The Messiah Secret

The equipment he was using was state-of-the-art. The shotgun microphone was tiny, but sufficiently powerful to allow him to listen to and record a conversation taking place as much as fifty yards away. Bronson and Lewis were a lot closer to him than that, but the airport was far from an ideal location for detailed surveillance. The problem was people: the passengers arriving and departing, who walked across the open space between Donovan’s seat and the café table where his targets were sitting. Sometimes people even stopped in his line of sight to hold a conversation, and there was very little Donovan could do about that. The location wasn’t perfect, but his equipment had proved good enough to capture about three-quarters of the conversation Bronson and Lewis had just had, a conversation that Donovan now had stored on a solid-state digital audio recorder.

Once he’d been certain Bronson and Lewis were heading back to their hotel in Cairo from el-Hiba, he’d quickly caught up with the Peugeot in his hired Mercedes and then overtaken it. Then he’d tracked them around the streets of Cairo and followed them out to the airport.

He still didn’t know the full story, but he had managed to record the translation of most of the Persian text as Bronson read it out, and now he probably had enough information to work out exactly where he should be looking next.

42

Angela and Bronson watched the computer screen as the first page of search results appeared on it.

‘It doesn’t look like it’s an actual place,’ Angela said. ‘Or at least there’s nowhere named Mohalla in any of the gazetteers. If there was, I’d have expected Wikipedia or one of the other encyclopaedia sites to have popped up with its location.’

‘The first result is from Wikipedia,’ Bronson pointed out.

‘I know, but it’s not a location. It’s a description of some kind.’ She clicked on the result.

‘You see? It gives the name Mohalla, or Mahalla as an alternative spelling, but the word means a neighbourhood or a district in some of the villages and towns in Central and South Asia. And that second sentence makes no sense in the context we’re investigating.’

‘What does it say?’

‘That Mohalla often describes a Muslim area, and can also be a derogatory term. Well, one thing that we can be absolutely certain about is that the Ark of the Covenant pre-dates Islam by millennia; and this Persian text we’ve been working with is at least half a millennium older than the Muslim religion.’

‘And what about that last bit?’ Bronson couldn’t see the screen as clearly as Angela could.

‘It says the word could be a reference to Shahi Mohalla, and that’s somewhere in Lahore in Pakistan.’ Angela glanced at Bronson. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘I know what you’re going to say. India and Pakistan are neighbours, so maybe you’re right. But I’m still not convinced.’

‘Let’s just treat it as a working hypothesis,’ Bronson suggested. ‘What you’ve found already suggests that Mohalla could be an Indian place-name. We just don’t yet know where it is – or rather where it was. So why don’t we assume that Mohalla is in India until we’ve managed to prove that it isn’t?’

‘OK,’ Angela agreed cautiously. ‘I’ll just take a quick look at the rest of the search results to see if there’s anything else there.’

She scanned down the page of results generated by the Google search engine, clicking on anything that looked interesting, then moved on to the second page, but found nothing there.

‘I’m going to alter the parameters slightly,’ she said, adding a couple of words to ‘Mohalla’ in the box and checking the results of the new search.

About halfway down the page one result looked interesting. Angela clicked it, they both read it, then Angela sat back, turning the laptop slightly to face Bronson.

‘Could that be it?’ She looked at Bronson, frowning slightly.

Bronson shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘If it is correct, it does explain exactly who “Yus of the purified” was, and where Mohalla was located.’

‘Yes, but after all this time – I mean, there’d be nothing left now, surely?’

‘We don’t know that. It all depends on what they did, how they did it, and where they ended up.’

‘So all this time we’ve been looking for the wrong relic?’ Bronson asked.

‘We’ve been looking for the wrong treasure, from the wrong time period, and in the wrong country.’ Angela rubbed her eyes. ‘How the hell could I have got everything so badly wrong?’

‘We were just following the clues,’ Bronson said softly, taking her hand. ‘We made deductions based on the best evidence we could find. The problem was that once we thought we knew what we were looking for, it was easy enough to make each new piece of evidence fit our preconceptions. It happens all the time in police work.’

‘But to be so wrong—’

‘At least now we know what the Wendell-Carfaxes were looking for. But is it worth following up, after all this time? Wouldn’t we be better just packing up and going home?’