WITH HUGE THANKS TO MY AGENT, LUIGI BONOMI OF LBA, to my publishers, Bill Massey and Caitlin Alexander at Bantam Dell and Harriet Evans at Headline, and to Tessa Balshaw-Jones, Gaia Banks, Jenny Bateman, Alison Bonomi, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Nicki Kennedy, Colleen Lawrie, Rebecca McEwan, Tony McGrath, Amanda Preston, Rebecca Purtell, John Rush, Poppy Shirlaw and Ann Verrinder Gibbins. As with my previous novel, Atlantis, the settings in this book are based on first-hand experience, and I owe much to those who have made this possible. To my parents for many trips to Hereford Cathedral as a child, and for accompanying me years later on a memorable study tour in Rome. To the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara for a travel scholarship that allowed me to study the Golden Horn in Istanbul, and to the chair of the NATO Life Sciences and Technology Committee for inviting me to Kiev. To the crew of RV Akademik Ioffe for taking me into Ilulissat icefjord in Greenland, a truly unforgettable experience, and to Parks Canada for opening the L’Anse aux Meadows site. To Steve Aitken and Tom D’Entrement for my first dives under ice, at the very outset of my diving career, and to my brother Alan for diving with me in the Yucatán and for his technical expertise. To Angie and to Molly with much love for our trips to Stamford Bridge and the holy isle of Iona, and to LNG for having been there too.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places and incidents are creations of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblence to actual or other fictional events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The factual backdrop is discussed in the author’s note at the end.

The spoils in general were borne in promiscuous heaps; but conspicuous above all stood out those captured in the Temple at Jerusalem. These consisted of a golden table, many talents in weight, and a lampstand, likewise made of gold, but constructed on a different pattern from those which we use in ordinary life. Affixed to a pedestal was a central shaft, from which there extended slender branches, arranged trident-fashion, a wrought lamp being attached to the extremity of each branch; of these there were seven, indicating the honour paid to that number among the Jews…The triumphal ceremonies being concluded and the Empire of the Romans established on the firmest foundation, Vespasian decided to erect a Temple of Peace…into that shrine were accumulated and stored all objects for the sight of which men had once wandered over the whole world, eager to see them severally while they lay in various countries. Here, too, he laid up the vessels of gold from the Temple of the Jews…

—Josephus, Jewish War VII, 148–62

“I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M SEEING THIS!”

Jack peered closer. “It’s the double-headed eagle. One head signifies the old Rome, the other the new Rome, Constantinople. It’s the imperial symbol of the Byzantine emperor.” He paused, then looked through his visor at Costas, his eyes lit in wonder. “We’ve just found one of the most famous weapons in history, a battle-axe of the Varangian Guard.”

“That makes sense. Look at these.” Costas twisted the axe round so Jack could see the other side.

“Runes!” Jack’s heart was racing, and he was sucking the oxygen hard from the rebreather.

“Hang on. I’m getting a warning reading on the seismograph,” Costas said. “Probably just a wobble in the machine, but I need to stop to make sure.”

Just then there was a horrifying creaking noise, followed by a series of wrenching vibrations that set Jack’s teeth on edge and sent an uncontrollable tremor through his body.

“Holy Mother of God. We’re…”

Costas’ words were drowned out by a terrible shrieking noise. Splinters of ice began to shear off the tunnel walls, rocketing through the water like shrapnel. One piece wedged itself in Jack’s left thigh, slicing through the Kevlar exoskeleton and embedding itself in his flesh. He watched in shock as the water filled with swirling tendrils of red. Then there was a grating lurch and suddenly the ice probe went dead.

With superhuman effort Jack turned his head to peer back down the tunnel. What he saw confirmed his worst fear. The tunnel was completely cut off, sealed shut by some tectonic shift in the ice. A terrible wave of certainty passed through him. They would be frozen into the ice before they were dead, a living nightmare of the worst kind.

PROLOGUE

THE TWO GOLDEN EAGLES SWEPT IN LOW OVER THE CITY from the west, their wingbeats slow and deep as they flew unswervingly towards the podium. In the pastel light of dawn their shadows seemed to undulate and magnify across the temples and monuments of the Forum, like two denizens of Hades come to take their rightful place at the table of victory. At the last moment the eagles dipped their wings and veered north along the line of the Sacred Way. The man with the laurel crown who stood alone on the podium felt the brush of their wings, saw the purple streamers issuing from their talons and the speckled radiance where their plumage had been brushed with gold. They were his prize pair, descendants of mighty eagles he had brought back to Rome for another triumph half a lifetime ago, snatched from their desolate mountaintop eyries on the northern fringes of the empire. Now as he watched they rose majestically over the very heart of the city, their wings lifted as if on an updraught from the massed exhalation of the people thronging either side of the Sacred Way far below. At the highest point they seemed to hang motionless, as if Jupiter himself had reached down and seized them in his embrace. Then with a raucous screech they flapped upwards and dived down on closed wings, swooping low over the Capitoline Temple and out of sight back towards the massed legions waiting on the Field of Mars.

In the tremulous silence that followed, all eyes strained towards the podium. The man drew his cloak up over his head in the customary way and raised his right arm for all to see, palm facing outwards. The omen had been propitious. The greatest triumph of all time could now begin.

As a thudding drumbeat of the procession began to echo from the Field of Mars, a slave mounted the podium and proffered his hand.

“Fresh from the mint, princeps.”

The man took the coin and quickly turned back, impatient not to miss any of the spectacle. He held the coin up so it was framed by the triumphal arch at the beginning of the Sacred Way, the place where the procession would appear. The coin was a silver denarius, minted from the spoils of war brought up from the river port at Ostia only the day before. He squinted and read the inscription around the edge. IMP CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG. Imperator Caesar Vespasianus Augustus, holder of tribunician power, consul for the third time, pontifex maximus. He had been emperor for less than a year, and the words still sent a tremor through his heart. He saw the image in the centre and grunted. It showed a heavyset, balding man, advanced in years, with jutting chin and hooked nose, deep creases around his eyes and mouth and lines on his forehead. It was not a pretty sight, but his was a grunt of satisfaction. He had ordered his portrait deliberately made in the old fashion of the Roman Republic, warts and all, in contrast to his reviled predecessor Nero, whose effeminate Greek-style images were being torn down and erased all over the empire. Vespasian was tough, gritty, honourable, a man close to the earth. A Roman of the old ways.

He flipped the coin over and held it high so the first rays of the sun behind him glinted off the silver. In the centre was a bowed, weeping woman, her hair done up in the eastern fashion. Beside her was a Roman legionary standard, identical to those that lined the Sacred Way today. Below her was the word he had ordered put on all his coins, the word that made this day his crowning triumph.

IVDAEA.

Judaea captured.

At that moment the crowd, hushed by the flight of the eagles, erupted in a huge crescendo of noise. The insistent drumbeat which had been coming up from the Circus Maximus suddenly became a thudding boom. Through the arch emerged an enormous African elephant, its trunk swaying from side to side almost to the hands of the spectators who were reaching out to touch it. Astride the elephant sat two immense Nubian slaves, their heavily muscled arms beating in unison on drums slung to either side. Immediately behind came the six Vestal Virgins, their hair in braids and their white robes shimmering as if they were emissaries from heaven itself. Then came a cohort of the Praetorian Guard, resplendent in their black breastplates and plumed helmets, giants among men recruited from the finest warriors across the Roman Empire. Then the first in a long procession of men and boys, senators and equestrians and members of Vespasian’s own family, all dressed in purple togas interwoven with gold. Between them at close intervals came wagons piled high with fabulous riches, some resting on biers and pedestals and others held aloft by slaves from all corners of the empire.

Vespasian watched as the wagons trundled by, each new wonder bringing a gasp of awe from the crowd. There were magnificent statues of gods in gilt bronze, sumptuous royal treasures from the kingdoms of the East, wild-haired slaves wearing heavy gold neck torques from Gaul and Germany, mounds of emeralds and diamonds from beyond the Indus, shimmering silk tapestries from the far-off land called Thina. All the wonders that men had previously travelled the world to see were here today in this one place, this Eternal City.

Only Vespasian knew that many of these treasures were being seen for the last time. Beside him on the podium was a thin sheet of marble prepared by his architects, its surface etched with an intricate city plan dominated by a huge elliptical structure. As the last of the wagons rolled past, Vespasian glanced beyond the procession to Nero’s Golden House, the wreathed head of Nero’s monstrous Colossus just visible over the tops of the temples. On that site Vespasian would build a vast amphitheatre, the biggest the city had ever seen, the first of many projects he had planned to give the spoils of conquest to the people of Rome.

Next marched a garish procession of dwarves and deformities, freaks the gods had created for their own amusement, culled from all over the empire. Some were carried high on silver platters like pigs to a feast, children with bulbous heads and others with shrivelled limbs and elephantine growths. There was even one screaming monster with a single eye in its forehead, a Cyclops in the making. Following them was a manic chattering dwarf driving a four-horse chariot, an imperial quadriga, only this one was pulled by haltered goats. The dwarf was attired as a Greek god with an absurdly oversized golden wig and bore a placard with the words damnatio memoriae, “Of Damned Memory.” It was a grotesque parody of the hated Nero. Vespasian slapped his thighs and guffawed along with the crowd. He was a man of the people. This was not just a triumph. It was entertainment on an epic scale. And the best was yet to come.

There was a gap in the procession and then a blast of trumpets. Through the archway came two horsemen riding side by side, both bedecked in crimson and wearing laurel diadems just like the emperor. The crowd erupted in thunderous applause, and Vespasian felt a surge of nostalgia as he watched his sons, Titus and Domitian, receive the acclamation. The next spectacle had the crowd dumbstruck, and Vespasian himself felt his jaw drop. Following the horsemen came a succession of immense travelling stages, each drawn by a team of white-garlanded bulls and carrying a vast scenic backdrop that towered to the full height of the arch. Each was a living tableau of scenes from the war, with prisoners and legionaries playing their part. One showed a countryside laid waste and its occupants put to the sword. Another depicted Roman siege engines battering a huge wall, the city’s occupants valiantly defending from above. Others showed scenes of utter destruction. Enemy soldiers annihilated on the battlefield. Whole families committing suicide in a clifftop citadel rather than surrendering. A great temple ripped down and destroyed in a conflagration, its priests locked inside. A triumphant legion marching through a ruined city, shackled prisoners and carts of booty in tow. Scenes of desolation so chastening that even the bloodthirsty Roman crowd was cowed to silence, and roared its approval only after the last tableau had been hauled past.

The triumph was heading inexorably towards its climax. Next came the prisoners, men, women and children, hundreds of them chained together and corralled between lines of spear-carrying legionaries. Following time-honoured practice, they were well dressed in purple robes, a way of concealing their wounds and making them seem more formidable adversaries. Vespasian leaned forwards and eyed them keenly. These were a different breed from the wild-eyed savages he had brought back from Britain thirty-five years previously. His Jewish informant Josephus had told him his people believed their God came with the Romans to purge their temple and blot out their city, as punishment for corruption. Yet these seemed a proud people, their heads held high, not captives broken by remorse. In their midst was the rebel leader Simon, shackled between two legionaries, a handsome bearded man struggling to walk tall and seemingly contemptuous of his fate. As he came level with the podium he flashed his dark eyes up towards the emperor, and for a second Vespasian felt his soul pierced, a fleeting moment of disquiet that he quickly pushed aside.

Another blast from the trumpets signalled the climax of the procession. Vespasian turned from the prisoners and looked towards the arch. Josephus had told him about the spoils from the temple, and he was eager to see them. Now they came, not heaped extravagantly on carts like the earlier treasures, but carried individually so they could be properly viewed. First came the sacred curtain that screened the sanctuary from the rest of the temple. Then came the vestments of the high priests, heavy garments dyed in precious Tyrean purple and bedecked with brilliant jewels. Next the scrolls of their ancient testament, the sacred laws that Josephus called the Pentateuch. Then a long procession of ritual objects from the sanctuary—cups, platters, ablution vessels, all in solid gold, followed by a heavy golden table carried by four legionaries, wreathed in smoke from incense burners attached to each corner. As the heady aroma of cinnamon and cassia wafted over the podium, Vespasian felt himself transported back to his early days of soldiering in the East. When he opened his eyes he was met with an apparition that left him gaping in awe.

Through the swirling smoke that lingered in front of the arch came a treasure like nothing seen before in Rome. Josephus had described it well but Vespasian had not expected such an immense weight of gold, so burdensome it took twelve legionaries to heft it on their shoulders. As they emerged slowly into view he began to make it out, a glowing object the height of a man or more. Rising from a two-tiered octagonal base was an ornate tapering column, on either side of which were branches extending upwards symmetrically to the same level. It was like a huge golden trident of the sea god Neptune, only here the tips of the prongs were fashioned into ornate lamps, seven in all. As the bearers cleared the arch a slave emerged with a burning torch which he used to light incense in each of the lamps, sending thick white smoke tumbling down over the throng on either side of the Sacred Way and enveloping them like a dawn mist.

Vespasian knew this was the menorah, the most sacred symbol of the Jewish Temple. Josephus had told him that the number seven held special significance for his people, and harked back to the days of their earliest prophets. He said that robbing the Temple of the menorah would be like an enemy stealing the statue of the she-wolf from the Capitolium, an unimaginable desecration that would tear out the heart of Rome itself.

A sudden commotion to the right drew the crowd away from the menorah. They had drunk their fill of treasure and were now baying for blood. Vespasian knew what was coming next, an act fixed in ritual since the days of Romulus and Remus. Far up under the Capitoline Hill he could see where the crowd had parted to form a wide circle around an ugly gash in the ground, the swaying mob held back by a detachment of the Praetorian Guard, their swords drawn. Here had gone Jugurtha, enemy of the Roman Republic, Vercingetorix the Gaul, the British chieftains Vespasian himself had dragged to this spot. He could see where the Jewish prisoners had been formed up around the edge of the circle, motionless and silent though their chains had been removed. In the centre the bearded man Simon was being tormented like a dog, baited and prodded by the surrounding guards like a beast in an amphitheatre. He was doing all he could to remain upright and dignified, but offered no resistance as his tunic was torn off and a noose was thrown violently around his neck. The crowd jeered as he was jabbed at spear-point towards the hole. Suddenly he tumbled out of sight. At that moment the scene was lit by a blinding beam of light, the sun having risen above the Temple of Mars, the war god, behind Vespasian, and reflecting dazzlingly off the menorah and the other golden spoils assembled in the Forum.

The crowd erupted. It was yet another good omen.

Vespasian remembered those dark eyes and set his face impassively to the west.

Let this be an end to it.

For a few moments there was a hushed silence, like the silence when the eagles had flown over, then a hooded man emerged from the pit holding up something in his hand. The crowd roared. Now it was the turn of the other prisoners. Vespasian watched dispassionately as the children were separated from their parents and led forwards. A woman fainted, and was held up by the hair and decapitated on the spot. A man broke free to stagger after his child and was stamped to a bloody pulp by one of the Nubians. The children were pushed to the edge of the pit in groups of three and had their throats cut, their little bodies hurled into the chasm. Then the women, then the men. The men were beheaded, gladiators with masked helmets bringing their giant curved swords down in unison, each sweep of steel accompanied by a single drumbeat as if they were oarsmen in a galley. Bodies piled upon bodies. Steel flashed up and down in the glare of the sunlight. The crowd swayed, gorging on blood. Vespasian glanced again at the menorah. The seven prisoners he had ordered spared hung from posts on the far side of the pit, their naked bodies sprayed crimson. They would go home to their compatriots in the desert of Judaea and bring news of the vengeance of Rome, of the submission of their most sacred object to the vaults of the victor. As long as Rome held the treasure of the Jewish Temple they would never dare rise against her again. Any trouble and their guiding light would be extinguished forever. It was the Roman way.

The executioners had done their work. Now the triumph could begin in earnest, days of feasting and games, piety and acclamations. Even before the crowd had shouted their exaltation, the bulls which had drawn the carts of treasure had been led up under the Temple of Jupiter, and already the altar and the statue of the she-wolf were spattered with blood from the first sacrifice.

Vespasian turned to leave the podium, still fingering the coin. He shrugged off his purple cloak and donned the crimson robe held out for him by two slaves. He would join his sons, Titus and Domitian, on horseback at the rear of the procession, leading a line of priests to the altar below the Temple of Jupiter, where he would perform his customary rituals as pontifex maximus. He glanced one last time at the marble plan and made a silent vow. The age of conquest would end. His would be an age of reconstruction, a return from decadence to the virtues of his ancestors. On this very spot where he stood he would build a Temple of Peace, a temple greater than any other. Here he would store for all time the treasure of this vanquished people. He remembered those dark eyes again. He would do all in his power to ensure that the menorah was never again paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome. He turned to go, then hesitated and tossed the coin far into the crowd, watching it streak in a high arc in front of the shimmer of gold as it disappeared forever into history.

I THINK WE’VE HIT PAY DIRT!”

Jack Howard looked up from the chart table to the minarets dotting the Istanbul skyline, then down to where the excited shout had come from the foredeck below. He quickly replaced the nautical dividers he had been using and swung out of the bridge door for a better view. He had been on edge all morning, hoping against hope that today would be the day, and now his heart was racing with excitement. When he saw what was happening he turned and slid down the metal handrails three flights to the walkway on the port side of the ship. Seconds later he was mingling with the crew on the foredeck, his dark blue fisherman’s jersey conspicuous among the overalls bearing the logo of IMU, the International Maritime University.

“Right. What have we got?”

Before the crew chief could reply, one of the divers surfaced in a tumult of white water off the port bow. Jack leaned over the bulwark railing to watch as the diver spat out his regulator mouthpiece and injected a blast of air into his stabiliser jacket.

“It’s Venetian,” he called up breathlessly. “I’m sure of it. I saw the markings.”

The diver vented his jacket and disappeared back beneath the waves. Jack watched the slew of bubbles that rose from his exhaust and that of the three other divers who were guiding the lifting platform to the surface. It was a potentially treacherous operation, with Sea Venture maintaining position against a five-knot surface current. A slight wobble in the current and the divers and their precious cargo would be swept off into one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.

Jack narrowed his eyes as the sunlight glinted off the waves, his rugged, tanned features creasing as he kept his attention glued on the spot where the diver had disappeared. Behind him the machinery on the foredeck clunked and whirred into action and the crane dipped with the weight of its load. Slowly, inexorably, the cable rose from the seabed a hundred feet below, groaning alarmingly as the current took hold. The crew lining the railing seemed to hold their breath as the cable creaked upwards inch by inch. At last the spread of chains holding each corner of the platform appeared and Jack knew they were safe. Sea Venture had been positioned with her port side in the lee of the current, facing the shoreline of the old city, and the lifting platform would now be protected by the deep draught of the vessel.

From the murky depths an oblong form began to take shape. Jack felt the familiar tug of excitement, the burst of adrenaline he always felt at this moment. Despite being present at some of the greatest archaeological finds ever made, he had never lost the thrill that came with every new discovery. Even the most mundane object could open a whole new window on the past, give reality to momentous events only obscurely remembered in myth and history. As he watched intently, his hands gripping the rails, the four divers emerged at the corners and the platform was winched clear of the waves. When they saw what lay in the middle, the crew erupted in a ragged cheer. Months of planning and days of round-the-clock effort had paid off.

“Bingo.” The crew chief grinned at Jack. “You were right again.”

“Couldn’t have happened without your hard work.”

It was a great gun, a gleaming bronze cannon at least two metres long, its upper surface washed clean of the accumulated grime of centuries and shining like gold. Jack could immediately see it was an early type, its ornate cylindrical breech tapering to an octagonal fore end. He had seen similar guns, dating from the sixteenth century, from King Henry VIII’s flagship Mary Rose in Portsmouth and from shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada. But this one looked older, much older. After the crane had slowly swung its load over the railing and deposited it on the foredeck, Jack strode over for a closer look, the crew crowding eagerly behind. He ignored the spatter of mud from the cleaning hose as he crouched down and stretched his hand reverently towards the gun.

“The Lion of St. Mark’s,” he said. “It’s Venetian all right.”

He pointed to a raised casting near the breech end of the gun. The image was unmistakable, a winged, forward-facing lion wreathed in a leafy garland, one of the most potent symbols of medieval Europe. He traced his fingers over the emblem and trailed them towards the rear of the breech. Suddenly he raised his other hand to order the crewman holding the hose to avert the flow.

“There’s a foundry mark,” he said excitedly. “In front of the touch hole.”

“It’s a date.” The crew chief leaned over Jack, shielding his eyes from the glare. “Anno domini. Then Roman numerals. I can barely make it out. M, C, D…”

“Fourteen fifty-three,” one of the others exclaimed.

“My God,” Jack said quietly. “The Great Siege.” He had no need to explain that date; its significance had been drummed into the crew during his many briefing lectures. 1453. The year of the greatest-ever showdown between East and West, a clash of titans at this crossroads between Europe and Asia. The year of the last dying gasp of the Roman Empire, its domain shrunk to this one defiant promontory from its heyday fifteen hundred years before, when Rome had ruled the greater part of the known world. For a moment Jack felt a frisson of energy as he pressed his hand against the cold metal of the gun. He glanced along the line of the barrel towards the city of Istanbul, its minarets and domes rising like a studded jewel from a mirage. He was touching history itself, drawn into the past with an immediacy no textbook could ever convey.

After a moment he stood and arched his back, his tall, lean frame towering over most of the crew. “It’s a field piece, a siege gun, much bigger than the antipersonnel breech-loaders carried on ships of this period. My guess is we’re looking at one of the guns used by Sultan Mehmet II and the Ottoman Turks to pound the city defences.” He gestured towards the shoreline where the fractured remains of the Byzantine sea walls were just visible, their impressive stature further reduced by earthquake and modern development. “The Ottomans would have used any gun they could lay their hands on. This one was cast in Venice earlier that year, then maybe captured in battle or by pirates, then used against the massed forces of Byzantium behind those walls, including the Venetians themselves. The Turkish media are going to love this.”

As the crew dispersed back to their jobs, Jack looked again at that emblem on the gun. Like his own forebears in England, sea captains and explorers who had touched the farthest reaches of the globe, the Venetians were maritime adventurers who had spread their tentacles across the Mediterranean world, even installing a colony of merchants here in Constantinople. Theirs was a world of trade and profiteering, not imperialism and conquest. Yet they had been responsible for one of the greatest crimes in the history of civilisation, a crime which had drawn Jack to this spot and which he was determined to fathom before the expedition was out.

Back on the bridge, Jack resumed his seat behind the chart table and rolled up his sleeves. It had been a cool early summer morning but the sun was beginning to bear down as the sea mist burnt off. He looked over at Tom York, IMU’s senior captain, a neatly attired, white-haired man who was conferring over the main radar screen with the ship’s second officer, a newly appointed Estonian who had come with impeccable credentials from the Russian merchant marine academy. York glanced keenly at Jack and inclined his head towards the window from which he had been watching the scene on the foredeck below.

“I’d say mid-fifteenth century, from a distance.” York had begun a distinguished career in the Royal Navy as a gunnery officer and since then had developed an expertise in early naval ordnance which had proved indispensable on IMU projects. “I can’t wait to take a closer look. Right at the dawn of naval gunnery. But too late for us.”

Jack nodded. “Fourteen fifty-three, to be precise. Almost two hundred and fifty years too late. We’re looking for something way before guns were used at sea. It’s a terrific find and I didn’t want to deflate the crew, but we’ve got a long way to go before we reach the Crusades.”

Jack gazed pensively towards the shore, his view momentarily obscured by an overcrowded ferry that passed perilously close to the excavation. In the shimmer of phosphoresence left in the boat’s wake the city seemed to be floating on a cloud, like a heavenly apparition. It was one of the supreme images of history, a palimpsest of the greatest civilisations the world had ever known. To Jack’s eye it was like a cross-section through an archaeological site, only instead of layer built upon layer, here everything was jumbled, the threads of history all interwoven and nothing clear-cut. At the lowest level were the cracked and fissured remnants of the walls of Constantinople, first planned by the emperor Constantine the Great when he moved his capital here in the fourth century AD and abandoned Rome to decline and ruin. Above the walls rose the slopes of the much older Greek acropolis of Byzantium, a name which survived as the term for the Christian empire of the Middle Ages which was based in Constantinople and traced its roots back to Rome. Above that rose the sprawling splendour of the Topkapi Palace, hub of the city the Ottoman Turks renamed Istanbul after they defeated the Byzantines in 1453 and shining heart of the most powerful state in the medieval world. Higher still, above the few remaining wooden houses of old Istanbul, rose the minarets and cascading domes of Hagia Sofia, once the greatest of all Christian cathedrals in the East but after 1453 a holy site of Islam. And somewhere, Jack knew, it was possible, just possible, that the sprawling mass of the city concealed evidence of a migration at the very dawn of history, of settlers from a precocious civilisation who had fled their citadel of Atlantis as it was inundated by floodwaters far to the east in the Black Sea.

He could hardly believe it was six months since he and Katya had lost themselves in the labyrinthine back ways of the city. It had been a time of supreme exhilaration, basking in the discovery of a lifetime, but a time also of emptiness and loss. For Katya it had been the devastating truth about her father’s evil empire, a revelation which weighed heavily on her despite all Jack’s efforts and led her to return to Russia to spearhead a renewed effort against the illegal antiquities trade. For Jack the sense of personal loss had been more acute, and he still felt it now. He had been with Katya when the search for Peter Howe had finally been called off. Howe had been a friend since boyhood and Jack was reminded of him every time he saw Tom York, his limp a legacy of the same gun battle. Jack had insisted on staying with Sea Venture over Atlantis until the search had finally been called off. For many days afterwards he felt that his ambitions had become entombed in the Black Sea with the wreck of Seaquest, that he had no right to risk the lives of others in his search for adventure. It was Katya who had nursed back his confidence as they became absorbed in the history of Byzantium during their long days together exploring Istanbul. She had persuaded him to reawaken a schoolboy dream he had cherished with Peter Howe, a dream of a fabulous lost treasure which had become all-consuming after Jack and Katya had parted ways at the airport, a dream which had led Jack back to where he was now.

“I’ve done it!”

Jack snapped out of his trance and hurried over to the source of the noise in the navigation room behind the bridge. In the darkened interior he could see where the radar and position-fixing consoles had been stacked on either side to make way for a complex array of electronic gadgetry surrounding an outsize computer screen. In the midst of it all, oblivious to his presence, sat a swarthy, dark-haired man with a rugby player’s physique, his eyes glued to the screen and his head clamped in earphones festooned with antennae.

“Good thing you finally lost some weight,” Jack said. “Otherwise we’d be excavating you out of this.”

“What?” Costas Kazantzakis shot him an impatient glance and reverted to the screen. Jack shouted the words at him again.

“Okay, okay.” Costas lifted off the headset and leaned back in what little space he had. “Yeah, well, it was scraping my way through that underwater tunnel that did it. I’ve still got the scars. If anything good came out of that project it was the gods of Atlantis warning me to pull back on the calories.”

Costas craned his neck around and took in Jack’s mud-spattered sweater. “Been playing again?”

“Siege gun. Venetian. Fourteen fifty-three.”

Costas grunted then suddenly snapped the headset back on as the screen erupted in a kaleidoscope of colours. Jack looked on fondly as his friend became absorbed again in his task. Costas was a brilliantly inventive engineer, with a PhD in submersibles technology from MIT, and had accompanied Jack on many of his adventures since the foundation of IMU over a decade ago. His hard science was a perfect foil to Jack’s archaeology. Not for Costas the complex interwoven threads of history and the uncertainties of interpretation. For him the only significant problems were those that could be solved by science, and the only complexity was when things failed to work.

“What’s going on?”

Maurice Hiebermeyer squeezed through the doorway beside Jack. His frame was definitely on the bulky side; Hiebermeyer seemed to be in a permanent sheen of sweat, despite his baggy shorts and open shirt.

Jack nodded in greeting. “I think Costas has finally got this thing to work.”

Jack knew what was coming next. Hiebermeyer had flown in by helicopter the night before from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria, like a bird of prey pouncing on its target, hoping that Jack would be looking ahead to the next project, having found the problems of excavating in Istanbul’s harbour insurmountable. They had last spoken on the deck of Sea Venture six months ago when Hiebermeyer had mentioned another extraordinary find of ancient writing from the necropolis of mummies that had produced the Atlantis papyrus, and since then he had been bombarding IMU with phone messages and emails.

He fumbled with a folder he was carrying. “Jack, we need to…”

“It will have to wait.” Jack flashed a good-natured smile at the portly Egyptologist. “We’re on a knife-edge here and I have to concentrate. Sorry, Maurice. Just hang on till this is over.” He turned back to the screen and Hiebermeyer went silent.

“Yes!”

The screen rippled with colour, and the two men moved up behind Costas for a better view. They were looking at a video image, a floodlit grey mass with a mechanical pincer arm extending into the middle.

“We’re now almost fifty feet below the sea floor, one hundred and sixty-eight feet absolute depth from our present position.” Costas removed the headset and leaned back as he spoke. “In a few seconds the imaging will automatically revert to sonar and the ferret should be back on line.”

“Ferret?”

Costas glanced apologetically at Hiebermeyer and handed over a plastic model he had been holding like a talisman, an odd cylindrical shape that bore a passing resemblance to the remote-operated vehicle they had used to explore the Neolithic village in the Black Sea. “A combination remote-operated vehicle, underwater vacuum cleaner and sub-bottom sonar,” he enthused. “It’s controlled from here via an umbilical and can burrow through sediment with pinpoint precision, sending back images as crisp as an MRI scan. At the moment it’s digging through terragenous sediment, land runoff, tons of it. We’re at the edge of the channel swept by the Bosporus, but even so there’s vast quantities of sediment, several metres per century. We need to go deep if we’re to stand any chance of finding what we want. The weight of that chain is going to bury it further still.”

“Ah, the chain,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “Remind me.”

Jack shifted over to a yellow Admiralty Chart of the Istanbul approaches pinned to the wall beside Costas. Their position was clearly marked at the outer edge of the estuary that cut through the city, its sinuous scimitar shape defining the promontory of Byzantium and forming one of the greatest natural harbours in the world. To the ancient Greeks this was Chrysoceras, the Golden Horn, as if a giant mythical bull had embedded itself in the Bosporus as it strained towards the Black Sea, a significance not lost on the three men with the bull imagery of Atlantis still fresh in their minds.

Jack picked up a pencil and traced a faint line over the entrance to the estuary. “During the Byzantine period the Golden Horn was closed off in times of emergency by a giant boom almost a kilometre long, huge links of roughly forged iron held up on pylons and barges. It was attached here, on a tower near the extremity of the city walls where the estuary meets the Bosporus, and here, about three hundred metres away from us on the Galata shore. The chain is first recorded in the eighth century AD and had a famous role in the Great Siege of 1453, but we know of only two occasions when it may have been breached. The first was in the eleventh century, when a gang of Viking mercenaries supposedly got their longships over it. The second is more definite, in 1204, when Venetian galleys broke it with a ram. The chain was rebuilt, but a severed section may have been lost on the seabed. If we can find it, then we’ve hit the layer with the loot and we’re in business.”

“The first link in our story.” Costas’ pun scarcely concealed his anxiety, his fingers quietly drumming the desk and his eyes flitting over the screen. The image had gone dark and the only indication that the ferret was operational was the depth gauge in the corner, cycling with agonising slowness through one-inch increments.

“So how can you be so certain about the location?” Hiebermeyer had put his own quest on hold and was becoming absorbed in the project.

“It’s always been contentious, but a fifteenth-century manuscript unearthed in the Topkapi archive last year gives an exact position fix between known monuments on the shoreline.”

“I don’t like it.” Costas glanced at the wall clock and shifted uneasily in his seat. “If that gun was from 1453, then we’ve got at least five metres of compacted sediment to dig through before we’re anywhere near the target layer. And we’ve only got twenty minutes before Sea Venture has to shift position.”

Jack pursed his lips in shared concern. This project was like no other they had worked on, a constant game of cat and mouse in one of the most overcrowded waterways on the planet. They had a six-hour window each day authorised by the port authorities, but even so they had to shift repeatedly to let a ferry or cargo vessel past, some with draughts so deep their screws churned up the bottom sediment. Jack had every confidence in Tom York’s ability to troubleshoot the navigation, and Sea Venture’s dynamic positioning system meant that she could reacquire precise co-ordinates with ease. But there was no protection for the excavation on the seabed, nor, more important for Costas, any guarantee that his prize creation would not become enmired forever with all the other detritus of history.

Hiebermeyer sensed the tension and persisted with Jack. “So what’s this childhood dream of yours?”

Jack took a deep breath, nodded and beckoned Hiebermeyer over to a computer console on the far side of the room. It was a story he had told a hundred times before, to the crew, to the press, in his repeated attempts to gain backing for the project from the IMU board of directors and the Turkish authorities, but it never failed to send a shiver of excitement up his spine.

“The Great Siege of 1453 was one of the defining moments in history,” Jack began. “The death knell of the biggest empire the world had ever seen, the event that gave Islam a permanent foothold in Europe. But for the city of Constantinople a far more calamitous event took place two and a half centuries earlier. Desecration and rape on a colossal scale, a horrendous atrocity even by medieval standards. And the perpetrators were not infidels but Christians, Crusaders of the Holy Cross, no less.”

“The Crusades,” Hiebermeyer said. “Of course.”

“The time they didn’t quite make it to the Holy Land.”

“Remember what Professor Dillen drummed into us at Cambridge,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “That the greatest crimes against Christendom have always been caused by Christians themselves.” The two men had been contemporaries as undergraduates, and when Jack had returned to complete his doctorate after a stint in the Royal Navy they had studied early Christian and Jewish history together under their famous mentor.

“The date was 1204,” Jack continued. “Pope Innocent III had called for a fourth Crusade, yet another doomed expedition to free Jerusalem from the infidel. How the noble knights of the Crusade came to be diverted from their cause to sack the greatest treasure-house of Eastern Christianity is one of the most appalling sagas in history.”

The small screen in front of them suddenly flashed up an image recognisable the world over, four splendidly wrought horses in gilded copper standing together in front of an ornate architectural backdrop.

“The Horses of St. Mark’s,” Hiebermeyer said.

“A few tourists would drop their cameras if they knew the truth about how these sculptures reached Venice.” Jack was in full stride now, his words tinged with anger. “The leaders of the Crusade needed someone to ship the knights and their equipment across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. And who better than the Venetians, the greatest maritime power of the day? But the Venetians had other ideas up their sleeves. The Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople had begun to encroach on territory near Venice in the Adriatic Sea, and the Venetians didn’t like it. Venetian merchants in Constantinople had been murdered. The Venetian doge Dandolo had been imprisoned and blinded by the Byzantines years before and was secretly bent on revenge. Then the Crusaders proved unable to come up with the cash for their passage after they had embarked, which virtually enslaved them to the Venetians. Add to that a claimant to the Byzantine throne among the Crusader ranks, and the stage was set. Pope Innocent III found himself unwittingly sponsoring the sack of the second city of Christendom, the focal point of the Eastern Church. Once they arrived at Constantinople, the Crusaders forgot the Holy Cross and behaved like any other marauding army of the Middle Ages, only with a ferocity and barbarism unparalleled even for that period.”

“What happened?”

“Imagine if an army out of control landed in London and stripped all the public statues, desecrated Westminster Abbey, emptied the British Museum, burned the British Library. All the symbols of nationhood and the treasures of empire lost in a single blood-soaked rampage. In Constantinople the holy warriors applied their much-vaunted Christian zeal to the great churches, Hagia Sofia foremost among them, looting the hallowed relics of a thousand years of Christianity. They destroyed the libraries, descendants of the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Ephesus, an incalculable loss for civilisation. They stripped the Hippodrome, the ancient racing circus that was the focus of the city, leaving only the fragments of sculptures you see there today and a few monuments too large to pillage.”

“The Egyptian obelisk of Thutmose III,” Hiebermeyer said, nodding.

Jack gestured at the screen. “We know that Constantinople was the inheritor of all the greatest treasures of western civilisation. Priceless artefacts that had once been in Egypt and Greece and the Near East were first brought to Rome as the empire expanded. Then, when Constantine moved the capital, many of these treasures moved with him, shipped across the Mediterranean from Rome to Constantinople. The Horses of St. Mark’s may originally have been fifth-century BC Greek creations, perhaps embellishing the famous sanctuary at Olympia. Five centuries later they’re in Rome, on top of a triumphal arch of Nero in the Forum, part of a sculptural group showing the emperor drawing a four-horse quadriga. The arch was destroyed by Vespasian but the image survives on Nero’s coins. Four centuries after that they’re here in Constantinople, perhaps in the Hippodrome beside that obelisk. And remember, Constantinople had never been sacked before 1204. The treasures that, from eyewitness accounts, were plundered by the Crusaders can only hint at what was here. Some of the loot was melted down for bullion and coin. Other treasures, like the Horses of St. Mark’s, were shipped back to Venice and the Crusader homelands—France, Spain, the Low Countries, England—where they may still lie secreted away in the great cathedrals and monasteries. And other objects, especially antiquities with pagan symbolism, were desecrated and hurled into the Golden Horn.” He paused. “When Peter Howe and I first heard this story we became convinced that one of the greatest troves of ancient art anywhere in the world may lie on the sea floor below us now.”

There was a sudden commotion behind them as Costas drew his chair up to the video screen. Hiebermeyer’s eyes remained on the image of the horses and he put his hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“You say anything from ancient Rome could have been brought here,” he said quietly. “Last year after our little adventure on the Black Sea I was called to Rome to translate an Egyptian hieratic text found on the site of Vespasian’s Temple of Peace, near the spot where the fragments of the marble plan of the city were found. It proved to be one of a series of bronze plaques attached to the public colonnade of the precinct, each with an identical text in all of the main languages of the Roman Empire: Latin, Greek, Egyptian, Aramaic, you name it. They were proclamations listing Vespasian’s victories and Rome’s triumph. Their subject was the Jewish War.”

Jack turned from watching Costas and looked Hiebermeyer full in the face, his dark eyes fathomless.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Hiebermeyer asked haltingly.

Jack remained silent.

“My God.” Hiebermeyer’s German accent grew more pronounced, and his voice wavered. “The Jewish treasures of the Tabernacle. Vespasian had them consigned to the Temple of Peace, never to be paraded again. They passed into legend.” His voice became a whisper. “Could they have been secretly shipped to Constantinople before Rome fell?”

“The thought had occurred to me,” Jack replied quietly.

Hiebermeyer took off his little round glasses and mopped his forehead. “The sacred vessels of the inner sanctum. The golden table. The menorah.” The last word was a hoarse gasp. “Do you have any idea what we could be getting into?”

“Yes,” said Jack.

“We’re not just talking fabulous treasures here. We’re talking major present-day ramifications. The menorah is the symbol of the modern state of Israel. Any hint that we’re on to the lost treasure of the Jewish Temple and the result could be explosive. Literally.”

“It doesn’t go beyond these four walls,” Jack said firmly.

At that moment there was a whoop and a joyful string of expletives from the other console. Jack and Hiebermeyer quickly returned to their positions behind Costas, and the ship’s second officer appeared beside them. Jack glanced curiously at the man and then reverted to the screen. They could immediately see why Costas was jubilant. The screen had transformed into a fantastic multicoloured image, the lines and contours of the scan as sharp as a 3-D computer drawing. In the centre were unmistakable signs of human agency, a dark twisted mass embedded in the sediment of the sea floor. It was an immense metal link, at least a metre long, a figure-eight shape crudely welded at the waist. A second link was looped through it and extended off-screen to the right, but the loop to the left was scarred and buckled where the adjoining link had sheared off.

“Fantastic!” Jack clapped Costas on the back. He was overjoyed, his mind already racing forward to the next stage of the search, but his eyes remained glued on the screen as the camera panned forward to the edge of the exposed metal. Wedged into the final loop was a fragmentary mass of wood, evidently ship’s timbers, a section of overlapping hull strakes with lines of regularly spaced dark protrusions where the iron rivets had been preserved for more than eight hundred years in the anaerobic ooze. Jack and Hiebermeyer both gasped as they realised what was woven through the link, a mass of white that looked like denuded branches from a tree. It was a crushed human skeleton, its arms pinned at grotesque angles through the metal, the skull distorted and barely recognisable but still covered with a rusty brown stain where there had once been a close-fitting conical helmet with a nose-guard.

“There’s your chain, and one of its casualties,” Costas said. “Now it’s time to get out of here.”

Costas activated a control to cast off the ferret’s umbilical just as the ship’s engines began to throb. Jack left Hiebermeyer with him and followed the Estonian officer out of the navigation room to join York on the bridge. He would broadcast the news of the discovery to the crew during the hour that Sea Venture would have off-site before the shipping lane was accessible to them again. He looked out of the window beyond the ore-carrier waiting to traverse the passage and to the low arches of the Galata Bridge, its road bustling with morning traffic and its balustrades lined with hopeful fishermen, oblivious to the true treasures that might lie beneath them. The choppy waters once plied by the pleasure barges of emperors and sultans now shone again, the result of a massive cleanup operation in the past decade. As Jack looked beyond the bridge to the radiant skyline, he felt again the allure that had drawn him and Katya to seek out Istanbul’s deepest secrets. For all its chaos and dark history, this city had come to symbolise hope; it was the place where Jack had revived his passion for the mysteries of the past that had driven him since childhood.

He looked down as the sparkling waters off Sea Venture’s bow erupted in turmoil from the vessel’s water jet stabilisers. He was exhilarated beyond belief that they had made a discovery that could vindicate his dream, a stepping-stone to even more sensational finds over the coming days. The chain put them right at the key moment in history, and showed they were at the outer limits of the harbour where the spoils from the Sack of Constantinople had been dumped. All they had to do now was work their way into the Golden Horn and they should hit pay dirt. But as usual Jack’s jubilation was tempered by anxiety. The pressure was now on. They still had a long way to go. He knew they would have to keep coming up with the goods for the authorities to continue boxing in the sea lane for them; the gun and the chain had proved him right but would also raise expectations. He looked again at the waters of the Golden Horn, shielding his eyes against the brilliance of the glare, and prayed fervently that it would live up to its name.

MARIA DE MONTIJO SHIFTED ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLY on her stool and briefly shut her eyes. It had been their longest day in the cathedral precinct so far, and despite the adrenaline that had sustained her hour after hour she knew her concentration would soon begin to wane. Outside, the dull grey English afternoon was beginning to darken, and she could hear the insistent patter of rain on the windowpanes. She straightened her back, blinked hard and raised the palette with her cleaning tools to the edge of the frame. In the utter silence of the room, time seemed to stand still, and all attention was focused on the intricate pattern of ink revealed by the microlight only inches from her face. She breathed slowly and deliberately, at the end of each exhalation bringing her brush to bear with a steadiness born of years of experience. After fifteen minutes she rocked backwards and handed the palette to her assistant.

“That’s it,” she said. “We’re finished.”

She carefully pulled back the angle-lamp to reveal the entire inscription, the product of more than a week of painstaking labour. With the patina of centuries removed, the letters stood out crisp and black as if they had been applied only days before.

Tuz ki cest estorie ont. Ou oyront ou lirront ou ueront. Prient a ihesu en deyte. De Richard de haldingham o de Lafford eyt pite. Ki lat fet e compasse. Ki ioie en cel li seit done.

The unfamiliar spelling of the Old French only served to deepen the mystery of the man who had composed it. After a moment of contemplation Maria turned encouragingly to her assistant, a willowy young man with steel-rimmed spectacles, who eagerly leaned forwards to make the translation.

“All those who possess this work, or who hear, read or see it, pray to Jesus in his godhead to have pity on Richard of Holdingham or of Sleaford, who made it and set it out, that he may be granted bliss in heaven.”

It seemed appropriate that Richard’s last words should also be theirs, that they should finish their task at the spot where the scribe had last lifted his quill from the parchment almost seven hundred years before.

Twenty minutes later Maria stood in the centre of the room and gazed one last time at the map before it was sealed behind its protective glass covering. With the spotlight now removed, the low-intensity glow of the room seemed to accentuate the age-old appearance of the vellum, the shadows and undulations showing where the calfskin had shrunk and buckled with the passing of the years.

Normally the job of cleaning manuscripts would be left to her technical staff at the institute in Oxford. But when the call came for a new programme of restoration on the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral, the temptation proved too great. It was the chance of a lifetime, the opportunity to work on the greatest extant thirteenth-century illuminated manuscript, to touch with her own hands the most important and celebrated medieval map in the world.

As her eyes adjusted to the gloom, the familiar form began to take shape. Almost filling the immense squared parchment was an orb more than four feet wide. At the centre was Jerusalem, and below it the T-shape of the Mediterranean dividing Asia, Africa and Europe. Squeezed in at the lower left were the British Isles, and in the exergue beyond was the inscription she had been cleaning. Everywhere on the map were hundreds of miniature drawings with captions in Latin and French, some illustrating biblical stories and others depicting bizarre creatures and mythical places.

It was a cornucopia of fact and fantasy, the supreme expression of the medieval mind. Yet it was also hemmed in by ignorance. In its order and confidence the map seemed the last statement on the world of men, yet beyond the thin strip of ocean that encircled Christendom lay nothing at all. To Maria the figure of Christ in the gable above seemed to be sitting in judgement not only on the dead but also on the living, on men with the hubris to think that the myriad wonders they had crammed into their map of the world represented anything like the entirety of God’s creation.

“Dr. de Montijo. You must come at once.”

The dapper figure in the clerical robe caught up to Maria as she made her way briskly across the cathedral forecourt, her umbrella raised against the perennial English drizzle. She was due back in Oxford that evening and had little time to spare if she was going to catch the train.

“This had better be good,” she said, her slight Spanish accent giving a lilt to her voice. “I’m scheduled to give a seminar on Richard of Holdingham at my institute in about three hours and need time to prepare.”

“That may just have to wait,” the little man wheezed excitedly. “The workmen in the old Chained Library have just made an extraordinary discovery. Your assistant is already with them.”

Together Maria and the cleric approached the north porch of the cathedral. With its soft honey hue the weathered sandstone of the buttresses made Hereford seem less forbidding than many of the great cathedrals of England, yet even so the effect when they entered was awesome. Maria glanced down the nave to the altar and up at the cavernous space in between, her view framed by the massive pillars on either side that rose to the smaller arches of the clerestory and the spreading fans of the ceiling vault far above. As she followed the cleric up the north aisle she was assailed by the smell of damp stone and a faint hint of decay, as if the sickly reek of putrefaction which had permeated the cathedral for so long had left a lingering aura long after the last burial vaults had been sealed.

The nave had changed little since Richard of Holdingham last passed this way. She brushed against a pillar and felt a sudden thrill of intimacy, as if she had reached back in time to shadow the great man’s footsteps. In his day the ponderous masonry of the Normans had been in place for only a century, yet a minster had stood on this spot since the time of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. It had been the Cathedral Church of St. Ethelbert, the king of East Anglia who had been foully murdered nearby. In Richard’s day it also attracted pilgrims who came from far and wide to pay homage to Thomas Becket, the archbishop martyred at Canterbury, whose enamel reliquary had also survived through the centuries, another of the cathedral’s great treasures alongside the Mappa Mundi.

After passing the north transept they reached the choir aisle where the map had been displayed over the past century before being moved to its present home in a purpose-built museum outside. Immediately opposite the blank space on the wall was a low doorway into the outer structure of the cathedral. Through it the beginning of a spiral staircase could be seen.

“The reconstruction work is almost complete,” the cleric said. “This is just a precaution.” He passed Maria a yellow safety helmet and put one on himself, its appearance incongruous above his brown clerical cassock. As she followed him up the steeply corkscrewing steps, his words resounded with a muffled echo.

“A sandstone cathedral is like a wooden ship,” he explained. “Keep an old hull in service long enough and all the timbers will need to be renewed. Like HMS Victory. Sandstone isn’t the most durable building material. When we moved the library we took the opportunity for some much-needed stone replacement.”

They were nearing the chamber which had once held Hereford’s world-renowned chained library, a fabulous collection including rare incunabula, books printed before 1500, as well as 227 manuscript volumes, beginning with the priceless Hereford Gospels of the eighth century. Both the books and the cases to which they had been chained were now reconstituted in the museum which housed the Mappa Mundi, itself once also stored in the library.

After ascending to the clerestory level, they squeezed past a stack of freshly quarried blocks and stood at the entrance to the chamber. In the thin rays of daylight cast through the slit windows they could just make out the paler patches along the walls where the bookcases had once been. Instead of a library, the chamber now looked like a medieval stonemason’s workshop, with cutting tools and fragments of decayed masonry piled all over the floor.

At the far end a group of workmen were huddled over a patch of bright light in the wall. It came from a hole where two blocks of masonry had been removed, leaving a space just wide enough for a slender form to get through. At that moment a head appeared upside-down, its tousled blond hair and glasses caked in dust.

“Maria! You’re not going to believe this.”

Jeremy Haverstock had been her best-ever doctoral student, a virtuoso in early Germanic languages, but he had been cloistered in Oxford writing his dissertation and was clearly revelling in the sense of adventure. She had invited him along to Hereford to give him a break, and to share in the unique experience. Since his arrival from America she had encouraged him to travel widely to visit early monastic libraries, yet he still had the infectious enthusiasm of a tourist touching history for the first time. She smiled in spite of herself as she and the cleric picked their way across the debris and pulled down the dust masks from their helmets.

“It’s your career on the line,” she said. “Anything less than an Augustinian Bible and you’ll be doing the seminar single-handed.”

“It’s better than that. Far better.” As they approached she could see his face was streaked with sweat despite the chill of the room. He heaved one of the blocks aside and withdrew out of sight into the wall. “Follow me.”

Moments later Maria was squeezed in beside him, her wavy brown hair and leather jacket covered with dust. Any irritation she may have felt instantly evaporated when she saw what lay before them. The workmen had broken through into a three-foot-wide space within the massive exterior wall of the cathedral. From Maria’s hunched position she could see they were squatting above a ruined spiral staircase, a relic of some previous building phase, which had long ago been blocked off. Three steps below them the well of the staircase was clogged with debris, jumbled chunks that looked like eroded sandstone covered with a pall of red dust. With her body bent double Maria sidled down for a closer look, the spotlight angled directly behind her head.

“Es estupendo.” The words of her native Spanish came out involuntarily as she stared open-mouthed in disbelief.

“See what I mean?” Jeremy slid down eagerly beside her. “It’s like Aladdin’s cave.”

The debris was not discarded masonry, as she’d assumed, but a great mass of brown and yellowed parchment, some compacted like papier-mâché but much of it well preserved with letters still plainly visible.

“It looks like a clean-out of the library,” Jeremy said. “Torn fragments, books damaged beyond repair. It’s all handwritten manuscript, and none of it looks later than the thirteenth century. The architectural historian reckons this staircase became redundant and was sealed up some time before the completion of the north transept in the fourteenth century.”

Maria shifted sideways and pointed to the spot where her head had obscured the centre in shadow. She was suddenly trembling with excitement.

“Look,” she exclaimed. “It isn’t all fragments. There’s an intact folio volume.”

Jeremy reached over with his longer arms and carefully extracted the leather-bound book from its bedding of parchment fragments. While he held it Maria gently blew off the dust and opened the hoary brown cover.

“Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.”

She read out the words slowly, her mind reeling in astonishment. “The Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. And in Latin, which means one of the original copies. Ninth, maybe eighth century.”

Jeremy peeled off a sheaf of parchment that had become stuck to the back of the volume. With the musty leaves balanced on his hands he began humming quietly to himself, his eyes darting to and fro across the writing. Maria watched bemusedly as he suddenly became silent.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Incredible,” he whispered. “A twelfth-century continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It mentions King Henry II and King John. It must be the latest document anywhere in Old English, the language the Normans tried so hard to suppress. It clinches my thesis once and for all, that the Anglo-Saxon tradition was kept alive in the secret scriptoria of the cathedrals well into the medieval period. If this doesn’t get me my doctorate, nothing will.”

Maria surveyed the scene in front of them, noting several more intact volumes poking out where they had removed the Bede.

“This was more than just a clean-out,” she asserted quietly. “It’s always been a mystery why these two seminal works of Anglo-Saxon history were missing from the Hereford library, in a collection with liturgical manuscripts going back to the eighth century. It may have been an overzealous librarian keeping up with the times, making space for more recent works. But it may have been more than that, a deliberate culling of works of Anglo-Saxon history from the library, an attempt to conceal anything the Norman aristocracy saw as subversive.”

She carefully closed the book and cradled it in her arms, at the same time looking with concern at the fragments of parchment which had broken off and crumbled where Jeremy had extracted the volume from its resting place.

“We’ll take the Bede and those pages of the Chronicle,” she instructed. “But everything else must remain in situ and the entrance resealed until we can assemble a full conservation team. We can’t afford to expose any more parchment to air.” She peered again at Jeremy, who was cleaning his glasses with a serious look on his face. “And I forgive you.” She grinned. “You may just have stumbled on the greatest treasure trove of early English history ever discovered.”

As they swivelled round to go, Jeremy caught sight of an anomalous shape protruding from the sea of parchment fragments. It was one end of a wound scroll, something that might be even older than the bound manuscript volumes. Unable to restrain himself, he leaned back to extract it just as Maria was beginning to crawl out.

He cleared his throat suggestively and Maria looked back towards the bright tungsten light. She saw his guilty expression and then the metre-long scroll perched on top of the Chronicle pages.

“We must leave it,” she said sharply.

“Not if you still want to do that seminar this evening.”

Maria’s curiosity was piqued and she crawled back towards him. Jeremy had unravelled about ten centimetres of the scroll and was holding it so she could see. The radius of a large inscribed circle was visible, and within it she could make out faint forms that looked like outline drawings and tightly written inscriptions.

She knew what she was looking at even before she reached him. In her own doctoral thesis a decade earlier she had argued that the Hereford Mappa Mundi was a copy, the work of a remarkable artist but not a scholar. It was the only way to account for its most glaring error, the word AFFRICA written across Europe and EUROPA across Africa. The Bishop of Hereford had commissioned the map from Richard of Holdingham, who had prepared a blueprint in his home cathedral of Lincoln, but the final version had been completed in his absence by an artisan at Hereford skilled in calligraphy and illumination but not very literate or accurate. His ignorance was revealed in the finer detail, from small licences he had taken for aesthetic purposes at the expense of credibility to peculiarities in the spelling and geography.

Now to her astonishment she knew she was looking at the sketch prepared by Richard himself, the cartographer and monk whose vision of the world had fascinated her since her student days. She stared with reverence at the precise, confident hand which had created captions all over the map. Just below Jeremy’s left hand were the faded letters EUROPA, correctly placed over France and Italy. Beside his right hand where he had pulled the scroll open was the elongated form of the British Isles, with Hereford and Lincoln prominently displayed.

As Jeremy moved the fingers of his right hand to the edge of the parchment she noticed something odd.

“My God,” she breathed. “The exergue. It’s missing.”

The elaborate decoration which filled the space between the orb of the world and the square edges of the parchment on the finished Mappa Mundi had clearly been the creation of the artisan alone, a place for decorative features of less interest to Richard, embellishments which could have been tailored to the whim of the cathedral authorities. It explained the bizarre parade of images, from huntsmen and clerics to references to the Roman emperors, which the artisan must have drawn together haphazardly from other maps and manuscripts he had seen.

In the corner Maria saw that the dedication she had so painstakingly cleaned on the Mappa Mundi was also missing, so it too must have been the work of the artisan rather than the master himself. Richard must have visited the cathedral to discuss the commission but had clearly not been present at the dedication. It solved the mystery of how the misnamed continents had been allowed to remain, mistakes Richard would surely never have countenanced. She felt a pang of disappointment as she looked at the blank space, a sense that Richard was no longer so securely in her grasp, that he had stepped back into the shadowlands of the past.

As Jeremy shifted slightly, she realised that the mottled brown and yellow of the parchment where the dedication should have been held a defined shape.

“Angle it towards the light,” she said. “There’s something here.”

The faded image of a drawing came into view. It was another landmass, an irregular image not much larger than the British Isles wedged into the corner of the parchment.

“It’s beyond the outer ocean surrounding the world, so it can’t be part of the map,” she said. “It must be Richard’s sketch for one of the continents. Look, you can see where he used his knife to scrape away the ink to try to erase it.”

Jeremy was craning his head over for a better view, his lank blond forelock hanging directly in front of Maria’s face.

“I’m not so sure,” he murmured. “It’s somehow vaguely familiar, but not from the Mappa Mundi. Perhaps if I saw it the right way up I might get a better…”

As his words trailed off they both looked up at each other in astonishment.

“The Vinland Map,” Maria whispered.

With her heart racing, she pulled out her magnifying glass and began scrutinising the lines. Only a few weeks earlier they had attended a conference at Yale University on the latest dating evidence for the famous Vinland Map, a drawing now thought to have been a forgery but based on a lost map that pre-dated Columbus by some fifty years, a map which showed a shoreline said to have been discovered by the Vikings centuries earlier to the west of Greenland.

“It’s incredible,” she exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same. There’s the river leading to the lake and the large inlet lower down. And the legend looks identical, in medieval Latin.”

With the magnifying glass the faint smudge at the top became legible: Vinlanda Insula a Byarno repa et Leipho socijs.

“Island of Vinland,” Jeremy murmured. “Discovered by Bjarni and Leif in company.”

“It proves the authenticity of the image on the Vinland Map beyond doubt!” Maria was flushed with excitement. “But if this is truly the hand of Richard of Holdingham, then it dates more than two centuries earlier than the Vinland Map. You can forget early English history for a while. You may just have discovered the oldest known depiction of North America.”

They stared at each other in amazement. The Mappa Mundi and this sketch dated from the thirteenth century, almost three centuries before the first European voyages of discovery to the New World, hundreds of years before the first maps of the American shoreline were thought to have been drawn.

“There’s more writing farther down.”

Maria had been focussed on the upper part of the depiction and had failed to register a second faint inscription beyond the drawing. She moved her magnifying glass a few inches lower.

“This definitely isn’t on the Vinland Map,” she said. “It’s in the Roman alphabet, but it isn’t Latin or French. It looks like Old Norse.”

She passed Jeremy the glass and took the map to hold it for him, tacitly acknowledging his greater expertise in the language of the Vikings.

“There’s a curious rune here,” he murmured. “It’s set at the beginning of the inscription like the illuminated letter of a medieval text. A single stem with branches on either side, angled up. It looks symmetrical. Five, maybe seven branches altogether, including the stem. Very odd.”

“Can you make out anything else?”

“Harald Sigurdsson.” He paused and looked up. “That’s Harald Hardrada, Harald Hard-Ruler, king of Norway. Killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in his attempt to take the English throne in 1066, only weeks before the Norman Conquest.”

“It’s not possible,” Maria whispered incredulously. “Go on.”

“Harald Sigurdsson our King with his thole-companions reached these parts with the treasure of Michelgard,” he slowly translated. “Here they feast with Thor in Valhalla and await the final battle of Ragnarøk.”

He looked up and eyed Maria with disbelief.

“Isn’t Michelgard the Viking name for Constantinople?”

For a moment she was too stunned to speak. Then she let the scroll roll up and passed it over.

“Guard this with your life. Don’t breathe a word of it to anyone.” She picked up the Bede and scrambled hurriedly towards the wall, extracting her cellphone as she went. Just as she was about to crouch through, Jeremy called out excitedly.

“That rune,” he said. “I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It’s not a rune at all. I can’t work out why on earth it should be here, but there’s only one thing it can be. It’s the symbol of the Jewish menorah.”

IT’S INCREDIBLE,” JACK SAID. “I KNEW HARALD Hardrada and the Vikings had been in Constantinople, but I never dreamt he’d been across the Atlantic. It puts Christopher Columbus in the shade once and for all.”

“You’ve lost me already,” Costas replied. “Vikings in Constantinople?”

Jack took a gulp of his coffee and stood up. “Wait here.”

The two men had been in England for less than an hour, having taken a dawn flight from Turkey direct to the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose and transferring by Lynx helicopter to the campus of the International Maritime University nearby. Costas had scheduled his return to England several days before, knowing that once the sub-bottom excavator in the Golden Horn was fully operational, he would be needed to provide technical backup for another IMU field project off the coast of Greenland. For Jack the decision had come only the previous evening, following the extraordinary phone call from his friend Maria de Montijo in Hereford. He had summoned an emergency meeting of the excavation staff and had asked Maurice Hiebermeyer to take over the archaeological supervision on Sea Venture, knowing that his friend would be delighted to accept a role well beyond his usual remit in the deserts of Egypt.

“You’d better make it quick.” Costas extracted a cellphone from his oil-spattered overalls and checked a text message. “They’re due in any time now.”

Jack nodded and made his way from the patio where they had been sitting to the open door of his office. He paused to look back over the broad sweep of Carrick Roads, the sinuous estuary which led out from the tip of Cornwall towards the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. From here generations of his ancestors had set sail to shape the destiny of England and make their fortune. Howards had fought with Drake against the Spanish Armada and under Nelson at Trafalgar, had brought back the riches of the Indies and had mapped the farthest reaches of the oceans.

Jack felt a surge of certainty as he surveyed the scene, knowing that he was maintaining a family tradition that stretched back a thousand years to before the Norman conquest of England. It was Jack’s father who had decided to donate the Cornwall estate to the fledgling International Maritime University, but IMU had been Jack’s dream and he had seen it to fruition. With generous financial backing from Efram Jacobovich, an old friend who had become a software tycoon, the mansion and outbuildings had been transformed into a state-of-the-art research facility that rivalled the world’s best oceanographic institutes. Beside the estuary the old shipyard had been expanded into a sprawling engineering complex, complete with a dry dock facility for the IMU research vessels as well as an experimental tank for submersibles research. On a wooded hill adjoining the complex was the elegant neoclassical building of the Howard Gallery, one of the foremost private collections of art in the world and also a venue for travelling exhibits from the IMU Maritime Museum at Carthage in the Mediterranean. Only a few weeks earlier Jack had inaugurated one of their most stunning exhibits yet, a dazzling display of finds from the Bronze Age Minoan shipwreck they had excavated the previous year. A banner advertisement showing the golden disc and the magnificent bull’s-head sculpture from the wreck adorned the wall facing Jack as he entered his office, a former sixteenth-century drawing room which was now the hub of IMU research and exploration worldwide.

A few moments later he was back outside with a map of Europe which he unrolled and pinned down on the patio table using their coffee mugs. Costas drew his chair up as Jack swept his hand from Scandinavia to the Black Sea.

“The Byzantines called them Varangians,” Jack said. “Tall, blond, terrifying barbarians from the north who served as mercenaries in the Byzantine emperor’s legendary Varangian Guard, the successor of the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome. In Hardrada’s day the Varangian Guard were mainly Vikings, Norse warriors from Scandinavia whose behaviour fully justified their reputation. They pillaged and burned their way around the Mediterranean, thinly disguised as standard-bearers for the Christian emperor but in reality pagan heroes who returned to their homelands in the north full of tales of bloodlust and booty. By the time they were wiped out by the Crusaders during the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, many of the Guard were English, descendants of Anglo-Saxon warriors who had fled England following the Battle of Hastings in 1066 when William of Normandy defeated King Harold of England.”

“You mean the other Harold?” Costas queried.

Jack nodded. “There was Viking blood in all the contestants to the English throne in 1066. The Normans were north-men, descendants of Vikings who had settled in France the century before. King Harold of England’s Anglo-Saxon ancestors were themselves migrants from Denmark and northern Germany. But the only thoroughbred Viking among the contestants in 1066 was Harald Hardrada, King of Norway. He was the most feared of them all, and had learned his trade decades earlier as chief of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople.”

Costas measured the distance with his hand and shook his head. “That’s over two thousand miles from Norway.”

“Just as the Vikings were beginning to explore west, to the British Isles and beyond, they were also going east,” Jack explained. “From as early as the eighth-century AD Scandinavian traders were penetrating the rivers of central and eastern Europe, from the Vistula on the Baltic to the Dnieper on the Black Sea. They were seeking untold wealth, the fabled treasures of the Orient, a hunt for silver and precious stones that took them to Central Asia and deep into the world of Islam. Eventually they founded the Viking kingdom of Rus, the origin of modern Russia. From their stronghold at Kiev they were within striking distance of the place they called Michelgard, the Great City, a perilous journey down the Dnieper but the key to riches beyond their dreams.”

“That’s how they got to Constantinople?” Costas said.

Jack smiled. “It’s true. If you don’t believe it, you only have to look at Viking treasure hoards discovered in their Scandinavian homeland, full of Arab silver coins which the Vikings acquired in exchange for furs and slaves and amber.”

Jack could see Costas looking dubiously at the distance between Norway and present-day Istanbul. “If you still need convincing, take a look at this.” Jack handed him a black-and-white photograph showing a polished marble railing, its surface covered with ancient graffiti. “Those linear symbols on the edge? They’re runes, Viking letters, probably eleventh century. They’re too worn to decipher completely, but a name can be made out: ‘Halfdan was here,’ or something like that. Any guesses where it is? Thousands of tourists pass within touching distance of it every year. It’s in an alcove high above the nave of Hagia Sofia, in the heart of ancient Constantinople. Halfdan was almost certainly one of the Varangian bodyguard, and given the date, he could even have been one of Harald Hardrada’s men.”

As he finished speaking, a thudding noise from the east that had been increasing in volume became a reverberating clatter, and a Lynx helicopter appeared out of the clouds, descending towards the helipad near the shoreline.

“I’ll take your word for it.” Costas grinned and handed back the photograph. “Right now I think we need to greet our guests.”

A few minutes later the two men stood at the edge of the helipad as the twin Rolls-Royce Gem turboshafts powered down and the main rotor of the Lynx shuddered to a halt. The first figure to step out of the passenger compartment was a strikingly attractive woman wearing a leather jacket and jeans, her long brown hair swept back into a loose bun. Maria de Montijo was one of Jack’s oldest friends, part of a close-knit group including Maurice Hiebermeyer and Efram Jacobovich who had first met as students at Cambridge. Maria and Jack had helped each other through difficult times and had forged a close bond. He had involved her in the Golden Horn project from the outset, and it made sense that he was the first person she would call with news of the astonishing discovery in Hereford Cathedral.

Maria’s dark Spanish features creased into a smile as she embraced Jack and Costas in turn. “Jack, you’ve met Jeremy, my American graduate student.” The tall young man who loped behind Maria swept his blond hair from his face and proffered his hand. They had met several weeks earlier when Jack had visited the Institute of Medieval Studies in Oxford to have a translation made of the newly discovered Topkapi manuscript, the eyewitness account of the Crusader siege of Constantinople that contained the crucial position-fix for the chain across the harbour. Jack had been impressed by Jeremy’s facility with the medieval Greek, and had no reason to doubt Maria’s enthusiastic judgement of his potential.

“How long have you been out of the States?” Costas asked amiably.

“Three years.” Jeremy peered down at the shorter man through his glasses. “I’ve got a fellowship waiting for me at Princeton, but I just don’t seem to be able to get away from this place.”

“I know the problem,” Costas said. “I keep trying, but every time I do he finds some reason to keep me here.” He jerked his head towards Jack and grinned. “Luckily, working for an international outfit means I’m not trapped in English drizzle all year long.”

“Gentlemen, allow me to introduce Father Patrick O’Connor.” Maria gestured towards the helicopter, and they turned to watch the figure being helped down by the pilot. In startling contrast to the flight suit and helmet of the crewman, he was wearing the distinctive black cassock of a Jesuit priest and was carrying two battered leather briefcases.

After nodding to the pilot, he strode confidently across the helipad, dropped his cases on the tarmac and shook Jack’s hand firmly. “Dr. Howard. Delighted to meet you at last. Maria’s told me all about you, and of course I’ve seen you on TV following your remarkable discoveries last year.”

Jack eyed the other man keenly. The accent had a hint of Irish brogue, but could as easily have been Boston. He guessed that O’Connor was a youthful fifty-five, his remaining hair grey and cropped close but with the weathered face and fit body of a man who had not spent his entire life in the cloisters.

“Maria tells me you have a PhD in early Church history,” Jack said.

“Trinity College, Dublin, then Heidelberg,” O’Connor replied. “Then I found my vocation. Twenty years in Central America, mainly Mexico, doing what we Jesuits do best, building schools, ministering to the sick, trying to bring humanity to places where there’s sometimes hardly any left at all.”

“And then you found academia again.”

O’Connor nodded. “Five years ago. I’d done my tour of duty and applied for a vacancy in the Vatican library. To my delight they offered me a tailor-made position in the Antiquities Department, as inspector of early buildings and archaeology. My remit covers everything in Rome under Vatican control up to the time of the Renaissance, with plenty of time for my own research. I was in Oxford to hear Maria’s seminar on Richard of Holdingham and the Mappa Mundi, one of my special areas of interest. I believe I may have something to offer.”

“That’s the reason we’re here now,” Jack said. “Let’s get down to business.”

After a quick coffee on the patio, Jack led them into his office. Almost the entire length of the old drawing room was occupied by a massive wooden table, its gnarled oak surface made from timbers reputedly salvaged from the ships that had brought the Norman invaders to England. Every time Jack sat at the table he felt the power of his own ancestry, as if his forebears who had plotted wars and voyages of discovery from this very table were keeping him ghostly company and egging him on. Now, instead of nautical dividers and parchment charts, the table was covered with the instruments of twenty-first-century exploration, computer workstations and communications consoles. To these Maria added a large black manila folder, which she laid at one end of the table. At the other end Jack raised a video screen linked to a laptop he had opened up beside the folder.

Costas arrived breathlessly after a rushed visit to the engineering complex, and Jack closed the door behind him and dimmed the lights. Maria and O’Connor sat down at the end of the table, with Jeremy on one side and Jack and Costas on the other.

“There was something I didn’t tell you on the phone, the reason why I wanted to show you this in person.” Maria spoke slowly, her hands laid flat on the closed manila folder. “Father O’Connor was in Oxford when I arrived from Hereford the night before last, and I took him immediately into my confidence. He is the world’s leading authority on what you’re about to see.”

Just as Maria was about to raise the cover of the folder, O’Connor put his hand on hers. “What we discuss here must remain secret,” he said quietly. “The time may come when this story will be headline news, but until then even the slightest leak could jeopardize everything. And I’m not just talking about archaeology. Lives are at stake here, perhaps countless lives.”

He released his grip and looked at the others, who all nodded in turn. Maria glanced at him again and then lifted the cover, folding it back to reveal a protective sheet of tissue paper over a hard white board. She slid away the paper and they saw the image that had transfixed her in the lost chamber of the cathedral the day before. Costas let out a low whistle as he and Jack stood up and craned over for a better view. The vellum, about three feet square, had been rolled out and pressed under a transparent polyurethane sheet. Even after seven hundred years in the dusty cathedral chamber the ink was still dark and clearly preserved the outline of the map.

“Fantastic,” Jack murmured. “I haven’t seen the Mappa Mundi for ages, but this is all familiar. You can clearly make out the T-shape of the Mediterranean and Red Sea dividing the continents, with Asia at the top and Jerusalem in the centre. And Europe and Africa are even labelled correctly.”

O’Connor nodded. “I’ve no doubt this is Richard of Holdingham’s exemplar. His sketch made in Lincoln and then copied and embellished by the illuminator in Hereford. Now look at the lower left corner.”

Jack had already seen the delicate lines of text and drawing Maria was pointing at, but had wanted to take in the whole map first. Now he peered closely at the image beyond the western rim of the world, an image so different from the dedication inscribed in this place on the finished map.

“My God, they really are runes,” he said excitedly. “I’m a little rusty, but this must be it.” He pointed at the smaller of the two inscriptions and glanced at Jeremy, who nodded and recited from memory.

“Harald Sigurdsson our King with his thole-companions reached these parts with the treasure of Michelgard. Here they feast with Thor in Valhalla and await the final battle of Ragnarøk.”

“Ragnarøk is the mythical battle at the end of time, when the warriors in Valhalla will seek final glory,” Maria said. “The second inscription and the drawing are virtually identical to the Vinland Map, showing the coastline discovered by Leif Eiriksson beyond Greenland around the year AD 1000. Sigurdsson was the family name of Harald Hardrada. The implication is that Hardrada and his companions reached America a generation or two after the first Vikings blazed the trail.”

“With the treasure of Michelgard, of Constantinople,” Jack murmured excitedly. “That’s why we’re here. I only wish I knew what he’d taken. It’s hardly likely to have been a shipload of classical bronzes.”

“Look closely at those runes,” O’Connor said. “Then you’ll see the real reason we’re here.”

Jack scanned the text from the bottom up, from the clearer ink of the lower lines to the more faded inscription above. The symbols seemed to be a standard version of the futhark, the Norse runic alphabet named for its first six letters. He could see nothing exceptional until he came to the faded symbol at the beginning, a symbol that had been drawn slightly larger, like the first letter of an illuminated manuscript.

He took the magnifying glass offered by Jeremy and leaned over to peer closer. “That’s definitely an odd one,” he said. “It looks like the futhark symbol for the letter F, with the arms angled up on the right side, only here it’s got three arms instead of two and it’s repeated symmetrically on the other side.”

Jeremy shook his head impatiently. “Forget runes for a moment. Think outside the box.”

Jack looked up and stared at Jeremy without expression and then looked down again. Suddenly his mouth opened and he nearly dropped the magnifying glass. “The menorah.”

“It was Jeremy who first noticed it,” Maria said after a silence. “I was completely wrapped up in that extraordinary map.”

“An understandable distraction,” Costas said, smiling at her.

“My father’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews,” she replied quietly. “Expelled from Spain by the Christian king not so long after your Crusaders were trying to save the Holy Land. One of the great ironies of history.”

Jack slowly sat back, his face a picture of stunned incomprehension. O’Connor pulled the laptop towards him and loaded a CD into the drive. “Forgive me for jumping in,” he said, “but if we’re talking about the menorah, we need to know something of its history. It so happens that the mystery of the lost Jewish treasure of the Temple is another special passion of mine.”

MOMENTS LATER A SPECTACULAR VISION OF ancient Rome appeared on the screen at the far end of the table. In the foreground a perfectly proportioned marble arch towered several stories high, its eroded surface embellished with relief carvings. Jack, Costas, Maria and Jeremy could make out trophies, banners, laurel wreaths and winged victories standing on globes. In the background loomed the vast tiered facade of the Colosseum.

“The most enduring legacy of the Flavian dynasty of emperors, Vespasian and his sons, Titus and Domitian,” Father O’Connor said. “The Arch of Titus straddles the Sacred Way in the centre of Rome. The Colosseum was financed on the spoils of the Jewish War and inaugurated by Titus in AD 80. It was built next to the Colossus of Nero, a monstrous gilt-bronze statue that gave the amphitheatre its name.”

“But not until the medieval period,” Jeremy interjected. “The name Colosseum first appears in the Venerable Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum in the eighth century AD.” He looked sheepishly at the group. “Another of our finds from the Hereford library.”

“The Jewish War,” Costas said. “Another excuse for rape and pillage on a colossal scale?”

“It was pretty ghastly, even by Roman standards,” O’Connor replied. “Probably a greater proportion of the Jewish population was annihilated in the war of AD 66 to 70 than during the Nazi Holocaust, either killed in battle or put to the sword in an orgy of retribution that lasted for another three years. But the story’s more complex than you might think. The Jewish state had enjoyed an unusual degree of autonomy under Rome, and there were close links with the emperors. King Herod Agrippa of Judaea was educated in Rome and was a friend of the emperor Claudius. A generation later the Jewish historian Josephus became a confidant of Vespasian, having switched sides to Rome during the rebellion. He has a bad reputation because the Jews never forgave him, but his writings are invaluable as the only eyewitness account of the war and the triumph in Rome in AD 71.”

“And the arch?” asked Costas.

“Built on the site of an earlier arch, exactly the spot where the triumphal procession would have first become visible to the huge crowd waiting in the Forum.” O’Connor tapped a key and zoomed in to an inscription on the attic of the arch. “Senatus Populusque Romanus,” he read. “The Senate and the People of Rome, to Divine Titus, son of the Divine Vespasian, Vespasian Augustus. This shows that the arch was dedicated by the emperor Domitian, who succeeded his brother Titus in AD 81. With a few notorious exceptions, like Nero, the title Divine was bestowed on emperors only after they’d died. The sculpture on the ceiling of the passageway even shows the apotheosis of Titus, riding heavenwards on the back of a great eagle.”

“The triumph was a family affair,” Jack added, his composure now close to normal again after the shock of seeing the menorah symbol. “According to tradition, Vespasian was the main celebrant as emperor at the time, but the Roman Senate voted a double triumph to acknowledge Titus as victorious general. Domitian was enhancing his own prestige by honouring the glorious achievements of his brother and father.”

O’Connor scrolled though a succession of views, each one bringing them closer to the arch as if he were walking them along the Sacred Way from the Colosseum. Through the passageway under the arch they could make out the heart of ancient Rome, the jumble of ruins in the old Forum with its shattered columns, vestiges of law courts and temples and the stark brick walls of the Senate House. Beyond the Forum lay the Capitoline Hill, where the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter lay buried under the medieval palace built by Michelangelo and the extravagant Vittorio Emanuele Monument which dominated Rome’s modern skyline.

“And now the incredible part,” O’Connor enthused. “This is where ancient history really comes alive for me, even more than in the arena of the Colosseum. Standing under the arch it’s as if those few moments at dawn two thousand years ago are endlessly re-enacted, imprinted in the marble. You can sense the exaltation of the victors, the pent-up frenzy of the crowd, the terror of the condemned. You can hear the drum beat, feel the pounding vibration of the procession. It never fails to send a shiver up my spine.”

He stopped at an image of an eroded relief panel. “On the wall of the passageway through the arch on the right-hand side, facing the Forum,” he explained, “you can see Titus in a quadriga, a four-horse chariot, led by the goddess Roma. The priests behind him are carrying long axes, fasces, which they’ll use to sacrifice bullocks on the steps of the Temple of Jupiter.”

He tapped the key again. “And this is on the left-hand side.”

O’Connor sat back as they absorbed the scene. It was fragmentary and worn, but the central portion was clear enough. It was one of the masterpieces of Roman relief sculpture. On the right-hand side was a triumphal arch in three-quarters view, with two quadrigas on top. In the background were placards borne aloft like standards, with blank spaces where there had once been painted inscriptions naming cities and peoples defeated in the war. Below them was the image which for almost two thousand years had fuelled the ardour of a people determined to rebuild their holiest temple, and of their enemies sworn to do all in their power to prevent that happening. It showed a procession of tunic-clad soldiers crowned with victory wreaths carrying two biers, each supporting an ornate object hefted high for all to see. On the right heading towards the arch was a table decorated with trumpets, the great altar of the Jewish Temple. On the left in the foreground was an extraordinary but unmistakable shape, a tapering column with three arms on each side curving upwards in concentric semicircles, each arm terminating at the same level and capped with an elaborate finial shaped like a lamp.

Costas let out a low whistle. “That’s some candlestick.”

“The menorah.” O’Connor spoke with barely suppressed excitement. “The most revered symbol of Judaism, placed immediately in front of the sanctuary in the Temple. The menorah represents the light of God, and harks back to the ancient symbol of the seven-branched Tree of Life. The Temple menorah was one of the most sacred treasures of the Jewish people, second only to the Ark of the Covenant.”

“How old was it?” Costas asked.

“There are those who believe the Temple menorah was the Tabernacle menorah itself, divinely ordained when God instructed Moses on the Mount,” O’Connor said. “Rabbinic tradition has it that God showed Moses the menorah drawn in fire and that divine light was radiated in pure gold. The earliest mention of the menorah is in the Pentateuch, in the Jewish Old Testament. In the Book of Exodus God instructs the Israelites on the form of their wilderness sanctuary, their Tabernacle, the basis for the Holy of Holies in the Temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem a thousand years before the Romans arrived.” He closed his eyes and recited from memory.

“And thou shalt make a candlestick of pure gold…. And there shall be six branches going out of the sides thereof; three branches of the candlestick out of the one side thereof, and three branches of the candlestick out of the other side thereof…. And thou shalt make the lamps thereof, seven; and they shall light the lamps thereof, to give light over against it. Of a talent of pure gold shall it be made.”

“A talent.” Costas stroked his chin thoughtfully. “How much was that?”

“The biblical talent was about thirty-four kilograms, seventy-five pounds,” O’Connor replied. “But don’t take it at face value. A talent was the biggest unit of weight in common use and was probably used in the Old Testament figuratively, to represent the largest weight that people could readily quantify.”

“It took at least ten Roman soldiers to heave the menorah, five on either side.” Costas was peering at the image on the screen. “The base looks at least a metre across, and I’m assuming that was gold too. If the arch was carved only a decade after the triumph, then many people in Rome would have seen the original, so the sculpture’s probably not an exaggeration. With the base, my guess is we’re looking at three hundred, maybe three hundred and fifty pounds of gold, four or five talents at least. That’s millions of dollars at today’s bullion rates.”

“It’s priceless.” O’Connor said tersely. “A symbol of nationhood, of a whole people. Nobody would ever value the menorah solely in monetary terms.”

“But that’s surely the point.” Jeremy turned and looked at O’Connor, his voice nervous but persistent. “The Vikings couldn’t care less about symbols of nationhood. Costas is right to see it in cash terms. In the Viking homeland, silver was the main bullion, and gold was at a huge premium. You hardly ever find it in Viking hoards. Three hundred pounds of gold would have assured Harald Hardrada’s place as the most powerful man in all of Scandinavia. So given the chance for a quick loot, he and his companions opted for the largest gold object they could lay their hands on. Substitute Vikings for Romans carrying the menorah and you’ve got a snapshot from one stormy night on the Golden Horn almost a thousand years later.”

Jack nodded as Jeremy spoke, his respect for the younger man’s knowledge increasing. “An extraordinary image. But before we get to the Vikings, let’s work out how on earth the menorah found its way to Constantinople.”

Half an hour later Jack stood with Maria and Jeremy in front of a building the size of an aircraft hangar, a stone’s throw from the edge of the estuary. O’Connor had asked for a break to search the IMU database for some key references, and Jack had taken the opportunity to give the other two a brief tour of the campus. They had reached the engineering complex just in time to see the door of the main loading bay roll open and a strange contraption appear on a flatbed truck.

“My latest baby,” a voice yelled out. “Come over and let me show you.”

They looked into the cavernous interior and saw Costas directing a team of workmen behind the truck, his overalls smeared with a fresh layer of oil and grime. He had excused himself from the meeting at the same time as O’Connor and was now fully engrossed in his work. The hangar was a fantastic jumble of technical projects, some on the drawing board and others clearly at the experimental stage. Through the flash of a welding torch Jack could make out the battered form of the ADSA, the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod, which had saved him from the wreckage of Seaquest only six months before. Ranged on either side were the Aquapods, the one-man submersibles in which he and Costas had first seen the silt-shrouded walls of Atlantis, their metal carapaces still streaked yellow from the sulphurous waters of the Black Sea.

“We’re nearly ready to roll,” Costas called out. “A final systems check and that’s it.”

Jack and Maria wove their way towards him through piles of hardware and semi-finished projects, Jeremy bringing up the rear. Costas put up his hand to order a generator switched off and the unearthly din subsided. He beckoned them over to the contraption on the truck, his face beaming with excitement. “You may have seen something like this in our pictures from the Golden Horn,” he said to Maria and Jeremy. “The ferret, the sub-bottom borer we’re using to dig through the seabed to the medieval layers. I haven’t got a name for this one yet, but it does a similar job. Spot the difference?”

“Let me take a look.” Jeremy craned forward, peering intently at the forward end of the contraption. He grunted, stooped down to look under the cradle and then straightened up, ignoring the streak of grease he had acquired on his tweed jacket. He pushed his glasses up and squinted at Costas. “It cuts through ice.”

“Very good.” Costas raised his eyebrows and winked at Jack. “Go on.”

“It has an electrical element around the rim,” Jeremy said. “I’d guess a superheated element using semiconductor materials, probably in a ceramic matrix. And that box behind looks like a high-energy laser device.”

“I’m impressed. Pretty good for a medieval historian. You’re in the wrong line of work.”

“When I applied for my Rhodes fellowship it was either engineering or Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. My school was very conservative.”

“You drew the short end of the straw.”

“I disagree,” Maria said. They all laughed and Jeremy looked ruefully at the contraption. Costas slapped an oily hand on Jeremy’s back and turned to Jack.

“We’re air-freighting it out this evening,” he said, his demeanour now serious. “I had a call from James Macleod a few minutes ago and he said the ice conditions are perfect. Another day or two and the summer melt could make it too risky. I’m flying out to Greenland tomorrow morning to oversee the setup. And there’s something else. He mentioned a local, some old guy, who claimed to have seen some old ship’s timbers in the ice. Something to do with a European expedition way back, before the Second World War. Macleod was adamant that you should see the guy, and soon. Apparently he’s on his last legs. I know it’s a bit of a diversion on the trip back to Istanbul, but you might just want to tag along.”

Back in the office, Jack clicked off his cellphone and swivelled his chair back to face the conference table. After a conversation with Maurice Hiebermeyer and Tom York on Sea Venture, he felt reassured that the excavation in the Golden Horn could carry on for another forty-eight hours without him. The greatest prize, he now knew, might lie elsewhere, in a place they could never have imagined, but the Golden Horn could still contain treasures of inestimable historical value. The team were riding on a wave of euphoria after the cannon and chain discoveries and had already begun to use Costas’ probe to penetrate the harbour sediments, but it was hit and miss and could be days before they came up trumps.

“Right,” he said. “What have you got?”

O’Connor sat with a small green-backed book pressed open in front of him, Greek text visible on one side and English on the other. Costas had excused himself and returned to the engineering complex, but Maria and Jeremy sat expectantly at the table with Jack.

“In his book The Jewish Wars, Josephus tells us that Vespasian had the treasures locked away in the Temple of Jupiter,” O’Connor began. “But we know they were transferred to the Temple of Peace when that was completed a few years into Vespasian’s reign. After that there’s no mention of the menorah for hundreds of years.”

“But surely the emperor would have wanted to display his loot at every opportunity, at parades and festivals in the city,” Maria protested.

“Vespasian was the supreme embodiment of the Roman imperial virtues,” Jack interjected. “Conquest, stability, building. As a young man he commanded a legion in the conquest of Britain, and as emperor he oversaw the conquest of Judaea. Then he stabilised the empire following the disastrous reign of Nero. Now his focus was entirely on building. The Temple of Peace, the monuments in the Forum damaged by the Great Fire of AD 64 under Nero, above all the Colosseum. He didn’t need to shout about his triumphs anymore.”

“There may be more to it than that,” O’Connor said cautiously. “You know, it’s an odd feature of Josephus’ account of the triumph that he only mentions the execution of Simon, the charismatic Jewish leader who’d been brought in chains to Rome. There’s nothing on the fate of the hundreds of other Jewish captives, men, women and children. Some of us now believe there was an orgy of murder at the end of the procession, a scene so appalling Josephus couldn’t bring himself to describe it. After all, these were his people, and he never forsook his Jewish faith. When Vespasian saw it, he too was repulsed. The emperor was a tough old soldier, as ruthless as any Roman to his enemies, but was well known for his hatred of gratuitous bloodshed. Perhaps he contrived an ill omen as an excuse never to celebrate the Jewish triumph again, secretly instructing his priests to keep the menorah under lock and key for all time.”

“And then the trail goes cold,” Maria said.

“All we have to go on is Procopius.” O’Connor gestured at the book in front of him. “He was an eyewitness to the last great attempt to reunite the Roman Empire, when the Byzantine general Belisarius recaptured Rome from the Vandals and Goths who had overrun the western provinces in the fifth century AD.”

“It amazes me that the menorah survived for so long in Rome without being looted,” Jack said. “Those weren’t exactly centuries of peace and harmony. Think of Commodus, the demented son of Marcus Aurelius. He thought he was the god Hercules, and melted down most of the imperial treasure to pay for gladiatorial contests. Or the anarchy of the third century, when there were more than thirty emperors in fifty years. The Temple of Peace was a well-known repository for the spoils of war, and its treasuries would surely have been thrown open to find gold to pay for the mercenary armies of each new claimant to the throne.”

“Absolutely.” O’Connor paused, then looked piercingly at Jack and lowered his voice. “I must ask you again to keep what I say within these four walls. The answer is staring at us in that image of the Arch of Titus. In the 1970s a sonar survey by a conservation team revealed a hidden chamber in the attic, behind the dedicatory inscription.”

Jack’s jaw dropped. “You’re not suggesting the menorah was hidden away inside the arch?”

O’Connor hesitated again, then reached inside his cassock and pulled out a brown envelope. “Few realize that the Arch of Titus is under Vatican control, one of many ancient monuments in Rome consecrated by the Church in the Middle Ages as a way of stamping papal authority on everything pagan. My predecessor in the Vatican Antiquities Department tried endlessly to have the chamber opened, but each application was rebuffed by the cardinals. I believe his persistence was the main reason for his dismissal from the Vatican. I finally managed it last month during the current programme of restoration work on the arch. One evening the chief conservator and I were alone on the scaffold inspecting progress, and a stone abutting the chamber gave way. An accident of course, you understand.”

Jack raised his eyebrows as O’Connor extracted a photograph from the envelope and slid it across the table, his hand remaining on it for a moment as he looked at Jack. “It’s not only my job that’s on the line here. It’s more, much more.”

Maria and Jeremy craned their necks as Jack lifted the picture. It showed a flashlit image inside a small chamber, its smooth walls discoloured by streaks of brown and green. On the floor were mounds of decayed matter, peppered with fragments of wood and fabric. It looked like an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, opened for the first time after having been looted long ago in antiquity.

“I managed to reach in and take a handful of that stuff, which I then had analysed in secret,” O’Connor said quietly. “The wood is shittim, acacia, the hardwood mentioned in the Old Testament. It was probably used for making a bier, something that required a lot of load-bearing strength. And the fabric’s silk, coloured with Tyrean purple, the prized dye derived from the murex shell found off the coast of Lebanon.”

“My God,” Maria murmured. “The Temple Veil, the sacred curtain of the Holy of Holies, used to conceal the sanctuary from the rest of the Temple.”

O’Connor nodded. “Probably used by the Romans to wrap up the menorah and the golden table.”

“So they were inside the arch all that time, directly above the symbol of the menorah on the relief carving.” Jack shook his head in amazement. “The priests must have had them moved under cover of darkness from the Temple of Peace, only a stone’s throw away.”

“And then hundreds of years later one of the custodians let the secret out, maybe using the treasure as a bargaining chip to save his own skin when the barbarians invaded,” O’Connor said. “Rome was devastated by the Goths under Alaric in AD 410 and then again by the Vandals in 455. According to Procopius, the Vandal king Giseric seized the Jewish treasures and took them to Carthage in North Africa, and after the Byzantine general Belisarius captured Carthage from the Vandals in 533 he had the treasures shipped to Constantinople. Procopius tells us that the Byzantine emperor Justinian was overcome by piety and had the treasures returned to Jerusalem, but I don’t believe a word of it. There’s no reliable record that the treasures of the Temple were ever again in the Holy Land.”

“So the menorah really was in Constantinople.” Maria looked keenly at O’Connor. “Could the story of their return to Jerusalem have been a cover-up, a false trail?”

“It’s very possible,” O’Connor replied. “Procopius became prefect of Constantinople, and was a member of Justinian’s inner court. The rituals and superstitions of pagan Rome continued well into the Christian period, and emperors of the Golden Age were revered. Perhaps Vespasian’s instructions to conceal the menorah still had potency through the centuries, and the story of the return of the treasures to Jerusalem was a way of keeping their presence in Constantinople secret. And just because the Byzantines were Christian doesn’t mean they were any more sympathetic to the Jews than the Romans of Vespasian’s day. I believe the menorah was locked away for another five hundred years, perhaps deep in the vaults of Justinian’s new cathedral of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.”

“There are some who believe the Jewish treasures never made it out of Rome at all, that they were secretly taken by the papal authorities and lie hidden to this day in the Vatican.” Jack looked penetratingly at O’Connor, uncertain how much the other man might reveal. “Even before the barbarian invasions, the Church had begun to appropriate temples in Rome and cleanse them of their artefacts, starting soon after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century.”

O’Connor paused for a moment before replying, his voice hushed but deliberate. “It is true that the Vatican conceals untold treasures, priceless works of art unseen for generations. There are sealed passageways in the catacombs under St. Peter’s that even I haven’t seen.” He looked solemnly at Jack. “But I can assure you the menorah is not among them. If it was I wouldn’t be here now. I would have been sworn to secrecy by the papal authorities. Remember our history. The treasures of the Jewish Temple would represent the ultimate triumph of Christianity, retribution for the complicity of the Jews in Christ’s death. If we held them it would have to be the world’s best-kept secret. Any word and there would be war.”

“War?” Jeremy said sceptically.

“Total breakdown in relations between the Vatican and Israel. Age-old animosities between Jews and Christians reignited across the world, fuelling anti-Semitism and ultra-Zionism on a horrifying scale. And if the treasure was ever returned to Jerusalem, it would spark the final showdown in the Middle East we have long feared. Some orthodox Jews believe the restoration of the menorah to Jerusalem would be the first step in rebuilding the Temple, on the site now occupied by the Al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites of Islam. The menorah would give Israel total confidence in its destiny, empowering fundamentalists and persuading waverers. And the Arab world would know once and for all that their demands would never be achieved by negotiation.”

“It’s curious that the Nazis never came looking for it in Rome,” Jack said.

“The Second World War was a dark period for the Church,” O’Connor said grimly. “The Pope never gave Hitler an excuse to plunder the Vatican. But there have been plenty of others knocking on our doors since then. Zionist fantasists, conspiracy theorists, treasure-hunters who believe they’re halfway to finding the Holy Grail. I can assure you they have all been on a dead-end trail.”

At that moment there was a bustle of activity outside and Costas burst into the room. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said breathlessly, “but I thought you should see this.” He hurried over and handed Jack a piece of paper. “Remember those timbers with the chain in the Golden Horn? You thought they looked a little odd.”

“Overlapping strakes, attached with iron rivets.” Jack struggled to take his mind off the menorah and focus on their remarkable find of two days before. “More in the northwest European tradition of shipbuilding in the early medieval period. Odd for a Venetian galley of 1453.”

“Well, there’s your answer.” Costas leaned forward excitedly, his hands on the table. “The sample we brought back’s just been analysed. It’s Scandinavian oak. And it’s from the prow of a longship, not a Mediterranean galley. It looks as if it broke off in the chain, probably without sinking the vessel. And check out the tree-ring date.”

“Ten forty-two, plus or minus a year,” Jack read, his mind reeling with astonishment.

Jeremy let out a whoop and stood up, unable to contain himself. “It fits perfectly! Harald Hardrada fled Constantinople in 1042. His ship could have been built the year before, on the shores of the Baltic. You haven’t found the chain from the Sack of Constantinople in 1204 at all. You’ve found the chain sunk by a band of Viking mercenaries a century and a half earlier, as they powered their longship out of the Golden Horn.”

Costas glanced at the image of the soldiers burdened with loot in the triumphal procession on the arch. “And now we know what could have given their ship the weight to smash that chain.”

“The menorah.” Jack shook his head and then grinned broadly at Costas. “I’ve got to hand it to you. Another one for science.”

JACK PEERED OUT THE WINDOW AS THE AIRCRAFT banked to starboard and the full expanse of the ocean came dramatically into view. It had been a cloudless early morning, and the sun shimmered off the waves more than thirty thousand feet below. For half an hour since their refuelling stop at Reykjavik they had been out of sight of land, but after passing over the Arctic Circle the sea had become increasingly speckled with white. Some of the shapes were huge slabs of white surrounded by turquoise where each iceberg continued for hundreds of metres underwater. Now the bergs were joined by sea ice, a fractured mosaic of white that extended as far as the eye could see, and Jack could make out the first fingers of land ahead of them to the west. He leaned towards the occupant of the seat opposite him and pointed through the window.

“You can see the Greenland ice cap.”

“It’s breathtaking.”

Maria’s face was ablaze with excitement, and Jack again felt certain he had been right to invite her along. After O’Connor had left for Rome three days before, Jack had put in a call to James Macleod to follow up on Costas’ account of a discovery in the ice. Macleod had revealed more, much more, an exciting development over the last few days that now made Jack’s visit imperative. The ice corer had turned up a sample that made the account of a ship buried in the ice far more than just a local legend. Jack had also learned of another extraordinary find that would call upon Maria and Jeremy’s expertise, and they had both leapt at the chance to join him for a few days on IMU’s premier research vessel in one of the most important projects they had ever undertaken.

Now they all sat in the forward compartment of a customized Embraer EMB-145, the sleek regional jet IMU used for personnel transport around the world. Across the aisle Jeremy was hunched behind a sea of paper and books, tapping on a laptop. Jack closed the introduction to Old Norse he had been reading and stared out the window again. For the past few days he had absorbed himself in Harald Hardrada, reigniting a boyhood passion. On his mother’s side Jack’s family had come from coastal Yorkshire, tall, blond people whose accent even retained a Scandinavian lilt, and Jack had always felt a strong affinity with his Norse ancestors. Harald Hardrada was the greatest of all the Viking heroes, yet his was a life unfulfilled. A man who would be king, whose destiny seemed too great even for him to reach. At the flip of a coin Harald could have won the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and the history of England—of the whole world—would have been different. Jack had driven alone to the battle site near York the day before, had slogged around the muddy fields feeling for the spot where Harald had wielded his battle-axe for the last time. He had felt close, had almost felt a presence, yet had come away strangely unsatisfied. Something was not quite right.

Opposite him in the aircraft Costas was slumped over in his seat, snoring fitfully, his head slowly descending to his chest and then jerking back up again. He had been up all night in the engineering lab perfecting the ice probe, and was still wearing his favourite tattered IMU overalls. With his stubble and tousled hair he looked more than ever like his grandfather, a Greek sponge fisherman who had made a fortune in shipping but had insisted that his family remain close to their roots. It was a legacy that Costas had unwittingly developed to a fine art in his appearance.

Jack grinned across at Maria as Costas snorted and stirred, and the two of them returned their gaze to the window. The coastline of eastern Greenland appeared as an irregular line of rock between the sea and the ice cap, the bare outcrops of granite girding inlets filled with shattered slabs of white. Soon they were directly over the ice cap itself, a carpet of brilliant white that undulated to the horizon, its surface dotted with pockets of meltwater that shone like turquoise gems in the morning sunlight. It was one of the world’s most forbidding landscapes, yet it had a compelling beauty that drew out the explorer in Jack, that made him understand what drove the Norse adventurers who first sailed to these shores a thousand years ago.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand.” Costas had suddenly jolted awake, as if there had been no hiatus in the conversation they had been having an hour before. “Harald Hardrada was killed in England, in 1066. Right? Then how come the map inscription suggests he died somewhere out here?”

Jack gave Costas a bemused look and they both peered at Jeremy, who was ruffling a sheaf of papers and seemed completely preoccupied by his work.

“Jeremy?” Maria said.

“Huh?”

“The Battle of Ragnarøk in the map inscription. How does that fit in with Harald’s death at Stamford Bridge?”

“Oh, the wording was probably just figurative,” Jeremy said dismissively. “All Viking warriors slain in battle went to Valhalla, where they served Odin and awaited the final showdown against evil at Ragnarøk. Valhalla was perceived as being in the west, beyond the rim of the world. The inscription doesn’t necessarily imply that Harald and his men met their fate there.”

“And the treasure of Michelgard?”

“Can’t help you there, I’m afraid.”

“Jeremy, do you have my copy of Sturluson?” There was an edge of irritation in Maria’s voice as Jeremy held out a book without looking at her, his attention concentrated on his computer. She took the book and held the cover towards Costas. It showed an image of a knight on horseback clad in chain mail, wearing a close-fitting open helmet with a nose-guard and carrying a large kite-shaped shield.

“Looks like a Crusader,” Costas said.

“Not far off,” Maria replied. “This is from a tapestry in Norway dating from the twelfth century, a hundred years or so after Harald died. But in the absence of any kind of portrait of him, it gives a pretty good idea of what Harald and his men would have looked like. The Varangian bodyguard in Constantinople were Vikings by birth and upbringing, and carried the dreaded war axe of the Norse. The axe was the stuff of legends, man-high, single-bitted, terrifying in battle. The Varangians cashed in on the reputation of their forebears, Vikings who had raped and pillaged their way around western Europe, and had even sailed into the Mediterranean to terrorise Italy and France. But the Varangians were also pretty cosmopolitan characters who had spent their adult lives in Constantinople, the most sophisticated city in the medieval world, serving the Byzantine emperors. Their armour and finery wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Crusades, and they would have spoken Greek as well as Norse. Harald Hardrada even campaigned in the Holy Land.”

“In the Holy Land?” Costas sounded incredulous. “But I thought the Crusades didn’t begin until the end of the eleventh century. That’s a generation after Harald died!”

“You could call Harald Hardrada the first Crusader,” Maria said, her eyes shining with enthusiasm. “He was born a pagan, and certainly wasn’t seeking redemption for his sins, but he did serve the interests of the Christian Church in the Holy Land. You have to understand, Costas. The Crusades as we know them were only part of the story, told from a western perspective. The Byzantine Church and its warriors had been trying to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Arabs for centuries. In the year 1036 the Byzantine emperor Michael concluded a treaty with the Arab caliph of Egypt to allow the restoration of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the shrine raised over the site of Christ’s grave in Jerusalem. A year later Harald Hardrada led the Varangian Guard to escort the Byzantine craftsmen to Jerusalem. The scene could have been straight from the Crusades, tall, blond horsemen weighed down with armour sweeping across the desert, except Harald was actually successful in pacifying the Holy Land. All of the towns and castles of Palestine surrendered to him without a fight, and he cleared the roads of robbers and brigands. He gave treasure to the shrine of the Holy Sepulcher, presumably on the instructions of the Byzantime emperor. He even bathed in the river Jordan, like any good pilgrim.”

“You can shore up the case even further.” Jeremy had abandoned his work and was now fully focussed on Maria. “After Jerusalem, Harald Hardrada campaigned for three years on behalf of the Byzantine emperor in the central Mediterranean, in Sicily and Italy. At the time, Sicily was an Islamic emirate, captured by the Arabs in the great jihad which saw Muslim armies take the Holy Land and sweep as far west as Spain. Harald was leading an army under the banner of the Cross against the infidel, to reclaim lands for the Church. The Byzantines called their enemy Saracens, the same opponents the Crusaders would face a few generations later. Harald’s war was one of Christian against Muslim, the first major flaring of the conflict that ignited the Crusades and is still with us today. Hardrada was the most feared leader of all the Christian forces, even more so than Richard the Lionheart or Baldwin of Flanders in the Crusades. To the Arabs Hardrada was Ra’d Shamaal, the Thunderbolt of the North.”

“This was some guy,” Costas murmured. “And you say he was from Norway originally?”

Maria waved the book she had taken from Jeremy. “This is our main source, King Harald’s Saga, written by the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson in the early thirteenth century. It’s part of the Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway. It gives us our only description of what Harald looked like: immensely tall, fair-haired, with a fair beard and long moustaches, a classic Viking. It shows that he was born Harald Sigurdsson in the year 1015. Later he acquired the name Hardrada, literally ‘Hard Ruler,’ Harald the Ruthless. His indoctrination into the ways of war came early, at the age of fifteen, when he fought alongside his half-brother, King Olaf the Saint, at the Battle of Stiklestad against a rival Norwegian army. Olaf was killed and Harald fled east into exile, first to Sweden and then to Novgorod and Kiev to serve as a mercenary of King Yaroslav of Rus.”

“How did he get to Constantinople, then?” Costas asked, looking at a map.

“Well, the pickings were richer there. At the age of eighteen, Harald arrived in Constantinople to join the Varangian Guard. He quickly rose to be atrologus, chief of the Guard, and for nine years plundered his way across the Mediterranean in the name of the Byzantine emperor. In 1042 he fled Constantinople, laden with booty, and reclaimed the throne of Norway. Twenty-four years later, years in which he ravaged Denmark and ruled Norway with an iron fist, his ambition drove him to the fateful encounter with King Harold of England at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. It was a career drenched in blood from beginning to end, but along the way Harald secured his birthright and became one of the wealthiest and most feared rulers in the medieval world.”

“It’s plausible that he should have visited Vinland,” Jack murmured. “Iceland and Greenland were predominantly Norse settlements, discovered by Norwegian Vikings, and a king like Harald Hardrada would have wanted to exert his influence. Also there’s the kudos factor. A voyage to Vinland would have been a daring feat, further shoring up his reputation as a fearless warrior and adventurer.”

“He wouldn’t have been the only man to try,” Maria said. “The Icelandic annals mention a bishop of Greenland who set off for Vinland. He vanished forever, disappeared from history.”

“It doesn’t add up.” Jack sounded troubled. “If Harald made the voyage to Vinland then he did survive, returning to Norway in time for 1066. He would have had everything to gain from proclaiming his success, asserting his claim over the western Viking settlements and extolling his courage. It’s the stuff of sagas, yet I’m assuming there’s nothing about it in the Heimskringla, is there? All we’ve got is a secret reference on a map in Hereford Cathedral. It doesn’t make sense.”

“His treasure, the stuff he looted with the Varangians,” Costas said. “What do we know about that?”

“It’s a fantastic story.” Maria flicked through the book to find a page and then held it open. “Listen to this:

“His hoard of wealth was so immense that no one in northern Europe had ever seen the like of it in one man’s possession before. During his stay in Constantinople, Harald had three times taken part in a palace-plunder: it is the custom there that every time an emperor dies, the Varangians are allowed palace-plunder—they are entitled to ransack all the palaces where the emperor’s treasures are kept and to take freely whatever each can lay his hands on.”

“I guess that’s the price you pay to keep the loyalty of mercenaries,” Costas said.

“It means the Varangians not only had as much as they could carry from the palaces each time an emperor died, but also must have known the locations of treasures that remained out of bounds. After all, their main job in Constantinople was to guard the Imperial Treasury. But Snorri’s account of palace-plunder is undoubtedly exaggerated, something that would appeal to his Viking audience. The greatest treasures must of course have remained under lock and key.”

“You’re talking about the menorah,” Costas said.

Maria nodded. “But wait for the rest of the story. It gets even better. By 1042, after more than a decade in the service of the emperor, Harald had had enough of campaigning. He’d got all the fame and plunder he wanted and was now bent on reclaiming Norway. So on his final return to Constantinople from the wars, he resigned from the Varangian Guard. The emperor, Michael Calaphates, was a weak man who seems to have been okay with this, but the empress Zoe was furious. She already had a grudge against Harald. Apparently he’d asked for her beautiful niece Maria’s hand in marriage, but Zoe had refused. The story later put about by the Varangians was that Zoe herself wanted Harald, and this was the real reason she was so upset about his departure from Constantinople.”

“A love triangle,” Costas chuckled. “The Thunderbolt of the North had finally met his match.”

“Harald was thrown in prison but was released by a mysterious lady, maybe another lover. The story goes that Harald summoned his Varangians and they exacted terrible revenge on the emperor, blinding him in his bed. That same night Harald broke into Maria’s apartment and kidnapped her. This is what Snorri says happened next:

“They went down to the Varangian galleys and took two of them. They rowed to the Bosporus, where they came to the iron chains stretched across the Sound. Harald told some of the oarsmen to pull as hard as they could, while those who were not rowing were to run to the stern of the galleys laden with all their gear. With that, the galleys ran up on to the chains. As soon as their momentum was spent and they stuck on top of the chains, Harald told all the men to run forward to the bows. Harald’s own galley tilted forward under the impact and slid down off the chains; but the other ship stuck fast on the chains and broke its back. Many of her crew were lost, but some were rescued from the sea.”

“That’s it,” Jeremy said excitedly. “What I was saying yesterday. The timbers you found in the chain in the Golden Horn were from Harald’s second ship. Snorri doesn’t say it actually sank, which explains why you only found the wood broken off in the chain. The skull with the helmet must be one of the drowned Varangians.”

“What happened to your namesake?” Jack asked Maria.

“According to Snorri, Maria was released unharmed when they reached the Black Sea and even given an escort back to Constantinople. Maybe her kidnapping was Harald’s way of cocking a snook at Zoe, but he’d already moved on and was planning to marry King Yaroslav’s daughter Elizabeth, probably a girlfriend of his in Kiev before he joined the Varangians.” Maria smiled at Jack. “But others think Maria remained with him and was his mistress and true love to the end.”

“So you think the menorah was stolen on the same night?” Costas persisted.

“Yes. If the Varangians had time to kidnap Maria, they also had time to snatch the greatest treasure they knew of in Constantinople.”

“That maybe explains the menorah symbol on the Hereford map.” Costas stared into the middle distance for a moment, lost in thought. “If the Vikings were only interested in the treasure as gold bullion, then it seems odd that the shape of the menorah should still have meaning years later when Richard of Holdingham wrote down that runic inscription. Maybe the fact that it was forbidden treasure, not palace-plunder, gave the menorah added significance. It could have become a symbol of Harald’s prowess, his manliness, a spoil of victory like in Roman days, to be endlessly trumpeted by the Vikings in sagas and feasts. When they got back home the story of that final night in Constantinople must have kept the Varangians in free drinks for the rest of their lives.”

They all turned to Jeremy, who averted his gaze and then glanced down at his computer, then looked Costas full in the face. He paused for a moment before speaking, his tone oddly troubled. “You’re probably right. But that may only be part of the story.”

At that moment the pilot’s voice came over the cabin speakers to announce that they were beginning their descent into Kangerlussuaq, the former US air base that now served as Greenland’s main international hub on the west coast. Jack looked out his window and saw that they had crossed the edge of the Greenland ice cap and were now approaching the Davis Strait, the wide channel of ocean between western Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. Below them lay sinuous fjords and expanses of green that suddenly made the Viking settlement of these shores seem plausible, an inconceivable thought on the barren east coast. As the aircraft banked sharply and turned back east they came in line with the longest inlet of them all, Søndre Strømfjord, with the bleak and sparse settlement of Kangerlussuaq scattered over the valley at its head. A few minutes later the undercarriage dropped and Jack could make out two aircraft parked in bays of the former military airfield in the centre of the valley, the first an Antonov An-74 transport jet which had preceded them with Costas’ precious gear and the second a Lynx helicopter bearing the distinctive logo of the International Maritime University.

“We’re coming over the icefjord now. Take a look out to port and you’ll see the tips of icebergs through the mist.”

James Macleod took his hand momentarily off the cyclic and pointed past Jack at the jagged pinnacles of white that appeared like peaks of distant mountains through the clouds. In the passenger compartment behind them, Maria and Jeremy leaned forward to follow his gaze. With the three-hour time difference from England it was still early morning, and the sun had yet to burn off the sea mist caused as the cold air tumbled off the ice cap and met the warmer air rising from the sea. In the summer sun it was actually warmer at three thousand feet than on the surface of the ice cap, but even so the temperature was a few degrees below zero and they all wore fully insulated flight suits as well as helmets, a precaution against turbulence as the helicopter encountered thermal updraughts over exposed land and water along the coastline.

“We’ve got fifteen minutes until the helipad’s clear. Time for a quick sightseeing tour.”

Macleod had met them on the tarmac at Kangerlussuaq and had escorted them straight to the waiting Lynx helicopter. It had taken them just under an hour to fly due north to the Ilulissat icefjord, on Greenland’s west coast, almost a hundred and sixty miles north of the Arctic Circle. They had been following a heavy Chinook transport helicopter, based out of the remaining US air base in Greenland at Thule, a welcome part of the US government’s contribution to the IMU project. Costas had decided to fly in the Chinook to oversee the transfer of his equipment, and Jack could imagine the other man’s gnawing anxiety as he sat in the loading bay watching the fruit of months of labour suspended in a cargo net above the void. Now Jack and Macleod watched as the Chinook descended into the sea mist at the head of the fjord.

“This is where the iceberg came from that sank the Titanic,” Macleod said, his thick Glaswegian brogue enhanced by the intercom. “It’s one of the fastest-moving glacial ice streams in the world.” He swung the helicopter round to the east, facing inland, and flew at maximum speed for a few minutes until they had cleared the mist and could see the Greenland ice cap rising ahead of them in a vast stark dome. “The Ilulissat glacier’s the main pressure outlet for the ice cap, where the glacier flows down to discharge ice into the sea. You can see where the ice floe begins now.”

Macleod worked the controls and swung the Lynx in a wide arc back towards the sea. As they peered out they could see where the seamless undulations of the ice cap began to fracture and crenellate, forming a corrugated flow that seemed to ripple off towards the west.

“Believe it or not, that thing’s flowing at an incredible rate, almost eight miles a year,” Macleod said. “The crevasses are caused by the pressure of the glacier as it moves against the bedrock, in places almost three thousand feet below. It’s like a river flowing through rapids. And now for the fun part.”

He dipped the nose of the helicopter and they were suddenly hurtling towards the glacier, its fractured surface looming up at them in gigantic folds and fissures. At what seemed like the last moment Macleod levelled out, and almost immediately they were enveloped in sea mist, the glacier only fleetingly visible as the rotor swirled away the mist to reveal patches of white and yawning crevasses of deep blue.

“We’re actually more than five hundred feet above the glacier,” Macleod reassured them. “Remember how huge those features are.” For a few minutes he flew by instruments alone as they continued to hurtle through the mist, and then he eased back on the cyclic and dropped down until the altimeter read only two hundred and fifty feet above sea level. “Here we are.”

As he brought the Lynx to a hover the mist parted and a spectacular image materialised before their eyes. It was a vast wall of ice, towering almost as high as the helicopter and extending on either side as far as they could see. Rather than a sheer face of compacted ice, it was a fragmented mass of towers and canyons, fissured with streaks of blue where meltwater had flowed down from the surface and frozen again. The whole mass looked unbelievably fragile and precarious, as if the slightest nudge would bring it all cascading down.

“The leading edge of the glacier,” Macleod announced. “Or rather the mass of icebergs that have sheared off it and jammed up the head of the fjord. The edge of the glacier itself is more than five nautical miles east of us towards the ice cap, back the way we came.”

“It’s awesome.” Jeremy’s voice came cracking over the intercom, and for once he seemed at a loss for words. “So this is where the North Atlantic icebergs come from?”

“Ninety per cent of them,” Macleod replied. “Twenty billion tons every year, enough to affect global sea levels. That wall of ice may seem pretty static, but it’s sped up recently and is actually moving towards us at nearly fifteen feet an hour. Some of the large bergs will be pushed out more or less intact, but almost all of them calve, producing smaller bergs and vicious little slabs called growlers. Almost ten thousand big bergs make it out of the fjord every year into Disko Bay. They process anti-clockwise with the current around Baffin Bay and then float as far south as the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and as far east as Iceland.”

“One of them’s calving now,” Jack said suddenly.

Without warning a vast slab of ice had cracked off the precipice immediately in front of them, the wrenching noise audible even above the din of the helicopter’s rotor. The slab of ice slipped straight down into the water and disappeared completely, then erupted upwards almost to its full height before settling down again, bobbing up and down until only a jagged pinnacle was visible above the slurry of ice fragments in front of the bergs.

“I see what they mean about icebergs being mostly underwater,” Jeremy said, his tone still awestruck. “The bigger ones must scrape along the bottom of the fjord.”

“That’s exactly what happens. Sometimes they drag along the sea floor, sometimes they tumble over.” Macleod flipped down a small video screen from the cockpit ceiling and tapped a keyboard, revealing an image of the fjord bathymetry.

Jack whistled. “Pretty deep.”

“Over three thousand feet.”

“That underwater ridge on the image, across the mouth of the fjord,” Jack said. “I assume that’s where the ice tongue reached its maximum extent?”

“The Danes who settled here in the eighteenth century called it Isfjeldsbanken, the threshold,” Macleod replied. “A huge sill of sediment bulldozed by the glacier. The tip of the threshold’s only about six hundred feet deep, so the bigger bergs get stuck on it. Until recently it marked the edge of the ice tongue, the congestion of bergs that choked the fjord.”

“But now the breakup occurs several miles closer to the ice cap, where we are now?”

“Correct.” Macleod tapped the screen and another image appeared, a satellite photo of the fjord. “Courtesy of NASA, a composite image from the Landsat satellite. The sequence of red lines across the fjord shows the retreat of the calving front of the glacier between 2001 and 2005. At the same time the glacier has accelerated dramatically, almost doubling its velocity. And airborne laser altimetry measurements have shown a thinning of the glacier by up to fifty feet a year.”

“Global warming,” Jeremy said.

“Bad news for the environment, but good news for us.” Macleod snapped the screen closed and re-engaged the cyclic, pulling the helicopter round on a westward bearing and flying through the mist away from the ice face. “Bad news because it suggests global warming has a more dramatic effect on the ice cap than many have feared. Good news because it allows us to work in the fjord itself, to carry out research that’s never before been possible.”

“And now we’re into summer,” Jack said. “I’m assuming that increases the rate of calving and ice disintegration along the glacier front?”

“That’s why I wanted you here now,” Macleod replied. “A few more days and we’re closing shop. We’re working on the edge in more ways than one.”

Twenty minutes later he eased back on the cyclic and the Lynx began to descend over the jagged line of icebergs near the head of the fjord. Jack’s heart began to pound as he saw a ship’s superstructure appear out of the mist to seaward. Macleod reached over to the ship-to-shore intercom, but before pressing engage he turned and looked at Jack.

“And now it’s time to let you know why I dragged you halfway round the world to this place.”

THE MAN IN THE PRISON CELL SLOWLY RAISED his head and listened hard for any signs of life, but heard nothing. He had heard nothing but the sounds of his jailers for more than five years now. He closed his eyes and breathed in slow and deep, immune to the aroma of feces and urine and vomit that had long ago impregnated the fabric of the prison. He had been sent to serve out his sentence in his grandfather’s homeland, in an empty prison left over from the Gulag, saving them the trouble of putting him in solitary confinement. But sensory deprivation held no fear for him, his training having taught him to exclude the reality of confinement and live in a world of his own creation. He slowly bent his head from side to side and then leaned again over the chessboard, the only indulgence he had asked of his captors. He lowered his elbows to the table and raised his hands together in their fingerless mitts, rubbing them against the damp chill that pervaded the cell all year round. For the thousandth time he reached down and picked up a little white pawn, shaped like a Viking warrior with chain mail and a shield, and placed it in front of the Christian king.

“Checkmate,” he said quietly.

He leaned back on his stool with the exaggerated slowness of a man whose tiniest movements have become his main preoccupation, his way of filling the solitary hours of yet another day. He lifted his left hand slowly to his face and drew his index finger along the scar that ran from his eye socket to his lower jaw, testing himself against the pain he felt every time. From his jaw he moved his hand to the wall beside him and began to trace his finger along the lines of incised graffiti, his hourly ritual, quietly reciting the words like a scholar with a holy text. “Paul Kruger,” he murmured. “Hauptsturmführer, Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. Kurt Hausser, Sturmbannführer, Panzergrenadier-Division Das Reich. Otto Lehmann, Brigadeführer, Panzer-Division Wiking.” He knew the names by heart, names of the true heroes of the Great Patriotic War, crusaders in the struggle against the East, the captured survivors of Kharkov and Kursk and countless other battles, sent by the Russians to this cell more than half a century ago, their last stop before the squalid execution chamber at the end of the corridor. Names like his grandfather’s. Only his grandfather had been luckier, for a while.

He shut his eyes and raised his hand to the jagged runes that cut across the names, knowing exactly where to place his two fingers to draw them down, then up, then down, lines so deeply carved that the Soviet guards had given up trying to erase them decades ago. They were the graffiti he liked to trace his fingers over best, the symbol of his grandfather’s order, Schutzstaffel, the SS. He dropped his hand slowly as his fingers fell away from the lines and pressed his ear against the clammy wall, feeling he was truly communing with the knights of the past, brothers in arms who had left their last imprint on this wall to give him strength, to guide him in his quest to find their holiest treasure, to put to rest all who had gone before him and failed.

“Anton Poellner.” The prisoner emerged from a well of blackness as the voice spoke loudly through the slot in the door. He pushed himself upright as the bolts were drawn and the door clanged open. An official in a peaked cap stood between two guards, silhouetted against the harshly lit corridor behind.

“Anton Poellner.” The official repeated his name, and the man in the cell held his hand up against the glare before slowly replying in English.

“What do you want?”

“By order of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” the official said, speaking in Lithuanian. “Case number IT-99-37b, the Prosecutor of the Tribunal against Anton Poellner, former paid mercenary of the Bosnian Serb Army. Indicted under Article 7 on the basis of individual criminal responsibility, for genocide and crimes against humanity.” The man paused, then raised a document he had been carrying. “Under the amnesty convention signed last year in The Hague, your case came up for review in the Appeals Chamber.” The official lowered the paper and spoke with obvious distaste. “You are free to go.”

He snapped his fingers and the two guards heaved the man to his feet, throwing an old Soviet greatcoat around him as they did so. The man blinked furiously against the light as they shoved him through the cell door, then shackled his feet for the last time and jostled him down the corridor. He was the final occupant of a condemned prison, and as the echoes of his chains resounded through the empty cells it was as if the ghosts of the past were urging him on, knowing he was their last hope that any would escape.

At the final door they unshackled his feet and thrust him wordlessly into the outside world. It was drizzling and unseasonably cold for early summer, but the man raised his pallid face upwards and smiled as the rain coursed over his skin. He picked up the duffel bag that had been dropped beside him and began to walk slowly towards the open outer gate and the road beyond, falling into the easy stride of a man accustomed to route marches. Outside the gate he shouldered the bag and thrust his hands into the greatcoat pockets, waiting for the car he knew would come. Minutes later a dark Mercedes rolled out of the shadows, its rear passenger door swinging open as it stopped in front of him. Without looking once at the prison he stooped down and got in.

“Welcome back,” a voice said in English from the front seat. “Your instructions.”

An envelope was thrust into his hand as the car drove away. The man felt the sheaf of papers inside, but first reached in and pulled out an object lying loose at the bottom. It was a golden ring, lustrous with age, and as he raised it he felt his lips brush against the symbol as they had done since childhood, a symbol so different from the one in his prison cell yet so familiar. He slipped the ring over the index finger of his right hand and pulled out the sheaf of papers. On top of them was a newspaper image imprinted in his brain for more than five years now, showing an old man with a swastika armband lying in a pool of blood. He looked at the dead face and then out at the lowering sky, and whispered to himself: “Payback time.”

“There she is now,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s the first time I’ve seen her on the open sea. It’s like meeting a long-lost friend, born again.”

Seaquest II had been commissioned only three months before, and the west Greenland ice-core project was her first official outing as a deep-sea research vessel of the International Maritime University. Ever since her predecessor had been lost in the Black Sea six months ago, Jack had been determined to find a replacement, and had decided to rename a vessel already on the stocks for IMU in the yards in Finland. Whereas the original Seaquest and her sister ship Sea Venture had been derived from the Akademik-class Russian research vessel, designed originally for acoustic submarine surveillance during the Cold War, Seaquest II was an entirely new concept planned from scratch to IMU specifications. Her state-of-the-art navigational features included a dynamic positioning system, using lateral thrusters and ballast control to maintain stability in virtually any sea conditions–vital for position-keeping and search tracking as well as to maintain a level platform for laboratory work. She could launch remote-operated vehicles and submersibles, using either deck cranes or an internal docking berth which allowed underwater egress. Like all IMU vessels she had a defensive capability, with a gun pod retracted below the foredeck. And, crucial for polar research, the ice-strengthened hull allowed her to plough through the shattered sea ice which choked the coastal waters north of the Arctic Circle even in early summer.

Jack was still casting a critical eye over her deck arrangements as the Lynx bounced on to the helipad and the rotors shuddered to a halt. While the awaiting crewmen secured the undercarriage to the deck, Jack eased off his helmet and released his seat belt harness. The sun was burning off the sea mist and ahead of him he could see the entire length of the superstructure, gleaming white in the pellucid Arctic light. He was in his element again, and his excitement showed as he leaned back and grinned at Maria and Jeremy. “Welcome to Seaquest II. This is where the fun really begins.”

James Macleod led them directly from the helipad through the hangar entrance and down a steep gangway into the bowels of the ship. They were joined by Costas, who had been winched down from the US Air Force Chinook fifteen minutes before and had been busy uncrating his cargo on the stern deck. He looked as if he needed about a week’s sleep, but with his sleeves rolled up on his burly forearms and fresh smears of grease on his beloved overalls, it was clear he was not going to waste a moment getting the equipment operational.

They reached the lower deck and Macleod ushered them through an open door into a brightly lit lecture room, gesturing for them to stand beside a projector screen to the right of the door. Ranged in front of them on plastic chairs was a motley group of about thirty men and women, some talking intently among themselves and others hunched over laptops and sheaves of printouts. They all looked up as Macleod entered, and Jack could see several bearded blond men with the Danish flag on their parkas, a couple of native Greenlander faces, and a number of men and women wearing the navy blue sweaters of the US Air Force. He nodded courteously to a man in the front row splayed languidly on his chair and stroking his sideburns, so lost in thought that he failed to catch Jack’s gesture. Lanowski was a brilliantly adaptive engineer who had been indispensable to IMU since they had poached him from MIT, but he had a manner calculated to irritate almost everyone who came into contact with him.

“People, you should all be familiar with Jack Howard, my colleague at IMU. At least from the TV news.” Jack looked distinctly uncomfortable, and Macleod gestured to the other three. “Dr. Maria de Montijo and her graduate student Jeremy Haverstock from Oxford, though he’s originally from the States. Costas you already know.”

They gazed with evident curiosity at Jack, a face familiar even to those who did not know him personally. Costas grinned at a few old friends, several of whom had got to know him very well when he had attended the project briefing several weeks previously at the IMU campus in Cornwall.

“We’re an international team, as you can see,” Macleod said to Jack. “Officially the project’s a collaboration with NASA and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, and there are also a couple of guys from the International Ice Patrol. We’re all doing our own thing, glaciology, biology, palaeoclimatology, but we’re pooling basic resources. IMU provides the research vessel, NASA the satellite imagery and GSDG the aerial photography and laser altitude measurements. A lot of the work’s just monitoring, making sure the ice conditions are safe enough for us to get the samples we need. With the summer melt almost in full swing we’re working against the clock. I wanted you here for a quick meet and greet. Any questions for this group now, fire away.”

“I don’t want to detain anyone, so just a few,” Jack said. “The Greenland ice cap, the inland ice. Can we have a swift rundown on its age and significance?”

“Most of it dates from the last two hundred and fifty years, and most of the ice at Ilulissat is from the last hundred thousand years,” Lanowski said, brushing his shoulder-length hair from his face. “It’s an outstanding survival from the last glaciation of the Quaternary.”

“Meaning?” Maria asked.

“Meaning the Ice Age we all know about, the one that ended ten thousand years ago when the ice sheets receded,” Lanowski explained, sighing impatiently. “Quaternary is a geologic term encompassing the recent Ice Age, beginning about one-point-eight million years ago, encompassing many episodes of advance and retraction in the ice. We’ve been in one of those warm spells for the last ten thousand years.”

“So what makes Greenland so special?”

“There are plenty of glaciers around the world dating from the Ice Age, and of course there are the polar ice caps,” Macleod said. “But the Greenland ice cap is the last remnant of the continental ice sheets that covered the northern hemisphere until ten thousand years ago. It’s a fantastic window into the past, as exciting to me as any of your archaeological discoveries.”

“Which brings us to why you’re here,” Jack said.

“It’s still early days, but the results are very promising,” one of the Danish scientists said. “We’re mostly looking at air bubbles trapped in the ice as it formed, preserving a detailed record of atmospheric conditions in the Ice Age. The calving front is now exposing areas of ice formed very recently, in a cold snap just prior to the Great Melt ten thousand years ago. It’s an unparalleled opportunity, the first time any research like this has been possible.”

“Global warming has its uses,” Costas remarked wryly.

“We can’t turn back the clock now, so we may as well get all the science out of it we can,” the Dane replied.

“One question,” Maria said. “You wouldn’t get me going anywhere near that calving front we just saw on the glacier. How do you get your samples?”

“We drill cores, just like a sedimentologist or an oil prospector on land,” Macleod said. “Each band of ice represents a cold spell, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. It’s a bit like dendrochronology, tree-ring dating.” Macleod turned and looked intently at Jack. “Which brings me to why you’re here.”

“I’m still baffled,” Maria persisted. “You’ve still got to get close up to the ice to drill a core.”

“All will be revealed.” Macleod beamed at her and started towards the door, nodding his thanks to the assembled group and turning to Jack. “Follow me.”

Seaquest II was marginally smaller than her predecessor, more economical on space to maximise fuel efficiency and endurance, but with a displacement of a little over seven thousand tons she was still one of the largest research vessels afloat, and it took them a good five minutes to reach the upper accommodation deck. Without stopping Macleod pointed at a line of cabins with their names pinned on the doors, their bags already visible inside. At the end of the corridor they walked into a room that occupied the entire forward end of the accommodation block, directly below the navigation room and wheelhouse. The layout had been Jack’s idea, providing a dedicated control and observation room for project staff, avoiding the problems of sharing bridge space with crew which they had recently experienced on Sea Venture in the Golden Horn. The room had a director’s chair set on a dais in the centre, a duplicate of the bridge radar screen, four computer workstations arranged in an arc radiating from the dais and viewing seats with high-powered scopes set up against the window, a continuous sloping screen that wrapped around the front and sides of the room. With the mist now lifted completely it gave them a dazzling view of the sea to the west, a deep blue expanse dotted with fragments of white, the low form of Disko Island just visible off the starboard bow and the Canadian shore of the Davis Strait somewhere beyond the horizon.

They had been followed from the lower deck by the shambling form of Lanowksi and by one of the Greenlander scientists, an Inuit woman of striking appearance who pointed to the coffee machine as they entered the room. Macleod grunted, then nodded and proceeded to pour them each a drink and hand round steaming mugs. Jack shook hands with the captain, a former Canadian navy officer who had spent a lifetime carrying out maritime patrols from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, who had bounded down the stairs from the bridge to greet them. Jack would have time later to do the full rounds of the crew, many of them old friends and veterans of the first Seaquest, people with whom he shared a special bond.

The Greenlander woman sat down beside Lanowski at the computer workstation on the right-hand side of the room, positioning her laptop on the available corner of the desk and stacking her papers and books neatly on the floor to give the others space to stand. From the body language it was clearly an uneasy alliance, with Lanowski hunched directly in front of the main workstation screen surrounded by his papers, making no concession for her.

“I knew I should have brought my own hardware,” Lanowski grumbled. “Someone should have given these things a trial run before they installed them. I may as well crunch the numbers by hand.”

Jack raised his eyes at the woman and she forced a smile. “I’m interested in seabed biology; Lanowski does the simulations,” she said. “James paired us at the beginning of the project.”

She cast Macleod a malevolent glare, and he quickly turned to the others. “I’m sorry. I should have introduced you. This is Dr. Inuva Nannansuit, with the Geological Survey. She’s a native of Ilulissat, the town on the headland, so she grew up with the glacier in her backyard. She’s been a fantastic addition to the team.”

“So what have we got?” Jack said.

“It’s behind the stern, but the captain’s swinging the ship round to give us a broadside view to starboard. It’ll be a few minutes yet. We’re using the dynamic positioning system, as we don’t want water movement from the main screws to disturb what you’re about to see.”

“That berg out by the island, dead ahead of us now,” Maria said, pointing towards the ship’s bow. “It’s got a streak of black on the top. Is that ancient sediment from the glacier?”

“Well spotted, but no,” Macleod said. “If you look at the berg, it’s smooth and rounded, like a sculpture, quite different from the jagged and fissured bergs we saw when we flew over the fjord.”

“It must have rolled,” Costas said.

“Correct. We watched it happen last night. One of the most awesome sights you can imagine, a quarter of a million tons of ice doing a somersault in the water. You don’t want to be anywhere near one of those babies when that happens.”

“Of course,” Maria exclaimed. “That smear is from the sea floor!”

“Exactly. When we arrived two weeks ago that berg was butted up against the threshold on the north side of the fjord, but we already knew from side-scan sonar that the submerged part had become eroded and lost much of its mass. It was only a matter of days before it would roll, and we kept well clear. Some of the bergs make it out that way, others get pushed upright over the sill. You can always tell from whether they look like Henry Moore sculptures or Disneyland ice castles.”

“You mean like that one,” Jack said.

They followed his gaze to starboard as a vast wall of ice came into view, about a quarter of a mile distant and clearly taller than the superstructure of the ship. It had the same contorted and jagged face as the front of the glacier, riven with veins of deep blue where meltwater had frozen inside crevasses, except for a wide flat area in the middle where it sloped down smoothly from the summit. The berg was immense, at least a quarter of a mile across, and blocked a large stretch of the entrance to the fjord along the line of the underwater threshold.

They stared in awe until Macleod broke the silence. “Remember, three-quarters of that thing’s underwater. You’re looking at a cubic kilometre and a half of frozen water, at least a million and a half tons.”

Costas let out a low whistle. “That’d keep all the bars in the world in ice well into the next century.”

“A single day’s outlet from this glacier would be enough to supply New York with water for a year. Twenty million tons a day. We’re talking global impact here.”

“Tabular bergs of this size are pretty rare in the Arctic,” Inuva said. “We think it’s atmospheric warming again, resulting in the glacier receding to a point where larger fractures occur. It’s the biggest berg I’ve seen here in my lifetime.”

“Why hasn’t it broken up?” Costas said.

“It’s had one major calving event, where you can see that smooth face,” Macleod said. “But the core’s unusually compact, solid glacial ice you’d crack only with explosives. It’s ideal for us. That face calved back to the core ice, so it’s relatively safe to work under. If you look closely you’ll see the drilling team in a couple of Zodiac inflatable boats out there now.”

“I don’t understand it.” Jeremy had been quietly absorbing everything since arriving on the ship, but had now recovered his normal inquisitiveness. “What’s to stop that thing tumbling over and crushing them?”

“That’s where the conditions really work in our favour,” Macleod said enthusiastically. “Without the pressure of the ice tongue behind them, bergs trapped on the sill are a lot safer to work on. The glacier itself is way too dangerous for coring, especially now that it’s flowing at such a rate. Bergs floating down the fjord are out of the question because they’re moving, and once they’re beyond the fjord they’re not only moving but are more liable to tumble. So a relatively fresh berg trapped on the sill is ideal for us. It’s a unique opportunity, but the window is closing fast.”

“How long has it been there?” Jack said.

“About three months. Lanowski’s run a simulation that shows it processing down the fjord and jamming against the threshold. Any chance of seeing it?”

“You’ll be lucky.” Lanowski muttered irritably to himself as he tapped a sequence of keys, and then visibly relaxed. “Finally.”

The screen displayed a 3-D isometric simulation of the fjord, with the glacier at one end and the arc of the threshold at the other. The berg was shown perched perilously on the sill, its vast bulk underwater now visible but with the seabed dropping off to even greater depths on either side.

“You can see the scour channel,” Inuva said. “That groove in the seabed leading up the threshold. As they grind along the bottom, the bergs pulverize the seabed, crushing everything to powder. It creates a sterile biotope, devoid of life. But the sampling we’ve been able to do here shows something else, that it actually benefits the diversification of species, allowing life to regenerate like a forest after a fire. And there are other pluses. James said you saw a berg calving as you flew in. Each time that happens, the upwelling brings up a host of nutrients. These were incredibly rich fishing grounds for my ancestors.”

“A biologist,” Lanowski muttered. “Just what we need.”

Inuva glared at Lanowski, and Jack quickly moved on. “How stable is that thing?”

“I created a simulation of ice conditions in the fjord over the planned period of the project, from two weeks ago ending tomorrow.” Lanowski said. “Everything’s happened exactly as I predicted. This should give you an idea of what we’re looking at.” He pressed a key and they watched as the screen sped through several dozen images on the same backdrop, showing the glacier receding alarmingly and a procession of bergs tipping over the threshold.

“A few years ago that would have been a whole season. Now it’s two weeks.” Lanowski pushed up his glasses and peered rheumily at Jack. “At the moment, the berg’s fine. There’s diurnal fluctuation in the grounding line, of course, about three metres as the tide goes up and down, and eventually the abrasion will knock off enough ice at the bottom to unbalance the berg. Right now the worst-case scenario is a major calving event, losing a lot more ice underwater than above, making the berg top-heavy. Then, say at high tide, we get an earthquake, or a storm, or ice from the glacier coming down the fjord and pressing from behind. That could push the berg against the sill and topple it.”

“What are the odds?”

“We’re not predicting any big ice coming down the fjord for at least a few days. An earthquake’s pretty well out of the question. A storm’s a possibility. There’s a local freak storm that could affect water movement against the threshold.”

“A piteraq,” Inuva said quietly.

“A what?” Costas asked.

“A piteraq. Caused as cold air tumbles down the ice cap and meets the warmer air of the sea.”

“Of course. James mentioned it as we flew in.”

Lanowski ignored them and carried on. “But there haven’t been any storms of the magnitude needed for almost seventy years. The last one recorded was in 1938.”

“What about calving?” Jack said.

“That’s where the simulation runs dry,” Lanowski said. “I just can’t predict it.” He looked at the floor in consternation, as if the limitations of science were his own personal failing, then relaxed his shoulders and gave Jack a defeated look. “All I can say is that the chances increase with the summer heat, especially now with the twenty-four-hour Arctic summer daylight. Forty-eight hours down the road I’ll be recommending that all work at the berg cease and advising the captain to reposition Seaquest II at least two miles farther offshore.”

Macleod turned to Jack with a sense of urgency in his expression. “All the more reason for us to get on.” He nodded thanks to Inuva, handing her a two-way radio from the command chair, which she took out of earshot through the side door on to the deck wing. “While Inuva sets up the final part of your tour, I think we’re ready to show you what this is really all about.” He tried and failed to catch Lanowski’s attention, then led them to a workstation on the other side of the room where a large man in a checked shirt and jeans was positioning a long metal tube like an oversize map case.

“Don Cheney, senior glaciologist from NASA,” Macleod said. “Don, show us what you’ve got.”

They quickly shook hands and stood behind the table and computer monitor. Cheney carefully pulled out an inner cylinder partway from the case, a transparent plastic tube about three feet long and six inches in diameter, and laid it on the table in front of them. He sat down at the workstation and leaned forward on his elbows, tapping the tube with a pencil and speaking in a low Texan drawl.

“For anyone who hasn’t seen one, this is an ice core,” he began. “Came out of that berg yesterday. Mostly glacial ice, the cloudy-looking stuff with tiny bubbles in it, but also bands of clearer blue meltwater ice. We’ve got one meltwater band with modern contaminants in it, atmospheric hydrocarbons from factory and engine emissions. Some time in the last century that glacier opened up, then snapped shut pretty quickly. It happens. We’ve traced the fracture line up to the surface of the berg, the one relatively weak point in the core.”

“We thought of using explosives to crack the berg along that line, then pretty quickly ditched the idea,” Macleod said. “It would probably have destroyed what we’ve found.”

“Which is?” Costas asked.

Cheney drew the tube about two feet farther out of the casing and pointed at it. “We were about to pull the corer out yesterday and wind down the project, but then one of my NASA guys spotted this.”

The final part of the core was totally different from the bands of ice, a mass of black and brown fibrous material about eighteen inches long.

“It’s nothing to do with seabed sediment this time,” Macleod said.

“It’s wood!” Costas exclaimed.

“Correct. Embedded in an ice layer about a thousand years old, from another sealed-up crevasse. The structure’s very compacted, and some of it even looks carbonized, whether through burning or decay we can’t tell yet. But we think we’ve got about a thirty-year tree-ring sequence. I had another core from the same spot air-freighted back to Cornwall in the Embraer that brought you in this morning. We should have the results from the IMU dendrochronology lab this evening.”

“It couldn’t be a local tree trunk,” Costas said, shaking his head. “There’s no tree this big growing anywhere in Greenland, let alone finding its way on top of the ice cap.”

Macleod eyes Cheney keenly. “Don, show them the scan.”

Cheney nodded and swivelled the workstation monitor so they could all see it clearly. He tapped a command and an image like an ultrasound scan appeared on the screen, with bands and patches in different shades of grey that flickered in and out of focus.

“A high-resolution still taken from the sonar,” Cheney drawled. “It shows the upper part of the berg, just behind that calved front. The shades of grey are mainly differences in density between glacial ice formed during the Quaternary and ice formed by meltwater. But there’s something else in there, and it’s big.”

He tapped a key, and another scan appeared on the screen, this time dominated by a darker mass in the centre. He scrolled slowly through a series of stills taken at different angles as the sonar moved from the side to the top of the glacier. At the final still Jack nearly dropped his coffee mug in amazement.

“You must be kidding,” he whispered.

“It’s the real deal,” Macleod said. “I told you about the wood on the phone yesterday, but we only just realised what this image was when we processed the data a few hours ago. We’ve run the sonar over the berg again this morning, and each vertical scan gives this identical image.”

“My God,” Costas said. “It looks like a ship!”

“We can’t see what else it could be. It’s about twenty metres long, wide-beamed with a symmetrical stem and stern. From the horizontal scan it looks flattened, probably no surprise under all that ice.”

“That halo you see around it is frozen meltwater, surrounding the thing like a cocoon,” Cheney said. “It’s the weirdest damn thing you ever saw.”

“Maybe it was on fire when it got embedded in the ice,” Jeremy said quietly.

“Yeah, right,” Cheney replied. “Whatever it is, I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“You sure the wood came from there?” Jack’s eyes remained fixed on the image as he spoke.

“Absolutely,” Macleod said. “Dead centre. The keel, if that’s what it is.”

“And it’s a thousand years old?”

“The frozen meltwater around it is a thousand years old, yes,” Macleod replied.

“Then we may have the first ever Viking longship discovered in the western hemisphere,” Jack said, his heart pounding with excitement. “I’d hoped against hope for this when you told me about the wood. This could be fantastic, one of the most amazing shipwreck finds ever.”

“I told you I was right to get you here,” Costas said.

“The Inuit natives here didn’t build wooden ships, and there’s no other design from Europe at that date that looks like this,” Jack said. “It makes total historical sense with the Norse settlement of Greenland at that period. But how a vessel could have ended up in a glacier, formed miles inland, is completely beyond me.”

“One reason we need to take a closer look,” Macleod said suggestively.

“Let me see.” Costas stroked his stubble and leaned over Cheney, peering at the scale on the scan. “That’s about three hundred metres into the berg from that calved front and about fifty metres below present sea level, right? I’d guess the core would be pretty solid against tunnel collapse, but we’d want to go in underwater to avoid introducing air pockets into the berg.”

“Our thinking exactly.”

“What are the risks?” Jack said. “I mean, the odds against collapse?”

“Lanowski’s the man for simulations, and he’s pretty well said it all,” Macleod replied. “All I can add is that it’s now or never. Once that thing’s rolled over the threshold and is out at sea, there’s no chance. Everything’s in place; we just need your go-ahead.”

“Thank God I don’t have life insurance,” Jack murmured. “Imagine trying to sell this one to your broker.”

“It’s probably no more dangerous than diving inside an active volcano,” Costas said ruefully.

“No. You can’t. It’s crazy.” Maria’s face froze in horror as she realised what they were planning, and she looked from one to the other for some sign that it was all just a joke. Jack grimaced apologetically at her and then cast a familiar gleam at Costas, who gave him a crooked smile in return.

“Okay. That’s good enough for me.” Macleod glanced at Inuva, who had returned the radio receiver and was waiting patiently behind them. “While the team at the berg are getting your gear into position, we’re taking a quick trip ashore.”

AN HOUR LATER THE MIGHTY FORM OF THE ICEBERG loomed before them, a jagged wall of white cut by bands of translucent blue and green. Jack zipped up his orange survival suit and adjusted his life jacket, glancing back at the sleek lines of Seaquest II receding in their wake. Beside him Maria tightened her grip on the safety line, and Macleod cast her a reassuring glance from the opposite pontoon.

“It’s a wee bit of a roller-coaster ride, but Henrik here’s an expert. He’s been playing in these waters all his life.”

The Danish crewman grinned and stood up in front of the Evinrude 120 outboard, holding the line of the painter taut in one hand and the throttle in the other. He began to drive the Zodiac like a chariot through the slew of brash that covered the sea, effortlessly swinging the big engine from side to side to avoid the growlers that lurked treacherously just below the surface. After five minutes of weaving through the ice debris they reached a pair of red buoys, the entrance to a floating boom that kept a large area in front of the berg free of ice. As they slowly drove the last few hundred metres, they watched a pair of men ascend the huge face in front of them using crampons and ice axes, their forms diminutive against the vast bulk of the berg. Already they could feel the cold radiating off the ice, a chill aura that sent a shiver through Maria. She had insisted on joining them on the trip to the berg, but now she felt unnerved, as if she had strayed too far into a world beyond her experience.

“It’s like a living thing,” she said. “Almost like it’s breathing.”

“The cold exhalation actually shows it’s melting, and fast,” Macleod said. “Soon even the calved face in front of us is going to be too dangerous to work.”

They drew up alongside a floating dock about twenty metres off the berg, the bobbing form of an Aquapod submersible visible on one side and two Zodiacs on the other. A twisted mass of cable was being lowered through the dock into the sea, and a group of men stood by wearing black IMU E-suits, all-environment dry suits that would prolong their survival even in these frigid waters should something go wrong. After a few moments the cable halted and a familiar form disengaged himself from the group with a wave.

“Good work, guys. I’ve done all I can here.”

With an agility belying his stout frame, Costas crossed the platform and on to the Zodiac, landing with a crash on the floorboards in front of Jack. He had preceded them to the berg by half an hour, and had clearly been on overdrive. He staggered up and stripped his E-suit down to the waist, sat down and cooled off for a moment, then slipped on the orange windbreaker and life jacket passed to him by the crewman.

“I’m good to go.”

The crewman pushed the Zodiac off and swung it back towards the line of the boom, driving slowly out to sea and then veering right once they had passed the buoys at the entrance. Five minutes later, the boom now out of sight and the northern edge of the berg behind them, Macleod motioned the crewman to drive a short way into the fjord and then ease back on the throttle and cut the engine. With the roar of the outboard gone everything suddenly seemed preternaturally still, an illusion of serenity, as if by crossing over the underwater threshold they had entered a fantasy world of ice, had become one with the towering crystal palaces that surrounded them.

“Don’t be deluded,” Macleod said. “There are titanic forces at work here.”

As if on cue the silence was rent by a tremendous bang, followed by a percussive shockwave through the air and an immense rushing sound as a wall of ice slid off the glacier far away on the edge of the ice cap. The noise seemed to resonate off all the bergs trapped in the fjord, an eerie chorus of competing echoes that seemed to pummel the Zodiac from every direction and then trailed off like a long sigh. In the unearthly silence that followed, the bergs around them seemed even more awesome, their own stature more puny and impotent.

“The sea’s often this placid in the summer,” the crewman said. “But it’s also the most active time for the glacier. And the warmer it gets down here, the more likely you are to get a clash with the cold air coming off the ice cap. It can happen very quickly.”

