The Moses Stone

'Izzat, I don't need to know how you're going to do it, only whether or not you can do it. I'll call you tonight, OK?'

'Very well.'

'Ma'a Salaama.'

'Alla ysalmak. Goodbye.'

* * *

On the way back to Petworth, Dexter worked out what he would have to do next. He'd need to close his shop and fly out to Morocco as soon as he could. Zebari was fairly competent, but Dexter trusted almost nobody, and if the Moroccan did manage to find and recover the tablet, he wanted to be right there when it happened.

To Dexter, the slightly blurred picture in the Mail was very familiar, because he'd sold an almost identical tablet to Charlie Hoxton about two years before. That tablet, if his recollection was correct, had been part of a box of relics one of his suppliers had 'liberated' from the storeroom of a museum in Cairo. Hoxton, he remembered, had been very keen to acquire any other tablets of the same type, because he believed that the tablet he had purchased had been part of a set.

And it looked as if Hoxton had been right.

17

The two men in the scruffy white Ford Transit looked pretty much like delivery men anywhere. They were casually dressed in jeans, T-shirts and leather jackets, with grubby trainers on their feet, and they both looked fit and quite strong. In fact, they actually were delivery men for a small Kent company, but they had a second line of employment that provided the bulk of their income.

In front of the driver, a satnav unit was attached to the windscreen with a sucker, which made the town plan that the man in the passenger seat was studying largely redundant. But while their first job was finding the right address in Canterbury, they also needed to identify their best route out of the housing estate and back on to a main road, and both men preferred to see the layout of the roads on a map rather than rely only on the satnav's small colour screen.

'That's it,' the passenger said, pointing. 'The one on the left, with the Golf parked outside.'

The driver pulled the van in to the side of the road and stopped about a hundred yards short of the property. 'Call the number again,' he instructed.

The passenger pulled out a mobile phone, keyed a number and pressed a button. He listened for perhaps twenty seconds, then ended the call. 'Still no answer,' he said.

'Right. We'll do it now.'

The driver slipped the van into gear and pulled away from the kerb. A few seconds later, he stopped directly outside the semi-detached house on the left and switched off the Ford's engine. The two men pulled on baseball caps, walked round to the back of the vehicle, opened the doors and picked up a large cardboard box from inside.

They carried it between them up the path, past the Volkswagen in the drive, to the back door, and lowered it to the ground. Although a casual observer would have assumed the box was heavy, it was actually completely empty.

The two men looked back towards the road, then glanced all round them. There was no bell, so the driver rapped on the glass panel in the back door. As he expected, there was no sound from inside the house, just as there'd been no response to their telephone call a couple of minutes earlier. After a moment he slipped a jemmy out of his jacket pocket, inserted the point between the door and the jamb beside the lock and levered firmly. With a sharp cracking sound, the lock gave and the door swung open.

They picked up the cardboard box and stepped inside, then immediately split up, the driver going up the stairs while the other man began searching through the groundfloor rooms.

'Up here. Give me a hand.'

The second man ran up the stairs as his companion walked out of the study carrying the system unit of a desktop computer. 'Get the screen and keyboard and stuff,' the driver instructed.

They placed the computer in the cardboard box, then trashed the place, ripping the covers off the beds, emptying all the wardrobes and drawers, and generally wrecking the house.

'That should do it,' the driver said, looking around the chaos of the lounge.

The two men walked back down the driveway to the road, again carrying the large cardboard box between them. They slid it into the load compartment of the Transit and climbed back into the cab. They'd just earned a total of five hundred pounds. Not bad for less than ten minutes' work, thought the driver as he turned the key in the ignition.

Not bad at all.

18

'Angela? My office.'

The summons from Tony Baverstock was, Angela thought, typical of the man: short to the point of being brusque, and completely lacking any of the usual social graces. When she went in, he was leaning comfortably back in his swivel chair, his feet up on one corner of the desk. The two photographs she'd given him were in front of him.

'Any progress?' Angela asked.

'Well, yes and no, really.'

That was also typical Baverstock, Angela thought. He was an acknowledged expert at giving curved answers to straight questions.

'In English, please,' she said, sitting down in one of his visitor's chairs.

Baverstock grunted and leant forward. 'Right. As you guessed, the text is Aramaic, which is slightly unusual in itself. As you ought to know' – Angela's hackles rose at his thinly veiled implication of her lack of knowledge – 'the use of this type of tablet declined after the sixth century BC, simply because it was a lot easier to write cursive Aramaic on papyrus or parchment than inscribe the individual characters into clay. The even more unusual feature is that it's gibberish.'

'Oh, for heaven's sake, Tony. In English, please.'

'That is English. The stupid woman – I presume it was a female behind the camera – who took these pictures was clearly incompetent as a photographer. She's somehow managed to take two photographs of the upper surface of the tablet without ever managing to get more than about half of one line of the inscription actually in focus. A translation of the whole tablet is absolutely impossible and, from what I have been able to decipher, it would probably be a waste of time.'

'What do you mean?'

'What's on the tablet seems to be a series of Aramaic words. Their individual meanings are perfectly clear, but taken together they make no sense.' He pointed at the second of the six lines of characters on one of the pictures. 'This is the only line of the inscription that's anything like readable, and even then there's one word that's unclear. This word here – 'ar b 'a h – is the number four, which is simple enough. The word after it means 'of', and three of the words that precede it translate as 'tablets', 'took' and 'perform', so the sentence reads 'perform took' another word, then 'tablets four of'. That's what I mean by gibberish. The words make sense, but the sentence doesn't. It's almost as if this was a piece of homework for a child, just a list of words selected at random.'

'Is that what you think it is?'

Baverstock shook his head. 'I didn't say that. I've seen a lot of Aramaic texts, and this looks to me like an adult hand because the letters are formed with short, confident strokes. In my opinion, this was written by an educated adult male – don't forget, in this period women were usually illiterate, much like many of them are today,' he added waspishly.

'Tony,' Angela warned.