The Breath of God (28 page)

Tim spotted Matthews and Misaki sitting on a stone bench between the reflecting pools fifty meters from him. After tying the skiff to the dock, he'd easily scaled the scaffolding and followed the signal on his cell phone's browser that led him to the formal gardens. The technology had served him well, exactly as he expected.

Tim moved closer, sticking to the shadowy areas between the landscaping lights that illuminated the garden's ornamental trees. He tried to appear casual, like a tourist exploring the grounds.

A bald man sat on the bench with the couple. Tim noted his medium dark complexion, and a face that was rounder and more East Asian than Indian. Tim's heart rate quickened. Although he wasn't dressed in robes, Tim felt sure
this was his man: the monk Kinley who had shown the texts to Matthews. The monk had met them just as the coded email message had said.

Tim stepped closer, angling his head to see around the bench, as if he were looking past the three people sitting there in order to view the mosque on the other end of the gardens. A brief disappointment passed over him. The monk carried nothing with him. No bag of ancient books in sight. Not that he really expected the monk to bring the Jesus books to this place. Anyway, while grabbing the manuscripts here would have been easier, he was up for the challenge of getting his hands on them no matter what measures he had to take.

“You have a message from Kinley?” Grant asked after the young monk had sat in silence for another few moments after the revelation.

“Let us walk first,” Jigme said, rising to his feet. “You have traveled all this way to see the world's grandest monument to true love. You might as well get your money's worth.” He stepped off the platform and headed toward the Taj Mahal. Grant glanced at Kristin, who grabbed his hand and pulled him after Jigme.

Grant called out, “Why Agra? And why didn't Kinley meet us here himself?” With the planning and travel time, he'd already lost four precious days.

“I see you have learned patience since returning to America,” Jigme said over his shoulder.

Gently chastised by the young monk, Grant held back further comment, quickly limping to keep up with Jigme's brisk pace. Grant's mind raced as fast as his legs. What other purpose did Kinley have for bringing them here, if not to give them the texts? Grant had risked his reputation and his academic career for these texts. Then another thought occurred to him: Kinley also had taken a huge risk. The monk had removed the manuscripts from the library and incurred the disapproval of the lama. But now he had disappeared.

What if Kinley has changed his mind? What if he no longer thinks I'm worthy of the secret?
The doubts began to multiply in his head. Their journey had better turn out to be more than a simple riddle leading them to a famous tourist
site. He didn't have time to play games, especially when his name was already a joke around the halls of the religious studies department. When he'd stopped in his office to collect some papers before leaving on the trip, he could hear the whispers of his fellow grad students behind his back.

Several minutes later they climbed a shadowy stairwell that led from the garden level to the immense marble plaza on which the Taj Mahal stood.

“Ah, here we are,” Jigme said.

The sight of the architectural feat before him immediately distracted Grant's thoughts from the texts and his troubles. Standing within fifteen meters of the monument, he understood the magnitude of the accomplishment of Isa, the Taj architect, and his workers three hundred sixty years ago. The smooth marble structure towered almost ninety feet over them, while the plaza stretched out over a hundred feet in each direction. Grant realized that the marble was not purely white as it appeared in the distance, but veins of beiges and grays ran through the blocks. Similar to the main gate, the massive stone walls contained squiggly Arabic text inlaid with black onyx, but on this monument the
pietra dura
assumed an even grander scale: a rainbow of semiprecious stones was also inlaid within the marble, forming vines and flowers that appeared to climb the sheer walls.

“Jigme!” a voice called from behind them.

Grant spun on his heels.

A broad grin broke out on Jigme's face. “Razi!”

A man who appeared to be a few years older than Jigme but younger than Grant embraced the monk. The man was dressed all in white—cotton pants and a long-sleeved shirt—with the exception of a black knit cap over his head. He smiled behind a neatly groomed mustache and beard, black like the hair that peeked out from under his cap.

“Kristin and Grant, please allow me to introduce you to my new friend, Jamil Razifar. He gave me a tour of the monument a few days ago.”

Days ago?
Grant thought.

“Good to see you again, my friend,” Razi said. “So my tour didn't drive you away?”

“Quite the opposite. I enjoyed it so much, I returned with my friends.”

Razi held out a hand to Grant. He spoke in a fast, clipped English with a distinct Indian accent. “Pleased to meet you, friends of Jigme.” He then gave a courteous bow to Kristin, who returned it.

“Are you a tour guide?” she asked.

He laughed. “Not officially. Just a student—studying to be a mullah one day. As a student of Islam in India”—he gestured to the monument before them—“I often enjoy visiting one of our most spectacular architectural accomplishments.”

“Do you have a minute to walk with us?” Jigme asked.

Grant tried to catch Kristin's eye.
Sightseeing?
They needed to hear Kinley's message about the texts. But she gazed at Razi with an anticipatory expression, as if she'd come halfway around the world just for this tour.

Then an idea interrupted Grant's impatience. He looked at the two men standing before him and realized that they were three students of religion: Christianity, Buddhism, and now Islam.
Peculiar coincidence
. Although he knew that for Kinley there were no coincidences.