He pointed up the fjord to the eastern horizon, to a band of sky over the ice that could have been dark blue or dark grey, but their attention quickly shifted to a growler the size of a car just ahead of them. It had suddenly begun to rock from side to side, an alarming sight that seemed to defy reason on the glassy sea. Soon it rocked more and more aggressively and then tumbled over, revealing a surface sculpted smooth and sending a ripple coursing out into the fjord. The brash surged around them like a slurry of broken glass, and other growlers reared up uncomfortably close out of the depths.

“That was frightening,” Maria exclaimed.

“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Macleod replied. “When a big berg rolls, you might not feel much out here, but a ten-metre tidal wave can hit the shore. You don’t want to go beachcombing around here.”

“Don’t speak too soon,” Costas said. “We want our berg to stay nice and quiet for at least the next twenty-four hours.”

Jack gazed back at the creaking mass of ice and then down the fjord towards the glacier. Outside the threshold the bergs seemed to glide majestically towards the open sea, but inside it was as if they were inchoate, shackled and straining to go, their jagged edges still raw and fresh from the violence of their birth. The power of the place was all the more awesome because so much of it was invisible, convulsions of energy that pulsed unseen through the depths each time a slab of ice fell into the sea, a steady unleashing of force seen like this nowhere else on earth. For Jack it was a new measure of human frailty in the face of nature, an envelope he seemed to be stretching farther and farther with each new project.

Macleod nodded at the crewman, who pulled the starter cord and fired up the engine. The Zodiac turned back in the direction of the open sea and then accelerated towards the shore, its wake rocking the brash that extended out from the fjord in long tendrils of white. The crewman found a patch of clear water and opened the throttle wide, planing the Zodiac in a wide arc towards the rocky promontory that marked the northern edge of the fjord. Jack held on to the safety line and leaned back from the pontoon where he was sitting near the front of the boat, letting the freezing spray lash his face and relishing the tang of salt in his mouth. It had been several months since he had dived and he had missed the taste of the sea. He saw Maria smile at him as she clung on beside him, and he watched as Macleod and Costas ducked down and held their hoods against the spray. He remembered his last dive with Costas, deep in the bowels of the volcano six months before, a dive that had reawakened his worst trauma. The dive they planned now was even more confining, and would be one of the most extraordinary they had ever undertaken. The fears were still there, but under control, and all he felt now was a sense of overwhelming elation. The Golden Horn project had reignited his passion for archaeology, but it had been directed from the bridge of a ship, one crucial step removed from revealing history with his own hands. He was itching to get underwater again, to be the first to see and touch fabulous treasures lost for centuries in the ocean depths.

As the engine powered down, the roar of the outboard was replaced by an eerie chorus of howling and yipping, and they realised that the valley ahead was dotted with dogs chained to posts, some of them baying with hunger and others gorging on hunks of meat left for them in their muddy pens.

“The Greenlanders still use dog sleds in winter,” Macleod said, his hood now pushed back. “Much of the terrain’s too rugged for snowmobiles, and the ice cap’s a long way from fuel. They keep the dogs chained up all summer long and shoot them when they get too old to work. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but then they’re not pets.”

“I seem to recall that when they excavated the last abandoned settlements of the Norse Greenlanders, they found dog bones with cut marks on them, their final meal,” Jack said. “Ancestors of these dogs.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re howling,” Costas said.

Maria stared apprehensively at the dogs after the others had scrambled over the bow on to the pebbly beach, and it took Jack proffering his hand to persuade her to join them. Macleod quickly led them to higher ground, above the danger zone from berg displacement, then responded to a call on his two-way radio and handed it to Maria. She stopped and spoke briefly into it, then passed it back to Macleod and resumed her place beside Jack.

“That was Jeremy,” she said. “He stayed on board to finish analysing the Mappa Mundi inscription. He thinks he’s got something else. It could be really exciting, but he needs a bit more time.”

“Should be just ready for us when we finish our dive,” Jack said. “We’ll need to sit down and work out where we go from here.”

“I still can’t believe you’re doing it,” she said, gazing at him with concern. “Sometimes I think you have a death wish.”

“This is your first time with IMU in the field.” Jack grinned. “As James said, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Despite the warmth of the summer sun, they kept their survival suits zipped up against the insects, and followed Macleod from the beach escarpment up an eroded path towards a low saddle in the valley. No vegetation stood more than a few feet high, but the bleak rock of the surrounding ridges was offset by lush beds of moss and grass that carpeted the valley floor.

“The ruins ahead are ancient Sermermiut,” Macleod said. “A sacred place for the local Inuit. People have lived here for at least four thousand years, since the first Greenlanders made their way across the frozen sea from the Canadian Arctic. The town of Ilulissat is over the ridge to the north, but it was only founded in 1741 with the modern Danish occupation of Greenland. The Danes called it Jacobshavn, but the Greenlandic name is a little more appropriate.”

“What does Ilulissat mean?” Costas asked.

“Icebergs.”

Costas grunted, and they trudged off the path over a marshy depression towards the ancient site, waving away the clouds of midges that seemed to rise from the bog like mist. “What about the Vikings?”

“To the Norse this whole stretch of coast up to the polar ice cap was Nordrseta, the northern hunting grounds, a forbidding place where hardly any Viking remains have ever been found.” Macleod stopped, waiting for Costas to catch up. “The Norse only settled permanently where they could have some hope of a traditional Scandinavian way of life, stock-raising and basic agriculture. In Greenland that meant the fertile fjord valleys near the southern tip, where Eirik the Red arrived with his family in the early eleventh century. Most of the colonists came from Norway and Iceland. Eventually there were hundreds of homesteads, a population that peaked at several thousand, and they even built crude stone churches after they converted to Christianity.”

“What happened to them?” Costas asked.

“One of the most haunting mysteries of the past,” Macleod said. “They clung on for generations, trading walrus ivory and furs back to Europe, but the last known contact was in the fifteenth century. When the Catholic Church sent an expedition to Greenland in 1721 to check that they were still God-fearing Christians, they found no sign of them.”

“Believe it or not, the Crusades were probably a factor,” Maria said.

“Huh?” said Costas. “The Crusades?”

“In 1124 the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar established an episcopal see in Greenland. That meant the Church could impose taxes on the Norse settlers, adding greatly to their hardships. Sigurd was known as ‘The Crusader,’ one of a number of Scandinavians who joined the Crusaders in the twelfth century. He had the gall to exact a special tax for the Crusades from Greenland, of all places. They paid it in walrus tusks and polar bear hides.”

“That’d be handy in Jerusalem,” Costas muttered. “The Crusades really were a global madness.”

“The Church was undoubtedly an economic burden,” Macleod said. “But others think the Norse in Greenland were wiped out by the natives, or by English pirates, or even by the Black Death. I think environment was the biggest factor. The so-called Little Ice Age of the medieval period blocked off the sea routes that were their lifeline back home, with sea ice remaining all summer long round the coasts. The cold would also have ruined their agriculture, and maybe they were unable or unwilling to adapt to the native way of life and survive by hunting and fishing.”

“So the last of the Vikings were done in by climate change,” Costas said. “Not exactly a glorious end for a warrior elite, was it?”

“Let’s wait and see,” Jack murmured. “It could be that the real warriors among them got farther west than this.”

The ruins of the ancient site were barely recognisable, humps of turf and low circles of unworked rocks set close into the ground, some of them nearly swallowed up by the alluvial soil and others exposed in patches of peaty bog. On a slight platform on the seaward edge was a low, dome-shaped tent about fifteen feet across, its frame of whalebones covered with layers of sealskins and musk-ox hide. A thin wisp of smoke rose from a hole in the centre.

“Some of these stones are tent circles, used to batten down tents against the wind,” Macleod explained. “You see them all over the Arctic, the main evidence of ancient habitation. People haven’t lived in this place for generations, but it’s hallowed ground for the Inuit of Ilulissat. Sometimes the elders who remain close to the old ways come here to prepare for death. Their families erect traditional tents inside the sacred stone circles of their ancestors when they know the time is close.”

A team of lean white huskies had been chained to stakes surrounding the tent, and as Macleod led the others forward the dogs strained at their fetters and slavered menacingly at them. Maria held back uncertainly, but Jack led her on, careful to keep outside the radius of the chains. The growling had alerted the occupants of the tent, and a flap opened, revealing a Greenlander woman wearing a traditional sealskin parka, her dark hair tied back and embellished with beads. As she looked up they recognized Inuva, who had left Seaquest II by Zodiac an hour before them. She hushed the dogs and beckoned to Macleod, who knelt down and exchanged a few words with her before the flap closed again.

“Inuva’s the old man’s daughter.” Macleod turned back to the others and spoke quietly. “He knows Danish but will only speak Kalaallisut, the local Inuit dialect, so Inuva will translate for us. His name is Kangia, which is also their name for the icefjord. He’s well over eighty years old, a great age for these people. They have a tough life. In his youth he was one of the most renowned hunters of Ilulissat, venturing hundreds of miles along the edge of the ice cap with his dogs, paddling his umiak far beyond the last settlement to the north.”

They stooped under the flap as Macleod held it open, then he followed them in. Jack’s eyes smarted from the acrid smoke rising from the hearth, fed by slabs of dried musk-ox dung. Macleod motioned for them to sit down below the smoke on a ring of hides arranged around the fire. As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they could see that the far side of the tent was occupied by a wooden sled, its rails dark with age but beautifully carved with flowing animal shapes. Sitting on the edge, draped in blankets, was an old Inuit man, his face leathery and gnarled and his long white hair flowing free over his shoulders. As he looked at them they could see that his eyes were dimmed by snow blindness, and his skin had the grey pallor of approaching death. With great effort he began to speak, and Inuva translated the soft clicking sounds of the native Greenlandic every time he paused.

“My father says that since time immemorial his people have lived here, and outsiders have come and gone,” she said softly. “Now it is nearly time for him to leave and join the dog sleds of his ancestors, as they speed across the ice cap for all eternity.” The old man extended a wizened hand out of the blankets and picked up a worn photograph on the sled beside him, nodding silently at Macleod as he passed it to him.

“This is why we’re here,” Macleod said. “Inuva told him about our research ship in the fjord, and it was she who summoned me to Kangia two days ago. Take a look at the picture.”

Macleod passed the photograph to Jack, and Maria and Costas shifted closer to get a better view. It was a faded black-and-white image of a group of men dressed in full polar gear, standing beside wooden sleds laden with equipment and surrounded by dogs.

“Some time before the Second World War, judging by the gear,” Jack said. “The 1920s, maybe 1930s.” He paused, then peered more closely. “That older man in the centre. Isn’t that Knud Rasmussen? I know he was born in Jakobshavn.”

“Kangia was one of his dog-handlers,” Macleod said. “He’s the boy on the left.”

“So Kangia knew Knud Rasmussen!” Jack looked in awe at the old Inuit, then glanced at Costas. “One of the most celebrated polar explorers, half Danish, half Inuit. The first person to make it all the way across the Greenland ice cap.”

“Rasmussen was a father figure to Kangia, and encouraged him to keep the old ways. Kangia revered him and admired his respect for native traditions. Which is more than can be said for these characters.” Macleod took a waterproof photograph sleeve out of his inner jacket pocket and passed it over. “Kangia also gave me this.”

“Ahnenerbe?” Jack’s expression suddenly became grim.

“Correct. I scanned the picture and did some research before you arrived. A German expedition came to Jakobshavn in 1938, a year before the war. They needed dog-handlers, and Kangia was an obvious choice.”

The photograph showed two European men standing against a backdrop of rock and ice. From the shape of the promontory the setting was clearly Sermermiut, near where they were now, but the line of the icebergs formed a continuous wall along the threshold of the fjord, as it had done more than fifty years ago before the glacier began to recede. Both men were dressed in the standard expedition gear of the day, thick sweaters, heavy woollen jackets and plus-four trousers tucked into knee-high socks. The man on the right was tall and handsome, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with a shock of blond hair, but was standing slightly apart as if reluctant to be photographed. The other man was small, dark-haired, with pinched features, with one leg bent and his right hand on his knee, staring imperiously into the camera. With his left hand he was holding a pair of measuring calipers over the head of a young Inuit man sitting awkwardly on a rock in front of him, easily recognisable from the previous picture as Kangia. It was like a hunter posing with his trophy, only it was far more chilling than that. On his left arm the European man was wearing a red band bearing the black symbol of the swastika.

Jack glanced at Costas. “Ahnenerbe meant ‘Ancestral Heritage.’ It was a department of the SS set up before the war by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s deputy. Devoted to the investigation of the ancestral origins of the Aryan race.”

“What on earth were they doing here?”

“Believe it or not, probably searching for Atlantis.” Jack gave Costas a wry look. “The Nazis thought the Atlanteans were the original Aryans. In the late 1930s the Ahnenerbe sent expeditions all over the world—to Tibet, to the depths of Mesoamerica, to the Arctic. They believed they could find the purest descendants of the Atlanteans in the remotest regions, in areas cut off from the rest of humanity. One of their techniques was phrenology, measuring heads for so-called Aryan features. That’s what this moron is doing in the picture. The science was medieval, but the genuine anthropologists conscripted by the Ahnenerbe had to bow to the Reichsführer’s demented obsessions. They even called it Himmler’s crusade.”

Macleod nodded. “Yes,” he said. “And the expedition to Greenland was doubly bizarre. The Nazis were also obsessed with Welteislehre, World Ice Theory, a cosmological fantasy cooked up by an insane Austrian at the turn of the century. It was one of the many weird theories that gained adherents after the First World War, that seemed to offer order and explanation in a world gone mad. According to the theory, everything about the universe was a perpetual struggle between ice and fire. The Aryan master race was born in a realm of ice, and had been scattered across the globe by floods and earthquakes. Where better to find evidence of the original Aryans than the Greenland ice cap, the last great remnant of the Ice Age.”

“It would be laughable if it wasn’t for the poisonous racism underlying everything the Ahnenerbe did,” Jack said. “Because they only told Himmler what he wanted to know, their activities helped to solidify his views about Aryan superiority. Remember he was the chief architect of the Final Solution, the liquidation of the Jews.”

“So these two guys were Nazis.” Costas had picked up the photograph and was scrutinising it with Maria.

“According to Kangia, the greasy-haired one with the armband was a thoroughly nasty piece of work, constantly ranting on about Hitler and treating the Greenlanders like dogs,” Macleod said. “But the other guy seems to have been more reasonable, apparently attempting to befriend Kangia and pulling his weight on the expedition. He was fascinated by the oral traditions of the Greenlanders and promised to visit them one day by himself to record them. Apparently he became a decent dog-sledder and earned the Greenlanders’ respect. The two Germans loathed each other and hardly spoke.”

“Do you have any idea who they were?” Inuva spoke quietly from the bedside where she had been listening, her hand on her father’s brow.

Macleod turned to her. “Records of the expedition disappeared mysteriously from the Ahnenerbe headquarters at the outbreak of war, so this picture and Kangia’s memory are all we’ve got to go on. I emailed the scan back to the IMU library yesterday. They couldn’t identify the smaller man with any certainty, a face that blurs with a thousand other thugs, but the other guy has quite a history.”

“Of course. Now I recognise him,” Maria suddenly exclaimed. “The blond one. Surely it’s Rolf Künzl, the renowned archaeologist?”

“Correct.”

“One of the founders of Viking archaeology,” Maria enthused. “His doctoral thesis on the Norse settlement of Greenland remains a benchmark for the subject. A precocious career cut short by war.”

“Then you know what happened to him.”

“The von Stauffenberg conspiracy,” Maria replied.

Macleod nodded. “One of a raft of genuine scholars forcibly recruited into the Ahnenerbe to shore up Nazi fantasies about a Norse master race. Künzl had little choice but to play the game, even though he was openly contemptuous of the lunatic fringe who ran the Ahnenerbe, mostly crackpots and failed scholars who owed their careers to the Nazis.”

“The lunatics were running the asylum,” Costas murmured.

Macleod nodded again. “But Künzl was never inducted into the SS because he was from an old Prussian military family, a reserve officer in the Wehrmacht, and managed to wheedle his way out of Himmler’s tentacles when the war began. He fought for two years under Rommel in the desert, reaching the rank of colonel and winning the Knight’s Cross, but then was recalled to Berlin and given a menial job. Himmler seems to have singled him out for special bullying, repeatedly accusing him of having stolen records of the Greenland expedition and concealing what they’d found. But Himmler must have given up on him by September 1944, when Künzl was arrested and strung up with piano wire alongside von Stauffenberg for attempting to assassinate Hitler.”

“One of the good guys,” Costas murmured.

“None of the conspirators was a saint,” Macleod replied. “Künzl had been one of the most effective Panzer commanders in the Afrika Korps and had plenty of Allied blood on his hands. He knew about the racial policies of the Nazis from his Ahnenerbe days and had apparently done nothing. But he detested Hitler and wanted the war finished before it destroyed Germany. If you look at the other man in that picture you can see where Künzl’s loathing for the Nazis came from.”

Kangia suddenly began to speak, the soft clicking tones filling the tent as if a gentle wind were ruffling the sealskins. He reached out for the photograph and Costas handed it to him, and they watched as he jabbed his finger at the image of the taller man. Inuva leaned over intently as the old man spoke and then looked back at the others.

“Three days into the expedition they’d reached the edge of the ice cap, due east from here, and found a way up the ice to the top. After a day of hauling the sledges across the ice they were suddenly pinned down by a piteraq, a windstorm.”

Kangia heard his daughter repeat the Greenlandic word and suddenly became animated, the shadows of his arms arching high against the tent wall as he gesticulated in the flickering firelight.

“It was a ferocious storm, the worst my father had ever seen,” Inuva said. “The expedition was at the northern edge of the glacier, where a tributary ice stream begins to flow towards the fjord. The two Germans insisted on crossing on to the glacier and seeking shelter behind an ice ridge, one of the undulations where the glacier had buckled. But the Greenlanders refused, knowing it was too dangerous, and braved it out with their dogs on the exposed ice cap, huddled behind their sleds.”

The old man put his fists together, pulled them apart while making a cracking sound and then spoke again to his daughter. “There was a mighty noise,” she translated. “The glacier had pulled apart and the Germans had disappeared into it. I, Kangia, was the only one courageous enough to crawl through the wind to the edge of the crevasse, where I looked down through the swirling snow and saw an incredible sight.”

The old man had been following his daughter’s intonations and nodding emphatically, but suddenly he coughed painfully and lay back on the pile of furs, his face grey and drawn.

“He has not got long now.” Inuva gently caressed her father’s arm and then looked up apologetically at Macleod. “I think it might be time for you to go.”

Macleod nodded slowly and began to get up, but the old man held out a wavering arm and spoke once more, his words almost inaudible. His daughter leaned close and then translated again.

“It was far below, as deep as the icebergs in the fjord are high.” Macleod sat back down as she spoke. “At the bottom of the crevasse was the prow of a ship, curving up to a fearsome face, its timbers blackened and old. I, Kangia, knew what it was as soon as I saw it. Legend passed down told of giants sheathed in steel, Kablunat, who arrived from across the sea and set one of their great ships alight on the ice. I, Kangia, heard the story as a boy from my grandfather, inside this very tent circle.” The old man stopped and coughed, and Inuva looked at the others. “Our Inuit ancestors, the Thule, arrived here from the Canadian Arctic to settle about eight hundred years ago, after the native people who lived here before had died out. But Thule hunters had already been coming here before that and had encountered the bearded giants who lived in stone houses in the south of Greenland. My ancestors called them Kablunat.”

“My God,” Jack whispered. “A ship in the ice. It couldn’t be.”

“Wait. There’s more.” Inuva held her hand up and listened again as the old man spoke. “The ice began to move beneath me,” she translated. “I, Kangia, threw down a rope and hauled up the two men. The crevasse closed with a crash just as they came out. The ship had disappeared in the ice. The piteraq continued for many days and we returned to Ilulissat. That was the end of the expedition. The Germans sailed away and we never saw them again.”

The old man reached under the blankets Inuva had laid over him and pulled out a package wrapped in white sealskin. With trembling hands he held it out. Macleod took it from him, bowing his head gravely as he did so. In full view of the old man he passed it on to Jack, who cradled the soft leather in his hands and looked questioningly at Macleod.

“This is why you had to come in person,” Macleod said. “When I spoke to Kangia two days ago he said he had an object he wished to pass on. I told him you were our boss, and he said only you could receive it from him.”

Jack looked at the old man and bowed his head solemnly, then carefully began to unwrap the package. Maria and Costas shifted closer for a better view as the folds of sealskin fell away.

Maria gasped, her face pale with excitement. “It’s a runestone!”

The object was a polished slab of dark green a little longer than Jack’s hand, roughly squared at the corners and with a flat upper surface. Crudely inscribed on it were three lines of runes, several of the symbols immediately recognisable to Jack as he angled it towards the light.

“It’s fantastic,” Maria murmured. “The runes are Old Norse, no doubt about it. There are some odd symbols and I don’t recognize the words, but Jeremy should be able to help.”

“My father told me the story but never showed this to me,” Inuva murmured. “There’s one just like this in the museum at Upernavik, about a hundred miles north of here, found on a remote burial cairn at a place called Kingigtorssuaq. It’s the most famous Viking find in Greenland, the most northerly runestone ever discovered in the Arctic.”

“Wait till you hear where this one came from,” Macleod said. “When Kangia rescued Künzl and the other German from the crevasse they were struggling over something, but the smaller man slipped and nearly lost his hold. Kangia had seen him slash at the other man with a knife but drop it into the crevasse. He was in a fury about something else he’d lost, but with the storm raging it became a matter of life and death to get them out and the struggle was forgotten. Before they left the ice cap Künzl gave this stone to Kangia for safekeeping. He said it came from the ship in the ice. Künzl apparently told the Nazi he’d dropped it in the crevasse, but the smaller man suspected he still had it and was rifling through his belongings in the night. Künzl told Kangia it was a sacred stone, that he must never let the other man know he had it. Kangia loathed the Nazi and was only too happy to oblige.”

“Künzl must have translated it,” Maria murmured. “He was the best runologist of his day, an expert in all the Norse scripts. In those few desperate moments in the crevasse he must have read something that made him determined never to let it fall into the hands of his despised SS colleagues in the Ahnenerbe.”

“Künzl told Kangia that if he was unable to return to Greenland Kangia must keep the stone secret for the rest of his life, and only pass it on to another who in his heart he could trust. The war sealed Künzl’s fate, and now you are that man.”

While the others were talking, Kangia’s arm had fallen back over his chest and he had begun to breathe in shallow rasps, his eyes half closed and staring at the ceiling. Inuva turned and looked at them with urgency in her expression. “Now it is truly time.”

Macleod nodded and they all got up to leave, ducking in single file under the flap at the entrance to the tent. Jack remained to the last, and before going he turned back and knelt down beside the old man, talking quietly to him and then saying a few words to his daughter. He touched Kangia’s hand before getting up and following Maria out into the bleak ruins of the old settlement.

“What did you say to him?” Maria asked.

“I wished him and his dogs godspeed across the ice, wherever their journey should take them. I told him that he had been right to pass on his treasure to us, that we would hold his trust sacred.”

Inuva appeared at the tent flap to bid them farewell.

“What will happen to him?” Maria asked, her voice soft.

“After the shaman comes we will help him to the high cliff overlooking the fjord, to the place we call Kællingekløften. We will leave him there, and tomorrow he will be gone.”

“You mean suicide?” Maria said in a hushed voice.

“At Kællingekløften we gather every year to watch the sun appear for the first time over the glacier after the weeks of winter darkness, and at that same place those who are tired of life leap into the icy depths of the fjord to join the spirit world. It is the traditional way. My father has finished here now and is eager to go on his next journey.”

She lowered her eyes and backed into the tent, closing the flap behind her. High up on a crag a dog raised its head to the west and howled, and then strained on its chain as it saw them, flattening its head like a hyena and baring its teeth in a snarl. Maria shuddered and pulled her coat around her, drawing closer to Jack as they made their way down the rocky path towards the sea.

“What is it?” he asked.

“An ancient Norse legend.” She paused as they negotiated a boggy patch. “The dread wolf Fenrir, one of a monstrous brood produced by a giantess, brother of the world-serpent Jormungard and the creature Hel, guardian of the dead. Odin heard a prophecy that the wolf and his kin would one day destroy the gods, so he chained Fenrir to a rock. Thar liggr hann til ragnarøks, there he waits till Ragnarøk, till the final showdown at the end of the world, when he will wreak his vengeance on the gods.”

“It’s a sled dog, not a wolf,” Jack said.

“I know. It’s irrational.” Maria glanced back at the distant figure of the dog and turned quickly back to the path. “But I feel as if we’ve reached the edge of that world of myth, a threshold between the world the Vikings knew and a world that even their gods couldn’t control. The Vikings who came here must have felt the same, a sense of foreboding as they looked over the icy sea to the west, wondering whether the horizon held riches and a new life or the nightmare of Ragnarøk. It’s as if we’re being warned, that others have been this way before us and not returned.”

Jack put his arm around Maria and gave her a reassuring hug. “I take it as a good sign. If Fenrir is here, then we must be on the right track.” He smiled and passed her the swaddled package he had been given by the old man. “Anyway, ancient legends will have to wait for a while. You’ve got your work cut out for you. The sooner we can have a translation of these runes, the better.”

“The Greenland Norse saw those storms, you know, the piteraqs,” Maria said. “There’s a haunting fragment from a poem called Norδrsetudrápa about these northern hunting lands. It goes something like: Strong blasts from the white mountain walls wove the waters, and the daughters of the waves, frost-nurtured, tore the fabric asunder, rejoicing in the storm. It’s virtually the only writing to survive from Norse Greenland, preserved in an Icelandic saga.”

“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ll be careful.”

A few minutes later they reached the shoreline and clambered into the waiting Zodiac. It was early evening now, but in the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic summer it was impossible to gauge the time of day, an effect Jack found vaguely disorientating. After he had helped Maria over the bow and they were all settled again on the inflatable pontoons, Macleod gave the crewman a signal and the Evinrude roared into life. They zipped up their survival suits and donned their life jackets as the crewman reversed out and then swung round the bay in a wide arc, the propeller churning up the brash as he searched for a passage between the floating slabs of ice. As they rounded the promontory at the head of the fjord the iceberg came dramatically into view, dwarfing the flotilla of Zodiacs that were drawn up alongside it laden with equipment and technicians. Costas anxiously scanned the scene as they sped towards Seaquest II, then visibly relaxed and looked over at Jack. He gave a thumbs-up signal and then shouted against the engine and the wind, his words lost but the excited refrain familiar to Jack over the years: “Time to kit up.”

ALL SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL. WE’RE GOOD TO GO.”

Costas flipped aside his microphone headset and grinned at Jack. Outside the Plexiglas dome they could see the two crewmen on the platform release the tethering lines, and the Aquapod began to bob uncomfortably on the surface as it drifted towards the iceberg. Costas quickly activated the water jets and reversed the submersible back to their descent position. It was nearly midnight, but in the continuous sun the dome had begun to heat up, and Jack reached down for the temperature control on his E-suit.

“Don’t adjust it too much.” Costas wiped the beads of sweat off his forehead. “We’ll cool down rapidly as soon as we’re submerged.”

The bustle of activity on the platform as they departed now seemed to belong to another place and time, and they listened as the last of the Zodiacs carrying the crewmen sped out of the danger zone and back towards Seaquest II. They were almost on their own now, their final human contact awaiting in the Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle nestled against the berg thirty metres below. Costas tightened his straps, scanned the instrument panel and gripped the controls. With its bubble dome and tubular ballast tanks on either side, the two-man Aquapod was not unlike a small helicopter, an impression enhanced by the multidirectional water-jet propulsion system which gave it even greater agility than its counterpart in the air.

“You can wave goodbye to the surface now,” Costas said.

“At least it’ll still be daylight when we return,” Jack murmured. “That’s something to look forward to.”

Costas opened up the ballast tanks and a geyser of water erupted on either side of the Aquapod, settling to a bubbling ferment as the submersible slowly trimmed down in the water and became negatively buoyant. For a few moments as the sea level rose up the dome in front of them they were looking at two worlds, both awesome in their magnitude. Above them was the towering form of the iceberg, familiar now yet still breathtaking, its hues of green and blue refracted through the flecks of brash that plastered the dome. Below them was a world as different as outer space, a place nature never intended them to broach. The Arctic waters were astonishingly clear, with visibility extending a hundred metres or more in every direction, and the sheer wall of the berg dropped below them as far as they could see into the frigid depths of the fjord. It was a stupefying sight, and for a few moments they stared in stunned silence as the dome slipped under the surface.

“Holy shit!” Costas exclaimed suddenly. “Taking evasive action!”

Costas gunned the main thruster and swung the Aquapod down towards the berg. Out of the corner of his eye Jack could see what Costas had sensed just in time, a rhythmic commotion in the water from within the fjord, a slow-motion whirling that was advancing relentlessly towards them. The deeper they dropped the larger it loomed, like some nightmare tormentor from which there was no escape. Jack fleetingly remembered Maria’s warning about the wolf Fenrir and the edge of the world, about forces even the gods could not control. They jetted down until they were nearly vertical, plummeting straight into the blackness of the abyss.

“Brace yourself!” Costas yelled.

A scything wall of white suddenly appeared out of the tumult, an apparition that bore down on them with horrifying speed and then swept past the front of the dome with inches to spare. They were jolted violently to one side. Costas fought to keep the Aquapod from spiralling out of control, then righted the submersible and brought it to a standstill. Above them they caught a glimpse of the giant slab of ice as it tumbled towards the open sea, swirling away until nothing but a mist of bubbles was left to mark its progress.

“That was close,” Costas said.

“I thought all this was supposed to end six months ago,” Jack said plaintively. “A quiet life of contemplation, tending the garden and writing my memoirs.”

“Yeah, right,” Costas replied. “Anyway, we needed some excitement to kick-start the adrenaline for what we’re doing next.”

Now that the water was calm again they looked around, and both men fell silent. They had plummeted to a depth of nearly a hundred metres, and the DSRV was now far above them, with two divers just visible outside and silvery trails of bubbles cascading up the ice towards the surface. The immense face of the berg filled the view in front of them, at this depth all colour lost except blue. It had a surreal tint, an azure glow that made it loom at them like a mirage. They could see huge concavities where the current had eroded the ice away, and a vast skid mark of sediment and rock fragments where the berg had scraped against the side of the fjord. And below them, far below, barely discernible in the darkness, they could just make out a sepulchral landscape of boulders and undulations, a shadowy ridge that dropped off into an infinity of blackness on either side. It was a savaged and rutted seascape, pulverized by ice, and they knew it was one of the most dangerous places in all the oceans.

“The threshold of the icefjord,” Jack murmured. “We must be the first people ever to see it.”

“Awesome,” Costas whispered.

“Not a place I want to go,” Jack replied.

“Roger that.” Costas turned his attention to the instrument panel and injected a blast of air into the buoyancy chambers, bringing the Aquapod towards the berg until it was directly under the DSRV. “Ben, this is Aquapod One, safe and sound. We’ll be with you in five minutes. Out.”

The Deep Submergence Rescue Vehicle from Seaquest II featured a small internal dock, an open pool that allowed the dome of an Aquapod to rise into a chamber at the rear of the submersible. As Jack looked up at the belly of the DSRV, he watched the dock door slide open and saw the wavering form of a figure staring down at them from inside the chamber. Two divers appeared on either side of the Aquapod and hooked on four anchoring cables that slowly drew them up. As they broke surface and the dome opened up inside the cramped space, they were met by the welcoming face of Ben Kershaw, a former Royal Marine who had been at the centre of the action in the Black Sea six months before and had recently taken over as chief security officer on Seaquest II. Jack reached out and took the hand proffered to help him up, then shook it warmly once he was on the narrow gangway that ringed the dock.

“Thought it’d be a while before I saw you back inside a submarine.”

“All in a day’s work.” Ben looked serious. “Everything okay?”

“A small brush with a growler.”

“We noticed. We thought you were goners. The fjord’s become more active in the last twenty-four hours, with more big chunks of ice like that calving off the glacier.”

“I want you away from here as soon as we’re gone,” Jack said.

“What happens if you need to bail out?”

Jack was firm. “We can surface and fire a flare. We’ve got the radio buoy. I don’t want anyone in the danger zone if this berg shifts. I want the DSRV back at the ship. We’ve had too much loss already over the last year, and I don’t want to put anyone else’s life on the line.”

“What about me?” Costas gave Jack a look of mock indignation as he lurched out of the Aquapod and crouched down beside them.

“Oh, you’re expendable. You should know that by now.”

“Yeah, there’s always Lanowski to take my place.”

Jack grimaced and the two other men laughed, a noticeable easing of the tension they had all felt. “Okay, point taken. I promise I’ll look after you like a father. Now let’s get this show on the road.”

Jack followed Ben through the bulkhead hatch that divided the docking chamber from the main compartment of the DSRV, his tall frame stooped almost double in the confined space. Around the floor ring where the DSRV could dock with a stricken submarine were two identical arrangements of diving equipment, and Costas stooped down behind them to do a quick inventory. Jack followed Ben a few feet farther to the command station at the front of the submersible, and Costas joined them moments later. They nodded to the crewman who was sitting in the pilot’s chair, a battery of monitors and instrument panels in front of him, then squatted down on either side of Ben behind the navigation console as he activated the screen.

“We’ve plotted a best-fit route,” Ben said. “Ideally we’d have you go in shallower, but we’re protected here by a ridge in the ice from any calving off the berg. We’ll put you in breathing nitrox, which will give you a longer bottom time than air at thirty metres.”

“Umbilical?” Jack said.

“Right. We’ll hook you up to the cylinders in the DSRV. That way you’ll conserve the gas you’re carrying with you.”

“It’s crucial we avoid exhausting gas inside the berg,” Jack said. “Lanowski was clear on that one.”

“Have no fear,” Costas interjected. “A little gizmo I’ve been playing with at HQ. There’s no problem with exhaust when you dive down into a wreck, right? You can prevent it pooling and damaging whatever you’re diving into by putting it through a tube that’s buoyed upwards, venting the exhaust above the wreck. The difficulty comes the other way, when you’re going up into a structure from below.”

“You pump it out.”

“Right. We’ll be hooked up to two hoses, one bringing us the nitrox and the other extracting the exhaust and venting it outside the berg. Not sure how it’s going to behave in the cold.” Costas rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Should be fun to try.”

“Let me guess. You haven’t tested it yet.”

“You don’t get icebergs in the English Channel.”

Jack turned from Costas and pointed at the screen, which showed an isometric computer simulation of the DSRV against the iceberg, with a dotted red line running up at a 45-degree angle from the DSRV and then levelling to a horizontal line that ended at a dark mass near the centre of the berg. “I take it we reach ten metres below sea level as quickly as we can, then ditch the umbilical and switch to rebreathers.”

“Correct,” Ben replied. “We’d love to kit you out with the latest IMU closed-circuit mixed-gas rebreathers, but there’s too much danger of freezing and too much to go wrong. This is one time when the old technology is best. You’ve got our tried and tested semi-closed rebreathers, with an oxygen-nitrox mix configured to give you maximum endurance at that depth. The carbon dioxide will be absorbed but not the nitrogen, so there will be a buildup in the counterlung that you’ll need to vent. But the nitrox fraction is small, and that shouldn’t happen till you’re out of the berg again. You won’t be producing any exhaust inside.”

“Just make sure you stay above ten metres,” Costas added. “We’ll be breathing over eighty per cent oxygen, and the mix becomes toxic at that pressure. Stray any deeper and you won’t know about it, you’ll convulse and be gone.”

“You’ll have the standard trimix package in the cylinder consoles on your backs, giving breathable mixes down to one hundred and twenty metres,” Ben said. “The regulators have an antifreeze cap on the first stage, so should be safe. But that’s an open-circuit system, producing exhalation inside the berg. Strictly for emergencies.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Now tell me about your ice-borer. Nothing technical, I just want to know how to drive the thing.”

Twenty minutes later Jack and Costas sat kitted up on either side of the docking pool, like divers preparing to go through a hole in the ice. The Aquapod had been driven away ten minutes earlier by the two divers who had assisted them into the dock. Now the only crew members remaining were Ben and the pilot, and they had already begun finalising systems checks in preparation for departure.

“We’ll be here until you drop the umbilical,” Ben said. “Then you’re on your own.”

Jack nodded as he sat festooned with diving equipment, his dark hair tousled where he had tried on his helmet. Opposite him Costas ballooned as he struggled to control the inflator on his E-suit, and Jack tried to suppress a smile at his friend’s appearance. Over their E-suits both men wore compact rebreathers slung like small rucksacks on their chests, and on their backs were streamlined yellow consoles containing three high-pressure cylinders with oxygen, nitrogen and helium, as well as integrated weights.

Ben finished his second complete check through all their equipment and then squatted beside the pool between the two men. “I have to level with you, Jack. It’s my obligation as security chief. Those timbers could just be some old whaler’s boat. The risk might just be too high.”

“I know where you’re coming from, Ben, and I appreciate it,” Jack said. “But it’s a calculated risk. We can laugh at Lanowski, but I trust his judgement on this one.”

“Okay, it’s your call.” Ben glanced at Costas, who nodded firmly at him. Without further discussion Jack and Costas put on their yellow Kevlar helmets, and Ben went to each in turn locking the neck seals, activating the twin headlamps on either side and checking that the rebreather and trimix feeds were in place. Jack and Costas pulled on their gloves and checked that the watertight seals were secure, then pressed the temperature control consoles on their shoulders to ensure that the chemical heat connection to their hands was functional. Finally they pulled on their fins, disturbing the wisps of mist that swirled off the frigid pool as it met the warm air of the compartment. Just as they were about to flip down their visors, the face of the other crewman appeared through the hatch.

“Message from Seaquest II. For you, Jack. Something to do with tree rings.”

“Read it to us, will you?” Jack said.

The crewman knelt down and held up a printout. “From IMU Dendrochronology Lab, 0212 GMT. Ilulissat Fjord wood sample is Scandinavian oak, possibly Norwegian. Extensive carbonization present from burning. Match to north-west European tree-ring sequence indicates felling date of AD 1040 plus or minus ten years.”

“Yes!” Jack punched his gloved hand into the air. “There’s your answer. I knew it in my gut all along. This could be one of the archaeological finds of the century.”

Looking down at the water, Jack pursed his lips, then gazed across at Costas with a gleam in his eye. He was looking forward to seeing the surface above them and the sunlight as they dropped out of the DSRV, a respite from the niggling sense of claustrophobia he always felt, but now he was itching to get inside the berg and probe its secrets. He reached down and picked up the umbilical that was coiled by his side, the twin hoses twisted together as a single mass, and plugged it into the remaining open port below the chin of his helmet. He watched as Costas did the same, then the two men clamped shut their visors and switched on the intercom. Jack eased himself off the bench and sat with his legs suspended over the abyss, the astonishing clarity of the water making him feel like a parachutist about to exit an aircraft. He and Costas were already in a world apart, their intercom audible only to each other. Jack gave an okay signal to Ben and a thumbs-down to indicate he was descending, and then looked at Costas.

“Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

THE MAN IN THE BLACK CASSOCK WALKED CONFIDENTLY towards the main entrance of the Apostolic Palace, his trappings as a Jesuit priest in keeping with the other applicants milling around the doorway. He had left the crowd in St. Peter’s behind him and had already passed the first security cordon at the bronze doors leading off from the square. Now he was approaching the very heart of the Vatican, the headquarters of the College of Cardinals, the hub from which the Holy See exerted its influence far beyond Rome to every corner of the globe.

Ahead of him two Swiss guards stood resplendent in their finery with halberds crossed in front of the door, an image that could have been straight from the Renaissance except for the Heckler & Koch submachine guns slung discreetly over their backs. An officer of the guard took the Jesuit’s ID and proceeded to scrutinise him, comparing the black beard and expressionless eyes with the photo on the card. Despite the heat of the early summer, the face was pale and pinched, but it was a scholarly visage all too common inside the closeted walls of the Vatican. The officer turned to a secretary beside him, and they checked the level of authorisation on a palm computer. The officer grunted in surprise and immediately handed the Jesuit back his card.

“You are free to enter.”

The guards raised their weapons and the Jesuit passed through, avoiding the usual body search and metal detector. He walked straight along a wide corridor on the ground floor, then turned left at the end and continued until he came to the ornate door of a private chapel, its entrance marked by trays of dedicatory candles on either side. He knocked once and pushed the door open. In the candlelit gloom he saw another man kneeling before the simple altar at the far end of the chapel. The man crossed himself and stood, then turned towards the door. He was tall and aquiline, with white hair, and he wore the full episcopal vestments of a cardinal, with a gold cross hanging in front of his scarlet cassock. He had the benign, ageless face of one who had spent many years in holy orders, but with a hard edge to his eyes. It was an expression appropriate for a man such as he, a man whose ambition had brought him to the very threshold of supreme power in the Catholic Church.

“Eminence.” The Jesuit bowed slightly, then closed the door behind him.

“Monsignor.”

The two men spoke in English, the Jesuit with a clipped drawl that could have been South African, the cardinal with a hint of north European in his accent.

“He is here?”

“The second one present at the opening of the chamber. We suspected, and he confessed. The Holy See has techniques of persuasion refined over the centuries.”

“And the other?”

“He is your next task.”

The Jesuit walked forward and knelt in front of the cardinal. The cardinal quickly drew off the holy ring from the middle finger of his right hand and replaced it with another, a heavier, flat-faced ring that glinted in the candlelight as he held it out. The Jesuit took his hand and kissed the ring, closing his eyes as his lips brushed the familiar shape, and with his other hand felt his own ring hanging round his neck under his cassock. He stood, made the sign of the cross and backed reverently towards the door, then stopped for a moment and held up his right hand towards the cardinal, whispering words in a language that sounded unearthly, words never before uttered in this holy place, and which seemed to blaspheme against all that it stood for.

“Hann til ragnarøks.”

The Jesuit closed the door of the chapel behind him and walked down the long corridor, his footsteps echoing off the walls of the palace. He emerged into an open courtyard, raising his hands in prayer as two officials passed, then made his way towards an unassuming entrance along the other side. The bells of St. Peter’s suddenly began to boom across the still air of the city, asserting the sovereignty of the Holy See as they had done since the dying days of the Roman Empire. Above him the walls of the courtyard framed the sky, two huge birds of prey circling far overhead, and he could hear the dull rumble of the city outside. He ducked through the entrance and looked quickly behind him, then gathered up his cassock and mounted the stairway to the first floor. The corridor ahead was lined with statues, bulletin boards and posters advertising exhibits, but was empty of people, today being a holiday for the museum staff. The Jesuit reached a door with a light on inside, just where he had been told it would be, and saw the word CONSERVATORI above the lintel.

He paused, not out of hesitation but to relish the moment. In the shadows he stood with his head bowed, his fists clenched. Sixty-five years earlier his forefathers had failed to breach these walls, had stopped short of taking the Vatican in their triumphal sweep through Rome. Now he would make amends, he would make his mark. He unclenched his left hand and raised it to his face, drawing his index finger down the ragged scar that pulsated beneath his beard, pressing it hard until he flinched in pain. He slipped his left hand back under his cassock and with his other hand knocked three times on the door.

“Enter,” a muffled voice said in Italian.

The Jesuit pushed the door open and closed it behind him. The room was crammed with books and manuscripts, with a computer workstation at the far end. In the foreground was a fragmentary stone relief sculpture on a pedestal, and in front of it sat a middle-aged man in jeans and a casual shirt, hunched over a notebook.

“Monsignor.” The man finished what he was writing and looked up, his expression alert and intelligent. “I had not expected to be interrupted today. What can I do for you?”

“You are the chief conservator?” The Jesuit spoke in Italian.

“I am.”

“You were present at the discovery of the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus, along with Father O’Connor?”

The other man suddenly looked deflated, and tossed his notebook on the floor. “Now everyone seems to know. We kept it secret for the good of the Church. I wish we had never found it.”

“So do I.”

The silenced Beretta coughed twice and the conservator jerked back on his stool, an expression of horrified surprise on his face. He tottered over and fell heavily to the floor, coming to rest with his arm splayed awkwardly over his front, his eyes wide open and uncomprehending in death. The Jesuit pulled his left hand out of his cassock and slowly raised it to his face. He drew his finger down the scar on his cheek, again and again, as hard as he could, grimacing with pleasure as he watched the blood seep from the man’s chest and pool on the cold stone slabs beneath him.

There would be more.

“Activating ice probe now.”

Costas turned to Jack as he spoke through the intercom, and the two men gave each other the okay sign. For about the fifth time Jack cast a critical eye over Costas’ equipment. Once they shed the umbilical they would be absolutely reliant on their breathing systems and on each other, with no bail-out option, no emergency escape route to the surface. The IMU equipment was state of the art, with a rock-solid computer system which took the job of calculating their breathing mix and ascent rate entirely out of their hands. It had been tested in conditions of extreme heat six months before inside a submerged volcano, but this was the first time it had been deployed in water that was as cold as it could be without turning to ice.

“Take up your position.”

Jack swung in from where he had been hanging by one hand and gripped the metal bar beside Costas. They were like two climbers on a vast ice wall, dwarfed by the immensity of the berg. Below them the ice dropped off hundreds of metres into the abyss, where the slope of the threshold sheered off to unimaginable depths, to a place of freezing blackness no human had ever dared enter.

“There’s only one safety drill,” Costas said. “Any sign of movement in the ice and we switch to trimix. If this baby rolls off the threshold we’re going down. Remember, the trimix gives us breathable gas to one hundred and twenty metres. That should at least give us some margin.”

Jack gave another okay sign and checked the three hoses which fed into the ports in his helmet. In truth he and Costas both knew their safety drill was a forlorn hope. If the berg moved off the threshold, the vast bulk of it would slip underwater, its base plunging hundreds of feet. If the movement of the ice didn’t crush them, the pressure of a sudden descent into the abyss would kill them instantly.

Jack shut his mind to the possibility and focussed on the outlandish device in front of them. They had just opened up the protective cage that cradled the probe against the berg, and attached the radio buoy which they planned to release to the surface once they re-emerged. The probe was already wedged partway into the ice, having been put in position earlier by the pair of divers they had seen from the Aquapod. Directly abutting the ice was a metal ring two metres in diameter, the width of the tunnel the machine would bore. The tunnel would be just wide enough for the two of them to follow on side by side, with little room to spare. The superheated element in the tube was complemented by an array of microwave and laser cutters emanating from the main body of the device, a metre-wide cylindrical canister directly in front of them. A small but powerful water jet would funnel the newly melted water away and propel the device forward. On the rear face above the guide rail a waterproof LED screen glowed a vivid green.

“We’ll keep the power line attached to the DSRV as long as we can, as well as the fibre-optic cable,” Costas said. “Normally the DSRV pilot would be able to see everything we see on the screen, but before the DSRV moves off we’ll have to disengage the power line and run the probe from the internal battery.” He adjusted a large dial below the screen, then turned and peered at Jack through his mask, remembering the debilitating effect of the gunshot wound that had nearly ended his friend’s life on a very different dive, deep in the Black Sea six months before. “You okay?”

“This new E-suit heating system is working wonders,” Jack replied simply.

“Without the coil the water in the tunnel would actually be below zero,” Costas said cheerfully. “It’s fresh water, from the glacier, so it freezes more quickly than salt water. We’d be ice before you could say scotch on the rocks.”

“Thanks for the thought.” Jack looked down with some scepticism at the coil, a wavering tendril of microfilaments hanging below them. It would be paid out from the device as they went in, and keep the newly melted water from freezing up again and entombing them inside the berg.

“It should work,” Costas added. “In theory.”

“Let me guess. I won’t even say it.”

Costas’ eyes glinted at Jack as he reached up to his shoulder and pressed the external channel on his communications console. “Ben, we’re on our way. Estimated time of arrival at the ten-metre disengagement depth, twenty minutes. Out.”

Jack watched beneath his fins as their entry hole into the berg receded far below, a shimmering patch of blue obscured by the swirl of heated microfilaments that trailed behind them. Twisting down the centre was the battery cable and the umbilical bringing in their nitrox and sucking out their exhaust, their lifeline to the world outside. Jack raised his head and watched in fascination as the borer carved a perfectly smooth tunnel through the ice, proceeding upwards at a 45-degree angle at a rate of more than two metres per minute. He had no sense of the water temperature in his E-suit, but the changing thermostat readout on his environmental regulator reflected the blast of warm water that was being ejected from the borer and driving the machine into the ice. Ahead of them their lamps lit up the wall of the tunnel, a dazzling spectacle of white, yet Jack knew that without artificial light they would be entering a world of total blackness, hemmed in on all sides by an unimaginable thickness of ice which had blocked out the last vestiges of the sun’s rays far above them.

“Okay,” Costas said. “We’ve reached ten metres external water depth. I’m going to level out and disengage.”

Costas adjusted the heat output controls on the panel in front of him, easing off on the lower elements so the borer would melt more ice above and gradually become horizontal. Jack watched their progress on the LED screen, a 3-D isometric image of the berg identical to the one Lanowski had shown them earlier that day. The image had been generated by the surface team using ultra-high-frequency sonar, created from thousands of data points where the sound waves had met differential resistance from frozen cracks and fissures in the berg. Lanowski had plotted a best-fit point of entry and route to minimise the chance of following a frozen meltwater fissure and rupturing the berg, and so far his plot had held true. The ice they had passed through had all been the cloudy white ice of the glacier, as hard as rock, formed a hundred thousand years ago in the depths of the Ice Age.

Costas reopened the external channel on his intercom receiver. “Ben, this is Costas. Do you receive me, over?”

“Costas, this is DSRV, we receive you loud and clear, over.”

“We’ve reached the disengagement point, over.”

“Roger that. We’ve got you on screen as long as you’re hooked up. Be advised, we have a meteorology warning from the captain of Seaquest II. There’s some thermal disturbance on the edge of the ice cap, a cold air mass moving in from the east. It may be nothing significant, but the captain’s pulling back another mile from the fjord as a safety precaution. You have the option to abort. Over.”

Costas and Jack looked at each other through their visors. “We’re carrying on,” Costas replied. “We’re only fifty metres from our target, and we’re not going to hang around. We’ll be out of here within the hour. But you must leave now. Over.”

“Roger that. Send up the radio buoy when you’re clear of the berg and we’ll pick you up. Standing by to receive umbilical. Over.”

Costas flipped a switch on the control panel in front of him and pulled out the power cord from the ice-borer. For an alarming moment the device went dead, and Jack could almost see the water around him beginning to freeze up. Then the LED screen and forward light array reactivated as the battery came on line, and the water began to shimmer again.

The two men turned towards each other in the narrow confines of the ice tunnel, their visors only inches apart. Costas talked them through the procedure they had practised repeatedly before leaving the DSRV, each man visually checking the other as they worked methodically through the steps.

“Engage rebreather.”

Jack copied Costas and opened the outlet valve of the rebreather on his chest, then turned the knob under his helmet that activated the flow of gas into the silicon rubber skirt that sealed over his nose and mouth. The first lungful of oxygen sent a tingle down his arms and legs, an invigorating effect he relished every time they used rebreathers. He grasped the umbilical hose with his right hand and with his other hand closed the nitrox port on his helmet, his body wedged awkwardly on his elbows against the wall of the tunnel and pressed up against Costas.

“Disengage umbilical.”

Simultaneously the two men pulled the nitrox hoses from their helmets and dropped them to the floor of the tunnel, and Costas released the power cable he had been holding. As they sucked on their rebreathers they watched the coiled mass of the umbilical slither off behind them and disappear over the bend in the tunnel, dropping down their entry route towards the open sea. The microfilament tendrils keeping the tunnel liquid wavered and undulated as if they had been caught in a breeze, then gradually became more stable, spreading out over the entire width of the tunnel.

“Ben, we’re disengaged. We’ll be out of communication range once we hit that mass of meltwater ice. Looking forward to a hot brew when you return. Over.”

“Roger that. Good luck. Out.”

They were now completely cut off from the outside, dependent solely on each other and the array of equipment that festooned their bodies. As Jack watched the umbilical disappear he had felt a pang of unease, a warning sign of his secret vulnerability as a diver, the lurking claustrophobia he constantly fought to suppress. Years before he had nearly died in a submerged mine shaft, his life saved only by buddy-breathing with Costas, and the trauma had been reawakened in the labyrinth of Atlantis, when his wound had left him weakened and exposed. He knew Costas was aware of his battle, and the unspoken bond between the two men was a source of strength. Jack gripped the guide rail behind the probe and forced himself to concentrate on the excitement ahead.

“We’re dead on target,” Costas said. “Check out the screen.”

Directly in front of them the LED display showed an anomalous form, the image created by the sonar data points around the mass of meltwater in the heart of the berg that had mystified Cheney and the NASA team. Even the ultra-high-frequency sonar had failed to penetrate further, and from this angle there was no sense of the extraordinary shape which had been so clear from the vertical sonar images. In the centre of the dark mass was a red cross-hair where the ice-corer had picked up the timber sample, and slightly above it a green cross-hair which marked their objective.

“Remember, we’re taking pictures, grabbing anything we can, then leaving,” Costas said. “No time for science today.”

“For once I’m with you,” Jack said. “Now we’ve got the tree-ring date, all I need is to confirm what it is and prove its origin. A couple more wood samples and we’re out of there.”

“While you’re doing that I’ll use the probe to melt a pool above the target zone, just wide enough to turn this baby round and head for home. I can already taste that brew Ben’s got going for us.”

“Let’s do it.”

The two men hung side by side behind the rail as Costas reactivated the heating element, and seconds later it began to carve out the tunnel towards the target zone. The borer was now an autonomous vehicle, free of any tether to the outside world. It was drawing them along like a slow-motion underwater scooter, pressing farther and farther into the heart of the berg. Costas concentrated on keeping them above the ten-metre threshold for oxygen toxicity. As they progressed onwards Jack experienced a rush of elation, as if the oxygen and the adrenaline he had needed to overcome his anxiety had filled him with an overwhelming exhilaration. The tiny bubbles that gave the ice its milky opacity were fizzing in the meltwater, and he suddenly realised that the only life-sustaining properties around them had been released from the depths of the Ice Age. The air was the same as that breathed by their most distant human ancestors, hunter-gatherers who had roamed the edge of the ice sheets thousands of years before civilisation. Jack had known he would feel a frisson of excitement as their objective neared, but this was an unexpected sensation, the extraordinary feeling of swimming through a tunnel in time that would be impossible to experience anywhere else on earth.

“This is it.” Suddenly the white ice ahead of the borer gave way to a wall of ice as clear as glass, refracted deep blue as their headlamps shone into it. “Meltwater ice,” Costas said. “It’s the first we’ve encountered. This must be from one of those crevasses in the glacier Lanowski was on about.”

He drove the probe forward another two metres until the clear ice was all round them, and then came to a halt. As the swirl from the water jet subsided, Jack realised they were over a dark mass just beneath the ice, and he could see it curving off to either side through the blue haze. He sank down to the floor of the tunnel for a closer look, his headlamp pressed directly against the ice.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“What is it?” Costas released his hold on the probe and dropped down beside him, their bodies up against each other in the narrow space.

“Timbers,” Jack said excitedly. “A huge mass of them. It’s the side of a boat, a wooden ship. I can see rivets, rows of rusted iron rivets along planks. And the planks are overlapping, clinker-built. That does it. We’ve got ourselves a Viking longship.”

“Awesome,” Costas said, his eyes glinting through his mask at Jack. “And they’re black, carbonized, just like the sample they analysed from the ice core. There’s charring across this whole section of timber. This boat burned.”

“A burning ship on the ice,” Jack murmured. “Remember Kangia, his story of the ancient Inuit legend?”

“It explains the clear ice that cocoons this thing, the image they got with the sonar,” Costas said. “It’s not just meltwater from a crevasse that filled up and froze. I think this boat was burning when it sank into the ice. The ice and snow falling on the timbers must have put the fire out pretty quickly, but not before the heat melted this cavity in the glacier.”

“Before we pull out I want to get some sense of the dimensions,” Jack said.

“The target point’s eight metres ahead. That should give you what you need. Once there I’m turning straight back.”

Moments later Costas came to a halt again. The edge of a huge blackened timber had appeared on the left side of the tunnel, and he adjusted the course of the probe to avoid colliding with it. As they passed alongside they could see that it curved upwards, and was superbly carved with writhing animal forms and abstract interlinked shapes in a wide strip along the edge.

“Urnes style,” Jack said excitedly. “Thank God Maria gave me a refresher course on Viking art last night. I’m certain this is Norwegian, a new style developed around the mid-eleventh century.” He rolled over and looked up through the ice where the timber extended above them. “It’s the stem post. Take a look at that.”

Costas aimed his headlamp through the ice at the top of the timber. He let out a low whistle through his regulator as he saw the carving at the top, a dark shape frozen in the ice at the limit of their visibility, a snarling head with flattened ears that protruded at least a metre in front of the curved prow of the ship.

“It must be Fenrir, the wolf-god,” Jack said in hushed tones, remembering Maria again. “He seems to be the guardian of this place.”

As they flipped back over and progressed slowly forward, a fabulous image unfolded beneath them, as if they were floating over a full-scale diorama of a shipwreck in a museum exhibit. The image was stunningly clear, and on either side they could see for at least five metres until the ice became too blue. Some sections of timber were remarkably intact, others charred and crushed by the ice that must have fallen on the hull before the meltwater froze up and protected it. Jack took photographs continuously with the digital camera integrated into his helmet, murmuring the technical descriptions into the audiotape as each new element of ship structure came into view.

“It’s classic west Scandinavian construction, completely consistent with the eleventh century,” he said after a few minutes. “More a deep-hulled, broad-beamed sailing vessel than the Hollywood image of a longship, but then you wouldn’t have wanted an oared warship out here. They were fine for skimming the waves at high speed and landing raiding parties, but they had a low sheerline and swamped easily in heavy seas. You wanted a ship that could transport people and supplies across the north Atlantic, sometimes spending weeks at sea.”

“It’s been repaired,” Costas said, staring through the ice. “There’s a section near the bow where planks have been replaced, where the carpentry looks different. Maybe they hit an iceberg. And look, there’s an oar.”

“It’s a steering oar, a side rudder,” Jack said, looking down at the perfectly preserved oar on the warped deck planking beneath them. “The Vikings didn’t have fixed rudders, so a broad oar was attached to the stern of the ship. It looks like this one was stowed inboard deliberately, near the bow, not the stern. This ship wasn’t at sea when it went down. And there’s more. Take a look at that. It’s incredible.”

As they passed beyond the bow area they began to see shapes that were not timbers, but items which seemed to have been arranged in a pile leading up to a dark structure in the centre of the hull where the mast-step should have been. There were amorphous masses clearly identifiable as skins and furs, with wooden platters and utensils placed alongside. Costas quickly adjusted the setting as the ice-borer narrowly missed the top of a large pottery jar that lay shattered over the middle of the furs.

“An amphora.” Jack picked up a rim shard which had come out in the meltwater and stowed it in his E-suit. “An east Mediterranean wine amphora, of the Byzantine period. In Greenland. It’s bizarre.”

“I guess they had to keep warm in those cold Arctic nights,” Costas said. “Anyway, I thought the Vikings were beer-drinkers.”

“Some of them were pretty widely travelled, remember, and must have picked up foreign habits.” Jack’s mind was racing, and he was beginning to think the unthinkable. “I may be wrong, but I’m wondering…” At that moment another object appeared inside the tunnel meltwater beneath them, a long wooden shaft with its head still embedded in the ice. Costas stopped the water jet to give the element time to melt more ice around the object, and Jack carefully drew it out and held it in the narrow space between them.

“Holy shit,” Costas said.

It was a huge, single-bitted battle-axe, hafted to a thick handle at least a metre and a half long. The head shone with gold and was embellished with ornate engravings on both sides.

“It’s gilded,” Jack murmured, his voice hoarse with excitement. “That’s what preserved the iron from corrosion. Standard technique for making a weapon look like gold, but keeping it functional with the harder metal underneath.”

“I’ve got symbols on my side of the blade,” Costas said.

“So have I.” Jack turned his side flat so Costas could see. The surface was engraved with a large pendant shape that respected the lines of the axe head, a wide stem dropping to symmetrical extensions that filled the width of the metal above the blade. The outline form was simple but it was elaborately decorated inside, with swirling curvilinear designs and garish animal forms, most prominently the snarling head of a wolf at the apex of the shape. Jack pointed to a line of symbols just above the axe blade.

“Mjøllnir.”

“What?”

“The letters are Greek, but the name’s Norse. The most potent symbol of the Vikings, the invincible weapon of their greatest god, their one hope of defeating evil at the Battle of Ragnarøk. Mjøllnir, Thor’s Hammer.”

“What’s the bird above it?”

Jack peered closer. “I can’t believe I’m seeing this. It’s the double-headed eagle. One head signifies the old Rome, the other the new Rome, Constantinople. It’s the imperial symbol of the Byzantine emperor.” He paused, then looked through his visor at Costas, his eyes alight in wonder. “We’ve just found one of the most famous weapons in history, a battle-axe of the Varangian Guard.”

“That makes sense. Look at these.” Costas twisted the axe round so Jack could see the other side.

“Runes!” Jack’s heart was racing, and he was sucking the oxygen hard from the rebreather. “And not just any old runes. I’m not an expert, but I know these like the back of my hand. They’re identical to the ones in the Church of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople. It’s the signature of Halfdan, the Viking who inscribed his pagan symbols into the holiest cathedral of eastern Christendom some time in the eleventh century.”

“So we’ve found Halfdan’s war axe,” Costas’ voice was deadpan, but his expression was incredulous. “In an iceberg off Greenland. This guy sure got around.”

“There’s one final thing I need to check,” Jack said. “There should be a simple mast-step and crossbeam in the centre of the hull, but instead it’s some kind of rectangular structure. I’ve now got a pretty good idea what it is, but I need to see it with my own eyes. Then we’re out of here.”

“Roger that.” Costas reactivated the water jet and they began to move up and over the dark structure a few metres ahead of them. Jack held on to the axe for a moment, scarcely believing what they had found, and then fed it over his shoulder under the straps of his trimix cylinders, carefully pushing the shaft back until the gilded axe head was wedged safely away from his regulator manifold. He turned back and clasped both hands on the guide rail, watching closely as the edge of the rectangular structure appeared beneath them, and they began to see what lay inside, a shadowy, sepulchral form that seemed completely different from everything they had discovered so far. At the foot of the structure Jack suddenly saw another fantastic pile of artefacts, a gilded conical helmet on top of a coat of gilded chain mail, and below them a folded scarlet cloth with gold embroidery, evidently a cloak. Just as they were about to pass over the middle of the structure, Costas flipped the control handle and the probe came to a halt.

“I’m getting a warning reading on the seismograph,” he said. “Probably just a wobble in the machine, but I need to stop to make sure.”

Jack looked with sudden unease at the red light flashing at the bottom of the screen. He could sense nothing unusual, but the microfilaments trailing behind them seemed to flutter longer than usual after the water jet had shut off.

“There’s definitely something going on,” Costas said.

Just then there was a horrifying creaking noise, followed by a series of wrenching vibrations that set Jack’s teeth on edge and sent an uncontrollable tremor through his body. The water began to vibrate, until all he could see of Costas and the ice probe was a shapeless blur.

“Holy Mother of God. We’re—”

Costas’ words were drowned out by a terrible shrieking noise, as if they were being assailed on all sides by demented banshees. Splinters of ice began to shear off the tunnel walls, rocketing through the water like shrapnel. One piece wedged itself in Jack’s left thigh, slicing through the Kevlar exoskeleton like butter. All he felt was numbness, and he watched in shock as the water filled with swirling tendrils of red. Then there was a grating lurch and the ice probe went dead, its entire fore end crushed beyond recognition by a seismic shift in the ice.

Everything went silent. Costas frantically tried to reactivate the probe, but to no avail. The space had become narrower, their bodies pressed against each other with hardly any room to move. Jack’s torso was twisted against the bottom of the tunnel, his face mask pressed hard against the ice above the mysterious rectangular structure embedded below them.

As the probe was now dead, the only light came from their headlamps. With superhuman effort Jack managed to turn his head to peer back down the tunnel. What he saw confirmed his worst fear. The tunnel was completely cut off, sealed shut by some tectonic shift in the ice. The space they were in was only about a metre longer than their bodies, and was shrinking fast. Jack watched in horror as the water froze up around his feet. The icy brash that seemed to appear out of nowhere refracted his view into a kaleidoscope, with Costas fragmented into a thousand shapes and colours. Jack tried to move his hand towards his friend but there was already too much resistance. A terrible wave of certainty passed through him: they would be frozen into the ice before they were dead, a living nightmare of the worst kind.

“We’re rolling!” Costas shouted. “Switch to trimix!”

Jack had barely registered the movement, but it suddenly became huge, bigger than anything that had gone before, a gigantic lurching that shoved him into the brash against the tunnel wall. With all his strength he heaved his arm up through the solidifying slurry and reached for the valve under his helmet, feeling Costas’ hand trying to do the same. With agonising slowness he twisted it open while Costas shut off his rebreather, then Costas withdrew his hand and reached for his own valve. Seconds later the first bubbles of exhaust crackled through the brash, some pooling mid-water, trapped under the forming ice, and the rest erupting upwards to form a pocket of air against the tunnel ceiling. The pocket quickly enlarged as Costas began to breathe out, and Jack slowly rose into it as the berg rolled. The instant he broke surface the sheen of liquid on his mask froze, a mix of water and blood that gave his view a surreal tint. He was now almost completely immobile, unable to move his limbs, and with each breath the compression of ice against his chest made it harder to inhale. He knew he had only moments left. He strained to the right, but there was no way he could see Costas. The intercom indicator inside his helmet was dead, and all he could hear was the suck of his own breathing and a terrible tearing and grinding far away, the noise of titanic forces within the berg that had entombed them.

As Jack began to black out, he glimpsed something on the ceiling of the air pocket, then realised it was a reflection of his own form on the ice. His breathing became shallower, quick and rasping, and he became light-headed, flitting in and out of consciousness as his body starved of oxygen. The form above him began to take on a wavering, unnerving shape, as if it were something more than just a reflection. Through the blood-streaked sheen of his mask he saw a flowing red robe where there should have been an E-suit, and instead of a diving helmet there was a bearded face framed by long golden hair. The eyes were dark shadows, sunk beneath the grey pallor of the face, but they seemed to be boring into him. In his delirium Jack saw one arm extended, a blackened hand shining with gold, beckoning him closer. Jack had found what he had been searching for, the ancient warrior who had passed out of time inside this ship, a wraith of Valhalla come to take him in his embrace. Jack shut his eyes on the image as a mighty crack rent the ice, throwing him far beyond the present into merciful oblivion.

THE HEAVY IRON DOOR IN THE ANCIENT CASTLE shut silently behind the three men as they stood in the gloom of the passageway, their eyes gradually becoming accustomed to the thin light that glowed up from the stairway ahead. Wordlessly they donned the scarlet robes that had been left for them inside the entrance, tying the gold-embroidered cords at their waists and pulling the hoods over their heads, then they made their way in single file to the top of the stairs. Their movements had an effortless familiarity about them, as if they had been here many times before. They were far below the foundations of the castle, inside a secret domain hewn from the living rock in the days when the longships still ruled the fjords. For generations the only footsteps to echo in these passageways had been those of the brotherhood. As the three men began to descend, the damp rock seemed to exude an essence of the past, as if the porous limestone preserved within it the exhalations of their revered forebears, a commingling with the spirit world that seemed to draw them to the very gates of Valhalla itself.

At the bottom of the stairs they entered a circular chamber, their inner sanctum. At first they were overwhelmed by the aura, dazzled by a dozen burning torches evenly spaced on pedestals around the edge of the chamber, the flames sending wisps of black smoke curling to the vaulted dome above. Then they began to make out the surrounding wall, an arcade of twelve pillars cut from the rock with an encircling passageway beyond. On each pillar was a fearsome battle-axe, girded to the rock with twisted thongs, the blades radiating the light in flashes of gold. Above each axe hung the chain mail and conical helmet of an ancient warrior, the visors with their empty eyes flickering in and out of shadow as the torchlight leapt up the wall. On the floor in front of the pillars stood twelve identical chairs, their heavy oak frames carved with swirling animal shapes and runic inscriptions, and in the centre of the chamber was a massive circular table, its timbers smoothed and blackened with age. Inlaid on the table was a twelve-spoked sun-wheel, continuing the symmetry of the room to a carved symbol obscured in shadow at the very apex of the design.

The three men passed silently inside and took their places behind chairs at different points around the table, clasping their hands in front of them and bowing their heads before sitting down. All of the chairs were now occupied except one, directly opposite the entrance, the pillar behind it lit up by a double torch and the axe glinting as if it had been freshly sharpened.

The hooded figure seated to the left of the empty chair stood up slowly and raised his right hand, revealing a deep scar that ran across his palm. He spoke in English, his voice gravelly and deep. “Herr Professor. Your Excellency. Mr. President. Welcome. The félag is nearly complete.”

He sat down and placed his left palm on the table. On his index finger was a luminous ring, a twisted band of gold with a signet, its surface impressed with a linear symbol similar to the runes on the chair behind him.

“For thirty generations now we have kept the fire of Thor burning for the return of our king,” he said. “Now the forces that would destroy us again threaten the sanctity of the félag. We will unleash all the powers at our disposal to safeguard our treasure, to find our inheritance from the king of kings.” He gestured towards the empty seat beside him. “But before the council we must complete our circle.”

A hooded figure emerged from the dark recess of the passageway behind the empty chair. In the flames of the double torch his robe seemed ablaze, glowing with the deep orange of a hearth. His hands were clasped in front of him and his face was concealed inside his hood.

“You have carried out your appointed task?”

“It has begun.”

“Come forward.”

The man stepped out beside the pillar until he was level with the axe, its shimmering blade only inches from his head. He raised his right hand to his face, pulling his hood back slightly to reveal his pallid skin and thin lips. A jagged white scar ran across his cheek from his eye socket to his chin.

“You are sworn to avenge your grandfather, our thole-companion who last occupied this chair,” the man at the table said. “The blood feud will not end until the last of our enemies are dead. You will seek to know what they know and extinguish their knowledge with them. You will exact terrible vengeance. You will honour the félag and earn your place at this table.”

The man beside the pillar drew his finger hard down the scar on his cheek, wincing slightly. He bowed towards the table, and the shadow of a smile passed across his lips. The eleven others watched as he turned to the axe. He raised his right palm to the blade and drew it down sharply, pressing hard into the steel until his blood welled out. He reached his bleeding hand down into his robe and pulled out a golden ring, identical to the one worn by the man at the head of the table, then walked forward and sat down. The others raised their hands in unison, revealing identical rings and scarred palms.

A channel of fire suddenly ignited under the table, lighting up the symbol in the centre. Around it the flames shone through the embedded glass that made up the sun-wheel, an orange light that pulsed over the hooded figures to the wall beyond, illuminating the axe blades and the empty helmets in a flickering orange glow. They had been joined by the spirits of the departed félag, the sacred fellowship, warriors called from their eternal feasting in Valhalla once again to occupy their armour in readiness for battle.

The symbol was their tree of life. Seven-branched, it would light their way until the final showdown at the end of days, when they would at last wield battle-axes shoulder to shoulder with their king.

The twelve hooded figures all reached forward until their rings touched, the blood of the one anointing the others, dripping in rivulets down their sleeves and over the symbol in the centre of the table. When their fists were all touching the figure who had spoken first spoke again.

“Hann til ragnarøks.”

Jack seemed to be waking into his worst nightmare. He first realised he was conscious when he recognised the sound of his own breathing, a rasping, sucking noise followed by the rush of exhalation from his regulator exhaust. He gradually became aware of his body, the dull ache of the six-month old gunshot wound in his side and a sharper pain in his leg. He seemed to have been in limbo for an eternity, hovering between a dream world and some kind of reality, but as he opened his eyes and saw the digital time display inside his visor he realized it had only been a few minutes. The view beyond seemed pure hallucination, a kaleidoscopic pattern drawn in tendrils of red. He shut his eyes and instantly confronted another image, one etched on his mind. The wraith-like form of a man was laid out in front of him, as if Jack were floating above his own shrouded body entombed in the ice. The image receded as he seemed to float higher above it, bringing an overwhelming, narcotic sense of relief, but something within him was fighting desperately to pull back, as if the image of his own death were his only lifeline.

The rushing sound of his exhaust became a bubbling ferment and then a high-pitched hiss. Jack opened his eyes and saw a diagonal line running across the centre of his visor. He realised he was lying half in and half out of the water and that the view he had seen a few moments before was his headlight refracting through a slurry of brash interspersed with his own blood. The lamp now shone above water and he could see a wall of ice only inches from his face. Cautiously he turned his head to the right, angling his lamp until he could see the length of his body. He was inside a cavity about the size of a small car, the upper part an air pocket created by his exhaust. Instead of the smooth surface of the tunnel created by the ice-borer, the walls were jagged and fractured, great slabs of ice that seemed to have compacted violently together. Some of the slabs were cloudy and others nearly transparent, creating the illusion that the chamber extended off in fissures and tunnels around the white ice.

For a fleeting moment Jack’s mind wandered again and he felt cocooned and safe, as if the chamber that had opened up and protected him from the crushing impact of the ice would be his ultimate salvation. Then reality kicked in and he felt a cold dread. Somehow the ice had cracked as the berg rolled and he had been given a reprieve, but it could only be temporary. As more water was displaced by his exhaust he could feel the slurry of brash around his lower body thicken, immobilising his legs. To his horror he realised he was being frozen alive all over again, only this time there would be no quick end, but a long, lingering agony half in and half out of the air pocket, as his breathing gas gradually expended and he suffocated in his own exhaust.

A noise crackled around his head and jerked him back to life. The intercom whined and then settled to the sound of grunting and straining. It seemed unbelievable, little short of a miracle. “Jack, can you hear me?”

“Costas.” Jack’s voice sounded peculiar, oddly distant to his own ears, and then he remembered the trimix contained helium. “Where the hell are you?”

“I can see you, but you can’t see me. Try to turn over. You have to get yourself out of the water, otherwise we’ve had it for good this time.”

Costas’ voice was a reassuring measure of reality, calm despite the desperate situation. Jack marshalled all of his energy and heaved himself up on his elbows. He could swivel his torso slightly to the right and his arms were free, but his feet and lower legs were nearly frozen into the ice. It was like fighting against clinging mud, and each time he pulled he only seemed to embed himself further.

“It’s no good,” he panted. “I can barely move my legs.”

“Can you reach your cylinder pack?”

“Just.”

“Okay. Pull out that axe and lay it on the ledge beside your head.”

Jack did as he was instructed, laboriously extracting the wooden haft of the axe hand over hand from where he had slid it behind his cylinder straps. He could scarcely register what he was holding, a Varangian battle-axe from a Viking longship, a discovery that now seemed pure fantasy. By the time he had finished withdrawing the axe the surface of the slurry had frozen solid around his waist, and the moisture in his exhaust had caused a sheen of ice to form over his visor.

“I can’t see any more,” he exclaimed, trying to remain rational, to stave off panic. “The pressure’s going to build up in here now that there’s no more water to displace, and the moisture from my exhaust is freezing my upper body too. This could be over quicker than I thought.”

“Lie back and push the shaft of the axe as far as you can above your head. The ice-borer’s embedded in the cavity, and I can see the filaments of the coil frozen in the ice below you. If we can reactivate the battery then we might be able to melt you out.”

Jack held the bit of the axe and pushed it as far as he could along a shelf of ice that angled slightly upwards above the slurry. At first he felt no resistance, but at the limit of his reach the base of the haft hit something solid.

“Okay. That’s it,” Costas said. “Now try about six inches to your left.”

Jack strained again and prodded the haft along. Suddenly he felt something depress, and a green aura became visible through the ice on his visor.

“Good. You’ve done it. The main element of the corer was crushed when things went haywire back there, but the coil is operated from a separate battery pack that looks intact. All we have to do now is wait.”

“How are you doing?” Jack spoke as he slumped back, forcing himself to think beyond his surroundings.

“Just great. Trapped in the Ice Age. Follow Jack Howard and see the world.”

“Seriously. I can’t see you.”

“At first I couldn’t work it out. If the berg had flipped we’d be hundreds of metres deep, crushed to oblivion. Then I saw the ice probe and realized. We’ve rolled a full three hundred and sixty degrees and come back upright again. Whatever force was behind this thing made the berg somersault right over on the threshold. My guess is it’s still stuck on the outer edge of the sill, but has slid down deeper than its original position. My depth gauge reads one hundred and twenty-three metres, just about the limit for our trimix gas. If the berg was floating out to sea it would have flipped again and we’d be way beyond that depth, gone for good. That could happen any time.”

“A reassuring thought.”

“Before we rolled. Did you see what I saw?”

“It was Halfdan. The guy whose runes are on the battle-axe. We were directly over the bier in the centre of the longship, where his body was meant to be burnt. We must be the only people alive to have seen a Viking warrior in the flesh. Fantastic.”

“Yeah, fantastic. It spooked me. Let’s hope we’re not joining him.”

“Got any plans?”

“Let’s do this step by step. The first thing is to get thawed out.”

In the lull that followed, Jack noticed the utter stillness of the berg, broken only by the noise of their breathing, in contrast to the deafening cacophony of a few minutes before as the ice sundered and cracked. Somehow the stillness accentuated the sepulchral quality of the chamber and brought home the full enormity of their situation. They were trapped deep inside an iceberg, hemmed in by a million tons of rock-hard ice, at the limit of their survivable depth and with every prospect of a fatal tumble into the abyss. Jack began to feel unnerved, and as he stared at the ice only inches from his head he began to feel the old claustrophobia nagging at the edges of his consciousness. Lurking beneath the surface was a fear that he would be gripped by panic, as had so nearly happened when Costas had kept him going in the tunnels of Atlantis six months before. He knew Costas’ banter had kept his mind focussed, that his friend knew him too well, and he forced himself to concentrate on little things, on the small steps that might eventually lead to their salvation.

“I’ve got movement,” Jack said. “I can move my feet.”

“Excellent. Try to swivel round in my direction.”

The sheen of ice on Jack’s visor was beginning to drip away, and he could now see the slurry more clearly. The coil of microfilaments from the probe was doing its work, and the surface was beginning to liquefy. He arched his back and flexed his legs, causing a stab of pain and a sudden spasm of shivering. For the first time he inspected the injury in his left thigh, the embedded spear of ice just visible through the rent in his E-suit. The ice had numbed most of the pain and staunched the bleeding, but even so the blood loss had left him dangerously vulnerable to the cold. He heaved himself sideways, pulling his legs out of the water and hauling himself as far as he could go up the shelf, then wiped his visor and looked into the jagged wall of ice that had lain behind him.

The sight that confronted him was surreal. He could see Costas, yet it was an image that defied sense. He seemed to be lying within easy reach, yet was separated by a wall of transparent ice. With each tiny movement Costas seemed to fragment into myriad shapes, refracted through numerous planes in the ice. Jack suddenly caught sight of Costas’ face, the yellow helmet at first appearing grotesquely elongated but then compressing to some semblance of normality.

“I’m about a metre from you,” Costas said. “When I recovered consciousness I was floating in a fissure. I tried to reach you, but this is how far I got. I’m as near as I can get to being frozen without actually being solid. It’s all meltwater ice, from that crevasse above the longship. It should be easier to hack through than glacier ice. How are you with an axe?”

Jack suddenly saw a ray of hope. “You know, it’s my main occupation during the off season when I disappear into the woods. When I tell everyone I’m writing. It makes me forget all this.”

“Good enough. Let’s see what you can do. If you can break through, then the water from your side should get in and do the trick. The coil won’t melt glacial ice, but it should keep this slush liquid. There’s about a six-inch air pocket around me from my exhaust.”

“Where does the rest go?”

“Fissures and cracks above me. This ice may look solid, but it’s really a mass of fallen slabs.”

Jack rolled over until he was lying face-down on the shelf. With his left hand he gripped the ledge to prevent himself from slipping into the slurry, and with his right hand he reached up and grasped the axe. He let himself go, sliding into the brash until he was kneeling on the bottom with the surface at waist level. He wrestled to remove his fins, drawing them up on their retaining straps behind his calves, then pulled the axe down with both hands and swivelled it so the bit was above him. Standing in the slurry, his tall frame bent low under the ceiling, he would have just enough room to wield the axe in short spans, though each heft would require extra effort as he struggled to maintain balance and momentum.

“Here goes.” He placed the axe blade on the ice just above water level in front of Costas’ face and took a short swing. The blade was dull but the metal still had the strength of a thousand years ago, and it was the force of impact rather than the cutting edge that mattered. As the bit struck it broke off a shard of ice and sent tiny fracture marks in a web from the point of impact, reducing his view of Costas to a meaningless mosaic. “I can just do it,” Jack panted. “Six inches less space and I wouldn’t have the momentum.”

Slowly, deliberately, he began to hack at the ice, each blow striking off another shard, and each swing sending a jolt of pain through his leg. With the additional strain of holding up the weight of his cylinder pack above water, the exertion soon started to tell, and he began to breathe his trimix at an alarming rate. He tried to ignore the digital readout inside his visor and focus on the task at hand. He was deploying a standard woodsman’s technique, cutting a wedge above and below his baseline. As each wedge deepened he struck off larger chunks from the space between, extending the hole until it was only inches from Costas and almost wide enough for him to get through.

As he lined up for the critical blow his legs suddenly buckled under him and he slipped back into the slurry, dropping the axe. He realised that he had not simply lost balance: he had been toppled by some greater force. He righted himself and saw the surface of the water shaking violently, and heard distant groans and cracks. Suddenly the water began to rise, and Jack saw a dark fissure opening in the ceiling of the chamber.

“The air pocket’s going,” he exclaimed. “It’s escaping upwards.” He heaved the axe out of the slurry and flung it against the cut one more time, but to no avail. “The hole’s already under water. I can’t get any momentum.”

He slid back against the back wall of the chamber, the axe hanging from his hand, and watched helplessly as the water level rose above his visor and reached the ceiling. Less than a minute after the crack had appeared, all that was left was the tumult of bubbles cascading upwards from his own exhaust, and that quickly dissipated through the crack after each exhalation. The temperature readout on his visor had dropped to -2 degrees Celsius, below the freezing point of the water. He realized with sickening certainty that the coil would never cope with the quantity of water now filling the chamber; only the lower portion around the filaments would remain liquid.

Brash began to form in front of his eyes. He felt the water stiffen around his arms and head. It was happening again, a hellish torment he was fated to endure repeatedly, a nightmare relived. He stared wide-eyed as the ice began to encapsulate him. He began hyperventilating, as if his body were willing him to suck away his last reserve of trimix and lapse into blackness, a merciful oblivion in the face of the lingering horror that lay ahead of him.

“Your oxygen! Cut your oxygen hose!”

The voice snapped him back into reality. He instantly realised what Costas meant. He dragged his left arm through the slurry and pulled out the knife he kept in a sheath on his chest, bringing the serrated edge up against the two hoses under his helmet. For an appalling moment he forgot which was trimix and which was oxygen, the narcotic effect of nitrogen at this pressure playing tricks on his mind. His head was nearly immobile and he was unable to see down to the hoses. He shut his eyes and resolutely grasped the left hose, bringing the blade to bear just under the point where it fed into his helmet.

“What’s left in your oxygen cylinder should fill the chamber long enough to clear the hole for another couple of blows,” Costas said. “But for God’s sake don’t breathe it. Eighty per cent oxygen at this depth would mean instant death.”

Jack slashed the hose and a huge geyser of bubbles erupted into the chamber. The water rapidly lowered to chest level and he heaved himself up again, the severed hose dancing and hissing in front of him. He pulled the axe out of the brash and aimed it at the hole. With all his strength he swung against the ice, causing a large chunk to break free. He could see Costas pushing with all his might against the remaining barrier. Jack frantically pulled the floating chunk of ice aside and aimed another blow. Just then the hissing of his oxygen hose faltered, and the water level began to rise again, inexorably. He had one last chance. He lined up above the fracture line where the chunk had broken off, then relaxed completely, his eyes glued on the point of impact. He swung the axe back and brought it forward with all his might, causing a spray of brash as the blade skimmed over the rising water and slammed into the ice. Then he slumped back and began to pant uncontrollably, sending geysers of bubbles out of his exhaust as the water rose and submerged him again.

The corner of a fin appeared out of the ice. Jack felt a nudge against his body. It had worked. Another chunk of ice floated past, and a large black form emerged beside him like an inquisitive seal. Costas’ eyes looked into Jack’s. “Am I glad to see you.”

“Thank God you lost weight,” Jack said weakly. “I didn’t book a double room.”

A spurt of red filled the water between them as Jack shifted in the confined space. “How’s the leg?” Costas asked.

“That’s the least of my worries.” Jack peered at the water level above them. “Your oxygen,” he said urgently. “Cut your hose and we’ll have a few more minutes.”

“No good,” Costas said. “My hose blew when the berg rolled. The shard of ice that cut it nearly decapitated me.” He struggled around until he was lying parallel to Jack, both of their heads now facing the ledge where the ice probe was embedded. The narrow confines of the chamber became even more apparent, barely large enough for the two of them festooned with all of their equipment. They were now completely submerged, slivers of ice from Jack’s efforts floating around them, and Jack could see the filaments from the coil tangled below. Costas leaned down to pull his fins up his calves and then hauled himself behind the probe. “It’s flashing amber,” he said. “The battery’s nearly dead. If we stick around here we’ll be on ice. Permanently.” He slid back down and struggled to remove something from the thigh pocket of his E-suit. “Here, hold on to this for me.”

Jack took it, then stared back at Costas. “C-4 explosive?”

“You got it. Always carry some in case of emergency.”

“You’re going to blow us up.”

“Beats the deep freeze.” Costas continued to delve in his pocket, then pulled out a miniature detonator transceiver. “I’m certain we’re inside the crevasse where Kangia and those Nazis saw the longship. The clear ice is meltwater that sealed up the crevasse. It’s weaker than the surrounding glacier ice, and fragmented when the berg shifted. We might be able to widen the crack. It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

“What’s our decompression status?”

“Not good. Our depth seems to be dropping. There must be an internal water level in the crevasse above us, below the level of the sea surrounding the berg. Somehow it’s filling up. At this rate we’ll be in the danger zone in less than five minutes.”

“That’s about how much trimix I’ve got left.”

“If we don’t freeze up first. With the coil dead the water’s already beginning to thicken. Time to get this show on the road.”

Jack shivered violently. The water was as cold as he had ever known, colder than the deepest ocean depths. There was another ominous creak in the ice, and the crack above them closed in perceptibly. Costas rolled over and looked up, panning his headlamp along the silvery shimmer of exhaust bubbles that lined the ceiling. “That’s not what I wanted to happen,” he said quietly. A brief high-pitched alarm sounded from the probe, and the amber light went dead. “Nor was that.” He rolled back and picked up the axe from the floor of the chamber, feeding it towards Jack. “You’ve got a longer reach than me. The crack’s widest above the probe. I need you to push the C-4 as high up as you can. It’s already armed.”

Jack held the brown packet in one hand and the haft of the axe in the other. Costas sank behind him and heaved up against his legs, forcing another pulse of blood from Jack’s thigh. Jack tried to ignore the pain and twisted his upper body so that his visor was up against the crack above the probe. With the rush of bubbles escaping through it he could only get a fleeting sense of its dimensions, but it was clearly a narrow chimney that extended high above them, a crack between the slabs of ice. He pushed the C-4 as far up as he could with his left arm, wedging it in the chimney. Then he pulled the axe up hand over hand and fed the wooden haft into the chimney, with Costas preventing him from sliding back. When he felt the haft meet resistance, he pushed up hard, dislodging the C-4 and thrusting it as high as he could into the chimney.

“Okay. That’s as far as I can go.”

Jack sank down beside Costas, and the two of them struggled against the freezing brash until they were as far away from the ice chimney as they could get, pressed against each other in the opposite corner of the chamber. Jack reversed the axe and fed it back under his straps, and both men reached down to slide their fins into place. Jack wrapped his arms tight around Costas, their faces pressed visor to visor. “Wherever we’re going this time, we’re going together.”

“Semper fidelis.”

Jack shook his head. “You never cease to amaze me. Latin too.”

Costas held up the transceiver between them. “Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

A violent tremor shook them, accompanied by a shrieking and tearing sound that set Jack’s teeth on edge. All around them the ice was a blur of vibration. The cacophony was rent by a deafening explosion and Jack felt his body pummelled as if by a thousand punches. He pressed his visor tight against Costas, protecting the vulnerable glass from the shards of ice that were flying around them. Almost simultaneously their headlamps burst and they were plunged into a bizarre, tremulous darkness, broken only by the blurry green of the digital readouts inside their helmets. Something huge thumped against Jack’s side and for an instant he felt he was about to be crushed, and then by a miracle it passed. He felt a rush of dizziness and realised they were tumbling, spinning round and round in a ferment of ice and water, utterly helpless as the crevasse rent asunder.

“We’re getting shallower!” Costas yelled. “For God’s sake don’t hold your breath. Your lungs would blow in seconds.”

Jack’s breathing began to tighten. In the swirling maelstrom there were no way-markers, no visual points of reference. He forced himself to concentrate on the digital readout inside his visor, his arms clinging tight to Costas and their legs intertwined. Jack could just make out a depth reading of ten metres, and they were rocketing upwards. The figures gave him something to grasp on to, and he was dimly aware that the danger of air embolism was compounded by the risk of the bends, of decompression sickness. They were coming up way too fast.

Suddenly they were on the surface. It was light again, a steely, crepuscular light, and Jack could see beyond Costas to an awesome world of blue. They were floating in a vast cauldron of ice, at least the length and breath of Seaquest II, with sheer white walls rising all around them. Jack felt dwarfed by the enormity of it. He arched his neck and looked at the source of light far above. It was a thin sliver of grey where the ice walls nearly joined, a first link to the world outside. The grey was streaked with black and light blue, and seemed to be rushing past at enormous speed.

“It must be one of those freak storms coming off the ice cap,” Costas said. “That’s what pushed the berg.”

“A piteraq.”

They clung to each other as they bobbed in the centre of the pool. Their decompression warning lights were flashing amber, indicating that they had pushed the envelope and were now in grave danger of the bends. Jack felt for any signs, a tingle in an elbow or a sudden surge of nausea, aware that the last six months away from diving might have reduced his resistance. He checked his trimix pressure gauge and saw the dial hovering at zero. “I’m out of air,” he said. “If there’s any more diving we’ll have to buddy-breathe.”

“Hook into me.”

Jack pulled the umbilical hose from the top of Costas’ cylinder pack and pressed the valve into an inlet under his helmet. With a sharp hiss his helmet filled up again with breathing gas, its makeup now close to atmospheric air as the computer adjusted the ratios to take account of their depth. Jack realised he had been running on empty, and he closed his eyes to concentrate on taking a few deep breaths.

“That should give us about ten minutes,” Costas said. “I’d prefer to spend it ten metres deep to increase the decompression margin, but we don’t have that luxury. We’ll just have to wing it.”

The movement in the water had died down dramatically, leaving the surface preternaturally calm after the tumult that had ejected them from the icy tomb far below. “The crevasse must have opened up when the berg moved, shattering all the meltwater ice inside it,” Costas said. “Then the walls closed in again as the berg encountered resistance, probably the seaward edge of the threshold.” He looked round again, the scene now eerily still. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Let’s keep together.”

As if on cue, the silence was rent by a shattering concussion, and ice and water disintegrated in another shuddering blur. Jack became aware of a curtain of ice falling around them, jagged spears that sliced into the water like shrapnel. He concentrated all of his energy on holding Costas tight, knowing that if the hose that was his sole remaining lifeline were to rip out he would drown. He flashed back to the body in the ice, to his hallucination, then woke to a worse reality. They were dropping with sickening speed, sliding down a whirlpool of grinding ice, as if they were being sucked back to the frozen warrior and the place that had nearly been their nemesis. The water was falling away so fast that they were dropping through air, suspended half in and half out of the water, tumbling weightlessly against the chunks of ice that were splintering around them. Costas pulled Jack closer, straining against the centripetal force of the whirlpool, and pressed his visor hard against Jack’s. “The water’s being sucked down as the crevasse opens,” he yelled. “Hold on tight. I might be able to reverse the flow.”

Suddenly the water billowed up around them and they were immersed deep within it. For a terrifying moment Jack felt the air crushed out of his lungs by some force that was working against the vortex, propelling them back upwards. Then they erupted out of the water, bouncing on a plume of brash that threw them high into the cleft above the cauldron. They crashed into a wall of ice and slid upwards, each scrabbling desperately with one free hand for some kind of hold. Then they began to slide back downwards, out of control, until they hit a ledge that held them precariously on the wall. As they crouched dripping together on the icy platform, the plume of brash and spray dropped back into the seething cauldron at the base of the crevasse far below them.

“What the hell was that?” Jack panted, peering down a sheer drop of at least thirty metres.

“The C-4,” Costas said exuberantly. “We were ejected from that chamber before I had a chance to blow it, but it came in useful after all.” He shoved the detonator transceiver into his thigh pocket. “Right. I’m cold and hungry. Let’s get out of here.”

“Better make it fast. Take a look at that.”

They peered down in horrified fascination at the ice chasm far below. It was beginning to narrow again, the walls compressing the slurry of ice and pushing it upwards. As the larger chunks were caught in the vise they exploded with a shattering resonance, sending lethal shards far up the crevasse. They knew that being caught in the maelstrom this time would mean instant death, their bodies shredded by the flying ice and then crushed as the crevasse caught them like a meat grinder. Relentlessly, terrifyingly, the gap was closing in on them, advancing like some living thing, its deadly maw spewing a geyser of splintering and shattering ice, moving with alarming speed up the cleft even in the few moments they had been watching.

“This is it,” Costas yelled above the din. “No second chance this time.” They swivelled on the ledge and faced upwards. The skylight at the top of the crevasse was about fifty metres away, rushing streaks of grey now clearly visible on a background of blue. Suddenly the clouds parted and a dark shape appeared, blotting out the cleft, a blinding spotlight aimed directly at them. Then it veered away violently, trailing something that streamed out behind and whipped over the crack.

“It’s the Lynx,” Costas shouted excitedly. “They’re trying to drop a winch.”

“I told them to stay away. They’re pushing their luck against that wind.”

“They could hardly do nothing.”

“There’s no way they’ll get that cable down here. They must be waiting, hoping we can get to the entrance of the crevasse.”

Jack glanced down. The gap was now terrifyingly close, no more than twenty metres below them, the shards of exploding ice almost reaching the ledge. He looked up again. The crevasse was glassy smooth, offering no handholds. The euphoria at seeing the helicopter suddenly turned to cold dread. It was another nightmare, a return to his brush with death years before in the flooded mine shaft, where the end of the tunnel had been in sight but no matter how frantically he tried to swim for it he seemed to stay the same distance away.

Jack suddenly felt as if he were being pressed into the wall. He looked up again, then it dawned on him. “The crevasse. Isn’t it supposed to be vertical?”

“Holy shit. The berg’s rolling!”

There was a huge lurch and everything went still. The cleft had seized up, no more than ten metres below them. Through the skylight they were looking directly at the promontory where they had visited the old Inuit the day before. Jack found himself thinking that it was going to be a perfect day, that the wind was leaving the land washed in sparkling light. Then he felt the dread again. They had to reach the crack or they would die. When the berg rolled again the skylight would drop underwater, taking them into the abyss as it toppled off the threshold, sealing their fates in an instant.

“The axe!” Costas shook him. “The axe!”

Jack snapped back into reality. With his left arm still around Costas, he reached back and drew the axe from its straps. His hand was sticky with blood where it had brushed his thigh and the axe nearly slipped away, saved only by Costas’ iron grip. They dangled the axe together down the slope, then flung it in a wide arc to lodge in the ice ahead of them.

“It’ll hold,” Jack panted. “Pull yourself up.” He tensed his body, his fins still planted on the ledge but his elbows and knees ready to find any undulation in the ice, anything that might stop him from sliding. They heaved up on the haft, then shook it frantically until it was loose. For a few seconds they would be totally without anchor, held only by the tension of their bodies against the ice. Costas looked Jack full in the eyes and nodded. Jack let the axe slide down again and heaved. It arched overhead, skimming the back of the crevasse, then slammed into the ice a metre and a half ahead of them. As Jack craned his head up to free the axe for another blow, he saw a black-clad diver dangling from a cable no more than a hundred metres beyond the berg. He realised that the noise he was hearing was the din from the Lynx’s twin turboshafts.

There was another lurch, and a rumble from the cleft behind them. The noise of the helicopter was drowned out by an immense creaking in the ice. The walls of the crevasse narrowed. The axe was poised but there was no more room to swing it. Another lurch brought up a surge of brash from the cleft, washing over them, then everything happened at once. The skylight was lost in a foment of water, a sucking whirlpool that rose up towards them, and suddenly they were sliding uncontrollably, plummeting towards the skylight as it angled into the abyss. Jack hit the incoming seawater with an immense crash, the axe trailing behind him, then was pulverised by the force of the water cascading down from the maw of the crevasse. The icy brash that had so nearly been their nemesis pushed them out of the berg, ejecting them in a frenzied tumble just as the walls of ice crushed together and sealed the crevasse for the last time.

It was not over yet. Jack saw a vast wall of sculpted white advancing on them, extending as far as he could see in every direction. Already the crevasse was far below, marked only by a trickle of bubbles rising up the side of the berg, framing the black immensity of the abyss. As the berg rolled, Jack had the illusion that he was rocketing upwards, yet his body told him exactly the opposite. “It’s pulling us down,” he yelled to Costas, his voice contorted. “Inflate your suit and swim for it!”

Jack pressed the inflator and began to fin hard, his left arm gripping Costas’ shoulder. His depth readout showed they were hardly moving at all. They were still in the grip of the berg, being sucked down. He looked up and saw the sun shimmering off the waves, tantalizingly close. He felt the cold again in the pit of his stomach. Having survived the iceberg, they were about to die within sight of the surface. This could not be happening. He began to hyperventilate, to outstrip the oxygen remaining in Costas’ cylinder. His breathing began to tighten.

“I’m ditching your tanks.” Costas was breathing heavily, a great plume of bubbles encircling his exhaust, and he finned furiously as he disconnected Jack’s redundant hoses and flipped the quick-release buckle on his cylinder packs, sending the oxygen rebreather and the console backpack with its empty trimix cylinders plummeting into the depths. “I’m doing the same to mine,” he panted. “We’ve only got about a minute’s air left anyway and it isn’t doing us any good. Get ready to disconnect your hose. Stop finning now and when I say so take five deep breaths.”

“I’m holding on to you,” Jack said, his breath coming in short gasps. “If you go down, I’m going with you.”

Costas disconnected his rebreather and it dropped out of sight. With his left hand he flipped the quick-release on his backpack and held it in place, and with his right hand he found the disconnect to the hose under his helmet. Already they were plummeting down, sucked deeper and deeper by the rolling iceberg, their chances receding with every metre they dropped into the abyss.

“Now!” Jack took five deep breaths, then yanked the umblical. Simultaneously Costas released his hose and backpack. With Jack’s left arm on Costas’ shoulder, they began to swim determinedly upwards, taking wide, hard strokes with their fins, Jack still clutching the axe in his right hand. For a few moments he felt fine, his bloodstream brimming with oxygen, and he remembered to breathe out as he ascended. Then the effort of their escape began to take its toll, and he felt the first niggle of discomfort. They were rising steadily, a metre every couple of seconds, but they were still more than twenty metres from the surface. Any letup in their finning and they would be dragged back down again. Jack started to suck on empty, his lungs instinctively heaving for more air, drawing the last dregs out of his helmet.

His legs, starved of oxygen, began to falter. He was beginning to black out, overwhelmed by exhaustion. He was not going to make it. He stopped clawing his way upwards, and in a last conscious act struggled to free himself from Costas’ grip, seeing his friend still going strong, desperate to give him some chance of reaching the surface alive.

Suddenly he felt an odd sensation, a jolting weightlessness. He had stopped finning but was still being impelled upwards. He was dimly aware that the berg had stopped moving. By instinct he found the dump valve to release air from his suit and stop himself from rocketing upwards. Then he was on the surface, blinded by the light. He unlocked his helmet and ripped it off, gasping over and over again in the cold fresh air, his entire being focussed on replenishing his life force. As soon as he could, he swivelled round and scanned the waves, shielding his eyes against the glare. After a few anxious seconds he caught sight of a tousled head bobbing in the waves about ten feet away.

“You okay?” he gasped.

“Well, at least that little swim solved our decompression issue.” Costas’ voice sounded strange after the intercom, adenoidal with the cold. He was facing away from Jack, seemingly oblivious to their surroundings, completely focussed on two gauges that he was holding out of the water. “But there’s a small discrepancy in the readouts. It’s incredibly annoying. I need to do a little tinkering.”

Jack managed a small smile. He leaned his head far back, letting the evening sunshine play on his face. He could hear the helicopter above him and heard the splash as the rescue diver dropped into the sea. He cracked open one eye and saw the glinting golden blade in the waves beside him, the prize he had refused to let go. Suddenly their extraordinary discovery in the berg came flooding back, and a burst of adrenaline rushed through him. He shut his eyes, his mind now coursing with excitement. A wave washed over him, a cleansing jolt of cold that left lines of salt water trickling over his lips. It tasted good.

THAT’S SOME ICE AXE YOU’VE GOT THERE.”

“Wait till you hear what else we found.”

James Macleod had just finished applying a compress to the gash in Jack’s leg. His E-suit was slick with fresh blood, but the compress staunched the bleeding. Jack leaned back against the bulkhead, his face streaked with fatigue, and adjusted his flight helmet and headset. Between talking he was breathing deeply on the oxygen regulator that had been passed to him as soon as he had been winched into the cargo bay of the Lynx.

“You don’t want to hear the odds Lanowski calculated against your survival.”

“No, I don’t.” Jack was utterly exhausted, but felt he had to keep talking to tell them what had happened.

“When the piteraq hit we were completely shut down. Inuva told us they could be bad, but I had no idea what we were up against. Couldn’t even get the chopper out of the hangar. It was terrifying, like banshees screaming above us.”

“We saw it from the crevasse.”

“When the berg rolled, all hell let loose. The displacement wave washed right up the shore and swept away the tent where we met Kangia. The local shaman was still there. As soon as we get you back on board Seaquest II the chopper’s out on a search, but it’s pretty hopeless.”

“Inuva?” Jack said.

“She’s okay. She was with Lanowski on board.”

Macleod broke off to help the crewman acting as loadmaster to haul another dripping form through the open cargo door. Seconds later Costas was strapped into the seat beside Jack, pulling on his flight helmet and sucking gratefully at the oxygen regulator that had been handed to him.

“You okay?” Jack asked.

Costas sucked a few more times and then lowered the regulator, giving Jack a doleful look.

“Oh. Let me guess.” Jack looked back with exaggerated sympathy. “Your ice probe.”

“Months of research and development,” Costas said sadly. “And that was the only prototype. I’ll have to build the next one entirely from scratch.”

“No hurry as far as I’m concerned,” Jack said. “I think I’ve just ticked diving inside icebergs off my list.” He turned back to Macleod. “What was your contingency plan?”

“When we saw that the berg had rolled three hundred and sixty degrees we thought there was a chance. Lanoswki remembered the old crevasse above the longship. It was all his idea, modelling the likely rupture line, even calculating the explosive charge we’d need to blow it open.”

“You’ve got to hand it to the guy,” Costas murmured.

“So that’s what Ben was doing,” Jack said.

Macleod nodded. “Ben volunteered to take the charge down. He tried half a dozen times, but he couldn’t get close enough to the crack. The wind was buffeting us and we had to fight to keep the chopper on station. Then he saw you inside the crevasse. He was trying to feed the cable in when the berg began to roll again.”

“You guys are heroes,” Costas said.

Macleod shook his head and smiled. “We’re just the shuttle service. I don’t know how you did it.”

At that moment the loadmaster hauled a third figure through the door and secured the winch hook to its davit. Ben ripped off his face mask and looked anxiously at Jack and Costas. He gave them a diver’s okay sign, and they responded in kind.

“Okay, Andy.” Macleod slapped the bulkhead behind the pilot’s seat. “We need to get out of here before that thing finishes its roll. We’re good to go.”

“Roger that.”

The others strapped themselves into the seats at the rear of the cargo bay. As the helicopter pitched forward and shuddered up to full power Costas jerked his hand to the axe lying across Jack’s legs. “By the way, thanks for saving me from the deep freeze.”

“I owed you. I seem to remember a little help a while ago inside a volcano.”

Costas looked warmly at his friend and nodded, his face suddenly lined with fatigue. Jack slumped back against the seat and breathed deeply from the regulator, feeling reinvigorated with every breath, knowing that the oxygen was cleansing his system of excess nitrogen. To his right he could see the immense form of the berg, seemingly as solid as a mountain, and to his left the sparkling shape of Seaquest II, far out in the bay. He was swept by the feeling of elation he had experienced upon surfacing. For months since their return from the Black Sea he had been nagged by a secret uncertainty, that the prize no longer justified the risk, that he had lost his edge. Now he knew he was back where he belonged. He shut his eyes and fell instantly into a deep and dreamless sleep.

“My apologies,” Lanowski said. “I didn’t count on a storm.”

“You gave us every warning,” Jack replied. “It was my call.”

Jack and Costas were sitting on the foredeck of Seaquest II, slumped against the port railing where the helicopter had winched them down with Macleod a few minutes before. The ship was maintaining position in Disko Bay about a mile west of the fjord entrance, and Jack could see the tip of the iceberg beyond the starboard railing opposite them. Even at this distance it was an awesome sight. He and Costas had been extraordinarily lucky that the berg had rolled a full 360 degrees, that the huge force of the storm had tumbled it back to its upright position and left it perched precariously on the outer rim of the threshold. The next time it rolled it would flip over and stay that way, crushing any remaining air pockets beneath hundreds of metres of freezing seawater.

Lanowski had been the first of the scientific team to reach them on the foredeck, joining the crew members who had guided down the helicopter winch and were now helping Jack and Costas to peel off their E-suits. They were quickly joined by Maria, whose look of relief turned to concern as she saw the blood on Jack’s thigh. The ship’s doctor was already on the scene, cutting away the bandage and spraying coagulant into the gash.

“It’s not as bad as it looks.” Jack winced as the medic applied a suture, then held up a bloody spear of ice. “Nature provided her own cold compress.”

“You were lucky,” the medic said. “It just missed the femoral artery.”

“It’s fantastic.” Lanowski was shaking his head and chuckling to himself, in a world of his own. “While you were away Inuva and I worked out where the 1930s expedition must have found the ship in the ice cap. Now I should be able to use my glacier-flow quotient to work out where the Vikings dragged the ship on to the ice for the funeral pyre. One of the tributary fjords to the north of Ilulissat, I’d say, where the ice cap is more accessible from the sea.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at Jack. “Having such a closely datable horizon inside that berg is the greatest discovery of the whole expedition. It should provide independent corroboration for my flow theory, the first time we’ll be sure of the rate of ice discharge over the last thousand years. Well worth your efforts. Congratulations!”

“We’ve just found a Viking longship, man,” Costas said in exasperation. “One of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time. A little more exciting than the rate of glacial ice flow.”

Lanowski looked at him with unseeing eyes, his mind already far away in a world of figures and equations. He pulled out a pocket calculator and began furiously tapping at the keys, occasionally looking up and muttering under his breath. Costas shook his head in disbelief as the ungainly figure shuffled off without another word towards the deckhouse computer room.

“Talk about a one-track mind.”

“But a brilliant one.” Jack grinned at the dripping form of his friend. “That’s why we’re a team. I couldn’t do all that math.”

Jeremy appeared beside Maria, and she nudged him forward in front of Jack.

“We’ve translated the runestone that Kangia gave you, the one the Germans found in the crevasse,” he said diffidently.

“Brilliant. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

“It’s west Norse, eleventh century, quite distinct from the runes used in England and Denmark at that time.”

“And?”

“His name was Halfdan.”

“We know. A veteran of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople.” Jack raised the object that had been resting on his knees, and Jeremy suddenly recognised it for what it was. He stared agape as Jack pointed to the runic inscription on the axe blade.

“Holy shit.” Jeremy suddenly forgot his restraint. “They’re identical to the Halfdan runes at Hagia Sofia in Istanbul.”

“He’s our man.”

“Tall guy, early middle age, long yellow hair and beard,” Costas interjected. “A little weatherworn and charred at the edges, but otherwise in pretty good shape for a guy who hasn’t moved for a thousand years. We’ve just met him, halfway to Valhalla.”

“Huh?”

Costas jerked his thumb towards the entrance of the fjord. “Inside the berg. He’s on ice. We were over the central burial chamber when it rolled. The funeral pyre must have been extinguished when the ship fell into the ice, and the flames only licked at the edges. My guess is that runestone was resting on his body.”

A crewman pushed past the others and handed Jack a piece of paper. He quickly read it and then stared into the distance, a smile flickering across his face. “I knew it!”

“What?” Costas asked.

“A hunch I had before our dive. A pretty wild hunch, so I didn’t share it. You remember the dendro date for the ship timbers, 1040 plus or minus ten years? For some reason all I could think about was Harald Hardrada’s escape from Constantinople. If the sagas are correct, it took place very close to that median date, in 1042.”

“And?”

“I asked the IMU lab to run a comparison between the timber fragments we got from the chain in Constantinople and the wood Macleod’s ice-corer brought up from the longship. The full checklist, species identification, tree-ring characteristics, fibre and cellulose specs.”

“Go on.”

“It’s not just the same species, Norwegian oak,” Jack said excitedly. “It’s incredible. It’s actually from the same tree. Planks cut radially from the same trunk.”

“Whoa. Steady on there.” Costas held one hand in front of him, trying to marshal his thoughts. “Let me get this straight. You’re suggesting that one of the ships Harald Hardrada used to escape from Constantinople with the princess and the treasure is the same ship we’ve just seen trapped in an iceberg off Greenland?”

Jack gave his friend an odd look and then started to nod.

“Of course.” Costas suddenly snapped his fingers and stared back at Jack. “The repair work on the hull.” He looked up at the others. “We found a section of planking which had been expertly replaced near the bow. It’s in the photographs. I assumed it was collision damage with ice or rock, but it’s exactly where the ship might have driven up against the chain across the harbour when they fled Constantinople.” He shook his head in disbelief and turned to Jack. “So if this is one of Harald’s ships, where’s the treasure?”

“They’re not exactly going to have put it in a funeral pyre,” Jack said. “And we don’t know the date when this happened. The Halfdan we saw was an older man, and he could have sailed here years after their Constantinople adventure, maybe seeking a new life for himself in the Greenland settlement. By then Harald would have been king of Norway and the treasure of his Varangian days secure in his stronghold at Trondheim.”

There was a percussive boom from the direction of the fjord, followed by an immense falling sound that reverberated across the still waters. Another giant slab of ice had calved off the iceberg, dropping out of sight into the depths and then emerging again like a surfacing whale to bob out into the bay.

“What about the longship?” Macleod jerked his head at the iceberg, a sense of urgency in his voice. “We haven’t got much time now. It’d be risky to go close again, but we could try another sonar scan.”

Jack lifted the axe from where it rested on his knees, twisting it until the sunlight sparkled off the gilding on the blade. He stared at it pensively for a moment and then looked at Maria, knowing they were both remembering their visit to the old Inuit the day before and her apprehension about Fenrir, the Norse wolf-god on the carved prow they now knew had been the spirit guardian of the longship.

“I took hundreds of pictures,” Jack replied. “Enough for a full photogrammetric reconstruction. There’s no way anyone’s going near that berg again. When we found Halfdan he was partway to Valhalla. I think we should let him finish his voyage.”

“What about the axe?”

Jack weighed the haft again in his hands. “I’ll look upon Mjøllnir as a loan,” he said. “It got Halfdan through all those wars alongside Harald Hardrada, and it’s got us through a few scrapes. It’s still got what the Vikings called battle-luck. Something tells me those old Norse gods are willing us on, and this is one of the best clues we’ve got. If Halfdan still had his treasured battle-axe from his days in Constantinople, then who knows what else the Vikings could have brought out here.”

“That reminds me.” Costas suddenly jerked upright and reached into the hip pocket of his E-suit. “I pulled this out of the ice just before things went haywire down there. I’d completely forgotten.” He extracted the object and they could see it was another weapon, a dagger the size of a small hunting knife with a gleaming steel blade and a decorative handle. As he held it up and the blade glinted, the crew members who had been milling on the deck converged around the group, and there was a collective gasp of amazement.

“Let me take a closer look at that.” Macleod said. “Something’s not right.”

As Costas passed it over they could see what had caught Macleod’s eye, and their astonishment turned to disbelief.

“A swastika,” one of the crew exclaimed.

Macleod turned the dagger over in his hands. “Just as I thought,” he murmured. “They did find the longship. Look at the pommel. A skull and crossbones, the death’s-head symbol. This is a Nazi dagger, a weapon carried only by a sworn member of the SS.”

There was a stunned silence and then the woman in the crew spoke again, quietly. “Could someone explain how a Nazi dagger got on a Viking longship inside an iceberg off Greenland?”

Macleod handed the dagger back to Costas and looked at Jack. “I think it’s time we told the crew the whole story.”

At that moment there was a sudden lurch in the deck, an unusual sensation in a ship with a state-of-the-art dynamic stabilizing system. The sea remained dead calm and covered with a steely grey mist after the storm. Then someone shouted from the starboard railing. “It’s the berg! She’s rolling!”

Everyone except Jack and Costas converged on the opposite railing to watch the mouth of the fjord. Even though it was more than a mile away, the spectacle was awesome, a breathtaking display of a force of nature no human agency could ever control. Through the mist they saw the huge front face of the berg drop off the underwater threshold and roll over the edge, the jagged eruptions of ice from the top of the glacier replaced by smooth undulations sculpted by the sea and streaked with black from the threshold. As the berg stabilised, Jack and Costas knew that the longship was now lost forever in the abyss, its fallen warrior destined to sail south along the old Viking sea route to the New World and find his eternal resting place as the berg melted far out in the Atlantic. It had nearly been their tomb too, and Jack found himself gripping the axe hard as he and Costas rested against the bulwark, suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion, and watched the berg float majestically towards the open sea.

Jack noticed Maria and Jeremy having a heated discussion, as if she were trying to persuade him of something, and then they detached themselves from the group beside the starboard railing and made their way back across the foredeck. Macleod joined them, and Jack peered up at Jeremy as they approached.

“You haven’t told us what the rest of the runestone says.”

“I was coming to that.” Jeremy pulled a palm computer out of his pocket, activated the screen and cleared his throat. “Prepare to be amazed.”

“Go on.”

“There are five lines of runes altogether, scratched into the quartz slate by one hand. As I said, they’re Norse and eleventh century, consistent with our warrior being the same Halfdan who scratched his name into Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.”

“Well, what does it say?”

Jeremy cleared his throat again. “I’ve had to add some connectives to make sense of it, but here’s the gist: Halfdan died here of wounds received in the battle against the King of England near Yorvik. Halfdan will fight again for Odin at Ragnarøk. Harald Sigurdsson his king made these runes the winter after the battle. The Wolf takes Halfdan to Valhalla. The Eagle sails west for Vinland.”

There was a stunned silence. “Harald Sigurdsson,” Jack gasped. “That’s Harald Hardrada.”

“The Mappa Mundi inscription from Hereford suggests he was out here,” Maria said. “Now we know for sure.”

Jeremy nodded. “The Wolf must be the name of the ship in the ice. The Eagle, the other ship, sailed on for Vinland. That’s the name of the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, the site at L’Ause aux Meadows, the farthest Viking outpost in the west and the only one known in North America.”

“Wait a minute.” Jack’s mind was suddenly reeling in astonishment. “Yorvik was the Viking name for the city of York, seven miles west of Stamford Bridge. The battle can only be Stamford Bridge in 1066, between King Harold Godwinson of England and King Harald Hardrada of Norway.”

“Correct.”

“But Harald Hardrada died at Stamford Bridge.”

“So the history books tell us,” Jeremy replied quietly. “But remember there’s no firsthand account of the battle. The events of that year were completely eclipsed by the Norman Conquest, and the Norman annals were hardly likely to extol an English victory. Most of what we know comes from a brief mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and from the Heimskringla, the semi-mythical history of the kings of Norway written in Iceland almost two centuries later. The copy of the Chronicle we found in the Hereford library mentions it, but only in a few lines.”

“Plenty of scope for omission, even a cover-up,” Costas murmured.

“My God.” Jack slumped back against the railing, his face dripping with seawater and sweat. “So Harald Hardrada survived Stamford Bridge. That changes everything. Somehow he and his remaining warriors made it out here, in the same two ships he had used to escape from Constantinople twenty years before. Remember the treasure of Michelgard, that incredible reference on the Hereford map? Harald must have had his treasure with him when he went to England, ready for a triumphal procession through York and London that never happened. Instead he sailed off after the defeat, taking it with him and his surviving followers far to the west, seeking a new land beyond the edge of the Viking world.” Jack lifted Halfdan’s axe in his hands, then gave a tired but jubilant smile. “I think we’ve just had another piece of battle-luck. I knew I was right to come out here.”

“You might like to have this then.” Costas had reached into the inner pocket of his E-suit lying nearby, and pulled out a small nodule of ice. “I was sure I’d dropped this when the berg rolled, so I didn’t mention it. I found it loose above the burial chamber, near that Nazi dagger.”

He handed the dripping object to Jack, who rolled it in his fingers and then passed it to Maria. A lustrous gold band protruded from one side of the ice, and Maria eyed it closely. “It’s a finger-ring, a Viking design,” she murmured. “Twisted gold, like a miniature arm-ring or neck-torque. But I’ve never seen one with a signet like this.” She clasped the ice in the warmth of her palm and then began rubbing it, gradually revealing the gold beneath. After a few moments she held it up to the sunlight. “I can see the surface of the signet. It’s got an impressed design. It’s…” Her voice trailed off, then she regained her composure. “Jack, tell me I’m not seeing things.”

She passed the ring over and Jack stared through the ice that still clung to the signet. The form beneath wavered, but the outline was unmistakable.

“The menorah.”

Jack stared at the seven-branched shape, his heart racing. Something amazing was happening. First the ship in the ice had proved to be Viking, the funerary vessel of a Varangian warrior. A man who would have served with Harald Hardrada, whose last journey to the far side of the world took place in one of the very vessels Hardrada had used to break free from Constantinople, a ship which had sailed across the Golden Horn on the very spot where Jack and Costas had stood aboard Sea Venture only days previously. And now this, an extraordinary link to the greatest lost treasure of antiquity, something Jack assumed had disappeared forever after Stamford Bridge.

“Don’t get your hopes up yet,” Costas said quietly. “This might not be all it seems.”

“What do you mean?”

Costas had sidled up alongside and was peering inside the ring, at the interior face of the signet. “As Maria said, tell me I’m not seeing things.”

Jack flipped the ring over and let out a gasp. It was a shape as old and familiar as the menorah, but this version of it could only be modern. They had been looking at it on the dagger only minutes before. It was a swastika.

Jack looked up slowly, his elation replaced by blank puzzlement. Maria glanced at him and then turned to Jeremy, her face set. “The time is now,” she said to the young man firmly. She squatted down between Jack and Costas while Jeremy remained standing, fidgeting slightly and looking paler than usual.

“Jack,” Maria said quietly, “about that Nazi expedition. There’s more you need to know. There are forces at play here far darker than we could ever have imagined. Jeremy’s got something to tell you.”

MARIA AND JEREMY LED JACK AND COSTAS through the imposing west entrance of Iona Abbey and down the worn flagstones of the nave. It was cool inside, a refreshing break from the tepid summer air outside, and the east window above the altar bathed the interior in a rich light. Standing off to one side was a tall, blond man gazing contemplatively at the window, his arms folded across his chest and one hand on his chin. When he saw Jack he seemed to know who he was and pointed towards the doorway opposite him. Jack nodded in acknowledgement and followed the others through a low stone entrance into the open courtyard of the cloister beyond.

“Father O’Connor is waiting for us,” Jeremy said. “He’s a long-standing member of the Iona community, and he has a room in the north range where he retreats for research and writing when he can get away from the Vatican.”

“Do we trust this guy?” Costas said, his voice sounding loud in the cloister. “I mean, he’s a bit of an unknown quantity.”

Maria stopped and turned sharply on him. “You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t trust him.”

“Okay.” Costas saw Jack gesturing at him to back off. “Sorry. It’s just a hell of a long way to come.”

“He insisted that we meet him here.” Maria’s voice was still curt, and she stopped and took out her cellphone. “I’ll join you. I’ve got to make an urgent call. Jeremy knows the way.”

That morning they had flown in the IMU Embraer from Greenland to Glasgow in Scotland, and then taken the waiting helicopter one hundred miles northwest to the island of Mull. It had only been twenty-four hours since Jack and Costas had escaped from the perils of the iceberg, and both men had slept soundly most of the way. On Mull they had joined the well-worn pilgrim route to the holy isle of Iona, taking the ferry across the narrow channel to Port Rònain, then walking up through the village to the abbey buildings in their setting of meadows with the sparkling blue sea beyond. As they gazed at the abbey Jeremy had explained that a building had stood on this spot since the time St. Columba arrived from Ireland almost fifteen hundred years before, had survived Viking raids, the Reformation and abandonment, and was now once again a thriving monastery and one of the holiest sites in the British Isles.

They passed along the sunlit alley of the cloister to another small door and ascended a wooden staircase to an attic corridor with windows overlooking the abbey. Jeremy knocked on a door and a moment later they heard the clatter of a bolt being unlatched and a chain withdrawn.

“Gentlemen. Welcome.” Father O’Connor ushered them in, then locked the door again behind him. He had discarded his Jesuit cassock in favour of the plain brown robe of a monk, and with his cropped white hair and the simple wooden cross hanging on his chest he seemed straight out of the Middle Ages. He looked pale and worn, older than when they had seen him a few days before in Cornwall. The room was small, piled high with books and papers, and they could see where O’Connor had been working at a laptop on a desk in the corner. They picked their way across the floor and sat down on wooden chairs arranged in a semi-circle in front of the desk. Above the small fireplace opposite, Jack recognized a scaled-down reproduction of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. Propped up beside it he could see a scanned copy of the exemplar for the map Jeremy and Maria had found in the sealed-off staircase in Hereford Cathedral, showing the extraordinary image of the New World in the lower left corner.

“Let’s get straight to the point,” O’Connor said. “It’s been a long journey.”

“Thank you,” Jack said. He opened the bag he had been carrying and took out the Nazi dagger and the gold ring with the menorah symbol, and placed them on the desk in front of O’Connor. The older man glanced at the objects and flinched slightly, averting his eyes. But then he looked up, staring at Jack.

“First let me apologize to Jeremy for the burden I placed on him. I took him into my confidence over a year ago, when he first came to study the early runic inscriptions on Iona. I had been seeking a younger colleague, a scholar who could carry on the flame. I swore him to secrecy, but told him when we met in Cornwall that the time might come when we would need to reveal everything to you. Even Maria knew nothing until yesterday.”

“Whatever it is, you could have told us when we discussed the Mappa Mundi and the menorah,” Jack said testily.

“I had to be sure of you. Believe me, I am on your side and we have a common enemy.”

“I’m not aware of any enemy.”

O’Connor shifted on his chair, stared distastefully at the objects in front of him and then leaned forward on his elbows. “We’ll begin with the Nazis. As you’ve probably guessed, you’re not the first ones to hunt for the menorah.”

“I never did buy the idea that we were,” Costas said cheerfully. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen. Someone, somewhere will have been searching for it. People never forget lost treasure.”

O’Connor smiled thinly and then turned grim. “It’s not as straightforward as it seems. And it’s not a game. The best way to show you what we’re up against is to tell you something about the characters on that Ahnenerbe expedition in 1938.”

“We know about Künzl, but we’re still trying to identify the one with the armband.” Relaxing slightly, Jack took out copies of the photographs Kangia had given him and tossed them on the desk.

“I can help here,” O’Connor said quietly. “Ever since the scandal over Pope Pius XII’s failure to condemn the Nazis during the Second World War, the Vatican has been particularly sensitive on this issue. I’ve recently taken over as Vatican spokesman on the Holocaust. Officially we liaise with Jewish groups and apprehend surviving war criminals. Unfortunately most of those who escaped punishment are now dead, but we still try to tie up loose ends for the sake of history.”

“I can’t imagine any of them making it past St. Peter,” Costas said grimly.

“God will make the final judgement,” O’Connor replied. “But most assuredly there is a special place in hell for those who murder children.”

There was a knock on the door, and O’Connor got up and stared through the spy hole before unlatching it and letting Maria in. She sat down in the empty chair beside Jack and they looked expectantly at her.

She was pale, distracted. “I was right,” she said. “I’ve just spoken to an old friend who works for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.” Jack suddenly remembered Maria’s Jewish background, her father’s Sephardic roots. “Our Nazi was a failed student at Heidelberg, with delusions of being a famous anthropologist. He joined the SS in 1933. After the Ahnenerbe expedition he volunteered for the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the death’s-head units. The ones who ran the concentration camps. His name was Andrius Reksnys.”

“Not German?” Jack asked.

“Lithuanian,” she replied.

“There were plenty outside the Fatherland willing to heed Himmler’s call,” O’Connor said. Maria’s cellphone chirped, and she looked apologetically at them and quickly slipped out of the door. O’Connor tapped his laptop and clicked through a series of websites. “I know this man,” he said quietly. “Here he is.”

He swivelled the screen so they could see and read from a scanned document, translating from German.

The Chief of the Security Police and the Security Service, Berlin, 5 November 1941

55 copies

(51st copy)

OPERATIONAL SITUATION REPORT USSR NO. 129a

Einsatzgruppe D

Location: Nikolayev, Ukraine

Addendum to Report No. 129 concerning the activity of the Einsatzkommandos in freeing places of Jews and finishing off partisan groups. SS-Sturmbannführer Andrius Reksnys personally executed 341 Jews. Revised total for the last two weeks: 32,108.

“Einsatzgruppen.” O’Connor forced out the word with revulsion. “Himmler’s mobile death squads. Responsible for murdering over a million Soviet Jews, among others.”

“How did this monster escape prosecution?” Jack asked.

“Usual story.” There was an edge of anger to O’Connor’s voice. “Shockingly few of the Einsatzkommandos were ever brought to justice. In the final Russian onslaught in 1945, Reksnys disguised himself as a Wehrmacht private and fled west, to surrender to the British. There were suspicions during his interrogation but nothing concrete. On his release in 1947, now named Schmidt, he recovered his son from an orphanage and went to Australia. Together they made a fortune mining opals near Darwin. Then in the mid-60s he sold his operation without warning and disappeared.”

“And the son?” Jack said. “Surely he was too young to have been in the war.”

“Pieter Reksnys was six years old in 1941,” O’Connor replied. “But there’s an eyewitness account from a Jewish survivor at the Einsatzgruppen trial, at Nuremberg in 1947, that spoke of a boy in Hitler Youth uniform accompanying Sturmbannführer Reksnys in his work. It’s a chilling account, one of the worst of the trial. Apparently the boy loaded his father’s Luger between each batch of executions, even carried out some himself. It was this account that eventually made the connection when Interpol became involved in the 1990s, and led to Andrius and Pieter Reksnys being tracked down to Mexico, where the son ran a drugs and antiquities cartel. He’s now in his early seventies, and is still there.”

“Why so long?” Costas said incredulously. “Why did it take so long to identify them?”

“Contrary to the Hollywood version, chasing down Nazi war criminals was never a priority in the West after the late 1940s,” O’Connor replied. “The main intelligence agencies—the CIA, the British SIS—were completely wrapped up in Cold War espionage. They knew all about Eichmann and Mengele and the other Nazis who had escaped to South and Central America, but few thought they posed a threat. Only the Israelis put serious efforts to bringing any of them to justice.”

“And now we reap the rewards,” Costas muttered.

“Not entirely.” O’Connor opened a drawer and placed a plastic sleeve with a photograph on the table. “You probably won’t remember this. A footnote in the newspapers about eight years ago, but actually the highest-profile Nazi death since Eichmann.”

The picture was a shocking image of a dead man lying on his back in a pool of blood, his eyes and mouth wide open and his face contorted with pain. He was an old man, wearing a dark suit, with his right arm flung over his front; visible through the smear of blood was a red armband with a black swastika.

“He wore that armband in the privacy of his own home,” O’Connor said. “An unreconstructed Nazi to the end. In case you haven’t guessed, that’s Andrius Reksnys. He was shot in the stomach to ensure a slow death, to give him time to be really frightened of where he was going next.”

“Mossad?” Costas asked.

“There is liaison with the Israelis,” O’Connor replied quietly. “But this was an independent operation.”

“What are you saying?”

O’Connor’s face was blank. He spoke coldly. “Andrius Reksnys was a henchman of the devil. All the efforts of international law had failed to bring him to account. He deserved to face the judgement of humanity, as well as God.”

“Are you saying the Vatican runs a hit squad?” Costas said incredulously.

“The Holy See is not just a spiritual beacon,” O’Connor said. “For centuries our survival has depended on strength in the world of men, on the power to persuade the unwilling to submit to God. Look at my own order, the Jesuits. Or the Crusades. Or the Inquisition. For centuries the Vatican has overseen the most successful covert intelligence network in the world, and has never shrunk from using it.”

“The Crusades were hardly a glorious episode, even if the intention was righteous to begin with,” Costas muttered. “I can’t imagine the sack of Constantinople was quite what the Pope had in mind.”

“You’d be surprised,” O’Connor said. “The papacy has always had to resist being drawn too far into the secular world, losing sight of the spiritual plane that bonds together all Christians. By the time of the Fourth Crusade the Vatican had developed a real problem with the Eastern Church, schismatics whom they regarded as heretics. It became a feud, and like all feuds led the antagonists to lose reason. Some apologists for the sack of Constantinople even twisted it into God’s actual purpose for the Crusade, punishment for deviating from the true path.”

“The feeling was reciprocated,” Jeremy added. “The Byzantine eyewitness Niketas Choniates called the Crusaders the forerunners of Antichrist, chief agents of his anticipated ungodly deeds.”

“The Holy See has always faced temptation from the dark side,” O’Connor continued. “Those who struggle against the devil can so easily end up doing the devil’s work. The Crusades were the ultimate challenge of the Middle Ages, and we did not always overcome. Monstrous tendencies have exploded into history in our moments of weakness. There are those among us who feel we owe a debt for failing to stem the greatest evil of all, the Nazi Holocaust.”

“So Reksys’ death has nothing to do with the menorah,” Jack said.

O’Connor paused, then stood. “I fear I may have misled you. His death has everything to do with the menorah. Please bear with me.”

There was another knock at the door, and O’Connor ushered Maria back in. She sat down, fingering her cellphone. “I’ve got news from Hereford,” she said, looking serious. “Fantastic news. My team from the Oxford Institute has finished excavating the manuscripts from the sealed-up stairway. It’s amazing, the greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts ever discovered. It’s like finding the Roman library in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and it’s going to be just as much work putting the pieces all together again.” She glanced at Jeremy, who was leaning forward in rapt attention. “Unless you’re in a hurry to return to the States, there’s going to be a full-time job looking after all this.”

“Yes, please,” Jeremy said.

“So why the glum face?” Costas said.

“It’s what else they found.” Maria suddenly sounded tense. “Right at the bottom of the stairwell, buried under all the paper and vellum. A skeleton of a man, a tall man, dressed in a monk’s cassock. Hundreds of years old, medieval. His limbs were askew as if he’d been thrown there. And the back of his skull was shattered.”

There was a stunned silence, and O’Connor paced towards the reproduction of the Mappa Mundi on his wall before turning to face them. “It is as I suspected. In the spring of 1299, Richard of Holdingham, mapmaker, came to this very place, to the isle of Iona. He was accompanying his ailing master, Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, on his final journey. Afterwards Richard went south to Hereford, to oversee the completion of the map he had started fifteen years before. There were errors in the inscriptions he wanted to correct. He had left an exemplar, a sketch for the Hereford monks to work from, and the illuminator had not been very literate. And now we know from his own personal exemplar, the one Jeremy and Maria found, that he wanted to add more, that he had a secret addition he wanted to make in the left-hand corner of the map, where the monks later added the inscription naming him as mapmaker.” O’Connor stopped in front of the fireplace, deep in thought. “We know he spent his final night at Bishop Swinfield’s palace at Bromyard and that he walked the final road to Hereford in the guise of a pilgrim. After that he vanished from history. The corrections were never made. He was never heard of again.”

“You think he was murdered?” Maria said shakily.

“I have no doubt of it.”

“I felt so close to him,” Maria whispered, her voice shaking with emotion and her hands gripping her chair. “I’ve studied him all my life, and I’ve never felt as close to him as I did that evening in the cathedral. It was almost like he was there.”

“A murder?” Costas looked dumbfounded. “And what was this guy doing on Iona? Can someone tell me what’s going on here?”

“Yes,” said O’Connor, pulling open a drawer. “Listen to me.”

A few minutes later O’Connor sat back in his chair and let the others study the maps he had just been showing them. Rolled out over the desk was a large-scale map of northern Britain, and beside it he had placed a plan of the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. On the large map he had traced a line from the Yorkshire coast near Stamford Bridge up to the northern tip of Scotland and down the west coast to the island of Mull.

“So Harald Hardrada came here to Iona after the battle.” Jack’s mind was reeling as he struggled to comprehend what O’Connor had just been telling them. He lowered himself back into his chair, and the others followed suit.

“He must have been in a hell of a state,” Costas said. “Bad enough for the English soldiers who fought him to assume he was dead on the battlefield.”

“It was a miracle he survived the journey,” O’Connor replied. “He was well looked after. There were about thirty of his warriors altogether, almost all of them grievously wounded, many former Varangian Guards. They were rowed in the two longships by loyal retainers. Some died on the way, some here on Iona.”

The pieces were beginning to fall together in Jack’s mind. “When Harald finally left Iona to sail west, there was a contingent left behind, loyal followers to await the return of their king.”

O’Connor looked at him shrewdly and nodded. “They called themselves a félag,” he said. “An ancient Norse term for a fellowship, a secret society.”

“And who were the félag?” Jack asked.

“At first they were a few of Harald’s companions, wounded survivors of Stamford Bridge who came with him to the holy isle but elected to stay behind when their king sailed west. They were younger men, warriors Harald had nurtured since his Varangian days, men who still had ambition and fire within them to carry on the cause. They may have included several of Harald’s own sons. Quickly they accrued others around them, never more than twenty in number. Their sworn intent was to keep the flame burning for the return of their king, to do all in their power to ensure that a true Viking once again ruled in England.”

“Not very realistic after 1066,” Jack said.

“They hated the Normans and their French Plantagenet successors. Within a few generations the cause of the félag had become the cause of the English. Remember, there was plenty of Viking blood already in England, among those who called themselves Anglo-Saxon. The Viking king Cnut had ruled England in the time of Harald’s youth, and there were huge swathes of the country where Viking raids had led to settlement and intermarriage: in East Anglia, in Northumbria, up here in the western isles. So it was natural that the English, once the enemy of Harald’s Vikings at Stamford Bridge, should unite with them in common cause against the Normans.”

“They can’t realistically have expected Harald’s return.”

O’Connor shook his head. “It became a mystical underpinning, a binding force that made the félag one of the most successful secret societies of the Middle Ages. Those few original companions had sworn secrecy to their king, that they would never reveal his survival or his passage west, for fear that the Normans would try to follow or take reprisals. After a few generations, when the return of the king in this life became impossible, they began to look forward to joining Harald at the great Battle of Ragnarøk, the final showdown in Norse mythology between good and evil. They would once again stand shoulder to shoulder with their liege, wielding battle-axes alongside him, vanquishing their foes and spreading fear as they had done in the glory days of the Varangians. Their sacred mantra, the oath that bound them in fellowship, became hann til ragnarøks, Old Norse for ‘until Ragnarøk,’ until we meet at the end of time.”

“So the name Harald Hardrada passed into history.”

“Not quite.” O’Connor reached out to his bookcase and handed a volume over to Jack. “Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, History of the King of England. A medieval bestseller, mostly fictional.”

“And?”

“The book responsible for the romantic legend of King Arthur.”

“Good God,” Jack murmured. “Of course. The once and future king.”

“Geoffrey was one of the félag, a couple of generations after Harald had gone. They were sworn never to mention the name of their king, but by the middle of the twelfth century the félag had begun to make inroads into English society. In the face of Norman oppression it became expedient to spread the fantasy of an ancient British king, a heroic leader who would one day return to free his people. Peel off the romantic fiction and you’ve got some hard facts.”

“For King Arthur, read Harald Hardrada,” Jack murmured. “For the Knights of the Round Table, read the Varangian Guard.”

“It’s what you said about Atlantis,” Costas added. “Behind every myth there’s some reality.”

“Yes, but people had been debating the Atlantis myth for ages,” Jack replied. “This one’s a bolt from the blue.” He turned to O’Connor. “So the félag wasn’t all just mystical?”

“By no means. By espousing the English cause they easily gained adherents, and as the generations passed the félag came to represent the great and the good among those who claimed Anglo-Saxon and Viking roots. They had little hope of infiltrating the Norman aristocracy, so by the time the last of the original Varangians had died, most of the félag were churchmen, pagans in disguise. The Church was the one area where Englishmen of Anglo-Saxon and Viking blood could still wield power, and the félag used it to their utmost advantage. By the end of the twelfth century their influence reached as far as Rome, and the membership included churchmen in Europe with English connections. Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham’s master and one of the senior clergymen in Italy, was the bastard child of an English mother who claimed descent from King Cnut. On several occasions there were even members among the College of Cardinals in the Vatican.”

“So Richard of Holdingham was one of the félag,” Maria said, her voice subdued.

“He was the last of the true félag, of the continuous line from Hardrada.”

“True félag?”

O’Connor paused, clearly troubled. “Early on there was a schism. You can compare it to the struggle in the Church we’ve just been talking about, against the temptation of the devil. We don’t know when it happened or who it was, but it was someone who had seen the menorah with his own eyes, one of the original companions who had chosen to stay behind. A Judas in the midst of the félag. The menorah had already been a secret symbol of kingship to Harald himself, worth far more to his prestige than its weight in gold, and after his departure it became elevated even further as a symbol of the félag, another part of the ritual that bound them together. But where some saw sacred cause, others saw gold. It attracted avarice, greed.”

“Like the Holy Grail,” Costas suggested. “To some a mystical quest, an allegory for some great revelation about Christianity. To others a golden cup.”

“Exactly. To those who could not resist, the search for Harald’s treasure became paramount, an obsession. Secretly they set up their own fellowship, their own félag, with the sole intent of finding the menorah. Those who remained true sensed the malignant force in their midst. Precious knowledge of Harald’s voyage had returned from over the western ocean, knowledge they were able to conceal from those who would use it with ill intent. The knowledge was only ever entrusted to one man, who would pass it on to the next appointed man, master to apprentice, as long as the line could be sustained.”

“I’m beginning to understand,” Jack said slowly. “Jacobus de Voragine, Richard of Holdingham.”

O’Connor nodded. “They were the last. Somehow the line had survived for over a hundred years following its greatest crisis, in 1170. In that year Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by followers of King Henry II in his own cathedral. Becket’s ascendancy had been the time of greatest power for the true félag, and his death was the beginning of the end.”

“Thomas Becket was a member of the félag?” Jack exclaimed in astonishment.

“And the holder of the knowledge,” O’Connor said. “The knights who hacked him down were not only seeking vengeance for Henry II.”

“Did they get what they wanted?”

“He refused to reveal any secrets, and in their rage they murdered him. They were reviled in England and joined the Third Crusade, ostensibly to seek absolution for their crime. They became known as the Knights of the Blooded Hand, for all these men had scars across their palms where they had cut themselves to form a blood pact. Their quest had gained its own mystique, its own rituals, though their allegiance to the cause of Harald Hadrada was a sham. They began to seek the other Jewish treasure, the treasure that Harald had left behind when he escaped from Byzantium with his Varangian companions. The golden table from the Jewish Temple, the Table of the Shewbread.”

“But that was in Constantinople.”

O’Connor nodded. “The knights were all butchered before they could get there, by Saladin and his Muslim warriors before the walls of Jerusalem. But another one did get to Constantinople, a generation later, in 1204.”

“That’s the date of the Fourth Crusade,” Costas said. “What we’ve been looking for in the Golden Horn. The chain and everything.”

It was suddenly cold in the cell-like room, a chill breeze seeping through a crack in the window. Jack’s mind was racing. “Hang on. The sack of Constantinople. That was Baldwin of Flanders. Are you saying…”

“He was the one. As a young man Baldwin had been to Rome and had seen the Arch of Titus in the Forum. The arch had become a place of pilgrimage for the félag, a sacred shrine. Richard of Holdingham undoubtedly went there. They not only saw the image of the menorah, but also the other treasures being carried by the Roman soldiers. They knew what the golden table looked like. Baldwin didn’t divert the Crusade to Constantinople by accident, just to do the Venetians’ dirty work. But others, those of the true félag, knew Baldwin’s intent, and got there in secret before him. There were still Varangians in the imperial guard at Constantinople, men for whom the name of Hardrada was hallowed, a legend from the glory days. They were persuaded to take the remaining treasure and sink it at a secret location in the harbour before the Crusaders arrived. All of the Varangians died in the siege, and the location was lost.”

“Eureka,” Costas murmured. “Not bad for us. Maybe Maurice Heibermeyer’s got something to look forward to in the Golden Horn after all.”

“By the time of the Fourth Crusade, the schism in the félag had turned into an all-out blood feud,” O’Connor continued. “Retribution was sought for the murder of Thomas Becket, and the cycle began. Even those who still held the cause true lost sight of their nobility, and lived in fear of their lives. Like many secret societies they turned in on themselves, began to self-destruct. Richard of Holdingham must have known he was a marked man once he returned from Iona, once he had torched his master’s body in the longboat in the hallowed félag ritual, sending him off to Valhalla at the very spot where their king had set sail. Their enemies knew that Jacobus must have passed on the knowledge to Richard before he died. There was no apprentice for Richard. His last act was to have been his record on the Mappa Mundi, his assignation of their secret to the future, to be discovered and deciphered by someone when the darkness had passed. And with the murder of Richard the line came to an end.”

“Do you think he relented in his final moments, when he faced death in the Chained Library?” Jack asked.

Maria looked at him, her face full of emotion. “He had the spirit of Thomas Becket beside him. He must have known he was going to die whatever he did. I believe he was strong to the end. Fortunately his attacker must have failed to recognise the exemplar of the map for what it was, or maybe Richard had time to conceal it in the library in the moments before he was confronted.”

“He could never have guessed it would be more than seven hundred years,” Jack murmured.

“And I fear the darkness is still with us,” O’Connor said.

“Fine.” Costas was fingering the ring, and held it up between them with the symbol of the menorah clearly visible. He pointed with his other hand at the swastika on the dagger. “And now to the really big question. How do we get from the medieval murder mystery to these bad guys in the twenty-first century?”

JACK SAT ENRAPTURED IN THE BOOK-LINED ROOM OF the old abbey, amazed at what he was hearing. Thoughts crowded in on his mind, and he struggled to separate them out. He had known they were on the trail of Hardrada since the revelation of the map, that an extraordinary thread tied their discovery in the Golden Horn of Istanbul with the longship in the ice off Greenland, but he could never have guessed that the holy isle of Iona was another link in the chain. And now O’Connor was telling another story, one which moved beyond the thrill of discovery to a world of darkness and danger.

“With the end of the Crusades and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, any hope of finding the remaining treasure in Constantinople seemed lost,” O’Connor continued. “To the west, all contact with Greenland was severed, and the promised land discovered by the Vikings was forgotten. By the time of the European voyages of discovery in the late fifteenth century, the last of the Knights of the Blooded Hand was long dead. Yet the myth endured, passed from father to son in the greatest of secrecy, by descendants of the félag across Europe and eventually in America. By the nineteenth century, all who received the story thought it fantasy, no more historical than the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table, and held on to their pledge only to sustain a romantic legend. Then it somehow reached the ears of a mad Austrian inventor obsessed with World Ice Theory.”

“We’ve heard about him,” Costas broke in. “The reason why the Nazis went to Greenland.”

“So this character re-founded the félag?” Jack said.

“One of his collaborators, a Lithuanian entrepreneur named Piotr Reksnys. Father of Andrius. A nasty piece of work.”

Costas grimaced. “It runs in the family.”

“The timing was perfect,” O’Connor went on. “The first decades of the twentieth century saw a resurgence of interest in the Vikings and Nordic heritage in Germany and across northern Europe. After the insanity of the First World War, it became a movement to bolster the idea of racial supremacy among a people who had lost their way. Secret societies thrived, and began to attract the thugs and fantasists who dreamed of a new Reich in Europe. They led to the ugliest society of all, Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, the SS, complete with fabricated Norse ancestry and rituals. The idea of a reconstituted félag fitted this baleful world perfectly, only unlike these other organisations the félag had some historical resonance.”

“And a different goal,” Jack said.

“The menorah,” O’Connor said. “They had all the trappings of a supremacist society, but that was just for show. They were obsessed with finding the menorah.”

Costas picked up the ring. “So what about this?”

O’Connor waved his hand dismissively. “A sham. Reksnys made out that these rings were some ancient inheritance, forged from the gold in Harald’s treasure, but they were not. They’re typical fabrications of the period. Reksnys knew the Viking kings had been ring-givers, bequeathing gold and silver neck-rings and arm-rings to their faithful followers. Like the Nazis he was obsessed with the operas of Wagner, with the Ring Cycle, the Nibelungenlied, the legend of Ragnarøk and the fall of the Norse gods. Reksnys revived the mantra of the old fellowship, hann til ragnarøks. They were fost-brœdralag, sworn brothers, and they called themselves thole-companions, the old Viking name for oarsmen. There were to be twelve of them, and he even refurbished a castle in Norway and persuaded his initiates that it had been an ancient meeting place of the félag, complete with fabricated Viking armour and axes, supposedly left by their Varangian precursors. He even reconstituted the most extreme form of punishment used by the Norse, reserving it for members of the félag who had strayed from their oath of loyalty.”

Maria looked aghast. “You don’t mean the blood eagle?”

O’Connor nodded. “Harald’s ship was the Eagle. The guardian of the félag was the great eagle giant Hræsvdg. The blood eagle was to be performed on his behalf, like a sacrificial rite.”

“It was the Norse equivalent of hanging, drawing and quartering,” Jeremy said. “Only without the hanging and quartering.”

“The outline of an eagle was carved on the back of the victim, while he was still alive,” Maria said quietly. “Then they cut away the ribs and ripped out the lungs.”

“God almighty.” Even Costas was at a loss for words.

“They haven’t used it yet on one of their own,” O’Connor said. “But at the Einsatzgruppen trial one of the Jewish survivors spoke of a rumour that an SS officer had carried out something like this on a group of prisoners, using his ceremonial dagger.” O’Connor looked at the object on his desk with disgust. “Even among the horrors of the Holocaust it was too much to believe, and there was nobody left alive to confirm it. But it would have been in Andrius Reksnys’ area of operations.”

“I’m really beginning to love this guy,” Costas murmured.

