The Brotherhood Conspiracy (24 page)

“That’s a good thing, right?” said Joe.

“It would be,” said Bohannon, “except that the Israelis are not going to allow the Arabs or the Waqf to return to the Mount when it’s rebuilt.”

“Holy Jerusalem, the Jews are looking for the Tent!” exclaimed Rizzo. “They’re gonna rebuild the Mount, put up the Tent instead of a Temple, and stick it to the Muslims, right?”

“That would be suicide,” whispered Johnson. “The Arab world would erupt.”

“Exactly,” agreed Bohannon. “Which is why the president contacted us.”

“President Whitestone thinks we may have an answer to the location of the Tent of Meeting?” Johnson asked.

“No,” Bohannon corrected. “He thinks Abiathar may have provided an answer, either in the scroll or on the mezuzah. He’s come to the same conclusion we did. If Abiathar took the time to build a temple, maybe he took the time to put a back-up plan in place.”

Bohannon turned over another page and revealed a drawing much more detailed. The dimensions of the Tent were huge. Before the others arrived, Bohannon worked up the math in his head. He figured the Tent of Meeting probably weighed over ten tons. It took three clans of Levites and six wagons to move it from place to place.

Joe Rodriguez reached out a hand and placed it on Bohannon’s right arm. “Tom . . . I’ve seen things . . . and done things . . . in the last few months that a year ago I would have sworn were impossible. So, it’s a little more difficult for me to say to you, now . . . I mean . . . nobody’s seen the Tent of Meeting for, what, three thousand years? I know it’s a crazy idea . . . but—” Rodriguez looked at the assembled gathering—“Sammy and I think we may have an idea where to start. We—”

“Just one minute,” interrupted McDonough. “As me sainted mother would say, ’tis difficult to choose between two blind goats. But my colleague and I
have a few thoughts of our own on Abiathar and his intentions. See, it’s our belief—”

“Hang on, Doc,” said Rizzo. “As
my
sainted mother would say, ‘Joe’s got the floor, and we’ve got something important—’ ”

“Calm down, will you,” said Bohannon. “We’re already attracting too much attention.” He turned to Rodriguez. “Joe, is your office available tomorrow?”

“Sure . . . always.”

“Alright,” said Bohannon. “Tomorrow afternoon—one o’clock. Bring your ideas, but leave your attitudes at home. If we’re going to work on this again, let’s work on it together. Maybe we do have a couple of places to start. Where to start is not the problem. What happens if somebody else finds the Tent, that’s a problem.”

Standing on the steps of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Washington Heights, Joe Rodriguez felt like a hypocrite. He wasn’t here under his own volition. The steely-eyed redhead to his right was the reason he was walking up these steps, into the domain of the dreaded Monsignor McGarrity.

“Are you sure . . .”

“Don’t ask me one more time, Joe.”

Deirdre Rodriguez had a firm grip on Joe’s right hand. Joe knew she would not let go until she got an answer . . . got this issue resolved once and for all. He was surprised that his wife didn’t drag him to meet with her pastor. Instead, she insisted Joe accompany her to his old, family parish church to meet with the man who ruled St. Frannie’s like a small fiefdom. It was late Saturday afternoon and the monsignor would be in his usual place of power—hearing confessions and providing absolution.

The church bells ringing the Angelus, Monsignor McGarrity exited the confessional and crossed the large church to the center aisle. He didn’t get far.

“Excuse me, Monsignor,” said Deirdre, her voice echoing more loudly than she expected in the cathedral-like expanse of St. Francis’s massive stone sanctuary.

Monsignor McGarrity was an old, stoop-shouldered, white-haired priest, in a plain, black suit. He was a big man, not fat, but massive. It took a moment for him to change the direction of his bulk. But when he did, Deirdre caught the
full power of the monsignor’s famous, scowling countenance. Lesser mortals withered and fled under that stare, but Deirdre matched the monsignor’s stare dagger-for-dagger.

