The Messiah Secret

by James Becker

  Was there a connection here? That was one other thing that disturbed Donovan: he now knew he wasn’t the only person looking for the treasure. Suddenly, what had started out almost as an academic curiosity had turned into a dangerous race. But in spite of McLeod’s death, Donovan was determined to find the treasure first, no matter what it took – the potential rewards were simply too great to ignore.

  He pulled out in to the busy morning traffic. The search had begun.

  11

  It was lunchtime by the time Donovan got back to the office and very quiet, which suited him just fine. He’d gone straight to McLeod’s workstation, telling his secretary he didn’t want to be interrupted, and opened up his computer. Now he leaned back, faintly surprised. He hadn’t expected his scan of the hard drive to reveal any useful information at all, but in fact he’d found an entirely unprotected folder named ‘Suffolk’ in the root directory. Inside it were the statements and forensic reports prepared by the Suffolk Police in their initial investigation into the murder of Oliver Wendell-Carfax, information that McLeod had obviously obtained recently, but which he’d failed to share with Donovan.

  He copied the whole lot on to a memory stick, then read the reports on-screen. The old man had obviously died a hard, painful death, and common sense suggested he would have told his killer whatever he needed to know. His injuries were so severe that he would probably have died from them anyway, even without the heart attack that had actually killed him.

  But the blood and tissue found in the corpse’s mouth pointed to an alternative scenario. It meant the killer’s face must have been right next to the old man’s mouth, and that implied that the killer was listening intently to what he said. So maybe Oliver Wendell-Carfax hadn’t blurted out everything?

  Obviously, there was no way of telling now, but that detail from the forensic report at least gave Donovan hope that the other man searching for the relic might not have obtained all the information he sought. The playing field, so to speak, might still be level.

  As Donovan shut down the computer, his mobile rang.

  ‘It’s Sergeant Hancock at the MPD, Mr Donovan. We sent a team over to Jesse McLeod’s apartment and it’s been cleaned out, at least as far as electronic devices are concerned. No computers, cameras or even mobile phones. Whoever did it left all the cables in place, but the hardware’s gone. You’ve no idea who the intruder could be, I guess?’

  ‘Absolutely none at all, Sergeant,’ Donovan said. But he knew he had to find out – and quickly.

  Back in his office, Donovan cleared everything off his desk, then walked across to the wall beside the door where a single piece of modern art hung. He didn’t particularly like the picture, but it was exactly the right size to conceal the safe that was set into the concrete wall directly behind it.

  He pressed the bottom left corner of the picture to release the spring-loaded magnetic catch and then swung the frame back on a piano hinge to reveal the wall safe and control panel behind it. With the ease that comes from familiarity, he entered a six-digit code on the control panel keypad that unlocked the thermostatic controls and gradually adjusted the internal environment of the safe to allow the air inside it to reach room temperature and humidity, and permit the door to be opened. It would take a little over three minutes, but he never minded the wait.

  As soon as the light on the control panel changed from red to green, he inserted a slim steel key in the adjacent lock, turned it twice, and swung open the door. Inside lay a zipped plastic bag containing a piece of papyrus with ragged, frayed and uneven edges, and a single sheet of paper. He picked up both and carried them over to his desk.

  Pulling on a disposable mask and a pair of thin cotton gloves, he unzipped the plastic bag and carefully, almost reverently, he slid the parchment out and placed it gently on the bag. For some moments he just stared down at it. He couldn’t read the closely written Aramaic script in its entirety, though he knew enough of the language to translate the odd word, but a complete translation – in fact, three complete translations prepared by three different but very experienced ancient-language specialists – was typed on the sheet of paper in front of him.

  Those translations had sparked his all-consuming passion and ongoing search for any other clues that might tell him where he should be searching for the relic he believed still had to exist. They were all subtly dissimilar, because each translator had interpreted the Aramaic script in a slightly different way, but there was no mistaking their meaning. The dozen or so Aramaic words in front of him, written in faded black ink, referred to the greatest lost treasure of all time, an object that even now quite literally had the power to change the world.

  Just under an hour later, Donovan checked the contents of his leather carry-on bag for the second time, then pulled the zip closed. His didn’t need to undo his suitcase – he kept two of them permanently packed with everything he’d need for a two-week stay, one for cold countries, and the other for the tropics. This time his destination was London, Heathrow, so choosing the correct case for the trip hadn’t been difficult.

  He also had a carry-on bag that contained a small Dell notebook computer, one partition on the hard drive hidden, encrypted and password protected. In that partition were the reports McLeod had copied from the Suffolk Police files, as well as telephone numbers and contact details he’d pulled off his own computer, plus an automatic destruct routine that would repeatedly over-write the contents with random characters if an incorrect password was entered three times. The bag also held a couple of external hard drives and memory sticks, and a selection of chips of various sorts, some of them of an unusual specification. Donovan wasn’t a computer expert, but before he’d started NoJoGen he’d worked for a specialist Los Angeles electronics company, which had contributed to the breadth of his technical knowledge.

  He paused for a moment, unzipped his carry-on and slid a compact umbrella inside, just in case.

