The Last Gospel

20

J ack was struggling towards consciousness, and became aware of the vibration of the aircraft where he had been leaning against the window. Images had been cycling through his mind, flashbacks to their extraordinary discoveries of the past few days. The chi-rho symbol in the ancient shipwreck, the scratched name of St Paul. The shadowy head of Anubis, leering out of the tunnel like a demon, beckoning him into the lost chamber in Herculaneum. More dark places, the cave of the Sibyl, the underground labyrinth in Rome, the blue woaded skull under London, staring sightlessly up at him from her tomb. Images at once vivid yet opaque, disjointed yet somehow bound together, images that flashed up in his mind over and over again as if he were caught in a continuous loop. He felt like Aeneas in the underworld, yet without the Sibyl to guide him back, only some malign force that pulled him down as he struggled to find the light, trapping him in a dark maze of his own devising. He felt disturbed, discomfited, and it was a relief to open his eyes and see the reassuring figure of Costas slumped over in the seat opposite. He realized that the overbearing feeling in his head had been the increased air pressure as the aircraft descended, and he blew on his nose to equalize. The whine of the Embraer’s twin jets swept the images from his mind, and reality took over. He leaned forward and stared out of the window.

‘Bad dream?’ Jeremy slipped into the aisle seat beside him, and closed the dog-eared notebook he had been studying.

Jack grunted. ‘It’s as if the ingredients are there, but nothing’s cooking. This trip’s make or break. If we don’t get anywhere today, I’m out of options.’ He took a deep breath, calmed himself, then glanced curiously at Jeremy’s book. ‘Cryptography?’

‘One of my childhood passions. I collated all the German codes broken by the Allies during the First World War. I was just getting myself back up to speed. It was looking at some of those early Christian acrostics that did it. I’ve realized you can’t have too many skills in this game.’

‘It would appear,’ Jack said, scratching his stubble, ‘that you have the makings of an archaeologist. Maria was right. Maybe I should just give up now and hand it all over to you.’

‘Maybe in about twenty years,’ Jeremy replied thoughtfully, then grinned at Jack. ‘That should give me time for a stint in special forces, to learn everything about diving, weapons and helicopters, to overcome all fear, and, most importantly, to work out how to handle your esteemed colleague opposite.’

Costas moaned and snorted in his sleep, and Jack laughed. ‘No one handles him. He’s the boss around here.’

‘Trouble is, in twenty years’ time, all the world’s mysteries will have been solved.’

Jack shook his head. ‘The past is like the New World was to the first colonists. You think you’ve found it all, then you turn a corner and another El Dorado’s shimmering on the horizon. And look where we are today. Some of the greatest mysteries may always be there, half solved, constantly drawing you on.’

‘Sometimes that’s the best way,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘You remember the Viking sagas? The loose ends aren’t always tied up, virtue isn’t always rewarded. We don’t always want a conventional ending.’

‘And you won’t always get one, with me,’ Jack grinned. ‘Something else I’ve learned, the treasure you find is rarely what you think you’ve been looking for.’

‘There it is.’ The aircraft banked sharply to port, and Jeremy pointed to the coastline some ten thousand feet below. ‘I asked the pilot to take us into Los Angeles from the north, to give us a view of Malibu. It’s pretty spectacular.’

‘Beaches,’ Costas murmured. ‘Good surfing?’ He had been asleep for the entire trip from JFK in New York, and before that for most of the transatlantic haul from England. He looked as if he had just come out of hibernation, and leaned his forehead against the windowpane as he peered blearily down.

‘Not bad,’ Jeremy replied. ‘Not that I’d know, of course. When I was here, I was working on my dissertation.’

‘Right.’ Costas still sounded blocked up, but the worst of his cold seemed to have passed. ‘I’m looking forward to finding out what we’re doing here, Jeremy, but I’m not complaining.’

‘I told Jack the whole story while you were dead to the world. I found Everett in the California State Death Registers. Same date and place of birth, no doubt about the identity. He lived just north of here, in Santa Paula, arrived here after leaving England in 1912. On a hunch I called a friend in the Getty Villa. Turns out he can tell us more, a whole lot more. For a start, Everett was a devout Roman Catholic, a convert.’

‘Huh?’ Costas rubbed his eyes. ‘I thought this was all about the British Church, the Pelagian heresy.’

