‘My name is Josephus. I wish to speak to Titus Vespasianus.’
The scene that met Josephus’ eyes as he was marched across the shattered remains of Jotapata surpassed his worst fears. Everywhere he looked were corpses; soldiers, men, women, children and the old, some of them already turning black and swelling in the heat – the people who had followed him, the ones who’d trusted him and had come to Jotapata rather than trust their fortunes to the Romans. He stopped and gazed in disbelief, tears rolling down his cheeks: somewhere among the dead lay his friend Giora.
‘They’d have died anyway.’ Josephus turned and realised he was face-to-face with Vespasian. ‘You did them a favour by not prolonging their suffering: dying of thirst is far worse, believe me.’ He nodded for the soldier to return to his post.
‘All I ask in return is a speedy and merciful death, sir.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ said Vespasian. ‘You’re not exactly in any position to dictate terms.’
Chapter Thirty-six
FBI Building, Federal Plaza, New York
‘So what have you got?’ Cohen’s supervisor peered over Flora’s shoulder at the unfamiliar symbols on the screen.
‘I think it’s what you’d call contradictory evidence.’
‘You got evidence for us?’ he asked, his features brightening for once.
‘I’ve got extracts from what looks like a work from Josephus – a manuscript which was previously believed to have been destroyed in antiquity.’
‘And that gets us a motive and the buyer, yes?’
‘Not yet, but it’ll get historians very excited,’ she replied. The supervisor rolled his eyes, scowled at Cohen and marched out of the office.
‘I said to try and be nice, Flora,’ Cohen said.
‘I was nice,’ she protested. ‘If he’d stayed I’d have told him all about it.’
‘Tell him about how you’ll help improve his clean-up numbers, then he’ll stay and listen. Anyway, what have you got?’
‘You know before you arrested Raymond and Luzzo we were talking about who would want this stuff badly enough to kill for it? Well, I didn’t want to say anything in front of your supervisor, he thinks I’m a madwoman as it is, but I do have a hypothesis.’
‘Go on. I’m listening.’
‘OK, now please bear with me because I’m filling in a few gaps with assumptions here,’ she said. ‘Do you remember I told you the Pompeii finds included lots of writing with clear text on one side and an identical but encrypted version on the other?’ He nodded and she continued. ‘And we also found a mass of entirely encrypted fragments – what’s commonly known as the Devil’s Codex.’
‘With you so far.’
‘Well, I took a few samples at random and thanks to the copper grids plus some of the recto-verso texts all mixed in with a big handful of good luck, I can now decode all of them. I think Josephus was in the process of writing a sequel to Wars and Antiquities and he probably had one or more scribes helping him. That explains the different handwriting styles.’
‘And?’
‘The “and” is that I think we’ve found their first efforts at turning plain text into code – a bit like playing scales when you’re learning the piano. Where things are entirely encrypted, it’s the real thing. In other words, Josephus was writing it out in clear and passing it over to the scribes to encrypt. You see?’
Cohen frowned. ‘I reckon. But so what?’
Flora smiled and tapped the screen with a fingernail. ‘The so what is I’m almost entirely sure that what Francesco Moretti said before the robbery is correct. We’ve got fragments from The Seven Stars. Better still, I’ve got a reasonable idea what it’s about. We’ve got a murderer on our hands.’
‘In Alabama?’
Excitement was written all over Flora’s face. ‘No. At various points around the first-century Roman Empire.’
She could see that Cohen didn’t share her enthusiasm. ‘I’ll file it under “cold cases”, but thanks for the lead,’ he said.
‘No, listen. The Seven Stars were seven men – all Christians – and Josephus wanted them dead. I’ve got names for three of them and I’m working on the others. He obviously wanted to restrict the truth of what he’d done, hence the use of encryption. Each victim was assigned a different code: one to six were encrypted using the copper grids and the final one uses a tabula recta with a book key – Caesar’s Gallic Wars, in this instance. The advantage of a book key, is that you don’t have to schlep a lump of copper with you everywhere you go. It’s an admission by Josephus that he was going around killing Christians two thousand years ago. He says the Seven Stars are the men who killed his father which explains why he hated Christians.’
