The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  'No, I suppose not. Are you sure Israel's the right place to start looking?'

  'Yes, because of the reference to Qumran. After that, who knows?'

  'Right,' Bronson nodded, 'I'll come with you.'

  'You can't, Chris. You're in the middle of a murder investigation.'

  'No, I'm not. I've finished the report about Morocco, I've got nothing to do with the investigation of Kirsty Philips's murder, and I'm owed at least ten days' leave. Dickie Byrd probably won't like it, but that's not my problem.' Bronson reached across the table and took Angela's hand. 'Look, I don't want you running off to Israel by yourself. I want to be close enough to take care of you.'

  Angela gave his hand a squeeze. 'Are you sure? That would be wonderful, Chris. I wasn't looking forward to forging on by myself. And we do make a pretty good team, don't we?'

  Bronson smiled at her. 'You bet,' he said. And we do, he thought contentedly, and not just as a pair of enthusiastic relic-hunters. But he knew he couldn't rush things . . .

  'Right,' Angela said briskly. 'I'll get on the internet and try to sort out flights to Tel Aviv. Once I've done that, I'll do some more work on that tablet. With that Aramaic text and the other bits of translations, I'm sure we can work out where the clues are pointing. We must have got more information about these hidden relics than anyone else, so we can be sure we'll be there at the kill.'

  'I hope that's just a figure of speech,' Bronson said.

  45

  Tony Baverstock looked at yet another list of clay tablets on the screen of his desktop computer and wondered, not for the first time, if there was any real point in continuing with the search. He must have studied pictures of hundreds of the things, and none of them – at least, none so far – had borne even the slightest resemblance to the one he was looking for.

  To complicate matters, there were some half a million clay tablets sitting in museum vaults and storerooms that had never been translated. The information about this huge repository of tablets was usually limited to just one or two poor-quality photographs and perhaps a very brief description of the provenance of each object – where it was found, its approximate date, that kind of thing.

  There were two reasons for his urgent search. First, Charlie Hoxton had called him the day before and told him to do it, which was in itself an entirely adequate incentive; second, his task had suddenly become even more crucial the previous afternoon, when he'd run into Roger Halliwell in the corridor outside his office. The head of department had looked more irritated that usual.

  'Something wrong, Roger?' Baverstock had asked.

  'It's Angela. She's gone off on another bloody wildgoose chase,' Halliwell had snapped. 'I've only just found out she's been in Morocco for the last couple of days, and now she's taken more leave to run off to Israel to study some Aramaic text. It's not her field, for God's sake. She should stick to what she's good at.'

  Baverstock hadn't commented, but suddenly felt sure that somehow Angela must have either found the missing clay tablet or at least got hold of a decent picture of the inscription on it. That had been enough for him to redouble his efforts.

  But despite his exhaustive research, he hadn't got his first 'hit' until the next morning. The picture of the tablet was of fairly poor quality, and he spent almost twenty minutes studying the Aramaic inscription before he finally realized that he was looking at the tablet Charlie Hoxton already owned, and which Dexter had 'sourced' from a museum in Cairo.

  With a snort of disgust, he closed the window on his computer screen and returned to his search. Two hours later, having changed his search parameters five times in an effort to reduce the sheer number of relics he was having to check out, he found himself looking at the Paris tablet. He printed all the images available in the database on the colour laser in his office, and spent a few minutes studying each of them with his desk magnifier before finally closing the connection to the museum intranet.

  Then he locked his office and left the building, telling his assistant he was going away for a few days unexpectedly. He walked down Great Russell Street, stopped at the same public phone he'd used before, and called Hoxton.

  'I've spent the last twelve hours looking for these bloody tablets,' he began.

  'Did you find anything?' Hoxton demanded.

  'I spent half an hour studying your tablet – the one you got me to translate – before I twigged what it was, the photographs were such poor quality. But eventually I got lucky. There's a clay tablet sitting in a storeroom in a museum in Paris that's definitely a part of the set. From the mark in one corner of it, it's the one that goes on the bottom right of the block.'

  'Can you translate the text from the pictures?' Hoxton asked.

  'There's no need,' Baverstock replied. 'The French have helpfully already translated the Aramaic for us. They translated it into French, of course, but obviously that's not going to be much of a problem. It'll just take me a little while to work out the best equivalent English words.'

  'Good,' Hoxton said. 'You're packed, I hope?'

  'Of course. I wouldn't miss this trip for the world. We're still booked on the flight this afternoon?'

  'Yes. I'll see you at Heathrow as we agreed. Bring all the pictures of the Paris tablet, and the French translation of the Aramaic, as well as your English version. This is going to be the trip of your lifetime.'

  Part Three

  Israel

  46

  The flight was no problem, but actually getting into Israel took Bronson and Angela several hours, and that was after they'd disembarked from the aircraft. The problem was the small blue square they each had stamped in their passports with the word 'sortie' printed in a vertical line down the left-hand side, a date in the centre and Arabic script across the top and down the right side – their exit stamps from Morocco.

