The First Apostle

screwed.”

“No, we’re not. His elevation doesn’t matter. Marcellus has given us height measurements for six hills, calculated from a single datum point. If the top of one hill was eight hundred feet above him and another was five hundred feet, there’s a difference of three hundred feet. So what you should be looking at on Google Earth are the differences in height between any two hills.”

“Yes, right, I see what you mean,” Bronson said. “I’ve told you before, Angela, but I’m really glad you’re here.”

He took a sheet of paper and quickly chose two of the points on the diagram. He converted the Roman numerals into feet, using a table Angela had found in one of her books, and then worked out the difference between them.

“Now, let’s see,” he muttered, turning back to the laptop.

But he still couldn’t find any two hills whose height difference fitted. After another hour, Angela took over for thirty minutes, but had no more luck than him.

“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Bronson asked, as Angela pushed the chair back and stood up.

“I need a drink,” she said. “Let’s go down to the bar and drown our sorrows with copious amounts of alcohol.”

“That’s perhaps not the best idea you’ve ever had, but it’s undeniably tempting,”

Bronson replied. “I’ll just grab my wallet.”

They found a vacant table in the corner of the bar. Bronson bought a bottle of decent red and poured two glasses.

“Do you want to eat in the hotel this evening?” he asked.

“Yes, why not?”

“OK. I’ll just book a table.”

When he returned to the bar, Angela was looking at the copy of the inscription Bronson had made. As he sat down she slid the paper across the table to him.

“There’s another clue there,” she said. “Something we haven’t even looked at.”

“What?” Bronson demanded.

Angela pointed at the wavy line that Bronson had thought looked something like a sine wave. “This is a purely functional inscription, right? No decoration of any sort.

So what the hell’s that supposed to be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the sea? Perhaps the northeast coast of Italy?”

Angela nodded. “You could be right, but whatever Marcellus buried had to be really important, otherwise why bother with the stone and all the rest? And if it was important, Nero wouldn’t have wanted it to be stuck in a hole on the other side of the country. He’d have needed to keep it fairly close to Rome. I think that shape probably represents a line of hills, and Marcellus included it so that anyone looking for the site in the future would have something obvious that would help to identify the search area. I think that line’s a deliberate marker.”

“OK,” Bronson said. “Finish that glass and let’s get back upstairs.”

Almost as soon as he sat down at the laptop he found something that might fit.

“Look at this,” he said, pointing at the computer screen.

Just more than thirty miles east of Rome, between the communes of Roiate and Piglio, was a long ridge that peaked at about 1,370 meters, or 4,400 feet. The most distinctive feature of the ridge was its northeast slope, which was furrowed in a regular pattern.

“I see what you mean. It does look quite like the drawing on the side of the skyphos.”

“That’s the first thing,” he said. “Now check this out.” Bronson moved the cursor over the top of the ridge and noted down the elevation Google provided. Then he moved it to the end of another ridge lying almost due east, and jotted down that figure as well.

Angela picked up a pencil, quickly did the subtraction and then compared it to those they’d derived from the diagram on the skyphos.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not exact, but it’s bloody close. There’s an error of maybe eight percent over the Latin numbers, that’s all.”

“Yes, but we’re using satellite photography and GPS technology, while Marcellus only had a diopter and whatever other surveying tools were available two thousand years ago. In the circumstances, I reckon that’s definitely close enough.”

“What about the other four locations?”

“Yes, I think I’ve found them as well. Watch.”

Swiftly Bronson moved the cursor over four additional locations on Google Earth and noted down their heights, and again passed the paper to Angela to do the calculations.

When she’d finished, she looked up with a smile. “Not exact, again, but certainly within the limits you’d expect from someone using first-century surveying tools. I think you might have found it, Chris.”

But Bronson shook his head. “I agree we’ve probably found the right area, but we still haven’t pin-pointed the physical location of the hiding place. I mean, the lines on the diagram cross, but not in a single point, which would have been the obvious way to locate the site. Instead they form a wide triangle.”

“No,” Angela agreed, “they don’t intersect at a single point, but right here, in the middle of the diagram, are the letters ‘PO LDA.’ And between the ‘PO’ and the

‘LDA’ is a dot. That was a common device in Latin to separate words in a piece of text. Now, why put those letters again in the diagram itself? They were already carved into the top section of the stone, directly below the ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ If they were going to be repeated, surely they would have been placed at the bottom of the diagram, near the ‘MAM’?

“But if this diagram shows the burial place of whatever Nero wanted hidden away, having ‘Per ordo Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’ in the center of the map does make sense. In fact, it’s a kind of double meaning. I think it means ‘This was done on the orders of Nero’ as well as ‘This is the location of the burial place.’ I believe those letters were placed in the middle of the diagram because the dot between the ‘O’ and the ‘L’ marks the site.”

“Yes, that’s as good a suggestion as any,” Bronson said. “And tomorrow morning we’ll drive over there and try to dig up whatever Nero ordered to be buried almost two thousand years ago.”

22

I

Bronson had worked out that the straight-line distance between Santa Marinella and their destination was only about seventy miles, but he knew it would be more like double that by road.

“Seventy miles isn’t that far,” Angela said, finishing her second cup of coffee. They’d walked into the dining room at seven, the earliest time that breakfast was available.

“Agreed. On a motorway it would be an hour, but on the sort of roads we’re likely to find, I reckon it’s at least two hours’ driving. But we’ve got a bunch of things to do before we get there, so it’s going to take three or four hours altogether.”

Bronson paid the bill and carried their bags down to the Renault Espace. His first stop was a newsagent’s on the outskirts of the town, where he bought a couple of large-scale maps of the area northeast of Rome.

Five miles down the road, they found a large out-of-town commercial center and, just as Bronson had hoped, a hardware supermarket.

“Stay here,” he said, “and lock the doors, just in case. I won’t be long. What size feet do you take? The continental size, I mean?”

“Forty or forty-one,” she replied, “if you mean shoes.”

“Shoes, feet, they’re all the same.”

Twenty-five minutes later he reappeared, pushing a laden cart. Angela hopped out as he approached and opened the trunk for him.

“Good lord,” she said, eyeing the contents of the shopping cart. “It looks as if you’ve got enough there for a week-long expedition.”

“Not quite,” Bronson replied, “but I do believe in being prepared.”