by Jeff Spence
He knew this kind of thing often didn't pay out for a long time. He did the mental math: he would have to turn down outside speaking engagements, so his rent would go past due, his student loans to arrears, maybe default, and it was also possible his teaching would suffer and he might get fired — and all of the money he had in his bank account might feed him for three months if he was careful with it, maybe ate a lot of rice. He did have a credit card with some space on it. He had family that might lend him a few bucks when the end was in sight…
In short, it was a clear and easy decision. "Are you asking me to translate it for you?"
Bass nodded. "Then yes, yes, of course I will. When can I see the sections? I can publish this, right? There are a dozen good journals that would love something like this."
"I'll be in touch tomorrow. We’ll make the arrangements then. Are you available to travel if need be?"
"Yes, you bet I am. I'll need to make some arrangement with the university of course, cover my classes. Travel will be covered, will it? Financially? I wouldn't ask, except that-"
"Not at all, Ben. None of us work for free. The best are always compensated, and that is as it should be. I wouldn't have it any other way." The way Bass said it, it was as if Ben had tried to refuse payment or expenses. "Okay then, here's a bit of a retainer, to show I mean business, and you'll be hearing from me soon, personally, with some paperwork. This project is very important to me. I want you to know that I take it seriously, and respect the scholarship and historical significance."
Ben took the envelope without registering that he had done so, his mind whirring in a daze of plans and calculations. When the driver opened the door and stepped back, the professor stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of his apartment. Greg Bass smiled back at him as the door was closed and the muscled sport jacket slipped back into the driver's seat and pulled the vehicle away from the curb. Ben opened the envelope to see a stack of hundreds, maybe fifty in all, every one of them crisp, new notes. He tucked them into his front trouser pocket and stared after the receding tail lights.
It was only then that he wondered how Greg Bass had known where he lived.
FIVE
The western sky glowed orange as the sun, hidden behind majestic towers of flaming cloud, drifted slowly toward the horizon. A tall man in an elegant black suit stared at it through a wall of glass. Behind him was an expansive office designed with clean luxury in mind. The plush, leather couches were flanked by mahogany end tables, polished to shine. The desk was broad and deep and, except for the closed laptop placed unobtrusively off to the side, the surface was completely clear. There were no papers out, no pens. No folders sat stacked at the edges of it and no telephone lurked there, pregnant with the will to ring.
The lower rim of the sun shone out from beneath the western clouds and the man squinted against the sudden light, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. He stood for ten minutes more, as the glowing orb drifted down, the lower rim dipping below the horizon even before the upper had cleared the clouds. The remaining arc of it shrank and dropped, as if it sank into shimmering quicksand, or rippling syrup, until the last gleam of light flickered away and only the orange glow remained.
A moment more and the man returned to his seat, opened a drawer, and placed a sleek black telephone on the desk. He opened the laptop and it flashed to life, its glow sterile and artificial after the warm glow of the setting sun.
He took a deep breath, steeled himself, and pressed a button on the phone. With a sharp click, the heavy wooden doors opened and a woman walked in, followed, at a respectful distance, by a man in a dark suit, this one off the rack, and in need of a tailor’s attention.
"Anything pressing?" The man asked from his desk. The woman's raised eyebrows answered his question. "What is it?"
The woman turned and motioned to the man behind her. He stepped forward.
"This is Jared, he's from technical security division."
"Yes Jared?"
"There's been a breach, sir."
"What kind of breach?"
He glanced at the woman. She nodded and arched her eyebrow, a motherly jab that prompted the young man past his hesitation.
"Someone hacked the system and copied some files. Yesterday. Just after sundown."
"Which files?"
"As far as we can tell so far, they were limited to high-def image files from your archeological collections."
There was a drawn out silence. "Which ones?"
"Something called 13QSil, numbers one to seventeen."
The man closed his eyes.
"Mr. Kantor?" the woman stepped forward. He opened them and the young man saw a fire lit in the stare. He stepped back. The woman stood her ground.
"Find out who did this."
Jared continued. "We're working on it sir, so far we know that the hacker breached the system from somewhere in the United States. He routed it through China, which should have made it impossible to trace, but we have a contact there. There was a fee involved, but she had the information. Beyond that it's really difficult to track these things, to be more accurate. We have specialists on it, and the security weakness is being dealt with as we speak."
Leonard Kantor pulled a notepad from the desk drawer and scribbled four names on it, handing the note to the woman. "Find out where these men were when this happened, and check them against anything we can get on the hacker, any connection at all. If we can link one of them to the theft, or eliminate any of them from suspicion, I want it done." The woman nodded. "Then bring me in a cup of coffee, but give me a few minutes first. I have a call to make."
"Yes sir." She shooed Jared from the room in front of her, like he was a errant sheep, and gently closed the door behind them.
