The First Apostle

“Give it a rest, will you? We’re here. In a couple of minutes they’ll slide a needle into your arm and when you wake up it’ll all be over.”

He got out of the car, walked around and pulled open the passenger door.

“Don’t touch me,” Alberti said, his voice hoarse and distorted, as he struggled out of his seat, levering himself up using only his left arm.

“Stand still,” Rogan ordered. “I’ll take off your holster. You can’t go in wearing that.”

Rogan eased his companion’s jacket off his shoulders, unbuckled the strap and removed the holster.

“Where’s your pistol?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your Browning. Where is it? In the car?”

“Hell, no,” Alberti gasped. “I was holding it when I went in through the window.

It’s probably inside the house somewhere.”

“Oh, shit,” Rogan said. “That’s all we need.”

“What’s the problem? The weapon’s clean.”

“I know that. I also know it’s got a full magazine, which means the son of a bitch who did this to you is now armed, and I’ve still got to go back there and finish the job.”

Rogan turned away and pointed toward the low-lying building, ablaze with lights, on the opposite side of the parking lot.

“There you go,” he said. “The emergency admissions section is on the right-hand side. Tell them you had a bad fall or something.”

“OK.” Alberti stumbled away from the car, still gripping his right arm.

“Sorry about this,” Rogan murmured quietly. He drew his own pistol and with a single fluid movement released the safety catch, pointed the weapon at the back of Alberti’s head and pulled the trigger.

The other man fell lifeless to the ground as the sound of the shot echoed off the surrounding buildings. Rogan stepped forward, turned over the body, avoiding looking at the shattered red mess that was all that was left of his companion’s head, and removed his wallet. Then he got back in his car and drove away.

A couple of miles down the road, Rogan stopped the car in a turnout and rang Mandino.

“It’s done,” Rogan said, as soon as Mandino answered.

“Good. That’s the first thing you’ve got right today. Now, get back to the house and finish the job. I need you to find that missing stone.”

10

I

“I think we need help.”

Bronson and Mark were sitting over breakfast in the kitchen the following morning.

“You mean the police?” Mark asked.

Bronson shook his head. “I mean specialist help. This house has been standing for about six hundred years, but I think that stone’s a hell of a lot older, maybe a couple of thousand years, otherwise why use Latin for the inscription? If it was contemporary with the house, I’d have expected it to be written in Italian. We need someone who can tell us what the Latin means, and why it’s so important.”

“So who do you—oh, you think Angela could help us?”

Bronson nodded, somewhat reluctantly. His former wife was the only person he knew who had any connection with the world of antiquities, but he wasn’t sure how she would react if he approached her. Their separation had been less than amicable, but he hoped she’d regard this problem as an intellectual challenge and respond professionally.

“She might, I hope,” Bronson said. “I know Latin inscriptions on lumps of stone are well outside her field of expertise, but she’ll certainly know someone at the British Museum who could help. She knows some Latin herself, because she specializes in first- to third-century European pottery, but I think we need to talk to an expert.”

“So what? You’ll call her?”

“No. She probably wouldn’t answer if she saw my cell phone number on her phone.

I’ll send her a couple of photographs in an e-mail. I hope she’ll be curious enough to open that.”

Bronson went up to his bedroom and returned with his laptop. He double-clicked the first image and angled the screen so that Mark could see it as well.

“We need to pick out two or three maximum,” he said, “and make sure they show the inscription clearly. How about this?”

“It’s a little blurred,” Mark said. “Try the next one.”

Within five minutes they’d selected two pictures, one taken from a few feet away and indicating the stone’s position in relation to the wall itself, and the second a close-up that showed the inscription in some detail.

“They should be fine,” Mark said, as Bronson composed a short e-mail to his ex-wife, explaining where the stone was and how they’d found it.

“It’ll take her a while to reply,” Bronson guessed.

But he was wrong. Just more than an hour later, his Sony emitted a musical double-tone indicating that an e-mail had been received. It wasn’t from Angela, but from a man named Jeremy Goldman, and was a couple of pages in length.

“Listen to this,” Bronson said. “As soon as she saw the pictures, Angela sent them off to a colleague—an ancient-language specialist named Jeremy Goldman. He’s supplied a translation of the Latin, but it’s exactly the same as we’d already worked out: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”

“So that was pretty much a waste of time,” Mark commented.

“No, it’s not. He’s also given us some information about where the stone may have come from. First, he looked at the inscription itself. He doesn’t know what the ‘liars’

were, but he’s suggested the word might have referred to books or texts, something like that, some documents that whoever carved the inscription believed were false.

“He doesn’t think the text refers to a grave, because it’s the wrong verb. He thinks it just means something that’s been hidden or secreted somewhere. The letters, he says, were fairly crudely carved and their form suggests that the inscription is very old, maybe dating from as early as the first century A.D.

“He’s also looked at the shape of the stone, and again it doesn’t fit with a grave marker. He thinks it might have been part of a wall, and he suggests that in its original location there would have been one or more inscribed stones below it, and those would probably have displayed a map showing the location of whatever the inscription referred to.

“He finishes up by saying that as a curiosity the stone is interesting, but it has no intrinsic value. He guesses that when this house was being erected, the builders found the stone and decided to incorporate it in the wall as a kind of feature. And then, over the years, tastes changed and the wall was plastered over.”

“Well, I suppose that’s helpful,” Mark acknowledged, “but it doesn’t get us very much further, and we still don’t know why these ‘burglars’ have been breaking in.”

“Oh, I think we do,” Bronson said. “Whatever those three words refer to, someone, somewhere, is very concerned that they should remain hidden, otherwise why would they replaster the wall? And that person obviously knows exactly what these

‘liars’ are, and is desperate to find their hiding place. They’re after the missing bit of the inscription, the map or whatever that shows where the relics were hidden.”

“So what should we do now?” Mark asked.

“That, I think, is fairly obvious. We find the missing stone before the burglars come back.”

II

Joseph Cardinal Vertutti’s caffeine intake was rising rapidly. Yet again he’d been summoned by Mandino, and yet again they’d met in a busy pavement cafe’, this time on Piazza Cavour, not far from the Vatican. As usual, Mandino was accompanied by two young bodyguards, and this time, Vertutti hoped, he’d have some good news.

“Have your men found the rest of the stone?” he asked, more in hope than expectation.

Mandino shook his head. “No. There was a problem,” he said, but didn’t seem inclined to elaborate.

“So what now?”

“This matter is occupying more and more of my time, Cardinal, as well as incurring significant expenses. I’m aware that we’re contracted to resolve this problem on behalf of your employer, but I need to make you aware that I’m expecting these expenses to be met by you.”

“What? You’re expecting the Vatican”—Vertutti lowered his voice as he said the word—“to pay you?”

Mandino nodded. “Exactly. I anticipate our total expenses will be in the region of one hundred thousand euros. Perhaps you could make arrangements to have that sum ready to transfer to us once we’ve sorted out this matter. I’ll advise you of the account details in due course.”

“I will do no such thing,” Vertutti spluttered. “I have no access to funds of that size and, even if I had, I wouldn’t contemplate transferring a single euro to you.”

Mandino looked at him without expression. “I was rather expecting that reaction from you, Cardinal. Put simply, you’re in no position to argue. If you don’t agree to meet these modest expenses, I may decide that the interests of my organization would be better served by not destroying the relic or handing it over to you. Perhaps making our findings public would be the optimum solution. Pierro is very interested in what we’ve found so far, and he believes his academic career would be greatly enhanced if he could discover this object and submit it to scientific scrutiny. But, of course, ultimately it’s your choice.”

“I think that’s called blackmail, Mandino.”

“You can call it anything you like, Eminence, but don’t forget who you’re dealing with. My organization is incurring necessary expenses in carrying out this operation on your behalf. It seems only reasonable that you should meet them. If you decide not to, then as far as I’m concerned our contractual obligation to you is at an end, and we would then be free to do whatever we thought most appropriate with anything we manage to recover. And don’t forget that I’m no friend of the Church.

Whatever happens to this relic wouldn’t bother me.”

Vertutti glowered at him, but both men knew he had no choice, no choice at all.

“Very well,” Vertutti grated. “I’ll see if I can arrange something.”

“Excellent.” Mandino beamed. “I knew you’d see things my way eventually. I’ll let you know as soon as we’ve resolved the situation in Ponticelli.”

III

“Jeremy Goldman’s pretty sharp,” Bronson said. He was rereading the e-mail and had only just realized the significance of another of Goldman’s suggestions.

“In what way?” Mark asked.

“He spotted something else about the inscribed stone. He says that the Latin text is centered on the stone left and right, but not vertically. The words are closer to the base of the stone than they are to the top. And that could mean that the stone isn’t complete, that someone’s cut away the lower section of it. Let’s go and take a look.”

The two men walked through into the living room and stood in front of the fireplace to stare up at the stone. It was immediately obvious that Goldman was right.

“Look at this,” Bronson said. “If you know what to look for, you can clearly see the marks where someone’s chiseled off the lower part. This section of stone—the bit that has the inscription carved on it—was once part of a much larger slab, probably twice this size. So all we need do now is find the lower half, the bit that presumably contains the map or directions or whatever.”

“That could be tricky. This house is built of stone, and so’s the garage. That used to be a stable block and before that a small barn. The house is surrounded by about half an acre of garden, and most of that has rocks buried in it, some of them obviously worked stones with shaped sides and edges. Even if the stone is somewhere here, it could take a hell of a long time to find it.”

“My guess, Mark, is that if it’s here it’ll be cemented into a wall somewhere in the house, just like this one. The stone was split into two carefully—the cut edge is almost straight—and I don’t believe whoever took the time to do that would simply dump the other section.”

“So we start checking inside the house. The problem is—which wall do we start with?”

Bronson grinned at his friend. If nothing else, the search was taking both their minds off Jackie’s death. “We check them all, and we might as well begin right here with this one.”

Just more than half an hour later, the two men were again standing in the living room, looking at the stone above the fireplace. All but three of the walls in the house had already been stripped of any covering before the Hamptons purchased the property, and they’d just inspected every exposed stone in the house and found precisely nothing. That left only two rooms where they were going to have to get their hands dirty: the dining room, with two plaster-covered walls that the builders hadn’t started work on yet, and the living room itself, where about half of the fireplace wall still had the original plaster on it.

“Is this really necessary?” Mark asked, as Bronson donned a pair of overalls left by the builders and picked up a hammer and chisel.

“I think so, yes. The only way to resolve this is to find the missing half of that stone.”

“And what do we do then?”

“Until we locate the stone and decipher what’s on it, I’ve no idea,” Bronson said.

Then he turned around and studied the wall beside the fireplace. The old plaster began just to the left of the cracked lintel and extended all the way to the back wall, which had already been stripped.

He took a firm grip of the chisel, positioned the tip about three inches from the edge of the plaster, and rapped it sharply with the hammer. The chisel drove about half an inch into it, and a section of plaster fell to the floor, revealing part of the stone underneath. It looked as if stripping the wall wouldn’t take him too long.

Rogan was stiff, tired, uncomfortable, bored and pissed off. He’d slept as best he could in the car for what was left of the night after he’d got back to Monti Sabini, then driven into the town for an early-morning coffee and a couple of pastries. He’d returned to the house straight afterward and had spent the rest of the morning watching the property through a set of powerful binoculars.

