The Messiah Secret

by James Becker

  And it wasn’t just the different colours. There was a huge contrast between the plain itself and the mountains, which seemed to rise almost vertically from the edge of the level ground. No foothills, no gentle slopes rising up to meet the mountains. In some ways it reminded Bronson of the Norwegian fjords, where the steep sides of the peaks plunge straight down into the icy waters.

  ‘This valley has the best climate in the whole of Ladakh,’ Angela said, ‘and, as you can see, it’s well cultivated and very fertile. As I told you before, in the ancient language of this area, it was known as Ldumra, meaning the “Valley of Flowers”. There’s even a theory that this area was the source of the story of the original Garden of Eden.’

  ‘Well, you can see why,’ Bronson said. ‘For somebody flogging their way along the paths that lead here, seeing nothing but rocks and mountains, and then suddenly being confronted by this sight. I mean, why wouldn’t they think they’d found a kind of paradise?’

  ‘But actually, this valley has been quite well-travelled over the centuries. It’s only in modern times that it’s been turned into a kind of dead end because of the disputes between India and Pakistan, and of course with China. We’re not that far from the Chinese border right now. But originally, this was a part of the so-called Silk Route or Silk Road, that ran from the capital of the old Chinese Empire – Chang’an, which is now called Xi-an – to several different locations around the Mediterranean, like Alexandria and Istanbul, and elsewhere.’

  A large brown animal moved among a clump of bushes off to one side of the road they were following.

  ‘What was that?’ Bronson asked, catching just a fleeting glimpse of it before switching his attention back to the road.

  ‘It’s a Bactrian Camel. That’s the kind with two humps,’ Angela replied, swivelling round in her seat to look at it more closely.

  ‘A camel? I wouldn’t have thought you’d find camels at this altitude.’

  ‘They’re hardy beasts, well equipped to endure harsh conditions – whether it’s very hot or very cold. In fact, about the only animals you’re likely to find up here are camels and goats.’

  On the opposite side of the river, above a reasonably large settlement surrounded by apricot plantations, a strangely modern-looking building was set into the hillside. It was square and mainly white in colour, but with some parts of it painted red, brown and yellow, and with tall and thin flags fluttering from its roof. It looked almost like a block of flats.

  ‘What’s that over there?’ Bronson asked.

  Angela looked down at her notes and the map. ‘The last place we drove through was called Khalsar, but that was just a small hamlet, so that must be Diskit village. It’s one of the bigger settlements in this region. It’s got a few hotels and guest houses, and even a handful of shops.’

  ‘I meant that building on the side of the hill.’ Bronson took one hand off the wheel and pointed to his left.

  Angela checked the map again. ‘Oh, that’s Diskit Gompa. It’s the oldest and biggest monastery in the whole of the Nubra Valley. It’s about three hundred and fifty years old.’

  ‘So the word gompa means “monastery”?’

  ‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘I think most of the villages here have one, though some have fallen out of use as the population’s moved around in the area. Many of them seem to have the same kind of construction – the square corners, flat roofs and square or tall thin windows are typical, and they can be quite colourful. And the monks that live in them are pretty colourful as well – they usually wear dark red robes and sometimes golden headdresses.’

  ‘What about the flags?’

  ‘They have prayers written on them. I think the wind whipping past the flags is supposed to send the message in the prayer straight to Buddha.’

  They drove through Sumur and carried on, heading north and occasionally catching sight of the river on their left-hand side.

  ‘Right,’ Angela said, as they saw a scattering of buildings on either side of the road ahead of them. ‘That should be Pänämik up ahead. We need to check out the condition of the road at the north end of the village.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘Roadblocks,’ Angela said simply. ‘Non-locals aren’t allowed to go any further north than Pänämik, and the place we need to get to is quite a way beyond it, so we’ll have to either try to talk our way through or drive back and then go cross-country to get around the patrols.’

  ‘And if we’re stopped out in the bundu?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘We’re stupid foreigners. We’ll say we got lost and didn’t realize where we were.’

  ‘OK,’ said Bronson, doubtfully. ‘As long as they don’t shoot us first.’

  Pänämik was the same as almost every other village they’d seen since they’d arrived in Ladakh, but perhaps a little bigger than most. Bronson slowed right down as they approached the northern end, and they both looked ahead. They’d almost cleared the settlement before they saw the barrier across the road, and the handful of Indian Army soldiers standing casually beside it, weapons slung over their shoulders.

  ‘Time for Plan B, I suppose,’ Bronson said with a sigh. ‘I hope you’ve got a decent map there.’ He pulled the four-by-four into the side of the road and switched off the engine. Angela unfolded the map she’d been using and used a pen to point at a spot to the north-east of Leh.

  ‘There’s Pänämik,’ she said. ‘And this is where we need to get to.’

  She indicated a right-hand junction in the road perhaps ten or twelve miles beyond the village.

  ‘And from there?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘From there we use our eyes and our imagination,’ she said, ‘because I think that junction is what the author of the text meant when he wrote that line, “Then turned to face the glory.” So once we get there, we’ll have to start looking for anything that could fit the expression “between the pillars”, which may be somewhere to the north of the road.’

