Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

‘That’s impossible!’ said Gabrielle. ‘How could he even have got hold of a copy? They only took it out of its hiding place when we persuaded the Samaritans and the Israel Antiquities Authority to let us. And they said it had been kept there for a couple of centuries.’

‘It may have been at that particular hiding place for a couple of centuries, but it had been taken out some time in the last couple of hundred years and copied on to parchment. We know that because your uncle had that parchment copy. We believe that he’d had it for a few decades and that he’d been working on it ever since. But he didn’t have what you and Professor Klein here had to help you.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘I understand from what you told my colleague in Herzliya that you had the benefit of other texts that you could compare to their biblical equivalent. Your uncle didn’t have that. So it obviously took him a lot longer. But he got there first.’

‘Then why didn’t he publish?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘Because of that professor – the one who peer reviewed it. He used his prestige to delay publication.’

‘But if they were anti-Israel why did they want to stop the paper being published?’

‘Because they wanted to draw on the information inside it. The paper revealed the disease that afflicted the Israelites. They figured out from the contents that it was a spore-borne disease. They saw the possibility of getting the spores and using them against Israel, so they bided their time.’

Now Daniel was even more confused. ‘But the information about the plague was in The Book of the Wars of the Lord, not The Book of the Straight. And it was pretty minimalistic information.’

Sarit was shaking her head. ‘It was in The Book of the Straight too – and in far greater detail.’

An uneasy silence settled over them, as Daniel had a deeply discomforting thought.

‘It says that the crossing is open till eight!’ Goliath was shouting, pointing at the sign.

He was at what the Jordanians call the ‘Sheikh Hussein Crossing’ between Jordan and the north of Israel.

‘You have to arrive an hour before,’ the middle-aged Jordanian official was explaining.

‘But this is an emergency!’ Goliath pleaded, not sure of what he would say if they asked him what he meant. ‘And it’s not like there’s a whole long queue. The hour before is presumably to give you time to do the paperwork.’

Friday is the Islamic day of rest and in Israel everything stops early on Friday in order to enable Jews to prepare for the Jewish day of rest which commences half an hour before sunset on Friday night and carries on until sunset the next day. It was now half past seven and the sun had just set.

‘I could let you through on this side, but the Israelis won’t let you through.’

‘Can’t you at least ask them? My sister is sick. I just had a call from my brother-in-law. I was visiting Petra and I was due back in a few days, but I got a call and he told me to come back. The other bridge was closed so I thought it was better to come this way. I am not even sure if she is in a hospital now because I lost my phone. All I know is-’

‘Wait a minute,’ said the Jordanian official.

He walked off and spoke to a colleague. Then he walked over to the Israeli side and spoke to several of their officials. The talk seemed to last for ages. When the official finally came back he was smiling.

‘Okay. You can go through.’

‘How far are we?’ asked Daniel.

‘We’re nearly there. When we get to the crossing, let me do the talking.’

‘Is there likely to be a problem?’ asked Daniel.

‘Strictly speaking we’re too late. But leave it to me.’

Daniel noticed that Gabrielle had been strangely silent for most of the journey. It was as if Sarit’s very presence bothered her. And because they were in Sarit’s car, it meant that Sarit was in control.

‘There’s something I don’t understand,’ said Daniel. ‘You said that they knew about the spores from Harrison Carmichael’s translation of the Book of the Straight.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I could understand if you said, The Book of the Wars of the Lord. I found some references to it there. But we’ve just translated the Book of the Straight and it didn’t have anything about that. It didn’t even mention the plagues at all. It described a power struggle in Egypt covering the period of Joseph and his son, when the Israelites were first enslaved.’

‘Look, I’m not an expert in biblical history or anything like that,’ said Sarit. ‘I can only tell you what I know from my briefing. Carmichael obtained a parchment copy, translated it after many years of effort and it was sent for peer review. The professor delayed publication and passed on the information to the rest of his cell and they’ve been sitting on it because they didn’t know where to look for traces of the spores.’

‘What do you mean sitting on it?’

‘Well, the manuscript described how the plague swept through the Israelites, prompting their decision to abandon the place where they were staying and cross into the land of Canaan. But it didn’t say where exactly they’d been staying on the other side of the Jordan River, so the New Covenant didn’t know where to look and couldn’t make much use of the information. But once that dig started in Sinai, they saw a possibility. They figured that the Israelites must have been carrying the spores on their clothes even before the outbreak, because of the sixth plague that affected the Egyptians.’

‘And that’s why the volunteers and the curator got ill,’ said Daniel.

‘Exactly,’ Sarit replied. ‘They were monitoring the dig and they got all excited when the stones were found. That implied that it was a site where the Israelites had been. Then when the kid Joel got ill, that confirmed it. From then on, they’ve been trying to get a sample of the spores and we’ve been trying to stop them. When he locked you in the cave, it wasn’t you he was after, it was your spare clothes in your bags. You were merely expendable.’

Daniel was looking at Gabrielle inquisitively.

‘Gaby?’

‘ What? ’

Daniel couldn’t tell if the tone was aggressive or defensive – maybe the former to cover the latter. But he noticed a single tear on one of her cheeks.

‘You kept feeding me clues.’

‘What?’ Gabrielle replied.

‘When we were trying to identify the papyrus from the museum in Cairo, you suggested that if it wasn’t the Aswan High Dam then it might be another public works project. That’s what pointed me in the direction of the Suez Canal.’

‘But it was you who suggested Aswan in the first place and you who came up with the idea that it was the Song of the Sea.’

‘But whenever I faltered, it was always you guiding back to the right path. Before I translated The Book of the Straight, there was a brief moment when you handled the clay jar container and I remember it very briefly disappeared from view.’

He had been hoping – praying – that he was wrong. But the fleeting look of fear on Gabrielle’s face was enough to tell him that he was right.

‘What are you saying, Daniel?’

‘I used to be an amateur magician when I was younger, and you also had an interest in the subject for a while.’

‘So what are you suggesting? That I magically changed the content of the papyrus?’

‘No, Gabrielle. I’m suggesting that you substituted it for a forgery.’

‘That’s ridiculous! Oh, Danny, you can’t possibly believe that!’

Her tone had changed. She didn’t sound like a confident woman any more. That gushing, eager ‘Oh, Danny’ was the way she used to talk as an overenthusiastic teenager.