Angela nodded. “You could be right, but whatever Marcellus buried had to be really important, otherwise why bother with the stone and all the rest? And if it was important, Nero wouldn’t have wanted it to be stuck in a hole on the other side of the country. He’d have needed to keep it fairly close to Rome. I think that shape probably represents a line of hills, and Marcellus included it so that anyone looking for the site in the future would have something obvious that would help to identify the search area. I think that line’s a deliberate marker.”
“OK,” Bronson said. “Finish that glass and let’s get back upstairs.”
Almost as soon as he sat down at the laptop he found something that might fit.
“Look at this,” he said, pointing at the computer screen.
Just more than thirty miles east of Rome, between the communes of Roiate and Piglio, was a long ridge that peaked at about 1,370 meters, or 4,400 feet. The most distinctive feature of the ridge was its northeast slope, which was furrowed in a regular pattern.
“I see what you mean. It does look quite like the drawing on the side of the skyphos.”
“That’s the first thing,” he said. “Now check this out.” Bronson moved the cursor over the top of the ridge and noted down the elevation Google provided. Then he moved it to the end of another ridge lying almost due east, and jotted down that figure as well.
Angela picked up a pencil, quickly did the subtraction and then compared it to those they’d derived from the diagram on the skyphos.
“Well,” she said, “it’s not exact, but it’s bloody close. There’s an error of maybe eight percent over the Latin numbers, that’s all.”
“Yes, but we’re using satellite photography and GPS technology, while Marcellus only had a diopter and whatever other surveying tools were available two thousand years ago. In the circumstances, I reckon that’s definitely close enough.”
“What about the other four locations?”
“Yes, I think I’ve found them as well. Watch.”
Swiftly Bronson moved the cursor over four additional locations on Google Earth and noted down their heights, and again passed the paper to Angela to do the calculations.
When she’d finished, she looked up with a smile. “Not exact, again, but certainly within the limits you’d expect from someone using first-century surveying tools. I think you might have found it, Chris.”
But Bronson shook his head. “I agree we’ve probably found the right area, but we still haven’t pin-pointed the physical location of the hiding place. I mean, the lines on the diagram cross, but not in a single point, which would have been the obvious way to locate the site. Instead they form a wide triangle.”
“No,” Angela agreed, “they don’t intersect at a single point, but right here, in the middle of the diagram, are the letters ‘PO LDA.’ And between the ‘PO’ and the ‘LDA’ is a dot. That was a common device in Latin to separate words in a piece of text. Now, why put those letters again in the diagram itself? They were already carved into the top section of the stone, directly below the ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ If they were going to be repeated, surely they would have been placed at the bottom of the diagram, near the ‘MAM’?
“But if this diagram shows the burial place of whatever Nero wanted hidden away, having ‘Per ordo Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’ in the center of the map does make sense. In fact, it’s a kind of double meaning. I think it means ‘This was done on the orders of Nero’ as well as ‘This is the location of the burial place.’ I believe those letters were placed in the middle of the diagram because the dot between the ‘O’ and the ‘L’ marks the site.”
“Yes, that’s as good a suggestion as any,” Bronson said. “And tomorrow morning we’ll drive over there and try to dig up whatever Nero ordered to be buried almost two thousand years ago.”
22
I
Bronson had worked out that the straight-line distance between Santa Marinella and their destination was only about seventy miles, but he knew it would be more like double that by road.
“Seventy miles isn’t that far,” Angela said, finishing her second cup of coffee. They’d walked into the dining room at seven, the earliest time that breakfast was available.
“Agreed. On a motorway it would be an hour, but on the sort of roads we’re likely to find, I reckon it’s at least two hours’ driving. But we’ve got a bunch of things to do before we get there, so it’s going to take three or four hours altogether.”
Bronson paid the bill and carried their bags down to the Renault Espace. His first stop was a newsagent’s on the outskirts of the town, where he bought a couple of large-scale maps of the area northeast of Rome.
Five miles down the road, they found a large out-of-town commercial center and, just as Bronson had hoped, a hardware supermarket.
“Stay here,” he said, “and lock the doors, just in case. I won’t be long. What size feet do you take? The continental size, I mean?”
“Forty or forty-one,” she replied, “if you mean shoes.”
“Shoes, feet, they’re all the same.”
Twenty-five minutes later he reappeared, pushing a laden cart. Angela hopped out as he approached and opened the trunk for him.
“Good lord,” she said, eyeing the contents of the shopping cart. “It looks as if you’ve got enough there for a week-long expedition.”
“Not quite,” Bronson replied, “but I do believe in being prepared.”
Together they transferred the equipment into the back of the Espace. Bronson had bought gloves, shovels, picks, axes, crowbars, a general toolkit, haversacks, climbing boots, flashlights and spare batteries, a compass, a handheld GPS unit and even a long towrope.
“A towrope?” Angela asked. “What do you need that for?”
“You can use it for dragging rocks or tree trunks out of the way, things like that.”
“I don’t like to mention it,” Angela said, “but this Renault’s definitely not the car I’d pick for an excursion up into the hills.”
“I know. It’s completely the wrong vehicle for where we’re going, and that’s why we’re not taking it off the road. I have a plan,” he said. “We’re just going to use the Renault to get over to San Cesareo, on the southeast outskirts of Rome. I checked on the Internet last night, and there’s a four-by-four hire center there. We’ll leave the Renault somewhere in the town, and I’ve pre-booked a short-wheelbase Toyota Land Cruiser in your name. If we can’t get up to the site in that, the only other thing we could use would be a helicopter.”
It was approaching noon when Bronson parked the Renault Espace in a multistory parking garage in San Cesareo. Together they walked the few hundred yards back to the off-road vehicle hire center, and twenty minutes later they drove out in a one-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser which Angela had hired for two days, using her credit card.
“Was it safe, using my Visa?” she asked as Bronson pulled the Toyota to a halt in the parking bay next to the Renault.
“Probably not. The trouble is you can’t hire a car without using a credit card. But I’m hoping we’ll be long gone from here before anyone notices.”
They transferred all their gear, including their overnight bags, into the Toyota, then locked the Renault, and drove away.
“That’ll do nicely,” Bronson muttered, spotting a couple of used-car lots on the outskirts of San Cesareo. Both looked fairly downmarket, the lots scruffy and the cars old and somewhat battered. They looked like the kind of places where cash transactions weren’t simply welcomed, but insisted upon. And that suited Bronson very well.
He walked into the first one and haggled with the salesman for about twenty minutes, then drove out in a ten-year-old Nissan sedan. The paintwork had faded, and there were dents in most of the panels, but the engine and transmission seemed fine, and the tires were good.
“Is that it?” Angela asked, stepping out of the Toyota.
“Yes. I’ll drive this. Just follow me and we’ll sort everything else out when we get to Piglio.”
The town wasn’t far, and the roads were fairly clear, so they made good time. Bronson parked the Nissan in a supermarket parking lot which was well more than half full, and a few minutes later they drove away together in the Toyota.