9

The Canterbury copper wasn't the only person to read the brief article in the local paper with interest. A fair-haired young man saw the picture of the clay tablet and immediately reached for a pair of scissors. Snipping around the story, he put it aside and turned his attention to the rest of the newspaper. Beside him in his modest apartment on the outskirts of Enfield was a pile that contained a copy of every British national daily newspaper, a selection of news magazines and most of the larger-circulation provincial papers.

Going through every one of them and extracting all the articles of interest – a task he performed every day – had taken him all the morning and a couple of hours after lunch, but his work still wasn't finished. He bundled the mutilated newspapers and magazines into a black rubbish bag, then carried the pile of stories that he'd clipped over to a large A3-size scanner attached to a powerful desktop computer.

He placed them on the scanner's flatbed one by one, and copied each on to the computer's hard drive, ensuring that every image was accompanied by the name of the publication in which it had appeared, and storing them in a folder that bore the current date.

When he'd finished, he put all the clippings in the rubbish bag with the discarded newspapers, then prepared an email that contained no text at all, but to which he attached copies of all the scanned images. Some days the sheer number and size of the attachments meant he had to divide them up and send two or even three emails to dispatch them. The destination email was a numerical Yahoo web-based address that gave no clue as to the identity of the owner. When the account had been set up, five separate email addresses had been created to form a chain that would obscure the identity of the originating email. Once the account was up and running, all those other addresses had been cancelled, ending any possible attempt to trace the source.

Of course, he knew exactly who the recipient was. Or, to be absolutely accurate, he knew precisely where his message would be read, but not exactly who would read it.

He had been stationed in Britain for almost two years, steadily building a name and establishing himself as a journalist specializing in writing for foreign magazines and newspapers. He could even produce copies of various continental journals that included articles he'd written – or which appeared over his byline. If anyone had bothered to check the original copies of those publications, they'd have seen the articles reproduced word for word, but with an entirely different byline. In fact, the copied pages had been carefully prepared in a secure basement in an unmarked and equally secure building in a town named Glilot in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv, for the sole purpose of helping to establish his cover.

He wasn't a spy – or not yet, at any rate – but he was an employee of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. One of his tasks as a support agent was to copy any and every article that related, however obliquely, to the British government and to all branches of the armed forces, including the special forces, and to the United Kingdom intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies. But like all agents in the employ of the Mossad, he had also been given an additional list of topics that were in no way connected with any of these subjects. Ancient tablets, whether made of clay or any other material, had been accorded a very high priority in the list.

Once he'd dispatched the email, there was usually nothing else for him to do until the following day, but on that afternoon, within minutes of sending the message, his computer emitted a double-tone that showed an email had been received. When he opened his inbox, the coded name of the sender jumped out at him, as did the priority. He scanned the message quickly, then read it again.

Whatever the importance of that old clay tablet, it looked as if the article he'd sent had stirred up a hornets' nest in Tel Aviv, and the new instructions he'd been given clearly emphasized this. He glanced at his watch, weighing his options, then grabbed his jacket from the hook in the hall, left his apartment and headed for the stairs leading to the small car park at the back of the building.

With any luck, he should reach Canterbury in just over an hour.