“And there was one other feature, something that marked the félag out wherever they went.” O’Connor paused. “They slashed their hands across the palm, a sign of blood fealty. They believed they were the Knights of the Blooded Hand, born again.”

“The SS, the Ahnenerbe, the search for lost Aryan civilizations, for Atlantis,” Jack murmured. “It was all a perfect vehicle for the félag, a cover to reach their goal.”

O’Connor nodded. “Andrius Reksnys, the son, was a fanatical Nazi. The picture the old Inuit presented of him is typical. A real sadist and bully. But he was an even more fanatical member of the félag, steeped in the obsession since childhood.”

“Why?” said Jack.

“Because it wasn’t just mystical. There was a goal, a quest. They worked out that Harald Hardrada must have headed for Greenland. They studied the Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga, which show that the nordrseta, the northern parts beginning around Disko Bay, would have been the staging post for voyages farther west. When they heard that the explorer Knud Rasmussen was planning an expedition to the Greenland ice cap at Ilulissat, they leapt on the chance. By then Himmler had become obsessed with World Ice Theory and a lost polar civilization, and there was no problem authorising an SS Ahnenerbe team to attach themselves to Rasmussen’s expedition.”

“And Rolf Künzl? How does he fit in?”

“Totally innocent of the goals of the félag. He was the one who mapped out the voyage described in the sagas. He was the world expert on the Vikings in the West, the perfect companion for Reksnys. They used him. And when they knew he had found some clue in the ice, something he then concealed, he was doomed.”

“The runestone in the longship,” Costas said.

O’Connor nodded again. “Künzl was quick-witted enough to know he had found something of momentous significance, and the fact that Reksnys was so desperate to get his hands on it was enough for him. Künzl loathed Reksnys and the Nazis with equal fervour. So he decided to pass the runestone to the old Inuit for safekeeping. Künzl had known nothing about the félag, but had begun to guess that he was dealing with more than just Nazi lunacy. He and Reksnys had fought in that crevasse, and from then on he must have known it was a blood feud, a duel to the death. That was always the weakness of the old félag. The murders of Thomas Becket and Richard of Holdingham meant that their secrets went with them to the grave. In the thirst for vengeance the killers lost sight of their goal. After the war began, Künzl was safe as long as he was fighting with the Afrika Korps, but when he was arrested with the von Stauffenberg conspirators, Andrius Reksnys finally had his chance. He used his considerable expertise to try to extract what he could from Künzl in the Gestapo torture chambers. He failed, and in his rage he let Künzl be executed along with the others. He must have assumed that Künzl, the great scholar, would have left some written record, but he discovered that Künzl had destroyed all of his personal papers and that all records of the expedition had disappeared from the Ahnenerbe headquarters early on in the war.”

“One question,” Maria said quietly. “The menorah would have meant everything to the Nazis. The ultimate symbol of domination over a race they were determined to destroy. They would have wielded it as the Romans had done in their triumph over the Jews two thousand years ago. What would Reksnys have done if he had found the menorah?”

O’Connor got up again and gazed pensively at the map. “The search for the menorah was kept secret, even from Himmler. If Himmler had found out anything about the menorah and the félag, that the search was being concealed from him, then Reksnys would probably have suffered the same fate as Künzl. To answer your question we need to move to the present day. We’re not dealing with neo-Nazis here. Nothing that banal. The félag is still with us, as strong as it ever was. And the menorah has even more potency today than it did in the dark days of the 1940s. They could hold the world to ransom for it. The Catholic Church, the Jewish state, the Arab states. Extremist groups of all persuasions.”

“Auction it to the highest bidder,” Costas murmured.

“So it’s really about greed, not ideology,” Maria said.

“That was what drove the schism in the félag almost a thousand years ago,” O’Connor replied grimly. “Greed and power.”

“So how do you know all this?” Costas blurted out. “I mean, if it’s all so secret, how does a Jesuit historian in the Vatican get access to this kind of information?”

“That was to be my last revelation.” O’Connor took a deep breath, pulled up the right sleeve of his cassock and held his hand towards them, palm outwards. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. Diagonally across the middle ran a jagged white scar.

“The blooded hand,” Maria whispered. “I thought that was just an old injury.”

“You can relax.” O’Connor let his sleeve down and slumped into his chair. “I am no longer one of them. My grandfather was an American inventor who was part of the World Ice Theory circle, no less eccentric than its founder but probably slightly less mad.”

“My God,” Maria exclaimed. “You never told me about this. I thought your family were all academics.”

“It was a strange period,” O’Connor said quietly, gazing at the floor. “The world started to go insane a few decades before the First World War, and we’re still not out of it.” He looked up and smiled thinly at Maria. “My grandfather was a scientist but dabbled in a lot of fringe stuff like many academics at the time, and eventually let this particular obsession consume him. Like my father before me I was sworn into the félag in my youth, went through the whole initation rite. I loathed it, hated the false rituals, and as soon as I found out about the Nazi connection I wanted out. I discovered my vocation as a Jesuit, and I could not reconcile it with membership of the félag. The félag has always professed to be pagan, to despise Christianity even while they worked within it. I believe they expected me to return to the fold, saw me as a useful future asset within the Church. They agreed to let me go with a vow of secrecy. It is a vow I have now broken.”

“But you are not bound by their absurd rituals,” Jack said.

“Indeed.” O’Connor looked down, and then gazed directly at Jack. “But I have stoked the fire of vengeance. Over the years I gathered all I could on Andrius Reksnys. I was merely contemptuous of the félag, but with Reksnys it was different. The more I found out about his murderous activities with the Einsatzgruppen, the more determined I was to bring him to justice, even if it meant breaking my vow of silence. The memory of Rolf Künzl drove me on. I took my creed from the old Varangian Guard, from the earliest félag, that our fate is predetermined, that Ragnarøk is inevitable, so what matters is our conduct in this world. It was my sole inheritance from the old ways. Somewhat at odds with my Jesuit calling, but it linked me to the nobility of the earliest félag and gave me strength.”

“You can’t have acted alone,” Jack said. “Someone else shot Reksnys.”

“Once I was in the Vatican, I brought a small group of trusted companions into my confidence. One is here in the abbey today. You may have seen him in the church. Jeremy was to be another. We came close to assembling enough evidence against Reksnys, but not close enough. We were determined that he should experience horror before death.”

“You reawakened the cycle of blood feud,” Maria murmured.

“Sometimes justice is best served by the old ways.”

“And the félag know who you are.”

“Earlier I told you that the Vatican had been penetrated by the félag in their heyday in the twelfth century. Today there is one again, one among my superiors who knows about the menorah, who has found out about your quest.”

“How?” Costas said.

“It could only have been an insider.”

Jack felt a sudden chill at the thought that one of the trusted members of their team might have betrayed them, but he put his shock aside as O’Connor shrugged bleakly and continued. “I knew the Holy See would do all in its power to prevent the location of the menorah from being revealed, but then I realized that there was more to it than that. The félag will do anything to know what we know, to thwart and destroy us and carry on the search themselves. And there is one we should fear most.”

“Who?” Jack asked.

“The grandson. Andrius Reksnys is dead and his son, Pieter, is holed up somewhere in Central America. But the grandson is still at large. I believe he is now a sworn member of the félag. He’s a thug. He inherited the family genes.”

“Like grandfather, like grandson,” Jack said quietly.

“The father, Pieter, is no better,” O’Connor said. “Remember his early education on the Russian front. But he seems to be fully preoccupied running his criminal organisation in Central America. The grandson’s the one to worry most about. He’s the warrior of the félag, the point man. He grew up steeped in all the rituals, and it has become his creed. He bought into what I rejected. He’s used many aliases, most recently Poellner, Anton Poellner. Among the félag he calls himself Loki, the name of a particularly nasty Norse god. His absurd warrior creed led him to train as a mercenary, and he gouged a trail of blood through the Balkan conflicts. He honed his skills at a terrorist training camp on the eastern Black Sea, in Abkhazia.”

“I think we can guess where that was,” Costas said.

“When his grandfather was assassinated he went on a particularly murderous rampage in Kosovo and let his guard down. He was arrested by the British SAS and convicted in The Hague as a war criminal. Five years ago he was sent to jail for life in Lithuania, the country he claimed as his homeland. They opened up a mothballed jail from the Gulag specially for him, a place where captured SS officers had been held for years after the war before being executed. Then about a month ago a new judge decided the evidence against him was insufficient, and he was released.” O’Connor’s lip quivered in disgust. “He was only a child when I left the félag, but I can still remember his face. His father had refused to cut his palm until the time was right, so Loki flew into a rage and slashed his own face with an axe. He would taunt me with it, pulling his finger hard down the scar until I cried. It used to give me nightmares. And now he’s back. He knows I’m the one who hunted down his grandfather. It’s the blood feud that drives him on. We have precious little time.”

Jack looked at O’Connor. “What will you do now?”

“I’m staying here. Rome is too risky.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something else has happened.” O’Connor looked grim, his eyes downcast. “I wanted to fill you in on the background before telling you. There’s been another murder. A modern one this time.”

“Where?”

“In the Vatican. Two days ago. The police think it was a mafia hit, because the victim was in the forefront of the battle against the antiquities black market.”

“Who was it?”

“The chief conservator.”

“You mean the man who saw the secret chamber in the Arch of Titus with you?”

“Alberto Bellini. One of the great modern scholars of Roman sculpture. A huge loss. And the only other man in the Holy See I could confide in.”

“Do you think…”

“I don’t think, I know. Alberto was a man who would put himself on the line again and again in the public war against the mafia, who needed armed guards every time he stepped outside the Vatican, but who had no inner strength when he was locked in a room with those who confronted him. He confessed to me the evening before his murder that they had forced it out of him, our midnight discovery at the arch and our interest in the menorah. That puts me in the firing line. And it means you too, I’m afraid.”

“Do you know who is behind all this in the Vatican?”

“There’s a kind of internal inquisition, run by one of the cardinals. It’s always been there. But this is more sinister, as bad as it can get. I’m not certain who it is, but I have a pretty good idea. The félag has changed since I left it more than forty years ago. I know who some of them are. The war crimes judge who released Loki, for one.” O’Connor again gripped his chair in anger. “All I can say now is he’s shockingly powerful within the Vatican. He could squash me on a whim. I’ve got nothing to pin on him for certain but enough to put his activities in the spotlight when I go public about this. What I am sure about is that the hit on Alberto was not the mafia. You can probably guess who I think it was, and he won’t be stopping there.”

“Is there anything you can do now?”

“I believe I’m safe here for the time being. The holy isle still has some sanctity, even among the new félag. But this has become too big for us to deal with alone. Blood feuds must be a thing of the past. We’re talking murder here, plain and simple. And if they somehow get their hands on the menorah, if it still exists, then the odd murder will seem a trivial matter. The Middle East would ignite like it never has before if the greatest symbol of the Jewish faith was thrown into it. Nobody would come out unscathed—Jews, Arabs, the Catholic Church.”

“Have you got any documentation?”

“It’s all here.” O’Connor patted the briefcase by his chair. “Hard copy. I can’t trust it to a computer. Loki is the key. He works alone, with horrifying speed. His masters are the great and the good, judges, senior churchmen, politicians. The days when the félag could all don helmets and wield battle-axes are long gone, however much they fantasise about it. There are no others like Loki. If we can stop him, then we buy the time we need.”

“Interpol?”

O’Connor nodded. “I can pull strings. We have some friends in higher places. An international arrest warrant, a global security alert. But I need time, two days at least to assemble a dossier. It would backfire horribly if the application were rejected but the story of the search for the menorah still leaked out.”

“That gives us a deadline,” Jack said pensively. “Two days or all hell breaks loose. It’s a pretty tall order.”

“Something gives me faith in you.”

“Let me help you, Patrick.” Maria leaned forward on her chair, looking at O’Connor and then at Jack. “I think I’ve done all I can for you on Seaquest II, Jack. I was thinking of staying here anyway and having another go at that runestone, to see if there’s anything we missed. But this is way more important. Father O’Connor needs all the help he can get.”

“I could do with it,” O’Connor said. “We’ve worked well together in the past.”

“You’re welcome to stay with us, Maria,” Jack said. “More than welcome. I should have made that clearer.”

“Jeremy can take over as expedition expert,” Maria replied. “If there’s anything more to do with Vikings and the New World, he’s your man.”

“Okay,” Jack said, a flicker of anxiety crossing his face. “Just make sure you look after yourself.”

O’Connor had one last thing to show them. He ushered Jack and Maria through the cloister and out into the grassy precinct in front of the abbey, leaving Costas and Jeremy behind to reformat a new scan of the Hereford map that had just arrived. Through the early-evening mist that now shrouded the island, Jack glimpsed the rocky outcrops that rose beyond the precinct, an image unchanged since the days of the Vikings. O’Connor led them along the cobbled track of Sràid nam Marbh, the Street of the Dead, past Reilig Odhráin, the hallowed burial ground of kings. On the way Jack paused beside the great stone cross of St. Martin, its weathered form still standing where it had been erected more than a thousand years before. He put his hand on the stone and felt the writhing serpents that had been carved into the granite almost two centuries before the Battle of Stamford Bridge, when the sea raiders of the north were still no more than a distant rumour to the monks on the island. He felt a frisson of immediacy, the same excitement he had felt on seeing the longship in the ice. Harald Hardrada had passed this way, had seen this cross. Jack suddenly had an image of the stricken king being carried on a bier towards the abbey, his wounded followers straggling up from the longships beached in the channel below. He felt he had been shadowing Hardrada all along, in the Golden Horn, in the icefjord, but he had never seemed so close, so certain that the trail ahead was drawing them on to follow the great king into the unknown.

The three colleagues walked in silence, lost in their own thoughts, digesting what had gone before. Half an hour later they reached the western side of the island, a wide bay fringed with golden beaches. O’Connor led them over a dune and found a place to sit, with Jack and Maria on either side. The mist had lifted to reveal a long vista off to the west, the deep orange rays of the setting sun searing their way towards the horizon. O’Connor lit a pipe, drawing on it a few times, then began to talk quietly.

“This is Camus Cùl an t-Saimh, the Bay at the Back of the Ocean,” he said. “After days on the brink of death they brought Harald to this spot, fearful that word of his survival would leak out to the Normans. They brought his longships, the Eagle and the Wolf, and pulled them up on the beach. They filled them with provisions and placed Harald on his litter in the centre of the Wolf. Halfdan the Fearless, his oldest companion, lay grievously wounded at his feet, ready to die if his king began to wane.”

“Wergild,” Maria murmured. “A man could forfeit his life to Odin to save the life of his master.”

“The monks helped them haul the ships into the shallows. Those of Harald’s band who were still fit and able manned the thwarts, drawing the long oars through the tholes. The masts were set and the sails unfurled. From here Harald and his thole-companions sailed into history, watched by the monks of Iona and the small band of the faithful he had left behind to keep the fire burning.”

“Where did the ships go?” Maria asked.

O’Connor paused, took out his pipe and jabbed it towards the western horizon, then recited quietly from memory.

But now farewell. I am going a long way

With these thou seëst—if indeed I go—

(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)

To the island-valley of Avilion;

Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard-lawns

And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea

Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.

So said he, and the barge with oar and sail

Moved from the brink, like some full-breasted swan

That, fluting a wild carol ere her death,

Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood

With swarthy webs. Long stood Sir Bedivere

Revolving many memories, till the hull

Looked one black dot against the verge of dawn,

And on the mere the wailing died away.

“Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur,” Jack exclaimed, shaking his head in wonder. “A pretty Victorian view of it, but if what you say is true, the romantic version of the Arthur legend goes right back to this spot.”

“Substitute Vinland for Avalon and you’ve got the promised land, the earthly paradise,” O’Connor said. “The story of Leif Eiriksson’s discovery of the New World would have trickled back to Harald’s court well before his decision to invade England, and it would have intrigued such a well-travelled man. He’d been pretty sedentary for years, apart from the occasional war parties to Denmark and Sweden, and he must have had wanderlust. Maybe he’d been planning an expedition across the western ocean even before Stamford Bridge. He wanted one last adventure, one last great voyage of discovery, something to take him back to the glory days of his youth with the Varangian Guard. With his defeat at Stamford Bridge the voyage became an imperative. The reports would have suggested a land of great abundance, of lush meadows for pasturage and endless forests for shipbuilding, the two things the Vikings coveted above all else. And there was nothing to go back to Norway for. His prestige would have been shattered if he’d returned alive, whereas death assured his place amongst the heroes. The Heimskringla even records that his remaining army in Norway swore eternal allegiance to him after news of the defeat had reached them, even after they thought he was dead.”

“And he had his treasure,” Jack said.

“Chests of it,” O’Connor said. “They certainly weren’t going to the New World in search of gold. They already had so much they didn’t need any extra ballast. Silver coins, tens of thousands of them, Arab dirhams, English pennies of Cnut and Aethelred, coins from Harald’s empire and beyond. Gold and silver neck-torques, arm-rings, precious heirlooms of his ancestors. And all of Harald’s booty from his days with the Varangians in the Mediterranean, some of it melted down, some still intact. Priceless religious reliquaries and ancient jewellery. And to cap it all, the greatest treasure of Harald’s reign, the treasure which had been ennobled by his exploit in escaping Constantinople, which had come to mean far more than its weight in gold.”

“The menorah,” Jack murmured.

“If Vinland is the site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, then it’s pretty well due west from here, over more than two thousand miles of open ocean,” Maria said. “So what’s our longship doing way up in Baffin Bay at Ilulissat?”

“It’s in the sagas,” Jack replied. “Leif Eiriksson found Vinland by sailing first up the west coast of Greenland, then across to Helluland and Markland. These places correspond to Baffin Island and Labrador, and the staging point in Greenland must have been Disko Bay, at the narrowest point of the Davis Strait. Harald was following the best available navigational advice.”

“That’s what Künzl must have worked out in the 1930s,” O’Connor said.

“So they overwintered at Ilulissat?” Maria asked.

“They were probably forced to stay by the pack-ice clogging up the sea,” Jack replied. “It would have been autumn when they arrived. The light gets poor, and ships get iced up by spray. Macleod said the slush ice begins to form in October, and when it hardens it can cut timbers like a saw. Overwintering would have been tough, but these were tough men used to hardship. They probably had some of the local Greenlander Vikings with them from the southern settlements, as guides and hunters. I wouldn’t be surprised if they camped in the same bay beside the icefjord where we saw Kangia, among the ancient tent circles.”

“It would have been especially tough on the wounded,” Maria said.

“Many must have perished on the voyage, and in the camp,” O’Connor replied. “By the time Halfdan died my guess is the number was so depleted they were easily able to spare one of the ships for the burial, the Wolf, the ship you saw in the ice. There weren’t enough hands left to man two ships.”

“So how did word get back?” Maria asked. “Two centuries later Richard of Holdingham knew they had reached Vinland, was confident enough to sketch it on his map. The archaeology indicates that the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was pretty short-lived, abandoned well before 1066, so it’s not as if there were regular supply trips that could pass on reports.”

“Jack was right about the Greenlanders,” O’Connor replied. “They were sympathetic to Harald, a fellow Norwegian, especially when they saw he had no intention of subjugating them and staying there. He swore them to secrecy, and the silver he gave them kept their trade with the Old World prosperous for generations to come. We know this because the félag sent out an expedition in search of Harald several generations later. Eirik Gnupsson, Bishop of Greenland and one of the félag, convinced his flock that he was a loyal follower of Harald, and learned what I have just recounted. He was told that Harald promised to leave a way-marker in Vinland if he and his companions decided to sail farther south. Richard must have been told this in the greatest secrecy, but nothing more. Eirik Gnupsson sailed for Vinland but was never heard of again. There was never another expedition, and the location of Vinland was lost to history. Even to the Greenlanders it became a kind of Avalon, a mythical promised land, ruled by the once and future king.”

“That reminds me,” Maria said. “The story of King Arthur. What about his queen, Guinevere? The menorah wasn’t the only thing Harald stole from Constantinople.”

“Ah. I was wondering when you were going to ask that.” O’Connor tapped out his pipe on the sand and smiled at her, their eyes meeting. “Legend has it that Harald was tended by a woman, her hair cropped short, dressed in the tunic and trousers of a man. History tells us that years earlier Harald had released the princess and returned her to Constantinople after he escaped. But we know your namesake was never kidnapped at all, that she was a willing participant. It was Maria who released Harald and his Varangian guardsmen from prison the night before their escape. She stuck with him through thick and thin, through his marriage of convenience to the Kievan princess Elizabeth, through all he needed to do on his road to kingship. She tamed him, became the true guiding light of his life. And in his ultimate bid for power, to conquer England in 1066, she accompanied him, to a kingdom where she would at last have been able to assume her birthright as a princess. Harald planned to install her as his consort, to crown her Queen of England.”

“Harald was fifty-one in 1066; she was maybe ten years younger,” Maria said. “Were there any other women in the two longships, when they set off to Vinland?”

“Maria was the only one.”

“Not the best advance planning for a new colony.”

“The Viking mentality.” Jack smiled. “Steal what you need when you get there. And remember, they were probably half crazed with exhaustion and pain, unable to think straight. Most of them probably thought they were going to Valhalla.”

The orb of the sun began to sink into the sea in the west, casting an orange glow over the eroded folds of bedrock that protruded from the slopes on either side of the bay. They looked silently out to sea, absorbing the muted radiance of the evening. “They say the holy isle is bathed in the bright light of angels,” O’Connor said. “It’s a light you see in places like this, where heaven and earth seem to meet, and in places where the crust of human endeavour has been peeled away to the bare rock beneath. The heart of the Forum in Rome, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.”

“Both places where the menorah has been,” Maria said.

“I’ve thought that,” O’Connor murmured.

Jack leaned forward, his eyes suddenly ablaze as he stared at the horizon. “The menorah was here, with Harald, at this very spot,” he said. “Ever since I saw Halfdan in the ice I’ve known we were on the trail, almost as if something were willing us on. All we need now is some clue, something more concrete about where they went after leaving the icefjord.”

O’Connor looked at Jack penetratingly, lighting his pipe again. “Halfdan gave you battle-luck, remember? He passed on the flame. Somehow I think there’s more ahead for you.”

They were beginning to get up when Jeremy came bounding along the sand, and they could see the burly figure of Costas straggling some distance behind. Jeremy came to a halt in front of them, flushed and excited, his ebullience back in full force.

“Well, what is it?” Jack said amiably. “Something else you’ve been concealing?”

“Not exactly.” Jeremy was struggling to regain his breath. “The Mappa Mundi. While you were in the berg. I knew it.”

“Slow down,” Jack said. “Take your time.”

Jeremy sank to his knees and extracted a rolled sheet from his carrying case, then took a few deep breaths and began to regain his composure. “Sorry. But this has got to be the most exciting thing yet.”

“Well?”

“Those hours I spent in my cabin. Avoiding you all,” Jeremy said apologetically. “Well, I was poring over a digital version of the map we found in Hereford, Richard’s exemplar, twelve hundred dpi resolution. Something was nagging me, something I thought I saw when Maria and I first unrolled the map in the cathedral chamber.”

“Go on.”

“I had our imagery lab in Oxford do a multi-spectral scan. Take a look.”

Jack took the sheet and unrolled it on his lap. It was a blown-up image of the lower left corner of the Mappa Mundi exemplar, showing the extraordinary image of Vinland and the New World they had first examined in Cornwall a few days previously, with the one inscription referring to Leif Eiriksson and the other to Harald Hardrada and the treasure of Michelgard. Jack suddenly saw what Jeremy meant. “There’s another drawing underneath!”

“Here it is, isolated and enhanced. Costas helped me do it.” Jeremy handed him another sheet, and Maria and O’Connor craned over to look. It was a simple linear tracing, a deep U-shape with the line bending back down on either side and trailing off, and two irregular circles in front.

“It’s Vinland!” Maria exclaimed. “It’s exactly the same as the image of Vinland on the map that superimposed it, only on a bigger scale. The U-shape is the bay, and Vinland is marked at the head of the bay on the superimposed map. I was at the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland last year. The archaeological site is at the head of the bay, exactly where Vinland is marked here, and these are the promontories on either side that extend out into the Strait of Belle Isle. Those circles are the islets off the coast, Little Sacred Island and Great Sacred Island. They would have been crucial navigational waymarkers for the Vikings.”

“That’s what’s so fantastic,” Jeremy said.

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“Take a close look at the larger one.” Jeremy passed him a magnifying glass. “There, where there seems to be a smudge.”

Jack slid the tracing aside and looked again at the imaging scan. “I can see a cross mark on it, a definite cross,” he murmured. “And that smudge on the side. Are those letters?”

“Runes.”

Jack’s excitement mounted. “Translation?”

“There are two lines,” Jeremy said. “Even with the image intensifier I can barely read them, but I’m pretty sure of it. The first line says Haraldi konungi, Harald the king. The second line has two words, gold and Michelgard, the gold of Michelgard. That’s Constantinople, of course.”

“Good God.”

“Richard of Holdingham must have done this sketch to begin with, but then had second thoughts. It’s too exact, it gives too much away. So he erased it and drew the more generalized map showing Vinland, with the Leif Eiriksson inscription. Then he thought again and decided to add a reference to Harald Hardrada after all, that he had been in these parts with the treasure of Michelgard.”

“The first sketch is telling us something,” Jack murmured. “It’s telling us something incredibly precise.”

“X marks the spot.” O’Connor smiled broadly, for the first time since they had seen him. “This suddenly makes it all worth while.”

Costas suddenly appeared over the head of the dune, looking slightly flustered after his route march over the island. “The chopper’s returned,” he panted as he joined them. “Macleod wants to know whether you’ll be returning to Seaquest II or going back to Istanbul. They’re standing by in Disko Bay awaiting instructions. They’re scheduled to sail north to carry out research on the edge of the polar ice cap, and some of the scientists are getting distinctly itchy feet.” He leaned over and spoke his next words quietly, directly into Jack’s ear. “I also called Tom York on Sea Venture to check on their progress in the Golden Horn. We’ve got a problem. One of the crew went AWOL two days ago, the ship’s second officer, the Estonian we recently appointed.”

Jack nodded once, grimly. “I remember him. It’s been niggling me since O’Connor suggested a traitor. The Estonian was listening in from the bridge when we first discussed the menorah with Hubermeyer in the navigation room.”

The two men glanced at each other, tacitly agreeing that there was nothing that could be done about the Estonian at the moment. Costas straightened, then suddenly noticed the sheet of paper on Jack’s lap and knelt for a closer look.

“A treasure map,” he exclaimed at his normal volume. “My favourite. Where is it?”

Jack gazed at Costas with a familiar gleam in his eye, and then pointed his finger at the glowing orb of orange on the horizon.

“Due west, about twenty-three hundred miles. You can tell Macleod to dig out the copy of the Viking sagas I left him. It tells you how to lay on a course for Vinland.”

O’Connor stood up. “It’s time for you to go, it seems?” He shook Jack by the hand. “I don’t know where my path will lead me. Just do one thing for me, will you, Jack?”

“You name it.”

“Find out what happened to the menorah.”

Jack flashed a smile and put his other hand on O’Connor’s shoulder. “We’ll do our best. Things have gone pretty well since Halfdan lent me his axe. I think there might just be a little battle-luck left.” He suddenly looked deadly serious. “And you must take the greatest care.”

THIRTY-SIX HOURS LATER, JACK LAY IN PITCH blackness on an earthen floor on the other side of the Atlantic, cocooned in a sleeping bag and insulated from the damp ground by a Therm-a-Rest. He shifted his rolled-up clothes to make a more comfortable pillow and stared into the darkness. Beside him Costas was snoring loudly, and he could hear the occasional rustle from Jeremy beyond his feet. He had leapt at the chance to spend the night in a reconstructed Viking longhouse on the very spot where Leif Eiriksson and his band of Norse adventurers had built their first crude shelter on the shores of North America a thousand years before. But for Jack it had been a restless night, plagued by ill-defined dreams. His mind was still full of the extraordinary account O’Connor had given them on Iona two days before, of a secret brotherhood that had spanned the centuries and come to be associated with the worst horror of modern times. Every time Jack dozed off, the same images crowded his mind—snarling wolf-gods and swirling eagles, the seven-branched candlestick and the dreaded swastika, images that no longer seemed like dislocated fragments of history but meshed together to tell a story full of potency and danger.

Jack awoke with a start to a steaming mug of coffee thrust in his face. Costas gave him a gentle kick and leaned his stubbly face towards his friend. “Rise and shine,” he said cheerfully. “We’ve only got the site to ourselves for the morning. The Parks Canada people need to open it for a tour group at noon.”

Jack grunted and quickly raised himself, pulling on his jeans and blue fisherman’s sweater and lacing up his boots. He flinched as he rubbed against the wound in his thigh, his legacy from the iceberg. In the sunlight streaming through the low entrance he could see Jeremy rolling up his Therm-a-Rest and packing his sleeping bag. They had arrived in darkness the night before, and for the first time Jack could appreciate the dimensions of the longhouse. It was elongated and low-set, built entirely of turf on a timber frame with a stamped dirt floor and a pitched roof. He could see how it might have accommodated twenty or thirty people, several family groups, clustered around hearths evenly spaced along the chamber. It would have been a damp, dark place, fetid and rank during the long winter months. He could understand why the Vikings always yearned for the open air and the sea, for the summer months tending their flocks and embarking on long voyages of raiding and exploration.

Jack took his coffee and stooped through the entrance to the world outside, shielding his eyes against the glare of the morning sun. On the grass a short distance away was the red and white form of the Canadian Coast Guard Sikorsky S-61N Sea King helicopter that had brought them to the remote northern peninsula of Newfoundland from Goose Bay in Labrador, the nearest airfield where the IMU Embraer jet had been able to land. Jack turned from the helicopter and looked at the site around him. The longhouse was one of three sod buildings reconstructed on the edge of the original Viking settlement, only yards from the meadow where three dwellings and a primitive smithy had been excavated by the Norwegian archaeologists who had discovered the site in 1960. They had found only low ridges where there had once been turf walls, ghostly imprints of post holes and fire pits, and a meagre handful of artefacts, but it was enough to prove conclusively that the Vikings had been here. Jack looked across the lush grassland to the seashore and out to the rocky islets with their sparse vegetation framed against the northern horizon. The site had none of the splendour of an ancient tomb or a lost city, but it had been one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time, irrefutable proof that adventurers from the Old World had visited the Americas five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. It was the first known European settlement in North America beyond Greenland, the first place where iron was smelted in the New World. And now Jack knew they were poised to open a whole new chapter in the history of the site, an episode that could scarcely have been dreamt of before the Mappa Mundi find. As he finished his coffee he felt the darkness of the night lift from him, and he began to tingle with excitement.

“Hard to believe Iona lies more than two thousand miles to the east.” Jeremy’s tousled head appeared through the entranceway, and he stood beside Jack rubbing his eyes and cradling a coffee. “But it looks much the same, doesn’t it? This would have been familiar terrain to the Vikings.”

“This must be home turf for you too,” Jack said with a twinkle in his eye.

“My mother was Canadian, from Nova Scotia,” Jeremy replied. “Visiting this place as a kid was what inspired me to study Norse archaeology. It’s amazing how few people come here, even thought it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Read some history books and you’d still think the European involvement with North America began with John Cabot in 1497.”

“But the Vikings didn’t stick around.” Costas had caught Jeremy’s words as he stacked their bedding outside the longhouse, and he came over to join them. “I thought L’Anse aux Meadows was more an outpost, a seasonal camp.”

Jeremy nodded. “If we go by the archaeology alone, this place was occupied for a few seasons at most, then maybe visited sporadically for a few years after that. The three longhouses could have accommodated upwards of a hundred people, so maybe there was an attempt to establish a permanent settlement. There were women here too, and livestock. But it didn’t last. We’re talking around AD 1000, maybe a little later. Iceland had been colonised from Norway about the end of the ninth century, Greenland by Eirik the Red about a century later, so that’s probably where the settlers here came from. The style of turf house is typical of Iceland and Greenland at that period. Leif Eiriksson was the son of Eirik the Red, as the name implies.”

“They were probably testing the boundaries of their world,” Jack reflected. “The Phoenicians did the same. The farthest Phoenician outposts date from the earliest period of exploration, and were all short-lived. Mogador in west Africa, Cornwall in Britain. Attractive trading potential, but too far away and vulnerable to last for long. It looks like the same story here.”

“That’s a good model,” Jeremy said, ruffling his hair. “Excavations here in the 1970s revealed lots of evidence for woodworking, for preparing logs and planks suitable for shipbuilding. It’s a little difficult to envisage now, but there were dense forests of deciduous trees reaching right up to these meadows. It would have seemed like a gold mine to the Icelanders and Greenlanders, who had no forests of their own and had to import large timbers from Scandinavia. They repaired their ships here and may even have built new vessels, but most of the timber was probably shipped back to Greenland and Iceland.”

“I’m baffled,” Costas said. “With all that wood, plus great pasturage and fishing, why didn’t they establish a permanent colony?”

“Scraelings,” Jack said.

“Who?”

“The Norse name for the native peoples, the Indians,” Jeremy replied. “It means wretches, which says it all for the Viking attitude. There was quite a large population in Newfoundland at that time, and their war canoes and bows made them more than a match for the Vikings. The archaeology doesn’t give us much to go on, but the sagas tell an ugly story. When Leif Eiriksson first arrived, relations with the natives were tense from the outset. Soon there were confrontations, violent clashes. The occasional murder by one side or the other may have turned to outright war, with more distant bands joining in and the Vikings soon being overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. They probably had to direct all their energy to stockading this place, to building a wooden palisade around their dwellings. It would have been impossible to tend livestock or hunt and fish, and in their weakened state illness would have been rife. They would have been unable to fell trees and prepare timber for shipment back home, their main reason for being here. The sagas tell us that Leif’s brother Thorvold was killed by an arrow, and that may have been the death knell for the settlement.”

“Sounds like the Pilgrim fathers in America, at Jamestown,” Jack said. “Hemmed in by hostile natives, plagued by starvation and disease.”

“There’s an even darker story.” Jeremy took out a battered paperback from his pocket. “These are the Vinland Sagas, passed down by word of mouth and written down in Iceland in the thirteenth century. They’re difficult to read as history, sometimes contradictory and confused, but the discovery of this site proves they’re based on real voyages. According to the Greenlanders’ Saga, another of Eirik the Red’s offspring, his daughter Freydis, organized an expedition to Leifsbúδir, ‘Leif’s Houses,’ their name for the Vinland settlement. There were two ships, one with about thirty Greenlanders, the other with about the same number of Icelanders. Once they’d disembarked there was some kind of dispute, maybe involving women, some deep-rooted animosity, that led Freydis and the Greenlanders to run berserk and murder all of the Icelanders in one awful rampage. Freydis herself murdered the five Icelandic women, and probably their children as well. If it truly happened, the dark deed would probably have taken place at night inside one of these longhouses.”

“Blood feud,” Jack murmured, remembering his troubled sleep. “I hope that’s not our most enduring legacy from the Vikings.”

“Do we have firm dates for any of this?” Costas asked.

“The radiocarbon dates look about right for the foundation of the settlement, around AD 1000, with the other expeditions recounted in the sagas taking place over the next fifteen years or so. Freydis’ expedition may have been the last.”

“Until Harald Hardrada.”

“That’s what we’re here to find out.” Jack rubbed his hands in anticipation and eyed the compact chart case that Jeremy had placed alongside their bags. “It’s time we looked at that map again.”

Twenty minutes later they stood on the foreshore a few hundred metres from the archaeological site. Behind them lay the gently undulating meadows that surrounded the Viking settlement, and on either side the low-lying coast swept round the tidal flats of the bay. Beside them two Canadian Coast Guard crewmen were readying a lightweight Zodiac inflatable boat they had carried down from the helicopter. Jack shielded his eyes and looked out to sea. The light was pellucid, with the clarity they had seen in the icefjord, and the breeze carried with it a vestige of the chill air that flowed off the ice to the north even in June. For a moment Jack found himself thinking of the iceberg far away in the fjord, wondering whether it would finally melt somewhere near these shores and put Halfdan to rest on the trail of his companions. He brushed the thought aside and focussed on the low rocky mass visible a few kilometres offshore.

“Great Sacred Isle,” he murmured. “That’s what we came here for.”

“There’s no doubt about the identification.” Jeremy was holding a copy of Richard of Holdingham’s sketch and comparing it to a photocopy from the local Admiralty Chart. “According to Maria, Richard was a painstaking scholar and would have transcribed the map as accurately as he could, probably copying from an original sketch which somehow made its way to him from Greenland.” He suddenly put down the sketch and rushed over to a nearby hummock, where a cloud of steam was rising from a small camping stove.

“So what exactly are we looking for?” Costas asked. “Pottery, coins, the odd rusty battle-axe?”

Jack smiled at his friend. “Not a chance. Eight years of excavation at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s produced exactly four Norse artefacts: a bronze pin, a stone oil lamp, a spindle whorl and a gilded brass fragment. And that was for a community that may have numbered over a hundred, and was here for several years. The Norse picked up what they dropped and didn’t throw away anything. If Harald Hardrada chose to leave something, we may find it. If not, we probably won’t find anything.”

Jeremy came tottering over the grass carrying two wooden bowls and spoons, and thrust them at Jack and Costas. “Carved them myself when I was a kid,” he said proudly. “Exact copies of Norse bowls from Greenland. And the stuff inside’s authentic too.”

Costas peered suspiciously at the congealed mass in his bowl and patted it with his spoon. “Looks old enough,” he said. “And smells like a resin factory. I take it this isn’t food?”

“My own recipe.” Jeremy affected to ignore him. “Based on the analysis of Norse refuse sites. Coarse barley flour, ground peas and pine bark. A kind of gruel. Quite good really.”

“Where’s yours?”

“Couldn’t wait. Ate it already.”

“Right.” Costas sniffed his spoon and took an experimental lick. “God almighty. Refuse is about right.”

“It’s all you’re getting. The total Viking experience. No modern food allowed at L’Anse aux Meadows.”

Costas grumbled, and Jeremy turned to Jack, who had quickly polished off his bowl and was staring again at the map.

“This was the place of no return,” Jack said. “If they really got this far, none of Harald’s men ever made it back home alive. They were on a one-way ticket to the end of the world.”

“What about their guides?” Costas spoke through a sticky mouthful, his eyes fixed balefully on Jeremy.

“I doubt whether any of the Greenlanders accompanied Harald this far,” Jack replied. “With only the one longship remaining after Halfdan’s burial they would have had no way of returning, and even at Ilulissat they would have had to await rescue by the Norse hunters and fishermen who made their way up to Norδrseta in the summer.”

“Remind me,” Costas said. “We’re here because of the map, the depiction of Vinland with the reference to Harald Hardrada on the Mappa Mundi. How did the information that Harald had been here get back to England, to the félag and Richard of Holdingham all those years later?”

“From what O’Connor was telling us, that bishop who arrived in Greenland in the early twelfth century, the one who was a member of the félag, managed to coax an account of Harald’s expedition out of the local Norse. The guides who had returned from the icefjord to the western settlement in Greenland must have told of Harald’s departure for Vinland, and the story would have passed down through the generations. If the history of Iceland is anything to go by, the Greenlanders must have had a rich tradition of sagas, some of them passed on secretively. None of the sagas survived the mysterious disappearance of the Greenlanders a few centuries later.”

“What about that cross on the map, X marks the spot?” Costas said. “If that really does mark something out there, how could the Greenlanders possibly have known?”

“Easy,” Jeremy said. “The Norse left way-markers, navigational signposts. They would have been essential to retrace voyages in such a huge area that was hardly explored. Some of the stone cairns around Baffin Bay attributed to the Inuit may in fact have been raised by the Norse. The Greenlanders’ Saga even tells us how Thorvold, the one who was shot down by the Indians, raised a ship’s keel as a marker on a cape somewhere to the north-east of here. It became known as Kjalarnes, Keel Cape.”

“So you’re suggesting Great Sacred Isle was a known way-marker.”

“I think there was more to it than that,” Jack said. “For the island to be singled out so precisely on the map suggests something more, something closely associated with Harald’s progress. It’s just a guess, but I wonder whether Harald promised his Greenlander guides before leaving Ilulissat that he would leave some mark of his progress. An obvious place for the Greenlanders to suggest was their own navigational way-marker for Leifsbúδir at Great Sacred Isle, a place Harald could easily find. The Greenlanders may never have ventured here to find out whether he made it, but the memory of Harald’s promise lived on.”

“Let’s see if it’s waiting for us then.” Costas handed Jeremy his empty bowl, then gestured towards his rucksack. “Got any mead or beer to wash that down with?”

“Out of luck there, I’m afraid. But what I have got is just as authentic. It’s a kind of sour runny yoghurt, made from cow’s whey left in an open vat for a few weeks. Best served warm. If you’ll just give me a minute with the stove…” Costas was already halfway to the beach, backing off with his hands held up defensively. Jack grinned at Jeremy and jerked his head towards the Zodiac. “I think breakfast is over.” A few moments later they were zipping up the survival suits and life jackets lent to them by the Coast Guard for the trip. They helped push the boat out into the shallows and then hopped aboard, sitting on the pontoons while one of the crewmen cranked up the outboard. As they chugged slowly out through the bay they turned and watched the low coastline receding in their wake.

“The tide’s in,” Jeremy shouted over the engine. “When it’s out, this whole bay is dry land. The Vikings caught salmon by laying traps at low tide, then returning on the next low tide. Harald’s men would have had no trouble stocking up with food.”

The crewman opened the throttle as they left the bay, and they moved from the clear shallows to the greenish black sheen of the open sea. Ahead of them the island was suddenly lit by a brilliant shaft of sunlight, shining through a gap in the clouds that were beginning to fill the sky.

“A shard from Mjøllnir,” Jeremy shouted.

“What?”

“The Norse believed that lightning and shafts of light were shards struck off Mjøllnir, Thor’s hammer,” Jeremy shouted. “It’s usually a good sign.”

“Not another Norse omen,” Costas replied. “I’m beginning to dream wolf-dogs and blood-eagles.”

“Don’t worry.” Jack grinned at Costas through the spray. “You’ll get over it. And you’ll soon have your feet back firmly on the ground.”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER JACK, COSTAS AND Jeremy stood on the lee side of Great Sacred Isle off the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, doffing the survival suits, which they left with the crewman beside the Zodiac. The island ahead of them was about a kilometre long and half a kilometre wide, and was made up of rocky outcrops interspersed with patches of bog and meadow. At various points it rose in low ridges that Jack was inspecting with a pair of lightweight binoculars.

“My favourite.” Costas sighed contentedly and kicked on his hiking boots. “A treasure hunt.”

“No sophisticated gadgets this time.” Jack lowered the glasses and glanced at Costas as he laced up his boots. “The terrain’s useless for geophysics, and what we’re looking for probably wouldn’t show up anyway. We’re talking Mark 1 Eyeball. Anyway, it’s the only way I’ve ever found treasure.”

“So what are we looking for?”

“Something on the highest point, or a prominent point on the seaward side. But your guess is as good as mine. A cairn, or courses of stones lying on the ground that look too regular and may be from a collapsed pile. But if it was a wooden marker like that keel in the saga, then we’re probably out of luck.”

The three of them fanned out over a fifty-foot swathe and began to work their way up towards the centre of the isle, Jack in the middle. The terrain was not difficult to traverse, but it was an awkward mix of exposed rock and soggy gullies that reminded him of their walk across Iona a few days before. After scrambling up the first small ridge, Costas stopped suddenly and looked at the ground. Jack caught his movement and spun round. “Got something?”

“It’s about Harald’s Vikings.”

“Go on.” Jack relaxed and looked at Costas expectantly.

“No women. I mean, apart from Harald’s lady, and she was obviously out of bounds.”

“Maria said that. But remember, they weren’t planning a colony. In their own minds they were going from one battle to another, to their last showdown. Anything they found on the way, fine, but if not, they had a higher purpose. Plus they were hardly in a fit state.”

“Are you worried about her?” Costas said. “Maria, I mean?”

Jack was silent for a moment, then replied, “She can look after herself. It’s O’Connor who’s in the firing line.”

A little over two hours later they had scoured the entire island and come up with nothing. Jack had dropped out of sight of the other two, and found himself wandering along the rocky foreshore on the west side of the isle. He was beginning to feel dislocated, and the memories of his troubled dreams the night before were flashing back through his mind. For the first time he seriously wondered whether they had come to the end of the trail. For the archaeologists who had followed the Vikings before, this bleak and forbidding site had been a scene of triumph, of euphoria that made even the tiny scraps of Norse remains at L’Anse aux Meadows seem as exciting as King Tut’s treasure. Yet here the trail had ended. Nothing conclusive had ever been found farther west or south, no evidence of Viking settlement or exploration.

Jack squatted down on the foreshore, found a flat pebble and skipped it far out into the sea, counting the splashes until it disappeared. Maybe this was truly the edge of the Norse world, the boundary of the afterlife. Maybe this was where they had found their mystical battle at the end of time, their Ragnarøk. Ever since Iona, Jack had felt an extraordinary convergence with Harald Hardrada, as if Harald were his spirit-companion, just present on the other side of the boundary. Maria had told him the Norse believed that those with wanderlust followed the paths left by their ancestors, by their spirit-companions, and Jack had begun to feel that he was being drawn along by this other presence. Now he suddenly felt marooned, swirling in a mist of uncertainty, without even a hint of where to go next.

Maybe this was exactly what Harald himself had felt at this point. Jack thought again of the map, of the ship in the ice, of Halfdan’s great war axe. It was not all fantasy. It really had happened. There had to be something more here. He pressed his hands against the solid rock of the island, willing it to give up its secrets. He remembered the axe again. “Battle-luck,” he whispered to himself. Then he stood and strode resolutely back up the low ridges of the island until he spotted Costas and Jeremy together on a slab of rock near the lower eastern shore. He reached them in a few minutes, then passed them his water bottle before taking a swig himself. “We’ve got an hour before the ebb tide begins and we have to leave. Any suggestions?”

“I’ve just been telling Costas,” Jeremy said. “Something’s been niggling me. Something about that map.” He took out the copy of Richard of Holdingham’s map and placed it on the rock, then sat down and stared at it with his hands clasped over his head. Suddenly he jumped up exultantly. “I’ve been stupid,” he exclaimed. “What I said about Richard, how meticulous he was. Look closely at his sketch. It’s not a cross, an X. It’s the Viking symbol of Thor’s hammer, the stem with two arms coming to a point at the top.”

“Cool.” Costas sounded deadpan. “But how does that help us?”

“Let’s say they found a rock of that shape and put their cairn there. Maybe not the best place for a beacon, but that’s exactly what the Norse would have done. It would have been an affront to Thor to ignore it.”

“We’ve just found it,” Costas suddenly exclaimed. “Take a look around your feet.”

They looked down and realised the slab they had been standing on had a peculiar regularity in its shape. They would not have noticed it without prompting, but as they clambered around they could see from one angle a clear similarity to the Thor’s hammer symbol.

“Okay,” Jeremy said excitedly. “What we’re after is markings, probably runes. Look under any overhangs you can find, anywhere sheltered.”

He vaulted over the side of the slab and began working his way along the edge, scanning the worn surface of the granite intently. After only a few seconds he dipped under an overhang and they heard a muffled whoop of delight. Jack jumped down beside him, and Jeremy took his hand and pressed it against the underside of the slab. “Can you feel it?”

Jack moved his hands over the rough, damp rock and began to feel interjoined linear depressions, like gouged lines. “Yes!”

“Do you have a torch?”

Costas moved alongside them and thrust a mini Maglite into Jeremy’s hands. He squatted back under the overhang and trained the light on the rock. “Two runes,” he said. “The first is the third rune in the Norse futhark, the sound th. With only two runes here, I’d suggest we’re looking not at the letters of a word but at the rune’s symbolic meaning, which in this case is eagle.”

“Eagle,” Jack said excitedly. “Could that mean Harald’s ship?”

“The second one clinches it,” Jeremy said. “You’d better take a look.” He heaved himself out and passed the light to Jack, who crouched down and took Jeremy’s place under the rock. Jack trained the light upwards straight on to the seven-branched symbol of the menorah. He stared transfixed, barely breathing. He could scarcely believe it. Harald Hardrada himself must have been at this very spot, staring up at the marks his men had made, perhaps the last person to see this before now. The pitted rock of the ancient runestaves looked like the surface of the carved stones Jack had seen two days before on Iona, yet he had only seen the symbol of the menorah carved in stone on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The image he was now looking at seemed to defy all the conventional parameters of history. It was incredible. He had to blink hard to remind himself that he was thousands of miles away from Iona and Rome on the other side of the Atlantic.

When Jack re-emerged he had a broad smile on his face, and he slapped Jeremy on the back as he shook his hand. “That’ll do nicely,” he said. “Very nicely. Congratulations, Jeremy.”

“What do the runes mean?” Costas said.

“The Eagle, Harald’s ship, plus the symbol of his treasure,” Jack replied.

“Harald was here.”

“Something like that.”

“So it really did happen.” Jeremy slumped down on the grass beside the rock, exultant but drained. “This rewrites the history books completely. Vinland was not just an obscure outpost, but a place visited by the greatest king of the Viking age.”

“And he went further,” Jack murmured.

“What happened here?” Costas said, peering glumly at the low shoreline where it was beginning to spatter with rain. “I mean, if this godforsaken place was such a paradise for the Norse, why didn’t Harald stay?”

“The Norse were great believers in the spirit world,” Jeremy said. “The barrier between their world and the spirit world was porous, easily transgressed. The wolf-god, the eagle-god, the evil god Loki, any of them could appear in the real world in various guises visible to those with seid, a kind of second sight. The spirits of the dead could haunt a place. Maybe Harald and his men could sense a malign presence when they arrived here.”

“You wouldn’t have needed second sight,” Costas said. “Even after half a century there’d still be all the skeletons, especially if they were trapped inside one of the longhouses.”

“Harald’s men probably would have felt compelled to collect the bones and cremate them, and then burn and bury everything else they could,” Jeremy said. “And these runes probably had a double meaning, a protective magic to keep the spirits of this place at bay and safeguard Harald and his men for what lay ahead. They were a rune-spell, a galdrastafir.” He got up and reached under the overhang, tracing his fingers over the staves carved in the rock. “One rune might be the eagle’s beak, another the tooth of a wolf, another Thor’s hammer.”

“And one might be the menorah,” Jack added quietly.

“The more I’ve seen it, the more I believe the menorah became Harald’s own rune, not only a symbol of his prowess and achievement but also a kind of talisman, something wrapped up in his own destiny.”

“His survival at Stamford Bridge would have seemed little short of a miracle,” Jack said. “As a Viking warrior Harald would have hoped for glorious death in battle, but the fact that he was spared may have suggested that an even greater battle awaited him. In their half-crazed state he and his men may already have crossed the boundary into the spirit world, and believed they were seeing portents of their own destiny at the final showdown of Ragnarøk.”

“Remember what Father O’Connor said,” Jeremy added. “The Norse believed in predestination, that one’s fate is fixed at birth. Maybe Harald felt his was still to come, and was being driven onwards. He still needed to find the greatest triumph for his character, to die a death befitting the supreme image of the Norse hero.”

“Okay, guys, you’ve lost me,” Costas said. “All I want to know is where he went from here.”

Jack nodded and looked serious. “Well, one thing they would have been able to do here was replenish their water and food and carry out ship repair. One of the first things the archaeologists found in the 1960s was a primitive smithy where local bog iron was smelted and made into rivets. And some of those wood chips found near the foreshore could have come from Harald’s men making replacement hull timbers.”

“And then where? East or south?”

“West down the St. Lawrence estuary would have been a tough haul against the river flow,” Jeremy said. “And going any farther in that direction they would have been terrified of reaching the edge of the world and plunging into Ginnungagap, the great abyss.”

“Not exactly the glorious end they had in mind,” Costas said. “So we’re talking south?”

Jack nodded, then turned round and squatted with his back to the rock while he took out a palm computer from his backpack. He looked up at Jeremy. “It’s my turn to apologise for concealing something. I’m already one step ahead.” He flipped open the screen and activated the computer, and Costas and Jeremy squatted on either side of him. After a few seconds the isometric image of a Viking longship appeared on the screen.

“Lanowski emailed this to me late yesterday evening, after you were both asleep,” Jack said. “It’s a 3-D image of our Viking longship in the ice, based on the photogrammetric data we acquired inside the berg. Assuming that the Wolf and the Eagle were sister ships, this gives a pretty good idea of what the vessel looked like that brought Harald and his men to Vinland.”

Jack scrolled around the image to give them different isometric views, then zoomed in to reveal details. They saw an elegant vessel with a single mast and square sail, broad-beamed amidships, with the stem and stern rising symmetrically. They could see where each strake of the hull had been made up of several planks, the lower edge of each overlapping the outside of the one below and joined to it by rivets and clenched nails. The keel was deep, with steeply angled lower planks, giving the vessel good resistance to sideways drift. Below the gunwale were evenly spaced oarports, and at the stern a steering oar on a projecting boss, just as Jack and Costas had seen on the longship in the ice. Lanowski had left out the superb carving that had adorned the stem-post, but flying from the stern was a white flag which on close inspection proved to contain the distinctive IMU logo and a spidery image of a seven-branched candlestick.

“My God,” Costas murmured. “The guy’s got a sense of humour after all.”

“After overwintering at the icefjord they would have needed to refit their ship for the voyage south,” Jack said. “Remember she was a venerable vessel by Viking standards, the same ship Harald had used to escape from the Golden Horn twenty-five years before. They would have had their work cut out for them making her seaworthy again after having survived the trip from Iona and then being laid up on the ice all winter.”

“What time of year are we talking about?”

“The palaeoclimatologists in Macleod’s team have got pretty excited about the ice cores they took through the berg where the longship was trapped. Apparently the winter of 1066 to 1067 in Greenland was particularly harsh, presaging the Little Ice Age of the medieval period. It would have been May or even early June before the Davis Strait was clear of drift ice.”

“Once they’d decided to consolidate in one ship, the Eagle, they could have used timbers from the other vessel to make repairs,” Costas said.

“Exactly what Lanowski found when he studied the pictures,” Jack said. “Cross-beams and even part of the keel had been removed from the stern area.”

“What about caulking material?”

“They could only have survived the winter by hunting and fishing on the ice,” Jack said. “I’m convinced they had Greenland Norse with them, men they had taken on board at the western settlement of Greenland to act as guides. They would have shown Harald’s men how to smear the timbers with seal blubber as protection against shipworms and to make rope from walrus hide.”

“And they would have told them there was no hope in going north,” Costas suggested.

“In theory, the Vikings could have navigated the Northwest Passage through the Arctic to the Bering Strait, but there’s no evidence they ever went west of Baffin Bay,” Jeremy replied. “There’s a smattering of Norse artefacts from Inuit sites as far north as Ellesmere Island, on the edge of the polar ice cap, but they were probably collected by Inuit hunters from shipwrecks or from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland. It’s like the evidence for Franklin’s doomed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845, a tantalizing scatter of finds absorbed into another culture.”

“It’s kind of spooky,” Costas murmured. “Everywhere we go we seem to be on the trail of the Vikings, yet it’s as if they weren’t quite there. I think I’m beginning to believe in that spirit world.”

Jack jerked his head back towards the low shoreline behind them and the site of L’Anse aux Meadows. In his mind’s eye he saw the Viking ship, sail furled, drawn up and keeled over in the shallow tidal estuary. “You can be sure they were here. And remember our longship in the ice.”

“So we agree they reached here in, say, late June of 1067?” Jeremy asked.

“Once the drift ice had gone and the weather had settled, it would have been a relatively easy passage across the Davis Strait from Ilulissat and down the coast of Baffin Island and Labrador to this place, following the route told to them by the Greenlanders,” Jack said. “It’s iceberg alley out there, but they could have mustered enough fit oarsmen for short bursts to keep out of harm’s way. Chances are they had a steady and favourable wind all the way, behind them or on the quarter. Even in rough seas a vessel like this would have been able to ride out storms, supple enough to flex with the pitch of the sea, and with a high enough freeboard to prevent the hull sinking under the weight of icing. And the Norse were extraordinarily skilled navigators. They had a kind of sunstone, a refractive feldspar which would catch polarized light in overcast weather and tell them where the sun was, but mostly they navigated by their senses, by an intimate knowledge of the sea and stars. If Harald ever got caught in one of the perennial fogs of this coast, they would have kept on course by the smell of the land, the waft of the pine forests.”

“And you really think Vinland was their promised land?” Costas persisted, looking dubiously towards the shore again. “It looks pretty bleak and forbidding to me.”

“That’s not how it would have appeared to the first Vikings who came here. It had all the ingredients for the good life.” Jack paused and looked pensively towards the mainland. “But by Harald’s time it had a darkness over it, a pall cast by Freydis’ murderous crime. The Greenlanders would have known of it, and may even have warned Harald to stay away. Half a century after the events described in the sagas, Vinland may have acquired a sinister reputation, a place where people went but rarely returned. The Norse were the toughest adventurers around but were a pretty superstitious bunch, and for them this place was baleful, cursed. They would not have wanted to stay.”

“And there were the Scraelings.”

Jack nodded. “By this stage Harald’s men probably numbered well under a normal longship’s complement of about thirty, maybe only half that. They would have known about the Scraelings from the Greenland Norse. To provoke any kind of confrontation would have been suicidal. They probably slipped into this bay unobtrusively, took the timber and iron they needed, tapped pine resin for caulking, killed a few deer for clothing and venison, collected as much fish and meat and wild fruit as they could. Their last act may have been to burn and level the settlement and then stop at this island to make their mark, before leaving Leifsbúδir forever.”

“And then heading south,” Costas said.

“Down the coast of Newfoundland, across to Nova Scotia, maybe along the eastern seaboard of the United States,” Jack said. “You remember the simulation programme Mustafa used to model the Black Sea exodus, the daily progress of the refugees from Atlantis? I had Lanowski use it to model the likely progress of a Viking ship along this route, factoring in everything we know about the longship, the likely season and the weather conditions in the eleventh century. Our new Canadian captain of Seaquest II knows these water like the back of his hand and was able to add his invaluable expertise. They were like ancient Mediterranean seafarers, the Vikings. They measured their progress in daily runs, doegr. With the Labrador current behind them and favourable winds, they would have been able to progress south. If they stuck close inshore and avoided the Gulf Stream, within three weeks they could have rounded the Panhandle of Florida and been in the Caribbean.”

“The Caribbean?” Costas whistled. “Incredible.”

“It’s just conjecture,” Jack said. “Wherever they got to, they would have needed to put ashore to replenish water and food within a week or ten days of leaving this place. Let’s say they encountered native peoples again where they put ashore, and were discouraged from trying to stay longer. Then another week or ten days and they were down opposite Georgia and Florida. The shoreline would have looked increasingly inhospitable, an unfamiliar terrain of tropical vegetation and dense scrub. But there would have been no easy turning back, against the currents and wind, with reliance on their sail and too few fit to man the oars for sustained rowing. With increasing desperation they may have continued south. It’s pure speculation, of course, but they could even have sailed through the Florida Keys and into the Caribbean. If that happened, the prevailing winds could have blown them south-west, even as far as Central America.”

“That’s a hell of a long way from Constantinople.”

Jack suddenly remembered his precious days with Katya six months before in Istanbul, the two of them absorbed in the labyrinthine past of the city, their discussion of how the back alleys of history could lead to the most extraordinary adventures of discovery. For a moment he felt a pang of regret, but then was overtaken by a surge of excitement. “A very long way indeed,” he said. “But look where we are now, how far we are already from their homeland. The Viking presence here at L’Anse aux Meadows is fully documented, corroborated by archaeology. Anything’s possible.”

“Half crazed with thirst and exhaustion, some of them still crippled by their wounds from Stamford Bridge,” Jeremy murmured. “It’s an incredible image. They would have been terrified but exhilarated, fearful any moment of dropping over the edge of the world yet every day getting closer to Ragnarøk, to the showdown where they would join Odin and Thor battle-girded for the last time with their great war axes. To us the tropics seem benign, but to the Vikings they would have been a vision of hell, a gathering aura of crimson that would seem to be drawing them ever closer to their destiny.”

Costas stood and gazed towards the north-eastern horizon, through the strait towards the shore of Labrador and the open Atlantic. Clouds were building up, and a sea mist was beginning to shroud the coast. Suddenly he pointed to a white form that appeared in and out of the mist on the horizon. “It’s Seaquest II,” he said excitedly. “And the Lynx is on the way.”

Jack looked out to sea. He had gambled a little bit of his reputation on persuading Macleod to call a halt to the icefjord project and sail south to meet them, in the expectation that they would be going somewhere farther after L’Anse aux Meadows. Jack never normally exerted authority over his colleagues in the other IMU departments, and fortunately Macleod had developed a keen interest in the archaeology after having brought Jack to Ilulissat in the first place. The conditions for taking ice cores were rapidly becoming untenable as summer drew in, and there had been serious rumbles of discontent among the invited scientists. Jack pursed his lips and for the next few minutes watched as the dark speck of the helicopter became recognisable and the thud of its rotor filled the bay. It flew lazily overhead and then settled down on its pontoons in the shallows close to the Zodiac. After the turbine had powered down they watched the helmeted figures of Ben and Andy emerge and wade across to greet the two Canadian Coast Guards.

“Where do we go from here?” Costas asked. “Looks to me like the trail’s wide open.”

“We need something more,” Jack said, his brow knitted. “I’d hoped there’d be something extra, some small clue. But at least there’s nothing for anyone else to go on. It means I can get back to Father O’Connor and give him the go-ahead to break his story to the press and Interpol. He and Maria should have finished compiling the dossier on the félag by now, and we haven’t got enough here to justify delaying any longer. As long as the discovery of the menorah was likely, O’Connor’s overriding concern was that we get there first and prevent it falling in the wrong hands. Now we must focus everything on stopping that character Loki. O’Connor’s life may depend on it.”

“I don’t want to be there when you have to tell Macleod to turn right round and sail back to the icefjord.” Costas squatted down to adjust his boots and leaned back against the grassy verge below the slab of rock. Suddenly there was a tumbling sound and a stream of Greek expletives. Where Costas had once been all they could see were his boots emerging from a mound of turf.

“Are you all right?” Jack spun round and peered anxiously into the black hole that had formed beneath the rock. He and Jeremy began frantically heaving away the turf and stones that had trapped Costas’ legs.

“Just the usual shattered pride.” The voice was muffled, and was followed by a pause. “But I’ve found a new friend.”

As Costas’ upper body came into view, they were met by an astonishing sight. In the small cavity in front of his face was a crouched human skeleton, the skull tucked down beneath the knees and the feet buried in earth. Hanging off the bones were the tattered remains of animal-skin clothing, and the scalp still retained patches of long white hair.

Jeremy leaned forward for a closer look. “My palaeopathology’s a little rusty, but I’d say we’ve got a male, maybe late middle age.”

“Scraeling?” Costas said.

Jeremy shook his head. “The physiognomy’s European. And this guy’s tall, well over six feet. He could be one of the early English or French explorers, but I’d say these bones are older than that, really old. I’d say we’ve got ourselves a Norseman.”

Jack closed his eyes and swayed slightly. This could be it. He prayed that his luck would hold.

“Those are some pretty impressive scars on the bones,” Costas said.

“I’ve seen that before in Viking warrior burials in England,” Jeremy said. “Battle injuries caused by axes and swords. Not the kind you’d get from an encounter with Scraelings, who had no edged metal weapons. This guy was pretty severely hacked about. There are some odd scars that may be later injuries, particularly those ring marks around his wrists, as if he’d been shackled. But all the battle wounds I can see look well healed, a long time before he died.”

Jack looked pensively at the skeleton. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Remember there were other Norse out here,” Jeremy cautioned. “But it’s possible, just possible, that we’ve got another of Harald’s men, another one to add to Halfdan. The thing that baffles me is the age of the injuries. If he died on their voyage down from the icefjord, the slash marks from wounds at Stamford Bridge the autumn before would still be fresh on the bones. These ones had healed up years before, even decades.”

“And this isn’t a burial,” Jack said. “This guy crawled in here and holed himself in with those rocks. That’s why his bones haven’t been scavenged.”

“This might help.” Costas’ muffled voice came from under the rock, where he had squeezed his upper body into the space in front of the skeleton and was gingerly feeling in the darkness under the rib cage. He carefully prised out two objects and held the larger one out. Jack took it without thinking, his mind still on the puzzling enigma of the skeleton.

“Well, what is it?”

Costas re-emerged to see the other two staring agape at the object in Jack’s hand. It was a flat pendant, about the size of a small saucer, and was carved in a lustrous green stone, unmistakably jade. The curvilinear, undulating surface seemed abstract in design, but as they stared at it they could make out eyes, a beak, stylized wings.

“Holy shit,” Jeremy whispered. “It’s the Maya eagle god.”

Costas crawled out and brushed himself off. “Maya,” he said phlegmatically. “Mexico, the Yucatán. Temples in the jungle, human sacrifice. Am I right?”

“Impossible.” Jack carefully brushed a film of dirt from two silver discs that formed the eagle’s eyes. He stared at them, shook his head and passed the pendant to Jeremy. “It’s impossible. Tell me I’m not seeing things.”

“They’re coins,” Jeremy said quietly. “Okay. Let’s be clinical about this. The one on the left’s a Viking coin from England, a quatrefoil penny of King Cnut. Look, you can read CNVT REX ANGLO, with the crowned bust.” He flipped the pendant over. “You can see the reverse on the other side. ARNCETEL OEO, minted by a man called Arncetel at York. Cnut ruled from 1016 to 1035, but his coins were valued for their purity and are found in hoards across Scandinavia to at least the 1066 period.”

“And the other one?” Costas said.

“That’s Roman. Over to you, Jack.”

Jeremy passed back the pendant and Jack peered closely at the right-hand coin. “It’s a silver denarius of the emperor Vespasian,” he said. “IMP CAESAR VESPASIANVS AVG. A particularly fine portrait head of Vespasian, warts and all, with a laurel crown.”

“You’ve just lost me again,” said Costas. “Did you say Vespasian? The Roman emperor?”

“Old Roman bullion coins, gold and silver, sometimes found their way into Viking hoards,” Jeremy said. “Looted from old treasuries, brought back as curiosities by the Varangians from the Mediterranean.”

Jack raised his eyebrows, then turned the pendant over. He brushed the reverse of the coin gently with his finger and then stifled a gasp. “Good God. It’s a Judaea Capta coin. One of the coins issued by Vespasian after the Roman conquest of Judaea, in AD 70 or 71.” He angled the pendant towards the light and they could clearly see the seated figure of a woman in front of a Roman legionary standard, and below it the single stark word IVDAEA.

“Isn’t this what we’re after?” Costas said. “I mean, the lost treasure of the Temple in Jerusalem?”

“I may be wildly wrong,” Jack said fervently, “but I think we’ve got two coins from the treasure of Harald Hardrada. How they got into this pendant is a total mystery. Something extraordinary happened, something that brought this man back here years later, to a place he had first come to on Harald’s ship. And yes, this is what we’re after. It’s fantastic. This coin may have been minted from silver vessels looted from the Temple along with the menorah. Who knows, it may even have been touched by the emperor Vespasian himself. It could be pure coincidence that Harald had this coin in his hoard, but I doubt it. Harald knew his history, had been to Jerusalem. In his own mind and those of his followers, anything associated with the menorah and the Temple treasure may have added lustre to his name. I really feel we’re standing in Harald’s footsteps now. This is our best find yet, maybe the closest we’ll ever come to the menorah itself.”

“Maybe not quite the best find,” Costas said with a twinkle. “Take a look at this.” He reached into the shadows under the rock and picked up the second object he had found with the skeleton. “I think it’s another runestone.”

Jeremy excitedly took the flake of rock and peered closely at it. One side had been crudely smoothed and was covered with faint lines. “Similar to the runestone found by the Nazis on the longship,” he murmured. “Same basic futhark and time period, but different hand. The runes have really just been scratched on the surface, maybe the last act of this guy as he squatted under the rock.”

“Maybe that’s what he came back here to do, to leave a record,” Costas said. “Maybe he was keeping true to Harald’s promise to the Greenlanders.”

“Anything legible?” Jack asked.

“It’s easier for me to transliterate the runes into Old Norse, using the standard alphabet.” Jeremy whipped out a notebook, and they watched as he quickly penned a neat line of symbols across the page, occasionally backtracking to make emendations:

Þar var ørœfi ok strandir langar ok sandar. Rak Þá skip Þeirra um haf innan. Sandar hvitir viδa Þar sem Þier fóru ok ósæbratt.

“I can’t read the first line completely, but it has the word dœgr, runs, and the rune for the number twenty. I think it means they sailed for twenty runs, along a coast with long beaches and sands. Then their ship, the skip, was driven all about on the inner ocean, um haf innan. Then they came to a flat land, covered with forest, with extensive white sands wherever they went and shelving gently to the sea. The last two lines are also unclear, but the first of them seems to say a land of fire and light.”

“It’s just like you said, Jack,” Costas exclaimed. “Twenty runs, twenty days, takes them along the eastern seaboard. It’s a coast with long stretches of beaches and sands, especially when you get to Florida. Then the inner ocean. That sounds exactly like the Caribbean.”

“Driven all about.” Jack spoke with mounting excitement. “July, August, that’s the beginning of the hurricane season. They could have been blown right across the sea, lost all sense of where they were.”

“Then the flat land, covered with forest,” Jeremy said. “When I was a kid we sailed across to the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico. That’s exactly what you see. It’s incredibly flat, a limestone plateau only a few metres above sea level, covered with dense scrub and jungle and surrounded by brilliant white beaches.”

“And hot as hell in summer,” Costas said. “A land of fire and light.”

“This is not just a wild guess. It’s all beginning to add up.” Jack lifted the jade pendant, then eyed Jeremy intensely. “And what about that final line?”

Jeremy let out a low exhalation and gazed back at Jack, his face flushed with excitement. “I can make out three words. The first one is the standard Norse word for the underworld, the watery abyss at the edge of the world, Ginnungagap. The second is Ragnarøk. The third I’ve never come across before in Old Norse. It’s a proper name, a place-name. Ukilabnal, or something close to that. It looks like Harald and his men reached their day of reckoning at this place, their final showdown at the edge of the underworld.”

“It didn’t work out for our friend.” Costas jerked his thumb at the skeleton. “I bet he wished he’d gone to Valhalla along with his buddies.”

“Does the name mean anything to you?” Jack asked.

“Oh yes.” Jeremy’s voice was hoarse, and he could hardly get the words out. “Anthropology 101. Luckily my undergraduate adviser forced me to keep my options open. Introduction to Mesoamerican Civilisation.”

“Go on.”

“In the eleventh century, Uukil-abnal was the name of Chichén Itzá, the greatest ceremonial centre of the Maya, smack in the centre of the Yucatán jungle.”

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

Costas let out a sigh of satisfaction. “At last.” He stood up, arched his legs stiffly where they had been pinned down and looked with distaste at the drizzle that was enveloping him. “You guys with Viking blood may have some kind of yearning for all this misery, but it just leaves me cold.” He turned to Ben and Andy, who had been loitering nearby, and grinned broadly at them. “Pack your bags, boys. We’re going to Mexico.”

THE FIRST INKLING MARIA HAD THAT SOMETHING was wrong came just before midnight. She was hunched over a laptop computer in a monk’s cell three doors down from Father O’Connor’s study in the medieval cloister on the isle of Iona. They had decided to stay up late and get the job done, two long days after she had waved Jack and the others off in the helicopter. She had been glancing at the photograph pinned on the wall in front of her, the extraordinary image of the jade pendant with the two coins that Jack had emailed her from L’Anse aux Meadows the day before. She was itching to be back, to be alongside Jack again. For the third and final time she was working through the document that she and O’Connor had prepared on the félag, straining her eyes to keep focussed on the screen. In a few minutes she would be able to copy the file to O’Connor and join him for a final proofread, and then they would email it off to his contact at Interpol in Austria. She was tired, as drained as she had ever been, but she was beginning to feel a glimmer of relief. They were not out of danger yet, but at least she had persuaded O’Connor to leave the monastery the next morning and accompany her back to the safety of Seaquest II.

The first sign of trouble was a dull thumping in the corridor. No obvious cause for alarm, but Maria was edgy with exhaustion and nerves. She turned towards the door, slightly ajar, and the dark corridor beyond. It had gone quiet again. She had grown accustomed to the stillness of the monastery, but something was different. She felt a sudden chill, a presentiment of fear.

Then without warning the door swung open. A gloved hand reached in and snatched its edge, stopping it from crashing into the wall. Then a dark figure advanced on her with lightning speed, head held low. Maria had no time to react. One hand slapped her head aside and savagely twisted her ear, another clamped her mouth. The table was hurled against the wall and a foot crushed her laptop. She was dragged violently backwards, through the door and into the corridor. The hand was wet against her mouth, sticky and warm. Her ear was twisted again and she was blinded by pain, her eyes watering, unable to breathe. Suddenly she was released and slammed face forward against the wall, her arms pinned behind her. Tape was slapped over her mouth and her wrists. Her assailant held her body tight to his and yanked her hair back. She could feel the coarseness of his skin against hers, the metallic smell of his breath.

For a horrifying moment there was no movement. Maria began to shake uncontrollably. Her breath returned in short, searing gasps through her nose. She felt claustrophobic, about to suffocate. Her assailant snorted, pushed her sideways until she nearly fell, then jolted her through an open door and held her tight again from behind. She felt his breath against her ear, the nauseating smell.

“Get a hold of that.” The words were snarled into her ear, the accent indefinable. Maria blinked hard to clear her eyes. She was in O’Connor’s study. Through the blur she saw the candle on his mantelpiece, the copy of the Mappa Mundi on the wall behind. The flame was flickering on the ink of the Red Sea and seemed to be throwing a red aura over the rest of the map. Maria felt light-headed, close to blacking out. She blinked again, desperately trying to clear the red tunnel around her vision. She saw the candle on his desk, the one she had lit for him an hour before. She looked down.

There was someone on the floor. She felt her knees give way, and her assailant pulled her upright, squeezing her until she retched.

She looked down again.

Father O’Connor.

Her heart lurched in horror. The candle cast a shadow over the floor, and at first all she saw was a dark form. Then she began to make out his head. His mouth was duct-taped, his eyes wide open. She struggled to make a noise, to speak to him, but her assailant stifled her nose. Surely O’Connor must see her, must realize she was trying to communicate. He remained still, his eyes staring. He was lying on his stomach, his head under his desk, his arms and legs splayed. He was wearing his brown monk’s cassock.

Then she realised. The colour on the map. The sticky wetness on her face. The metallic taste.

It was blood.

She looked at O’Connor again. Something was horribly amiss. The darkness on his back was not his cassock at all. Then she knew, with sickening certainty.

The blood-eagle.

She looked frantically from side to side, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. There was blood everywhere. Soaking the remains of his cassock, seeping out in a pool under his body, splashed and spattered over his desk and books, flecked in livid trails over the ceiling.

She forced herself to look again. She could see the gaping hole, the shape. From shoulder to shoulder, and down the back. The wings and the tail. On either side she saw things too awful to register. Lumps of bloody flesh. Rows of severed bone, a rib cage. Bulbous piles of organs, like offal on a butcher’s bench.

Maria screamed, but no sound came out.

Her assailant jerked his hand under her chin and pressed his cheek hard against hers. She could just make out his face, could see the leering smile, the murderous, washed-out eyes, the smears of drying blood. He began to rub his cheek against hers, his stubble rasping her skin like sandpaper, pressing her again and again with the smoothness of a scar that ran from his eye socket to his jawbone, all the while panting heavily, grinning obscenely at the carnage on the floor. She could feel his arousal, smell the adrenaline. Her mind began to shut down, seeking oblivion in the face of horror.

“That was for my grandfather,” the voice whispered. “O’Connor was conscious when I cut out his lungs. He knew what was happening. The blood feud is finished. Now it is time for me to claim my prize.”

He kicked her legs from under her and dragged her back towards the door. The last thing she felt was the throbbing pain in her cheek, her own blood mingling with O’Connor’s. Then there was blackness.

Jack skillfully manoeuvred the Zodiac towards shore, allowing the boat to slide down under its own weight into each trough and then gunning the engine until it stood at the crest of the next wave. Above them the sky was flecked with high, fast-moving clouds heading south, and they were buffeted by a strong onshore wind which had been gathering strength all morning, raising a rapid swell. The air had the same pellucid quality they had seen in the Arctic, but even the wind could not disguise the burning intensity of the sun as it bore down on them, the glare blinding to their unaccustomed eyes. Behind them the breakers over the reef-girt shallows underlined the sleek form of Seaquest II, which was maintaining position over deep water a mile offshore.

For Jack it was exhilarating to feel the spray of the sea again, after five days cooped up during the long voyage south from Newfoundland along the eastern seaboard of the United States and into the Caribbean. It was the same wherever he was, in the Arctic, on the Golden Horn, by the shore of Iona or Great Sacred Isle, an uplifting in his soul he felt every time he tasted the sea. He stood up, his left hand holding the throttle and his right hand holding the painter line from the bow, and motioned for the other two to slide forward and get ready. Just before entering the surf he killed the outboard and swung it up on its pinions. Costas and Jeremy leapt into the water on either side, holding the Zodiac against the surge and return of the breakers until it was pushed into an eddy beside a sandbar. They swung it round until the bow pointed into the waves and waited while Jack threw out the anchor. Once they saw he had things under control, they waded ashore, their black IMU wetsuits dripping with the warm seawater and their hair matted with spray.

They were on a low, narrow beach backed by a continuous line of thorny jungle, the twisted trunks and strewn fragments of dead coral and driftwood testament to the severe hurricane damage of the year before.

“Xerophytic scrub,” Jeremy panted. “Welcome to the Yucatán. Not really rain forest up here at all, but jungle in the true sense of the word.”

“Wasteland, you mean.” Costas ventured a few feet into the tangled undergrowth, then backed out quickly, irritably brushing a spider’s web and midges from his face. “Give me the Caribbean over Greenland any day, but how a civilisation could have developed here is beyond me.”

“The key to the whole Maya thing was fresh water.” Jeremy led Costas along the beach until they came to the source of the sandbar, a channel of extraordinarily clear water about three metres wide that cut through the jungle and flowed into the sea. “The place is riddled with it. Some of these rivers come underground through amazing cave systems that originate far inland. I should be able to show you later on today.”

“You’ve spent time here?”

“Student field trips. Sweating in the jungle, measuring overgrown ruins, getting eaten alive.”

“You should learn to dive,” Costas said drily.

“That’s what Jack’s been telling me. He says you’re an advanced technical diving instructor, one of the best. Maybe when this is all over.”

“A pleasure. Just don’t get any ideas about diving inside icebergs.”

“I’ll leave the thrill-seeking to you guys.” Jeremy grinned. “I’d be in it purely for the archaeology.”

“What was that place again, the Maya name on the runestone with my friend under the cairn?” Costas wiped away the sweat that was beginning to trickle down his face.

“Uukil-Abnal,” Jeremy replied. “The name in the eleventh century for Chichén Itzá, the most famous archaeological site in the Yucatán. A fantastic overgrown city sticking out of the jungle. Pyramids and all that. I think that’s our next stop.”

Jack came up after having anchored the Zodiac in the surf, and they began stripping their wetsuits to their waists.

“Nice beach,” Costas commented. “But a little desolate.”

“Cortés came here in 1519,” Jack replied. “But the conquistadors took one look and bypassed this place completely. They didn’t conquer the interior of the Yucatán until years later.”

“I can see why.” Costas struggled out of the top of his wetsuit, then flinched as a gust of wind blasted sand against him. “So you think Harald Hardrada was here?”

“Lanowski did a best-fit calculation for where the longship might have made landfall after being swept across by a summer north-westerly from the Florida Keys,” Jack said. “We chose this particular spot because of the river. The Vikings would have been desperate for fresh water, and they would have been able to draw up their longship in the creek. Also the edge of the river’s a likely place for a Maya track into the interior.”

“This may even have been a Maya beach landing, a harbour,” Jeremy added. “Most of the major Maya sites are well away from the sea, but they were pretty competent seafarers. I’ve seen paintings showing large war canoes, easily the size of a Norse longship.”

“Not exactly what Harald and his men were hoping for,” Costas said.

“If they were apprehensive about the Scraelings, these guys down here would have had them shaking in their breeches, fearless Viking warriors or not,” Jeremy replied. “The Vikings may have dreamt about that final showdown at Ragnarøk, but once they saw the reality of what they were up against, they might have had second thoughts.”

“Probably no choice by this stage,” Jack said. “Their ship would have been a wreck after the voyage, and they would have been starving. They were committed to ending it all here. My guess is they would have set off into the jungle.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Costas said. “That character Pieter Reksnys. The Nazi’s son, Loki’s father. Didn’t he end up in Mexico too?”

“Apparently when O’Connor was a Jesuit missionary in Central America in the 1960s, he knew all about Reksnys’ whereabouts.” Jack raised his hand to his eyes, shielding them from the glare of the sun. “But O’Connor was keeping a low profile, so he avoided an encounter. There was a price on his head in the félag even then. Apparently, when Andrius Reksnys and his son sold their opal mine in Australia they moved first to Costa Rica. It was a haven for Nazis on the run. Then when the Nazi hunt began to die down in the late 1960s, Reksnys senior moved back to Europe, to the remote castle in the Obersaltzburg where he was gunned down five years ago.”

“The dead old man in the newspaper photo, with the swastika armband.”

“Right.”

“O’Connor say anything more about that?”

“Not when I spoke to him,” Jack said. “He won’t reveal who they used, and we don’t need to know. Maybe he’ll change his mind. But he said no regrets. I think he felt it was his duty as a former member of the félag to make amends and see that justice caught up with Reksnys.”

“Fair enough.”

“The younger Reksnys, Pieter, the one who’d helped his father Andrius with those SS executions, had more than enough money to retire and devote himself to providing his own son with the same twisted view of the world. But like a lot of these characters he couldn’t keep his fingers out of organised crime, especially in this neck of the woods, where virtually anything goes.”

“Drugs? Guns?” Costas said.

“He dabbled in them, but he came to focus more and more on the antiquities’ black market, eventually to the exclusion of everything else. It became his obsession, and was immensely lucrative. From the 1960s there was huge demand in America and Europe for Mesoamerican antiquities, for decorated pottery, gold, jade, stone carvings. According to O’Connor, Reksnys had his eye on the Yucatán even before it began to open up to foreign investors.”

“He’s here?” Costas said, looking out into the jungle. “Right under our very noses?”

“This place was like an untapped gold mine. Even now the Mexican authorities have huge problems policing the area, especially in the tracts of jungle owned by foreigners like Reksnys. And just like the mafia who run the tourist industry, guys like Reksnys have plenty of connections among the politicos and the police. It’s as corrupt as hell down here. There are literally hundreds of uncharted Maya sites dotting the jungle, to be picked over at leisure if the few honest police and the archaeologists can be kept at bay.”

“Any idea where Reksnys operates?”

“He’s very elusive, lives barricaded away. But we know he owns a large area of jungle in the north Yucatán, between the coast where we are now and the inland site of Chichén Itzá.”

Costas whistled. “Seems an incredible coincidence.”

“There’s no way the félag could have made the connection with the Yucatán, except by pure guesswork. The only clue to this place we have is that jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows, and there’s no evidence anyone found it before us. But if there is something here, if Harald and his men truly got here, then Reksnys may have come across it by pure chance. He’s probably got more people working for him than there are archaeologists in the whole of the Yucatán. My hope is that if we do come up with anything, it’s in one of the policed archaeological zones and not out here in the wilderness.”

“So the menorah would be right up his street,” Costas murmured. “Not just as a sacred artefact for the félag, but from a professional point of view. He’d know exactly how to market it to the highest bidder.”

“That’s the one thing that really scares O’Connor. And remember we’re not just talking private collectors. Once again the world would have to contend with a Nazi influencing the course of Jewish history.”

“How’s Maria getting along?”

Jack lightened up for a moment. “Kicking herself for missing the L’Anse aux Meadows excitement, but planning to join us here unless we draw a blank. I’d be very pleased to see her away from Iona.”

“And back with us.”

“Too many males around here.”

“You know she’s close to Father O’Connor.”

“I know.”

“I mean very close.”

“I know.” Jack paused. “I think it began after that conference in Oxford, before they showed us the Mappa Mundi.”

“Something else that malignant force in the Vatican could hold against him.”

“O’Connor’s been walking a tightrope in more ways than one. But Maria was always very discreet.” Jack paused again and looked down. “Anyway, she’s one of my oldest friends. I knew her even before I had the dubious honour of meeting you.”

“It was destiny,” Costas said. “Where would you be without my technical backup? I’ve never come across anyone more hopeless with computers. And I’d be stuck inside some windowless prison in Silicon Valley, earning tons of money but having no fun.” He swatted a mosquito from his neck, then ducked his head as the wind blew up a swirl of sand that hit them like a blast from a furnace. “No icebergs, no beach holidays.”

“And no murderous psychopath on your trail,” Jack replied. “I just hope to God O’Connor gets to Interpol before Loki gets to him.”

“What’s your fallback if everything goes belly-up?”

Jack gave Costas a harrowed look as they and Jeremy began to push the Zodiac back into the surf. “I don’t have one.”

Three hours later, after a jolting ride along a jungle track, they came to the entrance to Chichén Itzá, some sixty kilometres inland from the beach. The ruins of the ancient city covered a vast area, though only the central precinct had been cleared of jungle and restored. Grey limestone structures reared above the tree canopy ahead, but Jack knew that all round them lay ruins submerged in the undergrowth that had entombed the city in the centuries since its abandonment. Some of the images seemed startlingly familiar, pyramids and colonnaded temples, but others were not: sacrificial platforms, terrifying hybrid animal and human sculptures, images that seemed from another planet. It was eerie, as if something were not quite right, as if they were entering a film set of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia where some attempt had been made at historical accuracy, but much had been left to the imagination of a designer rooted in some particularly lurid science fiction.

Jack was in the front seat of the four-wheel drive provided for them by the Mexican archaeological authorities, and as he opened the door he was greeted by an official who ushered them into the site. A few days earlier an earth tremor had caused concern about the stability of the ancient structures, and the site had been closed off to tourists while an evaluation was carried out. Jack thanked the official and found a shady place to unfold his map. He was joined by Costas. They were wearing shorts, T-shirts and jungle boots, but the summer heat was overwhelming and Costas was already dripping with sweat.

“Thinking fondly of our iceberg?” Jack asked, with some amusement.

“No way.” Costas puffed himself up, but looked doleful and hot under his panama hat. “Remember, I’m Greek? Heat’s in the blood.”

“Right.”

Jeremy walked over to them after talking in Spanish with the official, and pointed out a route on the map. “I was forced to spend a summer here as an undergraduate on a field training project, before I saw the light,” he said ruefully. “I’ll try to give a balanced account, but I have to tell you this place gave me nightmares. The Vikings were therapy after this.”

“What kind of time period are we looking at?” Costas asked.

“The Maya were one of the great early civilisations, as you know,” Jeremy said. “They flourished here around AD 300 to 900, that’s from about the end of the Roman Empire to the Viking age. But by the mid-eleventh century this place was ruled by the Toltecs, a warrior caste from the north. The Maya were still here, but they became the underclass, enslaved and brutalized. The Toltecs swept into the Yucatán around the time Harald was doing his stint in the Varangian Guard. A lot of what you see here isn’t Maya but dates from the Toltec period.”

They trudged along the path under the canopy of the jungle, passing the occasional iguana and a band of ring-tailed monkeys, their chattering competing with the raucous shrieks of toucans and evil-looking blackbirds. The heat was staggering, far more humid than Jack had experienced at archaeological sites in the Mediterranean, and he struggled to imagine people living normal lives in a place so far from the ameliorating effects of the sea. After a few minutes they came out into a wide grassy precinct surrounded by colossal stone buildings. It was an extraordinary sight, the quintessential image of ancient Mesoamerican civilization, dominated by an imposing temple that rose in stepped tiers like a pyramid.

“Don’t try to tell me these people weren’t influenced by the Egyptians,” Costas said, wiping the sweat from his face.

“That’s the Kukulkan Pyramid, the focal point of Chichén Itzá.” Jeremy led them past the pyramid as he talked. “But that building over there is where most of the sacrifices took place,” he said. “The Temple of the Warriors. You can see the stone altar at the top where the living victims were tied down and had their hearts ripped out.”

“Delightful.” Costas grunted. “But I thought all that kind of stuff was exaggerated by the Spanish.”

“Nope.” Jeremy led them to the north side of the precinct, past a structure where Jack saw a carved stone glyph that looked strikingly familiar. Jeremy saw him hesitate and called back. “The eagle-god. It’s exactly the same as the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows. I’m sure it came from here.” He stopped beside the next building, a wide stone platform about his height, and waited for the other two to catch up. “You asked about sacrifice. This one’s my favourite. It’s called the Tzompantli, the platform of the Skulls. The rotting heads of enemies were exhibited here, and just in case you needed reminding they were carved round the platform edge.” They saw that the sides of the platform were covered with hundreds of leering skulls, their jaws gaping and eyes wide open in terror and anguish. “To cap it all, you have to imagine that all the buildings here, the pyramid and the Temple of the Warriors, this platform, were painted red.”

“With human blood, I assume.” Costas traced his finger over one of the skulls and grimaced. “I know we had our bad episodes—the Roman Colosseum, the Spanish Inquisition and all that—but genocide and mass murder were never institutionalised, never part of our way of life. For these people it was normal. You’re born here, you get sacrificed. There was something deeply dysfunctional about this society.”

“The Maya had quite a lot going for them,” Jeremy replied cautiously. “Amazing architecture and art, phenomenal economic organisation. States that would easily have vied with the early city-states of the Near East.”

“Four thousand years before the Maya,” Jack said.

“And the Maya had no bronze,” Costas added.

“Or iron, or wheels.”

“Right.” Jeremy smiled wryly. “This society was the pinnacle of what was going on in the Americas before the Spanish conquest. But everything went apeshit when the Toltecs showed up. They were the horror warriors of ancient Mesoamerica, the SS of their day. Everything you’ve heard about the Aztecs, those accounts of mass human sacrifice recorded by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, magnify that several times and put it back five hundred years. Imagine the heart of darkness, apocalypse now, this is the place. The Maya themselves weren’t exactly averse to human sacrifice, but when the Toltecs arrived they turned this place into a death camp.”

“No wonder Reksnys settled here,” Costas murmured. “He would have felt right at home.”

“The fact is, for medieval Europeans this place would have been their vision of hell,” Jack said. “For the Vikings it would have exceeded their worst nightmares about the end of the world, about Ragnarøk. For any prisoner brought here it would have been a one-way ticket to Dante’s Inferno.”

“There’s something else I want you to see,” Jeremy said, walking briskly on. “Follow me.” They passed the Platform of the Skulls and out of the central precinct, and then followed Jeremy along a wide processional way that led down a shallow gradient and through the jungle to the north. After about two hundred metres they scrambled down an irregular rocky slope and stood on the edge of an eroded platform. In front of them was a vast sinkhole, some fifty metres across and twenty metres deep, its rim overhung with lush greenery and the limestone walls receding inwards through a series of striated ledges. The pool at the bottom was a putrid green, covered with a dense layer of algae and fallen vegetation. There was no access point to the water, and they could see that for anyone unfortunate enough to slip off the platform there would be no escape.

“The Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá,” Jack murmured. “I’ve always wanted to see this.”

“Cenote?” Costas said.

“A Spanish word, from the Mayan dzonot, meaning ‘sacred well, well of sacrifice,’” Jeremy explained. “I was telling you about it on the beach. The whole of the Yucatán was once a coral reef, then it became a limestone plateau during the Ice Age when the sea level lowered. Over millions of years rainwater percolated into the limestone and created a huge labyrinth of caves and tunnels, filled with stalagtites and stalagmites. Then at the end of the Ice Age, eight thousand years ago, the sea level rose again and the system flooded. Caves with ceilings that remained above water eventually collapsed, creating sinkholes like this one.”

“What about the earth tremors?”

“We’re just south of a huge meteorite impact site, the Chicxulub crater, which underlies much of the north Yucatán.”

“The one that wiped out the dinosaurs?” Costas said, looking around him with mock alarm. “Anything bad that didn’t happen here?”

Jeremy grinned. “The dinosaur disaster’s true. The rim is marked by a ring of cenotes, many of them collapsed into sinkholes. Nobody really knows why, but the crater underneath has some kind of de-stabilising effect on the limestone.”

“A cave-diver’s paradise.”

“It’s incredible,” Jeremy enthused. “Divers have explored systems fifty, a hundred kilometres long. Some of them are underwater rivers that run out into the sea. Below the slime it’s crystal clear, like swimming in an aquarium filled with spectacular calcite formations. But it’s also lethal. It put me off learning to dive when I was here as a student. More divers have died here than almost anywhere else in the world.”

“The Toltecs would have approved,” Jack said.

“Let me guess,” Costas said. “They sacrificed humans here as well.”

“The Well of Sacrifice was first dredged for artefacts in the 1930s, but then in the 1950s it was one of the first archaeological sites to be explored using scuba equipment,” Jack replied. “There have been other expeditions. Cousteau came here. The deepest deposits are still unexplored, but masses of artefacts have come up—pottery vessels, gold, jade. Almost all of it was thrown into the well intact, ritually deposited. And they found human skeletons. Hundreds of them.”

“It’s the same story all over the Yucatán,” Jeremy added. “Cenotes were the source of fresh water for the Maya, but also entrances to the underworld. They sacrificed warriors, maidens, children. That little building over there is the temazcal, a kind of sauna where victims were ritually purified. The stone ledges we’ve just come down were spectator seating, where the Toltec elite could sit and watch.”

“I guess variety is the spice of life,” Costas murmured distastefully. “Once you’ve seen a few thousand hearts ripped out back there at the temple, you might want a change of scene.”

An official appeared sweating and panting behind them on the processional way, waving a cellphone and beckoning for Jeremy to take it. Jeremy hesitated, knowing that he had been mistaken for the leader. He looked towards Jack, who smiled and gestured for him to go. As Jeremy clambered up with the official to find higher ground for better reception, Jack turned back and peered over the edge of the platform. The pool looked strangely benign, but for a moment his breath tightened as he felt the terror of the victims a thousand years ago poised at the edge of the underworld.

“You say there’s still stuff down there.” Costas wiped the sheen of sweat from his face, then looked questioningly at Jack.

“Most of the artefacts and bones higher up have been lifted, but there are still deeply buried deposits where you might find heavier objects.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Your sub-bottom borer,” Jack replied with a grin. “Maybe if things work out in the Golden Horn, we could approach the Mexican authorities and suggest a shift to operations here.”

“Do you think there’s a chance?”

Jack rubbed his chin and squinted against the glare off the rock. “From what Jeremy’s been telling us, this is the place where trophies of war might have been presented to the gods. Let’s imagine Harald and his crew made it ashore somewhere north of here, then were captured.”

“God, I hope not,” Costas said. “That would have been a major letdown after all they’d been through.”

“For the Vikings who weren’t lucky enough to die in battle, there was only one fate. The warriors would have their hearts ripped out back there at the temple. Any retainers who survived might have been enslaved. Maybe your friend who somehow made the trek back to the cairn.”

“The scars on his wrists and ankles,” Costas said. “Shackles.”

Jack nodded. “Others might have been brought here to this very spot for sacrifice. A spectacular procession from the temple to the cenote, the climax of the ritual of victory. Just like a Roman emperor’s triumph. Crushing the Vikings would have been a big deal for the Toltecs, victory over blond, bearded giants with their fearsome weapons of iron. They’d come here like foreign gods, and the Toltecs had vanquished them. The spoils of war would have been presented to the gods.”

“The menorah would have been a pretty spectacular sacrifice.”

“How much did you reckon it weighed? Three hundred, maybe three hundred and fifty pounds?”

“That’s an awful lot of gold to throw away.”

“It is an awful lot.” Jack looked at the shimmer of green on the pool below them, then back at Costas. “And the Toltecs did like their gold.”

Jeremy reappeared over the limestone ridge and began to make his way down towards them. He was tottering slightly, and he sat down heavily on a rock. They could see he was ashen-faced.

“The heat’s getting to you.” Costas looked at him with concern, and passed over his water bottle. “Drink this and let’s get into the shade.”

“It’s not that.” Jeremy’s voice was hoarse, barely audible, and he let the bottle slip from his fingers. “I just spoke to Ben. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news.” He looked up at Jack, his face stricken. “The worst.”

Jack felt a cold dread grip his stomach. He had tried to prepare himself. He had hoped they would beat the odds.

“It’s from Iona.” Jeremy looked bewildered, blinking the sweat out of his eyes. His voice was barely a whisper. “It’s Father O’Connor. He’s been murdered. And Maria’s missing.”

LATER, HOW MUCH LATER SHE COULD NOT TELL, Maria surfaced from a terrifying pit of darkness, her mind clawing its way out of some unremembered horror. She seemed exhausted beyond belief, spent by her struggle against the faceless demon of her dreams, yet she felt weighed down by the heaviness that follows deep sleep. For what seemed an eternity she lay motionless, drifting in and out of consciousness, waiting for her body to respond. She sensed her breathing, felt the hardness of the surface beneath her, a crick in her neck. She was lying in a foetal position on her right side, her hands tucked between her legs. Slowly she opened her eyes. It was dark, but not as dark as her dreams. From the corner of one eye she saw a flickering, a candle. The wall in front of her was covered with shapes, colours. She saw splashes of red.

Her breathing stopped. She went rigid. O’Connor’s study. She shut her eyes tightly, yearning for that darkness again, anything to blot out a reality she scarcely believed, a horror she tried desperately to push back into her dreams.

She felt a burning pain in her left cheek. A light touch seemed to play across it, a hint of a breeze. Suddenly she shrieked and sat bolt upright, her heart pounding and the blood rushing in her ears, frantically slapping at her face as she scrabbled backwards. She hit a wall, her breath coming in ragged gulps, then heard the flutter of wings swoop over her and disappear.

She raised her hand and felt a sticky wetness on her cheek, then looked up. The candle revealed a pointed ceiling, high-sided, made of small stone blocks covered with patches of plaster. It looked old, decayed. At the apex she could make out a line of darker shapes, hanging in a row.

They had been feeding on her.

She began to retch, folding her arms tight against her stomach and leaning to one side. She smelled the metallic breath again. She tried to throw up, retching over and over, desperate for something to expiate the revulsion she felt, the stain of death and violation that overwhelmed all her thoughts, that was all she could remember of what had gone before.

She gave up, tried to calm herself, panting. She closed her eyes, her bleeding cheek pressed hard against the damp wall, desperately seeking strength. She was pouring sweat, rivulets of it dripping over the caked blood on her face. She looked down. She was only wearing her khaki trousers and a T-shirt, torn and soiled. Someone had stripped off her sweater. Her watch was missing. She was burning hot, feverishly hot. She suddenly felt terribly dehydrated, desperate for a drink, and began to lick the sweat and blood off her lips.

She pushed herself upright again, swallowed hard and forced herself to look around. Everything looked damp, covered in green slime. She was in a rectangular chamber about ten metres long and five metres wide. There was some kind of entranceway at one end, a deep cut into darkness.

She thought of the buildings she knew at Iona, the old chapel on the north side, the refectory. She quickly dismissed all of them. The floor where she was now was natural rock, limestone by the look of it, smoothed in places but nothing like the granite bedrock at Iona. In the centre was a circular slab of wood, like a lid, as if this were a well-hood. The lid looked like an exotic hardwood, darker even than old oak. At the other end of the chamber was a mass of fallen masonry, clogging the space from ceiling to floor. From the white patches in the rubble she could see where stones had been recently removed, flung out on to the floor. Where the wall protruded from the rubble it was covered with wooden boards, a crude protective screen that extended for three metres or so towards the centre of the chamber opposite her.

Maria raised herself, pushing up against the wall behind, feeling woozy and unstable. She stood for a moment while a wave of dizziness passed, then hesitantly stepped to where she had seen the splashes of colour. The heat was stifling, like walking in a sauna. One thing was for sure, she was no longer in the western isles of Scotland. The walls looked as old as the monastery, but everything else told her she was almost inconceivably far removed from Iona. It was a possibility her mind simply refused to analyse any further.

She tottered across to the wall opposite. The single candle that provided the only illumination stood on a small flat stone in front of her. She picked it up, throwing shadows in a demented dance all round the chamber, then held it with both hands to stop it shaking. She peered at the wall.

Her jaw dropped in amazement.

She blinked hard. She knew her body was on its last reserves, that she had been without food and drink for hours, days. She could be hallucinating. She looked again.

The red splashes were truly there. They were blood. But they were not real blood, as in O’Connor’s study. This was a different kind of horror. She saw blood spurting out of necks, blood gushing from bodies gouged open, blood spilling in a livid slipway down a stepped slope.

It was a fresco, a wall-painting of unimaginable barbarity, a mass execution. Naked victims were being led up one side of a high temple. At the top, one was splayed out and held down on an altar, the executioner’s hands plunged into his innards, another figure holding up a ripped-out heart. Maria felt her stomach convulse again. The executioner was a fearsome giant, stripped to the waist, with a sloping, flat forehead and hooked nose, wearing a loincloth and an elaborate headdress. Above him were stylised symbols. Jaguars, birds, garish monsters. The symbol directly above the executioner looked familiar. Maria flashed back to the moment the nightmare began, when she had been in her study at Iona, peering at the picture of the eagle-god pendant Jack had sent her.

She blinked hard, trying to register what she was seeing. She took a few faltering steps back, the candle wavering in her hands. To the right she could see the victims assembled, like prisoners after a battle. The wall-painting was clearly a narrative, a progression of scenes in a story, going from right to left. She looked at the ceiling again. She tried to marshal her thoughts, to think like someone whose mind was highly trained. As if in another lifetime, she remembered her tutorials years before when she and Jack were undergraduates together, on the history of architecture. Corbel vaulting. One major civilisation had built all their vaults this way, had never learned to make an arch. One civilisation, famous for its architecture, infamous for its cruelty.

She looked back at the wall. Corbelled vaulting. Narrative scenes from right to left. Fearsome warriors with flat foreheads. The symbols, glyphs. Human sacrifice on a temple altar, sacrifice on a prodigious scale. She began to think the unthinkable.

The Maya.

She staggered back, hit by a wave of dizziness, then rallied her strength and took a few steps to the right, until she was standing beside the wooden lid. She held the candle up against the wall. She was midway between two scenes, the first of the paintings. The scene at the outset showed a naval engagement, long canoes full of warriors, one with a square sail. The next scene showed a bloody battle, this time on land. Warriors dressed identically to the executioner were battling other warriors, those who would soon become prisoners. All had sloping foreheads, but the vanquished were even bigger, giants. All were stripped to the waist. In the foreground were the dead of both sides, some dismembered, some in a river, seemingly underground. The victors were wielding clubs and maces, the vanquished swords and axes.

Maria stopped herself. Swords and axes.

She looked more closely. She began to tremble, and made herself steady the candle. The sloping heads of the vanquished were not foreheads, but the nose-guards of helmets. They were stripped to the waist but wore leggings, not the kilts and loincloths of the victors. They were bearded. They were blond. They had broadswords and huge, single-bitted axes.

Varangian battle-axes.

Maria reeled. It seemed as if she were dreaming the final chapter of the story that had possessed her for days now, a chapter so extraordinary it could only be fantasy. She wished Jack were here next to her, his calm, reassuring voice telling her this was all the stuff of fiction. She looked back at the scene of sacrifice, to the altar and the executioner where the wall seemed to be oozing blood. She staggered back and sank against the other wall, shutting her eyes tight, desperately trying to wake up back in the monk’s cell at Iona, to feel the warmth and steady breathing of another beside her.

“Dr. de Montijo. So good of you to come. The effects of the drug will wear off shortly.” A voice was addressing her, a real voice. “You are in Mexico.”

Maria jolted blearily awake. “Yes,” she said, the word coming out even before she had registered what was happening. “I know.”

“How?” The voice sounded shrill, testy.

Maria tried to stand, but slipped down the wall again to where she had been lying. She could see nothing, her vision blinded by a torch shining directly into her face. Her mouth was bone-dry, and her voice was a croak. “I worked it out.”

The torch snapped down and she saw a short, wiry man standing in front of her, his black hair slicked back from his forehead. She guessed he was about seventy, his hair obviously dyed, though he had the physique of a man thirty years younger. He had washed-out grey eyes.

The truth dawned on Maria. She looked at him with sickening certainty, scarcely believing she was finally in his presence. Everything else, her appalling state, even O’Connor’s death, was eclipsed from her mind. He was the one. She fought to control her emotions, to keep her cool. She was suddenly wide awake. “Pieter Reksnys. I see your father taught you well. Lithuanian, I believe? The master race.”

A hand shot out and gripped Maria’s neck like a vise, displaying lightning agility for a man of his age. He jerked her towards him and raised her up, holding her almost off the ground. Through the suffocating pain Maria sensed something familiar, a nasty tang to his breath, a familiar odour. “Never speak of my father again, Jew,” he hissed. “And don’t think he was the only one who pulled the trigger back then. I had plenty of diverting entertainment with the children.” He dropped Maria and stood over her while she coughed and retched. “I only wish my own son had been alive then. He would have done his grandfather proud.”

He kicked Maria over on to her back, ostentatiously wiping his shoe on the ground afterwards. Maria saw another figure advancing on her. His head was held low, his hands clenching and unclenching, his movements sickeningly familiar. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her over to the wooden lid, kicking it roughly aside and shoving her over the hole underneath. She could see nothing but blackness, a yawning depth that brought with it a waft of cooler air, as if there were water somewhere far below.

“Don’t worry.” She was yanked up against him, and she saw the ugly scar. “I reserved the blood-eagle for your boyfriend. When I throw you down into the underworld you won’t even die. At least that’s what the Toltecs told their victims.” The voice was hoarse, ugly, less refined than his father’s. He made as if to push her in, then pulled her back roughly. “My kind of people.” He laughed, an insane, high-pitched cackle, then hurled her down on the ground. “Now the félag has some use for you. Enjoy our little vacation hideaway while you can.”

“The true félag died out seven hundred years ago.” Maria raised her head and tried to stare at Loki. “Harald Hardrada’s men would never have admitted scum like you. They wouldn’t even have considered you worthy of a blood feud.”

Loki lunged at Maria, but Reksnys held him in check. “Not yet,” he muttered. He turned to Maria, speaking with mock apology. “My son still has these romantic notions. He thinks he’s in the SS.”

“Too weak for that.”

Loki lunged again and once more Reksnys held him back, then his voice hardened. “Our félag was a means to an end. No more, no less. And it looks like we will have the last laugh on Harald Hardrada.”

Loki snarled and turned abruptly away, heading quickly out of the entranceway at the side of the chamber. Maria crawled back against the wall. Reksnys tossed her a small water bottle. “So now we have become acquainted. I need some expert assistance. You are going to help me.”

He took out a digital camera and pointed it at her. Maria began to lose all feeling, sinking to the floor, then looked up at Reksnys and remembered what he and his son had done. O’Connor had ensured that justice was carried out against Reksnys’ father, had staked his life on it and had paid the ultimate price. She owed it to him to do everything in her power to see that the job was finished. And she owed it to herself.

She would be strong.

Jack stood pensively in the control room on Seaquest II, cradling a coffee and watching a cloudburst release a shimmer of rain far out to sea. The sky had an ominous grey overcast, the high clouds they had seen on the beach that morning having been replaced by a dark mass rolling in from the Caribbean. Where the sun shone through, curtains of light hung and twisted and mingled in the sky, like the northern lights they had seen in Greenland but heavy with the portent of weather to come.

“It looks like we’re in for some rain.” The Canadian captain of Seaquest II came up beside Jack, peering out to sea through his binoculars. “We’re almost into hurricane season. As a precaution I’m closing down shop. We’re moving farther offshore and I’m battening down the helicopter in the hangar.”

Jack grunted. It was not the news he wanted to hear. “Thanks. Do what you have to do.”

The captain left for the bridge and James Macleod got up from the computer console where he had been evaluating data from the icefjord. Everyone in the room was aware of Jack, but had been keeping their distance. Some of them had been on the first Seaquest and could remember the loss of Peter Howe in the Black Sea, how Jack had taken the responsibility personally. Maria had been enormously popular among the crew and scientists alike during their sojourn in the icefjord. Even Lanowski was subdued, quietly passing Jack a series of printouts of the longship in the iceberg he had finalised from the photogrammetric images.

Macleod sidled up to the window beside him. “How long do you think we’ll be here, Jack?” he asked quietly.

Jack turned and looked at him, his face drawn and distant, then stared back out to sea. “I don’t know, James. I just don’t know.” He pursed his lips and put down his coffee. They had been back on board for almost six hours now, and there was still no word from Iona. All they had to go on was a brief phone message to IMU headquarters from O’Connor’s colleague in the monastery, the man Jack remembered seeing briefly in the church. Apparently the police were keeping the scene completely under wraps, and there was a media blackout. But there was no doubt of the facts. Father O’Connor was dead, and Maria was missing.

“We have to assume she’s been kidnapped.” Ben had been within earshot, and had moved up to Jack’s other side. “Until there’s a body, that is.”

“I know.” Jack exhaled forcefully, then stood back from the railing with his hands on his hips, his usual demeanour returned. “We have to keep on top of this. We have to assume we’ll be hearing more soon. Until then there’s nothing we can do. It has to be situation normal.” He looked at Macleod, his expression grim but determined. “There’s your answer. My plan after visiting Chichén Itzá had been to collate all possible evidence from the north Yucatán datable to the second half of the eleventh century, to the time when Harald might have been here. Wall-paintings, glyphs, structures. Anything that might provide a clue.” He gestured to Jeremy, hunched over a screen in the corner, surrounded by open books. “I put Jeremy on it the moment we got back.”

“He’s taken the news very badly,” Macleod murmured.

“He revered O’Connor,” Jack said quietly. “And Maria’s his mentor. For someone like him, that’s like pulling the rug out from under your life.”

“He’s got us now,” Macleod replied.

“He’s a good guy,” said Jack.

Costas had been tapping at the workstation next to Jeremy, and leaned back on his chair as they looked over. “Jack. Something to look forward to. I’ve jumped the gun and been in touch with the IMU guy for the Caribbean, Jim Hales out of Grand Cayman. You know he’s an old pal of mine from the US Navy submersibles research lab. He was straight on to Mexico City and they’ve given us the go-ahead for Chichén Itzá. Amazing how that guy clears the red tape. Any time you want to talk setting up a project in that cenote, I’ve got the contact numbers.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Jack caught Costas’ eye, and knew they both sensed the need to keep positive, to look ahead. “I’ll put first claim on the sub-bottom borer after the Golden Horn’s done. Jeremy, you in on this?”

Jeremy looked at them, pale and distracted. “Huh? If Maria will let me.” He suddenly checked himself, and the room went silent.

“She will,” Jack said firmly.

Jeremy tried hard to keep a brave face. “Anyway, I’m not sure if the Well of Sacrifice is where I want to do my first open-water dive.”

“Don’t worry.” Costas stretched his hand over and placed it on Jeremy’s back. “We’ll do some coral first.”

A red light began flashing in the centre of the room. Ben looked at Jack, his face deadly serious. “To the bridge.” The two men quickly made their way out of the control room and up the stairway, followed by Costas. The captain was busily engaged with the chief officer at the binnacle but immediately gestured to the chart room. “Priority message on the security channel.” Ben was first in the room and snatched up the radio receiver, talking quickly and then putting it down. “That was IMU HQ. There’s been an email message. It’s directed us to a secure site and given us a password.”

Costas was already seated at the computer beside the chart table. “Okay. We’re on line. Address?” Ben read it out and Costas tapped the keyboard. “Password?”

Ben hesitated, then glanced at Jack. “Menorah.”

Costas let out a low whistle. “Well, that gives the game away.”

Jack’s knuckles were white as he gripped Costas’ chair, and his voice was hoarse. “We guessed who we were up against. This confirms it.”

“It’s addressed to you, Jack.” Costas leaned aside to let Jack read the short email that had appeared on the screen.

To: Jack Howard

You and Kazantzakis will arrive by Zodiac at 2300 this evening at the beach landing point you visited this morning. Bring cave diving equipment. You will blindfold yourselves and await our arrival. Any attempt to involve security or make contact with an outside body and your colleague will be executed.

“Maria’s alive,” Jack breathed. “Thank God.”

“The beach landing point,” Ben murmured. “Doesn’t surprise me they knew where we were. Probably the Mexican police. If it’s Reksnys, he’ll have prying eyes everywhere along this coast.”

“And cave gear,” Costas murmured. “What the hell’s that all about? I’m not going cave diving while it’s raining. All the air pockets will flood.”

“They must have found something,” Jack said.

“That password?”

“I truly hope not.”

“Maria’s somewhere here, near us,” Ben said. “They must have flown her in from Iona. Reksnys has a private jet, and his own runway in the jungle. It’s one of the few things you can’t disguise from satellite surveillance. And he must have known Seaquest II was on the way here even before they hit Iona.”

“My guess is the hit was a one-man show,” Jack said bleakly.

“Loki.”

“We’ve been sent a photo. Better prepare ourselves.” Costas clicked on an attachment below the message, and a picture began to download. It had been taken with a flash inside some kind of chamber with an irregular stone floor and old walls covered in green growth. As the image opened they could see a figure slumped on the floor, a woman. It was horrifying, an image of torture, the kind of image that leaked out of Iraq and untold Third World hellholes. She was filthy, wearing a clinging T-shirt partly ripped open over her breasts. Her dark hair was matted to her neck, and her arms were streaked with green from the floor. She had been trying to look at the camera but had flinched in the flash. Her eyes were puffed up and closed, her mouth flecked with white, and she had an ugly abrasion over her cheekbone which was oozing blood and pus.

Jack felt a lurching shock of recognition. “Maria.” He felt physically sick. His hands slipped off the back of the chair and he sat down heavily on the bench beside it. As he looked at the image again, his horror turned to anger, to seething rage.

The captain appeared at the door. “Message from Iona. There’s a police forensics guy who’s been allowed to talk to us.” He saw the screen, faltered.

“Coming.” Jack’s voice was cold, emotionless.

Ten minutes later Jack was back in the control room. It was empty except for Jeremy; Macleod and Lanowski had left for the bridge deck a few minutes before. Jeremy was still at his screen, working quietly, printing images from the web and bookmarking pages of Toltec art. Above him the window was flecked with the first lashings of rain, and Jack could see that the weather was deteriorating rapidly. He paused, feeling utterly drained from what he had just heard, looked again at Jeremy, then made his way through the consoles. He did not know how to break the news. He pulled up a chair and flipped it round to sit with his back to the window, then looked intently at Jeremy’s images.

“Good work,” he said quietly. “I could never have interpreted this stuff. I didn’t do Mesoamerican archaeology like you.”

“I’ve made one really interesting discovery.” Jeremy passed Jack a sheet of paper. “You remember the ancient Aztec prophecy about the return of the god-king Quetzalcoatl? When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlán in central Mexico in 1519, the emperor Moctezuma thought Cortés was Quetzalcoatl. It’s one reason the Spanish conquest happened so quickly.”

“Go on.”

“Well, Quetzalcoatl was a Toltec, a semi-legendary king. According to Aztec legend at the time of Moctezuma, he’d been exiled from their kingdom five centuries before, and promised to return from the land of the rising sun.”

“Five centuries before,” Jack mused. “That puts it in the eleventh century, smack in our period.”

“Right. The land of the rising sun, due east from the Aztec heartland in the vale of Mexico, was almost certainly the Yucatán peninsula. There’s some historical corroboration for this, because that’s about the time the Toltecs invaded Chichén Itzá.”

Jack looked hard at Jeremy, began to speak, then decided to let him carry on.

“It gets really intriguing when you look at the Maya sources,” Jeremy said. “What we know of the final years of the Maya comes mainly from the Books of Chilam Balam, the Jaguar Prophet, mostly written down by local scribes in the Latin alphabet after the Spanish conquest. The books were hidden away and jealously guarded. Each one relates to a different community in the north Yucatán, a bit like the Norse sagas in Iceland. One of the most extraordinary prophecies concerns the arrival of bearded men from the east.”

“Bearded men?”

“You follow me? A lot of scholars have dismissed this as a later embellishment. Some of the books weren’t written down until the eighteenth or even nineteenth century. But another book’s just come to light, in the Vatican archives in Rome, of all places. It looks like the earliest of them all, partly written in Maya script, apparently confiscated by the first Jesuit missionaries in the Yucatán in the sixteenth century. It contains the legends and prophecies of the Maya community north of Chichén Itzá. There’s the same story of bearded men, but with a twist. In this one they have a king, and he fights a great battle with the oppressors of the Maya, presumably the Toltecs. Then he disappears into the underworld, and the Maya await his return. It may be the origin of the Quezalcoatl prophecy of the Aztecs, except in the Maya story he’s called Wukub Kaqix, the monstrous bird-diety, the eagle-god.”

Jack glanced at a picture of the jade pendant pinned beside the monitor. “Pretty standard image around here.”

“But also the name of Harald Hardrada’s ship, the Eagle. In the Norse sagas there are some hints that when the Vikings burnt their boats, went to war with no intention of returning, they sometimes cut off the stems of the ships and carried them forward like battle standards. It was a signal that they would fight to the death, that they were on a one-way trip to Valhalla. It was a way of striking fear into the hearts of their enemies. Maybe that’s what happened here, and the local Maya saw it.”

“Fantastic. This is fantastic, Jeremy. This is just what we’re looking for.” Jack suddenly leaned forward and put his head in his hands, all pretence at bonhomie gone. He could keep it from Jeremy no longer. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you. We’ve had news from Iona.”

“I know.” Jeremy spoke softly, and put down the book he had been holding. Jack gazed up at him. He looked a world older than the ebullient graduate student he had first met the week before. “I knew from the moment I heard O’Connor had been murdered. He spoke of it, prepared me for it. I know what happened in Iona.” Jeremy paused, tried to speak, then the words came out as a hoarse whisper. “The blood-eagle.”

IT WAS WELL PAST MIDNIGHT, PROBABLY PUSHING ONE in the morning. It had already been dark when Jack and Costas had slipped away from Seaquest II and driven the Zodiac ashore, reaching the beach rendezvous point well before the appointed time. All Jack could hear now was the incessant drumming of the rain, the sound rising in a crescendo and falling again as each downpour swept over them. The humidity was stifling. He knew he was in a small vehicle, a four-wheel drive by the sound of it, hunched in the backseat beside Costas. For what seemed an eternity but was probably only half an hour they had been jostling and bouncing along a rough track, heading somewhere into the jungle from the beach. The injury to Jack’s thigh was throbbing. They had followed their instructions scrupulously and waited blindfolded beside the Zodiac with their diving equipment. Their captor had come without a word, bustling them into the vehicle without revealing anything about himself, about where they were going. It was unnerving, but Jack felt reassured having Costas bumping along beside him cursing every rut and pothole.

Ever since receiving the email ultimatum Jack had known they would be on their own, that they would have to follow the word of Maria’s captors and trust to luck. Whatever was in store for them, it seemed a fair certainty that it involved diving. And with the route they were now taking, somewhere inland seemed likely. Cenotes, underground rivers. The rain was beginning to prey on Jack’s mind. With a storm like this, the floodwaters could be dangerously high, filling underground caverns with water. And this close to the sea, the freshwater currents that honeycombed the Yucatán could be treacherously strong, sucking the rainwater through the labyrinth of limestone channels and out to sea.

The vehicle ground to a halt and Jack snapped back to reality. He was pulled out of the door and led across uneven ground, slipping and sliding on wet vegetation. The rain was torrential, pounding his senses. Then he was inside some kind of shelter, out of the rain but steaming hot. Costas bumped up behind him, and he heard their gear being offloaded. Then he was pushed forward again. His blindfold was ripped off, leaving him blinking and reeling. Duct tape was crudely slapped round his wrists. He was somewhere gloomy, candlelit. He saw Costas a few feet to his left, and a man in front of them. Jack immediately knew who it was. Pieter Reksnys was the spitting image of his father Andrius, the man Jack had seen in the photo of the SS Ahnenerbe team in Greenland, the picture Kangia had given Macleod.

Kangia. The icefjord. It all seemed a million miles away, back beyond some boundary they had crossed to come here, to a place where hell and its demons suddenly seemed far more than just a medieval nightmare.

Jack looked around. They were in a room, a stone chamber, maybe an old church. It was hot as a boiler-house, and Jack was dripping sweat. The ceiling was high, corbelled. There was a circular hole in the floor. The wall beside him was painted, vivid flickers of colour revealed in the candlelight.

Then he saw Maria.

He had tried to prepare himself, gazed at the emailed photograph before they left Seaquest II, but the reality was still shocking. She was sitting against the wall opposite the mural, groggy, swaying slightly, her legs drawn up and her wrists taped together. Her mouth was duct-taped. Her face was streaked and swollen, and her cheek had a raw welt across it. Their eyes met.

Jack tried to control his anger. “Did he do that to you?”

Maria looked at him imploringly, then shook her head, motioning to somewhere behind Jack. He turned round and saw the only other person in the room, the man who had picked them up from the beach. It had to be Loki. The same slicked-back hair, the spare, mean features, the washed-out eyes. Like father, like son. Loki grinned as he saw Jack looking at him, turned to the light, drew one finger hard down his cheek. Then Jack remembered O’Connor’s description. The scar.

Costas had been staring aghast at Maria, and he suddenly lunged towards Loki. The response was terrifyingly supple, quick and fluid like a hunting animal. Loki had Costas in a half-nelson and was pulling his head up and sideways, raising him effortlessly off the floor despite Costas’ greater weight.

“Release him.” Jack heard Reksnys’ voice for the first time, harsh, grating, an undefinable accent with a hint of east European. Loki obeyed his father and pushed Costas away. Jack stared at Loki. This was the ruthless killer described by O’Connor, an independent operator who relished working alone, yet he was totally subservient to his father. Rage was not his only weakness.

Costas picked himself up, grimacing with distaste, wiping his shoulder where Loki had held him ostentatiously. Loki sneered and slunk back to lurk in the far corner of the chamber. Reksnys pulled out a pistol, instantly recognisable to Jack as a Nazi-era Luger, and aimed it at Maria’s legs.

“First one knee, then the other. Then I work my way up.” His voice had an ugly edge to it. “Or you cease being foolish.”

At first there was no reaction from Costas, then a surly nod. Maria had gone sheet white at the sight of the pistol, and was staring at it in a daze.

Reksnys turned to Jack. “I want you to study that wall-painting. Closely.”

Jack looked at him stone-faced. Then he looked at Maria, who nodded weakly, mumbling through the tape over her mouth, encouraging him. He gave Reksnys a look of contempt and then turned to the mural.

It was two-dimensional, without depth. It had once been a dazzling explosion of colour, deep browns, reds and greens on a yellow and blue background. He immediately grasped the narrative sequence, the victors and the vanquished. To the right he saw a melée of boats, elaborately attired warriors with sloped foreheads, paddled vessels with symmetrical endposts. One vessel with a square sail, different warriors.

A square sail.

The next scene was a ferocious jungle battle. Some of the fighting was aboveground, some in a fast-flowing river, seemingly belowground. Mutilated bodies lay everywhere. The victors carried atlatls, spear-throwers, and square shields with the figure of a war god. They were led by an eagle-warrior, a muscular giant wearing an eagle mask with a staring eye, with wings on his back and huge tearing talons on his feet. His warriors wore jaguar-skin headdresses, anklets and wristlets, heavy jade necklaces and earrings. They fought with clubs, and fell on their victims with enraged, terrifying eyes. Their opponents had round, red shields, different headgear, different weapons.

Jack peered at the weapons again, then looked at Maria out of the corner of his eye. She must have been transfixed by this scene, stared at it as she lay on the floor before they arrived. She must have seen what he had just seen. She nodded at him, almost imperceptibly. She had seen it. He turned back.

Now he understood.

Jack betrayed nothing in his expression. He moved on, to the left. Captives were on the ground, some lying on their backs, some kneeling. Some were shackled, men not attired as warriors, captured servants being led off as personal slaves by each of the victorious warriors. Jack thought of the Viking skeleton at L’Anse aux Meadows, of the man who had somehow made the trek three thousand miles north, who almost made it back to his own world. This was the nightmare he was escaping from.

The next scene dominated the painting. Jack saw hideous images of death, of mutilation. On top of a terraced platform stood a priest-king, wearing the mask of the eagle-god. He was passing sentence on those taken in the battle. On the lower step were captives being tortured, having their fingernails ripped out. A few steps up a prisoner raised his hands in vain for mercy, and another was splayed on the steps, fainting, bleeding profusely from his fingers. At the top a priest plunged a knife into the chest of a victim, gouging out his heart, his soul ascending heavenward from the altar in a bloody trail. A severed head rested on a bed of leaves, and others tumbled in a cascade of blood down the steps. All around were fires, flaming pyres of incense. The ritual was not restricted to the hapless prisoners of war. Below a skull-faced deity, Toltec warriors offered their own blood from self-inflicted wounds, gushing out all over their bodies. On a stone table beside the king were three richly bedecked women, shaven-headed, being offered a bloodletting implement by a servant. One woman was drawing a thorn-studded rope through a hole in her tongue. Beside her a nobleman was doing the same, through his penis.

Jack turned away. Reksnys leered at him, enjoying his reaction. “I found this building myself, years ago when I acquired this land,” he said. “It’s a jungle temple, a sacrificial chamber above a sacred cenote.” He jerked his head towards the dark hole in the centre of the floor. “I scoured this jungle for years, searching for just such a find. What I have come across is truly remarkable. We in the félag guessed at such a thing, but there was never any evidence.”

“Evidence of what?” Jack said.

Reksnys ignored him. “Our sources told us you were searching for the menorah.”

“Sources,” Jack said derisively. “You mean you tortured it out of Father O’Connor.”

“O’Connor was very helpful to us,” Reksnys replied, his voice suddenly shrill. “But not in the way you think. In the Vatican he had become less cautious. Breaking into the Arch of Titus was one step too far. He had a superior who reported everything he did. We already knew about that woman.”

He jerked his head towards Maria and then saw Jack’s half-smile and suddenly narrowed his eyes. “That information is useless to you now. It is of no consequence whether I tell it to you or not, and I only share the story of my discovery with you as a fellow archaeologist.”

Jack looked from side to side. “I don’t see any other archaeologists here.”

Reksnys affected not to hear him. “We heard you had reached as far as Greenland. Of course we knew about the longship in the ice, discovered by my father with the Ahnenerbe expedition in the 1930s. Shortly before he was murdered he told me the full story, how Künzl had snatched the runestone from him and tried to kill him with his own SS dagger in the crevasse. Fortunately my father had a photographic memory and could reproduce the symbols for a runologist in our pay years later, after the war.”

“I trust the photographic memory of all the women and children he murdered on the eastern front kept him awake at night,” Jack said icily.

“Only counting them.” Reknys snorted, then carried on. “Something made me remember this little temple, something about the glimpse I had years ago of that battle scene, the appearance of the warriors from the sea. When I found it, the temple was swallowed in the jungle and filled with rubble. None of the local Maya will come near the place. Some nonsense about an eagle-god, the return of the king. I remembered Harald Hardrada, the menorah. The cherished dream of the félag. It was just possible. I cleared out the temple myself, stone by stone.” He looked childishly pleased with himself. “It has been a most satisfying hobby.”

“Don’t play games with me,” Jack said coldly, looking back up. “This is more than just a hobby. It’s an obsession. And it’s illegal.”

Reksnys scowled at Jack and snapped his fingers. Loki was on him in a flash, standing chest to chest with him, butting him back, the livid scar on his face turned towards him. Loki was clearly used to intimidating those weaker than himself, but Jack stood a full head taller and stared down at him contemptuously.

“Enough.” Reksnys barked the command and Loki snarled, hands clenching and unclenching, his eyes turned to his father like a dog to its master. “Time for that later.” Loki sloped off, and Reksnys turned to the mural. “And now for the reason you are here.” He walked over and lifted the large wooden panel off the left-hand side of the wall, abutting the rubble. “There.”

It was the final scene. A procession was leading away from the base of the temple. It was the only scene not soaked in blood, though the figures were even more garish, more extravagantly attired than before. Some were human, others supernatural. Musicians sang and beat time, with trumpets and gourd rattles. A turtle carapace split open to reveal a god, pouring liquid from a jar. Others emerged from the shell of a crab, the jaws of a serpent. Warriors and women weaved among rows of torch-holders. A jaguar ate a human heart. A company of mummers performed, writhing, snaking in and out, one dressed as a crocodile and another a crab, with giant pincers raised up high. A team of ball players with protective belts and kneepads jostled each other, one being led back towards the temple by a sacrificial priest. Above the procession were poles with human skulls skewered on them. Some were stripped bare, leering skulls like the sculptures at Chichén Itzá. Others were more recent victims, with hair and flesh still on them. Yellow hair. Beards.

In front of the pageant was a space which Reksnys had left covered by a protective cloth. But leading up to it was a line of white-robed women, with sloping foreheads and tied-back red hair, adorned with mountainous headdresses and green feathers from the sacred quetzal bird springing in hoops from their backs.

It was a triumphal procession. Another image flashed through Jack’s mind, an image that seemed unbelievably far removed from the world of the Yucatán—the Arch of Titus in Rome. The procession through the Forum. The triumph of Vespasian over the Jews.

He moved a few steps to his left, Loki’s eyes following him warily. The final depiction was still partly buried under rubble, but was clear enough. It was an abstract shape like a cauldron, its rim marking the end of the processional way. It was the jaws of the underworld, gigantic, gaping, hungry for sacrifice.

Chichén Itzá. The Cenote of Sacrifice.

Reksnys moved up to the cloth and put his hand on the lower corner. “I believe that is where we are now. The underworld, the end of the procession. We all know who the vanquished are. I believe the victory procession ended where we are standing now, at the entrance to this cenote below us.” He spoke bullishly, with the utter conviction of the ignorant. Jack caught Maria’s eye again. This time she shook her head. Jack looked back. He realised there was nothing in the painting to identify the setting. It could have been one of dozens of Toltec ceremonial sites. The only connection Jack had with Chichén Itzá was the runestone inscription from L’Anse aux Meadows. And that was unknown to Reksnys, safely under lock and key on board Seaquest II.

“I uncovered what you are about to see a mere four days ago, just before the félag exacted its revenge on the one who had betrayed us. A happy coincidence for your colleague here.” Reksnys jerked his pistol towards Maria. “We knew your ship was in the Caribbean and guessed our paths were converging. I thought we might benefit from your expertise. It is the only reason my son did not practise his art on her as well.”

Reksnys stood with his back to the wall, then with one quick movement lifted the cloth up.

There was a stunned silence. Jack felt his jaw drop, then regained his composure. Something Maria had once said came to him, something from rabbinical lore.

Drawn by the divine finger. Drawn by a finger of fire.

It was the menorah.

Seven branches, seven shafts of yellow shining as if they were aflame, shedding lustre like beams of light. At the head of the triumphal procession, raised in front of the Well of Sacrifice.

Jack looked at Maria, who was staring at the image in a trance, as if she were gathering strength from it.

Reksnys abruptly let the cloth drop back, concealing the image, and gave a coarse laugh. “Shocked?”

“I noticed you didn’t look at it,” Jack said coldly. “Or couldn’t.”

“I despise it. I have no wish to behold this object myself. It is a means to an end.” Reksnys nodded at Loki, who pulled Maria up and pushed her across to him. Reksnys kept her at arm’s distance, prodding her with the muzzle of the Luger, a look of distaste on his face. Then he shoved the gun in the small of her back, aimed down. “I know exactly how to do it. A slow, lingering death. Plenty of experience with her type.” He jerked his head towards the rebreathers and dive bags stacked beside the hole in the floor. He looked at Jack. “You are the world-famous underwater explorer, no?” His voice was mocking, sneering. “Now you and your friend will go down into the underworld and find what I desire.”

JACK HIT THE WATER WITH A RESOUNDING SPLASH, the echo resonating off the walls of the cavern. Costas had preceded him and was already carrying out an underwater recce, the arc of light from his headlamp visible off to one side. Jack quickly released the carabiner on the rope and gave it a tug. The rope began to jerk upwards, and Jack followed the glint of metal from the carabiner as it rose up the thin shaft of light to the hole in the limestone ceiling almost twenty metres above. He and Costas had silently kitted up in the ancient chamber a few minutes before, donning the equipment Reksnys had ordered them to bring from Seaquest II. Jack had refused to divulge any of his thoughts about the wall-painting, and Maria had remained obstinately silent in the corner of the chamber even after the tape had been ripped away from her mouth.

Jack was convinced that the scene with the menorah showed the Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, not this place. Yet all the indications were that Reksnys was right to think that the tunnel ahead of them held some clue to Harald Hardrada’s last stand. The location of the temple above the cavern, the depiction of the jungle battle with the river running beneath it, local Maya tradition.

There had been no chance to make contact with the security team, who had been on standby since he and Costas had left in the Zodiac two hours before. Jack knew the Lynx was in the air somewhere offshore, but Ben could do nothing until Jack and Costas found some way of radioing in their co-ordinates and confirming that the situation with Maria was safe enough for an intervention. Jack had given Maria a reassuring look just before he donned his helmet, had been cool and collected as Loki had winched him down the hole. But his mind was in a tumult at the prospect of what might lie ahead, desperately running through the possibilities if they were to return empty-handed. At the moment the options were few, and they were not good.

Costas’ voice came through the intercom. “There’s an underground river running through the bottom of this chamber, about eight metres beneath you. The current’s pretty vicious. Not exactly recommended cave diving conditions.”

“Roger that,” Jack replied, floating on the surface and following the sweep of light below that marked Costas’ progress. He tested his buoyancy compensator and ran a systems check on the computer that controlled his gas supply. They were wearing semi–closed circuit rebreathers, variable mixed-gas systems that enabled them to go to greater depths than either pure oxygen or air would allow. It was a precaution, as they had no expectation that the cave system would exceed the thirty-metre maximum typical of the Yucatán cenotes.

“Remind me about this calcium carbonate stuff,” Jack said.

Costas surfaced beside him, inflating the buoyancy wings on his backpack and adjusting the intercom on his helmet. “Dissolved limestone,” he said. “During the Ice Age, everything here was above water. That’s when the stalagmites and stalactites that are now underwater formed. Then at the end of the Ice Age, the sea level rose and the caves flooded. Leave something above water in one of these caverns, and it’ll get encased in stone. Drop it in the water, and it’ll stay good as new. We’re in fresh water down to about fifteen metres, when you hit salt water.”

Jack looked up at the thin shaft of light streaming in from the ceiling above, to the ugly face he could just make out peering down at them. The rope and sling that had been used to winch them down had now been pulled up again, to await their return. He thought of Maria, and took a deep breath from his rebreather. He gave an okay signal to Costas. “Right. Let’s get going.” They dumped air from their wings and dropped beneath the surface, Jack following Costas just above the current. It was cooler than the sea, justifying their full wetsuits, but refreshing after the torrid heat above. They both wore triple headlamps on their helmets, and the beams revealed an awesome scene as they panned them around. Stalagmites reared up from the base of the cave in clusters, overlying caves and grottoes. The water was crystal clear, as clear as Jack had ever seen, flickering with pastel colours. They dropped down and rode the back of the current, their arms outstretched and their fins extended behind to keep them stable. Seconds later they swept under an overhang into a dark tunnel, leaving the gloomy light of the entrance chamber behind.

“When it’s not raining, this tunnel’s partly above water,” Costas said. “You can see the waterline on the walls beside us, with fresh calcium formations above it. It looks like there’d normally be enough space for a small canoe or raft.”

Costas took out a pencil-size lightstick, cracked it to mix the chemicals and then dropped it into a fissure. Jack watched the green glow disappear behind him, and Costas took out half a dozen more. “I’m assuming we’ll want to come back this way,” he said. “The current’s weak near the ceiling, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Jack rolled over and saw a canopy of rock with none of the telltale ripples from air pockets. They had come at least two hundred metres from the entrance, maybe more. “Any guesses how much farther?” he said.

“I reckon we’re looking for another chamber, somewhere accessible from the entrance chamber. If this tunnel dips below the waterline, we’re on the wrong track.” As Costas spoke, the passageway began to do exactly the opposite, rising up and opening out, and their beams reflected off the underside of a water pool that spread out above them as far as they could see. “Hey presto.”

They surfaced and looked around, awestruck. They were inside another huge cavern, at least fifty metres across, extending in a great dome that reached up to the jungle floor. It was how Jack imagined the sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá had once looked, before the limestone ceiling collapsed. Unlike the entrance chamber, this one was pitch dark, with no visible opening to the surface. They swam slowly across the pool, their lights reflecting off fantastic shapes that dazzled them like sculptures in ice. Stalagmites rose out of the depths like sub-sea volcanic vents, some of them joining stalactites to form continuous columns like the pillars of some great cathedral. They could see the force of nature still at work, rainwater seeping through the limestone ceiling and spattering on the exposed formations, adding another sheen of minerals in a process that had begun thousands of years before human history first touched this place.

In the centre was an island, one that seemed to have been created entirely from calcium accretion. The surface was a bizarre array of shapes which looked like some fantasy citadel. Huge tendrils hung down over it from high above, the fossilised roots of long-dead trees.

As the slope up to the island became visible, Costas dropped down to the bottom, about eight metres below. Suddenly he seemed to be swimming sideways, and Jack saw him grab a stalagmite and pull himself up the slope until the current had released him and he could swim free again.

“That was frightening.” Costas stopped about five metres below Jack, and was catching his breath. “You’d never be able to swim against that. Take a look to your right and you can see where it goes.”

Jack peered across to a point directly opposite the entrance tunnel. He could see a shimmering disturbance where the underwater river swept through the chamber, exiting under an overhang near the base of the cavern about twenty metres away. It was a black hole, a forbidding place with no sign of natural light farther on. Jack realized how close he had come to losing Costas. He closed his eyes and swore to himself. As so often in diving it was the casual decision, the deceptively benign conditions, that nearly had fatal consequences. Jack had not given a second’s thought to Costas’ decision to drop down, yet the danger was as great as any they had faced in the iceberg, or back in the tunnels of Atlantis. And in cave diving there was rarely a second chance, no going back on a wrong move.

“Jack, I’ve found something.” Costas was a little farther upslope, but his upper body was wedged in a fissure. Jack sank down beside him, keeping a wary eye on the current a few metres away. Costas emerged in a cloud of silt and pressed an object at Jack. “Get a hold of that.”

It was a human jawbone. A small one, a child’s. It was brown with age, but perfectly preserved. Costas held the rest of the skull towards him, and Jack could see the eye sockets, the lines where the bones of the cranium had not yet fused. “They’re everywhere,” Costas said. “Hundreds of them.” Jack looked around. Lying in the silt, piled at the base of stalagmites, grimacing out from under overhangs: skulls, limb bones, ribs. He reached into the silt and pulled out a small jade pendant, shaped like the gaping jaw of some mythical beast, like the image of the underworld on the wall painting in the temple. He glanced through the translucent waters at the dark hole where the river disappeared, and felt a sudden chill of certainty.

“Human sacrifice,” he said. “The Toltecs must have lowered themselves and their victims through the hole in the ceiling just as we were, then paddled through into this chamber. This was the edge of their underworld, the closest they could get. When the current was strong, after a storm, they could have thrown their victims into the very maw of the underworld, watched them sucked into that black hole and out of earthly existence. This must have been the ultimate place of sacrifice.”

“We don’t seem to be able to get away from that,” Costas muttered. “I’m beginning to yearn for Vikings again.”

“You may just be in luck.”

“What do you mean?”

“Upslope, about three metres. At the edge of the island.”

It was another skull, larger than the others, with different wear on the teeth. It had been badly crushed, as if the victim had suffered a terrific blow to the face. But it was not the skull that had excited Jack’s interest. It was what it was wearing.

A gilded metal helmet, cone-shaped, with a long nose-guard.

Jack’s heart began to race. He wafted the bottom, raising clouds of silt. Maya pots, intact. More human bones. A shining disc, gold, covered with glyphs. A handle protruding from a gully, covered in gilt wire. A sword handle. Beside it a long wooden haft, a glint of metal at the end.

With mounting excitement Jack drew himself out of the water, Costas beside him. Both men quickly doffed their rebreathers and fins and stashed them on the edge. With their helmets removed they could hear the noise of the cavern, water dripping on the pool, the whoosh of bat wings, eerie sounds magnified and distorted by echo. They clambered up on to a level platform and surveyed the underground island. It was about ten metres in diameter, rising to a cone in the middle, covered in slick accretion. The centre was a gigantic single stalagmite, growing from the cavern floor beneath the ceiling where the fall of leached calcium had been greatest. Around it were stalagmites that had formed more recently as the shape of the ceiling had changed, some of them beneath the calcified tree roots which hung over them in a fantastic shroud.

Jack was carrying a torch, and he swept the beam over the island before placing his hand on the stalagmite nearest to them. It was a peculiar shape, almost seeming to curve above them, on the face of it no more extraordinary than anything else they were seeing around them.

“My God.” Jack’s voice was resonant, echoing.

“What is it?”

Jack stumbled back a few steps, then shone his torch up the stalagmite. He remembered what Jeremy had suggested when they had last spoken. His voice was taut with amazement. “Remember our longship in the ice?”

Costas followed his gaze, puzzled, and then gasped. The top of the stalagmite was a bulbous shape that extended out from the curve. They were looking at the prow of a Viking ship, the details of its surface lost under a millennium of accretion but the shape unmistakable. It was an astonishing sight.

“They must have carried it with them from the longship,” Jack murmured. “Erected it here, a last battle standard.” He shone the torch at the bulbous form on top. “The Eagle.”

“Look on either side,” Costas exclaimed. “I could be wrong, but I think it’s a shield wall.”

Jack saw a line of concretion about a metre high extended in an arc, facing the entrance to the cavern. Costas was right. The ridge was undulating with striking regularity, made up of identical semi-circles each about the width of a man. Three on one side of the stem-post, four on the other. They looked as if they had been iced over. Below them were long, square shapes that could have been timbers, perhaps crossbeams salvaged from the ship. Jack remembered Jeremy telling him about Viking defences built from ship’s timbers. He looked over the wall, to the space behind where the defenders would have made their stand. It was the most astonishing sight of all. Against the rampart was the spectral shape of a man, propped up on his back, limbs spread out. It had been a skeleton, but was covered with such a thick layer of accretion that it seemed to be fleshed out again, like one of the plaster shapes of Roman bodies from Pompeii.

It was wearing a helmet. The conical shape, the nose-guard, just discernible in the accretion. There was a shield, emerging at an angle as if it had been mauled. He had been tall, at least Jack’s height.

Jack stared, transfixed.

Could it be him?

Jack leaned back on the fossilised shield wall, his voice hoarse with emotion. “On the wall-painting, that river below the jungle battle. I think that’s where we are now. And I think this was where the final drama was played out. Harald Hardrada’s last stand.”

“You think the enemy in the painting really were Vikings?”

“The image of the menorah clinches it.”

“So this was as far as Harald got from the sea.”

“Let’s imagine a dozen of them, not many more,” Jack said. “The size of the vanquished army on the painting was probably an exaggeration, a way of making the victory seem greater.” He paused, marshalling his thoughts. “They make their way inland with everything they can bring, their weapons and armour, their treasure, what they can easily salvage and carry from the ship to build a shelter. Much like Cortés and his tiny band of conquistadors hundreds of years later, only with no intention of ever returning.”

“Then they bump into the locals.”

“The Maya are dazzled, think they’re gods, saviours arrived to rescue them from the Toltecs. But word inevitably spreads to the Toltecs, to the overlord in Chichén Itzá. He dispatches an army, there’s a desperate battle in the jungle. The few survivors seek a refuge, a final stronghold. The Alamo, Rorke’s Drift in the British Zulu War. In the Yucatán, if that’s what you want, you go underground. They discover the jungle temple, maybe they’re directed here by the Maya. They make their way down the sacrificial route. They light their way with burning torches, maybe burn their timbers on the island. Viking warriors fully girded for battle, ready to defend their shield wall at the edge of the world, wreathed in fire. But I doubt whether the Toltecs would have been daunted. Once the Toltecs find out and follow them, it’s only a matter of time before they’re overwhelmed.”

“I hope for their sake none of them was taken prisoner.”

“The only one we know about is your friend from L’Anse aux Meadows. Probably a retainer, a servant.

Jeremy told me the Toltecs sometimes took enemy servants as their own slaves, a way of stamping their dominance on the vanquished. You saw it on the wall-painting. Maybe he was a turncoat. Some of the Vikings would have been half crazed, starving. Maybe he told the Toltecs about this place. Maybe his escape years later and voyage back to L’Anse aux Meadows was some kind of atonement. We’ll never know. But he wasn’t the only one to survive. Judging by the painting, several of Harald’s warriors suffered the ultimate horror, taken to Chichén Itzá for sacrifice.”

“With the menorah.”

Jack suddenly remembered the breathtaking image they had seen on the painting, the fiery radiance. “Reksnys is wrong. I’m convinced the menorah isn’t here. The Toltecs may have left the Viking weapons here as some kind of offering, but I think they took the menorah with them from the battle site. We know the Toltecs didn’t offer all of Harald’s treasure to the gods, because we have those two coins incorporated in the jade pendant from L’Anse aux Meadows.”

“Which leaves us with a problem.”

“Reksnys is going to be disappointed.”

“We can’t go back empty-handed,” Costas said. “At best we’d be buying time, but probably not much of it. Chances are we’d be back down that hole again, dead before we hit the water. As Reksnys himself said, Maria was only saved on a whim. As soon as he finds out we don’t have the menorah, he’ll get bored. These people are always like that.” He looked at Jack. “He’ll let his son’s temper run its course.”

“They might try to follow us down here.”

“Loki might. There were a couple of old scuba rigs, gear Reksnys brought along before the chance came to use us, and Loki could easily follow the trail of lightsticks through the tunnel. But if he reaches the stage of going after us like that, he’ll be in a rage. That’d be curtains for Maria.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“We don’t have any choice.”

“These underground river systems always come up somewhere,” Costas said ruefully. “But it could be miles.”

“Could be less.”

Five minutes later they sat fully kitted up in the shallows, their helmet lights switched back on. Their voices sounded tinny and distant throught the intercom after the resonance of the chamber. Costas finished a final check on Jack’s rebreather, then looked at him intently through his visor. “You up for this?”

“All other options are closed. There’s no other exit from the cavern.”

“Okay. We’re looking for natural light, any hint. It’s just after five a.m., so should be dawn pretty soon. We’ll let the current take us. At least we can be sure that’ll come out somewhere. Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

They slipped into the water and dropped down towards the darkness. Once they had made the decision, Jack had not allowed himself to think beyond the practicalities of what they were doing. A few minutes earlier this had seemed like certain death, a one-way express that had nearly finished Costas. Now they were choosing to take it. He stared at the gaping blackness of the tunnel ahead. His mind was blank to the possibility of failure. This place had all the ingredients of his worst nightmare, and the only way to fight the fear was to keep focused. He thought of Maria.

