The Resurrection File Read online

  “No argument from me,” Will replied, trying to be cheery.

  “No offense, but are you going to be able to afford me?”

  “Oh yeah, of course,” Will said, keeping up his usual confidence.

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “As I’m sure you noticed, the firm took our law clerk and our paralegal. They were put back in the Richmond office. I trust you are going to be taking on extra help. Because I am not going to double as a paralegal as well as a secretary, and whatever else.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  “And just one more thing,” Betty said, her eyebrow slightly raised.

  “What is it?”

  “Well,” she said, “you’re a connected guy. Tell me something.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are we all going to be blown off the face of the earth?”

  “Well, no, I don’t think so. But this thing is scary, huh?”

  “I was telling Teddy last night as we sat there watching the news, ‘Teddy, honey, we’ve had a good life together. But I don’t want it to end in some kind of nuclear explosion.’”

  “No, I know what you mean,” Will replied. “Nothing like being melted into the concrete to ruin your whole day.”

  Just then Angus MacCameron walked in through the door. His daughter Fiona was with him.

  Will stood looking at Fiona as she smoothed her hair back slightly. He searched momentarily for something to say, but failed. He wondered whether he had met her before. Yet he knew that could not be true. Whatever the connection was that he felt, he couldn’t put his finger on it. He struggled to say something witty, but failed again, and only managed a wide smile.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I brought my daughter, Fiona, with me. Bob, her business manager, couldn’t make it,” MacCameron said, looking for a response from Will.

  Will was still studying Fiona when Betty chimed in.

  “Please pardon the state of the office. They’ve taken the old lobby furniture away. We are…in the process of doing some reorganizing.”

  “Refurnishing,” Will added.

  “Well, shall we sit down and have a chat?” MacCameron said. “Somewhere where there is a chair?”

  “Sure. Let’s have a…chat.” Will replied smiling, and led them into the conference room.

  He shook hands formally there. Fiona had small hands, but a firm grip. When he introduced himself to “Ms. MacCameron,” she smiled brightly. Will noticed that when Fiona smiled she had little dimples in both cheeks.

  “MacCameron was my family name,” Fiona remarked. “But when I started performing I decided to take my Scottish clan name—Cameron. I go by Fiona Cameron.”

  “That was my idea,” Reverend MacCameron interjected, smiling broadly at his daughter.

  When they were settled in, Will led his client through the initial questioning. He started with his personal and family background. Then Will moved on to interrogate him a little more thoroughly about his professional credentials.

  Will learned that MacCameron had been born in Glasgow, Scotland, to working class parents. He gave a little background on why the family, some two-hundred-fifty years before, had changed the family name from Cameron to MacCameron—to avoid retaliation by the English, who were at war with Scottish patriots at the time.

  He was educated at Aberdeen University. He received further schooling, in archaeology, at the University of Edinburgh, where he did some teaching while he was pursuing his graduate degree. He did not complete his studies—moving instead to the United States. Once in America he received both a master’s in Biblical Archaeology and a Master of Divinity from the College of the Piedmont in West Virginia. Later he became an assistant pastor of a small church in Pennsylvania, but after only a few years he left there and did some teaching and a little freelance writing for a few religious periodicals.

  Then he founded his own archaeological magazine, Digging for Truth. It had started on a shoestring budget, but slowly he built up a following. Later he was able to move to Israel, where he and his wife settled into a small apartment in Jerusalem. MacCameron would scurry around to various digs and report back to his readers on them. He openly admitted that he was not well-received by the other archaeologists in Israel. And he was even less well-received by the academics back in the United States.

  The only notable exception was a close friendship with a noted expert in Semitic languages and Middle Eastern history by the name of Dr. Richard Hunter. Hunter had worked for the British Museum but spent a considerable amount of time in Israel and the surrounding countries. MacCameron and Hunter had become good friends while they were students at the University of Edinburgh. They had remained close right up to the time of Hunter’s death, which had occurred within the last year. Hunter had been found, shot in the head, in his tiny field office in Jerusalem.

  Last, MacCameron described to Will with enthusiasm how he led several biblical archaeology tours every year—mostly for his faithful subscribers.

