Paul Christopher - The Lucifer Gospel

“Archaeology is a science of small increments, Ms. Ryan. The man seated beside you, young Dr. March, will spend several years collecting enough pieces from a shattered pot to make a reconstruction, and even then it will probably not be complete. But completeness is not the goal, is it, Adrian?”

“Dear me, no,” said the slim, fair-haired man with the thick glasses who sat on her left. “One looks for trends, points of comparison. Complete reconstructions aren’t necessary to know what one is dealing with.”

“There you are, Ms. Ryan. Our overall goal here at Deir el-Shakir is simply to add to the sum total of what we already know. This is not Howard Carter uncovering King Tut’s tomb, or a French captain of engineers discovering the Rosetta Stone as he prepared to blow up a bridge. Nothing that would be worthy of the CBS Evening News, believe me, not even Larry King.” He laughed. “This is simply the basic gathering of knowledge so that we have a better picture about the past.”

“Trudging in the fields of academe, tilling the soil of history, that kind of thing?” Hilts quipped. He picked up a chicken bone on his plate and sucked off a remaining piece of meat. He dropped the bone back on the plate, then wiped his hands on a napkin.

“Something like that, Virgil,” Adamson said with a nod.

“Just Hilts, if you don’t mind. Just Hilts.”

“As I understand it, Deir el-Shakir was originally founded by St. Thomas the Apostle,” said Finn, remembering what Hilts had told her.

“A myth,” Laval answered from the opposite side of the table. “Historically St. Thomas is presumed to have gone in the opposite direction, to India. Deir el-Shakir was born out of what is usually referred to as the Arian heresy, Arius being a well-known monk from Libya. He preached that Christ was not divine, but mortal, and merely a prophet; it is probably this doubt about Christ being the true Son of God that suggested the link to Thomas, a man given to the same sort of thinking, ergo the nickname ‘Doubting Thomas.’ The monks here were followers of Arius, but I’m afraid St. Thomas was not among them.”

“And the skull?” Finn asked. She turned to Adamson, trying to gauge his reaction.

“What skull would that be?”

“I think it’s called the Skull of Baphomet,” said Finn.

Adamson burst out laughing. Laval smiled broadly. “I’m afraid you’re getting your Knights Templar fantasies mixed up,” Adamson said, grinning. “Just because a book is on the New York Times Bestseller List doesn’t mean it’s true, especially if it’s on the fiction side. What you’re talking about is the supposed flight of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea to England. The head on the shield of the Templar Grand Master was a representation of the skull of one of the earlier French knights named Hughes de Payen… who lived about seven hundred years after the monks here were already dust.”

“You know a lot about the Templars,” said Hilts quietly.

“I know a lot about a lot of things,” answered Adamson. Dinner went on for a little while longer and then people began excusing themselves. As Hilts stood to go he whispered in Finn’s ear.

“He’s lying. There’s something else going on.”

Finn didn’t answer. She looked down the table at Adamson, who was lost in conversation with the Libyan liaison officer, Hisnawi. Suddenly the expedition leader turned and stared down the table at her. The glance was utterly cold and without emotion. She held his hawklike gaze for a second longer, and he finally looked away. Finn stood up and shivered. If looks could kill she’d be a corpse. The expression had been exactly the same as the one on the killer’s face in the City of the Dead.

“I’ve been here for two weeks and there’s been nothing out of the ordinary,” said Finn. She and Hilts were in the dining room on a coffee break. For the past two weeks they’d barely exchanged a dozen words. Hilts had flown a seemingly endless series of flights charting a low-altitude grid around the dig site and Finn had made exact drawings of a seemingly endless series of pottery shards. “Maybe Adamson really is operating on the up-and-up.”

Hilts pulled a face. “I don’t have to remind you about what happened in Cairo.”

“Which might have had more to do with you than me.”

Hilts sighed. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“If Adamson was out to kill me, why would he have wanted me on the expedition staff in the first place?”

“Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, as the Godfather once said.”

Finn laughed. “I think the quote is actually Sun Tzu from The Art of War, but I get your point… only how did I get to be Adamson’s enemy?”

Hilts played with the lip of his coffee cup. “I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about that. The only thing I could think of was Mickey Hearts.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call him that.”

“Sorry… Mr. Valentine. Anyway, he’s the only thing that makes sense, the only connection.”

“How do you figure?”

“He got you the job, didn’t he?”

“I like to think my qualifications had something to do with it.”

“No offense, sweetheart, but there’s a lot of technical illustrators out there with a lot more experience than you. And how did you hear about the job in the first place?”

“My faculty advisor told me about it.”

“How did he know about it?”

“He said he had a friend who told him about it.”

“Check it out. I bet you’ll find out that the friend in question was Mickey… your Mr. Valentine.”

“Why would Michael put my life in jeopardy?”

“Did he say anything to you before you left New York?”

“I put him down as a reference for the job. I called to make sure it was okay.”

“What did he say?”

“He said fine. He seemed to know about the job already.”

“And?”

“He told me to be careful.”

“A warning?”

“I didn’t think so at the time. I thought he was talking about foreign travel, watching out for pickpockets, that kind of thing.”

“And now?” Hilts asked.

Finn paused, thinking. Hilts started tearing little chunks out of the top of his foam cup. “Now I guess I’m not so sure anymore. It could have been a warning, but that still doesn’t answer my question. Why would he knowingly send me into danger? That is, if he got me the job in the first place, which is what you seem to think.”

“I wondered about that too. I think maybe your friend thought he was doing you a favor at first, but something changed his mind.”

“Like what?”

“Like he found out something.”

“Found out something like what?”

“Like this,” said Hilts, keeping his voice low. He reached into the pocket of his worn and faded fatigue jacket and brought out a device only a little larger than a cell phone.

Finn looked at the tiny piece of electronics. “What is it?”

“A Garmin i-Que.”

“I’m not too good at the hi-tech stuff,” said Finn. “Words that an art history major can understand.”

“It’s a GPS recorder, as in Global Positioning System.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Have you been keeping track of our esteemed leader?”

“Qaddafi? No, I’m not in the dictator’s loop.”

“Ha-ha. Adamson. Particularly Adamson and his pals Kuhn and Hisnawi, our man from Museums and Antiquities.”

“I’ve been far too busy drawing little pictures of broken pieces of thousand-year-old clay pots, which are of no interest whatsoever.”

“I’m busy flying patterns with the Polish answer to powered flight most days, which is probably just about as boring as sketching old chamber pots, but it does have one advantage.”