  Donovan glanced round his spacious penthouse apartment once again, nodded to himself and then headed for the door. He set the alarm, double-locked the door and took his personal elevator down the ten flights to street level. He walked out of the main door of the building as the cab he’d booked drew to a halt by the kerb.

  It was, he hoped, a good omen.

  12

  By 10 a.m. that morning, Angela was in the kitchen at Carfax Hall, her laptop open and running. The cataloguing software program would, she hoped, allow her to identify most of the ceramics in the house, or at least assign them an approximate date and country of origin. Valuations would take longer, and she really wasn’t equipped to do them. The other obvious problem, she thought, as she looked at the china piled at the other end of the table, was that the period she knew most about was the first century AD. Most of the stuff in front of her dated from about two millennia later than that. She sighed. She’d just have to do her best.

  By the time she finished her coffee, she’d already taken a preliminary look at the china, ceramic and earthenware utensils, and had picked out half a dozen nice pieces of early English slipware and put them to one side.

  Then she settled down into her tried and tested routine. She created a free-form database on her laptop, named it ‘Carfax Hall Ceramics’, and labelled the fields from top to bottom. She started with the current date, then moved down to the probable date of the piece of china; the manufacturer, if known; a description of it; a note of any defects she could see and finally a rough estimate of its value.

  She also created a second, much simpler, database for those pieces of china – and there were a lot of them – which weren’t likely to be of any interest to the museum, and which would probably end up in a local auction house. She’d already decided to look at the less valuable pieces first, to get them out of the way and clear space on the table as quickly as possible.

  She photographed each piece from different angles with her digital camera before enveloping it in bubble-wrap and storing it in one of the wooden tea chests from the
attics. It was soon apparent that almost everything on the table was going to end up in the ‘auction’ tea chest, because most of the china in front of her was worth only a few pounds – some even less than that. Periodically, she attached the camera to her laptop and transferred the pictures she’d taken to a new folder on her hard drive.

  The other members of the team drifted into the kitchen at intervals to make coffee or tea, or just to chat while they took a break from their own cataloguing activity elsewhere in the old house.

  When the team stopped for lunch, Angela had already half-filled the ‘auction’ tea chest and in the process had cleared perhaps a quarter of the pieces of china off the table.

  ‘Have you found anything interesting?’ David Hughes asked, his spectacles glinting in the sun that shone through the large kitchen window.

  Angela shook her head. ‘Not really. There’s some English slipware and a few bits of early Wedgwood, but nothing that you couldn’t pick up in almost any halfway decent antique shop. It doesn’t look to me as if Oliver or Bartholomew were really into collecting ceramics. What about you?’

  ‘Actually, quite a few nice pieces. There’s a good octagonal Regency rosewood centre table, but my most exciting find so far is a really nice Jacobean wainscot chair, in beautiful condition.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s not a mid-nineteenth century repro?’ Mayhew had just come in, looking more florid than usual. ‘They made a lot of them around that period.’

  ‘You just stick to your specialization, Richard,’ Hughes replied, looking at him over his glasses in what Angela thought was a teacher-ish sort of way, ‘and I’ll stick to mine.’

  ‘You’re very quiet, Owen,’ Mayhew said, turning to a grey-haired man wearing bifocals who was sitting on the opposite side of the long table. ‘Anything to report?’

  Owen Reynolds, one of the British Museum’s arms and militaria experts, leaned forwards. ‘I’m not sure. There’s not much here that’s obviously within my remit, apart from that suit of armour in the hall, so—’

  ‘Is that the real thing?’ Mayhew asked.

  ‘Definitely. It’s a particularly nice example of Gotischer Plattenpanzer, Gothic plate armour, dating from the fifteenth century. I’ll need to research it, but I think it might be Maximilian, which is really exciting. And I’ve found a couple of 1796-pattern heavy cavalry swords, one an Austrian pallasch and the other a British version. But apart from those, I haven’t found very much, so I’ve been checking the contents of the boxes in the salon or whatever that big room is called.’

  Mayhew looked at him expectantly. ‘And?’ he asked.

  Reynolds looked round the room. ‘Well, I’m not absolutely sure, but I think somebody’s been searching through them. Not one of us, I mean. In several of the chests the contents have been unwrapped and, as far as I can recall, everything in them was properly wrapped when we first inspected the boxes.’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘A burglar, you mean?’ Mayhew asked.

  Reynolds spread his hands. ‘The problem is that we don’t know what there was in the boxes to start with. I mean, we don’t have a full inventory of their contents, do we? That’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘Do you think somebody has been pilfering?’

  Reynolds shook his head. ‘I don’t know. There are a lot of valuable pieces on display in this house – silverware, that kind of thing – that any burglar would immediately realize were worth a lot of money, and I think one or two of those might be missing as well. But because there is no inventory I can’t be sure.’

  Angela stood up. ‘Look, if Owen is right, and somebody has been here, the first thing we need to find out is how this burglar – or whatever he is – is getting inside. God,’ she lowered her voice, ‘you don’t suppose he’s in the house now, do you?’

