The First Apostle

PROLOGUE

SPRING, A.D. 67 Jotapata, Judea

In the center of the group of silent watching men, the naked Jew was struggling violently, but it was never going to make a difference. One burly Roman soldier knelt on each arm, pinning it to the rough wooden beam—the patibulum—and another was holding his legs firmly.

General Vespasian watched, as he watched all the crucifixions. As far as he knew, this Jew hadn’t committed any specific offense against the Roman Empire, but he had long ago lost patience with the defenders of Jotapata, and routinely executed any of them his army managed to capture.

The soldier holding the Jew’s left arm eased the pressure slightly, just enough to allow another man to bind the victim’s wrist with thick cloth. The Romans were experts at this method of execution—they’d had considerable practice—and knew that the fabric would help staunch the flow of blood from the wounds. Crucifixion was intended to be slow, painful and public, and the last thing they wanted was for the condemned man to bleed to death in a matter of hours.

Normally, victims of crucifixion were flogged first, but Vespasian’s men had neither the time nor the inclination to bother. In any case, they knew the Jews lasted longer on the cross if they weren’t flogged, and that helped reinforce the general’s uncompromising message to the besieged town, little more than an arrow-shot distant.

The binding complete, they forced the Jew’s arm back onto the patibulum, the wood rough and stained with old blood. A centurion approached with a hammer and nails. The nails were about eight inches long, thick, with large flat heads, and specially made for the purpose. Like the crosses, they had been reused many times.

“Hold him still,” he barked, and bent to the task.

The Jew went rigid when he felt the point of the nail touch his wrist, then screamed as the centurion smashed the hammer down. The blow was strong and sure, and the nail ripped straight through his arm and embedded itself deep in the wood.

Compounding the agony of the injury, the nail severed the median nerve, causing continuous and intense pain along the man’s entire limb.

Blood spurted from the wound, splashing onto the ground around the patibulum.

Some four inches of the nail still protruded above the now blood-sodden cloth wrapped around the Jew’s wrist, but two more blows from the hammer drove it home. Once the flat head of the nail was hard up against the cloth and compressing the limb against the wood, the blood flow diminished noticeably.

The Jew screamed his agony as each blow landed, then lost control of his bladder.

The trickle of urine onto the dusty ground caused a couple of the watching soldiers to smile, but most ignored it. Like Vespasian, they were tired—the Romans had been fighting the inhabitants of Judea off and on for more than a hundred years—and in the last twelve months they’d all seen too much death and suffering to view another crucifixion as much more than a temporary diversion.

It had been hard fighting, and the battles far from one-sided. Just ten months earlier, the entire Roman garrison in Jerusalem had surrendered to the Jews and had immediately been lynched. From that moment on, full-scale war had been inevitable, and the fighting bitter. Now the Romans were in Judea in full force. Vespasian commanded the fifth legion— Fretensis—and the tenth— Macedonica—while his son Titus had recently arrived with the fifteenth— Apollinaris—and the army also included auxiliary troops and cavalry units.

The soldier released the victim’s arm and stood back as the centurion walked around and knelt beside the man’s right arm. The Jew was going nowhere now, though his screams were loud and his struggles even more violent. Once the right wrist had been properly bound with fabric, the centurion expertly drove home the second nail and stood back.

The vertical section of the T-shaped Tau cross—the stipes—was a permanent fixture in the Roman camp. Each of the legions—the three camps were side by side on a slight rise overlooking the town—had erected fifty of them in clear view of Jotapata.

Most were already in use, almost equal numbers of living and dead bodies hanging from them.

Following the centurion’s orders, four Roman soldiers picked up the patibulum between them and carried the heavy wooden beam, dragging the condemned Jew, his screams louder still, over the rocky ground and across to the upright. Wide steps had already been placed at either side of the stipes and, with barely a pause in their stride, the four soldiers climbed up and hoisted the patibulum onto the top of the post, slotting it onto the prepared peg.

The moment the Jew’s feet left the ground and his nailed arms took the full weight of his body, both of his shoulder joints dislocated. His feet sought for a perch—something, anything—to relieve the incredible agony coursing through his arms. In seconds, his right heel landed on a block of wood attached to the stipes about five feet below the top, and he rested both feet on it and pushed upward to relieve the strain on his arms. Which was, of course, exactly why the Romans had placed it there. The moment he straightened his legs, the Jew felt rough hands adjusting the position of his feet, turning them sideways and holding his calves together. Seconds later another nail was driven through both heels with a single blow, pinning his legs to the cross.

Vespasian looked at the dying man, struggling pointlessly like a trapped insect, his cries already weakening. He turned away, shading his eyes against the setting sun.

The Jew would be dead in two days, three at the most. The crucifixion over, the soldiers began dispersing, returning to the camp and their duties.

Every Roman military camp was identical in design: a square grid of open “roads,”

their names the same in every camp, that divided the different sections, the whole surrounded by a ditch and palisade, and with separate tents inside for men and officers. The Fretensis legion’s camp was in the center of the three and Vespasian’s personal tent lay, as the commanding general’s always did, at the head of the Via Principalis—the main thoroughfare, directly in front of the camp headquarters.

The Tau crosses had been erected in a defiant line that stretched across the fronts of all three camps, a constant reminder to the defenders of Jotapata of the fate that awaited them if they were captured.

Vespasian acknowledged the salutes of the sentries as he walked back through the palisade. He was a soldier’s soldier. He led from the front, celebrating his army’s triumphs and mourning their retreats alongside his men. He’d started from nothing—his father had been a minor customs official and small-time moneylender—but he’d risen to command legions in Britain and Germany.

Ignominiously retired by Nero after he fell asleep during one of the Emperor’s interminable musical performances, it was a measure of the seriousness of the situation in Judea that he’d been called back to active service to take personal charge of suppressing the revolt.

He was more worried than he liked to admit about the campaign. His first success—an easy victory at Gadara—might almost have been a fluke because, despite the best efforts of his soldiers, the small band of defenders of Jotapata showed no signs of surrendering, despite being hopelessly outnumbered. And the town was hardly strategically crucial. Once he’d captured it, he knew they’d have to move on to liberate the Mediterranean ports, all potentially much harder targets.

It was going to be a long and bitter struggle, and at fifty Vespasian was already an old man. He would rather have been almost anywhere else in the Empire, but Nero was holding his youngest son, Domitian, as a hostage, and had given him no choice but to command the campaign.

Just before he reached his tent, he saw a centurion approaching. The man’s red tunic, greaves or shin protectors, lorica hamata—chain-mail armor—and silvered helmet with its transverse crest made him easily identifiable among the regular soldiers, who wore white tunics and lorica segmenta—plate armor. He was leading a small group of legionaries and escorting another prisoner, his arms bound behind him.

The centurion stopped a respectful ten feet from Vespasian and saluted. “The Jew from Cilicia, sir, as you ordered.”

Vespasian nodded his approval and gestured toward his tent. “Bring him.” He stood to one side as the soldiers hustled the man inside and pushed him onto a wooden stool. The flickering light of the oil lamps showed him to be elderly, tall and thin, with a high forehead, receding hairline and a straggly beard.

The tent was large—almost as big as those normally occupied by eight legionaries—with separate sleeping quarters. Vespasian removed the brooch that secured his lacerna, the purple cloak that identified him as a general, tossed the garment aside and sat down wearily.

“Why am I here?” the prisoner demanded.

“You’re here,” Vespasian replied, dismissing the escort with a flick of his wrist,

“because I so ordered it. Your instructions from Rome were perfectly clear. Why have you failed to obey them?”

The man shook his head. “I have done precisely what the Emperor demanded.”

“You have not,” Vespasian snapped, “otherwise I would not be stuck here in this miserable country trying to stamp out yet another rebellion.”

“I am not responsible for that. I have carried out my orders to the best of my ability.

All this”—the prisoner gestured with his head to include Jotapata—“is not of my doing.”

“The Emperor does not agree, and neither do I. He believes you should have done more, far more. He has issued explicit orders to me, orders that include your execution.”

For the first time a look of fear passed across the old man’s face. “My execution? But I’ve done everything he asked. Nobody could have done more. I’ve traveled this world and established communities wherever I could. The fools believed me—they still believe me. Everywhere you look the myth is taking hold.”

Vespasian shook his head. “It’s not enough. This rebellion is sapping Rome’s strength and the Emperor blames you. For that you are to die.”

“By crucifixion? Like the fisherman?” the prisoner asked, suddenly conscious of the moans of the dying men nailed to the Tau crosses beyond the encampment.

“No. As a Roman citizen you will at least be spared that. You will be taken back to Rome under escort—by men I can ill afford to lose—and there you will be put to the sword.”

“When?”

“You leave at dawn. But before you die, the Emperor has one final order for you.”

Vespasian moved to the table and picked up two diptychs—wooden tablets with the inside surfaces covered in wax and joined with wire along one side as a rudimentary hinge. Both had numerous holes— foramina—pierced around the outer edges through which triple-thickness linum had been passed, thread that was then secured with a seal bearing the likeness of Nero. This prevented the tablets being opened without breaking the seal, and was common practice with legal documents to guard against forgeries. Each had a short note in ink on the front to indicate what the text comprised, and both had been personally entrusted to Vespasian by Nero before the general left Rome. The old man had seen them many times before.

Vespasian pointed to a small scroll on the table and told the prisoner what Nero expected him to write.

“And if I refuse?” the prisoner asked.

“Then I have instructions that you are not to be sent to Rome,” Vespasian said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sure we can find a vacant stipes you can occupy here for a few days.”

A.D. 67-69 Rome, Italy

The Neronian Gardens, situated at the foot of what are now known as the Vatican Hills, were one of Nero’s favored locations for exacting savage revenge on the group of people he saw as the principal enemies of Rome—the early Christians. He blamed them for starting the Great Fire that almost destroyed the city in A.D. 64, and since then he’d done his best to rid Rome and the Empire of what he called the Jewish “vermin.”

His methods were excessive. The lucky ones were crucified or torn to pieces by dogs or wild animals in the Circus Maximus. Those he wanted really to suffer were coated in wax, impaled on stakes placed around his palace and later set on fire. This was Nero’s idea of a joke. The Christians claimed to be the “light of the world,” so he used them to light his way.

But Roman law forbade the crucifixion or torture of Roman citizens, and that rule, at least, the Emperor was forced to obey. And so, on a sunny morning at the end of June, Nero and his entourage watched as a swordsman worked his way steadily down a line of bound and kneeling men and women, beheading each one with a single stroke of his blade. The elderly man was the second to last and, as specifically instructed by Nero, the executioner slashed at his neck three times before his head finally tumbled free.

Nero’s fury at the failure of his agent extended even beyond the man’s painful death, and his body was unceremoniously tossed into a cart and driven miles out of Rome, to be dumped in a small cave, the entrance then sealed by rocks. The cave was already occupied by the remains of another man, another thorn in the Emperor’s side, who had suffered crucifixion of an unusual sort three years earlier, at the very start of the Neronian Persecution.

The two diptychs and the small scroll had been handed to Nero as soon as the centurion and his Jewish prisoner arrived in Rome, but for some months the Emperor couldn’t decide what to do with them. Rome was struggling to contain the Jewish revolt and Nero was afraid that if he made their contents public he would make the situation even worse.

But the documents—the scroll essentially a confession by the Jew of something infinitely worse than treason, and the contents of the diptychs providing unarguable supporting evidence—were clearly valuable, even explosive, and he took immense care to keep them safe. He had an exact copy made of the scroll: on the original, he personally inscribed an explanation of its contents and purpose, authenticated by his imperial seal. The two diptychs were secreted with the bodies in the hidden cave, and the original scroll in a secure chest in a locked chamber in one of his palaces, but the copy he kept close to him, secured in an earthenware pot just in case he had to reveal its contents urgently.

Then events overtook him. In A.D. 68, chaos and civil war came to Rome. Nero was declared a traitor by the Senate, fled the city and committed suicide. He was succeeded by Galba, who was swiftly murdered by Otho. Vitellius emerged to challenge him, and defeated the new Emperor in battle: Otho, like Nero before him, fell upon his sword.

But Otho’s supporters hadn’t given up. They looked around for another candidate and settled on Vespasian. When word of events in Rome eventually reached him, the elderly general left the war in Judea in the more than capable hands of his son Titus and traveled to Italy, defeating Vitellius’s army on the way. Vitellius was killed as Vespasian’s troops secured the city. On 21 December A.D. 69, Vespasian was formally recognized by the Senate as the new Emperor, and peace was finally restored.

And in the confusion and chaos of the short but bitter Roman civil war, a locked wooden chest and an unremarkable earthenware pot, each containing a small papyrus scroll, simply disappeared.

1

I

For a few moments Jackie Hampton had no idea what had awoken her. The digital display on the radio alarm clock showed 3:18, and the master bedroom was entirely dark. But something had penetrated her slumber—a sound from somewhere in the old house.

Noises weren’t unusual—the Villa Rosa had stood on the side of the hill between Ponticelli and the larger town of Scandriglia for well more than six hundred years—the old wood creaked and groaned, and sometimes cracked like a rifle shot, in response to changing temperatures. But this sound must have been something different, something unfamiliar.

Automatically she stretched out her hand to the other side of the bed, but her probing fingers met nothing but the duvet. Mark was still in London and wouldn’t be flying back to Italy until Friday evening or Saturday morning. She should have been with him, but a last-minute change in their builders’ schedule had forced her to stay behind.

And then she heard it again—a metallic pinging sound. One of the shutters on the ground-floor windows must have become unlatched and was banging in the wind.

Jackie knew she wouldn’t get back to sleep until it was secured. She snapped on the light and slipped out of bed, slid her feet into her slippers and reached for the gown draped over the chair in front of the dressing table.

She switched on the landing light and walked briskly down the wide oak staircase to the central hall. At the foot of the stairs, she heard a noise again—slightly different from the previous sound, but still unmistakably metal on stone—and it was obviously coming from the huge living room that occupied most of the ground floor on the east side of the house.

