Rabbi Gabrielle Ignites a Tempest (21 page)

"You've been a wonderful support, Iti. I'm
not sure how I would cope without you. But I came to find Tim. Now
I know he's alive and probably nearby."

"He's a fugitive. Antiquities theft is a very
serious crime in this country. It's like desecrating Jewish history
and you as a rabbi ought to understand how sensitive Jews can be
about their past. Despite how much I want to help, I'm a government
official. I have two jobs: one, to take possession of everything
found in Cave XII and, two, to arrest anyone with historical
artifacts that don't belong to them. There are probably mitigating
circumstances, but Tim is suspected of looting. He's also a prime
suspect in the killing of the Bedouin youth."

Anxiety and anger caused her face to flush.
"I know he's in big trouble," she said while thinking about his
discovery of a lifetime
and his presence
in Mea She'arim. Eventually, she'd have to disclose what she knew,
but for the moment, she didn't feel ready. "Let's finish up here
for the night. I'm exhausted and, to tell the truth, this apartment
gives me the creeps."

He returned to the kitchen, calling to her.
"We have to find a safe place for you."

She stopped stacking books and shuffled over
the floor to the kitchen, speaking to Itamar's back. "Now that I
know he's in Jerusalem, he might need my help."

Itamar eased back and lifted himself from his
knees, staring at her across the kitchen. "Think about what you're
saying. The law will deal with you the same way it deals with Tim.
Both of you will be punished, and I won't be able to protect
you."

"That's a chance I must take. Every bone in
my body tells me that Tim's no criminal. We don't have the full
story. When we do, it won't be the way it appears."

"If he hasn't stolen anything, why is he
hiding? Believe me, Gabrielle, you don't want to be complicit in
this."

The argument continued until both realized
that no headway was being made. Gabby asked Itamar to leave,
pleading exhaustion and saying she needed rest.

"Bolt the door after me," he said. "And check
the locks on all your windows. Don't answer the door for anyone
unless you're absolutely sure who it is. Keep the chain lock on as
you look into the corridor. If you suspect anything, call Major
Zabronski's office immediately. They'll be able to send help faster
than I can."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Senior officials at the Antiquities Authority
rarely bothered to knock before entering the office of a colleague.
Shmuel Navid, a fastidious scholar who generally confined himself
to the science rather than the politics of Israeli antiquities, was
eager to share a discovery with Itamar and barged into the
director's office. Itamar was on the phone, so Shmuel was forced to
wait for the conversation to end, then announced, "I've followed up
on your request, Iti, and compared the University of Pennsylvania's
time sheets with their GPS records. You had the right instincts.
They don't jive."

Itamar stiffened in his chair. More than
anyone, he wanted to figure out how the looters had discovered Cave
XII when nobody at the Authority had a clue. But at the same time,
he had secretly hoped that the answer to this question would not
come through association with the University of Pennsylvania's
Qumran expedition. Shmuel brought both good and bad news. He said
in a low voice, "This will cost us our jobs, you know. The PM will
have our heads for this."

From the moment he learned about Cave XII,
Itamar believed he would soon be asked for his resignation. His
lack of progress in finding what was looted or arresting Tim
Matternly exacerbated the situation. But after meeting with the
deputy prime minister, he came to appreciate that secrecy in the
Qumran matter was even more important to the powers that be than
accountability. Aware that Shmuel had a penchant for take the
negative side of issues, Itamar had long since given up trying to
counter this pessimism with brighter pictures. But knowing his
scientific director wasn't good at thinking politically, he
countered by saying, "The ministry can't clean shop without
attracting attention. As long as the government wants to keep the
cave at Qumran under raps, we're safe. God help us when this leaks
to the press. So what did you find?"

"The U of Penn expedition billed us for
twenty-seven days of on-site work."

"How can I forget? I had to justify to the
Ministry spending $364,000 for discovering absolutely nothing.
Nada
."

