The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [111]
They arrived at a cave which Ibrahim had already entered.
‘Come on,’ said the sheikh. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of.’
Daniel knew that in fact there was a great deal to be scared of. Once Goliath got his hands on The Book of the Wars of the Lord, then what would he do? At that point he would have no further use for any of them. Would he kill them? Would he simply destroy both documents? Or would he take them and let them live?
The more he thought about it, the more Daniel realized how perilous their situation was. He wished he had offered some resistance before now. The trouble was it was so much easier being an armchair hero than a real one.
Daniel entered, his trepidation notwithstanding. Gabrielle and Goliath followed. The cave in fact was quite small, more like an average-size living room. Relying on nothing but the light entering from outside, Ibrahim went to a wall of the cave and removed a number of stones to reveal a crevice in the rock. He reached deep inside and seconds later his arm emerged holding something the size of four bricks, two on top of the other two, wrapped in a fragile, almost decaying white linen.
‘This isn’t the only thing that was found here,’ Ibrahim said in a conspiratorial tone. ‘A few years ago, they found some old bones.’
‘Bones?’ asked Gabrielle.
‘They had been buried here but an animal had apparently dug them out – or partially dug them out.’
‘And what were they? Animal bones?’
‘No… human.’
‘What, like… recent? I mean… new bones?’
‘No… they said they were old. Very old.’
‘And what happened to them?’ asked Goliath.
‘They were taken to the University of Jordan to do some tests on them.’
‘And?’ asked Gabrielle.
‘That was the funny thing. I asked the professor from the university afterwards and he didn’t want to talk about it. He told me not to ask about it ever again. I think he was afraid of something.’
‘Who was he?’ asked Gabrielle.
‘The professor? His name was Fikri – Hakim Fikri.’
He put the linen-wrapped package on the floor of the cave and carefully unwrapped it, putting the linen to one side, to reveal a set of tablets made from the red clay of Petra.
‘I think I’ll take that,’ said Goliath, reaching out and grabbing the linen shroud in which the tablets had been wrapped.
‘What are you doing?’ Ibrahim demanded indignantly.
‘I’m going to make the evil usurpers drink the water of death!’
‘You cannot!’ said the Bedouin.
Daniel didn’t understand what Goliath was doing. He had left the tablets and grabbed a torn and ragged piece of cloth. It made no sense. But it made even less sense that Ibrahim was challenging a man nearly twice his size to stop him. He tried to warn the sheikh not to resist, but before he could get more than the first syllable out of his mouth, Goliath had produced the semi-automatic and shot the sheikh, once, twice, three times, a vicious smile on his face, as if he took pleasure in the excess of force.
I should have acted before, Daniel’s mind screamed, cursing himself for his previous indecisiveness. There was no reasoning with this man. He was mentally deranged beyond all logic. But regrets served no purpose. If Daniel was to redeem himself, the time to act was now when his and Gabrielle’s life hung in the balance.
He hurled himself at Goliath, clamping his left arm around him in a headlock and hooking his left leg around Goliath’s right in an effort to wrestle him to the ground. He lacked the strength to bring down the bigger man, but as they twisted this way and that, Goliath’s mobile phone fell from his pocket with a sharp, staccato thud.
Goliath swung the semi-automatic towards Daniel and Daniel intercepted it with his right hand, clamping his fingers across the top and his thumb at the base of the slider that reloads the chamber. The gun discharged a round that ricocheted off the walls of the cave producing a moment of panic before the bullet found a resting place somewhere in the sand outside. But