The Kabbalistic Murder Code: Mystery & International Conspiracies (Historical Crime Thriller Book 1) (22 page)

              The room was dark, and Elijah didn’t dare turn on a light. Isabel was sleeping somewhere in the house, and Maria might also be there. As he entered the room, he saw that the computer was in standby mode. He tapped a key and brought it back to life. On the desk were four picture frames, which had not been there when Elijah was invited into the study that morning. Elijah looked at the first, and his blood ran cold. It was a picture of Norman embracing an elderly woman whose beauty was still discernible. From the surrounding scenery, he saw that the photograph had been taken in Formentera, near the lighthouse. On the photograph there was an inscription in English in a small feminine hand. The signature was clear: Odel Weiss. Odel Weiss smiled at Elijah from the photograph. Odel Weiss had also been on the island, and was dead!

              Elijah looked at the next two photographs. Both were of a group of people whom Elijah could not identify, together with Norman. He assumed these must have been the guests that Isabel had mentioned. The last frame did not contain a photograph, but a letter. It was hard for him to identify the handwriting. With great difficulty, he realized that the script, very small and compact, was a Hebrew script known as
nus-kalam
– “half reed”.

              Elijah photographed all four items. He made sure to photograph the letter several times, from different angles. He opened the drawer from which Norman had taken the wooden box containing the scroll. As he had imagined, there were seven such boxes there, one for each scroll. He saw his life contained within those boxes. As soon as the boxes had all been filled, he assumed that he too would be dead.

              He stepped over to the computer and examined the different icons. One, which was written in ancient Arabic, would never have caught his eye, but after seeing the framed letter he decided to click on it. He was not wrong. Pressing the icon made the computer run a program named “Golem”, written in the same ancient Arabic. For a moment Elijah’s blood froze. The program looked like a normal database program, with people’s names. However, there was only a single entry in the entire database, and that was for “Professor Elijah Shemtov”. Everything was written in Hebrew, but using ancient Arabic script. The numerals, too, appeared in the Arabic notation rather than the more common Latin one. Elijah read the entry carefully. Almost everything he had ever done in his life was listed there: his names, his parents’ names, his daughters’ names, everyone’s birth dates, the schools he had attended, the universities where he had taught, etc… details, long forgotten, were all there on the screen.

              On the right side of the screen was a large square, which read “Run”. Elijah clicked on the square. The computer churned away for a few seconds, and then words in large letters appeared on the screen. Elijah read a list of names of people, and next to each was a grade. In the first place was Elijah’s name, way above the others. A number of them had been tagged and marked “not suitable”. He knew almost all the people on the short list. They were among the foremost experts in Hebrew manuscripts. Elijah breathed heavily. He began to understand how Norman selected his people and what factors made them unsuitable. It was evidently due to some type of Kabbalistic calculation of the person’s name. Now he remembered how when he had first come to the Luzzato Institute he had been pressed to give his full name. He returned to his own name and added a few letters to it. The same words appeared, but in the square the words “not suitable” appeared. That proved his point! There were Kabbalistic factors involved.

              As he thought about it, the computer began to beep. He thought he heard footsteps. He acted totally hysterically, shut down the computer in a hurry, grabbed the camera-flashlight, and rushed out of the study toward his own room. He had no idea if he had moved things around, and only hoped that Norman would not remember if there had been any changes. He was out of breath when he finally reached his room, and it took him many long minutes before he could breathe easily again. If there had been any footsteps, they were no longer audible. He fell onto his bed and tried to reconstruct what had just happened.

              Why was he no more than an aesthete of letters? Why had he never been interested in the content? The seventh line kept coming back to him. He had to find out, as soon as possible, what was meant by “When you reach the pure marble rocks, do not say, ‘Water, water.’”

