The Messiah Secret

by James Becker

  ‘Not for the moment,’ Bronson said, pulling a card out of his pocket. ‘This has got my mobile number on it. If you think of anything else, please call me.’

  ‘I will,’ Suleiman said, shaking Bronson’s hand. ‘And thank you again for giving me back the rest of my life.’

  31

  Killian drove about five miles away from Al-Gebel al-Ahmar, heading east, away from Cairo and the suburbs of the city, until he found a deserted stretch of road. He hadn’t wanted to take the paintings to his hotel room because some of the staff would remember him arriving with such unusual items, and he didn’t want to be disturbed while he was examining the pictures. He also needed privacy to replace the dressing on his wounded ear.

  A narrow, rough and unmade track snaked away to one side of the road, meandering around a series of low dunes that would provide him with the privacy he wanted. He drove down the track until he was about a hundred yards from the road, then pulled the car to a stop.

  Getting out of the vehicle, he looked about him. The air was still and silent. Grunting in satisfaction, he took a blanket from the boot of the car and spread it on the ground. Then he placed both paintings face-down on it, ready to examine them. But as he did so, a stabbing pain shot through his skull and a couple of drops of blood splashed on to the dusty ground at his feet. Killian grimaced, then took a medical kit from the car, opened it and sat awkwardly in the passenger seat to change the dressing. With only his reflection in the interior mirror to guide him it wasn’t easy, but eventually he finished and stood up, a fresh dressing and plaster covering his injured ear. Suleiman’s blow had knocked the scab off the top of the wound and he knew that would delay the healing process still further.

  At least the wound was still clean and showing no sign of infection – perhaps surprising in view of the way he had sustained the injury. In his mind’s eye he could still see Oliver Wendell-Carfax’s yellowish teeth, stained with blood and shreds of flesh, when he’d finally managed to get free of his grasp. God knows what bacteria or worse had been in his mouth. As well as cleaning the wound twice a day, Killian had also been sprinkling it with holy water and that, he thought, perhaps even more than his rudimentary medical care, might be the reason it was still clean. It was yet one more manifestation of the power of God and of the sure and certain way that He protected His servant on Earth.

  Killian gave a grim smile. Both Oliver Wendell-Carfax and Suleiman had more than paid for their temerity in resisting God’s will. And Wendell-Carfax and the fat man from the museum had felt the teeth of the scourge, the oldest and most sacred instrument of holy chastisement, before they died. If he’d had a little more time, Killian would have taught Suleiman a proper and complete lesson using the instrument as well. But his first priority had been to get the paintings out of the building.

  At least that phase of the search was now over. He had the last clues he needed to recover the treasure, and even if anyone was still looking, his actions had ensured that they would get no further than Egypt. All he had to do now was find the hiding place Bartholomew had used to secrete the copy of the parchment.

  Killian looked down at the two pictures. Then he crossed himself and for a few minutes knelt in prayer before the small silver crucifix he took from his pocket. It was his constant companion, guide and comfort in times of stress and trouble.

  Then he began an exhaustive examination of the frames of the two paintings. Wherever Bartholomew had hidden the text, Killian was absolutely certain he would be able to find it. Once he had, he could destroy both paintings and start the final phase of his search. He licked his lips. The treasure was practically in sight.

  32

  Bronson and Angela were in their car, outside the still smouldering house.

  ‘So what now?’ Bronson asked, starting the engine to get the air conditioning running. ‘We came here to find the paintings, and we failed. So now we’ve got no way of continuing our search.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Angela said, her tone resigned. ‘Even the reference to el-Moalla – which we didn’t know about before – isn’t much of a help to us because we don’t know what directions were specified in the parchment.’

  She paused for a moment, considering, then brightened slightly. ‘There is one thing we might as well do while we’re here. According to Suleiman, Bartholomew believed Shishaq seized the Ark of the Covenant and then later in his reign ordered it to be concealed somewhere up the Nile in a secret valley. I still think he’s a good candidate for grabbing the Ark, but there are a couple of things wrong with the idea of him later hiding it way upstream near Luxor.

  ‘First, Shishaq’s capital was based at Tanis, quite close to Cairo, so why would he have hidden the Ark so far away from the area under his control? And, second, the Egyptians were compulsive record-keepers, and I would have expected there to be some documentary evidence to support this theory. If there is, I’ve never seen it, but I’m beginning to wonder if Bartholomew did find a reference somewhere, and that’s why he was so sure about it.’

  She sat forward, enjoying the blast of cold air on her face. ‘I think we should do what we planned to do when we came out here. We should drive out to el-Hiba and possibly fly down to Karnak, depending on what we find at el-Hiba.’

  ‘And you are sure we have to go to these places in person?’ Bronson asked. ‘You can’t just look at pictures of the inscriptions on the internet or study translations of them in a book?’

  ‘The images I found on the web aren’t clear enough to decipher properly, and I don’t actually think anyone’s done a complete translation of the hieroglyphs at either site – I certainly haven’t been able to find one anywhere.’

  ‘Can you read hieroglyphs?’ Bronson asked doubtfully.

