The First Apostle (11 page)

Bronson turned back to the foreman. “We’re certain no other builders have been in here,” he said, “but you obviously know what stage you’d reached in the renovations. Tell me, when you removed the plaster, did you find anything unusual about the wall, apart from the crack in the lintel?”

The foreman shook his head. “Nothing,” he said, “apart from the inscribed stone, but that was just a curiosity.”

Bronson looked at Mark with a kind of triumph. “I think we’ve just traced what Jackie found,” he said, explaining what the builder had told him. And without waiting for Mark to respond, he switched back to Italian.

“Strip it,” he ordered, pointing at the wall. “Strip the new plaster off that wall right now.”

The builder looked puzzled, but issued instructions. Two of his men seized club hammers and broad-bladed masonry chisels, dragged a couple of stepladders over to the fireplace and set to work.

Thirty minutes later, the builders left in their old van, again promising to return early on Monday morning. Bronson and Mark walked back into the living room and stared at the Latin inscription on the wall. Bronson took several pictures of it with his digital camera.

“The first four letters are the same as those I found impressed on that piece of paper in the study,” Bronson said. “And it
is
a Latin inscription. I don’t know what it means, but that dictionary Jackie bought should help me decipher it.”

“You think she was searching for a translation of that—of those three words—on the Internet, and that was enough to get her killed? That’s just bloody ridiculous.”

“I don’t know it got her killed, Mark, or not deliberately, anyway. But this is the only scenario that makes sense. The builders exposed the inscription on Monday. Jackie wrote down the words—that’s confirmed by the paper in the study—and bought a Latin dictionary, probably on Tuesday, and if she did do a search on the Internet, she most likely did it that day. Whatever happened, somebody broke into the house—my guess is late on Tuesday night—and on Wednesday morning Jackie was found dead in the hall.

“Now, I know it probably seems stupid that anyone would care enough about a three-word Latin inscription carved into a stone, maybe two thousand years ago, to risk a burglary, far less a charge of manslaughter or murder, but the fact remains that somebody did. Those three words are vitally important to someone, somewhere, and I’m going to find out who and why.

“But I’m not,” he added, “going to use the Internet to do it.”

Alberti and Rogan reached the town early that evening, following telephoned instructions—this time from Gregori Mandino—to enter the property for the
third
—and what they both hoped would be the
last
—time. They cruised slowly past the house as soon as they arrived in Monti Sabini and saw lights shining from windows on both floors. That complicated things, because they had hoped to be able to get inside and complete their search for the missing section of the stone without detection. But, ultimately, it wouldn’t matter, because this time Mandino’s instructions gave them far more latitude than before.

“Looks like the husband’s home,” Alberti said, as Rogan accelerated away down the road. “So do we wait, or what?”

“We wait for a couple of hours,” his partner confirmed. “Maybe he’ll be asleep by then.”

Just more than two and a half hours later, Rogan drove their car up the lane that ran beside and behind the house, and continued climbing the hill until they were out of sight of the building. Then he turned the car around, pointed it down the slope and extinguished the headlights. He waited a couple of minutes for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, then allowed the vehicle to roll gently down the gradient, using only the parking lights to see his way, until they reached a section of the grass verge that offered a good view of the back and side of their target. There he eased the car to the side of the road and switched off the lights and engine. As a precaution, Rogan turned off the interior light, so that it wouldn’t come on when they opened the doors.

A light was still burning in one of the downstairs rooms of the old house, so they settled down to wait.

Chris Bronson closed the dictionary with a snap and sat back in the kitchen chair, rubbing his tired eyes.

“I think that’s the best translation,” he said. “ ‘Here are lying the liars,’ or the short version: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”

“Wonderful.” Mark sounded anything but impressed. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve not the slightest idea,” Bronson confessed, “but it must be important to somebody. Look, we’re not getting anywhere with this, so let’s call it a night. You go on up. I’ll check the doors and windows.”

Mark stood up and stretched. “Good idea,” he murmured. “Your subconscious might have a flash of inspiration while you sleep. Good night—I’ll see you in the morning.”

As Mark left the kitchen, Bronson took one of the upright chairs and wedged it under the handle of the back door, then walked out of the room and switched off the light.

He checked that the front door was locked and bolted, and that all the ground-floor windows were closed and the outside shutters secured, then went up to his bedroom.

In the car parked on the hill road behind the house, Alberti nudged Rogan awake and pointed down the slope.

“The downstairs light just went out,” he announced.

As the two men watched, slivers of brightness appeared behind the closed shutters of one of the bedrooms, but after about ten minutes this light, too, was extinguished. A dull glow was still visible behind two other shutters, but the men guessed this was probably just the landing light.

“We’ll give it another hour,” Rogan said, closing his eyes and relaxing again in the car seat.

In the guest bedroom, Chris Bronson booted up his Sony Vaio laptop. He checked his e-mails, then turned his attention to the Internet. As he’d told Mark, he certainly wasn’t prepared to input the Latin phrase into a search engine or online dictionary, but there were other ways of trying to find out its significance.

First he ran a small program that generated a false IP address—the Internet protocol numbers that identified his geographical location. Then he made it look as if he was accessing the Web from a server based in South Korea, which, he thought with a smile, should be far enough away from Italy to throw anyone off the scent. Even so, he still wasn’t going to do a direct search. Instead, he began looking at sites that offered translations of Latin phrases in common use at the height of the Roman Empire.

After about forty minutes, Bronson had discovered two things. First, a surprising number of expressions he was already familiar with in both English and Italian had their roots in the dead language. And, second, the words
Hic Vanidici Latitant
were not recorded anywhere as being part of an aphorism or expression in common usage two thousand odd years ago. That wasn’t exactly a surprise—if the phrase had been well known, it would presumably have had no special significance for the people who had broken into the house—but at least it eliminated one possibility.

