He saw how upset she was, but there was no time for her feelings. Worrying over impossibilities could get you killed. He faced McCollum. “You heard me. I’m checking you out.”
“Through with the theatrics? Remember, I still have the rest of the quest and we don’t know where to go from here.”
“Who says?” He found the photo from the book in the gift shop and unfolded it. “Find the place that forms an address with no place, where is found another place. Okay, we found the place where silver is turned to gold. This. The Nativity. Bethlehem. Belém. What has an address but no place?” He pointed to the computer. “Lots of addresses and no places associated with a single one. Web addresses.”
He sat before the machine.
“The Guardians had to have a way to control the clues. They don’t seem the type to just throw something out there and leave it. Once an invitee, or a stranger, made it this far, they’d need a way to stop the quest if they wanted to. What better way than to have the final clues on a website they control.”
He typed BETHLEHEM.COM, but was routed to a commercial site loaded with junk. He tried BETHLEHEM.NET and found more of the same. Then, on BETHLEHEM.ORG, the screen turned white and a question appeared in black letters.
WHAT IS IT YOU SEEK?
The cursor flashed below the inquiry above a black line, ready for the answer. He typed in THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA. The screen flickered, then changed.
NOTHING MORE?
He typed what he thought they wanted to hear.
KNOWLEDGE.
The screen changed again.
28º 41.41N
33º 38.44E
Malone knew what those numbers represented. Find the place that forms an address with no place, where is found another place. “It’s the other place.”
“GPS coordinates,” McCollum said.
He agreed, but he needed to ground-site them, so he found a website and entered the numbers.
A few seconds later a map appeared.
He immediately recognized the shape-an inverted isosceles triangle, a wedge cleaving Africa from Asia, home to a unique combination of mountains and deserts surrounded by the narrow Gulf of Suez to the west, the even narrower Gulf of Aqaba on the east, and the Red Sea to the south.
The Sinai.
The GPS coordinates identified a site in the extreme southern region, in the mountains, near the apex of the inverted triangle.
“Looks like we found the place.”
“And how do you plan to get there?” McCollum asked. “That’s Egyptian territory, patrolled by the United Nations, close to Israel.”
Malone reached for the phone. “I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
VIENNA
10:30 PM
THORVALDSEN SAT IN THE CHÂTEAU’S GRAND HALL, WATCHING the Order of the Golden Fleece’s winter Assembly unfold. He, like the other members, filled a gilded antique chair. They were aligned in rows of eight, the Circle facing them, Alfred Hermann’s center chair draped in a blue silk. Everyone seemed anxious to talk, and the discussion had quickly gravitated to the Middle East and what the Political Committee had proposed the previous spring. At that time the plans had been merely tentative. Things were now different. And not everyone agreed.
In fact, there was more dissent than Alfred Hermann had apparently expected. The Blue Chair had already twice interjected himself into the debate, which was a rarity. Usually, Thorvaldsen knew, Hermann remained silent.
“Displacing the Jews is impossible and ridiculous,” one of the members said from the floor. Thorvaldsen knew the man, a Norwegian heavy into North Atlantic fishing. “Chronicles makes clear that God chose Jerusalem and sanctified the Temple there. I know my Bible. First Kings says God gave Solomon one tribe, so David would have a lamp before Him in Jerusalem. The city He chose for Himself. The reestablishment of modern Israel was not an accident. Many believe it came by heavenly inspiration.”
Several other members echoed the observation with Bible passages of their own from Chronicles and Psalms.
“And what if all that you quote is false?”
The inquiry came from the front of the hall. The Blue Chair stood. “Do you recall when the modern state of Israel was created?”
No one answered his question.
“May 14, 1948. Four thirty-two PM. David Ben-Gurion stood in the Tel Aviv Museum and said that by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people the state of Israel was established.”
“The prophet Isaiah made clear that a nation shall be born in a day,” one of the members said. “God kept his promise. The Abrahamic covenant. The land of the Jews was returned.”
“And how do we know of this covenant?” Hermann asked. “Only one source. The Old Testament. Many of you have today called on its text. Ben-Gurion spoke of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people. He, too, was referring to the Old Testament. It’s the only existing evidence that mentions these divine revelations-but its authenticity is seriously in doubt.”
Thorvaldsen’s gaze swept the room.
“If I were to have a deed to each one of your estates, documents that were decades old, translated from your respective languages by people long dead who could not even speak your language, would not each one of you question its authenticity? Would you not want more proof than an unverified and unauthenticated translation?” Hermann paused. “Yet we have accepted the Old Testament, without question, as the absolute Word of God. Its text eventually molded the New Testament. Its words still have geopolitical consequences.”
The gathering seemed to be waiting for Hermann to make his point.
“Seven years ago a man named George Haddad, a Palestinian biblical scholar, penned a paper published by Beirut University. In it he postulated that the Old Testament, as translated, was wrong.”
“Quite a premise,” a member said. The heavyset woman stood. “I take the Word of God more seriously than you.”
Hermann seemed amused. “Really? What do you know of this Word of God? You know its history? Its author? Its translator? Those words were written thousands of years ago by unknown scribes in Old Hebrew, a language dead now for more than two thousand years. What do you know of Old Hebrew?”
The woman said nothing.
Hermann nodded. “Your lack of knowledge is understandable. It was a highly inflected language in which the import of words was conveyed by their context rather than their spelling. The same word could, and did, have several distinct meanings, depending on how it was used. Not until centuries after the Old Testament was first written did Jewish scholars translate those words into the Hebrew of the time, and yet those scholars could not even speak Old Hebrew. They simply guessed at the meaning or, even worse, changed the meaning. Then centuries passed, and more scholars, this time Christian, translated the words again. They, too, could not speak Old Hebrew, so they, too, guessed. With all due respect to your beliefs, we have no idea as to the Word of God.”
“You have no faith,” the woman declared.
“On this I do not, since it does not involve God. This is the work of man.”
“What did Haddad argue?” another man asked, his tone suggesting that he was interested.
“Correctly, he postulated that when the stories of the covenant made by God to Abraham were first told, Jews already inhabited their Promised Land-what is now Palestine. Of course, this was many, many centuries after the actual promise was supposedly made. According to the biblical premise, the Promised Land was said to extend from the river of Egypt to the great River Euphrates. Many place-names are given. But when Haddad matched the biblical place-names, translated back into Old Hebrew, with actual locations, he discovered something extraordinary.” Hermann paused, seemingly pleased with himself. “The Promised Land of Moses and the land of Abraham were both located in western Saudi Arabia, in the region of Asir.”