‘That’s what I hope this visit will sort out for us.’

‘So we’re not going surfing.’

‘The trail’s hotted up again, Costas,’ Jack said intently. ‘Jeremy’s made a real breakthrough.’

‘You can see it now,’ Jeremy said. ‘The Getty Villa. In the cleft in the hills down there, overlooking the sea.’

Jack peered at the cluster of buildings visible just in from the Coastal Highway. Suddenly it was if he was back at Herculaneum, staring at the plan of the Villa of the Papyri made by Karl Weber more than two centuries before. He could see the great peristyle courtyard, extending towards the sea, with the main mass of the villa structure nestled behind at the back of the valley.

‘The only big difference is the alignment,’ Jeremy said. ‘The villa at Herculaneum lies parallel to the seashore, with the courtyard and the main buildings abutting the seafront. Otherwise the Getty Villa’s faithful to Weber’s plan. It’s a fantastic creation, the kind of thing that’s only possible with American philanthropy, with unfettered vision and unlimited wealth. It’s also one of the finest museums of antiquities anywhere in the world, and the place where I’ve done some of my best writing. Whatever else awaits us down there, you’re in for a treat.’

Three hours later they stood beside a shimmering rectangular pool in the main courtyard of the Getty Villa. They had entered unobtrusively by a small door at the west end, and now they stood stock-still like the statues that adorned the garden, soaking in the sunshine and the brilliance of the scene. It was as if they had entered a movie set for a Roman epic, yet with an intimacy and attention to detail rarely seen in the sweeping panoramas of history. The pool was almost a hundred yards long, extending from the front portico of the villa to the seaward side where they had walked up from the Coastal Highway. At either end were copies of ancient bronzes found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, a drunken Silenus and a sleeping faun, and opposite them was a seated Hermes so lifelike he seemed ready to slip into the pool at any moment. Between the pool and the colonnaded portico that surrounded the courtyard were trees and beds of plants that made the marble seem like natural extrusions of the bedrock, surrounded and cushioned by vegetation. The entire garden was an orderly version of the world outside, cocooned and protected by human ingenuity. The pool reflected the columns and trees, creating an illusionistic scene like the wall paintings they could just make out on the interior of the portico, as if they were being drawn beyond the garden to other, fanciful creations of the human mind, not to the disordered and uncontrollable reality beyond. Jack remembered the wall painting of Vesuvius he had shown Costas as they flew towards the volcano, an image that summed up all the Arcadian dreams of ancient Rome, a flimsy sheen over a reality that had blasted its way through on that fateful day almost two thousand years before.

‘Everything’s authentic,’ Jeremy said. ‘The plan’s based on Weber’s original record of the villa he saw in the tunnels in the eighteenth century, and the statues are exact copies of the originals they found then. Even the vegetation’s authentic, pomegranate trees, laurels, fan palms brought all the way from the Mediterranean.’

Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again. The California hills had the same stark, sun-scorched beauty he loved in the Mediterranean, and the smell of herbs and the sea transported him back. The villa was not an interpretation of the past but a perfect resemblance of it, full of light and shadow, alive with people, gesturing and breathing. Few other historical reconstructions had done this for him, and here it felt right. As he looked at the villa, rich with colour and precision, in his mind’s eye he saw the excavated buildings of Herculaneum, flickering in the background like a photographic negative. He found himself remembering the times he had witnessed death, the moment of transition when the body suddenly becomes a husk, when colour turns to grey. Herculaneum was too close after that moment for comfort, more troubling to behold than sites that had decayed and become whitewashed by time, like old skeletons. It was the blasted corpse of a city, still reeking and oozing, like a burns victim after a terrible accident. Yet here in the Getty Villa it was as if someone had injected a burst of adrenaline into the still-warm corpse and miraculously revived it, as if the ancient site was again pulsating and sparkling with a dazzling clarity.

‘Only in California,’ Costas said, shaking his head. ‘I guess with Hollywood only a few miles down the coast, this is what you’d expect.’

‘When the villa opened in 1974, the reaction was amazing,’ Jeremy said. ‘A lot of the critics panned it. The Romans can get a pretty bad press over here. It’s all Pontius Pilate, debauched emperors, throwing Christians to the lions. This place was a stunning revelation. The colour, the brilliance, the taste. Some scholars even refused to believe it was an authentic recreation.’

