The Moses Legacy (31 page)

‘Now then,' said Professor Fikri, ‘what is this fascinating academic matter that you wanted to talk about?'

They were in the office of Hakim Fikri at the University of Jordan, sitting opposite the man who had been entrusted with the task of examining the bones found in the cave at the Snake Monument. A man of average height and build in his forties with a dark, neatly trimmed beard, he had agreed to see them at short notice because of their academic credentials: the world's foremost expert on Semitic languages and a leading Egyptologist who worked closely with Akil Mansoor. They had only revealed this when they arrived at the reception desk, not before. But they had not told him what they wanted to talk about.

‘We met a man called Talal Ibrahim,' said Daniel. ‘Sheikh Ibrahim.'

Daniel was studying Professor Fikri's face for signs of recognition. There was a slight flicker, but no more than that.

‘Oh, yes, Talal. How is he?'

Daniel felt his face flushing. He didn't know what to say.

‘He's fine,' said Gabrielle, stepping in to fill the silence. ‘He sends his regards.'

‘I'll come straight to the point, Professor,' said Daniel.
‘The reason we're here is because we wanted to ask about the bones.'

This time it was Fikri's face that flushed. ‘Bones?'

‘We understand that some bones found in Petra were brought here for you to study.'

‘Well, quite a number of bones and skeletal remains have been brought here for study,' said Fikri, ‘especially from Petra.'

Daniel nodded. ‘I know. It's a site of great archaeological importance, and there's a considerable necropolis there. But the bones we're thinking of were found at one particular cave, overlooking the Snake Monument.'

Fikri swallowed nervously and appeared to be looking around the room, almost as if he wanted to run out.

‘There are so many cases I deal with. I'd have to look it up. I can't remember that one. I'm sure it can't have been anything special otherwise I would have done.'

Daniel knew that he was lying. Even apart from his manner it made no sense. An academic would
love
to make a big find and publish a major paper on the subject. And Sheikh Ibrahim had told them of how cagey Fikri had become.

But what was he afraid of?

Daniel decided to help the professor to open up by asking a few leading questions.

‘Presumably you were going to conduct radiocarbon tests to date the bones, DNA tests to determine the ethnicity and maybe a magnetic imaging scan to determine possible causes of death?'

‘I think you've been reading too many thrillers,' said Fikri with a forced smile. ‘An NMR scan can only reveal physical and anatomical characteristics. Unless the cause of death was violence or injury such tests are pretty much useless.'

‘And
was
the cause of death violence or injury?' asked Daniel.

‘No.'

‘Were there any other tests you could do to determine cause of death?'

‘We took a couple of tooth and gum samples for toxicology and came up negative. But that doesn't rule out poisoning, of course. Not all poisons would show.'

‘I was wondering why nothing has been published about those bones?'

‘It wasn't all that interesting.'

‘But Sheikh Ibrahim told us that last time he asked you about it you didn't even want to
discuss
the subject.'

‘Come on now, Professor Klein. You know how cagey we academics can be before we publish our results.'

‘Yes, but you
didn't
publish your results. I could understand if that was the silence before publication of a paper discussing the subject, but you said yourself it wasn't that interesting.'

‘Look…' he was
very
nervous, ‘there are some things that are better not to talk about.'

Gabrielle stepped in. ‘Could I ask you point-blank, Professor Fikri: is there any chance that these are the bones of the biblical figure Moses?'

‘I think you may be getting a little carried away, Miss Gusack.'

Daniel expected her to quibble over her title. But this time she ignored it completely.

‘We were told that there are local traditions linking Petra to the encampment of the Israelites before they entered the land of Canaan. Pharaoh's Column, the Valley of Moses, Mount Aaron.'

‘I know that,' he said stiffly, ‘but you're serious scholars. Those local legends are based on a somewhat literalistic interpretation of the Bible – not to mention a desire to pander to Western tourists.'

Daniel was hoping that Gabrielle would resist the temptation to mention
The Book of the Wars of the Lord
.

‘But even if you
don't
take it literally,' said Gabrielle, ‘there still must have been a kernel of truth in it. In the ancient times people made up stories as stylized accounts of real events. And that includes the possibility of a biblical character called Moses, or with some similar name.'

Fikri squirmed. ‘Well, I suppose they
could
be the bones of the biblical Moses, but the only way we could know for sure is by doing a DNA comparison between them and a known relative of Moses. And when I last checked there weren't any.'

