Joel Rosenberg - The Copper Scroll

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 965.81KB 252 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

To Caleb, Jacob, Jonah, and Noah,

whom I love with all my heart.

May you never forget there is a treasure

more precious than gold.

Visit Tyndale's exciting Web site at www.tyndale.com

TYNDALE and Tyndale's quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. The

Copper Scroll

permission.

Dean H. Renninger

1972, 1973, 1975, 1977 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rosenberg, Joel C., date.

The copper scroll : a novel / by Joel C. Rosenberg.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4143-0346-8 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4143-0346-7 (alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-1-4143-0347-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-4143-0347-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Copper scroll—Fiction. 2. Middle East—Fiction. 3. International relations—Fiction. 4. Polictical

fiction. I. Title.

PS3618.0832C67 2006

813'.54dc22 2006010228

Printed in the United States of America

11 10 09 08 07 06

7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CAST OF CHARACTERS

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

. James "Mac" MacPherson

THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

. William Harvard Oaks

THE PRINCIPALS

. Jon Bennett, Former Senior Advisor to the President

. Erin McCoy Bennett, Former CIA Operative

. Natasha Barak, Hebrew University Professor of Near East Archeology

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS

. Marsha Kirkpatrick, National Security Advisor

. Jack Mitchell, Director of Central Intelligence

. Lee James, Secretary of Homeland Security

. Scott Harris, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation

. Bob Corsetti, White House Chief of Staff

. Ken Costello, Senior Advisor to the President

. Indira Rajiv, Director of the NAMESTAN Desk, CIA

. Chuck Murray, White House Press Secretary

ISRAELI LEADERS

. David Doron, Prime Minister of Israel

. Dr. Eliezer Mordechai, Former Head of Mossad

. Avi Zadok, Current Head of Mossad

IRAQI LEADERS

. Mustafa Al-Hassani, President of Iraq

. Khalid Tariq, Chief Political Aide to the President

OTHERS

. Ruth Bennett, Mother of Jon Bennett

. Salvador Lucente, European Union Foreign Minister

. Dr. Yossi Barak, Chief Archeologist of the Israel Museum

. Viggo Mariano, Sicilian Operative

AUTHOR'S NOTE

* * *

The journey that follows is fiction.

The prophecies upon which it is based are true.

In 1947, two Bedouin shepherds tending their flocks in the Judean hills not far from

Jerusalem stumbled upon the greatest archeological discovery of all time. Over the course

of the next few years, hundreds of manuscripts and fragments—what became known to

the world as the Dead Sea Scrolls—were found in the caves of Qumran.

Some of the scrolls contained whole books of the Bible, including the oldest known

copy of the book of Isaiah, foretelling key details of the coming Messiah. Other scrolls

contained descriptions of religious life in the ancient community of the Essenes, a

monastic Jewish sect. Still others foretold a coming "War of Gog and Magog" and the

building of a great new Jewish Temple in the earth's last days.

But in 1952 another scroll was found in those same caves, and this one was strangely

unlike all the others. It was not, for example, made of sheep-skins or parchments. Instead,

the message of the scroll had been engraved on copper, a costly and rare procedure. But

why? What mysteries did this scroll possess? What message could it possibly contain that

was more valuable, more worthy of protection, than Isaiah's messianic prophecies or the

detailed architectural plans of a future Temple?

Members of a small team of experts entrusted with the scroll's care were eager to

know. But they had a problem. Nearly two thousand years of oxidation had caused the

Copper Scroll to become brittle and in danger of disintegration. They could not simply

unravel the scroll without risking the very real probability that its precious contents

would be lost forever. It took archeologists nearly four years to conceive a method to

open the Copper Scroll, and when they did, they were stunned by what they found.

The New York Times broke the story to the world on June 1, 1956: "Dead Sea Scrolls

Tell of Treasure."1

In a front-page, top-of-the-fold story that captured the imagination of readers around

the world, the Times reported that the messages hidden within the Copper Scroll "sound

like something that might have been written in blood in the dark of the moon by a

character in Treasure Island." Somewhere, hidden in the forbidding hills of the Judean

wilderness on the West Bank of the Jordan River, lay a treasure of almost unimaginable

pro-portions. "The documents tell of hoards of fabulous value," said the Times. "If the

treasure exists, it includes 200 tons of gold and silver," just waiting to be found.

Was it legend, or was it real?