  “Why did you leave the University of Edinburgh?” Will asked.

  “I was teaching some classes to the undergraduates. I had an American student—a very pretty and wonderful girl named Helen,” MacCameron explained. “Very bright. She just dazzled me. After she finished my class that term—by the way, she was an excellent student—I asked her out for tea. And then for walks down by the sea. And picnics. Well, we fell in love. She had to return to the States because she was over in Scotland for only a two-term study project. I followed her to America. We were married here in the States less than a year after that.”

  When Will started homing in on the allegations in Dr. Reichstad’s Complaint, and on the details of the lawsuit, he turned to Fiona.

  “Ms. Cameron…”

  “Call me Fiona,” she said, smiling.

  Will knew what had to come next. But he regretted saying it.

  “Okay, Fiona.” Will responded. “I’m going to have to ask you to leave the room at this point. The attorney-client privilege of confidentiality protects everything your father and I say—because he is the client. But it does not protect you. If you stay in this room you could later be called as a witness by the other side and forced to divulge everything that we talk about.”

  MacCameron’s face became animated, and he blurted out, “Well, let me assure you, Mr. Chambers, that I have nothing to hide from Reichstad’s storm troopers—absolutely nothing. Anything we talk about here, he is welcome to find out about.”

  “That may be your gut reaction, but that’s terrible litigation strategy,” Chambers explained. “The way this game is played is this: We make them sweat for every piece of information. If they don’t ask the right question, they don’t get the right answer. And believe me—knowing this law firm that is on the other side—they will probably end up asking most of the right questions. So the point is, I’m afraid, Ms. Cameron—Fiona—I’m afraid that you will have to step outside.”

  At that Fiona stood up and put out her hand to Will. He shook it warmly.

  “I think that’s my cue,” she said. “I noticed that little café across the street. I’ve got my cell phone with me. I’ll see if I can get a cup of tea there. I can make some phone calls while I wait. I’ll be there waiting for you, Da.” She kissed her father on the cheek.

  Then Fiona turned to Will, smiled sincerely, and said, “Mr. Chambers, it has been a pleasure. I will ask that the Lord give you special wisdom in dealing with my father’s case.”

  “Sure, thanks,” Will said, not knowing exactly how to respond. “It was a pleasure.” Will studied her carefully as she left.

  As soon as the door closed Will dove into the background facts of the lawsuit.

  MacCameron had brought with him several back issues of his magazine to show to the lawyer. As Will probed his client and glanced through the magazine, he groaned inwardly at the titles on the covers. One of them—in bold print that seemed to scream—was “Christ’s Second Coming and the Discovery of t
he Sacred Red Heifer!” Another pronounced, “Are We on the Verge of Discovering the Old Testament Ark of the Covenant?”

  But Will was dumbfounded at the cover of the December issue that had caused the lawsuit. As he stared at it, he wondered why this relatively intelligent—and not entirely eccentric—fellow had not consulted a lawyer before printing such a journalistic monstrosity.

  On the cover, in the upper-right-hand corner, was the picture of his friend, Dr. Richard Hunter.

  In the left-hand corner was a picture of someone MacCameron described as a good-natured and well-liked antiquities dealer in Bethlehem, by the name of Harim Azid.

  The face of each man was framed within a circle with red crosshairs. The point seemed painfully clear. Both men, who had died within a short time of each other—Azid by apparent suicide and Hunter in an unsolved murder—were being touted, by Will’s client, as victims of some kind of murder conspiracy.

  The black headline beneath their pictures proclaimed: “THEY DID NOT DIE IN VAIN!”

  And then the subtitle underneath read: “Dr. Albert Reichstad’s Phony, Anti-Christ ‘Discovery’—and How It Is Connected to These Tragic and Suspicious Deaths.”

  Chambers, a champion of freedom of speech, suddenly found himself wondering why MacCameron’s sophomoric and incendiary magazine should really be worthy of First Amendment protection. He thought back to another client of his—Billy Joe Highlighter, an evangelist whose case Will had handled—and it had cost him his job. Now, Reverend MacCameron. Did he really want to make a career of defending religious fanatics?

