The Moses Stone

by James Becker

  Bronson sighed. 'You want to do some research?'

  'Yes. If I'm right about the words on the tablet, there must be others like it – it has to be part of a set – and the logical place to start looking for them is museums. There's a kind of museum intranet that I can use to carry out a search. It allows people with the right access – and that includes me, obviously – to check both the exhibits and the relics that are in storage in most museums around the world. It's an ideal tool for researchers, because you can study particular objects without having to travel to the museum itself to do so.'

  Bronson cleared a space on the table, opened up his laptop and switched it on, then waited a couple of minutes for the Sony to access the hotel's wi-fi network.

  'How does the system work?' he asked, turning the Vaio to face Angela and watching as she input her username and password to log in to the museum intranet.

  'It's fairly simple. First, I have to fill in various fields to approximately identify what I'm looking for.'

  As she spoke, she was ticking a series of boxes and inserting brief details in text fields on the search form. When she'd completed the page, she turned the laptop so that Bronson could see the screen as well as her.

  'We still don't know too much about this tablet, so I've had to be fairly flexible in the search. For the date I've suggested between the start of the first century BC and the end of the second century AD – that's a period of three hundred years, which should cover it. Baverstock thought the tablet was probably first century AD, based on what he could translate of the inscription, but he couldn't be sure. For the origin I've been just as vague: I've specified the Middle East.'

  'What about the object itself?'

  'I've been fairly accurate with that, because we do have a pretty good idea what we're looking for. Here' – she pointed at two fields at the bottom of the screen – 'I've listed the material it's made from and the fact that it bears an inscription in Aramaic.'

  'So now you just start the search?'

  'Exactly.' Angela moved the mouse pointer over a button labelled 'Search' and gave it a single click.

  The wi-fi network at the hotel was obviously quite fast, because the first results appeared on the screen within a few seconds.

  'It looks like there are hundreds of them,' Bronson muttered.

  'Thousands, more likely,' Angela said. 'I told you clay tablets were really common. I'll have to do a bit of filtering or we'll never get anywhere.'

  She scanned the listings that were scrolling down the screen. 'A lot of these are quite early,' she said, 'so if I reduce the date range that will eliminate a large percentage. And if we don't find what we're looking for, I can always expand it again.'

  She changed the search parameters and restricted the date to the first and second centuries AD, but that still produced several hundred results, far too many to trawl through quickly.

  'Right,' she muttered, 'clay tablets were found in all sorts of shapes and sizes – square, oblong, round. There were even tablets shaped like drums or cones, with the inscription running around the outside. I've restricted the search to flat tablets, but it would help if I could put in the approximate dimensions of the one Margaret O'Connor acquired.'

  Bronson handed her the CD that Kirsty had prepared for him, and she flipped through the images on the laptop's screen until she found the first one showing the clay tablet. Margaret O'Connor had obviously placed the tablet on a chest of drawers in her hotel room, and had then photographed it from several different angles. In most of the pictures, the tablet was quite badly out of focus, probably caused by the camera's autofocus facility choosing a different object in the frame. In three photographs a part of a telephone was visible, including a section of the keypad.

  'That'll do,' Angela said. 'I can work out the rough size from that.'

  She studied the best of the pictures closely, then jotted down a couple of figures.

  'I reckon it's about six inches by four,' she said, and typed those numbers into the correct box on the search screen.

  This time, with the much tighter parameters, there were only twenty-three results of the search on the museum intranet, and they both leant closer to the laptop to study each in turn.

  The first dozen or so were clearly very different to the picture of the tablet Margaret O'Connor had picked up, but the fifteenth picture showed one that was remarkably similar.

  'That looks just like it,' Angela said.

  'What about the inscription?' Bronson asked.

  Angela studied the image carefully and saved a copy on the hard disk of her laptop. 'It could be Aramaic,' she said. 'I'll check the description.'

  She clicked one of the options on the screen, and a halfpage of text appeared, replacing the photograph of the tablet.

  Angela took one look at it, turned the laptop further to face Bronson and leant back. 'It's in French,' she announced. 'Over to you, Chris.'

  'OK. The tablet's in a museum in France, so no surprise there. It's in Paris, in fact. It was bought from a dealer of antiquities in Jerusalem as part of a job lot of relics about twenty years ago. The inscription is Aramaic, and the tablet's labelled as a curio, because the text is just a series of apparently random words – so you're right, Angela. This is another one.'

  'Does it say what the museum thinks the tablet was used for?'

  Bronson nodded. 'This description suggests it might have been used for teaching people how to write Aramaic or possibly was somebody's homework, which is pretty much the same as Baverstock thought, isn't it? In either case, the museum suggests that the tablet was fired accidentally, either because it was mixed up with tablets that were being fired deliberately or because there was an actual fire in the building where it was kept.'

  'That makes sense. Clay tablets were intended to be reused many times. Once an inscription had served its purpose, the tablet could be wiped just by running a knife blade or something similar over its surface to obliterate the existing inscription. The only tablets that would normally be fired were those recording something of real importance – financial accounts, property details, that kind of thing. And a fired clay tablet is virtually indestructible, unless it's broken up with a hammer or something.'

