by James Becker
So he'd changed his mind and told the taxi driver to drop him on a corner a short distance from the building, and had then walked straight over to the Citroën that he'd left parked on the street, got in and driven away.
When Dexter had flown out to Morocco, he'd taken an Air France flight to Rabat from Heathrow. The return half of that ticket was still in his jacket pocket, but there was no way he was going to use it. That, he guessed, would be far too obvious – and too obviously dangerous. He was sure Zebari's murderer would already have men on the way to the Rabat-Sale airport some five miles north of the city. Dexter's decision to drive to Casablanca was an attempt to put some distance between himself and his pursuers, and hopefully to throw them off the scent.
At the Mohammed V airport in Casablanca, he didn't bother returning the car to the Hertz desk. He just parked it, locked the doors and tossed the keys underneath it. When – if – he got back to England, he'd tell the local Hertz office where it was, but that was the least of his concerns right then.
As soon as he walked into the departure hall, Dexter checked the boards. He rejected all Royal Air Maroc flights, irrespective of their destination, because he wanted to use a non-Moroccan carrier, but he had just enough time to catch the Air France/KLM flight to Paris. A running man in an airport – and anywhere else, for that matter – always attracts attention, so Dexter walked briskly to the Air France ticket desk and paid cash for a return flight to Paris. He wanted to avoid any credit card charges appearing in his name.
He knew enough about the threat of terrorism to realize that paying cash for an airline ticket was unusual, but buying a single ticket for cash would certainly raise eyebrows and might result in him being delayed and questioned, which he was keen to avoid. So the return ticket was essential.
The flight was due to start boarding imminently, but before he walked to the departure gate Dexter nipped into one of the airport shops and bought a cheap carry-on bag. In another he purchased half a dozen items of clothing, in a third a traveller's wash bag, then added a couple of novels. He actually needed none of the items that he'd bought, but he knew that everybody boarding an aircraft carried a bag of some sort, and he was desperate not to stand out or attract attention in any way. He now hoped he looked like a businessman just nipping up to Paris for a conference or meeting for a day or two, and not like a man on the run from a bunch of hired killers.
The Moroccan customs officers opened his bag and checked it, as they did for almost every traveller, but that was the only delay. Half an hour after arriving at the airport, Dexter was at the departure gate, standing in a line of people waiting to board the Airbus 319. Twenty minutes after that he was finally able to relax in his seat with the stiffest drink Air France could offer as the jet headed north towards Paris. And he'd seen nobody and nothing to suggest that Zebari's killer or his men had the slightest idea where he was.
In Paris, he took time out to grab a meal before he flew back to Heathrow. He'd had very little to eat that day, and he found his appetite improved dramatically once he knew he was, at least for the moment, safe. By early evening he was back at home in Petworth, the small oblong card on the desk in front of him, and a large whisky in the glass at his elbow.
He would, he decided, wait an hour or so before he called Charlie Hoxton. First, he would take several photocopies of the card and try to work out just why his client had been so desperate to get hold of the clay tablet.
34
Night was drawing in, and up in Bronson's hotel room he and Angela seemed to have reached a stalemate.
The tablet held in the Paris museum had yielded its secrets easily enough. In just a few minutes Bronson had translated the French words into English and written them out. But the Cairo tablet proved to be much more difficult because of the poor clarity and definition of the single photograph they'd managed to find in the museum archives.
They'd spent hours trying to match the letters from the downloaded font with the characters in the photograph, but it was a long and tiresome process and they hadn't had very much success.
'I think,' Angela said, staring at the image on her laptop screen, 'that this picture was only ever intended for basic identification purposes. Somebody must have been told to photograph each of the objects the museum had acquired, purely so they would have a visual record of the relics. Pictures that could be used for research and translation would presumably have been taken later on, with a higher resolution camera and much better lighting.'
'Can you get anything at all from it?' Bronson asked.
'Yes, but probably only about half the words in the top three lines. The others are so blurred and out of focus that they could be almost anything.'
For over an hour Angela and Bronson studied the image, trying to interpret and copy on to paper the unfamiliar marks that comprised the written Aramaic script. Then Angela fed the results into the online Aramaic–English dictionary.
'So what have we got?' she asked, finally leaning back from the computer and stretching her aching muscles.
'Why don't I go and get us some drinks?' Bronson suggested. 'Of the alcoholic variety, obviously.'
'A gin and tonic would be just perfect. Preferably a long one, with lots of ice.'
Bronson left the room and returned a few minutes later, carrying a tray with two tall glasses in which ice chinked agreeably. He put the drinks down on the small dressing table and then returned to his perch on the side of the bed.
'Thanks,' Angela said. She raised the glass to her lips and took a long swallow. 'That's better. Now, where are we?'
