The Moses Legacy
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Adam Palmer
The Moses Legacy
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction.
The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
AVON
A division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
THE MOSES LEGACY. Copyright © Adam Palmer 2011. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
Adam Palmer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Source ISBN: 9781847561848
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2011 ISBN: 9780007352340
Version: 2018-07-03
Dedication
For my cousin Avi, fellow writer and most generous source of encouragement, and to Ira who first put me on to this theme by introducing me to Freud’s theory on Moses and Akhenaten.
But mostly for my father.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Prologue
‘Joshua, my time is coming and the mantle of leadership…
Chapter 1
Khamsin – the hot slow dry wind that blows in…
Chapter 2
‘I got the message at two in the morning,’ said…
Chapter 3
‘It’s a pity you didn’t find the rest,’ said Akil…
Chapter 4
‘This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate…
Chapter 5
‘How many years has it been?’ asked Harrison Carmichael as…
Chapter 6
Akil Mansoor had been true to his word about providing…
Chapter 7
Joel awoke in the men’s communal tent, sweating heavily. He…
Chapter 8
‘It’s definitely Proto-Sinaitic,’ said Daniel, struggling to contain his excitement.
Chapter 9
‘First of all, I have some good news. Carmichael is…
Chapter 10
‘We’re here,’ said Mansoor.
Chapter 11
‘Look, could you at least give me my phone back…
Chapter 12
‘This is where we keep all the artefacts that aren’t…
Chapter 13
‘They’re anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-British and anti-Western. They’d like to wipe…
Chapter 14
‘You’ve got to be kidding!’
Chapter 15
Goliath was lying on the bed in his hotel room,…
Chapter 16
‘So you admit that you were at the house that…
Chapter 17
‘He was a friend of Lord Byron, you know,’ said…
Chapter 18
Goliath hardly noticed the streets of Cairo sweep by as…
Chapter 19
‘Well, I’m pleased to tell you, Professor Klein, that you…
Chapter 20
Sarit arrived in Cairo from Cyprus, entering the country using…
Chapter 21
‘I still don’t like it,’ said Daniel, feeling self-conscious as…
Chapter 22
The curator was sweating, but it wasn’t just from the…
Chapter 23
‘It couldn’t have come from the Aswan High Dam excavations,’…
Chapter 24
‘What could it possibly be?’ asked the consultant.
Chapter 25
‘“I will sing to Jehovah for he has…” and then…
Chapter 26
Once again, Goliath was afflicted by a feeling of failure.
Chapter 27
‘This is the famous Mernepteh stele,’ said Mansoor. ‘Made of…
Chapter 28
Sarit was back in her hotel room in Cairo, waiting…
Chapter 29
Daniel was hit by an unexpected blast of heat as…
Chapter 30
Goliath was looking at the entrance to the tomb that…
Chapter 31
‘The theory that Yuya was Joseph of the Old Testament…
Chapter 32
The office was busy when a six-page fax arrived at…
Chapter 33
‘It’s known to the locals as the Valley of the…
Chapter 34
Goliath had decided not to take the taxi across the…
Chapter 35
Gabrielle had been the first one to hear something going…
Chapter 36
Sarit had watched Daniel and the others drive across to…
Chapter 37
‘His neck’s been broken,’ said Mansoor. The sorrow in his…
Chapter 38
Driving at night along the Nile Valley was a dangerous…
Chapter 39
Ignoring the blood and struggling desperately not to let the…
Chapter 40
Sarit’s training had involved the advanced driving course, including night…
Chapter 41
‘My name is Daniel Klein!’ Daniel shouted. ‘I’m a British…
Chapter 42
The bitch! thought Goliath. The fucking evil bitch!
Chapter 43
‘It’s just a flesh wound,’ said Gabrielle with a smile,…
Chapter 44
Sarit arrived in Cairo sometime after four in the morning.
Chapter 45
Daniel had let Gabrielle do the talking. After a sleepless…
Chapter 46
‘Can you hear me?’
Chapter 47
On the felucca, the rest of the day drifted by…
Chapter 48
‘These are very serious charges, Miss Stewart,’ the police captain…
Chapter 49
Breakfast on board Walid’s boat was shakshouka – fried eggs…
Chapter 50
‘We thought we should warn you. If she was trying…
Chapter 51
‘I’m telling you – we didn’t have anything to do…
Chapter 52
Sarit was in the Wekalat Al-Balah Bazaar, wearing a jilbab…
Chapter 53
Six days after they had set out, Daniel and Gabrielle…
Chapter 54
He came through for me, Goliath was thinking as he…
Chapter 55
‘We can’t go by bus,’ Gabrielle was saying. ‘They’ll catch…
Chapter 56
‘Passport, please,’ said the Egyptian soldier.
