The Third Day Page 13

  “And after that?”

  “In places like Pompeii, they’d have food and wine, and probably some musicians or other entertainment. There, the baths were a social occasion, and Roman writers often complained about people who stayed too long and became drunk and obnoxious.”

  “But this is an army base,” said Bryson.

  “Right,” said Lavon. “I’d expect it to be rather functional, without the decorative touches we’ve found in the resort towns. Once you’re out of the cold water, come back to the changing room and retrieve your clothes, and you’ll be done.”

  “What about me?” Sharon asked.

  He quizzed the servant again. Once again, the man flashed a sycophantic smile before beckoning her to sit. The rest of us would go first; she could follow once we had finished.

  That made sense, though something at the back of my mind didn’t feel right. Although he was a servant and thus accustomed to deferring to others, his demeanor seemed just a bit too obsequious – like a sleazy stockbroker trying to convince his intended victims of his honest nature.

  “I’ll stay with her,” I decided.

  “But you must – ”

  I rose. “Tell him I’ll stay here. Someone needs to watch over our stuff, anyway. I will bathe later.”

  The servant shrugged and then led the other three toward the warm water.

  Chapter 27

  An hour later, a beaming Lavon strode back into the changing room.

  “Incredible,” he said. “The chow is good, too: baskets of fresh bread, fruit, and dates are set up on the sides of both pools. Eat all you want.”

  “I’m hungry,” Sharon chirped. “Let’s go.”

  I was, too, but something wasn’t right. I peered behind Lavon into the corridor leading to the apodyterium.

  “Where are the others?”

  Lavon hesitated.

  “They have a change of clothes waiting for us after we get out of the cold water pool,” he finally said. “The servants will wash the ones we left here and bring them up to our room later this afternoon after they’ve dried.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Lavon shook his head. “I can’t stop them, Bill. You know that. They’re likely to need someone to translate.”

  I was afraid of something like this.

  “Where are they now?”

  Lavon reached up to a shelf and grabbed his bag, along with the two others’.

  “They’re waiting for me by the fort’s eastern gate. The road from there continues on to the northeast, to the Mount of Olives. We’ll circle around there, come back in through the City of David and work our way up to the Temple. You have to enter the Temple complex from the south, anyway. Going this way should help us avoid the worst of the crowds.”

  “I thought only Jews could enter the Temple.”

  “Foreigners were allowed in the outer courtyard, just not the Temple building itself.”

  “You’ve seen how Ray has been acting,” I replied. “He’ll try to get in somehow. Bryson will too, with that camera. God help them if they’re caught.”

  “Ray is Jewish,” said Lavon.

  “I know that, but he doesn’t look like any of the locals I’ve seen around here.”

  “That won’t matter. The Babylonians destroyed Solomon’s Temple roughly six hundred years before Christ and deported Judah’s upper classes to Babylon and beyond. By Roman times, Jews had scattered all over the world. The Passover was the big festival; they could be coming from anywhere.”

  I cast him a dubious glance.

  “I’m serious. Some of the exiles even wandered as far as China. Over time, they began to assimilate with the local populations. After several centuries, their physical appearances would have begun to vary.”

  “If they don’t buy it, you’re screwed.”

  “No, it’s plausible,” Lavon insisted. “And don’t forget, the Assyrians wiped out the northern Kingdom of Israel even earlier – about 150 years before the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. They followed the same policy: transport the people of a conquered region somewhere else, so they’d have no homeland of their own to defend, no reason to rebel. By the first century, those people could have gone anywhere. If worst comes to worst, I’ll tell them he’s from one of the Lost Tribes, coming home.”

  I sighed, but made no further move stop him. Lavon was the expert, after all.

  “Just don’t get yourself killed, OK. We still need someone who can actually talk to these people.”

  “Don’t worry, Bill,” he replied. “Besides, it will be helpful to scout the ground outside this fort, wouldn’t you say?”

  ***

  I couldn’t not worry, but there was no use arguing. For a brief instant, I followed Lavon up the steps into the courtyard, where I saw Markowitz and Bryson pacing back and forth on the other side of the open gate.

  On the ramparts above, a Roman sentry watched them curiously but made no move to impede their progress. Apparently, we could come and go as we pleased.

  As Lavon joined the others, I just waved and then walked back down to the baths.

  “This is a bad idea,” I said to Sharon.

  “Did they take the camera?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” she smiled. “That’s one less thing we have to worry about here. No one can steal it while we’re bathing.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “What are we going to do while they’re gone, after our baths?” she asked.

  I stared down at the floor and shook my head. “Perhaps we can go upstairs and watch the riot that starts when those three try to get into the Temple. That should be entertaining.”

  “I’m serious.”

  So was I.

  I decided not to complain, though. There was nothing I could do.

  “I’d be interested in learning how the soldiers train,” I finally replied. “Unfortunately, I can’t talk to them, and even if I could, they’d have questions for me, too. What could I tell them that they could possibly believe?”