"Not exactly nothing, Iti. I found only
twenty-six days of GPS records. They billed us for twenty-seven
working days, but provided documentation for only twenty-six."

"So you think they discovered something on a
day they didn't report?"

"We were taken for a ride, and a very costly
one."

"With all the checks and balances we
instigated, how did they get away with it?"
Shmuel carried with him
oversized records folded into thick wads and secured with oversized
rubber bands. He spoke while unfastening the package. "All this is
on digital disks, but I've printed hard copies to make it easier.
We know now the exact GPS coordinates for Cave XII, so I decided to
work back from these bearings and revisit what Penn recorded at
this location. I punched in the precise coordinates for the cave to
bring up the radar scans the project coordinator left with us."

"Did they show something we didn't see?"

Shmuel unfolded his papers, pointing to a GPS
map of Qumran, with a penciled circle marking the cave entrance.
"What's interesting is at the precise GPS location, the Penn report
doesn't show any depression in the earth. No cave entrance. No
cavity. Nothing but solid sandstone."

"Obviously, someone doctored the results,"
Itamar said.

"Someone who knew we would carefully review
these GPS findings. And we did. You first, then me, and at least
four others in this office."

"And did you check the technical settings for
the radar transducer as I asked?"

"I did. And here's where they outfoxed us.
The university's on-site radar operator must have discovered the
cave with the transducer operating under normal power. But he later
went back and rescanned the same terrain using a much lower power
setting. That gave him a negative sounding for the same location.
He simply destroyed the earlier chart showing the cavity and
submitted to us the negative scan taken with lower power."

"So simple," Itamar declared with a deep
sigh. "That's why we never recognized the ruse. Assumptions always
bedevil us. It just never occurred to me that someone would turn
down the juice."

Shmuel became more animated as he capped his
argument. "And this explains the difference between the billing and
the work days. The expedition's administrator sent the bill for the
twenty-seven days his team was on site, unaware that the
scientific-technical team provided one less day of GPS radar
reports. My guess is the operator deleted the findings for a day
when they scanned at some distance from the cave entrance. Then, if
we had noticed the discrepancy, he would have produced the negative
report, chalking it up to a clerical error. We would then have
scrutinized the missing day's report, maybe even had the area
rescanned, but, finding nothing, would have been convinced
everything was kosher. The operator bet that we wouldn't review
reports on the days that had been properly documented. And we
didn't."

"Any idea who's responsible?" Itamar
snapped.

Shmuel shook his head from side to side.
"We're now reviewing the signatures for all the operators who
signed off on the work."

"I remember how we certified everybody. Each
technician had a special identity badge which I personally
signed."

"Should we apprise the university president?"
Shmuel asked.

Itamar withdrew into his thoughts for a
moment before saying, "How can we do that with the Qumran fiasco
still unresolved? Besides, we know Penn will deny everything and
throw an army of American and Israeli lawyers at us. I'd prefer to
first pinpoint the culprits before making this into a
casus belli
."

"Without American assistance, that's going to
be tough. If we identify who screwed us, maybe he'll lead us to the
looters."

Itamar showed the first signs of impatience.
"I'm not certain they're the same people."

"If he didn't want to profit from his
discovery, why would a radar operator go to all this trouble?"

"This sounds to me like the work of a
technician who never intended to loot the cave himself. That's why
he waited two years. If you want my guess, he waited patiently,
then sold the cave location to people prepared to pay."

"Mafia?"

"Looks like it."

"Maybe Timothy Matternly's the wrong
target."

"Hang with this, Shmuel," Itamar said as his
associate back stepped toward the office door. He immediately
angled away to look out the window, but just as Shmuel stepped into
the corridor, Itamar called him back. "One last thought, friend. If
you possessed vital information about the location of a Dead Sea
cave, would you restrict it to a single buyer?"

"If that was my game plan."

