The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection Part 79

He looked to Rebecca, who frowned as she spoke. "Actually, that is quite a swath of territory to consider. Basically her theory only rules out Israel."

Did Rebecca just school Bunny? By the girl's flushed cheeks, yes Rebecca did.

"Actually," Bunny answered, "I was specifically speaking of Moses's well-doc.u.mented travels, which eliminated nearly all northern Arab countries."

It was a little like watching a nerd-off tennis match, only both of the contestants were pretty easy on the eyes, as Rebecca responded. "Except that would be following the path of the second set of tablets in the ark. What we are looking for are the first, the original tablets whose travels are not well doc.u.mented."

Again the younger woman blushed deeply. Yeah, about the only person Brandt had even seen go up against Rebecca's nearly encyclopedic knowledge of ancient religious history and win was their mutual professor, Lochum. Even he, in the end, was eclipsed by Rebecca.

And as much as he loved watching Rebecca in robo-scholar mode, it was not helping them get closer to Amed's freaking Rinderpest stash.

From across the room Harvish broke the deadlock. "Um...then what in the h.e.l.l was Amed doing so far from the Holy Land? Bringing his stink to Croatia?"

Brandt looked to Bunny first, who suddenly found a b.u.t.ton on her shirt incredibly fascinating. He turned his attention back to his go-to girl, Rebecca.

"What?" his ex-fiancee snorted. "She's the one that's had all week to work on this."

Brandt tilted his head. "Rebecca..."

Okay, that sounded kind of b.i.t.c.hy even to her own ears. Rebecca opened her laptop, hoping it would take her mind off of the fact that somehow Bunny had gotten even prettier and apparently smarter as well. It shouldn't matter given the fact they were tracking down a terrorist, but if Rebecca was being completely honest, it did. And Harvish stealing glances over at Bunny's legs was not helping.

"Croatia has a rich Jewish history," she said as she brought up a map of the country. "I am a.s.suming Amed went to the Split Synagogue since they have found ancient Jewish remains predating Roman times in the hills surrounding the area." Rebecca looked to Brandt. "And I am a.s.suming that after his capture the Croatian forces scoured the area for any sign of the Rinderpest?"

The sergeant nodded.

"The important fact is that Amed himself was clearly looking well beyond the 'well-doc.u.mented travels' of Moses to locate the tablets."

"So we are back to square one," Brandt grumbled. "Even if we find these fragments of the so-called Ten Commandments, they may not lead us to the stash after all."

Everyone's face clouded at the proclamation. Rebecca however wasn't so sure of that comment. Her theory, like most of her theories, was probably not going to make anyone any happier, but it might help them find the virus.

"I wouldn't be so quick to throw in the towel," Rebecca said.

"Why?" Brandt asked, hope flickering in those blue eyes of his.

She'd really hoped to not have to offer up this one particular theory until she had more proof. "Something about the biblical version of Moses coming down the mount has always bothered me."

Brandt crossed his arms, challenging her to shake his faith once again.

"Here he is carrying the word, the literal word of G.o.d," Rebecca said, trying to be as respectful as she could. "And I get the fact that he found his people worshipping a false idol and all, but why would he..." She took a deep breath. "Why would he throw the tablets down and shatter them? I mean, G.o.d supposedly touched those tablets. Isn't that a bit..."

"Childish?" Harvish offered but piped back down as Brandt's glare found him.

Rebecca nodded though. She could take the sergeant's ire. She'd felt it before. Although after the entire Maria thing she didn't think she'd ever be so lucky as to feel it again.

"Yes. I mean, we shatter G.o.d's word because the people aren't obeying G.o.d's word? Then we make a new set?"

Brandt's features darkened. "You are saying that Moses lied?"

"No," Rebecca said, which only seemed to confuse Brandt more. "I am saying Moses smashed the tablets for another reason."

"And that would be?" Brandt asked, skepticism thick in his voice.

"Think about it. Moses goes away for forty days and comes back to his people doing all kinds of wonky things, and here he is carrying a load of G.o.d's strict word..." Rebecca braced herself. This next part Brandt was not going to like. "I think he worried that his people couldn't handle the 'truth,' so to speak. That whatever was on those tablets was just too much, so he smashed them."

Bunny took a step closer. "So you are saying he destroyed the original tablets fearing his people could not follow G.o.d's word and then created a second set that was pared down?"

"Kind of like an Idiot's Guide to G.o.d's Word?" Harvish offered.

Guess the point man liked being skewered by Brandt's stare because Harvish was just asking for it.

"Crudely put," Rebecca continued, "but yes. He created a simpler, bullet-pointed set of G.o.d's rules that he felt his people could handle...the Ten Commandments."

