Crucified (28 page)

And they brought him bound and delivered him to Pontius
Pilate the governor.

Then Judas, who betrayed him, seeing that he was condemned,
repenting himself, brought back the thirty pieces of silver to
the chief priests and ancients,

Saying: I have sinned in betraying innocent blood. But they
said: What is that to us? Look thou to it.

And casting down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed
and went and hanged himself with a halter.

But the chief priests having taken the pieces of silver, said: It is
not lawful to put them into the corbona—the place in the temple for gifts and offerings—because it is the price of blood.

And after they had consulted together, they bought with them
the potter's field, to be a burying place for strangers.

For this cause that field was called
Haceldama,
that is, the
field of blood, even to this day.

Skipping to later pages, the expert said, "The alternate version, Acts of the Apostles—the second book of Luke—says:

Concerning Judas, who was the leader of them that apprehended Jesus:

Who was numbered with us, and had obtained part of this ministry.

And he indeed hath possessed a field of the reward of iniquity,
and being hanged, burst asunder in the midst: and all his
bowels gushed out.

And it became known to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem: so
that the same field was called in their tongue,
Haceldama,
that
is to say, The field of blood.

Closing the Bible, the expert returned to his drawing of Jerusalem on the blackboard and tapped the number 5.

"Haceldama—called the potter's field because a potter had once owned it—sits on a terrace south of Jerusalem, on the south face of the Hinnom Valley, just before it joins the Kidron Valley. Hinnom runs the length of the city's south wall, and Kidron runs down the east wall between the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives."

"That's where Judas hanged himself and was buried?"

"According to both the Bible and the script on your papyrus map."

"Is Haceldama still there?"

"Very much so. During the Crusades, it was the burial ground for European knights."

The art historian ushered Rommel to a corner of the library dedicated to the Holy Land. Maps of Jerusalem in different periods—the First Temple, the Second Temple, the time of Jesus, Aelia Capitolina, the Byzantine, the Early Arab, the Crusader, the Ayyubid, the Mamluk, the Ottoman, the British Mandate—were framed on the wall. Down one side of this map collage ran a chronology.

"Do you like solving puzzles, Herr Feldmarschall?"

"Military ones."

"Then permit me to pose a biblical puzzle with war the key to solving it. The puzzle is, What makes your papyrus map from Tobruk a biblical earthshaker?"

      
ENGLAND, NOW

The Legionary was lashed to Satan by a black umbilical cord.

His belly heaved as the beast within writhed through his gut and gnawed at his soul. Poison polluted his veins, rotting his body and sickening his mind. The clifftop cottage stank of sulfur and decaying flesh. Thrashing back and forth like a windshield wiper, the priest in him had tried to shake off the Devil's yoke, but Satan had all but conquered any good left in him. Instead of visions of God, the Virgin, and Jesus Christ, his head was stuffed with horrific images of the Inquisition to guide him through what he was doing now.

With every turn of the screw, the woman shrieked louder.

Her screams, however, were muffled by the gag.

Tears ran streaks of makeup down her gin-blotched cheeks.

"For the love of God!" beseeched the man tied to the plank.

"You have it
all!
"

His begging resulted in another twist of the crank.

Since God made man in His image, He alone knows how to break him. That's why God inspired the tools of the Inquisition, and taught His Vatican inquisitors how to use them to exorcise Satan's secrets from his disciples.

Crank.

The danger wasn't the witch's tit. That was just the sign of women who consorted with the Devil. No, the peril to the souls of mankind was the witch's womb, which would produce the Devil's spawn, the Antichrist!

Crank.

To combat that, the Inquisition had created the Pear. The Pear was a bulbous metal invader shaped like the fruit.

Having tied the daughter of the
Ace
'
s bomb-aimer to the corners of her four-poster bed, the Legionary had inserted the witch-hunting device into her vagina and was now twisting the crank to spread the bulb like a blooming flower.

Crank.

The expanding Pear ripped her womb apart.

"Moses," the Devil inside him sneered, "try holding back 
this
red sea."

Turning to focus on the man, the Legionary caught his reflection in a mirror. His skin was stretched across the bones of his diabolic face. As toxic fumes roiled from his lips, Satan's guttural growl rumbled deep within his chest. The priest gagged like a vomiting monster, and his fingers crooked into claws. The eyes that fell on the pleading man were intense and piercing.

"You next," Satan snarled.

To render the son of the
Ace's
flight engineer almost unable to speak, the Legionary had wedged a Heretic's Fork under his chin. Held in position by a loose iron collar around his neck, the double-ended fork jabbed his upper chest and the flesh beneath his chin. The husband lay stretched along a bench that rocked on the fulcrum of a kitchen stool. His head was outside the bedroom door, so he could see his wife from the corner of his eye and hear what was done to her. He was the one who had given up their fathers' wartime archives, answering every question the home invader put against the background of his wife's mewling.

Hell, the fool had even offered up his soul.

Gotcha!

