The Last Secret of the Ark: A completely gripping conspiracy thriller

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 invaders 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.

‘But even if you believe that the Kebra Nagast is accurate, there are numerous holes in whichever version of the story you accept, one of which is glaringly obvious. The Ark of the Covenant was the most sacred religious relic the Israelites possessed. It was kept in its own special room in the Temple, the Kodesh Hakodashim, the Holy of Holies, a secure room that could only be entered by one man, the High Priest of the Temple, and only on one day of the year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The reason why the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is still so important to the Jewish faith is because that’s the closest any Jew can get to where the First Temple once stood and where the Ark was kept. It’s just possible that Solomon permitted Menelik to look into the room while he was in Jerusalem, but the Temple priests would never have allowed any more contact than that. Not even Solomon had the right to enter the Holy of Holies.’

Angela broke off as their starters arrived. Ethiopian cuisine featured a lot of vegan and vegetable dishes, usually highly spiced. Angela had selected a local dish called ful medames, fava beans served with hard-boiled eggs and injera, a sourdough flatbread, while Bronson had more cautiously chosen a small dish of pasta and beef. Angela would normally have started with a salad, but whenever she travelled outside Europe, she avoided anything that had been washed rather than cooked. There were no pharaohs in Ethiopia and never had been, but that didn’t mean the pharaoh’s revenge wasn’t waiting in the wings to pay her a visit.

‘Don’t forget,’ she went on, ‘that the Ark had been designed by God for the Israelites and was of overwhelming importance to them. It was also very dangerous. There are stories in the Old Testament of people being killed instantly if they touched it, sometimes if they even looked at it, which is why it was always covered when the Israelites were wandering about the desert, and then held in the Holy of Holies in the Temple. The idea that Menelik’s people could have knocked up a convincing replica and then just strolled into the Temple to swap them over makes no sense at all. They simply couldn’t have done it. So the story’s badly flawed for that reason alone.

‘And then there’s what apparently happened after that. The Ethiopians believe that after the Ark had been removed from Jerusalem, it was transported via Egypt to Ethiopia, to the island of Tana Kirkos in Lake Tana, where it stayed for four hundred years. Today that island is home to about thirty men, all of them priests or monks. Women haven’t been allowed there for centuries in case the mere sight of them inflames unwanted passions in the younger monks. There’s no electricity or telephone, and virtually no contact with the modern world. There’s a small monastery, a church and a few houses.

‘According to some of the monks there who have talked to Westerners trying to trace the history of the Ark, it was kept outside in the open, placed on a specific flat rock that still bears faint marks where its feet would have been positioned. That makes no sense either. The Ark was basically a wooden box, and it would already have been old by this time. The Bible, as usual, is noticeably vague about dates and facts, but from the time of its construction to its placement in the First Temple couldn’t have been less than about a century and was probably a lot longer than that. If it had been left out and exposed to the elements on that island, I doubt it would have lasted four months, never mind four hundred years. And the Ark was never, ever supposed to rest on the ground. Even when it was in the tabernacle, it was always on some kind of a stand.

‘Quite probably something was placed on that island, but I don’t think it was the Ark. Next to this rock is a green-painted metal shed with a corrugated-iron roof, and inside are shaped stones used for the sacrifice of sheep and goats, animal sacrifice being a feature of the early Judaean religion. That does suggest a link between Ethiopia and Judaea. For years there was an oppressed minority people here called the Falashas, black Jews. They practised the earliest and oldest Jewish traditions, including animal sacrifice, for centuries after the mainstream Jewish religion had abandoned them. Most of them left Ethiopia in the 1970s.’

‘Okay,’ Bronson said, finishing his pasta. ‘I can’t pick holes in what you’re telling me because I know almost nothing about it, and you always do your research. So you’ve traced the Ark, or more likely something completely different, to this island in the lake. Where’s it supposed to have gone from there?’

Angela mopped up the last mouthful of ful medames.

‘It was moved to Axum, not far from where we’re sitting now. The official resting place of the Ark of the Covenant is the Cathedral of Our Lady Mary of Zion. It’s visited by thousands of people every year, drawn here by the story. In fact, there are two cathedrals and the Ark isn’t actually in either of them. It’s allegedly kept in a separate building known as the Chapel of the Tablet in the cathedral grounds. It’s occupied by a single man, a guardian monk, chosen by divine prophecy. Once selected, he stays in the chapel for the rest of his life. He’s not allowed to see the Ark, only to guard it and pray to it.’

