The First Apostle

“Because this man Bronson is a serving police officer,” Carlotti explained. “In fact, he’s a detective sergeant based at the station in Tunbridge Wells. And, just like in the Carabinieri, the British police protect their own.”

For a few moments Mandino didn’t respond. This was an unexpected development, and he wasn’t sure if it was good or bad news.

“Family?” he asked, finally.

“His parents are both dead, he has no children, and he’s recently divorced. His ex-wife’s name is Angela Lewis. She’s employed by the British Museum in London.”

“As what? A secretary or something?”

“No. She’s a ceramics conservator.”

And that, Mandino knew, definitely was bad news. He had no idea what a ceramics conservator actually did, but the mere fact that the Lewis woman worked in one of the most celebrated museums in the world meant that she would have immediate access to experts from a number of disciplines.

Time, Mandino now knew, was fast running out. He needed to get to London as quickly as he could if he was to have any chance of retrieving the situation. But before he ended the call, he obtained Angela Lewis’s London address and phone number. He also instructed that changes be made in the Internet monitoring system and added some very specific new criteria to the searches the syntax checkers were to analyze.

The monitoring system he’d put in place was both comprehensive and expensive, but as the Vatican was picking up the tab, the cost didn’t bother him. It was based on a product called NIS, or NarusInsight Intercept Suite, which Mandino’s people had modified so it could be installed on remote servers without the host’s knowledge and operated like a computer virus or, more accurately, a Trojan Horse. Once in place, the NIS software could be programmed to monitor whole networks to detect specific Internet search strings or even individual e-mail messages.

Whenever Bronson accessed the Internet, and whatever he searched for, Mandino was sure he’d find out about it.

13

I

Bronson pulled out his Nokia and dialed Angela’s work number. The journey into town from Tunbridge Wells had been quick and painless, and he’d even got a couple of seats to himself on the train so he’d been able to get comfortable.

“Angela?”

“Yes.” Her voice was curt and distant.

“It’s Chris.”

“I know. What do you want?”

“I’m near the museum and I’ve brought the pictures of the inscriptions for you to look at.”

“I’m not interested in them—I thought you realized that.”

Bronson’s steps faltered slightly. He hadn’t expected Angela to welcome him with open arms, obviously—the last time they’d met had been in a solicitor’s office and their parting had been frosty, to say the least—but he had hoped she would at least see him.

“But I thought . . . well, what about Jeremy Goldman? Is he available?”

“He might be. You’d better ask for him when you get here.”

Five minutes later, Bronson plugged his memory stick into a USB slot in the front of a desktop computer in Jeremy Goldman’s spacious but cluttered office in the museum. The ancient-language specialist was tall and rail- thin, his pale freckled complexion partially hidden behind large round glasses that weren’t, in Bronson’s opinion, a particularly good choice for the shape of his face. He was casually dressed in jeans and shirt, and looked more like a rebellious undergraduate than one of the leading British experts in the study of dead languages.

“I’ve got pictures of both the inscribed stones on this,” Bronson told him. “Which would you like to see first?”

“You sent us a couple showing the Latin phrase, but I’d like to look at those again, and any others you took.”

Bronson nodded and clicked the mouse button. The first image leapt onto the twenty-one-inch flat-panel monitor in front of them.

“I was right,” Goldman muttered, when a third picture was displayed. His fingers traced the words of the inscription. “There are some additional letters below the main carving.”

He turned to look at Bronson. “The close-up picture you sent was sharp enough,” he said, “but the flash reflected off the stone and I couldn’t make out whether the marks I could see were made by a chisel or were actually part of the inscription.”

Bronson looked at the screen, and saw what Goldman was pointing at. Below the three Latin words were two groups of much smaller letters that he’d not noticed previously.

“I see them. What do they mean?” he asked.

“Well, I believe the inscription itself to be first or second century A.D. and I’m basing that conclusion on the shape of the letters. Like all written alphabets, Latin letters changed in appearance over the years, and this looks to me like fairly classic first-century text.

“Now, the two sets of smaller letters might help us refine that date. The ‘PO’ of ‘PO

LDA’ could be the Latin abbreviation per ordo, meaning ‘by the order of.’ That was a kind of shorthand used by the Romans to indicate which official had instituted a particular project, though it’s unusual to find it as part of an inscription on a stone slab. It was more common to see it at the end of a piece of parchment—typically there would be a series of instructions followed by a date and then ‘PO’ and the name or initials of the senator or whoever had ordered the work to be carried out. So if you can find out who ‘LDA’ was, we might have a stab at dating this more accurately.”

“Any ideas?” Bronson asked.

Goldman grinned at him. “None at all, I’m afraid, and finding out won’t be easy.

Apart from the obvious difficulty of identifying somebody who lived two millennia ago from his initials and nothing else, the Romans had a habit of changing their names. Let me give you an example. Everyone’s heard of Julius Caesar, but very few people know that his full name was Imperator Gaius Julius Caesar Divus, or that he was normally just known as Gaius Julius Caesar. So his initials could be ‘JC,’ ‘GJC’ or even ‘IGJCD.’ ”

“I see what you mean. So ‘LDA’ could be almost anyone?”

“Well, no, not anyone. Whoever had this stone carved was a person of some importance, so we’re looking for a senator or a consul, someone like that, which will obviously narrow the field. Whoever the initials refer to will almost certainly be in the historical record, somewhere.”

Bronson looked again at the screen. “And these other letters here—‘MAM.’ What do you think they could stand for? Another abbreviation?”

Goldman shook his head. “If it is, it’s not one I’m familiar with. No, I think these letters are probably just the initials of the man who carved the stone—the mason himself. And I don’t think you’ve got the slightest chance of identifying him!”

“Well, that seems to have exhausted the potential of the first inscription,” Bronson said. “You thought that this stone might have been cut in half, so we checked throughout the house for the other piece. We didn’t find it but, on the other side of the same wall, in the dining room and directly behind the first stone, we found this.”

With something of a flourish, Bronson double-clicked one of the images on the memory stick and leaned back as a picture of the second inscription filled the screen.

“Ah,” Goldman said, “this is much more interesting, and much later. The Latin text on the first inscription was carved in capital letters, typical of first- and second-century Roman monumental inscriptions. But this is a cursive script, much more elegant and attractive.”

“We thought it might be Occitan,” Bronson suggested.

Goldman nodded. “You’re absolutely right—it is Occitan, and I’m fairly sure it’s medieval. Do you know anything about the language?”

“Not a thing. I put a few words into Internet search engines and those that generated any results were identified as Occitan. All except that word”—he pointed at the screen—“which seems to be Latin.”

“Ah, calix. A chalice. I’ll have to think about that. But the use of medieval Occitan