‘This place is all about putting art back in its original context, and that can be a shock to modern sensibility,’ Jack said. ‘The European aristocrats who plundered Greece and Rome thought they were doing it, arranging statues on pedestals in their neoclassical country houses, but their idea of the classical context was based on the bleached ruins of Greece rather than the Technicolor reality of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here, you get the real deal, with objects like these bronzes as components of a larger whole, with the villa as a work of art in itself. Classical scholars for too long venerated these things as works of art in the modern sense, in their own right. What the critics didn’t like was that the villa makes these venerated sculptures seem frivolous, and the whole setting more whimsical and fun than they’d bargained for. But that’s what it was really like.’

‘And that’s what I like about it.’ Costas squatted down with a coin in the crook of his finger and eyed the length of the pool. ‘If the Romans could have fun, so can we.’ Jack shot him a warning glance as a man appeared through the entrance portico and made his way briskly towards them. He was of medium height with a close-cut beard, and wore chinos and a shirt and tie with his sleeves rolled up. He raised a hand in greeting to Jeremy, who gestured towards Jack and Costas.

‘Allow me to introduce Dr Ieuan Morgan,’ Jeremy said. ‘An old friend, my mentor when I was here. He’s on secondment from Brigham Young University. Permanently, by the look of it.’

Costas and Jack shook hands with him. ‘Thanks for seeing us at such short notice,’ Jack said warmly. ‘Are you anything to do with the BYU Herculaneum papyrus project?’

‘That’s why I came here originally,’ Morgan said, a hint of Welsh in his accent. ‘I’m a Philodemus specialist, and the infra-red spectrometry on the scrolls from the eighteenth-century excavations was inundating me with new stuff. I needed breathing space, somewhere to put it all in perspective.’

‘And where better than the Villa of the Papyri itself.’ Jack gestured around. ‘I’m envious.’

‘Any time you want a sabbatical here, just give the word,’ Morgan said. ‘Your reputation precedes you.’

Jack smiled back. ‘Much appreciated.’ He winked at Jeremy. ‘Maybe in about twenty years’ time.’

Morgan looked intently at Jack. ‘I understand from Jeremy that you’re on a tight schedule. Follow me.’

He led them along one side of the peristyle, then on to the west porch of the villa and through the open bronze doors that served as the main entrance to the museum. They went up a flight of marble stairs to the upper storey, and came to a second, inner courtyard, another fragrant and colourful place, resonating with the flash and sparkle of fountains. Below the tiled roof, tiers of columns dropped down to surround a garden proportioned in the Roman way, with bronze statues of five maidens in the centre appearing to draw water from a pool. Again Jack felt the extraordinary immediacy of the past. Whatever else came of the day, this Roman villa on the coast of California had been an unexpected revelation, another vivid lens on the ancient world.

Jack narrowed his eyes, and spoke from memory. ‘“Lovely gardens and cool colonnades and lily ponds would surround it, spreading out as far as the raptured eye could reach.” Those are words that Robert Graves in Claudius the God has Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews, saying to his Queen Cypros. I’ve always remembered that description, since I first read Graves as a boy. Herod has always been thought of as anti-Christian, the man who ordered the execution of St James, but to me those words could have been an ancient Christian image of heaven.’

‘You’re talking about Herod Agrippa, friend of Claudius?’ Costas said.

‘That’s the one.’

Costas scanned the courtyard. ‘So if this villa is an accurate replica of the place where Claudius ended his days, he didn’t give up on life’s pleasures completely,’ he said.

‘He had all this to look out on, sure, but I doubt whether he would have cared less,’ Jack replied. ‘As long as he had his books and his statues of his beloved father and brother, he’d probably have been content to eke out his days in a sulphurous cave somewhere up on Mount Vesuvius.’

‘Claudius?’ Morgan said, clearly mystified. ‘Which Claudius?’

‘The Roman emperor Claudius,’ Costas said.

‘Jeremy didn’t mention any emperors.’ Morgan paused, then eyed Jack quizzically. ‘I think you’ve got some explaining to do.’

‘We have,’ Jack smiled. ‘Lead on.’

Morgan led them a few paces further to a room at the back of the portico. He opened the door, ushered them in and gestured at the marble table in the centre. ‘I had the cafe send up some things. Hungry?’

