The Sword of Moses

by Dominic Selwood

  Whichever way she looked at it, these were highly skilled tasks.

  Moreover, casting the cherubs and the calf would have been even more technical—requiring additional knowledge of moulds, clay, wax, casting techniques, and firing temperatures.

  Whoever had been engaged to undertake the work with such precious materials would have been highly experienced goldsmiths—or indeed whole workshops under master craftsmen.

  But according to the book of Exodus, the Ark and other sacred golden objects for the Tabernacle tent were made in the desert by Bezalel of Judah and Aholiab of Dan, two men randomly chosen on the spot and ‘filled with wisdom’ to work the metal and wood and to cut and set the precious stones.

  Was it possible, she wondered, that amateurs, living rough in the desert, could have gained the knowledge and equipment to create metal sculptures of that complexity?

  She lived these problems every day.

  Biblical archaeology was always controversial.

  Some people accepted the early books of the Bible as unerring literal fact. Others saw them as an intricate collection of fireside tribal tales which the centuries had interwoven with myth and symbol until only trace elements of any real historical events remained.

  She picked up a book on biblical archaeology she had taken from her bag, and re-read the now famous passage by the highly respected director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University. He had published it in 1999, and it was still causing waves today:

  This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.

  Ava knew only too well that he was by no means the only Israeli scholar to share that view. On the next page, another archaeology professor from the University of Tel Aviv was quoted describing Jerusalem in the period as ‘a hill-country village’. And he had likened King David to a ‘raggedy upstart akin to Pancho Villa’, whose fighting men were ‘five hundred people with sticks in their hands shouting and cursing and spitting’—not the great royal army of chariots described in the Bible.

  The question of Yahweh’s wife was even more controversial. She had spent a lot of time in Amman looking into it—and had found to her surprise there were a number of them.

  There was the terrible Anat, a brutal war goddess. Ava’s research had found there was solid evidence of Yahweh and Anat being worshipped together by biblical Hebrews as a warrior couple, even as far afield as Elephantine in southern Egypt.

  Another of Yahweh’s wives was Asherah, who was widely worshiped alongside Yahweh as Queen of Heaven from before the time of Moses, during the reign of Solomon, and right up to the Babylonian captivity. Ava had counted up the number of times Asherah was mentioned in the Bible, and it came to over seventy. The book of Exodus explicitly referred to the male prostitutes’ quarters in Solomon’s Temple where women wove the robes used for Asherah worship. And for a while there was even a sacred statue of Asherah in the Temple itself. Ava had taken part in archaeological digs in Israel whose finds of pottery inscribed ‘to Yahweh and his Asherah’ had confirmed Asherah’s status beyond doubt.

  Although this shocked many people, Ava regularly had to explain to them that modern historians and archaeologists had found a great deal of evidence that the Hebrews worshipped many gods up until the mid-500s BC, when they gave them up during their forced exile in Babylon. This was the true start of their monotheism, seven to eight hundred years after Moses and Mount Sinai.

  The Bible confirmed this original polytheism in many places, with repeated commands for the Hebrews to stop worshiping gods such as Baal, Moloch, Tammuz, the sun god, and the moon god in the shape of a calf.

  And worship of these other deities was not a fringe activity. Ava was well aware of the section in the book of Kings which stated explicitly that King Solomon worshipped many other gods besides Yahweh, and built them temples, too.

  These differences between people’s long-held beliefs and modern scholarship intruded into Ava’s life every day. She had to make fine judgements, based on all the evidence.

  Putting the books down, she looked out of the window at the azure water around her.

  Would the Ark be a crude desert-made object consistent with the Bible account, or would it be something more sophisticated from an established workshop, as modern scholarship suggested?

  If she was going to evaluate the physical Ark now, in the hotel’s library, she would have to be ready to make some assumptions about what was possible, plausible, or probable in the period. And she would have to think laterally, focussing on the Bible descriptions and all available modern scholarship.

  She looked at her watch. It was coming up to midday.

  She got up off the sofa and grabbed the mini-disc. Shutting the suite’s door firmly behind her, she headed up to the library where she hoped, with mounting excitement, a great many things would very soon become much clearer.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  29

  Burj al-Arab Hotel

  Dubai

  The United Arab Emirates

  The Arabian Gulf

  Ava headed straight for the eighteenth floor.

  Turning left out of the elaborately etched gold lift doors, she passed through a small antechamber with four Greek-inspired columns, entered the circular spa area, and headed up a deep red back staircase to its upper level.

  Ahead of her, across a short hallway, she immediately spotted what she was looking for.

  The two men standing outside a pair of heavy dark wooden double doors were the only clue she needed. As were the two restless chained Doberman Pinschers beside them—not a common sight in a culture where dogs were not welcomed.

  The men were wearing the regulation dark suits with coiled-wire earpieces disappearing under their crisp white collars, and handguns tucked obtrusively into under-arm holsters. She knew firearms were illegal in Dubai—but like everywhere in the Middle East, as she had learnt over the years, influential people were afforded a certain leeway.

