Dead Sea Conspiracy

by Jerry B. Jenkins

Genres: Historical Christian; Christian Suspense

Synopsis

In this thrilling adventure, archaeologist Nicole Berman is about to discover the key to unifying three major religions—if a dangerous enemy doesn't stop her first.

Archaeologist Nicole Berman is the first woman to be awarded a permit to lead a dig in Saudi Arabia. Nicole believes what she hopes to discover has the power to to rewrite world history. She assembles a team that will ultimately surprise - and in some cases - betray her. 

In a parallel storyline, readers are launched back to ancient Ur where young Abram is sent to learn from his forebears, who tell him firsthand stories of being on the ark during the Great Flood. 

Publisher: Worthy

Print pages: 320

Sample

Mada’in Saleh, Saudi Arabia

May 23, 2019

Conflicted.

How else could Nicole Berman describe herself on one of the most pivotal mornings of her life? As the first woman, and certainly the first under the age of forty, to be awarded a permit to serve as lead archaeologist on a dig here, she should have been euphoric. And, in many ways, she was.

But Nicole had hardly slept the night before. During her fourth day of this visit to the Middle East, she welcomed more than forty members of her team to the King Faisal Hotel in Al-’Ula, twelve miles south of the dig site. There she oriented them regarding the next few weeks, including the fact that at the dig site, women could wear shorts and informal head coverings, like caps—but that in the hotel and everywhere else, they should honor the customary modesty of the country.

Many from this team she had worked with before, but more than half were new, including nearly all the volunteers. Most hailed from the States, but about a quarter of the team came from other countries. She was proud of the diversity, not just ethnically, but also in seasons of life. Volunteers ranged from late teens to senior citizens, including one robust couple in their eighties.

She urged team members to call her Nic and reminded them she would not see them at the next morning’s buffet breakfast, but would wait for them at the site. That prompted one of her favorite volunteers to rise—Indian-born detective Pranav Chakrabarti, a forensic technician with the New York Police Department’s Crime Scene Unit.

“A thousand pardons!” he began with the charming lilt that still favored his native language, despite twenty years in the States. He introduced himself as Nicole’s bodyguard and informed the team, “I’ve been cleared by the Saudi government to carry a weapon—a nine-millimeter Glock, if you must know. This young woman has two doctorates. Two! That’s two more than most of us. So if in my presence you refer to her as anything less than Doctor Nic, I’m liable to whup you upside your head.”

That perfect icebreaker seemed to endear Detective Chakrabarti to all. Nicole felt in good hands with him, but he was also part of the reason for her foreboding. She’d met him months before when he helped investigate the attempted murder of her own mother in Manhattan. Ginny Berman had been a patient at Mount Sinai Hospital for weeks while the NYPD’s Senior Services and Domestic Violence Unit painstakingly uncovered the attack related to Nicole’s bid for this Saudi dig.

Despite that someone clearly did not want her here, with the support of both her mother and father, Nicole would not be dissuaded. Her mission was that important.

Her mother slowly, finally, began to rally, and it appeared she might be discharged. But one morning Nicole and her father were summoned from the Berman Foundation offices to the hospital by Kayla Mays, the petite midtwenties Black administrator who had proved most kind to the whole family.

“Kayla tell you any more than she told me?” Nicole asked her father in the back seat of a staff car.

He shook his head. “Has to be good news though, right? Your mom’s been adamant about getting out of there.”

“Hope so,” Nicole said, but she wasn’t as optimistic. News of her mother’s release shouldn’t require their presence until it was time for her to leave.

When they arrived a few minutes later, Nicole found beautiful Kayla’s cheeks wet, and she seemed unable to look Nicole in the eye. Her mother’s doctor pointed her and her father to chairs in a small conference room. Kindly yet directly, he said, “There’s no easy way to break this to you, but your wife and mother took a sudden turn for the worse this morning and passed less than an hour ago.”

