The Resurrection File (33 page)

Now, when Will revisited the art gallery, it was still there, but the proprietor was out for the day. The college-age girl at the desk did not remember the work of Audra Chambers or the art show Will asked about. That was before her time, she said.

After going past the Plaza he decided to catch a cab down toward Greenwich Village. He had dinner at a café the two of them had often frequented. Yet, as he paid the waiter and walked out after his solitary meal at their favorite table, he was surprised how none of these places now held any emotional connection for him anymore. They had merely become recognizable places. Now he was simply a tourist, following memories as an out-of-towner might flip through a guidebook.

On a lark he headed down to the harbor area and nosed around the shops. He had an idea in the back of his mind that he wanted to pick up a gift. He would send it to Fiona Cameron as a way of thanking her for the dinner at Luigi's.

Will picked out a crystal replica of the Statue of Liberty. He asked the shop owner to ship it to the office of Fiona's business manager, which was the only address he had for her. Then he wrote a little note for them to include in the package. It read,

Fiona—

I don't know why this small gift made me think of you and our dinner together. But please accept it as my thanks for the meal, for the conversation, and for being the delightful person you are.

Will

Will left the gift shop. As he was walking down the sidewalk, one of the two men following him quickly ducked into the same shop. Then Will decided he would make his way back to the train station, and he hailed another cab. As he did, the second man waved down a cab that was going in the same direction as Will's.

Once he was on the train, Will settled down for some more homework on the Reichstad lawsuit. He wanted to read some of the fundamentals of New Testament Greek. But as he tried to buckle down to his reading, a rush of thoughts bombarded him—static jamming his concentration. Thoughts of both Audra and Fiona kept interrupting his focus. This trip to New York had not been what he had expected. He wondered how Fiona would respond to his gift.

But a voice jolted him back to the case—the voice of the public defender asking, “What have you gotten yourself into?” Someone had an obvious concern about Will's activities. But why?

At the Newark train stop, Will got up and stretched. He was feeling tired, so he made his way down to the dining car to grab a cup of coffee—only to find it was closed. He returned to his seat and decided it was time to buckle down and learn something about Greek.

Will saw that MacCameron had started him off in the right direction. The New Testament was written in “Koine” Greek, the common, everyday form of the Greek language at the time of Christ. Koine Greek was the closest thing to the universal language of the known world then.

Will quickly discovered that the Greek alphabet resembled the English alphabet with some exceptions. He glanced at the spelling of the names of the four Gospels in his interlinear Greek-English New Testament that he had bought. The Gospel of “MARK,” for instance, appeared as:

MAPKON

As he read further, he noted that words were arranged in sentence structure much like English, except that in Greek, word order was not critical—words could be moved around in a sentence without necessarily changing the meaning of the sentence, unlike in English.

Will began to realize how hard it was going to be to understand even the rudiments of New Testament Greek by the time of trial.

After an hour and a half of reading, Will's eyes started getting heavy. He didn't remember falling asleep, or his head sliding to the side against the train window. He would not wake up until the train shuddered to a halt at the little station in Monroeville.

37

I
T WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN WILL
walked off the train. He trudged half-a-block down to the all-night cabstand. Still exhausted, he climbed into the back of a cab and gave the driver directions. Then he leaned his head back for a moment to collect his thoughts. In just a few minutes he was asleep again, his briefcase and coat still on his lap.

In a deep sleep, and dreaming, Will heard a voice. It was yelling. There was danger, but Will could not make out where the voice was coming from. It was saying,
Hey Mister. Hey Mister. Wake up.

“Hey mister, wake up! Is that your house? It's burning! Man, that house is on fire!”

The cabbie was yelling to him in a panic and pointing out the front windshield of the car. “Your house is on fire! It's burning down!”

Will stumbled out of the cab with his things, still groggy, and looked up the driveway of Generals' Hill. The whole sky was red and orange and filled with black smoke. He saw his Corvette, still there where he had parked it. Then he saw his house.

There were flames shooting from every window in the huge Civil War mansion. Will started sprinting up the driveway. He could see that the roof was also on fire. He heard himself scream, “No, no, no, no!”

In the background he heard the cabbie shout that he would call 9-1-1. Then he yelled, “Is there anybody in there?”

Clarence! Clarence was still in the house. Will ran to the front door. It was black with soot, and smoke was billowing out from around the corners, from under the bottom.

He snatched up his raincoat from the ground where he'd let it fall, wrapped it around his hand, and grabbed the large iron doorknob. When he opened the door, a blast of smoke and fire blew through the opening, hitting Will and throwing him straight back as if he had been hit by a bomb.

As he was scrambling to his feet, the flames retreated back into the house, and he could see something lying on the floor just inside the door. It was Clarence.

Shielding his head with the raincoat he raced up to the entrance and reached around ahead of him into the black smoke and furnacelike heat. Then his hand felt the fur and body of his golden retriever. He moved his hand up to the collar and began dragging the dog out of the smoke and the fire.

He pulled Clarence down onto the front lawn. Will looked down—Clarence's eyes were open, but staring straight ahead. His large pink tongue was caught, hanging out slightly, between his clenched front teeth. He was not moving. Will stroked his head and felt something wet. In the flickering light of the fire he could see that it was blood.

Looking closer he saw the blood was centered around a black bullet hole in Clarence's skull. Will patted the head of his dead dog, and smoothed his ears down. After a minute, he rose to his feet.

