Year Zero (3 page)

“Where did you get that thing?” Nathan Lee whispered.

“We should stop her,” said Ochs. “She’ll give us away.”

“She’s crazy. Didn’t you see her eyes?”

“You’re taking us in circles,” Ochs snarled. Low on blood sugar, jet-lagged, he was becoming dangerous.

Nathan Lee held up a hand for quiet.

Ochs pushed him, then he heard—or felt—it, too.

The vibrations traveled up the long bones in Nathan Lee’s legs. The ruins were trembling. Someone was approaching, a patrol or gang or militia. Killers. Night angels. Their footsteps shocked the earth.

Nathan Lee wasted no time calculating their distance. He started up a hillside of mangled debris, racing from one moon shadow to the next. Ochs followed, grunting, boots slugging for purchase. Nathan Lee saw the gun in his fist, a silvery toy. He reached the top of the debris, and stopped.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher stood beneath him. They had reached the Christian quarter.

Nathan Lee had been here before. The place actually housed many places. Crusader towers crowded against Byzantine domes built upon the ruins of a Roman temple of Venus. Here, contained under one roof, were the legendary landmarks of Christ’s death, from the rock of Calvary to the tomb of His resurrection. Some of the outer buildings had fallen, but most of it was intact, even the little crosses on top of the domes.

Ochs reached him, and saw the church. He gasped. “See?” he said. “See?”

Then Nathan Lee heard voices below. Without a word he lowered himself into a hollow where the rubble had sagged. Ochs squeezed in beside him.

“Untouched!” said Ochs. “Just like we saw on CNN.”

Nathan Lee drew back into the shadows. He lay his cheekbone against a concrete slab and rested his fingertips along a prong of rebar sticking from the rubble. The footsteps drew closer. He could feel the tremors gaining strength. Ochs’s sweat stank.

Then they appeared, or their shadows did. He saw shapes, not men, huge shadows streaming against what walls still stood. He saw the glint of rifles. They trampled the ruins like quiet machinery.

Ochs’s eyes were huge and white in the dark recess. His jowls were tiger-striped with black and olive paint. He lifted his gun.

The killers passed.

Ochs stood. “Come on.”

Nathan Lee stayed on his hands and knees. “There’s something down here,” he said. Next to Ochs’s boot toe, the thing jutted up.

Nathan Lee thought at first it was a tiny potted tree growing out of the wreckage, ten inches high, no more. He leaned closer to see what it was. The shock of recognition made him grunt.

It was a hand.

The twigs were fingers, wilted. The wrist was thin. It held a woman’s watch. The long plastic fingers had nails laquered ruby red. The gold wedding ring was shiny and new. A mannequin’s hand, that’s what he wanted it to be. He knew it was not.

“Look,” said Nathan Lee.

Ochs shined his light.

“It’s a woman.”

They had been smelling the dead all night. The odors seeped up from the ruins. Nathan Lee had started to think they might just escape without seeing any bodies.

“Okay, you found one,” said Ochs. He kept his voice flat. “Let’s get going.”

Nathan Lee stayed kneeling. The flares illuminated their ridge top with electric reds and greens. The hand hung limp, forefinger slightly pointing as in Michelangelo’s picture of Adam taking the mortal spark from God. The beautifully painted fingernails were broken off at the tips, and packed underneath with dirt. She had clawed her way out of the tomb. That spoke to him. She had refused to surrender.

“Do you hear that scratching sound?”

Since entering the city, the sounds had been rising up to them from underground. Murmurs, cries, knocking, scratches. They’d done a fine job pretending it was just the city settling in on its own rubble. Nathan Lee couldn’t pretend anymore.

“You’re hearing things,” said Ochs. He drew taller. “She’s dead. The city’s a write-off. Come on.”

Nathan Lee set his ear against the ground. Something was scraping under there. It could be stones whispering against one another. Or nails gently stroking at the dirt.

“Dogs,” said Ochs, “trying to dig their way in. Or house cats. They’re worse, I hear. They go for the face muscles.”

Nathan Lee began lifting stones away.

