The First Apostle (16 page)

“Can’t you stop them? Get the
Carabinieri
to intercept them?”

Mandino shook his head. “I have some influence with them, but this whole matter is supposed to be handled as discreetly as possible. We’ll have to find these two using our own resources.”

Mandino was right—Bronson
had
taken the autostrada and turned north, heading for the Italian border.

“Do you think they’ll be following us?” Mark asked, as the Alfa rounded a gentle curve at an indicated speed of one hundred and forty kilometers per hour.

“Not unless they’ve got a helicopter or something,” Bronson said, keeping his eyes on the road. “We lost the Fiat and Lancia well before we picked up the autostrada.”

“Which route are we taking, so I can program the navigation system?”

“Just in case those guys are planning on a roadblock or something, we’ll take the short route out of Italy. The closest frontier is with Switzerland, but as the gnomes aren’t yet a part of the E.U. we’ll probably be asked for paperwork. So we’ll turn north just outside Modena and head up through Verona and Trento to Austria, then on through Innsbruck into Germany and Belgium.

“This is going to be a bloody quick trip. I plan to stop for petrol, food, coffee and the loo, and nothing else. When we’re too tired to drive on, we’ll find a hotel somewhere. But that won’t be until at the very least we’ve crossed two borders and are well inside Germany.”

They’d met absolutely no problems on their very rapid drive across Europe. Bronson had been as good as his word, and he’d driven as fast as the traffic would allow, staying on the toll roads as much as possible, up through Italy, and crossed western Austria before entering Germany just north of Innsbruck.

They’d driven on to Munich, then turned west to Stuttgart and on to Frankfurt, but by then Bronson was really feeling the strain. He’d pulled off the autobahn at Montabaur and headed north. At Langenhahn they’d found a small hotel and fallen into bed.

The next morning, Bronson pushed the Alfa hard on the back roads until he picked up the autobahn just southeast of Cologne. After that it was toll roads all the way to the south of Aachen, where they entered Belgium, and on to the French border near Lille. And then it was only a short hop to the Channel Tunnel terminal just outside Calais, where Mark handed over a small fortune for the privilege of sitting in his own car for the brief journey under
La Manche.

“I’ll tell you this, Chris,” he said, as Bronson drove the Alfa onto the train. “The next time I cross to France I’m taking a ferry.”

An hour later, Bronson dropped Mark off at his apartment in Ilford, and then picked up the south-bound M25 and opened the front door of his house only seventy minutes after leaving his friend.

He left his computer bag in the living room and spent a few minutes transferring the photographs of both inscriptions onto a high-capacity USB memory stick, because he didn’t want to drag his laptop all the way up to London with him.

He hadn’t eaten since his breakfast in Germany, what seemed like a week ago, so on his way to the railway station he grabbed a packet of sandwiches and a can of soft drink from a convenience store.

Thirty minutes later he was sitting in a train heading for Charing Cross Station and the British Museum.

Gregori Mandino had returned to Rome as soon as it was clear that his quarry wouldn’t be going back to the house. He had managed to track down Mark Hampton’s home address in Ilford and his place of work in the City of London. The second man was proving more elusive: an Englishman who spoke fluent Italian, and who had introduced himself to the staff of the funeral home as “Chris Bronson.”

But there were ways of tracing people, and Mandino knew the two Englishmen had flown to Rome from Britain, and the
Cosa Nostra
had extensive connections at all levels of Italian bureaucracy. So he dialed a number and issued certain orders.

Just more than three hours later Antonio Carlotti called with the result.

“Mandino.”

“We have a match,
capo
,” Carlotti said. “Our contact in passport control in Rome has identified the man as Christopher James Bronson, and I have an address for him in Tunbridge Wells.”

Mandino grabbed a pencil and paper as Carlotti dictated Bronson’s address and telephone number to him.

“Where is this Tunbridge Wells?” Mandino asked.

