by James Becker
“No matches at all?” Angela asked.
“None. I’ve taken your conversions of the Roman numbers and I’ve assumed a fudge factor of ten percent above and below, but even doing that I’m finding hardly any hills on Google that even come close.”
“How many?”
“Maybe eight or ten hills that fit the criteria, that’s all, and they’re all down by the coast and quite a way outside Rome.”
For a few seconds Angela didn’t respond, just stared at the laptop’s screen, then she chuckled softly.
“Call yourself a detective?” she asked. “Do the initials ‘AGL’ and ‘AMSL’ mean anything to you?”
“Of course. ‘Above Ground Level’ and ‘Above Mean Sea Level.’ I—oh, hell, I see what you mean.”
“Exactly. Google Earth measures the height of objects above sea level—it gives you their altitude—but Marcellus wouldn’t have been able to work that out. He would have been standing on the ground close to the burial site. From there, the only thing he could measure with his diopter would be the heights of hills above his position, not their heights above sea level.”
“You’re right,” Bronson said, despair in his voice, “and because we don’t know what his elevation was, we’re screwed.”
“No, we’re not. His elevation doesn’t matter. Marcellus has given us height measurements for six hills, calculated from a single datum point. If the top of one hill was eight hundred feet above him and another was five hundred feet, there’s a difference of three hundred feet. So what you should be looking at on Google Earth are the differences in height between any two hills.”
“Yes, right, I see what you mean,” Bronson said. “I’ve told you before, Angela, but I’m really glad you’re here.”
He took a sheet of paper and quickly chose two of the points on the diagram. He converted the Roman numerals into feet, using a table Angela had found in one of her books, and then worked out the difference between them.
“Now, let’s see,” he muttered, turning back to the laptop.
But he still couldn’t find any two hills whose height difference fitted. After another hour, Angela took over for thirty minutes, but had no more luck than him.
“Frustrating, isn’t it?” Bronson asked, as Angela pushed the chair back and stood up.
“I need a drink,” she said. “Let’s go down to the bar and drown our sorrows with copious amounts of alcohol.”
“That’s perhaps not the best idea you’ve ever had, but it’s undeniably tempting,”
Bronson replied. “I’ll just grab my wallet.”
They found a vacant table in the corner of the bar. Bronson bought a bottle of decent red and poured two glasses.
“Do you want to eat in the hotel this evening?” he asked.
“Yes, why not?”
“OK. I’ll just book a table.”
When he returned to the bar, Angela was looking at the copy of the inscription Bronson had made. As he sat down she slid the paper across the table to him.
“There’s another clue there,” she said. “Something we haven’t even looked at.”
“What?” Bronson demanded.
Angela pointed at the wavy line that Bronson had thought looked something like a sine wave. “This is a purely functional inscription, right? No decoration of any sort.
So what the hell’s that supposed to be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the sea? Perhaps the northeast coast of Italy?”
Angela nodded. “You could be right, but whatever Marcellus buried had to be really important, otherwise why bother with the stone and all the rest? And if it was important, Nero wouldn’t have wanted it to be stuck in a hole on the other side of the country. He’d have needed to keep it fairly close to Rome. I think that shape probably represents a line of hills, and Marcellus included it so that anyone looking for the site in the future would have something obvious that would help to identify the search area. I think that line’s a deliberate marker.”
“OK,” Bronson said. “Finish that glass and let’s get back upstairs.”
Almost as soon as he sat down at the laptop he found something that might fit.
“Look at this,” he said, pointing at the computer screen.
Just more than thirty miles east of Rome, between the communes of Roiate and Piglio, was a long ridge that peaked at about 1,370 meters, or 4,400 feet. The most distinctive feature of the ridge was its northeast slope, which was furrowed in a regular pattern.
“I see what you mean. It does look quite like the drawing on the side of the skyphos.”
“That’s the first thing,” he said. “Now check this out.” Bronson moved the cursor over the top of the ridge and noted down the elevation Google provided. Then he moved it to the end of another ridge lying almost due east, and jotted down that figure as well.
Angela picked up a pencil, quickly did the subtraction and then compared it to those they’d derived from the diagram on the skyphos.
“Well,” she said, “it’s not exact, but it’s bloody close. There’s an error of maybe eight percent over the Latin numbers, that’s all.”
“Yes, but we’re using satellite photography and GPS technology, while Marcellus only had a diopter and whatever other surveying tools were available two thousand years ago. In the circumstances, I reckon that’s definitely close enough.”
“What about the other four locations?”
“Yes, I think I’ve found them as well. Watch.”
Swiftly Bronson moved the cursor over four additional locations on Google Earth and noted down their heights, and again passed the paper to Angela to do the calculations.
When she’d finished, she looked up with a smile. “Not exact, again, but certainly within the limits you’d expect from someone using first-century surveying tools. I think you might have found it, Chris.”
But Bronson shook his head. “I agree we’ve probably found the right area, but we still haven’t pin-pointed the physical location of the hiding place. I mean, the lines on the diagram cross, but not in a single point, which would have been the obvious way to locate the site. Instead they form a wide triangle.”
