Gregg Loomis - The Sinai Secret

London

The Next Morning

Lang sat across Jacob's littered desk from the barrister. They were both sipping hot tea the color of strong coffee as Jacob thumbed through the copies Lang had given him the day before.

"Can't really say when I'll be through translating," Jacob said. "Not a good idea to keep them about the house. Our friend from last night might pay a call. At least here I can hide 'em in the general clutter-like a pebble on the beach."

Lang took a tentative sip from his mug and winced at the bitterness of the brew, only increased by the wedge of lemon Jacob had offered. "Any preliminary ideas?"

"A few. I'd say someone copied a much earlier document-copied it out in verse, like your King James Bible. Like the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, these were likely used in synagogues rather than available to the public at large. They appear to be an effort to reduce Jewish history to the written word sometime after the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 a.d. This particular lot claims to be a copy of a much earlier chronicle by the scribe

Jereb. Superficially it resembles the Book of Exodus. The operative word here is resembles. The original might even predate Exodus."

"By how much?"

Jacob shrugged as he put his mug down on a stack of legal pleadings. "Possibly from the time of Moses. If I had to guess, I'd say from the little bit of content I can understand without a closer look that someone translated these from another language. It's likely that they were again copied, possibly in the first millennium. It would be helpful if I could see the material itself, judge the ink and writing surface."

"That's not possible."

Jacob picked up his tea and took a long sip. "Pity."

"I mean, I don't have a clue where the copy I used to make those came from, other than Dr. Yadish's cousin in Austria."

Jacob was regarding the contents of his mug. "The tea, I mean. A pity. Time was we got excellent leaf from Ceylon. Now it calls itself by some other name, natives too bleeding busy with some sodding revolution to tend the bushes, and I have to make do with Indian leaf."

Lang hid a smile. Jacob's current Zeitgeist was sometimes limited. "Can you at least give me some idea?"

"What does it matter? India's effing India, not Ceylon."

"The manuscript. Can you give me an idea what it's about?"

Jacob looked mildly surprised that the conversation had gone astray. "Some rot about Moses, powder, perhaps like the lot you told me about. And the Ark of the Covenant. Or so it seems."

Lang forgot the tea. "As in Exodus?"

Jacob shook his head. "Like but not the same. Someone else is telling this particular tale. I was told by those more educated on the subject than I that what you call the Old Testament was probably first reduced to Hebrew sometime during the Babylonian Captivity, 500 b.c. or thereabouts, a collection of Jewish oral history and stories in more ancient languages. What you have is probably one in a series of sequential copies, this one, as I said, much earlier than 500 b.c."

Lang was leaning forward in his chair. "But what you're looking at isn't in the Old Testament?"

Jacob was reaching for a pipe. "Not in your book nor mine. Torah either, I suspect."

"But…?"

Jacob had the leather pouch out, pinching stringy tobacco into the pipe. "Just as you Christians picked four Gospels out of any number-a new one seems to pop up every year or so-I suspect my people did, too. I'd speculate this one didn't… what do you Yanks say? Make the cut. This one didn't make the cut."

Jacob cocked an eyebrow as he puffed the flames of a match into the bowl, well aware that Lang's Southern upbringing frequently made him bridle at being called a Yankee. "So, what do you do now?" he continued. "After last night I wouldn't think you'd want to be about while I work on your manuscript."

Lang hadn't considered that it would take any length of time to translate the papers. "Don't know exactly. By the way, I apologize for exposing Rachel to what might have happened last evening."

Jacob watched a ring of blue smoke shimmer across the desk. "Apologize to me. I'm the one who caught bloody hell for it. Now she thinks I'm somehow back, connected to the lads over at the embassy."

The British headquarters of Mossad.

"You didn't tell her about…?"

Jacob put up a restraining hand. "Tell her you gave me something that turns out to be dangerous enough to get us killed? Not bleeding likely! She'll simmer down, thinking I'm doing my part for the homeland. She knows it's just a favor for a friend, albeit a jolly good friend. Otherwise I'd be takin' my sleep on that bloody awful settee you saw in my parlor. Less a woman knows, less she has to complain about."

That idea, Lang, thought, had damned near gotten him killed.

"Speakin' of favors for friends." Jacob put the pipe down long enough to open a desk drawer and remove a pistol in a belt clip holster. "When you called yesterday, you asked what I could do about gettin' some protection. I guessed right off it wasn't condoms you were lookin' for. I remembered you favored one of these."

Jason took the proffered weapon, a SIG Sauer P226 just like the one in his bedside table at home. "Thanks, Jacob. I'm surprised you could come up with this so quickly."

Jason held up dismissive hands. "I still know a few secrets some lads would just as soon I keep to m'self. Now, it's been lovely chatting you up, but if you'll leave me be I'll get on these papers."

Lang walked back to his hotel, careful to watch for anyone who might be following. He was still unsure of what came next when he checked the telltales on his door and let himself in.

He sat on the bed and picked up the phone after checking his watch. Then he put it down again and left the room. At the concierge's desk in the lobby he exchanged bills for coins before stepping back outside.

It took a while to find a pay phone in St. James. The signature red booths had long ago disappeared into American chain restaurants, to be replaced by simple plastic bubbles, if there at all. The cell phone had made the coin-operated variety an endangered species.

Although almost any call on the planet had been subject to monitoring long before the fact became a political issue, a public-telephone conversation would be buried in unmined data. If they-whoever "they" were-had sufficient sophistication to hack into the FAA's flight plan database to meet him in Brussels, they possibly could piggyback the Anglo-American spy system to pull up any calls made from his cell, a number they would surely be watching.

He toyed with the idea of simply going to a post office, a place that always had pay phones, since the British postal system owned the phone company. But it was too crowded and too easy to overhear conversations in the ordinary post office.

Past Picadilly Circus, he spotted what he was looking for and counted out a handful of change. He patiently listened to the hisses and squeaks of a transatlantic call, wondering why the sounds were just the same as when the old Atlantic cable was the sole means of communication.

"Hello?"

At least the quality had improved. The voice on the other end could have come from across the room rather than an ocean.

"Francis! It's your favorite heretic!"

Pause.

"Lang?"

"You don't recognize my voice?"

"Of course I do," the priest snapped. "You're just not among the people I'd expect to be calling at seven in the morning, ante lucem."

"Qui male odit lucem. That's because it's noon here. Surely I didn't wake you up."

"Obviously not, since you called my office, not my cell phone, hopefully for some other purpose than to announce the time of day, wherever you are."

Lang was about to quote Virgil again until he noticed a young cherub-faced and uniformed nanny giving him an odd look over the long handlebars of the pram she was pushing. "It's all right, dearie. I always practice my Latin on the phone."