The Boudicca Parchments (17 page)

But he asked for nothing of them. He asked only of God.

But his next words troubled them.

“Help me to kill Daniel Klein.”

Chapter 40

“What’s up?” asked Sarit, noticing the distressed look on Daniel’s face as she walked through the door.

“I saw the news… about my sister.”

Sarit – who had been in the process of removing her biking leathers – stopped stone still and looked at him.

“She’s okay.”

“I know! I’ve – ”

He was about to say “I’ve spoken to her,” but she would probably then go into panic mode about him using the phone. So he had to think quickly.

“I’ve seen on the news. They said she was unharmed.”

Sarit carried on stripping down to her indoor clothes.

“They also said the attack was foiled by a man on a motorbike.”

Sarit, who was by now back in a T-shirt and shorts smiled alluringly.

“I’m flattered.”

Despite his anger at being kept out of the loop, Daniel couldn’t help but smile back at her.

“You might have told me.”

“Told you what? And when? I only just got back.”

“You could have told me before you left.”

“Before I left I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“I could have come with you.”

“And done what? Get in the way? Get yourself caught? Slowed me down? Look Danny, these people want to silence you. They’ve tried once already. This time they were going to grab one of your nieces for leverage.”

“So it
was
an abduction attempt.”

“Of course it was.”

“Not a murder attempt.”

“How would it help them to kill anyone else in your family? You remember the old dictum of Capablanca, the chessplayer – the threat is greater than its execution? That was their game. They wanted to grab one of your nieces to use her as a bargaining chip.”

“But how did you know? In advance I mean?”

“I’m not really supposed to say. Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

He looked pitiful – angry, but pitiful. She wasn’t supposed to say, but after a few seconds, she did.

“Intercepts.”

“You’re tracking them and listening in?”

“Project Echelon – an alliance between the NSA, GCHQ and the Urim monitoring station in Israel.”

Daniel was amazed.

“Then why don’t you just tell Scotland Yard and get them picked up?”

“We can do that and get Baruch Tikva. But we also want to get the people behind him. Some of them are here and some of them are in Israel. We want to get all of them.”

“And how many of them are there?”

“Well there are several organizations involved. It’s not a simple case of one organization. There’s
Shomrei Ha’ir
and then there are some anti-Semitic lunatics here in Britain. And they in turn work with holocaust deniers, the Iranians and fascist and neo-Nazi groups. It’s all one big network of meshuganas.”

“And you think you’re going to get all of them?”

“Well obviously not
all
of them. But we hope to bag a few of them, if we can hold off and find out what exactly it is they’re after.”

“And in the meantime I’ve just got to sit tight while you babysit.”

“I’m afraid so. Did you have a chance to read through the witness reports?”

She walked further into the room as he sat down at the coffee table and picked up one of the printouts.

“Not yet. I was concentrating on the post mortem report.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Their were traces of animal fibres under his fingernails.”

“What animal?”

“Cowhide – unsplit, untanned cowhide.”

“You think he might have been on a farm?”

Daniel smiled.

“No you don’t understand. We need to get them to carbon date those fibres.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think they were from a living animal – or even a recently killed animal. I think they were from old parchment.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“You have to understand something about Jewish scribes and Jewish religious law pertaining to religious documents. All Jewish documents were handwritten by scribes on parchment made from cowhide.”

“But I’ve seen Jewish religious books printed on paper.”

“Yes, but those books are not originals. Prayer books and books for scholarship are another matter, but actual religious artefacts like torah scrolls have to be handwritten by a scribe and made from parchment. The same goes for the text inside a mezuzah that Jews put on their doorposts – and also tefillin.”

“To fill in what?”

