Blood Gospel

CHAPTER 1

October 26, 10:33 A.M., Israel Standard TimeCaesarea, Israel

Dr. Erin Granger stroked her softest brush across the ancientskull. As the dust cleared, she studied it with the eyes of a scientist,noting the tiny seams of bone, the open fontanel. Her gaze evaluatedthe amount of callusing, judging the skull to be that of a newborn,and from the angle of the pelvic bone, a boy.

Only days old when he died.

As she continued to draw the child out of the dirt and stone, shelooked on also as a woman, picturing the infant boy lying on hisside, knees drawn up against his chest, tiny hands still curled intofists. Had his parents counted his heartbeats, kissed his impossiblytender skin, watched as that tiny heartbeat stopped?

As she had once done with her baby sister.

She closed her eyes, brush poised.

Stop it.

Opening her eyes, she combed back an errant strand of blondhair that had escaped its efficient ponytail before turning her attentionback to the bones. She would find out what happened here allthose hundreds of years ago. Because, as with her sister, this child'sdeath had been deliberate. Only this boy had succumbed to violence,not negligence.

She continued to work, seeing the tender position of the limbs.Someone had labored to restore the body to its proper order beforeburying it, but the efforts could not disguise the cracked and missingbones, hinting at a past atrocity. Even two thousand years could noterase the crime.

She put down the wooden brush and took yet another photo.Time had colored the bones the same bleached sepia as the unforgivingground, but her careful excavation had revealed their shape. Still,it would take hours to work the rest of the bones free.

She shifted from one aching knee to the other. At thirty-two,she was hardly old, but right now she felt that way. She had been inthe trench for barely an hour, and already her knees complained. Asa child, she had knelt in prayer for much longer, poised on the harddirt floor of the compound's church. Back then, she could kneel forhalf a day without complaint, if her father demanded - but after somany years trying to forget her past, perhaps she misremembered it.Wincing, she stood and stretched, lifting her head clear of thewaist- high trench. A cooling sea breeze caressed her hot face,chasing away her memories. To the left, wind ruffled the flaps of thecamp's tents and scattered sand across the excavation site.

Flying grit blinded her until she could blink it away. Sand invadedeverything here. Each day her hair changed from blond to the grayishred of the Israeli desert. Her socks ground inside her Conversesneakers like sandpaper, her fingernails filled up with grit, even hermouth tasted of sand.

Still, when she looked across the plastic yellow tape that cordonedoff her archaeological dig, she allowed a ghost of a smile toshine, happy to have her sneakers planted in ancient history. Herexcavation occupied the center of an ancient hippodrome, a chariotcourse. It faced the ageless Mediterranean Sea. The water shoneindigo, beaten by the sun into a surreal, metallic hue. Behind her,a long stretch of ancient stone seats, sectioned into tiers, stood asa two thousand year old testament to a long dead king, the architectof the city of Caesarea: the infamous King Herod, that monstrousslayer of innocents.

A horse's whinny floated across the track, echoing not from thepast, but from a makeshift stable that had been thrown together onthe far end of the hippodrome. A local group was preparing aninvitational race. Soon this hippodrome would be resurrected, comingto life once again, if only for a few days.

She could hardly wait.

But she and her students had a lot of work to finish before then.With her hands on her hips, she stared down at the skull of themurdered baby. Perhaps later today she could jacket the tiny skeletonwith plaster and begin the laborious process of excavating it from theground. She longed to get it back to a lab, where it could be analyzed.The bones had more to tell her than she would ever discover in thefield.

She dropped to her knees next to the infant. Something botheredher about the femur. It had unusual scallop shaped dents along itslength. As she bent close to see, a chill chased back the heat.

Were those teeth marks?

"Professor?" Nate Highsmith's Texas twang broke the air andher concentration.

She jumped, cracking her elbow against the wooden slats bracingthe walls from the relentless sand.

"Sorry." Her graduate student ducked his head.

She had given strict instructions that she was not to be disturbedthis morning, and here he was bothering her already. To keep fromsnapping at him, she picked up her battered canteen and took a longsip of tepid water. It tasted like stainless steel.

"No harm done," she said stiffly.

She shielded her eyes with her free hand and squinted up at him.Standing on the edge of the trench, he was silhouetted against thescathing sun. He wore a straw Stetson pulled low, a pair of batteredjeans, and a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to exposewell muscled arms. She suspected that he had rolled them up just toimpress her. It wouldn't work, of course. For the past several years,fully focused on her work, she acknowledged that the only guys shefound fascinating had been dead for several centuries.

She glanced meaningfully over to an unremarkable patch of sandand rock. The team's ground penetrating radar unit sat abandoned,looking more like a sandblasted lawn mower than a high tech toolfor peering under dirt and rock.

"Why aren't you over there mapping that quadrant?"

"I was, Doc." His drawl got thicker, as it always did when he gotexcited. He hiked an eyebrow, too.

He's found something.

"What?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." Nate bounced on theballs of his feet, ready to dash off and show her.

She smiled, because he was right. Whatever it was, she wouldn'tbelieve it until she saw it herself. That was the mantra she hammeredinto her students: It's not real until you can dig it out of the groundand hold it in your hands.

