The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  While Gellerman and Dayan had been working on the decryption and translation of the ciphertext, Aaron Chason had not been idle. He’d made use of his contacts in the criminal underworld and the previous day had used the Paris Métro to take a trip up to Montmartre in the north of the city for a meeting in a cafe near the Cimetière de Montmartre.

  There he had sat at a table with two men he had never met before. When all three of them had been satisfied that nobody could see what they were doing, and they had established their bona fides, Chason had lifted the lid of a briefcase the two men had brought with them and briefly inspected the contents. Once he was satisfied that the goods were as described, he had closed the briefcase, lifted it off the table and placed it by the side of his chair. In exchange, he’d passed over a folded copy of the French daily newspaper Le Parisien and directed the attention of the men to an article near the middle. The article had been obscured by a white envelope that bulged slightly. After another quick glance around to make sure that they were still unobserved, one of the men had picked up the envelope, lifted the flap and visually checked the contents. Then he’d slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

  Neither he nor Chason would have insulted each other by counting the money or removing any of the objects from the briefcase to inspect them closely. In the criminal underworld, reputation and trust were hard to earn and could be lost in an instant, so both parties knew what they were getting, and neither would have dreamed of trying to deceive the other.

  A few minutes later, all three men had stood up and shaken hands. Chason had paid for the drinks and then they’d gone their separate ways.

  The briefcase was now in the boot of the Renault, but the contents – three nine-millimetre semi-automatic pistols, two different models of Browning and a Czechoslovakian CZ 75, plus two full boxes of Parabellum ammunition – had been divided between the three Israelis. Because they’d seen Luca Rossi in Paris and knew the Inquisition was involved, Gellerman had decided that they wouldn’t take any chances, and from now on they would all be armed, all the time.

  They would head down to the Languedoc and find accommodation in Toulouse or Carcassonne or some other location, unless Zeru’s experts in Jerusalem could give them a different destination before they got there.

  Chapter 32

  Hautes-Pyrénées, France

  ‘They’re on the move,’ Luca Rossi said when Ferrara answered his mobile.

  ‘I know. I saw it on my phone as well. I’m just leaving the hotel; I’ll see you somewhere on the road.’

  ‘Don’t crowd them. On the way to Auch, none of us got closer than about one or two kilometres and that worked really well.’

  ‘I know my business,’ Ferrara said, somewhat sharply. ‘I’ve done this kind of thing more times than I can remember.’

  In the hotel car park, he put his overnight bag in the boot, then attached a mobile phone mount to the inside of the windscreen, clipped his smartphone into it and ran the charging lead from the phone to a socket on the dashboard. He checked that in his normal driving position he could see the screen clearly, which meant he would have no difficulty in following the target vehicle.

  He studied the map display on his mobile. The tracker was moving down the link road that joined the N21 and the A64 autoroute, so the targets were going either west or east. It all depended on which way they turned when they got to the junction. If they went west, Ferrara knew he’d have to get out of the city centre pretty smartish to avoid being left too far behind, but until he knew whether to turn left or right, he couldn’t leave the hotel car park.

  Moments later, he had the answer. The steadily pulsing light on the display that represented the tracker had gone straight on at the intersection to the south side of the autoroute. That meant they were going east, because the road went nowhere else.

  The N21 acted as a kind of a ring road around the east and south of Tarbes, and Ferrara checked his satnav again before deciding which route to take. There was a junction, a complex of two roundabouts and autoroute access, just south-east of the built-up area. That was about the only place where the targets could change direction to head north and seemed like the obvious place for him to go. If they did turn north, he could simply go round one of the roundabouts to follow them, and if they continued to the east, he would join the autoroute and slot in behind them.

  Ten minutes later, he was driving south-east down the D817 towards the roundabout complex, keeping one eye on the screen of his smartphone, where the tracker symbol was approaching the same feature from the west.

  Ferrara had always believed in getting eyes on his targets as soon as he could, and as he looked at the converging symbol, he realised that if he slowed up slightly, he would actually be able to see the target car. He eased the pressure on the accelerator, slowing down by perhaps ten kilometres an hour as he neared the autoroute. As he passed over the eastbound lane, he glanced right and saw a light grey Peugeot drive underneath the overpass. A quick look at his smartphone confirmed it was the target vehicle.

  Rossi had told him the make and model of car the targets were driving, and his eyes-on check confirmed the description. It also showed that the targets hadn’t found either of the trackers and stuck them on an entirely different car.

  Ferrara turned the MiTo right at both the roundabouts and entered the slip road for the A64 autoroute, taking a ticket at the toll booth. According to his smartphone, he was three or four kilometres behind the Peugeot, and he knew he could quickly close that distance to about one kilometre, close enough to take any action necessary but far enough away that his car wouldn’t be spotted.

  * * *

  Like all French autoroutes, the A64 was mainly straight and fast with a good surface, and was a very efficient way of covering long distances quickly. Unfortunately, what it didn’t do was go where Bronson and Angela wanted, because it ended up in Toulouse.

