The First Apostle

There was no certainty that the police would accept that he had forced Angela to drive him out of the country if his hiding place was discovered. He knew very well that they could both end up as unwilling guests of Her Majesty if it all went wrong.

He climbed into the back of the Espace and slid under the bath. It was cramped, but by pulling his knees up to his chest he was able to make himself fit. Angela stacked boxes over and around the bath until it was covered, then climbed into the driving seat and pulled out of the service area.

At the port, she bought a five-day return ticket at one of the discount booking offices and drove into the Eastern Docks, following the “embarkation” signs. At the British Customs post she proffered her passport, which was swiped through the electronic reader with barely a grunt of acknowledgment. The French passport control officer glanced at the maroon cover and waved her through.

Just beyond the two booths was another “embarkation” sign, but as she accelerated toward it a bulky figure stepped in front of the car and pointed to his left, toward the inspection shed.

Angela cursed under her breath but smiled agreeably at him, and followed the road around into the shed. Inside, she dropped the driver’s door window as one of the officers walked toward her and glanced into the back of the car.

“The French dream?” the officer asked. People who bought goods in Britain to try to renovate French ruins were not exactly a rare sight at Dover.

“Sorry?” Angela replied.

“A little stone house on the edge of a village in Brittany?” he asked with a grin. “In need of some light restoration?”

“Substitute the Dordogne for Brittany,” Angela said, matching his smile, “and you’ve pretty much nailed it. And it’s a town rather than a village. Cahors. Do you know it?”

The officer shook his head. “Heard of it, but I’ve never been there,” he said. “So what’s in the back?”

“Most of the master bathroom, or at least that’s the plan, as long as I can persuade the builders to install it. Would you like to look at it?”

“No, thanks.” He stepped back and waved her forward. “Off you go, then,” he said.

Her heart thundering in her chest, Angela gave him a carefree wave, put the Renault into gear and drove toward the exit door, which opened automatically. They were through.

III

Angela milled about with the other passengers, wandered through the shop and finally sat down in one of the lounges to wait for the ferry to dock in Calais. But despite her appearance of absolute calm, inside she was almost frantic with worry.

What would she do if the French police were waiting for her on the other side of the Channel? Did Chris have enough air? Would she open up the back of the vehicle somewhere in France only to find she’d been accompanied by a corpse? What would she do then?

It was almost a relief when she heard the Tannoy announcement asking drivers to make their way to the car decks. At least the waiting was over.

Two hours after driving the Espace onto the ferry, Angela steered the car down the ramp onto French soil and joined the line of English cars heading toward the autoroute. She saw no police or customs officers, and nobody appeared in any way interested in her or anyone else disgorged by the ferry. Most of the drivers seemed to be taking the A26 Paris autoroute, but Bronson had told her to stay off the toll roads and head for Boulogne on the D940 instead. She was to look for a secluded parking place where he could escape from his pink—their choice of bath had been governed by size, shape and price, not color—acrylic prison.

As afternoon shaded toward evening, Angela drove along the coastal road past Sangatte and on to Escalles. Just beyond the village she found a deserted car park overlooking the sea and Cap Blanc-Nez. She parked the Espace in the corner farthest away from the entrance and checked that she hadn’t been followed before opening the trunk and pulling away the boxes that covered the bath. Bronson gave a low moan as he crawled out.

“Are you OK?” Angela asked.

“I feel like I’ve gone over the Niagara Falls in a barrel,” Bronson said, groaning and stretching. “Every joint and muscle in my body is aching, and I’m as stiff as a board.

Have you got any aspirins or something?”

“Men!” Angela teased. “The slightest bit of discomfort and you turn into real moaners.” She opened her handbag and pulled out a cardboard packet of tablets.

“I’d take a couple if I were you. Do you want to drive?”

Bronson shook his head. “No way. I’m going to sit in the passenger seat and let you chauffeur me.”

Twenty minutes later, they were heading south on the A16.

While she drove, Angela filled Bronson in on what she had found out before the police showed up at the Internet cafe’.

“It looks to me as if the second inscription could be connected to the Cathars,” she said.

“The Cathars? That’s what Jeremy Goldman suggested, but I’m not sure that makes much sense. I don’t know too much about them, but I’m certain they had nothing at all to do with first-century Rome. They came along about a thousand years later.”

“I know,” Angela said with a nod, “and their homeland was southern France, not Italy. But the verses do seem to have a strong and distinct Cathar flavor. Some of the expressions like ‘the good,’ ‘pure spirits’ and ‘the word becomes the perfect’ are almost pure Cathar. The perfects or perfecti—the priests—referred to themselves as

‘good men,’ and they believed their religion was pure.

“One of the problems about the Cathars is that virtually everything ever written about them was authored by their enemies, like the Catholic Church, so it’s a bit like reading a history of the Second World War written entirely from the perspective of the Nazis. But what we do know is that the movement was linked to, or maybe even derived from, the Bogomil sect based in Eastern Europe. That was another dualist religion, one of several that flourished in the tenth and eleventh centuries.”

“What did they believe? Why was the Catholic Church so opposed to them?”

“The Cathars thought that the God being worshipped by the Church was an impostor, a deity who had usurped the true God, and who was, in fact, the devil. By that definition the Catholic Church was an evil abomination, the priests and bishops in the service of Lucifer. And they pointed to the rampant corruption within the Church as a partial proof of this.”

“I can see that must have pissed off Rome. But surely the Cathars weren’t powerful enough to have any real influence?”

“That depends on what you mean by ‘powerful.’ Their power base, if you like, was in southern France, and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the people of that region embraced Catharism as a very real alternative to the Catholic Church, which most people saw as wholly corrupt. The contrasts between the two religions were enormous. The high-ranking Catholic clergy lived in the kind of splendor you’d normally associate with royalty or nobility. But the Cathar priests had no worldly possessions at all, apart from a black robe and a length of cord to use as a belt, and existed solely on alms and charity. When they accepted the consolamentum, the vow they swore on becoming priests or perfecti, they surrendered all their worldly goods to the community. They were also strict vegetarians, not even eating animal products like eggs and milk, and were absolutely celibate.”

“That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”

“It wasn’t, but that regime was only practiced by the perfecti. Followers of the religion—they were known as credentes—were allowed a lot more latitude, and most only accepted the consolamentum when they were actually on their deathbeds when celibacy, for example, wouldn’t have been much of a problem. I think the important point is that Catharism became popular in southern France precisely because the perfecti were so devout and humble. Significantly, the ranks of the Cathars were peopled by members of some of the wealthiest and most important local families.

However you look at it, the mere existence of the religion was a real threat to the Catholic Church.”

“So what happened?”

“At the end of the twelfth century, Pope Eugene III tried peaceful persuasion. He sent people like Bernard of Clairvaux, Cardinal Peter and Henry of Albano to France to try to reduce the influence of the Cathars, but none of them had any real success.

Decisions by various religious councils had no effect either, and when Innocent III ascended the papal throne in 1198 he decided to suppress the Cathars by any means possible.

“In January 1208 he sent a man called Pierre de Castelnau, a papal legate, to Count Raymond of Toulouse, who was the then leader of the Cathars. Their meeting was very confrontational, and the next day de Castelnau was attacked by unidentified assailants and murdered. That gave Innocent the excuse he needed, and he called for a crusade against the religion. The Albigensian Crusade—the Cathars were also known as Albigensians—lasted forty years, and was one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of the Church.”

“All very interesting,” Bronson pointed out, “but I still don’t see what any of that has to do with a couple of inscribed stones cemented into the wall of a house in Italy.”

“Nor do I,” Angela said. “That’s the problem. But I’ve got a few more books to look at, so I might have some answers by tomorrow.”

As the light began to fade, they started looking for somewhere to stay for the night.

“Our best bet is a small, family-run hotel somewhere. We don’t want anywhere that we’d have to use a credit card.”

“Don’t they want to see your passport?”

“Those old French government regulations were abolished some time ago. These days the only thing that matters is whether or not you can pay the bill.”

Twenty minutes later, they checked into a small hotel close to the center of a village not far from Evreux.

They had a late dinner, then walked around the village and found a small cybercafé

with half a dozen computers.

“I’ll just check my e-mail,” Angela said, and bought an hour of time on one of the PCs.

Most of the stuff in her in-box was the usual dross that everyone with an e-mail account receives daily, and she swiftly ran down the list, deleting reams of spam. At the end of the list were a couple from the British Museum staff messaging system, and she opened those to read them. The first was just routine, reminding staff of a forthcoming event, but when she opened the second one, she sat back with a gasp of shock.

“What is it?” Bronson asked.

“It’s Jeremy Goldman,” she replied. “According to this, he was killed today in an accident, just down the road from the museum.”

For a moment Bronson didn’t say anything. “Does it explain what happened?” he asked.

“No, just that he was involved in a road accident in Montague Street and was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.” She turned in her seat to stare at Bronson. “Do you think it was an accident?” Her face was white.

“No,” he said. “And neither do you.” He swore under his breath. “First Jackie, then Mark and now Jeremy. I’m going to hunt these bastards, and, by God, I’m going to bring them down.”

17

I

It was going to be a long day: they both knew that. Bronson wanted to reach the Hamptons’ house in Italy that evening, a journey of a thousand miles or so, which was just about possible if they stayed on the autoroutes. They got up at seven, eschewed the hotel breakfast, paid for the rooms and dinner in cash and then left.

When Bronson had gone to his room the previous evening, Angela sat up in hers, searching through the books she’d bought in Cambridge. She was tired, but the idea that had come to her while she’d been staring at the computer screen in the third cybercafe’ in Cambridge was now making more sense.

Now, while Bronson drove, she explained her theory, referring occasionally to a pocket book in which she’d recorded some notes in her small, neat handwriting.

“I think Jeremy was right,” she began. “At least part of this puzzle is about the Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, though perhaps not in the way he imagined.

If we assume for the moment that the verses in the second inscription were written about, or perhaps even by, the Cathars, some of the references do begin to make sense. The most obvious example is the ‘safe mountain.’ That’s an unusual expression, and there’s no obvious reason why anyone should talk about any mountain as being ‘safe,’ unless you’re a Cathar. If you are, the words are immediately recognizable as a direct reference to the citadel of Montse’gur: the name actually means ‘safe mountain’ in Occitan. It was the last major stronghold of the religion, and it fell to the crusaders in 1244.

“If you look at the first verse of the inscription, not only do the words ‘safe mountain’ make sense, but the first two lines probably describe the end of the siege itself: From the safe mountain truth did descend, Abandoned by all save the good.

“We talked a bit about this last night, remember? There were two general categories of Cathar. The priests were known as parfaits or perfecti, and the believers were called credentes, but what’s interesting is that neither of them called themselves Cathars. In fact, there are some suggestions that the name—it’s thought to derive from the Greek

‘Katharoi,’ meaning ‘the pure ones’—was only used by people outside the religion.

The Cathars almost always referred to themselves as ‘Bons Hommes’ or ‘Bonnes Femmes’—good men or good women—so when Montségur finally fell, you really could say that it had been ‘abandoned by all save the good,’ because the parfaits never left—they were executed on the spot.”

“And the ‘truth’ that descended?” Bronson asked. “What the hell does that mean?”

Angela smiled at him. “I’ve got an idea about that, but there are a few other things you need to understand first.”

“OK, Professor. Let’s hear it.”

“Right, so I assumed that these verses did have something to do with the Cathars, and worked on that premise. I started at the beginning, with the title, the ‘GB PS

DDDBE.’ You remember Jeremy thought these letters probably referred to an expression that would have been in common use in the fourteenth century or thereabouts, something as clear and obvious to people then as, say, ‘RIP’ is to us today?

“I wondered if the expression had been corrupted, its meaning altered or distorted, again like ‘RIP.’ Ask most people today what those letters stand for, and they’ll say

‘rest in peace,’ but they don’t. The initials refer to the Latin expression ‘requiescat in pace.’ ”

“But that means pretty much the same, doesn’t it?” Bronson asked.

“Yes—‘may he rest in peace’—but my point is that most people aren’t even aware that when they say ‘RIP’ they’re actually quoting a Latin expression, not an English one. So I wondered if this, too, was an old Latin expression that had been corrupted.

But I was wrong. It wasn’t. It was pure Occitan, and pure Cathar.

“I started with the ‘GB,’ but that didn’t get me anywhere. Then I looked at the other initials, and particularly the last five, the ‘DDDBE.’ Once I made sense of those, the

‘PS’ was obvious, and then it was just a matter of finding out who ‘GB’ was, and that wasn’t too difficult once I’d decoded the other letters.”

“So those initials referred to a person?” Bronson asked.

Angela nodded. “I think ‘GB’ was Guillaume Be’libaste.”

“Never heard of him.”

“You wouldn’t have, unless you’ve studied the history of medieval France.

Guillaume Bélibaste was the last known Cathar parfait, and he was burned alive in 1321. That was the method of execution preferred by the Vatican for dangerous heretics, which, in the Middle Ages, simply meant anyone who disagreed with the Pope.”

“So what does the title mean?”

“When any Cathar was about to die,” Angela replied, looking down at her notebook,

“prayers were said, prayers that started with a particular Occitan expression: ‘Payre sant, Dieu dreiturier dels bons esperits. ’ The initial letters of that expression spell ‘PS

DDDBE.’ That roughly translates as ‘Holy Father, true God of pure souls,’ somewhat analogous to the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’

“It was a common expression at the time, because you can still see it at several different locations in the Languedoc region of France. According to the books, there’s a particularly clear example carved on a stone at Minerve in Herault, where a group of Cathars took refuge after the massacre at Béziers, where about twenty thousand people were slaughtered by the crusaders. But it was only a temporary reprieve. In 1210 some one hundred and eighty parfaits were burned alive there by the advancing crusaders.”