  Arriving in front of them, she held up the mini-disc. Without a word of acknowledgement, they opened the doors wide enough for her to slip through.

  She was in the library—a long snug rectangular room, stretching away from her. It gleamed with marble and polished wood—the sides broken up by glistening black columns. The whole effect was unmistakably ancient Egyptian, with blues and golds adorning the columns, walls, alcoves, and bright carpets, and delicate golden metal screens separating the sections with pharaonic lotus motifs.

  At the far end she could see an adjoining billiards room, lifted straight from a London gentlemen’s club, filled with deep armchairs and a full-size blue baize billiards table.

  The library had obviously been chosen with security in mind. There were no windows in either room, and the only illumination came from carefully recessed lighting and tall sculptured lamps resting on wooden tables in the painted alcoves.

  It would have been a tranquil enough scene, except for the pairs of security guards lining the walls every few yards. All were armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. Ava counted sixteen of them, forming a cordon around both rooms.

  As she surveyed the scene, her eyes were pulled to the centre, where a space had been cleared, and a large shiny black plinth was set up.

  But to her disappointment, there was nothing on it yet.

  As the door closed behind her, she looked down at the heavy desk blocking her entry. On it, a sleek electronic disc reader was plugged into a
large monitor whose flat-screen display was entirely black, aside from the outlines of the twelve signs of the zodiac arranged in a large circle.

  The stocky guard standing behind the desk motioned for her to place her mini-disc in the reader. As she did, it whirred for a moment, then the sign for Leo on the screen changed from glowing dark red to bright green.

  She noticed that nine of the other signs were also green, and looking around the room she counted the same number of men sitting reading books from the shelves lining the walls.

  There was no conversation.

  Taking her cue from the others, she headed over to one of the bookcases, and selected a large illustrated volume of Wilfred Thesiger’s 1940s photographs of the people and landscapes of Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Folding herself into an oversize upholstered chair, she opened the book, and waited.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  30

  Burj al-Arab Hotel

  Dubai

  The United Arab Emirates

  The Arabian Gulf

  Upstairs on the twentieth floor, in his larger-than-average suite, Arkady Sergeyevitch Yevchenko was particularly pleased with life.

  He had been furious when he heard Kimbaba and his men had been hit by a jack-knifing lorry. They had been on a flyover crossing the infamous Sheikh Zayed Road—the lethal ten-lane highway that ran like a treacherous artery through the city. The incident report, which Yevchenko had seen, noted that the vast decorated Indian lorry, despite being covered in protective bells, tassels, and multicoloured images of gods, cows, and elephants, had flipped, crushing Kimbaba’s car like plywood, before spitting it out and sending it hurtling over the side of the flyover.

  Kimbaba and his entourage had been killed instantly.

  Until that moment, Yevchenko had been working on putting together a unique business deal for the militiaman.

  A lucrative Iranian opportunity.

  Yevchenko was perfectly suited to such work. According to his business card, he was a lawyer. But anyone who engaged his services soon found he was not an ordinary one. He did not do wills and divorces and neighbour disputes. He was specialized—brokering and bringing people together for deals that required unique contacts and maximum discretion. As a result, his clients were not ordinary either.

  Iranian work was not his only expertise—but years flying in and out of Dubai meant it was definitely one of his major strengths.

  When Kimbaba told him he had the Ark of the Covenant, had shown it to him, and intimated he wanted to sell it to Tehran in a game of cat-and-mouse with the United Nations, Yevchenko had dropped everything to focus on the deal. Normally he would take two-and-a-half per cent for brokering. But this was special. He could smell the money from the first meeting, and Kimbaba had not batted an eyelid when he told him he wanted ten.

  However, when no one came forward to claim the Ark after Kimbaba’s sudden and unexpected death, Yevchenko’s anger and frustration turned to excitement as he suddenly saw the chance to convert ten per cent into a hundred. He had provided Kimbaba with the house and guards to look after the Ark while it was in Dubai. So now, with Kimbaba gone, the Ark was his. And no one was any the wiser.

  If he had thought about it earlier, he might even have engineered Kimbaba’s accident himself. But he had not. It had been sheer luck.

  Now, as the Ark’s undisputed owner, he was not interested in continuing with the Iranian plan. That had been personal and political. With Kimbaba gone, he was free to turn it into a straight cash deal to the highest bidder. Clean. The way he liked it. He did not even need to bother getting the Iranians interested. That was difficult business at the best of times. Lucrative, yes, but only because it attracted a premium for keeping under the radar of the U.S. federal agencies. As there was no need for all that any more, he could just monetize the Ark the good old-fashioned way.

  After a day spent on conference calls and in meetings, he had a list of twelve people who would offer him serious money for the Ark. The rest was easy. He just needed to get them to Dubai, have them bid against each other in an auction, then fly out a day later with a lot of new zeros in his main offshore account in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

  So far, it had gone perfectly. All that now remained was to pick up some of the security guards from the library, go to the hotel’s strong room, collect the Ark, take it up to the library, and let the previewing begin.

