The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  A bulky figure detached itself from the left-hand wall of the staircase and walked towards him.

  ‘Luca,’ Ferrara said in greeting, and extended his right arm towards him.

  ‘Marco,’ Rossi replied, shaking his hand. ‘Not seen you around for a while.’

  The two men had worked together in the past but had never been friends.

  ‘Right, where are they?’

  ‘In the hotel. It looks like they’ve settled in for the night, though they might still nip out for dinner. If they do, we’ll be right behind them.’

  ‘Who’s the man with the target?’ Ferrara asked.

  ‘No idea, unless he’s her husband.’

  ‘He’s not. She isn’t married.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. Well, we know he’s English because we’ve heard them talking, and he acts like a husband or a long-term boyfriend. They look very comfortable with each other.’

  ‘Describe him.’

  Rossi did his best to provide a verbal sketch of the man he and the team he’d recruited had been following.

  ‘He’s quite big and looks capable,’ he finished. ‘Like he would be handy in a fight.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter how big he is. A nine-millimetre will take him down just the same.’

  ‘I thought it was supposed to look like an accident.’

  ‘It will. That was just a figure of speech,’ Ferrara replied. ‘Right, let’s go up so I can see the hotel and maybe them as well. Where’s your car?’

  Rossi gestured behind him. ‘I left it in the square. It was only a short walk down here.’

  Ferrara nodded. ‘You can direct me,’ he said. ‘Get in.’

  He started the Alfa and pulled away from the kerb.

  ‘Just go straight on. Auch is built on a hill, and there’s a maze of narrow streets between the cathedral and the river. This might seem like a long way round, but it’s a lot faster than trying to reach the square by any other route. When you get to a set of traffic lights, turn hard right to go back on yourself. It’s a hairpin bend and there are no road signs at the junction from this direction. Typical of the bloody French.’

  The lights were green when they reached the junction, and Ferrara hauled the MiTo round in a tight turn to head straight up towards the centre of Auch. He noticed a sign on the corner as he did so: the road he was on led to the Centre Historique and the Cathédrale.

  ‘This is the Rue de Metz,’ Rossi said. ‘Keep going until you reach a Y-junction, and take the left fork to Mont de Marsan and the cathedral.’

  Ferrara nodded, and a couple of minutes later made the turn.

  ‘At the end of this stretch there’s another set of traffic lights. Bear right into the Rue d’Etigny. When you approach the top, find a parking space.’

  There were two spaces on the left near the end of the street. Ferrara waited until a car had driven past them on the other side of the road, and then pulled into one of them.

  ‘Very convenient,’ Rossi said, opening the passenger door and getting out. He gestured towards the stone building right behind Ferrara. ‘That’s the hotel where the targets are staying.’

  They walked away from the car and into the Place de la Libération. Rossi swept his right arm out to indicate the open space.

  ‘This is more or less it. The centre’s quite small and the best way to get around it is to find somewhere to park your car and then walk.’

  They were approaching a restaurant on their right when Rossi suddenly stopped and looked around him, then stared back towards the Rue d’Etigny.

  ‘What is it?’ Ferrara asked.

  ‘The car. I didn’t see the car.’

  ‘What, your car?’

  ‘No. The one the targets are using.’

  Rossi pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket and rang a number. Then he looked at the screen.

  ‘It’s gone straight to voicemail,’ he said. ‘Where the fuck is he?’

  ‘Where the fuck is who?’ Ferrara demanded.

  ‘Moretti. Stefano Moretti. He was supposed to be keeping watch in the hotel.’

  Ferrara stared at him, anger showing in his face, though his voice was quiet and restrained.

  ‘You can’t see the targets’ car and you can’t raise the idiot who was supposed to be watching them? Let me hazard a guess here. They’ve spotted your man, this Moretti, somehow disabled him and then got into their car and driven away.’

  Rossi didn’t reply, just dialled another number on his mobile.

  ‘Where are you?’ he said when his call was answered.

  Ferrara listened carefully to one side of the short conversation.

  ‘Have you heard from Moretti? He’s not answering his phone… Where are you now?… We need to meet… I don’t care. Meet me outside the hotel right now. Bring the others.’

  Rossi ended the call, glanced at his watch and looked at Ferrara.

  ‘One of them was supposed to relieve Moretti in the hotel in half an hour,’ he said. ‘They weren’t expecting to hear from him.’

  ‘So your men have lost both targets they – and you – were supposed to be watching?’

  Ferrara’s rage was obvious, and made more so by his completely calm and controlled voice.

  ‘We’ll check the hotel,’ Rossi said, and turned to walk back the way they’d come.

  In the hotel lobby, Ferrara walked to the reception desk, where he was unsurprised to discover that his ‘good friend’ Angela Lewis had checked out less than half an hour earlier. He also managed to glance at the computer screen while he was talking to the receptionist, and learned that Lewis’s companion was named Bronson, initial C.

  Rossi walked into the bar to look around and emerged quickly, having found no trace of Moretti.

  ‘So their car’s gone, and according to the receptionist, they’ve gone as well,’ Ferrara said as Rossi rejoined him. ‘Your man?’

