The Messiah Secret - James Becker [55]
Angela straightened up, and put her hands on her hips. ‘That makes me feel a lot better.’
‘Actually, it should. The other trick amateur burglars are fond of pulling is to take a dump on the floor, preferably in the middle of the carpet, before they leave the place. They seem to think it leaves all the bad luck in the property, and means they won’t get caught.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Absolutely. So what’s been taken?’
‘Just my laptop and the broken pottery vessel from Carfax Hall. The laptop wasn’t an expensive model, and those broken pottery shards are worthless from a commercial point of view.’
‘So whoever took them was clearly looking for those and nothing else.’
Angela nodded. ‘Odd, isn’t it? Especially as there are lots more valuable things around.’
‘It’s pretty clear what happened,’ Bronson said. ‘The man who attacked you broke in here first and took those bits. Then he waited for you down on the street. And that begs another question.’
Angela nodded grimly. ‘Yes. Somebody must have told him what I look like.’
‘We’ve been here before, Angela,’ Bronson said slowly. ‘Somebody else is obviously searching for this “treasure of the world”, and we’ve no idea who it is, or why they’re looking for it.’
‘If I’m right and it is the Ark of the Covenant, the “why” is a very easy question to answer: the value of that relic is incalculable. I mean, you’d certainly be talking tens of millions of pounds, maybe even hundreds of millions.’
‘High stakes, and that means high risk. And now you’ve lost all your research notes and the box of papers, I suppose we’re pretty poorly placed to keep searching?’
Angela shook her head firmly. ‘Of course not. What was on the laptop is duplicated on my desktop computer at the museum, and I’ve got a full back-up of the data on a memory stick in my handbag. I duplicate everything. And even losing the papers isn’t important, because I scanned everything as soon as I got to the museum this morning.’ She stopped and smiled for the first time since she’d escaped from the man on the street. ‘That bastard might think he’s one step ahead of us, but he’s not. However, he now has exactly the same information, and he’ll probably eventually make the same connection, so we have to get there first.’
‘Get where?’ Bronson looked confused.
‘Egypt, to see a man named Hassan al-Sahid, and also to visit el-Hiba and the temple of Amun-Great-of-Roarings. Let me just grab my overnight bag. We leave in five minutes.’
Egypt
28
‘Bartholomew and Oliver were devious old sods,’ Angela said, as they sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for their flight to be called. ‘We know this because of the way Bartholomew hid his papers and Oliver made all his different wills. So it seems to me that Bartholomew would have planted a trail of clues in Carfax Hall for his son to follow. The trouble is that I don’t think Oliver was very good at that kind of thing. He only said a month or so ago that he was planning an expedition to follow in his father’s footsteps in the Middle East, so I doubt if he found that hidden drawer under the stuffed fox until quite recently, and he may never have made the connection. He could just have been intending to retrace the route his father took on one of his expeditions, based on Bartholomew’s notes.’
‘So what is the connection you’ve made?’ Bronson asked.
‘I found a bill of sale from Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax to a man named Hassan al-Sahid, and a sentence scrawled at the bottom of one of his pages of expedition notes. That read, “The Montgomerys hold the key.” Put those two things together, and what do you get?’
‘A headache?’ Bronson suggested, smiling at her.
Angela sighed. ‘The bill of sale is for two oil on canvas portraits, but the