Tartarus: Kingdom Wars II (9 page)

My breathing was such I could straighten up again. I looked up, wondering if I could see something the others couldn’t see. But all I saw were angels.

A young man ran from group to group, showing everyone a picture on his cell phone. People were nodding and grinning when they saw it.

He approached us and held up his cell phone. It was a picture from space of the phenomenon localized over Jerusalem. There was enough detail to see that the clouds were inhabited with figures. The central passageway, Jacob’s ladder, appeared as a laser beam shooting into space.

“Where did you get this?” an excited Choni asked.

“Internet,” the boy replied proudly. “This one—” he said, changing the picture, “—is from the Israeli air force.”

It, too, was from an elevated perspective with greater clarity and detail.

A short distance away three men with open Bibles began reading aloud, one at a time.

People around us hushed as they recognized the familiar verses that were being revealed over our heads. The third man read:

At the reading of this verse a cheer resounded atop Mt. Olivet.

“Grant Austin!”

A hand grabbed my shoulder and swung me around to face the fury of Jana Torres.

“Why didn’t you tell me at the hotel? You saw this, didn’t you? You saw it before anyone else did. And you didn’t tell me? You ran away and didn’t tell me?”

I went from feeling elation to scum in a nanosecond. “Jana, I’m sorry. At the time, I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing.”

I hoped the excuse wasn’t as lame as it sounded.

From Jana’s expression, it was worse than it sounded. “After all we’ve meant to each other…”

Sue Ling watched our exchange from a distance.

“Something’s happening!” Jana’s cameraman yelled.

With a smooth motion he swung his camera onto his shoulder, pointing it heavenward. All around us people did the same with video recorders, cameras, and cell phones.

An unseen trumpet sounded. Clear. Unwavering. Its sound came from above us and resounded all around us.

People fell to their knees. Young and old, male and female. They lifted clasped hands to heaven. Tears streaked their cheeks.

Above us the angels appeared agitated. They gave a mighty shout.

It was a shout such as I had never heard. It passed through me like a wave, knocking me to my knees.

Choni was beside me, weeping with both hands raised. Sue Ling appeared positively beatific, as did Jana on my other side. What kind of friend was I to deny her this experience?

A collective gasp rose upward as the heavens parted, and there shone a great light. The light took the form of a man, descending from the clouds. His radiance outshone the angels and illuminated the thousands of faces looking up at him.

His garments were translucent and white as snow, rippling as though in a breeze. His arms were outstretched all at once to embrace us, and to show us the nail scars in his hands. His face was unblemished. His eyes…his eyes…his eyes…took you in and warmed you and loved you.

A few feet above us he slowed his descent. The crowd shrank back. He was no more than ten feet from us as he completed his descent.

His expression serene, a portrait of peace, the earth still. It was as though all of nature held its breath.

Jesus gazed lovingly upon us and we upon him. His arms swept slowly side to side in blessing.

As he glanced in my direction, he broke into a smile, then a chuckle. He held it back. Then he couldn’t. He laughed, caught himself, tried to hold it back, then laughed again.

The dam burst. Despite his every effort, Jesus let loose with laughter until tears filled his eyes. He doubled over he laughed so hard.

“It was a joke, people!” he whooped.

A
fter having his laugh, Jesus disappeared and all the angels with him, leaving us to the thunderclouds. The downpour was torrential. Having been raised on Hollywood humor, I kept thinking of Jesus balancing a bucket of water over heaven’s doorway and instructing the last angel to slam the door shut on his way out.

Like fools we stood there, staring up at the clouds, with the rain pelting us in the face until we were drenched. When it was obvious there would be no encore, we trudged down the hill.

The exodus off the Mount of Olives was a somber trek. There were some, like Choni, who remained upbeat despite the bizarre ending to what had been a dramatic buildup. Most, however, were somber. Gone was the thrill of expectation that had marked our ascent. For people who had expected to be taken up into the clouds where they would reunite with their loved ones as they had been taught in church, trudging down a slippery, muddy slope was disappointing.

The car was where we’d left it. A flow of vehicles meandered around it like a stream around a rock. With Choni driving, we waded into the flow of traffic and continued northward to Mt. Scopus and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, our original destination.