             
In July 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem. An assemblage of princes devoid of a king and without a ruler came to reclaim the City of God. With them came a ragtag rabble drawn from throughout Europe. Godfrey of Bouillon attacked the city from the north, while Raymond of Saint-Gilles attacked from the south. Near what is now the Nablus Gate, the troops broke through the wall of the city and the Christian troops poured in through the breach. Tancred was the first to reach the Temple Mount. He locked the gates to it, and as a sign of his extreme devotion systematically looted all the treasures contained within it. Hundreds of Muslims, who had paid a huge ransom to save their lives, were clustered on the roof of the Al-Aqsa mosque, to be slaughtered a short while later. The Jews locked themselves in their synagogues in the Jewish Quarter and beseeched God to help them. They were burned alive, along with their Torah scrolls. Contemporary accounts tell of the Crusaders’ horses having to wade through blood up to their bridle reins, about the heads and limbs piled in the streets, and of the lethal combination of religious fanaticism and lust for booty and plunder. Again Jerusalem was witness to a terrible slaughter, which came to an end only when the Crusaders had killed everyone they could lay their hands on. Thus the mighty Christian warriors proved that, unlike Islam, which prided itself on forcing itself upon others by the sword, they - the religion with a message of mercy and of turning the other cheek - could wallow cheerfully in the blood of innocents.

              Twenty years after Jerusalem was conquered in the First Crusade, two French knights, Hugues de Payens and Geoffrey de St. Omer, set up the Order of the Templars. They and seven other knights who joined them took a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and pledged to devote their lives to battle the enemies of God. At the head of the order was its Grand Master, whose full authority was unquestioned. Under him was an advisory council of elders, whose recommendations were not binding on the Grand Master. Very seldom, though, did the Grand Master act against these recommendations. At the request of the order, King Baldwin II of Jerusalem granted the Templars land on the Temple Mount, where the Al-Aqsa mosque had stood. The building that the Templars erected on the site was called Solomon’s Temple, because of the (mistaken) belief that it had been the actual site of Solomon’s Temple.

              The Templars scorned death, and the order soon grew to be the best organized and strongest in the entire Crusader realm. Unlike other monastic orders in the Middle East, the Templars were interested in the esoteric beliefs of the other religions with which they shared the area. They learned both Hebrew and Arabic, studied Greek geometry, investigated the secretive Druze faith, took an interest in Jewish Kabbalah and sequestered themselves with Muslim Sufis.

              The main center of the Templars was in Jerusalem, until that city fell to the Arabs in 1187. Then its center was moved - at first to Acre and then to Caesarea, and even later to Antiochia and to Cyprus. When Acre fell in 1291, the Templars returned to Europe. The order, which had originally been extremely poor, became one of the greatest landowners in Europe. It owned fortresses, estates, fields and vineyards throughout the continent, and as religious functionaries, its members were exempt from paying any local taxes and were subject only to the Pope.

              The Templars transferred large sums of money from Europe to Palestine and from Palestine to Europe. In order to accomplish this, they developed a banking system that was highly advanced for its time. They were the first to introduce the idea of travelers’ checks. A Christian knight who wished to travel to the Holy Land could go to any of the offices of the Templars in France or Spain, deposit money there, and receive a receipt. When he came to Jerusalem, the local office would then honor that receipt and pay him the amount in question.

              But there was a fly in the ointment. As the Templars flourished and became more and more wealthy, opposition to them arose. One of their greatest opponents, who also owed them a great deal of money, was Phillip IV of France. On Friday, April 13 1307, Phillip’s soldiers attacked the Templars in France, seized all their holdings, and imprisoned every Templar on whom they could lay their hands. Ever since that time, Friday the 13
th
has been considered an unlucky day.

              The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, and senior officials of the order were tortured, as was customary at the time. According to Phillip, they confessed to a long string of crimes, including Satan-worshiping, homosexual orgies, the sale of the Holy Land to Muslims, black magic, and plotting to seize France.

