The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  ‘I thought frequency analysis would crack a substitution cipher?’

  ‘It can, but the crucial word in that sentence is the one you didn’t include: single. So if it was a basic Caesar cipher with the ciphertext shifted three places to the right, for example, the plaintext letter B would be replaced by the ciphertext letter E, and so on. But with a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, multiple ciphertexts would be used, so a different letter would be generated each time. And the longer the keyword, the more alphabets would be used to encrypt the text.’

  ‘Like a Vigenère cipher, you mean?’

  ‘You have done your research. But if we’re looking at a Vigenère cipher here, I have no idea how we’d crack it. It’s way beyond my level of competence.’

  ‘Such as it is,’ Angela suggested.

  ‘Yes. Such as it is,’ Bronson agreed. ‘Thank you for that.’

  ‘No trouble. So what do we do? Give up and forget about it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I was just pointing out the reality of the situation as I see it.’

  ‘We don’t know when this was encrypted,’ Angela said, ‘but we do know that it was one of the documents Élisabeth d’Hautpoul entrusted to her notary. She was born in the mid eighteenth century and lived in the family home, Hautpoul Castle at Rennes-le-Château, until 1816, when she sold it. She died four years later. We don’t know when she handed over the family papers, but it was probably late in the eighteenth century or early in the nineteenth, and the notary made his statement about not surrendering the documents in 1870. I don’t think she was the author of this, because she suggested getting the papers deciphered, so presumably it was created by somebody else decades or centuries earlier.’

  ‘I see where you’re going with that,’ Bronson said. ‘If the document related to the Ark of the Covenant, then most likely the text would have been written at about the same time as Montségur fell. In that case, the text probably dates from the mid to late thirteenth century, and that was about three centuries before the Vigenère cipher was developed. So if that dating is right, whatever encryption method was used couldn’t have been polyalphabetic substitution, because the technique didn’t exist at that time.’

  ‘That was what I thought. There are a lot of assumptions in that argument, but it does make sense based on what we know of the timeline. I think we can discount the Vigenère cipher. This has to be something a lot simpler than that. The other complication is that we don’t know the language of the plaintext. There are three possibilities. It could be Latin, probably the medieval variant, because that was the commonest written language in Europe at that time; Middle French, which was beginning to be spoken in the country; or lenga d’òc, Occitan, the language of the region.’

  Bronson nodded. ‘So now all we need to do is work out how the encryption was done, decrypt it and then translate the plaintext into a language we both understand. It sounds easy,’ he added, ‘if you say it quickly.’

  Chapter 16

  Rome, Italy

  Marco Ferrara had never been particularly good at following detailed orders. At achieving whatever task he was given, yes, but not at being micro-managed and told what he could and could not do. He preferred the broad sweep of a plain and simple command, ideally a one-liner. And, frankly, some of what Cardinal Julius Caravaggio had quite explicitly told him to do, or not to do, really didn’t make sense.

  For example, the prohibition against printing any of the data on the thumb drive. Ferrara would agree that printing some of the information would be an extremely bad idea if that printed matter then got into the hands of the media or somebody hostile to the Catholic Church. But if he decided to print some of the Hautpoul documents to study in private, that would make no difference at all. After all, any academic walking into the Bibliothèque Serpente in Paris would be able to read any of the papers. And Ferrara had a shredder to dispose of the evidence afterwards.

  So that was what he did.

  He didn’t print everything, because even a cursory inspection of the scanned papers on the screen of his laptop showed him very clearly that much of the material was utterly irrelevant to his task. When he had studied all the documents that did seem relevant, he was left with only a handful of papers; and of those, only two seemed significant.

  The first was what appeared to be a page torn from a diary or journal describing an event that had occurred shortly before the siege of Montségur ended. That was accompanied by a translation, presumably produced by a linguist at the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei, that showed Cardinal Caravaggio had been right.

  What the author of the document stated was that the Arche de l’Alliance, the fabled Ark of the Covenant, had been in the possession of the Cathars during the siege of Montségur. It had been removed from the fortress under the cover of night by four of the perfecti just before the siege and the truce ended. But it didn’t explain where the Ark had been taken after that, except to a place of safety. The text referred to a document described as velat in Occitan – a word that had been translated as ‘coded’ or ‘veiled’ – and stated that the place of safety, and the subsequent route taken by the Ark, was described in that document.

  And that document, Ferrara had no doubt, was the hand-written sheet that had also been copied and stored on the thumb drive, a sheet containing a solid block of encrypted text. He had many skills, but cryptography wasn’t one of them, so he folded the two sheets of paper – the encrypted text and the translation of the Occitan journal page – into small oblongs that he tucked away in his wallet, and shredded everything else he’d printed.

  He glanced at his watch and grabbed his carry-on bag. It was nearly thirteen hundred kilometres by road from Rome to Toulouse. That meant a full twelve hours’ driving at least, which luckily was autostrade in Italy and autoroutes once across the French border for almost the entire journey. Ferrara had no option but to travel by car because of what he was carrying in his bag. Trying to get even a largely plastic pistol like a Glock 17 onto an aircraft would hardly be possible, and the two boxes of ammunition he was carrying would show up on an X-ray screen like the testicles of a canine. The car was his only viable option.

