The Resurrection File (56 page)

The nameplate said, “Dr. Lundgren Dedencrist—Department of Oriental Antiquities.”

“So?” Will asked, not seeing the connection.

“This is it. This has to be it!” MacCameron cried out. “How could I have been so cloddish and stupid?”

But Will could still not see the significance of the name over the door.

“Will, boy. Reichstad must have told his goons to hit Dr. Lazarus's office because of Jesus' ‘order' for Lazarus to come forth. They thought it was
that
kind of order. But they were wrong.”

Will was nodding thoughtfully as he recalled how MacCameron and he had discussed that point previously.

“I still don't understand.”

MacCameron was jabbing his index finger toward the name over the office door.

“But there is
another
kind of ‘order,' isn't there? Tell me, Will, what is another meaning of the word ‘order'?”

“Well,” Will said, “there is the kind of ‘order' that you get when there is a well-organized state of something. Like a ‘well-ordered' society. Like that?”

“Stop thinking like a lawyer! There is another kind of ‘order.'”

Will was getting tired of playing twenty questions.

“Well, there is—oh, I don't know—maybe ‘order' in the way it is used in baseball. The ‘order' of the line-up. Batting order.”

“Exactly!” MacCameron cried out. “The batting order! Oh, that's rich. Except in the Bible, the apostle Paul talks about an order much more important than a batting lineup. He gives us the ‘resurrection order!' Don't you see?”

“No,” Will replied.

“Richard Hunter, bless his heart—I don't know whether he ever finally believed in Jesus before his awful death. But one thing about my friend Richard—he knew his New Testament. Better than some pastors. That's what he meant by the ‘resurrection order.' First Thessalonians, chapter four, verse sixteen. Paul talks about the resurrection.” And with that MacCameron pulled out his little pocket New Testament and started reading:

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.

“I tell you, that's the ‘resurrection order' Hunter was talking about. He said, when I am in the
halls of the British Museum,
to remember my Bible, and to remember the
resurrection order
—in which the ‘dead in Christ' rise first…‘dead in Christ'…Dr. Ded-en-crist…Somewhere, on the other side of this door, just a few feet from where we are standing, lies the missing 7QC fragment. It's somewhere in the office of Dr. Dedencrist. I know it.”

MacCameron needed to rest, so he asked that Will run down to the central administrative office and gain access to the office.

The assistant administrator was just leaving for the day when Will caught her and explained the urgent need to get into Dedencrist's office and search it.

She looked skeptical. “Dr. Dedencrist is currently somewhere in the hills of Mongolia, with a group of American explorers, looking for the burial site
of Genghis Khan. I don't know how we can contact him to obtain permission.”

“Does he have a cell phone that works internationally?”

“Well, he did leave some numbers. I can try. Heaven only knows where he actually is.”

Will walked back to the locked door where MacCameron was sitting on a bench in the hallway, and explained the problem.

“I'm going to pray. Want to join me?” MacCameron asked.

Will somehow felt compelled to bow his head as Angus MacCameron, in labored but impassioned words, asked for the intervention of “our Most High King of the universe, our dearest heavenly Father,” that he might make possible a connection between the British Museum and Dr. Dedencrist. By the end of the prayer, MacCameron was out of breath, and Will was beginning to have serious concerns about his client's condition.

Will offered to find some water for his client, and went down the hallway. After he had walked about twenty feet, he heard the fast paced clacking sound of a pair of high heels down the corridor. He turned and saw the assistant administrator approaching MacCameron. She spotted Will and shouted, very uncharacteristically, “Mr. Chambers! Quite extraordinary. Most unusual. I was able to get him on his cell phone on the very first try. Dr. Dedencrist gave me immediate approval for you to look for Dr. Hunter's things.”

“Isn't that marvelous!” MacCameron said.

“And I think you should know what else he said.”

“What is that?” Will asked as he quickly approached her.

“Dr. Hunter was tight on space in his offices. He was something of a pack-rat. Never tossed a thing away. He ended up keeping several filing cabinets of his with Dr. Dedencrist, who didn't mind because he had the extra space. So, there you are!”

She fished through her keys, and tried several that didn't fit.

Finally she found the right key, unlocked the door, and swung it open.

As she turned on the switch, the fluorescent lights buzzed, flickered, and then illuminated the room, as Will and MacCameron walked in.

66

T
HE ADMINISTRATOR TOLD THEM SHE WOULD BE
back to check on them in about an hour, when they would have to leave for the day. She left, and the two began to scan the room.

It looked like what one would think of as the office of a museum staff member. Stacks of semi-organized papers and files were scattered over Dr. Dedencrist's desk and credenza. There was a table in the middle of the office, covered with maps and books. In one corner there was a computer on a small desk. Beyond the desk there was a row of windows that gave a panoramic view of the spires of the Royal Courts of Justice and the River Thames off in the distance, reflecting the sun that was setting over the city of London.

Against one wall of the office there were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with books.

On the other wall there was a row of four brown wooden file cabinets. Next to those there were three tan, metal file cabinets, with a small label on each drawer that simply read, “Dr R.H.”

“This is it!” Will exclaimed. He told Angus MacCameron to sit down and rest in the leather armchair in the corner of the office while he went through the drawers.

First, Will did a quick inventory of the general contents of the three file cabinets. Not surprisingly, Hunter's files were arranged largely in general alphabetical order. There were hundreds of manila file folders with a variety of different-colored labels, most of them with handwritten titles.

“Didn't Hunter believe in storing information on computer?” Will asked, as he considered the number of files he had to scan. He was beginning to worry that they might run out of time before the administrator returned and told them to leave for the day.

