The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  ‘Because…?’

  Angela looked at him. ‘Lots of reasons. Do you know anything about Chartres?’

  ‘I know where it is. Apart from that, no, not really.’

  ‘Okay. The present cathedral wasn’t the first one. We don’t know how many previous churches had been built, but there were at least four and possibly seven, all of which came to some kind of calamitous end. When you look at a record like that, with buildings dedicated to God being regularly destroyed by acts of God, it does rather make you wonder why anybody’s still a believer. Some bits of the present cathedral survived a major fire that engulfed the previous building in 1194. We don’t know who paid for it, or the names of the master builders who constructed it, but there’s a strong possibility that it was financed at least in part by the Knights Templar. The order was then at the height of its power in France, and as an extremely wealthy Christian organisation, it would have been strange if it hadn’t contributed something towards it. Construction took about twenty-five years, and it was formally reconsecrated in 1260.

  ‘It’s a huge building, about four hundred and twenty-five feet long and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The tower rises to over three hundred and seventy feet, and there are more than a hundred and seventy stained-glass windows, which basically tell the story of the Bible in images. Inside, probably the most famous feature is the labyrinth, a circular structure marked out on the floor of the nave that’s designed as a tool to assist worshippers in their devotions. It has a single entrance, which is also the exit, and there’s only one path that can be followed to reach the centre. Although it’s only just over forty feet in diameter, if somebody follows the path all the way in and then all the way out again, by the time they’ve completed it they will have walked about a third of a mile.’

  ‘That should give them plenty of time to say their prayers,’ Bronson said.

  ‘Exactly. That is its purpose. Now, there’s one very obvious connection between Chartres Cathedral and the Ark. On the pillars in the north portico on the outside of the cathedral are carvings that very clearly show the relic being transported. But it’s the inscriptions underneath the carvings that are the really intriguing thing, because the Latin doesn’t make sense. Let me just find some pictures of them.’

  Angela opened up a search engine, and after a couple of minutes she showed Bronson a photograph of a curved stone pillar on which was carved a complex battle scene.

  ‘That’s supposed to show the Battle of Aphek, when the Philistines stole the Ark of the Covenant and carried it off to Ashdod. Remember I asked if you knew anything about a plague of haemorrhoids? Well, it was the Philistines who ended up suffering from that particular affliction.

  ‘They had put the Ark in one of their temples, dedicated to a god named Dagon, but the following day they discovered their idol lying face-down on the ground, apparently praying to the Ark. They replaced the statue where it should have been, but the next day it was found lying on its face again and broken into pieces. According to the Bible, the Ark went on to cause the plague of haemorrhoids, followed by a plague of mice and then a plague of boils. Understandably, the Philistines decided they could do without all this, and after a few months they returned Ark to the Israelites.’

  She found another picture.

  ‘This shows the Ark being transported on a cart pulled by oxen with an angel guiding it. We know it’s the Ark because in the carving just to the right there’s an open box containing the items the Bible tells us were originally stored in it: the stone tablets, the rod of Aaron and the pot of manna. Some people believe this means the Ark was transported from Jerusalem to France by the Knights Templar and then hidden away inside, or perhaps underneath, Chartres Cathedral. And what we’ve discovered supports that suggestion.’

  ‘You said the Latin was confusing,’ Bronson said.

  ‘Actually I didn’t,’ Angela replied. ‘I said it didn’t make sense, which is entirely different.’

  She found another picture that showed the lower parts of the two curved cylinders on the pillar and pointed to the inscription on the left-hand side.

  ‘This is what I mean,’ she said. ‘The Latin there spells out ARCHA CEDERIS, and on the right-hand cylinder we get the same two words as part of the longer phrase HIC AMITITUR ARCHA CEDERIS. The two words ARCHA CEDERIS are exactly the same in both inscriptions, and that’s the first problem. When the cathedral was built, it’s quite probable that some of the masons working on it would have been illiterate, but an illiterate mason would never have been allowed to carve an important inscription without supervision. So those phrases were carved because that’s what somebody in authority wanted to be inscribed on that pillar.’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘That’s the problem. People have assumed that ARCHA CEDERIS refers to the Ark of the Covenant, but it doesn’t. In fact, at first glance the phrase is meaningless. In the Latin Vulgate Bible, the Ark of the Covenant is always referred to as the arca foederis. Arca is an ark or chest, and foederis means a contract or undertaking. Put them together and you have the ark of the contract or the Ark of the Covenant, the contract or understanding between God and the Israelites. But the Latin word archa normally translates as “archangel”, as an abbreviation of archangelus – though its alternative translation as “box” works better in this case – and cederis isn’t a noun.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘Inscriptions were usually written in the simplest possible language so that they would be understood by the maximum number of people. “Here lies the body of John Brown”, that kind of thing. The word cederis is Latin, but it’s an obscure verb tense that most people – even people who spoke the language – would find difficult to understand. In fact, I’ve got to look it up myself.’

  She opened another screen on her laptop and studied it.

