The First Apostle

by James Becker

  At that moment, Bronson acted. He’d seen and heard the glass break, and guessed what the intruders’ next move would be, and he also knew that if the two men managed to get inside the house, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

  So as Alberti leaned forward, his right arm extended, ready to jump down inside the room, Bronson stepped away from the wall and smashed the walking stick down with all his force, instantly breaking the Italian’s right arm a few inches below the shoulder. The intruder screamed with pain and shock, dropped the automatic and in a reflex action threw himself backward, landing heavily on the ground outside.

  For the barest of instants Rogan had no clue what had happened. He’d stepped back to give Alberti room to hoist himself up through the window, and just a split second later his companion had tumbled backward, yelling in agony. Then, in the moonlight, he saw Alberti’s arm and realized it had been broken. That could mean only one thing. He stepped forward to the window and lifted his own pistol.

  An indistinct shape moved inside the darkness of the house. Rogan immediately swung the weapon toward his target, took rapid aim and pulled the trigger. The bullet shattered one of the unbroken panes of glass and slammed into a wall somewhere inside the room.

  The report of the pistol was deafening at such close range, the sound of breaking glass following moments later. Bronson’s military training took over and he dropped flat on the floor. But if the intruder hoisted himself up and looked down into the room, Bronson knew he’d be clearly visible. He had to get out of sight, and quickly.

  The base of the ground-floor window was higher than usual and the second man would have to be standing almost on tiptoe—not the ideal shooting stance by a long way. If he moved quickly, he might be able to make it to safety.

  Bronson jumped to his feet and ran across the room, ducking and weaving. Two more gunshots rang out, their reports a thunderous assault on the silence of the night. He heard the bullets smashing into the solid stone walls of the room, but neither hit him.

  Before the builders had arrived, the living room had contained a large wood-framed three-piece suite, a couple of coffee tables and about half a dozen smaller chairs, all of which were now stacked in a heap more or less in the middle of the floor.

  Bronson had no illusions that a collection of furniture, no matter how solid, would be sufficient to stop a bullet, but if the intruder couldn’t see him, he’d have nothing to aim at. So he dived behind the sheet-covered mound and flattened himself against the wooden floorboards.

  Then he waited.

  Alberti had staggered to his feet, clutching his broken arm and howling with pain.

  Rogan knew there was now no chance of getting inside the house that night. Even if Hampton, or whoever it was inside the property, hadn’t called the Carabinieri, somebody in the neighborhood would probably have heard the shots and made a call. And he was going to have to get Alberti to a hospital, if only to shut him up.

  “Come on,” he snapped, holstering his pistol and bending down to help his companion to his feet. “Let’s get back to the car.”

  Within a couple of minutes the two men had vanished into the night.

  Bronson was still crouching behind the stack of furniture when he heard the sound of footsteps above him. Moments later, the hall lights flared on. Bronson knew he had to stop his friend from walking into a gunfight, so he risked a quick glance toward the open window, then jumped up and ran across to the door, wrenched it open and stepped out into the hall.

  “What the hell’s going on, Chris?” Mark demanded, rubbing his eyes. “Those noises sounded like gunshots.”

  “Spot on. We’ve just had visitors.”

  “What?”

  “Just give me a minute. Stay here in the hall—don’t go into the living room. Where’s the switch for the security lights?”

  Mark pointed at a group of switches at the end of the hall, next to the corridor leading to the kitchen. “Bottom right.”

  Bronson stepped over to the panel and flicked the switch.

  “Don’t go into the living room, Mark,” he warned again, then ran up the stairs. On the first floor, he opened each window in turn and peered outside, checking the area around the house. The security lights the Hamptons had installed were fitted directly below the bedroom windows, mainly to make changing the high-power halogen bulbs as easy as possible. This had the accidental benefit of permitting anyone on the first floor to observe the perimeter of the property without being visible from below.

  Bronson checked twice but the men, whoever they were, had gone. The only sound he could hear—apart from the animals of the night—was the noise of a car engine receding rapidly, probably the two burglars making their getaway. He checked all the windows once more, then walked back down the staircase to the hall, where Mark was obediently waiting.

  “I think those guys were probably the same ones who broke in here before,” Bronson explained. “They decided to come in through the window because I’d jammed the back door with a chair.”

  “And they shot at you?”

  “At least three shots, maybe four. Wait here while I close the shutters in the living room.”

  Bronson opened the door carefully and peered inside, then strode into the room. He walked across to the open window, looked out to check that there was nobody in sight and reached out to pull the shutters closed. He shut and locked the window itself, then switched on the main lights. As Mark followed him into the room, Bronson noticed something lying on the floor close to the broken window, and in a moment realized it was a semiautomatic pistol.

  Bronson picked it up, removed the magazine and ejected the cartridge from the breech. The pistol was a well-used nine-millimeter Browning Hi-Power, one of the commonest and most reliable semiautomatics. He replaced the ejected cartridge in the magazine, reloaded the weapon but didn’t chamber a round, and tucked it in the waistband of his trousers.

  “Is that yours?” Mark asked.

