“Suppose the roof caves in when you get inside?”
“Angela, that cave’s stood here for the last two thousand years without collapsing, so as long as it can hold itself together for another ten minutes I should be fine.”
“Well, just be careful.”
“I’m always careful. Now pass me the flashlight and the camera, please.”
Bronson slid the camera into his pocket and shone the flashlight inside the opening.
“Can you see anything?” Angela asked.
“Not much. I’ll have to get right inside.”
Bronson lay flat on his stomach, held the flashlight out in front of him, and crawled slowly inside the cave.
II
The small cavern was around ten feet long, seven feet wide with a curved roof about four feet in height at the center, tapering to a little more than half that at the sides.
Bronson crouched down and looked around him, the beam of the flashlight dancing over the rough-hewn stone walls and the dusty floor.
It was immediately clear that Angela was right: the “liars” weren’t books or documents. Lying along each side of the cave were two skeletons, both of them obviously very old and tremendously fragile. Tiny scraps of coarsely woven cloth still clung to some of the bones. The skull of one skeleton was lying about a foot from the neck vertebrae.
“What is it?” Angela called.
“Hang on,” Bronson said, for a moment hardly trusting himself to speak. He was overwhelmed by an incredible sense of age, of time standing still. He reached out and touched the chisel marks on the stone walls. They were as sharp and clear as if they’d been made yesterday, though he knew the mason had died two thousand years earlier.
He sniffed the air. Faintly reminiscent of a church or cathedral, the cave had a dry, musty smell, overlaid with a faint hint of mushrooms. Really, really old mushrooms.
And then he looked down at the two pathetic piles of bones, feeling the hairs begin to rise on the back of his neck.
“There are two skeletons in here,” he called, looking carefully at the detached skull.
“Just dust and bones, and really old. But I don’t think either of them died of old age.”
“You mean they were murdered? How can you tell?”
“Hang on while I take some pictures. I daren’t touch them—they’d probably crumble away to nothing if I did.”
Bronson placed the flashlight on a rock so that its beam shone down the long axis of the cave and began to snap pictures of the interior of the chamber. He began with a panorama of the entire structure, photographing the floor, roof, walls and entrance, before moving on to the remains of the bodies. He took several of each one, first of the entire skeleton and then numerous close-up shots, concentrating on the skull and neck bones, especially a clearly severed vertebra on the first skeleton. On the second he took several pictures of the wrist and ankle bones, where the remains of rusted nails still protruded.
Bronson shivered, but not with cold. He looked around the tomb—a tomb as old as time itself—almost fearfully, then stared down at the bones again, bones that had been lying there undisturbed for two millennia. The bones of two men. One beheaded, the other crucified.
III
The pilot swung the helicopter around so that its nose pointed into the wind, then lowered the collective and settled the aircraft on the ground. He turned slightly in his seat and nodded to Mandino.
“Go,” Mandino said, and gestured to his right, where the four-by-four they’d spotted from the air was parked about sixty yards away across the rough ground.
One of the men slid open the side door and jumped down to the ground. He reached back inside the helicopter, picked up a Kalashnikov assault rifle and released the safety catch. He waited for his companion to appear, and then both men began running quickly toward the target, their weapons at the ready.
Mandino and Rogan watched their approach from the safety of the chopper. They hoped that Bronson and the woman had led them directly to the tomb. Mandino was impressed by their tenacity. In other circumstances, he might even have been prepared to let them live.
The two men split up when they got to about thirty yards from the vehicle, so as to approach it from different sides, and to offer two targets if it came to a firefight.
Mandino watched critically as they closed in, but the result wasn’t what he had expected. Both of his men almost immediately slung their assault rifles over their shoulders, peered inside the jeep, and then jogged back to the helicopter.
The moment they were strapped in and wearing headsets, Mandino fired questions at them.
“What happened?”
“It’s the wrong jeep,” one of them replied, panting slightly. “We were looking for a Toyota Land Cruiser, right?”
“Yes,” Mandino replied.
“Well, that’s a short-wheelbase Nissan Patrol. It looks similar, but it’s a different vehicle. That one has a rifle rack in the back and the hood’s cold. It probably belongs to a hunter or some local farmer who drove up here this morning and who’s still out in the hills somewhere.”
“Shit,” Mandino muttered, and turned back to the pilot. “Get us airborne again.
They must be up here somewhere.”
With the scene recorded on the data card inside his camera, Bronson looked around the cave again. He couldn’t understand why a couple of rotting corpses—even if one of them had been crucified and the other beheaded—could have been that important to the Roman Emperor. Dead bodies were not exactly a rare commodity in ancient Rome, so either there had to be something really special about these two victims, or there was something else hidden in the cave.
Bronson slipped the camera back into his pocket and shone the beam of the flashlight around the chamber, looking carefully at every inch of the rock. It wasn’t until he surveyed the interior for a second time that he saw, at the far end of the cave, what looked like a worked rock, its sides and top squared off. Maybe that carried an inscription or something that would explain what he’d found.
He crawled across the floor, but when he reached it, he found that the stone was completely blank. It looked as if someone had flattened the top surface in preparation for an inscription, but had never finished the job.
It was only as he began backing away that he noticed a line of darker material running around the lower part of the stone. He crawled back to study it more carefully. He soon realized that what he’d assumed was a large worked rock was actually one flat stone resting upon another, larger, stone like a lid. The gap between the two had been sealed with what looked to him like some kind of thick wax.
Bronson’s pulse began to race. The two stones obviously formed a kind of safe, and whatever was hidden inside the cavity had been secreted away from the elements for two millennia. That made sense. It wasn’t just the bodies themselves that were important: it was whatever had been buried with them.
He took a couple of pictures of the two stones, then tried lifting off the upper slab. It was stuck fast. He’d need to increase his leverage if he was going to be able to move the stone lid.
Bronson crawled back to the mouth of the cave and called out to Angela.
“I’ve found something else,” he said, “but I need the crowbar to get inside it.”
“Hang on a minute.”
For a few seconds there was silence, then Bronson heard the clatter of steel on rock and the end of the tool appeared in the narrow entrance to the chamber.
“Thanks.” He crawled back to the far end of the cave and slid the end of the crowbar into the sealing wax. But the wax, or whatever it was, was a lot tougher than it looked. He tried again, this time ramming the tool firmly between the two slabs, then tried to lever off the upper stone.