“Angela, that cave’s stood here for the last two thousand years without collapsing, so as long as it can hold itself together for another ten minutes I should be fine.”
“Well, just be careful.”
“I’m always careful. Now pass me the flashlight and the camera, please.”
Bronson slid the camera into his pocket and shone the flashlight inside the opening.
“Can you see anything?” Angela asked.
“Not much. I’ll have to get right inside.”
Bronson lay flat on his stomach, held the flashlight out in front of him, and crawled slowly inside the cave.
II
The small cavern was around ten feet long, seven feet wide with a curved roof about four feet in height at the center, tapering to a little more than half that at the sides. Bronson crouched down and looked around him, the beam of the flashlight dancing over the rough-hewn stone walls and the dusty floor.
It was immediately clear that Angela was right: the “liars” weren’t books or documents. Lying along each side of the cave were two skeletons, both of them obviously very old and tremendously fragile. Tiny scraps of coarsely woven cloth still clung to some of the bones. The skull of one skeleton was lying about a foot from the neck vertebrae.
“What is it?” Angela called.
“Hang on,” Bronson said, for a moment hardly trusting himself to speak. He was overwhelmed by an incredible sense of age, of time standing still. He reached out and touched the chisel marks on the stone walls. They were as sharp and clear as if they’d been made yesterday, though he knew the mason had died two thousand years earlier.
He sniffed the air. Faintly reminiscent of a church or cathedral, the cave had a dry, musty smell, overlaid with a faint hint of mushrooms. Really, really old mushrooms.
And then he looked down at the two pathetic piles of bones, feeling the hairs begin to rise on the back of his neck.
“There are two skeletons in here,” he called, looking carefully at the detached skull. “Just dust and bones, and really old. But I don’t think either of them died of old age.”
“You mean they were murdered? How can you tell?”
“Hang on while I take some pictures. I daren’t touch them—they’d probably crumble away to nothing if I did.”
Bronson placed the flashlight on a rock so that its beam shone down the long axis of the cave and began to snap pictures of the interior of the chamber. He began with a panorama of the entire structure, photographing the floor, roof, walls and entrance, before moving on to the remains of the bodies. He took several of each one, first of the entire skeleton and then numerous close-up shots, concentrating on the skull and neck bones, especially a clearly severed vertebra on the first skeleton. On the second he took several pictures of the wrist and ankle bones, where the remains of rusted nails still protruded.
Bronson shivered, but not with cold. He looked around the tomb—a tomb as old as time itself—almost fearfully, then stared down at the bones again, bones that had been lying there undisturbed for two millennia. The bones of two men. One beheaded, the other crucified.
III
The pilot swung the helicopter around so that its nose pointed into the wind, then lowered the collective and settled the aircraft on the ground. He turned slightly in his seat and nodded to Mandino.
“Go,” Mandino said, and gestured to his right, where the four-by-four they’d spotted from the air was parked about sixty yards away across the rough ground.
One of the men slid open the side door and jumped down to the ground. He reached back inside the helicopter, picked up a Kalashnikov assault rifle and released the safety catch. He waited for his companion to appear, and then both men began running quickly toward the target, their weapons at the ready.
Mandino and Rogan watched their approach from the safety of the chopper. They hoped that Bronson and the woman had led them directly to the tomb. Mandino was impressed by their tenacity. In other circumstances, he might even have been prepared to let them live.
The two men split up when they got to about thirty yards from the vehicle, so as to approach it from different sides, and to offer two targets if it came to a firefight. Mandino watched critically as they closed in, but the result wasn’t what he had expected. Both of his men almost immediately slung their assault rifles over their shoulders, peered inside the jeep, and then jogged back to the helicopter.
The moment they were strapped in and wearing headsets, Mandino fired questions at them.
“What happened?”
“It’s the wrong jeep,” one of them replied, panting slightly. “We were looking for a Toyota Land Cruiser, right?”
