The First Apostle (31 page)

“Yes. Why?”

“We still have the Internet monitoring software running, and some relevant searches have just been reported from Santa Marinella.”

“Where?”

“Santa Marinella. It’s a small coastal town northwest of Rome.”

“What searches?” Mandino demanded.

“More or less the same as those we detected from Cambridge. These came from a wireless network connection in a small hotel in the town. They were detailed searches for anything to do with Nero and Marcus Asinius Marcellus.”

“That must be Bronson. What the hell is he
still
doing in Italy? And why is he
still
following this trail? When were these searches recorded? Today?”

“No—yesterday evening. And there are a couple of other oddities. Those searches were followed by one for a
groma.
It’s an ancient surveying tool used by the Romans. And we traced other activity on the same network. Someone downloaded the Google Earth program. That’s the—”

“I know what it is, Carlotti. Which areas did they look at?”

“We don’t know,
capo.
Once the computer accessed the Google Earth server, we could no longer monitor its activities. The user was effectively working inside a closed system.”

“I don’t like the sound of this. Bronson’s still in the area. He’s finding out something about Roman surveying techniques, and the fact that he then went onto Google Earth might mean he’s following some kind of trail. Anything else?”

“Yes. As soon as I heard about these searches I asked one of my contacts in the Santa Marinella area to find out who’d been staying in the hotel there. He called me back a few minutes ago. There were two English guests—a man and his wife—there last night, but the hotel staff didn’t get their names because they paid the bill in cash. All the receptionist remembered was that they spent most of the evening in their room. And they know they used the Internet because they were charged for it. They were driving a British-registered Renault Espace and checked out early this morning.”

“That confirms it, then. What did you do?”

“I tipped off one of my contacts in the
Carabinieri.
But it’s the last piece of information that worries me most, in view of what happened with the scroll.”

“Tell me.”

“According to one of my other contacts in the
Carabinieri,
this morning a Toyota Land Cruiser was hired from a garage in San Cesareo, near Rome, by a woman named Angela Lewis, who paid for two days’ hire by credit card.”

“Damn,” Mandino muttered.

“It looks like Bronson’s following the same trail as us, though I don’t understand how,” Carlotti said. “Are you sure that stone at the house hadn’t been exposed before?”

“Definitely not, but somehow he must have got hold of another copy of the diagram showing the location of the burial. And if he’s hired a jeep, he must have worked out where to start his search. Hang on a minute,” Mandino said, as another thought struck him. “The Toyota was hired in San Cesareo this morning, you said?”

“Yes.”

“Right, at least that gives us a starting point. Get the
Carabinieri
looking out for the Toyota.”

“Already done,
capo.
Anything else?”

“No. Until we find out where he’s heading, there’s nothing more we can do.”

Mandino ended the call, then dialed Rogan’s number.

“Give the phone to Pierro,” he instructed, as soon as Rogan answered.

“Pierro.”

“Mandino. Any luck with matching the diagram?”

“Not yet, but I’m sure that with time we can—”

“We don’t have time,” Mandino snapped. “I’ve just heard that Bronson has hired a jeep from a garage over to the east of Rome, and that could mean that he’s
already
deciphered the diagram. Where have you been looking?”

“Mainly to the north of the city, because I believe Marcellus owned estates in that area.”

“It looks to me like Bronson’s better at this than you are, Pierro, and you’re supposed to be the expert. I suggest you start looking somewhere to the east of Rome, and quickly. If he finds the tomb before we do, I will be most displeased, and you
really
don’t want that to happen. You know what’s at stake.”

“Anything?” Bronson asked, as Angela walked through the long grass toward him.

They’d been searching for about two hours and had found precisely nothing, apart from a handful of fired shotgun cartridges. At first they’d looked together, following a logical grid pattern, then split up in order to cover more ground.

“Sod all,” Angela replied. “I’m fed up, hungry and thirsty. I’m taking a break.”