He’d seen two men inside—not one, as he’d been expecting—and had watched as one of them had pulled on a pair of overalls and started chipping away at the wall of the living room. It looked as if Hampton and the other man were going to do the job for him.

The old house was surrounded by lawns dotted with shrubs and trees, and the Italian found it easy enough to reach the property without being seen. He flattened himself against the wall and eased up into a standing position. From there he could see into the living room at an oblique angle and watch what was happening.

Removing all the plaster didn’t take long. Every time Bronson used the chisel, he knocked off a chunk two or three inches square and, just more than ninety minutes after he’d started work, the entire section of the wall was bare. Then he and Mark checked every single stone he’d revealed. Several of them bore chisel marks, but none had anything on them that could possibly be either a map or any form of writing.

“So what now?” Mark asked, staring at the debris piled up along the base of the wall.

“I still think it’s here somewhere,” Bronson replied. “I don’t believe that inscribed stone was incorporated in the wall purely as a decoration. That Latin phrase means something today, and must have meant something when this house was built. In fact

. . .” He broke off and looked again at the stone above the fireplace. Maybe the clue had been there all the time, literally staring him in the face.

“What is it?”

“Is this a riddle inside a riddle? According to Jeremy Goldman, that inscription probably dates from the first century, but the house is about six hundred years old.”

“So?”

“So the carving was already about fifteen hundred years old when the house was built. If the stone was just intended to be a decoration, where would the builders have put it? Over the fireplace, probably,” Bronson said, answering his own question, “but not exactly where it is now. They’d have positioned it centrally, directly over the lintel. But it isn’t—it’s well off to one side. That had to have been done deliberately, as a sign to show that the stone wasn’t just a decorative feature but had a special meaning.

“Suppose whoever built this house found the stone and tried to follow the directions to these ‘liars’—whatever they are—but couldn’t follow the map or work out the clues. They might have decided to split the stone and hide the map section somewhere for safekeeping, but leave a clue to its location for future generations. So one part of the stone indicates the location of the other section, which is a map to some sort of long-buried relics.

“If I’m right, maybe the ‘Hic’—the Latin word meaning ‘here’—is the most important part of the inscription. Could it be telling us exactly where the missing section of the stone has been hidden?”

“You mean ‘here’ as in ‘X marks the spot,’ that kind of thing?”

“Exactly.”

“But where is it, then?” Mark asked. “That’s a solid wall almost a meter thick. The other stones below that one are not only unmarked, but they’re also a different kind of rock, so what could the ‘Hic’ refer to?”

“Not something in the wall, necessarily, but perhaps below it. Maybe the hiding place is under the floor.”

But that looked unlikely. The fireplace in the old farmhouse was a collection of solid lumps of granite, and the floor in front of it was made of thick oak floorboards. If there was a hiding place either under the fireplace or below the floorboards, it would require major work—not to mention lifting gear—to find it.

“I don’t expect what we’re looking for will be under something as simple and obvious as a trapdoor in the floor,” Bronson said, “but equally I doubt if we’d need to demolish half the house to get at it.”

He looked at the wall again. “That’s about a meter thick, you said?”

Mark nodded.

“Well, maybe there’s something on the other side of the wall. Have you got a tape measure, something like that?”

Mark went out to the workshop at the back of the garage and returned a couple of minutes later with a carpenter’s steel tape. Bronson took it and, using the floor and the edge of the doorway leading into the dining room as datum points, measured the exact position of the center of the stone. Mark jotted down the coordinates on a sheet of paper, then they stepped through into the dining room itself.

This was much smaller than the living room, and the wall it shared with the living room was fully plastered. The furniture hadn’t been moved, though it was covered in the ubiquitous dust sheets. The Hamptons had planned to knock a large doorway through the southern wall of the dining room and build a conservatory, but they were still waiting for planning permission.

Using the coordinates and the tape measure, Bronson made a cross in the corresponding area on the dining-room wall. To confirm that they had the right place, they checked the measurements in the living room again, then repeated the process in the dining room.

Then Bronson picked up the hammer and chisel, climbed back up the stepladder and struck a single blow just below the cross he’d drawn. The plaster cracked, and after two more blows a large chunk fell off the wall. He wiped his hand across the exposed stone, trying to clear away some of the dust and debris.

“There’s something here,” he said, his voice rising with excitement. “Not a map, but what looks like another inscription.”

Half a dozen more blows from the hammer and chisel shifted the rest of the old plaster and revealed the whole face of the stone.

“Here,” Mark said, and passed up a new three-inch paintbrush.

“Thanks,” Bronson muttered, and ran the brush briskly back and forth over the stone. A few sharp raps from the handle of the hammer cleared away the remaining pieces of plaster. They could both now see exactly what had been carved into the stone.

It was an inscription that hinted at the blood-soaked history of another country—an inscription that was worth killing for.

Rogan watched with interest as the man in the overalls stripped all the old plaster off the wall in the living room, and smiled at their total failure to find what they were looking for. At the very least, they were saving him a job.

At first, he hadn’t understood why they had taken such trouble to measure the exact position of the inscribed stone in the wall, though he realized they’d worked something out when the two men had walked through into the small dining room.

The moment they vanished from sight, Rogan dropped down into a crouch and scuttled along the wall until he was beyond the end of the first of the two dining-room windows. Then he eased up slowly until he could just see inside the room, though he guessed he could have cavorted naked outside the window and the chances were neither of the men would have seen him. Their attention was entirely directed at the dining-room wall.

As Rogan watched, his view slightly distorted through the thick old glass of the dining-room windows, he saw the man uncover something. It looked as if the missing section of the stone that Mandino had sent him to find had been in the house after all.

The stone didn’t appear to have a map carved on it—from Rogan’s viewpoint, and through the admittedly distorting glass of the window, it looked to him more like a couple of verses of poetry. But whatever the content of the carving on the stone, the simple fact that there was another inscription was enough for him to report back to Mandino. He wasn’t prepared to try to get inside the house himself, because he was outnumbered, plus one of them was probably armed with Alberti’s pistol. Mandino had promised to send another man from the Rome family to join him, but he hadn’t appeared so far.

The important thing, Rogan decided, was to let Mandino know what he’d seen, and then await instructions. He dropped down into a crouch, crept back along the wall of the house until he was well clear of the dining room and living room windows, then ran swiftly across the lawn to the break in the fence where he’d entered the property, and walked back to his car and the cell phone he’d locked in the glove box.

“What the hell is it, Chris?” Mark asked, as Bronson climbed down the stepladder and looked up at the inscribed stone.

Bronson shook his head. “I don’t know. If Jeremy Goldman’s deduction was right, and if our interpretation of the first stone was correct, this should be a map. I don’t know what it is, but a map it ain’t.”

“Hang on a minute,” Mark said. “Let me just check something.”

He walked into the living room and looked at the inscribed stone, then returned a few moments later. “I thought so. This stone’s a slightly different color. Are you sure the two are related?”

“I don’t know. All I am certain of is that this stone has been cemented into the wall directly behind the other one, to the inch, as far as I can see, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”

“It looks almost like a poem,” Mark observed.

Bronson nodded. “That’s my guess,” he said, looking up at ten lines of ornate cursive script arranged in two verses, underneath an incomprehensible title that consisted of three groups of capital letters, presumably all some kind of abbreviations. “Though why a stone with a poem carved into it should have been stuck in the wall at this exact spot beats me.”

“But the language isn’t Latin, is it?”

“No, definitely not. I think some of the words might have French roots. These three here— ben, dessu’s and perfècte, for example—aren’t that dissimilar to some modern French words. Some of the others, though, like calix, seem to be written in a completely different language.”

Bronson climbed back up the ladder and had a closer look at the inscription. There were several differences between the two, not just the languages used. Mark was right—the stones were different colors, but the form and shape of the letters in the verses was also unfamiliar, completely different from those in the other inscription, and in places the stone had been worn away, as if by the touch of many hands over countless years.

IV

The ringing of the phone cut across the silence of the office.

“There’s been a development, Cardinal.” Vertutti recognized Mandino’s light and slightly mocking tone immediately.

“What’s happened?”

“One of my men has been carrying out surveillance of the house in Monti Sabini and a few minutes ago he watched the discovery of another inscribed stone in the property, on the back of the wall directly behind the first one. It wasn’t a map, but looked more like several lines of writing, perhaps even poetry.”

“A poem? That makes no sense.”

“I didn’t say it was a poem, Cardinal, only that my man thought it looked like poetry.

But whatever it is, it must be the missing section of the stone.”

“So what are you going to do now?”

“This matter is now too sensitive to be left only to my picciotti, my soldiers. I will be traveling to Ponticelli early tomorrow morning with Pierro. Once we’ve got inside the house, I’ll have both inscriptions photographed and copied, then destroy them.

Once we have this additional information, I’m sure Pierro will be able to work out exactly where we should be looking.

“While I’m away, you should be able to contact me on my cell phone, but I’ll also send you the telephone number of my deputy, Antonio Carlotti, in case of an emergency.”

“What kind of an emergency?”

“Any kind, Cardinal. You’ll receive a text listing the numbers in a couple of minutes.

And please keep your own cell phone switched on at all times. Now,” Mandino continued, “you should also be aware that if the two men in the house have worked out—”

“Two men? What two men?”

“One is, we believe, the husband of the dead woman, but we don’t know who the second man is. As I was saying, if these men have found what we’re seeking, I will have no option but to apply the Sanction.”

11

I

“I think these verses are written in Occitan, Mark,” Bronson said, looking up from the screen of his laptop. He’d logged onto the Internet to try to research the second inscription but without inputting entire phrases. He’d discovered that some of the words could have come from several languages— roire, for example, was also found in Romanian—but the only language that contained all the words he’d chosen was Occitan, a Romance language originally spoken in the Languedoc region of southern France. By trawling through online dictionaries and lexicons and cross-referencing, he had managed to translate some of the words, though many of those in the verses simply weren’t listed in the few Occitan dictionaries he’d found.

“What’s it mean?” Mark asked.

Bronson grunted. “I’ve no idea. I’ve only been able to translate the odd word here and there. For example, this word ‘roire’ in the sixth line means ‘oak,’ and there’s a reference to ‘elm’ in the same line.”

“You don’t think it’s just some medieval poem about husbandry or forest maintenance?”

Bronson laughed. “I hope not, and I don’t think so. There’s also one oddity. In the last line but one there’s the word ‘calix,’ and I can’t find that in any of the Occitan dictionaries I’ve looked at. That might be because it seems to be a Latin word, rather than Occitan. If so, it translates as ‘chalice,’ but I’ve no idea why a Latin word should appear in a verse written in Occitan. I’ll have to send a copy of this to Jeremy Goldman in London. Then we might find out what the hell this is all about.”

He’d already taken several photographs of the inscription, which he’d transferred to the hard drive of his laptop, and had also typed the text into a Word file.

“What we need to do now,” he said, “is decide what we should do with this stone.”

“You think these ‘burglars’ will be back?”

Bronson nodded. “I’m sure of it. I hurt one of them badly last night, and probably the only reason they haven’t been back already is because they know we’ve got a pistol in the house. I suspect that they will be back, and sooner rather than later. And that stone”—he pointed—“is almost certainly what they’ve been looking for.”

“So what do you suggest? You think we should cover it up again?”

“I don’t think that would work. The fresh plaster would be obvious the moment they walked into this room. I think we need to do something more positive than simply hiding the stone. I suggest we leave the plaster just as it is, but take a hammer and chisel to that inscription and obliterate it. That way, there’ll be no clues left for anyone to follow.”

