The Last Secret of the Ark

by James Becker

  * * *

  As Bronson steered the Buick away from the J. V. Fletcher Library, a man sitting in a greyish Honda Accord parked on Main Street about a hundred yards away started his car’s engine and pulled out to follow. Fifty yards behind him, a man in a Toyota sedan replicated his actions. They had watched the targets collect their hire car and had been behind them all the way from Logan International Airport. They would follow them wherever they went, alternating position so that the driver of the Buick wouldn’t see the same car behind him all the time.

  As he drove away, the man in the Toyota used his hands-free kit and dialled an Italian mobile telephone number. He had no idea of the identity of the man who answered, but he did know that he was the person pulling his strings.

  ‘What are they doing now?’ Cardinal Caravaggio demanded.

  ‘Driving around and doing the tourist bit. They’ve looked at the Westford Knight – that’s a kind of local attraction – and visited a local library. Right now they’re back on the road.’

  ‘Call me whenever they stop. And don’t let them see you.’

  Chapter 48

  Jerusalem, Israel, and Toulouse, France

  While Zeru was not an officially sanctioned Jewish organisation, its unstated but clear objective was something that almost every citizen of the country fundamentally agreed with to a greater or lesser extent, so it was able to rely on semi-official help in a number of fields. Information that the organisation requested or needed was never officially acknowledged, though official resources were often used to obtain it, and this level of under-the-counter cooperation even extended into parts of the security services and the military.

  So when one of the principals at Zeru flagged up the names Lewis, Angela, and Bronson, no first name, as an ‘anything known’ request, it didn’t take long for positive results to be obtained. Passport control records showed that both Angela Lewis and Christopher Bronson, believed to be her former husband, had visited Israel more than once. Further information on both was somewhat scanty, but Lewis was an academic and Bronson was a British police officer. Scans of their passports accompanied the response.

  That prompted a different enquiry from Zeru directed towards a sympathetic officer in the Mossad. They knew that Bronson and Lewis had been in Campagne-sur-Aude, so now that they had their passport details, they asked if either target had crossed any border, although that was impossible to check in Schengen countries. Again the response was quick, and again it was positive. The day after the incident in the French village, they’d both flown to Boston in Massachusetts.

  ‘Boston?’ Dayan asked, when he read the encrypted email. ‘What the hell are they doing over in America?’

  ‘They must have found a clue or been given some more information,’ Gellerman said. He thought about the situation for a few minutes, then nodded. ‘We should follow them. Find out what supporters we have over there and get their contact details. I’ll talk to Jerusalem and tell them where we’ll be, then I’ll book flights and a hotel. You have both got valid American visas?’

  Both Dayan and Chason nodded. Because members of Zeru might have to travel almost anywhere at short notice, they had visas for most countries where the validity period was over a year. The American B1/B2 visa was valid for ten years from the date of issue and allowed them to spend up to a hundred and eighty days in the States at a time, so they held them as a matter of course.

  ‘We’ll leave the pistols in a storage locker somewhere here in Toulouse, maybe at the airport. Aaron, make sure you identify somebody in Massachusetts who can supply us with weapons. We don’t know what we’ll be facing over there.’

  ‘Of course,’ Chason replied. ‘In America, finding pistols is never difficult, not even in Massachusetts.’

  Chapter 49

  Rhode Island, United States of America

  ‘Newport is where you said that inscribed stone was found on the beach,’ Bronson said as they drove over the Sakonnet River Bridge from the mainland to Rhode Island, the open water to their left scattered with private yachts riding on buoys or at anchor, and a couple of marinas to their right.

  ‘Yes, right down at the southern tip, not that far from where we’re going. I hope the clues in this parchment will make more sense once we’re actually on the spot, because some of them relate to the terrain, like that one about the island and the hill. And we need to see the place, to be there, to recognise and identify landmarks.’

  ‘What other clues are there?’

  ‘There are really two others that might help to pinpoint where we should be looking, but the one I’m most interested in is the Latin phrase medium inter finibus ubi flumen currit ad meridiem. It translates as “halfway between the coasts where the river runs south”. That seems quite specific, but it’s also a bit vague. The only thing it conveys for sure is that we need to find a river that flows towards the south. What we can do nothing about are the man-made changes that will have altered the landscape in the centuries between the Templars walking this ground and now. That’s the other reason I want to explore at least some of Rhode Island, to get a feel for the way the environment might have changed.’

  Like most American roads, the highway was good and largely straight without too much traffic, and for some time they drove through pleasant open countryside. Soon they started seeing scattered houses and the occasional industrial unit, and they ran into a lot more traffic as they passed the airport, but even so it continued to flow freely. The suburbs of Newport were quite built up but still felt spacious, because most of the houses were individually designed rather than built as identical units, and were well separated on large lots, not crammed together in the rows that were a feature of most British towns. As they neared their objective, the roads and streets narrowed, but many of them were one-way to avoid congestion.

