Echo breakthrough book 6, p.23
Echo (Breakthrough Book 6), page 23
One by one, the others turned and peered out from under the tree toward the small chapel.
“What we see is nothing more than a symbol, which is what I was trying to convince their government. And of what was most likely inside.”
“No Tabot,” said Clay.
“And no Commandment tablets. How could they be? Just look at the place. Look how bloody easy it was for me to get in.”
Still silent, Neely reached forward and pressed the button on the screen to continue playing, at which point, loud yelling could be heard in the background. The video became erratic again as Goodwin suddenly fled back outside.
“This was when Shenzu discovered me and began screaming.”
Goodwin had cursed under his breath as he fled, circling back around the chapel and attempting to scale the fence.
The picture tumbled wildly as he then tossed the camera over the fence and into a tall patch of grass, leaving the grunting Goodwin struggling offscreen before hitting the ground with a thud.
In the corner of the video frame between long blades of grass, flashing blue lights could be seen drawing closer in the distance.
“Bloody hell–” were Goodwin’s final words before he stopped the playback on the camera.
“That’s when things went bad. Negasi and his men were supposed to get me out of there. But when it all went pear-shaped, they arrested me instead and denied involvement.”
Caesare spoke to Clay. “Not the most sophisticated operation I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, I’m not exactly James Bond.”
“You’d think this Negasi could have come up with a better plan than that.”
“I don’t think Negasi believed the Tabot was there either,” said Goodwin. “It was clear by the end he was just following orders.”
“Whose orders?”
The Englishman turned toward Clay. “I don’t know. Someone higher up.”
“So, your friend Yonas escaped, but you didn’t.”
“Correct.”
“Do they know about Yonas?”
Goodwin shrugged and stuffed the camera into his pocket. “I assume so. But they didn’t need anyone else to blame it on. They had me. I allowed the government to close the case quietly with no attachments to them.”
“And they didn’t know about the camera?”
“No. Only Yonas and I.”
“So now you have evidence they may want.”
The faint smugness on Goodwin’s face suddenly disappeared. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
Clay nodded to Caesare, who immediately took the hint and turned to scan the area around them. Neither he nor Clay could spot anyone, but that didn’t mean much. If things were as politically sensitive as Goodwin indicated, and he had been framed to avoid embarrassment to the government, it would be foolish to assume they wouldn’t want to know what Goodwin was up to now.
Hearsay was easily debunked, particularly when coming from the mouth of an angry prisoner. But video footage was something else entirely.
True to Clay’s suspicion, nestled in a thick patch of jasmine bushes just three blocks away, another long black telescoping microphone stirred slightly, causing a few of the bush’s leaves and flowers to wriggle.
This time the feed was being recorded and transmitted live to Negasi’s phone, where he sat quietly listening in the driver’s seat of a black Mercedes.
He still didn’t understand why the Americans were interested in the Tabot. But it no longer mattered. If Goodwin had video footage of the event at the chapel, he might have more, perhaps even recordings of previous conversations in Negasi’s own voice.
If Negasi could be implicated, he had little doubt the Ethiopian President Selassie would do whatever was needed to keep it from implicating him, ensuring any footage would never see the light of day and draw the attention of the prime minister. And if the Americans had enough influence with his own prime minister to free Goodwin, surely they had enough to request a formal investigation. Which meant things could get very ugly, very quickly.
Negasi could sense the sick feeling of unease growing in his stomach as he continued listening to the transmission.
“So, you’re saying this is merely symbolic?”
“That’s right,” Goodwin replied. “Think about it. If you really had the greatest artifact in history, something potentially of great power, would you really tell people where it rested?”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Precisely. Even the most unsophisticated person knows how and when to lie.”
“Unless,” Neely’s voice said, “they believe this symbol is just as valuable. Spiritually.”
“Or,” said Goodwin, “the wooden box is simply a decoy. Perhaps even the entire chapel!”
Beneath the broad reach of the acacia tree, Clay studied Goodwin curiously. “The whole chapel?”
“Right. And I don’t just mean the location. What if the Chapel of the Tablet itself was built as a decoy hundreds of years ago?”
“That would be a clever diversion. Something tells me this didn’t just come to you.”
“Jail gave me a lot of time to think.”
“Because by then, you knew the real Ark was not in the chapel.”
“Correct.”
Borger thought it over. “It’s not the craziest theory.”
“That the Ark is real, but it’s not here?”
Borger nodded and wiped a line of sweat from his forehead. “He’s right. What’s the point of hiding something if you tell everyone where the thing is? No one would do that.”
“Unless they thought God would protect it for them,” said Neely.
“Then why is it not in the chapel,” countered Goodwin.
When she nodded, he quickly added, “Believing in God does not eliminate man’s treachery.”
So,” said Clay, “if it was in the church at one time and the chapel was then built to convince people it was still here, where would they have taken it?”