Almost without thinking, Jackie pushed open the door. She stepped inside the room, turning on the main lights as she did so. The moment the two chandeliers flared into life, the source of the metallic knocking sound became obvious. She raised her hands to her face with a gasp of fear, then turned to run.

A black-clad figure was standing on a dining chair and chipping away with a hammer and chisel at a section of the plaster over the massive inglenook fireplace, his work illuminated by the beam of a flashlight held by another man. Even as Jackie backed away, both men turned to look at her with startled expressions on their faces.

The man with the flashlight muttered a muffled curse and began running toward her.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Jackie sprinted across the wide hall, heading for the staircase and the safety of the master bedroom. The wood on the door was more than an inch thick and there was a solid steel bolt on the inside. Beside the bed was an extension phone, and her cell phone was in her handbag on the dressing table. If she could just get inside the room, she knew she’d be safe and could call for help.

But she wasn’t dressed for running, and the man behind her was. The slipper fell off her right foot as she reached the third stair, and she could hear the pounding of her pursuer’s trainers on the stone-flagged floor of the hall, just yards behind her. Her feet scrabbled for grip on the polished wooden treads, then she stumbled, missed a step and fell to her knees.

In an instant the man was on her, grabbing at her arm and shoulder.

Jackie screamed and twisted sideways, kicking out with her right leg. Her bare foot smashed into the man’s groin. He moaned in pain, and in a reflex action swung his flashlight at her. The heavy-duty aluminum tube crashed into the side of Jackie’s head as she tried to stand. Dazed, she lurched sideways and grabbed at the banister, but her grasping fingers missed it. She fell heavily, her head smashing into the rail, instantly breaking her neck. Her body tumbled limply down the staircase and came to rest on the hall floor, her limbs spread out, blood pouring from the wound on her temple.

Her pursuer walked down the stairs and stood over her. The second intruder appeared from the door to the living room and looked down at the silent and unmoving figure. He knelt beside her and pressed his fingertips to the side of her neck.

After a moment he looked up angrily. “You weren’t supposed to kill her,” he snapped.

Alberti looked down at his handiwork and shrugged. “She wasn’t supposed to be here. We were told the house would be empty. It was an accident,” he added, “but she’s dead and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Rogan straightened up. “You’re right about that. Come on. Let’s finish what we’ve got to do and get out of here.”

Without a backward glance, the two men returned to the living room. Rogan picked up the hammer and chisel and continued to chip away at the remaining sections of old plaster above the huge stone lintel that spanned the entire width of the fireplace.

The work took very little time, and in some twenty minutes the entire area was exposed. Both men stood in front of the fireplace, staring at the letters carved into one of the stones.

“Is that it?” Alberti asked.

Rogan nodded uncertainly. “It looks like it, yes. Get the plaster ready.”

As Alberti left the room carrying a bucket to collect some water, Rogan removed a high-resolution digital camera from his pocket and took half a dozen shots of the stone. He used the screen to check that they all clearly showed the inscription carved on it. Then, for good measure, he wrote down the words in a small notebook.

Alberti reappeared with the water. From the detritus left by the builders, he picked a wooden mixing board and trowel, then selected a bag of plaster from the pile stacked against one wall. A few minutes later, once he had a firm mix, he carried the board over to the fireplace.

The lintel rested on a steel plate, obviously a fairly recent repair to compensate for an unsightly crack that ran diagonally through the stone about two feet from the left-hand edge. The steel projected about half an inch in front of the lintel, and provided a firm base for the plaster.

Alberti clearly had some experience of the technique, and in about half an hour had produced a smooth and professional finish that neatly matched the new plaster on the right-hand side of the fireplace. The other side still had old plaster on it—the builders hadn’t got that far yet—but there was nothing they could do about that.

Fifty minutes after Jackie Hampton died, and almost ninety minutes after the two Italians had forced the rear door of the house, they walked away from the property, heading for the nearby lane where they’d left their car.

II

Chris Bronson swung his silver Mini Cooper into a space on the second floor of the Crescent Road multistory parking garage, which was directly opposite the police headquarters in Tunbridge Wells. For a few moments he sat in the driver’s seat, lost in thought. This morning, he anticipated, was going to be difficult, very difficult.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had problems with Harrison, though the way he was feeling it might well be the last. Detective Inspector Thomas Harrison—“Tom” to his few friends, and “the fat bastard” to almost everyone else—was Bronson’s immediate superior, and they hadn’t got on from day one.

Harrison considered himself to be an old-school policeman, who’d come up through the ranks, as he never tired of telling anyone who asked and most people who didn’t, and he resented Bronson for a number of reasons. The D.I. was particularly scathing about “smart-arse coppers”: officers who joined the force after university and enjoyed certain privileges as a result. He’d lumped Bronson in with this group, though he didn’t have a degree and had joined the army on a short-service commission straight from school. In short, Harrison believed that Bronson—whom he normally referred to as “Death Wish”—was just “playing” at being a policeman: the fact that he was clearly a highly competent officer cut no ice with him.

In the six months that Bronson had been stationed at Tunbridge Wells he’d been reprimanded virtually on a weekly basis by Harrison for something or other but, because he really did want a career in the police force, he’d tried his best to ignore the man’s obvious dislike. Now he’d had enough.

He’d been told to report to the station early that morning, and Bronson thought he knew exactly why. Two days earlier, he’d been involved with other officers—uniformed and plainclothes—in the apprehension of a gang of young men suspected of dealing in Class A substances. The gang’s normal turf was East London, but they’d recently expanded their operations into Kent. The arrests hadn’t gone as smoothly as everyone had hoped and in the resulting scuffles two of the young men had suffered minor injuries. Bronson suspected that Harrison was going to accuse him of using unnecessary force during the arrest, or even assaulting a suspect.

He climbed out of the car, locked it and walked down the stairs—the elevators in the parking garage didn’t start running until eight—to the street.

Ten minutes later he knocked on the door of D.I. Harrison’s office.

III

Maria Palomo had lived in the Monti Sabini area all her life, and still, at seventy-three years of age, worked a fifty-hour week. She was a cleaner, though it wasn’t work she enjoyed, and she wasn’t all that good at it. But she was honest—her clients could leave a pile of euro notes on a desk and be quite certain that all of them would still be there when Maria had finished—and reliable, in that she’d arrive more or less when she said she would. And if the odd corner remained unswept and the oven didn’t get cleaned more than once a year, well, at least the windows sparkled and the carpets were clean.

Maria, in short, was better than nothing, and in her voluminous handbag she had the keys to some thirty properties in the Ponticelli-Scandriglia area. Some houses she cleaned, others she simply checked for security while their owners were away, and in a few she watered the plants, sorted out the mail and checked that the lights and taps worked and that the drains hadn’t overflowed.

Villa Rosa was one of the houses she cleaned, though Maria wasn’t sure how long the arrangement was likely to last. She was fond of the young Englishwoman, who used Maria’s visits to polish her Italian, but her customer had voiced some dissatisfaction recently. On her last two visits, in particular, she’d pointed out several areas where the cleanliness could have been much improved, to which Maria had responded as she always did, with a smile and a shrug. It wasn’t easy, she’d explained, to keep everything clean when the house was full of builders and their tools and equipment. And dust, of course.

That clearly hadn’t pleased Signora Hampton, who’d urged her to try a little harder, but Maria was beyond the stage where she took very much notice of what people asked her to do. She’d go to the house every week, do as little as she thought she could get away with and see what happened. If the Englishwoman sacked her, she’d find work somewhere else. It really wasn’t much of a problem.

A little after nine that morning, Maria pottered up the drive to Villa Rosa on the elderly Vespa she’d used to get around the area for the last fifteen years. The scooter didn’t belong to her, and she’d been lent it so long ago that she barely remembered who did own it. This confusion extended to the Vespa’s documentation—it wasn’t licensed and hadn’t been tested for roadworthiness in a number of years, but that didn’t concern Maria, who’d never bothered applying for a driving license. She just took care to avoid the Polizia Municipale and the less frequently seen Carabinieri when she was riding it.

She stopped the scooter in front of the house and pulled it onto its stand. Her helmet—she complied with the law to that extent—went onto the seat, and she strode across to the front door. Maria knew Jackie was at home, so she left the keys in her bag and rang the bell.

Two minutes later she rang it again, with the same lack of response. That puzzled her, so she walked over to the double garage that stood to one side of the house and peered behind the partially open door. The Hamptons’ car—an Alfa Romeo sedan—was there, just as she had expected. The house was too far from Ponticelli for her employer to go there on foot, and in any case she knew Jackie wasn’t much of a walker. So where was she?

The garden perhaps, she thought, and walked around the side of the house to the rear lawn, studded with shrubs and half a dozen small flower beds, that rose gently away from the old building. But the back garden was deserted.

Maria shrugged and returned to the main door of the house, fishing in her bag for her bunch of keys. She located the Yale, slid it into the lock and turned it, ringing the bell again as she did so. “Signora Hampton?” she called, as the door swung wide open. “Signora . . .”

The word died in her throat as she saw the sprawled figure lying motionless on the stone floor, a pool of blood surrounding the woman’s head like a dark red halo.

Maria Palomo had buried two husbands and five other relatives, but there was a world of difference between the anticipation of seeing a sheet-draped figure in a mortuary chapel and what she was looking at. A scream burst from her throat and she turned and ran out of the house and across the gravel drive.

Then she stopped and turned to face the building. The door was fully open and, despite the brightness of the early-morning sun, she could still see the shape on the floor. For a few seconds she stood unmoving, working out what she should do.

She had to call the police, obviously, but she also knew that once the polizia were involved, everyone’s life would be placed under the microscope. Maria walked over to the Vespa, pulled on her helmet, started the engine and rode the scooter down the drive. When she reached the road, she turned right. Half a mile away was a house owned by one of her numerous extended family, a place where she could safely leave the Vespa and get a lift back to the Hamptons’ house.

Twenty minutes later Maria stepped out of the front passenger seat of her nephew’s old Lancia and led the way over to the still-open front door of the property. They walked into the hall and looked at the body. Her nephew bent down and felt one of Jackie’s wrists, then crossed himself and took a couple of steps backward. Maria had known what to expect, and barely reacted at all.

“Now I can call the polizia, ” she announced. She picked up the phone that stood on the hall table and dialed 112, the Italian emergency number.

2

I

“You’ve really screwed up this time, Death Wish,” Harrison began.

Right, Bronson thought. That’s it. He was standing in front of the D.I.’s cluttered desk, a swivel chair beside him that Harrison had pointedly not invited him to sit in.

Bronson glanced over his shoulder, a puzzled expression on his face, then looked back.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked quietly.

“You, you little shit,” Harrison snapped. This was laughable, as Bronson stood three inches taller than his superior, though he weighed substantially less.

“ ‘My name’s Christopher Bronson, and I’m a detective sergeant. You can call me Chris. You can call me D.S. Bronson, or you can just call me Bronson. But, you fat, ugly bastard, you can’t call me ‘Death Wish.’ ”

Harrison’s face was a picture. “What did you call me?”

“You heard,” Bronson said, and sat down in the swivel chair.

“You’ll bloody well stand when you’re in my office.”

“I’ll sit, thanks. What did you want to see me about?”

“Stand up!” Harrison shouted. Outside the glass-walled cubicle, the few officers who had arrived early were starting to take an interest in the interview.

“I’ve had it with you, Harrison,” Bronson said, stretching out his legs comfortably in front of him. “Ever since I joined this station you’ve complained about pretty much everything I’ve done, and I’ve gone along with it because I actually like being in the force, even if it means working with incompetent arseholes like you. But today, I’ve changed my mind.”

Small gobbets of spittle had gathered around Harrison’s mouth. “You insubordinate bastard. I’ll have your warrant card for this.”

“You can certainly try. I suppose you’ve worked out some scheme to charge me with assaulting a prisoner or using excessive force during an arrest?”

Harrison nodded. “And I’ve got witnesses,” he growled.

Bronson smiled at him. “I’m sure you have. I just hope you’re paying them enough.

And do you realize that’s almost the first sentence you’ve spoken since I walked in here that didn’t have a swearword in it, you foulmouthed, illiterate idiot?”

For a few moments Harrison said nothing, just stared at Bronson, his eyes smoldering with hate.

“It’s been lovely, having this little chat,” Bronson said, standing up. “I’m going to take a day or two off work now. That’ll give you time to decide whether you’re going to carry on with this charade or start acting as if you really were a senior police officer.”

“You can consider yourself suspended, Bronson.”

“That’s better—you actually got my name right that time.”

“You’re bloody well suspended. Give me your warrant card and get the hell out of here.” Harrison held out his hand.

Bronson shook his head. “I think I’ll hang on to it for the moment, thanks. And while you decide what you’re going to do you might like to take a look at this.” Bronson fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out a slim black object. “To save you asking, it’s a tape recorder. I’ll send you a copy of our conversation, such as it was. If you want an inquiry, I’ll let the investigating officers listen to it.

“And this,” Bronson extracted a buff envelope from another pocket and tossed it on the desk, “is a formal request for a transfer. Do let me know what you decide to do.

You’ve got my numbers, I think.”

Bronson clicked off the recorder and walked out of the office.

II

The telephone in the apartment in Rome rang just after eleven thirty that morning, but Gregori Mandino was in the shower, so the answering machine cut in after half a dozen rings.

Fifteen minutes later, shaved and dressed in his usual attire of white shirt, dark tie and light gray suit, Mandino prepared a large café latte in the kitchen and carried it into his study. He sat down at his desk, pressed the “play” button on the machine and leaned forward to ensure he heard the message clearly. The caller had used a code incomprehensible to an eavesdropper, but the meaning was clear enough to Mandino. He frowned, dialed a number on his Nokia, held a brief conversation with the man at the other end, then sat back in his leather chair to consider the news he’d been given. It wasn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, what he had wanted or expected to hear.

The call was from his deputy in Rome, a man whom he had come to trust. The task he had given Antonio Carlotti had been simple enough. Just get a couple of men inside the house, get the information and get out again. But the woman had been killed—whether it had been a genuinely accidental death he neither knew nor cared—and the information the men had obtained added almost nothing to what he already knew.

