Senior officials at the Antiquities Authority rarely bothered to knock before entering the office of a colleague. Shmuel Navid, a fastidious scholar who generally confined himself to the science rather than the politics of Israeli antiquities, was eager to share a discovery with Itamar and barged into the director's office. Itamar was on the phone, so Shmuel was forced to wait for the conversation to end, then announced, "I've followed up on your request, Iti, and compared the University of Pennsylvania's time sheets with their GPS records. You had the right instincts. They don't jive."
Itamar stiffened in his chair. More than anyone, he wanted to figure out how the looters had discovered Cave XII when nobody at the Authority had a clue. But at the same time, he had secretly hoped that the answer to this question would not come through association with the University of Pennsylvania's Qumran expedition. Shmuel brought both good and bad news. He said in a low voice, "This will cost us our jobs, you know. The PM will have our heads for this."
From the moment he learned about Cave XII, Itamar believed he would soon be asked for his resignation. His lack of progress in finding what was looted or arresting Tim Matternly exacerbated the situation. But after meeting with the deputy prime minister, he came to appreciate that secrecy in the Qumran matter was even more important to the powers that be than accountability. Aware that Shmuel had a penchant for take the negative side of issues, Itamar had long since given up trying to counter this pessimism with brighter pictures. But knowing his scientific director wasn't good at thinking politically, he countered by saying, "The ministry can't clean shop without attracting attention. As long as the government wants to keep the cave at Qumran under raps, we're safe. God help us when this leaks to the press. So what did you find?"
"The U of Penn expedition billed us for twenty-seven days of on-site work."
"How can I forget? I had to justify to the Ministry spending $364,000 for discovering absolutely nothing. Nada."
"Not exactly nothing, Iti. I found only twenty-six days of GPS records. They billed us for twenty-seven working days, but provided documentation for only twenty-six."
"So you think they discovered something on a day they didn't report?"
"We were taken for a ride, and a very costly one."
"With all the checks and balances we instigated, how did they get away with it?" Shmuel carried with him oversized records folded into thick wads and secured with oversized rubber bands. He spoke while unfastening the package. "All this is on digital disks, but I've printed hard copies to make it easier. We know now the exact GPS coordinates for Cave XII, so I decided to work back from these bearings and revisit what Penn recorded at this location. I punched in the precise coordinates for the cave to bring up the radar scans the project coordinator left with us."
"Did they show something we didn't see?"
Shmuel unfolded his papers, pointing to a GPS map of Qumran, with a penciled circle marking the cave entrance. "What's interesting is at the precise GPS location, the Penn report doesn't show any depression in the earth. No cave entrance. No cavity. Nothing but solid sandstone."
"Obviously, someone doctored the results," Itamar said.
"Someone who knew we would carefully review these GPS findings. And we did. You first, then me, and at least four others in this office."
"And did you check the technical settings for the radar transducer as I asked?"
"I did. And here's where they outfoxed us. The university's on-site radar operator must have discovered the cave with the transducer operating under normal power. But he later went back and rescanned the same terrain using a much lower power setting. That gave him a negative sounding for the same location. He simply destroyed the earlier chart showing the cavity and submitted to us the negative scan taken with lower power."
"So simple," Itamar declared with a deep sigh. "That's why we never recognized the ruse. Assumptions always bedevil us. It just never occurred to me that someone would turn down the juice."
Shmuel became more animated as he capped his argument. "And this explains the difference between the billing and the work days. The expedition's administrator sent the bill for the twenty-seven days his team was on site, unaware that the scientific-technical team provided one less day of GPS radar reports. My guess is the operator deleted the findings for a day when they scanned at some distance from the cave entrance. Then, if we had noticed the discrepancy, he would have produced the negative report, chalking it up to a clerical error. We would then have scrutinized the missing day's report, maybe even had the area rescanned, but, finding nothing, would have been convinced everything was kosher. The operator bet that we wouldn't review reports on the days that had been properly documented. And we didn't."
"Any idea who's responsible?" Itamar snapped.
Shmuel shook his head from side to side. "We're now reviewing the signatures for all the operators who signed off on the work."
"I remember how we certified everybody. Each technician had a special identity badge which I personally signed."
"Should we apprise the university president?" Shmuel asked.
