How much would you pay to know the mind of God? In 31 B.C., the Jewish High Priest, Amariah, flees to the ancient Essene fortification at Qumran, on the shore of the Dead Sea, to avoid Roman persecution. Hidden in his saddle bags are the Urim and Thummim, the revelatory devices used to ask and receive answers from God, which haven't been seen since the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC. When Amariah is murdered, the Urim and Thummim are buried with his body in a cave vault, later sealed by an earthquake that strikes Judea in 32 BC. There they remain until the present day, when they are discovered by Ishmael, a treadue-hunting young Arab Bedouin, then are passed to Rehavam Krasnoff, an unscrupulous chief investigatorfor the Israeli Antiquities Authority. When two masterminds in Athens, Gregory Kavidas and Mortimer Stein (who've developed the global financial network Masterlink--the precursor to a cashless world economy), become alerted of the stones' discovery, they set out to seize the stones for themselves. . . before their evil agenda is exposed.
