“That sounds easy, but only if you say it quickly,” Angela commented wryly. “How the hell are you going to manage that? There must be hundreds of hill formations outside Rome.”
“I have a secret weapon,” Bronson said, with a smile. “It’s called Google Earth, and I can use it to check the elevation of any point on the surface of the planet. There are six reference points on that diagram, so all I have to do is convert the figures from it into modern units of measurement, and then find six hills that match those criteria.
“Then we find the liars.”
II
On the way back from Ponticelli to Rome, Gregori Mandino telephoned Pierro and ordered him to wait at a restaurant on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. By the very nature of the business he was in, Mandino had no office and tended to hold most of his meetings in cafés and restaurants. He also told Pierro to find detailed maps of the city and the surrounding area, and of the structures built in ancient Rome, and bring those with him, along with a laptop computer.
They met in a small private dining room at the back of the restaurant.
“So you found the Exomologesis?” Pierro asked, once Mandino and Rogan had sat down and ordered drinks.
“Yes,” Mandino replied, “and I really thought that would be the end of the matter. But when Vertutti unrolled the scroll completely, there was a postscript to it that we hadn’t expected.”
“A postscript?”
“A short note in Latin accompanied by the imperial seal of Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus. It gave Vertutti quite a scare, because it implied that the scroll was only a part of what Marcellus had hidden on Nero’s instructions, and wasn’t even the most important part at that.”
“So what else did he bury?”
Mandino told him what Vertutti had translated from the Latin.
“Are you serious?” Pierro asked, a slight but perceptible tremor in his voice. “I can’t believe it. Both of them?”
“That’s what the Latin text claimed.”
The academic looked distinctly pale despite the warm lighting of the room. “But I don’t—I mean—oh, God. You really believe that?”
Mandino shrugged. “My views are irrelevant. And I frankly don’t care whether what’s written on the scroll is true or not.”
“Could those relics really have lasted two thousand years?”
“Vertutti isn’t prepared to take the chance. The point, Pierro, is that we’re still under contract to resolve this, so I’m expecting you to decipher what’s on the stone.”
“Where is it now?”
“We’ve left it in the car. Rogan has taken pictures of the inscription, and you can work from those.”
Rogan handed over the data card from the digital camera.
Pierro slipped it into a document pocket on his computer bag. “I’d like to see the stone for myself.”
Mandino nodded. “The car’s just around the corner. We’ll go and take a look at it in a few minutes.”
“And what exactly is the inscription? A map? Directions?”
“We’re not sure. It’s definitely the lower section of the stone with the Latin inscription—we put the two pieces together and they match—but it seems to be just three straight lines, six dots and some letters and numbers. It’s more like a diagram than a map, but it must indicate where the relics are hidden, otherwise there would have been no point in carving it in the first place, and no reason for anyone to hide the stone.”
“Lines?” Pierro murmured. “You mentioned letters and numbers. Can you remember what letters? Perhaps ‘P’ and ‘MP’?”
“Yes, and I think ‘A’ as well. Why? Do you know what they mean?”
“Well, perhaps. Pedes or passus, mille passus and actus. They’re Roman measurements of distance. Whoever prepared the diagram might have picked some prominent buildings or landmarks in Rome and used those as reference points.”
“I hope you’re right,” Mandino said. “We’ll go and look at the stone now, then you can get to work.” He got up and led the way out of the restaurant.
III
Bronson had been trying to find matches between the heights shown on the diagram from the skyphos and those on Google Earth for more than an hour.
“This could take forever,” he muttered, leaning back in his chair and stretching to ease his cramped joints. “This bloody country is full of hills, and God knows which ones Marcellus picked. And that’s assuming he did use hills.”
“No matches at all?” Angela asked.
“None. I’ve taken your conversions of the Roman numbers and I’ve assumed a fudge factor of ten percent above and below, but even doing that I’m finding hardly any hills on Google that even come close.”
“How many?”
“Maybe eight or ten hills that fit the criteria, that’s all, and they’re all down by the coast and quite a way outside Rome.”
For a few seconds Angela didn’t respond, just stared at the laptop’s screen, then she chuckled softly.
“Call yourself a detective?” she asked. “Do the initials ‘AGL’ and ‘AMSL’ mean anything to you?”
“Of course. ‘Above Ground Level’ and ‘Above Mean Sea Level.’ I—oh, hell, I see what you mean.”
“Exactly. Google Earth measures the height of objects above sea level—it gives you their altitude—but Marcellus wouldn’t have been able to work that out. He would have been standing on the ground close to the burial site. From there, the only thing he could measure with his diopter would be the heights of hills above his position, not their heights above sea level.”
“You’re right,” Bronson said, despair in his voice, “and because we don’t know what his elevation was, we’re screwed.”
“No, we’re not. His elevation doesn’t matter. Marcellus has given us height measurements for six hills, calculated from a single datum point. If the top of one hill was eight hundred feet above him and another was five hundred feet, there’s a difference of three hundred feet. So what you should be looking at on Google Earth are the differences in height between any two hills.”
“Yes, right, I see what you mean,” Bronson said. “I’ve told you before, Angela, but I’m really glad you’re here.”
He took a sheet of paper and quickly chose two of the points on the diagram. He converted the Roman numerals into feet, using a table Angela had found in one of her books, and then worked out the difference between them.
“Now, let’s see,” he muttered, turning back to the laptop.
But he still couldn’t find any two hills whose height difference fitted. After another hour, Angela took over for thirty minutes, but had no more luck than him.
“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Bronson asked, as Angela pushed the chair back and stood up.
“I need a drink,” she said. “Let’s go down to the bar and drown our sorrows with copious amounts of alcohol.”
“That’s perhaps not the best idea you’ve ever had, but it’s undeniably tempting,” Bronson replied. “I’ll just grab my wallet.”
They found a vacant table in the corner of the bar. Bronson bought a bottle of decent red and poured two glasses.
“Do you want to eat in the hotel this evening?” he asked.
“Yes, why not?”
“OK. I’ll just book a table.”
When he returned to the bar, Angela was looking at the copy of the inscription Bronson had made. As he sat down she slid the paper across the table to him.
“There’s another clue there,” she said. “Something we haven’t even looked at.”
“What?” Bronson demanded.
Angela pointed at the wavy line that Bronson had thought looked something like a sine wave. “This is a purely functional inscription, right? No decoration of any sort. So what the hell’s that supposed to be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the sea? Perhaps the northeast coast of Italy?”