“He was old-school—like me. He didn't trust storing a lot of information on a computer,” MacCameron replied.

Will noticed that several categories nearly took up a full drawer each, like “JERUSALEM,” “MAPS,” “MONTHLY REPORTS,” and “PENDING PROJECTS.”

After a hurried scan of the labels of all of the files to see if anything directly relating to the 7QC fragment would jump out, Will had come up with nothing.

“I suppose it was too much to ask for, that Hunter would make it easy for us,” Will said out loud to himself. He decided to hit “PENDING PROJECTS” first, as that would be a logical place for Hunter to have hidden the fragment. Will found budget projections, correspondence on planned excavations south of the Qumran, articles on some promising sites in Jordan to investigate, memos and notes, receipts for cash expenses that Hunter had incurred; but nothing even remotely connected to the ancient fragment he was looking for.

Next he dove into the “JERUSALEM” file—again thinking that it would be a
logical
location for the fragment, but found only letters, Museum conference agendas, memos from the Israeli Antiquities Authority, personal cards from friends in Jerusalem, newspaper and magazine articles about the Temple Mount, diagrams of various projects planned in the Kidron Valley, just outside the Old City area—but no 7QC. Will looked again at the papers in the file, then reached in and pulled out something that looked like parchment.

Will glanced at the paper, and then shook his head. “Dr. Hunter saved a menu from a Jerusalem restaurant,” he said. “He hides the most important archaeological fragment of all time, but keeps a menu handy. Does anyone see anything funny about that?” Will said to the air.

“Try Bethlehem,” MacCameron suggested from his leather chair, as he swabbed perspiration from his forehead.

“Yeah, that's right—that's where Azid's shop was located,” Will said as he pulled open another file drawer. But when he located a thin folder with a “BETHLEHEM” label, he found it empty.

“There's nothing here,” Will exclaimed. “You think he took it out of the file at the last moment and put it somewhere else?”

MacCameron said nothing, but simply shook his head.

Then Will thought about checking for “AZID.” But there was no such file.

Finally Will decided to simply leaf through the files alphabetically. But the next time that he glanced at his watch, he realized that their hour in the
office had already passed. Any minute their host would arrive and politely kick them out, and he had only gotten to the files bearing the label “MAPS.” He flicked through the maps, diagrams, and charts, but nothing looked promising. The next categories were “MAPKON,” “MIDRASH,” “MITHRAS (ROMAN—2ND-5TH CENTURY),” “MITZVAH (see: PENTATEUCH)”—all of them looked unpromising.

The door to the office swung open and the assistant administrator appeared, putting on her raincoat.

“I'm afraid you will have to leave now, gentlemen. I hope you brought your umbrellas; there is a tiny bit of a drizzle outside. The security guard will escort you out.”

She disappeared from the doorway, and the sound of her heels on the marble floor echoed away in the distance.

So, this is it,
Will thought to himself. “Here we are with our backs to the Red Sea. The Egyptians come roaring down at us in their chariots. But the sea just doesn't part. Not this time. This time they grease their wheels with us.”

Will glanced over at MacCameron, who was leaning back, his head resting against the high-backed chair. He seemed to be talking, mouthing words—but Will could hear nothing.

Looking back at the file drawer he had been working on, Will ran his eyes over the file tabs once more. Finally he closed the drawer, and walked away.

And that was when he was aware of the silent touch from somewhere in the dark—the invisible neuron firing, the minuscule current of a thought—sparked from the finger of someone or something. Was it something he had heard? Or had read somewhere? He turned and looked back at the file drawer he had just closed.

“Something there…” Will muttered. “Something in that drawer…”

He grabbed the metal handle, and yanked the drawer open with such force that the file cabinet rocked and banged against the wall.

Will madly ran his fingers over the tabs: “MAPS,” “MAPKON,” “MIDRASH,” “MITHRAS (ROMAN—2ND-5TH CENTURY),” “MITZVAH (see: PENTATEUCH).”

“Greek,” Will mumbled to himself. “The Greek for ‘Mark.' The Greek name for the Gospel of Mark…it looks like…‘MAPKON'…in the Greek, the ‘P' makes the
sound
of an ‘R,' so it sounds like ‘Markon,' but it reads ‘MAPKON'!” His thoughts were tumbling over themselves as he reached for the “MAPKON” file.

“Reichstad wrote that 7QA was the true original ending to the Gospel of Mark. But that wasn't really
his
idea,” Will continued to himself now loudly. “He stole it—just like he stole 7QA. It was
Hunter's
idea…and Hunter told Azid…and that's where Reichstad got the idea…as well as the 7QA fragment.” With that Will pulled from the folder its only contents, a large olive-green envelope, with the flourish of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

“This is it!” Will yelled, and quickly unwound the thread from the round tab on the outside flap.

He then pulled out the only thing within: a clear plastic zip bag. It contained an irregularly shaped and yellowish piece of material with the block letters of Greek writing.

Will ran to the large table that was cluttered with books and maps and papers. With his left arm, he cleared a corner in one sweep, sending books clattering to the floor and papers flying in the air.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photocopy of 7QA joined together with 7QB and laid it on the mahogany surface of the table. He placed the plastic bag with the fragment onto the upper right-hand corner of the photocopy, carefully lining up its lettering to the right of the top two lines of 7QA, and just above 7QB—exactly where MacCameron had always thought that 7QC belonged.

It was a perfect fit. The left-hand edge of this piece was an exact match with the right-hand edge of 7QA; and the bottom of this new fragment matched the top of 7QB. And the two lines of Greek letters matched perfectly with the top two lines of 7QA, apparently completing them.