'I've written out every word that we've managed to translate, and I've done a kind of drawing of each tablet,' Bronson said. 'I've included blanks for the words we haven't deciphered so that we know which words are missing.'
He placed a sheet of A4 paper on the table in front of Angela and they both looked at what he'd written on it. He'd drawn three rectangles of roughly the same size, and in each of them he'd put the English meaning of the words Angela had translated from the Aramaic, in the same position as the original word on the tablet. The result wasn't encouraging.
'This first one,' Bronson pointed at one of the boxed outlines, 'is the Cairo tablet. That's the top left of the four, if you're right about the meaning of the cross in the centre.'
As they'd both expected, there were far more blanks than words: our ----- ----- end ----- the by
and ----- ----- the ----- ----- -----
----- the temple scroll ----- task
----- a ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----- -----
'Now,' Bronson said, handing another sheet to Angela, 'as Aramaic is read from right to left, the words we've managed to translate should appear in this order.'
On the new page, he had just written the words in sequence, including all the blanks, except for the last two lines on which they'd so far failed to decipher even a single word:
by the ----- end ----- ----- our
----- ----- ----- the ----- ----- and
task ----- scroll temple the -----
----- ----- ----- ----- a -----
'That's not a hell of a lot to go on,' Angela muttered, then turned her attention back to the paper.
'This is the O'Connor tablet,' Bronson said.
'There were only eight words in this text that Baverstock managed to translate,' Angela said, 'and that complete second line definitely makes no sense to me.' ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
of four tablets Ir-Tzadok took perform
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- cubit ----- place ----- -----
'Nor to me,' Bronson said. 'This is the correct order of the words.'
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
perform took Ir-Tzadok tablets four of
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- place ----- cubit -----
The final oblong, containing the text of the tablet held in the Paris museum, read: within a days settlement scroll ben
our stones of B'Succaca from the
now side Jerusalem silver have the
we of the we cave completed
our height concealed cistern place now
invaders to of of of last
'And this is the list of words in the right order.'
ben scroll settlement days a within
the from B'Succaca of stones our
the have silver Jerusalem side now
completed cave we the of we
now place cistern concealed height our
last of of of to invaders
'When Baverstock described this as gibberish, he wasn't kidding,' Bronson added. 'Can you make any sense of it?'
Angela groaned. 'No,' she said, 'but whatever system of encryption the author of these tablets used, it must have been something fairly simple. I mean, at this period of history there were no sophisticated ciphers. We must be missing something, something pretty basic. The only thing that's fairly obvious is that Baverstock was right about Qumran.'
She pointed at the two lower oblongs Bronson had drawn. 'He said that this word here – Ir-Tzadok – might refer to Qumran. The full Aramaic name for the place was Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca, and the second part of that is right here on the Paris tablet. But,' she added, 'not even that makes much sense.'
'Why?'
'Because Aramaic text is read from right to left, not left to right, but the word Ir-Tzadok is on the left-hand tablet and B'Succaca is on the right. So if I'm right about the cross that was inscribed in the middle of the slab of clay before the tablets were cut out of it, then we should read the right-hand tablet first, then the left-hand one. So that would make those two words read B'Succaca Ir-Tzadok, which is nonsense, quite meaningless.'
'I see what you mean,' Bronson said slowly. He leant back in the chair and stretched. 'Look, we seem to have been stuck in this hotel room all day trying to work this out. Why don't we have a bite to eat downstairs? It might clear our thoughts, and we might even have a flash of inspiration.'
35
'I tell you, Charlie, I was lucky to get out of Morocco in one piece. If that bastard had guessed I was standing in the crowd, I really believe he'd have killed me right there.'
'And this was out in the open?' Charlie Hoxton was hearing for the first time about the events Dexter had witnessed in Rabat. The two men had met in a noisy pub near Petworth, and Dexter had just handed over the card that he'd obtained from Zebari. 'In broad daylight?' Hoxton persisted.
Dexter nodded. 'It was just after nine this morning, and there were plenty of people about. He didn't care at all. One of his men shot Zebari in the head, then they got back in the car and drove away. I just legged it, straight to the airport. I didn't even stop to pick up my clothes.'
Hoxton nodded and looked again at the piece of card he was holding, turning it over in his hands. 'And all he was interested in doing was getting this back,' he said to himself. 'That's good. Very good indeed.'
'What do you mean "good"?' Dexter demanded.
'I mean that if Zebari's killer is so desperate to recover the tablet, he must know it's genuine. But where the hell is it?'
Dexter ignored the question. 'He's bloody dangerous, Charlie, and he knows my name. He might be over here already, looking for me, and maybe for you as well.'
'I'm bloody dangerous too, Dexter, and don't you forget it.'
Across the table, Dexter could see the unmistakable bulge of a shoulder holster under Hoxton's left arm.
