The Moses Stone by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page B

dateline of the previous day. Before he could read it, his mobile rang again.
    “You’ve got it?” Byrd demanded. “One of the officers at Canterbury spotted it.”
    Bronson looked again at the headline: KILLED FOR A LUMP OF CLAY? Underneath the bold type were two pictures. The first showed Ralph and Margaret O’Connor at some kind of function, smiling into the camera. Below that was a slightly fuzzy image of an oblong beige object with incised markings on it.
    “Did you know anything about this?”
    Bronson sighed. “No. What else does the article say?”
    “You can read it yourself, and then go and talk to Kirsty Philips and ask her what the hell she and her husband think they’re playing at.”
    “You mean, when I get back to Britain?”
    “No, I mean today or tomorrow. They should have arrived in Rabat about the same time you did. I’ve got her mobile number for you.”
    Byrd ended the call as abruptly as he’d started it, and Bronson read the article in its entirety. The story was simple enough.
    The O’Connors, the reporter suggested, had witnessed a violent argument in the souk in Rabat. Immediately afterward, Margaret O’Connor had picked up a small clay tablet dropped by a man who was being pursued through the narrow streets and alleyways. The following day, on their way back to the airport at Casablanca, the couple was ambushed on the road near Rabat and killed.
    “This was no accident,” David Philips was quoted as saying. “My parents-in-law were hunted down and killed out of hand by a gang of ruthless criminals intent on recovering this priceless relic.” And what, the article demanded in conclusion, were the British and Moroccan police going to do about it?
    “Not a lot, probably,” Bronson muttered, as he reached for the phone to call Kirsty Philips’ mobile. “And how do they know the tablet’s worth anything at all?” he wondered.

9
     
    The Canterbury copper wasn’t the only person to read the brief article in the local paper with interest. A fair-haired young man saw the picture of the clay tablet and immediately reached for a pair of scissors. Snipping around the story, he put it aside and turned his attention to the rest of the newspaper. Beside him in his modest apartment on the outskirts of Enfield was a pile that contained a copy of every British national daily newspaper, a selection of news magazines and most of the larger-circulation provincial papers.
    Going through every one of them and extracting all the articles of interest—a task he performed every day—had taken him all the morning and a couple of hours after lunch, but his work still wasn’t finished. He bundled the mutilated newspapers and magazines into a black rubbish bag, then carried the pile of stories that he’d clipped over to a large A3-size scanner attached to a powerful desktop computer.
    He placed them on the scanner’s flatbed one by one, and copied each onto the computer’s hard drive, ensuring that every image was accompanied by the name of the publication in which it had appeared, and storing them in a folder that bore the current date.
    When he’d finished, he put all the clippings in the rubbish bag with the discarded newspapers, then prepared an e-mail that contained no text at all, but to which he attached copies of all the scanned images. Some days the sheer number and size of the attachments meant he had to divide them up and send two or even three e-mails to dispatch them. The destination e-mail was a numerical Yahoo web-based address that gave no clue as to the identity of the owner. When the account had been set up, five separate e-mail addresses had been created to form a chain that would obscure the identity of the originating e-mail. Once the account was up and running, all those other addresses had been canceled, ending any possible attempt to trace the source.
    Of course, he knew exactly who the recipient was. Or, to be absolutely accurate, he knew precisely where his message