‘You bet.’ Costas launched himself at a plate of croissants, and Morgan poured coffee. After a few moments he gestured at three seats on one side of the table, and walked around to the other side with his coffee and sat down.

‘Okay.’ Jack sat in the middle chair, and leaned forward. ‘You know why we’re here.’

‘Jeremy filled me in. Or at least I thought he did.’ Morgan swivelled in his chair to face Jack, took a sip of his coffee and then set his cup down. ‘When Jeremy had his fellowship here we worked quite closely together, and when he called me yesterday he discovered I had an interest in Lawrence Everett. I’d always kept quiet about it, a private obsession of mine, but of course I told him when he asked. It’s an incredible coincidence, but a man like that can’t go completely underground as he might have wished. And I thought there couldn’t possibly be anyone else on his trail, but there was another enquiry this morning.’

Jack suddenly looked alarmed. ‘Who?’

‘No idea. Anonymous hotmail address.’

‘Did you reply?’

‘After my conversation with Jeremy yesterday, I felt it prudent to claim ignorance. But I sensed that this was someone who wouldn’t go away. Somehow they knew there was a connection here, with the Getty Villa. I checked the online ticket reservations for the museum, and someone with the same e-mail address booked a ticket for tomorrow.’

‘Could be a coincidence, as you say,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘I can’t see how they’d have known.’

‘Known what, exactly? Who are you talking about?’ Morgan said.

Jeremy was quiet for a moment, glanced at Jack and then looked back across the table. ‘You were right. I haven’t told you everything. But what I did tell you was true, that we think Everett had something extraordinary to hide, an early Christian manuscript. That’s the key thing. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say, then we’ll fill you in.’

Morgan looked perplexed. ‘I’ve got no reason to be secretive. My scholarship, the collections here are open to all. It’s the founding ethos of the museum.’

‘Unfortunately this has gone way beyond scholarship,’ Jack said. ‘There’s far more at stake here. Let’s hear you out, then we’ll bring you up to speed before we leave this room.’

Morgan pulled a document box towards him on the table. ‘Fair enough. I can start by giving you a potted biography.’

‘Fire away.’

‘The reason I know about Everett is that he tried to correspond with J. Paul Getty, the founder of the museum. The nuns who looked after Everett during his final illness found the Getty headed notepaper among his belongings, and some architectural drawings. They thought the museum might be interested. I stumbled across the box of papers when I was researching the early history of the Getty villa, and thought they might have some bearing on the Getty interest in antiquities.’ He opened up the box and carefully lifted out a handful of yellowed pages covered in words and figures in a precise, minute hand. He spread them out on the table in front of him, including one page with a ruled-out plan of an apsidal structure. ‘Everett was fascinated by mathematical problems, by the game of chess, crosswords. There’s lots of that kind of stuff here, most of it way beyond me. But before he came to America he’d been an architect, and there’s an unfinished manuscript I’ve been annotating for publication. He was interested in early Church architecture, in the earliest archaeological evidence for Christian places of worship.’

‘Fascinating,’ Jack murmured. ‘But why try to contact Getty?’

‘The two men had a surprising amount in common,’ Morgan replied. ‘Getty had studied at Oxford, Everett at Cambridge. Getty was a passionate Anglophile, and he might have been pleased to discover a kindred spirit in California. And both men had rejected their professional careers, Getty to be a millionaire philanthropist, Everett to be a Catholic ascetic. There may seem a world of difference between those two, but Everett’s correspondence shows that he’d liberated himself in much the same way. And there was a more particular reason.’

‘Go on.’

‘It was well known that Getty had been to Pompeii and Herculaneum before the First World War, had visited the site of the Villa of the Papyri, been fascinated by it. Hence the villa we’re in today. Then in the late 1930s Everett heard of an extraordinary new discovery at Herculaneum, and wanted Getty’s opinion. Everett was really intrigued by it, to the point of obsession.’

‘You mean the House of the Bicentenary?’ Jack said.

‘You guessed it.’

Jack turned to Costas. ‘I pointed it out to you on our quick tour of Herculaneum, when we arrived at the site last week.’

‘Another black hole, I’m afraid,’ Costas said ruefully. ‘I think I was still asleep.’

