James Becker - The Messiah Secret

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.