James Becker - The Messiah Secret

He’d have to find a taxi and get away from the area as quickly as he could, before a car-load of cops turned up and started asking awkward questions. Then he’d have to decide what to do next. He tried to put himself in Bronson’s place. He guessed that Bronson and Angela would either return to their hotel or, perhaps more likely, head straight for the airport to follow whatever clues they’d found in the Montgomery paintings. And if they were following the clues, he would be able to follow them.

A taxi squealed to a halt in response to his raised arm.

‘The airport,’ he snapped. ‘And make it quick.’

‘I’ll be as fast as I can with this,’ Angela said, sitting down at a table in one of the cafes and switching on her laptop.

Bronson bought some food and drinks at the counter, then sat beside Angela as she downloaded a Persian-English dictionary from the web and fed the letters and words she could see in the photographs into it, jotting down the results on a piece of paper.

But it wasn’t a quick job. They sat in the cafe for well over an hour before she finally leaned back in her seat.

‘I think that’s it,’ she said.

‘Right,’ Bronson said eagerly. ‘What’s it say?’

But Angela seemed strangely reluctant to read out the text. ‘Look, there are a couple of words in it that could have alternative meanings, and a few that aren’t in the dictionary at all, so maybe they’re proper names. I’ve transcribed them exactly as they’re written. Here. See what you think.’

She turned the sheet of paper round so that Bronson could see what she’d written on it, and slid it across the table.

He scanned the lines Angela had written down. ‘I recognize some of it from what you told me before, the bit you found in the guidebook, I mean. But there’s no mention of Judea or a temple, which were the other two words you found on the Hillel fragment, if I remember rightly. So what do you think all this means?’

‘That’s the problem. I’m reasonably certain this is the whole thing, but it’s still not clear to me where — or even what — it refers to. It looks as if the first verse is a statement of intent, if you like. Then the second appears to be a general description of what the people involved did, and the third section looks as if it provides some details about the location they picked.’

Bronson looked down again at the text, and then read it aloud, his voice low-pitched and almost reverent as he spoke Angela’s translation of the two-millennia-old verses.

And then the son of Yus of the purified,

instructed that the light which had become

the treasure was to be taken from Mohalla

and returned from whence it came.

And Isaac journeyed long and far

with his trusted followers into the

valley of flowers and there fashioned

with their own hands a place of stone

where they together concealed and made

hidden the treasure of the world for all

eternity until the heavens shall be rent asunder

and all shall tremble in the face of judgement.

With their shadows ever before them

from the rising to the setting

beyond the meeting point where waters tumble

towards the mighty river that flows never.

Then turned to face the glory

between the pillars and beyond their shadows

into the silence and the darkness formed of man

to rest forever.

‘More information, but a whole bunch of new questions,’ Bronson muttered. ‘Why couldn’t it be easy for once?’

‘If it was easy, it wouldn’t be fun,’ Angela said, ‘though I wouldn’t mind trying “easy” just once in a while.’

‘Which are the two words that have multiple meanings?’ Bronson asked.

‘In the first line, “purified” seems to be the best meaning of the word, but it also has something to do with lepers, and I can’t quite pin that down. Then in the fourth line, “it” can also be translated as “he” or “she”, but in that context the word has to mean “it”.

‘What about the last two lines of the second paragraph — they’re a bit apocalyptic, aren’t they?’

Angela nodded. ‘Yes, but you quite often find that kind of thing in ancient writings. If the author of the text wanted to emphasize that he was talking about a really long time, he might well include some kind of reference to a day of judgement. Don’t forget, this idea of the world ending and the souls of all the living and dead being judged by some kind of god is very common in most civilizations. In the Bible it’s the Book of Revelations and in Islam-’

‘Yes, I remember,’ Bronson interrupted. ‘All the dead are supposed to assemble in the Well of Souls on the Temple Mount to await judgement.’

‘Exactly. I think almost every civilization believes the world will end, one way or another, but most seem to think it’ll be with a bang, and with some sort of a creator god involved who’ll weed out the good from the bad. I’m not sure that passage is significant — it looks to me like it’s just a bit of poetic licence on the part of the author.’

Bronson looked again at the piece of text. ‘Well, it seems to me that there are at least three new clues worth following up,’ he said. ‘The three proper names — Yus, Isaac and Mohalla. And you’ve spelt “Mohalla” wrong. That should be “Moalla” or “el-Moalla”, shouldn’t it?’

‘That’s how it’s spelt in the Persian,’ she said, ‘with the “h”.’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe the original author of the text spelt the name wrongly, though I would have expected the “el” prefix to be included.’

‘Or perhaps he really didn’t mean “el-Moalla”, but somewhere completely different?’

‘That’s possible, I suppose.’

Bronson looked back at the translation. ‘Two of them are the names of people, obviously.’

‘And they’re the key to this whole mystery. Isaac is still used today, of course, and it was a fairly common name in biblical times, so it’s probably not even worth looking at that. There’ll be hundreds or maybe thousands of references. But I’m not familiar with the name “Yus”, so I’m hoping that’s sufficiently unusual to give us some kind of a lead.’

‘And do you still think this piece of text is referring to the Ark of the Covenant?’ Bronson asked.

‘Yes. In the early biblical accounts, the Israelites believed that the Ark was a lethal weapon as well as a treasure. They claimed it was so dangerous that simply touching it could kill you, and that the Ark emitted a powerful light that destroyed their enemies. That seems to me to be a reasonably good match for the early part of this text, where it says “the light which had become the treasure”.’

‘Yet it sounds as if it had changed somehow,’ Bronson suggested. ‘Could the Ark’s powers — always assuming it had any, of course — have waned? Could the dangerous weapon have become just a richly decorated box? Or do you think there’s another meaning?’

‘Well, there is one theory that suggests the Ark might have contained some unknown highly radioactive source, something so powerful that touching it could literally kill you — not within seconds or minutes, obviously, but within a few days.’

Bronson grinned at her. ‘I think that’s getting a bit too wacky for me, Angela, not to mention the questions it raises. Like where the source came from, how the Israelites managed to handle it, and what it was. The most dangerous radioactive elements are things like plutonium, and you can’t just find lumps of the stuff lying around. It has to be manufactured in a reactor. Take my word for it — there are no unknown radioactive elements out there that could exist in a stable form on Earth.’