The Messiah Secret cb-3

by James Becker

  ‘What are they?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I know what they look like,’ Bronson said, ‘though that’s almost unbelievable. But there’s one way to check.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Let me show you.’

  From his vantage point on the cliffs above, Nick Masters watched the two figures vanish from sight into what he presumed was a cave.

  He looked away from his binoculars for a few seconds and stared at his watch. Then he glanced behind him to where Donovan stood, leaning against a boulder, looking uncomfortable.

  He slid back from the cliff edge and waved to Donovan to join him. Donovan crouched down and weaved towards him in a clumsy parody of a soldier’s advance that would have been funny in any other context. When he got closer, Masters waved him to a stop and knelt beside him.

  ‘Right,’ he snapped, his voice low and urgent. ‘Keep down, and keep quiet. I know the wind’s blowing real hard, but you’d be amazed how far sound can travel at times like this.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  Masters explained what he’d seen. ‘If they stay in that cave for another ten minutes, I’m giving the go signal.’

  Donovan nodded agreement. His instructions to Masters had been very specific — let Bronson and Lewis find the relic, but on no account let them touch it.

  ‘Do you think they’ve got it?’ he asked, his heart pounding with anxiety.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Masters said. ‘But we’re sure as hell going to stop them if they have.’

  60

  Back in Karu, Killian and Tembla stared intently at the video screen. Through the data-link from the Searcher UAV they’d watched two tiny figures look at the ruined monastery building, walk deeper into the valley, and enter another small structure, from which they’d reappeared almost immediately. But now they’d vanished completely.

  ‘They’ve found a cave,’ Killian muttered.

  ‘There are lots of caves in that valley,’ Tembla pointed out. ‘Let’s see if they come out again.’

  Five minutes later there was still no sign of the two figures.

  ‘They’ve found something,’ Killian said, standing up. ‘We must leave.’

  Tembla leaned over to the serviceman who was piloting the UAV and issued a series of orders. Immediately, the image widened as the man switched from the telephoto lens to a wide-angle view that covered the valley walls as well as the floor. Then he began to zoom in on one particular area.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Killian asked.

  ‘Checking on the opposition.’ As the picture tightened, Tembla pointed at a number of slow-moving dots that were just coming into focus. ‘There are the men Donovan recruited. Including Donovan, there are six of them in the valley, the four you can see there and two others who are still watching from the valley wall. There are a couple of others we spotted driving a four-by-four, but they’re some distance away, and we don’t yet know if they’re also a part of the group. And you’re right — from the way they move, they are mercenaries. They’re also carrying assault rifles, which is good for us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it gives us the perfect excuse to eliminate them. You know what we’re looking at here, but I’ll make sure that all the pictures from the Searcher will just show a group of heavily armed men who’ve almost certainly entered India illegally. We are entirely within our rights to engage them. Using the Hind might be considered to be overkill, but I’ll argue about that later.’

  Tembla issued a further instruction and the image changed again, to the view of the rocks where Bronson and Lewis had vanished.

  ‘They’re inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘Mark that spot and pass the coordinates to the chopper pilots. Right, Father. It’s time we got airborne.’

  * * *

  Inside the cave Bronson was dragging away the rocks and bits of wood. In a few minutes he’d cleared away most of the debris from a small area, and all that was left underneath it was a thick layer of dust and dirt.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said to Angela. He took a knife from his belt — one of the various items of camping equipment he’d bought back in Leh — and pressed the blade into the soil. The tip penetrated no more than a quarter of an inch. Then he moved the blade a few inches away and repeated the operation. This time, the blade slid into the dirt for about six inches. He withdrew the knife blade, moved it even further, and again the tip hit solid rock within less than half an inch.

  ‘You see,’ he said. ‘There’s a groove that runs from the edge of the rock wall across towards the right-hand side of the cave. It’s directly below those two lines on the roof.’ He paused and looked at Angela. ‘In fact, what you’re looking at up there isn’t a pair of parallel lines at all — it’s actually a groove cut into the stone itself, and it’s mirrored by an identical groove cut in the floor of the cave.’

