‘Don’t try to tell me you planned this back then,’ Costas panted.
‘Just a contingency. But sending Morgan to orchestrate the press release and find Ben was a big gamble.’
‘A serious bit of time management.’
Jack jerked his head towards the dark opening of the cistern in the floor. ‘I just thought something like this might happen.’
‘So Elizabeth really told you his name?’
Jack shook his head, and paused. ‘We only spoke for a few moments outside the villa in Herculaneum. Maybe she was about to tell me, or thought she’d be able to tell me later. Anyway, Jeremy and I worked through all the possibilities. Our man’s mention of the Viking felag was the giveway, when he gave us his spiel under St Peter’s. We’ve been head to head with this guy before. That narrowed it down.’
‘I’m really sorry about Elizabeth, Jack.’
‘We don’t know anything yet for sure. I’m going to get Ben and the police to give this guy a going-over before we leave this place, though I doubt whether he’ll spill anything.’
‘His henchman might.’
Jack looked at the unconscious figure sprawled on the floor beside them, a policeman standing above him. ‘God knows, he was probably related to her.’
Helena stood up, and put her arms around Jack. He could feel her shaking, but she was putting on a brave face. ‘That was nicely choreographed. Not the Jack Howard I remember. Planning ahead was never your strong point. You always followed your nose.’
‘That reminds me,’ Costas said, sneezing again. ‘Thanks for the bit about the smell of death. A nice little touch. I nearly threw up into that gag.’
‘I thought you needed a little incentive.’
‘Never mention that stuff again, Jack. Never.’
‘Never,’ Jack said solemnly.
Cardinal Ritter had been rooted to the spot beside the altar, a policeman guarding him. Suddenly there was a commotion as the gunman on the floor regained consciousness and grabbed the leg of the policeman guarding him, before being kicked back. The other policeman swung round instinctively, taking his eye off his charge for a second. In that moment of inattention the cardinal lunged forward and grabbed the bronze cylinder, then stumbled with it towards the entrance to the Chapel of St Vartan. ‘I have it now,’ he said. ‘I will destroy it. You will never know what it contains.’
‘Wrong again.’ Jack reached into his bag, and carefully pulled out another cylinder, a marble one, the cylinder he had taken from the underwater chamber only twenty minutes before, from the place where Everett had hidden it in 1918. ‘What you’ve got there is a bronze cylinder from a tomb in London. A very nice artefact, remarkable really. Probably late Iron Age. And it’s empty, by the way.’
The cardinal snarled, and tore the lid off the cylinder, peering inside. He swayed, then seemed frozen to the spot. Jack passed the stone cylinder to Costas, caught his eye, then launched himself forward. In an instant he had the cardinal in a headlock, forcing his right arm behind his back and pushing it up until the man bellowed in pain. Jack was tempted to squeeze the headlock fractionally tighter, to jerk upwards, to hear the crack. But it was too easy, too quick, and there was an off-chance the police interrogation might work. He relented slightly, keeping the man’s arm pinned with one hand, and took the bronze cylinder off him, placing it back beside the altar. Then he pushed the cardinal’s arm up again until he whimpered in pain. Jack held him like a vice, and pressed himself close behind Ritter’s left ear. He could smell the sweat, the fear.
‘You see?’ Jack whispered, steering the cardinal’s head in the direction of the press release on the laptop screen, and then pushing his face close to the precious cylinder in Costas’ hands. ‘You of all people should know, Eminence. A preacher of the Holy Gospels. The power of the written word.’
25
T he next morning they crammed into a four-wheel-drive Toyota, and Helena drove them up the great rift of the Jordan Valley from Jerusalem towards the Sea of Galilee. Costas and Jack were sitting beside Helena, and Morgan, Maria and Jeremy were in the back. Maria and Jeremy had joined them straight from Tel Aviv airport. Jack had called them immediately after coming out of the Holy Sepulchre the day before. He knew that much of his anxiety about their safety could now be dispelled, but it was still a huge relief to have them alongside. Hiebermeyer was another matter entirely. The world’s press corps seemed to have converged on him in Naples, and he had refused to budge. Jack knew he would be relishing every moment, but it was also a way of deflecting press attention from their activities in Israel. They still had one final act to play out, a final folding-back of history to the event that had led them on one of the most extraordinary quests of Jack’s career.
‘Any word?’ Costas said to Jack. His voice juddered as Helena slammed the vehicle over a patch of potholes.
‘Nothing yet.’ Jack had taken Jeremy aside the instant he arrived at their hotel in Jerusalem that morning. The news was not good. Elizabeth had vanished the evening after Jack had spoken to her, walked away from the site at Herculaneum and never returned. Jeremy’s enquiries had been met with only shrugs and silence. ‘But maybe that’s Naples for you,’ Jack said. ‘And we hadn’t spoken for fifteen years, since she left me. So I can hardly expect an instant pick-up.’
‘I’ll pray for her, Jack,’ Helena said, fighting the wheel. ‘But she may just have walked away. Sounds like she’s done it before.’
‘I had a strange vision in the tomb below the Holy Sepulchre, you know,’ Jack said. ‘I seemed to see her through the water, but it was a kind of odd composite, as if there were someone actually lying on the stone slab.’
‘An Agamemnon moment?’ Costas said.
‘She’d always been on my mind, you know, over all those years,’ Jack said. ‘It was the way it ended between us. It never really did end, she just left. It all came welling up when I was holding Ritter down in the chapel yesterday. It was what he said, about bringing Elizabeth back into the fold. In that instant everything seemed to be his fault. I nearly broke his neck, you know. I could do it now.’
‘At least he’s out of the way.’
‘For the time being. But he’ll be back. He and his henchman are only being held under the rules of the curfew, for carrying an open weapon and for assaulting a police officer. Kidnap would have been more serious, but the patriarch refused to press charges. That’s why Ben’s interrogation won’t get anywhere. Ritter knows he’ll be on a plane back to Rome within days. And all the press exposure, the naming of names, what I wrote in that article, that’ll dissipate like leaves in the wind. Organizations like his have weathered this kind of thing before. He’ll be quietly absorbed back.’
‘With public awareness of the concilium, the law might be able to exert a stronger arm,’ Maria said.
‘Whose law, exactly?’ Jeremy asked.
‘And it depends how much people believe all this,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, you said it, Jack, big exposes about Church conspiracies quickly become yesterday’s news, unless you can actually pin murder and corruption on them. And we’re hardly the first to claim we’ve found some kind of lost gospel.’
‘We haven’t seen it yet,’ Maria said, nudging Jack.
‘Remember what Jack said to Ritter,’ Helena said. ‘The power of the written word. If we’ve truly got it, then people will believe.’
‘Even if it rocks the foundations of the Church?’ Maria asked.
‘Freedom for people to choose their own spiritual path, without fear, guilt, persecution, the concilium,’ Helena said. That’s why I’m here. If we’ve found something that will help people make that choice, then we’ll have done some good.’