The Book of Lies Read Online Free PDF

relatives. Calvin. Cal.
    One of them was named
Cal
. And the way he was running—the shock and fear on his face as he came bursting out into the rainy night—Cal knew exactly whom he’d found.
    For a moment, Ellis laughed to himself. Of course. It had to come back to father and son. Just as it began with Adam and Cain. Just as it was with Mitchell and Jerry Siegel.
    It was the same when he’d first heard the truth about his own family—the lifelong lie his father had told him. In that instant, Ellis realized how much of his life was a construct. But Ellis wasn’t sad. He was thrilled. He
knew
he was meant for something bigger. No question, that’s why his mother left him the diary, the softbound journal with the water-stained leather cover.
    For over a year he’d been studying the diary’s pages, absorbing the theories that his grandfather and great-grandfather—both Leadership officers—spent so many years working on. Throughout the books, his name was spelled differently—Cayin, Kayin, Kenite—depending on the translation and where the story originated. But there was no mistaking the world’s first murderer. Or the first man God forgave—and empowered. The man who held the secret of God’s true power.
    Ellis still remembered—his hands shaking in the estate lawyer’s office—the first time he read the words his great-grandfather had written during his time at the Cairo Museum. Ellis had to go find a Bible—check the language himself. Like most, he’d grown up thinking Cain killed Abel with a stone. But as he flipped through the pages, speed-reading through chapter 4 of Genesis: “And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” That was all the Bible said. No mentions of stones or rocks or any sort of weapon.
    Time and history added other ideas, filling texts with theories of clubs, sticks, and wooden staffs. The Zohar, the most important work of the Jewish Kabbalah movement, insisted that Cain bit Abel’s throat, which led others to proclaim Cain as the world’s first vampire. And in ancient Egypt, archaeologists found hieroglyphics depicting a weapon made from an animal’s jawbone and sharpened teeth.
    It was this theory of the jawbone that filled up half the diary. Shakespeare wrote that Cain’s weapon was a jawbone, featuring it in
Hamlet
. Rembrandt depicted the same instrument in one of his portraits, even including Abel’s dog barking in the background.
    But for Ellis’s Cairo-based great-grandfather, the real question was: How did this obscure theory from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics suddenly become such a rage in seventeenth-century Europe? For years, there was no logical explanation—until his great-grandfather read the story of a small group of Coptic monks who emigrated from Egypt to the north, where they hoped to hide the small but priceless object they’d stumbled upon. The object from God Himself.
    Then the Leadership took interest. The group was new then. Untested. But extremely enthusiastic—like Ellis, especially now that he was so close.
    There was only one thing in his way.
    Across the park, Cal slid on his knees, his flashlight shining into Lloyd Harper’s terrified face.
    A trickster, Ellis decided. Every family had a trickster.
    In the passenger seat, Benoni cocked her head, which meant Ellis’s phone was about to—
    The phone vibrated in Ellis’s pocket. Somehow the dog always knew.
    “Officer Belasco,” Ellis answered as he readjusted the badge on his uniform.
    “You still with the driver—what’s his name again?” the Judge asked.
    “Lloyd,” Ellis replied, watching Cal’s father across the park and unable to shake the feeling that the bleeding old man was far more than just a driver.
    “He get the Book yet?”
    “Soon. He stopped for some help first,” Ellis said as he eyed just Cal.
    In 1900, the Book—one writing called it a “carving,” another an “emblem”—whatever it was, it