The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  The one thing missing from the office was the document ledger that one of the other retired members of the notary’s staff claimed should have been there. But stealing a book that served no purpose other than to record the arrival and disposition of legal papers and other documents handled by the notary made no sense. As the former member of staff had explained to the local newspaper, the information recorded in the hand-written ledger was duplicated on the local area network, the office computer system. The notary had been old-fashioned, however, and insisted on a paper record too, because he fundamentally distrusted computers.

  According to information the blogger had obtained, the gendarmes had summoned an IT specialist, who had sat in front of one of the office computers and read every single entry in the file containing the ledger’s data. The process took almost a whole day, and at the end of it he’d found nothing significant. Certainly nothing that appeared to provide even the smallest possible sliver of a motive for murder.

  So it didn’t look as if the ledger had been taken because of a piece of information it contained. And nor, the former clerk maintained, was the book itself of any value. Almost identical ledgers were readily available from most commercial stationers.

  The gendarmes had apparently given a collective Gallic shrug, mentally marked the case as unsolved and pencilled it in as a cold case until such time as some villain turned up at a gendarmerie and admitted that he’d done it. Nobody seemed to think that was a very likely outcome.

  The office, the blogger stated, remained a crime scene pending a full forensic examination. The broken door had been fixed and bright yellow tape was secured across the door and windows bearing the legend BARRAGE DE POLICE – NE PAS TRAVERSER in heavy black lettering. He included a couple of pictures of the office and the tape in his blog.

  And that was all the Zeru people needed. It was in about the right location, and it was exactly the kind of anomalous event they had been looking for.

  Chapter 11

  Languedoc, France

  ‘So now you think he was just a tourist?’ Angela asked.

  Contrary to Bronson’s expectation, the youngish-looking man who had followed them all the way up to Montségur, and then all the way down, had disappeared from view when they had returned to the chambre d’hôte to retrieve the hire car, and he had not been in evidence when they visited one of the restaurants in the village below the castle for dinner.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Or perhaps he was watching us from a distance and just followed us to the restaurant and then back to the chambre d’hôte but kept out of sight. Maybe he’s somewhere behind us now. There are about half a dozen cars following us, quite well spread out. Or maybe he’s not. I don’t know,’ Bronson said again. ‘But I do have the distinct feeling that we’re being watched, and not just by the idiot driver behind us.’

  He glanced thoughtfully at the Peugeot’s interior mirror. The closest car following them was, as was usual in France in Bronson’s experience, holding position about three feet behind the rear bumper of his hire car, apparently desperate to overtake on the narrow twisting road, but the driver looked very clearly female. Either that or he was a small, slim male undergoing a serious gender identity crisis, if the cascade of blonde curls outlining a tanned face dominated by bright red lips was any indication. But his or her irritation was also obvious.

  ‘I do know that he’s not right behind us,’ Bronson said, ‘unless he’s lost a lot of height and weight and changed his sex. And taken an angry pill. But we’ve no idea who we should be looking for, because mounting surveillance isn’t something that can be done by just one person. You need a team of something like six people as a minimum, typically two in a car, one on a motorbike and three on foot to cover all the possibilities. Plus you need another team the same size, with different vehicles, to take over from the first team at some point, and maybe a third team as well. There might be half a dozen people in the cars behind us, all part of the same surveillance team.’

  ‘So you don’t know?’

  ‘That is what I said,’ Bronson replied, ‘but the real question is why anyone would want to tail us. You still haven’t really explained why what we’re doing over here would attract attention.’

  ‘Ah,’ Angela said. ‘There could be some competition, shall we say.’

  ‘By all means say that. Ideally you can then tell me precisely what you mean and what you think is going on. And the other thing you could do is explain where we’re supposed to be going right now, because all you’ve told me is to drive to Toulouse, which is what I’m doing.’

  ‘OK,’ Angela said. ‘Well, the first thing is that we’re not actually going to Toulouse. We’re going through Toulouse, or rather around it on the local ring road, the périphérique, and then continuing out to the west.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Bronson said. ‘We’re heading for Auch. That’s west of Toulouse and you mentioned the cathedral there.’

  ‘Exactly. I also mentioned several other things, including a plague of haemorrhoids, and they’re connected – indirectly, I’ll admit – to Auch Cathedral. The reason we’re in France is because of those documents I received from the Sorbonne. I can’t read one of them at all, and I’ll tell you about that later. But I recognised that another of them was written in Occitan, and I had it translated for me. One of the great things about working in the British Museum is the number of experts we have in all sorts of disciplines, including linguistics. Anyway, in that document, which was probably part of a medieval journal, there was a reference to the greatest of all the lost treasures of antiquity. In Occitan it was called the Arc de l’Alianca, and the French refer to it as the Arche de l’Alliance.’

  ‘The Ark of the Covenant?’ Bronson replied. ‘Do you know, I kind of guessed it was something like that, after our brief visit to Axum last year when we didn’t find it where the entire population of Ethiopia believes it has been kept for centuries. You are serious about this?’

