The Messiah Secret

by James Becker

  But it wasn’t a quick job. They sat in the café for well over an hour before she finally leaned back in her seat.

  ‘I think that’s it,’ she said.

  ‘Right,’ Bronson said eagerly. ‘What’s it say?’

  But Angela seemed strangely reluctant to read out the text. ‘Look, there are a couple of words in it that could have alternative meanings, and a few that aren’t in the dictionary at all, so maybe they’re proper names. I’ve transcribed them exactly as they’re written. Here. See what you think.’

  She turned the sheet of paper round so that Bronson could see what she’d written on it, and slid it across the table.

  He scanned the lines Angela had written down. ‘I recognize some of it from what you told me before, the bit you found in the guidebook, I mean. But there’s no mention of Judea or a temple, which were the other two words you found on the Hillel fragment, if I remember rightly. So what do you think all this means?’

  ‘That’s the problem. I’m reasonably certain this is the whole thing, but it’s still not clear to me where – or even what – it refers to. It looks as if the first verse is a statement of intent, if you like. Then the second appears to be a general description of what the people involved did, and the third section looks as if it provides some details about the location they picked.’

  Bronson looked down again at the text, and then read it aloud, his voice low-pitched and almost reverent as he spoke Angela’s translation of the two-millennia-old verses.

  And then the son of Yus of the purified,

  instructed that the light which had become

  the treasure was to be taken from Mohalla

  and returned from whence it came.

  And Isaac journeyed long and far

  with his trusted followers into the

  valley of flowers and there fashioned

  with their own hands a place of stone

  where they together concealed and made

  hidden the treasure of the world for all

  eternity until the heavens shall be rent asunder

  and all shall tremble in the face of judgement.

  With their shadows ever before them

  from the rising to the setting

  beyond the meeting point where waters tumble

  towards the mighty river that flows never.

  Then turned to face the glory

  between the pillars and beyond their shadows

  into the silence and the darkness formed of man

  to rest forever.

  ‘More information, but a whole bunch of new questions,’ Bronson muttered. ‘Why couldn’t it be easy for once?’

  ‘If it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun,’ Angela said, ‘though I wouldn’t mind trying “easy” just once in a while.’

  ‘Which are the two words that have multiple meanings?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘In the first line, “purified” seems to be the best meaning of the word, but it also has something to do with lepers, and I can’t quite pin that down. Then in the fourth line, “it” can also be translated as “he” or “she”, but in that context the word has to mean “it”.

  ‘What about the last two lines of the second paragraph – they’re a bit apocalyptic, aren’t they?’

  Angela nodded. ‘Yes, but you quite often find that kind of thing in ancient writings. If the author of the text wanted to emphasize that he was talking about a really long time, he might well include some kind of reference to a day of judgement. Don’t forget, this idea of the world ending and the souls of all the living and dead being judged by some kind of god is very common in most civilizations. In the Bible it’s the Book of Revelations and in Islam—’

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘All the dead are supposed to assemble in the Well of Souls on the Temple Mount to await judgement.’

  ‘Exactly. I think almost every civilization believes the world will end, one way or another, but most seem to think it’ll be with a bang, and with some sort of a creator god involved who’ll weed out the good from the bad. I’m not sure that passage is significant – it looks to me like it’s just a bit of poetic licence on the part of the author.’

  Bronson looked again at the piece of text. ‘Well, it seems to me that there are at least three new clues worth following up,’ he said. ‘The three proper names – Yus, Isaac and Mohalla. And you’ve spelt “Mohalla” wrong. That should be “Moalla” or “el-Moalla”, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘That’s how it’s spelt in the Persian,’ she said, ‘with the “h”.’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe the original author of the text spelt the name wrongly, though I would have expected the “el” prefix to be included.’

  ‘Or perhaps he really didn’t mean “el-Moalla”, but somewhere completely different?’

  ‘That’s possible, I suppose.’

  Bronson looked back at the translation. ‘Two of them are the names of people, obviously.’

  ‘And they’re the key to this whole mystery. Isaac is still used today, of course, and it was a fairly common name in biblical times, so it’s probably not even worth looking at that. There’ll be hundreds or maybe thousands of references. But I’m not familiar with the name “Yus”, so I’m hoping that’s sufficiently unusual to give us some kind of a lead.’

  ‘And do you still think this piece of text is referring to the Ark of the Covenant?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘Yes. In the early biblical accounts, the Israelites believed that the Ark was a lethal weapon as well as a treasure. They claimed it was so dangerous that simply touching it could kill you, and that the Ark emitted a powerful light that destroyed their enemies. That seems to me to be a reasonably good match for the early part of this text, where it says “the light which had become the treasure”.’

  ‘Yet it sounds as if it had changed somehow,’ Bronson suggested. ‘Could the Ark’s powers – always assuming it had any, of course – have waned? Could the dangerous weapon have become just a richly decorated box? Or do you think there’s another meaning?’

  ‘Well, there is one theory that suggests the Ark might have contained some unknown highly radioactive source, something so powerful that touching it could literally kill you – not within seconds or minutes, obviously, but within a few days.’

