The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 89

Sarit was cradling the little boy in her arms when they returned to the top of the plateau. She had used the walkie-talkie to get the cable car operator at the base station to send them back up to the top. Returning the child to the parents was the first priority. But as she looked over at the doctor, she realized that the news about the man who had been shot was not good.

More soldiers and border guardsman were arriving at the base and Sarit had notified Dovi Shamir, who was now liaising with SHaBaK. The arriving cable car brought border guardsman and some ambulance crews to deal with the formalities at the top, although both Shalom Tikva and the cable car operator would almost certainly be pronounced dead at the scene.

The people on the plateau were told they would have to wait until the bodies were removed before they would be allowed to leave. This was deemed preferable to having them effectively walk past the body by the cable car. But some of the ambulance staff checked over the older people of the plateau to make sure they were all right and more help and first aid would be waiting when they went down to the tourist centre below.

In the meantime, their details were being taken as they may be needed to give witness statements as this was now a criminal investigation. Sarit was allowed to go down already because of her Mossad ID and she was able to take Daniel and Ted with her, on her guarantee.

When they got to the bottom, they were allowed to go, unimpeded, to the place where Bar Tikva had fallen, although not to approach the body, which was being examined in situ by a pathologist from the coroner’s office. Instead, they looked around for the treasure bag, which he had been holding in his hands when he sailed out of the doorway of the cable car. But, interestingly, it was nowhere to be found.

They started looking round, widening their search in ever increasing circles, but to no avail.

“Where the devil could it be?” asked Daniel, frustrated by this turn of events. Ted looked at him chidingly, putting him on the defensive. “Look I don’t care about the treasure per se, Ted. It wasn’t ours anyway. But the inscription… the fact that the treasure was here.”

“We can still back up our case with the parchments and the translations.”

Daniel knew that Ted was right. Even though the ketuba was lost forever and preserved only as a digital image, without the original parchment — and even without Boudicca’s treasure — they still had the Temple Mount Parchment and the Domus Aurea Parchment. The Vatican would cooperate with them on that. It wasn’t some deep, dark secret that threatened the Roman Catholic faith. And contra to HaTzadik’s paranoid fears, it didn’t threaten the Jewish religion either. Rather, it would add to the sum of human knowledge and spread further light on the history of Judeo-Christian monotheism throughout the west.

Yet it was frustrating. The ketuba and the Boudicca treasure would have completed the picture. But instead, they had been thwarted by the skulduggery of Bar Tikva.

Sensing his mood, Sarit approached Daniel and put a comforting hand on him.

“It isn’t necessarily lost for good. When we do a proper search with metal detectors and gravitometers, it’ll probably show up under a few inches of wind-swept sand. It fell from quite a height don’t forget. It could easily have got embedded below the surface.”

Daniel smiled weakly. He would have preferred to search the area personally until he found the treasure. But that wouldn’t be very practical. Within a short time, a helicopter had landed and Dovi Shamir had turned up at the scene. He gathered Sarit, Daniel and Ted around him and told him that they had to go with him to a secret location to make their formal statements.