  ‘No surprise, he’s not in the bar. But he has to be somewhere here. I’ll check the public rooms.’

  As they walked down the corridor towards the restaurant, they both heard a dull banging sound coming from somewhere nearby. Ferrara pushed open the door to the male lavatory and immediately identified its source.

  He held the door open for Rossi and pointed at the last stall, where somebody had obviously been locked inside. The occupant was trying to get out, banging or kicking the door, which had been secured by the shaft of a mop jamming the handle and preventing it from being opened.

  ‘Your man, I think,’ he said.

  Rossi muttered a curse, walked over to the stall and removed the mop. When he opened the door, Stefano Moretti, stark naked, peered at him from inside.

  ‘This had better be good,’ Rossi said, ‘or I’ll fucking well leave you in here.’

  * * *

  Getting Moretti out of the hotel hadn’t been as difficult as Ferrara had been expecting, because the watchers had various sets of clothing with them to ring the changes when they were following the targets.

  Rossi had left Moretti in the stall and told him to lock the door from the inside, then he’d gone outside to where the other three members of the team were waiting. He’d taken a tracksuit and a pair of trainers from Moretti’s bag in the boot of one of the cars, gone back into the hotel and handed them to him. A couple of minutes later, Ferrara, Rossi and Moretti assembled in the Place de la Libération to hear him explain what had happened.

  ‘I was following them to the restaurant when he grabbed me from behind,’ he said. ‘He stuck a gun in my back and—’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ Ferrara said.

  ‘What? And who are you?’ Moretti asked.

  ‘I’m the person giving the orders around here. His name’s Bronson and he didn’t stick a gun in your back because he hasn’t got one. We’ve been tracking these two since they left London. They flew to France, which means they couldn’t have brought a weapon with them. What he did was stick something in your back that he told you was a gun. If you’d thought it through,
you would have known he was unarmed.’

  Moretti shook his head. ‘No. He told me exactly what make it was. He—’

  ‘Did you see it?’ Ferrara asked.

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Exactly. But now he does have a gun – your Glock – thanks to your stupidity. And I suppose you told him who you were working for.’

  ‘No,’ Moretti said. ‘I would never do that.’

  ‘He couldn’t anyway,’ Rossi chimed in, ‘because he doesn’t actually know who’s paying for his services.’

  ‘I hope you’re not paying him much,’ Ferrara said, ‘because you’re not getting much of a service here at all.’

  ‘You have to work with what you can get,’ Rossi said. ‘This was what I got. Lose yourself, Moretti. You’re no good to me now.’

  ‘But he took my passport and credit cards, everything. I need to—’

  ‘That’s your problem, not mine. Get your stuff out of the car and then get lost, before I decide to retire you permanently.’

  Ferrara watched as Moretti walked away across the square.

  ‘Are you sure it’s wise, leaving him alive?’

  Rossi nodded. ‘I can do without the complications of killing him here in France. He knows nothing about who we are. I told him this was an undercover deniable black operation on behalf of the AISE. I even had an ID card mocked up to show him.’

  ‘And he believed you?’ Ferrara’s voice betrayed his disbelief. ‘He really thought he was working for the Italian secret service?’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe not. I think he just wanted the money. I gave him the pistol to show that I was serious and to make the whole idea a bit more convincing. Anyway, he’s not our problem any longer. He’ll go to the gendarmes and tell them he was mugged and lost everything, and they’ll arrange for him to have funds and an emergency passport. Or perhaps they won’t. I really don’t care.’

  Ferrara nodded. ‘The big problem is the targets. Thanks to Moretti’s incompetence, they now know they’re being watched, and Bronson – that’s the name of the man with Lewis – has proved he’s dangerous. He’s also now got a gun. They’ve obviously left Auch and we’re going to have to find them again. Have you any idea where they might be going?’

  Rossi shook his head. ‘No idea at all,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I know something they don’t. There’s a tracker fitted on their car. And I know that because I put it there. I know my trade, and it was always possible that they might give us the slip somehow. So it doesn’t matter where they go or how fast they drive, because I can always find them.’

  Chapter 26

  Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France

  They stayed on the N21 and drove through Tarbes, Angela navigating using the app on her mobile. She’d already found a hotel that looked ideal, located a few yards off a roundabout to the west of the town. She’d used Google Maps to check it out, and it offered one important feature: a parking area behind the hotel and out of view of the road.

  They checked in and took their bags up to their room. They’d missed dinner in the restaurant, so Bronson went down to the bar and ordered a large baguette jambon – basically a big ham sandwich – as an evening meal that they could share. They ate it sitting on the bed and flicking through the channels on the flat-panel set bolted to the opposite wall. Virtually the entire output, at least at that time of the evening, appeared to be either game shows or small numbers of French men and women talking earnestly into big hand-held microphones.

  ‘The old joke about French television,’ Bronson said, between mouthfuls, ‘used to be that you could tell how important a speaker was by the size of the microphone they gave him. At least on French TV, size matters.’

  ‘I might have known you’d reduce it to something smutty,’ Angela replied, looking at the screen. ‘But it does all look very amateurish,’ she added. ‘I mean, the only time you see a microphone on British television is if they’re doing an outside broadcast somewhere, but here they’ve all got them held in front of their mouths all the time.’