“Not ‘to fill in’ –
tefillin
. Those leather boxes that orthodox Jews strap to their arms and foreheads when they recite morning prayers. They have pieces of parchment inside them with certain paragraphs from the Torah. And there are special rules about what type of parchment can be used for what items. For example the parchment in the mezuzah can be made from either the inner or outer part of the hide or from the unsplit hide, a type of parchment called
gevil
. Torah scrolls are supposed to be made ideally from the
gevil
– the unsplit hide – but
can
be made from the outer hide or
klaf
. And tefillin can only be made from the outer hide.”

“Why such complex rules?”

“Well for
tefillin
, space was at a premium and the outer skin was thin and so it made good, efficient use of the available space. For a Torah scroll, the main concern was
durability
, because the scroll is taken out and read from and rolled on from one week to the next. So they wanted something that would last a long time. The main advantage of
gevil
was that it had precisely that durable and long-lasting quality. Also of course, a complete Torah is too long for a single animal hide, so they had to make it in several pieces and stitch them together. It’s easier to stitch together when it’s a thick, unsplit hide. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on gevil.”

“So do you think that this manuscript Costa found might have been a Torah scroll?”

“It’s possible. Or maybe the parchment from a mezuzah.”

“But why would he have fibres under his fingernails?”

“Well, let’s not forget he was killed by some one – quite possibly over the parchment. Maybe there was some sort of fight… a struggle for the parchment. Costa must have tried to hold on to it and the other person killed him.”

Sarit nodded.

“That makes sense.”

“And now the manuscript is gone and our only hope of finding out what it was is if your boffins at the Mossad managed to enhance the image sufficiently to make the writing legible.”

Sarit perked up at these words.

“You’re right. They should have finished the image enhancement by now. I’ll check.”

She logged on from the tablet and a smile lit up her face.

“Take a look at this,” she said, handing him the tablet.

He looked at it and what he saw amazed him. The letters had assumed a new clarity under the skilled hand – and computer software – of the experts who had worked on the digital image enhancement and what he found himself looking upon was a page of a manuscript in the form of the Hebrew alphabet that was used in Judea circa the first century. But the language was Aramaic. And as he started translating it, it dawned on him what he was reading.

“Holy shit!”

Chapter 41

“Come in, quickly,” called Bar-Tikva from the top of the stairs after buzzing him in.

Bar-Tikva had rented a one-room bed-sit over a shop in Stamford Hill, but he had no desire to let anyone see a
goy
entering his home. Who knows what gossip, what
lashon hara
– “evil tongue” – it would lead to. Sam Morgan closed the door quickly behind him and began climbing the stairs.

“I have a letter from your father,” said Morgan when he reached the top. He handed Bar Tikva the letter in the sealed white envelope.

Morgan had arrived from Israel and taken a black taxi here right away. As soon as he had told the driver that his destination was Stamford Hill, the taxi driver had regaled him with tales of life in London’s East End in the nineteen fifties. The driver was a war baby, now pushing retirement age. But he was the kind of man who wanted to die with his boots on.

Although not Jewish himself, the cabbie assumed, erroneously, that Sam Morgan was, and spent the entire journey rabbiting on about his “nice Jewish neighbours” including “the booby” who used to give him and his brother “lockshen soup” when they got home from school while their parents were both out working.

It amused Morgan to listen to the driver. Presumably he was hoping for a big tip at the end. Morgan obliged him, on the pragmatic grounds that in a worst case scenario, he didn’t want this man talking about him to the police and the best way to ensure a man’s silence was to make him your friend. If subsequently there was a report on
Crimewatch
in which his description came up, Morgan didn’t want the taxi driver rushing to the nearest phone and grassing him up.

Morgan looked around at the sparsely furnished room. The furniture was old and the atmosphere musty and smelly –with odours from the past that had accumulated in the poorly ventilated room. The room itself was over a shop and had a view of the high street.

While Morgan stood looking around, Bar-Tikva tore open the letter and read it. In fact, Morgan had steamed it open to try and find out what it said. But it was in Hebrew – or Yiddish, using the Hebrew alphabet at any rate – and he couldn’t make head or tail of it. So he re-sealed it, hoping that Bar-Tikva wouldn’t notice. Given the enthusiasm with which Bar-Tikva tore the envelope open – determined to get to the contents – Morgan suspected that he didn’t.