  The delay in joining the hunt didn’t really matter. Luca Rossi was already on the spot, directing a small team of undercover surveillance people tasked with keeping ‘David’ in view at all times.

  The real identity of ‘David’ had been a surprise to Ferrara. He’d been mentally anticipating an interfering English academic, a man with a talent for sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted, and when he’d opened the file labelled ‘David.docx’, he at first assumed it was a mistake and an incorrect picture had been included.

  But when he read the brief biography of the target, he remembered a couple of stories he’d heard about an individual whose interference had embarrassed the Church in the past, and something of what he recalled fell into place. He also realised why Caravaggio – if he had been the person responsible – had chosen the name David.

  Assumptions were always dangerous, and Ferrara had made one when Caravaggio had been talking to him at the cafe in the back streets of Rome, an assumption that had fuelled his mental image of the person he’d been told to follow, rob and ultimately kill.

  Any name conveyed more than just a label, a basic identity. Being told about a female called Sabrina or Roxanne produced an entirely different mental image to that of a woman named Agnes or Ethel, just as a man named David would appear very different to a male called Spike in the imagination of most people. David had sounded like the name of a scientist or academic, but irrespective of the image Ferrara had conjured up, he had had no doubt that he would be dealing with a man.

  But the David.docx file showed the degree of obfuscation Caravaggio or somebody else within the offices of the CDF had applied to this particular person, because not only was ‘David’ not the sort of man Ferrara had imagined, he wasn’t even a man at all.

  He was actually a woman, a woman with blonde hair, blue ey
es and an arresting curve to her lips that made it look – at least in the photograph – as if she was on the verge of a smile. The only thing Ferrara had guessed right was that she was an academic. Her name was Angela Lewis, and her beauty was undeniable and obvious. He would have no problem carrying out Caravaggio’s instructions and murdering her – his first allegiance was and always had been to the Mother Church – but nobody had told him to do it quickly. He saw no particularly good reason why he couldn’t find somewhere quiet and really take his time. The end result would be the same, but it would just be a kind of personal bonus.

  There was a smile on his face as he stowed his carry-on bag in the boot of his two-year-old Alfa Romeo MiTo and slid into the driver’s seat. He programmed the satnav, started the engine and pulled away from the kerb outside his apartment building in the Primavalle district of Rome, then began tracking west to pick up the A90 Circonvallazione Occidentale at the junction in Montespaccato.

  As he increased his speed, he was already planning which service areas he’d use to stop for fuel and coffee, and where he’d be able to find a hotel, because he would have to sleep, at least for a few hours, en route.

  Chapter 17

  Auch, Gascony, France

  It was a fine, warm evening, so rather than eat in the hotel, Bronson and Angela walked to the restaurant in the Place de la Libération and took a table outside. They finished their meal with coffee and sat for a few minutes enjoying the balmy evening air and watching handfuls of tourists and groups of locals walking the streets. Bronson checked for anyone paying them an unusual amount of attention, but saw nobody suspicious.

  Back at the hotel, Angela opened her laptop on the desk in their room and woke it up. As soon as she’d entered her PIN, she checked her email account, deleting a couple of obviously very sincere and completely honest requests for her help in transferring tens of millions of dollars out of Nigeria and into her own bank account on the sole condition that she give the money to a charity of her choice; and also a personalised offer to extend the length of her penis.

  ‘I mean,’ she muttered in irritation as she pressed the delete key, ‘my email address starts with Angela dot Lewis, and how many people called Angela have todgers, as you persist in calling them?’

  ‘There are some websites I’ve seen where almost all the alleged women are embarrassingly well equipped,’ Bronson said, ‘but I suspect that’s a bit of a niche market.’

  ‘I don’t want to know what you do in your spare time,’ she said, ‘and I especially don’t if it’s that kind of thing.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not guilty. It was part of an investigation into organised prostitution in Kent. We had to look at some very unusual images.’

  ‘I’ll bet you enjoyed that. In fact, if you… Oh.’ She broke off in mid sentence. ‘I don’t like the sound of this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s an email from George Anderson. You know, the chap working at the Sorbonne. Since the Hautpoul documents arrived at the Bibliothèque Serpente, two researchers have turned up there asking to look at those papers.’

  ‘So what? Academics do research all the time. It’s more or less a job description for most of them.’

  ‘That’s not the point. The first was a visiting Italian professor from the Università di Bologna named Angelo Romano, and the second was an Israeli historian called Israel Mahler, from Tel Aviv University.’

  ‘That’s probably a bit unusual. Why would the history of an obscure French family attract the attention of an Italian academic? And for an Israeli to be interested is even more unlikely.’

