The Blood Gospel (Page 21)

She risked a peek inside the coffin. Nothing. Just bare stone, stained deep burgundy. What would make a stain like that? Blood dried brown. Most resins ended up black.

She also took a few pictures of the empty clay jugs around the sarcophagus. They must have carried liquid down here. Usually they were used for wine, but why fill a sarcophagus with wine?

As she straightened, Jordan turned from the far wall. Even in the dim light, she could tell he was upset. “Doc, you want to explain this one?”

She looked over as the men parted to either side.

A macabre sculpture hung on the wall, like a blasphemous crucifixion. She moved past the corner of the sarcophagus. With each step, a growing horror rose in her.

It wasn’t a sculpture.

On the wall hung the desiccated corpse of a small girl, maybe eight years old, dressed in a tattered, stained robe. A handful of blackened arrows pinned her in place, a good yard off the floor. They pierced her chest, neck, shoulder, and thigh.

“Crossbow bolts,” Jordan said. “Looks like they’re made of silver.”

Silver?

She stood before the child, struck by one anachronism after another. The girl’s burgundy robes looked ancient, both in style and in the degree of decay. The ornamentation and pattern of weave dated from the same period as the fall of Masada. Probably made in Samaria, maybe Judea, but at least two thousand years old.

Long dark hair framed the sunken face. Her eyes closed peacefully, her chin hung to her thin chest, lips parted ever so slightly as if she had died in mid-sigh. Even her tiny eyelashes were intact. Judging by the amount of soft tissue still clinging to her bones, the girl had been dead only a few decades.

Decades. How could that be?

An object lay crumpled under the girl’s toes. Erin dropped to a knee next to it.

A doll …

Her heart ached. The tiny dried toy was crafted from hardened lumps of leather stitched with scraps of cloth and stained the same burgundy as the robes. The child’s slack arm seemed to be reaching for her plaything, forever unable to claim it.

The abandoned doll struck Erin deeply as she remembered another like it, handmade, too. She had buried it with her baby sister. She swallowed hard, fighting back tears, feeling foolish for it. Heinrich’s death continued to throw her off balance, and right now she had to pull herself together in front of the soldiers.

Still on her knees, she glanced up to the child’s other hand, half hidden behind her body, and saw a glint from between the curled fingers.

Odd.

She leaned one palm against the wall, feeling hard mortar extruding between the bricks. Though the body was the result of a recent murder, not an ancient one, she still treated the remains with respect. This child was once someone’s little girl.

She reached for that hand. The girl’s arm trembled, then jerked. The entire mummified body shook against the wall as if the child still lived.

Erin fell back with a gasp.

A hand gripped her shoulder, steadying her.

“Another aftershock,” Jordan said.

Fine dust sifted from the stone roof. Behind Erin, a brick thudded to the floor. She held her breath until the quake ceased.

“They’re getting worse,” Jordan said. “Nothing here for us. Time to go.”

She resisted the pull of his arm. This was her site now, and there were still things here for her to explore. She shifted closer to the wall and reached again for the girl’s hand.

Jordan noted her attention and dropped beside her. “What is it?”

“Looks like the child grabbed something before she died.”

Archaeological protocol dictated that nothing be touched before it had been photographed, but this girl had not been murdered that long ago, so Erin would forgo protocol just this once.

Reaching out, she nudged the girl’s fingers open. She had expected them to be brittle but found them eerily pliable. Surprised at the state of the body, she missed catching the object as it fell free. It dropped in the dust.

She didn’t need a doctorate in archaeology to recognize this artifact.

Jordan swore under his breath.

She stared dumbfounded at the medal, at the iron cross, at the swastika.

German.

From World War II.

Here was the identity of the grave robbers, the ones who had drilled down here with modern tools. But why was this medal clutched in the mummified fingers of a girl inside an ancient Jewish tomb?

Jordan clenched a fist. “The Nazis must have got here first. Raided and emptied this place out.”

His words clarified little. Hitler was obsessed with the occult, but what had he hoped to find in Masada?

She scrutinized the girl’s clothes. Why would the Nazis take so much care to dress a child in replicas of the first millennium, only to crossbolt her to the wall?

She pictured the girl ripping the medal off her tormentor’s uniform, hiding it, stealing proof of who killed her. Again an upwelling of sympathy for this child—and for the courage of this final act—swept through her. Tears again rose in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Jordan’s face was close enough for her to see a fine scar on his chin.

To hide her tears, she lifted her phone and took several pictures of the medal. The girl had gone to great lengths to secure a clue to the identity of her murderer. Erin would record her proof.

Once she lowered her phone, Jordan reached to the dust, picked up the medal, and flipped it over. “Maybe we can find out who did this. SS officers often carved their names on the reverse side of their medals. Whoever this bastard was, I want his name. And if he’s somehow still alive …”

At that moment she liked Jordan more than ever. Shoulder to shoulder, they studied the small metal disk. No name covered the reverse side, only a strange symbol.

She took a snapshot of it in Jordan’s palm, then read aloud the words along its border. “Deutsches Ahnenerbe.”

“That makes sense,” Jordan said sourly.

She shot him a quizzical glance. Recent German history was not her specialty. “How so?”

He tilted the medal from side to side. “My grandfather fought in World War Two. Told me stories. It’s one of the reasons I joined up. And I’m a bit of a history buff. The Deutsches Ahnenerbe were a secret sect of Nazi scientists with an interest in the occult who went around the world seeking lost treasures and proof of an ancient Aryan race. Himmler’s band of grave robbers.”

And they got here first. She felt a sinking sense of defeat. She was used to studying graves that had already been robbed, but those thefts usually happened in antiquity. It rankled her that this tomb had been despoiled mere decades ago.