The Messiah Secret cb-3

by James Becker

  The man turned so that he was facing his captive, then swung the scourge against Mayhew’s chest, the steel-tipped ends of the thongs ripping apart the thin cotton of his shirt and carving furrows across his torso.

  Mayhew howled in pain and leaned back as far as he could in the chair. His fists clenched and more blood appeared around the cable ties as the thin plastic cut deep into his wrists.

  The man moved around to the other side of the chair, changed his grip on the scourge and swung it again. Then he moved back to his own chair and sat down.

  After a couple of minutes, Mayhew’s howls of pain had subsided to low moans of agony.

  ‘Now,’ the man said, ‘we’ll start at the beginning — tell me everything you know about Bartholomew’s Folly.’

  Whatever Mayhew had been expecting, this wasn’t it.

  ‘But it’s just a story, a story about a stupid man who lost a fortune searching for something that wasn’t there.’

  ‘Then it won’t be a problem for you to tell me all about it, will it?’

  Mayhew shook his head. ‘No, but I mean. .’ His voice trailed away into silence.

  The man picked up his scourge, as Mayhew gathered his thoughts, and quickly explained everything he knew or had read about Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax’s abortive expeditions to Persia.

  ‘I’ve read all that in one of the guidebooks,’ the man snapped. ‘I need more information. Why do you think he was just wasting his time?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Five minutes ago you told me Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax was just — and I quote — “a stupid man who lost a fortune searching for something that wasn’t there.” Unquote. That’s what you said. So how do you know it wasn’t there?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know that, of course,’ Mayhew wailed. ‘What I said was an educated guess.’

  ‘So educate me. Give me your reasons.’

  Mayhew paused, trying desperately to think clearly amid the waves of panic and fear that were threatening to overwhelm him.

  ‘There are two reasons,’ he said finally. ‘First, the fragment of Persian text probably dated from the first century AD, and it’s likely that in the next two thousand years somebody would have stumbled across this so-called treasure — if it ever existed — and recovered it.’

  ‘And the second reason?’

  ‘From everything I’ve read, Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax had no real idea of where to look. He might not even have been searching in the right country. The only clue to the location was the “valley of the flowers”, and I suspect that that would have been a fairly common-place name in many cultures around that time. Unless, of course, the remainder of the fragment Bartholomew found contained some other information that we don’t have.’

  ‘You mean what’s printed in that guidebook isn’t the whole translation?’

  ‘No.’ Mayhew struggled briefly against his restraints. It was no good — he was held fast. ‘If you read the section, you can see that what’s contained is only the part of the text that Bartholomew showed to Oliver. He must have kept the rest of it hidden somewhere. Oliver spent quite a lot of his time in later life looking for the original, and that’s the reason for all the damaged walls in the house. He was certain there was a hidden passage or panel somewhere that held the Persian parchment.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. It’s well established that Bartholomew did find a piece of parchment, and that it subsequently vanished. But whether it’s hidden somewhere here in the house or locked away in a bank safety deposit box we know nothing about, or even got destroyed in the last eighty-odd years, is another matter entirely.’

  The man tightened the grip on the scourge. ‘Give me your best guess.’

  ‘I think it’s probably hidden here somewhere. Bartholomew was planning another expedition when he died, apparently, and he would have wanted the entire text available to him. He might have thought that there were still clues hidden in it, and he would probably have studied the text regularly.’

  ‘If it was parchment, handling it all the time wouldn’t have been such a sharp idea, though, would it?’

  Mayhew took a breath that sounded — even to him — like a sob. ‘But if he sealed the parchment in a plastic bag or mounted it between a couple of sheets of glass, and kept it away from moisture and sunlight, it would have lasted quite well. And he would also have made a copy of the text and kept that to hand. And I still think he would have kept it here, somewhere. It wouldn’t have been convenient to keep it in a bank, and it was a very precious and important relic for Bartholomew.’ Mayhew sighed. ‘But I’ve no idea where you’d start looking.’

