13th Apostle by Richard F. Heller, Rachael F. Heller Read Free Book Online Page B

invisibility. Moving from corridor to office, his sad lowly figure was barely noticed. With each office cleaning, with each access to more secure storage facilities, he was able to avail himself of greater proof of the secreted messages of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    His daily ritual was unerringly secure; all possible relevant information was stored below the plastic bags that lined the garbage cans within each room. He remained well into the night with the excuse that he was a bit slow and was willing to work longer hours in exchange for the Museum’s tolerance of his physical limitations.
    â€œYou pay me to get the job done, not punch a time clock,” he once remarked to the Director. DeVris had smiled, most likely with the thought that Hassan had little else to do to fill his nights.
    Quite the contrary. Hassan worked late into the evening. Each hidden document had to be retrieved from its trash can, scanned into e-mail, then sent to Maluka on one of the computers for which Hassan had secured the password. When all had been transmitted, each document or photo had to be returned to its original location or destroyed. They were long days and longer nights, but Maluka’s e-mail of confirmation each evening made it all worthwhile.
    Then all was changed in a heartbeat. It was a typical evening, and Hassan had been involved in the process of sending Maluka the translation of a relatively unimportant section of one of the scrolls. He was seated at DeVris’ computer and noticed a new e-mail had arrived from Ludlow. The Professor had no say in the decision to keep the most inflammatory sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls out of the reach of the public, so his communications were not among those that Maluka required Hassan to monitor.
    On that night, however, the subject line of Ludlow’s e-mail to DeVris pulled Hassan’s attention from his task. On impulse, he opened it. The “secured the find” subject line on the e-mail was not explained in its message, but Hassan forwarded the e-mail to Maluka anyway.
    In the three months that followed, Maluka had learned that a eleventh-century diary had been secured by Ludlow; one that could lead them to an artifact more valuable and more damning to the mythology of Jesus than any message contained within the Dead Sea Scrolls.
    The cost of this knowledge had been sizable; two deaths of key personnel at the Israel Museum that the police attributed to a random mugging and a unforeseen suicide along with the temporary collapse of the Israel Museum’s entire data base. The latter Maluka had not anticipated. Once he had infiltrated the secure portions of the system, an irreversible fail-safe mechanism triggered a shut down of the entire database. Fortunately, Maluka had time to access and download the information that he needed and then, in the few minutes before the shutdown, was able to introduce a tourniquet program that concealed the breach while affording future access to all e-mail.
    â€œBut what about all of the months of work?” Hassan had asked with some disappointment. “Are we to leave all of that behind?”
    â€œI have come to realize that the public is more fickle than I imagined. A sixty-year-old conspiracy holds no interest for them,” Maluka explained. “Others tried to expose the cover-up in the nineties as the Vatican Conspiracy but people quickly lost interest. With the power of MWT Videos behind me, I believed I could inspire the public to demand the truth, though recently I have begun to doubt it.
    â€œThis, on the other hand,” Maluka continued, “is a collusion in the making. And if we are able to procure the scroll described in the diary, if indeed—as Ludlow believes—it dates back to the time of Jesus, every eye in the world will be upon us. This, my friend, is a gift from the hand of Allah. A discovery so great that none will dare deny it. And, most importantly, one that might yet be acquired before the