Crucified (30 page)

Agnostic though he was, he prayed for deep water.

So what became of the True Cross?

That's the question that plagued the mind of the Secret Cardinal as he stood in the portico of St. Peter's Basilica and contemplated Bernini's sculpture of Constantine awed by the vision of the cross in the sky. According to the legends of the Roman Catholic Church, Empress Helena, Constantine's mother, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 326 A.D., and there, in a cistern near the hill where Christ was crucified, she uncovered the
actual
cross on which he'd hung.

The holiest relic in Christendom was the True Cross. The empress had it broken up, and a piece was left in the care of the bishop of Jerusalem. Periodically, pilgrims saw the venerated cruciform. But Jerusalem fell to Muslim invaders in 638 A.D.

They erected the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount, for Islamic tradition says that's where Muhammad ascended to heaven. In the centuries that followed, their empire grew, eventually stretching from India to the kingdom of France.

By the eleventh century, Christendom was ready to strike back. Christian knights from the fiefdoms of Europe answered Pope Urban II's call for holy war. With crosses stitched on the tunics they wore over their armor, they went off by the thousands to Jerusalem. On July 15, 1099, they stormed the walls with siege machines and took back the city.

The Secret Cardinal imagined the crusaders rampaging through the streets. The ferocious summer sun radiated off their helmets, chain mail, and double-edged swords. They hacked down anyone in their path as they chased the defilers of Jerusalem up the Temple Mount. Mounds of infidel heads, hands, and feet piled up in the streets and squares, until the crusaders were literally up to their ankles in blood. Loot belonged to whichever knight seized it first, so men laid claim to gold and silver, mosques and houses, horses and mules. Rumor was the Saracens had gulped down coins before the battle, so squires and footmen slit open their bellies to retrieve them.

The Muslims fell back to the Dome of the Rock, but the crusaders flushed them out. As knights pillaged that sanctuary, the infidels sought refuge in the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque. The crusaders forced their way in and put them all to the sword.

Then they surrounded the Jews hiding in their synagogue and torched the building in retribution for their crucifixion of Christ.

The Jews burned alive.

This was no regular conquest by an invading army. This was a ritual slaughter, a cleansing of the temple. The bodies of the infidels, every pound of flesh, got piled outside the city walls and burned in pyres that Christians would later describe as flaming pyramids.

The Secret Cardinal saw the First Crusade as an exorcism.

Expelling the Devil from Eden.

Cleansing original sin.

So to offer thanks to God, the crusaders gathered in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Constantine on the crest of Golgotha and over the tomb of Jesus. "Oh day so ardently desired!" they prayed. "Oh time of times the most memorable!

Oh deed before all other deeds! Let this sacred city, so long contaminated by the superstitions of pagans, be cleansed from their contagion!"

It was in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that Arnulf Malecorne of Chocques, chaplain of the crusader army led by Robert of Normandy, William the Conqueror's son, rediscovered the True Cross. Hidden by Christians, it had gone missing in 1009. The discovery was a blessing from God, for an Egyptian army was coming to expel the crusaders.

Arnulf carried the True Cross at the vanguard of Christ's army when it met and defeated the infidels at the Battle of Ascalon.

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before—

The phone vibrating in his cassock summoned the Secret Cardinal back to the twenty-first century.

He hoped it would be the Legionary, but it was the Art Historian.

Only those two had this number.

"Eminence?"

"Yes," the cardinal whispered.

"Have you heard from him?"

"No."

"Something's wrong. He should have called me by now."

"Have you called him?"

"Yes. No answer. He said he'd phone to confirm as soon as he got the archives."

"When was that?"

"Early this morning. From Sussex."

"Have you reason for concern?" asked the cardinal.

"I fear he's unstable. I don't think he's psychologically fit for this crusade."

"How so?"

"I fear he's
too
true a believer."

+ + +

The crusaders held Jerusalem for eighty-eight years. The True Cross led them into battle twenty times. Dead crusaders were buried at Haceldama, just as Judas Iscariot was. A massive sepulcher was raised over natural grottos. Lowered through holes in the roof, bodies were left to rot there until the bones piled up fifteen feet.

The warrior who united the Muslims for revenge was Saladin, the sultan of Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia.

A Kurd from Tikrit, in what is now northern Iraq, he was almost fifty years old when, in March 1187, he called for
jihad
against the crusaders. "When the forbidden months are past," he read in the Koran, "then fight and slay the infidels wherever ye find them and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war."

Saladin did just that.

With the Saracens massing on the border of Christendom, the king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, summoned twelve hundred knights and twenty thousand footmen to the citadel of La Safouri, site of the largest reservoir in the Holy Land. He also had the True Cross sent from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher so his soldiers could march to war behind the sacred relic.

Saladin, however, prayed to the same God. To bait his trap, the sultan besieged the castle of Count Raymond of Tripoli.

Chivalry demanded the rescue of the count's wife, so the crusaders departed from their plan, trudging fifteen miles along a dry valley and over a saddle-shaped desert hump called the Horns of Hattin to save their damsel in distress.