  Bronson grinned at her. ‘I think that’s getting a bit too wacky for me, Angela, not to mention the questions it raises. Like where the source came from, how the Israelites managed to handle it, and what it was. The most dangerous radioactive elements are things like plutonium, and you can’t just find lumps of the stuff lying around. It has to be manufactured in a reactor. Take my word for it – there are no unknown radioactive elements out there that could exist in a stable form on Earth.’

  ‘OK,’ Angela said, sighing. ‘Scratch that idea. But maybe what the author of that text meant was that the Ark itself hadn’t changed, but what they were doing with it had. Suppose they no longer needed to use the Ark as a weapon. That would fit very well with that phrase “the light which had become the treasure”. They weren’t fighting wars any more, so they no longer needed the destructive power of the Ark – the “light” – but, of course, they would still recognize the value of the relic, so they would treasure it.’

  ‘But what about Mohalla?’

  ‘I think what’s important is that the relic – the treasure – was taken from Mohalla and “returned from whence it came”. So it’s not Mohalla we have to find, it’s wherever the Ark was taken after it left. And that phrase suggests it was transported back to wherever it was created.’

  ‘So where did it come from originally?’

  ‘According to the Bible, it was made by Moses following the orders of God, to act as a repository for the original Ten Commandments, so I suppose you could say that the place “from whence it came” was most likely Mount Sinai. That was where Moses was meant to have received the Covenant.’

  ‘And Mount Sinai is where, exactly?’

  ‘Somewhere in the Middle East, but the
re are several different suggestions as to exactly where.’

  ‘So if the Ark was taken and hidden somewhere on a mountain in the Middle East, where the hell would you start looking for it? I’m assuming you didn’t find anywhere conveniently named the Valley of the Flowers when you were doing your research?’

  ‘Actually, I found quite a lot of them,’ Angela replied, ‘but none of them were located at any site that could conceivably have been mistaken for Mount Sinai.’

  Bronson nodded. ‘And with all the activity in the Middle East – by archaeologists as well as by invading armies – it would have to be a really well-hidden “place of stone” that could have escaped detection over the last two millennia. And if anyone had found the Ark, I presume we’d know about it by now.’

  ‘Almost certainly.’

  ‘OK,’ Bronson said, ‘here’s a thought. I know you said that finding out where Mohalla was didn’t really matter, but actually I think it might be worth doing. We’re talking two thousand years ago, when the fastest way to move something like the Ark would be in a horse-drawn cart that might cover twenty or thirty miles a day. I know the piece of text says that Isaac and his mates “journeyed long and far”, but that would be “long and far” in the context of that time. If they travelled for a solid week and managed thirty miles a day, which would be pretty good going, they’d still only have covered about two hundred miles. I think if we can find out where Mohalla is, we’ll have a much better idea about where to start looking for the “place of stone”.’

  Angela was silent for a few moments, then she looked across at him, a slight smile on her face. ‘Actually, Chris,’ she said, ‘that’s a pretty good thought. These days we’re so used to the concept of high-speed travel – five hundred miles a day in a fast car, ten times that distance in an aircraft – that you have to take a couple of steps back to really appreciate the difficulties involved in covering any distance at all that long ago. Right, we’ll have to find Mohalla.’

  Bronson sat back and stretched his legs. It had been a long hard day, and he knew there was some way yet to go. ‘I’ve just had another thought,’ he said, ‘and I’ll make you a prediction.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You told me that Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax died suddenly?’

  ‘Yes. He had a heart attack at home, when he was in the middle of preparing for yet another expedition to search for the treasure.’

  ‘And he’d had those two pictures painted a short time before?’

  Angela nodded.

  ‘Maybe the biggest clue of all has been staring us in the face all along. Why do you think Bartholomew chose those two subjects for the portraits?’

  ‘Because he needed to be able to hide the Persian text in the paintings, and those two costumes were ideal for that purpose.’

  ‘Well, I think Bartholomew had a sense of humour. I think he was looking forward to pointing out the Persian writing in the paintings to his son, and I also think he’d finally found out exactly where Mohalla is or was, and the paintings tell us that as well.’

  ‘How?’ Angela asked.

  ‘It’s right in front of you. Just look at the pictures again.’

  Angela flicked back through the images stored on her laptop, found the ones that showed the two paintings and stared at them, one after the other.

  ‘It might be obvious to you, Chris, but it certainly isn’t to me.’

  ‘Think it through. Bartholomew could have chosen any number of subjects that would have allowed him to hide the Persian text, so why did he choose these two?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, and if you don’t tell me this instant, I’m going to— ’

  ‘India,’ Bronson said simply. ‘In one picture he looks like an Indian maharaja, and in the other like an Indian chief. The paintings are linked, obviously, because each one has about half of the Persian text on it, but apart from that the only common feature is the subject material. And that’s two things – both the paintings show Bartholomew and both of them link him with India.’

  Angela shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Chris, but that’s just too obvious.’

