The Last Gospel (19 page)

‘I doubt it. I think Claudius was having Philodemus cleared out,’ Jack said. ‘I think he was making room on the shelves for his own stuff.’ He walked over to Costas, who moved aside, and peered where he was pointing. The scroll was open, the two ends partly rolled back, with a few inches of writing visible in between. The scroll looked identical to those in the basket by the door, the volumes of Pliny’s
Natural History
, with the distinctive rounded finials on the handles. Someone must have been consulting it, then put it down opened at a page. The woman’s voice came up the tunnel again, shouting, insistent. ‘Dr Hiebermeyer! Jack! Please. Now!’ Jack looked up, suddenly distracted at hearing his name spoken by a voice from a past that had never been resolved, as if she were calling to him in a dream. For a second he felt an overwhelming need to leave everything and go back out of the tunnel, to find out what had gone wrong. Maria and Hiebermeyer were already out of the chamber, taking the extractor fan with them. Jack shook his head, looked at Costas and then back at the scroll, forced himself to concentrate for a moment longer, to read the words of the ancient script.

He froze.

He looked again. Two words.
Two words that could change history
. His mind was racing, his heart thumping.

Then, for the first time in his life, Jack did the unthinkable. He lifted the scroll, carefully rolled the two wound ends together, and slid it into his khaki bag. He flipped over the cover of the bag and buckled the straps. Costas watched him in silence.

‘You know why I’m doing this,’ Jack said quietly.

‘I’m good with it,’ Costas replied.

Jack turned to follow Hiebermeyer and Maria. ‘Right. Time to face the inquisition.’

Fifteen minutes later Jack stood with Costas and Maria in the open air outside the archaeological site, waiting for the guard to unlock the door that led back out into the alleyway through the modern town of Ercolano. They had been hit by the heat as they left the tunnel, but the blinding sunlight of their arrival on the site had given way to a lowering grey sky, with dark clouds forming over Vesuvius and blanketing the bay behind them. They had doffed their safety helmets outside the tunnel and made their way past the workmen and the guards in the main trench, leaving Hiebermeyer to make his report to Elizabeth and a male inspector who had been waiting beside the tunnel entrance, impatient to close up the site. The Egyptian statue of Anubis had already been drilled out of the volcanic rock and stood partly crated outside the entrance, a cluster of tungsten lamps to one side ready for the impending media event. A concrete-mixer had already been drawn up next to the tunnel entrance, and workmen were laying wooden formers ready to fill and block up the tunnel for good. Everything seemed to be happening exactly as Hiebermeyer had predicted.

The guard who had jostled Costas on their way into the site was ambling across the small courtyard towards them again, smoking, his sub-machine gun slung over his back. He came directly towards Costas, flicked away his cigarette and made an upwards gesture with both hands. Jack realized that he was planning to frisk him. Jack looked at Costas, then back at the guard, then at Costas again. This was not going to work. They had less to lose now that they had done what they came for, but the last thing Jack wanted was an incident that would lead to full body searches. He put his hand on his precious bag and tried to catch Costas’ attention, but Costas’ eyes were glued on the guard, expressionless, and Jack could see his hands slowly clenching and unclenching.

At that moment there was a clatter behind them and Hiebermeyer entered the courtyard, followed by Elizabeth and the male inspector. Elizabeth snapped at the guard in Italian and he sneered at her, standing his ground. The man with Elizabeth then said something and the guard backed off a few steps, passing over a bunch of keys. The man went straight to the door and unlocked it, ushering them out. Maria and Costas ducked through. Jack was about to follow, then looked at Elizabeth, catching her eye for the first time. She looked back at him, imploring, and suddenly reached out and grasped his arm, drawing him into the shadows, past the slit-eyed gaze of the guard. For a fleeting moment Jack was back where he had been all those years before, held by those dark eyes that still had the same allure, but in a face more worn and anguished than the passage of time could explain. He barely registered what she whispered to him, a few tense sentences, before she pushed him forcibly away and left quickly the way she had come, back round the corner towards the excavation trench, disappearing out of sight.

Jack was rooted to the spot, and then heard Costas calling him through the doorway. He stumbled past the guard who was now talking intently on a cell phone, his eyes following Jack, and past the inspector who nodded at him, and then through the entrance into the rubbish-strewn alley. The door clanged shut behind him and he heard the padlock being engaged. He looked up towards the dark cone of Vesuvius looming over the rooftops at the end of the alley, and began following the other three. He clutched his bag, feeling the shape inside, and felt his heart begin to pound. There was no turning back now.

T
he man in the black cassock swept past the
baldacchino
and towards the pier of St Andrew, making the sign of the cross towards the high altar as he passed. He was tall, late middle aged, with fine, aquiline features and scholarly glasses, but with the sinewy toughness of a Jesuit who had spent years in the field. He nodded curtly at the Swiss Guard who stood at the low entranceway into the pier, then glanced back at the
baldacchino
. The great black pillars had been cast by Bernini from bronze taken from the Pantheon, the pagan temple to all the gods, here transformed into baroque splendour and captured beneath the dome of the greatest church in Christendom. To the man this place always made the ancient Roman sense of mastery over nature seem puny, insignificant, just as it made the people appear puny who stood beneath it today. It was a place where all could know the ascendancy of the Holy See, over a congregation far larger than ever could have been imagined by the Roman emperors at the time of Christ.

