The Sixth Station (14 page)

I cut her off. “Who exactly was this girl? Where did she come from?”

“America. New York City, actually. She went to the Friends Seminary school there, and then suddenly she wasn’t there anymore. Her parents skipped town when the school came looking. The cops thought they’d murdered her. We learned differently. They’d simply pimped her out to these freaks.”

I swallowed hard.

“As I was saying,” she continued, “she was traveling with three of the most evil humans that ever lived: a renegade, defrocked Catholic nun named Grethe—no last name we knew of, and a Vatican priest named Paulo Jacoby, plus a twenty-something-year-old soldier of fortune named, yes, Yusef Pantera. The same man who was named by the chief magistrate this morning. I assume you’ve been listening to the news?”

I didn’t dignify the question with a response, but said, “You know ben Yusef said to me, ‘Go forth for I am six,’ but if I’m counting correctly, you’re telling me there were five of them, including the baby.”

“Yes, there were five of them. And there was no question that they and the baby had to be ‘disappeared.’”

American-ordered infanticide of Christ, for Christ’s sake?

“Disappeared as in ‘shot’?” I asked, trying to look unaffected.

“No, as in blowing their plane out of the sky,” she said sarcastically. “Two hours after our meeting had begun, the electricity was restored and they began tracking all ports, sea, rail, air. We found that they had boarded a private aircraft during the blackout.

“We never figured out where all their resources came from. But trust me, theirs was the only aircraft that was able to take off, as opposed to just land, that day. That’s one reason we—all the operatives—knew it was their plane. It was also the one thing that proved that in fact this infant was no ordinary child.

“It was clear—at least to us and our higher-ups, from whom we were taking our orders on a minute-by-minute basis as things changed, and they were changing rapidly—that this child or whoever was in charge of this child seemed to be able to harness and block energy! Could it be true that the baby was some kind of superbeing? Or a clone of Jesus? Who else could harness power? It was an earthshaking concept, to say the very least!

“An international fleet of fighters was launched. They surrounded it and, just like that,” she said, snapping her fingers, “blew their aircraft out of the sky! Or a plane we
believed
was their aircraft.”

She carefully drained her glass and wiped her mouth as if she’d just had a cup of tea instead of half a tumbler of Scotch and had told me about capturing a spy instead of describing the assassination of a thirteen-year-old girl, a newborn baby, a nun, a priest, and their—what?—bodyguard/father/child molester?

“Interestingly,” she added, “no one noticed, because at that same exact moment the plane was exploding, that new star that had risen a few days earlier just happened to explode as well. I know for a fact that at least one of them—Father Paulo Jacoby—survived. He’s shown up in the newspapers. Always in the background of some important event. So either he wasn’t on the plane or”—she got up and poured another Scotch—“none of them were.”

“Oh, I see. But let me digress here a second,” I said, wishing like hell she’d offer me a drink. “You mentioned it earlier, and I meant to ask you: What new star? I never read about a new star in my astronomy classes.”

“That’s because it was called a comet. And it was only visible over a small part of the sky, over Ephesus in Turkey. Anyway, it exploded in spectacular fashion. The plane, the star—one big bright mess! The scientists explained that it was the comet’s unexplained emergence that had literally drained energy in the areas it passed over, causing the blackout.”

“Didn’t the astronomers know it was a lie?”

“It was before the real Internet, so rumors didn’t spread at the speed of light … and those that knew, well, let’s just say they either forgot immediately or unfortunately would have met with tragic accidents.”

“So you’re telling me the U.S. or whomever killed astronomers—passive professor types?”

“No.”

“But…”

“No,” she said again, without affect.

A standoff.

“Let me continue,” she said, clearly not willing to go there. “The UN put their professional spokespeople on TV to explain that the explosion of the comet returned things back to seminormal.”

“Semi?”

“That was the year of the wild El Niño winds. They were the strongest and most devastating in centuries. The trade winds unaccountably reversed direction in 1982. It caused disasters on almost every continent. Australia, Africa, and Indonesia suffered droughts, dust storms, and brush fires. Peru’s coastal water temperatures rose by over seven degrees.

