The Moses Legacy

Chapter 101

‘So what is this organization that hates Israel and the Jews so much?’ asked Gabrielle.

Abandoning the car that Gabrielle had been driving, they had piled into Sarit’s and were heading north, with the sun low in the sky to their left.

‘They’re called the New Covenant and it isn’t only Israel and the Jews. It’s the West in general. They hate the United States. They hate Britain. They hate blacks. They hate liberals.’

‘So it’s not Islamic extremists then?’ asked Daniel.

‘No, nothing like that. More like those racist rednecks that support the Ku Klux Klan and think there’s a Jewish conspiracy running the world. But their leaders aren’t stupid. They’re smart people who pander to gullible followers.’

‘So why hasn’t anything been done about them?’ asked Daniel. ‘I mean if you know who they are.’

‘Well, we don’t know who all of them are. They operate within a cell structure. But we’ve built up a pretty good picture and we’re keeping tabs on them – along with the FBI and various other law enforcement agencies.’

‘But I mean why haven’t they been prosecuted on terrorism charges?’

‘Well, up until now they’ve been mostly a talkshop. Big on rhetoric but nothing else. They spread stories over the Internet and in newspapers when they can. They talk the talk but they seldom walk the walk. Only now it’s different. They decided to try and get their hands on the spores that caused an ancient plague and use them to destroy Israel.’

‘But how did they know about the spores?’ asked Daniel. ‘I mean the people that this… Goliath was working for?’

‘One of the members of the New Covenant is a professor of Linguistics or something like that. He was asked to peer review a paper by Harrison Carmichael in which he essentially deciphered Proto-Sinaitic script.’

‘He told me about it… sort of… but I didn’t take him seriously at first.’

‘That’s understandable. He was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. But that didn’t detract from his intellectual powers. He had, in fact, translated The Book of the Straight.’

‘That’s impossible!’ said Gabrielle. ‘How could he even have got hold of a copy? They only took it out of its hiding place when we persuaded the Samaritans and the Israel Antiquities Authority to let us. And they said it had been kept there for a couple of centuries.’

‘It may have been at that particular hiding place for a couple of centuries, but it had been taken out some time in the last couple of hundred years and copied on to parchment. We know that because your uncle had that parchment copy. We believe that he’d had it for a few decades and that he’d been working on it ever since. But he didn’t have what you and Professor Klein here had to help you.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘I understand from what you told my colleague in Herzliya that you had the benefit of other texts that you could compare to their biblical equivalent. Your uncle didn’t have that. So it obviously took him a lot longer. But he got there first.’

‘Then why didn’t he publish?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘Because of that professor – the one who peer reviewed it. He used his prestige to delay publication.’

‘But if they were anti-Israel why did they want to stop the paper being published?’

‘Because they wanted to draw on the information inside it. The paper revealed the disease that afflicted the Israelites. They figured out from the contents that it was a spore-borne disease. They saw the possibility of getting the spores and using them against Israel, so they bided their time.’

Now Daniel was even more confused. ‘But the information about the plague was in The Book of the Wars of the Lord, not The Book of the Straight. And it was pretty minimalistic information.’

Sarit was shaking her head. ‘It was in The Book of the Straight too – and in far greater detail.’

An uneasy silence settled over them, as Daniel had a deeply discomforting thought.