“I checked. It was a small town in what used to be called Samaria, not far from Mount Gerizim and about twenty miles north of Jerusalem. It was never a very important place, and there’s pretty much nothing left of the original settlement now.”
“So how come this tablet finished up there?”
“We don’t know that it did,” Dexter replied. “What’s on that card might just be the version that was offered for public consumption. After all, it’s hardly likely to state it’s been looted from some museum, is it? Don’t forget that
your
clay tablet was once the property of a museum in Cairo, but I bet that’s not what you tell people when you show them the relic.”
“You’d better believe that.”
Dexter gestured toward the paper Hoxton was still holding. “You’ve already got one of the tablets and now a few blurred photographs of another one. What are you going to do next?”
“
I’m
not going to do anything,” Hoxton said. “
We
are going to do our best to find the missing relic.”
“But you’ve only got one tablet, Charlie, and we’ve already worked out that there must be four in the set. How the hell are you going to find anything with well over half the text missing?”
“I’ve got Baverstock doing a trawl through every museum’s database that he can access, looking for any other tablets that might have been recovered over the years. If he can get a decent picture of another tablet, I reckon we can crack this with two of them plus the partial translation of this tablet from Rabat. Whether he can or can’t, we’ll go out to the Middle East anyway. The picture on this card’s better than any of the other pictures I’ve seen of this tablet, and Baverstock should be able to decipher at least half of it. This is probably the best chance we’re ever going to have.”
“Surely you don’t want me to come along as well?”
“Yes, I do. You’re coming because I need your contacts, Dexter, and Baverstock’s coming because we’ll need his language skills—unless you’ve added Imperial Aramaic translation to your other skills.”
Dexter frowned, but after a moment he realized that getting out of Britain for a week or so might not be such a bad idea. If Zebari’s killer had sent some of his men to track him down, they’d presumably be looking for him in Morocco and the United Kingdom, not in Israel or wherever else Hoxton had in mind.
He sighed and leaned back in his seat. It wasn’t as though he had any choice in the matter in any case. “No,” he said, “I still can’t read Aramaic, Charlie. So when do we leave?”
36
“You know,” Bronson said, as he and Angela strolled along a street near their hotel, enjoying the cooler night air, “there’s one thing we haven’t really talked about, and that’s the purpose of the tablets. I mean, exactly
what
did the people who made these tablets hide? What
was
their treasure?”
They had finished their dinner, and Angela had insisted that she needed to stretch her legs before going back to her room. She’d told Bronson that if he was still concerned about the armed men who had chased him before, she would go out on her own—after all, nobody even knew she was in Morocco. Bronson hadn’t liked it, but he’d agreed to go outside with her. If something happened to Angela, he knew he’d never forgive himself.
“Whatever it was, it had to have been really important to them because of all the trouble they took. They enciphered the message on the tablets and then, presumably, hid them in separate locations so that the hiding place of their treasure could only be found when all four tablets had been recovered. And there are some clues in what we’ve found already. About half a dozen words in particular seem to me to be significant.”
“Let me take a guess. Those would be ‘scroll,’ ‘tablets, ’ ‘temple,’ ‘silver,’ ‘concealed’ and ‘Jerusalem’?”
Angela nodded. “Precisely. Any kind of ancient scrolls are of interest to historians and archaeologists today, but if a scroll was hidden two millennia ago, that suggests it was believed to be really important even then. And if you prefix the word ‘scroll’ with ‘silver,’ it raises a very interesting possibility—” She broke off as Bronson reached out and seized her arm, pulling her to a stop.
“What is it?” she demanded.
“I don’t like—” Bronson started, looking first up the street, then back the way they’d come.
About twenty yards in front of them, a white van had just pulled into the curb and was sitting there, engine idling. Perhaps fifty yards behind them, a black Mercedes sedan was approaching slowly, keeping close to the curb, and closer—much closer—a handful of men in flowing
jellabas
were walking quickly toward them.
It could all be entirely innocent, just a series of separate and unconnected events, but to Bronson’s trained eyes it looked like an ambush. He paused for under a second, then reacted.
“Run!” he whispered urgently to Angela. “Run. Get away from here.” He pointed toward a side-street. “Down there, as fast as you can.”
Angela glanced behind her, saw the approaching men for the first time and took to her heels.
Bronson span round to face the group, but tried to stand his ground, walking steadily backward to provide a measure of protection for Angela. He looked behind him, and saw that she had reached the corner of the side-street and was starting to run down it. He turned on his heels to follow her, but at that moment the approaching men themselves began to run, and in seconds they had caught up with him.
He felt a sudden tug on his shoulder as somebody grabbed at him, and tried to spin round to face his attackers. Then two blows crashed into the back of his head. He lost his balance and fell forward, his body collapsing limply to the potholed pavement.
The last thing he heard before his consciousness fled was a single distant scream from Angela as she called out his name.
PART TWO
ENGLAND
37
One of the first things Kirsty Philips did when she arrived back in Britain and had finished unpacking was to drive round to her parents’ house. While they’d been away in Morocco, she’d been doing that once every couple of days to check the house, make sure the indoor plants were watered, pick up the mail, check their answerphone messages and generally ensure that the place was in good order.