  ‘Because of the phrase “beyond their shadows”?’ Bronson offered.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Bronson studied the map, working out distances and checking the contour lines. If they were going to venture off the road and go cross-country, he needed to be sure their jeep could handle the terrain. If they got stuck, there would be nobody they could call for help, for obvious reasons.

  That was one factor. The other was that they couldn’t just pick a nice level route and power along it, because the car would throw up a plume of dust that would be visible for miles, and that would be a pretty sure way of attracting the attention of an Indian Army patrol. So they needed to keep it slow, and ideally drive along valleys or gullies – providing they could climb out of them when they had to.

  ‘I think we need to go back down the road and head south,’ Bronson said. ‘When we leave the road we can’t go west, because we’d have to drive through this village called Arann to rejoin the road. So once we get clear of Pänämik, we’ll have to swing over to the east and go along the slopes of this mountain here – I think it’s called Saser – in the Karakoram Range. Then we can turn north and join the road that runs east out of Arann without having to go into the village itself.’

  Angela nodded. ‘It’s a hell of a long way round,’ she said doubtfully, ‘but I don’t see any other options, unless we just drive up to the roadblock, wave the letter at the soldiers and tell them we’re an advance guard from the British Museum. That might work.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Bronson said, ‘and it might not. I’d rather hang on to the letter and use it if we’re stopped by a patrol out in the hills. If the soldiers at the roadblock don’t allow us through, we’ll have alerted them that we’re trying to get further north. They might radio any roving patrols they’ve got in the area to warn them to look out for this jeep, and that’s the last thing we want. The best bet is to just creep along the side of the mountain and hope nobody spots us. If we are stopped, we just plead ignorance, and then show them the letter.’

 
He glanced at his watch. ‘Do you want to start now or find somewhere here to stay for the night?’

  ‘Let’s leave now. I’d rather we got clear of Pänämik and at least tried to get into the right area.’

  As Bronson started the Nissan, three men walked past the four-by-four and glanced at it incuriously. Two had the typical features that they’d got used to seeing since their arrival in Ladakh, but the third man had a much fairer – almost ruddy – complexion, and auburn hair.

  ‘Is he a tourist, or what?’ Bronson muttered to Angela, as the three men walked past the jeep.

  ‘Not the way you mean it,’ she replied. He’s almost certainly from Baigdandu, a village about forty miles to the west of here. Every now and then a boy or girl is born there with red hair and blue eyes. There’s a local legend that centuries ago a tribe of Greeks arrived and then settled there, and it’s their genes that cause the aberration.’

  ‘Greeks?’ Bronson asked. ‘But why—’

  ‘I know,’ Angela interrupted. ‘The story makes no sense. Even if a bunch of Greeks did turn up here and inter-marry with the locals, that’s still not an explanation for that complexion. I mean, how many Greeks have you ever seen who have red hair?’

  ‘But what was a group of Greeks doing here in the first place? We’re a hell of a long way from the Mediterranean.’

  Angela paused, then rubbed the back of her neck to ease her tension. ‘Exactly the same as us, actually.’

  Bronson whistled. ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘That’s what the legend says.’

  ‘But they didn’t succeed?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be here, Chris, if I thought there was the slightest chance that anyone had beaten us to it.’

  Twelve thousand feet above Pänämik, the Israeli-built Searcher II UAV described a lazy circle in the sky, a near-invisible speck, its engine completely inaudible. Then the craft straightened up and started flying towards the south, anchored to the slowly moving Nissan Patrol by the electronic tether of the signal from the tracking device.

  56

  ‘So where are we now?’ Donovan asked from the back seat of the leading Land Cruiser. He’d flown in from Cairo the previous day, and joined the group at the military airport at Hushe in Eastern Baltistan, just before the vehicles left for the Indian border.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ the man in the front passenger seat muttered under his breath, then glanced behind him. ‘We’re about here, between Lhäyul and Gömpa.’ He pointed towards the map in his lap.

  ‘How soon before we reach the road junction?’

  Donovan had asked the same question at least four times already. He clearly wasn’t enjoying the bucking and lurching ride.

  ‘It’s about twenty miles away, so maybe forty minutes on this kind of surface. You still sure that’s where these two Brits are going, boss?’

  Masters, sitting beside Donovan in the back seat, shook his head. ‘Right now, I’m not sure of anything. But according to the guys who followed them to Pänämik, they’re going cross-country and it looks as if they’re heading towards the road that runs from Arann out to the east and then goes up and over the Saser Pass. So that’s where we’re going too.’

  The border crossing had been much easier than Masters had expected. Rodini’s plan had worked just as they’d expected, and all the Americans had had to endure was a vitriolic tongue-lashing from the senior Indian Army officer there.

  Now they just had to locate Bronson and Angela Lewis, after which they should be able to wrap up everything quickly. They’d whistle up Rodini’s chopper and get the hell out of India and back into Pakistan, where they wouldn’t have to sneak around quite so much. And once they got there, they could finally hand over the relic to Donovan, who could load it into the back of his private jet. And then they would collect the balance of their money.

