The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  ‘Okay. I’m all ears.’

  ‘The small fleet set out in 1398 under the leadership of Prince Henry Sinclair – I’m sure you’ve heard something about him before.’

  ‘I have, yes. He was the Earl of Orkney and the Lord of Roslin, and the grandfather of William Sinclair, the man responsible for constructing Rosslyn Chapel, which is something of a mystery carved in stone. But I didn’t think he was a member of the Knights Templar.’

  ‘I don’t think he was either, bearing in mind that the order had been suppressed nearly a century earlier. What I think happened was that when the Templars were merged with the Hospitallers in Scotland, there was a hard core of Templars within the combined order whose prime and secret responsibility was the safe keeping of the Templar treasure and the Ark itself. I think this inner circle of knights had sworn to guard the Ark but realised that the beliefs and standards of the old order were changing, and that the Knights Templar were never going to exist in the future as a separate body, which left them in something of a quandary about what to do with the Ark and their treasure. They probably thought that if they remained part of the Hospitaller movement, eventually the treasure would be discovered and the Ark, as an ancient and obsolete relic, would be broken up and the gold melted down. I know that’s just conjecture, but I think it kind of hangs together as a theory.

  ‘So when the opportunity to travel to a new land presented itself, they probably saw that as the ideal solution to the problem. They could travel on board the ships as passengers, taking the Ark and the treasure with them, and then find somewhere at the end of the voyage where they could hide it away for all eternity. Paying for their passage wouldn’t have been a problem, and I would imagine that Prince Henry Sinclair, contemplating setting out across an uncharted sea to a largely unknown destination, would have been pleased to have a group of Templar knights on board as a fighting force to combat any danger they might encounter.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Bronson said. ‘It does hang together and it does make sense. So does that piece of parchment tell us where they hid the loot?’

  Angela smiled slightly at him, and then nodded. ‘Yes, it does. But I don’t think you’re going to like the answer.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Right. The fleet ended up in Nova Scotia – New Scotland – after the Atlantic crossing, which might seem an appropriate place to land, but in fact it only acquired this name in 1621, well over two hundred years after the expedition. The place the Templars chose to hide their treasure was a small island located in a bay full of other islands on the south coast of the unusually shaped peninsula they had reached at the end of their voyage. The original name of the bay was chosen years later by the French, who were early settlers in the area, and they called it La Baye de Toutes Iles.

  ‘That’s as far as the parchment goes, and I only got that far with the location because the writer included a small but fairly accurate map on the reverse side of the sheet. The island itself is roughly marked, but there are so many islands in the area that it’s difficult to be certain which one is being indicated. However, because of other information, which will become obvious to you in a minute, I think I know exactly which one it is.

  ‘In about 1760, it was called Smith’s Island by the English settlers who had largely supplanted the French, then it was renamed Gloucester Isle, but that name didn’t last very long either. By about 1780, it had acquired its present name, based upon the kind of trees growing on it, and the bay in which it sits had also been renamed by the English. Today it’s known as Mahone Bay, and as you might have guessed, the island the Templars chose is now called Oak Island.’

  Bronson didn’t respond for a moment, and then he said just two words.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.’

  Chapter 44

  Paris, France

  George Anderson’s interest in the misfiled Aniort documents, and in particular the parchment, had been noticed by one of the permanent staff members at the Bibliothèque Serpente. He was a man who occasionally found ways to supplement his income by performing additional tasks that involved little more than observing what people were doing and occasionally taking surreptitious pictures of either individuals or documents and passing them on to a French mobile number.

  Over the last couple of weeks he’d photographed two academics, one Italian and the other Israeli, who had been particularly interested in an archive of papers relating to an obscure French noble family. Those images had eventually been viewed by a senior cardinal in Rome and had been the catalyst that had led to Caravaggio issuing his changed orders to Marco Ferrara about the elimination of Angela Lewis.

  When Anderson had left the library for lunch the previous day, the staff member had taken pictures of the Latin text on the sheet of parchment and forwarded that to his usual contact number as well.

  And that was why, the day after Ferrara had been forced to abandon his quest to locate the Ark of the Covenant, and to drive away from the village of Campagne-sur-Aude before the gendarmes arrived, Caravaggio issued him with exactly the same instructions once again, but told him to proceed to a very different destination.

  Chapter 45

  Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France

  ‘Right,’ Bronson said, sounding terminally irritated. ‘If this bunch of Templars buried the order’s treasure at the bottom of that pit on Oak Island, we might as well pack up and go home right now. It’s a private island, people have been searching for treasure in the Money Pit for the last three centuries, and as far as I know, they’ve so far recovered the square root of sod all.’

  Angela nodded. ‘You’re absolutely right. There’s a major company with lots of resources trying to reach the so-called treasure vault at the bottom of the Money Pit right now, and if they can’t get it, there’s no possible way we could do anything. Mind you, at least this information does clear up one matter. Assuming this document is accurate, we now know that the Oak Island Money Pit was built by the Templars.’