  “What did you do in the Army before you retired?”

  “My last assignment was to improve the coordination between our covert field operatives and their linkages to satellite reconnaissance and drone aircraft.”

  Sharon laughed. “Yeah, I see how that might be hard to explain. What did you do when you first enlisted?”

  “Chased Viet Cong through the jungle and tried not to be the last man killed.”

  The truth was the other way around – except for the trying not to get killed part – but I saw no reason to complicate matters.

  She eyed me strangely. “How old were you?”

  “Seventeen. I had stolen a car. The draft had ended but the Army still needed recruits. The judge told me I could either enlist or go to jail. It wasn’t really a hard choice.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “As it turned out, I was pretty good at it – soldiering, that is. After I came back stateside, they gave me an intelligence test, and the next year, I was off to OCS. After that, one thing led to another.”

  “And here you are.”

  I glanced around the room. Though the evidence was overwhelming, my mind still struggled to accept the fact that I was indeed sitting in the bath facility of a first century Roman fort.

  “Yeah, here I am.”

  The fawning servant interrupted and beckoned once more for us to follow. Sharon decided it would be best if she went ahead, though before she did, I waved the man away, reached into my bag and pulled out an object resembling a common ear bud, which hung from a Kevlar thread, like a pendant.

  I draped it around her neck. “Before you go, take this.”

  She looked confused – as if unsure whether I was giving her something she would need in the next few minutes or trying to convince her to let me join her for some rub-a-dub-tub.

  “It’s a transmitter,” I explained. “Actually, it’s more than that. If you put the bud in your ear, it will also make translations.”


  “You’re kidding!”

  I was not. The latest wars found American soldiers toiling in ever more remote parts of the world, and needing to communicate with people who spoke languages few Americans knew. DARPA scientists had labored over the technology for years, though they had only recently managed to construct viable prototypes.

  “What it won’t do,” I said, “is translate your speech back to them. I’ve disabled that feature, since I’m not sure how a first century Roman would react to a little talking disk.”

  I didn’t think they’d burn us as witches, but saw no need to take the chance.

  “As a safety precaution, it senses body heat; so if it’s not seated in your ear, it won’t make a sound.”

  “How well does it work? The last computer translation program I had was a joke.”

  “It’s not perfect,” I admitted. “I got the gist of what Publius and the other man were saying last night, though.”

  “Wow.”

  “The Greek should be functional. I programmed it with modern Greek during those few days we were getting ready to go.”

  “But the Greek spoken here is different.”

  “Yeah, Robert told me that it’s the equivalent of a modern American reading Chaucer in the original. Still, the eggheads at DARPA say that the software is adaptive. Although Chaucer isn’t easy to read, it’s still a lot easier for us than it would be for someone who didn’t know English at all.”

  “You couldn’t program the Aramaic?”

  “I had no access to modern speakers on such short notice. Besides, we’d have the same language drift problem – worse, probably.”

  Do the others have one?

  “I could only get my hands on three. I was going to give one to Lavon, but I didn’t expect the other two to take off like they did, which is a shame, since it can also serve as a two way radio.”

  Moments later, the servant returned. He was more insistent this time; we must have been holding up the line.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “It’s waterproof. If you keep it around your neck, you won’t be able to hear me, but I should be able to hear you.”

  She stepped behind the drapery and hung her clothes on a rack. Then she walked down a narrow corridor until she reached the entrance to the caldarium, where she slipped on the wooden clogs that the attendant had laid at the threshold.

  As I was to see a few minutes later, the pool itself was surprisingly large – about seventy-five feet long and roughly half as wide. We could hear the fires from the furnace underneath – a hypocaust, Lavon had called it. Hot air mixed with steam rose from hollowed out bricks along the edges of the room, producing a sauna-like effect.

  I could hear her kick off the clogs and ease herself into the water. It sounded like she swam a couple of easy laps before gliding over to the steps and leaning back.

  “It’s about the temperature of a Jacuzzi,” she said. “The only things lacking are the bubbles.”

  I smiled. We had, perhaps, enough mechanical knowledge between the five of us to invent some sort of pump out of available materials, though I for one didn’t want to hang around long enough to find out.

  Sharon stayed in the water and helped herself to the refreshments beside the pool. A little while later, we both heard a bell ring, which was the signal to move on.

  I gave her a few minutes before I, too, deposited my clothes on the shelf. I walked into the caldarium and set my bag next to the edge of the pool. I also swam a couple of slow laps and then just rested on the warm steps, sampling the food. Lavon was right: it was delicious.

  Between the warmth and the chow, I lost track of time. A little while later, though, the bell rang again, so I got out of the water, picked up my bag, and headed to the next station.

  This room, the frigidarium, Lavon had called it, was only a quarter of the size of the one I had just left. People were less likely to linger here, and this made sense.

  I suppose some creatures – polar bears, perhaps – might have described the water as ‘invigorating.’ To me, it was just plain cold, although it did shake the cobwebs loose.

