The Messiah Secret (33 page)

In front of the passenger on the dashboard was a topographical map of Ladakh, but he hadn’t bothered to open it. Instead, all his attention was focused on an electronic
device attached to the windscreen with a sucker. It looked something like a satnav unit, and comprised a five-inch screen with controls positioned around its rim. But unlike a normal satnav, as well as the symbol for the vehicle in which the unit was mounted, there was an additional moving dot showing on the electronic map. It was this symbol that was holding the passenger’s attention.

Although the road out of Leh towards the north-east was reasonably straight, albeit with a rough and potholed surface, in reality it was little more than a metalled track, defined only by its slightly flatter surface. On both sides, rocks and boulders marked the limits far more starkly and positively than any crash barriers could. The ride in the big Nissan jeep Bronson had rented was jarringly firm, so it wasn’t the most comfortable of drives, but Bronson would trade reliability over comfort any day, and especially in the kind of terrain that he knew they’d be encountering later.

‘Are you happy about the route?’ he asked, after they were well clear of the town itself.

‘More or less,’ Angela replied. ‘We carry on climbing along this road until we cross the top of the Khardüng La pass – which until recently was considered to be the highest pass in the world accessible by road – and then keep going straight to the bottom of the valley. Then we should swing left and follow the river that runs along the valley floor until we get to Thirit. There must be a way we can cross the river there. The trouble is, I have no idea
how big the river is and we’ve no way of knowing until we see it. According to the map it’s fed by tributaries from both sides of the valley, so my guess is that it’s quite substantial, and driving through it, even in this truck, might not be such a sharp idea.’

‘Makes sense to me.’

‘Anyway, somehow we’ll cross the river at or near Thirit, and then take the northern fork in the road and head up towards Pänämik, which lies near the southern end of the Nubra Valley. The word “Nubra” means “green” in the local dialect, because it’s supposed to have the best climate in the whole of Ladakh – its own microclimate, I suppose. And “Ladakh”, as a matter of interest, means the “land of the high passes”.’ She gestured at the hills and valleys visible all around them.

Bronson nodded, concentrating on the road, which had now started to climb quite steeply. ‘Now we’re on the last lap, can you just explain to me why you’re so sure the Nubra Valley is where we should be looking?’

‘Because it all fits so well with the Persian text. The first verse specifically refers to Mohalla, and the second states that they buried the treasure in the “valley of flowers”.’

‘I thought you told me a few minutes ago that “Nubra” meant “green”.’

‘I did, and it does. But the old name for the Nubra Valley was Ldumra, which means the “valley of flowers”. Some people think that “Nubra” means flowers, but it doesn’t – that’s just a linguistic echo from the old name in
the local dialect. And a small caravan would probably be able to reach the Nubra Valley from Mohalla in about ten days, which again matches the Persian text.’

‘OK,’ Bronson agreed. ‘And I assume there’s no other location that you’ve identified in this area which matches the description so well. But I’ve looked at the map, too, and the Nubra Valley is shaped like a triangle about forty miles long with a base around twenty-five miles wide. That means it covers an area of roughly five hundred square miles, and the northern end of it is in territory that’s controlled by Pakistan, not India, which adds a whole new level of complication. So the question I’m asking,’ he finished, ‘is where do you suggest we start looking?’

‘Your calculation is right, and trying to locate a cave in an area that size would be a complete waste of time and effort without some kind of directions. But, it so happens that we do have some directions,’ Angela said, smiling across at him. ‘Because of the third verse of the Persian script.’

Killian woke before dawn and paced his small room as he waited anxiously for some word from Tembla’s watchers a few miles up the road in Leh. Finally, when he could take the strain no longer, he walked down to the briefing room he’d been in the previous evening and helped himself to coffee.

Tembla strolled in about thirty minutes later, nodded to Killian and poured himself a mug.

‘Well?’ Killian asked.

‘They’re on the road already,’ Tembla said.

‘What?’ Killian jumped to his feet. ‘I need to get up there.’

‘Patience, Father. We launched a Searcher at dawn. That’s a UAV – an unmanned aerial vehicle – and it was programmed to loiter overhead Leh. It picked up Bronson and Lewis as soon as they left the guest house, and it’s been following their vehicle ever since. It’s tracking them
visually using a high-definition camera, and it’s receiving the electronic signal from the tracker, so we know exactly where they are. I got the last update just before I came here, and at the moment they’re climbing up the road towards the Khardüng La pass.’

Tembla unfolded a map of the area and spread it out on one of the desks.

‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing at the settlement marked ‘Karu’ on the map. ‘Leh is just here, and Khardüng La is almost due north of the town. At the other end of the pass is the River Shyok and the towns of Khalsar and Diskit. This area, the Nubra Valley, was originally called “Ldumra” and that’s the best match for the “Valley of Flowers”, as you called it. Now I know this valley, and there’s nothing much there, just a handful of old buildings at one end of it, so how sure are you that your information is correct?’

‘As sure as I can be; and in any case I need to get there as soon as possible. Can you arrange a jeep or something for me?’

Tembla shook his head. ‘There’s no point in leaving until Bronson and Lewis stop, and they’ve still got a long way to go before they even reach Khalsar. At best they’ll be making perhaps fifty kilometres an hour. When they stop, we’ll use helicopters which can reach them in a matter of minutes.’

