The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) Read Online Free PDF Page A

looking down at his boots, swinging his legs back and forth as he assimilated this new information. A critical question crashed into his thoughts. “Wait … once the Prophet’s Guard got ahold of the mezuzah, why not destroy it? Get rid of the evidence?”
    Hassan nodded his head. “A shrewd question, my friend. Destroying the mezuzah and its scroll would have solved one problem. But there is much about the mezuzah we have yet to learn, other clues to an ultimate secret all of us still seek. So our enemies hid the mezuzah while they continued their search.”
    “But,” said Rizzo, “I thought the Temple Guard brought the mezuzah to the Bibliotheca de Historique in Suez?”
    Outside in the larger cavern, a dog barked. Hassan lifted his head, peering out the entrance to the small chamber as if looking through the thousand years.
    “Many generations have killed and pillaged in pursuit of the scroll,” said Hassan, “and it changed hands many times. Nearly two hundred years ago, my ancestors of the Temple Guard captured the mezuzah once more and took it to the French, where it was held in great secrecy, where they thought it was safe. But the Prophet’s Guard once again learned of its hiding place and raided the Scroll Room, killing many of my brothers. For over one hundred years, we heard nothing of the scroll, though we monitored the movements of the Prophet’s Guard closely. It wasn’t long before we discovered they no longer possessed the scroll, either. We thought it was lost to us forever.”
    Rizzo ran his mind through the rest of the story—how Charles Spurgeon purchased the mezuzah and its printed silk cover while wandering the streets of Alexandria; how the Prophet’s Guard followed its trail to London; how Spurgeon dispatched the hunted mezuzah to his friend Louis Klopsch at the Bowery Mission in New York City.
    He looked around the nearly empty room, turned to look out the door into the bleak reaches of the cavern. “And you’ve been living here for a hundred years … waiting?”
    Hassan shook his head, a smile rising under his mountainous mustache. “No, I’m afraid we’re not that gallant. A few months ago we received word that the Prophet’s Guard was once again in pursuit of the scroll. A call went out to my brothers of the undefiled Coptic cross, who began to gather here in hope.”
    An overriding question kept interrupting Rizzo’s thoughts.
    “But why do you still care? What difference does it make to you, or to the Prophet’s Guard, who has the scroll? Not only has the message been deciphered but the Temple has been found and destroyed. What good is the scroll to you? Why … why are you here?”
    Hassan’s smile held no warmth. “It is not only the scroll we seek. In that you are correct. But there is a greater treasure, a treasure of which you have not dreamed.” He turned toward the table, lifted one of the books, and pulled it close. “A treasure whose secret may be held within these books.”

3

    A UGUST 28
    7:18 p.m., Rabbi Fineman’s home, Jerusalem
    “So what were these books?” asked Bohannon. “What was this treasure?”
    Rizzo got up off the floor, his legs tight after relaying the story of the Temple Guard. He pushed his shoulders back, stretched his neck, put the much-folded pamphlet into his jacket pocket, and looked at the faces staring back at him.
    “The books were incomplete copies of a book called the Aleppo Codex. The rabbi knows more about it than I do, but the Aleppo Codex is supposedly the most accurate representation of the Jewish Torah in existence. Why it’s important to us is because of a message that is apparently contained in the margin notations. It’s a message that completes a link between the mezuzah, Jeremiah, and Aaron’s staff—the shepherd’s staff symbol that we found on the mezuzah, in the St. Antony exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania, carved over the doorpost of the library at St. Antony’s Monastery, scratched into the wall