  ‘Right. Cederis is the second person singular present passive indicative of the verb cedere.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Bronson said. ‘I don’t know what that means in English, let alone in Latin. You’ll have to talk me through it.’

  ‘The verb cedere means to yield, to go away, or surrender. It’s the root of the English verb “to cede”. The tense refers to the subject of the verb, and there are three possibilities. If it was first person, the subject would be I or we. Third person means he, she or they, and second person means you.’

  ‘So it means “you yield” or “you give up” in this case?’

  ‘Yes,’ Angela nodded, ‘more or less, but we’ve not finished yet. Singular means the number of the subject, so it means you individually rather than you as a group of people. Present refers to the timing, and it means that the action of the verb is taking place now, at the present time. Passive refers to the voice. Verbs can be either active or passive. In this case, it means that you as the subject of the verb are having the action done to you, rather than you doing the action. And finally indicative refers to the mood of the verb, and again there are three possibilities – indicative, subjunctive and imperative. Subjunctive means something that might take place, imperative means that you’re telling somebody to do something, and indicative means that something is really happening.’

  The response to that was obvious, but Bronson asked the question anyway.

  ‘So what does cederis actually mean in this context?’

  ‘I was afraid you were going to ask me that. Okay, it translates as something like “you personally are right now having to yield in reality”. When you add the noun, it becomes “the box that you personally are right now having to surrender in reality”, more or less. I know that sounds incredibly clumsy, but it’s what the expression means. If you wanted a really short version, which I guess you do, it would be something like “the box you are yielding”. Some cathedral guidebooks translate this as “you are to work through the Ark”, which is complete nonsense. The Latin means nothing like that.’

  ‘Okay,’ Bronson said. ‘I more or less follow that. So
that’s what the first two words mean. What about the longer expression?’

  ‘The guidebooks suggest that HIC AMITITUR ARCHA CEDERIS means “Here things take their course; you are to work through the Ark”, and again they’re completely wrong. The only word correctly translated is HIC, which does mean “here”. First of all, the word amititur never existed in the Latin language, so that’s an obvious problem. But amittitur spelt with a double T did exist. It was derived from the verb amitto which means to lose. Amittitur is another complex tense, this time the third person singular present passive indicative, and the short and snappy translation is something like “he or she is losing”.

  ‘The other thing to look at in the inscription is the shape of the fourth letter, because it doesn’t actually look like a single letter T. Or a double T, come to that. It’s more like a T combined with a C, a ligature of T and C, but that doesn’t work because the word amitcitur also doesn’t exist in Latin. It might have been a shorthand symbol to indicate a double T, but there’s room to have carved two separate letters, so why didn’t they? The other alternative is that it’s just a stylized letter C, and that gives us another possible meaning. Amicitur is again the third person singular present passive indicative, this time of the verb amicio, which means to clothe or envelop or hide.’

  ‘So it means something like “he or she is hiding”,’ Bronson suggested.

  ‘Yes. So the most likely meaning of the longer expression, translating what the Latin words actually mean rather than what people think they should mean, is either “here he is hiding the box you are yielding”, if we’re going with amicitur, or “here he is losing the box you are yielding” if the verb is amittitur. The Latin certainly isn’t clear, which may have been deliberate on the part of the person who prepared the inscription. With a relic as important as the Ark, maybe he decided that the inscriptions had to say something about it, but he didn’t want to just come right out and say something like ARCA HIC LATEANT, which would mean “The Ark is hidden here”. Anyway, to me, the first sentence makes far more sense than the second, and that does suggest that the box – by implication the Ark – was hidden at Chartres Cathedral when these inscriptions were carved.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Bronson said, ‘and thanks for the Latin lesson. I’m better informed but none the wiser. So it looks like the Ark was hidden somewhere in Chartres Cathedral, but according to this text it didn’t stay there.’

  ‘No. This says it was entrusted to the care of the Cathars a few years later, and that’s certainly possible because it’s thought that the Templars and the Cathars shared some common religious beliefs. Because the Ark was believed to be a way of talking to God, it would be the one religious relic that the Cathars would have venerated above all others; a confirmation of one of their most important core beliefs.’

  ‘And the Ark being in the possession of the Cathars at Montségur also answers another couple of questions, like why King Louis IX seemed to tread very carefully around members of the Aniort family, who were closely involved with the Cathars. If they had the Ark, that would have been a tremendously powerful weapon, perhaps literally if the stories about it are true, but certainly metaphorically. And it would also explain what the king’s men were looking for when they reduced the castle of Montségur to rubble when the siege was over.’

  Angela nodded. ‘There’s also the suggestion that the Templars were in some ways an armed branch of the Cathar movement. The Cathars wouldn’t carry arms – that’s why they had to employ mercenary soldiers at Montségur to act as a garrison for the castle – but the Templars certainly did.’

