The Shroud Key (30 page)

I am going home again.

Going home to meet my maker.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

The flight arrives in New York’s JFK at 7:07 in the morning.

Fifteen minutes early thanks to a lighter than usual head wind, or so the captain politely informs us.

I have a choice here. I can immediately head into the city and surprise my ex-wife and daughter now, or I can head upstate to finish the job I started days ago. Truth is, there never was a choice. I want to see my daughter more than anything in the world. But I know that I cannot be hers entirely. Not until I nail the lid shut on this mystery … This chase.

That in mind, I take a cab in into the city and hop a train for Albany at Penn Station.

All during the train ride north, my eyes staring outside onto the Hudson River as the train winds its way along the banks, I can only wonder if my instincts are going to serve me right. If the bones of Christ are to be found not in Jerusalem or Egypt, but in New York of all places, the irony would not be profound, but almost comical. If they are to be found only within a mile of my birthplace and inside a cemetery where I used to play my Indiana Jones games as a scrappy-haired kid, I will know for certain that my life will have taken a humbling turn for the surreal. Or, what the hell, maybe it will all simply be a bizarre coincidence.

I ride, careful to keep a watchful eye on my surroundings, knowing that I am not yet out of danger. That at any moment, anyone of a number of enemies can jump me when I least expect it, those enemies now including certain corrupt members of the Florence police force.

By the time the train pulls into the station in Albany, it is going on noon. Outside the station I hail a cab and immediately tell the driver to take me to the Albany Rural Cemetery.

“Who died?” the old, overweight white man says from behind the steering column.

“A very important man,” I say. “Lived a long time ago.”

He looks at me in the rearview with tired eyes.

“You’re a little late for the funeral,” he says, with a lung cracking smoker’s laugh.

“Two thousand years too late,” I say.

I see his eyes do a roll in their sockets, and he falls quiet. I couldn’t be happier.

Driving over highway that borders the city of my youth, I open the window and take in the sweet smell of spring in upstate New York.

Albany.

The capital of the Empire State. Considered a backwater by some. A home for state workers and not much else. A place lost in time, always in the shadow of its far more popular bigger sister to the south. New York City.

How long has it been for me?

Maybe twenty years since I last laid my eyes on her tall buildings and the Hudson River that flows calm and heavy from the winter run-off in the spring. It dawns on me suddenly that I have nothing to dig with. Leaning forward, I instruct the cabbie to make a quick detour to the nearest hardware store, where I will purchase a shovel and a pick axe. He does it. When I get back inside the cab, I lay the tools onto the floor as the cabbie questions me over what I’m about to do with the digging equipment.

“Rob a grave,” I tell him.

He doesn’t laugh.

As we approach the village of Menands in North Albany, I remove the cross from the pocket in my jacket. I stare down at it, at the Maltese cross and the angelic lady. At her little eyes, hands, and wings. I feel my heart beat and my lungs strain to breathe. My gut is speaking to me, telling me that he’s close. The remains of Christ are very close.

The cabbie pulls up to the cemetery gates, comes to a stop under a metal sign that reads, The Albany Rural Cemetery, Incorporated April 2, 1841. I know the old metal sign well, even if it only dawns on me now that perhaps the founding cemetery fathers wanted to avoid incorporating a resting place for the dead on April Fools Day, or what was then known as the Feast of Fools day.

“You want me to drive inside?” asks the cabbie.

I tell him it won’t be necessary. Paying the man, I tip him generously and get out. As he pulls away I stare down a long avenue bordered on both sides with wide open greens which are bookended with thick woods. Pulling out my cell phone, I go to VZ Navigator and type in the same GPS coordinates that I Google
mapped prior to leaving Italy. It zeros in on a plot that can’t be located more than a half mile away along the cemetery road.

Pocketing the smartphone and hefting the tools over my shoulder, I walk.

The road winds and bends until the pristine greens become covered with hundreds upon hundreds of headstones, ornate statuary, and in some cases, mausoleums that are larger than my downtown New York apartment. The Albany Rural Cemetery is not just any cemetery. It is the resting place of former US President Chester Arthur, renowned architect Philip Hooker, an entire rebel brigade from the Revolutionary War, and one more important man: Erastus Corning, the mayor who presided over Albany for more than forty-one years until his death in 1978. The same year the Vatican called for the shroud inquiry. The same year the bodies from the Jesus tomb were removed from Jerusalem and supposedly, reburied inside a secret vault inside the Third Pyramid of Giza.

“Erastus …” whispered the Vatican soldier as he lie bleeding on my apartment floor. “Erastus … Erastus …”

Certain he was going to die, he was telling me the location of the bones. When I grabbed the cross strapped to his neck, he must have assumed that I was now without question, in possession of the true resting place of Jesus. If only I’d thought to read the inscription on the cross’s back, so much death and destruction could have been avoided. But then, my primary purpose was to find Manion. I found him, but I could not prevent him from losing his life in pursuit of the bones. If only I’d thought to read the inscription far earlier than I did …

I see the headstone from maybe fifty feet away. The granite Maltese cross is easy to spot amongst the tall oak and birch trees. My heart beating in my chest, I make my way to the cross like a penitent man approaching an altar from which he is about to be judged. The cross is taller than I thought. At least two stories tall, and carved into its center is the symbol that tells me I have come to the right place. It’s a triangle with the small circle in the center. The same symbol I found on the shroud, and in the third pyramid.

My eyes shift downwards.

