‘A trial? You mean like in a court of law?’ Bronson asked.
Angela shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s just that some of the expressions sound like the kind of thing you might hear during a trial. But who’s on trial, and for what offence, I have no idea.’
92
For a few minutes after he’d ended the phone call to the man in Madrid, Morini did nothing, just sat on the bench with the phone in his hand, staring down at it as if the slim fusion of metal and plastic and silica could somehow provide the answers that he sought. But his mind was racing.
The body count was rising. Two people dead in Cairo, then the market trader Husani gunned down in Madrid, and now two more men — and he didn’t even know their names, he realized at that moment — also shot to death. That made five so far and, from what Tobí had told him on the telephone, the Spaniard was utterly determined to add the names of Christopher Bronson and Angela Lewis to that tally. And still they were no closer to recovering the relic than they had been at the very start of the operation.
In fact, they were probably a good deal further away, because Bronson and Lewis would definitely now be very well aware of what was going on and would be on their guard. And this Bronson man didn’t seem to be scared of taking the fight to them.
Morini had no idea what forces or numbers of men Tobí would be able to deploy in an attempt to track down Bronson and Angela Lewis, but he did know that Spain was a very big country with a vast road network, and he guessed that trying to locate those two people, even if details of their car were known to all the watchers, would actually be a very difficult task. And if they did manage to elude their pursuers in Spain, and somehow made it into France it would be even harder — the French road system was even more complex and convoluted than that in Spain.
Morini knew he would have to make yet another telephone call to the Englishman, to update him on the utter failure of the actions his colleagues had taken in Spain — the other man had made it very clear that he needed to be kept fully informed at all times. But was it now time to call a halt to the operation? If Bronson and Lewis somehow managed to get out of Spain, would it be better to just let them go? That was one consideration, and yet the threat posed by the ancient text on the parchment was as potent as ever, and the consequences of the secret it held becoming known simply terrified Morini.
For several minutes, Morini tossed the arguments backwards and forwards in his head, and then decided to do nothing. He would wait to hear from the Spaniard again and, with any luck, the next telephone call he received might well bring him the news that he sought: that the troublesome pair from England had been eliminated and the parchment recovered.
That night he would, he knew, yet again pray for guidance, for some kind of confirmation that the events he’d set in train were justified in the eyes of the god he thought he still worshipped.
93
‘So who was this Jerod of Cana?’
They were sitting in the hotel room discussing a few of the words that Angela had managed to translate.
‘He might have been a lawyer of some sort,’ she replied, ‘if this is a record of a trial or legal proceeding, or maybe just a minor official. He probably spoke Greek because Judaea had been Hellenized for some time and that language was spoken there almost as commonly as Hebrew. And he also spoke at least some Aramaic as well, because according to this sentence on the parchment he describes Yusef — Joseph — as a naggar.’
‘And that means what?’
‘It’s a loanword from Aramaic that has two different but related meanings. The literal translation would be a “craftsman”, but it also had a metaphorical interpretation as a scholar or a learned man, which I suppose is another way of looking at a craftsman — somebody who works with words rather than wood, say. And that’s interesting, because I had expected to find the word teknon being used instead. That’s not Aramaic. It’s a Greek word that also means a craftsman or a technician, a man who worked in metal or wood, and it was almost certainly the root of the modern English word “technician”. But the point is that it has no other meaning.’
‘I don’t see the significance.’
‘It’s very simple. Forget the parchment for a minute and think back to what you were told when you were at school, during your religious instruction classes, or whatever they were called. What job was Jesus Christ supposed to have followed?’
‘He was a carpenter, of course. Everybody knows that.’
Angela nodded. ‘Of course everybody knows that,’ she replied. ‘And actually everybody’s got it wrong. When you go back to the oldest known sources, to the original Aramaic, it’s quite clear that whoever translated the word naggar assumed that the correct meaning was the literal one, that Jesus was a craftsman of some kind, a carpenter or metal worker, and more importantly so was his father.
‘But actually it’s almost certain that that was a mistranslation, and the word they should have used was the metaphorical meaning, a “scholar”. Quite apart from anything else, at one point Jesus was supposed to have begun teaching in the synagogue, and there is no possible way that any carpenter would have been permitted to do that. But a scholar would actually have been expected to carry out this kind of duty, and nobody would have thought it unusual in any way.’
Bronson shook his head.
‘I still don’t see why that’s important.’
‘It’s important,’ Angela said, ‘because it possibly shows that the parchment is contemporary with whatever event it’s describing, and not something written much later. In particular, because the carpenter story became established quite quickly, it would be far more likely for a later writer to describe him as a teknon, using the Greek word, rather than the Aramaic naggar. It’s not proof positive, of course, but it does suggest — at least to me — that the parchment is most probably an authentic and contemporary record of something. We just don’t know what.’
94
Bronson drove the Renault, wearing the stolen number plates, through the streets of Madrid, constantly checking his mirrors and all around for potential problems. So far so good. As he had hoped, their hotel seemed to have been safe.
By ten thirty they were clear of the city — most of the traffic heading in the opposite direction, back into Madrid — and steadily heading north-west in the general direction of Valladolid. That wasn’t the ideal route, bearing in mind their ultimate destination, but Bronson had guessed that the majority of the surveillance would be concentrated on the obvious routes out of the city, either due north towards Burgos and Santander where the overnight ferry to Britain docked, or north-east towards Saragossa and on to the French border. Well before he reached Valladolid, he would swing north-east and head towards France, staying off the autopistas.
The further they got from Madrid, the lighter the traffic became, and Bronson was able to maintain a reasonably high speed, although he was careful to keep within the limits. The last thing he wanted, with three unlicensed pistols about his person, was to be stopped by a member of the Guardia Civil for an offence as mundane as speeding.
He’d seen nothing to give him the slightest cause for concern up until that moment, so when he saw a sign for Segovia he took it without hesitation, because the sooner they started driving towards the French border the better.