The First Apostle

“This is all a bit bloody vague,” he muttered, “but I think we’re in the right place.”

Angela shivered slightly. “It’s spooky. We’re standing in about the same place that Marcus Asinius Marcellus did two thousand years ago,” she said, gesturing toward the horizon. “The landscape we’re looking at is pretty much identical to what he would have seen. You can even understand why he picked those six hills. From this spot they’re the most prominent landmarks by far.”

“Our problem is that we don’t have any kind of detailed directions,” Bronson said,

“so we’re going to have to check anywhere that looks a likely location. Neither these maps nor the diagram from the skyphos is going to be of much help to us now.”

“And what do you suggest would be a likely location? If Marcellus buried something in the ground, there are definitely going to be no visible signs of that now, not after all this time.”

“I don’t think we’re looking for an earth burial. Whatever was hidden was too important for that, so I think the hiding place will be in a cave or man-made stone chamber. And the entrance would nave been covered, probably by rocks or hefty slabs of stone, so that’s what we need to look out for.”

II

Gregori Mandino picked up the phone on the third ring. He was expecting—and hoping—it was Pierro with the news that he’d cracked the diagram on the stone, but the caller was Antonio Carlotti, his deputy.

“Some unusual news, capo, ” Carlotti began. “You told me the Englishman and his ex-wife had probably left Italy by now to return to Britain?”

“Yes. Why?”

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

“Where?”

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

“What searches?” Mandino demanded.

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

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

“No—yesterday evening. And there are a couple of other oddities. Those searches were followed by one for a groma. It’s an ancient surveying tool used by the Romans.

And we traced other activity on the same network. Someone downloaded the Google Earth program. That’s the—”

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

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

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

“Yes. As soon as I heard about these searches I asked one of my contacts in the Santa Marinella area to find out who’d been staying in the hotel there. He called me back a few minutes ago. There were two English guests—a man and his wife—there last night, but the hotel staff didn’t get their names because they paid the bill in cash. All the receptionist remembered was that they spent most of the evening in their room.

And they know they used the Internet because they were charged for it. They were driving a British-registered Renault Espace and checked out early this morning.”

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

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

“Tell me.”

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

“Damn,” Mandino muttered.

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

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

“Yes.”

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

“Already done, capo. Anything else?”

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

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

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

“Pierro.”

“Mandino. Any luck with matching the diagram?”

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

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

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

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

23

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What kind of marker?”

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

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

“That’s very encouraging. Thanks.”

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

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

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

“What’s this?”

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

“Do you feel it?” Angela asked.

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

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

“There might not be any,” Bronson suggested, “and I suppose a ‘V’ is more likely.

Marcellus wouldn’t have wanted anyone finding this by accident, so any marker he left would have been fairly discreet. He probably wouldn’t have wanted his initials on the stone, either, but a simple ‘V’ for Vanidici makes sense to me.”

“So what now?” Angela asked.

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

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

“Can I help?” Angela asked.

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

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bizarre.”

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

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

He slid the point of the crowbar behind the top of the stone and levered upward.

There was a cracking sound and the top of the flattened rock moved an inch or two away from the face of the cliff.

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

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

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

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

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

But when they looked behind the jeep, it was immediately obvious that it hadn’t.

The towrope had snapped cleanly in two just behind the tow hitch, and when they walked back to the rock face they saw that the round stone had barely moved.

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

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

“Yes, presumably. So what?”

“So that’s why the sealing stone is round. You’ve been trying to drag it away bodily.

We should be able to roll it sideways.”

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

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

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

“Keep going,” Angela urged.

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

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

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

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

“Angela, that cave’s stood here for the last two thousand years without collapsing, so as long as it can hold itself together for another ten minutes I should be fine.”

“Well, just be careful.”

“I’m always careful. Now pass me the flashlight and the camera, please.”

Bronson slid the camera into his pocket and shone the flashlight inside the opening.

“Can you see anything?” Angela asked.

“Not much. I’ll have to get right inside.”

Bronson lay flat on his stomach, held the flashlight out in front of him, and crawled slowly inside the cave.

II

The small cavern was around ten feet long, seven feet wide with a curved roof about four feet in height at the center, tapering to a little more than half that at the sides.

Bronson crouched down and looked around him, the beam of the flashlight dancing over the rough-hewn stone walls and the dusty floor.

It was immediately clear that Angela was right: the “liars” weren’t books or documents. Lying along each side of the cave were two skeletons, both of them obviously very old and tremendously fragile. Tiny scraps of coarsely woven cloth still clung to some of the bones. The skull of one skeleton was lying about a foot from the neck vertebrae.

“What is it?” Angela called.

“Hang on,” Bronson said, for a moment hardly trusting himself to speak. He was overwhelmed by an incredible sense of age, of time standing still. He reached out and touched the chisel marks on the stone walls. They were as sharp and clear as if they’d been made yesterday, though he knew the mason had died two thousand years earlier.

He sniffed the air. Faintly reminiscent of a church or cathedral, the cave had a dry, musty smell, overlaid with a faint hint of mushrooms. Really, really old mushrooms.

And then he looked down at the two pathetic piles of bones, feeling the hairs begin to rise on the back of his neck.

“There are two skeletons in here,” he called, looking carefully at the detached skull.

“Just dust and bones, and really old. But I don’t think either of them died of old age.”

“You mean they were murdered? How can you tell?”

“Hang on while I take some pictures. I daren’t touch them—they’d probably crumble away to nothing if I did.”

Bronson placed the flashlight on a rock so that its beam shone down the long axis of the cave and began to snap pictures of the interior of the chamber. He began with a panorama of the entire structure, photographing the floor, roof, walls and entrance, before moving on to the remains of the bodies. He took several of each one, first of the entire skeleton and then numerous close-up shots, concentrating on the skull and neck bones, especially a clearly severed vertebra on the first skeleton. On the second he took several pictures of the wrist and ankle bones, where the remains of rusted nails still protruded.

Bronson shivered, but not with cold. He looked around the tomb—a tomb as old as time itself—almost fearfully, then stared down at the bones again, bones that had been lying there undisturbed for two millennia. The bones of two men. One beheaded, the other crucified.

III

The pilot swung the helicopter around so that its nose pointed into the wind, then lowered the collective and settled the aircraft on the ground. He turned slightly in his seat and nodded to Mandino.

“Go,” Mandino said, and gestured to his right, where the four-by-four they’d spotted from the air was parked about sixty yards away across the rough ground.

One of the men slid open the side door and jumped down to the ground. He reached back inside the helicopter, picked up a Kalashnikov assault rifle and released the safety catch. He waited for his companion to appear, and then both men began running quickly toward the target, their weapons at the ready.

Mandino and Rogan watched their approach from the safety of the chopper. They hoped that Bronson and the woman had led them directly to the tomb. Mandino was impressed by their tenacity. In other circumstances, he might even have been prepared to let them live.

The two men split up when they got to about thirty yards from the vehicle, so as to approach it from different sides, and to offer two targets if it came to a firefight.

Mandino watched critically as they closed in, but the result wasn’t what he had expected. Both of his men almost immediately slung their assault rifles over their shoulders, peered inside the jeep, and then jogged back to the helicopter.

The moment they were strapped in and wearing headsets, Mandino fired questions at them.

“What happened?”

“It’s the wrong jeep,” one of them replied, panting slightly. “We were looking for a Toyota Land Cruiser, right?”

“Yes,” Mandino replied.

“Well, that’s a short-wheelbase Nissan Patrol. It looks similar, but it’s a different vehicle. That one has a rifle rack in the back and the hood’s cold. It probably belongs to a hunter or some local farmer who drove up here this morning and who’s still out in the hills somewhere.”

“Shit,” Mandino muttered, and turned back to the pilot. “Get us airborne again.

They must be up here somewhere.”

With the scene recorded on the data card inside his camera, Bronson looked around the cave again. He couldn’t understand why a couple of rotting corpses—even if one of them had been crucified and the other beheaded—could have been that important to the Roman Emperor. Dead bodies were not exactly a rare commodity in ancient Rome, so either there had to be something really special about these two victims, or there was something else hidden in the cave.

Bronson slipped the camera back into his pocket and shone the beam of the flashlight around the chamber, looking carefully at every inch of the rock. It wasn’t until he surveyed the interior for a second time that he saw, at the far end of the cave, what looked like a worked rock, its sides and top squared off. Maybe that carried an inscription or something that would explain what he’d found.

He crawled across the floor, but when he reached it, he found that the stone was completely blank. It looked as if someone had flattened the top surface in preparation for an inscription, but had never finished the job.

It was only as he began backing away that he noticed a line of darker material running around the lower part of the stone. He crawled back to study it more carefully. He soon realized that what he’d assumed was a large worked rock was actually one flat stone resting upon another, larger, stone like a lid. The gap between the two had been sealed with what looked to him like some kind of thick wax.

Bronson’s pulse began to race. The two stones obviously formed a kind of safe, and whatever was hidden inside the cavity had been secreted away from the elements for two millennia. That made sense. It wasn’t just the bodies themselves that were important: it was whatever had been buried with them.

He took a couple of pictures of the two stones, then tried lifting off the upper slab. It was stuck fast. He’d need to increase his leverage if he was going to be able to move the stone lid.

Bronson crawled back to the mouth of the cave and called out to Angela.

“I’ve found something else,” he said, “but I need the crowbar to get inside it.”

“Hang on a minute.”

For a few seconds there was silence, then Bronson heard the clatter of steel on rock and the end of the tool appeared in the narrow entrance to the chamber.

“Thanks.” He crawled back to the far end of the cave and slid the end of the crowbar into the sealing wax. But the wax, or whatever it was, was a lot tougher than it looked. He tried again, this time ramming the tool firmly between the two slabs, then tried to lever off the upper stone.

It remained obstinately in place. He was going to have to break the wax seal around most of the edge of the stone before he would be able to move it. He guessed that the seal was airtight, which at least meant that whatever was inside the stone “safe”

would probably be in good condition. Bronson jammed the crowbar into the wax again, wrestled it sideways and then pulled it out.

There was a sudden rush of air from inside the object, almost like an exhaled breath, the sound of a faint sigh, and Bronson leaned back in alarm. Then he shook himself.

It was just trapped air, obviously.

He began repeating the process all the way around the edge of the stone.

“There’s another one,” the pilot shouted, and again Mandino stared through the windshield in the direction the man was pointing.

Close to a rock face a couple of miles away was the unmistakable shape of an off-road vehicle. It was the third they’d seen, and Mandino was beginning to wonder if he’d overestimated Bronson. Maybe he’d hired the Toyota in preparation for the search, but hadn’t yet identified the location where he was going to start.

“Check it out,” Mandino ordered, and the pilot turned the helicopter toward the distant vehicle and began descending.

Bronson had cracked the seal around most of the stone, and again inserted the crowbar under the front edge of it and pressed down. This time the stone shifted very slightly. He increased the pressure on the crowbar gently. With a sudden crack, the wax seal finally surrendered its grip and the stone lid moved sideways and tumbled to the floor of the cave.

Bronson reached into the shallow recess. He pulled out two wooden tablets about the size and shape of modern paperback books, and a very small scroll. The latter was remarkably similar in appearance to the one they’d recovered from the skyphos, but he’d never seen anything like the tablets before. Each consisted of two flat pieces of wood, one of the long sides secured with a strip of what looked like a kind of wire as a rudimentary hinge. Small holes had been driven through the other three edges, and pieces of thread were looped through these, apparently as a means of preventing the object from being opened. All three relics appeared to be in excellent condition.

