by Adam Palmer
Chapter 91
Martin Costa’s jaw dropped.
“Da… Da… Daniel! What a pleasant surprise.”
He was trying to sound chummy – and he even forced his lips into a false smile to go with it. But the tone of Daniel’s reply was hostile.
“What are you doing here?”
The false smile vanished from Costa’s face.
“What? Oh er I’m here on holiday. Just doing a spot of sightseeing.”
“Pull the other one Costa; it’s got bell’s on.”
“Okay, well. I suppose you know now I’m not dead.”
“I know a lot more than that. If you’re not dead, then you set it up. Set it up to make it look like you were dead. Set it up to make it look like I killed you. Or even set it up to kill me too.”
“Oh no Daniel I’d never do that.”
“The hell you wouldn’t! I barely made it out of that place alive!”
“Oh come, come Daniel. I’m sure you’re exaggerating. A fit, healthy man like you.”
It sounded patronizing. But Daniel would have been angry however Costa had put it.
“I lost consciousness in the smoke! I just about managed to stagger out of there. I could’ve been killed!”
The anger in Daniel’s eyes was reflected by the fear in Costa’s.
“Well I can assure you that wasn’t my intention.”
“And I suppose you didn’t kill that other guy.”
“Well no er… I mean actually I er did kill him. But it was self-defence.”
“Self defence. The guy was out cold! What did you have to burn him to death for.”
“I didn’t burn him to death Daniel, I swear! He was already dead!”
“Then why the fire? If you weren’t trying to kill me?”
“I was trying to conceal the time of death. And the circumstances. I needed a smokescreen – if you’ll excuse the pun.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The idea was that they’d think I was dead. That would give me room to go about my… er… business.”
“Who was he?”
“Just some old meths-swilling tramp.”
“That didn’t give you the right to kill him.”
“I already told you, it was self-defence. And anyway, he’d’ve been dead within three months with his lifestyle.”
“What do you mean self-defence? How? When? Where?”
“In the office shed… at the dig site… at Arbury Banks. He was probably just looking for a place to use as a sleeping shelter. But he burst in when I was looking at the parchment and studying it. But when the door flew open, my instinct was to roll it up and try to hold on to it. He must have sensed that it was something worth getting his hands on. Anyway, he made a grab for it and when I pulled it out of his reach, he made a grab for me.”
“And?”
“Well at that point I panicked. I picked up a paperweight from the desk and smashed it over his head. He must have already been weak from all the drinking and meths and all that ‘cause he died. And then I… I guess I panicked a second time ‘cause I decide to move the body and make it look like he died in a fire. I knew about the old uninhabited house on the way there, ‘cause I’d passed it. So I decided to use it.”
“You mean you decided to use me! You invited me to meet you because by then you’d already decided what you were going to do. You didn’t invite me to the house until you were sure you could transport the body there undetected, so you told me to meet you at the pub instead. But then you took the body to the house and then when I came back to England, you phoned me at the pub and sent me to the house, intending to kill me there.”
“Not to kill you.”
Daniel stared at him long and hard. It was true. Martin Costa didn’t have the heart of a killer.
“Okay, maybe you did hope I would make it out of there alive. But you did try to frame me.”
“It wasn’t that, it’s just that you were a natural suspect. That was just the police, jumping to conclusions.”
“And who made that anonymous phone call telling them they’d seen me siphoning off petrol from the tank of the car I’d hired?”
A guilty smile crept on to Martin Costa’s face.
“Okay… maybe I did try to set you up. But only to negate the threat. I mean I needed some one to take the rap and I needed to make it look like I was dead. You know how hard it is for a man with my reputation. I figured that if I could establish myself as dead I could set up shop elsewhere. You know, like Sherlock Holmes pretended to be dead for three years, concealing his true fate even from his friend Doctor Watson.”
“I don’t think that analogy works too well Costa. Moriarty might be a better comparison.”
Costa smiled.
“You flatter me.”
“Right now I’m more inclined to flatten you.”
“Oh very good! Achilles and the Turtle!”
But Daniel was in no mood for humour.
“You were calling yourself Sam Morgan weren’t you?”
The look on Costa’s face changed to one of fear.
“How the hell did you know that?”
“Let’s just say that you haven’t been quite as clever as you thought. People have been watching you.”
