The Messiah Secret (8 page)

‘You said you didn’t find any keys on him either,’ Donovan said. ‘Could you do me a favour and send a car out to Carmel to check his apartment? He had a lot of expensive electronic equipment out there, and some of it belonged to my company. If the mugger took his keys, he might have burgled his home as well.’

‘We’ll do that today, sir, if you can give us the address. And do you know who his next of kin is?’

‘His parents live somewhere in Utah, I think,’ Donovan said, writing down the address of McLeod’s apartment in Carmel, together with his own mobile number. He passed them to the sergeant. ‘I’m going back to the office. Call me if you find anything.’

Donovan climbed back into his Porsche, started the engine – and just sat there, staring through the windscreen at the street ahead of him. So much had happened in such a short space of time. Two weeks earlier, McLeod had come to him with the first, tantalizing snippet of information. He’d found a report in a monthly magazine published in an English county called Suffolk about someone who was trying to raise money to fund an expedition to the Middle East to search for a lost treasure, a relic he’d referred to as
the ‘treasure of the world’. The old man had been following some clues originally found by his father and, according to the magazine, he finally believed he had worked out where he should start his search.

That single expression – the ‘treasure of the world’ – had electrified Donovan, because he’d seen it before, in an entirely different context, and he believed he knew exactly what it referred to. That was why he’d turned to Jesse McLeod. If anyone could locate any other references to the man or his quest, he could.

And then there had been the report of the Englishman’s brutal death. Now McLeod was also dead; murdered in a way that didn’t seem to make sense. McLeod had clearly been murdered: Donovan was certain of that. This was no mugging.

Was there a connection here? That was one other thing that disturbed Donovan: he now knew he wasn’t the only person looking for the treasure. Suddenly, what had started out almost as an academic curiosity had turned into a dangerous race. But in spite of McLeod’s death, Donovan was determined to find the treasure first, no matter what it took – the potential rewards were simply too great to ignore.

He pulled out in to the busy morning traffic. The search had begun.

It was lunchtime by the time Donovan got back to the office and very quiet, which suited him just fine. He’d gone straight to McLeod’s workstation, telling his secretary he didn’t want to be interrupted, and opened up his computer. Now he leaned back, faintly surprised. He hadn’t expected his scan of the hard drive to reveal any useful information at all, but in fact he’d found an entirely unprotected folder named ‘Suffolk’ in the root directory. Inside it were the statements and forensic reports prepared by the Suffolk Police in their initial investigation into the murder of Oliver Wendell-Carfax, information that McLeod had obviously obtained recently, but which he’d failed to share with Donovan.

He copied the whole lot on to a memory stick, then read the reports on-screen. The old man had obviously died a hard, painful death, and common sense suggested he would have told his killer whatever he needed to know.
His injuries were so severe that he would probably have died from them anyway, even without the heart attack that had actually killed him.

But the blood and tissue found in the corpse’s mouth pointed to an alternative scenario. It meant the killer’s face must have been right next to the old man’s mouth, and that implied that the killer was listening intently to what he said. So maybe Oliver Wendell-Carfax
hadn’t
blurted out everything?

Obviously, there was no way of telling now, but that detail from the forensic report at least gave Donovan hope that the other man searching for the relic might not have obtained all the information he sought. The playing field, so to speak, might still be level.

As Donovan shut down the computer, his mobile rang.

‘It’s Sergeant Hancock at the MPD, Mr Donovan. We sent a team over to Jesse McLeod’s apartment and it’s been cleaned out, at least as far as electronic devices are concerned. No computers, cameras or even mobile phones. Whoever did it left all the cables in place, but the hardware’s gone. You’ve no idea who the intruder could be, I guess?’

‘Absolutely none at all, Sergeant,’ Donovan said. But he knew he had to find out – and quickly.

Back in his office, Donovan cleared everything off his desk, then walked across to the wall beside the door where a single piece of modern art hung. He didn’t particularly
like the picture, but it was exactly the right size to conceal the safe that was set into the concrete wall directly behind it.

He pressed the bottom left corner of the picture to release the spring-loaded magnetic catch and then swung the frame back on a piano hinge to reveal the wall safe and control panel behind it. With the ease that comes from familiarity, he entered a six-digit code on the control panel keypad that unlocked the thermostatic controls and gradually adjusted the internal environment of the safe to allow the air inside it to reach room temperature and humidity, and permit the door to be opened. It would take a little over three minutes, but he never minded the wait.

As soon as the light on the control panel changed from red to green, he inserted a slim steel key in the adjacent lock, turned it twice, and swung open the door. Inside lay a zipped plastic bag containing a piece of papyrus with ragged, frayed and uneven edges, and a single sheet of paper. He picked up both and carried them over to his desk.

Pulling on a disposable mask and a pair of thin cotton gloves, he unzipped the plastic bag and carefully, almost reverently, he slid the parchment out and placed it gently on the bag. For some moments he just stared down at it. He couldn’t read the closely written Aramaic script in its entirety, though he knew enough of the language to translate the odd word, but a complete translation – in fact, three complete translations prepared by three different but
very experienced ancient-language specialists – was typed on the sheet of paper in front of him.

