“Coffee anyone?” he asked, already pouring himself a mug at a drink station at the far end of the room.
Both Bennetts accepted the offer. Natasha asked for water. Barak fixed the drinks and then joined them at the table.
“It is so good to finally meet you both,” he said after taking a moment to catch his breath and wipe his forehead with a clean handkerchief he kept in his trouser pocket. “Eli spoke so much about you I feel like you’re practically my own grandchildren. I suspect, however, he told you little, if anything, about me.”
“I’m afraid not,” Bennett said, though he’d been racking his brain for the past few minutes, trying to think of any reference Mordechai may have made to him or Natasha.
“He was a man of his word,” Barak sighed. “A real class act.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Erin.
“Well, we’ve been friends for almost fifty years,” the old man explained. “We served in military intelligence together. We served in the reserves together. Our wives — God rest their souls — were close when they were alive. We even vacationed together once. But when he became — how do you say it, ‘born again’?—I’m afraid we had a falling out. We didn’t speak for several years, and when we did, when we tried to patch things up between us and get together from time to time, I asked him not to mention it to anyone.”
“Why not?” asked Bennett.
“Well, you must understand that I come from a very strict religious community, and to them, any time I spent with Eliezer Mordechai was fraternizing with the enemy. But, God bless him, he was a man of his word, even to the end. He said he wouldn’t tell anyone about our friendship, and he didn’t. I’m really going to miss him.”
Barak took a deep breath, dabbed his eyes with his handkerchief, and shifted gears, just as Natasha had a while earlier. “So, you are probably wondering,” he said, staring into his coffee, “what brought us back together.”
The Bennetts nodded, but he didn’t see them. Not that it would have mattered. It was obvious he was going to tell the story anyway.
“A treasure hunt,” Barak said softly.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Bennett.
“Well, it’s like this. After so many years of not speaking, Eli called me out of the blue one day and said he’d found a clue — a big clue — to a puzzle I’d been trying to solve for decades. And then he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: if I would talk to him again, he would help find the greatest treasure the world has ever known.”
The old man had their full attention now — Natasha’s, too, though Bennett was sure she had heard this story a thousand times before.
“Is everything ready?” Barak then asked, turning to his granddaughter.
“Whenever you are,” Natasha replied.
“Very well then,” said Barak. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
“Go where?” asked Bennett.
“Let’s go for a little ride.”
Five minutes later they were on the museum’s roof.
Boarding a helicopter. Donning headphones. Lifting off — Natasha at the controls, Barak playing copilot — and banking eastward into the sun, though Jon and Erin had no idea where. Out the left-rear window, Bennett could see the Israeli Knesset building, not far from the museum grounds. Soon they were flying over the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, before making a slight course correction to the south.
“Dr. Barak, do you mind letting us in on our destination?” Jon asked, adjusting the volume on his headset and trying to hear over the roar of the rotors.
“What, and spoil all the fun?” asked Barak, clearly enjoying himself.
“Let me guess,” said Erin. “Qumran, where the scrolls were found.”
“Good try,” Barak replied, his eyes still fixed on the horizon ahead. “But not even close.”
“Masada?” asked Jon.
“What for?” said Barak. “Great place to visit, but irrelevant to the treasure hunt I’m taking you on.”
“Then where?” Erin pressed.
Barak mumbled something in Hebrew they couldn’t understand, and then — when he seemed confident Natasha had the flight under control — he turned back, as best he could, to address them both face-to-face.
“It will all make sense in a moment,” he insisted. “But first I must tell you a little story. Okay?”
They hardly had a choice, so they leaned back, enjoyed the flight and the view, and let the old man tell his tale.
“The year is 1947,” Barak began. “The Nazis have been defeated. Europe has been liberated. The concentration camps have been shut down. The British are preparing to pull out of Palestine. The U.N. is carving up the Holy Land between the Arabs and the Jews. We Jews are about to declare our independence, and five Arab nations are preparing to attack us and wipe us off the face of the earth.
“Meanwhile, a few miles east of Jerusalem, two shepherds — Bedouins, actually — begin tossing stones into a distant mountain cave. Suddenly, they hear something shatter, like pottery or glass. Their first thought: buried treasure! So they return at night with friends, ropes, torches, and a plan to scale the sheer rock face and enter the remote cavern. They’re electrified by the hope that what is waiting for them is gold or silver or precious jewels. To their dismay, that’s not what they find. But in time it will become clear that they have stumbled upon a treasure much greater by far: the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
Barak stopped for a moment, fished several bottles of water out of a cooler, offered two to the Bennetts, and then took a swig of his own. A moment later, he was back to his story, his voice low and mysterious.
“Over the next few years, more than eight hundred scrolls and more than 100,000 fragments were discovered,” he explained. “Whole books of the Bible — such as the Isaiah Scroll Natasha showed you — emerged from the caves of Qumran. Sections of nearly every Old Testament book were found, along with religious commentaries and detailed descriptions of the day-to-day lives of religious Jews under Roman occupation.”
He stopped abruptly and pointed out the window, off to their right. “We’re flying through the Jordan Valley,” he explained. “That’s the Dead Sea down there. Can you see it?”
“Yes,” they said.
“Good — now look over there, to the west,” Barak instructed as he urged Natasha to bank a bit so Jon and Erin could get a good look.
All Bennett could see were mountains — dusty, barren, and bleak.
“Now, you see those foothills? those caves?” Barak asked.
They did.
“Well that, my friends, is Qumran. That’s where the scrolls were found, where history was made.”
“Wow,” said Erin. “You’d never suspect something important would be hidden away in something so nondescript.”
“That’s often the case with archeology,” said Barak. “Where you least expect it, expect it.”
Erin pointed at a cluster of buildings and a parking lot. “What’s that?”
“That’s the visitor center and the offices that run the excavations at Qumran.”
“They’re still digging there?”
“A bit, yes,” said Barak. “Plus there’s a little theater and museum there, a gift shop, a snack bar, some restrooms — that kind of thing.”
“And that’s where we’re headed?” asked Bennett.
“No, no,” said Barak, pointing eastward. “Qumran was a big story in its day — the biggest archeological discovery in history to that point. But believe me, Jonathan, based on the research Eli and I did, I can tell you it pales in comparison with what is coming next.”
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