The Moses Stone

45

Tony Baverstock looked at yet another list of clay tablets on the screen of his desktop computer and wondered, not for the first time, if there was any real point in continuing with the search. He must have studied pictures of hundreds of the things, and none of them – at least, none so far – had borne even the slightest resemblance to the one he was looking for.

To complicate matters, there were some half a million clay tablets sitting in museum vaults and storerooms that had never been translated. The information about this huge repository of tablets was usually limited to just one or two poor-quality photographs and perhaps a very brief description of the provenance of each object – where it was found, its approximate date, that kind of thing.

There were two reasons for his urgent search. First, Charlie Hoxton had called him the day before and told him to do it, which was in itself an entirely adequate incentive; second, his task had suddenly become even more crucial the previous afternoon, when he'd run into Roger Halliwell in the corridor outside his office. The head of department had looked more irritated that usual.

'Something wrong, Roger?' Baverstock had asked.

'It's Angela. She's gone off on another bloody wildgoose chase,' Halliwell had snapped. 'I've only just found out she's been in Morocco for the last couple of days, and now she's taken more leave to run off to Israel to study some Aramaic text. It's not her field, for God's sake. She should stick to what she's good at.'

Baverstock hadn't commented, but suddenly felt sure that somehow Angela must have either found the missing clay tablet or at least got hold of a decent picture of the inscription on it. That had been enough for him to redouble his efforts.

But despite his exhaustive research, he hadn't got his first 'hit' until the next morning. The picture of the tablet was of fairly poor quality, and he spent almost twenty minutes studying the Aramaic inscription before he finally realized that he was looking at the tablet Charlie Hoxton already owned, and which Dexter had 'sourced' from a museum in Cairo.

With a snort of disgust, he closed the window on his computer screen and returned to his search. Two hours later, having changed his search parameters five times in an effort to reduce the sheer number of relics he was having to check out, he found himself looking at the Paris tablet. He printed all the images available in the database on the colour laser in his office, and spent a few minutes studying each of them with his desk magnifier before finally closing the connection to the museum intranet.

Then he locked his office and left the building, telling his assistant he was going away for a few days unexpectedly. He walked down Great Russell Street, stopped at the same public phone he'd used before, and called Hoxton.

'I've spent the last twelve hours looking for these bloody tablets,' he began.

'Did you find anything?' Hoxton demanded.

'I spent half an hour studying your tablet – the one you got me to translate – before I twigged what it was, the photographs were such poor quality. But eventually I got lucky. There's a clay tablet sitting in a storeroom in a museum in Paris that's definitely a part of the set. From the mark in one corner of it, it's the one that goes on the bottom right of the block.'

'Can you translate the text from the pictures?' Hoxton asked.

'There's no need,' Baverstock replied. 'The French have helpfully already translated the Aramaic for us. They translated it into French, of course, but obviously that's not going to be much of a problem. It'll just take me a little while to work out the best equivalent English words.'

'Good,' Hoxton said. 'You're packed, I hope?'

'Of course. I wouldn't miss this trip for the world. We're still booked on the flight this afternoon?'

'Yes. I'll see you at Heathrow as we agreed. Bring all the pictures of the Paris tablet, and the French translation of the Aramaic, as well as your English version. This is going to be the trip of your lifetime.'