Those translations had sparked his all-consuming passion and ongoing search for any other clues that might tell him where he should be searching for the relic he believed still had to exist. They were all subtly dissimilar, because each translator had interpreted the Aramaic script in a slightly different way, but there was no mistaking their meaning. The dozen or so Aramaic words in front of him, written in faded black ink, referred to the greatest lost treasure of all time, an object that even now quite literally had the power to change the world.

Just under an hour later, Donovan checked the contents of his leather carry-on bag for the second time, then pulled the zip closed. His didn’t need to undo his suitcase – he kept two of them permanently packed with everything he’d need for a two-week stay, one for cold countries, and the other for the tropics. This time his destination was London, Heathrow, so choosing the correct case for the trip hadn’t been difficult.

He also had a carry-on bag that contained a small Dell notebook computer, one partition on the hard drive hidden, encrypted and password protected. In that partition were the reports McLeod had copied from the Suffolk Police files, as well as telephone numbers and contact details he’d pulled off his own computer, plus an automatic destruct routine that would repeatedly
over-write the contents with random characters if an incorrect password was entered three times. The bag also held a couple of external hard drives and memory sticks, and a selection of chips of various sorts, some of them of an unusual specification. Donovan wasn’t a computer expert, but before he’d started NoJoGen he’d worked for a specialist Los Angeles electronics company, which had contributed to the breadth of his technical knowledge.

He paused for a moment, unzipped his carry-on and slid a compact umbrella inside, just in case.

Donovan glanced round his spacious penthouse apartment once again, nodded to himself and then headed for the door. He set the alarm, double-locked the door and took his personal elevator down the ten flights to street level. He walked out of the main door of the building as the cab he’d booked drew to a halt by the kerb.

It was, he hoped, a good omen.

By 10 a.m. that morning, Angela was in the kitchen at Carfax Hall, her laptop open and running. The cataloguing software program would, she hoped, allow her to identify most of the ceramics in the house, or at least assign them an approximate date and country of origin. Valuations would take longer, and she really wasn’t equipped to do them. The other obvious problem, she thought, as she looked at the china piled at the other end of the table, was that the period she knew most about was the first century
AD
. Most of the stuff in front of her dated from about two millennia later than that. She sighed. She’d just have to do her best.

By the time she finished her coffee, she’d already taken a preliminary look at the china, ceramic and earthenware utensils, and had picked out half a dozen nice pieces of early English slipware and put them to one side.

Then she settled down into her tried and tested routine.
She created a free-form database on her laptop, named it ‘Carfax Hall Ceramics’, and labelled the fields from top to bottom. She started with the current date, then moved down to the probable date of the piece of china; the manufacturer, if known; a description of it; a note of any defects she could see and finally a rough estimate of its value.

She also created a second, much simpler, database for those pieces of china – and there were a lot of them – which weren’t likely to be of any interest to the museum, and which would probably end up in a local auction house. She’d already decided to look at the less valuable pieces first, to get them out of the way and clear space on the table as quickly as possible.

She photographed each piece from different angles with her digital camera before enveloping it in bubble-wrap and storing it in one of the wooden tea chests from the attics. It was soon apparent that almost everything on the table was going to end up in the ‘auction’ tea chest, because most of the china in front of her was worth only a few pounds – some even less than that. Periodically, she attached the camera to her laptop and transferred the pictures she’d taken to a new folder on her hard drive.

The other members of the team drifted into the kitchen at intervals to make coffee or tea, or just to chat while they took a break from their own cataloguing activity elsewhere in the old house.

When the team stopped for lunch, Angela had already
half-filled the ‘auction’ tea chest and in the process had cleared perhaps a quarter of the pieces of china off the table.

‘Have you found anything interesting?’ David Hughes asked, his spectacles glinting in the sun that shone through the large kitchen window.

Angela shook her head. ‘Not really. There’s some English slipware and a few bits of early Wedgwood, but nothing that you couldn’t pick up in almost any halfway decent antique shop. It doesn’t look to me as if Oliver or Bartholomew were really into collecting ceramics. What about you?’

‘Actually, quite a few nice pieces. There’s a good octagonal Regency rosewood centre table, but my most exciting find so far is a really nice Jacobean wainscot chair, in beautiful condition.’

‘Are you sure it’s not a mid-nineteenth century repro?’ Mayhew had just come in, looking more florid than usual. ‘They made a lot of them around that period.’

‘You just stick to your specialization, Richard,’ Hughes replied, looking at him over his glasses in what Angela thought was a teacher-ish sort of way, ‘and I’ll stick to mine.’

‘You’re very quiet, Owen,’ Mayhew said, turning to a grey-haired man wearing bifocals who was sitting on the opposite side of the long table. ‘Anything to report?’

Owen Reynolds, one of the British Museum’s arms and militaria experts, leaned forwards. ‘I’m not sure. There’s
not much here that’s obviously within my remit, apart from that suit of armour in the hall, so—’

‘Is that the real thing?’ Mayhew asked.