Uzi looked away, looked for the nearest dining room chair, and sat down. The others followed suit.
Benny grabbed a tennis ball and leaped into Uzi’s lap. He began absentmindedly stroking the dog’s smooth hair. “It was all me. After Dena and Maya … were killed, I felt responsible. It … it was complicated. I stopped, well, pretty much everything. I stopped living. My heart was beating but my world ended. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.”
“That was a mistake. And I would’ve told you that if you’d let me. But you didn’t let me.”
“I was embarrassed. I — when I was finally able to deal with their deaths, when I began putting my life back together and started my job at the FBI, I dove in and gave it everything I had. It became my entire life, prevented me from thinking about it. Because when I did …” He waved a hand. “I felt bad that I’d cut you off. I didn’t stop to think that you were in pain too. I’m sorry. In retrospect I handled it very badly, I know that. But at the time, it was all I could do to get through the days.”
Roey leaned back against the countertop. “I accept your apology. And you’re right, I was in pain too. I loved that little girl. And Dena, she was like my own daughter. The hole it created, I know it’s nothing like what you went through, but …” He frowned. “That’s when I got Benny. To fill the void.”
The coffeemaker gurgled and java started to flow into the glass pot.
“Anyway, I realize the reason you’re here wasn’t for us to get right, but I’m glad you’re here, whatever it is that brought us back together.” He removed four mugs from the cupboard. “Actually I think I know why the director sent you. It involves a rare archaeological find?”
DeSantos and Uzi looked at each other.
Knox wouldn’t have sent us here to discuss the codex. Is there another rare archaeological find involved in this?
Roey removed a sugar bowl from a cabinet. “I’ve only got xylitol, if that’s okay. It’s all natural — made from tree bark. No artificial chemicals. Tastes as good as cane sugar. Good for the teeth. Will that work for you?”
“Dad,” Uzi said, impatience permeating his tone.
Benny jumped off Uzi’s lap and went over to DeSantos, who grabbed the tennis ball and played tug of war with him.
Roey set about pouring the coffee. “I haven’t discussed the scroll with anyone in many years. Honestly, I hoped it would just go away.”
“Scroll?” Vail asked. “What scroll?”
“Director Knox only told us we need to talk to you about something. You seem to know what it is.”
Roey hesitated, then handed out the mugs. He pulled over a chair and joined them at the table. “Agent Vail, do you know who Uzi’s grandfather was?”
Vail turned to Uzi, who shrugged. “He never mentioned him. He just told me he lived in Israel.”
“My father,” Roey said, “was Eylad. A Mossad agent. He worked—”
“Wait, what?” Uzi leaned forward. “What the hell are you talking about? Zayde wasn’t Mossad,” Uzi said, using the Yiddish term for grandfather. “He was a scholar, a professor—” He stopped himself and sat back in his seat.
Clearly Uzi had not known about his grandfather’s activities as a spy — but he surely understood why he had been kept in the dark: spies did not share such information with their families. Many never spoke of it even after getting out of the business.
“Sounds like it runs in the family,” DeSantos said. He lifted the tennis ball to shoulder height — and Benny maintained his grip. The dog was now a foot off the floor, but he was not relinquishing his toy.
Uzi did not notice. His mouth was open and his gaze had not moved from his father. “Was he a kidon?” he asked, using the term for assassin.
“No. Well, to be fair, I don’t know the things he did. I asked him a few times, but he never wanted to talk about it. Too dangerous. I only know about one case. But it’s a big one.”
“And that’s the one the director sent us here for,” DeSantos said, letting Benny drop a short distance to the floor.
“That’s the one. My father worked as a Hebrew and Aramaic translator on the archaeological team that excavated the Dead Sea Scrolls.”
The Dead Sea Scrolls?
“At the time, back in the early 1950s, the Qumran caves and nearby Essene ruins sat on land controlled by Jordan. The scrolls are thought to have been written by the Essenes, an ancient Jewish sect that settled outside Jerusalem to escape the Roman persecution. There are a number of interpretations as to why the Essenes were there and why they wrote the scrolls, so I’m telling you the one that my father felt made the most sense based on what he learned. The Essene scribes produced hundreds of scrolls, many of which were copies of one another. They contain the Hebrew Bible, so it’s likely the multiple copies allowed the people who lived in Qumran the ability to pray together. Basically, it was like having prayer books for your congregation.”
“But some weren’t prayer books,” Uzi said.
“Right. There were also biblical texts, biblical commentaries, and religious books that were later excluded from the Hebrew Bible when the scholars wrote the Aleppo Codex.” He stopped and his eyes flicked from one to the other. “Do any of you know about the codex?”
DeSantos laughed. “We all do.”
Roey eyed them again, then continued. “Some of the scrolls are manuals of the beliefs and practices of the Essenes, who were freethinkers. Ultimately, nine hundred documents were found. Archaeologists found a large room amongst the ruins that they believe was devoted solely to scroll writing.”
“Nine hundred documents,” Vail said with a shake of her head. “They were very prolific.”
“Some experts think they wrote down all their customs and beliefs because they feared Rome would one day sack Judea — which, of course, happened — and they didn’t want their culture to die alongside them. That’s why they hid them in clay jars inside caves. Others think the Essenes planned to return when it was safe and retrieve their holy scrolls.”
Roey reached into a cabinet and removed a strip of duck jerky, then tossed it to Benny, who dropped his ball and scooped up the treat.
“My father was sent there to observe the excavation process, to make sure rare pieces of ancient history didn’t disappear. I mean, there wasn’t anything like this ever discovered in the history of mankind. And there still hasn’t been, seventy years later. Those scrolls, written two thousand years ago, are our earliest written record of the basis of the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — they can all be traced back to those core beliefs. The scrolls told how things were done. The same things you and I do today, Aaron, are written in these documents.
“Unfortunately, a number of important scrolls were found before my father joined the archaeological team. But he was there on August 6, 1953, when a very special find was made. Inside a clay pot, like they were all stored, they found an intact scroll. It was exceptionally well preserved. When they unwrapped the linen covering, no one had touched that document in over two thousand years.
“Your zayde and a French archaeologist named Alberi Michel unrolled the scroll a few feet at a time while he read it from start to finish. He knew then that he’d found something very important. At the same time, he knew it was very dangerous. But he didn’t know what to do about it. If it’d only been him there, he would’ve smuggled it to the National Museum and let them decide how to handle it. But Michel worked for Roland de Vaux, who was in charge of the excavation. The scroll could not just disappear. Michel might’ve suspected my father, and they might’ve discovered who he really was — a Mossad operative.”