“Wha – what people?”
“The kind of people who don’t like what Shomrei Ha’ir have been doing… or what you’ve been helping them with.”
Costa’s voice took on a tone of denial.
“I was never part of them! We merely had certain mutual interests.”
“Membership is hardly the issue! You were helping their cause.”
“Not their cause Daniel. My own.”
“They weren’t that pragmatic. They would never have trusted you if you’d told them your aims were purely venal. Even Chienmer Lefou had common cause with them.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I told them that I supported their cause. But it was just a ruse to get them to trust me. I only did it so I could get close to them. I mean they paid me for the parchment. But I had to carry on playing along with them. I knew that the treasure would turn up sooner or later. You see they knew about the connection between Boudicca’s daughter and Bar Giora.”
“I know. They had the original Josephus manuscript – the Aramaic original.”
“Well there you are then. And I’d researched it and suspected the connection after I read about tartan fabrics from Judea.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just something I read. Remember Joseph’s coat of many colours? How the literally translation means a ‘coat of stripes’.”
“I know,” said Daniel. “And some people think that means tartan.”
“Well tartan fabrics were traded all over the Roman empire – just like other things. That’s how tartan got to England. But some of them in Britain were identified as coming from plant fabric grown in Judea in the second half of the first century. That’s how I became interested.”
“And you put it together from that?”
“I wouldn’t say I put it together. But I suspected the link. And I always wondered about what happened to Boudicca’s treasure.”
Daniel scowled at this odious, venal man.
“And of course treasure is all you care about.”
“Is there anything wrong with that? You’ve got what you wanted. Why shouldn’t I get what I want?”
He lifted up his rucksack to indicate what he was talking about.
“Because it’s too late for that Costa.”
“Too late? Why? You’ve got the two manuscripts – or at least access to them.”
“I’ve got the translation of the ketuba too – and the map.”
“The map?”
“It doesn’t matter Costa. What matters for you is that the game is up.”
“All right… look… I’ll give you the treasure. You can have it all Daniel. Everything. Do what you like with it. Keep it for yourself. Or give it to charity. Whatever
you like. Just let me go. Let’s forget this ever happened. The bad guys are dead. You can have Boudicca’s treasure and the prestige or rewriting the history books. Just let me walk away and we can wipe the slate clean.”
“I can’t do that Costa. You see too much water has flowed under the bridge. Too many people have died. Too many people have suffered.”
“But that wasn’t me Daniel,” said Costa, picking up the rucksack and holding it close to himself, like a cherished lover. “That was Bar Tikva and his father.”
“But you were part of it!”
“But only a small part. I’m not really responsible, Daniel.”
“We’re all responsible for our actions, Costa – and for the consequences. And now you’re going to have to answer for yours.”
Daniel realized afterwards that he should have been more careful. He should have seen the look in Martin Costa’s eyes. But he didn’t catch it – at least not in time to brace himself for what came next. For in that split second, Costa swung the rucksack at his head. He managed to put up an arm to block it. But the weight of the rucksack – packed with gold and silver – was sufficient to send Daniel flying.
And as Daniel fell, Costa took off for the exit, before Daniel had even hit the ground!
But he didn’t get far. For when he turned the corner and reached the entrance, he slammed into the rock hard chest of a tall, muscular man who towered over him by almost a head and who looked down on him with a face of implacable anger. And before Costa could say another word, the left fist of the man shot out and delivered a crushing punch that broke Costa’s nose and sent him reeling onto his back, the stars dancing before his eyes.
“That’s for my daughters!” said Nathaniel Sasson.
Epilogue
“You want a date?”
Daniel turned round to see a pretty young woman standing there holding a large serving platter. She was not asking Daniel if he wanted to go out with her but rather offering him a dried date to eat. He picked one on a skewer and chewed it slowly, savouring it and thinking about its enigmatic significance.
Daniel was back on the plateau of Masada a week later, along with several hundred other people. The event that had brought them all there was the swearing in of an Israel army unit. One of Daniel’s other sisters – Naomi – had two sons in the Israel Defence Forces, and her younger son was about to be sworn in to his unit along with another hundred and twenty young men who had just completed their basic training.
The practice of swearing in at Masada had fallen into disuse but was now being revived and Daniel’s nephew was to be one of the first in this newly revived tradition.