Joe loved her so much when she was in the midst of battle—particularly with someone else. He really believed it was Deirdre’s fire that welded their marriage together all these years.

“Monsignor . . . you know Joe,” Deirdre announced. “And I need you to talk some sense into his thick, obstinate head. He won’t listen to me so, here”—she released Joe’s hand in the monsignor’s direction—“you do something with him.”

The priest looked at one, then the other. “Is it divorce?”

“Hah!” blurted Deirdre. “He should have it so easy. You won’t believe this one.”

Deirdre spun on her heel. “Joseph . . . tell him the story. Let’s see what he’s got to say.”

Twenty minutes later, the three of them now sitting in pews, Joe finished his retelling of the Jerusalem adventure.

“So . . . Joe, how can you be thinking of leaving your family once more and getting mixed up again in this dangerous business?” asked the monsignor. “You need to stay home and take care—”

“Stay home? Are you kidding?” Deirdre moved closer to the monsignor, who moved farther away. “If I wanted him to stay home I didn’t have to come here. He’s the one who wants to stay home,” she said, hooking a thumb over her shoulder. “He says he’s worried about us, wants to take care of us.”

Deirdre turned her head and shot a lethal glance in Joe’s direction before turning back to the monsignor, who still looked at Deirdre as if she were speaking in Latvian. “Do you think I need somebody taking care of me?”

McGarrity’s eyes blinked . . . his head moved hesitantly from side to side . . . and he looked like he wanted to escape. “Well, I—”

“Right,” Deirdre said triumphantly. “I told him if he didn’t do this, he would never forgive himself. Worse, he would never forgive me. And the last thing I need, Father, is Joe spending the rest of his life regretting this decision.” She stuck out her hand. “Thank you, Monsignor. You’ve been a great help.”

McGarrity’s brain was still in freeze-frame when Deirdre swiveled on her hip to come face-to-face with Joe. She lifted her hands . . . and gently held both sides of his face.

“Joe,” she said, her voice a lover’s caress, “you are the most honorable, fearless
man I’ve ever known. You would give your life for us without a thought. I know that. But I know this is something you want to do, that you
should
do, and that some misguided sense of responsibility doesn’t have the right to keep you from doing.”

The fingers of her right hand slid down his cheek bone and stopped at his lips.

“Go and be the hero I know you are.” Deirdre kissed him, long and hard.

And Joe loved her so much . . . this Celtic warrior queen that God blessed him with every day.

18

S
UNDAY
, A
UGUST
16

New York City

The next day, an ugly, gray, humid New York summer afternoon, Bohannon brought the team back together again in the comfort of Joe Rodriguez’s office in the dark and deserted Humanities and Social Sciences Library. The five men—with Brandon McDonough on board as an adopted member of the club—benefited from the efficient climate-control system that kept the rooms, halls, stacks, and offices of the library cool and dry every day of the year. Five bodies made even Rodriguez’s generous office space feel cramped and tended to obscure the richness of the oak paneling. But Bohannon could tell that his friends were anxious to share what they had discovered.

So was he. But Joe took the lead.

“Well, I think we’ve discovered something that will give us a place to start looking,” said Rodriguez. “Or, more accurately,
who
to start searching for.”

“The answer to our problem,” Sammy Rizzo jumped in with a flourish, “is Jeremiah!”

“The prophet?” asked Doc.

“No . . . Jeremiah Johnson, the mountain man,” snapped Rizzo. “What Jeremiah do you think could have anything to do with the Tent of Meeting? Aunt Jeremiah’s pancakes?”

Embarrassed, Richard Johnson tried to skewer Rizzo with his most withering stare.

“Stuff it, Doc baby. I’m the one who came up with the solution.” Sammy jumped off his stool and sauntered in Johnson’s direction, his thumbs tucked
under the red suspenders that held up his taxi-yellow Bermudas. Like a diminutive general about to address his officers, Rizzo snapped an about-face and pinioned Tom, Joe, and Brandon with his big brown eyes, magnified to the tenth by Coke-bottle lenses.