Suddenly they were dragged into the current. Jack was flipped over and struggled to right himself, fleetingly aware of huge speed, of luminous stalagmites appearing and disappearing like giant white sentinels on either side. Then they were in the tunnel, twisting round a bend, blackness all around. The tunnel seemed to meander and turn like a living beast, seeking out a route among the calcite obstructions. They were completely at the mercy of the current, trusting the flow to keep them from crashing into the limestone walls on either side. Jack forced his head forward until his body was in line with the tunnel, Costas to his left, and they both extended their arms in a desperate attempt to use their hands as foils. Bulbous shapes appeared out of nowhere, caught in the beam of their headlamps, then vanished behind them with only inches to spare. Suddenly Jack was aware of a fork ahead, a widening in the tunnel divided by a column, a white pillar they were hurtling towards at terrifying speed.

“The right-hand tunnel!” Costas yelled. “I can see light!”

Jack swerved his hands to the right, craning his body to follow the main flow of the current. It was no use. At the last second he pulled his hands in violently to avoid smashing into the column and they tumbled into the left-hand tunnel, a narrowing pit of darkness with smooth walls like an ice chute. Jack bounced off Costas and felt an excruciating jolt in his thigh, from his injury in the ice. For a terrifying moment he was back inside the berg. “Wrong turn,” Costas yelled. Jack clutched him, could see his face behind his visor, frantic. “This is a side channel. “The main channel was flowing up towards the surface. I saw light.”

The current in the channel began to eddy, then slowed down. Even so it was impossible to swim against, and they were being pulled down inexorably. They clawed at the walls, to no avail. Suddenly everything was distorted, hazy, something Jack had last seen in the icefjord where the freshwater runoff from the glacier had formed a layer above the seawater. The water was shimmering, oily, the change in refraction caused by salinity throwing his senses into disarray. He began to feel disorientated.

“Shit,” Costas exclaimed. “That was the halocline. We’re below sea level.”

It was as if they had passed through into another dimension, into some darker world. The calcium formations were gone now, and the view ahead was bleak, forbidding. The intense, directional beam of light seemed to narrow the shaft, increasing Jack’s unease. The tunnel was elliptical, about five metres across, but the ceiling had lowered and a deep bed of gravel rose up from the floor. They were still going down, their lights boring a hole into the darkness. “Forty metres depth,” Costas said. “The Yucatán cave systems bottom out at about fifty metres, maximum. We’ve got to be going back up soon.” Jack looked at his depth gauge. Forty-six metres. Fifty-two metres. The ceiling and the floor had almost converged, and they were wedged in now, burrowing in the gravel to make space. Then they came to a standstill in a cloud of silt. Jack aimed his headlamp into the slit ahead, a crack only inches above the gravel. It was a dead end. They were trapped.

Costas heaved himself back beside Jack, his rebreather clunking against the ceiling and his body grinding through the gravel. “Something’s not right,” he said. “We were being pulled down by a current, and that’s got to go somewhere. And this gravel pile curves down at the sides, shaped by water movement. There has to be an outlet.”

He pushed himself down the right side of the gravel pile, into a narrow channel at the bottom, and pulled himself ahead until only his fins were showing. Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again, concentrating on little things, like the shape of a fossil in the limestone a few inches from his face. He looked down again to where Costas had disappeared. He could see that the crevasse was free of silt. Swept clear by the current. Costas was right.

“Jack. Follow me.” He did as Costas instructed, digging his hands into the gravel and heaving himself down the side of the tunnel. He felt the flow of water, saw light ahead. “It goes up,” Costas said excitedly. Jack followed slowly, squeezing through a boulder choke. There was hardly any room to move, and he was reduced to wriggling, his rebreather pack clanging against the stone walls. The tunnel beyond was narrower still, like a drainage pipe, smooth and rounded where the current had worn it down but only about three feet in diameter. Jack had never been in a space so narrow. It was beyond claustrophobic. There was no way they could go back, with the current pressing against them, and any blockage in the tunnel now would seal their fate. Costas’ fins were a few feet ahead of him. Jack checked his depth gauge, remained focussed. He stared at the rock inches from his face, then at his depth gauge. Forty-one metres. Thirty-seven metres. They were ascending, slowly but surely. Then the tunnel took a sharp turn upwards and they were in a chamber, a vast space filled with shadowy forms, great columns that towered upwards like white-robed giants, beckoning them up from the underworld. Far above, Jack could see a shimmer of green, distinct from the white beams of their headlights. He closed his eyes again, a wave of relief coursing through him, his heart pounding not with fear but with exhilaration. He rose beside Costas through the chamber, the water so clear that they seemed suspended in midair like figures from some scene of apotheosis. Then they were at the top of the cavern, only ten metres beneath the surface of the water, butting up against a crack in the rock where they could see the light of dawn shining through.

It was not over yet. The crack was a narrow squeeze, barely wide enough for one of them. There was no other exit from the chamber.

“Why does this always seem to happen when I dive with you?” Costas said. “Next time let’s do some open-water diving for a change.”

“If there is a next time.” Jack looked into the black chasm yawning below, then back up into the crack. He could see foliage, the wavering forms of trees overhanging the surface of the water. His heart was still pounding, but no longer with excitement. This was a ridiculous place to die.

“We’ll have to swim for it.” Costas said. “You go first.”

“No way. You’ll have the tighter squeeze, and I can help push you through.”

Costas unstrapped his rebreather and dangled it down beside him. He pulled himself as far as he could into the fissure, about two metres above Jack, then ripped off his helmet and dropped the rig. It went plummeting past Jack, disappearing into the darkness below. Jack pulled himself behind Costas and pushed up against his legs. Nothing happened. Suddenly he felt helpless, appalled that he might watch his friend die only a few metres from the surface, holding his legs. Then Costas kicked hard and erupted upwards. Jack paused to regain his breath, unbuckled his harness and dangled it beside him, took five deep breaths and then ripped off his helmet and dropped the rig. He heaved himself up through the rock, his eyes open to the blurry haze of daylight through the water, and pulled himself through. Another kick of his fins and he surfaced in a slurry of green algae, in a small pool sheltered by fronds of undergrowth.

Costas was panting on the edge of the pool, looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He wiped the slime off his face, submerged his head and shook it violently, then reared up out of the water and offered Jack a hand. “You might want to do the same. Don’t want to terrify the natives.”

After Jack was out and shaking himself off, Costas reached into the top of his wetsuit and extracted a slim metallic device, about the size of a pocket calculator. He tapped the front and pulled out an aerial, bringing the device to his ear.

“Sometimes you’re a surprising bag of tricks,” Jack panted.

“Combined GPS beacon and two-way radio,” Costas said. “All I need to do now is activate the mayday button and Ben’ll have us pinpointed. I can try to establish a radio link and talk to him when we know what the situation is.”

They had surfaced beside a rough jungle track. It was still raining, alternately drizzling and pouring. Costas activated the compass on his device and quickly took a bearing. Ten minutes later they crept up the limestone dome that covered the cenote and approached the overgrown temple. The jeep that had brought them was at the end of the track. Jack saw a boy, a local Maya, playing on the road, but he had not spotted them. They stealthily rounded the building and each took one side of the entrance, their backs flat to the wall, listening. They could hear nothing. Jack could taste the salt of his sweat joining the water on his face. He looked at Costas, nodded. They sidled into the chamber, keeping to the shadows, straining their eyes into the candlelit gloom. There was no sign of Maria or Loki. The only occupant was a man sitting with his back to them on a diving tank, cleaning a pistol. Jack gestured to Costas and returned to the entrance, vigilant. Costas crept up behind Reksnys and put his arm round his throat, clamping his mouth. The pistol dropped with a clatter. Costas drew the man close and spoke with a snarl.

“Now. Where were we?”

TWENTY MINUTES LATER THE NOISE OF RAIN was drowned out by the shuddering roar of the Lynx as it came to a hover overhead, sweeping the jungle floor with its downdraught. Two men were winched down through the dense foliage, followed by a red first-aid crate. Once they were safely on the ground, the Lynx tipped forward and disappeared back into the cloud. Jack ran over from where he had been sheltering to pull the box from the undergrowth and then scrambled over to help Ben.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Ben shouted above the downpour, holstering the pistol he had been holding at the ready. “When Costas radioed in the GPS co-ordinates we were only about three miles from you, flying a search pattern just off the coast. The cover story was an aerial survey for archaeological remains offshore. Jeremy came along as the only archaeologist on board. And because he insisted. You don’t want to fly uninvited into Mexican airspace bristling with weapons, especially at night, so it’s only me and my Glock. But now we’ve found you, the Lynx has gone back for a full security team and we’ve contacted the local police.”

“Loki’s gone,” Jack shouted. “Ordered by his father to follow us down into the cavern. Taken Maria with him. Didn’t trust us. But Reksnys is all yours.”

“I’ll need to do a perimeter sweep, priority. Jeremy’ll have to do prisoner detail.”

Jeremy pushed his way through the undergrowth from where he had landed, his glasses steamed up and kicking off a mass of vines. Jack led them through the tangle and out on to the rough track, then straight into the temple. At the entrance they shook off water and Jeremy wiped his glasses. Inside, Costas stood with the Luger aimed at a form lying gagged and face-down on the ground, his wrists and mouth roughly duct-taped. Jeremy bounded past them to the wall-painting and peered closely at the image of the menorah, now revealed, and at the battle scene. “Vikings,” he enthused, his glasses steaming up again. “You were right. Fantastic. And look. I’m sure that one’s a woman.”

“Time for that later.” Jack nodded to Costas, who gave him the Luger while Ben knelt over Reksnys and re-fastened his wrists with a plastic tie. “Costas needs to help operate the winch, Jeremy.” Jack passed him the pistol. “Can you handle this?”

“Six months in the ROTC at Stanford,” Jeremy said, taking off his glasses again. “A misplaced sense of duty after 9/11. Not really my kind of thing.”

Jack nodded. “Remember who this guy is. Remember what they did to O’Connor and Maria.”

“My grandfather brought one of these back from the war.” Jeremy replaced his glasses and took the Luger, pulling back the breech toggle to check the chamber and then releasing it. He knelt down and shoved the Luger into the small of Reksnys’ back, pulling his head up roughly and leaning behind his ear. “My friend Costas tells me you threatened Maria with this. A long, lingering death.” He pulled Reksnys to his feet and pushed him towards the door, disappearing with him into the rain.

Ben looked at Jack. “I don’t think we’ve got much to worry about there.”

“Okay. I’m going down to get Maria,” Jack said.

“Not alone.”

“No choice. There’s no way we can retrieve the rebreathers now. Reksnys had two scuba rigs here as backup, and Loki’s taken one. It looks like he used the octopus regulator for Maria, allowing her to breathe off the same tank. The rig we’ve been left with doesn’t have an octopus, and anyway the tank doesn’t have enough air in it for us to buddy-breathe to the chamber and back.”

“I could contact the Lynx and have gear airlifted in from the ship.”

“No time. We’ve pushed our luck as it is.” Jack heaved the air cylinder on to his back and clipped together the stabiliser jacket on his chest. “Loki’s already going to be in a rage. He would have been better off staying up here, and he knows it. The guy’s an independent. His father’s an evil bully but an amateur by comparison. Loki’s caught between blindly obeying all the nonsense about the félag and his better instincts. He’s been forced to a place where he’s not in control the way he likes. It’s our chance. But it also means he’s going to be volatile. And I need to act now. I don’t want him to come back into the chamber below us and work out what’s happened. Maria wouldn’t last a second. If she’s still alive.”

“You haven’t got a weapon.”

“I’ll improvise.”

“Torch?”

“Costas and I left chemical lightsticks to mark the route.”

“Good luck.”

Jack grunted as Ben looped the rope under his arms. Costas checked his air and weight belt and then gripped Jack by the shoulders, looking him straight in the eyes. “Battle-luck,” he said.

“Battle-luck.” Jack pulled down his mask, sat on the edge of the hole and then swung himself out over the dark pool far below. Costas and Ben immediately began winching him down. Jack was focussed, his whole being intent on his objective. He hit the water with his regulator in his mouth and immediately began swimming underwater towards the tunnel, following the trail of lightsticks they had dropped just over an hour before. The tunnel seemed less oppressive now, and as he looked ahead he saw the extraordinary luminosity of the calcite walls where they were lit up by the lightsticks, fantastic formations of stalagmites and stalagtites that loomed out of either side like abstract ice sculptures.

Ten minutes after entering the water he saw the pool of light ahead that marked the final chamber. The light was different, more intense than the chemical illumination. He reached the edge of the chamber, the bubbles from his exhaust cascading along the ceiling above him, and cautiously surfaced in a small side chamber just high enough for his head to be out of the water. In the centre of the cavern he could see the bizarre calcium formations of the islet, about twenty metres in front of him. The light was coming from the opposite side of the islet and shone in a wide beam against the ceiling.

The bubbles from his regulator would be a giveaway. For a moment he cursed their decision to ditch the rebreathers in the underwater river. He would have to swim on the surface, hoping not to be spotted.

He took off his mask and clipped it to his jacket, then looked around for something to darken his face, something to absorb the glare if a torch was shone at him. He reached out gingerly and rubbed a flat surface just in front of him. He sniffed his hand, and crinkled his nose. Potassium nitrate. Bat droppings. He took another swipe off the rock and rubbed it all over his face, careful not to make a noise.

He inflated his stabiliser jacket, blowing air into the mouthpiece to avoid the noise of the low-pressure feed from his regulator, then pushed himself off and began to swim slowly towards the outcrop.

When he reached the midway point, he could feel the tug of the underwater river, far stronger now than it had been when he and Costas had decided to follow it. A light swung round and caught his face. He froze. It swung back again, and he resumed swimming. If he was discovered now, he would have no chance. He assumed Loki was armed. Everything depended on surprise.

As he reached the edge of the islet, he heard a voice on the other side, magnified and distorted in the chamber, but unmistakably male. A snarling, menacing tone. Jack slipped off his tank and fins and sidled along to a place he remembered from his earlier dive, where he and Costas had seen the first extraordinary clue. He reached down into the shallows. It came away easily, unencumbered by accretion, as well preserved in the fresh water as the one he had found in the ice. Then he rose from the water, dripping and black in his wetsuit, and pulled the object up with him.

A Varangian battle-axe.

Jack made his way swiftly up the knobbled contours of accretion, thankful he was wearing neoprene boots that gripped the surface well. He passed over the fossilised Viking shield wall, the arching shape of the ship’s stem, the haunting form of the fallen warrior. From the top he looked down on the other side of the islet. Loki was there, no more than ten metres away. He was standing with his back to Jack, straddling Maria, who was lying on her back staring defiantly up. Loki was holding a pistol in his left hand, a Browning Hi-Power. In the other hand he held a blade against Maria’s heart, a sword. It was the Varangian sword Jack and Costas had seen in the water beside the axe.

Jack felt a chill of horror. History had never really stopped in this place. He was witnessing something ingrained in the stone of the Yucatán, impossible to exorcise. A human sacrifice.

With lightning speed Jack swept down on Loki, swinging the axe hard, severing the man’s left arm in one mighty swipe. The pistol flew into the water still grasped in the hand, spinning and disappearing into the blackness. Loki staggered, shocked, then spun round to face Jack, his face a contortion of surprise and rage. The stump was gushing blood. He dropped the sword, staggered, lifted his remaining arm to the scar on his face, then staggered back again, picking up the sword. Suddenly he exploded into action, lunging at Jack in a terrifying blur of speed and flashing metal. Jack was nearly caught off guard, raising the axe only just in time. Steel impacted against steel, clashing, grinding, ringing, a sound not heard here for almost a thousand years. Jack’s body quivered as he parried the blows, but he stood his ground. It was only a matter of time before his opponent would falter. Loki was already too weak to stop his body from following through the swing of the sword, lurching, swivelling as he struggled to regain his balance. He stood back again, in a frenzy of pain, snivelling and panting, goading Jack with the point of the sword, staggering back farther towards the edge of the water.

Loki’s rage had cast the shadow of his own downfall. He could have remained on the surface with his father, let his mind rule, retained his lethal efficiency.

Jack weighed the haft in his hands, just as he had done once before, when another long-handled, single-bitted axe had saved their lives in the iceberg.

Battle-luck.

He reared up and took two strides forward. As he swung the axe he thought he saw runes flashing in front of him, runes where Halfdan’s name had been on the other axe, runes that began with the same Norse letter.

The battle-axe of a mighty king. Thunderbolt of the North.

The axe came slicing through the air and struck Loki on the side of the head, then spun off from Jack’s hands and cartwheeled into the water above the underground river. Loki’s head jerked back and then sprang forward, like a marionette. For a horrifying moment he seemed uninjured. Then the scar on his face parted, split wide open through his eye socket. Jack could see jawbones and teeth, grimacing horribly like the sculpted skulls at Chichén Itzá. Then there was blood, thick, oozing drops that splattered on to the rock below.

Loki took one step forward, then slipped on the blood, falling heavily into the water with a crash, taking the sword with him. For a moment he was suspended in mid-water, one eye staring blindly towards Jack, still alive, clawing weakly for the surface. Then he dropped deeper and the current took him, dragging him down into the darkness, out of sight, sucked into the underworld.

Loki was gone.

Jack slid down beside Maria and they lay by the edge of the pool. He was shaking with adrenaline aftershock. She clung fiercely to him. The commotion in the water died away, and the only sound was dripping rainwater percolating through from above, the sound magnified in the cavern but soothingly rhythmic after the echoing clash of steel. As Jack’s shaking subsided, Maria stared into the crystalline water inches from her face. She reached in and pulled something out, a smooth chip of rock free of accretion. They could see marks on its surface, scratches. They both sat up. “It’s a runestone,” Maria whispered.

“Can you read it?”

“It’s crude, rushed,” Maria murmured. “Like the last entry in the diary of a doomed expedition.”

“Try.” Jack sounded exhausted, his voice barely a whisper.

Maria paused, muttered a few words to herself, then read it out loud. “Only Ulf, Finn and Halldor are left. The Scraelings have taken the outer chamber. Thor protect us. Hann til ragnarøks.”

Jack felt stripped of emotion, too drained to respond. All he could do was reach out and touch the dripping stone.

“Maybe Harald himself scratched this, his last act before the Toltecs were upon him,” Maria said. “It was Stamford Bridge all over again, only this time it truly was the end.” She looked back at the spectral shapes on the platform behind her, then towards the blackness in the water where Loki had disappeared. She gave an involuntary shiver. “They got as far as they humanly could, right to the entrance of the underworld.”

“I can feel what they felt,” Jack murmured. “We’re on the edge of the spirit world here, the very boundary. Something wants me to go down that passageway, to follow Loki. It’s like a malign force drawing me in, willing me to frame the challenge. I feel as close to Harald here as I’ve ever felt, really close.” Jack looked around at the flickering shadows on the cavern walls, then shook himself and raised Loki’s air tank from where it had been left by the edge of the water, attaching it to Maria’s back. “And I know this is not a place we want to be.”

“It’s not over yet,” Maria said.

“You’ve got plenty of air. There’s a line of lights back to the entrance. Piece of cake. I’ll be right behind you.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

Jack gave her shoulder straps a final tug. He splashed water on his face to rub off the black mess and sat down beside her. Maria began to talk, slowly at first, hesitantly, then in full flow, as if she were telling something she had never told before but had rehearsed countless times in her mind. Over the next few minutes Jack heard a story more awful than he could ever have imagined, a story that made the monsters of the underworld seem as potent as they had to the Vikings, that seemed to shape the lurking malevolence of this place into a force too evil to leave unchallenged.

Twenty minutes later Jack heaved himself out of the well-hole into the painted chamber. Costas squatted in front of him, breathless after operating the winch. Maria sat dripping on the stone floor a few metres away. Despite the heat she was shivering slightly, and Costas passed her a towel and an IMU jacket along with a bottle of water. As soon as he saw she was safe, Jack swivelled round and addressed Costas.

“What’s our status?”

“The Mexicans are here,” Costas panted. “Two guys in a jeep about ten minutes ago. They’re judiciales, plain-clothed guys. Pretty unsavoury if you ask me. They said a helicopter is on its way. Apparently all this tract is Reksnys’ territory, but we’re well away from his main compound. It doesn’t look like he trusted any of his own security people to be out here. A few locals live in the jungle, Maya, but they’re on our side. As soon as more police arrive and the Lynx returns from Seaquest II with a full security team, we can relax. Ben’s doing a wide perimeter sweep as we talk.”

Jack jerked his head towards the hole. “You probably gathered our friend Loki won’t be joining us.”

Costas raised his eyebrows. “Permanently?”

“He’s gone for a cave-diving endurance record. Without air.”

“The Toltec underworld,” Costas said quietly. “Not a place I’d want to spend eternity.”

Jack drew Costas aside and huddled with him in the gloom at the rear of the chamber, talking intently. Costas occasionally looked at Maria, his expression increasingly grim. After a few minutes Jack gestured for her to join them. Costas passed her something wrapped in a cloth, which she checked and quickly concealed inside her jacket.

Jeremy suddenly appeared at the entrance, breathless and frantic. “Quick. For God’s sake. Reksnys has escaped. He’s got a local kid. He’s threatening to kill him.”

“How the hell…”

“The Mexican police cut him loose, then they both vanished, did a runner.”

“Shit.”

There was a sudden commotion outside and Reksnys appeared, pushing a boy of about five, the distraught parents pleading in Spanish behind him. Jeremy forced them back out and Reksnys marched in holding a leather belt round the boy’s neck. He paraded in front of them, his head held high and sneering, then dragged the boy like an animal to the centre of the chamber.

“I can break his little neck in a second. Just like that.” He snapped the fingers of his free hand. He seemed to forget his audience, and spoke with almost childish glee. Suddenly he looked around. “Where’s my son?”

“Went for a swim.”

Reksnys failed to take in what Costas had said, and drew the boy towards him. “¿Cómo te llamas?”

The boy was too terror-stricken to reply.

Reksnys jerked the boy up towards his face. “¿Cómo te llamas?”

The boy whispered tearfully, “Daniel.”

“Daniel.” Reksnys let the boy drop and then jerked him back against him, the belt held tight around his neck. “Interesting name for a Maya. When I was his age, I knew some little boys with that name. Daniel, Doron, Menachem. And there were some little girls with them too. But not for long.” Reksnys sneered again, then eyed Maria suspiciously as she detached herself from the others and took a few steps to the wall, to the place where she had recovered consciousness after her nightmare trip from Iona. She stood facing Reksnys, her legs slightly apart.

“I think,” she said, “you once found it a lot easier using this.”

Slowly, deliberately, she raised the Luger and aimed it at Reksnys’ head, both hands clasping the butt, her left index finger brushing the trigger.

Jeremy stared at Maria, shocked.

Reksnys sneered again. “You don’t know how to use that.”

She flipped down the safety catch on the left side of the frame. “Oh yes I do.”

“It’s not loaded.”

“Jack?” Maria said, not moving her eyes.

Jack pulled out a small box with the words NINE MILLIMETRE PARABELLUM printed on one side and showed the half-empty interior. “We found these in your pocket,” he said. “Remember?”

Reksnys was contemptuous. “Put the gun down or the boy dies.”

Maria began to recite words she had memorized when she was a child. “Operational Situation Report USSR, Number 129a,” she said quietly. “Einsatzgruppe D. Location: Nikolayev, Ukraine. Addendum to Report Number 129 concerning the activity of the Einsatzkommandos in freeing places of Jews and finishing off partisan groups. SS-Sturmbannführer Andrius Reksnys personally executed 341 Jews. Revised total for the last two weeks: 32,108.”

There was a stunned silence. Maria kept the Luger levelled at Reksnys’ head. He remained stock still, staring at her with cold loathing, the belt taut and shimmering against the boy’s neck.

“May the fourteenth, 1943,” Maria continued. “A beautiful spring morning. The flowers were up everywhere, the birds singing. The last in line in front of the ditch were a young family, a father and a pregnant mother and four small children. Do you remember? Your father let you finish the little ones.”

“Impossible.” Reksnys spat out the word, looking conspiratorially at the others. “This woman is mad. There were no witnesses. There never were.”

“It was your first batch,” Maria continued matter-of-factly. “You were not very experienced with the Luger. Three days later the youngest child crawled out from among the bodies, a bullet lodged in her skull. A sweet little girl, weeping and helpless in the spring sunshine.” Tears were coursing down Maria’s cheeks, but her voice was unwavering. “A German Wehrmacht soldier found her, took pity on her. She stayed with his unit all the way back to Berlin, looked after by the Germans, men disgusted by what the SS had done. When they were all killed in action she was rescued by a British soldier. Years later she married a Spanish diplomat, had a daughter of her own. Last spring I took her back to Nikolayev, to lie once again in that lovely meadow, to be with her brothers and sisters, her beloved mama and papa. She said they had been missing her, had been desperate to find and protect her.” Maria swallowed hard, blinking away the tears but staring unflinchingly down the barrel. “That little girl was my mother.”

“Nonsense.” Reksnys jerked the boy towards him, his eyes flitting to and fro, his voice suddenly demented and high-pitched. “Don’t believe a word she says. She is a Jew.”

The room was deathly silent. Reksnys suddenly looked unnerved, began to shake, his face pale and dripping sweat. He pushed the boy away. Jack grabbed him and bundled him towards the entranceway. Reksnys staggered and then stood upright, attempting to regain his composure. “You have the boy.” He passed his shaking hands over his hair, greasing it back. He was struggling to make his voice seem normal again, to sound conciliatory. “Now is the time to end this nonsense. You have what you want. The police will never pin anything on me. We can all walk away. Where is my son?”

“On a one-way trip to hell,” Costas said.

“Where is my son?” Reksnys was uncomprehending, his eyes bloodshot and staring, panic-stricken. There was another silence, and he looked frantically from one face to another, then staggered sideways. “No.”

Maria aimed down the barrel, slowly, deliberately, all the time keeping it levelled at his head. Her voice was cold, clinical. “Kneel down. Face the wall.”

Reksnys lost all control. He fell to his knees, his lips shaking, his eyes transfixed with terror. A dark patch appeared on his trousers and spread down his legs. “No. I beg you. Not this.”

“I am a Jew.” Maria spoke quietly.

There was a deafening crack. Reksnys’ head snapped backwards and he fell on the floor, convulsing. A gush of blood arched out. For a moment he was conscious, his eyes wide open, his legs jerking horribly. Then he was still. The spatter of blood on the wall began to drip down, rivulets of crimson that picked out the faded colours of the sacrifical scene, trickling to join the blood pooling on the floor below.

Reksnys began to move again. They stared aghast. He seemed to be convulsing, jerking like a rag doll, moving towards Maria. She dropped the gun and collapsed, seemingly paralysed. Jack grabbed her, pulling her away. Suddenly the ground shook violently. Jack could barely register what was happening. Then he remembered. Chichén Itzá. The earth tremor a few days before. Reksnys hadn’t come alive again. Earthquake. A crack appeared in the wall, tearing apart the painting. An ear-splitting cacophony rumbled up from the cavern below. Jack was aware of a frantic rush to the entrance, of dragging Maria outside, of seeing the waters rise in a great surge behind him and recede back into the cavernous hole that was left where the temple had been.

Later he watched as Maria opened her eyes. He saw the water dripping on her face; saw sunlight streaming in through the tangled canopy above, heard birds screeching. He breathed in deep, savouring the draught of cool, clean air that followed the rain. He thought of Maria’s mother, of O’Connor.

It was over.

IT’S TWENTY-THREE METRES FROM THE EDGE OF THE platform to the water surface, give or take a few centimetres. We’ll need to rig a pretty elaborate gantry to get the machinery operational.”

“If they could do it in the 1950s, we can do it now. I’ll trust your ingenuity.”

“As it happens, I’ve designed just the thing.”

Costas pulled out a large blueprint from a cardboard tube and unrolled it on the hot limestone, pinning down one corner with the laser rangefinder he had been holding. Jack resigned himself to a detailed technical exposition, but then was saved by the appearance of Jeremy and Maria at the end of the processional way.

“Lunch.” Jeremy vaulted down the rock carrying a cooler, then ducked under the tarpaulin they had rigged against the sun. It had been two full days since the storm had abated, and the air still felt cleansed and fresh, but that morning the heat had returned with a vengeance and the humidity was stifling.

Jeremy opened the cooler and laid out the food and drink on the table as Jack came up. Costas was grumbling to himself but gave up at the sight of food and rolled up his blueprint. They sat down, with Maria leaning on the rock behind them.

“What have you got for me this time?” Costas said. “Some Toltec delicacy? Pickled human heart perhaps?”

Jeremy spoke between mouthfuls. “Nope. Just good old Mexican.” He turned to Jack. “Tourists back this afternoon.” He swallowed, and took a swig of water. “The tremor that hit us in the jungle barely even registered here, so they think it’s safe. Too damn hot to work here anyway.” He tore off another chunk of bread and gestured at the deep pit of the Well of Sacrifice, below the platform where Jack and Costas had been standing. “We really going to do this?”

“Later this year,” Jack said. “I’m sure there’s some fabulous stuff still down there.”

“I’ve got it all worked out.” Costas was gleaming with sweat under his panama hat, his mouth full of food. “Come over when you’ve finished and I’ll show you.”

“I’d love to see Harald’s last stand, the stuff you guys found,” Jeremy said. “Back in the other cenote.”

“I don’t think so,” Jack murmured. “The entrance is blocked by hundreds of tons of stone, and in the other direction you’d be fighting an impossible current. We’ve found Harald’s last battle, his Ragnarøk, and that’s enough. Something tells me I’d be pushing my battle-luck to go back there again.”

“It’s a dark place.” Maria shivered. “You don’t want to go there.”

“It’s just a bunch of stalagmites anyway,” Costas said.

Jeremy peered dubiously at the green surface of the sinkhole in front of them. “If you’re thinking of sending me down into this one as an alternative, count me out. This place spooks me enough as it is.”

“You can at least come along on the expedition as food-bearer.”

“Maria?” Jeremy craned his neck over the table to look at her. “The Hereford library, I mean. Can I have leaves of absence in my contract?”

Maria put down her water bottle and gave a tired smile. Jack had been watching her carefully from the other side of the table. She had been asleep or resting almost the entire time since Reksnys’ death. The medical team on Seaquest II had treated the abrasion on her face, which was now covered in white gauze. There would be no scar, which would have been an appalling legacy. Psychologically was another matter. Jack knew from his own experience that the loss of O’Connor would hit her hardest when she was back on home turf, with time to reflect. And two days before, Maria had stood with a gun aimed at the head of the man who had ordered that murder and who had traumatised her long before she had met O’Connor. Jack had seen her in a new light since she had revealed the terrible truth of her family’s past. He had met her mother years ago, when he and Maria were students together, had assumed she was Sephardic like Maria’s father, had never guessed. Like many Holocaust survivors, her mother had found some way of locking the horror away in her memory, had only let it overwhelm her when she knew she was dying. It explained Maria’s strength, but also her restlessness, her reluctance to commit herself to anyone. Exposing a trauma she had internalised all her life would change her. The showdown with Reksnys had brought some measure of closure, bringing her own blood feud to an end, but it had been a shocking experience and had taken its toll on her. Fortunately the Mexican police had been all too happy to change sides when they saw who was winning, and Maria had been hailed a hero for saving the little boy’s life. Only Jack and Costas and Jeremy had witnessed the final scene.

Maria gazed at Jeremy. “The job’s got your name on it, but any more time with these IMU guys and you’ll be hooked for good.” She gave him another tired smile and then looked across at Jack. “What’s the latest on the menorah?”

“I’ve been thinking about the symmetry of history,” Jack replied.

Costas gave an alarmed look and straightened himself. “Oh no. Philosophy. Time I got back to my blueprints.”

“No. Wait. It’s important, maybe the key to the whole story.” Costas sat down heavily while Jack marshalled his thoughts. “It came to me when I saw that painting of the Toltec procession to the Well of Sacrifice, so incredibly similar to the Roman procession a thousand years before on the Arch of Titus. Think of all the different places we know the menorah has been, all the different cultures. The supreme symbol of the Jewish people, second only to the Ark of the Covenant. Then it’s snatched by the Roman emperors and becomes a prestige item for them as well. Then the Byzantines. Then Harald Hardrada and the Vikings. Each time it could have been melted down, but it wasn’t. For the Romans it was a symbol of conquest, of superiority. For the Byzantines it was one of the hoarded treasures that linked them back to the old Rome, to the old virtues. For Harald Hardrada it was a symbol of his personal prowess and then became something more mystical, almost a talisman. By then its original Jewish significance was lost, but it still had almost supernatural meaning, the power to shape men’s destinies.”

Costas had been listening intently. “The Fourth Crusade, the sack of Constantinople,” he said. “That’s it. All that stuff we were looking for, the ancient works of art. Some of it had prestige value like you said, transformed into a different culture. The Horses of St. Mark’s in Venice, originally an ancient sculpture but then the symbol of a medieval city-state, something its makers could never have dreamed possible.”

“You get my drift.”

“And the other stuff, the works of art ditched in the Golden Horn. No prestige value.”

“Or symbolism that was dangerous, unwanted. For the Crusaders, like the Vatican, the symbolic power of the menorah had come full circle, back to its Jewish origins. That’s why we thought there was a chance of finding it in the Golden Horn.”

“So after the Vikings we move on to the Toltecs,” Costas said. “I see what you’re driving at.”

“The Toltecs were big on symbols of victory, symbols of prowess and dominance,” Jack said. “Really big. Just look at the architecture of this place, the sculpture. And they loved their gold. Maybe they didn’t offer the menorah to the gods at the end of that procession but stashed it away, something to be brought out only for the most sacred ceremonies. Think about the emperor Vespasian a thousand years before, the triumphal procession in the Roman Forum. Like the Toltecs he sacrificed his prisoners of war, the Jewish captives. He could have sacrificed their treasure too, melted it down to make a king’s ransom in coin. Instead he locked it away in the Temple of Peace.”

“The Temple of the Warriors,” Jeremy murmured. “That was the most sacred place of the Toltecs, but it sure wasn’t a temple of peace. It was more like Wewelsburg Castle in Bavaria, the headquarters of the SS.”

“Not exactly what Vespasian had in mind,” Maria said.

Costas was nodding enthusiastically. “Thinking outside the box. I like it.”

“See?” Jack grinned. “Not much different from engineering. You have your plodders, and you have your geniuses.”

“I take it you’re referring to Jeremy.”

Maria was still deep in thought. “So when the Toltecs die out, the menorah vanishes from history, just as we used to think it did at the end of the Roman Empire,” she said.

“The trail goes cold,” Jack agreed.

“Any leads?”

Jack looked at Jeremy, who gazed back blankly and then suddenly looked distracted. He delved with his free hand into a satchel on the table and pulled out a book. “What you were saying. I’ve just had a brainstorm. It’s something else I found when I was looking for clues in the Maya texts. I couldn’t think of a link when I read it, but it’s suddenly dawned on me. It’s possible, just possible.”

“Not again.” Costas looked at Jeremy with mock horror. “You’re not going to spring another secret society on us.”

“Have no fear.” Jeremy finished his bread and wiped his mouth, then took a gulp of water. “Remember how it took the Spanish years to conquer the Yucatán, a lot longer than central Mexico? The Yucatán was the first place Cortés landed, but he didn’t stick around long.”

“No gold,” Costas offered.

“Right. But he may have missed his cue there, maybe missed the biggest treasure of them all.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

“You won’t believe this, but the last of the Maya kings wasn’t conquered until 1697. That’s 1697,” Jeremy emphasised. “And he was a direct descendant of the kings of this place, of Chichén Itzá.”

Jack looked stunned. “That’s almost two centuries after Cortés!”

“I thought Chichén Itzá was already destroyed, abandoned before the Spanish arrived,” Costas interjected.

“Several decades before Cortés, in the fifteenth century.” Jeremy nodded. “The Toltecs were already long gone, imploded in some awful bloodbath two centuries before. They were replaced by a more civilized Maya dynasty called the Itzá, the people who gave their name to the place. What happened here in the final days is shrouded in mystery, but when the Maya finally abandoned the temples, they left here forever, disappeared into the jungle and wandered around for years like the lost tribes of Israel.”

“Maybe they had a collective breakdown,” Costas mused. “Centuries living in a horrifying vortex of violence, all that terror and sacrifice taking its toll. They finally cracked.”

Jeremy laughed. “Well, whatever happened, they eventually made their way to Lake Petén, more than four hundred kilometres south in what’s now Guatemala. Impenetrable jungle, as far away from the Spanish as you could get. They paddled across to a remote island and established a new city, Tah Itzá. They lasted there for generations, undisturbed and unknown except to a few missionaries. Tah Itzá came to have a mystical reputation among the Spanish. To some it was a terrifying jungle stronghold, a bastion of fierce warriors who practised satanic rituals, a hell on earth. To others it was a place of untold riches that could only be reached after great hardship, a kind of Maya Shangri-La, or Avalon.”

“Back to King Arthur again,” Costas murmured. “I doubt whether Tennyson would have ever dreamt of putting his Avalon in the Mexican jungle.”

“They could have had their treasure with them,” Jack murmured. “They may have been a vanquished people, a shadow of their former glory, but they would have salvaged what they could from Chichén Itzá. Like the Israelites, they would have kept with them their most sacred possessions, their greatest wealth.”

“Maybe they associated the menorah with the eagle-god, with the return of the king,” Maria said. “That reference Jeremy found in the Book of Chilam Balam suggests the Maya had some memory of Harald and the Vikings. Remember what Reksnys said about the local Maya today, their reluctance to go down into the cenote below the temple. Maybe Harald was transformed into a kind of mythical saviour god, fighting for the Maya against their Toltec oppressors. Maybe two hundred years after Harald met his end some intrepid Maya salvaged the menorah from the Toltec inferno, and it passed into yet another culture.”

“If they hadn’t already sacrificed it,” Jack said.

“Or melted it down.”

“What we know comes from a manuscript revealed in Mexico only recently, in the late 1980s,” Jeremy continued. “It’s an incredible story, the account of a Franciscan friar, Fray Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola, who reached Tah Itzá in 1695. Avendaño was a man of exceptional intellect and physical stamina, with great moral strength and sense of purpose. He became fascinated by the people he was sent to convert, as concerned with their livelihood as with proselytising. The early missionaries get a bad press out here, but without scholars like Avendaño we’d know virtually nothing of these people, and whole populations would have become extinct. Father O’Connor was part of that tradition.”

“I wonder if Patrick knew anything about this,” Maria murmured.

Jeremy opened the book. “According to his own account, Avendaño arrived that year on the shore of Lake Petén accompanied by two Franciscans and ten converted Maya. From the east, across the lake, they saw a spectacular sight.” Jeremy read out a passage. “A great wedge-shaped flotilla of canoes, all of them adorned with many flowers and playing much music with sticks and drums and wooden flutes. And seated in one larger than all was the king of the Itzá, who was the Lord Kanek, which means the star twenty serpent.”

“Sounds awesome,” Costas murmured. “Any gold?”

“What Avendaño saw was every Spaniard’s fantasy about the New World, the kind of thing the conquistadors sold their souls for two centuries before but rarely ever saw. You can tell Avendaño was overwhelmed. His instincts as a Jesuit were clouded by that lust that drove the Spaniards to conquest, like a shark smelling blood.”

Jack smiled. “Go on.”

“The last of the Maya kings came before them. Listen to this. He wore a crown of gold, and gold discs in his ears from which golden pendants hung down to his shoulders. He had bands of pure gold on his arms and golden finger-rings, and his blue sandals were covered with golden bells.”

Costas whistled. “He was weighed down with gold.”

Jeremy shut the book. “Avendaño failed to convert the Itzá. Two years later the city fell to Spanish arms.”

“You say they brought their treasure with them from Chichén Itzá?” Costas said.

“That’s the story.”

“That’s an awful lot of gold, for a vanquished people.”

“Just a thought.”

Jack was nodding slowly. “If the Maya were so secretive about their sacred texts, those books of Chilam Balam that prophesised the arrival of bearded men from the east, then they could have concealed untold other treasures. With the Spanish hunting everywhere for gold, an island stronghold on a lake set deep in the jungle sounds about right.”

“And maybe it was just gold, pure and simple,” Costas said. “All that prestige value, all the meaning the menorah had for the hated Toltecs, had fallen away. Once the Maya reached their hideaway, maybe they melted it down.”

“And then it comes full circle,” Maria said softly.

“What do you mean?” Costas said.

“Think about it. The Spanish conquer the last stronghold of the Itzá. They finally get their Maya gold. Only it isn’t Maya gold at all. And what do they do with it? They’re hardly going to sit on their jackpot in the jungle.”

“They send it home,” Jeremy said.

“They melt it down again, they coin it, they send it back in the treasure fleets to Cadiz and Seville,” Maria said. “Hundreds of pounds of gold, a spectacular bounty. It goes straight into the coffers of the Spanish king. And to the other great power behind the conquistadors.”

“The Catholic Church,” Jack murmured. “And some of that wealth filters back to the powerhouse of the Church, to the Vatican in Rome.”

“Hang on,” Costas said. “You’re losing me again.”

“Don’t you see?” Maria’s eyes were alight. “If we’re correct, the menorah was never lost at all. Three hundred years ago, the gold first cast in sacred form in ancient Israel returned to the lands of its earliest heritage, re-formed as bullion and as holy artefacts for a new world order. Maybe it was staring us in the face all that time, in the gilded splendours of St. Peter’s, in the golden reliquaries of the Vatican treasury, in countless embellishments and artefacts in churches around Christendom that received largesse from the mother Church.”

“And maybe some of it even found its way back to Jerusalem,” Jeremy said. “Remember the saga of Harald Hardrada, offering gifts of treasure to the Shrine of Christ in Jerusalem? The story that climaxed with the Crusades, of western involvement in the Holy Land, wasn’t all one of plunder and greed. Maybe, just maybe, some of the gold of the Itzá found its way back in recent centuries to the shadow of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and is still there today.”

Costas suddenly looked crestfallen, and glanced at his blueprint on the rock beside the cenote. “My sub-bottom borer. All my plans. Are we saying what I think we’re saying?”

“All this is just guesswork,” Maria murmured.

“And we have nothing to prove Harald even got here,” Costas said. “The wall-painting’s gone, the site of Harald’s last stand entombed forever. Nobody would believe us.”

“We’ve got this.” Maria removed the smooth chip of stone from her shorts pocket, the runestone she had found inside the cenote.

“It doesn’t actually mention Harald,” Costas said. “And the stone’s not local, it looks like a schist they probably picked up at L’Anse aux Meadows.”

“But we know,” Maria said.

“I’ll go with the Maya theory.” Jeremy was still reflecting on the menorah. “Better than trying to work out what to do with the menorah if we found it.”

Jack got up, walked over to the sacrificial platform and peered down at the impenetrable green of the water. Then he turned his back on the cenote and unclipped a radio receiver from his belt. “The menorah may be in the Well of Sacrifice after all. Or we may have reached the end of the road. But before I even think about another project, I’ve got a small debt to pay to an old friend. Something to do with battle-luck.” He glanced at Maria. “And we need to get out of here.”

FOUR DAYS LATER, JACK WAS CROUCHED NEAR THE stern of Seaquest II, muffling his ears against the churning of the ship’s wake as he took a call from Maurice Hiebermeyer in Istanbul. After a few moments struggling to hear he got up and walked back to where Costas was standing beside Maria and Jeremy, who were sitting on a bench behind the ship’s helipad.

“I read you.” Jack pressed the receiver against his ear. “Set it all out and I’ll see you in the Golden Horn tomorrow evening. And thanks for taking over the excavation, Maurice. Great work. I owe you one. Out.”

Jack snapped shut the radio receiver and weaved his way around the lines that had been laid on the deck to secure the Lynx helicopter after its arrival. Seaquest II was heading back to the Arctic to resume the scientific project at Ilulissat icefjord, and several of the scientists who had disembarked during their diversion to the Caribbean were being flown back on board. The ship was now less than a hundred nautical miles east of Newfoundland, and the final helicopter shuttle was due in later that afternoon. Apart from a deep swell, the sea was settled and the sky was clear, but as they ploughed their way north there was a chill in the air that seemed more pronounced after their days in the fetid jungle of the Yucatán. Maria and Jeremy were both wearing IMU anoraks and were huddled behind the bulwark out of the wind.

“That was Maurice Hiebermeyer,” Jack said. “It’s great news. They’ve finally got artefacts dumped after the siege of Constantinople in 1204.”

“Crusader gold?” Costas said hopefully.

Jack grinned. “A colossal gilt bronze statue of the emperor Vespasian, with a dedicatory inscription showing it had originally been set up in the Forum of Peace in Rome after the Jewish triumph. It’s not exactly what we had in mind, but then archaeology’s like that.”

“It’s what I wanted to hear.” Costas sighed contentedly. “My sub-bottom borer has come up trumps. Anyway, as I recall there was quite a list of items looted from the Jewish Temple other than the menorah. We’ll find them. Just have faith in IMU technology.”

“That might have to go on the back burner for a while,” Jack said. “Maurice had been itching to tell me about a find from the Egyptian desert since we came back from Atlantis, and I finally relented. It’s incredible.”

“Not another papyrus,” Costas said. “The last one got us into enough trouble.”

“This one’s Roman,” Jack said. “Just a scrap, but it holds a fantastic clue.”

“Another treasure hunt?”

“Ever heard of Alexander the Great?”

Costas saw the familiar gleam in Jack’s eye. “Okay. My kind of archaeology. You can count me in. Just no icebergs.”

“Deal.” Jack grinned and turned to Maria and Jeremy, but his expression changed as he saw Maria’s downcast face. “I’ve been meaning to ask, Maria,” he said gently. “Your Ukrainian heritage. I know the Jewish population were Ashkenazi, but any hint of anything farther back? I mean, I’m just trying to understand your passion for the Vikings.”

Maria lightened up and gave Jack a sad smile. “After I put my mother to rest last year, I spent a few days in Kiev, went to the Cathedral of Santa Sofia and studied the famous wall-paintings. The kings and queens who ruled Kiev in the Viking age, traders and warriors who came down the rivers in longships from the north. Blond, bearded, impossibly tall, the very image of Harald Hardrada and his court.”

“Varangians,” Jack murmured. “The Rus.”

“Before my mother died, she told me something of her family for the first time. A story of intermarriage far back in our past, of family legend that had us descended from Rus nobility.”

“Thought so.” Jack smiled.

“Looks like I’m the only one here who doesn’t have a drop of Viking blood,” Costas said.

“Don’t count on it. Halfdan’s inscription of Hagia Sofia isn’t the only evidence of Vikings in that neck of the woods. There’s another runic inscription on an ancient sculpture in Athens. It looks like Harald and his boys had some fun in Greece too. They got pretty well everywhere.”

Costas was looking at a map he had sketched of their adventure. “In the western hemisphere, anyway.”

Jack was serious again. “I also just spoke to the IMU security chief in the UK,” he said, addressing all three of them. “As a precaution, just before she was taken by Loki, Maria emailed the penultimate draft of the dossier she was helping O’Connor prepare to the IMU security chief. As we speak Interpol are instigating a number of high-profile arrests. Apparently the félag were heavily involved in international crime, money laundering, drugs and arms, the antiquities black market. One of them was even implicated in an audacious robbery at the Roman site of Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples, right under the noses of the Italian authorities. It looks like our friend Reksnys wasn’t the only one using the power of the félag to line his own pockets.”

“Seems a long way from the heroic ideals of Harald Hardrada,” Costas murmured.

“The modern félag had nothing to do with that.” Jeremy’s voice had an edge to it. “They were a criminal organisation, pure and simple. They had about as much historical legitimacy as the Nazis.”

“Apparently the dossier you and O’Connor compiled was crucial, the missing link that allowed Interpol to tie all these characters together,” Jack said to Maria. “And now that they’re implicated in murder, I don’t think we’ll be hearing from the félag for a good while.”

“What about that shadowy character in the Vatican?” Costas said.

Jack nodded, and a flicker of concern passed over his face. “That’s the one exception, I’m afraid. Reksnys nearly gave it away when he was boasting about his informers back in the chamber, but he stopped himself. O’Connor suspected who it was but wanted to be certain before telling us. His murder cut that short. That was Loki’s one small victory. But whoever it is, you can be assured he’ll be covering his tracks right now, keeping a squeaky-clean profile until the investigation dies down. Meanwhile we might uncover more in O’Connor’s records, some clue to who it is.”

“I’m going back to Iona to finish the job.” Maria’s eyes had clouded, and she forced a smile through her tears. “At least Father O’Connor kept his honour to the end. You remember what he said about the Vikings? Your fate is predetermined, so what matters is your conduct in life, your uncompromising behaviour. So you can enter Valhalla and stand alongside the gods at the final battle of Ragnarøk knowing you have kept your honour and that of your brethren intact.”

“He was one Hardrada would have been pleased to have had alongside him,” Jeremy said.

“Such a waste.” Maria looked down again, her voice hoarse with emotion. “All that knowledge, all that humanity.”

“Scholarship is about continuity,” Jack said gently, putting his hand on her shoulder. “About passing on wisdom to the next generation, knowing it can provide the basis for new discoveries, revelations you can hardly guess at.” He glanced at Jeremy. “I think Father O’Connor did that.”

“Speaking of which.” Jeremy looked at Jack with a sudden burst of enthusiasm, and patted a package resting on his knees. “I had this flown in via Goose Bay in Labrador on the last helicopter shuttle. I wanted to see the real thing with my own eyes before telling you.”

Jack smiled warmly. “I thought we hadn’t heard the last from you.”

“You remember that afternoon with the old Inuit, when we talked about the disappearance of the Greenland Norse in the fourteenth century? That haunting final account, about how the Scraelings had taken the entire western settlement?”

“Go on.”

“The Hereford library has really come up trumps. Big time.” Jeremy clutched the package, his face flushed with excitement. “It’s what Norse scholars have dreamt of for years, a discovery as fabulous as any of Harald’s lost treasure. Found dumped with all the rest of the old stuff in that abandoned staircase.”

“Let’s hear it,” Jack said.

Jeremy stripped the bubble wrap from the package and revealed the hoary leather binding of an old book. “It’s phenomenal.” He turned to Maria. “The lost saga of the western Greenland settlement, Vestribygδa Saga. Written down in the fourteenth century.”

Maria drew in her breath with sudden excitement and peered over Jeremy’s shoulder as he carefully opened the medieval codex to the final page.

“Does it give any details of what happened?” Costas asked.

“It certainly does.” Maria had been scanning the lines while Jeremy was talking. “By now you should be pretty familiar with this.” She pointed at two words in the centre of the page, and Costas peered down. “Haraldi konungi, our true king,” Maria said. “Harald Sigurdsson.”

Costas whistled. “Harald Hardrada! The Norse Greenlanders remembered, almost three centuries after he left!”

“And check out the symbol after his name.”

“Don’t tell me. The menorah.” Costas grinned as they all peered at the symbol like a rune among the Latin letters of the text. “We seem to have come full circle. Constantinople, Iona, the icefjord and Vinland, the Yucatán and now back to the musty old cathedral library that started it all.”

“This closes one loop, but then leads off somewhere fantastic,” Jeremy said. “Wait till you hear what the text says.”

Maria translated slowly as she traced her finger along the lines. “Anno Domini 1332. The leaders of the Vestribygδ determined to follow their true king Harald Sigurdsson to the Norδrseta, and across the sea to the west.” She looked up. “They were fleeing Church oppression, like the Crusader tax imposed on them in the twelfth century. The Norse Greenlanders were pagans at heart. To them Harald Hardrada was their true king, not some distant pontiff in Rome.”

“So where did they go?” Costas asked.

Maria continued, her finger farther down the page. “North to the great icefjord where Halfdan the Fearless set forth in his ship to Valhalla.”

“Good God,” Jack murmured. “It actually mentions Halfdan and the longship.” He glanced over at Costas. “The iceberg wasn’t just a dream after all.”

“Nightmare, more like.”

“They numbered one hundred and twenty people, men, women and children, and after packing their ships with provisions they set off northwest, never to be seen again. They were led by Erling Sighvatsson, Bjarni Thordarson and Endridi Oddsson.”

“I know those names,” Maria said excitedly. “They’re on the Kingigtorssuaq runestone, found on an island north of the icefjord. The only other runestone found in Greenland until the longship discovery.”

“Sometimes the pieces really do all fall together!” Jack murmured, shaking his head in wonder.

“So you’re saying Bjarni and these characters led the refugees from Greenland towards the Northwest Passage?” Costas said.

“That’s what the saga implies.”

“Any chance they made it?”

“No reason why not,” Jack said. “They were the hardiest seafarers ever. Look at where Harald and his depleted crew got to after Stamford Bridge. They almost circumnavigated the western hemisphere. If the passages through from Baffin Bay to the Beaufort Sea had been free of ice in the summer of 1333, then the Greenlanders could have made it.”

“Vikings in the Pacific in the fourteenth century,” Jeremy mused. “So much for ancient Chinese voyages of discovery. The Vikings would have to take the cake.”

“I think you might want to get some of your anthropology colleagues out there to run a few DNA tests,” Costas murmured.

“It’s a fantastic thought,” Jack said. “All along we’ve been seeking Harald himself, his treasure. But maybe his greatest legacy was the survival of these people, the people in all the Norse world who were closest to his ways. His brief passage through their land may have been the beacon of light that saved them from a miserable end all those years later.”

“If that was his legacy, I can’t help thinking it would have satisfied him as much as any of his great victories,” Maria said, looking at Jack. “A way of ensuring that the best of his people lived heroic lives with honour to the end.”

Jeremy closed the book and slipped it into its protective wrapping, and then he and Maria stood up between Jack and Costas. For a moment all four of them stared out over the stern to the east, where the rays of the afternoon sun were playing far out across the swell of the Atlantic. To Jack the distant horizon of the Old World seemed to beckon him back, heavy with the radiance of history, yet the shores of the New World and the seas beyond now had an allure he would never have dreamt possible only a few days before. His mind flashed back to the Golden Horn in Constantinople, and a surge of excitement coursed through him as he thought of all they had done.

Costas was holding the jade pendant they had found with the skeleton under the cairn, and was peering at the two silver coins mounted in the eyes. After a moment he looked up at Jack, his expression slightly bemused. “So this is all we get of Harald Hardrada’s treasure?”

“One Viking coin, one Roman.” Jack’s face creased in a smile. “I think that’s pretty good, don’t you? By themselves no more than dislocated fragments of history, but together they tell a fantastic story, something I never would have believed possible before all this. We found Harald’s treasure all right. Those coins are worth all the gold in the world.”

“One final question,” Costas said. “The Byzantine princess, Harald’s other treasure from Constantinople. Maria’s namesake. Do you think she really was with him to the end? I fancy her surviving, becoming a fearsome queen of the Toltecs. That would certainly add some spice to history.”

“As if we needed spice after all this,” Jeremy said.

“You thought you saw a woman on the wall-painting, a Viking,” Costas said to Jeremy, who suddenly nodded as he remembered.

“For me, it’s the legend of the Valkyries,” Maria said. “Female riders from the spirit world who chose the slain in battle for Valhalla and then served them in the great feasting hall. I think Maria stayed with Harald to the end, a warrior princess, his thole-companion. She would have accompanied him to the afterlife. It was the Viking way. I think she’s up there now, feasting alongside him with the rest of his noble fellowship, the true félag.”

“Maria, Queen of the Valkyries,” Costas said, deadpan. “From what I’ve seen, it suits you.”

Jack grinned. “Time we sent someone else to join them.”

The ship had been slowing down and was now motionless in the water, the last tendrils of its wake sloughing off in the swell to the south. The captain came clattering down the gangway from the bridge and joined them on the deck. “We’re in position, Jack,” he said. “Any time.”

Jack nodded, looked appraisingly out to sea and then turned to a blanket-wrapped shape on the deck behind him. He carefully unrolled it and a dazzling object came into view. It was the mighty Varangian war axe they had taken from the longship, Halfdan’s prized weapon that had saved Jack and Costas from certain death in the ice. It was the first time Jack had held the axe since they had been winched away from their ordeal, and he felt a tingle down his spine as he clasped the oak haft and raised the gilded steel of the bit until it was level with his head. He slowly turned it from side to side, revealing the pendant shape of Thor’s hammer, Mjöllnir, with the wolf’s head in the apex, and above it the double-headed eagle of Rome and Constantinople, all picked out in gold. On the other side he brought his hand against the runic symbols of Halfdan himself, marks made a thousand years ago when Halfdan had served his beloved leader in the glory days of the Varangian Guard, in the greatest city the world had ever seen.

The others moved wordlessly towards Jack and clasped their hands around the shaft. “Battle-luck,” Costas said.

“Battle-luck,” Jack repeated quietly.

Jack’s mind flashed back to the Golden Horn, to the extraordinary adventure that had brought them here. He thought again of Father O’Connor, of all he had done to keep the dark side of history at bay, of the terrible price he had paid.

A sea mist had begun to swirl around them, cutting off the ship and the grey swell from the outside world, as if they had been caught in a time warp. Just over the horizon to the west lay Vinland, the farthest outpost of the Vikings. For a fleeting moment Jack thought he saw the ghostly stern of a longship slipping into the mist, its curving stern carved in the snarling form they had seen in the ice. It was as if they were poised at the place where reality became myth, where the Viking world ended and the spirit world began, a journey into darkness and terror more awful than Harald and his men could ever have imagined.

Jack weighed the axe in his hands, then raised the cold steel and brushed it against his lips. Somewhere near here the last remnant of the iceberg would release Halfdan and his longship into the flow, the same stream that had taken his beloved king to the final showdown at the end of time. Halfdan would need to be girded well, fitted to stand proud alongside the companions of the battles he had fought when the Varangians had no equal in the world of men.

Jack paced forward and with one graceful movement lowered the axe-head behind him and swung the haft high in the air, releasing it at the last moment as the weight pulled him forward. The axe arched high over the stern and began to tumble, catching a sunbeam through the mist and disappearing in a dazzling tumult of light. It was like a wayward bolt of lighting, a swirling flash of energy from the Age of Heroes. Then it sliced into the sea and was gone, leaving only the barest of ripples, soon lost in the swell. Jack felt strangely light-headed, as if a weight had been lifted from his soul, and he leaned against the stern railing and gazed at the grey surface of the sea as the others came up alongside. He found himself mouthing the hallowed words of Old Norse, words that had lost their sinister overtones and spoke of a history more extraordinary than he could ever have imagined.

“Hann til ragnarøks.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Menorah.

THE MAGNIFICENT GOLD LAMPSTAND FROM THE JEWISH Temple in Jerusalem, looted by the Romans in AD 70, remains one of the greatest lost treasures of history, ranked alongside the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant. The only known depiction of the Temple menorah is on the Arch of Titus in Rome. The triumphal procession shown on the arch is vividly described by Josephus, a Jewish eyewitness and confidant of the emperor Vespasian. Among the spoils of the Temple was a lampstand made of gold: “Affixed to a pedestal was a central shaft, from which there extended slender branches, arranged trident-fashion, a wrought lamp being attached to the extremity of each branch; of these there were seven, indicating the honour paid to that number by the Jews” (Jewish War VII, 149–50). Josephus says little about the fate of the Jewish prisoners—he only describes the execution of their leader, Simon—but he affirms that some of the spoils, at least, survived being melted down: in his new Temple of Peace, Vespasian “laid up the vessels of gold from the Temple of the Jews, on which he prided himself” (VII, 161–62). Other treasure provided bullion for the famous “Judaea Capta” coins, the obverse showing a vanquished female Judaea beneath a Roman standard, above the word IVDAEA.

There are no further eyewitness descriptions of the Temple menorah. However, compelling evidence that it survived—perhaps removed to a secret chamber, such as one actually discovered in the Arch of Titus itself—is provided by the historian Procopius (ca. AD 500–62), in his firsthand account of the spoils taken by the Byzantine general Belisarius when he defeated the Vandals at Carthage in AD 534. They included objects looted by the Vandal king Giseric when he sacked Rome in AD 455, “the treasures of the Jews, which Titus, the son of Vespasian, together with certain others, had brought to Rome after the capture of Jerusalem” (History of the Wars IV, ix, 5–10). According to Procopius, Belisarius brought the treasures to Constantinople—present-day Istanbul—and displayed them in the Hippodrome for the emperor Justinian. Procopius then claims that a Jew persuaded Justinian to return them to “the sanctuaries of the Christians in Jerusalem.” The fact that Procopius describes the arrival of the treasures in Constantinople suggests that the account is authentic, as many of his intended readers would themselves have witnessed the triumph, but his story of their return to Jerusalem seems implausible and a typical embellishment to highlight Justinian’s Christian virtues. There is no credible evidence that the menorah was ever again in Jerusalem after AD 70–71.

The Fourth Crusade.

The lost treasures of the Jewish Temple may therefore have survived hidden away in Constantinople into the medieval period. The survival of many other antiquities in the city is attested by the list of objects destroyed or looted by the Crusaders in 1204, including the famous quadriga, shipped to Venice to become the Horses of St. Mark’s. Some of the Crusaders would already have been on pilgrimages to Rome, and it is possible that their leader, Baldwin of Flanders, had seen the extraordinary image on the Arch of Titus and had read Procopius. Contemporary accounts of the sack of Constantinople are overlain by pious justifications, but the truth may be that the allure of loot proved too great, and Baldwin desperately needed to find a way to pay the Venetians for shipping his Crusaders towards the Holy Land.

Harald Hardrada.

Whether the Jewish treasures survived in Constantinople as late as 1204 is an open question. A century and a half before the Fourth Crusade, the fabled Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor had been led by the towering figure of Harald Sigurdsson, known to history as Hardrada, “hard-ruler,” “the ruthless.” Harald was a Viking mercenary, the exiled son of a king of Norway who would return to claim the throne and become the most feared of all the Norse warlords. During his years with the Varangians he became a latter-day Belisarius, campaigning for the emperor in Sicily and North Africa and amassing a huge personal fortune. To the Saracens he was “Thunderbolt from the North,” and he succeeded where the Fourth Crusade would not: he entered Jerusalem, pacified the Holy Land, bathed in the river Jordan and gave treasure to the shrine at Christ’s grave. The expedition to Jerusalem probably took place in 1036 or 1037, making Harald Hardrada the first and most successful of all the Crusaders, albeit on behalf of the Byzantine emperor rather than the Church in the West.

Back in Constantinople, Harald was allowed to take part in palace-plunder, helping himself to treasure as a reward for his endeavours. One night in 1042 he kidnapped the empress Zoe’s niece Maria—whom he had wished to marry, but been refused by her aunt—and escaped with his Varangian companions in two ships over the great chain that bound the entrance to the Golden Horn, the harbour of Constantinople. The sole account of this escapade has Maria being returned to the city once they were safely out, but perhaps she did accompany Harald back to Norway and through the rest of his extraordinary life, including his marriage to the Kievan princess Elizabeth and his relationship with at least one other woman, Thora, which produced his son and heir, Olaf. According to his biography, Harald had a “daughter,” oddly enough called Maria, who accompanied him on his last voyage and supposedly died suddenly “on the very day and at the very hour that her father had been killed” (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 98).

Almost everything we know about Harald Hardrada comes from the Heimskringla, an account of the Norse kings written in the early thirteenth century by the Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). Eagle and wolf imagery abound in the passages of verse included in the text. The Heimskringla and a few sentences in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provide virtually all we know of the Battle of Stamford Bridge near York, where a Norwegian army under Harald was defeated on 25 September 1066 by the English King Harold Godwinsson, who in turn was defeated a few weeks later by the Normans. Stamford Bridge was a catastrophe for the Norse and to many signalled the end of the Viking Age; of some three hundred ships that had sailed to England, only twenty-four are said to have returned. The last description of Harald Hardrada alive is of him fighting “two-handed” in the thick of the battle, perhaps wielding a great battle-axe of the Varangians, surrounded by his loyal bodyguard.

Two of Harald’s Varangian companions who escaped with him from Constantinople were Halldor and Ulf, both Icelanders. Another may have been Halfdan—perhaps even Harald’s brother of this name—whose runic graffito can be seen on a balustrade inside the church of Hagia Sofia in Istanbul. Fragments of the chain that crossed the Golden Horn still exist. Elsewhere evidence for Harald’s exploits is elusive, but there is enough to give substance to the life recounted in the Heimskringla. In Jerusalem, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I have seen a cross carved in the rock that seemed to have the shape of Mjøllnir, Thor’s hammer, a symbol that remained potent for the Norse under Christian domination as far away as Iceland and Greenland, kept alive along with all the legends of Loki and Fenrir and Valhalla.

The Mappa Mundi.

The wonderful thirteenth-century map described in Chapter 2 can be seen today in a purpose-built museum next to Hereford Cathedral, alongside the famous chained library. When I first visited the cathedral as a boy, the library was still in the muniment room above the north transept aisle, where archives and treasures were stored at the time the map was drawn. The apparent absence of a spiral staircase in the northeast corner of the transept leading up to the gallery has always struck me as odd, so that is where I have placed the fictional discovery in this book. Richard of Holdingham was a true historical character, named in the lower left-hand corner of the map, though very little is known of his life. I have imagined him “apprenticed” in the fictional félag to Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, also a true-life character. Richard’s absence at the dedication of the map is indicated by the mis-labelling of Europe and Africa, a glaring error that a scholar of his calibre would surely never have tolerated.

A félag, or fellowship, was a Viking institution, and could be a band of warriors owing allegiance to a lord, bound by oaths of loyalty. Sworn enemies could suffer the dreaded blódörn, the “blood-eagle.” Snorri Sturluson, thirteenth-century biographer of the Norse kings, described how one victim had an eagle carved on his back by an enemy, who “stuck his sword into the body next to the spine, cut away all the ribs down to the loins, and dragged out his lungs.” The idea of a secret félag in medieval England is based on the antipathy of the English towards their Norman overlords, and on the Norse heritage which remained strong in parts of Britain where the Vikings had settled. One area where this influence was clearest was the western isles of Scotland, and today on the holy isle of Iona you can see the gravestones of Viking lords among the early Christian relics of the monastery.

The fascination of the Nazis with the Vikings is well known. The ultimate Nazi félag was the SS, complete with the infamous double-sig runic insignia. The mission of the SS became the subjugation of eastern Europe, of the lands once ruled by the Viking kings of Rus and Kiev, where the activities of the SS Einsatzgruppen—some of their members locally recruited—included the murder of over a million Ukrainian Jews. The Einsatzgruppen “Operational Situation Report USSR No. 129a” quoted in Chapters 12 and 20, is a fictional addendum to true-life Report No. 129, with the wording changed only to include mention of the fictional Reksnys and his death toll. The Nazi atrocity in this novel is based on my visit to the ravine of Babi Yar in Kiev, where thousands of Jewish families were stripped and shot, and on images and eyewitness accounts in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War in Kiev. Today Babi Yar is a beautiful children’s park, surmounted by a giant stone sculpture of the menorah.

The SS Ahnenerbe, the “Department of Ancestral Heritage,” existed as described in this novel. In recent years, extraordinary new evidence has come to light concerning Ahnenerbe activities in the 1930s, including expeditions to South America and Tibet, where Nazi scientists carried out craniological measurements. They believed that remote populations might preserve evidence of an Aryan master race, one they associated with the legend of Atlantis and the bizarre Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory. Heinrich Himmler, architect of the SS, believed that the Aryan birthplace was Iceland, and Ahnenerbe expeditions were sent there in 1936 and 1938. The Ahnenerbe expedition to Ilulissat in this novel is fictional, as are its two members, but Greenland is only one step from Iceland, and Himmler would undoubtedly have been intrigued by the accounts of the famous Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen and his studies of Inuit culture.

The Ilulissat icefjord, a UNESCO World Heritage site along with L’Anse aux Meadows and Chichén Itzá, may provide one of the clearest indications of global warming today, and has been extensively studied by glaciologists and climatologists. The ancient Inuit site of Sermermiut, “the place of the glacier people,” exists as described in this novel, along with Kællingekløften, “suicide gorge.” The description of the iceberg is based on my own experience at the Ilulissat icefjord and diving under ice in Canadian waters. Divers have entered natural fissures inside icebergs, and the technology exists for the kind of penetration described in this novel.

Timbers, textiles and gilded metal can survive almost indefinitely in ice. The idea that a Norse warrior might be preserved in this way came from the extraordinarily well-preserved bodies of two members of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to the Canadian Arctic in 1845, exhumed from permafrost on Beechey Island in 1984. For the Norse, ship burials were a well-established funerary rite. The burning of a ship is famously described by the tenth-century Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan, who witnessed the funeral of a Rus chieftain on the river Volga in which a woman joined her lord on the pyre. Snorri Sturluson gives us another account in which a burning ship filled with weapons and bodies was cast out to sea after a battle, carrying with it the mortally wounded Viking lord who had supervised the construction of his own funerary pyre.

The image of the ship in the ice is drawn from the spectacular Gokstad and Oseberg ship burials in Norway, though Harald’s fictional ship would have been a more practical design. According to Snorri Sturluson, the two ships in which Harald escaped from Constantinople were “Varangian galleys,” oared longships (King Harald’s Saga, Heimskringla 15). The best evidence for Viking ship types comes from almost exactly the date of the fictional voyage in this novel, from a group of vessels sunk in the 1070s near Skuldelev, in Denmark, to restrict the entrance to Roskilde Fjord. One was a robust, deep-hulled vessel suitable for open ocean sailing. The feasibility of Norse voyages to the Americas has been amply demonstrated by modern experiments, including the sailing of replica ships to L’Anse aux Meadows to celebrate the thousandth anniversary of the arrival of Leif Eiriksson in the New World.

The northernmost Viking settlement in Greenland was Vestribygδ, the “western settlement,” located some five hundred miles south of the Ilulissat icefjord. However, the region of the icefjord and farther north, Norδrseta, was frequented by the Norse and vital to their economy. The only runestone found in Greenland comes from the island of Kingigtorssuaq, almost four hundred miles north of the icefjord, and can be seen today in the museum at nearby Upernavik. It was placed in a cairn by three Norse adventurers—Erling, Bjarne and Eindride—probably in the early fourteenth century. My own explorations along this coast suggest that remote sites may contain further evidence of Norse activity. It is an extraordinary fact that Norse hunters in this extreme environment—seeking walrus ivory, whale, polar bear hides and narwhal tusk, the “unicorn horn” seen on medieval maps—helped to pay for the Crusades, through a tax imposed after the Norwegian king Sigurd Jorsalfar, “The Crusader,” established an episcopal see in Greenland in 1124. The Church exerted a tenacious hold over the Greenlanders, and the impossibility of paying Church taxes may well have been a factor in the disappearance of the Norse from Greenland by the fifteenth century.

There can be little doubt that Norse explorers sailed around Baffin Bay and into Lancaster Sound, the beginning of the Northwest Passage to the Beaufort Sea and the Pacific Ocean. A scattering of Norse artefacts has been found across the Canadian Arctic, some undoubtedly taken by Inuit from abandoned Norse settlements in Greenland but others reflecting Norse contact and exploration. No Viking ship has yet been found in these waters, but an extraordinary discovery close to the polar ice cap may suggest a shipwreck. At tiny Scraeling Island, a barren rock off Ellesmere Island—some eight hundred miles north of Ilulissat—an Inuit site has yielded more than fifty Norse artefacts, including woollen cloth, fragments of chain mail, ship rivets, knife and spear blades, a carpenter’s plane, fragments of wooden barrel and a gaming piece. Radiocarbon analysis suggests a date towards the end of the Norse period in Greenland, similar to the Kingigtorssuaq runestone. A comparison can be made with Franklin’s overwintering site at Beechey Island during his attempt to discover the Northwest Passage in 1845. Despite the “Little Ice Age” of the medieval period, analysis of ice cores from Greenland suggests that there were warm spells—one in the early fourteenth century—when the waters between the islands of the Canadian Arctic may have been clear. The possibility must remain open that the Vikings discovered the Northwest Passage, backtracking along the route taken by the first Inuit hunters, and that the last Norse to abandon Greenland went this way.

What is certain is that the Vikings sailed over a thousand miles southwest from Greenland to establish the first known European settlement on the shores of North America, at a place they called Vinland—perhaps “Land of Meadows” rather than “Land of Vines,” as has commonly been assumed—almost five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. Their main interest was probably timber, which was almost completely lacking in Greenland. The site at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, identified by many as Leifsbúδir in the Norse sagas, is one of the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time. “Great Sacred Isle” may have been a navigational way-marker—there are cairns on the mainland that may be Norse, and the story of the keel set up on the cape at Kjalarnes comes from Erik’s Saga—though no evidence has yet been found. Today the site at L’Anse aux Meadows is maintained by Parks Canada, and you can visit the reconstructed longhouse next to the site of three dwellings and a smithy excavated during the 1960s. The evidence indicates a short-lived settlement established about AD 1000. The story of Freydis and her murderous rampage comes from Erik’s Saga and the Greenlanders’ Saga, the two Viking written sources on Vinland, and it could be that the pall cast by this event dissuaded the Norse from continuing the settlement, along with the threat of attack from Scraelings—“wretches,” the native Indians—and the easier availability of timber along the coast of Labrador to the north.

The only authenticated Norse artefact discovered in the Americas south of L’Anse aux Meadows is a worn silver coin excavated from an Indian site beside Penobscot Bay in Maine. It has been identified as a Norwegian coin of King Olaf, Harald Hardrada’s son and successor who had been with him in England in 1066, and it may date to the very year of the fictional voyage in this novel. No Viking coins have been found at L’Anse aux Meadows or in Greenland, and how this coin came to be lost almost a thousand miles beyond the farthest known Viking settlement is a mystery.

There is no evidence that seafarers from across the Atlantic reached the shores of the Yucatán in Mexico before the Spanish in the early sixteenth century. However, the Maya prophet Chilam Balam, “Jaguar Prophet,” is said to have foretold the arrival of “bearded men, the men of the east.” The Books of Chilam Balam were mainly written down after the Spanish conquest, leading some to speculate that the prophecy was a later embellishment, but the possibility remains that it was genuine and based on a memory of foreigners who had arrived before the Spanish. Only one group of “bearded men, men of the east” are known to have visited the New World before the fifteenth century, and they were the Norse; and the evidence suggests that Norse exploration west and south of Greenland reached its greatest extent during the eleventh century.

The fictional jungle temple with its wall-painting is based on a remarkable discovery in 1946 by two American adventurers in the Yucatán, at a place which became known as Bonampak, Maya for “painted walls.” Inside an overgrown corbelled building they found a narrative wall-painting of extraordinary power, showing a jungle battle, the torture and execution of prisoners and victory celebrations, including white-robed Maya ladies drawing blood from their own tongues. The painting dates from the height of the Maya period, about AD 800, but another painting, in the Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá, dates from the time when the Toltecs swept into power in the eleventh century. It shows canoe-borne Toltec warriors reconnoitering the Maya coast, a great pitched battle on land and the heart-sacrifice of the captured Maya leaders.

If you visit the ruins of Chichén Itzá today, you are likely to be told that the stories of human sacrifice were exaggerated by the Spanish or relate only to the Toltecs, not the Maya, whose descendants still occupy the Yucatán. You can reach your own conclusion at the Tzompantli, the Platform of the Skulls, where you can look past the sculpted rows of decapitated heads towards the sacrificial altar on the Temple of the Warriors and then gaze down the ceremonial way to the Sacred Cenote, the Well of Sacrifice. Many of the depictions of torture and execution in Maya and Aztec art pre-date the arrival of the Spanish, and the latest techniques of forensic science are, almost literally, adding flesh to the picture: archaeologists in Mexico have discovered that the floors of Aztec temples are soaked with iron, albumen and genetic material consistent with human blood.

In the Yucatán, the most telling evidence comes from underwater archaeology. The Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, dredged between 1904 and 1911 and excavated by divers in the 1960s, contained hundreds of human skeletons—men, women and children—as well as a treasure trove of artefacts: gold discs, carved jade pendants, a human skull made into an incense burner, a sacrificial knife, numerous votive wooden figurines and other offerings. The story is similar at other cenotes in the Yucatán, including several in the ring of sinkholes that formed over a huge meteorite impact site close to the north coast. Many of these cenotes remain unexcavated and are vulnerable to looters. The fictional cenote in this book is based on my own experience exploring these sites, and especially diving in the spectacular caverns and passageways of Dos Ojos, “Bat Cave,” near the Maya coastal stronghold of Tulum.

The story of the last days of the Maya kings, almost two centuries after the Spanish conquest, is based on the account of Father Andrés de Avendaño y Loyola (Relation of two trips to Petén, made for the conversion of the heathen Ytzaex and Cehaches), who was eyewitness to this extraordinary scene beside the remote jungle lake of Petén in 1695 or 1696. A further fragment of this account came to light in the 1980s, and is quoted in Chapter 21. The true source of Maya gold, as described by Avendaño and found by archaeologists in the Well of Sacrifice at Chichén Itzá, remains a mystery.

The quote at the beginning of the book is from Josephus, Jewish War VII, 148–62, translated from the Greek by H. St. J. Thackeray (Loeb Edition, Harvard University Press). Old French quoted in Chapter 2 is the actual inscription visible in the lower left-hand corner of the Hereford Mappa Mundi. The Bible quote in Chapter 4 is an abridgement of Exodus 25: 31–40, King James Version. In Chapter 5, the two quotes from King Harald’s Saga, part of the Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson, were translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Pálsson (Penguin, 1966). The poetry in Chapter 13 is from Morte d’Arthur by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92). In Chapter 15, the sentence in Old Norse describing Harald’s sea voyage is fictional, but the phrases that make it up are taken verbatim from the thirteenth century Eirik’s Saga, describing the Norse voyages to Vinland. The Old Norse phrase par liggr hann til ragnarøks, “there he lies until the end of the world,” comes from the poetic Edda (Gylfaginning 34) also by the prolific Snorri Sturluson, written down some time in the early thirteenth century.

The two silver coins described in Chapter 15—and one of them in the Prologue—truly exist, and can be seen along with other images from this book at www.davidgibbins.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A native of Canada, at the age of fifteen David Gibbins dived on his first shipwreck in the Great Lakes. He has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a PhD from Cambridge University, he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.

For centuries, people have speculated about the fabled lost libraries of antiquity. If one were found, what marvels would it contain? Now, a fearless team of adventurers is about to unearth that long-hidden secret, and it will lead them to the most astonishing discovery ever made…

THE LAST
GOSPEL

David Gibbins

Coming from Dell in February 2008

READ ON FOR AN EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEEK!

THE LAST GOSPEL

On sale in February 2008

Jack Howard eased himself down on the floor of the inflatable boat, his back resting on one pontoon and his legs leaning against the outboard engine. It was hot, almost too hot to move, and the sweat had begun to trickle down his face. The sun had burned through the morning haze and was bearing down relentlessly, reflecting blindingly off the cliff face in front of him, the limestone scarred and worn like the tombs and temples on the rocky headland beyond. Jack felt as if he were in a painting by Seurat, as if the air had fragmented into a myriad of pixels that immobilized all thought and action, that caught him in the moment. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, took in the utter stillness, the smell of wetsuits, the outboard engine, the taste of salt. It was everything he loved, distilled to its essence. It felt good.

He opened his eyes and peered over the side, checking the orange buoy he had released a few minutes before. The sea was glassy smooth, with only a slight swell rippling the edge where it lapped against the rock face. He reached out and put his hand on the surface, letting it float for a moment until the swell enveloped it. The water below was limpid, as clear as a swimming pool, and he could see far down the anchor line into the depths, to the shimmer of exhaust bubbles rising from the divers below. It was hard to believe this had once been a place of unimaginable fury, of nature at her cruelest, of untold human tragedy. The most famous shipwreck in history. Jack hardly dared think of it. For twenty years he had wanted to come back to this place, an itch which had nagged at him and become a gnawing obsession, ever since his first doubt, since he had first begun to reassemble the pieces. It was an intuition that had rarely failed him, tried and tested over years of exploration and discovery around the world. Intuition based on hard science, on an accumulation of facts that had begun to point unswervingly in one direction.

He had been sitting here, off Capo Murro di Porco in the heart of the Mediterranean, when he had first dreamed up the International Maritime University. Twenty years ago he had been on a shoestring budget, leading a group of students driven by their passion for diving and archaeology, with equipment cobbled together and jerry-built on the spot. Now he had a multi-million-dollar budget, a sprawling campus on his family estate in southern England, museums around the world, state-of-the-art research vessels, an extraordinary team at IMU who took the logistics out of his hands. But in some ways little had changed. No end of money could buy the clues that led to the greatest discoveries, the extraordinary treasures that made it all worthwhile. Twenty years ago they had been following a tantalizing account left by Captain Cousteau’s divers, intrepid explorers at the dawn of shipwreck archaeology, and here he was again, floating above the same site with the same battered old diary in his hands. The key ingredients were still the same, the hunches, the gut feeling, the thrill of discovery, that moment when all the elements suddenly came together, the adrenaline rush like no other.

Jack shifted, pushing his diving suit farther down around his waist, and checked his watch. He was itching to get wet. There was a slight commotion as the divers pulled the buoy underwater, and he could see it refracted five metres below, deep enough to avoid the props of passing boats but shallow enough for a free diver to retrieve a weighted line that hung from it as a mooring point. Jack had already dared to look ahead, had begun to eye the site like a field commander planning an assault. Seaquest could anchor in a sheltered bay around the cape to the west. On the headland itself the rocky seashore dropped in a series of stepped shelves, good for a shore camp. He rehearsed all the ingredients of a successful underwater excavation, knowing that each site produced its fresh crop of challenges. Any finds they made would have to go to the archaeological museum in Syracuse, but he was sure the Sicilian authorities would make a good show of it. IMU would establish a permanent liaison with their own museum at Carthage, perhaps even an air shuttle as a package trip for tourists. They could hardly go wrong.

Jack peered down, checked his watch again, then noted the time in the logbook. The two divers were at the decompression stop. Twenty minutes to go. He leaned back, made himself relax and take in the perfect tranquility of the scene for a moment longer. Only three weeks earlier he had stood by the edge of an underwater cavern in the Yucatan, drained but exhilarated at the end of another extraordinary trail of discovery. There had been losses, grievous losses, and Jack had spent much of the voyage home ruminating on those who had paid the ultimate price. His boyhood friend Peter Howe, missing in the Black Sea. And now Father O’Connor, an ally for all too brief a time, whose appalling death had brought home the reality of what they were ranged against. Always it was the bigger stake that provided the solace, the innumerable lives that could have been lost had they not relentlessly pursued their goal. Jack had become used to the greatest archaeological prizes coming at a cost, gifts from the past that unleashed forces in the present that few could imagine existed. But here, he felt sure of it, here it was different. Here it was archaeology pure and simple, a revelation that could only thrill and beguile any who came to know of it.

He peered into the glassy stillness of the sea, saw the rocky cliff face underwater disappear into the shimmering blue. His mind was racing, his heart pounding with excitement. Could this be it? Could this be the most famous shipwreck of all antiquity? The shipwreck of St. Paul?

“You there?”

Jack raised his foot and gently prodded the other form in the boat. It wobbled, then grunted. Costas Kazantzakis was about a foot shorter than Jack but built like an ox, a legacy of generations of Greek sailors and sponge-fishermen. Like Jack he was stripped to the waist, and his barrel chest was glistening with sweat. He seemed to have become part of the boat, his legs extended on the pontoon in front of Jack and his head nestled in a mess of towels at the bow. His mouth was slightly open and he was wearing a pair of wraparound fluorescent sunglasses, a hilarious fashion accessory on such an unkempt figure. One hand was dangling in the water, holding the hoses that led down to the regulators at the decompression stop, and the other hand was draped over the valve of the oxygen cylinder that lay down the center of the boat. Jack grinned affectionately at his friend. Costas was always there to lend a hand, even when he was dead to the world. Jack kicked him again. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. I can see them at the safety stop.”

Costas grunted again, and Jack passed over a water bottle. “Drink as much as you can. We don’t want to get the bends.”

“Good on you, mate.” Costas had learned a few comically misplaced catchphrases in his years based at the IMU headquarters in England, but the delivery was still resolutely New York. He reached over and took the water, and proceeded to down half the bottle noisily.

“Cool shades, by the way,” Jack said.

“Jeremy gave them to me,” Costas gasped. “A parting present when we got back from the Yucatan. I was moved.”

“You’re not serious.”

“I’m not sure if he was. Anyway, they work.” Costas pulled them down again, passed back the bottle then slumped back. “Been touching base with your past?”

“Only the good bits.”

“Any decent engineers? I mean, on your team back then?”

“We’re talking Cambridge University, remember. One guy took a portable blackboard with him everywhere he went, would patiently explain the Wankel rotary engine to any passing Sicilian. A real eccentric. But that was before you came along.”

“With a dose of good-old American know-how. At least at MIT they taught us about the real world.” Costas leaned over, grabbed the bottle again and took another swig of water. “Anyway, this shipwreck of yours. The one you excavated here twenty years ago. Any good finds?”

“A typical Roman merchantman,” Jack replied. ‘About two hundred cylindrical pottery amphoras filled with olive oil and fish sauce laden on the edge of the African desert, due south of us. A fascinating selection of ceramics from the ship’s galley, which we were able to date to about A.D. 200. And we did make one incredible find.”

There was a silence, broken by a stentorian snore. Jack kicked again, and Costas reached out to stop himself from rolling overboard. He pushed his shades up his forehead and peered blearily at Jack. “Uh huh?”

“Sorry. I know you need your beauty sleep. But it’s almost time.”

Costas grunted again, then raised himself painfully on one elbow and rubbed his hand across his stubble. “I don’t think beauty’s an option.” He heaved himself upright, then took off the sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Jack peered with concern at his friend. “You look wasted. You need to take some time off. You’ve been working flat out since we returned from the Yucatan last month.”

“You should stop buying me toys.”

“What I bought you,” Jack gently admonished him, “was an agreement from the Board of Directors for an increase in engineering personnel. Hire some more staff. Delegate.”

“You should talk,” Costas grumbled. “Name me one archaeological project run by IMU over the last decade where you haven’t jumped onboard.”

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Costas stretched, and gave a tired grin. “Okay, a week by my uncle’s pool in Greece wouldn’t go amiss. Anyway, was I dreaming? You mentioned an incredible find?”

“Buried in a gully directly beneath us now, where Ben and Andy should have anchored the shot-line. The remains of an ancient wooden crate, filled with sealed tin boxes. Inside the boxes we found more than a hundred small wooden phials, filled with unguents and powders including cinnamon, cumin and vanilla. That was amazing enough, but then we found a large slab of dark resinous material, about two kilogrammes in weight. At first we thought it was ship’s stores, spare resin for waterproofing timbers. But the lab analysis came up with an astonishing result.”

“Go on.”

“What the ancients called lacrymae papaveris, tears of the poppy, papaver somniferum. The sticky milky stuff that comes from the calyx of the black poppy. What we call opium.”

“No kidding.”

“Pliny the Elder writes about it, in his Natural History.”

“The guy who died in the eruption of Vesuvius?”

“Right. When Pliny wasn’t writing he was in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum, the big naval base on the Bay of Naples. He knew all about the products of the east from his sailors, and from Egyptian and Syrian merchants who put in there. They knew the best opium came from the distant land of Bactria, high in the mountains beyond the eastern fringe of the empire, beyond Persia. That’s present-day Afghanistan.”

“You’re kidding me.” Costas was fully alert now, and looked incredulous. “Opium. From Afghanistan. Did I hear you right? We’re talking the first century A.D. here, not the twenty-first century, right?”

“You’ve got it.”

“An ancient drug runner?”

Jack laughed. “Opium wasn’t illegal back then. Some ancient authorities condemned it for making users go blind, but they hadn’t refined it into heroin yet. It was probably mixed with alcohol to make a drink, similar to laudanum, the fashion drug of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seed was also pounded into tablets. Pliny tells us it could induce sleep, cure headaches, so they knew all about the painkilling properties of morphine. It was also used for euthanasia. Pliny gives us what may be the first-ever account of a deliberate Class A drug overdose: a guy called Publius Licinius Caecina who was unbearably ill and died of opium poisoning.”

“So what you found was a medicine chest,” Costas said.

“That’s what we thought at the time. But a really odd find in the chest was a small bronze statue of Apollo. When you find medical equipment it’s more commonly with a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. A few years later I visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, on the edge of the active volcanic zone a few miles north of Misenum, within sight of Vesuvius. Apollo was the god of oracles. Sulphur and herbs were used to ward off evil spirits and maybe opium was added to it. I began to wonder whether all those mystical rites were chemically assisted.”

“It could have been smoked,” Costas murmured. “Burned like incense. The fumes would have been quicker than a draught.”

“People went to those places seeking cures,” Jack said. “All we hear about is the message of the oracle, obscure verses written on leaves or issued as prophetic pronouncements, all sound and fury and signifying God knows what. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe some people really did find a cure of sorts, a palliative.”

“And a highly addictive one. It would have kept the Sibyl in business. Cash offerings from grateful clients would have kept the supply rolling.”

“So I began to think our little ship wasn’t carrying an apothecary or doctor, but a middleman traveling with his precious supply of opium for one of the oracles in Italy, maybe even procured for the Sibyl at Cumae herself.”

“A Roman drug dealer.” Costas rubbed his stubble. “The godfather of all godfathers. The Naples mafia would love it.”

“Maybe teach them a little respect for archaeology,” Jack said.

“The opium. Procured from where?”

“That’s what worried me.” Jack rolled out a laminated small-scale Admiralty chart of the Mediterranean over the equipment on the floor of the boat, pinning its corners under loose diving weights. He jabbed his finger at the center of the chart. “Here we are. The island of Sicily. Bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the apex of ancient trade. Right?”

“Go on.”

“Our little Roman merchantman, wrecked against this cliff with its cargo of north African olive oil and fishsauce. It does the trip to Rome three, maybe four times a year, during the summer sailing season. Up and down, up and down. Almost always within sight of land, Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, Italy.”

“Not a long-distance sailor.”

“Right.” Jack stabbed his finger at the far corner of the chart. “And here’s Egypt, the port of Alexandria. Fifteen hundred miles away across open sea. Everything points to the drug chest coming from there. The wood’s Egyptian acacia. Some of the phials had Coptic letters on them. And the opium was almost certainly shipped to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea ports of Egypt, a trade in exotic eastern spices and drugs that reached its height in the first century A.D.”

“The time of St. Paul,” Costas murmured. “Why we’re here.”

“Right.” Jack traced his finger along the coastline of north Africa, between Egypt and Tunisia. “Now it’s possible, just possible, that the opium chest reached Carthage or another Africa port direct from Egypt, and then was shipped out on our little merchantman.”

Costas shook his head. “I remember my Mediterranean Pilot from my stint in the navy. Prevailing onshore winds. That desert coastline has always been a deathtrap for sailors, avoided at all costs.”

“Precisely. The ships leaving Alexandria for Rome were generally large-grain carriers, and sailed north to Turkey or Crete and then west across the Ionian Sea to Sicily and the Strait of Messina. The most likely scenario for a cargo from Alexandria being wrecked at this spot where we are now would be one of these ships, blown southwest from the Ionian Sea towards eastern Sicily.”

Costas looked perplexed, then suddenly his eyes lit up. “I’ve got you! We’re looking at two overlapping shipwrecks!”

“It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve dived on ship’s graveyards with dozens of wrecks jumbled together, smashed against the same reef or headland. And once that idea clicked, I began to see other clues. Take a look at this.” Jack reached down into a crate beside him and picked up a heavy item swaddled in a towel. He handed it across to Costas, who sat up on the pontoon and took the item into his lap, then began carefully lifting the folds of toweling away. ‘Let me guess.’ He stopped and gave Jack a hopeful look. ‘A golden disk covered with ancient symbols, leading us to another fabulous lost ancient city?”

Jack grinned. “Not quite, but just as precious in its own way.”

Costas raised the last fold and held the object up. It was about ten inches high, shaped like a truncated cone, and weighed heavily in his hands. The surface was mottled white with patches of dull metallic sheen, and at the top was a short extension with a hole through it like a retaining loop. He eyed Jack. “A sounding lead?”

“You’ve got it. Check out the base.”

Costas carefully held the lead upside down. In the base was a depression about an inch deep, as if the lead had been partly hollowed out like a bell, and below that was a further depression in a distinctive shape. Costas raised his eyes again at Jack. “A cross?”

“Don’t get too excited. That was filled with pitch or resin, and was used to pick up a sample of seabed sediment. If you were heading for a big river estuary, the first appearance of sand would act as a navigational aid.”

“This came from the wreck below us?”

Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. “My first ever discovery of real significance from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.”

“And now?”

“Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow seabed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.”

“You mean like the Nile.”

Jack nodded enthusiastically. “I have no doubt about it. What we’re looking at here is the equipment of a large Alexandrian grain ship, not a humble amphora carrier.” He carefully placed the lead back in the crate, then pulled out an old black-bound book from a plastic bag. “Now listen to this.” He opened the book to a marked page, scanned up and down for a moment and then began to read. “But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven to and fro in the sea of Adria, about midnight the sailors surmised that they were drawing near to some country; and they sounded, and found twenty fathoms; and after a little space, they sounded again, and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing lest haply we should be cast ashore on rocky ground, they let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for the day.”

Costas whistled. “The Gospels!”

“The Acts of St. Paul, chapter 27, to be precise.” Jack’s eyes were ablaze now. “And it gets even better.”

ALSO BY DAVID GIBBINS

Atlantis

AND COMING SOON

The Last Gospel

CRUSADER GOLD

A Bantam Book / October 2007

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Map by TK

Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-440-33719-5

www.bantamdell.com

v1.0

�

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

EPIGRAPH

�JACK, THIS IS NO STATUE.�

ALSO BY DAVID GIBBINS

COPYRIGHT

�

�he perished in a catastrophe which destroyed the loveliest regions of the earth, a fate shared by whole cities and their people, and one so memorable that it is likely to make his name live for ever; and he himself wrote a number of books of lasting value: but you write for all time and can still do much to perpetuate his memory. The fortunate man, in my opinion, is he to whom the gods have granted the power either to do something which is worth recording or to write what is worth reading, and most fortunate of all is the man who can do both�

Pliny the Younger
Letter to the historian Tacitus, c. AD 106

�

�Jack, this is no statue.�

�What do you mean?� Jack struggled to his feet, then slipped on the floor and fell into the statue, holding it close. He winced and drew back, leaning for a moment while he flexed the knee that had hit the floor, staring at the decayed shape inches from his face. He suddenly froze. It was not limestone at all. It was calcite accretion, a weird, shapeless stalagmite that rose more than a meter from the floor, encasing a stone seat. He looked again at what had startled him. It was a sculpted stone serpent, green, writhing up the back of the chair, staring out at him through a diaphanous mask of accretion.

�Not that, Jack. Over here. Inside.�

Jack moved a step to the left and followed Costas�s beam. Then he saw it, trapped inside the calcium, lolling off to one side.

A human skull.

�

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places and incidents are creations of the author�s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual or other fictional events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The factual backdrop is discussed in the author�s note at the end.

�

PROLOGUE

24 August AD 79

THE OLD MAN LIMPED TO THE BRINK OF THE CHASM, the firm grasp of his freedman all that prevented him from pitching forward. Tonight was a full moon, a red moon, and the swirl of vapors that filled the crater seemed to glow, as if the fires of Vulcan were burning through the thin cusp of ground that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. The old man peered over the edge, felt the warm blast on his face and tasted the tang of sulfur on his lips. Always he was tempted, but always he held back. He remembered the words of Virgil, the poet whose tomb they had passed on the way to this place. Facilis descensus Averno. It is easy to descend to the underworld. Not so easy to get out again.

He turned away, and drew his hood up to conceal his face. Behind them he glimpsed the dark cone of Vesuvius over the bay, the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii glimmering like sentinels on either side. The great bulk of Vesuvius was reassuring on nights like these, when the earth shuddered and the reek of sulfur was almost overwhelming, when the ground was littered with the bodies of birds which had flown too close to the fumes. And always there were the harbingers of doom, madmen and charlatans who lurked in the shadows ready to prey on the gullible, on those who came to this lookout to gape and gawk, but who never went farther. One was here now, a wild-haired Greek who leapt up from an altar beside them, hands cupped forward in supplication, flailing and foaming, babbling about a great plague, that Rome would burn, that the sky would rain blood, that the land below Vesuvius would be consumed by the fires within. The freedman pushed the beggar roughly aside, and the old man muttered in annoyance. This was not a place where anyone needed a soothsayer to interpret the will of the gods.

Moments later they slipped through a fissure in the rock known only to the crippled and the damned, where the old man had first been brought as a boy more than eighty years before. He still remembered his terror, standing here weeping and trembling, his head jerking uncontrollably with the palsy. There was to be no cure, but those who took him in gave him solace, gave him the strength to defy others who wanted him never to be seen in Rome again. Even now he had not shaken off the fear, and he whispered his name, steeling himself. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus. Remember who you are. Remember why you are here.

Slowly they descended, the old man dragging his bad leg behind him, his hands leaning heavily on his freedman in front. On most nights the heavens were visible through the rent at the top of the fissure, but tonight the rock-cut steps were wreathed in a swirl of vapor that seemed to suck them down. Dark corners were lit by burning torches, and in other places orange light flickered through from outside. They reached a ledge above the floor of the crater, and the old man strained to see what he could not make out from above. Swirling gases seemed to float on a layer of emptiness above the rocky floor, an invisible poison that extinguished flames and suffocated all who fell into it. Somewhere beyond lay the entrance to Hades itself, a burning gash that split the rock, surrounded by the charred skeletons of those who had left their bodies behind on the way to Elysium. For a second he saw slits of red like glowing eyes in the rock, and then he watched a molten mass seep out and solidify, leaving shapes like gigantic limbs and torsos imprisoned in a writhing mass on the crater floor. The old man shuddered, and thought again of Virgil. It was as if those who had chosen to leave the mortal life in this place were straining for renewal, as giants and titans and gods, yet were doomed to eternity as inchoate, protean forms, forms that nature had begun but would never finish, forms like himself.

The scene vanished in the vapors like a dream, and they pressed on, the old man staggering and panting behind the freedman. His vision tunneled and blurred, as it did often these days, and he paused to rub his eyes and squint ahead. They reached a causeway, a raised path shrouded in yellow smoke rising from vents in the ground and hemmed in on either side by pools of boiling mud, heaving and juddering. He had been told that these were the tormented souls in purgatory pushing upward, desperate to escape, that the hissing gas was their exhalations, like the ill humors rising from a charnel pit. The old man had seen that before, when his legionary commanders had brought him before the pits where they had flung the dead Britons, bodies that still shifted under the soil weeks after the slaughter. He grimaced, remembering his nausea, and they pressed on, past the steaming fumeroles, into the gloom ahead.

Out of nowhere hands reached out toward him, and he could sense ghostly forms lining either side of the causeway, some hauling themselves up on withered limbs from the edge of the crater. His freedman walked ahead with arms outstretched, his palms facing outward and touching theirs, creating a space behind for the old man to follow. He heard low chanting, a soloist and then many voices responding, a rustling noise like fallen autumn leaves lifted on a gust of wind. They were singing the same words, over and over again. Domine ivimus. Lord, we shall come. There was a time when Claudius would have walked among them, been one of them. But now they made the sign with their hands as they reached toward him, fingers crossed, and they whispered his name, then the name of the one they knew he had touched. His friend Pliny had seen it too, had gone in disguise among his sailors at the naval base at the head of the bay, had seen knots of men and women listening in dark alleyways and the back rooms of taverns, had heard talk of a new priesthood, of those they called apostoles. The great poet Virgil had foretold it, Virgil who had trodden this very path a hundred years before, who had sought his wisdom too in the message of the leaves. A boy�s birth. A golden race arising. A world at peace, freed from never-ceasing fear. Yet a world where temptation lurked, where men would once again arise to place themselves between the people and the word of God, where terror and strife might rule again.

The old man kept his gaze steadfastly down, and limped on. For twenty-five years now he had lived in his villa beneath the mountain, a humble historian with a lifetime�s work to complete. Twenty-five years since he, ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever known, had supposedly died by poison in his palace in Rome, spirited away one night never to return. An emperor who lived on not as a god, but as a man. An emperor with a secret, with a treasure so precious it had kept him alive all these years, watching, waiting. Few others knew of it. His friend Pliny. His trusted freedman Narcissus, here today. Yet now these others treated him with a strange reverence, hung on his every word as if he were a soothsayer, as if he were the oracle herself. The old man muttered to himself. Tonight he would fulfill a promise he had made beside a lake long ago, to one who had entrusted him with his word, his written word. It was the old man�s final chance to shape history, to achieve more than he ever could as emperor, to leave a legacy that he knew could outlast even Rome itself.

Suddenly he was alone. Ahead of him the causeway disappeared into a cavernous darkness, a place where the rising heat of the pit met a chill exhalation from within, to form a shimmering mirage. He reached for the dice he always kept in his pocket, turning them round and round, trying to calm his tremor. It was said that the cave had a hundred entrances, each one with a voice. Beside him was a low basin, and he dipped his hand in the lustral waters, splashing his face. In front of him was a low stone table, wisps of brown smoke rising from a smoldering mass spread over the surface. Eagerly he lurched over, grasping the smoothed edges of the table, his eyes tightly shut, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, coughing and retching, holding it there. Pliny called it the opium bactrium, the extract of poppy brought from the far-off kingdom of Bactria in the east, from the bleak mountain valleys conquered by Alexander the Great. But here they called it the gift of Morpheus, god of dreams. He sucked in again, feeling the heady rush that reached into his limbs, bringing feeling back where it had almost gone, dulling the pain. He needed it more now, needed it every night. He leaned back, and felt as if he were floating, face upward and arms outstretched. For a fleeting moment he was back again in the other place where he had sought healing, long ago beside the lake in Galilee, laughing and drinking with his friends Herod and Cypros and his beloved Calpurnia, with the Nazarene and his woman, where he had been touched by one who had known his destiny, who had foreseen this very day itself.

He opened his eyes. Something was coming from the cave, a writhing, undulating form that seemed to press against the mirage like a phoenix rising. It broke through, and he saw a huge serpent, standing upright as tall as he was, its flat head lowered and its tongue flicking in and out, swaying from side to side. Pliny had told him these were hallucinations brought on by the morpheum, but as the snake drooped down and slithered round his legs the old man felt the silky sheen of its skin, and smelled its musty, acrid odor. Then it slid away, slithering into a crack at the side of the cave, and there was another smell, overpowering the sulfur and the morpheum and the snake, a smell like a chill wind wafting through a rotting tomb, a smell of ancient decay. Something flickered, a shape barely visible in the darkness. She was here.

�Clau-Clau-Claudius.�

There was a low moan, then a sound like a mocking laugh, and then a sigh that echoed through all the different passageways in the rock, before it died away. Claudius peered into the darkness, waiting, his head spinning. It was said that she had lived for seven hundred ages of men, that Apollo had granted her as many years as the grains of sand she could hold in her hands, but that the god had refused her eternal youth after she had spurned his advances. All Apollo had allowed was the voice of a young woman, so that as she shrank and decayed, the voice of her youth remained to torment her, to remind her of the immortality she had forsaken. And now she was the last of them, the last of the oracles of the earth goddess Gaia, last of the thirteen. She who had held sway in her lair since before Rome was founded, bewitching all who came before her, whose riddles had brought emperors to their knees.

�S-Sibyl.� Claudius broke the silence, his voice tremulous, harsh with the sulfur. �I have d-done as you instructed. I did what you ordered me to do for the Vestals, in Rome. And now I have been to the thirteenth, to Andraste. I have been to her tomb. I have taken it to her. The prophecy is fulfilled.�

He dropped a bag of coins he had been carrying, and they clunked out, dull gold and silver, the last batch of coins he had saved for this night, coins bearing his portrait. A shaft of light fell in front of the table, revealing the worn stone surface of the passageway beneath the swirls of vapor. On the floor were leaves, oak leaves arranged like words, the inked Greek letter on each just visible. Claudius lurched forward, falling on his hands and knees and peering at the leaves, desperate to read the message. Suddenly there was a gust and they were gone. He cried out, then slowly bowed his head, his words rent with despair. �You took my ancestor Aeneus to see his dead father, Anchises. He came here after Troy, seeking the underworld on his way to found Rome. All I asked was to see my father, Drusus. My dear brother, Germanicus. My son, Britannicus. To glimpse them in Elysium, before Charon takes me where he will.�

There was another moan, thinner this time, then a shriek that seemed to come from everywhere at once, as if all hundred mouths of the cave were turning inward on him.

Day of wrath and terror looming!

Heaven and earth to ash consuming,

Clau-Clau-Claudius� words and Sibyl�s truth foredooming!

Claudius lurched to his feet, his body shaking and jerking, convulsed with fear. He peered again at the pool of light. Where the leaves had been was now a pile of sand, the grains trickling down the sides. He watched as a final sprinkle fell from somewhere high above, a shimmer that dropped like a translucent curtain. Then everything was still. He looked around, and realized that the snake had gone, had sloughed off its skin and left it empty in front of Claudius, had slithered down into the poison above the crater floor. He remembered the words of Virgil again, the coming of the Golden Age. And the serpents too shall die.

Claudius felt his head clear, and saw the mirage in front of the cave drop away. He was suddenly desperate to leave, to cast aside the yearning that had bound him to this place and to the Sibyl for so long, to return to his villa beneath Vesuvius to finish the work that he and Pliny had planned for that evening, to fulfill the promise he had made by that lake so long ago. He turned to go, then felt something on the back of his neck, a touch of cold that made his hairs stand on end. He thought he heard his name again, softly whispered, but this time they were the words of an old woman, impossibly old, and were followed by a rustling like a death rattle coming closer. He dared not turn around. He began pressing forward, limping and slipping over the rock, looking around frantically for Narcissus. Over the lip of the crater he could see the dark form of the mountain, its summit wreathed in flickering lightning like a burning crown of thorns. The clouds were rushing overhead, tumbling and darkening, glowing orange and red as if they were on fire. He felt a terrible fear, then a sudden lucidity, as if all his memories and dreams had been sucked out of him by the vortex ahead. It was as if history itself had sped up, history which he had kept at bay since vanishing from Rome half a lifetime ago, history which had waited for him like a coiled spring that could no longer be held back.

He staggered on. Behind him he felt a baleful presence pushing him forward, onward through the sulfurous haze toward the floor of the crater. He grasped the dice again, pulled them out of his pocket then dropped them, heard them rattle on the rocks then stop. He looked despairingly, but saw nothing. On either side spectral forms emerged from the pit, no longer in supplication but joining him like a silent army, shrouded in hot flecks of ash which had begun to fall from the sky like snow. He felt his mouth go dry, a desperate thirst. On the top of Vesuvius he saw a burning ring of fire, racing down the slopes toward the towns, fields of flames in its wake. Then the scene was obliterated by blackness, a swirling funnel that descended into the crater and blotted out all but the narrowing void ahead. He heard screams, a muffled roar, saw bodies ignite like torches in the darkness, one after the other. He was getting closer. Now he knew, with dread certainty. The Sibyl had kept her promise. He would follow in the footsteps of Aeneus.

But this time there would be no return.

�

JACK HOWARD EASED HIMSELF DOWN ON THE FLOOR of the inflatable boat, his back resting on one pontoon and his legs leaning against the outboard engine. It was hot, almost too hot to move, and the sweat had begun to trickle down his face. The sun had burned through the morning haze and was bearing down relentlessly, reflecting blindingly off the cliff face in front of him, the limestone scarred and worn like the tombs and temples on the rocky headland beyond. Jack felt as if he were in a painting by Seurat, as if the air had fragmented into a myriad pixels that immobilized all thought and action into this one moment. He pushed his hands through his thick hair, feeling the heat on his scalp, and stretched out his long arms to either side. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, took in the utter stillness, the smell of wetsuits, the outboard engine, the taste of salt. It was everything he loved, distilled to its essence. It felt good.

He opened his eyes and peered over the side, checking the orange buoy he had released a few minutes before. The sea was glassy smooth, with only a slight swell rippling the edge where it lapped against the rock face. He reached out and put his hand on the surface, letting it float for a moment until the swell enveloped it. The water below was limpid, as clear as a swimming pool, and he could see far down the anchor line into the depths, to the shimmer of exhaust bubbles rising from the divers below. It was hard to believe this had once been a place of unimaginable fury, of nature at her cruelest, of untold human tragedy. The most famous shipwreck in history. Jack hardly dared think of it. For twenty years he had wanted to come back to this place, a yearning which had nagged at him and become a gnawing obsession, ever since his first doubt, since he had first begun to reassemble the pieces. His intuition rarely failed him, tried and tested as it was over years of exploration and discovery around the world. It was an intuition based on hard science, on an accumulation of facts that had begun to point unswervingly in one direction.

He had been sitting here, off Capo Murro di Porco in Sicily in the heart of the Mediterranean, when he had first dreamed up the International Maritime University. Twenty years ago he had been on a shoestring budget, leading a group of students driven by their passion for diving and archaeology, with equipment cobbled together and jerry-built on the spot. Now he had a multimillion-dollar budget, a sprawling seafront campus on his former family estate in southern England, the place where Howards had lived for generations before Jack�s father turned over the house and grounds to the fledgling institution. There were museums around the world, state-of-the-art research vessels, an extraordinary team at IMU who took the logistics out of his hands. But in some ways little had changed. No end of money could buy the clues that led to the greatest discoveries, the extraordinary treasures that made it all worthwhile. Twenty years ago they had been following a tantalizing account left by Captain Cousteau�s divers, intrepid explorers at the dawn of shipwreck archaeology, and here he was again, floating above the same site with the same battered old diary in his hands. The key ingredients were still the same, the hunches, the gut feeling, the thrill of discovery, that moment when all the elements suddenly came together, the adrenaline rush like no other.

Jack shifted, pushing his diving suit farther down around his waist, and checked his watch. He was itching to get wet. He glanced overboard. There was a slight commotion as Pete and Andy, the divers who had been sent down to anchor the shotline, pulled the buoy underwater, and Jack could see it now, refracted five meters below, deep enough to avoid the props of passing boats but shallow enough for a free diver to retrieve a weighted line that hung from it as a mooring point. Jack had already dared to look ahead, had begun to eye the site like a field commander planning an assault. Their research vessel, Seaquest II, could anchor in a sheltered bay around the cape to the west. On the headland itself the rocky seashore dropped in a series of stepped shelves, good for a shore camp. He rehearsed all the ingredients of a successful underwater excavation, knowing that each site produced its fresh crop of challenges. Any finds they made would have to go to the archaeological museum in Syracuse, but he was sure the Sicilian authorities would make a good show of it. IMU would establish a permanent liaison with their own museum at Carthage in nearby Tunisia, perhaps even an air shuttle as a package trip for tourists. They could hardly go wrong.

Jack peered down, checked his watch again, then noted the time in the logbook. The two divers were at the decompression stop. Twenty minutes to go. He cupped his left hand in the sea and splashed it over his head, feeling the water trickle through his thick hair and down his neck. He leaned back, stretched his long legs down the boat, made himself relax and take in the perfect tranquillity of the scene for a moment longer. Only six weeks earlier he had stood by the edge of an underwater cavern in the Yucat�n, drained but exhilarated at the end of another extraordinary trail of discovery. There had been losses, grievous losses, and Jack had spent much of the voyage home ruminating on those who had paid the ultimate price. His boyhood friend Peter Howe, missing in the Black Sea. And Father O�Connor, an ally for all too brief a time, whose appalling death had brought home the reality of what they were ranged against. Always it was the bigger stake that provided the solace, the innumerable lives that could have been lost had they not relentlessly pursued their goal. Jack had become used to the greatest archaeological prizes coming at a cost, gifts from the past that unleashed forces in the present few could imagine existed. But here, he felt sure of it, here it was different. Here it was archaeology pure and simple, a revelation that could only thrill and beguile any who came to know of it.

�You there?�

Jack raised his foot and gently prodded the other form in the boat. It wobbled, then grunted. Costas Kazantzakis was about a foot shorter than Jack but built like an ox, the legacy of generations of Greek sailors and sponge fishermen. Like Jack he was stripped to the waist, and his barrel chest was glistening with sweat. He seemed to have become molded to the boat, his legs extended on the pontoon in front of Jack and his head nestled in a mess of towels at the bow. His mouth was slightly open and he was wearing a pair of wraparound fluorescent sunglasses, a hilarious fashion accessory on such an unkempt figure. One hand was dangling in the water, holding the hoses that led down to the regulators at the decompression stop, and the other hand was draped over the valve of the oxygen cylinder that lay down the center of the boat. Jack grinned affectionately at his friend, who meant far more to him than his official role as IMU�s chief engineer. Costas was always there to lend a hand, even when he was dead to the world. Jack kicked him again. �We�ve got fifteen minutes. I can see them at the safety stop.�

Costas grunted again, and Jack passed over a water bottle. �Drink as much as you can. We don�t want to get the bends.�

�Good on you, mate.� Costas had learned a few comically misplaced catchphrases in his years based at the IMU headquarters in England, but the delivery was still resolutely American, a result of years spent at school and university in the States. He reached over and took the water, then proceeded to down half the bottle noisily.

�Cool shades, by the way,� Jack said.

�Jeremy gave them to me,� Costas gasped. �A parting present when we got back from the Yucat�n. I was truly moved.�

�You�re not serious.�

�I�m not sure if he was. Anyway, they work.� Costas pulled them down again, passed Jack the bottle then slumped back. �Been touching base with your past?�

�Only the good bits.�

�Any decent engineers? I mean, on your team back then?�

�We�re talking Cambridge University, remember. The brightest and the weirdest. One guy took a portable blackboard with him everywhere he went, and would patiently explain the Wankel rotary engine to any passing Sicilian. A real eccentric. But that was before you came along.�

�With a dose of good old American know-how. At least at MIT they taught us about the real world.� Costas leaned over, grabbed the bottle again and took another swig of water. �Anyway, this shipwreck of yours. The one you excavated here twenty years ago. Any special finds?�

�It was a typical Roman merchantman,� Jack replied. �About two hundred cylindrical pottery amphoras filled with olive oil and fish sauce, on the edge of the African desert, in Tunisia due south of us. Plus there was a fascinating selection of ceramics from the ship�s gallery. We were were able to date it all to about AD 200. And we did make one incredible find.�

�I know you need your beauty sleep. But it�s almost time.�

Costas grunted again, then raised himself painfully on one elbow and rubbed his hand across his stubble. �I don�t think beauty�s an option.� He heaved himself upright, then took off the sunglasses and rubbed his eyes.

Jack peered with concern at his friend. �You look wasted. You need to take some time off. You�ve been working flat out since we returned from the Yucat�n, and that was well over a month ago.�

�You should stop buying me toys.�

�What I bought you,� Jack gently admonished him, �was an agreement from the Board of Directors for an increase in engineering personnel. Hire some more staff. Delegate.�

�You should talk,� Costas grumbled. �Name me one archaeological project run by IMU over the last decade where you haven�t jumped on board.�

�I�m serious.�

�Yeah, yeah.� Costas stretched, and gave a tired grin. �Okay, a week by my uncle�s pool in Greece wouldn�t go amiss. Anyway, sorry. Was I dreaming? You mentioned an incredible find?�

�Buried in a gully directly beneath us now, where Pete and Andy should have anchored the shotline. The remains of an ancient wooden crate, packed with sealed tin boxes. Inside the boxes we found more than a hundred small wooden vials, filled with unguents and powders, including cinnamon and cumin. That was amazing enough, but then we found a large slab of dark resinous material, about two kilograms in weight. At first we thought it was ship�s stores, spare resin for waterproofing timbers. But the lab analysis came up with an astonishing result.�

�Go on.�

�What the ancients called lacrymae papaveris, tears of the poppy, Papaver somniferum. The sticky milky stuff that comes from the calyx of the black poppy. What we call opium.�

�No kidding.�

�The Roman writer Pliny the Elder writes about it in his Natural History.�

�The guy who died in the eruption of Vesuvius?�

�Right. When Pliny wasn�t writing he was in charge of the Roman fleet at Misenum, the big naval base on the Bay of Naples. He knew all about the products of the east from his sailors, and from Egyptian and Syrian merchants who put in there. They knew that the best opium came from the distant land of Bactria, high in the mountains beyond the eastern fringe of the empire, beyond Persia. That�s present-day Afghanistan.�

�You�re kidding me.� Costas was fully alert now, and looked incredulous. �Opium. From Afghanistan. Did I hear you right? We�re talking the first century AD here, not the twenty-first century, right?�

�You�ve got it.�

�An ancient drug runner?�

Jack laughed. �Opium wasn�t illegal back then. Some ancient authorities condemned it for making users go blind, but they hadn�t refined it into heroin yet. It was probably mixed with alcohol to make a drink, similar to laudanum, the fashion drug of Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The seed was also pounded into tablets. Pliny tells us it could induce sleep, cure headaches, so they knew all about the painkilling properties of morphine. It was also used for euthanasia. Pliny gives us what may be the first-ever account of a deliberate Class A drug overdose, a guy called Publius Licinius Caecina, who was unbearably ill and died of opium poisoning.�

�So what you found was really a medicine chest,� Costas said.

�That�s what we thought at the time. But a very odd find in the chest was a small bronze statue of Apollo.�

�Apollo?�

Jack nodded. �I know. When you find medical equipment it�s more commonly with a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. A few years later I visited the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, on the edge of the active volcanic zone a few miles north of Misenum, within sight of Vesuvius. Apollo was the god of oracles. Sulfur and herbs were used to ward off evil spirits, and maybe opium was added to it. I began to wonder whether all those mystical rites were chemically assisted.�

�It could have been smoked,� Costas murmured. �Burned like incense. The fumes would have been quicker than a drink.�

�People went to those places seeking cures, to the Sibyl and other prophets,� Jack said. �Organized religion at the time didn�t provide much personal comfort, often excluding the common people and fixating on cults and rituals that were pretty remote from daily concerns. The Sibyl and her kind provided some kind of emotional comfort, psychological relief. And the Sibyls must have known it, and played on it. All we hear about from ancient accounts is the message of the oracle, obscure verses written on leaves or issued as prophetic pronouncements, all sound and fury and signifying God knows what. But maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe some people really did find a cure of sorts, a palliative.�

�And a highly addictive one. It could have kept the Sibyl in business. Cash offerings from grateful clients would have kept the supply rolling.�

�So I began to think our little ship wasn�t carrying an apothecary or doctor, but a middleman traveling with opium procured for one of the oracles in Italy, maybe even the Sibyl at Cumae herself.�

�A Roman drug dealer.� Costas rubbed his stubble. �The godfather of all godfathers. The Naples mafia would love it.�

�Maybe if they found out, it would teach them a little respect for archaeology,� Jack said. �Organized crime is a huge problem for our friends in the Naples archaeological superintendency.�

�Doesn�t one of your old girlfriends work there?� Costas grinned.

�Elizabeth hasn�t been in contact with me for years. Last I heard she was still an inspector, pretty low down on the food chain. I never really worked out what happened. She finished her doctorate in England before I did and then had to go back, part of her contract with the Italian government. She swore to me that she�d never return to Naples, but then it happened and she completely shut down communication with me. I suppose I moved on too. That was almost fifteen years ago.�

�Ours is not to reason why, Jack.� Costas shifted. �Back to the opium. Procured from where?�

�That�s what worried me.� Jack rolled out a laminated small-scale Admiralty chart of the Mediterranean over the equipment on the floor of the boat, pinning its corners under loose diving weights. He jabbed his finger at the center of the chart. �Here we are. The island of Sicily. Bang in the middle of the Mediterranean, the apex of ancient trade. Right?�

�Go on.�

�Our little Roman merchantman wrecked against this cliff with its cargo of north African olive oil and fish sauce. It does the trip to Rome three, maybe four times a year, during the summer sailing season. Up and down, up and down. Almost always within sight of land�Tunisia, Malta, Sicily, Italy.�

�Not a long-distance sailor.�

�Right.� Jack stabbed his finger at the far corner of the chart. �And here�s Egypt, the port of Alexandria. Fifteen hundred miles away to the east of us, across open sea. Everything points to the drug chest coming from there. The wood�s Egyptian acacia. Some of the vials had Coptic letters on them. And the opium was almost certainly shipped to the Mediterranean via the Red Sea ports of Egypt, a trade in exotic eastern spices and drugs that reached its height in the first century AD.�

�The time of St. Paul,� Costas murmured. �Why we�re here.�

�Right.� Jack traced his finger along the coastline of north Africa from Egypt. �Now, it�s possible, just possible, that the opium was shipped along the African coast from Alexandria to Carthage, and then went north to Sicily in our little merchantman.�

Costas shook his head. �I remember the navigational advice in the Mediterranean Pilot from my stint in the U.S. Navy. Prevailing onshore winds. That desert coastline between Egypt and Tunisia has always been a death trap for sailors, avoided at all costs.�

�Precisely. Ships leaving Alexandria for Rome sailed north to Turkey or Crete and then west across the Ionian Sea to Italy. The most likely scenario for our opium cargo is one of those ships, blown southwest from the Ionian Sea toward Sicily.�

Costas looked perplexed, then his eyes suddenly lit up. �I�ve got you! We�re looking at two overlapping shipwrecks!�

�It wouldn�t be the first time. I�ve dived on ship�s graveyards with dozens of wrecks jumbled together, smashed against the same reef or headland. And once that idea clicked, I began to see other clues. Take a look at this.� Jack reached down into a crate beside him and picked up a heavy item swaddled in a towel. He handed it across to Costas, who sat up on the pontoon and took the item onto his lap, then began carefully lifting the folds of toweling away.

�Let me guess.� He stopped and gave Jack a hopeful look. �A golden disk covered with ancient symbols, leading us to another fabulous lost ancient city?�

Jack grinned. �Not quite, but just as precious in its own way.�

Costas raised the last fold and held up the object. It was about ten inches high, shaped like a truncated cone, and weighed heavily in his hands. The surface was mottled white with patches of dull metallic sheen, and at the top was a short extension with a hole through it, like a retaining loop. He eyed Jack. �A sounding lead?�

�You�ve got it. A lead weight tied to the end of a line for sounding depths. Check out the base.�

�Don�t get too excited. That was filled with pitch or resin, and was used to pick up a sample of seabed sediment. If you were heading for a big river estuary, the first appearance of sand would act as a navigational aid.�

�This came from the wreck below us?�

Jack reached across and took back the sounding lead, holding it with some reverence. �My first-ever major find from an ancient shipwreck. It came from one end of the site, nestled in the same gully where we later found the drug chest. At the time I was over the moon, thought this was a pretty amazing find, but I assumed sounding leads were probably standard equipment on an ancient merchantman.�

�And now?�

�Now I know it was truly exceptional. Hundreds of Roman wrecks have been discovered since then, but only a few sounding leads have ever been found. The truth is, they would have been expensive items, and only really of much use for ships regularly approaching a large estuary, with a shallow seabed for miles offshore where alluvial sand could be picked up well before land was sighted.�

�You mean like the Nile.�

Jack nodded enthusiastically. �What we�re looking at here is the equipment of a large Alexandrian grain ship, not a humble amphora carrier.� He carefully placed the lead back in the crate, then pulled out an old black-bound book from a plastic bag. �Now listen to this.� He opened the book to a marked page, scanned up and down for a moment and then began to read:

�But when the fourteenth night was come, as we were driven to and fro in the sea of Adria, about midnight the sailors surmised that they were drawing near to some country; and they sounded, and found twenty fathoms; and after a little space, they sounded again, and found fifteen fathoms. And fearing lest haply we should be cast ashore on rocky ground, they let go four anchors from the stern, and prayed for the day.�

Costas whistled. �The Gospels!�

�The Acts of St. Paul, chapter 27.� Jack�s eyes were ablaze. �And guess what? Directly offshore from where we are now, the bottom slopes off to deep water, but diagonally to the south there�s a sandy plateau extending about three hundred meters out, about forty meters deep.�

�That�s a hundred and twenty feet, twenty fathoms,� Costas murmured.

�On our last day of diving twenty years ago we did a recce over it, just to see if we�d missed anything,� Jack said. �The very last thing I saw was two lead anchor shanks, unmistakably early Roman types used to weigh down wooden anchors. By the time of our North African amphora wreck, anchors were made of iron, so we knew these must have been lost by an earlier ship that had tried to hold off this coast.�

�Go on.�

�It gets better.�

�I thought it would.�

Jack read again:

�And casting off the anchors, they left them in the sea, at the same time loosing the bands of the rudders; and hoisting up the foresail to the wind, they made for the beach. But lighting on a place where two seas met, they ran the vessel aground; and the foreship struck and remained unmoveable, but the stern began to break up by the violence of the waves.�

�Good God,� Costas said. �The drug chest, the sounding lead. Stored in the forward compartment. What about the stern?�

�Wait for it.� Jack grinned, and pulled out a folder from the bag. �Fast-forward two millennia. August 1953, to be exact. Captain Cousteau and Calypso.�

�I was wondering when they were going to come into it.�

�It was the clue that brought us here in the first place,� Jack said. �They dived all along this coast. Here�s what the chief diver wrote about this headland: �I saw broken amphoras, concreted into a fold of the cliff, then an iron anchor, concreted to the bottom and apparently in corroded state, with amphora sherds on top.� That�s exactly what we found here, the Roman amphora wreck. But there�s more. On their second dive, they saw �des amphores grecques, en bas profound.��

�Greek amphoras, in deep water,� Costas murmured. �Any idea where?�

�Straight out from the cleft in the rock behind us,� Jack said. �We reckoned they hit seventy, maybe eighty meters depth.�

�Sounds like Cousteau�s boys,� Costas said. �Let me guess. Compressed air, twin-hose regulators, no pressure gauge, no buoyancy system.�

�Back when diving was diving,� Jack said wistfully. �Before mixed gas took all the fun out of it.�

�The danger�s still there, just the threshold�s deeper.�

�Twenty years ago I volunteered to do a bounce dive to find those amphoras, but the team doctor vetoed it. We only had compressed air and were strictly following the U.S. Navy tables, with a depth limit of fifty meters. We had no helicopter, no support ship, and the nearest recompression chamber was a couple of hours away in the U.S. naval base up the coast.�

Costas gestured pointedly at the two mixed-gas rebreathers on the floor of the boat, and then at the white speck of a ship visible on the horizon, steaming toward them. �State-of-art deep-diving equipment, and full recompression facilities on board Seaquest II. Modern technology. I rest my case.� He waved at the battered old diary Jack was holding. �Anyway, Greek amphoras. Isn�t that before our period?�

�That�s what we assumed at the time. But something was niggling me, something I couldn�t be sure of until seeing those amphoras with my own eyes.� Jack picked up a clipboard from the crate and passed it over to Costas. �That�s the amphora typology devised by Heinrich Dressel, a German scholar who studied finds from Rome and Pompeii in the nineteenth century. Check out the drawings on the upper left, numbers two to four.�

�The amphoras with the high pointed handles?�

�You�ve got it. Now, in Cousteau�s day, divers identified any amphora with those handles as Greek, because that was the shape of wine amphoras known to have been made in classical Greece. But since then we�ve learned that amphoras of that shape were also made in the areas of the west Mediterranean colonized by the Greeks, then later under the Romans when they conquered those areas. We�re talking southern Italy, Sicily, northeast Spain, all major wine-producing regions first developed by the Greeks.� He passed over a large black-and-white photograph showing high-handled amphoras leaning against a wall, and Costas peered at it thoughtfully.

�A wine storeroom? A tavern? Pompeii?�

Jack nodded enthusiastically. �Not Pompeii, but Herculaneum, the other town buried by the eruption of Vesuvius. A roadside bar, preserved exactly as it was on 24 August, AD 79.�

Costas was quiet for a moment, then squinted at Jack. �Remind me. What was the date of St. Paul�s shipwreck?�

�Best guess is spring AD 58, maybe a year or two later.�

�Put me in the picture.�

�A few years after the death of the emperor Claudius, in the reign of Nero. About ten years before the Romans conquer Judaea and steal the Jewish menorah.�

�Ah. I�m with you.� Costas gave Jack a tired smile, then narrowed his eyes again. �Nero. Gross debauchery, throwing Christians to the lions, all that?�

Jack nodded. �That�s one take on the history of the period. But it was also the most prosperous time in ancient history, the height of the Roman Empire. Wine from the rich vineyards of Campania around Vesuvius was being exported in those Greek-style amphoras all around the known world. They�ve even been found in the farthest Roman outposts in southern India, traded for spices and medicines, like the opium in that chest. And they�re found in Britain. They�re exactly what you�d expect to find on a large Alexandrian grain ship of this period. According to the New Testament account in Acts of the Apostles, there were more than 270 people on board that ship with St. Paul, and diluted wine would have been their staple drink.�

�Last question,� Costas said. �The big one. From what I remember, St. Paul�s shipwreck was supposed to have been in Malta. How come Sicily?�

�That�s why it didn�t click twenty years ago. Then I did a bit of lateral thinking. Geographically, I mean.�

�You mean you had a way-out hunch.�

Jack grinned. �It�s like this. All we have to go on is the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles. There�s no other account of St. Paul�s shipwreck, no way of verifying the story. Right?�

�It�s all about faith.�

�In a way, that�s the nub of it. The Gospels, the New Testament, were a collection of documents chosen by the early Church to represent the ministry of Jesus, or perhaps their view of the ministry of Jesus. Some of the Gospels were written soon after Jesus� life, by eyewitnesses and contemporaries, others were written later. None of them were written as historical documents as we would understand the term, let alone geographical ones. To those who put together the texts, it was probably a matter of little consequence which island Paul was actually wrecked on.�

�I had all this drummed into me by my Greek Orthodox family. Acts was written by a survivor of the wrecking, Paul�s companion Luke.�

Jack nodded. �That was what everyone was taught. Acts tells us that Paul was accompanied by two men, Luke from Asia Minor and a Macedonian from Thessaloniki.�

�Aristarchos.�

�I�m preaching to the converted.� Jack grinned. �You should be telling this.�

�I can only give you the bare bones,� Costas said. �After Paul was arrested in Judaea they joined him on the voyage north from Caesarea to Myra in southern Turkey, where they transferred to an Alexandrian ship destined for Rome.�

�That�s what we�re told,� Jack said. �But we need to stand back from the detail. It goes back to what I said about reading the Gospels as history. That wasn�t their primary purpose. Some scholars now think Acts was composed several decades later by someone else, maybe based on an eyewitness account. And then there are questions over textual transmission. The Gospels went through the same process as all the other classical texts, all those except the fragments we�ve actually found in ancient sites. Sieved, purified, translated, embellished with interpretations and annotations which became part of the text, censored by religious authorities, altered by the whim or negligence of the individual copyist.�

�You�re saying take the details with a pinch of salt.�

�Be circumspect.�

�A favorite word of yours these days.�

Jack grinned. �The earliest surviving fragment we have of Acts dates to about AD 200, almost 150 years after Paul, and it only contains the first part of the story. The earliest version with the wreck dates several hundred years later. It gets translated from Greek to Latin to medieval languages, to seventeenth-century English, goes through numerous scribes and copyists. It makes me very cautious, circumspect, about a detail like the word Melita, whether it even means Malta. Some ancient versions even render it as Mytilene, an island in the Aegean more familiar to Greek copyists of the Gospels.�

�Treasure-hunting 101,� Costas said solemnly. �Always authenticate your map.�

�St. Paul�s shipwreck is just about the first time in history that we can hunt a known wreck, but like so many wreck accounts, it�s fraught with pitfalls. You have to stand back from it, open your mind to all the possibilities and let them fall into place, not force them toward a foregone conclusion. I think that�s what I�ve been doing over the years since I last dived here, since the idea first began to dawn on me.�

�That�s why you�re an archaeologist, and I�m an engineer,� Costas said. �I don�t know how you do it.�

�And that�s why I leave robotics and submersibles to you.� Jack grinned at Costas, then looked toward the eastern horizon. �There�s nothing else in Acts to corroborate Malta as the location, and all that happens on the island is that Paul heals some local man. Sicily makes a lot more sense. It�s in the right neck of the woods, a far more likely landfall for a grain ship blown off course in the Ionian Sea by a northeast wind. Acts even mentions Syracuse, just round the headland from us, where Paul and his companions spent several days on their eventual trip to Rome after the wrecking. According to Acts they hitched a lift on another grain ship which had overwintered in Malta, but I believe that was far more likely to be a ship in the Great Harbor at Syracuse itself.�

�So two thousand years of biblical scholarship is wrong, and Jack Howard has a hunch and is right?�

�Careful reasoning based on an accumulation of evidence, pointing��

�Pointing unswervingly to one conclusion,� Costas finished. �Yeah, yeah. A hunch.� He grinned at Jack, then spoke with mock resignation. �Okay. You�ve sold me. And now that I look at it, that cleft in the cliff face beside us, your marker for the wreck site�have you noticed how it also looks like the Greek letter Chi? Like a cross?� Costas grinned. �While we�re on the subject of leaps of faith, don�t tell me you�re above a little sign from on high.�

Jack squinted at the rock, then grinned. �Okay. I�ll go with that. Twenty years on, you see things with different eyes.� He leaned back on his elbows and shook his head. �I can�t believe it�s taken me so long to put all these pieces together.�

�You�ve had a few other projects on your mind.�

�Yes, but this could be the biggest of them all.� Jack sat up and leaned toward Costas, his face ablaze with excitement. �Anything, anything at all, that identifies this shipwreck with St. Paul would make it a treasure trove like we�ve never seen before. Nobody has ever found anything so intimately linked with the lives of the evangelists, with the reality behind the Gospels. We�re looking at a time when a few people truly believed in a Kingdom of Heaven on earth, a dream that most pagan religions didn�t offer the common people. A time before churches, before priests, before guilt and confession and inquisitions and holy wars. Strip away all that and you go back to the essence of what Jesus had to say, what drew so many to him.�

�I never knew you were so passionate about it.�

�It�s the idea that individuals can take charge of their own destiny and seek beauty and joy on earth. That seems to be about as uplifting as you can get. If we can find something that will draw people back to that, take them back to the essence of the idea and make them reflect on it, then we�ll have done humanity a service.�

�Holy cow, Jack. I thought we were just treasure hunters.�

Jack grinned. �Archaeology isn�t just about filling up museums.�

�I know. It�s about the hard facts.�

�A shipwreck could be a time capsule of the period, like Pompeii and Herculaneum, only with a direct connection to the most potent figures in western history. It would capture the imagination of the world.�

Costas shifted and stretched. �We still have to find it yet. And speaking of excitement, we�ve got company.� He jerked his head toward the cascade of bubbles now erupting on the surface, and they watched as the two divers came into view a few meters below them. They surfaced simultaneously and both gave the okay signal. Jack noted down the time in the log and then glanced at Costas. �This place was a fulcrum of history,� he continued. �Whatever we find, we�d be adding to a story that�s already pretty fantastic. In 415 BC the Athenians landed at this spot to attack Syracuse, a key event in the war with Sparta which almost destroyed Greek civilization. Fast-forward to another world war, July 1943, Operation Husky. My grandfather was here, chief officer of the armed merchant ship Empire Elaine, just inshore from the monitor HMS Erebus as she bombarded the enemy positions above us with fifteen-inch shells.�

�This place must be in your blood,� Costas said. �Seems like a Howard was present at just about every famous naval engagement in British history.�

�If many English families knew their background, they�d be able to say the same.�

�Anything left to see?�

�The Special Raiding Squadron, an offshoot of the SAS, parachuted onto the cliff above us and forced the Italian coastal defense battery to surrender, throwing their arms into the sea. When we first dived here the site was strewn with ammunition.�

Costas rubbed his hands. �That�s what I like. Real archaeology. Beats bits of old pottery any day.�

�Let�s keep our eyes on the prize. You can play bomb disposal later.�

Costas grinned and held up the feed hose from his rebreather. �Lock and load.� He clicked it home, then watched Jack do the same.

�Done.� Jack angled his neck down to check his equipment, then eyed Costas. �You up for it?� he said. �I mean, going deep?�

Costas raised his eyes, then gave an exaggerated sigh. �Let me see. Our last dive was in an underground passageway beneath the jungles of the Yucat�n, being swept toward some kind of Mayan hell. And before that it was inside a rolling iceberg. Oh, and before that, an erupting volcano.�

�You saying you�ve had enough, or can manage one more?�

Costas gave his version of the thousand-yard stare, then gave a haggard grin and began pulling up his diving suit. �You just say the words.�

�Time to kit up.�

�

MAURICE HIEBERMEYER LEANED BACK AGAINST THE wall of the passageway, panted heavily a few times and eyed the ragged hole ahead of him. He would not be defeated. If the Bourbon King Charles of Naples, an ample girth if there ever was one, could do it, then so could he. Once again he heaved himself up on his hands and knees, aimed his headlamp at the hole and threw himself bodily forward, his hard hat clattering against the ceiling, the jagged protrusions tearing at his overalls. Once again he ground to a halt, stuck like a cork in a bottle. It was no good. He looked through the filthy sheen on his glasses at the dust cloud he had created in the tunnel beyond. He could hardly believe it. The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, the greatest unexcavated treasure in Italy. Buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, rediscovered by the Bourbon Kings of Naples in the eighteenth century, hardly excavated since. And then an earthquake, a rushed international response, and here he was, the first archaeologist ever to reach this far into the villa, stopped dead by his own girth. He felt like weeping. They would have to get in a pneumatic drill, widen the hole. It would mean more delays, more frustration. Already they were two weeks behind schedule, days spent pacing and sweating in the superintendency lobby while the bureaucracy inched toward releasing their permit. Precious time he could ill afford to lose, with his new excavation in full swing in the eastern desert beside the Red Sea.

Then he saw it.

He gasped, and whispered in his native German, �Mein Gott. No, it can�t be.� He reached out and felt the smooth surface. A snout. �Yes, it is.� He let his hand drop and stared in amazement.

The guardian god of the dead.

A few feet ahead the gray mottled wall of the eighteenth-century tunnel had fallen away to form a shallow cavity, no more than a foot in depth. In the center was a head, peering out, black and shrouded with dust but unmistakable, the ears pointing high up and the snout jutting out defiantly. He who walked through the shadows and lurked in dark places, guardian of the veil of death. Hiebermeyer stared at the sightless eyes, surrounded by the thick black line of kohl, then shut his own eyes tight and silently mouthed the name. Here, at the threshold of the unknown, at a place of unimaginable terror and death, where those who last lived truly saw the fires of hell. Anubis. He opened his eyes again, and saw three vertical lines of hieroglyphs running down the chest of the statue, the text instantly recognizable. A man remains over after death, and his deeds are placed beside him in heaps. Existence yonder is for eternity, and for him who reaches it without wrongdoing, he shall exist yonder like a god. Hiebermeyer stared past the statue into the empty blackness of the tunnel beyond. For a brief, bizarre moment he pitied all of them, the ancients who placed such store in the world beyond, whose crumbled dreams of the afterlife had become his own kingdom of the dead. Not for the first time Hiebermeyer felt he was on a mission, that his true calling as an archaeologist was to bring those in limbo some semblance of the immortality they had so craved.

�Maurice.� A muffled voice came through from behind.

�Maria.�

�Relax for a moment.�

There was a massive jolt and he sprang forward, tumbling awkwardly down the cascade of rock fragments that filled the tunnel entrance. He began to cough violently and quickly pulled the dust mask back to where it had been wrenched off. He grimaced, heaved his legs through, then crouched upright in the narrow tunnel.

�Sorry.� Maria�s face appeared through the hole, capped with a yellow hard hat and wearing protective glasses and a dust mask, her long dark hair tied back. Her voice was strong and mellifluous, English with a hint of a Spanish accent. �Always best to catch people unawares, I find. If you tense up it�s hopeless.�

�You�ve done that often?�

�I�ve been through a few holes in my time.� She slipped effortlessly inside and crouched beside him, their two bodies exactly filling the width of the tunnel, with scarcely enough headroom to stand upright. �I hope you�re still intact. A few bruises seemed better than another week spent in the superintendency office applying for a modification to the permit.�

�My thoughts precisely.� Hiebermeyer rubbed his left leg gingerly. �The permit we have only allows us to follow this old tunnel, not to dig new ones. Even widening that hole created by the earthquake would be a criminal transgression. It�s madness.� He peered back through the dust. �Not that the superintendency people will notice what we do right now.�

�They�ll be catching up to us soon.�

Hiebermeyer grunted, then raised his safety glasses and eyed Maria thoughtfully as he cleaned the lenses. �Anyway, I rather enjoyed our time conversing together in the office. A crash course on medieval manuscripts from a world expert. Fascinating. And I was about to read you my doctoral thesis on the Roman quarries opened up by the emperor Claudius in Egypt.�

Maria groaned. �You�re supposed to be in your element here, Maurice. Underground, I mean. Remember, I was on board Seaquest II when Jack took the call, after the earthquake here? Get an Egyptologist, he said. Someone used to catacombs, burrowing in the ground, the Valley of the Kings and all that.�

�Ah, the Valley of the Kings.� Hiebermeyer sighed. He watched as Maria backed up until her head was inches from the snout of the jackal. �But you�re right. I am in my element now. It�s fabulous. We have a new friend.�

�Huh?�

�Turn around. Slowly.�

Maria did as instructed, then yelped and threw herself back. �Dios mia. Oh my God.�

�Don�t worry. It�s just a statue.�

Maria was splayed against the tunnel entrance, but far enough back to take in everything that had been revealed. �It�s a dog,� she whispered. �A wolf. On a human torso.�

�Relax. It won�t bite.�

�Sorry. My nerves are a little frayed.� Maria took a deep breath, then leaned forward and peered closely. �It�s not possible,� she murmured. �Hieroglyphs? Is this thing Egyptian?�

�Anubis,� Hiebermeyer said matter-of-factly. �A life-sized statue of the Egyptian god of the dead, in black steatite. The hieroglyphs are a copy of the Instructions for Merikare, a text of the third millennium BC, but that cartouche at the bottom is a royal inscription of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, of the sixth century BC. I wouldn�t be surprised if this came from the royal capital at Sa�s, on the Nile Delta.�

�That rings a bell,� Maria said. �Wasn�t that where the Athenian Solon visited the High Priest? Where he recorded the legend of Atlantis?�

�You�ve spent some time with Jack.�

�I�m an adjunct professor of the International Maritime University now, remember? Just like you. It�s like we�re all back at college again. He told me the whole story on board Seaquest II on our voyage back from the Yucat�n. I was completely hooked. It really helped to refocus me.�

Hiebermeyer peered back at her through the dust. �I know this may seem an odd time to say it, but I do know what you went through. In the Yucat�n, I mean, the kidnapping and torture, your friend O�Connor in Scotland. Jack told me on the phone before you joined me in Naples. I haven�t mentioned it before because the time was never right. Like now. Just so you know.�

�I know.� Maria straightened up and dusted off her sleeves. �Jack said he�d told you. Thank you, Maurice. Much appreciated. End of topic.�

Hiebermeyer paused as if about to say something, then nodded. �So. Atlantis.�

�Jack and Costas have plans to go back to the Black Sea to the site and find a Greek wreck they saw nearby�a trireme, I think.�

Hiebermeyer grunted. �I wish Jack would give me some time instead. I�ve got something much better for him. It�s supposed to be our job, feeding him any new leads. I�ve been trying to tell him about this one for months now.� He sighed in exasperation, then looked at the statue. �But back to what we�ve got here. The Greek historian Herodotus also visited Sa�s, and described a lake outside the Temple of Neith, a sanctuary surrounded by statues like this, pharaohs and gods brought from older sites all over Egypt. By the Roman period Sa�s was silted up and abandoned, but it would have been accessible to Roman ships and stripped of all its precious stone and statuary.�

�You�re saying this was looted?�

�I prefer the word transferred. The Romans who built this villa had access to great works of art from all over the Mediterranean, and beyond, from many different cultures stretching far back in history. They were just like private collectors or museum curators today. Some of the best Greek bronze statues ever found came from this very villa, discovered only yards away from us when well-diggers broke through in the eighteenth century. Some Romans equated Anubis with Cerberus, guardian of the river Styx in the underworld, but to many he was a figure of derision, a barker, a dog. This statue would have been an antiquity, a curio, probably seen as an amusing work of art and nothing more.�

�I don�t know,� Maria said quietly. �He seems to be staring at us, half in and half out of history, exactly like a guardian.� She peered at Hiebermeyer. �Do you ever get superstitious, Maurice? I mean, King Tut�s tomb, the curse of the mummy, all that?�

�No.� Hiebermeyer spoke curtly. �I�m just a dirt archaeologist.�

�Come on, Maurice. You must at least be thrilled by this. Remember when we were undergraduates, and you talked all the time about Egypt? And I mean all the time. Admit it.�

Hiebermeyer looked at the jackal head and allowed himself a rare smile. �I am thrilled. Of course I am. It�s wonderful. I can�t wait to see the rest of the inscription.� He pressed the palm of his hand against the polished steatite, then looked down the tunnel. �But I really think this is the end of the road. This statue must have been revealed in the seismic aftershock last night, and we must be the first to see it. But others have been this far in the tunnel before us, before it was sealed up to get it ready for our arrival. The local site security people would have been in here as soon as that first earthquake opened it up. If they found anything it�s probably on the black market already. I doubt whether we�ll find anything else.�

�I can�t believe you�re so cynical.� Maria seemed genuinely affronted. �They�d never have allowed it. Have you forgotten where we are? The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Site of the only known library of papyrus scrolls to survive from antiquity, yet everyone knows that more of it must remain here to be found, sealed up behind these walls. You don�t just let anyone walk in here and pilfer it.�

�Also one of the greatest disappointments in archaeology,� Hiebermeyer said. �Almost all the excavated scrolls are by Philodemus, a third-rate philosopher of no lasting significance. No great works of literature, hardly anything in Latin.� He replaced his glasses. �Ever wonder why the villa was never fully excavated?�

�Lots of reasons. Structural issues. Undermining the modern buildings above. Resources needed for maintaining the existing excavation, the main part of Herculaneum already revealed. Bureaucracy. Lack of funds. Corruption. You name it.�

�Try again.�

�Well, there are huge problems working out the best way of conserving and reading the carbonized papyri. You remember our visit to the Officina dei Papyri in Naples? They�re still working on the stuff found in the eighteenth century. And they need to determine the best way of excavating new material, of recovering any more scrolls that may exist. This place demands the best. It�s a sacred site.�

�Precisely.� Hiebermeyer clicked his fingers. �The last thing you said. A sacred site. And like other sacred sites, like the caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Israel, people yearn to find out what lies inside, yet they also fear it. And believe me, there�s one very powerful body in Italy that would rather not have any more written records from the first century AD.�

At that moment the dust in the air seemed to blur and there was a palpable tremor, followed by a sound like falling masonry somewhere ahead. Maria braced her hands on the floor of the tunnel and looked at Hiebermeyer in alarm. He quickly whipped out a palm-sized device with a prong and jammed it onto the wall of the tunnel, watching the readout intently as the tremor subsided. �An aftershock, a bit bigger than the one last night but probably nothing to worry about,� he said. �We were told to expect these. Remember, the walls around us are solidified pyroclastic mud, unlike the ash and pumice fallout on Pompeii. Most of it�s harder than concrete. We should be safe.�

�I can hear the superintendency people coming up the tunnel behind us,� Maria said quietly.

