The Lost Testament

88

‘That doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence,’ Angela muttered. ‘So what now?’

Bronson was silent for a minute, trying to decide on their next move. He could think of only one thing they could do at that precise moment.

‘Right. Quite apart from anything else, I’m tired and I’m sure you must be as well. We’ll both function a lot better if we had a decent night’s sleep, and that will also give us time to work out the best route we can take up through France.’

‘So you are quite sure that the hotel will be safe?’

‘We paid cash, and we weren’t followed to the building, so I don’t see how anybody can know we’re there. But we’ll park the car a few streets away in a multistorey and walk the last part. And if I see anything I don’t like,’ Bronson added, patting his jacket pockets, ‘I’m now more or less a walking arsenal, so I should be able to handle any members of the opposition who have by some miracle found out where we are.’

Thirty minutes later, they were in their room back at the hotel, Angela taking a shower while Bronson sipped a gin and tonic he’d prepared from the somewhat limited supplies in the minibar, and studied a map of France that also included northern Spain. He still wasn’t entirely sure how comprehensive the surveillance of Madrid would be, but he thought it was certainly possible that P2 might be able to obtain access to the traffic cameras that covered much of the city. But just being able to see the surveillance footage would still leave them with an enormous amount of data to sift through.

More specifically, they would be searching for the car he’d hired at the airport. And there was something he could do about that. Before they set off the next morning, he had every intention of swapping their number plates with those from some other car. That would make the job of identifying the vehicle, far less following it, infinitely more difficult.

A few moments later, Angela emerged from the bathroom in a faint cloud of steam, a towel tied around her head like a turban and another wrapped around her slim body, and Bronson handed her the second gin and tonic he had prepared.

‘There’s no lemon and no ice, I’m afraid.’

Angela took the plastic beaker from him.

‘Right now,’ she said, ‘I don’t care about ice or lemon. What I need is alcohol, the stronger the better.’

As they prepared themselves for sleep, or at least rest, Angela received an email.

‘What is it?’ Bronson asked.

‘It’s an email from a laboratory in England,’ she replied, ‘attaching some kind of test results.’

She was silent for a few moments as she scanned the message, then nodded.

‘I see what it is now. Ali Mohammed must have asked for carbon-14 testing to be done on a small piece of the parchment, without telling anyone. This is the test results, and he must have asked for them to be expedited, because that’s a really quick turnaround.’

‘But why have they sent them to you?’

‘They haven’t,’ Angela replied, ‘or not directly, anyway. I’m just copied in, but it’s been sent to Ali himself. Because I mentioned to him that the British Museum might be interested in buying the relic, I suppose he asked the laboratory to copy the results directly to me.’

Bronson stood up and walked across to peer over Angela’s shoulder at the computer screen.

‘So how old is it?’ he asked.

‘Just a minute. I need to open up the attachment.’

Bronson found himself looking at some kind of a graph, and below it a table containing a large number of figures. It meant nothing to him, but Angela appeared unfazed by it, running a finger down the table as she checked the data displayed in it.

‘I suppose that’s good news,’ she said, ‘or perhaps bad news, depending upon your point of view. According to the radiocarbon analysis, the relic dates from AD 25, and that figure is accurate to plus or minus roughly seventy-five years — the dating can’t be much more accurate than that — and so the parchment had to have been prepared between 50 BC and AD 100, which is pretty much the timescale I’ve been assuming, because of the reference to Yusef, to Joseph. If it is authentic, then that would have to be approximately the period it dates from, round about the beginning of the first millennium.’

Despite the fact that he was bone-weary and had the reassuring warmth of Angela’s body lying right next to him, sleep eluded Bronson for several hours. Every time he closed his eyes, one part of his brain persistently replayed the events in the warehouse. He heard the shots, saw the blood and watched the bodies fall to the floor, time after time. Killing another human being was never an easy thing to live with, and the feeling of guilt and revulsion was almost overwhelming, despite his certainty that what he’d done was the only possible course of action he could have taken.

He finally fell into a shallow sleep at around four in the morning, but still tossed and turned restlessly for what was left of the hours of darkness.