For a few minutes Mandino sat at his desk, his irritation growing. He wished he’d never become involved in this mess. But it hadn’t been his choice, and the instructions he’d been given years ago had been both clear and specific. He couldn’t, he rationalized, have disregarded what they’d found out through the Internet, and the Latin phrase was the most positive clue they’d ever unearthed. He had no choice but to get on with the job.

Just, in fact, as he had no real choice about what to do next. Distasteful though it might be to him, in view of what had happened, at least one man would have to be informed.

Mandino crossed to his wall safe, spun the combination lock and opened the door.

Inside were two semiautomatic pistols, both with loaded magazines, and several thick bundles of currency secured with rubber bands, mainly U.S. dollars and middle-denomination euro notes. At the very back of the safe was a slim volume bound in old leather, its edges worn and faded, and with nothing on the front cover or the spine to indicate what it contained. Mandino took it out and carried it across to his desk, released the metal clasp that held the covers closed, and opened it.

He turned the handwritten pages slowly, scanning the faded ink lettering and wondering, as he did every time he looked at the volume, about the instructions it contained. Almost at the end of the book one page contained a list of telephone numbers, clearly a fairly recent addition, as most had been written using a ballpoint pen.

Mandino ran a finger down the list until he found the one he was looking for. Then he glanced at the digital clock on his desk and picked up his cell phone again.

III

In his office in the City, Mark Hampton had shut down his computer and was about to go off for lunch—he had a standing arrangement with three of his colleagues to meet at the pub around the corner every Wednesday—when he heard the knock. He shrugged on his jacket, walked across the room and opened the door.

Two men he didn’t recognize were standing outside. They didn’t, he was certain, work for the firm: Mark prided himself on knowing, if only by sight, all of the employees. There were stringent security precautions in place in the building as all four companies housed there were involved in investment and asset management, and their offices held financially critical data and programs, which meant that the men must have been properly checked in by the security staff.

“Mr. Hampton?” The voice didn’t quite match the suit. “I’m Detective Sergeant Timms and my colleague here is Detective Constable Harris. I’m afraid we have some very bad news for you, sir.”

Mark’s mind whirled, making instant deductions based on nothing at all, and almost immediately dismissing them. Who? Where? What had happened?

“I believe your wife is at your property in Italy, sir?”

Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

“I’m afraid there’s been an accident there. I’m very sorry to have to tell you that your wife is dead.”

Time seemed to stop. Mark could see the police officer’s mouth opening and closing, he even heard the words, but his brain completely failed to register their meaning.

He turned away and walked across to his desk, his movements mechanical and automatic. He sat down in his swivel chair and looked out of the window, seeing but not seeing the familiar shapes of the high-rise buildings that surrounded him.

Timms had continued talking to him. “The Italian police have requested that you travel out there as soon as possible, sir. Is there anybody you’d like us to contact?

Someone who can go with you? To handle the—”

“How?” Mark interrupted. “How did it happen?”

Timms glanced at Harris and gave a slight shrug. “She was found by your cleaning lady this morning. It looks as if she had a bad fall on the stairs sometime last night.

I’m afraid she broke her neck.”

Mark didn’t respond, just continued to stare out of the window. This couldn’t be happening. It must be some kind of mistake. It’s somebody else. They’ve got the name wrong. That must be it.

But Timms was still there, still spouting the kind of platitudes Mark assumed policemen had been trained to say to bereaved relatives. Why didn’t he just shut up and go away?

“Do you understand that, sir?”

“What? Sorry. Could you say that again?”

“You have to go to Italy, sir. You have to identify the body and make the funeral arrangements. The Italian police will collect you from the nearest airport—I think that’s probably Rome—and drive you to the house. They’ll organize an interpreter and whatever other help you need. Is all that clear now?”

“Yes,” Mark said. “I’m sorry. It’s just—” A racking sob shook his whole body, and he sank his face into his hands. “I’m sorry. It’s the shock and . . .”

Timms rested his hand briefly on Mark’s shoulder. “It’s quite understandable, sir.

Now, is there anything you want to ask us? I’ve a note here of the contact details for the local police force in Scandriglia. Is there anyone you’d like us to inform on your behalf? You need somebody to stand by you at a time like this.”

Mark shook his head. “No. No, thank you,” he said, his voice cracking under the strain. “I have a friend I can call. Thank you.”

Timms shook his hand and handed him a single sheet of paper. “Sorry again, sir.

I’ve also included my contact details. If there’s anything else you need that I can help with, please let me know. We’ll see ourselves out.”

As the voices faded away, Mark finally let himself go, let the tears come. Tears for himself, for Jackie, tears for all the things he should have said to her, for all that they could and should have done together. In an instant, a few words from a well-meaning stranger had changed his life beyond all recognition.

His hands shaking, he flicked through his Filofax and checked a cell phone telephone number. Timms, or whatever his name was, had been right about one thing: he definitely needed a friend, and Mark knew exactly whom he was going to call.

3

I

“Mark? What the hell’s wrong? What is it?”

Chris Bronson pulled his Mini to the side of the road and held the cell phone more closely to his ear. His friend sounded totally devastated.

“It’s Jackie. She’s dead. She—”

As he heard the words, Bronson felt as if somebody had punched him in the stomach. There were few constants in his world, but Jackie Hampton was—or had been—one of them. For several seconds he just sat there, staring through the car’s windshield, listening to Mark’s tearful explanation but hearing almost none of it.

Finally, he tried to pull himself together.

“Oh, Christ, Mark. Where did . . . ? No, never mind. Where are you? Where is she?

I’ll come straight over.”

“Italy. She’s in Italy and I have to go there. I have to identify her, all that. Look, Chris, I don’t speak the language, and you do, and I don’t think I can do this by myself. I know it’s a hell of an imposition, but could you take some time off work and come with me?”

For a moment, Bronson hesitated, sudden intense grief meshing with his long-suppressed feelings for Jackie. He genuinely didn’t know if he could handle what Mark was asking him to do. But he also knew his friend wouldn’t be able to cope without him.

“I’m not sure I’ve got a job right now, so taking time off isn’t a problem. Have you booked flights, or what?”

“No,” Mark replied. “I’ve not done anything. You’re the first person I called.”

“Right. Leave it all to me,” Bronson said, his firm voice giving the lie to his emotions.

He glanced at his watch, calculating times and what he would need to accomplish.

“I’ll pick you up at the apartment in two hours. Is that long enough for you to sort things out at your end?”

“I think so, yes. Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate this.”

“Don’t mention it. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

Bronson slipped the phone into his pocket, but didn’t move for several seconds.

Then he flipped on the turn signal and pulled the car back out into the traffic, working out what he had to do, keeping his mind focused on the mundane to avoid dwelling on the awful reality of Jackie’s sudden death.

He was only a few hundred yards from his house. Packing would take him no longer than thirty minutes, but he’d need to find his passport, pick out whichever cards had the most credit left on them, and get to the bank and draw some euros.

He’d have to let the Crescent Road station know he was taking unpaid compassionate leave and confirm they had his cell phone number—he would still have to follow the rules despite his problems with Harrison.

And then he’d have to fight his way through the London traffic to get to Mark’s crash pad in Ilford. Two hours, he guessed, should be about right. He wouldn’t bother trying to book tickets, because he wasn’t certain when they would reach Stansted, but he guessed EasyJet or Ryanair would have a flight to Rome sometime that afternoon.

II

The direct-line telephone in Joseph Cardinal Vertutti’s sumptuous office in the Vatican rang three times before he walked across to the desk and picked it up.

“Joseph Vertutti.”

The voice at the other end of the line was unfamiliar, but conveyed an unmistakable air of authority. “I need to see you.”

“Who are you?”

“That is not important. The matter concerns the Codex.”

For a moment, Vertutti didn’t grasp what his unidentified caller was talking about.

Then realization dawned, and he involuntarily gripped the edge of his desk for support.

“The what?” he asked.

“We probably don’t have a great deal of time, so please don’t mess me about. I’m talking about the Vitalian Codex, the book you keep locked away in the Apostolic Penitentiary.”

“The Vitalian Codex? Are you sure?” Even as he said the words, Vertutti realized the stupidity of the question: the very existence of the Codex was known to a mere handful of people within the Vatican and, as far as he knew, to no one outside the Holy See. But the fact that the caller was using his external direct line meant he was calling from outside the Vatican walls, and the man’s next words confirmed Vertutti’s suspicions.

“I’m very sure. You’ll need to arrange a Vatican Pass for me to—”

“No,” Vertutti interrupted. “Not here. I’ll meet you outside.” He felt uncomfortable about allowing his mystery caller access to the Holy See. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a map of Rome. Quickly his fingers traced a path south, from the Vatican Station. “In the Piazza di Santa Maria alle Fornaci, a few streets south of the Basilica di San Pietro. There’s a café on the east side, opposite the church.”

“I know it. What time?”

Vertutti automatically glanced down at his appointments book, though he knew he was not going to meet the man that morning: he wanted time to think about this meeting. “This afternoon at four thirty?” he suggested. “How will I recognize you?”

The voice in his ear chuckled. “Don’t worry, Cardinal. I’ll find you.”

III

Chris Bronson drove his Mini into the long-term parking at Stansted Airport, locked the car and led Mark toward the terminal building. Each man carried a carry-on and Bronson also held a small computer case.

Bronson had reached the Ilford apartment just more than an hour after leaving Tunbridge Wells, and Mark had been standing outside waiting when he pulled up.

The journey up to Stansted—a quick blast up the M11—had taken them well less than an hour.

“I really appreciate this, Chris,” Mark said for at least the fifth time since he’d climbed into the car.

“It’s what friends do,” Bronson replied. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Now don’t take this the wrong way, but I know being a copper doesn’t pay much, and you’re helping me out here, so I’m picking up the tab for everything.”

“There’s no need,” Bronson began a halfhearted objection, though in truth the cost of the trip had been worrying him—his overdraft was getting near its agreed limit and his credit cards couldn’t take too much punishment. He also wasn’t certain whether Harrison was going to try to suspend him or not, and what effect, if any, that would have on his salary. But Mark’s last bonus had been well into six figures: money, for him, wasn’t a problem.

“Don’t argue,” Mark said. “It’s my decision.”

When they got inside the airport, they realized they’d just missed the midafternoon Air Berlin flight to Fiumicino, but they were in good time for the five thirty Ryanair, which would get them to Rome’s Ciampino Airport at just before nine, local time.

Hampton paid with a gold credit card and was given a couple of boarding cards in return, and they made their way through the security control.

There were a few empty seats at the café close to the departure gate, so they bought drinks and sat down to wait for the flight to be called.

Mark had said very little on the journey to the airport—he was clearly still in shock, his eyes red-rimmed—but Bronson desperately needed to find out what had happened to Jackie.

“What did the police tell you?” he asked now.

“Not very much,” Mark admitted. “The Metropolitan Police received a message from the Italian police. They’d been called out to our house this morning.

Apparently our cleaning woman had gone to the house as usual, got no answer and used her key to get inside.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a brief moment, then took out a tissue and dabbed at them. “Sorry,” he said. “She told the police she’d found Jackie dead on the floor of the hall. According to the Italian police, she’d apparently stumbled on the stairs—they found both of her slippers on the staircase—and hit the side of her head against the banister.”

“And that . . .” Bronson prompted.

Mark nodded, the depth of his despair obvious. “And that broke her neck.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he took a sip of water.

“Anyway,” he went on, “Maria Palomo—she’s the cleaner—told the police that I worked in London. They traced me through the British Embassy in Rome, and they contacted the police here.”

That was the limit of his knowledge, but the paucity of information didn’t stop him speculating. Indeed, for the next hour or so he did little else but hash and rehash possible scenarios. Bronson let him—it was probably good therapy for him to get it out of his system—and, to be selfish, it gave Bronson a chance simply to sit there, contributing little to the conversation, as his mind spanned the years and he remembered Jackie when she’d been plain Jackie Evans.

Bronson and Mark had first met at school, and had formed a friendship that had endured, despite the very different career paths they’d followed. They’d both known Jackie for almost the same length of time, and Bronson had fallen helplessly, hopelessly in love with her. The problem was that Jackie only really ever had eyes for Mark. Bronson had hidden his feelings, and when Jackie married Mark, he had been the best man and Angela Lewis—the girl who would become Mrs. Bronson less than a year later—was one of the brides-maids.

“Sorry, Chris,” Mark muttered, as they finally took their seats in the rear section of the Boeing 737. “I’ve done nothing but talk about me and Jackie. You must be sick of it.”

“If you hadn’t, I’d have been really worried. Talking is good for you. It helps you come to terms with what’s happened, and I don’t mind sitting here and listening.”

“I know, and I do appreciate it. But let’s change the subject. How’s Angela?”

Bronson smiled slightly. “Perhaps not the best choice of topic. We’ve just finalized the divorce.”

“Sorry, I didn’t think. Where’s she living now?”

“She bought a small apartment in London, and I kept the little house in Tunbridge.”

“Are you talking to each other?”

“Yes, now that the lawyers are finally out of the picture. We are talking, but we’re not on particularly good terms. We just weren’t compatible, and I’m glad we found out before any kids arrived to complicate things.”

That, Bronson silently acknowledged, was the explanation both he and Angela gave anyone who asked, though he wasn’t sure if Angela really believed it. But that wasn’t why their marriage failed. With the benefit of hindsight, he knew he should never have married her—or anyone else—because he was still in love with Jackie.

Essentially, he’d been on the rebound.

“Is she still at the British Museum?”

Bronson nodded. “Still a ceramics conservator. I suppose that’s one of the reasons we split up. She works long hours there, and she had to do field trips every year.

Add that to the antisocial hours I work as a cop, and you’ll see why we started communicating by notes—we were almost never at home at the same time.”

The lie tripped easily off Bronson’s tongue. After about eighteen months of marriage he’d begun to find it easier to volunteer for overtime—there was always plenty on offer—instead of going home to an unsatisfactory relationship and the increasingly frequent rows.

“She loves her job, and I thought I loved mine, but that’s another story. Neither of us was willing to give up our career, and eventually we just drifted apart. It’s probably for the best.”