“Yes,” Mandino replied.
“Well, that’s a short-wheelbase Nissan Patrol. It looks similar, but it’s a different vehicle. That one has a rifle rack in the back and the hood’s cold. It probably belongs to a hunter or some local farmer who drove up here this morning and who’s still out in the hills somewhere.”
“Shit,” Mandino muttered, and turned back to the pilot. “Get us airborne again. They must be up here somewhere.”
With the scene recorded on the data card inside his camera, Bronson looked around the cave again. He couldn’t understand why a couple of rotting corpses—even if one of them had been crucified and the other beheaded—could have been that important to the Roman Emperor. Dead bodies were not exactly a rare commodity in ancient Rome, so either there had to be something
really
special about these two victims, or there was something else hidden in the cave.
Bronson slipped the camera back into his pocket and shone the beam of the flashlight around the chamber, looking carefully at every inch of the rock. It wasn’t until he surveyed the interior for a second time that he saw, at the far end of the cave, what looked like a worked rock, its sides and top squared off. Maybe that carried an inscription or something that would explain what he’d found.
He crawled across the floor, but when he reached it, he found that the stone was completely blank. It looked as if someone had flattened the top surface in preparation for an inscription, but had never finished the job.
It was only as he began backing away that he noticed a line of darker material running around the lower part of the stone. He crawled back to study it more carefully. He soon realized that what he’d assumed was a large worked rock was actually one flat stone resting upon another, larger, stone like a lid. The gap between the two had been sealed with what looked to him like some kind of thick wax.
Bronson’s pulse began to race. The two stones obviously formed a kind of safe, and whatever was hidden inside the cavity had been secreted away from the elements for two millennia. That made sense. It wasn’t just the bodies themselves that were important: it was whatever had been buried with them.
He took a couple of pictures of the two stones, then tried lifting off the upper slab. It was stuck fast. He’d need to increase his leverage if he was going to be able to move the stone lid.
Bronson crawled back to the mouth of the cave and called out to Angela.
“I’ve found something else,” he said, “but I need the crowbar to get inside it.”
“Hang on a minute.”
For a few seconds there was silence, then Bronson heard the clatter of steel on rock and the end of the tool appeared in the narrow entrance to the chamber.
“Thanks.” He crawled back to the far end of the cave and slid the end of the crowbar into the sealing wax. But the wax, or whatever it was, was a lot tougher than it looked. He tried again, this time ramming the tool firmly between the two slabs, then tried to lever off the upper stone.
It remained obstinately in place. He was going to have to break the wax seal around most of the edge of the stone before he would be able to move it. He guessed that the seal was airtight, which at least meant that whatever was inside the stone “safe” would probably be in good condition. Bronson jammed the crowbar into the wax again, wrestled it sideways and then pulled it out.
There was a sudden rush of air from inside the object, almost like an exhaled breath, the sound of a faint sigh, and Bronson leaned back in alarm. Then he shook himself. It was just trapped air, obviously.
He began repeating the process all the way around the edge of the stone.
“There’s another one,” the pilot shouted, and again Mandino stared through the windshield in the direction the man was pointing.
Close to a rock face a couple of miles away was the unmistakable shape of an off-road vehicle. It was the third they’d seen, and Mandino was beginning to wonder if he’d overestimated Bronson. Maybe he’d hired the Toyota in preparation for the search, but hadn’t yet identified the location where he was going to start.
“Check it out,” Mandino ordered, and the pilot turned the helicopter toward the distant vehicle and began descending.
Bronson had cracked the seal around most of the stone, and again inserted the crowbar under the front edge of it and pressed down. This time the stone shifted very slightly. He increased the pressure on the crowbar gently. With a sudden crack, the wax seal finally surrendered its grip and the stone lid moved sideways and tumbled to the floor of the cave.