  ‘I can read them well enough to check something like this, I think, and I know a little bit about hieratic and demotic too.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘They’re technically not hieroglyphic scripts: they’re more like a kind of shorthand, and were always written from right to left. The problem with hieroglyphics is that each character is quite detailed – a bird, a leaf, a snake, that kind of thing – and takes a long time to draw correctly. Hieratic and demotic scripts developed so that scribes could produce texts fairly quickly on papyrus, and much more easily than using hieroglyphics. What we’ll find will be hieroglyphics – they were used for monumental inscriptions all the way through the Pharaonic period. But I’ve got a computer program that should help – it analyses and translates hieroglyphic characters.’

  Bronson looked at his watch. ‘You want to go there now?’

  ‘Yes, we might as well,’ Angela said, fastening her seat belt. ‘We should be able to get there and back today.’

  They headed north and picked up the Salah Salem road that ran south-west towards central Cairo. The traffic was flowing much more freely, and they were able to make good progress.

  ‘Where are the pyramids?’ Bronson asked, as they approached the centre of the city. ‘I’d like to see them while we’re here, and I thought they were quite close to Cairo.’

  ‘They are, but they’re over on the west bank of the Nile, probably about five or six miles in front of us. You might get the odd glimpse of them through the buildings when we start heading south. Right,’ she said, checking the map again, ‘stay on the east bank of the river, and keep going.’

  ‘Understood. Which side of the Nile do we need to be on eventually?’

  ‘I don’t think it matters. According to this map there are two main roads that follow the Nile south, one running along each bank, and there are several bridges where we can cross to the other side if we have to.’

  The traffic was still congested, but most of the vehicles were heading towards the centre of Cairo, so Bronson was driving against the flow and, as soon as they reached the district of Tura, where the road turned due south, he was able to speed up a little as the traffic thinned out. The tall apartment buildings and office blocks were gradually replace
d by lower, older and much more decrepit structures, and a couple of times they did catch just the briefest sight of the very tops of the pyramids in the distance, over to the west. On their right-hand side the Nile flowed steadily northwards, a wide, grey-brown mass of moving water, peopled with a variety of boats, including a couple of big Nile cruisers, scores of motorboats and dozens of lateen-rigged feluccas, the iconic sailing boats of old Egypt.

  On the west side of the Nile, the built-up area seemed to have petered out, just a few isolated dwellings, but the road Bronson was following, which was right beside the bank of the river, had extensive urban developments extending to the east. He pointed out this oddity to Angela.

  ‘There’s a good reason for that,’ Angela said. ‘Over to our left there’s a large urbanization, but the land on the west side of the river has a lot of ancient sites. We’re just about level with a place called the Amba Armiyas Monastery, and just below that is Saqqara.’

  ‘That name rings a bell.’

  ‘As it should. It’s a huge ancient burial ground – I think it’s about five miles long by one mile wide – and it’s where you’ll find the oldest hewn-stone building complex ever discovered. That’s Djoser’s step pyramid, which dates from about two thousand six hundred BC, well over four thousand five hundred years old. Egyptologists believe that was the first stone pyramid of all time. They think it was built by erecting a large mastaba, a kind of flat-roofed rectangular tomb, on the bedrock, then building a slightly smaller one on top of it, and then another smaller one, and so on.’

  ‘It sounds like that would account for the steps,’ Bronson said.

  ‘True. But in fact stepped pyramids are found in several different parts of the world, where mastabas are completely unknown, so it could also have been a design that the ancient peoples liked the look of. The best known are the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia – that’s modern-day Iraq – and the pre-Columbian civilizations of South America.’

  ‘The Incas and the Aztecs?’

  ‘Yes, and the Maya and the Toltecs as well. They all had a go at building them. Anyway, as well as Djoser’s step pyramid, there are pyramids belonging to about fifteen or sixteen other Egyptian kings at Saqqara, in various states of disrepair. And, because the high officials of the court liked to be buried as close to their king as possible, there are shaft tombs and mastabas all over the place. And there’s also a thing called the Serapeum there. That was the burial site for mummified Apis bulls.’

  ‘The Egyptians mummified bulls?’ Bronson asked, surprised. ‘I thought it was only cats.’

  Angela nodded. ‘They mummified a lot of animals, actually. Bulls and cows were the biggest, cats were probably the most popular, and they also mummified birds, especially hawks and ibis.’

  The road they were on was called the Kornaish El Nile, which they guessed meant ‘Corniche of the Nile’, and as they passed the built-up area on their left, the road moved slightly away from the bank of the river before swinging back towards it. As they cleared the urbanization, they passed a bridge over the Nile.

  ‘That’s the first crossing point of the river we’ve seen since we left Cairo itself,’ Bronson said.

  ‘Yes. According to this map, that’s the El Marazeek Bridge,’ Angela replied. ‘But there are plenty of other bridges further south. Just keep going on this road.’

  Within a couple of miles, the river had swung away from them, over to the west, and the road was taking them slightly to the east, so they lost sight of the Nile altogether. The traffic had thinned considerably, though there were still about a dozen cars in sight in front of them, and at least that number behind, and a fairly steady stream of vehicles heading towards them. The open road and less frantic driving conditions meant Bronson could relax a little. He glanced over at Angela, who appeared lost in thought; he guessed she was thinking about their search and the dangers surrounding them. He knew he’d have to be extra vigilant if they were going to stay safe.

