by James Becker
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 assembly 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 alway
s 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.
‘And then, in about nine hundred and twenty BC, the Egyptian pharaoh, Shishaq, invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem. That was bad enough for Rehoboam, but what made it worse was that Shishaq had provided refuge to Jeroboam — Rehoboam’s bitter enemy — so his invasion was in support of his ally. And it’s known that to buy off Shishaq and the Egyptians, Rehoboam gave them all the treasures of the Temple.’
‘And that would presumably have included the Ark?’
‘Unless Rehoboam’s priests had managed to hide it somewhere else, yes. And if they’d managed to hide the Ark, why didn’t they also hide the other Temple treasures, which were known to have been seized by Shishaq?’
‘I see what you mean.’
Angela nodded. ‘The counter-argument, if you like, is that the Second Book of Chronicles states that the Ark was present in the Temple of Jerusalem in the reign of Josiah, between about six hundred and forty BC and six hundred and nine BC.’
‘So if you follow this line of reasoning, the story in the Bible about the Ark being seized and hidden in Tanis by Shishaq must be wrong?’
‘Not necessarily. The Bible is inaccurate about almost everything, but especially dates and anything that resembles an historical fact.’
‘So how do you know that the stuff about Shishaq is accurate?’
Angela smiled and sat back. ‘Simple. It’s not just in the Bible. The Egyptians were compulsive record-keepers, and Shishaq’s conquest of Judah is recorded there as well. What we have to do as a first step is to go and check on the only relevant primary sources that I know of. Untranslated primary sources, I mean.’
Their flight was being called, and Bronson stood up. ‘And where are these untranslated primary sources?’
‘The place I mentioned back in my flat: the bas-relief carvings in a small temple dedicated to Amun-Great-of-Roarings at el-Hiba. If I don’t find anything definite there, we may also have to trek a long way south to look at the Shishaq Relief on the Bubastis Portal. That’s outside the Temple of Amun at Karnak. But first, we must track down the man who has the paintings — Hassan al-Sahid.’
As Bronson and Angela vanished from sight, a tall dark-haired man stood up from his seat on the opposite side of the departure lounge. He strode across to the ground stewardess at the barrier and joined the end of the queue. When his turn came, he showed her his passport and handed over his boarding card. She tore off one section, handed the remainder back to him, and wished him a pleasant flight.
The man nodded and smiled at her, then followed the last of the passengers down the ramp and on to the aircraft.
29
Cairo airport had been a surprise. Bronson had been expecting a dusty, crowded and inefficient place, probably fairly ramshackle, but actually it was gleaming and ultramodern, a high-tech steel and glass cathedral dedicated to the needs of the international traveller.
Like all non-Egyptian nationals, they’d needed entry visas but had obviously not had enough time to obtain these before they left the UK. Fortunately, after a few minutes spent queuing at a booth in the t
erminal building, they were each sold a couple of stamps — entry and exit — that were then applied to a page in their passports. Then they queued again, at a different booth, to get the ‘entry’ visa stamped. That entitled them to fourteen days’ residence in Egypt.
After a short taxi ride they’d checked in to their hotel in the Heliopolis district on the north-eastern side of the city, not too far from the airport, grabbed a late snack at a local restaurant that was still serving food and then fallen into bed.
First thing the following morning Bronson borrowed a copy of the Cairo telephone directory from the reception desk and started looking for Hassan al-Sahid, only to find that al-Sahid was a fairly common name in the area, with about forty or fifty entries in the directory listings.
‘We need to narrow this down a bit,’ he observed. ‘Was there any indication in the stuff you got from Carfax Hall where al-Sahid might live?’
‘Hang on a second.’ Angela put her laptop — she’d bought a new machine at Heathrow and had transferred all her stored files and programs on to it while they’d waited for their flight to depart — on the table and switched it on. Then she flicked through the scanned images until she found the bill of sale for the paintings and magnified the appropriate section of it.
‘Here we are. It’s hand-written, so the address isn’t that clear, but I think it says he lives in Al-Gabal el-Ahmar, which I presume is a Cairo district or suburb.’
Angela spelt out the name and Bronson ran his finger down the appropriate page in the telephone directory.
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘no listings at all. Oh, just a second. Could it be spelt Al-Gebel al-Ahmar, not Al-Gabal el-Ahmar?’
Angela looked carefully at the image on her laptop. ‘It’s a bit blurred, but I suppose it could be.’
‘Right. If it is, then there are three al-Sahids there, one actually called Hassan, the second just with the initial “M” and the third named Suleiman.’ Bronson copied down their numbers and addresses, then closed the directory. ‘What we don’t know, of course, is whether Hassan al-Sahid is even alive after all this time, or whether he still lives in the same house. Do you want to telephone, or just turn up at the door?’