‘What about weapons? Donovan will be following them too, you know, and he will be armed.’

Tembla smiled thinly. ‘That won’t be a problem. You can fly to the Nubra Valley in the Dhruv, but I have a couple of Hinds as well, and I’ll send one of those up with you.’

‘Hind?’

‘A Russian-built helicopter gunship. It can take on a main battle tank, so no matter how many mercenaries or what type of weapons Donovan might have assembled, I can promise you that he’ll be outgunned by the Hind.’

‘Are you sure you’ve deciphered the paragraph?’ Bronson asked.

The faintest shadow of uncertainty clouded Angela’s face, and just as quickly vanished. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I tried to analyse what the writer was describing, and then match his description with the geographical features that I know still exist in the Nubra Valley.’

‘And it worked?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ she repeated. ‘Let’s see if you agree.’ She pulled a sheet of paper out of her bag and unfolded it. ‘Right. The first line is, “With their shadows ever before them”. Any idea what that might mean?’

Bronson thought for a few moments. ‘I suppose it means they were walking north, with the sun behind them, because that would cast their shadows forward, so they would always be visible to them.’

‘Very good.’ Angela applauded silently. ‘That was
exactly what I thought as well. The second line is slightly easier, I think. It reads, “from the rising to the setting”.’

‘That has to mean the rising and setting of the sun, so what the writer is saying in those two lines is that they walked north for a full day, which means they probably covered about twenty or thirty miles, no more. But to make any sense of that, you obviously need to know the starting point – the place they set out from.’

‘And that,’ Angela said, ‘is given in the third line. It says, “beyond the meeting point where waters tumble”. I took that to mean either a crossroads near a waterfall or, probably more likely, a place where two streams or rivers merge to become one. The problem is that the whole of this area, including the Nubra Valley, is punctuated by rivers and streams. That could have meant almost any location around here.’

‘And?’ Bronson asked.

‘I figured that the same thought must have occurred to the author of this text, so I looked at the next line to see what else he told us. This reads, “towards the mighty river that flows never”, and that marks the end of the first sentence, so that’s the entire description.’

‘Maybe he meant a dried-up river?’ Bronson suggested. ‘Did you check to see if there are any in the area?’

Angela shook her head. ‘I thought the same thing as you at first, but then I quickly realized it didn’t make sense. If he really was describing a dried-up river, why would he use a word like “mighty” to describe it? Actually there is a
huge river near the Nubra Valley that never flows. Or, to be exact, it flows incredibly slowly.’

Bronson took his eyes off the road for a second or two to look where she was pointing on the map. Beside the end of her finger was a small patch of white.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

‘That’s the Siachen Glacier up on the Saltoro Ridge. It feeds the River Nubra, and from the dimensions given on the topographical chart, it looks as if it’s about a mile wide in some places. I reckon that fits the description quite nicely. It’s certainly “mighty”, and it flows so slowly it’s almost as if it doesn’t flow at all.

‘If we put that lot together, what we end up with is a description of a group of people walking northwards for between twenty and thirty miles, heading towards a glacier and starting at a point where two streams or rivers join.’

‘And you found somewhere that matches that account?’ Angela nodded.

‘That’s where we’re heading right now. I said we’d cross the river at this place called Thirit. Just north of that village, the two rivers that define the Nubra Valley, the Nubra itself and the Shyok’ – Angela pronounced it ‘Shay-ock’ – ‘meet. The road that we’ll be following runs almost directly north from there, so that fits the description of their shadows being in front of them; and about twenty-five miles north of Thirit is a road that branches off to the east, and I believe that fits the second part of the verse.’

She took another look at the piece of paper in her hand. ‘The third verse begins with the line “Then turned to face the glory”. I think that has to be another reference to the sun, the rising sun, meaning that when they set off the next day they headed east, into the sunrise, and that also more or less matches the direction that the present road follows. From what I can see on the topographical map, there aren’t that many other routes the road could take, so it’s a reasonable assumption that the track they followed two thousand-odd years ago runs in pretty much the same direction as the road that’s there now.’

Angela paused briefly. Up to that point, she’d been reasonably happy with her interpretation of the meaning of the three verses they’d found. But she was really guessing about the end of the last verse and that, of course, was the most important bit of all.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘the last three lines, which read, “between the pillars and beyond their shadows / into the silence and the darkness formed of man / to rest forever”, are, shall we say, a little more open to interpretation.’

‘Basically, you don’t know what they mean?’ Bronson suggested.

‘I didn’t say that,’ Angela objected. ‘The last line – “to rest forever” – is simple enough, and that’s just a repeat of the last part of the second verse. And I think the second line is most likely a reference to a cave, either a man-made cave or, probably more likely, a man-made structure within a cave. That is what I believe is meant by the phrase
“a place of stone” in the second verse. I don’t think Isaac and his followers would have had the time or the equipment to excavate a cave. It would have meant weeks or months of hammering away into solid rock. It’s far more likely that they found a suitable natural cave and created some kind of a stone chamber inside it. Or maybe even hid the relic at the back of a cave and simply built a rock wall in front to hide it.’