Bronson shook his head.
‘No, and that’s the point. If I don’t know where we’re going, nor will anybody else. What I want to do is put about thirty miles between us and Auxerre, because that will create a huge search area for someone trying to find us.’
Around three-quarters of an hour later, he steered the Citroën into the car park of a hotel lying just off the Route de Paris on the outskirts of Avallon and not too far from the local airport. The parking was behind the building, which meant that the car would be out of sight of the road, and a large sign beside the main entrance extolled the virtues and facilities of the premises. These included the obvious essentials like en suite bathrooms and central heating, but also advertised coffee-making facilities in each room and, in quite large letters, free Wi-Fi.
The proprietors only spoke basic English, but Bronson’s French was more than up to the task, and they chose a double room on the first floor overlooking the road.
‘Are you sure about the double?’ Bronson had asked, somewhat surprised at Angela’s insistence. Their relationship was still somewhat fragile and sharing a room was unusual rather than normal.
‘Just book it before I change my mind,’ Angela had replied. ‘It’s going to attract a lot less attention. And after what we’ve been through in the last day or so, I don’t think I want to be on my own.’
In the hotel room, Angela immediately opened up her computer and navigated to the folder containing the photographs of the inscription.
Bronson sat beside her as she studied the pictures she’d taken.
‘It really isn’t what I expected,’ Bronson said, staring at the image on the screen. It was many times larger than the small image he’d previously looked at on her camera, and he could see the inscription clearly for the first time. ‘I’d envisaged a neat carving, maybe inside a shield or escutcheon, something like that. But that just looks so crude.’
The image showed a flat area of rock, brilliantly illuminated by the flash from the camera and on which every detail stood out clearly. There was a roughly carved border around the outside of the text, and the incised letters were carved in a simple and basic fashion with no attempt at ornamentation of any sort. It looked as if the carving had been done in a hurry by somebody whose only aim had been to ensure that the individual letters were perfectly readable.
‘That’s one of the things that struck us about it as well,’ Angela said. ‘We came to the conclusion, maybe wrongly, that the inscription was a copy of something else. Maybe a piece of text written on a parchment or something of that sort, and the inscription was just intended to be a permanent record.’
‘In other words, it’s not the inscription that’s important, it’s the message. It’s the information, rather than the form in which that information is conveyed.’
Angela nodded. ‘Exactly. Now, I think the easiest way to tackle this is for you to take a pencil and paper and copy down the inscription as I read it out, letter by letter. Once we’ve done that, I can try to work out how the encryption was done.’
Bronson opened his own computer bag and took out what he needed, then sat at the other end of the small desk in the room and wrote down each letter as Angela read it out from the image on the screen. It wasn’t a large piece of text, and it didn’t take long for Angela to finish. There were a few instances where extra clarity was needed, and on these she looked at different pictures of the inscription until she was satisfied that she had correctly read every single letter.
‘And I suppose that,’ Bronson said, putting down the pencil he’d been using, ‘was the easy bit.’
‘Correct.’
An hour or so later, Angela had followed the same logical process as Khaled had done hours before and had in front of her a new version of the inscription, produced not by any form of Atbash but simply by frequency analysis.
She was staring at it, her head in her hands.
‘I must be missing something,’ she said. ‘This looks almost right, but it just doesn’t make sense.’ She pointed at one section of the text. ‘It still looks like gobble-degook, but less obscure, somehow.’
Bronson walked over to the side of the room and made a couple of cups of coffee, then returned to the desk and put one of the cups in front of her.
‘It’ll come to you,’ he said confidently. ‘I know you. You’ll keep going backwards and forwards over this until you finally crack it.’
Angela suddenly stiffened.
‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,’ she murmured, grabbing another piece of paper.
31
The biggest problem Khaled had encountered in his search for a possible location was the sheer number of places that could be described in a way that matched the crucial words in the deciphered inscription, that could be below a ‘lost temple’. There were far more destroyed temples, buildings lost to the world through neglect, natural catastrophe and, inevitably, war, than there were places of worship still standing.
There were obvious filters that he could apply — it had to have been in existence at least as early as the thirteenth century, for example — but that still left dozens of possibilities. The other problem he faced was that although he knew that many Christian churches — and in his opinion these could be generically described as ‘temples’ — had crypts lying underneath the building, this fact was rarely a matter of public record. The number of places he found that were described as having such a structure was vanishingly small, and he was quite certain that subterranean chambers existed below many buildings that he had initially dismissed.
Khaled pushed back his chair, stood up and paced back and forth across the carpet in front of his desk. It was a habit he had acquired years earlier, as the worn track in the carpet mutely testified, but it did seem to help him think more clearly. And after only a couple of minutes, a thought popped into his mind, an idea that might focus his search significantly. But first, he needed to check his translation of the inscription again.
He sat down in front of the computer and pulled up the transcription he had prepared. He scanned down to the appropriate section, and then nodded. It was something of a jump, but it seemed to him to make sense. It all hinged on the interpretation of a single word, a word chosen by a man over five hundred years earlier.
He looked again at the decrypted Latin, and then navigated to an online Latin dictionary and entered the word hypogeum into the search field. He’d done it before, and the result was exactly what he had expected. It wasn’t even an unusual word, and had been in use during the entire period when Latin had been the predominant European language — but just to make absolutely certain he brought up three other different Latin dictionaries, one after the other, and checked the results in those as well.
They all agreed. The translation was simple: the word meant a crypt or a vault, or some other kind of underground chamber, and that was what had prompted his re-examination of the text. The question really was whether or not the mediaeval author of the inscription had thought the same way that he was now doing.
Because there was another word, a word much more commonly used than hypogeum, and which indicated almost exactly the same kind of thing, but with one subtle difference. In Latin, the word crupta — the root of the English word ‘crypt’ — also meant an underground chamber, but one that was additionally used for rites, for religious services of one sort or another. If Khaled was right in his interpretation, the mediaeval author was specifically stating that the ‘hall’ was not used by the temple above it for any kind of religious function, and — making another leap of deduction that might well not be justified by the evidence — might not even be in any way a part of that temple. The writer could simply have been referring to two entirely separate buildings: a temple, or to be exact a place where a temple had once stood, and some kind of hall cut into the ground some distance underneath it.