“What are you doing?”

“It could be her child down there,” said Nathan Lee.

“Have you lost your mind? Her child?”

“It could be.” Nathan Lee pried up one block, but another slid into its place. He tried another stone, and the debris shifted again. It was like a puzzle that refused to be undone. The ruins did not want to give her up.

“You can’t change what’s happened,” said Ochs. “We’re in enough danger.” A machine gun rattled in the distance.

Nathan Lee lifted her fingers on his palm. They were flexible, not entirely cold. He squeezed them gently.

“Damn it. Feel for a pulse,” said Ochs. “Get this over with.” He reached across and stabbed his fingers against the inner wrist.

The fingers twitched. The hand clutched Nathan Lee’s. “God,” he barked. He tried to let go. But she held on. Her grip relaxed very slowly. Nathan Lee stared at his hand.

“A nerve contraction,” Ochs said.

“How would you know?”

“Dead frogs do it.” Ochs milked the wrist, and the hand balled and loosened, a puppet with no brains.

“Stop,” said Nathan Lee. He took her hand again, but this time she didn’t return his grip. He laid his fingers along the wrist. Was that a pulse, or the earth’s vibrations? The warmth, was it a residue of the day? He returned to pulling at the heavy stones. “Help me,” he said.

“We can’t stay here,” said Ochs. “If the aftershocks don’t kill us, the animals or soldiers will. You’re not going to find your conscience in the dirt, you know.”

Faraway, a man shrieked. Grieving or gut shot or mad. It stopped suddenly.

“Go,” said Nathan Lee. “There’s your church. I’ll be here. I won’t leave without you.”

“I need you down there,” said Ochs. “The trench is deep.”

What trench?
wondered Nathan Lee. Ochs had offered no clues to his prey, other than the name of the Church itself. “Help me then,” he repeated. He strained at another stone.

“All right,” Ochs said. “But first you help me. We go into the church. Get what we came for. It will take half an hour. After that you can come back here and dig to your heart’s content.” His teeth glittered red and green.

Nathan Lee balked. “And you’ll help me.”

“I’ll help. If anyone asks what we have in the body bag, we’ll tell the truth. Human remains.”

Another clue, thought Nathan Lee. He marked the edge of the depression with a mountaineer’s cairn, rocks stacked on rocks. Then he led Ochs down the rubble to the flat stone courtyard.

One of the great wooden doors had buckled open. They stepped inside from ruin into relative serenity. Tiles had buckled here and there. Colored glass crunched underfoot. Candles lay toppled and bent. Otherwise the interior appeared to be unscathed.

It was like walking through a dream among the altars and dark icons lining the walls. The rotunda area was larger than he remembered, but that was because the crowds of pilgrims were absent. Pillars and arches surrounded them. Flare light illuminated the surviving stained glass art. Not a soul occupied this safe haven.

“What did I tell you,” said Ochs. “All ours.” The quiet interior put him at ease. “The Tomb of Jesus,” he announced, walking to a boxy shape at the center of the rotunda.

The marble was polished from centuries of fingertips and reverent kisses. Inside the small edifice, Nathan Lee knew, was a tiny gate with a poor view of a rock. As he recalled, the fragment was covered with white and pink wax drippings. Was that Ochs’s souvenir? It would explain the geologist’s hammer and stone chisels. But not the “human remains.”

“What are we after?” said Nathan Lee. He felt disoriented in this place. Stone staircases led up here, down there. In the beam of his flashlight, metal chandeliers swayed slightly on heavy chains. The earth was still settling.

Ochs took his time. He crossed to a separate area, and Nathan Lee followed. A horizontal window looked down upon a misshapen boulder.

“The Rock of Calvary,” Ochs entoned. “Golgotha, in the Aramaic. The cave of Adam’s skull, they say. The hill of Christ’s death.”

“I’ve had the tour,” said Nathan Lee. The rock was roughly forty feet high, made of cream-colored limestone known as
mizzi hilu,
or sweet stone, a favorite of Iron Age quarriers. This particular blob of stone had been left in place because it was flawed, with a crack through the top that predated the Christian era by eons. Was this Ochs’s memento, a chunk of Christ’s rock? But what museum would buy such a thing?