Itamar withdrew into his thoughts for a moment before saying, "How can we do that with the Qumran fiasco still unresolved? Besides, we know Penn will deny everything and throw an army of American and Israeli lawyers at us. I'd prefer to first pinpoint the culprits before making this into a casus belli."
"Without American assistance, that's going to be tough. If we identify who screwed us, maybe he'll lead us to the looters."
Itamar showed the first signs of impatience. "I'm not certain they're the same people."
"If he didn't want to profit from his discovery, why would a radar operator go to all this trouble?"
"This sounds to me like the work of a technician who never intended to loot the cave himself. That's why he waited two years. If you want my guess, he waited patiently, then sold the cave location to people prepared to pay."
"Mafia?"
"Looks like it."
"Maybe Timothy Matternly's the wrong target."
"Hang with this, Shmuel," Itamar said as his associate back stepped toward the office door. He immediately angled away to look out the window, but just as Shmuel stepped into the corridor, Itamar called him back. "One last thought, friend. If you possessed vital information about the location of a Dead Sea cave, would you restrict it to a single buyer?"
"If that was my game plan."
"How about an auction? What would stop you from selling the same information to more than one buyer? Why not get two or three fees rather than one?" Shmuel wrinkled his brow before saying, "If there are multiple buyers and one is the mafia, that's a nonstop ticket to heaven."
"Two years have passed since the cave was discovered. A lot can occur in that time."
Shmuel said nothing to this. He now had a new possibility to mull over
***
Tim spent ten days updating software retrieved from his apartment in Rehavia. It was now eight years since he had finished the actual coding and used this software to decipher the original Qumran fragments. During the intervening period, many improvements had come to mind, but without new documents to compile, he had little motivation to incorporate them into his program. That, he realized, had been a tactical mistake because now that a new cave had disgorged a trove of text, his software was woefully inadequate. And in the meantime, several good ideas to update this code had been lost. Additionally, any complete software would have to accommodate for matching the DNA of similar parchments, though now that meant nothing to Tim because he had left the original texts behind for Father Benoit.
Scanning performed at the Monastery of St. George revealed 4,237 phrases, full words or partial words, and 9,765 individual letters. Tim first sorted them into groups, starting with the full words and phrases. Partial words were then divided into subcategories of those with sufficient letters to propose a meaning and those that wouldn't support an intelligent guess. The 9,765 stray letters were alphabetized according to the twenty-two consonants of Hebrew and Aramaic. His software also recognized the decomposed parchment edges of each scanned fragment, and where other fragments were obviously complementary, they were merged. Where it was clear that individual fragments were part of a larger unit, they were joined. Unfortunately, such felicitous situations were rare.
While Tim tinkered with his code, Rav Schreiber busied himself by perusing volumes of rabbinic texts his deceased neighbors had bequeathed to him. They referred to his apartment as a genizah, a permanent depository for books harboring the sacred name of God—discarded tractates of the Mishna and Gemora, commentaries of Rashi, the Ramban, and the Rambam, endless forgotten responsa letters seeking rabbinical interpretations of pressing laws—volumes so sacred they could never be physically destroyed, no matter how faded, dog-eared or decayed their pages. Zechariah Schreiber readily accepted these holy volumes as if lost cousins who had shown up on his doorstep to reside permanently in his crowded apartment. Not only did he clean and stack the new manuscripts, but included each in a schedule for obligatory review, reading a chapter from each volume at least once a year. Tim soon came to appreciate how this bizarre behavior was nothing short of Schreiber's salvation. Now that most of his fellow scholars had made their final journey to study Torah in the Yeshiva shel-Maalah, the heavenly academy, he fussed over every volume placed into his custody. Tim liked to think that while Zechariah kept his books from oblivion, they protected him from the Angel of Death.
During the six-year interval since collaborating on Fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Schreiber's macular degeneration had left him almost blind in one eye. A cataract operation on the other provided him with partial sight. He made a habit of listening to what Tim read, then in a weak, unevenly hand wrote full words on a notepad, distinguishing subjects from predicates, adverbs from adjectives. Proper names were subdivided into given names and surnames. Periodically, he handed the pad to Tim who would enter this transcription back into his computer. New and old constructions appeared on split screens for easy comparison.