‘Bicentenary refers to the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Herculaneum, in 1738,’ Morgan said. ‘The 1930s excavation was one of the few to have taken place on any scale since the eighteenth century. Mussolini was behind it, part of his own obsession with all things Roman, though there seems to have been Church resistance to his more grandiose excavation schemes and the Herculaneum project was almost stillborn.’

‘Why does that not surprise me?’ Costas murmured.

‘They discovered a room which they called the Christian Chapel,’ Morgan continued. ‘They called it that because they found an inset cross shape in plaster above a wooden cabinet, which they thought looked like a prayer stand. In a house nearby they found the name David scratched on a wall. Hebraic names are not unusual in Pompeii and Herculaneum, but they’re usually Latinized. Jesus was thought to be a descendant of King David of the Jews, and some think the name David was a secret way the early Christians referred to him, before they started to use the Greek word for messiah, Christos.’ Morgan paused, and looked pensive. ‘These were very controversial finds, and plenty of scholars still don’t accept the interpretation, but it may be the earliest archaeological evidence anywhere for a place of Christian worship.’

‘Only a few hundred yards from the Villa of the Papyri,’ Jack murmured. ‘I wonder if Everett had any inkling, if he had any idea how close he was to the source of what he possessed.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Morgan asked.

‘First, let’s have the rest of your story,’ Jack said. ‘Do you have anything more on him?’

Morgan nodded, and slid a sheet of paper from the box across the table. ‘We don’t know whether Getty himself ever responded to Everett, or even knew about him. The headed notepaper we found was just an acknowledgement note from a secretary. But I like to think that Everett’s interest helped to fuel Getty’s continuing fascination with Herculaneum, in the years leading up to the creation of this villa. After that brief correspondence, Everett slid back into obscurity. This is the only image we have of him, an old photocopy of a picture taken by his daughter. She managed to discover his whereabouts and visit him in 1955, the year before he died. I traced her to a care home in Canada, where she’d emigrated from England, and got hold of this.’

Jack peered at the grainy black-and-white image, the details almost washed out. In the centre was an elderly man, well dressed, hunched over on sticks but standing with as much dignity as he could muster, his face virtually indiscernible. Behind him was a single-storey shack made of corrugated metal, festooned with ivy and surrounded by lush vegetation.

‘This was taken outside the nunnery, in front of the shack where he lived for more than thirty years,’ Morgan continued. ‘The nuns looked after him, cared for him when he became too ill to fend for himself. In return he tended their gardens, did odd jobs. He’d been a choral scholar in his youth, and sang Gregorian music for them. He took in tramps, down-and-outs, fed and clothed them, put them up in his shack, the full Christian charity thing.’

‘Sounds a little messianic to me,’ Costas murmured.

‘I doubt whether he had any delusions about that,’ Morgan said. ‘But California in his day was the world of Steinbeck, of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, a whole subculture on the margins of society. And these were the ones he felt most at home with, outcasts, drifters, people who had forsaken their own background and upbringing, men and women like himself.’ He paused, and then spoke quietly. ‘What do you know about the Pelagians?’

‘We know there was an Everett family connection. His grandfather was a member of the New Pelagians, the Victorian secret society.’

‘Good. That saves a lot of explaining,’ Morgan replied, relaxing visibly. ‘In one of his letters he reveals his Pelagian beliefs, something he clearly wanted to talk about, and it explains a lot about where we’re going this afternoon. It’s as if he was living a double life, a devout ascetic Catholic on the one hand, and privately about the most radical heretic you can imagine.’

‘When was that letter written?’ Jack said.

‘About the end of the Second World War. He was already pretty ill by then, rambling a little, and there was no more correspondence.’

‘That explains it,’ Jack murmured. ‘I don’t think he would have risked revealing himself before then.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Okay. What do you know about his origins?’

‘It’s an amazing story. Born in the centre of the city of London, in Lawrence Lane, where his family had lived for generations. They were Huguenots, and his father was a prominent architect. Went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was a wrangler, achieving first-class Honours in Mathematics, and also studied languages. One of his tutors was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was offered a fellowship but turned it down, having promised his father that he’d go into partnership with him. Ten prosperous years as an architect, unexceptional, got married, had three kids, then his father died and he suddenly gave it all up, family, job, and disappeared to America.’

‘Any explanation given?’ Costas asked.

