The Artifact (29 page)

“There were twelve of them,” he replied. “Lieutenant Mitchell, Sergeant Conté, Bogosian, Franks, Palagi, Alvarez, Gerlach, Crandall, Hannah, and five more whose names you do not need to know.”

“Mitchell’s fire team found the sealed amphora,” Callaghan picked up where he had left off that afternoon, “but didn’t have a clue what was in it.”

There were no markings on the urn to give any indication of its age or contents. It looked old, but the reason the U.S. had invaded Iraq was that Saddam was supposed to have weapons of mass destruction. The amphora could have been one of several containers that held deadly bacteria, planted along similar outlying tracks. When Conté radioed HQ about the nomad firefight, Mitchell’s mental condition, and discovering the vessel, Callaghan had ordered him to keep the amphora intact until he and Geoff flew a chopper out to their position. When they arrived, a closer inspection discovered that the amphora showed minute cracks and seemed harmless.

The troopers gathered around their company commander as Geoff opened the ancient vase, all hoping to share the gold icons and jewels everyone supposed was in it. Callaghan pried away a corner of the waxy substance that sealed a protective leather casing to reveal the fragile papyrus document within. His immediate reaction was to bring their find to his division commander, until he recalled the controversies attending the discoveries of other ancient documents, often resulting in subjective interpretations, inexpert tampering or downright suppression of true content.

Some of the men were disgruntled at the prospect of turning over an artifact that could be valuable to a museum or private collector, while others expressed their concern that the army might turn it over to Iraqi religious leaders or politicians, or even send it home to disappear forever in the Pentagon archives rightly known as Foggy Bottom.

Callaghan finally decided that the document could be an important discovery that should be delivered to an international group of experts when they had determined in what area of expertise the document should reside, and with whom. He explained to the members of demented Lieutenant Mitchell’s decimated squad what he believed was their proper course of action, which superseded the questionable rights of any government or entity, until the contents and provenance of the document had been established. After considerable discussion for which Callaghan abandoned his rank and established a democratic atmosphere, every soldier swore to uphold the plan he proposed and secrecy required.

“So we farmed a dozen innocuous pages out for authentication by experts, followed by the whole thing piecemeal for translation,” Geoff said.

“Now what?” Sammy asked.

Callaghan called out for Palagi to join them from the adjacent dining room where he, Alvarez, Gerlach and Palagi were working on long tables with annotated copies of the ancient papyrus scroll, painstakingly reassembling the translated manuscript, then running the finished 11” X 14” pages through a copy machine.

“We’re just reversing the cut-and-paste scrambling we did to conceal the contents from the translators,” Palagi explained. “Even with all our notes and cues, we have to proof, check and triple check for sense and continuity.”

“When will you finish?” Geoff asked him.

“Sometimes the translators got the Greek derivation of Aramaic wrong,” Palagi said, “because we purposely hadn’t given them the proper context. Lucky my mother’s maiden name is Papadopoulos and we spoke Greek at home. Modern Greek isn’t that different from the ancient version once I got the hang of it.”

“When will you finish?” Geoff repeated.

Palagi looked over his shoulder into the dining room where his associates were sorting through papers on the tables. “Couple of days.”

“That’s a tough assignment in today’s fragmented mass media,” Andrea admitted. “Each of the major TV news programs command a max of 10 percent viewers, meaning any announcement on just those three will miss seventy percent. Add cable, newspapers….”

“This document deserves more than an announcement,” Geoff injected.

“You expect to have the whole thing read by a talking head on television?” Andrea scoffed in her forced whisper. “Boring.”

Sammy asked, “How long will it take to tell? An hour? Five? You won’t get half of that, unless you plan on proving Cleopatra was a man.”

“We haven’t gone very far down that road,” Callaghan admitted. “We just began to get the feel of it a couple of weeks ago when the first of the translations came in, and started putting them in order.”

“You better think on it, General,” Andy told him, “because if nobody knew we put a man on the moon, it wouldn’t have happened, do you catch my drift?”

Andrea’s expression registered wonderment accompanied by a shake of the head. “Now that you know what it is, you claim that your purely altruistic objective is to communicate its contents to the world simultaneously, is that correct?”

“Correct,” Callaghan answered.

If they did not provide some outlet for discussion of its contents by experts and lay people, the general believed, there could be a serious backlash from the population not only in the United States, but abroad. Other nations and factions would challenge the legitimacy of the document itself and the scruples of America for its unilateral release without consulting them.

Both Cassandra and Callaghan seemed extremely concerned about how to disseminate the document since they had begun assembling the translations, which revealed for the first time who had authored it and what he had written. They seemed torn between the need to share it with its rightful owners they judged to be the entire world, before they were apprehended and the manuscript wrested from them. They believed that a singular, universal presentation would ensure maximum acceptance and minimum chaos.

In an effort to spare Andy the exertion of speaking, Sammy said, “That is an almost impossible task in today’s highly diverse and competitive news environment. The media doesn’t operate in concert, even in cataclysmic events like the assassination of a president, 9/11. Every news org is out to top the others with their own slant, a different spin, innuendoes that even question various aspects of the event. The Internet will run amok with it before anyone else has a chance to explore it.”

