Maybe not, he thought.
He may have cared for something no one ever realized.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
ZACHARIAH WAS READY FOR REST. TOMORROW COULD BE THE day he’d been waiting for all of his life. Had he found the Levite? The keeper of the secret? Finally, after five hundred years?
Columbus had been a clever one, that he’d give him.
In 1504 the admiral returned to Spain from his fourth and final voyage, spending the next two years trying to force Ferdinand and Isabella to honor their promises. In 1506 he died and his sons assumed the cause. When they died, it remained for one of their widows to finally make a deal with the Crown, one that gave the Columbus family total control over Jamaica for the next 150 years.
Luis de Torres, Columbus’ Hebrew interpreter on the first voyage, never returned to Europe.
He stayed.
And for good reason.
De Torres’ birth name had been Yosef Ben Ha Levy Haivri—Joseph, the son of Levi the Hebrew—making him the first person of Jewish origin to settle in the New World. He’d been forced to convert to Christianity in order to be eligible for the voyage but, like so many other
Some historians claimed de Torres died in 1493 on Hispaniola, one of 39 left there by Columbus at the end of the maiden voyage, part of the settlement called La Navidad. All of those men were slaughtered by natives before Columbus could return months later on the second voyage.
But de Torres had not died.
Instead he’d guarded three crates that had crossed the Atlantic with Columbus on the first voyage and had been deposited on land for safekeeping.
The first person, called the Levite, charged with that duty.
And there’d been a succession of others ever since. Each guarding their secret, remaining in obscurity.
Until Abiram Sagan.
Finally, a mistake.
Sagan had told his granddaughter things. Meaningless to her and 99 percent of the rest of the world.
But not to a Simon.
Where the Levites went to great lengths to keep their secret, the Simons had gone to even greater lengths to expose them. His father and grandfather had both searched, learning bits and pieces from old documents, especially ones found in a forgotten archive. They’d wanted to provide the new state of Israel a magnificent gift—restoring the Temple treasure. But they’d both failed. History mattered, his father would many times say. Thank heaven for the Internet. That resource had not been available before his generation. From there he’d been able to discover Abiram Sagan’s mistake.
Now he would capitalize on that error.
He climbed into bed.
His phone buzzed and he checked the display. Rocha.
“What is it?”
He listened as his acolyte told him about Alle Becket and what had happened at a Viennese cafe.
“It was him,” Rocha said. “Brian Jamison. He is here.”
That meant trouble.
He’d spent the past few months coddling Alle Becket, listening to her progressive garbage, all the while thinking that she embodied everything wrong with the current state of Judaism. She was naive to the point of stupidity. But this unexpected contact directly with her signaled a problem.
He could not afford any mistakes of his own.
“Where is she now?” he asked Rocha.
“Back at the apartment. She went home. I am having it watched.”
“What did she say happened?”
“He appeared. Pressed her about you. She told him to leave a couple of times, then we showed up.”