‘He’d converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife’s father was vehemently anti-Catholic. The father gave him an ultimatum, then bought him off. Seemingly as simple as that. The children’s education was paid for by their grandfather on the condition that they had no contact ever again with their father. A sad story, but not unique, given the antipathy that existed between Protestant and Catholic in England, even as late as the Victorian period.’

‘But we know the true reason he left,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘His father’s death, the will, his sudden overwhelming responsibility for the family heirloom. The question is why he came here, and what he did with it.’

‘Why convert to Catholicism?’ Costas said. ‘Was that part of the plan? Hide in the least likely place?’

Morgan paused. ‘It could have been. But it could have been heartfelt. He’d been Anglo-Catholic, and others like him had taken the step. Remember, the followers of Pelagius, those who traced their Christianity back to the earliest British tradition before Constantine the Great, were not necessarily great fans of the Church created by King Henry VIII either. What had discomfited them about the Roman Church, the ascendancy of the Vatican and the Pope, had an uneasy conterpart in the English monarch as head of the Church of England, divinely appointed. It seemed one step from the emperor as god, the grotesque apotheosis that had ruined ancient Rome. Whether pope or king many had a problem with the Church as a political tool.’

‘Yet for some like Everett, the Roman tradition of worship came to have more attraction,’ Jack said.

Morgan nodded. ‘The letters show that he still saw himself as a follower of Pelagius, and some of his theological views would have seemed heretical to Catholic purists. But the Roman liturgy, the rituals, above all the music, seemed to offer him great spiritual comfort.’

‘What Jeremy said in London yesterday about Sir Christopher Wren, missing the beauty of the old rituals,’ Costas murmured. ‘Speaking as a Greek Orthodox, I can understand that.’

‘That was what mattered to Everett. But his fundamental faith remained unchanged.’

‘And the thought police were a long way from a remote valley in Californa,’ Jack murmured.

‘I believe that was part of the plan. He came here to safeguard what he had with him, to a country where religious freedom had provided a haven for all Christian denominations. He still needed to be careful, to pick the time and place to reveal what he had, to find some way of passing on the secret.’

‘So he arrived here in 1912,’ Costas said.

Morgan nodded. ‘He sailed to New York, gained American citizenship, then worked his way west. After what Jeremy told me, I now believe that what he did took huge strength, a decision to preserve an extraordinary treasure not for his own benefit but for humanity, for the future. Once he’d been assured of his children’s upbringing, he made the greatest sacrifice a father can ever make, and walked away assuming he would never see them again.’

‘I only hope it was worth it,’ Costas said.

‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Jack replied, turning to Morgan. ‘Do you know anything more about his life, anything that might give us clues?’

Morgan paused. ‘August 1914. Europe is torn apart. Britain mobilizes. The First World War begins.’

‘He goes to fight?’ Costas said.

Morgan nodded. ‘In the folly and horror of the First World War, people often forget that many at the time believed it was a just war, a war against impending evil. Everett felt morally compelled to join. Winston Churchill wrote about men like him.’ Morgan leaned back so he could read the inscription below a framed portrait on the wall, showing a young man in uniform. ‘“Coming of his own free will, with no national call or obligation, a stranger from across the ocean, to fight and die in our ranks, he had it in his power to pay tribute to our cause of exceptional value. He conceived that not merely national causes but international causes of the highest importance were involved, and must now be decided by arms.”’ Morgan paused. ‘That’s a friend of Churchill’s, Lieutenant Harvey Butters, Royal Field Artillery, an American killed on the Somme in 1916. J. Paul Getty was a great admirer of these men, Americans who volunteered to fight German imperialism even before the United States joined the war.’

‘So Everett returns to Europe,’ Costas said.

‘He went north to Canada and enlisted in the British Army. By early 1916 he was an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, on the Western Front. In June that year he was gassed and wounded in a terrible battle at Hulluch, near Loos. During his recuperation his mathematical skills were discovered, and he was transferred to British Military Intelligence, the original MI1. He worked in the War Office in London, and then was seconded to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty down the road, in a top-secret complex known as Room 40. He was a codebreaker.’

‘No kidding.’ Jeremy leaned forward, excited. ‘Cryptography.’

‘They were desperate for people like him,’ Morgan continued. ‘And he was recruited by intelligence just in time. What happened next may well have won the war.’

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

‘Ever heard of the Zimmerman telegram?’

‘Yes!’ Jeremy exclaimed. ‘Of course! It’s what brought America into the First World War.’