Impossible, Nicole thought. “She was perfectly fine last night! What happened?”

Benzion stood quickly. “I want to see her.”

“Let’s let them make her presentable, and—”

“Right now,” Ben said.

Nicole had shared her father’s urgency but now remained haunted by the pained expression she found on the face she had come to cherish over the years—as if her mother had fought for a last breath. There had been no signs of trauma or danger for days. Nicole couldn’t make it compute, and her father seemed on the verge of a breakdown. “How does something like this happen?” he asked the doctor, his voice constricted. “No warnings from all these machines?”

The surgeon flipped a page on her chart and turned it toward Nicole. “Alarms were triggered,” he said. “And a nurse reached her within thirty seconds. She called a Code Blue, and the crash cart and team arrived inside another thirty seconds. They tried everything…”

The bottom of the chart read “2 of 3 pages,” but when Nicole reached to peek at the final page, the doctor said, “Miss Mays herself can corroborate these notes” and she let it go.

Nicole found herself grateful that Kayla had been with her mother. “Was she conscious?”

Kayla nodded, clearly struggling to speak. “Well, not at first. I checked on her, like I did so often—”

“And we appreciate that,” Nicole said, fighting to control her own emotions. “She was so fond of you.”

“And you know how I felt about her. She appeared to be asleep. Then she opened her eyes and seemed to struggle.”

“Struggle how?” Nicole’s father said.

“Her eyes grew wide and she seemed to plead with me without speaking. I asked if she was all right, and that’s when the machines started beeping. I wanted to help, to do something, but as I reached for her, a nurse burst in and elbowed me out of the way—which was a relief. I’m sorry, so sorry.”

Nicole tried to take comfort in the fact that her mother did not die alone, that a friendly face was nearby, but she anticipated sleepless nights as memories flooded her. It encouraged her to know her mother had heard the good news about Nicole’s approval to lead the Saudi Arabia dig, after having insisted on updates about it every day. But that too just reminded her heavily how she depended on her mother’s interest in her life and how she cherished their daily interactions.

Nicole had been unable to mourn her mother the way she needed to, as the bulk of the funeral planning fell to her. More than once she caught herself with an urge to call or text her mother, and she often called Kayla just to talk about her. Nicole hated learning firsthand what was meant by the phrase dark night of the soul. She suffered through too many to count.

Her father was also a wreck, and he immediately announced he would not join Nicole for the dig—at least not at first.

“You sure, Dad? Don’t you need something to distract you—”

“I don’t want to be distracted, Nic! I have to know how this happened. I’ll be no good to you or anyone else until then. Don’t you need to know, too?”

“Well, sure, and I’m devastated. But we both know it’s going to turn out to be some freak aneurism or something that couldn’t have been avoided. And knowing anything more is not going to bring her back.”

“So humor me,” he said. “I can’t let this go.”

Nicole knew her father well enough to accept that, though she wanted him along for her first lead job. Well, he’d get there as soon as he could. And it wasn’t as if she was among strangers. Detective Chakrabarti had begged to volunteer and endured a lengthy vetting process by the Saudis before being allowed to come and also to carry a weapon.

And Kayla had expressed interest in Nicole’s profession the day they’d met, telling her she “almost majored in archaeology myself.” She stepped up—at her own expense—when two volunteers dropped out at the last minute. Nicole believed she would make a perfect personal assistant. She’d keep her close, counting on her organizational skills and detail orientation to allow Nicole to concentrate on the work itself.

So before dawn on the first day of the dig, Nicole met both Kayla and Detective Chakrabarti in the lobby of the King Faisal Hotel. With Pranav driving and Kayla in the back seat of a rented Land Rover, Nicole played navigator and directed him first to a McDonald’s drive-through and then on to the site.

“That may be the last less-than-healthy meal we’ll have over here,” Nicole said.

“Hope not,” Kayla said.