Cohen laughed and slipped back into his Israeli accent. ‘Hey, is this the face of concern already?’
She smiled back. ‘Point taken. On the other hand if you take a look at “Republicans for Jesus dot com” –’
‘At what?’ asked Cohen, trying not to inhale his coffee. ‘You gotta be shitting me.’
‘Nope, it’s a real web-site and Sumter’s photos from Pompeii are on there together with translations from the Aramaic. And guess what? They’re all eye-witness accounts of Jesus’ life, saying what a great guy he was, son of God, miracles-r-us and so on.’
‘I’m sure it’s fascinating stuff,’ he said. ‘But a two thousand year old serial killer with a grudge against Christianity ain’t the kinda stuff my supervisor wants to hear. None of this gets me any closer to an arrest.’
‘It certainly explains why someone would kill for it though,’ she said.
‘Sure. It might do if anyone else knew about it. But apart from you, who does?’
‘Raymond’s clients?’
‘In that case, we’ve definitely got to meet them,’ Cohen replied. This time, Flora didn’t even bother asking who “we” were and he picked up the phone and dialled. The conversation was brief and he turned to her once more. ‘How d’you fancy a little conversation with our friend Raymond?’
She treated him to one of her looks. ‘No guns?’
‘No guns.’
The interview room was bleak and windowless: bare brick painted in a sickly pale green with neon tubes giving a harsh overhead light. Opposite sat Raymond, dressed in prison overalls, one wrist manacled to the desk. He looked pleased to see them, Flora thought.
The conversation was brief, one-sided and to the point. Raymond didn’t need telling twice: co-operate or go to jail for a long time.
‘There is one problem, though,’ said Raymond. ‘They don’t like using the telephone,’ he turned to Cohen. ‘Like I told your people, most of the time these guys use the regular mail and we share a polyalphabetic cipher with a book key just in case the letters get seen by someone else.’
Cohen consulted his notes. ‘Do you think you can set up a meeting?’
‘I can try,’ said Raymond. ‘But I’m not wearing a wire. Every time we’ve met apart from that screw-up in the church with those stupid kids they’ve searched us and I don’t mean no gentle pat-down neither, I’m talking one step short of latex gloves if you get my meaning.’
‘Don’t worry, I’d already thought of that,’ said Cohen. ‘We can set up a hotel room or someplace reasonably private with all the cameras and mikes we need. All you’ve got to do is get them there.’
Raymond shook his head. ‘Won’t work. When Luzzo did the last handover they moved him half-way round the county and we didn’t know where the meet was till right at the end.’
‘Can I have a word with you outside please, Ben?’ asked Flora.
‘Sure.’ He nodded to one of the two guards who unlocked the door to let them out. ‘So what’ve you got?’
Flora drew a deep breath. ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you do realise what we’ve got to do?’ He shook his head. ‘If Raymond can’t be the bait, then it’ll have to be Grossman and Crump.’
Cohen looked at her with his head cocked to one side. ‘So how
does that work?’ he asked.
‘It might not but hear me out. Raymond tells the client he’s sold a big chunk of the finds to Grossman. Now, if they’re as desperate to get their hands on this stuff as we hope they are, they’ll probably want to get it back and so –’
Cohen’s face lit up with comprehension. ‘And so Raymond puts them in touch with Grossman. That’s clever,’ he said.
‘Insanity more like. I must be out of my tiny bloody mind,’ replied Flora.
Birmingham, Alabama
Nothing, Flora thought, could be worse than the climate of New York in summer, but as she walked out of the aircraft door onto the jetway at Shuttlesworth airport, the first gasp of hot, wet air proved how wrong she’d been.
Once inside the terminal, breathing became a little easier. They were met by an agent from the Birmingham FBI Field Office who led them into the briefing room. Inside were twelve black-clad members of an FBI Special Weapons And Tactics team: at the back of the room sat two men wearing flight suits.
