The Moses Stone

owner's house, with the card beside it.'

Hoxton read out the first few lines from Dexter's translation. ''Ancient clay tablet recovered from the ruins of Pirathon or Pharaton (Greek), today the site of the Arab village of Farata in Israel. The inscription is in Aramaic but is garbled and the meaning is unclear. Possibly a part of a set.' So where was this Pirathon or Pharaton?'

'I checked. It was a small town in what used to be called Samaria, not far from Mount Gerizim and about twenty miles north of Jerusalem. It was never a very important place, and there's pretty much nothing left of the original settlement now.'

'So how come this tablet finished up there?'

'We don't know that it did,' Dexter replied. 'What's on that card might just be the version that was offered for public consumption. After all, it's hardly likely to state it's been looted from some museum, is it? Don't forget that your clay tablet was once the property of a museum in Cairo, but I bet that's not what you tell people when you show them the relic.'

'You'd better believe that.'

Dexter gestured towards the paper Hoxton was still holding. 'You've already got one of the tablets and now a few blurred photographs of another one. What are you going to do next?'

'I'm not going to do anything,' Hoxton said. 'We are going to do our best to find the missing relic.'

'But you've only got one tablet, Charlie, and we've already worked out that there must be four in the set. How the hell are you going to find anything with well over half the text missing?'

'I've got Baverstock doing a trawl through every museum's database that he can access, looking for any other tablets that might have been recovered over the years. If he can get a decent picture of another tablet, I reckon we can crack this with two of them plus the partial translation of this tablet from Rabat. Whether he can or can't, we'll go out to the Middle East anyway. The picture on this card's better than any of the other pictures I've seen of this tablet, and Baverstock should be able to decipher at least half of it. This is probably the best chance we're ever going to have.'

'Surely you don't want me to come along as well?'

'Yes, I do. You're coming because I need your contacts, Dexter, and Baverstock's coming because we'll need his language skills – unless you've added Imperial Aramaic translation to your other skills.'

Dexter frowned, but after a moment he realized that getting out of Britain for a week or so might not be such a bad idea. If Zebazi's killer had sent some of his men to track him down, they'd presumably be looking for him in Morocco and the United Kingdom, not in Israel or wherever else Hoxton had in mind.

He sighed and leant back in his seat. It wasn't as though he had any choice in the matter in any case. 'No,' he said, 'I still can't read Aramaic, Charlie. So when do we leave?'

36

'You know,' Bronson said, as he and Angela strolled along a street near their hotel, enjoying the cooler night air, 'there's one thing we haven't really talked about, and that's the purpose of the tablets. I mean, exactly what did the people who made these tablets hide? What was their treasure?'

They had finished their dinner, and Angela had insisted that she needed to stretch her legs before going back to her room. She'd told Bronson that if he was still concerned about the armed men who had chased him before, she would go out on her own – after all, nobody even knew she was in Morocco. Bronson hadn't liked it, but he'd agreed to go outside with her. If something happened to Angela, he knew he'd never forgive himself.

'Whatever it was, it had to have been really important to them because of all the trouble they took. They enciphered the message on the tablets and then, presumably, hid them in separate locations so that the hiding place of their treasure could only be found when all four tablets had been recovered. And there are some clues in what we've found already. About half a dozen words in particular seem to me to be significant.'

'Let me take a guess. Those would be 'scroll', 'tablets', 'temple', 'silver', 'concealed' and 'Jerusalem'?'

Angela nodded. 'Precisely. Any kind of ancient scrolls are of interest to historians and archaeologists today, but if a scroll was hidden two millennia ago, that suggests it was believed to be really important even then. And if you prefix the word 'scroll' with 'silver', it raises a very interesting possibility—' She broke off as Bronson reached out and seized her arm, pulling her to a stop.

'What is it?' she demanded.

'I don't like—' Bronson started, looking first up the street, then back the way they'd come.

About twenty yards in front of them, a white van had just pulled into the kerb and was sitting there, engine idling. Perhaps fifty yards behind them, a black Mercedes saloon car was approaching slowly, keeping close to the kerb, and closer – much closer – a handful of men in flowing jellabas were walking quickly towards them.

It could all be entirely innocent, just a series of separate and unconnected events, but to Bronson's trained eyes it looked like an ambush. He paused for under a second, then reacted.

'Run!' he whispered urgently to Angela. 'Run. Get away from here.' He pointed towards a side-street. 'Down there, as fast as you can.'

Angela glanced behind her, saw the approaching men for the first time and took to her heels.

Bronson span round to face the group, but tried to stand his ground, walking steadily backwards to provide a measure of protection for Angela. He looked behind him, and saw that she had reached the corner of the sidestreet and was starting to run down it. He turned on his heels to follow her, but at that moment the approaching men themselves began to run, and in seconds they had caught up with him.

He felt a sudden tug on his shoulder as somebody grabbed at him, and tried to spin round to face his attackers. Then two blows crashed into the back of his head. He lost his balance and fell forward, his body collapsing limply to the potholed pavement.

The last thing he heard before his consciousness fled was a single distant scream from Angela as she called out his name.

Part Two

England

37

One of the first things Kirsty Philips did when she arrived back in Britain and had finished unpacking was to drive round to her parents' house. While they'd been away in Morocco, she'd been doing that once every couple of days to check the house, make sure the indoor plants were watered, pick up the mail, check their answerphone messages and generally ensure that the place was in good order.

That morning, she parked her Volkswagen Golf in the driveway of the small detached house in a quiet street on the western outskirts of the city, took out her keys and opened the front door. As usual, there was a pile of envelopes lying on the mat, most of them clearly junk mail of various sorts. She picked them up and carried them through to the kitchen, where she placed them with others that had accumulated since her parents had left the house for what she now knew had been the last time. Her eyes misted at that thought, but she pushed her sorrow aside and began her usual walk-round of the property, inspecting all the rooms one after the other. The last thing she did was go into the lounge and check the answerphone, but there were no messages on it.

She pulled open the door to the hall and immediately came face to face with a man she'd never seen before.