“You really think that’s necessary?”

“I honestly don’t know. But without that inscription, the trail stops right here.”

“Suppose they decide to come after us? Don’t forget, we’ve seen both these carved stones.”

“We’ll have left Italy by then. Jackie’s funeral is tomorrow. We should leave soon after that’s over, and be back in Britain tomorrow evening. I hope that whoever’s behind this won’t bother following us there.”

“OK,” Mark said. “If that’s what it’ll take to end this, let’s do it.”

Twenty minutes later Bronson had chipped away the entire surface of the block, obliterating all traces of the inscription.

II

Gregori Mandino arrived in Ponticelli at nine thirty that morning and met Rogan by arrangement in a cafe’ on the outskirts of the town. Mandino was, as usual, accompanied by two bodyguards, one of whom had driven the big Lancia sedan from the center of Rome, as well as the academic Pierro.

“Tell us again exactly what you saw,” Mandino instructed, and he and Pierro listened carefully as Rogan explained what he’d witnessed through the dining-room window of the Villa Rosa.

“It definitely wasn’t a map?” Mandino asked, when they’d heard the explanation.

Rogan shook his head. “No. It looked like about ten lines of verse, plus a title.”

“Why verse? Why are you so sure it wasn’t just ordinary text?” Pierro asked.

Rogan turned to the academic. “The lines were different lengths, but they all seemed to be lined up down the center of the stone, just like a poem you see in a book.”

“And you said the color of the stone looked different. How different?”

Rogan shrugged. “Not very. I just thought it was a lighter shade of brown than the one in the living room.”

“It could still be what we’re looking for,” Pierro said. “I’d assumed that the lower half of the stone would contain a map, but a verse or a few lines of text could give directions that will lead us to the hiding place of the relic.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out. Anything else?”

Rogan paused for a few seconds before replying, Mandino noticed.

“There is one other thing, capo. I believe that the men in the house are armed. When Alberti tried to break in and was attacked by one of them, he dropped his pistol. I think it’s in the house and that the men have found it.”

“We’re well rid of Alberti,” Mandino snarled. “Now we’ll have to wait until they’ve gone out. I’m not risking a gunfight in that house. Anything else?”

“No, nothing,” Rogan replied, sweating slightly, and not because of the early-morning sun.

“Right. What time’s the funeral?”

“Eleven fifteen, here in Ponticelli.”

Mandino glanced at his watch. “Good. We’ll drive out to the house and, as soon as these two men have left, we’ll get inside. That should give us at least a couple of hours to check what this verse says and arrange a reception committee for them.”

“I really don’t want—” Pierro began.

“Don’t worry, Professore, you won’t need to be anywhere near the house when they get back. You just decipher this verse or whatever we find in the place, and then I’ll get one of my men to drive you away. We’ll handle the rest of it.”

III

Like every day since they’d arrived in Italy, the morning of Jackie’s funeral presaged a beautiful day, with a solid blue sky and not the slightest hint of a cloud. Mark and Bronson were up fairly early, and ready to leave the house by a quarter to eleven, in good time to attend the service at eleven fifteen in Ponticelli.

Bronson locked his laptop and camera in the trunk of the Hamptons’ Alfa Romeo when he went out to the garage at a few minutes to eleven. As an afterthought, he went back into the house, collected the Browning pistol from his bedroom and slipped it into the waistband of his trousers.

Two minutes later, Mark sat down in the passenger seat and strapped himself in as Bronson slipped the Alfa into first gear and drove away.

Mandino’s driver had parked the Lancia about a quarter of a mile down the road, between the Hamptons’ house and Ponticelli, in the parking lot of a small out-of-town supermarket, and Rogan’s car was right next to it. The site offered an excellent view of the road, and the gateway of the house.

A few minutes before eleven, a sedan car emerged from the gateway and headed toward them.

“There they are,” Mandino said.

He watched as the Alfa Romeo drove past them, two indistinct figures in the front.

“Right, that was both of them, so the house should be deserted. Let’s go.”

The driver pulled out of the parking space and turned up the road toward the house.

Behind them, one of Mandino’s bodyguards turned the opposite way out of the supermarket in Rogan’s Fiat and fell into place about two hundred yards behind the Alfa, following the vehicle toward Ponticelli.

The Lancia sedan swept in between the gateposts. The driver turned the car so that it faced back up the drive and stopped it. Rogan climbed out and walked around to the back of the house. He slipped a knife from his pocket and released the catch on one set of shutters outside the living room. As he had hoped, the pane of glass Alberti had broken during their last, abortive, attempt to break in still hadn’t been repaired, and he needed only to slip his hand through the window and release the lock.

With a swift heave, he pulled himself up and through the window, landing heavily on the wooden floor of the living room. Immediately, he pulled his pistol out of his shoulder holster and glanced around the room, but there was no sound anywhere in the old house.

Rogan walked through the room into the hall and pulled open the front door.

Mandino led Pierro and his remaining bodyguard inside, waited for one of them to shut the door and then gestured for Rogan to lead the way. The three men followed him through the living room and into the dining room, and then stopped dead in front of the featureless surface of the honey-brown stone.

“Where the hell is it? Where’s the inscription?” Mandino’s voice was harsh and angry.

Rogan looked like he’d seen a ghost. “It was here,” he shouted, staring at the wall.

“It was right here on this stone.”

“Look at the floor,” Pierro said, pointing at the base of the wall. He knelt down and picked up a handful of stone chips. “Somebody’s chiseled off the inscribed layer of that stone. Some of these flakes still have letters—or at least parts of letters—on them.”

“Can you do anything with them?” Mandino demanded.

“It’ll be like a three-dimensional jigsaw,” Pierro said, “but I should be able to reconstruct some of it. I’ll need the stone to be pulled out of the wall. Without that, there’s no way I can work out which piece goes where. There’s also a possibility that we could try surface analysis, or even chemical treatment or an X-ray technique, to try to recover the inscription.”

“Really?”

“It’s worth a try. It’s not my field, but it’s surprising what can be achieved with modern recovery methods.”

That was good enough for Mandino. He pointed at his bodyguard. “Go and find something soft to put the stone chips in—towels, bed linen, something like that—and collect every single shard you can find.” He turned to Rogan. “When he’s done that, get the stepladder and start chipping out the cement from around that stone.

But don’t,” he warned, “do any more damage to the stone itself. We’ll help you lift it down when you’ve loosened it.”

Mandino watched for a few moments as his men started work, then walked toward the door, motioning to Pierro to follow him. “We’ll check the rest of the house, just in case they were helpful enough to write down what they found.”

“If they did that to the stone,” the professor replied, “I doubt very much if you’ll find anything.”

“I know, but we’ll look anyway.”

In the study, Mandino immediately spotted the computer and a digital camera.

“We’ll take these,” he said.

“We could look at the computer here,” Pierro suggested.

“We could,” Mandino agreed, “but I know specialists who can recover data even from formatted hard disks, and I’d rather they checked it. And if these men photographed the stone before they obliterated the inscription, the images might still be in the camera.”

Mandino yanked the power cable and connecting leads out of the back of the desktop computer’s system unit and picked it up. “Bring the camera,” he ordered, and led the way to the hall, where he carefully placed the unit beside the front door.

They walked back into the dining room, where Rogan and the bodyguard were just lifting the stone clear of the wall. When they’d lowered it to the floor, Mandino examined the surface again, but all he could see were chisel marks. Despite Pierro’s optimism, he didn’t think there was even the remotest chance of recovering the inscription from the pathetic collection of chips and the surface of the stone itself.

The best option they had was to talk to the men themselves.

Funerals in Italy are normally grand family affairs, with posters pasted around the town announcing the death, an open casket and lines of weeping and wailing mourners. The Hamptons knew few people in the town—they’d only been there, off and on, for a matter of months, and had spent most of that time working on the house rather than getting to know their neighbors.

Bronson had arranged for a simple service in the anticipation that there’d be only three people there—himself, Mark and the priest. In fact, there were about two dozen mourners, all members of Maria Palomo’s extended family. But it was, by Italian standards, a very restrained, and comparatively brief, ceremony. Within thirty minutes the two men were back in the Alfa, and heading out of the town.

Neither of them had noticed the single man in a nondescript dark-colored Fiat who had followed them into Ponticelli. When they’d parked near the church, he’d driven past but within moments of Bronson pulling away from the curb, the car was behind them again.

Inside the vehicle, the driver pulled a cell phone from his pocket and pressed a speed-dial number. “They’re on the way,” he said.

* * *

Mark had barely said a word since they’d left Ponticelli, and Bronson hadn’t felt like talking, the two men united in their grief for the death of a woman they’d both loved, albeit from different perspectives. Mark was trying to come to terms with the final, irrevocable chapter of his short marriage, while Bronson’s aching loss was tempered by guilt, by the knowledge that for the last five years or so he’d been living a lie, in love with his best friend’s wife.

The funeral had been Mark’s last farewell to Jackie and, now it was over, he was going to have to make decisions about his life. Bronson guessed that the house—the property the Hamptons had intended to retire to—would go on the market. The memories of their time together in the old place would probably be too painful for Mark to relive for very long.

As he neared the house, Bronson noticed a Fiat sedan coming up fast behind them.

“Bloody Italian drivers,” he muttered, as the car showed no signs of overtaking, just maintained position about ten yards behind the Alfa.

He braked gently as he approached the gateway, turned on his blinker and turned in. But the other car did the same, stopping actually in the gateway and completely blocking it. In that instant, as Bronson glanced toward the old house, he realized they were trapped, and just how high the stakes really were.

Outside the house, a Lancia sedan was parked, and beside the front door—which looked as if it was slightly ajar—was an oblong gray box and a cubical sandy-colored object. Behind the car, two men were standing, staring at the approaching Alfa, one with the unmistakable shape of a pistol in his right hand.

“Who the hell . . . ?” Mark shouted.

“Hang on,” Bronson yelled. He swung the wheel to the left and accelerated hard, powering the car off the gravel drive and across the lawn, aiming straight for the hedge that formed a boundary between the garden and the road.

“Where was it?” Bronson shouted.

Strapped into the passenger seat, Mark immediately guessed what Bronson was asking. When they’d bought the house, the driveway was U-shaped, with two gates, but they’d extended the hedge and lawn across the second entrance. And that was now their only way out. He pointed through the windshield. “A little farther to the right,” he said, braced himself in the seat and closed his eyes.

Bronson twitched the wheel slightly as the Alfa rocketed forward. He heard the cracks of two shots behind them, but he didn’t think either hit the vehicle. Then the nose of the car tore into the hedge, the bushes planted barely a year earlier. Beyond the windshield, their view turned into an impenetrable maelstrom of green and brown as the Alfa smashed the plants under its chassis, branches whipping past the side windows. The front wheels lifted off the ground for a moment when the car hit the low bank that formed the base of the hedge, then crashed down again.

And then they were through. Bronson lifted his foot off the accelerator pedal and hit the brakes for an instant as the car lurched across the grass verge, checking the road in both directions. It was just as well he did.

A truck was lumbering up the hill directly toward them, just a few yards away, a black cloud of diesel belching from its exhaust. The driver’s face wore an almost comical look of shock, having just seen the bright red car materialize from a hedge right in front of him.

