‘And the “Christ” is another later addition. According to the Bible, Jesus was believed by some of the people he encountered to have been the Messiah, and that word in Hebrew means “the anointed one”. That fact was recognized by the early translators who were rendering the Bible in Greek, and the oil used for that kind of anointing was called khrisma in Greek and a person who had been anointed was known as a khristos. When the text was then translated from Greek into Latin, the khristos was changed into christus and, predictably enough, during the translation into English that became “Christ”, but it was never a part of Jesus’s name when he was alive.’
‘Assuming that such a person lived at all,’ Bronson interjected.
Angela shook her head.
‘Another time, another story,’ she said shortly. ‘In those very early days, people didn’t actually have a second or family name. Instead, Jesus would have been known as “Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub”, or “Joshua, son of Joseph, son of Jacob”.’ She paused for a moment and pointed at the paper, and at the second group of letters. ‘“Y B Y B Y”,’ she said. ‘There doesn’t seem to me to be any doubt that that refers to “Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub”, the man the Mandaeans saw as the usurper, and if we were in any doubt at all, then the letters “F E I” would seem to confirm it.’
‘Furis et interceptoris,’ Bronson said, remembering their earlier conversation and nodding. ‘“Thief and usurper”. Let’s hope that really is it.’
He took another piece of paper, wrote out the three Latin words, then the reversed alphabet, and then Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, all without spaces. Then he wrote out the plaintext alphabet below it, repeating it until he had matched each ciphertext letter with its plaintext equivalent. The entire ciphertext string amounted almost to three complete alphabets.
‘I’ve reversed the alphabet this time,’ he said, ‘but we can always try it the other way round, and I suppose reverse the added bits as well. Ring the changes, as it were. Let’s see how it goes.’
As Angela read out the encrypted letters from the temple inscription, Bronson carefully checked the possible plaintext equivalents and wrote each of them down, bracketing each group as he did so.
And slowly, with much trial and frequent error, a kind of message began to emerge from the jumble of letters.
49
‘Where are they?’ Farooq demanded, sitting down at the café table next to Mahmoud, who now had a fresh cup of coffee in front of him, a necessary purchase to allow him to retain his seat. ‘Don’t point,’ he added. ‘Just tell me.’
‘The hotel on the corner to our left. First floor, second window from the right. I saw her for maybe ten seconds.’
‘And you’re certain it’s her?’
Mahmoud nodded. ‘I’m quite sure. The photograph you supplied was very clear. It’s definitely her.’
‘What about the man? Have you seen him?’
‘No. I’ve only seen her, and only for that short period.’
‘No other shadows or shapes on the window?’ Farooq persisted. ‘Nothing that could mean the man Bronson, or anyone else, was in there with her?’
Mahmoud was silent, mentally reliving that brief few seconds when he’d seen their quarry. Then he smiled as realization dawned, and he nodded again.
‘I’ve just thought…’ he said. ‘I was concentrating on making sure it really was her, but there must have been someone else in the room because she was talking. Or at least, her mouth was opening and closing.’
‘You’ve done well, my friend,’ Farooq said, and reached across to squeeze Mahmoud’s shoulder. Then he took his own mobile from his pocket, dialled a number and held a very brief conversation with Khaled. That completed, he switched to messaging, composed a short text and sent it simultaneously to the mobiles held by the remainder of his men. Then he leaned back in his seat, ordered a coffee from a waiter who’d been waiting expectantly a few feet away and glanced across at Mahmoud.
‘The others are on their way,’ he said, ‘and Khaled will be coming as well. He wants to be here.’
‘So now we just wait?’
‘We wait,’ Farooq confirmed. ‘And we watch. If they leave the hotel, we’ll follow them to make absolutely sure that they don’t manage to slip away.’
‘Where are we going to do it? We could take them in the hotel easily enough.’
‘We could, and then we’d be shot down like dogs in the street by the Israeli police or the soldiers who would be here within minutes. Like you, my friend, I have no fear of death, but I do want my dying to mean something, something a lot more than that. And don’t forget that the man Bronson almost certainly has Salim’s pistol. Trying to kill them in the hotel would be too noisy and uncertain. We must wait until they leave and then pick our moment. We’ll find somewhere much quieter, a place where they would least expect it.’
Mahmoud nodded, clearly seeing the logic of what his leader was telling him. But then another thought struck him.
‘What about Khaled?’ he asked. ‘He will probably want the job done as quickly as possible. Do you think he will be prepared to wait, as you suggest?’
‘Khaled is an administrator, not a man of action. In military matters, or tasks of this sort, I have no doubt he will defer to me.’
50
Almost two hours after they’d started, Angela finally put down the piece of paper she’d been working on. The writing on it followed a series of wandering lines, the text marked by numerous crossings-out but it did, finally, make some kind of sense.
‘Is that it?’ Bronson asked.
‘Pretty much, yes,’ Angela replied. ‘There are still one or two words that are a bit ambiguous in translation, but I think it’s more or less right. There’s no point in reading out the first section of the text, because it’s nothing more than a condemnation of the actions of Yeshua bar Yahosef bar Yaqub, Jesus Christ, the usurper. There was obviously no love lost there. It’s the next bit that’s interesting. Confusing, but interesting.’
‘So confuse and interest me at the same time,’ Bronson said. ‘I’m all ears.’
‘Right. The next section makes a reference to the “brotherhood”. That’s not an exact translation, but it’s as close as I can get. I have the feeling that the Latin word probably had a slightly different meaning at that time, and might well have been rather more specific. But in my opinion the precise meaning is made clear in the very next section, because it states that the members of the brotherhood wear the “splayed cross”, and you know as well as I do what that’s likely to refer to.’
‘The best-known symbol of the Knights Templar,’ Bronson replied. ‘The croix pattée. They wore it from 1147 right up until the day that the order was purged and dissolved.’
‘Exactly. So what we have here is an explicit reference to the Knights Templar, and he then goes on to describe the movement of an object, or perhaps more likely a number of objects. I’ll come back to that later, because there’s another reference that I don’t quite understand. But the route or path that these objects followed is perfectly clear, as long as we can identify the various waypoints. The places where the hoard spent various periods of time.’