There were times when the rabbi would close his eyes to explore an encyclopedic memory cultivated over a lifetime of Torah study. Several minutes would elapse before his eyes would reopen and his tongue wet his lips with a smacking sound. He would begin by saying, "Dat is..." and then declare a word or phrase for Tim to record. When the rabbi wrestled with a perplexing puzzle for long intervals, Tim couldn't be sure if he had shut his eyes for the last time, never to reopen them again. But whether he was actually snoozing or delving deep into his reservoir of knowledge, he would eventually wake with a start, accompanied by a miraculous grammatical or syntactical solution.
On Shabbos, when Schreiber disappeared to pray with his elderly colleagues in a small synagogue a few blocks away, Tim seized the opportunity to take long walks through Mea She'arim and observe Hasidic families strolling the streets in their finest clothes, offering Sabbath greetings and showing off their new babies, of which there seemed to be an endless number. On Shabbos afternoons, he pondered up-to-date topographical maps, careful to observe the prohibition against writing on the holy Sabbath in Rav Schreiber's apartment. Unable to write, he inscribed potential locations in his memory. The more he pondered this lost wilderness, the more he became obsessed by what he imagined to have occurred there. The Romans were harsh, but efficient, practical rulers in Judea who would not have squandered their resources to demolish a yeshiva on the distant extremity of their empire if it were not perceived as a genuine threat. But without further information, he could only speculate.
When Rav Schreiber awoke late one Sunday morning ready to resume work, Tim had a surprise waiting for him: a list of proper names that had emerged from their previous readings. One by one, he read them aloud, spelling each. Zechariah's arthritic fingers pushed a ballpoint pen over paper with starts and stops, transforming them into a new list written in modern Hebrew characters.
Zarepheth bat Ishimaris
Urias bar Natan
Simon bar Amos
Ananus, son of Jonathan
Alcyon, a physician
Jochanan Gaddis
Judas bar Jairus
Joseph bar Daleu
Netir of the Galilee
Noami, bat Nadab
Shmiel, bar Gera
Tephtus, unknown family
David, the Pharisee
To have stumbled into a cluster of names early in their collaboration was indeed a stroke of luck, though Tim remained puzzled. "Any ideas why these turned up in the cave?" he asked Schreiber.
"Two women. Not all are Hebrew. But we know many Jews assumed Hellenic names back then. Like Alexander and Hyrcanus."
"So, what do you make of them?"
Schreiber retreated into his thoughts and remained there for a while before shaking a bony finger to signify that he had something to share. "What do we know so far about the contents of the cave?" he asked with uplift in his voice practiced by yeshiva students as they grilled each other on some fine point in the Gemora.
"Very little," Tim said, voicing his frustration.
"Not exactly. We know from the Greek scroll that the yeshiva at Ein Arugot was destroyed. We know also that the commander, Digius Silban, forced Jewish prisoners to help with his dirty work. I know what that's like because I spent three and a half years of my life working as a slave for the Nazis in Germany. Prisoners think a lot about their fellow inmates because their fates are inextricably tied. I'm thinking that maybe one of these unfortunate Jews working for Digius Silban was able to send a warning that Legionnaires were coming to burn down the yeshiva and arrest its students and faculty. If so, it's possible that somebody spirited away the school records, perhaps for safekeeping in Qumran, where we know other valuable records were being stored. These names might represent a list of students, or faculty. I don't recognize any, do you?"
"Not one," Tim said, more than intrigued by the possibility Schreiber offered. But he knew something Schreiber didn't—that the fragments had yielded not thirteen, but fourteen names. Immediately, Tim's passion to visit the desert site at Ein Arugot took on the aura of a pilgrimage. Of course, he didn't expect to do more than make superficial observations. No digging. No excavations. But finding artifacts was unimportant compared with reliving history. Just standing at this location, or near it, was bound to inspire him.
Schreiber did not own a car, but he had a relative prepared to lend Tim a small Brazilian-assembled Volkswagen. On one of his daily ventures to purchase food, Tim stopped by a military surplus store and bought a pair of hiking boots, a collapsible shovel, a compass, light desert clothing, five water bottles, and a disposable Kodak camera. It would have been ideal to make this pilgrimage on Shabbos, while Schreiber rested, but he didn't think it proper to offend the car's religious owner by using it to travel on the Sabbath. Tim waited impatiently for a convenient weekday. That came when Schreiber's doctor admitted him to the hospital for treatment of a urinary infection.