  ‘That’s not bad,’ the man said, looking at Mayhew keenly. ‘Oliver told me the parchment did fall apart, several years ago. He also told me his father made a copy of the text before that happened.’

  ‘Oliver Wendell-Carfax told you?’ Mayhew whispered, an appalling realization suddenly crowding into his brain.

  The man nodded, a slight smile playing over his lips. Then he picked up the whip and walked across to the chair Mayhew was sitting in. This time he stepped behind the chair. The wooden back was tall and reached almost up to Mayhew’s neck.

  ‘Bend forward,’ he ordered, ‘or I’ll whip you twice.’

  Mayhew muttered something inaudible, then bent forward, his whole body trembling in anticipation of the agony to come.

  Instantly, the man swung the scourge down, opening up a line of new wounds on his prisoner’s back.

  Mayhew screamed again, as the man lashed his back a second time.

  ‘You said you’d only hit me once,’ Mayhew protested, between sobs of pain.

  ‘I make the rules,’ the man said simply, sitting down again, his voice still calm and controlled. ‘Now I need to know what else you found here. You’ve had all week to explore this place. What did you discover?’

  Mayhew shook his head, the pain of the lashes across his chest and back still clouding his mind. ‘We didn’t-’ he began, but the stranger again picked up the whip.

  ‘Wait, wait,’ Mayhew stammered desperately. ‘We did find something. It wasn’t much, but-’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of its value. Just tell me what it was.’

  ‘The vessel. The first-century pottery jar that the parchment had been sealed inside. We found that — at least we think we did — up in the attic. It was in pieces. Bartholomew broke it when he tried to remove the parchment.’

  ‘Who found it? And where is it now?’

  ‘One of our ceramic specialists — Angela Lewis — took it away with her.’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  Sobbing, Mayhew described Angela and told the man where she lived and worked, and then fell silent. He’d apologise to her when he next saw her, he told himself. For now it was a matter of survival.

  ‘Did you find anything else?’

  Mayhew nodded miserably. ‘Chris Bronson — Angela’s former husband — found a small leather box full of papers, mainly notes Bartholomew had written. Angela said they were expedition records, that kind of thing, and a few bills and receipts.’

  ‘And she took them away with her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was silence as the man stared at Mayhew. ‘Anything else?’ he asked at last.

  ‘No, nothing to do with Bartholomew’s treasure hunt.’

  The man nodded and picked up the scourge again.

  ‘No more, please,’ Mayhew begged him. ‘No more. I can’t take it.’

  The man walked over to the kitchen sink, ran the cold tap and washed away the sticky drying blood from the leather thongs. He dried the scourge carefully on a tea towel and tucked it away in his jacket pocket, then shrugged the garment on to his shoulders.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mayhew croaked.

  The man turned back and looked down at him. ‘You have done your best to help me, I think, and so I shall be merciful.’

  He pulled a small bottle from another pocket of his jacket and
unscrewed the stopper.

  ‘What’s that?’ Mayhew asked, his voice trembling with fear.

  ‘It’s holy water, nothing more.’

  The man dabbed a little of the water on to the tip of his right forefinger and traced the sign of a cross on Mayhew’s forehead. Then he replaced the bottle in his pocket and strode back to the table.

  He turned to face Mayhew, crossed himself and softly intoned ‘In nomine padre, filii et spiritu sancti.’ Then he picked up the pistol and aimed it at Mayhew’s chest.

  ‘No, no! Wait! Please wait! I’ll do anything. Don’t kill me. Please.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Begging is undignified, and, in any case, I have no option. You’ve seen my face.’

  ‘No! I’ll do whatever you want me to do. Please! I’ll never tell anyone anything about you. And why didn’t you wear a mask?’

  The man shook his head again. ‘I would never hide my face. I believe God’s work should always be done openly.’

  ‘God’s work?’ Mayhew whispered incredulously, as the man took careful aim and squeezed the trigger.

