About to descend, Garvey said, “Did you hear something?”
“I wouldn’t worry. Just a few rocks falling or some plaster collapsing.” He grinned, poking his forefinger at the floor above. “Fixer-uppers like this need a lot of rehab.”
His reassurance made her laugh. Where were guys like this when she was growing up? Not hearing anything more, Garvey stepped down the ladder.
“I’m leaving my lamp up here,” Fisher said, following her down. “Too much other stuff to carry.”
She thudded onto the floor with her feet and looked up. Her helmet light caught him straining under the backpack, taking one tentative step down at a time. Only the sound of water dripping somewhere broke the tomb-like silence. He started to fall but braced himself on the ladder. The clamminess of the chamber tightened its grip around her throat and chest.
Their underground world turned to light as her portable lamp powered on and absorbed the feebleness of their LED headlamps.
A mithraeum came into view.
Raised platforms on either side of a central aisle ended under the trapdoor. Their lamplight skittered along the faded red wall on their left, revealing algae blossoms sprouting from cracks.
The ground murmured under her feet like a truck passing through and stopped as soon as she became aware of it. “Let’s finish up as quickly as we can . . . and get out of here.”
“Nothing unusual.” The crack in his voice betrayed a diminishing confidence. “But I agree. Better to be safe than you know what.”
Under the semicircular apse at the front of the mithraeum stood a magnificent altar of rose marble nearly two meters across and incised with the iconography of bulls and fish. Flush against the curved wall of the apse, a bench of white marble veined in red glittered in the glare of their lamplight. Unlike the plain stone platforms, this bench must have been reserved for dignitaries.
On the wall above the bench, a fresco of Phrygian-capped Mithras wielding a sword on top of a bucking bull stared at them. The washed-out blue of buckled plaster represented the heavens. The golden color of the sun, dulled with age, shot out rays in all directions. One ray longer than the others descended onto the sword-wielding arm of Mithras.
A scroll wrapped in linen poked out of a terra-cotta jar placed along the altar.
Will scrutinized the title in Latin on a red tag attached to the scroll. He translated it as something called the Unity Report. While he snapped a photo of the apse wall, she painstakingly deposited the Unity Report inside a polyester insulated carrier.
Garvey felt a tap on her shoulder.
“Didn’t mean to scare you . . . Do you know what this discovery means?” he asked, grinning with his back to the Mithras mural on the wall over the marble bench.
Before she could reply, Fisher’s eyes opened wide. He looked gape-jawed over her right shoulder.
Was something wrong?
She turned to face the trapdoor entrance to the mithraeum.
Renaldi pointed a pistol at them. “Sorry to interrupt you two lovebirds.” He snatched the carrier with the Unity Report off the altar. “Hands up.”
“Piso said we didn’t need your permission to enter.” She refused to raise her hands. She changed her mind when he pointed the pistol in her direction.
“To hell with Piso.” Renaldi looked at the gun and then at her. “Ignore my commands again, and I’ll shoot you.”
“You’ve gone too far this time,” Will said, his hand raised. “Stealing a cultural asset.”
“Not as far as I’m going to go, thanks to this.” He held up the Unity Report in the carrier.
A rumble rolled through the mithraeum like the stirring of a giant trapped in the earth. Plaster fell. The floor shook as if on rollers. She and Will clung together.
They were all doomed.
Renaldi fell. The carrier dropped to one side and the pistol to the other. Fisher and Renaldi scrambled for the gun. Seizing it first, Renaldi fired a shot, just missing Fisher’s head. He ordered the pair down on their stomachs with hands on their heads.
Renaldi scrambled up the ladder without the scroll carrier.
Almost at the top, he swayed on the ladder as another tremor struck.
He grabbed the edge of the trapdoor opening with both hands.
The extension ladder fell onto the mithraeum floor.
Dangling, he hoisted himself through the opening and slammed the trapdoor shut.
