Victory of Coins (The Judas Chronicles, #7) (22 page)

“No,” I said, shaking my head while a niggling hunch told my heart I might soon regret insisting she retract her ruse.

“You don’t remember me, I know,” she continued. “But I remember you. I remember all of you, the Disciples and followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Mary left us for a time to join up with you, and your nomadic band. My father cut her off, since he was part of the Sanhedrin. He hated Jesus, as he despised all those who might destroy our delicate peaceful coexistence with Rome. He saw Jesus as a subversive troublemaker... but that didn’t stop Mary’s attraction to Jesus and this ‘new’ movement that was gaining popularity throughout Israel, as you know.”

“So, what does your sister, Mary, have to do with your immortality?” I asked, hoping my subdued tone would convey sensitivity. Rachel studied me again in the mirror for nearly a minute before answering.

“My sister was the one who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and hair,” she said. “You should remember the scorn that swept through the crowd which by then was following Him everywhere... don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, my friend... following the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus, my father would not protect my sister from a local mob demanding her death,” she said. “Mary was stoned.”

“I’m so sorry to hear this,” I said, to which Roderick and Cedric also added their sincere condolences. “However, I still don’t understand how her tragedy led to you being cursed to walk the earth like Rod and me.”

She didn’t reply, her frigid expression fixed upon the road ahead. But when I persisted with a query to see if she was all right, the façade fell and Rachel began to cry.

“I went with her to hear Jesus speak—more than once,” she said between sobs. “I was touched by His message, and it brought joy to Mary’s heart that someone in her family—the big sister whom she looked up to—also believed in Jesus as our long awaited Messiah.... But, when He was arrested and crucified, I thought He was a fraud, and I quit believing that He was anything other than a very good, but foolish, man desperate enough to inspire the overthrow of the Romans....”

We waited patiently for her to finish, and after collecting herself, Rachel concluded the story that answered my very regrettable question.

“I was at home when Mary was dragged out by the Sanhedrin guards into the street before our house,” she continued, after collecting her thoughts. “No one from my family would come to her aid—which surely she expected. When she saw me appear, she looked at me with hope, crying and desperately begging for me to come save her, since by then she was so terrified. I don’t believe she understood she was going to die until two-dozen men surrounded her, each carrying large stones with the intent to stone her to death.

“I should have died with her—there was no way to protect her, but I should have not left her alone! ...I stood motionless and emotionless, watching the men beat her until we could not recognize her anymore.... Afterward, my father and brothers carried her body to where the refuse was dumped and buried her there.”

We were about to join the main highway that would take us back to the heart of Istanbul, and she stopped the SUV. She turned to face me with glistening, reddened eyes, while her mouth quivered. But she was determined to finish.

“Within a week, I had my first experience,” she said.

“Bleeding from the wounds of Jesus?” Roderick asked, to which she nodded.

“I had no idea what it was, since I had missed the crucifixion,” she said. “But after it happened again, and my father and mother thought I was possessed by an evil spirit, I learned of what had happened to Jesus on the cross. By then, wild rumors were going around about Him coming back from the dead—which none of us believed. We had seen many so-called Messiahs rise and fall during the past ten years. Having another one propped up by fantastic tales was nothing new.

“But when I couldn’t be cured of this strange affliction, I became so distraught that I drank poison—several different kinds, and each time I vomited horribly, but lived.... Then I finally succeeded in hanging myself—much like you were rumored to have done, Judas. But unlike you, I came back into the same body that had started to rot, and it was another stigmatic attack that restored me to full health.”

She put the Yukon back into gear and merged onto the mostly deserted highway.

“By then I was almost thirty-one years old, and the only one besides my youngest sister who wasn’t married,” she resumed. I could tell she was ready to finish her long answer to the query I sincerely wished I had left unasked. “We had primitive mirrors compared to what has been common in the more modern world for centuries now. But I could tell that my age had changed, and so did my appearance.... I looked like Mary, who was fifteen years younger than me.”