He took out his digital camera, checked that he still had plenty of space on the data card, and took several more pictures.

Outside the cave, Angela was leaning against a rock, her face upturned toward the sun.

She suddenly became aware of an unmistakable throbbing sound and peered around the rock. Still some distance away, but undoubtedly heading straight toward them, was a helicopter.

She scrambled down to the cave entrance and yelled inside.

“Chris! There’s a chopper heading straight for us.”

“There’s someone moving down by those rocks,” the pilot said, “next to the jeep. It looked like a woman.”

“Excellent,” Mandino muttered. “Now we’ve got them.” He turned in his seat and nodded to Rogan. “Get ready,” he ordered.

Bronson grabbed the two booklike objects and the scroll, and backed away hurriedly. At the entrance, he passed them to Angela, then wriggled out as quickly as he could. As he emerged into the daylight, he could see the helicopter flaring as it prepared to land about fifty yards away.

“Get in the car,” he yelled.

They ran across to the Toyota and climbed inside. Angela reached over to the backseat, grabbed a towel she’d brought along and carefully wrapped the relics in it, then put the bundle in the glove box in front of her. Bronson started the engine, slammed the gear lever into first and powered the big vehicle across the plateau and away from the cave.

“For Christ’s sake, land this thing,” Mandino shouted, as he watched the Toyota roar away from the rock face.

He wasn’t worried that Bronson had already driven off—he knew that the paved road was more than a mile away and that the chopper could easily catch up with the fleeing vehicle long before it got there. His first priority was to see what the Englishman had found.

“I can’t,” the pilot said. “The ground’s so uneven I can’t risk putting it down. There are rocks everywhere. The best I can do is bring it to a low hover so you and your men can jump out.”

“Don’t explain it to me, you idiot! Just do it.”

The pilot lowered the collective lever until the right-hand skid touched the ground, then kept the aircraft level in a hover.

Mandino ripped off his headset and climbed out, followed by Rogan and the two picciotti. The four men ran across to the exposed cave entrance.

“ ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant,’ ” Mandino said, staring at the three letters carved above the mouth of the chamber. If they’d frightened Bronson off before he’d managed to search the cave thoroughly, that would be the end of the matter. If the Englishman had taken anything away from the site, they’d have to stop him. And they’d have to do it before he got off the hillside. “You,” he ordered, pointing at the smaller of his two men, “get inside and find out what’s in there.”

Obediently, the man stripped off his jacket and shoulder holster. Rogan handed him a flashlight, and he wriggled inside the cave.

Less than thirty seconds later, his head popped out again.

“There are only two skeletons in here,” he called out. “Very old.”

“Forget them,” Mandino ordered. “I know all about them. What you’re looking for are books or scrolls, anything like that.”

The man vanished back inside the cave, but reappeared after a few minutes.

“There’s nothing like that in there,” he said, “but in the far corner there’s a kind of stone box, just a hollowed-out rock with another flat stone used as a lid. It’s empty, and there’re some marks in the dust inside it. I think there was definitely something in it, but it’s been taken out.”

Mandino cursed. “Right, back to the chopper,” he ordered. “We’ve got to stop Bronson, no matter what it takes.”

24

Angela was strapped in tight, but had turned around in her seat to check behind them.

“Any sign of them?” Bronson yelled, over the roar of the engine and the crashing of the suspension as the Toyota bounced over the rutted and uneven ground.

“Nothing yet,” she shouted back. “How far to the main road?”

“Too bloody far. That chopper’ll overtake us any time now.”

The helicopter lifted off the moment the four men belted themselves in, and turned immediately to the west, heading toward the edge of the plateau and the route Mandino knew Bronson must have taken to get back to the main road.

He turned around in his seat. “We must stop them before they reach the road,” he said, and pointed to the man sitting beside Rogan. “You’re the best shot. When we get in front of them, use your Kalashnikov, and try to disable the jeep. Aim for the tires and the engine if you can. If it won’t stop, then hit the cab, but I’d prefer the two of them alive if possible.”

The man took his AK-47 assault rifle, removed the curved magazine and cleared the round from the breech. He checked that the cartridges were loaded properly, slammed the magazine back home and cocked the weapon.

“I’m ready,” he said.

The other man reached over, slid the side door of the helicopter backward and locked it in the open position.

In the front seat, Mandino leaned forward, searching the terrain below the helicopter for the fleeing off-road vehicle. Then he pointed ahead, at a plume of dust rising from the rough and barely visible track that snaked down the side of the hill in front of them.

“There it is,” he yelled.

The pilot nodded, pitched the nose of the helicopter farther down and accelerated, heading toward a point lower on the hillside.

Bronson was driving harder than he’d ever done in his life. He had no doubt who was in the helicopter. And he was equally certain exactly what would happen to them if they didn’t get away.

Angela grabbed at Bronson’s arm and pointed out to the left, where the helicopter was passing alongside, about fifty yards away at low level, effortlessly overtaking them.

“There it is,” she shouted.

Bronson took his eyes off the road for a bare second. The chopper was close enough for him to see that one of the men was holding an assault rifle.

“Shit, they’ve got a Kalashnikov,” he yelled. “Hold on tight.”

The helicopter descended in front of them, dropping out of sight behind a clump of trees.

“Are they landing?” Angela asked, frantically.

“Probably not. The pilot will try to position the chopper to block the track down to the road, so that the man with the Kalashnikov can shoot out our engine.”

“So what can we do?”

Bronson slammed the brakes hard, then swung the wheel to the left. “We get off the track,” he said.

He steered the vehicle well away from the rutted pathway, picking the best route he could between the trees and bushes, all the time keeping the jeep heading down the hill toward the road.

Bronson’s guess had been right. The helicopter pilot had dropped the aircraft down almost to the ground, and it was straddling the track, its right side and the open door facing up the hill, the man with the Kalashnikov watching for his target.

But after a couple of minutes the Toyota still hadn’t appeared.

“He must have turned off the track,” Mandino said. “Lift off again and find him.

This time don’t lose sight of him when you descend.”

In a few seconds the pilot spotted the jeep again. The Toyota was following an erratic and unpredictable course down the hill. The vehicle was swerving from side to side as Bronson drove around trees and other obstacles on the hillside.

“Drop down over there,” Mandino ordered, pointing toward the base of the hill, where trees grew thickly and the track snaked through a gap between them. Bronson would have to drive through there if he was to get down to the road.

“Do you want me to land?” the pilot asked.

“No. Just get into a low hover and stabilize the aircraft. My man will need a steady platform to give him the best chance of hitting the target.”

As the Toyota careered down the hill toward them, the helicopter swooped down.

The Toyota was less than a hundred yards away when the man with the Kalashnikov began to fire single shots.

“Showtime,” Bronson muttered as he saw the muzzle flashes. He swerved the Toyota even more violently to make it as difficult a target as possible. Then he took his hand off the steering wheel just long enough to pass Angela the Beretta pistol he’d taken from Mandino’s bodyguard. It was smaller than the Browning and he thought it would be easier for her to manage.

“Hold it in your right hand,” he shouted over the noise of the engine, “but keep your finger off the trigger.” He glanced sideways quickly. “Now take hold of the top of the pistol, that bit that’s serrated, pull it straight back and then let go.”

There was a distinctive metallic clicking sound as Angela pulled back the slide and released it, feeding a cartridge into the chamber of the Beretta.

“Now look at the back of the pistol,” Bronson continued, still weaving the Toyota unpredictably across the rough ground. “Is the hammer cocked?”

“There’s a little metal bit here pointing backward,” she said, looking at the weapon.

“That’s it. Now, holding it in your right hand, move your thumb up until you find a lever on the side.”

“Got it.”

“That’s the safety catch,” Bronson said. “When you want to fire the pistol, click that down. And keep it pointing out of the window all the time, please,” he added, as Angela moved the weapon slightly in his direction.

“God, I’ve never fired a gun before.”

“It’s easy. Just keep pulling the trigger until you’ve emptied the magazine.”

When they were about fifty yards from the helicopter, Bronson lowered the window on Angela’s side of the Toyota.

“Start shooting,” he yelled.

Angela aimed the Beretta at the helicopter and flinched as she pulled the trigger.

Bronson knew it would be an absolute miracle if she hit the chopper. Firing a relatively inaccurate weapon from a vehicle traveling at speed over a plowed field was hardly conducive to accurate shooting. But helicopters are comparatively fragile, and if they could make the pilot think there was a possibility of a bullet damaging his craft, he might lift off and out of danger. In the circumstances, it was the best they could hope for.

As Angela fired her first shot, a bullet smashed through the windshield and passed directly between them and out through the Toyota’s tailgate.

The shattering glass unnerved them both. Bronson swerved hard to the left, then right again, the Toyota barely staying upright.

Angela screamed and dropped the pistol. The weapon fell into the gap between her seat and the door. She scrambled to grab it, but couldn’t reach.

“Christ, sorry,” she shouted. “I’ll have to open the door to get it.”

“Don’t. It’s too late now. Brace yourself.”

They had no options left. Bronson accelerated the Toyota directly toward the helicopter.

Mandino was shouting at the man with the Kalashnikov who, despite the closeness of his target, was still finding it difficult to hit it.

The gunman fired two more shots at the rapidly approaching vehicle, and then the action locked open on the AK-47 as he fired the last round. He pressed the release to disengage the empty magazine, grabbed another one and slammed it home, but in those few seconds the Toyota had covered another ten yards, and actually seemed to be accelerating. He cycled the action to chamber a round, selected full auto and brought the sights to bear again. At that range—now probably less than twenty yards—he simply couldn’t miss.

The pilot watched the approaching jeep with increasing alarm. He lost his nerve when the Toyota got within about fifteen yards. He hauled back on the collective lever, gave the engines full power and the chopper leapt into the air.

At precisely the same moment, in the back of the aircraft, the gunman squeezed the trigger and sent a stream of 7.62-millimeter bullets screaming directly at the jeep. His aim was good, but the helicopter’s lurch into the air took him by surprise and the shells plowed harmlessly into the ground.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mandino screamed at the pilot.

“Saving your life, that’s what. If that jeep had hit us, we’d all be dead.”

“He was playing chicken. He’d have swerved at the last moment.”

“I wasn’t going to take that chance. I’ve seen what’s left after helicopter crashes,” the pilot snapped, as he turned the chopper toward the main road, again following the plume of dust kicked up by the Toyota.

As the Toyota roared underneath the helicopter, Bronson accelerated even harder and turned back onto the rough track.

“Jesus Christ,” Angela muttered. “I really thought you were going to hit it.”

“It was close,” Bronson conceded. “If he hadn’t pulled up, I was going to try to swerve around the front of him.”

“Why not the back?” Angela asked. “There was more room behind him.”

“Not a good idea. There’s a tail rotor there. If you hit that, you end up looking like sliced salami. By the way,” he added jokingly, “I hope you chose the fully comprehensive insurance option when you hired this. There seem to be a few holes in it now.”

Angela smiled briefly at him, then peered behind them. “The helicopter’s heading straight for us again.”

“I see it,” Bronson said, looking in the external rearview mirror. “But now we’re only a couple of hundred yards from the road.”

“And we’ll be safe then?” Angela didn’t sound convinced.

