‘And Mount Sinai is where, exactly?’
‘Somewhere in the Middle East, but there are several different suggestions as to exactly where.’
‘So if the Ark was taken and hidden somewhere on a mountain in the Middle East, where the hell would you start looking for it? I’m assuming you didn’t find anywhere conveniently named the Valley of the Flowers when you were doing your research?’
‘Actually, I found quite a lot of them,’ Angela replied, ‘but none of them were located at any site that could conceivably have been mistaken for Mount Sinai.’
Bronson nodded. ‘And with all the activity in the Middle East — by archaeologists as well as by invading armies — it would have to be a really well-hidden “place of stone” that could have escaped detection over the last two millennia. And if anyone had found the Ark, I presume we’d know about it by now.’
‘Almost certainly.’
‘OK,’ Bronson said, ‘here’s a thought. I know you said that finding out where Mohalla was didn’t really matter, but actually I think it might be worth doing. We’re talking two thousand years ago, when the fastest way to move something like the Ark would be in a horse-drawn cart that might cover twenty or thirty miles a day. I know the piece of text says that Isaac and his mates “journeyed long and far”, but that would be “long and far” in the context of that time. If they travelled for a solid week and managed thirty miles a day, which would be pretty good going, they’d still only have covered about two hundred miles. I think if we can find out where Mohalla is, we’ll have a much better idea about where to start looking for the “place of stone”.’
Angela was silent for a few moments, then she looked across at him, a slight smile on her face. ‘Actually, Chris,’ she said, ‘that’s a pretty good thought. These days we’re so used to the concept of high-speed travel — five hundred miles a day in a fast car, ten times that distance in an aircraft — that you have to take a couple of steps back to really appreciate the difficulties involved in covering any distance at all that long ago. Right, we’ll have to find Mohalla.’
Bronson sat back and stretched his legs. It had been a long hard day, and he knew there was some way yet to go. ‘I’ve just had another thought,’ he said, ‘and I’ll make you a prediction.’
‘What?’
‘You told me that Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax died suddenly?’
‘Yes. He had a heart attack at home, when he was in the middle of preparing for yet another expedition to search for the treasure.’
‘And he’d had those two pictures painted a short time before?’
Angela nodded.
‘Maybe the biggest clue of all has been staring us in the face all along. Why do you think Bartholomew chose those two subjects for the portraits?’
‘Because he needed to be able to hide the Persian text in the paintings, and those two costumes were ideal for that purpose.’
‘Well, I think Bartholomew had a sense of humour. I think he was looking forward to pointing out the Persian writing in the paintings to his son, and I also think he’d finally found out exactly where Mohalla is or was, and the paintings tell us that as well.’
‘How?’ Angela asked.
‘It’s right in front of you. Just look at the pictures again.’
Angela flicked back through the images stored on her laptop, found the ones that showed the two paintings and stared at them, one after the other.
‘It might be obvious to you, Chris, but it certainly isn’t to me.’
‘Think it through. Bartholomew could have chosen any number of subjects that would have allowed him to hide the Persian text, so why did he choose these two?’
‘I’ve no idea, and if you don’t tell me this instant, I’m going to- ’
‘India,’ Bronson said simply. ‘In one picture he looks like an Indian maharaja, and in the other like an Indian chief. The paintings are linked, obviously, because each one has about half of the Persian text on it, but apart from that the only common feature is the subject material. And that’s two things — both the paintings show Bartholomew and both of them link him with India.’
Angela shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Chris, but that’s just too obvious.’
Bronson grinned. ‘I disagree,’ he said. ‘And I’ll make you a bet that when you do dig up some reference to Mohalla, you’ll find that it’s somewhere in India.’
Sitting in a plastic chair on the opposite side of the airport lounge, completely hidden behind a copy of the Wall Street Journal that he’d purchased from the airport shop, JJ Donovan slightly adjusted the position of the shotgun mike resting on his lap as the sound in his earphones — they looked like the type you use with an iPod — faded slightly.
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 cafe 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?’