The Moses Stone

Then he brought his knee up – hard – into his groin. That wasn't perhaps the best of ideas, as Bronson's kneecap scraped against the rocks as he did so, sending stabbing pains shooting up his right leg.

But the man he'd attacked tensed, his hands grasping between his legs, so Bronson knew he'd incapacitated him, at least for a few seconds.

He scrambled to his feet and looked down at the bent figure lying moaning on the floor. The pistol. He knew he should grab the man's weapon, seize the advantage, but he couldn't see it anywhere. Sprinting to the back of the cave, he grabbed his torch and walked back to the groaning figure. He shone the beam all around him, looking for the telltale gleam of metal. Nothing. Then something caught his eye, something glinting dully, and he crossed over to investigate.

It was the pistol, but it had fallen between two rocks, into a near-vertical crack that was little wider than the weapon itself, and he couldn't slide his hand in far enough to even touch it. To get it out he'd need to either move one of the rocks – which might not be possible – or find something like a length of wood he could use as a lever. And he didn't have time for that, because the man he'd attacked was already up on his knees.

As the man got to his feet, Bronson aimed a punch at his jaw, but missed as his target swayed backwards. Then he heard an ominous click and saw the flash of steel as a switchblade snapped open. Bronson backed away as the man stabbed the knife towards his stomach, then swung at his assailant with the only weapon he had – his torch.

When he'd looked in the shop that morning, he'd seen several different kinds, but Bronson had always believed in buying quality whenever he could, and the one he'd chosen was a heavy-duty aluminium tube that held three large batteries. And at that moment he was delighted he'd spent the extra money.

The torch crashed into the side of the man's head and he collapsed face-down on the ground. Amazingly, the torch still worked, although Bronson could feel that there was now an impressive dent in one side of it.

He looked at the unmoving figure for a few seconds, then reached down and seized his shoulder, rolling the man onto his back. He shone the torch beam at his face for a moment, then nodded slowly.

'Now why am I not surprised?' he muttered.

He made one more unsuccessful attempt to retrieve the man's pistol from the crevice in the rocks, then walked out of the cave.

Angela was waiting about twenty yards away, hidden behind a rocky outcrop, a cricket-ball-sized stone clutched in her right hand.

'Thank God,' she said, standing up as Bronson appeared. 'Are you OK?'

He put his hand on her shoulder, then brushed her cheek gently where it was streaked with dirt.

'I'm fine. The shot didn't hit you?'

Angela shook her head. 'I thought he was firing at you,' she said. 'What happened in there?'

Bronson grinned. 'We had a difference of opinion, but fortunately I had the element of surprise.'

'He's dead?'

'No, just sleeping it off. Just as well I had this torch.'

Bronson pointed at her improvised weapon, which she'd dropped and was now tumbling away down the hillside. 'What were you going to do with that?' he asked.

'I've no idea, but I wasn't going to leave you up here.'

'Thanks,' he said, suddenly feeling a lot happier. 'Now, let's go. Just because I've dealt with one man doesn't mean there aren't others watching for us. We need to hurry.'

55

'So we carry on?' Bronson asked, as they drove back to Tel Aviv.

They'd made it down the hillside to the car park in record time, and he was driving as quickly as the road conditions allowed. He had to assume that somebody had followed them from their Tel Aviv hotel to Qumran, and he intended to get back to the city and find another place to stay as soon as they could.

'Yes,' Angela replied. 'If anything, I'm even keener to find the Silver Scroll and the Mosaic Covenant, especially now that it seems others are after them as well. I think we can assume that, can't we?'

Bronson nodded, his eyes on the road.

'But what I can't work out,' Angela continued, 'is who – beside us – is looking for these relics.'

'I don't know, but when I looked at that man's face up there in the cave I knew I'd seen him before. I've got a good memory for faces, and I'm sure he was one of the people in the photographs Margaret O'Connor took in the souk in Rabat, which means he was one of the Moroccan gang. I guess he'd been told to follow us and try to recover the clay tablet that Yacoub thought we'd got.'

'You should have killed him. And then taken his gun.'

Bronson shook his head. 'Killing him would have been a really bad idea,' he said. 'Leaving him with a sore head means the Israeli police probably won't get involved, and that suits me just fine. I would have grabbed his pistol, but it fell into a crevice in the rocks and I couldn't get it out.'

Bronson paused and looked at Angela. 'If we carry on, this could get pretty dangerous for us both. Are you prepared for that?'

'Yes,' Angela said firmly. 'We have to find that scroll.'

That evening, Bronson and Angela ate an early dinner in Angela's room in the small hotel they'd hastily moved to when they returned from Qumran. Bronson had chosen a place well away from the centre of Tel Aviv, where he hoped they'd be less likely to be spotted by any watchers, and where surveillance might be a little easier for him to detect. When they'd finished their meal, they had over an hour before their appointment with Yosef Ben Halevi, so they took another look at the translated inscription.

Angela logged on to the internet and the Aramaic translation site she'd found earlier, and started inputting all the Aramaic words they could read, including those from the tablet stored in the museum in Paris, just in case there had been any mistranslations there, while Bronson looked up the same words in the printed Aramaic dictionary.

After about half an hour she sat back in her chair. 'There seem to be only a few possible changes,' she said, 'and none of them are important, as far as I can see. In the first line we had 'settlement', and that could also mean 'village' or 'group of habitations'. In the third line, 'concealed' could be 'hidden' or 'secreted'. In the fourth line the website suggests 'cavern' instead of 'cave', and in the fifth line 'well' rather than 'cistern'. But those are all just different words that have almost the same meaning – it's simply a matter of interpretation.'

Bronson cracked two miniatures of gin from the minibar, added tonic and gave one of the glasses to Angela.

'Any luck with the words you couldn't translate before?' he asked.

'Some, yes. I'd be prepared to bet that the first word on the right-hand side of the top line is 'Elazar', part of the name Elazar Ben Ya'ir. And I did finally translate this word.'

She pointed at 'Gedi', which she'd written on the fourth line of their translation of the Rabat tablet, replacing the blank that had been there previously.

'Where did that come from?' Bronson asked.

'Because I couldn't find that word in any of the dictionaries, I wondered if it could be another proper name, like 'Elazar', so I started looking for Aramaic versions of family and place names, and I found that.'

''Gedi'?' Bronson asked, pronouncing it like 'Jedi' from the Star Wars films.

'Yes. But I don't know of any locations near Qumran with that name that seemed relevant. I'm hoping that Yosef might have some ideas when we meet him.'

'And what about the word next to it? Any luck with that?'

Angela nodded slowly. 'Yes,' she said. 'That translates as 'Mosheh', the Aramaic version of 'Moses'. And that means the sentence now reads 'the tablets of ----- temple of Jerusalem ----- ----- Moses the ----- -----'. If we take an educated guess at the blanks, the original probably said 'the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem and of Moses the great leader', or maybe 'famous prophet', something like that.'

Angela paused and glanced at Bronson. 'But what's obvious,' she said, 'is that Yacoub was right – the 'tablets