Bronson slammed the accelerator pedal down again, and the Alfa shot straight across the road, missing the back of the truck by perhaps three feet. He hit the brakes, swung the wheel hard left and, the moment the car was aiming down the hill, accelerated again. The Alfa fishtailed as he fed in the power, but in moments it was screaming down the road at well more than sixty miles an hour.

“What the hell’s going on?” Mark demanded, turning around in his seat to look back toward his house. “Who were those people?”

“I don’t know who they were,” Bronson said, “but I know what they were. That cubical object was the stone from your dining-room wall, and the gray box was the system unit from your computer. They were the people who broke in to read the first inscription, and who’ve been trying to get back inside ever since to find the second one.”

Bronson glanced in his mirror as he accelerated hard down the hill. About two hundred yards behind them he saw two cars emerge from the gateway one after the other and start chasing them. The first was the Fiat that had blocked the drive behind them, and the second was the Lancia.

“I don’t—” Mark began.

Bronson interrupted. “We’re not clear yet. Both cars are chasing us.”

His eyes were scanning the instruments, checking for any abnormal readings that might have been caused by the harsh treatment he’d given the car, but everything seemed OK. And he hadn’t detected any problems with the handling, though there appeared to be various bits of greenery attached to the front of the car.

“What do they want?”

“The inscription, obviously. They know we erased it, so now we’re their only lead, simply because we saw it. Whatever it means, it must be a hell of a lot more important than I thought.”

Bronson was pushing the Alfa as hard as he dared, but the roads were fairly narrow, twisting and not that well surfaced and, though he couldn’t see the other cars behind him, he knew they had to be close. He was a very competent police-trained driver, but he wasn’t familiar with the car or the area, and he was driving on the “wrong”

side of the road, so the odds were stacked against him.

“You’ll have to help me, Mark. We’ve got to get the hell away from here, as quickly as possible.” He pointed ahead to a road sign indicating a crossroads. “Which way?”

Mark stared through the windshield, but for a moment he didn’t respond.

“I need to know,” Bronson said urgently. “Which way?”

Mark seemed to rouse himself. “Left,” he said. “Go left. That’s the quickest route to the autostrada.”

But as Bronson paused in the center of the road, waiting for a group of three cars coming in the opposite direction to pass, the Fiat appeared in his rearview mirror about a hundred yards behind.

“Shit,” Bronson muttered, and accelerated as quickly as he could the instant the road was clear.

“A quick check, Mark,” he said. “My laptop and camera are in the car, and my passport’s in my pocket. Is there anything you have to collect from the house?”

Mark felt in his jacket pocket and pulled out his wallet and passport. “Only my clothes and stuff,” he said. “I hadn’t finished packing.”

“You have now,” Bronson said grimly, alternating his gaze between the road in front and his mirrors.

“We need to take the next road on the right,” Mark instructed. “Then the autostrada’s only a couple of miles away.”

“Got it.”

But though Bronson slowed as the Alfa neared the junction, he didn’t take the turn.

“Chris, I said turn right.”

“I know, but we need to lose this guy first. Hang on.”

The Fiat had closed to less than fifty yards behind the Alfa when Bronson acted. He slammed on the brakes, waited until the car’s speed had dropped to about twenty miles an hour, then released the brakes, spun the wheel to the left and simultaneously pulled on the handbrake. The car lurched sideways, tires screaming in protest as it slid across to the other side of the road. The moment it was facing the opposite way, Bronson dropped the handbrake and pressed on the accelerator. The Alfa shot past the Fiat, whose driver was still braking hard, and moments later they passed the Lancia as well, which had just caught up.

“What the hell was that?” Mark asked.

“Technically it’s called a J-turn, because that’s the shape of the skid mark the tires leave on the road. It’s amazing what you can learn in the police force. The important thing is that it should have given us a couple of minutes’ breathing space.”

Bronson was checking his mirrors constantly and when they reached the turning for the autostrada there was still no sign of either the Fiat or the Lancia behind them. For a second or two he debated ignoring the junction and taking a side road up into the hills, where they might be able to find somewhere to hide for a few minutes. But he decided that speed was more important, and hauled the Alfa across the road, barely slowing, and within three minutes they were taking a ticket at the barrier.

“Where are we going?” Mark asked.

“We’re heading for the Italian border. I’m going to put as much distance as possible between us and them, and the sooner we’re in another country the better, as far as I’m concerned.”

Mark shook his head. “I still don’t really understand what’s going on. Stealing the computer makes sense, I suppose—it’s possible we could have stored the pictures of the verses on that—but the stone? You completely destroyed the inscription, so why would they bother taking it?”

“They probably think they can recover it by using some kind of high-tech process.

You can use X-rays to read the number of a car engine after it’s been ground off the block, so maybe there’s a similar technique that can be applied to stone. I really don’t know. But to go to the trouble of hacking that stone block out of the wall—not to mention shooting at us—that means they’re really serious about finding that inscription.”

12

I

Gregori Mandino was furious. He’d ordered the stone and computer unit to be taken out to the Lancia, and he’d planned to have Pierro drive the vehicle away from the house, leaving the three of them in the property to await the return of Hampton and his companion. But the call from his bodyguard, telling him the two Englishmen were already heading back to the house, had changed all that.

The maneuver by his bodyguard had worked perfectly, completely blocking the entrance to the driveway, but the way the car had escaped had been totally unexpected. That, and the way the Alfa had evaded them minutes later, had convinced Mandino that the driver was either desperate or an expert.

They’d turned to give chase as quickly as possible, but by the time they’d reached the first junction, the Alfa Romeo was nowhere in sight, and there were three possible routes the driver could have taken. Mandino had guessed Hampton and the other man would head for the autostrada, and he’d ordered the Lancia driver to take that route, but they’d seen no sign of their quarry before they reached the tollbooths and, without knowing which way the Alfa had gone, any further attempt at pursuit was pointless.

Mandino hated making mistakes. He’d assumed that the two Englishmen wouldn’t be returning to the house for at least two hours, and assumption, as an American colleague had been fond of saying, was the mother of all screwups. But it was too late now.

“Search the house,” he ordered. “Look for any documents that identify the second man, and anything that might help us find the two of them.”

As his men dispersed to do his bidding, Pierro walked over to Mandino. “What would you like me to do?”

“Take another look around the place, just in case my men miss anything.”

“Where do you think the Englishmen have gone?”

“If they’ve got any sense,” Mandino replied, “they’ll be heading for England. They’ll have picked up the autostrada and headed north, out of Italy.”

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

“Mandino.”

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

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

“Where is this Tunbridge Wells?” Mandino asked.

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

“What did he tell them?”

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

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

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

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

“Family?” he asked, finally.

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

“As what? A secretary or something?”

“No. She’s a ceramics conservator.”

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

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

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

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

13

I

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

“Angela?”

“Yes.” Her voice was curt and distant.

“It’s Chris.”

“I know. What do you want?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Now, the two sets of smaller letters might help us refine that date. The ‘PO’ of ‘PO

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

“Any ideas?” Bronson asked.

Goldman grinned at him. “None at all, I’m afraid, and finding out won’t be easy.

Apart from the obvious difficulty of identifying somebody who lived two millennia ago from his initials and nothing else, the Romans had a habit of changing their names. Let me give you an example. Everyone’s heard of Julius Caesar, but very few people know that his full name was Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar Divus, or that he was normally just known as Gaius Julius Caesar. So his initials could be ‘JC,’ ‘GJC’ or even ‘IGJCD.’ ”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what does the inscription mean?”

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

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

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

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

As Bronson walked out of Goldman’s office, he glanced around expectantly. He had hoped to see Angela while he was in the museum, and her refusal to meet him had been a disappointment.

He wandered out into Great Russell Street and went down one of the side roads. He took a seat in a café and ordered a cappuccino. The first sip he took made him realize just how bad most English coffee was in comparison to the real Italian stuff. That started him thinking about Italy again and, inevitably, about Jackie.

As he sat there, drinking the bitter liquid, his thoughts spun back over the years, and he remembered how excited she and Mark had been when they completed the purchase of the old house. He’d gone out to Italy with the Hamptons because they didn’t speak the language well enough to handle the transaction, and had stayed with them in a local hotel for a couple of days.

A vivid picture swam into his mind: Jackie, dancing on the lawn in a bright red and white sundress while Mark stood beside the front door, a broad grin on his face, on the day when they’d finally got the keys.

“Stay here with us, Chris,” she’d said, laughing in the spring sunshine. “There’s plenty of room. Stay as long as you like.”

But he hadn’t. He’d pleaded pressure of work and flown back to London the following afternoon. Those two days he’d spent with them in Italy had rekindled feelings for Jackie that he’d really thought he’d got over, feelings that he knew were a betrayal of both Mark and Angela.

Bronson shook himself out of his reverie, and drained the last of his coffee, grimacing as he tasted the gritty grounds. Then he sat back and, in a sudden moment of gloomy introspection, seriously wondered if his life could do anything except improve.

Jackie was now—to his eternal regret—dead and gone. Mark was an emotional wreck, though Bronson knew he was strong and he’d pull himself out of it, and Angela was barely speaking to him. He wasn’t sure he still had a job and, for some reason he still couldn’t fathom, he’d got embroiled with a gang of armed Italian thugs over a couple of dusty old inscriptions. As midlife crises went, Bronson reflected, it pretty much ticked all the boxes on the debit side. And he wasn’t even middle-aged. Or not quite, anyway.

Three-quarters of an hour later he walked back into Goldman’s office.

If Bronson had been hoping for a clue that would lead them to the missing section of the first inscribed stone, or even a written description of its contents, he was disappointed. The verses that Goldman handed him appeared to be little more than rambling nonsense:

GB•PS•DDDBE

From the safe mountain truth did descend

Abandoned by all save the good

The cleansing flames quell only flesh

And pure spirits soar above the pyre

For truth like stone forever will endure

Here oak and elm descry the mark

As is above so is below

The word becomes the perfect

Within the chalice all is naught

And terrible to behold

“You’re sure this is accurate, Jeremy?” he asked.

“That’s a fairly literal translation of the Occitan verses, yes,” Goldman replied. “The problem is that there seems to be a lot of symbolism in the original that I’m not entirely sure we can fully appreciate today. In fact, some of it would be completely meaningless to us, even if we knew exactly what the author of this text was driving at. For example, there are some Cathar references, like the statement ‘As is above so is below,’ which, without a thorough grounding in that religion, would be impossible to understand completely.”

“But the Cathars were prevalent in France, not Italy, weren’t they?”

Goldman nodded. “Yes, but it’s known that after the Albigensian Crusade some of the few survivors fled to northern Italy, so maybe this verse was written by one of them. That would also explain the use of Occitan. But as to what it actually means, I’m afraid I haven’t got a clue. And I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Cathar you could ask. The crusaders did a very efficient job of exterminating them.”

“What about the title—this ‘GB PS DDDBE’? Is that some kind of code?”

“I doubt it,” Goldman replied. “I suspect they refer to some expression that would have been familiar to people who saw the stone back in the fourteenth century.”

Bronson looked blank.

“There are a lot of initials in common use today that would have been completely meaningless a hundred years ago, and might be just as incomprehensible to future generations. Things like . . . oh, ‘PC’ for ‘personal computer’ or even ‘politically correct’; ‘TMI’ for ‘too much information’; that kind of thing. OK, a lot of these kind of initials refer to slang terms, but nobody today would have any trouble telling you that ‘RIP’ stands for ‘rest in peace,’ and that’s the kind of thing you’ll frequently find carved on a piece of stone. Maybe the initials we have here had a similar significance in the fourteenth century, and were so familiar to people that no explanation was ever needed.”