Chapter Forty-Three
Seeing a lamp left nearby, Marco Leone shot a flashlight beam down the open trapdoor. Through the opening, a modern extension ladder lay on top of ancient wood. “Are you down there, Renaldi?”
No answer.
“Professor Fisher, Dr. Garvey, anybody . . . are you—”
“Thank God it’s you, Commissario.” Fisher stumbled into the illuminating arc of the flashlight. He looked up, blinking, before shielding his eyes from the light with his hands.
“Where’s Renaldi?” Leone diverted the flashlight from Fisher’s eyes. “I had an appointment to question him. But he’s hiding from me.”
“When you find him,” Garvey said, coming out of the shadows, “ask about the gun he pulled on us.”
“Gun?”
“Hold your questions, please, until we get out of here.” She raised the extension ladder and scrambled up first.
Leone helped her through the opening. “Where did he go?”
She brushed off her jeans. “Wish we knew. He forgot to tell us.”
Sassy as ever, Leone thought.
After Fisher emerged, Leone followed them toward the perimeter gate as they explained Renaldi’s attempt to steal the priceless Unity Report. Fisher and Garvey, holding the scroll case, passed through the villa gate. Leone froze just before going through. Renaldi had mounted closed-circuit monitors on either side to spy on anyone entering or leaving.
“What’s the matter?” Garvey asked.
Sweeping back and forth in a tight arc, the monitors had already captured images of Garvey and Fisher passing through the gate with the polyester carrier holding the Unity Report. The commissario was too far behind for the limited sweep of the cameras to detect his presence.
Leone fell to the ground and crawled under the electronic eyes until he was beyond their range on the other side.
“What are you doing?” Garvey said, hands on hips. “We have to get away before Renaldi returns.”
“We don’t know where Renaldi’s gone, right?” Leone stopped talking to brush off his pants. With dismay, he looked at the scuffs on his polished Bruno Magli wing-tip shoes. “And we’re outnumbered by his men, right?” Their silence confirmed his view. “When they see you two on the monitor with the Unity Report, they’ll go after you, not me.”
“Reminds me of fishing.” The professor looked at the ground. “And we’re the bait.”
“Give me the scroll.” Leone held out his hands. “The security cameras did not see me exit. They only saw Dr. Garvey exit with the scroll. Instead of taking the scroll in my car, I can catch the next Circumvesuviana train to Naples on foot. I’ll meet up with Dr. Bemis at the Gabinetto Segreto. You two join me and analyze the scroll in safety while I arrange for police protection.”
“Problem.” Garvey looked worried. “What if Renaldi spots you boarding at the Ercolano station?”
“Renaldi knows I hate taking trains.” He nodded in the direction of the station. “The train station isn’t far. If I hurry, I can catch the next one.”
“What,” Garvey asked, “if Renaldi or his men stop us?”
“Doesn’t matter. By then the scroll and I will be gone.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Garvey said, “while he’s waterboarding us.”
On his race to meet the train, Leone dodged tourists and street vendors to arrive winded at the Ercolano station. Huffing and puffing, he flash
ed his identification in the eyes of the conductor about to blow his departure whistle. The conductor waited until the commissario plunged into the last car of the graffiti-tagged train just before the doors hissed shut.
As the train chugged away, the conductor telephoned the guard on duty at the Villa of the Papyri. “The man Riccardo Renaldi warned about just boarded the train to Naples . . . with some kind of plastic container.”
***
The sunlight streaming through a window in the Gabinetto Segreto of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples fell in a band along the white lining of Wesley Bemis’s open sleeping bag. The clanging of the malfunctioning air conditioner had disturbed his sleep and that of his grad-student assistant. Refusing to bunk down in the room another night, the assistant had left for accommodations at a nearby hotel. It took a dedicated Latter-day Saint like him to protect the carbonized scrolls around the clock while he coaxed out their secrets.
