He shut the lid of the laptop and slid it back into the case, then climbed back out of the jeep and rejoined Farooq by the ladder.
‘The pictures are good enough?’ the younger man asked.
‘They’re very clear. So now we just need to get rid of it. This is our information, and I’m not willing to risk sharing it.’
Farooq nodded, and waved to one of his men, who immediately jogged over. Farooq murmured his instructions, and the man pulled a broad-bladed cold steel chisel and a hammer from a fabric bag he had slung over his shoulder.
The man glanced at Khaled, apparently seeking final confirmation for what he was going to do and then, as Khaled nodded, he strode over to the aluminium ladder and descended into the underground temple.
Farooq issued another instruction, and the generator sprang back into life, illuminating the lights inside the chamber.
Within seconds, the sound of steel on stone became clearly audible as Farooq’s man began carefully chipping every last vestige of the inscription off the wall. It wasn’t a particularly long inscription, and within about a quarter of an hour he had completed the task and emerged from the temple.
Both Khaled and Farooq climbed down again to inspect what he had done. The section of the wall where the letters had been carved was now completely blank and featureless, with no indication at all — apart from a few barely visible chisel marks — that there had ever been anything displayed there.
Khaled glanced down at the small pile of stone chippings that lay on the floor of the temple underneath that section of the wall.
‘One last thing,’ he said. ‘Get somebody to sweep up all those and then dump them.’
‘You really think that’s necessary?’ Farooq asked. ‘I doubt anybody could reconstruct the carving from those few bits of stone.’
‘It’s not worth taking the chance. I want the evidence gone. And have your men go through every tent in this camp to collect all the computers, cameras, disks and memory sticks, just in case any of the archaeologists took photographs in the underground chamber. Tell them to put them all in the back of my jeep.’
Ten minutes later, the stone chippings had been collected and then scattered at random around the site, joining a myriad other small pieces of stone, and every piece of electronic equipment in the place had been collected. Now they were all ready to leave. Farooq ordered his men to climb up into their trucks, and then those two vehicles started up and drove slowly away from the encampment.
Khaled waited until his driver started the engine — and hence the air-conditioning — of his 4x4 vehicle before he climbed into the back. Once seated, and with the temperature inside the vehicle dropping steadily, he opened the computer bag, took out the laptop and began studying the pictures that he had taken.
The driver turned the jeep around and drove back out of the encampment the same way they had arrived. He looked incuriously at the bullet-ridden corpses, their clothes blotched with starlet stains, that lay scattered about the area.
But Khaled, sitting in the back seat, didn’t so much as glance at the bodies. He was entirely focused on the images on his computer screen.
5
‘I see where you’re going with this idea,’ Angela said, ‘but I just don’t know whether or not you’re right.’
They were now well clear of Kuwait City and were driving out into the largely empty desert, heading south-west along the Atraf Road, Highway 70. Traffic was even lighter, with only a few cars; the majority of vehicles on the road were lorries of one size or another. The sun was blazing down from an entirely cloudless sky, and Bronson was not looking forward to the moment when they would finally come to a stop and he would have to get out of the Toyota.
‘Look, I’m no archaeologist,’ he said, ‘but this doesn’t really seem to me to be an archaeological matter. We have a situation where the residents of the village, and probably everybody else within a few hundred miles of that location, all spoke Arabic, or perhaps a similar but related language. In fact, whatever language they spoke, we can be sure that it wasn’t Latin.’
‘Yes, that is a fact,’ Stephen agreed.
‘Right. So that inscription couldn’t have been read by, or meant for, any of the locals. It must have been aimed at somebody else. The big question, obviously, is who.’
‘Any ideas?’ Angela asked.
‘Not a clue,’ Bronson said. ‘That’s very definitely your field, my dear, not mine. What I know about this area is basically what you’ve told me since I got into this car. I have no idea what other tribes or peoples were wandering about round here five hundred years ago or even earlier. But I did have another idea that might help explain the inscription, although you might think it’s a bit of a stretch.’
‘Try me,’ she said.
Bronson turned slightly in his seat so that he could see both Angela and Stephen.
‘For people who have religious faith it’s based on belief: they believe what they’re told and accept, or turn a blind eye to, all the obvious inconsistencies. And they sometimes take on rights and traditions without asking what they mean. Take an obvious example: saying grace. People do it because it’s something they do before eating a meal, but I’m prepared to lay you money that almost none of them know why they do it, or where the practice comes from.’
‘Did you know Chris was an atheist, Stephen?’ Angela asked, with a wide smile.
‘I think I might have guessed that, actually. Do carry on.’
‘Right. So if we take it as a given that most people will just accept all the various trappings of their religion without questioning their relevance, then perhaps that carving on the wall of the temple might be a symbol of what they believe. A kind of carved relic that their priests told them dated from the earliest times. If that were the case, then they might not only accept it, but also worship it. It would be a kind of inscribed reminder of something that happened centuries earlier, maybe. Perhaps the followers of this religion had a copy of that inscription in all their temples, just as every Christian church displays a cross, a symbol of execution. Maybe it was some kind of an ancient talisman that they absorbed into their religion over the centuries and worshipped without having any idea at all about what it was or what it was supposed to mean.’
Both Angela and Stephen looked somewhat doubtful at this suggestion.
‘That’s an interesting idea,’ Stephen said, ‘but it’s rather improbable. We do know a bit about the likely religion the people of this area would have followed. They were almost certainly Mandaeans, and we don’t know too much about the origins of this particular belief system. It was a gnostic sect, and some researchers believe that it most probably originated in Palestine or Syria in about the first or second century ad, and then migrated to southern Iraq and parts of Iran, more or less the area that used to be called Mesopotamia. There’s another theory that it began in Mesopotamia itself but, whichever is true, we do know that it was an established religion by the third century. In fact, it’s still followed by about sixty-five thousand people worldwide, and today it’s an important religion here in south-west Iraq.’
‘I know Stephen won’t necessarily agree with me, but I’m fairly certain that the temple we found was Mandaean.’
‘I’m not saying that you’re wrong, Angela, but I am saying that your case is really not proven. Your evidence is circumstantial at best, and liable to other interpretations.’
‘What evidence is that?’ Bronson asked.
‘Three things,’ she replied, ‘and I do agree that not one of them is actually compelling. But I just think that the obvious thing to do is follow William of Occam and apply Occam’s Razor, so we should assume that the simplest explanation is the correct one until we find information that proves it isn’t. So, first, the Mandaean religion was the dominant faith in this area at the time we think the temple was probably in use, which is basically the Middle Ages, so on the basis of probability it’s most likely to have been used by people following this faith.