  ‘And then the four perfecti abseiled down from Montségur carrying the Ark, handed it over to Raymond d’Aniort and went their separate ways. If this is to be believed. And that could very well leave us some distance up shit creek without a paddle. Or a canoe, come to that,’ Bronson said.

  Chapter 27

  Auch, Gascony, France

  ‘That was good thinking,’ Ferrara admitted, almost reluctantly. ‘So where are they – or rather where is their car – right now?’

  Rossi took out his smartphone and opened the tracking application. When it had loaded and collected the data, he showed the screen to Ferrara.

  ‘Not far away,’ he said. ‘The tracker’s stationary on the west side of Tarbes in a hotel car park, so I guess they’ve gone to ground. That’s a biggish town about sixty kilometres south-west of here. You want to head down there now?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I don’t want the tracker to drop off or the battery to fail before we’ve reached them. But I don’t think there’s too much urgency. They’re in a hotel and they’ll think they’ve given us the slip and are safe. We’ll find accommodation somewhere nearby. I’d like another tracker, or two if you have that many, put on their vehicle tonight to make sure we don’t lose them, and then we’ll see what they do tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you want the other three men I recruited to go with us? They’re not the best, as we know, but at least they’ll do what they’re told.’

  ‘Might as well,’ Ferrara said. ‘They can act as bullet-catchers if there’s any shooting, and we’ll need them as extra bodies if we have to follow the targets on foot.’

  Despite his explicit instructions from Cardinal Caravaggio, Ferrara was again disobeying his orders. The sight of the page of encrypted text had convinced him that he would not be able to decipher it; it was way outside his area of expertise. And as the Vatican obviously wanted the Ark either found or totally destroyed, it made sense to him to revert to the first plan the cardinal had suggested: keep following the Lewis woman and let her find the relic – because that was what she was good at – and then simply step in and take it from her. Then he could dispose of her and the man she was travelling with. Of course, if the experts employed by the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei finally managed to crack the encryption, that would radically change the situation. Then he would be able to kill them both before following the trail of the Ark.

  Luca Rossi would do what he was told – the cardinal had made it clear that Ferrara was running the show – and the only other complication would be if the fanatical Jews from Zeru managed to work out what was happening and turned up somewhere.

  But Ferrara thought he would be able to deal with that situation if it arose.

  In the meantime, he would head off to Tarbes, fill his vehicle with fuel and find a hotel to get some sleep.

  Tomorrow could be a very long day.

  Chapter 28

  Paris, France

  Josef Gellerman had seen no point in leaving Paris until the Zeru team had identified a definite destination. The city was an international travel hub with excellent road, rail and air links, and from there they could easily and quickly get anywhere in the world.

  The sighting of Luca Rossi near the Bibliothèque Serpente had been unexpected and unwelcome, because it meant that the Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei had become involved. It also meant that the CDF had the same information as Zeru, so Gellerman knew they were in a race, a race that Zeru had to win. The clue was obviously the page of encrypted text. If they could decipher that, he was convinced they would know where to find the Ark of the Covenant.

  Lemuel Dayan was both a computer expert and a talented programmer, and almost as soon as they’d identified Rossi from the video, Gellerman had told him to drop everything else and just crack the code. Neither of them had expected it would be that difficult to decipher a hand-written message encrypted during the medieval period, but it had taken far longer than they had anticipated.

  Dayan’s first efforts had involved mounting brute-force attacks to try all possible combinations of an Atbash cipher. That hadn’t taken long but had produced no results apart from generating occasional random combinations of a few letters that happened to spell something recognisable, common enough in cryptology when working with ciphertexts.

  Next he’d looked at Atbash variants, perhaps using two alphabets, but again this had produced no
usable results, and this program had taken his computer a lot longer to run because of the greater number of variables. By the end of that, all he knew for certain was that the encryption hadn’t used a substitution cipher. So he’d looked elsewhere, and the very next decryption method he tried had worked. Not the first time, but eventually.

  All he had done was write a program that would start with the first letter of the encrypted text and then follow it with every third letter – he hadn’t thought there was any point in trying it with the second letter – all the way through the encrypted passage, making repeated passes until every letter had been selected. Then the program would do the same with every fourth letter, and then every fifth letter and so on.

  That generated a lot of pages of text that Dayan viewed on the screen of his laptop, feeding anything that looked like a genuine word into an online Occitan dictionary to check it. But when he looked at the output when the program had selected every thirty-first letter of the ciphertext, the first seven letters stopped him in his tracks.

  ‘Josef,’ he called urgently. ‘I think we may have it. Look.’ He pointed at the text on his screen. ‘Those first two words are SANT DEU, and I’ve already picked up enough Occitan to know that that translates as “Holy God”. That can’t be a mistake or a random grouping.’

  Gellerman stared at the screen, his gaze roaming over the other lines displayed there. Several other combinations of letters looked to him like real, albeit unfamiliar, words. He slapped Dayan on the back.

  ‘Well done, my friend, well done. Print a copy of that so I can look at it and start working on the translation. We’ll crack this today.’

  Chapter 29

  Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France