The Last Secret of the Ark by James Becker

Author:James Becker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canelo Digital Publishing Ltd
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

En route Paris to Languedoc

While Josef Gellerman, Lemuel Dayan and Aaron Chason constituted part of the front-line operational side of the Zeru group, at their base in Jerusalem the second-line members tended to be of a more academic bent, and they could also call on the services of outside experts in various disciplines, including linguists and historians.

Although Gellerman had initially been confident he would be able to work out what the decoded text said, he’d quickly got bogged down in it and decided to get one of Zeru’s experts involved instead. He had emailed a copy of it to Jerusalem. The people there, he knew, would turn it into a readable document that he hoped would lead them to their goal.

In the meantime, he doubted very much if the quest for the Ark of the Covenant would end up in Paris or anywhere nearby. If the Ark still existed, the consensus opinion at Zeru was that it had been hidden somewhere in the southern part of the country, most probably in the Languedoc, because they had detected hints that that was where it had last been seen. So as soon as they’d sent the email, the three men had climbed into their Renault hire car, Gellerman at the wheel, and driven onto the Boulevard Périphérique, the Paris ring road. They headed anticlockwise towards the intersection at Gentilly, where they would pick up the A6a Autoroute du Soleil to drive south out of the city.

While Gellerman and Dayan had been working on the decryption and translation of the ciphertext, Aaron Chason had not been idle. He’d made use of his contacts in the criminal underworld and the previous day had used the Paris Métro to take a trip up to Montmartre in the north of the city for a meeting in a cafe near the Cimetière de Montmartre.

There he had sat at a table with two men he had never met before. When all three of them had been satisfied that nobody could see what they were doing, and they had established their bona fides, Chason had lifted the lid of a briefcase the two men had brought with them and briefly inspected the contents. Once he was satisfied that the goods were as described, he had closed the briefcase, lifted it off the table and placed it by the side of his chair. In exchange, he’d passed over a folded copy of the French daily newspaper Le Parisien and directed the attention of the men to an article near the middle. The article had been obscured by a white envelope that bulged slightly. After another quick glance around to make sure that they were still unobserved, one of the men had picked up the envelope, lifted the flap and visually checked the contents. Then he’d slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

Neither he nor Chason would have insulted each other by counting the money or removing any of the objects from the briefcase to inspect them closely.

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