The Messiah Secret

by James Becker

  Desperately searching for help, she looked in both directions but the street appeared to be deserted. No pedestrians, no traffic.

  For the briefest of instants she considered her options. Then she turned and started to run.

  Bronson fingered the mobile in his pocket, wondering if he should make the call to the emergency services before he even stepped inside.

  Then he shook his head and crossed to the door. Just like the outside door of the building, the lock had obviously been jemmied. He pressed his ear to the opening, but the only noise he could hear was the regular ticking of Angela’s old long-case clock that he knew stood in the hallway.

  He took a deep breath, pushed the door open very slightly, just wide enough for him to see through the gap, and looked inside.

  Immediately Angela started to run she heard pounding footsteps behind her. She risked a quick glance back, which confirmed what she already knew – her pursuer was much quicker than she was, and was gaining on her with every step. He’d be on her in a matter of seconds.

  She’d never reach the main road, she knew. She took a deep breath and screamed; a loud, panicky yell that echoed off the walls of the buildings. But as the sound died away, the only noise she could hear was the thudding of the man’s feet behind her. He was getting closer with every second.

  To her right was an apartment block, the lighted entrance lobby offering a safe haven. If the door was open, and if she could reach it before the man caught her.

  She changed direction abruptly, cutting across the road towards the lobby, but she was still twenty yards short when a hand seized her shoulder.

  Angela screamed again and jinked to her right, shaking off the man’s hand and trying to dodge away from him. But almost immediately he grabbed her again. She spun round, reached for his face and scratched her nails down his cheek, digging as deep as she could.

  Then she ran again.

  The hall of Angela’s flat was empty, and it looked as if nothing had been disturbed. Bronson swung the door wider and slipped into the flat. On one side was the kitchen, the light switched on but the small room clearly empty. To his right, the open door led into the lounge, and it was obvious even from where Bronson stood that the room had been comprehensively searched. Every drawer on the sideboard had been pulled open, the contents scattered all over the floor. But, again, the room looked empty and there was no noise from anywhere in the apartment.

  Making as little sound as he could, Bronson stepped over to the lounge door and glanced inside the room. Nobody was there. Moving more confidently now, he strode further down the hall, checking each room. But within a couple of minutes he’d confirmed his initial suspicions – the burglars had already left.

  Angela felt a blow to her side that slammed her hard to the right. The next instant, she was gasping for breath, pinned by the man’s left hand against the rough brick wall of a building. She stared in terrified silence at her attacker.

  He was short and stocky, with a bandage covering one side of his head. The clerical collar didn’t fool her for an instant. Perverts, she assumed, would adopt whatever guise they thought would put their victims off-guard, and most people deferred to priests, even if they never went to church.

  But what happened next utterly amazed her.

  ‘You’ve got something I want, Angela,’ the man said calmly, his voice measured and level. Blood trickled steadily down his neck from the ragged scratches on his cheek. ‘Give me that case.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ she stammered.

  ‘Just give me that,’ he snapped, grabbing for the leather-bound box of papers Angela had removed from Carfax Hall.

  But Angela didn’t let go. Instead, she pulled back, trying to wrench the box from his hand, and herself out of the man’s grasp.

  The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade knife and pressed the button. The ‘snick’ of the five-inch blade snapping open was ominously loud in the quiet street. He drew back his arm and then swung the knife forward in a vicious under-arm blow aimed directly at Angela’s stomach.

  Bronson pulled out his mobile phone, cancelled the triple nine that was displayed on the screen and dialled Angela’s phone. There was no answer.

  In that instant he guessed that something was wrong. Stuffing the mobile in his pocket, he ran out of the flat, ignoring the lift and pounding down the stairs towards the ground floor.

  The moment she saw the knife swinging towards her, Angela reacted instinctively. Grasping the leather-bound box with both hands, she slammed it downwards to meet the blade.

  She felt a sudden blow as the switchblade slammed into the wood and staggered with the force of the impact. She looked down. The blade had penetrated both sides, and a couple of inches of it were sticking out.