  ‘This seems like a very pleasant place to live,’ Angela said. ‘Lots of open spaces, attractive houses and all the rest.’ She checked something on her smartphone. ‘They aren’t even expensive, most of them. According to this website, you can get a perfectly reasonable three-bedroomed detached house for around two to three hundred thousand, and that’s dollars, not pounds. Obviously it depends on the area, but that’s less than I would have thought.’

  ‘Or for about the same money,’ Bronson pointed out, ‘you could buy a two-up, two-down terraced cottage in one of the cheaper bits of Kent. But I think I’d still rather live in England.’

  The satnav took them into Bellevue Avenue, and then right into Pelham Street. About halfway along, Angela pointed to the right.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s the Newport Tower. Just park anywhere along here.’

  Bronson locked the Buick and they walked over towards one of the strangest-looking buildings he had ever seen. It was almost circular – actually it was octagonal, but because of its size this was barely noticeable – with eight pillars forming eight arches. Above them the walls continued upwards, but there was no roof or any kind of covering; it was obvious that it was just a circular shell. What it looked like to Bronson could be summed up in a single word: old.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I can see that it’s a tower, but what was it for? And who built it?’

  ‘Two predictable questions, both entirely valid. And the short answer to both is the same: nobody knows. The prevailing theory is that it was a grist mill – a mill that grinds cereal into flour – built in colonial times, and presumably powered by wind.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like a windmill to me. Or even like the remains of a windmill.’

  ‘Nor to me, and that’s the first problem. It’s the wrong shape and the design doesn’t make sense. Windmills almost always taper from the base upwards and they’re usually built of wood because they have to be able to turn to take advantage of the prevailing wind. If you can’t turn the entire windmill then you have to be able to turn the bit that the sails are attached to. The conventional theory is that the colonists built a wooden windmill here bu
t it blew down in a storm in about 1675, and so they replaced it with this stone structure. There are a few stone windmills still standing, but the one characteristic they all share, with one exception, is that the base is a solid stone tower. The exception is a thing called the Chesterton Windmill in Warwickshire, which does look a bit like this but only stands on six pillars rather than eight.’

  ‘But if they built a stone windmill because the wooden one was blown down in a storm, why did they build a tower that would be inherently weaker and much more difficult to construct than a solid tower? Logically, a solid tower would make much better sense.’

  Angela nodded. ‘Exactly. The related problem is that despite the claim that a wooden windmill was blown down here in a storm, there’s no record whatsoever of this one being built. There are various extant documents that refer to a mill in this area, but that’s all, and it’s possible that they called it a mill because they had to call it something.’

  ‘So you think it pre-dates the arrival of the colonists?’

  ‘I do,’ Angela said. ‘Let me ask you a question. When you saw it for the first time, what was your initial impression?’

  ‘I thought it looked old. Certainly older than seventeenth-century. We’re used to seeing very old buildings in Britain and to me this looks more medieval than anything.’

  ‘And probably one reason why you thought that was because of the way it’s been built.’ Angela pointed at the tower in front of them. ‘As far as I’m aware, every surviving colonial building in America – and some of those were erected over a century before the colonists began building anything here – is either some form of timber-framed property or it’s been built using shaped stones. So why, if the colonists here really did want to build a windmill of this peculiar shape, would they have abandoned the established building techniques that they were familiar with and were using on every other building they constructed, and instead decided to revert to a construction method that is unequivocally medieval and much, much more difficult?

  ‘That would be like a builder in Britain today deciding that he wouldn’t bother with bricks and breeze blocks and plasterboard and all that kind of stuff and instead use mud bricks, rough timbers and wattle-and-daub to build a house. It simply makes no sense. This tower, whatever its purpose, was built using rough and unworked field stones of all shapes and sizes, a medieval building technique that would have been obsolete for centuries by the time this part of America was colonised in the early seventeenth century. The only possible reason for that was if the builders themselves were medieval and didn’t have either the skills or the tools to shape the stones they were using. And if you think about it, when Prince Henry Sinclair set out from Scotland to cross the Atlantic in 1398, his crew would have included sailors, navigators, carpenters, sailmakers and men with all the other skills needed to sail and maintain a wooden ship, but the one craftsman he almost certainly wouldn’t have needed or wanted on board would have been a stonemason.’

  ‘As usual,’ Bronson said, ‘what you say makes perfect sense. So if this was built by Sinclair and his men, or even an earlier Templar expedition, what was it for? Presumably not a windmill.’

  ‘No. In 1939, somebody took an aerial shot of this part of Newport from almost directly above the tower. One thing about aerial photography is that it often reveals underground structures that are completely invisible to anybody standing on the ground. The picture wasn’t particularly clear, but there is just the faintest hint of a buried or vanished rectangular structure right next to the tower on its eastern side. And again this is pure conjecture, but if there actually was a rectangular building next to the Tower, the ground plan would look the same as the Temple Church in London, with a circular nave and a rectangular chancel. So maybe what we have here is the ruins of a medieval chapel.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, it’s not been proved, obviously. But there’s something else. In fact, there are several other things. The tower may look round, but it’s not perfectly circular and has slightly different dimensions depending on whether you measure it from east to west or north to south, which suggests it wasn’t designed by an architect or constructed by experienced builders. If it had been built in the seventeenth century, it would have been symmetrical. And at one time the interior was covered with a layer of smooth white plaster, the remains of which can still be seen on the inside of some of the columns. Nobody has yet come up with any sensible idea as to why that would have been done if it was in fact a windmill, but it would make very good sense if the structure had been the circular nave of a chapel.