He sniffed, then wrinkled his nose slightly. The air seemed heavy with the exhalation of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who had passed through that day, as they did every day. They were the power of the Church, yet the man found the base reality of the common people distasteful and always relished passing beyond, into the sanctuaries of the ordained. He reminded himself why he was here, this evening. He recovered his stride and made his way purposefully down the steps into the grotto under the nave, to the level of the Roman hillside where there had once been a hippodrome of Caligula and Nero and a city of the dead, a necropolis, dug into the rock. Now it was the burial ground of popes, and the revered resting place of St Peter. The man made the sign again as he passed that holy spot, then weaved his way through the surviving foundation stones of Constantine the Great’s basilica to another door and another flight of steps, leading down into the depths of the ancient necropolis. The door had been opened for him, but as he passed through he took out a key from under his cassock, and with his other hand flicked on a small torch. At the bottom of the stairs the beam danced over rough stone walls lined with niches and shadowy recesses. He bent to pass down a low passageway to the right, descended a flight of rock-cut steps into an empty tomb and felt along the wall, quickly finding what he was looking for. He slid the key into the hole and a concealed door gave way, opening inwards. He ducked through, then turned and locked the door again. He was inside.

He still remembered the thrill when he had first crouched at this spot. It was during the excavation of the necropolis, when all attention was focused on the tomb of St Peter. He and another young initiate had discovered this passageway, an early Christian catacomb sealed off since antiquity. It was better preserved than the rest of the necropolis, with the niches still plastered over and the burials intact. They had gone inside, just the two of them. Then they had made their extraordinary discovery. Only a few had ever been told of it: the pontiff, the head of the college of cardinals, the man who held the position he now held, the other members of the
concilium
. It was one of the greatest secrets of the Holy See, ammunition for the day when the forces of darkness might reach the holy gates, when the Church might need to rally all its reserves to fight for its very existence.

He made his way towards a flickering pool of light at the end of the passageway. Along the way he passed the images they had seen that first day, simple, crude expressions of early faith that still moved him powerfully, more visceral than any of the embellishments in the church above. Christ in a boat, casting a net, a woman seated beside him. Christ on fire, rising with his two crucified companions above the flames, a burning mountain in the background. And names everywhere, on the tomb niches, names made from simple mosaics pressed into the plaster.
Priscilla in Pace. Zakariah in Pace
. Chi-rho symbols, incised images of baskets of bread, a dove holding an olive branch. Images that became more frequent as he drew closer to the source of light, as if people had been yearning to be interred near that spot, crowding in on it. And then he was there. The passageway widened slightly, and he could see that the light ahead came from candles on each corner of a plinth set in the floor, a tomb. It was a simple structure, raised a few inches on plaster, and was covered with large Roman roof tiles. He could see the name scratched on the surface. He made the sign again, and whispered the words that had long been suspected, but that only he and a few others knew to be true.
The Basilica of St Peter and St Paul
.

Two others were already there, cassocked figures seated in low rock-cut niches on either side of the tomb, their faces obscured in shadow. The man made the sign again. ‘
In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti
,’ he said. He bowed slightly to each in turn. ‘Eminences.’

‘Monsignor. Please be seated.’ The words were in Italian. ‘The
concilium
is complete.’

The catacomb was damp, keeping the dust down, but the wreathing smoke from the candles made his eyes smart, and he blinked hard. ‘I came as soon as I received your summons, Eminence.’

‘You know why we are here?’

‘The
concilium
only meets when the sanctity of the Holy See is threatened.’

‘For almost two thousand years it has been so,’ the other said. ‘From the time of the coming of St Paul to the brethren, when the
concilium
first met in the Phlegraean Fields. We are soldiers of our Lord, and we do his bidding.
Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla
.’

‘Amen.’

‘We accept only the true word of the Messiah, no other.’

‘Amen.’

‘We have met once already this year. We have thwarted the search for the lost Jewish treasures of the Temple. But now a greater darkness threatens us, a heresy that would seek to destroy the true Church itself. The heresy of those who would deny the sanctity of the ordained, who would seek to poison the ministry of St Paul, who believe that the word of our Lord lies elsewhere, outside the Gospels. For almost two thousand years we have fought it, with all our power and all our guile. Now the heresy has arisen again. That which we had hoped destroyed, lost for ever, has been found. A blasphemy, a lie, ammunition of the Devil.’

‘What would the
concilium
have us do?’

The voice when it replied was steely, icy cold, a voice that brooked no debate, that sought no reply.

‘
Seek it
.’

 

The sky was streaked with gold as Jack brought the Lynx helicopter down towards the landing lights on
Seaquest II
’s stern. Maria was in the co-pilot’s seat and Costas was stretched out in the rear, snoring heavily. They had waved Hiebermeyer off at the helipad near Herculaneum, just as it began to rain, a heavy, pelting downpour that took Jack’s full attention as they lifted off. He had been quiet for the rest of the flight, preoccupied with his own thoughts after his encounter with Elizabeth and then focused on an e-mail exchange on the helicopter’s computer. It had taken less than an hour to fly south from the Bay of Naples, skirting the dark mass of the Calabrian mountains and then veering offshore to the ship’s position some ten nautical miles north of the Strait of Messina. The evening had become startlingly clear, almost pellucid, the air cleansed and the sea ruffled by the dying breeze from the west, but as the rotor churned up propwash on either side of the ship it was as if they were descending through a vortex of water, the landing lights illuminating the spray like a twister swirling off the stern.