The Moses Legacy

Chapter 11

‘Look, could you at least give me my phone back so that I can call my folks?’

Jane’s tone was like that of a stroppy teenager. She was being held in the isolation wing of a military hospital along with the other volunteers from the dig and also some of the soldiers. They were segregated from each other in order to further reduce the risk of infection.

They had been told very little, beyond the fact that it was a precaution and it was for their own wellbeing.

‘We aren’t allowing phone calls for the time being,’ the man from the Ministry of Health explained to her, in the tone of a kindergarten teacher to a not very bright child.

‘Why not?’

‘We don’t want to start a panic.’

‘You’re probably starting more of a panic by holding us incommunicado like this.’

The man from the Health Ministry, an alumnus of Harvard, looked impressed by Jane’s vocabulary as he thought of her as an empty-headed blonde. She sensed the patronizing attitude from the smile on his face, even though he said nothing.

‘My father’s a United States senator.’

‘I know,’ said the official, still smiling. ‘And this is against your constitutional rights.’

‘Look, it’s not funny!’

‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. But you have to understand that a panic is the last thing we need. We depend heavily on the tourist industry in this country.’

‘Look, I’m not going to start a panic. Besides, my father already knows.’

The official looked at her blankly and then understood.

‘Oh yes, aren’t you the one who smuggled a phone into the dig?’

She blushed and then smiled, realizing that the look on the health official’s face was actually one of approval.

‘Okay, yes that was me. Look, I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I just didn’t want him to worry.’

She gave the official a seductive smile. He looked at her hesitantly.

‘Okay, one call. And don’t mention that anyone else is in quarantine. You can tell him that you’re okay – and that you’ll be released in two weeks.’

She smiled as he handed his mobile phone through the sliding drawer into the isolation area. Then she took the phone and put in the call.

‘Hallo Dad.’

‘Jane,’ said Senator Morris.

‘Listen, I’ve got some bad news. Because of what happened at the dig with Joel, we’ve been put into quarantine.’

‘What? At the hospital?’ The shock was palpable.

‘Yes, but a different hospital. They’ve said they’ll release me in two weeks, but I’m not allowed to have my phone with me.’

‘Why not?’

She looked at the health official, wondering how much she was free to say.

‘Something about contamination.’

‘Did you manage to get any of Joel’s clothes?’

‘No, I didn’t have a chance.’

‘Okay, well, look… don’t feel bad. You tried your best.’

She did feel bad though, or at least mildly guilty. ‘Thanks, Dad.’

‘Oh, just one thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re sure they don’t know that I told you to get a sample of Joel’s clothes?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Okay, that’s good.’

They said goodbye and Jane handed the phone back to the official through the sliding drawer. He picked it up with an alcohol wipe and cleaned it all over before putting it in his pocket.

Amused as she was by the official’s paranoia, Jane was more concerned by what her father was up to. She could tell from his tone that whatever he was doing, he wasn’t finished yet.

Chapter 12

‘This is where we keep all the artefacts that aren’t on display,’ Mansoor was explaining as he led Daniel and Gabrielle through a labyrinth of corridors in the basement of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.

Daniel had worked on the details of the translation of the text from the stones on the plane back from Sharm. It was painstaking work, matching the recognized words and then pairing up single words or groups of words from the stones with the counterparts in the Bible. But after a while it had become easier. It was like a crossword puzzle: the more matches he found, the easier it was to find suitable matches for the remainder.

By the time they landed in Cairo, he had finished the translation and created a concordance of some 138 words in the old language and the equivalent in biblical Hebrew.

‘I think we need to agree the terms we’re working on,’ Mansoor had said on the plane. ‘Whilst it’s your translation, Professor Klein, and Gabrielle was in charge of the dig, I am the senior scholar amongst the three of us and I think it should be my name first when we publish our findings.’

This was more than just a wish. It was a firm decision. He couldn’t actually stop Daniel from publishing a paper from memory about the language in abstract, but the finding of the original Mosaic tablets was much bigger news than the mere decipherment of an old script. Mansoor had control over the stone fragments themselves.

Furthermore, as Vice Minister of Culture, he could stop either of them from working in Egypt again. This would have been more of a blow to Gabrielle than to Daniel, but it was Daniel who was the more conciliatory of the two.

‘That’s fine with me. I don’t even mind if my name goes last. I’m just thrilled and honoured to be part of this.’

Mansoor responded to Daniel’s pliant reply by offering him a consolation prize.

‘You do know of course that we have another long document in the ancient script.’

‘What document?’ Gabrielle had asked, taken aback by this revelation.

