The First Apostle (27 page)

The Italian grunted in pain and staggered backward, releasing his hold on Angela’s neck as he did so. She dived to one side, getting out of Bronson’s line of fire, as the big man hobbled toward the door.

Bronson aimed the Browning straight at the Italian, but he immediately vanished into the hall, and seconds later Bronson heard the front door slam shut. He ran across to the window and looked out to see the man jogging away from the house, his limp now markedly less pronounced.

Bronson turned back to Angela. “Are you OK?” he demanded.

Her hair tousled and her face flushed with exertion, Angela nodded. “Thank God for aerobics and Manolos,” she said. “I always liked these shoes. What happened to the other one?”

“I winged him,” Bronson said. “He’s in the dining room, bleeding all over the floor.”

“They were going to kill us, weren’t they? That’s why you drew the gun.”

“Yes, and we’re not safe yet. We need to get out of here as quickly as we can, in case that big bastard decides to come back with reinforcements.”

“What about him?” Angela said, pointing toward the dining-room door, behind which moans and howls of pain could be heard. “We should take him to the hospital.”

“He was going to kill us, Angela. I really don’t care if he lives or dies.”

“You can’t just leave him. That’s inhuman. We’ve got to do something.”

Bronson looked again toward the dining room. “OK. Go upstairs and grab all your stuff. I’ll see what I can do.”

Angela stared at him. “Don’t kill him,” she instructed.

“I wasn’t going to.”

Bronson went into the downstairs lavatory, found a couple of towels and walked back into the dining room, the Browning Hi-Power held ready in front of him. But the pistol was unnecessary. The Italian was lying moaning in a pool of blood, his right hand trying to staunch the flow from the bullet wound in his shoulder.

Bronson placed the two pistols on the table, well out of reach, then bent down and eased the injured man into a sitting position. He pulled off his lightweight jacket and removed the shoulder holster he found underneath it. Then he folded one of the towels and placed it over the exit wound, laying the man down again so that the weight of his body would help reduce the blood loss.

“Hold this,” Bronson said in Italian, pressing the man’s bloody right hand onto the other towel, positioned over the entry wound.

“Thank you,” the Italian said, his breath rasping painfully, “but I need a hospital.”

“I know,” Bronson replied. “I’ll telephone in a minute. First, I need answers to a few questions, and the quicker you tell me, the sooner I’ll make that call. Who are you? Who do you work for? And who’s your fat friend?”

The ghost of a smile crossed the wounded man’s face. “His name’s Gregori Mandino, and he’s the
capofamiglia
—the head—of the Rome
Cosa Nostra
.”

“The Mafia?”

“Wrong name, right organization. I’m just one of the
picciotti,
a soldier,” the man said, “one of the
capo
’s bodyguards. I do what I’m told, and go where I’m needed. I have no idea why we’re here.” He said it with such conviction that Bronson almost believed him. “But let me give you a piece of advice, Englishman. Mandino is ruthless, and his deputy is worse. If I were you, I’d get away from here as quickly as you can, and not come back to Italy. Ever. The
Cosa Nostra
has a very long memory.”

“But why should someone like Mandino care about a two-thousand-year-old scroll?” Bronson asked.

“I told you, I’ve no idea.”

The “need to know” concept was one Bronson was very familiar with from his time in the army, and he guessed that a criminal organization like the Mafia probably worked in a similar way. The wounded man very probably
didn’t
know what was going on. Employed because of his skill with a gun—though he hadn’t been quite good enough on this occasion—he would have been told only what he needed to know to complete whatever tasks he was set.

“OK,” Bronson said. “I’ll call now.”

He quickly searched the man’s jacket, found a handful of nine-millimeter shells and removed them. Then he scoured the floor, found the ejected cartridge case from the Browning and picked it up. The bullet that had hit the Italian had passed straight through his shoulder and buried itself in the edge of the doorframe, but he quickly removed it with one of the screwdrivers he’d used to lift the floor panel. That was all he could do to eliminate the forensic evidence.

Finally, he picked up the holster and the two pistols—and the
skyphos
as an afterthought—and left the room. Angela was waiting for him in the hall, both her bags at her feet.

“I’ve tried to stop the bleeding with a couple of towels,” Bronson explained, “and I’ll call the emergency services right now. You get in the car.”

Fifteen minutes later they were in the Espace—the back of the car now empty as Bronson had unceremoniously dumped the bath and all the other boxes beside the Hamptons’ garage—and heading west, away from the house.

Bronson steered the Renault down the road and glanced over at Angela. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m furious,” she snapped. Bronson realized that the shaking he had taken to be shock or fear was actually intense anger. Every sinew of Angela’s body telegraphed her fury.

“I know,” Bronson said, his voice deliberately calm and measured, “it’s a shame we didn’t get the chance to examine the scroll, but we
are
alive. That’s the most important thing.”

“It’s not just that,” Angela retorted. “I was terrified in there, do you know that? I’d never even seen a real pistol until you waved that one at me back in England, and a few hours later I’m in the middle of a gun battle, and some fat Italian crook’s dragging me around by my neck. That’s bad enough. Then, just as we finally manage to decode the inscription and track down the relic, those two bastards come along and take it away from us. After all we’ve been through! I’m really pissed off.”