  Bronson shook his head. “The only people in Britain who own handguns these days are criminals, thanks to the coterie of idiots and spin doctors who allegedly govern the country. No, this was dropped by the guy who tried to climb in through the window. These people are serious, Mark.”

  “We’d better call the police.”

  “I am the police, remember? Plus, there’s nothing they would be able to do.”

  “But these men tried to break in and they’ve shot at you, for God’s sake.”

  “I know,” Bronson said patiently, “but the reality is that we have no clue who they are, and the only physical evidence we’ve got—assuming they weren’t stupid enough to drop their wallets or something outside the house—is a forced door, a broken window and a couple of bullet holes.”

  “But you’ve got that pistol. Can’t the police trace . . . ?” Mark’s voice died away as he realized the futility of what he was suggesting.

  The kind of people who break into houses never carry weapons that can be traced.

  They may be criminals, but they’re not stupid.

  “But we’ve got to do something, ” Mark protested.

  “We will,” Bronson assured him. “In fact, we are already.” He pointed to the exposed stone above the fireplace. “Once we’ve found out what that means, we’ll probably know why a couple of bad guys were prepared to break in here waving pistols. More important, we might be able to work out who sent them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My guess is those two men were just a couple of thugs, employed for the job. Even if we’d caught them, they probably wouldn’t know anything, more than the specific orders they’d been given. There’s a plan behind whatever’s going on here, and that’s what we need to understand if we’re going to make any sense of this. But that inscription’s at the very heart of it.”

  IV

  Just outside Rome, Rogan pulled the car to a halt in the parking area and switched off the engine. Alberti was huddled in the passenger seat next to him, moaning and clutching his shatt
ered arm. Rogan had driven as quickly as he could—stopping only once, to call Mandino and explain what had happened—but it had taken them the better part of an hour to reach their destination. Alberti’s pain was obvious, but still Rogan wished he’d shut up.

  “Give it a rest, will you? We’re here. In a couple of minutes they’ll slide a needle into your arm and when you wake up it’ll all be over.”

  He got out of the car, walked around and pulled open the passenger door.

  “Don’t touch me,” Alberti said, his voice hoarse and distorted, as he struggled out of his seat, levering himself up using only his left arm.

  “Stand still,” Rogan ordered. “I’ll take off your holster. You can’t go in wearing that.”

  Rogan eased his companion’s jacket off his shoulders, unbuckled the strap and removed the holster.

  “Where’s your pistol?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Your Browning. Where is it? In the car?”

  “Hell, no,” Alberti gasped. “I was holding it when I went in through the window.

  It’s probably inside the house somewhere.”

  “Oh, shit,” Rogan said. “That’s all we need.”

  “What’s the problem? The weapon’s clean.”

  “I know that. I also know it’s got a full magazine, which means the son of a bitch who did this to you is now armed, and I’ve still got to go back there and finish the job.”

  Rogan turned away and pointed toward the low-lying building, ablaze with lights, on the opposite side of the parking lot.

  “There you go,” he said. “The emergency admissions section is on the right-hand side. Tell them you had a bad fall or something.”

  “OK.” Alberti stumbled away from the car, still gripping his right arm.

  “Sorry about this,” Rogan murmured quietly. He drew his own pistol and with a single fluid movement released the safety catch, pointed the weapon at the back of Alberti’s head and pulled the trigger.

  The other man fell lifeless to the ground as the sound of the shot echoed off the surrounding buildings. Rogan stepped forward, turned over the body, avoiding looking at the shattered red mess that was all that was left of his companion’s head, and removed his wallet. Then he got back in his car and drove away.

  A couple of miles down the road, Rogan stopped the car in a turnout and rang Mandino.

  “It’s done,” Rogan said, as soon as Mandino answered.

  “Good. That’s the first thing you’ve got right today. Now, get back to the house and finish the job. I need you to find that missing stone.”

  10

  I

  “I think we need help.”

  Bronson and Mark were sitting over breakfast in the kitchen the following morning.

  “You mean the police?” Mark asked.

  Bronson shook his head. “I mean specialist help. This house has been standing for about six hundred years, but I think that stone’s a hell of a lot older, maybe a couple of thousand years, otherwise why use Latin for the inscription? If it was contemporary with the house, I’d have expected it to be written in Italian. We need someone who can tell us what the Latin means, and why it’s so important.”

  “So who do you—oh, you think Angela could help us?”

  Bronson nodded, somewhat reluctantly. His former wife was the only person he knew who had any connection with the world of antiquities, but he wasn’t sure how she would react if he approached her. Their separation had been less than amicable, but he hoped she’d regard this problem as an intellectual challenge and respond professionally.

  “She might, I hope,” Bronson said. “I know Latin inscriptions on lumps of stone are well outside her field of expertise, but she’ll certainly know someone at the British Museum who could help. She knows some Latin herself, because she specializes in first- to third-century European pottery, but I think we need to talk to an expert.”

  “So what? You’ll call her?”

  “No. She probably wouldn’t answer if she saw my cell phone number on her phone.

