The Boudicca Parchments dk-2

by Adam Palmer

  His father spoke again.

  “Do you remember I asked you about Daniel’s family?”

  “Yes. But like I told you, he’s divorced. And they didn’t have children.”

  “No,but I was thinking about his extended family… parents, brothers sisters, etc.”

  “I think he has three sisters. I know that one of them has three daughters, eight-year-old twins and a five year old.”

  Chapter 28

  “They’re a small, ultra-orthodox Jewish sect called Shomrei Ha’ir.”

  “I’ve heard of them. The most anti-Zionist Hassidic sect — ”

  “Everybody’s heard of them! And they’re not Hassidic. Ultra-orthodox, yes. But not Hassidic. Technically they’re a Lithuanian Jewish sect.”

  Daniel was looking at Sarit with that same feeling of lust that he had developed for her back in Israel, after he had seen through Gaby and her true colours. Physically they were very different women. Gaby, a former competitive swimmer, was taller than Daniel, whereas Sarit was barely five feet five. Yet despite the height, she was as fit as Gaby had been and had proved quite effective when the two women had engaged in a catfight in the shallows of the Jordan River. Gaby packed quite a bit of muscle into her small frame and now that she had taken off her biker’s leathers and stripped down to a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, she looked pretty damn sexy.

  “Push your eyeballs back in,” she told Daniel, firmly.

  His tension broke into a smile as he realized that he had been ogling her.

  They were in a safe house in Edgware, having got back to London via a series of A and B roads, to avoid the numerous CCTV cameras that now seemed to be everywhere.

  “How did you know they were going to be there?”

  “We’ve been keeping them under surveillance.”

  “We… being…”

  “The Mossad. There’s a limit to what I can tell you, but suffice it to say that when your name came up on the radar, Dovi took a personal interest in it.”

  Daniel remembered Dovi Shamir from his last little adventure. When he fled to Israel from Egypt, he had been interviewed by Dovi and initially given quite a hostile reception. But after that, a mutual respect had developed between them. Then, when Daniel foiled a plot to contaminate Israel’s water supply, he became something of a hero amongst the elite few who were truly in the know.

  Sarit Shalev had also been part of it. But she had not always been Sarit Shalev.

  She had first travelled to Israel from Cork in Ireland with her parents and brother, visiting Jerusalem’s numerous churches and wondering around the city as a curious eighteen-year-old. But a tranquil holiday was turned into something ugly when a suicide bomber injured her and claimed the life of her brother. After a short stay in an Israeli hospital, in which she saw Jews and Arabs treated by Israeli doctors — also both Jewish and Arab — she became increasingly interested in the conflict that had spawned the violence that had claimed her brother’s life.

  But she noticed the vast gulf between the one-sided reporting and the more complex reality on the ground. She witnessed, at first hand, Palestinians staging incidents with their children to try and provoke a reaction from Israeli soldiers, while cameras rolled nearby. And she saw the Israeli soldiers remaining calm in the face of this provocation. This prompted her to want to learn more about the Israeli army in particular.

  So the following year — bypassing the more traditional picking-apples-on-a-kibbutz option — she volunteered for eight weeks of equally menial duty on an Israeli army base under the auspices of an organization called Sar-El. It was soon discovered that she had a sharp mind and was a fast learner and so she ended up being given duties that a foreign volunteer would not normally be trusted with.

  This was followed by her bold decision to apply for permanent residence and volunteer for a full two years of service in the Israeli army, much to the horror of her parents. After some gruelling interviews to test her intelligence and sincerity, and in defiance of plaintive parental appeals to come home, she was accepted by the Israeli army and spent the next two years serving in communications.

  Upon leaving the army, she was planning to go to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study psychology. But she took the fateful decision of responding to an ad for a job interview involving “interesting work abroad.” After passing that interview and several more — where they looked deeper into both her motivation as well as intelligence — she went through a rigorous initial training course, that was itself part of the selection procedure. Only then was she inducted into the Mossad and the real hard work began.

  In the course of her training, she had proved herself more than usually resourceful, coming to the attention of Dovi Shamir by then a training officer after he had become compromised in Britain. He took the young Siobhan Stewart under his wing and singled her out for training as a kidon — an assassin. During that time she had changed her name, to the more Israeli sounding Sarit Shalev — with the emphasis on the second syllable in each case. Of course that was only the name she used when in Israel. She retained the name Siobhan Stewart, on her Irish passport, as it enabled her to work more freely internationally.

  “He sometime shortens his name to ‘Bar-Tikva’.”

  “Is that to sound more like Bar Kochba?”

  “Bar Kochba?” Sarit echoed. “Could be. But he seems more concerned with fighting against his fellow Jews over their lack of piety.”

  Bar Kochba — born Simon ben Kosiba, but renamed Bar Kochba, the Aramaic for “Son of a Star” by the great rabbi Akiva — was the leader of a Jewish uprising against the Romans in Judea in the year 135. Like the earlier Jewish rebellion between 66 and 72, it was brutally put down by the might of Rome. But it remains one of the high points in Jewish history for the struggle against tyranny.