Bronson looked again at the paper in his hand. He’d hoped that the translation would provide an answer, but all it had done was present him with a whole new list of questions.

II

Early that evening, and a mere five hours after they’d landed at Heathrow, Rogan braked the rental car to a halt about a hundred yards from Mark Hampton’s Ilford apartment.

“You’re sure he’s here?” Mandino asked.

Rogan nodded. “I know somebody is. I’ve made three telephone calls to that apartment and they’ve all been answered. I did one as a wrong number, and the other two as telesales calls. In all three cases, a man answered, and I’m reasonably certain it was Mark Hampton.”

“Good enough,” Mandino said. He picked up a small plastic carrier bag from the footwell of the Ford sedan, opened the passenger door and headed along the street, Rogan at his side.

Time was of the essence. With every hour that passed, Mandino knew that more people would be likely to see copies of the inscriptions as Hampton and Bronson tried to work out what they meant.

He and Rogan walked the short distance to the building. At the entrance door, Mandino glanced in both directions before pulling on a pair of thin rubber gloves, and then pressed the button on the entry-phone. After a few seconds there was a crackle and a man’s voice issued from the tiny speaker grill.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Mark Hampton?”

“Yes. Who is it?”

“This is Detective Inspector Roberts, sir, of the Metropolitan Police. I’ve got a few questions to ask you about your wife’s unfortunate death in Italy. May I come in?”

“Can you prove your identity?”

Mandino paused for a few seconds. In the circumstances, Hampton’s response was not unreasonable, or unexpected.

“You don’t have a videophone, sir, so I can’t show you my warrant card. But I can read you the number, and you can check it with either the Ilford police station or New Scotland Yard. The number is seven four six, two eight four.”

Mandino had not the slightest idea what number or numbers might be found on a Metropolitan Police warrant card, but he was prepared to bet that Hampton wouldn’t either. It all depended on whether the Englishman would bother to check.

“What questions?”

“Just some simple procedural matters, sir. It will only take a few minutes.”

“Very well.”

There was a buzz and the electric lock on the front door of the building clicked open.

With a final glance up and down the street, Mandino and Rogan stepped inside, walked straight to the elevator and pressed the button for Mark’s floor.

When the doors opened, they checked the apartment numbers, then strode down the corridor. At the correct door they stopped and Mandino knocked, then stepped to one side.

The moment the door came off the latch, Rogan kicked against it, hard. The door flew backward, knocking Mark off his feet and sending him sprawling onto the floor of the narrow hallway. Rogan stepped forward quickly, knelt down and hit him on the side of his head with a bludgeon. The blow was just hard enough to knock Mark unconscious, and was sufficient to disable him for the few minutes they needed.

“There,” Mandino said, walking into the living room and pointing at a carver dining chair. “Tie him in that.”

Rogan pulled the chair into the center of the room. Together, the two men dragged Mark over to the carver and sat him in it. He slumped forward, but Mandino pulled his shoulders back and held him in place while Rogan did his work. He took a length of clothesline from the bag Mandino had been carrying, looped it twice around Mark’s chest and tied it behind the back of the chair, holding him upright.

Then he took some cable ties, wrapped one around each wrist and used a pair of pliers to pull them tight. He repeated the process around Mark’s forearms and elbows, and then secured his ankles in the same fashion to the chair legs. In less than three minutes, he was completely immobilized.

“Check the place,” Mandino ordered. “See if he brought a copy of the inscription back with him.”

While Rogan began looking around the apartment, Mandino walked through into the kitchen and made himself a mug of instant coffee. It was nothing like the Italian latte he was used to, but it was better than nothing, and the last drink he’d had was a can of orange juice on the flight from Rome.

“Nothing,” Rogan reported, as Mandino walked back into the room.

“Right. Wake him up.”

Rogan stepped across to Mark, lifted his head and then roughly forced his eyes open. Their captive stirred, then regained consciousness.

When Mark came to, he found himself staring at a well-dressed and heavily built man sitting in an easy chair opposite him, sipping a hot drink from one of his own mugs.

“Who the hell are you?” Mark demanded, his voice harsh and slurred. “And what are you doing in my apartment?”

Mandino smiled slightly. “I’ll ask the questions, thank you. We know about the two inscribed stones you found in your house in Italy, and we know you or your friend Christopher Bronson decided to obliterate the carving in the dining room. Now you’re going to tell me what you found.”

“Are you the bastards who killed Jackie?”

The smile vanished from Mandino’s face. “I said I’ll ask the questions. My associate will now emphasize the point.”

Rogan stepped forward, the pliers in his hand, reached down and placed the jaws around the end of the little finger on Mark’s left hand and slowly levered backward.

With a snap that was audible to both Italians, one of the bones broke, the sound followed immediately by a howl of pain from Hampton.

“I hope the soundproofing here is good,” Mandino remarked. “I wouldn’t want to disturb your neighbors. Now,” he continued, raising his voice above Mark’s groans,

“just answer my questions, quickly and truthfully, and then we can get you proper medical attention. If you don’t tell us what we want to know, you’ve seven more fingers that my associate can work on.”

Rogan waved the pliers in front of Mark’s face.

Through a red haze and tears of pain, Mark stared in disbelief at the Italian.

“OK,” Mandino said briskly, “let’s begin. What did you find on the second inscribed stone? And don’t even think about lying to me. My colleague here was watching through the window of the house when Bronson uncovered it.”

“A poem,” Mark gasped. “It looked like a poem. Two verses.”

“In Latin?”

“No. We thought it was a language called Occitan.”

“Did you translate it?”

Mark shook his head. “No. Chris tried, but he could only find a few of the words on the Internet, so we’ve no idea what the verses were about.”

“What did you manage to translate?”

“Only a couple of words about trees—oak and elm, I think—and there was a Latin word as well. Something about a cup or chalice. That’s all we could do.”

“Are you quite sure?” Mandino asked, leaning forward.

“Yes, I—” Mark screamed as Rogan tapped the pliers sharply on his fractured finger, already badly swollen and bleeding.

Mandino waited for a few seconds before continuing. “I’m inclined to believe you,”

he said, in a conversational tone. “So where is the inscription? I presume you copied it or something before your friend destroyed it.”

“Yes, yes,” Mark sobbed. “Chris photographed it.”

“And what’s he doing with it?”

“His ex-wife put him in contact with a man named Jeremy Goldman at the British Museum. He’ll be taking the pictures to show him, to try to get it translated.”

“When?” Mandino asked softly.

“I don’t know. We only got back from Italy today. He’s been driving for two solid days, so he’ll probably go there tomorrow. But I don’t know,” he added hastily, as Rogan lifted the pliers threateningly.

Mandino raised a calming hand. “And do you have a copy of those photographs?”

“No. There didn’t seem any point. Chris is the one who’s interested in this—I’m not.

All I wanted was my wife back.”

“Are there any other copies, apart from those Bronson has?”

“No—I’ve just told you that.”

It was time to finish it. Mandino nodded to Rogan, who walked behind their captive, picked up a roll of adhesive tape and tore off a strip about six inches long, which he stuck roughly over Mark’s mouth as a rudimentary gag. Then he cut about a two-foot length of clothesline and knotted the ends together to form a loop.

Mark’s terrified stare never left the Italian as he made his preparations.

Rogan dropped the loop of cord over Mark’s head and walked into the kitchen, returning a few seconds later with that most mundane of kitchen utensils, a rolling pin. He stood directly behind Mark, awaiting instructions.

“Neither you nor your policeman friend have any idea what you’ve stumbled into,”

Mandino said. “My instructions are explicit. Anyone with any knowledge of these two inscriptions—even the limited knowledge you appear to have—is considered too dangerous to remain alive.”

He nodded to Rogan, who slipped the rolling pin into the loop of cord and began twisting it to form a simple but effective garrotte. Mark immediately began to struggle in a desperate effort to free himself.

When the cord tightened around the Englishman’s neck, Rogan paused for a moment, awaiting final confirmation.

Mandino nodded again, and watched Mark as the noose began to bite, seeing the flush rise in the man’s face as his struggles intensified.

Rogan grunted with the effort as he held the rolling pin tight, waiting for the end.

Mark jerked violently once, then a second time, then slumped forward as far as the rope would allow. Rogan maintained the pressure for another minute, then released the cord and checked for a pulse in Mark’s neck. He found nothing.

Mandino finished his coffee, then stood up and carried the mug through into the kitchen where he washed it thoroughly. He wasn’t too bothered about the possibility of his DNA being found in the apartment, as there was nothing whatsoever to link him or Rogan to the killing, but old habits died hard.

Back in the living room, Rogan had already released Mark from the chair and dragged his body to one side of the room. Then they trashed the place, trying to make it look as if a violent struggle had taken place. Finally, Mandino produced a leather-bound Filofax, opened it, tore several pages and smeared the organizer with blood from Mark’s broken finger, then dropped it beside the body. The name in the front of the document was “Chris Bronson,” and it was one of the items Mandino’s men had found when they searched the house in Italy.

They made a final inspection of the apartment, then Rogan opened the door and checked up and down the corridor. He nodded to Mandino and they left the apartment, pulled the door closed behind them and walked to the elevator.

Outside, they strode unhurriedly down the street to their rental car. Rogan started the engine and pulled away from the curb. As they neared the end of the road, Mandino pointed to a public phone booth.

“That will do. Stop beside it.”

He got out, stepped across to the phone, checked he still had his gloves on, then lifted the receiver and dialed “999.” The call was answered in seconds.

“Emergency. Which service do you require?”

“Police,” Mandino replied, speaking quickly and with what he hoped was the sound of panic in his voice.

“There’s been a terrible fight,” he said when the officer came on the line. He gave the address of Mark’s apartment, then ended the call just as the officer began asking for his personal details.

“Drive back up the road. There’s a side street not far from the apartment building.

Take that turning.”

Rogan parked the car where Mandino directed, facing the main road. Mark’s building was just visible from their position.

“Now what?” Rogan asked.

“Now we wait,” Mandino told him.

Twenty minutes later they heard the unmistakable sound of a siren, and a police car drove swiftly past the end of the road and squealed to a stop outside the apartment block. Two officers ran toward the building.

“Can we go now?” Rogan asked.

“Not yet,” Mandino said.

After about another fifteen minutes, three more police cars, sirens screaming, tore down the street. Mandino nodded in satisfaction. He hadn’t been able to find Bronson so far, but he had no doubt that the British police force would be able to track him down quickly. They would almost certainly have enough evidence to arrest him on suspicion of the killing of Mark Hampton.

Faced with the possibility of a murder charge, deciphering an ancient Occitan inscription would be the last thing on Bronson’s mind. Mandino’s organization had good contacts within the Metropolitan Police, and he was certain he would be able to find out where Bronson was being held and, more important, when and where he would be released.

“Now we can go,” he said.

III

Bronson unlocked the front door of his house and stepped inside. He’d caught one of the fast trains out of Charing Cross, and had got back home quite a bit sooner than he’d expected. He walked through into the kitchen and switched on the kettle, then sat down at the table to study the translation of the inscription again. It still wasn’t making any sense.

He looked at his watch and decided to give Mark a call. He wanted to show him the translation, and suggest that they meet up for a meal. He knew his friend was in a fragile emotional state. He’d feel happier if Mark wasn’t left alone on his first evening back in Britain immediately after his wife’s funeral.