  On the right-hand side of the road he saw a sign displaying the universally recognized symbol of a wasp-waisted bottle and a word beside it in Arabic script, which he guessed meant ‘Coke’.

  ‘I could do with a drink after all we’ve been through this morning,’ he said, ‘and it looks like there’s a café or a bar somewhere ahead. Shall we stop?’

  About half a mile further on Bronson pulled up outside a bar that was little more than an old and dusty shack. But they heard the sound of a generator running somewhere behind the structure, so at least the drinks should be cool. This, he thought, was a priority. If he was going to spend the day being a chauffer and bodyguard, he was going to make sure he wasn’t thirsty.

  33

  The sun was high in the sky by the time Killian had taken both paintings out of their frames and then systematically reduced the frames to matchwood. The obvious place to hide a small piece of paper or parchment was within a secret compartment somewhere in the heavily gilded wood that surrounded and supported each picture, he reasoned, so he’d started by examining the frames themselves, looking for any writing or marks on the wood itself that might be relevant. But both the fronts and the backs of the two frames were virtually unmarked. Killian had checked every crack and line he could see, searching for the compartment he was certain was hidden there, but no panels or drawers sprang open under his probing.

  Then he’d broken the first frame, pulling apart the joints and separating the four component parts. He’d examined each of them individually, breaking the lengths of wood apart until he was surrounded by splinters and chunks of wood, and flakes of gilt paint covered the blanket like golden confetti. But still he found nothing.

  He repeated the process with the second frame, with precisely the same result. There was nothing hidden inside the frame of either picture. Only then did he turn his attention to the paintings themselves.

  The reverse sides of the two oil paintings appeared normal in every way. The canvases were mounted on oblong wooden stretchers, the fabric pulled taut and secured in place using short tacks. As far as Killian could see, there were no marks on the wood itself, and nothing on the rear of the canvas. The only other place Bartholomew could possibly have concealed the text of the parchment was on the face of the wooden stretcher, the part that lay hidden underneath the canvas of the painting itself.

  Killian took a broad-bladed screwdriver from the small toolkit he always carried, then stopped and shook his head. There were dozens of tacks – maybe fifty or sixty in all – studding the rear of the stretcher, and to shift them using the screwdriver would take ages. The painting itself was of no interest to him, so he could remove it much faster using a knife.

  Selecting a utility knife, he slid out the blade and, with one swift movement, cut down the entire length of one side of the stretcher. Then he turned the painting and repeated the operation on the other three sides. The canvas fell away and Killian eagerly studied the clean wood his action had revealed.

  Again, he could see no marks of any sort. He picked up his screwdriver again and worked the end of the blade under the strip of canvas that was still attached to the stretcher. He levered up the fabric until he could grip it firmly, then ripped the canvas away from the stretcher and tossed it aside. There was nothing on the wood; no marks of any sort.

  Killian stood looking down at the stretcher, turning the wooden oblong over in his hands. He knew he must have missed something. The statement by Bartholomew could only be interpreted in one way. The translation of the lost parchment had to be hidden somewhere in the paintings, in the ‘Montgomerys’. Nothing else made sense.

  Groaning with frustration, he tossed the stretcher aside and picked up the painting he’d cut out of it. He examined the back of the canvas but could see no marks of any sort. Only then did he turn the fabric round and look at the painting itself.

  Ten minutes later he screwed the canvas into a ball. There was nothing, no clue at all, anywhere on the painting. There was only one possible conclusion he could draw, and he be
latedly realized there was one vital question he hadn’t asked Suleiman al-Sahid.

  He’d badly underestimated Bronson and Lewis. They’d obviously studied the contents of the leather-bound box before he’d snatched it off them, and made the same connections he had. Then they’d flown out to Egypt, visited al-Sahid and removed the clues Bartholomew had hidden in the paintings years earlier. His own exhaustive and destructive search of the pictures, he now realized, had been a complete waste of effort, and more importantly of time. Most likely, Bartholomew had written down the full translation of the Persian text on a couple of bits of paper, sealed the pages in envelopes and tucked them away at the backs of the paintings.

  And then Bronson had come along, spun Suleiman some line, and helped himself to what they’d all been looking for.

  Killian cursed long and fluently, then gave the wooden debris a vicious kick that scattered pieces of the frames in all directions. The clues simply weren’t there.

  He bent down and rummaged through the bits and pieces one more time, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter and touched the flame to the edge of the canvas. In the extreme midday heat, the old and dry fabric caught almost immediately. Killian waited a few moments, making sure that the fire was well established, piled the remains of the picture frames and stretchers on top of the flames, then walked back to his car.

  At least he now knew exactly what he must do. Bronson and Lewis obviously had the information he needed and they had to be somewhere in Cairo. He simply had to find them and recover the clues. And then he’d kill them. He smiled, the pain from his ear receding a little. The deaths he was planning would be long and lingering.