Those stormy, suppressing-his-anger-the-best-Brandt-could-do eyes found Rebecca. "I am a.s.suming you are challenging several millennia's faith for a reason other than sport?"

"Of course," Rebecca sighed. Granted they were no longer intimate, however he should give her more credit than that. "Whatever else was written on those first tablets contained something that needed to be hidden. I'm thinking if we know what that was, it might point us to where they hid the rest of the tablets."

Brandt's frown intensified, which only meant he was starting to understand her logic. "In this scenario they created the Ark of the Covenant as a decoy?" Off her nod, he continued. "So all eyes were pointed to the ark's position rather than the original tablets."

Bunny nodded vigorously. "It does make more sense why the ark's legend has never been fulfilled. I mean if the ark truly did carry the might of G.o.d, then why didn't the Jews use it at Masada? The first attack on the Temple of Jerusalem? Or a thousand other battles?"

"And I don't think I'm the first person to have these thoughts," Rebecca stated, turning her attention to the robed man. "Am I, Bishop Tolst?"

Brandt turned to the bishop. "Do you have something to add?"

The old man clutched some old papers to his chest. "Nyet."

"Tolst," Bunny urged. "You need to tell them."

The bishop shook his head from side to side, gritting his teeth. Bunny gave him a sympathetic glance before turning back to Brandt. "You have to understand, he hasn't told the authorities or even the church's patriarch about what we're doing."

The young woman knelt next to the bishop's knee as she coaxed, "Tolst, Amed is dead. The knowledge you hold may be our only way to find the Rinderpest before it is spread."

A tear sprang to the man's eye and ran down the craggy side of his face. Slowly his fist unclenched, revealing an old sketch. Bunny removed it and handed the page to Brandt. His eyes scanned it quickly, but they made no sense. They were just old religious paintings. Much like the fourteen million covering the rest of the church. He offered the paper to Rebecca. "I don't get it."

"Neither do I," Rebecca said as she studied the artwork. "Wait..."

Brandt waited and waited as Rebecca's eyes scanned the doc.u.ment. "You have something?"

The faint smile on her lips said yes. "These paintings aren't in the style of the sixteenth century. They are nineteenth century, if I'm not mistaken."

Bunny looked to the page. "You're right." The younger woman looked to the bishop. "These paintings there were 'removed' from the cathedral back in the sixties."

Tolst nodded, indicating to the wall across from them. He spoke slowly as if weighing each of his words. "But the renovation damaged the wall. It was one of these weakened sections that were replaced in the seventies. For the first time since Ivan the Terrible, a wall was completely removed, taken down to the wooden frame."

"Who was it?" Rebecca asked, clearly not of Brandt. "The architect's name? The guy who supervised the restoration?"

"Nikolay Sobolev," Bunny answered.

One hand of Rebecca's worked furiously across the keys. With the other hand she gave Harvish the power cord. "Plug this in, would you?"

"Rebecca?" Brandt asked.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," she said, waving him off. "Give me a second."

Brandt's patience was running thin. They had already spent too much time talking rather than doing. He liked his ratio favoring the action side. A metronome in his head had him calculating exactly how much leeway they had before their attackers caught up with them. His only comforts, and those were pretty small, was Talli perched atop the Russian museum, covering the building. The other, which actually did get his pulse to slow down, was the fact that Lopez was out there somewhere with their getaway vehicle.

For so many reasons, not the least of which was to avoid a trip to Siberia, this mission needed to be a quick in-and-out mission. Holding a Russian bishop at gunpoint was not going to go over well once it was discovered. They needed to be far, far away, like a different continent before that happened.

"Rebecca?"

"Wait, wait, wait," she said as she typed furiously. "Here it is. Nikolay Sobolev...in 1905."

"That can't be the same guy," Brandt sighed. One more dead end.

The bishop shook his head. "Nyet. That Nikolay is the architect's uncle."

Brandt was on the verge of calling this trip a wash. "Then I don't see-"

"Uncle Nikolay headed up the Circle of Thirty-two," Rebecca jumped in. "A group of priests who wished to reform the Greek Orthodox Church." She emphasized the next words. "To bring it closer to their Jewish roots. This article states, and I quote, 'He shared his great love and respect for the greatest man of faith, Moses, with the next generation.'"

"And then his nephew turns out to be the main architect on the renovation of St. Basil's?" Brandt could see where Rebecca was going with this.

"I know how much you hate coincidences," she teased.

Yes. Yes he did. "So you think Nikolay wasn't here just to renovate but to get his hands on a piece of the tablets?"

