“And you are—what?—a gunslinger for God?”
He raised his eyebrows slightly in that condescending way that the French have perfected into an art form.
I decided to get to the meat of it. “What do you all want from me? I don’t kill people, and when you get right down to it, I don’t even believe in God. Well, not your God. I’m not the person you want.”
“Yes. You are. And what I want is for you to listen very carefully to what I have to say. You are going to be challenged in the coming days in ways you cannot now begin to imagine. The world is on the precipice. The Son of the Son is on trial, just as his biologically identical father was nineteen hundred and eighty-two years ago.”
“So you guys made a clone. But you can’t really believe it is the clone of Jesus.”
“Not believe. Know. Know as surely as I know who you are.”
“Well, that proves it. You think my name is Alazais Roussel, which I’ve never even heard before I got those bogus credentials—which were made by friends of mine in New York.”
He laughed lightly and took a sip of wine. “You are a very clever woman, but not as clever as I had hoped.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
The waiter brought our dinner, and for the first time since this horrible odyssey began, I wasn’t the least bit hungry.
“So tell me, how do you know this Demiel ben Yusef was actually cloned from the DNA of Jesus? Wasn’t Jesus a man of peace, while this maniac is his exact opposite? That’s what happened to that cow this farmer had cloned in the early 2000s. I saw it on Discovery. Bessie had been his favorite, so he had her cloned when she died. But it was reborn as the devil cow. Stomped the whole family to death. You must have read about it.”
He looked annoyed; actually, it was more a look of disgust at my levity.
“No, I didn’t read about it. And no, Demiel is not the exact opposite to the Son of God. He is exactly—and I mean that literally—the same being as the first Son. Jesus was called a seditionist. Demiel is called a terrorist. The only danger either of them ever posed was as a threat to the powerful. The truth—the truth of God—is a powerful thing. More powerful than all the men in Washington or Israel or the Arab states.”
“Okay, suppose he is innocent—which I don’t believe for a minute—what makes you think he’s the real deal? Or the clone of the real deal at any rate?”
“Because a group that has been in existence since the beginning of the Christian era has protected the precious blood of Jesus—has held these drops for this long, knowing, knowing that it was the key to resurrection, the next coming. They didn’t know how it would happen but only that it would. In the ancient times, they believed it would happen through some sort of godly miracle. And science is, in its way, a miracle of God.”
“You mean these people kept a beaker of blood for thousands of years without it drying up?”
“No. Yes. But it’s not what we should discuss right now.”
“How do you know I’ll have anything beyond ‘now,’ considering my status as a fugitive?”
“Because now you have me. To guard you.”
“Not that I believe one word, but if I did, I’d have to ask you why you of all people need to guard me. I still believe my life could come to a tragic end—if you have your way. Which you won’t.”
He picked his head up and looked right at me—yes, like a lover would—and said, “Alessandra, like you, I have no choice in the matter. I—we—need for you to live, even though you are an impossible rebel. Keeping you alive is the challenge.”
“That explains nothing,” I snapped, refusing to return his look. He then pointed directly to one of the embroidered tapestry wall hangings.
“Do you find it odd that such an ancient piece hangs in a restaurant in such an obscure village?”
“No. I’m not a scholar of embroidery, so I have no idea if it’s ancient or just old.” I decided that I needed at least a piece of bread. I had let the fish get cold.
“Doesn’t it look familiar at all?”
I refused to admit that now that I looked at it, it did—in a sort of weird déjà vu kind of way. The tapestry depicted a woman from the Middle Ages standing in the foreground at the base of a mountain. Three companions were standing slightly behind her; one was definitely a man, the other, I couldn’t make out. All had those crazy-shaped yellow crosses on red backgrounds on the front of their tunics.
In the forefront, the woman who was wearing trousers had a small sack around her neck and a knife tucked into her rope belt.