The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  ‘So that wasn’t the real Ark? Is that what you mean?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Obviously,’ Gillon replied. ‘The last thing we’d do is let those Israelis anywhere near the genuine article. You followed a trail of clues, yes? An encrypted text that led you from Montségur to Rennes-le-Château to Campagne-sur-Aude and then on to Collioure. And then the trail went cold. That text was entirely genuine, and we’ve known about it for a while through a contact in Limoux.

  ‘But the parchment with the Latin plaintext was created by us in Tel Aviv, based on information provided to us by Roger and Michael here, and was as accurate as we could make it. Then it was inserted in the apparently misfiled Aniort papers in the Paris library. If you do a radiocarbon dating of the parchment, you’ll find it’s virtually new, and the ink won’t stand up to analysis either. All that was designed to get Zeru into this place to grab the Ark, and we even prompted them a few times with tips and hints from apparent sympathisers in the Mossad. We didn’t expect you two to be here as well, frankly, though we’ve also been keeping an eye on you, so we modified our plan slightly when we saw Gellerman capture you outside the barn. Actually, it all worked out really well.’

  ‘But the Ark?’ Angela said, returning to her theme.

  ‘We had it made in America,’ Rogers said, ‘and the Mossad picked up the tab. It’s a good replica of the real thing, but there are one or two differences. First of all, it’s not solid gold, not even the lid, just plated with a thick layer of the metal; much of the weight comes from a lead sheet in the lid of the box. There’s nothing on it to immediately suggest that it’s anything other than the real thing, which was essential if the men from Zeru were to accept it as genuine.’

  ‘They aren’t entirely stupid,’ Pemberton pointed out. ‘They will obviously run non-destructive tests on it, including XRF testing – X-ray fluorescence – and the plating is thick enough that it will show as high-carat gold. We needed to make it as convincing as possible. The gold plating is actually worth quite a few thousand dollars. We doubt Zeru will do much more than physically examine the Ark and test the metal before proclaiming it the genuine article, mainly because of what Gellerman will tell them about how and where it was discovered and what happened here.

  ‘That’s the thing about fanatics. They see what they want to see, not what’s really there. They’re probably on their way right now to a shipping company to have it crated and sent to Jerusalem, but once they’ve made the announcement, the Israeli government will make sure that the relic is thoroughly examined and the results of that examination published as widely as possible.’

  ‘And that will prove the Ark is a fake?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Much more than that,’ Gillon said. ‘We decided that the best way to effectively destroy Zeru and end their crackpot scheme was to make them a laughing stock. So etched very clearly into the lead sheet that provides most of the weight of the lid are a few words that will show up with crystal clarity on an X-ray. The words are “Made in America” and “Property of Lucasfilm Ltd props department”.’

  Angela burst out laughing.

  ‘Once that’s happened, I don’t think we’ll hear any more from that particular source about building a Third Temple. So,’ Gillon continued, ‘I’m sorry that you’ve had an entirely wasted journey following the trail of the Ark, but I think your presence here in search of the relic probably helped convince Gellerman and the other two that they really had found the genuine thing, and for that we thank you.’

  ‘A good job all round,’ Rogers said, standing up. ‘So now you know the truth about all this, we suggest you enjoy yourselves here in Nova Scotia for a few days until you fly home.’

  The meeting, such as it was, was clearly over.

  ‘Is there anything else we can tell you?’ Pemberton asked, also standing up and starting to remove his armour, obviously preparing to leave.

  ‘Well, yes, obviously,’ Angela said. ‘Now we know that the Ark we saw was a fake, where’s the real one? In one of these other hidden rooms here?’

  Pemberton and Rogers looked slightly shocked.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Pemberton replied. ‘It’s much too valuable – and for that matter much too dangerous – to be kept here. This is a secure site, but it’s nothing like secure enough to contain the genuine Ark of the Covenant.’

  ‘So where is it?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘Where it’s been for the last fifty years,’ Rogers said. ‘Crated to conceal what it is and locked away in the best and most secure bank vault we’ve been able to identify.’

  ‘You mean just like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ Angela said. ‘Where the Ark is taken to some kind of secret government warehouse.’

  ‘Exactly like that,’ Rogers agreed. ‘I mean, where do you think they got the idea from?’

  Author’s Note

  Ethiopia and the Ark of the Covenant

  The descriptions of the churches of Lalibela, the cathedrals at Axum and the building where the Ark of the Covenant is supposed to be kept are accurate. There is no proof that the relic actually is in Ethiopia, and as is explored in this novel there are compelling reasons for believing it isn’t there.

  The truth of this particular matter will only be revealed if the Ethiopian authorities allow their alleged Ark to be properly examined, and there’s no indication this is ever likely to happen. And obviously, the Ethiopians potentially have far more to lose if they do this than they have to gain.

  Eachine E10W mini quadcopter

  This nano-drone exists and is exactly as described in this novel. It’s designed mainly for indoor use, because it’s so small and light that it’s at the mercy of even quite light winds, but it can operate outside on still days. It’s much more than just a toy.