‘And that’s the building you’re interested in,’ Bronson said.

‘Yes, because if the Ark really is here, despite all the evidence against it, that’s where it’ll be. In fact,’ she added, ‘there are lots of Arks here. The Ethiopians refer to them as tabots in the local language, though the word means the tablets, the Ten Commandments, not the Ark itself. And that extends to the name of the chapel. It’s called the Chapel of the Tablet, not the Chapel of the Ark, which is a bit of an anomaly. Every Ethiopian Orthodox church worldwide has a replica of the Ark and the tablets in its own mak’da or holy of holies, where only the most senior priests can enter. If it hasn’t got one, then it can’t be classed as a church, so they do take this idea very seriously.’

‘Could we get to see one of these replicas?’ Bronson asked.

‘Possibly, but it wouldn’t do us any good, because they aren’t really replicas in the sense that you or I understand the word. They aren’t copies of the original in shape, size or material and don’t even resemble each other. They’re just wooden boxes of various sizes holding stone copies of the Ten Commandments, and their function is purely symbolic. But even these replicas are believed to have huge power.

‘Every year on the nineteenth of January there’s a celebration called Timkat, meaning the Feast of the Epiphany, when every church in the country brings out its own tabot to parade it through the streets. I’ve read one account of the Timkat here in Axum that was filmed by a Westerner outside the church. Normally a priest carries the replica Ark on his head, with a cloth covering it. The person watching saw one side of a red wooden box decorated with three large metal protrusions incorporating a starburst design, and four smaller ones. He estimated it was about two and a half feet long and roughly a foot high, which means it was much smaller than the genuine Ark. Other replicas seen in public look like flat boxes only a few inches high, so there’s no commonality in their design. They’re just symbols, nothing more.’

Bronson nodded as the waiter approached with their main courses, both of them opting for pasta.

‘I like pasta,’ he said defensively as Angela looked at his plate with a slightly raised eyebrow, ‘and so do the locals round here. It’s a legacy of the Italian occupation during the last war. So the short summary is that we’re just wasting our time here. Is there any chance at all that the Ark really is here in Axum?’

‘Not in my opinion. Even if Menelik’s people did manage to steal it, and against the odds it survived the journey here from Israel and its time on the island, it still might not be here. It could have left the country later. The Knights Templar visited Ethiopia in the thirteenth century, and if they had found the real Ark here, I’ve no doubt they would have taken it away with them, by force if necessary. But I still think it’s very unlikely it was here in the first place. And there’s one other piece of evidence that’s particularly significant.

‘A man named Edward Ullendorff served here as a British army officer during the Second World War. When he was interviewed in 1992, he said he had been inside the church here in Axum in 1941 and had been able to examine the alleged Ark for himself. I remember his description of it. He said: They have a wooden box, but it’s empty. Middle- to late-medieval construction, when these were fabricated ad hoc. The real point is that he wasn’t just some soldier giving an uninformed opinion about a box he’d seen. Ullendorff knew a lot about this country – he ended up as a professor of Ethiopian studies at the University of London, so by any standards he was an expert witness. As far as I know, he’s the only non-Ethiopian ever to have seen the alleged Ark here, so his opinion is a clincher as far as I’m concerned.

‘The counter-argument is that because the Ark and the tablets have supposedly been guarded in the same way almost since the days of Menelik, no visitors could possibly have seen the genuine article. If they had seen anything like an Ark, it must have been a fake. But I still think what Ullendorff said is probably correct.’

‘So I was right about something,’ Bronson said. ‘We’re just wasting our time here.’

‘Probably, yes.’

‘But you still want to check out the chapel?’

‘Yes. That’s why we’re here. Let’s try tomorrow morning, when it’s warm but not too hot. The guardian’s job is to guard the Ark, obviously, but he’s also required to pray beside it, surrounded by burning incense and worshipping God. But he doesn’t stay in the chapel all the time. He wanders about within the metal fence surrounding the building, and sometimes talks to people, especially priests or monks, as long as they speak Oromo or Amharic. We’d get nowhere with him using English, but we don’t want to talk to him. We just want him outside the chapel and ideally distracted by a visitor. If we wait until the afternoon, it’ll be too hot and he’ll probably stay in the chapel because it’ll be cooler inside. Is the device ready?’

