'Has any of the treasure been found?' Bronson asked. 'I mean, that would validate the scroll, wouldn't it? It would immediately prove that the listing was genuine.'
Angela sighed. 'If only it was that easy. The locations specified in the scroll probably meant something at the start of the first millennium, but they mean almost nothing now. The listing contains things like: "In the cave next to the fountain owned by the House of Hakkoz, dig six cubits: six gold bars." That's fine if you know who "Hakkoz" was, and where his fountain was located, but after two thousand years the chances of finding the treasure with a description as vague as that are pretty slim. And in fact, we do know something about this particular family or house, which is more than can be said for most of the names recorded on the Copper Scroll, because "Hakkoz" is in the historical record. A family with that name were the treasurers of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, but frankly that doesn't help much, because we don't know where they lived and, of course, it could have been a completely different Hakkoz family that was referred to in the scroll.'
Bronson stood up, stretched his aching back and walked across to the mini-bar to get another drink.
'But what I don't understand is what this has to do with the Silver Scroll and Moses' tablets of stone.'
Angela took the glass he was holding out for her. 'Look what the inscription says next. The reference to the Silver Scroll implies they hid it in a cistern somewhere, and later in the text it states that – somewhere – they concealed some tablets. But not just any old tablets. They were "the tablets of the temple of Jerusalem", and that's really exciting. It also means that Yacoub could have been right – there's at least a possibility that these tablets could be the Mosaic Covenant. So this piece of Aramaic script, some of which was on the clay tablet Margaret O'Connor found, is a description of three separate relics being hidden away – a copper scroll, a second scroll made of silver, and these Mosaic tablets. And now I think I know why, and I think I know when. The importance of one single word in that text has only just dawned on me.'
'Which word?' Bronson asked, leaning forward.
'This one,' Angela said, pointing.
'"Ben"?' Bronson asked.
'Yes. There's a very famous fortress not too far from here called Masada, which finally fell to the Romans in AD 73 after a long siege. The rebels holed up there were known as the Sicarii, and their leader was a man named Elazar Ben Ya'ir. Ben,' she emphasized. 'Neither of the dictionaries we've been using list proper names, and that could explain why we haven't been able to translate this word here.' She pointed at a series of Aramaic characters on the laptop's screen. 'I think that this text could be an actual description of the Copper Scroll being hidden in a cave at Qumran by a bunch of Sicarii who'd escaped from Masada just before the citadel fell. That would also explain why the Copper Scroll is so completely different to all the other Dead Sea Scrolls – it was never meant to be a part of the same collection.
'Think it through, Chris.' Angela's hazel eyes were sparkling with excitement. 'The Copper Scroll is completely different to the rest of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was an inventory of hidden treasure: the other scrolls dealt almost exclusively with religious matters, most of them actually biblical texts. Absolutely the only feature it shares with them is the language inscribed on it – Hebrew – though even that's odd. The script on the Copper Scroll is Mishnaic Hebrew, a form of the language used to express in writing the oral traditions of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses.' She leant back in her chair and thought for a few seconds. 'The only explanation that makes sense is that this scroll – the Copper Scroll – came from a completely different source.'
Bronson nodded. Angela's logic was, as usual, compelling. 'I know what you said before, but isn't it at least possible that the other objects – the "scroll of silver" and the "tablets of the temple" – were also hidden somewhere at Qumran?'
Angela shook her head. 'I don't think so. If they'd hidden everything in one place, I would expect the inscription to say something like "and at Qumran we hid the two scrolls and the tablets", but the text describes hiding the first scroll and then goes on to talk about concealing the other objects. That suggests they hid one relic there and went somewhere else to hide the others.'
She looked at Bronson. Her determination to solve this mystery was almost palpable.
'It's up to us to find out where they put them,' she finished.
51
'Got it,' Tony Baverstock muttered, running his eyes over the sheet of paper in front of him again.
The three men were in his room at the Tel Aviv hotel. Ever since they'd arrived in Israel, Baverstock had been poring over the translations of the Aramaic text he'd copied from the clay tablets.
'You've cracked it?' Charlie Hoxton asked. He put down a bottle of local Dancing Camel beer he'd bought that afternoon and walked across to the table where Baverstock had been working.
'I wondered at first if there might be three missing tablets, not just one, but if that were the case, the lines in the corners made no sense. So I tried to reassemble the tablets into a square and looked again at the inscription. The answer was childishly easy. You read the first word at the right-hand end of the top line of the first tablet, which is the one we don't have, of course.'
Baverstock gestured at the scatter of papers on the table. He'd prepared four sheets of A4, and written the English versions of the Aramaic inscriptions he'd managed to translate on three of them, then slid them into position. The fourth sheet, the one at the top right, was blank apart from a short line in the bottom left-hand corner, that mated with similar lines drawn on the other three pages.
'Then,' Baverstock went on, 'you read the word in the same position on the next three tablets, reading anticlockwise, of course. That gives you: "by Elazar Ben", so the first word, the missing word, is probably "selected" or "ordered", or something similar. The next word on the tablet that we don't have is almost certainly "Ya'ir", to complete the proper name of the leader of the Sicarii at Masada. But that word doesn't occur on the top line of the inscription. Instead, you take the first word from the line below, and repeat that process for each tablet. It's a very simple but clever code.'
'Right, got that, I think,' Hoxton muttered impatiently.
'All clever stuff. But all I want to know is what the bloody tablets say.'
'I already know what they say,' Baverstock snapped, and handed over another page.
Hoxton carefully read what the ancient-language specialist had written down in block capitals.
'Very impressive, Tony,' Hoxton nodded. 'Now tell me what all that lot means. What are we actually looking for?'
'I would have thought it was obvious what the inscriptions refer to,' Baverstock replied sharply. 'The decoded text explicitly mentions the "copper scroll" and "scroll blank silver".'
'But unless there are two copper scrolls, that relic has already been found,' Dexter said.
Baverstock snorted. 'That's the point. Look at the inscription, and you'll see that the discovery of the Copper Scroll at Qumran actually validates what's written on these tablets. That relic was found in Cave Three in 1952; the people who prepared these clay tablets put it in there. Look at the text.'