'And I'm not very impressed with this bloody card,' Hoxton snapped. 'The picture's not much better than the ones we've already got, and it's certainly not worth fifteen grand. Couldn't you have cancelled the deal once you saw it?'
'I tried,' Dexter said, 'but he pulled a gun on me.'
Hoxton grunted in displeasure. 'And what the bloody hell does this bit here say? Is that a copy of the Aramaic text?'
Dexter shook his head. 'No. That's just an explanation of where the tablet came from. It's in Arabic, but I've written out a rough translation for you.'
Hoxton dropped the card on the table and took the sheet of paper Dexter offered. He unfolded it and read the English text.
'Is this accurate?' he demanded.
'It's probably not an exact translation – my Arabic isn't good enough for that – but it's close enough, I think.'
Hoxton didn't reply, just scanned the words on the page.
'It doesn't tell us much, does it?' he said. 'It's like an exhibit card in a museum.'
Dexter nodded. 'Zebari told me the tablet had been displayed in a case in one of the public rooms in the owner's house, with the card beside it.'
Hoxton read out the first few lines from Dexter's translation. '"Ancient clay tablet recovered from the ruins of Pirathon or Pharaton (Greek), today the site of the Arab village of Farata in Israel. The inscription is in Aramaic but is garbled and the meaning is unclear. Possibly a part of a set." So where was this Pirathon or Pharaton?'
'I checked. It was a small town in what used to be called Samaria, not far from Mount Gerizim and about twenty miles north of Jerusalem. It was never a very important place, and there's pretty much nothing left of the original settlement now.'
'So how come this tablet finished up there?'
'We don't know that it did,' Dexter replied. 'What's on that card might just be the version that was offered for public consumption. After all, it's hardly likely to state it's been looted from some museum, is it? Don't forget that your clay tablet was once the property of a museum in Cairo, but I bet that's not what you tell people when you show them the relic.'
'You'd better believe that.'
Dexter gestured towards the paper Hoxton was still holding. 'You've already got one of the tablets and now a few blurred photographs of another one. What are you going to do next?'
'I'm not going to do anything,' Hoxton said. 'We are going to do our best to find the missing relic.'
'But you've only got one tablet, Charlie, and we've already worked out that there must be four in the set. How the hell are you going to find anything with well over half the text missing?'
'I've got Baverstock doing a trawl through every museum's database that he can access, looking for any other tablets that might have been recovered over the years. If he can get a decent picture of another tablet, I reckon we can crack this with two of them plus the partial translation of this tablet from Rabat. Whether he can or can't, we'll go out to the Middle East anyway. The picture on this card's better than any of the other pictures I've seen of this tablet, and Baverstock should be able to decipher at least half of it. This is probably the best chance we're ever going to have.'
'Surely you don't want me to come along as well?'
'Yes, I do. You're coming because I need your contacts, Dexter, and Baverstock's coming because we'll need his language skills – unless you've added Imperial Aramaic translation to your other skills.'
Dexter frowned, but after a moment he realized that getting out of Britain for a week or so might not be such a bad idea. If Zebazi's killer had sent some of his men to track him down, they'd presumably be looking for him in Morocco and the United Kingdom, not in Israel or wherever else Hoxton had in mind.
He sighed and leant back in his seat. It wasn't as though he had any choice in the matter in any case. 'No,' he said, 'I still can't read Aramaic, Charlie. So when do we leave?'
36
'You know,' Bronson said, as he and Angela strolled along a street near their hotel, enjoying the cooler night air, 'there's one thing we haven't really talked about, and that's the purpose of the tablets. I mean, exactly what did the people who made these tablets hide? What was their treasure?'
They had finished their dinner, and Ange
la had insisted that she needed to stretch her legs before going back to her room. She'd told Bronson that if he was still concerned about the armed men who had chased him before, she would go out on her own – after all, nobody even knew she was in Morocco. Bronson hadn't liked it, but he'd agreed to go outside with her. If something happened to Angela, he knew he'd never forgive himself.
'Whatever it was, it had to have been really important to them because of all the trouble they took. They enciphered the message on the tablets and then, presumably, hid them in separate locations so that the hiding place of their treasure could only be found when all four tablets had been recovered. And there are some clues in what we've found already. About half a dozen words in particular seem to me to be significant.'
'Let me take a guess. Those would be "scroll", "tablets", "temple", "silver", "concealed" and "Jerusalem"?'
Angela nodded. 'Precisely. Any kind of ancient scrolls are of interest to historians and archaeologists today, but if a scroll was hidden two millennia ago, that suggests it was believed to be really important even then. And if you prefix the word "scroll" with "silver", it raises a very interesting possibility—' She broke off as Bronson reached out and seized her arm, pulling her to a stop.
'What is it?' she demanded.
'I don't like—' Bronson started, looking first up the street, then back the way they'd come.