“Is that what the Spanish called an auto-da-fé?”

“No. The execution of heretics never took place during the auto-da-fe’. The expression simply meant an ‘act of faith’ and was conducted by the Inquisition. It was a very public spectacle that lasted for hours, sometimes days, and often involved thousands of spectators. It began with a mass, then prayers, followed by a procession of those found guilty of heresy and a reading of their sentences.

Punishment would only be administered after the auto-da-fe’ had finished.”

“Did people just come forward and confess, then?”

Angela laughed. “No, or not very often anyway. According to the records, most so-called heretics were snitched on by their neighbors, and it’s reasonably certain the arrival of the Inquisition offered a wonderful opportunity to settle old scores. The problem the accused faced was that they were in a no-win position. If they admitted to whatever charges the Inquisitors leveled at them, they could face death at the stake. If they denied the accusations, they’d be tortured until they did confess.

“As far as the Inquisitors were concerned, there was no question of an accused person being innocent—the fact that an accusation had been made was sufficient proof of guilt, and all they had to do then was obtain a signed confession from the heretic. That almost always involved prolonged and inventive torture and took place in private, in specially equipped torture chambers. The Inquisitors were forbidden to spill blood, during either questioning or execution, so they made liberal use of the rack and the strappado to dislocate joints. They also roasted limbs over slow fires, usually the feet because the heretic had to be able to sign a confession once it was all over.”

“Nice people,” Bronson observed drily.

“Their aim was to cause the maximum possible pain for prolonged periods of time, and they specialized in methods that involved little effort on the part of the interrogators, so they had plenty of time to pray for guidance. Lighting a fire, for example, or hauling a victim up using the strappado took just a few minutes, but the heretic would be in agony for hours or days.

“One of their favorites was the iron boot. They’d put the victim’s foot in an iron boot, then hammer wooden wedges all around the leg, crushing the shin and ankle.

That was bad enough, but it was only the first stage. As a refinement, they’d pour water into the boot and leave the man overnight. The wooden wedges would absorb the water and expand, steadily increasing the pressure on the lower leg. After a few hours, while the interrogators were sleeping soundly or kneeling in prayer, the bones of the shin and ankle would be shattered, the muscles ripped to shreds, and for sure the man would never walk again.

“If execution was necessary, the only method approved by the Vatican was burning at the stake, again because that wouldn’t spill the victim’s blood, but even then there were refinements. Recanting at the last moment earned the condemned the mercy of being garrotted before the pyre was lit. Heretics who refused to do so would be made to suffer for even longer by the use of slow-burning wood. The executioners could also add fuel like wet or green wood that would generate choking fumes intended to kill the victims before the fire reached them—a small mercy. As a method of execution, burning offered considerable variety, and the Spanish and Portuguese were apparently very good at it. And they had plenty of victims to practice on.”

“And the French?”

“My guess is they just chained their victims to wooden posts, lit the fire and waited for the screaming to stop.”

Angela fell silent as the Renault Espace sped along the autoroute, heading southeast for the Italian border, with the back still full of the boxes they’d bought from B&Q.

“OK,” Bronson conceded, “but I still don’t see how any of that helps us. The Hamptons’ house is in Italy, not France, and even if you’re right and the second inscription does relate to the Cathars, the other one is written in Latin and is maybe fifteen hundred years older. So what possible connection could there be between them?”

“Well, I have a theory. It’s a crazy idea, but it does answer at least one of our questions.”

“Try me.”

“First, we have to go back to 1244 and the end of the siege of Montségur, when the garrison of the fortress eventually surrendered. It had been a long, hard siege, but realistically there was only ever going to be one result, and everyone knew it. On the first of March that year, facing overwhelming odds and with food and drink reserves running low, the defenders finally capitulated.

“Now, this siege had occupied a significant number of men-at-arms for months, and had incurred huge costs for the crusaders. Plus, the Pope had initiated the Albigensian Crusade with the specific intention of completely destroying the Cathar heresy, and it was known that some two hundred parfaits had taken refuge in the fortress. In almost every other case, the defenders of towns and castles taken by the crusaders were slaughtered without mercy. So what terms do you think the crusaders offered?”

“Probably a choice between beheading, hanging or burning at the stake?”

“Exactly,” Angela said. “That’s more or less what any impartial observer would have guessed. Would you like to know what terms they actually offered?”

“Worse than that?”

Angela shook her head, and referred again to her small notebook. “Listen to this.

First, the men-at-arms—that’s the mercenary soldiers and others employed as the bulk of the garrison at Montségur—were to be allowed to walk away with all their goods and equipment, and would receive full pardons for their part in the defense of the fortress.”

“Well,” Bronson said slowly, “I suppose they weren’t actually part of the heresy. I mean, they weren’t Cathars, were they, just people employed by them?”

“I agree,” Angela said. “Ever heard of a place called Bram?”

“No.”

“It was another Cathar stronghold that fell in 1210 after a three-day siege, and there was nothing very significant in that. But shortly afterward, when the crusaders under Simon de Montfort tried to—”

“Simon who?” Bronson asked.

“Simon de Montfort. He was the commander of the crusaders at the time, and was trying to capture the four castles at Lastours, just north of Carcassonne, but he’d met furious resistance. To persuade the defenders to give up the fight, Simon’s men took one hundred of the prisoners they’d captured at Bram and cut off their lips, noses and ears. Then they blinded them all apart from one man who only had one eye put out, so he could lead his companions in a bloody parade in front of the castles.”

“Dear God,” Bronson murmured. “Did the tactic work?”

“Of course not. It only made the defenders more determined to fight on, if only to avoid the same fate. The castles did fall, but not until a year later. That’s just one example of ‘God’s mercy’ as it was interpreted during the Albigensian Crusade.

“Or take the massacre at Béziers, where some twenty thousand men, women and children were slaughtered in the name of God and Christian charity. Before the attack, Bishop Arnaud Armaury, the Papal Legate and the Pope’s personal representative, was asked by the crusaders how they could identify the heretics, because there were believed to be only about five hundred Cathars in the town. His reply in Latin was recorded as: ‘Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.’ That translates as, ‘Kill them all. God will know his own.’ And that’s exactly what they did.”

“I didn’t know any of this,” Bronson said. “It’s just unbelievable. Anyway, back to Montségur. The crusaders were lenient with the soldiers, but I presume not with the Cathars themselves?”

“Wrong again,” Angela said. “The parfaits were told that if they renounced their beliefs and confessed their sins to the Inquisition they would be allowed to go free, but they would have to leave all their possessions behind.”

“In other words,” Bronson interjected, “both the Cathars and their soldiers were handed ‘get out of jail free’ cards. But why?”

“You haven’t heard the best bit yet. The first anomaly was the leniency of the surrender terms. The defenders requested a two-week truce to consider the terms—terms that, if they’d been accepted, would have allowed the entire garrison to walk away from Montse’gur unharmed. That’s the second anomaly: you wouldn’t have thought they’d have needed more than two minutes to consider their options, not two weeks. Anyway, surprisingly, the crusaders agreed to this.” She paused.

“And this is where it gets really peculiar. When the truce expired on the fifteenth of March, not only did all the parfaits reject the surrender terms unequivocally, but at least twenty of the non-Cathar defenders elected to receive the ultimate Cathar vow—the consolamentum perfecti—so condemning themselves to a certain and horrendously painful death.”

“When they could have just walked away, they opted for death?”

“Right. At dawn on the sixteenth of March 1244, more than two hundred parfaits were taken out of the fortress and escorted down to the foot of the mountain. There, they were pushed into a hastily built wood-filled stockade and burned alive. None of them recanted their heresy, despite being offered every opportunity to do so.”

For a few moments Bronson was silent. “That really doesn’t make sense. Why would they reject the surrender terms after asking for two weeks to think about it? And, especially, why did the Cathars—and, from what you say, twenty-odd non-Cathars—decide their best option was to scream their way to death in the flames instead of simply walking away?”

“That’s the interesting part. It’s also worth pointing out that even when chained to the stake, the heretics were always given one last chance to recant.”

“And then they could walk away?” Bronson asked.

“No, not at that stage. But as I said before, they would then be garrotted as an act of mercy rather than be burned alive. So what made the Cathars so sure of their faith that they were prepared to die in just about the most painful way imaginable rather than repudiate it?”

Bronson rubbed his chin. “They must have had one hell of a reason.”

“There’s a persistent story—I’ve found references to it both on the Internet and in the books I’ve studied—that suggests there was a definite reason for the delay in the Cathars’ decision to accept or reject the surrender terms, and also for their willingness to perish in the flames. They were protecting their treasure.”

Bronson glanced at Angela to see if she was joking, but her expression remained deadly serious.

“Treasure? But how could the deaths of two hundred Cathars by fire possibly help protect it?”

“I think—and this really is conjecture—that the Cathars were prepared to sacrifice themselves as a kind of diversion. They thought that once they’d died in the flames, the crusaders would be less inclined to mount a proper guard on Montse’gur and that would allow a few of their number to escape with their most precious possessions.

“And I don’t believe we’re talking about a typical treasure. No gold or jewels, nothing like that. I think their treasure was some kind of religious relic, an object of undeniable provenance that proved the veracity of the Cathar faith beyond any doubt. That might be enough, not only to persuade the committed members of the order to accept death at the hands of the crusaders, but also to convince the twenty non-Cathars to join them.”

“So the treasure wasn’t really a treasure at all, in the usual sense of the word?”

Bronson interjected. “It was probably completely worthless in intrinsic terms—just an old bit of parchment or something—but priceless in what it proved?”

“Exactly.”

“But what could it be?”

“Impossible to say for sure, but we can infer certain things about it from what we do know. If the sources I’ve looked at have got it right, sometime during that last night at Montse’gur, as the flames of the huge pyre at the foot of the mountain died away to a dull red glow, the last four parfaits escaped. They’d been hidden in the fortress by the garrison, and chose an extremely hazardous, but almost undetectable, route, using ropes to descend the sheer west face of the mountain.

“They took this risk because they were carrying the treasure of the Cathars. They reached the foot of the mountain and then vanished both into the night and from the pages of history. No one knows what they were carrying, where they went or what happened to them.

“If there’s any truth in that story, then there are at least two points worth making.

First, whatever the ‘treasure’ comprised, it had to be fairly small and not too heavy, because otherwise the four men couldn’t have carried it during their perilous descent. Second, it had to be a physical object, not simply knowledge, or the four parfaits could have disguised themselves as soldiers or servants and left the fortress with the men-at-arms the following day.

“Now, this is all guesswork, unsupported by a single shred of verifiable evidence, but it does provide a plausible explanation for what happened when the siege of Montse’gur ended. But what happened next on the mountain is in the historical record.

“Once the fortress was deserted, the crusaders, acting on the specific instructions of the Pope, tore it apart in a desperate search for some object, some ‘treasure.’ But whatever it was they were looking for, they clearly didn’t find it, because they dismantled the castle, quite literally stone by stone. It’s not generally known, but the citadel that now stands at Montse’gur was actually erected early in the seventeenth century, and no part of the original Cathar castle now remains at the site.

“For the next half-century, Rome ordered all traces of the Cathar heresy to be expunged from the landscape. As well as executing every parfait they could lay their hands on, the crusaders also continued their search for whatever had been secreted at Montségur, but without result. Eventually, memory of the ‘treasure of the Cathars’ passed into the mists of legend. And that’s the story of Montse’gur as we know it today: a mix of historical fact, rumor and conjecture.”

“But what the hell has that got to do with a six-hundred-year-old farmhouse on the side of a hill in Italy?” Bronson asked, waving his arm in frustration.

“It’s all in the inscription,” Angela explained. “The first verse of the Occitan poem can be interpreted as a specific reference to the end of the siege.”

She read Goldman’s translation of the verse from her notebook:

“ ‘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.’

“The second line could describe the surrender of the garrison of Montse’gur, and the third and fourth the mass execution when the Cathars were burned alive. But I think the expressions ‘truth did descend’ and ‘truth like stone forever will endure’ refer to the escape of the four remaining parfaits, carrying with them some document or relic upon which the core of their faith—their unarguable ‘truth’—relied. Whatever the object, it was so compelling in its implications that Cathars would rather die at the stake than renounce their beliefs.”

“And the second verse?” Bronson asked.

“That’s just as interesting, and again some lines seem to refer to the Cathars.”

Again, she read the verse aloud:

“ ‘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.’

“The expression in the second line was commonly used by the Cathars, and the

‘word’ referred to in the third line could be the ‘truth’ that guided the beliefs of the parfaits. The first line’s nothing to do with the Cathars, but I think it’s possible that the reference to the two species of tree indicates a hiding place.”

“And the last couple of lines? About the chalice?”

“I’m guessing—I’ve been guessing all along, but now I’m really guessing—that they mean the object was secreted in some kind of a vessel—a chalice—and that it’s dangerous.”

Bronson began to reduce speed. He was approaching Vierzon, where the autoroute divided, and turned southeast for Clermont-Ferrand.

“So what you’re suggesting,” Bronson said, “is that the Cathars had some kind of relic, something that confirmed their beliefs, and that quite probably would have been seen as dangerous by other religions? And the Pope started the crusade to recover or destroy it?”

“Exactly. The Albigensian Crusade was instigated by Pope Innocent III—and rarely was any pope so misnamed—in 1209.”

“Right. So you think the Pope knew about this relic and believed it was secreted somewhere at Montse’gur? And that was why he ordered the different treatment of the Cathars and garrison there, and why, after the massacre, his crusaders demolished the fortress?”