The two of them walked back down the slope to the Toyota. Bronson opened the doors and turned on the engine, letting the welcome chill of the air-conditioning waft over them. Angela pulled out the packets of sandwiches and offered Bronson a choice.

“I’ll have the chicken salad,” he said, and ripped open the cellophane.

“Are you sure we’re in the right place?” Angela asked, peeling apart a ham sandwich and looking with some uncertainty at the pinkish meat inside.

“Frankly, no. The dot on the diagram on the
skyphos
has to cover a fairly large area on the ground. If someone had invented the compass and given one to Marcellus to provide accurate bearings, it would have been a hell of a lot easier. As it is, we’re really stumbling around in the dark.”

“You’d really expect him to leave some sort of a marker so that he could find the exact location again if he needed to,” Angela said. “All these cliffs and slopes look pretty damn similar to me.”

“What kind of marker?”

“I don’t know—an arrow carved on a rock, something like that.”

“He might have done,” Bronson pointed out, “but the mark might have weathered away to nothing over the centuries.”

“That’s very encouraging. Thanks.”

“Let’s have a drink,” Bronson suggested, “and then we’ll try again.”

Three hours later they were still searching. They’d scoured the entire plateau from one side to the other. Bronson had climbed onto the upper slope of the feature and checked it out—but had found nothing—while Angela had clambered over the piles of irregular rocks that formed a kind of rough perimeter of the plateau itself.

Bronson was absolutely ready to call it a day and head back down the track when Angela suddenly called out to him.

“What’s this?”

Bronson walked over to where she was standing, close to the low cliff that marked the upper edge of the plateau and a little way to the left of where they’d spent most of their time searching. About five feet above the ground, he could just see something that looked like a small letter “V” on a rock, maybe a couple of inches tall, but so faded and weathered that it was only when they traced the indentation with their fingers that they were sure it wasn’t just their eyes deceiving them.

“Do you feel it?” Angela asked.

“I think so, yes,” Bronson said, “but is it a ‘V’ or what’s left of the letter ‘M’ or ‘W,’ or even a downward-pointing arrow? It’s so weathered it could be almost anything.”

Angela ran her fingertips over the rock on both sides of the indentation. “I can’t feel any other letters,” she said.

“There might not be any,” Bronson suggested, “and I suppose a ‘V’ is more likely. Marcellus wouldn’t have wanted anyone finding this by accident, so any marker he left would have been fairly discreet. He probably wouldn’t have wanted his initials on the stone, either, but a simple ‘V’ for
Vanidici
makes sense to me.”

“So what now?” Angela asked.

Bronson pointed down at the base of the rock face in front of them, where there was a jumble of boulders that had obviously remained untouched for years, possibly centuries. “We find out what’s under that lot,” he said. “Hang on here. I’ll bring the jeep over.”

He trotted back to the Toyota, started the engine and backed the vehicle up as close as he could to the rock face. He opened the tailgate and took out the crowbar, then inserted the tip behind one of the smaller boulders on top of the pile and levered it away from the rock. It tumbled away with a satisfying crash.

“Can I help?” Angela asked.

“No,” Bronson grunted, “because these are sodding heavy rocks, and it’s all I can do to shift them. But it might be an idea if you took pictures every time I moved a couple, just to document the scene.”

Angela walked over to the Toyota to collect a bottle of water and the digital camera, and Bronson freed another boulder from the top of the pile. As it fell away he stared in disbelief at the rock behind it.

“Angela,” he called, his voice slightly strained.

“What?”

“Forget the water,” he said, “but bring the camera right away. We’ve found it.”

Carved into the rock directly behind the boulder he’d just moved were three capital letters, protected from weathering by the stones that had covered them for centuries, and as clear and crisp as the day they were carved. “H•V•L.”

“
‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’
Here lie the liars,” Bronson whispered softly.

In the ten minutes that followed he shifted all the boulders except for three large rocks at the base that were simply too big for him to move without using the Toyota to drag them, and he’d probably need a chain or steel cable to do so. Behind them, a flat and almost circular stone, clearly worked and with chisel marks still visible, rested against the rock face. Around its edge a kind of mortar had been used in an attempt to seal the gap.