“I don’t know, but I hope so. The last thing these guys need is publicity, and shooting up a car on a public road from a helicopter is a pretty good way of guaranteeing plenty of media interest. I’m hoping they’ll just follow us and try to take us down when we finally stop. In any case, there’s nowhere else we can go.”

At the end of the track, Bronson glanced both ways, then swung the Toyota onto the road and floored the accelerator pedal. The diesel engine roared as the turbo kicked in and the big jeep hurtled down the road toward Piglio.

Mandino was hoarse from shouting instructions.

“Thanks to your total incompetence,” he yelled at the pilot, “they’ve reached the road.”

“I can take them there,” the gunman said. “They’ll have to drive in a straight line, and they’ll be an easy target.”

“This is supposed to be a covert operation,” Mandino snapped. “We can’t start blasting away with automatic weapons at a vehicle on the public roads.” He tapped the pilot on the arm. “How much fuel have you got?”

The man checked his instruments. “Enough for about another ninety minutes in the air,” he said.

“Good. We’ll slow down and follow them. Sooner or later they’ll have to stop somewhere, and then we’ll take them.”

“I can’t see the helicopter,” Angela said, craning her neck at the window of the Toyota. “Perhaps they’ve given up.”

Bronson shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “It’s somewhere behind us.”

“Can we outrun it?”

“Not even in a Ferrari,” he replied, “but I hope we won’t have to. If we can just make it to Piglio, that should be enough.”

Traffic was light on the country roads, but there were enough vehicles around, Bronson hoped, to deny their pursuers any opportunity to drop the helicopter down to the road to try to stop them. Then he looked ahead and pointed at a road sign.

“Piglio,” he said. “We’re here.”

The helicopter was holding at five hundred feet. As the Toyota entered the town below them, Mandino instructed the pilot to descend farther.

“Where is this?” Mandino asked.

“A place called Piglio,” Rogan said. He was tracking their location on the topographical chart, in case they needed to summon help from the ground.

It was a small town, but they couldn’t risk losing their quarry in the side streets. The Toyota had been forced to slow down in the heavier local traffic, and the helicopter was almost in a hover as the men watched carefully.

“Keep your eyes on it,” Mandino ordered.

“Nearly there,” Bronson said, as he turned the Toyota down the side street, following the signs for the supermarket. Seconds later he swung the jeep into the parking lot, found a vacant parking bay, stopped the vehicle and climbed out.

“Don’t forget the relics,” he said, as Angela followed him.

She tucked the towel and its precious contents carefully into a carrier bag. “Got the camera?” she asked.

“Yes. Come on.” Bronson led the way to the main entrance of the supermarket, where several shoppers were staring up at the helicopter, now in a hover about a hundred yards away.

“Land as close as you can,” Mandino told the pilot.

“I can’t put it down in the parking lot—there’s not enough open space—but there’s a patch of wasteland over there.”

“Be as quick as you can. Once we’re out, get back into the air. Rogan, stay in the aircraft and keep your mobile close.”

The pilot swung the helicopter around to the right and descended toward the area of grass that adjoined the supermarket parking lot.

“The Nissan’s right there, isn’t it?” Angela said.

“Yes, but we can’t just climb in it and drive away. That would be a dead giveaway.

We’ll wait here.”

Bronson pulled Angela to the left-hand side of the entrance hall and carefully watched the helicopter.

“They’ll have to land to let someone out to follow us on foot,” he said, “and they can’t put the chopper down out there in the parking lot—it’s too crowded. Right, there he goes.” He watched the helicopter move away and start to descend.

“We walk, not run,” he said, squeezing Angela’s hand. Without even a glance at the aircraft, they crossed to where Bronson had parked the Nissan. He unlocked it, climbed in and started the engine, then reversed out of the parking bay and drove the old sedan car unhurriedly away from the building.

Thirty seconds later Mandino and his two men ran into the parking lot, heading toward the Toyota, the helicopter hovering above them.

But Bronson was already driving away, heading for Via Prenestina and Rome.

An hour later, after a careful search of the parking lot and the supermarket, Gregori Mandino was forced to face the unpalatable truth: Bronson and the Lewis woman had obviously escaped. The Toyota had been abandoned in the parking lot, and was already attracting attention because of the very obvious bullet holes in its windshield and bodywork. They’d peered in the back window and seen the tools and equipment that were still there. One of the men had stuck his knife blade into both front tires to ensure that their quarry definitely wouldn’t be able to drive it away.

The three men had checked everywhere inside the supermarket, then extended their search to the surrounding streets and shops—and even the few cafe’s, restaurants and hotels—but without result.

“They could have had an accomplice waiting here for them,” one of the men suggested. “So what do we do now?”

“It’s not over yet,” Mandino growled. “They’re still somewhere here in Italy, in my territory. I’m going to find them and kill them both, if it’s the last thing I do.”

25

I

“We have to get an expert to look at these,” Angela said.

They’d driven back to the Italian west coast and booked a twin room in a tiny hotel near Livorno. After a couple of drinks in the bar, and a very late dinner, they’d gone back up to their room. Bronson had plugged in his laptop and transferred the photographs to it from the data card in his camera.

He burned copies of the pictures he’d taken in the tomb onto four CDs. He gave one to Angela, put two of the others into envelopes to post back to his and Angela’s addresses in Britain the next day, and kept one himself.

Only then did they unwrap the three relics Bronson had pulled out of the tomb.

Angela spread towels on the small table in their bedroom, pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves and carefully transferred the three objects to the table.

“What are they, exactly?” Bronson asked.

“These two are diptychs. That’s a kind of rudimentary notepad. Their inner surfaces are covered in wax, so somebody could jot down notes, and then simply erase what had been written by scraping something across the surface of the wax.

“But these are very special,” she went on. “You see this?” she asked, pointing at a small lump of wax clinging to a thread looped through a series of holes pierced in the edges of the wooden tablets. The thread had broken in several places on both relics, but Angela hadn’t attempted to remove it or open either of the diptychs.

Bronson nodded.

“The thread is called a linum and the holes are known as foramina. To prevent the tablets being opened, the thread would be secured with a seal, as this has been. That was usually done with legal documents as a precaution against forgers.”

“So we’ve recovered a couple of first-century legal documents.”

“Oh, these are more than that, much more. This seal is, I’m almost certain, the imperial crest of the Emperor Nero. Have you any idea how rare it is to find an unknown text from that period of history in this kind of condition? That wax seal around the stone in the cave seems to have preserved these almost perfectly. This is like the tomb of Tutankhamun—it’s that unusual.”

“Tutankhamun without the gold and jewels, though,” Bronson said, looking more closely at the diptychs. “They both look a little tatty to me.”

“That’s just the paint or varnish on the outside. The wood itself seems to be in almost perfect condition. This is a really important find.”

“Aren’t you going to look inside them?” Bronson asked.

Angela shook her head. “I’ve told you before—this isn’t my field. These should be handed to an expert, and every stage of the opening recorded.”

“What about the scroll? You could have a look at that. You can read enough Latin to do that, can’t you?”

“Yes,” Angela said doubtfully. “I can try translating some of it, I suppose.”

With hands that weren’t quite steady, she took the scroll and slowly, with infinite care, unrolled the first three or four inches. She stared at the Latin text, the ink seemingly as black as the day it had been written, and read the words to herself, her lips moving silently as she did so.

“Well?” Bronson demanded.

Angela shook her head. “I can’t be sure,” she said, distractedly. “It can’t be right—it just can’t.”

“What can’t? What is it?”

“No. My translation must be wrong. Look, we have to find someone who can handle the relics professionally and translate them properly. And I know just the person.”

II

“It’s all been a bit of a shambles, Mandino, hasn’t it?” Vertutti asked, his voice dripping scorn. The two men were meeting again—at the same café as previously—but this time the balance of power had changed.

“If I understand you correctly,” Vertutti continued, “you actually had the relics within your grasp, and the Englishman at your mercy, but you somehow managed to let him escape with them. This debacle hardly inspires much confidence in your ability to bring the matter to a satisfactory conclusion.”

“You need not worry, Eminence,” Mandino said, with a confidence that was only slightly forced. “We have several possible leads to follow, and you shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties this man Bronson faces. I know from my sources inside law enforcement that he has no valid passport, so he can’t leave Italy by air or sea. Details of the vehicle he’s driving have been circulated to all European police forces, and staff at the border crossing points told to look out for it. The net is closing in on him, and there’s nothing he can do about it.”

“Suppose he decides not to leave Italy?”

“Then tracing him will be even easier. We have eyes everywhere.”

“I hope you’re right,” Vertutti said. “You must make sure he doesn’t escape.” He got up to leave, but Mandino motioned him back to his seat.

“There’s still the matter of the bodies,” he said. “You know their identities, obviously, so what do you want us to do about them?”

“The bodies, Mandino? What bodies? Ask any Catholic where those two men are buried and he’ll tell you that the tomb of one man is right here in Rome and the bones of the other were sent to Britain in the seventh century.”

“Sent by Pope Vitalian, Cardinal, the author of the Codex. He knew those bones weren’t what he said they were. Vitalian would never have given away genuine relics.”

“That’s pure conjecture.”

“Maybe, but we both know that the tomb in Rome doesn’t hold the body the Vatican claims. What we’ve already found proves that, and now you know it’s not true.”

“It’s true as far as the Vatican is concerned, and that’s all that matters. Our position is that the bodies you found are exactly what the inscription above the tomb stated—they’re the bones of liars—and of no interest to the Mother Church. And now the documents have been taken out of the cave, there’s no proof whatsoever of what you’re suggesting. Take some men up to the plateau and destroy the bones completely.”

III

“So now we’ve got to drive all the way to Barcelona?” Bronson asked. “You can at least tell me why.”

They were in the Nissan sedan, heading out of Livorno toward the French border. It was going to be a long drive, mostly because Bronson was determined to stick to the minor roads wherever he could, to avoid any possible roadblocks. There were more than twenty roads crossing the French-Italian border and Bronson knew the Italian police couldn’t possibly mount a presence on every one, and would probably have to concentrate on the autostradas and main roads.

In truth, he wasn’t too concerned about being stopped, because nobody knew that he was driving a Nissan. The police would be looking for him in a Renault Espace, and that car was tucked away in a corner of a parking lot in San Cesareo.

“About ten years ago,” Angela replied, “just after I’d started work at the British Museum, I did a twelve-month stint in Barcelona at the Museu Egipti, working with a man named Josep Puente. He was the resident papyrologist.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Papyrology is a generic term for the study of ancient texts written on a whole range of substances including parchment vellum—that’s the skin of sheep and goats—leather, linen, slivers of wood, wax tablets and potsherds, known as ostraca. I suppose the discipline became known as papyrology simply because the most common writing material that’s survived is papyrus. Josep Puente is a renowned expert on ancient texts.”

“And I presume he can read Latin?”

Angela nodded. “Just like poor Jeremy Goldman, if you specialize in this field, you end up with a working knowledge of most of the ancient languages. Josep can read Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew.”

Angela fell silent, and Bronson glanced across at her. “What is it?” he asked.

“There’s another reason I want to go there,” she said.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t tell you what I read in the scroll, because I simply can’t believe it. But if Josep Puente comes up with the same translation as I did, the museum would be the ideal place to announce the find to the world. He has the credibility and experience to be believed, and that’s going to be important, because you have no idea what kind of opposition we’ll face if we go public. Men with machine guns would be the least of our worries.”

Bronson glanced at her again. “Tell me what you think you translated,” he asked.

But Angela shook her head. “I can’t. I might be wrong. In fact, I really hope I am.