  ‘You don’t mean. .’ Angela’s voice trailed away as she looked from the floor to the roof of the cave, then to the rock wall itself. She stepped forward and carefully felt the stone, running her hand up and down the edge of the wall.

  Bronson nodded. ‘That isn’t a wall of rock. That’s a sliding door made of solid stone that somebody went to a lot of trouble to conceal. What we have to do now is find a way to open it.’

  Nick Masters checked his watch once more — it was ten minutes and eighteen seconds since Bronson and Lewis had disappeared. He considered his options for a few more seconds then made a decision. Beckoning to Donovan, he moved back from the cliff-edge and made a call on the sat-phone to the small group of mercenaries who were waiting a short distance up the slope.

  ‘The targets have gone into a cave. There’s a small stone building on the valley floor — you’ll see it when you get down there. The cave entrance is maybe seventy yards east of that. Move forward now, slowly and quietly. Then hold position about thirty yards clear of the cave entrance.’

  Next he made a call to the two men who’d been in the Land Rover — and issued orders to them as well.

  Finally he checked his Kalashnikov was fully loaded, shouldered the sniper rifle and began a careful descent down into the valley, Donovan following cautiously behind him.

  ‘A stone door, Chris? In your dreams! How would they do it?’

  ‘You’re the one who’s always banging on about how technologically advanced the ancient races were,’ Bronson said, continuing to dig around in the earth with the sheath knife. ‘The pyramids have been standing for what — about five thousand years — and you’ve told me that even today nobody actually knows for sure how the ancient Egyptians managed to build them.’

  Angela nodded, almost reluctantly. ‘True enough. And some of the passages in them were deliberately blocked by massive stone blocks to foil tomb-robbers, so the technology obviously existed — or at least it did in Egypt. It’s just that up here in these mountains, in this country — it’s not the kind of thing I expected to find.’

  Bronson pointed at the floor, where he’d exposed a long straight-sided groove. ‘Once they’d slid the door closed, they jammed rocks under the base of it to stop it moving, filled the channel in the floor with earth and covered it, and the front of the stone door, with rocks and wood. But they couldn’t do anything to conceal the channel they’d had to cut in the ceiling.’

  He looked up, then back down at the floor. ‘They must have used rollers of some kind,’ he said, almost talking to himself, ‘probably lubricated with animal fat or something like that. I just hope that they used stone instead of wood because of the weight of the door. No, in fact, they must have used stone. After two millennia wooden rollers would have simply disintegrated, and the door would have dropped, and maybe even fallen out of the top groove.’

  ‘Can we open it?’ Angela asked, her voice trembling with excitement.

  ‘We can have a bloody good try. First, we’ll have to shift all this stuff from in front of it, so there’s as little resistance as possible when we try to slide it.’

  Together, they
cleared all the rocks and bits of timber from the front of the rock wall. Once they’d done so, the edge of the groove the stone door sat in was clearly visible on the ground.

  Bronson opened up his haversack and took out a hammer and chisel. Walking to the right-hand end of the stone door, he bent down and started bashing away at the rocks which had been jammed underneath it, and which were acting as wedges to stop the door being opened. In a couple of minutes, he’d chipped them all out and checked under the edge to make sure there was nothing else jamming it in position.

  ‘I can’t see anything else locking the door in place,’ he said. ‘Maybe they relied on those few stone wedges and its sheer weight.’

  He stepped closer to the rock, looking for any sign of a hole or another wedge, but found nothing. It appeared that the stone door would slide to the right as long he could find some way of exerting enough leverage to start it moving — though that obviously wasn’t going to be easy.