              According to the rumors that swept Paris at the time, the Grand Master was able to bribe one of his jailers, and received a number of magic books of the order. De Molay then proclaimed his innocence and claimed that the confessions extracted from him and others had been under torture, and that their only sin had been in confessing to have done something they had not done. Phillip reacted immediately. On March 18 1314, de Molay and other Templars were burned at the stake outside the Notre Dame cathedral. On the stake, de Molay cursed the Pope and King Phillip, and promised that by the end of the year both would join him in Heaven. Indeed, a month later, on April 20, Pope Clement V died suddenly, at the age of fifty-four. Phillip died in November that year, at the age of forty-six.

              The people of that generation interpreted these deaths in various ways. The Templars’ opponents viewed this as conclusive proof of the Templars’ satanic powers, whereas their supporters saw it as proof of the Templars’ innocence.

              Most modern historians believe that the allegations against the Templars were unfounded. The claim that they had engaged in black magic was based on their ties to the members of other religions and on their famed collection of documents, and was simply used as an excuse to appropriate their considerable property. That was exactly how Phillip treated the Jews: he banished them from France and seized all their assets.

              Somewhere, Elijah heard a noise. It took some time for him to realize that the noise would not go away by itself. He focused, and finally realized that someone was knocking on his door. He had evidently finally dozed off.

              “Yes?”

              Ruth entered the room. She was more beautiful than ever.

              “Professor Shemtov, I accidentally overslept. Norman is still asleep. It’s already 10:00 am, and your flight is due to depart from Ibiza at noon. We have to leave immediately. The problem is your connecting flight to Tel Aviv. If you miss your connection to Barcelona, you’ll have to stay here for a few days longer.”

              Elijah jumped out of bed. It took him but a few moments to be ready. At Ruth’s suggestion, they skipped breakfast and he found himself shaving on the yacht that took them from Formentera to Ibiza, trying to keep his balance and hoping Ruth would steer them through safely without overturning the boat.

              Ruth steered with one hand, while holding a cell phone in the other and carrying on conversations with different people.

              “I’m trying to get them to hold the plane,” she explained. There was a taxi waiting for them at the port, and they half-ran to it. Elijah was breathing heavily, as he tried to move as quickly as possible. Only when they were about ten minutes from the airport did he regain his equanimity.

              “The plane has been delayed for thirty minutes. We’ll make it easily.”

              Thirty minutes stretched into forty-five. They had time for a long, leisurely breakfast at the airport.

              Ruth’s cell phone rang. “Elijah, it’s for you. It’s Norman.”

              “Good morning, Professor Shemtov. I just got up. I’m sorry, Ruth did not wake me up in time.” As usual, Norman’s voice was sweet and reassuring. “We’ll continue to work on the scroll by correspondence. I’ll be coming to Jerusalem soon. Very soon. You’ll be the first to know about it.”

              Elijah said goodbye to Norman and then to Ruth, and boarded the plane to Barcelona. Because of the delay, he had very little time to wait before boarding the plane to Tel Aviv.

              Throughout the flight, Elijah was engrossed in himself; his comfortable First Class seat was totally wasted on him. Norman was familiar with every tiny detail of his life. What did he know about David Norman? How could he have agreed to work for a man about whom he knew so little? Why was Norman living under an assumed name and running two investment firms simultaneously? Was the man an international swindler? Elijah felt his life was still in very real danger. Granted, the execution itself seemed to have been postponed, but for how long? He swore to himself he would find out everything there was to know about David Norman, come what may.

              During the flight he was obliged to rely on his memory, which he needed to do in order to process whatever information he had on the race for the scrolls. How had the scroll reached Spain with the stamp of the Templars? Elijah assembled all the information in his mind and began to try to cross-reference it with what he knew about the conquests of Jerusalem. He realized that what, until now, had only been a hobby of his - the study of the different conquests of Jerusalem - had come in very handy a number of times in enabling him to understand certain aspects of the overall puzzle. He wondered if he had mixed up cause and effect; maybe it was not he who had chosen this area as a hobby, but rather that this hobby had chosen him. He remembered that the Templars had been granted an area on the Temple Mount, within the Al-Aqsa mosque. There had been several unconfirmed reports of manuscripts that the two founders of the Order had found there, manuscripts the existence of which the Templars had never admitted and whose very existence they had attempted to conceal.