“Now that, my friend,” said a grinning Goodwin, “is the question.”
The rest grew quiet again when Neely thought of something and looked around. “Where’s Li Na?”
The others looked up and glanced around.
“She was just here,” Caesare said, standing up from a kneeling position to do a 360-degree scan. “I didn’t hear her leave.”
“Neither did I.”
“There she is,” he said, pointing to the grounds on the opposite side of the church. Through several trees and bushes, the teenager could be seen standing near a smaller fence. It was old and black and appeared to be made of wrought iron.
“What is she doing?” asked Neely, stepping forward.
“I don’t know.”
“What is she in front of?”
Goodwin squinted before answering in a solemn tone. “It’s the church’s graveyard.”
64
The private graveyard was small, barely a thousand square feet, and checkered by perhaps thirty or forty headstones. Many were so old and modest as to be hand carved. The small, neat patches of grass between them showed the area to be meticulously groomed. The teenager stood before the small fence beneath the waving shadow of a nearby tree, her dark hair blowing gently in the breeze.
“Li Na?”
She didn’t turn around when the others approached. Instead, she remained still, staring quietly into the cemetery.
Neely reached the fence, trying to see what the girl was staring at.
“Li Na, is something wrong?”
The teenager’s head remained fixed. “Something feels bad here.”
“In the cemetery?”
She nodded.
“What are you feeling?”
“Sickness.”
Neely frowned to herself. It was a cemetery. “A lot of people die of sickness, Li Na.”
The girl shook her head. “Not that kind. Something poisonous.”
Caesare stepped closer. “Someone was poisoned?”
She shook her head again, not as an answer, but slower, peering toward the back of the small lot. As though trying to measure.
“More than one,” she said.
Caesare turned to Goodwin, who was now behind them, followed by Clay and Borger. “What is this place?”
“A private burial site,” Goodwin answered. “Sacred. For the monks and clergy who serve the church.”
They looked back to Li Na, who was still moving her head.
“Poison is not the right word,” she finally said. “It is different than that. Something…warm.”
“Warm?”
The girl nodded and extended her hand over the waist-high fence. “I can feel it. From here.”
Behind everyone else, Borger pursed his lips and looked at Clay. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
***
It came in a cardboard box, twenty-four inches wide by thirty-six long, delivered into the hands of a perspiring Will Borger, just two kilometers from the church and thirty minutes away, using unnamed and poorly maintained roads. The delivery was made possible through a phone call from a now very reluctant Yonas, who wanted nothing more than to remain uninvolved in whatever Goodwin was doing.
Nevertheless, Goodwin and Borger were left standing outside one of Axum’s Polytechnic College Science Department's heavy metal doors staring into the open box at several pieces of instruments.
“Is that it?”
Borger studied the contents for a few moments before nodding. “Looks like it.”
When they returned to the church, the sun was setting and the rest of the group were waiting following an improvised nearby dinner of flatbread and legume stew, of which Caesare was visibly disappointed.
When Goodwin and Borger arrived with the box, they set it down and began removing the pieces.
“Have any meat in there?”
Borger ignored the joke and paused momentarily, moving a few things aside and pulling out a large yellow metal box. In his other hand, he retrieved a black coiled cord affixed to a long black tube. He lowered the yellow box, propped it on one side, and plugged the end of the hanging cord into an outlet approximately the size of a headphone jack. Then he turned the box right side up and peered at the display on the front, directly below a mildly scratched pane of clear glass.
Flipping it on caused a tiny arm to jump briefly along the curved bar before promptly returning to zero.
“I think we’re ready.”
Clay glanced at his watch. “Another half hour until dark.”
Even beneath a rising crescent moon, the spate of overhead trees cast more than enough shadow for Clay and Borger to safely move forward from tree trunk to tree trunk until reaching the outside corner of the gated cemetery.
They stepped over the low fence and squatted near the ground with no one in sight while Borger readied his instrument. He flipped it on and jumped at the sudden squawk of feedback through the speaker, rushing to turn its volume down.
Even on low, the clicking was unmistakable, prompting both men to look at each other.
“Well, that’s interesting.”
Minutes later, Goodwin was waved over, trotting out from beneath the trees in a low, awkward crouch. He ambled out and over a stretch of dirt until he reached the fence and clumsily scrambled over after a quick scan of the church grounds. Then, he remained on his hands and knees, crawling to Clay and Borger.
Waiting in the center of the small graveyard, Borger shook his head at Clay. “That was worse than me.”
Goodwin arrived slightly out of breath. “What do we have, chaps?”
Borger waved the tube over several headstones, causing the Geiger counter to erupt in a flurry of low clicks. “It’s coming from these stones here in the middle.”
Goodwin turned and eyed each corner of the yard, then stared down at the headstones. “Almost exactly in the center.”
“That’s what I just said.”