Rebecca didn't answer him though. Instead she glanced to the bishop. "I don't get it, Tolst. You clearly must have figured out this connection. Which means you know that Nikolay more than likely found the pieces of tablet he was looking for. That the tablets are no longer here."

Which completely blew. A wasted trip to Russia. A firefight in Pushchino for nothing. Before he could get them packing out, the bishop stood.

"I do not think Nikolay found them," Tolst said reluctantly, "or at least not all of them."

Brandt suddenly got interested again.

"Why do you think that?" Rebecca asked, not following the bishop's logic.

"Nikolay restricted his aggressive renovations to the damaged walls," the bishop stated. "Even he could not bring himself to break down a pristine sanctuary."

Which made sense. And it wasn't necessarily Nikolay's conscience that stopped him. Everyone from the Greek Orthodox Church's patriarch to President Leonid Brezhnev wanted the renovation of the church to go smoothly. It would have been a little hard for Nikolay to explain knocking out a perfectly good wall to the authorities.

"And you think you know where Ivan hid a cache of the tablet fragments?" Rebecca prompted.

The old man nodded. "I have been trying to decide if I have it in my soul to create such a sacrilege. Could I go where Nikolay feared to tread?"

Again, Rebecca didn't think Nikolay was afraid to commit sacrilege so much as he feared ending up in a gulag. However, she could sympathize with the bishop's reluctance to violate a sanctuary. It was a heady thing to think of destroying an international cultural site.

Of course after you did it a few times, it did get slightly easier.

"Where?" she asked.

The bishop stared directly at the wall across from St. Basil's tomb. "My family has long been spiritual consultants to the Russian leaders." He rose and put his hand on the edge of a painted insert, depicting John the Baptist. "My grandfather told me stories of my great-great-grandfather serving Ivan the Terrible. He would come here to meditate on his next conquest. Bar himself in this tomb and let none other enter until his studies were done."

Brandt looked to her. Rebecca studied the artwork that Tolst indicated. "This was the last of the sanctuaries to be built. According to all the records down the ages, this room has never been renovated."

Rebecca's fingers slipped along the edge of the painting. There was no discernible crack or fissure. Nothing to indicate it was anything but a work of devotion.

"How would Ivan access a hidden chamber though?" Bunny asked from the other side of the bishop. "I don't see any hinges or locks."

Rebecca took a step back. Something bugged her. Something she had read. But she had read so much about this church. From the grounds' ancestral history to the company currently responsible for janitorial work. Which of the thousands of random factoids was important now?

"What's going on in that brain of yours?" Brandt asked.

How she wished he hadn't. All eyes turned on her. This kind of pressure did not help her sifting process. Rebecca took another step back from the painting. It looked sixteenth-century authentic. What with the delicate brushstrokes and carved oak frame. The wall behind it was decorated with renditions of thin vines very much in favor in Europe at the time. The Russians truly had gone international when it came to this landmark. Again, more useless factoids.

Wait. Rebecca c.o.c.ked her head, studying the wall. International.

She turned to Brandt with a smile. "Flemish."

That was Rebecca for you, Brandt thought as he counted to ten. If anyone expected her to give a straight answer, they clearly didn't know her very well.

"Flemish?" he prodded.

"The Russians outsourced so much of the building of the church. Ottoman era craftsmen, German bricklayers."

Brandt tried to hurry her along. "Which you said."

Rebecca once again went to her laptop and brought up a new screen. "All the other countries made sense except the Flemish." She pointed to the article detailed the various artisans who were commissioned to work on the cathedral. "Hiring Flemish craftsmen made no sense. They were all about the baroque at the time, and look around you-this place is the exact opposite of baroque."

"But they were known for something else," Bunny said, leaning over the keyboard. "May I?" Rebecca hesitated but then nodded for the younger woman to type. "The Flemish were well known however for their ability to build hidden staircases, usually inside of a dresser or armoire."

The screen transformed into a picture of a silver cabinet that when opened parted to create an archway that led to a hidden staircase. Brandt followed Rebecca's gaze to St. Basil's tomb.

"No..." Brandt said, hoping his intuition was wrong. "You aren't saying the staircase is in there."

St. Basil's tomb looked solid. The thing was made of thick black stone with beaten gold embellishments. The elaborately decorated canopy stood on four solid wood pillars. It was basically a shrine, as was fitting a saint.

Rebecca brought one shoulder up in a sympathetic shrug. "We've got to try."

d.a.m.n it she was right. As much as Brandt wished she wasn't. He really did not want to desecrate a saint's tomb. Brandt did not have many lines in the sand, but he'd kind of thought that was one of them. As he helped Rebecca check around the rim of the tomb, he guessed it wasn't.