  Mayhew’s body shook with the impact of the bullet. He remained upright for a couple of seconds, then slumped forwards lifelessly.

  The man walked over, felt for a pulse but found nothing. Then he turned and looked out of the window. His next step was clear. He’d go to London and find the woman who was also hunting for the treasure. His treasure.

  24

  For a few seconds, Angela stared at the page of text displayed on the computer screen in front of her, then glanced down at the copious notes she’d made on her laptop. She stood up, stretched her arms above her head and rotated her shoulder joints, trying to work the kinks out of her muscles.

  She realized she’d been working on the computer for almost four hours without a break — once she got her teeth into any project, she tended to become remarkably single-minded about it. She needed to take a short walk, let her eyes relax for a few minutes and maybe grab a cup of coffee.

  Twenty minutes later she sat back at her desk, put down her mug and took another bite of the salad sandwich she’d bought at a delicatessen a few dozen yards down Great Russell Street, across the road from the museum.

  She still wasn’t entirely certain, but the references she’d uncovered were beginning to make sense, and a tantalizing hypothesis was starting to take shape. The ‘treasure of the world’ seemed to be almost a code phrase that had echoed through the last two millennia, and appeared to refer to something quite specific. Exactly what was meant by the expression, Angela still didn’t know, but there were one or two hints, and it did seem to be an ancient relic of considerable importance.

  She also started to search backwards. Instead of looking for further first-century references to the ‘treasure of the world’, she’d started at the other end of time, trying to find much more recent documents that contained the expression. Her rationale was that if she found a reference to that expression in a later book or manuscript, there might well be a note about where the author of the work had found the phrase, and that would enable her to establish a trail back through the historical record, to back-track the references to the relic. Hopefully, each mention of the expression would amplify her knowledge and narrow down the search area — always assuming there was still something left to search for.

  She’d consulted a wide range of late-medieval books without finding any reference to the phrase, and almost as an after-thought she’d decided to check the contents of a number of grimoires — a grimoire was essentially a textbook of magic. She wondered if that might be worth doing simply because, although such books mainly contained nonsensical spells, curses and incantations, they also often drew on a wide range of earlier sources.

  The third grimoire she looked at was the Liber Juratus, also known as The Sworne Booke of Honorius, the Liber Sacer and the Liber Sacratus, a medieval grimoire written in Latin that dated from the thirteenth century. The original text had vanished long, long ago, but two fourteenth-century copies had survived, and the vast British Museum database had a scanned copy of the Latin text, as well as a copy of the only known English translation of the work.

  Angela’s Latin was reasonable, so she’d carried out a full scan of the Latin text using the search string thesaurus mundi, which she thought was close enough to the expression ‘the treasure of the world’. That produced no results, so she altered the search term to arcarum mundi, and that generated two hits, not as part of any spell, but just in a passage that described a number of hidden relics. The author of the grimoire imbued one of these lost objects with the most extraordinary abilities, claiming that it could confer incredible power on its owner. From what Angela had found out so far, she had assumed that the hidden treasure was simply gold or silver or some other object of high intrinsic value, but the passage definitely suggested that whatever it was had magical properties.

  The book also hinted that although the object’s hiding place was still unknown, it was most likely somewhere in the Middle East. According to Angela’s quick translation, it was described as ‘hidden most cunningly in the gorge of the blooms’, a location that sounded close enough to the ‘valley of flowers’. Unfortunately, the grimoire gave no indication of the country in which the ‘gorge of the blooms’ might be found and, as far as she could tell, the writer was apparently copying the information from an earlier, but unnamed, source.

  Although thesaurus translated as ‘treasure’ or ‘hoard’, and could also refer to a place where valuables were stored, like a ‘treasury’, the Latin word arcarum had a much wider and more general meaning. Depending on the context — which in Latin meant analysing the declension of the other nouns and the tenses of the verbs clustered at the end of the sentence — it could mean a box, a chest, a strong-box, a coffer, wealth, money, a coffin or a bier, or even a cell or cage. And there was one other possible meaning of the word that came as a complete surprise, and opened up both a whole new field of thought and a tantalizing possibility.