  “Was it really necessary for you to refer to this Dr. Reichstad as the Antichrist?” Will asked.

  “First of all, Mr. Chambers, I did not call him the Antichrist. I described his so-called discovery as an ‘anti-Christ discovery.’ Which it was.”

  “Okay, explain that one to me.”

  “Most certainly. The Bible teaches that the spirit of this world—the whole world system of the world, the flesh, and the devil himself—is the spirit of Antichrist. So therefore, Dr. Reichstad’s ‘discovery’ is being used by the spirit of this age—in fact by the devil himself—as the most cunning form of deception yet to be unveiled in our day.”

  Will hardly knew where to start as he heard MacCameron’s preposterous minisermon. The spirit of this world, he thought to himself, includes me. And Audra. Was our marriage part of the spirit of anti-Christ? And what about Jacki? And a whole lot of other wonderful, decent people? As Will thought about it, this MacCameron had apparently consigned them all to condemnation and everlasting hell because they hadn’t stashed their brains in their dresser drawers with their socks—as MacCameron obviously had.

  MacCameron must have noticed that Will was thinking deeply about something and not paying attention.

  “Well, do you want me to continue?” MacCameron asked.

  “Sure. Go to it.”

  “As I was saying. First, this so-called ‘discovery’ is being used by the spirit of anti-Christ. Second, you, Mr. Chambers, have no idea who this Dr. Reichstad is.”

  Will then asked his client what he knew about Dr. Reichstad’s background. MacCameron described Reichstad’s scholarly background in detail. He then produced a thirty-five-page curriculum vitae of Reichstad’s that had been dug up by Tiny Heftland, whom he had hired to investigate Reichstad immediately after being sued.

  Flipping through the massive professional bio of the plaintiff—Reichstad’s degrees, and honors and awards, and twenty pages of published scholarly articles, books he had written, teaching assignments around the world, and the conferences he had hosted—that was when Will thought he heard the voice.

  It was the voice somewhere in the unconscious that trial lawyers learn to heed. Will knew that all-important voice; it was the one that tells a lawyer later on “I told you so.” He had always felt that it must be similar to the whisper in the back of the brain that tells some very lucky folks not to get on that airplane—the one with the ice on the wings, the one that everybody is going to read about in the morning newspaper.

  That was the voice Will had learned not to ignore. It would warn him about those cases that started out looking good and ended up going real bad. And now that voice was telling Will Chambers that this case would not only turn out to be a dog—but it would be a dog with really big teeth.

  “And third,” MacCameron continued. His voice was getting quieter and even more intense. Now he was bending over toward Chambers.

  “Third, and you have to get this one if you’re going to be any good to me at all—third, while Reichstad pretends that this so-called discovery is the ultimate proof of who Jesus really was, I say—and much more importantly, God says in his holy, and immutable, and living Word—that this papyrus fragment is not about Christ at all. It is about that which is not Christ. Therefore, it is anti-Christ. Jesus said anyone who is not with him is against him. This papyrus discovery by Reichstad is a fraud against the truth of Christ.”

  Will found himself reeling from MacCameron’s theological rantings. He strained to pick out the one, cogent string of information from his client’s tangled ball of medieval religious thinking.

  “You’ve got to tell me something,” Will asked. “Why do you insist on calling this archaeological find by Reichstad a ‘so-called discovery’?”

  “You will begin to understand after I tell you about my last meeting with Richard Hunter. Then what is hidden from you now, will start being revealed.” There was a labored sadness to his voice as he said that. And then, as if beginning the narration of some obscure epic, MacCameron intoned the beginning of his story.

  “It all began in Jerusalem.”

  10

  WILL LEANED BACK IN HIS OFFICE CHAIR as he listened intently to Angus MacCameron. As MacCameron began telling the story of his last, fateful meeting with Dr. Hunter, Will knew he was getting close to pay dirt, whatever it might be. If there was to be any hope for a valid defense to the lawsuit, this would be it.

