The Sacred Cipher Read online

  “It was a gold ring with a large, square, rounded red stone encased in the gold. I remembered my dad wearing the ring. And I was so proud to get it. It was the only thing of his that I possessed.

  “The ring was too big for me,” said Rodriguez, “but I wanted to wear it. I wanted people to ask me about it, so I could tell them, ‘This was my dad’s ring. It was given to me.’ I wanted to have a legacy. I guess I wanted to belong to him, be the son who is bequeathed the king’s ring.”

  Rizzo watched pain rise and fall in Joe’s eyes.

  “I knew I either had to put a ring guard in it or get it sized smaller, but I procrastinated. Kept telling myself, ‘You’ve got to get this ring fixed.’ And then I’d think, yeah, okay, I’ll get it done.

  “About two weeks after I got the ring, I was on the F train and got to the Bryant Park stop. By the time I got to the top of the station stairs, I realized the ring was not on my finger. I raced back to the platform, but the train was long gone.”

  Bryant Park was crowded, but only the calliope music from the carousel interrupted the silence around their table. Rodriguez pulled in a deep, sighing breath.

  “I can only assume my dad loved me, because he never told me so himself. I didn’t think I wanted any part of him. But then I got the ring. And I was proud to be his son.”

  Rodriguez looked up, stepped out of his memories.

  “I’ve regretted losing that ring ever since. I’ve regretted my indifference and resentment of my father. Who knows what he had to live through, who knows what made him the man he was? And I’ve regretted my laziness and my foolishness for being so cavalier with a precious gift.”

  Rodriguez held up his hands and looked at his fingers.

  “Part of me died that day. I don’t know how else to express it. I had a chance to live a fuller life, and I lost it, squandered it.

  “I’ve been looking for something, something I couldn’t define, for a long time, Sammy. Maybe this is it. I’m not sure. But I know I’m going. I’m not going to live with any more regret. And besides . . . somebody will need to keep you in line.”

  “Me? Me? I’m the perfect traveling companion.”

  “You’re a perfect pain in the butt.” Rodriguez leaned his elbows on the edge of the small table. “Look, Sammy, you’re one of the brightest guys I know. You’re a critical thinker with excellent logic. You’re a great asset to this team.”

  “But?”

  “But . . . sometimes you really turn people off. I know you’re just being a wise guy; it’s part of the personality that makes you unique. And I’m used to your comments. But others aren’t. Some of the things you say, or do, can seem pretty childish . . . immature. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Sammy, but if you want to be taken seriously by these guys, if you want to really be part of this team, then . . . and this is just my opinion . . . then tone it down a notch. Okay?”

  Rizzo felt the burrito turn in his stomach. He wrestled with his defenses. Keep it hidden. Keep it buttoned up. He heard the children’s laughter.

  He felt like his heart was going to leap from his chest and go running down the gravel path.

  “At least you had a dad.” Don’t cry!

  “Sammy, I . . .”

  Rizzo held up a hand. “It’s okay. Looks like this is the time for True Confessions.”

  He pushed the soiled napkins in circles around the table. It’s okay . . . it’s okay.

  “My parents were normal-sized people,” Sammy said, his eyes still on the napkins. “I’m a dwarf. There’s some medical name for it—some one-in-a-thousand shot. But it was a shot my dad couldn’t take. Maybe he thought it was his fault. Maybe he couldn’t take the comments. I’ll never know. He left when I was two. Never seen him since.”

  Rizzo grabbed a bunch of the napkins and squeezed them in his fist, unconsciously depicting the ache in his heart. “It nearly killed my mom. Most of my early memories are of her crying. First, I felt it was my fault. As I got older, I realized just how much her heart was broken by my dad.”

  Sammy remembered the small apartment in Brooklyn where his mom always kept the shades drawn. How the blankness of her soul had slowly taken possession of her face.

  “So I became the clown. I was the dancing elf with the endless wisecracks . . . the only one who could make her laugh.” Eyes on the tabletop, Rizzo’s hand went to his mouth, rubbed down and over his chin. “It was that way until she died.” He sniffed, and held his breath.