“Yes. And if my reading of these verses is right, I think we may well find that the Cathar treasure was hidden somewhere in Mark’s house in Italy!”

II

Back at their hotel near Gatwick, Mandino and Rogan had spent hours using their laptops to study the search strings the intercept system had recovered from the Cambridge cybercafe’s.

They seemed to have exhausted all their other options. They’d waited outside Angela Lewis’s building, but her apartment lights had remained switched off, and neither her phone nor her doorbell was answered. Bronson’s house was just as obviously deserted, and Mandino had now realized that both of them had disappeared. The intercept system was all they had left.

The biggest problem they’d faced was the sheer volume of information they had to work with. Carlotti, Mandino’s deputy who’d remained in Italy, had sent them three Excel files. Two contained the searches input at the cybercafe’s he believed Bronson had visited, while the third and much larger file listed the search strings from the other half dozen Internet cafés within the five-mile radius which Mandino had requested.

He and Rogan ran internal searches for words they knew their quarry had been looking for, including “LDA,” “consul,” “senator” and so on. Each time either of them got a hit, they copied the following fifty search strings and saved them in separate files.

Just doing that took a long time, and at the end of it they were really no further forward.

“We’re not getting anywhere with this,” Mandino said in irritation. “We already knew that Bronson had probably worked out what the additional letters meant on the Latin inscription. What I haven’t found yet is anything that looks like it might refer to the second inscription.”

Rogan leaned back from his laptop. “Same here,” he said.

“I think what we need to do is try to second-guess Bronson,” Mandino mused. “I wonder . . .”

He did have one powerful weapon in his armory. The book he held in his safe in Rome contained the first few lines of the Latin text of the lost relic. More important, it had a potentially useful couple of pages that detailed the Vatican’s attempts to trace the document’s location through the ages.

“The house in Italy,” he asked, turning to face Rogan. “Did you find the exact date it was built?”

His companion shook his head. “No. I did a search in the property register in Scandriglia, and turned up several records of sales, but they were all quite recent.

The earliest reference I could find was a house shown in that location on a map of the area dated 1396, so we know it’s been standing for at least six hundred years.

There was also an earlier map from the first half of the fourteenth century that doesn’t show any building on the site. Why, capo?”

“Just an idea,” Mandino said. “There’s a section in that book I was given by the Vatican that lists the groups that might have possessed the relic through the ages.

The likely candidates include the Bogomils, the Cathars and Mani, who founded Manichaeism.

“Now,” Mandino went on, “I think that Mani and the Bogomils were too early, but the Cathars are a possibility because that house must have been constructed shortly after the end of the Albigensian Crusade in the fourteenth century.

“And there’s something else. That crusade was one of the bloodiest in history—thousands of people were executed in the name of God. The Vatican’s justification for the massacres and wholesale looting was the Pope’s determination to rid the Christian world of the Cathar heresy. But the book suggests that the real reason was the growing suspicion by the Pope that the Cathars had somehow managed to obtain the Exomologesis.”

“The what?”

“The lost relic. Pope Vitalian called it the Exomologesis de assectator mendax, which means ‘The confession of sin by the false disciple,’ but eventually it became known inside the Vatican just as the Exomologesis.”

“So why did they think the Cathars had found it?”

“Because the Cathars were so implacably opposed to Rome and the Catholic Church, and the Vatican believed they had to have some unimpeachable document as the basis for their opposition. The Exomologesis would have fitted the bill very well. And the Albigensian Crusade was only half successful. The Church managed to eliminate the Cathars as a religious movement, but they never found the relic. From what I’ve read, the crusaders probably came close to recovering it at Montse’gur, but it somehow slipped through their hands.

“Now,” Mandino continued, “looking at the dates— which seem to fit—I wonder if a Cathar placed the second inscription in the Italian house, or perhaps even built it.

We know from what Hampton told us that the verses were written in Occitan. Why don’t you try searching for words like ‘Montségur,’ ‘Cathar’ and ‘Occitan,’ and I’ll check for Cathar expressions.”

Mandino logged onto the Internet and rapidly identified a dozen Occitan phrases, and their English translations, and then turned his attention to the search strings.

Almost immediately he got two hits.

“Yes,” he breathed. “Here we are. Bronson—or someone at that cybercafé—looked for ‘perfect,’ and then the expression ‘as is above, so is below.’ I’ll just try

‘Montse’gur.’ ”

That didn’t generate a hit, but “safe mountain” did, and when he checked, Mandino found that all three searches had originated from a single computer at the second cybercafe’ he believed Bronson had visited in Cambridge.

“This is the clincher,” he said, and Rogan leaned over to look at the screen of his laptop. “The third expression he searched for was a complete sentence: ‘From the safe mountain truth did descend.’ I’m certain that refers to the end of the siege of Montségur, and it also implies that the Cathars had possessed the Exomologesis—their

‘truth’—and managed to smuggle it out of the fortress.”

“And the searches are all in English,” Rogan pointed out.

“I know,” Mandino agreed, “which means that Bronson must have obtained a translation of the inscription from Goldman almost as soon as he got back to Britain.

If he hadn’t been hit by that taxi, we’d have had to kill him anyway.”

They searched for another half hour, but found nothing further of interest.

“So what now, capo?”

“We’ve got two choices. Either we find Bronson as quickly as possible—and that doesn’t look likely to happen—or we go back to Italy and wait for him to turn up and start digging in the garden, or wherever he thinks the Exomologesis is hidden.”

“I’ll book the tickets,” Rogan said, turning back to his laptop.

III

“You’re kidding,” Bronson said.

“I’m not,” Angela retorted. “Look at the dates. You told me that the Hamptons’

house was built roughly in the middle of the fourteenth century. That was around a hundred years after the fall of Montse’gur, and about twenty-five years after the last known Cathar parfait was executed.

“And once in Italy, their first priority would have been to secrete their ‘treasure’—the ‘truth’ they’d managed to smuggle out of Montségur at the end of the siege—somewhere safe. They needed a permanent hiding place, somewhere that would endure, not just a hole in the ground somewhere. I think they decided to hide the relic in something permanent, or as near as possible, and one obvious choice would be a substantial house, probably in the foundations, so that routine alterations to the property wouldn’t uncover it.

“But they also wouldn’t want to bury it beyond recovery, because it was the most important document they possessed, and they must have hoped that one day their religion would be revived. So whoever hid the relic would have needed to leave a marker, a clue of some kind, that would later enable someone, someone who understood the Cathar religion and who would be able to decipher the coded message, to retrieve it. If I’m right, then that was the entire purpose of the Occitan inscription.”

Bronson shifted his attention from the unwinding autoroute in front of him and glanced across at his ex-wife. Her cheeks were flushed pink with the excitement of her discovery. Although he’d always had enormous respect for her analytical ability and professional expertise, the way she’d dissected the problem and arrived at an entirely logical—albeit almost unbelievable—solution, amazed him.

“OK, Angela,” he said, “what you say does make sense. You always made sense. But what are the chances that the Hamptons’ second home in Italy was the chosen location? It just seems so—I don’t know—unlikely, somehow.”

“But treasure—real treasure—turns up all the time, and often in the most unlikely places. Look at the Mildenhall Hoard. In 1942 a plowman turned up what is probably the greatest collection of Roman silver ever found, in the middle of a field in East Anglia. How unlikely is that?

“And what other explanation can you offer for the carved stone? The dates fit very well; the stone would seem to be Cathar in origin, and has been in the house since the place was built. The fact that the inscription’s written in Occitan provides an obvious link to the Languedoc, and the contents of the verses themselves only make sense if you understand the Cathars. There’s also the strong likelihood that a Cathar

‘treasure’ was smuggled out of Montségur. If it was, it had to be hidden somewhere.

So why not in that house?”

18

I

“At last,” Bronson muttered, as he steered the Renault Espace down the gravel drive of the Villa Rosa. It was well after midnight and they’d been on the road since about eight that morning.

He switched off the engine and for a few moments they just reveled in the silence and stillness.

“Are you going to leave it here?” Angela asked.

“I don’t have any option. Mark locked the garage before we went to the funeral, so the keys are probably somewhere in his apartment in Ilford.”

“House keys? You do have house keys, I hope?”

“I don’t, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Mark always used to keep a spare set outside the house. If that’s missing, I’ll have to do a bit of breaking and entering.”

Bronson walked around the side of the house, using the tiny flashlight on his key ring to see his way. About halfway along the wall was a large light-brown stone, and immediately to the right of it what looked like a much smaller, oval, light-gray rock.

Bronson picked up the fake stone and turned it over, slid back the cover and shook out the front-door key. He walked back to the front of the house and unlocked the door.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked, as he put their bags in the hall. “Scotch or brandy or something? It might help you sleep.”

Angela shook her head. “Tonight, absolutely the only thing I need to get to sleep is a bed.”

“Listen,” Bronson said. “I’m worried about the people who are looking for us. I think we should sleep in the same room while we’re here, for safety. There’s a twin-bedded guest room at the top of the stairs, on the right. I think we should use that.”

Angela looked at him for a few seconds. “We are keeping this professional, aren’t we? You’re not going to try to crawl into bed with me?”

“No,” Bronson said, almost convincingly. “I just think we should be together, in case these people decide to come back here.”

“Right, as long as that’s clearly understood.”

“I’ll just check that all the windows and doors are closed, then I’ll be up,” Bronson said, bolting the front door.

With both Jackie and Mark gone, it seemed strange to be back here. He felt a surge of emotion, of loss and regret that he’d never see his friends again, but suppressed it firmly. There’d be time for grief when this was all over. For now, he had a job to do.

Bronson woke just after ten, glanced at Angela still sleeping soundly in the other single bed, pulled on a dressing gown he found in the en suite bathroom, and walked down to the kitchen to make breakfast. By the time he’d brewed a pot of coffee, found half a sliced loaf in the Hamptons’ freezer and produced two only slightly burnt slices of toast, Angela had appeared in the doorway.

“Morning,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Still burning the toast, I see.”

“In my defense,” Bronson replied, “the loaf was frozen, and I’m not used to the toaster.”

“Excuses, excuses.” Angela walked over to the worktop where the toaster sat and peered at the two slices. “Actually, these aren’t too bad,” she said. “I’ll have these, and you can burn another couple for yourself.”

“Coffee?”

“You have to ask? Of course I want coffee.”

Thirty minutes later they were dressed and back in the kitchen—apart from the bedrooms, it was the only place in the house where all the furniture wasn’t covered in dust sheets. Bronson put the translation of the Occitan inscription on the table.

“Before we start looking at that, can I just see the two carved stones?” Angela asked.

“Of course,” Bronson said, and led the way into the living room. He dragged a stepladder over to the fireplace and Angela climbed up to examine the Latin inscription. She ran her fingers over the incised letters with a kind of reverence.

“It always gives me a strange feeling when I touch something as old as this,” she said. “I mean, when you realize that the man who carved this stone lived about one and a half millennia before Shakespeare was even born, it gives you a real sense of age.”

She took a final look at the inscription, then stepped off the ladder. “And the second stone was directly behind this, but in the dining room?” she asked.

“It was, yes,” Bronson replied, leading the way through the doorway, “but our uninvited guests removed it.” He pointed at a more or less square hole in the wall of the room, debris from the extraction process littering the floor below.

“And they took it to try to recover the inscription you’d obliterated?”

“I think so. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

Angela nodded. “Right, so where do we start?”

“Well, the most obvious clue is the first line of the second verse of the inscription: Here oak and elm descry the mark. That could mean whatever’s been hidden is in a wood or forest, its location indicated by the two different species of tree, but there’s one obvious problem . . .”

“Exactly,” Angela said. “This was probably written about six hundred and fifty years ago. The oak is a long-lived tree—I think they can survive for up to five hundred years or so—but the elm, even if it doesn’t get hit by Dutch elm disease, only lives for about half that time. So even if this line refers to two saplings, they’d both be long dead by now.”

“But suppose the author of this verse expected the object to be recovered fairly soon afterward, within just a few years, say?”

Angela shook her head decisively. “I don’t think so. The Pope’s opposition to the Cathars was so great that they must have known there was no chance of the religion surviving except as a covert, underground movement. Whoever wrote this line was anticipating a long wait before there would be any chance of a revival in their fortunes.

“And, in any case, it’s far too vague. Suppose there was a stand of oaks next to a group of elm trees on the hillside behind the house. Where, exactly, would you start digging? And note that the line says ‘oak and elm,’ not ‘oaks and elms.’ Jeremy was quite specific about that. We can take a look outside if you want, but we’d just be wasting our time. That line refers to something made of wood. Some object fabricated from oak and elm that would already have been in existence when the verse was written.”

Bronson waved his hand to encompass the entire house. “This place is built of wood and stone. It’s full of wooden furniture, and I know that the Hamptons inherited a lot of it when they bought the property, partly because some of the pieces are far too big to be removed.”

“So somewhere in the house there must be a chest or some other piece of furniture made of oak and elm, and there’ll be a clue or something on it or inside it. Maybe another verse or a map, something like that.”

The old house had an attic that ran the entire length of the building. Bronson found a large flashlight in the kitchen and they ascended the stairs. At first sight, the attic appeared almost empty but, once they started looking, it was clear that among the inevitable detritus that accumulates in old houses, like the empty cardboard boxes, broken suitcases, old and discarded clothing and shoes, and impressive collections of cobwebs, there were a number of wooden objects, all of which they needed to look at. There were boxes, large and small, some with lids, some without, bits and pieces of broken furniture, and even a number of lengths of timber, presumably from some construction project that had never come to fruition.

After almost two hours, they had checked everything. They were both covered in dust, cobwebs decorating their hair, their hands filthy, and they’d found exactly nothing.

“Enough?” Bronson asked.