Bronson reached into the shallow recess. He pulled out two wooden tablets about the size and shape of modern paperback books, and a very small scroll. The latter was remarkably similar in appearance to the one they’d recovered from the
skyphos,
but he’d never seen anything like the tablets before. Each consisted of two flat pieces of wood, one of the long sides secured with a strip of what looked like a kind of wire as a rudimentary hinge. Small holes had been driven through the other three edges, and pieces of thread were looped through these, apparently as a means of preventing the object from being opened. All three relics appeared to be in excellent condition.
He took out his digital camera, checked that he still had plenty of space on the data card, and took several more pictures.
Outside the cave, Angela was leaning against a rock, her face upturned toward the sun.
She suddenly became aware of an unmistakable throbbing sound and peered around the rock. Still some distance away, but undoubtedly heading straight toward them, was a helicopter.
She scrambled down to the cave entrance and yelled inside.
“Chris! There’s a chopper heading straight for us.”
“There’s someone moving down by those rocks,” the pilot said, “next to the jeep. It looked like a woman.”
“Excellent,” Mandino muttered. “Now we’ve got them.” He turned in his seat and nodded to Rogan. “Get ready,” he ordered.
Bronson grabbed the two booklike objects and the scroll, and backed away hurriedly. At the entrance, he passed them to Angela, then wriggled out as quickly as he could. As he emerged into the daylight, he could see the helicopter flaring as it prepared to land about fifty yards away.
“Get in the car,” he yelled.
They ran across to the Toyota and climbed inside. Angela reached over to the backseat, grabbed a towel she’d brought along and carefully wrapped the relics in it, then put the bundle in the glove box in front of her. Bronson started the engine, slammed the gear lever into first and powered the big vehicle across the plateau and away from the cave.
“For Christ’s sake, land this thing,” Mandino shouted, as he watched the Toyota roar away from the rock face.
He wasn’t worried that Bronson had already driven off—he knew that the paved road was more than a mile away and that the chopper could easily catch up with the fleeing vehicle long before it got there. His first priority was to see what the Englishman had found.
“I can’t,” the pilot said. “The ground’s so uneven I can’t risk putting it down. There are rocks everywhere. The best I can do is bring it to a low hover so you and your men can jump out.”
“Don’t explain it to me, you idiot! Just do it.”
The pilot lowered the collective lever until the right-hand skid touched the ground, then kept the aircraft level in a hover.
Mandino ripped off his headset and climbed out, followed by Rogan and the two
picciotti.
The four men ran across to the exposed cave entrance.
“
‘Hic Vanidici Latitant,’
” Mandino said, staring at the three letters carved above the mouth of the chamber. If they’d frightened Bronson off before he’d managed to search the cave thoroughly, that would be the end of the matter. If the Englishman had taken anything away from the site, they’d have to stop him. And they’d have to do it before he got off the hillside. “You,” he ordered, pointing at the smaller of his two men, “get inside and find out what’s in there.”
Obediently, the man stripped off his jacket and shoulder holster. Rogan handed him a flashlight, and he wriggled inside the cave.
Less than thirty seconds later, his head popped out again.
“There are only two skeletons in here,” he called out. “Very old.”
“Forget them,” Mandino ordered. “I know all about them. What you’re looking for are books or scrolls, anything like that.”
The man vanished back inside the cave, but reappeared after a few minutes.
“There’s nothing like that in there,” he said, “but in the far corner there’s a kind of stone box, just a hollowed-out rock with another flat stone used as a lid. It’s empty, and there’re some marks in the dust inside it. I think there was definitely
something
in it, but it’s been taken out.”
Mandino cursed. “Right, back to the chopper,” he ordered. “We’ve got to stop Bronson, no matter what it takes.”
24
Angela was strapped in tight, but had turned around in her seat to check behind them.
“Any sign of them?” Bronson yelled, over the roar of the engine and the crashing of the suspension as the Toyota bounced over the rutted and uneven ground.
“Nothing yet,” she shouted back. “How far to the main road?”