You’ll have to wait until we get to Barcelona.”

IV

Antonio Carlotti was not in the best of tempers. His boss, Gregori Mandino, was consumed by this ridiculous quest to track down the English couple and the relics they’d managed to find up in the hills near Piglio, but the bulk of the work involved seemed to have fallen on Carlotti’s shoulders.

He was the man who’d had to supervise the Internet monitoring and related searches. He was the person whom Mandino had told to run down all the biographical details of Christopher Bronson and Angela Lewis, and who’d had to deduce where they were likely to go next. Mandino just demanded results and then made his own plans accordingly, usually with Rogan in tow.

To call Mandino’s pursuit “single-minded” was to understate the case. He seemed to be letting all his other responsibilities slide and, as the Rome family capo, he had plenty of other things he should be doing. The quest appeared to be almost personal to him, and the one thing Carlotti had learned since he’d become a member of the Cosa Nostra was that you never let things get personal.

The bodyguard who’d been wounded at the property near Ponticelli was a good example. The Englishman, Bronson, had called an ambulance and then driven away from the house, and the man had been taken to a surgical hospital in Rome. But for Carlotti, a bodyguard who got himself shot was no use. He knew the man. He even liked him, but he’d failed in his duty, and that was enough. The two men Carlotti had sent to the hospital had distracted the police guard and then killed the wounded man, messily but quickly, before he could be properly interviewed by the Carabinieri.

That was what Carlotti meant by not getting personal.

He was wondering what, if anything, he should say to Mandino next time they met when his cell phone rang.

“Carlotti.”

“You don’t know me,” the voice said, “but we have a mutual acquaintance.”

“Yes.” The Italian was somewhat cautious.

“This concerns the Codex.”

“Yes?” Carlotti said again, now on surer ground. “How can I help? My colleague has already left for Barcelona.”

“I know. He gave me your number before he went. We need to meet. It’s very important—for both of us.”

“Very well. Where and when?”

“The cafe’ in the Piazza Cavour, in thirty minutes?”

“I’ll be there,” Carlotti said, and ended the call.

“So, how can I help you, Eminence?” Antonio Carlotti asked, as Vertutti sat down heavily in the seat opposite him.

“I think it’s more how I can help you,” Vertutti said. He leaned forward and clasped his hands under his chin. “Do you believe in God, Carlotti?”

Whatever Carlotti had expected, this wasn’t it. “Of course. Why do you ask?”

Vertutti continued, ignoring the question. “And do you believe that the Holy Father is God’s chosen representative on earth? And that Jesus Christ died for our sins?”

“Actually, that’s three questions, Cardinal. But the answer’s the same to all of them—yes, I do.”

“Good,” Vertutti said, “because that’s the crux of the problem I face. Gregori Mandino would have answered ‘no.’ He’s not simply godless: he’s a committed atheist and a rabid opponent of the Vatican, the Catholic Church and everything they stand for.”

Carlotti shook his head. “I’ve known Gregori for many years, Eminence. His personal beliefs will not prevent him from completing this task.”

“I wish I shared your confidence. How much do you know about the quest he’s undertaken?”

“In detail, very little,” Carlotti replied, cautiously. “I’ve mainly been involved in providing technical support.”

“But you are his second-in-command?”

“Yes. That’s why you have my number.”

Vertutti nodded. “Let me explain exactly what we have become involved in. This is a quest,” he began, “that commenced in the seventh century under Pope Vitalian. A quest that could affect the very future of the Mother Church herself.”

“And this Exomologesis is what, exactly?” Carlotti asked, having listened to Vertutti’s explanation of the Vitalian Codex.

“It’s a forgery,” Vertutti explained, embarking on the wholly fictitious story he’d worked out the previous evening, “but a very convincing one. It’s a document that purports to prove that Jesus Christ did not die on the Cross. Now,” he added with a smile, “the faith of true Christians is strong enough to dismiss such a fabrication, and the Vatican can demonstrate the fallacy of the document itself, but the very existence of this scroll is enough to raise doubts about our religion. With people increasingly turning away from the Church, we simply cannot afford to have any such doubts expressed.”

Carlotti looked puzzled. “But I thought Gregori had recovered the Exomologesis. I understood that was what had been concealed in the house outside Ponticelli.”

“Mandino removed it from the property, but we found additional text at the foot of the scroll. It said a further copy of the document had been prepared, together with two diptychs which would provide proof of the validity of the scroll. Now, we know that these diptychs, like the scroll itself, must be forgeries, but we simply cannot afford for the contents of these documents to be made public. These three additional relics have been stolen by the Englishman Bronson and his ex-wife.”

Carlotti still looked confused. “I know about Bronson, and I understand what you’re saying, but Gregori will hopefully recover these objects when he reaches Barcelona.”

Acting on Mandino’s instructions, Carlotti had run exhaustive checks on the backgrounds of both Bronson and the Lewis woman. The only possible contact either of them had with academics based in Europe was Angela Lewis’s previous work with Josep Puente, which was why Carlotti had ordered two of his men to watch the Museu Egipti in Barcelona, with detailed descriptions of what Bronson and Lewis looked like, and why Mandino was already on his way to Spain.

“That,” Vertutti said, leaning forward earnestly to make his point, “is what worries me. Unfortunately, Mandino and I have never seen eye to eye over this matter, and he’s told me that, once he’s recovered these relics, he intends to make them public.

With his religious—or rather anti-religious—views, that didn’t surprise me, and he seems unconcerned that his action will do irreparable harm to the Church.”

“So what can I do?” Carlotti asked.

Vertutti leaned even farther forward, lowered his voice and made the suggestion he’d been working on for the last three days.

Ten minutes later, Vertutti shook hands with Carlotti and headed back toward the Vatican. As he walked, he noticed he was sweating slightly, and it was not entirely due to the gentle heat of the Rome evening.

V

For a short while after Vertutti had left, Antonio Carlotti sat lost in thought. It had been, he reflected, a most unusual conversation. He’d noticed the slight traces of perspiration on Vertutti’s forehead as the senior churchman worked his way through the lies he was telling. Carlotti’s statement about only providing technical support was, of course, completely untrue: he knew just as much about the Exomologesis as Mandino did. But he’d guessed that he’d stand a much better chance of learning exactly what Vertutti was up to if he played dumb, and his decision had been amply vindicated.

Now all he had to do was decide whether to simply pass on what he’d learned to Mandino—which was the obvious and logical thing to do—and leave him to deal with Vertutti on his return to Rome, or do something else. Something that would, strangely enough, achieve exactly what Vertutti wanted, but at the same time benefit Carlotti himself. It was a big step to take, and before he acted he needed to be certain he could pull it off.

Finally, he pulled out his cell phone and made a long call to one of his most trusted men, a call that included the most specific—and highly unusual—instructions.

26

I

Two men walked out of Terminal B at Barcelona airport carrying only hand luggage and joined the queue for a taxi. The names in their Italian passports were Verrochio and Perini, and they were almost identical in appearance: tall and well-built, wearing dark suits, sunglasses with impenetrable black lenses shielding their eyes.

When they reached the head of the line, they climbed into a black and yellow Mercedes cab and, as the driver pulled away from the rank, Perini gave him an address on the western edge of the city in heavily accented but fluent Spanish.

When they arrived at their destination, Perini leaned forward. “Wait here, please,”

he said. “I’ll be about ten minutes, then we need to go into Barcelona itself.”

Verrochio stayed in the car while Perini got out, walked a short distance down the street and entered the foyer of an apartment building. He checked a small piece of paper on which a few numbers were written, then pressed one of the buttons on the intercom. Lights flared on and he stared unblinking into the lens of a camera. A couple of seconds later the electric lock buzzed, and he pushed open the door and walked inside.

Perini took the elevator to the seventh floor, walked down a short corridor and knocked on a door. He heard the sound of movement inside and was aware of an unseen eye assessing him through the security peephole. The door opened and he found himself face-to-face with a swarthy, heavily built man wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

“Tony sent me,” Perini said, in Italian, and the man beckoned him inside, locking the door behind him.

The man led the way into one of the bedrooms and opened a built-in wardrobe. He pulled out two black leather briefcases and placed them both on the bed.

“I can offer you Walthers or Glocks,” he said, snapping open the locks on both cases.

Perini bent down to look at them. In one were two Walther PPK semiautomatic pistols in nine-millimeter, and in the other a pair of Glock 17s in the same caliber.

Both cases also contained one spare magazine for each pistol, two boxes of fifty rounds of Parabellum ammunition and a couple of shoulder holsters.

Perini inspected the four pistols carefully, then replaced them in the briefcases.

“I’ll take the Glocks,” he said, finally.

“No problem. You’ll need them for one day, I was told?”

“One day, perhaps two,” Perini agreed.

“Is there sufficient ammunition?”

“More than enough.”

“Good. Call me on this number when you want to return them.” The man handed over a slip of paper.

Perini slipped it into his wallet. Then he snapped the locks shut on the briefcase containing the Glocks, shook the man’s hand and left the apartment.

“Take us to the Plac¸a Mossèn Jacint Verdaguer,” he instructed the taxi driver, as he leaned back in his seat.

The driver nodded. In a few minutes the vehicle was heading for the center of the city on the Avinguda Diagonal, the major road that divides Barcelona in two.

On arrival at the plac¸a, Perini paid the driver, including a modest tip, and the two men climbed out and stood waiting on the pavement until the taxi vanished into the stream of fast-moving traffic.

Verrochio pulled out a street map of Barcelona.

“We need to get over there,” Verrochio said, pointing. They waited at the pedestrian crossing for the lights to change, then walked across the Diagonal and headed south down the Passeig de Sant Joan, before turning right onto the Carrer de Valencia.

“That’ll do,” Perini said, as they reached the junction with the Carrer de Pau Claris.

Near the corner was a street café with chairs and tables outside. They stopped and took seats that offered them a clear view of the entrance of the Museu Egipti on the opposite side of the road.

When the waiter appeared, Verrochio practiced his Catalan by ordering two cafe’s amb llet and a selection of pastries, and settled down for what was probably going to be a long wait.

Once their coffees and food had been served, Perini nodded to his companion. “You go first.”

Verrochio walked through the café to the toilet, carrying the briefcase, and returned in about five minutes. Ten minutes or so later, Perini did exactly the same thing.

Anyone looking closely may have noticed that the briefcase appeared to be lighter once Perini sat down again at the table. This was because it was now almost empty, containing only forty-odd rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition. The two Glock pistols and loaded spare magazines were tucked in the shoulder holsters the two men were now wearing under their light jackets.

“This could be a complete waste of time, you know,” Verrochio said, his eyes invisible behind his designer shades. “They might never turn up.”

“On the other hand, they might arrive in the next ten minutes, so look sharp,” Perini replied.

But after an hour, the strain of watching, with nothing to show for it, was beginning to tell on both of them.

“I’ll read for an hour while you watch, then we’ll change over, OK?” Perini said.

“And let’s grab another drink next time that waiter comes by.”

“Sounds good to me,” Verrochio replied, and shifted his chair slightly to ensure he had an unobstructed view of the museum entrance.

II

Getting to the museum wasn’t easy. It was the first time Bronson had been to the city, and, once they’d left the main roads, they got lost in the maze of one-way streets.

“This is it,” Angela said finally, looking up from her map to check the street signs as Bronson swung the Nissan around a corner. “This is the Carrer de Valencia.”

