Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

With the rock in his hand, Daniel charged at the iron door and began smashing away at a single point on its surface, near where the lock would be. Iron, when smashed repeatedly with the pressure on a single point, can eventually break. By hitting it repeatedly, Daniel was trying to puncture the iron door and then enlarge the hole sufficiently to reach through it. But after many attempts, all he had managed to do was make a dent in the heavy iron. And he had exhausted himself. Over the course of the next hour, Mansoor took over and then Gabrielle. Finally Daniel took the stone back and went at it with a vengeance.

‘There’s a hole!’ he cried with delight, noticing a pinprick of light. It was very small, but it was progress, and it encouraged the others to take over and go at it with similar vigour.

Daniel wondered why no one heard the noise. To him it was deafening. Having heard the silence of the valley, it seemed strange that such a din did not carry. But then again, he realized that in the main valley the clamour made by the throngs of tourists would surely drown out the noise they were making. In any case, the distance was quite great and the fact that the noise of the tourists did not puncture the peace of the western valley testified to just how far apart those two worlds were.

But as they continued with their exhausting efforts, Daniel noticed two things. The first was that the hole was getting bigger and the second was that the light that was coming through the ever increasing gap was ebbing. It was getting on for half past six and the sun was setting.

A renewed sense of urgency set in and it manifested itself in the vigour with which Daniel wielded the stone as he attacked the hole. Finally, he stopped, exhausted. He held out the stone to Gabrielle, but she refused to take it. She was looking straight past him.

‘I think it’s big enough,’ she said.

Daniel turned and looked. It was hard to tell. The poor light inside the tomb and the dimming light outside made it hard to assess the size, and the jagged edges made it uncertain how safe it was to put one’s hand through, not to mention one’s wrist. Daniel would personally have preferred to enlarge the hole before trying, but he was ready to defer to Gabrielle.

‘Do you think you can reach through that?’ he asked.

Gabrielle stared at him, not answering.

‘No, she can’t,’ said a voice behind him. ‘But I can.’

Daniel turned round to see Mansoor holding the key ready and realized that he was right. Gabrielle, because of her hand size and well-developed wrists, would not be able to reach through and neither could Daniel. But the more slender Mansoor might just be able to.

‘Please don’t drop it,’ said Daniel.

It wasn’t intended to sound patronizing, but Mansoor responded with a withering look. Then, very slowly and carefully, he reached through with the key and tried to angle it towards the padlock. The other two saw the pained expression on his face as he rotated his arm in a desperate effort to get the key to where they needed it. And then he felt the key slipping in his sweaty fingers. He tried to pull his arm back in, but in his haste he cut his wrist on the jagged metal. Blood spurted from it and he cried out in pain.

The others watched in horror as they realized that both his hand and the key it was struggling to hold on to were still on the other side of the door, trapped in the jagged-edged hole.

Driving at night along the Nile Valley was a dangerous business. The main ‘highway’ was a single lane in which vehicles parked at night with their lights off, and donkey carts with neither lights nor red markings or reflectors to make them visible trundled along invisibly. Added to that, there were also trucks with unsafe loads and long-distance taxis, driven with a brazen disregard not only for the speed limit but even for the laws of physics.

This meant that drivers had to make a hard choice between high speed, to mingle with the flow of local motorized traffic, and low speed to avoid the pitfalls of the stationary vehicles and donkeys. Navigating a middle course between those two perils was difficult.

But Sarit didn’t really have a choice.

She had followed Goliath back to Luxor, thinking that he was going to ditch the jeep and either fly back to Cairo or take the overnight train. But instead he proceeded to drive north along the Nile Valley, presumably intending to make it to Cairo by road. This was understandable – the further he took the jeep away from the western valley, the less likely Mansoor and the others were to be found. And this made Sarit more convinced that they were still alive.

Sarit calculated that she had two options – either to press on and try to catch Goliath, or to turn back to save the people she was supposed to protect. The drive back would take several hours and it was already dark. On the other hand, she had had to stop for petrol and was not sure if she was still in with a chance of catching up with Goliath. He might be driving fast, in excess of the speed limit. Of course she could do the same, but what if she was stopped by the police? The last thing she wanted to do was come to the attention of the authorities.

Finally, she made a decision. She pulled over by the roadside and logged on to the Internet via her mobile phone. Lacking the time for the usual photograph and steganography routine, she put a message on the wall of her social network page that said: I’m looking for big man. She just hoped that Dovi or someone at the Mossad would get it and give her a real-time update on his whereabouts.

Right now she didn’t have time to wait for an answer. Instead, she restarted the car and drove on, keeping to the main road north. After a while she got a message on her phone that a friend had commented on her wall. She pulled over again, logged on and saw a message that said: You’re only two kilometres away from the man of your dreams. Maybe you’ll have to chase him faster, but keep going the way you are and you’ll meet him.

She smiled and realized that Mossad were tracking both her and Goliath via the GPS on their mobile phones. The message implied that a slight acceleration would be all that she needed to catch up with him.

Looking at the terrain, she realized that she might find a quiet spot without witnesses where she could deal with Goliath once and for all. Then she remembered that this was a petrol car, not diesel and that meant she could nip this problem in the bud. Instead of restarting the car immediately, she got out, opened the tank and siphoned off some petrol into the soft drink bottle she had retained from the gas station. Using a rag from the boot of the car, which she soaked in petrol, she created a Molotov cocktail. She got back into the car and shoved it into the door compartment.

Now all she had to do was drive fast, without attracting the attention of the police. She realized that the way others were driving, she might just get away with it.

Ignoring the blood and struggling desperately not to let the key slip from his fingers, Mansoor made another turn of his hand and just about managed to find the insert point of the padlock. But he still had to twist the key with his fingers to rotate it to the right angle to get it in. For a minute he thought it was going to slip from his sweaty grasp, but then he felt something catch and he realized that the key was in.

Now it was just a matter of turning it… turning it some more… and some more…

Yes!

The padlock was open. He pulled on the heavy lower part to disengage it, then he turned the bottom away ninety degrees. Finally he removed the whole thing and let it drop to the floor.

‘Quick! Let’s get him out!’ Daniel yelled to Gabrielle. Mansoor was hardly able to speak.