Patmos, but I found something else on another page just before you landed.”

Daniel punched a few more keys on the keyboard and a new page scrolled across the screen. Highlighted in green and circled in red, the words
birthplace
overlapped another phrase—
final transition
.

Morelli threw his hands up in the air. “That certainly clears things up.”

“It could indicate that the cave we found was the birthplace of someone ... or something,” Lev said, “however we’re not sure these words are even connected to the cave here on Patmos, much less the site in Turkey.”

“What’s your gut feeling, Lev?” Leo asked. “Anything stirring in that psychic brain of yours?”

Lev cast a downward glance as he pulled a cigar from his shirt pocket and stuck the unlit roll of tobacco in his mouth. “I’m afraid my little psychic voice has remained silent since that day in the chapel under the Vatican. As you may recall, Leo, I had no such visions last year when we were being pursued by Rene Acerbi. It appears that either my little psychic well has gone dry or I’m being blocked for some reason. I’ve never fully understood that part of me, and as a man who’s dwelt in the worlds of both mathematics and archaeology for most of my life, I’m as lost as anyone else on the subject. When it comes to things like psychic visions, we’re leaving the world of science behind and entering an area that’s never been fully explored.”

“This is all very strange,” Morelli said. “Something’s not right.”

Lev lit a match and fired up his cigar. “What’s on your mind, Bishop?”

“Well, the only thing I’ve ever experienced in the psychic realm was the group dreams we were all experiencing last year ... which by the way have stopped. Has anyone else noticed?”

Morelli had nailed it. No one had mentioned it, but the group dreams that had come to those who had been mentioned as
chosen
in the Bible code had all stopped. Before, when they had all been facing a supernatural threat, it was the group dreams that had united them, making it possible to identify one another as members of the same team so to speak. But where the dreams had once been a unifying force, there was now a gaping silence, and it was making them feel vulnerable.

Mulling Morelli’s words over in his mind, Leo continued staring at the screen. “I believe we need to have a look at that cave, and we need to do it soon.”

“Do you know how to ride a motorbike, Cardinal?” Lev asked.

“That’s how I get around Rome ... much to the dismay of the pope.”

“Good. Let’s all meet down on the dock in fifteen minutes.”

* *

Under the intense rays of the sun, the group wove through the dense traffic in the port town of
Skala
before heading up into the surrounding hills on their tiny, multi-colored motor scooters. Curving through the center of the island, the warm, salty air brushed Leo’s face as they sped past a Greek restaurant and inhaled the aroma of garlic-and-lemon-infused cooking flowing from the exhaust fans at the side of the building. Leo’s stomach groaned with hunger, and as they headed up the hill toward the promise of a sweaty afternoon digging in the dirt, he found himself wishing that he was here on vacation with Evita instead.

Holding onto the handlebars of the tiny scooter, he missed her arms wrapped around him and imagined them stopping together at that little café he had just passed, where they could sit outside under the blue-and-white-striped awning with a glass of wine, enjoying the sea breeze as they tried out new dishes. Maybe someday he would be able to live like everyone else, but today was not that day.

Reaching the top of the hill, they passed the monastery built over the cave where John had written the Book of Revelation. Thoughts of Evita continued to flood his mind, but he had to force himself to stay focused— to keep reminding himself that this was no island joy ride.
Why was this proving to be so difficult for him?
Deep down inside, Cardinal Leopold Amodeo felt lost, and he had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Coming here had been necessary, but he was convinced the real truth lay back in Turkey— in the hills surrounding that village with the dusty streets and lopsided houses. Things definitely weren’t right back there in that place.

Rounding a long curve at the bottom of the hill, Alon turned off the road onto a dirt trail and headed toward a wall of solid brush that fronted several large boulders at the base of the hill. Throttling the engine of the small motor scooter, Leo could see that they were following a narrow donkey path that had probably been here since the time John had lived among these hills as an old man; when Patmos had once been a place of banishment during the Roman period instead of a place for tourists to sip their wine under striped awnings on lazy, sun-filled afternoons.

At the bottom of a cliff, they stopped in a shady hollow and parked their scooters before setting out for the cave. Alon and Nava led the way, followed by Lev, John and Ariella, Leo, and Bishop Morelli. Bringing up the rear was Javier Mendoza, who had forced them to wait another twenty minutes back in town while the Carmela’s crew lowered another scooter to the dock because his Spanish pride would not allow him to ride sitting behind another man on one of the tiny vehicles.

Pushing through the thick brush, they followed a rocky incline that turned sharply to the left, revealing the darkened entrance to a cave that had probably remained hidden for centuries. Forging ahead, Alon switched on a light attached to a headband and plunged into the darkness.

The cave was slightly larger than Leo had been led to believe, with tall, drippy-looking ceilings hanging over a smooth dirt floor that looked as if it had been swept clean every day, although judging by the amount of brush they had found covering the entrance, the thought that someone was actually taking care of the cave seemed a remote possibility. Above their heads they saw soot marks on the ceiling, indicating that the cave had once been inhabited, but according to Morelli, the stains were at least a thousand years old, if not older.

“Well, where do we start?” Leo asked. He was feeling uncharacteristically impatient, and although the temperature inside the cave was cooler than outside, he was already beginning to perspire. As a former tenured professor of history at Boston College before his sudden rise within the Church, he understood Morelli’s love for archaeology, but Leo disliked field work, preferring instead to haunt ancient libraries in search of long-forgotten wisdom rather than dig in the earth for old
pottery shards
, a term he had used to describe most of Morelli’s finds.

Scanning the walls, Morelli lifted his floppy canvas hat and ran a pudgy hand through a patch of thinning red hair. “You were right, Ariella. There’s no evidence of writing on these walls. I imagine this cave was once used by sheep herders when the weather was bad, and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of habitation by people who predate the history of writing. There’s no painted handprints or drawings of animals, which were very popular to many cave dwellers in this area of the world. This is a strange cave ... it’s almost too clean.”