  A stack of towels sat on a nearby table, so I jumped out and dried myself off. I tossed the first towel into a wicker basket, wrapped another around my waist, and placed my ear bud back into position.

  “What do you want?” I heard her say – and not to me.

  “Sharon?” I called out.

  I stepped out of the frigidarium but instead of walking into one corridor, I found myself at the intersection of three.

  “Sharon?”

  I listened intently, but heard only a soft murmur.

  Then I heard a shuffling sound: the toadying slave appeared in the right hand corridor and signaled for me to follow him.

  I glared at him. “Where is she?”

  He couldn’t understand my words, but I suspected he knew their meaning.

  The worm motioned me forward again. This time, his manner reminded me of the pimps I had once seen all over the Far East – obnoxious pests who followed me everywhere touting ‘I have deal for you my friend.’

  Right.

  Since he was rushing me to go in one direction, I obviously wanted to go in another. But which one?

  I pretended to stumble and reached down to grab my ankle. When he stepped closer to assist me, I grabbed my folding knife from my bag, whipped it open and held it to his throat.

  “Where. Is. She?” I said.

  The words weren’t important. He knew exactly what I wanted.

  He pointed down the center corridor, and somewhat foolishly, I backed toward it, intending to turn around and push him through in reverse.

  I never made it. A second later, I felt a thump and my world went completely black.

  Chapter 28

  The next thing I remembered, a man was shaking me awake. I instinctively recoiled and reached for my knife, then felt several sets of arms holding me down as I flailed about.

  It took me a few more seconds to fully come to. As I did, I could see three men, bald, clean shaven and dressed in identical white tunics, standing around me.

  One of them spoke. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying, though as my vision improved, I noted the look of concern in his eyes – all of their eyes, for that matter. Whoever these people were, they weren’t part of the crew in the baths.

  Once I was completely conscious, the three of them took a step back and watched as I reached behind my pounding head to feel for blood.

  Fortunately, I found none, and after minute or so, two of them reached down and helped me stagger to my feet.

  I gestured my thanks as best I could and then glanced past them to take in my surroundings. The tallest man pointed to a spot just outside the city wall and gestured that he had found me there. He had then recruited his colleagues to carry me to my current location, a shady spot beneath an olive tree about a quarter mile to the northeast of the Antonia.

  Why, I couldn’t tell. Maybe they were Good Samaritans – perhaps even the original ones.

  I could see from the position of the sun that it was only mid-morning, so I hadn’t been out all that long. I also noticed, for the first time, that a boisterous crowd had gathered around a colonnaded structure a hundred yards to the north.

  There, several groups of men, each carrying stretchers, attempted to push their way through the southernmost entrance. However, those already inside closed ranks to block their passage.

  My benefactors watched the burgeoning drama with a sense of concern. One of them, evidently the leader, ordered the other two to deal with the situation.

  As they hustled away, their boss gestured for me to follow him, but I just held my hands up, silently asking to remain in place a little longer.

  He stared into my eyes for a few seconds and then shrugged, as if to indicate that I was no longer his responsibility; then he ambled up the path to join his colleagues.

  I still couldn’t figure out what was happening. The stretcher-bearers continued to jost
le for position without success, until a couple of them finally set their loads down and turned on the crowd blocking their way. I watched half a dozen men fall to the ground, where they grappled and threw wild punches as bystanders cheered them on.

  My rescuers did nothing for several minutes. Finally, they shoved the crowd back, and after another brief interval to let the brawlers tire even further, they pulled the combatants apart, like modern policemen breaking up a bar fight.

  Knowing the Roman tendency to pounce on the first inkling of trouble, I glanced back to the Antonia, half expecting a squad of soldiers to come charging up the road. Neither sentry, however, paid the commotion any mind. Apparently, this sort of thing wasn’t unusual, at least not here.

  After they broke up the altercation, the man in charge glanced back in my direction and once again signaled me to follow.

  I hesitated briefly. My first inclination was to return to the Antonia, and if I could have been certain that Publius was there, I would have. He’d sort it all out, I was sure, probably first by seizing that slave and flogging him to within an inch of his life.

  But the more I considered it, the less reasonable this plan sounded. For one, I couldn’t communicate properly. Making matters worse, my attackers had dressed me in a tunic so old and worn out that the sentries would perceive me as just another member of the swarm of disheveled beggars mobbing the city gates. They would surely turn me away.

  Whatever this place was, it was my best bet at the moment. For some reason, these people seemed inclined to help me, and if nothing else, they might at least let me wash my clothes.

  I was pleasantly surprised to see my bag lying on the ground next to where my rescuers had placed me. My knife, of course, was gone, as was the sack of coins that Bryson and Lavon had so painstakingly assembled in Boston; but the rest of my kit appeared to be intact.

  If only the thieves knew.

  ***

  It was only then, as I felt for the pendant hanging from my neck, that I realized with a horrible sinking feeling that my attackers probably hadn’t been thieves.