The Testimonium (60 page)

“I swear, this has been the longest two hours of my entire life!” he commented.

Castolfo nodded. “I must agree, my young friend,” he said. “Perhaps our escort was so strong the enemy had second thoughts?”

“I would be very surprised at that,” said Joshua. The words were no sooner out of his mouth when the ringing of the phone startled them all. Castolfo answered immediately.

“Is the convoy under attack?” he asked.

Guioccini answered: “Heavily! They just blew the chopper out of the air and crippled one of the APCs! Bullets are flying everywhere!”

“Stay safe, old friend!” said Castolfo. He switched the cell phone off and turned to the others. “Let’s go!” he said.

Josh grabbed the case and they took the elevator up to the first floor. A security guard let them out the side door, and the three of them slid into the waiting BMW. Josh rode shotgun, while Isabella sat in the back seat with the
Testimonium
in her lap. The president of the Bureau started his car, jammed it into gear, and goosed the accelerator. They shot out into the street, took a hard right, and headed east toward the coast road. None of them saw the sports car two blocks behind them that slowly eased out of its parking space and began to follow.

* * *

Abbasside’s heart raced as he moved into position behind the speeding BMW. He was an expert driver and had tailed vehicles before, but never with so much at stake. He could not follow too closely without alerting his quarry, but he only had the vaguest idea of their route, so he could not let them out of his sight either. He had received the call about five minutes before the BMW had come rocketing out onto the street. Falladah and his men had spotted the chopper approaching several miles off. They had chosen their spot well, just north of the town of Cassino, where the road wound between two fairly steep hills. He advised them to open up on the chopper and the lead APC at point blank range, to maximize damage and casualties, and then hung up. The true quarry was here in front of him, not in those distant hills, and he could not afford to lose it.

They reached the outskirts of Naples quickly, turning northward just before Bacoli. He dropped back a few hundred yards—the coast road was a straight shot all the way up to Pomezia, several hours away, and he doubted they would stray from it. He was already plotting his intercept point. Between Mondragone and Minturno was a fairly long straightaway with no large towns, where his car’s powerful engine would enable him to catch up to the German sedan. He unholstered one of his guns and chambered a round. One way or another, he would bring them to a stop!

* * *

Josh was nervous. He had spotted headlights in the distance behind them two or three times now, never closing in, but never turning off either. He looked across the seat at Castolfo, whose eyes never left the road ahead.

“Are you thinking what I am thinking?” he asked.

“I am not sure if he is following us or not,” replied the board president. “He is certainly keeping his distance, but I am not comfortable with the fact that he has yet to turn off. I need to find out what is going on!”

He pulled out his cell phone, scrolled through some recent calls, and punched a button to call Antonio Lucoccini. Moments later the Italian agent’s voice came on the line.

“Castolfo!” he said. “Are you safely underway?”

“We just passed Castel Volturno,” said the president. “How is the convoy?”

“The army men in the APC suffered heavy losses, but they have the terrorists pinned down with reinforcements coming in. It’s a heavy firefight, and a lot of good men are down. So unless something is really amiss, I need to let you go,” said Lucoccini.

“We’ve had a single set of headlights following us since we left Naples,” said Castolfo. “They’re staying about a kilometer or two behind us, but they haven’t turned off yet. It’s making us nervous.”

“I have a unit at Formia,” said the Italian Security Agent. “I will order them south to meet you.”

“Thanks,” said Castolfo. “Try to keep our friends safe!” He hung up the phone and looked over at Joshua. “The cavalry is on the way!” he said with a smile.

Josh nodded, and looked in the back seat at Isabella. She looked nervous, so he took her hand in his and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “We will be eating breakfast in Rome before you know it,” he said.

They had just passed the small town of Mondragone when the headlights behind them suddenly began catching up quickly. Castolfo punched it, but the mysterious vehicle was closing the gap rapidly.

“This is NOT good!” Josh said. As he watched the headlights get closer, he saw a small orange flash of light above and to the left of them. He barely had time to register it before the back windshield shattered into a thousand tiny shards of glass, and a bullet whizzed past him and through the front windshield. “Get down, Isabella!” he shouted.

