“You mean, when I get back to Britain?”
“No, I mean today or tomorrow. They should have arrived in Rabat about the same time you did. I’ve got her mobile number for you.”
Byrd ended the call as abruptly as he’d started it, and Bronson read the article in its entirety. The story was simple enough.
The O’Connors, the reporter suggested, had witnessed a violent argument in the
souk
in Rabat. Immediately afterward, Margaret O’Connor had picked up a small clay tablet dropped by a man who was being pursued through the narrow streets and alleyways. The following day, on their way back to the airport at Casablanca, the couple was ambushed on the road near Rabat and killed.
“This was no accident,” David Philips was quoted as saying. “My parents-in-law were hunted down and killed out of hand by a gang of ruthless criminals intent on recovering this priceless relic.” And what, the article demanded in conclusion, were the British and Moroccan police going to do about it?
“Not a lot, probably,” Bronson muttered, as he reached for the phone to call Kirsty Philips’ mobile. “And how do they know the tablet’s worth anything at all?” he wondered.
9
The Canterbury copper wasn’t the only person to read the brief article in the local paper with interest. A fair-haired young man saw the picture of the clay tablet and immediately reached for a pair of scissors. Snipping around the story, he put it aside and turned his attention to the rest of the newspaper. Beside him in his modest apartment on the outskirts of Enfield was a pile that contained a copy of every British national daily newspaper, a selection of news magazines and most of the larger-circulation provincial papers.
Going through every one of them and extracting all the articles of interest—a task he performed every day—had taken him all the morning and a couple of hours after lunch, but his work still wasn’t finished. He bundled the mutilated newspapers and magazines into a black rubbish bag, then carried the pile of stories that he’d clipped over to a large A3-size scanner attached to a powerful desktop computer.
He placed them on the scanner’s flatbed one by one, and copied each onto the computer’s hard drive, ensuring that every image was accompanied by the name of the publication in which it had appeared, and storing them in a folder that bore the current date.
When he’d finished, he put all the clippings in the rubbish bag with the discarded newspapers, then prepared an e-mail that contained no text at all, but to which he attached copies of all the scanned images. Some days the sheer number and size of the attachments meant he had to divide them up and send two or even three e-mails to dispatch them. The destination e-mail was a numerical Yahoo web-based address that gave no clue as to the identity of the owner. When the account had been set up, five separate e-mail addresses had been created to form a chain that would obscure the identity of the originating e-mail. Once the account was up and running, all those other addresses had been canceled, ending any possible attempt to trace the source.
Of course, he knew exactly who the recipient was. Or, to be absolutely accurate, he knew precisely
where
his message would be read, but not exactly
who
would read it.
He had been stationed in Britain for almost two years, steadily building a name and establishing himself as a journalist specializing in writing for foreign magazines and newspapers. He could even produce copies of various continental journals that included articles he’d written—or which appeared over his byline. If anyone had bothered to check the original copies of those publications, they’d have seen the articles reproduced word for word, but with an entirely different byline. In fact, the copied pages had been carefully prepared in a secure basement in an unmarked and equally secure building in a town named Glilot in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv, for the sole purpose of helping to establish his cover.
He wasn’t a spy—or not yet, at any rate—but he
was
an employee of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. One of his tasks as a support agent was to copy any and every article that related, however obliquely, to the British government and to all branches of the armed forces, including the special forces, and to the United Kingdom intelligence and counterintelligence agencies. But like all agents in the employ of the Mossad, he had also been given an additional list of topics that were in no way connected with any of these subjects. Ancient tablets, whether made of clay or any other material, had been accorded a very high priority in the list.
Once he’d dispatched the e-mail, there was usually nothing else for him to do until the following day, but on that afternoon, within minutes of sending the message, his computer emitted a double-tone that showed an e-mail had been received. When he opened his inbox, the coded name of the sender jumped out at him, as did the priority. He scanned the message quickly, then read it again.
Whatever the importance of that old clay tablet, it looked as if the article he’d sent had stirred up a hornets’ nest in Tel Aviv, and the new instructions he’d been given clearly emphasized this. He glanced at his watch, weighing his options, then grabbed his jacket from the hook in the hall, left his apartment and headed for the stairs leading to the small parking lot at the back of the building.
With any luck, he should reach Canterbury in just over an hour.
10
“This,” Talabani said in English, “is Hafez Aziz, and he’s the man who saw the accident. He only speaks Tamazight, so I’ll have to translate for you.”
Bronson was in another interview room at the Rabat police station. On the other side of the table was a short, slim Moroccan wearing faded blue jeans and a white shirt.
For the next few minutes, Jalal Talabani translated what Aziz said, sentence by sentence, and at the end of it Bronson knew no more than he had before. Aziz patiently repeated exactly the same story that Talabani had told him earlier, and what he said sounded to Bronson like a statement made by an honest man.
He said he’d seen the Renault approaching the bend, traveling very quickly. He’d watched the car start to make the turn, but then swing wide and hit the rocks at the side of the road. He’d seen it fly into the air, tumble sideways over the edge and vanish from sight. He’d stopped his car at the scene and called the police, then scrambled down into the
wadi
to try to help the occupants, but it was already too late.
There was only one question Bronson really wanted to ask, but he kept his mouth shut and just thanked Aziz for coming to the police station.
When the Moroccan had left the interview room, Bronson turned to Talabani.