In his groundbreaking 1960 nonfiction book The Treasure of the Copper Scroll,

1 "Dead Sea Scrolls Tell of Treasure: `Key' to Vast Riches Written on Copper Is Deciphered," Stanley

Rowland Jr., New York Times, June 1, 1956, Al.

archeologist John Marco Allegro—a member of the original team that opened the

scroll—concluded that not only was the treasure real, but its importance extended far

beyond the wealth it listed. "There is," he wrote, "hardly an aspect of Near Eastern

archeology, history, and religion that it does not in some way illumine."2

And yet, half a century later, the treasure has never been found, and so many questions

remain unanswered. Johns Hopkins University professor P. Kyle McCarter Jr. once told a

gathering of archeologists at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington:

The Copper Scroll does not fit into any of the categories customarily included

when the Scrolls are discussed. . . . It is not in the Rockefeller Museum in

Jerusalem nor in the Shrine of the Book.... [I]t is written in a language that is

different from the language of any of the other Scrolls. It is written on a material

that is different ... and its content has no parallel. . . . It does not resemble any of

the other Qumran Scrolls—or anything else, except pirates' treasure maps in

Hollywood. It is an unusual phenomenon, an anomaly3.

In the summer of 2005, just before the publication of The Ezekiel Option, a colleague

and I traveled halfway around the world to see this "anomaly" for ourselves at the Jordan

Archaeological Museum in Amman. We had the chance to study it up close, to read its

text, to compare it with other Dead Sea Scrolls, and to hear whispers of a story that has

never been published. Until now.

There are some who believe that the dazzling treasures of the Copper Scroll will be

uncovered in our lifetime, perhaps very soon. What's more, some believe this "anomaly"

of history—this "unusual phenomenon"—will lead us to an even greater discovery, to the

most important archeological find of all time, one that will shock the world and in the

process trigger the end of days.

Are they correct? Should such whispers be listened to or dismissed as ancient legends

and myths? It remains to be seen. But it is here that our story begins.

JOEL C. ROSENBERG

Amman, Jordan

June 2005

2 John Marco Allegro, The Treasure of the Copper Scroll (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1960),

25. Also published in the U.S. by Doubleday.

3 P. Kyle McCarter Jr., "The Mystery of the Copper Scroll," The Dead Sea Scrolls After Forty Years:

Papers Presented at a Symposium at the Smithsonian Institution, October 27, 1990 (Washington, DC:

The Biblical Archeology Society, 1991, 1992), 1, 45; cited by Dr. Randall Price, Secrets of the Dead Sea

Scrolls (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1996), 265.

PREFACE

Ezekiel's War was over, but the world was still reeling.

In a single day, millions had perished. Entire cities had been laid waste. Even now,

many lay smoldering, virtually uninhabitable. The entire geopolitical system had been

upended, and an eerie hush seemed to have settled over the world.

Where would the hammer fall next? Could what had happened to Moscow and Tehran

and Khartoum and Damascus still happen to Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles?

Some said no. They believed the worst was now behind them, that a new age of peace

and prosperity was about to dawn.

It was a tempting premise.

SATURDAY, JANUARY I0 - 12:39 P.M. - WASHINGTON, D.C.

Their eyes locked for only a moment, but in that moment FBI Agent Marcus Santini

knew something was terribly wrong.

He had seen that face. He knew that face. But how?

Santini's cab swerved violently to avoid hitting the man who had suddenly stepped

into the flow of Washington, D.C., traffic. The man's eyes flashed with fear, but not of

dying. He seemed oblivious to the danger of standing in the middle of Massachusetts

Avenue, busy even on a Saturday. Instead, for that brief instant, he seemed rattled only

by the look of recognition in Santini's eyes.

And then he bolted.

The cab started moving again, but Santini couldn't take his eyes off the man as he

raced toward Union Station, clad in a thick winter coat and clutching a large backpack.

Santini had been trained to trust his instincts, but he had been with the bureau's

Counterterrorism Division for less than a year. And this was his day off. What were the

chances this guy was actually on a watch list? Two blocks from the Capitol? Less than a

mile from the White House?

Then again, what if he was? What if something happened, and he had done nothing to

stop it? Santini knew he would never be able to live with himself.

"Stop here," he ordered the driver.

"But, sir, we're almost there," the man replied.

"Now," Santini insisted, tossing a twenty through the small opening in the Plexiglas

divider and jumping out the back door, even as the taxi was still slowing to a stop.

