The Messiah Secret

Bronson nodded and turned away from the ruins of the temple towards the road. As he did so, he caught a fleeting glimpse of a figure wearing a white shirt and light-coloured trousers ducking swiftly out of sight behind a wall on the opposite side of the road.

He felt a warning stab of surprise. Unlike the citizens of Cairo, the residents of el-Hiba clearly didn’t see that many foreign tourists, and he and Angela had been objects of interest ever since they’d arrived there. But most of the people they’d seen had simply stared at them with frank and not unfriendly curiosity. Maybe that man – and Bronson was reasonably certain the figure had been male – was just shy. The only odd thing was that it looked as if he’d been holding a pair of binoculars or perhaps a camera in his hand. Certainly he’d been clutching a small black object. And his Western-style dress was unusual in a place where most people seemed to be wearing the more traditional Egyptian dishdasha or jellabah.

‘What is it?’ Angela asked.

‘I think there’s a man over there watching us.’

‘I don’t see anything.’

‘I know what I saw. You stay here. I’ll go and check.’

But Angela grabbed his arm with both hands to stop him. ‘No, Chris. Let’s just get away from here, right now. It might be that priest again.’

Bronson nodded reluctantly, and looked back up the road to where the car was parked. ‘You start running,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right behind you.’

Angela took to her heels, heading back the way they’d come.

Bronson stared across the road for a few seconds more, then followed her.

Two minutes later, Bronson spun the steering wheel of the hire car and powered down the street and away from el-Hiba, the car trailing a cloud of dust as he headed for the open road and Cairo.

37

While Bronson drove, Angela sat in the passenger seat of the Peugeot, transferred the memory card from her camera to the slot on the laptop and copied all the photographs she’d taken of the hieroglyphics on to the computer’s hard disk. The LCD screen on her camera offered reasonably good quality, but she needed the better resolution of the laptop screen to be sure of what she was seeing.

And what she was looking at wasn’t what she’d hoped for. There was nothing in any of the surviving sections of the inscriptions in the temple that suggested Shoshenq had seized the Ark of the Covenant. In fact, quite the contrary.

‘Oh, damn,’ she muttered, as she looked at one particular image.

‘What is it?’

‘On this picture there’s a readable section of hieroglyphics, just a few words that probably came from the middle and end of a sentence – the rest of the inscription’s long gone. If I’m interpreting it correctly, the top line says something like “the gold from the temple”. That sounds to me like part of a description of Shoshenq’s foray into Judea or Judah. We know he was paid off by Rehoboam, who gave the Egyptians the treasures of the Temple.

‘But the second line finishes with “sacred box” – that’s as close a translation as I can get – “which remained”. As far as we know, the Ark of the Covenant was in the Temple of Jerusalem when Shoshenq’s forces entered Judea, and “sacred box” would be a reasonable description of it. This would mean that the Egyptians may not have seized the Ark. They allowed the priests to keep it in the Temple: the “sacred box which remained”. And so—’

‘We’ve been looking in the wrong place,’ Bronson said, finishing it off for her. ‘Shoshenq didn’t seize it, so he can’t have taken it to Tanis or anywhere else. Is there anything else there?’ Bronson asked, glancing sideways at the laptop screen. ‘Hang on – I’m getting distracted by all the pictures. I think I’d better stop for a few minutes.’

He pulled the car to a rapid stop just off the road. The driver of a heavily laden lorry which had been following far too close behind gave an angry blast on his horn, but Bronson ignored him and turned towards Angela.

‘There’s nothing else in these hieroglyphics that even mention the Ark,’ she said. ‘These inscriptions, for example, seem to be part of fairly standard texts honouring Amun, and there are a couple that I think are praising Shoshenq’s courage and leadership. Again, pretty much what you’d expect to find in a temple erected by the reigning pharaoh to one of the most important Egyptian gods.’

She pressed the cursor control key and started flicking back through the other pictures on the computer’s hard drive. One of the images showed a dark-haired man standing beside a chair.

‘Who’s that?’ Bronson asked, as he glanced down at the picture.

Angela had already moved on to a different image, but then scrolled back and looked at the screen. Then she laughed.