The First Apostle

“But there’s nothing else inside it,” Angela said, turning the vessel upside down. “I checked that when I was looking for a sittybos.”

Bronson looked confused.

“Remember?” Angela said. “It’s a kind of tag attached to a scroll that identifies its contents.”

“Oh, right,” Bronson said. “Well, maybe not anything inside it, but what about the outside? Is that just a random pattern on the side of the pot?”

Angela peered closely at the green-glazed pottery vessel and almost immediately she noticed something. Just below the rim on one side of the skyphos were three small letters separated by dots: “H•V•L.”

“Now, that’s odd,” she murmured. “There are three letters inscribed here—‘HVL’—and they obviously have to stand for ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ ”

“ ‘Here lie the liars,’ ” Bronson breathed. “That’s a definite link. So what’s that pattern underneath the letters?”

Below the inscribed letters was what looked almost like a sine wave: a line that undulated in a regular pattern, up and down, and with short diagonal lines running below it, sloping from top right to bottom left. Below the wavy line was a geometric pattern, three straight lines crisscrossing in the center and with a dot at each end.

Running along the lines were Latin numbers, followed by the letters “M•P,” then more numbers and the letter “A.” Beside each dot were other numbers, each followed by a “P.” In the very center of the design were the letters “PO•LDA,” and below that “M•A•M.”

“It’s not random,” Angela said decisively. “Whatever these lines mean, they indicate something definite, almost like a map.”

Bronson looked across at the skyphos Angela was holding. “But a map of what?”

20

I

Late that afternoon, the setting sun bathed the irregular rooftops and old walls of the ancient heart of the city of Rome with a golden glow. Pedestrians bustled to and fro along the wide pavements, and a constant stream of hooting and jostling vehicles fought its way around the Piazza di Santa Maria alle Fornaci. But Joseph Cardinal Vertutti saw none of it.

He sat down beside Mandino in the same cafe where the two men had first met. As the operation had been successfully concluded, he thought that it rounded things out nicely to hold their last meeting in the same place where they’d held their first.

But this time Mandino had insisted that they meet in a small back room.

“You have it?” Vertutti asked, his voice high and excited. His hands were trembling slightly, Mandino noticed.

“All in good time, Cardinal, all in good time.” A waiter knocked and entered with two cups of coffee. He placed them gently on the table and then withdrew, closing the door behind him. “Before I deliver anything, we have one small administrative detail to take care of. Have you transferred the money?”

“Yes,” Vertutti snapped. “I sent one hundred thousand euros to the account you specified.”

“You might think your word is sufficient proof, Eminence, but I know firsthand that the Vatican is just as capable of duplicity as the next person. Unless you have a transfer slip for me, this conversation will finish right here.”

Vertutti pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket. He opened it and extracted a slip of paper, which he passed across the table.

Mandino looked at it, smiled, and then tucked it away in his own wallet. The amount was correct, and in the “reference” section Vertutti had inserted “Purchase of religious artifacts,” which was a surprisingly accurate description of the transaction.

“Excellent,” Mandino said. “Now, you’ll be pleased to hear that we managed to retrieve the relic. I watched the man Bronson—Mark Hampton’s friend—retrieve the scroll, and we interceded immediately. Neither Bronson nor his wife, who was also present at the house, have any significant knowledge of what the Exomologesis contains, and so they don’t need to be eliminated.”

Mandino said nothing to Vertutti about what he’d told them about the scroll, or the embarrassing fact that the Englishman had sent him running for his life and had actually shot one of his bodyguards.

“Very generous of you,” Vertutti quipped sarcastically. “Where are they now?”

“They’re probably heading back to Britain. Now that we’ve recovered the relic, there’s nothing else for them here.”

Mandino was again being slightly economical with the truth. He’d already instructed Antonio Carlotti to advise one of his contacts in the Carabinieri that Bronson—a man wanted for questioning by the Metropolitan Police about a murder in Britain—was roaming at will around Italy. He’d even passed on details about the Renault Espace he’d seen parked outside the house. He was certain that the two of them would be picked up well before they reached the Italian border.

“So, where is the relic?” Vertutti asked impatiently.

Mandino opened his briefcase, removed a plastic container filled with a white, fluffy substance and passed it across the table.

Vertutti cautiously lifted out several layers of cotton wool to reveal the small scroll.

With trembling fingers, he gingerly picked up the ancient papyrus. He held it up—the expression on his face reflecting his knowledge of both its age and its terrible destructive power—then carefully unrolled it on the table in front of him. He nodded gravely, almost reverently, as he read through the short text.

“Even if I wasn’t sure about it,” he said, “the way this is written is an indication of the author’s identity.”

“What do you mean?” Mandino asked.

“The writing is bold and the letters large,” Vertutti said. “It’s not generally known, but the man who wrote this suffered from a medical condition known as ophthalmia neonatorum, which was fairly common at the time. This disease caused a progressive loss of sight and a very painful weakness in his eyes, and in his case eventually left him nearly blind. Writing was always difficult for him, and he probably normally used an amanuensis, a professional scribe. That facility was obviously not available to him in Judea when he was forced to write this document.”

Vertutti continued studying the relic for a few moments, then looked up. “I know we’ve had our differences of opinion, Mandino,” he said, with a somewhat strained smile, “but despite your views of the Church and the Vatican, I would like to congratulate you for recovering this. The Holy Father will be particularly pleased that we’ve managed to do so.”

Mandino inclined his head in acknowledgment. “What will you do with it now?

Destroy it?”

Vertutti shook his head. “I hope not,” he said. “I believe it should be secreted in the Apostolic Penitentiary along with the Vitalian Codex. Destroying an object of this age and importance is not something I believe the Vatican should contemplate doing, no matter what the context.”

Vertutti unrolled the last few inches of the scroll. Then he leaned forward to examine something at the end of the document, below the mark “SQVET.”

“Did you look at this?” he asked, an edge of tension in his voice.

“No,” Mandino replied. “I only checked the beginning of it, purely to make sure it was the correct document.”

“Oh, it’s the correct document all right. But this—this changes everything,” Vertutti said, pointing at the very end of the scroll.

Mandino squinted at the document. There were a few lines written in a different, smaller hand just above Nero’s imperial seal.

Vertutti translated the Latin aloud, then looked at Mandino.

“You know what you have to do,” he said.

II

Bronson and Angela found a small family-run hotel on the outskirts of Santa Marinella, on the Italian coast,