35

'I tell you, Charlie, I was lucky to get out of Morocco in one piece. If that bastard had guessed I was standing in the crowd, I really believe he'd have killed me right there.'

'And this was out in the open?' Charlie Hoxton was hearing for the first time about the events Dexter had witnessed in Rabat. The two men had met in a noisy pub near Petworth, and Dexter had just handed over the card that he'd obtained from Zebari. 'In broad daylight?' Hoxton persisted.

Dexter nodded. 'It was just after nine this morning, and there were plenty of people about. He didn't care at all. One of his men shot Zebari in the head, then they got back in the car and drove away. I just legged it, straight to the airport. I didn't even stop to pick up my clothes.'

Hoxton nodded and looked again at the piece of card he was holding, turning it over in his hands. 'And all he was interested in doing was getting this back,' he said to himself. 'That's good. Very good indeed.'

'What do you mean "good"?' Dexter demanded.

'I mean that if Zebari's killer is so desperate to recover the tablet, he must know it's genuine. But where the hell is it?'

Dexter ignored the question. 'He's bloody dangerous, Charlie, and he knows my name. He might be over here already, looking for me, and maybe for you as well.'

'I'm bloody dangerous too, Dexter, and don't you forget it.'

Across the table, Dexter could see the unmistakable bulge of a shoulder holster under Hoxton's left arm.

'And I'm not very impressed with this bloody card,' Hoxton snapped. 'The picture's not much better than the ones we've already got, and it's certainly not worth fifteen grand. Couldn't you have cancelled the deal once you saw it?'

'I tried,' Dexter said, 'but he pulled a gun on me.'

Hoxton grunted in displeasure. 'And what the bloody hell does this bit here say? Is that a copy of the Aramaic text?'

Dexter shook his head. 'No. That's just an explanation of where the tablet came from. It's in Arabic, but I've written out a rough translation for you.'

Hoxton dropped the card on the table and took the sheet of paper Dexter offered. He unfolded it and read the English text.

'Is this accurate?' he demanded.

'It's probably not an exact translation – my Arabic isn't good enough for that – but it's close enough, I think.'

Hoxton didn't reply, just scanned the words on the page.

'It doesn't tell us much, does it?' he said. 'It's like an exhibit card in a museum.'

Dexter nodded. 'Zebari told me the tablet had been displayed in a case in one of the public rooms in the owner's house, with the card beside it.'

Hoxton read out the first few lines from Dexter's translation. '"Ancient clay tablet recovered from the ruins of Pirathon or Pharaton (Greek), today the site of the Arab village of Farata in Israel. The inscription is in Aramaic but is garbled and the meaning is unclear. Possibly a part of a set." So where was this Pirathon or Pharaton?'

'I checked. It was a small town in what used to be called Samaria, not far from Mount Gerizim and about twenty miles north of Jerusalem. It was never a very important place, and there's pretty much nothing left of the original settlement now.'

'So how come this tablet finished up there?'

'We don't know that it did,' Dexter replied. 'What's on that card might just be the version that was offered for public consumption. After all, it's hardly likely to state it's been looted from some museum, is it? Don't forget that your clay tablet was once the property of a museum in Cairo, but I bet that's not what you tell people when you show them the relic.'

'You'd better believe that.'

Dexter gestured towards the paper Hoxton was still holding. 'You've already got one of the tablets and now a few blurred photographs of another one. What are you going to do next?'

'I'm not going to do anything,' Hoxton said. 'We are going to do our best to find the missing relic.'

'But you've only got one tablet, Charlie, and we've already worked out that there must be four in the set. How the hell are you going to find anything with well over half the text missing?'

'I've got Baverstock doing a trawl through every museum's database that he can access, looking for any other tablets that might have been recovered over the years. If he can get a decent picture of another tablet, I reckon we can crack this with two of them plus the partial translation of this tablet from Rabat. Whether he can or can't, we'll go out to the Middle East anyway. The picture on this card's better than any of the other pictures I've seen of this tablet, and Baverstock should be able to decipher at least half of it. This is probably the best chance we're ever going to have.'

'Surely you don't want me to come along as well?'

'Yes, I do. You're coming because I need your contacts, Dexter, and Baverstock's coming because we'll need his language skills – unless you've added Imperial Aramaic translation to your other skills.'

Dexter frowned, but after a moment he realized that getting out of Britain for a week or so might not be such a bad idea. If Zebazi's killer had sent some of his men to track him down, they'd presumably be looking for him in Morocco and the United Kingdom, not in Israel or wherever else Hoxton had in mind.

He sighed and leant back in his seat. It wasn't as though he had any choice in the matter in any case. 'No,' he said, 'I still can't read Aramaic, Charlie. So when do we leave?'