              Suddenly, another piece of the puzzle slipped into place, and Elijah jumped out of his seat. The flight attendant came over immediately and Elijah ordered a cocktail, to celebrate the brilliance of his insights in detective work. Both in the Templar conquest and in the hints found in the scrolls, Al-Aqsa was a key element. And the scrolls themselves! Elijah had no doubt that they had found some of the scrolls of Nehemiah of Peki’in, almost 900 years after they were hidden on the Temple Mount. That might even be the reason why the French persecuted the Templars for being involved in black magic and mysticism. There was no doubt about it! The Templars had found the secrets on the Temple Mount and tried their hand at word combinations, God’s secret codes. Most historians claim it was just an excuse to put them to death and seize their assets. But then, what do historians know about secret word codes? The fact is that de Molay had cursed both the French king and the Pope, and his prediction that both would die that year had indeed come true exactly as he had specified.

              The flight landed at Ben Gurion airport at night. 

              After a short sleep, Elijah’s first stop was the university, to print the digital photographs he had taken. He hoped that Orna would not remember exactly when he was due back, or if she did remember, she would understand the pressure he was under and the urgency of what he had to do.

              The photograph of Odel Weiss had a simple inscription: “To John, the one and only. There is no one like him, and there never will be. Odel Weiss.” In the second photograph, with the sea as the background, John could be seen embracing a much older man. Based on John’s apparent youth, the picture must have been taken when he was still a student. The other man had a shock of white hair, an old-fashioned shirt, and eyes, which even in the blurred photographs, seemed to suggest infinite wisdom. The inscription again added a piece to the puzzle: “To John, who carried the banner of Nash’s equilibrium point.” The signature was illegible. In the third picture, Norman was shown next to a short, stout man with a ponytail and the face of a hippie who had never grown up. The man held his hands behind his back and appeared surprised at having his picture taken. There was no inscription on the photograph.

              Elijah ran to the library, logged onto the Internet, and tried to identify the two men in the pictures. All he knew about them was that they were mathematicians who had died in the last few years. In spite of the lack of information, the Internet search soon yielded results. He found them on a web site that dealt with famous people who had died, and provided their pictures.

              The man with the shock of white hair was evidently a mathematician named Marcel Gardosh, one of the most productive mathematicians of the 20
th
century. Elijah read his biography with baited breath. Professor Gardosh had been born in the early 20
th
century into an assimilated Jewish family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Gardosh had almost no material possessions: no home, no family, no property, and certainly no fixed abode. From time to time he would arrive at another mathematician’s home with two half-full suitcases, and announce: “I’m here,” and the other mathematician would see to all his needs. In return, he would share with the mathematician various profound mathematical insights. Every so often he would receive a prize for his mathematical work or he would receive payment for a lecture or royalties from the sale of his books. He would use the money to support mathematicians in need or donate it to organizations that dealt with mathematics.

              The second photo was of Professor Larry Wolford, a very shy man who specialized in computer sciences at UCLA. Wolford was one of those who had set up the protocols for the Internet, dealing with principles, standards, names and concepts that enabled the Internet to become what it is today. His primary contribution was in utilizing the unexploited power of computers.

              Elijah found that Wolford had been one of the primary initiators of a computer project named “Links Right Now”. His premise was simple: most computers in the world are inactive for most of the time. All this tremendous computer power should somehow be harnessed for the good of mankind. If all the computers were effectively linked in real time, they could be utilized without their owners losing any computing power. All this excess computing power could be transferred to those places that were in need of it. The analogy made by the proponents of this idea was to unused electricity production. Unless the excess is somehow “siphoned off”, it is a total loss. Wolford left academia in the 1960s and became a hippie. He never married, never had a family, spoke little, and very few people knew him personally. Of course, by harnessing all this excess power, one could possibly emulate the power of a supercomputer. Could that have been Norman’s interest? Here was an idea that was well worth considering, at some point.

