He still remembered the thrill when he had first crouched at this spot. It was during the excavation of the necropolis, when all attention was focused on the tomb of St Peter. He and another young initiate had discovered this passageway, an early Christian catacomb sealed off since antiquity. It was better preserved than the rest of the necropolis, with the niches still plastered over and the burials intact. They had gone inside, just the two of them. Then they had made their extraordinary discovery. Only a few had ever been told of it: the pontiff, the head of the college of cardinals, the man who held the position he now held, the other members of the concilium. It was one of the greatest secrets of the Holy See, ammunition for the day when the forces of darkness might reach the holy gates, when the Church might need to rally all its reserves to fight for its very existence.
He made his way towards a flickering pool of light at the end of the passageway. Along the way he passed the images they had seen that first day, simple, crude expressions of early faith that still moved him powerfully, more visceral than any of the embellishments in the church above. Christ in a boat, casting a net, a woman seated beside him. Christ on fire, rising with his two crucified companions above the flames, a burning mountain in the background. And names everywhere, on the tomb niches, names made from simple mosaics pressed into the plaster. Priscilla in Pace. Zakariah in Pace. Chi-rho symbols, incised images of baskets of bread, a dove holding an olive branch. Images that became more frequent as he drew closer to the source of light, as if people had been yearning to be interred near that spot, crowding in on it. And then he was there. The passageway widened slightly, and he could see that the light ahead came from candles on each corner of a plinth set in the floor, a tomb. It was a simple structure, raised a few inches on plaster, and was covered with large Roman roof tiles. He could see the name scratched on the surface. He made the sign again, and whispered the words that had long been suspected, but that only he and a few others knew to be true. The Basilica of St Peter and St Paul.
Two others were already there, cassocked figures seated in low rock-cut niches on either side of the tomb, their faces obscured in shadow. The man made the sign again. ‘ In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti,’ he said. He bowed slightly to each in turn. ‘Eminences.’
‘Monsignor. Please be seated.’ The words were in Italian. ‘The concilium is complete.’
The catacomb was damp, keeping the dust down, but the wreathing smoke from the candles made his eyes smart, and he blinked hard. ‘I came as soon as I received your summons, Eminence.’
‘You know why we are here?’
‘The concilium only meets when the sanctity of the Holy See is threatened.’
‘For almost two thousand years it has been so,’ the other said. ‘From the time of the coming of St Paul to the brethren, when the concilium first met in the Phlegraean Fields. We are soldiers of our Lord, and we do his bidding. Dies irae, dies illa, solvet saeclum in favilla.’
‘Amen.’
‘We accept only the true word of the Messiah, no other.’
‘Amen.’
‘We have met once already this year. We have thwarted the search for the lost Jewish treasures of the Temple. But now a greater darkness threatens us, a heresy that would seek to destroy the true Church itself. The heresy of those who would deny the sanctity of the ordained, who would seek to poison the ministry of St Paul, who believe that the word of our Lord lies elsewhere, outside the Gospels. For almost two thousand years we have fought it, with all our power and all our guile. Now the heresy has arisen again. That which we had hoped destroyed, lost for ever, has been found. A blasphemy, a lie, ammunition of the Devil.’
‘What would the concilium have us do?’
The voice when it replied was steely, icy cold, a voice that brooked no debate, that sought no reply.
‘ Seek it.’
The sky was streaked with gold as Jack brought the Lynx helicopter down towards the landing lights on Seaquest II ’s stern. Maria was in the co-pilot’s seat and Costas was stretched out in the rear, snoring heavily. They had waved Hiebermeyer off at the helipad near Herculaneum, just as it began to rain, a heavy, pelting downpour that took Jack’s full attention as they lifted off. He had been quiet for the rest of the flight, preoccupied with his own thoughts after his encounter with Elizabeth and then focused on an e-mail exchange on the helicopter’s computer. It had taken less than an hour to fly south from the Bay of Naples, skirting the dark mass of the Calabrian mountains and then veering offshore to the ship’s position some ten nautical miles north of the Strait of Messina. The evening had become startlingly clear, almost pellucid, the air cleansed and the sea ruffled by the dying breeze from the west, but as the rotor churned up propwash on either side of the ship it was as if they were descending through a vortex of water, the landing lights illuminating the spray like a twister swirling off the stern.
The Lynx thumped to a halt and Jack waited for the rotors to stop before unbuckling himself and opening the door, giving a thumbs-up to the crew chief who was lashing the pontoons to the deck. He took off his helmet, waited as Costas and Maria did the same and then got out and led them straight into a hatchway at the forward end of the helipad. Moments later they were in the ship’s main conservation lab, the door shut behind them. Jack chose a workstation with a computer console on one side and a light table on the other, then activated a fluorescent bulb on a retractable metal arm above the table and sat down. He pulled out a two-way radio from his flight overalls and pressed the key for the secure IMU channel. There was a crackle and he spoke into the receiver. ‘Maurice, this is Jack. We’re on Seaquest, safe and sound. I’ll update you on any progress. Over.’ He waited for an affirmative, then placed the radio beside the monitor and slipped the strap of his old khaki bag over his head, placing the bag on his lap and pulling on a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser under the table.
‘Do you think he can hold the fort?’ Costas said.
‘Maurice? He’s a professional. He knows how to play the authorities. He knows exactly how to shut down an excavation. All he has to do is say that the tunnel’s unsafe, in danger of collapse, and they’ll board it up. The superintendency didn’t want any new excavation in the villa anyway. And they’ve got the ancient statue of Anubis to feed the press, more than enough to satisfy the public that the archaeology’s being done. We’re sticking with my revised plan. Reuters will get told, but not about the library, not yet. As soon as we’ve seen through wherever this is leading us, I’ll make a call which will expose the whole thing. Maria took hundreds of digital pictures, and they’re all here. They look like those first views of King Tut’s tomb. Absolutely sensational, front-page stuff. The authorities will have no choice but to open up the site properly, for the world to see what we’ve seen.’
‘I’ll be back there with Maurice as soon as we’ve finished here,’ Maria said.
‘That’s crucial, Maria. You can keep his blood pressure down. You obviously make a great team.’ He grinned at her, then opened his bag. ‘Now let’s see what we’ve got.’
Seconds later the extraordinary find Jack had taken from the villa chamber at Herculaneum lay in front of them on the light table. It looked much as Costas and Jack had first seen it, with each side of the scroll wound round a wooden stick, an umbilicus, and lines of ancient writing visible where the scroll was open in between. Jack attached small foam pads with retractor wires to the ends of each umbilicus and carefully drew the scroll wider apart, each wire attached to the edge of the light table and secured with ratchets. Now they could see the entire column of text, similar to the page of a modern book. ‘This is how the Greeks and Romans read them, from side to side, unrolling the scroll to reveal each page, like this,’ Maria said. ‘People often think scrolls were awkward, because they assume they were written as continuous text from one end to the other, unrolled a bit at a time. In fact, they were almost as convenient as a codex, a modern book.’