  Montségur and the Cathars

  The events described in this novel relating to the end of the siege of Montségur are as historically accurate as it is possible to be so long after the event. The precise reasons why more than two hundred Cathars were prepared to die in the flames of the execution pyre rather than renounce their heretical beliefs and simply walk away have never been established. And it is also true, according to contemporary accounts, that they walked into the pre-prepared stockade led by their bishop and singing hymns, as if they were entering a church rather than facing prolonged and agonising execution.

  Aniort, Blanchefort, Hautpoul and Voisin families

  The relevant parts of the histories of these noble French families are as stated in this novel, including the involvement of the Aniorts in the events leading to the end of the siege of Montségur. The actions taken by Pierre-Roger de Mirepoix, Raymond de Perella and Escot de Belcaire in this context are accurately described. It is also historical fact that King Louis IX treated the Aniort family with notable deference despite their obviously heretical views and actions.

  Perhaps surprisingly, it is also true that a French notary refused to surrender the Hautpoul family papers when requested to do so by the then head of the family, Pierre d’Hautpoul, in 1870, and that Élisabeth d’Hautpoul did state it would be dangerous to hand over the papers. She also suggested that they should be decoded and examined, though she did not say why. As far as is known, the Hautpoul family archive has never been examined and is still being held in safe keeping by a notary somewhere in the Languedoc region of France.

  The treasure of the Cathars

  Something was smuggled out of the castle of Montségur just before the end of the siege, but nobody knows what it was. The descriptions of the transportation of the Ark from Montségur to Rennes-le-Château and on to Campagne-sur-Aude, and its subsequent journey to Nova Scotia, are fiction. The old Templar fortress at Campagne-sur-Aude is as described in this book.

  Cathedral of Sainte-Marie, Auch

  The bas-relief carving showing four monks carrying the Ark of the Covenant is accurately described. The face of the monk on the right bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Elvis Presley, and his hairstyle appears t
o be astonishingly modern.

  The Vigenère cipher

  The Vigenère cipher wasn’t invented by Blaise de Vigenère, which is what most people think, but by Giovan Battista Bellaso and published by him in 1553 in his book La cifra del Sig. Giovan Battista Bellaso. The cipher used a tabula recta or Vigenère square, the alphabet written out as a block, twenty-six lines deep and twenty-six lines across, each new horizontal line containing the alphabet shifted one character to the left. So the top line started A B C and ended with Z, the second line started B C D and ended with A, the third line started with C D E and ended with B, and so on. The shifting of the start of the alphabet meant that each line was an individual Caesar cipher.

  It was called a polyalphabetic substitution cipher because it provided up to twenty-six different alphabets to use based on a repeating keyword, the horizontal rows being selected by the letters of the keyword (key: row) and the vertical column by the letters of the plaintext (text: column). For example, if the keyword was DENBY (DENBYDENBYDENBY and so on) and the first word of the plaintext message was SOUND, the encoder would read down to the fourth horizontal line (D from DENBY), then along that row to the vertical column headed by the letter S (from SOUND), and note the letter where those two lines intersected. That would be the ciphertext for S. Then he would read down to the fifth line, the E row, and across to the O column, and note the ciphertext letter at the intersection. And so on.

  If the keyword was short, like DENBY, then cracking the cipher would be possible because it would only use five alphabets, and each plaintext letter could only be represented by five different ciphertext letters. Not easy, but possible. But if the encryption was done with a keyword that was a phrase of twenty-six letters, it would be almost impossible to decipher, as each plaintext letter would have twenty-six possible ciphertext equivalents. Deducing the keyword was crucial.

  Vigenère himself produced a variant called the autokey cipher, which used a table of ten alphabets and a previously agreed key letter followed by the first twenty-five letters of the plaintext message itself as the keyword; this was significantly more difficult to crack.

  The French called the Vigenère cipher le chiffre indéchiffrable, meaning ‘the unbreakable cipher’, and it was unbreakable for about three hundred years, until in 1863 a man named Friedrich Kasiski developed a method to decrypt it.

  But he wasn’t the first. In 1854, Charles Babbage, the astonishingly gifted nineteenth-century English polymath, and inventor of the Analytical Engine – a mechanical computer that contained all the basic concepts and ideas embodied in today’s electronic computers – devised a way of cracking the more complex autokey cipher, but he never published his solution.

  Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna (AISE)

  The AISE is Italy’s secret intelligence service, responsible for the country’s external security. It was formerly known as the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militaire, or SISMI, acquiring its new name in 2007 after yet another reorganisation of the Italian intelligence community. It is analogous in its functions and operations to America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6), and is only allowed to operate outside Italian territory. It makes heavy use of HUMINT (human intelligence) in its operations.

  Chartres Cathedral

  This is an astonishing building for all sorts of reasons, irrespective of anybody’s religious beliefs or lack of them. It is enormous, with stunning acoustics, wonderfully impressive architecture, including huge flying buttresses to cope with the massive weight of the walls, beautiful stained-glass windows and of course the famous labyrinth. Because the nave is used to seat worshippers, quite often the labyrinth is hidden beneath rows of folding chairs, but it’s usually possible to see enough of it to get a good impression of its size.