“This is just amazing,” Angela breathed. “It looks as if Jeremy got it wrong. Nobody would go to all this trouble just to hide a few books. This looks more like a tomb.”

“They even tried to seal the entrance,” Bronson said.

“That was probably as a precaution against scavengers, just in case Nero needed to retrieve the bodies he’d buried. He wouldn’t have wanted to dig them up again only to find foxes or other animals had eaten the remains.”

“And why the hell would he have needed to recover a corpse?”

“Oh, several reasons,” Angela said. “The most obvious was a form of legalized robbery.”

“You could rob a dead man?” Bronson asked, using a hammer and chisel to shift the sealing mortar from around the edge of the rock.

“It was rather more subtle than that. In the past, several crimes, notably treason and witchcraft, carried more severe penalties than just death. If an individual was found guilty, their entire assets could be seized by the king. There are quite a few recorded cases where corpses were dug up, dressed in fresh clothes and sat down in a courtroom to be tried for crimes like these, just because the reigning monarch wanted their lands. And, for obvious reasons, the accused couldn’t speak in his own defense, so the verdict was usually a foregone conclusion.”

“Bizarre.”

“That’s one word for it. How are you doing?”

“I’ve shifted the mortar,” Bronson said, “so now I should be able to move it.”

He slid the point of the crowbar behind the top of the stone and levered upward. There was a cracking sound and the top of the flattened rock moved an inch or two away from the face of the cliff.

“That’s broken the seal,” Bronson said, “but I’m going to have to use the Toyota to move it out of the way. It’s too heavy for me to shift by myself.”

He walked over to the Toyota and returned in a few moments with the heavy-duty towrope. He used the crowbar to lever the rock farther away from the cliff, so that he could drop the rope down behind it, secured the clip and then attached the other end to the towing hitch of the jeep.

“Keep well clear,” he instructed Angela, “in case the rope snaps. In fact, you’d better get in the car with me.”

He started the Toyota and moved it slowly forward until he’d taken up the slack in the rope, then began increasing the tension steadily. For a few seconds nothing happened, except that the noise of the Toyota’s big diesel rose to a roar, and then the vehicle lurched forward.

“That should have done it,” Bronson said. He turned off the engine and climbed out.

But when they looked behind the jeep, it was immediately obvious that it hadn’t. The towrope had snapped cleanly in two just behind the tow hitch, and when they walked back to the rock face they saw that the round stone had barely moved.

“Shit. I should have brought a steel cable. I don’t see how we’re going to shift that.”

“Maybe we should have rented a Toyota fitted with a winch,” Angela said, staring at the stone. “Hang on a second, Marcellus wouldn’t have had steel cables and turbo-charged diesels up here, would he? But he would still have had to be able to get back inside the tomb.”

“Yes, presumably. So what?”

“So that’s why the sealing stone is round. You’ve been trying to drag it away bodily. We should be able to roll it sideways.”

“Genius,” Bronson said. He crouched down at the side of the stone and began clearing away the earth and debris. Then he stood back.

“Bingo,” he said. “There’s a kind of channel cut in the rock here, like a track for the stone to roll along.”

Bronson climbed over the rocks, to the other side of the stone, rammed the crowbar down at its base and levered. With surprising ease, the stone moved slightly, rolling an inch or two down the channel.

“Keep going,” Angela urged.

Bronson heaved again and the stone rolled about a yard, so that they could both see exactly what lay behind it. Now visible was the entrance to a small cave, the opening too smooth and regular to be natural. Though they’d successfully removed the sealing stone, the three large rocks still partially obstructed the entrance.

“You can’t move those big boulders,” Angela stated.

“Not easily, and maybe not at all,” Bronson agreed, “but I reckon I can crawl in through the gap.”

“Suppose the roof caves in when you get inside?”