  The Israeli authorities are notably suspicious of travellers arriving at any of their borders who have recently left an Arab country, even one as distant as Morocco. The moment the immigration officer had seen the stamps, he'd pressed a hidden switch and minutes later Bronson and Angela were whisked away into separate interview rooms while their luggage was found and comprehensively searched.

  Bronson had anticipated what their reception was likely to be, and they'd taken precautions to ensure that none of the photographs of the clay tablets, or of their translations of the Aramaic text, remained on Angela's laptop, just in case the Israelis wanted to inspect the contents of the hard disk. She had transferred all these files to a couple of highcapacity memory sticks, one of which was tucked away in the pocket of Bronson's jeans and the other hidden in Angela's make-up kit in her handbag. Back in London, they'd gone to Angela's bank, where she had a safety deposit box that held the deeds to her apartment and other important papers, and deposited the clay tablet there, because they didn't want to risk travelling with the relic.

  The questioning was thorough, relentless and competent. What had they been doing in Morocco? How long had they been there? Had they been there before? If so, why? All repeated again and again, the questions the same, though the way they were asked changed frequently as the interrogators looked for any discrepancies or alterations in their answers. Bronson, who had considerable experience in sitting on the other side of the table, interviewing suspects, was impressed by their thoroughness. He hoped that his police warrant card and Angela's British Museum identification were helping to establish their bona fides.

  Only towards the end of the interviews, when they were apparently satisfied with what they'd been doing in Morocco, did the officials begin asking why they'd come to Israel. Bronson had discussed this with Angela on the flight out, and they'd decided that the only right answer to this question had to be 'holiday'. Any other response would simply cause problems and certainly lead to more questioning.

  It was mid evening before they were finally allowed to leave the interview rooms by the unsmiling Israelis.

  'I don't mind the security checks they do here,' Angela said. 'At le
ast you can feel fairly safe on an El Al flight.'

  'We flew British Airways,' Bronson pointed out.

  'I know. I mean, when you're flying out of an Israeli airport, the chances of anyone being able to smuggle a weapon or a bomb on to a departing flight are almost nil. Did you know that all hold luggage is subjected to a pressure drop in a sealed bomb-proof chamber that simulates a high-altitude flight, just in case there's a bomb in a suitcase that's linked to a barometric switch? And that's in addition to everything being X-rayed and passing through explosive sniffers?'

  'No,' Bronson admitted, 'I didn't. And that is comforting, especially when you compare it to somewhere as leaky and slapdash as Heathrow. The security there is a joke.'

  Angela looked at him with a quizzical expression. 'I'm so glad you didn't tell me that before we took off.'

  Ben Gurion International airport is close to the city of Lod, about ten miles to the south-east of Tel Aviv, so the train journey only took a few minutes. The railway line followed the route of the main road into the city – in fact, for some of the distance it ran between the two carriageways – and they got off at HaShalom Station, at the edge of the industrial zone, and almost in the shadow of the hulking Azrieli Centre.

  Most of the hotels in Tel Aviv are unsurprisingly strung along the Mediterranean coast, but their prices are fairly high, so Bronson had booked two rooms in a more modest establishment tucked away in the side-streets near Zina Square, not far from a tourist office.

  They caught a cab from HaShalom to Zina Square, checked into the hotel and deposited their bags, then walked the short distance to the Lahat Promenade that borders Frishman Beach, found a restaurant and enjoyed a reasonable meal. Bronson wished fleetingly that they were going to return to the same room but he decided not to push this. They were in Israel, working together. This, for the time being, would have to be enough.

  The BMI flight had landed at Tel Aviv on time late that afternoon; two of the three passengers travelling together on British passports cleared customs and immigration without any particular delays. The third man, Alexander Dexter, was pulled aside and subjected to about an hour of detailed questioning before he was allowed to proceed. But he'd expected that to happen because of the Morocco exit stamp in his passport, so it didn't bother him.

  Outside the airport, he rejoined Hoxton and Baverstock, who'd already collected their pre-booked Fiat Punto hire car, and the three men drove off together, heading for the centre of Tel Aviv and their hotel.

  Just over two hours after the BMI flight landed at Ben Gurion, a flight arrived from Paris. On board were four men of distinctly Arabic appearance. Their French passports, which lacked any signs of transit through Morocco, raised no suspicions at all, although their luggage was thoroughly checked by the Israeli customs officers.

  Once they had left the airport in their Peugeot hire car, heading for a hotel they'd already booked on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the man in the passenger seat made a telephone call to a number in the city on a pay-as-you-go mobile that he'd bought just before they boarded the aircraft in Paris. Once he'd ended the call, he leant back and looked incuriously through the windscreen.

  'Everything OK?' the driver asked.

  'Yes,' the tall man known only as Yacoub said shortly. 'I know exactly where they are.'

  47

  The morning sun woke them both early – their rooms were side by side and faced east, towards the Haqirya district of Tel Aviv rather than towards the coast – and Bronson and Angela walked into the dining room just before eight to get some breakfast.

  'So what do we do first?' Bronson asked, as they sat over coffee afterwards.

  'I'll need to call Yosef and see if we can see him today.'

  'Who?' Bronson asked.

  'Yosef Ben Halevi. He works at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. He was involved in a project at the British Museum a few years ago and I met him then.'