�Ah yes. The mysterious lady from the superintendency. You know she�s an old friend of Jack�s? I mean, a close friend. It was after you�d left, when he was finishing his doctorate and I was already in Egypt. For some reason they don�t talk anymore. I can see the flashlight now. Best behavior.�

�No, I didn�t know,� Maria said quietly, then looked up at the snout. �Anyway, Anubis should stall them.�

�Anubis will probably halt the whole project,� Hiebermeyer said. �It�ll be hailed as a great discovery, vindication of their decision to explore the tunnel. It�ll be enough for them to withdraw our permit and seal this up. The only reason we�re here is that someone leaked the discovery of the tunnel to the press after the earthquake, and the archaeological authorities had no choice but to put up a show.�

�You�re being cynical again.�

�Trust me. I�ve been in this game a long time. There are much bigger forces at play here. There are those who are fearful of the ancient past, who would do all they can to close it off. They fear anything that might shake the established order, the institutions they serve. Old ideas, ancient truths sometimes obscured by those very institutions which sprang up to protect them.�

�Ideas that might be found in a long-lost library,� Maria murmured.

�We�re talking the first century AD here,� Maurice whispered. �The first decades anno Domini, in the year of our Lord. Think about it.�

�I have.�

�It�s your call whether or not we try to continue down the tunnel to see what else we can find before the superintendency shuts us down. I�ve got an excavation in Egypt waiting for me. You need a rest.�

�Let�s take the chance now while we�ve got it,� Maria said. �You�ve found your treasure, now I need mine.�

Hiebermeyer stowed the oscillator in his front overalls pocket, sneezed noisily then peered at Maria. �I can see what Jack saw in you. He always said you might make something of yourself, if you got out of the Institute for Medieval Studies at Oxford and took a job with him.�

Maria gave him a withering look, then crawled forward until she was just beyond the statue. The dust was settling, and ahead of them they could just make out a white patch where another fragment of the tunnel wall had been dislodged by the tremor. As the beams of their headlamps concentrated on the fracture, they could see something dark at the center. Hiebermeyer pulled himself forward and turned to Maria, his face ablaze with excitement. �Okay, we�ve passed Anubis, and we�re still in one piece.�

�Superstitious, Maurice?�

�Let�s go for it.�

�

23 August AD 79

CLAUDIUS GULPED AT THE WINE, HOLDING THE CUP with trembling hands, then shut his eyes and grasped the pillar until the worst of the fit was over. Tonight he would go to the Phlegraean Fields, stand before the Sibyl�s cave for the last time. But there was work to do before then. He lurched sideways onto the marble bench, clutching wildly at his toga to stop it from slipping off, then tripped and fell heavily on his elbows. His face twisted in pain and frustration, willing tears that no longer came, retching on an empty stomach. In truth he was going through the motions. He barely felt anything anymore.

He raised himself and peered rheumily at the moonlight that was now shimmering across the great expanse of the bay, past the statues of Greek and Egyptian gods that lined the portico of the villa. The nearest to him, the dog-headed one, seemed to frame the mountain, its ears and snout glowing in the moonlight. From his vantage point on the belvedere of the villa he could see the rooftops of the town he knew intimately but had never visited, Herculaneum. He could hear the clinking and low sounds of evening activity, the rising and falling of conversation, peals of laughter and soft music, the lapping of waves on the seashore.

He�d had all he needed. Wine from the slopes of Vesuvius, rich red wine that flowed like syrup, always his favorite. And girls, brought for him from the back alleys below, girls who still gave him fleeting pleasure, years after he had stopped pondering what it did for them.

And he�d had the poppy.

He sniffed and wrinkled his nose, and then looked up. The soothsayers had been right. There was something about the sky tonight.

He looked across the bay to the west, past the old Greek colony of Neapolis, toward the naval base at Misenum, on the far promontory beside the open sea. The shadow of the mountain darkened the bay, and all he could make out were a few merchantmen anchored close inshore. He was used to looking out for the phosphorescence left in the wake of the fast galleys, but tonight he could see nothing. Where was Pliny? Had Pliny got his message? It was hardly as if he were away on naval maneuvers. Claudius knew exactly what the commander of the Roman fleet at Misenum did. The fleet had not put out for action since Claudius� grandfather Mark Anthony had been defeated at Actium, more than a century before. Pax Romana. Claudius nodded to himself. He, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, Imperator, had helped to keep that peace. He looked back toward the half-empty pitcher on the table. Pliny had better get here soon. What he had to say tonight demanded a clear head. It was getting late.

He reached out to pour himself another cup, letting the wine overflow and trickle down the table to join the wide red stain that had permeated the marble floor over the years. He could see back into his little room and the line of wax images ranged along the wall, caught in the moonlight. Ancestral images, the only things he had saved from his past. His father, Drusus, cherished in memory. His beloved brother, Germanicus. With his waxen skin, Claudius felt he was already one with them. He was old, old enough to have lived through the Age of Augustus, the Golden Age tarnished forever by the debauchery of Tiberius and Caligula and then Claudius� successor, Nero. Sometimes, in his bleaker moments, usually after the wine, he felt that time had made a monster of him just as it had ruined Rome, not by some hideous malformity but through a slow and inexorable wasting, as if the gods who had inflicted the ailment on him, the palsy, were making him endure the full extremity of torment in this life before they pitched him into the fires below.

He shook himself out of his trance, coughed painfully and looked over the balcony of the villa again, over the rooftops of Herculaneum. When he had faked his own poisoning and escaped Rome, when his work there was done and he craved his former life as a writer and a scholar, his old friend Calpurnius Piso had blocked off an annex to his villa and made a home for him here, his hideaway now for almost a quarter of a century, overlooking the sea and the mountain. He missed nothing in Rome that was not already gone, and had all that a scholar could need. He knew he should be more grateful, but there were irritations. Calpurnius� grandfather had been a patron of the Greek philosopher Philodemos, whose library of unreadable nonsense was always in the way. And then poor Calpurnius Piso had been forced to commit suicide, here, in front of Claudius� very eyes, after his failed plot against Nero, leaving the villa to a grudging nephew who did not even know who Claudius was, who thought he was just another one of the Greek charlatans who seemed to beg their way into every aristocratic household around here. It was exactly the anonymity that Claudius sought, but it was also the ultimate humiliation.

But he had the memories, one above all others. The fisherman by the inland sea, that afternoon all those years ago. The promise Claudius had made him. Everything the fisherman had predicted had come to pass. Now forces beyond Claudius� control were closing in on him. Claudius would not let him down.

�Ave, Princeps.�

Claudius straightened with a start. �Pliny? My dear friend. I told you to stop calling me that. We have known each other since you were a young cavalry officer with my legions in Germany. I stopped being Princeps when you were still a young man. It is I who should be honoring you, a veteran and an admiral. But we are both citizens of Rome, no more, no less, for what that is worth these days.�

Pliny came quickly in and helped Claudius back to his seat, taking his cup and filling it. He passed it over and poured himself one, holding it up formally. �The gods give you salutations on your ninetieth year.�

�That was three weeks ago.� Claudius waved his hand dismissively, then looked at the other man with affection. Pliny was tall, unusually so for a Roman, but then he did come from Verona in the north, the land of the Celts. Rather than a toga he wore the emblazoned red tunic and strap-on boots of a naval officer, and he had a sinewy toughness about him. He was everything that Claudius most admired, a decorated war veteran, a natural leader of men, a prodigious scholar who was author of countless volumes, and now the new encyclopedia. Claudius clenched his fist to stop his stutter. �Have you b-brought me the book?�

�The first twenty volumes. My present for your birthday, Princeps, even if a little belated. I could not imagine a more auspicious occasion or a more exacting reader for my work.� Pliny pointed proudly to a basket beside the door, carefully placed away from the wine, brimming over with scrolls. �A few details on the flora and fauna of Britannia I want to check with you, and of course the space you asked me to keep in the section on Judaea. Otherwise complete. The first natural history of the world not written by a Greek.�

Claudius gestured at the half-empty shelves in the room, then at the scrolls lying in bundles on the floor. �At least now I�ve got space to store them. Narcissus has been helping me to box up these other scrolls. I�ve never been able to bring myself to throw any book away, and I never had the heart to tell old Calpurnius, but these ones by Philodemus aren�t worth the paper they�re written on.�

�Where do you want them? My books, I mean. I can shelve them for you.�

�Leave them where they are by the door. Narcissus is making space in my library tomorrow. Yours will have pride of place. All of that Greek nonsense will be removed.�

�Narcissus still does all your writing for you?�

�He castrated himself, poor fellow, so he could serve me, you know. It was when he was a boy, a young slave. I was going to free him anyway.�

�I�ve never quite trusted Narcissus,� Pliny said cautiously.

�You can always trust a eunuch.�

�It�s always been your Achilles� heel, if I may say so. Wives and freedmen.�

�Achilles is one thing I�m definitely not. I may be a god, but I�m no Achilles.� Claudius stifled a giggle, then looked serious. �Yes, Narcissus is a bit of a mystery. I sometimes think his fall from being Prefect of the Guard in Rome to being little more than the slave of an old hermit must be hard for him to bear. Part of my own disappearing act. But Nero would have executed him if he hadn�t faked his death too. Narcissus has always been a shrewd fellow, with business interests in Britannia. And there�s his religion, the quirky stuff he picked up when he was a slave. He�s a very pious chap. And he�s always been very loyal to me.� Claudius suddenly smiled, lurched up and caught Pliny by the arm. �Thank you for your books, my friend,� he said quietly. �Reading has always been my greatest joy. And there will be much to help me with my own history of Britannia.� He pointed to an open scroll pinned on the table, one edge splattered with wine. �We�d better get to work while I�ve still got a modicum of common sense left in me. It has been a long day.�

�I can see.�

The two men hunched together over the table, the curious hue of the moonlight giving the marble a reddish tint. It was unseasonably hot for late August, and the breeze wafting over the balcony was warm and dry like the sirocco that sometimes swept up from Africa. Claudius sometimes wondered whether Pliny the great encyclopedist was not just flattering him by calling on his expertise on Britannia, a hollow victory if there ever was one. Claudius had been there, of course, had ridden out of the freezing waves on a war elephant, pale and shaking, not in fear of the enemy but terrified that he might have a seizure and fall off, bringing dishonor to his family name. Yet Britannia was his one imperial achievement, his one triumph, and he had devoted himself to writing a history of the province from the earliest times. He had read everything there was to read on the subject, from the journal of the ancient explorer Pytheas, who had first rounded the island, to the bloodcurdling accounts of head-hunting that his legionaries had extracted from the Druids before they were executed. And he had found her, princess of a noble family, the girl the Sibyl had told him to seek out, she who would rise and fall alongside the warrior-queen.

�Tell me,� Claudius suddenly said. �You saw my father in a dream?�

�It was why I wrote my History of the German Wars,� Pliny replied, repeating the story he had told Claudius many times before. �It was while I was stationed on the Rhine, in command of a cavalry regiment. I awoke one night and a ghost was standing over me, a Roman general. It was Drusus, I swear it. Your revered father. He was committing me to secure his memory.�

�He d-died before I even knew him.� Claudius glanced at the bust of his father in the room, then clasped his hands together in anguish. �P-poisoned, like my dear brother, Germanicus. If only I had been able to live up to his legacy, to lead the legions like Germanicus, to earn the loyalty of the men.�

�But you did,� Pliny said, looking anxiously at Claudius. �Remember Britannia.�

�I do.� Claudius slumped, then smiled wanly. �That�s the trouble.� He began fingering a coin on the table, a burnished sestertius with his portrait on it, turning it over and over again, a nervous habit, but he let it slip out of his fingers and roll toward the scrolls by the door. Claudius sighed irritably and made as if to get up, but then slumped down again and stared morosely at his hands. �They�ve built a temple to me there, you know. And they�re building an amphitheater now, did you know that? In Londinium. I saw it on my secret trip there this summer, when I went to her tomb.�

�Don�t tell me about that again, Princeps, please,� Pliny said. �It gives me nightmares. What about Rome? Your achievements in Rome? You constructed many wonderful things, Claudius. The people are grateful.�

�Not that anyone would see them,� Claudius said. �They�re all underground, underwater. Did I tell you about my secret tunnel under the Palatine Hill? Right under my house. Apollo ordered me to make it. I worked out the riddle in the leaves, in the Sibyl�s cave. Let me see if I can remember it.�

�And Judaea,� Pliny said quickly. �You granted universal toleration for the Jews, across the empire. You gave Herod Agrippa the kingdom of Judaea.�

�And then he died,� Claudius murmured. �My dear friend Herod Agrippa. Even he was corrupted by Rome, by my vile nephew, Caligula.�

�You had no choice,� Pliny said soothingly. �With nobody to replace Herod Agrippa, you had to make Judaea a Roman province.�

�And let it be ruled by venal and rapacious officials. After all that Cicero warned a century ago about provincial administration. The lessons of history,� Claudius added bitterly. �Look how I learned them.�

�The Jewish Revolt was inevitable.�

�Ironic, isn�t it? Fifteen years after Rome grants universal toleration for the Jews, she does all she can to eradicate them from the face of the earth.�

�The gods willed it.�

�No, they did not.� Claudius took a long shuddering drink. �Remember the temple you told me about during your last visit? The one Vespasian had erected in Rome? To the deified Claudius. I�m a god too now, remember? I�m a god, but this god did not will the destruction of the Jews. You have it on divine authority.�

Pliny quickly rolled up the scroll and slid it into a leather satchel beside the table, away from the splatter of wine, then hesitantly pulled out another. �You were going to tell me something about Judaea. Another day?�

�No. Now.�

Pliny sat poised with a metal stylus over the scroll, eager and determined. Claudius peered at the writing already on the scroll, at the gap in the middle. �Tell me, then,� Pliny said. �This new Jewish sect. What do you think of them?�

�That�s why I asked you here.� Claudius breathed in deeply. �The followers of the Anointed One. The Messiah, the Christos. I know about them from my visits to the Phlegraean Fields. They are just the kind of people the Nazarene wanted to follow him. The crippled, the diseased, outcasts. People who so desperately crave happiness that their yearning becomes infectious, leading others to find their own release from the burdens of life, their own salvation.�

�How do you know all this?�

�Because I am one of them.�

�You are one of them?� Pliny sounded incredulous. �You are a Jew?�

�No!� Claudius scoffed, his head jerking sideways. �A cripple. An outcast. Someone who went to him for a cure.�

�You went to this man? But I thought you never traveled to the east.�

�It was all Herod�s doing. My dear friend Herod Agrippa. He tried to help, to take me away from Rome. He had heard of a miracle-worker in Judaea, a Nazarene, a man they said was descended from King David of the Jews. It was my only trip ever to the east. The heat made my shuddering worse.�

�So the trip was wasted.�

�Except for a few hours on a lake.� Claudius suddenly had a far-off look in his eyes. �The town of Nazareth lies on a great inland body of water�the Sea of Kinnereth, they call it. It�s not salt water at all, you know, but really a vast lake, and lies several stades below the level of the sea.�

�Fascinating.� Pliny was writing quickly. �Tell me more.�

�He was a carpenter, a boatwright. Herod and I and our women went out with him on his boat, fishing, drinking wine. I was with my lovely Calpurnia, away from the clutches of my wife. We were all about the same age, young men and women, and even I found an exuberance I thought I could never have. I spilled wine in the lake and he joked about turning water into wine, catching the fish that way.�

�But no miracle.�

�After the fishing we sat on the shore until the sun went down. Herod grew impatient, and went off to the town seeking his pleasure. The Nazarene and I were left alone together.�

�What did he say?�

�He said I must bear my affliction, that it would protect me and propel me to a greatness I could scarcely imagine. I had no idea what he was on about�me, Claudius the cripple, the embarrassing nephew of the emperor Tiberius, barely tolerated in Rome, hidden away and denied public office while all the other young men were finding glory with the legions.�

�He saw a scholar and a future emperor,� Pliny murmured. �He knew your destiny, Princeps. He was a shrewd man.�

�I don�t believe in destiny. And there you go again. Princeps.�

Pliny steered him back. �What of the man�s own future? The Nazarene?�

�He spoke of it. He said one day he would disappear into the wilderness, then all the world would come to know of him. I warned him not to be brought down by the sticky web of those who would exploit and deceive him. That was my advice for him. Nazareth was a pretty out-of-the-way place, and I don�t know if he realized then what men are capable of. I doubt whether he�d ever even seen a crucifixion.�

�And Herod Agrippa?�

�Herod was still with us when the Nazarene had said he wanted no intermediaries, no interpreters. Herod used a Greek word for them, apostoles. Herod was a straightforward man, blunt, a dear fellow. He had no interest in the visions of the Nazarene, but he could see I had been affected, and he was fond of me. Herod determined that if he came to power he would tolerate the Nazarene.�

�But this man was executed, I believe?� Pliny said.

�Crucified, in Jerusalem. In the final years of the reign of my uncle Tiberius. The Nazarene had told me he would offer himself as a sacrifice. Whether he truly foresaw his own crucifixion is another matter. The man I met had no death wish. He was full of the joys of life. But we talked about the ancient legends of human sacrifice among the Semites, the Jews. He knew his history, how to reach his people. I think the sacrifice he meant was symbolic.�

�Fascinating,� Pliny murmured absently. �The Sea of Kinnereth, you say? Not the Dead Sea? That sea is remarkably briny, I believe.� He was writing in the final narrow space he had left on his scroll, dipping his quill in an ink pot he had placed beside him. �This will make a splendid addition to my chapter on Judaea. Thank you, Claudius.�

�Wait. There�s more. I haven�t even given it to you yet.� Claudius stood and hobbled unsteadily over to the bookcase where Philodemos� library had been, sweeping aside the few remaining scrolls on the middle shelf and reaching into a dark recess behind. He lurched back to the table, sat down heavily and passed a small wooden tube over to Pliny.

�There it is,� Claudius panted. �That�s what I wanted you to have.�

�Acacia, I shouldn�t wonder.� Pliny sniffed the wood. �What the Jews call shittim, from the stunted tree that grows along the shores of the east.� He uncorked the tube and reached gingerly inside, extracting a small scroll about a foot square. It was yellow with age, though not as old as Philodemos� papyrus scrolls, and some of the ink had crystallized and smudged on the surface. Pliny held the sheet close and sniffed the ink. �Probably not sulfate,� he murmured. �Though it�s hard to tell, there�s so much sulfur in the air today.�

�You smell it too?� Claudius said. �I thought it was just me, bringing it back from my visits to the Phlegraean Fields.�

�Bitumen.� Pliny sniffed the ink again. �Bitumen, no doubt about it.�

�That makes sense,� Claudius said. �Oily tar rises to the surface all round the Lake of Kinneret. I saw it.�

�Indeed?� Pliny scribbled a note in the margin of the text. �You know I have been experimenting with ink? My Alexandrian agent sent me some excellent gall nuts, cut from a species of tree in Arabia. Did you know they are made by tiny insects, which exude the gall? Quite remarkable. I crushed them and mixed them with water and resin, then added the iron and sulfur salts I found on the shore at Misenum. It makes a marvelous ink, jet black and no smudging. I�m writing with it now. Just look at it. Far better than this inferior stuff, oil soot and animal skin glue. Whatever this writing is, I fear it won�t last as long as old Philodemos� rantings.�

�It was all I could find.� Claudius took a gulp of wine and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. �I�d used up all my own ink on the voyage out.�

�You wrote this?�

�I supplied the paper, and that concoction that passes as ink.�

Pliny unraveled the papyrus and flattened it on a cloth he had laid over the sticky mess on the table. The papyrus was covered with fine lines of writing, neither Greek nor Latin, lines of singular flowing artistry, composed with more care than would normally be the case for one accustomed to writing often. �The Nazarene?�

Claudius twitched. �At the end of our meeting, on the lakeshore that night. He wanted me to take this away and keep it safe until the time was right. You read Aramaic?�

�Of course. You have expertly taught me the Phoenician language, and I believe they are similar.�

Pliny scanned the writing. At the bottom was a name. He read the few lines directly above it, looked up, then read them again. For a moment there was silence, and utter stillness in the room. Claudius watched him intently, his lower lip trembling. A waft of warm air from outside the balcony brought with it a sharp reek of sulfur, and from somewhere inland came a distant sound like waves along the seashore. Claudius kept his eyes on Pliny, who put down the scroll and raised his hands together pensively.

�Well?� Claudius said.

Pliny looked at him, and spoke carefully. �I am a military man, and an encyclopedist. I record facts, things I have seen with my own eyes or have been recounted to me on good authority. I can see that this document has the authority of the man who wrote it, and who signed his name on it.�

�Put it away,� Claudius said, reaching out and grasping Pliny�s wrist. �Keep it safely, the safest place you can find. But transcribe those final lines into your Natural History. Now is the time.�

�You have made copies?�

Claudius looked at Pliny, then at the scroll, and suddenly his hand began shaking. �Look at me. The palsy. I can�t even write my own name. And for this I don�t trust a copyist, not even Narcissus.� He got up, picked up the scroll and went over to a dark recess filled with papyrus sheets and old wax tablets beside the bookcase, then knelt down awkwardly with his back to Pliny. He fumbled around for a few moments, got up again and turned around, a cylindrical stone container in his hands. �These jars came from Sa�s in Egypt, you know,� he said. �Calpurnius Piso stole them from the Temple of Neith when he looted the place. Apparently they were filled with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic scrolls, but he burned them all. The old fool.� He put the jar down, then picked up a bronze-handled dish filled with a black substance and held it over a candle, his hands unusually steady. The air filled with a rich aromatic smell, briefly disguising the sulfur. He put the dish down again, picked up a wooden spatula and smeared the resin around the lid of the container, let it cool for a moment and then handed the cylinder to Pliny. �There you go. It is sealed, as I was instructed in the leaves, according to divine augury.�

�This document,� Pliny persisted. �Why so urgent?�

�It is because what he predicted has come to pass.� Claudius shuddered again, ostentatiously clutching his hand as if to stop it from shaking. He fixed Pliny with an intense stare. �The Nazarene knew the power of the written word. But he said he would never write again. He said that one day his word would come to be seen as a kind of holy utterance. He said that his followers would preach his word like a divine mantra, but that time would distort it and some would seek to use their version of it for their own ends, to further themselves in the world of men. He was surrounded by illiterates in Nazareth. He wanted a man of letters to have his written word.�

�The written words of a prophet,� Pliny murmured. �That�s the last thing a priesthood usually wants. It does them out of a job.�

�It�s why the r-ridiculous Sibyl speaks in r-riddles.� Claudius said, flustered. �Only the soothsayers can interpret it. What nonsense.�

�But why me?� Pliny insisted.

�Because I can�t publish it. I�m supposed to have died a quarter of a century ago, remember? But now that your Natural History is nearly finished, it�s perfect. You have the authority. People will read you far and wide. Your work is one of the greatest ever written, and will far outlast Rome. Immortal fame will await those whose deeds are recorded by you.�

�You flatter me, Princeps.� Pliny bowed, visibly pleased. �But I still don�t fully understand.�

�The Nazarene said that his word would first need others to preach it. But there would come a time when the people would be ready to receive his word directly, when there would be enough converts for the word to be spread from one to the other, when they could dispense with teachers. He said that time would come within my lifetime. He said I would know when.�

�A concilium,� Pliny murmured. �They are forming a concilium, a priesthood. That�s what he was warning about.�

�In the Phlegraean Fields. They use that very word. Concilium. How do you know?�

�Because I hear it among my sailors at Misenum.�

�I told you about those in the Phlegraean Fields, the followers of Christos,� Claudius continued. �More and more are going into the fold, the concilium. They are already talking about a kyriakon, a House of the Lord. There is already dissent, there are already factions. Some say Jesus said this, some that. They are already speaking in riddles. It is becoming sophistry, like Philodemos. And there are men who call themselves fathers, patres.�

�Priests,� Pliny murmured. �Men who would rather nobody knew what we now know.�

�While I was still emperor in Rome, one came here, a Jewish apostolos from Tarsus named Paul. I was in disguise, making one of my visits to the Sibyl, and I heard him speak. He found followers in the Phlegraean Fields, many who are still there today. Yet none of these people knew the Nazarene, not even Paul, none of them touched him as I did. To them the man I knew was already some kind of god.� Claudius paused, then looked intently at Pliny. �This scroll must be preserved. It will be your ultimate authority, for what you write in the Natural History.�

�I will keep it safe.�

�It�s worse.� Claudius suddenly looked down in despair. �The poppy makes me talk, makes my mind wander, makes me say things I can never remember afterward. They know who I am. Every time I go now they seem to appear out of the mist, reaching out for me.�

�You should be more careful, Princeps,� Pliny murmured.

�They�ll come here. All my life�s work, all my manuscripts. They�ll destroy everything. That�s why I�ve got to give it to you. I don�t trust myself.�

Pliny thought for a moment, then took the scroll of Natural History he had been writing on and placed it on the bookshelf. �I will return for this tomorrow. It will be safe here for one night, and I will add more to it about Judaea, anything more you can tell me. I will return. There is someone else I must visit here tomorrow evening. Maybe even tonight. I have been starved of her for too long. You will join me?�

�I sometimes avail myself. But these days I think more and more of my dear Calpurnia. Such pleasures are in the past for me, Pliny.�

�Tonight I will take my fast galley straight to Rome. I�ll be back here by the morning. After I see you again, I will make the same additions into my master version, then send it to the scribes in Rome for copying,� he muttered, half to himself. �The Natural History will be complete at last. The final edition. Unless you can tell me anything more about Britannia, that is.� He thought for a moment, drumming his fingers on the table, then tapped the cylinder Claudius had given him. �And I think I know just the place for this.� He tucked it in a pouch under his toga, then took down the scroll on Judaea from the shelf, placed it on the table, picked up the stylus and wrote a few lines, paused for a moment, smudged the lines out with his finger, then made a note in the margin. Claudius watched, grunting his approval. Pliny let the two ends of the scroll roll loosely together and replaced it quickly on the shelf, suddenly remembering the time and his visit to the woman that night. At that moment there was a shuffling sound at the entranceway, something that might have been a knock, and a stooped old man appeared, dressed in a simple tunic and carrying two woolen cloaks.

�Ah, Narcissus,� Claudius said. �I am ready.�

�You go to the Sibyl?� Pliny asked.

�One last time. I promise.�

�Then one last thing, Princeps.�

�Yes?�

�I do this for you as a friend, and as a fellow historian. It is my job to present the facts as I know them, and to hold nothing back.�

�But?�

�You? Why is this so important to you? This Nazarene?�

�I too am loyal to my friends. You know that. And he was one of them.�

�My sailors speak of a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, that people with goodness and compassion can find it. Do you believe in this thing?�

Claudius started to speak, hesitated, then looked Pliny full in the face, his eyes moist and suddenly etched with his years. He reached out and touched his friend�s arm, then gave a small smile. �My dear Pliny. You forget yourself. I�m a god, remember? Gods have no need of heaven.�

Pliny smiled back, and bowed. �Princeps.�

�

Present day

JACK AND COSTAS HUNG WEIGHTLESS IN THE WATER eight meters below the Zodiac boat off southeast Sicily, their equipment reflecting the sunlight that shone as far down as the cliff base thirty meters below. Jack was floating a few meters away from the shotline, maintaining perfect buoyancy with his breathing and watching the extraordinary scene overhead. The Lynx helicopter from Seaquest II had arrived a few minutes before, and its deflected prop-wash created a perfect halo around the silhouette of the boat. Through the tunnel of calm in the middle Jack could see the wavering forms of the two replacement divers who had been winched down to provide safety backup should anything go wrong. Jack could feel the vibration, the drumming of the prop-wash on the water, but the roaring of the engines was muffled by his helmet and communication headset. He had been listening to Costas giving instructions to the departing divers, a complex checklist that seemed to run through the entire IMU equipment store.

�Okay, Jack,� Costas said. �Andy says we�re good to go. I just wanted to get the logistics people moving on Seaquest II in case it�s showtime.�

His voice sounded oddly metallic through the intercom, a result of the modulator designed to counter the effects on the voice of helium in the gas mix. Jack tilted upright and finned back toward the shotline. The twin corrugated hoses of his regulator made him feel like a diver of Cousteau�s day, but the similarity ended there. As he approached Costas he cast a critical eye over the yellow console on his friend�s back, its contoured shell containing the closed-circuit rebreather with the cylinders of oxygen and trimix they needed for the dive. The corrugated hoses led to a helmet and full-face mask, allowing them to breathe and talk without the encumbrance of a mouthpiece.

�Remember my briefing,� Costas said. �Lights off, unless we find something.�

Jack nodded. With their eyes accustomed to the gloom, he knew they would have a greater range of vision for spotting a wreck mound than with the limited cone of light from a headlamp. �Dive profile?� he asked.

�Maximum depth eighty meters, maximum bottom time twenty-five minutes. We can go deeper, but I don�t want to risk it until Seaquest II �s on station and the recompression chamber�s fired up. And remember your bailout.� He pointed to the octopus regulator that could be fed into the helmet if the rebreather malfunctioned, bypassing the counterlung and tapping gas directly from the manifold on the cylinders.

�Roger that. You�re the divemaster.�

�I wish you�d remember that the next time you see treasure glinting at the bottom of the abyss. Or inside an iceberg.� Costas pressed a control on his dive computer and then peered at Jack through his visor. �Just one thing before we go��

�What is it?�

�You said anything that touches on the life of Jesus is like gold dust. People must have been searching for the shipwreck of St. Paul since diving began, even before Cousteau. It�s one of the biggest prizes in archaeology. Why us?�

�That�s what you said about Atlantis. A few lucky breaks and a little lateral thinking. That�s all I�ve ever needed.�

�And a little help from your friends.�

�And a little help from my friends.� Jack grasped the dump valve on his buoyancy jacket. �Good to go?�

�Good to go.�

�

Seconds later Costas was hurtling down into the depths, approaching the dive in his customary way, as if he were going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Jack followed more gracefully, his arms and legs outstretched like a skydiver, exhilarated by the weightlessness and the panorama that was opening below them, listening to the sound of his own breathing. The view was exactly as he remembered it from twenty years before, every gully and ridge of the cliff base etched in his mind, from hours spent measuring and recording, poring over the wreck plan and working out where to excavate next. Costas was right about the technology. Underwater archaeology had advanced leaps and bounds in the past two decades, as if physics had advanced from Marie Curie to particle accelerators in a mere generation. Back then, measurements had been taken painstakingly by hand; now it was laser range-finders and digital photogrammetry using remote-operated vehicles rather than divers. What had taken months back then could now be achieved in a matter of days. Even the discomforts of diving were greatly reduced, the E-suits insulating them from the temperature drop at the thermocline. Yet with new diving technology, greater depths beckoned, depths that brought new boundaries, new thresholds of danger. The cost was still there, the risks even greater. Jack was drawn on, always pushing the limits of exploration, but before committing others to follow in his wake he needed to be certain that the prize was worth it.

Directly below, he saw where Pete and Andy had anchored the shotline, in the gully where he had found the sounding lead, and from there he saw a wavering line encrusted with algae extending down the slope, into the depths. He stared at it, suddenly feeling in a time warp. It was the line he had paid out on his final dive all those years ago, still lying exactly where he had left it, as if the site had been waiting for him, unfinished. Costas had seen it too, and somehow brought himself to a halt before augering into the seabed. He waited for Jack to reach him, then together they finned slowly side by side over the line until they reached the last plateau, fifty meters deep, the farthest point where amphoras had tumbled from the Roman shipwreck. As they swam over the plateau, a barlike shape appeared below them in the silt, about two meters long with a rectangular aperture just visible in the center.

�My old friend.� Jack tweaked the control on the side of his helmet to get his voice to sound normal. �It�s the lead Roman anchor shank I saw on my final dive, and there should be another identical one about fifty meters ahead, on the edge of the plateau. It�s exactly what you�d expect to see from a ship using two anchors to hold offshore, one paid out behind the other. We can use them to take a compass bearing.�

�Roger that.�

They swam on over the line and soon saw the second shank, just as Jack remembered it, wedged in a cleft above a drop-off. From there, Jack could see the line tapering off, its end hanging over a ridge, the deepest he had dared to go on his final dive twenty years before. It was like the end of divers� safety lines he had followed inside caves, haunting relics of extraordinary human endeavors that beckoned others to surpass them. Without pausing they swam beyond, and dropped down to the base of the rocky cliff, where the seabed became a featureless desert of sand. On the edge Jack saw a belt of corroded machine-gun cartridges draped over a clip of larger cannon rounds from an anti-aircraft gun. He remembered seeing them before, relics of the Second World War. Costas slowed down, reaching for the dump valve on his buoyancy compensator.

�Don�t even think about it,� Jack said.

�Just looking,� Costas said hopefully, then finned away. Beyond them the sand seemed to extend to infinity, a blue-gray desert with no visible horizon. About fifty meters on they swam over a small outcrop of rock, then saw an undulation where the sand rose in a low dune. As they approached it looked more and more unnatural, like some sea creature lurking beneath the sediment, the undulation extending ten meters or more in either direction from a central hump, with another ridge running at ninety degrees through it. Costas gave an audible intake of breath. �My God, Jack. It�s an aircraft!�

�I was wondering if we�d see one of these,� Jack murmured. �It�s an assault glider, a British Horsa. Look, you can see where the high wings have collapsed over the fuselage. That night in 1943 when the SAS dropped in on the Italians, the British also sent in an Airlanding Brigade. It was the only major glitch in the whole Sicily invasion, and it was a pretty horrific one. The gliders were released too far offshore against a headwind, and dozens of them never made it. Hundreds of guys drowned. There are going to be bodies in there.�

�That�s one place I definitely don�t want to go,� Costas said quietly.

�Topside, you can sometimes believe old wars never happened,� Jack said. �Everything�s cleaned up and sanitized, but underwater it�s all here, just below the surface. It�s haunting.�

�Depth seventy-five meters.� Costas was concentrating hard on his computer as they finned over the last of the shadowy form in the sand. �Not looking too good on the time front, Jack. Ten minutes max, unless we really want to stretch the envelope.�

�Roger that.�

�I take it we�re not looking for a giant cross sticking out of the seabed.�

Jack grinned through his visor. �I wish it were that easy. At this date we don�t even know whether the cross was a Christian symbol yet. If it�s the shipwreck of St. Paul, we�re talking twenty, maybe twenty-five years after the Crucifixion. Most of the familiar Christian symbols�the cross, the fish, the anchor, the dove, the Greek letters Chi-Rho�only start appearing in the following century, and even then were only used secretly. The archaeology of early Christianity is incredibly elusive. And remember, Paul was supposed to be a prisoner, under Roman guard. He�s hardly going to have relics with him.�

Jack looked at his depth gauge. Seventy-seven meters. He could feel the compensator continuously bleeding air into his suit as he descended, counteracting the water pressure. He felt elated, preternaturally aware, at a depth where he would have been one step from death twenty years before. He remembered too well the numbing effect of nitrogen narcosis, the thick, syrupy taste of compressed air below fifty meters, into the danger zone. Breathing mixed gas was like drinking wine without alcohol content, all expectation but no buzz. He realized that he missed the narcosis, that his mind was overcompensating. It was euphoria of a different kind to descend to these depths clearheaded. He felt acutely alive, focused, his lucidity sharpened by the threshold of danger just ahead, reveling in the moment as if he were a novice diver again.

�They must have been narked out of their minds,� Costas said.

�Cousteau�s boys?�

�I can�t believe they got this deep.�

�I can,� Jack replied. �I dived with the last of that generation, the survivors. Tough French ex-navy types. They took a slug of wine before diving to dilate the blood vessels, and the last breath they took before the regulator was a lungful of Gauloise. Going deep was like a drinking competition. Real men could take it.�

�Take it and die.�

Then out of the gloom Jack saw them. First one, then another. The unmistakable shapes of pottery amphoras, half buried and shrouded in sediment. The trail of amphoras led back to the cliff face, the way he and Costas had come, in the right direction, but the forms were too encrusted to identify. They could be Greek, they could be Roman. Jack needed more. He looked at his depth gauge. Eighty meters. He swam over to the last shape, Costas behind him. Suddenly they were at another cliff, only this time there was no sandy shelf below, only inky blackness. They had reached the edge of the unknown, a place as forbidding as outer space, the beginning of a slope that dropped through vast canyons and mountain ranges to the deepest abyss of the Mediterranean, more than five thousand meters below. It was the end of the road. Jack let the momentum carry him a few meters over the edge, his mind blank in the face of the immensity before them.

�Don�t do it, Jack.� Costas spoke quietly, his voice now distorted as the helium level increased. �We can come back with the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod, check out the next hundred meters or so. Do it safely.�

�We haven�t found enough to justify it.� Jack�s voice sounded distant, emotionless, too overwhelmed to register his feelings, masking his disappointment. �Cousteau�s divers, the account in that diary, they must have meant that scatter of amphoras on the shelf. There�s no way they could have gone deeper, down that slope. We�re well into the death zone for compressed air.� He slowly turned, then on a whim switched on his helmet head-lamp. There was nothing to lose now. The glare was blinding, and showed how dark it was around them. He played the beam down the rock face, revealing occasional patches of red and orange marine growth which had been invisible in the natural light. Very little lived at this depth. He swept the beam back up from the limit of visibility below, then swept it back down again.

Bingo.

A narrow ledge, concealed from above by the cornice of the cliff. A mound of forms, twenty, maybe thirty of them, identical to the ones they had just seen. Amphoras.

�I�ve got it,� Jack said excitedly. �About ten meters below us.�

Costas swam alongside, switched on his headlamp and peered down. �Looks like a wreck mound to me,� he murmured. �A sandy gully. Could be good for preservation.�

�It must be the stern,� Jack said fervently. �The bow strikes the cliff, the stern floats back, dropping amphoras as it goes, then sinks here. It�s where the best artifacts should be�ship�s stores, personal possessions, stuff to identify it.�

�Can you see the amphora type?�

�No way. I need to get down there.�

�Jack, we can do it, but I�d have to reconfigure the dive profile. It�s exactly what I didn�t want. It puts us into an extended decompression schedule, before Seaquest II arrives and without any backup. Even the safety diver�s no use. And we�d only get an extra ten minutes.�

�Every dive�s a risk,� Jack murmured. �But if you can calculate the risk, you can do it safely. That�s what you always tell me. And you�ve just calculated it.�

�Remember what you said about all the new diving technology, about missing the edge? Well, you�re on it now.�

�I trust your equipment, you trust my intuition. This could be the best wreck we�ve ever discovered.�

�We could wait. Surely we�ve found enough now to come back.�

�We could.�

�I�ll cover your back, you cover mine.�

�That�s always the deal.�

�Let�s do it.�

They dropped over the cliff together, Costas reprogramming his wrist computer as Jack panned his light over the mound of amphoras below. Just before they reached the ledge he let out a whoop of excitement. �Graeco-Italic,� he exclaimed. �Dressel 2-4. Look, you can see the high handles, the angular shoulder. First century AD, Italian type, from Campania around Mount Vesuvius. That�s it. We�ve found what we need. We�ve got a mid�first century AD wreck.�

�We�ve got another nine minutes,� Costas said. �I�ve programmed it in, and we may as well use the time.� They both dropped down and knelt on the seabed beside the amphoras, and began sweeping the site with their headlamps, the light revealing the red color of the amphoras and reflecting off a sheen of silt suspended in the water. Jack saw other shapes protruding from the sediment under the amphoras, bar shapes about a meter long. He sank down farther and wafted away sediment with his hand, then unsheathed his knife and scraped cautiously. �Just as I thought,� he murmured excitedly. �Lead ingots.�

�This one has lettering on it.�

Jack sheathed his knife and swam over to Costas, then fanned the sediment away for a clearer view. For a moment there was silence. �Well, I�ll be damned,� he murmured. TI.CL.NARC.BR. LVT.EX.ARG. �Tiberius Claudius Narcissus.�

�You know this guy?�

�A slave of the emperor Claudius. When he was freed he adopted the emperor�s first two names, Tiberius Claudius. He was Claudius� secretary and became one of his chief ministers, but was murdered by Claudius� wife, Agrippina, after she had her husband poisoned.�

�How does this help us?�

�Freed slaves were the nouveaux riches of the time. They weren�t restricted by aristocratic snobbery about investing in trade and industry. It was just like the nineteenth century. We already know that Narcissus had his fingers in a number of pies in Rome, some of them pretty muddy. This ingot shows what a crafty character he was.�

�BR means �Britain�?�

�Yes. LVT was Lutudarum, in Derbyshire, one of the main lead-mining centers in Britain. EX ARG means �ex argentariis,� from the lead-silver works. I guessed it when I scraped that other ingot.�

�High-quality lead,� Costas said. �Produced from galena, lead sulfide, a by-product of silver production. Fewer impurities, less stuff to oxidize, brighter. Am I right?�

�Correct. We know that British lead was exported to the Mediterranean, from the analysis of lead pipes at Pompeii. It�s just what you�d expect a wealthy shipowner to have on board his vessel, to repair lead sheathing on the hull. Our sounding lead was pretty pure, not blackened with corrosion, and my guess is it was cast from this metal somewhere along the way.�

�Fascinating, but I still don�t see where this gets us.�

�Britain was invaded by the Romans in AD 43, the lead mines were in operation by AD 50. Wily old Narcissus gets straight in on the act and snaps up a lucrative contract, just like a modern mining speculator. These ingots must date to the early 50s. That gets us closer, a whole lot closer, to the magic date for St. Paul�s shipwreck.�

�Got you.�

There was a crackling on the intercom, and then a staccato beep indicating a relay message from Seaquest II. �You take it,� Jack said. �I need to concentrate.� He toned down the external receiver on his helmet and rose a few meters above the wreck site, while Costas sank down beside an amphora as he listened to the message. Jack swept his headlamp over the tumbled rows of amphoras, knowing he and Costas only had a few minutes left. They had found more than he had expected, much more, and with a huge sense of elation he realized that the excavation could now go ahead. Suddenly everything here was sacrosanct, no longer a frontier of discovery but a forensic scene, an interlocking matrix of evidence where every feature, every relationship could contain precious clues. He began to drop down again to pull Costas off the site, just as the three-minute warning flashed inside his helmet.

�Uh-oh,� Costas said. �It�s your old buddy Maurice Hiebermeyer. Just when you thought he was up to his neck in mummies in Egypt, he pops out of a hole in the ground in Italy.�

�Maurice?� Jack said. �Not now.�

�He says it�s urgent. He won�t go away.�

�He�s been working with Maria at the Roman ruins of Herculaneum,� Jack said. �There was an earthquake, and it�s a kind of rescue excavation. They�ve been having problems with the authorities who control their part of the site, so maybe there�s been some kind of lull. He�s been badgering me for months about a papyrus, something to do with Alexander the Great. Last time he collared me was when we were raising that cannon from the great siege of Constantinople. He really chooses his moments. Tell the radio officer I�ll talk to him while we decompress.�

There was an insistent beeping sound, and Costas looked at his computer. �We�re on amber, Jack. Two minutes, max.�

�Roger that. I�m good to go.�

�Jack.�

�What is it?�

�This amphora in front of me. It�s got some kind of inscription on it.�

Jack was directly above Costas now, and could clearly see the letters painted on the shoulder of the amphora. EGTTERE. �It�s a Latin infinitive, means �to go.� Fairly standard export marking.�

�No. Not that. Below it. Scratched markings.� Costas wafted his hand gently at the side of the amphora as Jack sank down beside him. �It looks like a big asterisk, a star maybe.�

�Pretty common too,� Jack murmured. �Bored sailors, passengers whiling away their time doodling on the pottery, playing games. If it was a long-haul voyage, we�ll find plenty of that. But I�ll get the remote-operated-vehicle guys to photo this on their first run over the site.�

��Aristarchos,�� Costas said slowly. �Greek letters. I can read it.�

�Probably a sailor,� Jack said distractedly, his tone now urgent as he looked at his computer. �Plenty of Greek sailors then. Probably an ancestor of yours.� He suddenly caught his breath. �What did you say?�

�Aristarchos. Look for yourself.�

Jack sank down and peered at the pottery. A common name. The letters were confident, bold, not the crude scratches of a sailor. Yet could it be? He hardly dared think it. Aristarchos of Thessaloniki?

�There�s another,� Costas said, excited. �The same hand, by the looks of it. �Loukas,� I think. Jack, I�m remembering the Acts of the Apostles. Paul�s two companions.�

Jack�s mind reeled. Loukas. Luke. He looked back at the symbol scratched above the names, the star shape. �I was wrong,� he said hoarsely. �We were all wrong.�

�What do you mean?�

�That symbol. It�s not a star. Look, the vertical line has a little loop at the top. It�s the Greek letter R, and the X is the Greek letter Ch. It�s the Chi-Rho symbol. So they did use it in the first century.� Jack could hardly believe what he was saying. �The first two letters of the word Christos, the Greek for Messiah,� he whispered.

�I think it�s about to get better. A whole lot better.� Costas had been wafting sediment off the amphora below the word Loukas, and a third scratching appeared. The letters were as clear as day. They both stared, speechless.

Paulos.

Paul of Tarsus, St. Paul the Evangelist, the man who had scratched his name and those of his companions on this pot almost two thousand years before, below the symbol of the one they already revered as the Anointed, the Son of God.

Jack and Costas pushed off and rose together, toward the opaque shimmer of light where the sun shone on the surface almost one hundred meters above. Jack seemed to be in a trance, looking at Costas but not seeing him, his mind�s eye on the foredeck of a great grain ship plying the Mediterranean two thousand years before, in the age of the Caesars, taking its passengers inexorably into the annals of history.

�I take it,� Costas said bemusedly, �we�re in business?�

�

JACK LIFTED HIS HELMET BRIEFLY TO EASE THE ACHE IN his neck, his senses suddenly overwhelmed by the roar of the Rolls-Royce turbine just behind him, and then pulled the helmet back into place, pressed in the ear protectors until the noise was dampened and the microphone repositioned. He was physically exhausted but too excited to rest, elated by their discovery of the shipwreck the day before, itching to get back, but now full of anticipation for a new prize that lay ahead. Hiebermeyer had been able to say little, but it had been enough for Jack to know that this was real. He checked his watch again. They had been flying due north in the Lynx helicopter for just over an hour from the position where they had left Seaquest II before dawn, in the Strait of Messina off Sicily, and Jack had set the autopilot to keep them low over the waves. Monitoring the altimeter was critical, and it was keeping him awake. It had been less than twelve hours since they had surfaced from their dive, and their bloodstreams were still saturated with excess nitrogen, which could expand dangerously if they gained any more altitude.

He checked again, then switched off the autopilot and engaged the hand controls and pedals of the helicopter, bringing the Lynx around thirty degrees to the northeast so that it was angled toward the coastline. He reactivated the autopilot, then settled back and looked again at the image he had been contemplating on the computer screen between the seats. It was an image he had grown up with, a centerpiece of the Howard Gallery, the art collection Jack�s grandfather had accumulated and which was now housed in a building on the IMU campus in Cornwall. It was a miniature watercolor by Goethe, painted during an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 1787. In the background Goethe had painted a gray, flat sky, and in the foreground a luminous yellow sea. In the center was the dark mass of the volcano, the shoreline beneath it fronted by flat-roofed buildings similar to the ancient Roman towns below Vesuvius then being unearthed for the first time. The image seemed whimsical, almost abstract, yet the streaks of red and yellow above the volcano betrayed the violent reality of the event that Goethe had witnessed. Jack gazed out of the cockpit windscreen toward the bay ahead of them. It was as if he were seeing a version of the watercolor, pastel shades drifting across the horizon in the sunrise, the details melded and obscured by the layer of smog in the atmosphere just below their altitude.

In the co-pilot�s seat Costas had been dozing fitfully, but he shifted forward when Jack adjusted the course. He woke with a start as his sunglasses slipped off his helmet and wedged on his nose.

�Enjoying off-gassing?� Jack said through the intercom.

�Just keep us below fifteen hundred feet,� Costas replied blearily. �I want to keep those nitrogen bubbles nice and small.�

�Don�t worry. We�ll be on the ground soon enough.�

Costas stretched, then sighed. �Fresh air, wide-open spaces. That�s what I like.�

�Then you should choose your friends more carefully.� Jack grinned, then nosed the helicopter down a few hundred feet. They broke through the layer of haze, and the mirage became a reality. Below them the dramatic shoreline of the islands and the mainland coast was sharply delineated, expanses of sun-scorched rock surrounded by azure sea. To the east was the great expanse of the city, and beyond that a smudge on the horizon where the bay ended, the haze just concealing a looming presence below a burst of orange, where the sun was rising above the mountains beyond.

�The Bay of Naples,� Jack said. �Crucible of civilization.�

�Civilization.� Costas yawned extravagantly, then paused. �Let me see. That would be corruption on a seismic scale, drug crime, the mafia?�

�Forget all that and look at the past,� Jack said. �We�re here for the archaeology, not to get embroiled in the present.�

Costas snorted. �That�d be a first.�

Jack looked out at the extraordinary scene in front of them, and was infused by the sense of history he had experienced at other cities in the Mediterranean�Istanbul, Jerusalem�where the superimposed layers of civilization were still visible, different cultures which had left their distinctive mark yet were bound together by the possibilities that settlement and resources at the place had to offer. The Bay of Naples was one of the great staging posts for the spread of ideas into Europe, where the Greeks first settled in the ninth and eighth centuries BC when they came west, trading with the Etruscans for iron at a time when Rome was just a few huts above a swamp. Cumae, where the alphabet was first brought west, Neapolis, Pompeii, all these places became centers of the new Greece, Magna Graecia, fueled by trade and by the hinterland of Campania with its rich agriculture. Jack stared at the slopes of Vesuvius, then had a sudden flashback to their underwater discovery the day before. He turned to Costas. �Remember those wine amphoras on the shipwreck? They were from here.�

�Rich volcanic soil, perfect for vineyards.�

�And a lot of Greek influence,� Jack said. �Even after the Romans took over in the fourth and third centuries BC, making this place a kind of Malibu for the wealthy, Greek culture stayed strong. People think of Pompeii and Herculaneum as the quintessential Roman towns, but actually they existed for centuries before the Romans arrived. They were still highly cosmopolitan in AD 79, with people speaking Greek and local dialects as well as Latin. And the Bay of Naples continued to be the first port of call for all things from the east, not just Greece but also the Near East and Egypt and beyond, exotic trade goods, new art styles, foreign emissaries, new ideas in philosophy and religion.�

�Now fill me in on the volcano,� Costas said.

Jack tapped the computer keyboard and the Goethe watercolor was replaced by a black-and-white photograph, showing a distant view of a volcano erupting, a great plume of rolling black clouds hanging like a malign genie over the city. �March 1944, during the Second World War,� Jack said. �Fast-forward nine months from the Allied landings in Sicily, where we�ve just been diving. A few months after the liberation of Naples, while the Allies were still slogging toward Rome. The most recent major eruption of Vesuvius.�

Costas whistled. �Looks like the gods of war unleashed hell.�

�That�s what people thought at the time, but fortunately it was just an immense venting of gas and ash and then the fissure closed up. Since then there�s been nothing as dramatic, though there was a bad earthquake in 1980 that killed several thousand people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. There�s a lot of concern about the recent seismic disturbances.�

�Three weeks ago.�

�That�s why we�re here.�

�And in ancient times?� Costas said. �I mean, the eruption of AD 79?�

Jack tapped again, and another painting appeared. �This is the only known Roman image of Vesuvius, found on a wall painting in Pompeii. It�s fanciful, with the god of wine laden with grapes to the left, but you can see the mountain is rich with vegetation and vineyards growing up the slopes. Vesuvius had been completely dormant since the Bronze Age, and the Romans only knew of it as an incredibly bountiful place, with rich soils that produced some of the best wines anywhere. The eruption in AD 79 was a massive shock, psychological as well as physical. Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae, the villas around the volcano, were all gone forever, though eventually life reasserted itself in Campania. The psychological effects were probably more damaging, reverberating down the centuries. It�s hard to make a modern analogy, but imagine if the San Andreas Fault split open, destroying Hollywood and devastating Los Angeles. Many would see it as the coming apocalypse.�

�So they really had no clue about what was going to happen?�

�The clues were there, where we�re headed now, but they had no reason to link them with the mountain.�

Jack pulled the helicopter in a wide arc to the north, and Costas peered down at a barren landscape. �What�s that place?�

�That�s what I wanted you to see. We�re over the northwest shore of the Bay of Naples, about twenty-five kilometers west of Vesuvius. This was the one area of extensive volcanic activity in the Roman period, though even Pliny never made the connection with Vesuvius. The Phlegraean Fields, the Fields of Fire. Listen to this. It�s from The Aeneid by Virgil. I�ve got the text on-screen. �There was a deep rugged cave, stupendous and yawning wide, protected by a lake of black water and the glooming forest. Over this lake no birds could wing a straight course without harm, so poisonous the breath which streamed up from those black jaws and rose to the vault of sky.� Now look out. That�s Lake Avernus, which means �birdless.� Over there you can see the most active crater today, Sulfaterra. That�s what Virgil was on about. And by the coast you can just make out the overgrown acropolis of ancient Cumae, one of the first places the Greeks settled.�

�Where the Sibyl hung out.�

�Literally. According to some accounts, she was suspended in a cage in the back of her cave, never fully visible and always wreathed in smoke.�

�High in more ways than one.�

Jack grinned. �In the Roman period, the Phlegraean Fields was a big tourist attraction, much more so than it is now. The entrance to the underworld, a place that reeked of fire and brimstone. People came here to see the tomb of Virgil, buried beside the road from Naples. And the Sibyl was still here too, at least before the eruption. Augustus consulted her, and other emperors too. Claudius went to the Sibyl,� he added.

�So the Greek colonists brought the first Sibyl with them?�

�Yes and no.�

Costas groaned. �Facts, Jack. Facts.�

�Supposedly there were thirteen Sibyls across the Greek world, though the earliest references suggest they derived from the idea of a single all-seeing prophetess. The site of Cumae is one of the few places where archaeology adds to the picture. In the 1930s, an extraordinary underground grotto came to light, exactly as the Romans described the Cave of the Sibyl. It�s a trapezoidal corridor almost fifty meters long, lit by side galleries and ending in a rectangular chamber, all hewn out of the rock. In The Aeneid, this was where the Trojan hero Aeneas consulted the Sibyl, to ask whether his Trojan colony in Italy would one day become the Roman Empire. And this was where she took him down into the underworld, to see his father, Anchises.�

Costas pointed to the steaming crater below them. �You mean the Fields of Fire, the Phlegraean Fields?�

�There were probably open volcanic vents here in antiquity. It must have been a vision of Dante�s inferno if there ever was one,� Jack said. �People are always drawn to these places, creation and destruction together in one terrifying cauldron. It was the perfect location for the Sibyl, who must have seemed like an apparition from the underworld itself. Supplicants were probably led through the fumaroles and boiling mud, so would have been shaking with fear even before they stood in front of her cave.�

�If memory serves me, Aeneas was a Trojan prince escaping from the Trojan War, at the end of the Bronze Age,� Costas said thoughtfully. �That means Virgil thought the Sibyl was here already, way before the Greeks or the Romans arrived.�

�All of the mythology we know today associated with the Cumaean Sibyl was Greek, especially her relationship with the god Apollo. But this may have been what the Greeks brought with them, and layered onto a goddess or prophetess who already existed in prehistoric Italy. The Greeks and the Romans often fused their gods with similar native gods, even as far away as Britain.�

�So there may have been a much older female deity here.�

�Our friend Katya has a theory about that. Her team at the Palaeographic Institute in Moscow are almost ready to publish the Atlantis symbols. You remember the Neolithic mother goddess of Atlantis?�

�Could hardly forget her. I�ve still got the bruises.�

�Well, we already knew that corpulent female figurines were being worshipped across Europe at the end of the Ice Age, at least to the time of the first farmers. For years archaeologists have speculated about a prehistoric cult of the mother goddess, a cult that crossed boundaries between tribes and peoples. Well, Katya thinks the survival of that cult owes everything to a powerful priesthood, the men and woman who led the first farmers west, whose descendants preserved the cult through the Bronze Age and to the classical period. She even thinks the Druids of northwest Europe were connected.�

�I remember,� Costas murmured. �From Atlantis. The wizards with conical hats. Lords of the Rings.�

�The idea of Tolkien�s Gandalf, like Merlin in the King Arthur stories, may ultimately derive from the same tradition,� Jack said. �Men with supposedly supernatural powers who could pass from one kingdom to the next, who knew no borders. Healers, mediators, prophets.�

Costas peered down again at the Phlegraean Fields. �Seems that every culture needs them,� he murmured.

�And the mother goddess also survived in different guises. The Roman goddess Ceres, the Greek Demeter. Magna Mater, the Great Mother.�

�Every new culture adds its own layer of paint, but it�s the same old statue underneath.�

�And the same allure, the same mystery. I�ve just been giving you the facts as we know them. Part of me can�t help thinking that there was something about the Sibyls that defies rational explanation, something so powerful that it allowed them to maintain the mystique over centuries, so alluring that it even drew in the Romans, the most rational and practical of peoples. Something the Sibyls themselves believed in.�

�Don�t go all supernatural on me, Jack.�

�I�m not suggesting it. But if the Sibyls believed in themselves, and if others with the power to shape the world�emperors�believed in them, then it becomes something we have to take seriously.�

Costas grunted, then gave Jack a wry look. He peered down through his visor at the indented shoreline that was now directly beneath them. �What�s that place now?�

�Pozzuoli. Roman Puteoli.�

�So that was where St. Paul was heading? After Sicily, after surviving the wreck?�

�According to the Acts of the Apostles, he and his companions sailed up from Syracuse on a ship of Alexandria, then stopped at Puteoli. That�s the ancient Roman grain port you can see off the port side now. It complements the naval port beside it at Misenum.� Jack tapped the screen. �The words are: Where we found brethren, and were entreated to tarry with them seven days.�

�Brethren? Fellow Christians? What about persecution?�

Jack jerked his head to the north. �The Phlegraean Fields. Perfect hideaway. Probably always a place for outcasts, beggars, misfits.�

�And then Paul goes to Rome. Where Nero had him beheaded.�

�The New Testament doesn�t actually say so, but that�s the tradition.�

�Might have been better for him if he�d gone down in that shipwreck after all.�

�If that had happened, then western history might have been utterly different.� Jack banked the helicopter to starboard, then nosed it toward the smudge on the eastern shore of the bay. �We might have ended up worshipping Isis, Mithras, or even the great mother goddess.�

�Huh?�

Jack adjusted the throttle, glanced at the air-traffic screen and flicked on the autopilot. �That shipwreck really was one of the pivotal events of history, not because of what was lost but because of who survived. Remember, Jesus� ministry in his lifetime was confined to Judaea, mainly his home province of Galilee. The idea that his word should spread to Jewish communities abroad, and then to non-Jews, only seems to have taken hold after his death. Paul was one of the first generation of missionaries, of proselytizers. Without him, many of those who proved receptive to Christianity might have been seduced by one of the other cults on offer. At the time we�re talking about, the spread of the Roman Empire and the Pax Romana meant that the Mediterranean world was awash with new cults, new religious ideas, some brought back by soldiers from newly conquered lands, others brought by sailors to ports such as Misenum and Puteoli. The Egyptian goddess Isis, the Persian god Mithras, the ancient mother goddess, any one of these could have provided the kernel of a monotheistic religion, giving the common people something they craved in the face of all the gods and rituals of Greece and Rome. If one of those religions had truly taken hold, it might have been enough to repel Christianity.�

�Phew,� Costas said. �And I thought with the Crucifixion, it was all a done deal.�

�That was really just the beginning,� Jack said. �And the amazing thing is, there�s no indication that Paul ever met Jesus in life. Paul was a Jew from Asia Minor who had a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, but only after the Crucifixion. And yet Paul may have been responsible more than any other for the foundation of the Church as we know it. The spread of the concept of Jesus as the son of God, as the Messiah, the meaning of the Greek word Christos, all seem to owe a huge amount to his teaching. The word Christian probably first appears about the time of his travels, and the emphasis on the cross. It�s as if, a generation after Jesus� death, after people�s personal experience of him, the focus had shifted from Jesus the man to the risen Jesus, almost as if he�d come to be seen as a god, been put on a pedestal.�

�That�s what people would have understood,� Costas said. �No one worships a man.�

�Exactly,� Jack said. �It was a world where emperors were deified after their death, where the Imperial cult was a huge unifying factor in the Roman Empire. And like all good missionaries, Paul was a shrewd operator who knew what he had to do to get the word across, the compromises and incorporation of age-old ways of thinking and seeing the world he would have thought necessary to get the light to shine through.�

�So you�re saying this is the place where it all took hold, the Bay of Naples?�

�The Acts of the Apostles suggest that there were followers of Jesus already here on the Bay of Naples when Paul arrived in the late 50s AD, only twenty-odd years after the Crucifixion. But Paul may have been responsible for making them truly Christian, for turning their thoughts from the message of Jesus, the imminent Kingdom of Heaven, to Christ himself, the Messiah. This is the place where Paul may have created the first western church, the first organized worship, maybe somewhere hidden out there among the craters and the sulfur of the Phlegraean Fields. Taught them what they should believe, how they should live. Given them the Gospel.�

�I wonder how much of it was the original one.�

�What do you mean?�

�Well, Paul didn�t know Jesus in life, had never met him. And Jesus never wrote anything down, right? It makes you wonder.�

�Paul claimed to have had a vision, to have seen the risen Christ.�

�I grew up with all this stuff, remember? Greek Orthodox. I loved the beauty of it, the rituals. But I�m just a nuts-and-bolts man, Jack. If we can follow a trail of hard facts, then I�m good with it. This early Christianity stuff is like looking through one of those kids� kaleidoscope tubes, endlessly shifting lenses and prisms. I want facts, hard data, stuff written by those who were there at the time, texts that have never been tampered with. As far as I can tell, the only hard facts we have are those names scratched on that amphora we found yesterday at the bottom of the Mediterranean.�

�I hear you.� Jack grinned and flipped off the autopilot. �Speculation out, facts in.�

�I wonder what the old Sibyl would have thought of it all.�

�What do you mean?�

�Christianity. Followers of a new religion, gathering here under her very nose.�

�Okay. Final bit of speculation,� Jack said. �Hard facts first. By the late Roman period, Cumae had become a focus for Christian worship. The temples were converted to churches, the cave of the Sibyl was reused for burials. The place is riddled with Christian tombs, almost like a catacomb.�

�And the speculation? I�ll allow you.�

�There�s a long-standing Christian tradition that the Sibyl foretold the coming of Christ. In Virgil�s Eclogues, poems written about a hundred years before Vesuvius erupted, we�re told of being at the end of the last age predicted by Cumae�s Sibyl, and of a boy�s birth preceding a golden age. Later Christians read this as a Messianic prophecy. And then there�s the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, a medieval hymn used in the Catholic Requiem Mass until 1970. I�ve just been looking at it again, while you were asleep. The first lines are Dies Irae! Dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla teste David cum Sibylla! Day of wrath and terror looming! Heaven and earth to ash consuming, David�s word and Sibyl�s truth foredooming! It�s usually thought to be medieval, thirteenth century, but there may be an ancient source behind it, one that�s now lost to us.�

�The Sibyl would certainly have had her ear to the ground, in that cave,� Costas said.

�Go on.�

�Well, that verse all sounds pretty apocalyptic,� Costas said. �I mean, heaven and earth to ash consuming. That sounds like a volcanic eruption to me.�

�Pure speculation.� Jack smiled at Costas, then put his hands on the helicopter controls. He stared out of the window, thinking hard. It was possible, just possible, that the Sibyl knew something big was about to happen. There had been a catastrophic earthquake a few years before, in AD 62, bad enough to topple much of Pompeii. Maybe creating the Sibylline prophecies involved keeping a close eye on the Phlegraean Fields, divination and augury based on all the changing moods of the underworld. It suddenly seemed plausible. That mystique, that power, based on knowledge that few others had, on hard science. Jack turned back to Costas. �The Sibyl may have known her days were numbered. Already she was becoming a curio, a tourist attraction. Only a few supplicants were now coming seeking utterances, with few of the gifts and payments that had sustained the oracle in the past. And she had a pretty good idea where Vesuvius was heading.�

�And what better way to go than with a bang,� Costas added.

�Precisely. Maybe the Sibyl fed this idea to the Christians who lived here, hung out in the Phlegraean Fields. There�s no clear indication that Jesus� teaching had the Kingdom of Heaven preceded by an apocalypse, even though this idea has gripped Christians over the centuries. Maybe it has its origins here, in the Christians who may have perished in the inferno of AD 79. I hate to think what was running through their minds in those final moments. When Paul had brought the Gospel to them twenty years before, I doubt whether they envisaged the end being a pyroclastic flow followed by incineration.�

�Speculation built on speculation, Jack.�

�You�re right.� Jack grinned, and brought the Lynx out of its circling pattern and onto a course due east, along the coast, toward the rising sun. �Time to find some hard facts. We�re coming inbound.�

�Roger that.� Costas flipped down his designer sunglasses and stared to the east. �And speaking of fire and brimstone, I�m seeing a volcano dead ahead.�

�

JACK LEANED FORWARD ON THE RAILING OVER THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL precinct, taking in the extraordinary scene in front of him as the morning sunlight began to pick out the alleyways and dark spaces of the Roman town below. He felt tired, as tired as he�d ever been, with the sense of heaviness that always came after a deep dive. He knew that his system was still working overtime to flush out the excess nitrogen from the dive the day before, yet the feeling also came from a profound sense of contentment. In the space of twelve hours he had moved from one of the most remarkable underwater discoveries of his career to one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world, a place that had left an indelible impression on him when he had first visited as a schoolboy. Herculaneum. It had been a scorching afternoon when he�d found the frigidarium of the bathhouse, a cool, dark place where he had sat in a corner for over an hour, listening to the drip of condensation from the damp walls and conjuring up the people who had last used it almost two thousand years before. Herculaneum seemed shabbier now, neglected in places, but had changed little over the years, and it still took his breath away. He could hardly believe that they were about to be the first archaeologists in over two hundred years to excavate the place, inside the tunnel Maria and Maurice had discovered the day before.

�Text message for you, Jack.� Costas passed up the cell phone without looking. He was squatting with his back against the railing, focusing entirely on a complex systems diagram on his laptop. �It�s from Maria.�

Jack read the message, and grunted. �Another half hour, maybe less. Good news is, the transaction�s been done.� He and Costas had already been waiting over an hour since landing the helicopter, time well spent showing Costas around the archaeological site, but neither of them was used to being at the beck and call of officialdom, and the delay was becoming an irritation.

Costas took back the phone, and squinted up at Jack. �I still can�t believe we�re doing this. Paying baksheesh. It�s like something from The French Connection.�

�That�s Naples for you,� Jack said. �Bandit country.�

�So the idea is, our money goes toward the upkeep of the site, conservation work.� Costas turned round and gestured at a dusty roof above a crumbling ancient wall. �Like all the other foreign money that�s been pumped in here in the past.�

�I was frank with the IMU board of directors,� Jack said. �There�s no way round it. If you want to work in this place, you cough up.�

�Basically, we�re paying a bribe.�

�Not exactly how I put it to the board, but that�s about the size of it,� Jack replied, looking at his watch. �Now we just have to wait while they confirm the electronic transfer. You may as well stick with your work for a while longer. I�m going back to the first century AD.� Jack turned again toward the site, took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. As a child traveling around the world he had developed an unusual imagination, an ability to use a few images to transport himself back into the distant past, almost a trancelike state. But here he hardly needed it, as the past was in front of him with extraordinary clarity, complete in almost every detail.

Herculaneum was that rarest of archaeological sites, without the compressions and distortions of time, with little of the complex layering of history seen in most ancient ruins. Here, the city of AD 79 was so well preserved it was almost habitable, the flat-roofed structures almost identical to the modern suburb above the edges of the excavated area. Jack�s eye moved up beyond the rooftops to the blackened cone of Vesuvius, rearing in the background. The image seemed to epitomize the underlying continuity of the human condition, and the indomitable power of nature. He looked down at the warehouses on the ancient seafront, where masses of distorted skeletons had been found huddled together in their death agony. Then he looked up at the villas where those same people had been eating and talking and going about their daily lives a few minutes before, everything left as they had abandoned it in those final moments of horror. There was clarity here, Jack reflected, extraordinary clarity, but also opacity. Teasing older history out of this site, before those final moments, was like watching an animation deconstructed, in which the first scenes were sharp and clear, then the next vague, increasingly out of focus, until images that had been dominated by people became a shadowland, with only the artifacts standing out and the people reduced to flitting forms barely discernible in the background.

That was the challenge for archaeologists at this place, Jack reflected, to give depth, to tell stories stretching back hours, days, years. And yet that final apocalyptic scene was a continuous draw, playing on the human fascination with death, with the macabre, the final moments of normality, what that would be like. Earlier, walking into the Roman houses with Costas, he had felt a curious unease, as if he were violating the intimate places of people who had never really left, places where he could still sense the mundane acts of the living, the private smells and sounds of the household. What had happened here had happened so quickly, quicker even than at Pompeii, that the place was still in a state of shock, frozen in that moment just before hell unleashed. Herculaneum still seemed to be reeling, as if the earthquakes of recent weeks were a nervous tremor that had begun on the night of the inferno almost two thousand years before.

�That�s a hell of a view.� Costas was standing beside him, and Jack snapped out of his reverie. �The past, the present, and the big bang. Says it all.�

Jack gave a tired smile. �I�m glad you see it too.�

�So this is all solidified mud,� Costas said.

�Mud, ash, pumice, lava, everything picked up as it snowballed down the volcano.�

�Pyroclastic flow?�

�You remember Pliny the Elder, who wrote about opium?� Jack said.

�You bet. The workaholic admiral. Somehow found time to write an encyclopedia.�

�Well, his teenage nephew, also called Pliny, was here that day too, staying at his uncle�s villa near the naval base at Misenum. The younger Pliny survived the eruption, his uncle didn�t. Years later he wrote a letter about it to the historian Tacitus, who wanted to know how the elder Pliny died. From a natural history viewpoint it�s one of the most important documents to survive from antiquity, maybe even more so than his uncle�s encyclopedia. It�s not only a unique eyewitness account of the eruption of Vesuvius, it�s also one of the best scientific observations ever made of a volcanic eruption until modern times.�

�Sounds like a chip off the old block. His uncle would have been proud of him.� Costas watched Jack pull a small red book from his bag, its cover worn and battered. �You seem to have an endless supply of those. I had no idea so much literature survived from this period.�

�It�s what didn�t survive that keeps me awake at night,� Jack said, jerking his head toward the ruins in front of them. �That�s what�s so tantalizing about this place. But before we go there, listen to this. It�s crucial to understanding why Herculaneum and Pompeii look the way they do.� He held the book up so that the site and the volcano were in the background, and then began to read marked passages. �Its general appearance can best be expressed as being like an umbrella pine rather than any other tree, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed.� Jack traced his finger down the page. �Then he describes ashes falling, �followed by bits of pumice and blackened stones, charred and cracked by the flames.� Later he says the darkness was blacker and denser than any ordinary night, and on Vesuvius �broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points.��

�Sounds like a classic ash-and-pumice fallout,� Costas said. �But that first bit, about the plume collapsing on itself, that�s a pyroclastic flow.�

�That�s exactly the difference between the two sites. Pompeii was buried by fallout from the sky, mixed with poisonous gases. Afterward some of the rooftops still stuck out, which is why they�re not so well preserved today. Herculaneum was buried by landslides, tons of boiling mud and volcanic material, surging over the site each time the plume collapsed, until the buildings were completely buried, up to ten meters above the rooftops.�

�That�s a hell of an image, Jack. And that�s what those early Christians would have seen, the ones you think were in the Phlegraean Fields, I mean. Rings of fire at the leading edge of each pyroclastic flow, coming down the mountain at terrifying speed.�

�The younger Pliny was watching all that from the villa at Misenum, only a mile or so south of Cumae, the Sibyl�s cave. More or less the same vantage point.�

�Post-traumatic stress syndrome,� Costas said.

�Come again?�

�Post-traumatic stress syndrome,� Costas repeated. �The obsession with hellfire, damnation. I�ve been thinking about it. If this is the main place where Christianity spread from in the west, then they�re bound to have been affected by the experience, right? When we were flying in, you mentioned the psychological fallout of the eruption. Once you�ve seen hell, you don�t forget it in a hurry. They were already halfway there in the Phlegraean Fields, living among the fumeroles and the entrance to the pagan underworld. Add a volcanic eruption, and you�ve got a pretty apocalyptic outlook. Am I right?�

�For a nuts-and-bolts man, that�s a pretty fantastic idea. Ever thought of rewriting the history of Christian theology?�

�Nope.� For a moment they were quiet, both looking into the windows of the excavated Roman warehouse in front of them, dark and forbidding like the portholes of a sunken ship. �No survivors here,� Costas murmured. �No one who stayed.�

�It�s hard to know which would have been worse,� Jack said thoughtfully. �Suffocated in superheated gas at Pompeii, or incinerated alive at Herculaneum.�

�Come live by the sunny Bay of Naples,� Costas murmured. �Today, all that happens is that you get mugged or run over.�

�Don�t speak too soon,� Jack said. �Remember that picture of the 1944 eruption? The seismologists have been talking doom and gloom for decades now, and the earthquakes are pretty ominous.�

Costas shaded his eyes and squinted at the summit of the volcano, where the sunlight was beginning to radiate off the barren upper slopes. �Pliny was here? The elder one, I mean. In Herculaneum?�

�According to his nephew, he took one look at the eruption and hared off in a warship toward the volcano, this side of the bay, under the mountain. It was supposedly a heroic mission to rescue a woman.�

�The undoing of many a great man.� Costas sighed.

�It was hopeless. By the time he got here the shore was blocked with debris, floating pumice like sea ice. But instead of returning he got his galley to row south to Stabiae, another town beyond Pompeii directly under the ash fallout. He stayed too long and was overcome by the fumes.�

�Sounds like a Shakespearean love tragedy. Maybe he was really overcome by grief.�

�I don�t think so,� Jack said. �Not Pliny. Once he saw his girlfriend was doomed, he would have been on to something else. What he really wanted was to get close to the eruption. I can see him, notebook in hand, sniffing and identifying the sulfur, collecting pumice samples along the shoreline. At least he�d finished his Natural History.�

�What with all that multitasking, he was probably heading for a burnout anyway.�

Jack rolled his eyes, then caught sight of two figures making their way down the entry ramp into the site, a woman and a man. �Good,� he said. �It looks like we�re moving at last.� He pushed off from the railing, ruffling his hair. Maria was wearing desert boots, khaki combat trousers and a gray T-shirt, and her long black hair was tied back. She had a well-honed, lean physique, and the look suited her. Maurice Hiebermeyer was several paces behind her, a cell phone clamped to his ear; he cut a somewhat less svelte figure. He was slightly shorter than Maria, considerably overweight, and was wearing a curious assortment of safari gear over a pair of scuffed leather dress shoes. He was red-faced and flustered, constantly pushing his little round glasses up his nose as he spoke into the phone. His shorts reached well below his knees and seemed perilously close to half-mast, almost miraculously free-floating.

�Don�t say anything,� Jack muttered to Costas. �Anything at all.� He glanced at Costas and fought to keep a straight face. �Anyway, you can smirk. When was the last time you looked in a mirror? You look like you�ve just walked out of six months in a submarine.�

Hiebermeyer halted before reaching them, gesturing at the phone and turning his back to them, while Maria walked up and embraced them both. Jack closed his eyes as she pressed against him. He had missed seeing her, hearing her sonorous voice, her accent. It had been an intensive time together during the search for the menorah, and Jack had gone through the usual moments of emptiness when the expedition was over. Above all, he wanted to see that she was well, that he had made the right move in suggesting that she join Hiebermeyer in Naples. Maria shot him a look with her dark eyes. �It�s been six weeks since I was on Seaquest, but it seems a lot longer.�

�It�s the company you miss,� Costas said, looking at her with concern.

�I�ve really tried to put it all behind me,� she said quietly, turning away from them and gazing out over the site. �I had a text message from Jeremy this morning, and that was the first time I�d really flashed back to our time in the Yucat�n, those terrible scenes. It�s been good for me to have this new project to focus on, better than going back straightaway to my medieval manuscript research at the Institute. And Jeremy�s taken care of everything in Oxford. It�s just the opportunity he wanted, a chance to serve as acting director while still a graduate student, and he�s brilliant at it.�

�I really want him at IMU full-time, you know,� Jack said. �It�s only been a couple of months since he joined us on the trail of the Vikings, but already he seems like a permanent fixture. I always know when someone�s right, and the moment he walked throught the IMU engineering lab and began talking to Costas about submersibles, I knew that was it.�

�How is my favorite new dive buddy?� Costas said. �Has he told you I passed him with flying colors on his check-out dive? A real natural.�

�Buried up to his neck in the lost library at Hereford Cathedral. He�s got some fantastic new stuff, Jack. Another early map, some reference to Phoenicians, I think. He�s itching to show you. And he�s had an idea for some new diving contraption, Costas. I don�t understand a word of it.�

�Really,� Costas said in hushed excitement. �If it�s Jeremy, it�s got to be good.� He reached into his hip pouch for his cell phone, but Jack stopped his arm.

�Not now. Bad timing.�

Costas relented, ruefully. �Just keeping on the ball.�

�No multitasking, remember? Let�s stick with where we are, for now.�

�Yes, boss.�

�I�m grateful you suggested me, Jack,� Maria continued. �It�s a real privilege to be here. And an eye-opener in more ways than one. But it should have been you here from the outset.�

�Then you�d never have had the pleasure of spending time with our old friend Maurice,� Jack said with a smile. �I know you haven�t seen him much since Cambridge.�

Maria sidled up to them. �He�s a dear man,� she whispered, looking questioningly at Jack. �Isn�t he?�

�He is a dear man,� Jack replied quietly, giving her a knowing look. �Remember, he and I were at school together, even before we all met up at Cambridge. I had my first real adventures with him, when we were kids. You know, he�s treated like a god in Egypt, with some justification. Easily the finest field archaeologist I know. And despite appearances, he�s not one of those Egyptologists who thinks all other archaeology is beneath them. He�s tremendously knowledgeable, inquisitive across all periods and places. He wouldn�t be seen dead in a wetsuit, but he�s a perfect adjunct professor for IMU.�

�So what�s with the shorts?� she whispered.

�Ah.� Jack looked at Hiebermeyer�s backside and struggled with his expression. �Genuine German Afrika Corps, circa 1940. Seemed appropriate, when he first went to Egypt and needed kit. I gave them to him as a graduation present. He gave me my British Eighth Army khaki bag. I always have it with me too.� Jack patted the battered bag hanging against his side. �My fault. Sorry.�

�Some suspenders would help,� Maria whispered. �You know, liederhosen.�

�What Jack�s saying,� Costas said with a twinkle in his eye, �is that Maurice grows on you.�

�He�s developed quite a lot since you knew him at Cambridge,� Jack said.

�Just as long as he doesn�t expect me to treat him like a god,� Maria whispered, then she stood back and spoke normally. �Anyway, now I see what it�s like to be in Jack Howard�s shoes. I just hope I haven�t taken the steam out of your sails.�

�We haven�t exactly been sunbathing on the fore-deck,� Costas said. �Wait until you hear what we found yesterday.�

Hiebermeyer looked increasingly exasperated, raising his eyes and bunching his fist in the air, then suddenly he listened intently to the person on the other end of the phone and flashed a look of relief. He nodded toward Maria, then snapped the phone shut and walked over, shaking hands quickly with Jack and Costas. �I thought I�d be wasting your time.� His voice was slightly hoarse with stress, his German accent more pronounced. �I couldn�t believe it. All I did was step out yesterday to call you. They weren�t going to let us back in.�

�Can you finger anyone?� Jack said. �I might be able to exert some pressure in the archaeological superintendency.�

�It�s not the archaeologists who are the problem, it�s the site guards and whoever pulls the strings at the top of the archaeological superintendency. They�re apprehensive, clamped down�even some old colleagues I know personally�and sometimes there�s real fear in their eyes. I�ve never seen anything like it. I feel as if we�re walking on very thin ground.�

�Everyone ready?� Maria interrupted, slinging her pack, clipping on her waist strap and turning back up the ramp. �Maurice and I have learned the hard way that when you get the go-ahead in this place, you go ahead pronto. It�s about two hundred yards due west from here, but we have to go out of the site and down some back alleys. We�ll be met at the entrance.� She eyed Costas� camera bag. �And watch your valuables, all right? Remember where we are.�

�

TWENTY MINUTES LATER JACK AND THE OTHERS STOOD outside a low door at the end of a dark alley in the modern town of Ercolano. They were above the buried remains of the Villa of the Papyri, one of the greatest archaeological sites ever discovered, much of it still entombed under the streets around them. Jack�s excitement had increased as they got closer, though the narrowing walls of the alleyway seemed to accentuate the unease he had felt since talking to Hiebermeyer and Maria. It had become hot in the midday sun, so they gathered in the shade against the wall. The scene was astonishingly similar to an excavated street in ancient Herculaneum a few hundred meters away, and for a split second Jack felt completely displaced, uncertain whether he was in the past or the present. He was brought back to reality by the tinny echo of a Vespa scooter as it hurtled down a nearby alley, and by the distinctly modern smells that rose up around them. The sides of the alley were strewn with rubbish, and an alcove beside the doorway was scattered with used hypodermic syringes.

�Watch your feet,� Maria said. �It�s a favorite local shooting-up place.�

�Opium,� Costas said. �Plus �a change.�

Maria looked at him questioningly. �Later,� Jack said. �We�ve got some fabulous news. An incredible discovery. But let�s do what we�ve got to do here first.�

The door opened, and an armed security guard appeared. Hiebermeyer spoke a few halting words of Italian and the man looked dubiously at Jack and Costas. He shook his head, grudgingly took the permit papers Hiebermeyer offered him and pushed him back out into the alley, shutting the door in his face.

�This happens every time,� Heibermeyer said, his teeth clenched. �There�s always a new guard, and they always need to see the paperwork. Then they insist on keeping the papers, and I have to get new ones issued by the superintendency in Naples. It took two weeks before they�d let Maria in.�

�I don�t know how you can stand it,� Costas said.

�Patience 101,� Jack said. �Mandatory introductory archaeology course.�

�I can�t imagine how you passed that one, Jack.�

�I bribed Maurice to sit the exam for me.�

The door reopened, and the guard jerked his head. Hiebermeyer ducked through and the others filed after him into a small gray courtyard. The guard waved his submachine gun toward another entrance; Costas caught his gaze for slightly too long, and the man�s look froze.

�Don�t,� Jack said under his breath. Before they realized what was happening the guard stepped up to them and casually sideswiped Costas, knocking him into the wall. Jack took Costas by the arm and quickly led him behind Maria and Hiebermeyer, toward the other entrance. The guard remained rooted to the ground, watching them, then they heard him sidle away. They passed through the entrance into another small alleyway.

�Nobody does that to me,� Costas seethed, brushing the graze on his arm and trying to push Jack away.

�Keep cool,� Jack said quietly, putting a viselike hold on Costas and steering him forward. �It�s not worth it. A little man in a uniform.�

�With thirty rounds of nine millimeter,� Maria murmured.

�I thought you were supposed to be the star attraction around here,� Costas grumbled to Hiebermeyer as Jack released his hold. �Distinguished foreign archaeologist, flown in from Egypt to help excavate one of the most important sites ever found.�

�That�s the public face of it,� Hiebermeyer said, keeping his voice down. �Come through that entranceway, and it�s a different story. They won�t even let a film crew in here. This place has been shut down for two hundred years, and somebody somewhere wants it to stay that way.�

�None of the villa�s open to the public?�

�After intense international lobbying, a small section was opened with great ceremony a few years ago. We passed the entrance on the way. For the first time, people can visit some of the eighteenth-century excavations. They made a big show of it, even got Prince Charles over from London to cut the ribbon. You�ve no idea how many scholars and philanthropists have been trying to kick-start work on this place. But from our point of view this progress has been a mixed blessing. It�s allowed the authorities to paint a picture of huge achievement, diverting attention away from the most pressing need, which is to resume the excavations.�

�So without the earthquake last month that opened up this new tunnel, we wouldn�t be here,� Costas said.

�Not a chance.�

�Thank God for natural catastrophe.�

�You could say that about this place.�

�It�s bizarre,� Maria said quietly as they reached the end of the alley. �It�s as if they hate us being here, and have done everything in their power to impede us. It took a geologic age for Maurice to get an extractor fan to clear out the noxious gas from the tunnel. But in the press releases, Maurice is the big star. He�s all over the papers here. Then, once we�re inside, it�s as if they actually want us to find something, but only enough to allow them to shut the whole place down for good.�

�That�s just about the stage we�ve reached now,� Hiebermeyer said. �I�m convinced this is the last time we�ll be let in. You�ll see why in a few minutes. Okay. Here goes. Best behavior.� He led them around a corner into a deep trench, open to the sky like the foundation pit for a large house. The walls were gray volcanic mud, identical to the main site of Herculaneum, and they could see fragmentary courses of ancient masonry and the odd Roman column sticking out. Half a dozen workmen and a woman with a clipboard were clustered around some tools and planking on the far side of the pit, and two more armed security guards were loitering and smoking in another corner. The guards grasped the barrels of their submachine guns and peered suspiciously at the entering group. Hiebermeyer took a deep breath, nodded courteously and proceeded to lead his companions briskly across the floor of the pit. �The guards are here to prevent the site being pillaged at night.�

�That�s a joke,� Costas said. �Those apes look like they were recruited from the local drug gang.�

�Keep your voice down,� Maria said urgently. �There�s some authority behind all this who keeps even the guards in control, and I don�t think it�s the mafia.� She took the lead, navigating her way around piles of ancient masonry, toward a wooden structure against the other side of the pit which evidently concealed some kind of entranceway. The workmen all glanced up briefly as they passed, but the woman studiously ignored them. She was dark-featured, Neapolitan, with wavy black hair going prematurely gray, wearing jeans and a loose-fitting white shirt. A superintendency ID hung around her neck and she wore an orange hard hat. She slipped on a pair of sunglasses as they passed.

�She�s our guardian angel from the superintendency,� Hiebermeyer murmured.

�No meet and greet?� Costas said.

�No chance. They�re under strict orders not to fraternize with the enemy.�

�Dr. Elizabeth d�Agostino,� Jack murmured, fiddling with his cell phone. �An old friend of mine.� He slipped the phone inside his bag.

�That�s her,� Hiebermeyer murmured. �She knows her stuff, but someone�s definitely put a gag order on her.�

�Aren�t you going to say hello, Jack?� Maria said.

�I don�t want to muddy the waters,� Jack murmured. �We have a history.� He glanced again at the woman, his expression troubled, and then looked at Maria. �As you said, when you get the go-ahead here, you go ahead. I�ll try to have a word with her later.�

Costas looked at Hiebermeyer. �Do the superintendency people join you in the tunnel?�

�Officially, no. They�re afraid of tunnel collapse. That�s the official reason why they�ve refused to authorize a full excavation. Any further tunneling will increase the risk of collapse, threatening the modern town above. Far better to seal up the tunnel again for another two hundred years.�

�And unofficially?�

�Yesterday, as soon as we found what they wanted, Dr. d�Agostino and those workmen were in there like a shot. I imagine they�ve been trying to get the statue out while we�ve been gone. But she wasn�t with us when we went farther into the tunnel, and you�ll soon see why they won�t have tried on their own.� Hiebermeyer pulled at the lock on the door of the wooden structure, then signaled with his hand to one of the guards. �We have to wait for the guard to unlock it for us,� he grumbled. �Another little ritual.� The guard saw him, but pointedly continued talking to the other guard, doing nothing. The workmen started up an electric drill, putting them out of earshot. �The guards know perfectly well what I want. All in their own time.�

�Welcome to the Villa of the Papyri,� Costas said ruefully.

�I didn�t think it was going to be this bad,� Jack murmured.

�There are some excellent archaeologists here, and I have good friends in the superintendency,� Hiebermeyer said. �They do what they can. But they have to battle the system. Some end up thriving on it, getting sucked in. Only here, even those people seem subdued, oppressed, as if they�ve been locked down by some bigger force. Others fall by the wayside, get eliminated.�

�You mean offed?� Costas said in a hushed voice. �They really do that here?�

�Usually not quite that dramatic, but sometimes. A car crash, a boating accident. Usually it�s more mundane. Threats, bribery, intimidation, tampering with personal financial records. People can easily be brought down in this place, if they�re honest.�

�If they�re honest,� Costas repeated, shaking his head.

�But there are some good ones who do reach the top and hang in there,� Hiebermeyer said. �The current chief superintendent is one of them, our lady�s boss. We wouldn�t be here if he hadn�t given the go-ahead, against all kinds of pressure from somewhere. Needless to say, he has permanent bodyguards�but then, that�s not uncommon for officials in Naples.�

�I still don�t understand what the mafia could want with this place,� Costas said.

�I don�t even know for sure that the mafia are involved. Nobody seems to know. You just have to assume it. It�s not only the trade in stolen antiquities�and you can rest assured that goes on here�there�s also a huge amount of money tied up in archaeological tourism.�

�Speaking of archaeology, what�s the story here?� Costas said.

�A Swiss Army engineer named Karl Weber took over the excavations at Herculaneum in 1750,� Hiebermeyer said, suddenly animated. �A few weeks later, a well-digger discovered a marble floor, probably right about where we are now. Eventually they tunneled all over this place, and Weber realized they had a huge villa, bigger than anything else they�d seen. It was smash and grab�statues, mosaics, anything. Then they started finding carbonized scrolls. They didn�t realize what they were, and some of the diggers even took them away and used them as fire-starters, believe it or not. Then they realized they were papyrus. Eventually most of the legible ones were interpreted as part of the Greek library of an obscure philosopher called Philodemos.�

�He was probably patronized by the rich owner of this house,� Jack said. �A kind of philosopher mascot. Whether or not there was a Latin library too has always been the big question.�

�And the tunnel, the one we�re going into, the one revealed by the earthquake?� Costas asked.

�It�s one of the early tunnels, dug by Weber�s men, heading toward the area of the villa where the library was found. It was sealed up while Weber was still in charge.�

�Any idea why?�

�That�s what we�re here to find out.�

�Any idea who owned this place?� Costas said.

�That�s the beauty of this period, leading up to the eruption,� Jack replied. �We know a lot of the names of aristocrats from the Roman historians, from Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, half a dozen others.�

�Cue your first treat,� Hiebermeyer interrupted, beaming. �What alerted the superintendency to the earthquake�s effect on this site was that part of the solidified mud wall in this trench collapsed, over there. We may as well look at it now, while our guard finishes his cigarette.�

They made their way past the group of workmen who were now clearing away chunks of rocky conglomerate, and came to a gap where a section had fallen away from the trench wall. Elizabeth d�Agostino was standing only a few meters away with a clipboard, talking rapidly to a man with the same type of ID card around his neck, evidently another inspector. Jack tried to catch her eye, but failed. �It�ll be months before they clear all this,� Hiembermeyer muttered to Jack as they picked their way through the rubble. �Every possible reason for delay will be found. Someone, someone really big, wants this place shut down, and I think they�re going to have their way.�

�Not if we can help it,� Jack murmured.

�There are three big forces at play around here,� Hiebermeyer continued quietly, mopping the sweat off his brow. �The first is the volcano. The second is the mafia, organized crime.�

�And the third is the Church,� Jack said.

�Correct.�

�Pretty volatile mix,� Costas said loudly, then coughed as he saw the inspector glance at them.

�Makes doing archaeology in Egypt seem like a piece of cake,� Hiebermeyer murmured. �Sometimes I think they�re wishing for another eruption, to seal this place up forever. It seems that the huge loss of life that would result, the destruction of these sites and all the archaeology and the loss of tourist money, would be nothing compared to the danger of what might be found here. What that might be, I don�t know, but someone�s frightened of something. I suspect someone powerful in the Church is worried about some great revelation, some ancient document that might undermine their authority. Look how much obstruction there was when the Dead Sea Scrolls were revealed in Israel. Another pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius would eliminate the threat here for all time.�

�Let�s hope you�ve found enough to keep the door open before that happens.�

�You�re going to be amazed,� Hiebermeyer whispered, looking at Jack intently. �What we�ve found. Trust me.� They reached a table covered with safety gear, and he turned and spoke loudly. �Hard hats on. Health and safety regulations.�

�They have those in Naples?� Costas said pointedly. The inspector looked around again, and Jack shot Costas a warning look. They both donned orange hard hats, followed by the others. Everyone followed Maria and stooped in file under the overhang, into a cavity about five meters deep, decreasing in height to the point where Maria, at the far end, was forced to squat down. Costas crawled in beside Jack and pressed his hand on the irregular gray surface above them.

�See what I mean?� Jack said. �Hard as rock.�

�Must have been a nightmare to excavate.�

�Here we are.� Hiebermeyer pointed. Emerging from the solidified mud in front of them was a smoothed slab of masonry, veins of blue and green visible on the polished white surface.

�Cipollino,� Jack murmured, stroking the surface appreciatively. �Euboean marble, from Greece. Very nice. No expense spared in this villa.�

Hiebermeyer flicked on the headlamp on his hard hat, and immediately they could see that the slab was covered with an inscription. It was in three lines, bold capital letters carved deep into the marble:

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�It�s Greek!� Costas exclaimed.

�These kinds of inscriptions were highly formulaic,� Hiebermeyer said. �You find them in Egypt too, from the time before the Romans, when the Greeks ruled. It reads � The council and the people honor Leukios Kalpornios Peison, the son of Leukios, the ruler and patron of the city.��

�Ruler and patron,� Costas whistled. �The local mafia boss?�

Jack grinned. �I remember this. There�s an identical inscription in Greece. Calpurnius Piso was Roman governor on the island of Samothrace, in the Aegean. He must have brought this back as a memento.�

�Along with a shipload of statues and other art,� Maria murmured. �Maurice showed me the stuff they found here in the eighteenth century, in the Naples museum. It�s incredible.�

�This particular Calpurnius Piso was probably the father or grandfather of the one we know most about, who lived in the time of the emperors Claudius and Nero,� Hiebermeyer said. �That later Calpurnius Piso seems to have been especially loyal to Claudius, but hatched a plot against Nero that failed. Piso retired to his house, maybe this very one, where he opened his veins and bled to death. That was in AD 65, eleven years after Claudius� death and fourteen years before Vesuvius blew. We don�t know who the owner of the villa was at the time of the eruption, but it was probably another family member, or this inscription wouldn�t still be here. Maybe a nephew, a cousin, someone who escaped Nero�s purge of the family following the assassination attempt.�

�So you have your answer, Costas,� Jack said, eyeing Hiebermeyer. �This clinches it�this villa was the home of Calpurnius Piso. Another small step for archaeology. Congratulations, Maurice.�

They moved out into the open courtyard again. Hiebermeyer took off his hard hat and jerked his head toward the looming presence behind the rooftops. �Don�t congratulate me, Jack. It was the volcano that did it, not us. This inscription was revealed by the earthquake. It�s what alerted the authorities to what else might have been revealed, old excavation workings that might have opened up. Then they saw the tunnel entrance.�

�It seems to be more Greek than Roman around here,� Costas said, wiping the dust from his hands. �I had no idea.�

�There are layers of it,� Jack said. �First the Greeks who colonized the Bay of Naples, then the Romans who rediscovered Greece when they conquered it. The Roman generals in Greece looted all the great works, from places like Delphi and Olympia, and a lot of Greek art starts to appear in Rome, often stuck on Roman monuments. Then wealthy private collectors like Calpurnius Piso bring back their own haul, some of it masterpieces, but mostly lesser works, what was left. Then, by the time we�re talking about, the early Imperial period, Greek artisans are making stuff specifically for the Roman market, just as Chinese potters or Indian furniture-makers produced stuff for western taste in the nineteenth century. That�s what you mostly see in Pompeii and Herculaneum, objets d�art in the Greek manner, more style than substance.�

�I look at a sculpture,� Costas said determinedly. �I like it or I don�t like it, and I don�t care about the label.�

�Fair enough.� Jack grinned. �The truest kind of connoisseur. But you really have to understand the context here, and that�s the beauty of these sites. You can see how the Romans used their art, how they appreciated it. To them, it didn�t matter if they had a Greek Old Master or a fine reproduction, because when it came to the crunch they were all just decoration. What really mattered to the Romans were the portraits of their ancestors, images that embodied the virtues they so admired, that emphasized family continuity. Those portraits were kept away, often in a private room, and were traditionally in wax and wood, so they haven�t survived. The Romans get a lot of bad press because art historians of the Victorian period, who glorified classical Greece, mostly only saw collections of ancient sculptures ripped out of context and lined up in galleries and museums. It seemed to show indiscriminate judgment, bad taste, vulgarity. Come here, and you can see that nothing was further from the truth. If anything, it was the Greeks at this period who lacked the edge.�

�Which brings us very neatly to the reason you�re here.� Hiebermeyer beamed, pressing his hard hat back on.

They watched as the guard finally roused himself, ambling over to the wooden doorway and making a big display of unlocking it. �The greatest lost library of antiquity,� Hiebermeyer said quietly. �And one of the greatest black holes in archaeology. Until now.�

�

JACK CROUCHED BEHIND HIEBERMEYER AT THE ENTRANCE to the tunnel into the ancient villa. It was already cooler, a relief from the baking sun outside. Immediately in front of them was a meter-wide extractor fan with an electric motor, and behind it a flexible corrugated tube that ran out of the temporary wooden structure in front of the entrance to a coil and an outlet high on a wall above the site.

�After coming out of the tunnel yesterday, I played up the danger element just to ensure they wouldn�t try going in,� Hiebermeyer said. �But there really is a toxic gas buildup in there�methane, carbon monoxide. Mostly it�s from organic material that�s beginning to rot, with the introduction of more oxygen after the tunnel was opened up.�

�Not bodies,� Costas said hopefully.

�In this place, they�re either skeletonized or incinerated,� Hiebermeyer replied. �Usually,� he added.

�How long do we have to wait?� Maria asked.

�We�ll give it a few more minutes, then take the fan in and reactivate it when we reach the grille.�

Jack paused. �I think this is the first time we�ve dug together since Carthage.� He turned to Costas. �The three of us were students together, and we cut our teeth with a UNESCO team at Carthage. I dived in the ancient harbor, Maurice disappeared into a hole in the ground and Maria recorded inscriptions.�

�I feel the odd one out here,� Costas said.

�I think you can join our club.� Jack nudged Hiebermeyer, who tried to look at Costas stonily through his pebble glasses, the hint of a smile on his face, his face streaked with grime. Jack suppressed a grin. �Maurice found the remains of a great bronze furnace, just as described by the Romans, the first definitive evidence for Carthaginian child sacrifice. It was a fantastic find.�

�Fantastic?� Costas said weakly. �Child sacrifice. I thought we�d left all that behind on our last little adventure, with the Toltecs in Mexico.�

�The past is a pretty unsavory place sometimes,� Jack said wryly. �You just have to take what you get, go with the flow.�

�Go with the flow,� Costas repeated. �Yeah, right.� He looked into the dark recess behind the gated entrance in front of them, then back at Jack. �So what delights does this place hold for us?�

�Ever been to the Getty Villa?�

�The Getty Villa. Malibu, California. Yeah,� Costas said vaguely. �I remember a school trip. Classical design, lots of statues. Big central pool, great for skimming coins.�

Hiebermeyer raised his eyes, and Jack grinned again. �Well, this place was the basis for the design of the Getty Villa.�

Costas looked doubtfully at the black hole in front of them. �No kidding.�

�Okay, we�re moving,� Hiebermeyer said. He lifted the extractor fan and heaved it forward, pulling the exhaust hose behind him. Jack and the others followed, and within a few meters they were completely enclosed by the tunnel. It was about as wide as a person could stretch and just high enough for Jack to stand upright. The surface was like an old mine shaft, covered with the marks of chisels and pickaxes, and it smelled musty. Jack felt as if he were walking back into the eighteenth century, seeing the site through the eyes of the first tunnelers who had hacked their way into the rock-hard mud, through the eyes of the engineer Karl Weber as he tried to make sense of the labyrinth his men had dug in their search for loot. Jack followed Hiebermeyer around a corner, and it became darker. �No electric lighting yet,� Hiebermeyer said ruefully. �But you can switch your headlamps on now.�

Jack activated his beam and shone it forward. He stifled a gasp, and tripped forward slightly. The head of Anubis was staring out from the side of the tunnel just ahead of him, the black ears upright and the snout defiant just as Hiebermeyer and Maria had first seen it the day before.

�Behold your second treat.� Hiebermeyer twisted back around after having placed the extractor fan just in front of him. �This is the key find I meant, the clincher for the superintendency. It�s exactly what they want. A spectacular discovery. You can see they�ve already widened the recess around the statue, ready for taking it out later today. It�ll be all over the front pages tomorrow morning. Cue closing up this tunnel. Permanently.�

�Amazing.� Jack was still awestruck by the image, and put his hand carefully on the snout. �They found one of these in King Tut�s tomb,� he said to Costas.

�At least that one was where it belonged, in Egypt,� Hiebermeyer grumbled.

�Greeter of the souls of the underworld, and protector of them on their journey,� Maria said. �Or so Maurice tells me.�

�I don�t like the sound of that,� Costas muttered. �I thought you said there were no bodies in here.�

Jack tilted his helmet up and looked past the snout of Anubis to the darkness beyond. He felt as if the eighteenth century had now given way to a much older past, erupting through the walls like the head of Anubis. He also sensed the danger. A few meters beyond the statue was a temporary metal grille across the tunnel, bearing the word pericolo and a large death�s head symbol. Hiebermeyer unlocked the hatch through the grille and pushed the extractor fan inside. He clicked it on, and a red light began flashing, accompanied by a low electronic whirr.

�That�s a good start,� he said. �Believe it or not, the extension lead actually works. We�ve got electricity.� He checked a digital readout on the back of the fan. �In about ten minutes this should have cleared the tunnel ahead as far as we got yesterday, to the point where the tunnel ends at another wall. When the light goes green we�ll take the fan forward until the sensor flashes red again.� He glanced at Jack, and spoke quietly. �I could have had this running before you arrived, but I didn�t want to tempt anyone to sneak in. Your superintendency friend seems perfectly happy with Anubis. In fact, she�s obsessed with it.�

�That would figure,� Jack said quietly. �Elizabeth was passionate about Egypt when I knew her. She was paid to study Roman archaeology, but she really wanted to follow in your footsteps, Maurice. I told her all about you. She swore she�d go there once she�d fulfilled her government contract. But something drew her back here. Family connections. Obligations. She only ever hinted at it, hated the whole thing. That�s what really baffles me. Why she�s still here.�

�You seem to have known her well,� Maria murmured.

�Friends for a while. But not anymore, it seems.�

Hiebermeyer pushed up his glasses. �The bottom line is, as far as she�s concerned, the investigation has got its result, and what we�re doing now is purely a sideshow, a recce, before the whole thing is deemed unsafe and sealed up again. At the moment, I�m happy to go along with that.�

�How safe is it, exactly?� Costas said.

�Well, the tunnel isn�t shored up, and there�s the risk of another earth tremor. The place is full of toxic gas. Vesuvius might erupt again. We could be crushed, asphyxiated, incinerated.�

�Archaeology,� Costas sighed. �To think, I turned down a position at Caltech for all this. Beach house, surfing, martinis on tap.�

�We could also be gunned down by the mafia,� Maria added.

�Great. That�s just the icing on the cake.� Costas sighed, then looked at Anubis. �Anyway, I thought by the Roman period this Egyptian stuff was all pass�,� he said. �I mean, what you were saying about this guy Calpurnius Piso. The fashion accessories. Everything had to be Greek.�

�The Warhol collector doesn�t necessarily throw away his family collection of Old Masters,� Maria said.

�Actually, ancient Egypt was the very latest rage,� Jack said. �Egypt was the last of the big old places to be annexed by Rome, after the defeat of Cleopatra in 31 BC. Most of the obelisks you see in Rome today, the one in St. Peter�s Square, were shipped over by the first emperors. It was just like the pillage of Greece all over again. Everyone wanted a piece of the action.�

�Barbarians,� Hiebermeyer muttered. At that moment the extractor fan flashed green and the fan cut out. He motioned for them to move forward. Jack and Costas picked up the corrugated tube and followed him through the grille, with Maria close behind. Ahead of them the passageway was unlit except for the wavering beams of their headlamps. Jack had wondered when he would feel the claustrophobia, and it was now, the point in a tunnel when he suddenly felt removed from the world outside, when progress ahead seemed beyond his own volition, when the tunnel itself seemed to be drawing him in. It was as if the toxic air they were pressing against had bled around them and filled the tunnel behind, sealing them in a capsule that could implode at any moment, sucking them into the vortex of the past. They pressed on, pulling the tube noisily behind them. The tunnel was longer than he had expected, reaching deep into the recesses of the villa site, well beyond the tunnels he had seen on Weber�s plan. About thirty meters on they came to the end, to the dark crack in the wall where Maria and Hiebermeyer had stopped the day before. Jack could clearly see the pick marks from the eighteenth century, and he looked at them closely. Some of the marks were on stone, not solidified mud. The tunnel clearly ended at some kind of structure, a stone entranceway. Hiebermeyer heaved the fan inside the crack and activated it again. �It still shows green, but I�m going to give it five minutes anyway. Better safe than sorry.� He looked at Jack. �This is as far as we got just before I came out and called you. After I looked inside.�

�I can hardly wait.� Jack turned and peered back down the corridor, where they could see a wavering electric light and hear voices, then the sound of a power tool being tested. �Will any of them join us?�

�I doubt it,� Hiebermeyer said. �They�re widening the passageway to get Anubis out. Even our lady guardian won�t come through that grille.�

�Maybe they think the place is cursed,� Costas murmured. �Maybe Anubis does it for them.�

As if on cue there was a shudder and the air shimmered with dust. It was gone as quickly as it had arrived, but there was no doubting the cause. Hiebermeyer took out his seismic oscillator and pressed it against the side wall, then grunted. There was silence for a moment, then a quiet coughing from Maria, and they all clipped on their dust masks.

�Maybe they�re right,� Costas said. �Is there anything more to see, Maurice? I mean, anything really? I�m good to go.�

�Too late to turn back now,� Hiebermeyer said, peering at Jack. �I hate to admit it, but I�m beginning to understand those eighteenth-century tunnelers. I know where they were coming from. You don�t want to linger too long down here. I don�t think we�re here for a painstaking excavation. Not exactly smash and grab, but something like an archaeological raid.�

�I�m hearing you,� Jack said.

At that moment there was a grunt and a curse. �I think we�ve got something here.� Costas had been edging ahead of the others, and now framed the ragged hole at the end of the tunnel. �I think it might be another statue.� The others quickly came up behind him, their beams converging on the place where the seismic shock had just caused a section of wall to cave in beside the crack. Inside the cavity was a human form, life-sized, lying on its front, one arm outstretched and the other folded under its chest, the legs extending back toward the entrance. It seemed to be naked, but the surface was obscured by a darkened carbonized layer that made the material underneath difficult to ascertain.

�My God,� Maria whispered.

�This must have just been revealed,� Hiebermeyer said quietly. �That tremor just now. It wasn�t visible yesterday.�

Jack knelt down and examined the head, then tried to peer through a small hole just below one ear. He could see that the form was hollow, like a bronze statue, but there was no metal visible, not even a corrosion layer. He thought for a moment, then looked again. �Well, I�ll be damned,� he murmured.

�What is it?� Costas said.

�You remember I told you about the bodies at Pompeii, shapes preserved as hollow casts in the solidified ash?�

Costas looked aghast. �You�re not telling me this is one.� He edged back.

�Only it�s not preserved in ash,� Hiebermeyer said. He had come up beside Jack and taken out his worn old trowel, using it to pick up a small sample of blackened material from beside the body. �It�s bizarre. It�s preserved in some kind of carbonized material, something fibrous.�

�My God,� Jack said. �You�re right. I can see the crossed fibers. Clothing maybe.� He peered at Hiebermeyer, who looked back at him suggestively. Jack thought again, and felt his jaw drop. �Not clothing,� he whispered. �Papyrus.�

�Wait till you see what�s in there,� Hiebermeyer whispered back, aiming his trowel at the crack in the wall ahead of them.

�These were scrolls?� Maria whispered. �This man was covered in papyrus scrolls?�

�They were spilling out of the place that lies ahead of us,� Hiebermeyer replied. �It�s as if this man fell into a bed of scrolls, and they were all blown over him when the blast came. When they found Philodemus� library in the eighteenth century, a lot of the scrolls were strewn around, as if someone were trying to escape with them.�

�Or was searching through them, frantically searching for something precious to salvage before fleeing,� Maria said.

�Let�s hope these books were just more of Philodemus� Greek scrolls,� Jack muttered, �and not the lost Latin library.�

Costas put out his hand and gingerly touched the shoulder of the body. Instantly the entire form shimmered and disappeared in a puff of carbon. His finger was left suspended in midair, and for a moment there was silence.

�Whoops,� he said.

Hiebermeyer groaned.

�Not to worry.� Jack sighed. �An Agamemnon moment.�

�Huh?�

�When Heinrich Schliemann excavated the Bronze Age site of Mycenae, he lifted a golden death mask from a royal grave and claimed to have gazed on the face of King Agamemnon. Maybe he really did see something, some fleeting impression under the mask. You remember Atlantis, the spectral form of the bull on the altar? Sometimes you really do see ghosts.�

�I think it�s time for photographs from now on, Jack,� Maria said, pulling out a compact digital camera.

�Absolutely,� Jack said. �Take everything, several times, different settings. It could end up being the only record we have.�

�Look what�s underneath,� Hiebermeyer said, suddenly excited. �Far more interesting, forensically speaking.� He hunched down close over the place where the head had been and took out a photographer�s lens cleaner, gently blowing at the dust. Another form was emerging underneath, gray and blackened. �It�s the skull,� he whispered, his voice tight with emotion. �It�s partially carbonized too, but looks as if it�ll hold up. And I can see the vertebrae, the ribs.� He put his finger into a dark sticky mass under the skull, then sniffed it, first cautiously, then deeply. He suddenly gagged, then swallowed hard. �Amazing,� he said hoarsely, wiping his finger against the wall. �Never even come across that in a mummy, and I�ve stuck my fingers in a few.�

�What is it?� Costas said. �Some kind of resin, pitch?�

�Not exactly.� Hiebermeyer�s glasses had slipped down his nose, and he pushed them up with the same finger, leaving a dark streak between his eyes. He looked at Costas, beaming with excitement. �When the inferno hit this place, the scrolls must have instantly carbonized, but there must have been something in them, a resinous preservative material, that caused the carbonized mass to form the cast around the body. That sealed off the flesh from oxygen, so it couldn�t incinerate. Instead, it cooked.�

�Cooked alive,� Maria said.

�He means this guy melted,� Jack added, peering at Costas.

�Oh, no.� Costas swayed back against the opposite wall of the tunnel. �And you put your finger into it.�

Hiebermeyer held up his finger again and peered at it with some reverence. �It�s fantastic. Probably some brain in that. Should be perfect for DNA analysis.�

Maria had edged back to where the man�s feet had been, looking closely, and then sidled up to Hiebermeyer and peered into the rib cage. �Look! He�s wearing a gold ring!� she exclaimed. Hiebermeyer followed her gaze, tracing the finger bones, which were contorted under the rib cage as if the man had been clutching at his chest in his death throes. He took out a Mini Maglite and put his face right up to the bones. �It�s a signet ring, for impressing into wax sealings on documents. It�s partly melted into the bone, but I can see the design. It�s an eagle impression.�

�An Imperial signet ring,� Jack said. �This guy must have been in the service of the emperor.�

�I�m not sure if this was a guy, exactly,� Hiebermeyer murmured, kneeling up with his hands on his hips. �There�s something odd about this skeleton. Distinctly odd. Rounding of the face, areas of bone structure you�d expect to be more developed in a male, unusual widening of the pelvic area. It�s not a woman, exactly, but it�s not far off. Very odd.�

�Didn�t they have eunuchs?� Costas said.

�An interesting thought,� Jack murmured. He stared at the skeleton, thinking hard. In the early fourth century AD, the emperor Constantine the Great surrounded himself with eunuchs, and so did the later Byzantine emperors. Eunuchs were thought to be a safer bet as secretaries and state officials, less likely to be hard-driven and ambitious. Earlier emperors had them too. He looked up. �Some scholars think that Claudius� freedman Narcissus was a eunuch.� He paused for a moment, then spoke again. �But it couldn�t be Narcissus. He was murdered when Claudius was poisoned, in AD 54. That�s a quarter of a century before Vesuvius erupted. There would have been other eunuchs around, certainly. This whole area attracted oddities, freaks who came here for the amusement of the wealthy, as well as cripples and other unfortunates who sought cures in the sulfur vents of the Phlegraean Fields. That�s the other side of life here in the Roman period, not exactly the tourist image.�

�Whoever and whatever this was, he may have ended up as an Imperial freedman, but he certainly started off life as a slave.� Hiebermeyer had shifted to the feet end of the skeleton, and then came back up beside the extractor fan, just inside the entranceway ahead of them. �His ankles have the characteristic contusions caused by shackles, healed over years before. I think he was an old man when he died, very old for this period, maybe in his eighties or even his nineties. But he�d had a pretty rough time of it a long time before, as a boy.�

�From shackles to castration to this,� Costas said, his eyes studiously averted from the slick of black goo under the skeleton. �Let�s hope the years in between weren�t so bad.�

�The end was probably pretty quick,� Hiebermeyer said, scraping some of the black material onto his trowel and then into a small specimen vial. �The terrible shock of that blast of heat, then one lungful and you�d be gone. There would only have been a few seconds of awareness.�

�He must have known something bad was going down,� Costas said, forcing himself to look again. �I thought the volcano had been erupting for hours.�

�Yes, but the pyroclastic flow that wiped Herculaneum off the map came from nowhere, rushed down that mountain in rings of fire, faster than anything any Roman had ever seen. Before that, the eruption would have seemed a terrifying catastrophe, but not necessarily a death sentence. After that it truly was the apocalypse. Nobody would have escaped Herculaneum alive.�

Jack began to sense the smell of the place, not just the familiar smell of dust and old tombs, but the smell of recent death, the rusty smell of blood, the scent of animal fear. For a moment the tunnel lost its solidity and became the whirling vortex of death that had encased this man, a terrifying, claustrophobic place which moments before had been a shrine to beauty, a sumptuous expression of freedom and confidence. The whole place still seemed traumatized, still trembling in the aftershock almost two thousand years on. Jack closed his eyes briefly, then moved up behind Hiebermeyer, toward the dark entranceway ahead of them. He glanced back to where he could still see the snout of Anubis peering sightless out of the side wall, to the glimmer of light just visible beyond. The noise of the drill could be heard where the tunnel entrance was being widened, but there was still nobody to be seen. He turned back to the dark crack in the wall ahead.

�You ready for this?� Hiebermeyer said, flicking off the fan. There was now no noise ahead of them, only the silence of a tomb, and even the distant noise of the drill had stopped. Jack looked at the grimy face a few inches away from his, the face of a man which in the blink of an eye could have been a boy. �Do you remember when we were at school, when we filled that cellar room up with homemade artifacts and then sealed it up, pretending it was King Tut�s tomb? I was Howard Carter, you were Lord Caernarvon.�

�No.� Hiebermeyer shook his head decisively. �Other way round. You were Caernarvon, I was Carter.�

Jack grinned, then looked ahead at the dark crack in the wall, his face suffused with excitement. �Okay. Let�s do it.�

�

JACK PEERED THROUGH INTO THE HIDDEN CHAMBER AT the end of the tunnel, trying to make sense of the flashes of clarity revealed by his headlamp in the darkness. The tunnel had felt like an old mine working, which was exactly what it was, the result of Weber�s digging more than two hundred years before, itself part of the extraordinary archaeology of this place. But now there were glimpses that reminded Jack of exactly where they were, deep inside the buried remains of an ancient Roman villa. At first all he could see were shadows, dusty gray forms, darkness. Then he saw a table, possibly a stone table, and some kind of shelf structure on the far wall. Something was not right. Then he realized to his astonishment what it was. There was no ash, no solidified mud.

�It�s perfectly preserved,� he whispered.

Hiebermeyer heaved the extractor fan forward a few feet into the chamber, and it showed red again. He cautioned them to stay back. �This room is a miracle,� he replied in hushed tones. �I realized it when I first peered in here yesterday, before we backed out and called you. There are other rooms at Herculaneum that escaped the mud, the pyroclastic flow, but the extraordinary thing about this room is that it escaped the furnace effect as well. It could have been something to do with the elevation, perched on the top floor of the villa above the rooftop level of the town, looking down on it. The hot blast certainly ripped through everywhere else right up to the room, over that body at the entrance. But it missed this chamber itself. We always knew something like this was possible at Herculaneum.�

�Maurice, I can see scrolls,� Jack said, his voice tight with excitement. �Wound-up scrolls. No doubt about it. In jars, under those shelves.�

�That�s why I called you here,� Hiebermeyer replied, almost whispering. �Now you see what I mean. This really could be it.�

�Can you imagine what they might contain?� Jack�s voice was hoarse.

The fan suddenly went dead, and Hiebermeyer cursed in German. �Not now. Please God, not now. He bent over the machine and seemed to be praying. �I apologize profusely for everything I have ever said or thought about Naples. Just another five minutes. Please.�

�This happened before,� Maria murmured. �Dodgy electrical grid in Ercolano. The guards couldn�t be bothered to fire up the backup generator, and we had to come out in a hurry. But right now the superintendency are planning to use electrical drills to widen the cavity in the volcanic rock around the Anubis statue, so there�s a bit more incentive for the guards to get on with it. We just have to back off and wait.�

Jack looked over at the shadowy recess with the scrolls, hardly able to restrain himself. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He turned and followed the others, crawling back through the entrance to their start point. Costas reached into the shadows by the wall and picked up something. �Check this out,� he said excitedly. He held it up, shaking off the dust. It was a metal disk about an inch across, dark green and mottled. �It looks like a medallion.�

�Not a medallion,� Hiebermeyer murmured, peering closely. �A bronze sestertius, the biggest base metal denomination of the first century AD. A bit like a quarter.�

�Also the largest type of Roman coin, the best for portraits.� Jack crouched closer to Costas. �Anything visible?�

�Nero!� Costas exclaimed. �I can read it. The emperor Nero!� He passed the coin to Jack, who looked at it intently, angling it to and fro in his headlamp. �Right about the name, wrong about the emperor,� Jack murmured. �I�m looking at the reverse, the back side. It reads �NERO CLAUDIUS DRUSUS GERMANICUS � That�s the full name of Drusus, brother of the emperor Tiberius. Nero was a family name. Drusus was one of the ablest Roman generals, a decent man and a hero of the people. A real beacon at the beginning of the Empire, a time of great promise but also great uncertainty, a bit like 1960s America. Charismatic characters like that seem to be typical of those periods. His death by poisoning and then the murder of his son Germanicus were like the Kennedy assassinations, casting a pall over the whole early Imperial dynasty.�

�That was well before the time period we�re dealing with here,� Hiebermeyer murmured. �Drusus was murdered in 10 BC, during the reign of Augustus, almost eighty years before Vesuvius erupted.�

Jack nodded, and peered closely at the coin. The image showed a triumphal arch in Rome, surmounted by an equestrian statue of Drusus galloping between trophies. �But this isn�t a coin of Drusus. It�s a coin celebrating him. He was never emperor.� Jack flipped it over. This was a coin from the reign of one who survived all the madness of his uncle Tiberius and his nephew Caligula. It dated more than fifty years after Drusus� death. �This coin belonged to Drusus� son, younger brother of Germanicus. The inscription reads, �TI CLAVDIVS CAESAR AVG PM TR P.� That�s Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus, Pontifex Maximus, Tribunicia Potestas. The emperor Claudius.�

�Poor Claudius,� Maria murmured. �Claudius the cripple.�

�That�s the caricature,� Jack said. �But it�s a bit like Shakespeare�s take on the English King Richard III, the hunchback. There was a good deal more to Claudius than that.�

�He was emperor from AD 41 to 54,� Hiebermeyer said, looking again at the extractor fan and seeing the backup sensor still showing red. �Died in Rome a quarter of a century before Vesuvius erupted, probably poisoned by his wife Agrippina.

�He had bad luck with his wives,� Jack said. �His one real love seems to have been the prostitute Calpurnia, but she�d also been murdered by then.� Jack paused, again entranced by the coin image. �He�s no cripple here. It�s a handsome face, but there�s no glorification, no idealization. You can see the features of the Julio-Claudian dynasty�the forehead, the ears, features that hark back to his great-uncle Augustus, to Julius Caesar before that. There�s intelligence in this face too, a yearning, but also sadness and pain. A young man�s face clouded by disappointment, eyes older than his years.�

�His illness was probably a palsy,� Hiebermeyer murmured. �Cerebral palsy, with some element of spasticity. No cure, hardly any palliative treatment back then except copious quantities of wine.�

�What about opium?� Costas suddenly cut in. �Morphine?�

Hiebermeyer turned and gave Costas a look verging on pity. �We�re talking about the first century AD. Let�s keep modern Naples out of this.�

�I�m not kidding. Have you heard about our shipwreck find?�

�Later.� Jack glanced at Costas, and at that moment the extractor fan buzzed to life.

�Speaking of modern Naples,� Hiebermeyer muttered. �Looks like someone bribed the grid operator to give us some electricity. Or the guards outside finally got off their backsides. Whatever it was, we�re good to go. As you would say, Costas.� The words sounded slightly absurd in his clipped German accent, and Jack stifled a smile. Hiebermeyer pushed up his glasses and gave Costas another look, this time more quizzical than pitying.

�Hey. Good to go. He�s one of us after all.� Costas returned the look deadpan, then glanced at Jack, grinning. �Roger that.�

Jack pressed his back against the jagged side of the tunnel to let Maria through. �I think it�s time for our resident manuscripts expert to take the lead.�

�I�m good with that.� Hiebermeyer peered inquisitively at Costas, who gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up, then he pushed up his glasses again and spoke seriously. �From now on, we touch only what we have to. The papyrus scrolls in there may be unusually well preserved, but they may also be extremely fragile. Even in the driest tombs in Egypt, papyrus with no resin preservative can crumble to dust at a touch.� He kept his gaze fixed on Costas. �Remember the body at the entrance. The body that disappeared in a puff of smoke. After all the effort we�ve been through to get the authorities to allow us in here, I don�t want to be the latest in a long line of investigators to destroy more than they recover from this place. Okay? The fan shows green. Let�s move.�

Jack crouched down and made his way behind Maria over a pile of rubble that had evidently fallen when the earthquake damaged the wall, clogging up the lower part of the crack leading into the chamber. A few moments later they cautiously stood up inside. Jack felt sure that he was now beyond the eighteenth-century tunneling, that they were the first to stand here since the time of the Roman Empire. It was an extraordinary feeling, and took him straight back to that time as a schoolboy when he had sat alone in the ancient bath building in the main site of Herculaneum, only a stone�s throw from where he was now, willing himself to pass back into antiquity and become one of the living, breathing inhabitants in the fateful hours leading up to the eruption. He shut his eyes tight, opened them again, unclipped his dust mask, and took a cautious breath. The air had a slightly sickly tang to it, but there was little dust. For the first time he looked at the room properly, sweeping his headlamp around all four walls, then methodically working his way back through everything he had seen.

�Can we have the fan off now, Maurice?� he said. �I�m worried our voices might travel with the extractor exhaust, be heard by the guards and superintendency people outside.�

�Done.� Hiebermeyer flicked the switch, and suddenly it was eerily quiet. Then they heard the sound of clinking and distant voices down the tunnel, and the whining of electric drills. �Good. That noise should cover us.�

Hiebermeyer came through behind Jack and Maria, followed by Costas. �This room seems pretty austere,� Costas said, standing up behind Jack and looking around. �I mean, not much here.�

�That�s the Roman way,� Jack said. �They often liked to have their floors and walls covered in color and decoration, but usually had very few furnishings by our standards.�

�No mosaics or wall paintings here,� Maria murmured. �This room�s all stone, white marble by the look of it.�

Jack peered around again, absorbing everything he could, trying to get a sense of it all. To the right, on the south side, the wall was pierced by two entrances, both blocked up with solid volcanic material. He guessed they led to a balcony overlooking the town of Herculaneum below. It would have been a spectacular view, with Vesuvius rearing up to the left and the broad sweep of the Bay of Naples to the right, the coastline visible as far out as Misenum and Cumae. Jack shifted, and his headlamp beam illuminated a marble table, perhaps three meters long and a meter wide, with two stone chairs backing against the balcony. On the table were two pottery pitchers, three pottery cups, and what looked like ink pots. Just visible against one leg of the table was a small wine amphora. Jack looked at the tabletop again. Ink pots. His heart raced with excitement. He saw dusty shapes that could have been paper, papyrus. He narrowed his eyes. He was sure of it. He forced himself to remain rooted, to remain calm and detached for a few moments longer, and swept his beam to the left. He saw the shelves they had seen from the entrance, that Hiebermeyer had seen through the crack in the wall the day before. Bookshelves, piled high with scrolls. It was incredible. More scrolls were strewn on the floor, just as Weber had found elsewhere in the villa in the eighteenth century. Jack pivoted farther left, to the place where they had come in. Beside the entrance were scrolls in some kind of wicker basket, different from the scrolls on the floor, wound around wooden sticks with distinctive decorative finials poking out of the ends of each one, labels protruding. There was no doubt about it. Not just blank rolls of papyrus. Finished books.

He aimed his beam back to the left wall of the room, between the basket and the shelves, at something he had seen earlier but not properly registered. Now he realized what it was, and drew in his breath in excitement. It was two shadowy heads, portrait busts perched on a small shelf, looking beyond the table. He took a few careful steps toward them. He needed to find out who had been here, who had been the last person to sit at that desk, almost two thousand years ago. He stood in front of the busts and saw that they were life-sized. For a moment they had a ghostly quality, as if the occupants of the villa that fateful day had walked out of the wall and were staring straight at him, with lifeless eyes. Jack forced himself to look dispassionately. Typical early Imperial portrait busts, extraordinarily lifelike, as if they had been taken from wax death masks. Handsome, well-proportioned heads, slightly protuberant ears, clearly members of the Imperial family. Jack peered down at the small pedestals below each bust and read out the names:

NERO CLAVDIVS DRVSVS NERO CLAVDIVS DRVSVS GERMANICVS

�Drusus and Germanicus,� he whispered.

�The two guys you mentioned just now? The guy on the coin?� Costas said. �Father and brother of Claudius?�

�Seems an incredible coincidence,� Maria said.

Jack�s mind was racing. He still had the coin in his hand, and he held it up so the portrait was framed by the two portrait heads. The similarity was truly remarkable. Could it be? �There�s something about this coin,� he murmured. �Something staring us in the face.�

�But that one coin doesn�t necessarily mean much, surely,� Maria said. �This villa was like an art gallery, a museum. The great villa owners of Italy in the Renaissance collected medallions, old coins. Why not Roman villa owners too?�

�Possibly.� Jack looked around the chamber pensively. �But I think we�re in the room of an old person, stripped to its essentials. This isn�t just Roman minimalism, it�s real austerity. Books, a writing table, a few revered portraits, wine. No wall paintings, no mosaics, nothing of the hedonism we associate with the Bay of Naples. The room of someone prepared for the next step, for the afterlife, already swept clean of the past. The twilight of a life.�

�Seems pretty old for a lavish villa,� Costas said. �I mean, this room�s like a monk�s cell.�

Hiebermeyer had squatted down and was peering closely at one of the scrolls on the floor. �This papyrus is fantastically well preserved,� he murmured, carefully prising at it with his fingers. �It�s even pliable. I can read the Greek.�

�Ah. Greek,� Jack said, his voice neutral.

�What�s wrong with that?� Costas said.

�Nothing,� Jack said. �Nothing at all. We just want Latin.�

�Bad news, Jack,� Hiebermeyer said, peering closely at the script, then pushing up his glasses and looking at him. �I may have brought you here on a wild-goose chase.�

�Philodemus.�

�I�m afraid so.�

�I thought Greek philosophers were highly esteemed,� Costas said.

�Not all of them,� Jack said. �A lot of Romans, educated men like Claudius, like Pliny the Elder, thought many of these Greek philosophers around the Bay of Naples were quacks and charlatans, hangers-on in the villas of the wealthy. But there was a lot of this stuff around, and in a typical library here you were probably more likely to pick up a book by someone like Philodemus than one of the great names we revere today. Remember, the classical texts that have survived, that were saved and transcribed in the medieval period, only represent the pinnacle of ancient achievement, and only a small part of that. It spoils us into thinking that all ancient thinkers were remarkable minds. Look at the academic world today. For every great scholar, there are dozens of mediocrities, more than a few charlatans. But they�re still all called professors. It was just bad luck for us that old Calpurnius Piso patronized one of the flaky ones.�

�I hope to God we haven�t just stumbled into Philodemos� study,� Hiebermeyer muttered. �I hate to lead you on, Jack. Hardly worth calling you from your shipwreck.�

�I wouldn�t miss being here for anything,� Jack said fervently, �Philodemus or not. And we aren�t going anywhere with the wreck until all the equipment for a major excavation�s in place, a week at least.�

�It�d be such a pity, though,� Maria said, slumping slightly. �Some second-rate philosopher. It�s hard to believe someone was trying to save it all when the eruption happened,� she said, waving at the strewn scrolls all over the floor.

�Maybe they weren�t,� Costas said. �Maybe the clearance was already under way, and they were trying to get rid of it.�

�Or searching for something. You said it before.� Jack glanced back at the macabre form of the skeleton at the entrance, its hand seeming to grasp toward the scrolls inside the room. �But there�s something about this place. It doesn�t seem like the study of a Greek philosopher. Not at the end anyway, not in AD 79. It�s just too Roman. It�s a very private room, a hidden sanctuary almost, a place where someone could live in their own world and forget about impressing others. And I just can�t imagine a Greek choosing to have two Imperial Roman portrait busts as the only decoration in his study, the only things to look at from his desk.�

Hiebermeyer flipped on the extractor fan again, and it flashed red. �Let�s give it a few more minutes,� he said. �I think we�re still okay to talk, with the noise. I don�t think they can hear us with that drill going.�

They backed up to the entrance again, clustering around it, and Jack held up the coin. He looked at the statues again, then back at the coin. He realized that the coin had been fingered a lot, in the same place on both sides. �Maybe this was the memento of an old soldier, an old man who lived here in AD 79,� he murmured. �Perhaps one who had served under Claudius in the invasion of Britain, or even under Germanicus, sixty years before. An old man who revered his general, and that general�s brother and father.� He paused, troubled. �But it�s still odd.�

�Why?� Costas said. �It�s a great find, but as Maria says, it�s just one coin.�

�Well, it would still have been risking it,� Jack said. �In the Roman period, you didn�t hang on to old coins, unless you were hoarding them. You just didn�t want to be seen with issues of a past emperor. Coins were hugely important propaganda tools. It was how a new emperor conveyed his image, asserted his power. And the coin reverse had commemorative images which celebrated the achievements of the emperor and his family.�

�The Jewish triumph of Vespasian,� Costas said. �Judaea Capta. The menorah.�

Jack grinned. �A great example. How could we forget. That issue was less than two years after the eruption of Vesuvius. Another famous example is the Britannia issues of Claudius, celebrating his conquest of Britain in AD43.�

�But this coin commemorates Claudius� father.� Costas took the coin from Jack and looked at it closely in the beam from his headlamp. �It seems a selfless thing for an emperor to do, a little touching. I think I like this guy.�

�It�s not quite what it seems,� Jack said. �This coin probably dates to the first year of Claudius� reign, before he had anything to brag about. Harking back to a glorious ancestor was a way of giving your claim to the throne some authority, reminding people of the virtues of your ancestors. In AD 41, when Claudius was proclaimed emperor, Rome had just suffered four years of insanity under Caligula, Claudius� nephew. What people desperately wanted was a return to the hallowed old days. Personal honor, integrity, family continuity, living up to your ancestors, that was all very much the Roman way. At least in theory.�

�In Italy,� Costas murmured. �The family. Sounds familiar.�

�Claudius was Rome�s most reluctant emperor,� Jack continued. �Dragged from behind a curtain by the Praetorian Guard when he was already in middle age, looking forward to his remaining years as a scholar and historian. But he revered the memory of his father, and all his life he wished he�d been fit enough to join the army like his brother, Germanicus, who he adored. Being emperor gave him the chance. And the acclamation of every new emperor, even Caligula and Claudius� successor, Nero, was always accompanied by pious assertions of a return to the ways of the past, the end of debauchery and corruption and a return to the virtues of their ancestors.�

�Did Claudius live up to it?� Costas asked.

�He might have done, if he hadn�t been ruled by his wives,� Hiebermeyer muttered.

�Britain was a great triumph,� Jack said. �Claudius was doomed never to cover himself in personal glory, riding out from the waves of the English Channel rather absurdly on a war elephant, arriving in time to see the corpses of the British vanquished but not to lead his legions in battle. But he was a good strategist, a visionary of sorts who had spent his life studying empire and conquest and could see beyond the individual campaign, the triumph. The world would be a very different place today if Claudius hadn�t conquered Britain. And remember, for the men in the legions nothing could be worse than Caligula a few years earlier forcing them to line up on the French side of the English Channel and attack the sea god Neptune. With Claudius they didn�t mind having a cripple for an emperor, as long as he was sane. And Claudius chose very able field commanders, generals like Vespasian and middle-ranking officers like Pliny the Elder, and they were loyal to him. And the legionaries revered the memory of Claudius� father and his brother.� Jack paused, and looked up again at the portrait bust. �Just like the occupant of this room.�

�Their loyalty didn�t prevent Claudius from being poisoned,� Hiebermeyer said.

�No,� Jack murmured. �But for a first-century emperor, that was also the Roman way.�

�Speaking of poison, what�s all this about opium?� Hiebermeyer said. At that moment the light flashed green, and Hiebermeyer reached over and deactivated the fan. �Sorry. It�ll have to wait.�

Jack crouched back into the ancient chamber and went straight over to the table, around to the far side between the chairs. He looked at what lay on the surface. He had been right. They were shrouded with gray matter, dust and fallen plaster, but there was no mistaking it. Sheets of papyrus, blank sheets. A pinned-out scroll, ready for writing. Ink pots, a metal stylus poised ready to dip into the ink, left where it had been abandoned forever, the day when this place became hell on earth. Jack stared down, then glanced up again at the two portrait busts. Drusus and Germanicus. There were Romans alive in AD 79 who could still hark back to those glory days. The untimely deaths of two heroes meant that their memory lived on, for generations. A Roman would have known the portraits of his ancestors intimately. And this was a private room. A room where a man kept his most precious heirlooms, the portraits of his ancestors.

Jack was beginning to think the impossible.

The portrait of his father. Of his brother.

The pieces were suddenly falling together. Jack felt a heady rush of excitement. Something else sprang into his mind from talking to Costas about Pliny the Elder the day before. He reached into his bag, his heart pounding, took out the little red book and placed it on the table, under his headlamp beam. He clipped on his dust mask, carefully picked up an ancient sheet of papyrus, shook it slightly and shone his Maglite through it. He laughed quietly to himself. �Well, I�ll be damned.�

�What is it?� Costas said.

Jack held the paper up to the light so the others could see. �Look, there�s a second layer of papyrus underneath, coarser than the upper layer. It means the surface is of the best quality, but underneath it the paper is strengthened, less transparent. And unless I�m mistaken, the sheet measures exactly one Roman foot across.�

�So?�

Jack put down the sheet and picked up the book, his copy of the Natural History. �Listen to what Pliny has to say about paper. Book 13, chapter 79, on papyrus:

�The Emperor Claudius imposed modifications on the best quality because the thinness of the paper in Augustus� time was not able to withstand the pressure of pens. In addition it allowed the writing to show through, and this brought fear of blots caused by writing on the back of the paper. Moreover, the excessive transparency of the paper looked unsightly in other ways. So the bottom layer of the paper was made from leaves of the second quality, and the cross-strips from papyrus of the first quality. Claudius also increased the width of the sheet to a foot.�

Hiebermeyer leaned over the table and peered at the sheet closely with a small eyeglass. �And unless I�m mistaken, this is the best-quality ink available at the time,� he said excitedly. �Gall ink, in all probability, made from the desert beetle. I�m a bit of an expert, you know, having studied ink types when we found papyrus documents reused as mummy wrappings in Egypt. Pliny writes about that too.�

�Then I�m about to make an extraordinary suggestion,� Jack said, replacing the sheet carefully on the table and looking intently at the others. �I think it�s possible, just possible, that we�re standing in the study of a man who should never have been here, who history tells us died a quarter of a century before the eruption of Vesuvius.�

�A man who once ruled an empire,� Maria said softly.

Hiebermeyer was nodding slowly, and whispered the words, almost to himself, �Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus.�

Jack held up the coin, allowing the light to pick out the portrait. �Not the emperor Claudius, not the god Claudius, but Claudius the scholar. Claudius who may have somehow faked his own poisoning and survived for all those years after his disappearance from Rome, hidden away in this villa. Claudius who must have finally perished just as Pliny the Elder did, in the cataclysm of AD 79.�

There was a stunned silence, and Costas looked keenly at Jack. �Well,� he said quietly. �That�s another little bit of history you�re going to have to rewrite.�

�And not the only bit.� Maria had her back to them, and was hunched over the lower shelf in the corner of the room. �There�s more here, Jack. Much more. Books and books of it.�

Jack came around the table and they all crouched beside her. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. In front of them, below the shelves they had seen from the entrance, were two shelves packed with several dozen cylindrical boxes, each about eighteen inches high. �They�re lidded, sealed with some kind of mortar,� Hiebermeyer murmured. �Hollowed-out stone, Egyptian marble by the looks of it. They look like reused canopic jars. No expense spared here.�

�This one�s open.� Maria took out her Maglite, twisted it on and shone it at the top of the cylinder on the right side of the lower shelf. The hollowed-out interior was about a foot wide, and inside it they could see further narrow cylindrical shapes, with a space where one appeared to have been removed.

�Eureka,� Hiebermeyer said, his voice tight with emotion.

�What is it?� Costas asked.

�Papyrus scrolls,� Hiebermeyer said. �Tightly wound papyrus scrolls.�

�Jack, they�re not carbonized,� Maria whispered. �It�s a miracle.� She reached out, then pulled back, as if she wanted the spell to remain unbroken, to preserve that moment of realization before their action changed history.

�Any idea what they are?� Costas said.

�There should be sillyboi, labels describing each book,� Jack said. �Scrolls don�t have spines, so books were identified with pasted labels, usually hanging out over the shelf. I don�t see any here.�

�Wait a second.� Maria peered closely at the top of the sealed cylinder next to the one with the displaced lid. �There are markings. Engravings in the stone. Words, in Latin. I can read it. �Historiae Carthaginienses Antiquae.��

�The History of the Ancient Carthaginians,� Jack whispered. �Claudius� lost history of Carthage. It�s mentioned in other ancient sources, but not a word of it survived. Or so we thought. There may only ever have been one copy, too controversial to publish. The only dispassionate account of Rome�s greatest rival. Who else but Claudius himself would have had that, in his own private library. These jars must contain his other works.�

�Wait for it, Jack.� Hiebermeyer had sidled over to the basket of scrolls by the door and was holding up a flap of papyrus attached to one of the decorative handles. �Naturalis Historia C. Plinius Secundus. My God. Looks like we�ve got a complete edition of Pliny�s Natural History.�

�Looks like you�ve found that Latin library after all,� Costas said.

Jack felt an overwhelming sense of certainty. He looked at the scroll, remembered his sense of the room when he first saw it, those two portraits. There had been another here, another presence, as if the old man so covetous of his private space had allowed in one other, a man whose imprint was still here, around them. �There�s something else that�s niggling me about this place,� Jack said. �About who was here.�

�What is it?�

�Well, we�ve got what looks like an entire copy of Pliny�s Natural History, hot out of the scriptorium. How does Claudius get hold of that?�

Costas jerked his head toward the skeleton at the door. �Maybe he sent the eunuch to buy books for him.�

�Let�s just think about it,� Jack said. �Let�s say we�re right, that Claudius was living here in secret up to the time of the eruption, AD 79. That�s hypothesis, but one of the most famous facts of ancient history is that Pliny the Elder was here, on the Bay of Naples, based at Misenum only a few miles away, admiral of the Roman fleet, and that he died in the eruption.�

�You�re saying they may have met each other, here,� Costas said.

Jack flipped open the index pages of his copy of the Natural History. �This is what sparked me off. Pliny the Elder mentions Claudius a number of times throughout the book, always studiously, always lauding his achievements. He owed Claudius his career, when Claudius was emperor and Pliny was a young man, but the passages in the Natural History are almost too laudatory for an emperor who had supposedly been dead for a quarter of a century. Just an example. Listen to this. He talks of Claudius� achievement in having a tunnel dug to drain the Fucine Lake near Rome, taking thirty thousand men and eleven years, an immense operation �beyond the power of words to describe.� That final phrase is odd, by itself. For Pliny the Elder, absolutely nothing was beyond the power of words. And another thing, he should have referred to Claudius as Divus Claudius, the divine Claudius, in keeping with his status as a deified emperor, years after his death and supposed apotheosis. But instead, Pliny refers to him as Claudius Caesar. It�s almost too familiar, almost as if Claudius is still alive when Pliny is writing this. The clues are all here.�

�It makes sense,� Hiebermeyer murmured.

�From what we know of him, Claudius seems to have been a gregarious man, as was Pliny,� Jack said. �Claudius may have been forced to live as a recluse, but he had always enjoyed company. He may even have summoned Pliny in secret to this room when he heard that Pliny had arrived to take up his naval post at Misenum. And Pliny would constantly have been searching for informants, people who could help with his Natural History. He was a practical, straightforward Roman, and Claudius may have been a breath of fresh air for him in this place which might have seemed infested with Greek-loving hedonists, Romans with more money than sense under the spell of weak-minded philosophers like Philodemos.�

�And vice versa,� Maria said. �Claudius probably felt the same about Pliny.�

�Claudius would have greatly admired Pliny,� Jack said. �Soldier, scholar, fantastically industrious, a decent man. Pliny claimed he once had a vision of Claudius� father Drusus, telling him to write a history of the German wars. With his bust of his beloved father in front of him here, Claudius would have loved to hear that anecdote from Pliny himself, perhaps over a few pitchers of wine.�

�Claudius would also have been very knowledgeable, hugely well read,� Hiebermeyer added, pointing at the shelves. �It could have been a real meeting of minds. Claudius would have been a great source for Pliny on Britain, though I don�t remember much on Britannia in the Natural History.�

�Possibly because Pliny died before he could incorporate it,� Jack murmured. �He had only been based at Naples for a year before the eruption, and he probably hadn�t found time. He was too sociable for his own good, constantly doing the rounds of friends, the ladies too. But Claudius would have been a fantastic discovery for him, a tremendous secret. I believe Pliny was here, in this room. I can feel it. I think Pliny came to visit Claudius often, and they had begun to work together. Pliny had given Claudius the latest copy of his Natural History, but he was probably poised to make additions, once he realized what a gold mine he�d found.�

�Maybe this is where Pliny was really coming when he sailed toward Vesuvius during the eruption,� Costas said. �That letter you read me, from his nephew, Pliny the Younger. Maybe he only told his nephew he was coming here for a woman. Maybe it was a secret mission. Maybe he was really coming to rescue Claudius, this fabulous library.�

�But he was too late,� Maria murmured.

�I wonder what did happen to old Claudius, if he really was here?� Costas said.

�He was here,� Jack said fervently. �I can almost smell it. Stale wine, spilled by a shaking hand. A whiff of sulfur, maybe brought back from nocturnal visits to Cumae to see the Sibyl, who we know he consulted when he was emperor. The smell of old gall ink. He was here, all right. I know it in my bones.�

Jack walked back to the desk as he spoke. He suddenly saw that words were visible, where there had been none before. He realized that the sheet of papyrus below the blank one he had picked up was covered in writing, perfectly preserved for almost two thousand years. He peered down, and read across the top:

HISTORIA BRITANNIARUM CLAUDIUS CAESAR

�My God,� he whispered. �So this is what he was writing. So this is why he wanted to return to the life of a scholar. A History of Britain, by Claudius Caesar. Can you imagine what this contains?� He scanned the lines of fine, precise writing and then looked back at the title. Underneath it were two words, in the same hand but smaller:

NARCISSUS FECIT

�Of course,� Jack exclaimed, his voice hoarse with excitement. �Narcissus did this. Narcissus wrote this.� He looked back toward the doorway, where the outstretched arm of the skeleton was visible in his headlamp beam. �So it is you after all,� he murmured to himself, then looked at the others, his face suffused with excitement. �You remember I said that Narcissus was Claudius� freedman? Well, his official title was praepositus ab epistulis, letter writer. This clinches it. We know who that skeleton was after all. He was Claudius� amanuensis, his scribe. I know Pliny always had one, and Claudius must have had one too, especially with his palsy.� Jack looked at the page again, then at some other pages scattered beside it on the table, with no writing but covered in dark-red blotches like wine stains. �It�s amazing. I only hope we can find something in Claudius� own hand.�

The sound of the drill at the entrance to the tunnel had stopped, and a woman�s voice was shouting, in heavily accented English, �Dr. Hiebermeyer? Dr. Hiebermeyer? We are closing the tunnel now. Please come out immediately.�

�Si, si, si, pronto,� Hiebermeyer bellowed back. Maria immediately came over with her digital camera and began taking pictures, quickly moving through everything on the table, finishing with a close-up sequence of the page of writing before picking up the blank papyrus sheet and placing it on top to protect and conceal the writing.

�We need to decide what to do, Jack,� Hiebermeyer said in a low voice. �Pronto.�

�As soon as we�re out of earshot beyond the villa site, I�m on the phone to my friend at Reuters,� Jack said. �Maria should now have a disk full of images of everything we�ve seen here, and those can be emailed straight through. But we keep quiet until then. Leak any of this now to the superintendency people, and we�ll never see the contents of this room again. You need to play the danger card, Maurice, big-time. We found nothing of much interest, spent our time examining some masonry fragments sticking out of the wall. Far too dangerous for anyone to come beyond that grille again. Tell them their drill destabilized the tunnel even more, and there was a collapse. But by tomorrow morning, when these images are out, splashed across the headlines and TV news everywhere, they�ll have no choice but to open up this place. It�ll be one of the most sensational finds ever made in archaeology. And by the way, Maurice and Maria, many congratulations.�

�Not just yet, Jack,� Hiebermeyer murmured, making his way past the scrolls on the floor toward the extractor fan. �I�ve spent too long dealing with these people now to be so optimistic. Let�s stall the champagne until this place is more than just a figment of our imagination.�

�Jack, there�s an open scroll here.� Costas was standing beside the shelves, peering into the recess behind the marble jars.

�There are scrolls everywhere,� Jack said. �This place is an Aladdin�s Cave. We�ll just have to leave it.�

�You said you wanted to see Claudius� handwriting. I�m not sure, but this one looks like it might be in two different hands, one of them a little spidery. Looks like someone�s jotted notes in the margin.�

�Probably mad old Philodemus,� Hiebermeyer said.