Bronson smiled to himself. Good old Angela, he thought. Trust her to come back fighting.

“Look, Angela,” he said, “I’m really sorry about what happened back there. It was my fault they got into the house. I should have double-checked that all the doors and windows were locked.”

“If you
had
locked the doors, they’d probably still have got inside, and if we’d heard them coming we might have been involved in a shoot-out neither of us would have survived. As it is, thanks to you, we’re both still very much alive. But it’s a shame about the scroll.”

“I brought the
skyphos
or whatever you call it. At least we’ve got that as a souvenir. It’s obviously old—do you think it’s valuable?”

Angela leaned over to the backseat and picked up the vessel to examine it properly—in the house she’d hardly had a chance.

“This is a fake,” she said a few minutes later, “but a good one. At first sight it looks exactly like a genuine Roman
skyphos.
But the shape is slightly different: it’s a bit too tall for its width. The glaze feels wrong, and I think the composition of the pottery itself isn’t right for the first century. There are a lot of tests we could run, but it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.”

“So we’ve been through all this for a fake?” Bronson asked. “And remind me. What, exactly, is a
skyphos
?”

“The name’s Greek, not Roman. It’s a type of vessel that originated in the eastern end of the Mediterranean, around about the first century A.D. A
skyphos
is a two-handled drinking cup. This one’s in excellent condition, and if it had been the genuine article it would have been worth around four or five grand.”

“So when was it made?”

Angela looked at the
skyphos
critically. “Definitely second millennium,” she replied. “If I had to guess I’d say thirteenth or maybe fourteenth century. Probably made about the same time that the Hamptons’ house was built.”

Bronson glanced over at her. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“More coincidental than anything else, I’d have thought.”

“Not necessarily, if you
are
right and they’re more or less contemporary. I think it could be far more than simple coincidence that a fourteenth-century pot—and a fake at that—was deliberately hidden in a fourteenth-century house.”

“Why?”

Bronson paused to order his thoughts. “The whole trail we’ve been following is obscure and complicated, and I’m wondering if that Occitan verse is even more complex than we thought, and that we’re missing something.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Look at the verse,” Bronson said. “It’s written entirely in Occitan apart from one word—
calix
—and that’s Latin for ‘chalice.’ When we follow the other clues in the riddle, we eventually find something that looks like a Roman drinking cup, but isn’t. So the verse uses a Roman word for chalice, and we’ve recovered a copy of a Roman chalice. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? Or at least convoluted?”

“Keep going,” Angela said, encouragingly.

“Why did they go to all the trouble of manufacturing a fake
skyphos
when they could just as easily have buried the scroll in any old earthenware pot? It’s as if they wanted to draw our attention to the Roman element in all this, back to the Latin inscription in the living room.”

“But we’ve been over and over this. There aren’t any other clues in those three Latin words. Or, if there are, they’re bloody well hidden.”

“Agreed. So maybe the Occitan verse is pointing us toward something else. Something more than just the location of the hidden scroll? Perhaps to the
skyphos
itself?”

“But there’s nothing else inside it,” Angela said, turning the vessel upside down. “I checked that when I was looking for a
sittybos
.”

Bronson looked confused.

“Remember?” Angela said. “It’s a kind of tag attached to a scroll that identifies its contents.”

“Oh, right,” Bronson said. “Well, maybe not anything inside it, but what about the
outside
? Is that just a random pattern on the side of the pot?”

Angela peered closely at the green-glazed pottery vessel and almost immediately she noticed something. Just below the rim on one side of the
skyphos
were three small letters separated by dots: “H•V•L.”

“Now, that’s odd,” she murmured. “There are three letters inscribed here—‘HVL’—and they obviously have to stand for
‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’
”

“ ‘Here lie the liars,’ ” Bronson breathed. “That’s a definite link. So what’s that pattern underneath the letters?”

Below the inscribed letters was what looked almost like a sine wave: a line that undulated in a regular pattern, up and down, and with short diagonal lines running below it, sloping from top right to bottom left. Below the wavy line was a geometric pattern, three straight lines crisscrossing in the center and with a dot at each end. Running along the lines were Latin numbers, followed by the letters “M•P,” then more numbers and the letter “A.” Beside each dot were other numbers, each followed by a “P.” In the very center of the design were the letters “PO•LDA,” and below that “M•A•M.”

“It’s not random,” Angela said decisively. “Whatever these lines mean, they indicate something definite, almost like a map.”

Bronson looked across at the
skyphos
Angela was holding. “But a map of what?”

Late that afternoon, the setting sun bathed the irregular rooftops and old walls of the ancient heart of the city of Rome with a golden glow. Pedestrians bustled to and fro along the wide pavements, and a constant stream of hooting and jostling vehicles fought its way around the Piazza di Santa Maria alle Fornaci. But Joseph Cardinal Vertutti saw none of it.

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?”