  ‘As far as I know, the Knights Templar were the only people who built churches to that plan, with a round nave and a rectangular chancel; the reason for that design is because that’s the plan of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, so the Templars were replicating that shape in their chapels. It’s also worth remembering that Prince Henry Sinclair came from Orkney, and on the Orkney mainland you can still see the remains of the Round Kirk of Orphir, built in the 1120s. That’s the only surviving medieval round church in Scotland and was also modelled on the Holy Sepulchre, so he would have been familiar with the design.

  ‘And there’s another bit of evidence that is suggestive but not compelling. In 1948, an archaeological dig carried out inside and outside the tower found that some of the ground outside the structure contained layers of stones that could have been intended as foundations. Records from colonial times show that no other structure was built next to the tower after 1639, when the town was founded, so if there had been anything there, it must have pre-dated the arrival of the colonists.’

  For a couple of minutes they both stood and looked at the old stones that formed the structure in front of them.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Bronson said, ‘and whatever the reason for constructing it was, it is a weird building. Has any dating been done on it?’

  ‘Yes, I meant to mention that. In 1993, radiocarbon dating was carried out on the organic components of samples of the mortar. The results suggested a date range of between 1635 and 1698, and a mean of about 1680 was proposed. But all that proves is the date of the mortar, not the date of the structure itself. If this was built and then abandoned in the last couple of years of the fourteenth century, by the time the colonists arrived over two hundred years later, it probably would have needed a lot more work than just repointing. To keep it standing they would very probably have had to remove virtually all the old mortar and replace it with new. That’s the easiest and most obvious explanation for the dating.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Bronson said as they walked back to the car, ‘if slightly weird. So has seeing it in the flesh helped?’

  ‘Not really. I don’t know what I was expecting to find here, but Newport is so built up and developed that I think we’re wasting our time. The island is also very flat, which means the clue about the island and the hill doesn’t really make sense unless there’s a hill on the mainland that would fit. And there isn’t a river flowing south, as far as I can see. There’s a thing called Bailey Brook, but that’s certainly not a river – it’s barely even a stream. But the biggest problem is the amount of development. If the Templars had constructed a hidden vault anywhere on this island, I’m quite sure somebody would have found it by now. And if somebody had found it, and it did contain the Ark of the Covenant, then the whole world would know about it.’

  Bronson started the Buick and eased it away from the kerb.

  ‘So where to now?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s retrace our steps and get out of Rhode Island and back into Massachusetts. Head back towards Boston and we’ll find somewhere to stay on the road, a motel or something. I don’t want to drive too far in case what we’re looking for is here after all. There’s a nearby town called Taunton. I know it’s only early afternoon, but let’s stop somewhere there for the night and I’ll do some more research.’

  ‘And what are you looking for now? Presumably somewhere that fits the clues so far, the hill and t
he island and the south-flowing river, I mean.’

  ‘Exactly. Nothing anywhere here seems to match up with any of that, so I’m beginning to think we’re definitely in the wrong place, but I need to check before we do anything else. And then there’s the last clue. We’ve got to find the well that isn’t.’

  Bronson glanced at her. ‘The well that isn’t what?’ he asked.

  ‘The well that isn’t a well, obviously. Do try and keep up, Chris.’

  Chapter 50

  Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

  The rules relating to gun ownership in Massachusetts are among the most stringent and restrictive in America, but as with every rule ever made or every law ever passed, there are ways around them. The man that Aaron Chason had been put in touch with through another of his contacts explained the deal in very clear and unambiguous terms.

  ‘The three pistols in this briefcase are part of my personal collection,’ he said.

  The two men were meeting in a small and fairly noisy bar in the Back Bay area of central Boston, not far from the hotel the three Israelis had booked. They were sitting at a table in one corner and talking quietly so that neither of them could be overheard. The man opposite Chason had introduced himself only as ‘John’ and looked like a successful businessman, clean-shaven, well dressed and slightly overweight.

  ‘There’s a Glock, a Browning and a Colt, each with one spare magazine,’ he went on, ‘all nine millimetre, and there are two boxes of fifty rounds as well. I would like them back when you’ve finished whatever you’re doing here, in the same state that they are now.’

  He glanced around before continuing, and then passed Chason a slip of paper with a mobile number written on it.

  ‘But remember this. I only want the weapons back if you don’t use them. That number’ – he pointed at the slip of paper in front of the Israeli – ‘is a prepaid mobile, a burner, and you or one of your men must call me on it every afternoon between five and six and talk about anything. During that conversation, you must say the word “Israel”. That will tell me that you have not used the weapons. If I don’t receive a call or you don’t say that word, I will assume that you have fired them. I will then stage a break-in at my house and tell the police they’ve been stolen. Do you understand?’