That morning, she parked her Volkswagen Golf in the driveway of the small detached house in a quiet street on the western outskirts of the city, took out her keys and opened the front door. As usual, there was a pile of envelopes lying on the mat, most of them clearly junk mail of various sorts. She picked them up and carried them through to the kitchen, where she placed them with others that had accumulated since her parents had left the house for what she now knew had been the last time. Her eyes misted at that thought, but she pushed her sorrow aside and began her usual walk-round of the property, inspecting all the rooms one after the other. The last thing she did was go into the lounge and check the answerphone, but there were no messages on it.
She pulled open the door to the hall and immediately came face-to-face with a man she’d never seen before.
He had a dark-brown complexion and was tall and slim, but strongly built. In his right hand he was carrying a long black tool of some kind, perhaps a crowbar. He looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to confront him.
The intruder recovered first. He swung the crowbar round in a short, vicious arc, the tempered steel bar smashing into the left side of Kirsty’s face, fracturing her cheek-bone and cracking the side of her skull. It was a killing blow. She felt an instant of shocking, numbing pain, then tumbled sideways, knocked unconscious by the force of the impact. She fell limply onto the carpet, blood pouring from the side of her face where the skin had been brutally torn apart. But that wasn’t what killed her.
The major damage was internal, half a dozen blood vessels in her brain ripped apart by the splinters of broken bone. Shards of the same fractured bone had been driven deep into her cerebrum, causing irreparable damage. She was still breathing as she lay there, but effectively she was already dead.
The man looked down at her for a long moment, then stepped over her body and continued walking toward the front door. He’d heard no noise from inside the house before he’d forced the side door, and had assumed that the car he’d seen parked on the drive had belonged to the O’Connors—an assumption he now realized had been erroneous.
He glanced round, saw no sign of any mail, and retraced his steps to the kitchen. He’d have to check each room in turn until he found the package.
On the kitchen table, he saw the post stacked neatly on one side and began searching through it. But there was no sign of the envelope he was looking for, so perhaps his boss’s deduction had been wrong.
For perhaps a minute he stood irresolute, wondering what he should do next. Who the young woman was he had no idea—a neighbor, or a cleaner, perhaps—and already he was beginning to regret hitting her quite so hard. Should he try to shift the body, get it out of the house and dump it somewhere? Then he rejected that idea. He didn’t know the area very well, and the risk of being seen carrying her out of the house—or being stopped by a police officer with her corpse in the car—was too great.
He opened the door, glanced around him, and walked away.
38
Bronson was aware of a throbbing ache at the back of his skull as consciousness returned slowly. Instinctively he raised his hand to his head. Or rather he tried to, but his arm wouldn’t move. He couldn’t move either arm, in fact, which puzzled him. Nor his feet. There were stabbing pains in his wrists and ankles, and a dull ache down the left side of his chest. He opened his eyes, but could see nothing in front of him. Everything was completely black. For a few seconds he had no recollection of what had happened to him, and then he slowly started to remember.
“Oh, shit,” he muttered.
“Chris? Thank God.” The voice came from out of the darkness, somewhere over to his left.
“Angela? Where the hell are we? Are you OK?”
“I don’t know. Where we are, I mean. And I’m fine, apart from being tied up in this bloody chair, that is.”
“Why can’t I see anything?”
“We’re in a cellar and the bastards turned the lights out once they’d tied us up.”
“But what happened? All I can remember is something hitting me on the back of the head.”
“I was running down the street and I turned back to see what was happening just as one of the men grabbed you and another swung a cosh or something. You dropped like a stone and for a few seconds I was certain you were dead. I ran back to—”
“You should have run on, Angela. There was nothing you could have done.”
“I know, I know.” Angela sighed. “And it’s my fault we’re here. I shouldn’t have insisted we go outside. And then when I saw you were hurt, all I wanted to do was try to help.”
“Well, thanks for trying, but it would have been better if you’d got away, because then you could have called the police. Then what did they do?”
“It was very slick. Two of the men grabbed me and stuck a gag over my mouth—I was yelling my head off—and then they bundled me into the back of the white van that had stopped a few yards up the road. They tied my wrists and ankles with some kind of thin plastic device—”
“Probably cable ties,” Bronson interrupted. “They’re virtually unbreakable.”
“Then three more men picked you up and dragged you over to the van and tossed you inside.”
That probably explained the ache in his chest, Bronson thought.
“They all climbed into the back of the van and tied you up the same as me as soon as it started moving. It drove for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, then stopped and reversed. When the doors opened, all I could see was the whitewashed wall of a house, and then I was carried out, through a doorway and down a set of steps into this bloody cellar. There were two upright chairs down here. They tied me to one of them, while another couple of men dragged you down here and repeated the process. Then they turned out the lights and buggered off. I’ve been sitting here in the dark ever since. It’s been hours.” There was a pause. “I’m so sorry, Chris.”
Bronson wasn’t surprised to hear a quaver in her voice. Angela was tough—he knew that only too well—but he could understand how traumatized she must have been by the events of the evening, especially if she was blaming herself for what had happened.
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his voice gentle.
“Yes, it was. And do you know what I found most unnerving about all this?”
“What?”
“During the whole process—the kidnapping, the drive in the van and when they tied us up down here in this cellar—none of the men said a single word. Nobody issued any orders; none of them asked any questions, or even made a comment. They all knew exactly what they were doing. That worries me, Chris. We weren’t just snatched off the street at random by some gang of thugs. Whoever was responsible for this took us for a reason, and it was a really well-planned operation.”