The Boudicca Parchments

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?”

Now that did surprise Daniel. And from the look on Ted’s face it left him surprised too. In fact it left them both feeling like they’d been kicked in the ribs.