The Messiah Secret (22 page)

Suleiman shivered. ‘He looked like a priest, and he was smiling and friendly until he got inside the house. But his eyes – I’ll never forget his black eyes. But who are you?’

‘Chris here is a British police officer, and I’m a kind of archaeologist. We got involved with the Wendell-Carfax family by accident, and we’re trying to follow the clues Bartholomew left. You knew about his expeditions out here, I suppose?’

Suleiman nodded. ‘My father was Bartholomew’s gang master.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘You probably won’t thank me for saying this, but you’re almost certainly wasting your time. My father tried to persuade Bartholomew to give up his expeditions, to stop wasting his money, but he
wouldn’t hear of it. He remained convinced that the treasure was almost within his grasp, and that he’d find it on the very next expedition, or on the one after that.’

They all turned as two fire engines announced their noisy presence and headed straight towards them. A crowd was starting to gather, people staring at the burning building.

‘The paintings?’ Bronson asked.

Suleiman nodded. ‘My father agreed to store them here for Bartholomew. He told my father that the clues to the location of the treasure were hidden in the paintings. I actually looked for hidden compartments, where he might have tucked away a copy of that old parchment, but I never found anything, so I’ve always wondered if they were just another one of Bartholomew’s eccentricities. But they were all that priest was interested in.’

‘Did he take them?’

‘I’ve no idea. We were in the dining room when he attacked me. I tried fighting back, but it was no use. Finally, he slammed my head into the side of the table and I blacked out. I assume he did take them.’

‘If he didn’t,’ Bronson said, looking at the house, ‘they’re totally destroyed now.’

‘What treasure did Bartholomew think he was looking for?’ Angela asked.

Suleiman shrugged. ‘Only the biggest and most famous of them all. He was convinced he was on the trail of the Jews’ Ark, the Ark of the Covenant.’

Angela glanced at Bronson. ‘And where was he searching?’

‘Various places, because he kept on interpreting the clues slightly differently, which led him to different locations each time. My father never knew what those clues were because Bartholomew always kept that information to himself, but he did at least know the starting point of each search Bartholomew conducted, because it was always the same – Moalla.’

Suleiman smiled slightly at Bronson’s puzzled expression. ‘He was convinced that the Pharaoh Shishaq had seized the Ark when he invaded Judea, and had brought it back to Egypt as one of the spoils of war. He believed that later in his reign Shishaq ordered the treasure to be hidden a long way up the Nile, in a secret valley, where it would remain for all time. According to Bartholomew, the clues he’d found stated that the treasure convoy had started its journey from Moalla, so that’s where he always based his searches.’

Angela’s face suddenly lightened. ‘He must mean el-Moalla,’ she said.

‘Which is where?’ Bronson asked.

‘On the east bank of the Nile, about twenty miles south of Luxor. It’s a very ancient cemetery,’ Suleiman said. He glanced across the road to where the firemen were tackling the blaze. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I need to go and talk to the fire chief. Is there anything else you need from me?’

‘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.’

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.

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 replaced 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.’