Bronson picked up the landline phone and dialed Mark’s cell phone, which was switched off, so he called the apartment. The phone was picked up after half a dozen rings.

“Yes?”

“Mark?”

“Who’s calling, please?”

Immediately, Bronson guessed something was wrong.

“Who is this?” the voice asked again.

“I’m a friend of Mark Hampton, and I’d like to speak to him.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir. There’s been an accident.”

The “sir” immediately suggested he was talking to a police officer.

“My name’s Chris Bronson, and I’m a D.S. in the Kent force. Just tell me what the hell’s happened, will you?”

“Did you say ‘Bronson,’ sir?”

“Yes.”

“Just a moment.”

There was a pause, then another man picked up the phone.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr. Hampton is dead, Detective Sergeant.”

“Dead? He can’t be. I only saw him a few hours ago.”

“I can’t discuss the circumstances over the telephone, but we are treating the death as suspicious. You said you were a friend of the deceased. Would you be prepared to come over to Ilford to assist us? There are several matters that we think you could help us to understand.”

Bronson was in shock, but he was still thinking clearly. It was far from normal procedure to ask an officer from another force to just pop over to the scene of a suspicious death.

“Why?” he asked.

“We’re trying to establish the last movements of the deceased, and we hope you can assist us. We know you’re acquainted with Mr. Hampton, because we found your Filofax here in his apartment, and the last few entries suggest you’ve just returned from Italy with him. I know it’s not the usual routine, but you really could be of great assistance to us.”

“Yes, of course I’ll come over. I’ve got a couple of things that I’ve got to do here, but I should be there within about ninety minutes, say two hours maximum.”

“Thank you, D.S. Bronson. That’s very much appreciated.”

The moment Bronson put down the phone, he dialed another number. It rang for a very long time before it was answered.

“What do you want, Chris? I thought I told you not to ring me.”

“Angela, don’t hang up. Please just listen. Please don’t ask questions, just listen.

Mark’s dead, and he’s probably been murdered.”

“Mark? Oh my God. How did—”

“Angela. Please listen and just do as I say. I know you’re angry and you don’t want to have anything to do with me. But your life is in danger and you have to get out of your apartment right now. I’ll explain why when I see you. Pack the minimum possible—enough for three or four days—but bring your passport and driver’s license with you. Wait for me in that cafe’ where we used to meet in Shepherd’s Bush. Don’t say the name—it’s possible this line has been bugged.”

“Yes, but—”

“Please, I’ll explain when I see you. Please just trust me and do what I ask. OK? Oh, and keep your cell phone switched on.”

“I . . . I still can’t believe it. Poor Mark. But who do you think killed him?”

“I’ve got a good idea, but the police have a completely different suspect in mind.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

14

I

Though he was used to the traffic in Rome, Mandino was still surprised at the sheer number of cars on London’s streets. And at the treacle-slow pace at which the traffic moved, from red light to road works to another red light.

The distance between the apartment in Ilford and Angela Lewis’s apartment in Ealing was only about fifteen miles, about a quarter-hour drive on an open road. But it had taken them more than an hour so far. Rogan was inching his way down the Clerkenwell Road, silently cursing the traffic, and the navigation system for bringing them this way.

“We’re coming up to Gray’s Inn Road,” Mandino said, consulting a large-format London A-Z he’d bought at a newsagent’s fifteen minutes earlier, when they had been stationary for even longer than usual. “When we reach the junction, ignore what that piece of electronic junk tells you and turn right, if you’re allowed to.”

“Right?”

“Yes. That’ll take us up to King’s Cross, and if we turn left there we’ll be able to get on the Euston Road, and that will take us straight to the motorway. That’s a longer way around, but it has just got to be faster than staying in this.” Mandino gestured at the nearly motionless traffic all around them.

A mere ten minutes later, Rogan was pushing the Ford sedan up to fifty on the A40.

“If there are no more holdups,” Mandino said, calculating distances on the map, “we should reach the Lewis woman’s building in under twenty minutes.”

In her north Ealing apartment, Angela replaced the telephone and stood in the living room for a few seconds, irresolute. Chris’s phone call had scared her, and for a moment she wondered if she should ignore what he’d asked her to do, bolt the doors and simply stay inside the apartment.

Chris was right—she was still angry with him, because in her opinion the breakup of their marriage had been his fault, due entirely to the fact that he’d always been in love with his best friend’s wife. He’d never talked about his feelings for Jackie—but then again, Chris had never been very good at talking about any of his feelings. But you only had to watch his reaction when Jackie appeared—his whole face would light up. The sad reality was that in her and Chris’s marriage there had always been three people.

And Mark was dead! This shocking news, coming so soon after Jackie’s fatal accident in Italy, was almost unbelievable. In just a few days, two people she’d known for years were dead.

Angela felt the tears coming, then shook her head angrily. She wasn’t going to turn into a weeping wreck, and she knew what she had to do. Chris had many faults that she could—and indeed had—expound in great detail during their brief marriage, but he’d never been given to flights of fancy. If he said her life was in danger, she was perfectly prepared to believe him.

She walked briskly into the bedroom, pulled put her favorite bag from under the bed—it was a Gucci knockoff she’d picked up in a Paris street market years earlier—and quickly stuffed clothes and makeup inside. She took a smaller bag and grabbed a selection of her favorite shoes, checked her cell phone was in her handbag, unplugged the charger from its usual socket by the bed and tucked that in the overnight bag as well, then chose a coat from her wardrobe.

Angela made a final check that she’d got everything, then picked up her bags, locked her door and took the two flights of stairs down to street level.

She’d only walked about a hundred yards down Castlebar Road when she spotted a vacant black cab in the northbound traffic. She waved her hand and whistled. The cabbie made a sharp U-turn and stopped the vehicle neatly beside her.

“Where to, love?” he asked.

“Shepherd’s Bush. Just around the corner from the Bush Theatre, please.”

As the cab gathered speed down Castlebar Road toward the Uxbridge Road, a Ford sedan made the turn into Argyle Road from Western Avenue, and stopped outside Angela Lewis’s apartment building.

II

Bronson put down the phone, ran upstairs, pulled an overnight bag from his wardrobe, grabbed clean clothes from his wardrobe and chest of drawers and stuffed them into it. He made sure he left one particular item on the bedside table, then went back downstairs.

His computer bag was in the living room, and he picked that up, checked that the memory stick was still in his jacket pocket, seized Jeremy Goldman’s translation of the inscription from the kitchen table and shoved that into his pocket as well.

Finally, he opened a locked drawer in his desk in the living room and removed all the cash, plus the Browning pistol he’d acquired in Italy. He slipped the weapon into his computer bag, just in case.

And all the time he was doing this he was checking outside the windows of his house, watching for either Mark’s killers or the police to turn up. The Met now knew he was a serving officer with the Kent force, and it would take only a few phone calls to find his address. Whether or not his agreement to drive over to the apartment in Ilford had actually served to allay their suspicions he had no idea, but he wasn’t prepared to take any chances.

Less than four minutes after he’d called Angela, he pulled his front door closed behind him and ran across the pavement to his Mini. He put his bags in the trunk and drove away, heading north toward London.

About two hundred yards from his house, he heard sirens approaching from ahead of him, and took the next available left turn. He drove down the road, made another left at the end, and then left again, so that his car was pointing back toward the main road. As he watched, two police cars sped through the junction in front of him. He guessed that he’d got out of the house by the skin of his teeth.

An hour later, Bronson parked the car in a street just off Shepherd’s Bush Road and walked the short distance to the café. Angela was sitting alone at a table in the back, well away from the windows.

As Bronson threaded his way through the tables toward his ex-wife, he felt a rush of relief that she was safe, mingled with apprehension as to how she might be feeling.

And, as always when he looked at her, he was struck anew by her appearance.

Angela wasn’t a beauty in the classical sense, but her blond hair, hazel eyes and lips with more than a hint of Michelle Pfeiffer about them gave her a look that was undeniably striking.

As she pushed her hair back from her face and stood up to greet him, she drew appreciative glances from the handful of men in the cafe’.

“What the hell is going on?” Angela demanded. “Is Mark really dead?”

“Yes.” Bronson felt a stab of grief, and swallowed it down quickly. He had to stay in control—for both their sakes.

He ordered coffee, and another pot of tea for Angela. He knew he should eat something, but the thought of food made him nauseous.

“I rang Mark’s apartment,” he said, “and a man answered the phone. He didn’t identify himself, but he sounded like a police officer.”

“What does a policeman sound like?” Angela asked. “Still, I suppose you would know.”

Bronson shrugged. “It’s the way we’re told to use ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ when we’re talking to members of the public. Almost nobody else does that these days, not even waiters. Anyway, when I gave him my name, he told me that Mark was dead, and they were treating the death as suspicious. Then another man—definitely a copper, and probably a D.I.—asked if I could drive over to Ilford and help explain some things.”

He put his head in his hands. “I can’t believe he’s dead—I was with him earlier today. I should never have left him alone.”

Angela cautiously reached for his hand across the table. “So why didn’t you just drive over to Ilford, as the policeman asked?”

“Because everything changed when they found out my name. The second man—the D.I.—told me they knew I was a friend of Mark, because they’d found my Filofax in the apartment, and that there were notes about the trip to Italy in it.”

“But why did you leave your organizer with Mark?”

“I didn’t, that’s the point. The last time I saw my Filofax was in the guest bedroom of Mark’s house in Italy. The only way it could have been found in his apartment was if the killers had dropped it there in a deliberate attempt to frame me for his murder.”

He went on to explain about the “burglaries” at Mark’s house following the uncovering of the first inscription, and the possibility that Jackie had been killed during the initial break-in.

“Oh, God. Poor Jackie. And now Mark—this is a nightmare. But why are you and I in danger?”

“Because we’ve seen the inscriptions on the stones, even if neither of us has a clue why they’re important. The fact that Mark was killed in his apartment—or at least, that’s where the body was found—means the killers found out where he lived. And if they found his address, they could just as easily find mine and, more important, yours. That’s why I wanted you to get out of your apartment. They’re going to come after us, Angela. They’ve killed our friends and we’re next.”

“But you still haven’t explained why.” Angela banged the table in frustration, spilling some of her tea. “Why are these inscriptions so important? Why are these people killing anyone who’s seen them?”

Bronson sighed. “I don’t know.”

Angela frowned, and Bronson could tell that she was thinking it through. She had a fierce intellect—it was one of the things that had attracted him to her in the first place. “Let’s just look at the facts here, Chris. I talked to Jeremy about these stones and he told me that one inscription dates from the first century and contains exactly three words written in Latin. The second is fifteen hundred years later, written in Occitan, and appears to be a kind of poem. What possible link can there be between them, apart from the fact that they were discovered in the same house?”

“I don’t know,” Bronson repeated. “But the two people who owned the house where the stones were hidden are now dead, and the Italian gang that I believe is responsible has made a pretty professional attempt to frame me for Mark’s death.

We have to stop them. They can’t get away with this.”

Angela shivered slightly, and took a mouthful of her tea. “So, what’s your plan now?

You have got a plan, haven’t you?”

“Well, we’ve got to do two things. We have to get ourselves out of London without leaving a paper trail, and then we have to sit down and decode those two inscriptions.”

“Got anywhere in mind?”

“Yes. We need somewhere not too far from London, but with easy access to a reference library and where a couple of researchers like us won’t stand out.

