“Good.”  She smiled as she clicked a handcuff over his right wrist.  “Come.  Let Devorah see if she can make you forget all your mysterious distractions.”

‡

The Judean Wilderness

It had taken some heavy persuasion, but Dan managed to convince Carrie to leave the cave so they could talk outside...in the light...in the air...away from that...thing.

He felt instantly better outside.  It had seemed like night in there.  Even though the entire tav rock was in shadow now, he squinted in the relative brightness.

And he was still staggering from Carrie’s words.  He’d never thought they’d find anything on this trip, so he’d never even dreamed that Carrie might want to...

“Take her back?  To the US?  Are you serious?”

“We have to,” she said.  “If we don’t, other people might decipher that other scroll you mentioned and find her.  The wrong kind of people.  People who’d...misuse her.”

“Then why don’t we just move her from here and bury her where no one will find her?”

She wheeled on him.  “This is the mother of God, Dan!  You don’t just stick her in the dirt!”

“All right, all right.”  He could see she wasn’t rational on this.  “But even if we could get her back home—and believe me, that’s a big if—what’ll we do with her?  Give her to a museum?  To the Vatican?”

“Oh, no.  Oh, Lord, no,” she said, vigorously shaking her head.  “We’ve got to keep her secret.  She was hidden away for a reason.  We have to respect that.  Imagine if some crazy Muslims got hold of her, or some sort of satanic cult.  Think how they might desecrate her.  Now that we’ve found her, we have a very clear duty: We have to take her back with us and hide her where no one else can find her.”

“You’re not thinking, Carrie.  We’ll never get her past customs.”

“There’s got to be a way.  Your friend Hal says people are smuggling archeological artifacts out of the Mid East all the time.  Call him.  He can tell you how.”

“Call Hal?  Sure.  Hand me the phone.”

“This is not a joking matter, Dan.”

He saw her tight features and the look in her eyes and realized how serious she was.  But she wasn’t thinking straight.  Finding that strange body in there, whoever it was, had jumbled up her rational processes.  He had to get her away from here, get her calmed down so she could get some perspective on this whole situation...

And calling Hal might be just the excuse he needed.

“All right.  We’ll call Hal and see what he says.”

Her expression relaxed.  “You mean that?”

“Of course.  We’ll drive back to the highway, maybe go to En Gedi...”  He glanced at his watch.  “It’s seven hours earlier in New York so we can still catch him in his office.  And we’ll ask his advice.”

“You go.  I’m staying here.”

“No way, Carrie.  No way I’m leaving you sitting up here at night in the middle of nowhere.”

“I’ll be all right.  Now that I’ve found her, you can’t expect me to leave her.”

“If she is who you think she is, she’s been fine here for two thousand years.  One more night isn’t going to matter.”

“I’m staying.”

Dan had humored her as far as he could.  He wasn’t backing down on this point.

“Here’s the deal, Carrie,” he said, fighting to keep from shouting.  “Either we go down to En Gedi together or we stay up here and starve together.  But under no circumstances am I leaving you alone.  So it’s up to you.  You decide.  And make it quick.  Because when night falls, we’re stuck here—I won’t be able to find my way back to the highway in the dark.”

They went round and round until she finally agreed to accompany him to En Gedi in return for a promise to come straight back to the tav at first light.

The downhill trip going was shorter by hours than the uphill trip coming, but it seemed much longer.  Carrie hardly spoke a word the whole way.

‡

En Gedi

They lay side by side in their double bed in the local guest house.  Dan’s arms and legs were leaden with fatigue as he floated in a fog of exhaustion.  Here they were, in bed together in one of the world’s most ancient resorts, a green oasis of grasses, vineyards, palm trees, and even a waterfall in the midst of the barren wastelands.  A beauty spot, a lovers’ rendezvous, mentioned even in the ancient Song of Solomon, and all he could think of was sleep.

Not that Carrie would have been receptive to any romantic advances anyway.  She’d seemed more than a bit aloof since they’d left the tav.

That and the knowledge that they’d be returning to the Wilderness tomorrow only heightened Dan’s fatigue.

Hal had been no help.  As soon as they had arrived in En Gedi, Dan called him and explained that they needed a way to get a five-foot-long artifact out of the country.

“Quietly, if you know what I mean.”

Hal had known exactly what he meant and gave him a name and a telephone number in Tel Aviv.  He’d said he was very interested and wanted to see this artifact when it reached the states.  Dan had thanked him and hung up.

Yeah.  Thanks a lot, Hal.

Nothing was working out the way he’d hoped.  He’d expected Hal to tell him to forget it—no way to get something that size past the inspectors.  Instead of no way, it was no problem.

Damn!

Carrie had remained in a sort of semi-dream state.   What little conversation she’d initiated had been whispers of “Can you believe it?  Can you believe we’ve actually found her?” as they stocked up on twine, blankets, work gloves, a pry bar, a lantern, and hundreds of feet of rope.

And now, beside him in bed, after a long silence...

“I’ve been thinking...”

“Great.”  Dan dragged himself back from the borderlands of sleep.  “Does that mean you’re giving up this ca-ca idea of bringing that corpse home?”

“Please don’t refer to her so coarsely.  Please?”

“Okay.  Just for your sake.  Not because I believe it.”

“Thank you.  Now tell me: Who do you think wrote the scroll?”

“A clever, phony bastard.”

“All right,” she said with exaggerated patience.  “Let’s humor Sister Carrie and assume that the scroll is genuine.  Who wrote it?”

“We’ve been over this already.  A Pharisee.  An educated man.”

“But what of that passage where he says ‘I do not fear killing.  I have killed before, slipping through the crowds in Jerusalem, stabbing with my knife.  And I fear not damnation.  Indeed, I am already thrice-damned.’  That doesn’t sound like a Pharisee.”

“What’d you do, memorize that translation?”

“No.  But I’ve read it a few times.”

More than a few, Dan bet.

He said, “Some of the upper-class Israelites, a few Pharisees among them, got involved with the anti-Roman rebels, some with the zealots.  These were a rough bunch of guys, sort of the Israelite equivalent of the IRA.  They mounted guerrilla attacks, they murdered collaborators and informants and generally did whatever they could to incite revolt.  These were the guys who gathered at Masada after the fall of Jerusalem.  They held out for three years, then all 950 of them chose to die rather than surrender to the Roman siege.  This scroll writer is patterned after that sort of zealot.”

“He was a pretty tough cookie then.”

“Extremely.  Not the kind you’d want to cross.”

“I wonder what happened to him?”

“He’s probably hanging around, laughing up his three-striped sleeve, waiting for someone to chase the wild goose he created.”

He regretted the words immediately, but he was tired, dammit.

Carrie yanked the sheet angrily and turned onto her side, her back to him.

“Good night, Dan.  Get some sleep.  We’re out of here at dawn.”

“Good night, Carrie.”

But exhausted as he was, thoughts of the forger kept sleep at bay.  And the more Dan thought about how this slimy bastard had sucked Carrie in, making her believe all this nonsense, the more he wanted to get back at him.