He had less than a minute, if that. If the man made it onto one of the trains, Santini

would never find him until it was too late.

Sprinting like he had in college—like he had during training at the FBI Academy in

Quantico for eight lonely months away from his wife and two-year-old son—Santini

raced for the Red Line. Down the escalator. Through the turnstiles. Onto the platform.

The chimes began ringing. The doors were closing. The train was about to leave.

Santini boarded the last car just in time, scanning the crowd to his left and right. The man

was not there.

Santini's heart was pounding, and his doubts were rising. Was he overreacting? Was

he in danger of winding up as a gossip item in the Post—"Junior Agent Mistakes Area

Student for Suicide Bomber"?

The train began moving, heading west.

Santini glanced at his watch. It was 12:42. He knew the station at Judiciary Square

was closed on Saturdays. That meant their first stop was Gallery Place-Chinatown. From

there, nearly the entire D.C. Metro system was accessible—the Green Line to the Navy

Yard, the Yellow Line to the Pentagon and Reagan National Airport, and only one Red

Line stop away from FBI headquarters and the White House itself.

And they would be there in exactly three minutes.

Santini pulled out his phone and called a friend in the Directorate of Intelligence.

"Bobby, it's Marcus. I need a favor, fast."

"Whoa, whoa, slow down, big guy. You sound terrible."

"I need every watch-list photo you have of priority-one targets—males, European or

North African, eighteen to thirty. Can you e-mail those to my cell phone?"

"That's a lot of photos, but I ..."

Santini's phone chirped. His battery was dying.

"Can you do it?" he pressed.

"I guess so, but why?"

"Just send them—now. I'll call you back.

"Santini hung up and glanced at his watch again.

12:44.

He had less than a minute to the next stop.

George Murray was late, and he was never late.

Overworked, absolutely. Underpaid, it went without saying. But though the chief

archeologist for the Smithsonian Institution was not one who typically tolerated a lack of

discipline in his staff, much less himself, today it simply couldn't be helped.

Uncharacteristically disheveled and out of breath, Murray burst through the revolving

doors of the Willard InterContinental, arguably Washington's grandest five-star luxury

hotel, beautifully situated around the corner from the Treasury Building and the White

House.

"I'm so sorry—I should have taken a cab," Murray confessed, wiping the sweat off his

brow with one hand and shaking the hand of a literary agent from New York a bit too

vigorously with the other.

"No, no, please, Dr. Murray. It is an honor to finally meet you in per-son. I've heard

so much about you. You were very kind to call me."

"Well, I just wish I had more time, Mr. Catrell," Murray apologized. "I'm leaving for

Israel tomorrow. I haven't even started to pack. My youngest is in bed with a fever. We

can't figure out what he has. I've got to get my oldest to a basketball game in Annandale

by four...."

"Then let's have a seat," the agent insisted, guiding Murray over to some couches in a

quiet corner of the lobby, where they could talk in private. "And please, call me Gene.

Believe me, I would've happily waited longer. It's not every day a proposal as intriguing

as yours comes along."

The train began to slow.

Marcus Santini stepped to the door. His right hand moved to the sidearm holstered

under his overcoat. His left hand reached for his badge.

A voice came over the loudspeakers, announcing their location. The doors opened.

Santini waited a moment, then looked out. Only a handful of passengers stepped off the

train and onto the platform. The man with the backpack wasn't among them.

Santini drew his weapon and, keeping it low and at his side, moved quickly to the

next car. He ducked his head in but saw no one he recognized. He did the same for the

next car, but again, Backpack wasn't there.

His doubts were rising again. Was this guy even on the Metro? There was only one

train he could have gotten on, and this was it. But what if he had headed into Union

Station instead, toward the shops or the movie theaters or perhaps the Amtrak trains?

Which was worse: chasing a ghost or losing one?

Santini was about to call the whole thing off when he suddenly spotted Backpack. He

was standing in the next car, nearly hidden by a group of giggling teenage girls. Santini's

heart began racing again. If he was going to move, it had to be now. But was he really

going to pull his weapon on this guy on a crowded D.C. subway car?

He still had no idea who the man was. He had no proof he was actually a threat. The

backpack could be filled with schoolbooks or gym clothes or a ham sandwich and a six-

pack of Coke, for all he knew.

Santini remembered an incident in London, shortly after the bombings there, when

police had mistakenly shot and killed an innocent, unarmed man, thinking he was another

suicide bomber. And yet, for all his doubts, Santini knew he had to move now, even at

the risk of embarrassing himself and the bureau.