“The story of the cause of the international energy drain and subsequent climatic changes was a great cover. And maybe it was true—or maybe it had been caused by a man-made attempt at the ‘Second Coming.’” Wright-Lewis winked conspiratorially.

Oh, please! She was too good a Mata Hari to suddenly forget herself and show her poker face and her hand at the same time.

“Even though the crisis had passed,” she continued, “they wanted proof that we’d done our job. Of course, there was nothing left: The plane had exploded over the ocean. ‘Was the new Jesus on that plane?’ was all they wanted to know.”

“Was He? On the plane I mean?”

She walked to the cabinet again, but instead of looking for more booze, she took out a folder and handed it to me. It was an old CIA dossier, marked “classified.”

I opened it and read:
Demiel ben Yusef, approximate age: 11–13, parents unknown/Tel Dan, (aka Tell el-Kadi, Tel el-Kady, Tel/Tell el-Qadi, Antiochia,… Dan): The Biblical City (Israel, Israel), July 1993–1994.

“You—ah, they,” I corrected myself, “knew about this guy as far back as 1994?”

“Yes and no,” she said, not quite answering. “Demiel ben Yusef became a person of interest for the first time in 1994, true. But not for the reason you might suspect. In the early nineties, they—government agencies in the U.S. and Israel—did put the child on their radar. Not because the boy was a danger but because anything out of the ordinary in Israel or in any of its enemy states was immediately made record of—no matter how seemingly unimportant.”

“Why?” I asked, trying to see what any of this had to do with the man on trial. “Were they looking for any signs that this supposed clone baby was alive?”

“Hardly. After the Cold War ended, everyone was scrambling, frankly, to find ways to stay employed and to keep their agencies relevant. This boy made a scene that caused local media attention.”

“But you weren’t with the company any longer, and yet…”

She ignored me completely, continuing, “The boy had showed up at a construction site being prepared for tourists in Tel Dan, in the northern Golan, near the Jordan River. He was bothering the workers and telling them they should dig in different areas. A man, seemingly his father, would come and fetch him away and everyday he’d show back up.

“Then one day, when they were excavating—right where the child had told them to dig—they came across what might be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries in Jewish history.”

“What was it?”

“A fragment from a large monumental inscription. It was a piece of a stele and it mentions King David’s dynasty. Then in June they uncovered two other fragments in separate locations, locations that the boy had also pointed out.”

“Why is that so significant? There must be millions of fragments of all kinds of things in that area—no?”

“Not like this,” she said, actually raising her voice for the first time. “Ms. Russo, it was nothing less than proof
positive
of the dynasty of King David!

“Stranger still, before it could even be deciphered by the archaeologists, the boy reappeared and started arguing with the rabbis in a town nearby. The argument went on for days and yet his parents were nowhere to be found.

“The boy insisted that the stele was made by an enemy of the Jews, and that it was a memorial boasting about their exploits in conquering the descendants of the house of David. The boy called the discovery a ‘boastful document’ that had then been smashed by a Jew of royal blood, perhaps Jehoash, who reigned from BCE 798–782.

“His frantic parents—unnamed—finally found him at a temple, but a media crowd had already gathered when they heard about the argument. A man, presumably his father, swept him away, saying he’d been lost.”

“So there was footage and photos of the boy at that time?”

“No. That’s when I knew, you see.”

“Knew?”

“That he was the clone baby. Every bit of film taken by every reporter was blank. The boy was twelve, the same age as Jesus when He’d been found questioning the rabbis. It wasn’t a coincidence. I
knew
it was history repeating.…”

“How did you know it was
that
boy, though?”

“He
told
the rabbis, that’s how. He said, ‘My name is Demiel ben Yusef and I come at the behest of my father.’”

“And you believe he was the clone baby from Ephesus?”

“I am as sure as I can be without definitive proof.”

She got up from her chair. I’d seen this move dozens of times. It meant the interview was over.