The Englishman wasn’t listening. Instead, he studied the other headstones.
“It’s radiation,” said Borger. “Alpha.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not unless we stay here for a couple months. But it’s only this row. None of the others.”
Under the unobstructed moon, Goodwin studied each headstone individually, running his hands gently over each surface. “Some are more worn than others.” After another pass, he rotated around, still on his knees, to face them. “In fact…it feels as if the stones are more worn as you move to the right.”
He stopped on the last and studied it closer. Its surface was worn smooth, with the only features being the letters carved into the stone in a single word.
“Do you recognize those letters?”
“Looks like Ga’ez. Classical Ethiopic.”
“Can you read them?”
“Not well,” he said with a frown before moving to the left. “This one looks as if it might be newer. And–”
When Goodwin stopped, Clay and Borger both followed his gaze to the second headstone. “Looks like the same word.”
“It does.” Goodwin nodded and moved once more to his left then again. “They all say the same thing.”
“But you can’t read it?”
He remained quiet, thinking, fingering the first few letters. “They look familiar,” he said, tapping the stone with his index finger. “I think this says guard…or maybe guardian.”
“They all say guardian?”
“I said I think.”
“Like the monk in the chapel.”
“Like Shenzu, yes. But there are no names on any of them.”
“Just the same word on each.”
Goodwin turned around again, studying the rest of the cemetery.
“What is it?”
“Their location,” he muttered. “These headstones are positioned almost dead center in the middle of all the others.”
“You think it means something?”
“I think…it’s symbolic.”
“Maybe a symbol of protection,” offered Clay.
“You think too much like a soldier.” The Englishman frowned. “Putting them in the middle would not be a symbol of protection. It would be a symbol of honor.”
It was a profound idea, and not until Goodwin scooted backward, preparing to crawl out, did he notice something more, made visible by the moonlight, appearing at the bottom edge of the first headstone—the oldest.
What Goodwin had initially taken as a flake or chip in the stone appeared at a closer glance to be something else.
“Well, well. What do we have here?” he said, gingerly moving his finger back and forth, feeling the indentation.
“What’s that?”
With his glasses, he moved closer to the ground, studying the small mark at eye level. “It looks like a very faint shape.” He gradually moved his eyes back and forth, examining the rift from different angles. “The shape, if I’m not mistaken, is of a hexagram.”
“What, like the Star of David?”
Goodwin continued, his chin grazing the ground. He then rose and rocked back onto his knees. “Like the Star of David, which is what most people would think of. But the Star of David isn’t that old. It was established in the 1890s as a representation of the worldwide Zionist community, and later the broader Jewish community. However, both pentagrams and hexagrams have much older associations. They were both symbols of the Seal of Solomon—King Solomon.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not. And what’s more, I think I know who these headstones belong to: The Black Jews.”
Borger frowned. “Excuse me?”
“The Black Jews,” Goodwin repeated. When neither Clay nor Borger spoke, Goodwin frowned. “Relax. It’s not a racial slur. It’s a historical reference. An important one, which I dare say has been largely wiped from many of our modern history books.”
65
The Black Jews, better known as The Falashas, had faded from most modern scholars' discussions, due in large part to years of warfare having destroyed all accounts of their early lineage, in addition to numerous political parties who had deemed their existence unfavorable.
Surviving for centuries in the mountains of Northwestern Ethiopia, the group had become so disconnected and so cut off from the rest of Judaism that the Falashas believed themselves to be the only Jews remaining in the world for years. Reachable only by foot or horseback until very recently, the group, numbering in the thousands, were said to have originated following the great Exodus from Egypt when a band of Hebrews headed south rather than across the Sinai Desert. Or alternatively, perhaps as captives following the destruction of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E.
Now sitting in a quiet, rundown restaurant, all six sat around a circular wooden table marred in nicks and grooves with only faint traces of its original green paint still visible.
All eyes and ears were on Goodwin, listening in earnest as he explained, even Caesare, who sat gnawing quietly and happily on a large turkey leg.
“They’re here because of the Assyrians?”
Goodwin shook his head. “That’s just one of the theories. Another claims they are descendants of Elephantine Island's Jewish colonists in the Nile near modern-day Aswan.”
“So, no one really knows where they’re from,” replied Neely.
“Well, scholars might not agree, but the Falashas appear to know.”
“And?”
“And…” said Goodwin, momentarily peering up at a young group of Ethiopians who, laughing, entered, and navigated between tables to the opposite side of the room. “As it turns out,” he continued, “all you have to do is ask them.”
“The Falasha.”
He nodded. “They know exactly where they’re from. Descended directly from King Solomon’s son Menelik—or rather his half-brother who accompanied Menelik to Israel.”
“And helped him bring back the Tabot,” Clay said.
“Precisely.”
“Which is why you believe the headstones in the cemetery belong to them.”
