The Messiah Secret

What she didn’t know was how thorough he’d been. Had he and his men just ambled up and down the gorge looking for the ‘place of stone’, or had they done a proper, in-depth survey, checking for hidden caves and underground chambers?

The Persian text stated that the people who’d buried the treasure had fashioned the hiding place with their own hands. Angela didn’t have a date when this was done, but the age of the Hillel fragment meant it had to have been no later than the first century AD, and that in turn meant the hiding place was probably a fairly simple structure. Unless the ‘trusted followers’ included a large slave-labour force, skilled masons and a lot of equipment, the ‘place of stone’ had to be reasonably basic, and would probably have made use of some natural feature – a cave or something like that. And as it was a place of concealment, a location where the treasure was intended to remain securely hidden for all eternity, if her guess at one of the missing words was correct, it would by definition not be easy to detect. So just how thorough had Bartholomew been?

There was, of course, a more important question: had he been looking in the right valley? Or even in the right country? She looked again at the search results for the whole of the Middle East. Altogether, she’d identified almost fifty locations spanning countries from Turkey to India. Any one of them could be the place she was looking for, which meant she had no real idea where to start. If this was going to work, she’d have to find some way of narrowing the search parameters.

It was time she tried to track down the other reference – to the ‘treasure of the world’.

23

Richard Mayhew was actually quite glad that Angela Lewis and her irritating ex-husband had left the team. She had a way of getting his back up, of usurping his authority, and she was one of those people who always thought they were right. What made it particularly galling for Mayhew – who shared this trait with her – was that she usually was right.

She’d correctly guessed that there had been a burglar at Carfax Hall, and had then managed to persuade her ex-husband to frighten him off. Mayhew wasn’t entirely sure how he’d done that, although there was an air of menace about Chris Bronson that Mayhew found disturbing. He guessed he was a good police officer, because he could be very intimidating. Mayhew, a man of delicate sensibilities, thought that Bronson was a brute.

Anyway, they’d both gone, which suited him fine. And their work at the Hall was now complete. The individual specialists had prepared their inventories, listing all the items they’d assessed, their historical importance, and where possible their likely commercial value. All he had to do now was collate their data, write a covering letter with his overall assessment of the collections and present the final report to his superior at the British Museum. Then he could get back to his regular work.

But, he reflected, as he stepped outside the Hall for the last time on that Friday evening and looked up at the crumbling masonry of the old building, it hadn’t been an entirely unpleasant interlude. A week in the country, all expenses paid, engaged on what amounted to an academic treasure hunt – there were definitely much worse ways to spend one’s time.

These pleasant thoughts were interrupted by a brisk tap on his shoulder. Mayhew jumped – the rest of the team had left about a quarter of an hour earlier, and he knew he was alone at the building.

He spun round, and came face to face with one of his personal nightmares.

The man standing in front of him was shorter than Mayhew, perhaps five feet six, and stocky, with the solid bulk that comes from hard physical exercise. A bandage covered his left ear and that side of his face, and his dark unblinking eyes seemed to sear into Mayhew’s soul.

The man’s physical appearance was disturbing enough, but what Mayhew found alarmingly difficult to reconcile was the clerical collar the stranger wore at the neck of his black shirt, and the pistol in his right hand, a pistol that was aimed directly at him.

Mayhew caught his breath. ‘Who are you? What do you want?’

‘One question at a time, fat boy,’ the man said, his voice quiet and measured, his accent American and the words simple but delivered with such menace that Mayhew felt his bowels loosening.

‘I’ve got no money,’ he stammered.

‘I don’t want your money. I just want you. Open the door you’ve just locked and get back inside the building.’

Mayhew looked around him frantically. He needed help.

The stranger chuckled softly. ‘There’s nobody here but us. Just get that through your thick skull. I could kill you right here, right now, and nobody would even hear the shot. So move before I do just that.’

Mayhew’s hands were trembling so much that it took him three tries before he got the key into the lock.

‘Get a move on,’ the man snapped, poking his gun into Mayhew’s back.