“You’ve got problems at work?” Mark asked.

“Just the one, really. My alleged superior officer is an illiterate idiot who’s hated me since the day I walked into the station. This morning I finally told him to shove it, and I’ve no idea if I’ll still have a job when I get back.”

“Why do you do it, Chris? There must be better jobs out there.”

“I know,” Bronson replied, “but I enjoy being a cop. It’s just people like D.I. Harrison who do their best to make my life a misery. I’ve applied for a transfer, and I’m going to make sure I get one.”

4

Joseph Vertutti changed into civilian clothes before leaving the Holy See and, striding down the Via Stazione di Pietro in his lightweight blue jacket and slacks, he looked like any other slightly overweight Italian businessman.

Vertutti was the cardinal head, the Prefect, of the dicastery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the oldest of the nine congregations of the Roman Curia and the direct descendant of the Roman Inquisition. Its present-day remit hadn’t changed much since the times when being burned alive was the standard punishment for heretics, only now Vertutti ensured that it was somewhat more sophisticated in its operations.

He continued south, past the church, before crossing to the east side of the street.

Then he turned north, back toward the piazza, the bright red and green paintwork of the café building contrasting with the Martini umbrellas that shaded the tables outside from the afternoon sun. Several of these tables were occupied, but there were three or four vacant at the end, and he pulled out a chair and sat down at one of them.

When the waiter finally approached, Vertutti ordered a café latte, leaning back to look around him and glancing at his watch. Twenty past four. His timing was almost perfect.

Ten minutes later the unsmiling waiter plopped a tall glass mug of coffee down in front of him, some of the liquid slopping into the saucer. As the waiter moved away, a heavyset man wearing a gray suit and sporting sunglasses pulled back the chair on the other side of the table and sat down.

At the same moment, two young men wearing dark suits and sunglasses each took a seat at the nearest tables, flanking them. They looked well built and very fit, and exuded an almost palpable air of menace. They glanced with disinterest at Vertutti, then began scanning the street and the pedestrians passing in front of the café.

Although he’d been watching the road carefully, Vertutti had no idea where the three men had come from.

The moment his companion was seated, the waiter reappeared, took his order and vanished, taking Vertutti’s slopped drink with him. In less than two minutes he was back, two fresh lattes on a tray, together with a basket of croissants and sweet rolls.

“They know me here,” the man said, speaking for the first time.

“Who exactly are you?” Vertutti demanded. “Are you a church official?”

“My name is Gregori Mandino,” the man said, “and I’m delighted to say I’ve got no direct link to the Catholic Church.”

“Then how do you know about the Codex?”

“I know because I’m paid to know. More important,” Mandino added, glancing around to ensure they weren’t overheard, “I’ve been paid to watch for any sign that the document the Codex refers to might have been found.”

“Paid by whom?”

“By you. Or, more accurately, by the Vatican. My organization has its roots in Sicily but now has extensive business interests in Rome and throughout Italy. We’ve been working closely with the Mother Church for nearly a hundred and fifty years.”

“I know nothing of this,” Vertutti spluttered. “What organization?”

“If you think about it you’ll realize who I represent.”

For a long moment Vertutti stared at Mandino, but it was only when he glanced at the adjoining tables, at the two alert young men who hadn’t touched their drinks and who were still scanning the crowds, that the penny finally dropped. He shook his head, disbelief etched on his florid features.

“I refuse to believe we have ever been involved with the Cosa Nostra.”

Mandino nodded patiently. “You have,” he said, “since about the middle of the nineteenth century, in fact. If you don’t believe me, go back to the Vatican and check, but in the meantime let me tell you a story which has been omitted from official Vatican history. One of the longest-serving popes was Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti, Pope Pius IX, who—”

“I know who he was,” Vertutti snapped impatiently.

“I’m glad to hear it. Then you should know that in 1870 he found himself virtually besieged by the newly unified Italian state. Ten years earlier the state had subsumed both Sicily and the Papal States, and Pius encouraged Catholics to refuse cooperation, something we’d been doing for years. Our unofficial relationship began then, and we’ve worked together ever since.”

“That’s complete nonsense,” Vertutti said, his voice thick with anger. He sat back in the chair and folded his arms, his face flushed. This man—virtually a self-confessed criminal—was suggesting that for the last century and a half the Vatican, the oldest, holiest and most important part of the Mother of all Churches, had been deeply involved with the most notorious criminal organization on the planet. In any other context it would have been laughable.

And to cap it all, he, one of the most senior cardinals of the Roman Curia, was now sitting in a pavement café in the middle of Rome, sharing a drink with a senior Mafioso. And he had no doubts that Mandino was high-ranking: the deference exhibited by the normally surly waiters, the two bodyguards, and the man’s whole air of authority and command proved that clearly enough. And this man—this gangster—knew about a document hidden in the Vatican archives, a document whose very existence Vertutti had believed was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the Catholic Church.

But Mandino hadn’t finished. “Cards on the table, Eminence,” he said, the last word almost a sneer. “I was christened a Catholic, like almost every other Italian child, but I’ve not set foot inside a church for forty years, because I know that Christianity is nonsense. Like every other religion, it’s based entirely on fiction.”

Cardinal Vertutti blanched. “That’s blasphemous rubbish. The Catholic Church can trace its origins back for two millennia, based upon the life and deeds and very words of Jesus Christ our Lord. The Vatican is the focus of the religion of countless millions of believers in almost every country in the world. How dare you say that you’re right and everyone else is wrong?”

“I dare say it because I’ve done my research, instead of just accepting the smoke and mirrors the Catholic Church hides behind. Whether or not huge numbers of people believe something has no bearing whatsoever on its truth or validity. In the past, millions believed that the earth was flat, and that the sun and the stars revolved around it. They were just as wrong then as Christians are today.”

“Your arrogance astounds me. Christianity is based upon the unimpeachable authority of the words of Jesus Christ himself, the son of God. Are you really denying the truth of the Word of God and the Holy Bible?”

Mandino smiled slightly and nodded. “You’ve gone right to the crux of the matter, Cardinal. There’s no such thing as the Word of God—only the word of man. Every religious tract ever written has been the work of men, usually writing something for their own personal gain or to suit their individual circumstances. Name me one single thing—anything at all—that proves God exists.”

Vertutti opened his mouth to reply, but Mandino beat him to it. “I know. You have to have faith. Well, I don’t, because I’ve studied the Christian religion, and I know that it’s an opiate designed to keep the people in line and allow the men who run the Church and the Vatican to live in luxury without actually doing a useful job of work.

“You can’t prove God exists, but I can almost prove that Jesus didn’t. The only place where there’s any reference to Jesus Christ is in the New Testament, and that—and you know this just as well as I do, whether you admit it or not—is a heavily edited collection of writings, not one of which can be considered to be even vaguely contemporary with the subject matter. To come up with the “agreed” gospels, the Church banned dozens of other writings that flatly contradict the Jesus myth.

“If Jesus was such a charismatic and inspiring leader, and performed the miracles and all the other things the Church claims he did, how come there’s not one single reference to him in any piece of contemporary Greek, Roman or Jewish literature? If this man was so important, attracted such a devoted following and was such a thorn in the side of the occupying Roman army, why didn’t anybody write something about him? The fact is that he only exists in the New Testament, the “source” that the Church has fabricated and edited over the centuries, and there’s not a single shred of independent evidence that he ever even existed.”

Like every churchman, Vertutti was used to people doubting the Word of God—in an increasingly Godless world, that was inevitable—but Mandino seemed to harbor an almost pathological hatred of the Church and everything it stood for. And that begged the obvious question.

“If you hate and despise the Church so much, Mandino, why are you involved in this matter at all? Why should you care about the future of the Catholic religion?”

“I’ve already told you, Cardinal. We agreed to undertake this task many years ago, and my organization takes its responsibilities seriously. No matter what my personal feelings, I’ll do my best to finish the job.”

“You’re lucky to be living in this century if you harbor such heretical views.”

“I know. In the Middle Ages, no doubt, you’d have chained me to a post and burned me alive to make me see things your way.”

Vertutti took a sip of his drink. Despite his instant and total loathing for this man, he knew he was going to have to work with him to resolve the present crisis. He put the mug back on the table and looked across at Mandino.

“We must agree to differ in our views of the Church and the Vatican,” he said. “I’m much more concerned about the matter in hand. You obviously know something about the Codex. Who told you about it?”

Mandino nodded and leaned forward. “My organization has been involved in the quest to find the source document since the beginning of the last century,” he began.

“The task has always been the sole responsibility of the head—the capofamiglia—of the Rome family. When that mantle fell upon my shoulders, I was given a book to read, a book that to me made little sense. So I sought clarification from your dicastery, as the source of the original request, and your predecessor was kind enough to supply me with some additional information, facts that he believed would help me to appreciate the critical nature of the task.”

“He should never have done so.” Vertutti’s voice was low and angry. “Knowledge of this matter is restricted to only a few of the most trusted and reliable senior Vatican officials. What did he tell you?”

“Not a great deal,” Mandino replied, his tone now conciliatory. “He simply explained that the Church was seeking a document lost for centuries, an ancient text that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone outside the Vatican.”

“That was all?” Vertutti asked.

“More or less, yes.”

Vertutti felt a surge of relief. If that genuinely was all the information his predecessor had divulged, then little real damage had been done. The Vitalian Codex was certainly the darkest of all the multitude of secrets hidden in the Apostolic Penitentiary and it seemed that for now this particular secret was safe. But the crux of the matter was whether he trusted Gregori Mandino enough to believe him.

“We’ve established you know about the Codex. But what I still don’t know is why you called me. Do you have some information? Has something happened?”

Mandino appeared to ignore the question. “All in good time, Eminence. You’re obviously not aware that a small group of my people has been constantly watching for the publication of any of the significant words and phrases contained within the Codex. This is in accordance with the written instructions given to us by your dicastery more than a hundred years ago.

“We have monitoring systems in all the obvious places, but since the arrival of the Internet, we’ve also focused on dead language translation sites, both the online programs and those supplying more professional services. With the agreement of your predecessor, we set up a small office here in Rome, ostensibly charged with the identification, recovery and study of ancient texts. Under the guise of scholarly research, we requested all Latin, Hebrew, Greek, Coptic and Aramaic translators we were able to identify to advise us whenever they received passages that contained the target words, and almost all of them agreed.

“We’ve also approached the online programs, and most of these have been easier—it’s amazing what cooperation you get if people think you work for the Pope. We’ve simply supplied the same word list for each language service, and in every case the Web site owners have agreed to notify us whenever anyone requests a translation that fits the parameters. Most of the sites have automatic systems that send us e-mails containing the word or words, and any other information they have about the person making the request. This sometimes includes their name and e-mail, but we always get their IP address.”

“Which is what?” Vertutti asked.

“It’s a set of numbers that identify a location on the Internet. We can use it to find the person’s address, or at least the address of the computer they used. Obviously if an inquiry comes from an Internet café there’s no easy way of identifying the person who made it.”

“Is all this relevant?”

“Yes, just bear with me. We’ve cast our net wide and we’ve specified a huge number of words to ensure that nothing gets past us. We also have programs in place that scan the e-mails we receive and identify the most likely matches. They’re known as syntax checkers. Until last week, no expression scored more than forty-two percent.

“And then two days ago we received this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a single sheet of paper. He unfolded it and handed it to Vertutti. “The syntax checkers rated it at seventy-three to seventy-six percent, almost double the highest score we’d seen previously.”

Vertutti looked down at the page in front of him. On it, typed in capital letters, were three words in Latin:

HIC VANIDICI LATITANT

5

I

“And this came from where, exactly?” Joseph Cardinal Vertutti asked, still staring down at the paper in his hand. Below the Latin was a translation of the words into Italian.

“An online translation program on a server located in America—Arlington, Virginia, to be exact. But the inquiry originated here in Italy, at an address only a few miles outside Rome.”

“Why would they choose an American site?”

Gregori Mandino shrugged. “On the Internet, geographical locations are irrelevant.

People pick whatever site they find the easiest to use or the fastest or most comprehensive.”

“And the translation? Is this what the program provided?”

“No, though it’s fairly close. The American site suggested ‘In this place or location the liars are concealed, ’ which is clumsy at best. My language specialist’s interpretation is much more elegant: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”

“The Latin is clear enough,” Vertutti murmured. “ ‘Hic’ is obviously ‘here,’ and I would perhaps have expected ‘vatis mendacis’—‘false prophets’—rather than

‘vanidici,’ but why ‘latitant’? Surely ‘occubant’ would have been more literal?”

Mandino smiled slightly and extracted two photographs. “We anticipated that question, Eminence, and you would have been right if this inscription had been found at a grave site. ‘Occubant’—‘buried’ or ‘resting in the grave’—would have been far more likely. But this inscription isn’t on a tombstone. It’s carved on a small oblong stone that’s part of the wall above a fireplace in a six-hundred-year-old converted farmhouse in the Monti Sabini region.”

“What?” For the first time, Vertutti was shocked. “Let me see those pictures,” he instructed.

Mandino passed them over and Vertutti studied them for a few moments. One was a close-up view of the inscription, and the other several stones over a large fireplace.

“Then why,” he asked, “are you so certain this has anything at all to do with the Codex?”

“I wasn’t at first, and that’s why I decided to investigate further. And that, I’m afraid, is when things went wrong.”

“You’d better explain.”

“The person who made this inquiry left their e-mail address—it’s one of the conditions of using this particular site—and that made tracing them a lot easier. We identified the house from which the request for the translation was made. It’s located a short distance off the road between Ponticelli and Scandriglia, and was bought last year by an English couple named Hampton.”

“And then what did you do?” Vertutti demanded, fearing the worst.

“I instructed my deputy to send two men to the house when we believed the owners would be away in Britain, but what we didn’t know was that Signora Hampton was still on the property. For some reason she hadn’t accompanied her husband. The men broke in and began searching for the source of the Latin phrase, and quickly located it carved into the stone above the fireplace. It had been covered in plaster that a team of builders are replacing and only part of the stone had been exposed.

That section contained the inscription.