  She had told Daniel about Shalom Tikva — AKA “HaTzadik”. She had explained about the telephone intercepts and the SHaBaK and Mossad watch lists. And she explained how Dovi had called her at short notice after booking her onto the London flight to keep tabs on Baruch Tikva.

  “But how did you know when and where he’d make his move?”

  By now they were sitting down in the living room of the safe house having a cup of tea.

  “I didn’t. I had a motorbike waiting for me at the airport and I followed him to an address in Belgravia — the home of a woman called Chienmer Lefou — nee Lowe.”

  “Chienmer Lefou?”

  “She calls herself ‘Lady Lefou’ although she isn’t really a lady.”

  “But who is she?”

  “Former model, professional trophy wife to the rich and titled, and now a well-spoken, but rather badly educated anti-Semitic whore.”

  “Ouch! Now tell me what you really think about her?”

  The smile didn’t leave Daniel’s face, nor the scowl Sarit’s.

  “She’s a holocaust denier — or rather a denier-lite. She tries to play down the numbers rather than make a fool of herself by disputing it outright. But she also uses her ever-dwindling social connections to help holocaust deniers. And she tries to spread anti-Israel propaganda and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories — although she mainly preaches to the converted.”

  “Is she open-eye or shut-eye?”

  Sarit was surprised by this question. The terms originally referred to spiritualists and self-styled psychics. It didn’t mean that they literally closed their eyes when they performed. Rather, it referred to whether or not they believed their own bullshit. Shut-eye meant they did. Open-eye meant they didn’t. Now the term was used also for conspiracy theorists. Shut-eye were the ones who bought the conspiracy theories — often paying large sums of money for the books and videos. Open-eye meant they sold them — literally — knowing full-well that they were lying through their teeth, but making a pretty penny in so doing.

  “Open-eye,” Sarit explained. “She may have initially been motivated by an argument she had with a Jewish woman about Lefou’s extravagance when arranging char
ity dinners. But after that she just went overboard, first venting her spleen for the sake of it and then realizing that she could actually make money out of it.”

  “But how did you know about her?”

  “I didn’t. I called in to Dovi. He checked the address online at the UK Land registry and got the owner’s name. He also checked it against the voting register to see who was actually registered as living there. Then he cross-checked the name against the various watchlists and needless to say it came up, with a whole long case file.”

  “How many names of you got on the watchlist?”

  “There are several lists, ranging from terrorists, to enemy-recruitables, to friendly recruitables to non-violent critics, etc. She’s on the non-violent critics and enemy-recruitables list. She’s seen as some one who would actively work against us if she could. Until now she’s been basically a talker. But the fact that Bar Tikva arranged to see her after Sam Morgan tried to kill you while he was working for them, meant that the meeting might have something to do with the attempts on your life. And of course because she’s on the enemy-recruitables list, she might be ready to do more than just talk. We knew that Bar Tikva didn’t go there just to have a chat.”

  “What do you mean ‘arranged to see her’?”

  Sarit looked confused.

  “Pardon?”

  “You said ‘Bar Tikva arranged to see her.’ That means it was pre-planned. How did you know?”

  Sarit blushed. She wasn’t supposed to reveal more than she had to.

  “Well we didn’t get it on an intercept, as we should have done. He used a new phone and we didn’t get its details until after that. His old phone actually went dead and we didn’t initially have the number of the new one. He probably ditched the old one for security reasons.”

  “So he knows he’s being watched?”

  “Not necessarily. He was probably just being cautious. But he may know now of course.”

  “And when you said ‘we didn’t get its details until after that…’.”

  Daniel smiled. Sarit smiled back.

  “You’ve got it. That’s how we tracked him.”

  “Tracked him?”

  “After I followed him to the Lefou woman, I waited down the road, keeping the place under surveillance. When he emerged, I followed him to a hotel in Golders Green. Then Dovi called me and told me that they’d got a lock on his new phone number and they were tracking him. So I stood down and checked into another hotel there. I got a call bright and early telling me that he was on the move and got dressed quickly and followed him again. He was picked up at the hotel by three men in a car and I followed them.”

  “They didn’t spot you?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “And where did they…”

  “They drove through north London into Hertfordshire to the court where you were appearing. I saw them going into the court building but obviously I couldn’t follow them in, because Bar Tikva would have recognized me from the plane. But I figured they wouldn’t try anything inside the court building.”

  “So you knew they were going to try and kill me?”

  “I suspected. I mean, after the last attempt, it seemed reasonable that they’d try again. And the fact that Shalom Tikva sent his son here after Sam Morgan botched it, plus the fact that they went to the court building, suggested that they were up to something along those lines.”

  “And you couldn’t have got some back up?”

  “Not at such short notice. Time was of the essence and we didn’t have enough specific information to go to the police.”

  “So my life was in your hands.”

  “Don’t worry Daniel. You’re safe in my hands.”

  Daniel smiled.

  “I suppose they’re registered as lethal weapons.”

