The Messiah Secret (23 page)

‘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.

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 belatedly 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.

JJ Donovan had watched the excitement of the house fire – an event which made no sense to him – and the arrival of the fire engines, and then started his car and eased out after Bronson as they drove away from the scene.

Now he watched with irritation as Bronson pulled off the road. He daren’t stop there as well, because it was too small a place, and Bronson was a police officer, which meant he’d been trained in observation skills. Donovan knew that if he stopped at the bar Bronson would notice and remember him, and he definitely didn’t want that to happen.

So he carried on another quarter of a mile or so and then eased his car off the road and on to the verge. He stopped the engine and waited for a few seconds, watching the scene in his rear-view mirror carefully. When it was obvious that Bronson and his companion were going to have a drink at the roadside café, he realized that he would
have to wait, too. And the obvious way to do that was to stage a breakdown.

Donovan dropped all the windows on the Mercedes – it was going to get very hot inside the car without the engine and the climate control running – but the heavily tinted glass was a possible identification feature. With the windows lowered, it was just another light-coloured midsized Mercedes saloon, one of thousands on the roads around Cairo.

Then he stepped out of the car and lifted the bonnet. There was very little to see inside the engine compartment, apart from a massive sculpted aluminium plate that covered the top of the motor, but that didn’t matter. With the bonnet lifted, any passing driver would simply assume the car had stopped because of some fault – mechanical or electrical.

Then he got back inside the car and sat down, all his attention focused on the café-bar about five hundred yards behind him. The other thing he needed to do was make sure Bronson didn’t get a look at the car’s number plates as he drove past, and that meant lifting the boot lid. But he couldn’t do that until the Peugeot started moving, because his best view of the café was using the interior mirror and, when he lifted the boot, that view would vanish.

So all he could do was wait. Wait and watch.

Bronson switched off the engine and he and Angela got
out of the car, the heat hitting them like the blast from a furnace. About half a dozen men, all wearing either traditional Arab dress or white shirts and trousers, were already sitting at the tables, drinks in front of them. They eyed the two Westerners with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion as Bronson steered Angela through them towards a couple of vacant seats at a table close to the side of the bar, where the noise from the generator was loudest.

‘What would you like to drink?’ he shouted.

‘What I’d really like is a long, cold gin and tonic with bags of ice, but I guess that’s not an option here,’ she said. ‘Get me anything non-alcoholic, a Coke, Fanta, something like that. No glass and no ice, obviously.’

‘Right,’ Bronson said. A couple of minutes later he returned to the table with two cans of Coke, moisture beading the outside of the metal. He sat down beside her and they both drank thirstily. ‘So this el-Hiba place,’ Bronson said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you know about it?’