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.
The Lynx thumped to a halt and Jack waited for the rotors to stop before unbuckling himself and opening the door, giving a thumbs-up to the crew chief who was lashing the pontoons to the deck. He took off his helmet, waited as Costas and Maria did the same and then got out and led them straight into a hatchway at the forward end of the helipad. Moments later they were in the ship’s main conservation lab, the door shut behind them. Jack chose a workstation with a computer console on one side and a light table on the other, then activated a fluorescent bulb on a retractable metal arm above the table and sat down. He pulled out a two-way radio from his flight overalls and pressed the key for the secure IMU channel. There was a crackle and he spoke into the receiver. ‘Maurice, this is Jack. We’re on Seaquest, safe and sound. I’ll update you on any progress. Over.’ He waited for an affirmative, then placed the radio beside the monitor and slipped the strap of his old khaki bag over his head, placing the bag on his lap and pulling on a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser under the table.
‘Do you think he can hold the fort?’ Costas said.
‘Maurice? He’s a professional. He knows how to play the authorities. He knows exactly how to shut down an excavation. All he has to do is say that the tunnel’s unsafe, in danger of collapse, and they’ll board it up. The superintendency didn’t want any new excavation in the villa anyway. And they’ve got the ancient statue of Anubis to feed the press, more than enough to satisfy the public that the archaeology’s being done. We’re sticking with my revised plan. Reuters will get told, but not about the library, not yet. As soon as we’ve seen through wherever this is leading us, I’ll make a call which will expose the whole thing. Maria took hundreds of digital pictures, and they’re all here. They look like those first views of King Tut’s tomb. Absolutely sensational, front-page stuff. The authorities will have no choice but to open up the site properly, for the world to see what we’ve seen.’
‘I’ll be back there with Maurice as soon as we’ve finished here,’ Maria said.
‘That’s crucial, Maria. You can keep his blood pressure down. You obviously make a great team.’ He grinned at her, then opened his bag. ‘Now let’s see what we’ve got.’
Seconds later the extraordinary find Jack had taken from the villa chamber at Herculaneum lay in front of them on the light table. It looked much as Costas and Jack had first seen it, with each side of the scroll wound round a wooden stick, an umbilicus, and lines of ancient writing visible where the scroll was open in between. Jack attached small foam pads with retractor wires to the ends of each umbilicus and carefully drew the scroll wider apart, each wire attached to the edge of the light table and secured with ratchets. Now they could see the entire column of text, similar to the page of a modern book. ‘This is how the Greeks and Romans read them, from side to side, unrolling the scroll to reveal each page, like this,’ Maria said. ‘People often think scrolls were awkward, because they assume they were written as continuous text from one end to the other, unrolled a bit at a time. In fact, they were almost as convenient as a codex, a modern book.’
‘We’re incredibly lucky we can see any of this at all,’ Jack murmured. ‘The carbonized scrolls found in the villa in the eighteenth century took years to unravel, millimetre by millimetre. But everything we saw in that room was incredibly well preserved, having missed the firestorm in AD 79. There seems to be some kind of resin or wax in the papyrus which means it’s still supple.’ ‘This looks like two paragraphs in one hand, with a section in the middle in a completely different hand,’ Costas said.
Maria nodded. ‘The main text is like the printed page, the practised hand of a copyist, a scribe. The other writing is a little sprawling, more like personal handwriting, legible but certainly not a copyist’s hand.’
‘What are those blotches?’
‘At first I thought they might be blood, but then I sniffed them,’ Jack said. ‘It’s what I saw all over that table in the chamber. They’re wine stains.’
‘Let’s hope it was a good vintage on that final night,’ Maria murmured.
Costas pointed at a slip of papyrus attached to the top of the scroll, like a label. ‘So that’s the title?’
‘The sillybos,’ Jack said, nodding. ‘ Plinius, Naturalis Historia . This scroll must have been taken out from the batch in the basket by the door, undoubtedly one of the volumes of completed text. I can still hardly believe it. Nothing like this has survived anywhere else from antiquity, a first edition by one of the most famous writers of the classical period.’
‘I can see that,’ Costas murmured. ‘But why are we being so secretive about this?’
‘Okay.’ Jack pointed to the upper line in the scroll. ‘The first clue for me was that word, Iudaea. Pliny the Elder mentions Judaea in several places in the Natural History. He tells us about the origin and cultivation of the balsam tree, and about a river that dries up every Sabbath. Typical Pliny, a mix of authoritative natural history and fable. But the main discussion of Judaea is in his geographical chapter, where he tells us everything else he thinks worth knowing about the place. That’s what we’ve got here.’ Jack opened his modern copy of Pliny’s Natural History at a bookmarked page, and pressed it down. They could see the Latin on the left-hand side, the English translation on the right. He read out the first line on the page: ‘ “ Supra Idumaeam et Samariam Iudaea longe lateque funditur. Pars eius Syriae iuncta Galilaea vocatur.” ’
He peered back at the scroll, then at the printed text, reading it again under his breath. ‘It’s identical. Those medieval monks who transcribed this got it right after all.’ He read out the translation. ‘“Beyond Idumaea and Samaria stretches the wide expanse of Judaea. The part of Judaea adjoining Syria is called Galilee.”’ He then began to work his way down the text, his eyes darting from the translation to the scroll and back again, pausing occasionally where the lack of punctuation in the scroll made it difficult to follow. ‘Pliny was fascinated by the Dead Sea,’ he murmured. ‘Here, he tells us how nothing at all can sink in it, how even the bodies of bulls and camels float along. He loved this kind of stuff. That’s the trouble. He was right about the high salinity of the Dead Sea, but there were other wonders he wrote about that were completely fabulous, and he wasn’t great at distinguishing fact from fiction. If he had any kind of guiding principle, it was to include everything he heard. He was almost entirely reliant