Angela cast a final glance around the attic before nodding her agreement. “Enough.

Let’s get washed and have a drink. In fact, I know it’s early, but let’s have some lunch. At least that’s the worst of the search over.”

Bronson shook his head. “Don’t forget this house has cellars too. And that means rats and mice, as well as spiders.”

“You really know how to show a girl a good time, don’t you? Think positive—maybe we’ll find the clue before we have to go down there.”

Searching the bedrooms didn’t take as long as Bronson had expected, because there wasn’t a huge amount to check. There were chests, wardrobes and beds which had been inherited with the property, many of them made of oak, but despite emptying every one there was no sign of anything that didn’t belong to the Hamptons. There was also no indication that any of them were made from two types of wood, apart from three of the freestanding wardrobes that had an inlaid marquetry decoration, but the wood used on those pieces was certainly not elm: it looked to Bronson more like cherry.

“This isn’t easy,” he remarked, replacing a pile of bedding in a large chest at the foot of the bed in one of the guest bedrooms.

“I didn’t expect it would be. This object was hidden more than six hundred years ago by people who’d been chased halfway across Europe by an army of crusaders who wanted nothing more than to burn them alive. When they hid the relic, they knew exactly what they were doing, and they would have made sure that no casual search was ever going to find it. Let’s face it: we might not find it ourselves.”

Bronson sighed, walked over to the corner of the room and pulled open the lid of another small chest made—like most of the others they’d looked at—of oak. As he bent forward to look inside it, a thought struck him.

“Just a minute,” he said. “I think we’re going about this the wrong way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think back to the Occitan inscription. What does the line actually say?”

“You know what it says: Here oak and elm descry the mark. ”

“We’ve been assuming that the verse was telling us to find an object made of oak and elm, and that we’d find a chest or something with a lid made of the two woods, say, and when we opened it up there’d be a map or directions on the inside.”

Angela sat down beside him on the floor.

“But if that was what the Cathars did, if the clue was as obvious as that, then by now surely somebody would have found it.” Bronson continued. “This relic was of crucial importance to the Cathars, right? So if they just carved a map or something inside a chest or wardrobe, how could they guarantee that somebody wouldn’t sell it or break it up for firewood a few years, or a few centuries, down the line? If that happened, the secret would be lost forever.

“And, just in case the property was ever raided by the crusaders, they wouldn’t have wanted any visible or obvious clue. The inscribed stone was almost certainly covered with wood paneling, or maybe even plaster, and even if it was exposed, it could just be taken for a Cathar lament for the death of—oh—what’s his name?”

“Guillaume Bélibaste,” Angela supplied automatically. “So what’re you suggesting?”

“It’s possible that the clue, or whatever it is, isn’t just on a comparatively fragile piece of furniture. I think we’ll find it’s built into the fabric of the house. We should be looking at the beams and the joists and the floorboards. We should be studying the actual materials—the wooden components—the Cathars used when they built this place.”

Angela nodded hesitantly. “You know,” she said slowly, “that just might be the most intelligent suggestion you’ve made since we started this. OK, forget the furniture. Let’s start with the ceiling.”

The construction of the house was typical for buildings of its age. Thick wooden planks rested on huge square-section beams, their ends inserted in sockets in the solid stone outer walls, that formed each floor, including that of the attic. The roof timbers were almost as massive as the beams, and covered with thick terra-cotta tiles: the property had clearly been built to last. The wood was blackened by age and smoke from the two wide inglenook fireplaces, and the floorboards had been polished by the passage of countless feet over the centuries and were now covered with loose rugs.

“Maybe the floorboards are made of both oak and elm,” Bronson suggested.

They worked through the house methodically, again checking the attic first. All the floorboards appeared to be made of the same dark-brown wood, painted and varnished, which didn’t look to Bronson as if it was either oak or elm. And they couldn’t see anything on the floor that looked as if it might be a marker of any kind.

They checked the first and then the second guest bedroom: nothing. In the master suite, a good deal of the floor was invisible because of the massive four-poster bed that had come with the house and dominated the room. They checked the floorboards that were visible, without result. Then Bronson looked thoughtfully at the bed.

It was a king-sized double with a carved wooden base. At each corner a tapering and fluted dark-brown wooden pillar terminated in a solid canopy close to the ceiling, draped with a heavy dark-red material that looked to him like a kind of brocade. The sheets had been stripped off, and two three-foot mattresses rested on the solid wooden base. It would take at least four or five strong men to move it.

“How the hell do we shift that?” Angela demanded.

“We don’t. I’ll wriggle under it and take a look. Pass me that flashlight, please.”

“Find anything?” Angela asked, after he’d been under the bed for a few minutes.

“Quite a lot of dust, and that’s all, so far. No, there’s nothing here . . .” His voice died away.

“What? What is it?”

“There’s what looks like a small circle on one of these floorboards. It could be a knot, but it’s the first thing I’ve seen on the floor that looks out of place. I’ll need to . . .”

“What? What do you want?” The excitement was rising in Angela’s voice.

“A knife, I think, but not a kitchen knife. I need something with a strong blade. Have a look in Mark’s toolbox—it’s under the sink in the kitchen—and see if you can find a penknife or something like that. If I can scrape off the paint and varnish, I’ll be able to tell if this is just a natural feature of the wood or something else.”

“Hang on.” Bronson heard her walk out of the room and down the stairs. A couple of minutes later she returned, carrying a heavy folding knife with a spike and a thick blade. She bent down and passed it under the bed to Bronson.

“Thanks, that’s perfect. Here,” he added, “could you hold the flashlight for me? Just aim it at my left hand.”

He opened the knife blade, eased back slightly and began to scrape away at the paint. After a few minutes Bronson had managed to shift some of the multiple layers that covered the wood, but because of the oblique angle of the flashlight, he couldn’t see clearly what he’d exposed.

“Let me have the flashlight, please,” he said.

Angela handed it to him. “Well?” she demanded impatiently.

“It’s not a knot in the wood,” Bronson said, excitement coloring his voice.

“Not a knot?”

“No. It’s some kind of an insert in the plank. It looks like two semicircles of different types of wood.” There was a long pause. “And one of them looks like oak.”

II

Bronson lay under the bed, looking at the small circle of wood he’d uncovered. The first thing he needed to do was pinpoint its location. He stuck the spike of the penknife into the center of the circle of wood and used it as a datum to measure its exact position with reference to the walls of the bedroom.

“I’m not sure how this helps,” Angela said, as Bronson jotted down the measurements in a small notebook. “This floor is made of wooden boards laid on timber beams, so there can’t possibly be anything concealed underneath them, simply because there is no underneath. If we go down to the dining room, we’ll be able to see the beams themselves and the undersides of the floorboards.”

“I know that,” Bronson said. “But that circle of wood must have been placed there deliberately. It must mean something, otherwise why did they go to the trouble of doing it, and putting it in such an inaccessible position?”

“You’re right . . . hang on a minute.” Her voice rose in excitement. “Remember the second line of the Occitan verse: ‘As is above so is below.’ Suppose the circle you found just acted as a marker, indicating something in the dining room? A mark on the ceiling that actually points you toward something hidden under the floor of that room?”

“God, Angela, I’m glad you’re here. If I was by myself I’d still be drinking coffee and burning toast in the kitchen.”

They walked quickly down the stairs and Bronson led the way through to the dining room. He took out the notebook and a steel tape measure, and began working out where the underside of the circle of wood had to be. When he’d more or less located its position, he and Angela stood side by side, carefully studying the timbers that formed the ceiling.

Bronson’s measurements had indicated roughly where the bottom of the circle should be, but neither he nor Angela could see it in the ceiling beams. The undersides of the planks were uniform dark brown in color, the result of countless applications of paint and varnish through the ages.

“Are you sure you’ve got the right spot?” Angela asked. “I can’t see anything.”

“Neither can I,” Bronson replied testily. “But this is where the measurements say it should be. And I’ve checked them twice.”

They craned their necks, staring upward with total concentration.

“There,” Bronson said at last, pointing. “I think I can see a circular mark on that plank. I’ll need to get closer to be certain.”

The blemish Bronson thought he’d seen was directly above the massive dining table.

Using one of the chairs, he climbed up onto it. The wooden ceiling was still well above his head, but he could now see the mark much more clearly.

“Well, what do you think?” Angela asked. “Is that it?”

For a moment Bronson didn’t reply. “I think so, yes. There’s definitely a circular mark on the bottom of that plank, and it looks too regular to be a natural feature.”

He climbed down from the table and both of them stared upward, then down at the table. It was a hulking structure, made of oak and easily able to seat a dozen people.

Like the four-poster bed in the master suite, it was far too big to ever be removed from the house in one piece, and had obviously been assembled in situ when the property was built. Under the six column-like table legs was a large red carpet, worn and faded with age.

“We’ll have to shift this to see what’s underneath.”

Bronson walked to one end of the table, grasped the top and strained to lift it, but the massive structure barely moved.

“Jesus, that’s heavy,” he muttered.

“Can I help?” Angela asked.

Bronson shook his head. “There’s no way the two of us can lift it. The best we’ll be able to do is slide it sideways on the carpet. We’ll push it over here,” he added, pointing toward one side of the room.

Angela helped him move the dining chairs away from that side of the table to clear a space.

“Lean your back against it,” Bronson said, “and push with your legs. They’re much stronger than your arms.”

They stood at the side of the table, one at each end, and strained against it. For a few seconds, nothing happened, then they felt the first slight movement, and pushed even harder.

“It’s moving! Keep going.”

Once the table began to slide, it seemed to get easier, and within a few minutes they’d shifted it about ten feet to one side, well away from its original position.

“Well done,” Bronson said, slightly out of breath. “Now, let’s see what we’ve got.”

They stepped directly under the circle on the ceiling and looked down at the floor.

Like most of the rest of the ground floor of the house, it was composed of parquet panels, each roughly half a meter square and containing about a dozen lengths of wood in a herringbone pattern.

“This panel looks exactly the same as all the others,” Angela said, disappointment clouding her voice.

Bronson took the knife from his pocket, bent down and began scraping away some of the accumulated paint and varnish. Immediately it was clear that the grains of the two central lengths of timber were different. He cleared sections on all the pieces of wood, and then did the same thing on the four adjacent panels.

“Look,” he said. “The four surrounding panels are all made from exactly the same type of wood, but on this one the two central pieces—and only those two pieces—are different. It must be deliberate.”

Bronson ran the knife around the edge of the panel, then slid the blade down into the gap and tried to lever it up, but it was far too heavy to move.

“Hang on a moment,” he said. “I’ll get something stronger from Mark’s toolkit.”

He went into the kitchen, rummaged around and picked out two large screwdrivers.

Back in the dining room, he worked their tips into the gaps on opposite sides of the panel and pressed both of them down together, at first gently and then with increasing force. For a second or two nothing happened, then, with a sudden creak, the old wood began to lift. He readjusted the screwdrivers and pressed down again.

The panel moved up a few more millimeters. On the third try, the screwdrivers slammed all the way down to the floor and the panel sprang free.

“Excellent,” he breathed, reaching down to pick up the wooden panel and move it over to one side. They both peered down into the cavity that had now been revealed.

III

Outside the house, two men watched with interest as Bronson and Angela searched the dining room. When Bronson lifted the wooden panel, Mandino gestured to his companion. The endgame, he now knew, was near, and it looked as if the Englishman had found exactly what they were looking for. All they had to do was get inside the house and kill them both.

The two men ducked down below the level of the dining-room windows and headed for the rear door of the house. The bodyguard—Rogan was waiting in the car parked in the lane beside the property—pulled a collapsible jimmy from his pocket as they reached the door, but Mandino simply turned the handle—it wasn’t even locked—and they stepped inside. Mandino led the way toward the dining room, the bodyguard—his pistol loaded and cocked in his right hand—just behind him.

The door to the room wasn’t closed, and the gap between the door and the jamb was wide enough for both men to easily see and hear through. Mandino raised his hand, and they stopped there and just waited. Once they were sure the Englishman had found the Exomologesis, they would walk in and finish him off.

Bronson and Angela stared down into the square hole. It was stone-lined, about two feet across and eighteen inches deep. A musty odor—redolent of mushrooms, dust and damp—rose from it. Right in the center of it was a bulky object wrapped in some kind of fabric.

Bronson reached down into the cavity with both hands. “It’s round, like a cylinder, or maybe a pot,” he said.

The material that shrouded the relic crumbled away even as he touched it, and he quickly brushed away the last remnants.

“It looks like a ceramic container of some kind,” he said.

Angela breathed in sharply. Her excitement was tangible.

“Get it out so we can look at it. Take it to that end of the table, near the door,” she suggested. “The light’s better there.”

Bronson lifted out the object, carried it carefully over to the end of the dining table and put it down gently. It appeared to be a green-glazed pottery jar, the outside decorated with a random pattern, and fitted with two ring handles. There wasn’t a lid, but the opening was plugged with a flat wooden stopper, its circumference coated with what looked like wax to form an airtight seal.

“It looks like a Roman or Greek skyphos, ” Angela said, examining the pot carefully.

“That’s a kind of two-handled drinking vessel. This is exactly what we should have expected, given the second verse of the Occitan inscription.”

“Let’s open it,” Bronson said, picking up the penknife again.

“No, hang on a minute. Remember what else the verse said: Within the chalice all is naught, And terrible to behold. What if that refers to something physically dangerous inside the pot? Perhaps some kind of poison?”

Bronson shook his head. “Even if this was stuffed full of cyanide or something when it was hidden, the possibility of it still being viable after six hundred years is virtually nil. It would have decayed centuries ago. Anyway, I don’t think the verse means the vessel contains something dangerous in that sense. It says whatever it contains is ‘terrible to behold.’ That suggests it’s something dangerous to look at, and that probably means forbidden knowledge or a terrible secret.”

