The Moses Stone

Blood spurted and Hammad howled, the incredible pain adding a new dimension to his agony.

'Stop, stop,' he yelled, his voice a blubbering wail. 'Please stop. I'll tell you anything you want to know.'

'I know you will,' the tall man said, pushing still harder.

Hammad's head flew back as a flood of pain overwhelmed his senses, and then he slumped forward, unconscious.

'Put another bandage on his leg,' the tall man ordered, 'then we'll wake him up.'

* * *

Ten minutes later, a bucket of cold water and a couple of slaps brought Hammad round. The tall man sat down on a chair in front of him and prodded his captive sharply in the stomach with the sharpened length of wood.

'Right,' he said, 'start at the beginning, and leave nothing out.'

27

'Does this hotel have wi-fi?' Angela asked, pushing her coffee cup towards Bronson and nodding for him to refill it.

They were sitting at a small table in Bronson's hotel room on the outskirts of Rabat, because he was still concerned about being seen by the wrong people, and breakfasting in his room had seemed a safer option than going down to the hotel dining room. Angela was still wearing her nightdress under the large white dressing gown she'd found in her bedroom next door. It was a gesture of intimacy he appreciated – it showed that she was comfortable enough in his company – but he was frustrated because she'd insisted on sleeping in the adjoining room.

Bronson sighed. 'You want to do some research?'

'Yes. If I'm right about the words on the tablet, there must be others like it – it has to be part of a set – and the logical place to start looking for them is museums. There's a kind of museum intranet that I can use to carry out a search. It allows people with the right access – and that includes me, obviously – to check both the exhibits and the relics that are in storage in most museums around the world. It's an ideal tool for researchers, because you can study particular objects without having to travel to the museum itself to do so.'

Bronson cleared a space on the table, opened up his laptop and switched it on, then waited a couple of minutes for the Sony to access the hotel's wi-fi network.

'How does the system work?' he asked, turning the Vaio to face Angela and watching as she input her username and password to log in to the museum intranet.

'It's fairly simple. First, I have to fill in various fields to approximately identify what I'm looking for.'

As she spoke, she was ticking a series of boxes and inserting brief details in text fields on the search form. When she'd completed the page, she turned the laptop so that Bronson could see the screen as well as her.

'We still don't know too much about this tablet, so I've had to be fairly flexible in the search. For the date I've suggested between the start of the first century BC and the end of the second century AD – that's a period of three hundred years, which should cover it. Baverstock thought the tablet was probably first century AD, based on what he could translate of the inscription, but he couldn't be sure. For the origin I've been just as vague: I've specified the Middle East.'

'What about the object itself?'

'I've been fairly accurate with that, because we do have a pretty good idea what we're looking for. Here' – she pointed at two fields at the bottom of the screen – 'I've listed the material it's made from and the fact that it bears an inscription in Aramaic.'

'So now you just start the search?'

'Exactly.' Angela moved the mouse pointer over a button labelled 'Search' and gave it a single click.

The wi-fi network at the hotel was obviously quite fast, because the first results appeared on the screen within a few seconds.

'It looks like there are hundreds of them,' Bronson muttered.

'Thousands, more likely,' Angela said. 'I told you clay tablets were really common. I'll have to do a bit of filtering or we'll never get anywhere.'

She scanned the listings that were scrolling down the screen. 'A lot of these are quite early,' she said, 'so if I reduce the date range that will eliminate a large percentage. And if we don't find what we're looking for, I can always expand it again.'

She changed the search parameters and restricted the date to the first and second centuries AD, but that still produced several hundred results, far too many to trawl through quickly.

'Right,' she muttered, 'clay tablets were found in all sorts of shapes and sizes – square, oblong, round. There were even tablets shaped like drums or cones, with the inscription running around the outside. I've restricted the search to flat tablets, but it would help if I could put in the approximate dimensions of the one Margaret O'Connor acquired.'

Bronson handed her the CD that Kirsty had prepared for him, and she flipped through the images on the laptop's screen until she found the first one showing the clay tablet. Margaret O'Connor had obviously placed the tablet on a chest of drawers in her hotel room, and had then photographed it from several different angles. In most of the pictures, the tablet was quite badly out of focus, probably caused by the camera's autofocus facility choosing a different object in the frame. In three photographs a part of a telephone was visible, including a section of the keypad.

'That'll do,' Angela said. 'I can work out the rough size from that.'

She studied the best of the pictures closely, then jotted down a couple of figures.

'I reckon it's about six inches by four,' she said, and typed those numbers into the correct box on the search screen.

This time, with the much tighter parameters, there were only twenty-three results of the search on the museum intranet, and they both leant closer to the laptop to study each in turn.

The first dozen or so were clearly very different to the picture of the tablet Margaret O'Connor had picked up, but the fifteenth picture showed one that was remarkably similar.

'That looks just like it,' Angela said.

'What about the inscription?' Bronson asked.

Angela studied the image carefully and saved a copy on the hard disk of her laptop. 'It could be Aramaic,' she said. 'I'll check the description.'

She clicked one of the options on the screen, and a halfpage of text appeared, replacing the photograph of the tablet.

Angela took one look at it, turned the laptop further to face Bronson and leant back. 'It's in French,' she announced. 'Over to you, Chris.'

'OK. The tablet's in a museum in France, so no surprise there. It's in Paris, in fact. It was bought from a dealer of antiquities in Jerusalem as part of a job lot of relics about twenty years ago. The inscription is Aramaic, and the tablet's labelled as a curio, because the text is just a series of apparently random words – so you're right, Angela. This is another one.'

'Does it say what the museum thinks the tablet was used for?'

Bronson nodded. 'This description suggests it might have been used for teaching people how to write Aramaic or possibly was somebody's homework, which is pretty much the same as Baverstock thought, isn't it? In either case, the museum suggests that the tablet was fired accidentally, either because it was mixed up with tablets that were being fired deliberately or because there was an actual fire in the building where it was kept.'

'That makes sense. Clay tablets were intended to be reused many times. Once an inscription had served its purpose, the tablet could be wiped just by running a knife blade or something similar over its surface to obliterate the existing inscription. The only tablets that would normally be fired were those recording something of real importance – financial accounts, property details, that kind of thing. And a fired clay tablet is virtually indestructible, unless it's broken up with a hammer or something.'

'There's something else.' Bronson looked at the bottom of the entry on the screen. He reached over and