  'There's something else.' Bronson looked at the bottom of the entry on the screen. He reached over and clicked on another link. 'This is the original Aramaic inscription,' he said, as the screen changed to show two blocks of text, 'and below that is the French translation of what it says. We should make a copy of this.'

  'Absolutely,' Angela replied, and swiftly copied an image of the web page on her hard drive. 'What does the French translation say? A lot of those words look like they're repeated to me.'

  'They are. There are some duplicates, and the words look as if they've been selected almost at random. It has to be part of the same set. Is it worth going to the museum to see it?'

  'Hang on a second,' Angela said, and clicked the mouse button to return to the 'description' page. 'Let's see if it's actually on display. What does that say?'

  Bronson peered at the screen. 'It says: "In storage. May be accessed by accredited and approved researchers upon submission of written requests giving a minimum of two weeks' notice." Then it tells you who to write to if you're interested and what credentials are acceptable to the museum.' He sighed. 'Well, that's it then, isn't it? I guess we won't be going to Paris any time soon.'

  28

  The calm, measured voice on his mobile was instantly recognizable to Jalal Talabani.

  'How can I help you?' he asked, checking that none of his colleagues in the Rabat police station were within earshot.

  'Two of my men followed the English detective – the man Bronson – to Casablanca airport yesterday evening. He met a woman who had arrived on a flight from London. We assumed she might be his wife, but one of my associates ran a check on her and her name is Angela Lewis. But she is staying with him at his new hotel in Rabat. Find out who she is and get back to me.'

  Ther
e was a pause, and Talabani waited. He knew his caller didn't like to be hurried.

  'You have three hours,' the voice said, and the line went dead.

  Bronson had had enough. They'd spent the last hour and a half staring at drawings and translations and pictures of tablets from museums around the world. Some of the images were sharp and clear, some were so blurred and out of focus as to be almost useless, but after ninety minutes of looking at the never-ending sequence of pictures on the computer screen, he was about ready to quit.

  'God, I need a drink,' he muttered, leaning back and stretching his arms above his head. 'I really don't know how you do it, Angela. Doesn't this just bore you rigid?'

  She glanced at him and grinned. 'This is how I spend my life. I'm not bored – I'm fascinated. And particularly by this tablet,' she added.

  'What?' Bronson said, returning his gaze to the Vaio's screen.

  The picture showed a tablet that looked almost identical to the one Margaret O'Connor had picked up in the souk. But this one was listed as being stolen, along with a number of other relics, from a storeroom at a museum in Cairo. There'd been no trace of it since then. The tablet had been photographed as a matter of routine when the museum had acquired it, but no translation of the inscription – again a piece of Aramaic text – had been attempted either at the time or since.

  'I wonder if that's the tablet Margaret O'Connor found in the souk,' Bronson muttered, rubbing his eyes and sitting up straighter. 'If it was stolen, that might explain why the owner – whoever it is – was so keen to get it back.'

  'Hang on a second,' Angela said. She selected one of the pictures from the CD Bronson had given her, and then displayed the photograph of the stolen tablet right beside it on the screen.

  'It's different,' Bronson said. 'I don't read Aramaic – obviously – but even I can see that the top lines are different lengths on those two tablets.'

  Angela nodded agreement. 'Yes,' she said, 'and there's something else I've just noticed. I think there are only four tablets in the set.'

  'How do you work that out?'

  'Here.' Angela pointed at the right-hand image. 'See that short diagonal line, right at the corner of the tablet?'

  Bronson nodded.

  'Now look at the other photograph. There's a similar line in the corner of that one as well.' She flicked rapidly back to the picture of the tablet held in the Paris museum. 'And on this one, just there.'

  Angela sat back from the laptop and looked at Bronson with a kind of triumph. 'I still don't know what the hell this is all about, but I think I can tell you how these tablets were made. Whoever prepared these inscribed a small diagonal cross in the centre of an oblong block of clay, then they cut that block into four quarters and fired them. What we've been looking at are three of those four quarters. Each of the lines in the corners of the tablets is one arm of that original cross.'

  'And the idea of the cross is to tell us exactly how the four tablets are supposed to line up,' Bronson said, 'so that we can read the words in the correct order.'

  Discovering Angela Lewis's identity took less time than Jalal Talabani had expected. First, he called the hotel where the two English guests were staying and talked to the manager. The man had actually been behind the reception desk both when Bronson made the booking for her, and when Angela Lewis had checked in the previous evening.

  'She's his former wife,' the manager said, 'and I think she works in London at a museum.'

  'Which one?' Talabani asked.

  'I don't know,' the manager replied. 'It was just that when she checked in she was talking to Mr Bronson about her work and mentioned a museum. Is it important?'

  'No, not really. Thank you for that,' Talabani said, and ended the call.