Fisher and Miss Uppity Woman hadn’t called. What hanky-panky were they up to?
He rolled on his daily smile like lipstick. He would need it when he got into it again with the museum director about the temperamental air conditioner. The director was already on his case because of the project’s delay in vacating the Gabinetto Segreto. The director had ordered workmen to pile up paint supplies outside the door of the room so that they could begin renovations as soon as the Americans moved out. With a lacquered smile rivaling his own, the director explained the supplies would provide a cover story for the “Chiuso per Restauro” sign—Closed for Restoration—on the outside of the door.
Bemis suspected the physical inconvenience and odors of the paint supplies stored outside the door were a not-so-subtle attempt to pressure the Americans out of the Gabinetto Segreto. He would love to leave the rent-free den of debauchery as soon as possible, but aside from a budget now in the red, he was at a critical point in his work. He had to figure out how to free the past locked up in carbonized papyrus sheets bunched like onion layers and as brittle as potato chips.
The burnt scroll on his worktable was no Callinicus letter protected from the molten fury of Mount Vesuvius. No matter how he manipulated his CT scanning equipment, he could not tease the text of the charred scroll onto his computer monitor. The resolution wasn’t good enough. Letters written in black ink remained imprisoned in the deeper blackness of the volcano-scorched papyrus. The carbon-based nature of the ink, probably a mixture of soot or charcoal bound with a gluing agent, most likely explained the failure. His equipment only deciphered the iron-based ink more commonly used in the Middle Ages.
He prided himself on Plan B: his multispectral imaging equipment. The upside of the equipment was that the ink type would not pose a problem. Once he found the right waveband on the light spectrum with his revolving disk of filters, the text would appear as if by magic. The downside was that he would need to first unravel the fragile scrolls with chemical peel. Even with the advanced form of chemical peel available, the museum director had to give him additional time to finish.
Someday soon, archaeologists would not have to fuss with opening the delicate scrolls. Synchrotrons the size of football fields, like the one at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, would accelerate particles around a gigantic ring at almost the speed of light to generate X-rays one hundred billion times stronger than his equipment. He could almost see the trapped scroll script read like the morning’s newspaper.
The “Hallelujah” chorus ringtone ended his professional analysis. Sleep-deprived, he fumbled for his cell.
Where had his assistant put it?
He followed the sounds of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir behind the statue of Pan copulating with a goat. He put a hand over his eyes and retrieved the cell with the other.
“This is Commissario Leone. I’m coming to see you.”
“Speak up. I can barely hear you . . . Why?”
“I’m on a train. Your colleagues gave me a scroll found under the trapdoor.”
He awaited the return of Leone’s voice from a dead zone.
“Renaldi tried to steal the scroll called the Unity Report with a gun.”
“Oh my heck.” He put a hand to his forehead. “Where are my colleagues?”
“We’re all meeting you at the museum. Did Renaldi contact you?”
“He called. Furious I didn’t tell him the whereabouts of Fisher and Garvey.”
“Did he ask about me?”
“Said he knew where to find you, Commissario.”
“Stay put till I get there. Do not let Renaldi in. He’s armed and dangerous.”
***
Speeding along the A3 highway, Riccardo Renaldi was not a happy man.
After Leone left the Villa of the Papyri and the tremors stopped, he had hoped to return from his hideout in Sorrento to retake the scroll from the Americans penned under the trapdoor.
Instead, the security guards monitoring the villa gate had called earlier to report. The guard stationed at the surveillance camera recorded Leone entering the villa but not leaving. The security force detained the Americans, who no longer possessed the container. They refused to talk. After noticing the commissario’s automobile still parked on the grounds but unable to find him, the guard received a call from the conductor, who identified Leone boarding the train for Naples with a container in his arms.
The container had to hold the scroll.
After the telephone conversation with the guard, Renaldi received on his visor-mounted Bluetooth another call from Cardinal Gustavo Furbone.
