A Long Way to Shiloh by Lionel Davidson Read Free Book Online

firing point had been identified and the building cordoned off, the gunman had escaped. He was never found.
    In due course the file on the case went to Nazareth police station, with copies to Border Police HQ at Beit Shean. And there the matter rested.
    It rested for ten months – until three weeks ago – when purely by chance a former student of Agrot’s, a specialist in Arabic who had been one of the team working on the Ein Gedi scroll, entered the Border Police service and was posted to Northern Area HQ at Beit Shean. There, to familiarize himself with the work, he was told to spend a week or two in the file room. It hadn’t taken him long to come on the file of the two infiltrators, or to recognize in the posthumous photo of one of them the features, familiar enough to him from his specialized reading, of Khalil Sidqui. Just about three days later he had a pretty good idea what Sidqui had been up to.
    In that time he’d retraced the steps of the infiltrators, found the holes in the ground, and identified the steel pipes as a contraption for collecting geological core samples. But while returning to Beit Shean in the dusk this young man had run into a booby trap: a rope stretched across the road. He’d been found still on his motor bike but with his neck broken lying at the bottom of a steep hill off the road. His notes at Beit Shean had been very explicit, however, and they’d gone to Agrot; who after some researches of his own, had set in motion the devious machinery that had brought me to sit opposite him in the Rehavia flat, arak in hand. 
    *
    It was Israeli arak, rather too refined and without the coarse oily kick of the Arabic, but with the same tendency to get you bow-legged after a couple. I’d now had three.
    ‘Any comments so far?’ Agrot said.
    The one that immediately occurred was that funny things seemed to happen to people in the area where I was expected to work. He didn’t seem to be inviting that kind of comment. I said, ‘What was this with the core samples?’
    ‘The Menorah is supposed to be buried under a layer of blue marble chips. There isn’t any marble in Galilee. The presumption is they were looking for it.’
    ‘That sounds a cockeyed way of going about things.’
    ‘Very cockeyed. And very Sidqui. But not without a grain of sense,’ Agrot said. ‘At least nobody tumbled to what these pipes were for a long time.’
    ‘So the idea was to find the marble, dig up the Menorah and take it back across the Jordan?’
    ‘No, no,’ Agrot said. ‘It would be far too heavy for them. The idea would be to locate it, so it could be picked up later.’
    ‘By whom?’
    ‘Exactly,’ Agrot said. He looked round. There were double doors between the sitting-room and the bedroom and Tanya had left one open. He got up and closed it. ‘By a military group,’ he said. ‘At least, a para-military group. There’s always a bit of trouble of one kind or another going on up there, you know – raids, counter-raids. Where you get a full-blown military operation, a number of objectives have got to be decided for it in advance. I think the idea here would be to get the Menorah included as an objective. They’d go for it under the umbrella of whatever else was going on. And there’s a certain amount of evidence to support this. For instance we know now there must have been at least two other attempts to find the Menorah, since Sidqui’s – they left core pipes behind. And after each one, about a month after, there was a fairly heavy raid. The supposition is that the infiltrators knew the raids were being planned. It now looks as if we can expect another.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘And there are some disturbing aspects. For one thing, the last mob were very cocky. They weren’t spotted coming in, but they put up a fight going out – which is unusual. And for another , they had a mine detector with them. They threw it in the river, and we recovered it. The reasoning is they wouldn’t have lumbered