A guilty smile crept on to Martin Costa’s face.
“Okay… maybe I did try to set you up. But only to negate the threat. I mean I needed some one to take the rap and I needed to make it look like I was dead. You know how hard it is for a man with my reputation. I figured that if I could establish myself as dead I could set up shop elsewhere. You know, like Sherlock Holmes pretended to be dead for three years, concealing his true fate even from his friend Doctor Watson.”
“I don’t think that analogy works too well Costa. Moriarty might be a better comparison.”
Costa smiled.
“You flatter me.”
“Right now I’m more inclined to flatten you.”
“Oh very good! Achilles and the Turtle!”
But Daniel was in no mood for humour.
“You were calling yourself Sam Morgan weren’t you?”
The look on Costa’s face changed to one of fear.
“How the hell did you know that?”
“Let’s just say that you haven’t been quite as clever as you thought. People have been watching you.”
“Wha — what people?”
“The kind of people who don’t like what Shomrei Ha’ir have been doing… or what you’ve been helping them with.”
Costa’s voice took on a tone of denial.
“I was never part of them! We merely had certain mutual interests.”
“Membership is hardly the issue! You were helping their cause.”
“Not their cause Daniel. My own.”
“They weren’t that pragmatic. They would never have trusted you if you’d told them your aims were purely venal. Even Chienmer Lefou had common cause with them.”
“I don’t know anything about that. I told them that I supported their cause. But it was just a ruse to get them to trust me. I only did it so I could get close to them. I mean they paid me for the parchment. But I had to carry on playing along with them. I knew that the treasure would turn up sooner or later. You see they knew about the connection between Boudicca’s daughter and Bar Giora.”
“I know. They had the original Josephus manuscript — the Aramaic original.”
“Well there you are then. And I’d researched it and suspected the connection after I read about tartan fabrics from Judea.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just something I read. Remember Joseph’s coat of many colours? How the literally translation means a ‘coat of stripes’.”
“I know,” said Daniel. “And some people think that means tartan.”
“Well tartan fabrics were traded all over the Roman empire — just like other things. That’s how tartan got to England. But some of them in Britain were identified as coming from plant fabric grown in Judea in the second half of the first century. That’s how I became interested.”
“And you put it together from that?”
“I wouldn’t say I put it together. But I suspected the link. And I always wondered about what happened to Boudicca’s treasure.”
Daniel scowled at this odious, venal man.
“And of course treasure is all you care about.”
“Is there anything wrong with that? You’ve got what you wanted. Why shouldn’t I get what I want?”
He lifted up his rucksack to indicate what he was talking about.
“Because it’s too late for that Costa.”
“Too late? Why? You’ve got the two manuscripts — or at least access to them.”
“I’ve got the translation of the ketuba too — and the map.”
“The map?”
“It doesn’t matter Costa. What matters for you is that the game is up.”
“All right… look… I’ll give you the treasure. You can have it all Daniel. Everything. Do what you like with it. Keep it for yourself. Or give it to charity. Whatever you like. Just let me go. Let’s forget this ever happened. The bad guys are dead. You can have Boudicca’s treasure and the prestige or rewriting the history books. Just let me walk away and we can wipe the slate clean.”
“I can’t do that Costa. You see too much water has flowed under the bridge. Too many people have died. Too many people have suffered.”
“But that wasn’t me Daniel,” said Costa, picking up the rucksack and holding it close to himself, like a cherished lover. “That was Bar Tikva and his father.”
“But you were part of it!”
“But only a small part. I’m not really responsible, Daniel.”
“We’re all responsible for our actions, Costa — and for the consequences. And now you’re going to have to answer for yours.”
Daniel realized afterwards that he should have been more careful. He should have seen the look in Martin Costa’s eyes. But he didn’t catch it — at least not in time to brace himself for what came next. For in that split second, Costa swung the rucksack at his head. He managed to put up an arm to block it. But the weight of the rucksack — packed with gold and silver — was sufficient to send Daniel flying.
And as Daniel fell, Costa took off for the exit, before Daniel had even hit the ground!
But he didn’t get far. For when he turned the corner and reached the entrance, he slammed into the rock hard chest of a tall, muscular man who towered over him by almost a head and who looked down on him with a face of implacable anger. And before Costa could say another word, the left fist of the man shot out and delivered a crushing punch that broke Costa’s nose and sent him reeling onto his back, the stars dancing before his eyes.
“That’s for my daughters!” said Nathaniel Sasson.
Epilogue
“You want a date?”
Daniel turned round to see a pretty young woman standing there holding a large serving platter. She was not asking Daniel if he wanted to go out with her but rather offering him a dried date to eat. He picked one on a skewer and chewed it slowly, savouring it and thinking about its enigmatic significance.
Daniel was back on the plateau of Masada a week later, along with several hundred other people. The event that had brought them all there was the swearing in of an Israel army unit. One of Daniel’s other sisters — Naomi — had two sons in the Israel Defence Forces, and her younger son was about to be sworn in to his unit along with another hundred and twenty young men who had just completed their basic training.
The practice of swearing in at Masada had fallen into disuse but was now being revived and Daniel’s nephew was to be one of the first in this newly revived tradition.
The reason that the date was of such significance was on account of its provenance. During the excavations at Masada between 1963 and 1965 a small cache of ungerminated seeds were found in a jar by Hebrew University archaeologist Ehud Netzer. They were suspected of being 2000 years old. However this could only be tested, by radiocarbon dating, and this was a destructive test that would make it impossible to germinate them thereafter. But the prospects of germinating such old seeds was anything from low to non-existent and it was deemed to be sufficiently important to find out the age of the seeds, for the historical value of the information.
So two of the seeds sent to the University of Zurich where they were carbon dated to between 155 BCE and 64 CE. The remainder of the seeds were given to botanical archaeologist Mordechai Kislev at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv who kept in storage for some forty years. Then, in November 2004, Sarah Sallon, director of the Hadassah Medical Organization’s Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center in Jerusalem asked Kislev if she could have a few to pass on to desert agriculture expert Elaine Solowey, the director of the NMRC cultivation site at Kibbutz Ketura in the Aravah desert.
Solowey was quite surprised at the request, as germinating 2000 year old seeds was something that had never been done before and calling it a “tall order” would have been an understatement. However, she rose to the challenge, and conducted extensive research into how such seeds might be germinated. By January 2005 she was ready to apply her research to the challenge and she set to work, first soaking the seeds in hot water to soften them and make them more absorbent to other liquids, then soaking them in a nutrient, following this up by treating them with an enzymatic fertilizer that was made from seaweed.