  The man tugged on the knife, trying to pull it free, but the blade was stuck fast.

  Angela wrestled the box from side to side, but couldn’t loosen the man’s grip on it. So she did the next best thing. She kicked upwards, as hard and as accurately as she could, and felt her foot connect firmly with her attacker’s groin.

  He grunted in shock and his eyes clouded with pain, and for a moment it seemed as if he might let go of the knife. But then he tightened his grip on the weapon and pulled back his left arm to punch Angela in the face.

  She did the only thing she could. The instant he released his grip on her shoulder, she let go of the leather-bound box and dodged away from him, ducking under his outstretched arm. And then she ran away – ran for her life – up the street towards safety.

  * * *

  Running as fast as he could, Bronson reached the corner of the street where he had parked his car and turned into it. She had to be down there somewhere.

  He’d barely made ten yards down the street when he saw her, dishevelled, panting and running hard in the opposite direction.

  ‘Angela!’ he yelled, and ran across to her.

  She slumped to a stop and collapsed into his arms, gasping for air and trembling with exertion.

  ‘What happened?’ Bronson demanded. As he held her, he scanned the street behind her. It was deserted.

  For several seconds Angela couldn’t speak. Finally, she gasped out a single sentence.

  ‘He knew my name, Chris.’ She flung out an arm and pointed down the street behind her. ‘The priest,’ she said, ‘down there.’

  But apart from a couple of girls who’d just appeared from a side street about a hundred yards away, there was nobody in sight.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ she whispered.

  ‘What happened?’ Bronson asked again, holding Angela hard against his chest.

  In short, breathless sentences, Angela explained what had happened to her since they’d separated outside her apartment building.

  ‘And you thought he was a priest?’ Bronson asked.

  Angela shook her head. ‘I meant he looked like one. He was wearing a black suit and a clerical collar.’

  ‘Would you recognize him if you saw him again?’

  Angela nodded decisively. ‘Absolutely. I’ll never forget those cold, dead eyes. And I left him a souvenir.’ She held up her hand and Bronson saw the blood under her fingernails.

  ‘Good for you,’ he said, hugging her.

  She pushed herself back, her hands on Bronson’s shoulders. ‘He called me “Angela”, but I’ve never seen him before in my life. He wanted the box of papers and I’m afraid he got it. But it saved my life. If I hadn’t jammed it down when he swung the knife at me, I’d be dead by now.’ She turned and looked towards the end of the street.

  ‘What happened to the flat?’

  ‘You’ve been burgled,’ Bronson stated flatly. ‘You’d better check and see what’s been taken.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Angela said, her old spirit returning. ‘Why the hell is it always my place that gets robbed?’

  As Angela looked around her flat, Bronson found a couple of long screws in the small toolbox she kept under the sink and replaced the lock a
ssembly on the main door of the apartment.

  ‘You’ll need to get that door fixed properly,’ he warned her, ‘but that should hold it for a day or two. And there is some good news.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Whoever did this was a professional, not some hyped-up junkie looking for something to sell so he could buy his next fix.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘Those drawers over there.’ Bronson pointed at the sideboard. ‘Amateurs usually start searching in the top drawer, but that means they have to close it afterwards so they can look in the one below it. Professional searchers – or professional thieves – always start with the bottom drawer and work their way up. That way they can leave each drawer open when they’ve finished.’

  Angela straightened up, and put her hands on her hips. ‘That makes me feel a lot better.’

  ‘Actually, it should. The other trick amateur burglars are fond of pulling is to take a dump on the floor, preferably in the middle of the carpet, before they leave the place. They seem to think it leaves all the bad luck in the property, and means they won’t get caught.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Absolutely. So what’s been taken?’

  ‘Just my laptop and the broken pottery vessel from Carfax Hall. The laptop wasn’t an expensive model, and those broken pottery shards are worthless from a commercial point of view.’