  Bronson grinned. ‘I disagree,’ he said. ‘And I’ll make you a bet that when you do dig up some reference to Mohalla, you’ll find that it’s somewhere in India.’

  Sitting in a plastic chair on the opposite side of the airport lounge, completely hidden behind a copy of the Wall Street Journal that he’d purchased from the airport shop, JJ Donovan slightly adjusted the position of the shotgun mike resting on his lap as the sound in his earphones – they looked like the type you use with an iPod – faded slightly.

  The equipment he was using was state-of-the-art. The shotgun microphone was tiny, but sufficiently powerful to allow him to listen to and record a conversation taking place as much as fifty yards away. Bronson and Lewis were a lot closer to him than that, but the airport was far from an ideal location for detailed surveillance. The problem was people: the passengers arriving and departing, who walked across the open space between Donovan’s seat and the café table where his targets were sitting. Sometimes people even stopped in his line of sight to hold a conversation, and there was very little Donovan could do about that. The location wasn’t perfect, but his equipment had proved good enough to capture about three-quarters of the conversation Bronson and Lewis had just had, a conversation that Donovan now had stored on a solid-state digital audio recorder.

  Once he’d been certain Bronson and Lewis were heading back to their hotel in Cairo from el-Hiba, he’d quickly caught up with the Peugeot in his hired Mercedes and then overtaken it. Then he’d tracked them around the streets of Cairo and followed them out to the airport.

  He still didn’t know the full story, but he had managed to record the translation of most of the Persian text as Bronson read it out, and now he probably had enough information to work out exactly where he should be looking next.

  42

  Angela and Bronson watched the computer screen as the first page of search results appeared on it.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it’s an actual place,’ Angela said. ‘Or at least there’s nowhere named Mohalla in any of the gazetteers. If there was, I’d have expected Wikipedia or one of the other encyclopaedia sites to have popped up with its location.’

  ‘The first result is from Wikipedia,’ Bronson pointed out.

  ‘I know, but it’s not a location. It’s a description of some kind.’ She clicked on the result.

  ‘You see? It gives the name Mohalla, or Mahalla as an alternative spelling, but the word means a neighbourhood or a district in some of the villages and towns in Central and South Asia. And that second sentence makes no sense in the context we’re investigating.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘That Mohalla often describes a Muslim area, and can also be a derogatory term. Well, one thing that we can be absolutely certain about is that the Ark of the Covenant pre-dates Islam by millennia; and this Persian text we’ve been working with is at least half a millennium older than the Muslim religion.’

  ‘And what about that last bit?’ Bronson couldn’t see the screen as clearly as Angela could.

  ‘It says the word could be a reference to Shahi Mohalla, and that’s somewhere in Lahore in Pakistan.’ Angela glanced at Bronson. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘I know what you’re going to say. India and Pakistan are neighbours, so maybe you’re right. But I’m still not convinced.’

  ‘Let’s just treat it as a working hypothesis,’ Bronson suggested. ‘What you’ve found already suggests that Mohalla could be an Indian place-name. We just don’t yet know where it is – or rather where it was. So why don’t we assume that Mohalla is in India until we’ve managed to prove that it isn’t?’

  ‘OK,’ Angela agreed cautiously. ‘I’ll just take a quick look at the rest of the search results to see if there’s anything else there.’

  She scanned down the page of results generated by the Google search engine, clicking on anything that looked interesting, then moved
on to the second page, but found nothing there.

  ‘I’m going to alter the parameters slightly,’ she said, adding a couple of words to ‘Mohalla’ in the box and checking the results of the new search.

  About halfway down the page one result looked interesting. Angela clicked it, they both read it, then Angela sat back, turning the laptop slightly to face Bronson.

  ‘Could that be it?’ She looked at Bronson, frowning slightly.

  Bronson shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘If it is correct, it does explain exactly who “Yus of the purified” was, and where Mohalla was located.’

  ‘Yes, but after all this time – I mean, there’d be nothing left now, surely?’

  ‘We don’t know that. It all depends on what they did, how they did it, and where they ended up.’

  ‘So all this time we’ve been looking for the wrong relic?’ Bronson asked.

  ‘We’ve been looking for the wrong treasure, from the wrong time period, and in the wrong country.’ Angela rubbed her eyes. ‘How the hell could I have got everything so badly wrong?’

  ‘We were just following the clues,’ Bronson said softly, taking her hand. ‘We made deductions based on the best evidence we could find. The problem was that once we thought we knew what we were looking for, it was easy enough to make each new piece of evidence fit our preconceptions. It happens all the time in police work.’

  ‘But to be so wrong—’

  ‘At least now we know what the Wendell-Carfaxes were looking for. But is it worth following up, after all this time? Wouldn’t we be better just packing up and going home?’

  Angela looked shocked. ‘But we’re only just getting started.’ She pointed at the screen of her laptop. ‘If this information checks out, this would be the single biggest find in the history of the world – bigger than Tutankhamun, bigger than anything else. If there’s even a one in a million chance of finding this treasure, it’s definitely worth trying.’