any more as he stormed out.
‘Wait,’ said another, following him out.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Daniel, to the high priest who remained. ‘I can only read what is written.’
‘Are you sure your translation is correct?’
‘I’m sure of the words. I cannot vouch for their truthfulness.’
They both turned to Gabrielle, inquisitively. She shrugged.
‘There’s nothing in any other written record to support it,’ she said tentatively.
‘But?’ Daniel replied, picking up on the hangnail in her tone.
‘It would explain an aberration that was found in the DNA tests. There were two mummified foetuses in Tutankhamen’s tomb. But the DNA tests show that they can’t both be the children of both Tutankhamen and his wife… unless his wife had different parentage to the one the official record shows.’
‘So this is consistent with the DNA?’ Daniel wanted to be sure.
‘Yes, but the chronology of the narrative is all wrong. Tutankhamen’s wife was born a few years before Tutankhamen himself. Yet in this papyrus it is described afterwards.’
‘The order is irrelevant,’ said the priest, his brows furrowing with the weight of the troubles in his heart. ‘Ancient narratives often jump around in their order. It is the words themselves that are painful.’
Chapter 78
‘Why did we let them get hold of the manuscript?’ asked Sarit.
She and Dov Shamir were in the Mossad’s headquarters in Herzliya. She was supposed to be going to Eilat for some R amp;R, but she had asked for permission to stay and keep working on this assignment. She didn’t like leaving a job unfinished.
‘We couldn’t really stop them. They’re both prestigious academics and they had the Antiquities Authority behind them.’
‘Couldn’t we have said it was a matter of national security?’
‘The PM knows about the security angle. But a three-thousand-year-old manuscript isn’t going to threaten national security in itself. Besides, we know that Harrison Carmichael had a copy-’
‘Which Goliath destroyed in that fire.’
‘The point is he already translated it.’
‘Yes, but the New Covenant managed to suppress publication.’
‘ Delay publication,’ Dov corrected.
‘Well, with Carmichael dead and Professor Tomlinson so well connected, he’ll probably be able to block publication.’
‘So Daniel Klein’ll get the credit when he publishes his translation. The point is, Sarit, that we can’t stop it. And there’s no reason why we should. The threat to national security is not in the contents, but in what people do with the information. And let’s face it, The Book of the Straight doesn’t really tell us the exact location. All we know is that it’s somewhere on the other side of the Jordan River. If they knew where to look, they wouldn’t have been wasting time trying to get samples of infected clothes.’
‘But the infection is still out there. Look at what happened to that curator in England. He had all the symptoms: the fever, the snake-like lesions…’
‘It doesn’t appear to have spread.’
‘And what about the Egyptians?’
‘They seem to have contained it too.’
‘So it’s not all that virulent.’
‘Not the Egyptian strain certainly. If Carmichael’s translation is right, then it mutated into a more virulent strain in the Jordan area.’
‘How can we be so sure of that? I mean it’s not like Carmichael was an epidemiologist.’
‘No, but it’s a case of reading between the lines. We got hold of a copy of Carmichael’s paper and gave it to our own epidemiologists for an assessment.’
‘And how badly should we be worrying?’
‘Well, as long as it’s in stasis, there should be no problem.’
She was about to say something more when Dov’s phone went. She watched as his face went from sombre to grave.
‘Has General Security been notified?… Okay, keep me posted.’
When he put the phone down, his face drained of blood and Sarit looked at him expectantly.
‘That Samaritan rabbi they spoke to, Aryeh Tsedaka… he’s been found dead in the synagogue in Holon. There were signs of a struggle and his neck was broken.’
Chapter 79
‘Shall I wait for them?’ Daniel asked Gabrielle when she returned.
She had been outside to find out what was going on. The priest who had stormed out was not merely angry; he was crying at what Daniel had just revealed from the text. The other was trying to comfort him. But Gabrielle did not want to reply until the high priest had spoken.
‘It is not our custom to let an outsider read from our scrolls unless at least two priests are present.’
‘I don’t think they’re going to be back anytime soon,’ said Gabrielle.
The high priest seemed to be wrestling with his conscience before replying. Daniel knew that this must be hard for him. Ephraim was not just one of the patriarchs of the tribes of Israel. He was the patriarch of one of the two tribes from which the Samaritans specifically claim their descent. And this ancient scroll cast him as a cunning schemer, an incestuous adulterer and a murderer.
‘Please continue,’ the priest said finally through his pain. In his twelfth year, Pharaoh raised his wife Nefertiti to rule at his right side and she ruled with him, and when his heart was calm he ruled and when his heart was troubled she ruled. And at the end of summer of his seventeenth year, he died and Nefertiti ruled alone. But she feared her father and she feared Horemheb, the chief of the army, and she feared Tutankhaten for he was a troubled boy and both Horemheb and Neferayim tried to be as fathers to him. And he would not listen to her for he was not her son and she did not have a son. So she wrote to the king of the Hittites and offered to marry one of his sons.
Daniel had to break off when he heard Gabrielle’s sharp intake of breath. ‘Do you know about this?’
‘There is a record of such an incident. It’s called the Zananza Incident. In the early part of the twentieth century, archaeologists found a huge collection of some 10,000 clay tablets written in cuneiform, at the site of the ancient Hittite capital. And some of the tablets are letters referring to this incident.’
Daniel continued reading. But the king of the Hittites was suspicious, for the daughters of Egypt did not marry foreign men. So he sent a messenger to Egypt to accuse Nefertiti of deception. So she wrote to the Hittite king again and his messenger brought her words to the king. She told the king of her fears and swore that she spoke true and would give his son the throne of Egypt. And so the Hittite king sent Zananza his son to be her husband, but Horemheb, the chief of the army, heard of this and he sent out his men and they met Zananza on the road and smote him.
Daniel looked up at Gabrielle, waiting for her inevitable comment.
‘That’s how history records it,’ she said. ‘But it doesn’t tell us what happened to-’
‘The next bit does.’ He lowered his eyes and continued. And when this became known in the royal court, there was much anger. And Horemheb accused Neferayim and Nefertiti of plotting with the enemy. And Neferayim swore that he knew not of his daughter’s treachery and he had her put to death and Tutankhaten became king.
When Daniel looked up this time, Gabrielle seemed more shocked than the high priest.
