Crucified (37 page)

Death was one thing.

An ugly death was another.

And no death was uglier than this.

Stiff upper lip be damned!

Wyatt was terrified.

So he did what any intelligent agnostic would do in his place.

He hedged his bets.

He prayed.

A trickle of blood from the Scot's wounds ran across the planks to Liz, spread-eagled beside him. Her wrists and ankles weren't cuffed with U-clamps like the men's. Instead, Liz was tied to the clamps with ropes, so her limbs were loose enough to allow triangular wooden blocks to be wedged beneath her joints.

Wedged beneath her elbows, and wedged beneath her knees.

Wyatt winced.

He knew what the blocks were for.

When he was finished nailing the Scot to the floor, the demoniac followed the trail of blood from the outstretched hand to Liz. Except for a silver crucifix hanging upside down from his neck, the killer Wyatt knew as Lenny was dressed in bible black. Crouching, he pulled a knife and slit open Liz's blouse, then he began searching every inch of her bare skin.

Like the Scot, Liz was gagged with a ball. Thai meant she could speak only through her eyes, and the silent shriek Wyall saw in them deafened him.

Dissatisfied, the demoniac flicked the blade at Liz's bra. Then used the tip to flip the released cups from her heaving breasts When he failed to find what he sought, the inquisitor slashed her pant legs from her ankles to her groin. He gave up once Liz was naked except for a swath around her waist. Even now, the fallen Christian couldn't shed his prudery. His fig leaf out of Eden.

"No witch's tit," he declared. "Virgin flesh. I heard you say in the car that you're agnostic. Before I'm through with you, you
will
believe in me. I am
Legion!"

The Inquisition wheel had spokes and a heavy iron rim.

It would be rolled across the blocked-up lengths between a victim's wrist and elbow, elbow and shoulder, ankle and knee, knee and hip, splintering the bones into sharp shards that pierced the skin. The salvage museum didn't offer a big, rolling wheel, but it did have a heavy gun carriage from the battery deck of a man-o'-war. If that rumbling wagon was pulled across Liz's wedged limbs, her bones would be pulverized to dust.

Near her sat a bronze bowl and a cage of mice.

What were they for?

A diabolic
coup de grace?

Rumble, rumble . . .

The gun cart was on the move.

Wyatt couldn't bear the thought of witnessing this, so ho jerked at his shackles as violently as he could, hoping a miracle would tear the bolts from the metal walls. His mouth worked so hard to shout at the killer—anything to distract him—that the spikes of the witch's bridle jabbed through his cheeks.

The gun carriage stopped rumbling.

The demoniac turned.

"You want to go first?" he asked.

From inside the cage around his head, Wyatt watched the priest drag an old steering wheel assembly from a sailing ship over to him. Using his knife, the demoniac slashed Wyatt's clothes to bare his belly, breastbone to groin.

"Does your agnosticism extend to ignorance about the death of St. Erasmus?"

It didn't.

Wyatt had seen Poussin's painting
The Martyrdom of St. 
Erasmus
in the Vatican Museums. The bishop had been killed for preaching the gospel during Emperor Diocletian's persecution of the Christians in 303 A.D. Roman executioners slowly wound his bowels out of his belly using a sailor's windlass.

Wyatt knew he was minutes away from such a disemboweling, and he quivered as the killer's fingers probed his abdomen to find where to insert the knife. The demoniac would slit a small hole in his gut, just large enough to extract a coil of bowel, then hook one end of his entrails to this steering wheel and turn, turn, turn, winding his ropey viscera around the wheel's axle like a fireman does to reel in his fire hose.

To
feel
your belly emptying!

Slither, slither, slither . . .

To be hanged, drawn, or quartered.

Which was the worst?

Wyatt braced himself for the stab of the knife.

The man he knew as Lenny moved in close to stare directly into his eyes.

"I.. . am . . . Legion!"

Then both eyes bugged out of his head.

And the side of his face away from the door blew out in a blast of blood and bone.

+ + + 

Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!

The silencer-equipped gun whispered as the Art Historian to the Vatican pulled off three shots. At least one of the bullets struck the Legionary in the side of his head. Knife clattering to the floor, he dropped like a stone between the old steering wheel and Wyatt Rook.

The anemic ghost at the door shuffled toward the treasure on the workbench. His co-conspirators had been motivated by their need to save the Catholic Church, but he was trying to save
his
earthly life. With that at stake, he couldn't chance betrayal by the priests. For all he knew, the Secret Cardinal would give the Holy Grail to the pope with no thought of curing his leukemia first. Or worse yet, the Legionary—if he was indeed possessed by Satan—would hurl it into the Firth of Forth to destroy any proof that Jesus Christ
is
the son of God.

Thirty pieces of silver.

That's all it took to entice Judas to nail Christ to the cross.

Imagine the value of the nails in the secular marketplace.

How much is your life worth to you?

No, he couldn't risk letting anyone betray him for a motive either sacred or profane.

Not with
his
life depending on it.

So the Art Historian had supplied the Legionary with the tools he needed for the British leg of his crusade: tracking devices, the pistol he fired at Rook in Sussex, and the dart gun that subdued the three captives in this Nissen hut. But to keep track of the Vatican's attack dog, the dying man also had his
own
receiver monitoring the bug on Liz Hannah's car, as well as a GPS tracker hidden in the receiver used by the Legionary. That's how the Art Historian could assure the Secret Cardinal that the possessed priest was on his way to York. And how, tonight, he had tracked Liz, Wyatt, and the demoniac to Inverkeithing.

