The Lost Testament (33 page)

In the train on the way back to Sevenoaks, Bronson and Angela sat in the half-empty carriage in virtual silence, both still shell-shocked by the events of that day. As the train accelerated away from Orpington, Angela stirred herself.

“What can we do, Chris?” she asked. “I’ve known Charles Westman for years. He was the last person I would ever have suspected of being involved with any organization more dangerous than the local Rotary Club. And he turns out to be the head of a group that rivals the Mafia for its ruthlessness. If you can’t trust somebody like him, who the hell can we trust?”

“I know. It seems completely unbelievable.”

“So what can we do?” she asked again. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life jumping at shadows, but we could end up doing that if we make this public.”

“I suppose it all depends on how important the truth is,” Bronson said. “I know your opinion of the parchment, but so far nobody else knows what you’ve found. That does provide us with a couple of options.”

“What options?” Angela asked, a puzzled frown on her face.

“Well, you might not like it, but I did have one idea.”

Antonio Morini sat in his office at the Vatican and read again the Italian translation of a short report he had just been sent. It had been released by the British Museum in London and had been headlined “Early Second Century Forgery Discovered.” He’d read the text three times in Italian and had found the original English version on the Internet and had read that twice as well, and he still wasn’t sure what to make of it.

Could it be possible that the parchment that had caused so much consternation in the corridors of the Vatican when it had been stolen in 1965 had actually been a forgery all the time? Techniques for examining ancient documents had improved out of all recognition over the previous half century. It was, he supposed, at least possible that what had been believed by the Vatican’s scholars to be a contemporary description of a trial held two thousand years ago could actually be shown using modern methods to be nothing of the sort. That was one possibility, and there was no real reason to doubt it. The second option was that the parchment was precisely what the Vatican had believed it to be all along, but for some reason the people who had it in their possession had decided to publicly renounce the truth and go along with the idea of it being a second-century fake.

And in fact, he suddenly realized, it really didn’t matter which version of the truth was actually the truth. The Vatican and Christianity were off the hook, so to speak. If anyone in the future examined the parchment again and came to the conclusion that it was the genuine article, then they would have an uphill struggle to prove their case against the authoritative analysis that would be provided by the British Museum when the full report on the relic was released in a month or two.

Morini leaned back in his chair and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, he could lock away the protocols in the safe and return to his normal duties. Hopefully he could forget the terrible doubts that had been plaguing him over the last few days. Shove them to the back of his mind and pretend they had never existed.

The Englishman hadn’t answered his phone for the last two days, and Morini hadn’t known quite what to make of that. He’d try one last time, to discuss the report that had just been released. He would need to call him off the hunt, because any other deaths now could open up the entire thing all over again.

He changed into his usual civilian clothes and left the Vatican City. He would, he thought, treat himself to an ice cream today, now that the operation had finally been terminated. It would make a pleasant change to wander the streets of Rome in a carefree manner, as opposed to the nervous tension that had been his constant companion for the previous week or so.

He headed toward his normal café, but as he turned almost the last corner, and walked down the tiny alleyway adjacent to the café, he was suddenly aware of a man approaching him quickly from behind, and he turned to see who it was.

The moment he did so, the stranger, a heavily built man with a dark complexion and black hair, slammed into him and knocked him to the ground, driving the breath from his body.

“I warned you,” the stranger growled. “If you didn’t give me Bronson, I told you I’d come after you.”

A flash of mortal terror coursed through Morini’s body as he realized who the man was.

“You don’t understand,” Morini said, his voice laced with terror. “I need to—”

“It’s too late for that now, monsignor, far too late.”

The Spaniard leaned down—it almost looked as though he was helping the old man up—and with a single powerful blow drove the knife that he had concealed under his jacket deep into the Italian’s body, thrusting up under the rib cage and seeking out the vital organs of the upper torso. The tip of the blade ruptured Morini’s heart, and almost immediately the Italian moved no more.

“Debt paid in full,” Tobí murmured, then stood up, straightened his jacket and walked away without a backward glance.

This book is of course a novel, which means that it’s fiction. But as with all the books in this series, I always try to build my fiction on the solid ground of established fact.

