David Epperson - The Third Day

This surprised me — pleasantly, for a change. I had always thought that ancient monarchs spent their entire lives in mortal fear of assassination. Such people tended to move around a lot, rarely sleeping in the same place two nights in a row.

“No,” she said. “This is the most luxurious room in the palace. Herod would have no other.”

“Can you take us there?” asked Lavon.

She didn’t say anything as she thought through the options.

“Yes,” she said. “I know a passage.”

But then she paused. I suppose she had too much tact to say so directly, but the question was obvious: what, exactly, did we plan to do once we arrived?

I had been thinking about the same thing.

I drew the outline of a rectangle on the floor with my finger. Herod’s bedroom was located on the southern end of the palace complex. The tower in which Sharon was being held was on the opposite side.

Both, I suspected, would be heavily guarded and equally impenetrable. The weak link, if one existed, would be the transit between the two.

As Lavon explained, Naomi’s eyes brightened. “I know just the place,” she said.

“That seems easy enough,” said Bryson, after Lavon had explained.

I nodded — and kept my thoughts to myself. However straightforward this scheme might have sounded, if any of us were still alive 48 hours from now, I’d concede that miracles truly did happen.

***

“We’d best get going,” said Lavon. “All the activity to the north of the fort will give us a limited window of opportunity to slip out the other way.”

As to what that activity would be; well, that was something I really didn’t want to think about. Lavon must have had a similar notion, for he directed our attention to our unfinished breakfast.

“Eat up,” he ordered. “This is all we’re going to get for a while.”

“Grab all your stuff, too,” I added. “Whatever happens, this is a one way trip.”

That seemed to jolt Markowitz into a higher level of awareness. He wolfed down his chow and walked back over to the window, where he just stared in silence into the Temple courtyard, watching the morning sacrifices, one last time.

I noticed also that the look on his face had changed, and I didn’t think it was just the effects of the wine wearing off. I sensed a newfound firmness, even a resolve, that I had not seen before.

“Next year in Jerusalem,” he said.

Bryson looked at him with a puzzled expression, though neither Lavon nor I cared to explain. Markowitz’s statement had been the Jews’ Passover rallying cry for nearly two thousand years, until the Israeli army seized the city in 1967.

Lavon and I exchanged a quick glance. Unless we found a way to stop him, he was definitely coming back.

But we had no time to worry about that now.

“Do we have anything resembling a weapon?” Lavon asked. “Just in case.”

I lifted my tunic to expose a gladius I had strapped to my right leg.

“I picked up a souvenir last night.” I said.

But this was more for show than anything. I had no illusions regarding my swordsmanship skills. In a fair fight, a trained soldier would kill me with ease.

Lavon had the good sense to recognize this. I only hoped the others did.

“Need I remind you that our success depends on stealth ,” I said. “We can’t exactly call for reinforcements.”

As we made our last-minute preparations, I showed Lavon the wax tablet Publius had given me the night before. He read the Greek and laughed. As I had suspected, it was my get-out-of-jail-free card, in case Herod’s soldiers caught me snooping.

The writing described my poor sense of direction and instructed whoever found me to “return an obstinate, dim-witted servant to the centurion Publius so that the appropriate disciplinary measures may be taken.”

“Those ‘appropriate measures’ won’t be such a joke today,” said Lavon.

I had no doubts on that score. I closed the tablet’s cover and slid it back into my bag.

“What are you talking about?” asked Bryson.

Lavon started to explain, but thought better of it. He just turned and gave our room a final inspection as he headed for the door.

“Let’s go,” he said.

While I had been out, the archaeologist had done some exploring of his own and had located a little-used passageway that led directly into the northwest corner of the Temple compound. We followed it and soon found ourselves on the second level of a colonnaded walkway that ran along the edge of the complex’s massive western wall.

About halfway across, we veered off to the right and down some stairs, where we joined a stream of pilgrims heading west across the stone bridge that connected the Temple Mount to the wealthy enclave of the Upper City.

“Wilson’s Arch,” Lavon reminded us.

“Do you have any idea what they call it now?” I asked.

He didn’t. I could see him struggle with the temptation to inquire of our fellow pilgrims before he decided not to risk highlighting our foreignness any further. Neither of us thought to have Naomi ask for us until the opportunity had passed, and oddly, she did not know herself.

About fifty yards ahead of us, a donkey stumbled under its load, and our procession ground to a brief halt while its harried owner struggled to right the overburdened creature and prod it forward once more.

Since we had a free moment, I couldn’t resist asking Lavon a question that had nagged at me all morning, though I pulled him forward a few feet so the others could not hear.

“Were you able to listen in on that conversation in Pilate’s office?” I asked.

Lavon nodded. “Amazing, wasn’t it?”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“Not really. Are you?”

“A little bit,” I admitted. “I always had the impression that the high priests manipulated a reluctant Pilate into killing Jesus.”

Lavon didn’t respond immediately. Instead, he turned around to face the Temple and spent a few moments staring at it, lost in thought.

When he spoke, he did so in a low voice. “People have argued about this for centuries,” he said, “and with more than words.”

Sadly, that was all too true.

He hesitated once more. I suppose he was wary of provoking an unnecessary quarrel, or perhaps he had been drawn into so many debates over the subject that he was sick of the question altogether.

“I think we can agree that everyone in authority around here wanted to get rid of him,” he said. “Put it to a vote and you’d get thumbs down from them all — the high priests, Pilate, Herod, the lot.”

I agreed. “That seems pretty clear.”

He paused again, as if he were trying to phrase his thoughts exactly the right way.

“Each party had its own reasons to fear the crowds; and for trying to shift the responsibility for the deed to someone else; or at least the appearance of responsibility. We heard Pilate’s thoughts on the matter earlier this morning.”

“What about the high priests?” I asked.

“I had always wondered why they didn’t just stone him in a mob frenzy, like they did with Stephen a few years later. Whatever the actual rules were, had they done so, do you think Pilate would have cared?”

“No,” I replied; “but with so many people in the city, they probably didn’t want to risk a mob getting out of hand.”

“Exactly; so they had to find another option,” he said. “It served their interests for the Romans to carry out the actual killing. The high priests’ dilemma was that no matter how much they wanted to eliminate him, neither Jesus’s sympathizers in the Sanhedrin nor the crowds outside would take kindly to their handing over a brother Jew to the pagan occupiers for torture and death.”