�I doubt it. I think Claudius was having Philodemus cleared out,� Jack said. �I think he was making room on the shelves for his own stuff.� He walked over to Costas, who moved aside, and peered where Costas was pointing. The scroll was open, the two ends partly rolled back, with a few inches of writing visible in between. The scroll looked identical to those in the basket by the door, the volumes of Pliny�s Natural History, with the distinctive rounded finials on the handles. Someone must have been consulting it, then put it down opened at a page. The woman�s voice came up the tunnel again, shouting, insistent. �Dr. Hiebermeyer! Jack! Please. Now!� Jack looked up, suddenly distracted at hearing his name spoken by a voice from a past that had never been resolved. For a second Jack felt an overwhelming need to leave everything and go out of the tunnel, to find out what had gone wrong. Maria and Hiebermeyer were already out of the chamber, taking the extractor fan with them. Jack shook his head, looked at Costas and then back at the scroll, forced himself to concentrate for a moment longer, to read the words of the ancient script.

He froze.

He looked again. Two words. Two words that could change history. His mind was racing, his heart thumping.

Then, for the first time in his life, Jack did the unthinkable. He lifted the scroll, carefully rolled the two wound ends together and slid it into his khaki bag. He flipped over the cover of the bag and buckled the straps. Costas watched him in silence.

�You know why I�m doing this,� Jack said quietly.

�I�m good with it,� Costas replied.

Jack turned to follow Hiebermeyer and Maria. �Right. Time to face the inquisition.�

�

Fifteen minutes later Jack stood with Costas and Maria in the open air outside the archaeological site, waiting for the guard to unlock the door that opened into the alleyway that led through the modern town of Ercolano. They had been hit by the heat as they left the tunnel, but the blinding sunlight of their arrival on the site had given way to a lowering gray sky, with dark clouds forming over Vesuvius and blanketing the bay behind them. They had doffed their safety helmets outside the tunnel and made their way past the workmen and the guards in the main trench, leaving Hiebermeyer to make his report to Elizabeth and a male inspector who had been waiting beside the tunnel entrance, impatient to close up the site. The Egyptian statue of Anubis had already been drilled out of the volcanic rock and stood partly crated outside the entrance, a cluster of tungsten lamps to one side, ready for the impending media event. A concrete mixer had already been drawn up next to the tunnel entrance, and workmen were laying wooden formers, ready to fill and block up the tunnel for good. Everything seemed to be happening exactly as Hiebermeyer had predicted.

The guard who had jostled Costas on their way into the site was ambling over the small courtyard toward them again, smoking, his submachine gun slung over his back. He came directly toward Costas, flicked away his cigarette and made an upward gesture with both hands. Jack realized that he was planning to frisk him. Jack looked at Costas, then back at the guard, then at Costas again. This was not going to work. They had less to lose now that they had done what they came for, but the last thing Jack wanted was an incident that would lead to full-body searches. He put his hand on his precious bag and tried to catch Costas� attention, but Costas� eyes were glued on the guard, expressionless, and Jack could see Costas� hands slowly clenching and unclenching. At that moment there was a clatter behind them, and Hiebermeyer entered the courtyard, followed by Elizabeth and the male inspector. Elizabeth snapped at the guard in Italian and he sneered at her, standing his ground. The man with Elizabeth then said something and the guard backed off a few steps, passing over a bunch of keys. The man went straight to the door and unlocked it, ushering them out. Maria and Costas ducked through. Jack was about to follow, then looked at Elizabeth, catching her eye for the first time. She looked back at him, imploring, and suddenly reached out and grasped his arm, drawing him into the shadows, past the slit-eyed gaze of the guard. For a fleeting moment Jack was back where he had been all those years before, held by those dark eyes that still had the same allure, but in a face more worn and anguished than the passage of time could explain. He barely registered what she whispered to him, a few tense sentences, before she pushed him forcibly away and left quickly the way she had come, back round the corner, toward the excavation trench, disappearing out of sight.

Jack was rooted to the spot, and then heard Costas calling him through the doorway. He stumbled past the guard, who was now talking intently on a cell phone, his eyes following Jack, and past the inspector, who nodded at him, and then through the entrance into the rubbish-strewn alley. The door clanged shut behind him and he heard the padlock being engaged. He looked up toward the dark cone of Vesuvius looming over the rooftops at the end of the alley, and began following the other three. He clutched his bag, feeling the shape inside, and felt his heart begin to pound. There was no turning back now.

�

THE MAN IN THE BLACK CASSOCK SWEPT PAST THE BALDACHIN and toward the pier of St. Andrews, making the sign of the cross toward the high altar as he passed. He was tall, late middle age, with fine, aquiline features and scholarly glasses, but with the sinewy toughness of a Jesuit who had spent years in the field. He nodded curtly at the Swiss Guard who stood at the low entranceway into the pier, then glanced back at the baldachin. The great black pillars had been cast by Bernini from bronze taken from the Pantheon, the pagan temple to all the gods, here transformed into baroque splendor and captured beneath the dome of the greatest church in Christendom. To the man, this place always made the ancient Roman sense of mastery over nature seem puny, insignificant, just as it made the people who stood beneath it today appear puny. It was a place where all could witness the ascendancy of the Holy See, over a congregation far larger than ever could have been imagined by the Roman emperors at the time of Christ.

He sniffed, then wrinkled his nose slightly. The air seemed heavy with the exhalation of thousands of pilgrims and tourists who had passed through that day, as they did every day. They were the power of the Church, yet the man found the base reality of the common people distasteful and always relished passing beyond, into the sanctuaries of the ordained. He reminded himself why he was here this evening. He recovered his stride and made his way purposefully down the steps into the grotto under the nave, to the level of the Roman hillside where there had once been a hippodrome of Caligula and Nero and a city of the dead, a necropolis, dug into the rock. Now it was the burial ground of popes and the revered resting place of St. Peter. The man made the sign again as he passed that holy spot, then wove his way through the surviving foundation stones of Constantine the Great�s Basilica to another door and another flight of steps, leading down into the depths of the ancient necropolis. The door had been opened for him, but as he passed through he took out a key from under his cassock, and with his other hand flicked on a small torch. At the bottom of the stairs the beam danced over rough stone walls lined with niches and shadowy recesses. He bent to pass down a low passageway to the right, descended a flight of rock-cut steps into an empty tomb and felt along the wall, quickly finding what he sought. He slid the key into the hole and a concealed door gave way, opening inward. He ducked through, then turned and locked the door again. He was inside.

He still remembered the thrill when he had first crouched at this spot. It was during the excavation of the necropolis, when all attention was focused on the tomb of St. Peter. He and another young initiate had discovered this passageway, an early Christian catacomb sealed off since antiquity. It was better preserved than the rest of the necropolis, with the niches still plastered over and the burials intact. They had gone inside, just the two of them. Then they had made their extraordinary discovery. Only a few had ever been told of it�the pontiff, the head of the college of cardinals, the man who held the position he now held, the other members of the concilium. It was one of the greatest secrets of the Holy See, ammunition for the day when the forces of darkness might reach the holy gates, when the Church might need to rally all its reserves to fight for its very existence.

He made his way toward a flickering pool of light at the end of the passageway. Along the way he passed the images they had seen that first day�simple, crude expressions of early faith that still moved him powerfully, more visceral than any of the embellishments in the church above. Christ in a boat, casting a net, a woman seated beside him. Christ on fire, rising with his two crucified companions above the flames, a burning mountain in the background. And names everywhere, on the tomb niches, names made from simple mosaics pressed into the plaster. Priscilla in Pace. Zakariah in Pace. Chi-Rho symbols, incised images of baskets of bread, a dove holding an olive branch. Images that became more frequent as he drew closer to the source of light, as if people had been yearning to be interred near that spot, crowding in on it. And then he was there. The passageway widened slightly, and he could see that the light ahead came from candles on each corner of a plinth set in the floor, a tomb. It was a simple structure, raised a few inches on plaster, and was covered with large Roman roof-tiles. He could see the name scratched on the surface. He made the sign again, and whispered the words that had long been suspected, but only he and a few others knew to be true. �The Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul.�

Two others were already there, cassocked figures seated in low rock-cut niches on either side of the tomb, their faces obscured in shadow. The man made the sign again. �In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti,� he said. He bowed slightly to each in turn. �Eminences.�

�Monsignor. Please be seated.� The words were in Italian. �The concilium is complete.�

The catacomb was damp, keeping the dust down, but the wreathing smoke from the candles made his eyes smart, and he blinked hard. �I came as soon as I received your summons, Eminence.�

�You know why we are here?�

�The concilium only meets when the sanctity of the Holy See is threatened.�

�For almost two thousand years it has been so,� the other said. �From the time of the coming of St. Paul to the brethren, when the concilium first met in the Phlegraean Fields. We are soldiers of our Lord, and we do his bidding. Dies Irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla.�

�Amen.�

�We accept only the true word of the Messiah, no other.�

�Amen.�

�We have met once already this year. We have thwarted the search for the lost Jewish treasures of the Temple. But now a greater darkness threatens us, a heresy that would seek to destroy the true Church itself. The heresy of those who would deny the sanctity of the ordained, who would seek to poison the ministry of St. Paul, who believe that the word of our Lord lies elsewhere, outside the Gospels. For almost two thousand years we have fought it, with all our power and all our guile. Now the heresy has arisen again. That which we had hoped destroyed, lost forever, has been found. A blasphemy, a lie, ammunition of the Devil.�

�What would the concilium have us do?�

The voice when it replied was steely, icy cold, a voice that broached no debate, that sought no reply.

�Seek it.�

�

The sky was streaked with gold as Jack brought the Lynx helicopter down toward the landing lights on Seaquest II �s stern. Maria was in the co-pilot�s seat and Costas was stretched out in the rear, snoring heavily. They had waved Hiebermeyer off at the helipad near Herculaneum, just as it began to rain, a heavy, pelting downpour that took Jack�s full attention as they lifted off. He had been quiet for the rest of the flight, preoccupied with his own thoughts after his encounter with Elizabeth and then focused on an email exchange on the helicopter�s computer. It had taken less than an hour to fly south from the Bay of Naples, skirting the dark mass of the Calabrian Mountains and then veering offshore to the ship�s position some ten nautical miles north of the Strait of Messina. The evening had become startlingly clear, almost pellucid, the air cleansed and the sea ruffled by the dying breeze from the west, but as the rotor churned up prop-wash on either side of the ship, it was as if they were descending through a vortex of water, the landing lights illuminating the spray like a twister swirling off the stern. The Lynx thumped to a halt and Jack waited for the rotors to stop before un-buckling himself and opening the door, giving a thumbs-up to the crew chief, who was lashing the pontoons to the deck. Jack took off his helmet, waited as Costas and Maria did the same and then got out and led them straight into a hatchway at the forward end of the helipad. Moments later they were in the ship�s main conservation lab, the door shut behind them. Jack chose a workstation with a computer console on one side and a light table on the other, then activated a fluorescent bulb on a retractable metal arm above the table and sat down. He pulled out a two-way radio from his flight overalls and pressed the key for the secure IMU channel. There was a crackle and he spoke into the receiver. �Maurice, this is Jack. We�re on Seaquest, safe and sound. I�ll update you on any progress. Over.� He waited for an affirmative, then placed the radio beside the monitor and slipped the strap of his old khaki bag over his head, placing the bag on his lap and pulling on a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser under the table.

�Do you think he can hold the fort?� Costas said.

�Maurice? He�s a professional. He knows how to play the authorities. He knows exactly how to shut down an excavation. All he has to do is say that the tunnel�s unsafe, in danger of collapse, and they�ll board it up. The superintendency didn�t want any new excavation in the villa anyway. And they�ve got the ancient statue of Anubis to feed the press, more than enough to satisfy the public that the archaeology�s being done. We�re sticking with my revised plan. Reuters will get told, but not about the library, not yet. As soon as we�ve seen through wherever this is leading us, I�ll make a call which will expose the whole thing. Maria took hundreds of digital pictures, and they�re all here. They look like those first views of King Tut�s tomb. Absolutely sensational, front-page stuff. The authorities will have no choice but to open up the site properly, for the world to see what we�ve seen.�

�I�ll be back there with Maurice as soon as we�ve finished here,� Maria said.

�That�s crucial, Maria. You can keep his blood pressure down. You obviously make a great team.� He grinned at her, then opened his bag. �Now, let�s see what we�ve got.�

Seconds later the extraordinary find Jack had taken from the villa chamber at Herculaneum lay in front of them on the light table. It looked much as Costas and Jack had first seen it, with each side of the scroll wound around a wooden stick, an umbilicus, and lines of ancient writing visible where the scroll was open in between. Jack attached small foam pads with retractor wires to the ends of each umbilicus and carefully drew the scroll wider apart, each wire attached to the edge of the light table and secured with ratchets. Now they could see the entire column of text, similar to the page of a modern book. �This is how the Greeks and Romans read them, from side to side, unrolling the scroll to reveal each page, like this,� Maria said. �People often think scrolls were awkward, because they assume they were written as continuous text from one end to the other, unraveled a bit at a time. In fact, they were almost as convenient as a codex, a modern book.�

�We�re incredibly lucky we can see any of this at all,� Jack murmured. �The carbonized scrolls found in the villa in the eighteenth century took years to unravel, millimeter by millimeter. But everything we saw in that room was incredibly well preserved, having missed the firestorm in AD 79. There seems to be some kind of resin or wax in the papyrus, which means it�s still supple.�

�This looks like two paragraphs in one hand, with a section in the middle in a completely different hand,� Costas said.

Maria nodded. �The main text is like the printed page, the practiced hand of a copyist, a scribe. The other writing is a little sprawling, more like personal handwriting, legible but certainly not a copyist�s hand.�

�What are those blotches?�

�At first I thought they might be blood, but then I sniffed them,� Jack said. �It�s what I saw all over that table in the chamber. They�re wine stains.�

�Let�s hope it was a good vintage on that final night,� Maria murmured.

Costas pointed at a slip of papyrus attached to the top of the scroll, like a label. �So that�s the title?�

�The sillybos,� Jack said, nodding. �Plinius, Naturalis Historia. This scroll must have been taken out from the batch in the basket by the door, undoubtedly one of the volumes of completed text. I can still hardly believe it. Nothing like this has survived anywhere else from antiquity, a first edition by one of the most famous writers of the classical period.�

�I can see that,� Costas murmured. �But why are we being so secretive about this?�

�Okay.� Jack pointed to the upper line in the scroll. �The first clue for me was that word, Iudaea. Pliny the Elder mentions Judaea in several places in the Natural History. He tells us about the origin and cultivation of the balsam tree, and about a river that dries up every Sabbath. Typical Pliny, a mix of authoritative natural history and fable. But the main discussion of Judaea is in his geographical chapter, where he tells us everything else he thinks worth knowing about the place. That�s what we�ve got here.� Jack opened his modern copy of Pliny�s Natural History at a bookmarked page and pressed it down. They could see the Latin on the left-hand side, the English translation on the right. He read out the first line on the page:

�Supra Idumaeam et Samariam Iudaea longe lateque funditur. Pars eius Syriae iuncta Galilaea vocatur.�

Jack peered back at the scroll, then at the printed text, reading it again under his breath. �It�s identical. Those medieval monks who transcribed this got it right after all.� He read out the translation. ��Beyond Idumaea and Samaria stretches the wide expanse of Judaea. The part of Judaea adjoining Syria is called Galilee.�� He then began to work his way down the text, his eyes darting from the translation to the scroll and back again, pausing occasionally where the lack of punctuation in the scroll made it difficult to follow. �Pliny was fascinated by the Dead Sea,� he murmured. �Here he tells us how nothing at all can sink in it, how even the bodies of bulls and camels float along. He loved this kind of stuff. That�s the trouble. He was right about the high salinity of the Dead Sea, but there were other wonders he wrote about that were completely fabulous, and Pliny wasn�t great at distinguishing fact from fiction. If he had any kind of guiding principle, it was to include everything he heard. He was almost entirely reliant on secondhand sources.�

�At least with Claudius he would have had a reliable informant,� Maria said. �A pretty sound scholar, by all accounts.�

�Here we go,� Jack said. �This is just before the gap in the scroll text, before the writing style changes. �Iordanes amnis oritur e fonte Paniade. The source of the river Jordan is the spring of Panias.� Then there�s a longer description:

�In lacum se fundit quem plures Genesaram vocant, xvi p. longitudinis, vi latitudinis, amoenis circumsaeptum oppidis, ab oriente Iuliade et Hippo, a meridie Tarichea, quo nomine aliqui et lacum appellant, ab occidente Tiberiade aquis calidis salubri.

�It widens out into a lake usually called the Sea of Gennesareth, 16 miles long and 6 broad, skirted by the agreeable towns of Iulias and Hippo on the east, Tarichae on the south, the name of which place some people also give to the lake, and Tiberias with its salubrious hot springs on the west.�

Jack pointed at a map he had laid on the other side of the light table. �This time he�s not writing about the Dead Sea, but the Sea of Galilee, some eighty miles north at the head of the Jordan Valley. Gennesareth was the Roman name for it, the same as the modern Hebrew name Kinnereth. Tiberias is the main town today on the Sea of Galilee, a popular resort. Tarichae he got wrong, it�s not south but west, a few miles north of Tiberias. Tarichae was the Roman name for Migdal, home of Mary of Magdalene.�

�The place where the Gospels say Jesus began his ministry,� Maria said.

Jack nodded. �Along the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.� He paused, and sat back. �Now we come to the gap in the scroll text. This is where it gets really intriguing. There�s no gap at all in the modern printed text, based on the medieval transcription, which goes straight on to a discussion of bitumen and the Dead Sea.�

�So our scroll must be a later version, the basis for a new edition that was never published,� Costas murmured. �Maybe it was one he was working on when he died, with updates and changes.�

�He may have asked his scribe to do him a working copy, leaving gaps where he thought he was likely to make additions,� Maria said. �And that could be the copy he brought with him to Claudius.�

�Writing the Natural History must have been an organic process, and it�s hard to believe a magpie mind like Pliny�s would ever have been able to leave it alone,� Jack said. �And remember, more places were being conquered and explored by the Romans every year, so there was always plenty to add. Claudius would have been able to tell him much that was new about Britain, especially as we now know that Britain was foremost in Claudius� mind at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius, with his own history of Britannia in progress. And if Pliny had survived Vesuvius, my guess is we�d have had a whole new chapter on vulcanology.�

�Can you read what�s in the gap?� Costas said.

�I can, just,� Jack said. �It�s in a completely different hand to the main text in the scroll�spidery, precise. I�ve no doubt this is the actual hand of Pliny the Elder.� As he said the words Jack suddenly felt himself transported back to that hidden room in the villa almost two thousand years ago, beneath the lowering volcano, the ink still freshly blotted and the wine stains still reeking of grapes and alcohol, as if the figures on either side of him were not Maria and Costas but Pliny the Elder and Claudius, urging him to join them in exploring the revelations of their world.

�Well, fire away,� Costas said, peering at him quizzically.

Jack snapped back and leaned over the text. �Okay. Here goes. This is where that name appears, the words I saw when we found this scroll in the villa. The reason for all this secrecy.� He glanced at Costas, then paused, scanning the text to pinpoint the beginning and end of the sentences and to put the Latin into coherent English word order. �Here�s the first sentence:

�Claudius Caesar visited this place with Herod Agrippa, where they met the fisherman Joshua of Nazareth, he whom the Greeks called Jesus, who my sailors in Misenum now call the Christos.�

Jack felt as if he had delivered a thunderbolt. There was a stunned silence, broken by Costas. �Claudius Caesar? Claudius the emperor? You mean our Claudius? He met Jesus Christ?�

�With Herod Agrippa,� Maria whispered. �Herod Agrippa, King of the Jews?�

�So it would appear,� Jack replied hoarsely, trying to keep his voice under control. �Herod Agrippa, grandson of Herod the Great. And there�s more.� He read slowly: ��The Nazarene gave Claudius his written word.��

�His written word,� Costas repeated slowly. �A pledge, some kind of promise?�

�I�ve translated it literally,� Jack said. �It�s more than that. I�m sure it means he gave him something written.�

�His word,� Maria murmured. �His Gospel.�

�The Gospel of Jesus? The written word of Christ?� Costas suddenly sat back, his jaw dropping in amazement. �Holy Mother of God. I see what you mean. The secrecy at Herculaneum. The Church. This is exactly what they have most feared.�

�And yet it is something that many have hoped against hope would one day be found,� Maria said, almost whispering. �The written word of Jesus of Nazareth, in his own hand.�

�Does Pliny say what happened to it?� Costas asked.

Jack finished sorting out the next sentences in his mind, and read his translation:

�Gennesareth, that is Kinnereth in the local language, is said to derive from the word for the stringed instrument or lyre, kinnor, or from the kinnara, the sweet and edible fruit produced by a thorn tree that grows in the vicinity. And at Tiberias, there are springs that are remarkably health-restoring. Claudius Caesar says that to drink the waters is to clear and calm the mind, which sounds to me like ingesting the morpheum.�

�Ha!� Costas exclaimed. �Morpheum. I want Hiebermeyer to see that.�

Jack paused, and muttered under his breath, �Come on, Pliny. Get on with it.� He read what came next to himself, grunted impatiently and then repeated it out loud. ��And the Sea of Gennesareth, really a lake, lies far below the level of the Middle Sea, the Mediterranean. And whereas the Sea of Gennesareth is fresh water, my friend Claudius reminds me that the Dead Sea is remarkably briny, and part of it is not water but bitumen.��

�My friend Claudius,� Costas repeated, weighing the words. �That�s a bit of a slip, isn�t it? I mean, I thought Claudius� survival was meant to be a secret.�

�That proves it,� Jack said. �I think this particular scroll was Pliny�s own annotated version, one that he eventually intended to take away with him. It got left in Claudius� study, probably deliberately. And I think some of this addition was for Claudius� benefit too. You have to imagine Claudius sitting beside Pliny as he�s writing this, sipping and spilling his wine, keenly reading over the other man�s shoulder. Of course, as we know from the published text, Pliny was already perfectly well aware that the Dead Sea was briny and produced bitumen.�

�He was flattering Claudius,� Maria said.

�Classic interrogation technique,� Costas said. �Never let on what you already know, then people will tell you more.�

�Is there anything else?� Maria said. �I mean, about Jesus? Pliny seems to have lost himself in a digression.�

�There may be,� Jack said. �But there�s a problem.�

�What?�

�Look at this.� Jack pointed at the bottom of the gap in the scroll text, then at the right-hand margin. �I�ve read everything I can make out in the gap. But you can see at the bottom that a few lines have been smudged, wiped out. Then he�s written something in the margin beside it, much smaller. He hasn�t replenished his ink, maybe even deliberately, so it�s barely legible. It�s almost as if he wrote at the bottom of the gap something he wanted in the published edition, then thought better of it and erased it, then thought again and put a note in the margin, perhaps a note to himself that he didn�t want anyone else to read.�

�But you can read it,� Costas said.

�Not exactly.� Jack swiveled the turntable until the scroll was at ninety degrees, then pulled a magnifying glass on a retractable arm over the miniature lines of writing just visible in the margin. He pushed his chair back so Maria and Costas could take a look. �Tell me what you think.�

They both craned over, and Costas spoke immediately. �It�s not Latin, is it? Is that what you mean? But some of those letters look familiar to me. There�s a Lambda, a Delta. It�s ancient Greek?�

�Greek letters, but not Greek language,� Maria murmured. �It looks like the precursor Greek alphabet, the one they adopted from the Near East.� She glanced back at Jack. �Do you remember Professor Dillen�s course at Cambridge on the early history of Greek language? It�s a while ago now, but I�m sure I recognize some of those letters. Is this Semitic?�

�You were the star linguist, Maria, not me,� Jack said. �He�d have been proud of you for remembering. In fact, he already sends his congratulations for the discovery, as we emailed from the Lynx when we flew in. When I took this scroll from the shelf in Herculaneum I caught a glimpse of this writing, and I had a sudden hunch. I asked Professor Dillen to provide his latest version of the Hanno Project for us to download. It should be online now.�

�Jack!� Costas said. �Computers? All by yourself?�

Jack gestured at the keyboard beside them. �Don�t worry. It�s all yours.�

�The Hanno Project?� Maria said.

�Two years ago, we excavated an ancient shipwreck off Cornwall, not far from the IMU campus. Costas, you remember Mount�s Bay?�

�Huh? Yeah. Cold. But great fish and chips in Newlyn.� Costas had sat down at the computer and was busily tapping. He turned and glanced at Jack. �I take it you want a scan?�

Jack nodded, and Costas pushed away the magnifier and positioned a movable scanner arm over the margin of the scroll. Jack turned to Maria. �It was a Phoenician shipwreck, the first ever found in British waters, dating almost a thousand years before the Romans arrived. We found British tin ingots stamped with Phoenician letters, and a mysterious metal plaque covered in Phoenician writing. Dillen�s been working on it ever since. We called the translation project �Hanno� after a famous Carthaginian explorer. We don�t know it was him. Just a name pulled out of a hat.�

�So you think our scroll writing is Phoenician.�

�I know it is.�

�So Pliny read Phoenician?�

�Phoenician was similar to the Aramaic spoken around the Sea of Galilee at the time of Jesus, but that may just be a coincidence. No, I think this has to do with Claudius. You remember those scrolls on the bottom shelf of the room in Herculaneum? Claudius� History of the Ancient Carthaginians? It was his biggest historical work, one thought completely lost but now miraculously discovered. Well, Claudius would have learned the language in order to read the original sources, the language spoken by the Phoenician traders who founded Carthage. It was virtually a dead language by the time of Imperial Rome, and it�s just the kind of thing I can imagine Claudius teaching Pliny in their off time together after finishing their writing, over wine and dice. So when Pliny comes to make this note, he chooses a language that was virtually a code between them. Claudius is watching, and he would have been pleased and flattered by that too.�

�They must have been the only people around who could read this.�

�That�s the point.�

�It�s ready,� Costas said, hunched over the screen. �There are four words the concordance has identified as transliterations�that is, proper nouns�and it�s rendered them first into Latin and then into English. One word is Claudius. The other�s Rome. All the other words are in Dillen�s Phoenician lexicon. There�s one I even know. Bos, �bull� or �cow.� I remember that from the Bosporus.�

Jack�s heart was pounding with excitement. This could be it.

�It�s coming on-screen now.�

Maria and Jack moved up behind Costas. At the top of the scan they could see that the script had been enhanced, with the Greek-style letters more clearly visible. Below it was the translation:

Haec implacivit Claudius Caesar in urbem sub duo sacra bos iacet.

That which Claudius Caesar has entrusted to me, lies in Rome beneath the two sacred cows.

Jack stared again. His mind was racing. Only one day after finding the shipwreck of St. Paul, they had stumbled on something extraordinary, perhaps the biggest prize of them all. And now he knew he had been right to take the scroll away, to keep it hidden until they had followed the trail to the end.

The word of Jesus. The final word, the word that would eclipse all others. The last gospel.

�Well?� Maria said, looking up at him. �Sacred cows?�

�I think I know where that is.�

�Game on,� Costas said.

�

THE NEXT MORNING JACK AND COSTAS STOOD BESIDE the Via del Fori Imperiali in the heart of ancient Rome. They had flown the Lynx helicopter from Seaquest II to Rome�s Fiumicino Airport, on the site of the great harbor built by the emperor Claudius, and had taken the train along the course of the river Tiber into the city. Despite the heat, Jack had insisted that they leave the train at Ostiense Station and walk through the ancient city and over the Aventine Hill, and then down past the Circus Maximus, toward the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. As they neared their destination, the assurance and solidity of the modern city gave way to the fractured landscape of antiquity, desolate and empty in places, in others resplendent with structures more awesome than anything built since in the city. It was as if those ruins and the shades of monuments long gone had the power to repel any attempt to better them, an aura which preserved the heart of ancient Rome from being submerged by history. Jack knew that the impression was partly an illusion, as much of the area of the Imperial fora had been cleared of medieval buildings in the 1930s under the orders of Mussolini, but even so, the Palatine Hill, with the remains of the palaces of the emperors, stayed much as it had been since the end of antiquity, ruinous and overgrown in the many places where archaeologists had done little more than scrape the surface.

Jack had been talking intently in Italian on his cell phone, and now snapped it shut. A van carrying their gear would rendezvous with them in two hours� time at the foot of the Palatine Hill. He nodded at Costas, and they joined a small throng of tourists lining up behind the ticket desk outside the site of the old Forum.

�Doesn�t seem right,� Costas grumbled, wiping the sweat from his face and swigging some water. �I mean, a celebrity archaeologist and his sidekick. They should be paying you.�

Jack pushed his cell phone into his khaki bag and pulled out a Nikon D80 camera, slinging it around his neck. �I often find it�s best to be anonymous at archaeological sites. You�re less likely to be watched. Anyway, I�d never convince them with you looking like that.� Jack was dressed in desert boots, chinos and a loose shirt, but Costas wore a garish Hawaiian outfit, complete with a straw hat and his beloved new designer sunglasses.

�They must be used to it,� Costas said. �Archaeologists� dress sense, I mean. Look at Hiebermeyer.�

Jack grinned, paid for the tickets and steered Costas into the archaeological site, down a ramp and toward the ruin of a small circular building, with fragmentary columns still standing. �The Temple of Vesta,� Jack said. �Shrine, really, as it was never formally consecrated as a temple, for some reason. Where the sacred fire was guarded by the Vestal Virgins. They lived next door, in that big structure nestled into the foot of the Palatine, a bit like a nunnery.�

�A pretty extravagant nunnery,� Costas murmured. �So all that stuff �s really true? About the Vestal Virgins?�

Jack nodded. �Even the stuff about being buried alive. There�s no more sober witness than our friend the Younger Pliny, who wrote the famous letters about the eruption of Vesuvius. In another letter he described how the emperor Domitian ordered the chief Vestal Virgin to be buried alive for violating her vows of chastity. Domitian was a nasty piece of goods at the best of times, and the charge was concocted. But being walled up underground was the traditional punishment for straying Vestals, and she was taken to the appointed place and immured alive.�

�Sounds like a male domination thing gone badly wrong.�

�Probably right. After the first emperor Augustus became Pontifex Maximus�the supreme priest�the emperor and the chief Vestal were on a collision course. The goddess Vesta was very powerful, guardian of the hearth. The eternal fire, the ignis inextinctus, symbolized the eternity of the State, and the future of Rome was therefore in the hands of the Virgins. They called her Vesta Mater, Vesta the Mother. She was like the Sibyl.�

�In what way?�

�Well, some of the similarities are pretty remarkable. Vesta was probably an amalgam of an ancient local deity of Italian origin with a Greek import, supposedly brought by Aeneas from Troy. The Sibyl at Cumae has the same kind of history. And the Vestals were chosen as girls from among the aristocracy of Rome, just as I believe the Cumaean Sibyls were. We might find out more here. Come on.�

Jack led Costas along the Sacred Way past the Arch of Titus, where they paused and looked silently up at the sculpture of the Roman soldiers in triumphal procession, carrying the Jewish menorah. They then continued up the Palatine Hill into the Farnese Gardens, and then to the vast ruins of the Imperial palace on the west side of the hill, overlooking the Circus Maximus. They were met by a refreshing breeze as they came over the top�but even so, the heat was searing, and Jack led them to a shaded spot beside a wall.

�So this was Claudius� stomping ground,� Costas said, taking off his sunglasses and wiping the sweat from his face. �Before he did his Bilbo Baggins disappearing act. It seems a far cry from that monk�s cell in Herculaneum.�

�This was where he grew up, then where he spent most of his time as emperor, apart from his visit to Britain,� Jack replied. �But the image we have of this place at that time, the Hollywood image, you can forget a lot of that. Our view of the past is so often conditioned by later accretions, anachronisms. The Colosseum wasn�t built yet, was only inaugurated in AD 80, the year after Vesuvius erupted. The Imperial Palace, the huge sprawl in front of us, was only begun a few years after that by Domitian, the emperor who had the showdown with the Vestals. That was when megalomania really took hold, when the emperors really did begin living like gods. But for Claudius, like his grandfather Augustus, it was crucial to maintain the pretense of the Republic, the idea that they were simply caretakers. They lived in a modest house, actually smaller than the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.�

�Where was it?�

�You�re leaning against it now.�

�Ah.� Costas put his hand against the worn brick facing. �So Claudius was here,� he murmured.

�And Pliny the Elder, in AD 79,� Jack said.

�I was wondering when you were coming to that.�

�Right here, we�re smack in between the House of Augustus and Domitian�s Palace, and the building in front of us is the Temple of Apollo,� Jack said. �Hardly anything�s left of the temple now, but you have to imagine an awesome structure of white marble. It was embellished with some of the most famous sculptures of classical Greece, taken by the Romans when they conquered the east. Right where we�re sitting was the portico, a colonnaded structure that surrounded the temple. Augustus had an enclave constructed within the portico next to his house, and it contained a library, apparently large enough to hold Senate meetings. The enclave may have had particular administrative functions, including a Rome office for the fleet admirals.�

�Got you,� Costas said. �Pliny the Elder. Admiral at Misenum.�

Jack nodded. �Pliny would have known this place well. Augustus also built a new shrine to Vesta at this spot, probably meant to supplant the one in the Forum.�

�Right under his bedroom window,� Costas said. �Talk about control.�

�The Vestal Virgins seem to have resisted the idea of moving their sacred shrine, and continued to patronize the old one. And here�s the really fascinating thing, the reason we�re here. The shrine to Vesta in the Forum contained an adytum, an inner sanctum, a hidden place where various sacred items were stored. Its contents were pretty mystical, sacred objects to do with the foundation of Rome. The fascinum, the erect phallus that averted evil, the pignora imperii, mysterious pledges for the eternal duration of Rome, the palladium, a statue of the goddess Pallas Athena, supposedly brought by Aeneas from Troy. Only the Vestals and the Pontifex Maximus were ever allowed in, and these items were never shown in public.�

�A secret chamber,� Costas mused. �So if Augustus was planning this new shrine as a replica of the old, he would have had a chamber built into this one too?�

�My thinking exactly.�

�But if the sacred items remained in the Forum shrine, this new one would have been empty.�

�Or not quite empty.�

�Are you saying what I think you�re saying?�

Jack opened his bag and pulled out a clipboard with a blown-up photograph of a Roman coin on the front. �This is the only known depiction of the new shrine, the Palatine Shrine of Vesta. It�s from a coin of the emperor Tiberius, of AD 22 or 23. You can see a circular colonnaded building very similar to the old shrine in the Forum, clearly emulating it. The circular shape was meant to copy the hut form of the earliest Roman dwelling, the so-called House of Romulus, which was carefully preserved as a sacred antiquity on the other side of the House of Augustus. You can still see the postholes in the rock. What else can you see on that coin?�

Costas took the clipboard. �Well, the letters S and C above the shrine. Senatus Consultum. Even I know that. And the shrine�s got a column on either side, a plinth with a statue on it. They�re animals, possibly horses.� He paused, then spoke excitedly. �I�ve got you. Not horses. Bulls.�

�That�s what clinches it,� Jack said excitedly. �We know from the ancient sources that two statues stood in front of the Palatine Shrine of Vesta. Statues of sacrificial animals, sacred to the rites of the Vestals. Both statues were originally Greek, by the famous sculptor Myron, of the fifth century BC. Statues of cows.�

�Of course.�

�Remember our clue,� Jack enthused. �Sub duo sacra bos. Beneath the two sacred cows. These two statues were a unique pair. There was nothing else like them in Rome. This can only be what Pliny meant. He hid the scroll here, in the empty chamber under the Palatine Shrine of Vesta.�

�Where exactly?� Costas had taken out a GPS receiver and was looking around, eyeing the featureless ground and dusty walls dubiously.

�My best guess is where we are now, give or take ten meters either way,� Jack said. �All trace of the shrine is gone, but it seems clear that it would have been on this side of the temple portico, right beside Augustus� house.�

�Ground-penetrating radar?�

�Too much else going on here. The place is honeycombed, building built on building. Even the bedrock�s full of cracks and fissures.�

�So what do we do now? Get a shovel?�

�We�ll never find it that way. At least not without a lot of money, a lot of bureaucracy and about a year for the permit to come through. No, we�re not going to dig down.�

�So what can we do?�

�We might be able to go up.�

�Huh?�

Jack took back the clipboard, closed his bag and jumped to his feet. He checked his watch. �I�ll explain on the way. Come on.�

Twenty minutes later they stood on a terrace on the north side of the Roman Forum archaeological precinct, with a magnificent view of the heart of ancient Rome stretching out in front of them and the vast bulk of the Colosseum in the background. �This is the best place to get a sense of the topography,� Jack said. �At its height this was a huge conglomeration of buildings, temples, law courts, monuments, all crowding in on one another. Strip all that away and you can see how the Forum was built in a valley, with the Palatine Hill on the west side. Now look to our right, below the north slope of the Palatine, and see how the valley sweeps round toward the river Tiber. Where we�re standing now is the Capitoline Hill, the apex of ancient Rome, the place where the triumphal processions reached their climax. Just to the right of us is the Tarpeian Rock, where criminals were flung to their deaths over a precipice.�

�The miscreant Vestals?�

�Traditionally their place of execution is thought to have been outside the city walls, but Pliny the Younger only mentions an underground chamber. It could have been close by.�

�So tell me about underground Rome,� Costas said. �Not that I want to go there. Three thousand years of accumulated sludge.�

Jack grinned, opened his bag and pulled out the clipboard again, folding back the sheet with the image of the coin to reveal a copy of an old engraving, the word ROMA in large letters at the top. The center of the map showed topographical features, valleys, hills and water-courses, and around the edge were building plans. �This is my favorite map of Rome,� he said. �Drawn by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the eighteenth century, about the same time that the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum was first being explored. The fragmentary plans of buildings around the edge are drawings of chunks of the famous Marble Plan, a huge mural originally displayed in Vespasian�s Temple of Peace. Only about ten percent of the Marble Plan survives, in fragments like this.� To Jack, Piranesi�s map was like a metaphor for knowledge of ancient Rome, like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle with some areas known in great detail, others hardly at all, even building layouts known in great detail but their actual location lost to history.

�It shows the topography very clearly,� Costas said.

�That�s why I love it,� Jack replied. �Piranesi kept the pieces of the jigsaw to the edges, swept aside the buildings and focused on the hills and valleys. That�s what I wanted you to see.� Jack angled the map so it had the same orientation as the view in front of them, and traced his finger over the center. �In prehistoric times, when Aeneas supposedly arrived here, the Forum area was a marshy valley on the edge of a floodplain. As the first settlements spread down the slopes of the hills into the wetland, the stream was canalized and eventually covered over. It became the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Drain, extending beyond where you can see the Colosseum now, then right under the Forum, then sweeping round in front of us and flowing into the Tiber. There were tributaries, streams running into it, as well as artificial underground constructions, the channels of aqueducts. It�s all still there, a vast underground labyrinth, and only a fraction of it has ever been explored.�

�Where�s the nearest access point?�

�We�re heading toward it now. Follow me.� Jack led Costas off the terrace and down into Via di San Teodoro, the ruins on the Palatine rearing up to the left and the buildings of the medieval city to the right. They veered right again into a narrow street which opened out into a V-shaped courtyard, with traffic thundering beyond. In the foreground was a massive squat ruin, a four-way arch with thick piers at each corner. �The Arch of Janus,� Jack said. �Not the most glorious of Rome�s ruins, pretty well denuded of anything interesting. But it stands astride the Cloaca Maxima, the Great Drain. The place where the drain disgorges into the river is only about two hundred meters away, beyond the main road.� They went through an opening in the iron railing surrounding the arch and walked under the bleached stone. In the forecourt on the other side, a van was drawn up and two clusters of diving equipment were laid out on the cobbles, with two IMU technicians running checks on one of the closed-circuit rebreathers.

�This looks like a setup,� Costas grumbled.

�I thought I�d spring this on you now after giving you a sense of purpose. It�s fantastically exciting, the chance to explore completely unknown sites in the heart of ancient Rome.�

�Jack, don�t tell me we�re going diving in a sewer.�

A man came toward them from where he had been squating beside the arch. He had a wiry physique and fine Italian features, though he seemed unusually pale for a Roman. �Massimo!� Jack said. �Va bene?�

�Va bene.� The voice sounded shaky, and close up the man looked slightly gray. �You remember Costas?� Jack said. The two men nodded, and shook hands. �It seems only yesterday that we met at that conference in London.�

�It was my greatest pleasure,� Massimo said in perfect English, only slightly accented. �We work here under the auspices of the archaeological superintendency, but we�re all amateurs. It was a privilege to spend time with professionals.�

�This time, the tables are turned,� Jack said, smiling. �This will be my first venture into urban underwater archaeology.�

�It�s the archaeology of the future, Jack,� Massimo said with passion. �We come on ancient sites from below, leaving the surface intact. It�s perfect in a place like Rome. It beats hanging on the shirttails of developers, waiting for a fleeting chance to find something in a building site before the bulldozers destroy it.�

�What do you call yourselves?� Costas asked.

�Urban speleologists.�

�Tunnel rats.� Jack grinned.

�Be careful of that word, Jack,� Massimo said. �Where you�re about to go, it might come back to haunt you.�

�Ah. Point taken.� Jack gave a wry grin. �You have a map?�

�It�s inside the arch. Your people will bring over the equipment. Follow me.� Jack and Costas waved at the two IMU technicians, and went toward a door in one of the stone piers. �This leads up to a complex of small chambers and corridors inside the arch, used when it was converted into a medieval fortress,� Massimo said. �What nobody knew was that the stairway extends below as well, into the Cloaca Maxima. We assumed there must have been an access point somewhere under the arch, and came looking for it a few months ago. The superintendency allowed us to remove the stones.� He pointed to a new-looking manhole cover, about a meter and a half round, on the floor just inside the door. �But first, the map.� He reached behind the door and pulled out a long cardboard tube, then extracted a rolled-up sheet and held it open against the side of the pier. �This is a plan of everything we know about what�s underground in this part of Rome, from the entrance into the Cloaca Maxima under the Colosseum to the river Tiber just beyond us here.�

�This is what I�m really interested in,� Jack said, using both hands to point to branches leading off the main line of the Cloaca Maxima, then drawing his hands together into the blank space in between.

�Absolutely. That�s one of our most exciting finds,� Massimo said. �We think those branches are either end of an artificial tunnel running right under the Palatine. We think it was built by the emperor Claudius.�

�Claudius?� Jack said, startled.

�He�s our hero. A posthumous honorary tunnel rat. His biggest projects were underground, underwater. Digging the tunnel to drain the Fucine Lake. Building the great harbor at Ostia. His aqueduct into Rome, the Aqua Claudia. We think a drainage tunnel under the Palatine would have been right up his street. And he was an historian, would have been fascinated by anything they came across, any vestiges of the earliest Romans, his ancestors. He might even have gone down there himself. One of us.�

�Small world,� Costas murmured.

�What do you mean?�

�Well,� he began, then Jack shot him a warning look. �Well, Jack was just telling me about Claudius, the harbor, when we were flying into Fiumicino. Fascinating guy.�

�I think we can leave Claudius aside until we actually find something that identifies his involvement,� Jack said sternly. �Remember, what we�re after dates hundreds of years before Claudius� time. What we talked about on the phone, Massimo. The Lupercale cave.�

�The Lupercale,� Massimo repeated reverently, then looked furtively around. �If you can find a way into that from underground, then we�ve made history.�

Costas peered inquiringly at Jack, who turned to him stony-faced. �My apologies, Costas. I was waiting till now to fill you in on what we�re really after. I didn�t want anyone overhearing, any word leaking out,� he said forcibly, looking at Massimo. �It�s an amazing find. Archaeologists drilling into the ground below the House of Augustus on the Palatine broke through into an underground chamber, a cavity at least fifteen meters deep. They sent in a probe, and saw walls encrusted with mosaics and seashells, like a grotto. It could be the Lupercale, the sacred cave of Rome�s ancestors, where the she-wolf nursed Romulus and Remus. A place revered in antiquity but lost to history. It could be one of the most sensational finds ever made in Roman archaeology. We�re here to see if we can find an underground entrance. Massimo�s even kept the superintendency in the dark. His team are worried about looters getting in, and want to explore the place fully before going public.� He turned to Massimo. �You�re sure this is the best entrance, here under the arch?�

�On the other side of the Palatine, the tunnel runs from the Cloaca Maxima somewhere near the Atrium Vestae, the House of the Vestal Virgins,� Massimo replied. �We haven�t got the right diving equipment to go any farther than that. This side is definitely your best bet. The branch going from here into the Palatine is on the line of the Velabrum, an ancient stream that was canalized and arched over in about 200 BC. We�ve explored as far as the edge of the Palatine, but then the tunnel drops down and becomes completely submerged. From our farthest point we think it�s only about two hundred meters to the site of the Lupercale, and about thirty meters up.

�You�ll see a fluorescent orange line running along the edge of the Cloaca Maxima, then into the Velabrum, as far as we reached,� Massimo said. �Beyond that, you�re on your own.�

�You�re not coming with us?� Jack said.

�I�d love to, but I�d be a liability. I had a bad experience yesterday, just below the Forum of Nerva. A conduit suddenly disgorged a gob of yellow liquid into the Cloaca, and it aerosolized into a mist. No idea what it was, don�t want to know. I didn�t have my respirator on. Stupid. I�ve been throwing up every half hour or so ever since. It�s happened to me before, I just need a little time. Occupational hazard.�

�You guys take risks,� Jack murmured. �So what is down there? Liquid, I mean.�

�You want the full menu?�

�� la carte,� Jack said.

�Well, it�s a mixture of runoff from the streets, the things that actually live down there and leakage.�

�Leakage,� Costas muttered. �Great.�

�Mud, diesel, urine. Rotting rat carcasses. And the stringy gray stuff�well, it shouldn�t be there, but the sewage outlets aren�t exactly all they�re piped up to be.� Massimo gave them a slightly macabre grin, and coughed. �But it�s an old city. There�s always going to be a bit of give and take.�

�Give and take?� Costas said.

�Well, one conduit provides clear, life-giving water, the other takes away putrid effluent. Or, to put it another way, the sewage pipes give to the drains, the drains take it away, the river flows to the sea. Here it�s the natural order of things.�

�Sheer poetry,� Costas muttered. �No wonder the river Tiber looks green. It�s how I�m beginning to feel.�

�We�ll be fine in the IMU E-suits.� Jack said. �Completely sealed in, no skin exposed. Tried and tested in all the most extreme conditions, right, Costas? If this goes well, Massimo, we�ll donate all of our equipment to you.�

�That would be excellent, Jack. Perfetto.� He swayed, and looked as if he was about to throw up. �You�d better get going. They�re forecasting heavy rain this afternoon, and the Cloaca can become a torrent. You don�t want to get flushed out into the river.�

�I don�t like that word, flush,� Costas muttered.

�The good news is, once you turn the corner from the main drain into the Velabrum, the water becomes clear,� Massimo said. �Under the Palatine it comes from natural springs, and because nobody lives there anymore, there�s hardly any pollution. Right under the hill it should be crystal clear.�

Jack took off his old khaki bag and slung it over Massimo�s head. �Guard this bag with your life, Massimo, and I�ll see that our Board of Directors award Costas a special secondment here as your technical advisor.�

�What?� Costas looked aghast.

�Another honorary tunnel rat.� Massimo gave Costas a feverish grin, and slapped him on the shoulder. �It�s a deal. And now it�s my turn to donate some equipment.� He went back into the chamber inside the stone pier and came out with two compact climber harnesses, with metal carabiners, a hammer, pitons and a coil of rope. �It�s not exactly what you�d imagine needing under Rome, but trust me, this can be a lifesaver.�

Jack nodded. �Much appreciated.� He laid the harnesses down beside the rest of his kit, and waved appreciatively to the two IMU technicians who had gone back to wait by the van. He looked at the cover over the hole into the Cloaca Maxima, the place where they would soon be going, and took a few deep breaths. Their banter had kept his anxieties at bay, but now he had to face it: this dive was going to force him to confront his worst fear, the one thing that could truly unsettle him. Costas knew it too, and Jack sensed that he was being watched very closely. He pulled the E-suit toward him and squatted to take off his boots. He would remain focused. An extraordinary prize could await them. And underwater tunnels always had exits.

Costas peered at him. �Good to go?�

�Good to go.�

�

THE MANHOLE COVER ABOVE JACK SLID INTO PLACE with a resounding clang, sealing him and Costas off from the rumble of Rome traffic. They had given their final okay signal to Massimo and the two IMU crewmen moments before, and Jack felt reassured that the others would be above the manhole for the duration, awaiting their return. But now that they were entombed in the Cloaca Maxima, he found himself weighing the odds once more. There was no safety backup, no diver poised ready to assist in a rescue. It was another calculated risk, like their dive at St. Paul�s shipwreck. But Jack knew from hard experience that safety backup was often more psychological than practical, that problems were most often solved on the spot or not at all, that his ability to pull off a dangerous dive often depended on himself and his buddy alone. And any more equipment and personnel would make their operation more visible, and take precious time they could ill afford. He peered at Costas squatting beside him, then angled his headlamp down the spiral staircase into the darkness. This was it. They were on their own again.

�I�ll go first,� Costas said over the intercom, peering at Jack through his helmet visor.

�I thought this wasn�t exactly your cup of tea.�

�Decision made. Always ready to try a new brew. You okay?�

�Lead on.�

Costas heaved himself up and clunked down the stairs in front of Jack, the halogen beam from his headlamp wavering along the ancient masonry walls. They were wearing the same IMU E-suits they had used at the wreck, all-environment Kevlar-reinforced drysuits that had served them well from the Arctic to the Black Sea, with integrated buoyancy and air-conditioning systems. The yellow helmets with full-face masks contained a call-up digital display showing life-support data, including the computerized gas mix fed from the compact closed-circuit rebreathers on their backs. Their only concessions to the unusual circumstances were the climber harnesses that Massimo had insisted they take along, fitted and tested before they had donned their rebreathers a few minutes before.

�This reminds me of going into that sunken submarine in the Black Sea, hunting for Atlantis,� Costas said as he stomped around the stairs. �I feel as if I could cut the air with a knife here too.�

Jack swallowed hard. Just before sealing his helmet he had caught a waft of fetid air from below, and he still had the cloying taste in his mouth. The last thing he needed now was to throw up inside his helmet. That was one human reality the IMU engineers had failed to consider. He swallowed again. �You know, you might want to get the design guys to fit these with a sick bag.�

�I was just thinking the same thing.�

After about thirty steps, the spiral staircase ended at a small platform in front of an arched doorway, blackened and dripping with slime. Jack came up behind Costas and they both aimed their headlamps through. �There it is,� Jack said, trying to sound cheery. �The Great Drain.� Ahead of them a straight flight of steps led down into a wide tunnel built of stone and brick, dripping with algae. Half filling the tunnel was a surging mass of dark liquid, rushing toward them from the darkness ahead and disappearing out of sight below. Jack turned up his external audio sensor, and his head was filled with the sound of the torrent, almost deafening. He turned it down again and pointed to the fluorescent orange line that began ahead of them where the stairs disappeared underwater. �That must be Massimo�s line,� he said. �It�s pitoned in, and we can haul ourselves along it. There�s a ledge about a meter and a half below it that�s usually above water, but it looks as if we�ll be wading. The entrance to the Velabrum is only about twenty meters ahead of us.�

�That�d be a hell of a waterpark ride if we fell in.�

�It disgorges into the Tiber, but Massimo says there�s a big metal grid in the way. Might not be a happy ending.�

Costas walked gingerly onto the first step in the tunnel. Something large and dark scurried off at enormous speed, along a narrow ridge in front of him. �Looks like Massimo left one of his friends down here,� Costas said distastefully. He played his headlamp over the rushing torrent just below them. �It looks like espresso,� he murmured. �That foam on top.�

�Schiuma, you mean,� Jack said. �That�s the Italian word for it. That�s exactly what Massimo called their brown stuff down here.�

Costas put a foot into the torrent, holding tight to the rope with both hands. His foot created a wide wake, with foam streaming off to either side. He lifted it out, and what seemed to have been brown foam came out with it, but was a stringy mass of brown. He thrust his foot back in, shaking it violently. �Jack, that was just about the worst thing that has ever happened to me,� he said, panting. �Why this? We could be in the crystal-clear waters off Sicily. Lying by a pool, having a long overdue holiday. But no, we go diving in a sewer.�

�Fascinating.� Jack was squatting on the step behind Costas, peering at a pile of washed-up debris just above the torrent. Costas twisted around, his foot still in the water. �Have you found it? Can we go now?�

Jack pushed aside some rodent bones and held up a slimy chunk of pottery. �Roman amphora shard. Dressel 2�4, unless I�m mistaken. The same type we found on the shipwreck, and in Herculaneum. The wine Claudius would have drunk. This stuff got everywhere.� He put his other hand deep into the sludge, and grunted. �There�s more.�

�Leave it, Jack.�

Jack paused, then pulled out his arm and stood up. �Okay. Just being an archaeologist.�

�Save it for this secret chamber. If we ever get there.� Costas took the coil of rope from his shoulder and clipped one end to the piton holding the fluorescent line, and the other end to his harness. �I think we can sacrifice one rope here, for safety,� he said. �I refuse to end my days in a torrent of shit. Clip on behind me.� He turned back and stepped down until the liquid was nearly chest-high, flecking his visor with foam. �I�m on the ledge,� he said. �Moving ahead now.�

Jack followed him, feeling the pressure of the water push hard against his legs and then his waist. They began to move painfully slowly, a few inches at a time. The water felt heavy, cloying, and Jack could see iridescent streams of oily matter on the surface, then shifting blotches of brown and gray, a camouflage color. He tried to focus on the walls, the ceiling, on stonework which had been built well before the Roman Empire, when the Velabrum was first covered over. He arched his head back, and realized the tunnel had taken a slight curve to the right. The steps they had come down from the spiral staircase were now out of view. He turned forward and slogged on, beginning to pant hard with the exertion. He looked down to check his carabiner on the line and then looked up. Costas had vanished. He blinked hard, and wiped his mask. Still gone. For a horrified moment he thought Costas must have fallen in, and he braced himself for the whip of the rope as he was swept past. Then he saw a dull glow coming from the wall about five meters in front of him, and a yellow helmet appeared.

�This is the side tunnel,� Costas said. �I�ve clipped the other end of the rope to a piton inside.� Jack heaved himself against the current for the final few steps, then Costas reached out and hauled him up out of the water. Both men sat for a moment, slumped against the side of the tunnel, panting. Jack sucked at the hydrating energy drink stored inside his suit, sluicing it round his mouth to get rid of the unpleasant taste. He looked around. They were in a smaller tunnel raised above the main drain, with an arched, barrel-vaulted roof and a flat bottom, a channel filled with water flowing down the center. The flow was exiting into the Cloaca Maxima, and the water was clear.

�Time for a final reality check,� Costas said, peering at his wrist gauge. �This must be it. The Velabrum. It�s orientated straight into the Palatine Hill, and I can see Massimo�s line running ahead along the right side as far as I can make out, to wherever they stopped.�

Jack put his hand on the side of the tunnel. �This is an impressive piece of engineering,� he said. �The Cloaca Maxima, the Great Drain, has masonry and brickwork from lots of periods, from when it was first covered over in the sixth century BC. But this is different, a single-period construction. Regular, rectilinear blocks of stone at the entrance. If I didn�t know better, I�d say we were walking into one of the great aqueduct channels made by the emperors.�

Costas looked at Jack through his visor. �About this Lupercale place, Jack. The cave of Romulus and Remus. I didn�t have a clue what you were on about.�

�Sorry to spring that on you. When I realized yesterday we were coming to Rome, it was the perfect pretext. Once I guessed that Pliny must have hidden the scroll under the Palatine Shrine of Vesta, right next door to the House of Augustus, I also realized it was the site where the Lupercale was found. At the moment we just can�t risk bringing anyone else in on this quest. I hate keeping Massimo in the dark, but maybe he�ll forgive us once we tell him the role he played.�

Costas grunted, stood up and started forward again, the rivulet of clear water from the darkness ahead rising over his ankles.

�I hate to say this, Costas, but you�re trailing something.�

Costas turned round, stared and made a strangulated noise. A mess of stringy brown tendrils extended back from his left foot, toward the Cloaca, and caught in their midst was a writhing form with a long black tail. Costas shook his foot frantically, and the whole mass slithered off out of sight, into the drain. �Never again, Jack,� he muttered. �I swear to God, you�re never doing this to me again.�

�I promise I�ll make it up to you. Next dive will be pure heaven.�

�We�ve got to get out of this version of hell first.� Costas resumed his slog up the tunnel, and Jack followed close behind. He still felt connected to the world outside, only a quick rappel along the rope back to the base of the spiral staircase, but with every step the underworld seemed to be closing in on him, with darkness ahead and behind and only the immediate walls of the tunnel visible in their headlamps. He forced himself to concentrate, to push aside the claustrophobia, counting his steps, estimating how close they were getting to the foot of the Palatine Hill. After thirty paces he sensed that the angle had changed, that they were going down. The walls appeared buckled, fractured. The fluorescent line ended abruptly at a piton in front of a dark pool, and he could see where the ceiling sloped down into the water about five meters ahead.

�This isn�t natural,� Costas murmured. �I mean, the tunnel wasn�t designed this way. It looks like damage from seismic activity, like some of those fracture lines at Herculaneum.�

�They get earthquakes here too,� Jack said.

�A pretty big one, but some years ago, centuries probably. And this might be a dead end for us, though there�s still plenty of flow getting through.�

�Time for a swim,� Jack said.

Costas sloshed into the pool, then disappeared in a mass of bubbles. Jack followed close behind, dropping to his knees and flopping forward, hearing the air in his suit expel as his computerized system automatically adjusted to neutral buoyancy. The water was extraordinarily clear, cleansing, like the underground cenote they had dived through in the Yucat�n, and even here Jack felt the exhilaration he always felt as he went underwater, the excitement of the unknown. He reached back and slipped his fins down from where they had been tucked up behind his calves, and powered forward after Costas. His depth gauge showed three meters, then six. The earthquake had created a sump in the tunnel, and they were coming back up again. He saw in front of him that Costas had surfaced and that the floor of the tunnel rose up to less than a meter depth. He swam as far as he could, pulled his fins in again and rose out of the water beside Costas, who was staring ahead down the tunnel.

�I�ve got that feeling again,� Costas said.

�What feeling?�

�That feeling of walking into the past. I had it at Herculaneum, even had it diving down onto the shipwreck of St. Paul. It�s weird, like d�j� vu.�

�So you get it too,� Jack murmured.

�Maybe it�s the force.�

�I had it explained to me once,� Jack said. �It�s that you�ve had exactly the identical emotional response before, in very similar circumstances. Your brain�s playing tricks on you. It�s a short-circuit.�

�No, Jack. I�ve seen it in you. It�s the force.�

�Okay. It�s the force. You�re right. Maybe you can use some of it to get us through the next sump.� Jack pointed ahead to another dip in the tunnel, to more cracked and fragmented masonry, another pool. He knew they must now be on the very edge of the Palatine Hill, under at least eighty meters of fractured tufa, volcanic rock. Costas splashed in again and Jack followed. This time the tunnel regained its former shape and continued underwater, but about ten meters ahead it constricted. As Jack swam closer he realized that the point of constriction was two ancient columns on either side. Beyond them the tunnel narrowed into a culvert taller than it was wide, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. The dimensions would have allowed them to stand upright and walk through it, single file, were it not for the water. He reached out and touched the right-hand column. It was gray granite, with white and black flecks, a stone seen all over the ruins of Rome, in the columns of the Pantheon, in Trajan�s basilica next to the old Forum. Jack had been with Hiebermeyer to the source, Mons Claudianus in Egypt, the great quarry first opened under the emperor Claudius, another of his distinctive stamps on the architecture of the city.

�Maurice would love this,� he murmured. �His doctoral project was Claudius� quarries in Egypt, and that�s where this stone came from.�

�Jack, take a look at this.�

Jack rolled over and looked up, and realized that Costas had broken surface about three meters above him, bobbing in a wavering sheen of water that reflected his head-lamp in shifting patterns of white. Jack rose slowly, pressing his buoyancy control to inject air, remembering to exhale as the ambient pressure decreased. His head emerged from the water, and he gasped in astonishment. Costas� beam was shining at a rock face that rose directly above the columns and the conduit entrance. It extended at least four meters high and five meters wide, carved out of the living rock. Above them Jack could see the triangular gable of a pediment, projecting half a meter out of the rock. He looked down into the water again, saw the columns. He realized that the entire structure was a monumental entranceway, carved and decorated as a work of art in its own right. He gazed at it, awestruck. It was like the great rock-cut fa�ades at Petra in Jordan, yet deep under the Palatine, a curious mixture of ostentation and secrecy, the creation of someone who cared about his own achievements but not what other people thought of them.

�Check this out,� Costas said. �Take a look at the stone face under that gable.�

Jack raised his head again above the surface. An eddy effect from the current below had pushed them closer to the rock face, and he was now within touching distance. He reached out and put his hand on it. What looked like mold and slime was rock-hard, and he realized it was calcite accretion from groundwater seepage. He saw tiny rivulets of wet running down the rock, evidently from rainwater far above. Then he saw the regular incisions in the rock. He pushed off, and aimed his headlamp up. Of course. It was an Imperial monument, and there had to be a monumental inscription. The calcite lay over the inscription like icing, but instead of smudging, it seemed to clarify it, crystallize it. There were four registers, the letters only about three inches high, scarcely big enough to be seen from the floor of the chamber. Whoever had made this dedication did it for propriety, for his own private satisfaction and to sanctify the place, not to impress the masses. Jack read it:

�

TI.CLAVDIVS.DRVSI.F.CAISAR.AVGVSTVS.GERMANICVS
PONTIF.MAXIM.TRIBVNICIA.POTESTATE.XII.COS.V
IMPERATOR.XXVII.PATER.PATRIAE.AQVAS.VESTIAM.
SACRA.SUA.IMPENSA.IN.URBEM.PERDVCENDAS.CVRAVIT

�

�This is authentic, no doubt about it,� Jack murmured. �It has the characteristically archaic spelling of the word Caesar, harking back to the glory days of Julius Caesar, the Roman Republic. The wall�s like that too, carved as if it�s made of blocks in a rusticated style, the surfaces left rough with almost an exaggerated lack of finish. Absolutely characteristic of Claudius, of buildings where he had a personal involvement. And typical of Claudius to get the epigraphic details right, the archaic reference.�

�You�re talking about our Claudius? The emperor? This was his doing, the drainage tunnel Massimo was talking about?�

Jack translated the inscription:

�

�Tiberius Claudius, son of Drusus, Caesar, Augustus, Germanicus, Chief Priest, with Tribunician Power for the 12th time, 5 times Consul, 27 times Imperator, Father of his Country, saw to the construction at his own expense of the Sacred Vestal Water.�

�

�That�s going to make Massimo very happy,� Costas said. �It�s all we need to tell him. His tunnel rats can have a party down here when they see this. Their hero.�

�The formula�s similar to Claudius� inscription on the Aqua Claudia, at the Porta Maggiore where the aqueduct entered Rome,� Jack said. �But the fascinating thing here, the unique thing, is those three words. Aquas Vestiam Sacra. The sacred waters of the Vestals. It means Massimo may well have been right about that too, that this tunnel connects with the House of the Vestals on the other side of the Palatine.�

�The strange thing is, this isn�t a drain from the Cloaca,� Costas murmured. �It�s exactly the opposite. The fact that the water�s crystal clear on this side suggests it must be on the other side too, flowing down back toward the Forum. There must be a pretty big spring smack in the middle of all this, right under the Palatine.�

�Perhaps a sacred spring,� Jack murmured. �Maybe the Vestals were the guardians.�

Costas eyed his navigation computer again. �Judging by the direction of this tunnel and the likely angle of the other tunnel�the one Massimo explored�under the Forum, the point of confluence should be almost exactly under where we were sitting by the House of Augustus this morning. Maybe that cave, the Lupercale, was actually an entranceway down to the spring, a secret passage from the palace. Maybe all that myth stuff, Romulus and Remus, could actually have some fact behind it.�

�The Romans never doubted it,� Jack murmured.

�Right,� Costas said. �The myth could even underline the importance of the spring. The earliest settlement of Rome was on the Palatine Hill, right? Well, control of a spring could have been crucial to their success. Maybe we�re about to find the real reason why Rome became great. Water.�

�You never cease to amaze me,� Jack said. �And it makes sense that the Vestals were involved, an ancient priesthood dating from the foundation of Rome, probably from way before. By sanctifying this place, by keeping it secret and pure, they would also have been safeguarding Rome. No wonder they were feared and revered. Down here under the Palatine they may literally have been the powerhouse of ancient Rome.�

�Time to find out.� Costas pushed off from the rock and vented air from his buoyancy system, dropping under the rock face between the two columns. Jack lingered for a moment, staring at the inscription, his excitement pushing against a feeling of apprehension which had not yet fully grown but was there. He dropped down and followed Costas, finning into the tunnel, completely submerged again with the vault above him.

�Waterproof concrete,� Costas said. �Looks like they used it to seal the walls of volcanic tufa, which must be pretty porous.� Jack could see the cone of light from his headlamp a few meters ahead, aimed at a section of the conduit wall which had partly cracked and crumbled.

�Another Claudius speciality,� Jack replied, coming up behind him. �It�s how they built the underwater moles of his great harbor at Ostia, and what they used to line aqueducts. In here it was probably used to keep ground-water from leeching down into the conduit, contaminating the springwater. The key ingredient of hydraulic concrete was a dust called �pozzolana,� from ancient Pozzuola. That�s Puteoli on the Bay of Naples, beside the Phlegraean Fields.�

�Small world,� Costas murmured as he pressed ahead. Jack passed the damaged section, and then came under Costas� legs where he had stopped, about fifteen meters beyond the columns that had marked the entrance to the conduit.

�It�s all choked up,� Costas said. �It looks as if there�s been a collapse.�

�A dead end?� Jack said.

Costas bent over and delved into the tool pocket on his E-suit. He produced a device about the size of a spoon, activated it and held it out in front of him. Jack watched the flashing red light turn to green. �The water-current meter shows we�ve still got flow. Wherever the spring is, it�s still ahead of us.� Costas pocketed the meter, then looked at the gauge on his wrist. �And we�re still going up at a slight angle, about ten degrees. At this rate we�ll break surface about twenty meters ahead, if the tunnel continues at the same angle beyond this rubble.�

Jack edged under Costas and peered at the jumble of tufa fragments on the floor of the tunnel. He reached down and shifted one, then moved several more. �Take a look at this,� he said. �There�s a crack underneath us, a fissure in the base of the tunnel. It must have split open when the quake brought down the ceiling. We might be able to get through.�

Costas dropped alongside Jack and looked into the hole, angling his head so that the beam shone deep inside. �You may be right,� he said. �It widens ahead of us, maybe body width, and goes on as far as I can see. The rubble seems to have compacted at the top of the fissure and not fallen into it. If we can clear the first couple of meters or so, we might reach the point where the fissure�s wide enough to fin through.�

�My turn to take the lead,� Jack said. Costas dropped back and peered at him closely, his visor almost touching Jack�s, and made the okay sign. The two men knew each other too well, and words were unnecessary. It was always the second sump that did it for Jack, the realization that escape was no longer straightforward, that he would need to go back through several submerged spaces before reaching the final passage to freedom. He had survived a near-death experience as a boy, diving in a sunken mine shaft, when his air had cut off. His buddy had saved him, but the memory rose up again every time he confronted similar circumstances, every time his mind began to lock into that sense of d�j� vu. He had already felt the icy grip of claustrophobia before he saw the inscription, and now he needed all his reserves to fight it, his own secret battle that only Costas knew about. Taking the lead helped him to focus, to concentrate, to see the objective ahead as his own personal quest, to feel responsibility for one who now came behind him.

�We�re still at about six meters water depth,� Costas said. �By my reckoning, we�re only about thirty meters from the point directly below the House of Augustus and that temple, where we were sitting on top of the Palatine.�

�Okay. Here goes,� Jack muttered. He angled down and pulled himself through the crack. He finned hard but got nowhere. He was beginning to hyperventilate. He closed his eyes, then felt a jostle from behind. �Your coil of rope caught on a rock,� Costas said. Jack felt a hard push, and then was floating free inside the fissure, which had quickly widened to about two meters. He realized that he was dropping, and dropping fast. He looked at his gauge. Fifteen meters� depth already. He must have deactivated the automated buoyancy control as he squeezed into the fissure; now he fumbled with the controls on the side of his helmet. There was a hiss of gas into the suit and he slowed down, reaching neutral buoyancy at eighteen meters. For the first time he looked along the length of the fissure ahead of him. The water was still crystal clear, and he could see horizontally at least thirty meters, to a point where the rough volcanic tufa walls on either side seemed to join together again. He looked down. There was nothing, a yawning blackness, an abyss like he had never seen before, deep below the heart of one of the world�s most ancient cities.

He heard grunting and cursing through his intercom, and looked up to see Costas partway into the fissure. He began to swim back up to help him, and then Costas was through, dropping down until they came level with each other at twelve meters depth.

�This place is phenomenal.� Costas was still panting from his exertion, but was peering down. �The crack of doom.�

�I can�t see the bottom,� Jack said. �It must be at least fifty meters below us, maybe more.�

�I didn�t wager for a decompression dive under Rome,� Costas said. �We haven�t got the gas for that.� They both checked the readout inside their helmets, which showed the gas mixture from their rebreathers adjusting for depth. �I�d say half an hour, no more, with a twenty-five-meter maximum. Any deeper than that and it�s a bounce dive, then we�re out of here.�

�We may be lucky,� Jack said. �Look along the top of the fissure.� He panned his headlamp beam along, and Costas followed it. �Looks like it breaks the surface again about ten meters down,� Jack said. �Let�s go up.�

They began to swim in the direction of Jack�s beam. Costas rolled on his back, peering up and down the fissure, then looking hard at the rock directly above them. �This fissure�s clearly a seismic cleft�tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of years old. It looks as if it�s always been filled with water, spring-fed. Claudius� tunnel must have been built above it as a kind of outlet, an overflow conduit for when the water here got too high.�

�Look at that,� Jack exclaimed, pointing to the side of the fissure. �There�s a flight of four, five rock-cut steps.�

�It looks like a well-head,� Costas said. �Maybe this was where they accessed the spring. We�re coming up almost directly under the place where those prehistoric huts were found, the House of Romulus on top of the Palatine, about sixty meters above us.�

Jack broke the surface first, then cautiously walked up the steps, craning his neck around to ensure there was ample headspace. He looked back to check that Costas was behind him, then reached down and pulled his fins up his calves before walking up out of the water onto a flat rock surface. He was inside another tunnel, but it was spectacularly different from the one they had come through. Jack turned around, looking. At the north end, about ten meters from him, the tunnel terminated at what looked like a small chamber, slightly larger than the dimensions of the tunnel. At the other end, about the same distance away, it opened into a rocky cavern, obscured in shadows. The tunnel itself was hewn out of the living rock, about three meters wide and five meters high, with a trapezoidal cross-section like a truncated pyramid. Jack swiveled around and scanned the whole length again, then looked closely at one wall, inspecting the ancient pick-marks. This was old, far older than anything else they had seen. He looked again. It suddenly clicked. �My God,� he whispered.

�Another tunnel,� Costas said, his dripping form appearing beside Jack.

�Not just another tunnel,� Jack murmured. �A dromos.�

�A what?�

�Where have you seen this shape before?�

Costas gazed along the tunnel, the rectilinear profile of the walls framed by his beam. �Bronze Age,� he suddenly said, sounding triumphant. �The Greek Bronze Age. Those tombs at Mycenae, in Greece�a dromos was a sacred corridor. The time of the Trojan Wars, Aeneas, all that.�

�And this may finally pin down the origin of Rome, once and for all,� Jack said, his voice hushed. �We�re on the edge of the age of myth again, Costas, just like Atlantis, myth made real. But I�m thinking of somewhere closer to home. This is almost identical to the dromos in the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae.�

�The Sibyl,� Costas murmured. �So she had an apartment in Rome too.�

�This is all beginning to make sense,� Jack murmured. �The Lupercale, the sacred cave of Rome�s origin. I�ll bet that�s what�s ahead of us, that cavern. And we�ve just emerged from the spring, vital for the survival of Rome. A sacred place, sanctified and protected. We know the ritual at Cumae involved lustral waters, rites of purification. The Vestals probably did that too. And then there�s the dark side.�

�The crack of doom,� Costas said.

�The entrance to the underworld.�

�Just like Cumae, the Phlegraean Fields,� Costas said.

�And on top of it all sits a Sibyl.�

�I wonder if she was here when they arrived, the first Romans, or whether they brought her with them,� Costas mused. �And I wonder how the Vestal Virgins figure in all this.�

�Maybe there are answers here. We need to get to that cave. Come on.�

�Before you do that, Jack, you might want to take a look at the other end of this tunnel. There�s something in the middle of that chamber.�

Jack swiveled around to follow Costas� gaze. With their two beams concentrated together, the chamber was more clearly illuminated. They walked along the passageway, toward it. The ancient walls were streaked with accretion, calcite deposits that covered the tufa like dirty whitewash. They reached the edge of the chamber. It was a perfect dome, about eight meters in circumference, with small rectangular openings in the ceiling that may once have been air vents, evidently clogged up. On the far side was what looked like the decayed remains of a statue, on a plinth. In front of it was a circular depression in the floor about three meters wide, surrounded by a rock-cut rim and filled with a dark mass, what seemed like a black resinous material sealed under calcite accretion. Jack stared at it, and then at the decayed figure behind it. �Of course,� he whispered.

�What is it?�

�That statue, it looks as if it might once have been female,� he said. �A seated woman. A cult statue. And this black material is a hearth, a sacred hearth.� He was suddenly elated. �That�s why the shrines of Vesta in the Forum and on the Palatine were never inaugurated, never made into temples. It�s because they were outliers, just the public face of the cult. This chamber was the real Temple of Vesta.�

�Jack, the statue. It�s got an inscription.�

Jack stepped around the hearth and followed Costas� beam. At the base of the statue was a thin slab of marble veneer, about thirty centimeters across. Jack squatted down and peered at it. �Odd,� he said. �It�s not a dedicatory inscription, not part of the plinth. It�s propped up here loose, or at least was until the calcite glued it in place.� He bent down as far as he could, then got down on the floor. The Latin was clear in his beam, and he read it:

COELIA CONCORDIA VESTALIS MAXIMA ANNO DOMINI CCCXCIV

�Well, I�ll be damned,� he said. �Coelia Concordia, Chief Vestal, AD 394. She was the last one, and that was the year the cult was abandoned. Odd that they used Anno Domini, though. Year of Our Lord. The empire had been Christian for almost a century by that date, but you�d have thought the Vestals would have resisted Christianity to the end. It�s what sidelined them, as well as all the other pagan cults of Rome.�

Costas was silent, and Jack peered at him. �You still with me?�

�Jack, this is no statue.�

�What do you mean?� Jack struggled to his feet, then slipped on the floor and fell into the statue, holding it close. He winced, and drew back, leaning for a moment while he flexed the knee that had hit the floor, staring at the decayed shape inches from his face. He suddenly froze. It was not limestone as he�d assumed. It was calcite accretion, a weird, shapeless stalagmite that rose more than a meter from the floor, encasing a stone seat. He looked again at what had startled him. It was a sculpted stone serpent�green, writhing up the back of the chair, staring out at him through a diaphanous mask of accretion.

�Not that, Jack. Over here. Inside.�

Jack moved a step to the left and followed Costas� beam. Then he saw it, trapped inside the calcium, lolling off to one side.

A human skull.

He gasped, stepped back, then stared again. There was more. A sternum, ribs, shoulder blades. Costas was right. The statue was no statue at all. It was a skeleton, a human skeleton. Small, almost childlike, but with the jaw of someone old, very old, the teeth all missing. Then Jack saw something else. She wore a necklace, a neck torque, solid gold, an extraordinary sight in the heart of Rome, some ancient booty perhaps from the Celtic world. And above the skull, encased in the accretion, were sparkling fragments of gold leaf and jewels from an elaborate hairdo, the coiffure of a wealthy Roman woman, a matron.

Then Jack realized. She came here to die. Coelia Concordia, the last of the Vestals. But a Vestal wreathed in serpents. Not just a Vestal. A Sibyl.

Jack�s mind was in a tumult. So the cult of the Sibyl had not come to an end with the eruption of Vesuvius after all. She had come back here, back to her cave under Rome, to another entrance to Hades. And the oracle had survived, lived on for more than three centuries after Claudius met his end, after the old world of the Cumaean Sibyl had been consumed by fire. This Sibyl had seen out Rome, seen Rome rise and fall to the end, seen out the pagan world and ushered in a new order, one whose beginnings she had watched all those years before, among the outcasts near her cave beside the Fields of Fire.

�Jack, take a look at her hand.�

Jack peered down, barely able to breathe. He looked again. So that was what had happened to the Sibyls. They had become what they had foreseen. They had fulfilled their own prophecy. She was holding a crude metal forging, two iron spikes joined at right angles. A cross of nails.

Suddenly there was a flash of light, a momentary surge. For a second Jack thought he might be hallucinating. Then he was dragged violently sideways, to the edge of the chamber, down to the floor. A hand slammed the side of his helmet and his light went off. He was in total darkness. The hold relaxed, and Costas came over the intercom, his voice tense. �Sorry about that, Jack. But there�s someone else down here.�

�

FOR A FEW MOMENTS THEY REMAINED ON THE FLOOR of the chamber, in utter darkness. Their intercom was virtually inaudible with the external speaker deactivated, though they instinctively talked in low voices. �Jack, I thought you said nothing else would be living in here.� Costas moved to the edge of the chamber and peered along the line of the dromos tunnel, toward the cave at the other end. Jack crawled behind him. Their headlamps were still switched off, but they had activated the night-vision goggles inside their E-suit helmets. There was just enough natural light for the sensors to work�not enough to be discernible to the naked eye, but enough for Jack to make out Costas� form in front of him, speckly and green, an eerie apparition that seemed to be constantly forming and re-forming with every movement. It made sense that there would be light coming from cracks and fissures leading outside, where the archaeologists� probe had reached into the cave somewhere ahead of them.

�You�re sure it was a flashlight.�

�Positive. I was looking in the opposite direction while you were communing with our dead lady. One look at that thing was enough for me. Then I saw the beam. It flashed out from somewhere on the left side of the cave.�

�That�s where the other tunnel enters, the one from the house of the Vestals,� Jack whispered. �But God knows how they got in.�

�If we could do it, someone else could.�

�Massimo�s map showed entrances into the Cloaca in the Forum of Nerva and under the Colosseum,� Jack said. �His guys were turned back by a flooded culvert, didn�t have the right equipment. Someone with the right gear could have found a way, but not one of his people. He�d have told us.�

�Is this a coincidence?�

Jack paused, then stared into the darkness. �There�s something that�s been on my mind since yesterday. It wasn�t going to stop us coming to where we are now, and I was waiting to speak to her more, on the phone. You remember Elizabeth at Herculaneum, the superintendency official? My old friend?�

�What�s she got to do with this?�

�She caught up with me for a few moments yesterday in Herculaneum before we left the villa.�

�Maria and I noticed.�

�She was taking a big risk, with the guards around. Maurice had already warned us about how somebody seemed to be sitting on the superintendency people, keeping them from talking. She wanted to tell me something. About what we�re up against. An organization as deeply rooted in the history of Rome as you can imagine, that goes right back to the time of St. Paul. An organization that knew the villa concealed a threat to their very existence, something they had hoped lost forever in the eruption of AD 79. Elizabeth was whispering, and I didn�t have time to question her. She said these people will do anything in their power to keep this threat at bay.�

�You think we�re being followed?�

�If it�s who I fear it is, they�ll have tentacles everywhere. And if they know we�re in here, they must assume we�re on to something. And if they somehow have an idea what it is we�re after, it�s a prize they�d die for.�

�And kill for.�

Jack drew closer behind Costas and peered over his helmet. All he could make out was speckly green, with darker smudges at the end. �The only thing we can do is brazen it out. My guess is, it�s likely to be only one guy. The entrances from the Forum and Colosseum are pretty public. More than one might be too much of a risk, to get in unseen.�

�Maybe the authorities turned a blind eye.�

�Rome isn�t Naples,� Jack said. �But you may be right. At the moment, whoever�s in that cave is going to be kicking themselves for having the flashlight on as they came out of the tunnel. I should imagine it was a pretty hairy ride, unless they had the kind of equipment we�ve got. And the longer we keep our lights off, the more likely they�ll assume we�re on to them.�

�You�re saying we should carry on as if we�ve seen nothing.�

�Our intruder might think we�ve gone down a side passage, a dead end, come back up again. Let�s just switch on our lights, go forward. They�re not going to have a go at us until we�ve found what we�re after.�

�Okay. Lights on, sweeping them from behind as if we�ve just come from somewhere. I�m not armed, Jack.�

�I�ve got the rock hammer in my right hand,� Jack murmured. �If I hadn�t forced Ben to go on vacation, he�d have insisted that I carry the Beretta. That�s what a security chief is for. There�s even a pocket for it in the E-suit. Lesson learned. Next time.�

�Next time?� Costas snorted.

They switched on their headlamps, then stood out in the passageway and began to make their way forward, passing the edge of the pool they had come up through. They knew they were being watched, but had no idea where from. When they reached the end of the tunnel and the edge of the cave, they swept their beams around, and could see it was a huge natural cavern, extending at least twenty meters upward. To the right was an ancient rock-cut stairway, winding up the natural contours of the cave, the tufa steps so heavily eroded they were sloping. About halfway up, the cavern was a series of massive fractures and displacements in the rock, and they could see a continuation of the stairs far above that, near the ceiling, above a jagged precipice. Directly below that point on the floor of the cavern they could see an opening identical to the overflow channel they had come through earlier, with rivulets just visible flowing into it. �That�s the other channel,� Jack murmured, scanning the folds of rock around the entrance. �Can you see anything?�

�Not yet.�

�But thank God for Massimo and his rope. He was right. Looks as if we�re going rock climbing.�

�You are. I�m clambering round the base of the cavern, exploring for lost treasure, right? I might switch off my light, for better light contrast, you know, to see those secret chambers. Sometimes, you might not see me.�

�Be careful. This guy�s bound to be armed.�

�He won�t shoot until he thinks we�ve found whatever it is we�re looking for.�

�That�s the theory.�

�Then don�t find it.�

�I�ll tell you when to move on him,� Jack said. �Loudly.�

Jack shifted the coil of rope off his shoulder in readiness and began to climb the steps. Costas was quickly lost to view among the folds of rock, and his beam disappeared. Jack hated the vulnerability, knowing that eyes were following his every move. Costas was no assassin, and didn�t have the most inconspicuous of physiques. Jack stopped and looked up, ostentatiously. If they played their cards right, there was a chance. But some kind of showdown was inevitable. He steeled himself and carried on, focusing only on the challenge of the climb ahead. After thirty steps he reached the end, the point where the earthquake had pushed out a huge section of rock, creating a sheer face at least ten meters high. He inspected the rock, carefully judging the holds. It could be done. He clipped the rope to his harness, then unfastened the rebreather from his back, setting it down on the step behind him, unclipping the hoses from his helmet and lifting the visor. For the first time since the fetid blast from the drain an hour before, he tasted the air. It was damp and warm, and he could hear water dripping all around him. The rainstorm Massimo had predicted must have started. He pulled himself onto the rock face. The tufa seemed friable, but he knew it was strong volcanic stone that gave a good grip. He eased himself up, splayed on the rock, using his long limbs to find holds. About five meters up, he hammered in the first piton, the sound ringing through the cavern. He hammered another one in three meters higher. Another two meters and he was above the main precipice, with a ledge in front of him and then the stairs continuing into the rock face above. To the right, he glimpsed a wide fissure that had walls decorated with a mosaic of embedded shells. It must be the fissure the archaeologists had found beneath the House of Augustus. He now knew with absolute certainty that the steps led up under the lost Palatine Shrine of Vesta, to the secret chamber they were seeking, only a few meters ahead.

He turned, hammered in a final piton just above the cliff edge, then clipped the rope to his harness and under his back, rappeling down the first few meters. He stopped and listened. The rivulet down the tunnel leading toward the Forum had greatly intensified, and was now a torrent. The rainwater must have pushed the water reservoir from the spring over its threshold, and the tunnel was doing the job Claudius had designed it for. Jack paused, took a deep breath. This was it. He yelled out, as loudly as he could.

�Costas, I�ve found it. I�m coming down.�

He bounced another couple of meters, halfway down the cliff, the hammer in his left hand. Suddenly a hand gripped his left ankle, and he began spinning wildly. He looked down. A figure in a black wetsuit was staring up at him, wearing a close-fitting diving mask, legs wrapped around the rope dangling below Jack just above the base of the cliff. One hand held Jack�s ankle and the rope, the other held a silenced pistol, aimed at Jack�s head. �Give it to me,� the man said coldly, in a thick Italian accent. Jack looked down, saying nothing. A bullet cracked past his face, followed by the thump of the silencer. It was a warning shot. Jack caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye, a shape. He swung and aimed the hammer at the man�s head, a killer blow. But the arm holding his ankle was closer, and he brought down the hammer hard against the man�s wrist. There was an explosive sound as the bone snapped and the pistol spun off into the cavern. Simultaneously, Costas launched himself at the man�s legs, bringing him down with a huge crash. The man tried to get up, tripped, tumbled down and hit the channel below with a sickening crack, and then was gone, swept away in the torrent. Jack dropped down to help Costas, who had also removed his respirator and visor. �You okay?�

�Fine,� Costas panted. �Only wish you�d put that hammer in the little bastard�s forehead.�

�I don�t think he�ll be troubling us anymore,� Jack said.

Costas wiped some blood off his mouth and looked down. �Well and truly flushed out.� He looked back up the cliff face. �Right. Hook me up. That�s done it for me. The sooner we get what we�ve come for and get out of here, the better.�

�

Twenty minutes later they were in a narrow space above the final flight of rock-cut stairs. Jack squeezed himself as far up the crack as he could go, his arms raised above him into a hollowed-out chamber. He could feel nothing. He wriggled farther, but it was no use. His head was jammed sideways against the top of the crack, and all he could see was the side of the jagged fissure inches from his face. He felt blindly with his hands, but there was only empty space. He arched his back, pushing hard, and felt himself move fractionally forward an inch or two. Suddenly his fingers met resistance. Wet rock, smoothed down, different from the irregular rock of the fissure. He parted his hands and felt around. It was a circular chamber, about two feet wide, sunk into the rock. He felt down as far as he could reach, and touched the base of the chamber. He traced his fingers slowly around the edge. Nothing.

It was empty.

Jack slumped slightly, and peered down at Costas� face, just visible below Jack�s feet. �I can feel the chamber.� His voice sounded peculiar, resonating in the chamber but then deadened in the fissure. �It�s a cylindrical hole bored into the rock. I can feel all round the base. There�s nothing inside.�

�Try the middle.� Costas� voice sounded distant, muffled. �Maybe there�s another smaller chamber sunk below it.�

Jack shifted as far as he could to the right, another inch or two. He slowly drew his left hand across the bottom of the chamber. It was wet, slimy, with small ridges and furrows, as if it had been left roughly finished. He reached the other side. Suddenly he pulled his hand back again. There was a regularity to the furrows. He felt around, his eyes shut, tracing the marks, trying to read what he was feeling. There was no doubt about it. �You�re right,� he said excitedly. �I can feel the outline of another circle, an inner circle on the floor of the chamber. I think it�s a lid, a stone lid. I can feel markings on it.�

�Is there a handle?� Costas said.

�Nothing. It�s flat across the top. I�ve no idea how we�re going to open this.�

�And those markings?�

�I can count twenty so far,� Jack said. �Wait.� He flinched in pain as he jammed his elbow against the crack. He worked his hand around it. �No, twenty-three. They�re in a circle, around the edge of the lid. They�re letters, raised letters carved on little blocks, set slightly into the stone surface. It�s curious. I can actually press them down slightly.�

�Can you read them?�

Jack traced his fingers across the letters. He suddenly realized what they were. �It�s the Latin alphabet, the alphabet of the later Roman Republic and the early Empire. Twenty-three letters. Alpha to zeta.�

�Jack, I think what you�ve got there is a combination lock, Roman style.�

�Huh?�

�We studied these things at MIT. Ancient technology. If there isn�t a handle, the lid must have some kind of spring opener, set underneath to push it up. My guess is a bronze spring, set around the edge of the inner chamber. The letters must be a combination lock, probably attached to stone or metal pivots that secure the lid into the rock. Press the right combination, and bingo, the lid springs up.�

�Twenty-three letters,� Jack murmured. �And no way of knowing how many we need to press. I don�t even want to begin to calculate the number of possibilities.�

�Let�s start with the obvious,� Costas said. �It was Pliny the Elder who put the scroll here, right? What was his full name?�

Jack thought for a moment. �Gaius Plinius Secundus.�

�Okay. Punch in the initials.�

Jack pictured the Latin alphabet in his mind�s eye, and traced his finger around the circle until he came to each letter. G, P, S. He pressed them in the correct order, and they depressed very slightly, but no more. He tried again, then in a different order. Still nothing.

�No good,� Jack said, his teeth gritted.

�Then your guess is as good as mine,� Costas said. �You may as well try random combinations. We shouldn�t be here for more than a week. We really need to get going, Jack. Our friend might not be the only one. We don�t know.�

�Wait.� Jack�s mind was racing. �Let�s think about this. Pliny gets the document from Claudius. He promises to hide it away. Pliny keeps his promises, and never puts anything off. He�s got too much else to do, managing the naval base, writing his books. He takes his fast galley up to Rome that night, 23 August, AD 79, right up the Tiber, comes straight here to the admiral�s safety-deposit box, returns that same night to Misenum on the Bay of Naples, just in time for the eruption. Whose name is fresh in his mind?�

�You mean Jesus? The Nazarene?�

�Not enough there for a code, and it might be too obvious. No, I mean Claudius himself. His name before he became emperor. Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus.� Jack shut his eyes again, moved his hand over the letters and pressed them in. T, C, D, N, G. Nothing. He repeated it. Again nothing. He exhaled forcibly. �No good.�

�Maybe you�ve missed a letter. His title? Emperor?�

�Caesar Augustus.� Jack found the letters, then punched them. Still nothing. He slumped again, then suddenly drew his breath in sharply. �No. Not Caesar Augustus. Claudius was no longer emperor. He would have been at pains to tell Pliny that. Not an emperor. He�d become something else. Something that would have amused them both.�

�Claudius the God,� Costas murmured.

�Divus.� Jack reached back around and found the letter D. He pressed the first letters of the name again, then pressed D as hard as he could. Something gave way, and the letter depressed at least an inch. Suddenly the lid sprang up, and Jack quickly withdrew his hand to prevent it being trapped. �Bingo,� he said excitedly. He put his hand back where the lid had been and reached inside. He felt a cylindrical shape, loose in the hole. His heart began to pound. He pulled it out, easing it between the metal coils of a bronze spring. The cylinder was heavy for its size, made of stone, about ten inches long and six inches wide. �I�ve got it,� he said, pulling it into the fissure, then holding it in the beam of his headlamp. �It�s Egyptian, a hand-turned Egyptian stone vessel. We�ve hit paydirt, Costas. It�s identical in manufacture to those larger jars in Claudius� library, the reused canopic jars, the ones holding the papyrus scrolls. The lid�s still sealed in resin. Looks like Pliny didn�t tamper with it. We might be in luck.� He passed the cylinder down to Costas, who reached up from the tunnel below. Jack eased himself back down the fissure, and the two of them squatted over the cylinder in the darkness, their beams illuminating the mottled marble surface as Costas turned the object over in his hands.

�What do we do now?� he said.

�We open it.�

�So this could be it.�

Jack nodded silently and looked at Costas. They had been here before, the knife-edge moment just before a new revelation, but each time the excitement seemed more intense.

�Not exactly controlled laboratory conditions,� Costas said.

�My call.� Jack took the cylinder, grasped the lid with one hand and the body of the jar with the other and twisted. It gave way easily, the ancient resin around the sealing cracking off and falling to the tunnel floor. He prised the lid off and set it down, then peered inside. �No papyrus,� he said, his voice flat. �But something else, wedged in.� He reached inside with his other hand, and withdrew a flat stone object about six inches long and four inches wide, the size of a small cosmetic mirror. It was made up of two leaves joined together, with a hinge on one side and a metal latch on the other. Jack turned it over in his hands and then put his thumb against the latch. �It�s a writing tablet,� he said excitedly. �A diptych, two leaves that open up like a book. The inside surface should be covered with wax.�

�Any chance that could have survived?� Costas said.

�This could be another Agamemnon moment,� Jack said. �It could still be there, but exposure to oxygen could degrade it immediately. I�m going for it. We can�t risk waiting.�

�I�m with you.� Costas pulled out a waterproof notebook and pencil, and knelt beside Jack, poised to write. Jack pressed the latch and felt the stone leaves move. �Here goes,� he whispered. He opened the tablet. The interior surfaces were hard, glassy. They could see it was wax, smooth and perfectly preserved, but getting darker by the second. �Quick,� Jack said. He passed the tablet to Costas and grabbed the notebook, feverishly copying down what was written. �Done,� he said after less than a minute. The wax was still there, but the scratchings on the surface had virtually disappeared, gone like a phantasm. Costas closed the tablet and immediately folded it in a sheet of bubble-wrap and a waterproof bag, then slipped it into his chest pocket. He peered at Jack, who was staring at the notebook. �Well?�

�It�s Latin.� Jack paused, marshaling his thoughts. �Whoever wrote this, it wasn�t a Nazarene from Galilee. That could only have been Aramaic, Greek perhaps.�

�So this is not Claudius� precious document.�

�It could have been written by Claudius, or it could have been Narcissus,� Jack murmured, shifting his body in the cramped space. �Impossible to tell from scratchings on a wax tablet whether it was the same handwriting as that sheet by Narcissus in Claudius� study. Especially when it disappears before your very eyes.� He gazed at Costas. �No, this is not the document we�re after. But it�s not the end of the trail either.� He ripped off the page of the notebook and transcribed his scribbled words neatly onto a fresh sheet, then held it in his beam so they could both see:

�

Dies Irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla

Teste David cum Sibylla

Inter monte duorum

Qua respiciatam Andraste

Uri vinciri verberari

Ferroque necari

�

�Poetry?� Costas said �Virgil? He wrote about the Sibyl, didn�t he?�

�You wily old devil,� Jack murmured.

�Who?�

�I think Claudius was keeping his word, but he was also playing a game, and I think the Sibyl was playing games with him too.�

�Go on.�

�Well, the first verse is easy enough. It�s the first stanza of the Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath, the hymn that used to be central to the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. It�s an incredible find, because before this the earliest version of these lines dates from the thirteenth century. Most people think it was a medieval creation, especially with those rhyming words which you never see in ancient Latin verse, in Virgil for example.� Jack scribbled down an English text beside the Latin. �Here�s how it�s usually translated, keeping the meter and the rhyme:

Day of wrath and terror looming!

Heaven and earth to ash consuming,

David�s word and Sibyl�s truth foredooming!

Costas whistled. �Sounds like a premonition of the eruption of Vesuvius.�

Jack nodded. �I think what we�ve got here is a Sibylline prophecy, given to Claudius at Cumae. She must have given these first lines to others who remembered it, and preserved it secretly, until it resurfaced in the medieval Catholic liturgy.�

�Who�s David?� Costas asked.

�That�s the fascinating thing about discovering that this verse is so old, from the early Christian period. David in the Dies Irae is usually thought of as a reference to Jesus, who was believed to be a descendant of King David of the Jews. If that�s true, then this may confirm that the Sibyl knew of Jesus, that the association of the Sibyl with early Christianity is based on fact.�

�And the second verse?�

�That�s our clue. It has all the hallmarks of a Sibylline utterance, a riddle written on the leaves in front of the cave at Cumae. Here�s how I translate it:

Between two hills,

Where Andraste lies,

To be burned by fire, to be bound in chains,

To be beaten, to die by the sword.

�Meaning?� Costas said.

�The second part�s easy. Extraordinary, but easy. It�s the sacramentum gladiatorum, the gladiators� oath. Uri, vinciri, verberari ferroque necari. I swear to be burned by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten, to die by the sword.�

�Okay,� Costas said quietly. �You can�t spring anything new on me. Gladiators. I�m cool with that. And the first part?�

�Andraste was a British goddess, from before the Romans. We know about her from the Roman historian Dio Cassius, who says that Andraste was invoked by Boudica before a battle. You know about Boudica?�

�Boudica? Sure. The redhead queen.�

�She led the revolt against the Roman occupation in AD 60. The biggest bloodbath in British history.� Jack looked at the word again, then suddenly had a moment of utter clarity, as if he were just waking up. �Of course,� he said, his voice hoarse. �That�s what the Sibyl means.� He quickly scanned the final lines again. �The gladiators� oath. Ad gladium, by the sword. We�re being directed to a gladiators� arena, an amphitheater.�

�The Colosseum? Here in Rome?�

�There were many others.� Jack looked at the verse again. A place between two hills, a place where a British goddess lies. He suddenly peered at Costas, grinning broadly.

�I know that look.� Costas said.

�And I know exactly where we�re going,� Jack said triumphantly. �Come on. You might not want to hear this until we reach sunlight.�

Costas narrowed his eyes and looked at Jack suspiciously. �Roger that.� He heaved himself up, and they both crouched around and made their way down the steps to the cliff face, rappeling down one by one and kitting up again with their rebreathers at the bottom. As they made their way down to the cavern floor, they both kept an eye on the tunnel exit where their assailant had disappeared, but the flow of water had increased further and there was clearly no chance of a repeat entrance from that direction. At the water�s edge, they checked their breathing equipment. Costas studiously avoided looking down the passageway to the macabre seated figure in the sacred cave, but Jack was transfixed by it for a moment, suddenly aware of the momentous discovery they had made. The pool of water leading back toward the Cloaca Maxima seemed less forbidding now, a way out of the underworld rather than a portal into the unknown. Costas put both hands up, ready to shut his visor, then peered at Jack. �We�re getting to know old Claudius pretty well now, aren�t we?�

�He�s become a friend,� Jack said. �We seem to be following his life�s works, his achievements. It�s like he�s standing over my shoulder. Back there I really felt he was with us, egging us on.�

�So he didn�t trust Pliny after all.�

�I think he trusted him as a friend, but he knew that curiosity might get the better of him. If Pliny had survived Vesuvius, I�ve little doubt he would have come back here one day and opened that container. So Claudius gave him a riddle. A Sibylline prophecy. What neither of them knew was that Vesuvius would cut the whole story short. That wax tablet�s been sitting there unread since the day Pliny deposited it almost two thousand years ago.�

�For us to discover.�

�I think that�s what Claudius wanted. Not for Pliny to take up the trail, not another Roman, but someone far in the future, someone who could follow the clues and reveal his treasure at a time when it could be safely revealed.�

�What he didn�t foresee was that the threat would remain,� Costas murmured. �So where do we go now?�

Jack said nothing, but looked at Costas apologically.

�I knew it,� Costas said with resignation. �I just knew it. Another hole in the ground.�

�We need to find a long-lost goddess.�

�

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER JACK LED COSTAS PAST THE great bulk of St. Paul�s Cathedral in London, into the maze of streets and alleys that made up the heart of the old city. They had spent the previous night on board Seaquest II in the Mediterranean, and had flown into London City Airport early that morning. Jack�s first task had been a meeting with Ben Kershaw, IMU Security Chief. After his and Costas� experience in Rome, what had begun as a secretive archaeological quest had taken on a deadly new dimension. It seemed almost inconceivable that they should have been followed to London, but Jack was taking no chances. They would keep the lowest possible profile, and Ben and two others would be lurking in the background, watching, waiting, ready to pounce should there be any repeat of the encounter in the ancient cavern under Rome.

�Welcome to sunny London.� Costas grimaced, then stood back too late as a line of black cabs rumbled past, sluicing water up over his ankles. He and Jack both wore blue Gore-tex jackets with the hoods up, and Costas was fumbling inexpertly with an umbrella. What had begun as a heavily overcast day had now settled into constant drizzle, interspersed with occasional heavy downpours. Costas sniffed noisily, then sneezed. �So this was where Claudius brought his precious secret. Seems an awful long way from Judaea.�

�You�d be surprised,� Jack said, raising his voice above the traffic. �The early Christians in Roman Britain thought they had a direct link to the Holy Land, undistorted by Rome. It caused them no end of trouble when the Roman Church tried to assert itself here.�

�So we�re on the site of Roman London now.�

�Just entered it. The City of London today, the financial district, is the old medieval city, and that was built on the ruins of the Roman city of Londinium. You can still see the line of the Roman walls in the street layout.�

�This place must have seemed a backwater to the Romans,� Costas said, splashing across the street behind Jack. �Who�d have wanted to come here?�

�Look around you now, at the faces,� Jack said, as they navigated through a crowd of people hurrying on the pavement. �London was just as cosmopolitan in the Roman period. It was founded for commerce, a magnet for traders from all corners of the empire.� He veered left over the road and dodged through traffic, which had almost crawled to a standstill, then led Costas up the alleyway opposite. �It�s true that the Celtic background gave Britain a particular stamp, something that made it seem very distant to some Romans, pretty frightening. But this place was no backwater in the eyes of Roman entrepreneurs, freedman and retired soldiers on the make. It offered chances of fortune and social status they never would have found in Rome.�

�You mean guys like Narcissus, Claudius� freedman,� Costas said.

�Precisely. He may never have lived here, but those British lead ingots with his name stamp we found on St. Paul�s shipwreck show he was a pretty shrewd investor in the new province.�

�So it was Claudius who invaded this place.� Costas blinked at the drizzle that was beginning to envelop them, and then pulled the hood of his jacket forward. �Left Italy for this.�

Jack wiped the sheen of water from his face, then bounded across another street. They were on Lawrence Lane, heading toward the medieval Guildhall. �Claudius was on a mission,� he said. �It was a matter of family pride. Almost a hundred years before, his great-great-uncle Julius Caesar had landed in Britain with his legions, at the tail end of the conquest of Gaul. It was more a show of strength than an invasion, a bit of ancient gun-boat diplomacy to keep the Britons on their side of the Channel.�

Costas peered out gloomily from under his hood. �You mean Julius Caesar took one look at this place, thought better of it and left.�

Jack grinned. �He had other things on his mind. But he paved the way for traders. Even before Claudius invaded, there was a settlement of Romans at the tribal capital, Camulodunum, about fifty miles northeast of here, near modern Colchester. They imported cargoes of wine in pottery amphoras, exactly the same type we discovered on the shipwreck of St. Paul and saw in Herculaneum. The British loved alcohol.�

�Glad to see that hasn�t changed.� Costas� muffled voice came from several paces behind, and Jack turned to see his friend�s hooded figure standing in front of a pub. Costas pulled his hood down farther and pointed suggestively. Jack shook his head and beckoned him. �We�re almost there. Time for that later.�

�That�s what you always say,� Costas grumbled, then splashed behind Jack. They walked on for a few paces in silence, then Costas caught Jack�s arm and pulled him to a halt. �One thing been�s nagging at me since Rome, Jack.�

�Fire away.�

�It�s Elizabeth, your encounter with her at Herculaneum. You said she warned you, told you to be on your guard.�

�It was only a few snatched words.�

�I�m wondering about our assailant in the cave under Rome. Whoever he was, whoever they are, how could they have known we were there?�

�I assume we were being followed. I only really put it together afterward, but it wouldn�t have been difficult to trace us from Herculaneum to Seaquest II, then to Rome. A few tapped phone calls, even some highjacked satellite surveillance. We kept our movements low-key but it still wouldn�t have been difficult for the right people to know we were trucking IMU diving equipment into the center of Rome and going into the Cloaca Maxima.�

�You�re suggesting some pretty sophisticated surveillance.�

�That could be what we�re dealing with. No holds barred.�

�They seemed to know specifically what we were after. That guy in the cave. The last thing he said. �Give it to me.��

�Are you suggesting Elizabeth could have been part of this?�

�I�m not suggesting anything.�

Jack looked troubled. �She did say something else. I thought it was personal, about us, but maybe I was wrong.�

�Go on.�

�She said she knew.�

�Knew what?�

�That was it. Just that she knew. It was the last thing she said to me.�

�Do you think she knew what we�d found in Herculaneum? Do you think she�d been up the tunnel into the villa herself, before we arrived?�

�Maurice was certain that nobody else had been through the crack in the wall before us, and he knows better than anyone the signs of modern interference, tomb robbers. But Elizabeth could have gone up the tunnel in secret the night before we arrived, seen Narcissus and the carbonized scrolls, looked through the crack into the chamber. She could have known there were scrolls.�

�Why not tell you?�

�There was fear in her eyes. Real fear. And she�s one tough lady, brought up in the back streets of Naples. I�ve left phone messages for her at the superintendency, but there�s been no reply. I think she told me everything she could in those few moments. I think she was taking a big risk.�

�You think she�s on our side?�

�I don�t know what to think, Costas. I haven�t known what to think about Elizabeth for a long time. But I do believe she�s not pulling the strings. There something very powerful behind all this, powerful enough to put the gag on her. And that frightens me too.�

Costas grunted, peered up at the the drizzle again, then nodded slowly. �Okay. I guess we don�t have any choice. We carry on. But I still feel like bait.�

�Ben and the other guy are just behind us.�

Costas nodded, and then walked on. �Okay. Back to Roman London. A lot of foreigners here, so a lot of foreign ideas too.�

�Exactly.� They came to the edge of Gresham Street, and Jack pointed to the building opposite. �That�s what we�ve come for.� Costas gazed at the darkened masonry fa�ade, clearly much older than the towering concrete-and-glass structures of Lawrence Lane they had just passed. The fa�ade was broken by five tall windows with a circular window at each end, and the east side in front of them had columns and a pediment embedded in it in a neoclassical style. �English baroque,� Jack said. �Not quite as grand as St. Paul�s, but same period, same architect. One of the city churches rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren following the Great Fire of London in 1666.�

�St. Lawrence Jewry.�

�The name says it all.� Jack waited for a taxi to roar past. �This was the Jewish quarter of London until the Jews were expelled in the thirteenth century. St. Lawrence Jewry is Church of England, Anglican, but just up the road there are Catholic churches, nonconformist chapels, synagogues, mosques, you name it. That�s my point. It would have been similar in Roman London. Today most people worship one God, but in some ways it�s not that far from the polytheism that Romans such as Claudius would have known, with lots of different temples and forms of ritual.�

�Wasn�t there a cult of the emperor too?�

Jack nodded and stepped back against a wall for a moment, out of the spray from the road. �The Romans built a temple to Claudius at Colchester, and maybe one here in London too. Privately, I don�t think Claudius would have bought into it, if he really did survive to see himself being worshipped. It would have smacked too much of his deranged nephew, Caligula, and of Claudius� successor, Nero. But here in the provinces the Imperial cult was a practical matter, a way of getting the natives to pay dues to Rome as much as it was about idolizing the individual emperor himself.�

�Didn�t the Romans try to stamp out rival religions?�

�Not usually. That�s the beauty of polytheism, politically speaking. If you already have more than one god, then it�s easy enough to absorb a few more, less hassle than trying to eradicate them. And absorbing foreign gods stamps the authority of your gods over them. That�s what happened in Roman Britain. The Celtic war god was absorbed into the cult of Mars, the Roman war god, who had earlier absorbed the Greek war god, Ares. The Celtic goddess Andraste from our inscription was linked with Diana and Artemis. Even Christianity came to adapt pagan rites of worship, including temples and priests. Almost everything you see about that church over there would have been unfamiliar to the first Christians, even the idea of Christianity as an organized religion with acts of worship. To some of them, it might have been anathema.�

�Maybe even to their Messiah himself.�

�Provocative thought, Costas.�

�Remember, I was brought up Greek Orthodox. I can say these things. In Jerusalem, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Greeks think they�re the closest to Christ, custodians of the Tomb. But then, so do all the other denominations there, Armenian, Roman Catholic, you name it, all crowded up against it, competing. It�s a bit ridiculous, really. Not seeing the woods for the trees.�

Jack led Costas briskly over the road, past the church and into Guildhall Yard. A few meters behind them was the west wall of the church, and in front of them, set into the paving slabs of the courtyard, was a wide arc of dark stones, like part of a huge sundial extending under the surrounding buildings. Jack�s cell phone chirped and he spoke quickly into it, then began to walk toward the entrance to the Guildhall Art Gallery on the west side of the courtyard, following the alignment of the arc. �Jeremy�s there already,� he said. �And remember this arc in the courtyard. It clarifies what we�re about to see.�

�

Ten minutes later they stood at almost exactly the same spot as in the courtyard, but eight meters belowground. They were in a wide subterranean space, backlit around the edges, with brick and masonry ruins in front of them. They had taken off their coats, and Costas was reading a descriptive plaque. ��The Roman amphitheater,�� he murmured. �Fantastic. I had no idea.�

�Nor did anyone else, until a few years ago,� Jack said. �Much of Roman London was destroyed by German bombing during the Second World War, and clearance and redevelopment has allowed a lot of archaeological excavation to take place since then. But the chance for a big dig in Guildhall Yard didn�t come up till the late 1980s. This was their most astonishing find.�

�That elliptical arc in the pavement, above us,� Costas murmured. �Now I�ve got you.�

�That arc marks the outline of the arena, the central pit of the amphitheater,� Jack said.

�What date are we looking at?�

�You remember the Boudican revolt? That took place in AD 60, about the same time as St. Paul�s shipwreck. Roman London had been founded about fifteen years before that, soon after Claudius� invasion in 43. Boudica destroyed the first Roman settlement, but it soon recovered and there were big building projects under way within a few years. The amphitheater was wooden, but the wall you see here around the arena was made of brick and stone, probably begun sometime in the 70s.�

�In time for Claudius� second visit, incognito as an old man.�

�That�s my working hypothesis, that he came here sometime shortly before AD 79, on a secret mission.� Jack pulled out his translation of the extraordinary riddle they had discovered on the wax tablet in Rome. ��Between two hills,�� he said in a low voice. �That�s what London looked like, with the Walbrook stream running down the middle. And then the gladiator�s oath. � To be burned by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten, to die by the sword.� This has to be the spot.�

�Where Andraste lies,� Costas murmured. �A temple? A shrine?�

�Some kind of holy place, the home of a goddess.�

�But where exactly?�

�There�s one spot here that hasn�t been excavated, between the amphitheater and the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry,� Jack said. �Just behind the wall over there.� At that moment he heard footsteps coming up behind them and he swiveled round in alarm, then relaxed. �Here�s someone who might be able to tell us more.�

�

A TALL, RANGY YOUNG MAN WITH GLASSES AND A SHOCK of blond hair came loping up to Jack and Costas, smiling and waving his hand in greeting. With his dripping Barbour jacket and pale corduroys Jeremy Haverstock looked the quintessential English country squire, but his accent was American. �Hi, guys. Just got off the train from Oxford. Lucky your call caught me at the Institute yesterday, Jack. I was on my way out for a week in Hereford studying the lost cathedral library. Maria gave me complete responsibility for it, you know. It�s a big break for me, and I was a little worried about canceling. I couldn�t get her on her cell phone.�

�She�s back in Naples by now,� Jack said. �She and Hiebermeyer are tying themselves up in red tape. Don�t worry, I�ll put in a word.�

�I had time for a couple of hours in Balliol College Library in Oxford yesterday evening,� Jeremy said. �Turns out Balliol owned the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and they still have the archive. I looked up what you wanted. I think I found enough for you to go on, but I need to get back there after we visit the church. There�s one really intriguing lead I want to follow.�

�Great to see you again, by the way, Jeremy,� Costas said. �Hadn�t expected it so soon.�

�The whole thing still seems like a dream, our expedition,� Jeremy said. �The hunt for the lost Jewish treasure, Harald Hardrada and the Vikings, the underground caves in the Yucat�n. I thought I might try to write it down, but nobody would believe it.�

�Just make it fiction,� Costas said. �And leave our names out of it. At the moment, we�re trying to remain anonymous. We�ve had a slightly unpleasant encounter in Rome. Underground.�

�So Jack tells me,� Jeremy said quietly. �You guys seem to make a habit of it. I thought I recognized someone from Seaquest II in the art gallery.�

�Good,� Jack murmured. �They�re here.�

�We�ve got half an hour until we can get into the crypt.�

�Crypt?� Costas said.

�Fear not,� Jeremy said. �It�s empty. The first one is anyway.�

Costas gave him a dubious look, then sat down on a chair and leaned back, stretching out his legs. �Okay. So we�ve got a little time. Some questions. Put me in the picture. Tell me about this place before the Romans. In the lead-up to Claudius,� he said.

Jack looked at him keenly. �Prehistoric London was a weird place. Not a settlement, as far as we can tell, but a place where something was going on. Best guess is some kind of sacred site. Trouble is, we don�t know much about religion in the Iron Age, because they didn�t build temples or make representations of their gods that have survived. Almost all we have to go on are the Roman historians, most of them biased, all information secondhand.�

�Druids,� Jeremy said, sitting down on the edge of the amphitheater wall and leaning forward. �Druids and human sacrifice.�

Jack nodded. �When the Roman general Suetonius Paulinus heard of Boudica�s revolt, he was attacking the remote island of Mona, modern Anglesey off north Wales. It was the last bastion of the British who�d refused to come under Rome�s yoke, and the sacred stronghold of the Druids.�

�Guys in white robes,� Costas murmured.

�That�s the Victorian image of the Druid, a kind of Gandalf figure, Merlin, gathering mistletoe and traveling unharmed between warring kingdoms. The idea of priestly mediators is probably accurate, but the rest is pure fantasy.�

�Tacitus paints a pretty appalling picture,� Jeremy said.

Jack nodded, extracted a book from his khaki bag and flipped it open. �Tacitus� father-in-law, Agricola, had been governor of Britain, so he knew what he was talking about. The Romans at Mona were confronted by a dense mass of enemy along the shoreline. Among them were the Druids, who he says were �raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses.� After the Romans were victorious, they destroyed the sacred groves of the Druids, places where they �drench their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult their gods by means of human entrails.��

�Sounds like a few modern priests I�ve known,� Costas said wryly. �Power through terror.�

�As you say, there are plenty of historical parallels.�

�The Church in the Middle Ages, for one.� Jeremy murmured. �Submission, obedience, confession, vengeance, retribution.�

�All things the earliest Christians would have abhorred,� Jack said.

�And it wasn�t just male Druids on Anglesey,� Jeremy said.

Jack opened the book again. �The thing that really terrified the Romans, that awed them to the point of paralysis, was the women.�

�This gets even better,� Costas murmured.

�Hordes of fanatical women, �black-robed women with disheveled hair like Furies, brandishing torches.�� Jack put down the book. �It was the Romans� worst nightmare. The image of the Amazon, the warrior-queen, really kept the Roman male awake at night, and it wasn�t lust. Tacitus may have exaggerated this aspect of Britain to play on Roman fantasies about the barbarian world, a world beyond control, a world with no apparent method or rationale. But all the evidence suggests it was true, that the Romans in Britain really had walked into their own vision of hell, a world of Amazon queens and screaming banshees.�

�Boudica,� Costas said. �Was she some kind of Druid?�

�We know of one other British queen, Cartimandua of the Brigantes,� Jack replied. �And queen usually meant �high priestess.� There was nothing unusual in that. The Roman emperor was pontifex maximus, the Egyptian pharaohs were priest-kings, the queens and kings of England are defenders of the faith.�

�A redhead arch-Druid warrior-queen,� Costas said weakly. �God help her enemies.�

�And how does London fit into all this?� Jeremy said.

�That�s where we really get our teeth into the archaeology.� Jack took a map from his bag and rolled it out on the floor, and Jeremy knelt down and held the corners. �Or rather, the lack of it. This shows the London area during the Iron Age. As you can see, there�s no clear indication of habitation on the site of Londinium, where we are now. A few finds of pottery, some of the silver coins the tribes began producing in the decades before the Roman conquest. Not much else.�

�What�s this?� Costas pointed to an object marked in the river Thames west of the Roman town. �Armor?�

�The Battersea Shield. One of the finest pieces of metalwork ever found from antiquity, rivaling the best the Romans produced. You can see it in the British Museum. It probably dates to the century before the Romans arrived, and it may suggest what actually went on at this place.�

�Go on.�

Jack rested on his haunches. �Almost all the other major towns of Roman Britain were built on the site of Iron Age tribal capitals, often right next to the prehistoric earthworks. Camulodunum, where they built the temple to Claudius, was a colony for Roman veterans right on top of the Iron Age tribal capital of the Trinovantes. Verulamium was built next to the old capital of the Catuvellauni. It was an ingenious system, designed to stamp Roman authority on the heart of the tribal world, yet also to maintain the power base of the old tribal leaders, who became the new magistrates. It was rule by devolution, maintaining the pretense of native authority, just as the British did in India.�

�But London was the exception,� Jeremy said.

Jack nodded. �London became the provincial capital when it was rebuilt following the Boudican revolt. But something was going on here before the Romans arrived, something really fascinating. The Battersea Shield was almost certainly a ritual deposition, a valued object deliberately thrown into the river as a votive offering. There are other finds like this from the Thames and its tributaries. Swords, shields, spears. It�s a tradition that goes back at least to the Bronze Age and lasted well into the medieval period.�

�Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake,� Jeremy murmured.

�Offerings seem to have been made on tribal boundaries,� Jack continued, nodding. �Maybe the weapons were to arm the god of your tribe, a way of asserting territorial claims. And London was the biggest boundary site of them all, with at least five tribal areas converging on the river Thames.�

�Yet no Iron Age settlements have been found here, according to this plan,� Costas said.

�Remember Tacitus� account, the sacred groves on the isle of Anglesey? London was densely wooded at the time of the Roman invasion, right up to the water�s edge. Within the forest, along the edge of the river and its tributaries, were clearings, groves, places now submerged under the streets of London.�

Costas peered hard at the map. �How about this. In AD 60, when Boudica rose in revolt, the one place the Britons really can�t stomach having a new Roman settlement is London, built on their sacred site. They save their worst retribution for it.�

Jack nodded enthusiastically. �After the rebels had ravaged Camulodunum and driven the Roman survivors into the Temple of Claudius there, Tacitus tells us that the Celtic warriors heard an augury. At the mouth of the Thames a phantom settlement had been seen, in ruins. The sea was a bloodred color, and shapes like human corpses were seen in the ebb tide. For Boudica, it was a sign of where to go next.�

�What happened when Boudica hit London?�

�There were no survivors. Tacitus says that General Suetonius and his army reached London from Anglesey before Boudica arrived, but Suetonius decided his force was too weak to defend the place. There were lamentations and appeals, and the inhabitants were allowed to leave with him. Those who stayed, the elderly, the women, children, were all slaughtered by the Britons.�

�Cassius Dio tells more.� Jeremy picked up another book Jack had taken out of his bag. �As I recall, he�s our only other source on Boudica, writing over a hundred years after the revolt but perhaps based on lost firsthand accounts.� He found a page. �Here�s what the Britons did to their captives:

�The worst and most bestial atrocity committed by their captors was the following. They hung up naked the noblest and most eminent women, cut off their breasts and sewed them into their mouths, so that they seemed to be eating them; afterward they impaled the women on sharp skewers run through the length of their bodies. All this they did to the accompaniment of sacrifices, feasts and wanton behavior. This they did in their holy places, especially in the Grove of Andraste, their name for the goddess of Victory.�

�Sounds like a scene from Apocalypse Now,� Costas murmured.

�That may not be far off,� Jack said quietly. �The word boudica also meant �victory,� and it could be that Boudica�s own sacred grove was some pool up the river, her own holy of holies.�

�Her own private hell, you mean,� Costas said.

�Geoffrey of Monmouth thought there were mass beheadings,� Jeremy said quietly. �He wrote in the twelfth century, when human skulls started to be found along the Walbrook, just yards from here. They�ve been found ever since, when the river�s been dug into. Skulls, hundreds of them, washed down from somewhere and embedded in the river gravel, right under the heart of London, where the Walbrook flows into the Thames. Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to link the skulls with the Boudican revolt.�

�I don�t get it.� Costas had picked up Jack�s copy of Tacitus, and was flicking through the pages, stopping and reading. �Here we go again. Sacrifices, orgies of slaughter. Whole towns razed, everyone murdered. Men, women, children. Correct me if I�m wrong, but these hardly seem acts of charity. I don�t get why Claudius would have brought his precious document with the word of Christ to this place, to the care of some pagan goddess.�

�We don�t know what was going on,� Jack murmured. �The British rebels who knew of Jesus, perhaps even Boudica, may have seen him as a fellow rebel against Roman rule. They may have been sympathetic to early Christians for that reason alone. If Tacitus and Dio Cassius are right about the violation of Boudica�s daughters by the Romans, she would have had ample cause for retribution, for vengeance wreaked in the ways of the barbarian, ways which she must have known would cast the most fear into the hearts of Romans.�

�She must also have known it was suicidal, that she was on a one-way ticket,� Costas murmured. �Maybe it unhinged her. Remember Apocalypse Now�s Colonel Kurtz. A noble cause, unsound methods. Maybe Boudica got swallowed up in her own heart of darkness.�

�Speaking of which, it�s time.� Jeremy lurched to his feet. �The rector�s opened the crypt specially for us during the lunchtime concert in the church. Come on.�

�

A few minutes later they stood just inside the portico of the Guildhall Art Gallery, looking out over the yard with the elliptical line of the Roman amphitheater arena marked across it. To their right was the medieval fa�ade of the Guildhall itself, and to the left the solid, functional shape of St. Lawrence Jewry.

�This place seems pristine now, but it�s seen three circles of hell,� Jack said quietly, peering out into the drizzle. �Boudica�s revolt in AD 60, the massacre, possibly human sacrifice. Then the Great Fire of 1666. Of the buildings here, only the Guildhall wasn�t completely destroyed, because its old oaks wouldn�t burn. An eyewitness said it looked like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a palace of gold or a great building of burnished brass. Then, almost three centuries later, the inferno visited again. This time from above.�

�December 29, 1940,� Jeremy said. �The Blitz.�

�One night of many,� Jack replied. �But that night the Luftwaffe targeted the square mile, the City of London. My grandmother was here, a dispatch rider at the Air Ministry. She said the sound of dropping incendiaries was ominously gentle, like a rain shower, but the high-explosive bombs had been fitted with tubes so they screamed rather than whistled. Hundreds were killed and maimed, men, women, children. That famous picture of St. Paul�s Cathedral, wreathed in flames but miraculously intact, comes from that night. St. Lawrence Jewry wasn�t so lucky. It went up like a Roman candle, the flames leaping above the city.�

�My grandmother heard a terrible scream that night, like a banshee,� Jack said quietly. �It haunted her for the rest of her life.�

�Must have been a lot of horror,� Costas said.

�The scream came from the church,� Jack continued. �The organ was on fire and the hot air rushing through the pipes made it shriek, as if the church was in a death agony.�

�Shit.�

�You couldn�t put that in a horror movie, could you? Nobody would believe you.�

�I�m getting the jitters about this place, Jack.�

�Another circle of hell,� Jeremy murmured.

�It�s all still there, under our feet,� Jack said. �The Boudican destruction layer, charred earth and smashed pottery, human bone. Then masses of rubble from the old medieval church destroyed in 1666, cleared and buried to make way for Sir Christopher Wren�s new structures. And then another layer of destruction debris from the Blitz, with reconstruction work still going on.�

�Any unexploded ordnance?� Costas said hopefully. �You owe me one. That stuff you wouldn�t let me touch on the seabed off Sicily.�

Jack gave Costas a look, and then walked briskly from the art gallery portico over Guildhall Yard. �Remember where we are, the lay of the amphitheater,� he said as he stepped over the curved line in the pavement. He pointed to the western wall of St. Lawrence Jewry, about eight meters away. �And remember the proximity of the church.� They reached the church entrance and went inside. The lunchtime concert was about to begin, and Jeremy led them quickly through the nave packed with seated people, to a small wooden door off the west aisle. He opened it, ducked inside and beckoned. Costas followed him, then Jack. As Jack shut the door, the music began. The concert was a selection of Bach�s reconstructed violin concertos, and Jack recognized the Concerto in D Minor for solo violin, strings and basso profundo. The music was bold, confident, joyous, the strident Baroque beat giving order to confusion, structure to chaos. Jack lingered, and for a moment he thought of slipping back in and sitting anonymously in the audience. He had always loved the reconstructed concertos, the result of a kind of musical archaeology that seemed to mirror his own processes of discovery, small fragments of certainty put together by scholarship, by guesswork and intuition, suddenly fusing into an explosion of clarity, of euphoria. At the moment, he felt he needed the reassurance, uncertain whether the pieces they had found would meld, whether the trail they were following would lead to a conclusion that was greater than the sum of the parts.

�Come on, Jack,� Costas said from below. Jack closed the door and followed him down the steps, into an undercroft beneath the level of the nave and down into another chamber, smaller and darker. It was old, much older than the masonry structure of Wren�s church, and looked as if it had been recently cleaned. A bare bulb hung from the brick vault.

Once they were all inside, Jeremy closed and bolted the door at the bottom of the steps, then ran his hand along the masonry wall. �It�s a medieval burial chamber, a private crypt. It was found during the recent excavation work. This is as far as anyone�s got to the southern edge of the amphitheater.�

�This must be it,� Jack said. �Jeremy?�

�I agree. Absolutely.�

Costas eyed them. �Okay, Jack. I want a damn good explanation for what we�re doing here.�

Jack nodded, then squatted against the wall, his khaki bag hanging beside his legs. He was excited, and took a deep breath to steady himself. �Okay. When we worked out that riddle in Rome, when the location clicked, I immediately thought of Sir Christopher Wren and this church. When I was a boy I used to come here a lot, visit the old bomb sites and help with the excavations. My grandmother was a volunteer, drawn back to the place where she had watched helplessly decades before, trying to atone by helping with the reconstruction work. She took me along for my first excavation, and somehow her description of the inferno in 1940 brought the Boudican revolt to life for me, brought the true horror home�the color, of fire and blood and the terrible noises of human suffering. I�ve been fascinated by the Boudican revolt ever since, by all the attempts to find Boudica�s last place of refuge and her tomb. It became my grandmother�s passion too, and when she was dying it was the last thing we spoke about. I made her a promise I thought I�d never be able to fulfill. Later, as a student, having seen myself what the bombing and clearance had revealed of the Roman city, I became fascinated by the other great inferno, by what Wren might have come across in the prehistoric and Roman layers exposed after the Great Fire of 1666. That was before archaeology had begun as a discipline, when most artifacts were never even recognized, let alone recorded.�

�With a few exceptions,� Jeremy murmured.

Jack nodded. �Wren himself had an antiquarian interest, and mentioned finding Roman artifacts under St. Paul�s. That�s what really fired me up. Then I discovered that the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry had been owned by Balliol College, Oxford. One of my uncles was a fellow of the college, and he arranged for me to visit the archive, to see whether there was any record of finds made here after 1666. That visit was years ago, when I was being drawn away by diving and shipwrecks, and I didn�t take detailed notes. That�s what I asked Jeremy to check out.�

�And Jeremy came up trumps,� Costas said.

�It was part of the master mason�s diary,� Jeremy replied, pulling a notepad out of his coat pocket. �It�s fantastic. It was when they were clearing the rubble and burnt timbers after the fire, trying to find holes underground to bury the stuff away�disused wells, cesspits, old vaults. One of the workmen broke into a crypt which must be this chamber. The mason described going through into another crypt, then seeing a line of large pottery pipes with handles, upright in a row against the earth wall on one side. He thought they might be drainage pipes, possibly the lining of a well, so they left them intact. They stuffed as much debris as they could into a space off to one side and then bricked it up. They then came back out and bricked up the entrance from the first crypt also.� Jeremy gestured toward the crumbling wall on the far side of the chamber, opposite the side with the entrance door. �Over there. That must be it. The brickwork looks hasty, and it�s definitely post-medieval. It looks like it hasn�t been disturbed since.�

Costas looked perplexed. �Okay. Drainage pipes. So where does that get us?�

Jack took a photograph from his bag and handed it to Costas. �Where it gets us,� he said excitedly, �is back to the time of Boudica.�

�Ah,� Costas murmured. �Got you. Not drainage pipes. Roman amphoras.�

�More than just amphoras,� Jack enthused. �Much more. Intact amphoras by themselves would be a fantastic find, but it�s the context that counts. Think of where we are.�

�The Roman amphitheater?� Costas said. �A bar, an ancient tavern like the one we saw at Herculaneum?�

�Good guess,� Jack said. �But that picture�s from a place called Sheepen. It shows the amphoras exactly as archaeologists found them. Intact wine amphoras, five of them in a row, along with drinking cups and other goods. They were in a grave.�

�A Roman grave?� Costas said.

Jack shook his head. �Not Roman. Remember what I said about the Celtic taste for wine? Imported wine had prestige value, a sign of wealth and status. No, the Sheepen amphoras were in the grave of a Celtic nobleman, a warrior.� Jack suddenly felt exuberant. �All those years ago, when I was a boy, I knew I was on to something really big when I came to the Guildhall site. I just had a hunch. I thought it was the amphitheater when they found it years later. But now this, something else, maybe even more extraordinary. I wish my grandmother were here now. Wherever else this trail leads us, this could be another dream of mine realized.�

Costas looked at the photo, then at the bricked-up wall in front of them. He started to speak, but he suddenly stopped, transfixed. He looked at the photo again, then at Jack. �Holy cow,� he said weakly.

Jack looked at him, and nodded. �Yes.�

�That goddess Andraste,� Costas whispered.

Jack nodded wordlessly.

�What do we do now?� Jeremy said.

Jack looked at his watch. �If everything goes according to schedule, the van with the equipment should be here in an hour. By then the concert upstairs will be over and we�ll be able to get all the gear in discreetly, if the church people agree.�

�I�ve just got one more guy to talk to, but we�ll be good to go,� Jeremy said, eyeing Costas, who gave a thumbs-up.

�We�re not taking any chances,� Jack said. �Full kit. We might be going below the water table, and who knows what else is down there. I�m not even going to tackle that wall until we�re ready. Meanwhile, I might just go up and listen to the music.�

�No, you don�t,� Costas said. �I still need to get a few things straight. A few big things. Like how Christianity fits into all this warrior-queen stuff.�

�Okay,� Jeremy said, pushing up his spectacles and peering at Costas. �If it�s early Christianity in Britain, it�s one of my areas of interest. Fire away.�

�Before meeting you this morning we went to the British Library,� Costas said. �Jack needed to check some source material on this church, and while he was busy I visited the display of ancient manuscripts. Incredible stuff. I saw one of the Bibles brought to Britain by St. Augustine, in AD 597. That�s almost two hundred years after the Romans left Britain. That�s where I�m confused. I thought Augustine was the one who brought Christianity to Britain. I thought, Hold on, how can there be Christians in Roman Britain?�

Jeremy leaned forward from where he was sitting against the wall. �That�s a common misconception. And it�s what the Anglo-Saxon church historians would have liked you to believe, even the big names like Bede.�

�I don�t get it.�

�The Church of England, the Ecclesia Anglicana, was really the Church of the Anglo-Saxons. It traced its origins to the mission of Augustine, who supposedly brought Christianity to the pagan population of Britain well after the Romans had left. It was a political tool, intimately bound up with Anglo-Saxon kingship and with the power of Rome. But even the Anglo-Saxon historians knew there had been Christianity in Britain before that, when the Romans had ruled.�

�The Ecclesia Britannorum,� Jack murmured. �The Church of the Britons. The Celtic Church.�

�To get a handle on it, you have to go to Gildas,� Jeremy said. �A British monk who lived in the early sixth century, about a hundred years after the Romans left, a couple of generations before Augustine arrived. Gildas is just about the only Briton we know of who may have been alive at the time of King Arthur, who was probably a British warlord fighting the Anglo-Saxon invaders at that time.�

�Sounds like the original Friar Tuck,� Costas murmured.

�His book�s called De Excidio Britonum, �The Ruin of Britain.� It was written in Latin, but I�ve got a translation.� Jack delved into his bag, and brought out a scuffed blue and gray book with a Chi-Rho symbol on the front. �It�s a rant about how the kings who ruled Britain after the Romans had failed in their Christian duty. I�ve got it because Gildas mentions Boudica. It was a present from my grandmother when I was a boy.�

�Gildas called Boudica a deceitful lioness,� Jeremy said, grinning.

�That�s all he says, but it suggests that the memory of her rebellion lingered on, even in a churchman who knew virtually nothing of Roman history�and little of Christian history, for that matter.�

�But he gives us the first-ever account of the founding of the British Church, the Celtic Church in the time of the Romans,� Jeremy said.

Jack nodded, and turned the page. �Here it is.� He read it aloud:

�Meanwhile, to an island numb with chill ice and far removed, as in a remote nook of the world, from the visible sun, Christ made a present of his rays, that is, his precepts, Christ the true sun, which shows its dazzling brilliance to the entire earth, not from the temporal firmament merely, but from the highest citadel of heaven, that goes beyond all time. This happened first, as we know, in the last years of the emperor Tiberius, at a time when Christ�s religion was being propagated without hindrance: for, against the wishes of the senate, the emperor threatened the death penalty for informers against soldiers of God.�

�At least he got the weather right,� Costas grumbled. �So what�s he on about? The emperor Tiberius?�

�The Roman emperor at the time of the Crucifixion,� Jeremy said.

Jack closed the book. �Tiberius was Claudius� uncle, ruled Rome from AD 14 to 37. Gildas seems to think that Tiberius was himself a Christian, at odds with a pagan Senate. It�s all pretty garbled and probably an anachronism, referring to the problems the Christian emperors had with the pagan Senate in the fourth century AD, after Constantine the Great had made Christianity the State religion. There�s no other indication anywhere that Tiberius was a Christian. But what we�ve found in the last few days, in Herculaneum, in Rome, has set me thinking.�

�About others in Rome who knew of Jesus of Nazareth,� Jeremy murmured.

�The British Church�the Celtic Church of the Roman period�has left no written records,� Jack replied. �If there ever were any, they would almost certainly have been destroyed by the Anglo-Saxons. But was Gildas recounting a distant truth, a folk memory perhaps, a secret passed on by word of mouth among followers of the British Church for more than five centuries? Was he telling us that there indeed had been a Christian emperor very early on, or an emperor well disposed toward Christians? Not Tiberius, but another emperor who had been alive at the time of Christ?�

�Claudius,� Costas exclaimed.

�It�s just possible.� Jack was animated, and gesticulated as he spoke. �By the time of Gildas, centuries later, the true identity of the emperor could have been confused. Claudius would have been remembered as the invader of Britain, as the deified emperor worshipped in the Temple at Colchester. A pretty unlikely Christian. But Gildas would have known of Tiberius from the Gospels, as the emperor who had presided over the death of Jesus. To Gildas, it might have seemed the ultimate triumph of Christianity to suggest that Tiberius himself was a convert. A pretty extravagant fiction, but Gildas lived at a time when many fanciful additions were being made to the story of events surrounding the life of Christ.�

�And he�s talking about Britain,� Costas said.

�Gildas was implying that Christianity came to Britain very early on, in the first century AD,� Jeremy said. �He�s even implying that the emperor himself brought it, in person. That�s what�s really fascinating. It�s only through being here ourselves, on the trail of an emperor, that those lines in Gildas� book suddenly take on a new significance, a real authority. His De Excidio Britonum was a book exclusively on Britain, not some wider history.�

�What�s the other evidence for early Christianity here?� Costas said. �From archaeology, I mean.�

�Just like in the Mediterranean region,� Jack replied. �Incredibly elusive until the second century, and it�s not until the fourth century that you start to see churches, burials, overt symbols of Christianity, after it becomes the State religion. But early Christianity was a religion of the word, not of idols and temples. It was secretive, and often persecuted. If it wasn�t for the Gospels and a few Roman sources, we�d know nothing at all about Christianity in the first century AD. Remember our shipwreck off Sicily? That scratched Chi-Rho symbol was the only overt evidence we saw there of Christianity, yet we�re talking about the ship of St. Paul, one of the key episodes in early Christian history.�

�And remember who we�re looking at in early Roman Britain,� Jeremy added pensively. �There were the immigrants, traders and soldiers who may well have brought the idea of Christianity with them, and may have come to worship Christ as others did Mithras or Isis. But the majority of the population were natives, Romanized to some degree but retaining much of their Celtic way of life and customs. Their religion has left almost no archaeological trace. These were not people who were inclined to build temples and altars or to make statues of their gods. Archaeology was never going to tell us much.�

�Okay.� Costas narrowed his eyes. �But if there was Christianity in early Roman Britain, why would the Anglo-Saxon Church want to deny it? I mean, wouldn�t it have been something to celebrate, that their religion had been in place hundreds of years before?�

�But it wasn�t their religion,� Jeremy said quietly.

�Huh?�

�The time of Gildas, the time of King Arthur, wasn�t just a formative period in the political genesis of Britain,� Jeremy said. �It was also a time when a conflict within the Christian communities of Britain first began to play out in a big way. Everyone knows about King Henry the Eighth, his break with the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. But the roots of the English Reformation under Henry go way back to this period, to the time when the British Church stood up against Rome and proclaimed their direct connection to the Holy Land, to Jesus the man.�

�The Pelagian heresy,� Jack murmured.

Jeremy nodded. �A lot of the Church schisms are obscure, but this one was straightforward, a really profound one. It went right to the heart of Christian belief. It also went right to the heart of the Church as an institution. It frightened a lot of those in power in Rome. It still does.�

�Pelagian?� Costas said.

�Pelagius was another monk in Britain, earlier than Gildas, possibly Irish by birth, born about AD 360, when the Romans were still in control of Britain. By Pelagius� time, the Roman Empire had been officially Christian for several decades, since the conversion of Constantine the Great, and efforts were being made to establish the Roman Church in Britain. Pelagius himself went to study in Rome, but was very disturbed by what he saw there. He came into direct conflict with one of the power-houses of the Roman Church.�

�St. Augustine of Hippo,� Jack said.

�Author of the Confessions and the City of God. The earlier Augustine�not the one who brought the Roman Church to Britain, the one whose Bible you saw in the British Library, Costas. Augustine of Hippo came to believe in the concept of predestination, that Christians were utterly dependent on Divine grace, on the favor of God. In his view, the Kingdom of Heaven could only be sought through the Church, not by free volition. It was a theological doctrine, but one with huge practical benefits for the Roman Church, for the newly Christian State.�

�Domination, control,� Jack murmured.

�It made believers subservient to the Church, as the conduit of Divine grace. It made the State stronger, more able to control the masses. Church and State were fused together as an unassailable powerhouse, and the stage was set for the medieval European world.�

�But Pelagius was having none of that,� Jack said.

�Pelagius probably thought of himself as a member of the original Christian community which existed in Britain before the official Roman Church arrived, the Celtic Church who traced themselves back to the earliest followers of Jesus in the first century AD,� Jeremy said. �Pelagius is virtually the only evidence we have for their beliefs. It seems possible that they took the concept of heaven on earth at face value, the idea that heaven could be found around them, in their earthly lives. To them, the message of Jesus may have been about finding and extolling beauty in nature, about love and compassion for its own sake. It would have been a morally empowering concept, completely at odds with what Pelagius saw in Rome. When Pelagius was there he stood up against Augustine of Hippo, denied the doctrine of predestination and original sin, defended innate human goodness and free will. It was a hopeless battle, but he was a beacon for resistance and his name resounded through the centuries, in hidden places and secret meetings, when any hint of it could have meant arrest, torture, even worse.�

�What happened to him?� Costas said.

�Pelagianism was condemned as heretical in AD 418. Pelagius himself was excommunicated and banished from Rome. It�s not clear whether he ever got back to Britain. Some believe he went to Judaea, to Jerusalem, to the site of Christ�s Tomb, and was murdered there.�

�There were uncompromising forces already within the Roman Church, ready to stop at nothing to carry out what they saw as Divine justice,� Jeremy said. �But they couldn�t control what went on in Britain. After the Roman withdrawal in AD 410, after the Roman towns of Britain had crumbled and decayed, the Church which had been brought by Constantine�s bishops seems to have virtually died out. That�s what Gildas was lamenting. He himself was probably one of the last monks in Britain of the Roman Church of the fourth century, though a pretty confused one. With the edifice of the State removed, the Roman Church no longer held sway over a people who were not attracted by Augustinian doctrine. Then the Anglo-Saxons invaded. They were pagan. That�s where we come to the second Augustine, St. Augustine of Canterbury. He was sent by Pope Gregory in AD 597 with forty monks to convert King Aethelbert of Kent, and after that the Roman Church was here to stay.�

�But Celtic Christianity somehow survived,� Costas said.

�There was something in its philosophy that spoke to the Celtic ancestry of the Britons,� Jeremy said, �something they also believed was true to the original teachings of Jesus. Something that told a universal truth about freedom and individual aspiration. Something which had been taught to them by the first followers of Jesus to reach these shores, perhaps even by the emperor dimly remembered by Gildas. A wisdom they had kept and cherished, a sacred memory.�

�People having control and responsibility for their own actions, their own destiny,� Jack said.

�That�s the nub of Pelagianism,� Jeremy agreed. �When Pelagius came to Rome, he saw moral laxity, decadence, and he blamed it on the idea of Divine grace. If everything is predestined and the whim of God, why bother with good deeds, or with trying to make the world a better place? Pelagianism was all about the individual, about free will, about moral strength. In his view, Jesus� example was primarily one of instruction. Jesus showed how to avoid sin and live a holy life, and Christians can choose to follow him. What�s really fascinating is how these ideas may also represent a continuity from Celtic paganism, which seems to have championed a person�s ability to triumph as an individual, even over the supernatural.�

�What I don�t get is how this early Celtic Christianity survived the Dark Age after the Romans,� Costas said. �I mean, you�ve got the Anglo-Saxons invading, then the Vikings, then the Normans. This Celtic ancestry stuff must have been pretty fringe by then.�

�It�s something to do with the kind of people who chose to come to Britain,� Jeremy responded. �Not just those famous invasions, but later migrations too, the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain, the Huguenot Protestant refugees from France and Holland. Some common thread, character traits needed to succeed here. Independence, willfulness, stubbornness, endurance in the face of authority, strength through hardship. Everything about this place where we are now, the history, the Blitz spirit�all of it makes those ideas espoused by Pelagius seem particularly British.�

�I think it�s something to do with the weather myself,� Costas grumbled. �You�ve got to have something extra to survive this place.� He paused. �So you think this church St. Lawrence Jewry has all this history in it?�

�There�s no proof there was a church here before the eleventh century, when the Normans arrived,� Jack said. �But nobody knows where the churches of late Roman London were located. Before then, Christian meetings were secretive, and even after Christianity became the official religion in the fourth century AD, congregational worship never really took hold in Roman Britain. But I believe St. Lawrence Jewry is a very likely spot. Right next to the amphitheater, a place that would have been associated with the martyrdom of Christians. And churches were often built on sites of pagan ritual. There may have been more going on here, something very old�sacred long before Roman London. And this place may have concealed an extraordinary secret.�

�The heart of darkness,� Costas murmured, looking at the bricked-up wall at the end of the chamber.

Jack followed his gaze, excitement coursing through him. He looked at his watch. The music had finished upstairs in the nave, and there was a knock on the door. He got up, took a deep breath and slung his bag over his shoulder. �I think we just might be about to find out.�

�

AN HOUR LATER, JACK AND COSTAS CROUCHED AGAIN inside the small chamber of the crypt, this time behind the glare of two portable tungsten lights. An IMU De Havilland Dash 8 aircraft had freighted all the equipment they needed from the Cornwall campus to London City Airport, including a fresh pair of E-suits to replace those they had left with Massimo in Rome. Jeremy had obtained immediate permission from the Church authorities for an exploratory reconnaissance beyond the bricked-up wall at the side of the chamber. Above them, the lunchtime concert had ended and they could hear a Gregorian chant wafting down from choristers practicing in the nave, a sound Jack found strangely reassuring as they contemplated another dark passage into the unknown.

�Okay. It�s done. There�s definitely a space behind there, but I can�t see much without getting in.� Jeremy had been creating a hole in the brick wall, pulling out the bricks and stacking them to either side. The wall turned out to have been poorly constructed, with mortar which had not been properly set, allowing him to remove the bricks with ease.

�Good,� Jack said. �Your job now is to hold down the fort.� Jeremy nodded, walked back to check the bolt on the door into the crypt and then sat against the wall, watching them kit up.

Costas was staring at an image on his laptop computer as he checked the neck seal on his suit. �We�re about three meters below the present level of the Guildhall Yard, about two meters above the Roman layers. Below that, there�s a tributary of the Walbrook stream somewhere just in front of us. With all this rain it�s likely to be pretty wet.�

�We�re going to need the suits either way,� Jack said. �Could be pretty toxic down there.�

Costas groaned. �Gas leaks?�

Jack gestured around the burial chamber. �Two thousand years of human occupation, Costas. I�m not going to spell it out for you.�

�Don�t.� Costas leaned over and flipped down Jack�s visor, then adjusted the regulator on the side of Jack�s helmet to verify the oxygen flow. He quickly did the same to his own helmet. Suddenly they were sealed off from the outside world, only able to hear each other through their intercom. �The oxygen rebreathers should give us four, maybe four and a half hours,� he said.

�We could be back here in ten minutes,� Jack said. �It could be a dead end.�

�If only I had our remote-sensing equipment from Seaquest II, then we could snake in a camera and see what�s behind that wall.�

�Nothing beats the human eye,� Jack said. �Come on.� He nodded back at Jeremy, who had taken his laptop out of his bag and spread out his notebooks. Jack crouched down on all fours and made his way through the hole in the brickwork, his headlamp illuminating the darkness in front of him. Once he was through, Costas came alongside. They were perched on a stone landing, and in front of them a dozen steps led down to another entranceway, a low arched doorway about four feet high. Jack squatted on his haunches and began to sidle down the steps, playing the flashlight in his hand across the stone steps in front of him.

�Let�s hope the ceiling doesn�t give way,� Costas muttered.

Jack glanced up. �It�s corbeled stone, about as strong as you could hope for. The masonry looks identical to the old part of the burial crypt we�ve just come through�fourteenth century, maybe earlier. I can see reused Roman tile and ragstone, probably taken from the ruins of the amphitheater.� He continued down the steps, reached the bottom and stood up, his back stooped over awkwardly. In front of him the arched stone entrance was blocked by the partly rotted remains of a wooden door, with a grilled window about ten inches wide directly in front of him. Jack shone his headlamp through.

�Looks like a prison cell,� Costas said.

�It�s a crypt,� Jack murmured. �Another burial crypt. Exactly as Sir Christopher Wren�s mason described in his diary. And it looks undisturbed.�

�What do you mean �undisturbed�? I thought Wren�s guys got in here.�

�I mean it looks full. No parking space.�

�Oh, no.�

Jack pushed cautiously at the door, and it gave way slightly. �It�s still solid,� he said. �Damp conditions, ideal for organic survival. We could find some pretty amazing preservation down here.�

�Oh, good,� Costas said weakly.

