City of Screams by James Rollins

for the corruption inside her.
    My little Azubah . .  .
    He collapsed against the sarcophagus.
    â€œSeal it,” the leader ordered.
    A limestone slab, lowered with ropes, ground into place. Men slathered the edges of the lid with a slurry of ash and lime to bind stone to stone.
    Eleazar flattened his palms against the side of her prison as if his touch could comfort her. But she was beyond comfort now.
    He rested his forehead against the unforgiving stone. It was the only way. It served a higher good. But these truths did not ease his pain. Or hers.
    â€œCome,” their leader beckoned. “What must be done has been done.”
    Eleazar drew in a rattling breath of foul air. The soldiers coughed and shuffled to the doorway. He stood alone with her in the dank tomb.
    â€œYou cannot stay,” the leader called from the doorway. “You must walk a different path.”
    Eleazar stumbled toward the voice, blinded by tears.
    Once they left, the tomb would be hidden, the passage sealed. No living being would remember it. Any who dared trespass would be doomed.
    He found their leader’s gaze upon him.
    â€œDo you regret your oath?” the man asked. His voice rang with pity, but it also held the hardness of the resolute.
    That hardness was the reason why Christ named their leader Petrus, meaning “Rock.” He was the apostle who would be the foundation of the new Church.
    Eleazar met that stony gaze. “No, Peter, I do not.”

 
    P ART O NE
    Who looks on the earth and it trembles,
    who touches the mountains and they smoke!
    P SALM 104:32

 
    Chapter One
    October 26, 10:33 A.M., Israel Standard Time
    Caesarea, Israel
    D R. E RIN G RANGER stroked her softest brush across the ancient skull. As the dust cleared, she studied it with the eyes of a scientist, noting the tiny seams of bone, the open fontanel. Her gaze evaluated the amount of callusing, judging the skull to be that of a newborn, and from the angle of the pelvic bone, a boy.
    Only days old when he died.
    As she continued to draw the child out of the dirt and stone, she looked on also as a woman, picturing the infant boy lying on his side, knees drawn up against his chest, tiny hands still curled into fists. Had his parents counted his heartbeats, kissed his impossibly tender skin, watched as that tiny heartbeat stopped?
    As she had once done with her baby sister.
    She closed her eyes, brush poised.
    Stop it .
    Opening her eyes, she combed back an errant strand of blond hair that had escaped its efficient ponytail before turning her attention back to the bones. She would find out what happened here all those hundreds of years ago. Because, as with her sister, this child’s death had been deliberate. Only this boy had succumbed to violence, not negligence.
    She continued to work, seeing the tender position of the limbs. Someone had labored to restore the body to its proper order before burying it, but the efforts could not disguise the cracked and missing bones, hinting at a past atrocity. Even two thousand years could not erase the crime.
    She put down the wooden brush and took yet another photo. Time had colored the bones the same bleached sepia as the unforgiving ground, but her careful excavation had revealed their shape. Still, it would take hours to work the rest of the bones free.
    She shifted from one aching knee to the other. At thirty-two, she was hardly old, but right now she felt that way. She had been in the trench for barely an hour, and already her knees complained. As a child, she had knelt in prayer for much longer, poised on the hard dirt floor of the compound’s church. Back then, she could kneel for half a day without complaint, if her father demanded—but after so many years trying to forget her past, perhaps she misremembered it.
    Wincing, she stood and stretched, lifting her head clear of the waist-high trench. A cooling sea breeze caressed her hot face, chasing away her memories. To the