left. Satisfied, he returned to collect Allegra and the small bag he had brought into the office that morning.
‘Got your gloves?’
Allegra nodded, her initial excitement giving way to nervousness.
‘They’ve put the security camera in a really dumb position,’ David said when they stepped into the same corridor he had headed down with a gun in his hands all those years before. ‘We can approach it from behind and I can reach it quite easily.’ David took a piece of black cloth from his bag and climbed onto one of the wide ledges directly beneath the camera and threw the cloth over the lens.
‘Won’t they suspect something?’
‘They might, but what if they do? They’ll check the vault, find nothing missing and assume it’s malfunctioned. They haven’t changed this vault since 1938,’ he said. ‘I don’t think security is their long suit.’
Allegra watched as David pulled a stethoscope out of his black bag. Joseph Silberman had given David the stethoscope, along with a set of lock picks, as a memento when he had left the Army to join Mossad. David spun the dial to the left to clear the tumblers and rolled it one revolution to the right until he picked up the click of the cam and lever mechanism, just as Silberman had shown him.
‘Twenty-five is still the last number,’ he said, ‘and it’s only got three tumblers.’ It took David about twenty minutes until he picked up the soft ‘nikt’ of the last tumbler slot being lined up. Twice the time that Joseph Silberman had taken but David was pretty pleased with himself as he turned the wheel and the big retaining bolts slid aside. Allegra’s heart was pounding. David was calm but the excitement of discovery was reflected in his eyes as he clicked on the lights and looked around.
‘Look! In the far corner,’ he said, pointing towards a battered red trunk marked ‘Lonergan’ and ‘Personal’, secured with an old brass padlock. David chose a torque wrench and a small half-diamond shaped shallow angle lock pick from his bag. He inserted both and without applying any torque on the lock’s plug, pulled the pick out to get a feel for the stiffness of the pin springs. Satisfied, he applied a light torque and using Silberman’s scrubbing technique, moved the pick backwards and forwards, gradually increasing the torque so that each of the driver pins set on the sheer line. One by one the pins set until he was able to turn the plug and the ‘U’ of the lock popped free.
‘I’m getting better at this,’ he said, grinning as he swung the trunk lid open.
Allegra just shook her head and smiled. Inside the trunk was the olive wood box Lonergan had secured as his ‘commission’ for arranging the Vatican’s fifty million dollar purchase of the intact copy of the Omega Scroll.
David let out a low whistle. ‘Fragments,’ he said. ‘Hundreds of them.’
‘What are they?’ Allegra asked, pointing to the three fragments in the small plastic bag taped to the inside of the lid.
‘Don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out.’ David took a pair of tweezers from his bag and put the three fragments on top of a trunk nearby.
David recognised the ancient Koine immediately. ‘Allegra! The Omega Scroll. It’s here!’ he said, staring at the three fragments. ‘These are in Koine and the Omega was the only Dead Sea Scroll to be written in that language. The Omega’s messages were meant for the wider world,’ David said. ‘Koine was the dialect of Greek spoken in the Roman Empire in the East.’
The three fragments were a clear indication that the rest of the scroll was to be found in amongst the others, but they could only be pieced together by someone with extraordinary skill, and time.
‘That bastard Lonergan has known about this all along,’ David said, deep in thought.
‘Trouble is,’ Allegra said, ‘how do we get this box out of here?’
‘We don’t,’ David replied finally, taking out some large plastic envelopes from his bag. ‘We leave the box in the trunk. We put the fragments in the safe in our office tonight and tomorrow we get them out in broad daylight.’
‘Isn’t that a bit risky?’
‘Not as risky as being stopped by the night security patrol.’
David carefully transferred the fragments into the envelopes, re-locked the trunk and closed the big vault door. He removed the black cloth from the camera and they slipped back up the corridor.
As they walked to the car park a figure loomed out of the shadows.
‘Working late, Dr Kaufmann?’
Allegra felt her blood freeze.
‘No rest for the wicked, Hafiz,’ David replied with a smile.
‘I’m sorry to have to ask, Sir, but do you mind if I have a quick look in your briefcase. We’ve had some petty theft in the museum lately and, while I’m sure you’re not stealing the biros and paperclips, they are insisting we make random checks of all people leaving the building.’ Hafiz was clearly embarrassed, torn between doing his duty and loyalty to David.
‘Not at all, Hafiz, not at all,’ David replied, opening his briefcase on Onslow’s bonnet.
CHAPTER FORTY
Jerusalem
T he biochemistry laboratory that the Hebrew University had made available was equipped with the latest technology for DNA analysis.
‘Fire away, Teach.’ David’s grin was irrepressible.
‘Twenty years ago we couldn’t have done this,’ Allegra said, standing in front of a whiteboard. David had asked for an explanation of how DNA analysis might help unlock the secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
‘DNA or deoxyribonucleic acid looks like this,’ she said. Allegra then drew the long spiralling ladder-like helix on the board. ‘The goatskin parchment the Essenes used to prepare their documents is so old that any DNA has deteriorated to the point where there are only very short sequences and not enough to analyse,’ she said. ‘But in 1983, an American biochemist, Kary Mullus, developed a technique called polymerase chain reaction which makes copies of DNA so that we have enough to test.’
‘So even though the fragments in the trunk don’t contain much DNA, you can manufacture more from what’s left?’
‘Precisely. And it may not be as difficult as I first thought. If you’re right and there are only three scrolls, one of which is Isaiah, one the Gospel of Thomas and the third being the Omega Scroll, the chances are there will only be three sets of goat DNA. And that will separate the thousand-piece nightmare into three much smaller puzzles.’
‘Always assuming they’ve only used three separate goatskins,’ David observed.
Allegra looked thoughtful. ‘Even if we turn up a fourth or a fifth skin and we can identify what scroll it comes from, we will only have to worry about it if it’s part of the Omega Scroll. And we already have a great start because we’ve got the DNA of the Omega Scroll from the envelope inside the lid of the trunk.’
‘Lonergan will be back in a bit over four months. Are we going to have enough time?’ David asked.
‘Because there are so many fragments, we’re going to have to put in some long hours in here, but four months should be enough. With the equipment in the lab we can process nearly four hundred samples simultaneously. That will generate nearly three million bases a day and we’re only talking picogram amounts here.’
David pulled another face.
‘To give you peasants an idea,’ Allegra said with a smile, ‘there’s enough DNA in one-tenth of one-millionth of a litre of human saliva to identify a genetic sequence as human. So we won’t need to damage any of the script on the fragments. We’ll only need microscopic amounts for copying the sequences and analysing them.’
Allegra took David through the process step by step, explaining how the samples were cooled so that the paired strands would form again with the help of primers and how enzymes were added that could read the sequences and extend them in a chain reaction replication.
Even with David acting as the junior lab assistant, it was going to take time. Time they might not have.
Mike McKinnon walked into the Cellar Bar as Tom Schweiker was ordering a beer.
‘Mike! Welcome back,’ Tom said, stretching out his hand. ‘Make that two beers, thanks Abdullah.’