Somewhere like Cambridge, maybe?”

“Bicycle city? Yes, OK. That sounds as good as anywhere. When do we leave?”

“As soon as you’ve finished your tea.”

A couple of minutes later they stood up to leave. Bronson glanced at Angela’s luggage.

“Two bags?” he asked.

“Shoes,” Angela replied shortly.

Bronson paid the bill and they walked out of the cafe’. He turned right, not left toward where he’d parked the Mini Cooper, but to an ATM machine outside a bank off the Uxbridge Road.

“I thought guys on the run didn’t use plastic?” Angela said, as Bronson took out his wallet.

“You’ve been watching too many American films. But you’re right. That’s why I’m using this machine, not one up in Cambridge.”

Bronson withdrew two hundred pounds. He wasn’t bothered that the transaction would pinpoint his location, because they wouldn’t be staying in the area for more than a few minutes.

He stuffed the cash in his pocket and led the way to his Mini. He repeated the process, each time drawing a few hundred pounds, at four further ATMs about a mile apart, but always staying in the Shepherd’s Bush-White City area. He reached his credit limit at the last one.

“Right,” he said, as he got back into the driving seat of the Cooper after the final withdrawal. “Hopefully that will convince the Met that I’ve gone to ground somewhere in this area. From now on, we’re only going to use cash.”

15

I

Angela stepped out of the cramped shower cubicle, wrapped a towel around her and walked across to the sink. As she dried her hair, she stared at herself critically in the small mirror and again wondered just what the hell she was doing.

In the last twenty-four hours her world had been turned completely upside-down.

Before, her life had been ordered and predictable. Now, one of her best friends had been killed and her ex-husband was apparently the prime suspect, and she was on the run with him, trying to avoid both the police and a gang of Italian killers.

But, strangely, she was beginning to enjoy herself. Despite the failure of their marriage, she still liked Chris, and enjoyed being in his company. And, though she would never admit it to anyone else, she found his dark good looks just as attractive now as when she’d first met him. It still gave her a thrill inside when he walked into a room, instantly commanding attention.

Perhaps, she reflected as she dressed, that was part of the problem. Chris was attractive, and perhaps that had clouded her judgment when he’d proposed. Maybe if she’d looked at him more carefully she’d have realized that his real affection was directed elsewhere, at the unattainable Jackie. It would have saved her a lot of heartache if she’d deduced that at the time.

She jumped slightly at the knock on the door.

“Good morning,” Chris said. “Have you had breakfast yet? Because we need to get to work.”

“I’ll grab something later,” Angela replied. “I’ll go and make the calls, and take a look around. You stay here until I get back.”

Outside the hotel, she walked briskly down the street until she found a working public telephone, fed a phone card into the slot and dialed the number of her immediate superior at the British Museum.

“It’s Angela,” she croaked. “I’m afraid I’m going down with something, Roger. Flu or something. I’m going to have to take a couple of days off.”

“God, you sound like death. Don’t you dare come anywhere near here until you’re better. Seriously, is there anything you need—food, medicine, anything like that?”

“No, thanks. I’m just going to stay in bed until it’s gone.”

Angela and Bronson had discussed their plan on the train to Cambridge the previous evening. She was using a public phone because that left no trace—Bronson knew that switching on their cell phones would locate them to the nearest few yards immediately, so both of their Nokias were in his overnight bag, their batteries removed as a precaution.

Angela made one more call, then she walked back along East Road, stopping at the bakery along the way.

“Here,” she said, as she walked into Bronson’s hotel room and passed him a small paper bag. “I bought a couple of pastries to keep us going until lunch.”

“Thanks. You made the calls?” Bronson asked.

Angela nodded. “Roger will be fine. He’s paranoid about any kind of cold or flu.”

“And Jeremy?”

“Well, I called him and passed on the message. I explained about Mark and that we think his death had something to do with the inscriptions. I warned him he might be a target too but he laughed it off. He still thinks that the verses are meaningless to anyone in this century.”

Bronson frowned. “I wish I could believe he’s right,” he said. “Well, you did your best.”

“Right,” Angela said, brushing crumbs off her lap. “Let’s get started. Have you had any thoughts?”

“Not really. The problem with the Occitan verses is that they seem tantalizingly clear in what they say, but I’ve got no idea about their actual meaning. So I did just wonder if our best option was to start with the Latin inscription—or rather with the initials below it—and see if we can identify the man who ordered the stone to be carved.”

“That makes sense,” Angela said. “There are a couple of cybercafés not far from here, full of unshaven, scruffy students probably accessing high-quality porn sites.”

She paused and looked critically at him. “You’ll fit right in.”

Bronson had opted for a rudimentary disguise. He’d stopped shaving, though it would take a couple of days before his beard became really noticeable, and had discarded his usual collar and tie for a sloppy T-shirt, jeans and trainers.

Ten minutes later they entered the first of the Internet cafés Angela had identified.

Three machines were available, so they ordered two coffees and started trawling the Web.

“Are you happy with Jeremy’s suggestion about the ‘PO’ standing for per ordo?”

Angela asked.

“Yes. I think we should just take that as established and try and find out who ‘LDA’

was. The other thing he suggested was that the carving was probably first century A.D. And, Angela, we have to be quick. After what happened to Jackie, I’m only staying on this machine for an hour. Whether or not we’ve found anything by then, we get up and leave. OK?”

Angela nodded her agreement. “Let’s start the simple way,” she said, typed “LDA”

into Google, pressed the return key and leaned forward expectantly.

The result didn’t surprise them: almost one and a half million hits, but as far as they could see from a quick scan, none of any use unless you were searching for the London Development Agency or the Learning Disabilities Association.

“That would have been too easy,” Bronson muttered. “Let’s refine the search. Try and find a list of Roman senators and see if any of them fit the bill.”

That was easier said than done, and by the end of the hour Bronson had allotted, they’d found details about the lives of numerous individual senators but no list they could peruse.

“OK,” Bronson said, with a quick glance at his watch. “One last try. Put ‘Roman senate LDA’ and see what comes up.”

Angela input the phrase and they waited for the search engine to deliver its results.

“Nothing,” Angela said, scrolling down the page.

“Wait,” Bronson said. “What’s that?” He pointed at an entry entitled “Pax Romana”

that included a reference to “LDA and Aurora.” “Try that,” he said.

Angela clicked on it. On the left-hand side was a long list of Roman names, below the title “Regular members.”

“What the hell is this?” Bronson wondered aloud.

“Oh, I know,” Angela said, scrolling up and down. “I’ve heard of this. It’s a kind of online novel about ancient Rome. You can read it, or write material for it, if you want. You can even learn quite a bit.”

Bronson ran his eyes down the list of names, then stopped. “I’ll be damned. Look—is that serendipity or what?” And he pointed at the name “Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus” about three-quarters of the way down. “The contributors must be using the names of real historical Romans.”

Angela copied the name and input it into Google.

“He certainly was real,” she said, looking at the screen, “and he was a consul in sixteen B.C. Maybe Jeremy was wrong about the age of the inscription. It could have been fifty or so years older.”

Bronson leaned over and clicked the mouse. “It might be even simpler than that,” he said. “It seems this was a fairly common family name. On this list there are nine people all called Domitius Ahenobarbus, five of them with the first name Gnaeus, and the other four Lucius. Three of the four named Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus were consuls: the one you found in sixteen B.C., plus two others, in ninety-four B.C.

and fifty-four B.C.”

“What about the fourth Lucius?”

Bronson clicked another link. “Here he is—but he looks a bit different. ‘Like the others, this man was born Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, but his full name was Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also known as Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus. Just to complicate things, when he ascended the imperial throne in fifty-four A.D., he took the name Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus.’ ”

He scrolled down, then chuckled. “But he’s better known to us as the emperor who fiddled while Rome burned.”

“Nero? You think that inscription might refer to Nero?”

Bronson shook his head. “I doubt it, though that does fit better with Jeremy’s estimated date. He suggested that the initials probably referred to a consul or senator. Just say for a moment that the inscription was prepared on Nero’s orders—wouldn’t it be more likely to read ‘PO NCCD,’ to reflect his imperial name?”

“Perhaps the inscription was carved before he became emperor?” Angela suggested.

“Or maybe it was intended to be personal, to emphasize that whoever had carved the stone knew a lot about Nero, and maybe was even related to him.”

“We’re out of here,” Bronson said, looking at his watch and standing up to leave.

“So you reckon Nero’s worth another look?”

“Absolutely,” Angela agreed. “Let’s find another cybercafé. ”

II

They walked the quarter mile or so to the second cybercafe’ Angela had located earlier. This one was almost empty, presumably due to the time of day, and they sat down at the PC at the end of the line, closest to the back wall of the cafe’.

“So where do we go from here?” Angela asked.

“Bloody good question. I’m still not convinced we’re even on the right track, but we’ve got to start somewhere. Look, forget ‘LDA’ for the moment. Jeremy suggested that the other letters on the stone—‘MAM’—were probably those of the mason who carved it. But what if there’s another explanation?”

“I’m listening.”

“This is a bit tenuous, so bear with me. Assume that the ‘PO LDA’ does mean ‘by the order of Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,’ and that we are talking about Nero himself.

Jeremy guessed that meant the stone was inscribed on Nero’s instructions. But let’s suppose it wasn’t. Maybe Nero ordered something completely different to be done—some other action—and another person, someone with the initials ‘MAM,’ decided that this event should be recorded.”

“I’m sorry, you’ve lost me.”

“Take a present-day example. You’ll quite often see monuments and inscribed stones in Britain commemorating some event: the names of local residents who died in a war, or details of a building that once stood on the spot, that kind of thing.

Sometimes there’s a note at the end explaining that the stone, or whatever, was paid for by the Rotary Club or some other group. The point is that the people who paid for the stone had nothing to do with the event the inscription described. They just arranged for the memorial to be erected. Maybe this is something similar.”

“You mean that Nero did something that could be described by the expression ‘here lie the liars,’ but someone else—‘MAM’—ordered the stone to be prepared as a record of what Nero had done?”

“Exactly. And that suggests that whatever Nero did might have been illegal or private, nothing to do with his position as emperor. So what we have to do is find out if he was connected to anyone with the initials ‘MAM.’ If he was, we might have something. If he wasn’t, it’s back to the drawing board.”

That search took very little time. Within a few minutes they had a possible match.

“This guy might fit the bill,” Angela said. “His name was Marcus Asinius Marcellus, and he was a senator during the reigns of both Claudius and Nero. What’s most interesting is that he should have been executed in A.D. sixty because of his involvement in a plot to forge a will. All his accomplices were put to the sword, but Nero spared his life. I wonder why?”

“That’s worth chasing.”

Angela scrolled down the page. “Ah, here we are. Marcellus was distantly related to the Emperor. That’s probably why Nero gave him a break.”

“Yes, that could be the link.”

“I’m not following you.”

Bronson paused for a moment to order his thoughts. “Suppose the Emperor saved Marcellus because he was a relative, certainly, but also for some other reason. Nero wasn’t known for his compassion. He was one of the most ruthless and bloodthirsty of all the Roman emperors—if my memory serves me correctly, he even had his own mother executed—so I don’t think killing a fifth cousin or whatever Marcellus was would have made him lose any sleep.

“But suppose Nero wanted the services of someone who owed him a debt of allegiance, someone whom he could trust completely. In that case, this inscription makes more sense. Nero had ordered something done, something private or illegal or both, and Marcellus had been told to carry it out, maybe against his will. And it’s that action which the inscription on the stone has recorded.”

