Sign of the Cross

Cooper Glenn

Description

Abruzzo, Italy: a young priest suffers the stigmata of the crucifixion. The Vatican, Rome: the Pope calls on Harvard professor Cal Donovan to investigate the truth of the priest's claim. Berlin, Germany: a neo-Nazi organisation believes the priest is the key to an earth-shattering secret. A secret that can be used as a deadly weapon. When the priest is abducted, a perilous race against the clock begins. Only Cal can track down the ruthless organisation and stop it, before an apocalyptic catastrophe is unleashed.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 04 juillet 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786895059
• Langue: English

Extrait

Glenn Cooper chairs a media company, Lascaux Media, which produced three independent feature-length films. His debut novel, The Library of the Dead , became an international bestseller and was translated into thirty languages. All of his seven published books have become top-ten international best-sellers. @GlennCooper glenncooperbooks.com
Also by Glenn Cooper
The Will Piper Library Series
Library of the Dead Books of Souls The Keepers of the Library

The John Camp Down Series
Pinhole Portal Floodgate

Novels
The Tenth Chamber The Devil Will Come Near Death The Resurrection Maker

Published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Black Thorn, an imprint of Canongate Books
First published in 2018 by Severn House Publishers Ltd, Eardley House, 4 Uxbridge Street, London W8 7SY
blackthornbooks.com
Copyright © Glenn Cooper, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidentsare either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 487 8 eISBN 978 1 78689 505 9
CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
ONE
Syria Palaestina, 327
T he relentless Jerusalem sun had baked the earth hard as stone. Despite the midday heat, the leather-skinned laborers swinging heavy picks dared not break their cadence. The lady was close by, watching their every move, listening to the musical pings of iron striking the hard concretion.
She sat, shaded by her tent, on a flattened mound of detritus overlooking the excavation. Unsmiling Roman soldiers stood guard at each corner of the open-sided enclosure. These men and their comrades, who encircled the site with a ring of steel, were no ordinary legionnaires, but an elite cohort of centurions chosen by the emperor himself. It was not as if there were specific threats against the lady s person or even a general sense of menace. In truth, most of the people of Jerusalem were supportive of her actions and appreciative of her generosity to the poor. But there was no room for a cavalier error. One malcontent with a sling could have wrought disaster. This was the emperor s mother, an empress in her own right.
Flavia Iulia Helena Augusta.
The tavern girl who was consort to an emperor, Constantius Chlorus, and birthed a greater one, whom history would come to know as Constantine the Great. The man who defied centuries of Roman tradition, sweeping aside the gods and embracing Christianity.
If Constantine did the sweeping, then Helena was the broom.
So enamored was she with this young Christian religion, that at the age of near-eighty - when most noble women in extreme dotage were being carried from room to room in comfortable Roman villas - spry Helena was making pilgrimages to distant lands in search of the relics of Christ.
Arriving in the holy city of Jerusalem with her entourage, she astonished the ordinary populace by walking among them in their markets and churches, asking what they had learned from their ancestors about the location of Christ s tomb and Golgotha: the site of his crucifixion. The oral history was strong. Three hundred years in a land so ancient and rich in storytellers was but a grain of time. Now, two years into her expedition, the end was in sight and Helena s success was staggering. She had churches built on the site in Bethlehem, which she deemed to be that of Christ s birth, and on the Mount of Olives, the place of his ascension. These discoveries were but a trifle compared with the enormous task at Calvary: the site most often mentioned by locals as Jesus s burial place. Two hundred years earlier, Emperor Hadrian had undertaken a reconstruction of Jerusalem following the violent and destructive Jewish revolts. At Calvary, he covered the mound with earth and erected a large temple to Venus and it had fallen to Helena to take that building down, block by block.