  Masters settled back in his seat. Good organization, that was what it was all about. Attention to detail. If all went according to plan – his plan – he’d be back in New York by the end of the week.

  If they’d thought the pot-holed and dusty roads in Ladakh were any kind of a preparation for travelling cross-country, they were wrong. Bronson had tried to pick the smoothest route but, no matter what he did, the jeep lurched and bounced, throwing them from side to side.

  ‘I’ve had about enough of this,’ Bronson muttered, as the front wheels of the jeep left the ground completely and smashed down on to the rutted surface a split-second later, shaking the whole vehicle.

  The good news was that they weren’t leaving much of a trail of dust, because the ground was rocky. Bronson was reasonably sure their progress would be invisible to anyone watching from Pänämik.

  ‘I’m checking everywhere,’ Angela said, ‘but there are no signs of any Indian Army patrols anywhere ahead of us. Or behind us, for that matter.’

  ‘I guess they just put up roadblocks and patrol the roads. They probably think nobody would be stupid enough to try to drive cross-country anywhere around here. And they’ve got a point,’ Bronson added, as the Nissan lurched particularly savagely.

  They were right – there were no Indian Army troops closer to them than the roadblock they’d already seen on the north-bound road out of Pänämik. But they weren’t quite alone on the mountain. Nearly a mile behind them, a dusty grey Land Rover was plodding along steadily, not following exactly the same route as Bronson’s jeep because the driver didn’t need to. The tracking device, securely clamped to one of the chassis members, ensured that they knew exactly where Bronson was. That had been done the first night in Leh, after Bronson had collected the jeep from the vehicle hire company and parked it outside their lodging.

  ‘How much further?’ Bronson asked, the quaver in his voice caused by the car’s violent jolting.

  ‘No more than ten miles,’ Angela replied, trying to sound upbeat about the remaining distance. ‘We’ve already covered five.’

  Nearly an hour later, Angela spotted a faint horizontal line on the side of the mountain right in front of them.

  ‘That’s got to be the road we’re looking for,’ she said, checking her map.

  She looked over to the left and pointed. ‘I think those must be the outskirts of Arann.’

  About ten minutes later, Bronson swung the Nissan on to the road and heaved a sigh of relief.

  ‘I vote we go back from here on the road. I’d rather try to crash through a bloody roadblock than do that again.’

  ‘You might not feel that way when we end up in jail,’ Angela said. ‘Now we head east, but take it slowly. We’re looking for anything that looks like a couple of pillars.’

  About half a mile away, the driver of the grey Land Rover pulled the vehicle to a halt behind some rocks that completely hid it from the road ahead. Both men climbed out and stepped forward, pulling compact binoculars from their jacket pockets. In the distance, Bronson’s Nissan Patrol was heading slowly eastwards.

  ‘You reckon they’ve found anything?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Don’t look like it,’ the passenger replied. ‘He’s going real slow. I’ll go get the sat-phone, check in with Masters.’

  He dialled a number and held a brief conversation.

  ‘What’s he want us to do?’

  ‘We stay here and keep eyes on the jeep. If it turns off the road, we tell Masters, then drive over there, stash the Rover and follow on foot, keepin’ out of sight. Masters is going to hole up with the other guys near Arann until he knows where Bronson and the woman are going. He doesn’t want them spooked, not when we’re this close.’

  They watched the jeep continue down the road, moving at little more than a crawl, until it was only a distant speck at the limit of their vision.

  ‘You think we should maybe follow them now?’

  ‘No need. The tracker’ll tell us where they are if we have to move. Masters seemed to think that whatever they’re lookin’ for is most likely somewhere at this end of the valley.’

  Both men focused their
binoculars on the distant vehicle.

  ‘Looks like they’ve stopped.’

  And moments later they watched as the Nissan four-by-four turned round in the road and began heading back in their direction.

  In ten minutes, the jeep had covered most of the distance back to the point where they’d watched it join the road.

  The driver stared through his binoculars, then lowered them to his chest.

  ‘Looks like Masters could have been right, and maybe the end-game is near, because the Nissan’s just stopped again.’

  Bronson pulled the jeep to a halt beside the road and looked over to his right, in the direction Angela was pointing.

  ‘Could that be it?’ she asked, her voice clouded with doubt.

  On the north, uphill side of the road a fairly narrow gully opened up, a tumble of rocks partially blocking the entrance to it.

  ‘I don’t see anything much there that looks like a pair of pillars.’

  ‘Me neither. OK, just go on a little bit further, and see if there’s anything else closer to Arann that looks like a better candidate.’ Bronson slipped the jeep into gear and eased it back on to the road. But he’d only covered about ten yards when Angela suddenly grabbed his arm.

  ‘Stop,’ she said, pointing again.

  Perhaps two hundred yards further up the mountainside, beyond the entrance to the gully, a vertical crack split the rock in two.

  ‘What?’ Bronson said.

  ‘Look – over there. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen so far.’ Angela’s voice was high with excitement. ‘The ancient languages didn’t have the huge vocabularies we’ve got today. “Pillars” might have been the most accurate word the author could find to describe what he was seeing. Anyway, I think it’s worth checking out. Can you get the jeep up there and into that gully?’