  “I’m sorry, Sammy.”

  The carousel stopped.

  Another deep breath.

  “I know, Joe . . . thanks.” He waited a moment to gather himself, then looked up at his friend.

  “I’ve known other short people who are really angry . . . really angry,” Rizzo said. “They blame everything on big people. They’ve got some score to settle. Well, I came to peace with that a long time ago. I’m not anybody’s fault. I just am. Sometimes, unfortunately, part of who I am is that dancing elf with the endless wisecracks. It’s in there and just comes out. So thanks for the attitude check, Joe. I really want to be part of this team. So I’ll try to keep my mouth in check. But no promises, eh?”

  Rizzo forced a smile onto his face.

  “Why do you want to go, Sammy?”

  Sammy felt his smile warm. “Now you’re really digging.” He laughed. “You’re going to think I’m even weirder.”

  “Impossible.”

  Rizzo picked up the intact half of his burrito and stuffed it back into the Chipotle bag. Then he looked at Joe.

  “You remember Kallie Nolan?”

  “The archaeologist . . . the one you said you put a move on, right?”

  Rizzo nodded his head. “Yeah, a really bad move.” He leaned into the table. “I’d go anywhere if it gave me a chance to see Kallie Nolan again. She was . . . special. She treated me like a normal guy. It was like she never noticed anything different about me. I never had a woman friend before, somebody I felt so comfortable with. And of course, being a guy, the hormones kicked in. One night when we stopped at her place after doing research at the library, I went over the edge. Way over. She kicked me out. Didn’t talk to me much after that, then went back to school and on over to Jerusalem to study.”

  “Didn’t you ever apologize?”

  “I did . . . I tried . . . but after that night, it seemed like I could never break through. Like she was determined to wear a mask.”

  Rizzo’s attention was drawn by the carousel. “I’d seen that mask before,” he said. “It was the same one my mother used to wear to hide her pain. That’s why I have to see her again, Joe. I need to make sure the mask is gone.”

  Rizzo grabbed the lunch bag, slid off his seat, and headed down the gravel path back to the library. “C’mon on, you sack of sweat. You’ll make me late with all your sob stories.”

  18

  “Excuse me, guys,” Larsen said, his mind reeling from what he had just heard. “Let me get this straight. You found a scroll you believe to be a thousand years old, in an extinct language, in code. Somehow you broke the code, and the message claims the Jews built the Third Temple of God under the Temple Mount. All of this has remained secret for a thousand years, and no one has found this temple in the most archaeologically active six square miles on earth. And you are asking me if it’s a hoax?”

  The men sitting across from him looked like they had just been caught stealing hubcaps. Larsen’s summary made their findings appear ludicrous.

  “Yeah,” said Rizzo. “Sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?”

  “Actually,” said Larsen, his voice picking up, “no, it isn’t stupid at all. I don’t know if what is written on the scroll is true. But it certainly is possible.”

  “What! What are you saying?” exclaimed Bohannon, echoed by the others in the room.

  “Oh, yeah, it could be there,” said Larsen, leaning his elbows against the small conference table to close the distance between him and the others. “And it’s not far-fetched to b
elieve that, if it is there, no one has ever found it.”

  Recently slipping into his forties, Winthrop Larsen was medium in many ways—medium height, medium weight, medium features. His wire-rim glasses and short, auburn hair added to his bookish look. But there was nothing medium about the thrill Larsen felt, the adrenalin rush that had his body buzzing. He may have been standing in a small conference room on the third floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, but his heart and mind were trying to pierce the mysteries of the Temple Mount.

  “Winthrop, I’m stunned,” said Johnson. “Obviously, your comments are encouraging, although I never really expected anyone to take any of this seriously. But how can this message be possible?”

  The team members each arranged for half a day off so they could have a late lunch and meet with Larsen in a conference room at the library. Now he was going to test their endurance. “Get comfortable,” said Larsen, “because this will take a little bit of time.