When we arrived, it was dark and the campus was deserted. Sue and I followed Choni to the Institute of Archeology. The institute had been pressed into service because of its advanced technical facilities and close proximity to the artifacts identified in the Alexandrian manuscript.

Choni identified himself to a security guard, who checked a log sheet. He commented on the tardiness of our arrival, then radioed a buddy announcing our arrival.

Moments later Choni’s father emerged through a set of double doors. He embraced his son with a weary smile and made a comment about him not having the good sense to come in from the rain. He then shook Sue Ling’s hand and my hand in Western fashion.

Dr. Gershom Serrafe was a kindly man, small, with broad shoulders and a bad combover. Both his hair and his bristly mustache were more white than gray.

“How is John these days?” he asked Sue, his eyes twinkling.

It took an awkward moment for me to realize he was inquiring after the professor.

“Professor Forsythe sends you his best,” Sue Ling offered. “He wishes he could have come himself.”

“He wishes he could climb up out of that straitjacket on wheels and get back into the field, that’s what he wishes,” Serrafe said ruefully. “But archeological digs are for the young, and John and I must content ourselves with more cerebral endeavors. Speaking of which, the manuscript in question would have been a waste of his time.”

“How can you say that, Papa, after what has happened?” Choni said.

Serrafe eyed his son without comment.

Choni was aghast. “Have you really been stuck so deep in this cave that you do not know what has happened?”

“Mt. Olivet,” Serrafe replied.

“Of course, Mt. Olivet! We were there! We saw! Angels, Papa! Thousands of them!”

“And you saw them, too?” Serrafe asked.

He looked directly at me. I wondered if he knew about me.

“We all saw,” Sue Ling said, answering for both of us.

“It was awesome, Papa!” Choni said. “Absolutely astounding! When he spoke, we all heard him in our own languages. I heard him in Hebrew. They heard him in English.”

“Awesome…astounding—” his father repeated. “It would take awesome and astounding to rid the parking area of those jackals with their microphones and cameras and satellite dishes. May their vans get mired in the mud.”

With a flick of his finger he indicated we were to follow him. He turned and led us through the double doors.

A wide corridor led to another pair of doors, which opened to a huge library study area. The tables and chairs had been rearranged to form seven groups of language scholars—each working on a separate translation of the Alexandrian manuscript. This must have been what Babel sounded like when God confused the tongues of man.

A half-dozen televisions were hung on ceiling mounts around the room. Following Serrafe’s lead, we gravitated around one just inside the door.

On the screen a distinguished-looking male commentator was delivering the news in Hebrew. I didn’t understand a word he was saying. I didn’t have to. The footage accompanying the story was from Mt. Olivet.

“They are calling him the Laughing Jesus,” Serrafe translated for us.

The most dramatic footage was accompanied by a banner at the bottom of the screen identifying the source as courtesy of KTSD, San Diego. Jana and her team had scored an international journalistic coup.

“We were right next to that cameraman, Papa,” Choni exclaimed, pointing at the television. “That’s exactly what we saw.”

Unimpressed, his father walked to a table, picked up a book, and slapped it against his son’s chest. “Matthew 24:3–5. Look it up.”

Choni’s expression soured, the way it does when someone resists reality, preferring that his excitement go unchallenged.

“Read it aloud,” Serrafe said.

Choni read:

Choni looked up. “But, Papa—”

Serrafe cut him off. “You’re not done reading. Read verse 23.”

Choni lowered his head, found the verse, and read:

Serrafe took the Bible from his son and shook it at him. “This is why we study Scripture! So that we are not tossed here and there by every drama, no matter how awesome. Do you think what happened on Mt. Olivet today is a coincidence? Come, I will show you.”

We snaked through the room to the opposite end, where several rows of long tables had been placed end to end. Brightly lit with portable lights was the Alexandrian manuscript itself. While the translators worked mostly from photo and computer images, occasionally they rose from their workplaces to consult the manuscript itself.

Despite Professor Serrafe’s overt disdain for it, the manuscript itself was impressive—hand-printed black Greek letters on ancient papyrus, brown and brittle with age.

He turned to Sue and me. “You have read the text?”

“I have,” Sue replied.

“And your field of study?”

“Physics.”

“Ah, then you know our dilemma,” the professor said. “And you, what is your field of study?” Tired eyes focused on me, awaiting an answer.