“But the jar is clearly very old and it’s possible that sudden exposure to the air might destroy the contents,” Angela objected.

“I know,” Bronson said. “But whatever’s inside that pot was indirectly responsible for the deaths of both Jackie and Mark, and possibly Jeremy Goldman as well. I’m not prepared to wait around for weeks for some man in a museum to open it under controlled conditions. I’m going to take a look inside it right now.”

“OK,” Angela said, “but just wait a few seconds. We should photograph the stages in finding and opening this.”

She pulled a compact digital camera out of her pocket and took several shots of the sealed pot, and a couple of the cavity in the floor.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Unseal the lid.”

Bronson took his pocketknife and carefully cut away the wax seal. He waited while Angela took another two pictures, then used the point of the knife blade to ease up the wooden stopper. It was stiff so he had to lift it by stages, but finally it came out of the neck of the vessel. Again Angela took pictures, before he removed the stopper completely, and then snapped a further image looking down directly into the pot.

“Before you reach inside it,” Angela said, “wrap your fingers in a handkerchief or something. The moisture on your hands could damage whatever’s in there.”

“OK,” Bronson replied, doing as she instructed. “Here we go.” He reached inside the jar and pulled out a small cylindrical object.

Angela gasped.

“Be careful,” she said urgently. “It looks like an intact papyrus scroll. That’s an incredibly rare find. Hold it for a second.”

She trotted across the room, picked up a seat cushion from one of the dining chairs and put it on the table. “Rest it on that,” she instructed.

“How rare, exactly?” Bronson asked, placing the relic where she indicated.

“Scrolls are fairly common, but it’s the condition that matters. Over the centuries most scrolls, including those from sites like Qumran—you know, the Dead Sea Scrolls—have largely disintegrated. Papyrologists have had to study individual fragments and attempt to reconstruct entire scrolls piece by piece, trying to match up tiny slivers of papyrus.”

“I didn’t know papyrus could last that long—so how old do you think it could be?”

“Give me a minute, will you? It’s not like looking inside a modern novel. Scrolls don’t have publication dates.” She drew a chair closer to the table and took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket.

“You’ve come prepared,” Bronson observed.

“I’m always prepared,” she said, “at least for some things.”

For some time she didn’t touch the relic, just looked at it, turning the cushion this way and that to reveal different areas of the scroll. Although her specialization was ceramics, it was obvious to Bronson that she knew quite a lot about early documents as well, and that it was a necessary part of her job. After a couple of minutes she leaned back in the chair.

“Right, from what I can tell it’s early, precisely because it is a scroll. Scrolls normally had writing on only one side of the papyrus, though some later examples have been found with writing on both. This scroll looks as if it has text on one side only, so that’s another indication that it’s an early document.

“One of the obvious problems the ancients discovered,” Angela went on, carefully checking the inside of the pottery vessel on the table, “was that the only way to find out what was written on a scroll was to open it and read the text, which is why someone invented the sittybos. That was a tag attached to the handle of the scroll to identify it to the reader or seller, and they used it the way we use the writing on the spine of a book these days. I’ve just checked the pot, and there’s no sign of one in there, and there’s nothing on the scroll itself.”

“Which means what?” Bronson asked.

“Nothing very significant, just that there’s probably not a lot written on the scroll. It suggests it’s not what you might call a commercial document, that it’s not a known text, which probably would have a sittybos attached. It’s more likely to be a private text of some sort. I’m happy to take a quick look at it, but it’s not my field and, no matter what you think, this should be examined by an expert.”

Carefully, Angela opened the scroll, just far enough that she could see the first few lines of characters, then gently closed it again.

“It’s written in Latin,” she said, “and the letters are unusually large. I think the text is continuous, which also suggests it’s early. Later writing would normally include both a spatium—that’s a gap between the verses—and a paragraphus, a horizontal line under the beginning of each new sentence.”

“So how old do you think it is?” Bronson asked, as they both bent forward over the dining table, their backs to the door, staring at the relic.

“If I had to guess I’d say second or third century A.D. It’s got to—”

Angela screamed as someone grabbed her arm. She was pulled violently backward away from the table and slammed into the wall beside the door.

Bronson spun around. He’d heard no footsteps, no noise of any kind.

A heavily built man wearing a light gray suit had grabbed Angela and pinned her against the wall. But it was the other man who held Bronson’s attention, or rather the semiautomatic pistol he was holding in his right hand. Because it looked to Bronson as if he knew exactly how to use it.

19

I

“You’re wrong,” the big man in the gray suit corrected Angela. His English was fluent and almost devoid of any accent. “It’s first century.”

“Who the hell are you?” Bronson demanded, silently berating himself for not checking that all the doors and windows had been locked.

Bizarrely, the man holding Angela could almost have been a banker or a businessman, judging by his appearance—immaculate suit, highly polished black loafers and neat, well-cut dark hair. Until, that is, Bronson looked into his eyes. They were black, and as cold and empty as an open grave.

In contrast to his companion, the man holding the gun was wearing jeans and a casual jacket. Bronson guessed these were probably the men who’d broken into the house. And killed Mark Hampton and Jackie and possibly Jeremy Goldman as well.

Anger rose in him like a tide, but he knew he had to remain focused.

“Who we are isn’t important,” the bigger man said. “We’ve been looking for that”—he gestured toward the scroll on the table—“for a very long time.”

Still holding Angela’s arm, he strode across to the table and picked up the scroll while the second man kept his pistol trained on Bronson.

“What’s so important about this scroll that both my friends had to die? You did kill them, I presume?” Bronson balled his fists, and forced himself to take deep, even breaths. He couldn’t afford to get things wrong.

The man in the suit inclined his head in acknowledgment. “I wasn’t personally responsible,” he said, “but my orders were being followed, yes.”

“But why is that old scroll so important?” Bronson asked again.

The man didn’t respond immediately, but instead pulled a dining chair away from the table and pushed Angela toward it.

“Sit down,” he snapped, and watched as she obeyed him.

He unrolled one end of the scroll, looked at the first few lines and nodded in satisfaction, then he slid it into the pocket of his jacket.

“I will answer your question, Bronson,” he said. “You see, I already know who you are. I’ll tell you exactly why this scroll is worth killing for. I think you know why I’m prepared to do that,” he added. “You understand the situation.”

Bronson nodded. He knew exactly why the Italian was happy to talk—the two intruders had no intention of leaving either him or Angela alive when they left the house.

“Who are these people, Chris?” Angela asked, and Bronson noted that her voice was steady but tinged with anger. She could have been inquiring about the identity of a couple of uninvited guests at a party. He felt a sudden rush of admiration for her.

Bronson focused on the big man. “Tell us,” he said shortly.

The Italian smiled, but without any humor in his eyes. “This scroll was written in A.D. sixty-seven, on the specific orders of the Emperor Nero by a man who routinely signed himself ‘SQVET.’ The people who employ us have been looking for it for the last fifteen hundred years.”

Bronson looked at Angela.

“What on earth do you mean?” she asked, looking shocked.

The Italian shook his head. “I’ve said enough. All I will tell you is that we believe the scroll holds a secret that the Church would far rather remain hidden. In fact, it suggests that the entire Christian religion was founded on a lie, so perhaps you can guess what’s going to happen to it?”

“You—or your employer, which I presume is the Vatican—will destroy it as soon as possible?” Bronson suggested.

“That won’t be my decision, obviously, but I imagine they’ll either do that or lock it away in the Apostolic Penitentiary for all eternity.”

Bronson had been watching the two Italians carefully. He’d tried to keep them talking, stalling for time while he figured out his next move.

The big Italian took a step back toward the door and glanced at his companion. “Kill them both,” he hissed in Italian. “Shoot Bronson first.”

And that was the moment Bronson had been waiting for. The second man half-turned his head toward the bigger man as he received his orders, nodded, and then began bringing his automatic up to aim at Bronson.

But Bronson was already moving. The Browning Hi-Power hadn’t been out of his immediate possession since he’d left his house in England. He reached under his jacket, grabbed the pistol from his waistband, clicked off the safety catch and leveled the weapon at the Italian.

“Lower your weapon,” he yelled, in fluent Italian. “If you move that pistol even one centimeter I’ll shoot.”

For several long seconds, nobody moved.

“Your choice,” Bronson shouted, his eyes never leaving the man’s weapon. “Take the damned scroll and get out of here, and nobody gets hurt. Try anything else, and at the very least one of you is going to die.”

II

But even as Bronson aimed his pistol at the armed man about fifteen feet in front of him, the big man in the gray suit moved, as quick and lithe as a cat. He grabbed Angela by the hair, dragged her out of the dining chair and held her in front of him as a shield.

“Chris!” Angela yelled, but there wasn’t a thing Bronson could do to stop him. If he’d fired, he’d probably have hit her.

In seconds, the big Italian had pulled Angela, struggling in his grasp, out through the door.

Bronson was left facing the second man. For a long couple of seconds they just stared at each other, then the Italian muttered something and moved his pistol. Bronson had absolutely no option. He adjusted his aim slightly and squeezed the trigger. The Browning kicked in his hand, the report of the shot shockingly loud in the confined space, the ejected cartridge case spinning away to his right in a blur of brass.

The Italian screamed and tumbled backward, his left shoulder suddenly blooming red. He clutched at the wound, his pistol falling to the floor.

Bronson ran forward and scooped up the weapon, which he recognized immediately as a nine-millimeter Beretta. But he didn’t even give the injured man a second glance. His whole attention was focused on Angela and whatever was happening behind the closed dining-room door.

His military training kicked in. Pulling open the door and stepping through it could be the last thing he ever did if the big man had a pistol, because he’d be a sitting duck, framed in the doorway. And that wouldn’t help Angela.

So he stepped forward cautiously, flattened himself against the stone wall beside the door, and turned the handle. Then he peered through the gap into the living room.

The big Italian wasn’t waiting for him. He was almost at the far door, the one that led into the hall, one beefy arm around Angela’s neck as he dragged her roughly across the floor.

Bronson wrenched open the door, stepped into the room, took rapid aim and fired a single shot into the stone wall beside the hall door. The Italian turned, his expression confused and almost frightened, and at that moment Angela acted.

As the big man paused, she lifted her right leg and scraped her shoe hard down the man’s left shin and then drove her heel as hard as she could into the top of his foot.

The Italian grunted in pain and staggered backward, releasing his hold on Angela’s neck as he did so. She dived to one side, getting out of Bronson’s line of fire, as the big man hobbled toward the door.

Bronson aimed the Browning straight at the Italian, but he immediately vanished into the hall, and seconds later Bronson heard the front door slam shut. He ran across to the window and looked out to see the man jogging away from the house, his limp now markedly less pronounced.

Bronson turned back to Angela. “Are you OK?” he demanded.

Her hair tousled and her face flushed with exertion, Angela nodded. “Thank God for aerobics and Manolos,” she said. “I always liked these shoes. What happened to the other one?”

“I winged him,” Bronson said. “He’s in the dining room, bleeding all over the floor.”

“They were going to kill us, weren’t they? That’s why you drew the gun.”

“Yes, and we’re not safe yet. We need to get out of here as quickly as we can, in case that big bastard decides to come back with reinforcements.”

“What about him?” Angela said, pointing toward the dining-room door, behind which moans and howls of pain could be heard. “We should take him to the hospital.”

“He was going to kill us, Angela. I really don’t care if he lives or dies.”

“You can’t just leave him. That’s inhuman. We’ve got to do something.”

Bronson looked again toward the dining room. “OK. Go upstairs and grab all your stuff. I’ll see what I can do.”

Angela stared at him. “Don’t kill him,” she instructed.

“I wasn’t going to.”

Bronson went into the downstairs lavatory, found a couple of towels and walked back into the dining room, the Browning Hi-Power held ready in front of him. But the pistol was unnecessary. The Italian was lying moaning in a pool of blood, his right hand trying to staunch the flow from the bullet wound in his shoulder.

Bronson placed the two pistols on the table, well out of reach, then bent down and eased the injured man into a sitting position. He pulled off his lightweight jacket and removed the shoulder holster he found underneath it. Then he folded one of the towels and placed it over the exit wound, laying the man down again so that the weight of his body would help reduce the blood loss.

“Hold this,” Bronson said in Italian, pressing the man’s bloody right hand onto the other towel, positioned over the entry wound.

“Thank you,” the Italian said, his breath rasping painfully, “but I need a hospital.”

“I know,” Bronson replied. “I’ll telephone in a minute. First, I need answers to a few questions, and the quicker you tell me, the sooner I’ll make that call. Who are you?

Who do you work for? And who’s your fat friend?”

The ghost of a smile crossed the wounded man’s face. “His name’s Gregori Mandino, and he’s the capofamiglia —the head—of the Rome Cosa Nostra.”

“The Mafia?”

“Wrong name, right organization. I’m just one of the picciotti, a soldier,” the man said, “one of the capo’s bodyguards. I do what I’m told, and go where I’m needed. I have no idea why we’re here.” He said it with such conviction that Bronson almost believed him. “But let me give you a piece of advice, Englishman. Mandino is ruthless, and his deputy is worse. If I were you, I’d get away from here as quickly as you can, and not come back to Italy. Ever. The Cosa Nostra has a very long memory.”

“But why should someone like Mandino care about a two-thousand-year-old scroll?” Bronson asked.

“I told you, I’ve no idea.”

The “need to know” concept was one Bronson was very familiar with from his time in the army, and he guessed that a criminal organization like the Mafia probably worked in a similar way. The wounded man very probably didn’t know what was going on. Employed because of his skill with a gun—though he hadn’t been quite good enough on this occasion—he would have been told only what he needed to know to complete whatever tasks he was set.

