The Messiah Secret by James Becker Read Free Book Online Page A

acres around the house is all that’s left of the estate now.’
    ‘But how does that relate to the damage here in the house?’
    ‘Bartholomew told his son that he’d fashioned a secure hiding place for the parchment he’d found. According to what Oliver wrote – he supplied the text for the guidebook, of course – his father had promised to tell him where the hiding place was, and also to give him a complete translation of the text, but he never did because he died suddenly of a massive heart attack, here in the house.’
    ‘So I presume Oliver made the holes in the wall and ripped off the panelling?’ Angela asked. ‘Looking for this piece of parchment or papyrus?’
    ‘Exactly. Oliver spent the last few years trying to discover where his old man had hidden it. And as far as I know, he never did find it.’
    By now, they were downstairs again in the hall. Angela looked around her, at the bloodstained flagstones and the missing banister, and shivered. The house felt sad and lonely, there was no doubt about that. But there was something else – an air of lurking evil – that she didn’t like at all.

7
    ‘Where did this come from?’ JJ Donovan asked, pointing at his system display.
    Jesse McLeod barely glanced at the screen. He knew exactly which of the twenty or so search results his boss would be most interested in.
    ‘The on-line version of a local newspaper.’
    ‘Not encrypted or protected, then?’
    McLeod shook his head. ‘Nah. It’s a town news-sheet – you know, births, deaths, marriages, all that sort of stuff, strictly local news. It’s entirely open-source and terminally boring if you don’t know any of the names, and pretty boring even if you do. The whole thing’s a waste of time and in my opinion a total misuse of space on the web.’
    He paused for a second or two, then again voiced a suggestion he’d made to Donovan a couple of times before. ‘Look, JJ, I know what keywords you gave me, butit was a real broad search and I’ve still got no idea what you’re looking for. If you could tell me why this stuff’s so important, I’d be able to get you more targeted results.’
    Donovan shook his head. ‘Right now, I don’t even know if it is important. It’s just an idea I’ve got, a possibility of something that could change everything. But I’ll tell you this. If I am right about what I’m looking for, it could be the single most significant discovery in the history of science. After this, nothing would ever be the same again.’
    McLeod was thoughtful as he rode the elevator back down to the computer suite on the first floor. It sounded like Donovan had flipped, and that was a real worry. The company ran so well because Donovan was a genius when it came to genetic manipulation. If he’d lost the plot, it was definitely time to start thinking about finding employment somewhere else. When he got back to his office, he thought, he’d put out a few feelers, just in case.
    And he also needed to make a call, because JJ Donovan wasn’t the only person he was working for. And his other contact would be a lot more interested in the story he had to tell him.

8
    It was late afternoon before Mayhew finally led Angela into the kitchen at Carfax Hall. Like the rest of the house, it was constructed and equipped on a grand, albeit late nineteenth-century, scale. A huge oblong solid-wood table sat squarely in the centre of the floor, most of its surface covered with china and ceramics of various types.
    A Victorian cooking range, traces of wood or coal ash visible in the fire grate, was built into one wall, and old steel and copper pans and cooking utensils hung from hooks in the walls on either side of it. Incongruously, on the counter-top to the right of the range stood a grubby white microwave oven, and next to that an electric kettle, about half a dozen modern mugs in different colours, a jar of instant coffee, a box of tea bags and an open bag of sugar. Below the counter-top, an