“I’m a writer. A journalist. Well, actually, a biographer.” I paused and looked to Sue Ling. When she didn’t offer the information for me, I added, “My biography of President Douglas won a Pulitzer Prize.”

“A journalist.” Serrafe sniffed. “So you are here as—how do you say it—Miss Ling’s protection, her um…her bodyguard.”

Sue Ling laughed. I didn’t think the professor dismissing my credentials was all that amusing.

Choni stood with his hands behind his back, leaning over the manuscript reading. He didn’t appear to be having any trouble reading the text even though there were no spaces between the words. As he read, his brow wrinkled.

“The Alexandrian text reveals a darker side to the Laughing Jesus,” Serrafe said. “To label him the Joker Jesus would be more accurate.”

Sue nodded her agreement.

“Jesus as portrayed in this manuscript,” Serrafe continued, “is a being not of this world who visited this planet in the first century and fashioned himself as the Jewish Messiah as a practical joke. The evidence offered in support of his claim is threefold. First, the date of the manuscript itself.”

Serrafe placed his hand over the manuscript without touching it. “The papyrus, ink, style of writing, and vocabulary are without doubt from the first century. Second, the precise locations of the artifacts—the thirty pieces of silver, Pilate’s documents, the coin the Apostle Peter pulled from the mouth of the fish—all prove an intimate knowledge of the people and events to which they’re attached.”

I was beginning to understand why Tiffany Sproul was a reluctant celebrity, and why the college was buying time to formulate a public statement regarding the manuscript.

“Third,” Serrafe said, “and most difficult to explain, are the modern scientific references.”

“All the things Jana mentioned at the press conference?” I asked Sue.

“Dark matter, DNA, black holes, entanglement, and more,” she replied. “Much more.”

Choni looked up from his reading. His eyes were dark. Disturbed. Without his smile he looked like a different person. “And now we have a face to put with the manuscript.”

“Of one thing I’m certain,” his father added. “We haven’t seen the last of him.”

“Grant? Higgins. Did I wake you? You sound tired.”

With a six-hour difference separating us, it was five o’clock in the afternoon in New York, eleven o’clock at night in Jerusalem. Choni was driving us back to our hotel. At his request Sue was sitting in the front seat. He was quizzing her about the physics in the manuscript when my cell phone rang. I’d been nodding off in the backseat for the past twenty minutes.

“It’s been a long day,” I said, stretching.

“A long day? It’s only two o’clock in California. Please tell me you’re getting up early to write.”

I was slow in coming up with an excuse.

“You are working on the book, aren’t you?”

“Um—not at the moment.”

“Watching television? Can’t say that I blame you. That’s some video from Israel, isn’t it? You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“What’s your take on it?”

“Um—I’m not quite sure what to make of it yet.”

“It’s so obviously a hoax. You know, like that Blair Witch movie those kids made. They had everyone believing something spooky was chasing them in the woods. This is no different. You watch: In a day or two a couple of pimply faced nerds will come forward, explaining how they did it. So, when can I see some chapters?”

The question took me by surprise. It shouldn’t have, but it did. Problem was, I hadn’t written any chapters. I had flown to Jerusalem instead. All I had were some outline notes.

“When do you need them?”

“Yesterday. Marketing wants to get a feel for the book. So do the cover design people.”

Great.
“Let me…um—let me whip them into shape and I’ll get them to you tomorrow.”

“They don’t have to be in your usual Pulitzer Prize–winning form, Grant. Rough draft is fine. Email them to me.”

“Yeah, well…” I stammered. “It’s what time in New York? Five, right? Nobody’s going to get anything done today. Let me work on them, and I’ll have them on your desk first thing tomorrow.”

There was a long pause.

“Eight o’clock New York time, Grant. No later.”

He sounded suspicious. Probably from years of dealing with authors like me.

“You got it,” I said, trying to sound cheerful, optimistic, even carefree.

We chatted about restaurants and baseball for a few minutes. He said good-bye by telling me he looked forward to reading my chapters.

After I hung up, I did some quick mental calculations. Eight o’clock in the morning in New York was two o’clock in the afternoon in Jerusalem.

“I can do this,” I told myself, as if putting it into words would somehow make it true.