‘Oh, just a papyrus that’s been lying around in the archives for some time. It was never really given much thought, but in the current light, I think it’s fair to say that it takes on a new importance.’

It was this other document that Mansoor was taking them to see now. He led them into a room full of metal shelves laden with boxes. He went over to a shelf and stood before a brown cardboard box with some Arabic writing on it in thick, black magic marker. Daniel understood the writing, but all it said was ‘Papyrus’ and ‘Clay jar’. Mansoor lifted the box and brought it over to a workbench. He deposited it carefully on one side, while Daniel and Gabrielle stood on the other. Then he opened the box, reached in and produced what looked like a wooden-framed glass box which he also deposited on the table.

Daniel stared at it in awe. What he was looking at, he realized, was a glass-mounted papyrus which contained about fifty lines of writing in Proto-Sinaitic script. Gazing now at the longest piece of text that he had ever seen in this ancient language almost brought tears to his eyes.

The writing was set out horizontally relative to the paper in a single column, running parallel to the shorter side of the papyrus and perpendicular to the longer side. In this respect it differed from, say, a Jewish Torah scroll written in a series of columns, to be unfurled horizontally and read one column at a time.

Daniel stared at it for a long time, taking in the fact that what he had before him was a very ancient papyrus in remarkably good condition. After a while, he looked up at Mansoor. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

Mansoor frowned. ‘That’s what you’re supposed to tell me.’

‘I mean what can you tell me about its provenance?’

‘First of all, can you translate it?’

Daniel sat down, took out his one-page concordance and started looking for words in the papyrus that matched. After some considerable time, he looked up, disappointed.

‘There aren’t enough words matching the concordance. I found nine instances of Jehovah and three variants of El which I assume is a generic reference to God. But there were no other common words.’

He noticed that Gabrielle looked disappointed. He could always tell her mood from her face, even when she tried to hide it. It was harder to tell with Mansoor; Daniel had not known him long enough.

‘But nine instances of Jehovah,’ said the Egyptian contemplatively. ‘What’s your general impression? I mean what sort of a document do you think it is?’

‘Well, my first impression was that it was a proclamation intended to be unfurled vertically and read out loud by a herald to an assembled audience. But then I rejected that because proclamations would more likely be engraved on a stone monument and displayed in public to be seen by one and all.’

‘Not if it were a proclamation to a nomadic people,’ Gabrielle interrupted, picking up the theme of the nomadic Shasu of Yahowa that they had talked about earlier.

Daniel nodded approvingly. ‘True. But then I considered the possibility that it might be a letter or missive to a single individual. I also noticed a peculiarity about the way it was set out: every single line is different in length. That is precisely the way that poetry would be written.’

‘So which is it?’ asked Mansoor. ‘A proclamation to a nomadic people or an ancient poem?’

‘Well, if it weren’t for the presence of the name Jehovah, one might speculate that this was copied or plagiarized from an old Egyptian poem. But Jehovah precludes that.’

‘So it must be a proclamation to the Israelites,’ said Gabrielle.

Daniel wanted to proceed more cautiously. He turned to Mansoor. ‘I’ve told you as much as I can based on looking at it. I might be able to tell you more if you can give me some idea about its origins.’

‘I can tell you that it’s been carbon dated to around 1600 BC,’ said Mansoor.

‘That makes it older than the Bible.’

‘Yes it does. But I can’t tell you when or where it was found.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know. That is, I can tell you where it was found latterly. But I cannot tell you where it was found originally.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was found here in one of the storage rooms, when we were in the process of entering all the items in the museum on to our new computer database. But it didn’t have any object card with it, so the provenance is completely unknown. All we found was the clay jar with the papyrus.’

‘Clay jar?’

‘Yes, the papyrus was actually found inside an old clay jar. We only mounted it in glass recently, shortly after finding it. But we haven’t been able to trace the origins of either the papyrus or the jar.’

‘But aren’t they listed in the museum’s register?’

‘We did a thorough search of the register and haven’t found it.’

‘Isn’t that rather… strange?’

‘It’s not suspicious, if that’s what you mean. There are quite a few items in the storage rooms that we haven’t been able to find listed in the register books.’

‘When you say “the register books”… I mean, aren’t the records computerized now?’

‘Actually, we’re still in the process of creating our computerized database of objects and artefacts – with the help of an American non-profit organization. But you have to understand that until 2006 the registration system was entirely manual. We’ve got a quarter of a million objects in this museum, only half of which are in the database. It was when this papyrus and its container were due to be entered into the system, that we discovered it was unlisted.’

‘But how could something like that happen?’ asked Daniel.

‘You have to understand,’ Mansoor continued sheepishly, ‘that due to historic reasons, the manual numbering system is a bit fragmented. We actually have four different numbering systems that developed over time. But unfortunately, different objects were categorized according to the different systems. In fact, some items have numbers in more than one of the numbering systems.’

‘But how could you track so many objects with such a fragmented system?’

‘We couldn’t. It was a real nightmare. And to make matters worse, we didn’t even have anyone specifically trained in archive maintenance. In practice, responsibility for keeping the records was divided between the sections. Each section had responsibility for its own objects and artefacts.’

‘Okay, may I see the clay jar?’

Mansoor put on a pair of latex gloves, reached into the box, pulled aside some padding and then produced the clay jar, carefully depositing it on the workbench in front of them. Daniel put on a similar pair of gloves and gently turned the jar this way and that to get a better look. The outside of the jar looked quite plain. Then a very faint trace of an engraving on the side caught Daniel’s eye.

‘Holy shit!’

‘What?’ asked Mansoor, picking up on Daniel’s excitement.

‘Take a look at that,’ said Daniel, handing the jar over to Mansoor.

The Egyptian held it up to the light and tilted it back and forth to get a better view. His face changed when he saw what Daniel had seen: a barely visible engraving of a serpent coiled around a pole.

‘But that looks like…’

‘The Rod of Asclepius!’

‘But that’s a Greek symbol,’ said Mansoor, lowering the jar and meeting Daniel’s eyes. ‘It didn’t exist at the time when Proto-Sinaitic script was used.’

‘Not under the name Rod of Asclepius,’ said Daniel.

‘Wasn’t Asclepius the Greek god of medicine?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘Exactly,’ said Daniel. ‘And the Rod of Asclepius – the rod with a snake coiled around it – is widely associated with medicine and used by a number of pharmaceutical organizations. Snakes were often associated with medicine as well as illness. Hence snake oil.’

‘Also in ancient Egyptian culture,’ said Mansoor.

‘But not in this specific form,’ Daniel cut in. ‘The snake coiled around a pole, I mean.’

‘That’s true, Professor Klein. But then again there’s a lot of ancient Egypt that remains undiscovered, even today. And much of what we had was lost to theft – both foreign and domestic.’

Daniel was thinking about something Gabrielle had said about the Greek god of medicine. At the back of his mind he was also remembering what Harrison Carmichael had said about fiery snakes, Moses putting a snake on a pole and the possibility of the sixth plague returning. Now the dig had been closed down because of ‘food poisoning’ according to Mansoor. He was turning these thoughts over in his mind, uncertain of what to make of it. For a moment he considered asking Mansoor why the dig was really closed down, but he sensed that if Mansoor was holding out on him, he was unlikely to be more candid and open if pressed. He was more likely to clam up completely.

Daniel decided to test the waters.

‘I wonder if we could get some outside advice on this point. Would it be all right if I called Harrison Carmichael?’

‘Okay,’ said Mansoor. ‘But be discreet.’

Daniel called Carmichael’s number on his mobile, but the voice that answered was not that of Professor Carmichael. ‘Hallo, could I speak to Harrison Carmichael please… Daniel Klein. Yes, he knows me… What?’

Gabrielle was looking at him, concerned.

‘When?… How?… The police?’

‘What is it?’ asked Gabrielle.

When Daniel looked at Gabrielle next, his face had turned to stone.

‘It’s Harrison. He’s dead.’

Chapter 13

‘They’re anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-British and anti-Western. They’d like to wipe us off the face of the earth.’

Sarit Shalev stared at Dov Shamir, trying to gauge how much of his manner was showmanship for her benefit. It was hard to tell with Dov, or ‘Dovi’ as she called him. Everything about him was uniformly dark – appearance and mood alike – except for the odd flash of excitement. Although he was dressed like a typical casual Israeli in a blue shirt and jeans, he somehow reminded her of Heathcliff – or at least the way she imagined Heathcliff to be when she first read Wuthering Heights as a gangly teenager.

Now a compact but kick-ass fit twenty-four-year-old, she was no longer quite so enamoured by characters in fiction, and thinking about Dov’s appearance, she realized that perhaps ‘dark’ was too strong a word. It was true of his eyes and hair, but applying it to his skin tone was stretching it somewhat. His ancestry was central European, and his skin wasn’t naturally dark, merely tanned by the Mediterranean sun.

‘They sound like the usual crowd of semi-literate rednecks.’

‘Except these guys aren’t semi-literate, Sarit. These are movers and shakers, people with power and influence. These are the people who manipulate the rednecks: the educated people who use pop science to sell people on their crackpot conspiracy theories.’

She was eight years his junior, and in terms of intelligence experience, that difference was vast. But it didn’t restrain her feisty, independent spirit when it came to questioning his judgement as he briefed her on the assignment in this windowless room at Mossad’s headquarters in the coastal town of Herzliya.

‘Why did this Milne woman contact us in the first place?’

‘She first approached us a couple of years ago. Technically she’s been my asset even before she took her husband’s place.’

‘But she initiated contact, not vice versa?’

‘She didn’t like what her husband was doing.’

‘Can we trust her?’

‘Walk-in assets are always potential bait. But we have ways of verifying. Everything she’s told us checked out.’

‘But if she was your asset, why did she have to go through the embassy?’

‘I was treating her as passive. Once we ID’d the key people from her, we maintained silence.’

‘So what’s changed?’

‘They’ve changed. They’re becoming more active… and more dangerous.’

He told her about the murder of Harrison Carmichael and Roksana.

‘Does it check out?’

‘According to the British press and the police statements, yes. The fire, the ante-mortem injuries. They’re planning to do a report about it on a programme called Crimewatch.’

‘And have we passed on any of the information that she gave us?’

‘Not yet. We’re hesitant about passing it on. We don’t want to compromise her position at this stage. We may want to use her more actively, either to flush out more of their members or to disseminate misinformation to them.’

‘So we’re going to let these murders go unpunished?’

‘No, but right now the most urgent priority is tracking down this Goliath. We don’t actually know his real name. And at the moment, we don’t even know where he is.’

‘So what do we know?’

Sarit and Dov went back together some four years, when she was the eager young twenty-year-old immigrant from Ireland, fresh out of her two-year army service. In those days, she was called Siobhan Stewart. At eighteen, she had left her sheltered middle-class life in Cork and volunteered to work in Israel and ended up staying. The trigger for her decision had been a visit to the Holy Land the previous year with her family during which her brother had been killed in a suicide bombing in Jerusalem along with twenty-one other people. She herself had been one of the 135 wounded, albeit comparatively mildly.

After that she had tried to understand both sides in the conflict and not merely jump to a conclusion based on emotions alone. But what she found particularly galling were the one-sided condemnations when Israel retaliated against the organizers and planners of a whole spate of similar suicide bombings that followed.

So the following year, bypassing the more traditional picking-apples-on-a-kibbutz option, she had volunteered for eight weeks of equally menial duty on an Israeli army base under the auspices of an organization called Sar-El. It was soon discovered that she had a sharp mind and was a fast learner and so she ended up being given duties that a foreign volunteer would not normally be trusted with.

This was followed by her bold decision to apply for permanent residence and volunteer for a full two years of service in the Israeli army, much to the horror of her parents. After some gruelling interviews to test her sincerity, and in the face of plaintive appeals to come home, she was accepted by the Israeli army and spent the next two years serving in communications. She also changed her name in that time to the more Israeli-sounding Sarit Shalev.

In the course of her two-year stint, she was based at the Urim monitoring unit in the Negev Desert – a vast array of large satellite dishes that picked up information from telecommunications satellites over the region, covering everything from India and China to Europe. This enabled them to monitor not only cell phones but also intercontinental landlines and shipping. Ultra-fast supercomputers and highly sophisticated software analysed the voice and text messages for keywords and particular phone numbers of interest.

Upon leaving the army, she was planning to go to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study psychology. But she took the fateful decision of responding to an ad for a job interview involving ‘interesting work abroad’. After passing that interview and several more – where they looked at motivation as well as intelligence – she went through a rigorous initial training course, that was itself part of the selection procedure. Only then was she inducted into the Mossad and the real hard work began.

One of the first lessons she learnt was that the hunter can all too easily become the hunted if alertness flags, even for a moment. This was a lesson that she learnt all too well on one of her training exercises, when her designated target turned the tables on her. She had assumed that she had an advantage, because the targets were not told which of the ‘hunters’ in the exercise had been assigned to them. But he had been alert and set an ingeniously baited trap, making himself look careless so that she made her move with insufficient preparation.

He had punished her for the error by capturing her and then twisted the knife by subjecting her to the embarrassment of being marched hogtied back to the field HQ for the exercise. It was a humiliation that she resolved never to be exposed to again. And she never had. But more than that: it was a humiliation that she was determined to avenge. The problem was, she couldn’t just seek revenge willy-nilly. She had to maintain her professional façade in order to avoid failing the final selection process. But she suspected that her instructors were aware of her intentions and used it to their advantage.

