Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’

‘Numbers 21. Oh, yes. Here it is. The Israelites are complaining about not having any water.’

‘Was there ever a time when the Israelites didn’t complain?’

This brought a laugh from Daniel. ‘Not then and not now!’

Gabrielle remained surprisingly straight-faced at his levity. ‘As if they’re the ones who have something to complain about,’ she responded, under her breath. ‘Anyway, what was it about that passage that interested you so much?’

‘Let me read it to you.’ And Moses and Aaron gathered the people before the rock and he said to them ‘Hear me rebels, are we to bring forth water from this rock for you?’ And Moses lifted up his hand and smote the rock with his rod twice and water flowed forth in abundance and the congregation and their cattle drank.

‘So they may have had the spores on their clothing,’ said Gabrielle. ‘And all it took was exposure to fresh water and the plague came back.’

‘That explains what must have happened at the dig. Presumably there were traces of the spores at the dig site.’

‘I must have had some spores on my clothes that infected the curator.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘What?’

‘I’ve been racking my brains wondering why Goliath wanted the shroud!’

Gabrielle’s jaw dropped.

‘You mean…’

‘But who is he planning on using it against?’

‘Wait a minute, Daniel. What did he say?’

Daniel searched his memory.

‘“I’m going to make the evil usurpers drink the water of death”.’

Suddenly, the car behind started to overtake them. Then Daniel noticed that the woman who was driving it was pointing, and appeared to be mouthing the words ‘Pull over.’

Gabrielle wasn’t having it, however. She was getting increasingly angry, and the fact that the woman in the other car appeared to be trying to communicate with her only made her angrier.

The other car continued veering right to push them off the road, and Gabrielle finally snapped. She spun the steering wheel of their much bigger vehicle sharply to the left, side-swiping the smaller car. The trouble was that Gabrielle hadn’t given her own vehicle enough time to recover and it ended up skidding to the side of the road.

Gabrielle screamed, but it was Daniel who was flung against the side as the vehicle rolled. By the time it was inverted, the front airbags had inflated, protecting the occupants from any further damage but forcing Gabrielle to stop. All three of them got out aggressively and in the ensuing confrontation Daniel noticed that the woman from the other car was quite attractive.

‘What the bloody hell were you trying to do?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘My name is Sarit Shalev. I work with Dov Shamir.’

‘You nearly got us all killed,’ said Gabrielle.

‘Like I said, I’m sorry. But I think we have an emergency on our hands.’

There was a look of solemnity on the faces of Senator Morris and the professor as Audrey entered the library of Morris’s house in north-west Washington DC. For some reason, the senator had called this meeting in his home, instead of the Capitol Building, and Audrey had no wish to rock the boat by questioning him on it.

The professor did not even look up from the cherrywood table, let alone rise to greet her as she approached them. Morris did, but there was a look of sadness in his eyes, as if he had some bad news to tell her.

‘Has someone died?’ she asked, using the old gambit of humour to divert or soften the tension that confronted her.

‘You don’t know?’ said Professor Tomlinson.

Audrey looked at him with shock and confusion written across her face and then at Morris, hoping for an explanation.

‘Sit down,’ said Morris softly, indicating the chair that he had pulled out for her.

She sat, as did Morris.

‘I tried to call Goliath. He was supposed to be going to Petra.’

‘Petra?’

‘To get the shroud that The Book of the Wars of the Lord was wrapped in.’

‘And?’ asked Audrey.

‘There was someone else there.’

‘So?’

‘Using his cell phone!’

‘I… I don’t understand.’

‘He would never give his cell phone away unless he was killed or captured!’

‘You mean…’

‘He means that you betrayed us, you bitch!’ shouted Professor Tomlinson.

For a second or two, Audrey was afraid. But then she overcame her fear.

‘Whatever you think about the Jews, or the Israelis or the Zionists or whatever you call them, you have no right to play God.’

‘I didn’t play God. I am a servant of God.’

‘And Goliath? Is he a servant of God too? Killing Professor Carmichael who had done us no wrong?’

‘Goliath is God’s avenging angel.’

‘An avenging angel who knows no bounds! Just like you know no bounds. Do you really think you have the right to commit genocide?’

‘It isn’t genocide, it’s pest control,’ said Morris. ‘You could call it de-lousing.’

‘You’re sick,’ said Audrey.

‘At least he isn’t a traitor!’ shouted the professor, almost rising out of his seat towards Audrey.

Morris stayed the older man with a gesture of his palm, a feeble sign of his ailing authority. Audrey wasn’t afraid of the professor’s anger, but she wanted to know more. She wanted to understand what Morris was telling her.

‘What did they offer you?’ asked the senator. ‘Thirty pieces of silver?’

‘Oh, I didn’t do it for money. I did it because I didn’t like what you were doing – didn’t like what my husband was doing.’

‘I never trusted you!’

‘And you were right. I was against you the whole time. Only it took me a while to realize how right I was.’

‘You prefer to sit back while those pasty-faced mongrels take over the world.’

‘Oh, not that old chestnut again.’

‘You think it’s just a myth? The World Trade Center, the Kennedy assassination-’

Audrey burst out laughing. ‘My God! You really believe your own bullshit! I thought you just sold it to the rednecks. I didn’t think you actually bought it yourself.’

‘And what about all the things you can’t deny? Bernie Madoff, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken-’

‘Albert Einstein, Ernst Boris Chain, Yehudi Menuhin, Kirk Douglas-’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ shouted Tomlinson angrily.

‘You think you’re the only one who can memorize a string of names and spit them out on demand? Save the demagoguery for the men in white sheets!’

‘Well, what does your list prove? It’s easy enough to achieve success when you run the world!’

‘Oh yeah! And what does your list prove? That a few Jews have broken the rules? I could just as easily throw other names at you… like Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Timothy McVeigh. But what does it prove? That you can use a handful of facts to sell a conspiracy theory? I’m in the newspaper business, buddy! I could write the book on that!’

‘ You’re one of them! ’ said the professor.

‘One of whom, for God’s sake? There is no them. It’s just a paranoid myth that power-hungry demagogues feed the people when they’re outside of government.’

‘Next you’re gonna say there’s no us? But that’s the myth that the people on the inside like to spread when they’ve got their snouts in the public trough.’

‘So what’s the story, Paul? You wanna fight corruption? Then go fight corruption! But don’t use it as an excuse for hate-mongering.’

Paul Tomlinson was looking at her as if seeing her for the first time. He had always doubted the strength of her commitment to the cause. He knew that she could never be quite as committed as her husband. He’d put that down to her being a woman. He thought that she was merely a bit wishy-washy. But now he realized that it was not a case of her being too soft. She was simply an enemy of their cause. She had never been one of them.