“Look how small the summit is,” Ochs drily observed. “No room for two more crosses of the thieves, would you say? And steep. Have you seen the section drawing by Gibson and Taylor? It’s overhanging on the back side. Maybe a climber like you could get up the sides with a cross on your back. But a man who’s just been whipped half to death? They say a fully assembled cross would have weighed 200 pounds. Even if it was only the crosspiece Jesus was carrying, it still would have meant a good fifty pounds or more.”

Ochs went on. “The Gospels said nothing about Jesus being crucified on a hill, only at a
topos
or place. According to Jerome,
golgotha
was a common term for crucifixion sites. The skull referred to the unburied remains. It’s no wonder scholars have come to dismiss the site. I did, too.”

“We don’t have time for this,” said Nathan Lee. He looked around for something portable and precious, but it was all knickknacks to his eye. He couldn’t imagine what Ochs wanted here.

“One thing is certain,” Ochs rambled on. “Wherever Golgotha was, it must have served for thousands of other executions over the years. Varus crucified 2000 in the year 4
B
.
C
.
E
. Florus crucified almost twice that many at the start of the First Jewish Revolt. A few years later, Titus was crucifying 500 people per day. It adds up. But have you ever asked yourself, with all those dead men, where are the remains? Wouldn’t some of those skulls and bones have survived? In all our excavations around Jerusalem, we’ve found only one skeleton that had been crucified.”

Nathan Lee knew the skeleton…by name. Yehochanan had been a male, five-foot five-inches tall, twenty-five years old. Possibly he’d been a rebel. Possibly his little daughter had been killed before his eyes as he hung on his cross. At any rate, her bones had been found mixed with his. A spike driven sideways through his heel bone had stuck, and they had buried Yehochanan with the nail at a tomb just north of the city.

For a moment, despite himself, Nathan Lee felt pulled in. “The bones were removed when the Old City walls were expanded,” he said. “According to
halakhic
law, carcasses, graves and tanneries couldn’t remain within fifty cubits of the town.”

“That’s conventional wisdom,” said Ochs. “But the Jews weren’t in charge of the city’s expansion, remember? It was the Romans calling the shots. They didn’t give a damn about Hebrew regulations.”

“Then the bones turned to dust. I don’t know. They’re gone. What does it matter?”

“My man,” tutted Ochs.

The pieces fell together. “There are remains?”

“Under our very feet.”

“But I would have heard about it.”

“They were only discovered a month ago,” said Ochs. “A team with the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum. Vatican people. You know how secretive they are.”

“How did you find out then?”

Ochs rubbed his fingers and thumb. “Filthy lucre. I know you think you’re above everyone else, Nathan Lee. But even you have your price.”

Nathan Lee flushed. Ochs led the way down a set of stone stairs through a chapel region, then further on to a barred gate with a U-shaped, titanium bike lock. “The Cave of the Invention of the Cross,” he said, beaming his flashlight into the depths.

According to legend, the true cross had been discovered here, in 327 C.E., by the newly converted mother of Emperor Constantine. In a sense, she’d been the original archaeologist, dashing around, digging up artifacts, orchestrating bits and pieces of the Passion Narrative, the story of Jesus’ death. It was she who had decided the Rock was Golgotha, a tomb was the Tomb, and that Jesus’ cross had been buried in this cave. The wooden cross was long gone. Twice it had been lost to Moslem conquerors, first the Persians, then the great Kurdish warrior Saladin. Each time it had been recovered, only to be nibbled to toothpicks by faithful Christians. If Christ’s “tree” had ever existed in the first place, it was now scattered around the world in holy relic boxes.

Ochs gave the bars a shake, and took off his daypack. He tried a pry bar, but the bike lock defied him. He looked like a giant rat gnawing at the door. “The chisel, come on,” he said.

Nathan Lee shucked his pack. The bolts in the hinges were negligible. He chopped their heads off. The gate opened.