“They’d been ordered to find the Latin phrase and anything else that might be relevant, and their first task was to check the entire stone for any other inscriptions.

The men began chipping away the plaster but Signora Hampton heard them, and came down to investigate. When she saw what was happening she ran away. One of the men chased her, and in a scuffle on the stairs she fell against the banister rail and broke her neck. It was a simple accident.”

This was even worse than Vertutti had expected. An innocent woman dead. “A simple accident?” he echoed. “Do you really expect me to believe that? I know the way your organization works. Are you sure she wasn’t pushed? Or even beaten to death?”

Mandino smiled coldly. “I can only repeat what I’ve been told. We’ll never know what really happened in that house, but the woman would have had to die eventually. I understand that the provisions of the Sanction are unambiguous.”

In the middle of the seventh century, Pope Vitalian had written the Codex by hand, not wishing to entrust his recommendations to even the most devoted of scribes.

Down the centuries, the contents of the Codex had been known to only a handful of the most senior and trusted men in the Vatican, including the reigning pope. None had recorded any reservations about the steps Vitalian had suggested—known as the Vitalian Sanction—should any of the forbidden relics surface, but that was hardly surprising.

“Don’t you dare presume to lecture me about the Sanction. How do you even know about it?” Vertutti demanded, his eyes flashing with annoyance.

Mandino shrugged. “Again, from your predecessor. He told me that anyone who finds this document or has knowledge of its contents would be considered so dangerous to the Church that his or her life would be forfeit. For the good of the Church, obviously.”

“The cardinal exaggerated.” Vertutti leaned forward to emphasize the point. “This document must be recovered, and under no circumstances must it be allowed to enter the public domain. That much is true. The provisions of the Sanction are secret, but I can tell you that assassination is not one of the options suggested.”

“Really, Eminence? The Church has openly sanctioned assassinations in the past. In fact, it’s even condoned them inside the Vatican, and you know that as well as I do.”

“Rubbish. Name one single incident.”

“That’s easy. Pope Pius XI was almost certainly assassinated in 1939 to prevent him making a crucial speech condemning Fascism at a time when the papacy had decided to embrace it. It was no surprise when his successor, Pius XII, openly supported the Third Reich.”

“That’s a frivolous allegation that has never been proven.”

Mandino spat back, equally angry, “Of course it hasn’t. But that’s because the Vatican has refused to allow independent investigations into events that occur inside the Holy See. But just because the Vatican refuses to acknowledge something, that does not mean it hasn’t happened or doesn’t exist.”

“Some people will try anything to besmirch the good name of the Church.” Vertutti sat back, convinced he’d scored a point. “And your hypocrisy astounds me. You trying to lecture me about morality and murder.”

“It’s not hypocritical at all, Eminence.” Again, Mandino sneered the word. “At least the Cosa Nostra doesn’t hide behind the trappings of religion. Just like us, the hands of the Catholic Church have been stained red with blood throughout the centuries, and still are today.”

For a few moments both men remained silent, glaring at each other across the table, then Vertutti dropped his gaze.

“This is getting us nowhere, and obviously we’ll have to work together.” He took another sip of his coffee to emphasize the change of mood. “Now, was the search by these men successful? What else did they find?”

“Nothing much,” Mandino replied calmly, as if they hadn’t, a few seconds ago, exchanged harsh words. “The same Latin text that the Hamptons found. My two men cleared all the plaster off the stone and photographed it, and made a written copy as well, but they found no other words on it.”

Vertutti shook his head. Not just a death, but a completely pointless one. “So you’re saying that the woman died for nothing.”

Mandino gave a tight smile. “Not entirely. We did find something that the Hamptons probably dismissed as unimportant. Look closely at this photograph and you’ll see it.”

Vertutti took the picture from Mandino—it was the close-up of the inscription—and stared at it for a few seconds. “I can’t see anything else,” he said.

“It isn’t another word, just eight letters: one group of two and another of three, close together, and a further group of three letters. They’re at the bottom of the inscription, and very much smaller, almost like a signature.” Mandino paused, savoring the moment. “The first two groups of letters spell ‘PO’ and ‘LDA,’ and I think we can both work out what they mean. The final three are ‘MAM,’ and we believe they stand for ‘Marcus Asinius Marcellus.’ And that, I think, is all the proof we need.”

II

They knew the house should be deserted, but even so Rogan and Alberti waited until just after ten thirty in the evening before they approached the building: it was just possible that the police might have left an officer there. Rogan walked around to the back, checking for any telltale lights shining or cars parked outside, but saw nothing. Satisfied, he and Alberti walked to the back door.

Both men were keenly aware that Mandino and his deputy Carlotti were extremely unhappy with them because of the death of the woman and, though the orders Carlotti had given them didn’t make a lot of sense, they were determined to carry them out perfectly.

Alberti produced a collapsible jimmy from his pocket, inserted the tip between the door and the jamb and levered gently. With a slight splintering sound, the screws holding the lock in place pulled easily out of the wood, just as they’d done the previous evening, and the door swung open.

Leaving Alberti to replace the lock—they’d leave by the front door, as before—

Rogan walked through the house to the staircase, lighting his way with a pencil flashlight, and ascended to the first floor. He wasn’t sure exactly where he’d find what he was looking for, so he tried every room, but without success. It had to be downstairs somewhere.

It was. Four doors opened off the hall, and the third one revealed a small study. On the desk the light of the flashlight revealed a flat-panel computer monitor, keyboard and mouse, with the system unit on the floor beside it. There was also a telephone and a combined scanner and printer, plus a scatter of papers, pens, Post-it notes and the usual stuff to be found in any small office.

“Excellent,” Rogan murmured. He walked across to the window, glanced through the glass to confirm that the outside shutters were closed, then drew the curtains.

Only then did he turn on the main light.

He sat down in the leather swivel chair behind the desk and switched on the computer and screen. While he waited for the machine to load the operating system, he quickly checked the papers on the desk, looking for any notes that might refer to the inscription. He found a single sheet of paper on which the three Latin words had been written, with an English translation underneath. He folded the page and put it in his pocket, then continued his search, but found nothing else.

When the Windows desktop was displayed, Rogan used the mouse to open Internet Explorer. He selected “Internet Options” and cleared the history of recently visited Web sites. He also checked the “Favorites” list, looking for anything resembling the Web sites Carlotti had specified, but found nothing. Then he scanned the sent and received e-mails in Outlook Express, again following Carlotti’s precise instructions, but once more his search was fruitless. Rogan checked his written instructions one final time, shrugged and then shut down the computer.

He took a last look around the room, switched off the light and walked out. Alberti was waiting in the hall.

“We’ll check the living room again,” Rogan said, and led the way. The new plaster over the fireplace was still slightly damp to the touch, but was a good match for that on the adjacent wall.

The two men inspected the room thoroughly, looking for pictures or drawings that might show the now-invisible inscription, but found nothing.

“I think that’s it,” Rogan said. “We’ve done everything the capo wanted. Let’s get out of here.”

They were twenty-five minutes and nearly thirty kilometers away from the house when Rogan suddenly realized that he’d forgotten to open the curtains in the study.

He eased his foot off the accelerator pedal while he debated whether or not they should go back, but eventually decided it didn’t matter. After all, what could anyone possibly deduce from a set of drawn curtains?

6

It was almost midnight when the taxi turned into the gravel drive, the car’s headlights washing over the old stone walls of the Villa Rosa and startling a fox that was making its solitary way through the garden. Mark looked wrecked, staring at the house with a kind of horrified fascination as the car pulled to a halt. They lifted their bags out of the trunk and watched as the taxi drove away.

“Wait here, Mark. I’ll go in first.”

Hampton nodded, but didn’t respond. He pulled a bunch of keys from his jacket pocket and passed it over. Bronson left his bag on the drive, walked over to the front door of the property and undid the lock. The door swung open and he stepped inside, turning on the hall lights as he did so.

Inevitably, the first place he looked was the stone floor at the foot of the wide oak staircase. It wasn’t anything like as bad as he’d feared: the mark where Jackie’s head wound had bled was still just visible as an almost circular discoloration, but somebody—probably the cleaning woman, Maria Palomo—had cleaned off the blood. There was an oblong rug beside the hall table, and Bronson dragged it over the floor until it completely covered the mark on the flagstones.

Waves of sadness rolled over him. He imagined Jackie, her body crumpled on the floor, unable to call out for help and probably knowing that she was dying. What a terrible, lonely, appalling way to die. He felt the tears welling up, and angrily brushed them away. He had to be strong. For himself, for Jackie and especially for Mark.

The stairs and hall had obviously been cleaned, and every attempt made to conceal the fact that a fatal accident had occurred in that part of the house. There was even a vase of fresh flowers on the table. Bronson made a note to give the cleaner some extra money.

He quickly walked around the rest of the property, upstairs and down, checking that the Italian police and forensic people hadn’t left any debris or equipment, then went back outside.

“OK, Mark?”

Mark nodded, quite obviously anything but “OK,” and followed Bronson to the door of the house.

“Go through to the kitchen,” Bronson suggested. “We’ll have a drink and then get to bed. I’ll sort out the bags.”

Mark didn’t respond, just stared at the staircase and the hall floor for a few seconds, then walked down the short passage that led to the rear of the property. Bronson stepped back outside, collected their two bags and returned to the house.

He left the bags in the hall and walked through to the kitchen. Mark was sitting in an upright chair, staring at the wall. Bronson opened cupboards, finding tea and coffee, then a tin of drinking chocolate and a half-full jar of Horlicks. That wasn’t what he wanted, but in a floor-level cupboard he found a selection of bottles of spirits and pulled out two of them.

“Whiskey or brandy?” Bronson asked. “Or do you want something else?”

Mark looked up at him, almost as if he was surprised to see him there. “What?”

Bronson repeated the question, holding up the bottles for emphasis.

“Oh, brandy, please. I can’t bear that other stuff.”

Bronson sat opposite his friend and slid a half-full tumbler across the table.

“Drink that, then get up to bed. It’s been a long day and you must be exhausted.”

Mark took a sip. “You should be exhausted as well.”

“I am,” Bronson said with a slight smile, “but I’m more concerned about you. Which bedroom do you want to use?”

“Not the master suite, Chris,” Mark said, a distinct tremor in his voice. “I can’t face that.”

Bronson had already checked the master bedroom. Someone had tidied it—probably the cleaner—because the bed was made and Jackie’s clothes neatly folded on a chair.

“No problem. I’ll take your bag up to one of the guest rooms.” Bronson put down his tumbler and left the kitchen, but was back in a few minutes, a small brown tablet bottle in his hand. “Here,” he said, “take one of these. They’ll help you sleep.”

“What are they?”

“Melatonin. I found them in the bathroom. They’re good for jet lag because they relax you and help you get to sleep. And they’re nonaddictive, not like normal sleeping pills.”

Mark nodded, and washed down the tablets with the rest of his brandy.

Bronson rinsed their glasses and put them in the sink. “Go on up. I’m just going to check the house, make sure all the doors and windows are locked, then I’ll follow you.”

Mark nodded and left the room. In the hall, Bronson bolted the main door, then walked around the ground floor, room by room, checking that all the windows were locked and the outside shutters bolted.

He finished his security check back in the kitchen and, as he made sure the key was turned in the back-door lock, he glanced down at the floor. There was something on it, some small brown particles. He bent down to look more closely, picked up a couple of the larger fragments and rolled them between his forefinger and thumb.

They were obviously small pieces of wood, and Bronson glanced up at the ceiling above him, wondering if the old house had a woodworm or termite problem. But the beams and floorboards were blackened with age and looked absolutely solid. The fragments weren’t residue from insects either. Boring insects reduce wood almost to dust, and what he was holding in his hand were more like small wooden splinters.

Bronson unlocked the door to check the outside of it and immediately noticed on the doorframe, and level with the lock itself, a small section of compressed wood about one inch square. He knew immediately what had caused it—he’d been to enough burglaries in his short career as a police officer to recognize the marks made by a jimmy or crowbar. Obviously someone had forced the door, and fairly recently. The fragments of wood had almost certainly been ripped out when the lock was torn off.

He examined the lock carefully. Even with his bare hands, he could move it very slightly—all the original screws were there, but had barely enough purchase to keep the lock in position on the door. Somebody had broken into the house—that much was obvious—then replaced the lock and presumably left the property by the front door, which would self-lock because of the Yale. He guessed that the burglars had done this—if the cleaning woman had found the lock ripped off, she would presumably have left a message or told the police, and if the police had found it, they would hopefully have done more than just shove the screws back in the holes.

What puzzled Bronson was why any burglar would waste his time replacing the lock. In his experience, most people who broke into houses chose the easiest point of entry, picked up every item of value they could carry, and then left by the simplest route. Fast in, fast out. But in the Hamptons’ property they must have taken several minutes to refit the lock. The only possible reason he could come up with was that the burglars hadn’t wanted anyone to know they’d been inside the house, and that really didn’t make any sense. Why should they care? The homeowner would know immediately that he’d been robbed. Unless, of course, the burglars didn’t take anything, but if that were the case what was the point of them breaking in?

Bronson shook his head. He was tired after the flight and could no longer think clearly. He’d try to work out what the hell was going on once he’d got some sleep.

He looked around the kitchen and selected one of the upright chairs that flanked the wooden table. He picked it up and wedged its back under the door handle, kicking the legs to jam it firmly into position. He placed another chair behind it, so that even if somebody did force the door, the noise they’d make getting in would awaken him.

Then he went up to bed. The forced door was a puzzle that would have to wait until the morning.

7

I

Bronson woke early. His sleep had been restless and his dreams peopled with unaccountably vivid pictures of Jackie on her wedding day, smiling and radiant, contrasting with his constructed image of her crumpled body lying dead on the cold and unyielding flagstones of the hall floor.

He padded down the staircase at just after seven and went straight into the kitchen.

While he waited for the kettle to boil, he removed the chair he’d used to jam the door the previous night and looked again at the damage. In daylight, the marks were even more clearly visible.

He walked around the room, opening cupboards and looking for a screwdriver.

Under the sink he found a blue metal box where Mark kept a good selection of tools, a necessity in any old house. But there were no screws, which were what he needed to secure the lock properly.

