boom across the still air of the city, asserting the sovereignty of the Holy See as they had done since the dying days of the Roman Empire. Above him the walls of the courtyard framed the sky, two huge birds of prey circling far overhead, and he could hear the dull rumble of the city outside. He ducked through the entrance and looked quickly behind him, then gathered up his cassock and mounted the stairway to the first floor. The corridor ahead was lined with statues, bulletin boards and posters advertising exhibits, but was empty of people, today being a holiday for the museum staff. The Jesuit reached a door with a light on inside, just where he had been told it would be, and saw the word CONSERVATORI above the lintel.
He paused, not out of hesitation but to relish the moment. In the shadows he stood with his head bowed, his fists clenched. Sixty-five years earlier his forefathers had failed to breach these walls, had stopped short of taking the Vatican in their triumphal sweep through Rome. Now he would make amends, he would make his mark. He unclenched his left hand and raised it to his face, drawing his index finger down the ragged scar that pulsated beneath his beard, pressing it hard until he flinched in pain. He slipped his left hand back under his cassock and with his other hand knocked three times on the door.
“Enter,” a muffled voice said in Italian.
The Jesuit pushed the door open and closed it behind him. The room was crammed with books and manuscripts, with a computer workstation at the far end. In the foreground was a fragmentary stone relief sculpture on a pedestal, and in front of it sat a middle-aged man in jeans and a casual shirt, hunched over a notebook.
“Monsignor.” The man finished what he was writing and looked up, his expression alert and intelligent. “I had not expected to be interrupted today. What can I do for you?”
“You are the chief conservator?” The Jesuit spoke in Italian.
“I am.”
“You were present at the discovery of the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus, along with Father O’Connor?”
The other man suddenly looked deflated, and tossed his notebook on the floor. “Now everyone seems to know. We kept it secret for the good of the Church. I wish we had never found it.”
“So do I.”
The silenced Beretta coughed twice and the conservator jerked back on his stool, an expression of horrified surprise on his face. He tottered over and fell heavily to the floor, coming to rest with his arm splayed awkwardly over his front, his eyes wide open and uncomprehending in death. The Jesuit pulled his left hand out of his cassock and slowly raised it to his face. He drew his finger down the scar on his cheek, again and again, as hard as he could, grimacing with pleasure as he watched the blood seep from the man’s chest and pool on the cold stone slabs beneath him.
There would be more.
“Activating ice probe now.”
Costas turned to Jack as he spoke through the intercom, and the two men gave each other the okay sign. For about the fifth time Jack cast a critical eye over Costas’ equipment. Once they shed the umbilical they would be absolutely reliant on their breathing systems and on each other, with no bail-out option, no emergency escape route to the surface. The IMU equipment was state of the art, with a rock-solid computer system which took the job of calculating their breathing mix and ascent rate entirely out of their hands. It had been tested in conditions of extreme heat six months before inside a submerged volcano, but this was the first time it had been deployed in water that was as cold as it could be without turning to ice.
“Take up your position.”
Jack swung in from where he had been hanging by one hand and gripped the metal bar beside Costas. They were like two climbers on a vast ice wall, dwarfed by the immensity of the berg. Below them the ice dropped off hundreds of metres into the abyss, where the slope of the threshold sheered off to unimaginable depths, to a place of freezing blackness no human had ever dared enter.
“There’s only one safety drill,” Costas said. “Any sign of movement in the ice and we switch to trimix. If this baby rolls off the threshold we’re going down. Remember, the trimix gives us breathable gas to one hundred and twenty metres. That should at least give us some margin.”
Jack gave another okay sign and checked the three hoses which fed into the ports in his helmet. In truth he and Costas both knew their safety drill was a forlorn hope. If the berg moved off the threshold, the vast bulk of it would slip underwater, its base plunging hundreds of feet. If the movement of the ice didn’t crush them, the pressure of a sudden descent into the abyss would kill them instantly.
Jack shut his mind to the possibility and focussed on the outlandish device in front of them. They had just opened up the protective cage that cradled the probe against the berg, and attached the radio buoy which they planned to release to the surface once they re-emerged. The probe was already wedged partway into the ice, having been put in position earlier by the pair of divers they had seen from the Aquapod. Directly abutting the ice was a metal ring two metres in diameter, the width of the tunnel the machine would bore. The tunnel would be just wide enough for the two of them to follow on side by side, with little room to spare. The superheated element in the tube was complemented by an array of microwave and laser cutters emanating from the main body of the device, a metre-wide cylindrical canister directly in front of them. A small but powerful water jet would funnel the newly melted water away and propel the device forward. On the rear face above the guide rail a waterproof LED screen glowed a vivid green.
“We’ll keep the power line attached to the DSRV as long as we can, as well as the fibre-optic cable,” Costas said. “Normally the DSRV pilot would be able to see everything we see on the screen, but before the DSRV moves off we’ll have to disengage the power line and run the probe from the internal battery.” He adjusted a large dial below the screen, then turned and peered at Jack through his mask, remembering the debilitating effect of the gunshot wound that had nearly ended his friend’s life on a very different dive, deep in the Black Sea six months before. “You okay?”
“This new E-suit heating system is working wonders,” Jack replied simply.
“Without the coil the water in the tunnel would actually be below zero,” Costas said cheerfully. “It’s fresh water, from the glacier, so it freezes more quickly than salt water. We’d be ice before you could say scotch on the rocks.”
“Thanks for the thought.” Jack looked down with some scepticism at the coil, a wavering tendril of microfilaments hanging below them. It would be paid out from the device as they went in, and keep the newly melted water from freezing up again and entombing them inside the berg.
“It should work,” Costas added. “In theory.”
“Let me guess. I won’t even say it.”
Costas’ eyes glinted at Jack as he reached up to his shoulder and pressed the external channel on his communications console. “Ben, we’re on our way. Estimated time of arrival at the ten-metre disengagement depth, twenty minutes. Out.”
Jack watched beneath his fins as their entry hole into the berg receded far below, a shimmering patch of blue obscured by the swirl of heated microfilaments that trailed behind them. Twisting down the centre was the battery cable and the umbilical bringing in their nitrox and sucking out their exhaust, their lifeline to the world outside. Jack raised his head and watched in fascination as the borer carved a perfectly smooth tunnel through the ice, proceeding upwards at a 45-degree angle at a rate of more than two metres per minute. He had no sense of the water temperature in his E-suit, but the changing thermostat readout on his environmental regulator reflected the blast of warm water that was being ejected from the borer and driving the machine into the ice. Ahead of them their lamps lit up the wall of the tunnel, a dazzling spectacle of white, yet Jack knew that without artificial light they would be entering a world of total blackness, hemmed in on all sides by an unimaginable thickness of ice which had blocked out the last vestiges of the sun’s rays far above them.
“Okay,” Costas said. “We’ve reached ten metres external water depth. I’m going to level out and disengage.”
Costas adjusted the heat output controls on the panel in front of him, easing off on the lower elements so the borer would melt more ice above and gradually become horizontal. Jack watched their progress on the LED screen, a 3-D isometric image of the berg identical to the one Lanowski had shown them earlier that day. The image had