“You’re quite right—it is tenuous. But what orders did Nero give?”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea.” Bronson stood up and stretched. It had been a long morning. “And there’s something else. How would you describe the inscription we found on that stone—the three Latin words?”

“Cryptic, probably.”

“Exactly. Assuming we’re right about this, why did Marcellus feel the need to have a cryptic inscription prepared? Why didn’t he carve something that explained the situation? Or was that exactly what he did on the missing lower section of the stone?

Maybe that Latin phrase we found was just the title of the inscription?”

He paused and looked at Angela. “We need to do a lot more research.”

Two hours later, Angela was in Bronson’s room surrounded by books on the Roman Empire. They now knew a great deal more about Nero, but information on Marcellus was tantalizingly sparse. He seemed an extremely shadowy figure, and they found almost nothing about him that they hadn’t already known. And they still had not the slightest idea what the Latin inscription might refer to.

“We’re really not getting anywhere with this,” Angela said, closing one of the reference books with an irritated snap. “I’m going to start looking at the second inscription.” She stood up and reached for her coat. “I’ll be in the third cafe’ on our list, if you need me.”

“Right,” Bronson replied. “I’m going to keep flogging away at these for a while. Be careful out there.”

“I will, but don’t forget nobody’s looking for me, at least as far as I know.”

Angela had been working at the machine for only about twenty minutes when the door of the cafe’ opened. A police constable entered and walked across to the girl manning the counter.

“Good afternoon, miss,” the officer said. “We’re looking for a man who we believe was in this area earlier today using cybercafe’s, and we wonder if you remember seeing him in here.”

He produced a photograph from a folder he was carrying and placed it on the counter. As he did so, Angela caught a glimpse of the face in the picture and realized in a single heart-stopping moment that it showed Chris.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I only started my shift here a couple of hours ago, and I’m pretty sure he hasn’t been in this afternoon. You could try asking the customers.”

She waved her hand to encompass the twenty or so computers in the café and the dozen people using them. “Some of them are regulars. What’s he done, anyway?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, I’m afraid,” the officer said. He walked across to the first occupied terminal and repeated his question. By the time he’d got to the third computer, all the people in the cafe’ were clustered around him, staring at the picture. Angela realized that if she didn’t go and look, that would appear suspicious in itself. So, on legs that weren’t quite steady, she walked across the room and peered at the photograph of the man she knew better than anyone else in the world.

“And you, miss?” the constable asked, looking directly at her.

Angela shook her head: “No, I’ve never seen him before. Quite good-looking, though, isn’t he?”

A couple of girls in the group giggled, but the policeman seemed unamused. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, and turned to leave.

“This bloke,” the girl behind the counter asked, “if he does come in, what should I do? Run away and hide in the loo, or make him a drink? I mean, is he dangerous, or what?”

The constable considered the question for a few moments. “We don’t think he’d pose any risk to you personally, miss, but you should telephone the Park-side station as soon as possible. In case you need it, the number’s 358966.”

Angela returned to her computer and forced herself to remain at the machine for several more minutes, then stood up.

“Find what you were looking for, love?” the girl behind the till asked.

Angela shook her head. “I’ve never found exactly what I’m looking for,” she replied, with a slight smile, thinking about her taste in men.

“The bloody police are looking for you, Chris,” Angela announced, the moment she’d closed the hotel room door behind her. Quickly, she outlined what had happened in the cafe’.

“So they knew I’d been using the Internet?” Bronson said.

“Yes, I told you. They even had your photograph, and they said you’d been in the area this morning.”

“Jesus, these guys are good,” Bronson muttered. “They even have the police doing their dirty work for them. They’re a lot more dangerous than we thought.”

“I can understand that the police are looking for you because of Mark’s death, but how can they possibly know you’ve been using cybercafe’s?”

“I thought from the start that these Italians had an Internet-monitoring system running—that’s why Jackie died. They must have a contact in the British police and be feeding him details of the searches we’re running, which means we must be on the right track. We’re going to have to get away from here, and quickly.”

“Where to?” Angela asked.

“The answer must lie in Italy, where all this started.”

“But don’t you think that if the police are already looking for you in cybercafe’s, they’ll be checking the ports and airports as well?”

“Yes, of course,” Bronson said, “but I made sure I left my passport inside the house, and I’ve no doubt that by now they’ll have got inside and seen it. They might have a token watch in place at the ports, but without a passport, they won’t be expecting me to try to leave the country.” He grinned suddenly. “Which is exactly what we’re going to do. It’ll be a lot harder for them to find us in Europe.”

“I thought Interpol helped international cooperation between police forces.”

“Dream on. Interpol is a wonderful concept, but it’s also a huge system. To get anything useful out of it, you’ve got to fill in the right forms and talk to the right people, and even then it will take time to get the information disseminated. Anyway, it’s not that difficult to get in or out of Britain without being detected, if you know how. You have got your driving license and passport with you?”

Angela nodded.

“Good. Now, what I need you to do is take this money”—he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a wad of notes and counted out a sum on the table—“that’s just over fifteen hundred pounds. Use that as a deposit and go out and buy an old minivan. A Chrysler Voyager, Renault Espace, even a Transit van as a last resort, in your name, and get it insured for driving on the Continent.”

“Then what?”

“And then,” Bronson replied, grinning again, “we’re going shopping for a new bathroom.”

16

I

A little after six, Jeremy Goldman walked out of the museum gates and glanced in both directions before heading east along Great Russell Street. Angela’s telephone call had bothered him more than he liked to admit and his feeling of unease had been increased by the incident with the Frenchman.

Earlier that afternoon, in response to a call from one of the reception staff, he’d gone down to meet a French archaeologist named Jean-Paul Pannetier who apparently knew him. The name hadn’t been familiar to Goldman, but he’d worked all over the world with specialists from a number of disciplines, and such unannounced visits weren’t that unusual.

But when he’d introduced himself to the visitor, the Frenchman had appeared confused and explained that he was looking for a Roger Goldman, not Jeremy Goldman, and then left the building. He’d been fiddling with a cell phone the whole time he’d been in the museum, and Goldman suspected that Pannetier had used it to photograph him.

That was peculiar enough, but what concerned him more was that he’d checked his academic directories and been unable to find any reference to a Roger Goldman. Or, for that matter, to a Jean-Paul Pannetier. There was a Pallentier and a Pantonnier, but no Pannetier. Of course, he could have misheard—the museum had been quite noisy—but the incident, in conjunction with Angela’s warning, did concern him.

So as he emerged into the evening bustle of Great Russell Street, Goldman was—for once—paying attention to his surroundings. But spotting anyone who might be lurking in wait for him was virtually impossible, simply because of the sheer number of people on the pavements.

At least he didn’t have far to go—only to the tube station at Russell Square. He walked down Great Russell Street, casting occasional glances behind him, checking the traffic and the pedestrians, then turned up Montague Street.

Until that point, Goldman had seen nothing to concern him, but when he glanced back once more, he saw a dark-haired man starting to run directly toward him. More alarmingly, he locked eyes with a bulky man sitting in the driving seat of a slow-moving car, a man he instantly recognized as the “Jean-Paul Pannetier” who’d visited the museum that afternoon.

Goldman didn’t hesitate. He stepped off the pavement and began running across the road, dodging through the traffic. A barrage of hoots followed him as he swerved around cars, taxis and vans, sprinting for the far side of the street and the safety—he hoped—of the tube station.

He almost made it.

Goldman glanced behind him as he ran around the back of a car, and simply didn’t see the motorcyclist coming up fast on the vehicle’s nearside. When he did see it, the bike was just feet away. The rider braked hard, the front suspension of his bike dipping, and Goldman instinctively leapt aside to try to avoid him.

The front wheel of the bike hit Goldman’s left leg and knocked him sideways.

Waving his arms to try to regain his balance, he stumbled and almost fell, then recovered himself. Again he risked a quick look behind him as he resumed his weaving run, still slightly unbalanced. The man he’d spotted was just a few feet away, and Goldman increased his pace.

But when he looked ahead again, all he saw was the front of a black cab. To Goldman, it was as if everything was happening in slow motion. The driver stamped on the brakes, locking the wheels, but the taxi just kept coming, straight toward him.

Goldman experienced a moment of sheer terror, then the solid impact as the front of the skidding vehicle smashed into his chest. He felt a sudden searing pain as his ribs broke and organs ruptured, then only blackness.

II

Less than ninety minutes later, Angela stepped back into the hotel room.

“That was quick,” Bronson said, looking up from the book he was studying.

“I found a garage on Newmarket Road selling secondhand cars,” she said. “I got a Renault Espace, seven years old. It’s a bit scruffy around the edges, but it’s got a decent rating, good tires and most of its service history, all for two nine nine five. I haggled the salesman down to two and a half and told him to forget about the warranty, which was almost worthless anyway. Five hundred deposit and the rest on credit.”

“Excellent,” Bronson said, as he began packing away the reference books Angela had bought. “That’s ideal. Right, let’s get this show on the road.”

While Bronson carried their few bags out to the car, Angela handed back the room key and paid the hotel bill in cash.

“So, now where are we going?” she asked a few minutes later, as Bronson swung the Espace off the A10 and onto the London-bound M11, just south of Trumpington. “I know you want to cross the Channel, but what was all that about a new bathroom?”

“The plods may be trying to find me, but they shouldn’t be after you. And even if they are, hopefully they’ll be looking for a Mrs. Angela Bronson, not a Miss Angela Lewis. We’re going to fill the back of the car with flat-pack furniture and catch a ferry out of Dover. And I’ll be under all the boxes.”

Angela stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. The checks at Dover and Calais are rudimentary, to say the least. This is the simplest way I can think of to get across the Channel.”

“And if they stop me?”

“You deny all knowledge of me. Tell them you haven’t seen me for weeks. Act surprised that anyone’s looking for me. You haven’t heard about Mark’s death, and you’ve recently bought a tumbledown ruin in the Dordogne—just outside Cahors, say—and you’re taking a bunch of B&Q’s finest flat-packs over to refit the bathroom.”

“But what if they steer me into the inspection shed and start unloading the boxes?”

“In that case,” Bronson said, “the moment they find me, you leap out and hide behind the biggest customs officer you can find. You’re terrified, because I’ve forced you at gunpoint to help me escape from Britain. You’re a victim, not a collaborator.

I’ll back you up.”

“But you don’t have a gun,” Angela objected.

“As a matter of fact, I have.” Bronson pulled the Browning from the pocket of his jacket.

“Where the hell did that come from?”

Bronson explained about the second, failed, burglary at the house in Italy.

“You do know that you could go to prison just for carrying a gun?”

“I do. I also know that the people we’re up against have already killed at least once, so I’m hanging on to this and taking my chances with the plods.”

“You are a plod, remember?” Angela pointed out. “Which makes carrying a weapon even worse.”

Bronson shrugged. “I know, but that’s my problem, not yours. I’ll do my best to protect you.”

Just more than an hour later, Bronson emerged from the B&Q warehouse in Thurrock with a laden cart. He loaded everything carefully into the back of the Renault, making sure that the upturned acrylic bath was in the center.

Then they were off again, crossing the Thames at Dartford and picking up the motorway for Dover. Bronson pulled off at the last service area before the port and parked the Espace in the most secluded section of the car park he could find.

“Time to pack me away,” he said lightly, his tone not entirely concealing his concern.