“At last,” Bronson muttered. “Now, if we can just find somewhere to park the bloody car . . .”

They found a space in one of the multistory parking garages near the museum and walked across the road toward the small gray-white building. It didn’t look much like a museum to Bronson, who had a mental picture of stone steps and marble columns. Instead, the building was only about the width of a house, and in fact didn’t look unlike a large townhouse. Above the central double doors were three floors of windows, fronted by balconies with metal railings.

“Not very big, is it?” Bronson remarked.

“It’s not meant to be. It’s a small, specialist unit, not a huge place like the Victoria and Albert, or the Imperial War Museum.”

Inside, they paid the six-euro admission charge. Angela walked over to the reception desk and smiled at the middle-aged woman sitting behind it.

“Do you speak English?” she asked.

“Of course,” the receptionist replied. “How can I help you?”

“We’d like to see Professor Puente. My name is Angela Lewis and I’m a former colleague of his. Is he in the building?”

“I think so. Just a moment.” She dialed a number and held a short conversation in high-speed Spanish. “He remembers you,” she said with a smile, as she replaced the receiver. “He’s working upstairs in the Dioses de Egipto room, on the first floor, if you’d like to go straight up.”

“Thanks,” Angela said, and led the way toward the staircase.

Almost as soon as they reached the first floor, a short, dark-haired swarthy man trotted toward them, his arms held wide in a gesture of welcome.

“Angela!” he called, and wrapped himself around her. “You’ve come back to me, my little English flower!”

“Hello, Josep,” Angela said, smiling while disentangling herself from his grasp.

Puente stepped back and held out a hand toward Bronson, his movements quick and bird-like. “Forgive me,” he said, with a barely distinguishable accent, “but I still miss Angela. I’m Josep Puente.”

“Chris Bronson.”

“Ah.” Puente stepped back, his eyes flicking from one to the other. “But I understood that you two were . . .”

“You’re right,” Angela said, sighing and looking at Bronson. “We were married, then we got divorced and I’ve frankly no idea what we are now. But we need your help.”

“And might that be because of what you’re carrying in that black bag, Chris?”

Puente asked.

“How do you know that?” Bronson demanded, astonishment in his face.

“It’s not difficult to work out. Most people don’t carry overnight bags when they tour a museum. I’ve noticed you’ve not let go of the bag, and you’ve been very careful not to knock it against anything. So, there’s probably something inside that’s fragile, and possibly valuable, that you need an opinion about. What have you brought for me to look at?”

Angela’s face clouded briefly. “I’m not sure. We need to explain the sequence of events to you before we show you what’s in the bag. Could we go to your office or somewhere private?”

“My office hasn’t got any bigger since the last time you were here, my dear. I’ve a better idea. Come down to the basement. There’s plenty of room in the library.”

Angela remembered that the basement of the Museu Egipti housed a private library created by the museum’s founder, Jordi Clos. She told Chris about it as they walked through the modern, open-plan public rooms where white, square-section pillars and stainless-steel handrails contrasted with the classic, timeless beauty of the three-thousand-year-old exhibits.

Puente led the way down the stairs, past the “Privat” signs and into the library.

“Now,” he said, when they were seated, “tell me all about it.”

“Chris has been involved in this from the start, so it’s probably better if he explains what’s happened.”

Bronson nodded, and started at the beginning, telling the Spaniard how Jackie Hampton had died in mysterious circumstances at the house outside Ponticelli, his trip to Italy with Mark and what had happened while they were there, and subsequent events in Britain.

“The crux of this whole saga,” he said, “appears to be the two inscribed stones. Until the Hamptons’ builders uncovered the Latin inscription—”

“ ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant,’ ” Angela interjected.

“ ‘Here lie the liars,’ ” Puente translated immediately.

“Exactly,” Bronson continued. “Until the builders knocked the plaster off the wall above their fireplace, nobody was interested in the house or what it contained. But as soon as Jackie started searching the Internet for a translation of that phrase, well . . .

you know the rest.” He still didn’t like to think about how she and Mark had died.

He explained how Angela had worked out the meaning of the second, Occitan, inscription, how they’d recovered the skyphos and the scroll from below the floorboards.

“And you’ve brought that for me to look at?” Puente asked eagerly.

Bronson shook his head and described how the scroll had been taken from them by the two Italians, and that the leader of the pair had claimed it dated from the first century A.D. and contained a secret that the Church wanted to keep hidden.

“So if you haven’t got the scroll, what have you got?” Puente asked.

“We’re not quite there yet,” Bronson said. He told Puente how Angela had examined the skyphos and realized it was a reproduction, and guessed that the pattern on the side of the vessel was more than just an abstract decoration. Then he described their discovery of the ancient tomb up in the hills near Piglio, and what was inside it.

“Two bodies?” Puente interrupted.

“Yes,” Bronson replied. “We have the photographs that I took inside the tomb, which I can show you. I believe that one of the bodies was beheaded and the other crucified. Above the entrance to the cave the letters ‘HVL’ had been carved, which we assume meant ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ ”

Puente was lost in thought. “Why are you so sure that’s how they died?” he asked, finally.

“On the larger of the two skeletons, one of the neck vertebrae was cut in half. As a police officer, I know that the vertebrae are very strong, and I can’t think of any circumstances in which one of these bones could split like that after death.

Beheading is the only scenario that makes sense.”

“And the second body?”

“That was easy. The two heel bones were still pinned together by the remains of a thick nail, and there were traces of rusted metal in both wrists.”

Puente looked shocked. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve got the pictures to prove it,” Bronson reminded him, “and we could certainly find the tomb again—assuming that the Italians haven’t blown it up.”

“And you’ve still got the items that you retrieved from the cave?” Puente asked, a distinct tremor in his voice.

“There are two diptychs and a scroll,” Angela said, as Bronson opened the leather case and began to unwrap the bundle that held the relics. “The diptychs are sealed, but I’ve looked at the scroll. That’s the reason we brought them to you. I can’t quite believe what I read.”

Bronson placed the final part of the bundle on the desk and carefully unrolled it while Puente pulled on a pair of thin white cotton gloves. The moment the relics were revealed, he drew in his breath sharply.

“Dear God,” he muttered, “these are in excellent condition, the best I’ve ever seen.”

He placed a large sheet of cartridge paper on the table and arranged a couple of desk lights on either side of it. He picked up one of the diptychs and placed it reverently in the middle of the paper, then bent over it with an illuminated magnifier.

“I thought that might be Nero’s imperial seal,” Angela suggested, and Puente nodded.

“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “It is. And that makes this very rare and extremely valuable.” He looked up at Angela. “You’ve no idea of the contents?”

“No. I only looked at the scroll.”

“Very well. Some of the linum has disintegrated, so I can remove the sections of thread without damaging the seal.”

“This is quite urgent, Professor,” Bronson interjected.

“You must appreciate that proper examination of relics like these will take months or even years,” Puente said, “but I can certainly run some very quick visual checks.”

He unlocked a climate-controlled safe behind the table and took out three boxes containing scrolls and diptychs, and another two holding just fragments of papyrus.

Then he placed the scroll and the second diptych on the cartridge paper, selected four diptychs and a couple of scrolls from the boxes and placed those on the paper as well.

“Comparative paleography is a very complex and meticulous science,” he said, “but a quick comparison with these extant and dated relics might help indicate a likely period.”

Five minutes later he looked up. “This scroll is very early, probably first century A.D., and the diptychs look as if they’re from about the same period. I’ll know better when I’ve opened them, and I’ll also be able to tell you what the contents are.”

He walked over to a cupboard and returned to the table carrying a camera. He took several photographs of the first diptych, then carefully removed the securing thread, placing the lengths beside the object. Then slowly, and with meticulous care, he opened the diptych. Before doing anything else, he photographed it.

Bronson leaned forward to stare at the relic but the result was disappointing. The two wax-covered surfaces looked like muddy-brown layers of paint, covered in faint scribbling.

But Puente’s face lit up as he eagerly scanned the object.

“What is it?” Angela asked.

The Spaniard glanced up at her, then resumed his scrutiny of the diptych. “As I said, it may be years before we’re certain of their age and authenticity, but to me this appears to be a genuine first-century relic. It looks like a codex accepti et expensi.

That,” he went on, glancing at Bronson, “was what the Romans called their records of payments and expenses. A kind of receipt book,” he added.

“Is that all?” Bronson asked, feeling a stab of disappointment.

Puente shook his head, his eyes bright with excitement. “A receipt book makes for pretty dull reading, usually,” he said, “but this one’s rather different. It appears to be a list of payments—quite substantial payments, in fact—made by the Emperor Nero himself to two men over a period of several years. The recipients aren’t named, but they have signed their initials against each amount. The initials they’ve used are

‘SBJ’ and ‘SQVET.’ Do they mean anything to you?”

Bronson shook his head, but Angela nodded, her face pale. “That’s what I wanted to ask you about. I think ‘SBJ’ was ‘Simon ben Jonah’ and ‘SQVET’ was ‘Saul quisnam venit ex Tarsus,’ or ‘Saul who came from Tarsus.’ ”

“Who’s rather better known to us today,” Puente remarked, “as St. Paul.”

“Hang on,” Bronson interrupted. “That Italian told us the scroll we found in the skyphos was written by someone who signed himself ‘SQVET.’ Are you saying that was St. Paul?”

“I . . . I think so,” Angela replied, her face pale.

“So who’s ‘Simon ben Jonah’?”

“Well,” she said, almost reluctantly, “it could be St. Peter.” She turned to Puente. “Is it genuine?”

“It’s difficult to say for certain,” Puente replied. Bronson noticed his hands were shaking. “All three of these relics could be fakes. Very early, and very good, first-century fakes, but fakes nevertheless. But if they are genuine, they could relate directly to the bodies in the tomb.”

“How?” Bronson asked.

“You found two bodies,” Puente stated, “one beheaded, and the other crucified. The very early history of Christianity is incomplete and often contradictory, and little is known about the fate of some of the early saints. However, St. Peter is believed to have been martyred in Rome by Nero in about A.D. sixty-three. The date’s uncertain, but the manner of his death is believed to have been by crucifixion—upside-down, apparently—as he didn’t feel worthy enough to occupy the same position on the cross as Jesus.”

“But even I know that the bones of St. Peter have been found in Rome,” Bronson interrupted.

Puente smiled briefly. “What people know is often very different from the truth. But you’re quite right. The remains of St. Peter have been found in Rome—at least twice, in fact.

“In 1950 the Vatican announced that bones had been found in a crypt underneath the high altar of the Basilica of St. Peter, and conclusively identified them as those of the saint. But pathologists later identified the remains as parts of the skeletons of two different men, one much younger than the other, the bones of a woman plus bones belonging to a pig, a chicken and a horse.

“You might think, after such an embarrassing fiasco, that the Vatican would be more cautious about making such claims, but a few years later yet another group of bones was found in more or less the same area. These, too, were confidently proclaimed by the Vatican to be the mortal remains of this apostle. Another one of his tombs has been found in Jerusalem.

“The point is that nobody knows much about St. Peter, mainly because he only appears within the pages of the New Testament, and no contemporary writings mention him at all. Despite that, he’s generally regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as the first pope. He was the son of a man named John or Jonah, hence his biblical name of Simon ben Jonah or Simon bar Jonah, but he was also known as Peter, Simon, Simon Peter, Simeon, Cephas, Kepha and, sometimes, as ‘the fisherman’ or the ‘fisher of men.’ ”

Puente looked at Angela and Chris steadily. “No one actually knows if St. Peter ever lived. And if he did, nobody knows where his body was buried, or whether his remains have survived.”

