“So your colleagues plan to eliminate Haddad?”

Jonah nodded. “As we speak.”

He’d heard enough, so he slid from the booth.

“What of my payment?” Jonah quickly asked.

He slipped an envelope from his pocket and tossed it on the table. “That should bring our account current. Let us know when there’s more to tell.”

Jonah pocketed the bribe. “You’ll be the first.”

He watched as his contact stood and headed not for the front door, but toward an alcove where restrooms were located. He decided this was as good an opportunity as any, so he followed.

At the bathroom door, he hesitated.

The restaurant was half filled, ill lit, and noisy, the table occupants self-absorbed, buzzing with talk in several languages.

He entered, locked the door, and quickly surveyed the scene. Two stalls, a sink, and a mirror, amber light from incandescent fixtures. Jonah occupied the first stall, the other was empty. Sabre grabbed a handful of paper towels and waited for the toilet to flush, then withdrew a knife from his pocket.

Jonah stepped from the stall, zipping his pants.

Sabre whirled and plunged the knife into the man’s chest, twisting upward, then with his other hand clamped paper towels over the wound. He watched as the Israeli’s eyes first filled with shock, then went blank. He kept the towels in place as he withdrew the blade.

Jonah sank to the floor.

He retrieved the envelope from the man’s pocket, then swiped the metal on Jonah’s trousers. Quickly he grasped the dead man’s arms and dragged the bleeding body into the stall, propping the corpse on the toilet.

He then closed the stall door and left.

Outside, Sabre followed a guide who was steering a walking tour to the town’s rathaus. The older woman pointed to the ancient city hall and spoke about Rothenburg’s long history.

He hesitated and listened. Bells clanged for four PM.

“If you’ll look up at the clock, watch the two bull’s-eye windows to the right and left of the face.”

Everyone turned as the panels swung open. A surmounted mechanical man appeared and drained a tankard of wine while another figure looked on. The guide droned about the historical significance. Cameras clicked. Camcorders whined. The event lasted about two minutes. As Sabre strolled away, he caught a glimpse of one tourist, a man, who deftly angled a lens away from the clock tower and focused on his retreat.

He smiled.

Exposure was always a risk when betrayal became a way of life. Luckily, he’d learned all he needed to know from Jonah, which explained why that liability had been permanently suppressed. But the Israelis were now aware of Jonah’s contact. The Blue Chair seemed not to care and had specifically instructed him to provide a “good show.”

Which he’d done.

For the Israelis and for Alfred Hermann.

LONDON

2:30 PM

MALONE WAITED FOR GEORGE HADDAD TO FINISH EXPLAINING. His old friend was hedging.

“I wrote a paper six years ago,” Haddad said. “It dealt with a theory I had been working on, one that concerns how the Old Testament was originally translated from Old Hebrew.”

Haddad told them about the Septuagint, crafted from the third to the first centuries BCE, the oldest and most complete rendition of the Old Testament into Greek, translated at the Library of Alexandria. Then he described the Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century CE manuscript of the Old and New Testaments used by later scholars to confirm other biblical texts, even though no one knew whether it was correct. And the Vulgate, completed about the same time by St. Jerome, the first translation from Hebrew directly to Latin, major revisions to which occurred in the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.

“Even Martin Luther,” Haddad said, “tinkered with the Vulgate, removing parts for his Lutheran faith. The whole meaning of that translation is muddled. A great many minds have altered its message.

“The King James Bible. Many think it presents original words, but it was created in the seventeenth century from a translation of the Vulgate into English. Those translators never saw the original Hebrew, and if they had, it’s unlikely they could have understood it. Cotton, the Bible as we know it today is five linguistic removes from the first one ever written. The King James Bible proclaims itself authorized and original. But that does not mean genuine, authentic, or even true.”

“Are there any Hebrew Bibles?” Pam asked.

Haddad nodded. “The oldest surviving one is the Aleppo Codex, saved from destruction in Syria in 1948. But that’s a tenth-century CE manuscript, produced nearly two thousand years after the original text from who-knows-what.”

Malone had seen that manuscript’s crisp, cream-colored parchment, with faded brown ink, in Jerusalem’s Jewish National Library.

“In my article,” Haddad said, “I hypothesized how certain manuscripts could help resolve these questions. We know that the Old Testament was studied by ancient philosophers at the Library of Alexandria. Men who actually understood Old Hebrew. We also know they wrote about their thoughts. There are references to these works, quotations and passages, in surviving manuscripts, but unfortunately the original texts are gone. Further, there may well be ancient Jewish texts-we know the library accumulated many of those. Mass destruction of Jewish writings became common later in history, especially Old Testaments in Hebrew. The Inquisition alone burned twelve thousand copies of the Talmud. Studying just one of those could prove decisive to resolving any doubts.”

“What does it matter?” Pam asked.

“It matters a great deal,” Haddad said. “Especially if it’s wrong.”

“In what way?” Malone asked, becoming impatient.

“Moses parting the Red Sea. The Exodus. Genesis. David and Solomon. Since the eighteenth century archaeologists have dug in the Holy Land with a vengeance-all to prove that the Bible is historical fact. Yet not one shred of physical evidence has been unearthed that confirms anything in the Old Testament. Exodus is a good example. Supposedly thousands of Israelites trekked across the Sinai Peninsula. They camped at locations specifically identified in the Bible, locations that can still be found today. But not a shard of pottery, not a bracelet, not anything has ever been found from that time period to confirm Exodus. This same evidentiary void is present when archaeology has tried to corroborate other biblical events. Don’t you think that odd? Wouldn’t there be some remnant of at least one incident depicted in the Old Testament still lying in the earth somewhere?”

Malone knew that Haddad, like many people, bought into the Bible only so much as history. That school of thought believed there was some truth there, but not much. Malone, too, possessed doubts. From his own reading he’d come to the conclusion that those who defended the narrative as history formed their conclusions far more from theological than from scientific considerations.

But still, so what?

“George, you’ve said all this before, and I agree with you. I need to know what’s so important that your life is at stake?”

Haddad rose from the table and led them to where the maps adorned the walls. “I’ve spent the past five years collecting these. It hasn’t been easy. I’m ashamed to say, I actually had to steal a few.”

“From where?” Pam asked.

“Libraries, mainly. Most don’t allow photocopying of rare books. And besides, you lose details in a copy, and it’s the details that matter.”

Haddad stepped to a map that depicted the modern state of Israel. “When the land was carved out in 1948 and the Zionists given their supposed portion, there was much talk about the Abrahamic covenant. God’s word that this region-” Haddad pressed his finger onto the map. “-this precise land, was supposedly Abraham’s.”