Without asking permission, he grabbed Castolfo’s cell phone and redialed the most recent call. “This is Lucoccini!” came the voice on the other end.

“We are being shot at!” Josh said. “How far off are your men?”

“Ten minutes,” said the agent.

“That may be too long!” Josh snapped. There was another flash of light, and he heard the impact of a bullet on the car’s rear bumper. “I think he is shooting at our tires!”

Castolfo tried to swerve, but the next round blew out one of the side windows. The Italian was flooring the accelerator, but the pursuing car was faster. The headlights were now only about twenty meters behind them.

“Josh!” the bureau’s president said. “Under my coat, in a shoulder holster, there is—” He never finished the sentence. A bullet found its mark, and the back tire blew out. The BMW slowed, and the headlights pulled even closer. Castolfo cut hard to the right, trying to force their tormentor off the road, but before the two vehicles met, another shot was fired, and the right front tire blew. The BMW spun to a stop in the middle of the road.

Castolfo lunged out of the car, pulling a Beretta from a shoulder holster. Three barking reports sounded, and the Italian antiquarian crumpled, blooms of red spreading across the front of his shirt. He tried to lift his pistol to fire a shot at their pursuer, but a final report sounded, and the top of his head exploded in a cloud of blood. His body crumpled lifeless to the pavement.

“Come out, Dr. Parker, and bring the scroll and the girl with you. One bit of foolishness and she dies,” came a voice out of the darkness behind the headlights. It was a deep baritone, with a slight African accent.

“No matter what happens, remember I love you!” whispered Josh to Isabella. He helped her out of the car, grabbed the metal case, and put himself between the shadowy figure and her. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Open the case and show me the scroll,” the voice demanded. Its owner now stepped in front of the lights, and Josh could see that he was a tall, swarthy individual, but his face was still too strongly backlit for them to see.

“I don’t understand,” Josh said. “Why do you want it so badly?”

“Do not play games with me, Dr. Parker. I am a serious man. You know the scroll will do great damage to the religion of truth, while promoting your infidel heresies. Now open . . . the . . . case!” the voice snapped.

“No!” Josh said.

The sound of the pistol was deafening at close range. Josh looked down in astonishment at the hole in the front of his khaki shirt. The edges of the hole smoked for a second where the bullet had singed the fabric in its passage, but then the spark was extinguished by a sudden flow of blood from his abdomen. He felt his legs give way under him, and he crumpled to his knees. He would have fallen backwards had Isabella not supported him.

“Infidel whore!” snapped the figure. “Open the case, or the next round goes between his eyes!”

Blinded by tears, Isabella gently lowered Josh to the ground and picked up the case. She could not think of the numbers, so she began to lift up Josh’s limp arm.

“What are you doing?” the voice snapped, and a pistol round passed through the air an inch above her head.

“I am looking for the combination,” she said. “He wrote it on the back of the hand in case he forgot it!” The numbers were still there, and she lifted the case into her lap and began to twirl the dials.

“Isabella . . . no!” Josh pleaded, his voice a hoarse whisper.

She looked at him in fury. “Your life is worth more than a million scrolls to me!” she snapped, and opened the case. She lifted the clear tube out.

“Now take the document out of that sleeve, and lay it on the ground between us!” snapped the terrorist.

She took the scroll from its protective sleeve and laid it on the road, unrolling it and weighing down its edges with small rocks. In the glare of the stranger’s headlights, she saw the clear, strong Latin hand one last time.

“Excellent!” the voice said. “Now get back!”

The tall figure stepped forward, and Isabella scuttled back, taking Josh in her arms again. He lifted his hand to place it over hers, and she saw that his face was a mask of pain and loss. Meanwhile, the terrorist—Isabella could now see that he was a black man, perhaps fifty years of age—reached into his pocket with his left hand and pulled out a small metal tube with some sort of trigger and nozzle on top. He aimed the nozzle at the
Testimonium
and pulled the trigger. A gout of flame shot out and hit the ancient papyrus dead center. The official report to Rome by Proconsul Pontius Pilate caught fire immediately and burned very quickly. The man directed the fiery spray back and forth, even kicking aside the small rocks that held the scroll down; making sure that every last scrap of papyrus was consumed. When he was done, he slid the mini-flamethrower back into his pocket and turned to Isabella, leveling his pistol at her.

