Sam Bourne - The Last Testament

Inset was a smaller photo depicting a stunning mosaic, divided into three panels, the middle section devoted to what seemed to be a wheel. The caption explained that this was the mosaic floor of the oldest synagogue in Israel, estimated to date from the Byzantine period of the fifth or sixth century. ‘Preserved intact for 1500 years, experts now worry for its survival.’

While she was reading, Miller had turned to Sanchez to discuss their next moves. No point in the Secretary coming now, they agreed, with the two sides not even talking. Smarter to hold him back for the final phase-

‘It’s too much of a coincidence,’ Maggie said, aware that she was interrupting two much more senior officials.

‘Bet Alpha?’

‘Yes. So far everyone hurt on both sides since this sudden deterioration has been connected with all this,’ she gestured at the photograph in the paper. ‘With archaeology, with ruins. With the past.’

Miller gazed at her, a smile on his lips, as if Maggie was somehow amusing him. ‘You think we gotta ghost problem? Spirits of the ancient come to haunt the present?’ He made a spooky, Hallowe’en gesture with his hands.

Maggie chose to ignore the condescension. ‘I don’t yet know what it is, but I bet you it explains why these talks are in meltdown.’

‘Face it, Ms Costello. Everything in this goddamn country-’ He suddenly remembered himself and lowered his voice. ‘Everything in this place is tied up to all this,’ he picked up the newspaper, scrunching up the page showing the Bet Alpha mosaic. ‘It’s all rocks and stones and temples. That’s the whole freakin’ point. It don’t explain nothing. We have a serious political problem here, which is gonna take some serious political solving. And I need you to start living up to your goddamned five star reputation and do some solving right now. Do I make myself clear, Ms Costello?’

Maggie was about to insist that she was not wasting her time, that the connection was real, when they were interrupted by a buzzing sound on the table. Miller’s BlackBerry, vibrating to announce a new message.

‘Israeli police have just confirmed the name of the man killed in the market last night.’

‘I bet he was a trader of antiques, wasn’t he, Mr Miller? Antiquities? Archaeological relics? Am I right, Mr Miller?’

He looked back at the handheld device, using his thumb to scroll down through the message.

‘As a matter of fact you’re wrong, Ms Costello. The dead man was, it seems, a seller of fruit and vegetables. Nothing ancient about that. He was a greengrocer. Name of Afif Aweida.’

JERUSALEM ,THE PREVIOUS THURSDAY

Shimon Guttman’s hand trembled as he put his key in the lock. The journey back home had been dizzy, his mind oscillating between excitement and alarm. Not once in all his years in Jerusalem had he ever feared mugging, but today he had looked over both shoulders, eyeing everyone who came near him with suspicion. He imagined the tragedy of it: some lout approaching him in the street, demanding he empty his pockets. He couldn’t let that happen. Not today. Not with this in his hand.

‘I’m home,’ he called as he walked inside. He prayed there would be no reply, that he would be alone.

‘Shimon? Is that you?’ His wife.

‘Yes, I won’t be long. I’ll be in my study.’

‘Did you eat yet?’

Shimon ignored her and headed straight for his desk, closing the door behind him. With his arm, he swept a pile of junk-video-camera, digital sound recorder and piles of paper-to one side, to clear a space. Slowly he took out the clay tablet Afif Aweida had given him an hour earlier. For the last half of his journey he had wrapped it in a handkerchief, to keep the sweat of his own clammy hands at bay.

As he unwrapped it now, reading again those first few words, he felt his body convulse with anticipation. In the market he had been able to make out only the opening words: the rest were obscured, their meanings out of reach. To decode the full text, he would have to study it closely, using some of his most arcane reference books. He would labour over it all night.

The thought thrilled him. He hadn’t felt this way since…since, when? Since his work on the Bet Alpha site, discovering the houses that adjoined the synagogue, which proved the existence of an entire Jewish village from the Byzantine period? Since his work, as a student of Yigal Yadin at Masada? No. The exhilaration he felt now was on an entirely different scale. The closest comparison, he was ashamed to realize, was with the moment when, as a shy sixteen-year-old, he had lost his virginity to Orna, the nineteen-year-old beauty on his kibbutz. The ecstasy rising in him now was explosive, just as it had been then.

I Abraham, son of Terach…

He was desperate to find out what it said, but there was a feeling in his gut like a lead weight. What if he were wrong? What if this was an extraordinary case of mistaken identity?

Shimon tried to calm himself. He got out of his chair, shook his head, like a dog shaking off drops of rain, and sat down again. The first task was to confirm that this really was the word of Abraham; the meaning would come next. He breathed deeply and started again.

The text was in Old Babylonian language. That, thought Guttman, fitted: it was the dialect that would have been spoken eighteen centuries before Christ, when Abraham was commonly believed to have lived. He looked back at the text. The author gave his father’s name as Terach and identified his sons as Isaac and Ishmael.

It was conceivable that there had been other Abrahams who were sons of other Terachs, even possible that they lived at that time and in that place. These other Abrahams might even have had two sons. But two sons with those exact names, Isaac and Ishmael? It was too much of a coincidence. It had to be him .

The door opened. Instinctively, Shimon placed his hand over the tablet to hide it.

‘Hello, chamoudi . I wasn’t expecting you back. Aren’t you meant to be with Shapira?’

Shit. The meeting.

‘Yes. I was. I mean, I am. I’ll phone him.’

‘What is it, Shimon? You’re sweating.’

‘It was hot out. I was running.’

‘Why were you running?’

He raised his voice. ‘Why all these questions? Leave me alone, woman! Can’t you see I’m working?’

‘What’s that on your desk?’

‘Rachel!’

She turned around, slamming the door behind her.

He tried to calm himself, looking back to the text, his eye tracing the line in which the author named his hometown as Ur, the Mesopotamian city where Abraham was born. He saw the seal on the reverse side of the tablet, in the space between the text and the date at the bottom, and repeated in another corner and again on the edges. It had not been made by a cylinder, the seal used by kings and men of wealth, the carved stone tube that could be rolled into the soft clay, thereby leaving a unique marking, a signature. Nor was it a series of crescent shapes, etched into the clay by the use of the author’s right thumbnail. No, it was a pattern found much more rarely than that, one that Guttman instantly recognized-and found unaccountably moving.

It was a roughly circular pattern, formed by a criss-cross of lines. Shimon had seen it only twice before, and one of those was in a photograph. It was formed by pressing into the clay the knot found at the fringes of a male garment, of the kind worn by Mesopotamian men at exactly Abraham’s time. Such fringed garments had faded from history, with one exception: the Jewish prayer shawl. Shimon would only have to step outside his house to find an ultra-orthodox Jew waiting at a bus stop, or buying a paper, wearing the exact same garment now, nearly four thousand years later. And here was its mark, pressed deep by Abraham, son of Terach.