He spread his hands. “Until today, that is.”

27

I

In the café down the street, Verrochio nudged his companion and pointed as Gregori Mandino and Rogan got out of a car on the north side of the Carrer de Valencia.

“And about time, too,” Perini said. He stood up, tossed a ten-euro note onto the table to cover the cost of their last few drinks, and walked away from the café.

“Well?” Mandino demanded, as Perini stopped beside him.

“They’re both inside the museum,” Perini replied. “They arrived about three-quarters of an hour ago. Bronson was carrying a black leather case.”

The four men crossed the road and entered the museum together.

“So what you and Angela are saying is that we found the last resting place of St.

Peter, and that one of the skeletons—the one that had been crucified—was his. Is that correct?”

Puente shook his head helplessly at Bronson’s question. “I’m a Catholic,” he said,

“and I’ve always accepted the teachings of the Church. I know there’s been confusion about the bones they found in Rome, but I’ve always assumed that the apostle’s remains—if they still exist—would be found somewhere in the city.” He looked down at the diptych, then up again at Bronson. “Now, I’m not so sure.”

“So is that the secret—the lie?” Bronson asked. “Is that what the Italian meant? That St. Peter’s bones were not buried somewhere in Rome?”

“No,” Puente said decisively. “Neither the existence nor the location of the bones would make any real difference to the Church. He must have been talking about something else.”

“What about the second body?” Bronson demanded. “You’re not going to tell me that was St. Paul?”

“It’s at least possible. Again, it’s not known exactly when he died, but it’s almost certain he was executed on Nero’s orders in A.D. sixty-four or sixty-seven.”

“Paul was a Roman citizen,” Angela added, “and so he couldn’t have been crucified.

Beheading would be the obvious method of choice, and that does seem to fit with the bodies we found.”

“But why would Nero have been paying these two men money? And why would he then have had them both killed?”

“That,” Puente said, “is the nub of the matter. Perhaps the second diptych or the scroll will provide some answers.”

Tenderly, he closed the first diptych and placed it, together with the fragments of linum, in a cardboard box on the table. He reached for the second tablet and repeated the process of opening it, again taking photographs at every step.

“Now this,” he said, when the relic was open on the table in front of him, “is different. This appears to be a confidential order, issued by Nero himself, giving specific instructions to Saul of Tarsus—he was also sometimes known as ‘the Jew from Cilicia.’ It’s signed ‘SQVET,’ so presumably Paul accepted the assignment.”

Puente sat back in his chair and rubbed his face with his hands. “This is unbelievable,” he muttered.

“Take a look at the scroll, Josep,” Angela suggested quietly. “That’s what frightened me.”

Puente moved the diptych to one side, picked up the small scroll and carefully unraveled it. He moved the magnifier over the text to begin translating the characters.

When he finished, he looked up at Angela, his face as pale as hers. “What do you think this means?” he asked.

“I only read the first few lines, but it referred to the ‘Tomb of Christianity,’ which held the bones of ‘the convert’ and ‘the fisherman.’ ”

Puente nodded. “This scroll,” he said, “was apparently written by a Roman named Marcus Asinius Marcellus.”

“We worked out that he was acting as Nero’s agent in some secret operation,”

Bronson said.

“Exactly,” Puente replied. “From what I’ve read here, it looks to me as if he was pressured into acting by the Emperor—”

“That makes sense,” Bronson interrupted. “We think Nero saved him from execution when he was involved in a plot to forge a will.”

“Well, according to the scroll,” Puente said, in a voice that was far from steady, “the author states explicitly that Christianity was a sham, nothing more than a cult started by Nero to serve his own purposes, and based on a handful of lies, and that these two men—the men we now know as St. Peter and St. Paul—were in the pay of the Romans.”

II

“Check the whole building,” Mandino instructed Rogan. “Start with the roof terrace and work your way down. I’ll stay on the ground floor in case they’re somewhere here. When you see Bronson and Lewis, leave Perini and Verrochio to cover them, and come and fetch me.”

“Understood.”

Rogan led the way up to the deserted roof terrace and worked his way back down, checking each level carefully.

“No sign of them, capo, ” he reported, when he returned to the ground floor. “Could they have slipped away somehow?”

“Not through the front entrance,” Perini answered. “We were both watching it carefully. They definitely didn’t come out again.”

“There’s a basement with a private library,” Mandino told them, checking a museum information leaflet. “They must be down there. Let’s go.”

It was almost closing time as Mandino led the way toward the basement entrance.

As they approached, a guard came over to them, raising his hand to stop them.

“Take him, Perini,” Mandino murmured, as the man walked toward them, “but do it quietly, then lock the doors. We don’t want any interruptions.”

Perini drew his pistol and jammed it into the man’s stomach.

“Verrochio,” Mandino said, turning away, “take the receptionist. Rogan, secure the shop.”

Under the silent pressure of Perini’s Glock, the guard walked over to the main doors, which he closed and locked. Verrochio escorted the receptionist over to the museum shop, the sight of his pistol ensuring her silent cooperation. Two late visitors and the shop assistant stood quaking at the far end of the shop, their arms in the air, while Rogan covered the three of them. Perini produced a handful of plastic cable ties and handed them to Verrochio, who expertly tied up all five people, making them sit on the floor and lashing their hands behind their backs and tying their ankles together.

“There’s hardly any money in the till,” the assistant said, her voice quavering.

“We’re not interested in the takings,” Perini told her. “Keep quiet—that means no shouting for help—and you won’t be harmed. If any of you yell out, I’ll shoot. And I don’t care who gets hurt. Do you understand?”

All five nodded vigorously.

Josep Puente had always taken pride in his faith. He was a Roman Catholic, born and raised. He attended mass every Sunday. But what he’d read that afternoon in the two diptychs and the scroll had turned his world upside down. And he really didn’t know what he should do about it. He did know that the three objects—whether elaborate and convincing forgeries or genuine relics—were probably the most important ancient documents that he, or anyone else, would ever see.

When they heard the sound of approaching footsteps, none of them paid much attention. Then a man stepped through the doorway, flanked by three others, each holding a pistol.

“So, Lewis, we meet again,” Mandino said, his voice cutting through the silence.

“And where’s Bronson?”

For several seconds nobody said a word. Angela and Puente were sitting on opposite sides of the library table, the scroll and the diptychs in front of them.

Bronson was out of sight, walking between the library shelves. The moment he heard Mandino speak, he drew the Browning pistol and crept back toward the center of the room.

He risked a quick glance around a freestanding bookcase to check exactly where the intruders were, then took four rapid strides across the room. Two of the gunmen saw him, but before they could react he’d cocked the Browning—the metallic sound unnaturally loud in the tomb-like silence—seized the back of Mandino’s collar with his left hand and placed the barrel of the pistol firmly against his head. Bronson pulled the man backward, away from his armed companions, the pistol never wavering.

“It’s time,” Bronson said, “to find out what the hell’s going on, starting with why you’re here, Mandino.”

He felt the man give a start of surprise.

“Yes, I know exactly who you are,” Bronson said. “Tell your men to lower their weapons, otherwise the Rome family of the Cosa Nostra is going to be looking for a new capofamiglia. ”

“The bodyguard, I suppose?” Mandino’s voice was surprisingly calm. “Put your weapons away,” he told his men, then turned his head slightly toward Bronson. “I’ll tell you what I know, but it will take some time.”

“I’m not in any particular hurry,” Bronson said. “Angela, can you bring a couple of chairs over here? Put one behind the other, back to back.”

Bronson pushed Mandino onto the front chair, and he sat down on the one behind, resting the muzzle of the Hi-Power on the chair back, so that it was just touching his captive’s neck. Rogan and the other two men took seats between Mandino and the table where Angela and Puente were sitting.

“This story started,” Mandino said, “in first-century Rome, but the Vatican’s involvement only began in the seventh century. I’m nothing to do with the Church, but my organization—the Cosa Nostra—was contracted to resolve this problem on its behalf. The Mafia and the Vatican are two of the longest-lived organizations in Italy, and we’ve had a mutually beneficial relationship for years.”

“Why don’t I find that surprising?” Bronson murmured.

“In the first century A.D., the Romans had been fighting the Jews for decades, and the constant military campaigns were weakening the empire. Rather than initiate a massive military response, Emperor Nero decided to create a new religion, based on one of the dozens of messiahs who were then wandering about the Middle East. He chose a Roman citizen called Saul of Tarsus as his paid agent. Together they decided that a minor prophet and self-proclaimed messiah named Jesus, who had died in obscurity somewhere in Europe a few years earlier after attracting a small following in Judea, was ideal. Nero and Saul concocted a plan that would allow Saul to hijack the fledgling religion for his own purposes.

“Saul would first achieve a reputation as a persecutor of Christians, as the followers of Jesus were becoming known, and then undergo a spiritual ‘revelation’ that would turn him from persecutor into apostle. This would allow Saul to insinuate himself into a position of power and leadership, and he would then direct the followers—mainly Jews, of course—into a path of peaceful cooperation with the Roman occupying forces. He would tell them to ‘turn the other cheek,’ ‘render unto Caesar’

and so on.

“In order to achieve this fairly quickly, Saul needed to ‘talk up’ Jesus into far more than he ever was in real life. He decided that the obvious option was to portray him as the son of God. He concocted a variety of stories about him, starting with the virgin birth and finishing with him rising from the dead, and proclaimed these to be the absolute truth.

“To help him spread the word, he recruited a man named Simon ben Jonah—a weak and gullible man—who had known Jesus personally, but had regarded him as nothing more than just another prophet. Simon—who later became much better known as St. Peter—also entered Nero’s employment, but toward the end of his life he began to believe his own stories. A third man—Joseph, son of Matthias, better known as Flavius Josephus—later joined them, but as far as we know he was a true believer. All three men preached Saul’s version of events, attempting to recruit Jews who, because of their teachings as Jesus’s ‘disciples,’ had become peace-loving people who no longer wished to fight the Romans.”

“Are you seriously trying to tell us that Nero founded Christianity as nothing more than a device to keep the Jews quiet?” Angela whispered.

“That’s precisely what I’m telling you. In the seventh century A.D., Pope Vitalian found a draft of a speech Nero never gave to the Roman Senate. It explained in detail exactly how Christianity began, and that it was an idea suggested by Nero himself.

Pope Vitalian was appalled at what he read and began what would be a lifelong search for any other documents that might support or—hopefully—repudiate this horrific claim.”

“And he found something,” Bronson suggested.

“Exactly. In a bundle of uncataloged ancient texts he found a scroll that turned out to be a copy of what Vatican insiders began calling the Exomologesis. The name Vitalian gave to this document was the Exomologesis de assectator mendax, which translates as

‘The confession of sin by the false disciple.’ It was an admission that Nero’s statements were true, and was handwritten by Saul.”

“Dear God. So what did Vitalian do?” Angela asked.

“Precisely what the Church has been doing ever since: he hid the evidence. He prepared a document—now known as the Vitalian Codex—that explained what he’d discovered, and included the copy of the Exomologesis. The Codex also included one other piece of information derived from Nero’s draft speech: it stated that the bodies of Saul and Simon ben Jonah had been buried in a secret location after their respective executions, a location that Vitalian referred to as the ‘Tomb of Christianity.’ He left instructions that each new pope, as well as a handful of carefully selected senior Vatican officials, was to be shown the Codex.

