The Blood Gospel (Page 11)

Rhun suspected what that meant.

He gripped the silver cross at his throat. Metal warmed through his glove.

Above his head rotor blades throbbed like a massive mechanical heart, beating fast enough to burst.

His gaze fell on the second woman. She was German, from her whispered words to the man on the stretcher. Blood streaked her white cotton dress. She gripped the hand of the wounded man, never taking her eyes off his face. The iron smell of his blood blanketed the airborne vehicle.

Rhun closed his eyes, fingered the rosary on his belt, and began a silent Our Father. Vibrations shuddered through his prayer.

He would much rather travel on a mule with a naturally beating heart.

But the blades drowned out more dangerous sounds—the heavy drip of blood from the split scalp to the floor, the quick breathing of the woman next to him, and the faraway neighing of a frightened stallion.

As the vehicle banked, the stench of jet fuel rolled in. Its foreignness stung his nostrils, but he preferred it to the scent of blood. It gave him the strength to let himself look at the injured man, at the blood running in threads along the metal floor, then dropping out toward the harsh stone landscape below.

This late in the fall, the sun set early, in less than two hours. He could ill afford a delay to aid a wounded man. Much rested on his shoulders.

Out of the corner of his eye, he studied the woman next to him. She wore threadbare denim jeans and a dusty white shirt. Her intelligent brown eyes traveled once around the cabin, seeming to assess each man. Those eyes skittered past him as if he were not there. Did she fear him as a man, as a priest, or as something else?

He tightened his gloved hands on his knees and meditated. He must purge thoughts of her from his mind. He would need all his holy strength for the task ahead. Perhaps, after it was complete, he could return to the Sanctuary, to the Cloister, and rest undisturbed.

Suddenly the woman brushed him with her elbow. He tensed, but did not jump. His meditation had steadied him. She leaned forward to check on her colleague, her fine eyebrows drawn down in worry. The man would not recover, but Rhun could not tell her so. She would never believe him. What did a simple priest know of wounds and blood?

Far more than she could ever imagine.

3:03 P.M.

Erin’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket. She drew it out and held it next to her leg to conceal it from Lieutenant Perlman. She doubted he would want her texting from the helicopter.

Amy wrote her:

“Hey, Prof. Can u talk?”

The lieutenant seemed to be looking the other way.

Erin typed.

“Go.”

Amy’s answer came back so quickly she must have been typing while Erin was thinking.

“Took a look at that skeleton’s femur.”

“And?”

“It had gnaw marks.”

That confirmed Erin’s earlier assessment. She had noted what looked like teeth marks on the bone. She struggled to type as the helicopter jolted.

“Not uncommon … Lots of desert predators out here.”

Amy’s response was slow, her answer long to type out:

“But the bite marks match what I saw on that dig in New Guinea. Same dentition. Same pattern of gnawing.”

Erin’s heart sped up, knowing the subject of Amy’s last dig: the headhunters of New Guinea. That could mean only one thing …

But cannibalism? Here?

If true, the story behind this mass grave of children might be even worse than the tale of Herod’s massacre. But it still seemed unlikely. The newborn’s skeleton had been fairly large, with no obvious signs of malnutrition that might indicate a famine, which might warrant such depraved hunger.

“Evidence?”

she typed back.

“4 incisors. Continuous arch. It was HUMANS who gnawed that baby’s bones.”

Erin lifted her thumb, momentarily too shocked to type—then Lieutenant Perlman suddenly snatched the phone out of her grip, making her jump. He switched it off.

“No outside contact,” he yelled.

She swallowed her anger and crossed her arms, submitting. No point getting further on his bad side.

Yet.

The lieutenant dropped the phone into his shirt pocket. She missed it already.

She was relieved when the helicopter touched down at the pad at Hillel Yaffe Medical Center. Perlman had kept his word. White-suited hospital personnel sprinted toward them. She’d heard that they had a good trauma team, and she was grateful to see such a rapid response. She reached to unbuckle her harness, but Perlman covered her hand.

“No time,” he warned.

His men had already climbed out and unfastened the stretcher. Julia stood next to it on the ground, still holding Heinrich’s fingers. She lifted her free hand to wave to Erin. Heinrich’s chest rose and fell as they wheeled him off. Still breathing. She hoped that would be true the next time she saw him.

As soon as the soldiers were back on board, the chopper lifted fast and hard.

She turned her gaze from the hospital to stare at the spread of desert beyond Caesarea as her thoughts moved from her anxiety about Heinrich to another gnawing worry.

Where are they taking me?

4

October 26, 3:12 P.M., IST

Tel Aviv, Israel

Bathory Darabont stood poised in the shadows, hidden on a second-story landing above the hotel. She stared down to the tiled fountain that dominated the hotel lobby, water splashing from the wall into a half-round basin of monstrous green marble. She guessed the water was two or three feet deep. She stroked the ornate brass railing as she calculated the drop from where she stood.

Twenty-five feet. Probably survivable. Definitely intriguing.

The man next to her rattled on. With his masses of curly dark hair, huge brown eyes, and straight nose, he looked like he had just stepped out of a fresco depicting Alexander the Great. Of course, he knew that he was beautiful and rich, some distant prince of a distant land—and that made him accustomed to getting his own way.

This bored her.

He strove to talk her right out of her designer silk dress and into his bed, and she wasn’t necessarily averse to that, but she was more interested in action than in preliminaries.

She pushed back her waist-length red hair with one languid white hand, watching his eyes linger on the black palm tattooed across her throat. An unusual mark, and more dangerous than it looked.

“How about a bet, Farid?”

His brown eyes returned to her silver ones. He really did have the most amazing long dark lashes. “A bet?”

“Let’s see who can jump into that fountain.” She pointed one long finger down into the atrium. “Winner takes all.”