The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 40

“What’s up?” asked Sarit, noticing the distressed look on Daniel’s face as she walked through the door.

“I saw the news… about my sister.”

Sarit — who had been in the process of removing her biking leathers — stopped stone still and looked at him.

“She’s okay.”

“I know! I’ve — ”

He was about to say “I’ve spoken to her,” but she would probably then go into panic mode about him using the phone. So he had to think quickly.

“I’ve seen on the news. They said she was unharmed.”

Sarit carried on stripping down to her indoor clothes.

“They also said the attack was foiled by a man on a motorbike.”

Sarit, who was by now back in a T-shirt and shorts smiled alluringly.

“I’m flattered.”

Despite his anger at being kept out of the loop, Daniel couldn’t help but smile back at her.

“You might have told me.”

“Told you what? And when? I only just got back.”

“You could have told me before you left.”

“Before I left I didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“I could have come with you.”

“And done what? Get in the way? Get yourself caught? Slowed me down? Look Danny, these people want to silence you. They’ve tried once already. This time they were going to grab one of your nieces for leverage.”

“So it was an abduction attempt.”

“Of course it was.”

“Not a murder attempt.”

“How would it help them to kill anyone else in your family? You remember the old dictum of Capablanca, the chessplayer — the threat is greater than its execution? That was their game. They wanted to grab one of your nieces to use her as a bargaining chip.”

“But how did you know? In advance I mean?”

“I’m not really supposed to say. Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

He looked pitiful — angry, but pitiful. She wasn’t supposed to say, but after a few seconds, she did.

“Intercepts.”

“You’re tracking them and listening in?”

“Project Echelon — an alliance between the NSA, GCHQ and the Urim monitoring station in Israel.”

Daniel was amazed.

“Then why don’t you just tell Scotland Yard and get them picked up?”

“We can do that and get Baruch Tikva. But we also want to get the people behind him. Some of them are here and some of them are in Israel. We want to get all of them.”

“And how many of them are there?”

“Well there are several organizations involved. It’s not a simple case of one organization. There’s Shomrei Ha’ir and then there are some anti-Semitic lunatics here in Britain. And they in turn work with holocaust deniers, the Iranians and fascist and neo-Nazi groups. It’s all one big network of meshuganas.”

“And you think you’re going to get all of them?”

“Well obviously not all of them. But we hope to bag a few of them, if we can hold off and find out what exactly it is they’re after.”

“And in the meantime I’ve just got to sit tight while you babysit.”

“I’m afraid so. Did you have a chance to read through the witness reports?”

She walked further into the room as he sat down at the coffee table and picked up one of the printouts.

“Not yet. I was concentrating on the post mortem report.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Their were traces of animal fibres under his fingernails.”

“What animal?”

“Cowhide — unsplit, untanned cowhide.”

“You think he might have been on a farm?”

Daniel smiled.

“No you don’t understand. We need to get them to carbon date those fibres.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think they were from a living animal — or even a recently killed animal. I think they were from old parchment.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“You have to understand something about Jewish scribes and Jewish religious law pertaining to religious documents. All Jewish documents were handwritten by scribes on parchment made from cowhide.”

“But I’ve seen Jewish religious books printed on paper.”

“Yes, but those books are not originals. Prayer books and books for scholarship are another matter, but actual religious artefacts like torah scrolls have to be handwritten by a scribe and made from parchment. The same goes for the text inside a mezuzah that Jews put on their doorposts — and also tefillin.”

“To fill in what?”

“Not ‘to fill in’ — tefillin. Those leather boxes that orthodox Jews strap to their arms and foreheads when they recite morning prayers. They have pieces of parchment inside them with certain paragraphs from the Torah. And there are special rules about what type of parchment can be used for what items. For example the parchment in the mezuzah can be made from either the inner or outer part of the hide or from the unsplit hide, a type of parchment called gevil. Torah scrolls are supposed to be made ideally from the gevil — the unsplit hide — but can be made from the outer hide or klaf. And tefillin can only be made from the outer hide.”

“Why such complex rules?”

“Well for tefillin, space was at a premium and the outer skin was thin and so it made good, efficient use of the available space. For a Torah scroll, the main concern was durability, because the scroll is taken out and read from and rolled on from one week to the next. So they wanted something that would last a long time. The main advantage of gevil was that it had precisely that durable and long-lasting quality. Also of course, a complete Torah is too long for a single animal hide, so they had to make it in several pieces and stitch them together. It’s easier to stitch together when it’s a thick, unsplit hide. Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls were written on gevil.”

“So do you think that this manuscript Costa found might have been a Torah scroll?”

“It’s possible. Or maybe the parchment from a mezuzah.”

“But why would he have fibres under his fingernails?”

“Well, let’s not forget he was killed by some one — quite possibly over the parchment. Maybe there was some sort of fight… a struggle for the parchment. Costa must have tried to hold on to it and the other person killed him.”

Sarit nodded.

“That makes sense.”

“And now the manuscript is gone and our only hope of finding out what it was is if your boffins at the Mossad managed to enhance the image sufficiently to make the writing legible.”

Sarit perked up at these words.

“You’re right. They should have finished the image enhancement by now. I’ll check.”

She logged on from the tablet and a smile lit up her face.

“Take a look at this,” she said, handing him the tablet.

He looked at it and what he saw amazed him. The letters had assumed a new clarity under the skilled hand — and computer software — of the experts who had worked on the digital image enhancement and what he found himself looking upon was a page of a manuscript in the form of the Hebrew alphabet that was used in Judea circa the first century. But the language was Aramaic. And as he started translating it, it dawned on him what he was reading.

“Holy shit!”