  He took a final sip of his coffee. Picking up his Audemars Piguet watch from the table, he slipped it over his wrist and under the cuff of his black silk shirt, and headed for the door.

  He never got to it.

  The door flew open, and seven men in black jumpsuits charged in.

  Their stocky green-eyed leader was the first to reach Yevchenko. He caught him completely off guard, swinging his elbow viciously into the Russian’s surprised face, simultaneously driving his kneecap hard into his groin. Yevchenko dropped to the floor, yelling in pain as the blood spurted from his splintered nose.

  But he recovered fast, burying the toecap of his right shoe hard into his attacker’s ankle. The green-eyed man was thrown off balance, stumbling backwards into a glass side-table, which cracked and smashed to the floor, along with the red crystal vase of orchids sitting on it.

  Yevchenko tried to stand up, but the rest of the men were on him immediately, raining fists and boots down into the soft flesh of his face, abdomen, and groin.

  Through the blows, Yevchenko became aware of a pair of hands holding him by his shirtfront, lifting his head and shoulders off the ground. He opened his swollen eyes to find himself staring into the cold expression of the man who had first attacked him.

  “You know what I’ve come for.” He had a German accent. Although he was speaking calmly, Yevchenko could see from his glistening eyes that he was high on a rush of endorphins from the violence.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Yevchenko growled. “You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  Still holding the Russian by the shirt, the stocky man dragged him upright. As he did so, other pairs of hands grabbed Yevchenko from behind, pinning his arms behind his back.

  The leader let go and walked to the large polished wooden dining table covered with the lawyer’s papers and mobile computing equipment. With one deft swipe, he sent it all crashing to the floor. Looking back over to his men, he nodded for them to lay Yevchenko on the table, then motioned for them to drag the table into the kitchen.

  With so many pairs of hands holding him down, there was nothing Yevchenko could do to resist as the table was manoeuvred into his suite’s large kitchen, angled so his feet were by the stove.

  He watched, wide eyed, as his glossy leather shoes and cashmere socks were pulled off, and one of the men began sloshing cooking oil over his exposed feet. Meanwhile, the green-eyed man walked to the stove and turned on the gas rings.

  “Wait—you’ve got the wrong guy … ,” Yevchenko whispered, terror rising in his voice.

  ——————— ◆ ———————

  31

  Burj al-Arab Hotel

  Dubai

  The United Arab Emirates

  The Arabian Gulf

  Something was clearly wrong.

  The two remaining buyers had arrived, and the flat screen zodiac display on the security desk now showed all twelve astrological signs glowing bright green.

  Ava had lost count of the number of times she had checked her watch. It was 12:45 p.m., three-quarters of an hour after the preview was due to start, and there was still no sign of the Ark.

  The other buyers were showing signs of impatience, with a number speaking anxiously into their mobile telephones.

  Ava slipped the book she was reading back into the row of volumes behind her, and walked over to the security desk. “Is there a problem?” she asked the guard standing behind it, who was drumming his fingers quietly on the polished wooden surface.

  He shook his head.

  Sensing he had no more inf
ormation than she did, Ava opened the heavy library doors. The two security guards and their Dobermans made no effort to stop her. Their orders clearly only covered who could enter the room.

  Needing time to think, she headed back to the seventeenth floor, past the butler at his desk guarding access to the suites.

  She walked down the left-hand aisle wrapping around the hotel’s great atrium—the tallest in the world, she had read in one of the brochures—before stopping to look down over the balcony’s wavy edge. The light was soft and almost dreamlike, and she felt much higher than seventeen floors up, until she realized, from looking at the honeycombed rainbow of differently coloured balconies beneath her, that every suite in the hotel was a duplex. She was therefore thirty-four floors up.

  An idea forming, she headed for the bank of elevators. On arrival at the lower lobby and main entrance, she spotted a gold desk on either side of the atrium, each housed inside a giant gold shell. She knew from her arrival the previous night that they were not check-in desks. But even if they had been, she was aware that the staff behind them, like hotel staff the world over, would be under strict orders not to give out the type of information she wanted.

  It had been one of the tests the Firm had set her class while going through MI6’s intelligence officers’ new entry course. She and her fellow trainees on the IONEC had been tasked to enter a hotel and find out the room number of a specified guest. On that occasion it had been a small hotel in Portsmouth, near the Firm’s training centre, and Ava had succeeded by jamming the revolving front doors so the lone receptionist left the counter long enough for Ava to check the hotel’s computer.

  But this was a much more complicated proposition.

  Thinking fast, she headed out of the main doors, and made straight for the unobtrusive white desk offering bellboy and valet parking services.

  The midday sun was already hot, but a fine cooling spray was drifting off a large round fountain at the centre of the drop-off bay.