  Excited now, Angela started checking texts that dated from the fifth to the tenth centuries AD, finding sufficient references to convince her she was on the right track.

  She glanced at her watch: it was already after five in the afternoon. She copied all the documents and references she’d looked at on to a memory stick, copied them on to her laptop, which she shut down, then switched off the screen of her desktop PC — most of the museum’s computer systems ran all the time — and locked her office.

  Chris was coming to her apartment that evening and they were going out for a meal together. She wanted to make sure she looked her best.

  25

  ‘OK,’ Chris Bronson said, leaning back in his chair. They were sitting over an after-dinner pot of coffee in a small Italian restaurant a few streets away from Angela’s apartment in Ealing. ‘Let’s look at it like a police investigation. What’s your evidence?’

  Angela leaned towards him, her brown eyes shining in the candlelight. ‘We know about Bartholomew’s Folly — at least, we know what’s printed in the Carfax Hall guidebook and what Jonathan Carfax told us. I also told you I recognized the reference to the “treasure of the world” on the parchment that old Bartholomew found, and I was right — the same expression was used on the Hillel fragment. In fact, both appeared to be copies of the same source document. The only difference was that the parchment Bartholomew found is written in Persian, and the Hillel piece is in Hebrew, but the text is virtually identical on both.’

  Bronson nodded, happy to see Angela so excited. ‘What else did you find?’

  ‘I looked at a thirteenth-century grimoire — that’s a kind of ancient magician’s sourcebook of spells and incantations — and I found the same expression there. It even suggested the treasure was hidden in the “gorge of the blooms”, which is close enough to the “valley of the flowers” to suggest it’s referring to the same treasure, hidden in the same place.’

  ‘But you still don’t know which country?’
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  Angela put her hand on his. ‘No. That’s the downside. But I plugged away, going back through all the ancient texts I could find, because I thought there might be some really old source document that other authors had copied from over the centuries, and if I could find that, I hoped it might tell us where we should start looking.’ She paused, and Chris raised his eyebrows, so she continued.

  ‘I started with De Administrando Imperio. That’s a really long letter written in Greek by the tenth-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII to his son, the future Emperor Romanus II, telling him how to run an empire. As far as we know, it was never intended to be published — it was just a private letter. I found a single reference in that text to an important treasure that was supposed to be “hidden in the valley”, which I agree isn’t an exact correlation with the other references. I also checked the translation of a tenth-century geography book written in Persian and called Hudud al-Alam, which translates as “The Limits of The World”.’ She looked at Bronson. ‘Following me so far?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he said. ‘Just don’t question me too closely afterwards. And I hope you aren’t expecting me to remember any of this,’ he muttered.

  Angela laughed. ‘Point taken. The Hudud al-Alam described what was then known about the entire world, and its author divided the world into three areas — Asia, Europe and Libya, by which he almost certainly meant the whole of Africa — and described the geography, the people, the languages, the food, and so on. In the section dealing with Asia, I found a phrase very similar to those I’d looked at before. One section referred to “the treasure of the world” and described it as being hidden in a place of stone located in a high valley.’

  ‘But still no mention of where the hell the place is?’ Bronson said, sounding frustrated.

  ‘No, and that’s probably because the author didn’t know either. It’s generally accepted that he was just regurgitating chunks of information he’d gleaned from earlier works. And I found similar references in other books that dated from the tenth century. I then went back about half a millennium to the sixth century and a man named Procopius of Caesarea. He left a manuscript known as the Anecdota, which means “unpublished things” and which is today normally referred to as the “Secret History”, and there’s a mention in that of a treasure hidden in the valley of the flowers. But, just like the other writers, he doesn’t give any helpful details, like in which country the valley’s located.’