Vatican Robbery

The daring robbery that took place at the end of November 1965 happened exactly as I described it in this book, and my account is based upon contemporary police reports and newspaper stories about the event. Obviously, I invented the profession of the two thieves, but because of the route they used to enter the Vatican it is almost certain that they were either acrobats or at the very least had extensive climbing experience.

They took only the four items that I claim they stole, a somewhat peculiar selection of treasures in view of the priceless relics that surrounded them when they effected their entrance to the building, and it is also a proven fact that in less than twenty-four hours three of these treasures—the replica crown and the two collections of literary manuscripts—had been returned in precisely the manner I described.

I have no idea whether or not the manuscripts that were returned to the Vatican were the originals, but in my opinion the only sensible explanation for this event is that it was a robbery to order, to allow a wealthy collector to get his hands on the genuine manuscripts. At the time, the Italian police were convinced that this was the most likely motive for the theft, and made statements to the press to this effect.

And I think it is at the very least a strong possibility that the two manuscript collections that were recovered were actually very good forgeries. Common sense suggests that nobody would plot or plan such a daring robbery, which was undetected until long after the thieves had left the Vatican City, only to hand back the three most valuable objects stolen that very same day. I have not been able to find out if the two manuscript collections are currently on display anywhere in the Vatican, or if they are locked away somewhere, out of the sight of anyone who might be able to raise doubts about their authenticity, but my money’s on the latter.

Parchment

The background information that I supplied about ancient parchment and ink, and modern methods and techniques for making such ancient texts readable is accurate, if somewhat simplified for the purposes of the narrative.

Propaganda Due, P2

Again, the historical information in the book about the P2 lodge is accurate, including the details of the death of the banker Roberto Calvi, whose body was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London.

One aspect of his death that has never really been explored is the possible significance of this location, the “Black Friars” being a direct reference to members of the Dominican order, who were specifically charged by the Vatican with investigating heresy. In short, with conducting the Inquisitions: the Dominicans were essentially the Pope’s personal torturers.

It could be argued that Calvi had betrayed the Vatican through his machinations at the Banco Ambrosiano, and possibly hanging his body underneath a bridge named after the Dominican order was a not very subtle way of suggesting that he had died as a heretic, killed on the orders of the Pope like so many thousands of other heretics over the centuries.

The death of Pope John Paul I was entirely unexpected and in all sorts of ways highly suspicious, not least because it occurred within twenty-four hours of his announcing his decision to remove Archbishop Marcinkus and the other members of P2 from the Vatican Bank. Whilst there is no proof that he was murdered, it is fairly clear that he was unable to trust at least some of the people around him, and they may have felt that they owed a higher allegiance to the P2 lodge than they did to the Pope himself.

If this were the case, and of course now it is mere conjecture, then his supposed death from natural causes begins to look even less likely to be based in fact, and the idea of a deliberate act of murder increasingly plausible. But because the Vatican will never permit the autopsy of a Pope’s body, there is almost no chance that we will ever find out for sure precisely what happened on the night of 28 September 1978.

Codex S

The monitoring system employed by the Vatican to monitor Internet searching, and which I named Codex S, is a figment of my imagination. But that doesn’t mean that the Vatican doesn’t actually have some system that works in a similar fashion.

The Pantera Rape

In the prologue I make oblique references to the rape of Mary, and this idea forms the core of the story. It is indeed possible, as I suggested, that the Roman Emperor Constantine—as the first emperor ever to embrace the new religion—might well have been troubled by the influence of a second-century Greek philosopher named Celsus. He wrote a comprehensive attack on Christianity called
The True Word
, which contained a detailed account of this alleged rape. His work has not survived, but it was later criticized in detail by Origen, who first stated each of the arguments advanced by Celsus, and then attempted to refute them, thus providing a largely complete copy of the earlier work.

Later writers have criticized the claim made by Celsus that the father of the man later known as Jesus Christ was a Roman archer, citing the lack of any historical evidence for this assertion. Interestingly, no writers have ever attempted to rebuke the idea of a virgin birth for the same reason—the complete lack of evidence—despite the manifest biological impossibility of such an event ever occurring. Whilst it is an extremely unpleasant idea to suggest that the founder of Christianity was the product of a violent rape, this actually makes far more sense than the alternative explanation that is claimed by the Church.