The chimes sounded again. The train doors began to close. Angry with himself for

hesitating too long, Santini stuffed his sidearm into his coat pocket and quickly slipped

into the train car behind Backpack's—just in time. The train began to move again.

Santini took a seat behind a large African-American woman carrying an armful of

shopping bags, then noticed that the phone in his pocket was vibrating. He pulled it out

and found that the e-mail had arrived. Actually, eight had arrived, the master file having

been too large to send all at once. He scrolled through the photos as quickly as he could.

"Come on, come on," he whispered under his breath.

There were too many faces, and none of them matched.

He glanced up at Backpack. But with so many people around him, Santini couldn't get

a better look at his face. He would have to go by memory. His phone chirped again. His

battery was almost dead.

He scrolled through another set of photos, then glanced back at his watch. He had less

than two minutes until they reached the next station. More e-mails. More photos. Santini's

pulse was racing. Sweat was drip-ping down his back.

And then his heart stopped. That was him. That was Backpack. Santini saved the

image, then speed-dialed the FBI Operations Center.

"This is Special Agent Marcus Santini," he whispered, his voice quaking slightly as

he gave his authorization code. "I'm on the Metro. Red Line. Heading west. I have a

positive ID on one Alonzo Cabresi. High-priority target. Suicide profile. Bulletin says

consider armed and extremely dangerous. Requesting backup at—"

But Santini's phone died before he could give his location.

"What did he just say?"

For a moment, the watch commander in the FBI Op Center couldn't believe what

she'd just heard and made her colleague who had fielded the call repeat himself, just to be

sure. A priority-one target in D.C.? On a Metro train, no less?

It wasn't possible. They'd had no warnings. No chatter. Nothing that would indicate

an attack, imminent or otherwise. Just the opposite. After all that had happened in Russia,

Iran, and the Middle East recently, the world had gone quiet. The last three months had

been the quietest of her entire ten-year career.

"Trace the call," she ordered.

"I'm doing it now, ma'am."

"Let's go, let's go."

"I'm going as fast as I can, ma'am."

"How much longer?"

"At least another minute or two."

"We might not have that long."

She grabbed the red phone on the console in front of her and speed-dialed the Secret

Service command post.

"Sir, this is Agent Andrews at the FBI Op Center. 'We are going to threat level delta.

Secure POTUS and crash the White House."

"Next stop Metro Center. Please watch your step."

Santini raced through his options. But there weren't any. He was out of time. He

would have to do this alone, he realized, and his hands began to tremble. At least he still

had the element of surprise.

Then Santini looked up and saw Cabresi staring back at him from the adjoining train

car. The man had a look of both shock and horror on his face. He'd been made, and he

knew it. His hand moved to the back-pack.

Instinctively, Santini drew his weapon. Cabresi ducked behind the teenage girls and

moved to the exit. The doors opened. Cabresi made a mad dash for the escalators.

Santini moved to the door, but the woman in front of him did as well. He almost

knocked her over trying to get out and in the process lost his footing and precious

seconds. By the time he got back on his feet and onto the platform, Cabresi was nearly to

the top of the stairs. Santini raised his sidearm and shouted, "Stop, FBI."

But it was too late. Cabresi had disappeared.

He answered on the first ring.

"Secretary James?"

"Speaking."

"Sir, this is the FBI Op Center. You have an urgent call from Director Harris."

"Put him through."

Homeland Security Secretary Lee James was headed to Baltimore to give a speech to

a conference of mayors when the FBI director gave him the news. Now he ordered his

protective detail to turn around and get him back to Washington as quickly as possible.

His driver instantly slammed on the brakes and spun the heavily armored Chevy

Suburban into a lane of oncoming traffic, followed by the rest of their security convoy.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

2ToCaleb,Jacob,Jonah,andNoah,whomIlovewithallmyheart.Mayyouneverforgetthereisatreasuremorepreciousthangold.VisitTyndale'sexcitingWebsiteatwww.tyndale.comTYNDALEandTyndale'squilllogoareregisteredtrademarksofTyndaleHousePublishers,Inc.TheCopperScrollCopyright©2006byJoelC.Rosenberg.Allrightsreserved.Co...

展开>> 收起<<

Joel Rosenberg - The Copper Scroll.pdf

共252页,预览51页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Joel Rosenberg - The Copper Scroll

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: