The Moses Legacy (32 page)

There was a look of solemnity on the faces of Senator Morris and the professor as Audrey entered the library of Morris's house in north-west Washington DC. For some reason, the senator had called this meeting in his home, instead of the Capitol Building, and Audrey had no wish to rock the boat by questioning him on it.

The professor did not even look up from the cherrywood table, let alone rise to greet her as she approached them. Morris did, but there was a look of sadness in his eyes, as if he had some bad news to tell her.

‘Has someone died?' she asked, using the old gambit of humour to divert or soften the tension that confronted her.

‘You don't know?' said Professor Tomlinson.

Audrey looked at him with shock and confusion written across her face and then at Morris, hoping for an explanation.

‘Sit down,' said Morris softly, indicating the chair that he had pulled out for her.

She sat, as did Morris.

‘I tried to call Goliath. He was supposed to be going to Petra.'

‘Petra?'

‘To get the shroud that
The Book of the Wars of the Lord
was wrapped in.'

‘And?' asked Audrey.

‘There was someone else there.'

‘So?'

‘Using his
cell phone
!'

‘I… I don't understand.'

‘He would never give his cell phone away unless he was killed or captured!'

‘You mean…'

‘He means that you
betrayed
us, you bitch!' shouted Professor Tomlinson.

For a second or two, Audrey was afraid. But then she overcame her fear.

‘Whatever you think about the Jews, or the Israelis or the Zionists or whatever you call them, you have no right to play God.'

‘I
didn't
play God. I am a
servant
of God.'

‘And Goliath? Is he a servant of God too? Killing Professor Carmichael who had done us no wrong?'

‘Goliath is God's avenging angel.'

‘An avenging angel who knows no bounds! Just like
you
know no bounds. Do you really think you have the right to commit genocide?'

‘It isn't genocide, it's pest control,' said Morris. ‘You could call it de-lousing.'

‘You're sick,' said Audrey.

‘At least he isn't a traitor!'
shouted the professor, almost rising out of his seat towards Audrey.

Morris stayed the older man with a gesture of his palm, a feeble sign of his ailing authority. Audrey wasn't afraid of the professor's anger, but she wanted to know more. She wanted to understand what Morris was telling her.

‘What did they offer you?' asked the senator. ‘Thirty pieces of silver?'

‘Oh, I didn't do it for money. I did it because I didn't like what you were doing – didn't like what my husband was doing.'

‘I never trusted you!'

‘And you were right. I
was
against you the whole time. Only it took me a while to realize how right I was.'

‘You prefer to sit back while those pasty-faced mongrels take over the world.'

‘Oh, not
that
old chestnut again.'

‘You think it's just a myth? The World Trade Center, the Kennedy assassination—'

Audrey burst out laughing. ‘My God! You really believe your own bullshit! I thought you just sold it to the rednecks. I didn't think you actually bought it yourself.'

‘And what about all the things you can't deny? Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken—'

‘Albert Einstein, Ernst Boris Chain, Yehudi Menuhin, Kirk Douglas—'

‘What's
that
got to do with it?' shouted Tomlinson angrily.

‘You think you're the only one who can memorize a string of names and spit them out on demand? Save the demagoguery for the men in white sheets!'

‘Well, what does
your
list prove? It's easy enough to achieve success when you run the world!'

‘Oh yeah! And what does
your
list prove? That a few Jews have broken the rules? I could just as easily throw
other
names at you… like Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Timothy McVeigh. But what does it prove? That you can use a handful of facts to sell a conspiracy theory? I'm in the newspaper business, buddy! I could write the book on that!'

‘
You're one of them!
' said the professor.

‘One of whom, for God's sake? There is no
them
. It's just a paranoid myth that power-hungry demagogues feed the people when they're outside of government.'

‘Next you're gonna say there's no
us
? But that's the myth that the people on the
inside
like to spread when they've got their snouts in the public trough.'

‘So what's the story, Paul? You wanna fight corruption? Then go fight corruption! But don't use it as an excuse for hate-mongering.'

Paul Tomlinson was looking at her as if seeing her for the first time. He had always doubted the strength of her commitment to the cause. He knew that she could never be quite as committed as her husband. He'd put that down to her being a woman. He thought that she was merely a bit wishy-washy. But now he realized that it was not a case of her being too soft. She was simply an enemy of their cause. She had never been one of them.

And she had just admitted that it had been she who told the Israelis about Goliath.
She
had betrayed them and got Goliath killed, and now she was sitting here taunting them with her treachery… mocking them for their credulity… gloating over her betrayal of their righteous cause. It was all too much for Professor Tomlinson to take. He stood up and moved towards her menacingly, with hatred in his eyes.

‘What do you mean “an emergency”? Daniel asked, although he already had some idea.

Sarit was looking at them intently, like she had a lot to say and very little time in which to say it. The sinking sun made her shadow look ridiculously long.

‘The man who locked you in the tomb – the man who forced you to go to the cave in Petra. He was working for an organization that hates Israel and the Jewish people.'

‘Look, there's no point beating about the bush,' said Daniel. ‘We know about the spores.'

‘Then you know what Goliath is planning to do.'

‘Goliath?' Gabrielle echoed, unable to suppress the smile.

‘That was his code name. The people he's working for wanted to use the spores for a terrorist attack on Israel. You may not know this, but they sent Goliath to get a sample of that boy, Joel's clothes from the hospital. He failed. And he also wanted to get a sample of
your
clothes when he stole the jeep after locking you in the tomb. I put a stop to that, but I understand that he's got the shroud now.'

‘How do you know?' Gabrielle challenged.

‘Sheikh Ibrahim told me.'

‘He's still alive?'

‘Not any more. But he told me that Goliath took the linen
shroud that the tablets were wrapped in and that means he intends to use it. We need to warn the Israeli authorities. The battery on my mobile phone died. I found the one Goliath dropped in the cave, but the battery's run out on that one too.'

Daniel took out his mobile and was frantically trying to get it to work.

‘Damn,' he said. ‘Mine's out of juice as well.'

They looked over at Gabrielle. She shook her head.

‘If we drive fast we might be able to make it to the King Hussein Bridge just after him,' said Daniel. ‘Then we can warn the authorities.'

Sarit was shaking her head.

‘It's Friday. The bridge closes at lunchtime.'

‘Then he must be stuck on this side too,' Daniel replied with relief.

‘Not necessarily,' Sarit contradicted. ‘There are two other crossings that are open until eight: the Yitzhak Rabin Crossing in the south and the Nahar Yarden Crossing in the north.'

‘He left us in Petra,' said Gabrielle. ‘So he probably took the one in the south.'

‘Damn!' shouted Sarit. ‘That means he's probably in Israel already. We have to get to a phone! We have to warn them!'

Then Daniel remembered something.

‘I don't know if this helps, but there was something he said when he took the shroud.'

‘What?' asked Sarit.

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

Sarit thought about this for about half a minute. Then it suddenly hit her.

‘Of course!'

‘What?' asked Daniel and Gabrielle in unison.

‘You know what the main reservoir for the State of Israel is?'

‘No,' said Daniel.

‘The Sea of Galilee.'

Recognizing the encroaching danger in the professor's approach, Audrey stood up too.

‘No, Paul,' cried Senator Morris. ‘Not here!'

Tomlinson pushed Audrey against the wall. But he hadn't noticed the lamp with the heavy bronze base on the side table. Even in the agony of Tomlinson's stranglehold, Audrey had the presence of mind to grab the lamp with one hand and smash it down on the professor's head.

She only had to do it once and her attacker fell to the ground in a lifeless heap. As the lifeblood returned to her head, her arm dropped to her side and she let the lamp slip from her hand. It landed on the floor with a thud.

Realizing what she had done – what she had been obliged to do – she turned to the senator.

‘You killed him.'

‘It was self-defence.'

‘What are you going to do?' he asked weakly.

‘What I should have done from the beginning: tell the truth.'

‘You're going to tell them about the New Covenant?'

‘Yes… both the police and my readers.'

‘But that'll destroy us.'

‘I certainly hope so, Arthur. I certainly hope so.'

For a moment, she wasn't sure she had said the right thing. Senator Morris was capable of anger himself. She had seen that in the past. But as she saw the faraway look in his eyes, she realized that his anger had spent itself.

Barely a couple of seconds later, he broke down in tears.

‘My daughter,' he sobbed.

‘Jane? What about her?'

‘She died… of the plague.'

Finally Audrey mellowed slightly.

‘I'm sorry.'

She was tempted to remind the senator that it was he who had sent his daughter on the dig. It was he who had used her for his own means. He had told her to get a sample of Joel's clothes and if he thought that they contained the spores then it meant he was ready to risk her life for his evil cause. Like Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia to get wind for the sails of his ships in the war against Troy.

There was no reason to sympathize with him. With Jane perhaps – but not with Morris.

But in an instant, all that was swept into irrelevance as the senator clutched his chest and fell to the floor, writhing in agony.

‘So what is this organization that hates Israel and the Jews so much?' asked Gabrielle.

Abandoning the car that Gabrielle had been driving, they had piled into Sarit's and were heading north, with the sun low in the sky to their left.

‘They're called the New Covenant and it isn't only Israel and the Jews. It's the West in general. They hate the United States. They hate Britain. They hate blacks. They hate liberals.'

‘So it's not Islamic extremists then?' asked Daniel.

‘No, nothing like that. More like those racist rednecks that support the Ku Klux Klan and think there's a Jewish conspiracy running the world. But their leaders aren't stupid. They're smart people who pander to gullible followers.'

‘So why hasn't anything been done about them?' asked Daniel. ‘I mean if you know who they are.'

‘Well, we don't know who
all
of them are. They operate within a cell structure. But we've built up a pretty good picture and we're keeping tabs on them – along with the FBI and various other law enforcement agencies.'

‘But I mean why haven't they been prosecuted on terrorism charges?'

‘Well, up until now they've been mostly a talkshop. Big on rhetoric but nothing else. They spread stories over the
Internet and in newspapers when they can. They talk the talk but they seldom walk the walk. Only now it's different. They decided to try and get their hands on the spores that caused an ancient plague and use them to destroy Israel.'

‘But how did they
know
about the spores?' asked Daniel. ‘I mean the people that this… Goliath was working for?'

‘One of the members of the New Covenant is a professor of Linguistics or something like that. He was asked to peer review a paper by Harrison Carmichael in which he essentially deciphered Proto-Sinaitic script.'

‘He told me about it… sort of… but I didn't take him seriously at first.'

‘That's understandable. He was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. But that didn't detract from his intellectual powers. He had, in fact, translated
The Book of the Straight
.'

‘That's
impossible
!' said Gabrielle. ‘How could he even have got hold of a copy? They only took it out of its hiding place when we persuaded the Samaritans and the Israel Antiquities Authority to let us. And they said it had been kept there for a couple of centuries.'

‘It may have been at that particular hiding place for a couple of centuries, but it had been taken out some time in the last couple of hundred years and copied on to parchment. We know that because your uncle
had
that parchment copy. We believe that he'd had it for a few decades and that he'd been working on it ever since. But he didn't have what you and Professor Klein here had to help you.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Gabrielle.

‘I understand from what you told my colleague in Herzliya that you had the benefit of other texts that you could compare to their biblical equivalent. Your uncle didn't have that. So it obviously took him a lot longer. But he got there first.'

‘Then why didn't he publish?' asked Gabrielle.

‘Because of that professor – the one who peer reviewed it. He used his prestige to delay publication.'

‘But if they were anti-Israel why did they want to stop the paper being published?'

‘Because they wanted to draw on the information inside it. The paper revealed the disease that afflicted the Israelites. They figured out from the contents that it was a spore-borne disease. They saw the possibility of getting the spores and using them against Israel, so they bided their time.'

Now Daniel was even more confused. ‘But the information about the plague was in
The Book of the Wars of the Lord
, not
The Book of the Straight
. And it was pretty minimalistic information.'

Sarit was shaking her head. ‘It was in
The Book of the Straight
too – and in far greater detail.'

An uneasy silence settled over them, as Daniel had a deeply discomforting thought.