Chapter 57
Mid-April was towards the end of the tourist season, at…
Chapter 58
‘I didn’t actually lose it,’ Sarit was explaining. ‘I just…
Chapter 59
Daniel had initially assumed that Walid was a local Luxor…
Chapter 60
Sarit had been sitting in the waiting area on the…
Chapter 61
‘Are you awake?’ asked Gabrielle.
Chapter 62
‘I’m telling you she’s dangerous.’
Chapter 63
It had taken three days on camels instead of the…
Chapter 64
Goliath was beginning to regret leaving the hospital. The burns…
Chapter 65
A trail of bullets from the Israeli patrol boat raked…
Chapter 66
It took Goliath somewhat longer to get to the Sphinx…
Chapter 67
Captain Ben-Dor had told them very little. Little as in…
Chapter 68
Na’if was struggling frantically for breath. He felt the bandaged…
Chapter 69
Daniel wondered if he should ask for a lawyer, but…
Chapter 70
Back in his cheap hotel room, Goliath was thinking.
Chapter 71
‘So what did he tell you?’ Daniel asked Gabrielle.
Chapter 72
‘So we still haven’t got a fix on Goliath,’ said…
Chapter 73
Participating in the open-air Samaritan Passover celebrations on Mount Gerizim…
Chapter 74
‘So you’re a veteran?’ Goliath said to the brash fifty-something…
Chapter 75
‘I, Joshua, son of Noon, of the tribe of Neferayim,…
Chapter 76
‘I’m looking for some friends of mine,’ said Goliath, holding…
Chapter 77
Daniel looked up from the papyrus at Gabrielle, expectantly. ‘It…
Chapter 78
‘Why did we let them get hold of the manuscript?’…
Chapter 79
‘Shall I wait for them?’ Daniel asked Gabrielle when she…
Chapter 80
‘You have to send me in there,’ Sarit told Dovi.
Chapter 81
‘Look, I know this is painful,’ said Daniel. ‘If you…
Chapter 82
‘Which bus do I need for the Hebrew University?’ Goliath…
Chapter 83
‘Maybe we should wait until they come back,’ said Daniel.
Chapter 84
Sarit never had been one for following orders. Besides, Dov…
Chapter 85
‘I assume you know who I am?’ Goliath said.
Chapter 86
There was an eerie silence in the Conservation Department when…
Chapter 87
‘Do not give him any sign that you are under…
Chapter 88
‘I’m telling you – I didn’t do it!’ Sarit explained…
Chapter 89
‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ said Goliath as they clambered…
Chapter 90
‘What the hell do you think you were playing at?’
Chapter 91
‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ said Daniel, still in a…
Chapter 92
‘Excuse me, I know this is going to sound awfully…
Chapter 93
Daniel had recovered his composure and was reading out loud.
Chapter 94
Finding the Snake Monument and the path leading to it…
Chapter 95
‘Now then,’ said Professor Fikri, ‘what is this fascinating academic…
Chapter 96
Goliath had taken the bus from Petra back to Amman,…
Chapter 97
‘The spores must have got reactivated at Petra and become…
Chapter 98
There was a look of solemnity on the faces of…
Chapter 99
‘What do you mean “an emergency”? Daniel asked, although he…
Chapter 100
Recognizing the encroaching danger in the professor’s approach, Audrey stood…
Chapter 101
‘So what is this organization that hates Israel and the…
Chapter 102
‘It says that the crossing is open till eight!’ Goliath…
Chapter 103
‘How far are we?’ asked Daniel.
Chapter 104
Goliath had made it into Israel and the Sea of…
Chapter 105
While Daniel and Gabrielle remained in the car, Sarit had…
Chapter 106
Goliath pulled up and got out of the car. He…
Epilogue
A couple of weeks later, on the morning of 19…
About the Author
About the Publisher
Foreword
Extensive research went into this book, during the course of which I made some amazing discoveries. The historical references herein are a mixture of known facts, conjecture by Egyptologists and my own fertile imagination. For those who are interested in separating the fact from the fiction, there is a wealth of material on Egyptology and Jewish history available from booksellers and in libraries (if our esteemed politicians can be persuaded to keep them open). I sincerely hope this book piques your interest in the subject.
Prologue
‘Joshua, my time is coming and the mantle of leadership will pass to you.’
The white-haired man was lying down in the cave on a bed of hay, looking at the one whom he had chosen as his successor. The younger man, a dark-haired forty-year-old, had torn his robes in mourning, while the older man yet lived. There were tears of grief in his eyes.
‘I will not leave your side, my teacher.’