Nicole had flown over early, as was her custom, and spent the previous three days at the site, thrilled afresh at the stunning rose-red beauty of the place. Gleaming edifices hewn out of the rock transformed from deep ruby in the bright sunlight to breathtaking pink hues as the skies changed throughout the day. It reminded her of the magnificent palettes of ancient Petra in Jordan with its jaw-dropping array of colors. Here, however, the massive works of architectural art had been carved from separate monoliths, rather than from great and largely connected cliff faces. She arranged with a couple of trustworthy locals her father had recommended to keep an eye on the dig site after-hours when the usual security staff was off duty.

Nicole had also supervised local workers she paid to remove enough debris and large rocks that would have impeded ground transportation and the camp setup. She had ordered two storage sheds full of tools and equipment and a trailer to serve as the temporary office, connected to power for computers, a refrigerator, water, drainage, and air-conditioning.

Now, at the perimeter of the site, Chakrabarti stopped at a checkpoint manned by a uniformed guard wearing a UN helmet. Nicole leaned forward and greeted him.

“Morning, Doctor,” the guard said. “And who do you have along today?”

While he examined their credentials and the ID badges encased in plastic dangling from lanyards around their necks, she informed him that the rest of the team would arrive by bus by five thirty a.m. The guard noted that the detective had been cleared to carry a weapon and asked to see it. He hefted it carefully, keeping the muzzle facing away. “This is what NYPD carries, eh? Took a little training there myself a few years ago.”

The guard seemed to study Kayla longer than Pranav, which didn’t surprise Nicole. Kayla was striking enough to give both men and women pause, though Nicole expected more decorum from the guard. She cleared her throat and he seemed to cover. “You know, Ms. Mays, that you can burn just as severely here as your teammates. You from Africa?”

“Manhattan,” Kayla said flatly. “It’s right there in my papers.”

“So it is,” he said.

“And yes, I’m old enough to be aware of the sun.”

The guard waved them through.

“Didn’t expect to see the UN here,” Chakrabarti said.

“Oh, yes,” Nicole said. “UNESCO has hundreds of locations like this all over the world. They call ’em heritage sites.”

“All digs?” Kayla said.

“Not all. Anything the UN considers significant, culturally or scientifically.”

“Nice to know I’m not the only one looking after the place,” Chakrabarti said. He and Kayla seemed unable to take their eyes off the ancient porticos looming in the predawn.

“Mind the path, Detective,” Nicole said. “You’ll have plenty of time to take this all in. It’s well known for its 131 rock-cut monumental tombs.”

He slowly passed a parked flatbed truck laden with a crane and pulled up to the site. Nicole asked for a few minutes alone. With Pranav and Kayla waiting in the vehicle, she strode through the area, scoping out where she would have the volunteers mark off and begin digging the four 20-foot-by-20-foot squares and erect sunscreens over them. Already sticky as dawn broke over the horizon, she could tell the day was going to be a broiler—frankly the way she liked it. Yet while she didn’t want anything to dampen the thrill of this achievement, something kept her from exulting.

How Nicole wished her mother were alive to rejoice with her, maybe even join her. Imagine both her mom and dad involved in such a monumental life moment.

On the other hand, with neither of them here she wouldn’t have to defend against charges of nepotism. No question she felt uniquely privileged to have been born into the family of the Berman Foundation. But she had also paid her dues since she was a teen, volunteering for digs and learning everything there was to know to qualify for this assignment. And she had also earned those doctorates.

Nicole would ask the detective to shoot a picture of her here once the sun fully rose. Maybe he’d enjoy shooting something other than a crime scene.

Still that feeling was there…

Conflicted.

Ur of the Chaldees

Four millennia prior

King Nimrod’s right-hand man, Terah, should not have been surprised at his wife’s resolve. Belessunu had said she was going to do this, and now she had actually taken their boy and sojourned, on her own, toward his ancestors. Terah had been seventy when the lad was born, and ten years later he suddenly felt every day of his age.