              Elijah sighed. Norman seemed to fit in perfectly among such extraordinary people. What bothered him most was how he himself fit into the group. He tried to find some common factor that would link him to these great minds. He went to the bathroom in the library and took a long look at himself in the mirror. What he saw was a rather ordinary, somewhat rounded, everyday kind of face, with old-fashioned glasses, and rapidly thinning hair. Most of the people who saw him assumed he was a teacher or a university lecturer, and they were right. No one had ever mistaken him for a great army general or a scientist who would leave his mark on humanity. As opposed to the interesting biographies he had just been reading, his own was nondescript and uninspiring. He had attended an average high school, had served in an army unit, had graduated university
cum laude
, gone on to graduate school, married the right girl from the right family, and was now a university lecturer struggling to obtain tenure and to eventually receive a decent pension when he retired. No, he could find no common element linking him to these giants, and he was convinced that in future generations his own photograph would not appear in any of the search engines.

              He returned to the letter he had photographed and tried, slowly, to decipher it. It was an extreme example of
nus-kalam
. In this script the letters are all joined together. Even experts found this script difficult to read. It was developed primarily by the Jews of North Africa and the Arab lands. Wealthy Syrian Jewish families used it to communicate with each other over their extensive business enterprises, using it as a means for denying customs officials and others an understanding of their affairs.

The letter had been written in the 20
th
century, and not necessarily at its beginning. As it had been written with the kind of fountain pen that was not manufactured before the 1920s, the letter was obviously written during or after the third decade of the century. The handwriting was extremely clear and consistent, which would seem to indicate the work of a professional scribe. The person was obviously well acquainted with this type of script, and Elijah found it remarkable that anyone alive was still using it - and evidently very skillfully. By the early 1900s, the use of this script had been curtailed. Even then, there were a few left who still used it, and they were all in their eighties. Elijah felt a certain surge of pride in realizing he was probably the youngest person in the world who was still able to read this script fluently.

              He sat down to work. In his work he used specially lined paper, which enabled him to write the original text on one line and the deciphered text on the next. He used only a pencil, as constant revisions necessitated erasing and rewriting sections. Where he knew what the word was, he added the appropriate vowel points to it. Often, when working, he would practice imitating the writing style of the original writer. Sometimes, to obtain the proper effect, he would use the same writing implements the original scribe had used: a reed pen from the Atlas Mountains, a quill from a Polish duck, a fancy pen with a metal nib, apple-flavored tea… Using the same instrument often gave him an understanding of what the original pen strokes had been, the rate at which the ink flowed, and the various shapes of a particular letter. For example, when a stylus is used, it is difficult to make a stroke from the bottom to the top, and as a result this type of script is generally slanted.

              He had worked for a good hour when the effects of not really having slept since leaving Israel finally caught up with him. His eyes were smarting, his stomach churned and he decided to go to see Orna at the hospital. On the way, he tried to come up with some hypothesis with regard to the role these mathematicians had played in Norman’s life. First, he knew that Norman was a brilliant economist. Elijah was not sure whether this was due to his knowledge of economics or to his psychic ability to foresee the future and read minds. Anyway, Elijah, too, was familiar with the Nash equilibrium point. The question was what bearing it had on Norman’s dark deeds. He wished to know what interests and factors were involved in considering the Nash equilibrium point. What factors prevent someone from maximizing his profits, and force him to work against his own best interests? What people are ensnared in the prisoners’ trap? And where was Wolford’s preoccupation with the underutilized time of computers leading? He wondered if computer power was what was needed to combine the different holy names in all their various combinations. The big question was if Norman had killed those people after having extracted what he needed from each of them, and if so, why
?
And was he, Elijah, next on the list?

              He entered the hospital’s Ophthalmology Department, hoping that Orna was not operating at the moment and that he would be able to have a brief chat with her. He peeked into the lounge where off-duty doctors rested, but there was only one doctor there, with his back to Elijah, and making himself a cup of tea.