The only thing that Morgan didn’t understand was why HaTzadik had given him a letter in the first place. Why not a phone call. HaTzadik had a mobile phone after all – even if it didn’t have internet connectivity. Then again perhaps he was afraid of being monitored.
Shomrei Ha’ir
were not too popular in Israel, because of their virulent anti-Zionism. One of their former leaders had once said that if he had a nuclear bomb, he would use it on Israel. In the eyes of some ultra-Orthodox Jews, this had put him beyond the pale – even some of those who were themselves anti-Zionist.

Casting a brief glance at Bar-Tikva now, Morgan noticed him smile as he read the letter. It was so unusual to see Baruch Tikva smile – he was usually such a misery-guts – that Morgan couldn’t help but wander what had brought this mirth to his face.

“Okay,” said Bar-Tikva after he finished reading the letter. “My father wants us to work together. He says that you know this country better than I do, so you are in a better position to avoid mistakes than I am.”

What Bar-Tikva didn’t tell Morgan was that the letter also cautioned his son not to trust Sam Morgan because there was evidently a traitor in the camp and until they knew who it was, he should be very wary of “that greedy Englishman.” But in any case, Morgan was no longer thinking about the letter. He was thinking about his own plans to take this matter further.

“That’s right. And I’ve been thinking about what we need to do. The way I see it, it also starts at the dig. That’s where Martin Costa found the parchment and that’s where Daniel Klein is bound to go sooner or later of he wants to get any more information. So that’s where we have to be to intercept him and to find out what he’s up to.”

“You mean… what.. we just turn up at the dig site?”

“No obviously we need a cover story. We need to find a way to worm our way in. But it isn’t going to work if you turn up there dressed like that. You’re going to have to ditch the religious garb.”

Chapter 42

“ ‘On the day Third of the week, the 28th day of the month Iyar in the year three thousand eight hundred and twenty one since the creation of the world according to the reckoning which we are accustomed to use here in the city of Verulamium in the land of Brittania…’ ”

Daniel was reading in his mind and translating slowly, as Sarit listened in amazement.

“And this is in Aramaic?” asked Sarit.

“This is in Aramaic. And the script is right for the time.”

“And what time is that?”

“By my reckoning some time in the first century of the Common Era?”

Daniel was an atheist rather than a practicing Jew. His insistence on “Common Era” and “Before the Common Era” – rather than AD and BC – was based on academic rigour, not theology.

“Can we work it out exactly?”

“Sure, but we’ll have to go online.”

Daniel minimized the image and did a search for an app or website that could convert from the Jewish calendar to the civil calendar. The first few that he came up with could only go back as far as the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar. Eventually he found one that worked and entered the information, while Sarit went into the kitchen to make coffee.

“Good God!”

“What?” Sarit called out.

“It’s from the year 61.”

Sarit had come rushing in, holding a mug that she had just rinsed out.”

“What date?”

“May… May the forth.”

“Anything particular about that day?”

“No, but the
year’s
particular enough. Wasn’t that the year that Boudicca fought with the Romans?”

“Wait a minute. Didn’t Professor Hynds say that the site had something to do with that?”

“Not exactly. All he said was that it was a Romano-British site. That covers a five hundred year period.”

Daniel minimized the calendar conversion app to get on with the translation. Sarit stood there, realizing that the coffee could wait.

“ ‘Simon son of Giora said to this maiden Lanevshiah daughter of Farashotagesh ‘Be thou my wife according to the law of Moses and Israel.’ ”

“Are those Jewish names?”

“Simon and Giora are. In fact there was a very famous Simon son of Giora at the time of the Judean uprising 66 CE.”

Daniel froze suddenly, as he realized how close that date was to the date of this document.