“Kent, about fifty kilometers south of London. And there’s something else. The reason the inquiry took so long was because my man had to explain the reasons for his request to the British authorities. Usually, a passport check is just a formality, but in this case they refused to release the information until he had told them why he was making the inquiry.”

“What did he tell them?”

“He said that Bronson might have been a witness to a road accident in Rome, and that seemed to satisfy them.”

“But why,” Mandino asked the obvious question, “were they reluctant to divulge this?”

“Because this man Bronson is a serving police officer,” Carlotti explained. “In fact, he’s a detective sergeant based at the station in Tunbridge Wells. And, just like in the
Carabinieri,
the British police protect their own.”

For a few moments Mandino didn’t respond. This was an unexpected development, and he wasn’t sure if it was good or bad news.

“Family?” he asked, finally.

“His parents are both dead, he has no children, and he’s recently divorced. His ex-wife’s name is Angela Lewis. She’s employed by the British Museum in London.”

“As what? A secretary or something?”

“No. She’s a ceramics conservator.”

And that, Mandino knew, definitely
was
bad news. He had no idea what a ceramics conservator actually did, but the mere fact that the Lewis woman worked in one of the most celebrated museums in the world meant that she would have immediate access to experts from a number of disciplines.

Time, Mandino now knew, was fast running out. He needed to get to London as quickly as he could if he was to have any chance of retrieving the situation. But before he ended the call, he obtained Angela Lewis’s London address and phone number. He also instructed that changes be made in the Internet monitoring system and added some very specific new criteria to the searches the syntax checkers were to analyze.

The monitoring system he’d put in place was both comprehensive and expensive, but as the Vatican was picking up the tab, the cost didn’t bother him. It was based on a product called NIS, or NarusInsight Intercept Suite, which Mandino’s people had modified so it could be installed on remote servers without the host’s knowledge and operated like a computer virus or, more accurately, a Trojan Horse. Once in place, the NIS software could be programmed to monitor whole networks to detect specific Internet search strings or even individual e-mail messages.

Whenever Bronson accessed the Internet, and whatever he searched for, Mandino was sure he’d find out about it.

Bronson pulled out his Nokia and dialed Angela’s work number. The journey into town from Tunbridge Wells had been quick and painless, and he’d even got a couple of seats to himself on the train so he’d been able to get comfortable.

“Angela?”

“Yes.” Her voice was curt and distant.

“It’s Chris.”

“I know. What do you want?”

“I’m near the museum and I’ve brought the pictures of the inscriptions for you to look at.”

“I’m not interested in them—I thought you realized that.”

Bronson’s steps faltered slightly. He hadn’t expected Angela to welcome him with open arms, obviously—the last time they’d met had been in a solicitor’s office and their parting had been frosty, to say the least—but he had hoped she would at least see him.

“But I thought . . . well, what about Jeremy Goldman? Is he available?”

“He might be. You’d better ask for him when you get here.”

Five minutes later, Bronson plugged his memory stick into a USB slot in the front of a desktop computer in Jeremy Goldman’s spacious but cluttered office in the museum. The ancient-language specialist was tall and rail-thin, his pale freckled complexion partially hidden behind large round glasses that weren’t, in Bronson’s opinion, a particularly good choice for the shape of his face. He was casually dressed in jeans and shirt, and looked more like a rebellious undergraduate than one of the leading British experts in the study of dead languages.

“I’ve got pictures of both the inscribed stones on this,” Bronson told him. “Which would you like to see first?”

“You sent us a couple showing the Latin phrase, but I’d like to look at those again, and any others you took.”

Bronson nodded and clicked the mouse button. The first image leapt onto the twenty-one-inch flat-panel monitor in front of them.

“I was right,” Goldman muttered, when a third picture was displayed. His fingers traced the words of the inscription. “There
are
some additional letters below the main carving.”

He turned to look at Bronson. “The close-up picture you sent was sharp enough,” he said, “but the flash reflected off the stone and I couldn’t make out whether the marks I could see were made by a chisel or were actually part of the inscription.”

Bronson looked at the screen, and saw what Goldman was pointing at. Below the three Latin words were two groups of much smaller letters that he’d not noticed previously.