The reason that the date was of such significance was on account of its provenance. During the excavations at Masada between 1963 and 1965 a small cache of ungerminated seeds were found in a jar by Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer. They were suspected of being 2000 years old. However this could only be tested, by radiocarbon dating, and this was a destructive test that would make it impossible to germinate them thereafter. But the prospects of germinating such old seeds was anything from low to non-existent and it was deemed to be sufficiently important to find out the age of the seeds, for the historical value of the information.
So two of the seeds sent to the University of Zurich where they were carbon dated to between 155 BCE and 64 CE. The remainder of the seeds were given to botanical archaeologist Mordechai Kislev at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv who kept in storage for some forty years. Then, in November 2004, Sarah Sallon, director of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem asked Kislev if she could have a few to pass on to desert agriculture expert Elaine Solowey, the director of the NMRC cultivation site at Kibbutz Ketura in the Aravah desert.
Solowey was quite surprised at the request, as germinating 2000 year old seeds was something that had never been done before and calling it a “tall order” would have been an understatement. However, she rose to the challenge, and conducted extensive research into how such seeds might be germinated. By January 2005 she was ready to apply her research to the challenge and she set to work, first soaking the seeds in hot water to soften them and make them more absorbent to other liquids, then soaking them in a nutrient, following this up by treating them with an enzymatic fertilizer that was made from seaweed.
Solowey then planted the seeds on the 25th of January 2005. She chose that date for symbolic reasons, because it coincided with Tu Bishvat, the Jewish “New Year for Trees” – a harvest festival when Jews celebrated the renewal of fruit growth after the winter. Two months later, one of the seeds sprouted into a date palm and continued to flourish over the next few years. Because of its age, it was named Methuselah, after the Biblical character who reputedly lived till the age of 969. Three years later it had reached a height of four feet and two years after that it stood well over six feet tall.
Unfortunately, date palms can be male and female and although the males can pollinate the females, only the females can bear fruit. Much to the disappointment of all concerned, Methuselah was male and so could not yield fruit. However, three other seeds started to flower, two of them date palms and one of them Myrrh. One of the date palms had recently flowered and proved to be female. It was this second plant that had produced the first dates of the ancient plant that the honoured guests and relatives of the soon to be sworn in soldiers were now eating.
The flowers of the female plant would also be pollinated later with pollen from Methuselah, thus preserving the entire ancient genome.
As he chewed the date slowly and savoured its rich flavour, Daniel pondered its significance: the triumph of a stubborn people over others who thought themselves culturally superior and believed that this gave them an excuse to Lord it over others. He thought about modern Israel and wondered if, to some small extent at least, they had become like their ancient enemies.
But then he recalled the cruelty and tyranny that Israel’s modern enemies were capable of – even towards their own brethren. And he realized also that it was precisely because the Jewish people had modernized – because they had been able to look to the future, without forgetting the past – that they had managed to bridge the gap between history and destiny in a way that few other nations could even understand.
And in that moment, he realized – that warts and all – Israel was a country that it’s people had a right to proud of. As if sensing the thought going through his mind, his sister Naomi – the proud mother of the young soldier – came into his view and walked towards him. They were joined by Simone and Julia, his other siblings, Nat and Barry (Naomi’s husband). Their parents couldn’t be there: they were babysitting for Romy and the twins.
The siblings and in-laws exchanged a few words about the events of the last two weeks. Daniel explained that the Israeli authorities had interceded on his behalf with the British government and the charges against him had been dropped – including any possible charges relating to his escape. Martin I Costa would be extradited to England to stand trial for Arson, Unlawfully Disposing of a Body, Perverting the Course of Justice and quite possibly attempted murder – all charges arising out of the fire at the house in Ashwell. There was even a possibility that Chienmer Lefou would also be prosecuted.
But it was now time for the families and guests to take their places, as the swearing in ceremony was about to begin. First came the marching-in and the speeches. Daniel sat through them tolerantly, but it was not the speeches he had come to hear. He came here to see the flame being lit and his nephew proclaim in proud and defiant tone – in unison with his fellow soldiers – the words that would guide him not just for the next three years, but also for the rest of his life thereafter:
“Masada shall not fall again!”
THE END
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