Hertz office where it was, but that was the least of his concerns right then.
As soon as he walked into the departure hall, Dexter checked the boards. He rejected all Royal Air Maroc flights, irrespective of their destination, because he wanted to use a non-Moroccan carrier, but he had just enough time to catch the Air France/KLM flight to Paris. A running man in an airport – and anywhere else, for that matter – always attracts attention, so Dexter walked briskly to the Air France ticket desk and paid cash for a return flight to Paris. He wanted to avoid any credit card charges appearing in his name.
He knew enough about the threat of terrorism to realize that paying cash for an airline ticket was unusual, but buying a single ticket for cash would certainly raise eyebrows and might result in him being delayed and questioned, which he was keen to avoid. So the return ticket was essential.
The flight was due to start boarding imminently, but before he walked to the departure gate Dexter nipped into one of the airport shops and bought a cheap carry-on bag. In another he purchased half a dozen items of clothing, in a third a traveller's wash bag, then added a couple of novels. He actually needed none of the items that he'd bought, but he knew that
The Moroccan customs officers opened his bag and checked it, as they did for almost every traveller, but that was the only delay. Half an hour after arriving at the airport, Dexter was at the departure gate, standing in a line of people waiting to board the Airbus 319. Twenty minutes after that he was finally able to relax in his seat with the stiffest drink Air France could offer as the jet headed north towards Paris. And he'd seen nobody and nothing to suggest that Zebari's killer or his men had the slightest idea where he was.
In Paris, he took time out to grab a meal before he flew back to Heathrow. He'd had very little to eat that day, and he found his appetite improved dramatically once he knew he was, at least for the moment, safe. By early evening he was back at home in Petworth, the small oblong card on the desk in front of him, and a large whisky in the glass at his elbow.
He would, he decided, wait an hour or so before he called Charlie Hoxton. First, he would take several photocopies of the card and try to work out just why his client had been so desperate to get hold of the clay tablet.
34
Night was drawing in, and up in Bronson's hotel room he and Angela seemed to have reached a stalemate.
The tablet held in the Paris museum had yielded its secrets easily enough. In just a few minutes Bronson had translated the French words into English and written them out. But the Cairo tablet proved to be much more difficult because of the poor clarity and definition of the single photograph they'd managed to find in the museum archives.
They'd spent hours trying to match the letters from the downloaded font with the characters in the photograph, but it was a long and tiresome process and they hadn't had very much success.
'I think,' Angela said, staring at the image on her laptop screen, 'that this picture was only ever intended for basic identification purposes. Somebody must have been told to photograph each of the objects the museum had acquired, purely so they would have a visual record of the relics. Pictures that could be used for research and translation would presumably have been taken later on, with a higher resolution camera and much better lighting.'
'Can you get anything at all from it?' Bronson asked.
'Yes, but probably only about half the words in the top three lines. The others are so blurred and out of focus that they could be almost anything.'
For over an hour Angela and Bronson studied the image, trying to interpret and copy on to paper the unfamiliar marks that comprised the written Aramaic script. Then Angela fed the results into the online Aramaic– English dictionary.
'So what have we got?' she asked, finally leaning back from the computer and stretching her aching muscles.
'Why don't I go and get us some drinks?' Bronson suggested. 'Of the alcoholic variety, obviously.'
'A gin and tonic would be just perfect. Preferably a long one, with lots of ice.'
Bronson left the room and returned a few minutes later, carrying a tray with two tall glasses in which ice chinked agreeably. He put the drinks down on the small dressing table and then returned to his perch on the side of the bed.
'Thanks,' Angela said. She raised the glass to her lips and took a long swallow. 'That's better. Now, where are we?'
'I've written out every word that we've managed to translate, and I've done a kind of drawing of each tablet,' Bronson said. 'I've included blanks for the words we haven't deciphered so that we know which words are missing.'
He placed a sheet of A4 paper on the table in front of Angela and they both looked at what he'd written on it. He'd drawn three rectangles of roughly the same size, and in each of them he'd put the English meaning of the words Angela had translated from the Aramaic, in the same position as the original word on the tablet. The result wasn't encouraging.
'This first one,' Bronson pointed at one of the boxed outlines, 'is the Cairo tablet. That's the top left of the four, if you're right about the meaning of the cross in the centre.'
As they'd both expected, there were far more blanks than words:
'Now,' Bronson said, handing another sheet to Angela, 'as Aramaic is read from right to left, the words we've managed to translate should appear in this order.'
On the new page, he had just written the words in sequence, including all the blanks, except for the last two lines on which they'd so far failed to decipher even a single word:
'That's not a hell of a lot to go on,' Angela muttered, then turned her attention back to the paper.
'This is the O'Connor tablet,' Bronson said.
'There were only eight words in this text that Baverstock managed to translate,' Angela said, 'and that complete second line definitely makes no sense to me.' ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
