to start to try to get an ID on him.’
Donovan looked down at the face of the man he’d worked with for more than a decade.
‘How did it happen?’ he asked the police sergeant. ‘Where did you find him?’
‘A couple of guys in a patrol car spotted his body on a vacant corner lot in downtown Monterey. It looks as if he was mugged, because his wallet is missing.’
‘Did he have a bag with him? A computer bag, I mean?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘No. Apart from a comb and a handkerchief, the only thing we found was the card. No bag, no wallet, no phone, no keys, even.’
‘But Jesse lived down near Carmel, and spent most of his spare time on the beach. If he went out in the evening, he normally stayed in Carmel because he didn’t much like Monterey. So what was he doing there?’ Donovan scratched his head. It was all too much to take in.
‘I can’t help you there, sir. What we seem to have is a mugging that went wrong, and the only unusual thing about it is the weapon used.’ The sergeant pointed down, at the sheeted corpse. ‘This body has two small-calibre bullet wounds in the chest. We won’t know for sure until the doc does the autopsy, but it looks like he was hit by a couple of point two-fives, maybe even twenty-twos. Most of the bad boys around here use thirty-eights or bigger. A twenty-two isn’t your usual mugger’s pistol of choice. It’s not a serious weapon.’
‘Maybe that’s all the criminal could find,’ Donovan suggested.
‘Maybe. Sometimes, a small-calibre gun could mean a professional hit, because with a suppressor fitted the weapon’s pretty near silent, but it doesn’t look like that was the case here.’
‘Why?’
‘Because a pro would go for a head shot every time. And this guy was shot in the chest.’
‘You said you didn’t find any keys on him either,’ Donovan said. ‘Could you do me a favour and send a car out to Carmel to check his apartment? He had a lot of expensive electronic equipment out there, and some of it belonged to my company. If the mugger took his keys, he might have burgled his home as well.’
‘We’ll do that today, sir, if you can give us the address. And do you know who his next of kin is?’
‘His parents live somewhere in Utah, I think,’ Donovan said, writing down the address of McLeod’s apartment in Carmel, together with his own mobile number. He passed them to the sergeant. ‘I’m going back to the office. Call me if you find anything.’
Donovan climbed back into his Porsche, started the engine – and just sat there, staring through the windscreen at the street ahead of him. So much had happened in such a short space of time. Two weeks earlier, McLeod had come to him with the first, tantalizing snippet of information. He’d found a report in a monthly magazine published in an English county called Suffolk about someone who was trying to raise money to fund an expedition to the Middle East to search for a lost treasure, a relic he’d referred to as the ‘treasure of the world’. The old man had been following some clues originally found by his father and, according to the magazine, he finally believed he had worked out where he should start his search.
That single expression – the ‘treasure of the world’ – had electrified Donovan, because he’d seen it before, in an entirely different context, and he believed he knew exactly what it referred to. That was why he’d turned to Jesse McLeod. If anyone could locate any other references to the man or his quest, he could.
And then there had been the report of the Englishman’s brutal death. Now McLeod was also dead; murdered in a way that didn’t seem to make sense. McLeod had clearly been murdered: Donovan was certain of that. This was no mugging.
Was there a connection here? That was one other thing that disturbed Donovan: he now knew he wasn’t the only person looking for the treasure. Suddenly, what had started out almost as an academic curiosity had turned into a dangerous race. But in spite of McLeod’s death, Donovan was determined to find the treasure first, no matter what it took – the potential rewards were simply too great to ignore.
He pulled out in to the busy morning traffic. The search had begun.
11
It was lunchtime by the time Donovan got back to the office and very quiet, which suited him just fine. He’d gone straight to McLeod’s workstation, telling his secretary he didn’t want to be interrupted, and opened up his computer. Now he leaned back, faintly surprised. He hadn’t expected his scan of the hard drive to reveal any useful information at all, but in fact he’d found an entirely unprotected folder named ‘Suffolk’ in the root directory. Inside it were the statements and forensic reports prepared by the Suffolk Police in their initial investigation into the murder of Oliver Wendell-Carfax, information that McLeod had obviously obtained recently, but which he’d failed to share with Donovan.
He copied the whole lot on to a memory stick, then read the reports on-screen. The old man had obviously died a hard, painful death, and common sense suggested he would have told his killer whatever he needed to know. His injuries were so severe that he would probably have died from them anyway, even without the heart attack that had actually killed him.
But the blood and tissue found in the corpse’s mouth pointed to an alternative scenario. It meant the killer’s face must have been right next to the old man’s mouth, and that implied that the killer was listening intently to what he said. So maybe Oliver Wendell-Carfax
Obviously, there was no way of telling now, but that detail from the forensic report at least gave Donovan hope that the other man searching for the relic might not have obtained all the information he sought. The playing field, so to speak, might still be level.
As Donovan shut down the computer, his mobile rang.
‘It’s Sergeant Hancock at the MPD, Mr Donovan. We sent a team over to Jesse McLeod’s apartment and it’s been cleaned out, at least as far as electronic devices are concerned. No computers, cameras or even mobile phones. Whoever did it left all the cables in place, but the hardware’s gone. You’ve no idea who the intruder could be, I guess?’
‘Absolutely none at all, Sergeant,’ Donovan said. But he knew he had to find out – and quickly.
Back in his office, Donovan cleared everything off his desk, then walked across to the wall beside the door where a single piece of modern art hung. He didn’t particularly like the picture, but it was exactly the right size to conceal the safe that was set into the concrete wall directly behind it.
He pressed the bottom left corner of the picture to release the spring-loaded magnetic catch and then swung the frame back on a piano hinge to reveal the wall safe and control panel behind it. With the ease that comes from familiarity, he entered a six-digit code on the control panel keypad that unlocked the thermostatic controls and gradually adjusted the internal environment of the safe to allow the air inside it to reach room temperature and humidity, and permit the door to be opened. It would take a little over three minutes, but he never minded the wait.
As soon as the light on the control panel changed from red to green, he inserted a slim steel key in the adjacent lock, turned it twice, and swung open the door. Inside lay a zipped plastic bag containing a piece of papyrus with ragged, frayed and uneven edges, and a single sheet of paper. He picked up both and carried them over to his desk.
Pulling on a disposable mask and a pair of thin cotton gloves, he unzipped the plastic bag and carefully, almost reverently, he slid the parchment out and placed it gently on the bag. For some moments he just stared down at it. He couldn’t read the closely written Aramaic script in its entirety, though he knew enough of the language to translate the odd word, but a complete translation – in fact, three complete translations prepared by three different but very experienced ancient-language specialists – was typed on the sheet of paper in front of him.
Those translations had sparked his all-consuming passion and ongoing search for any other clues that might