In fact, the story about Mary being impregnated in a rape by a Roman archer has been around for longer than most of the Gospels. The tale of course suffers from precisely the same problem as the Gospels, in that there is not a single shred of proof that the rape ever took place, or indeed that the Gospels themselves are anything more than works of fiction.

This is one of the most fundamental problems about Christianity: there are simply no independent sources that support any of the statements and claims made by the Catholic Church through the ages.

Ultimately, belief in God or belief in Jesus—or belief in anything else that cannot be proven—is simply a matter of faith, not a matter of fact.

SPRING, AD 67

Jotapata, Judea

In the center of the group of silent watching men, the naked Jew was struggling violently, but it was never going to make a difference. One burly Roman soldier knelt on each arm, pinning it to the rough wooden beam—the
patibulum
—and another was holding his legs firmly.

General Vespasian watched, as he watched all the crucifixions. As far as he knew, this Jew hadn’t committed any specific offense against the Roman Empire, but he had long ago lost patience with the defenders of Jotapata, and routinely executed any of them his army managed to capture.

The soldier holding the Jew’s left arm eased the pressure slightly, just enough to allow another man to bind the victim’s wrist with thick cloth. The Romans were experts at this method of execution—they’d had considerable practice—and knew that the fabric would help stanch the flow of blood from the wounds. Crucifixion was intended to be slow, painful and public, and the last thing they wanted was for the condemned man to bleed to death in a matter of hours.

Normally, victims of crucifixion were flogged first, but Vespasian’s men had neither the time nor the inclination to bother. In any case, they knew the Jews lasted longer on the cross if they weren’t flogged, and that helped reinforce the general’s uncompromising message to the besieged town, little more than an arrow-shot distant.

The binding complete, they forced the Jew’s arm back onto the
patibulum,
the wood rough and stained with old blood. A centurion approached with a hammer and nails. The nails were about eight inches long, thick, with large flat heads, and specially made for the purpose. Like the crosses, they had been reused many times.

“Hold him still,” he barked, and bent to the task.

The Jew went rigid when he felt the point of the nail touch his wrist, then screamed as the centurion smashed the hammer down. The blow was strong and sure, and the nail ripped straight through his arm and embedded itself deep in the wood. Compounding the agony of the injury, the nail severed the median nerve, causing continuous and intense pain along the man’s entire limb.

Blood spurted from the wound, splashing onto the ground around the
patibulum.
Some four inches of the nail still protruded above the now blood-sodden cloth wrapped around the Jew’s wrist, but two more blows from the hammer drove it home. Once the flat head of the nail was hard up against the cloth and compressing the limb against the wood, the blood flow diminished noticeably.

The Jew screamed his agony as each blow landed, then lost control of his bladder. The trickle of urine onto the dusty ground caused a couple of the watching soldiers to smile, but most ignored it. Like Vespasian, they were tired—the Romans had been fighting the inhabitants of Judea off and on for more than a hundred years—and in the last twelve months they’d all seen too much death and suffering to view another crucifixion as much more than a temporary diversion.

It had been hard fighting, and the battles far from one-sided. Just ten months earlier, the entire Roman garrison in Jerusalem had surrendered to the Jews and had immediately been lynched. From that moment on, full-scale war had been inevitable and the fighting bitter. Now the Romans were in Judea in full force. Vespasian commanded the fifth legion—
Fretensis
—and the tenth—
Macedonica
—while his son Titus had recently arrived with the fifteenth—
Apollinaris
—and the army also included auxiliary troops and cavalry units.

The soldier released the victim’s arm and stood back as the centurion walked around and knelt beside the man’s right arm. The Jew was going nowhere now, though his screams were loud and his struggles even more violent. Once the right wrist had been properly bound with fabric, the centurion expertly drove home the second nail and stood back.

The vertical section of the T-shaped Tau cross—the
stipes
—was a permanent fixture in the Roman camp. Each of the legions—the three camps were side by side on a slight rise overlooking the town—had erected fifty of them in clear view of Jotapata. Most were already in use, almost equal numbers of living and dead bodies hanging from them.

