The Second Messiah (6 page)

Robert Cane put an arm around his son, hugged him close, and winked. “So promise me something? Someday when I’m gone I want you to know that even though I won’t be here in flesh, I’ll be here in spirit. You can still talk to me. Anything you want to say, anything you need to discuss, come sit by my grave and talk. Same with your mom. We’ll be listening, okay? You won’t see or touch us, but we’ll be standing next to you. Don’t ever forget that, Jack.”

Years later, Jack wondered if his father had spoken those words simply to provide his only son with a small blanket of comfort—a touchstone to lessen the pain of loss after his parents had gone. Jack never knew the answer, only that talking worked. Some people talked to their dog, or to their image in the mirror. He talked over his parents’ graves and afterward felt the better for it.
So long, Dad, Mom. We’ll talk again
.

And yet, despite his belief that he was being listened to in some unearthly dimension, always the questions came that were tiny seeds
of
doubt.
Do we really meet again? Does the love we nurtured on this earth go on forever, beyond this universe, for all eternity?

When he had finished his final words to his dead, he picked up the empty water bottle, stood, and turned toward the Land Cruiser.

He heard a noise, looked up. Not a hawk this time but a sound like a metallic wasp—a distant helicopter, a speck in the sky. Shielding his eyes, Jack stared at the speck and then the noise faded and it was gone.

FIVE THOUSAND FEET
in the air Hassan Malik sat in the Bell helicopter and watched the Land Cruiser depart. He nodded to the pilot and ten minutes later the chopper touched down near the graves with a flurry of sand.

The swish of the rotors died and Hassan climbed out, followed by Nidal. The scorching heat of the late afternoon ripped the air from their lungs, but they had known this desert furnace all their lives.

In the distance, Hassan saw the faint plume of Cane’s Land Cruiser disappear toward Qumran.

Hassan stood there, hearing the light murmur of the desert wind, as if he were listening for something, he wasn’t sure what. But for a moment, he could almost hear the ghostly echo of voices carry on the wind. In one of those flashes of recall, he was fifteen again, a poor Arab boy wearing cheap jeans and a pair of his father’s worn sandals, digging among the ruins of Qumran. And from that to now, so much in between.

Hassan stepped over to the gravesite. He stared down at the lilies lying on the tomb, within the neat border filled with gravel chips. His own parents were long gone, buried in the chalk earth, his father dead on the same day as Jack Cane’s.

He would never forget that day.
Never
.

That same night his mother had traveled to her cousin in Jerusalem and never came back. The police told Hassan that she had hung herself. Hassan knew why. His Bedu mother would rather endure death than the indignity of a barren life without a husband or an income. His brother, Nidal, and his sister, Fawzi, were inconsolable. Hassan too,
but
after the numbness wore off a fierce determination blazed inside him. He was not going to leave little Nidal and Fawzi to the fate of an orphanage. They were all going to stay together.

First Hassan had buried his parents, and then he had buried his dignity, begging on the streets of Jerusalem, putting barely enough food in their bellies to keep from starving.

He and Nidal and Fawzi had slept in filthy doorways, searched for scraps among garbage in rat-infested alleyways. In winter, he kept his little brother and sister warm by giving them his own filthy coat, while he himself froze from the cold.

Nidal was always a weak child. Living malnourished on the streets had not helped, and his bouts of sickness had more than once brought him close to death. But somehow Nidal had survived, as if his small body had fire in its belly.

All of it happened a long time ago, but what was it his father liked to say? We can never escape our past.

Nor can we rewrite it
, Hassan thought.
But we can change our future. And in changing our future, we can right the wrongs of our past
.

Nidal touched his arm, taking him from his reverie. “We are late for our appointment, Hassan.”

“Right now,
this
is our most important appointment.”

Nidal noted his brother’s voice was very quiet, but as always infinitely dangerous, his dark eyes glittering with purpose. “Of course, Hassan. It is as you say.”

“Go back to the helicopter. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Nidal retreated without a word. Hassan watched his brother walk back toward the chopper. The sight of Nidal’s rake-thin body always brought out a protective streak in him.

He heard a bird cry overhead, looked up, and saw a hawk circling. He tried to focus, knew that this moment was important. Not one to be rushed but savored.
What happened in Rome had changed everything, he felt sure of it
.

Now Hassan turned to stare down at the graves of Robert and Margaret Cane. He stared for long time until a wave of fury exploded
inside
him. Without a word he violently crushed the lilies with his shoe until they were a trampled mess of green stalks and white flowers. He stamped and kicked, scattering the gravel chips. All control gone now, Hassan hawked a mouthful of saliva and spat upon the graves.

Then he wiped his lips with his sleeve and strode back to join his brother.

QUMRAN

DEAD SEA

ISRAEL

“IT’S PRETTY INCREDIBLE.
Take a look for yourself. I wanted you to be the first to know, Jack. You’re the one who found it, after all.”

Jack Cane, wearing a pair of white latex gloves, steadied the magnifying glass in his hands. “Are you sure about all this, professor?”