  ‘So whoever took them was clearly looking for those and nothing else.’

  Angela nodded. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Especially as there are lots more valuable things around.’

  ‘It’s pretty clear what happened,’ Bronson said. ‘The man who attacked you broke in here first and took those bits. Then he waited for you down on the street. And that begs another question.’

  Angela nodded grimly. ‘Yes. Somebody must have told him what I look like.’

  ‘We’ve been here before, Angela,’ Bronson said slowly. ‘Somebody else is obviously searching for this “treasure of the world”, and we’ve no idea who it is, or why they’re looking for it.’

  ‘If I’m right and it is the Ark of the Covenant, the “why” is a very easy question to answer: the value of that relic is incalculable. I mean, you’d certainly be talking tens of millions of pounds, maybe even hundreds of millions.’

  ‘High stakes, and that means high risk. And now you’ve lost all your research notes and the box of papers, I suppose we’re pretty poorly placed to keep searching?’

  Angela shook her head firmly. ‘Of course not. What was on the laptop is duplicated on my desktop computer at the museum, and I’ve got a full back-up of the data on a memory stick in my handbag. I duplicate everything. And even losing the papers isn’t important, because I scanned everything as soon as I got to the museum this morning.’ She stopped and smiled for the first time since she’d escaped from the man on the street. ‘That bastard might think he’s one step ahead of us, but he’s not. However, he now has exactly the same information, and he’ll probably eventually make the same connection, so we have to get there first.’

  ‘Get where?’ Bronson looked confused.

  ‘Egypt, to see a man named Hassan al-Sahid, and also to visit el-Hiba and the temple of Amun-Great-of-Roarings. Let me just grab my overnight bag. We leave in five minutes.’

  Egypt

  28

  ‘Bartholomew and Oliver were devious old sods,’ Angela said, as they sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for their flight to be called. ‘We know this because of the way Bartholomew hid his papers and Oliver made all his different wills. So it seems to me that Bartholomew would have planted a trail of clues in Carfax Hall for his son to follow. The trouble is that I don’t think Oliver was very good at that kind of thing. He only said a month or so ago that he was planning an expedition to follow in his father’s footsteps in the Middle East, so I doubt if he found that hidden drawer under the stuffed fox until quite recently, and he may never have made the connection. He could just have been intending to retrace the route his father took on one of his expeditions, based on Bartholomew’s notes.’

  ‘So what is the connection you’ve made?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘I found a bill of sale from Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax to a man named Hassan al-Sahid, and a sentence scrawled at the bottom of one of his pages of expedition notes. That read, “The Montgomerys hold the key.” Put those two things together, and what do you get?’

  ‘A headache?’ Bronson suggested, smiling at her.

  Angela sighed. ‘The bill of sale is for two oil on canvas portraits, but the terms are a bit unusual, because the purchaser – al-Sahid – agreed to hold the pictures in safe keeping in his family for fifty years or until Bartholomew or his son requested their return, when the purchase price would be refunded, plus accrued interest. So it was really more like an extended loan. The two photographs we found in the box of papers were of the paintings, and I’ve got scanned copies of those as well. That’s the first thing.

  ‘The second point is that the name of the artist was Edward Montgomery. I think the reason Bartholomew had those two portraits painted was so he could conceal the text of the ancient Persian script within them. That’s what he meant by “the Montgomerys hold the key”. I think he leased them to al-Sahid as a kind of insurance policy, so that there’d always be another copy of the parchment text in existence, just in case Bartholomew lost his version.’

  ‘Or in case something else happened to him,’ Bronson said thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, and Hassan al-Sahid had special significance. His home was in Cairo, and he was Bartholomew’s gang master on all his explorations in Egypt, and probably the one man Bartholomew trusted implicitly – his best friend, in fact. His expedition notes make that very clear. The text of that piece of Persian script has to be hidden in one of those two paintings, and that’s what we’re going to Cairo to track down.’

  ‘What about that roaring-Amun stuff?’

