said.”
“Not necessarily. One of the few good things about the Mafia is that the organization has certain standards, and they don’t normally kill innocent bystanders. If you’re in their way, it’s a different matter. I think those two men had very specific orders to ensure that the relics were found and destroyed, and that Mandino and, presumably, his number two were to die. In fact, I think what we witnessed tonight was a
“Do you believe what that man said about Mark and Jackie? About who killed them?”
“I’ve no reason to doubt it,” Bronson replied, “and I’d have been quite happy to pull the trigger on Rogan and Mandino myself. We’ve had a hell of a time these last few days,” he added, his voice now low and bitter, “and all for nothing. Three people we knew are dead, and the relics we managed to recover have been destroyed, the secret they held now lost for all time. And the Catholic Church will just continue to preach its lies from pulpits around the world every Sunday as if they were literally the gospel truth.”
“I wouldn’t argue with any of that. But the important thing is that we’re still alive. I don’t see how we’d have got out of that basement if Josep hadn’t done what he did.”
“I know,” Bronson said, “but it still rankles with me.”
He fell silent, then somewhat hesitantly took her hand as they walked down the street. “I still can’t quite believe Mark and Jackie have gone.” His voice had softened as he thought again about his friends.
“Yes,” Angela replied. “And Jeremy Goldman too—I really enjoyed working with him. Their lives are over, and I suppose you could say that a chapter of our lives has ended at the same time.”
II
In the Museu Egipti, Puente was tidying the basement library. The bloodstains on the floor would need industrial cleaning equipment and, probably, special solvents, but they weren’t his concern. He was only interested in the relics sitting on his desk.
One by one, he carefully replaced the scrolls he’d removed from the special safe. The last one wouldn’t fit properly in the recess in the box, just as he had expected: it was a little too big. He would have to get a special container made for it as soon as possible. For the moment, he hunted around until he found a small cardboard box, filled it with cotton wool and carefully placed the scroll inside. Then he took a felt-tip pen and wrote “LEWIS” on the end of the box.
As he closed the safe he marveled again that none of the people in the room had thought to confirm that the scroll and diptychs he’d destroyed were the same ones that Angela had given him. Everyone had been focused on the guns, and on his deliberate piece of misdirection with the sprinkler system controls, and nobody had been really watching his hands.
It was a shame that he’d had to burn one of the museum’s prized possessions, but the early-second-century text was utterly insignificant compared to what he was now thinking of as the Lewis Scroll. He was disappointed that he’d had to destroy two of the museum’s few diptychs as well, but, in truth, they had been quite unremarkable, the writing on their wax surfaces almost completely illegible.
Not bad for an old man, Puente thought, chuckling to himself.
III
Bronson and Angela were heading out of Barcelona in the Nissan when Angela’s cell phone emitted a faint double-beep, indicating that a text message had been received.
She fished around in her handbag, pulled out the phone and looked at the screen.
“Who on earth’s texting you at this time of night?” Bronson asked.
“I don’t recognize the number—oh, it’s Josep. He’s probably just wishing us a safe journey.” She opened the message and stared at the screen. The text was short, and initially meant nothing at all to her.
“What does it say?”
“There are just two words. In Latin.
“Which means?” Bronson prompted.
“The rough translation would be ‘I have them,’ I suppose. What can he mean by that?”
Then the penny dropped, and Angela smiled to herself. Then she laughed out loud.
“I don’t know how he did it,” she said, “but Josep must have switched the relics we found for a scroll and a couple of diptychs from the museum’s collection.”
“You mean he destroyed three different relics?”
“Exactly.”
“Brilliant,” Bronson said. “Just sheer brilliance. I think that the pope and the Vatican—the whole of the Christian world, in fact—are going to go into massive shock when the professor publishes his research.”
Angela laughed again. “So we did manage it after all. We decoded the clues and found the relics, and those bastards working for the Vatican didn’t destroy them.”
“Yes, that’s a real result.” Bronson glanced appraisingly at Angela’s profile, shadowy in the darkness of the car. “Would you do it again?” he asked.
She turned and looked directly at him. “I don’t see relic-hunting as a viable career, somehow. Was that what you meant?”
“Not exactly. I was thinking more about us spending a bit of time together. We didn’t get on too badly, did we?”
Angela was silent for a few moments. “No promises, no commitment. Let’s see how things work out.”
They were both smiling as Bronson turned onto the
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is, of course, a novel and to the best of my knowledge no documents resembling either the Vitalian Codex or the
However, the central idea of this book is founded on fact because, despite my fiction, there is some historical evidence that St. Paul
The hypothesis is that Paul and Titus Flavius Josephus—a first-century Jewish historian—were employed by Rome to foster a peaceful messianic religion in Judea in an attempt to reduce the rebelliousness of the Jews and their opposition to Roman rule. If true, this suggests an interesting piece of lateral thinking on the part of the Roman emperors.
St. Paul
Unlike St. Peter, we are at least certain that the man who became known as St. Paul actually existed. Quite a lot is known about him, and some of his writings survive to this day.
His birth name was Saul and he was born in about A.D. 9 to a wealthy Jewish merchant in Tarsus in Cilicia. He was a member of the tribe of Benjamin, and was an Aramaic- and Greek-speaking Pharisee, one of the most ancient of the Jewish sects.
As a young man he was a violent opponent of Christ and was active in identifying those he saw as heretic Jews and delivering them for punishment.
Tradition holds that he was on his way to Damascus to continue his persecution of Jews when he was blinded by a light from heaven and underwent his celebrated conversion, after which he remained blind for some time. Once his sight was restored he became an ardent Christian. This apocryphal incident may have been inspired by ophthalmia neonatorum, a painful weakness of the eyes that left him almost blind in later life.
Whatever the reality of his “conversion” or motive in switching from persecutor of Christians to dedicated supporter of Jesus Christ, there are mixed views about his contribution to the Christian religion. One body of thought suggests that his views were so different from those of Jesus that his teachings are sometimes referred to as
“Pauline Christianity.”
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche viewed him as the anti-Christ, and the American Thomas Jefferson famously wrote that “Paul was the first corrupter of the teachings of Jesus” and actually tried to have his writings