“I see them. What do they mean?” he asked.

“Well, I believe the inscription itself to be first or second century A.D. and I’m basing that conclusion on the shape of the letters. Like all written alphabets, Latin letters changed in appearance over the years, and this looks to me like fairly classic first-century text.

“Now, the two sets of smaller letters might help us refine that date. The ‘PO’ of ‘PO LDA’ could be the Latin abbreviation
per ordo,
meaning ‘by the order of.’ That was a kind of shorthand used by the Romans to indicate which official had instituted a particular project, though it’s unusual to find it as part of an inscription on a stone slab. It was more common to see it at the end of a piece of parchment—typically there would be a series of instructions followed by a date and then ‘PO’ and the name or initials of the senator or whoever had ordered the work to be carried out. So if you can find out who ‘LDA’ was, we might have a stab at dating this more accurately.”

“Any ideas?” Bronson asked.

Goldman grinned at him. “None at all, I’m afraid, and finding out won’t be easy. Apart from the obvious difficulty of identifying somebody who lived two millennia ago from his initials and nothing else, the Romans had a habit of changing their names. Let me give you an example. Everyone’s heard of Julius Caesar, but very few people know that his full name was Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar Divus, or that he was normally just known as Gaius Julius Caesar. So his initials could be ‘JC,’ ‘GJC’ or even ‘IGJCD.’ ”

“I see what you mean. So ‘LDA’ could be almost anyone?”

“Well, no, not anyone. Whoever had this stone carved was a person of some importance, so we’re looking for a senator or a consul, someone like that, which will obviously narrow the field. Whoever the initials refer to will almost certainly be in the historical record, somewhere.”

Bronson looked again at the screen. “And these other letters here—‘MAM.’ What do you think they could stand for? Another abbreviation?”

Goldman shook his head. “If it is, it’s not one I’m familiar with. No, I think these letters are probably just the initials of the man who carved the stone—the mason himself. And I don’t think you’ve got the slightest chance of identifying him!”

“Well, that seems to have exhausted the potential of the first inscription,” Bronson said. “You thought that this stone might have been cut in half, so we checked throughout the house for the other piece. We didn’t find it but, on the other side of the same wall, in the dining room and directly behind the first stone, we found this.”

With something of a flourish, Bronson double-clicked one of the images on the memory stick and leaned back as a picture of the second inscription filled the screen.

“Ah,” Goldman said, “this is
much
more interesting, and much later. The Latin text on the first inscription was carved in capital letters, typical of first- and second-century Roman monumental inscriptions. But this is a cursive script, much more elegant and attractive.”

“We thought it might be Occitan,” Bronson suggested.

Goldman nodded. “You’re absolutely right—it
is
Occitan, and I’m fairly sure it’s medieval. Do you know anything about the language?”

“Not a thing. I put a few words into Internet search engines and those that generated any results were identified as Occitan. All except that word”—he pointed at the screen—“which seems to be Latin.”

“Ah,
calix.
A chalice. I’ll have to think about that. But the use of medieval Occitan is interesting. It places this carving in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but Occitan wasn’t a tongue in common usage in the Rome area of Italy, where I gather you found this. That suggests the person who carved this had probably traveled to the region from southwest France, from the Languedoc area. Languedoc literally means the ‘language of Oc,’ or Occitan.”

“But what does the inscription mean?”

“Well, it’s not a standard Occitan text, as far as I can tell. I mean, it’s not a prayer or a piece of poetry that I’ve ever seen before. I’m also puzzled by that word
calix.
Why put a Latin word in a piece of Occitan poetry?”

“You think it’s a poem?” Bronson asked.

“That
is
what the layout suggests.” Goldman paused, took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses thoughtfully.

“I can translate this into modern English, if you like, but I won’t be able to vouch for the absolute accuracy of the translation. Why don’t you go and have a cup of coffee or take a look around the museum? Come back in about half an hour and by then I should have a finished version ready for you.”