  I’ll send her a couple of photographs in an e-mail. I hope she’ll be curious enough to open that.”

  Bronson went up to his bedroom and returned with his laptop. He double-clicked the first image and angled the screen so that Mark could see it as well.

  “We need to pick out two or three maximum,” he said, “and make sure they show the inscription clearly. How about this?”

  “It’s a little blurred,” Mark said. “Try the next one.”

  Within five minutes they’d selected two pictures, one taken from a few feet away and indicating the stone’s position in relation to the wall itself, and the second a close-up that showed the inscription in some detail.

  “They should be fine,” Mark said, as Bronson composed a short e-mail to his ex-wife, explaining where the stone was and how they’d found it.

  “It’ll take her a while to reply,” Bronson guessed.

  But he was wrong. Just more than an hour later, his Sony emitted a musical double-tone indicating that an e-mail had been received. It wasn’t from Angela, but from a man named Jeremy Goldman, and was a couple of pages in length.

  “Listen to this,” Bronson said. “As soon as she saw the pictures, Angela sent them off to a colleague—an ancient-language specialist named Jeremy Goldman. He’s supplied a translation of the Latin, but it’s exactly the same as we’d already worked out: ‘Here lie the liars.’ ”

  “So that was pretty much a waste of time,” Mark commented.

  “No, it’s not. He’s also given us some information about where the stone may have come from. First, he looked at the inscription itself. He doesn’t know what the ‘liars’

  were, but he’s suggested the word might have referred to books or texts, something like that, some documents that whoever carved the inscription believed were false.

  “He doesn’t think the text refers to a grave, because it’s the wrong verb. He thinks it just means something that’s been hidden or secreted somewhere. The letters, he says, were fairly crudely carved and their form suggests that the inscription is very old, maybe dating from as early as the first century A.D.

  “He’s also looked at the shape of the stone, and again it doesn’t fit with a grave marker. He thinks it might have been part of a wall, and he suggests that in its original location there would have been one or more inscribed stones below it, and those would probably have displayed a map showing the location of whatever the inscription referred to.

  “He finishes up by saying that as a curiosity the stone is interesting, but it has no intrinsic value. He guesses that when this house was being erected, the builders found the stone and decided to incorporate it in the wall as a kind of feature. And then, over the years, tastes changed and the wall was plastered over.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s helpful,” Mark acknowledged, “but it doesn’t get us very much further, and we still don’t know why these ‘burglars’ have been breaking in.”

  “Oh, I think we do,” Bronson said. “Whatever those three words refer to, someone, somewhere, is very concerned that they should remain hidden, otherwise why would they replaster the wall? And that person obviously knows exactly what these

  ‘liars’ are, and is desperate to find their hiding place. They’re after the missing bit of the inscription, the map or whatever that shows where the relics were hidden.”

  “So what should we do now?” Mark asked.

  “That, I think, is fairly obvious. We find the missing stone before the burglars come back.”

  II

  Joseph Cardinal Vertutti’s caffeine intake was rising rapidly. Yet again he’d been summoned by Mandino, and yet again they’d met in a busy pavement cafe’, this time on Piazza Cavour, not far from the Vatican. As usual, Mandino was accompanied by two young bodyguards, and this time, Vertutti hoped, he’d have some good news.

  “Have your men found the rest of the stone?” he asked, more in hope than expectation.

 
Mandino shook his head. “No. There was a problem,” he said, but didn’t seem inclined to elaborate.

  “So what now?”

  “This matter is occupying more and more of my time, Cardinal, as well as incurring significant expenses. I’m aware that we’re contracted to resolve this problem on behalf of your employer, but I need to make you aware that I’m expecting these expenses to be met by you.”

  “What? You’re expecting the Vatican”—Vertutti lowered his voice as he said the word—“to pay you?”

  Mandino nodded. “Exactly. I anticipate our total expenses will be in the region of one hundred thousand euros. Perhaps you could make arrangements to have that sum ready to transfer to us once we’ve sorted out this matter. I’ll advise you of the account details in due course.”

  “I will do no such thing,” Vertutti spluttered. “I have no access to funds of that size and, even if I had, I wouldn’t contemplate transferring a single euro to you.”

  Mandino looked at him without expression. “I was rather expecting that reaction from you, Cardinal. Put simply, you’re in no position to argue. If you don’t agree to meet these modest expenses, I may decide that the interests of my organization would be better served by not destroying the relic or handing it over to you. Perhaps making our findings public would be the optimum solution. Pierro is very interested in what we’ve found so far, and he believes his academic career would be greatly enhanced if he could discover this object and submit it to scientific scrutiny. But, of course, ultimately it’s your choice.”

  “I think that’s called blackmail, Mandino.”

  “You can call it anything you like, Eminence, but don’t forget who you’re dealing with. My organization is incurring necessary expenses in carrying out this operation on your behalf. It seems only reasonable that you should meet them. If you decide not to, then as far as I’m concerned our contractual obligation to you is at an end, and we would then be free to do whatever we thought most appropriate with anything we manage to recover. And don’t forget that I’m no friend of the Church.