Kantor took a deep breath, fighting against rage and a sense of personal stupidity. Why had he left the files on a computer with any kind of Internet access? Why not just be sure, and keep them on a disc in the vault? At least then he had have some concrete clues. These cyber-thieves were next to impossible to track down; routing through China from some hole in the wall cyber-cafe… the chase would grind to a halt. All he could hope for was that the hacker's ego overcame the fee, no doubt a generous one, and that he would start to brag about his exploit. Then at least Kantor would have a place to start.
Follow the money. It always started with the money.
There was a chance, he knew, that the hacker could be identified as to state. New York wouldn't help him as much, as two of the parties upon whom he levelled suspicion lived there, and there might be a new player coming on the scene. Too many people in New York with the money to try something like this. Too big a pool for his liking. California would be better, at least a little. Or Texas. Texas would validate a feeling he already sensed in his gut. Of course the hacker may have been hired from another state, but even then, at least he had have a place to start.
Well, he did have one other place to begin his inquiries. He needed to know if any of the men on his list had started anything peculiar since the theft. Had any of them contacted a specialist, for example. Whoever it was, knew him well enough to know that stealing it in the first moments of Shabbat would ensure a twenty-four hour head start from Kantor himself, even if his security staff would have been on it right away. The bastard knew him.
If he could find any irregularities in the behaviour of his short list of suspects, he could circumvent all the private-eye stuff and go straight to the man behind the thief. There were people who would love to get their hands on those files, but only a dozen people even knew that they existed, so far as he knew. Of them, only eight knew that Leonard had them. Of those, only four would have the inclination — and the means — to try to take them. He had been very careful about security for the item itself. Perhaps it was that care that had blinded him to the need to protect the data, the intellectual content of the item he had acquired. After all, this was a treasure that could lead to an even greater one. The levels of value were layered, and could ru
n deeper than anything so far discovered. His people had lost the Temple Mount, and the security of Jerusalem itself was always in question. He was no zealot, but he was a proud Jew, and a proud Israeli. The recovery of any of the ancient treasures of his people would sit close to his heart.
With another deep breath, Kantor picked up his phone and speed dialled number seven. The woman who answered spoke in Hebrew.
"Israel Antiquities Agency, Aidel Pissarro's office. How may I help you?"
"Leonard Kantor here for Aidel. Is he in?"
"Yes Mr. Kantor, one moment please."
Tinny, unidentifiable classical music played for a few seconds as the call was transferred.
"Hello, Leonard?"
"Hello Aidel."
"What can I do for you?"
"We have a problem, my friend, with the item."
"The item? What's happened?"
"It's still here, not to worry about that, but there has been a breach nonetheless."
"A break-in?"
"Pictures of the item were taken. Electronically. A hacker."
"Just the pictures?"
"Yes, just the pictures."
"Then the scroll is safe."
"Yes, the scroll itself is safe."
"But if someone were to go looking…"
"Worse yet, if someone were to go finding."
"I understand. What can we do?"
"I'm emailing you a short list right now. Find out if any of these men have been in the country recently, or if they're here now. If not, we may have a little time, but I don't need to tell you that, in either case, the cat is out of the bag, so to speak."
"Yes, of course. I'll make some calls."
"Let me know as soon as you know anything."
"Of course. Thank you for telling me, perhaps together we can avert greater consequences."
Aidel Pissarro heard a vague grunt of agreement — he supposed — and then the click of the receiver at the other end of the line. Leonard Kantor was never much for lingering on the phone.
He opened his email and found the message Kantor had promised. One of the names stuck out immediately. This was a name he knew well. He also knew that Greg Bass had not been in Israel for some months, though he had vacationed in Abu Dhabi prior to that. Pissarro had met him there. Had a few drinks. Discussed a few business propositions.
Greg Bass was a billionaire and a collector. He was funded by family oil, but also by his real estate ventures, shipping interests, and not a small portion of arms dealing dollars — though he himself didn't handle these last on his own. He was content to acquire companies and properties to expand his wealth, and to acquire also, by whichever means seemed on par with the importance of the piece, items from antiquity, for his substantial personal collection.
He had recently shared an interest in the Ancient Near East and had, through Pissarro's contacts, secured a few noteworthy items of stonework and a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was a damaged fragment of Deuteronomy, it seemed, though there was some ambiguity, due to its small size and rather generic surviving text.
Pissarro was a dedicated conservator at the museum, but he didn’t struggle much with his conscience on those items. The stonework was beautiful, but hardly rare, and the fragment had been in the hands of another black market collector, not in the hands of the Israel Antiquities Agency nor likely to fall into them. From one private hand to another. It did no harm to the museum, and did Pissarro's pocketbook a great deal of good.
Leonard Kantor's item, however, well that was something quite different. The Silver Scroll, as they had been calling it, had been found in a new cave on the northeastern bank of the Dead Sea, or so the finder had said. The Bedouin tracker who had found it took it to a known dealer who had called Kantor. Close to a million dollars later, the money secured in less than an hour and handed over even prior to official authentication of the item, the metal scroll was secreted in the vault below Kantor's Tel Aviv office tower.