“But the Exomologesis that Vitalian had found was obviously a copy, specifically prepared for Nero, and there was a short note on it to that effect. The Pope ransacked the Vatican archives and every other document source that he had access to, but could find no trace whatsoever of the original scroll. A search was started for the relic, and the quest has been running ever since. Vitalian also instructed that the Exomologesis was to be destroyed as soon as it had been found, for the eternal good of the Church.

“Ever since the seventh century, each new pope has been initiated into the secret of the Exomologesis within the first four weeks of his papacy, but only once has any pope made a pronouncement about it, such was its power. In the early sixteenth century, Leo X, a Medici whose papacy ran from 1513 to 1521, made the somewhat enigmatic statement ‘It has served us well, this myth of Christ.’ That one sentence has been the subject of speculation for the last five hundred years.

“The Vitalian Codex is held in the Apostolic Penitentiary—the most secure document repository in the whole of the Vatican—in a safe in a locked room inside another locked room. The official responsible for the document is the Prefect of the dicastery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He has custody of the relic, and normally only a handful of carefully selected senior cardinals from that Congregation are even aware of its existence.”

“What did they think happened to the original scroll?” Bronson asked.

“Senior Vatican officials believe that the Exomologesis, and the stone that Marcellus had carved, disappeared during the chaos following Nero’s expulsion from Rome, and passed through unknown hands before eventually being acquired by the Cathars. The scroll and the stone subsequently became the principal and most important items in the so-called Cathar ‘treasure’ spirited out of Montse’gur in 1244

during the Albigensian Crusade. And from that date until an English couple named Hampton began to restore a house they’d bought in Italy, both the scroll and the stone simply vanished.”

Bronson took a deep breath. So this was why the woman he loved and his best friend had both died. The story had the unmistakable ring of truth, and provided cogent answers to almost all their questions. But there was one obvious matter that Mandino had glossed over.

“How did you know about the tomb up in the hills?”

“There was a postscript on the original Exomologesis, the scroll that had been hidden in the skyphos. It stated that two diptychs—relics that would prove what the Exomologesis stated—and another scroll had been buried with the two bodies. It also stated that the location of the tomb could be deduced from the ‘stone Marcellus created.’ That was why the Cathars guarded the stone so zealously, even though they had no idea how to decipher the diagram on it. All I had to do then was follow your trail, Bronson.”

“But how do you know all this,” Angela asked, “if you’re not a member of the Vatican?”

“I was extensively briefed on the history of the quest by the last Prefect of the dicastery of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” Mandino replied.

“But why would a senior cardinal and member of the Roman Curia reveal all this information to someone outside the inner circle of the Vatican? And especially to a member of the Mafia?”

“Simply because they needed my help to find the Exomologesis, and I refused to give it until I knew exactly what the situation was.”

Silence fell in the library for a minute or so as Angela, Bronson and Puente digested what they’d heard.

“Let’s be clear about this,” Bronson said at last. “What we’re involved in here goes a long way beyond a mere matter of lost relics. Those three items on the table over there have the ability to topple the very foundations from under the Roman Catholic Church. If they’re genuine, Christians all around the world could wake up one morning to find that their faith has been callously betrayed by the Vatican for nearly fifteen hundred years. Even if it could be proved that they’re fakes, there would always be doubts and conspiracy theories about them, just like those surrounding the Turin Shroud. So the question is: what should we do with them?”

“My instructions are quite clear,” Mandino replied. “I’m an atheist, but even I can see the incalculable damage that would be done to the Catholic Church and every other Christian religion if knowledge of their contents leaked out. For the sake of countless millions of believers around the world, these relics are simply too dangerous to be allowed to survive. They must be destroyed.”

Bronson glanced around the room. Surprisingly, Puente nodded agreement, and even Angela looked undecided.

Suddenly Perini lunged across the room and grabbed Angela by the arm, spinning her around so that her body was between him and Bronson. In a fluid movement he drew his Glock and pressed it into the side of her neck, almost exactly mirroring Bronson’s position behind Mandino.

Puente stepped forward and raised his arms in a calming gesture.

“Please, everyone, please,” he said. “There’s no need for bloodshed. No scroll or diptych, no matter how old or what text it contains, is worth a single human life.”

He stepped back to the table, picked up the scroll and the diptychs and held them above his head.

“We all now know exactly what these documents purport to be, and the destructive power of the information they contain,” he continued. “I know the circumstances are far from normal, but can we please take a vote? What should we do with them?

Angela?”

Perini jabbed her sharply with the pistol, and she answered hesitantly. “We should preserve them. Whether they’re genuine documents or forgeries commissioned by Nero, they’re relics of immense importance.”

Puente nodded. “Chris?”

Bronson thought of Jackie, lying dead on the stone-flagged hall. Of Mark murdered in his apartment. And of Jeremy Goldman dying of terrible injuries in some London street. They had all died to preserve these relics. “We should keep them,” he said,

“obviously.”

Puente looked down at Mandino. “We already know your views,” he said, and turned toward Rogan. “What do you think?”

“We destroy them,” Rogan said. “Verrochio?”

The man standing beside him nodded. “Burn them.”

“That’s three to two who’ve voted to destroy them,” Puente said. “You, sir.” He turned to Perini, who was still using Angela as a human shield. “What’s your decision?”

“Destroy them.”

“I’m very much afraid,” Puente said, “that I agree with the majority. We must think of the greatest good of the greatest number.” He looked around the room. “It grieves me even to contemplate destroying objects so ancient, and so important, but in these unique circumstances I can genuinely see no other option. Mr. Mandino, if these three relics cease to exist, will that mark the end of your interest in this matter?”

“Yes. My instructions are to ensure they’re destroyed.”

“And if that is done, what will happen to those of us who’ve seen the relics, and who know what they contain?”

“Nothing, I give you my word. Without the objects, there’s no proof of their contents,” Mandino said.

Puente nodded. He seemed, Bronson noted, to have comprehensively taken control of the situation.

Puente stepped behind his desk and removed the data card from the camera he’d used. “All the pictures on this card are of these objects,” he said. Taking a large pair of scissors, he cut it into four pieces. “Now I’ll destroy the relics themselves. I’ll do it right now, with all of you as witnesses, willing or not.”

Puente pointed across the library at the side wall near the entrance door, and every eye followed his gesture. “That red box controls the smoke detectors and the fire alarm,” he said. “Before I can burn these, somebody has to switch off the system, otherwise the sprinklers will cut in.”

“I’ll do it,” Rogan said. He walked across to the box and flicked a couple of switches.

“Papyrus burns very well,” Puente said, sorrow evident in his voice, “so this won’t take long.”

He placed a square steel plate on his desk, then picked up the scroll. He produced a cigarette lighter and held the flame to one end of it. Within a matter of seconds the tinder-dry papyrus was being consumed, and soon there was nothing left but a pile of ash. Puente opened the first of the diptychs and held the flame of the lighter against the inscribed wax until it dripped and melted onto the steel. The wood failed to catch, so he took a small hammer and with a few blows reduced it to dust and splinters. Then he repeated the process with the second diptych.

“That’s it,” he said, with a halfhearted attempt at a smile. “The world of organized religion is safe for all eternity.”

For a moment or two nobody moved, as if the enormity of Puente’s actions had turned them all to stone. Then suddenly Perini pushed Angela to one side, lifted his pistol and shot Rogan through the heart. Then he swung the weapon around and fired a second bullet straight into Mandino’s chest.

28

I

“No!” Angela screamed, as Bronson instinctively dived to one side.

Mandino staggered backward and fell to the ground in a lifeless heap. When Bronson looked up, both Perini and Verrochio were aiming their pistols straight at him. He had no option but to drop the Browning.

Perini stepped forward and picked up the weapon, then he and Verrochio holstered their Glocks.

“What the hell’s going on?” Bronson demanded.

“We were told to carry out a cleanup operation,” Perini said. “Just in case you didn’t know, Rogan”—he pointed at the body on the floor—“was responsible for killing your friends, and the capo”—he gestured at the other corpse—“gave the orders.”

“But the scroll and the diptychs have been destroyed. Why did you have to kill them?” Angela asked.

“We had orders from Rome to tie up all the loose ends. Be grateful that you’re still alive. Despite what he told you, Mandino intended to kill all three of you, and probably the handful of people in the shop as well.”

“What are you going to do with us?” Angela asked. “We’ve read what was written on the scroll and in the diptychs.”

“It doesn’t matter what you read or what you know,” Perini said dismissively.

“Without the relics, nobody will believe you, and the only evidence left is that.” He pointed at the desk and the sad pile of wood splinters and ash that was all that remained of the scroll and diptychs. “You won’t see us again,” he said, then he and Verrochio turned and walked away.

For several seconds nobody spoke, then Josep Puente stepped forward and put his arms around Angela.

“It’s probably for the best,” he said. “I’m so sorry, but if I hadn’t destroyed the relics, we might all be dead by now. Come on, let’s go upstairs so I can call the Guardia Civil.”

While Puente used the telephone at the reception desk, Bronson went into the museum shop and released the staff and the two visitors, explaining that they’d have to wait in the building until the Guardia Civil had questioned them.

Four hours later, and well past midnight, Angela and Bronson were free to go.

Puente’s testimony and that of the other museum staff had cleared them of any involvement in the killings except as witnesses. Bronson would still have to satisfy the British police about the death of Mark Hampton, but the senior Guardia Civil officer had been able to confirm that he was now only wanted for questioning by the Metropolitan Police, and was no longer considered a suspect.

“Will they catch those two men, do you think?” Angela asked, as they headed toward the parking lot.

“Not a chance,” Bronson said. “They would have had an escape route planned in advance, because those two killings were obviously premeditated.”

“Those men were all in the Mafia, so we’re lucky to be alive. You heard what Mandino and that assassin said.”

“Not necessarily. One of the few good things about the Mafia is that the organization has certain standards, and they don’t normally kill innocent bystanders. If you’re in their way, it’s a different matter. I think those two men had very specific orders to ensure that the relics were found and destroyed, and that Mandino and, presumably, his number two were to die. In fact, I think what we witnessed tonight was a coup d’e’tat in the Rome Cosa Nostra. If Mandino was the capo, there’s been a power shift, and another Mafioso has now taken over as the head.”

“Do you believe what that man said about Mark and Jackie? About who killed them?”

“I’ve no reason to doubt it,” Bronson replied, “and I’d have been quite happy to pull the trigger on Rogan and Mandino myself. We’ve had a hell of a time these last few days,” he added, his voice now low and bitter, “and all for nothing. Three people we knew are dead, and the relics we managed to recover have been destroyed, the secret they held now lost for all time. And the Catholic Church will just continue to preach its lies from pulpits around the world every Sunday as if they were literally the gospel truth.”

“I wouldn’t argue with any of that. But the important thing is that we’re still alive. I don’t see how we’d have got out of that basement if Josep hadn’t done what he did.”

“I know,” Bronson said, “but it still rankles with me.”

He fell silent, then somewhat hesitantly took her hand as they walked down the street. “I still can’t quite believe Mark and Jackie have gone.” His voice had softened as he thought again about his friends.

“Yes,” Angela replied. “And Jeremy Goldman too—I really enjoyed working with him. Their lives are over, and I suppose you could say that a chapter of our lives has ended at the same time.”