Jack pushed again with both hands, and the door came completely ajar. Ahead of them was a single vaulted chamber, similar in proportions to the burial crypt they had just come through, but about three times as large. Ranged along either side were stone cavities, some of them crudely bricked over, others open and brimming with old wooden coffins, some intact and lidded, others crumbled and decayed. Dark shapeless forms were just visible within. Jack took a few steps forward, while Costas remained glued to the spot, staring straight ahead. �This is my worst nightmare, Jack.�

�Come on,� Jack said. �It�s all part of life�s rich tapestry.�

Costas edged forward, paused, then resolutely stepped over and peered closely at one of the erupted coffins, clearly having decided that scientific inspection was the best therapy. �Interesting,� he murmured, clearing his throat. �There�s a pottery pipe emerging from the top of this coffin, blackened at one end. I never realized people poured libations at Christian burials.�

�Nice try, but wrong,� Jack said. �You brought it up, so I�m telling you: Those pipes were for letting off steam.�

�What?�

�You see them in Victorian catacombs,� Jack said. �The trouble with a lead-lined coffin is that it can explode, especially if the body�s sealed in it too soon after death. It�s the first stage of decomposition, you know. Off-gassing.�

�Off-gassing.� Costas swayed slightly, but remained fixated on the coffin.

�The pipes were lit to burn it off,� Jack said. �That�s where the blackening comes from.�

Costas swayed backward, then slipped on the floor, catching himself on the edge of an open niche on the opposite wall. He pulled himself upright again, then lifted his foot from a sticky pool that extended under one of the niches near the entrance. �We must be closer to water level than I thought,� he murmured. �There�s too much here for it just to be condensation.�

�I�ve got more bad news for you, I�m afraid.�

Costas stared at the pool, then at the dark stain running down the stonework, from the burial niche above. �Oh, no,� he whispered.

�Saponification,� Jack said cheerfully. �There�s a wonderful account by Sir Thomas Browne, a kind of seventeenth-century Pliny. He loved digging up old graves. Hiebermeyer and I did a course on mummification with the Home Office forensics people, and I can remember it word for word. �We met with a fat concretion, when the nitre of the Earth, and the soft and lixivious liqueur of the body, had coagulated large lumps of fat, like the consistency of the hardest candle soap; whereof part remaineth with us.��

�Body liqueur,� Costas whispered, frantically wiping his foot on a fallen brick. �Get me out of here, Jack.�

�Mortuary wax,� Jack replied. �The slow hydrolysis of fats into adipocere. Especially likely in alkaline conditions, where the bodies are sealed off from bacteria, and where it�s damp. Like I said, we�re going to find amazing preservational conditions here.�

�It couldn�t get any worse than this.�

�Don�t count on it.� Jack squatted down to peer at the inscribed stone blocks he could now see in front of each intact niche, built into the center of the brick facings. He moved along, from one to the next. �Fascinating,� he murmured. �Normally, crypts in London churches were used for a few decades, maybe a century or so, stuffed full and then sealed up. But this one�s very strange. The formula on each of these inscriptions is virtually identical, but they range over a huge time span. Each of them has a Chi-Rho symbol, followed by a Latin name. Look, here. Maria de Kirkpatrick. And there, Bronwyn ap Llewellyn. They�re mostly Latin renditions of British names. And they�ve got dates, in Roman numerals. The one nearest to you, on the lower shelf by the door, is the latest, from 1664, just a few years before the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the medieval church.�

�That figures.� Costas was still staring into the middle distance, clearly trying to focus on something other than the physical horror around him. He cleared his throat. �The diary. It said the crypt was sealed by Wren�s men in the 1680s. It makes sense there shouldn�t be any more burials after that.�

Jack reached the far end of the chamber, having carefully circumvented the sticky slick on the floor. He squatted down again and shifted a few fallen bricks with his hands. �And the earliest of these inscriptions is incredibly early,� he murmured. �The oldest ones at this end have crumbled, but there are two here with Anglo-Saxon names. Aelfrida and Aethelreda. I can�t read the name on this one, but I can read the date: AD 535. My God,� he said hoarsely, �that�s the Dark Ages, the time of King Arthur, of Gildas. That�s even before Augustine brought Roman Christianity back to Britain, yet here�s a burial with a Christian symbol.�

�The names are all women,� Costas said quietly.

�This chamber is a lot older than the medieval church,� Jack continued, peering around. �It looks as if it was kept in repair during the medieval period, up to the time of the Great Fire, but the lower courses of brick and stone look Roman.� He knelt down, and swept his hand under the farthest niche. �No doubt about it. We�re inside a catacomb built in the Roman period. The only one ever found in Britain.�

�Check out the inscription above the doorway.�

Jack peered up, and saw a single register of letters carved into the masonry, covered in blackened accretion. Costas slowly read out the words:

URI VINCIRI VERBERARI FERROQUE NECARI

�Good God,� Jack exclaimed, standing up and staring, his mind in a whirl. �It�s the gladiator�s oath. The sacramentum gladiatorum.�

�The Sibylline prophecy,� Costas said, his voice hushed. �The wax tablet we found under Rome. It�s the same wording, isn�t it?

�Identical. To be burned by fire, to be bound in chains, to be beaten, to die by the sword. Good old Claudius,� Jack murmured. �I think we�re exactly where he wanted us to be.�

�And where the Sibyl wanted him to be.�

�This must originally have been the gladiators� mortuary, the death chamber, where the mutilated corpses from the arena next to us were laid out before being taken away and burned,� Jack murmured. �And then it was used as a Christian burial crypt, for over a thousand years. A burial crypt for women, for women who were somehow bound together, over all that time.�

�Maybe they were a secret society, a guild,� Costas said. �Maybe they wanted to be buried close to whatever lies beyond that wall.�

�According to the diary, this is where the Roman amphoras were found by Wren�s men,� Jack said. �And this must be the wall, where we are now.�

Costas placed both hands on the brick face in front of them, and cautiously pushed. He flinched as several of the bricks shifted. �It�s not mortared,� he said. �It looks like they just stacked the bricks.�

�That makes sense,� Jack said. �The diary says they decided to seal up the entire crypt back in the first chamber, where we�ve left Jeremy, so they must have abandoned sealing up this deeper chamber partway through. We�ll have to take it down from the top, brick by brick.�

Costas experimentally pushed a little farther, and one of the bricks that had shifted fell out behind. Suddenly the whole edifice collapsed inward, and they both leapt backward as the air filled with red dust. Costas narrowly avoided the sticky pool on the floor.

�I was going to say, we don�t have time for finesse,� Jack said, wiping the front of his visor.

�Check it out,� Costas said, picking himself up and moving forward.

Jack aimed his flashlight where Costas was gesturing. Where the brick wall had been was now a gaping hole, but just inside to the left was a row of what looked like sections of old ceramic drainpipe, pointing upward. Jack edged forward over the pile of fallen bricks and beckoned excitedly. �Recognize those?�

�Amphoras. Roman amphoras. Just what we�re looking for.�

�Right. And they�re exactly the same type of wine amphora we found on St. Paul�s shipwreck, the ones made in Campania near Pompeii and Herculaneum. Remember the date of the wreck?�

�AD 58, give or take a bit.�

�Right. These were typical wine amphoras of that period. What was the date of Boudica�s rebellion? AD 60, 61? If wine amphoras were being left as an offering here, these are exactly the type you�d expect to find at that date.�

Costas squeezed in beside Jack and peered into the darkness beyond. �Not sure where we go from here. Seems to be some kind of shaft.�

Jack looked intently around. To his left was a precarious mass of rubble, much of it old brick, but it included charred and blackened timbers, all jumbled and compressed into a tight mass. It protruded into a timber-lined shaft about two meters wide and three meters deep, with water at the bottom. �Destruction debris from the Great Fire of 1666, probably dumped during Wren�s rebuilding of the church. If any of his men went beyond this crypt, that�s the way they must have gone. We�ll never get through all that without a major excavation. It�s out of the question. Our only hope now is going down this shaft.�

�What is it?�

�Looks like a well. There were fresh springs in the gravels beside the Thames. London water was remarkably healthy until it was swamped by sewage. Wells were often timber-lined like this.� Jack leaned in and peered at the wood. �Fascinating. Reused ships� timbers. These are overlapping, clinker-built, Viking. Remember our Viking longship in the iceberg off Greenland?�

�I never thought I�d say this, but I�d much rather be there now.�

�I�m going in.� Jack swung his legs over the edge of the hole, pivoting on his arms until he was facing backward. He grasped Costas� arm as he hung over the edge, his feet dangling a meter or so over the black pool below. �Let�s hope it�s not a bottomless pit.� He let go and fell with a huge splash, coming to rest on his knees in mud, his upper body out of the water. �You next.� He reached his foot experimentally around. �I think it�s a safe landing.�

Costas grunted, then lowered himself gingerly over the edge, his visor pressed against the damp wood of the well lining. He shifted slightly to avoid falling on Jack. He had moved in front of a small section of wood in the well lining that had partly rotted away, and he suddenly froze.

�What is it?� Jack said.

Costas� voice sounded distant, hoarse. �About this well, Jack. It wasn�t dug through gravel.�

�What?�

�It was dug through bones,� Costas said, his voice sounding beyond emotion. �Human bones, thousands of them, packed in around us. It�s all I can see.�

�It could be a plague pit,� Jack said thoughtfully. �But more probably an ossuary, bones cleared from a crypt or a graveyard. Still, a good thing we�ve got the E-suits on, just in case.�

Costas let go of the edge of the wall and dropped with an enormous splash beside Jack, disappearing completely under the water before rebounding in a tumult of mud. The water settled, and he raised his hands, looking at the dark glutinous streaks on his gloves. �Good old-fashioned dirt,� he muttered. �I think I�ve had enough of human remains.�

�What you said set me thinking,� Jack said. �About a well, dug through an old ossuary. Pretty unlikely. I think I may have got it wrong. I think what we�ve actually got here is a cesspit.�

Costas wiped his visor, streaking it with brown, and stared speechless at Jack.

�Actually, cesspits were quite hygienic,� Jack said. �Each dwelling usually had one. It was only when they flooded that raw sewage was a problem, and then after people started using sewers that weren�t up to the job.�

�Is that supposed to be reassuring?� Costas sounded close to tears. �Come diving with Jack Howard: no latrine too deep.� He tried to struggle upward, suddenly disappeared from sight, then bobbed up again. �I thought so,� he said. �There�s water flowing below us. This shaft has broken through into an underground stream.�

�The tributary of the Walbrook stream, where they found the skulls,� Jack said. �Maybe we�ve got a chance after all. If we can get into it and find another opening upward, we might be able to get beyond that rubble obstruction to the edge of the Roman amphitheater.�

�Or we might join the city of the dead down here. Permanently.�

�Always a possibility.�

�Okay.� Costas pulled out his waterproof GPS computer unit and called up a 3-D topographical outline he had programed into it while they were waiting for the equipment to arrive at the church. �The flow of the stream is easterly, toward the Walbrook, which then flows south into the Thames. The outer edge of the amphitheater is only five meters to the north of us. If we somehow get beyond that point, then we may as well turn back. We�ll be into the area that was dug up in the recent excavations.�

�I�ll be right behind you,� Jack said.

�See you on the other side.� Costas dropped below the water, out of view. For a few moments there was a commotion as his feet broke the surface, then it settled down and the pool became a glistening sheen of darkness. Jack squatted, the water up to his chest, and listened to Costas� breathing through the intercom. He thought for a moment of his own secret fear, the claustrophobia he fought so hard to control, and realized that his mind sensed a lifeline to this place, an exit route through the ancient crypt and the burial chamber, to the church above. What lay beyond this pool was that crucial extra step beyond the escape route that could unnerve him, and he took a few deep breaths as he stared at the limpid surface. He felt vibrations, a slight tremor through his body, and watched the surface of the water shimmer. He guessed it was an underground train, passing through a tunnel somewhere far below. The sensation drew him back to the reality of the twenty-first century, and in his mind�s eye all of the tumultuous events of the past, the dark rituals of prehistory, the blood of the Roman amphitheater, the Great Fire of 1666, the 1940 Blitz, all seemed to speed past him like a fast-motion film, leaving their imprint blasted into the cloying sediment around him.

He shut his eyes, then opened them again. He pressed the digital readout display inside his visor, scanning the figures that showed the remaining oxygen in his rebreather, the carbon dioxide toxicity levels. It was a reality check, and it never failed him. He heaved himself up, and realized he had nearly become stuck fast in more than a meter of mud at the bottom of the pool. After extracting himself he floated facedown on the surface with his visor underwater, staring into swirling darkness with the dim patch of light from Costas� headlamp directly below him. Jack arched down, bleeding air from his buoyancy compensator, and sank into blackness. About two meters down he could sense the flow of the underground stream, and he saw a tumult of clearer water where the silt was being swept away. The visibility was still only a matter of inches, but it was better than the black soup at the surface of the pit.

�There�s an obstruction.� Costas� voice came over the intercom. �I�m nearly around it.�

Jack could sense Costas� feet directly in front of him, churning the water as he heaved himself around a bend in the tunnel. Jack stayed back to avoid being kicked, and then as the turbulence subsided he let himself slowly fall forward, his hands splayed out to feel for any obstacle. After about two meters he felt something smooth, metallic, and then his shoulders came to rest on Costas� legs. He felt a wriggling, then no movement at all, then a dull metallic thumping, then everything was still except the sound of their breathing.

�It�s a Series 17 fuse. Good.�

�What is?� Jack exclaimed. �What�s good?�

�This is.� There was a clanging noise, then a curse.

�What? I can�t see anything.�

�This bomb.�

Jack�s heart sank. �What bomb?�

�German SC-250, general-purpose bomb. Carried by the Stuka, Junkers 88, Heinkel 111. They dropped thousands of them over here during the Blitz. Should be pretty routine.�

�What do you mean �routine�?�

�I mean, they weren�t delayed-action fuses, so they�re pretty routine.�

Jack had another sinking feeling. He thought of the tremor again, the vibration of the train. Suddenly this place seemed less solid, less stable, ready for history to have another go. �Don�t tell me what you�re about to do.�

�It�s okay, I�ve done it already. Done as much as I can.� Costas� legs shifted forward, and Jack dropped another meter in the water. �The forward fuse pocket was right in front of my nose, and I happened to have just the right socket in my E-suit equipment pouch. The after pocket�s the problem. I can feel it, but it�s all rusted over. It�s not my style, but we might just have to leave it.�

�Yes, we might,� Jack said quietly. �How dangerous is it?�

�The usual fill for an SC-250 bomb was only 280 pounds of Amatol and TNT, 60/40 mix.�

�Only?� Jack said incredulously.

�Well, enough for us to be toast, of course, but the financial hub of the world would probably remain intact.�

�I think there�s probably been enough human sacrifice at this spot,� Jack said. �How stable is it?�

�The problem�s that corroded after-pocket fuse,� Costas murmured. �It�s been happily dormant for almost seventy years, but with our arrival, who knows.�

�You mean after you tampered with it, who knows.� The silt had settled slightly, and Jack could see the bomb casing about three inches from his face. It was corroded, deeply pitted, with no visible markings, and looked about as menacing as Jack could imagine. He was making the usual mental calculations, and this time the odds were not looking good. He sensed Costas shift forward and upward, beyond the bomb. �I think it might be time to leave now.�

�Oh, no.�

�What do you mean �no�? This thing�s still live. We need to get out.�

�No. I don�t mean that. I mean this, in front of me.� Costas was almost whimpering. �It�s another nightmare. It�s just getting worse.�

�Okay. I�m coming.� Jack eased himself deeper, with the corroded bomb casing just in front of his face, until he saw where it curved down to the nose cone and suspension lug. He turned over on his back and put his hand on the lug to keep his body from jolting against the casing, which seemed to be suspended perilously in mid-water. He slowly pulled himself up until he felt the casing between his legs, and then below his E-suit boots. At the point where he imagined the base plate and tail fins should be, he suddenly broke surface, his face inches from a slimy mud wall. He had been fine in the silt, underwater, with his face pressed close to the bomb casing, but now he suddenly felt unnerved, as if those extra few inches of visibility were just enough to give him a sense of how confined the space was. He knew he had to fight hard now, concentrate entirely on what they were doing. He slowly rolled over, careful not to budge the bomb casing, until he was beside Costas and facing in the same direction. He could feel the compacted gravel of the ancient streambed below his feet, showing they had come under the archaeological layers. He angled his headlamp upward and gasped with astonishment. They were inside some kind of structure, a chamber, with unworked tree trunks lining the roof about two meters above them. He saw massive beams of blackened oak, with bracing timbers around the walls. He looked down, following Costas� gaze.

And he saw it.

He could hardly breathe. He shut his eyes, forced himself to inhale hard and looked again.

It was a skull, a human skull, blackened with age, lying faceup out of the water, with the jaw still in position, slightly ajar. He could see the vertebrae of the neck, the shoulder blades, all cushioned in a red fibrous material. He looked again. The fibrous material seemed to be coming out of the skull. Then he realized what it was. Human hair. Red hair.

He panned his beam down again, to something he had seen lying on the neck bones. He put his hands on a wet timber beside the water�s edge, tested it, and heaved himself up slightly. He was only inches away now, and gasped in disbelief. It was gold, lustrous, a solid gold neck ring. Just like one they had seen on another body, deep under Rome. A torque. Then Jack realized: This was no medieval burial crypt.

�Looks like we might have found our goddess,� Costas whispered.

�Andraste,� Jack said, scarcely believing what he was saying.

�Not exactly immortal,� Costas murmured.

�Everything looks right,� Jack said. �That neck torque is Celtic, the amphoras at the entrance are the right date. Some kind of high priestess, buried about the time of the Boudican revolt.�

�Maybe the revolt signaled the end of the old order,� Costas murmured. �The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Like the eruption of Vesuvius, the disappearance of the Sibyls.�

Jack looked at the skull again. He leaned over and peered more closely, right at the empty eye sockets. The black accretion covering the skull was not black at all. It was blue, dark blue. He gasped as he realized. �Isatis tintoria,� he murmured. �Well, I�ll be damned.�

�Huh?�

�Woad. Blue woad. She was painted with blue woad. Must have looked terrifying in life.�

�Couldn�t be worse than in death,� Costas croaked.

Jack stared again. It was something Costas had said. The last of the ancient priestesses, wiped out in the conflagration. Had they had found something people had been seeking for hundreds of years, in the heart of the City of London, in a tiny wedge of undisturbed ground in one of the most dug up, excavated and bombed-out places in the world? He turned to Costas, who seemed numb, rooted to the spot, splayed out on the edge of the pool of sludgy water, staring through his visor at the skull.

�Another Agamemnon moment?� Jack said.

�That thing�s no ghost. It�s real,� Costas whispered. �After the body liqueur and everything. I�ll never sleep again.�

�Come on,� Jack said. �Remember, we�ve got a rusty bomb on slow broil for company.� He crawled over the soggy timber, clear of the hole, and Costas heaved himself out. They both slowly stood up, dripping profusely, with their helmets and breathing gear still on, mud slicked over their E-suits like brown paint. Jack flicked his headlamp to wide beam, and took out a halogen flashlight. They stared in awe at the scene revealed in front of them.

It was a breathtaking sight. Jack instantly saw images that were familiar to him, artifact types, the layout of the grave goods, but nothing this intact had ever been found in Britain before. It looked like one of the tombs Jack had visited of ancient Scythian nobility on the Russian steppes, girt in massive timbers and miraculously preserved in the permafrost, yet this was the heart of London. Somehow the waterlogged atmosphere and the thick clay that surrounded the tomb had kept the timbers from rotting and the tomb from imploding.

And it had not just preserved the skeleton. Jack could see that the red-haired woman had been laid on a bier, a square wooden platform about three meters across, a meter or so short of the edges of the chamber. There were strange shapes, curved shapes, on either side of the skeleton. �It�s a chariot burial,� he exclaimed. �Those are the two wheels, tilted up toward the body. You can see the spokes on each wheel, the iron rim and the hubcaps.�

�Take a look at this.� Costas was peering closely at the base of the bier, at the legs of the skeleton, and then between the wheels. �There are cut marks on the bones, slash marks, a couple of healed fractures. Looks like she�s been through the wars. This was some lady. And she�s lying in some kind of canoe, a wooden dugout.�

Jack shifted over, slipping on the mud. �Fantastic,� he exclaimed, as he came alongside. �There are boat burials from the Anglo-Saxon period onward, Viking ship burials, but I�ve never seen one like this from the late Iron Age.�

�Maybe this was what they used to get her to this place on her final journey, to her sanctuary up the river. To the heart of darkness.�

Jack stood up as far as he could, and for the first time properly stared at the torso of the skeleton. It was one of the most incredible things he had ever seen, like a computer-generated image of a perfect Iron Age burial. He edged up the side of the bier, then slipped, and fell heavily on one knee beside the chariot wheel.

�Watch out,� Costas exclaimed from behind. �The hub of the wheel�s got a metal spike sticking out of it.�

Jack looked at the corroded iron protrusion that had just missed skewering him, and felt his chest tighten as he realized how close he had been. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to concentrate. He looked again. It was a vicious spike, one of three that stuck out from the hub about half a meter, twisted like aircraft propeller blades. This was no ordinary chariot. Jack heaved himself up and moved alongside Costas, who had gone around him and was crouching over the torso of the skeleton.

�I think this lady was preparing to do battle with the gods in the afterlife,� Costas murmured. �And I think she was going to win.� They stared in awe at the accoutrements laid over the skeleton. There were leaf-shaped iron spear-points, their shafts snapped where the spears had been broken over the grave. Strewn everywhere were numerous pinecones, charred where they had been burned for incense. Parallel to the body on the left side, from the neck to the hip, was a great iron sword, unsheathed, with a decorated bronze scabbard lying alongside. The incised pattern on the scabbard matched the shape of the inlaid wire decoration on the bronze handle of the sword, gold lines that swirled up toward a great green jewel embedded in the pommel. On the other side of the skeleton was a wooden staff, like a wizard�s wand. But the most extraordinary treasure was lying across the torso of the skeleton, covering the rib cage and pelvis. It was a great bronze shield, in a figure-8 shape, its central boss surrounded by swirling curvilinear forms in enamel and raised repouss� decoration.

�Amazing,� Jack said, his voice hoarse. �It�s virtually identical to the Battersea Shield, found in the river Thames in the nineteenth century.�

�It�s made of thin sheet bronze,� Costas said, peering closely at the edge. �Not very practical in battle.�

�It was probably ceremonial,� Jack said. �But that sword looks pretty real. And so do those scythes on the chariot wheels.�

Suddenly it sprang out at him, imagery that had not registered at first but now seemed to knit together all the artifacts in front of him. There were horses, horses everywhere, swirling through the curvilinear patterns on the shield, racing along the sword scabbard, carved into the timbers of the bier. His mind was racing, daring to believe the unbelievable. Horses, the symbol of the tribe of the Iceni, the tribe of a great warrior-queen. He saw a scatter of coins below the shield, and reached down to pick one up. On one side was a horse, highly abstract, with a flowing mane and mysterious symbols above. On the other side was a head, just recognizable as human, with long wild hair. An image from a people who left no portraits, who hardly ever depicted the human form in their art, yet here he was standing in front of her, one who had been revered as a goddess, whose true likeness none of her followers had dared capture. Jack carefully replaced the coin, then looked around again, appraising, cataloging, allowing himself to see the unexpected. �The dovetail joints in the timbers show this tomb was made after the Romans arrived, by carpenters who knew Roman techniques,� he murmured. �But there are no Roman artifacts here. She wouldn�t have allowed it. Those amphoras must have been outside the tomb, offerings made after her burial.�

�She? Her? You�re talking about this woman, Andraste?�

Jack paused, then spoke quietly, his voice tense with excitement. �Nobody has ever been able to find the location of her last battle. The Roman historian Tacitus tells us that forty thousand Britons died, that she survived but went off and poisoned herself. Dio Cassius tells us her surviving followers gave her a lavish burial, somewhere in secret. For centuries scholars have wondered whether her tomb lies under London. It would have been the perfect place, the city laid waste and uninhabited, returned to the state it was in before the Romans arrived. Site of the sacred grove of the goddess Andraste.�

�You still haven�t answered my question, Jack.�

�It all fits perfectly,� Jack murmured. �She would have been a teenager when emperor Claudius arrived in Britain in AD 43, in the wake of his victorious army. She would have been brought before him when her tribe submitted to the Romans, a princess offering her fealty, probably a dose of defiance too.�

�You�re talking about the warrior-queen, about Boudica.�

�A queen who was herself a high priestess, a goddess, and had some connection with the Sibyls,� Jack murmured. �Something that made the Sibyl order Claudius to come here in secret as an old man, to seek her tomb.�

�Jack, you�re wrong about there being no Roman artifacts here. Looks like our lady had a gladiator fixation.� Costas had moved back to the foot of the bier, and now gestured down. Jack slithered over and confronted another astonishing sight. It was a row of helmets, five elaborate helmets arranged in a row, just below the level of the bier, facing the skeleton.

�Unbelievable,� he said. �But these aren�t gladiator helmets. They�re Roman legionary helmets, fairly high-ranking by the look of it. Centurions, maybe cohort commanders. And they�ve seen some pretty brutal action.� He reached over and carefully tipped back the nearest one, which had a deep dent across the top. It was heavier than he had expected, and it stuck to the timber. He pushed harder, and it gave way. He let it drop, and flinched in shock.

They were still in there.

Costas saw it too, and moaned. �Beam me up, Scotty.�

Jack looked closely along the row of helmets. They were all the same. Each one held a human skull, leering, several of them grotesquely smashed and splintered. The skulls were white, bleached, from heads that had been exposed and left to rot before they were placed inside the tomb. �Battle trophies,� Jack murmured. �Collected from the field, or more likely the heads of executed prisoners, the highest-ranking Romans they captured.� His mind was racing again. The warrior-queen�s last battle. He remembered the accounts of Tacitus, Dio Cassius. Living trophies of war, brought with her for sacrifice at the most sacred place, consigned with her in eternal submission.

Then Jack saw them. Huge, shapeless forms emerging from the far side of the tomb, forms that seemed to struggle and rear out of the earth like the sculpted horses from the Athenian Parthenon, only these were real, the blackened skin and manes still stretched over the skulls, teeth bared and grimacing, caught forever in the throes of death, as they had their throats cut beside the body of their queen. It was a terrifying sight, even more so than the line of Roman skulls, and Jack began to feel unnerved again, aware that he and Costas did not belong in this place.

�Time to go,� Costas said quietly.

Jack tore himself away from the image. �We haven�t found what we�re looking for. There has to be something more here.� He slithered back toward the bier and peered down at the skeleton and the array of weapons and armor. Costas took out his compass and aimed it at the bier. �It�s aligned exactly north-south,� he said. �It points directly toward the arena of the amphitheater.�

�The amphitheater was built later,� Jack murmured. �If this is who I think it is, she was buried at least a decade before work on the amphitheater was started.�

�Maybe the Romans deliberately built the amphitheater on a site they knew was sacred�this grove to Andraste,� Costas murmured. �A way of stamping their authority on the natives after the revolt.�

�And the perfect place to conceal a secret cult, right under the noses of your enemy,� Jack said.

�Have you seen the chariot axle?� Costas said. �It�s lying under her shoulders. With the chariot pole aligned north-south under her body, it makes a cross.�

Jack grunted, only half listening. �In Iron Age chariot burials, the axle was usually placed below the feet.� Suddenly he gasped, and reached out to the shield. �It was staring at us right in the face. He placed it right over the shield boss.�

�Who did?�

�Someone who was here before us.� Jack began to reach for the object, a metal cylinder. Then he paused, and drew his hand back.

�You must be the only archaeologist who has trouble taking artifacts from burials, Jack.�

�I can�t violate her grave.�

�I�m with you there. I wouldn�t want to raise this lady from the dead. In this place, it�s not as if we have anywhere to run.� Costas paused. �But if you�re right, this cylinder wasn�t part of the original grave goods. I�m willing to take the risk.� He reached over and picked up the cylinder, then passed it to Jack. �There. Spell�s broken.�

Jack took the cylinder and held it carefully, rotating it slowly in his hands, staring at it. A chain dangled off a rivet on one side. The cylinder was made of sheet bronze, hammered at the join to form the tube, and one end had been crimped over a disk of bronze to form the base. On the bottom was a roundel of red enamel, and swirling around the cylinder were incised curvilinear decorations. Jack saw that the decoration was in the shape of a wolf, an abstract beast that wrapped itself round the cylinder until the snout was nearly touching the tail. �It�s British metalwork, no doubt about it. There�s a bronze cylinder just like this from a warrior grave in Yorkshire. And the wolf is another symbol of the Iceni, Boudica�s tribe, along with the horse.�

�What about the lid?� Costas said.

�There�s a lot of corrosion, bronze disease,� Jack replied, peering closely at the top of the cylinder. �But it�s not crimped over like the base. There�s some kind of resinous material around the join, pretty cracked up.� He pushed a finger cautiously against the crust of built-up corrosion on the top, then flinched as it broke off. �Thank God our conservators didn�t see me do that.� He angled the cylinder toward Costas so they could both see the surface of the lid. Around the edge were the remains of red enamel, from a roundel similar to the one on the base. But on the lid the enamel seemed to have been crudely scraped back to the bronze, which had an incised decoration. The incision was angular, crude, unlike the flowing lines of the wolf on the side of the cylinder, more like scratched graffiti. Jack stared at it. He suddenly froze.

It was a name.

�Bingo,� Costas said.

The letters were large, shaky, the name curving round the top, the other word below, like an inscription on a coin:

CLAVDIVS DEDIT

�Claudius gave this,� Jack said, suddenly ecstatic. �Claudius did come here, where we are now, and he placed this in Boudica�s tomb.� Jack held the cylinder with sudden reverence, looking at the name and then at the fractured join at the lid, hardly daring to think what might be inside.

�How come Claudius has a British bronze cylinder?� Costas asked.

�Maybe he got it when he first came to Britain, during the conquest,� Jack said. �Maybe Boudica herself gave it to him, and afterward he used it to hide away his treasured manuscript, what we�re looking for. It might have been less obvious than one of those Egyptian stone jars from his library in Herculaneum.�

�But the bronze cylinder would have fitted inside one of the smaller stone jars, like the one we found in Rome,� Costas murmured. �Maybe there�s one of those lying around here too.�

�If this bronze cylinder was inside a stone jar, then it�s been disturbed and opened by someone since Claudius came down here.�

�Are we going to open it?�

Jack took a deep breath. �These aren�t exactly controlled laboratory conditions.�

�I�ve heard that before.�

Jack looked back at the slurry of water where they had come into the tomb, slopping back and forth, and distinctly brown in their torchlight. �I�m worried the seal on the lip of the cylinder might have decayed. If we take it back underwater, we might destroy what�s inside forever. And I don�t want to risk going back to get a waterproof container. This whole place might be atomized.�

�At any moment,� Costas said, looking at the tail fin of the bomb rising above the water. �Right, let�s do it.�

Jack nodded, and put his hand over the lid. He shut his eyes and silently mouthed a few words. Everything they had been striving for suddenly seemed to rest on this moment. He opened his eyes and twisted the lid. It came away easily. Too easily. He tipped the cylinder toward his beam, and stared inside.

It was empty.

�

EARLY THE NEXT MORNING JACK SAT IN THE NAVE OF ST. Paul�s Cathedral in London, beneath the great dome, facing the high altar to the east. The cathedral had opened to the public only a few minutes before and was still almost empty, but Jack had chosen a row of seats well in from the central aisle of the nave, where they would be less likely to be overheard. He glanced at his watch. He had arranged to meet Costas at nine o�clock, five minutes from now, and Jeremy would join them as soon as he could after arriving back from Oxford.

Jack and Costas had spent the night in IMU�s flat overlooking the river Thames, a place where Jack often stayed between projects when he needed to carry out research in one of London�s libraries or museums. After the exhilaration of the ancient tomb and then the empty cylinder, they had been too tired to talk, and too numb to feel disappointed. Jack leaned back, stretched, and closed his eyes. He still felt drained from their extraordinary exploration the day before, and his morning coffee was just kicking in. He felt strangely discomfited, unsure whether their quest had gone as far as it could, whether he should look back on what they had discovered, begin to relish the extraordinary finds of the past few days for what they were and not see them as clues to something even bigger. He opened his eyes and peered up at the magnificent dome far above him, so similar to the dome of St. Peter�s in the Vatican, to the dome of the Pantheon in Rome, built over fifteen hundred years earlier. Yet here Jack felt he was looking not at replication or continuity but at the unique brilliance of one man, the architect Sir Christopher Wren. The interior dome was set below the ovoid dome of the exterior, a way of elevating the cathedral externally, yet ensuring that the view of the dome from inside was pleasing in aspect. Jack narrowed his eyes. As so often in the best works of human creation, the view was not quite what it seemed.

�Morning, Jack.� Costas came sliding in from the central aisle, and Jack eyed him with some concern. He was wearing one of Jack�s fisherman�s guernseys from the IMU flat, slightly too small for him around the middle but about two sizes too long, the sleeves pushed up to reveal his muscular forearms. He looked a little pale and red around the nose, and his eyes were watery. �Don�t ask,� he said, slumping down on the seat beside Jack and looking miserable, sniffing and digging in his pocket for a tissue. �Every decongestant I could find. I�m beginning to float. I don�t know how you can breathe when the air�s so damp. And cold.� He sneezed, sniffed noisily and groaned.

�I gather the all-clear�s been given in the city,� Jack said.

�They�re removing the barriers now. The disposal team dug straight down through the Guildhall pavement, craned out the bomb and choppered it away in the middle of the night for a controlled explosion. It was quite a commotion. I made sure they dug in from the east, so I don�t think there was any damage to the tomb.�

�I�ve just been speaking to my friends at the London Archaeology Service,� Jack said, pointing to his cell phone. �They�ve got a real challenge on their hands. They need to make some kind of protective bubble over the site to maintain the atmospheric conditions in the tomb, to keep it from decaying. They�ve got the best conservation people on standby. It�s probably going to take months to excavate, but it should be amazing when it�s revealed. I�ve suggested they leave the tomb in situ, make a museum on the spot. It could be completely underground, entered from the amphitheater.�

�They don�t want to be disturbing her.� Costas sniffed. �No way.�

�Did they let you in on the act?� Jack inquired. �The disposal team?�

�The CO of the dive unit turned out to be an old buddy of mine, a Royal Engineers officer from the Defence Diving School. We met when I did the Mine and Explosive Ordnance Disposal course at Devonport two years ago. I told him the second fuse on the bomb was too corroded to drill into, that they�d have to fill it with chemicals to neutralize it. He couldn�t let me in to help. Health and safety regulations, you know.� Costas sniffed again. �That�s the trouble with this country. Overregulated.�

�You�d rather we were based in�Italy, let�s say?�

Costas� eyes lit up. �Speaking of which, when are we getting back to the shipwreck of St. Paul? A couple of weeks in the Mediterranean would suit me just fine. Might even kill this cold.�

�Seaquest II �s still on station, and the Embraer jet�s on standby,� Jack replied. �I�ve just been on the phone to Maurice about timing the press release on the Herculaneum library. Unless Jeremy�s got something new for us, I don�t see where we go from here with the Claudius connection. It�s already a fabulous addition to history, with the extraordinary finds we�ve made in Rome and here in London. But the whereabouts of the manuscript might just have to remain one of the great unsolved mysteries of all time.� Jack heaved a sigh, then peered up at the dome again. �Not my style, but a dead end�s a dead end.�

Costas nodded at the laptop on Jack�s lap. �I see you�ve been scrolling through Maria�s images of the Herculaneum library.� He pointed a soggy tissue at the page of thumbnail images. Jack nodded, then peered back at him with an expectant expression. �I know that look,� Costas said.

�That page of papyrus I found in Herculaneum, lying on the table under the blank sheets. Historia Britanniarum. Narcissus Fecit.� Jack clicked a thumbnail image, and a page of ancient writing appeared on the screen. �I remembered something.�

Costas blew his nose. �I knew it.�

�I�d assumed it was probably part of a treatise on military strategy, the kind of thing Claudius the armchair general would have relished, to show he really knew his stuff and was worthy of his father and brother. Maybe something on the lead-up to the invasion of Britain, on his planning sessions with his legionary commanders, all painstakingly recorded. But then I put myself back into Herculaneum, into that room. I began to think about the last things Claudius would have had on his mind, what he would have been writing. In the weeks leading up to the eruption of Vesuvius, we know Pliny the Elder was visiting him in the villa. Pliny was a military historian too, an experienced veteran himself, but he�d been there, done that, and what really fired him up in his final years was his Natural History, collecting any facts and trivia he could stick in it.�

�Like that page on Judaea, you mean, his additional notes that we found on the shelf in the room,� Costas said.

�Precisely. And what really would have excited Pliny about Claudius was the Britannia connection. Not the military campaign, the invasion, but anything Claudius could tell him about the natural history, the geography, the people, anything unusual, garish. After all, we know Claudius had seen the place with his own eyes, had visited Britain not just once, for his triumph, but twice, when he came in secret to the tomb as an old man, not long before the eruption. Britain was his great achievement, and he would have loved telling Pliny all about it, playing the old general reminiscing on his conquest for the glory of Rome and his family honor.�

�Go on.� Costas sneezed violently.

�I�ve now read the entire text preserved on that page from the table, Claudius� History of Britain. It�s clearly part of a preamble, an introductory chapter, setting the stage.� Jack pointed at the fine handwriting on the screen. �The Latin�s easy, clearly written. We have to thank Narcissus for that. It�s about religion and rituals, just the kind of thing Pliny would have loved.�

�And just what we need.� Costas sniffed. �All that discussion yesterday about the Iron Age, about Boudica, Andraste. There are still some pretty big black holes.�

Jack nodded. �The first part really staggered me. It�s the end of the description of a great stone circle Claudius had visited. �I have seen these things with my own eyes,� he says.�

�A stone circle? Stonehenge?�

�He tells us that the stones were set up by the British people in honor of a race of giants who came from the east, escaping a great flood,� Jack said. �The stones represent each of the priest-kings and priest-queens, who afterward ruled the island.�

�The Black Sea exodus!� Costas exclaimed. �The priests of Atlantis. That shows Claudius wasn�t being fed a pack of lies.�

��These giants brought with them a Mother Goddess, who afterward was worshipped in Britain,�� Jack translated. ��The descendants of these priest-kings and priest-queens were the Druids.�� He reverted to the original Latin: ��praesidium posthac inpositum victis excisique luci saevis superstitionibus sacri: nam cruore captivo adolere aras et hominum fibris consulere deos fas habebant.�� He paused, then translated. ��Who consider it their sacred duty to cover their altars with the blood of their victims. I myself have watched them at the stone circle, the place they call Druidaeque circum, the circle of the Druids.��

�In our last few expeditions, we�ve had Toltecs, Carthaginians and now ancient Britons,� Costas grumbled. �Human sacrifice everywhere.�

�The early antiquarians of Sir Christopher Wren�s day actually thought Stonehenge had been a Druid circle, and they were right after all,� Jack said. �It�s amazing. But this is the clincher. Listen to this. � They choose the high priestess from among the noble families of the Britons. I myself have met the chosen one, the girl they call Andraste, who also calls herself Boudica, princess of the tribe of the Iceni, who was brought before me as a slave but who the Sibyl ordered me to set free. For the Sibyl of Cumae says that the high priestess of these Druids is the thirteenth of the Sibyls, and the oracle for all the tribes of Britannia.��

�Stop right there,� Costas said.

�End of page. That�s it.�

�You�re saying Boudica, the warrior-queen, she was the high priestess? That Boudica was a kind of arch-Druid?�

�I�m not saying it, Claudius is.�

�And this Druidess was one of the Sibyls?�

�That�s what he says. And Claudius should know. We know he was a visitor to the Sibyl�s cave at Cumae.�

�That�s because the Sibyl was his drug dealer.�

�There�s something extraordinary going on here, something people have guessed at but never been able to prove,� Jack murmured, putting the computer on the seat beside him and staring up toward the altar. �Let�s backtrack for a moment. Begin at the beginning. Claudius gets a document from a Galilean, a Nazarene.�

�We know who we�re talking about, Jack.�

�Do we? There were plenty of would-be messiahs floating round the Sea of Galilee at that time. John the Baptist, for a start. Let�s not leap to conclusions.�

�Come on, Jack. You�re playing devil�s advocate.�

�Let�s keep the Devil out of this. We�ve got enough to contend with as it is.� Jack paused. �Then, as an old man, Claudius makes a secret trip to Britain, to London. He has the manuscript with him, inside a metal container given to him during a previous visit to Britain, perhaps by a princess of the Iceni.� Jack patted a bulge in his bag. Costas looked at the bulge, then at Jack.

�That�s called looting,� Costas said with mock solemnity. �It�s becoming a habit.�

�Just a precaution. In case that bomb cooked off. We had to have some evidence we�d really seen the tomb.�

�No need to explain it to me, Jack.�

�Okay, like all good treasure hiders, Claudius leaves a clue,� Jack said. �Or rather, a series of clues. Some of them are by way of his friend Pliny.�

�I think Claudius was having fun with us,� Costas said, sniffing.

�He�s addicted to riddles, to reading the leaves, has done it all his life, all those visits to the Sibyl. She has him wrapped round her shriveled fingers, of course. Claudius becomes like a crossword freak, a cryptologist. And leaving clues seems to be part of the treasure-hiding psychology,� Jack continued. �If you have to hide something, you hide it ingeniously, but you have to feel that somewhere along the line someone else might find it. If you leave clues, you�re in control of that process of discovery too. A way of assuring your own immortality.�

�So he comes back to Britain and finds her tomb, and here we are too,� Costas said. �Always hide things in the most unlikely places.� He sneezed. �The word of the Messiah clutched in the dead hands of a pagan priestess.�

�That�s one thread in our story,� Jack said. �Claudius, his motivations, what drove him. But there�s another thread that�s been fascinating me. It�s about women.�

�Katya, Maria, Elizabeth? Careful, Jack. That�s one thing you don�t seem to be able to control.�

�I mean women in the past. The distant past.�

�The mother goddess?� Costas said.

�If the priesthood that Claudius writes about did survive from Neolithic times, then there�s every reason for thinking that the cult of the mother goddess did as well,� Jack said. �She�s there in the Graeco-Roman pantheon, Magna Mater, the Great Mother, Vesta, whose temple we found in Rome, and among the Celtic gods too. But I�m not just thinking about female goddesses. I�m thinking about the earthly practitioners of religion, the priests, the oracles.�

�The Sibyls?�

�Something�s beginning to fall into place,� Jack murmured. �It�s been staring at us for centuries, the Sibylline prophecy in Virgil, the Dies Irae. And now we�ve found the extra ingredient that suddenly makes it all plausible, that tips the balance into reality.�

�Go on.�

�It�s about early Christianity.� Jack suddenly felt a surge of excitement as he realized where his thoughts were leading him. �About women in early Christianity.�

�Huh?�

�What does that mean to you? First thought?�

�The Virgin Mary?�

�The cult of the Virgin probably incorporated pagan beliefs in a mother goddess,� Jack said. �But I�m thinking about the early believers, the first followers of Jesus, who they were.� He reached into his bag and pulled out a red hardback book. �Remember I told you how elusive the written evidence is for early Christianity, how virtually nothing survives apart from the Gospels? Well, one of the rare exceptions is Pliny. Not our old friend Pliny the Elder, but his nephew, Pliny the Younger.�

�The one who wrote about the eruption of Vesuvius,� Costas said slowly. �And the Vestal Virgins.�

Jack nodded. �The account of Vesuvius was in a letter to the historian Tacitus, written about twenty-five years after the event. Well, here�s the younger Pliny again, in a letter written shortly before he died in AD 113. By that time he was Roman governor in an area of Turkey beside the Black Sea, and he�s writing to the emperor Trajan about the activities of Christians in his province. Pliny wasn�t exactly a fan of Christianity�but then, he was echoing the official line. What had started out at the time of Claudius as an obscure cult, yet another mystery religion from the east, fifty years on had become a real concern to the emperors. Unlike the other big eastern cults, Mithaism or Isis worship, the Christians had become political. That was what really put Christianity at center stage. Farsighted Romans could see the Church becoming a focus for dissent, especially as Christianity attracted slaves, the great underclass in Roman society. The Romans were always frightened of another slave uprising, ever since Spartacus. They were also thrown off balance by the fanaticism of the Christians, the willingness to die for their beliefs. You just didn�t see that in any of the other cults. And there was something else that really terrified them.�

�These Romans you�re talking about,� Costas said, sneezing. �They�re all men. We were talking about women.�

Jack nodded, and opened the book. �Listen to this. Pliny�s seeking advice on how to prosecute Christians, as he�s never done it before. He calls it a �degenerate cult, carried to extravagant lengths.� He tells Trajan he has unrepentant Christians executed, though he generously spares those who make offerings of wine and incense to the statue of the emperor, the living god. But then listen to this: In order to extract the truth about their political activities, he orders the torture of duabus ancillis, quae ministrae dicebantur. Both the words ancillis and ministrae mean female attendants, though ministra is often equated with the Greek word diakanos.�

�Deaconesses,� Costas mused. �Priestesses?�

�That�s what really terrified the Romans,� Jack said. �It�s what terrified them about the British too, about Boudica. She fascinated them, excited them, but also terrified them. Women could be the true power behind the scenes in Rome, women like the emperor Augustus� wife, Livia, or Claudius� scheming wives, but it was a male-dominated system. The cursus honorum, the rite of passage through military and public offices, followed by upper-class Romans like Pliny the Younger and his uncle, would never have admitted a woman. Just like the image of the wild barbarian warrior-queen, the idea of this new cult having priestesses on a par with men would have been horrifying, worse still if they were slaves.�

�But I thought the Christian Church was male-dominated.�

�That�s the really fascinating thing about Pliny the Younger�s letter. That one word, deaconesses. It implies the Church didn�t begin male-dominated. Somewhere along the line, perhaps soon after the time of Pliny the Younger, the more politically minded leaders among the Christians must have realized they�d never defeat Rome head-on, that they stood a good chance of being extinguished completely. Instead, they decided to confront the system from within. Make converts of Roman men who can see how the Church fits with their own personal ambitions, with their political careers. Ultimately, catch the emperor himself, as happened two hundred years after Pliny, with Constantine the Great. The power of the Roman Church, its political power, was all about men. But in the earliest period of Christianity, before the Church developed as a political force, the word of Jesus was carried equally by men and women.�

�Talk me through the Sibyl again, Jack�the link to this early period of Christianity.�

�Okay.� Jack closed the book, looked up at the dome again, then narrowed his eyes. �Speculation, and a few facts.�

�Fire away.� Costas sneezed violently.

�By the end of the first century BC, at the beginning of the Roman Empire, the power of the Sibyls was on the wane,� Jack said. �To the Sibyl at Cumae, the Romans who had come to occupy the old Greek settlements of the Bay of Naples, places like Pompeii, Herculaneum, Neapolis, were a double-sided coin. On the one hand, they kept her in business. Romans came to the Phlegraean Fields seeking cures and prophecies, or as tourists, gawping at the fire and spectacle at the entrance to the underworld. On the other hand, to many Romans the music of the Sibyl had become ersatz, a contrivance, a Greek embellishment, like those statues in the Villa of the Papyri or those phony philosophers kept for after-dinner entertainment. And, as we now suspect, the Sibyl began to depend for her livelihood more and more on dishing out narcotics than on selling divine prophecies that people took at all seriously.�

�But surely the poet Virgil believed in her,� Costas said. �The Sybilline prophecy in his poem, about the coming Golden Age.�

�It�s hard to know whether he took her seriously or just fancied embellishing his poetry with a Sybilline utterance,� Jack said. �The Sibyl may have seen a man whose word would outlast him, a man destined for supreme achievement, just as she saw Claudius a generation later. She may have given Virgil words she wanted to see survive, immortalized in his writing. The Sibyls were shrewd operators. Like most successful mystics, she would always have tried to keep one step ahead of her clients, profess to know more about them than could seem plausible. The Sibyls probably had an extensive network of spies and informants, keeping them abreast of everything going on. Remember the cave of the Vestal Virgins we found under the Palatine, right under the heart of Rome. And remember Claudius� extraordinary statement about the priestesses in Britain, chosen from the families of tribal chieftains, of kings. Maybe the Sibyls at Cumae were also chosen from the wealthiest families of Rome, like the Vestals, even from the Imperial family. Maybe the cave under the Palatine was where they were nurtured. And the schooling of a Sibyl was probably all about how to tease private information out of people without them realizing it.�

�Easy if your client�s all drugged up,� Costas said.

�That may be how Claudius revealed his secret to her,� Jack murmured.

�And the Christianity connection?�

�That�s where speculation takes over,� Jack said intently. �But try this: By the time Virgil visits Cumae, by the time of the first emperor, Augustus, the Sibyls already know their days are numbered. Rome has come to rule the world, and the Sibyls see the pantheon of Roman gods solidifying around them like the temples and palaces of the great city itself, built to last a thousand years. But the Sibyls also look east, beyond Greece, and they see new forces which could engulf the Roman world, forces kept at bay while Rome fought within itself and then strove to conquer the ancient lands once ruled by Alexander the Great. The Sibyls foresee the eastern cult of the Divine ruler coming to Rome, the emperor becoming a living god. And they see something else. They see it in the slaves and outcasts who hide in the Phlegraean Fields near the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl. They see it in the easterners who flock to the Bay of Naples after the Augustan peace, just as Pliny the Elder must have seen it in his sailors at Misenum. New religious ideas from the east, new prophets, a Messiah. A world where the Sibyls will no longer be able to hold sway, where people may no longer be enslaved to oracles and priests in order to know the word of God.�

�Virgil�s coming Golden Age,� Costas murmured.

�By the time of Virgil, the Sibyl at Cumae must have guessed it would come to pass. By the time of Claudius, she knew it. Christianity had arrived.�

�And she heard the rumblings underground,� Costas said. �Literally.�

�There was a huge earthquake in the Bay of Naples in AD 62,� Jack said. �Some buildings at Pompeii were still under repair seventeen years later when Vesuvius erupted. Dangling in her cave in the Phlegraean Fields, the Sibyl must have had her ear to the ground in more ways than one, guessed that something catastrophic was imminent. We�re talking empirical observations here, not mysticism. Everything was heating up. The sulfurous smell was getting worse. And maybe the memory of past volcanic catastrophe was part of the ancient lore passed down to the Sibyls, the eruption of Thera in the Aegean in the Bronze Age, earlier eruptions at the dawn of civilization. And perhaps she truly did believe in some Divine power behind it all, behind her utterances. She saw signs, auguries, that her age was ended. With the eruption of Vesuvius, her god Apollo would be gone, extinguished forever.�

�Time for a fast exit left,� Costas murmured.

�Time for the final ingredient, the biggest twist,� Jack said. �Several decades earlier, in the time of Claudius the emperor, the Sibyl would have seen her prophecy to Virgil come true. The birth of a boy, the imminent Golden Age. She would have seen Christians appearing in the Phlegraean Fields. She would have heard of Jesus, and of Mary of Magdalene. She would have known that the Christians included both men and women. She would have seen that there were no priests.�

�We�re talking women here again, aren�t we, Jack? That�s what you�re driving at. Girl power.�

�Girl power.� Jack grinned. �Not goddesses, but real flesh-and-blood women. That�s what the Sibyl saw. In Rome, the power of women was on the wane. The Vestal Virgins were virtually imprisoned within the palace walls, almost a despotic male fantasy of female submission. The Imperial cult, the cult of the emperor, was male-dominated, with an exclusively male priesthood. To the Sibyls, their own vocation was perhaps not really about Apollo or any earlier gods they may have served. It was about matriarchy, about continuation of the female line that extended as far back as the Stone Age, to the time when women ruled the family and the clan. In Christianity, the Sibyl may have seen hope for the future, for the continuation of the matriarchy.�

�Why the focus on Britain?� Costas asked.

�Because it�s often at the periphery that the biggest changes take place,� Jack said. �In Rome itself, civilization had become corrupt, decayed. Christianity had come from the periphery, from the eastern boundary of the empire, and it was at the other periphery, far to the northwest, that some saw greatest hope for its success. Britain would have seemed like the New World did to the religious dissenters of seventeenth-century Europe, a place where they could pursue their beliefs without persecution. The Britons themselves, the natives, were fiercely independent, truculent, with a mysterious religion that would never be fully captured and manipulated by the Romans, where the Roman gods would never truly hold sway. The tribes of Britain had been ruled by great warrior-queens, by Boudica and those before her. And as we now know from Claudius, their own priesthood, the Druids, were ruled by a high priestess. If the Druids were dominated by women, then it was women who knit together the warrior tribes of the Celtic world, just as women had done for thousands of years before that, back through prehistory.�

�And how much would Boudica have known about Christianity?�

�Claudius himself may even have talked to her about it, when she was brought before him as a teenager on his first visit to Britain, after the Roman invasion. Something about her, about what he saw and felt in Britain, may even have influenced Claudius to tell her his best story, of his visit to Judaea as a young man. Then, remember the reference in Gildas, the monk writing after the Roman period, the memory of a Roman emperor himself secretly bringing Christianity to Britain may have become part of the folklore of the first Christians in Britain. And Claudius may have known about the connection of the Sibyl with the Druids, as he was already under the sway of the Sibyl at Cumae. The Sibyl herself may have influenced his decision to invade in the first place, perhaps a way of knitting Britain more closely within her world. She may have given him a message in the leaves.�

�Amazing what people will do for their drug dealers,� Costas murmured.

�In the years that followed Claudius� visit, Boudica would have learned more about Christianity,� Jack continued. �Like the children of most vanquished princes, she would have been brought up in the Roman way, learning Latin and perhaps even traveling to Rome, maybe even to the Bay of Naples and the cave at Cumae. Back home in London, she would have heard of sailors and soldiers bringing ideas from the east, Mithraism, Isis worship, Christianity. Then, as she was inducted into the priesthood, preparing for her role as high priestess, as the British Sibyl, she would have become part of the secret network of knowledge that tied together all the Sibyls across the Roman world, the thirteen. And she may have seen the same thing that the Sibyl at Cumae saw in Christianity, something that drew her even closer to its followers after she rebelled against the Romans. A religion on a collision course with Rome, with the Rome which had abused her and raped her daughters, a religion of defiance. And the ideas she heard, the quest for a heaven on earth, may have come easily to the Britons, people whose beliefs were attuned to the natural world and not fossilized in temples and priests. She may not have shown any outward signs of it, but she may have decided that those ideas could work for her, and for the survival of the matriarchy.�

�You�re talking about Christianity before the Roman Church,� Costas murmured. �What you and Jeremy were telling me about in the amphitheater. The Celtic Church, the church of the Britons. The Pelagian heresy.�

�I believe that�s the reason why the Sibyl at Cumae made Claudius bring his precious document here,� Jack said. �To provide a secret gift for the early Christians in Britain, something which might strengthen them against what she saw happening before her eyes in the Phlegraean Fields, in the years after St. Paul�s arrival there.�

�You mean the beginnings of what would become the Roman State religion,� Costas said, blowing his nose.

�There was something in Claudius� document from Judaea, something we can only guess at, that gave the Sibyl hope. Something Claudius must have said when he was in a stupor before her cave. Something that made her realize that what he had was extraordinarily precious, and needed to be secreted away in a place where it might survive, and further her cause. And something she knew some of those around Claudius would do anything to get their hands on, to destroy.�

�She saw the first priests among the Christians. Male priests. And it frightened her. She saw Christianity going the same way as all the other cults in Rome.�

�You�ve got it.�

�So she threatens to withdraw Claudius� drugs unless he does her bidding.�

Jack grinned. �She knew exactly why he kept coming back for more, what it was that dulled his pain. Claudius himself might not have been so sure. All he knew was that if he did her bidding, every time he stood in that smoky cavern he felt good again. Probably she offered him something tangible, something else that drew him back to that place at the entrance to the underworld. Maybe, like Aeneas in Virgil�s story, she offered to take him down below, to see his father and brother again. That�s what he would have yearned for most. Like any good fortune-teller, she knew her client�s psychology.�

�And she knew he loved a good riddle.�

Jack nodded. �She gives him a prophecy. A message in the leaves. Claudius laps it up, relishes the challenge. It was the one we found in Rome, the Dies Irae. A prophecy of doom, but also of hope. Claudius knows who Andraste was, and knows where to find her tomb. The Sibyl knew that he knew. He writes it down, seals it in that stone cylinder, the one he gave Pliny to put in Rome. All Claudius had to do was fulfill the prophecy, take the manuscript and put it with Andraste, and he would get what he had begged the Sibyl for, his visit to the underworld.�

�Big-time,� Costas murmured.

�When it came down to it, in those last moments of hell in front of the crack of doom in the Phlegraean Fields, it may have felt right. Claudius may have shut his eyes, and in his mind seen only those statues we found in his room in the villa in Herculaneum, those images of his father and brother which must have been seared into his mind.�

�Jack, I think you�ve found another soul mate,� Costas said. �Move over Harald Hardrada, King of the Vikings, here comes Claudius, Emperor of Rome.�

�I feel like I did on that little island north of Newfoundland, on our search for the Jewish menorah,� Jack said, closing the book. �Harald had taken us on an extraordinary adventure in search of his treasure, further than we could ever have dared imagine. I feel the same way now, but I feel Claudius has left us, has taken us as far as he can. I owe it to him to find the clues, to go where he wanted me to go, but I just can�t see a way ahead.�

�Speaking of soul mates, here�s one of mine,� Costas said, sniffing and gesturing blearily at the figure making his way along the row of seats, toward them. �And maybe he�s got what you need.�

�

THE WOMAN STUMBLED AS THEY DRAGGED HER OUT OF the car and pushed her over the irregular rocky surface. She was blindfolded, but she knew where they were. The smell had hit her as soon as they opened the car door, the acrid waft of sulfur that made the tip of her tongue burn. She could sense the yawning space ahead, the warm updraft from the furnace in the pit of the earth. She knew the score. They would either do it here, or take her down below. She had been here many times before, as a girl, when they had tried to toughen her up. She had seen the terror, the pleading, the incontinence, and sometimes the serene composure, the acceptance of the old ways as they always had been, the futility of resistance.

A hand steered her to the left and pushed her on, down a rocky path. So it would be below. They were taking no chances. The hand pulled her to a halt and roughly undid her blindfold. She blinked hard and stared into darkness. She sensed the bulk of Vesuvius over the bay behind her, but knew that if she turned for one last look she would be slapped down, and the blindfold put back on. She knew they had only removed it to make it easier for them to get her down the rocky path to the floor of the crater, but she hoped they would keep it off to the end. It was her only fear, that she should experience that moment in darkness, unable to distinguish between blindness and death.

She kept her eyes ahead, only looking down when she stumbled, her hands duct-taped behind her. They reached the bottom. One set of footsteps behind remained, guarding. It was the usual drill. Once, long ago, that had been her job, when they had tried to suck her deeper into the family, before they had found another way for her to serve them. She remembered the interview, the shadowy man from Rome, the man she never saw and never spoke to again. Afterward, there had been occasional phone calls, instructions, threats she knew to be real, the order that she take the job in Naples. Nothing for years, and then the earthquake, and the nightmare returned, the calls in the night, hissing demands, threats to her daughter, her world of scholarship and archaeology crashing down. She thought of earlier times, when she had seemed free of it. She thought of Jack; of the lost years since they had forced her to leave him, of seeing him again two days ago and their fleeting words in the villa. There was something else she had wanted to tell him, but now only her daughter would know, three years from now when she came of age and would read the truth. It was all too late now.

The other pair of footsteps resonated in the crater, pushing her forward. The hand halted her again, and the blindfold was yanked tight over her eyes. �No,� she said fiercely in Italian. �Not this. Do you remember how much it frightened me when we were children? When I looked after you. My little brother.�

There was no response. The hands paused, then relented. The blindfold caught on the superintendency ID card still dangling around her neck, and it was pulled violently off. Her neck felt as if it had been whipped. She kept her eyes resolutely ahead, but caught sight of the fresh plaster cast on his wrist. �What happened to you, mia caro?� she said. There was no reply, and she was pushed ahead, this time violently, the hand against the bun of her hair. She stumbled forward. Fifty paces. Another twenty paces. A hand grasped her hair again, and a foot kicked behind her right knee. She collapsed onto the floor of the crater, her knees hitting the lava with a crack. The pain was shocking. She kept her composure, remained upright. Her legs were kicked apart. Something cold was pushed against the nape of her neck, sending a tingle down her spine. �Wait,� she said, her voice strong, unwavering. �Release my hands. I must make my peace with God. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti.�

For a few moments nothing happened. The muzzle was still pressed against her neck. She wondered if that was it, if it had already happened, if this was death, if death meant being frozen in the moment of passing. Then the muzzle was removed, she heard a sloshing metal can clatter on the ground, smelled the petrol and felt the hands fumbling at her wrists. Her heart was beginning to beat faster now, pounding, and her knees felt weak. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, savoring it, even the sickly smell of this place. She would not let herself down. She would not let her family down. The family. She knew she should be thinking of something else, of those she truly loved, of her daughter, but she could not. She opened her eyes and looked in front of her. The crack was there, pitch black, solidified lava around the edges. She knew what would happen next. The bark of the silenced Beretta, the jet of blood and brains, strangely self-contained, like water from a hose, pulsing out with the final heartbeats. The body pushed into the crack, the fuel can emptied over it, the tossed cigarette. She wished the crack itself would take her, come alive as it had when the volcano had throbbed like a living heart under this place, the seething core of the underworld. She wanted to be embraced by it. She wanted it to burn.

There was a tearing sound as the tape on her wrists came free, a jolt of pain as it was ripped off. She let her left hand fall free, shook it, feeling the circulation return. She slowly raised her right hand in front of her breasts, made the sign of the cross and touched her forehead. Her hand was firm, unshaking. She was pleased. She let it drop. Her eyes were wide open, staring into the crack. She moved her hands together, felt the delicate ring his grandmother had given her, an ancient treasure of Jack�s seafaring ancestors. She felt the muzzle press against the nape of her neck. She bowed her head slightly. The angle would be better. Quicker. She heard a cell phone chirp, and then a voice behind her, a voice that brought back the warmth of childhood, a voice that she had loved hearing in the mornings when she had stroked his forehead, seeing him waken.

�Eminence? Va bene. Your will be done.�

The click of the pistol cocking.

Then nothing.

Costas sneezed as he made space for Jeremy, who had arrived in St. Paul�s Cathedral five minutes before but had spotted a church official and gone straight off to talk to him. Jeremy came down the aisle carrying a dripping umbrella and a briefcase and wearing a red Gore-tex jacket. Costas and Jack had only just returned to their seats below the dome a few moments before, having made a quick dash to a pharmacy outside on the Strand. Costas was noisily snorting a decongestant and peering at the label on a bottle. He popped a small handful of pills, took a swig of water and leaned back to let Jeremy by, making space on the chair between him and Jack. Jeremy took off his coat, sat down, sniffed the air, removed his glasses to wipe away the rainwater, then sniffed again. He leaned toward Costas, then recoiled slightly. �Something smells bad around here.�

�Good morning to you too,� Costas said nasally.

�It�s kind of sickly,� Jeremy said. �Really pretty disgusting.�

�Ah,� Jack said. �Body liqueur. Must have been when we took off the E-suits. Somehow it always stays with you.�

�Ah,� Jeremy replied. �I forgot where you�ve been. Dead bodies. That�s why I stick to libraries.�

�Don�t say that word. Stick,� Costas said, looking miserable.

�Come on. This way,� Jeremy said, gathering his things and getting up, pointedly keeping his distance from Costas. �I�ve arranged a private room.�

�How do you know all these people?� Costas said.

�I�m a medieval manuscripts expert, remember?� Jeremy replied. �A lot of the best documents are still held by the Church. It�s a small world.� Jack quickly packed his laptop, then followed Jeremy down the nave, toward a side chapel. Jeremy nodded at a cassocked man who was waiting discreetly nearby with a ring of heavy keys, and who came over and unlocked the grated steel door for them. Jack slipped in first, followed by the other two. They were in the Chapel of All Souls, dominated by an effigy of Lord Kitchener and also containing a piet� sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ. Jeremy led them behind the effigy, out of earshot from the aisle outside, and squatted down with his back to the statue. He took out a notebook from his bag and looked up at Jack, his face flushed with excitement. �Okay. You told me on the phone about your finds, about the tomb. Pretty incredible. Now it�s my turn.�

�Fire away.�

�I was in Oxford most of yesterday, following that lead I told you about. The archivist at Balliol College is a friend of mine. We searched through all the unpublished papers related to the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry, and found an accounts ledger from the 1670s reconstruction of the church by Sir Christopher Wren. Nobody had ever thought much of the ledger, as it seemed mostly to replicate Wren�s account books that have already been published. But something caught my eye, and we looked at it in more detail. It was an addendum, from 1685. An old burial chamber under the church had been cleared out, and Wren�s team returned to seal it up and check the foundations. They found a locked crypt beyond the chamber. They managed to break open the door, and one of them went in.�

Jack whistled. �Bingo. That�s our crypt. Do you know who it was?�

�All of the master craftsmen were present in the burial chamber. It was five years after the church had been completed, and the 1685 visit was a tour of inspection to see how everything was standing up. Edward Pierce, mason and sculptor. Thomas Newman, bricklayer. John Longland, carpenter. Thomas Mead, plasterer. Christopher Wren himself was there, taking a breather from his work here at St. Paul�s. And there was one other man, a new name to me. Johannes Deverette.�

�French?� Jack said.

�Flemish. My friend the librarian had come across the name before, and we found enough to build a sketch. He was a Huguenot refugee, a Calvinist Protestant who had fled the Low Countries for England earlier that year�1685 was the year the French king revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had given Protestants protection.�

�Nothing unusual in a Huguenot in the London building trade at that time,� Jack murmured. �Some of Wren�s best-known woodworkers were Huguenots, the famous carver Grinling Gibbons, for example. You can see his work all round us here in St. Paul�s.�

�What was unusual was Deverette�s occupation. I went over the road to the Bodleian Library and did a name search, came up with more biographical notes. He described himself as a music meister, a master of music. Wren apparently employed him on a recommendation from Grinling Gibbons, to soothe Wren�s young son Billy, who was mentally handicapped. Deverette sang Gregorian chants.�

�Gregorian music.� Costas sneezed. �Isn�t that the traditional music of the Roman Catholic liturgy?�

�It�s a really fascinating ingredient of this whole story,� Jeremy said. �Like the Anglicans, the Huguenots rejected the rule of the Roman Church, but there were many who clung to the old traditions for purely aesthetic reasons. I discovered that Deverette came from a long line of Gregorian musicians who claimed descent from the time of St. Gregory himself, the pope who formalized the plainsong repertory in the sixth century. I was stunned to discover that Sir Christopher Wren himself shared that aesthetic. But then I thought of his architecture. Just look at this place.� Jeremy gestured at the cathedral�s interior. �It�s hardly an austere Protestant meeting house, is it? It�s a match for the grandeur of St. Peter�s in the Vatican.� He pulled out a scrap of notepaper. �This quote is almost all we know about Wren�s religious views, but it�s extraordinarily revealing. As a young man he was much taken by the country house of a friend. He said it was a place where �the piety and devotion of another age, put to flight by the impiety and crime of ours, have found sanctuary, in which the virtues are all not merely observed but cherished.� Nobody has ever seriously thought of Wren as a secret Catholic, but he certainly regretted the killjoy aspects of the Protestant Reformation.�

�Doesn�t plainchant originate much earlier than all that, in Jewish ritual?� Jack said.

�Unaccompanied singing almost certainly goes back before the foundation of the Roman Church, to the time of the apostles,� Jeremy said. �It was probably responsorial chanting, verses sung by a soloist, alternating with responses by a choir. It may have been one of the very earliest congregational rituals, sung in secret places where the first followers of Jesus came together. Singing is even mentioned in the Gospels.� He looked at his notebook. �Matthew, 26.30. �And when they had sung a hymn, they went out unto the Mount of Olives.��

�So this guy Deverette was here in London during Wren�s rebuilding of St. Paul�s Cathedral?� Costas asked.

�He was here beginning in 1685, when he arrived in England. Wren�s men had finished the new structure of the Church of St. Lawrence Jewry a few years earlier, but the ledger we found in the college library shows that 1685 was the year they broke through into the undercroft, the old crypt. That�s where it gets really fascinating. It turns out Deverette had another passion. He was a keen antiquarian, a collector of Roman and Christian relics. Wren was also interested in all the old stuff his men found during his building work in London. He gave Deverette another job, to rescue interesting artifacts. A kind of archaeological watching brief.�

�He�s our man,� Jack said excitedly. �We know somebody got into the tomb and found that cylinder. It must be him.�

�Did he keep any records?� Costas said, coughing.

�I checked everywhere. I went back through all the published Wren papers, everything on the churches, all his personal papers. Nothing. Then I had a brainstorm. I went to the National Archives at Kew, got there just in time yesterday afternoon. I did a search of the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury.�

�You found his will,� Jack exclaimed.

Jeremy nodded, his face flushed. �Many of the ecclesiastical wills are now online, but his was in a newly discovered batch that had been filed wrongly and has only just been cataloged. My librarian friend told me about it. I was incredibly lucky.�

�Let�s have it,� Jack said.

Jeremy took out a scanned image from his sheaf of papers. It showed a yellowed page, with about twenty lines of neat handwriting. Below the handwriting was a red seal and a signature, with more signatures and a scrawled probate note at the bottom. Jeremy began to read:

�In the Name of God, Amen. I, Johannes Deverette, Musick Meister to Sir Christopher Wren, Knight, Surveyor General of her Majesty�s Works, do make and ordain this my last Will and Testment as followeth. I desire that my body may be decently buried without pomp at the discretion of said Sir Christopher Wren, herein after named sole Executor and Trustee.�

�My God,� Jack murmured. �Wren was his executor. He must have known about any antiquities Deverette possessed, anything he�d found in London and been allowed to keep by Wren, anything he�d chosen to pass on at his death.�

Jeremy nodded. �Deverette died only a few months after making the will, when his son and heir was still a minor, so Wren would have safeguarded any bequeathed possessions. But wait for it. There�s the usual inscrutable verbiage about chattel and estates, but the final sentences are the crunch.� He read aloud:

�All of my books, musick and musickal instruments, I give and bequeath unto my sone John Everett. To my said sone too I bequeath all of my antient rarities, my Cabinett of Curositys and Relicks from the divers excavations in Londone of said Sir Christopher Wren, including the Godspelle taken by me from the hand of the Antient priestess. This last mentioned to be kept in Security, in the most sacred Trust, and bequeathed by my said sone to his own sone and heire, and thereafter to his sone and heire, in perpetuity, in the Name of Christ, Jesu Domine. Signed and Sealed by the above named Johannes Deverette as and for his last Will and Testament in the presence of us who have subscribed our names as written in his presence, this sixth of Auguste 1711. Chris. Wren. Grinling Gibbons. Witnesses.�

�Godspelle,� Costas said. �What�s on earth�s that?�

Jack�s heart was pounding. His voice was hoarse. �Jeremy said it a few moments ago. It�s Old English, meaning �good word,� and meaning �gospel.�� Jack paused, and swallowed hard. �It means that Deverette found the scroll in that cylinder, and must have read it.�

Costas attempted a whistle. �Game on again.�

�It�s the only reason I can see why he would have called it that,� Jeremy said.

�It�s the first indication we�ve had of what Claudius� document might have contained,� Jack said, peering at Jeremy. �I hardly dare ask. Did you get anywhere further?�

�It was easy enough tracing Deverette�s descendants,� Jeremy replied. �The Huguenots kept pretty good family records. Deverette himself anglicized the name, had his son named Everett. The musical tradition seems to have carried on, but they came to make their living as builders and architects. For generations they were worthies of the Carpenters� Company, one of the most prominent London guilds. They settled in Lawrence Lane, overlooking the church, only yards from the crypt where Deverette had made his discovery.�

�Guardians of the tomb,� Costas murmured.

�This is beginning to fit together,� Jack said quietly. �The secret crypt, the burials of those women we found, the succession of names from Roman times to the Great Fire of 1666. I think they were a secret sect who knew about the tomb, knew about the treasure it held, were the original guardians. But then the Great Fire broke the succession, burned the church and buried the entrance to their crypt and the tomb.�

�Maybe it was like the eruption of Vesuvius for the Sibyl at Cumae,� Costas said. �Fire and ash foredooming, all that. The end of their time.�

�And then by sheer chance the tomb was found again, the sacred Gospel was removed, and the cycle of guardianship was renewed,� Jack murmured.

�The strong Huguenot family tradition counts in our favor again,� Jeremy said. �There�s no reference to relics in any of the later wills, but the power of that original bequest in Deverette�s will would have held sway through the generations. And there�s something else, a real clincher. In the mid-nineteenth century, Deverette�s great-grandson John Everett was associated with a secretive Victorian society called the New Pelagians, who claimed to follow the teachings of the rebel British monk Pelagius.�

�Claudius?� Jack murmured. �Can we really trace all this back to him, to his introduction of Christianity to Britain?�

�To one he met in Judaea,� Costas said.

Jeremy carried on. �The Everetts continued to be prominent in the City of London in the nineteenth century, always living and working close to St. Lawrence Jewry and the Guildhall. John Everett the Pelagian was a Councilor of the Corporation of London, and a freedman of the City. His son Samuel was Master of the Carpenters� Company. But then something odd happens. Samuel�s eldest son, Lawrence Everett, was an architect like his father. But almost immediately after his father died in 1912, he closed his business on Lawrence Lane, left his family and disappeared. You can read too much into it, but it was as if Lawrence Everett was the last of the guardians and broke the succession, taking the treasure away to a new sanctuary before hell was unleashed again during the London Blitz.�

�Any idea where he went?� Jack said.

�Immigration records, passenger manifests. A lot of stuff to research. I�ve got one promising lead, though.�

�You always do,� Jack said. �You�re becoming indispensable, you know.�

Jeremy grinned. �I might be able to make some headway back at the National Archives in Kew. It might take me another day.�

�Let�s get on with it, then.�

�

Five minutes later they stood under the entrance to St. Paul�s Cathedral, looking out through the sweeping curtains of rain and seeking a break in the deluge. Jack felt as if he were on an island, and the solidity of the cathedral with the veiled miasma outside seemed to mirror his state of mind. The astonishing revelations of the last hours had taken the quest forward by leaps and bounds, made it seem as real as the structure above them, yet their goal still seemed like an unseen beacon somewhere out beyond the rain, down some dark alley they might never find. Jack had a sudden, surreal flashback to the lost library in Herculaneum, the image seeming to concertina into a succession of chambers, the doors open as far as he could see but the goal out of sight in the distance. He knew their only hope now lay with Jeremy, that some revelation in the archives would push them toward that last door, to the place Claudius had wanted them to find.

�Don�t tell me we�re going on the Tube, Jack,� Costas croaked. �You know I�m never going underground again.�

�As it happens, I�ve always wanted to see the Great Conduit,� Jack replied, winking at Jeremy. �An underground channel built in the thirteenth century to bring fresh water from the Tyburn stream, about three kilometers west of here. The stone cisterns sound impressive, but Roman aqueduct engineers a thousand years earlier would have been appalled. It leaked, and the gravity flow was all wrong. A great example of the march of progress, marching backward. Well worth a visit.�

�No,� Costas said flatly. �No way. You go. And I�m only doing taxis from now on.�

Jack grinned, then saw a respite in the drizzle and stepped out from the cathedral entrance. At that moment a young man in a city suit disengaged himself from a group of people also sheltering under the entrance and walked in front of Jack, blocking his way. �Dr. Howard?� he said intently. Jack stepped back in alarm. The man handed him a slip of paper. �Tomorrow, eleven a.m. Your lives may depend on it.� He moved away and quickly trotted down the steps, disappearing into the throng of morning commuters making their way into the city. Jack quickly stepped back under the doorway and read the note, then passed it to Jeremy. �Did you recognize that guy?� Jack asked.

�I�m not sure.� Jeremy anxiously scanned the other people on the steps. �It�s not good news if you�ve been tracked here, Jack.�

�I know.�

Jeremy glanced at the piece of paper, read the typed words and pursed his lips. �Right in the heart of things.� He passed it back to Jack. �You going?�

�I don�t think I have any choice.�

�I�d go with you, but I have to find out what I can about Everett.�

�I agree,� Jack said quietly.

�Take Costas with you. You might need a bodyguard.�

Jack looked at the form slumped miserably against the other side of the stone column beside them, dripping and sneezing. He walked over, took Costas by the shoulder and steered him toward the steps. The rain had begun again in earnest, and Costas looked as if he were about to dissolve.

�Come on,� Jack said, looking up for a moment and letting the rainwater stream over his face. �I think we might just be able to do something about that sniffle of yours.�

�

AT FIVE MINUTES TO ELEVEN THE NEXT MORNING JACK led Costas across the Piazza San Pietro in the Vatican, heading toward the Ufficio Scavi, the office of the archaeological excavations, on the south side of the basilica. They had flown in that morning from England on the IMU Embraer, arriving at Leonardo da Vinci Airport, away from public scrutiny, and Jack felt sure they were not being followed. The vast scale of the piazza and the surrounding colonnade seemed to dwarf the milling crowd of tourists and pilgrims, and they passed through as inconspicuously as they could. As they came closer to the Ufficio, Jack began to scan the faces around them, looking for some sign, some recognition. He had no idea what to expect.

Then out of nowhere a young man was walking beside him, dressed casually in jeans and an open-necked shirt and wearing sunglasses. �Dr. Howard?� the man said. Jack looked at him, and nodded. �Please follow me.� Jack glanced at Costas, and they followed the man as he strode ahead. After passing the Ufficio he approached the Swiss Guard at the entrance to the Arco delle Campane and flashed his identity card. �These are my two guests,� he said in Italian. �A private tour.� The guard nodded and lifted his automatic rifle to let them pass. They crossed a small piazza, then entered the south annex of the Grottoes beneath the basilica. At the third room, the young man motioned for them to wait, and then walked over to a locked door. �We will not be disturbed,� he said in English. �The Ufficio has closed this part of the Grottoes for more excavation work. Wait here.� He produced a set of keys and opened the door, slipping through and leaving Jack and Costas alone, suddenly hemmed in by silence and the old walls.

�Any idea what�s going on?� Costas said quietly, his voice muffled by his cold. �Any idea where we are?�

�First question, your guess is as good as mine. Second, these walls are virtually all that�s left of the early basilica, the one built here by the emperor Constantine the Great after he�d converted to Christianity in the early fourth century AD. Before that, this was the site of a Roman circus, a racetrack. And where our guide has disappeared is the entrance to the necropolis, a street of rock-cut mausolea of the first century AD, discovered when archaeological excavations began here in the 1940s. Their big find was the Tomb of St. Peter, ahead of us under the High Altar.�

The door swung open and the young man reappeared. He handed Jack and Costas each an unlit candle, and flicked a lighter over the wicks. �Where you see the candle on the floor, go right, but extinguish it and take it with you,� he said quietly. �There are twelve steps down, then you�ll see another candle through another door. Pass through that door, and then close it behind you. I�ll wait for you here. Go.�

Costas looked pained. �We�re going underground again, Jack.�

�It�s just your kind of thing. A city of the dead.�

�Great.�

Jack paused, looked at the young man for a moment, decided not to speak, then nodded and walked toward the door, Costas following. They went through, and immediately the door was shut behind them. It was pitch dark except for the candles they were carrying and a faint glow somewhere ahead. It had been hot and dry outside, but the air was cool and damp as they descended, becoming musty. Jack led, carefully feeling his way down the steps, until he reached a rough stone floor. They could see that the glow ahead of them was a candle on the floor. After reaching it Jack did as instructed, snuffing it out with his fingers and picking it up, then turning right and going down another flight of steps, into a rock-cut chamber, evidently an ancient mausoleum long since cleared of its contents. At the bottom to the left was a stone door opened inward in the rock, and through it they could see another distant pool of candlelight, just as before. They passed through, and Jack pushed the door back until it was shut, seamlessly fitting into the rock as if it were a secret entranceway.

�Incredible,� he murmured, looking around in the flickering candlelight, making out the niches and decorations on the walls. �It�s a catacomb. The mausoleums we�ve just come through were originally aboveground in the Roman period, a street of tombs. But this deeper part must always have been subterranean, cut into the living rock. The Vatican has never revealed this before.�

�Makes you wonder what else they haven�t revealed,� Costas murmured.

Jack stepped forward, sensing images on either side of him, inscriptions, paintings. He stopped at one, and held the candle forward. �Amazing,� he whispered. �It�s intact. The catacombs are intact, the burials are still here.�

�Just what I wanted to know,� Costas moaned.

�They�re sealed up, plastered over. Look, this inscription�s legible. In Pace.� Jack faltered. �It�s early Christian, very early. It dates well before the time of Constantine the Great. A secret burial place, used when the Christians in Rome were outlawed, persecuted. This is a fantastic find. I can�t see why they haven�t made it public.�

�Maybe something to do with this.� Costas was ahead now, not far from the candle on the floor, and Jack cautiously followed. �It�s a raised area, covered with pottery tiles,� Costas said. He made his way along the left side of the passageway and squatted down beside the candle.

�It�s a tomb,� Jack said quietly. �You sometimes get them in the floor of catacombs, as well as along the sides. Sometimes the floor tombs were the more important ones.�

�Jack, I might be hallucinating. That d�j� vu thing you were on about under the Palatine Hill. Maybe a delayed nitrogen effect.�

�What is it?�

�That tile. Below the candle. There�s an inscription scratched on it. Either I�m seeing things, or it�s identical to a word we�ve come across before.�

Jack edged up behind Costas. There were decorative scratchings around the edge of the tile, like a wreath of vine tendrils. In the center he saw what had sent a tremor through Costas. It was a name, unmistakable, a name they had seen scratched on pottery like this before, on an ancient shipwreck hundreds of miles away, lost for almost two millennia beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The name of a man, written in Latin.

Paulus.

Could it be? Jack looked around, saw the widening of the passage, the other tombs crowding in on this spot but not built over it, as if their occupants had wanted to be close to it, in reverence. He saw Christian symbols everywhere, a dove on the wall beside him, a fish, the Christian formula in inscriptions again and again, in pace. And then as Costas moved his candle over the tile he saw it faintly scratched beside the name, the Chi-Rho symbol. The sign of Christ.

�The Tomb of St. Paul,� he whispered incredulously, laying his hand on a tile. �St. Peter and St. Paul, interred in the same place, ad catacumbus, just as tradition says.�

�It is so.�

Jack drew back, startled. The voice came from a shadowy niche opposite them, in the wall beyond the head of the tomb. He could just make out a black cassock over legs, but not the upper body. The voice was authoritative, with an edge to it, the English slightly accented, possibly East European. �Do not attempt to approach me. Please extinguish your candles. Sit on the stone bench behind you.� Jack paused for a second, then nodded at Costas, and they did as instructed. The only source of light now was the candle on the tomb, and everything else was reduced to flickering shadow and darkness. The other figure shifted slightly, and they could just make out a hooded head, hands placed on knees. �I have summoned you here today in the greatest secrecy. I wanted you to see what you have just seen.�

�Who are you?� Costas said.

�You will not be told my name, nor who I am,� the man repeated. �Do not ask again.�

�This truly is the Tomb of St. Paul?� Jack said.

�It is so,� the man repeated.

�What about the Church of San Paulo fuori le Mura?� Jack said. �Isn�t he supposed to have been buried there, in a vineyard?�

�He was indeed taken there after his death, but was brought back here secretly to be reunited with Peter, at the place of their martyrdom.�

�It is true, then,� Jack murmured.

�They were martyred together by the emperor Nero, in the circus built at this spot by Caligula. Peter was crucified upside down, and Paul was beheaded. The Romans made martyrs of the two greatest fathers of the early Church, and in doing so the pagan emperors helped to bring the Holy See into being at this place. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, amen.�

�You have brought us here to show us this?� Jack said.

There was a pause, and the man shifted again. The candle on the tomb wavered, lengthening the shadow so that for a few moments he was obscured completely, then the flame burned upright again. �You will by now know that the Roman emperor Claudius faked his own poisoning and survived in secret for many years beyond the end of his reign in AD 54.�

Jack peered into the shadows, unsure how much to reveal. �How do you know this?�

�By telling you what I am about to tell, I test my bond with the sanctity of the Church. But it will be so.� The man paused, and then reached into the shadows beside him and lifted an ancient leather-bound volume onto his lap. Jack could now see his hands�strong, long-fingered hands that had seen physical toil, but he could still not see his face. �In AD 60, St. Paul came to Italy from the east, surviving the famous shipwreck on the way. It was as it is told in the Acts of the Apostles, except that the shipwreck was off Sicily, not Malta.�

Costas glanced questioningly at Jack, who flashed an exultant look back at him. Neither of them spoke.

�St. Paul came first to the Bay of Naples, to Misenum, and met with the Christian brethren he found there, as recounted in Acts,� the man continued quietly, almost whispering. �After the Crucifixion, it was the single most important event in the early history of Christianity. Paul was the first to take the word of Jesus beyond the Holy Land, the first true missionary. When he left Misenum for Rome, those whom he first instructed called themselves a concilium, the concilium ecclesiasticum Sanctus Paulus.�

�The council of the church of St. Paul,� Jack translated.

�They were three in number, and they remain three today.�

�Today?� Jack said, astonished. �This concilium still exists?�

�For generations, for almost three centuries, the concilium was a secret organization, a pillar of strength for the early Church when it was fighting for its very survival, when Christianity was still an underground religion. At first they met in the Phlegraean Fields, and then they took over the Sibyl�s cave at Cumae, after the last of the Sibyls had disappeared. Later, as Christianity took hold, the concilium moved to Rome, to these catacombs where we sit now, to the place where the martyred body of St. Paul was buried by his followers, in secret, after his beheading, near the hallowed tomb of St. Peter.�

�And this concilium has been meeting here ever since?� Costas asked.

�By the time of the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, the leaders of the concilium saw its purpose over and disbanded it, sealing up the catacomb of St. Paul. Its location was lost, and was only rediscovered during the necropolis excavation following the Second World War. Only since then has this chamber again become the meeting place.�

�The concilium was re-created in modern times?� Jack said.

�It was called forth again by Constantine the Great, near the end of his reign. He had invested much in converting the State to Christianity. As a statesman, as a soldier, he saw the need to defend the Church, to create a council of war who would send out soldiers to fight in the name of Christ, who would show no mercy in the face of the Devil, who would follow no rules of engagement. Over the centuries, the concilium fought off the most pernicious of heresies, the ones the Inquisition of the Holy See were unable to defeat. In Britain they fought the Pelagians, sending Pelagius himself to the fires of hell. They fought the Protestants after the Reformation, a secret war of terror and murder that nearly destroyed Europe. After the New World was discovered, the concilium ordered the destruction of the Maya and the Aztec and the Inca, fearing a prophecy of the ancient Sibyl that foretold a coming darkness from the west.�

�And these were men of God,� Costas murmured.

�They were believers in the sanctity and power of the Church, in the Roman Church as the only route to salvation and the Kingdom of Heaven,� the man said. �Constantine the Great was an astute statesman. He knew that the survival of the Church depended on unswerving loyalty, on the faith of his holy warriors in the Church as the only route to God. In his revived concilium, he created his perfect enforcers.�

�Can you prove all this?� Costas said.

The man lifted the book slightly into the candlelight. �The records of the concilium ecclesiasticum Sanctus Paulus. One day the world will know. History will be rewritten.�

�What does this have to do with Claudius?� Jack said.

The man leaned forward slightly, and the candlelight flickered off the shadowy outline of his face. �It is the greatest threat the concilium has ever faced, and their greatest fear. It is the reason why I have brought you here. You and your team are in the gravest danger, far more so than you may realize.�

�We realize what it�s like to look down the business end of a Beretta 93,� Costas said. �Inside a cavern under the Palatine Hill.�

�He had instructions not to shoot,� the man said quietly.

�Then maybe the concilium should employ more obedient henchmen,� Costas said.

�How did you know?� Jack said. �How did the concilium know we�d be diving under Rome?� The man was silent, and Jack persisted. �Was there someone listening in the tunnel at Herculaneum? Was it the inspector, Dr. Elizabeth d�Agostino?�

�We know she spoke to you outside the villa.�

�How do you know?� Jack felt a sudden chill run through him. What if it was more than fear that had prevented her from returning his calls? �Where is she now?�

�There are spies everywhere.�

�Even on board Seaquest II?� Costas said.

�You need to do everything you can to find what you are looking for and to reveal it to the world before they get to you,� the man said intently. �Once they know where it is, they will do everything in their power to destroy you. I have done all that I can�I cannot restrain them any more.�

�Dr. d�Agostino,� Jack persisted.

�As I said, I have done all that I can.�

�Why should you want to help us?� Costas said.

The man paused. �Let me tell you about Claudius.� He opened the book at the beginning. They could just see the ancient writing in the dim candlelight, extensively annotated in the margins and clearly in several different hands, reminiscent of the page from Pliny�s Natural History they had found at Herculaneum, but more ragged and stained, as if it had been pored over many times. �This page recounts the founding of the original concilium, in the first century AD,� the man said, shutting the book again and putting his hands over it. �One of the first three members was a man named Narcissus, a freedman of the emperor Claudius.�

�Good God,� Jack murmured.

�The eunuch? We�ve met him,� Costas said. �Lying across the doorway into Claudius� study. Looked as if he was heading in, reaching for something. He got a little singed.�

�Ah.� The man was quiet for a moment. �You found Narcissus. For almost two thousand years we have wondered.�

�I think I can guess now what he was doing there,� Jack murmured.

�You will know then that Narcissus was Claudius� long-serving praepositus ab epistulis, his scribe,� the man said. �When Claudius decided to disappear from Rome in AD 54, he also engineered Narcissus� fake poisoning so that he could accompany his master to his hideaway in Herculaneum, and help him with his books. But after AD 58, there was another reason for Narcissus to stay on. He always accompanied Claudius on his nocturnal visits to the cave of the Sibyl, where Claudius sought a cure for his palsy. Narcissus came to know the Christians who hid in the Phlegraean Fields, and he himself converted after meeting St. Paul there. Narcissus already knew that Claudius had been to Judaea as a young man, that he had met the Messiah and had returned with a precious document. Paul himself had never met Jesus, and was astonished to hear from Narcissus that something written in the hand of Christ might survive. He instructed Narcissus to find and bring the document to him in Rome, where Paul was going next. History overtook Paul, of course, and he was martyred, and Narcissus never found it. Claudius had been too cunning even for him. But the clamor for the document grew among the Christian brethren in the Phlegraean Fields, and word spread that Claudius was an anointed one, that he had touched Christ. The other two members of the concilium saw the threat this posed, a threat against their authority, and they implored Narcissus to find the document, to destroy it. They believed it to be false, a heresy, a fable dreamed up by Claudius, a man who they only ever saw delusional, after his visits to the Sibyl. Finally, Narcissus left Claudius one night at the cave of the Sibyl and made his way back to Herculaneum, intending to burn the study and all the books. That was the night of 24 August AD 79.�

�When everything except that room went up in flames,� Costas murmured.

�The concilium had no way of knowing whether or not Narcissus had succeeded. But with the utter disappearance of Herculaneum in the eruption, the threat was thought extinguished forever,� the man continued. �Over the generations, the document, the false Gospel, was remembered as heretical, as the first of many forgeries intended to bring down the Church, and its destruction as the first of many battles won by the concilium. Then, in the seventeenth century, more than a thousand years after the fall of Rome, the Bourbon King Charles of Naples began digging at the site of Herculaneum, and an ominous truth was revealed. Herculaneum had not been destroyed in the eruption. It was miraculously preserved. Even worse, one of the first sites to be discovered and explored was the Villa of Calpurnius Piso, the Villa of the Papyri, which the concilium knew had been Claudius� hideaway. Then, even worse still, books started to be found, ancient scrolls, mostly carbonized but some legible. The concilium had to act. For more than two centuries now they have done everything in their power to hamper exploration at Herculaneum, at the Villa of the Papyri. The concilium has huge wealth and resources at its disposal, more than enough to excavate Herculaneum in its entirety, or to prevent excavation forever. Or so they thought. Just as in AD 79, natural catastrophe intervened again. The earthquake last month revealed the tunnel which had been sealed up in the eighteenth century, one the concilium knew might lead to more scrolls, even to Claudius� secret room. With all the world�s media present, there was no way an investigation could be prevented. The work of the Devil might yet see light. That was when your team was called to the scene.�

�Phew.� Costas sat down against the tomb, then suddenly realized what he had done and sprang up, brushing the plaster from his legs. �That explains a few things.�

�But it doesn�t explain who you are, and why you are telling us this,� Jack said. �Are you a member of the concilium?�

There was a silence, and then the man spoke again, more quietly than before. �For many years I was a Jesuit missionary. Once, in a canoe on the lake at Pet�n in the Yucat�n, I had an epiphany, a revelatory experience. When you are on water, in a small boat, the motion seems at once to focus and to free the mind, until you think about nothing except what you are experiencing, the sensations of the moment.� The man paused, and Jack nodded, but felt uneasy. �I began to think about Jesus on the Sea of Galilee. I began to think that the sea was his Kingdom of Heaven, that his message to the others was that the Kingdom could be found, just as he had found it. That the Kingdom of Heaven is all around us, on earth.�

�And that turned you from the concilium?� Jack asked.

�Love thy neighbor, because it is easier than hating him. Turn the other cheek, because it is easier than resisting. Free your mind from such preoccupations, and focus your energy on finding the Kingdom of Heaven. That was Jesus� message. The concilium had a holy cause, but it did not heed this call. The search for heresy, for blasphemy, became all-consuming, and the goal was lost. Their methods became unsound. And now there is one among the three who has turned a dark corner, has been unable to resist the temptation. The Devil has reached out and drawn him into his fold. It has happened to others in the past.�

�Who is he? And how do you know about us?�

�You have come to the attention of the concilium before. The one of whom I speak was also a member of the Norse brotherhood who guarded the secret of the lost Jewish treasure of the Temple, the f�lag.�

�And who murdered Father Patrick O�Connor,� Jack said grimly. �My friend, and a devout man of God. Butchered in the name of the concilium, it seems.�

�The instruments used by the concilium have often been blunt. But now they have enlisted forces of darkness that seem far beyond the reach of God.� The man paused, sinking back farther into the shadows, his voice little more than a whisper. �Father O�Connor was a friend of mine too. He was the other young initiate who found this place years ago with me, the tomb of St. Paul. He delved too deep into a past that the concilium did not wish to see opened. He knew about the book that I now hold in my hands. He believed that we must face the truth. And now so do I.�

�You have put yourself at grave risk,� Jack murmured.

�I have done all that I can to protect you. You must swear to keep secret all that I have said until I reveal myself. I must continue to work from within. And you must understand. Were the true words of the Messiah to be found, the concilium would rejoice. Were the words to prove false, as they believe them to be, then the dogs of war would be unleashed to devour those who would convey them, who would peddle such a blasphemy. You must be careful. Do not try to find me again. Go now.�

Half an hour later, Jack and Costas sat high on the rooftop balcony beside the dome of St. Peter�s, swigging water and soaking in the afternoon sun, gazing out over Bernini�s great piazza far below. Beyond the sweeping semicircular colonnades that surrounded the piazza, they could just make out Castel St. Angelo, the mausoleum of the Roman emperors, beside the river Tiber, and farther south they could see the heart of the ancient city, the Capitol and the Palatine Hill. Costas leaned back on his elbows, his face tilted to the sun and his eyes shut behind his designer sunglasses. �On balance, I prefer being high up to being underground,� he murmured. �I think I really have had enough of damp subterranean places.� He peered over at Jack. �You trust this guy?�

�Well, a good deal of what he said we�d already guessed at, and the rest fits. But I�m not sure.�

�I don�t weasel up to anyone who sends a thug to point a gun at me, turncoat or not. I have to tell you, Jack, I don�t trust the guy. I think it�s all an elaborate game of charades. Tell us enough that�s verifiable and plausible, take us into his confidence, get us to reveal what we know.�

�He didn�t answer my question about Elizabeth. I�m worried.�

�Maybe Hiebermeyer and Maria can find out.�

�Maybe.� Jack breathed in deeply, and looked out over the city again. �Anyway, the crunch time will be if we actually find something.�

�Or if we get no further,� Costas said. �Either way could be bad news. I can�t imagine the concilium wanting us to tell the world what we know. If that guy was playing a game with us, then as soon as he started revealing all that history he was also issuing our execution warrant. It was his risk telling us, but if what he says is even half true, then he could silence us with a click of his fingers.�

�You�re assuming the worst about this guy.�

�I�m being devil�s advocate, but we have to be wary, Jack. And it�s not just us I�m thinking about. The hit list gets bigger with each person we bring on board. Hiebermeyer and Maria have to be up there at the top. There�s your friend Elizabeth. And Jeremy�s been seen with us, by that guy who slipped you the message in London. God knows what was overheard when we talked in the cathedral. We should have been more careful.�

�My Reuters friend is only a call away. We�ll send out a press release with the images from Herculaneum at the first threat.�

�There�s not enough hard evidence, Jack. As it stands, this concilium could all be a figment of our imagination. It would be yet another conspiracy theory, big news one day, forgotten the next. And any investigative reporter�s got to think twice about taking on this lot.�

�We�ll just have to hope our man really is what he says he is,� Jack murmured. �And that Jeremy comes up with something in London.�

Costas grunted and lay back. Jack was still reeling in astonishment at what they had heard. They had another hour to kill before their car arrived for the airport, and he got on his cell phone to update Hiebermeyer and their old mentor Professor Dillen with the latest developments, skirting around what they had just been told until he could be convinced it was all true. Many pieces of the puzzle seemed to have fallen together, but the enormity of what they might be up against was only beginning to register. He focused on the view below, anything to take his mind off it, knowing there was nothing they could do at the moment, no leads they could follow until Jeremy had exhausted all possible lines of inquiry in England. He glanced at Costas. �A few days ago you asked about the size of St. Paul�s ship,� he said, pocketing his cell phone. �Take a look at the center of the piazza.�

Costas heaved himself up and peered over the parapet. �You mean the obelisk?�

�Brought here by the emperor Caligula from Egypt, to decorate the central spine of the circus, the place where Peter and Paul were executed,� Jack said. �Twenty-five meters tall, weighing at least two hundred tons. Looking at stone like that is the best way to gauge the size of the biggest Roman ships, including grain ships like the one carrying St. Paul. The obelisk carrier was eventually sunk by Claudius in his new harbor at Ostia, filled with hydraulic concrete to make a mole. It�s still there today. Pliny the Elder tells us all about it in his Natural History.�

�Good old Pliny,� Costas murmured, then slumped back in the sun. Jack peered around at the other people who had come up to the roof of the dome, his eyes alert for anything suspicious, his vigilance heightened after their warning in the catacombs far below. He might have been telling the truth. Jack had no reason to believe they had been followed, and they were probably safer here than anywhere else in the city. He relaxed slightly and looked over the parapet again. He had an eagle�s-eye view of the piazza, whose grandeur equaled the greatest monuments of pagan Rome. He watched the people crossing far below. It was as if he were viewing a computer-generated image from a Hollywood epic, of Rome the way people thought of it, not the way it was, as if on closer inspection the people below would be revealed not as flesh and blood but as stick figures, mere embellishments to the architecture, ethereal and meaningless. Jack reached for his wallet and took out a paper sleeve containing the bronze coin of Claudius they had found in Herculaneum, then slid it out and held it up so that it blocked his view of the piazza, what he�d been able to see between the colonnades of the roof.

�My find! You took it. Good man. Nobody would have ever seen it again if we�d left it.� Costas was peering at Jack, and at the coin.

�Borrowed it.�

�Yeah. Right.�

�I�m thinking about Claudius again,� Jack said. �That history is shaped by individuals, unique personalities, not by processes. Those are real people down there in the piazza, individuals with their own volition, their own free will, and they aren�t subordinate to this whole thing.� He gestured back at the dome of St. Peter�s, and at the huge colonnades surrounding the square. �Somewhere down there is someone who could create more grandeur than all this, or destroy it. It�s individual decisions, whims, that make history. And people have fun. Look where Claudius has taken us.�

�Fun isn�t exactly the word that springs to mind, Jack.� Costas rolled over. �Let me see. Dead rats, sewage, body liqueur, a fossilized Vestal Virgin, a terrifying banshee redhead queen.�

�But you got an unexploded bomb.�

�Didn�t even get to defuse it.�

Jack�s phone chirped, and he quickly sleeved the coin and pulled out the phone, flipped it open, listened intently for a few minutes, spoke briefly and then pocketed it. He had a broad smile on his face.

�Well?� Costas said. �You�ve got that look again.�

�That was Jeremy. He had a hunch, and did a search of the international death registries available on the Web. All the obvious places Everett could have disappeared to in 1912: Australia, Canada, the States. The IMU Embraer�s being fueled up as we speak. You�re going to love this one.�

�Try me.�

�When was the last time you were in southern California?�

�

AS JACK WAS STRUGGLING TOWARD CONSCIOUSNESS, he became aware of the vibration of the aircraft where he had been leaning against the window. Images had been cycling through his mind, flashbacks to their extraordinary discoveries of the past few days. The Chi-Rho symbol in the ancient shipwreck, the scratched name of St. Paul. The shadowy head of Anubis, leering out of the tunnel like a demon, beckoning him into the lost chamber in Herculaneum. More dark places, the cave of the Sibyl, the underground labyrinth in Rome, the red-haired skull under London, staring sightless up at him from her tomb. Images at once vivid yet opaque, disjointed yet somehow bound together, images that flashed up in his mind over and over again as if he were caught in a continuous loop. He felt like Aeneas in the underworld, yet without the Sibyl to guide him back, only some malign force that pulled him down as he struggled to find the light, trapping him in a dark maze of his own devising. He felt disturbed, discomfited, and it was a relief to open his eyes and see the reassuring figure of Costas slumped over in the seat opposite. He realized that the overbearing feeling in his head had been the increased air pressure as the aircraft descended, and he blew his nose to equalize it. The whine of the Embraer�s twin jets swept the images from his mind, and reality took over. He leaned forward and stared out the window.

�Bad dream?� Jeremy slipped into the aisle seat beside him and closed the dog-eared notebook he had been studying.

Jack grunted. �It�s as if the ingredients are there, but nothing�s cooking. This trip�s make or break. If we don�t get anywhere today, I�m out of options.� He took a deep breath, calmed himself, then glanced curiously at Jeremy�s book. �Cryptography?�

�One of my childhood passions. I collated all the German codes broken by the Allies during the First World War. I was just getting myself back up to speed. It was looking at some of those early Christian acrostics that did it. I�ve realized you can�t have too many skills in this game.�

�It would appear,� Jack said, scratching his stubble, �that you have the makings of an archaeologist. Maria was right. Maybe I should just give up now and hand it all over to you.�

�Maybe in about twenty years,� Jeremy replied thoughtfully, then grinned at Jack. �That should give me time for a stint in Special Forces, to learn everything about diving, weapons and helicopters, to overcome all fear and, most importantly, to work out how to handle your esteemed colleague opposite.�

Costas moaned and snorted, still asleep, and Jack laughed. �No one handles him. He�s the boss around here.�

�Trouble is, in twenty years� time, all the world�s mysteries will have been solved.�

Jack shook his head. �The past is like the New World was to the first colonists. You think you�ve found it all, then you turn a corner and another El Dorado�s shimmering on the horizon. And look where we are today. Some of the greatest mysteries will always be out there, half-solved, constantly drawing you on.�

�Sometimes that�s the best way,� Jeremy murmured. �You remember the Viking sagas? The loose ends aren�t always tied up, virtue isn�t always rewarded. We don�t always want a conventional ending.�

�And you won�t always get one, not with me.� Jack grinned. �Something else I�ve learned, the treasure you find is rarely what you think you�ve been looking for.�

The aircraft banked sharply to port, and Jeremy pointed to the coastline some ten thousand feet below. �There it is. I asked the pilot to take us into Los Angeles from the north, to give us a view of Malibu. It�s pretty spectacular.�

�Beaches,� Costas murmured. �Good surfing?� He had been asleep for the entire trip from New York, and before that for most of the transatlantic haul from England. He looked as if he had just come out of hibernation, and leaned his forehead against the windowpane as he peered blearily down.

�Not bad,� Jeremy replied. �Not that I�d know, of course. When I was here, I was working on my dissertation.�

�Right.� Costas still sounded blocked up, but the worst of his cold seemed to have passed. �I�m looking forward to finding out what we�re doing here, Jeremy, but I�m not complaining.�

�I told Jack the whole story while you were dead to the world. I found Everett in the California State death registers. Same date and place of birth, no doubt about the identity. He lived just north of here, in Santa Paula, arrived here after leaving England in 1912. On a hunch I called a friend in the Getty Villa. Turns out he can tell us more, a whole lot more. For a start, Everett was a devout Roman Catholic, a convert.�

�Huh?� Costas rubbed his eyes. �I thought this was all about the British Church, the Pelagian heresy.�

�That�s what I hope this visit will sort out for us.�

�So we�re not going surfing.�

�The trail�s heated up again, Costas,� Jack said intently. �Jeremy�s made a real breakthrough.�

�You can see it now,� Jeremy said. �The Getty Villa. In the cleft in the hills down there, overlooking the sea.�

Jack peered at the cluster of buildings visible just in from the Coastal Highway. Suddenly it was if he was back at Herculaneum, staring at the plan of the Villa of the Papyri made by Karl Weber more than two centuries before. He could see the great peristyle courtyard, extending toward the sea, with the main mass of the villa structure nestled behind, at the back of the valley.

�The only big difference is the alignment,� Jeremy said. �The villa at Herculaneum lies parallel to the seashore, with the courtyard and the main buildings abutting the seafront. Otherwise the Getty Villa�s faithful to Weber�s plan. It�s a fantastic creation, the kind of thing that�s only possible with American philanthropy, with unfettered vision and unlimited wealth. It�s also one of the finest museums of antiquities anywhere in the world, and the place where I�ve done some of my best writing. Whatever else awaits us down there, you�re in for a treat.�

Three hours later they stood beside a shimmering rectangular pool in the main courtyard of the Getty Villa. They had entered unobtrusively by a small door at the west end, and now they stood stock-still, like the statues that adorned the garden, soaking in the sunshine and the brilliance of the scene. It was as if they had entered a movie set for a Roman epic, yet with an intimacy and attention to detail rarely seen in the sweeping panoramas of history. The pool was almost a hundred yards long, extending from the front portico of the villa to the seaward side, where they had walked up from the Coastal Highway. At either end of the pool were copies of ancient bronzes found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, a drunken Silenus and a sleeping faun, and opposite them was a seated Hermes, so lifelike he seemed ready to slip into the pool at any moment. Between the pool and the colonnaded portico that surrounded the courtyard were trees and beds of plants that made the marble seem like natural extrusions of the bedrock, surrounded and cushioned by vegetation. The entire garden was an orderly version of the world outside, cocooned and protected by human ingenuity. The pool reflected the columns and trees, creating an illusionistic scene, like the wall paintings they could just make out on the interior of the portico, as if they were being drawn beyond the garden to other, fanciful creations of the human mind, not to the disordered and uncontrollable reality beyond. Jack remembered the wall painting of Vesuvius he had shown Costas as they flew toward the volcano, an image that summed up all the Arcadian dreams of ancient Rome, a flimsy sheen over a reality that blasted its way through on that fateful day almost two thousand years before.

�Everything�s authentic,� Jeremy said. �The plan�s based on Weber�s original record of the villa he saw in the tunnels in the eighteenth century, and the statues are exact copies of the originals they found then. Even the vegetation�s authentic�pomegranate trees, laurels, fan palms brought all the way from the Mediterranean.�

Jack closed his eyes, then opened them again. The California hills had the same stark, sun-scorched beauty he loved in the Mediterranean, and the smell of herbs and the sea transported him back. The villa was not an interpretation of the past but a perfect resemblance of it, full of light and shadow, alive with people gesturing and breathing. Few other historical reconstructions had done this for him, and here it felt right. As he looked at the villa, rich with color and precision, in his mind�s eye he saw the excavated buildings of Herculaneum, flickering in the background like a photographic negative. He found himself remembering the times he had witnessed death, the moment of transition when the body suddenly becomes a husk, when color turns to gray. Herculaneum was too close after that moment for comfort, more troubling to behold than sites that had decayed and become whitewashed by time, like old skeletons. Herculaneum was the blasted corpse of a city, still reeking and oozing, like a burn victim after a terrible accident. Yet here in the Getty Villa it was as if someone had injected a burst of adrenaline into the still-warm corpse and miraculously revived it, as if the ancient site was again pulsating and sparkling with a dazzling clarity.

�Only in California,� Costas said, shaking his head. �I guess with Hollywood only a few miles down the coast, this is what you�d expect.�

�When the villa opened in 1974, the reaction was amazing,� Jeremy said. �A lot of the critics panned it. The Romans can get pretty bad press over here. It�s all Pontius Pilate, debauched emperors, throwing Christians to the lions. This place was a stunning revelation. The color, the brilliance, the taste. Some scholars even refused to believe it was an authentic re-creation.�

�It�s all about putting art back in its original context, and that can be a shock to modern sensibility,� Jack said. �The European aristocrats who plundered Greece and Rome thought they were doing it, arranging statues on pedestals in their neoclassical country houses, but their idea of the classical context was based on the bleached ruins of Greece rather than the Technicolor reality of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here you get the real deal, with objects like these bronzes as components of a larger whole, with the villa as a work of art in itself. Classical scholars for too long venerated these things as works of art in the modern sense, in their own right. What the critics didn�t like was that the villa makes these venerated sculptures seem frivolous, and the whole setting more whimsical and fun than they�d bargained for. But that�s what it was really like.�

�And that�s what I like about it.� Costas squatted down with a coin in the crook of his finger and eyed the length of the pool. �If the Romans could have fun, so can we.�

Jack shot him a warning glance as a man appeared through the entrance portico and made his way briskly toward them. He was of medium height with a close-cut beard, and he wore chinos and a shirt and tie, with his sleeves rolled up. He raised a hand in greeting to Jeremy, who gestured toward Jack and Costas.

�Allow me to introduce Dr. Ieuan Morgan,� Jeremy said. �An old friend, my mentor when I was here. He�s on secondment from Brigham Young University. Permanently, by the look of it.�

Costas and Jack shook hands with him. �Thanks for seeing us at such short notice,� Jack said warmly. �Do you have anything to do with the BYU Herculaneum papyrus project?�

�That�s why I came here originally,� Morgan said, a hint of Welsh in his accent. �I�m a Philodemos specialist, and the infrared spectrometry on the scrolls from the eighteenth-century excavations was inundating me with new stuff. I needed breathing space, somewhere to put it all in perspective.�

�And where better than the Villa of the Papyri itself.� Jack gestured around. �I�m envious.�

�Anytime you want a sabbatical here, just give the word,� Morgan said. �Your reputation precedes you.�

Jack smiled. �Much appreciated.� He winked at Jeremy. �Maybe in about twenty years� time.�

Morgan nodded. �I understand from Jeremy that you�re on a tight schedule. Follow me.�

He led them along one side of the peristyle, then on to the west porch of the villa and through the open bronze doors that served as the main entrance to the museum. They went up a flight of marble stairs to the upper story, and came to a second, inner courtyard, another fragrant and colorful place, resonating with the flash and sparkle of fountains. Below the tiled roof, tiers of columns dropped down to surround a garden proportioned in the Roman way, with bronze statues of five maidens in the center, appearing to draw water from a pool. Again Jack felt the extraordinary immediacy of the past. Whatever else came of the day, this Roman villa on the coast of California had been an unexpected revelation, another vivid lens on the ancient world.

Jack narrowed his eyes, and spoke from memory. ��Lovely gardens and cool colonnades and lily ponds would surround it, spreading out as far as the raptured eye could reach.� Those are the words that Robert Graves in Claudius the God has Herod Agrippa, King of Judaea, saying in a letter to his wife Cypros. I�ve always remembered that description, since I first read Graves as a boy. Herod has always been thought of as anti-Christian, the man who ordered the execution of St. James, but to me those words could have been an ancient Christian image of heaven.�

�You�re talking about Herod Agrippa, friend of Claudius?� Costas said.

�That�s the one.�

Costas scanned the courtyard. �So if this villa is an accurate replica of the place where Claudius ended his days, he didn�t give up on life�s pleasures completely,� he said.

�He had all this to look out on, sure, but I doubt whether Claudius could have cared less,� Jack replied. �As long as he had his books and his statues of his beloved father and brother, he�d probably have been content to eke out his days in a sulfurous cave somewhere up on Mount Vesuvius.�

�Claudius?� Morgan said, clearly mystified. �Which Claudius?�

�The Roman emperor Claudius,� Costas said.

�Jeremy didn�t mention any emperors.� Morgan paused, then eyed Jack quizzically. �I think you�ve got some explaining to do.�

�We do.� Jack smiled. �Lead on.�

Morgan led them a few paces farther, to a room at the back of the portico. He opened the door, ushered them in and gestured at the marble table in the center. �I had the caf� send up some things. Hungry?�

�You bet.� Costas launched himself at a plate of croissants, and Morgan poured coffee. After a few moments he gestured at three seats on one side of the table, and walked around to the other side with his coffee and sat down.

�Okay.� Jack sat in the middle chair, and leaned forward. �You know why we�re here.�

�Jeremy filled me in. Or at least I thought he did.� Morgan swiveled in his chair to face Jack, took a sip of his coffee and then set down his cup. �When Jeremy had his fellowship here we worked quite closely together, and when he called me yesterday he discovered I had an interest in Lawrence Everett. I�d always kept quiet about it, a private obsession of mine, but of course I told him when he asked. It�s an incredible coincidence, but a man like that can�t go completely underground as he might have wished. And I thought there couldn�t possibly be anyone else on his trail, but there was another inquiry this morning.�

Jack suddenly looked alarmed. �Who?�

�No idea. Anonymous Hotmail address.�

�Did you reply?�

�After my conversation with Jeremy yesterday, I felt it prudent to claim ignorance. But I sensed that this was someone who wouldn�t go away. Somehow they knew there was a connection here, with the Getty Villa. I checked the online ticket reservations for the museum, and someone with the same email address booked a ticket for tomorrow.�

�Could be a coincidence, as you say,� Jeremy murmured. �I can�t see how they�d have known.�

�Known what, exactly? Who are you talking about?� Morgan said.

Jeremy was quiet for a moment, glanced at Jack and then looked back across the table. �You were right. I haven�t told you everything. But what I did tell you was true, that we think Everett had something extraordinary to hide, an early Christian manuscript. That�s the key thing. We�ll listen to what you�ve got to say, then we�ll tell you the rest.�

Morgan looked perplexed. �I�ve got no reason to be secretive. My scholarship, the collections here are open to all. It�s the founding ethos of the museum.�

�Unfortunately, this has gone way beyond scholarship,� Jack said. �There�s far more at stake here. Let�s hear you out, then we�ll bring you up to speed before we leave this room.�

Morgan pulled a document box on the table toward him. �Fair enough. I can start by giving you a quick biography.�

�Fire away.�

�The reason I know about Everett is that he tried to correspond with J. Paul Getty, the founder of the museum. The nuns who looked after Everett during his final illness found Getty notepaper among his belongings, and some architectural drawings. They thought the museum might be interested. I stumbled across the box of papers when I was researching the early history of the Getty Villa, and thought they might have some bearing on the Getty interest in antiquities.� He opened the box and carefully lifted out a handful of yellowed pages covered in words and figures in a precise, minute hand. He spread them out on the table in front of him, including one page with a ruled plan of an apsidal structure. �Everett was fascinated by mathematical problems, by the game of chess, crosswords. There�s lots of that kind of stuff here, most of it way beyond me. But before he came to America he�d been an architect, and there�s an unfinished manuscript I�ve been annotating for publication. He was interested in early Church architecture, in the earliest archaeological evidence for Christian places of worship.�

�Fascinating,� Jack murmured. �But why try to contact Getty?�

�The two men had a surprising amount in common,� Morgan replied. �Getty had studied at Oxford, Everett at Cambridge. Getty was a passionate Anglophile, and he might have been pleased to discover a kindred spirit also in California. And both men had rejected their professional careers, Getty to be a millionaire philanthropist, Everett to be a Catholic ascetic. There may seem a world of difference between those two, but Everett�s correspondence shows that he�d liberated himself in much the same way. And there was a more particular reason.�

�Go on.�

�It was well known that Getty had been to Pompeii and Herculaneum before the First World War, had visited the site of the Villa of the Papyri, been fascinated by it. Hence the villa we�re in today. Then in the late 1930s Everett heard of an extraordinary new discovery at Herculaneum, and wanted Getty�s opinion. Everett was really intrigued by it, to the point of obsession.�

�You mean the House of the Bicentenary?� Jack said.

�You guessed it.�

Jack turned to Costas. �I pointed it out to you on our quick tour of Herculaneum, when we arrived at the site last week.�

�Another black hole, I�m afraid,� Costas said ruefully. �I think I was still asleep.�

�Bicentenary refers to the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of Herculaneum, in 1738,� Morgan said. �The 1930s excavation was one of the few to have taken place on any scale since the eighteenth century. Mussolini was behind it, part of his own obsession with all things Roman, though there seems to have been Church resistance to his more grandiose excavation schemes, and the Herculaneum project was almost stillborn.�

�Why does that not surprise me,� Costas murmured.

�They discovered a room which they called the �Christian Chapel,�� Morgan continued. �They called it that because they found an inset cross shape in plaster above a wooden cabinet, which they thought looked like a prayer stand. In a house nearby they found the name David scratched on a wall. Hebraic names are not unusual in Pompeii and Herculaneum, but they�re usually Latinized. Jesus was thought to be a descendant of King David of the Jews, and some think the name David was a secret way the early Christians referred to him, before they started to use the Greek word for messiah, Christos.� Morgan paused and looked pensive. �These were very controversial finds, and plenty of scholars still don�t accept the interpretation, but it may be the earliest archaeological evidence anywhere for a place of Christian worship.�

�Only a few hundred yards from the Villa of the Papyri,� Jack murmured. �I wonder if Everett had any inkling, if he had any idea how close he was to the source of what he possessed?�

�What are you talking about?� Morgan asked.

�First, let�s have the rest of your story,� Jack said. �Do you have anything more on him?�

Morgan nodded, and slid a sheet of paper from the box across the table. �We don�t know whether Getty himself ever responded to Everett, or even knew about him. The Getty stationery we found was just an acknowledgment note from a secretary. But I like to think that Everett�s interest helped to fuel Getty�s continuing fascination with Herculaneum in the years leading up to the creation of this villa. After that brief correspondence, Everett slid back into obscurity. This is the only image we have of him, an old photocopy of a picture taken by his daughter. She managed to discover his whereabouts and visit him in 1955, the year before he died. I traced her to a care home in Canada, where she�d emigrated from England, and got hold of this.�

Jack peered at the grainy black-and-white image, the details almost washed out. In the center was an elderly man, well dressed, hunched over on sticks but standing with as much dignity as he could muster, his face virtually indiscernible. Behind him was a single-story shack made of corrugated metal, festooned with ivy and surrounded by lush vegetation.

�This was taken outside the nunnery, in front of the shack where he lived for more than thirty years,� Morgan continued. �The nuns looked after him, cared for him when he became too ill to fend for himself. In return he tended their gardens, did odd jobs. He�d been a choral scholar in his youth, and sang Gregorian music for them. He took in tramps, down-and-outs, fed and clothed them, gave them a place to sleep, the full Christian charity thing.�

�Sounds a little messianic to me,� Costas murmured.

�I doubt whether he had any delusions about that,� Morgan said. �But California in his day was the world of Steinbeck, of Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, a whole subculture on the margins of society. And these were the ones he felt most at home with, outcasts, drifters, people who had forsaken their own background and upbringing, men and women like himself.� He paused, and then spoke quietly. �What do you know about the Pelagians?�

�We know there was an Everett family connection. His grandfather was a member of the New Pelagians, the Victorian secret society.�

�Good. That saves a lot of explaining,� Morgan replied, relaxing visibly. �In one of his letters he reveals his Pelagian beliefs, something he clearly wanted to talk about, and it explains a lot about where we�re going this afternoon. It�s as if he was living a double life, a devout ascetic Catholic on the one hand, and privately about the most radical heretic you can imagine.�

�When was that letter written?� Jack said.

�About the end of the Second World War. He was already pretty ill by then, rambling a little, and there was no more correspondence.�

�That explains it,� Jack murmured. �I don�t think he would have risked revealing himself before then.� He took a deep breath. �Okay. What do you know about his origins?�

�It�s an amazing story. Born in in the center of the City of London, at Lawrence Lane, where his family had lived for generations. They were Huguenots, his father a prominent architect. Went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was a wrangler, achieving First Class Honours in Mathematics; and also studied languages. One of his tutors was the philosopher Bertrand Russell. He was offered a fellowship but turned it down, having promised his father that he�d go into partnership with him. Ten prosperous years as an architect, unexceptional, got married, had three kids, then his father died and he suddenly gave it all up�family, job�and disappeared to America.�

�Any explanation given?� Costas asked.

�He�d converted to Roman Catholicism. His wife�s father was vehemently anti-Catholic. The father gave him an ultimatum, then bought him off. Seemingly as simple as that. The children�s education was paid for by their maternal grandfather, on the condition that they have no contact ever again with their father. A sad story, but not unique, given the antipathy that existed between Protestant and Catholic in England, even as late as the Victorian period.�

�But we know the true reason he left,� Jeremy murmured. �His father�s death, the will, his sudden overwhelming responsibility for the family heirloom. The question is, why he came here, and what he did with it.�

�Why convert to Catholicism?� Costas said. �Was that part of the plan? Hide in the least likely place?�

Morgan paused. �It could have been. But it could have been heartfelt. He�d been Anglo-Catholic, and others like him had taken the step. Remember, the followers of Pelagius, those who traced their Christianity back to the earliest British tradition before Constantine the Great, were not necessarily great fans of the church created by King Henry VIII either. What had discomfited them about the Roman Church, the ascendancy of the Vatican and the Pope, had an uneasy conterpart in the English monarch as head of the Church of England, divinely appointed. It seemed one step from the emperor as god, the grotesque apotheosis that had ruined ancient Rome. Whether pope or king, many had a problem with the Church as a political tool.�

�Yet for some like Everett, the Roman tradition of worship came to have more attraction,� Jack said.

Morgan nodded. �The letters show that he still saw himself as a follower of Pelagius, and some of his theological views would have seemed heretical to Catholic purists. But the Roman liturgy, the rituals�above all, the music�seemed to offer him great spiritual comfort.�

�What Jeremy said in London yesterday about Sir Christopher Wren, missing the beauty of the old rituals,� Costas murmured. �Speaking as a Greek Orthodox, I can understand that.�

�That was what mattered to Everett. But his fundamental faith remained unchanged.�

�And the thought police were a long way from a remote valley in Californa,� Jack murmured.

�I believe that was part of the plan. He came here to safeguard what he had with him, to a country where religious freedom had provided a haven for all Christian denominations. He still needed to be careful, to pick the time and place to reveal what he had, to find some way of passing on the secret.�

�So he arrived here in 1912,� Costas said.

Morgan nodded. �He sailed to New York, gained American citizenship, then worked his way west. After what Jeremy told me, I now believe what he did took huge strength, a decision to preserve an extraordinary treasure, not for his own benefit but for humanity, for the future. Once he�d been assured of his children�s upbringing, he made the greatest sacrifice a father can ever make, and walked away assuming he would never see them again.�

�I only hope it was worth it,� Costas said.

�That�s what we�re here to find out,� Jack replied, turning to Morgan. �Do you know anything more about his life, anything that might give us clues?�

Morgan paused. �August 1914, Europe is torn apart, Britain mobilizes, the First World War begins.�

�He goes to fight?� Costas said.

Morgan nodded. �In the folly and horror of the First World War, people often forget that many at the time believed it was a just war, a war against impending evil. Everett felt morally compelled to join. Winston Churchill wrote about men like him.� Morgan leaned back so he could read the inscription below a framed portrait on the wall, showing a young man in uniform. ��Coming of his own free will, with no national call or obligation, a stranger from across the ocean, to fight and die in our ranks, he had it in his power to pay tribute to our cause of exceptional value�. He conceived that not merely national causes but international causes of the highest importance were involved, and must now be decided by arms.�� Morgan paused. �That�s a friend of Churchill�s, Lieutenant Harvey Butters, Royal Field Artillery, an American killed on the Somme in 1916. J. Paul Getty was a great admirer of these men, Americans who volunteered to fight German imperialism even before the United States joined the war.�

�So Everett returns to Europe,� Costas said.

�He went north to Canada and enlisted in the Army. By early 1916 he was an officer in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, on the Western Front. In June that year he was gassed and wounded in a terrible battle at Hulluch, near Loos. During his recuperation his mathematical skills were discovered, and he was transferred to British Military Intelligence, the original MI-1. He worked in the War Office in London, and then was seconded to Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty down the road, in a top-secret complex known as Room 40. He was a code-breaker.�

�No kidding.� Jeremy leaned forward, excited. �Cryptography.�

�They were desperate for people like him,� Morgan continued. �And he was recruited by Intelligence just in time. What happened next may well have won the war.�

�Go on,� Jack said.

�Ever heard of the Zimmerman telegram?�

�Yes!� Jeremy exclaimed. �Of course! It�s what brought America into the First World War.�

�A coded telegram dispatched in January 1917 by Arthur Zimmerman, German Foreign Secretary, to the German ambassador in Mexico,� Morgan said. �It revealed the German intention to begin unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping, and to help Mexico reconquer the southern states. The plan seems ludicrous now, but it was deadly serious then. The British intercepted and decrypted the telegram, then passed it on to the U.S. ambassador to Britain. Sentiment in the United States was already pretty anti-German because of earlier U-boat sinkings that had killed Americans. A month after the telegram was deciphered, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany.�

�Let me guess,� Costas said. �The decipherment was done in British Admiralty Room 40.�

�Correct. The Room 40 code-breakers had a book for an earlier version of the cipher that had been captured from a German agent in the Middle East, but the decryption of the telegram by the London team was still a work of genius.�

�And Everett was involved.�

�His name was never released. After the war, the British went to extraordinary lengths to keep the activities of their code-breakers secret, and only ever released enough to tell the essential story. Some of the Room 40 code-breakers of the First World War went on to work at Bletchley Park in the Second World War, and their names will never be known.�

Costas whistled. �So Everett really did have a place in history. Bringing America into the First World War.�

�If you think that�s a place in history, wait for what I�ve got to say next.�

�Go on,� Jack said.

�A lot of the stuff is still classified. But I do know he worked alongside the two men whose names were released and celebrated after the war, Reverend William Montgomery and Nigel de Grey. Of those two, Montgomery is the one who concerns us most. He was a Presbyterian minister, a civilian recruited by British Military Intelligence. He was a noted authority on St. Augustine, and a translator of theological works in German. He was best known for his translation of Albert Schweitzer�s The Quest of the Historical Jesus.�

Jack suddenly felt the hairs prick up on the back of his neck. �Say that again.�

�Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.�

The historical Jesus. Jack felt himself go tense with excitement. He thought for a moment, his mind racing, then spoke quietly. �So we�ve got two men, both brilliant code-breakers, Everett and Montgomery, both passionate about the life of Christ. One a Catholic convert, the other a Presbyterian minister. Everett is guardian of an extraordinary ancient document, something he�s hidden away. Maybe the horror of that war, his near-death experience on the front, perhaps a soldier�s conviction that he will not survive, gives him an overwhelming need to share the secret, to ensure that the torch is kept alight.�

�He tells Montgomery,� Costas said.

�They devise a code,� Jeremy murmured.

�Pure speculation, but if it happened, it probably happened here,� Morgan said.

Jack looked startled. �You mean here? In California?�

�In Santa Paula. Where Everett spent the rest of his life. A small nunnery in the hills, where Everett had found what he was looking for when he arrived in America before the war. Peace, seclusion, a community whose fold he could enter effortlessly, where he could follow his faith and seek the time and place to pass on his secret.�

�Just like the emperor Claudius, two thousand years before,� Jeremy murmured. �And just like Claudius, the tide of history seems to have overtaken his plans, the First World War erupting like a latter-day Vesuvius.�

�Could Everett and Montgomery have been here together during the war?� Costas said.

�May 1917,� Morgan replied. �Publication of the Zimmerman telegram had just brought America into the war. The two men were invited to the United States to help set up the fledgling U.S. code-breaking unit. It was all top secret. I can�t prove it, but there was enough time for a fleeting visit to California.�

�Does the nunnery still exist?� Jack said.

Morgan looked at Jack, nodded, then pushed back his chair, got up and walked over to the window, his voice tight with emotion. �All my professional life I�ve lived and breathed this place. I was here when the museum was inaugurated. There�s a spirit here that�s infused my work. An ancient Roman villa in the California hills. But it also haunts me. This room, where we are now, is unknown, pure guesswork. The Getty Villa�s based on Weber�s eighteenth-century plan of the Villa of the Papyri as he saw it in the tunnels, yet this section of the villa is pure conjecture, a part never excavated. With your discoveries in the villa at Herculaneum, it�s as if the past is catching up, and we risk losing all the solidity and assurance we�ve created. I want this room to be a library, a scholar�s room, but it may never even have existed.� He took a deep breath, walked back over to the desk, picked up a bunch of keys, then sat down again, resolutely. �I�ll take you to the nunnery now. But before we go, you owe me the rest of your story. I want to hear about what lay at the end of that tunnel. I want to hear about Claudius.�

�

THREE HOURS LATER, JACK STOOD ON A WOODED RIDGE above a small valley outside Santa Paula, in the Californian hills some twenty miles northeast of the Getty Villa. It was a brilliant afternoon, the sky a deep azure blue, a refreshing breeze wafting up the valley from the Pacific coast to the west, rustling the leaves. He was among a grove of mature black walnut trees, interspersed with the occasional cottonwood and stunted oak. The trees had been deliberately planted, not in regimented rows but artfully arranged along a series of terraces dropping down the slope, giving each tree the space to grow and conforming with the natural features of the landscape. The walnut bark was deeply furrowed, and the trunks forked close to the ground to give the impression of two trees grown together, diverging to create bowery hollows and passageways that temped Jack ever deeper into the grove. It seemed a magical, secretive place, cut off from the world outside, yet reveling in all the light and color that California had to offer.

Morgan came down the path from where they had left his Jeep, followed by Costas and Jeremy. �Everett�s shack was where you�re standing, and his grave is somewhere nearby,� Morgan said. �They�re both lost now, but in a way he�s everywhere here. He planted all these trees, did all the landscaping. But wait until you see what�s around the corner.� He continued on down the path as it veered left along the line of the terrace, descending through a rustling corridor of walnut leaves. Jack lingered for a moment, then caught up with Costas and Jeremy. They passed over a bubbling stream and suddenly were at the entrance to a building, a low-set structure that extended along the terrace on one side and dropped down into the valley on the other. The walls had been built on a base of irregularly cut stone, and above that were made up of long, thin bricks. A course of darker bricks had been laid in the center, creating a horizontal line that relieved the appearance of the fa�ade. The roof was sloping and covered with large, flat tiles secured by overlapping semicircular ones, in the Mediterranean fashion. Jack stood back and appraised the structure, racking his brain. It all looked oddly familiar.

�Welcome to the convent of St. Mary of Magdalene,� Morgan said.

�You been here often?� Costas asked.

�I�ve only been allowed access within the last year. It�s still pretty much a revelation for me. Originally this place was a Jesuit retreat, a typical Spanish mission affair, all adobe mud and whitewashed plaster. Then it was completely rebuilt in the early twentieth century. What you see here is one of the unknown architectural gems of California.� He glanced at Jack. �You�ve probably guessed it.�

�I can see Getty wasn�t the only one re-creating ancient Roman villas,� Jack murmured.

�When Everett first came here in 1912, the old mission building was crumbling, almost uninhabitable,� Morgan said. �Apart from the war years, building this was his main occupation for the next three decades. And he built the whole thing virtually single-handedly, until his health gave out.�

�So he didn�t give up his vocation as an architect after all,� Costas said.

�Far from it,� Morgan responded. �Out here he was really able to indulge his passion, to do something he might never have been able to get away with in Edwardian England. In the 1890s, when he was a student of architecture, people were beginning to realize just how beautiful the country villas of Roman Britain were, places that were first being properly excavated at that time.�

�It took a moment, but then I recognized it,� Jack said. �One of my favorite Roman sites, Chedworth Villa in Gloucestershire. Even the setting�s similar, a bit damper there maybe.�

�You�ve got it,� Morgan said. �And the setting was crucial to him. The great houses of Roman Italy were enclosed places, inward-looking, cut off from the natural world. Think the Getty Villa, the Villa of the Papyri. There�s a magnificent view to be had outside, but the peristyle courtyard excludes it, encloses you in its own order. And instead of windows on the outside world, you�ve got those wall paintings showing fanciful scenes of gardens and landscapes, deliberately unreal, mythical. The whole place represents control over nature.�

�Or lack of control,� Jack said.

�Or denial,� Costas said. �More comforting to paint Vesuvius on your villa wall as some kind of Dionysian reverie than to look out the window and see a reality you could never hope to control.�

�In Roman Britain, something different was going on,� Morgan said. �The Britons, the Celtic tribespeople, worshipped in forest glades, and seem to have had no temples. They were attuned to nature, saw themselves as part of it. Nature wasn�t something to control. So when the Celtic elite wanted villas in the Roman fashion, they built them as part of the landscape, not excluded from it. That�s what Everett wanted to do here. Instead of a peristyle courtyard, there�s a single corridored structure extending along the head of the valley to the south, the nun�s dormitory, just like the west range at Chedworth. It fits beautifully into the contours and the colors of the landscape, becomes part of it. That was Everett�s vision.�

�He must have relished the challenge,� Jack said. �Getty could call on architects and builders from all over the world for his villa, whereas Everett had only himself. And yet Everett finished this place decades before the Getty Villa was opened.�

�And the Getty Villa was a public spectacle, a bene-faction to the world, whereas this place is about as secret as you can get,� Morgan added. �The constitution of the nunnery forbids outsiders from going beyond the entrance vestibule, or from having any direct contact with the nuns. It�s a huge privilege for us to be allowed this far.�

�Can we look inside the vestibule?� Jack said.

�That�s why I brought you here.�

Morgan led them on to a patio of irregular flagstones, toward a simple, unassuming doorway surrounded by upright slabs and capped by a lintel in the local yellow-brown sandstone Jack had seen on the terrace. The door was made from chiseled planks of hardwood that looked like walnut, and was slightly ajar, pivoting inward. Morgan pushed it farther in, then stood back and pointed at the floor. �First, look at the threshold.�

They stared down. In front of them was a black-and-white floor mosaic, made of irregular, crudely cut cubes, tesserae, polished smooth. It was about three feet across and filled the entranceway, half in and half out. The black cubes formed a pattern of letters. Jack had seen a threshold like this before, a black-and-white mosaic in a doorway at Pompeii, bearing the Latin words Cave Canem, �Beware of the dog.� But this one was different. The letters had been arranged in a square, and the message had no obvious meaning. Each line constituted a word:

Jack stared for a moment, and then it clicked. �It�s Latin. Arepo, the sower, holds the wheels carefully.�

�Some kind of code?� Costas said.

�Not exactly,� Jeremy murmured. He quickly took out a notebook and pencil from his pocket and scribbled down some words, then ripped out the sheet and handed it to Costas. �It�s a word-square, a puzzle. Rearrange the letters and this is what you get.� Costas held up the paper so Jack and Morgan could see it too:

Costas whistled. �Clever.�

�But not Everett�s idea,� Jack said. �It�s ancient Roman, found scratched on an amphora shard in Britain.�

�That sounds familiar,� Costas said. �Ever since the graffiti of St. Paul on the shipwreck off Sicily, I�m beginning to look at humble old pots in a whole new light.� He took a step forward and peered into the vestibule. �And speaking of which, that looks familiar too. I think I see a Chi-Rho symbol.�

�Two of them, in fact,� Morgan said. �One on the floor, one on the wall.�

They filed inside. The room was simple, austere, in keeping with the exterior of the villa, the plastered walls painted matte red in the Roman fashion. There were no windows, but instead a series of apertures just below the ceiling, artfully designed to let shafts of light fall on the middle of the floor and on the wall opposite the entranceway, on the centerpieces of the two decorations in the room. The floor decoration was another mosaic, but this time polychrome. It covered almost the entire width of the room, perhaps eight feet across. The tesserae were each about half an inch square and the palette was limited, no more than half a dozen colors. The mosaic was executed in a bold, linear style, with stark images and little subtlety of shading. A series of concentric circles advanced inward, abstract patterns of tendrils, meanders and scrolls divided by bands of white. In the center was the image that Costas had seen, a Chi-Rho monogram inside a medallion about two feet across, surmounted by the head and torso of a human figure. The Chi-Rho symbol appeared behind the head, as if it were a halo.

�Extraordinary,� Jack murmured. �Hinton St. Mary, in Dorset. It�s almost identical to the famous mosaic.�

�Another British villa?� Costas asked.

Jack nodded absently, then squatted down, absorbed in the detail. �The Hinton St. Mary mosaic wasn�t excavated until the 1960s, but the medallion design was probably repeated by the Roman mosaicist, and Everett must have known of it from somewhere else. Everett�s even used the same materials,� he murmured. �Brick for red, limestone for white, sandstone for yellow, shale for gray. He had access to plenty of other colors around here, quartzes, greens and blues, the colors you see in the Getty Villa mosaics, but he stuck to a British palette.�

�I take it that�s Christ?� Costas said.

�Good question,� Morgan replied.

Jack got up. �I didn�t think there was any dispute,� he said. �Pretty standard fourth-century representation. Clean-shaven, square-faced, long hair, wearing something like a Roman toga. It was pure fantasy, of course. Nobody knew what he looked like. This could as easily have been an image of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, or one of his successors. In fact, the emperors probably didn�t discourage the confusion of their images with Christ.�

�That�s the problem,� Morgan said.

�What do you mean?�

�Well, some of early Christians in Britain seem to have distanced themselves from the Roman Church, to have seen themselves as part of another tradition, which drew strength from their own pagan ancestry. You have to ask yourself whether the owner of that villa at Hinton St. Mary would have wanted an image of Christ so similar to the image of the emperor on the coins in his purse. And the educated British elite of the late Roman period would have known what people from Judaea looked like. The idea that Jesus should have been clean-shaven, almost cherubic, is preposterous. He was a fisherman and carpenter from the sun-scorched Sea of Galilee. But look again. The long hair, those almond eyes, that cloak that might be a toga, might be a gown. Forget about the identification. What does that image say to you?�

�It�s a woman!� Costas exclaimed.

Morgan nodded. �For the earliest British Christians, then for later followers of Pelagius, like Everett, Jesus� companion Mary was a powerful part of the story. Not for the Pelagians were the androgynous images you see in some late Roman art, of Christ seemingly embodying both man and woman. They saw the iconography of Christ in the Roman tradition reduced to a mere decorative motif as Imperial propoganda. For the Pelagians, it was Jesus the man, and Mary the woman. And remember where we are. It�s an appropriate image for a convent of St. Mary Magdalene.�

�Fascinating,� Jack murmured.

�And you�ll recognize the painting.�

Jack looked from the mosaic, up to the wall. He saw another Chi-Rho symbol, painted in black on a light blue background, with the Greek letters Alpha and Omega on either side. The symbol and the letters were surrounded by a dark blue wreath, and Jack could make out other, smaller Greek letters among vine tendrils swirling decoratively around the flowers and leaves of the wreath. Below the symbol was a small cross with ornate finials in the Armenian tradition, and below that, the Latin words domine iuimus.

�Lord, we come,� Jack translated. �Apart from that inscription and the Armenian cross, it�s a version of another famous mosaic, from Lullingston, in Kent,� he said. �Everett really had a thing for Romano-British villas, didn�t he?�

Morgan nodded. �It�s not just these images we�re meant to be looking at, it�s the setting. Everett wanted us to see art like this in its original context, just as Getty did. And whereas Getty was inspired by Herculaneum, Everett was fueled by the archaeological discoveries of nineteenth-century England, a rediscovery of the Romano-British and early Christianity which had excited Everett as a young man. He realized that early Christian worship in Britain had taken place in private houses, in villas, probably much as it had in Herculaneum. Everett called this room the �scholarium,� the learning place. Not a church, not a chapel, but a learning place. A place where people could gather and read the Gospels. A place which had no pulpit, no special place for preachers or priests.�

�A place where he might have envisaged one day revealing his great secret,� Costas said.

Jeremy had been pensive, but now spoke quietly. �It shows the absurdity of those centuries of conflict between the different denominations, Rome and the Pelagians, Catholic and Protestant. Here, in this Catholic convent in the California hills, he found a place where he could express his convictions with total freedom, create a place where he could get closer to Jesus and his teachings than anywhere before.�

Jack looked around, nodding slowly. Over the years he had learned to accept his own instincts about art, to trust his own sensibility and not force himself to find beauty out of obligation. This place felt familiar to him, somehow touched his own past. The relationship with nature, the choice of colors, the use of light and shade reflected a particular adjustment to the world that seemed to gel with Jack�s own, with the landscapes of his ancestry. But there was more to it than that. Moving from the great monuments of Christianity, from St. Peter�s in Rome and St. Paul�s in London, to the intimacy of this place, he had begun to sense that he was looking at two different versions of truth, of beauty. He looked again at the face in the mosaic, and thought Jesus the man, Mary the woman. So much Christian tradition had been wrapped up in high art, creating images that were awesome, remote, unattainable. Yet there was another beauty, one crudely fashioned perhaps, but with a power wrought through intimacy with men and women themselves, not a creation of idealized forms. Being here today had helped Jack to crystallize these feelings, and to navigate a mystery that was becoming more complex and fascinating the more they delved into it.

Jack snapped out of his reverie, took a deep breath and looked hard at the mosaic and the painting. �Come on,� he murmured.

�What is it?� Costas said.

�It�s got to be here somewhere,� Jack said. �If Everett left any kind of clue, it�s got to be embedded in these images.�

Jeremy walked up to the wall and peered at the painted wreath that surrounded the Chi-Rho symbol. �Is this an exact copy?� he asked.

�He did make some changes,� Morgan said. �Those pinnate leaves are walnut and the flowers are orchids, which he loved. He added the Greek letters too. I checked them all after I first came here, tried to match them with every known Christian acrostic, but came up with nothing. I�ve had to conclude they were purely decorative.�

�That doesn�t sound like Everett,� Jeremy said.

�No, it doesn�t, but I�ve tried everything.�

Jeremy stood back, and looked all round the room. �What�s the chronology of this place?� he said. �I mean, do we know when he did these decorations?�

�I was able to speak to the Mother Superior, through an intermediary,� Morgan said. �She�d been a young nun here when Everett was dying, and had nursed him in his shack during his final months. Apparently, he�d finished building this part of the convent before the First World War, within two years of arriving in America. He seems to have worked with extraordinary fervor, as if he needed to justify the decision he�d made to leave his family and sacrifice his career.�

�And the decoration?�

�He finished the mosaics then too, including the word-square at the entrance. But the wall painting he did when he returned from the war. When the Mother Superior was young, some of the older nuns remembered it. Everett had returned a changed man, withdrawn and troubled. Physically he was weakened, his lungs permanently damaged. He virtually locked himself in this room, for months on end. They had no notion of what he�d gone through. How could they? Southern California was a long way from the hell of a gas attack. But you can see it in that painting. His version of the Chi-Rho is stark, jagged, pitch black, as if it�s been blasted by fire. It�s like those black-and-white photographs of towns on the Western Front�Ypres, Passchendaele, Loos, where he was wounded�utter desolation, with only a few shattered fragments standing, like a bleak image of the hill of Golgotha, the empty crosses of the Crucifixion blackened and warped by fire.�

Jeremy walked up to the wall painting, and traced his finger over the wreath. �I count twenty-five letters altogether, all Greek,� he murmured. �No obvious order, no rationale. They don�t seem to read anything, forward or backward.�

�I told you I�d tried that route,� Morgan said. �Didn�t get anywhere. The only legible inscription is those words domine iuimus, at the bottom, below the Armenian cross. That doesn�t get us anywhere either.�

�He was a brilliant mathematician,� Jeremy murmured. �He loved puzzles, word games. You can see it in that word-square at the door. Then he goes to war, comes back and does this painting, adding these letters to his copy of the Roman original. Why? What had happened to him?� Jeremy stared at the wall, pressing on it with one hand and tapping his fingers, then suddenly turned and looked at Morgan. �Remind me: 1917. You said he came back here. You mean to the convent, where we are now?�

Morgan nodded. �After America had entered the war, after he�d been involved in decrypting the Zimmerman telegram. He and William Montgomery came here to California, to this place.�

�Cryptographers,� Costas said, his eyes narrowing. �Code-breakers.�

�That�s it. I�ve got it.� Jeremy bounded over to the bag he had left by the door and pulled out a battered notebook. �Remember this, Jack? It�s what I was reading on the plane. I had a hunch it might be useful.� He flipped it open, thumbed through it and stopped at a dog-eared page. �I once transcribed the entire Zimmerman code,� he said excitedly. �That�s what happened to Everett during the war. He�d been wounded, shell-shocked, but he�d also become a code-breaker. That�s the key. He returns here during the war and wants to leave a clue, just as Claudius did two thousand years before. He�s immersed in codes, and he�s got the Zimmerman code running though his head. He lets Montgomery in on his secret. It�s the only reason I can imagine he brought Montgomery to this place, in the middle of the war, when they must have had precious little time. Maybe they devised a code in this very room. Maybe the ancient document, the Gospel, was somewhere here, concealed by Everett in this room when he was building it before the war, and maybe they planned a permanent hiding place for it when they were here together.� He paused, and peered at Morgan. �You�re right. These letters don�t fit any ancient acrostic. But I don�t think they�re purely decorative. I think they�re a First World War code.�

�Keep talking,� Jack said.

�The Zimmerman code was numerical, right?� Jeremy flipped to another page. �The telegram looked like any other, except instead of letters there were numbers, arranged in clusters, like words. The problem was assigning values to the numbers, equating them to a letter or a syllable or a word. The breakthrough was the secret codebook acquired from a German agent in the Middle East.�

�I think I�m with you,� Costas murmured. �What about giving the Greek letters on the painting a numerical equivalent?�

�That�s exactly what I thought.� Jeremy rummaged for the pencil in his pocket, opened a fresh page and began copying down the Greek letters in sequence as they appeared on the painting, clockwise from the top where the two arms of the painted wreath nearly joined. He then jotted down the Greek alphabet from Alpha to Omega, with the numbers one to twenty-four alongside, and transferred those numerical values to the sequence of letters from the painting, beginning with the first letter from the painting, Delta, and the number 4. �Okay. I�ve got it.� They crowded around, and he held the notebook up in a shaft of light. They could see the Greek letters, with their numerical value below:

�Okay. It�s pure guesswork, but if I�m right, there will be clusters of these numbers identical to clusters in the German codebook, and then we�re in business.� Jeremy bounded back to his bag, pulled out a palm-sized computer and activated it, squatting down on one knee. �When I first became interested in the Zimmerman code, I decided to see how modern computer technology could have aided the decryption,� he said.