  As MacCameron recounted it, he and Dr. Hunter happened to be in Jerusalem at the same time last year. But MacCameron hadn’t seen him for some time. His calls to Hunter’s field office went unanswered. Then Hunter called MacCameron out of the blue. He said he had to meet him immediately. All Hunter would say was that it was incredibly important. He was breathless and excited, and he even sounded a bit frightened. But he wouldn’t give any details over the phone.

  MacCameron remembered that phone call from Hunter very clearly. “We’ve got to meet, and it’s got to be quite soon,” Hunter had insisted in a hoarse whisper.

  MacCameron suggested a few restaurants, but Hunter rejected them immediately.

  “Angus, it has to be somewhere in the old section, close to my office. I can’t afford to leave this part of town, it’s just too dangerous. I can’t tell you why. You just have to trust me, my friend. It’s got to be somewhere close to the western wall, and somewhere nicely hidden from view.”

  MacCameron thought for a minute and then made a suggestion. “How about the old Between the Arches Café? The streets there are always crowded with tourists heading to the wall and you can make your way to the restaurant without being noticed. Besides,” MacCameron added, “the space used to be an old Roman cistern, remember? So the tables are at least two stories down.”

  Hunter agreed. The next day they met in the early afternoon in the café. MacCameron was already seated when Hunter showed up a few minutes late, wearing his usual wide-brimmed straw hat, the one with the dirty red bandanna for a hatband. His threadbare golf shirt was soaked through with sweat and his ruddy English complexion was almost purple with the heat. He was perspiring profusely.

  “You look like a mess,” Angus exclaimed in astonishment.

  But his friend was busy turning around and looking behind him as he sat down at the little glass-topped café table.

  “I had to double back several times on my way here.” Hunter spoke in a hushed tone. “I am sure I was being followed, but I th
ink I lost them.”

  “What in the world are you talking about, Richard?” Angus asked. “Followed by whom?”

  As the waiter approached the table with their menus, Hunter fell silent, swabbing the sweat off his forehead.

  MacCameron tried to make some small talk. “I read about the archaeology conference that Albert Reichstad is sponsoring. I assume that you were invited to speak there. What’s the name of it?”

  “‘The Final Quest for the Historical Jesus—a New Way of Looking at the Archaeo-Biblical Data,’” Hunter responded distractedly. “I was invited to speak, but I have come across something much more important than anything they could address at that conference. So I told them I would be unable to attend. Angus, I am sure that the British Museum will be outraged when they find out that I canceled. But when you see with your own eyes what I’ve got, you’ll understand. You’ll see why it is much bigger than anything Reichstad and his traveling band of scholars could ever come up with.”

  “What is it?” MacCameron asked expectantly.

  “I can’t go into specifics,” Hunter responded, bending his head down and leaning forward over the tabletop. “Let me just say this—I have come across a discovery that is about to erase two thousand years of religious history right off the map.”

  MacCameron was flabbergasted and searched for a response. But before he could speak, Hunter added, “That’s why I want a second opinion. You and I have never been on the same page theologically, Angus. Which is exactly why I want you to see what I have discovered. One thing I know about you—you are a man of integrity.”

  “Can’t you give me some idea—”

  “It’s a papyrus fragment,” Hunter blurted out. “Almost certainly first century in origin, and absolutely from the Jerusalem area. I came across it through Harim Azid. You remember him?”

  MacCameron nodded. “Yes. Everyone calls him ‘Tony.’ But—”

  “Exactly,” Hunter affirmed. “He was the antiquities dealer in Bethlehem. Before his death, Tony handled a lot of ancient artifacts, a number of them quite valuable. One day, he called me to come in and take a look at something. When he unwrapped it and showed it to me, I immediately knew this was going to be an earth-shaking find. Tony told me that this papyrus fragment he was showing me had been brought in by a Bedouin. Apparently, the man had found it in a cave at Qumran when he lived by the Dead Sea as a boy and had kept it under wraps for some fifty years. Then he finally decided to take it to Tony, who was some kind of shirttail relative, to find out what he could get for it. And then, well, poor Tony…” With that, Hunter’s voice began to tremble.