  He turned to his computer, input a search string into Google and opened the 'Britain Express' website's list of the museums of London. The sheer number both surprised and dismayed him, but he printed the list and started at the top. He put a line through the details of the small and highly specialized establishments, but began calling each of the others in turn and asking to speak to Angela Lewis.

  The seventh number he tried was the switchboard at the British Museum. Two minutes later he not only knew that Angela Lewis was employed there, but also which department she worked in, and that she was away on leave.

  And five minutes after that, the man with the calm, measured voice knew this too.

  29

  Tony Baverstock had been at work for a little over an hour when he took a call from the switchboard. A member of the public had telephoned the museum with a question about a piece of pottery they'd found, apparently bearing part of an inscription.

  It was the kind of call the museum got all the time, and almost invariably the object turned out to be completely worthless. Baverstock vividly remembered one elderly lady from Kent who'd actually brought along the alleged relic for inspection. It was the grubby remains of a small china cup she'd dug up in her garden, and had borne the partial inscription '1066' and 'le of Hastin' in a kind of Gothic script on one side.

  The woman had been convinced she'd found something of national importance, a relic dating from nearly a thousand years earlier and a crucial reminder of one of the most significant events in England's turbulent past, and refused to believe it when Baverstock told her it was rubbish. It was only when he turned the cup over, cleaned the dirt off it and pointed to the other, complete, inscription on the base of the vessel that he'd been able to convince her that she was mistaken. That piece of text, in very small letters, had read 'Dishwasher safe'.

  'Not my field,' Baverstock snapped, when the switchboard girl described what the caller had apparently found. 'Try Angela Lewis.'

  'I already have,' the telephonist replied, just as irritated, 'but she's taken some leave.'

  Five minutes later he had convinced the caller, who lived in Suffolk, that the best place to have his find examined was the local museum in Bury St Edmunds. Let somebody else have their time wasted, Baverstock thought. Then he placed an internal call to Angela Lewis's superior.

  'Roger, it's Tony. I was just looking for Angela, but she doesn't seem to be at work. Any idea where she is?'

  'Yes.' Roger Halliwell sounded somewhat harassed.

  'She's taken some leave. At pretty short notice, actually.

  She rang yesterday afternoon – some domestic crisis, I gather.'

  'When will she be back?'

  'She didn't say – which is all pretty inconvenient. Anything I can help you with?'

  Baverstock thanked him and replaced the receiver. Now that's interesting, he thought. Very interesting indeed.

  30

  'So there were originally four tablets, and together they formed a larger oblong?'

  'Exactly,' Angela said. 'And we've identified three of them, but we've only got a clear photographic image of one – an image clear enough to read the inscription on it, I mean. The other problem is that we don't have the fourth tablet, and that means we're completely missing a quarter of the inscription.'

  'You can't do anything with the three we've located?'

  'Not a lot,' Angela replied. 'We'll need to buy or maybe download an Aramaic–English dictionary before we can even start doing any work on the inscriptions. The bigger problem is that the pictures of these two tablets' – she pointed – 'simply aren't good enough to allow us to translate more than the odd word. Most of them are blurred and out of focus, and to translate Aramaic you need a clear image of the original, because several of the letters are very similar in appearance.'

  'But it's still worth trying, especially as we've got a complete translation of the Paris tablet.'

  Angela nodded. 'Yes, assuming I can find a suitable dictionary. Let's see what the web can offer.'

  She opened Google, typed 'Aramaic dictionary' in the search field and hit the return key.

  The two of them leant forward and peered at the screen of Angela's laptop.

  'Over a hundred thousand hits,' Bronson mu
ttered. 'Somewhere in that lot there must be a dictionary that we can use.'

  'There is,' Angela said. 'The very first entry, in fact.' She double-clicked the listing in Google and checked the screen. 'This site offers translations both ways – to and from Aramaic – for single words. And it even includes a downloadable font that we'll need to use for the Aramaic text. Aramaic is an abjad, a consonantal alphabet, with only twenty-two letters, and in appearance it's very similar to Hebrew. So we need a font like this one – this is called Estrangelo – to display it, so that the dictionary can recognize the words.'

  Angela downloaded and installed the font, then opened a new document in her word processor, selected the Estrangelo font and carefully wrote out one of the words from the clay tablet Margaret O'Connor had found in the souk.

  'This is one of the words Tony couldn't translate,' she said. 'He told me it wasn't clear enough.'

  When she was satisfied that she'd got it as accurate as possible, she copied the word into the online dictionary and pressed the 'search' button.

  'That's not a good start,' she muttered, looking at the screen. The message 'word not recognized' was displayed under the search field. 'It looks like Tony was right about this word, at least.'

  'Maybe one of the characters you've used isn't exactly right,' Bronson suggested. 'It is pretty blurred in that photograph. Why don't you try a different word?'

  'OK. This is what Tony translated as "tablet", and it's one of the words I checked earlier. Let's see what the system makes of this.'

  She prepared the Aramaic characters and copied the word into the search field. Immediately the system returned the English translation as 'tablet'.