“And now, Doctor Sforza, you will die!” he said, pulling the trigger. The hammer fell on an empty chamber. He scowled, and then lifted his head. The sound of sirens was growing in the distance, and a pair of headlights topped a hill a couple of kilometers away. He holstered the gun and pulled the flamethrower out again, aiming it at her and pulling the trigger. She flinched, but only a small flicker of fire emerged—apparently his thoroughness in destroying the scroll had consumed all its fuel.

Rage twisted his dark features for a moment, and then a look of serenity returned. “Allah is merciful, whore!” he said. “You are allowed to keep your infidel life—for now!”

He turned on his heel and climbed back into the sports car, and with a screech of tires and a shower of gravel sped back down the road toward Naples.

Isabella cradled Josh in her arms. With one hand, she tried to stem the flow of blood from his wound, but she could feel his life ebbing between her fingers. In the absence of the headlights, the half-moon gave scant illumination. His breath was weak and labored.

“Isabella?” he whispered.

“Shhhh!” she said. “Don’t try to talk. Help is coming.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” she sobbed through her tears.

“I’m sorry we won’t grow old together,” he said. “I was . . . looking forward to being your husband so much. . . please, Izza. Please don’t blame God. He didn’t do this . . .” His voice trailed off, and his eyes closed.

She cupped his face in her hands and wept. Sobs racked her body, and in her grief, something else surfaced—rage! A white hot anger that surprised her with its intensity. She turned her eyes to the starry Italian sky above her. All the anguish of her soul came out in her next words.

“Why shouldn’t I blame you?” she asked the Almighty. “What kind of God are you, anyway? How could you allow this? Why would you let the kindest, most loving and decent man I have ever met die like a dog in the middle of the road? Josh was innocent!!” The last word left her mouth in an audible howl.

Where the answering voice came from she did not know. It was not from Josh, who lay unconscious and dying in her arms. It was not booming down from the sky above. It seemed to come from within, from the deepest coils of her mind, and yet it reverberated gently in the air around her.

Was my Son any less innocent?
it asked.

She thought of the suffering Jesus that Pilate had written about in his
Testimonium
, and of the compassionate Jesus hanging on the cross, praying for those who drove the nails in His hands. She thought of the shamed woman, taken in the act of adultery, that he had treated with gentleness and compassion. Then, in her mind’s eye, she saw the full horror of the cross as if for the first time. She hung her head, and the voice that came from her next was as soft as a little girl’s.

“I’m sorry, God,” she sobbed. “Please, Lord—please don’t take this good man from me! I will believe! I will serve You! I will love You forever, if You will just give Josh back to me. I can’t stand to lose anyone else!”

But then her cool, rational mind scolded her. Was this the best she could do? Bargaining with God, like a fishwife in the marketplace? Do this for me, and I will do that for You? How did that honor the life that Josh had lived before her every moment she knew him? Her body racked with sobs as she bowed her head again.

“That’s not right,” she said. “Josh is Yours, God, not mine. I love him so much, but he belongs to You, and he is in Your hands. Thank You for sharing him with me for a while. You showed me Your love every time he looked at me, and I was too foolish to see it. I trust You now, Lord, to do what is best for him, but if You take him home, I will miss him so much. I cannot bear to think I might never see him again. But there is a way I can, isn’t there? You showed us that way!” The realization swept over her, hard and sudden.

“Oh God, I love You! I am Yours! Please, Jesus! Save me!” The words tore out of her, hard to say but impossible not to say. When they finally escaped her lips, she felt something she had never felt before, never even dreamed of. It was the love of God, washing through her like a strong wave, cleansing every dark stain from her soul. Her grief and anger remained, but they were purified and tempered by a depth of compassion and love that drowned out the old Isabella and raised a new, clean, and shining self in her place.