The Messiah Secret

Inside the cave Bronson was dragging away the rocks and bits of wood. In a few minutes he’d cleared away most of the debris from a small area, and all that was left underneath it was a thick layer of dust and dirt.

‘Look at this,’ he said to Angela. He took a knife from his belt – one of the various items of camping equipment he’d bought back in Leh – and pressed the blade into the soil. The tip penetrated no more than a quarter of an inch. Then he moved the blade a few inches away and repeated the operation. This time, the blade slid into the dirt for about six inches. He withdrew the knife blade, moved it even further, and again the tip hit solid rock within less than half an inch.

‘You see,’ he said. ‘There’s a groove that runs from the edge of the rock wall across towards the right-hand side of the cave. It’s directly below those two lines on the roof.’ He paused and looked at Angela. ‘In fact, what you’re looking at up there isn’t a pair of parallel lines at all – it’s actually a groove cut into the stone itself, and it’s mirrored by an identical groove cut in the floor of the cave.’

‘You don’t mean . . .’ Angela’s voice trailed away as she looked from the floor to the roof of the cave, then to the rock wall itself. She stepped forward and carefully felt the stone, running her hand up and down the edge of the wall.

Bronson nodded. ‘That isn’t a wall of rock. That’s a sliding door made of solid stone that somebody went to a lot of trouble to conceal. What we have to do now is find a way to open it.’

Nick Masters checked his watch once more – it was ten minutes and eighteen seconds since Bronson and Lewis had disappeared. He considered his options for a few more seconds then made a decision. Beckoning to Donovan, he moved back from the cliff-edge and made a call on the sat-phone to the small group of mercenaries who were waiting a short distance up the slope.

‘The targets have gone into a cave. There’s a small stone building on the valley floor – you’ll see it when you get down there. The cave entrance is maybe seventy yards east of that. Move forward now, slowly and quietly. Then hold position about thirty yards clear of the cave entrance.’

Next he made a call to the two men who’d been in the Land Rover – and issued orders to them as well.

Finally he checked his Kalashnikov was fully loaded, shouldered the sniper rifle and began a careful descent down into the valley, Donovan following cautiously behind him.

‘A stone door, Chris? In your dreams! How would they do it?’

‘You’re the one who’s always banging on about how technologically advanced the ancient races were,’ Bronson said, continuing to dig around in the earth with the sheath knife. ‘The pyramids have been standing for what – about five thousand years – and you’ve told me that even today nobody actually knows for sure how the ancient Egyptians managed to build them.’

Angela nodded, almost reluctantly. ‘True enough. And some of the passages in them were deliberately blocked by massive stone blocks to foil tomb-robbers, so the technology obviously existed – or at least it did in Egypt. It’s just that up here in these mountains, in this country – it’s not the kind of thing I expected to find.’

Bronson pointed at the floor, where he’d exposed a long straight-sided groove. ‘Once they’d slid the door closed, they jammed rocks under the base of it to stop it moving, filled the channel in the floor with earth and covered it, and the front of the stone door, with rocks and wood. But they couldn’t do anything to conceal the channel they’d had to cut in the ceiling.’

He looked up, then back down at the floor. ‘They must have used rollers of some kind,’ he said, almost talking to himself, ‘probably lubricated with animal fat or something like that. I just hope that they used stone instead of wood because of the weight of the door. No, in fact, they must have used stone. After two millennia wooden rollers would have simply disintegrated, and the door would have dropped, and maybe even fallen out of the top groove.’

‘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.’