  One of the most impressive features of the cathedral is the wealth of beautiful stone carvings that adorn it, inside and out, most of them in remarkably good condition. They often tell a story of some kind, or depict a significant event or an important character from history, and truly represent the pinnacle of the stonemason’s art. The carvings depicting the Ark of the Covenant and the inscriptions below them are exactly as described in this novel. They can be seen in the north portico, outside the building.

  Rennes-le-Château and Bérenger Saunière

  The descriptions in this novel of the village of Rennes-le-Château, the church there and the life and extravagances of the village priest are as accurate as it is possible to be. The source of Saunière’s colossal wealth has never been explained. In fact, it’s easier to be definitive about what it wasn’t derived from. He certainly didn’t make his money from mass trafficking, as has been repeatedly claimed by people who haven’t done their research, and nor did he find strange parchments in the church that allowed him to blackmail the Vatican and/or the pope.

  We do know roughly how much he spent, and we know more or less what he spent it on. It also seems clear, based upon the way he renovated the church, that his faith in God and his belief in Christianity probably took a serious hit while he was in the village. The most likely explanation for his conduct is that he found something on his various digging expeditions that was of such value that it turned him into a multimillionaire almost overnight and destroyed his faith at the same time.

  But we’ll probably never know exactly what it was.

  The Money Pit

  In the last decade of the eighteenth century, a young man named Daniel McGinnis allegedly found a depression in the ground on Oak Island. He believed that it might be a spot where pirate treasure, possibly that of Captain Kidd, had been buried, and started digging. Records from this period are sparse, unreliable and contradictory, but according to most accounts, the digging – first by McGinnis and a few friends, and later by groups of treasure hunters, some having formed companies to carry out the work – exposed a vertical shaft. The earliest accounts mention a layer of flagstones, and then some kind of marks every ten feet or so as the excavation progressed, while later accounts state that they found platforms made of oak logs every ten feet. Other accounts claim that as well as the log platforms, the shaft also contained layers of charcoal, a kind of putty or clay, and a flat stone bearing strange and indecipherable markings.

  The one thing that is consistent in every story is that when the excavations reached a depth of about eighty or ninety feet, the shaft flooded with seawater, which could not be pumped out because it was fed into the shaft by a tunnel system. Every expedition met the same fate, with parallel shafts flooding at about the same depth.

  Subsequent investigations showed that far from it being a simple, if very deep, shaft, at the bottom of which lay a wooden vault of some kind, the island possessed a highly sophisticated defence mechanism, clearly designed to frustrate any would-be treasure hunters, which it has done very successfully for well over two hundred years. Briefly, a system of stone box drains constructed on the beach in Smith’s Cove fed into an underground flood tunnel, which terminated in the area above the buried vault. All attempts to bypass, block or even locate the flood tunnel failed, but there was no doubt about its existence. Or its effect.

  It is clear that the Oak Island vault had been constructed by people possessing a very high degree of engineering ability and building skills, and it is also certain that they had come from overseas, from Europe, in fact. The local native American people, the Mi’kmaq, had neither the skills nor the need to construct something of this type. And there were unambiguous clues: several of the timbers used to construct some of the structures in Smith’s Cove – the purpose of most of which is still not understood – show European building techniques such as wooden dowels, pegs and notches and the like, and bear clear and distinct Latin numerals. Radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology produce dates for samples of this wood of around 1650, a century and a half before Daniel McGinnis started digging.

  If one radiocarbon date is accepted as being accurate, other radioc
arbon dates must be accorded the same status, and this is important for what comes next.

  As stated in this novel, the original work done on Oak Island is so clever, complex and sophisticated that very few people could have carried it out. A pirate captain with a crew of seamen wouldn’t have had the knowledge or the patience to do so: it had to have been a team of skilled and dedicated men with engineering abilities of a very high order. And at that time – we’re talking about the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, for reasons that will become clear – about the only organisation that possessed these qualities, and had any need to create such a structure in such a location, was the order of the Knights Templar.

  It is also a highly relevant fact that none of the treasures or assets of the Knights Templar, apart from a mere handful of relics, have ever been found. Exactly where the combined wealth of the order – which at the time of its dissolution was richer than most European countries – was concealed has never been established. Of all the possible hiding places, Oak Island is certainly one of the most likely.

  The counter-argument is that if the dating of the timbers found there is accurate – and it is – then by the time the work was done, the Templars had already been extinct for over three centuries. But this assumes that the timbers found either in Smith’s Cove or in the excavations around the Money Pit date back to the time of the original construction, which is almost certainly not the case.

  The stone box drains constructed on the beach had obviously been designed to operate for centuries, and layers of coconut fibre had been used to prevent silt and sand from blocking them. Coconuts are not native to Nova Scotia. In fact, the closest source of this material is probably Bermuda, some one thousand miles distant. This fact argues that the Oak Island structure must have been carefully planned well in advance, with a ship or ships first collecting the coconut fibre from Bermuda or perhaps from the islands of the Caribbean and then sailing north to Nova Scotia to carry out the work.