The briefing complete they set off, heading south west on Interstate 20 towards the rendezvous with the buyers. Cohen checked the mirror and was comforted to see the two small trucks. Both stayed several hundred yards back, and it was good to know that each held members of their back-up team. Somewhere out of sight and two thousand feet above them, a tactical response unit in an MD530 “Little Bird” helicopter was tracking the car’s every move.
Turning south onto Alabama 5, they left the main road and entered a country of rolling pine-clad hills. ‘Wouldn’t take much to get lost round here,’ said Flora, checking the map against the sat-nav.
‘I think that’s the idea,’ replied Cohen, checking his watch and pulling off the side of the road onto a gravel hard-standing by the junction with Bear Lake Road. He picked up the radio’s handset and broadcast to the other units. ‘Stopping now. Next call due in three minutes.’ Unseen, about a mile behind them, the two trucks pulled off the road and the helicopter turned in a lazy arc back towards the town of Centreville.
At exactly half past the hour, the call came into Cohen’s mobile: number withheld. ‘Grossman here,’ he answered.
‘Take County Thirty Eight, signposted Bear Lake Road and after six and one third miles pull into the turning on your right and wait. The line went dead. Cohen relayed the instructions and they set off once more.
As instructed, they stopped at the turning. The next call directed them down a metalled road with space, just, for two cars to pass. After less than a mile, the road narrowed and the surface went from paved, to loose stone, to truck-sized potholes in the space of only a few hundred yards. They jolted and bumped along, sending clouds of dust swirling into the air, the road now running beside a broad, meandering river. ‘We’re coming up to the bridge,’ said Flora, eyes glued to the map, and Cohen slowed to manoeuvre the car onto the single-lane, steel swing-bridge which they crossed, tyres humming over the metal grating. ‘Now right again,’ she said as they reached dry land on the other side. ‘Four hundred yards from here, stop for the next call.’ The words were barely out of her mouth when the radio came to life.
‘Abort, abort: Foxtrot One this is Hotel Alpha, I say again, abort, abort.’ The urgent tone told them the helicopter crew had seen something. ‘Foxtrot one, the bridge has just opened and Foxtrots Two and Three are still on the southern side. State your position.’
‘Fuck, they can’t see us,’ shouted Cohen, stamping on the brakes. From above, the car was hidden from view by the canopy of trees covering the narrow road and the summer heat defeated any hopes of detection by the helicopter’s infra-red sensors. ‘Estimate three hundred yards from the bridge,’ shouted Cohen, the fear in his voice audible to his helpless colleagues.
Flora glanced down at the map once more. ‘I make it three-fifty,’ she said and as Cohen transmitted the correction, from out of cover, about fifty yards in front of them, a red pickup emerged from the bushes and stopped broadside on across the road. Ramming the column shift into reverse, he accelerated hard, only to slam to a halt once more when another vehicle, closer this time, blocked their escape and three armed men piled out.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Galilee AD 67
Josephus had only met Titus, Vespasian’s son, once before. Then, it had been in Rome under much happier circumstances, but now Josephus was a prisoner of war, his life dependent on Vespasian keeping his word and over-ruling Titus who wanted him sent to Nero.
After only one day, the stench of decay and the swarms of flies attracted by tens of thousands of rotting corpses became too much and the three Roman legions under Vespasian’s command broke camp and returned north towards Caesarea. Josephus was kept under guard, travelling in a closed wagon near the front of the immense caravan as it snaked over a landscape shimmering under a pitiless sun. As Titus had pointed out, there was no need for shackles or close confinement: no-one could survive alone in such conditions and furthermore, once word of his treachery got out, he was far safer in Roman custody than with his own people.
For three days and nights he fretted alone in his cell until at last Vespasian’s summons came.
Vespasian offered him a seat. ‘I’ve been discussing you with Titus,’ he said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We think you may be of use to us after all.’
Josephus brightened. If he’d had a tail he would have wagged it. ‘I’m delighted to hear that.’
‘You haven’t heard what I’ve got in mind yet. The Jews in general, and you in particular, have made some very stupid decisions. We’re losing supply ships to pirates from Joppa, the inhabitants of Tiberias and Taricheae have changed their mind about submitting to Roman rule and I’m losing count of the number of idiot factions in Jerusalem who’re opposing us. Can you talk some sense into them before I lose patience?’