  “Not quite. But I am trained to do my job.”

  She decided not to tell him that she was an assassin and not merely a field officer.

  “But I thought you guys always work in small teams — or even large ones.”

  She knew what he was talking about: the assassination in Dubai. Maybe she didn’t need to tell him that she as an assassin.

  “We work in small teams. We work in large teams and we work alone. We do whatever we have to do. The question is why do they want you?”

  He told her about the blurred picture sent to his phone, the text exchanges with Martin Costa and dropping the phone in the house when it went up in flames.

  “So you have no idea what was in the picture, other than that it was a Hebrew manuscript that he claimed to have found at the dig site?”

  “Yes. I mean either Hebrew or Aramaic. Martin Costa may have thought himself to be a great Theology scholar, but he wouldn’t have known the difference.”

  “So it looks like they’re trying to kill for nothing?”

  “Well assuming that what they’re doing has something to do with Costa, I guess so. But then again they don’t know that.”

  “Well regardless, Dovi regards you as an asset to be protected and if you want to come to Israel, we can keep you safe there.”

  “I can’t stay there forever. I have my career. I have my life to lead.”

  “Well we’ve got enough evidence to intercede on your behalf on the murder charge and to get them to arrest Bar Tikva. It’s just a pity that we don’t know what it is they’re after.”

  Daniel realized that he could trust Sarit, so he decided to come clean.

  “I did upload a copy to my cloud account.”

  “You did?”

  “Uh huh.”

  Daniel was enjoying Sarit’s display of enthusiasm.

  “Can I see it? There’s a computer here.”

  “With internet?”

  “High speed broadband.”

  “Then you may.”

  She led him upstairs to a room packed with computer equipment: a PC with four screens in one corner and a Mac with another four in the other. This wasn’t a computer room: it was a control centre for World War Three. Sarit threw the switch and the computer sprang to life. Daniel had expected the boot-up to be the bottleneck in this entire process. But the computer was on and ready for action in almost the blink of an eye.

  “Solid state hard drives,” said Sarit when Daniel looked at her quizzically.

  She eased the keyboard over in Daniel’s direction. He keyed in the URL of his cloud account, typed in one of his eMail addresses and then looked at her again, as if he expected her to look away while he logged on.

  “You’re worried about your password?” she asked incredulously. “You think we couldn’t get it if we were interested?”

  “Dovi probably already has,” he said with a shrug, and typed it in.

  In another blink of an eye, the screen refreshed with his account summary. A couple of clicks opened up the image that he had uploaded. Sarit looked at it. She was somewhat less equipped to read it than Daniel, although she was able to make out the shapes of some of the Hebrew letters.

  “You do know,” she said “that blurring of an image is usually caused by jerking the camera in one or another specific direction while the picture is being taken?”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “So?”

  “Well that means that the blurring has a certain specificity about it. If the picture is, say of black text on a yellowish background. Then the blurring involves a specific amount of black and yellow depending on the speed of the movement and the exposure time or digital equivalent.”

  “You’re talking in jargon,” he said.

  “What I’m trying to tell you is that we have people who can use image-enhancement technology to clean up this image and get the text.”

  Daniel’s puzzlement turned into excitement.

  “Let’s go for it.”

  Chapter 29

  Julia Sasson was now back in England along with Nat, Romy and the twins. She had heard about Daniel’s arrest and subsequent escape and had tried to contact him, but it went straight to voic
e mail. Although he had always been more of a scholar than a man of action, she knew from recent escapade in the middle east that her older brother could handle himself in a crisis. But not being able to contact him was worrying. She wanted the reassurance of hearing his voice. So far it had eluded her. She sensed however, that he would get in touch in his own time.

  In the meantime, however, she had her children to look after. That was her immediate priority. As it was still school holiday, she was taking them on an outing to Holders Hill Park. She had brought with her the usual collection of footballs, Frisbees, tennis rackets and tennis balls.

  She knew that they’d be hungry — probably sooner rather than later — but the cafe in the park was expensive, like almost all local monopolies. So she brought along a big collection of sandwiches, including egg and onions, smoked salmon and chicken schnitzel. She also brought along several bottles of water as well as grape juice and apple-and-pear juice.

  It had taken her time to find a parking space, but she had driven around, keeping her keen eyes open until she spotted a car about to leave and then she pounced. She got them out of the car and marshalled them together before using the key fob to look the car doors. With three children, even a simple task like crossing a narrow side-street was fraught with peril.

  As she crossed the road, she noticed a tall man dressed in the black attire of some ultra-orthodox sect. They were very near to Golders Green and ultra-orthodox Jews went to the park just like others. And the fact that he looked away from her when she met his eyes was typical of the ultra-orthodox. According to their belief system, they are not supposed to stare at women — especially with lust in their hearts — but they sometimes didn’t quite live up to their highest ideals.

  But what bothered Julia was the feeling that it wasn’t just a momentary glance.

  She couldn’t escape the feeling that he had been staring at her… and that he had been doing so for some time.