His excitement mounting, Jack studied the faded images on the two-thousand-year-old parchment. It lay partially unrolled on the table, the scroll edges sepia brown, fragile from centuries of lying buried in an earthenware jar. They were in Professor Green’s tent, a stand-up affair cluttered with boxes of reference books, a cot, a table, and folding chairs.

Jack tried to read by the light of an overhead butane lamp and using the magnifier. Faded lines of ancient Aramaic characters had been exposed in the unraveling. “I mean, really sure?”

Professor Donald Green frowned. “Sure about all what, Jack?”

“Your translation.”

Green’s delight was replaced by a tone that bristled with irritation. “Of course I’m sure. Yasmin and I stayed up working on it after everyone went to bed. Once I managed to unravel another three inches of the parchment, which was about as much as I could without causing damage, I went to work deciphering the exposed text. I wouldn’t have had Yasmin fetch you from your bunk if I hadn’t been certain.”

Jack rubbed his gritty eyes, tried to focus on the ancient writing in front of him and ignore Green’s annoyance. It was, after all, past
5
A.M.
“I’m glad you did, professor. I was half awake and couldn’t sleep either.”

Professor Green was a bear of a man, bristling with energy. Distinguished-looking with gray hair, he wore a khaki tropical shirt with epaulettes, one of them hanging loose and missing a button. He removed his half-moon glasses and gave an excited nod. “Okay, go ahead. Translate lines three and four.”

“Give me a chance, professor. My Aramaic’s pretty basic and not up to your standards, and here and there the writing’s faded.” Jack’s mind felt sluggish, despite his elation. Like most of the other forty-strong crew he had stayed up late, drinking beer to celebrate the scroll’s discovery in one of Qumran’s caves. He’d only climbed into his cot two hours before being woken again by Green’s niece.

The professor hovered at his shoulder. “Let me tell you again what it says—”

“It’s okay, I think I’ve got it.” Jack studied the faded parchment symbols and his voice was hoarse with shock. “You’re right. It’s incredible.”

Green said excitedly, “Of course I’m right. No scroll like this has ever been discovered at Qumran. We both know with absolute certainty that this scroll’s unique.”

Jack knew that Green was right. In 1947, two hundred yards farther up the valley of Qumran, the first of many hundreds of the famous Dead Sea scrolls had been discovered by Bedouin tribesmen. Most of the finds dated from between 250
B.C.
and 70
A.D.
and had been hidden by the Essene community. They had remained hidden for thousands of years.

The discovery was to rock the world.

The leather parchment, papyrus, and copper scrolls documented the life of the Essenes—an austere Jewish religious group that had been in existence during the time of Jesus Christ. Copies of parts of the Old Testament, as well as unknown New Testament records, were also found.

The restoration and translation of the scrolls was directed by Father Roland de Vaux, director of the Ecole Biblique, a French-Arab
theological
school in Jerusalem. Dominated mostly by Catholic priests, the process had taken decades and became mired in controversy.

It took almost fifty years after the discovery for the Vatican to finally claim that all the contents had been made public. But the slow pace of de Vaux’s work and its extreme secrecy fueled a theory that some senior Vatican churchmen wished to suppress damaging information revealed in the scrolls. The theory was never proven, but the Dead Sea caves produced such a rich mother lode that digs were ongoing, even after more than six decades.

And now he, Jack Cane, had uncovered another ancient scroll. But one that was very different from all the others that had been discovered.

Yesterday afternoon, digging in one of the many cave recesses that dotted the Qumran landscape, in the southern part of the location known as Area A, he had found a two-foot-long sealed terra-cotta pot. Breaking the seal, inside the pot he discovered a single rolled leather parchment wrapped in frayed linen. The scroll appeared fragile but reasonably intact. Cane was elated.

Judging by its material condition and its written language, Aramaic, Jack believed it came from the same period as those already uncovered. When Professor Green unrolled the first two inches of the leather—as much as he dared risk at first without causing damage—they saw that it had already suffered partial destruction.

Portions of the inked parchment were obliterated, leaving holes and frayed gaps in the parchment. However, it was still possible to decipher several word clusters. Two in particular—faintly visible on the second line—leaped out and made Cane’s pulse race:

Yeshua HaMeshiah

Yeshua HaMeshiah—
Jesus the Messiah. Jesus Christ. Jack knew that the presence of that name was remarkable, for one very simple reason.

The Dead Sea scrolls that had already been discovered in the last sixty years were mostly Jewish documents. They had almost nothing
Christian
in them. Jesus’ name was never mentioned once in the 870 scrolls and the tens of thousands of scroll fragments found—not a single reference made to him or to his followers.
Until now
.

Green said, “Do you have a knife handy?”

“Sure.” Jack unfolded a well-worn four-inch Gerber folding pocketknife. The sharp-tipped titanium blade was his favorite implement for picking away any fine debris, and he handed it to Green. “Be my guest.”

The professor’s enthusiasm rose as he used the tip of the knife to raise the edge of the parchment. “Take a look at the sentences that comprise the first lines. You can just make out the words. There’s definitely something very odd going on here. You see?”

Green’s left index finger hovered over the first faded words of Aramaic.