Will stood before the house, which was now starting to collapse into the inferno. The walls, the wood shutters, the draperies and furniture, the floors and all else that had been there was being consumed. The great house, with its towering white pillars, and broad front porch, fan-shaped windows, and the charm of a century long past, was forever gone, incinerated in the raging ball of fire rising higher and higher into the night sky.

Out of nowhere Will began to feel it all fall away. The furniture he and Audra had picked out. Her artwork, which still decorated several of the walls. The photo album of their life together. The books. The clothes. The small things of a lifetime, each collected at a place, and carefully preserved for a reason. The photographs he had of his father when he had served in the Navy during World War II. His boyhood things: the old baseball glove, the trophies, the high school and college yearbooks. Love letters from Audra. It was all gone. And Clarence…

As Will stood in front of the wall of flames that roared upward he could hear the sirens of the fire engines in the distance, coming down the country road toward Generals' Hill.

Tears welled up in his eyes. He shook his head, engulfed with rage and sorrow.

Will's head hung down as if some invisible sinew had just snapped. Like a bull whose snorting and charging was now over. Worn and bloodied and receiving the final thrust of the sword from the matador. From the blade that pierces the tough hide and plunges down into the back of the neck, where it brings the bull, slumping and stumbling, down to his knees, and down to bloody defeat. Down into the dirt of the roaring arena.

38

U
P IN HIS GLASS-AND-MAHOGANY OFFICE SUITE
, J-Fox Sherman had assigned his multiple associates in the Reichstad case to two different tracks. His strategy would be like a combination of land invasion and air strike, exquisitely coordinated.

On one team, several of the lawyers in the firm, under his supervision had researched, drafted, and now completed a lengthy Motion for Summary Judgment. Such a motion can be brought when the facts are not in substantial dispute—and the law can be applied to the facts by the judge, thus bringing the case to an end without ever going to trial.

Sherman was asking the court to review the facts that had already been established—relying primarily on Angus MacCameron's own sworn deposition testimony. He would argue that the facts dealing with two issues were certain, clear, and undisputed. The first issue Sherman wanted the judge to decide was whether MacCameron had been reckless at the time of the printing of his article against Reichstad. Sherman felt that through MacCameron's own deposition testimony, recklessness had been established.

Sherman would also ask the judge to decide the second issue, the defense of
truth
—whether there was a substantial amount of truth in what MacCameron had said about Reichstad. Sherman would contend that there was no hard evidence that MacCameron could produce to support what he had written.

The Motion for Summary Judgment was the “air strike.” If Sherman won both of these arguments, the case was over—except for his right to have a jury calculate the enormous damages that he also hoped to prove. In addition, he would argue his motion for attorney's fees against Will Chambers: that the defenses Will had presented at the beginning of the case were so lacking in evidence that he should be punished by having to pay the
quarter-of-a-million dollars in attorney's fees to Sherman's firm. That would be the coup de grace—the final, decimating blow—Sherman's response to Will Chambers' obstinate and aggressive defense.

The second team of Sherman's lawyers were working on the “land invasion.” They were preparing for a full-blown jury trial in the event that Judge Jeremiah Kaye did not rule in their favor on all of the issues. The attorneys had lined up several scholars in archaeology, papyrology, and cultural anthropology who would testify as expert witnesses in support of Reichstad's interpretation of 7QA. They had done a thorough review of MacCameron's background and were preparing a crippling cross-examination for him at trial.

As the commanding general, Sherman was ready for war. The Summary Judgment motion was five hundred pages long. Will Chambers would only have fourteen days to respond. Judge Kaye would hear arguments in open court the next week after that, and probably give his ruling from the bench.

A copy of the motion had been sent by Sherman to his client. At his research center, Reichstad scanned the thick packet of papers, but his mind was elsewhere.

Dr. Reichstad had only five days left before he had to produce the original 7QA fragment to MacCameron and Chambers' expert witness. Until now, Reichstad had been successful in jealously protecting the fragment from the outside world.

Reichstad had insisted that Sherman find a way to block the production of the fragment. The lawyer had told his client it was impossible—all he could do would be to delay it by filing motion after motion with Judge Kaye, asking him to issue orders that placed multiple layers of restrictions on MacCameron and Chambers—preventing them from doing any testing that affected the paper or the writing, or that had any effect on the humidity and barometric pressure inside the glass case which housed the 7QA fragment.

In addition, for reasons unknown even to J-Fox Sherman, Reichstad refused to have the opposing experts do their evaluation of 7QA on the grounds of his own research center. He insisted that it be transported by armored car to some neutral site in the D.C. area. He also demanded that his own staff be present during the defense's evaluation of the fragment.

Reichstad rose and examined himself in the full-length mirror in his office. He was preparing to drive to the studio to begin filming a TV documentary on his discovery of 7QA and its revolutionary effect on Christianity. The film would be titled,
The Dead Jesus.
Because the project would not air until
after
the trial date in his lawsuit, he had not bothered to tell his
lawyer about it. After all, Sherman seemed forever preoccupied with holding Dr. Reichstad back in his meteoric climb to greatness.

Reichstad was certain that he could retrieve information from MacCameron that would destroy, and bury, two thousand years of religious history concerning Jesus. Only then could he move onward to the final project—one so daring and so dangerous that Reichstad could scarcely believe it was now within his reach. A project that would change not just two thousand years of Christianity, but more than five thousand years of Judaism—and which had the potential to shift the balance of world power to the Middle East.

Yes, Reichstad thought to himself, he was right not to tell his lawyer about the documentary film. No lawyer was going to rob him of his place in world history.