The Boudicca Parchments (39 page)

“When does he land?”

Daniel looked at his watch.

“He’s already landed. But with border control and baggage, I reckon he’ll be airside for the next hour at least.”

“Are you two travelling together,” said a pretty woman from flight security.

This was the pre-check-in security check that they use as the first line of defence against terrorists.

“Oh er no,” said Daniel. “I’m not flying today. My friend here is. I’m just here to see him off safely.”

The pretty girl smiled and went through the routine security questions. They sounded banal and some people wondered why asking these questions would catch a real terrorist who was planning something. But these staff were highly trained and they knew exactly what to look out for. They even asked a few questions about Daniel and he answered himself, explaining his own family residential connections to Israel as well as his academic vocation.

A minute later, Ted was putting his suitcase on the X-ray scanner and three minutes later he was checking in at the desk for pre-booked checkins. They went through to the section where the groundside fast food and shops were located. Daniel, who knew Ben-Gurion Airport’s Terminal 3 quite well, was acting as a guide.

“You can get some fast food over there, but it’s not exactly cordon bleu.”

“Fast food never is.”

“Believe me this is worse than fast-food in England. The steak houses here are great, but when they take out franchises with the Big Three, they get it wrong. There’s better food airside.”

“Okay, well I guess this is goodbye for now, or what is it you say in Hebrew?”

“Lehitra’ot.”

“Lehitra’ot. I’ll see you back in England. We have a paper to work on.”

They shook hands and Ted went off through the second security check, the one that would involve metal detectors and ex-ray inspection of hand baggage.

Daniel was quite looking forward to working with Ted on the paper. In the meantime, he walked back, intending to go upstairs to arrivals where he expected to have to wait an hour for his brother-in-law.

However, as he emerged back into the checkin area, he noticed a man who looked terribly familiar walking into the men’s toilet, carrying a rucksack.

It can’t be!

And yet he had just seen it with his own eyes. If he hadn’t, he would never have believed it, But there was no mistaking what he saw. He strode briskly towards the toilet that the man had entered, but by the time he got there, there was no sign of the man. Then he realized why. The man had gone in to a cubicle. So Daniel waited calmly until the man emerged and then he stepped into his path.

Daniel didn’t know this, but the man whom he was confronting had been calling himself Sam Morgan when he had his dealings with Shalom Tikva and
Shomrei Ha’ir
. But that wasn’t his real name. And that wasn’t the name by which Daniel addressed him now.

“Hallo Costa.”

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.