II

In the Museu Egipti, Puente was tidying the basement library. The bloodstains on the floor would need industrial cleaning equipment and, probably, special solvents, but they weren’t his concern. He was only interested in the relics sitting on his desk.

One by one, he carefully replaced the scrolls he’d removed from the special safe. The last one wouldn’t fit properly in the recess in the box, just as he had expected: it was a little too big. He would have to get a special container made for it as soon as possible. For the moment, he hunted around until he found a small cardboard box, filled it with cotton wool and carefully placed the scroll inside. Then he took a felt-tip pen and wrote “LEWIS” on the end of the box.

As he closed the safe he marveled again that none of the people in the room had thought to confirm that the scroll and diptychs he’d destroyed were the same ones that Angela had given him. Everyone had been focused on the guns, and on his deliberate piece of misdirection with the sprinkler system controls, and nobody had been really watching his hands.

It was a shame that he’d had to burn one of the museum’s prized possessions, but the early-second-century text was utterly insignificant compared to what he was now thinking of as the Lewis Scroll. He was disappointed that he’d had to destroy two of the museum’s few diptychs as well, but, in truth, they had been quite unremarkable, the writing on their wax surfaces almost completely illegible.

Not bad for an old man, Puente thought, chuckling to himself.

III

Bronson and Angela were heading out of Barcelona in the Nissan when Angela’s cell phone emitted a faint double-beep, indicating that a text message had been received.

She fished around in her handbag, pulled out the phone and looked at the screen.

“Who on earth’s texting you at this time of night?” Bronson asked.

“I don’t recognize the number—oh, it’s Josep. He’s probably just wishing us a safe journey.” She opened the message and stared at the screen. The text was short, and initially meant nothing at all to her.

“What does it say?”

“There are just two words. In Latin. ‘Rei habeo.’ ”

“Which means?” Bronson prompted.

“The rough translation would be ‘I have them,’ I suppose. What can he mean by that?”

Then the penny dropped, and Angela smiled to herself. Then she laughed out loud.

“I don’t know how he did it,” she said, “but Josep must have switched the relics we found for a scroll and a couple of diptychs from the museum’s collection.”

“You mean he destroyed three different relics?”

“Exactly.”

“Brilliant,” Bronson said. “Just sheer brilliance. I think that the pope and the Vatican—the whole of the Christian world, in fact—are going to go into massive shock when the professor publishes his research.”

Angela laughed again. “So we did manage it after all. We decoded the clues and found the relics, and those bastards working for the Vatican didn’t destroy them.”

“Yes, that’s a real result.” Bronson glanced appraisingly at Angela’s profile, shadowy in the darkness of the car. “Would you do it again?” he asked.

She turned and looked directly at him. “I don’t see relic-hunting as a viable career, somehow. Was that what you meant?”

“Not exactly. I was thinking more about us spending a bit of time together. We didn’t get on too badly, did we?”

Angela was silent for a few moments. “No promises, no commitment. Let’s see how things work out.”

They were both smiling as Bronson turned onto the autovia and headed north toward the snowcapped Pyrenees, the jagged peaks coldly illuminated by the full moon overhead.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book is, of course, a novel and to the best of my knowledge no documents resembling either the Vitalian Codex or the Exomologesis exist, or have ever existed, though without doubt there are numerous dark secrets lurking within the Vatican Library’s 75,000 manuscripts and the estimated 150,000 items now held in the Secret Archives.

However, the central idea of this book is founded on fact because, despite my fiction, there is some historical evidence that St. Paul was an agent of Rome, employed by the Emperor Nero in precisely the manner I’ve suggested in this book. For more information about this, readers are directed to Joseph Atwill’s book, Caesar’s Messiah.

The hypothesis is that Paul and Titus Flavius Josephus—a first-century Jewish historian—were employed by Rome to foster a peaceful messianic religion in Judea in an attempt to reduce the rebelliousness of the Jews and their opposition to Roman rule. If true, this suggests an interesting piece of lateral thinking on the part of the Roman emperors.

St. Paul

Unlike St. Peter, we are at least certain that the man who became known as St. Paul actually existed. Quite a lot is known about him, and some of his writings survive to this day.

His birth name was Saul and he was born in about A.D. 9 to a wealthy Jewish merchant in Tarsus in Cilicia. He was a member of the tribe of Benjamin, and was an Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Pharisee, one of the most ancient of the Jewish sects.

As a young man he was a violent opponent of Christ and was active in identifying those he saw as heretic Jews and delivering them for punishment.

Tradition holds that he was on his way to Damascus to continue his persecution of Jews when he was blinded by a light from heaven and underwent his celebrated conversion, after which he remained blind for some time. Once his sight was restored he became an ardent Christian. This apocryphal incident may have been inspired by ophthalmia neonatorum, a painful weakness of the eyes that left him almost blind in later life.

Whatever the reality of his “conversion” or motive in switching from persecutor of Christians to dedicated supporter of Jesus Christ, there are mixed views about his contribution to the Christian religion. One body of thought suggests that his views were so different from those of Jesus that his teachings are sometimes referred to as

“Pauline Christianity.”

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche viewed him as the anti-Christ, and the American Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “Paul was the first corrupter of the teachings of Jesus” and actually tried to have his writings removed from the Bible.

St. Peter

As the Spanish scholar Josep Puente states in the book, St. Peter is found only within the pages of the New Testament, and there’s no independent historical evidence to substantiate his existence. The two epistles ascribed to Peter were apparently written in sophisticated Greek and display such disparate characteristics that many commentators doubt they were written by the same person, and few serious researchers believe they could have been authored by a simple Aramaic-speaking fisherman. Despite all this, he’s considered by the Roman Catholic Church to have been its first pope.

The Bones of the Apostles

Both men apparently died at the hands of the Romans, and in Rome, though neither death can be substantiated historically. Peter is believed to have died on either 29

June or 13 October A.D. 64, and he was apparently crucified upside down, while Paul was allegedly beheaded in A.D. 64 or A.D. 67—as a Roman citizen he could not be executed by crucifixion.

As for the final resting place of the bones of the two saints, the Vatican has shown a certain amount of confusion on the subject. Two entirely separate sets of bones, both found under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, have been conclusively identified as those of St. Peter. The announcements were made in 1950 by Pope Pius XII and in 1968 by Paul VI.

The first set was inspected by an anthropologist in 1956 and found to contain five tibias—most human skeletons have a mere two, and at least one of those examined came from a woman—as well as pig, sheep, goat and chicken bones.

The 1968 bones, like the earlier set, included those of various domesticated animals, plus those of a mouse, as well as fragments of St. Peter’s skull. The skull fragments were something of an embarrassment, because what purported to be the apostle’s skull had rested in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome since about the ninth century.

Finally, to complicate the situation still further, in 1953 what appeared to be the skeleton of St. Peter was unearthed in Jerusalem on the site of a Franciscan monastery called “Dominus Flevit” on the Mount of Olives. The bones were in an ossuary inscribed, in Aramaic, “Simon Bar Jona” (Simon, son of Jona).

Bearing in mind that there’s no evidence St. Peter ever lived, such confusion over his remains is perhaps not surprising, and such “duplication” of relics is not uncommon in the Catholic Church—although there were only twelve apostles, the remains of some twenty-six are buried in Germany alone.

According to the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History, St. Paul’s bones were given by Pope Vitalian to Oswy, King of Britain, in A.D. 665. Given the Vatican’s reluctance to surrender relics of any sort, this seems a somewhat unlikely fate for the skeleton. What happened to the bones after that isn’t known.

The Cathars

Catharism was a dualist and Gnostic religion that possibly descended from the Byzantine Bogomils and, earlier, from Manichaeism. The Cathars believed that a benevolent god had created the human soul and the realm of spirit and light that lay beyond the earth. But an evil deity had then trapped the soul and forced it to suffer in the corrupt flesh of the human body: salvation lay only in death, when the soul could finally escape to the spiritual realm. Because they believed that the soul could also make this journey in the body of an animal, they were strict vegetarians.

They saw themselves as Christians, but rejected the Old Testament because they believed that the god who was described in it was the evil deity who had created the world to enslave the souls of mankind. They believed this god was actually the devil, and that the Catholic Church was therefore in the service of Satan.

Catharism was diametrically opposed to the medieval Catholic Church in almost every way, and the contrast between the two could hardly have been greater. Unlike the Catholic Church, the Cathars asked for nothing at all from their congregations except faith. In fact, they made material contributions to the society in which they lived. When a Cathar took the consolamentum vow and became one of the perfecti, he or she donated all their worldly goods to the community. They had no church buildings or property, and the movement rejected all the trappings of wealth and power. Unusually for the period, Cathars also treated women as equals, and ensured that the children in the community were properly educated. The obvious piety and essential goodness of the Cathar perfecti greatly appealed to the people of the Languedoc, and the heresy gained considerable power. That, predictably, was unacceptable to the Catholic Church, which could see its own power and influence in the area waning, and the inevitable result was the Albigensian Crusade.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Fall of

Montségur

The events that I’ve described as taking place during the Albigensian Crusade, such as the massacre at Béziers, the mutilation of the prisoners from Bram and the ending of the siege of Montségur, are historically accurate.

The defenders of the citadel did request a two-week truce to consider the surrender terms offered by the crusaders, only to then reject them on 15 March 1244. One possible reason for this strange request was that the Cathar defenders wanted to celebrate an important ritual on the previous day, 14 March, possibly the so-called manisola festival.

The day before this, 13 March, was the spring equinox, another important date for the religion, and some records suggest that this was the date when at least twenty—perhaps as many as twenty-six—non-Cathars opted to receive the consolamentum perfecti, which would condemn them to certain death some forty-eight hours later.

For obvious reasons it hasn’t been possible to establish as fact the story of the last four Cathars’ escape from the doomed fortress carrying the “Cathar treasure,” but there is considerable anecdotal evidence—some apparently deriving from records of later interrogations conducted by the Inquisition—that something like this event did actually occur.

The “Myth of Christ”

Finally, anyone who has ever properly researched the birth of Christianity must have wondered why no truly contemporary sources—apart from the books that now form the New Testament, which were anything but contemporary, being written between about A.D. 75 and A.D. 135—ever mention Jesus Christ.

In all, the Bible is a compilation of sixty-six books—thirty-nine in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New—that were written by some forty different individuals over a period of about 1,600 years.

It’s generally acknowledged that the first list of the present twenty-seven New Testament books appeared in a letter written in A.D. 367 by the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. In Carthage in A.D. 397, a council decreed that only the canonical writings—the “agreed” twenty-seven books—were allowed to be read in church as divine scriptures: they were literally to be accepted as the “gospel truth.”

That decree essentially marked the creation of the New Testament.

All those other documents—and there were hundreds of them, including the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, the Gospel of Mary, the Protovangelion of Jesus, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Nicodemus—that disagreed with this corpus of work were excluded and became known colloquially as “the banned books.” And it’s worth emphasizing that the selection was made on the basis of content, not authenticity or relevance, so the result was, by any standards, highly selective.

And even those books that were included are frequently at variance with each other, even the so-called “synoptic” gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew, which appear to derive from an earlier common source, possibly the so-called “Q Document,” now lost.

So, despite what is preached from pulpits in churches around the world every Sunday, the only evidence for the existence of the man upon whose shoulders rests the largest single religion in history lies within the pages of a single section of the Bible, a heavily edited, noncontemporary source. What this proves has been—and no doubt will remain—a source of worldwide debate by theologians and philosophers, believers and nonbelievers, for centuries to come.