For a few moments, Angela stared at the image displayed on the screen of her computer.
‘My God, Chris, I think you might be right,’ she said slowly. ‘Now that I know what I’m looking for, it doesn’t seem to be a random pattern. In fact, I think I can make out several individual letters here.’ She looked across at her ex-husband. ‘You are brilliant – do you know that?’
Bronson smiled. It had been an educated guess, but a good one.
‘And the painting of Bartholomew wearing a Red Indian outfit,’ she said, finding the appropriate picture. ‘I suppose it’s in the band of this headdress that goes around his forehead?’
Bronson looked at the screen and nodded. ‘And perhaps running down the front of the tunic as well. Can you read the script?’
‘I hope so. The photographs Bartholomew had taken were done professionally, as far as I can see, and my guess is that he would have insisted that the lettering be readable on them. Otherwise, what would be the point in having the pictures taken at all? Then he sent the paintings to Cairo for safe keeping. If you’re right, and I think you are, these two photographs would have been his personal record of the Persian text, there for all to see, but only if you knew exactly what you were looking for.’
‘What about your scans? Did you lose any of the details of the photographs when you did them?’
‘Maybe a tiny bit, but nothing significant. These scans are probably just as good as having the original photographs, and we also have an advantage – using the computer, I can enlarge the areas we’re interested in and keep them displayed on the screen, which is a lot easier than trying do the same thing with a magnifying glass standing in front of a canvas hanging on a wall.’
Angela leaned over and gave Bronson a kiss.
‘Let’s get back to the hotel as quickly as possible. I’ll have to transcribe the letters and then find an on-line Persian translation program to sort out what the text says. With any luck, I might be able to do all that today.’
She looked at Bronson, her eyes shining with excitement.
‘We’re getting closer, Chris. I can feel it. By this evening, we might have a very good idea where the Ark of the Covenant is buried.’
40
Nearing the centre of Cairo, Bronson indicated left and pulled the hire car over towards the middle of the road, looking for a gap in the oncoming traffic. Nobody seemed particularly inclined to give way, so he eased over further, forcing his way into the traffic stream until a couple of vehicles finally and reluctantly slowed enough to let him swing across in front of them.
‘I’ll never get used to the way they drive over here,’ Angela muttered as Bronson straightened up and headed down the street towards their hotel.
Fifty yards ahead of Bronson’s car, Killian tossed the binoculars aside, reached down and twisted the key in the ignition. The engine sprang to life immediately. As the Peugeot approached him, Killian engaged first gear and accelerated hard, powering it out of the vacant lot and aiming for the side of Bronson’s vehicle.
* * *
‘Look out!’ Angela yelled, as she saw another car lurch into motion just beside them, the driver apparently not having seen them.
Bronson registered the other car at the same instant and reacted the way he’d been trained, turning the wheel away from the impending collision and accelerating hard to get clear of the path of the other vehicle.
Angela looked more closely at the driver and registered the bandaged ear, pale skin and dark, almost black, eyes of the man behind the wheel.
‘It’s that priest!’ she shouted. ‘He’s trying to kill us.’
Bronson glanced to his right, but his concentration was on the traffic, not on the driver of the other vehicle.
His options were limited. There was a line of vehicles – cars and light vans – heading towards them, but only a couple of cars in their lane ahead of them. No side streets, or not for about a hundred yards, and all the side turnings Bronson could see were dead ends. The last thing he wanted to do was get trapped somewhere that the priest could attack them. He didn’t know if the priest was armed, and had no desire to find out.
But a car is a weapon. A ton or so of metal able to travel at high speed, and in skilled hands – perhaps even more so in
He accelerated hard down the road. The single ace he held was that his car had already been in motion, and this gave him a tiny speed advantage.
He checked the mirror on the passenger side. The priest’s car was now perhaps ten feet behind him, and dropping back slightly. Fifty yards ahead was a lumbering grey van, the rear doors wedged open to reveal a motley collection of carpets and other unidentifiable materials inside it. To the left, an almost unbroken stream of cars was heading towards them.
Angela looked behind them, then tensed, pushing back in her seat, her arms pressing against the dashboard, as Bronson changed up and mashed the accelerator pedal again.
The priest was still close behind, maybe fifteen feet back, clearly visible in Bronson’s mirror and now matching speed with him.
Ahead, the back of the van loomed ever closer. At the last second, Bronson swung the wheel to the left, heading straight towards the oncoming traffic, gambling that the drivers on the other side of the road would give way.
But they showed no signs of moving over, and at the last second before a collision was inevitable, he slammed on the brakes and swung back on to the right-hand side of the road.
There was a bang and a scream of tortured metal as the front of the priest’s car crashed into the boot of his. The priest had braked as well, but too late.
‘There goes my no-claims bonus,’ Bronson muttered.
Angela spun round to look behind them.
‘He’s still coming after us,’ she said, her voice choked with fear.
Bronson had been hoping that the air bags in the priest’s car might have deployed as a result of the collision, but there was no sign of that having happened. Behind the wheel he could see the man’s black eyes staring right at him as he wrestled with the steering wheel.
Bronson swung his car to the right, back on to the correct side of the road, then moved even further over. He took a quick glance down the right-hand side of the slow-moving van, trying to see what was in front of it, then hit the accelerator again.
‘Hang on,’ he muttered, as the right-hand wheels of his car mounted the pavement. He sounded a long blast on the horn. With the left wheels of the car on the road and the right ones bouncing over the uneven paving slabs, Bronson powered past the van, scattering pedestrians, chickens and dogs as he did so.
Just as he reached the front of the van, a pile of boxes stacked four high on the pavement loomed in front of the car.
‘Brace yourself,’ he said, and hit them squarely, his eyes closing at the moment of impact. Cardboard and debris flew in every direction but, as he drove over their remains, he could see that the boxes had contained nothing more solid than a few dozen packets of crisps.
Bronson steered his car back on to the road. It bounced hard as it left the pavement, the suspension banging in protest. Behind them rose a clamour of angry shouts as crowds of people surged on to the streets. The van driver gave a long blast on his horn and gesticulated angrily. But Bronson had got past him, and that was all that mattered.