  ‘Funnily enough,’ Bronson said, ‘I’ve always thought it was. I know there were theories about it being the treasure of Captain Kidd or some other pirate, but none of that ever really made sense to me because of what we know about it. It’s just too well thought out, and too complicated and sophisticated. There’s obviously some kind of vault, presumably full of treasure, buried over a hundred feet down under the surface of the island. That in itself is a fairly major piece of engineering and certainly a lot deeper than any pirate would be prepared to dig to hide something. There’s the shaft above it with oak platforms every ten feet or so, which was presumably how they dug down to create the treasure vault in the first place. Then there could well be another way of getting down to the vault, some hidden tunnel on the island that no one’s found yet. And finally there’s the booby-trap, the system of flood tunnels designed to make absolutely certain that if anybody did manage to dig down the shaft and get anywhere close to the vault, seawater would flood in and stop them.

  ‘That’s where radiocarbon dating has proved useful. The team doing the exploration at the moment recovered some of the coconut fibre that had been used to prevent the water collection system on the beach on the island from clogging up, and the dating analysis came up with a date in the thirteen hundreds, if I recall. That would fit well with the Templars building the Money Pit.

  ‘That defence system isn’t something dreamt up by an illiterate pirate captain and cobbled together by his crew of seamen. It’s a major piece of really clever engineering, designed by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing and constructed by people who were dedicated, knowledgeable and highly skilled. We absolutely know for certain that the only people living in the Nova Scotia area at that time were the Native Americans, and they definitely didn’t possess either the skill or the knowledge to attempt something like that. The project could only have been undertaken by one of two entities. It could have been a government, but that makes no sense, because if
a government had something big to hide they could simply create a secure vault in their own country and put it in that. The only other option is that it was done by a military unit employing military engineering skills and military discipline, and the only possible candidate to fit that bill at that time would have been the Knights Templar, doing their best, as the order faced enemies on all sides, to preserve their most valuable assets. So,’ he finished, ‘I suppose we just forget it?’

  ‘Yes, and at the same time no, because there are a couple of things that I gleaned from this document that I haven’t told you yet. First of all, the fleet that Prince Henry Sinclair sailed across the Atlantic was quite small, probably no more than six or seven ships, but the treasure fleet that sailed out of La Rochelle consisted of eighteen vessels that were probably of a similar size to Sinclair’s. You can’t load the cargo from eighteen ships onto six similar vessels, obviously. According to this parchment, the Templars picked out only the most valuable pieces of treasure to take with them on the voyage and left the remainder, which must’ve been about two thirds of their total treasury, hidden somewhere in Midlothian. It doesn’t say where, but because the Templar properties were all by then in the hands of the Hospitallers, they certainly wouldn’t have felt safe leaving it in one of their buildings. So my guess is that somewhere in that area there’s a disused and abandoned coal mine that now contains something a lot more valuable than the coal that was originally dug out of it.’

  ‘Okay, that all makes sense, but there’s still the awkward fact that we can’t get onto Oak Island unless we go as tourists in an organised group, and if we did visit we wouldn’t be able to do anything to recover the treasure.’

  ‘I know, but we’re not interested in recovering the treasure. We’re looking for one very specific item, the Ark of the Covenant, and I didn’t say that that was hidden anywhere on Oak Island. In fact, I didn’t say it was hidden anywhere in Nova Scotia or even anywhere in Canada.’

  Bronson looked interested. ‘No, you didn’t,’ he agreed. ‘So where is it?’

  ‘According to this parchment, the Templars realised that the Ark was fragile. It was only a wooden box covered in gold plating with a gold lid, and if it got wet it would simply rot away and disintegrate. And getting wet would have been inevitable if the flood tunnel booby-trap had been triggered. The gold and silver bullion or whatever the rest of their treasure consisted of would be completely unaffected if the vault flooded. But the Ark was precious to them, and so they hid it somewhere else. What I don’t know is exactly where.’

  ‘Ah,’ Bronson said. ‘Any clues?’

  ‘Yes, but they really won’t make any sense until we actually get over there and start searching.’

  ‘Right. I’ll look for flights.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Angela said. ‘We’re booked on a flight out of Blagnac at five past two tomorrow afternoon, which is quite a civilised time. That will take us north to Amsterdam, home of canals and hookers, where we’ll arrive at about four. We’ll have to wait around there for an hour, just long enough to get a drink and a snack, and then it’ll take us just over seven and a half hours to fly across the pond. We arrive in Boston at—’

  ‘Boston? Last time I looked, that was in America, not Canada.’

  ‘Well spotted. If you recall, I didn’t say where the Templars had hidden the Ark, only that they’d buried their treasure on Oak Island. Anyway, we’ll get to Boston at twenty to seven in the evening, if the flight’s on schedule, and that’s local time, obviously. The return flight will be a week later, because I reckon if we haven’t found it by then, we’re probably not going to find it at all.’

  ‘What about visas?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘We don’t need them. We’re both citizens of the United Kingdom, so we’re eligible to travel to the States under the Visa Waiver Program. I’ve already been online to sort out the ESTAs – the Electronic System for Travel Authorisation approvals – that we’ll need.’