  ‘Amun-Great-of-Roarings,’ Angela said patiently. ‘Everything I’ve discovered up to now suggests that the “treasure of the world” is actually the Ark of the Covenant, and one of the likeliest contenders for seizing the relic is the Pharaoh Shishaq.’

  ‘OK,’ Bronson said, determined to be practical. He also knew that these discussions were what made them such a good partnership. ‘Let’s accept that the relic that’s referred to in the grimoire and the other places really is the Ark of the Covenant. What do we know about it? What does the Ark look like, for instance? And what’s supposed to have happened to it?’

  ‘According to the Bible, it was a wooden box made of acacia wood. The acacia was known to the Israelites as the shittah-tree, and it was an important botanical with several uses in traditional medicine. The Ark was built in accordance with the so-called golden ratio – that’s the relationship between the dimensions of an object – and it was two and a half cubits long and one and a half cubits high and wide. If we assume they were using the Egyptian royal cubit, that would make it about four feet long and two feet six inches wide and high.

  ‘The box was then covered with pure gold, and the lid, which was known as the kaporet in Hebrew, was possibly solid gold, or at least it had a gold rim. The lid was decorated with two sculpted cherubim, facing each other with their wings spread out over the top of the Ark. On each of the long sides of the box were two gold rings, so that gold-covered poles could be inserted to lift the object, because it wasn’t ever supposed to touch the ground.’

  Bronson smiled to himself: Angela was getting into her stride.

  ‘We touched on this before, when we were in Israel. According to the Bible, the Pharaoh Shishaq sacked Jerusalem in about nine hundred and twenty BC and took away the treasures of the Temple, which might have included the Ark. According to legend, he hid the Ark in Tanis, his capital city, which is about fifteen miles from Cairo.

  ‘Where the Ark is now is unknown, obviously. Perhaps the most widely accepted possible location is the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum in
Ethiopia. But there’s the problem of proof – nobody’s allowed inside the building to see or photograph the object, and it’s never taken out, so they might just as well claim to have aliens and spaceships and Elvis in there as well.’ Angela frowned, obviously frustrated.

  ‘So what do you think happened to it?’

  ‘Well, the Ark was almost certainly in the Second Temple in Jerusalem in nine hundred and twenty BC, and it seems to me that there are only two possible things that could then have happened to it. Either it was taken to a place of safe keeping before Shishaq and his army arrived or it was captured by the Pharaoh. And I’m starting to think that Bartholomew was right – maybe it was seized by Shishaq.

  ‘The problem with the idea of the Ark being spirited away from Jerusalem is where it would have gone. It was the most sacred object held in the temple, and the priests certainly wouldn’t have handed it to just anyone. It would have had to have been held by people they trusted implicitly, and that would have meant another group of Jews. And there’s a very good reason why they wouldn’t have given it to the only other Jewish community that was anywhere near Jerusalem.’

  Angela sat forward, a faraway look in her brown eyes. ‘Solomon’s son was named Rehoboam, and when he ascended the throne he decided to tax the people even more heavily than Solomon had done. This was round about nine hundred and thirty BC – the dates of Rehoboam’s reign are disputed – and not too surprisingly there was a revolt. Ten of the northern tribes, under the leadership of a man named Jeroboam, broke away and formed a separate kingdom that became known as Israel, or the Northern Kingdom, or, rather later, as Samaria. Rehoboam’s kingdom was called Judah, or sometimes the Southern Kingdom, and it occupied the area to the west and south of the Dead Sea, broadly speaking the area that’s now Israel.

  ‘Rehoboam wanted to go to war against Israel, but was advised against it, because he would have been fighting his own countrymen, but the two Jewish nations were in a state of low-level conflict for his entire seventeen-year reign. So absolutely the last people Rehoboam would have trusted with the Ark were Jeroboam’s Northern Kingdom tribes, and as far as I know there were no other groups anywhere near Jerusalem that he would have been likely to trust enough to give it to.