It was a crude attempt to use sarcasm to brush off their probing questions. But Daniel wasn't convinced. And he knew that neither was Gabrielle. He decided to leave it to her.

‘No, but you could have compared the DNA to various ethnic groups – including Jews.'

Fikri seemed to grow bolder at this. ‘As a matter of fact, we did. And the DNA didn't match the genetic types that we normally associate with Jews. It was actually more like the genotype we associate with Egyptians. Maybe it was a refugee from Egypt.'

Fikri was smiling at his own sarcasm. Daniel was not. Gabrielle however
was
smiling, because of the full implications of what Fikri had intended as a brush-off.

‘And what about the age?' asked Daniel.

‘It was an old man,' Fikri responded. ‘Surprisingly old, considering that human lifespan was shorter in those days. But that still doesn't make it Moses.'

‘Sorry, that wasn't what I meant. I was asking about the age of the bones. How long ago are they from?'

‘Well, we—'

Fikri broke off, realizing that he was doing the very thing that he had tried so hard
not
to do: talk about it. But the looks on their faces made it clear that he had passed the point of no return. He had already implied that the bones were old by using the phrase ‘in those days'.

‘We carbon dated them to around 1200 BC.'

Daniel decided to summarize. ‘So let me get this straight. You found the bones of someone of probable Egyptian origin—'

‘
Possible
Egyptian origin. Probable is too strong a word.'

‘
Possible
Egyptian origin… in a cave in Petra in an area associated with the Israelites. And the bones date back to the late Bronze Age – exactly the time associated with the biblical Exodus and the Israelite conquest of Canaan.'

‘Yes. But I wasn't going to make an ass of myself by publishing a paper saying we've found Moses.'

Daniel decided to back off slightly. He was in a foreign country, sitting in the office of a leading professor of medical pathology who had been kind enough to give him time at very short notice. It was not Daniel's place to question the probity or veracity of his host, but he hadn't come all this way just to draw a blank. Over the last few weeks, he had been locked in a cave, shot at, threatened by an oversized lunatic and now he was on the verge of making a major discovery. He
had
to find out the rest – especially considering how high the stakes were.

‘Could I ask you about the cause of death?'

‘As I said, we conducted various tests, but there are no guarantees that one can find the cause of death in three-thousand-year-old bones.'

Daniel's alertness was highly tuned by now and he picked up on a curious omission in Fikri's statement: he hadn't actually said that he had
failed
to establish the cause of death. He had merely alluded to the
difficulty
of the task.

But Daniel also remembered something he had read from the clay tablets
…we were afflicted with boils on our skin that looked like fiery snakes.

He decided to take the bull by the horns. ‘We believe that he may have died of some disease… possibly a disease that produced red elongated lesions.'

Fikri froze. ‘How could you possibly know that?'

Daniel knew that he had him. Now he had to press home his advantage. ‘Suffice it to say that we do.'

‘Then you'll also know that the last thing we need is to encourage tourists to start swarming over the area.'

‘I don't quite follow your logic, Professor.'

‘We found spores in the linen shroud that the bones were wrapped in. We studied them under the microscope and they were in stasis – but we know that spores can remain in stasis for tens or even hundreds of years.'

Daniel was not a doctor, but as a bit of a renaissance man he had some medical knowledge and he knew that stasis was a kind of state of suspended animation that spores and certain other biological matter could stay in for a long time.

‘We'd already carbon dated the bones and we've never seen cases of spores remaining in stasis for three thousand years. But we couldn't rule out the possibility. So we tested them in controlled conditions and discovered that there were two factors that kept them in stasis: heat and dryness. The hot, dry conditions of Petra made it ideal for keeping the spores in stasis. But if their temperature was lowered and they were exposed to water – fresh water, that is, or even just humidity – they could be reactivated and turned into the pathogenic bacilli.'

‘The disease-causing bacteria,' Daniel said to Gabrielle, much to her annoyance. He had to know more. ‘How virulent was it?'

‘Well, we could hardly test it on people. But we did some toxicity tests on rhesus monkeys and it was fatal in the cases of the old, the young and the frail.'

‘So it wasn't fatal in healthy adults,' said Gabrielle.

‘In some cases them too.'

‘And how contagious was it?'

