Khaled checked his decryption a couple of times and looked at the few possibilities for alternative meanings, and then for a minute or so he just sat and stared at his best guess of the translation of the original Latin script, the only bit of the inscription that actually mattered to him. It was far from specific, but interpreting what it meant — or more accurately the location to which it referred — wouldn’t be that difficult.
He smiled to himself. With any luck, his quest would be over within a matter of days.
But there was no time to waste, because of the woman who had got away. She had escaped from the camp and then vanished from Milan before she could be silenced. She was probably somewhere in France at that very moment, running for her life. But what concerned Khaled more than anything was not the fact of her continued existence, but the unpleasant knowledge that — according to the dead archaeologist in Milan — she, like all the other members of the team, had taken copious photographs of the inscription.
And, sooner or later, she would go to ground somewhere and when she did Khaled had no doubt that she too would manage to decrypt the enciphered text and make exactly the same connection that he had. And if she had the slightest inkling of the importance of the object the inscription referred to as the ‘hoard’, then almost certainly she and her former husband would join the race.
Time really was of the essence, and Khaled knew he would need to move as quickly as he could once he’d worked out the meaning of the clue he’d uncovered. And he would also need some help. Or, to be completely accurate, some muscle. He opened his briefcase, took out his personal mobile phone and dialled Farooq’s number.
‘I need you and six of your men,’ he said without preamble when his call was answered. ‘And make sure you have your passports, because we will almost certainly need to fly somewhere at short notice, probably somewhere in Europe.’
‘You mean you don’t know where?’ Farooq asked. He sounded surprised.
‘Not yet,’ Khaled replied. ‘I’ve deciphered the inscription, but I still need to work out exactly what the text means.’
‘What about weapons?’
‘Hopefully we won’t need them, but if we do we’ll have to find them at our destination. Anyway, warn your men and hold yourself ready.’
Khaled ended the call, opened up a web browser and began searching for a location that matched the description he’d managed to decipher.
30
‘And Plan B is what, exactly?’ Angela asked.
‘Basically,’ Bronson replied, ‘it’s not so much a plan, more like an anti-plan. Instead of doing what they might expect, we do the opposite, and stay unpredictable. I’ve no doubt that Stephen was forced to tell his killers that we planned to drive to England, and if we do that there’s a good chance there’ll be a man with a long rifle waiting for us somewhere near the Channel port or outside your apartment building.’
Angela stared at his profile for a few moments before she spoke.
‘You’re serious? You really think they won’t give up until they’ve killed me?’
Her voice was calm and level, but there was no mistaking the fear that lay behind her simple questions.
‘They massacred a whole camp of people and then had Stephen murdered,’ Bronson said in reply. ‘Italy’s a long way from Iraq, but they had no trouble reaching out and killing him in Milan within just a few hours. So, yes, I’m serious. Mind you,’ he added, ‘we’ve been here before, facing the same kind of threat.’
‘I know,’ Angela said, ‘but when it happened before, at least we had a good idea what the motive was. This time, it just doesn’t make sense. How can the knowledge contained in an inscription carved over half a millennium earlier be so important — or so dangerous — that everybody who sees it ends up dead?’
‘The only way to find out is for you to decipher it,’ Bronson said simply. ‘Do you think your photographs are good enough to let you transcribe the letters and work out what the plaintext says?’
Angela nodded.
‘That wasn’t why I took the pictures,’ she said. ‘At the time, the inscription was just a curiosity, and the photographs were intended to show the entire layout of the underground temple, but they’re certainly clear enough to let me transcribe every character.’
‘I think we should go to ground, lose ourselves completely for a while. Once you’ve worked out the meaning of the inscription, we can decide what to do next.’
‘That won’t get them off our backs, though.’
Bronson nodded. ‘I know. The trouble is that at the moment we have no idea why they want us dead, so what we need more than anything else is information. And pretty much the only source is that inscription. Once we know what it says, we’ll have a better idea why it’s worth killing for and hopefully what we should do about it.’
‘So we just drop off the radar?’
‘Exactly. For the time being, I think that’s our safest course of action. And the first thing we need to do is get rid of this car. If they traced Stephen to his hotel room, there’s no doubt at all that they’ll know about this vehicle.’
A few minutes later they reached the Auxerre-Sud junction of the Autoroute du Soleil, and Bronson steered the car down the off ramp. Auxerre wasn’t a huge town, but it was big enough to have a number of vehicle hire agencies and, luckily, one of them was the same company that they had approached in Milan. He handed over the vehicle, explaining to the counter clerk that they had changed their plans and were now going to take a train to Paris and then fly to London from there. That, he hoped, would help muddy the waters if their anonymous pursuers managed to track them to that agency.
About a quarter of an hour later they sat down at an outside table at a pavement café, their bags tucked against the wall behind them, and ordered the menu of the day, plus a coffee for Bronson because he was going to be driving, and a large gin and tonic for Angela because she looked like she needed it.
‘So we’ve got rid of the car,’ Angela said, taking a long swallow. ‘What next?’
‘We max out our credit cards, draw as much cash as we can. With the resources these people seem to have, I’ve no doubt they’ll be able to pinpoint our location if we pay hotel bills with cards, so we need the cash if we’re going to stay out of sight. Out of electronic sight, I mean. Then we find ourselves another car, hopefully from a small agency.’
‘We’ll have to use a card for that,’ Angela pointed out, ‘unless the rules have changed.’
‘I know, but there’s nothing we can do about it. But it will take them time to find out what we did after we handed back the first car, and even if they get the details of our new vehicle, France is a really big country and finding us won’t be easy. We’ll make sure of that. And then we disappear. Just take a look at the map and pick somewhere at random. Find a hotel and get started deciphering the inscription as soon as we can.’
‘Okay. A hotel would be helpful because I’m going to need the Internet. My Latin isn’t too bad, but I’ll need some pointers about deciphering the text. I’m not an expert in cryptography.’
They left Auxerre in a small and anonymous three-year-old Citroën a little over two hours later, having raided the ATMs and drawn out a couple of thousand euros between them. Their natural inclination was to head towards Paris and the Channel ports, but that was probably what anybody trying to follow them would assume they’d do, so instead Bronson steered the dark blue C3 south-east, following a road that more or less paralleled the autoroute, and taking turnings as and when he felt like it.
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Angela asked.