The Last Secret of the Ark Read online

  The Last Secret of the Ark

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue Jerusalem 587 BC

  Chapter 1 Axum, Tigray, Ethiopia Eight months ago

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 Rue des Remparts, Limoux, Languedoc, southern France Ten days ago

  Chapter 5 Paris, France

  Chapter 6 Languedoc, France Present day

  Chapter 7 Monteverde district, Rome, Italy

  Chapter 8 Languedoc, France

  Chapter 9 Monteverde district, Rome, Italy

  Chapter 10 Jerusalem, Israel

  Chapter 11 Languedoc, France

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 14 Paris, France

  Chapter 15 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 16 Rome, Italy

  Chapter 17 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 18 Paris, France

  Chapter 19 Legino, Savona, Italy

  Chapter 20 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 21 Paris, France

  Chapter 22 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 23 South of Carcassonne, France

  Chapter 24 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26 Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France

  Chapter 27 Auch, Gascony, France

  Chapter 28 Paris, France

  Chapter 29 Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées, France

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31 En route Paris to Languedoc

  Chapter 32 Hautes-Pyrénées, France

  Chapter 33 Aude, France

  Chapter 34 Rennes-le-Château, Aude, France

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37 Campagne-sur-Aude, Aude, France

  Chapter 38 Rennes-le-Château, Aude, France

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40 Campagne-sur-Aude, Aude, France

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43 Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France

  Chapter 44 Paris, France

  Chapter 45 Toulouse, Haute-Garonne, France

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47 Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

  Chapter 48 Jerusalem, Israel, and Toulouse, France

  Chapter 49 Rhode Island, United States of America

  Chapter 50 Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America

  Chapter 51 Taunton, Massachusetts, United States of America

  Chapter 52 Massachusetts, United States of America

  Chapter 53 Gatwick Airport, London, England

  Chapter 54 Massachusetts, United States of America

  Chapter 55 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Chapter 56 Nova Scotia, Canada

  Chapter 57 New Ross, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Chapter 58 Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Chapter 59 Nova Scotia, Canada

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62 New Ross, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Author’s Note Ethiopia and the Ark of the Covenant

  Eachine E10W mini quadcopter

  Montségur and the Cathars

  Aniort, Blanchefort, Hautpoul and Voisin families

  The treasure of the Cathars

  Cathedral of Sainte-Marie, Auch

  The Vigenère cipher

  Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna (AISE)

  Chartres Cathedral

  Rennes-le-Château and Bérenger Saunière

  The Money Pit

  The Templars in Massachusetts

  The Mossad

  Zerubbabel and Zeru

  About the Author

  Also by James Becker

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Prologue

  Jerusalem

  587 BC

  Their instructions were clear and unambiguous, and from the moment the Babylonian soldiers surged through the splintered remains of the doors of the Temple, they ignored them. The red mist had descended on them and the shouted orders from the officers behind them didn’t even register. The pent-up frustration engendered by the eighteen-month siege had culminated in a slaughter that had seen some streets in Jerusalem running almost ankle-deep in blood. Despite their orders, the priests would not be spared.

  They had barricaded the building in a futile last-ditch effort to keep out the invaders, but once the city walls had been breached, it was only a matter of time – just a few hours – before the attackers fought their way to the top of the Temple Mount, the final stronghold and highest point of Jerusalem.

  As the tall gilded doors crashed open, the baying mob of Babylonian troops, their sword blades slick and crimson with the blood of countless fallen Jews, poured inside. The priests were unarmed, and there was nowhere for them to run. Their end was swift and brutal. The first soldiers through the doors swung their swords in devastating arcs, severing limbs and opening gaping wounds. The Temple rang with the exultant yells of the Babylonians and the screams of the wounded and dying.

  As well as about a dozen priests, some twenty Jewish civilians, mainly women and children, had taken refuge in the building, huddled in a group at the far end. As the head of the last remaining priest tumbled to the ground and his body collapsed, the soldiers turned their attention to the terrified survivors. The Babylonians had appetites and needs that had been heightened by the battle they had fought, and the bodies of the women – and those of the children as well – had uses, and possibly even cash values later. Those they segregated, roughly tying their wrists and ankles. There were also three male civilians, all old men. The soldiers forced them to their knees before brutally decapitating them.

  Jerusalem had fallen to the Babylonians, and not for the first time.

  A decade earlier, Nebuchadnezzar II had captured the city and installed Zedekiah from the House of David as the vassal king, a puppet ruler. But Zedekiah had rebelled, prompting the inevitable and brutal Babylonian response. As the siege had approached its end, he had fled the doomed city with a group of his followers, but his escape would be only a temporary reprieve. He would be captured on the plains of Jericho to the east of the city and transported to Babylon. There he would be forced to watch his sons being executed before he himself was blinded. He would be held prisoner, sightless and in chains, for the rest of his days as punishment for his perceived treachery.

