The Messiah Secret (39 page)

‘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 custom, 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.

‘I also think it’s possible they spread a story that the man didn’t die here, but had returned to his own country and died there years earlier, whereas in fact he lived out his days in Kashmir. And we know he fathered a child here, a man named Isaac, according to the Persian text. In fact, I think that Isaac was either the author of that text or very closely acquainted with the person who wrote it.’

‘And there’s the Baigdandu anomaly,’ Donovan interjected.

‘That’s a contributing factor, yes,’ Angela nodded. ‘Whatever the source of the genes that throw up occasional fair-skinned, blue-eyed children in that village, you can be reasonably certain it wasn’t some wandering tribe of Greeks. It’s far more likely to have been a single source, one very different bloodline that became intermixed with the local genetic make-up.’

‘This is making no sense to me,’ John Cross interrupted. ‘What is this all about?’

Angela smiled at him, half-turned and pointed at the wall behind her. ‘On the other side of that stone door,’ she continued, ‘we’ll find a tomb, and in it will be the body of a late-middle-aged or elderly man who in his time acquired a certain reputation, both here and in the country of his birth, which is a long way to the west of here. In India, he was called Yus Asaph or Yuz Asaf, and occasionally Isa-Masih, but you all know him better by another, much more familiar, name.’

She looked around the cave, taking her time. She took a deep breath.

‘I believe that in the cavern just behind me is the last resting place of Isa-Masih or Jesus the Messiah – the man better known to you all as Jesus Christ.’

‘Four minutes,’ the pilot murmured.

‘OK. Time we sent the Hind in front,’ Tembla said, then issued a crisp order.

Almost immediately, the pilot of the Dhruv banked the helicopter to the left, hauling it around in a tight turn.

As the manoeuvre started, Killian glanced to his right and saw the Hind gunship’s nose dip slightly as the pilot accelerated ahead of them. Then he concentrated on keeping what little he’d had for breakfast in his stomach as the Dhruv seemed to roll completely on to its side, the ‘whupwhup-whup’ of the rotor blades clawing at the air rose to a crescendo, the sound exploding through his skull as the chopper seemed to defy both gravity and the laws of physics.

Below the aircraft, the ground spun past at a dizzying speed, a grey-brown featureless blur. Then the pilot
righted the helicopter, pulling it straight, the nose dipping as he increased speed.

Killian looked through the windscreen and saw that the Hind was now well ahead of them, maybe half a mile in front.

‘Good,’ Tembla said. ‘We’ll let the gunship take out the mercenaries; then we’ll go in and see what Bronson and Angela Lewis are up to.’

For a long moment there was absolute silence in the cave, then John Cross muttered, ‘Bull
shit
.’

Donovan started a slow, ironic hand-clap. ‘Bravo,’ he said. ‘Impeccable reasoning based upon an imaginative and expert interpretation of the available evidence. It’s just a shame you’ll never get to find out whether or not you’re right.’

Angela looked startled.

‘What’s behind that wall may be the most important archaeological find ever,’ Donovan continued, ‘but it means far more to me than that. If the stories in the Bible are true – and I believe that they are – then Jesus had the power to heal the sick and raise the dead. That’s why I’ve been following this trail for so long. Just think what I could do with that kind of power today.’

‘But how can the bones of a two-thousand-year-old corpse be . . . ?’ Bronson’s voice trailed off as he made the connection.

‘You’re a geneticist,’ Angela said flatly, making an
intuitive leap. ‘And the whole purpose of all this’ – she gestured at the armed men in the cave – ‘is so that you can get your hands on the body. Or more accurately get your hands on a sample of tissue from the remains.’