But he really wasn’t getting anywhere and eventually decided to give up. He shut down the laptop, then opened the shutters and one of the windows to provide fresh air, switched off the main light and got into bed.

Rogan looked along the back of the house. He nodded to Alberti, who produced a jimmy from one of the pockets of his jacket. He inserted the point of the tool between the door and the frame, changed his grip on it, and levered, pushing toward the door. It gave slightly, but then stuck: something seemed to be jamming it.

Rogan took out his flashlight and shone it through the window, the beam dancing over the interior of the kitchen as he tried to see the cause of the problem. He directed the flashlight downward, and muttered a curse. A chair had been wedged below the door handle. Rogan shook his head at Alberti, who removed the jimmy and stepped back.

The two men walked cautiously along the back wall of the house to the nearest window. Like all of the windows on the ground floor of the property, it was protected by full-height wooden shutters, but Rogan didn’t think that would be a problem: it was just going to be a noisier solution. He used his flashlight to check the lock, and nodded in satisfaction. The shutters were held closed by a central catch that not only locked the two halves together, but also secured them to the wall using bolts at the top and bottom. It was a simple design with a single flaw. If the catch was undone, both bolts would immediately be released and the shutters would swing open.

Rogan took the jimmy from Alberti and slid its point between the two shutters. Then he moved it up until it touched the underside of the catch, and rapped the other end sharply. With a scraping sound, the catch lifted and both shutters swung outward. Rogan opened them fully and clipped them back using the hooks fitted to the wall.

In his bedroom almost directly above, Bronson was still wide awake, lying silently in the dark and puzzling over the meaning of the three Latin words.

He heard noises—a metallic click followed by a creaking sound and other clicks—and climbed out of bed to investigate. He walked across to the window and looked down cautiously.

At the back of the house he saw two dark figures, bulky in the shadows cast by the moon, the beam of a small flashlight playing over one of the downstairs windows. The shutters that he’d locked an hour or so earlier were now wide open.

Bronson slowly moved away from the window and walked back across the room to where he’d left his clothes. He pulled on a black polo-neck sweater and dark-colored trousers, and slid his feet into his trainers. Then he eased open the bedroom door and made his way across the landing and down the stairs.

There were no guns in the house, as far as he knew, but there were several stout walking sticks in an umbrella stand beside the front door. He picked out the biggest one and hefted it in his hand. That, he thought, would do nicely. Then he walked over to the living-room door, which was fortunately ajar, and pushed it open just far enough to allow him to slide into the room.

The open shutters were obvious—every other window was black—and Bronson moved across the room to his left, keeping low. Their unwelcome visitors were not visible through the window but that simply meant that they hadn’t yet broken one of the panes of glass to get in.

The window was wood-framed with twelve small single-glazed panes of glass, and Rogan had come prepared. He hadn’t anticipated that they wouldn’t be able to use the back door again, but whenever he was tasked with a burglary he always had a backup plan. And for an old house like this, with very basic security, breaking a window and getting inside that way was the most obvious option.

He took a roll of adhesive tape from his pocket and tore off several strips, handing each to Alberti, who stuck them on the glass in a star pattern, leaving a protruding “handle” in the middle, formed from the central sections of the tape. Then Alberti held the tape in his left hand, reversed the jimmy and rapped the rounded end sharply against the taped window. The glass broke instantly, but stuck to the tape, and he easily pulled out the broken pane. He handed the glass to Rogan, who placed it carefully on the ground, then reached inside and lifted the catch to open the window.

Although he’d been as quiet as he could, there was obviously a possibility that the noise had been heard inside the house. So, before he climbed in, Alberti took the pistol from his shoulder holster, checked the magazine and chambered a round by pulling back the slide. He set the safety catch, then grasped the left side of the window frame, rested his right foot on a protruding stone in the wall and pulled himself up and into the open window to lower himself into the room.

At that moment, Bronson acted. He’d seen and heard the glass break, and guessed what the intruders’ next move would be, and he also knew that if the two men managed to get inside the house, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

So as Alberti leaned forward, his right arm extended, ready to jump down inside the room, Bronson stepped away from the wall and smashed the walking stick down with all his force, instantly breaking the Italian’s right arm a few inches below the shoulder. The intruder screamed with pain and shock, dropped the automatic and in a reflex action threw himself backward, landing heavily on the ground outside.

For the barest of instants Rogan had no clue what had happened. He’d stepped back to give Alberti room to hoist himself up through the window, and just a split second later his companion had tumbled backward, yelling in agony. Then, in the moonlight, he saw Alberti’s arm and realized it had been broken. That could mean only one thing. He stepped forward to the window and lifted his own pistol.

An indistinct shape moved inside the darkness of the house. Rogan immediately swung the weapon toward his target, took rapid aim and pulled the trigger. The bullet shattered one of the unbroken panes of glass and slammed into a wall somewhere inside the room.

The report of the pistol was deafening at such close range, the sound of breaking glass following moments later. Bronson’s military training took over and he dropped flat on the floor. But if the intruder hoisted himself up and looked down into the room, Bronson knew he’d be clearly visible. He had to get out of sight, and quickly.

The base of the ground-floor window was higher than usual and the second man would have to be standing almost on tiptoe—not the ideal shooting stance by a long way. If he moved quickly, he might be able to make it to safety.

Bronson jumped to his feet and ran across the room, ducking and weaving. Two more gunshots rang out, their reports a thunderous assault on the silence of the night. He heard the bullets smashing into the solid stone walls of the room, but neither hit him.

Before the builders had arrived, the living room had contained a large wood-framed three-piece suite, a couple of coffee tables and about half a dozen smaller chairs, all of which were now stacked in a heap more or less in the middle of the floor.