Bronson made a pot of coffee, and ate a bowl of cereal for breakfast, then took a set of keys and went out to the garage. He found a plastic box half full of woodscrews on a shelf at the back. Ten minutes later, he’d fixed the lock back on the door using thicker screws about half an inch longer than the originals, but because the screws had been torn out of the wood when the door was forced, the holes had been enlarged and the wood weakened. He was certain that, even with the bigger screws in place, quite gentle pressure on the door from the outside would probably rip the lock off again. He could find a couple of bolts to fit on the door but he would have to check that with Mark before he did it. Next, he inspected the entire building for other signs of forced entry, but found nothing else.

The property stood on the side of a hill, honey-colored stone walls and small windows under a red-tiled roof, in the center of a pleasantly overgrown garden of about half an acre, a satisfying mix of lawns, shrubs and trees. Beside the house a lane snaked away up the hill to a handful of other isolated properties. The closest town—Ponticelli—was about five kilometers distant.

Bronson had visited the house twice before, once when the Hamptons had just bought it but hadn’t yet moved in, and a second time, a month or so later, before all the renovation works began. He remembered the property well, and had always liked the feel of it. It was a big, rambling, slightly dilapidated farmhouse, which displayed its advanced age with a mix of charm, solidity and eccentricity. The blackened beams and floor timbers contrasted with the thick stone walls: some plastered, but many not. Jackie always used to say, her voice tinged with both pleasure and irritation, that there wasn’t a straight wall or a square corner anywhere in the house.

Bronson smiled sadly at his memories. Jackie had loved the old house from the first, adored the relaxed Italian lifestyle, the café society, the food and wine, and the weather. Even when it rained, she’d said, it seemed somehow less wet than British drizzle. Mark had pointed out the logical impossibility of her argument, but that hadn’t swayed her.

And now, it finally hit Bronson that he’d never hear her cheerful voice again, never be carried away by her infectious enthusiasm for all things Italian, from the cheap Chianti they bought from a small and dusty shop in the local village to the mind-blowing beauty of the lakes.

He could feel the tears coming, and quickly brought that train of thought to a halt.

He forced himself to concentrate on checking the building, looking for any sign that a burglary had occurred.

Of course, with builders’ tools and equipment, bags of plaster and pots of paint stacked up in almost every room, the property looked very different from his recollection. Most of the furniture had been shifted into piles and covered in dust sheets to allow the builders space to work, but Bronson was still able to identify most of the more valuable items—the TV, the stereo and computer, and half a dozen decent paintings—and even, in the master bedroom, nearly a thousand euros in notes tucked under a bottle of perfume on Jackie’s dressing table.

As he walked around the house, he wondered if Mark would want to keep it, and its tragic mix of memories, or just sell the place and walk away.

A few minutes later, Bronson sat down at the kitchen table and looked at the wall clock. If Mark didn’t get up soon, he was going to have to go and wake him: they had things—unpleasant things for both of them—to do today. But even as the thought crossed his mind, he heard his friend’s footsteps on the stairs.

Mark looked dreadful. He was unshaven, unwashed and haggard, wearing an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt that had seen better days. Bronson filled a mug with black coffee and put it on the table in front of him.

“Morning,” he said, as Mark sat down. “Would you like some breakfast?”

His friend shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ll just stick to coffee. I feel about as sharp as a sponge this morning. How long have we got?”

Bronson glanced at his watch. “The mortuary is about a fifteen-minute drive, and we need to be there at nine. You’d better drink that, then we should both go and get ready. Do you want me to ring for a taxi?”

Mark shook his head and took another sip of his coffee. “We’ll take the Alfa,” he said. “The keys are on the hall table, in the small red bowl.”

They left the house thirty minutes later. The temperature was already climbing steeply and there wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, a beautiful day. It would have suited their moods better if it had been raining.

II

Joseph Cardinal Vertutti stared at the ancient text in front of him. He was in the archives of the Apostolic Penitentiary, the most secret and secure of the Vatican’s numerous repositories. Most of the texts stored there were either Papal documents or material that would never be made public because it was protected by the Seal of the Confessional, the promise of absolute confidentiality for Roman Catholic priests for any information gleaned during the confessional. Because access to the archives was strictly controlled, and the contents of the documents never revealed, it was the ideal place to secrete anything the Vatican considered especially dangerous. Which was precisely why the Vitalian Codex had been stored there.

He was sitting at a table in an internal room, the door of which he’d locked from the inside. He pulled on a pair of thin cotton gloves—the fifteen-hundred-year-old relic was extremely fragile and even the slightest amount of moisture from his fingertips could do irreparable long-term damage to the pages. Hands trembling, he reached out and carefully opened the Codex.

The seventh-century Church of Christ, headed by Pope Vitalian, had existed in chaotic times. The arrival of Muhammad and the subsequent emergence of Islam had been a disaster for Christianity and within a few years Christian bishops had virtually vanished from the Middle East and Africa, and both Jerusalem and Egypt became Muslim. The Christian world had been decimated in just a few decades, despite the strenuous efforts of Vitalian and his predecessors to convert the inhabitants of the British Isles and Western Europe.

Somehow Vitalian had found time to study the contents of the archives. He’d summarized his findings in the Codex that bore his name and which Vertutti was studying yet again.

He had first seen the document just more than a decade earlier, and it had frankly terrified him then. He wasn’t even sure why he was looking at it again. There was no information in the Codex he hadn’t already studied and memorized.

The conversation he’d had with Mandino had disturbed him more than he was willing to admit, and as soon as he’d returned to his offices in the Vatican, Vertutti had spent more than an hour meditating and praying for guidance. It greatly concerned him that the very future of the Vatican had, almost by chance, been placed in the hands of a man who was not only a career criminal, but—far worse—also a committed atheist, a man who was apparently almost rabid in his hatred of the Catholic Church.

But as far as Vertutti could see, there was no alternative. Mandino held all the cards.

Thanks to Vertutti’s predecessor in the dicastery, and despite the most explicit prohibitions against the dissemination of such information, the mobster had intimate knowledge of the quest begun by Pope Vitalian almost one and a half millennia earlier. On the plus side, he also had the necessary technical resources to complete the task, and men who were willing to follow whatever orders he gave.

Vertutti’s gaze dropped down to the Codex. He’d been turning the pages of the ancient document without really seeing them. Now, as he stared at the Latin sentences, he realized that the open page described the finding of the text that had so terrified Pope Vitalian, and had produced the same effect on his successors through the ages. Vertutti read the words again—words almost as familiar to him as the prayers he offered daily—and shuddered.

Then he carefully closed the Codex. He would replace the document in its climate-controlled safe and then return to his office and his Bible. He needed to pray again, and perhaps the holy book would guide him, reveal to him the best way to try to avert the disaster that was almost certainly just around the corner.

III

To say the identification of Jackie’s body had been traumatic was an understatement.

The moment the mortuary technician lifted the sheet to reveal his wife’s face, Mark virtually collapsed, and Bronson had to grab his arm to steady him. The police officer who’d been waiting for them outside the mortuary opened his notebook and asked formally, and in passable English, if the body was that of Jacqueline Mary Hampton, but all Mark could do was nod, before turning away and stumbling from the viewing room. Bronson sat him down in the waiting room, then returned to talk to the officer.

Bronson was holding it together, just. If Mark hadn’t been standing beside him, relying on him for support, he probably wouldn’t have been able to handle the moment. He’d been in mortuaries dozens of times as an attending officer, waiting for desperate relatives to confirm their nightmares and identify the corpse on the table, but this was the first time, ever, that he’d been on the other side, as it were.

Jackie looked incredibly peaceful, as though she was merely asleep and might at any moment open her eyes and sit up, and as beautiful as ever. Somebody had taken a lot of trouble over her appearance. Her hair was brushed back and looked freshly washed; her complexion appeared flawless. Bronson forced himself to take a closer look, tried to be professionally detached, and then saw the heavy makeup on her forehead and cheeks, obviously concealing large bruises. And she was pale, much paler than she’d ever been in life.

He shook hands with the police officer, took a long last look at the woman who’d been his first and all-consuming love, and stumbled out of the room.

Once the documentation had been completed, Bronson and Mark headed outside to the parked Alfa Romeo.

“I’m sorry, Chris,” Mark said, tears streaming uncontrollably down his face, his eyes red and puffy. “It only really hit me when I saw her body just lying there on that slab.”

Bronson just shook his head. He didn’t trust himself to speak without breaking down.

Their route out of the town took them past a pharmacy. Bronson pulled the car to a stop at the side of the road, went into the shop and emerged a few minutes later carrying a small paper bag.

“These should help,” he said, handing the bag to Mark. “They’re mild tranquilizers.

They’ll help you to relax.”

At the house, Bronson poured his friend a glass of water and insisted he take a couple of the tablets.

“I won’t be able to sleep, Chris. Everything’s just going round and round in my head.”

“At least go and lie down upstairs. You need to rest, even if you stay awake all afternoon.”

Reluctantly, Mark took the drink and headed for the stairs.

Breakfast seemed an age ago, and Bronson found he was hungry. He looked in the walk-in larder and the big American fridge and found ham, bread and mustard, and made himself a couple of sandwiches and a pot of coffee to wash them down. When he’d finished eating he loaded the plates into the dishwasher and crept upstairs.

Outside Mark’s bedroom he stopped and listened at the door. He could hear the sound of gentle snoring, so he knew the tranquilizers had done their job. He smiled briefly, then retraced his steps.

Bronson had looked around the house that morning, but he wanted to check the property again. He was still worried about the “burglary,” and was sure he must have missed something, some clue that would reveal why the property had been broken into.

He started in a methodical way, in the kitchen where the door had been forced, and then worked his way around the rest of the house. He even checked the garage and the two outbuildings where Mark kept the lawn mower and other gardening tools.

Nothing appeared to be missing, and he could find no other sign of damage or forced entry anywhere in the house. It just didn’t make sense.

Bronson was standing in the hall, looking up at the staircase where Jackie had fallen, when he heard the crunch of car tires on the gravel drive. He peered out the window and saw that a police car had pulled up outside the house.

“You are Signor Hampton?” the officer asked in halting English, stepping forward and extending his hand.

“No,” Bronson replied, in fluent Italian. “My name’s Chris Bronson and I’m a close friend of Mark Hampton. You’ll appreciate that the death of his wife has come as a severe shock. He’s asleep upstairs and I really don’t want to disturb him unless I have to.”

The officer, seemingly relieved at Bronson’s command of the language, reverted to his native tongue. “I’ve been sent here to give Signor Hampton the results of the autopsy we carried out on his wife.”

“That’s no problem,” Bronson replied. “Come on in. I can explain everything to him when he wakes up.”

“Very well.” The policeman followed Bronson into the kitchen, sat down at the table and opened the slim briefcase he was carrying. He extracted a buff folder containing several typed sheets of paper, some photographs and diagrams.

“It was a tragic accident,” he began, and passed two pictures across to Bronson. “The first photograph shows the staircase of the house, taken from just inside the hall. If you look here”—he took a pen out of his uniform jacket pocket and pointed—“and here, you’ll see two slippers on the stairs, one close to the bottom and the other nearer the top. And this one shows the victim’s body lying on the floor at the foot of the staircase.”

Bronson braced himself to look at the image, but the picture wasn’t anything like as bad as he’d feared. Again, the photograph had been taken from just inside the hall, and had probably been intended only to show the position of the corpse in relation to the staircase. Jackie’s face was not visible, and Bronson found he was able to study the picture almost emotionlessly.

“Reconstructing the sequence of events,” the officer continued, “it seems clear that she ran up the stairs but lost her footing near the top and her slippers fell off as she tumbled down the staircase. We found a small patch of blood on the banister rail with three hairs adhering to it, and the pathologist has matched those to Signora Hampton. The cause of death was a broken neck, caused by a violent sideways impact to the right side of her head with a blunt object. It seems clear that when she lost her footing on the stairs she hit her head on the rail.”

Bronson nodded. The conclusion seemed logical enough based on the available forensic evidence, but he still had some unanswered questions.

“Were there any other injuries on the body?” he asked.

The officer nodded. “The pathologist found several bruises on her torso and limbs that were consistent with an uncontrolled fall down the staircase.”

He riffled through the papers and selected a page containing outline diagrams of the anterior and posterior views of a human body. The drawings were annotated with a number of lines pointing at areas of the body, and at the end of each was a brief note.

Bronson took the sheet and studied it.

“May I have a copy of this?” he asked. “It will help me explain to Mr. Hampton exactly what happened to his wife.”

“Of course. This copy of the report is for Signor Hampton.”

Ten minutes later Bronson closed the door behind the police officer and walked back into the kitchen. He spread the pages and photographs out on the table in front of him and read the report in its entirety.

Halfway down the second page he found a single reference that puzzled him. He looked carefully at the injury diagrams to cross-refer what he’d read, but that merely confirmed what the report stated. He walked out into the hall and up to the top of the stairs, and looked very carefully at the banister rail and the stairs themselves.

Frowning, he returned to the kitchen to look again at the pathologist’s report.

Half an hour later he heard the sound of movement upstairs, and shortly afterward Mark walked into the kitchen: he looked a lot better after a couple of hours’ sleep.

Bronson poured coffee and made him a ham sandwich.

“You’re probably not hungry, Mark, but you have to eat. And then we need to talk,”

Bronson finished.

“What about?”

“Finish that, and I’ll tell you.”

He sat quietly as Mark drained his cup and sat back in his chair.

“So talk to me, Chris,” Mark demanded.

Bronson paused for a second or two, choosing his words with care. “This won’t be easy for you to accept, Mark, but I think we have to face the possibility that Jackie didn’t die from a simple fall.”

Mark looked stunned. “I thought the police said she’d hit her head on the banister.”

“She probably did, but I think there’s more to it than that. Take a look at this.”

Bronson got up and led Hampton across to the kitchen door. He opened it and pointed to the compressed area of wood on the frame close to the lock.

“That mark was made by a jimmy or something very similar,” he said. “When I checked the lock on the inside of the door, I found that all the screws had been pulled out. But the lock had then been refitted on the door and the screws replaced.