Joshua had long known that this day would come, that one day the man who had led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt would be taken to God’s bosom and that he, the loyal disciple, would take over the mantle of leadership from the man to whom he owed so much. Yet he still felt ill-prepared for the duties that would fall upon him. It wasn’t just the fact that this once vibrant man was now reduced to the frail figure before him. It was also the terrifying sight of the red lesions on his mentor’s flesh that looked like fiery snakes.
‘I am not long for this earth, Joshua. When I die, you must bury me here and leave this place forever.’
From the valley below the sound of the murmuring of the people, as they awaited news of their leader, billowed up to the cave on the desert wind.
‘But why must we leave?’ asked Joshua. ‘Why can we not stay here and make peace with the Snake God?’
‘Because the Snake God is false!’ The old man’s voice resonated once again with the strength of his youth. The harsh tone instilled his disciple with fear and joy in equal measure. Despite his age and the ravages of disease, his vitality had not yet deserted him. ‘That is why Jehovah has punished us. It was for our appeasement of the Snake God that we were chastised with disease. Jehovah commanded us to have no other gods before him and yet we built that…’ he waved his arm towards the cave entrance, ‘…that monstrous idol to the Snake God.’
‘Then I shall tear down the monument and show the Snake God that we are loyal only to Jehovah,’ the younger man replied earnestly.
‘That is not enough. This place is cursed. You must lead the people across the river into the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey. Jehovah your God will go with you.’
‘But we are weak. We cannot fight the Canaanites. They are giants and we were like grasshoppers in their eyes.’
A blazing fire lit up the old man’s eyes. ‘Enough! Do you really believe those foolish rantings? Did not Caleb tell us that Jehovah will give us strength to conquer them?’
‘But they are more numerous than we.’
The old man’s voice mellowed again, as if he had spent himself with his wrath and had no more fight left in him. ‘Then live in the hills not in the valleys, and leave them alone until you are ready. Bide your time, Joshua, just as I bided my time.’
Joshua nodded. But the teacher was not finished. Through his frailty, the old man raised his head and shoulders to speak one more time. Joshua leaned forward to place his ear next to the mouth of Moses.
‘Be strong and courageous. Because you will lead the people into the land which Jehovah promised their fathers… and you will make it their legacy.’
Chapter 1
Khamsin – the hot slow dry wind that blows in from the west.
Derived from the Arabic word for ‘fifty’ because according to Arab tradition, it is supposed to blow for fifty days during the course of the year.
The lean nineteen-year-old from West London was sweltering, unaccustomed to these desert conditions. At least the heat was dry, he thought; that made it just about bearable. All he had to do was remember to drink plenty of water. Having holidayed once in Sharm el-Sheikh, he was grateful that it wasn’t humid here like it was on the coast. But even so, it was weather for relaxing by a hotel swimming pool, not for working on an archaeological dig.
Now, in the heat of a morning in late March, over a dozen fit young students worked in their designated areas under the watchful eyes of Egyptian soldiers. Dressed in t-shirts and Bermuda shorts (referred to locally as ‘Islamic shorts’ because of their relative modesty), these enthusiastic volunteers came from all over the world: Egypt, Europe, South America, even Australia and New Zealand. Each volunteer was assigned an area of one metre square, marked out on a grid with flags stating their co-ordinates.
It was painstaking work. Armed with a metal trowel, plastic scoop and small-headed brush for cleaning larger finds, the youth dug out to a depth of six inches below the previous level, put the contents into his bucket and took it over to the two volunteers who operated the sieve screens. The pair were known as JJ because of their initials: Joel and Jane. Though similar in age – he at the end of his teens, she barely out of hers – they were an unlikely team: the wiry, ginger-haired nerd and the bottle blonde with a cheerleader body. But they had been thrown together by chance and now the two of them were inextricably linked by this coincidence of nomenclature.
Joel had been assigned to this relatively simple job because of his lack of experience, but it was a role that carried its fair share of responsibility. And as the volunteer from London turned up at his shoulder with a bucketful of sand and pebbles, Joel sighed – he wasn’t expecting anything to break the monotony of the day.
From a corner of the dig site, the work was being overseen by a blonde woman with a commanding presence and an almost Nordic appearance. She preferred to watch from a distance, because whenever she wandered around the site, people stopped their work to look at her, especially the men.
It was an understandable reaction – she was not a woman whom it was easy to ignore. Her back was both broad and straight, and her well-toned thighs and arms subtly muscular. But her torso was by no means devoid of body fat. In a woman of average height, this combination of muscle and fat would have made her look rather squat, but at five foot eleven she towered over most other women and was perfectly proportioned, especially in the eyes of men.