Gerlach and Alvarez left their tasks on the dining room tables and joined Palagi under the wide archway between the two common rooms. Cassandra sensed Andrea’s frustration. “Are you getting tired, Andy? We can break, and pick this up later.”

The reporter responded to the woman’s concern with a wan smile. “No, I want to do this. The general is right. If you do not present this properly, it could be all for naught, masticated by our glorious fourth estate before you get a chance to qualify it, if that’s what it needs.”

Geoff addressed Andrea from the position he had taken leaning against the side of the fireplace mantle. “You want an exclusive on this, Miz Madigan. Without sounding cruel, won’t your ALS prognosis limit your options for announcing the story with maximum impact?”

Sammy’s response was immediate. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. We may need to run this by a couple of producers in different media, maybe an ad agency.”

Callaghan shook his head forcefully. “Not a chance. Breathe a word of this to anyone, and you’re off the clock, never mind an exclusive.”

Geoff pushed himself upright, away from the mantel to pace the room. “So, we have to get all the news outlets to accept the document and run it as is, spot-on without telling them what it is in advance.”

Callaghan shook his head again, this time mystified. “Over a hundred pages?”

“Never!” Andrea whispered hoarsely. “Some ancient document probably of real interest to five percent of the thinking population of the world?”

“Which raises the question of translation from English,” Sammy said, “into Spanish, French, German, maybe a hundred other languages.”

Andrea tried to sound like the voice of reason. “Sammy’s right about not jumping to conclusions. Frankly, I think you’ll regret a mass press conference. Let Sam and I brainstorm this. If we conclude that we need outside expertise, we’ll tell you why and who. Then you decide. If we come up with a feasible strategy, you give me an exclusive. If we don’t...we’re all screwed.”

The group was silent for several long minutes, until Cassandra said, “Three days.”

“What makes it so imperative to get this out to every soul on earth simultaneously?” Andrea asked.

“It’s contents will surely create controversy,” Callaghan said. “If only a fraction of the public learns about it, there would be tremendous conflict not only among those who embrace and reject it, but those who haven’t been exposed to the full manuscript.”

Cassandra’s countenance seemed to exude a soft light, her eyes filled with a million undecipherable secrets unexpressed in the words she spoke. “It is an autobiography written in 67 A.D. by Shimon, the younger brother of Jesus of Nazareth.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Saranac, New York

December 2004

The first mistake Travis made was telling Eddie that Paula had no authority to make a deal of reduced charges for his information. Upon that revelation, Eddie refused to repeat his earlier disclosures to the bespectacled, unimaginative agent even without legal counsel. His second mistake was ignoring the Plattsburgh U.S. Attorney who had been present when Eddie had recounted his whitewashed events at the Machias farmhouse, and could have told him about the missing helicopter. His third and most grievous error was acting on the assumption that if Callaghan had survived the car bomb explosion, he would run as far from the northeast corridor as available transportation could take him.

Although Travis did have the benefit of Paula’s prior reports, it was her intrinsically lone-wolf nature to hold back significant details: in this instance, the presence of the Madigan woman and Simkowski’s helicopter among them. Travis was disinclined to take many of her findings at full value anyway, preferring to establish his own theories based on selective facts and his own assumptions. If Callaghan had escaped the conflagration with the document, he had not left Machias in Charlie Geoff’s single wing plane because Paula had impounded it at the airfield. The duplicitous general would have arranged for some other escape from their yearlong hideaway, he reasoned, probably in a third vehicle that had not burned in the barn with their other two, possibly across the nearby Canadian border. His command decision fanned agents with photographs of the two army officers out to 500 miles beyond Machias to establish roadblocks with state police on major highways and check every private and commercial airline within that radius.

Reports were sketchy at first, and like the Kennedy assassination, would probably stimulate questions and speculation for centuries. The known facts were that NNC cameraman Steven Sarno had captured the image of the Preacher Lady assassin on tape, which FBI video technicians had enhanced to enable the Bureau to identify a youth in clerical collar and track the movements of that unknown suspect to a Jesuit seminary in Chicago where agents proceeded to interrogate every priest and seminarian in the school. Halfway through that exercise in the first floor library, a shot was heard from the upper dormitory. Second year student Thomas F. Harahan, an expert ex-army sniper who pleaded his release from the military as a conscientious objector after the fall of Baghdad, was found in his room fully dressed in cassock and Roman collar, except for his bare right foot whose big toe had pulled the trigger of the Preacher Lady murder rifle, sending a .30 caliber bullet under his chin, out the top of his head.

Andrea grudgingly accepted the spoon-fed oatmeal before Cassandra undressed, bathed and struggled with the unfamiliar task of putting the unresponsive limbs of a grown woman into one of her own nightgowns. Lying in bed in the strange, darkened room that night, Andrea realized she was not experiencing the slow pace of deterioration from the disease her physicians had anticipated. She gazed at the pale suggestion of the half moon probing the edges of the drawn windows shades, her mood alternating between violent mental diatribes and the determination to outlive her story; to report it to viewers who depended on her for digging out corruption, the truth behind current events, for her dogged investigations that had led to the exposure of illegal and unjust practices in government and industry. Her job, her calling, her obsession.