‘I can try, sir.’
‘Good. I want to get this wretched campaign finished and my troops home before the sailing season ends. The last thing I need is to be stuck here over winter with sixty thousand mouths to feed.’
Josephus swallowed. He knew this might be his last chance. ‘There is one more thing, sir,’ he said hesitantly.
‘Go on.’
‘After I sent you that message –’
Vespasian eyed him coldly. ‘I’ve already told you I’m grateful, don’t labour the point.’
‘It’s not that, sir. I started thinking – nothing more than a vague jumble of ideas really – but what you said just now about getting your army back to Rome made me see how it might work.’
‘Stop talking in riddles, man, I haven’t got all day.’ The Roman got to his feet and headed for the door.
‘I think you should stay here. You, Titus and the whole army. Going back to Rome would be a mistake.’
Vespasian spun round to face him. ‘You dare to tell me how to manage my campaign? If you want me to send you back to Nero, just keep talking.’
‘It’s Nero I wanted to warn you about.’ Vespasian looked at him, open-mouthed with stupefaction. Josephus continued. ‘Piso won’t be the last: there’ll be other plots, we both know that. The emperor is fatally weakened. You saw what happened – he’s executed so many of the people who were loyal to him he hasn’t an ally to his name.’
The reply came accompanied by a contemptuous snort. ‘So you’re suggesting I throw my hat into the ring are you?’
‘No, sir, not yet.’
‘What do you mean, not yet? How dare you – ?’
‘The senate, the army and yes, even the Praetorian Guard, have had enough. It’s just a matter of time now.’
‘You think I don’t know?’ shouted Vespasian. ‘I’m a soldier, I’m loyal to my emperor… whoever he is.’
‘That’s the point, sir. There’s no natural successor to Nero and when he falls, your loyalty to him will look like a threat to whoever comes after.’
Vespasian drew breath for another tirade but stopped short. ‘Interesting conjecture,’ he said. ‘Y
ou know I could have you executed for talking treason?’
‘I trust you won’t interpret it as treason, sir, my intention was merely to suggest some options that might be to your benefit.’
‘You dissemble like a lawyer, Josephus.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Believe me it wasn’t a compliment. So let’s hear this “vague jumble of ideas” that’s going to save my bacon.’
Josephus leaned towards him, speaking softly as though afraid of being overheard. ‘Nero will fall: within a year at a guess. The result will be strife on a scale not seen since the days of Marcus Antonius. You stay out of it, you wait till the dust settles and then you decide –’
‘Which horse to back?’
‘No. Your happy dilemma will be whether to back the winner or to take the prize for yourself.’
‘I don’t see how that works,’ said Vespasian.
‘It works like this. With Nero gone, whoever comes out on top is likely to be backed by an army weakened by fighting professional Roman legions. He’ll have made powerful enemies along the way. You have sixty-thousand men here: they’re fighting rebels armed with sticks and stones. I can help you wrap this campaign up: at the end of it you’ll be a victorious general, untainted by intrigue and the senate will jump at the chance to proclaim you as rightful emperor.’
‘And you say you’ll help me? Can I trust you, Josephus?’
‘I think you know the answer to that, sir.’
Chapter Thirty-eight
Bibb County, Alabama
‘Out, get out of the car and take cover!’ screamed Cohen as the first round crashed through the rear window, showering them with glass. He kicked the door open and grabbed the microphone for the last time. ‘All Foxtrot and Hotel units this is Foxtrot One, bring down rapid fire on my current position, I say again, rapid fire on my current position.’ Rolling away from the car, partially hidden in the cloud of dust stirred up by their sudden halt, he fired three shots from his pistol at the nearest group, sending them diving for cover. Then, he fired at the group from the red pickup who were edging hesitantly forward and sprinted around the front of the car, nearly tripping over the reason for their slow progress: Flora was lying prone by the roadside and firing her .38 at them every time they came into view. ‘Come on, we’ve got to move,’ he yelled above the din of the approaching helicopter, and grabbing her by the scruff of the neck pulled her into the undergrowth.
The Seven Stars Page 33