“So, that’s how you kind of gain the gray spots and wrinkles every so often and then look like a sweet young thing two days later?” Cedric asked.

“You sure know how to make a girl feel sexy, asshole,” she replied, to which they both laughed. “Does that answer your question, Judas?”

Obviously, it more than answered it. I felt like a king-sized jerk for dismissing her worthiness to accompany Roderick and me across Europe three centuries ago, and of course I wasn’t exactly a peach to her before that time or here recently. Her anger and sorrow concerning her birth into immortality mimicked my own, and her sense of loss about her sister awakened my own forgotten bitter losses, and intensified the latest ones.

I wanted to scream at The Almighty for what I perceived as injustices to me and to Rachel—and to Roderick, too. But thinking this way only made things worse, and I worried that if I thought any longer about it all, I would soon succumb to the powerful reality that I was now forever without Beatrice and Alistair. Gaze too deeply into that painful hole in my soul, and I might fall in and never be able to crawl out. Missing them, likely until Judgment Day, was my assured fate. To make any semblance of an existence workable I would have to find a way to forget them until we could reasonably be reunited. Only God knew when that would be....

I’m not sure why it happened, but as I considered the unfairness of life, I thought I heard the faint call of my final coin. Barely detectable, my attention was pulled to the south of where we were.

“I feel it, too,” Roderick advised.

This time, Cedric did react, huffing while shaking his head. For the moment he refused to look back at either of us.

“How ironic that Judas’ last remaining coin should call to him after discussing what had cursed
me
to my existence as an immortal, eh?” Rachel said to Cedric.

“You’re joking, right?” he asked, guardedly.

“Maybe it’s nothing,” I replied. “It could just be a phantom call... it’s happened before.” But I knew in my heart this was real. Whether it ended up lasting all the way until we uncovered the latest hiding place for the Damascus Coin was another matter entirely. For now, though, it made sense to pursue it... at least it made sense to my heart.

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” said Roderick, to which Rachel nodded. “We will have to get on to the main southern thoroughfare from Istanbul. If the sensation continues, we will follow it until it dies. Agreed?”

I waited for Cedric to give his consent and for Rachel to reaffirm hers before I gave mine. Then we set out to follow the signal. I almost called it off when it disappeared, but waited until we were on the main highway to Ankara. The signal became much stronger, and yet grew weaker as we reached the city limits just before dawn. Fjar was starting, and we waited for it to end before continuing south.

“How much farther south should we go if your damned intuition can’t get it together, William?” asked Cedric, when the signal failed to reappear.

“We can turn around in a moment, I guess—
holy shit!”
A sudden surge of pain embraced my left side, and I knew beyond all doubt it was the coin calling to me...more like yelling for me to come find it! In waves like a pulse, it meant that the signal was radiating toward me from far, far away. But why? Why like this?! “Maybe we should go back and take the jet.”

“To where?” Rachel asked. “If the coin is near Kayseri, or some other town farther south, we will arrive quicker by car since we would lose five hours to get to the airport alone.”

“And if it is farther south than we are presently considering, flying wouldn’t be an option anyway,” said Roderick. “You would need special permission from the US Embassy.”

“What? We already have permission to be here in Turkey,” said Cedric. “Unless you’re talking about.... Ah, hell, you don’t think the damned thing is someplace in Syria, do you? Surely not!”

But I couldn’t tell exactly how far away the signal was coming from. All I knew for sure was that the pulse was getting stronger the farther south we drove, despite disappearing for periods of time.

Rather than speculate any longer on whether the coin was below Turkey, we journeyed to Kayseri, arriving just before noon. The signal continued the bizarre pattern of disappearing and coming back with a vengeance, and the ebb and flow became something I expected. All of us were eager to see if we could find a place where the signal would settle down, and we pushed on to Gaziantep before stopping for lunch.

By then, it was almost one o’clock in the afternoon. We weren’t far from the Turkish border, and our discussion turned from where to look in Turkey to how would we invade Syria without putting ourselves in extreme danger. The chances of running into hostile Islamic extremists were high—especially since it seemed increasingly likely we might end up deep inside Syria before finding this ornery coin.