Someone broke into this house and made every effort to keep that fact a secret.”

“You mean a burglar?”

Bronson shook his head. “Not unless it was a very strange kind of burglary. I’ve investigated dozens back in Britain, and I’ve never encountered one where the criminals tried to hide the fact that they’d broken in. Most thieves take the easy way in, grab whatever they can, and get out again as quickly as possible. They’re interested in speed, not stealth. I’ve looked around the house and I haven’t found any sign of anything missing. It’s difficult to tell, because of all the work being done, but your TV sets and computer are still here, and there’s even some jewelry and money lying on the dressing table in the master bedroom. No thief would ignore stuff like that.”

“So what are you saying—someone broke in but didn’t take anything? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Exactly. And the other thing I’ve found relates to Jackie. I’m really sorry about this, but we need to consider the possibility that she didn’t just fall. She may have been pushed.”

Mark studied his friend’s face for a moment. “Pushed?” he echoed. “You mean someone . . . ?” Bronson nodded. “But the police said it was an accident.”

“I know, Mark, but while you were asleep an officer brought the autopsy report to the house, and after he left I studied it very carefully. There’s one thing that doesn’t make sense.” Bronson selected one of the sheets of paper and showed it to Mark.

“Jackie’s body had numerous bruises on it, obviously caused by her fall down the staircase, and I’ve no doubt that what actually killed her was hitting her head on the banister. But this one injury here really worries me.

“On the left side of her head the pathologist found a single compressed fracture of the skull: that’s on the opposite side to the more severe injury. In his opinion, that wound had been caused by a roughly spherical object about three to four centimeters in diameter. It would have been a painful injury, but certainly not fatal, and had been inflicted at about the time death occurred.”

Mark nodded. “She probably hit her head on the stairs or something when she fell.”

“That’s obviously what the local police thought, but that injury bothers me. I’ve looked all the way up the staircase and in the hall, and I can’t find anything of the right size and shape to have inflicted the wound, and which she could possibly have hit when she fell.”

For a few moments Mark didn’t reply. “So what are you suggesting?” he asked eventually.

“You know exactly what I’m suggesting, Mark,” Bronson said. “Take the fact that someone has obviously broken into the house, and that Jackie had an injury on her body that I don’t think could have been caused by her falling, and there’s only one possible conclusion. I think she disturbed the burglars, and was hit on the head by a bludgeon or something like that. And then she fell against the banister rail.”

“Murdered? You mean Jackie was murdered?”

Bronson looked at him steadily. “Yes, I think she was.”

8

I

“What do you know about ciphers, Cardinal?” Mandino asked.

The two men were sitting at a busy pavement café in the Piazza del Popolo, just east of the Ponte Regina Margherita, people bustling past on the street. Vertutti would under no circumstances allow the man to enter the Vatican: it was bad enough having to deal with him at all. This time Mandino had three men in attendance. Two were bodyguards, but the third was a thin, bespectacled man with the air of an academic.

“Virtually nothing,” Vertutti confessed.

“Neither do I, which is why I’ve asked my colleague—you can call him Pierro—to join us.” Mandino gestured toward the third man sitting at their table. “He’s been involved in the project as a consultant for about three years. He’s fully aware of what we’re looking for, and you can rely on his discretion.”

“So this is someone else who knows about the Codex?” Vertutti demanded angrily.

“Do you tell everyone you meet, Mandino? Perhaps you should publish information about it in the newspapers?”

Pierro looked uncomfortable at Vertutti’s outburst, but Mandino appeared unruffled.

“I’ve only ever told those people who needed to know,” he explained. “For Pierro to analyze the snippets of dead languages we’ve been translating, he needed to know what we were looking for and why. He can read Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Coptic, and he’s also something of an expert on first- and second-century encryption techniques. I was lucky to find him.”

The glance Pierro directed at Mandino immediately suggested to Vertutti that the

“luck” might have been somewhat one-sided, and he guessed that Mandino had used threats or some kind of pressure to persuade the academic to work with him.

“You’re obviously familiar with the Latin phrase we found, Cardinal,” Pierro said, and Vertutti nodded.

“Good. We know that all early ciphers were very simple and basic. Until about the fifth century, illiteracy was the norm for the majority of the population, and not just in Europe but throughout the whole of the Mediterranean region. The ability to read and write, in any language, was almost the sole preserve of religious communities and working scribes. And it’s worth remembering that many of the monks were essentially copyists, reproducing manuscripts and books for use within their own communities. They didn’t need to understand what they were duplicating: the skill they possessed was that of making accurate copies of the source documents. The scribes, or amanuenses, on the other hand, did have to understand what they were writing, because they were producing legal documents, taking dictation and so on.

“Because of such widespread illiteracy, there was rarely any need to encrypt information, simply because so few people would have been able to read anything that had been written. But in the first century the Romans did begin to use a simple plain-text code for some important messages, particularly those relating to military matters. The code was, by modern standards, childishly simple: the hidden text was formed from the initial letters of the words in the message. As a further refinement, sometimes the hidden message was written backward. The problem with this type of encryption was that the plain-text message was almost invariably stilted, just to accommodate the secret text, and so it was often obvious that there was a concealed message, which rather defeated the object of the exercise.

“Another common cipher was known as Atbash, a simple substitution code originally used in Hebrew. The first letter of the alphabet was replaced by the last, and so on.”

“So are you suggesting that ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant’ contains a cipher?” Vertutti asked.

Pierro shook his head. “No, I’m not. In fact, I’m quite convinced it doesn’t. We can eliminate an Atbash cipher immediately, because anything encoded in Atbash invariably resulted in gibberish, and the Latin phrase is far too short for a plain-text code to work. As a precaution, I’ve run several analysis programs on the Latin words, but without result. I’m certain that there’s no hidden meaning.”

“So why am I here?” Vertutti demanded. “If there’s nothing more to be learned from this inscription, I’m just wasting my time. And you, Mandino, could have told me all this over the telephone. You do have my number, don’t you?”

Mandino gestured to Pierro to continue.

“I didn’t say there was nothing else to be learned from this phrase,” the scholar persisted. “All I said was that there was no hidden message in the words—that’s not the same thing at all.”

“So what did you find out?” Vertutti snapped.

“Patience, Cardinal,” Mandino said. “That stone’s been waiting for someone to decipher the inscription for about two thousand years. I’m sure you can wait a few more minutes to hear what Pierro has to tell you.”

The lanky academic glanced uncertainly from one man to the other, then addressed Vertutti again. “My analysis of the Latin phrase has only confirmed the literal meaning of the words. ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant’ means ‘Here lie the liars,’ and the most plausible explanation for the inscription is that the stone was originally in one of two places. The first possible location is obvious: it was placed in or close to a tomb or burial chamber that contained at least two bodies. If there was only a single corpse, the Latin should read ‘Hic Vanidicus Latitat.’ ”

“I do read and understand Latin, Signor Pierro,” Vertutti murmured. “It is the official language of the Vatican.”

Pierro colored slightly. “I’m only trying to show you the logic that I was using, Cardinal. Please hear me out.”

Vertutti waved his hand in irritation, but leaned back and waited for Pierro to continue.

“I rejected that explanation for two very simple reasons. First, if that stone had been in or close to a tomb, there’s a very strong chance that whoever found it would also have found the bodies. And we can be reasonably certain that didn’t happen, because there would certainly have been a record of the discovery. Even in the Middle Ages, the significance of the burial would have been quite obvious.”

“And the second reason?”

“The stone itself. It’s simply not the right size or shape to be a grave marker.”

“So what was the other possible location? Where was that?” Vertutti asked.

Pierro smiled slightly before replying. “I have no idea. It could be anywhere in Italy, or even in another country.”

“What?”

“When I said there were two possible locations for the stone, what I meant was that if the stone wasn’t a grave marker—which I think I’ve demonstrated—there’s only one other thing it could possibly be.”

“And that is?”

“A map. Or, to be precise, half a map.”

II

Mark studied the autopsy diagram with care, and listened as Bronson translated the Italian description of the injury to the side of Jackie’s head. Then he nodded agreement.

“You’re a police officer, Chris, and you know what you’re talking about. What you say makes sense. I can’t think of anything that shape on the staircase or down in the hall.”

Bronson could tell that Mark’s grief was slowly being displaced by anger. Anger at whoever had violated his property and—deliberately or by accident—killed his wife.

“So what should we do now? Tell the Italian police?”

“I don’t think that would help much. They’ve already decided this was just an accident, and absolutely the only evidence we’ve got is an unusual wound and the fact that the back door of the house was forced. They would point to the fact that nothing was stolen, not even the cash that we found lying about, and you could interpret the injury to Jackie’s head in more ways than one. They’d nod politely, offer their condolences, walk away and do nothing.”

“So what do we do?”

“I think,” Bronson said, “that the first thing we should do is to try to find out what the burglars—or whatever they were—were looking for. I’ve been around the house a couple of times, and I’ve not noticed anything missing, but if we do it together we might spot something.”

“Good idea.”

But twenty minutes later, having checked every room, they’d found nothing.

Everything of value—money, jewelry and expensive electronic equipment—was, as far as Mark could tell, present and correct.

The two men walked down the stairs to the kitchen where Bronson filled the kettle and switched it on. “Forget anything missing, Mark. Did you see anything out of place, anything in one room that should be in another, that kind of thing?”

“Bloody difficult to tell. Half the furniture in the house is covered with dust sheets, and some bits have been moved into different rooms to give the builders space to do their work.”

“You didn’t see anything that looked as if it had been disturbed or moved that wasn’t to do with the builders?”

Mark thought for a few seconds. Finally he said, “Only the curtains in the study.”

“What do you mean?”

“We haven’t owned this place very long, and there are a lot of things that need changing. The study curtains came with the house, and they’re hideous, which is probably why the sellers left them. Jackie couldn’t stand the sight of them, so we always left them pulled back, so you can’t really see the pattern. But when we were in the study I noticed they were drawn across the window.”

“And Jackie wouldn’t have done that?”

Mark shook his head. “Absolutely not. There are shutters on the outside of that window, and we’ve always kept them closed—that helps stop reflections appearing on the computer screen—so there would never be any need to draw the curtains.”

“Well, somebody must have done,” Bronson said. “The police would have had no reason to do so. Maybe the burglars closed the curtains because they were looking for something in the study and wanted to ensure no light shone through the window.”

“But we’ve checked the study,” Mark protested, “and there’s nothing missing.”

“I know, so we need to go back and check it again.”

In the study, Bronson switched on the computer, and asked Mark to check every drawer and cupboard in the room, just in case they’d missed something. While he waited for the operating system to load, Bronson rummaged through the papers scattered over the desk, and found invoices, estimates and quotations for the work the Hamptons were doing on the property, plus the usual collection of utility bills.

There were also several sheets of A4 paper that he presumed Jackie had used to write herself notes, as he found shopping lists and to-do lists on a few of them. One of these interested him, and he put that piece of paper to one side, together with another, apparently blank, sheet.

When the computer was ready for use, Bronson checked what programs were installed and then scanned through the “My documents” folder, looking for anything unusual, but found nothing. Then he checked the e-mail client, looking in both the “Inbox” and “Sent items,” again without result. Finally, he opened the Web browser—like most people, the Hamptons had used Internet Explorer—and looked at the Web sites Jackie had visited recently. Or rather, he tried to. There were no sites listed in the history, so he checked the program settings. That puzzled him, and he leaned back in the black leather office chair with a frown.

“What is it?” Mark asked, closing the door of the cupboard they used to store their stationery.

“I don’t know that it’s anything, really. Was Jackie an experienced computer user? I mean, would she have fiddled about with program settings, that kind of thing?”

Mark shook his head. “Not a chance. She used the word processor and the spreadsheet, sent and received e-mails and did a bit of surfing on the Internet.

Nothing else. Why?”

“I’ve just checked the settings for Internet Explorer, and pretty much everything uses the default values, including the history, which is set for twenty days.”

“So?”

“Despite the default setting, there are no sites at all listed in the program’s history, so somebody must have deleted them. Could Jackie have done that?”

“No,” Mark said firmly. “She would have had no idea how to do it and, in any case, why would she have wanted to?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Back in the kitchen, Mark made coffee while Bronson sat down at the table, the papers in front of him.

“Right, then,” Mark said, carrying two mugs across the room. “What have you found?”

“Apart from the anomaly with the computer, I picked up a shopping list and what looks like a blank piece of paper.”

“That doesn’t sound promising—or even very interesting.”

Bronson shrugged. “It might be nothing, but it’s a bit odd. The shopping list, for example. It’s got the usual kinds of things you’d expect to find on it, like groceries and stuff, but right at the bottom is ‘Latin dictionary.’ There’s a line through the words, so either Jackie changed her mind or she went out and bought one and then crossed out the entry when she’d done so.”

“She bought it,” Mark said. “I saw a Latin-Italian dictionary on the bookshelf in the study. I didn’t bother mentioning it, because it didn’t seem important. But why would she want a Latin dictionary?”

“Maybe because of this,” Bronson said, holding up the blank sheet of paper. “There’s no writing on either side of this sheet, but when I looked at it I saw faint indentations, as if Jackie had written something on another piece of paper on top of this one. There are four letters altogether, printed in block capitals, and they’re reasonably clear. The letters are ‘H,’ ‘I,’ ‘C’ and ‘V.’ Those letters, in that order, are not a part of any word I can think of in English.”

“ ‘CV’ could refer to someone’s curriculum vitae,” Mark suggested.

“But what about the ‘HI’?”

“Apart from the obvious, I’ve no idea.”

“I think the dictionary Jackie bought might be a clue. I studied Latin, believe it or not, and ‘Hic’ is a Latin word. It means ‘here’ or ‘in this place,’ as far as I remember, and the ‘V’ could be the first letter of another word. There’s what looks like a dot between the ‘C’ and the ‘V’ on this page, and I think the Romans sometimes separated words with a symbol like that.”

“Are you serious? Jackie had enough trouble with Italian. Why would she be messing about with Latin?”