The loneliness was not new to Terah. Belessunu and young Abram had lived in a cave for the first decade of his life, but at least Terah stole away to visit them every day or two, as they relied on him for food and oil and other necessities. Like the king, Terah sought the comfort of concubines, but they did not live with him. They rarely even stayed the night with him, and he was left feeling hardly comforted at all.

Now he not only spent his nights alone as before, but he was also left without loved ones for succor. Loved ones. At least he loved them. He had given them myriad reasons to not love—or trust—him.

But now he missed them both—terribly. And he dared not send anyone to check on their well-being on the road, for there was a reason they had been hiding for so long. No one could know that little Abram was alive and well.

King Nimrod himself had plotted to kill their firstborn son, convinced by his stargazers that the baby was a threat to the throne. In heated discussions with his pregnant wife, Terah had actually referred to the prospect of a male offspring as a curse.

That was something a man could only try to take back but which his wife would also never forget—like so much else Terah had said and done in the wake of Abram’s birth. Such as substituting a trusted servant’s firstborn for his own and presenting him to the king to dispose of as he wished. Terah might as well have murdered the infant with his own hands. Even Terah’s closest confidant had taken his own life over having allowed Terah to commit such evil and participating in the tragic deceit.

But Terah and Belessunu had fundamentally been at loggerheads with each other long before they had been blessed, or cursed, with a child in their dotage. She put up with the concubines he occasionally visited—whom he justified by saying he was relieving her of the entire burden of his cravings. Belessunu had confronted Terah on how he’d drifted from the worship of God to believing in every pagan deity known to man—including his own king. Nimrod referred to himself as Amraphel and considered himself divine, along with all the gods of nature.

Terah had been so immersed in his worship of many gods that he had taken to crafting graven images of dozens of them, including his favorite, Utu the sun god. Travelers from near and far knew of Terah’s skill and enterprise and frequently stopped to buy graven images from him.

Belessunu, who had married him when he too believed in the one true God of the Hebrews, Yahweh, made clear she had no patience for his devotion to a pantheon of deities. And as the time had drawn near for the birth of their first child, she had even claimed to speak to Terah under the authority and with the very words of the Spirit of the living God.

She spoke with such conviction that at times Terah believed she was indeed speaking for the Lord Himself, maker of heaven and earth. And yet Terah remained committed to gods represented by the very images he crafted with his own hands. Belessunu told him she had become convinced he was irredeemable, especially after the sacrifice of an innocent servant’s even more innocent child and then telling the grieving parents he had failed in a heroic attempt to protect the baby from wild animals…

Terah couldn’t help but love his own son and always looked forward to visiting Abram in the cave. But every encounter with Belessunu devastated him. He could not seem to reach her, to soften her view of him, to return to any measure of the love they once knew. And she made plain to him that she would raise Abram in the tradition of his—and Terah’s—forefathers: worshiping the one true God.

Belessunu needed Terah only for sustenance. No one else could be trusted to know her or the boy’s whereabouts, so no servant could deliver them food or oil for their lamps. That gave Terah reasons to visit, satisfying his need to interact with his son. But Belessunu had become more than a stranger. How dare she? She seemed an enemy, eager to taunt him by having Abram recite what she taught him every day.

The boy would talk of midnight forays from the cave, when there was little danger anyone would see them. “I look to the heavens,” the lad would say, “and Mother tells me of God, who created it all.”

“No mention of the gods of the sun and the moon and the stars?” Terah would venture.

The boy would laugh. “Mother said you would say that! Those so-called gods were conjured by mere men who don’t believe in Yahweh. But where were they when our ancestors were protected from the great flood by God Himself?”

Terah scoffed. He knew the story, of course, as the accounts of everyone’s forebearers—Noah’s sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth—had been passed down through the generations. But what made the tales of Yahweh true and the narratives of his gods not true? Yet Terah dared not counter Abram’s training for fear of kindling the wrath of his wife.