  The end of the siege was not the end for Jerusalem. Immediately afterwards, Nebuzaradan, the captain of Nebuchadnezzar’s bodyguard, was ordered to flatten the city. His men plundered the place, razing the buildings to the ground and destroying what was left of the Temple of Solomon. Those Jewish nobles who had survived were taken in shackles to Babylon, and virtually the entire surviving population was dispersed, with only what amounted to a skeleton staff of farm workers, principally husbandmen and vine dressers, being allowed to remain to manage and maintain the land and crops.

  Yet although the horde of Babylonians seized whatever they could carry as the spoils of war, the most precious object held within the walls of the Temple of Solomon eluded them. It would have been kept inside the Kodesh Hakodashim, the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the holy spirit or shekhinah, but when the Babylonians smashed their way inside the sacred building, the relic was not there. And there was nobody left alive who could tell them where it was.

  The crucial secret knowledge of the object’s location was lost to the world through the thrusts and swings of Babylonian swords as the soldiers slaughtered the priests of the Temple. Searches were fruitless, because the inv
aders had no idea where the object was, or even whether it had been in the city when it fell. There were hiding places without number inside and beyond Jerusalem’s city walls.

  The relic remained lost, though remembered and revered and prayed for by the Jewish nation.

  As it still is today.

  Chapter 1

  Axum, Tigray, Ethiopia

  Eight months ago

  ‘I’m not entirely sure this is a good idea,’ Chris Bronson said, as he and his former wife Angela Lewis walked side by side along a dusty street in Axum in the northern part of Ethiopia. It was early evening, the sun was sinking towards the western horizon in what promised to be another spectacular display of primary colours, and they were heading for their hotel and an early dinner. ‘I know the locals we’ve met have been perfectly friendly, but that might change if they knew you were here to investigate and possibly disprove one of the most important traditions they have.’

  ‘That’s a fair point,’ Angela conceded, ‘so how about we don’t tell them? We won’t be able to get inside the building, so all we can do is examine the claim as best we can and reach a conclusion. And that will be our conclusion, not to be published or shared with anyone, least of all the Christians of Ethiopia.’

  ‘You mean you won’t use the device?’

  She looked at him as if he were mad.

  ‘Of course I’ll use it, as long as we get the opportunity. Why else do you think I asked you to buy the bloody thing?’

  ‘I’m still a little hazy on why you think this really might be the last resting place of the Ark of the Covenant. Or why you’re so interested in finding it.’

  ‘Actually,’ Angela replied, ‘I don’t think that what the Ethiopians call the Tabota Seyen – the Ark of Zion – is here. They’ve got something, but I don’t think it’s that. And I would have thought that the reason for my interest was quite obvious. The Ark is far and away the most important and significant of all the ancient relics that have vanished from the pages of history. It’s the only one allegedly created on the specific instructions of God, and if the Bible is to be believed, it was a weapon of devastating power. Searching for the Ark has been one of my personal quests for a long time, and a lot of people have taken the Ethiopian claim seriously. I think they’re wrong, but I needed to investigate it. And for a few years I’ve had a feeling that things were changing slightly, and that there was at least a chance that the relic would be revealed. Back in June 2009, the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church here said he was going to show the Ark to the world, though he changed his mind the next day. And a couple of years later, the roof of the chapel started leaking and there was speculation that the relic would have to be removed from the building and would then be visible. But that came to nothing as well. So it’s a kind of Mohammed and the mountain situation. If they won’t bring out the Ark and prove that they have it, then I want to somehow see the relic so that I can be sure that they haven’t.’

  ‘So why does anybody think it is here?’

  Reaching their hotel, they walked out of the noise and dust and clamour of the street into the relative cool of the lobby and through into the restaurant. Most of the people they’d talked to in Ethiopia spoke at least some English, the language being taught in schools there alongside Amharic, the country’s official language, and the waiter was no exception. Bronson ordered a couple of Cokes, and they sat down at a corner table in the almost empty dining room.

  ‘That’s a fair question,’ Angela replied. ‘The trick is separating the legends from the facts, and there are precious few of those. We have to go back to the time of King Solomon, the man with the wisdom—’

  ‘And the mines and the gold,’ Bronson interrupted.

  ‘That’s one of the first anomalies. Some historians don’t believe Solomon was a real character, but let’s assume he did exist and did rule Israel. You mentioned King Solomon’s mines, so let me ask you this. Where were these mines, and what did he dig out of the ground?’