“No,” Angela agreed, “they don’t intersect at a single point, but right here, in the middle of the diagram, are the letters ‘PO LDA.’ And between the ‘PO’ and the
‘LDA’ is a dot. That was a common device in Latin to separate words in a piece of text. Now, why put those letters again in the diagram itself? They were already carved into the top section of the stone, directly below the ‘Hic Vanidici Latitant.’ If they were going to be repeated, surely they would have been placed at the bottom of the diagram, near the ‘MAM’?
“But if this diagram shows the burial place of whatever Nero wanted hidden away, having ‘Per ordo Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus’ in the center of the map does make sense. In fact, it’s a kind of double meaning. I think it means ‘This was done on the orders of Nero’ as well as ‘This is the location of the burial place.’ I believe those letters were placed in the middle of the diagram because the dot between the ‘O’ and the ‘L’ marks the site.”
“Yes, that’s as good a suggestion as any,” Bronson said. “And tomorrow morning we’ll drive over there and try to dig up whatever Nero ordered to be buried almost two thousand years ago.”
22
I
Bronson had worked out that the straight-line distance between Santa Marinella and their destination was only about seventy miles, but he knew it would be more like double that by road.
“Seventy miles isn’t that far,” Angela said, finishing her second cup of coffee. They’d walked into the dining room at seven, the earliest time that breakfast was available.
“Agreed. On a motorway it would be an hour, but on the sort of roads we’re likely to find, I reckon it’s at least two hours’ driving. But we’ve got a bunch of things to do before we get there, so it’s going to take three or four hours altogether.”
Bronson paid the bill and carried
their bags down to the Renault Espace. His first stop was a newsagent’s on the outskirts of the town, where he bought a couple of large-scale maps of the area northeast of Rome.
Five miles down the road, they found a large out-of-town commercial center and, just as Bronson had hoped, a hardware supermarket.
“Stay here,” he said, “and lock the doors, just in case. I won’t be long. What size feet do you take? The continental size, I mean?”
“Forty or forty-one,” she replied, “if you mean shoes.”
“Shoes, feet, they’re all the same.”
Twenty-five minutes later he reappeared, pushing a laden cart. Angela hopped out as he approached and opened the trunk for him.
“Good lord,” she said, eyeing the contents of the shopping cart. “It looks as if you’ve got enough there for a week-long expedition.”
“Not quite,” Bronson replied, “but I do believe in being prepared.”
Together they transferred the equipment into the back of the Espace. Bronson had bought gloves, shovels, picks, axes, crowbars, a general toolkit, haversacks, climbing boots, flashlights and spare batteries, a compass, a handheld GPS unit and even a long towrope.
“A towrope?” Angela asked. “What do you need that for?”
“You can use it for dragging rocks or tree trunks out of the way, things like that.”
“I don’t like to mention it,” Angela said, “but this Renault’s definitely not the car I’d pick for an excursion up into the hills.”
“I know. It’s completely the wrong vehicle for where we’re going, and that’s why we’re not taking it off the road. I have a plan,” he said. “We’re just going to use the Renault to get over to San Cesareo, on the southeast outskirts of Rome. I checked on the Internet last night, and there’s a four-by-four hire center there. We’ll leave the Renault somewhere in the town, and I’ve pre-booked a short-wheelbase Toyota Land Cruiser in your name. If we can’t get up to the site in that, the only other thing we could use would be a helicopter.”
It was approaching noon when Bronson parked the Renault Espace in a multistory parking garage in San Cesareo. Together they walked the few hundred yards back to the off-road vehicle hire center, and twenty minutes later they drove out in a one-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser which Angela had hired for two days, using her credit card.
“Was it safe, using my Visa?” she asked as Bronson pulled the Toyota to a halt in the parking bay next to the Renault.
“Probably not. The trouble is you can’t hire a car without using a credit card. But I’m hoping we’ll be long gone from here before anyone notices.”
They transferred all their gear, including their overnight bags, into the Toyota, then locked the Renault, and drove away.
“That’ll do nicely,” Bronson muttered, spotting a couple of used-car lots on the outskirts of San Cesareo. Both looked fairly downmarket, the lots scruffy and the cars old and somewhat battered. They looked like the kind of places where cash transactions weren’t simply welcomed, but insisted upon. And that suited Bronson very well.
He walked into the first one and haggled with the salesman for about twenty minutes, then drove out in a ten-year-old Nissan sedan. The paintwork had faded, and there were dents in most of the panels, but the engine and transmission seemed fine, and the tires were good.
“Is that it?” Angela asked, stepping out of the Toyota.
“Yes. I’ll drive this. Just follow me and we’ll sort everything else out when we get to Piglio.”
The town wasn’t far, and the roads were fairly clear, so they made good time.
Bronson parked the Nissan in a supermarket parking lot which was well more than half full, and a few minutes later they drove away together in the Toyota.
On the way out of Piglio, Bronson pulled into a garage, went inside and emerged shortly afterward with a couple of carrier bags filled with sandwiches and bottles of water.
