James Becker - The Messiah Secret

‘Can we open it?’ Angela asked, her voice trembling with excitement.

‘We can have a bloody good try. First, we’ll have to shift all this stuff from in front of it, so there’s as little resistance as possible when we try to slide it.’

Together, they cleared all the rocks and bits of timber from the front of the rock wall. Once they’d done so, the edge of the groove the stone door sat in was clearly visible on the ground.

Bronson opened up his haversack and took out a hammer and chisel. Walking to the right-hand end of the stone door, he bent down and started bashing away at the rocks which had been jammed underneath it, and which were acting as wedges to stop the door being opened. In a couple of minutes, he’d chipped them all out and checked under the edge to make sure there was nothing else jamming it in position.

‘I can’t see anything else locking the door in place,’ he said. ‘Maybe they relied on those few stone wedges and its sheer weight.’

He stepped closer to the rock, looking for any sign of a hole or another wedge, but found nothing. It appeared that the stone door would slide to the right as long he could find some way of exerting enough leverage to start it moving — though that obviously wasn’t going to be easy.

He rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a crowbar, fully aware that such a puny tool — and even his own strength — might prove inadequate. He looked at the left-hand side of the stone wall, trying to decide where he should try levering it. There were a few gaps that he could see that might be wide enough to let him drive the end of the crowbar into them, but he knew it all depended on how much the stone door weighed and the condition of the rollers that he was sure had to be underneath it, in the groove cut in the stone floor. Then he looked across at Angela, who, like him, was entirely absorbed in the task confronting them.

‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked.

‘She might not be, but I sure as hell am,’ JJ Donovan snapped as he walked into the cave, two armed men crowding in behind him.

‘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.