“OK,” Bronson said. “I’ll call now.”

He quickly searched the man’s jacket, found a handful of nine-millimeter shells and removed them. Then he scoured the floor, found the ejected cartridge case from the Browning and picked it up. The bullet that had hit the Italian had passed straight through his shoulder and buried itself in the edge of the doorframe, but he quickly removed it with one of the screwdrivers he’d used to lift the floor panel. That was all he could do to eliminate the forensic evidence.

Finally, he picked up the holster and the two pistols—and the skyphos as an afterthought—and left the room. Angela was waiting for him in the hall, both her bags at her feet.

“I’ve tried to stop the bleeding with a couple of towels,” Bronson explained, “and I’ll call the emergency services right now. You get in the car.”

Fifteen minutes later they were in the Espace—the back of the car now empty as Bronson had unceremoniously dumped the bath and all the other boxes beside the Hamptons’ garage—and heading west, away from the house.

III

Bronson steered the Renault down the road and glanced over at Angela. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m furious,” she snapped. Bronson realized that the shaking he had taken to be shock or fear was actually intense anger. Every sinew of Angela’s body telegraphed her fury.

“I know,” Bronson said, his voice deliberately calm and measured, “it’s a shame we didn’t get the chance to examine the scroll, but we are alive. That’s the most important thing.”

“It’s not just that,” Angela retorted. “I was terrified in there, do you know that? I’d never even seen a real pistol until you waved that one at me back in England, and a few hours later I’m in the middle of a gun battle, and some fat Italian crook’s dragging me around by my neck. That’s bad enough. Then, just as we finally manage to decode the inscription and track down the relic, those two bastards come along and take it away from us. After all we’ve been through! I’m really pissed off.”

Bronson smiled to himself. Good old Angela, he thought. Trust her to come back fighting.

“Look, Angela,” he said, “I’m really sorry about what happened back there. It was my fault they got into the house. I should have double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked.”

“If you had locked the doors, they’d probably still have got inside, and if we’d heard them coming we might have been involved in a shoot-out neither of us would have survived. As it is, thanks to you, we’re both still very much alive. But it’s a shame about the scroll.”

“I brought the skyphos or whatever you call it. At least we’ve got that as a souvenir.

It’s obviously old—do you think it’s valuable?”

Angela leaned over to the backseat and picked up the vessel to examine it properly—in the house she’d hardly had a chance.

“This is a fake,” she said a few minutes later, “but a good one. At first sight it looks exactly like a genuine Roman skyphos. But the shape is slightly different: it’s a bit too tall for its width. The glaze feels wrong, and I think the composition of the pottery itself isn’t right for the first century. There are a lot of tests we could run, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.”

“So we’ve been through all this for a fake?” Bronson asked. “And remind me. What, exactly, is a skyphos?”

“The name’s Greek, not Roman. It’s a type of vessel that originated in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, around about the first century A.D. A skyphos is a two-handled drinking cup. This one’s in excellent condition, and if it had been the genuine article it would have been worth around four or five grand.”

“So when was it made?”

Angela looked at the skyphos critically. “Definitely second millennium,” she replied.

“If I had to guess I’d say thirteenth or maybe fourteenth century. Probably made about the same time that the Hamptons’ house was built.”

Bronson glanced over at her. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“More coincidental than anything else, I’d have thought.”

“Not necessarily, if you are right and they’re more or less contemporary. I think it could be far more than simple coincidence that a fourteenth-century pot—and a fake at that—was deliberately hidden in a fourteenth-century house.”

“Why?”

Bronson paused to order his thoughts. “The whole trail we’ve been following is obscure and complicated, and I’m wondering if that Occitan verse is even more complex than we thought, and that we’re missing something.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Look at the verse,” Bronson said. “It’s written entirely in Occitan apart from one word— calix—and that’s Latin for ‘chalice.’ When we follow the other clues in the riddle, we eventually find something that looks like a Roman drinking cup, but isn’t.

So the verse uses a Roman word for chalice, and we’ve recovered a copy of a Roman chalice. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Or at least convoluted?”

“Keep going,” Angela said, encouragingly.

“Why did they go to all the trouble of manufacturing a fake skyphos when they could just as easily have buried the scroll in any old earthenware pot? It’s as if they wanted to draw our attention to the Roman element in all this, back to the Latin inscription in the living room.”

“But we’ve been over and over this. There aren’t any other clues in those three Latin words. Or, if there are, they’re bloody well hidden.”

“Agreed. So maybe the Occitan verse is pointing us toward something else.

Something more than just the location of the hidden scroll? Perhaps to the skyphos itself?”

“But there’s nothing else inside it,” Angela said, turning the vessel upside down. “I checked that when I was looking for a sittybos.”

Bronson looked confused.

“Remember?” Angela said. “It’s a kind of tag attached to a scroll that identifies its contents.”

“Oh, right,” Bronson said. “Well, maybe not anything inside it, but what about the outside? Is that just a random pattern on the side of the pot?”

Angela peered closely at the green-glazed pottery vessel and almost immediately she noticed something. Just below the rim on one side of the skyphos were three small letters separated by dots: “H•V•L.”

“Now, that’s odd,” she murmured. “There are three letters inscribed here—‘HVL’—and they obviously have to stand for ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ ”

“ ‘Here lie the liars,’ ” Bronson breathed. “That’s a definite link. So what’s that pattern underneath the letters?”

Below the inscribed letters was what looked almost like a sine wave: a line that undulated in a regular pattern, up and down, and with short diagonal lines running below it, sloping from top right to bottom left. Below the wavy line was a geometric pattern, three straight lines crisscrossing in the center and with a dot at each end.

Running along the lines were Latin numbers, followed by the letters “M•P,” then more numbers and the letter “A.” Beside each dot were other numbers, each followed by a “P.” In the very center of the design were the letters “PO•LDA,” and below that “M•A•M.”

“It’s not random,” Angela said decisively. “Whatever these lines mean, they indicate something definite, almost like a map.”

Bronson looked across at the skyphos Angela was holding. “But a map of what?”

20

I

Late that afternoon, the setting sun bathed the irregular rooftops and old walls of the ancient heart of the city of Rome with a golden glow. Pedestrians bustled to and fro along the wide pavements, and a constant stream of hooting and jostling vehicles fought its way around the Piazza di Santa Maria alle Fornaci. But Joseph Cardinal Vertutti saw none of it.

He sat down beside Mandino in the same café where the two men had first met. As the operation had been successfully concluded, he thought that it rounded things out nicely to hold their last meeting in the same place where they’d held their first.

But this time Mandino had insisted that they meet in a small back room.

“You have it?” Vertutti asked, his voice high and excited. His hands were trembling slightly, Mandino noticed.

“All in good time, Cardinal, all in good time.” A waiter knocked and entered with two cups of coffee. He placed them gently on the table and then withdrew, closing the door behind him. “Before I deliver anything, we have one small administrative detail to take care of. Have you transferred the money?”

“Yes,” Vertutti snapped. “I sent one hundred thousand euros to the account you specified.”

“You might think your word is sufficient proof, Eminence, but I know firsthand that the Vatican is just as capable of duplicity as the next person. Unless you have a transfer slip for me, this conversation will finish right here.”

Vertutti pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket. He opened it and extracted a slip of paper, which he passed across the table.

Mandino looked at it, smiled, and then tucked it away in his own wallet. The amount was correct, and in the “reference” section Vertutti had inserted “Purchase of religious artifacts,” which was a surprisingly accurate description of the transaction.

“Excellent,” Mandino said. “Now, you’ll be pleased to hear that we managed to retrieve the relic. I watched the man Bronson—Mark Hampton’s friend—retrieve the scroll, and we interceded immediately. Neither Bronson nor his wife, who was also present at the house, have any significant knowledge of what the Exomologesis contains, and so they don’t need to be eliminated.”

Mandino said nothing to Vertutti about what he’d told them about the scroll, or the embarrassing fact that the Englishman had sent him running for his life and had actually shot one of his bodyguards.

“Very generous of you,” Vertutti quipped sarcastically. “Where are they now?”

“They’re probably heading back to Britain. Now that we’ve recovered the relic, there’s nothing else for them here.”

Mandino was again being slightly economical with the truth. He’d already instructed Antonio Carlotti to advise one of his contacts in the Carabinieri that Bronson—a man wanted for questioning by the Metropolitan Police about a murder in Britain—was roaming at will around Italy. He’d even passed on details about the Renault Espace he’d seen parked outside the house. He was certain that the two of them would be picked up well before they reached the Italian border.

“So, where is the relic?” Vertutti asked impatiently.

Mandino opened his briefcase, removed a plastic container filled with a white, fluffy substance and passed it across the table.

Vertutti cautiously lifted out several layers of cotton wool to reveal the small scroll.

With trembling fingers, he gingerly picked up the ancient papyrus. He held it up—the expression on his face reflecting his knowledge of both its age and its terrible destructive power—then carefully unrolled it on the table in front of him. He nodded gravely, almost reverently, as he read through the short text.

“Even if I wasn’t sure about it,” he said, “the way this is written is an indication of the author’s identity.”

“What do you mean?” Mandino asked.

“The writing is bold and the letters large,” Vertutti said. “It’s not generally known, but the man who wrote this suffered from a medical condition known as ophthalmia neonatorum, which was fairly common at the time. This disease caused a progressive loss of sight and a very painful weakness in his eyes, and in his case eventually left him nearly blind. Writing was always difficult for him, and he probably normally used an amanuensis, a professional scribe. That facility was obviously not available to him in Judea when he was forced to write this document.”

Vertutti continued studying the relic for a few moments, then looked up. “I know we’ve had our differences of opinion, Mandino,” he said, with a somewhat strained smile, “but despite your views of the Church and the Vatican, I would like to congratulate you for recovering this. The Holy Father will be particularly pleased that we’ve managed to do so.”

Mandino inclined his head in acknowledgment. “What will you do with it now?

Destroy it?”

Vertutti shook his head. “I hope not,” he said. “I believe it should be secreted in the Apostolic Penitentiary along with the Vitalian Codex. Destroying an object of this age and importance is not something I believe the Vatican should contemplate doing, no matter what the context.”

Vertutti unrolled the last few inches of the scroll. Then he leaned forward to examine something at the end of the document, below the mark “SQVET.”

“Did you look at this?” he asked, an edge of tension in his voice.

“No,” Mandino replied. “I only checked the beginning of it, purely to make sure it was the correct document.”

“Oh, it’s the correct document all right. But this—this changes everything,” Vertutti said, pointing at the very end of the scroll.

Mandino squinted at the document. There were a few lines written in a different, smaller hand just above Nero’s imperial seal.

Vertutti translated the Latin aloud, then looked at Mandino.

“You know what you have to do,” he said.

II

Bronson and Angela found a small family-run hotel on the outskirts of Santa Marinella, on the Italian coast, northwest of Rome. It offered off-street parking in a courtyard at the rear of the building and seemed quietly anonymous. Bronson booked in, taking the last remaining twin room, and carried their bags upstairs.

The room was south-facing, light and airy, with a view over the courtyard. Angela opened her bag, lifted out a bulky bundle of clothes and laid it on the bed.

“We need decent light,” Bronson said, moving one of the bedside tables over to stand it in front of the window.

Behind him, Angela carefully unwrapped the clothes, layer by layer, to reveal the skyphos nestling in the center of the bundle. She placed it gently on the table Bronson had moved.

Bronson removed the digital camera from his overnight bag. He crouched down between the table and the window so that the full light of the afternoon sun fell on the skyphos, making the old green glaze of the earthenware pot glow. He snapped a couple of dozen pictures of the vessel, from all sides and angles, then finally took a pencil and paper and made as accurate a drawing as he could of the inscribed lines and figures on its side.

“So all we have to do now,” Angela said, as Bronson copied the photographs onto his laptop, “is work out what the hell that diagram—or whatever it is—means.”

“Exactly.”

They looked at the lines, letters and numbers.

“I still think it might be some kind of map,” Angela suggested hesitantly.

“You may be right. But if it is, I’ve no idea how to decipher it. I mean, it’s just three lines and a bunch of numbers. Maybe we should ignore it for the moment and look again at Marcus Asinius Marcellus and Nero. We guessed the literal meanings of

‘MAM’ and ‘PO LDA,’ but we never really deduced why they were inscribed on that slab. If we can do that, it might give us a steer.”

“Back to the books?”

“You check the books. I’ll use the Internet. Now that those two Italians have taken the scroll, hopefully no one will be looking for us.”

Bronson logged on to the hotel’s wireless network on his laptop, while Angela leafed through the books that she had bought in Cambridge.

Bronson started by looking for references to Marcus Asinius Marcellus, because they surmised that he had probably been responsible for the Latin inscription on the stone in the Hamptons’ house. They already knew Marcellus had been involved in a scandal over a forged will, and had only been spared execution by the personal intervention of Nero himself.

“That,” Bronson said, “would have given Nero a lever he could use to pressure Marcellus into carrying out tasks for him. That would explain the ‘PO LDA’: ‘Per ordo Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus.’ What the letters on the stone meant was that the job—whatever it was—was done by Marcellus, but on Nero’s orders.”

“So perhaps we should look a bit more closely at the Emperor?” Angela said.

They transferred their attention to Nero himself and discovered, among other things, his implacable hatred of all aspects of Christianity.

“If that Italian henchman was telling the truth,” Bronson said, “the scroll contained some secret that the Vatican definitely didn’t want anyone to discover. Which would mean that whatever we’re looking for is also connected with the Church.”