“Think about this instead, Ms. Russo. What if the man on trial, who seems so particularly fond of you, is the real child born from the blood of Jesus? For whatever reason, you were the one ben Yusef chose to kiss. Let’s hope it wasn’t a Judas kiss.”

“I guess it depends on who I give up.…”

She walked to the door and opened it. “It’s not a joke. There are powerful people who will want you to find out the truth, and equally powerful and more dangerous people who will keep you from ever finding it out—or even living beyond tonight, I assume,” she said, as though she were giving me directions to the bar down the hill.

That’s what you say to someone as you’re escorting her out of your house?

“Where do you suggest I start looking?” I asked her, trying not to show fear.

“You’re the investigative journalist—you’ll figure it out. I can only tell you that you’ve come this far, so surely you’ll be able to connect the dots—or in this case, the drops. And yes, I do believe that other droplets of blood still exist somewhere.

“But of course, you’ll have to do what every agent assigned has been unable to do for the past thirty-three years—find the rest of that blood. I believe it’s contained in some kind of vessel. If you find it, and if the DNA matches ben Yusef’s—well, you may be able to stop the second Crucifixion of Christ.”

“What? I’m just one person.…”

“Again, it’s finding whatever it is that holds the droplets first. It is simply the most important relic in Christendom, and would make the most important story any reporter has ever written, and you, dear, have clearly been invited to participate in the hunt.”

“The hunt”? Jesus!—no pun intended.

I stood up, too, and started gathering up my stuff. She said, “You were the Chosen One, remember that. So just trust your instincts.”

“How in the hell do I know I can even trust
you
?”

She just said, “What I did is something I can never forgive. Prove that I failed. They can’t be allowed to kill Jesus one more time.”

“So you want me to prove you wrong, find the relic, and somehow manage to steal it and get the DNA off it? You can’t really think…”

What in my life had ever equipped me to parse out the unbelievable story she just told me? But, other than this, possibly the biggest (and the second greatest) story ever told, I had nothing to go on.
Can I do this? Am I capable of forgetting it and not even trying? Is the pope a Muslim?

With that last question hanging, she cut me off cold. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Russo. I hope you’re as good an investigative reporter as they, whoever ‘they’ are, think you are. And, if you can keep it in mind—a little respect for authority can go a long way,” she chastised me, while ushering me out.

“No disrespect, ma’am,” I retorted, “but you had nothing but respect for authority and look what happened to you. You’ve spent the last thirty-something years in hiding!”

“In plain sight…” she said.

“You don’t really live here, do you?”

Silence. Oh, right. Respect.

“Okay then. How about ‘How can I find you if I need to?’”

“I’ll find you when I need to,” she said, closing the door. “Have a safe journey, Ms. Russo.” Then, almost as an afterthought: “The world depends on it.”

It was dark by then and cold. Fog was settling in, too. Great.

I heard the dead bolt lock behind me as I made my way back to the car, wondering about that house and trying to feel my way in the dark. For sure it wasn’t her house. I mean, she was still wanted by the Feds. But still, Wright-Lewis clearly knew a lot more about me than I knew about her. Just who was the investigative reporter here? She even knew my favorite brand of Scotch.

Just for the record? It’s Johnnie Blue. Not that she offered me any.

14

I didn’t know where to go.

I got into Sadowski’s Caddy, turned it on, and then punched in Dona’s number on his satellite phone. “Hey, it’s me,” I said, when her cheery voice mail picked up. “Sadowski gave me his cell to use, but I don’t know what the number is. It’s a secure line, though, so I don’t think the number will pop up on your end. I was wondering if I could bunk with you tonight? Call me. Well, call me if you can. And tell Sadowski to call me the hell back, too! He can give you this number, which I’d like to have myself, thank you very much.”

I sounded much more flippant and upbeat than I felt.

My apartment had been broken into, so I wasn’t about to go there—at least until I could get the cops to pay attention. And I was being watched. But by whom?

Damn. I didn’t even have my fallback home—the newsroom—to return to any longer.

I sure couldn’t ask for room and board with Sadowski, because for one thing, the SOB, my supposed friend, had stopped answering my calls.