  Just beyond Lestelle-de-Saint-Martory, they turned off onto the D117, a narrower, twisting road that first took them south-west before turning south and then east to head through the Parc Naturel Régional des Pyrénées Ariégeoises, a very pretty area dotted with small villages. Bronson had been checking his mirrors ever since he’d left the autoroute but had seen no sign of any pursuing vehicles. He pulled off the road in Saint-Girons, where the road went around the village in a large loop to the south and over the river, and they stopped there for a few minutes. They ordered coffee in a cafe near the river, sitting outside in the sun at a round metal table shaded by an umbrella, watching village life, while Bronson tried to check that nobody was showing any particular interest in them.

  One of the defining characteristics of the French is that they are very patriotic. In any group of French-owned cars, an observer can be reasonably certain that eight or nine out of every ten will be manufactured by Citroën, Peugeot or Renault, unlike the situation in Britain, where patriotism is often seen as a dirty word and the vehicles of choice for most people tend to be manufactured in Germany. Or Japan. Or Italy or France or any nation, basically, apart from Britain.

  That simple fact, he hoped, gave him a slight edge. He knew two things about the people who were watching them. First, they were Italian, and second, they were armed. That more or less guaranteed they must have arrived in France by car, and so he could ignore the French-registered Euro-boxes.

  From their vantage point he could see their parked hire car, but every car that passed or stopped had French plates. It looked to Bronson as if they had successfully shaken off the surveillance team, but he would keep one eye on his rear-view mirrors, just in case.

  Just over quarter of an hour later, they got back on the road. At Foix they would turn south on the N20 towards Andorra and then head east, back on the D117 towards Lavelanet and Puivert. When they reached Couiza, they would turn south towards Rennes-le-Château.

  * * *

  In fact, one of the vehicles Bronson had seen had been occupied by two of Rossi’s men. He had ordered them to driv
e through the village when the tracker had stopped moving to assess the situation. They’d spotted both the parked hire car and the two targets sitting outside the cafe, and the passenger had reported back to Rossi. The driver had then stopped out of sight in a quiet road at the other end of the village.

  Rossi and Ferrara had both stopped their cars to the west of Saint-Girons when they’d seen the tracker come to a halt, and Rossi had ordered the last of his three men to do the same, keeping in touch with each other using their mobiles. They would simply stay where they were until the tracker started moving again, when the pursuit would continue.

  Twenty minutes later, they were back on the road, Ferrara’s Alfa Romeo leading the four vehicles shadowing the English couple, who still appeared completely unaware that they were the focus of so much covert attention.

  Which was exactly the way Marco Ferrara wanted it.

  Chapter 33

  Aude, France

  Ferrara had closed the gap between himself and the Peugeot every time the other vehicle entered a built-up area. The reason for that was simple. Although the tracker worked perfectly well, at junctions with multiple exits it was all too easy to pick the wrong road and find the target vehicle was no longer where you expected it to be.

  So when the Peugeot reached the outskirts of Espéraza, Ferrara’s MiTo was just three cars behind it and the Italian was only glancing intermittently at the screen of his smartphone. In traffic, he kept his eyes on the road, and especially on the rear of the grey Peugeot. Once he’d cleared the eastern end of the village, he relaxed slightly as the road opened up and he slowed down slightly.

  A little under two kilometres later, they reached another village – Couiza – and again Ferrara tried to keep the Peugeot in view. But just as he entered the outskirts, the car in front stopped to allow an elderly couple to shuffle slowly across the road on a pedestrian crossing, and by the time Ferrara started moving again, the Peugeot was out of sight. He checked his smartphone and it appeared that the target car was continuing straight on.

  He had to concentrate on driving as he was now in the middle of a short line of cars and there was heavy traffic in the opposite direction. He was almost in the centre of Couiza before he again checked his smartphone and saw that the tracker’s position was no longer in front of him but behind him and some distance to the south.

  He muttered an inventive Italian curse and started looking for somewhere to turn round. But the road wasn’t very wide and was lined with houses on both sides behind unusually narrow pavements. And with the traffic moving in both directions, there was nowhere he could stop. He would have to make the turn at the next junction.

  He passed a sharp and narrow left-hand turning and instead took the turning to the right, almost opposite. On the left-hand side of the road were several parking spaces outside a cafe. He swung the Alfa Romeo into one of them, then immediately backed out and turned left to head west, back along the road he had just driven down. That put the tracker symbol ahead of him and to his left, which was what he wanted.

  There was only one road that the Peugeot could have taken: the D52 to Rennes-le-Château. Ferrara steered the MiTo onto it and saw that the tracker was now in front of him and about a mile away. He pulled into the side of the road for a moment and checked his satnav, because the last thing he wanted was to find himself in a dead end with the driver of the Peugeot looking straight at him. The map showed that there was a junction along the road, with Rennes-le-Château to the right. It also showed that this road was the only way into and out of the village, so he would take it slowly.