  ‘You were busy on the way back this afternoon, weren’t you? So what’s the plan when we get to Boston?’

  ‘We’ll be knackered when we arrive because of the time changes and stuff, so I’ve booked one night in an airport hotel. Then we get up bright and early the next day, hire a car and get on with it.’

  ‘I’ve always said there’s nothing more dangerous than a man with a plan,’ Bronson said, ‘but with you they quite often seem to work. So once we’re awake and we’ve got wheels, where do we start?’

  Chapter 46

  The team of three Israelis from Zeru had unwittingly been following Angela and Bronson, albeit taking a different route, and had also reached Toulouse and booked into a hotel. They’d returned the hire car and apologised for the shattered rear window, claiming that a stone thrown up by a truck heading in the opposite direction had been the cause. Unfortunately, they hadn’t, they claimed, got the registration number of the vehicle, and the truck driver, apparently unaware of what had happened, had simply continued on his way. The car hire firm hadn’t been pleased because the vehicle would now be off the road for a couple of days while the glass was removed and a new rear window installed, but accidents happened and that was the end of it. The insurance company would cover the costs.

  Before they used their return airline tickets to go back to Jerusalem, Gellerman and Dayan played the video recording they had made in Campagne-sur-Aude of Luca Rossi talking to the other man. Neither had any particular expectation that they would glean any useful information, but they still thought it was worth watching it, or more accurately, listening to it.

  And unexpectedly, they did find out something they hadn’t known before.

  Gellerman had assumed that Rossi and his men had been following the trail indicated by the encrypted text, but the recording they’d obtained using the shotgun microphone made it clear that this hadn’t been the case. Rossi had been following two people, two English people, who very obviously had managed to decipher the text. It was also clear that the couple involved – who might very well have been the two ‘tourists’ that Aaron Chason had noticed and pointed out – had been in the village at that moment, because Rossi had been briefing the man to take one of the other new arrivals and go and eavesdrop on their conversation in a local bar. All of which was interesting, but not particularly helpful.

  What was helpful was that Rossi had also provided their names. The woman was called Angela Lewis and the man’s surname was Bronson. With the trail in France effectively cold, the fact that the English couple had been involved in the search gave them a measure of importance, particularly as they had apparently decrypted the text, something the Inquisition, with all its resources back in Rome, had so far not managed to do – which was why Rossi had been following them.

  If the Ark still existed, maybe the English couple would stumble upon another clue that would allow the search to resume.

  Gellerman made copious notes about exactly what had happened when they’d been in Campagne-sur-Aude, including the names Angela Lewis and Bronson, which he suggested should be checked and the two people identified as a matter of some urgency, and included everything in an encrypted email that he sent to his superiors at Zeru in Jerusalem. He concluded by saying that he, Dayan and Chason would remain in Toulouse awaiting further orders rather than fly back to Israel.

  Even a decade or so ago, finding a particular person was a highly skilled and extraordinarily tedious task, involving physically checking parish registers, local councils and national archives for documents like birth and marriage certificates and then travelling to various locations to talk to people who might conceivably know or have known the target. Today, with the plethora of online directories and databases and other sources of accurate information, the job is a lot easier, and most of it can be done sitting in a comfortable chair, looking at a computer screen and using a mouse and keyboard. Law-enforcement organisations in any country – and people with non-official access to the same systems – can track almost anybody’s moveme
nts electronically, because in today’s totally connected world, every airline ticket, hotel booking and car hire requires the use of a credit card.

  And because of Zeru’s sympathisers within the Mossad and Shin Bet, Gellerman knew that identifying the English man and woman, and more importantly finding out where they were and what they were doing, probably wouldn’t take very long.

  The search for the Ark wasn’t over yet, not by a long way.

  Chapter 47

  Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

  ‘God, I feel about as sharp as a sponge,’ Bronson said, rolling over in the wide double bed and peering at the unfamiliar surroundings of the bedroom at the Hilton, chosen by Angela because it was the only hotel that was actually at Boston’s Logan International Airport.

  ‘And good morning to you too,’ Angela replied, sitting up in bed and looking at him brightly. ‘I’m going to take a shower. Maybe you can think about getting up while I’m in the bathroom. It would be good if you were at least sitting up when I come out rather than just lying there farting and grunting and complaining.’

  ‘I need coffee. Preferably intravenously.’

  ‘We’ll get some downstairs. And some breakfast as well. Now stop lying about moaning and move it.’

  Once he was shaved, showered and dressed and had put himself outside the American equivalent of a full English and two large cups of coffee, Bronson both looked and sounded rather more like a human being than a bad-tempered ape.

  ‘Jet lag always screws me up,’ he said apologetically. ‘What’s the time difference here?’

  ‘That depends where you’re talking about. If you mean from the UK, it’s five hours, but we flew out of France so it’s six.’

  Bronson looked at his watch, which he’d reset to local time the previous evening on the aircraft when the pilot had given his short ‘Welcome to Boston and the United States of America’ speech.