  Richard Mayhew shook his head. ‘No. But we have been leaving the front door open while we’ve been in here, so I suppose it is just possible somebody could have snuck in. We’d better keep it locked from now on.’

  Angela nodded decisively. ‘I also want a complete sweep of the entire house, right now, just in case there is anyone lurking in the cellar or attic or somewhere.’ She was aware of how fast her heart was beating and took some deep breaths. She had narrowly escaped death the last time she’d been away and didn’t want to take any chances here.

  ‘OK, OK,’ Mayhew agreed, with a heavy sigh. ‘As soon as we’ve finished lunch we’ll search the place from top to bottom. Will that do?’

  Ninety minutes later, hot and dusty from poking around at the top and bottom of the old house and everywhere in between, the team re-assembled somewhat grumpily in the kitchen. They’d found absolutely nothing to suggest that anybody else had been in the house recently, apart from an unfastened ground-floor window at the back of the house, which they’d now closed and locked, and which Angela had then jammed with a screw to ensure it couldn’t be opened from the outside.

  ‘Happy now?’ Richard Mayhew snapped.

  Angela sighed. She still felt very uneasy. ‘I’d rather be back in London, thank you. But at least now I’m sure that there isn’t someone watching us.’

  ‘OK, now that we’ve finally got that cleared up, let’s get some useful work done, shall we?’ Mayhew hurried out of the kitchen.

  Angela picked up another piece of china from the table to assess and catalogue. She had just opened up her laptop when she heard a startled gasp from David Hughes.

  ‘What is it?’ She spun round to look behind her.

  ‘I thought I saw something outside, some movement.’

  He strode across the kitchen to the window and stared through the somewhat grubby panes of glass at the unkempt grassland outside.

  Angela put down the china plate she’d been examining and stood up, joining him at the window moments later. The land in front of them sloped gently downwards, away from the house, dotted with clumps of shrubs and bushes, many of them easily big enough to conceal a person. And there was something else Angela noticed as well.

  ‘You might be right,’ she said slowly. ‘Every time I’ve looked out of this window since we got here, I’ve seen at least two or three rabbits hopping about out there. Right now, I don’t see any. Rabbits are extremely nervous animals. Because they’ve vanished, it could mean there is somebody out there.’ She shivered slightly. ‘God, I’ll be pleased when we’re finished and back in London. This place gives me the creeps.’

  13

  Jonathan Carfax stared through a pair of compact binoculars as the last of the cars drove away from the front of Carfax Hall. He knew he was invisible to the museum people, because he was standing in the shelter of a group of trees just outside the boundary of the property, but with a clear view of the house.

  Earlier that afternoon, he’d crept closer to the house, approaching it from the rear and making use of the cover provided by various small groups of bushes, but he’d obviously been seen by somebody. As he’d moved towards the building, two faces had appeared at the kitchen window and looked out, but by that time he’d already run down the slope away from the house, and ducked down into a hollow behind a large rhododendron bush, where he’d lain and fumed. Jonathan was one of Oliver’s cousins, and like the rest of his family had only recently discovered that he’d been disinherited. Well, he’d told himself, as he became gradually colder and damper, he was going to do something about that.

  Fifteen minutes later, he’d finally eased up into a crouch and then sprinted the last few yards to the boundary fence. Then he’d walked through the woods back to his car, and waited for the last of the British Museum people to leave.

  Darkness was falling as Carfax walked back towards the house. The cars had left, and no one seemed to be around. A solitary bat swooped through the gloaming. So far, so good, he thought.

  Quickly, he made his way to the window he’d left open at the back of the house. He took one more look round and pushed the sash upwards. Or tried to. It took less than a second for
Carfax to realize that somebody – obviously one of the team from the British Museum – must have spotted the open catch and locked it.

  ‘Bugger,’ he muttered, backing away and retracing his steps. He had come prepared, though. In the boot of his car he’d assembled a selection of tools that he hoped would be enough for him to slip the window catch if he found it locked.

  Ten minutes later he was back at the window, a long thin chisel in his hand, which he slid up between the two sections of the sash window. He positioned it against the locked catch and applied sideways pressure. Nothing happened – the catch remained obstinately closed. He tried again, and then again, each time increasing the level of force on the tool, and each time with precisely the same result – the catch didn’t move.

  Carfax swore again, more loudly this time. He’d chosen that window because, of all those on the ground floor, that one had the loosest catch. Finding a chunk of stone that had fallen from some part of the house he dragged it across to the window and stood up on it. Almost immediately he spotted the screw jammed into the catch, and knew he wouldn’t be able to force it from the outside.

  Somebody must have guessed he’d been inside the property. He thought he’d covered his tracks, and had only taken a handful of the choicest pieces. Quickly he tried forcing the other windows in the back wall of the house, but he knew that all the other catches were stiff with rust and disuse. Within ten minutes he was certain he was wasting his time – none of the other catches had budged even a millimetre.

  Grumbling to himself, Carfax gathered together his tools and equipment. His best option seemed to be a ladder that he could use to reach one of the first-floor windows. Hopefully he’d be able to force one of them. His only other choice was to break a pane of glass and open a window on the ground floor but then the police would get involved and he really didn’t want that.