Following the centurion’s orders, four Roman soldiers picked up the
patibulum
between them and carried the heavy wooden beam, dragging the condemned Jew, his screams louder still, over the rocky ground and across to the upright. Wide steps had already been placed at either side of the
stipes
and, with barely a pause in their stride, the tour soldiers climbed up and hoisted the
patibulum
onto the top of the post, slotting it onto the prepared peg.

The moment the Jew’s feet left the ground and his nailed arms took the full weight of his body, both of his shoulder joints dislocated. His feet sought for a perch— something, anything—to relieve the incredible agony coursing through his arms. In seconds, his right heel landed on a block of wood attached to the
stipes
about five feet below the top, and he rested both feet on it and pushed upward to relieve the strain on his arms. Which was, of course, exactly why the Romans had placed it there. The moment he straightened his legs, the Jew felt rough hands adjusting the position of his feet, turning them sideways and holding his calves together. Seconds later another nail was driven through both heels with a single blow, pinning his legs to the cross.

Vespasian looked at the dying man, struggling pointlessly like a trapped insect, his cries already weakening. He turned away, shading his eyes against the setting sun. The Jew would be dead in two days, three at the most. The crucifixion over, the soldiers began dispersing, returning to the camp and their duties.

Every Roman military camp was identical in design: a square grid of open “roads,” their names the same in every camp, that divided the different sections, the whole surrounded by a ditch and palisade, and with separate tents inside for men and officers. The
Fretensis
legion’s camp was in the center of the three and Vespasian’s personal tent lay, as the commanding general’s always did, at the head of the
Via Principalis
—the main thoroughfare, directly in front of the camp headquarters.

The Tau crosses had been erected in a defiant line that stretched across the fronts of all three camps, a constant reminder to the defenders of Jotapata of the fate that awaited them if they were captured.

Vespasian acknowledged the salutes of the sentries as he walked back through the palisade. He was a soldier’s soldier. He led from the front, celebrating his army’s triumphs and mourning their retreats alongside his men. He’d started from nothing—his father had been a minor customs official and small-time moneylender—but he’d risen to command legions in Britain and Germany. Ignominiously retired by Nero after he fell asleep during one of the Emperor’s interminable musical performances, it was a measure of the seriousness of the situation in Judea that he’d been called back to active service to take personal charge of suppressing the revolt.

He was more worried than he liked to admit about the campaign. His first success—an easy victory at Gadara—might almost have been a fluke because, despite the best efforts of his soldiers, the small band of defenders of Jotapata showed no signs of surrendering, despite being hopelessly outnumbered. And the town was hardly strategically crucial. Once he’d captured it, he knew they’d have to move on to liberate the Mediterranean ports, all potentially much harder targets.

It was going to be a long and bitter struggle, and at fifty Vespasian was already an old man. He would rather have been almost anywhere else in the Empire, but Nero was holding his youngest son, Domitian, as a hostage, and had given him no choice but to command the campaign.

Just before he reached his tent, he saw a centurion approaching. The man’s red tunic, greaves or shin protectors,
lorica hamata
—chain-mail armor—and silvered helmet with its transverse crest made him easily identifiable among the regular soldiers, who wore white tunics and
lorica segmenta
—plate armor. He was leading a small group of legionaries and escorting another prisoner, his arms bound behind him.

The centurion stopped a respectful ten feet from Vespasian and saluted. “The Jew from Cilicia, sir, as you ordered.”

Vespasian nodded his approval, and gestured toward his tent. “Bring him.” He stood to one side as the soldiers hustled the man inside and pushed him onto a wooden stool. The flickering light of the oil lamps showed him to be elderly, tall and thin, with a high forehead, receding hairline and a straggly beard.

The tent was large—almost as big as those normally occupied by eight legionaries—with separate sleeping quarters. Vespasian removed the brooch that secured his
lacerna,
the purple cloak that identified him as a general, tossed the garment aside and sat down wearily.

“Why am I here?” the prisoner demanded.

“You’re here,” Vespasian replied, dismissing the escort with a flick of his wrist, “because I so ordered it. Your instructions from Rome were perfectly clear. Why have you failed to obey them?”

The man shook his head. “I have done precisely what the Emperor demanded.”

“You have not,” Vespasian snapped. “Otherwise I would not be stuck here in this miserable country trying to stamp out yet another rebellion.”