* * * * *

T
he irony is not lost on me that the coin could well be in the city it was named for: Damascus. After all, our coordinates have steadily moved toward the ‘direct line’ I am used to sensing when looking for one of my cursed shekels. The painful surges to my left side have become more fervent, and the gaps in the ‘pulse’ sensation have steadily decreased in size to where I am getting hit every ten to fifteen minutes. I have no doubt that one of the most storied of my blood coins is calling to me.... But I might have to wait until tomorrow, Sunday, to retrieve it.

Normally, I wait to update my journal until after the fact. But I feel compelled to leave an update now while we remain in Gaziantep. Rachel has contacted Michael Lavoie in Washington, to alert him to our plans to enter Syria sometime this evening. We are hoping he can get clearance for us to enter the country so that we are not arrested. Our immediate plan, once we get the security clearance we hope for, is to visit the city of Aleppo, where Rachel has contacts at the college there. We hope to spend the night there and if the signal—along with Roderick’s, Rachel’s, and my intuitions—continues to point to Damascus as the likely location for my last blood coin, we will head there in the morning.

Maybe revisiting the very streets I walked upon with Jesus and my formerly cherished brethren will be the key. Perhaps the coin had long ago returned to the city it was named for, and has been waiting ever since for me to come collect it once the others were safely in tow.

***Note to myself. Remember to clean up and finish this latest entry (or scrap it altogether) following the next twenty-four hours’ events. Perhaps it will make sense to include the dream I had of Beatrice, when I briefly fell asleep at Ataturk airport. It lasted all of ten minutes but seemed as if hours had passed... I mourned waking up from it! I might discuss the dream with Rod first before deciding whether or not to include it here... we shall see.

In the meantime, may The Almighty see fit to grant me success in this final quest for the last of my blood coins. May it be His will and mercy that the search finally ends.

––––––––

G
reetings.

My name is Roderick Cooley, and after much debate, I have decided to finish my dear friend’s final journal. Judas Iscariot, aka Emmanuel Ortiz, aka William Barrow is no longer with us.

Rachel Bashemath and Cedric Tomlinson are witnesses to what I am about to relate. Since neither of them feels qualified to handle this exchange, it has been left up to me to finish what the most cherished companion I have ever known had nearly completed. Please forgive me if I am unable to match his prowess and style that have gained him some affection among the reading public. I will do my best.

Beginning where Judas left off....

It appeared that we would be stuck in Gaziantep for several days, as our initial attempts to gain entrance into Syria were denied. Soon after sunset, however, Michael Lavoie paid back an old favor to Rachel, and the four of us were allowed to travel as far as Aleppo that night.

“I don’t recall a coin’s pull being this intense before, Rod,” Judas confided, once we had settled into a vacant dormitory suite at Aleppo College, one of the safer places to stay in the city. Rachel and Cedric occupied the beds in one room, and Judas and I took the beds in the other room. A small bathroom connected the rooms. “I pray it lasts long enough to find the damned thing this time.”

“Aye, my brother—I pray it does, too,” I agreed.

I had rarely seen him this anxious in regard to one of the blood coins, as often he would be like a child at Christmas, anticipating with delight what Santa Claus might bring him. This time he was like a lad expecting a stocking full of coal and a switch to the backside to boot!

“What if we get there and we find nothing?” he continued to worry, after we retired to our beds to wait out the night until the dawn’s advent would relieve him of the pretense of sleeping. I might manage a few hours, since I hadn’t slept much in the past week, and under less duress, Judas might catnap for an hour or so. “Or, worse... suppose the signal stops before we journey south to Hama?”

“Rest easy, Judas. I don’t foresee the signal getting weaker,” I sought to assure him. “If anything, it will get stronger, especially now that the straight transmittal line has been confirmed. If you had been directed to someplace, say, like Palmyra, I would share your doubts. But the trajectory likely emanates from—“