The exact location of the cave had not been disclosed, but the item itself was a great treasure, worth tens of millions at least. Even so, if it contained writings similar to its copper cousin, then the potential riches to be gained by it would dwarf that by comparison… it would dwarf almost anything by comparison.
He knew a second name on the list: Devin Haish. Pissarro had just watched a live feed of a lecture Haish had given on the effect of war on the provenance of valuable antiquities — American and Russian soldiers looting, IS forces blowing things to smithereens, even the effects of weather on building not properly kept up due to the interruptions of local conflict — it was a mess. So Haish was in Boston, at least as of the night before.
He made a note to call about the other two names on the list, but inside he knew Bass was behind the theft. He tapped out an email to Kantor, assuring him that Haish was in Boston and Bass was in the States as well. Texas, as of the night before. This done, he picked up his phone and scrolled down to a contact number labeled GB. He pressed the button.
Just after lunch, on Sunday, Greg Bass stood at Ben Gela's kitchen counter, sipping tea and watching as the professor poured over the first photograph of a scroll segment. He knew that Kantor would have ended his Sabbath rest, during which he would have been sequestered from everything to do with business. Then Sunday not much would be happening. Too many agencies closed for the weekend. Too many people off doing personal business. Sometime late in the coming night, when the sun rose over the Middle East, the race would be starting in earnest. But Bass had already begun. Bass was well into the race now, despite the day, and he could tell that it was going well. He could sense Ben's heart racing, and so intense was the scholar's concentration that the vibration of Bass's phone didn't draw so much as a glance from the professor. Bass looked at the number. Israel. Pissarro. Could be awkward, but it was a call he couldn't afford to ignore.
"Bass here."
"Hello Mr. Bass, it is Aidel Pissarro. Do you have a moment?"
"Yeah, sure. What can I do for you?"
"I have some information for you. I thought you might be interested."
"Yes?"
"Well, it is just that there has been a leak of certain information, some image files, actually, from a major collector here."
"Yes."
"Leonard Kantor."
"Yes."
"That is all. He is asking that the IAA look into it, as a precaution. Unofficially."
"Yes, I see."
"As a collector yourself, I thought you might like to keep informed."
"I appreciate that, you never know what might be important. It's not a great time for me to talk more right now, but did you enjoy that case of Merlot I sent over?"
"Yes, I did, thank you very much." The case had, in place of one of the bottles, an envelope containing six thousand in American cash.
"Good, good. I have another vintage that you might like, I'll send one along."
"Thank you, Mr. Bass. I will keep you informed."
"That would be fine. Thank you."
Ben looked up just as Bass placed his phone back in his pocket. The professor shook his head, eyebrows raised with wonder and anticipation.
"Greg, this thing is… well, it's amazing."
"It's like the Copper Scroll, isn't it."
"Yes, I think it is. I mean, not just similar physically, but there's a connection here. I'm almost sure of it. The problem with the Copper Scroll is that we don't always know where to start looking, right? Well, there's that and the fact that the Jerusalem it describes is an average of thirteen feet below what's there now, covered over by rubble from wars, earthquakes and newer development. Then there’s the religious and political rat’s nest to go through to dig anywhere near the Temple Mount.
"But this is different, yes?"
"I'll need more time with it, but the palaeography seems similar to the Copper Scroll — the style of the letters more or less matches — but if it is a similar list, the clues might be less architectural and more geolog
ical… topographical, I mean. We might be able to get a bearing on the places this document references."
"And how accurate are they? How specific are the directions?"
Ben hesitated. He didn't know any of that yet. It was far too early. But something had made him uneasy. Something in Bass's carefully maintained tone had risen a notch. Something in his eyes had changed, just for a moment.
Bass smiled, "I know it's a long shot, but my friends at Columbia would fund an expedition, even if it was just to study the empty hiding places… hell, if they wouldn't fund it, I would. That might even be better. It would definitely be faster. Of course, I'd need someone leading it, someone who was an expert, but wouldn't mind me hanging around, watching the progress…"
Ben smiled. A job in the field, striding, like Indiana Jones, over the dunes in search of the lost Temple Treasure of Jerusalem. Nothing like it in all of his hopes; only in his wildest fantasies had he ever come close to thinking such a thing. Maybe that was it, the source of the unease. He hadn't even dreamed of anything like field work since Donna was diagnosed. Since her death, in fact, he hadn't dreamed of much at all.
"It'll take some time, to translate it properly, then there is the chance that the ancient landmarks have changed some after so much time… and then there's the almost certainty that the treasure has been moved, or looted, or just lost."
"I know."
"Still worth a look, though…" Ben said, almost a question to Bass.
"I know."
"It would be amazing to do it, Greg. Something like this could make my career."
"Good. I'll start getting things set up, and I'll see to it that you get the rest of the photographs."
"No chance of seeing the original?"
"Not yet. There are security issues, and conservation has to come first. You understand that of course."
"Of course."
"For now I can give you access to high-res photos like this one, and if there is any need later on to verify with the real thing, we can look into flying you to its location to have a look in person."