To lever up the man, the Legionary wedged the foot end of the bench under a heavy armchair. He used a clothespin to plug the man's nose, then the priest yanked his jaw down on the prongs of the Heretic's Fork just enough to be able to jam a funnel between his teeth. It took quart after quart of water poured down the funnel's spout to bloat the husband's stomach to maximum distention. A kick from the Legionary's foot shoved away the chair so the head end of the bench slammed down. Water spewed from the open mouth as the full weight of the stomach pressed against the inverted heart and lungs. The unbearable pain was etched into the man's eyes, as was the fear of suffocation.

Whap!

Whap!

Whap!

Using a wooden mallet, the Legionary hit the man's bloated belly with harder and harder blows, until he burst open like Judas at Haceldama.

What a mess!

All that remained was to leave Satan's signature. As the possessed priest walked the floor of the cottage to smear the number 666 across the walls in the woman's blood and suspend an upside-down crucifix from a ceiling beam, his footsteps sounded like the clomping of cloven hoofs.

Having cleaned up at the sink and with the archives clutched under one arm, he turned to exit by the door that opened on the yard fronting the cliff-edge path, and that's when he saw the bewildered face of Wyatt Rook peering in through the Judas window.

His hand went for the gun.

      
GERMANY, 1944

"What makes your papyrus map from Tobruk a biblical earthshaker, Herr Feldmarschall?"

Moving to the chronology beside his map collage, the art historian touched the uppermost date.

"Clue one," he said, "is background to the puzzle."

Rommel read:

1000 B.C.: King David captures Jerusalem and makes it the
capital of the Israelite kingdom. David's son, King Solomon,
erects the First Temple in Jerusalem, on Mount Moriah, at the
site of the Foundation Stone, where Abraham almost sacrificed
his son, Isaac, to God.

"From then on," said the historian, "Jerusalem was of religious significance to Jews."

His finger dropped.

"Clues two and three," he said.

586 B.C.: Babylon's King Nebuchadnezzar conquers
Jerusalem, destroys the First Temple, and exiles the Jews to
Babylon, about fifty miles south of what is now Baghdad, Iraq.

538 B.C.: King Cyrus of Persia, now Iran, conquers Babylon.

He allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem and resurrect their
temple from the ruins of the first one. The Second Temple is
dedicated twenty-two years later.

"The Second Temple is on the papyrus map," said Rommel.

His host nodded. "Clue four," he continued.

63 B.C.: The Roman general Pompey, a third of the triumvi-rate that includes Julius Caesar, conquers Jerusalem.

Accountable to Rome, King Herod ascends to the Judean
throne in 37 B.C. He constructs a manmade Temple Mount on
Mount Moriah, surmounted by a refurbished Second Temple.

He also adds the Second Wall of Jerusalem, to expand the city
to the north.

"That Second Temple and that Second Wall are the ones sketched on the papyrus map," said the historian. "That's how Jerusalem appeared when Christ died."

His finger touched a wall map titled "The Time of Jesus."

"Clue five," he said.

33 A.D.: Tensions rise in Jerusalem because Jews resent the
Roman occupiers. Jesus enters the city, confronts the high
priests in the Second Temple on the Temple Mount, and by
order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, is crucified on
Golgotha.

"So," said the historian, "from then on, Jerusalem was of religious significance to Christians." He pointed to the same crucifixion sites on "The Time of Jesus" map that he had chalked on the blackboard across the room.

Gethsemane.

Golgotha.

Haceldama.

"Clue six," he said, returning to the timeline.

70 A.D.: The Third Wall of Jerusalem—to the north of the
Second Wall—is built between 41 and 44 A.D. and later
strengthened by the Zealots fighting Rome in the Jewish War.

That wall brings Golgotha inside the city. In 70 A.D., the
Romans sack Jerusalem, demolish its walls, and raze
the Second Temple. All that's left is the Temple Mount's
western retaining wall (which becomes the Wailing Wall,
the holiest site for Jews). All Jews are expelled from
Jerusalem.

"The Third Wall's not on the papyrus map," noted Rommel.

"Clue seven."

65 to 100 A.D.: The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John—the core of the Bible's New Testament and the Four
Pillars of the Church—are written. The probable dates are:
 

Mark—around 70 A.D.

Matthew—after 70 A.D., since it refers to the destruction of
Jerusalem.

Luke—after 70 A.D., since it also refers to the destruction of
Jerusalem.

John—after 70 A.D., most likely in the 90s.

Conservative theologians suggest earlier dates, pushing Mark
back to the early 50s.

"And finally," concluded the historian, "clue eight."

135 A.D.: Hadrian crushes the Bar Kokhha Rebellion and
expels all Jews from Palestine. Left without a homeland, the
Jews are dispersed around the Mediterranean. Jerusalem is
renamed Aelia Capitolina, and Hadrian raises a temple to
the Roman god Jupiter on the ruins of the Second Temple.

He fills in the quarry with the tomb of Jesus to construct a
Temple of Aphrodite on the summit of Golgotha.

"Herr Feldmarschall, those are the clues to solving the puzzle. Do you now understand what makes your papyrus map a biblical earthshaker?"