  “The entire area around Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, is comprised of Cenomanian limestone. It’s a sedimentary rock that behaves very strangely when water and pressure are applied. In laymen’s terms, it melts. This result is called karstic. When rainwater seeps into the ground, the limestone melts, though ever so slowly, with a honeycomb of tunnels and caves forming naturally.

  “In the nineteenth century, Charles Warren discovered a large, vertical shaft that went deep underground in the City of David, the rocky crag upon which the ancient city of Jerusalem was founded. Recent excavations discovered another karstic cave adjacent to Warren’s shaft, which is big enough to hold twenty to thirty people.

  “The Gihon Spring,” said Larsen, warming to his lesson, “ancient Jerusalem’s main water source, is also a karstic spring. The route that Hezekiah’s tunnel followed was originally formed by an underground karstic stream.

  “Basically, karstic caves, tunnels, and cisterns played a significant role in Judean antiquity, and it’s likely that the Temple Mount is riddled with these things. Hang on to that thought, because it’s important.

  “The interior of the Temple Mount is a source of hundreds of legends, but little concrete scholarship. There is a great boulder in the center of the Dome of the Rock, the foundation stone. Jews believe the foundation stone is the point from which the entire world was created. Muslims believe the foundation stone was put in place by the angel Gabriel and is home to the ‘well of souls.’ It’s all a mystery because the Muslim Authority—the Waqf—won’t allow anybody underneath the Mount.”

  Rodriguez interrupted Larsen’s lesson. “Winthrop, if the Temple Mount is really a mass of tunnels and caves, how in the world did it support a massive Jewish temple when it was there? How does it support the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the thousands of people who come there in pilgrimage? Why doesn’t everything just fall into a huge sinkhole?”

  “That’s a good question, and one that the Jews would have had to answer before they could ever erect a temple as large as the one that was there in Jesus’ time.

  “The answer,” said Larsen, “is that the temple of old and the Islamic shrines of today are not actually constructed on the Temple Mount. They are actually constructed on a huge, stone platform that was built by King Herod two thousand years ago.”

  He stepped to the whiteboard and began to sketch his explanation. “Herod’s platform is three hundred feet wide, in its time, the largest in the world. If the platform was supported by Mount Zion only, it would tip over once anything of size was built on it. So Herod constructed a series of arches under the platform and also built four huge, stone, retaining walls to support the outer edges of the platform around the existing, natural hill. Then he filled in the area between the walls and the hill with stone, rocks, dirt—anything they could find and squeeze into the space.

  “Herod was also extravagant in his use of water,” said Larsen. “Herodian cisterns were man-made and elaborate, not only meant to capture drinking water for Jerusalem, but also to gather enough water for Herod’s swimming pools, decorative pools, and fountains.”

  Larsen turned from the board and leaned against the edge of the conference table. “In Judea, collecting water and saving water were a matter of life and death. Torrential rainfall in Israel can fill a lake or create a rushing river in a matter of minutes. In the desert, one significant rainfall can supply a small town and irrigate its crops for nearly a year. Creating cisterns, whether plastering over existing karstic caves or carving out man-made, decorated pools, was critical. So we know that the Jews of the eleventh century, like their ancestors long before Christ, had the engineering and construction skill to create cisterns, caverns, or causeways of almost any size they desired.”

  Larsen paused, making sure he had everyone’s attention. It was an unnecessary tactic.

  “Gentlemen, it is certainly possible that the Jews of the eleventh century could carve out a great cavern in the limestone under the Temple Mount. But what is more important is that they probably didn’t have to. In a region that already has many natural caverns, it might be much wiser to use an existing one, or at least enlarge a smaller one. There would certainly be a lot less debris to discard.

  “Your research—Spurgeon’s letter, Schwartzman’s connection to Elgar, Abiathar’s history, not to mention the violent opposition you have encountered in your search—appears to validate the authenticity of the scroll. So it’s my belief,” said Larsen, “that the only remaining question is not whether the Jews could have created a place for the Third Temple. The question is, does it exist?”

  Bohannon smiled. This is like the Fellowship of the Ring. Something tells me we’re about to embark on a journey.