‘I’ve checked it, and I’ve made the modifications I told you about to increase its endurance. That makes it a bit unstable but nothing I can’t handle, so as far as I can see we’re ready to go.’

‘Good. Let’s watch the sunset from our balcony. And tomorrow afternoon I thought we might just do the tourist bit and take a taxi ride down to Lalibela.’

‘What’s there?’ Bronson asked.

‘You’ll see tomorrow, but I guarantee you’ll be impressed, even amazed. It’s one of the must-see places in the world. Think Petra in Jordan, only downwards not sideways.’

And with that somewhat enigmatic statement, Angela stood up and led the way out of the dining room.

Chapter 2

They were up, breakfasted and walking along the cobbled pavement of the street outside the hotel by 9 a.m. Angela was carrying a large bag made of colourful woven material that she’d bought locally, and Bronson was carrying nothing at all.

When they reached the cathedral, they found several people around the building and in the grounds. Most were locals, judging by their dress and skin colour, but there were also clumps of tourists, some in organised tour groups and others couples or families having a look around.

They walked around the old Cathedral of Our Lady Mary of Zion, which looked more like a fortress than a place of worship, with solid stone walls pierced by very few openings and crenellated around the top. Dating originally from the fourth century ad, it had been destroyed and rebuilt over the years, and last rebuilt and enlarged in the seventeenth century. It was unusual in that only men were permitted to enter it, probably because in the tenth century the building was destroyed by the forces of Queen Gudit. The only woman permitted inside was Mary, the saint to whom the building was dedicated, and she was a permanent resident.

Almost next to it was the new Cathedral of Our Lady Mary of Zion, a much more modern building begun in the 1950s by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. This one was open to both sexes. It was a circular domed structure with an impressive and restful interior.

Nestling between the two was the Chapel of the Tablet, a small, brownish single-storey stone building marked by blue-painted decoration within the windows, blue fence posts, a crucifix above the door and another adorning the dome in the centre of the roof.

Angela looked around as they approached. There were a couple of locals standing right beside the steel perimeter fence, perhaps hoping to exchange a few words with the guardian monk. He was obviously inside, the door of the chapel shut.

They were in no hurry and picked a spot to sit some distance from the boundary fence, because women were not permitted to get close to the chapel. From that location they had a good view of the door of the building, and also the benefit of a tree to provide a measure of shade.

‘This is almost ideal,’ Angela said, lowering herself to the ground and opening her voluminous bag to take out a thick novel. She passed the bag over to Bronson and adjusted her wide straw hat to shade her face from the sun. She was wearing a pair of large sunglasses that rendered her eyes invisible to anyone looking at her, which was convenient because she wasn’t reading the book she was holding but watching the door of the chapel.

Bronson was also wearing sunglasses and a hat, as was every other tourist, male or female, in the vicinity, but he didn’t have a book to read. Or even to pretend to read. Instead, he reached into the bag Angela had handed him, took out a small cardboard box with a brightly coloured lid and opened it up.

Inside were a few sheets of paper covered in printing, diagrams and pictures, and underneath those were two objects. The first was what looked like a small computer game controller, including a clamp that was obviously designed to hold a smartphone. He took his mobile out of his pocket and fitted it in place. The previous evening at the hotel he’d synched the components together and tested everything.

He removed the other object from the box, a tiny plastic mechanism that he had purchased – on Angela’s detailed instructions – for this single purpose. It was an Eachine E10W mini quadcopter, a so-called nano-drone, fitted with a tiny high-definition two-megapixel camera capable of taking both video and still images. Two versions of this nano-drone existed, the other model being the E10C, which was slightly cheaper but lacked the FPV – first-person view – facility that was essential for what Bronson intended to do. This allowed him to see the view through the drone’s camera on his linked mobile phone screen. He would be able to tell exactly where the device was pointing, just as if he were actually on board the drone.

Fitted with four rotors, the E10W was a mere six centimetres – just over two and a quarter