“Holy moly!” said Ted.
“I’m surprised it took you so long to figure it out,” came a voice from above them.
They looked up to see Shalom Tikva leaning into the entrance to the cistern… holding a hand grenade.
Chapter 82
As Masada loomed up ahead, Sarit was driving Israeli style: with little regard for the laws of the road and even less for the laws of physics. She knew how easy it was for even the best intelligence and security services to bungle things by underestimating the threat and she had no intention of letting Daniel become another casualty of such ineptitude!
They should have arrested Shalom Tikva as soon as they had evidence that he had ordered a killing. The fact that he had used ambiguous wording in his instructions to his son, would not have been a barrier to a guilty verdict in a trial by judge, the only sort of trial available in Israel. And they should not have let Baruch Tikva slip through the net. The British should have caught him there and when they failed to do so, passport control should have caught him when he re-entered Israel.
The British had been quick enough to arrest Daniel on the flimsiest of evidence and had unreasonably refused him bail on the strength of the fact that he had fled the country the last time they falsely accused him. The fact that he had been vindicated didn’t seem to matter to the judge.
And yet Baruch Tikva had been able to attack a police van and kill two policemen, yet go on to escape and even make an attempt to abduct one of Daniel’s nieces. Then two of Daniel’s nieces had been kidnapped by the henchmen of Shalom Tikva and only then did the police and Security Services go into action and start arresting them.
But by then it was too late. Because by then, Shomrei Ha’ir knew that the authorities were on to them and they scattered into the four winds.
And now they knew that these enemies of the state were making their last stand — going after Daniel Klein for reasons that had still not become clear. He had made a few discoveries about Jewish history. But what had that set them against him? How did an expert on ancient languages — and a British professor of archaeology — manage to fall afoul of a Bible-toting sect of Jewish fanatics? Was there some connection between the modern zealots of Judaism and the ancient zealots that Daniel was researching and studying?
That was surely unlikely. These ancient sects that have existed for centuries were the stuff of a whole new wave of historical thrillers, but they surely had no basis in reality? Besides, the ancient zealots were nationalistic Jews, whereas the modern ones were decidedly anti-nationalist. Indeed anti-Zionism was the hallmark of most ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. With one or two exceptions, it was the moderates who supported Zionism.
She had spoken to Dovi a couple of times on the way and he had assured her that a Border Guard unit had been dispatched there. It was a sensitive area, so there would be Border Guardsman and soldiers nearby anyway. But it was unlikely that they would have been given pictures of who they were looking for. And what if HaTzadik had sent other people. How would they know who to look out for?
The most they could do is look out for anyone trying anything fishy. That meant they would have to be reactive rather than proactive.
Sarit was still going fast when she turned into the bus forecourt. Private vehicles were supposed to park further away, but when a security guard approached and started giving all that swaggering “I’ve got a dick and you haven’t” Israeli macho, she just flashed a badge at him and told him to back off.
The Mossad had no jurisdiction on the home front, but when in Israel they carried ID that enabled them to avoid hassle from other law enforcement officials.
Ignoring the security guard who was no doubt watching her ass and mentally undressing her, she ran towards the tourist centre and the cable cars.
Chapter 83
“What are you going to do?” asked Daniel hesitantly.
“Hand over the bag,” said HaTzadik.
“Is that what this is all about?” asked Daniel. “A few pagan baubles? Not some pious cause after all, but just the old God of mammon?”
“It’s nothing like that,” Shalom Tikva snarled. “You couldn’t even begin to understand.”
“I think I’m beginning to,” said Daniel. “You’re not greedy. But like any other terrorist gang, you need money to finance the revolution. You justify it by telling yourselves that the money is to change the world, not to live the high life.
The mockery wasn’t entirely real. He was trying to goad HaTzadik into talking. Partly this was playing for time, but partly he wanted to understand what was going on. What did Shalom Tikva mean when he said “I’m surprised it took you so long to figure it out.”
“We didn’t do it for the treasure. We weren’t even sure that it existed. Although I suspect Sam Morgan was.”
“Sam Morgan?”
Daniel remembered the name from what Sarit had told him. Sam Morgan, Sarit had determined, was the man ho had killed Martin Costa and tried to kill Daniel at the house.
“A man who is helping us — or at least was helping us.”
Did this mean that Sam Morgan was dead? Or that they had fallen out?
“But what is that we took so long to figure out? The possible confusion between the Essenes and the Ikeni?”
“It’s more than possible confusion Professor Klein. That’s really what this is all about. You see archaeology has always been divided into two camps. The people who crave knowledge and the people who want to make a quick buck.”
“And where do you stand?” asked Daniel.
“We stand apart from all that. Our only interest is in the purity of the Jewish people. But you’re right. There are people who like to steal ancient artefacts and then sell them on the black market. Yigael Yadin once implied that Moshe Dayan fell into that category.”
Yigael Yadin was a former soldier who went on to become one of Israel’s leading archaeologists. Moshe Dayan, was the legendary former soldier and Defence Minister, who was an amateur archaeologist whom Yadin implied was also a private collector with a less than ethical approach.
“But why does all this bother you so much?” asked Daniel. “To the point of killing people who have done you know harm.”
“You have done us immense hard, Professor Klein. Even if you don’t realize it.”
“But how?”
“You know about the Dead Sea Scrolls — dozens of ancient manuscripts found in the caves of Qumran over the course of a decade, starting in 1946 when an Arab shepherd boy made the initial find?”
It was more of a rhetorical question really. Of course Daniel knew about the finds of nearly a thousand ancient scrolls from the first century, some books of the Bible, some part of the post-Biblical record of the Second Temple period and some a contemporary record of the life and times of the people who kept them.
Daniel nodded.
“Well in addition to the known finds, Professor Klein, there were also some finds that were… shall we say… removed from the scene and sold privately. Does that surprise you?”
“I know that there have been cases of theft of archaeological finds Israel. So I suppose the answer is no, it doesn’t surprise me.”
“Well would it surprise you then to know that one of those documents was some surviving parts of Josephus’s original Aramaic manuscript of the Wars of the Jews?”