“I’m guessing here. Apart from this piece of paper, I’ve seen nothing anywhere in this house that looks like a Latin text, but I suspect Jackie found or was given something that had a Latin phrase written on it. That would certainly explain the dictionary.”

Bronson paused for a few seconds, because what he was about to suggest was less a leap of logic than a quantum leap.

“What is it?” Mark asked, seeing the uncertainty on Bronson’s face.

“I’m trying to make some sense of this. We’ve got a newly bought Latin dictionary, and the impression of what could be a Latin word on a sheet of paper, but no sign of the top sheet. That means somebody’s definitely been into the study, unless Jackie herself removed the top sheet and then destroyed it. But what worries me most of all is the deletion of the browsing history from Internet Explorer.”

“I’m not following you.”

“I don’t want to make too much of this, but suppose Jackie found something, here in the house or maybe in the grounds, something with a Latin expression written on it.

She didn’t understand what it meant, so she bought a Latin dictionary. She’d probably have preferred a Latin-English version, but couldn’t find one. She tried to translate the text, but found she couldn’t make sense of it with the Italian dictionary.

“So Jackie did what most people in that situation would do. She logged on to a search engine, found a Latin translation service and input the phrase. Now,”

Bronson said, “the next stage is pure conjecture, but it does make sense, to me at least.

“Maybe some organization, somewhere, put a form of Internet-monitoring service in place, watching for any requests to translate certain expressions from ancient languages. Technically, it wouldn’t be all that difficult to set up, as long as the translation service Web sites were willing to cooperate. When Jackie input the Latin phrase into the search engine, it raised a flag, and perhaps even identified the address where the computer that generated the query was located—”

“Hang on a minute,” Mark interrupted. “Why the hell would anyone today have the slightest interest in somebody trying to translate a two-thousand-year-old—or whatever—bit of Latin?”

“I’ve not the slightest idea, but nothing else seems to make sense. If I’m right, whoever put the monitoring service in place then came here, to this house, to search for whatever Jackie had found. It was that important to them. They obviously recovered the object, sanitized the computer so there would be no record of Jackie’s searches, and took away anything they could find that referred to the Latin text.

“And, in the process,” Bronson finished sadly, “I think Jackie just got in their way.”

III

Pierro reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a brown envelope. He looked around the cafe’, checking that nobody else was in earshot—a superfluous precaution with Gregori Mandino’s two men acting as watchdogs—and placed several photographs on the table in front of Vertutti.

He recognized the images immediately: they were close-up views of the inscribed stone.

“When I’d concluded that there was no secret message hidden in the inscription,”

Pierro went on, “I started looking at the stone itself, and there are two obvious clues in its shape. First, look at the four edges of the slab.”

Vertutti bent forward over the table and stared at two of the pictures, side by side, but saw nothing he hadn’t previously noticed. He shook his head.

“The edges,” Pierro prompted gently. He took a short ruler out of his pocket, placed it on one of the photographs and aligned it with the top of the stone. He repeated the process with the left and right sides of the image.

“You see now?” he asked. “The top edge and both sides of the slab are absolutely straight. But now do the same to the bottom of the stone.”

Vertutti took the ruler and positioned it carefully. And then he saw what the academic was driving at: with the ruler in place, it was obvious that the bottom edge of the stone was very slightly out of true.

“That’s the first point,” Pierro said. “If the Romans—or whoever prepared this slab—could get three of the edges straight, why couldn’t they do the same with the fourth? And the second clue is related to the first. Look closely at the position of the carving. If you study it, you’ll see that the words are centered on the stone from left to right, but not from top to bottom.”

Vertutti peered at the photograph in front of him and nodded. The gap between the letters and the top of the stone was much larger than that at the bottom. Now that Pierro had pointed it out, the discrepancy was quite obvious. A classic case, he mused, of not being able to see the wood for the trees.

“And that means what?” he asked.

“The most obvious conclusion is that this stone”—Pierro tapped the photograph with his finger for emphasis—“was originally part of a larger slab, and at some point the lower section was removed.”

“Can you be certain of that?”

Pierro shook his head. “Not without examining the stone for myself, but these photographs are fairly clear. In one of them are what look to me like marks made by a chisel, which would have been the obvious tool to split the slab in two. I think this stone was made as a kind of pointer, a device that would lead to the ‘Tomb of Christianity,’ which is how I believe Pope Vitalian described it in the Codex.”

Vertutti glanced angrily at Mandino as Pierro confirmed the depth of his knowledge of the secret Codex.

“I believe the lower half of the slab almost certainly had a map or directions of some sort carved on it,” Pierro finished.

“So what are you suggesting?” Vertutti demanded. “Where is the missing section?

And how do we find it?”

Pierro shrugged. “That’s not my problem,” he said, “but it seems logical that whoever decided to split the stone would not have discarded the lower half. If this stone had been incorporated in the wall of the house purely as a decoration, why didn’t they keep it intact? Why go to the trouble of cutting it in two? The only scenario that makes sense is that this section of the stone was placed in the wall for a purpose, as a definite pointer for somebody who knew what they were looking for.

Unless you know the identity of the ‘liars,’ this stone is merely a curiosity. And that means—”

“That means,” Mandino interrupted him, “that the other half of the stone is probably concealed somewhere in the property, so I’m going to have to send my men back to the house to find it.”

9

I

Bronson walked across the hall to the front door and pulled it open. Standing on the doorstep was a short, dark-haired man dressed in grubby white overalls. Behind him was an old white van, the diesel engine clattering noisily, with three other men sitting in the cab.

“Can I help you?” Bronson asked in Italian.

“We would like to speak with Signor Hampton. We need to know about the work.”

Bronson guessed they were the builders who’d been employed to do the renovations on the property.

“Come in,” he offered, and led the four men through to the kitchen.

Mark greeted them in halting Italian.

Bronson immediately took over, explaining that he was a family friend and offering wine—an offer that was gratefully accepted. Once Bronson had opened a couple of bottles and filled glasses, he asked what the men wanted.

“We had a small job to do on Wednesday morning and so we arrived here in the afternoon,” the foreman said, “but when we drove up we found that the police were here. They said there’d been an accident, and told us to go away and not come back for at least two days. Later we heard that the signora had died. Please accept our sincere condolences for your loss, Signor Hampton.”

Bronson translated, and Mark nodded his understanding.

“What we need to know,” the foreman continued, turning back to look at Bronson,

“is whether or not Signor Hampton wants us to continue with the work. We have other clients waiting for us if he doesn’t, so it’s not a problem. We just need to know.”

Bronson relayed the question to Mark, who immediately nodded his head in agreement. The renovations weren’t even half finished, and whether he decided to keep the house or sell it, the work would obviously have to be completed. That response generated broad smiles all around, and Bronson wondered briefly just how many “other clients” the builders had.

Ten minutes later, having each drunk a second glass of red wine, the four builders were ready to leave. They would, the foreman promised, be back at the house first thing on Monday morning, ready to continue their labors.

Bronson led the way back to the hall, but as the procession passed the door to the living room—which was standing wide open—one of the builders glanced inside and came to an abrupt halt. He said something to his companion, which Bronson didn’t hear clearly, then stepped inside the room.

“What is it?” Bronson asked.

The foreman turned to face him. His former good humor seemed to have vanished.

“I know Signor Hampton has had a dreadful shock, but we do not appreciate him trying to take advantage of us.”

Bronson hadn’t the slightest idea what the man was talking about. “What? You need to explain what you mean,” he said.

“I mean, Signor Bronson, that he’s obviously employed another builder to do some work here since last Tuesday, and that builder has probably been using our tools and materials.”

Bronson shook his head. “As far as I know, nobody else has done any work here.

Signora Hampton died sometime on Tuesday night or early on Wednesday morning.

The police were probably here for most of Wednesday, and we arrived late last night, so when could . . . ?” His voice died away as a possible explanation occurred to him. “What work has been done?” he demanded.

The foreman swung around and pointed at the fireplace. “There,” he said. “There’s new plaster on the wall, but none of us put it there. We couldn’t have, because we were waiting for Signora Hampton”—he made the sign of the cross on his chest—“to decide about the lintel.”

Bronson felt the conversation slipping away from him.

“Wait there,” he said, and walked quickly back to the kitchen. “Mark, I need your input here.”

Back in the living room, Bronson asked the foreman to explain exactly what he meant.

“On Monday afternoon,” the Italian said, “we were stripping the old plaster off the wall here above the fireplace. When we exposed the lintel, we called Signora Hampton, because the stone had a big crack in it, just about here.” He sketched a diagonal line directly above one side of the fireplace. “It had a steel plate underneath it, so it was safe enough, but it wasn’t very attractive. The signora had wanted the lintel exposed, as a feature, but when she saw it was broken she couldn’t decide what to do. She asked us to wait, and just carry on stripping the old plaster, which we did. But now, as you can see, that whole area has fresh plaster on it. Somebody else has been working in here.”

Bronson glanced at Mark. “Do you know anything about that?”

His friend shook his head. “Nothing. As far as I know, Jackie was perfectly happy with these builders. If she wasn’t, I can guarantee she’d have told them so. She was always very forthright.”

That, Bronson thought, was an understatement. Jackie had never, to use an old expression, been backward in coming forward. It was one of the many things he’d found attractive about her. She always said exactly what she thought, politely but firmly.

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.”

II

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.

III

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.

Bronson had no illusions that a collection of furniture, no matter how solid, would be sufficient to stop a bullet, but if the intruder couldn’t see him, he’d have nothing to aim at. So he dived behind the sheet-covered mound and flattened himself against the wooden floorboards.

Then he waited.

Alberti had staggered to his feet, clutching his broken arm and howling with pain.

Rogan knew there was now no chance of getting inside the house that night. Even if Hampton, or whoever it was inside the property, hadn’t called the Carabinieri, somebody in the neighborhood would probably have heard the shots and made a call. And he was going to have to get Alberti to a hospital, if only to shut him up.

“Come on,” he snapped, holstering his pistol and bending down to help his companion to his feet. “Let’s get back to the car.”

Within a couple of minutes the two men had vanished into the night.

Bronson was still crouching behind the stack of furniture when he heard the sound of footsteps above him. Moments later, the hall lights flared on. Bronson knew he had to stop his friend from walking into a gunfight, so he risked a quick glance toward the open window, then jumped up and ran across to the door, wrenched it open and stepped out into the hall.

“What the hell’s going on, Chris?” Mark demanded, rubbing his eyes. “Those noises sounded like gunshots.”

“Spot on. We’ve just had visitors.”

“What?”

“Just give me a minute. Stay here in the hall—don’t go into the living room. Where’s the switch for the security lights?”

Mark pointed at a group of switches at the end of the hall, next to the corridor leading to the kitchen. “Bottom right.”

Bronson stepped over to the panel and flicked the switch.

“Don’t go into the living room, Mark,” he warned again, then ran up the stairs. On the first floor, he opened each window in turn and peered outside, checking the area around the house. The security lights the Hamptons had installed were fitted directly below the bedroom windows, mainly to make changing the high-power halogen bulbs as easy as possible. This had the accidental benefit of permitting anyone on the first floor to observe the perimeter of the property without being visible from below.

Bronson checked twice but the men, whoever they were, had gone. The only sound he could hear—apart from the animals of the night—was the noise of a car engine receding rapidly, probably the two burglars making their getaway. He checked all the windows once more, then walked back down the staircase to the hall, where Mark was obediently waiting.

“I think those guys were probably the same ones who broke in here before,” Bronson explained. “They decided to come in through the window because I’d jammed the back door with a chair.”

“And they shot at you?”

“At least three shots, maybe four. Wait here while I close the shutters in the living room.”

Bronson opened the door carefully and peered inside, then strode into the room. He walked across to the open window, looked out to check that there was nobody in sight and reached out to pull the shutters closed. He shut and locked the window itself, then switched on the main lights. As Mark followed him into the room, Bronson noticed something lying on the floor close to the broken window, and in a moment realized it was a semiautomatic pistol.

Bronson picked it up, removed the magazine and ejected the cartridge from the breech. The pistol was a well-used nine-millimeter Browning Hi-Power, one of the commonest and most reliable semiautomatics. He replaced the ejected cartridge in the magazine, reloaded the weapon but didn’t chamber a round, and tucked it in the waistband of his trousers.

“Is that yours?” Mark asked.

Bronson shook his head. “The only people in Britain who own handguns these days are criminals, thanks to the coterie of idiots and spin doctors who allegedly govern the country. No, this was dropped by the guy who tried to climb in through the window. These people are serious, Mark.”

“We’d better call the police.”

“I am the police, remember? Plus, there’s nothing they would be able to do.”

“But these men tried to break in and they’ve shot at you, for God’s sake.”

“I know,” Bronson said patiently, “but the reality is that we have no clue who they are, and the only physical evidence we’ve got—assuming they weren’t stupid enough to drop their wallets or something outside the house—is a forced door, a broken window and a couple of bullet holes.”

“But you’ve got that pistol. Can’t the police trace . . . ?” Mark’s voice died away as he realized the futility of what he was suggesting.

The kind of people who break into houses never carry weapons that can be traced.

They may be criminals, but they’re not stupid.

“But we’ve got to do something, ” Mark protested.

“We will,” Bronson assured him. “In fact, we are already.” He pointed to the exposed stone above the fireplace. “Once we’ve found out what that means, we’ll probably know why a couple of bad guys were prepared to break in here waving pistols. More important, we might be able to work out who sent them.”

“What do you mean?”

“My guess is those two men were just a couple of thugs, employed for the job. Even if we’d caught them, they probably wouldn’t know anything, more than the specific orders they’d been given. There’s a plan behind whatever’s going on here, and that’s what we need to understand if we’re going to make any sense of this. But that inscription’s at the very heart of it.”

IV

Just outside Rome, Rogan pulled the car to a halt in the parking area and switched off the engine. Alberti was huddled in the passenger seat next to him, moaning and clutching his shattered arm. Rogan had driven as quickly as he could—stopping only once, to call Mandino and explain what had happened—but it had taken them the better part of an hour to reach their destination. Alberti’s pain was obvious, but still Rogan wished he’d shut up.