‘A coded telegram dispatched in January 1917 by Arthur Zimmerman, German foreign secretary, to the German ambassador in Mexico,’ Morgan continued. ‘It revealed the German intention to begin unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, and to help Mexico reconquer the southern States. The plan seems ludicrous now, but it was deadly serious then. The British intercepted and decrypted the telegram, then passed it on to the US ambassador to Britain. Sentiment in the United States was already pretty anti-German because of earlier U-boat sinkings that had killed Americans. A month after the telegram was deciphered, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.’

‘Let me guess,’ Costas said. ‘The decipherment was done in the British Admiralty Room 40.’

‘Correct. The Room 40 codebreakers had a book for an earlier version of the cipher that had been captured from a German agent in the Middle East, but the decryption of the telegram by the London team was still a work of genius.’

‘And Everett was involved.’

‘His name was never released. After the war, the British went to extraordinary lengths to keep the activities of their codebreakers secret, and only ever released enough to tell the essential story. Some of the Room 40 codebreakers of the First World War went on to work at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, and their names will never be known.’

Costas whistled. ‘So Everett really did have a place in history. Bringing America into the First World War.’

‘If you think that’s a place in history, wait for what I’ve got to say next.’

‘Go on,’ Jack said.

‘A lot of the stuff is still classified. But I do know he worked alongside the two men whose names were released and celebrated after the war, the Reverend William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey. Of those two, Montgomery is the one who concerns us most. He was a Presbyterian minister, a civilian recruited by British Military Intelligence. He was a noted authority on St Augustine, and a translator of theological works from German. He was best known for his translation of Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus.’

Jack suddenly felt the hairs prick up on the back of his neck. ‘Say that again.’

‘Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.’

The historical Jesus. Jack felt himself tense up with excitement. He thought for a moment, his mind racing, then spoke quietly. ‘So we’ve got two men, both brilliant codebreakers, Everett and Montgomery, both passionate about the life of Christ. One a Catholic convert, the other a Presbyterian minister. Everett is guardian of an extraordinary ancient document, something he’s hidden away. Maybe the horror of that war, his near-death experience on the front, perhaps a soldier’s conviction that he will not survive, gives him an overwhelming need to share the secret, to ensure that the torch is kept alight.’

‘He tells Montgomery,’ Costas said.

‘They devise a code,’ Jeremy murmured.

‘Pure speculation, but if it happened, it probably happened here,’ Morgan said.

Jack looked startled. ‘You mean here? In California?’

‘In Santa Paula. Where Everett spent the rest of his life. A small nunnery in the hills, where Everett had found what he was looking for when he arrived in America before the war. Peace, seclusion, a community whose fold he could enter effortlessly, where he could follow his faith and seek the time and place to pass on his secret.’

‘Just like the emperor Claudius, two thousand years before,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘And just like Claudius, the tide of history seems to have overtaken his plans, the First World War erupting like a latter-day Vesuvius.’

‘Could Everett and Montgomery have been here together during the war?’ Costas said.

‘May 1917,’ Morgan replied. ‘Publication of the Zimmerman telegram had just brought America into the war. The two men were invited to the United States to help set up the fledgling US codebreaking unit. It was all top secret. I can’t prove it, but there was enough time for a fleeting visit to California.’

‘Does the nunnery still exist?’ Jack said.

Morgan looked at Jack, nodded, then pushed back his chair, got up and walked over to the window, his voice tight with emotion. ‘All my professional life I’ve lived and breathed this place. I was here when the museum was inaugurated. There’s a spirit here that’s infused my work. An ancient Roman villa in the California hills. But it also haunts me. This room, where we are now, is unknown, pure guesswork. The Getty Villa’s based on Weber’s eighteenth-century plan of the Villa of the Papyri as he saw it in the tunnels, yet this section of the villa is pure conjecture, a part never excavated. With your discoveries in the villa at Herculaneum it’s as if the past is catching up, and we risk losing all the solidity and assurance we’ve created. I want this room to be a library, a scholar’s room, but it may never even have existed.’ He took a deep breath, walked back over to the desk, picked up a bunch of keys, then sat down again resolutely. ‘I’ll take you to the nunnery now. But before we go, you owe me the rest of your story. I want to hear about what lay at the end of that tunnel. I want to hear about Claudius.’