Free Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set by F. Paul Wilson, Blake Crouch, Scott Nicholson, Jeff Strand, Jack Kilborn, J. A. Konrath, Iain Rob Wright, Jordan Crouch Page B

tavern at cleanup time.
    He had arrived here unannounced tonight, shown Miss Szobel his Shin Bet identification, and all but pushed his way in.  Now he waited while she procured the scroll from a room in some other quarter of the house.
    The scroll...he’d begun a low-key search for it immediately after its theft.  A subtle search.  Not I’m looking for a scroll recently stolen from a cave in the Judean Wilderness.  Have you seen or heard of such a thing?   That kind of search would close doors rather than open them.  Instead, Kesev had extended feelers into the antiquities market—legitimate and underground—saying he was a collector interested in purchasing first-century manuscripts, and that money was no object.
    Perhaps his feelers hadn’t been subtle enough.  Perhaps the seller he sought preferred more tried-and-true channels of commerce.  Whatever the reason, he was offered many items over the years, but none were what he sought.
    Then, just last year, his feelers caught ripples of excitement from the manuscript department at the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem.  A unique first century scroll had been brought in for verification.  As he homed in on the scent, word came that the scroll turned out to be a fake.  So he’d veered off and continued his search elsewhere.
    And then, just last month, whispers of another fake, identical to the first—the same disjointed story, written in the same Aramaic form of Hebrew, on an ancient parchment.
    Something in those whispers teased Kesev.  The scant details he could glean about the fakes tantalized him.  He investigated and learned that the first scroll had been brought in by an American who had since returned home.  But the second...a wealthy woman from a Tel Aviv suburb had brought that in, and taken it home in a huff when informed that she’d been duped.
    Kesev was standing in her living room now.
    He heard her footsteps. 
    “Here, Mr. Kesev,” said a throaty voice.  Her Ivrit carried a barely noticeable Eastern European accent.  “I believe this is what you want.”
    He turned slowly, hiding his anticipation.  Tulla Szobel was in her mid fifties, blonde hair, reed thin, prematurely wrinkled, and dressed in a beige knit dress the color of her walls.  A cigarette dangled from her lips.  She held a lucite case between her hands.
    Kesev took the case and carried it to the glass-and-chrome coffee table.  Without asking permission, he lifted the lid and removed the scroll.
    “Careful!” she said, hovering over him.
    He ignored her.  He uncoiled a foot or so of the scroll and began reading—
    Then stopped.  This wasn’t the scroll.  This looked like the scroll, and some of it read like the scroll, but the writing, the penmanship was all wrong.
    “They were right,” he said, nodding slowly.  “This is a fake.  A clumsy fake.”
    Miss Szobel sniffed.  “I don’t need you to tell me that.  The Rockefeller Museum—”
    “Where did you get this?” Kesev said, rerolling the scroll. 
    She puffed furiously on her cigarette.  “Why...I...picked it up in a street bazaar.”
    “Really?” 
    They all said that.  Amazing.  Israel seemed full of lucky collectors who were forever happening on priceless—or potentially priceless—artifacts in street stalls, and purchasing them for next to nothing from vendors who had no idea of their true worth. 
    “You must take me to him.”
    “I wish I could,” she said.  “I’ve been looking for him myself, trying to get my money back.  But he seems to have vanished into thin air.”
    “You are lying,” Kesev said evenly, replacing the lucite lid and looking up at her. 
    She stepped back as if he’s spit at her.  “How dare you!”  She pointed a shaking finger toward her front door.  “I want you out of—”
    “If I leave without the name that I seek I will return within the hour with a search warrant and a search team, and we will comb this house inch by inch until we turn up more