  'And why do we need him, exactly?'

  'We need Yosef because he's an expert on Jewish history, and I'm not. I do know something about this area – about Qumran, for example – but not enough about the history of Israel to be able to interpret everything that's on that tablet. We need somebody like him, and he's the only authority I know over here.'

  Bronson looked doubtful. 'Well, OK,' he said, 'but you don't really know this man, so don't let him see the pictures of the tablet or the translations. I think we should keep all that to ourselves, at least for the moment.'

  'I was planning to,' Angela said. 'I'll call him right now.' She crossed to the reception desk.

  She was back in a few minutes. 'He's tied up all day, but he's agreed to drive over here to meet us this evening. Now, we'll need to try to translate the inscription on the tablet, obviously, but it might be useful if we visited Qumran as well, because it's the one location that we know is quite definitely mentioned in the combined inscriptions and so it's as good a place as any to start. I don't expect we'll find much of interest there, but at least it'll give us a feel for the kind of terrain we'll be searching here in Israel.'

  'Is it difficult to get to?'

  'It shouldn't be. Like Masada, it's a renowned archaeological site, so I'd be surprised if there weren't regular trips out there.'

  'There's a tourist office about a hundred yards away,' Bronson said. 'We passed it last night when we walked over to the beach. Let's nip over there and see if we can buy tickets for an organized tour.'

  In fact, there were no tours to Qumran. Or rather, there were, but only on certain days of the week, and the next one that had availability wasn't scheduled for another three days.

  'Not a problem,' Bronson said, as they left the tourist office. 'We'll hire a car. We'll need to be able to get around while we're out here. Do you want to go now?'

  Angela shook her head. 'No. I'd like to work on the inscription first. We'll drive over this afternoon.'

  'I don't want you to think I'm paranoid,' Bronson said, 'and I can't see any way that we could have been followed out here, but I still think we should keep out of sight. So I'd rather we didn't work in the hotel lounge or one of the public rooms.'

  Angela linked her arm through Bronson's. 'I agree, especially after all we've been through. My room's a bit bigger; why don't we work in there?'

  Back in her hotel room, Angela pulled a large paperback book out of her computer bag. 'I found this fairly decent Aramaic dictionary in one of the specialist bookshops near the museum in London. With this and the online translation site, I think we'll manage.'

  'Anything I can do?'

  'Yes. You can check the dictionary while I input the words into the online translator, so we have some form of cross-checking that we're doing it right. We need to do this slowly and carefully, because it's not just the language that's unfamiliar, it's the individual characters as well. Some of them are very similar, and we have to be certain that we're recognizing the correct symbols on the photographs. Let me show you what I mean.'

  She enlarged the image on the screen of her laptop and pointed at five symbols in turn that, to Bronson, looked remarkably similar. Then she copied them in a horizontal line on to a piece of paper. The line read:.

  'The first one,' she said, 'is daleth, which equates to "d" or "dh". The second is kaph or "k"; the third is nun or "n"; the fourth resh or "r", and the last one is waw, meaning "w". I'm reasonably familiar with the appearance of the language, though I don't normally get involved in trying to translate it, and to me – and certainly to you – those characters probably look pretty much identical. But obviously the meanings of the words will be completely altered if you put the wrong letter or letters into it. And bearing in mind we also have to take account of the individual idiosyncrasies of the hand of the person who prepared this tablet, this is going to take some time.'

  Angela was right. It took them well over an hour to complete the translation of just the first line of the tablet. Eventually they developed a technique that seemed to work for them. They would look at a word and
independently decide what each letter was. They wrote these down, then swapped notes to see if they agreed. If they'd come to different conclusions, they'd study that letter again, Angela magnifying the screen image – she had used an eight megapixel camera to ensure maximum definition – so they could look at each character in enormous detail. Only when both were satisfied that they'd got the letters themselves right did they turn their attention to the dictionaries.

  But even after taking such care, they still couldn't translate the first three words of the top line of the tablet – at least, not to begin with. They went back over each letter in turn, choosing alternatives, and eventually managed to decipher the second and third words as "copper" and "the", but the first word, no matter what combination of different characters they tried inserting, didn't appear to be in either the printed Aramaic dictionary or any of the online versions.

  'Right,' Angela said, her frustration evident, 'we'll come back to that later. Let's move on to the next line.'

  48

  Hassan pulled the hire car to a stop in a car park – really little more than a dusty piece of waste ground – on the outskirts of Ram Allah, a small settlement north of Jerusalem and deep in the territory of the West Bank. Almost as soon as he'd stopped the vehicle, two other cars nosed their way into the parking area and braked to a halt close by. As Hassan and Yacoub climbed out of their car, four men – all wearing jeans and T-shirts – emerged from the other vehicles and walked over to them.

  'As-Salaam alaykum,' Yacoub said formally. 'Peace be upon you.'

  'And upon you,' the apparent leader of the group replied, then asked: 'You have the money?'

  Yacoub turned to Hassan, who reached slowly into the outside pocket of his light jacket and pulled out a bundle of notes, then stepped forward. Yacoub raised his arm to stop him advancing any further.