"Then they haven't seen the coded part," Selena said.
"No. Stephanie has. She's downstairs working on it right now."
"It has to be something simple," Nick said.
"I hope so." Elizabeth picked up her pen and set it down again. "If it has to be decrypted with a companion writing, we're out of luck."
"Like a book code? I don't think those came in until the fifteenth or sixteenth century," Selena said. "Not until after the invention of the printing press."
"If it can be broken, Steph will do it. Meantime, we're stalled out. With Abidi dead we don't know who ended up with that Semtex."
"There's more than one end-user," Nick said. "It turned up in several of the recent bombings."
"Yes. Probably brokered by Abidi and probably to Hezbollah. Someone who wants Semtex to attack the Israelis isn't going to waste it on an obscure Italian professor in France. It doesn't fit."
"There are a couple of things we haven't asked ourselves," Nick said.
"Such as?"
"How did whoever took the scroll find out about it in the first place? No one knew what was on it until it was x-rayed. Somehow the assassin found out about the scroll between the time it was x-rayed and the time Caprini got on that train. That's only a couple of days. What does that tell us?"
"Someone at the x-ray facility tipped them off," Ronnie said. "Has to be."
"It could have been the technician," Selena said, "the one who was killed. He would have known about it before anyone else."
Elizabeth nodded. "He told someone. Or Caprini did."
"I don't think Caprini would do that. He'd want to keep it under wraps so he could make a big splash with an announcement. It was going to make him famous. I suppose he could have talked about it with the technician while they were working on it."
"Good point. We'll focus on him as the possible contact point with the killer."
"If he's the contact he had to call someone," Nick said. "Can we get his phone records?"
"I'm sure we can." Elizabeth made a note. "I'll give it to Stephanie."
"How about Abidi's phone as well? His calls must be in a database somewhere. NSA has been recording everything in Lebanon for years."
Elizabeth made another note. "Nick, you said there were a couple of things we hadn't asked. What else?"
"Why blow up the train?"
"To kill Caprini."
"There are easier ways to do that. I think it was to make it look like the scroll was destroyed."
"That's a stretch."
"Can you think of a better reason? Nothing was found in the wreckage. The French went over the wreckage with everything they had. There should have been something left behind, fragments, traces, something. I think whoever killed Caprini was trying to keep anyone from finding out the scroll had been stolen."
"Why kill all those people?" Elizabeth asked. "It would be easy enough to just steal it after they killed him."
"I don't think they cared about collateral damage. If everyone thinks the scroll was destroyed in the crash then no one will look for it."
"That's cold, Nick," Ronnie said.
"What makes it worse is that it doesn't make any difference. The bad guys didn't know the x-rays still exist and show what's on it."
Diego spoke up. "The Temple treasure would be enough reason to take the scroll out of circulation."
"Maybe." Nick sounded doubtful. "It's still overkill."
"What about the political angle?" Selena asked. "The body of Solomon is a big deal."
Elizabeth picked up her pen and tapped it on her desk.
"I suppose someone could try to sell the location of the tomb to Israel or the Arabs if they knew where it was. They'd never get away with it. It would be like pasting a target on their head. Diego is probably right. They're after treasure."
"Whoever is behind it is one ruthless son of a bitch," Nick said. "Taking out the train like that."
"I wonder how Stephanie's coming with that code?" Elizabeth said her pen down.
Nick nodded at the door. "Why don't you ask her?"
Stephanie entered the room and sat down.
"Ask me what?"
"About the part of the scroll Selena couldn't read," Elizabeth said. "Is it a code?"
"Yes. It's a variation of an Atbash, a classic."
"I've heard of that," Selena said.
"What's an Atbash?" Diego asked.
"It's a substitution code using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The simplest form substitutes the last letter of the alphabet for the first, the second to last for the second and so on. Back when the scroll was written it was almost unbreakable. No one would've figured it out."
"You said Hebrew. The scroll is written in Aramaic."
"The principle's the same, whatever the alphabet. In our alphabet A becomes Z, B becomes Y, C becomes X and you keep going like that. The Aramaic complicated things but once I knew what I was looking at it wasn't difficult. Freddie printed it out in English."
"Who's Freddie?" Diego asked.
"My favorite computer," Stephanie said. "He's a Cray XT."
She handed copies of the computer print out to everyone.
"The first and last parts are missing. The scroll is damaged."
Selena read the decoded message.
…water. Enough, praises to God. At dawn we continued south. I grow weary of this journey. Two moons and the Sabbath have passed since we began. This land is harsh and cruel, the people few and ignorant. They live in the high places, fearing their neighbors. They worship spirits and animals, without knowledge of the One God. They decorate themselves with flowers and plants in their hair.
We have been following a wide valley. Cliffs rise high on either side and three columns of rock stand guard, one sharp to pierce the sky. If you seek wisdom, look there for…
"For what?" Nick asked.
"It doesn't say," Stephanie said. "That's where something ate the scroll."
"He'd been traveling for more than two months," Selena said. "Assuming he left from Jerusalem, where would that put him?"
"How far could a caravan get in a day?" Diego asked.
"That depends on the country and what they were using for pack animals," Nick said. "Donkeys or camels. Those are both stubborn animals. They'll only go so far unless you drive them to exhaustion."
"On a good road, flat, you can get about twenty miles out of a donkey in a day," Diego said. "That's pushing it."
"How do you know that?"
"We had donkeys on the farm. The town was about ten miles away. I remember my grandfather saying that when the truck broke down he'd hitch two of them up and take a wagon to town. He said it took him all day to go there and back and that the animals were worn out."
"Ephram wouldn't have had a road like that," Stephanie said.
"I don't think he would've used donkeys," Selena said. "Too many things can go wrong in bad country. Camels would be a better choice. They can go farther without water and they can carry more than a donkey."
"You don't think they had wagons?" Nick asked.
"I doubt it. A caravan track would have been impossible for wagons"
"Okay, camels. How far can they go on a day?"
"I don't know."
Stephanie entered a few keystrokes. The answer appeared on the monitor.
"Looks like a camel can travel about twenty miles a day loaded down."
Nick said, "Let's cut that a little bit and allow for things like rough terrain or unavoidable delays. Say fifteen miles a day, loaded to the max. How far would he have gotten when Ephram wrote that part of the scroll?"
Stephanie tapped her keyboard and a map of Saudi Arabia and surrounding areas popped up on the wall monitor.
"Two moons and a Sabbath is a little over two months. If we assume fifteen miles a day, call it a thousand miles."
She drew a line on the screen that went along the eastern edge of the coastal range of Saudi Arabia. The line ended near the modern city of Abha, in the Haraz Mountains.