“Can you map-read, please?” Bronson asked. “We need a track or minor road that will take us as close as possible to the site, so we won’t have to walk for miles.”
The location suggested by the inscription on the skyphos was well off the main road, and thirty minutes later, after driving down increasingly narrow and bumpy roads, Angela asked him to stop the jeep so she could explain where they were.
“This is where we are now,” she said, indicating an unnumbered white road on the map, “and this dotted line here seems to be about the only route up there.”
“OK, the entrance to the track should be just around the corner.”
Bronson pulled the Toyota back onto the tarmac, drove another hundred yards until he saw a break in the bushes that lined the road. He turned in through the gap and immediately engaged four-wheel drive.
In front of him, a rough but well-used track snaked up the slope.
“Looks like other jeeps have been up here,” he said, “and perhaps a tractor or two as well. Hang on. This is going to be fairly uncomfortable.”
The main track seemed to peter out after a couple of hundred yards, but tire tracks ran in several directions, and he picked the route that seemed to head for the high ground in front of them. He urged the Toyota up the slope and over the rutted and uneven ground for nearly another mile, until they reached a small plateau studded with rocks.
Bronson angled the jeep across toward the far side, where a low cliff rose up, and then stopped the vehicle.
“That’s it,” he said. “This is the end of the road. From here we walk.”
They climbed out of the vehicle and looked around. Shrubs and trees grew in clumps all around them, and there was absolutely no sign of any human presence.
No litter, no fences, no nothing. The wind blew gently in their faces, but carried no sound. It was one of the most peaceful places Bronson had ever visited.
“Quiet, isn’t it?” Angela asked.
“Probably the only people who ever venture up here are shepherds and the occasional hunter.”
Bronson turned on the GPS and marked the geographical coordinates it displayed onto the map. Then he cross-referred it to his interpretation of the diagram on the side of the skyphos.
“This is all a bit bloody vague,” he muttered, “but I think we’re in the right place.”
Angela shivered slightly. “It’s spooky. We’re standing in about the same place that Marcus Asinius Marcellus did two thousand years ago,” she said, gesturing toward the horizon. “The landscape we’re looking at is pretty much identical to what he would have seen. You can even understand why he picked those six hills. From this spot they’re the most prominent landmarks by far.”
“Our problem is that we don’t have any kind of detailed directions,” Bronson said,
“so we’re going to have to check anywhere that looks a likely location. Neither these maps nor the diagram from the skyphos is going to be of much help to us now.”
“And what do you suggest would be a likely location? If Marcellus buried something in the ground, there are definitely going to be no visible signs of that now, not after all this time.”
“I don’t think we’re looking for an earth burial. Whatever was hidden was too important for that, so I think the hiding place will be in a cave or man-made stone chamber. And the entrance would nave been covered, probably by rocks or hefty slabs of stone, so that’s what we need to look out for.”
II
Gregori Mandino picked up the phone on the third ring. He was expecting—and hoping—it was Pierro with the news that he’d cracked the diagram on the stone, but the caller was Antonio Carlotti, his deputy.
“Some unusual news, capo, ” Carlotti began. “You told me the Englishman and his ex-wife had probably left Italy by now to return to Britain?”
“Yes. Why?”
“We still have the Internet monitoring software running, and some relevant searches have just been reported from Santa Marinella.”
“Where?”
“Santa Marinella. It’s a small coastal town northwe
st of Rome.”
“What searches?” Mandino demanded.
“More or less the same as those we detected from Cambridge. These came from a wireless network connection in a small hotel in the town. They were detailed searches for anything to do with Nero and Marcus Asinius Marcellus.”
“That must be Bronson. What the hell is he still doing in Italy? And why is he still following this trail? When were these searches recorded? Today?”
“No—yesterday evening. And there are a couple of other oddities. Those searches were followed by one for a groma. It’s an ancient surveying tool used by the Romans.
And we traced other activity on the same network. Someone downloaded the Google Earth program. That’s the—”
“I know what it is, Carlotti. Which areas did they look at?”
“We don’t know, capo. Once the computer accessed the Google Earth server, we could no longer monitor its activities. The user was effectively working inside a closed system.”
“I don’t like the sound of this. Bronson’s still in the area. He’s finding out something about Roman surveying techniques, and the fact that he then went onto Google Earth might mean he’s following some kind of trail. Anything else?”
“Yes. As soon as I heard about these searches I asked one of my contacts in the Santa Marinella area to find out who’d been staying in the hotel there. He called me back a few minutes ago. There were two English guests—a man and his wife—there last night, but the hotel staff didn’t get their names because they paid the bill in cash. All the receptionist remembered was that they spent most of the evening in their room.
And they know they used the Internet because they were charged for it. They were driving a British-registered Renault Espace and checked out early this morning.”
“That confirms it, then. What did you do?”
“I tipped off one of my contacts in the Carabinieri. But it’s the last piece of information that worries me most, in view of what happened with the scroll.”
“Tell me.”