She was Gabrielle Gusack, a young Viennese archaeologist, and she was looking at the work with a mixture of exhaustion and pride. It had taken a lot of determination and a healthy dose of diplomacy to get this dig approved. The site was in a restricted military area at the foot of Mount Hashem el-Tarif, closely guarded by the Egyptian army due to its proximity to the Israeli border, and for this reason had never been subjected to proper archaeological excavation, despite hints and signs that it might be of historical significance.
After some delicate lobbying, the authorities gave the dig an official green light, albeit with some stringent security conditions attached; no mobile phones or cameras were to be brought to the site and only an official cameraman working for the Supreme Council of Antiquities would be allowed to take pictures. Thus the Egyptian authorities could control the flow of information that came out of the dig.
It was the SCA and its head, Akil Mansoor, that had proved to be the lynchpin of this whole project. Mansoor was not only an enthusiastic supporter of the project, but also Gabrielle’s mentor – she had done her PhD under him at the University of Cairo, and their friendship had proved enduring, if somewhat volatile at times. He was also a friend of her uncle, the much respected British biblical historian, Harrison Carmichael. Perhaps most important of all, he was the Vice Minister of Culture.
But not even he could override security considerations or the wishes of the Egyptian military, and he had been forced to engage in a certain amount of horse-trading as he gingerly tiptoed around the objections and won over the key decision-makers in the political and military hierarchy.
And now with the job of brokering the deal accomplished, he stayed away from the site and let the enthusiastic kids rise to the challenge of ‘painting the fence’ – with his young, attractive protégée playing the role of Tom Sawyer. Of course, if they found anything exciting, he would lose no time in going out there to make the official announcement in front of the cameras.
The volunteer who had just emptied his bucket into the sieve screen that Joel was operating didn’t wait to see the results, he simply returned to his digging. The screen consisted of a four-sided wooden box with a quarter-inch metal mesh ‘floor’ and a pair of handles that could be used to shake it.
Joel shook the screen now to begin the separation process, and as the sand fell away through the mesh, a large number of stone fragments remained. Normally the residue proved to be nothing but desert pebbles, but this time something caught his eye. Mindful of Gabrielle’s instruction to observe the residue before bagging it up, he looked more closely, blinked and then looked again.
It wasn’t that the stones were of any radically different material – quite the contrary: they were typical of the local stone – nor were they any larger than usual. And they certainly didn’t have the glint of noble metals or the crystalline glow of precious stones. No, it was just that these stones, or rather fragments of stone, seemed to have markings on them.
Joel picked one up and held it closer to get a better look. Turning it this way and that, he noticed that on one side it seemed to have some engraved shapes. The shapes were too simple to be hieroglyphics and they looked too unfamiliar to be any alphabet that he knew. But they did look like writing, not merely random markings.
He picked up another and looked at it, then another and then yet another. He noticed some repetition of the symbols, which confirmed his suspicion that there was nothing random about these engravings. They had been made purposively, by a human hand. And that made this a find!
He could just bag it up and mark it, leaving the others to figure out its significance in due course, but something about this discovery appealed to his ego. He wanted some small share of the kudos, even if someone else had dug it up, and someone more knowledgeable than himself would interpret it. And in any case, if it was something important, they would surely want to know about it now.
Joel realized that he had been daydreaming and Jane had noticed that something was up.
‘What?’ she asked, in that ever cheerful way of hers.
He held out one of the stone fragments and let her look at it, making sure that she didn’t actually get her hands on it.
‘Oh… my… God!’ she blurted out.
Fearing that others people would hear and start gathering round before he had had a chance to claim his glory, he threw the fragments into a plastic bag and raced over to Professor Gusack, suppressing the urge to cry out aloud like Archimedes on his homeward sprint from the public bath house.
While Joel was racing off to claim his share of the glory, Jane felt her breath constricting. Unlike Joel, she understood the full significance of what she had just seen. And she had to do something about it.
Mumbling some excuse about a stomach bug, she raced off to the latrines, which were little more than holes in the ground with individual booths around each drop. She closed and bolted the door behind her and whipped out her slender mobile phone from the pocket of her combat trousers. She was supposed to have handed it in to the security people at the entrance to the camp, but she had been forewarned of this in advance, so she had made sure she had two mobiles. The large flashy one she had handed over meekly with a look of disappointment. But this small thin one with its limited features, she had retained. She knew that the male soldiers wouldn’t frisk a woman, and they had no female soldiers at hand to do the job. So her secret was safe.
Safely ensconced in the latrine, she frantically keyed in a message and hit the ‘Send’ button. A minute later her message appeared on another phone six thousand miles away. It said: They found the stones.