Waiting for them along that route were thirty thousand Muslims flying the apricot banners of Saladin. His archers used charge-and-retreat tactics to harass the crusaders. Like irritating flies that wouldn't be shooed away, they returned again and again. Then, as the hammer of the sun beat down on its anvil, thousands of horsemen swung around behind the Christians to block their retreat.

The crusaders suffered a sleepless night beside a dry well.

Archers picked off their horses in the dark, and foot soldiers choked their camp with brush fires to increase their thirst.

Musicians kept them awake with drums, horns, and cymbals, while scorpions and tarantulas crawled into their armor.

Come morning, they plodded on toward the sight of Saladin's men pouring water on the sand to taunt them. The Muslim camp had water tanks replenished by camels circling to Lake Tiberias and back. With the enemy between him and the answer to his thirst, the king pitched his red tent on the crest of the Horns as a rally point. Only when the sun was in the crusaders' eyes and the heat and wind were up did the sultan attack.

The thundering hoofs of horses threw up a cloud of grit.

Lances, maces, and crescent blades flashed in the haze. Boxed in on the heights, weary knights grew more dehydrated with every swing of their swords. Men on foot crumpled under a rain of arrows. Whittled down, the Christians crowded around the True Cross. Saladin's son cried, "We have beaten them!"

"Be silent," his father replied. "We shall not defeat them until the red tent of the king falls." A second later, the tent collapsed. The king of Jerusalem was captured, along with two hundred knights. The True Cross vanished in the dust.

Three months later, Jerusalem fell. When he heard the news, Pope Urban III died of shock.

Saladin became the hero of the Muslim world. Allah, Mohammed, Saladin. God, prophet, liberator.

Muslims view the crucifixion as a sacrilege, a story unworthy of a proud religion. Jesus was human, not divine. Jesus was a prophet, not the son of God. To flaunt their contempt for that ignoble demise, the victors marched the knights'

Golgotha relic to Damascus stuck upside down on a spear.

The last time anyone saw it—according to legend—the True Cross was being dragged through the streets of Damascus tied to the tail of Saladin's horse.

+ + +

It was a long way from the dusty Golgotha of Cutud to the magnificence of the Vatican. From the portico, the Secret Cardinal crept into St. Peter's and marveled at its treasures.

Lifting his eyes toward the soaring dome, he imagined fragments cracking off and falling to earth. He was gripped by a sickening vision of the Church crashing down around him.

Help me, Lord, he prayed.

Damascus was not the end for the True Cross. The legend is that during the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, knights sacked the city of Constantinople—now Istanbul—and seized one of the pieces brought from Jerusalem by Constantine's mother, Empress Helena. That piece was broken up and distributed among the crusaders, and so many bits of the relic were bequeathed to the Catholic churches and monasteries of Europe that the Protestant John Calvin later joked, "Collected together, they would make a big shipload. Yet the gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it."

This modern-day crusade, however, was far more crucial.

If the Judas relics were what they were purported to be, they would be the most earthshaking find in the two-thousand-year history of Christendom.

Even more sacred than the True Cross.

If he succeeded in his crusade, the Secret Cardinal would undoubtedly qualify for sainthood.

Divine inspiration.

But if the relics were as false as all those pieces of the True Cross from Constantinople, they would bring the Holy See crumbling down.

Again, the phone in his cassock vibrated.

"Yes?" he whispered.

Nothing.

Only ragged breathing.

Then . . .

Barely audible . . .

"Father .. . Help . . . I need an exorcist. . ."

ENGLAND

Daniel Defoe took his inspiration for
Robinson Crusoe
from the coastline of southeast England. But lucky Crusoe was cast ashore on the sands of the warm Caribbean, not here in the chilly English Channel with shingle as a beach.

Thank God for high tide and a dip in the seabed created by the cliff's tumbling. Wyatt struck the bottom feet first, but not hard enough to fracture his legs and spine. He was able to claw his way to the surface and cling to the chalk until the tide ebbed, exposing the shore at the foot of the cliff. His arm hurt like hell from his weight, but the bullet hole was a flesh wound, not something serious. Salt in the wound made it worse, and he hoped that, in the age of pollution, it was still true that sea water was good for a cut.

Ha!

In his bag stored at the station, Wyatt had antibiotics. He'd learned from past travels never fly to a Third World country without a medical kit, so he had a vial of unused drugs from last summer's trip to Botswana.

He was freezing. Survive this and he'd probably catch his death of cold.

Ah yes, the smell of sea air.

A day at the beach.

Waiting for the tide gave Wyatt time to assess his situation. The moment the cops got their claws into him, he knew he'd be tossed in the clink. He was up to his neck in circumstantial evidence before this, and now he'd left his calling card at two more murders.

The hand that had aimed the gun was wearing gloves, he recalled.

That meant there'd be no prints from the killer in the cottage.

Just his calling card on the mat, dropped when he stopped by to butcher two more descendants of the
Ace's
crew.

Wait a sec.

The hand, he thought.

What was that mark on the hand?

Not the gloved hand of the Lenny aiming the gun at him through the Judas window, but the bare hand that shook his when he met Lenny in Germany. Wyatt recalled seeing a scar on the back of that palm.