  He rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a crowbar, fully aware that such a puny tool — and even his own strength — might prove inadequate. He looked at the left-hand side of the stone wall, trying to decide where he should try levering it. There were a few gaps that he could see that might be wide enough to let him drive the end of the crowbar into them, but he knew it all depended on how much the stone door weighed and the condition of the rollers that he was sure had to be underneath it, in the groove cut in the stone floor. Then he looked across at Angela, who, like him, was entirely absorbed in the task confronting them.

  ‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked.

  ‘She might not be, but I sure as hell am,’ JJ Donovan snapped as he walked into the cave, two armed men crowding in behind him.

  61

  ‘How long?’ Killian demanded. He was strapped into the back seat of the Dhruv and the rubber strap of the throat mike was uncomfortably tight around his neck. His voice vibrated as he spoke, but the other men in the helicopter — the two pilots in the front seats, one of them acting as the navigator, and Tembla sitting beside him — seemed to have no difficulty understanding each other.

  ‘Twelve minutes to the edge of the valley,’ the pilot replied. ‘And then thirty seconds to the target.’

  The Dhruv was flying at about ninety knots — just over a hundred miles an hour — due north and had just reached the Shyok river valley. The pilot altered course very slightly to the west to follow the path of the tumbling river, rugged brown hills and mountains rising well above the helicopter on both sides.

  Behind and slightly to the right of the Dhruv was the Hind, a menacing and unfamiliar shape, its stubby wings bristling with ordnance, the light reflecting off the individual windscreens of the tandem cockpits. Tembla had told him that the cockpits and the vital systems on the Hind were armour-plated, and the most that a round from an assault rifle could do was dent it.

  Tembla had, of course, been correct. If all the opposition they’d face in the Nubra Valley was half a dozen men armed with Kalashnikovs, using the Hind was overkill. But these were the kind of odds Killian liked. He smiled in satisfaction as he imagined the terror that would follow the totally unexpected appearance of the helicopter gunship.

  Tembla tapped the navigator on the shoulder. ‘Get me an update,’ he instructed.

  There was a click as the man went off the intercom to use the radio. A few moments later he had the answer from the UAV operator at the base outside Karu.

  ‘Bronson and Lewis are still inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘And three of the other men we’ve been watching have just gone in after them.’

  Bronson and Angela spun round, shocked by the unexpected sound of the nasal American voice and the sudden appearance of three men, two of them carrying automatic weapons.

  ‘So we meet again,’ Donovan said. ‘I’ve been following you ever since that night at the country house in England.’

  Bronson looked from one man to the other. The man doing the talking was unarmed, but obviously the real power lay with him. The figure standing beside him looked like a soldier, tough, composed and sure of himself, the Kalashnikov assault rifle in his hands clearly a familiar tool, another heavy rifle slung over his shoulder.

  ‘You’re the guy who hit me,’ Bronson said to the American, a statement, not a question.

  Donovan nodded.

  ‘But how on earth did you follow us?’

  ‘When I heard you tell Jonathan Carfax that your wife worked at the British Museum, I put a tracking chip in your mobile. I was right behind you all the time you two were wasting your time digging around in Egypt.’

  ‘You were in the cream Mercedes,’ Bronson hazarded, ‘on the road to el-Hiba?’

  ‘Well spotted. Just satisfy my curiosity — how did you make the connections to find this place?’

  Bronson looked at Angela. Since the intruders had appeared, she’d not said a word, but one glance was enough to tell him she was both furious and frightened. Pretty much Rule One in Bronson’s book was never irritate a man carrying an assault rifle, and definitely not a man who employed people who carried assault rifles. So before she could say something they might both regret, he intervened.

  ‘We really thought we were looking for the Ark of the Covenant,’ he said, placing a restraining hand on Angela’s arm. ‘At first, all the clues seemed to point to that.’

  ‘So that explains your trip to Egypt,’ Donovan said, looking satisfied. ‘You thought the Pharaoh Shoshenq might have seized it from the Temple of Jerusalem and taken it to Tanis? But why in hell did you think you were looking for the Ark?’