“And if I’m right and those lines are a kind of map, that suggests Marcellus might have been burying or hiding something for Nero,” Angela said. “It must have been something that the Emperor felt was so important that he had to entrust it, not to a squad of workmen or gang of slaves, but to a relative who owed him an enormous debt of gratitude.”

“So what the hell did Marcellus bury?”

“I’ve no idea,” Angela said, “but the more I look at those lines, the more sure I am that something was buried, and this diagram must be trying to tell us where.”

III

Mandino wasn’t surprised to find the Villa Rosa appeared to be deserted. If he’d been in Bronson’s place, he would have left the house as quickly as possible. He also knew that his wounded bodyguard was now in a Rome hospital, Carabinieri officers waiting to interview him about his gunshot wound, because the man had made a brief telephone call to Rogan.

The driver stopped the car in front of the house. Mandino ordered one of his men to check the garage, just in case the Renault Espace had been parked there. He wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. Moments later, the bodyguard ran back.

“The door’s locked but I looked through the window. There’s nothing in there,” he said.

“Right,” Mandino said. “Rogan—get us inside.”

The rear door was jammed with a chair—Rogan could see that clearly enough through the glass panels in the door—so he walked farther on to the living room window where he and Alberti had broken the pane. The shutters were closed and locked, but they yielded easily to his crowbar. The glass hadn’t been repaired yet, and in a few minutes Rogan was able to open the front door of the house for the others.

The two men walked straight through to the living room, and stopped in front of the fireplace.

“Are you sure it’s there, capo?”

“It’s the only place it can be. It’s the only hiding place that makes sense. Get on with it.”

Rogan dragged a stepladder over to the fireplace, then removed a hammer and chisel from the bag he was carrying. He climbed up until his shoulders were level with the inscribed stone and started removing the cement that held it in place. He drove the tip of the chisel into the gap between the stone and the one below it, and levered. The stone moved very slightly.

“This slab can only be a few centimeters thick,” Rogan said, “but I’d like somebody else to help lift it out.”

“Wait there.” Mandino gestured at one of the bodyguards who quickly removed his jacket and shoulder holster, and grabbed a second stepladder.

Driving the tool into the space above the slab, Rogan levered upward, and the top of the stone moved forward. He shifted the position of the chisel and pushed up again, then repeated the action on both sides of the slab, until he was satisfied that the stone had been freed off sufficiently to lift it out.

“Get ready to take the weight,” he warned the bodyguard.

Together the two men worked the slab back and forth until it came free. Each held one side of the stone, but Rogan immediately realized it wasn’t that heavy.

“It’s only about an inch thick,” he said. He lifted it himself and climbed down the ladder. He carried the stone across to a small but sturdy table, where Mandino was waiting. Rogan held it up upright on its base while Mandino eagerly brushed dust and mortar from its back, searching for any letters or numbers.

“Nothing,” Mandino muttered. The reverse of the stone was unmarked apart from tiny cuts made when it had been prepared. “Check the cavity.”

Rogan climbed back up the ladder and peered inside the gaping hole above the fireplace.

“There’s something in here,” he said.

“What?”

“There’s another stone lying in the cavity. It’s not been cemented in place. It’s as if the first stone acted as a door.”

“Bring it down,” Mandino instructed.

Rogan pulled the second stone out of the recess and placed it on the table beside the first one.

“No,” Mandino said. “Not like that. Put it below the other stone. That’s it,” he added, as the two men maneuvered the slab into position. “Look, that’s the lower section. That’s the piece somebody must have cut off centuries ago.”

The three men examined the markings on the stone.

“Is it a map?” Rogan asked, brushing the dust and dirt off the inscribed surface.

“It could be,” Mandino said. “It’ll take time to decipher, though. It’s not like any map I’ve ever seen.”

Religion held no sway over Mandino. He believed in the things he could see like money, and fear. But he was developing a grudging respect for the ingenuity of the Cathars. With their religion crumbling around them, they must have known that time was running out. But rather than risk either the stone or the Exomologesis falling into the hands of the crusaders, they decided to hide them both. They buried the scroll under the floor and split the stone in two, sealing the lower half inside the wall, where it would be safe from wear and tear. And then they left two markers visible. Two inscribed stones that showed where the two objects were hidden, but only if you knew exactly what you were looking for.

21

I

The Internet searches had helped, but not very much. Bronson and Angela now knew a lot more about the Romans in general, and Emperor Nero in particular, but still almost nothing about Marcus Asinius Marcellus, who remained a vague and insubstantial figure almost completely absent from the historical record. And they still had no idea what he had buried on Nero’s orders.

In their room in Santa Marinella, Bronson examined the skyphos carefully while Angela studied one of their books about Nero.

“The one thing we haven’t really looked at,” Bronson said slowly, “is this drinking cup.”

“We have,” Angela objected. “It’s empty now, because the scroll’s gone, and we’ve copied that map thing off the outside. There’s nothing else it can tell us.”

“I didn’t mean that, exactly. I’ve been trying to reconstruct the sequence of events.

This pot is a fourteenth-century copy of a first-century Roman skyphos. But why didn’t the Cathars use a contemporary vessel to hide the scroll? They could have made any old pot and inscribed that diagram on it. Why did they bother creating a replica of a Roman drinking cup? There had to be a good reason for doing that.

“The Occitan verse we found contained a single Latin word— calix—meaning

‘chalice.’ That was an obvious pointer to this vessel. But I think the fact that this appears to be a Roman pot points straight to the Latin inscription. Maybe this vessel and the two stones are all part of the same silent message left for somebody by the last of the Cathars.”

“We’ve been over all this, Chris.”

“I know, but there’s one question we haven’t asked.” Bronson pointed at the side of the skyphos. “Where did that come from?” he said.

“The vessel?”

“No. The map or diagram or whatever the hell it is. Maybe we’ve got it wrong about the ‘Cathar treasure, ’ or half wrong, anyway. They must have had the scroll—the clues we followed when we found it were too specific to be a coincidence—but just suppose the scroll was only part of their treasure.”

“What else did they have?”

“I’m wondering if the Cathars found or inherited both the scroll and the stone with the Latin inscription on it.”

Angela looked puzzled. “I don’t see how that helps us. All that’s on the stone are those three Latin words.”

“No,” Bronson said. “There is—or at least there was—more than that. Remember what Jeremy Goldman told me. He said that the stone had been cut, that the section cemented into the wall of the Hamptons’ house was just the top half. In fact, that tip was the reason Mark and I started searching the rest of the house. We were looking for the missing lower section.”

“But you never found it, so how does that help?”

“You’re quite right. We didn’t find it, but I wonder if we have now, or at least what was written on it. Think about it. How would you describe the carved letters on the Roman inscription?”

“All capitals, no frills. A typical first-century Latin inscription. There are hundreds of similar examples.”

“And what about the Occitan verses?”

Angela thought for a moment. “Completely different. That was a cursive script. I suppose the modern equivalent would be a kind of italic.”

“Exactly. Now your estimate was that the Occitan inscription was carved at about the same time as the skyphos was made, probably in the fourteenth century?”

“Probably, yes.”

“Now look at the diagram on the side of the vessel, and the letters and numbers. The numbers are Latin—that’s the first thing—and the letters are all capitals. In other words, although the skyphos and the Occitan inscription are probably contemporary, you’d never deduce that just by looking at the two texts. They appear completely different.”

“So what you’re saying is that if the skyphos was made by the Cathars, why is the decoration on the side so obviously Roman? Except that it’s an obvious copy of a Roman drinking vessel, of course.”

“Yes,” Bronson said, “but I think that was quite deliberate. The Cathars made a copy of a Roman vessel to hold the scroll, and the decoration they chose for the skyphos is also Roman. More than that, the diagram is headed ‘HVL’— ‘Hic Vandici Latitant’—just like the stone with the Latin inscription.”

“Yes,” Angela said, her voice suddenly excited. “You mean that what we’re looking at here could be an exact copy of the map on the missing section of that stone?”

Bronson nodded. “Suppose the Cathars had possessed this stone for years, but they’d never managed to decipher what it meant. Perhaps the scroll itself refers to the stone, or to whatever was buried, and that convinced them that the map or diagram was really important. When the last of the Cathars fled from France and arrived in Italy, they knew their religion was doomed, but they still wanted to preserve the ‘treasure’ they’d managed to smuggle out of Montségur. So they split the stone in two, left one part—the top section—where it could be easily found, but hid the important bit, the diagram, somewhere else.

“To allow a fellow Cathar, or someone who knew enough about their religion, to decipher it, they prepared the Occitan inscription. The clues in that would lead to the scroll, safely hidden away in the skyphos, and on the vessel itself they left an exact copy of the diagram they’d never managed to understand. I think that map shows exactly where the ‘liars’ are hidden.”

“But this isn’t like any kind of map I’ve ever seen before. It’s just lines, letters and numbers. They could mean anything.”

Bronson nodded again. “If it was easy, the Cathars would have cracked it seven hundred years ago. I’m guessing here, but I think Nero must have insisted that the hiding place be located in an area that would never be found by accident, and that meant somewhere well outside Imperial Rome. Obviously the Emperor—or perhaps Marcellus—decided to make a map showing the location, so that the site could be found later if necessary. But to provide an extra layer of protection, they devised a type of map that would need to be deciphered.”

“I see what you’re driving at,” Angela said. “But this jar is a lot smaller than the stone would have been. What about the scale?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think it matters. I know a bit about mapping and, as long as you know the scale, you can interpret a map of any physical size. That diagram”—he pointed at the skyphos—“isn’t a conventional map because it hasn’t got a scale, at least as far as I can see, and it doesn’t show any features like a coast, rivers or towns. I’ve been trying to put myself in the position of the man who prepared it, trying to work out what he could have done to create a map that would endure, if necessary for centuries.

“If the burial place was outside Rome, he wouldn’t have been able to use buildings as reference points, because the only structures he’d see out in the country wouldn’t have been permanent. I mean, if he’d buried something in Rome itself, he might have guessed that places like the Circus Maximus would survive and used them to identify the location of the burial place. But in the country, even a large villa might be abandoned or destroyed within a generation or two. So the only realistic option he would have had would be to use very specific geographical features.

“I think Marcellus—or whoever made this—picked permanent objects, things that, no matter what happened in Italy, would always be visible and identifiable. I don’t think this diagram needs a scale because it probably refers to a group of hills near Rome. I think the lines show the distances between them and their respective heights.”

For a few seconds Angela looked at the diagram on the side of the skyphos, then down at the drawing Bronson had made, her fingers tracing the letters and numbers he’d copied from the vessel. Then she grabbed a book about the Roman Empire, flicked through it until she reached the index and turned to a specific page. It contained a table with letters and figures, but Bronson couldn’t read it upside-down.

“That might make sense,” she said, her eyes flicking between Bronson’s copy of the diagram and the table in the book. “If you’re right and the lines represent distances, then ‘P’ would translate as passus, the pace step of a Roman legionary and equal to 1.62 yards. ‘MP’ would mean mille passus, one thousand passus. That’s the Roman mile of 1,618 yards. The ‘P’ markings beside the dots would probably represent the heights of the hills, measured in pes, plural pedes, the Roman foot of 11.6 inches, and

‘A’ the actus, 120 pedes or about 116 feet.”

“But would the Romans have been able to produce figures that accurate?” Bronson asked.

Angela nodded confidently. “Absolutely. The Romans had a number of surveying tools, including one called a groma. That had been in use for centuries before Nero’s reign and would have allowed for quite sophisticated measuring. And you should also remember how many large Roman buildings are still standing today. They wouldn’t have survived if their builders hadn’t had quite advanced surveying ability.”

Angela leaned over the keyboard of the laptop, typed the word “groma” into the search engine and pressed the “enter” key. When the results appeared, she picked one site and clicked on that.

“There you are,” she said, pointing at the screen. “That’s a groma.”

Bronson looked at the diagram of the instrument for a few moments. It comprised two horizontal arms crossed at right angles and resting on a bracket that was itself attached to a vertical staff. Each of the four arms had a cord at the end that formed a plumb bob.

“And they also used a thing called a gnomon to locate north—very roughly—and they could measure distance and height using a diopter. ”

“So all we have to do now is work out which hills Marcellus used as his reference points.”

“That sounds easy, but only if you say it quickly,” Angela commented wryly. “How the hell are you going to manage that? There must be hundreds of hill formations outside Rome.”

“I have a secret weapon,” Bronson said, with a smile. “It’s called Google Earth, and I can use it to check the elevation of any point on the surface of the planet. There are six reference points on that diagram, so all I have to do is convert the figures from it into modern units of measurement, and then find six hills that match those criteria.

“Then we find the liars.”

II

On the way back from Ponticelli to Rome, Gregori Mandino telephoned Pierro and ordered him to wait at a restaurant on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. By the very nature of the business he was in, Mandino had no office and tended to hold most of his meetings in cafés and restaurants. He also told Pierro to find detailed maps of the city and the surrounding area, and of the structures built in ancient Rome, and bring those with him, along with a laptop computer.

They met in a small private dining room at the back of the restaurant.

“So you found the Exomologesis?” Pierro asked, once Mandino and Rogan had sat down and ordered drinks.

“Yes,” Mandino replied, “and I really thought that would be the end of the matter.

But when Vertutti unrolled the scroll completely, there was a postscript to it that we hadn’t expected.”

“A postscript?”

“A short note in Latin accompanied by the imperial seal of Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus. It gave Vertutti quite a scare, because it implied that the scroll was only a part of what Marcellus had hidden on Nero’s instructions, and wasn’t even the most important part at that.”

“So what else did he bury?”

Mandino told him what Vertutti had translated from the Latin.

“Are you serious?” Pierro asked, a slight but perceptible tremor in his voice. “I can’t believe it. Both of them?”