The venerated Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem was Helena s constant companion, spiritual advisor and it was he who had chosen the spot for excavation, once the ground was laid bare. A team of pick and shovel men (Syrians and Greeks for the most part) led by the foreman, an unctuous Syrian named Safar, had soon found an old, Jewish-style rock-cut tomb. Safar helped Macarius descend a ladder into the excavation pit and when the old bishop returned to Helena s side he tearfully proclaimed it to be the Savior s very tomb. Weeks later, at a nearby location, the diggers unearthed three sets of decayed and petrified timbers. Lifted from the pit and laid out for Helena s inspection, she and Macarius joyfully declared them to be the crosses of Christ and the two thieves. But which one was Christ s?
Macarius proposed a solution to the vexing problem.
Pieces of each cross were taken to the bedside of a cachectic woman dying from tumors in her belly. Firstly, one piece of wood was placed in her hand. Nothing happened. Likewise a second piece had no effect. But the third piece was miraculous. Clutching the splinter, her color went from yellow to pink and the swelling of her belly receded. She sat up, the first time she had been able to do so in ages and smiled.
They had found the True Cross.
Now Helena had one final quest before she could bundle up her relics and journey back to Rome. She sent the diggers back into the pit to find the nails of the crucifixion.
Will there be three or four? she asked Macarius.
The bishop sat beside her in the tent. I cannot say, my lady. Some executioners preferred a separate spike for each ankle. Others speared both ankles with a single one.
I do wish they would hurry, she said. I am an old woman.
The bishop dutifully laughed. He had heard her say the same countless times.
Down in the pit and hidden from view, Safar watched his men scrape away at the earth beneath the spot where they had found the True Cross. His keen eye spotted something. He pushed the nearest man aside and continued the task with his handpick. Digging on his knees he exposed a large spike, black with oxidation. It was as long as a man s hand, quadrangular, with an intact, flat head. He was about to pull it out when his eye settled on a black dot a short distance away and soon he had exposed a second nail, this one shorter, with a broken tip. Then a man several feet away called out to him in Syrian. He had unearthed another nail and while Safar was cleaning along the shaft he noticed yet another trace of black. Soon four nails were exposed. The last one was missing half its head, apparently sheared off in its insertion or removal from the cross.
The lady will be pleased, no? the worker said to Safar.
I am sure she will be most pleased, Safar said, looking up at the pale sky. Her work is done. She will leave us now.
Will she give us coins? the worker asked.
She will give me a bag of coins and if you keep your mouth shut then I will give you a nice share.
Keep my mouth shut about what?
She will receive three nails only.
What of the fourth?
That one is mine, he said, pointing to the last found, the one with the broken head. I have long endured laboring under the yolk of a woman.
She is an empress.
She is still a woman. This is my reward for the indignity. Besides, it is broken and she will accuse us of causing the damage. I will sell the relic. If you talk, you will die poor.
Safar used his pick to loosen the dirt around the fourth nail, until he could pry it out. He greedily closed his fingers around it to feel its heft but he loosened his grip at once. There was a tingling sensation in his wrist, a slightly unpleasant warmth, and he quickly shoved the nail into the front pocket of his robe.
The other worker climbed from the pit and ran over to Helena s tent.
Safar has found the nails, your majesty! he declared.
Helena s wrinkled face lit up at the news. How many? she asked, as Safar approached. Three or four?
Safar gave her a gap-toothed grin. Three, your majesty. Only three.
TWO
Asunci n, Paraguay, 1955
H e was a sensitive eleven-year old, prone to flinching when his father was beastly which only made the towering figure angrier.
Be a man, goddamn it! Don t whimper!
His father was like a volcano. When the pressure inside him redlined, he would erupt. Otto Schneider s isolation was so complete that there was no one on the receiving end other than his wife and son. But for every ten times his father threatened young Lambret for some real or imagined transgression, he smacked him only once. This restraint quotient of ten to one was so uncannily accurate, young Lambret would know when it was time for a bruise and steel himself. His mother couldn t bear corporal punishment, so when it was imminent she would flee the room in tears and come back when it was over to offer kisses and a piece of tea cake. And when she