“Your voice mail disturbed me. What do you mean the Americans found a new scroll under the trapdoor? You’re supposed to prevent that.”
“There’s been a problem.”
“I’m not paying for problems.”
“It’s under control. Leone is most likely taking it to Naples by train.”
“Let me contact Lucio Piso to help you.”
“No, no, no . . . I don’t need that man’s help. I don’t need anyone’s help.”
He couldn’t take a chance of losing Leone in the crowded Naples station. He had to do something right now before he failed again. Narrowly avoiding a collision, Renaldi screeched the car to a halt at the train station right before Naples.
“Don’t worry, Gustavo. I’m boarding the train at Barra and taking the scroll from Leone.”
***
After ending his call to Bemis, Leone imagined himself a soccer player about to break clear and score. He was only a few stops away from the Stazione Centrale in the Piazza Garibaldi of Naples. From there he could cab it to the museum and arrive in no time. He would set the Naples police straight on Renaldi’s attempted armed robbery of the cultural treasure he now clutched. Placing the polyester container on the empty seat next to him, he let go his death grip.
A drunk, the only other passenger in the car, opened bloodshot eyes and stared at the container. Leone got up with the scroll box and made his way down the aisle to an empty seat at the very front of the car. The drunk resumed snoring. He wouldn’t be a problem. The train whistle blew, its wheels grinding and screeching. The train slowed, approaching the Barra station not far from the main one in Naples. With one hand on the scroll box, the commissario took a deep breath and closed his eyes to relax.
The train jolted to a stop. The rear door of the car whooshed open. Passengers shuffled in behind him. The door whooshed closed. Footsteps padded down the aisle. Someone sat down in the seat behind him. Footsteps continued to the front of the car. On guard, the commissario opened his eyes.
A bearded man faced him at the front of the car, less than a meter away. A purple felt cap in the shape of a cone was perched on his head. He wore an ocher tunic with long sleeves and loose-fitting salmon trousers. A little over a foot long, a sheathed sword dangled from a cincture over his right thigh. Yellow satin footwear curved up at the toes. A black mask concealed his
face.
The man offered brochures for a play in Naples based on the Arabian Nights tale of Princess Scheherazade, the story of a woman who prevented Shahryar, a Persian king, from killing her by enchanting him with stories lasting a thousand and one nights. He announced he played the role of the Persian king, and anyone attending the play with a brochure would receive a ten percent discount. He bowed, passed out a few brochures, and seated himself in the rear of the car. One never knew what sort of weirdo, con man, or would-be musician one would find on the Circumvesuviana.
“Give me the scroll,” Renaldi whispered into Leone’s ears from the seat behind. A second later, a pistol barrel pressed against his neck. “And don’t make a scene.”
“You won’t get away with it.”
“I’m arresting you for stealing a cultural artifact.”
The pistol barrel burrowed into his flesh.
“You’re arresting me?”
“Hand it over.”
“You can’t arrest me. You’re suspended.”
“Fork it over now, or I shoot.”
***
The pounding on the door stopped. Wesley Bemis couldn’t make out the voice on the other side. The crackling and popping outside prevented a clear identification. The voice stopped. He wasn’t going to reveal his presence, no matter what.
It had to be Renaldi or one of his assistants. Leone had warned that the security chief of the villa was on his way, armed and dangerous. Not that it would have made any difference. Bemis wasn’t about to open the door for anyone until the commissario arrived.
What is Renaldi up to?
Sweat leaked out, dampening the two-piece Mormon underwear he refused to shed. The air conditioner must have broken down completely. He gulped down the last bottle of acqua minerale, warm as dishwater. The fuzziness in his sleep-deprived head grew worse. He had to get fresh air. Even the door was warm. He felt his head. Warm. He must have a fever. Whoever hid behind the door would have left. He slid back the dead bolt. The doorknob burned his hand. He wrapped his shirt around the knob.
The Mithras Conspiracy Page 17