To protect her work site and out of respect for the child's bones,she gently pulled a tarp over the skeleton. Once she was done, Natereached down and helped her out of the deep trench. As expected, hishand lingered on hers a second too long.

Trying not to scowl, she retrieved her hand and dusted off theknees of her jeans. Nate took a step back, glancing away, perhapsknowing he had overstepped a line. She didn't scold him. Whatwould be the use? She wasn't oblivious to the advances of men, butshe rarely encouraged them, and never out in the field. Here she woredirt like other women wore makeup and avoided romantic involvement.Though of average height, she'd been told that she carried herselfas if she were a foot taller. She had to in this profession, especiallyas a young woman.

Back home, she'd had her share of relationships, but none ofthem seemed to stick. In the end, most men found her intimidating - whichwas off putting to many, but oddly attractive to others.

Like Nate.

Still, he was a good field man with great potential as a geophysicist.He would grow out of his interest in her, and things woulduncomplicate themselves on their own.

"Show me." She turned toward the khaki colored equipmenttent. If nothing else, it would be good to get out of the baking sun."Amy's got the information up on the laptop." He headed acrossthe site. "It's a jackpot, Professor. We hit a bona fide bone jackpot."She suppressed a grin at his enthusiasm and hurried to keep pacewith his long legged stride. She admired his passion, but, like life,archeology didn't hand out jackpots after a single morning's work.Sometimes not even after decades.

She ducked past the tent flap and held it open for Nate, who tookoff his hat as he stepped inside. Out of the sun's glare, the tent'sinterior felt several degrees cooler than the site outside.

A humming electric generator serviced a laptop and a dilapidatedmetal fan. The fan blew straight at Amy, a twenty-three year oldgrad student from Columbia. The dark- haired young woman spentmore time inside the tent than out. Drops of water had condensed ona can of Diet Coke on her desk. Slightly overweight and out of shape,Amy hadn't had the years under the harsh sun to harden her to therigors of archaeological fieldwork, but she still had a keen technologicalnose. Amy typed on the keyboard with one hand and waved Erin overwith the other.

"Professor Granger, you're not going to believe this."

"That's what I keep hearing."

Her third student was also in the tent. Apparently everyone haddecided to stop working to study Nate's findings. Heinrich hoveredover Amy's shoulder. A stolid twenty-four year old student from theFreie Universität in Berlin, he was normally hard to distract. Forhim to have stepped away from his own work meant that the findwas big.

Amy's brown eyes did not leave the screen. "The software is stillworking at enhancing the image, but I thought you'd want to see thisright away."

Erin unsnapped the rag clipped to her belt and wiped grit andsweat off her face. "Amy, before I forget, that child's skeleton I'vebeen excavating ... I saw some unusual marks that I'd like you tophotograph."

Amy nodded, but Erin suspected she hadn't heard a word she'dsaid.

Nate fidgeted with his Stetson.

What had they found?

Erin walked over and stood next to Heinrich. Amy leaned backin her metal folding chair so that Erin had a clear view of the screen.The laptop displayed time sliced images of the ground Nate hadscanned that morning. Each showed a different layer of quadranteight, sorted by depth. The pictures resembled square gray mudpuddles marred by black lines that formed parabolas, like ripplesin the puddle. The black lines represented solid material.Erin's heart pounded in her throat. She leaned closer in disbelief.This mud puddle had far too many waves. In ten years of fieldwork she'd never seen anything like it. No one had.

This can't be right.

She traced a curve on the smooth screen, ignoring the way Amytightened her lips. Amy hated it when someone smudged her laptopscreen, but Erin had to prove that it was real - to touch it herself.She spoke through the strain, through the hope. "Nate, how bigan area did you scan?"

No hesitation. "Ten square meters."

She glanced sidelong at his serious face. "Only ten meters? You'resure?"

"You trained me on the GPR, remember?" He cocked his head tothe side. "Painstakingly."

Amy laughed.

Erin kept going. "And you added gain to these results?"

"Yes, Professor," he sighed. "It's fully gained."

She sensed that she'd bruised his ego by questioning his skills,but she had to be certain. She trusted equipment, but not always thepeople running it.

"I did everything." Nate leaned forward. "And, before you ask,the signature is exactly the same as the skeleton you were justexcavating."

Exactly the same? That made this stratum two thousand yearsold. She looked back at the tantalizing images. If the data werecorrect, and she would have to check again, but if they were, eachparabola marked a human skull.

"I did a rough count." Nate interrupted her thoughts. "Morethan five hundred. None larger than four inches in diameter."

Four inches ...

Not just skulls - skulls of babies.

Hundreds of babies.

She silently recited the relevant Bible passage: Matthew 2:16.

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, wasexceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that werein Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old andunder, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of thewise men.

The Massacre of the Innocents. Allegedly, Herod ordered it doneto be certain, absolutely certain, that he had killed the child whomhe feared would one day supplant him as the King of the Jews. But hehad failed anyway. That baby had escaped to Egypt and grown intothe man known as Jesus Christ.