  Whoever the man was, it was immediately clear that he knew what he was talking about.

  Angela relaxed very slightly. ‘I found a reference in a grimoire,’ she said.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The Liber Juratus or Liber Sacratus,’ Angela replied. ‘It dates from the thirteenth century,’ she added.

  Donovan nodded. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The Sworne Booke of Honorius, also known as the Liber Sacer.’

  ‘So you do know what might be in this cave?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Donovan said, smiling. ‘That’s why we’re here now.’

  The armed man at the back of the cave — John Cross — shuffled his feet in irritation. ‘Will somebody here just tell me what the hell this is all about?’ he muttered.

  Angela looked at him, then switched her gaze back to Donovan. ‘You haven’t told them?’ she demanded.

  Donovan shook his head. ‘What convinced you that you weren’t on the trail of the Ark?’

  ‘Two things,’ Angela said tightly. ‘The first was the expression “the light which had become / the treasure”. Making that fit the Ark of the Covenant was a stretch, though we tried. But if the “treasure” becomes the “light”, as the Persian text says, then everything changes. The phrase “the treasure of the world” is one thing, but “the light of the world” means something completely different. And then there was a statement about the relic being removed from Mohalla.’

  She paused and looked expectantly at Donovan, who just shook his head.

  ‘There’s a reference to it in the Quran,’ Angela added. ‘The full name of the place is Mohalla Anzimarah. Does that help?’

  Again Donovan shook his head.

  ‘Anzimarah is in the Kashmir, in the old town district of Srinigar, in the Khanjar quarter. There’s a building there called the “Rozabal”, an abbreviation of Rauza Bal. The word rauza means “the tomb of the prophet”. Inside the building there are two tombs, and two gravestones. One of them is the grave of the Islamic saint Syed Nasir-ud-Din, who was buried there in the fifth century. The second, larger gravestone is for another man. Right now, Srinigar’s effectively in the middle of a war zone, but the Rozabal was investigated by several people a few years back, and details about the building are fairly well established.’

  Angela took a breath. Still no one interrupted her. ‘Both the gravestones point north-south, in accordance with Muslim c
ustom, but the actual graves are located in a crypt under the floor of the building. In the crypt, the sarcophagus of Syed Nasir-ud-Din also points north-south, as you’d expect, but the other tomb is aligned east-west, which signifies that the occupant was neither an Islamic saint nor a Hindu. Aligning a grave east-west is actually a Jewish custom. In other words, its occupant would have been a follower of Moses.’

  She looked at Bronson who nodded for her to continue. ‘The name on the second tomb is Yuz Asaf, but he was also known as Yus Asaph, which translates as the “leader of the purified”, and that specifically refers to lepers who’d been cured of the disease. The first few lines of the Persian text explained how the son of “Yus of the purified” ordered that the “light which had become the treasure” was to be removed from Mohalla and taken back to the place it had come from. I assumed that meant that the light or the treasure had been located somewhere here, in this valley. The next section of the text described how the treasure was hidden in a “place of stone” in the “valley of flowers”. Put all that together and you have a recognizable description of a group of men removing something from Mohalla and hiding it out here.

  ‘There’s only one generally accepted meaning for the expression “the light of the world”,’ Angela stated. Bronson could tell that she had virtually forgotten she was being held at gunpoint, such was the excitement in her face. ‘I believe that two millennia ago, the son of Yus Asaph and a band of devoted followers removed one of the bodies from the tomb in Srinigar and transported it here, into this specially prepared cave in the mountains, where they hid it, hoping it would stay hidden for all eternity.’

  ‘But why did they do that?’ the man standing beside Donovan asked.

  ‘It may have been instigated by Buddhist monks. Buddhism started around five hundred BC, and by the first century AD travelling monks were visiting India and Tibet. They wouldn’t have wanted the location of the tomb to become widely known, for fear that it would become a place of pilgrimage, and they might also have worried that it could dilute the message of their own religion.