"How about an auction? What would stop you
from selling the same information to more than one buyer? Why not
get two or three fees rather than one?"
Shmuel wrinkled his brow
before saying, "If there are multiple buyers and one is the mafia,
that's a nonstop ticket to heaven."

"Two years have passed since the cave was
discovered. A lot can occur in that time."

Shmuel said nothing to this. He now had a new
possibility to mull over

***

Tim spent ten days updating software
retrieved from his apartment in Rehavia. It was now eight years
since he had finished the actual coding and used this software to
decipher the original Qumran fragments. During the intervening
period, many improvements had come to mind, but without new
documents to compile, he had little motivation to incorporate them
into his program. That, he realized, had been a tactical mistake
because now that a new cave had disgorged a trove of text, his
software was woefully inadequate. And in the meantime, several good
ideas to update this code had been lost. Additionally, any complete
software would have to accommodate for matching the DNA of similar
parchments, though now that meant nothing to Tim because he had
left the original texts behind for Father Benoit.

Scanning performed at the Monastery of St.
George revealed 4,237 phrases, full words or partial words, and
9,765 individual letters. Tim first sorted them into groups,
starting with the full words and phrases. Partial words were then
divided into subcategories of those with sufficient letters to
propose a meaning and those that wouldn't support an intelligent
guess. The 9,765 stray letters were alphabetized according to the
twenty-two consonants of Hebrew and Aramaic. His software also
recognized the decomposed parchment edges of each scanned fragment,
and where other fragments were obviously complementary, they were
merged. Where it was clear that individual fragments were part of a
larger unit, they were joined. Unfortunately, such felicitous
situations were rare.

While Tim tinkered with his code, Rav
Schreiber busied himself by perusing volumes of rabbinic texts his
deceased neighbors had bequeathed to him. They referred to his
apartment as a
genizah
, a permanent
depository for books harboring the sacred name of God—discarded
tractates of the Mishna and Gemora, commentaries of Rashi, the
Ramban, and the Rambam, endless forgotten
responsa
letters seeking rabbinical interpretations of
pressing laws—volumes so sacred they could never be physically
destroyed, no matter how faded, dog-eared or decayed their pages.
Zechariah Schreiber readily accepted these holy volumes as if lost
cousins who had shown up on his doorstep to reside permanently in
his crowded apartment. Not only did he clean and stack the new
manuscripts, but included each in a schedule for obligatory review,
reading a chapter from each volume at least once a year. Tim soon
came to appreciate how this bizarre behavior was nothing short of
Schreiber's salvation. Now that most of his fellow scholars had
made their final journey to study Torah in the
Yeshiva shel-Maalah
, the heavenly academy, he fussed
over every volume placed into his custody. Tim liked to think that
while Zechariah kept his books from oblivion, they protected him
from the Angel of Death.

During the six-year interval since
collaborating on
Fragments from the Dead Sea
Scrolls
, Schreiber's macular degeneration had left him
almost blind in one eye. A cataract operation on the other provided
him with partial sight. He made a habit of listening to what Tim
read, then in a weak, unevenly hand wrote full words on a notepad,
distinguishing subjects from predicates, adverbs from adjectives.
Proper names were subdivided into given names and surnames.
Periodically, he handed the pad to Tim who would enter this
transcription back into his computer. New and old constructions
appeared on split screens for easy comparison.

There were times when the rabbi would close
his eyes to explore an encyclopedic memory cultivated over a
lifetime of Torah study. Several minutes would elapse before his
eyes would reopen and his tongue wet his lips with a smacking
sound. He would begin by saying, "Dat is..." and then declare a
word or phrase for Tim to record. When the rabbi wrestled with a
perplexing puzzle for long intervals, Tim couldn't be sure if he
had shut his eyes for the last time, never to reopen them again.
But whether he was actually snoozing or delving deep into his
reservoir of knowledge, he would eventually wake with a start,
accompanied by a miraculous grammatical or syntactical
solution.