“I am not responsible for that. I have carried out my orders to the best of my ability. All this”—the prisoner gestured with his head to include Jotapata— “is not of my doing.”

“The Emperor does not agree, and neither do I. He believes you should have done more, far more. He has issued explicit orders to me, orders that include your execution.”

For the first time a look of fear passed across the old man’s face. “My execution? But I’ve done everything he asked. Nobody could have done more. I’ve traveled this world and established communities wherever I could. The fools believed me—they still believe me. Everywhere you look the myth is taking hold.”

Vespasian shook his head. “It’s not enough. This rebellion is sapping Rome’s strength and the Emperor blames you. For that you are to die.”

“By crucifixion? Like the fisherman?” the prisoner asked, suddenly conscious of the moans of the dying men nailed to the Tau crosses beyond the encampment.

“No. As a Roman citizen you will at least be spared that. You will be taken back to Rome under escort—by men I can ill afford to lose—and there you will be put to the sword.”

“When?”

“You leave at dawn. But before you die, the Emperor has one final order for you.”

Vespasian moved to the table and picked up two diptychs—wooden tablets with the inside surfaces covered in wax and joined with wire along one side as a rudimentary hinge. Both had numerous holes—
foramina
—pierced around the outer edges through which triple-thickness
linum
had been passed, thread that was then secured with a seal bearing the likeness of Nero. This prevented the tablets being opened without breaking the seal, and was common practice with legal documents to guard against forgeries. Each had a short note in ink on the front to indicate what the text comprised, and both had been personally entrusted to Vespasian by Nero before the general left Rome. The old man had seen them many times before.

Vespasian pointed to a small scroll on the table and told the prisoner what Nero expected him to write.

“And if I refuse?” the prisoner asked.

“Then I have instructions that you are not to be sent to Rome,” Vespasian said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m sure we can find a vacant
stipes
you can occupy here for a few days.”

AD 67–69

Rome, Italy

The Neronian Gardens, situated at the foot of what are now known as the Vatican Hills, were one of Nero’s favored locations for exacting savage revenge on the group of people he saw as the principal enemies of Rome—the early Christians. He blamed them for starting the Great Fire that almost destroyed the city in
AD
64, and since then he’d done his best to rid Rome and the Empire of what he called the Jewish “vermin.”

His methods were excessive. The
lucky
ones were crucified or torn to pieces by dogs or wild animals in the Circus Maximus. Those he wanted really to suffer were coated in wax, impaled on stakes placed around his palace and later set on fire. This was Nero’s idea of a joke. The Christians claimed to be the “light of the world,” so he used them to light his way.

But Roman law forbade the crucifixion or torture of Roman citizens, and that rule, at least, the Emperor was forced to obey. And so, on a sunny morning at the end of June, Nero and his entourage watched as a swordsman worked his way steadily down a line of bound and kneeling men and women, beheading each one with a single stroke of his blade. The elderly man was the second to last and, as specifically instructed by Nero, the executioner slashed at his neck three times before his head finally tumbled free.

Nero’s fury at the failure of his agent extended even beyond the man’s painful death, and his body was unceremoniously tossed into a cart and driven miles out of Rome, to be dumped in a small cave, the entrance then sealed by rocks. The cave was already occupied by the remains of another man, another thorn in the Emperor’s side, who had suffered crucifixion of an unusual sort three years earlier, at the very start of the Neronian Persecution.

The two diptychs and the small scroll had been handed to Nero as soon as the centurion and his Jewish prisoner arrived in Rome, but for some months the Emperor couldn’t decide what to do with them. Rome was struggling to contain the Jewish revolt, and Nero was afraid that if he made their contents public he would make the situation even worse.

But the documents—the scroll essentially a confession by the Jew of something infinitely worse than treason, and the contents of the diptychs providing unarguable supporting evidence—were clearly valuable, even explosive, and he took immense care to keep them safe. He had an exact copy made of the scroll: on the original, he personally inscribed an explanation of its contents and purpose, authenticated by his imperial seal. The two diptychs were secreted with the bodies in the hidden cave, and the original scroll in a secure chest in a locked chamber in one of his palaces, but the copy he kept close to him, secured in an earthenware pot just in case he had to reveal its contents urgently.