“And we know what happened then,” said Sarit sadly, almost as if she hoped that this time, upon the retelling, history would have a different ending.
“But even then, it wasn’t over Sarit. They put up quite a brave resistance, considering how far they’d let things slide. But pretty soon the city fell and the temple was destroyed.”
“ ‘There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down,’ ” said Sarit, to herself, quoting Jesus’s prophecy as she stared into some imaginary point in the distance.
“Exactly.”
Listening to this account had proved to be a bit of a strain for Sarit. She went over to the window and looked out.
“Wouldn’t it be poignant if they’d been killed at the Temple, making their last stand shoulder to shoulder, like brothers?”
“It would have been. But that’s not quite the way it happened — although Bar Giora did effectively meet his fate on the Temple Mount. What actually happened is that Bar Giora and a small band of followers, aided by stonecutters, tried to dig their way out to freedom. But they ran out of food and couldn’t make it — or at least, that’s the way Josephus tells it.”
“I gather you don’t like Josephus?”
“He was a traitor and his stories are self-serving. In his account of the mass suicide at Masada, he copied the events of his own treachery at Yodfat. Anyway, realizing that all was lost Bar Giora dressed up in a King’s robes and climbed out of the ground at the spot where the Temple’s innermost chamber — the Holy of Holies — once stood.”
“A grand entrance.”
“Grand, but futile. For a moment the Romans were terrified. Then they gathered their wits and grabbed him and from then on it was the familiar pattern like most of the leaders who challenged Rome.”
“Crucifixion?”
“Actually no. They took him back to Rome in chains, paraded him through the city and then threw him to his death from the Tarpeian Rock — that’s a cliff-face of the Capitoline Hill in Rome.”
“Oh God!”
Daniel’s head spun round to look at Sarit, wondering what it was in his words that had provoked such a reaction. But he quickly realized that it was not his words that had prompted her reply. She was looking out the window.”
“What is it?”
“Daniel, what have you done?”
“What is it?”
She turned round to look at him, her face ashen white.
“The police are outside.”
Chapter 45
“Professor Hynds! Professor Hynds! You’ve got to come and see this!”
The young man was breathless from his sprint. He had been on the other side of the dig site — almost diagonally opposite the professor’s makeshift office — and he had been forced to run two sides of a square to reach the professor.
Emeritus Professor Edward Hynds looked up and swept a strand of grey hair from his eyes.
“What is it?”
“You’ve got to see this, professor,” said the gangly youth. “We found clay jar… intact.”
The professor scratched his silver beard, contemplatively.
“Okay, well follow procedure. Hand it to your coordinator and have him bag it up and marked… carefully.”
The breathless youth stood there immobile, looking at the professor, expectantly.
“No you don’t understand.” The voice was still panting from his recent exertions. “He’s the one who sent me to tell you.”
“Why would he…”
Hynds trailed off, sensing that something was missing from this explanation.
“He opened it, professor.”
“What?”
“He opened the jar. It had a cork lid. And he took it off and there was a jute bag inside. And inside that was a piece of leather and rolled up inside that was piece of parchment!”
Hynds put a hand on the table and stood up to his full six foot height. Although only a year and bit shy of his proverbial three score and ten, he was in pretty good nick. He tipped the scales at sixteen stone, but most of it was muscle. This was not some deskbound professor who had gone to fat. This was a man of the outdoors who kept himself fit by hill-walking and gardening. When he did find himself deskbound for any significant period — such as when he had to fulfil the academic’s perennial obligation to generate a scholarly paper for publication, so as to stay on the cutting edge of academia — he took advantage of the various local gyms to counterbalance the desk time with a muscle-building and cardiovascular work out.
“When you say parchment, do you mean papyrus?”
It sounded patronizing, but Hynds knew that some of these students were wet behind the ears and didn’t know the difference.
“He said parchment. In fact he said it looked like Jewish style parchment — whatever that means.”
By this stage, the Hynds was moving round the desk. He knew that Jews had very particular ways of preparing parchment, that differed significantly from the iron age Romans and Romano-Britons.
“Did he say what was on it?”
“He said it was a map… a map of Europe actually. But he also said something about writing on it.”
Hynds realized that the reason he hadn’t brought the map back to the office was in case the professor wanted to check out the spot where it was found. After a find like that, they would almost certainly want to prioritize the digging in that area. But Hynds also wanted to check out the stratum that the find had come from. And the area coordinator had probably realized this.
“I think I’d better go and take a look.”
And without further ado, Hynds was out of the door, leaving behind the tall, bearded man who had come to the office volunteering to participate in the dig.
Chapter 46
“Your sister? Why the hell did you do that?”
“I had to find out if she was all right… and to tell her that I was.”
Sarit and Daniel were arguing. The police had not in fact come to their door, but appeared to be checking other houses further down the street.
“And it didn’t occur to you that they could do a trace?”
“I thought that if I kept it short, and they weren’t tracing already, then they couldn’t.”
“You think they can only do live traces? You didn’t know they could pull the records from the phone company and get a retroactive trace.”
“But how can they do that when the phone doesn’t even have GPS on it.”
“By the ground stations! They can check which ground stations it was routed through and work it out that way!”
“But then they can’t get an exact fix, just a general area.”
“My God Daniel are you completely techno-illiterate? The ground stations in rural areas are spaced far apart, but the ones in urban areas are packed close together.”
“Then why aren’t they here now?”
Sarit had to take a deep breath to keep her temper.”
“They’ve got about ten cars out there! They’re searching house to house and from what I can see they’ve blocked one end of the street. They’ve probably blocked the other too!”
Although he was trying to sound calm, Daniel was anything but. He knew as well as Sarit what sort of trouble they were in, even if he was trying to play it down in his mind.
“What are we going to do?”
“There’s only one thing we can do. Use the motorbike.”
“Can’t we just go upstairs and keep quiet?”
“It won’t work. If they’re this determined, they’re probably asking neighbours if they’ve seen anything suspicious. All it’ll take is one of them to say a couple of people on a motorbike and the games up.”
“But if they’ve blocked off the road…”
“Then we’ll use the pavement. It won’t be blocked completely.”