“That’s what the Latin text claimed.”

The academic looked distinctly pale despite the warm lighting of the room. “But I don’t—I mean—oh, God. You really believe that?”

Mandino shrugged. “My views are irrelevant. And I frankly don’t care whether what’s written on the scroll is true or not.”

“Could those relics really have lasted two thousand years?”

“Vertutti isn’t prepared to take the chance. The point, Pierro, is that we’re still under contract to resolve this, so I’m expecting you to decipher what’s on the stone.”

“Where is it now?”

“We’ve left it in the car. Rogan has taken pictures of the inscription, and you can work from those.”

Rogan handed over the data card from the digital camera.

Pierro slipped it into a document pocket on his computer bag. “I’d like to see the stone for myself.”

Mandino nodded. “The car’s just around the corner. We’ll go and take a look at it in a few minutes.”

“And what exactly is the inscription? A map? Directions?”

“We’re not sure. It’s definitely the lower section of the stone with the Latin inscription—we put the two pieces together and they match—but it seems to be just three straight lines, six dots and some letters and numbers. It’s more like a diagram than a map, but it must indicate where the relics are hidden, otherwise there would have been no point in carving it in the first place, and no reason for anyone to hide the stone.”

“Lines?” Pierro murmured. “You mentioned letters and numbers. Can you remember what letters? Perhaps ‘P’ and ‘MP’?”

“Yes, and I think ‘A’ as well. Why? Do you know what they mean?”

“Well, perhaps. Pedes or passus, mille passus and actus. They’re Roman measurements of distance. Whoever prepared the diagram might have picked some prominent buildings or landmarks in Rome and used those as reference points.”

“I hope you’re right,” Mandino said. “We’ll go and look at the stone now, then you can get to work.” He got up and led the way out of the restaurant.

III

Bronson had been trying to find matches between the heights shown on the diagram from the skyphos and those on Google Earth for more than an hour.

“This could take forever,” he muttered, leaning back in his chair and stretching to ease his cramped joints. “This bloody country is full of hills, and God knows which ones Marcellus picked. And that’s assuming he did use hills.”

“No matches at all?” Angela asked.

“None. I’ve taken your conversions of the Roman numbers and I’ve assumed a fudge factor of ten percent above and below, but even doing that I’m finding hardly any hills on Google that even come close.”

“How many?”

“Maybe eight or ten hills that fit the criteria, that’s all, and they’re all down by the coast and quite a way outside Rome.”

For a few seconds Angela didn’t respond, just stared at the laptop’s screen, then she chuckled softly.

“Call yourself a detective?” she asked. “Do the initials ‘AGL’ and ‘AMSL’ mean anything to you?”

“Of course. ‘Above Ground Level’ and ‘Above Mean Sea Level.’ I—oh, hell, I see what you mean.”

“Exactly. Google Earth measures the height of objects above sea level—it gives you their altitude—but Marcellus wouldn’t have been able to work that out. He would have been standing on the ground close to the burial site. From there, the only thing he could measure with his diopter would be the heights of hills above his position, not their heights above sea level.”

“You’re right,” Bronson said, despair in his voice, “and because we don’t know what his elevation was, we’re screwed.”

“No, we’re not. His elevation doesn’t matter. Marcellus has given us height measurements for six hills, calculated from a single datum point. If the top of one hill was eight hundred feet above him and another was five hundred feet, there’s a difference of three hundred feet. So what you should be looking at on Google Earth are the differences in height between any two hills.”

“Yes, right, I see what you mean,” Bronson said. “I’ve told you before, Angela, but I’m really glad you’re here.”

He took a sheet of paper and quickly chose two of the points on the diagram. He converted the Roman numerals into feet, using a table Angela had found in one of her books, and then worked out the difference between them.

“Now, let’s see,” he muttered, turning back to the laptop.

But he still couldn’t find any two hills whose height difference fitted. After another hour, Angela took over for thirty minutes, but had no more luck than him.

“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Bronson asked, as Angela pushed the chair back and stood up.

“I need a drink,” she said. “Let’s go down to the bar and drown our sorrows with copious amounts of alcohol.”

“That’s perhaps not the best idea you’ve ever had, but it’s undeniably tempting,”

Bronson replied. “I’ll just grab my wallet.”

They found a vacant table in the corner of the bar. Bronson bought a bottle of decent red and poured two glasses.

“Do you want to eat in the hotel this evening?” he asked.

“Yes, why not?”

“OK. I’ll just book a table.”

When he returned to the bar, Angela was looking at the copy of the inscription Bronson had made. As he sat down she slid the paper across the table to him.

“There’s another clue there,” she said. “Something we haven’t even looked at.”

“What?” Bronson demanded.

Angela pointed at the wavy line that Bronson had thought looked something like a sine wave. “This is a purely functional inscription, right? No decoration of any sort.

So what the hell’s that supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the sea? Perhaps the northeast coast of Italy?”

Angela nodded. “You could be right, but whatever Marcellus buried had to be really important, otherwise why bother with the stone and all the rest? And if it was important, Nero wouldn’t have wanted it to be stuck in a hole on the other side of the country. He’d have needed to keep it fairly close to Rome. I think that shape probably represents a line of hills, and Marcellus included it so that anyone looking for the site in the future would have something obvious that would help to identify the search area. I think that line’s a deliberate marker.”

“OK,” Bronson said. “Finish that glass and let’s get back upstairs.”

Almost as soon as he sat down at the laptop he found something that might fit.

“Look at this,” he said, pointing at the computer screen.

Just more than thirty miles east of Rome, between the communes of Roiate and Piglio, was a long ridge that peaked at about 1,370 meters, or 4,400 feet. The most distinctive feature of the ridge was its northeast slope, which was furrowed in a regular pattern.

“I see what you mean. It does look quite like the drawing on the side of the skyphos.”

“That’s the first thing,” he said. “Now check this out.” Bronson moved the cursor over the top of the ridge and noted down the elevation Google provided. Then he moved it to the end of another ridge lying almost due east, and jotted down that figure as well.

Angela picked up a pencil, quickly did the subtraction and then compared it to those they’d derived from the diagram on the skyphos.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not exact, but it’s bloody close. There’s an error of maybe eight percent over the Latin numbers, that’s all.”

“Yes, but we’re using satellite photography and GPS technology, while Marcellus only had a diopter and whatever other surveying tools were available two thousand years ago. In the circumstances, I reckon that’s definitely close enough.”

“What about the other four locations?”

“Yes, I think I’ve found them as well. Watch.”

Swiftly Bronson moved the cursor over four additional locations on Google Earth and noted down their heights, and again passed the paper to Angela to do the calculations.

When she’d finished, she looked up with a smile. “Not exact, again, but certainly within the limits you’d expect from someone using first-century surveying tools. I think you might have found it, Chris.”

But Bronson shook his head. “I agree we’ve probably found the right area, but we still haven’t pin-pointed the physical location of the hiding place. I mean, the lines on the diagram cross, but not in a single point, which would have been the obvious way to locate the site. Instead they form a wide triangle.”

“No,” Angela agreed, “they don’t intersect at a single point, but right here, in the middle of the diagram, are the letters ‘PO LDA.’ And between the ‘PO’ and the

‘LDA’ is a dot. That was a common device in Latin to separate words in a piece of text. Now, why put those letters again in the diagram itself? They were already carved into the top section of the stone, directly below the ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ If they were going to be repeated, surely they would have been placed at the bottom of the diagram, near the ‘MAM’?

“But if this diagram shows the burial place of whatever Nero wanted hidden away, having ‘Per ordo Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’ in the center of the map does make sense. In fact, it’s a kind of double meaning. I think it means ‘This was done on the orders of Nero’ as well as ‘This is the location of the burial place.’ I believe those letters were placed in the middle of the diagram because the dot between the ‘O’ and the ‘L’ marks the site.”

“Yes, that’s as good a suggestion as any,” Bronson said. “And tomorrow morning we’ll drive over there and try to dig up whatever Nero ordered to be buried almost two thousand years ago.”

22

I

Bronson had worked out that the straight-line distance between Santa Marinella and their destination was only about seventy miles, but he knew it would be more like double that by road.

“Seventy miles isn’t that far,” Angela said, finishing her second cup of coffee. They’d walked into the dining room at seven, the earliest time that breakfast was available.

“Agreed. On a motorway it would be an hour, but on the sort of roads we’re likely to find, I reckon it’s at least two hours’ driving. But we’ve got a bunch of things to do before we get there, so it’s going to take three or four hours altogether.”

Bronson paid the bill and carried their bags down to the Renault Espace. His first stop was a newsagent’s on the outskirts of the town, where he bought a couple of large-scale maps of the area northeast of Rome.

Five miles down the road, they found a large out-of-town commercial center and, just as Bronson had hoped, a hardware supermarket.

“Stay here,” he said, “and lock the doors, just in case. I won’t be long. What size feet do you take? The continental size, I mean?”

“Forty or forty-one,” she replied, “if you mean shoes.”

“Shoes, feet, they’re all the same.”

Twenty-five minutes later he reappeared, pushing a laden cart. Angela hopped out as he approached and opened the trunk for him.

“Good lord,” she said, eyeing the contents of the shopping cart. “It looks as if you’ve got enough there for a week-long expedition.”

“Not quite,” Bronson replied, “but I do believe in being prepared.”

Together they transferred the equipment into the back of the Espace. Bronson had bought gloves, shovels, picks, axes, crowbars, a general toolkit, haversacks, climbing boots, flashlights and spare batteries, a compass, a handheld GPS unit and even a long towrope.

“A towrope?” Angela asked. “What do you need that for?”

“You can use it for dragging rocks or tree trunks out of the way, things like that.”

“I don’t like to mention it,” Angela said, “but this Renault’s definitely not the car I’d pick for an excursion up into the hills.”

“I know. It’s completely the wrong vehicle for where we’re going, and that’s why we’re not taking it off the road. I have a plan,” he said. “We’re just going to use the Renault to get over to San Cesareo, on the southeast outskirts of Rome. I checked on the Internet last night, and there’s a four-by-four hire center there. We’ll leave the Renault somewhere in the town, and I’ve pre-booked a short-wheelbase Toyota Land Cruiser in your name. If we can’t get up to the site in that, the only other thing we could use would be a helicopter.”

It was approaching noon when Bronson parked the Renault Espace in a multistory parking garage in San Cesareo. Together they walked the few hundred yards back to the off-road vehicle hire center, and twenty minutes later they drove out in a one-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser which Angela had hired for two days, using her credit card.

“Was it safe, using my Visa?” she asked as Bronson pulled the Toyota to a halt in the parking bay next to the Renault.

“Probably not. The trouble is you can’t hire a car without using a credit card. But I’m hoping we’ll be long gone from here before anyone notices.”

They transferred all their gear, including their overnight bags, into the Toyota, then locked the Renault, and drove away.

“That’ll do nicely,” Bronson muttered, spotting a couple of used-car lots on the outskirts of San Cesareo. Both looked fairly downmarket, the lots scruffy and the cars old and somewhat battered. They looked like the kind of places where cash transactions weren’t simply welcomed, but insisted upon. And that suited Bronson very well.

He walked into the first one and haggled with the salesman for about twenty minutes, then drove out in a ten-year-old Nissan sedan. The paintwork had faded, and there were dents in most of the panels, but the engine and transmission seemed fine, and the tires were good.

“Is that it?” Angela asked, stepping out of the Toyota.

“Yes. I’ll drive this. Just follow me and we’ll sort everything else out when we get to Piglio.”

The town wasn’t far, and the roads were fairly clear, so they made good time.

Bronson parked the Nissan in a supermarket parking lot which was well more than half full, and a few minutes later they drove away together in the Toyota.

On the way out of Piglio, Bronson pulled into a garage, went inside and emerged shortly afterward with a couple of carrier bags filled with sandwiches and bottles of water.

“Can you map-read, please?” Bronson asked. “We need a track or minor road that will take us as close as possible to the site, so we won’t have to walk for miles.”

The location suggested by the inscription on the skyphos was well off the main road, and thirty minutes later, after driving down increasingly narrow and bumpy roads, Angela asked him to stop the jeep so she could explain where they were.

“This is where we are now,” she said, indicating an unnumbered white road on the map, “and this dotted line here seems to be about the only route up there.”

“OK, the entrance to the track should be just around the corner.”

Bronson pulled the Toyota back onto the tarmac, drove another hundred yards until he saw a break in the bushes that lined the road. He turned in through the gap and immediately engaged four-wheel drive.

In front of him, a rough but well-used track snaked up the slope.

“Looks like other jeeps have been up here,” he said, “and perhaps a tractor or two as well. Hang on. This is going to be fairly uncomfortable.”

The main track seemed to peter out after a couple of hundred yards, but tire tracks ran in several directions, and he picked the route that seemed to head for the high ground in front of them. He urged the Toyota up the slope and over the rutted and uneven ground for nearly another mile, until they reached a small plateau studded with rocks.

Bronson angled the jeep across toward the far side, where a low cliff rose up, and then stopped the vehicle.

“That’s it,” he said. “This is the end of the road. From here we walk.”

They climbed out of the vehicle and looked around. Shrubs and trees grew in clumps all around them, and there was absolutely no sign of any human presence.

No litter, no fences, no nothing. The wind blew gently in their faces, but carried no sound. It was one of the most peaceful places Bronson had ever visited.

“Quiet, isn’t it?” Angela asked.

“Probably the only people who ever venture up here are shepherds and the occasional hunter.”

Bronson turned on the GPS and marked the geographical coordinates it displayed onto the map. Then he cross-referred it to his interpretation of the diagram on the side of the skyphos.