Struggling against weakness to reach the workbench, the doomed man closed his hand around the nails that had cured his meningitis as a boy.

"Cure me, Christ," he prayed, raising the relics toward heaven as a shudder shook him to his diseased soul.

Ironically, his tire had been punctured by a nail on the road approaching the yard. Too weak to change it, the Art Historian now required a substitute means of escape, for he had no intention of spending his soon-to-be-recovered life in prison. He wondered if the salvage yard had a motorboat. With the fog thickening by the minute, he might be safer by sea than chancing a road accident in a car stolen from what would soon be a murder victim.

Retrieving the knife the Legionary had dropped, the Art Historian cut the tape around the Scot's mouth, yanked out the ball, and aimed the gun between the man's eyes.

"Do you have a boat?"

The pent-up pain from the spikes piercing his flesh must have been too much, for the Scot cried out in what the Art Historian assumed was Scottish Gaelic.

It was.

"Mharaigh!"

Translation: "Kill!"

+ + + 

Wyatt saw the shadow before he saw the fur and fangs. It came from the open door moments after the Scot's command and was in the air before the gunman whirled toward it in fright.

The jaws of the shadow tore into the fleshy throat, and the beast took the sickly man down with its pouncing weight.

Wyatt recalled the minefield of puddles, litter, and shit on the path from the car to the Nissen hut.

Every salvage man keeps a junkyard dog.

If the Holy Grail equals holy blood, what could be closer to the blood of Christ than the nails that
actually
crucified him? Not some cup that supposedly collected his blood
after
death, and not some putative offspring of Mary Magdalene.

So Holy Grail equals holy nails.

What makes more sense than that?

The Empress Helena, legend holds, found both the True Cross and the crucifixion nails. Returning to Constantinople, she had one nail added to the helmet of her son, Constantine, to protect his head from the weapons of Rome's enemies.

A second nail formed the bridle for his horse, to shield the steed from injury.

Today, more than thirty "holy nails" are venerated in Europe, but like the fragments of the True Cross brought back from Constantinople, they are medieval frauds.

No wonder archconservatives in the Roman Catholic Church were willing to kill to get their hands on the Judas relics.

The holy nails! Now that Wyatt had acquired translations of the Aramaic parchments and Rommel's letter, he knew how strong their pedigree was.

Earthshaking.

The Judas relics had traces of what was believed to be Christ's blood, as well as a chip of bone that was probably caught when the nails were yanked out.

DNA lasts at least two thousand years.

That's what got Wyatt thinking when he first examined the nails.

And that's why Wyatt was here in this DNA lab, where the human genome had been broken into all its constituent genes so scientists could map the Darwinian blueprint of life all the way back to the primordial ooze.

Christ's DNA.

What could be more threatening to the Vatican than that?

"The Church draws her life from the Eucharist," Pope John Paul II maintained. "For this very reason the Eucharist . . .stands at the center of the Church's life.. . . The Eucharist is too great for anyone to feel free to treat it lightly and with disregard for its sacredness and universality."

That's because the Eucharist isn't simply a representation of Christ. Through Transubstantiation at Mass, the Host becomes
the actual body of Christ.

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI reasserted the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. Other Christian denominations are not true churches, he declared, because they don't have the "means of salvation" provided by Mass and the Eucharist.

"Christ established here on earth only one Church," he said.

Other Christian gatherings "cannot be called churches in the proper sense," because they don't have apostolic succession—

that is, the ability to trace their priests back to Christ's original apostles.

Back to St. Peter and his keys to heaven.

Back to Christ himself.

Back to the son of God, the product of Immaculate Conception.

So a lot was riding on this DNA test.

If the DNA recovered from the holy nails showed
two
parents, a male and a female, the thinking man could only conclude that Jesus Christ wasn't the son of God, and that his resurrection was a hoax. This would particularly be so if that male parent—like all humans alive today—shared 99 percent of his genes with a chimpanzee.

But if the DNA showed just one parent, then the only rational explanation would be that Jesus was created by Immaculate Conception by an unseen God.

Therefore, Jesus
was
the son of God.

"I like a man with dimples," said Liz as they waited for the computer to print the results of the test.

"Very funny."

"Really. I saw how you struggled when I was about to get crushed by the gun carriage. How heroic that you would mar your handsomeness for me."

Liz kissed the scabs on his cheeks.

"The salvage man has a better story to tell his grandkids," said Wyatt. "His scars are through his palms and feet. Lucky for him—and for us—that his wife had a roast in the oven and went looking for him when he stayed too long at work.

He could have bled to death."

The lab tech gave them a sign the printout was imminent.

Wyatt phoned Rutger in Germany.

"Well?" Rutger answered.

"It's coming. Liz wants a word with you."

Wyatt passed her the cell.

"How gracious of you to cut me in for a third of the Judas book," Liz said.

"Fair's fair," Rutger replied. "Wyatt and I are friends because we both know the other is fair."

Liz passed back the phone.

Wyatt's heart was pounding with excitement. Not every historian gets to be a hinge of history. The Old Testament survived for millennia until Darwin hammered the nail of evolution into the coffin of fundamentalism.

So long, original sin.

Now, the Judas relics could be the final nail in the coffin of the New Testament.

If Jesus was betrayed by his own DNA, that would be the ultimate Judas kiss.

So long, salvation through Christ.

"Here it comes," Wyatt said.

The geneticist reached for the DNA profile as it emerged from the printer.

"Well?" asked the rational historian.

"My God," said the scientist.