The Messiah Secret

The man walked over to the kitchen sink, ran the cold tap and washed away the sticky drying blood from the leather thongs. He dried the scourge carefully on a tea towel and tucked it away in his jacket pocket, then shrugged the garment on to his shoulders.

‘Thank you,’ Mayhew croaked.

The man turned back and looked down at him. ‘You have done your best to help me, I think, and so I shall be merciful.’

He pulled a small bottle from another pocket of his jacket and unscrewed the stopper.

‘What’s that?’ Mayhew asked, his voice trembling with fear.

‘It’s holy water, nothing more.’

The man dabbed a little of the water on to the tip of his right forefinger and traced the sign of a cross on Mayhew’s forehead. Then he replaced the bottle in his pocket and strode back to the table.

He turned to face Mayhew, crossed himself and softly intoned ‘In nomine padre, filii et spiritu sancti.’ Then he picked up the pistol and aimed it at Mayhew’s chest.

‘No, no! Wait! Please wait! I’ll do anything. Don’t kill me. Please.’

The man shook his head. ‘Begging is undignified, and, in any case, I have no option. You’ve seen my face.’

‘No! I’ll do whatever you want me to do. Please! I’ll never tell anyone anything about you. And why didn’t you wear a mask?’

The man shook his head again. ‘I would never hide my face. I believe God’s work should always be done openly.’

‘God’s work?’ Mayhew whispered incredulously, as the man took careful aim and squeezed the trigger.

Mayhew’s body shook with the impact of the bullet. He remained upright for a couple of seconds, then slumped forwards lifelessly.

The man walked over, felt for a pulse but found nothing. Then he turned and looked out of the window. His next step was clear. He’d go to London and find the woman who was also hunting for the treasure. His treasure.

24

For a few seconds, Angela stared at the page of text displayed on the computer screen in front of her, then glanced down at the copious notes she’d made on her laptop. She stood up, stretched her arms above her head and rotated her shoulder joints, trying to work the kinks out of her muscles.

She realized she’d been working on the computer for almost four hours without a break – once she got her teeth into any project, she tended to become remarkably single-minded about it. She needed to take a short walk, let her eyes relax for a few minutes and maybe grab a cup of coffee.

Twenty minutes later she sat back at her desk, put down her mug and took another bite of the salad sandwich she’d bought at a delicatessen a few dozen yards down Great Russell Street, across the road from the museum.

She still wasn’t entirely certain, but the references she’d uncovered were beginning to make sense, and a tantalizing hypothesis was starting to take shape. The ‘treasure of the world’ seemed to be almost a code phrase that had echoed through the last two millennia, and appeared to refer to something quite specific. Exactly what was meant by the expression, Angela still didn’t know, but there were one or two hints, and it did seem to be an ancient relic of considerable importance.

She also started to search backwards. Instead of looking for further first-century references to the ‘treasure of the world’, she’d started at the other end of time, trying to find much more recent documents that contained the expression. Her rationale was that if she found a reference to that expression in a later book or manuscript, there might well be a note about where the author of the work had found the phrase, and that would enable her to establish a trail back through the historical record, to back-track the references to the relic. Hopefully, each mention of the expression would amplify her knowledge and narrow down the search area – always assuming there was still something left to search for.

She’d consulted a wide range of late-medieval books without finding any reference to the phrase, and almost as an after-thought she’d decided to check the contents of a number of grimoires – a grimoire was essentially a textbook of magic. She wondered if that might be worth doing simply because, although such books mainly contained nonsensical spells, curses and incantations, they also often drew on a wide range of earlier sources.

The third grimoire she looked at was the Liber Juratus, also known as The Sworne Booke of Honorius, the Liber Sacer and the Liber Sacratus, a medieval grimoire written in Latin that dated from the thirteenth century. The original text had vanished long, long ago, but two fourteenth-century copies had survived, and the vast British Museum database had a scanned copy of the Latin text, as well as a copy of the only known English translation of the work.