  Larsen was engaged with other members of the team in speculation about the Mount, tunnels, and other topographical information. Bohannon remained in the background, observing the group, sifting through what he had heard thus far, replaying the message of the scroll in his mind, and trying to connect the dots.

  “Winthrop, I have a question for you,” Bohannon stated over the conversation. The chatter stopped, and heads swiveled in his direction. “And there is really only one question. How do we get ourselves under the Temple Mount to find out if anything is hidden there?”

  Uncertainty joined them in the room. Uncertainty about the implications of what they were hearing, its cost and its consequences.

  “There is only one way for us to discover whether the message of the scroll is true or a hoax,” Bohannon announced. “We need to go and look. And we can’t leave this search for somebody else. Only God knows what might happen if the temple exists and it were manipulated for political or personal agendas. That could be a disaster.

  “I don’t know about these chaps, Winthrop, but I’m expecting to take an extended vacation in Jerusalem at the earliest possible moment. What do I need to know, and where do we go from here?”

  Immediately, all the mouths were speaking at once.

  An hour and a half later, after Rodriguez had gone to the deli across 42nd Street and returned with pastrami and Swiss on rye and a variety of Snapples, they were once again gathered around the whiteboard as Larsen tried to give them a visual of what they were up against.

  “You are facing a very difficult challenge,” said Larsen, gathering up several different colors of dry erase markers, “actually, many difficult challenges. First, you have to get into Jerusalem. Not a difficulty in itself for men traveling on business. But, men with a load of underground equipment may draw some attention. And attention is going to be your enemy.

  “How do you get near the Temple Mount? How do you investigate the Temple Mount? Greater yet, how do you get under the Temple Mount without drawing attention to yourselves? I won’t even bother to address how you’re going to get out, or what you’re going to do if the thing is there. But let’s just say you get yourselves under the Temple Mount somehow through one of the tunnels. Then what? Where do you go? How do you find your wa
y around, assuming you can get around under there? How do you locate a temple that’s remained hidden for a thousand years?”

  Larsen shook his head. “I just don’t know.” He gazed thoughtfully at the whiteboard for a minute. “But perhaps we can narrow things down a bit.

  “For what you are considering, perhaps the most important event came in 1867 when the Turkish/Ottoman authorities gave permission to a British archaeologist and explorer, Charles Warren, to explore the few tunnels they already knew existed beneath the Temple Mount. Their conditions were that he would work only during the day and only under the supervision of their officials. And that he would reseal each tunnel, close up every hole, once he concluded the dig.

  “But Warren was a very ambitious young man,” said Larsen. “He bribed his guards to give him freedom at night and, without the knowledge or consent of the Turks, began his own, independent search under the Temple Mount. From inside the existing tunnels, Warren and his assistant dug new tunnels under the Temple Mount. To avoid detection, they closed the tunnels behind them as they went.”

  “Yo,” snapped Rizzo, “that doesn’t sound very healthy. Sounds like they were trapping themselves underground. Not too bright, if you ask me.”

  “Unfortunately for his assistant,” said Larsen, “that is exactly what happened. The man died in a cave-in during the process, and Warren was forced to leave his body where it lay.

  “Warren, however, uncovered two points of curiosity,” said Larsen. “Now, you must remember that nearly two thousand years of history passed from the time of Herod and his great temple to the time of Warren. Jerusalem was sacked, destroyed, and rebuilt several times. So what was ground level in Herod’s time was now underground in Warren’s.

  “His first discovery is called ‘Warren’s Gate.’” Larsen began to sketch the inside of a tunnel. “It is a small gate or window sealed shut with stone bricks and mortar. Warren concluded that the gate led to the underbelly of Herod’s Temple. Nearby, Warren made his second discovery—an alcove or cave, which he theorized was adjacent to the Holy of Holies of Herod’s Temple. During Muslim control of Jerusalem, the alcove was used by Jews seeking a place of prayer near to the now-destroyed temple. Somewhere in time, both the alcove and the gate were sealed by authorities, and eventually, their existence forgotten . . . until Warren.