James Becker - The Messiah Secret

Egypt

‘Bartholomew and Oliver were devious old sods,’ Angela said, as they sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for their flight to be called. ‘We know this because of the way Bartholomew hid his papers and Oliver made all his different wills. So it seems to me that Bartholomew would have planted a trail of clues in Carfax Hall for his son to follow. The trouble is that I don’t think Oliver was very good at that kind of thing. He only said a month or so ago that he was planning an expedition to follow in his father’s footsteps in the Middle East, so I doubt if he found that hidden drawer under the stuffed fox until quite recently, and he may never have made the connection. He could just have been intending to retrace the route his father took on one of his expeditions, based on Bartholomew’s notes.’

‘So what is the connection you’ve made?’ Bronson asked.

‘I found a bill of sale from Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax to a man named Hassan al-Sahid, and a sentence scrawled at the bottom of one of his pages of expedition notes. That read, “The Montgomerys hold the key.” Put those two things together, and what do you get?’

‘A headache?’ Bronson suggested, smiling at her.

Angela sighed. ‘The bill of sale is for two oil on canvas portraits, but the terms are a bit unusual, because the purchaser — al-Sahid — agreed to hold the pictures in safe keeping in his family for fifty years or until Bartholomew or his son requested their return, when the purchase price would be refunded, plus accrued interest. So it was really more like an extended loan. The two photographs we found in the box of papers were of the paintings, and I’ve got scanned copies of those as well. That’s the first thing.

‘The second point is that the name of the artist was Edward Montgomery. I think the reason Bartholomew had those two portraits painted was so he could conceal the text of the ancient Persian script within them. That’s what he meant by “the Montgomerys hold the key”. I think he leased them to al-Sahid as a kind of insurance policy, so that there’d always be another copy of the parchment text in existence, just in case Bartholomew lost his version.’

‘Or in case something else happened to him,’ Bronson said thoughtfully.

‘Yes, and Hassan al-Sahid had special significance. His home was in Cairo, and he was Bartholomew’s gang master on all his explorations in Egypt, and probably the one man Bartholomew trusted implicitly — his best friend, in fact. His expedition notes make that very clear. The text of that piece of Persian script has to be hidden in one of those two paintings, and that’s what we’re going to Cairo to track down.’

‘What about that roaring-Amun stuff?’

‘Amun-Great-of-Roarings,’ Angela said patiently. ‘Everything I’ve discovered up to now suggests that the “treasure of the world” is actually the Ark of the Covenant, and one of the likeliest contenders for seizing the relic is the Pharaoh Shishaq.’

‘OK,’ Bronson said, determined to be practical. He also knew that these discussions were what made them such a good partnership. ‘Let’s accept that the relic that’s referred to in the grimoire and the other places really is the Ark of the Covenant. What do we know about it? What does the Ark look like, for instance? And what’s supposed to have happened to it?’

‘According to the Bible, it was a wooden box made of acacia wood. The acacia was known to the Israelites as the shittah-tree, and it was an important botanical with several uses in traditional medicine. The Ark was built in accordance with the so-called golden ratio — that’s the relationship between the dimensions of an object — and it was two and a half cubits long and one and a half cubits high and wide. If we assume they were using the Egyptian royal cubit, that would make it about four feet long and two feet six inches wide and high.

‘The box was then covered with pure gold, and the lid, which was known as the kaporet in Hebrew, was possibly solid gold, or at least it had a gold rim. The lid was decorated with two sculpted cherubim, facing each other with their wings spread out over the top of the Ark. On each of the long sides of the box were two gold rings, so that gold-covered poles could be inserted to lift the object, because it wasn’t ever supposed to touch the ground.’

Bronson smiled to himself: Angela was getting into her stride.

‘We touched on this before, when we were in Israel. According to the Bible, the Pharaoh Shishaq sacked Jerusalem in about nine hundred and twenty BC and took away the treasures of the Temple, which might have included the Ark. According to legend, he hid the Ark in Tanis, his capital city, which is about fifteen miles from Cairo.

‘Where the Ark is now is unknown, obviously. Perhaps the most widely accepted possible location is the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum in Ethiopia. But there’s the problem of proof — nobody’s allowed inside the building to see or photograph the object, and it’s never taken out, so they might just as well claim to have aliens and spaceships and Elvis in there as well.’ Angela frowned, obviously frustrated.

‘So what do you think happened to it?’

‘Well, the Ark was almost certainly in the Second Temple in Jerusalem in nine hundred and twenty BC, and it seems to me that there are only two possible things that could then have happened to it. Either it was taken to a place of safe keeping before Shishaq and his army arrived or it was captured by the Pharaoh. And I’m starting to think that Bartholomew was right — maybe it was seized by Shishaq.

‘The problem with the idea of the Ark being spirited away from Jerusalem is where it would have gone. It was the most sacred object held in the temple, and the priests certainly wouldn’t have handed it to just anyone. It would have had to have been held by people they trusted implicitly, and that would have meant another group of Jews. And there’s a very good reason why they wouldn’t have given it to the only other Jewish community that was anywhere near Jerusalem.’

Angela sat forward, a faraway look in her brown eyes. ‘Solomon’s son was named Rehoboam, and when he ascended the throne he decided to tax the people even more heavily than Solomon had done. This was round about nine hundred and thirty BC — the dates of Rehoboam’s reign are disputed — and not too surprisingly there was a revolt. Ten of the northern tribes, under the leadership of a man named Jeroboam, broke away and formed a separate kingdom that became known as Israel, or the Northern Kingdom, or, rather later, as Samaria. Rehoboam’s kingdom was called Judah, or sometimes the Southern Kingdom, and it occupied the area to the west and south of the Dead Sea, broadly speaking the area that’s now Israel.

‘Rehoboam wanted to go to war against Israel, but was advised against it, because he would have been fighting his own countrymen, but the two Jewish nations were in a state of low-level conflict for his entire seventeen-year reign. So absolutely the last people Rehoboam would have trusted with the Ark were Jeroboam’s Northern Kingdom tribes, and as far as I know there were no other groups anywhere near Jerusalem that he would have been likely to trust enough to give it to.

‘And then, in about nine hundred and twenty BC, the Egyptian pharaoh, Shishaq, invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem. That was bad enough for Rehoboam, but what made it worse was that Shishaq had provided refuge to Jeroboam — Rehoboam’s bitter enemy — so his invasion was in support of his ally. And it’s known that to buy off Shishaq and the Egyptians, Rehoboam gave them all the treasures of the Temple.’

‘And that would presumably have included the Ark?’