  ‘I assume they were gold mines, and because he ruled Israel, they were probably somewhere near Jerusalem.’

  ‘Well, at least you’re consistent,’ Angela said, ‘even if you’re consistently wrong. Solomon did have mines, but for copper, not gold, and the latest research puts them in the Timna Valley at the southern tip of Israel, roughly two hundred miles from Jerusalem. Remnants of organic material found in the remains of the smelting camps were radiocarbon-dated. The result was a surprise. It had been assumed that the copper industry in that area was part of the New Kingdom dynasties of Egypt, dating from the thirteenth century bc, but the remains were tenth century bc, the time of King Solomon.’

  ‘If he existed,’ Bronson said.

  ‘Quite.’

  The waiter crossed over to their table, put down a couple of menus and their drinks and walked away. Bronson took a swig of his Coke and looked across the table at Angela, his ex-wife and still his best friend.

  ‘Let me ask you a question,’ he said. ‘I’m consistently wrong, you just said. You must have heard the conundrum about a tree falling in the forest. If there’s nobody there to hear it, does it still make a noise? Well, here’s a variant on that. If a man goes into a forest and makes a definitive statement and there’s no woman close enough to hear what he says, is he still wrong?’

  Angela grinned at him. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘Actually, you weren’t wrong about Solomon’s wealth. According to several accounts, he had massive amounts of gold, but there were no gold mines anywhere in his realm, so the assumption is that his wealth probably came from trading outside Israel. There’s evidence that he controlled trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean, and that Israel supplied grain to the Phoenicians in return for gold from Orphir. That place hasn’t been definitively identified, but it was probably part of the Tigray region at the northern tip of Ethiopia, more or less where we are now.

  ‘And then we meet another player. In Solomon’s time, this area was allegedly controlled by the Queen of Sheba, Queen Makeda. Again, many modern scholars claim that she was entirely fictional. Those that do accept her historical reality believe her territory was actually located east of the Red Sea, in what is now Yemen, and that Sheba was the southern Arabian territory of Saba, near Yemen’s capital city, Sana’a.

  ‘Wherever she came from, the Old Testament – the second Book of Chronicles – claims she visited Jerusalem to consult Solomon and as a gift took him five tons of gold from her mines, a generous present. She was supposed to be beautiful, and they had a relationship that produced a son, Menelik. His Arabic name was Ibn Al-Hakim, which means “son of the wise”, appropriate if Solomon was his father. His birth united the two kingdoms and he inaugurated the Solomonic dynasty in Ethiopia. Tigray, by the way, is still a good source of gold. You can find it just by washing sediment taken from the banks of the river.

  ‘Another part of the story is that Solomon built the First Temple on the Temple Mount. It was decorated with copper and gold and was designed to house the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. That was the temple destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 bc, and at that point the Ark vanished from the historical record. There are no claims that it was seized by the Babylonians, and the Bible never mentions it again.’

  They’d both been glancing at the dinner menus while Angela had been talking, and when the waiter appeared, they ordered their meals.

  ‘There’s a wrinkle in this,’ Angela said as he walked away. ‘According to Ethiopian legends and a holy book called the Kebra Nagast, which means “the glory of kings”, when Menelik came of age, he visited Solomon. They apparently got on well, and Solomon asked his son to stay and become his heir and rule Israel, but Menelik refused. He wanted to become his mother’s heir and returned to Ethiopia.

  ‘According to one legend, when he got back, he discovered the Ark among his possessions. It had been accidentally taken from Jerusalem by members of his entourage. The alternative explanation in the Kebra Nagast is that it was a deliberate theft. Menelik
had allegedly had a replica Ark built, which he then swapped for the original. And there’s a third alternative alternative story in which he was given a replica of the Ark by Solomon but found out during his return journey that they’d left the replica in Jerusalem and had possession of the original. That’s three different explanations for the same event, none of which exactly cover Menelik or anyone else in glory. Oh yes, and yet another version that states he was given the Ark by Solomon himself.’

  ‘So that’s why the Ethiopians believe the Ark is somewhere here,’ Bronson said.

  ‘Yes, but relying on the Kebra Nagast as a source is problematic. The book dates from the thirteenth century, when there were two dynasties competing for power in Ethiopia. One was the Zagwe dynasty, who stated that their lineage went back to Moses, while the Axumites claimed that their descent from Solomon was confirmed by the presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Ethiopia and by the Kebra Nagast. This book was supposed to have been a fourth-century Coptic manuscript that was translated into Arabic by Ethiopian clerics in about 1225. Now, bearing in mind how strongly the text supported the Axumite claim, it’s possible these clerics actually wrote it as a piece of political propaganda and that there was no original Coptic text.