‘The Sea of Galilee.’
Chapter 100
Recognizing the encroaching danger in the professor’s approach, Audrey stood up too.
‘No, Paul,’ cried Senator Morris. ‘Not here!’
Tomlinson pushed Audrey against the wall. But he hadn’t noticed the lamp with the heavy bronze base on the side table. Even in the agony of Tomlinson’s stranglehold, Audrey had the presence of mind to grab the lamp with one hand and smash it down on the professor’s head.
She only had to do it once and her attacker fell to the ground in a lifeless heap. As the lifeblood returned to her head, her arm dropped to her side and she let the lamp slip from her hand. It landed on the floor with a thud.
Realizing what she had done – what she had been obliged to do – she turned to the senator.
‘You killed him.’
‘It was self-defence.’
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked weakly.
‘What I should have done from the beginning: tell the truth.’
‘You’re going to tell them about the New Covenant?’
‘Yes… both the police and my readers.’
‘But that’ll destroy us.’
‘I certainly hope so, Arthur. I certainly hope so.’
For a moment, she wasn’t sure she had said the right thing. Senator Morris was capable of anger himself. She had seen that in the past. But as she saw the faraway look in his eyes, she realized that his anger had spent itself.
Barely a couple of seconds later, he broke down in tears.
‘My daughter,’ he sobbed.
‘Jane? What about her?’
‘She died… of the plague.’
Finally Audrey mellowed slightly.
‘I’m sorry.’
She was tempted to remind the senator that it was he who had sent his daughter on the dig. It was he who had used her for his own means. He had told her to get a sample of Joel’s clothes and if he thought that they contained the spores then it meant he was ready to risk her life for his evil cause. Like Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia to get wind for the sails of his ships in the war against Troy.
There was no reason to sympathize with him. With Jane perhaps – but not with Morris.
But in an instant, all that was swept into irrelevance as the senator clutched his chest and fell to the floor, writhing in agony.
Chapter 101
‘So what is this organization that hates Israel and the Jews so much?’ asked Gabrielle.
Abandoning the car that Gabrielle had been driving, they had piled into Sarit’s and were heading north, with the sun low in the sky to their left.
‘They’re called the New Covenant and it isn’t only Israel and the Jews. It’s the West in general. They hate the United States. They hate Britain. They hate blacks. They hate liberals.’
‘So it’s not Islamic extremists then?’ asked Daniel.
‘No, nothing like that. More like those racist rednecks that support the Ku Klux Klan and think there’s a Jewish conspiracy running the world. But their leaders aren’t stupid. They’re smart people who pander to gullible followers.’
‘So why hasn’t anything been done about them?’ asked Daniel. ‘I mean if you know who they are.’
‘Well, we don’t know who all of them are. They operate within a cell structure. But we’ve built up a pretty good picture and we’re keeping tabs on them – along with the FBI and various other law enforcement agencies.’
‘But I mean why haven’t they been prosecuted on terrorism charges?’
‘Well, up until now they’ve been mostly a talkshop. Big on rhetoric but nothing else. They spread stories over the Internet and in newspapers when they can. They talk the talk but they seldom walk the walk. Only now it’s different. They decided to try and get their hands on the spores that caused an ancient plague and use them to destroy Israel.’
‘But how did they know about the spores?’ asked Daniel. ‘I mean the people that this… Goliath was working for?’
‘One of the members of the New Covenant is a professor of Linguistics or something like that. He was asked to peer review a paper by Harrison Carmichael in which he essentially deciphered Proto-Sinaitic script.’
‘He told me about it… sort of… but I didn’t take him seriously at first.’
‘That’s understandable. He was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But that didn’t detract from his intellectual powers. He had, in fact, translated The Book of the Straight.’
‘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.
Chapter 102
‘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.