“Think back to the scroll’s message. There was one line in Abiathar’s letter that didn’t really fit with the rest of the message. It came almost at the end of the letter. He said, “Look to the prophets for your direction.” We didn’t pay any attention to it then, because it really didn’t have anything to do with our search for the Temple. But . . . now . . . now there is a reason to pay attention.”

Sammy stepped closer to Bohannon, who was balanced on the edge of the leather loveseat, and put his hand on Tom’s knee. “You’re going to like this one,” he said, nodding his head, a wicked smile creasing his face. “Joe and I went surfing through the library’s database, looking for ‘prophet’ and ‘Tent of Meeting.’ We got a mess of hits right away. The first was a Bible reference in the book of Maccabees.”

Bohannon saw his own face reflected back from the thick lenses on Rizzo’s glasses. “Maccabees? That’s not in my Bible.”

“It used to be in a lot of Bibles, but not anymore,” Rizzo offered. “Maccabees is one of a bunch of books included in the early versions of Scripture that were later tossed out of the game by the Council of Trent, which decided they weren’t really inspired. They became known as the Apocrypha. For a long time, both Catholic and Protestant Bibles included the apocryphal books in a separate section, apart from the Old and New Testaments. But, starting a couple hundred years ago, many Bibles excluded the Apocrypha—Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Esdras—altogether. But there’s a reference in the book of Maccabees that isn’t found anywhere else. You got it, Joe?”

Rodriguez handed each man a printout. “This is in chapter two of Second Maccabees,” he said. “This translation is from what’s called the Good News version . . . written in more contemporary language.

“We know from the records that Jeremiah the prophet instructed the people who were being taken into exile to hide some of the fire from the altar, as we have just mentioned. We also know that he taught them God’s Law and warned them not to be deceived by the ornamented gold and silver idols which they would see in the land of their exile. And then he urged them never to abandon the Law.

“These same records also tell us that Jeremiah, acting under divine guidance, commanded the Tent of the Lord’s Presence and the Covenant Box to follow him to the mountain where Moses had looked down on the land which God had promised our people. When Jeremiah got to the mountain, he found a huge cave and there he hid the Tent of the Lord’s Presence, the Covenant Box, and the altar of incense. Then he sealed up the entrance.”

“So, you see,” said Rizzo, “look to the prophets for your direction!” He took a step into the center of the room, puffed up his chest, his thumbs stretching his suspender straps away from his body. As punctuation, he let the suspenders fly. “Ouch! Ewwww . . . that smarts. Okay . . . the Bible says Jeremiah took the tent and buried it on Moses’ mountain, right? Well, after that, Jeremiah and a bunch of his Jerusalem buddies got outta Dodge before the Babylonians could come back and take them into exile. Wher-r-r-e?” Rizzo gave them his best crazed Jack Nicholson smile. “In Egypt! So, there’s our answer, right?”

“Well, actually,” said Brandon McDonough, “these verses are talking about Mount Nebo, in Jordan. Mount Nebo is the mountain Moses stood atop to look over the Jordan River and into the Promised Land. God didn’t permit Moses to enter the Promised Land because of his disobedience. So, tradition and the Bible tell us, Moses died and was buried on Mount Nebo. And that’s where Maccabees tells us Jeremiah buried the Tent and the Ark of the Covenant.”

“It’s been at least twenty-five hundred years,” Bohannon said, shaking his head. “If the location of the Tent and the Ark are so clearly indicated, why hasn’t anyone found it?”

“Several possibilities come to mind,” said Doc Johnson, stretching his long body. “Perhaps it has been found . . . destroyed . . . lost. Or, decayed beyond recognition. Perhaps it was never hidden there in the first place. Perhaps the text itself gives us an answer. If we are to believe what is written in the Bible, then God will not allow the Tent and the Ark to be discovered until he gathers his people together and the dazzling light of his presence comes in the clouds—language very much of the prophesied second coming of the Christ. I don’t believe the world has yet seen this dazzling light of God’s return.”