  He indicated and pulled out. He knew about Rennes-le-Château. In fact, it was somewhat notorious within the Catholic Church because of the conduct of the local priest at the end of the nineteenth century, but to his knowledge it had nothing whatsoever to do with the Ark of the Covenant. Unless the Lewis woman knew something different, of course.

  As he drove, he noted that the tracker turned right at the junction, following the narrow road up the side of the hill towards the village. That confirmed their destination. Now he had to decide whether to follow them or wait for them to come down the hill again. But he also needed to cover his bases, and although he’d seen a photograph of Angela Lewis, he had never seen her in the flesh. And all he knew about her companion was his name and a rough word picture supplied by Luca Rossi, whose principal skills lay in the application of violence rather than any kind of descriptive abilities.

  His best option was probably to let Rossi go into the village and follow them while he remained in his car to resume his distant surveillance when they left.

  He took the same turning as the Peugeot driver, and as he was approaching the village, he pulled into a free parking area on the left-hand side of the road, where he could leave his car in plain sight so that Rossi would see it as he drove up. He assumed that his fellow Italian would only be a short distance behind him, or perhaps even in front because of the delay when he had missed the turning.

  He’d just parked and switched off the engine when his mobile rang.

  Chapter 34

  Rennes-le-Château, Aude, France

  ‘This is a very strange place,’ Bronson said, stopping in a car park on the side of the hill below the village centre. He’d already paid an admission fee near the top of the long, steep and winding approach road, which was a first. Most villages didn’t charge tourists an entrance fee.

  ‘You’re right. There are a lot of peculiar stories told about this village,’ Angela said, ‘and a whole raft of unanswered questions. But none of them have anything to do with the Ark of the Covenant, otherwise there’d be other volumes of conspiracy theories doing the rounds. It’s also,’ she added, ‘a very old place. Relics have been found here that date back over thirty thousand years to the Palaeolithic period, the Stone Age. In recorded history the first important occupiers were the Visigoths in the fourth and fifth centuries. They recognised the strategic importance of this site – it was quite a climb getting up to the top of this hill even in the car – and they built a fortress here. They also named the place, calling the area Rhedesium or Reddensis, which over time morphed into Razès. Rennes was derived from that. So as well as Rennes-le-Château, there’s also Rennes-les-Bains, named after its natural hot springs, about three miles east of here.’

  They climbed the wooden staircase that linked the parking area with the road into the village. At the top, they paused for a few seconds to catch their breath and admire the spectacular views out to the north and east.

  ‘It is an impressive location,’ Bronson said. ‘There’s no doubt about that. In the medieval period, if your forces occupied this hill you’d be able to control most of what you can see from here.’

  Angela shaded her eyes and looked around, then turned towards the village.

  ‘Nothing to do with Rennes-le-Château,’ she said as they began walking, ‘but there’s a minor mystery associated with the castle of Bézu. That’s about four miles south of here and now a complete ruin. Some people claim it was a major Templar commandery, but it wasn’t, though the owners, the Sermon family, the lords of Albedun, had links to the order, and Bernard Sermon joined the Templars in 1151 as a confrère.’

  ‘And a confrère was…?’ Bronson asked. ‘I know the French word translates as a fellow member, but what did that mean to the Templars?’

  ‘A confrère was a married man who joined the order but who obviously couldn’t take the same vow of chastity as the unmarried Templar knights and wasn’t allowed to live in the same property as them. A confrère had to leave part of his estate to the order when he died, and Bernard donated huge sums of money to the Templars during his lifetime. The order did take over Bézu castle in 1292, but they had to leave it in 1307, so they only occupied it for fifteen years. The minor mystery starts in 1156, when Bertrand de Blanchefort became the Grand Master of the Templars.’

  ‘You mentioned the Blancheforts before. Was he a local man?’

  ‘Oddly enough,
no. He came from Guyenne, near Bordeaux, in the south-west of France, and he had no connection to the local Blanchefort family. The same year that he was elected, the Templars organised a group of skilled workers to travel to the area around Bézu, and that’s where the mystery comes in.

  ‘First, they weren’t French but German, and the suspicion is that they were recruited because they didn’t speak Occitan and couldn’t talk to the local residents. Second, this part of France is rich in metals. Ever since Roman times copper, lead, silver and gold have been dug out of the ground here, but most sites had been fully exploited well before the twelfth century. Third, these labourers were casters, people whose skill was working with metal, not miners who would have been employed to dig out the ore. So whatever they were doing in these hills it probably wasn’t mining. It’s much more likely that they were melting, reworking and casting precious metals like gold and silver that had already been extracted.

  ‘Now, we don’t know exactly what these men were doing here, but in 1307 the new owner of the castle at Bézu, a man named Othon d’Aure, was arrested and accused of counterfeiting money. Just to clarify, he wasn’t producing fake coins made of lead with a thin coating of gold or anything like that. He was producing solid gold coins, but they weren’t official coins of the realm. He was probably turning gold bullion that he had illegally acquired somewhere into gold coins that he could spend. And even more strangely, just a few years later, in 1344, several members of the Voisin family, who were then resident in Bézu castle, were accused of committing exactly the same crime.’