  ‘I’m perfectly serious. The document stated that the Ark was the Cathar treasure the four perfecti smuggled out of Montségur just before the end of the siege. And that makes some sense out of what happened on the mountain. The non-Cathars voluntarily took the consolamentum perfecti, knowing that they would die in the flames a few days later. That means they must have been given an utterly convincing religious reason to do so. And the sight of the Ark of the Covenant might have been enough.

  ‘Think about it. It was a holy relic that had been created in accordance with the word of God one and a half millennia before Christianity had even been invented. It had been constructed to God’s own specifications to hold the decalogue, the stone tablets listing the Ten Commandments, which were God’s instructions to humanity. It was also supposed to be a device for talking to God and for God to make his own voice heard. I’d say that was a pretty impressive religious relic, wouldn’t you? Something with infinitely more authority than some local priest standing in a pulpit and spouting the usual platitudes.’

  Bronson glanced at her. ‘Do you believe all that stuff? Moses climbing up Mount Sinai to collect the Commandments and then constructing the Ark to carry the tablets? And God addressing the faithful from the gold lid of a wooden box?’

  Angela grinned at him. ‘What you and I believe or don’t believe is irrelevant. It’s what the Cathars believed that matters. And just as a point of order, according to the Hebrew Bible it wasn’t Moses who constructed the Ark but a man named Bezalel, assisted by another chap called Oholiab and a team of craftsmen, all working under Moses’s direction and to God’s design. But to answer your question, no, I don’t believe any of it, from the existence of God downwards. I’m a scientist and I’m rational, and there’s no room for any kind of supreme being in my universe. You can trace the origins of the Ten Commandments right back into Hittite and Mesopotamian customs and laws. They were nothing more than rules of conduct that most civilised people would accept as being a fairly normal and moral way to live.

  ‘But to g
o back to the Cathars. They were gnostics, and they didn’t want, need or accept the hierarchy of the Church. They believed that if you wanted to pray to God, that was what you did: you knelt down and prayed to God. There was no need for a priest or a church, and certainly not some old man elected by a bunch of other old men and sitting on a throne in the Vatican, a long, long way from the country where the Christian religion began. The Ark was supposed to allow God to communicate with you and the other way round, so as far as the Cathars were concerned, it was the ultimate confirmation of their belief system. It was so much more than a wooden box covered in gold. It was an object that negated the entire apparatus and hierarchy and endemic corruption of the Catholic Church by its very existence. At that time and in that religious climate, I can absolutely see how it would have inspired utter devotion and persuaded people to convert to the religious order that possessed it, irrespective of the consequences.’

  ‘I get all that,’ Bronson said, still keeping a wary eye on the woman in the car behind him and wondering on which blind bend she’d next try and overtake, ‘but you still haven’t told me why we’re here. There are enough written references to the Ark of the Covenant throughout history to suggest it was a real object, and I can believe that it was the treasure that the Cathars smuggled out of Montségur in 1244, but so what? How do you know if it still exists? It was basically only a wooden box. And if it is still in one piece, do you know where it is now, or how to find it?’

  Angela smiled at him. ‘Not exactly,’ she said, ‘but one of the documents that Élisabeth d’Hautpoul refused to hand over to her siblings and entrusted to her local notary is both hand-written and encoded. That almost certainly means it’s not a family document, because there would be no point in enciphering something like that. More interestingly, the text has a title, of a sort: the three letters A, D and A, each followed by a full stop, which suggests they might be abbreviations. One of the other papers refers to the A. D. A. quête or quest, and to the piste d’indice, which I’m sure you know is nothing to do with skiing.’

  ‘It’s not,’ Bronson confirmed. ‘It means something like a trail of clues, that kind of thing, which would link up with the idea of a quest, I suppose.’

  ‘And there’s something else,’ Angela added. ‘At the bottom of the page of encrypted text is a rough sketch showing an oblong shape like a box.’

  ‘Which could be anything,’ Bronson pointed out. ‘Not necessarily the Ark.’

  ‘You’re right, except for one other detail. This box – assuming that’s what it represents – has a lid. All the descriptions of the Ark state that the lid was gold, probably solid gold – unlike the box itself, which was made of acacia wood and then covered with gold plating – and was decorated with two cherubim. The lid was known as the kapporet, which is usually translated as “mercy seat”. There are no more detailed descriptions than this, so it’s not clear if the two cherubim were depicted as standing or kneeling, which would be more respectful.’

  ‘Remind me,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘What’s a cherubim?’

  ‘It’s not an “it” but a “they”, to be pedantic,’ Angela replied. ‘The singular form is “cherub”, and according to biblical sources like the Book of Ezekiel, they’re tetramorphs, meaning they incorporate four different elements or characteristics. Traditionally they were shown with four faces, those of a lion, an ox, an eagle and a man, representing, respectively, wild animals, domestic animals, birds and the human race, and they also had two pairs of wings and, usually, cloven hooves like a bull. They were really important entities. In both Abrahamic and Islamic literature, they’re angels of the highest rank, the closest to God. That’s presumably why they were chosen to ornament the cover of the Ark, so that God would appear or speak with a cherub on either side of him.’