“I’m very grateful for all your help,” he said, “and for arranging that interview. I think I’ve seen almost all that I needed to. The last thing is the suitcases and stuff you recovered from the car. And I think you said you’d already prepared an inventory?”
Talabani nodded and stood up. “Stay here and I’ll have the cases brought in,” he said, and left the interview room.
Twenty minutes later, Bronson acknowledged that the Moroccan had been right. There was nothing at all in the O’Connors’ luggage that was in any way unusual, not that he had expected that there would be. It was just one last check he’d needed to make. In fact, the only unusual thing about the inventory was not what
was
on the list, but what
wasn’t
. One item he was certain he would see—the O’Connors’ camera—simply wasn’t there.
“One last thing, Jalal,” he said. “There wasn’t any sign of an old clay tablet in the car when you recovered it, was there?”
The Moroccan looked puzzled. “A clay tablet?” he asked. “No, not that I remember. Why?”
“Just something I heard. No matter. Thanks for everything. I’ll be in touch if I need anything more.”
Bronson’s last appointment was to see the O’Connors’ daughter and her husband at their hotel the following morning. He folded up the printed inventory, slipped it into his pocket, and glanced at his watch. He should, he hoped, be able to catch a flight out of Casablanca the following day and be back home by late afternoon.
When Jalal Talabani left the police station in Rabat that evening, he didn’t follow his usual routine and walk to the parking lot to collect his car and drive to his home on the northern outskirts of the city. Instead, he visited a local café for a drink and a light meal. Then he followed a circuitous route around the nearby streets, varying his pace and stopping frequently to check behind him. Only when he was quite certain that he was unobserved did he walk to a public telephone and dial a number from memory.
“I have some information you might find useful.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s a British policeman named Bronson here in Rabat looking into the deaths of the O’Connors. He’s also interested in finding an old clay tablet. Do you know anything about that?”
“I might,” the man replied. “Where’s he staying?”
Talabani told him the name of Bronson’s hotel.
“Thank you, I’ll take care of him,” said the man, and ended the call.
11
Early that morning, in a conference room in one of the numerous Israeli government buildings near the center of Jerusalem, three men met by appointment. No secretaries were present; no notes were taken.
In front of each man were two large photographs, one in color and the other monochrome, depicting a gray-brown clay tablet in considerable detail. There was also a photocopy of the article from the British regional newspaper, together with a translation of the text into Hebrew.
“That report appeared yesterday in a British newspaper,” Eli Nahman began. He was elderly, thin and stooped, with a white beard and a mane of white hair topped with a black embroidered yarmulke, but his eyes were a clear and piercing blue, and sparkled with intelligence. He was a senior professor at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and an authority on pre-Christian relics.
“The story was spotted by one of the Mossad’s assets in London and forwarded to Glilot,” he continued, gesturing to the younger man sitting at the head of the table.
Levi Barak was in his late thirties, with black hair and a tanned complexion, his otherwise regular features dominated by a large nose that would forever stop him being described as handsome. He was wearing a light tan suit, but had hung the jacket over the back of his chair to reveal the shoulder holster under his left arm-pit, from which the black butt of a semiautomatic pistol protruded.
“As you know, we have standing instructions to inform Professor Nahman when any such reports are received, and I called him yesterday afternoon as soon as I saw this article,” Barak said. “What you see is all the information we have at present. We’ve instructed our asset to monitor the British press for any further information about this story. He’s also been ordered to drive over to Canterbury—that’s the city in Kent where these people lived—and obtain copies of all newspapers printed there. He will forward to us any other reports and articles he can find.”
Barak paused and glanced at the two other men.
“The problem we have is that there’s very little hard data here. All we really know is that two elderly English people died a couple of days ago in a road accident in Morocco, and that at some point prior to this they came into possession of an old clay tablet. What we have to do today is decide what action, if any, we should take.”
“Agreed,” Nahman said. “The first step, obviously, is to decide if this clay tablet is a part of the set, but that’s not going to be easy. The picture printed in the paper is so blurred as to be almost useless, and the report gives no indication as to where the relic is now. To help us make a decision, I’ve supplied photographs of the tablet we already possess, so we can at least compare the appearance of the two of them.”
He paused and looked across the table at the young man sitting opposite him. “So, Yosef, what’s your opinion?”
Yosef Ben Halevi stared down at the photocopied picture of the newspaper article for a few seconds before he replied. “There’s not much to go on here. Without a ruler or something else in this picture to provide scale, we can’t do more than estimate its size. It could be anything from about five to twenty or thirty centimeters long. That’s the first problem. If we’re to determine if this
is
one of the set, the size is critical. Is there any way of finding out the dimensions of this relic?”
“Not that I can think of, no,” Nahman said. “The newspaper report describes the object as a ‘small clay tablet, ’ so the chances are that we’re looking at something no more than, say, ten or perhaps fifteen centimeters in length. Any bigger than that and I doubt if the word ‘small’ would have been used. And that, of course,
is
about the right size.”
Ben Halevi nodded. “The second point of comparison must obviously be the inscriptions. Looking at the pictures of the two relics, it appears to me that both are superficially similar, and both have the diagonal mark in one corner that I’d expect. The lines of characters are different lengths, and that’s not a normal characteristic of Aramaic script, but the newspaper photograph is too poor to allow me to do more than try to translate a couple of words.”