  ‘French television really isn’t that good,’ Bronson agreed, finishing the last bit of his baguette. ‘They buy in a lot of stuff from America and then dub it, usually badly, into French, so you end up with troopers in Alaska moving their mouths in one way while entirely uncoordinated French comes out of the speakers.’

  The room had a kettle and sachets of coffee and tea, so they made drinks and then settled down to continue decrypting the page of text they’d begun back in Auch.

  ‘Before we start, I’ll just check my emails.’ Angela opened the lid of her laptop. She quickly scanned her inbox, muttering ‘Dross, dross and more dross’ as she deleted most of the messages. ‘There’s one from George Anderson,’ she said. ‘That alleged Israeli historian paid him another visit, and it wasn’t a very pleasant experience. He told George that if he didn’t get copies of the two missing documents, he would break both his arms right there on the street.’

  ‘That’s not entirely unexpected,’ Bronson said. ‘Whoever he is, he’s no academic. I assume George handed them over?’

  ‘Of course. And then spent a couple of unproductive hours at the library with a member of the gendarmerie explaining what had happened. Of course, there’s nothing much anybody can do, because the only piece of identification George saw from the man was a business card that said his name was Israel Mahler, and we already knew he was using an alias. Anyway, George was quite shaken up by it.’

  ‘Well, at least he wasn’t hurt. Now we know there are two groups of people out there, one Italian and the other possibly Israeli, both looking for the same thing. We also know the Italians are armed – or at least the one I ran into was – and that the Israelis were quite prepared to cripple a man in broad daylight on a street in Paris. We are not dealing with nice people here.’

  ‘Do think we should carry on?’

  ‘Yes, I do. The best way to avoid contact with these two groups is for us to find the relic first. So let’s get to it.’

  Now that they’d worked out the encryption method used, it was just a matter of transcribing the plaintext based on the spacing created by the scytale. That produced a page of Occitan text that Angela then spent about an hour reworking into English. She separated the continuous text into individual words, then used a Catalan-to-English translator as well as a number of Occitan and Catalan dictionaries to translate each one.

  The result wasn’t elegant in a literary or indeed any other sense, and there were several sections that really needed a bit more work to be easily readable, but at least they understood what the text was telling them. Its meaning was clear enough and that was what mattered.

  ‘This isn’t exactly what I expected it to say,’ Angela commented, looking again at the translation she’d produced.

  ‘Nor me,’ Bronson said.

  They were reasonably sure that the text they’d translated was the document described as velat on the journal page, meaning ‘veiled’ or ‘coded’, so they weren’t looking for any other piece of text. What they had in front of them was it.

  They’d both expected the translation to explain where the Ark had been taken in the last days before the occupants of the castle of Montségur finally capitulated and left the fortress to descend the mountain, some walking to freedom but the majority heading for the flames. And it did do that, after a fashion.

  The first few words of the text contained Old Testament references. Angela checked them on the Internet and found they described the construction of the Ark and how the Israelites had carried the object with them during their wanderings.

  ‘I suppose that’s just setting the scene,’ she said, as Bronson started going through the text once again. ‘It saves having to explain the background, though I guess almost everyone, certainly in medieval times, would already know the story of the Ark of the Covenant. The next bit’s more interesting, though it’s not what you might call new o
r ground-breaking stuff.’

  That part described how the Ark had vanished around the time of the siege of Jerusalem, though it didn’t provide either the date of the event or any suggestions about where the relic had gone.

  ‘They’re probably talking about the second siege,’ Angela suggested, ‘which would make it 587 bc. The first siege was in 597 bc, a decade earlier, but the Temple was only destroyed at the end of the second one.’

  After that, the narrative jumped over half a millennium to the time of the Crusades and the formation of the order of the Knights Templar, explicitly stating that the knights had recovered the Ark from a hiding place deep within the Temple Mount. It had taken them nine years to find it. Bronson had always assumed that the order had been formed specifically to recover the Ark. He also knew there were more than fifty tunnels under the Temple Mount that covered, along with numerous subterranean chambers, some thirty-five acres in all, plenty of space in which to construct a false wall to hide an existing chamber or do something of that sort, and the search would inevitably have been both long and difficult.

  According to the deciphered document in front of them, the Templars had searched everywhere. Once they’d eventually found the relic, they’d summoned an envoy to travel from the Vatican to Jerusalem, and when he appeared they’d shown him the Ark and made a number of demands to be submitted to the Pope.

  ‘That was obviously what sparked the issue of the Omne datum optimum papal bull by Innocent II, which exempted the Templars from all authority apart from that of the Pope himself,’ Bronson said.

  ‘That much we already knew,’ Angela replied, ‘or if we didn’t know it for sure, we assumed that was what had happened. When the Templars eventually left Jerusalem, the order was the biggest institution in Europe after the Catholic Church itself, far more wealthy than most nations and much more powerful than the Pope, their nominal master. But what I didn’t expect was that the Ark would then be taken to France, to what the author of this text calls the “Templar Cathedral”, which is probably Chartres.’