Razi guided them to the left side of the building's arched entrance, where he rested his hand on the stone. “The marble is called Makrana, one of the hardest and least porous, which is why the building has remained in such good condition for so many centuries. The inlay work you see consists of fourteen types of semiprecious stones such as coral, onyx, malachite. The stones are only three or four millimeters thick, and yet the workmanship is so detailed, you will not see any gaps or seams between the stones and the marble.”

“The Islamic script around the arches, it's from the Koran like on the main gate?” Kristin asked.

Razi nodded. “The text on the building describes the damnation that awaits those who do not follow the will of Allah, as well as detailing the paradise that the faithful will experience.”

“Isn't it true that the Koran is the collected visions of Muhammad?” Jigme asked. Grant glanced at his friend.
Jigme knows this to be true
, he thought. He had the distinct feeling that this encounter had been planned.
But why?

Razi nodded. “The Prophet lived about five hundred years after Jesus. Unlike the Bible, which is the collected writings of many authors over many centuries, the Koran was a series of visions that came to Muhammad in bits
and pieces over a twenty-three-year period. Many of its stories and themes overlap with the Bible. We Muslims see the Koran as completing the trilogy that began with the Old and New Testaments—the culmination of Allah's word as spoken through Muhammad.”

“So do Muslims view Muhammad like Christians view Jesus?” Jigme asked.

Grant leaned against the cool marble wall of the Taj, resting his aching leg.
We really don't have time for this
, he thought. Jigme was delaying telling them about Kinley and the texts for a reason. The doubts began to creep back into his mind again.

“Not exactly.” Razi traced the black Arabic script in the wall with a finger. “Muhammad was never deified like Jesus was. He was considered to be God's spokesman, but not an incarnation of God himself. We consider Muhammad to be the last and greatest in a long line of prophets that began with Adam and continued through Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.”

“Wait,” Kristin said. “My Old Testament knowledge is pretty fuzzy, but wasn't Muhammad actually related to Abraham?”

Grant pushed himself away from the building and began to walk along the wall, hoping that his movement might encourage the others. But as much as he wanted to steer the conversation back to the Issa texts, he couldn't resist responding, “When Abraham and his wife Sarah were unable to conceive a son, Abraham took a second wife, Hagar, with whom he had a son named Ishmael. Later Sarah had Isaac. According to Jewish scripture, Hagar was a concubine, and thus Ishmael was not a rightful heir to Abraham.”

“But we Muslims,” Razi interjected, “see Ishmael as Abraham's firstborn. Sarah didn't like the idea of wife number two hanging around with the competing son, so she convinced Abraham to exile them from the tribe. According to the Koran, Hagar and Ishmael traveled to the town that would become Mecca in Arabia.”

Grant completed the thought, “So we have the descendants of Abraham's son Isaac becoming the Jews, while the descendants of his son Ishmael, including Muhammad, became the Muslims in Arabia.”

“That puts the whole Arab-Israeli conflict in perspective, doesn't it?” Kristin said. “But how does Jesus fit into the picture?”

“The Koran speaks of Jesus' birth from a virgin,” Razi said, “and so many Muslims see Jesus as a creation of God, just as Adam was, but they reject his deification as being an idolatrous creation of man. Instead they see Jesus as a great prophet, the teacher who brought us the Golden Rule, for example.”

“‘There is no god but Allah,'” Grant said, watching Razi expectantly. The reasoned manner in which this Muslim scholar presented his knowledge impressed him.

“Yes!” Razi clapped his hands together. “In Arabic the prayer is ‘
La ilaha ila Allah
.'”

Then Grant remembered something. He had difficulty controlling the excitement in his voice. “Isn't Jesus known as Isa in the Koran?”
And with one s like in Kinley's riddle
, he added to himself.

“Indeed.” A sly smile spread across the man's face, as if he understood the implications of the question.

Tim watched him apprehensively, following the group as they circumambulated the monument. Tim was careful to keep his distance, while pretending to be interested in the marble castle in front of him. From their interactions, Tim guessed that before tonight Matthews and Misaki hadn't known the man, whom Tim immediately identified as a Muslim from his dress and beard. The monk must have brought some muscle with him.
How appropriate
, he thought,
to bring another heathen into their plot to confuse the world
. His hand slid absentmindedly into his right pocket. He twirled one of the EpiPens between his fingers.

Had the monk already communicated to his friends the hiding place of the books? While he could use his cell phone to follow Matthews to the texts, he wanted to get there first. He couldn't risk the chance that they might slip out of his grasp or that Matthews would photograph them again before Tim could control the situation. Tim had seen the smug attitude Matthews had taken with the reverend the night of the debate. His blood ran hot at the memory. But Reverend Brady had triumphed in the end, shown him for the
liar he was. Now it was Tim's responsibility to flush away this poison for good.

After he rounded the monument's southeast corner, Tim paused. He saw no sign of his targets anywhere on the plaza.

Maybe
, he thought,
they've descended the stairwell to the ground level
. Hurrying to the front of the marble plaza, he shielded his eyes from the lights blazing up from the ground twenty feet below.