So she waited patiently until she got the chance to get back at the trainee who had sandbagged her, and when it was delivered on a plate, she grabbed it. It took a while, because the exercise assignments were random. But she knew that despite her self-restraint, their instructors had evidently picked up on her competitive spirit, because in the very last exercise, they had made her former nemesis her designated hunter. And she suspected that this assignment had not been as random as it was supposed to be. However, unlike her arch-enemy, she did know who her hunter was, because when he opened the envelope, he had given himself away by the glint in his eye – as powerful a ‘tell’ as any she had seen.

From there it had been easy. Just like he had done in the first exercise, she had used a subterfuge: making it seem like she thought another of the class was her hunter, a nerdy type, smart but socially awkward. When the real hunter closed in for the kill, he avoided the obvious trap that he had set for her – and fell into the subtle one instead.

The trap – the idea for which came from a story she had read – consisted of allowing herself to be captured in her flat. The hunter had persuaded the trainee whom, she appeared to think of as her assigned hunter, to help him. She ‘captured’ the trainee and then her real hunter captured her – or at least thought he had. Certainly he had her tied to a chair, which he meticulously photographed using his still camera and videotaped using hers. But this didn’t surprise her. She knew that he wouldn’t be able to resist rubbing her nose in defeat in a macho display. But the exercise called for her to be ‘delivered’ to their field HQ. Until then, it wasn’t complete.

However, between the moment she had captured the decoy hunter and the real one captured her, she had taken out a bottle of sparkling wine from the fridge and told the decoy hunter that she was going to drink to celebrate her victory and record it on video. The real hunter had picked the lock and pounced before she could open the bottle. But he made the mistake of assuming that an unopened champagne bottle couldn’t be drugged – or more likely he hadn’t thought about it at all.

In fact, it is possible to open the bottle, lace it with Rohypnol or GHB and then reseal it. She had not only done this, she had even carefully preserved the foil and re-covered the plastic stopper. And Mr Macho Israeli couldn’t resist the urge to drink her sparkling wine before her eyes and then pour some over her, accompanied by the crude words: ‘I like you wet.’ (He later explained that this was to ‘toughen’ her up to the real world of espionage and was not in any way a representation of his real self.)

She had wanted to smile, as he had already drunk enough of the drugged sparkling wine. But she held her facial muscles, showing great patience, to maximize her victory. It was only when he held the bottle to her lips and offered her the chance to toast his victory – which she politely declined – that he got his first inkling of what was about to happen.

‘Why don’t you want to be magnanimous in defeat?’ he asked mockingly.

‘You’ve got it wrong,’ she replied. ‘It’s magnanimous in victory; defiant in defeat. Besides, I want to stay awake.’

That was when he realized. But by then it was too late, he was already feeling the lethargy that precedes unconsciousness. So a few hours later, it was the hunter who was deposited bound and gagged on the floor of the field HQ by a triumphant Sarit. Then, after three days, when his sleeping patterns had returned to normal, she was confronted by her ‘victim’ again and told the whole story.

She was led into an office – amidst the utmost solemnity – and found herself facing a tribunal. Her first instinct was panic, assuming that it was some sort of disciplinary tribunal. But that assumption was contradicted by the even more terrifying fact that her deadly foe was on the tribunal. The chairman of the panel introduced him as ‘Dov Shamir’ and explained that he was not a trainee but a long-serving intelligence officer and one of the training team. This in itself was none too reassuring, but what did put her at ease was the fact that Dov was smiling, and it was not a gloating smile, although there was perhaps a hint of mockery about it.

The chairman went on to say that they had identified her early on as a promising recruit for training as a kidon officer. This meant that her job would be assassinations of Israel’s enemies and not merely intelligence gathering like a regular katsa.

Dov had been assigned to bring out the best in her, to put her through her paces and test her to the limit. And she had passed with flying colours. He was to give her one-to-one coaching, and after that they had got on like a house on fire. It was obvious that he respected her – especially after she had turned the tables on him. And it was also obvious that he was attracted to her.

‘What we know is that he’s extremely dangerous,’ he said to Sarit.

‘But why should that concern us?’

‘For several reasons. Apart from anything else, what Daniel Klein is doing involves discovery of old material pertaining to our ancient history and the doctrine that forms our very justification for having a homeland in this part of the world.’

‘So what?’ said Sarit with a cheeky grin. ‘We’re going to execute him for challenging biblical dogma?’

‘We’re not going to execute him at all unless he becomes a threat to us. But you have to understand that we may be facing a much bigger threat here: a threat to our very survival.’

‘What threat?’ she asked, knowing that Dov was not one for idle talk.

He told her the nature of the threat… and she listened with growing alarm.