19

“You’re wrong,” the big man in the gray suit corrected Angela. His English was fluent and almost devoid of any accent. “It’s first century.”

“Who the hell are you?” Bronson demanded, silently berating himself for not checking that all the doors and windows had been locked.

Bizarrely, the man holding Angela could almost have been a banker or a businessman, judging by his appearance—immaculate suit, highly polished black loafers and neat, well-cut dark hair. Until, that is, Bronson looked into his eyes. They were black, and as cold and empty as an open grave.

In contrast to his companion, the man holding the gun was wearing jeans and a casual jacket. Bronson guessed these were probably the men who’d broken into the house. And killed Mark Hampton and Jackie and possibly Jeremy Goldman as well. Anger rose in him like a tide, but he knew he had to remain focused.

“Who we are isn’t important,” the bigger man said. “We’ve been looking for that”—he gestured toward the scroll on the table—“for a very long time.”

Still holding Angela’s arm, he strode across to the table and picked up the scroll while the second man kept his pistol trained on Bronson.

“What’s so important about this scroll that both my friends had to die? You did kill them, I presume?” Bronson balled his fists, and forced himself to take deep, even breaths. He couldn’t afford to get things wrong.

The man in the suit inclined his head in acknowledgment. “I wasn’t personally responsible,” he said, “but my orders were being followed, yes.”

“But why is that old scroll so important?” Bronson asked again.

The man didn’t respond immediately, but instead pulled a dining chair away from the table and pushed Angela toward it.

“Sit down,” he snapped, and watched as she obeyed him.

He unrolled one end of the scroll, looked at the first few lines and nodded in satisfaction, then he slid it into the pocket of his jacket.

“I will answer your question, Bronson,” he said. “You see, I already know who you are. I’ll tell you exactly why this scroll is worth killing for. I think you know why I’m prepared to do that,” he added. “You understand the situation.”

Bronson nodded. He knew exactly why the Italian was happy to talk—the two intruders had no intention of leaving either him or Angela alive when they left the house.

“Who are these people, Chris?” Angela asked, and Bronson noted that her voice was steady but tinged with anger. She could have been inquiring about the identity of a couple of uninvited guests at a party. He felt a sudden rush of admiration for her.

Bronson focused on the big man. “Tell us,” he said shortly.

The Italian smiled, but without any humor in his eyes. “This scroll was written in A.D. sixty-seven, on the specific orders of the Emperor Nero by a man who routinely signed himself ‘SQVET.’ The people who employ us have been looking for it for the last fifteen hundred years.”

Bronson looked at Angela.

“What on earth do you mean?” she asked, looking shocked.

The Italian shook his head. “I’ve said enough. All I will tell you is that we believe the scroll holds a secret that the Church would far rather remain hidden. In fact, it suggests that the entire Christian religion was founded on a lie, so perhaps you can guess what’s going to happen to it?”

“You—or your employer, which I presume is the Vatican—will destroy it as soon as possible?” Bronson suggested.

“That won’t be my decision, obviously, but I imagine they’ll either do that or lock it away in the Apostolic Penitentiary for all eternity.”

Bronson had been watching the two Italians carefully. He’d tried to keep them talking, stalling for time while he figured out his next move.

The big Italian took a step back toward the door and glanced at his companion. “Kill them both,” he hissed in Italian. “Shoot Bronson first.”

And that was the moment Bronson had been waiting for. The second man half-turned his head toward the bigger man as he received his orders, nodded, and then began bringing his automatic up to aim at Bronson.

But Bronson was already moving. The Browning Hi-Power hadn’t been out of his immediate possession since he’d left his house in England. He reached under his jacket, grabbed the pistol from his waistband, clicked off the safety catch and leveled the weapon at the Italian.

“Lower your weapon,” he yelled, in fluent Italian. “If you move that pistol even one centimeter I’ll shoot.”

For several long seconds, nobody moved.

“Your choice,” Bronson shouted, his eyes never leaving the man’s weapon. “Take the damned scroll and get out of here, and nobody gets hurt. Try anything else, and at the very least one of you is going to die.”

But even as Bronson aimed his pistol at the armed man about fifteen feet in front of him, the big man in the gray suit moved, as quick and lithe as a cat. He grabbed Angela by the hair, dragged her out of the dining chair and held her in front of him as a shield.

“Chris!” Angela yelled, but there wasn’t a thing Bronson could do to stop him. If he’d fired, he’d probably have hit her.

In seconds, the big Italian had pulled Angela, struggling in his grasp, out through the door.

Bronson was left facing the second man. For a long couple of seconds they just stared at each other, then the Italian muttered something and moved his pistol. Bronson had absolutely no option. He adjusted his aim slightly and squeezed the trigger. The Browning kicked in his hand, the report of the shot shockingly loud in the confined space, the ejected cartridge case spinning away to his right in a blur of brass.

The Italian screamed and tumbled backward, his left shoulder suddenly blooming red. He clutched at the wound, his pistol falling to the floor.

Bronson ran forward and scooped up the weapon, which he recognized immediately as a nine-millimeter Beretta. But he didn’t even give the injured man a second glance. His whole attention was focused on Angela and whatever was happening behind the closed dining-room door.

His military training kicked in. Pulling open the door and stepping through it could be the last thing he ever did if the big man had a pistol, because he’d be a sitting duck, framed in the doorway. And that wouldn’t help Angela.

So he stepped forward cautiously, flattened himself against the stone wall beside the door, and turned the handle. Then he peered through the gap into the living room. The big Italian wasn’t waiting for him. He was almost at the far door, the one that led into the hall, one beefy arm around Angela’s neck as he dragged her roughly across the floor.

Bronson wrenched open the door, stepped into the room, took rapid aim and fired a single shot into the stone wall beside the hall door. The Italian turned, his expression confused and almost frightened, and at that moment Angela acted.

As the big man paused, she lifted her right leg and scraped her shoe hard down the man’s left shin and then drove her heel as hard as she could into the top of his foot.

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?”