The angel of a woman who adorns its pedestal is as large as I am. Her copper body has oxidized over the years and become entirely green, like the Statue of Liberty. But her wings look thick and full and light, while her flowing robes seem as if they will blow in the breeze should it suddenly pick up. She looks into my eyes, and with her opens hands, begs me to come forward and perhaps even to accompany her to a world that is not of this earth. She’s taking a step forward as is evidenced by her right knee which is rising up against her gown, and if I didn’t know any better, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she suddenly took hold of my hand and began lifting me up into the heavens to greet the soul of the man who truly rests here.

The man who is said to be buried here is not Erastus Corning, as the engraved name indicates on the stone located directly below this angelic woman’s feet, but instead they belong to someone else. Or perhaps, Erastus shares the grave. In any case, I set aside the pick-axe while positioning the shovel so that the vertical blade stabs the soft grass. I press my booted foot down on the blade and feel it sink into the soil.

It takes maybe five minutes of digging before the blade hits something solid. Something that feels and sounds like metal. All around me now, the wind blows. I’ve been so busy digging, that I never noticed the once bright blue sky which has blackened with thick, dark clouds. Off to the east towards the river, I spot a flash of lightning and a few seconds later, a deep rumble of thunder. Climbing out of the hole, I feel the first of the heavy raindrops pelt my face and the wind slapping my skin.

Setting down the shovel, I grab the pick axe and jump back down into the hole.

I chop all around the box with the axe portion of the tool, and then set the pick into the earth beneath it. With one hard thrust of the thick wood handle, I free the box from the earth. Bending at the knees, I take the box into my arms and set it onto the grass. Climbing back out, I stand over it and simply look at it.

The storm has picked up, the wind blowing so hard the trees above me are bending. The sky is so black it’s like night has settled in early over the land, while the rain pelts my head. A bolt of lightning strikes a tree not one hundred feet away, and a heavy branch falls from it onto the road. The explosive thunder steals my breath away. Looking back down at the box, I can see that it’s locked, but that it will be possible to open it with one swift, and well-placed swipe of the axe.

Turning the box onto its side, I hold the axe in my hands, as if I were chopping wood. I position the blade over the center of the metal box, where the two halves join together. Sucking in a deep breath, I slowly raise the axe overhead and come down at the precise moment a jagged bolt of lightning strikes the road, thunder exploding like live artillery, making my ears ring and my head buzz.

I look down and see that the box is open.

I drop the axe and feel the rain that is soaking me. It’s as if the rain is heaven sent. It’s seeping into my clothing, soaking my skin and drowning my pounding heart. I feel suddenly paralyzed as though no longer in control of my movements. But that’s insane. I’m merely afraid of what it is I’m about to find.

And then I hear a voice. It’s coming from behind me.

“What is it you seek, Chase?”

I turn fast, entirely expecting to be confronted by an irate cemetery worker or even a police officer. But the man I face is someone else entirely. The man stands no more than a few feet away from me, dressed entirely in black, his black fedora protecting his head and face from the wind and the rain. He’s using a heavy wood cane for balance, which he holds tightly in his left hand. More than anything else, I know now for certain that he is not dead … that he did not bleed out on my apartment floor in Florence.

“I see what we all seek,” I answer.

“And what is that exactly?” asks the man I shot … The soldier of the Vatican.

“Erastus …” he whispered while bleeding out on the floor of my apartment. “Erastus … Erastus …”

“The truth,” I say, swallowing something dry. “Proof of the truth.”

“And how will this proof change your life?”

I shake my head.

“It’s not about that. The bones of Christ are an important artifact. Perhaps the most important in all mankind. They belong to all humanity and they should be exposed, resurrected, researched, protected.”

“Perhaps they should be placed in a museum to gather dust?” he says. “Perhaps a placard above them should read, Here Lies Jesus of Nazareth, the man responsible for changing the world forever. Or perhaps it should say, Here lies the body of a man who once gave people strength in their mortal lives and hope for a heavenly rest in their afterlife.”

“People don’t need to lose their faith just because mortal proof of Christ exists.”

He cocks his head over his shoulder.

“Perhaps,” he says. “But is that for you to determine? A writer who wishes only for fame?”

“I need to know. I need to know the truth. It’s not fame I’m seeking. It’s not money. In the end, I seek only truth.”

“Then by all means, Chase Baker,” he says, taking a careful limping step backwards, “please be prepared to meet your maker.”

I drop to my knees on the rain-soaked grass.

The penitent man …

Grasping the box with both hands, I lift off the cover, toss it aside. Inside is a leather bag, not unlike the bag that was discovered in the box we took from the chamber in the Third Pyramid. I pull the bag open with my fingers, reach inside. My hand feels bone. The touch sends an electrical charge up into my arm. Into my brain. It shoots down my back and down my legs. My entire body feels charged.

I feel the Vatican soldier standing over me. I sense the lightning and the feel the thunder concussions, but I am in another place entirely. My lungs breathe, my heart beats, but I am not even certain that I am alive any longer. Perhaps it’s possible that I have died and only now am becoming aware of it.

I pull something out.

It’s a bone. A dark, almost richly blackened bone. If I had to guess, a leg bone. I pull something else out. It’s a rib. Then I pull out another rib, and another. Only this rib is different from all the rest. This rib has been severed at the tip, as if something stabbed this body. Reaching in once more I pull something out that feels like rusted metal and bone fused together. It’s an ankle bone. Piercing the ankle bone is a nail. But not a nail in the traditional sense. More like a spike that has blackened and rusted with time. The pointed end of the spike has been pounded with a hammer so that it now bends at a ninety degree angle. It’s a trick the Roman soldiers once employed during execution by crucifixion in order to keep the spike from slipping out of the wood once the blood began to lubricate it.