�I�m liking you more and more, you know, Jeremy,� Costas murmured.

�I�m sure Everett would have loved the technology,� Jeremy continued. �But he would have seen that with some decoding, no amount of computer wizardry can replace the human brain. Decrypting the Zimmerman code depended on understanding the Germans who created it, their perception of the world, their vocabulary. You had to know the words they would have used and been familiar with.�

He tapped a command, and a page of numerical sequences came up, with words and syllables alongside. �As it turned out, the key to the German code was quite simple,� he said. �Each cluster of numbers is a word or a phrase or a letter. You use the codebook like an index. The problem was, the Germans who created the code hadn�t anticipated some of the words that were going to be needed for this particular message, so a few words had to be made up from smaller parts. Here you can see the word Arizona made up from four different clusters of numbers�for the syllables AR, IZ, ON and the letter A. That�s the part of the Zimmerman telegram where the Germans were going to help the Mexicans reconquer the southern states. The intelligence people back in Germany had never imagined they�d need the word Arizona evidently. This was probably where Everett came in. He may have been more familiar than any of the other British code-breakers in Room 40 with America, having lived here for several years before the war. He may have been the one who suggested that they should be looking for geographical names, unique place names that might not be in the codebook.� Jeremy paused, tapped the keyboard again and sat back. �Okay. I�m going to run these numbers. This might take a minute or two.�

�Everett was having fun, wasn�t he?� Costas said.

�What do you mean?�

�Well, all this business was deadly serious for him, of course, hiding the ancient Gospel and leaving this trail, but he was also having fun.�

�He loved puzzles,� Jeremy replied. �Was a code-breaker.�

�A bit like Claudius.�

�A treasure hunt can be like a game of chess,� Jack murmured. �With someone who thinks they�re always one move ahead of you, leaving openings to make the game last longer, and then you trounce them.�

�I thought you were an archaeologist, not a treasure hunter, Jack,� Costas said, with a twinkle in his eye. �I�m getting seriously worried about you.�

�Bingo!� Jeremy said excitedly. �It worked!� Six words had appeared on the screen.

�Well, I�ll be damned,� Jack murmured.

�It�s in German, of course.�

�Ah.�

�How�s your German?� Jeremy asked, scribbling down the words.

�Rusty.� Jack paused, scanning the words. �Grabeskirche. I think that�s church, though there might be a more specific meaning. But I know a man who can help.� He dug his cell phone from his pocket, flipped it open and pressed the number for the IMU secure line. �Sandy, this is Jack. Please find Maurice Hiebermeyer and have him call me, ASAP. Thanks.� He held the phone expectantly, and a moment later it chirped. �Maurice? Good to hear your voice.� Jeremy ripped a sheet of paper from his pad and gave it to Jack, who took it and the pencil and walked outside. A few minutes later he returned, still holding the open phone. �I read the words to him, and he�s going to mull over it for a moment then call me back.�

�How is our friend?� Costas asked.

�He�s in a pizzeria in Naples,� Jack replied. �Seems to have had a change of heart about the place. Says as long as you actually want to string along the bureaucracy, it�s a piece of cake. All you have to do is show up at the superintendency in the morning and throw another spanner in the works, then you can go away and relax for the rest of the day. He�s on his second circuit of the pizzerias. Says even if we were allowed back into the passageway in Herculaneum again, he wouldn�t fit.�

�Cue his latest discovery in the Egyptian desert, the one he�s been trying to tell you about,� Costas said. ��No tight passageways, more room to maneuver. Would we care to join him? Finally?��

�Nope. Didn�t even mention it. His mouth was full.�

�Seriously, what did he say?�

�He�s really taken the initiative. The authorities had already used him as a media figure when they got him in to excavate the tunnel�the famous Egyptologist, showing they�d got the best person to do the job. He�s fluent in Italian, and they probably hadn�t reckoned that he�d become an overnight star on Italian TV. He�s used it to our advantage. The superintendency wanted him to front a big press event on the Anubis statue, and he insisted it take place in the villa site, outside the tunnel entrance. That way, he and Maria were able to keep an eye on things. He�s made a huge play in the media about the dangers of the site, the need to seal it up until the funding�s there for a complete excavation of the villa, once and for all. He insisted that the superintendency concrete up the entrance to the tunnel while he watched. They were only too happy to oblige, of course, but at least it means we know what lies at the end is still intact.�

�Amazing guy,� Costas murmured, then eyed Jack closely. �Was he able to find out anything about Elizabeth?�

Jack shook his head. �Nothing.� The phone chirped, and he rushed outside again. He returned a moment later, pocketing the phone, looking at the notebook. �Here it is.� He cleared his throat, and read slowly: �The word of Jesus is in the grave chapel.��

There was silence for a moment, and they all looked at the painting on the wall.

�The word of Jesus,� Costas said. �Surely that means the Gospel, what we�re after.�

�It might,� Jack murmured.

�And �the grave chapel.� That must be this room. He�s telling us the Gospel is somewhere in this room?�

�Or he�s simply telling us that this room is a burial chapel.�

�Not much of a clue.�

�It doesn�t add up.� Jack looked around the austere interior, then back to the painting. �He could have hidden it here. But somehow it�s too obvious. He would have known that anyone standing here, anyone who�d reached the point of decrypting those Greek letters, would have known something of his life, his background. There�s something more, something we haven�t recognized. There�s a big piece missing.�

Jeremy murmured, �1917. That�s the key year.�

�I can�t see what else we can tease out of it,� Jack said.

�Did Everett remain here, after Montgomery left? Costas asked.

Morgan looked up, distracted. �Huh?�

�In 1917. When Everett and Montgomery came here. The war was still on, and Everett was still a British Intelligence officer. Did he remain in the States, working with the Americans?�

�Ah. I forgot to say.� Morgan cleared his throat.

�I was in London and had a few days in the National Archives at Kew. I found a file of personal correspondence in his service records. It turns out Everett already knew his next posting, assigned to him just before the trip to America. Somewhere along the line, the War Office discovered that Everett was not just a mathematician but had also studied Arabic at university. That made him a real prize. Immediately after returning from America in 1917, he became a cipher officer with British Middle East forces, on the other big British front of the First World War, fighting the Ottoman Empire. He accompanied General Allenby in the liberation of Jerusalem.�

Jack suddenly went still. He let his pencil drop, and looked up at Morgan. �Say that again.�

�Everett was in Jerusalem in late 1917. We only have that faded picture of him as an old man to go on, but I believe you can actually make him out in the famous photograph of Allenby and his staff dismounted, walking through the Jaffa Gate on December 11, 1917. I believe he�s one of the officers behind T. E. Lawrence�Lawrence of Arabia. We know they walked on through the Old City to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where they prayed in the square. Everett stayed on in Jerusalem as an intelligence officer with the British occupying forces for the remainder of the war. They had plenty of time on their hands after the Turkish defeat, and that explains how he drafted an architectural treatise on the Holy Sepulchre, the manuscript of his I told you about that I�ve been working up for publication. After his demobilization from the army in 1919, he returned to America and spent the rest of his life here in this nunnery. His lungs had been so badly damaged in the gas attack in 1916 that he was unable to travel, and he eventually became an invalid.�

Jack had his back to them still, and was staring at the painting. �Well, I�ll be damned,� he whispered.

�That usually means something,� Costas said.

�I know where Everett buried his treasure.� Jack stood up quickly and turned around, a wide smile on his face. �That message in the letters. The word of Jesus is in the grave chapel. Not grave chapel. Maurice has given us a literal translation. There was no reason why he should have done otherwise. But my German isn�t that rusty. I knew the word was familiar. It�s from the last time I was in Jerusalem. It�s the German for Holy Sepulchre.�

There was a collective gasp. Jack felt a huge burst of adrenaline course through him, as all the loose ends suddenly seemed to coil together and point in one direction. He quickly took out his cell phone again and pressed the number for the IMU direct line. �Sandy? How soon can you get us to Tel Aviv?�

Morgan gestured, pointing toward himself. Jack eyed him, nodding. �Four of us�Yes�His name is Morgan.� He listened for a moment, replied quickly and shut the phone. �We may as well head for the airport now. We�ll pick up what you need on the way.� Morgan nodded, and Jack stepped toward the painting with the Chi-Rho symbol, putting his hand on it. He turned round and looked at the others, his khaki bag slung over his shoulder. �From now on, we�re back in the firing line. We already know someone else has been on the trail of Everett, and may have even tracked us here. As soon as we leave on that flight, things will really heat up. They�ll know we�re on to something. We�re all in this now. There�s no backing out. Anyone have any questions?�

�Let�s do it,� Costas said.

�

JACK? JACK HOWARD?�

A woman detached herself from a huddled group of monks on the rooftop of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and marched across the sun-drenched courtyard, her white robe flowing around her. Jack shielded his eyes as he took in the scene. The dome of the greatest church in Christendom lay before him, rising above the whitewashed walls and flat rooftops of the Old City of Jerusalem. Up here there seemed to be more room to think, above the narrow alleyways and hemmed-in courtyards below, where every square inch was zealously guarded by one of the many factions who had staked a claim to this holiest of cities. They had left Morgan a few minutes earlier at the entrance to the Holy Sepulchre, as he was intent on checking accessibility to the part of the church he wanted them to explore. Jeremy was not with them. At the last minute Jack had asked him to go to Naples, to join Maria and Hiebermeyer and do what he could to find out what had happened to Elizabeth. Jack had felt uneasy about sending anyone else back there, but Maria and Hiebermeyer were completely wrapped up in the media circus at the villa site, and he knew he could rely on Jeremy to search for Elizabeth, until he could get there to do it himself.

The car ride from Tel Aviv had been hot and dusty, but as the Old City of Jerusalem opened out in front of them Jack had felt a surge of exhilaration, a certainty that they had come to the right place, that whatever lay at the end of the trail would be here. With the feeling of certainty had come increased anxiety. If what they had been told in the catacombs under the Vatican was true, for almost two thousand years those who were following them had won all their battles, allowed no failure. And with every new person Jack brought into the fold, another name was added to the concilium�s hit list. He looked at the approaching woman, then glanced again at Costas, beside him. He suddenly remembered his friend�s old adage: If you can calculate the risk, then it is a risk that can be taken. But he hated gambling with other people�s lives.

The woman came to a stop in front of him, smiling. She had strips of colorful embroidery down the front and around the wrists of her robe, and wore a gold necklace and earrings. Her long black hair was tied back, and she had the high cheekbones and handsome features of an Ethiopian, with startlingly green eyes. She extended her hands and Jack embraced her warmly. �My old school friend,� he said to Costas. �Helena Selassie.�

�That surname rings a few bells,� Costas said, shaking hands with her and smiling.

�The king was a distant relative,� she said, in perfect English, with an American accent. �Like him, I�m Ethiopian Orthodox. This is our holiest place.�

�Virginia?� Costas murmured, his eyes narrowing. �Maryland?�

Helena grinned. �Good guess. And you have a hint of New York. My parents were Ethiopian exiles�I grew up among the expat community south of Washington, DC. I was at high school with Jack in England when my father was stationed in London, then I went back to MIT. Aerospace engineering.�

�Really? I must have just missed you. Same faculty; submarine robotics.�

�We didn�t mix with the sub jocks.�

�The Old City of Jerusalem�s a far cry from moon rockets and outerspace, Helena,� Jack said.

She gave him a wan smile. �After NASA wound down the space shuttle program, I figured I�d seek the spiritual route. Get to the heavens quicker.�

�You knew you�d be coming here eventually.�

�It�s in the blood,� she said. �My father did it, my grandfather, his father before that. A fair number of women along the way. There are always at least twenty-eight of us up here on the roof�mostly monks, but always a couple of nuns�have been for almost two centuries now. Our presence on the Holy Sepulchre is the hub of our Ethiopian faith, helps keep our sense of identity. I don�t just mean the Ethiopian Church, I mean my extended family, Ethiopia itself.�

�Seems a little crowded,� Costas said.

�You can say that again. Custody of the Holy Sepulchre is divided between a number of communities�Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox. We spend more time negotiating about when we can use the washroom in this place than we do worshipping. It�s like a microcosm of the world here�the good, the bad and the ugly. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Turks who ruled Jerusalem imposed something called the �Status Quo of the Holy Places,� in an attempt to stop the bickering. The idea was that any new construction work, any change in the custodial arrangements in the Holy Sepulchre required government approval. Trouble was, it got turned on its head and used for more infighting. We can�t even clear fallen wall plaster from our chapels without weeks of negotiations, then formal approval from the other denominations. Everyone�s always spying on one another. We�re never more than one step from open warfare. A few years ago, an Egyptian Coptic monk staking a claim up here moved his chair from the agreed-upon spot a few feet into the shade, and eleven monks had to be hospitalized.�

�But at least your Church controls a prime position on the roof,� Jack said.

�Halfway to heaven.� Helena grinned. �At least, that�s how the monks console themselves in the middle of winter, when it�s below freezing and the Coptics have accidentally on purpose cut off the electricity.�

�You live up here?� Costas asked, incredulous.

�Have you smelled the toilets?� she said. �You must be kidding. I have a nice apartment in the Mount of Paradise nunnery, about twenty minutes� walk from here. This is just my day job.�

�Which is what, exactly?�

�Officially, I try to get back all our ancient manuscripts, the ones held here by the other denominations. They�re easy to spot, with Ethiopian Ge�ez inscriptions and bound in colorful artwork, the signature of our culture.�

��Get back?�� Costas repeated.

She sighed. �It�s a long story.�

�Tell me the nub of it.�

�Okay. Ethiopia, the ancient kingdom of Aksum, was one of the first nations ever to adopt Christianity, in the fourth century AD. Not a lot of people realize it, but Africans, black Africans from Ethiopia, are one of the oldest Christian communities associated with the Holy Sepulchre. We were given the keys to the church by the Roman emperor Constantine the Great�s mother, Helena, my namesake. But then for centuries we had a very unholy rivalry with the Egyptian Coptic Church, the monks from Alexandria. Things began to go seriously downhill when we refused to pay taxes to the Ottoman Turks after they took over the Holy Land. Then, in 1838, a mysterious illness wiped out most of the Ethiopian monks in the Holy Sepulchre. They said it was the plague, but none of us believe it. After that, most of our property was confiscated. The surviving monks were banished to the roof, and we kept our foothold here, bringing mud and water by hand from the Kidron Valley to build these huts you see around us. Then came the worst desecration of all. Many of our precious books were stolen from us and burned. The Egyptians claimed the manuscripts were infected with the plague.�

�In other words, there was something in them they didn�t want revealed,� Costas murmured.

Helena nodded. �They were afraid of proof that we were here at the site of the Holy Sepulchre a few years before them, that we could use our books to claim ascendancy. The tragedy is, we know some of those lost documents dated back to way before the foundation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There were manuscripts on goat parchment almost two thousand years old. Some of them may still exist, locked away in the libraries of our rivals. My dream is to find just one of those manuscripts�something dating from the lifetime of Jesus and his followers, those who met him and actually heard his word�and to house it up here in a purpose-built library. Something that speaks to all the pilgrims of any denomination who come here seeking Jesus, not the bickering and rivalry you see below. Having that kind of treasure to show the world would put the Ethiopian community firmly on the map again, as something more than a bunch of oddballs camped out on the roof.�

Jack shaded his eyes and glanced past the dingy gray structures of the monks� cells to the holy cross on top of the dome over Christ�s Tomb, rising behind the west range of the courtyard in front of him. The seeming purity of the scene, the whitewashed walls set against the sky, seemed to bely the complex history Helena had been describing, yet he knew they were standing on the accretion of centuries, like an archaeological site. �I agree,� he murmured. �This would be the perfect place. I�d love to help you.�

�We don�t have much of a stake below, near the Tomb, but up here we feel we�ve got the edge. Right over the spot where Christ rose, as high as you can get.�

�You believe this is the place?� Costas asked.

She paused. �It�s like everything else to do with early Christianity. You have to cut away so much encrustation to reach the truth, and sometimes the truth you were seeking just isn�t there to be found.�

�The encrustation of history,� Costas murmured. �Funny, Jack uses that word too.�

�Same school, I guess.� Helena grinned. �The Church of the Holy Sepulchre wasn�t dedicated until three hundred years after Jesus� death, at a time when the search was on, among some Christian clergy, for a fantasy past, one that fit the political needs of the emperor Constantine the Great. The story of his mother, Helena, finding a fragment of the True Cross in one of the ancient water cisterns below the church is probably just that, encrustation. But there�s truth here too. This place where we�re standing really was an ancient hill outside the city walls. There were tombs here at the time of Jesus, and it could have been a site for executions. It all adds up.�

�You�re sounding dangerously like an archaeologist, Helena,� Jack said.

�It�s what lies under it all that I want to get at, the bare bones of history.�

�They�re not always bare, in my experience,� Costas muttered.

�Don�t mind him,� Jack said, smiling. �He�s recently traumatized.� He turned back to Helena. �But I understand what you�re getting at.�

�There�s something about spending time on this rooftop, Jack,� Helena said. �It�s as if everything below is smothered under the great weight of the past. Up here, with nothing but the sky above, it�s like being inside a great bowl of history, radiating upward to some distant focal point. And looking down, all the absurdities of humanity seem trivial, easily dispensable. You seem to see the shape of things for what they really are, the simple truths. It gives me hope that one day I will find the real Jesus, Jesus the man. That�s what makes this place precious to us. I sat beside the Sea of Galilee only a few days ago, just water and shimmering hills and sky, and I seemed to see it all so clearly in front of me.�

Jack glanced at Helena. �I�d love you to share some of that. But first we need your help. Pretty urgently. It�s what I called you about. Is there somewhere we can go?�

At that moment Morgan came up the stairs, onto the rooftop courtyard. Like Jack and Costas he was wearing chinos and a loose shirt, but he was carrying a straw hat, which he put on as he came out into the sun, walking toward them.

�Welcome to the Kingdom of Heaven,� Costas said, smiling.

�It�s hot enough to be the other place,� Morgan said, then looked at Helena apologetically and held out out his hand. �You must be Sister Selassie.�

�Dr. Morgan.�

Helena gestured for them to follow her to a line of doors on the other side of the courtyard. The walls and upper structure of the church that surrounded the courtyard kept the noise of the city at bay, but there was a sudden sharp clatter from somewhere nearby, followed by a series of percussive echoes. �Gunfire,� Jack said. �Sounds like .223, M16. Israeli army.�

�They�ve just called a curfew,� Morgan said. �Apparently there�s been some kind of disturbance at the Wailing Wall, and it�s spread to the Christian Quarter. A couple of tourists have been knifed. We got into the Old City just in time. They�ve shut all the gates. I�d only just started my recce of the Holy Sepulchre, and then they shut that down too, got everyone out.�

�That�s another advantage of being up here on the roof,� Helena said. �We�re above all that. But it�s pretty unusual for tourists to be attacked. The extremists here rarely resort to that. Doesn�t help any cause.�

�Just what we need,� Jack murmured, suddenly feeling uneasy. �Curfew, no tourists, police and army distracted. It leaves us vulnerable. I only hope Ben can get through.� He glanced at Helena. �Our security chief. He flew out of London early this morning and is due in from Tel Aviv about now.�

�If anyone can get them to open the gates, it�s Ben,� Costas said.

�He�s already liaised with the chief of police here,� Jack said. �They know each other from Special Forces, some combined UK-Israeli operation even I don�t know about. Special Forces is a pretty small world.�

�You guys sure do network,� Helena said.

Jack gave her a wry look. �Anyone thinks being Indiana Jones is a one-man show, forget it.�

They reached a door, indistinguishable from others along the side of the courtyard. Helena unlocked it, switched on an electric bulb hanging just inside and ushered them in. �Welcome to my office,� she said. They all squeezed in, Jack and Costas sitting on a bench and Morgan standing. It was little more than a monk�s cell, with the bench and devotional images on one side; on the other side there were shelves brimming with books, architectural drawings pinned to the wall and a narrow desk with a state-of-art laptop. �I steal electricity from the Armenians and hack into wireless Internet from the Greek monastery next door.� She grinned and sat down on a stool behind the desk. �You see, it�s really all a sharing community.�

Morgan peered at one of the drawings, showing simple rectilinear structures surrounded by rocky outcrops and terrain contours. �The Holy Sepulchre?� he asked. �Is this the early church?�

�I�m doing an architectural history of the Roman Church,� Helena said. �I�m most interested in what lies beneath, what can be found out about the site before the Constantinian Church was established in the fourth century. There was a lot more going on here in the early Roman period after the Crucifixion than people have ever guessed. It�s been my secret after-hours project, but now you know. I reckon if I�m going to be sitting on top of one of the most complicated places in history for the next few years, I may as well do more than keep my monks in order.�

�Then you�re going to love what I�ve got,� Morgan said excitedly, patting his bag. �Someone else was doing the same thing almost a hundred years ago. His work was left unfinished, and has never before been published. It�s mostly a detailed record of the early medieval elevations, but there are some observations on the Roman stuff underneath that will take your breath away.� Morgan lowered his voice. �He thought that when King Herod Agrippa rebuilt the city walls in the mid-first century AD, he also put a shrine on this spot, only a few years after the Crucifixion. If you can help me follow his clues, we may have one of the most extraordinary revelations ever in the archaeology of early Christianity.�

Helena seemed rooted to her stool, and had gone pale. �You�re kidding me. Wait till you hear what I�ve found. Who was this guy?�

Jack took out a sheaf of papers from his faded khaki bag and laid them on his knees. Costas leaned over from where he was sitting and shut the door. �That�s what we couldn�t tell you about on the phone,� Jack said. For the next forty minutes he quietly ran through everything�the shipwreck, Herculaneum, Rome, the London tomb, the clues they had found the day before in the nunnery in California. At the end he glanced at Helena, who was staring at him, speechless, and then he placed a photograph on her desk, of Everett�s wall painting with the Chi-Rho symbol and the Greek letters. �Does this do anything for you?�

Helena looked straight at the bottom of the photograph. She seemed stunned, and remained motionless.

�Well?�

She cleared her throat, and steadied herself on the side of the desk. She blinked hard, then peered closely at the image. �Well, that�s an Armenian cross. The lower shaft is longer than the arms and top, and those are the distinctive double tips.�

Jack nodded. �Does that help us?�

�If you�re looking for something Armenian inside the Holy Sepulchre, you�d be thinking of the Chapel of St. Helena, below the church in the ancient quarry. It�s one part of the church the Armenian monks are responsible for.� She stopped, gripped the table and whispered, �Of course.�

�What is it?�

Helena spoke quietly. �Okay. Here�s my take. My particular interest is what lies under the church. Everything above, between the bedrock and the roof, is encrustation�that word again, Costas. A fascinating record of the history of Christianity, but encrustation on any truth this place may have to offer on the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth�Jesus the man.�

�Go on,� Jack said.

�It�s what Dr. Morgan said about Herod Agrippa, the idea of a first-century shrine. Ever since first standing in that underground chapel, I�ve been convinced there�s more Roman evidence buried under the church, from the time of Jesus and the Apostles. From everything you�ve just told me, from what you�ve managed to piece together about the events of 1917, it turns out we�ve been following the same leads.�

�Explain.�

�You say this man Everett was here during the First World War? A British intelligence officer? A devout man, who spent much of his time in the Holy Sepulchre? An architect by training?�

Morgan patted his bag. �He�s the one who wrote the architectural treatise I mentioned. I�ve got a CD copy you can have.�

�Well, I didn�t know the name, but I know the man,� Helena murmured. �I know him intimately. I feel his presence every time I stand in that underground chapel.�

�How?� Jack exclaimed.

�The key to the main door of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is held by two Muslim families, a tradition that goes back to the time of Saladin the Great. One family takes care of the key, the other opens the door. They�ve been more sympathetic to the Ethiopians on the roof than some of our fellow Christian brethren, and three years ago, when I first arrived here, I became close to the old patriarch of one of the families. Before he died he told me an extraordinary story from his youth. It was early 1918, when he was a boy of ten. The Turks had been evicted, and the British were in control of Jerusalem. His grandfather remembered from decades before that British officers often had a great interest in the history and architecture of the place, engineers like Colonel Warren and Colonel Wilson, who mapped out Jerusalem in the 1860s. Because of this, the caretakers were better disposed toward the British occupiers than the Turks, who were fellow Muslims but had no interest in the Holy Sepulchre. The old man told me that a British officer who spoke Arabic came with two army surveyors and spent many days in the church, mapping out the underground chapels and exploring the ancient quarry cuttings and water cisterns. Afterward, the officer came back many times by himself and befriended the boy. The officer was sad, sometimes tearful, said he had children of his own he�d not seen for years and would never seen again. He�d been badly wounded, gassed, on the Western Front, and had difficulty breathing, coughed up blood a lot.�

�That�s our man,� Jack murmured excitedly.

�Apparently on his last visit he spent a whole night in the church. The caretakers knew he was a very pious Christian, and left him alone. When he emerged he was muddied and dripping, shivering, as if he�d been down a sewer. He told them they had a great treasure in their safekeeping, and they must guard it forever. They knew he had been badly traumatized in the war and thought he was probably delirious, and was referring to the Holy Sepulchre, to the Tomb of Christ. He disappeared, and they never saw him again. With his lungs being so weak, they thought his final night�s exertions might have killed him.�

�Did the old man talk about anything that Everett and his surveyors might have found?� Jack asked. �Anything in the Chapel of St. Helena? We�re looking for some kind of hiding place.�

Helena shook her head. �Nothing. But the custodians have always known there are many unexplored places under the Holy Sepulchre, ancient chambers that might once have been tombs, cisterns cut into the old burial ground, entrances that were sealed up in the Roman period and have never been opened up since.�

�Then we�ll just have to trust our instincts,� Jack murmured.

�I�ve spent many hours down there, days,� Helena said. �There are so many possibilities. Every wall could conceal a chamber, a passageway. And they�re almost all mortared up or plastered over. I know of at least half a dozen stone blocks in walls that have spaces behind them, where you can see chinks through the mortar. And doing any kind of invasive exploration is out of the question. The Armenians are going to take a dim view of me taking you down there in the first place, let alone unleashing jackhammers.�

Jack reached for the photograph of Everett�s wall painting from the nunnery, and opened his folder. �If we don�t try, someone else will. There are others who know we�re here, I�m convinced of it. We need to move now. Can you get the door to the Holy Sepulchre unlocked for us?�

�I can do that.� Helena caught another glimpse of the photograph in Jack�s hand, then suddenly reached out and grabbed his arm. �Wait! What�s that? Under the cross?�

�A Latin inscription,� Jack said. �It�s not clear in the picture, but it says domine iuimus.�

Helen was still for a moment, then gasped. �That�s it! I know where Everett went!� She got up, her eyes ablaze. �I need at least two of you with me. Two strong pairs of hands.�

Costas gave a thumbs-up. �I�m with you.�

�Where?� Jack demanded.

�You�re the nautical archaeologist, Jack. Ships and boats. What�s the most incredible recent discovery in the Holy Sepulchre? Follow me.�

�

HALF AN HOUR LATER JACK STOOD NEAR THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the enclosed courtyard below the fa�ade built almost a thousand years before, when the Crusaders took Jerusalem. As they made their way down from the Ethiopian monastery on the rooftop, Jack had handed Morgan a compact disc from his khaki bag. He had already arranged with Helena for an escort to take Morgan out of the Old City, to the place where he would pass on the disc to Jack�s contact. This was it. Jack had no doubt they had reached the final stage in their quest, and now was the time to prepare themselves in case anyone tried to stop them.

Jack glanced up at the sky. Everything was now in motion. The sun had disappeared behind a bank of gray cloud, and the air had an oppressive quality, humid and heavy. He heard a burst of gunfire echo through the streets, followed by screams in Arabic. He mouthed a silent prayer for Morgan, and then followed Costas and Helena to the doors of the church. Two men in Arab headdress stood on either side. Costas stepped back in alarm, but Helena put her hand on him reassuringly. One man passed a ring of ancient keys to the other, who then proceeded to unlock the doors. They pushed them open, just enough. Helena glanced at the two men, bowing her head slightly, then led Jack and Costas forward. The doors closed behind them. They were inside.

�There�s been a power cut in the entire Christian Quarter of Old Jerusalem,� Helena said quietly. �The authorities sometimes flip the switch. Helps to flush out the bad guys.� It was dark inside, and they remained standing for a moment, their eyes getting accustomed to the gloom. Ahead of them natural light was filtering through the windows that surrounded the dome over the rotunda, and all around them the shadows were punctuated by flickering pinpricks of orange. �Joudeh and Nusseibeh, the two Arab custodians who unlocked the door, came in and lit the candles for us after I told them we�d be coming.�

�Does anyone else know we�re here?� Jack asked.

�Only my friend Yereva. She has the key to the next place we�re going. She�s an Armenian nun.�

�Armenian?� Costas said. �And you�re Ethiopian? I thought you people didn�t get along.�

�The men don�t get along. If this place had been run by nuns, we might actually have been able to get somewhere.�

She led them forward to the edge of the rotunda. Jack looked up, to where the circle of windows let in the dull light of day, and peered above that to the interior of the dome, restored in modern times to the same position as the dome of the first church, built by Constantine the Great in the fourth century. He thought of the other great domes he had stood beneath in the last few days�St. Paul�s in London, St. Peter�s in Rome, places that suddenly seemed far removed from the reality of the life of Jesus. Even here the momentous significance of the site, the truths embedded in the rock beneath them, seemed obscured by the church itself, by the very structures meant to extol and sanctify the final acts in life of one whom millions came here to worship.

�I see what you mean about the encrustations of history,� Costas murmured. He was staring at the gaudy structure in the center of the rotunda. �Is that the Tomb?�

�That�s the Holy Sepulchre itself, the Aedicule,� Helena replied. �What you see here was mostly built in the nineteenth century, in place of the structure destroyed in 1009 by the Fatimid caliph al�Hakim, when the Muslims ruled Jerusalem. That destruction was the event that precipitated the Crusades, but even before the Crusaders arrived, the Viking Harald Hardrada and his Varangian bodyguard from Constantinople had come here on the orders of the Byzantine emperor, to oversee the rebuilding of the church. But I think you know all about that.�

�I thought we�d left Harald behind in the Yucat�n,� Costas murmured. �Is there anywhere he didn�t go?�

�The ancient rock-cut tomb inside the Aedicule was identified by Bishop Makarios in AD 326 as the Tomb of Christ,� Helena continued. �You have to imagine this whole scene in front of us as a rocky hillside, half as high as the rotunda is now. Just behind us was a small rise known as Golgotha, meaning �the place of the skull,� where most believe Jesus was crucified. The hill in front of us had been a quarry, dating maybe as early as the city of David and Solomon, but by the time of Jesus it was a place of burial, and probably riddled with rock-cut tombs.�

�How do we know the bishop got the right tomb?� Costas said.

�We don�t,� Helena replied. �The Gospels only tell us the tomb was hewn out of the living rock, with a stone rolled in front of it. You had to stoop to look in. There was space inside for at least five people, sitting or squatting. The platform for the body was a raised stone burial couch, possibly an arcosolium, a shelf below a shallow arch.�

�All of which could describe a typical tomb of the period,� Jack said. �According to the Gospels, the tomb wasn�t custom-built for Jesus, but was donated by Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew and member of the Jerusalem council. It was apparently a fresh tomb, and there would have been no further burials, no added niches as you see in so many other rock-cut tombs. It was never used as a family tomb.�

�Unless�� Helena hesitated, then spoke very quietly, almost in a whisper. �Unless one other was put there.�

�Who?� Jack exclaimed.

�A companion,� she whispered. �A female companion.�

�You believe that?�

Helena raised her hands and pressed the tips of her fingers together briefly, then gazed at the Aedicule. �It�s impossible to tell from what�s there now. Constantine the Great�s engineers hacked away most of the surrounding hill to reveal the tomb, to isolate it. By so doing, they actually destroyed much of the tomb itself, the rock-cut chamber, leaving only the burial shelf intact. It was almost as if Constantine�s bishops wanted to remove all possible reason for doubt, any cause for dispute. From then on, the Holy Sepulchre, the identification of the tomb, would be a matter of faith, unassailable. Remember the historical context, the fourth century. When the Church was first becoming formalized, some things that were inconvenient, contradictory, were concealed or destroyed. Other things were created, spirited out of nowhere. Holy relics were discovered. Behind it all lay Constantine the Great and his bishops. Everything had to be set in stone, a version of what went on here in the first century AD that suited the new order, the Church as a political tool. They were editing the past to make a stronger present.�

�And behind Constantine lay a secret body of advisors, guardians of the earliest Church,� Jack said. �That�s one thing we haven�t told you yet.�

�I know,� Helena replied quietly.

�You know?�

�As soon as you told me what you were seeking, I knew you would come up against them. The concilium.�

Jack looked at her in astonishment, then nodded slowly. �We had an audience with one of them, in Rome, two days ago.�

�At the tomb? The other tomb?�

Jack stared at her again, stunned, then nodded. �You know about that too?�

�They�re tight, Jack. There are never any chinks. You need to be incredibly careful. Whoever you saw, he may have told you some truths, but he may not be who you think he was. The concilium has been stalled in the past, but never defeated. They�re like a bad dream, endlessly returning. We should know.�

�We?�

�The location of that other tomb, the Tomb of St. Paul in the secret catacomb under St. Peter�s in Rome, was not entirely lost. The truth was passed down by those who were there, and it reached the kingdom of Aksum, Ethiopia. Remember, we Ethiopians are one of the earliest Christian communities, derived from the first followers of Jesus. There are others on the periphery of the ancient world. The British Church, in existence since the first century AD, since the word of Jesus first reached the shores of Britain. We share the memory of an emperor and Christ�the British tradition that an emperor brought Christianity to their shores, ours that an emperor and a king sought the Messiah in the Holy Land, during the time of the Gospels. And we have always been good at keeping secrets. You know we have the Ark of the Covenant, Jack.�

�We were going there after we graduated, you remember, but Mengistu refused to lift the ban on your family. Have you actually seen it since then?�

�Eyes on the prize, Jack,� Costas murmured. �We can plan that one by the pool later.�

�If there is a later,� Jack said, peering at Helena. �The other thing you said. You�ve never told me that before. An emperor in the Holy Land.� He thought for a moment. �The British tradition must be the one alluded to by Gildas, in the sixth century. Is there any ancient source for yours?�

�Passed down through my ancestors,� Helena replied. �A tradition, no more, but a cherished one.�

�So how did you survive the concilium?� Costas asked.

Helena paused. �We were an inconvenience, one of those bits of untidiness that Constantine�s advisors wanted swept away. Ever since the fourth century we have been persecuted by the concilium, hunted down, just as our brethren in Britain were. Always we maintained our link with our sister churches, our strength. We women, followers of Jesus and of Mary of Magdalene. In Britain they came to link her with the cult of their high priestess, the warrior-queen Andraste.�

�We�ve met her,� Costas said.

�What?�

�The tomb in London,� Jack said. �Where we found the empty cylinder, left there by Everett�s ancestor. I�ve got a lot more to tell you.�

�Then it all falls into place,� Helena whispered.

�That plague you talked about, the extermination of the Ethiopian monks in 1838?� Jack said. �The destruction of the libraries? Are you saying the concilium was behind all that?�

Helena looked behind her furtively and whispered again. �Something sinister was, and is, behind all of the rivalries in this place, all the absurdities. Something that wanted us destroyed, and wanted this place kept in a state of virtual lockdown. Look at the Tomb, the Holy Sepulchre. You can hardly see it for the encrustation. The little chapels of the rival denominations, crowding in on it, suffocating it. It�s almost as if they�ve devoured as much as they can of the Tomb, right up to the burial platform, and are locked together in a permanent standoff. It�s madness.�

�It�d serve them right if it wasn�t the actual Tomb, wouldn�t it?� Costas said.

�Yet keeping you there, keeping them in permanent standoff, might also serve the purpose of the concilium,� Jack murmured. �Maybe there is something else here, something they don�t want revealed. Another inconvenience.�

Helena gave Jack a piercing look and glanced at her watch. �Come on. My friend Yereva�s due to meet us any time now.�

She led them back the way they had come, and then past the entrance. A few moments later they stood at the top of a flight of steps that dropped down into total darkness. Jack had been here before, and knew that the steps led to the Chapel of St. Helena, an ancient cave and quarry-cutting five meters below the level of the church. It was a mysterious, labyrinthine place, filled with walled-off spaces and ancient water cisterns, dug deep into the rock. Jack stood alone as Helena and Costas went off to find candles. For a moment all he could hear was a sound like a distant exhalation, as if the echoes of two millennia of prayers were caught in this place, resonating through history. He thought of all the pilgrims, those who survived uncharted roads fraught with peril and uncertainty, standing at last inside their Holy of Holies. He hoped that nothing would ever sour the sanctity of this place, where so many had found strength in the events of one extraordinary life two thousand years ago.

Helena and Costas returned, each carrying a couple of lit candles, and they began to descend. On the damp walls Jack saw hundreds of small crosses, carved deep into the rock by medieval pilgrims. He knew that every inch of the bedrock around them had been shaped by human hands, but as the three of them went deeper he felt as if they were walking away from human fabrication, toward the truth of what had actually happened on this bare rock before the church was built. He stopped to listen, but heard nothing. He glanced at his watch and thought of Morgan. Less than two hours to go now. It was a gamble, but he knew he had to take it, that it could be their final line of defense. The written word. Now they must do all they could to reach their goal. He was only a few steps from the floor of the chapel, and all he could see ahead were deep shadows and pools of orange cast by the candles. Then they were on the stone floor, walking past columns, toward a grated steel door on the far side, beside an altar.

�Through this door is the Chapel of St. Vartan,� Helena murmured, placing two candles in holders on the wall. �The ancient quarry cuttings below us were only excavated in the 1970s, and part of the enclosed space was made into a little Armenian chapel. It�s not open to the public. We have to wait for my friend Yereva to bring the key.� She glanced at her watch. �She�d hoped to be here by now, but she works for her Patriarch and often has trouble getting away.�

There was a rustling from the stairway they had just come down and a figure came out of the gloom toward them, wearing a brown robe and the distinctive triangular hood of the Armenians. The hood was swept back to reveal a young woman with olive skin and curly dark hair. She held a candle in one hand, and a large black ring with a single key in the other. She went straight toward the steel door, nodding at Helena. �These are your friends?� she asked quietly, her English heavily accented.

�The ones I told you about. Jack Howard and Costas Kazantzakis.�

�I had to tell the Patriarch I was coming here.� The woman spoke in a low voice.

�You were allowed out in the curfew?� Jack asked.

�We have our own private passageway.�

�Yereva is the unofficial custodian of the chapel,� Helena said. �But being a lowly nun, she�s not even allowed to look after the keys. She has to apply for them every time from the Patriarch.�

�Officially, I�ve just come to light the candles and say a prayer,� Yereva said. �I�m going to return immediately, just in case there are any suspicions. If I�m back with the Patriarch, nobody will have cause to come looking for me. You should be undisturbed until the curfew is over, which should be at least a couple of hours.�

�You said nothing else to him?� Helena asked.

�Nothing else. Nothing different from our usual routine.�

�You two have met here before?� Jack asked.

�Helena will tell you,� Yereva said. �I would love to go in there now with such a famous archaeologist, but I cannot. I hope we will meet here again when times are easier.� She turned the key in the lock, and swung the door open. �God be with you.�

�God be with you too, Yereva,� Helena murmured. �And be careful.� Jack eyed Helena, and saw for the first time that she looked anxious. Yereva pulled up her hood and left quickly, pattering across the stone floor and up the steps. Helena turned to the doorway. �Come on. We may not have much time.� She led them into a gloomy passageway, lighting candles on the wall with her own candle as she went. Jack could see the rough-hewn bedrock around them, the pick-marks of ancient quarrying. The surface seemed old, much older than the stone in the Chapel of St. Helena, and it was pitted like corroded metal. Below a modern metal railing on one side was a dark space, the bottom invisible. Jack had a flashback to the cavern under the Palatine Hill, to the Phlegraean Fields and the Sibyl�s cave, other bottomless places where the underworld seemed visible. He cast the thought aside and followed Helena into a chamber to the right, stooping low through the entranceway. In front of them was a section of ancient wall, three courses high, the blocks thickly mortared together, with retouching that looked recently done. Helena lit more candles, and they could see another wall, different in style, with the rough surface of rock-cuttings all round them. She knelt down beside the wall and placed her candle in front. The farthest block to the left of the middle course was covered with a hanging blanket, and she lifted it and folded it above. Where the blanket had hung was a frame with a glass window covering the block, and behind that Jack could make out what covered the surface of the rock.

He knew what he�d be looking at even before she raised the blanket. It was the most extraordinary find made when the quarry was excavated. The St. Vartan Chapel ship graffito. It was a drawing of a ship, an ancient Roman merchantman, with words below. He knelt down, Costas beside him. He could see the lines of the drawing clearly now, crude but bold, the confident strokes of someone who knew what they were depicting, who got the details right even in this place so far from the sea. An experienced seafarer, a pilgrim, one of the first. Jack�s eyes strayed down from the drawing to the words below. Then he remembered. Suddenly his heart began to pound. He slowly read it:

DOMINE IVIMVS

�Of course,� he whispered.

�What is it?� Costas asked.

�It�s the same words as the inscription from California, from Everett�s painting.� He glanced excitedly at Helena. �This is what you recognized in the photograph.�

�That�s when I knew,� she said. �It just had to be from here.�

�Everett must have found this chamber, more than half a century before it was opened up and made into a chapel,� Jack exclaimed, keeping his voice low. �He was here, right here where we are now. These words are the clue in his painting. Somehow, this stone�s the key to the whole thing.�

�What�s your take on that ship, Jack?� Helena said.

�It�s Roman, certainly,� Jack murmured, trying to control his excitement, narrowing his eyes. �High curving stern, reinforced gunwale, distinctive prow. A sailing ship, not an oared galley. The mast has been stepped down, which was done in harbors. It�s got double steering oars and what looks like an artemon, a raking mast at the bow. All of that suggests a large ship. My guess is we�re looking at the kind of vessel that would have been seen in the harbor of Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Judaea, one of the grain carriers that stopped off there on the way north from Alexandria in Egypt before heading west for Rome. The kind of ship a Christian pilgrim from Rome might have taken on its return voyage.�

�Can you date it?�

�I�d have said early Roman rather than late. If I�d seen this anywhere else, I�d have said first century AD. But in this place, the Holy Sepulchre, there�s hardly anything that�s been dated that early.�

�The inscription was clearly done at the same time as the ship, the same width and style of line,� Helena said. �But you�re the expert.�

�Well, it�s Latin, which in this neck of the woods means no earlier than the first century AD, when the Romans arrived in Judaea. Beyond that, it�s hard to say. The lettering style certainly could be first century.�

�It�s usually translated as �Lord we shall go,� or �Let us go to the Lord,�� Helena said. �Some scholars have associated it with the first verse of Psalm 122, one of the Songs of Degrees sung by pilgrims approaching Jerusalem. �I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the House of the Lord.��

�That doesn�t really help us pin down the date,� Jack murmured. �The Psalms were originally Hebrew, and were probably chanted by the earliest Christians, here at the Tomb and in other places where they gathered in the first years after the Crucifixion. So the Psalms could date to any time from the first century onward.�

�I�ve checked, and these two words, domine iuimus, don�t actually appear together in the Latin of the Vulgate, the Roman Bible of the early medieval period,� Helena said. �If they are a translation of Psalm 122, they could be very early, before the Latin translation that appears in the Vulgate was formalized. They could be a translation done by a very early Christian pilgrim, maybe from Rome.�

�Ships come and go, don�t they?� Costas said. �I mean, it doesn�t have to be a pilgrim arriving here. It could be someone going, leaving Jerusalem. Your first translation, �Lord we shall go.� Maybe it was one of the apostles, practicing a bit of Latin before heading out into the big wide world, telling his Lord he was heading off to spread the word.�

Helena remained silent, but her expression was brimming with anticipation. Jack peered at her. �What aren�t you telling us?� he asked.

She reached into her robe and took out a small plastic coin case. She handed it to Jack. �Yereva and I found this bronze coin a few days ago. We did a bit of unofficial excavation. There was some loose plaster under the graffito. The coin was embedded in the base of that stone, in a cavity made for it. It�s like those coins I remember you telling me about that the Romans put in the mast-steps of ships, to ward off misfortune. A good-luck token.�

Jack was peering at the case. �Unusual to put an apotropaic coin like that in a building,� he murmured. �Do you mind?� He clicked open the case and took out the coin. He held it up by the rim, and the candelight reflected off the bronze. He saw an image of a man�s head, crude, thick-necked, with a single word underneath. �Good God,� he exclaimed.

�See what I mean?� Helena replied.

�Herod Agrippa,� Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement.

�Herod Agrippa,� Costas murmured. �Buddy of Claudius?�

�King of Judaea, AD 41 to 44,� Helena said, nodding.

Jack touched the wall beside the graffito. �So this masonry could be centuries older than the fourth-century church above us.�

�When that wall was revealed during the 1970s excavations, there was nothing to pin down the date. But it was clearly earlier than the basement wall of the fourth-century Constantinian Church, which you can see over there,� Helena said, pointing off to the side wall of the chapel to her left. �The only ancient record of any structure before the fourth century comes from Eusebius� Life of Constantine, which says that the site had been built on two hundred years before, when the emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as Colonia Aelia Capitolina.�

�Hadrian built a temple of Aphrodite, apparently,� Costas said, peering in the candlelight at a battered guidebook Jack had given him.

�That�s what Eusebius claims,� Helena replied. �But we can�t be sure. He was part of that revisionist take on early Christian history under Constantine. Eusebius wanted his readers to think Hadrian had deliberately built over the site of the Tomb of Christ to destroy it, to revile it. And Aphrodite, Roman Venus, the goddess of love, was regarded as a particular abomination by the Church fathers, so the identification of the building as a temple of Aphrodite could just have been something Eusebius or his informants dreamed up for their Christian readership.�

�Bunch of killjoys,� Costas muttered. �What was their problem? I thought Jesus was all about love.�

Helena gave a wry shrug. �Eusebius was probably right about the date of the building, though. There are other sections of wall here that are Hadrianic, judging by construction technique. If there was a structure here before that, all memory of it had clearly gone by Eusebius� day.�

Jack was staring at the wall, his mind in a tumult. �That coin,� he murmured. �Herod Agrippa. This begins to make sense.�

�What does?� Costas said.

�It�s one of the biggest unanswered questions about the Holy Sepulchre site. I�ve never understood why nobody has properly addressed it. Maybe it�s the Resurrection, fear of treading too close to an event so sacrosanct.�

�This is beginning to sound familiar,� Costas murmured. �Go on.�

�Herod had grandiose schemes for Judaea, for his capital, Jerusalem. He fancied himself as emperor of the east, a kind of co-regent with his friend Claudius. It was Agrippa�s undoing. Before he died in AD 44, probably poisoned, one scheme he did complete was to increase the size of Jerusalem, building an entirely new wall circuit to the northwest. It encompassed the Hill of Golgotha and the ancient quarry site where we�re standing now.�

�Bringing the old burial ground, the necropolis, within the city limits,� Helena murmured.

Jack nodded. �When city walls were extended like that, old tombs were often emptied, sometimes even reused as dwellings. In Roman tradition, no burials could exist within the sacred line of the pomerium, the city wall. Herod Agrippa had been brought up in Rome, and may have fancied himself enough of a Roman to observe that.�

�What date are we talking about?� Costas said.

�The wall was built about AD 41 to 43, probably just before Claudius became emperor.�

�And Jesus died in AD 30, or a few years after,� Helena said.

�So about a decade after the Crucifixion, the tombs here would probably have been cleared out,� Costas murmured. �Would Herod Agrippa have known about Jesus, about the Crucifixion?�

Jack took a deep breath and reached out to touch the wall. �Helena�s probably one step ahead of me on this, but yes, I do believe Herod Agrippa would have known about Jesus. There was a time earlier in Herod�s life when contact between the two men was possible. And from the Crucifixion onward, I have no doubt that this place would have been venerated by Jesus� family and followers, become a place of pilgrimage. When Herod built his walls, he himself in the Roman guise of Pontifex Maximus, chief priest, would have ordered all the tombs within the walls to be emptied. But at the same time, this coin and the wall here suggest that he ordered a masonry structure built over this, above or very close to the tomb. Why? Was he reviling Christ, trying to eradicate the memory?�

�Or trying to protect it,� Helena murmured.

�I don�t understand,� Costas said. �Herod Agrippa?�

�It�s not necessarily what you might think,� Jack replied. �He could have been genuinely sympathetic to the Christians, or there could have been some other factor at play. An augury that led him to believe he had to protect the site, a chance encounter with a Christian that swayed him, some early experience. Or politics. He could have been at loggerheads with the Jewish authorities, and done it to spite them. We may never know. The fact remains, we seem to have a structure built at the likely site of Christ�s tomb only a few years after the Crucifixion, at a time when this hill was probably already sacred ground to early Christians.�

�Then there�s another thing I don�t get,� Costas said. �The Tomb of Christ, the Holy Sepulchre, is behind us in the rotunda, at least eighty meters west of here, by my reckoning. Let�s imagine this wall in front of us was built by Herod Agrippa as some kind of shrine over the tomb. If that�s the case, then the ship graffito must be on the inside, painted by someone who was actually within the structure. That just doesn�t make sense to me. You�d expect the interior of the tomb to be sealed up, hallowed ground, and any graffito to be on the outside wall. And looking at the lie and wear of the masonry around that graffito, I�d say we�re actually more likely on the outside of a structure. Something�s not quite right.�

Jack nodded, and squatted back. �We need some hard archaeology. The ball�s in your court now, Helena,� he said, holding out the coin of Herod Agrippa to her. �Have you got anything more, anything at all?�

�Keep hold of the coin,� she murmured. �There are others here who may suspect I have something, and it�s safest with you until this is over.� She pointed to his khaki bag, and Jack replaced the coin in its case and slid it deep in his bag. She turned to face the ancient wall again, then reached out to either side of the glass pane over the graffito, lifting it up and out. She placed the pane carefully on the floor, then knelt down and began to work her fingers into a section of mortar beneath the stone block with the graffito. �There is something I haven�t shown you yet,� she said, flinching as she scraped her hand. �I want an objective assessment.�

�About the graffito?� Jack said.

Helena winced again, and then gripped two points under the mortar. She pulled, and there was a slight movement. �Done,� she said. She jiggled a broken section of mortar out and laid it carefully beside the glass pane. The base of the block was now revealed, with a dark crack beneath where the mortar had been. She knelt down and blew at the lower face of the block, pulling back quickly to avoid a small cloud of dust. �There it is,� she said, retreating further.

Jack and Costas knelt down where she had been. Jack could see more markings, inscriptions. There was a Chi-Rho symbol, crudely incised into the rock. Beside it was another inscription, a painted word, clearly by the same hand as the ship graffito and the domine iuimus inscription, the same-shaped letters and stroke of the brush. Costas was closest, and peered down farther to get a better angle. He sat back and looked at Jack. They both stared at the rock, speechless for a moment.

�Jack, I�m getting that strange sense of d�j� vu again.�

Jack felt faint. He suddenly realized where he had seen that style of letter before. The serifs on the V, the square-sided S.

The ancient shipwreck off Sicily.

The shipwreck of St. Paul.

�My God,� he whispered. �Paulus.� He swallowed hard and slumped back. St. Paul the Apostle. St. Paul, whose name they had seen only a week before, a hundred meters beneath the sea, scratched on an amphora in an ancient shipwreck. Impossible. Jack closed his eyes for a moment, then stared again. No. Not impossible. It made perfect sense. He sat back, and stared at Helena.

�Are you thinking what I�m thinking?� she said quietly.

�You asked for an objective assessment,� Jack replied. �And here it is: That graffito was carved by St. Paul. That�s his ship. Domine iuimus. �Lord, we go.� Costas, you were right. The man who drew this was going, not coming. He came here to tell his Lord that he was about to set out on his great mission, to spread the word beyond Judaea. Paul was here, sitting on the hillside at the very spot where we are now, beside the wall built by Herod Agrippa only a few years before.�

�At the place of pilgrimage,� Helena murmured. �At the Tomb of Christ.�

�At the Tomb of Christ,� Jack repeated.

Helena pointed at the space under the block. �Jack, take a look in there. Is hasn�t been mortared. You remember I told you I knew of some areas of masonry down here with spaces behind them? Most of the mortar you can see around the block is modern, dating from after the 1970s excavations, when the graffito was revealed. But there�s another sealing layer beneath that that�s also relatively recent, dating within the last hundred years or so.�

�Let me guess,� Jack murmured, �1918?�

�I�m convinced of it.�

�You�re talking about Everett,� Costas exclaimed. �You�re saying he found this and removed the block. Can we do it too?�

�That�s why I needed both of you here,� Helena said. �When Yereva and I first found the Paul inscription, we realized there was a space beyond it. You can see it through the crack. It could just be a dead space beyond the wall, or another water cistern. There are at least eleven cisterns under the Holy Sepulchre, for collecting rainwater, most of them disused and sealed over. Or it could be something else. There was no way we could move this block, and if we�d been caught trying, there would have been a couple more crucifixions at this spot.�

�Have you told anyone else about the Paul inscription?� Jack asked.

�You�re the first. But we�re certain others know, and have kept it secret. Like I said, the mortar over the inscription was recent, from the 1970s excavation. They found it, then concealed it.�

�I don�t understand,� Costas said. �Surely a discovery like that would give the Armenians extra clout, really put them on the map.�

�It�s all about keeping the status quo in this place,� Helena murmured. �Whoever made the decision might have feared jealousy from the other denominations in the Holy Sepulchre. It could have pulled the rug out from all the checks and balances, threatened rights and privileges they�d worked so hard to maintain over the centuries. Better to keep a discovery like this as their secret, to bolster their own private sense of superiority, to save as ammunition, should it be needed in the future.�

�And there could have been other factors at play,� Jack murmured.

�The concilium?� Costas said.

�A fear of bringing dark forces down upon themselves, forces that would do anything to suppress them simply for what they knew, just as so nearly happened to the Ethiopians,� Jack murmured.

�Come on,� Helena said, her voice suddenly urgent. �Let�s get started.� She began to prise away more sections of ancient mortar around the block. It came away surprisingly easily, in chunks which had clearly been removed before and then sealed back into place. After a few minutes the entire block was clear, leaving a crack around the edge a few centimeters wide, enough to slide in a hand to palm depth. Jack rummaged in his bag and took out a climber�s headlamp, flicking it on and pushing it through the crack at the widest point, on the right-hand side. �I see what you mean,� he murmured, his face close to the crack. �With the block removed we�d be looking at a space about a meter by half a meter wide, just big enough for a crawlway.�

�Do you think you can do it?� Helena said. �Move it, I mean? Yereva and I couldn�t.�

�Only one way to find out.� Jack passed her the head-lamp, then motioned to Costas. They each put their hands under a corner of the block. �We�ll have to try to rock it out,� Jack said. �Gently does it. Toward you first.� They heaved, and the block budged. Costas yelped in pain. �You okay?� Jack said.

Costas drew out one hand, shaking and blowing on it, and grimaced. He slid it back in under the block, which was now a few centimeters out of the wall. �Again,� he said. They pushed back and forth another half a dozen times, each time pulling it out farther. It came surprisingly easily. They shifted position so they were facing each other, both hands under the stone. �Heave,� Jack said. With one hand under the outer edge of the block, each moved his other hand back fractionally every time the stone came forward, keeping close to the wall. Helena pulled up a pair of short wooden planks she had found on the way in beside the railing outside the chapel, positioning them under the stone. �Okay. This is it,� Jack said. �Let�s try to take it out a good meter. Careful of your back.� They both straightened up as much as they could, looking each other in the eye, and nodded. In one swift movement they heaved the block out from the wall and placed it on the planks. They withdrew their hands, shaking them and exhaling forcefully. �Right,� Jack panted, looking at the hole where the block had been. �What have we got?�

Helena was already peering into the space, holding Jack�s headlamp as far in as she could reach. �It goes in about five meters, then there�s another wall, rock-cut by the look of it,� she said. �Then the tunnel seems to veer down and to the right.� She knelt, and passed the light to Jack. �If there�s a cistern in there, it could be underwater,� she said. �We�re in the deepest accessible place under the Holy Sepulchre, and it�s been raining a lot over the past few days. What now?�

Jack looked at Costas, who looked back at him, his face expressionless.

�Jack, we had a deal,� Costas said. �No more underground places.�

�You�re off the hook this time. Too narrow for you.�

�Are you okay with this?� Costas said, looking hard at Jack. �I mean, going in alone?�

Jack peered into the space. �I don�t think I�m walking away from this one.�

�No, you�re not.�

Jack opened the straps on the lamp and slipped it over his head, then picked up his khaki bag and pushed it as far ahead as he could into the hole.

�His lucky bag,� Costas said to Helena. �He never goes anywhere without it.�

Helena glanced nervously at the entrance to the chapel. �Make it quick,� she said. �We need to get out of here soon.� She looked at Jack, then touched his arm. �Domine iuimus,� she murmured. �Godspeed.�

�

Moments later Jack was inside the space where the stone block had been, inching his way forward on his stomach, his bag ahead of him. The entrance into the wall lay only a few meters back, but already he felt completely isolated, away from the chapel behind him, part of another space, the one he could see ahead in the beam from his headlamp. He remembered Herculaneum, the extraordinary feeling of stepping back in time as they entered the lost library. He felt it here too, part of the same continuum, as if he had edged back farther, close to the beginning of the story that had led Claudius to be in that villa. Helena�s last words kept running through his head, the two words of Latin, and he found himself murmuring them, a low chant that helped keep him focused. He pulled himself forward, trying to keep his elbows from scraping on the rock. There was now no light at all visible from the entrance behind his feet. He paused, sweeping his headlamp around the walls. To his right was masonry, clearly a continuation of the first-century wall with the graffito, at a right angle to it. To his left and above him was bedrock, scored and cut by quarry marks, so old that they seemed almost part of the natural geology, as if the ancient imprint of man had become just another process of erosion and transformation that had gone into shaping this place.

Ahead of him the tunnel ended abruptly where Helena had spotted the quarry wall, and he could see where it joined a space to the right. He pushed his bag into the corner and angled his body around, squeezing into the opening. It was tight, and the sharp edges of the rock ripped his shirt. He pulled himself through, wincing where the rock scraped him. He was in a larger space now, enough to crouch on his hands and knees. To his right, the masonry wall of the entrance tunnel continued at right angles, at least five courses of large stone blocks. His face was only inches from it, and he saw that it was the same stone as the wall outside with the ship graffito, only here the surface was unworn, fresh. He realized that the crawlspace had taken him along the sides of a rectilinear structure built up against the quarry face, and that he was now behind it, inside a cavity that the structure concealed. He turned to the left, toward the quarry face. The rest of the stone was natural, bedrock. Above him were large rectilinear cuttings, where blocks had been chiseled out. Below that he saw a narrow opening into a rock-cut chamber, its ceiling and the upper few feet of the sides visible. Inside he could see that it was filled with water, a black pool that glistened in his headlamp. He crawled over to the edge and peered in. It looked bottomless, like the cistern he had seen beyond the railing on the way into the Chapel of St. Vartan.

There was just enough room to maneuver, and he struggled onto his back, kicking off his boots and stripping off his clothes. He crawled back to the edge of the pool, his headlamp still on, and slipped into the water. It was icy cold, but felt instantly cleansing. For a moment he floated motionless on the surface, facedown, eyes shut. Then he looked. Without a mask, the image was blurry, and his eyes smarted with the cold. But the water was crystal clear, and he could see the beam from his headlamp dancing off rock, revealing walls and corners. He was floating above a deep cutting, at least four meters deep, rectilinear. He twisted sideways for more air, then put his face under again. As the headlamp beam swept down, he saw a wide opening in the side of the chamber, cut into the rock in the direction of the quarry face. The opening was arched above and flat below, forming a shelf wide enough for two to lie side by side. He ducked his head down and stared into the cutting, but was blinded by a dazzling sheen of light that reflected off the polished surface of the shelf. He remained there, staring into the speckly radiance, registering nothing, his mind frozen.

This was no water cistern.

He came up for air, then quickly looked down again. Out of nowhere he had an image of Elizabeth, then of Helena, and for a split second he thought he saw something, a trick of the light perhaps, a reflection of his own form floating over the edge of the shelf. He jerked his head upward, gasping for air, and his headlamp slipped off, spiraling down out of reach through the water. He blinked hard, then looked down again. The shelf was lost in darkness, and all he could see was the bottom of the pool where the light had fallen, a blurry image of shadows and light. He took another breath, then arched his back and dived, pulling himself down with strong strokes, relishing the freedom of being underwater again, where he belonged.

Then he saw it.

A stone cylinder resting on the bottom, white, just like ones he had seen before, in an ancient library under a volcano, a library once owned by a Roman emperor who had come here to the Holy Land to seek salvation in the words of one who dwelled beside the Sea of Galilee.

Then he realized.

Everett had found the Tomb.

He reached down.

�

JACK CRAWLED BACK TO THE ENTRANCE OF THE TUNNEL where he and Costas had removed the stone block, pushing his bag ahead of him. He dropped it on the floor of the chapel, then stretched his hands down and used them to walk himself out. He had still been dripping wet when he put his clothes back on, but he hardly noticed the cold and damp. All he could think about now was getting out and to safety. He looked around. The candles in the chapel were still lit, but there was nobody to be seen. �Costas?� he said, his voice echoing back down the tunnel. �Helena?� There was no reply. He squatted down, putting the strap of his bag over his neck. He shook out his hair and wiped his face. Maybe they had gone back to the first chamber, to the Chapel of St. Helena. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes to go. He prayed that Morgan had made it. He clutched his bag. Whatever happened now, the world would know.

He got up and walked cautiously toward the chapel entrance, then out into the passageway. He wiped his face again with the back of his hand and saw how grimy he was. Ahead of him was the grated door into the Chapel of St. Helena, wide open. He could see candlelight flickering over the central columns of the chapel, and in the gloom at the back the steps that led up to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He took a few steps forward, then stopped. Something was wrong. Then he heard a sound, out of place, metallic. The sound of a gun cocking. So this was it. He braced himself, his heart pounding. He had no choice now. There was only one way out. He walked slowly into the chapel.

�Dr. Howard. We meet again.�

The voice was instantly familiar, with the hint of an East European accent. It was the voice of a man from another underground place, two days before, a man Jack had only seen in shadow. He suddenly felt a cold grip in the pit of his stomach. Helena had been right. Jack said nothing, but made his way cautiously over the irregular stone floor, keeping his eyes averted from the candles to accustom them to the gloom. The figure stood in front of him, in the shadows again, beside the chapel altar and a statue of a woman holding a cross: St. Helena. Jack stood still, his feet apart, glancing from side to side, trying to discern others in the darkness.

�Show them to me,� Jack snarled.

There was a pause, then a sound of fingers clicking, and someone in a disheveled monk�s robe was pushed forward, tripping and falling heavily on one elbow. It was Yereva, her face bruised and swollen. �I didn�t say anything, Helena,� she blurted out, peering into the darkness behind her. �They followed me.� Then Jack saw the silencer of a pistol rammed into her neck, and she was yanked back into the shadows.

�You see, we knew where you were all along,� the man said to Jack, his face obscured. �We have eyes and ears everywhere. Many willing brethren.� Jack saw him click his fingers again. Another figure was pushed out from the shadows, a bearded man wearing an episcopal robe, a bishop, clutching an ornate Armenian cross to his chest. Jack saw the silencer thrust out of the darkness toward the man, who looked imploringly at Jack, twisting sideways. Jack looked back toward the man in the shadows, and snorted. �One of your willing brethren?� he said.

The bishop spoke rapidly in his own language, beseechingly. The man in the shadows turned on him, his voice low, vicious. He said something in Latin. The bishop stopped talking, stood rooted to the spot, then started shaking, weeping.

�You see?� the man said, turning to Jack. �Everyone is willing who serves our cause.�

�Show me them,� Jack snarled again.

The man spoke into the darkness to one side, in Italian. �Pronto,� he said. The fingers snapped again. There was a tussle, and a grunted exclamation. Costas was suddenly pushed into the candlelight, tripping and then standing upright, a strip of duct tape over his mouth and his hands tied behind his back. He was breathing stentoriously, sucking in the air through his blocked sinuses, his chest heaving. Jack could see a silencer behind his neck, and the dark outline of a figure behind him. A man with his arm in a cast. Jack�s mind was working overtime. Their assailant in Rome. Costas caught sight of Jack, his eyes wide, desperate.

�Take off the tape,� Jack snarled. �He can�t breathe.�

�He has nothing further to say,� the figure by the altar said. �And nor do you.�

Jack suddenly knew, with cold certainty. This was no longer a sanctuary. It was an execution chamber. He glanced at his watch. Only ten minutes to go. He needed to string it out. �I take it that little affray out in the streets was no coincidence,� he said. �The knifings by the Wailing Wall, the curfew, the power cut.�

�It served our purpose,� the man said. �And it has always been easy to infiltrate extremist groups, on both sides.�

�When we met before, you said you wanted an end to it.�

�I needed to convince you.�

�You told us the truth about the concilium, about Claudius and the last Gospel.�

�I needed to convince you. Enough for you to carry on your quest, to bring us to this place. You have served our purpose well. From Narcissus we knew that Pliny had taken what Claudius gave him to Rome, and that Claudius had visited the tomb in London. The rest was your work. The Getty Villa, the nunnery at Santa Paula, here. It was not difficult to follow. Your young American colleague trusts his friends too much. Not that it need concern him now.�

�Jeremy.� Jack felt another cold jab in the pit of his stomach.

�He is alive. For the time being. As are your colleagues in Naples. Safe in the folds of our extended family.� The man nodded toward the shadowy figure behind Costas. �When the time comes, it will be quick. A bullet in the head, another soul sent to hell. That has always been our way.�

�How did you know I wouldn�t tell others? About the concilium?�

�Because you needed to keep it secret until you had found what we all seek. I told you that others were searching for it, that you were in grave danger. And I was telling the truth. I saw through you, Dr. Howard. I took you into my confidence, and you thought you saw something sympathetic, something kindred. But you cannot escape the concilium. We will always prevail.�

�You mean you can�t escape it,� Jack said, playing for time. �You�re wrong. I saw through you. You weren�t just telling us the truth about the concilium, you were telling us what you really felt. You needed to confess, even though you were living a lie. You wanted to break free, but you didn�t have the strength.�

�Blasphemy,� the man spat, his voice quavering. �I could never break my covenant. That is my strength.�

�Do you really think St. Paul would have wanted all this?� Jack said.

�St. Paul was our founder,� the man replied.

�Really?� Jack said. �I thought it was Constantine the Great. You told us yourself. The concilium was re-created as his secret council of war.�

�He foresaw the battles we have had to fight, the sacrifices we have had to make. In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Our war is the war of all humanity. The Devil is omnipresent.�

�Only in your mind,� Jack said. �The concilium sought out dissent, and created fire. Self-fulfilling and self-consuming.�

�I think not, Dr. Howard,� the man said icily.

�You won�t get far with these thugs as henchmen.�

�There are plenty more where he came from.� The man gestured into the shadows behind him. �Our extended family, as I said.�

�Family? And how does your family treat their relatives? Elizabeth d�Agostino was a friend of mine.�

�Ah, Elizabeth. She was my pupil. I drew her in, but when the time came she lacked the strength to pledge the covenant. It is always honor that has ruled in her family, and we have always found that most convenient. Their honor was to serve us, and she betrayed them.�

�What have you done to her?�

�She knew her fate when she tried to warn you. The path will be cleansed. We will prevail.�

Jack felt anger well up inside him, but knew he had to keep his cool. �If I were you, I�d be careful who I trust,� he said, his voice level. �They�re mafia, drug-runners now, not servants of the Lord. One day they�ll come for you.�

�Blasphemy,� the man hissed again. �They have been our faithful servants always. Nothing has changed, and nothing will change.�

�Wrong again,� Jack said. �Others will seek you out, for what you have done. Once the world knows, the weight of your own history will destroy you.�

�Nobody will know. We never leave a trail.� The man gestured into the darkness beside him. �There are eleven water cisterns dug deep into the rock below this place. You are already inside your own tomb.� He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and held it up. �When we are finished here, I will go outside and call Naples. By the end of today, your colleagues will all be gone. None of this will ever have happened.�

Jack glanced at his watch. Two minutes. �The smell of death,� he said. �You can�t hide the smell of death.� He looked at Costas, who was suddenly staring at him, and seemed to have stopped breathing.

�Everything here smells of death,� the man sneered. �Have you ever been to the Mount of Olives? That sickly sweet smell is everywhere. And you won�t be the first. From Pelagius onward, others have brought their delusions here, and gone no further. We will not let blasphemy visit the tomb of Christ, our Lord.�

�You believe that? That he was buried here?� Jack said.

�This was the place of the resurrection. We know little of Jesus the man.�

�That�s your trouble.�

�Enough of this,� the man said, his voice suddenly shrill. �You will give us what you have found. It makes no difference whether your companions die now or over your dead body.� He clicked his fingers into the shadows, and Costas and Helena suddenly lurched out, the man with the silenced pistol behind them. �Give it to me now, and the end will be quick.�

Jack took a deep breath, reached into his bag and felt around, deliberately smearing what he was searching for with the wet grime from the tunnel that was still on his hands. He pulled the object out, walked forward and placed it on the altar, beside the statue of the woman with the cross. He stepped back. Costas and Helena both stared at it, transfixed, but said nothing. It was the bronze cylinder from the tomb in London, the cylinder Claudius had put there. Jack had carried it with him to California and then to Jerusalem, convinced that somewhere along the line it still had a role to play. The man had stepped back into the shadows as Jack approached, but now reached over and snatched the cylinder, holding it at arm�s length, shielding himself from it. �It is as it should be,� he whispered. �The will of the concilium is done.�

Jack glanced at his watch. Zero hour. He pointed at the cylinder. �You might want to check inside,� he said quietly.

�I will not gaze upon blasphemy,� the man said, his voice contorted. �It is a falsehood, created by that fool Claudius. A falsehood that has deluded all who have sought it. I will burn it and crush it and throw it into your tomb. You can cherish your treasure in oblivion.� He clicked his fingers, and Costas was pushed toward a dark hole in the floor beside him, the barrel of the pistol at the nape of his neck. Jack quickly stepped forward and held his hands up. �Wait,� he exclaimed. �There�s something else you should see.� He reached toward the flap of his bag. The pistol swung abruptly toward his head. He stopped his hand in midair. �It�s just a computer.� Nobody moved, and there was silence. Jack cautiously withdrew a palm-sized laptop from his bag. He walked slowly back to the altar and set it in front of the statue, flipping the lid open. The screen showed the IMU logo, with a headline and three paragraphs of text beneath. �I set up this page an hour ago, when we were on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre. We used Helena�s wireless connection to email it to our press-agency contact here. Morgan has taken a disc with the full text in person to the agency.� He tapped a key to enlarge the text. The banner headline was now splashed across the top of the screen:

THE LAST GOSPEL? LOST TOMB REVEALED

Jack turned to the man in the shadows. �You see?� he said coldly, his temper barely in control. �I too have friends. Willing brethren, as you say. As we speak, this story is being syndicated around the world. I arranged for the press release at 1900 hours, three minutes ago. The whole story. My name, your name. This place. Two thousand years of terrorism and murder. Everything you so helpfully told us about the concilium.�

The man said nothing, and then there was a sneering laugh. �You don�t know my name.�

�Wrong again,� Jack replied. �That�s one thing Elizabeth did manage to say to me, Cardinal Ritter.�

The man twisted in rage and tripped backward, scrabbling for the wall. At that moment there was a clatter and a blinding light from the stairway at the entrance to the chapel. Everything suddenly happened at once. Costas ducked forward, then swung his left shoulder back at the figure behind him, catching him in the stomach and sending him sprawling. There were shouts in Hebrew, and two uniformed figures advanced out of the light with M4 carbines trained ahead. One of them pulled the gag out of Costas� mouth and slashed his wrist tie. Costas sneezed violently, then lurched over to Jack, breathing hard. �That came in handy,� he panted, nodding at the bronze cylinder. Helena stumbled over to help Costas. Jack looked back to the light, and could see Ben standing guard at the entrance to the room, an Israeli police inspector and Morgan alongside. Jack reached out and held Costas by the shoulders. �Thank Christ for that,� he said, suddenly exhausted. He gave Costas a tired smile, then gestured at the bronze cylinder. �And now you know. I haven�t become a treasure hunter after all. I only loot artifacts if there�s something bigger at stake.�

�Don�t try to tell me you planned this back then,� Costas panted.

�Just a contingency. But sending Morgan to orchestrate the press release and find Ben was a big gamble.�

�A serious bit of time management.�

Jack jerked his head toward the dark opening of the cistern in the floor. �I thought something like this might happen.�

�So Elizabeth really told you his name?�

Jack shook his head, and paused. �We really only spoke for a few moments outside the villa in Herculaneum. Maybe she was about to tell me, or thought she�d be able to tell me later. Anyway, Jeremy and I worked through all the possibilities. Our man�s mention of the Viking f�lag was the giveaway, when he gave us his spiel under St. Peter�s. We�ve been head-to-head with this guy before. That narrowed it down.�

�I�m really sorry about Elizabeth, Jack.�

�We don�t know anything yet for sure. I�m going to get Ben and the police to give this guy a going-over before we leave the chapel, though I doubt whether he�ll spill anything.�

�His henchman might.�

Jack looked at the unconscious figure sprawled on the floor beside them, a policeman standing above him. �I hope he wasn�t really related to her.�

Helena stood up and put her arms around Jack. He could feel her shaking, but she was putting on a brave face. �That was nicely choreographed. Not the Jack Howard I remember. Planning ahead was never your strong point. You always followed your nose.�

�That reminds me,� Costas said, sneezing again. �Thanks for the bit about the smell of death. A nice little touch. I nearly barfed into that gag.�

�I thought you needed a little incentive.�

�Never mention that stuff again, Jack. Never.�

�Never,� Jack said solemnly.

Cardinal Ritter had been rooted to the spot beside the altar, a policeman guarding him. Suddenly there was a commotion as the gunman on the floor regained consciousness and grabbed the leg of the policeman above him, before being kicked back. The other policeman swung around instinctively, taking his eye off his charge for a second. In that moment of inattention the cardinal lunged forward and grabbed the bronze cylinder, then stumbled with it toward the entrance to the Chapel of St. Vartan. �I have it now,� he said. �I will destroy it. You will never know what it contains.�

�Wrong again.� Jack reached into his bag and carefully pulled out another cylinder, a marble one, the cylinder he had taken from the underwater chamber only twenty minutes before, from the place where Everett had hidden it in 1918. �What you�ve got there is a bronze cylinder from a tomb in London. A very nice artifact, remarkable really. Probably late Iron Age. And it�s empty, by the way.�

The cardinal snarled and tore the lid off the cylinder, peering inside. He swayed, then seemed frozen to the spot. Jack passed the marble cylinder to Costas, caught his eye, then launched himself forward. In an instant Jack had the priest in a headlock, forcing his right arm behind his back and pushing it up until the man bellowed in pain. Jack was tempted to squeeze the headlock fractionally tighter, to jerk upward, to hear the crack. But it was too easy, too quick, and there was an off chance the police interrogation would reveal something useful. He relented slightly, keeping the man�s arm pinned with one hand, and took the bronze cylinder off him, placing it back beside the altar. Then he pushed the cardinal�s arm up again, until he whimpered in pain. Jack held him like a vice, and pressed himself close behind Ritter�s left ear. He could smell the sweat, the fear.

�You see?� Jack whispered, steering the cardinal�s head in the direction of the press release on the laptop screen, and then pushing his face close to the precious marble cylinder in Costas� hands. �You of all people should know, Eminence. A preacher of the Holy Gospels. The power of the written word.�

�

THE NEXT MORNING THEY CRAMMED INTO A FOUR-WHEEL-DRIVE Toyota, and Helena drove them up the great rift of the Jordan Valley from Jerusalem toward the Sea of Galilee. Costas and Jack were sitting beside Helena, and Morgan was in the back beside Maria and Jeremy, who had joined them straight from Tel Aviv airport. Jack had called them immediately after coming out of the Holy Sepulchre the day before. He knew that much of his anxiety about their safety could now he dispelled, but it was still a huge relief to have them alongside. Hiebermeyer was another matter entirely. The world�s press corps seemed to have converged on him in Naples, and he had refused to budge. Jack knew he would be relishing every moment, but it was also a way of deflecting press attention from their activities in Israel. They still had one final act to play out, a final folding back of history to the event that had led them on one of the most extraordinary quests of Jack�s career.

�Any word?� Costas said to Jack. His voice shook as Helena slammed the vehicle over a patch of potholes.

�Nothing yet.� Jack had taken Jeremy aside the instant he arrived at their hotel in Jerusalem that morning. The news was not good. Elizabeth had vanished the evening after Jack had spoken to her, walked away from the site at Herculaneum and never returned. Jeremy�s inquiries had been met with only shrugs and silence. �But maybe that�s Naples for you,� Jack said. �And we hadn�t spoken for fifteen years, since she left me. So I can hardly expect an instant pickup.�

�I�ll pray for her, Jack,� Helena said, fighting the wheel. �But she may have just walked away. Sounds like she�s done it before.�

�I had a strange vision in the tomb below the Holy Sepulchre, you know,� Jack said. �I seemed to see her through the water, but it was a kind of odd composite, as if there were someone actually lying on the stone slab.�

�An Agamemnon moment?� Costas said.

�She�d always been on my mind, you know, over all those years,� Jack said. �It was the way it ended between us. It never really did end, she just left. It all came welling up when I was holding Ritter down in the chapel yesterday. It was what he said, about bringing Elizabeth back into the fold. In that instant everything seemed to be his fault. I nearly broke his neck, you know. I could do it now.�

�At least he�s out of the way.�

�For the time being. But he�ll be back. He and his henchman are only being held under the rules of the curfew, for carrying an open weapon and for assaulting a police officer. Kidnap would have been more serious, but the Patriarch refused to press charges. That�s why Ben�s interrogation won�t get anywhere. Ritter knows he�ll be on a plane back to Rome within days. And all the press exposure, the naming of names, what I wrote in that article, that�ll dissipate like leaves in the wind. Organizations like his have weathered this kind of thing before. He�ll be quietly absorbed back.�

�With public awareness of the concilium, the law might be able to exert a stronger arm,� Maria said.

�Whose law, exactly?� Jeremy asked.

�And it depends how much people believe all this,� Costas said. �I mean, you said it, Jack, big expos�s about Church conspiracies quickly become yesterday�s news, unless you can actually pin murder and corruption on someone. And we�re hardly the first to claim we�ve found some kind of lost Gospel.�

�We haven�t seen it yet,� Maria said, nudging Jack.

�Remember what Jack told Ritter,� Helena said. �The power of the written word. If we�ve truly got it, then people will believe.�

�Even if it rocks the foundations of the Church?� Maria asked.

�Freedom for people to choose their own spiritual path, without fear, guilt, persecution, the concilium,� Helena said. �That�s why I�m here. If we�ve found something that will help people make that choice, then we�ll have done some good.�

�I�ll second that,� Morgan said from the back.

�We still have to find out what�s in that cylinder,� Costas said insistently. �If Jack will let us.�

�Have patience,� Jack said.

�We�re heading in this direction because of Pliny�s note in the Natural History, right? The scroll we found in Herculaneum? That Claudius and his friend Herod visited Jesus on the Sea of Galilee?�

�Right.�

�No holes in the ground?�

�Well, I promised Massimo in Rome that you�d be back. There�s a huge job opening up the entrance to the Vestal�s chamber. Absolutely tons of sludge to clear out.�

�Jack.�

�Okay, no holes in the ground. This time.�

They passed signposts with names redolent of the rich history of the Holy Land: Jericho, Nablus, Nazareth. At the sign for the Sea of Galilee they veered left, past the resorts and thermal springs of modern Tiberias, then to the edge of the Sea of Galilee. They carried on a few miles farther, beneath the imposing flanks of Mount Arbel, until they came to the entrance to Kibbutz Ginosar. The land around them was scorched, dessicated, and the shoreline of the lake had receded some distance over the mudflats to the east. Helena pulled into the kibbutz and they all got out, tired and hungry after the long journey. Jack was wearing khaki shorts with a gray T-shirt and desert boots, and he had his trusty khaki bag slung over his shoulder. Costas had on his usual garish selection of Hawaiian gear and the designer sunglasses Jeremy had given him, now seemingly a permanent fixture. Jeremy, Maria and Morgan were all dressed like Jack. The only one who seemed oblivious to the heat was Helena, who had on an Ethiopian white cassock identical to the one she had been wearing when they first met her on the roof of the Holy Sepulchre yesterday.

After a quick lunch in the kibbutz canteen, they trooped into the Yigal Allon Museum and stood around its centerpiece exhibit, silently absorbing one of the most remarkable finds ever made in the Holy Land. It was an ancient boat, its timbers blackened with age but beautifully preserved, a little over eight meters long and two meters wide. �It�s a unique find, the only Sea of Galilee boat to survive from antiquity,� Jack said, pointing out the features. �It probably had a mast with a single brailed sail, with space for two oarsmen on either side and an oar that served as a quarter-rudder. It had a recurving stern and a pointed bow, with a cutwater. The wood�s mainly oak for the frames and cedar for the strakes, cedar of Lebanon.�

Costas tipped up his sunglasses and leaned over the metal cradle that held the timbers. �Polyethylene glycol?�

Jack nodded. �It didn�t take long to impregnate the timbers with PEG, as the boat was found in freshwater and there was no salt to leach out. It was the summer of 1986, a drought year like this one, and the level of the Sea of Galilee had dropped. Two local guys searching for ancient coins found these timbers sticking out of the mud, the prow facing the lake. The Israeli Ministry of Tourism reveled in the possible Jesus connection, seeing a new magnet for tourism at a time when terrorism was putting people off visiting Israel. But some ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrated against the excavation, seeing it as a green light for Christian missionary activity in the area. There were even people praying for rain so the site would be inundated and the excavation thwarted.�

�That sounds familiar,� Costas murmured.

�That�s one reason I wanted you to see this, before we go out to our final destination,� Jack said. �All of that nonsense is forgotten now. This boat�s one of the star archaeological attractions of Israel�for Christians, for Jews, for all the people of Galilee, whatever their faith. It�s their shared heritage.�

Costas peered closely at the timbers. �You can see iron nails, but you can also see how it�s been put together in the ancient shell-first fashion, the planks edge-joined with mortice and tenon.�

�Maurice showed me pictures of a boat about this size from the foreshore at Herculaneum,� Maria murmured. �It was found when they discovered all those skeletons huddled in the chambers below the seawall. It was immaculately built, maybe a pleasure craft for one of the rich villa owners.�

�Maybe old Claudius snuck out on it, for a bit of fishing,� Costas said.

�There�s a lot of recycled timber in the Galilee boat, scraps cleverly reused,� Jack said. �It may not have the finesse of the Herculaneum boat, but it shows a lot of skill. Whoever built and maintained it had an intimate feel for the Galilee area, for its resources and how to use them.�

�Any radiocarbon dates?� Costas asked.

�Yes�40 BC, plus or minus 80 years.�

Costas whistled. �Wide latitude, but pretty good odds. Jesus died around AD 30, right? Close to the end of that spectrum. But boats like this could have lasted for generations on the lake, repaired and refitted. Even a boat made at the beginning of that time frame could still have been in use during his lifetime.�

�The only artifacts found associated with it were a simple cooking pot and an oil lamp, both probably from the same period.�

�So what about Claudius and Herod Agrippa?� Costas said. �What date are we looking at for their visit?�

�I believe they came here in AD 23,� Jack said quietly. �Jesus of Nazareth would have been in his mid-twenties, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Claudius was thirty-two or thirty-three and Herod Agrippa was the same age, both born in 10 BC. A few years later Jesus went into the wilderness and renounced his worldly occupation, and the rest is history. Claudius must have returned to Rome soon after his visit here, and never came again. We know what happened to him. And Herod Agrippa went on to become King of the Jews.�

�How do you get the date?�

�Something I remembered in Jerusalem. Something that had been niggling me ever since we first saw those words in the lab on board Seaquest II, on Pliny�s page from the Natural History. There�s no reference anywhere else to Claudius traveling to the east. I guess it must have happened when he was living in obscurity as a scholar in Rome, before he was dragged to the Imperial throne in AD 41. It was obviously before Jesus was crucified, about AD 30, in the reign of Tiberius. It was also probably before Jesus was surrounded with disciples, who surely would have remembered a visit from Rome, left some record of it in the Gospels.�

Helena cleared her throat. �We have our tradition, in Ethiopia. That an emperor sought the Messiah.�

�If Herod Agrippa was King of Judaea, he might have visited Galilee then,� Costas said.

Jack shook his head. �That was much later. It was Claudius who gave him Judaea in AD 41, as a reward for loyalty. Until then Herod Agrippa had lived mainly in Rome. No, I�m thinking of another time, years earlier. Herod Agrippa was grandson of Herod the Great, King of Judaea, but was brought up in Rome in the Imperial Palace, adopted by Claudius� mother, Antonia. He and Claudius became the most unlikely of friends, the hard-living playboy and the crippled scholar. One of Herod Agrippa�s drinking buddies was the emperor Tiberius� son Drusus, who used to get drunk and pick fights with the Praetorian Guard. There was some murky incident one night, and Drusus died. Herod Agrippa was immediately packed off to Judaea. That�s what I remembered. It happened in AD 23.�

�Bingo,� Costas said.

�It gets better. Herod Agrippa�s uncle, Herod Antipas, was governor of Galilee at the time. He got his wayward nephew a token job as a market overseer, an agoranomos. Guess where? In Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee a few miles south of here. We passed the site on the way.�

Costas whistled. �So Herod Agrippa really could have crossed paths with Jesus.�

�Herod Agrippa would probably have got to know everyone worth knowing in Tiberias pretty quickly,� Jack replied. �He was a gregarious man, boisterous and charismatic, and would have spoken the local Aramaic as well as Latin and Greek. He would have felt a real affinity with the people here�his own people, who he would one day rule. Perhaps he heard tavern talk of some local healer, someone who really did seem a step above the rest. Perhaps he sent word to Rome, to his crippled friend Claudius, who might still have harbored a youthful hope that a cure could be found, maybe somewhere in the east.�

�So we�ve got Herod Agrippa and Claudius and Jesus of Nazareth here in Galilee at the same time, in AD 23,� Costas said slowly. �A meeting recorded nowhere else, and even then only in the margin of an ancient scroll we found at the end of a lost tunnel, three days ago, in Herculaneum.�

�Correct.�

�Jesus was a carpenter,� Costas said thoughtfully, stroking the edge of the timber in front of him. �That could mean boatbuilder, right?�

Jack nodded. �In ancient Greek, as well as in the Semitic languages of the time, Aramaic, old Phoenician, the word we translate as carpenter could have a whole range of meanings: architect, worker in wood, even builder in stone or metal. After Herod Antipas had founded Tiberius in AD 20 there would have been a palace to build, and the city walls. It would have been a boom time for local builders. But you�re right. The staple woodworking trade around here would have been boat-building. Later in the first century AD, the historian Josephus wrote about the Sea of Galilee and said there were 230 boats on the lake, and that probably didn�t include the smaller ones. Boats here would have lasted longer than on the Mediterranean, with no saltwater woodworms. But even so, there would have been all the usual repair work as well as construction of new vessels. The 20s AD could have been a boom time for this as well, with a lot of scrap wood coming off the building sites at Tiberias. The hull of this boat has some odd-shaped timbers.�

Costas nodded, and put his hand on the edge of the timber in front of him, then looked at Jack. �A lifetime ago�I think it was last Tuesday�we were diving on the shipwreck of St. Paul, off Sicily. You told me then that the archaeology of early Christianity is incredibly elusive, that hardly anything is known with certainty.� He paused. �Now tell me this: Am I touching a boat made by Jesus?�

Jack put his hands on the boat as well, scanned the ancient timbers and then looked over at Costas. �In the New Testament, one problem is working out how Jesus regarded himself, whether or not he saw himself as the Christos, the Messiah. When he�s asked, when people wonder who he is, he sometimes replies with a particular turn of phrase. It�s in translation, of course, but I think this is the gist of it: He says, �It is as you say.��

�What are you saying?�

�It is as you say.�

Costas was silent for a moment, looking at Jack imploringly, then sighed and took his hand off the boat. �Archaeologists,� he grumbled. �Can�t get a straight answer out of any of them.�

Jack gave a tired smile, then gently patted his khaki bag. �Come on. There�s one final place we need to go.�

�

Half an hour later they stood on the edge of the mudflats on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. It was now early evening, and the shadows had began to steal up behind them and advance across the flats. In the distance the water still sparkled, and Jack remembered the strange pixilation he had sensed in the sky off Sicily the week before, as if his eyes were being drawn to the parts rather than the whole, the view too blinding to comprehend. Now, clutching his bag, he felt the same thrill of anticipation he had felt then, the knowledge that he was on the cusp of another extraordinary revelation, a promise that had brought them to the place where the treasure in Jack�s hands had begun its journey almost two thousand years before. He knew with utter conviction that Claudius had stood at this spot, that he too had gazed at the distant shoreline of the Golan Heights, felt the allure of the east. He wondered whether Claudius had sensed the disquiet too, the lurking danger of this age-old fault-line between east and west, known the calm of the sea was an illusion, like the eye of a storm.

As Jack watched, the sun set lower behind them and the scene became coherent in his mind again, more like a painting by Turner than by Seurat, the sparkles smudging together into pastel hues of blue and orange. He took a deep breath, motioned to the others, and they began to pick their way onto the mudflats, through a tangle of twigs that had been blown over the shoreline like tumbleweed.

�Ziziphus spina-cristi, if I�m not mistaken,� Jeremy said. �Christ-thorn. It has an excellent fruit. You should try it sometime.�

�You sound just like Pliny the Elder,� Maria said.

They walked on, Jack in the lead, the rest forming a ragged line over the flats. Jeremy splashed through the puddles to get closer to Jack, and out of earshot of the others. �About Elizabeth, Jack. There�s one thing I didn�t mention.�

Jack kept walking, but glanced at Jeremy. �Go on.�

�Did you know she had a daughter?�

�A daughter?�

�She�s at school in New York, and lives with two of Elizabeth�s old friends, both university professors. Elizabeth didn�t want her brought up in Naples, with her own family. She kept her daughter secret from almost everyone. One of the other superintendency people told me, a man who seems to have been close to Elizabeth. He was very emotional.�

�Does she know? The daughter, I mean?�

�Elizabeth�s only been missing for two days, and she kept her daughter completely out of the loop about her life in Naples. But they spoke on the phone every few days. She�ll soon know something�s wrong.�

�Can you put me in touch with the man you talked to?� Jack said. �Can I get the daughter�s contact details?�

�I�m there already, Jack,� Jeremy said quietly. He passed over a slip of paper. �He�ll do it, but he said you should be the one.�

�Why would he suggest me?�

�He and Elizabeth had talked about you.�

They walked on in silence. Jack felt as if he were walking on a treadmill, the ground below his feet moving but the world around him stock-still, as if everything around, the play he was in, were suddenly frozen in time, and only the path he could see in front of him had any significance. He began to speak, but caught his breath. When the words came out they sounded as if they came from another person.

�How old is she?�

�She�s fifteen, Jack.�

Jack swallowed hard. �Thanks for telling me,� he said quietly. Jeremy nodded, then stopped to join the others who were coming behind. Jack continued walking, but his mind was fragmented, seeing images of Elizabeth over and over again, willing an anger that would not come, a rage against all the forces that had made this happen, against the man he had nearly killed the day before and all that he stood for. But instead all he could think about was the last fifteen years, and what he had done.

What he had missed.

After ten minutes skirting the shallow mud-pools, they came to a raised patch about a hundred yards in front of the shoreline. It was a fishermen�s hard, a temporary landing area used during the drought, and was suffused with the odor of fish and old nets. In the center, a large rock lay deeply buried where it had been used as a mooring stone, a frayed old rope emerging from the mud in front and trailing off toward the shore. Jack pulled away some decayed netting and sat down, and the others did the same on two old railway sleepers which had clearly been dragged out for this purpose. Jack laid his bag on his lap, and they all looked out to sea, caught by the utter tranquillity of the scene. They watched as a man and a woman walked languidly along the shoreline, the sheen of water on the mud making it look as if they were walking on water, like a mirage. Far away they could make out the fishing boats on the lake, the lights on the masts dotting the scene like a carpet of candles across the sea.

�This shoreline was where Jesus spent some of his formative years,� Helena said quietly. �In the Gospels, his sayings abound with metaphors of fishing and the sea. When he spoke of the red evening sky presaging a fine day, he was not being a prophet, but being a sailor and a fisherman, someone who knew that dust in the air meant a dry day to follow.�

�And people have come here to the Sea of Galilee seeking him ever since,� Jeremy murmured. �Early Christians came after the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, the ones who created the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then pilgrims of the medieval world, from the British Isles, from the Holy Roman Empire, from Byzantium. Harald Hardrada was here, leading the Viking mercenaries of the Byzantine emperor�s bodyguard, bathing in the river Jordan. Then the Crusaders, riding on a tide of blood, thinking they had found the Kingdom of Heaven, only to see it collapse before their eyes as the Arab armies rolled in from the east.�

�I bet this place hasn�t changed much, though,� Costas said, skipping a pebble along a shallow pool, then eyeing Jack. �Are you going to show us what you�ve got?� Jack nodded absently, then looked back to where he had been staring, at the man and the woman walking off in the distance by the shoreline.

�Did you know Mark Twain was here?� Jeremy asked.

�Come again?� Costas said, turning to him.

�Mark Twain, the writer. In 1867, one of the first American tourists in the Holy Land.�

�I memorized his words,� Helena said. �I read them last time I was here, and they made a real impression on me:

�Night is the time to see Galilee�when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight�. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings.�

�There were others like him,� Jack said, clearing his throat and taking a deep breath. He was still reeling from Jeremy�s news, unable to suppress the bleakness he felt about Elizabeth�s disappearance, a feeling of culpability he knew was irrational. What had happened to her had been set in motion the day she was born. He had seen it in her eyes when they were together all those years ago, only he had seen it then as something else. And yet, as he had watched the shoreline, the boats on the horizon, he had suddenly felt the weight lifted from him, a sense of peace he had never known before. Part of him seemed to accept Jeremy�s news as if he had known it all along. He wiped his hand over his eyes, then looked at Costas, who had been watching him closely. He clutched the slip of paper from Jeremy tight in his hand. In the face of despair, there was huge yearning, and an overwhelming responsibility. And he still had to hope that Elizabeth was alive after all, that they had stopped Ritter and his henchmen in time.

�There were others who believed the stories in the Bible were not just allegory and fable,� Jack said. �It was the time when archaeology came of age, when Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans proved the reality of the Trojan Wars and the Greek Bronze Age. Ten years after Mark Twain, Lieutenant Horatio Kitchener, Royal Engineer, cut his teeth in Galilee with the Survey of Palestine, before becoming Britain�s greatest war leader,� Jack said. �And then T. E. Lawrence came here studying Crusader castles, before returning as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the Arab legion over those hills, toward Damascus. Great movements of history sweep past this place, and the biggest fracture line between the eastern and western worlds runs through here, along the Jordan Valley. But Galilee has so often been an eddy pool of history, a place where the individual can stand out.�

�People who came here with the future ahead of them, on the cusp of greatness,� Maria murmured.

Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small snap-lid box. He opened it and took out two coins. He held them up, one in each hand, letting the fading sunlight catch the portraits, the features accentuated by shadow as he slowly moved them from side to side.

�It looks to me as if you�ve been borrowing again, Jack,� Costas said quietly, still peering intently at his friend. �It�s a slippery slope to becoming a treasure hunter, you know. I always wondered when you�d cross the line.�

Jack flashed him a smile but kept silent, staring at the faces on the coins. He had needed to view them one last time, to reach out and touch them before opening up his bag and revealing what they had all come here to see. The coin on the left was a tetradrachm of Herod Agrippa, the one that Helena and Yereva had found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The portrait was worn, but it showed a thickset, bullish face, the image of a fighter more than a thinker, but with large, sensitive eyes. It was idealized in the eastern tradition, a Hercules or an Alexander more than Herod Agrippa. He wore a laurel diadem, normally only seen on coins of Roman emperors. The man on the other coin was wearing a diadem too, but this time rightly so. It was the sestertius of Claudius they had found in Herculaneum. Jack saw Claudius as he had imagined him sitting at his table in the villa, working with Narcissus and Pliny on his history of Britain, then standing before the tomb under London. He saw the full head of hair, the high forehead, the eyes set back and thoughtful, the pursed mouth. Not Claudius the cripple, not Claudius the fool, but Claudius the emperor at the height of his powers, an emperor who built aqueducts and harbors and brought the Roman world back from the brink of catastrophe, paving the way for the Christian west in centuries to come. Both coins showed men who had reached the pinnacle of their lives, a future they could scarcely have foreseen that day in AD 23 when they came here together as young men, beside the Sea of Galilee. Herod Agrippa, Prince of the East. Claudius the God.

�I wonder if they sensed the darkness ahead,� Helena murmured.

�What do you mean?� Costas said.

Jack put away the coins, slipped the box back into his pocket, and then took out a swaddled package from his bag. The others watched him intently. �Herod Agrippa came from one of the most volatile dynasties of the east, and had grown up in Rome,� he said. �He knew all about the fickle nature of power. Claudius was intimate with that too, and was also a historian. Even as early as AD 23 he would have seen the seeds of decay in the reign of Tiberius. And the one they met here, the fisherman from Nazareth, had lived his life in Galilee away from the momentous events of history, but he may have known what lay ahead.

�When Claudius made his final visit to Britain to hide his treasure, he was doing it to last beyond Rome. And when Everett came to Jerusalem in 1917, he was doing the same. His world was one of terrible darkness, closer to apocalypse than Claudius could ever have imagined. And both men knew how the fickle winds of history might snatch away their prize.�

Jack removed the bubble-wrap from the object in his hands and revealed a small marble cylinder. There was a murmur of excitement from the others, and both Helena and Morgan held their hands together as if in prayer. Jack held the cylinder out for Helena. �Will you break the seal?�

Helena made the sign of the cross and took the cylinder from Jack�s hands. Slowly, carefully, she twisted the lid. She strained, then it came away, breaking the blackened resinous material that had sealed the join. She handed it back to Jack, who finished removing the lid. The others crowded around, Maria and Jeremy kneeling in front and Costas and Morgan peering over Jack�s shoulder. There was another gasp as they saw what was inside. It was a scroll, brown with age but apparently intact, still wound round a wooden rod.

�The cylinder was watertight,� Jack breathed. �Thank God for that. Everett must have resealed it after he�d soon what was inside.� He reached in and held the edge of the scroll between two fingers, gently feeling it. �It�s still supple. There�s some kind of preservative on it, a waxy material.�

�Clever old Claudius,� Maria murmured.

�Clever old Pliny, you mean,� Jeremy said. �I bet that�s who Claudius learned it from.�

They were silent, and all Jack could hear was a distant knocking sound, and a faint whisper of breeze from the west. He held his breath, drawing out the scroll and putting the cylinder on his lap. There was no writing to be seen, just the brown surface of the papyrus. Jack held the scroll up so it was caught in the remaining sunlight than shone over the hills behind them. Carefully, without a word, he unrolled a few centimeters of the scroll, peering closely at the surface as it was revealed.

�Well, I�ll be damned,� he murmured.

�Got something?� Costas said.

�Look at the cross-layering, where the strips of papyrus have been laid. You can see it where the light shines through. This is first-grade paper, exactly the same as the papyrus sheet we found on Claudius� desk in Herculaneum. And there it is.� His voice was hushed. �I can see it.�

�What?�

�Writing. There. Look.� Jack slowly unraveled the papyrus. First one line was revealed, then another. He unraveled the entire scroll, and they could see about twenty lines. Jack�s heart was racing. The ink was black, almost jet-black, sealed in by the preservative wax. The writing was continuous, without word breaks or punctuation, in the ancient fashion. �It�s Greek,� he whispered. �It�s written in Greek.�

�There�s a cross beside the first word,� Jeremy exclaimed. �You see that in medieval religious manuscripts too.�

�There�s some scrubbed-out writing underneath it, older writing,� Costas said, squinting at the paper from behind Jack. �Just the first few lines. You can barely make it out, but it looks like a different hand, a different script.�

�Probably some older writing by Claudius,� Jack murmured. �If so, it�d be in Latin. Maybe something he�d started then erased, notes he�d made on the journey out to Judaea. That�d be fascinating. We don�t have anything yet in Claudius� own handwriting.�

�Mass spectrometry,� Costas said. �That�d sort it out. Hard science.�

Jack was not listening. He had read the first lines of the visible text, the lines that overlaid the scrubbed-out words. He felt light-headed, and the scroll seemed to waver in his hands, whether from his own extraordinary emotion or from a waft of breeze he could not tell. He let his hands slowly drop, and held the scroll open over his knees. He turned to Helena. �Kyriakon,� he said. �Am I correct in using the literal translation, �House of the Lord�?�

Helena nodded. �It could mean congregation as a whole, church in the broad sense.�

�And naos? The Greek word for �temple�?�

�Probably used to mean church as a physical entity, as a structure.�

�Are you ready for this?�

�If these are his words, Jack, then I have nothing to fear.�

�No, you do not.� Jack paused, and for an extraordinary moment he felt as if he were looking down from a great height, not at their gathering on the mudflat but at a pinprick of light on a vast sea, on two shadowy forms hunched across from each other in a little boat, barely discernible in the darkness. He closed his eyes, then looked at the scroll and began to translate.

��Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth, these are his words��

�

EPILOGUE

Summer, AD 23

THE EAGER YOUNG MAN IN THE WHITE TUNIC STOPPED and sniffed the breeze. He had never been to the east before, and the sights and smells of the last few days had been strange, startling. But now the breeze that wafted over the hills from the west came from the Mediterranean Sea, bringing with it the familiar smell of salt and herbs and faint decay, a smell which had been purged the day before by a sharp wind from the heights of Gaulantis on the opposite shore. He looked again, shielding his eyes against the glare. The mudflats extended far out to the edge of the lake, a wide shimmering foreshore where the water had evaporated in the long dry summer. The distant surface of the lake was glassy smooth, like a mirror. On the edge he spied a wavering shape, a fishing boat perhaps, with movement around it. He listened and heard the far-off screech of a gull, then a tinkering sound, a distant knocking like rainwater dripping off a roof. It was becoming hot, suddenly too hot to keep up the pace he had set for himself. He turned toward the mountain they called Arbel, raised his face and yearned for that breeze again, for the cool air from the west to waft over and envelop him.

�Claudius!� It was a girl�s voice. �Slow down! You need water.�

He turned awkwardly, dragging his bad leg behind him, and waited for his companions to catch up. It was only ten days since they had landed at Caesarea on the coast, and five days since they had set off from Jerusalem, up the valley of the river Jordan to the inland sea they called Gennesareth, in the land of Galilee. They had spent the night in the new town of Tiberias, built by Herod�s uncle Antipas and named after Claudius� own uncle Tiberius, emperor in Rome now for almost ten years. Claudius had been astonished to find images of Tiberius everywhere in Judaea, in temples and statues and on coins, as if the living emperor were already worshipped as a god. It seemed to Claudius that he could never escape them, his benighted family, but that morning as they had walked away from the bustle of construction in the town he had felt an extraordinary contentment, a sense of liberation in the simplicity of the coastal flats and the shimmering shore of the lake with the hills of Gaulantis beyond.

Afterward, after this day, they planned to go over those hills to Antioch, to give offerings at the place where his beloved brother Germanicus had been poisoned four years before. Claudius still felt the pain, the stab of anguish in the pit of his stomach. He tried to push it away, and turned to watch as those dearest to him came up the dusty road from the south. His beloved Calpurnia, with her flaming red hair and freckled skin, not yet out of her teens but as sensuous a woman as he had ever beheld. She was wearing the red of her profession, the oldest one, but now only out of habit, not necessity. And beside her, Cypros, wife of Herod, veiled and bejeweled as befitted a princess of Arabia, gliding along like a goddess beside her wild-haired companion. And striding behind them was Herod himself, black-bearded, his long hair braided like an ancient king of Assyria, his cloak hemmed with real Tyrian purple, his big, booming voice regaling them with songs and bawdy jokes all the way. Herod always seemed larger than life, always the center of attention, yet he was Claudius� oldest and dearest companion, the only one among all the boys in the palace who had befriended him, who had seen past the stutter and the awkwardness and the withered limb.

Claudius took the skin of water offered to him by Calpurnia and drained it. Herod pointed toward the distant speckle of movement on the shoreline, and they left the road and began to pick their way across the mudflats. Claudius had seen the tower of Migdal, the next town along the coast, in a hollow in the hills, but now the tower was lost in the haze that rose up and obscured the shoreline like a shimmering veil. Then the sun broke through and reflected off a myriad shallow pools across the flats. To Claudius the view seemed to fragment, like a shattering pane of glass, the sunlight reflecting blindingly off each pool, and then regain its whole again in the haze. A hint of a rainbow hung in the air, a suspension of color that never quite materialized, that stayed just beyond reality. Soon all he could see was the movement around the boat ahead of them, and even that seemed to waver and recede as they walked farther on. Claudius wondered if it was real after all, or a mere trick of the eye, like one of the phantasms that Herod said he had seen in the desert, a reflection of some distant, unattainable reality.

Herod strode up and pushed him playfully, his voice booming, his breath smelling of last night�s wine. �Do you remember the Aramaic I taught you in Rome when we were boys?�

�My dear Herod, how could I forget? And these past years while you�ve been playing the rogue, I�ve been teaching myself Phoenician. I�m planning a history of Carthage, you know. You just can�t get by without reading the original sources. I don�t trust anything a Roman historian has to say about barbarians.�

�We�re not barbarians, Claudius. It�s the other way round.� Herod pushed Claudius again, almost toppling him off balance but catching him just in time, with his usual tenderness. �Anyway, I don�t trust Romans, period. With one noble exception, of course.� He shouldered Claudius again, then embraced him to stop him from falling, and they both laughed.

�Does he speak Greek, this man?� Claudius asked.

�Yes.�

�Then let it be Greek, not Aramaic. My dear Calpurnia is a real barbarian, you know. Her grandparents were brought as slaves by my great-uncle Julius from Britannia. A fascinating place. Calpurnia tells me such amazing things. One d-day I will go there. I believe the Phoenicians reached those shores, but I do not believe they left the Britons any knowledge of their language.�

�Very well, then, my dear Claudius. For your lovely Calpurnia. Greek it is.�

They came closer to the shoreline. Claudius was walking ahead again, and could now see that the boat was real, not a mirage, and was drawn up a few yards from the edge of the water. It was a good-sized boat, with an incurving stern and a single high mast, a bit like the one Claudius had sailed on the Bay of Naples as a boy and still kept in its shed at Herculaneum. He looked more closely. Under an awning behind the stern sat a woman, heavy with child, working at something on her lap. Beside the hull were loose pieces of wood, fragments of old boats, and a plank with a careful arrangement of tools, a handsaw, a bow drill, chisels, a basket of nails. Claudius realized that this was the origin of the tinkering sound he had heard. Then the carpenter came around from the other side, holding a plane. He was lean, muscular, wearing only a loincloth, his skin a deep bronze, with crudely shorn black hair and a full beard, just as Herod had looked when he came back from a hard season�s campaigning. Claudius hobbled up to the boat, keeping his eyes on the man. He could have been one of the gladiators in Rome, or one of the escaped slaves from the marble quarries whom Claudius had befriended in the Phlegraean Fields near Naples, where his mother had tried to abandon him but where he had been taken in, befriended by outcasts and others afflicted as he was.

�I am C-Claudius,� he said in Greek, clearing his throat. �My friend H-Herod has brought me here from Rome, to seek your help. I am ailing.�

The woman smiled up at Claudius, then looked down and carried on with her work, mending the cotton strands of a fishing net. The man gazed at Claudius full in the face. His eyes were intense, luminous, like nothing Claudius had seen before. The man held his gaze in silence for a few moments, then looked down and pushed his plane forward and backward, carrying on working the wood. �You are not ailing, Claudius.� His voice was deep, sonorous, and the Greek was accented in the same way as Herod�s. Claudius made as if to reply, then stopped. He was dumbfounded, could think of nothing to say. The words when they came were stumbling, inconsequential, instantly regrettable. �You are from these parts?�

�Mary is from Migdal,� the man said. �I was born in Nazareth, in lower Galilee, but came here to this lake as a youth. These are my people, and this is my vessel.�

�You are a boatwright? A fisherman?�

�This sea is my vessel, and the people of Galilee are my passengers. And we are all fishermen here. You can join us, if you like.�

Claudius caught the man�s gaze again, and found himself nodding, and then looked back and gestured at the others. Herod bounded up, the mud spattering against his bare shins, and embraced the Nazarene in the eastern fashion, murmuring greetings in Aramaic before turning to Claudius. �When Joshua comes with me to Tiberias for an evening in the taverns we call him Jesus, the Greek version of his name. It trips off the tongue more readily, especially after a few jars of Galilean.� He guffawed, slapped the Nazarene on the back and then knelt down beside Mary, gently putting his hand on her belly. �All goes well?� he said in Aramaic. She murmured, smiling. He leapt back up, then caught sight of someone on the shoreline toward Migdal, a distant figure waving, then loping on. Claudius followed Herod�s gaze, and saw a man with black skin, tall and slender, wearing a white robe, carrying a stringer of fish.

�Aha!� Herod guffawed, slapping the man again. �You have a Nubian slave!�

�He is Ethiopian, from a place called Aksum,� the man replied. �He is a free man. And he is a good listener.�

�Everyone listens to you, Joshua. You should be a king!�

The Nazarene smiled, then raised his hand in greeting to Calpurnia and Cypros as they came walking toward him across the mud, barefoot. He passed beside them wordlessly and heaved over a crude stone anchor which had been mooring the boat, then detached a thick hemp rope which had been looped through a hole in the center of the stone. Herod and Calpurnia and Cypros placed the baskets they had been carrying in the boat, and Mary made as if to lift a pitcher beside her, but the Nazarene quickly took it off her and placed his hand on her belly, smiling. He coiled the anchor rope and tossed it over the sternpost, then braced himself against the stern and heaved, every muscle in his body taut and bulging. As Claudius watched him work, the Nazarene seemed like the bronze statues of Hercules and athletes he had seen in the villa of his friend Piso, below Vesuvius. The keel slid along the mudflat until it was half in the waves, and the Nazarene stood back, glistening with sweat, while the others splashed past him and clambered on board. Claudius came last, awkwardly pulling his leg up and over. A few more heaves and the boat was afloat, and the Nazarene quickly leapt up over the gunwale and released the square sail from its yard, while Mary sat by the tiller oar.

Claudius and Herod sat side by side in the middle of the boat, each with an oar, and began to pull in unison as the wind took the sail and pushed the boat beyond the shallows. The hull and the rigging creaked, the water gurgled and crackled under the bow. Claudius relished the exercise, his face flushed and shining. If only he had been allowed into the gymnasium in Rome before the palsy took hold, then he might have led the legions in Germania just like his beloved brother. But now, in this boat, as they slipped farther offshore, until the line of the coast was all but lost in the haze, the pain and unhappiness that had begun to cloud his life seemed to slide away, and for the first time he felt whole, no longer battling against himself and others, those who would rather have seen him never return when he was pushed toward the mouth of the underworld as a frightened little boy.

They drifted for hours, blown along by wafts of breeze, talking and dozing in the shade under the sail. The Nazarene cast his net, catching only a few fish, but enough for him to cook in a pot over a small brazier. �Oh, prince of fishermen,� Herod had joked, �you tell us your kingdom is like a net that is thrown into the sea and catches fish of every kind. Well, it looks as if you have a pretty small kingdom.� He guffawed, and the Nazarene smiled and continued to prepare the food. Later, Mary played the lyre, making music that seemed to shimmer and ripple like the surface of the lake, and Calpurnia sang the haunting, mystical songs of her people. They ate the food they had brought with them, bread, olives, walnuts, figs, and a fruit Claudius had never eaten before, produced by the thorn tree, all washed down with pure water from the springs of Tiberias. Afterward, they played dice, and arm-wrestled across a loose plank, and Calpurnia made diadems for them out of the twigs of the thorn tree, solemnly crowning Herod a king and Claudius a god. Herod kept them entertained with a stream of stories and jokes, until his thoughts began to turn to the evening. �They say you can work miracles, Joshua son of Joseph,� he said. �But you can�t turn water into wine, can you?� He guffawed again, then scooped up a handful of water from the lake and splashed it over the man�s head. The Nazarene laughed along with him, and the two men jostled playfully, rocking the boat from side to side. �Anyway,� Herod said, sitting back, �we can�t stay out here much longer. I�ll die of thirst. Anyone for the taverns?�

Dusk was coloring the sky red an hour later when Claudius again pulled the oar, this time sitting alongside the Nazarene. They had landed, and Herod had set out on the road back to Tiberius, eager to seek out the young bloods in the officers� mess for an evening�s cavorting. The three women had gone back to Migdal, to Mary�s home. But Claudius had wanted to stay on with the Nazarene, to make this day last forever, to ask more. He had offered to help the Nazarene set his seine net, a few hundred yards offshore from the mudflat where they had first set out.

The Nazarene rowed silently alongside him. Then he stopped, and gazed at the deep red sky where the sun had set, the color of spilt blood. �The weather will be fine tomorrow,� he said. �The net will be safe here overnight. Then, tomorrow, it will be time for the autumn sowing of the fields. The autumn wind will blow up from the west, bringing heavy downpours, coming over the Judaean hills and cleansing the land. The Sea of Galilee will once again be filled, and where we once stood there will be water.�

�Herod says you are a prophet,� Claudius said.

�It does me good to see Herod,� the Nazarene replied. �I have that same fire within me.�

�Herod says you are a scribe, a priest. He says you are a prince of the House of David.�

�I minister to the people of this land,� he said. �But I am no priest.�

�You are a healer.�

�The lame and the blind shall walk the farthest and see the most, because it is they who yearn most to walk, and to see.�

�But who are you?�

�It is as you say.�

Claudius sighed. �You speak in parables, but where I come from our prophets are oracles of the gods, and they speak in riddles. I go to the Sibyl, you know, in Cumae. Herod thinks she�s an old witch, but I still go there. He doesn�t understand how much better it makes me feel.� Claudius paused, self-conscious. �Virgil also went there. He was our greatest poet.� Claudius closed his eyes, declaiming from memory, translating the Latin verse into Greek:

�Now is come the last age of Cumaean song;

The great line of the centuries begins anew.

Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns,

Now a new race descends from Heaven on high.

Only do you, pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child,

Under whom the iron brood shall at last cease

And a Golden Age spring up throughout the world!�

The Nazarene listened intently, then put his hand on Claudius� shoulder. �Come on. Help me with my net.�

�Have you ever seen Rome?� Claudius said. �All the wonders of human creation are there.�

�Those are things that stand in the way of the Kingdom of Heaven,� the Nazarene replied.

Claudius thought for a moment, then picked up a chisel with one hand, the edge of the net with the other. �Would you renounce these?�

The Nazarene smiled, then touched Claudius again. �Let me tell you,� he said, �about my ministry.�

Half an hour later it was almost dark, and the boat had gently grounded on the foreshore a few miles from where they had set out. The burning torches of Migdal and Tiberias twinkled from the shore, and other faint lights bobbed offshore. The Nazarene took a pair of pottery oil lamps from a box beside the mast-step, filled them with olive oil left over from their lunch and deftly lit the wicks with a flint and iron. The lamps spluttered to life, then began to burn strongly, the flames golden and smokeless. He placed them on a little shelf on the mast-step and then turned to Claudius.

�Your poet, Virgil,� he said. �Can I read his books?�

�I�ll ask Herod to bring them to you. He�s supposed to be at Tiberias for the rest of the year, banished from Rome. Maybe he�ll even do a translation for you himself. It might keep him out of trouble for a while.�

Claudius dropped the dice he had been carrying, his habit for years now. Before reaching down he shut his eyes tight, unwilling to see the numbers, the augury. The Nazarene picked them up, placed them in the palm of Claudius� hand, closed his hands around Claudius�. For a moment they remained like that, then he let go. Claudius opened his eyes, laughed, then tossed the dice overboard, not looking. �In return for Virgil, you must do one thing,� Claudius said. �You must write down what you have just told me. Your euangelion, your Gospel.�

�But my people do not read. Mine is a ministry of the spoken word. The written word stands in the way of the Kingdom of Heaven.�

Claudius shook his head. �If your Kingdom of Heaven is truly of this earth, then it will be subject to violence, and violent men will maltreat it. In thanks for this day, I will do all I can to ensure that your written word remains safe and secret, ready for the time when the memory of your spoken word has become the word of others, shaped and changed by them into something else.�

There was a silence, then the Nazarene spoke. �You have paper?�

�Always,� Claudius said, reaching for the slim satchel he kept slung over his back. �I write down everything, you know. I have one last sheet of first-grade, and some scraps. I had the first-grade made to my special instructions in Rome. It�s the best there is. You�ll see. Lasts forever. I used up my gall ink on the voyage here, but I picked up some concoction that passes as ink in Tiberias.�

The Nazarene lifted up the board he had used to chop fish, cleaned it over the side and then dried it on a twist of his loincloth. He placed the board on his knees, then took the sheet of papyrus and the reed pen that Claudius offered him. Claudius opened a small pot with a wooden lid and held it out, and the Nazarene dipped the pen in the ink. He held the pen in his right hand over the upper left corner of the papyrus, poised for a moment, motionless.

�The Sibyl writes her prophecies on leaves of oak.� Claudius chuckled. �When you reach out for them, the wind always blows them away. Herod says it�s some demonic Greek machine, hidden in the cave.�

The Nazarene looked Claudius full in the face, then began to write, a bold, decisive hand, slow and deliberate, the hand of one who had been taught well but did not write often. He dipped the pen into the ink every few words, and Claudius concentrated on keeping the pot steady. After the Nazarene had started the fourth line Claudius stared at the script, and then blurted out, spilling the ink on his hand. �You�re writing in Aramaic!�

The Nazarene looked up. �It is my language.�

�No.� Claudius shook his head emphatically. �No one in Rome reads Aramaic.�

�I write these words for my people, not for the people of Rome.�

�No.� Claudius shook his head again. �Your word here, in Galilee, is the spoken word. You said it yourself. Your fishermen do not read, and have no need of this. Your written word must be read and understood far beyond the Sea of Galilee. If you write in riddles, in a tongue few understand, your word will be no clearer than the utterances of the Sibyl. You must write in Greek.�

�Then you must do it for me. I speak Greek, but I do not write it.�

�Very well.� Claudius took the board with the paper and pen, and handed the ink pot over. �We must start again.� He fumbled in his satchel, thought for a moment, then reached across and took a cut lemon from the fruit bowl. He squeezed the lemon over the writing, then rubbed it vigorously with a cloth from his bag. He held the paper up to catch the last rays of the setting sun, and saw the faded imprint of the Nazarene�s writing as he waited for the lemon juice to dry. A breeze wafted over them, making the paper flutter, and Claudius quickly took it down and pressed it against the board on his knees. He dipped the pen in the ink and tested the paper, inscribing a cross mark as he always did at the start of a document, to see whether the ink would spread. It had better not. The paper was his own first-grade. He grunted, then wrote a few words across the top, in the careful hand of a scholar conscious that his writing was usually legible only to himself.

�I am speaking Greek to you now, but I speak my gospel to my people in Aramaic,� the Nazarene said. �You must help me to find the words in Greek for what I have to say.�

�I am ready.�

An hour later the two men sat motionless opposite each other in the boat, a silhouette that was growing darker in the moonless sky, and would soon be no more. The lamps spluttered between them, then one went out. The Nazarene shifted along the plank he was sitting on, toward one side of the boat, then put his hand on the space beside him.

�We must pull the oars together.�

Claudius looked up from the paper, and smiled. �I should like nothing better.� He looked down one last time, scarcely able to see it now, and read the final words the Nazarene had spoken, that Claudius had translated:

The Kingdom of Heaven is on earth.

Men shall not stand in the way of the word of God.

And the Kingdom of Heaven shall be the House of the Lord.

There shall be no priests.

And there shall be no temples�

�

AUTHOR�S NOTE

According to the ancient sources, the Roman emperor Claudius died in AD 54, probably by poison. He was succeeded by Nero, who ruled until AD 68, and then by Vespasian, who ruled until AD 79, the year that Vesuvius erupted and buried the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The idea that Claudius should have faked his own death, disappeared with his freedman Narcissus and survived in secret for all those years, is fictitious, though in keeping with what can be surmised of his character. Claudius had been a famously reluctant emperor, sidelined for years because of a crippling condition, probably a form of palsy, and then dragged from behind a curtain to assume the royal purple in AD 41, when he was already well into middle age. He learned to accommodate himself to the role, and achieved much as emperor�public reforms, practical building projects, the invasion of Britain�but by the end had been worn down by corruption and a succession of scheming wives. He may have looked back wistfully to his earlier life as a scholar, to his histories of Rome, of the Etruscans, of Carthage�all now lost�and yearned for the same again, perhaps with a plan to write a history of Britain; he himself had visited Britain in the aftermath of the invasion, in AD 43. Had he survived, he would have mourned Calpurnia, his mistress, probably also poisoned in AD 54, but he could have been driven on by the need to complete his account of his British triumph and maintain the family honor of his revered brother Germanicus and father, Drusus�a reverence seen in the commemorative inscription on the coin in this book, a genuine issue of Claudius from the beginning of his reign.

Narcissus was Claudius� freedman secretary, his ab epistulis. He reputedly amassed a huge personal fortune as only an Imperial freedman could do, with dealings in Gaul and Britain. He appears to have served his own interests, and sometimes Claudius� wives� interests, more so than he did those of his master, yet there was evidently a transcending bond that kept Narcissus in Claudius� employ after the emperor must have been aware of his nefarious activities. It is not known whether Narcissus was a eunuch, though Claudius had several eunuchs at his court�one was his taster�or whether Narcissus had Christian affiliations, though it is possible. According to the sources, Narcissus� reputation was such that he was forced to commit suicide after Claudius� death, so my fictitious escape route would have been an attractive lifeline.

Pliny the Elder�the most famous encyclopedist from antiquity�was a young army officer on the German frontier when Claudius was emperor, and it is quite likely that the two men met. Before the end of Claudius� reign, Pliny had already written a history of the wars against the Germans, the lost Bella Germaniae, the result, his nephew claimed, of a vision his uncle had of Claudius� father, Drusus (Pliny the Younger, Letters iii, 5, 4). As a veteran, Pliny would have cherished the memory of Drusus and Germanicus, and his mentions of Claudius in the Natural History are respectful, almost familiar, and rarely refer to him by the official designation Divus, which Claudius would have scorned. The Natural History was dedicated to the emperor Titus, who had succeeded his father, Vespasian, on 23 June AD 79, so was completed only a short time before Pliny�s own death in the eruption of Vesuvius on 24 August that year. It is entirely consistent with Pliny that he should already have been at work on additions to his great work; Pliny the Younger inherited 160 notebooks from his uncle, �written in a minute hand on both sides of the page.� He had watched from Misenum as his uncle departed by galley toward Herculaneum on that fateful day of the eruption, and was told of his final hours (Letters vi, 16).

Herod Agrippa, grandson of King Herod the Great of Judaea, is the King Herod of Acts of the Apostles; his formal name was Marcus Julius Agrippa, and his coins refer to him as Agrippa. He and Claudius were the same age, born in 10 BC, and were brought up in the same household after Herod Agrippa was adopted by Claudius� mother, Antonia. Whether or not Claudius visited Judaea and the Sea of Galilee as a young man is unknown, though little is certain about his life at this time, just as little is known of Jesus of Nazareth during his years in Galilee. What is recorded is that Herod Agrippa was appointed agoranomos at Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee ( Josephus, Jewish Antiquities xviii, 147�50). The appointment was on the instigation of his wife, Cypros, and occurred after the sudden death in AD 23 of his companion Drusus, the dissolute son of the emperor Tiberius. Years later, as King of the Jews, Herod Agrippa appears in Acts as the man who allowed the execution of James, son of Zebedee and brother of John the Apostle�yet his attitude toward Christianity is far from clear. The idea that his new walls around Jerusalem may have included building at the site of the Holy Sepulchre is speculation. As for Claudius, he knew what it was to be an outcast, he may have felt let down by his own gods, and he may have been attracted by the Stoic philosophy later associated with Christianity; he would certainly have known of Christians by the time he was emperor in Rome, but there can be no certainty of his thoughts on the matter.

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The archaeology of Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples�buried by the eruption of Veruvius in AD 79�has advanced greatly in recent decades, but our picture still largely derives from the excavations of the eighteenth century, and large areas have seen little exploration since. One exception is the House of the Bicentenary, investigated in 1938; the discovery of a possible household �chapel� led some to speculate on an early Christian presence. The room was extraordinarily well preserved, showing how the pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius in AD 79 could bypass some places, leaving them miraculously intact.

Much attention has focused on the Villa of the Papyri, a palatial structure that was tunneled into during the eighteenth century but remains largely unexcavated. A wonderful sense of it can be gained in California at the Getty Villa, based on plans made by Carl Weber when he oversaw the eighteenth-century tunneling. The finds included bronze statues as well as carbonized papyrus scrolls, many of them by the little-known Greek philosopher Philodemus. Work continues on reading those scrolls, with remarkable advances being made through multispectral imaging, but scholars yearn for more excavation to search for additional Greek scrolls and a possible Latin library, which many believe must exist. The excavation in this novel is fictitious, though the finds are plausible and suggest the extraordinary revelations that could await archaeologists in the villa.

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Cumae was an important early Greek colony on the Bay of Naples but was destroyed in the thirteenth century AD and remains a remote and overgrown place. The Sibyl�s cave�first identified in 1932�is a trapezoidal corridor, or dromos, hewn out of the rock, some forty-four meters long, two and a half meters wide and five meters high. At one end is an oecus, an inner sanctum, and on either side are openings, some leading to chambers that may have contained lustral waters. This seems likely to be where the Roman poet Virgil�buried somewhere nearby�had his Trojan hero Aeneas visit the Sibyl on his way to found Rome (Aeneid vi, 42�51); the image in the Prologue draws on the account of Virgil, who describes prophecies written on oak leaves, and the Roman poet Ovid, who recounts the story of Apollo condemning the Sibyl to wither away for as many years as she could hold grains of sand (Metamorphoses 14). The use of opium is conjectural but seems consistent with the trancelike state of the oracle, as well as the pliability she may have wished of her supplicants. The Sibyl is said to have sold a book of prophecies to the last king of Rome, Tarquinus Superbus, in the fifth century BC, and these were consulted as late as the fourth century AD. The cult was important in the ideology of the first emperor, Augustus, and it is possible that he and subsequent emperors secretly visited the Sibyl in her cave.

The Temple of Jupiter at Cumae was transformed into a Christian basilica in the fifth to sixth century AD, and the cave of the Sibyl shows evidence for Christian occupation and burials. An association between Sibylline prophecy and early Christianity has long been proposed on the basis of Virgil�s fourth Eclogue, where he has the Sibyl foretelling a future �golden age,� heralded by the birth of a boy; it is also seen in the medieval Dies Irae, which has no known ancient source but may derive from this tradition.

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The final resting place of St. Paul may be Rome, where a fourth-century sarcophagus found in 2006 beneath the Church of St. Paulo fuori le Mura has been associated with him. The tradition that he was martyred along with St. Peter in the Circus of Caligula and Nero, the site of Piazza San Pietro in the Vatican, led me to imagine that his original tomb may lie under St. Peter�s Basilica, close to the tomb identified as that of St. Peter. The extension in this novel to the ancient necropolis excavated during the 1940s under St. Peter�s is fictional, but its early Christian burials, symbols and inscriptions are based on actual catacombs I have explored elsewhere in Rome and in North Africa.

The shipwreck off Sicily is based on a wreck of about AD 200 excavated under my direction at Plemmirio, off Capo Murro di Porco, south of Siracusa. This was where the British Special Raiding Squadron landed in July 1943, in advance of the disastrous glider assault recounted in this novel; my grandfather, Captain Lawrance Wilfrid Gibbins, gave me a firsthand account of this action, as he was close inshore that day with his ship Empire Elaine of the assault convoy. The seabed around the Roman wreck was strewn with ammunition, thrown into the sea after the Italian garrison surrendered. We had been led to the site by an account of one of Captain Cousteau�s divers, who had seen the wreck in 1953 during a Calypso expedition. The description of the site is largely factual up to the point where Jack and Costas follow the shotline beyond fifty meters� depth. Nevertheless, the deep wreck they discover, with Italian wine amphoras from the first century AD, is itself closely based on other sites I have seen. The ingots of Narcissus are fictional, but the inscription is closely based on the actual formulae found on British lead-silver ingots of this period, some of which have also been found at Pompeii.

As well as the sounding lead described in Chapter 1, and the amphora shard with a painted graffito that may read Egttere, our finds induded a Roman surgeon�s instrument kit�the first time one had ever been found on a wreck. Another Roman wreck, off Italy, has produced the contents of an apothecary�s chest�numerous small boxwood vials filled with substances including cinnamon and cumin. So far, nobody has identified opium from an ancient shipwreck, though its use is well established in the ancient sources. Pliny the Elder devotes a chapter to the poppy and its sleep-inducing extracts, telling us that �the seed cures leprosy,� and describes the overdose taken by the father of one Publius Licinius Caecina, a man of praetorian rank, who �died of opium poisoning at Bavila, in Spain, where an unbearable illness made his life not worth living� (Natural History xx, 198�200).

We searched for an ancient Greek wreck also reported by Cousteau�s divers, in deep water beyond the Roman wreck. On our last dive we discovered a scatter of amphoras, several of seventh or sixth century BC date. At this point the seabed dropped off to abyssal depth, three thousand meters and more, and we could only imagine what treasures lay in the darkness beyond. You can see a picture of me holding one of those amphoras at the moment of discovery on my website, www.davidgibbins.com.

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In 2007 archaeologists announced a stunning discovery in the heart of ancient Rome. Probing beneath the Palatine Hill�home of the emperors, and site of Rome�s earliest settlement�revealed a subterranean chamber, some sixteen meters below the House of Augustus. The chamber measures seven and a half meters high and six meters wide, and was formed partly from one of the natural fissures that honeycomb the hill. A camera lowered into the grotto revealed lavish mosaics studded with seashells, and in the center of the floor a marble mosaic of a white eagle, an imperial motif. This may be the long-lost Lupercale, the cave where Rome�s founders Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been suckled by the she-wolf, and decorated by Augustus to form the focus of a cult that lasted until Christianity eclipsed the old rituals.

The �urban speleologists� of my novel are inspired by true-life heroes of underwater archaeology, a group of divers and explorers who have charted the fetid passageways of the Cloaca Maxima�the �Great Drain��beneath the city of Rome. The main line of the drain runs from the Forum to the river Tiber beneath the Arch of Janus, where another branch runs in from under the Palatine Hill. The entrance beneath the arch is fictional, though the appearance of the circular staircase is inspired by one that leads into the Aqua Virgo, the aqueduct that feeds the Trevi Fountain. The description of being in the Cloaca and inside an aqueduct is based on my experience and on the accounts of urban speleologists who have gone farther, revealing many areas under Rome that remain to be explored. The continuation of the tunnel beneath the Palatine is conjectural�the central chamber is based on the appearance of the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae�though it follows a plausible route between known points of the main drain; the idea that such a project should have been the brainchild of Claudius is consistent with his bent for utilitarian projects, including his aqueduct in Rome, the Aqua Claudia, his huge rock-cut tunnel to drain the Fucine Lake and his construction of the great harborworks at Ostia, the port of Rome.

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Whether or not there was a church on the site of St. Lawrence Jewry in London before the Norman period is unknown, but it is a plausible location for one of the lost churches of Roman London. St. Lawrence Jewry has endured successive destructions, most recently by German bombing on the night of 29 December 1940. The account of St. Lawrence Jewry shrieking that night is true; the firestorm caused by German bombing created violent winds, and a soldier on leave who had been an organmaker recognized the noise of hot air rushing through the organ pipes. Unexploded German ordnance such as the SC250 bomb still lies under London, and the Royal Navy Fleet Diving Squadron bomb disposal teams are called out frequently to deal with discoveries such as the fictional bomb in this novel.

Almost three centuries earlier, the medieval church had been destroyed in another firestorm, �a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like an ordinary fire,� as Samuel Pepys described it in his diary of 2 September 1666. And sixteen hundred years before that, the newly laid-out town of Londinium, created soon after Claudius� conquest, had been laid waste by the forces of Boudica, the warrior-queen, who razed the buildings and slaughtered the inhabitants during a terrible rampage in AD 60 or 61. There is no surviving description of the sack of London, but in the estuary of the Thames had been seen a frightful vision: �the Ocean had appeared blood-red�the ebbing tide had left behind what looked to be human corpses� (Tacitus, Annals xiv, 32).

The Roman historian Dio Cassius wrote that Boudica�s followers exacted their retribution to the accompaniment of sacrifices in their sacred places, particularly �the grove of Andate��probably the same as Andraste, whom Boudica herself invokes in a speech�whom they regarded �with the most exceptional reverence� (lxii, 7). As for Boudica, after her death following the final battle against the Romans, �the Britons mourned her deeply and gave her a costly burial.� The location of this burial has been sought ever since, but it is possible that both the tomb and the �grove of Andate� lie somewhere under modern London. The fictional tomb in this novel incorporates features from actual Iron Age discoveries in England, including the chariot burial, the horse iconography of the Iceni, Boudica�s tribe, and the golden neck torque��a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace� (Dio Cassius lxii, 2.4). The decorated bronze cylinder is based on one actually found in a chariot burial in Yorkshire. Some of the artifacts described in the novel can be seen in the British Museum, including a row of Roman wine amphoras from an Iron Age burial at Sheepen and the magnificent Battersea Shield.

Apart from the tomb and the gladiators� chamber, the picture of archaeology in the Guildhall Yard owes much to actual finds. You can go underground and visit the remains of the Roman amphitheater, discovered in 1988; and beneath the restored Church of St. Lawrence Jewry lies a vaulted burial chamber, forgotten since the seventeenth century and discovered by chance in 1998. It contains the only surviving part of the medieval church. As these extraordinary discoveries show, underground London may continue to harbor untold secrets. Much of this can be appreciated in the marvelous displays and publications of the Museum of London, which has overseen many excavations during the regeneration of the city following the bomb damage of the Second World War.

This rich archaeological potential was recognized during the rebuilding following the Great Fire of 1666, when Sir Christopher Wren recorded a Roman road and other remains during his rebuilding of St. Paul�s Cathedral and the City Churches. Wren did indeed employ the four craftsmen mentioned in the novel, Edward Pierce, mason; Thomas Newman, bricklayer; John Longland, carpenter; and Thomas Mead, plasterer, all of whom worked on the rebuilding of St. Lawrence Jewry from 1671 to 1680. Johannes Deverette is fictional, though his Huguenot background is plausible at this period; the wording of his will is based on Sir Christopher Wren�s will, which can be seen on the UK National Archives website. Wren did have a mentally disabled child, Billy, and the idea that Wren himself may have found Gregorian music appealing springs from his own documented sympathies for the another age ��in which holy mothers and maids singing divine songs, offering the pure incense of their prayers, reading, meditating and conversing of holy things, spend almost all day in the company of God and his angels� (recorded by his son Christopher in Parentalia: or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens, 1750, p. 195, and quoted further here in Chapter 18).

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The fictional character of Deverette�s descendant Lawrence Everett draws inspiration from the lives of my great-grandfather, Arthur Everett Gibbins (1877�1956), and his brother Norman (1882�1956). They were from a Huguenot family, based in Lawrence Lane, London, overlooking the church of St. Lawrence Jewry in the heart of the city; their grandfather Samuel Gibbins had been Master of the Carpenters� Company and a Common Councillor of the City of London. Arthur followed his father, John, and became an architect, but shortly before the First World War he left his young family and went to America, never to return. He had been Anglo-Catholic but converted to Roman Catholicism before his departure. He became a U.S. citizen and lived out the remainder of his life in California, where he spent his final years in Santa Paula playing organ, singing Gregorian chants and doing odd jobs for a convent, whose nuns looked after him. He never saw his family again.

For years Arthur had managed a remote estate in the mountains above Santa Paula, and in the first part of his life he and his father had designed and built country villas in southern England. I have a plan of one of those houses, St. Mark�s Parsonage in Kemp Town, Brighton, from The Building News of 1 March 1889 (John George Gibbins, FRIBA, architect), showing a fa�ade with the alternating courses of bricks and stone characteristic of Roman construction. As an architecture student Arthur would have known of the Roman villas then being discovered in Britain. His cousin Henry de Beltgens Gibbins, an economic historian, wrote in his bestselling Industry in Britain (1897) about seeing traces of these villas, �with their Italian inner courts, colonnades and tessellated pavements.� Henry was interested in the relationship of these villas to the landscape, and Arthur may have shared that fascination too. In a fold of the Cotswold hills, not very far from Warwick School, where Arthur was educated, lies Chedworth�my favorite Romano-British villa�where the layout and vista from the buildings seems perfectly attuned to the landscape, outward-looking in contrast to the enclosed splendor of the great Italian houses such as the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.

Arthur�s brother Norman was a �wrangler� at Cambridge University, achieving First Class Honours in Mathematics, and later became a school headmaster, a published mathematician and a prominent figure in British chess. He was commissioned in 1915 into the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, and was severely wounded near Loos on the Western Front in June of the following year. In April his battalion had been devastated by a German gas attack at Hulluch, one of the worst gas attacks of the war. During his recuperation he worked as a cipher officer in Room 108 of the War Office in London, encoding and decoding telegrams. While he was there, in January 1917, the Zimmerman telegram�revealing German plans to attack America�was decoded, in the nearby Room 40 of the Admiralty Building. One of the codebreakers was the Rev. William Montgomery, translator of Albert Schweitzer�s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910). Montgomery�s secret visit to America in my novel is fictional, though plausible given the great interest by the United States in British decryption work at the time. The decoding of the Zimmerman telegram was one of the greatest intelligence coups in history, the act that brought the United States into the First World War.

In October 1917, Norman became a cipher officer with British Army HQ in Italy, on the front facing the Austrians, and he remained there until 1919. The other British war in the Mediterranean was against the Ottomans, culminating in General Allenby�s victorious entry into Jerusalem in December 1917. My character Everett�s activities in Jerusalem are fictional, though there had been a long tradition of British officers devoting themselves to the archaeology of the Holy Land. I myself was fortunate to spend time with the Ethiopian monks on the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the days leading up to the First Gulf War, when Jerusalem was virtually empty of tourists. One day, when the Old City was in lockdown because of violence, I had the extraordinary experience of being in the church alone, and descended past the carved pilgrim crosses to the Chapel of St. Helena. The ship graffito described in this novel is preserved in the Chapel of St. Vartan, normally closed to visitors. The passage beyond the graffito is fictional, though there are many cisterns and unexplored spaces nearby and much still to be discovered about the site of the Holy Sepulchre in the first century AD.

The quote at the beginning of the book is from Letters of the Younger Pliny vi, 16 (trans. Betty Radice, Harvard, 1969); the same source is used for quotes in Chapters 6 and 17, the latter from x, 96. In Chapter 9, the quote from the Elder Pliny�s Natural History is from xi, 79 (trans. John L. Healey, Penguin, 1991), and in Chapter 10, from v, 70�4 (trans. H. Rackham, Harvard, 1942, with place names rendered by me in their ancient form); the discussion between Pliny and Claudius in Chapter 4 derives material from the Natural History too, including the account of different types of ink. In the Prologue, the line Facilis descensus Avernus is from Virgil�s Aeneid (vi: 126), as is the quote in Chapter 5 (vi, 237�42, trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb, 1916); the other Virgil quotes are from his fourth Eclogue, including the passage spoken by Claudius in the Epilogue (trans. H. R. Fairclough, ibid., but rendered in verse by me). The quotes from the Acts of the Apostles in Chapters 1, 5 and 25, and from the Gospel of Matthew in Chapter 18, are from the King James Version. The Dies Irae is a traditional part of the Requiem Mass; the translation used here, in the Prologue�in the utterance of the Sibyl�and in Chapters 5 and 12 was made by John Adams Dix (1798�1879), American Civil War general, Governor of New York and a remarkable classicist, whose version preserved the trochaic meter of the medieval Latin.

In Chapter 15, the quotes from Tacitus are from Annals xiv, 30 (trans. John Jackson, Harvard, 1937), also the source of the line of Latin read by Jack from Claudius� fictional history in Chapter 17; from Dio Cassius, the Roman History, lxii, 2�13 (trans. Earnest Cary and Herbert Baldwin Foster, Harvard, 1925); and from Gildas, the De Excidio Britonum, �The Ruin of Britain,� 15 (trans. Michael Winterbottom, Phillimore, 1978). The �sacramentum gladiatorium� is my translation of the gladiators� oath in Petronius, Satyricon 117.

In Chapter 2, the hieroglyphics on the Anubis statue are text from the �Instruction of Merikare,� an Egyptian Middle Kingdom document preserved in several Eighteenth Dynasty papyri. In Chapter 7, the inscription of Piso, though fictional, is worded after an actual inscription of Piso found on the Greek island of Samothrace. In Chapter 12, the fictional inscription under the Palatine Hill, including the archaic spelling Caisar, is based on the inscription of Claudius on the Porta Maggiore, originally part of his aqueduct�the Aqua Claudia�where you can still see masonry in the �rusticated� style typical of Claudius. In Chapter 16, the delightful baroque prose of Sir Thomas Browne in treating the grim business of saponification and �body liqueur� can be appreciated throughout his Hydrotaphia, Urn Burial, or a Discourse on the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk (1658). In Chapter 20, the words of Winston Churchill are from his obituary of Harvey Augustus Butters in The Observer, 10 September 1916. In Chapter 21, the �Paternoster� is based on an actual word-square found scratched on a second-century Roman amphora shard from Manchester, once thought to be the earliest evidence for Christianity in Britain. In Chapter 24, the quote from Mark Twain is from his The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim�s Progress (San Francisco, 1870), p. 497.

DOMINE IVIMVS is the painted inscription under the St. Vartan�s Chapel ship graffito in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; the other inscription found there in the novel is fictional. The illustrations in the text are based on the ship graffito, still in situ in Jerusalem, on the Lullingtone Villa Chi-Rho mosaic and the St. Mary Hinton �Christ� painting�both on display in the British Museum�and on the map of Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in Antichit� Romane de�tempo prima Repubblica e dei prima imperatori (Rome, 1756), Vol. I, Pl. II. The Roman painting of Vesuvius described in Chapter 5 is from the House of the Centenary in Pompeii, and is now in the Naples Archaeological Museum. Other images, including the coins of Claudius and Herod Agrippa and finds from the Plemmirio shipwreck, can be seen on my website, www.davidgibbins.com.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

With huge thanks to my agent, Luigi Bonomi of LBA, and to my publishers, Caitlin Alexander at Bantam Dell and Harriet Evans at Headline. To Tessa Balshaw-Jones, Gaia Banks, Alexandra Barlow, Alison Bonomi, Chen Huijin Cheryl, Raewyn Davies, Darragh Deering, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Pam Feinstein, Emily Furniss, George Gamble, Si�n Gibson, Janet Harron, Jenny Karat, Celine Kelly, Nicki Kennedy, Colleen Lawrie, Stacey Levitt, Kim McArthur, Tony McGrath, Taryn Manias, Peter Newsom, Amanda Preston, Jenny Robson, Barry Rudd, John Rush, Emma Rusher, Jane Selley, Molly Stirling, Katherine West and Leah Woodburn. To my brother Alan for his work on my website, to my mother, Ann, for much reading and advice and to Angie and Molly for much inspiration. To the many friends who worked with me during expeditions from the universities of Bristol and Cambridge to excavate shipwrecks off Sicily, and to the bodies that sponsored those projects and other exploration that lies behind this novel, including the British Schools of Archaeology in Rome and Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. To Anna Pond, my Latin teacher at school in Canada, who first introduced me to the world of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the letters of the Younger Pliny. And last, to my father, Norman, for passing on to me his passion for the writings of Robert Graves and the life of Claudius, and the tales of Pliny the Elder, and for time together exploring the antiquities of Rome. Equidem beatos puto, quibus deorum munere datum est aut facere scribenda aut scribere legenda, beatissimos vero quibus utrumque.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born in Canada, David Gibbins dived on his first shipwreck in the Great Lakes at the age of fifteen. He has worked in underwater archaeology all his professional life. After taking a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, he taught archaeology in Britain and abroad, and is a world authority on ancient shipwrecks and sunken cities. He has led numerous expeditions to investigate underwater sites in the Mediterranean and around the world. He currently divides his time between fieldwork, England and Canada.

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ALSO BY DAVID GIBBINS

Atlantis

Crusader Gold

�

THE LOST TOMB
A Dell Book / October 2008

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author�s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-553-90454-3

www.bantamdell.com

v1.0

amble, Si�n Gibson, Janet Harron, Jenny Karat, Celine Kelly, Nicki Kennedy, Colleen Lawrie, Stacey Levitt, Kim McArthur, Tony McGrath, Taryn Manias, Peter Newsom, Amanda Preston, Jenny Robson, Barry Rudd, John Rush, Emma Rusher, Jane Selley, Molly Stirling, Katherine West and Leah Woodburn. To my brother Alan for his work on my website, to my mother, Ann, for much reading and advice and to Angie and Molly for much inspiration. To the many friends who worked with me during expeditions from the universities of Bristol and Cambridge to excavate shipwrecks off Sicily, and to the bodies that sponsored those projects and other exploration that lies behind this novel, including the British Schools of Archaeology in Rome and Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund and the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust. To Anna Pond, my Latin teacher at school in Canada, who first introduced me to the world of Pompeii and Herculaneum and the letters of the Younger Pliny. And last, to my father, Norman, for passing on to me his passion for the writings of Robert Graves and the life of Claudius, and the tales of Pliny the Elder, and for time together exploring the antiquities of Rome. Equidem beatos puto, quibus deorum munere datum est aut facere scribenda aut scribere legenda, beatissimos vero quibus utrumque.

�

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

�

ALSO BY DAVID GIBBINS

Atlantis

Crusader Gold

�

THE LOST TOMB
A Dell Book / October 2008

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

Dell is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-553-90454-3

www.bantamdell.com

v1.0