  ‘I thought a cherub was supposed to be a plump naked boy with wings,’ Bronson said. ‘Not these four-faced characters ambling about on bull’s legs.’

  Angela grinned. ‘Another example of the way things change. In ancient classical art, there was a being called a putto, a naked winged male child, which represented some aspects of the profane. In the Baroque period, the putto changed and became a kind of representative of the omnipresent God, a symbol meaning that God was there even if you couldn’t see him. And later in Western Christianity this figure became known as a cherub. God was rarely depicted, but the angels who served him were, so cherubim became quite common in Western religious art, with a completely different meaning to their original function.’

  ‘You were talking about the drawing?’ Bronson reminded her. ‘The lid?’

  ‘Oh, yes. So the lid of the Ark, the kapporet, had two cherubim on it. Most depictions of the Ark show them facing each other and kneeling, their wings extended forwards, almost meeting. If you saw the Indiana Jones film, the way the Ark is shown in that is the most common representation. Those with standing cherubim are rarer. Anyway, the sketch that I’ve got shows the oblong that could be a box with two lumps on the lid that look like this.’

  Angela clenched her fists, pressed her hands together at the knuckles, then raised and crooked her thumbs to point at each other. It was surprisingly graphic, and Bronson knew immediately what she meant.

  ‘I get it. Two cherubim kneeling down, facing each other, with their wings outstretched. But is that what it really shows, or are you seeing more than is there?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s not a big drawing and it’s not that clear, but that’s what it looks like to me. And there’s also the A. D. A. title and the encrypted text.’

  ‘So,’ Bronson said, ‘what are we doing in this part of France? Do you think the Ark is hidden somewhere here?’

  ‘No. I think it was here, but it’s long gone now.’

  The road straightened for a few dozen yards and the angry-looking woman in the Renault behind them swept past with a roar of her engine and a blast from her horn, presumably intended to let Bronson know that he was driving much too slowly, even though he was cruising along at pretty much the legal limit.

  ‘I’d forgotten that speed limits over here were more of a target than a restriction,’ he said, as another French-plated car moved into position a few feet behind them and again far too close for comfort. Or safety. ‘So this is the start of the hunt?’

  Angela shook her head. ‘Yes and no, really. Yes, it’s the start of our search but not where the Ark started its journey. I think it travelled a long way to get here, and then continued its journey to somewhere else, somewhere very different. But I wanted to see Montségur and I wanted you to see it as well. And I needed to explain what information I had so you could decide if we were just wasting our time even starting the search.’

  ‘You could have told me all this earlier,’ Bronson complained.

  ‘I wasn’t sure you’d believe me without getting a feel for the place.’

  ‘I’m not sure I believe you now, but I’m prepared to give it a go. You’ve obviously got some idea about where we should be looking. What does the encrypted document say?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t managed to crack the coding yet. I thought you could give me a hand.’

  Bronson was silent for a few seconds, mulling over what Angela had just said.

  ‘So all you’ve actually got is an idea, a small, indistinct sketch of something that might be the Ark and a sheet of paper covered in writing that you can’t read.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, nodding happily. ‘But everybody has to start somewhere.’

  ‘Quite,’ Bronson replied.

  Chapter 12

  The same day they received the information about the Limoux notary, a three-man team from Zeru flew direct from Jerusalem’s Ben Gurion Airport to Blagnac at Toulouse, arriving just before half past ten in the evening. They picked up a pre-booked hire car and reached Limoux at around one in the morning.

  They parked their hired Renault about a hundred yards from the office on the Rue des Remparts and made their way on foot to the building, all
of them pulling on latex gloves as they walked. One of the three was an expert locksmith, but in the event his services were barely needed. The lock securing the side door of the office was a standard Yale type, which surrendered in less than ten seconds to a slim torsion wrench and a snap gun, a device designed to nudge the pins out of the keyway.

  ‘You could have done this yourselves,’ Aaron Chason said quietly as the door swung open and they dodged below the police tape and stepped inside. He was a short, dark man with a heavy black beard atop a stocky body that looked as if it would develop a hunch in a few years. ‘All you needed to get inside was ten seconds with a credit card.’

  ‘Enough. We didn’t know what we were facing. You were our insurance policy.’

  The speaker was the leader of the group, Josef Gellerman. Tall, slim and clean-shaven, with light brown hair and blue eyes, he looked anything but Israeli; more Scandinavian than anything else. It was a useful natural camouflage.

  ‘Watch the road outside while we work,’ he ordered, gently pushing the door closed until the lock clicked shut.

  Chason nodded and moved over to the window that offered the best view both ways along the Rue des Remparts.

  The third member of the group, Lemuel Dayan, using a small pocket torch with the lens taped to reduce the amount of light it emitted, had already sat down in front of one of the office computers and switched it on. Now he waited for the operating system to load.

  ‘Is there a password?’ Gellerman asked.