  ‘That’s still not the point. Because of something that happened, George decided to do a bit of checking. It turns out that the Università di Bologna have nobody on their staff called Angelo Romano and never have had, and you won’t be surprised to hear that Tel Aviv University denied all knowledge of Israel Mahler. I told you there might be a bit of competition over this, and that more or less proves it.’

  ‘You said something happened,’ Bronson said. ‘What was it?’

  ‘The man calling himself Romano was given access to the papers in a reading room and later walked out of the library with copies of all of them. Nothing unusual about that. But when this Mahler bloke turned up to do the same thing, George discovered that the sheet of encrypted text and the journal entry written in Occitan had disappeared. The obvious deduction is that Romano removed them. After all, it’s easy to extract two sheets of paper from a large pile of documents and then hide them.’

  ‘But surely the library would have copied papers they received, so I assume the Israeli was given copies of the copies, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘Oddly enough, no, because George got suspicious of Mahler and told him the staff were busy and hadn’t got around to doing that. So the Israeli – if he was an Israeli – had to leave empty-handed.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose,’ Bronson said. ‘But how the hell did anyone find out about this, and that the Hautpoul papers were at the Sorbonne? I’m amazed that two different people knew about it. Something must have happened that we don’t know about.’

  Angela shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea, but I don’t like it.’

  ‘Nor do I. I didn’t really take you seriously when you talked about there being competition, but I do now. I suggest you thank George and ask that he checks out any other wandering non-academics before they get inside the building. And you know what this means?’

  ‘Yes. We have to get that bloody page of text decrypted as quickly as we can, otherwise when we get to wherever the Ark is hidden, we might find somebody’s beaten us to it and the cupboard is bare.’

  ‘Exactly. So let’s get on with it.’

  Chapter 18

  Paris, France

  To say Josef Gellerman was irritated by his failure to obtain a copy of the encrypted document – which he was certain was the key to the recovery of the relic – barely even hinted at his anger. Based on what Anderson, the English academic, had told him, he was certain that the Italian professor was bogus and that he had abstracted both the encrypted paper and a sheet from a journal written in Occitan. Anderson had discovered the second document was also missing when he’d inspected the folio of papers while Gellerman was still in the building. The fact that he couldn’t remember the man’s name was irrelevant. There would be no way of finding the Italian because he would have been using an alias.

  Gellerman was used to playing catch-up, and he’d known from the start that he and his two companions were well behind the curve. By the time they’d heard about the break-in at the notary’s office in Limoux, the crime had already been a week old. That delay would have allowed the bogus professor – who had almost certainly been responsible for the robbery and the murder of the clerk – plenty of time to get to Paris, visit the Bibliothèque Serpente and see the Hautpoul papers.

  Gellerman was used to thinking laterally, approaching problems in a non-linear way, and there were two things he could do to try to resolve the situation. First, there was one possible method he could use to try to identify the Italian professor, and second, he’d had further thoughts about what Anderson had told him, and there was something he could do about that, too.

  Lemuel Dayan spoke workable though not fluent French, and among the half-dozen or so identification documents the man always carried with him, Gellerman knew there was one that would fit the bill nicely. While Dayan followed his instructions tomorrow, Gellerman would spend a short time back at the Bibliothèque Serpente, following a slightly different line of enquiry.

  Chapter 19

  Legino, Savona, Italy

  Marco Ferrara had got as far as Savona, roughly sixty kilometres beyond Genoa, before calling it a day and pulling off the E80 autostrada about an hour after the sun had sunk below the horizon in front of him.

  Rather than take pot luck, he’d booked a hotel room a couple of hours previously, when he’d stopped for a coffee and a snack. He’d chosen his destination
mainly because it was less than two kilometres from the nearest autostrada junction. It was a modern, square, white hotel located almost on the beach, with gardens that went right down to the sand, but Ferrara wasn’t there to laze in the sun.

  He’d had a drink in the bar and eaten a small plate of spaghetti marinara before returning to his room overlooking the Mediterranean and going to bed. He had wanted a decent sleep because of the long drive he would have the following day.

  He was awoken the next morning not by the alarm clock on his mobile, which he’d set the previous night, but by a text message on his burner phone.

  Like many people woken unexpectedly in a strange place, for a few moments he didn’t know where he was or what had disturbed his slumber.

  The first thing he did was check the time on his smartphone: 06:18. He knew the message would be important, because the only people who had the burner’s number were Julius Caravaggio and Francesco.

  He took a swig of water from the bottle he’d put beside the bed, rubbed his eyes and then opened the message. It was from Caravaggio.

  Urgent. Expedite. You have competition. Precaution: action David immediately. Follow trail yourself. Report soonest.

  He read it twice before it really sank in, then he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It wouldn’t change what he would do that day – he still had to get to Auch, where Rossi’s people were watching ‘David’ – but it would certainly affect what he would do when he reached his destination.

  Chapter 20

  Auch, Gascony, France

  Bronson and Angela had got precisely nowhere in trying to crack the cipher the previous evening. When it was quite obvious that that was the case, they’d given up, gone down to the hotel bar for a couple of nightcaps and then retired, slightly early, to bed.