And the last thing he wanted was for her to break into recitations of the ancient holy books in that voice she claimed came from God Himself. Besides, King Nimrod’s belief that Terah had proven his devotion to the throne by sacrificing his own son had solidified Terah as his most trusted aide. He had put Terah in charge of building the tower to heaven that would become Nimrod’s eternal shrine.

Why Belessunu could not be proud of him for that assignment, Terah could not understand. She clearly did not believe Nimrod was divine in any fashion. And she told Terah that the fact that he was a murderer made her finally accede to young Abram’s pleadings and, when he had turned ten, she prevailed upon Terah to buy her a camel and set out to introduce the boy to Noah’s son Shem himself. “He will tell Abram everything about the ark, the flood, and the promises of God.”

Terah had tried everything in his power to dissuade her, trying to scare her with the dangers of being seen, found out, attacked, raped, killed. “It will take you months to get that far north along the Euphrates!” he wailed. “What will you do for food, provisions, protection?”

“God will provide. He always has. He has fed us lo these many years through you. Imagine! He should have stricken you dead for your sins.”

“How can you take my only son from me?”

“You exiled both of us with your evil scheme.”

“But God promised he would be—”

“Oh, now you believe in the one true God?”

“I’ll believe anything you want if you will not expose Abram to such an impossible journey.”

“Terah! You cannot be shamed into returning to God. You must come to him with a contrite heart. But even then He may not forgive you. Who knows how long it takes for His patience to run out?”

“I will never see you or the boy again!”

“You will see us in the afterlife,” she said, “but only if you truly repent and turn back to the God of your youth.”

Mada’in Saleh, Saudi Arabia

Nicole paced the dig site in the faint light until the bus labored up to the checkpoint behind her. She faced the rising sun and bowed her head, whispering, “Hear O Israel! The Lord our God, the Lord is One. Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom for all eternity. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be on your heart. And you shall teach them to your children, and speak of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise up.”

She peeked back past the Land Rover to where the guard boarded the bus. His checking everyone’s documents would give her time for a picture. She signaled Kayla and Detective Chakrabarti to join her. “I want a shot of just me in front of where the dig squares will be,” she told Pranav, “with the cliff in the background. Then can you set up to shoot us all, you two included?”

“Of course,” he said, unpacking his case. “But if you can wait three or four minutes, the sky will be brilliant, and look at those clouds. They’ll be pristine.”

He proved right, and as the sun fully emerged, the cliff and the clouds seemed to burst in 3-D relief from the cerulean sky. Pranav set his camera on a tripod and positioned Nicole, peering through the range finder and adjusting his settings. He shot a couple of times as she smiled sweetly, then told her, “Show me what you’re really feeling right now.”

She felt grateful, which her smile had displayed. She also felt excited, fulfilled, confident, and if she could ignore everything else in her life, perhaps she could playfully mug for the lens. Nicole pushed her floppy, wide-billed hat back on her head and spread her feet. Arms akimbo, she pasted on a closemouthed grin as if she alone were in charge. Which she was.

“Perfect!” Pranav and Kayla said in unison, and Nicole burst into laughter, unable to hold the pose for even one more picture. She jogged to Pranav to see the shot on the back of his camera and almost didn’t recognize herself. She knew it was due to the skill of the photographer, the quality of his equipment, and his genius in waiting for just the right light—a morning version of most afternoons’ golden hour. But still the result stunned her. Overcome, she managed, “You must send that to me.”

How her mother would have loved this picture! And how it would thrill her father. Just enough mirth showed in her eyes to prove the pose was a tease, but the shot was no less fabulous. Here was a woman at the top of her game, owning her new role and in fact owning the entire site in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

By the time the bus rumbled into position behind the trailer and the rest of the team disembarked, Nicole had pulled a couple of index cards from her pocket.. . .