‘We didn't do any epidemiology trials. But any disease spread by spores is going to be highly contagious. We knew enough and so we froze a few samples and then destroyed the shroud.'

‘And the bones?'

‘What about them?'

‘Did you destroy them?'

‘We considered them important enough to preserve… so we irradiated them.'

‘And where are they now?'

‘I've said all I can say.'

He got up from his desk and made it clear that he meant not only with regard to that last question but with regard to this entire conversation. Daniel sensed that Gabrielle wanted to press on further, but he also sensed that this was not a good idea. They had gone as far as they could and would not get any more useful information from this man. If they pushed their luck, there was a danger of them outstaying their welcome and possibly getting themselves into trouble.

‘Well, thank you, Professor Fikri,' said Daniel, standing up and seizing the initiative back from Gabrielle. ‘You've been most helpful.'

Gabrielle, who had remained seated, looked daggers at Daniel. Finally, she stood up and muttered a polite thank you.

Goliath had taken the bus from Petra back to Amman, knowing that if he took the car, Klein and Gusack could report it to the police and they would be on the lookout for the vehicle. It wouldn't be so easy to catch him on a tourist bus packed with other people.

His plan had been to hire a car to drive back across the King Hussein Bridge and then to Israel's main Ayalon Highway. However, he was told that because today was Friday, the King Hussein Bridge was closed from midday and would not reopen till Sunday. That left him with a problem. The longer he waited around, the greater the likelihood that he would be stopped.

And he had no intention of being stopped.

Then someone told him that there was another way of getting into Israel – if he hurried.

‘The spores must have got reactivated at Petra and become even more virulent,' said Daniel. ‘And the so-called fiery snakes in the Bible that bit the Israelites were actually snake-like boils that infested their skin.'

They were driving from Amman to the King Hussein Bridge, Gabrielle at the wheel.

‘But
why
would the spores come out of stasis? Petra's a pretty hot dry place—'

‘Wait a minute, I have an idea.'

He opened the glove compartment and took out a compact book. It was a copy of the Bible that Daniel had bought in Israel and had been keeping with him for reference. He started thumbing through it.

‘Are you looking for anything in particular?'

‘Numbers 21. Oh, yes. Here it is. The Israelites are complaining about not having any water.'

‘Was there ever a time when the Israelites
didn't
complain?'

This brought a laugh from Daniel. ‘Not then and not now!'

Gabrielle remained surprisingly straight-faced at his levity. ‘As if
they're
the ones who have something to complain about,' she responded, under her breath. ‘Anyway, what was it about that passage that interested you so much?'

‘Let me read it to you.'

‘So they may have had the spores on their clothing,' said Gabrielle. ‘And all it took was exposure to fresh water and the plague came back.'

‘That explains what must have happened at the dig. Presumably there were traces of the spores at the dig site.'

‘I must have had some spores on my clothes that infected the curator.'

‘Oh my God!'

‘What?'

‘I've been racking my brains wondering why Goliath wanted the shroud!'

Gabrielle's jaw dropped.

‘You mean…'

‘But who is he planning on using it against?'

‘Wait a minute, Daniel. What did he say?'

Daniel searched his memory.

‘“I'm going to make the evil usurpers drink the water of death”.'

Suddenly, the car behind started to overtake them. Then Daniel noticed that the woman who was driving it was pointing, and appeared to be mouthing the words ‘Pull over.'

Gabrielle wasn't having it, however. She was getting increasingly angry, and the fact that the woman in the other car appeared to be trying to communicate with her only made her angrier.

The other car continued veering right to push them off
the road, and Gabrielle finally snapped. She spun the steering wheel of their much bigger vehicle sharply to the left, side-swiping the smaller car. The trouble was that Gabrielle hadn't given her own vehicle enough time to recover and it ended up skidding to the side of the road.

Gabrielle screamed, but it was Daniel who was flung against the side as the vehicle rolled. By the time it was inverted, the front airbags had inflated, protecting the occupants from any further damage but forcing Gabrielle to stop. All three of them got out aggressively and in the ensuing confrontation Daniel noticed that the woman from the other car was quite attractive.

‘What the bloody hell were you trying to do?' he asked.

‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘My name is Sarit Shalev. I work with Dov Shamir.'

‘You nearly got us
all
killed,' said Gabrielle.

‘Like I said, I'm sorry. But I think we have an emergency on our hands.'