The Moses Stone

21

Dexter drove away from his shop in Petworth that afternoon and met a man in a café on the outskirts of Crowborough. Once they'd finished their drinks, he slid a sealed envelope across the table. In the car park outside, he removed a cardboard box from the back of the man's small white van and transferred it to the boot of his BMW. Then he drove away.

In Petworth, he carried the box into his storeroom and lifted out the computer. He placed it on the bench that ran down the length of the room, plugged in the peripherals, and switched on. Fifteen minutes later, having connected one of his own printers, he was looking at half a dozen pictures that showed a greyish-brown oblong tablet, covered in a form of writing. They weren't particularly clear, and didn't show the inscription in anything like the detail he had hoped, but they were a lot better than the fuzzy image printed in the newspaper.

He had not the slightest idea what the text meant, or even which language it was written in. He slipped the pictures into a manila envelope, locked the storeroom and returned to his shop. In the office at the back he had a powerful computer of his own, with a massive hard disk that contained images and written descriptions of everything he'd bought and sold over the years through the shop and, in a hidden partition protected by an eight-digit alphanumeric password, full details of all his 'unofficial' private sales as well.

Minutes later, he was comparing the pictures he'd just printed with images of the clay tablet he'd sold to Charlie Hoxton two years before.

He leant back, satisfied. He'd been right. The tablet was part of a set, which made it very important indeed.