The First Apostle (29 page)

“What else did they have?”

“I’m wondering if the Cathars found or inherited both the scroll
and
the stone with the Latin inscription on it.”

Angela looked puzzled. “I don’t see how that helps us. All that’s on the stone are those three Latin words.”

“No,” Bronson said. “There is—or at least there was—more than that. Remember what Jeremy Goldman told me. He said that the stone had been cut, that the section cemented into the wall of the Hamptons’ house was just the top half. In fact, that tip was the reason Mark and I started searching the rest of the house. We were looking for the missing lower section.”

“But you never found it, so how does that help?”

“You’re quite right. We didn’t find it, but I wonder if we have now, or at least what was written on it. Think about it. How would you describe the carved letters on the Roman inscription?”

“All capitals, no frills. A typical first-century Latin inscription. There are hundreds of similar examples.”

“And what about the Occitan verses?”

Angela thought for a moment. “Completely different. That was a cursive script. I suppose the modern equivalent would be a kind of italic.”

“Exactly. Now your estimate was that the Occitan inscription was carved at about the same time as the
skyphos
was made, probably in the fourteenth century?”

“Probably, yes.”

“Now look at the diagram on the side of the vessel, and the letters and numbers. The numbers are Latin—that’s the first thing—and the letters are all capitals. In other words, although the
skyphos
and the Occitan inscription are probably contemporary, you’d never deduce that just by looking at the two texts. They appear completely different.”

“So what you’re saying is that if the
skyphos
was made by the Cathars, why is the decoration on the side so obviously Roman? Except that it’s an obvious copy of a Roman drinking vessel, of course.”

“Yes,” Bronson said, “but I think that was quite deliberate. The Cathars made a copy of a Roman vessel to hold the scroll, and the decoration they chose for the
skyphos
is also Roman. More than that, the diagram is headed ‘HVL’—
‘Hic Vandici Latitant’
—just like the stone with the Latin inscription.”

“Yes,” Angela said, her voice suddenly excited. “You mean that what we’re looking at here could be an exact copy of the map on the missing section of that stone?”

Bronson nodded. “Suppose the Cathars had possessed this stone for years, but they’d never managed to decipher what it meant. Perhaps the scroll itself refers to the stone, or to whatever was buried, and that convinced them that the map or diagram was
really
important. When the last of the Cathars fled from France and arrived in Italy, they knew their religion was doomed, but they still wanted to preserve the ‘treasure’ they’d managed to smuggle out of Montségur. So they split the stone in two, left one part—the top section—where it could be easily found, but hid the important bit, the diagram, somewhere else.

“To allow a fellow Cathar, or someone who knew enough about their religion, to decipher it, they prepared the Occitan inscription. The clues in that would lead to the scroll, safely hidden away in the
skyphos,
and on the vessel itself they left an exact copy of the diagram they’d never managed to understand. I think that map shows exactly where the ‘liars’ are hidden.”

“But this isn’t like any kind of map I’ve ever seen before. It’s just lines, letters and numbers. They could mean anything.”

Bronson nodded again. “If it was easy, the Cathars would have cracked it seven hundred years ago. I’m guessing here, but I think Nero must have insisted that the hiding place be located in an area that would never be found by accident, and that meant somewhere well outside Imperial Rome. Obviously the Emperor—or perhaps Marcellus—decided to make a map showing the location, so that the site could be found later if necessary. But to provide an extra layer of protection, they devised a type of map that would need to be deciphered.”

“I see what you’re driving at,” Angela said. “But this jar is a lot smaller than the stone would have been. What about the scale?”

“I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think it matters. I know a bit about mapping and, as long as you know the scale, you can interpret a map of any physical size. That diagram”—he pointed at the
skyphos
—“isn’t a conventional map because it hasn’t got a scale, at least as far as I can see, and it doesn’t show any features like a coast, rivers or towns. I’ve been trying to put myself in the position of the man who prepared it, trying to work out what he could have done to create a map that would endure, if necessary for centuries.

“If the burial place was outside Rome, he wouldn’t have been able to use buildings as reference points, because the only structures he’d see out in the country wouldn’t have been permanent. I mean, if he’d buried something in Rome itself, he might have guessed that places like the Circus Maximus would survive and used them to identify the location of the burial place. But in the country, even a large villa might be abandoned or destroyed within a generation or two. So the only realistic option he would have had would be to use very specific geographical features.

“I think Marcellus—or whoever made this—picked permanent objects, things that, no matter what happened in Italy, would always be visible and identifiable. I don’t think this diagram needs a scale because it probably refers to a group of hills near Rome. I think the lines show the distances between them and their respective heights.”

For a few seconds Angela looked at the diagram on the side of the
skyphos,
then down at the drawing Bronson had made, her fingers tracing the letters and numbers he’d copied from the vessel. Then she grabbed a book about the Roman Empire, flicked through it until she reached the index and turned to a specific page. It contained a table with letters and figures, but Bronson couldn’t read it upside-down.

“That might make sense,” she said, her eyes flicking between Bronson’s copy of the diagram and the table in the book. “If you’re right and the lines represent distances, then ‘P’ would translate as
passus,
the pace step of a Roman legionary and equal to 1.62 yards. ‘MP’ would mean
mille passus,
one thousand
passus
. That’s the Roman mile of 1,618 yards. The ‘P’ markings beside the dots would probably represent the heights of the hills, measured in
pes,
plural
pedes,
the Roman foot of 11.6 inches, and ‘A’ the
actus,
120
pedes
or about 116 feet.”

“But would the Romans have been able to produce figures that accurate?” Bronson asked.

Angela nodded confidently. “Absolutely. The Romans had a number of surveying tools, including one called a
groma.
That had been in use for centuries before Nero’s reign and would have allowed for quite sophisticated measuring. And you should also remember how many large Roman buildings are still standing today. They wouldn’t have survived if their builders hadn’t had quite advanced surveying ability.”

Angela leaned over the keyboard of the laptop, typed the word “groma” into the search engine and pressed the “enter” key. When the results appeared, she picked one site and clicked on that.

“There you are,” she said, pointing at the screen. “That’s a
groma
.”

Bronson looked at the diagram of the instrument for a few moments. It comprised two horizontal arms crossed at right angles and resting on a bracket that was itself attached to a vertical staff. Each of the four arms had a cord at the end that formed a plumb bob.

“And they also used a thing called a
gnomon
to locate north—very roughly—and they could measure distance and height using a
diopter.
”

“So all we have to do now is work out which hills Marcellus used as his reference points.”

“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.”

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.

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.”