He sat down beside Mandino in the same café where the two men had first met. As the operation had been successfully concluded, he thought that it rounded things out nicely to hold their last meeting in the same place where they’d held their first. But this time Mandino had insisted that they meet in a small back room.
“You have it?” Vertutti asked, his voice high and excited. His hands were trembling slightly, Mandino noticed.
“All in good time, Cardinal, all in good time.” A waiter knocked and entered with two cups of coffee. He placed them gently on the table and then withdrew, closing the door behind him. “Before I deliver anything, we have one small administrative detail to take care of. Have you transferred the money?”
“Yes,” Vertutti snapped. “I sent one hundred thousand euros to the account you specified.”
“You might think your word is sufficient proof, Eminence, but I know firsthand that the Vatican is just as capable of duplicity as the next person. Unless you have a transfer slip for me, this conversation will finish right here.”
Vertutti pulled a wallet from his jacket pocket. He opened it and extracted a slip of paper, which he passed across the table.
Mandino looked at it, smiled, and then tucked it away in his own wallet. The amount was correct, and in the “reference” section Vertutti had inserted “Purchase of religious artifacts,” which was a surprisingly accurate description of the transaction.
“Excellent,” Mandino said. “Now, you’ll be pleased to hear that we managed to retrieve the relic. I watched the man Bronson—Mark Hampton’s friend—retrieve the scroll, and we interceded immediately. Neither Bronson nor his wife, who was also present at the house, have any significant knowledge of what the Exomologesis contains, and so they don’t need to be eliminated.”
Mandino said nothing to Vertutti about what he’d told them about the scroll, or the embarrassing fact that the Englishman had sent him running for his life and had actually shot one of his bodyguards.
“Very generous of you,” Vertutti quipped sarcastically. “Where are they now?”
“They’re probably heading back to Britain. Now that we’ve recovered the relic, there’s nothing else for them here.”
Mandino was again being slightly economical with the truth. He’d already instructed Antonio Carlotti to advise one of his contacts in the Carabinieri that Bronson—a man wanted for questioning by the Metropolitan Police about a murder in Britain—was roaming at will around Italy. He’d even passed on details about the Renault Espace he’d seen parked outside the house. He was certain that the two of them would be picked up well before they reached the Italian border.
“So, where is the relic?” Vertutti asked impatiently.
Mandino opened his briefcase, removed a plastic container filled with a white, fluffy substance and passed it across the table.
Vertutti cautiously lifted out several layers of cotton wool to reveal the small scroll. With trembling fingers, he gingerly picked up the ancient papyrus. He held it up—the expression on his face reflecting his knowledge of both its age and its terrible destructive power—then carefully unrolled it on the table in front of him. He nodded gravely, almost reverently, as he read through the short text.
“Even if I wasn’t sure about it,” he said, “the way this is written is an indication of the author’s identity.”
“What do you mean?” Mandino asked.
“The writing is bold and the letters large,” Vertutti said. “It’s not generally known, but the man who wrote this suffered from a medical condition known as ophthalmia neonatorum, which was fairly common at the time. This disease caused a progressive loss of sight and a very painful weakness in his eyes, and in his case eventually left him nearly blind. Writing was always difficult for him, and he probably normally used an amanuensis, a professional scribe. That facility was obviously not available to him in Judea when he was forced to write this document.”
Vertutti continued studying the relic for a few moments, then looked up. “I know we’ve had our differences of opinion, Mandino,” he said, with a somewhat strained smile, “but despite your views of the Church and the Vatican, I would like to congratulate you for recovering this. The Holy Father will be particularly pleased that we’ve managed to do so.”
Mandino inclined his head in acknowledgment. “What will you do with it now? Destroy it?”
Vertutti shook his head. “I hope not,” he said. “I believe it should be secreted in the Apostolic Penitentiary along with the Vitalian Codex. Destroying an object of this age and importance is not something I believe the Vatican should contemplate doing, no matter what the context.”
Vertutti unrolled the last few inches of the scroll. Then he leaned forward to examine something at the end of the document, below the mark “SQVET.”
“Did you look at this?” he asked, an edge of tension in his voice.
“No,” Mandino replied. “I only checked the beginning of it, purely to make sure it was the correct document.”
“Oh, it’s the correct document all right. But this—this changes everything,” Vertutti said, pointing at the very end of the scroll.
Mandino squinted at the document. There were a few lines written in a different, smaller hand just above Nero’s imperial seal.
Vertutti translated the Latin aloud, then looked at Mandino.
“You know what you have to do,” he said.
II
Bronson and Angela found a small family-run hotel on the outskirts of Santa Marinella, on the Italian coast, northwest of Rome. It offered off-street parking in a courtyard at the rear of the building and seemed quietly anonymous. Bronson booked in, taking the last remaining twin room, and carried their bags upstairs.
The room was south-facing, light and airy, with a view over the courtyard. Angela opened her bag, lifted out a bulky bundle of clothes and laid it on the bed.
“We need decent light,” Bronson said, moving one of the bedside tables over to stand it in front of the window.
Behind him, Angela carefully unwrapped the clothes, layer by layer, to reveal the skyphos nestling in the center of the bundle. She placed it gently on the table Bronson had moved.
Bronson removed the digital camera from his overnight bag. He crouched down between the table and the window so that the full light of the afternoon sun fell on the skyphos, making the old green glaze of the earthenware pot glow. He snapped a couple of dozen pictures of the vessel, from all sides and angles, then finally took a pencil and paper and made as accurate a drawing as he could of the inscribed lines and figures on its side.
“So all we have to do now,” Angela said, as Bronson copied the photographs onto his laptop, “is work out what the hell that diagram—or whatever it is—means.”
“Exactly.”
They looked at the lines, letters and numbers.
“I still think it might be some kind of map,” Angela suggested hesitantly.
“You may be right. But if it is, I’ve no idea how to decipher it. I mean, it’s just three lines and a bunch of numbers. Maybe we should ignore it for the moment and look again at Marcus Asinius Marcellus and Nero. We guessed the literal meanings of ‘MAM’ and ‘PO LDA,’ but we never really deduced why they were inscribed on that slab. If we can do that, it might give us a steer.”
“Back to the books?”
“You check the books. I’ll use the Internet. Now that those two Italians have taken the scroll, hopefully no one will be looking for us.”
Bronson logged on to the hotel’s wireless network on his laptop, while Angela leafed through the books that she had bought in Cambridge.
Bronson started by looking for references to Marcus Asinius Marcellus, because they surmised that he had probably been responsible for the Latin inscription on the stone in the Hamptons’ house. They already knew Marcellus had been involved in a scandal over a forged will, and had only been spared execution by the personal intervention of Nero himself.